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Writing Mary I
History, Historiography, and Fiction

Edited by
Valerie Schutte
Jessica S. Hower
Queenship and Power

Series Editors
Charles E. Beem, University of North Carolina, Pembroke, NC, USA
Carole Levin, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA
This series focuses on works specializing in gender analysis, women’s
studies, literary interpretation, and cultural, political, constitutional, and
diplomatic history. It aims to broaden our understanding of the strategies
that queens—both consorts and regnants, as well as female regents—
pursued in order to wield political power within the structures of
male-dominant societies. The works describe queenship in Europe as well
as many other parts of the world, including East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa,
and Islamic civilization.

More information about this series at


https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14523
Valerie Schutte · Jessica S. Hower
Editors

Writing Mary I
History, Historiography, and Fiction
Editors
Valerie Schutte Jessica S. Hower
Beaver Falls, PA, USA Southwestern University
Georgetown, TX, USA

ISSN 2730-938X ISSN 2730-9398 (electronic)


Queenship and Power
ISBN 978-3-030-95131-3 ISBN 978-3-030-95132-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
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general use.
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To Eloise and Bates—our sources of inspiration and sleep deprivation.
Acknowledgements

Writing Mary I is the second volume in our series of essays on England’s


first queen regnant. As with the first, we owe our contributors thanks for
their tireless effort in writing thoughtful and thought-provoking essays
while under the strenuous conditions and significant limitations imposed
by national and international lockdowns as well as myriad other profes-
sional and personal hardships. We are consistently amazed with and
thrilled by the fresh, innovative research that continues to be produced
on Mary I and that demonstrates the necessity of this collection.
We also thank the wonderful staff and editors at Palgrave Macmillan—
namely Sam Stocker, Charles Beem, and Carole Levin—for their support
and guidance.
To our spouses, thank you for tolerating never-ending conversations
about Mary and queenship, and making us better scholars for it.

vii
Praise for Writing Mary I

“This fascinating collection of wide-ranging essays provides an extensive


exploration of multiple aspects of the life, reign, image, and afterlife of
Mary I. It offers a deeper, more thorough examination of Mary, placing
her center stage and convincingly establishing her importance as the first
ruling queen of England without recourse to comparisons with her more
well-known sister Elizabeth. The end result of these new insights is an
expansion of knowledge about Mary and a significant contribution to
Marian scholarship that provides a valuable resource for academics and
students alike.”
—Sarah Duncan, Professor of History, Spring Hill College, Alabama, USA

ix
Contents

Introduction 1
Jessica S. Hower and Valerie Schutte

Ambassador and Princess


‘A Paragon of Beauty, Goodness, and Virtue’: Princess
Mary in the Writings of Imperial Ambassador Eustace
Chapuys 11
Derek M. Taylor
Imperial Meddler/Marian Mentor: Eustace Chapuys
and Mary Tudor in Film and Television 35
William B. Robison

European Entanglements
Venetian Diplomacy Under Mary I 61
Samantha Perez
A Narrative That Was Not Her Own: Mary I
as Mediterranean Queen 87
Darcy Kern

xi
xii CONTENTS

Speaking from Spain


From Lioness to Exemplary Yet Unsuccessful Queen: Mary
I in Early Modern Spain 115
Kelsey J. Ihinger
Images of Mary I in Modern Spanish Media 141
Tamara Pérez-Fernández

Fact or Fiction
Dressed to Kill: The Fashioning of “Bloody Mary” 167
Emilie M. Brinkman
Mary I in The Ringed Castle 191
Alexander Samson
Still Bloody Mary: Mary I in Historical Fiction 217
Stephanie Russo

Index 241
Notes on Contributors

Emilie M. Brinkman is a historian of early modern Europe specializing in


material culture, politics, and gender. She graduated from Purdue Univer-
sity in 2018 with her Ph.D. in Early Modern European History. She holds
an M.A. in History from Miami University as well as a B.A. in History and
A.A. in Art History from Thomas More College. She combines her work
as an independent lecturer and scholar with part-time roles at Thomas
More University in Crestview Hills, Kentucky and Maryville University
in St. Louis. Her research areas include seventeenth-century political
culture; fashion and material culture; display, representation, and iden-
tity; and the intersection of Renaissance history and modern pop culture.
Her work on the history of modern British weddings has been featured
in The Washington Post. She is currently working on her first monograph,
“The Politics of Fashion in Stuart Britain, 1603–1714,” which examines
how fashion and material objects served as a site for political discourse
and agency during the seventeenth century.
Jessica S. Hower earned her Ph.D. in History at Georgetown Univer-
sity in 2013, after completing her M.A. there in 2009 and her B.A. at
Union College in 2006. She is currently an associate professor of History
at Southwestern University, a small liberal arts college outside of Austin,
Texas, where she teaches on Britain, Ireland, the British Empire, the Early
Modern Atlantic World, comparative colonialism, gender, and memory.
Her first monograph, Tudor Empire: The Making of Britain and the
British Atlantic World, 1485–1603 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), explores

xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

over a century of theorizing about and activity in the world beyond


England’s borders, showing how enterprise aboard at once mirrored,
responded to, and provoked politics and culture at home, while decisively
shaping the broader Atlantic context. Other projects have appeared in
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, Cannibalism and
the Early Modern Atlantic, and Britain and the World, and The Oxford
Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia (forthcoming).
Kelsey J. Ihinger received her Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the depiction of England in
early modern Spain, the creation of Spain’s early modern imperial identity,
and the relationship between history and fiction in texts that depict histor-
ical events and characters. She has published her work on the theatrical
representations of Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart in Spanish drama with the
Bulletin of the Comediantes and is currently preparing a manuscript on
England’s place in the creation of Spain’s imperial image in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
Darcy Kern earned her Ph.D. at Georgetown University and is Asso-
ciate Professor of History at Southern Connecticut State University. Her
research interests include language, translation, politics, and authority;
Anglo-Spanish interactions; and cultural exchange in Western Europe
and the Atlantic. She has published in journals such as Renaissance and
Reformation, the Journal of Medieval History; and Philological Quarterly.
Her chapter on Thomas More’s Utopia in Spain and Mexico is forth-
coming in the Oxford Handbook of Utopia. She is currently finishing
her first monograph, Translating Politics in Renaissance Europe. She has
held fellowships with the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington
Library, UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Amer-
ican Catholic Historical Association, and the Connecticut State University
System and has been a seminarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library and
the Rare Books School (UVa).
Samantha Perez is currently an Assistant Professor at Southeastern
Louisiana University where she serves as the graduate coordinator for the
Master’s program. She completed her Ph.D. from Tulane University in
2017 with a dissertation entitled “Roman Inheritance: Romanitas and
Civic Identity in Trecento Siena” which explores the republic’s coordi-
nated efforts to fabricate its own antiquity and assert an association with
classical Rome in the early Renaissance. Her research interests are chiefly
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

questions of identity and responses to other-ness in the early modern


period and currently focus on diplomatic and economic encounters
between Japanese and Italians in the late sixteenth century.
Tamara Pérez-Fernández is an Assistant Professor at the University of
Valladolid, where she teaches courses on English language and liter-
ature. She holds a degree in English Studies from the University of
Valladolid, and a Ph.D. in English Studies from the Universities of
Valladolid and Salamanca. Her research focuses on the paratextual mate-
rials and the textual transmission of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and
John Gower, and specifically on the role of the scribes. As part of the
research project “Exile, Diplomacy, and Textual Transmission: Networks
of Exchange between the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles,” funded
by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, she
has written about Anglo-Spanish relations in the late middle ages and the
early modern period.
William B. Robison earned his Ph.D. at Louisiana State University
in 1983 and is Professor of History and Head of the Department of
History and Political Science at Southeastern Louisiana University; editor
of History, Fiction, and ‘The Tudors’: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic
License in Showtime’s Television Series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); co-
author of The Tudors on Film and Television (McFarland, 2013); co-editor
of Historical Dictionary of Late Medieval England (Greenwood, 2002)
and Historical Dictionary of Stuart England (Greenwood, 1996); author
of articles, book chapters, essays, and reviews dealing with early modern
England, film history, and popular culture; director of the film Louisiana
During World War II (2013); a published poet; a BMI-affiliated musi-
cian; and at work on a new edition of The Tudors on Film and Television,
a book project about politics, religion, and society in Tudor Surrey, and
another on the comic appropriation of the Tudors in film, fiction, and
popular culture.
Stephanie Russo is a Senior Lecturer and Discipline Chair of Liter-
ature at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of
The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction
and on the Screen (2020) and Women in Revolutionary Debate: Female
Novelists from Burney to Austen (2012). She specializes in historical
fiction, and particularly in historical fiction about early modern women.
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

