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

Elizabeth always refused to name her successor. As she said, she had more reason than most to know just what opportunities for conspiracy the position of heir apparent offered.
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    Relations between the two sisters never recovered from Mary’s suspicions and Elizabeth’s resentment of her time in the Tower, but the extent to which Mary’s reign paved the way and helped shape the form of that of Elizabeth was always historically more significant than relations between them. As already discussed, it was necessarily Mary who addressed the need to persuade her male subjects that her office as monarch took precedence over her gender as female. Moreover, Mary married and yet—remarkably—remained legally and effectively sole monarch of her realm. Mary herself had been insistent from the earliest mention of marriage that when she married she would, of course, love and obey her husband, as any wife should, “but if he wished to encroach in the government of the kingdom, she would be unable to permit it.” 16 Indeed, when he  was  in England, Philip was indeed essentially an influential adviser and Mary’s close companion—but usually little more. The problems faced by her subjects in comprehending this unusual but not unique situation arose from widespread assumptions about the nature of women, and the fact that from the moment of their marriage Philip’s name took precedence in all official pronouncements. That, combined with his title of king, at a time when “queen” was more usually a descriptor of that much lesser being, a king’s wife, was always confusing for her subjects. Although the inclusion of the regnal year in their titles always made Mary the senior partner (e.g., Philip I and Mary II), that nuance was apparently lost on many of her subjects. Nevertheless—and despite his remarkable verbal flourishes on occasion—Philip did understand that his formal exclusion from kingly authority was set out in the marriage treaties and subsequent legislation. The problem was that, whatever Mary’s immediate political circle understood of the status of Mary as both queen and wife, the law that set out that she remained “sole queen” after her marriage was not enough to settle the issue for all of her subjects. After all, Mary was a wife and, therefore, to be ruled; moreover, as males knew, political life was a masculine sphere of activity. When in 1557 the Venetian ambassador wrote that Mary was “of a sex which cannot becomingly take more than a moderate part” in government, he was only repeating a widely held belief. 17 It was, however, a belief to which Mary did not subscribe.
    There is no way of knowing the extent to which Elizabeth viewed Mary’s always problematic marriage as a warning against entering into that relationship herself. But she certainly found other, more positive models in Mary’s reign. Just as the first queen regnant resolutely held Philip to the status of royal consort and adviser, in ceremony and public appearance as in politics—even in images not so easily controlled by her, Philip was usually on Mary’s left side—elsewhere she enacted the extent to which her office took precedence over her sex. Perhaps the most striking example of Mary’s modeling female full monarchy was her exercising the capacity to heal sufferers of the scrofula and associated conditions by the royal touch and, in Mary’s case, by blessing cramp rings. It had been, in earlier times, precisely that exercise of monarchical quasi-sacral power that had enabled French polemicists in the fourteenth century, at a time when there were several plausible female candidates, to argue against placing a woman on the throne. 18 That royal healing capacity was effectively sacred, the argument went, being derived from the coronation consecration. Since that healing touch was a semi-priestly power, women were obviously disqualified from exercising it—and, therefore, it was concluded that women were excluded from