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

wearing the crown. 19
    Mary, however, was not persuaded by any part of that argument and, by exercising her power in that capacity, demonstrated that the office of crowned monarch fully outweighed whatever frailties might conventionally be attached to females. It was a power that, exercised by French and English monarchs for centuries, was still in much demand among their subjects. In this matter also, Elizabeth followed Mary’s example in exercising the royal touch—though not in blessing cramp rings, a practice that Edward also had previously abandoned. Indeed, for Elizabeth the royal touch was such a significant power that late in her reign, one of her chaplains set out to refute Catholic arguments that she was not a legitimate monarch by pointing to her effectiveness in just that healing touch—a God-given sanction for a monarch, if ever there was one, he argued, and, therefore, irrefutable proof of Elizabeth’s legitimate rule. 20
    IV
    The traditional contrast between the two female Tudor monarchs has been most clearly defined by their religious differences. But even in this area, it is arguable that Mary set a number of significant precedents for Elizabeth to adopt or modify. In matters of religious practice, for example, Mary indeed restored the mass, many older church rituals, and papal authority to England. The papacy, of course, Elizabeth repudiated entirely. Mary had also restored and promoted the older traditions of church music. Given that both daughters were accomplished musicians, it is hardly surprising that this was a feature of Mary’s changes that Elizabeth retained. The first queen regnant encouraged church musicians whom Elizabeth also later retained, patronising such “inherited” musicians as Thomas Tallis and John Sheppard. Nevertheless, whatever interests they shared, given the histories of their respective mothers as wives to Henry VIII, and the part played by Anne Boleyn in the break with Rome, it was hardly surprising that Henry VIII’s two daughters ultimately represented different religious positions. As the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, Mary’s religion, most easily demonstrated by her consistent devotion to the mass, was Catholic. If later in Henry’s reign she came to accept her father’s exclusion of papal authority from the realm—and it is possible that she did—it was the successive doctrinal innovations of the Edwardian era that led her into defiance of the new doctrines and, as queen, to decide to restore papal authority as ultimate guardian of religious orthodoxy. She was by no means alone in those particular shifts of attitude to the papacy; several eminent Henrician churchmen, among them Stephen Gardiner, followed that same path.
    But before she had restored papal authority and despite her strong distaste for her inherited title of “Supreme Head of the Church,” Mary issued a number of instructions on her own authority for restoring the English church to her preferred practice and for encouraging more preaching. Since she was a monarch, that she was a woman did not constrain her from expressing—and enforcing—her views on church reform nor from resisting the advice of such church leaders as Reginald Pole when she found the advice unreasonable. 21 She always resisted the papal demands for the comprehensive restoration of monastic lands to the church; indeed finally her submission to the papacy proved to be as conditional as her other submissions to church authority, and in the final stages of her reign she excluded all papal communications from her realm. The ultimate counter to later analyses of Mary’s imputed devoutly conservative Catholicism may well be the report that Pope Paul IV rejoiced when the news of Mary’s death reached him, apparently believing that Elizabeth would prove a more satisfactory monarch for his own (profoundly anti-Hapsburg) purposes.
    The main point to this comparison of the religious policies followed by the two queens, however, is