She is currently working on a project on the use of anachronism in


contemporary historical fiction, film, and television.
Alexander Samson is a Reader in Early Modern Studies at Univer-
sity College London. His research interests include the early colonial
history of the Americas, Anglo-Spanish intercultural interactions and
early modern English and Spanish drama. His book Mary and Philip:
The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain was published by
Manchester University Press in 2020. He runs the Golden Age and
Renaissance Research Seminar and is director of UCL’s Centre for Early
Modern Exchanges and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters.
Valerie Schutte is an independent scholar who specializes in royal Tudor
women and book dedications. She has edited or co-edited four volumes
on Queen Mary I, Shakespeare, and queenship, of which The Palgrave
Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens (2018) won the 2020 Royal Studies
Journal book prize. Her first monograph is Mary I and the Art of Book
Dedications: Royal Women, Power, and Persuasion (2015), which is the
first comprehensive study of Mary’s books and those dedicated to her.
Schutte’s second monograph, Princesses Mary and Elizabeth Tudor and
the Gift Book Exchange, was published with ARC Humanities Press in
2021. She is currently editing a volume on the making and re-making of
Lady Jane Grey and Mary and writing a cultural biography of Anne of
Cleves.
Derek M. Taylor is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the State Univer-
sity of New York at Buffalo with a conferral date of September 1, 2021.
His research interests include early modern diplomacy, the migration of
Scots Catholics to Europe, post-Reformation Catholicism in Britain, and
female political leadership during the early modern era. His doctoral thesis
focuses on the life and career of Scottish author and intellectual George
Conn, who served as the papal emissary to the court of Queen Henri-
etta Maria from 1636 to 1639. Mr. Taylor currently serves as a history
instructor at West Virginia State University in Institute, West Virginia,
where he teaches courses in world history, British history, European
history, and the history of female leadership.
Introduction

Jessica S. Hower and Valerie Schutte

Readers of the introduction to volume one of this two-part edited collec-


tion will be familiar with one line of Mary I’s famous Guildhall Speech, in
which she called upon “the worde of a Prince” to rally her subjects against
the rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt in early February 1554, and that line’s
significance for the eleven essays that followed. The most careful of those
readers will have also noted a mention of several clauses—plural—that
are ripe for reexamination and that function to encourage new scholar-
ship, not merely one. Indeed, much as the first manifested so many of the
themes central to the first volume, a second line serves the same purpose
for volume two. After expressing her hope that she and her loyal subjects
could be bound together in love and concord, both equally committed
to the realm and its rightful rule, and defending her upcoming marriage
to Philip of Spain as duly measured and considered, a Privy-Council-
approved means to honor and promote the English commonweal, Mary

J. S. Hower (B)
Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX, USA
e-mail: howerj@southwestern.edu
V. Schutte
Independent Researcher, Beaver Falls, PA, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1


Switzerland AG 2022
V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship
and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_1
2 J. S. HOWER AND V. SCHUTTE

explained that she was not particularly desirous or eager to wed. “But,”
she declared, “if as my progenitors haue done before, it might please
God that I might leaue some fruite of my bodie behind me to be your
Gouernor, I trust you would not onely reioyce therat, but also I know
it would be to your great comforte.”1 Of course, and quite famously,
Mary did not leave any children behind at her death; she was, instead,
succeeded by her younger half-sister Elizabeth I. However, if we isolate
the middle portion of the sentence, in which the queen regnant hopes to
“leaue some fruite of my bodie behind me,” and define that fruit more
broadly than children alone, she was quite successful. Mary appreciated
the power and importance of what might remain after her death, as well
as how she was perceived more broadly. As such, her words encourage
us to do the most with the literary remains composed by the many who
have observed her, in life and in death, at home in England and further
afield abroad, to look at Mary from multiple perspectives, and to appre-
ciate the twists, turns, and continuities in her posthumous representation.
Put simply, the queen’s words serve as a wonderful exhortation to explore
the process and consequences of Writing Mary I .
Following on the heels of a first book dedicated to examining represen-
tations of Queen Mary I in writing, this second book explores the multi-
valent means of writing that queen into text, very capaciously defined,
from England to parts abroad, from the sixteenth century to the present,
and from ostensibly factual primary sources to equally ostensibly fictional
ones. In so doing, it retains the historiographical mission and thrust
of volume one, while complementing and expanding upon its themes,
including the value of transcending literary genres to create a holistic
assessment of how the queen perceived herself and has been perceived
by others across different kinds of sources, the utility of subjecting Mary
to the same sorts of questions and same degree of in-depth scrutiny that
her younger half-sister Elizabeth has received, the centrality of power and
authority alongside foreign diplomacy, and more—all in service of making
a significant contribution to the vibrant field that is twenty-first-century
Marian Studies. Readers eager for more are encouraged to peruse volume

1 Richard Grafton, A Chronicle at large and meere History of the affayres of Englande
and Kinges of the same, deduced from the Creation of the worlde, vnto the first habitation
of thys Islande; and so by continuance vnto the first yere of the reigne of our most deere
and souereigne Lady Queene Elizabeth: collected out of sundry Aucthors, whose names are
expressed in the next Page of this leafe (London, 1569), 1333.
INTRODUCTION 3

one and its introduction for a more thorough conversation about the
existing scholarly literature and the two-volume collection’s intervention
in it, as well as for the first eleven essays on Mary as conveyed via the
written word.
Volume two opens by properly locating one of the most important
foreigners at Mary’s court near the center of her monarchy and unpacking
his vital contemporary role as well as his much more modest place in
modern popular memory, helping to unearth the sometimes remembered,
sometimes forgotten, and always important story of the “Ambassador
and Princess.”
Derek M. Taylor’s chapter reevaluates the relationship between Mary
and Holy Roman Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys. He argues
that returning to familiar, traditional source material—namely, Chapuys’s
correspondence with Charles V as translated and summarized in the
Calendar of State Papers, Spain and Letters and Papers of Henry VIII —
and elevating third-person accounts reveals a new, clearer understanding
of how Princess Mary was both viewed by and used by the Holy
Roman Empire in its diplomatic dealings with England. Moreover, Taylor
purports, Chapuys’s representations of Mary should be given more cred-
ibility than has hitherto been the case (and especially by comparison to
the ambassador’s renderings of Anne Boleyn) because of Mary’s young
age when they met, the genuine friendship that the pair built over time,
and the princess’s precarious place at court. Doing so turns Chapuys’s
letters from mere contextual evidence for the chaotic years when the
divorce crisis wracked Europe into the basis for new appraisals, like a
far more positive view of Mary than comes down to us from Protes-
tant polemics and Taylor’s contention that Chapuys’s concern was not to
damage Anne’s reputation, but rather to protect Mary. Through Taylor’s
Chapuys, we can see the adolescence and maturation of England’s first
regnant queen, and her important place in international politics.
William B. Robison explores Mary I’s relationship with Eustace
Chapuys in modern television and film, or more accurately, the rather
surprising dearth of on-screen representations of the pair. He focuses
on some of the most well-known and highly revered pieces of Tudorist
popular culture produced over the last twenty years to show how oppor-
tunities to depict the Mary–Chapuys dynamic have been refused or
ignored for the sake of apparently sexier topics, such as Henry VIII
and his six wives and the rivalry between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen
of Scots, or of contemporary messages that seem to be at odds with
4 J. S. HOWER AND V. SCHUTTE

traditional perceptions of the two, like the women’s and civil rights move-
ments. While Mary and Chapuys often receive little or no screen time
separately, let alone together, Robison shows that the decision has more
to do with the biases of writers and producers than with the importance
of the princess and ambassador as historical figures and puts film markedly
at odds with newer historiographical trends. Significantly, Robison finds
that, for all its faults and in contrast to the supposedly more high-brow
Wolf Hall , Showtime’s The Tudors conveys Mary and Chapuys in a more
successfully, casting them as historical actors with their own agency who
were paramount to happenings at Henry’s court.
Moving beyond Mary I’s years as a hopeful future queen and
enveloping more than even the expansive Holy Roman Empire, the
second set of chapters in this volume draws our gaze to other locales
implicated in her reign, whether as a crucial diplomatic contact or
because she was their queen consort, despite the lack of attention these
“European Entanglements” have received in scholarly, popular, and
even contemporary accounts.
Samantha Perez examines Mary I and her court through the eyes of
the Venetian ambassadors stationed there. By shifting emphasis away from
the much more frequently examined Spanish and French perspectives
and thereby complicating the picture of mid-sixteenth-century European
diplomacy. She finds out just how important Mary was to navigating the
vicissitudes of Continental politics, restoration Catholicism, and Italian
affairs—as well as how acutely aware the Venetians were of that impor-
tance. Moreover, after briefly chronicling the rise of the Venetian embassy
in Tudor England early in the reign of Henry VII and then contin-
uing the narrative through to its departure over fifty years later, Perez
uses their ambassadorial correspondence to shed new light on the queen
herself, in matters of religion, rule, personality, and more, as viewed
through Venice’s lens. Offering a fresh contribution to current discus-
sions on Anglo-Italian relations and broader conceptions of early modern
monarchical authority, diplomatic dynamics, and foreign policy, Perez
argues that a Venetian look at Mary helps us better understand both the
significance of her reign and England’s role on the international stage.
Darcy Kern reminds us that owing to her marriage to Philip II, Mary
was not only queen of England, Ireland, and (nominally) France, but also
queen of Naples and, after 1556, of Spain—despite the lack of atten-
tion her role as consort in these more southern territories has received.
Kern explains why: as Mary never stepped foot in either country, the
INTRODUCTION 5

