Free Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth by Anna Whitelock, Alice Hunt

the status of a queen regnant when Elizabeth came to the throne, for any possible ambiguities about such a phenomenon had all been addressed in Mary’s reign. In April 1554, Mary’s parliament—with, of course, her prior sanction—passed two pieces of legislation defining fully the status of a queen regnant. One act clarified that a queen had exactly the same regal power as the kings of the English realm had always exercised. The other addressed the status of a queen regnant as wife, reiterating the provisions of the marriage treaties (themselves already approved by parliament and widely promulgated) that Mary remained “solye and sole quene” after her marriage. 15 Mary was indeed both “king and queen” of the realm, legally and, it will be argued, in practice.
    However publicly amiable the relations between the Tudor sisters at the beginning of Mary’s reign, before the end of 1553 they were becoming strained enough for observers to comment on it. Various explanations have been offered for the increasing tension. One is that after her own legitimacy had been confirmed by parliament Mary increasingly snubbed her sister, now restored, at least by implication, as being illegitimate; another possible reason is that Elizabeth (understandably enough) resented those times when their Catholic cousin Margaret Douglas (daughter from the second marriage of Henry VIII’s elder sister, and long Mary’s companion) took precedence over her at court; yet another reason is that in Mary’s eyes (as in the eyes of many others) Elizabeth’s religious preferences remained suspect. None of those explanations are entirely satisfactory but together they do indicate the range of possible differences between the sisters. Increasingly uneasy at court, Elizabeth sought permission to retire to Ashridge—one of her country houses.
    At Elizabeth’s departure Mary presented her with a sumptuous sable stole, a royal gift indeed. In return, Elizabeth begged Mary to believe no damaging reports she might hear of her until she had a chance to respond, a request that indicates her consciousness of just how suspect her reputation already was. Before her departure, she was also visited by two Marian councilors to warn her against contact with either heretics or the French. The sisters were not to meet again until Elizabeth finally obeyed repeated commands to return to London in February 1554, doing so only after the Wyatt rebellion had collapsed. Then she was examined about the extent of her prior knowledge of that rebellion. After a period of relative isolation in the palace, she was confined to the Tower for six weeks, albeit not in the prison but in the royal quarters. The uprising headed by Sir Thomas Wyatt and joined by the duke of Suffolk, father of the dethroned Jane Grey, was ostensibly directed against Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain. But there were many reports that the real purpose was to replace Mary by Elizabeth, with the Plantagenet descendant Edward Courtenay—earl of Devon, the man who had previously been the English preferred suitor for Mary—as Elizabeth’s husband.
    Just how much Elizabeth knew of the plot is now unknowable, but she admitted Wyatt had been in contact with her and that she had not reported that to the authorities. Mary’s advisers were even more alarmed that a copy of a letter from Elizabeth to Mary was found in the French ambassador’s postbag to his king. The ambassador had demonstrably known a great deal from an early stage about the Wyatt plot, and that copied letter suggested complicity with the plot from the very heart of Elizabeth’s household, if not from Elizabeth herself. There were also strong indications that, as the Wyatt conspiracy took shape, Elizabeth’s household had made preparations to fortify Donnington Castle as a more defensible position than her usual residences. Her experience of several plots, particularly the Wyatt episode, was one reason that once on the throne herself