The marriage of Philip of Habsburg and Mary Tudor and anti-Spanish sentiment in England

307 Pages·2016·20.57 MB·English

The marriage of Philip of Habsburg and Mary Tudor and anti-Spanish
sentiment in England : political economies and culture, 1553-1557.
Samson, Alexander Winton Seton

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1
The Marriage of Philip of Habsburg and Mary Tudor
and Anti-Spanish Sentiment in England:
Political Economies and Culture, 1553-1557.
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PhD thesis by Alexander Winton Seton Samson.
Queen Mary and Westfield College.
(LO N)
2
Abstract
This thesis examines the early part of Mary I's reign, focusing on her marriage to
Philip of Habsburg and the marginalisation of their co-monarchy in Tudor historiography.
By looking at the diplomatic background and political opposition in England, I interrogate
the notion that anti-Spanish sentiment was a central cause of the Wyatt rebellion, arguing that
instead its aetiology lay in female sovereignty and the constitutional uncertainties produced
by it. Dynasticism tended to alienate power from familiar, local and territorial sources of
political authority. Infant mortality and the vicissitudes of the marriage market in this context
threatened discrete 'national' identities with an incipient imperialist internationalism. I analyse
in detail the marriage contract and 'Act declaring that the regal power of this realm is in the
Queen's Majesty', using them as evidence to show that anxieties about property rights were
not related to the repudiation of the Supremacy, repeal of Henrician legislation and return of
papal jurisdiction. The staging of the wedding harped on Philip's inferior status, inverting that
which the marriage ceremony rehearsed. The Castilian writing of England as a romance of
chivalry sublimated a sexual licence which repeated the fears played upon by exiled
polemicists that the kingdom had been transformed into the feminised subject of Spanish
male authority. Anti-Spanish propaganda did not reflect popular xenophobia. It was literate
and sophisticated, related to sectarian struggle and engaged with theories of justifiable
disobedience. Finally, I treat the joint royal London Entry and representations of Philip and
Mary welcoming his assumption of authority in relation to both England and his new queen.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
TitlePage..............................................................................................................................1
Abstract................................................................................................................................2
Tableof Contents................................................................................................................3
Listof Illustrations.............................................................................................................4
Acknowledgements.............................................................................................................. 5
Abbreviations.....................................................................................................................6
Introduction........................................................................................................................7
1. International Relations and Seminal Exchanges:
Commerceand the Political History of Romance....................................................... 18
1. 1. The Anglo-B urgundian Axis: Chivalry, Etiquette, and Cultural History..... . 29
1. 2. 'Womanly Daring': the Accession ofMary Tudor......................................... 43
1. 3. Coronation .....................................................................................................54
2. A Nuptial Prelude and the Political Origins of Popular Xenophobia......................68
2. 1. Marriage Contract and International Treaty.................................................... 84
2. 2. Foreign Threat and the Wyatt Rebellion, 1554:
AReligious or Politic Resistance?.............................................................. 106
2. 3. Effeminisation andAnti-Spanish Sentiment ..................................................... 126
3. Comuneros, 1520: Dynasticism, Internationalism, and Locating Allegiance.......138
4. 'Sole Queen'................................................................................................................. 160
4. 1. 'Act declaring that the regal power of this realm is in the Queen Majesty'... 174
4. 2. Hermaphrodite: the Case ofFemale Sovereignty........................................... 188
5. A Marriage made in Heaven?
TheAnglo-Hispanic Court in England, 1554-1556 ................................................206
5. 1. The Wedding................................................................................................ 212
5. 2. Sexual Conquest and el caballeresco...........................................................233
5. 2. Royal Entry.................................................................................................. 243
Conclusion...................................................................................................................... 259
...................................................................................................................261
Bibliography
4
Illustrations
1.Andrea Mantegna, Judith and Holofernes (1492).
NationalGallery of Art, Washington..............................................................................p. 58.
2.Copper plate engraving, La batalla de Muhlberg (1547).
BibliotecaNacional.....................................................................................................p. 115.
3.Print from William Turner, The Hunting of Romyshe Wolfe (Emden: 1555).
BodleianLibrary, Oxford.............................................................................................p. 123.
4.Titian, Venus andAdonis, (c. 155 1-1554).
Museodel Prado, Madrid............................................................................................p. 210.
5.Antonis Mor portratit of Mary Tudor (November 1554).
Museodel Prado, Madrid.............................................................................................p. 220.
6.Hans Eworth portrait of Mary Tudor (1556).
NationalPortrait Gallery, London................................................................................p. 221.
7.Frontispiece of The Great Bible (London: Richard Grafton, 1539).
St. John's Library Cambridge).....................................................................................p. 248.
8.Nova Descriptio Hispania (1555), map engraved by Thomas Gemini.
BibliothequeNational, Paris........................................................................................p. 257.
9.Britannia Jnsulae Quae Nunc Angliae Et Scotiae Regna Continet Gum Hibernia Adiacente
Nova Descriptio (1555), map engraved by Thomas Gemini.
BibliothequeNational, Paris.......................................................................................p. 258.
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Acknowledgements
This project owes most to my supervisors. I would like to thank Lisa Jardine for her
enthusiasm and constantly positive comments; Peter Evans for his attentive readings of my
drafts and helpful suggestions for pulling it all together; and Charles Davis. I thank my friend
Glyn Redworth for our frank and interesting discussions of Marian history and Craig
Muidrew for allowing me to read an unpublished article of his. Roger Mettkam was
extremely supportive and the European History 1500-1800 Seminar provided me with a
perfect forum to test out my ideas. I would like to thank the staff of the Biblioteca Nacional
Rare Books and Manuscript Room, of Simancas, the British Library and Corpus Christi
College Library, Cambridge. My mother, brother James, and father have all played an
essential role in bringing this to fruition. Last but not least I would like to thank Carolina
Carrillo Plasencia for her support and encouragement.
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Abbreviations