queen was little known and rarely perceived as have any real authority
in either. More specifically, Kern argues that in Naples, Mary’s power
was inextricably linked to that of her husband and, as such, when he was
perceived of as weak (which was so often the case), so too was Mary. In
Spain, Mary was also marginalized and deemed lacking in royal authority
there, this time on the basis of her power in England, the dominance of
her Privy Council in political matters, and the nature of English society
and governance more generally; her appearance, sexuality, and fertility,
which failed to meet Spanish standards of beauty and fecundity; and her
distance, both physical and imagined, from the Mediterranean country
and its actual rule. To make matters worse, Philip did not really acknowl-
edge his wife as Queen of Spain either, going so far as to ignore her in
official correspondence near the end of her reign. Even though Mary was
queen consort of these two realms, she maintained little if any authority
among her Neapolitan and Spanish subjects and her image has been all
but lost as a consequence.
Fixing entirely on the site of Mary’s more famous consortship and
moving the chronology ahead, two more essays uncover how the queen
appears when “Speaking from Spain,” in the past and in the present.
Here, it seems that complexity, nuance, multiplicity, even favor in Mary’s
own lifetime and in the century that followed have given way to generality
and easy stereotyping in our time.
Kelsey J. Ihinger uses a close analysis of Mary I as depicted in Spain
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to challenge the automatic
assumption that any mention of a blood-soaked, tragic Tudor monarch,
especially a “bloody” Tudor queen, necessarily refers to her, rather than
her father or half-sister, and bring to the fore a far more complicated
story. In the hands of Spanish writers, who produced everything from
traditional histories to pamphlets, popular plays, and poems, Mary’s image
was a positive, if ever-shifting one, subject to frequent reshaping and revi-
sion as Anglo-Spanish relations, the broader European context, and global
imperial politics themselves shifted. Eminently useful and malleable across
her lifetime and in death, and especially during the four critical stages that
Ihinger privileges, Mary functioned as a means by which her husband’s
subjects could comment on changing circumstances, transforming their
queen consort from a superlative and well-rounded leader, to a strong
if less agentic defender of the Catholic faith, to an inspiring symbol
of saintly piety, to a manifestation of Spain’s altered perceptions of an
ascendant England. Ihinger shows that there was, then, never one single,
6 J. S. HOWER AND V. SCHUTTE

stable Spanish Mary, but rather multiple versions, each constructed and
reconstructed to suit the architect’s needs.
Tamara Pérez-Fernández surveys modern Spanish media depictions
of Mary I. Charting the significant if modest burst of recent television
episodes, radio broadcasts, print articles, and digital pieces that portray
the queen for Spanish audiences, Pérez-Fernández finds that Mary is,
unsurprisingly, largely stereotyped as “Bloody Mary” and presented as
a failure of queenship and motherhood. Following extensive quantitative
as well as qualitative analysis, the author argues that conservative media
tends to be more interested in Mary and to offer a more sympathetic view
of her than its more progressive counterpart, yet neither offers a nuanced
picture of Spain’s queen consort, instead resorting to familiar images
of failure, unattractiveness, religious zealotry, instability, and childhood
trauma. Even though these renderings have emerged simultaneous with
groundbreaking revisionist histories and an increased interest in mining
the past for popular culture, the author shows that mainstream Spanish
sources have not adopted the newest historiography of Mary, resulting in
the regurgitation of old tropes. Nevertheless, there is reason for hope; as
the more in-depth, subtle study of important women in Spanish history
now grips the academy, perhaps it will one day grip the press and screen
as well.
The volume and, by extension, the full collection closes with a final
set of three chapters at the messy intersection of history and literature,
showcasing what it means to write about and portray Mary I in our own
time, whether in the form of screenplays, theatrical plays, or novels. The
authors demonstrate that there is both “Fact and Fiction” at work in
popular culture that centers on the queen or her era, but also find that
these pieces are few and far between and that not all of them are informed
by current historiographical trends or even what we “know” about the
past in which Mary lived. The scoresheet shows a decidedly mixed result.
In this, perhaps, historical fiction, in all of its forms, is not unlike academic
scholarship: there is much to commend revisionist work on Mary I, yet
there is still a long way to go.
Emilie M. Brinkman investigates the role of costume in the construc-
tion of Mary I’s negative reputation in history and in popular culture.
Beginning with arguably the most potent modern visual representation,
Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998), then shifting back in time to fill in
the gap between the sixteenth and late twentieth centuries, Brinkman
examines descriptions of Mary’s dress during her lifetime, as well as how
INTRODUCTION 7

the queen was dressed in posthumous stage and screen productions. She
argues that beginning in the seventeenth century, sartorial depictions of
Mary do not accurately reflect what the queen wore; rather, they fabricate
and reinforce a dark, bloody image. During her reign, and even reaching
back to her childhood, Mary seemed to favor a French style of dress, as
opposed to the Spanish style she is typically portrayed in. In two early
seventeenth-century plays, staged amid Stuart-era anti-papal hysteria,
Mary is given all the material trappings of Catholicism and her atten-
tion to dress is meant to be a commentary on the opulence and excess
supposedly inherent to the faith. The eighteenth-century Jacobite threat
further exacerbated Mary’s bad reputation, and this is what manifested
in the nineteenth century, as Mary’s concern for proper attire borders on
the obsessive—a warning against the tyranny and vanity of Catholic rule—
and she is increasingly appareled in red. Brinkman contends that Mary’s
wardrobe is an understudied aspect of her reign, and must be interrogated
as more than merely a foil to the well-dressed Elizabeth.
Alexander Samson’s chapter focuses on the fifth installment of Dorothy
Dunnett’s The Lymond Chronicles, set in the reign of Mary I and Philip
II. Like much of Dunnett’s work, The Ringed Castle (1971) has received
almost no academic treatment, yet Samson shows that it is meticulously
researched and written, informed by copious primary source material,
brimming with historically accurate detail, and keenly aware if not actu-
ally ahead of the relevant scholarly literature, not to mention a world-wide
bestseller. Moreover, he argues, the novel offers a unique perspective on
Mary and Philip’s court, appreciating the interplay between individual
and broader forces, bringing the mid-Tudor world and its cultural fabric
tangibly to life, and foregrounding England’s activity abroad, especially
in Russia, as well as the gendered dynamics at work with a woman on
the throne—all in a way that exemplifies the close, complex relationship
between history and literature. Dunnett’s duly complex Mary is both
the familiar bloody queen and the more sympathetic, politically astute
woman, as influenced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories that
vilify and pity her and Dunnett’s own reading of sixteenth-century sources
that acknowledged Mary’s achievements.
Stephanie Russo offers a careful study of twentieth- and twenty-first-
century historical fiction featuring Mary I, ultimately showing that these
fictionalized portrayals have not caught up to the historical revision of
Mary’s reign championed by academics over the same period, but instead
8 J. S. HOWER AND V. SCHUTTE

perpetuate her bloody popular image. Appreciating the untapped poten-


tial that fictionalization might provide such a frequently maligned subject,
Russo focuses on novels in which Mary is the main character, of which
there are relatively few, especially compared to those centered on her step-
mother Anne Boleyn or her successor Elizabeth I. She suggests that this
dearth carries significant cultural and misogynist baggage, stemming from
the idea that a younger husband would not fall in love with an older wife,
that a proto-feminist Gloriana needed a negative foil, and that Mary’s
reign lacked a dramatic moment of romance or victory (even if invented),
such as Henry VIII’s break with Rome for Anne Boleyn or Elizabeth’s
Tilbury speech in the face of the Spanish Armada. Accordingly, novelized
treatments of Mary have only confirmed what historians have increasingly
rejected and granted the myth of England’s first and failed queen regnant
even more staying power.
Twenty essays across two volumes later, the significance of Mary I in
writing and of writing Mary I should be abundantly and unequivocally
obvious. Perhaps, then, it is only the years in which scholars failed to pay
the queen any heed that constitute a “barren interlude.”2

2 Conyers Read, The Tudors : Personalities and Practical Politics in Sixteenth Century
England (New York: Norton, 1936), 144.
Ambassador and Princess
‘A Paragon of Beauty, Goodness,
and Virtue’: Princess Mary in the Writings
of Imperial Ambassador Eustace Chapuys

Derek M. Taylor

Protestant polemics regarding her reign in the century-and-a-half after


her death aside, it is nevertheless little surprise that Mary I became
one of England’s most notorious monarchs if her adolescence and early
adulthood are considered in full. Declared illegitimate by her father,
King Henry VIII in 1533, Mary spent much of her time as a young
woman mourning the loss of her father’s favor and the poor treatment
he bestowed upon her mother, Queen Catherine of Aragon, prior to the
queen’s death in 1536. Throughout this period, Mary’s friend Eustace
Chapuys served the princess not only as her confidant and political advisor
but also as her champion during his time as the Holy Roman Imperial
ambassador to Henry’s court until his retirement in 1545. As such, the
Savoy native was a pivotal figure in Mary’s maturation process. Although
Chapuys was Catherine’s chief ally, it was through that tie that the ambas-
sador also built a strong relationship with Mary, who was thirteen years
old when the two met and twenty-nine when Chapuys left England. Their
relationship began just as the roots of the English Reformation were

