Read Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth for Free Online

fatally compounded by her having had for her mother a woman of such stark immorality that she was executed for treason. The Act rehearsed Anne Boleyn’s alleged transgressions in minute detail, in terms that made it impossible to avoid the conclusion that Elizabeth was a bastard twice over: illegitimate in the eyes of God (there existed, according to the Act, an unspecified but “just true and lawful impediment”), and, in contrast to Mary, not even her father’s biological child. It was well known that the Lady Anne, “inflamed with pride and carnal desires of her body,” had committed adultery, “confederat[ing] herself” with George Boleyn, “her natural brother,” as well as with four other named individuals. Their “treason” was both proved and very much in the public domain, they having been “attainted...and hav[ing] suffered according to their merits, as by the records...appear[s].” 22
    The same allegations circulated at Edward’s death, in order to pave the way for the diversion of the crown to Lady Jane Grey, and they were alluded to, if not explicitly rehearsed, in the legislation that established Mary Tudor on the throne. 23 Indeed, the evidence suggests that Marian regime deliberately sought to underline Elizabeth’s illegitimate status, using arguments that were judged to appeal across the confessional divide. After Mary’s coronation it was proposed that a public declaration of Elizabeth’s illegitimacy be made in parliament. The grounds were to be, not papal sanction, but rather the principal of marital indissolubility that Henry VIII had resoundingly reaffirmed as part of his reformation agenda. 24 “Elizabeth is to be declared a bastard, having been born during the lifetime of Queen Catherine, mother of the queen,” the Spanish ambassador Simon Renard reported. The declaration “will be made without any mention of the Pope or his authority.” 25 (Mary herself clearly preferred the more damning option that presented Anne Boleyn as a strumpet. “As for Elizabeth,” Mary told Renard, “she was a bastard, the offspring of one of whose good fame [he] might have heard, and who had received her punishment.” 26 )
    Thus in 1558 the task of legitimating the new queen was not easy. It was complicated by Elizabeth’s identification with the “new religion” and by the very success of one distinctive feature of Mary Tudor’s queenship—her pan-European program. Corinna Streckfuss’s work in this volume clearly shows the powerful appeal of her twin policies of dynastic security, to be effected through a Habsburg marriage, and religious reconciliation with Rome. 27 Historians now generally agree that that program was undone more by gynecological misfortune than by the Protestant bona fides so assiduously credited to the English nation by historians and apologists from John Foxe onward. As Mark Nicholls observes, the situation two years after the marriage, with Mary apparently pregnant and the nation manifestly enthusiastic over the prospect of a Spanish Catholic heir, “presents the observer with a fleeting vision of what might have been.” 28
    That vision continued to haunt committed English and Scottish Protestant councilors of state after Mary’s death. It did so in large measure because in its essentials it seemed to live on in the person of another Catholic Mary, the Scottish queen Mary Stuart. Granddaughter of Henry VII, daughter of James V of Scotland, wife of the French king Francis II—and, from 1566, the mother of a son—she became the focal point of a variant Catholic imperial vision, this one centered on French hegemony. 29 Their fears intensified once the 1559 Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis ended the chronic wars between the Habsburg and the Valois dynasties. The new concord raised the specter of Catholic monarchs sinking their differences in order to launch a European crusade against the True Church— and against England, its local habitation. At the same time, the