AGS Archivo General de Simancas

BNM Biblioteca Nacional en Madrid
BL British Library
Cal. Dom. Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1547-1580, Mary
I, 1553-1558, (London: HMSO, 1856).
Cal. For. Calendar of State Papers. Foreign: Edward VI. Mary.
Elizaabeth I, 25 vols. (London: HMSO, 1861-1950).
Cal. Span. Royall Tyler (ed.), Calendar of Letters. Despatches. and
State Papers.Relating to the Negotiations Between
England and Spain, vols. XI-Xffl (London: HMSO,
1916, 1949, 1954).
Cal. Ven. R. Brown (eds.), Calendar of State Papers and
Mausrcipts Existing in the Archives and Collections
of Venice, vols. 5 and 6 (two parts), ed. Rawdon
Brown, (London: Longman and Co., 1873-188 1).
DNB Dictionary of National Biography, 63 vols. (London:
Smith, Elder & Co., 1885-1900).
Grevfriars Chronicle Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London, Camden
Society 53, 1st ser. (London: J. Nichols and Son, 1851).
Machvn's Diary J. G. Nichols (ed.), The Diary of Henry Machvn
(London: Camden Society, 1848).
Tower Chronicle J. G. Nichols (ed.), The Chronicle of Queen Jane and
of two years of Queen Mary, Camden Society XLVffl,
(London: Camden Society, 1850).
Tudor Royal Proclamations P. Hughes and J. Larkin (eds.), Tudor Royal
Proclamations: Vol. 2 The Later Tudors (1553-1587,
(London: Yale University Press, 1969).
Viaje de Felipe Segundo Andrés Mufioz, Viaje de Felipe Segundo a Inglaterra
y Relaciones Varias Relativas Al Mismo Suceso, ed.
Pacual de Gayángos and D. Manuel Zarco del Valle
(Madrid: La Sociedad de Bilbiófilos Espafioles, 1877).
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Introduction
The reign of Mary Tudor, perhaps more than any other period in British history, is
bedeviled by, what Jennifer Loach and Robert littler called in 1980 in the volume which
inaugurated a major reassessment of the mid-Tudor period, "the liberal and Protestant
shibboleths of the Asquithean era".' J. A. Froude's characterisation of Maiy's rule as a 'barren
interlude' in the nineteenth century has had a tenacious hold on the historical imagination. As
late as 1970, E. H. Harbison concurred, the "reign of Mary has been called a 'barren interlude'
in Tudor history, and so it undoubtedly was."2 A. F. Pollard, influenced by Froude, wrote at
the beginning of the twentieth century: "Sterility was the conclusive note of Mary's reign",
in default of royal or ministerial leadership there could only be stagnation...
the whole nation malingered in divers degrees. Debarred from the paths it
wished to pursue, it would not follow in Mary's wake. A blight had fallen on
national faith and confidence, and Israel took to its tents.3
Pollard's language closely echoed Froude's. The description of her reign with images of
infertility is suggestive of why Pollard and Froude found Marian history unpalatable. Her
childlessness signalled the end of Habsburg dynastic hopes in England and Catholic
restoration. The bainess of the period is a corollary of Mary's fated and felicitous (for them)
inability to produce an heir. Pollard's notion of the 'national faith', of England as 'Israel',
resonates with the investment in sectarian and providentialist histories, which have been at
the root of readings of Mary ever since. The parochial and anti-Catholic assumptions of both
historians substantiated their judgement that in terms of our nation's destiny, "Mary's reign
had been a palpable failure".4 In these Whigghish interpretations, "Mary represented the
'Jennifer Loach and Robert littler (eds.), The Mid-Tudor Polity c. 1540-1560
(London: MacMillan, 1980), p. 1.
2E H. Harbison, Rival Ambassadors at the Court of Oueen Mary (New York: Books
for Libraries Press, repr. 1970), Preface, p. vii. The original comment is from Froude.
3A. F. Pollard, The History of England From the Accession of Edward VI to the Death
of Elizabeth (1547-1 603), The Political History of England, 12 vols. (London: Longmans,
Green and Co., 1915), vol. 6, p. 172.
4A. F. Pollard, The History of England, p. 173.
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failed past, while the Protestant Henry Vifi and Elizabeth I stood for the glorious future".5
The recent film Elizabeth (1998) by Shekhar Kapur, typifies the hold which propagandist
myths disseminated from the Reformation onwards have on our historical imagination. It
plots a linear development from Henry's repudiation of Roman authority to imperial triumph