D. M. Taylor (B)
West Virginia State University, Institute, WV, USA
e-mail: derek.taylor@wvstateu.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11


Switzerland AG 2022
V. Schutte and J. S. Hower (eds.), Writing Mary I, Queenship
and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95132-0_2
12 D. M. TAYLOR

beginning to sprout, and the friendship was tied to some of the starkest
changes made by Parliament at Henry’s behest to the Church of England.
This important period in Mary’s development is portrayed in regular
correspondence between Chapuys and Mary’s cousin, Emperor Charles
V. These letters, translated in the nineteenth century and available in
full in the Calendar of State Papers and among the Letters and Papers
series, provide us with assessments of not only Mary’s political value
to Charles’s goals as emperor, but more importantly to this project,
of Mary’s person.1 An assessment of these works provides access to a
version of Chapuys’s thoughts about her that direct correspondence with
the princess might not reveal for a variety of reasons, including that
Chapuys might have feared being overly negative with Mary since that
could jeopardize the stability of his own position. After all, Mary’s well-
being was not the primary concern of the emperor throughout Chapuys’s
embassy. Instead, Mary’s plight became a development of interest only
after Chapuys had been there for several years. Mary’s lack of active
participation in these epistolary conversations allows this study to add
to historiography regarding third-party opinion of Mary both as a human
being and as a person of political interest to foreign entities, namely by
the Holy Roman Empire and its representative in England. This work,
therefore, fits alongside recent scholarship that address these third-party
writings such as Valerie Schutte’s “Under the Influence: The Impact of

1 Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 4 Part 1, Henry VIII, 1529–1530. Edited by
Pascual de Gayangos (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1879); Calendar of State
Papers, Spain, Volume 4, Part 2, Henry VIII, 1530–33. Edited by Gayangos (London:
Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1882). Abbreviated as CSP: Spain in subsequent cita-
tions; Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 6, 1533. Edited
by James Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1882); Letters and Papers,
Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 7, 1534. Edited by Gairdner (London: Her
Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1883); Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII,
Volume 8, January–July 1535. Edited by Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary
Office, 1885); Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 9, August–
December 1535. Edited by Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1886);
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 10, January–June 1536.
Edited by Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1887); Letters and Papers,
Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 11, July–December 1536. Edited by Gairdner
(London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1888); and Letters and Papers, Foreign and
Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 17, 1542. Edited by Gairdner and R.H. Brodie (London:
Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1900). Abbreviated at L&P with volume notations in
subsequent citations.
‘A PARAGON OF BEAUTY, GOODNESS, AND VIRTUE’ … 13

Queenly Book Dedications on Princess Mary” and “Religion and Trans-


lation at the Court of Henry VIII: Princess Mary, Katherine Parr and the
Paraphrases of Erasmus,” by Aysha Pollnitz.2 Yet whereas those works
address the various influences on Mary’s development, including that of
foreigners, the present study reverses the equation, revealing how Mary’s
development influenced—even altered how foreign entities viewed her
and how they approached England during her upbringing. Schutte’s work
is of particular value here because the Mary portrayed by Schutte, a young
woman believed by writers such as Erasmus to be destined to follow in
the pious and headstrong footsteps of her mother and grandmother, is
easily recognizable in Chapuys’s representation of the princess.3
Chapuys’s correspondence has served as a foundation for much of
the historical research regarding Henry VIII’s pursuit of an annulment
of his first marriage, and as the basis for much of our understanding of
contemporary public opinion regarding Anne Boleyn. Mary’s relationship
with Chapuys and her role in attempts by European political entities to
keep England within the Catholic realm have not been given nearly the
same amount of consideration. This can be attributed to the influence
of A.G. Dickens’s The English Reformation, which argues that Henry
VIII’s cleaving of the English Church from Rome was the result of a
groundswell of popular dissatisfaction with the Vatican that had begun
well before Henry’s reign.4 This “ground-up” view diminishes the role
of high politics and Henry’s personal aims in the process, making the
move away from Rome appear as a phenomenon and success attributable
instead to Henry’s subjects. Therefore, Mary’s role in the Long English
Reformation can more easily be cast as a step backward in the tale of

2 Aysha Pollintz, “Religion and Translation at the Court of Henry VIII: Princess Mary,
Katherine Parr and the Paraphrases of Erasmus,” in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman,
eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011),
123–137.
3 Valerie Schutte, “Under the Influence: The Impact of Queenly Book Dedications on
Princess Mary,” in Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte, eds., The Birth of a Queen: Essays
on the Quincentenary of Mary I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 39–40.
4 A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (University Park, PA: Penn State University
Press, Second Edition, 1989), 12–15. Dickens argues that religious change in England
was fundamentally tied to movements that predated Henry VIII’s reign, and gives pride
of place to Wycliffe’s movement, whose followers in turn became more openly receptive
to Lutheranism.
14 D. M. TAYLOR

English progress, and her relationship with Chapuys can more accept-
edly considered to be a moot point. Followed by the works of Patrick
Collinson and Diarmaid McCulloch, the English Reformation had been
made “properly Protestant,” as described by Christopher Haigh.5
Due in part to the inconsistency of his reports regarding Anne Boleyn
as well as his identity as a Catholic Savoyard, Chapuys has not traditionally
been considered a significant figure in the English Reformation or within
the field of Marian studies. Retha Warnicke’s The Rise and Fall of Anne
Boleyn is perhaps the best example of the difficulty historians have experi-
enced in properly positioning and considering the ambassador. Warnicke
argued that Chapuys’s characterizations of Boleyn should be discounted
due to their inconsistencies with other third-party accounts of identical
events, and Warnicke portrayed Chapuys as an untrustworthy historical
source.6 At the same time, she accepted Chapuys’s accounts when it
suited her arguments.7 Warnicke’s trouble results from not considering
the context of Chapuys’s role and identity in determining the content
of his reports. Her challenge to the reliability of Chapuys’s accounts was
nevertheless a positive development in itself, as prior to her work few chal-
lenged the validity of the source material regarding Boleyn. This was the
case for many historians, including Mortimer Levine.8
Historians have more recently begun to fully recognize Chapuys’s
importance to the Tudor era and are taking pains to properly contex-
tualize his accounts. Lauren Mackay’s biography of Chapuys was a first.9
Mackay’s accounts of Chapuys’s upbringing in Savoy and of his personal

5 Christopher Haigh, “Dickens and the English Reformation,” Historical Research, No.
77 (2004), 25.
6 Retha M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 1–3. Chapuys’s references to Boleyn as “the whore” and “the
concubine” were terms for Henry’s second queen that were coined by Dr. Pedro Ortiz,
the Holy Roman Imperial ambassador to the Vatican while Chapuys was in England.
Chapuys followed Ortiz’s lead in such references in subsequent correspondence between
the emissaries and elsewhere.
7 Warnicke, Rise and Fall, 72.
8 Warnicke, Rise and Fall, 66; Mortimer Levine, Tudor Dynastic Problems, 1460–1571
(New York: Allen & Unwin, 1975), 55–66. Warnicke notes the existence of this problem,
indicating its negative impact on historical understanding of not just Anne Boleyn, but
also of Catherine Howard.
9 Lauren Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives Through the
Writings of the Spanish Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys (London: Amberley, 2014).
‘A PARAGON OF BEAUTY, GOODNESS, AND VIRTUE’ … 15

ambitions finally provided context that helps explain why he character-


ized events and people the way he did in his correspondence. Although
comparably little space is devoted to the ambassador’s relationship with
Mary, the humanization of Chapuys that Mackay accomplished breathes
life into not only his own words, but importantly, the personalities of
those about whom he wrote. Mackay’s approach allowed for the accep-
tance of Chapuys’s accounts as legitimate with the caveat that he was
often providing straightforward observations through a filter of what his
best guess was regarding what the emperor wanted to know or what
the emperor would be most receptive to learning. At the same time, the
increased human element to his writings enables a more thorough under-
standing of his subjects to develop. This approach is most useful when
assessing Chapuys’s writings, and is appropriated for this chapter.
Herein lies the promise of using Chapuys to more fully examine Mary,
and as her role waxed and waned in England across his embassy, so too
did her importance to Habsburg and Catholic interests and the extent
to which the ambassador’s reports smacked of political spin. Mary’s age
when the two first met, the status of her parents’ marriage, and Mary’s
own changing positions vis-à-vis her father suggest that Chapuys would
have little ability to make such an unpredictable period in the princess’s
life conform to a pre-established template. Mackay argues that Mary’s
willingness to accept Chapuys’s suggestions in dealing with her father
was indicative of the quality of their friendship.10 Anna Whitelock used
Chapuys’s correspondence quite extensively in her portrait of Mary’s
adolescence and young adulthood, but even in matters such as Chapuys’s
reporting of what he suspected was Anne Boleyn’s intended treachery
toward Mary, the ambassador remained a source, and his relationship
with Mary was not investigated.11 Stephen Hamrick, meanwhile, used
Chapuys’s correspondence in ways that clearly suggest the ambassador’s
affinity for the princess.12 These depictions represent a move forward
from earlier characterizations of Mary as a tool of the Holy Roman

10 Mackay, Tudor Court, 189.


11 Anna Whitelock, Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen (New York: Random House,
2009), 51–52.
12 Stephen Hamrick, “‘His wel beloved doughter Lady Mary’: Representing Mary
Tudor in 1534,” Renaissance Studies Vol. 31, No. 4 (September, 2017), 502.
16 D. M. TAYLOR

Empire via Chapuys’s direction.13 The portrait of Mary conveyed by


Chapuys alternates between frightened, frail, and helpless young woman
and headstrong, competent, and pious potential leader of England, the
model of proper governance. Both could absolutely be true, and given
this, Chapuys’s representation of her presents a wide and complex range
of characteristics of the princess that is valuable to our historical under-
standing of Mary as she emerged from adolescence. By privileging the
ambassador’s representations of the princess in their own right, rather
than as mere contextual evidence, this chapter reveals a more complex
picture of the Chapuys–Mary dynamic and a deeper understanding of
how and why the Holy Roman Empire viewed her as it did. The result is
to demonstrate the strong friendship that developed between the pair and
suggests that his accounts should be afforded significantly more credibility
with regard to Mary than of other subjects such as Anne Boleyn.

