Mary I, Queen of England

I ' MAR! I, QUEEN OF ENGLAND ERIC HARRISON ' THE English have -never approved of fanaticism in their rulers. Visionaries on the throne of England have been mercifully rare. Of.the few wh_ which they clung. Henry's other daughter, Elizabeth, and Lord Burghley, made use of th~ same skill in resolving political .'dilemma. Being confronted with an incipient ana.rchy of Catholic and Protestant, they contrived to equate the spiritual welfare of the nation with- the secular, and by dexterity in -draftsmanship, produced the Anglican Church. It has been somewhat cynically observed by a recent / 466 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY biographer of Archbishop Laud that "the 'thirty-nine articles managed to sanction. almost 'every known doctrine." Yet such a latitude was surely not so far removed from the " humanistic view of essential _,Christianity without p~dantry , of- ,theology, which, if the hierarchy had listened to Erasmus -in time, might have saved the Church in the West from catastrophe~ and preserved Europe in Christian charity from the oceans of blood th~t it spilled over Christian dogmatics. As fo'r poor Mary, though lacking nothing of the family's stomach for great affairs, she was too steadfast in religion and too Spanish in temperament to be ' 'able to anticipate so smooth an emulsion'of doctrinal oil and, water. She lived under the fatal handicap of too potent an heredity in the Princess of Aragon. ' The mother of Mary was plain and devout, risky virtues in a wife. She had been more likely to produce a child of fait~ than had the mother of Elizabeth,- the bright, vicious and hysterical' Anne Boleyn. Yet Queen Katharine's dutifulness of twenty years might have sufficed her, had it not been for her unfruitful laboriousness in child-be~. Was she not a.'valuable asset to the, diplomacy of her in-laws; linking that upstart dynasty and · their exiguous p~wer to the imperial grandeur of Spain? As a Queen of England she had patterned the monogamous ethic of her people and done honour to their martial ardour in war. Her role had been a brave one when in the early days, as Henry's Regent, she had faced the invading Scots, the lion himself being away in France besieging Therouanne. «You are not so busy with,war in Therouan-ne," she had written to ,Wolsey, 41as I a~ encumbered with it in England." She came close to the English people then, as they were to' draw nearer to her when Henry went a-whoring after Boleyn. IIThey are all very glad to be busy with the Scots," she had said, Hfor they , take it to be a pastime. My heart is very good to it, and I am horribly busy making standards, banners and badges." The Scots ran into a ghastly defeat and Flodden passed into history as their last great border battle:, not least in the armoury of victory were Katharine's own fortitude and the confident example 6f her needle,. Try as she would, however, Queen Katharine!was never able wholly to be reconciled to the land of her marriage. Always in the background other consciousness her Spanish confessor stood, the ghostly guardian of her ultimate loyalties. Moreover, the . admirable qualities she displayed as Henry's consort did not make good her r ' MARY I, QUEEN OF ENGLAND 467 repeated failure to bear him a healthy boy, the male heir in whom King and people found their common necessity. In the persisten t mortality of Henry's sons lay the making of religious revolution, and the fate of Mary, the solitary child who survived. , ' Those traits in Mary's nature which chiefly determined the grim purpose of her rule w, ere Aragonese , rather than Tudor. - Courage she inherited from both her parents. The .fascination that theology held for her was similarly a joint bequest. Her gaiety, somewhat stifled in adolescence; she derived from her father, as to him also she owed its withering. But the gravity and ballast. of her personality, the spiritual conviction that came to resolve itself into 'a cold passion of cruelty, appear to derive from a strain of religiosity engendered within her out of the harsh intellectual...