via Gloriana religious settlement; moving from the dark, torch-lit world of a hysterical and
neurotic Mary whom Philip finds repulsive, to the absurd notion that by the end of Elizabeth's
reign, England was the most powerful nation on earth.
Professor David Loades, the most important modem historian of Marian England,
someone whose influence must be acknowledged by anyone writing on this subject, writes
that "the picture painted by Froude and endorsed by Pollard was a grotesque caricature". 6 He
remains, however, "unrepentantly sceptical of the attempts which are sometimes made to
claim that Mary's death at the relatively early age of forty three deprived England of a great
catholic queen".7 The grounds for his position are that her reign, "did not command the same
consensus of support as that of Elizabeth - or even the level achieved by Flemy in the last
years of his life".8 Here my reading differs from his, since I would tend to support such claims
in order to counter and compensate for the bias which haunts this period. In the 1950s, S. T.
Bindoff judged the Marian 'interlude': "Politically bankrupt, spiritually impoverished,
economically anarchic, and intellectually enervated, Marian England awaited the day of its
deliverance".9 Professor Geoffrey Elton's assessment of Mary in 1977 was no better. He
described her as "arrogant, assertive, bigoted, stubborn, suspicious and (not to put too fine
a point upon it) rather stupid... devoid of political skill, unable to compromise, set only on
the wholesale reversal of a generation's history".'° This remains representative of the majority
5Edwin Jones, The English Nation: The Great Myth (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing,
1998), p. 226.
6David Loades, The Reign of Mary Tudor: Politics. Government and Religion in
England 1553-1558 (London: Longman, 2nd ed. 1991), p. x.
7Ibid.
8lbid.
9S. T. Bindoff, Tudor England (London: Penguin, 1950), p. 182.
'°Geoffrey Elton, Reform and Reformation: England 1509-1558 (London: Edward
Arnold, 1977), p. 376.
9
view." The trouble with Mary and what makes the Marian period fascinating are two central
and related problems.
Firstly, even where historians have recoiled from the excesses of earlier writers, it is
true that, "the basically Whiggish and ultimately Protestant view of things is still a potent
influence", albeit in a diluted, residual, and secularised form.' 2 The official view of the
British past is built around an understanding of the Reformation, in which Mary is necessarily
antipathetic; an investment in the image of the Tudors riding on the back of popular anti-
clericalism and turning their backs on a papacy which had systematically encroached and
trespassed on the liberties and independence of the English Church and State during the
medieval period. The concept of the Reformation as a movement of national liberation,
restoring England to an original sovereign estate and laying the foundations for the nation's
"divinely appointed role as the 'elect nation', destined to lead Protestantism in the old world
of Europe and in the new world of the widespread colonies abroad", makes any recuperation
of Mary atavistic.'3 l'his moment is a watershed; the schism which fractures the British and
European historiographical traditions. The misrepresentation of Mary's reign is a nationalist
imperative.
Secondly, Philip's reign in England has to a considerable extent been erased from our
historical memory. As David Loades has written in a recent review of historiography and
research of the period: "Philip as king of England remains a shadowy figure, and his
relationship with Mary appears less straightforward the more it is investigated".' 4 The flip-
side of Mary's marginalization in Tudor historiography is the scant and lightweight treatment
given to the 'enterprise of England' as much by Hispanist historians as in Tudor history. The
most recent biographies of Philip H, by Geoffrey Parker, Henry Kamen, and Manuel
Fernández Alvarez, cover this four year period of his career in a mere two, five and ten pages
"Elizabeth Russell, 'Mary Tudor and Mr. Jorkins', Historical Research 63:152 (1990),
263-276, p. 263.
'2Edwin Jones, The English Nation: The Great Myth, p. 239.
'3lbid, p. 192.
'4David Loades, 'The Reign of Mary Tudor: Historiography and Research', Albion
21:4 (1989), 547-558, p. 556.