Chapuys’s Arrival in England


Although never formally invested with the title Princess of Wales, Mary
had been granted the royal prerogatives reserved for the heir to the
English throne four years prior to Chapuys’s arrival in England. As such,
her status as the beloved daughter of the king had changed little regardless
of Henry’s growing dissatisfaction at having no male heir. Mary accompa-
nied Henry and Catherine to mass on January 2, 1530, and in early 1531
the princess visited the queen for a month while their family unit was dete-
riorating rapidly. Henry banished his wife from court in July of that year,
and Mary moved to Richmond, yet there was still little to suggest Mary’s
status was to soon take a significant turn for the worse. In fact, even
later, when Mary moved into housing with Anne Boleyn’s daughter, the
infant Elizabeth, such an occurrence was not uncommon. Remarriages
were actually more common in early modern England than they are in
the modern era, and the combination of households, even among the
aristocracy, was not unusual.14 The maintenance of Mary’s materialistic
well-being, however, was misleading.

13 David Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, Second Edition,
1992), 89.
14 Ralph A. Houlebrooke, The English Family 1450–1700 (London: Routledge, 1984),
215.
‘A PARAGON OF BEAUTY, GOODNESS, AND VIRTUE’ … 17

Chapuys’s first mentions of Mary in his letters to Charles V were


limited to vague reports of potential marriage matches made for her
by her father. In fact, much of the correspondence between Chapuys
and Charles regarding Mary centered on Henry’s search for a suitable
husband for her. These dispatches became more specific in November
1530, when Mary was fourteen and the potential match in question was
the eighteen-year-old King James V of Scotland.15 Chapuys’s explana-
tion of the situation made clear Mary’s importance in foreign policy
at this stage of Henry’s reign. “Some suspect that a promise has been
more, or some hope held out of a marriage of the young King with the
Princess, as it may divert the Scotch from any project of alliance with
Your Majesty or any other power,” Chapuys wrote, adding that he hoped
to provide more information on the matter in his next letter.16 No such
information followed, although a letter from the Imperial ambassador to
Venice, Rodrigo Nino, to the emperor written November 30 mentioned
another possible match for Mary, the Duke of Milan.17 Having already
been betrothed to a number of continental princes from an extremely
young age, Mary remained fair game for Henry’s political intrigues until
her bastardization relegated her to a position of lesser consideration in his
pursuit of matches. Elizabeth’s station as heir complicated Mary’s status in
these negotiations, as she became of less interest to other heirs, although
the French were consistently more interested in Mary than in Elizabeth.
The princess and ambassador did not immediately begin correspon-
dence and private visits upon his arrival, but as the king’s pursuit of
an annulment intensified and his relationship with his family became
increasingly strained, Chapuys began to visit Catherine and Mary’s house-
holds independently, a strategy he applied of his own volition. Chapuys
had already grown protective and almost defensive of Mary during his

15 Chapuys to Charles V, Nov. 27, 1530, “Spain: November 1530, 26–31” in CSP:
Spain, Vol. 4, Part 1, 819. Chapuys first mentions a potential marriage for Mary in
October 1529, with the rumor of Henry marrying her to Henry Howard, oldest son of
the Duke of Norfolk.
16 Chapuys to Charles V, Nov, 27 1530.
17 Rodrigo Nino to Charles V, Nov. 30, 1530, CSP: Spain, Vol. 4, Part 1, 830.
18 D. M. TAYLOR

earliest dispatches, before the two were well acquainted.18 He saw her
as collateral damage to Henry’s actions, and worse, that her father was
not mindful or bothered by the damage being done.19 It was as Mary
became increasingly isolated from her father, however, that the combina-
tion of Chapuys’s Catholicism and his own excitable nature began to find
a welcome friend in the princess.
By the time Chapuys wrote to the emperor on April 6, 1533, Henry
had secretly married Anne Boleyn, and the new queen was pregnant.
In reaction to Catherine’s pleas for help and their shared concern for
Mary’s well-being, Chapuys wrote that, “the great interest I take in Your
Majesty’s concerns compels me to say that, considering the very great
injury done to Madame, your aunt, you can hardly avoid making war
upon this king and kingdom.”20 In this same letter, Chapuys argued that
military action would not solely be on behalf of Mary and Catherine, but
also a religious matter. Also implicating Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in
Mary and Catherine’s plights, he added that war against England would
prevent the kingdom from alienating itself entirely from Catholicism and
becoming Lutheran, a development Chapuys feared was likely to occur
thanks to Cranmer and the king. Chapuys wanted not only for Charles to
declare war on England, but for Pope Clement VII to “call in the secular
arm” and endorse such military action.21
It was, in part, Mary’s popularity that lead Chapuys to advise such
a course of action, although his opinion could have been colored by his
own affinity for the princess. He wrote, “It is very true, that if the Princess
were not in such danger as I have said, and that if the people here did not
take up this affair a little warmly, they would lose heart and affection.”22
Chapuys quickly apologized for what he feared might be construed as

18 Chapuys to Charles V, Dec. 9, 1529, CSP: Spain, Vol. 4, Part 1, 361–362. Chapuys
writes that Mary is in Windsor, and reports that his sources tell him she is being treated
well below a person of her rank and birth. He adds that he recently received a message
from Mary indicating she was working to find a way Chapuys could visit her without
being noticed.
19 Chapuys to Charles V, Jan. 20, 1530, CSP: Spain, Vol. 4, Part 1, 433–434. Here,
Chapuys expresses concern that Mary’s marriage potential would be greatly harmed should
Henry be granted a divorce and the princess be declared illegitimate.
20 Chapuys to Charles V, April 10, 1533, CSP: Spain, Vol. 4, Part 2, 629.
21 Chapuys to Charles V, April 10, 1533.
22 Chapuys to Charles V, April 10, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 151.
‘A PARAGON OF BEAUTY, GOODNESS, AND VIRTUE’ … 19

an emotional outburst, and added, “Pray, pardon me, if I thus speak out
of compassion for the Queen and the Princess.”23 Through this letter,
Mary is viewed as not only beloved by her father’s subjects, but also as a
bastion of the Catholic faith in England. Her loss of legal status as heir
had, if anything, a positive effect on her public image. This passion for
Mary’s well-being reached significant heights at times, and provides ample
opportunity to question Chapuys as a credible source for the period, as it
is easy to draw a connective line between his excitability and the sugges-
tions and requests he presented to the emperor with regard to the events
he observed.
Perhaps the best example of Chapuys’s tendency to either exaggerate
or to fall victim to worst-case scenario rumor regarding Mary came in
his reporting of Elizabeth’s birth, on September 7, 1533. Three days
later, Chapuys wrote that he had been told the baby was to be named
Mary so that the newborn not only assumed the position of Henry’s
eldest child in the line of succession, but completed the process by taking
her name.24 The exasperation expressed in Chapuys’s letter to Charles
regarding this development is revealing in numerous ways. First, it vividly
illustrates how affected Chapuys could be by the prospect of Mary being
disrespected, marginalized, or dispossessed. It also shows that his ability to
discern between credible information and rumor was possibly subject to
his emotional attachment to the subject. Chapuys lunged to the conclu-
sion that what he had been told was true rather than questioning the
validity of the information. Furthermore, it indicated the possibility that
perhaps his affinity for Mary was so well known that those from whom
he gained information might have been toying with the ambassador, or
even feeding him false information knowing that he would report it to the
emperor. There is no indication of Chapuys’s reaction when he learned
that Anne Boleyn’s daughter was indeed named Elizabeth, though it is
difficult to imagine that it would be lacking either relief or embarrass-
ment. His next letter to Charles, dated September 15, simply stated, “The
daughter of the lady has been named Elizabeth, not Mary.”25 In the same
letter, Chapuys explained how Mary had reacted to the developments,
and to the assumption that Henry would further diminish her household

23 Chapuys to Charles V, April 10, 1533.


24 Chapuys to Charles V, Sept. 10, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 465.
25 Chapuys to Charles V, Sept. 15, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 469.
20 D. M. TAYLOR

in the wake of Elizabeth’s birth. He wrote, “Like a wise and virtuous


princess as she is, she takes matters patiently, trusting in the mercy of
God, and has written a comforting letter to the Queen her mother, which
is wonderfully good.”26
Of course, this does not fit the portrait of Mary as recorded largely by
Protestant polemicists regarding Mary’s demeanor, even though her late
teenage years are widely separated from the era of her life most focused
upon by those writers and later Whig historians.27 Furthermore, given
Mary’s excitability and expressions of fear and abandonment throughout
this period, the characterization of her reaction can be seen as being
at odds with the expected. Mary was portrayed as nearly stoic in this
instance. If Chapuys accurately reported her response, it could be viewed
as a portent of the way in which she handled the issue of her gender in
her removal of Jane Grey as queen twenty years later. Mary at that point
exhibited her worthiness of the role of monarch to those loyal to her by
not allowing her temper to dominate her strategy for accession.28
Mary’s confrontation with her father took place soon after Elizabeth’s
birth through sparring that lasted more than a month through letters
written by the king and his daughter. Prior to the parliament that met
to deem Mary illegitimate, Henry sent to Duke of Norfolk, Thomas
Howard, to meet with her to inform her of her new status. Mary was not
only indignant toward Norfolk, but if Chapuys’s account is accepted, she
managed to remain self-assured in doing so, although we must understand
he was relying completely on Mary’s account of the incident for his source
material. When Norfolk suggested Mary pay her respects to Princess Eliz-
abeth, Mary replied that she was the only princess, and at most would
call her “sister.”29 Mary further extended a request to Norfolk that she
begged to receive her father’s blessing, though Norfolk refused to deliver
such a message, leaving Mary to flee the scene in tears. Chapuys wrote
that this exchange led Henry to scold Norfolk for not accomplishing the

26 Chapuys to Charles V, 470.


27 Tessa Grant, “’Thus Like a Nun, Not Like a Princess Born’: Dramatic Representa-
tions of Mary Tudor in the Early Years of the Seventeenth Century,” in Susan Doran and
Thomas S, Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 62–63.
28 Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 78.
29 Chapuys to Charles V, Dec. 16, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 617.
‘A PARAGON OF BEAUTY, GOODNESS, AND VIRTUE’ … 21

task of bringing Mary to Elizabeth. The king further proclaimed that he


would break Mary of her prideful streak one way or another.30
Chapuys was enthusiastic when Mary stuck up for herself in any
manner that inconvenienced Anne Boleyn or her family, and that is how
he viewed this transaction, as Norfolk was Anne’s uncle. He was not
interested in Howard’s rebuke for failing to produce results for Henry.
However, Chapuys knew that Mary charted a dangerous path for herself
in taking these steps.31 An earlier letter, written October 10, 1533,
informed the emperor that Bishop John Fisher had joined Chapuys in
encouraging Mary to challenge her father’s wishes regarding her place in
the succession, which on one hand is curious given Fisher’s earlier pleas to
Catherine to simplify Henry’s path.32 The Fisher–Chapuys alliance in this
matter therefore indicates a change in the bishop’s opinion of how best
to manage the situation, or that Fisher saw that Mary’s fate was a signif-
icantly different issue than Catherine’s due to Mary’s previous status as
heir.
The issue is tied to the state of religion in England through this period
and Mary’s adherence to Catholicism. Perhaps the earliest inklings of the
potential religious strife of the 1550s are suggested in Chapuys’s letters.
Fisher’s willingness to join Chapuys in encouraging Mary to oppose
Henry’s designation of himself as the head of the Church of England
indicates that others also put their trust in Mary as a bastion of hope for
the old faith. Indeed, Fisher agreed with Chapuys regarding a potential
invasion by the Holy Roman Empire, and this correspondence verifies
the existence of a Catholic conspiracy against Henry that involved the
emperor, his agent, and the bishop in a group that was working to pull
Mary into their ranks.
Catherine, meanwhile, had encouraged her daughter to do the oppo-
site of what Chapuys had instructed. A letter from the former queen to
Mary believed to have been written September 15, 1533 begged Mary,
“Answer you with few words, obeying the King your father in every-
thing, save only that you will not offend God and lose your own soul.”33
Catherine worked to convince Mary that adherence to God would deliver

30 Chapuys to Charles V, 617.


31 Chapuys to Charles V, 617.
32 Chapuys to Charles V, Oct. 10, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 510–511.
33 Catherine of Aragon to the Princess Mary, Sept. 15, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 472.
22 D. M. TAYLOR

her from whatever ill effects Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn were
bound to cast upon her. The letter is a good indicator of how Catherine’s
increased expression of piety had clouded her vision of the reality that
Chapuys and Fisher were arming Mary to help forward their own goals.
The comparison between Chapuys’s description of Mary and Catherine’s
tone in addressing her daughter indicates that it was Chapuys who had
gained the upper hand influencing and guiding the princess by this point.
The ambassador saw her as a capable and useful political resource for
the aims of the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, while
her mother still viewed her solely as a child. At the same time, Chapuys
viewed Mary as an impressionable young friend for whom he felt a protec-
tive responsibility. He regularly included reports to Charles about the
devotion the public retained for Mary.34 It is a telling characteristic of
his relationship with the princess that with all the domestic and inter-
national political intrigue playing out around him, Chapuys was most
moved by the safety and well-being of a young woman still in her teenage
years. Chapuys’s place in history is largely due to his antagonistic stance
regarding Anne Boleyn, but this is perhaps due to historical interest being
more vested in conflict rather than agreement. The evidence that remains
from the period, however, suggests quite strongly that Chapuys was more
interested and invested in protecting Mary than he was in damaging
Anne.
Chapuys was also involved in playing matchmaker for Mary, and in
this pursuit he definitely had designs on securing the English throne for
Catholicism. Not long after Elizabeth’s birth, Chapuys agreed, with input
from Catherine and Mary, to suggest to Charles that Reginald Pole was
a fitting match for Mary. Pole was the son of Mary’s governess, Margaret
Pole, who was herself the daughter of the former Duke of Clarence.
Reginald Pole was at the time studying at the University of Padua, and
if Charles was able to bring him into the emperor’s service, Catherine
would gladly consent to have her daughter marry him, “and the Princess
would not refuse.”35 Within six months, Charles V issued a policy that

34 Chapuys to Charles V, Oct. 16, 1533, CSP: Spain, Vol. 4, Part 2, 828. Chapuys
here writes, “It is impossible for me to describe the love and affection which the English
bear to their Princess, but they are already so much accustomed to see and tolerate such
disorderly things that they tacitly commit the redress of the same to God and to Your
Majesty.” This dispatch was sent in the wake of the reduction of Mary’s household.
35 Chapuys to Charles V, Sept. 27, 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 486.
‘A PARAGON OF BEAUTY, GOODNESS, AND VIRTUE’ … 23

Mary should not be married without the consent of her mother and the
emperor.36 The move was largely ceremonial and part of a larger state-
ment regarding the emperor’s distrust of English relations with France,
but it nevertheless sent a message of sorts that since Henry VIII no
longer appeared to care for the well-being of Catherine and his first-born
daughter, the Holy Roman Empire would gladly have them.

Chapuys Moves on Mary’s Behalf


Mary was presented with a notice of her reduced status and illegitimately
by Lord John Huse in September 1533. In response to Mary’s refusal to
acknowledge these new realities, the king issued a statement the following
month that vividly detailed his displeasure with his bastardized daughter.
Henry chastised Mary, writing that she had forgotten her “filial piety
and allegiance” in her attempt to “arrogantly usurp the title of Princess”
from Elizabeth, further noting that Mary could not, in good conscience,
believe that she is actually the King’s lawful daughter, much less believe
that Henry agreed with her regarding this opinion.37 Henry also hinted
that Mary knew how dangerous the ground on which she was treading
was, and that it was punishable by law. As was common for the king,
he did end the statement by extending a potential olive branch to his
daughter, writing, “on her conforming to his will he may incline of his
fatherly piety to promote her welfare.”38 The tension between Mary and
Henry carried over well into the following years. In January 1534, the
king traveled to see Elizabeth, whose household was twenty miles from
London. Mary was also living there in the infant’s service, and although
Henry spent time with his new daughter, he did not visit with Mary.
After months of gnashing his teeth over the situation and making no
headway, Chapuys sought to address parliament regarding the treatment
of Mary and Catherine in February 1534. Chapuys believed he would be
denied this opportunity, and he was correct. However, it appears that he
asked for this in order to be granted a lesser request as consolation.39

36 The Emperor’s Policy, Feb. 25, 1534, “Henry VIII: February 1534, 21–25,” in
L&P, Vol. 7 , 89–90.
37 King Henry VIII, “The Princess Mary”, Sept. 30. 1533, L&P, Vol. 6, 491.
38 King Henry VIII, “The Princess Mary”, 491.
39 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 26, 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 92.
24 D. M. TAYLOR

To the ambassador’s surprise, the Privy Council told him that Cromwell
and Norfolk wanted to hear what the ambassador had to say. Though
Cromwell could not attend a meeting regarding the matter, Chapuys
reported to the emperor that Norfolk could not disprove what Chapuys
had argued regarding Mary’s poor treatment, but that he needed to pass
on the ambassador’s sentiments to those who knew the situation better.
Norfolk advised Chapuys to tread carefully when granted an audience
with Henry, and it proved to be sage advice.40
This was one of the quintessential moments of Chapuys’s tenure, as it
displayed his knowledge of English history, his understanding of ecclesias-
tical law, and his willingness to face down Henry VIII, all while defending
Mary’s rights and honor. It also turned out to be the first instance in
which Henry was so irritated with Chapuys that he made a less-than
veiled allusion to revoking the ambassador’s station in the kingdom.
Chapuys reported he told Henry that, “All the Parliaments could not
make the Princess a bastard, for the cognizance of cases concerning legit-
imacy belonged to ecclesiastical judges. Even if his marriage with the
Queen were null, she was legitimate, owning to the lawful ignorance of
her parents.”41 Knowing he was not free to address parliament, Chapuys
asked Henry if it was possible for Mary to be allowed to live with her
mother and to be better treated. The king replied that as Mary’s father,
he was better equipped to determine what was best for her and, further-
more, he “might dispose of her as he wishes, without anyone laying down
the law to him, and without giving account to anyone.”42 This not only
is indicative of Mary’s tenuous status within the kingdom at the time,
but the potential risks to her life at play, and further, her father’s attitude
toward her as an individual.
Henry’s claim came to fruition, in some respects, in April 1534, when
Henry and Anne were visiting Elizabeth’s household. With the king’s
apparent consent, attendants kept Mary from seeing her father by keeping
her in her chamber throughout the two-day visit. Chapuys wrote that
what happened to Mary during the visit was worse than prison. Anne’s
aunt, Anne Shelton, was Mary’s governess and, according to Chapuys’s
dispatch, told Mary, “the King her father did not care in the least that

40 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 26, 1534.


41 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 26, 1534, 94.
42 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 26, 1534, 94.
‘A PARAGON OF BEAUTY, GOODNESS, AND VIRTUE’ … 25

she should renounce her title, since by statute she was declared a bastard
and incapable; but that if she were in the King’s place, she would kick her
out of the King’s house for disobedience, and moreover the King himself
has said that he would make her lose her head for violating the laws
of his realm.”43 Mary’s physician had reported the incident to Chapuys,
telling the ambassador that she had recounted the event to him in Latin
so that no others present could understand.44 Chapuys’s own assessment
indicated that while he did not believe Henry would harm Mary, those
loyal to the Boleyn family were far more likely to do so.45 Although
the ambassador repeatedly wrote of plots being devised to end Mary’s
life and he never missed an opportunity to suggest or accuse Anne of
being the instigator of such plots, there was never direct evidence of such
machinations.
Chapuys reported another confrontation between Mary and Anne a
month earlier. In that instance, Mary insisted that her mother was the only
person whom she would ever recognize as queen. In Chapuys’s account,
Anne ended the argument acting, “very indignant, and intended to bring
down the pride of this unbridled Spanish blood, as she said. She will
do the worst she can.”46 The problem with taking this as an accurate
portrayal in this supposed argument is that Chapuys left the issue there,
and immediately in his next sentence began to write of parliament’s decla-
ration that Catherine could no longer call herself queen and could not
retain the items that had been bestowed upon her as queen. That Chapuys
shifted focus so quickly suggests that although he might have feared a
plot against Mary’s life, he did not consider it a grave enough threat to
warrant further elaboration, much less offer a plan of defense. It is here
that the line between Chapuys’s role as ambassador and as a personal ally
to Mary might have blurred. While he was concerned, the information
was little more than a seed to plant in the mind of the emperor to do with
what he wished. The ambassador had already suggested military interven-
tion on Mary’s behalf, thus the notion of repeating the request without

43 Chapuys to Charles V, April 22, 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 214.


44 Chapuys to Charles V, April 22, 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 214.
45 Chapuys to Charles V, April 22, 1534, 214.
46 Chapuys to Charles V, March 7, 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 127.
26 D. M. TAYLOR

hard evidence of new activity warranting it would run the risk of dimin-
ishing the validity of the earlier proposal suggested by the ambassador and
Fisher.
Mary was involved in another confrontation later in the month, this
time with a member of Elizabeth’s traveling company. At this point,
Chapuys wrote that he regretted urging Mary to be so forthright in
protesting her situation, and he told Charles that he had consulted
Catherine on the matter.47 In this instance, it was Mary who turned what
could possibly have been an act of courtesy into a scene. The unnamed
member of the traveling company had tried to put her in a carriage to
move to a new household along with the rest of Elizabeth’s staff, and
Mary strongly protested. “She made a public protest of the compulsion
used, and that her act should not prejudice her right and title,” Chapuys
wrote.48 This is one of the few instances in which Chapuys suggested that
Mary’s response overshadowed the perceived slight.
It was not the last time she would act in such a manner. In June
1534, Mary sent a letter of protest to numerous foreign officials including
Chapuys and Charles V. Written in Latin, the letter included a sentence
that translates to, “To clarify all the details of this Scripture we have, we
say, we maintain, assert, and protest that our identity is a mere fact of our
knowledge and after mature deliberation on the testimony of my manual,
a sign and a seal of my own.”49 Through this, Mary was insisting to the
world outside of England that in no way did she intend to renounce her
title or give in to the pressures to marry or enter a convent without the
consent of her mother. This in itself could easily have been interpreted
as treason enough to warrant her execution. As it turned out, Chapuys
had actually written the letter and gave it to Catherine to pass along to
Mary to rewrite, copy, sign, and distribute ten months earlier.50 The same
dispatch in which Chapuys explains this scenario to Charles includes yet

47 Chapuys to Charles V, March 30, 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 165.


48 Chapuys to Charles V, March 30, 1534, 165.
49 The Princess Mary, June 7, 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 308. Translation by the author (“Ita
ut universa et singular in hac scriptura habentur, dicimus, narramus, asserimus, asseveramus
ac pretestamur de mera nostra Scientia ac matura deliberation, teste meo manuali signo
et sigillo meo.”).
50 Chapuys to Charles V, June 23, 1534, L&P, Vol. 7 , 323.
‘A PARAGON OF BEAUTY, GOODNESS, AND VIRTUE’ … 27

another suggestion that Anne was intending to have Mary killed in July
of that year, when Henry had planned to visit France.51
It is, however, difficult to tell for certain how much of Chapuys’s sensi-
tivity to Mary’s precarious position was due to his own interpretation of
events. Much of the flair added to his explanation of incidents could have
come from Catherine, or at least his understandings of those events could
have been to seem more severe due to Catherine’s input. At issue is that
little is known about the order in which news traveled between these
three individuals. In a letter Chapuys wrote to Charles dated February
9, 1535, it appears Catherine contacted Chapuys through her physician
to inform the ambassador that, once again, Mary was being threatened
with execution or lifetime imprisonment if she did not soon acquiesce
and swear to the Act of Supremacy.52 This adds another potential vari-
able to the conveyance and accurate reporting of facts in the form of
Catherine’s physician, and Mary’s earlier passage of information through
her own doctor should also be considered with regard to how the record
as revealed through epistolary documentation can be less than objec-
tively reliable. While historical accuracy is perhaps lessened or lost through
these letters, they reveal significant elements of the personalities at play in
these scenarios. Of course, the primary personality revealed here is that
of Chapuys, but it is through his accounts that we are at least able to see
what at least one diplomat, and one with greater access to her than any
other, thought of her in this era.
Mary sought Charles’ aid through Chapuys in early 1535, her goal to
have Charles ask the king directly to allow her to live with her mother.
Several physicians who had attended Mary had concluded her recurring
poor health was due to what today would perhaps classify as depression,
and these physicians added that if she would be allowed to stay with
Catherine, much of the situation would possibly alleviate itself.53 Chapuys
tried to intercede on her behalf, and Henry was reportedly gracious in
hearing Mary’s case. However, the king said he could not allow such a
move, because Mary was at that time betrothed to the Dauphin of France.
The risk of Catherine taking her out of England in secret to avoid this
match was too great. Charles V, meanwhile, said nothing to the king of

51 Chapuys to Charles V, June 23, 1534, 323.


52 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 9, 1535, L&P, Vol. 8, 66.
53 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 25, 1535, L&P, Vol. 8, 100.
28 D. M. TAYLOR

this matter.54 In this instance, the portrayal of Charles as Mary’s protector


is somewhat misleading, as it was Chapuys who operated, largely on his
own accord, while the emperor refused to act. It is indicative of the ways
in which Chapuys, more than Charles, was Mary’s staunchest defender,
even if he did not have the power Charles possessed.
Chapuys and Mary communicated on a regular basis by the middle of
1535, and their clandestine communication shows that the relationship
was important enough to both to risk the potentially harsh result of it
being discovered. Henry’s prior statements threatening to expel Chapuys
from the kingdom, and even more dangerous, his assertion that he was
not above removing his daughter’s head attest to this. Unfortunately, it is
in part due to this correspondence being passed in secret that it has been
lost, and most evidence of it can only be located in Chapuys’s dispatches
that summarize the letters. A letter dated August 3, 1535 shows that
Henry was taking greater care to control Chapuys’s access to Mary. “I
have not yet wished to go to the chase, nor do I know that leave would
be given me to visit the Princess, seeing that the chase is round about her,
and that I am not allowed to send my men to her,” Chapuys wrote.55
At other times, such as in September 1535, Henry declined to grant
Chapuys leave to visit her on account of her poor health and an episode
of plague sweeping through the region. Cromwell wrote to Chapuys that
month, and noted that the king would like Chapuys to delay his visit until
the plague passed. It was during this period that Chapuys called Mary a
“paragon of beauty, goodness, and virtue” in a letter to imperial advisor
Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle.56 This is at varying level of odds with
the traditional depiction of Catholic Mary as the punisher, the “Bloody
Mary” of Protestant lore and subsequent Whig history, but at the same
time much of this history is reflective of her time as queen. Writing of
Mary’s accession, Whitelock notes that Mary’s bright eyes and red hair
helped make her a “striking figure” even though her features showed the
ill effects of a lifetime of poor health.57 Chapuys’s description, of course,
is of a woman almost twenty years younger, before the strains of time had

54 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 25, 1535, 100.


55 Chapuys to Charles V, Aug. 3, 1535, L&P, Vol. 9, 5.
56 Chapuys to Nicolas Granvelle, March 23, 1535, L&P, Vol. 8, 169.
57 Whitelock, Princess, Bastard, Queen, 187.
‘A PARAGON OF BEAUTY, GOODNESS, AND VIRTUE’ … 29

much opportunity to show themselves. Her piety has never been called
into question by objective historians.
Although Henry diminished Mary’s household and eventually moved
her into a house she shared with Elizabeth, the king was always mindful
of his eldest daughter’s intermittent health issues regarding her menstrual
cycle, and although he forbade Mary and Catherine to correspond,
evidence shows that he was not keen on enforcing that order.58 It was
in this area that Chapuys served as a conduit between the Lady Mary and
her mother. There were few people better qualified by that point to serve
in such a role. As such, Chapuys’s accounts of the interaction between
the two women are arguably the best source of the relationship between
Mary and her mother during this period. Chapuys wrote the emperor on
September 6, 1535 that he, “sent lately a servant to request the King to
send his physician to the Princess, both on account of a certain rheum,
and to provide against a return of her ordinary complain(t), which she
dreads, in the coming winter.”59 Mary’s menstrual problems had plagued
her since the onset of adolescence. By the time she was nineteen she was
using Chapuys and his chosen representatives as messengers to speak to
her father regarding them. It was not the first time Mary’s menstrual
complications were the focus of conversation between Chapuys and the
king. The ambassador had previously taken the opportunity to chastise
Henry about his treatment of Mary and its negative effect on her health.60
This is an area in which Cromwell could have been helpful to Mary’s
cause, at least in the way Chapuys represents the story. The more
Chapuys pushed for a favorable change of lodging for Mary, the more
it alerted Henry that something of which he would not approve was
afoot. Cromwell’s involvement, however, might have potentially allowed
Chapuys greater leeway to plan an escape attempt, which had become
an increasingly popular idea among Charles V and his advisors since the
beginning of 1535. Though they were friends, Chapuys grew suspicious
of Cromwell during the year, often due to conflicting information he
received that contradicted Cromwell’s professed allegiance to Mary. This
was part of a match of wits between the two men, and while Chapuys
grew frustrated with Cromwell, there was no person in England other

58 Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life, 64.


59 Chapuys to Charles V, Sept. 6, 1535, L&P, Vol. 9, 96.
60 Chapuys to Charles V, Feb. 9, 1535, L&P, Vol. 8, 66.
30 D. M. TAYLOR

than Mary for whom Chapuys exhibited such a consistently positive


opinion in his letters.
A plot to sweep Mary out of England in early 1536 was called off
due to Catherine’s death. Chapuys wrote that he feared for Mary’s well-
being in the wake of it. Although he found the news of Catherine’s death
“cruel” and “painful,” his concern and grief were more for Mary than
anyone.61 “I fear the good Princess her daughter will die of grief, or else
that the King’s concubine will hasten what she has long threatened to do,
viz., to kill her,” he wrote.62 This could have been another of Chapuys’s
attempts to instigate military intervention from the Holy Roman Empire,
but it is also possible that his affection for and devotion to Mary led
him to sincerely believe she would succumb to depression in the wake
of her mother’s death. Chapuys suggested to Mary during this time that
she become a nun in order to remove her from the stress she had long
experienced and the dangers both she and the ambassador believed her
to be facing.63 This is indicative of the extreme impact Catherine’s death
had upon her daughter. At this point, issues of legitimacy and of Mary’s
place in the succession were cast aside. What was paramount to Chapuys
at this stage was her mere survival.
The execution of Anne Boleyn in May 1536 removed the immediate
threat to the princess, whether real or received. Still, little in Mary’s
life immediately changed. Perhaps the most important and lasting action
Chapuys took in Mary’s life was convincing her to finally sign her name
to a statement in June that acknowledged her father as head of the
Church while accepting her own illegitimacy, even though he had previ-
ously agreed with and even celebrated her refusal to do so. The move did
a great deal in terms of reconciling Mary and the king, and their rela-
tionship began to thaw quickly after she signed. However, Mary felt she
was betraying her beliefs and felt guilty about the decision.64 Meanwhile,
Chapuys’s advice to Mary in this matter also produced professional diffi-
culties for the ambassador. Mary begged him to seek a papal dispensation
to ease her conscience for what she had done, and Chapuys explained
to the emperor that her acceptance of the Act of Supremacy was part

61 Chapuys to Charles V, Jan. 9, 1536, L&P. Vol. 10, 21.


62 Chapuys to Charles V, Jan. 9, 1536, 21.
63 Chapuys to Charles V, Jan. 29, 1536, L&P, Vol. 10, 69.
64 Princess Mary to Cromwell, June 13, 1536, L&P, Vol. 10, 473–474.
‘A PARAGON OF BEAUTY, GOODNESS, AND VIRTUE’ … 31

of a larger strategy to restore her status, and thus increase her potential
political power.65 Neither she nor Chapuys were happy with how it was
obtained, but a utilitarian view indicates that it was the prudent move for
her to make.
By 1542, Mary had made a permanent return to court under her
father’s reign, and Chapuys was reporting news regarding Mary more
frequently to Queen Mary of Hungary than to Charles V. The emperor
had turned over considerable authority in the empire to his sister, and
she was not unfamiliar with the situation in England, having received
updates from the princess herself since the younger Mary’s teenage years.
Most commonly, Chapuys’s letters to the queen contained updates on
Mary’s health, which continued to cause problems for her throughout
her life.66 Updates regarding the potential match between the princess
and the Duke of Orleans were a common topic of this correspondence,
as well, suggesting that Mary of Hungary had assumed a role of consulta-
tion and even guidance in matters regarding Mary as she navigated early
adulthood.
Chapuys has most frequently been viewed by historians as a key source
for understanding Henry VIII’s pursuit of an annulment and the Anne
Boleyn era of his reign, even though Chapuys remained in England in
the service of the Holy Roman Empire until just before Henry’s death.
However, what is of equal value in Chapuys’s correspondence is his
portrayal of Mary through the course of her father’s reign. This corre-
spondence, as emotional as it often was, provides a window through
which we can see Mary’s development as well as her reaction to her
father’s decisions and actions, even if the window includes a screen repre-
sented by Chapuys’s interpretations of Mary’s view. In the process of
assessing Chapuys’s writing, we can see a young woman navigate the
volatile political landscape of 1530s England as a potential ruler of the
kingdom and as a daughter who had been cast aside for reasons not
of her own making. Ultimately, Chapuys provides the most complete
third-person account of Mary’s life from early adolescence until the late
1530s. This highlights the importance of third-party correspondence and
private writing in the construction of our understanding of the period
and the persons living within it. Perhaps more importantly, it indicates

65 Chapuys to Charles V, June 6, 1536, L&P, Vol. 10, 444–446.


66 Chapuys to Mary of Hungary, Apr. 30, 1542, L&P, Vol. 17 , 155.
32 D. M. TAYLOR

that sources that become attached to particular historiographies should


not go unmined as potential troves of information about other persons
and events.

Bibliography
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Calendar of State Papers: Spain, Volume 4, Part 2.
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 6.
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 7 .
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 8.
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 9.
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 10.
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 11.
Letter and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Volume 17 .

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Beem, Charles. The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English
History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Dickens, A.G. The English Reformation (University Park, PA: Penn State
University Press, Second Edition, 1989).
Freeman, Thomas S. “Inventing Bloody Mary: Perceptions of Mary Tudor from
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Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011).
Grant, Tessa. “’Thus Like a Nun, Not Like a Princess Born’: Dramatic Repre-
sentations of Mary Tudor in the Early Years of the Seventeenth Century,”
in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New
Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Haigh, Christopher. “Dickens and the English Reformation,” Historical Research
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Hamrick, Stephen. “‘His wel beloved doughter Lady Mary’: Representing Mary
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