Mary I ("Bloody Mary")

Mary I(1516 – 1558), also known as Mary Tudor, and "Bloody Mary" was the queen of England from July 1553 until her death. She is best known for her forceful attempt to reverse the English Reformation. In only five years on the throne, Mary had over 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake in the Marian persecutions.

Mary was born on 18 February 1516, the only surviving child of King Henry VIII and his first wife Katherine of Aragon. Mary was baptised into the Catholic faith three days after her birth. Her godparents included Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey. In 1520, the Countess of Salisbury was appointed Mary's governess.

Mary was a intelligent child. In July 1520, when scarcely four and a half years old, she entertained a visiting French delegation with a performance on the virginals (a type of harpsichord). A great part of her early education came from her mother, who consulted the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives for advice and commissioned him to write De Institutione Feminae Christianae, a treatise on the education of girls (yaas queen). By the age of nine, Mary could read and write Latin, as well as Spanish, French, and Greek (show off!).  Henry VIII doted on his daughter and boasted to the Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustiniani that Mary never cried. Like her father, Mary had a fair complexion with pale blue eyes, rosy cheeks and red hair.

Despite his affection for Mary, Henry was famously distraught that his marriage had produced no sons. By the time Mary was nine years old, it was apparent that Henry and Catherine would have no more children, leaving Henry without a legitimate MALE heir. In 1525, Henry sent Mary to the border of Wales to preside, presumably in name only, over the Council of Wales and the Marches. She was given her own court based at Ludlow Castle and many of the royal prerogatives normally reserved for the Prince of Wales, although she was never formally made Princess of Wales. 

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Throughout Mary's childhood, Henry negotiated potential future marriages for her. When she was only two years old, she was promised to Francis, the infant son of King Francis I of France, but the contract was repudiated after three years. At the age of six, she was betrothed to marry her 22-year-old first cousin, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. When this contract fell apart,  Cardinal Wolsey, resumed marriage negotiations with the French, and Henry suggested that Mary marry the Dauphin's father, King Francis I himself, who was eager for an alliance with England. A marriage treaty was signed which provided that Mary marry either Francis I or his second son Henry, Duke of Orleans, but Wolsey secured an alliance with France without the marriage. There was also some discussion of her marriage to James V of Scotland. Despite Mary’s reputed beauty and charm, all of these negotiations proved fruitless.

Meanwhile, the marriage of Mary's parents was in jeopardy. Henry attempted to have his marriage to her mother annulled, but Pope Clement VII refused his request. Henry claimed, citing biblical passages (Leviticus 20:21), that his marriage to Catherine was unclean because she was the widow of his brother Arthur (Mary's uncle). Her first marriage had been annulled by a previous pope, Julius II, on the basis that it was never consummated. Clement may have been reluctant to act in Henry’s favor due to the influence of Charles V, Catherine's nephew and Mary's former betrothed, whose troops had surrounded Rome. Ruling Henry and Katherine’s marriage invalid would also render Mary illegitimate.

From 1531, Mary was often plagued with irregular menstruation and depression, although it is not clear whether this was caused by stress, puberty or a more chronic illness. Cruelly, she was not permitted to see her mother, whom Henry had exiled from court. In early 1533, Henry married Anne Boleyn, who was pregnant with his child, and in May, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, formally declared the marriage with Katherine void, demoting her to Dowager Princess of Wales (a title she would have held as Arthur's widow), and Mary was denounced illegitimate. She was renamed "The Lady Mary" rather than Princess, and her place in the line of succession was transferred to her newborn half-sister, Elizabeth, Anne's daughter. Mary's household was dissolved; her servants (including the Countess of Salisbury) were dismissed and in December 1533 she was sent to join the household of the infant Elizabeth. 

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Mary steadfastly refused to acknowledge that Anne was the queen or that Elizabeth was a princess, evoking the wrath of her father. Stressed and closely monitored, Mary was frequently ill, which the royal physician attributed to her "ill treatment". The Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys became her close adviser, and interceded, unsuccessfully, on her behalf at court. The relationship between Mary and her father worsened and they did not speak to each other for three years. Despite the ill health of both Mary and Katherine, they were refused permission to meet. When her mother died in 1536, Mary was "inconsolable", left to grieve in seclusion in Elizabeth’s household.

In 1536, Queen Anne as beheaded fell from the king's favour and was beheaded. Elizabeth, like her half-sister, was declared illegitimate and stripped of her succession rights. Within two weeks of Anne's execution, Henry married Catholic sympathizer Jane Seymour, who urged her husband to make peace with Mary. Henry insisted that Mary recognise him as head of the Church of England, repudiate papal authority, acknowledge that the marriage between her parents was unlawful, and accept her own illegitimacy. She attempted to reconcile with him by submitting to his authority as far as "God and my conscience" permitted, but was eventually bullied into signing a document agreeing to all of Henry's demands. Reconciled with her father, Mary resumed her place at court with her household restored. Her expenses included fine clothes and gambling at cards, one of her favourite pastimes (a difference from the virginal and austere picture we are usually given of her). Rebels in the North of England, including Lord Hussey, Mary's former chamberlain, campaigned against Henry's religious reforms, and one of their demands was that Mary be made legitimate. The rebellion, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, was ruthlessly suppressed, but there was no implication that Mary had been directly involved. The following year, 1537, Jane died after giving birth to a son, Edward. Mary was made godmother to her half-brother and acted as chief mourner at the queen's funeral. 

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Following more failed marriage negotiations, Mary was also brought into the downfall of Thomas Cromwell following Henry’s disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves. One of the trumped-up charges against him was that he had plotted to marry Mary, but there is little evidence of this.

In 1541, Henry had the Countess of Salisbury, Mary's old governess and godmother, executed after her son was implicated in a a Catholic plot. In 1542, following the execution of Henry's fifth wife, Catherine Howard, the unmarried Henry invited Mary to attend the royal Christmas festivities where she acted as hostess in the absence of a Queen. In 1543, Henry married his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr, who was able to reconcile the family. Consequently, Henry returned Mary and Elizabeth to the line of succession after Edward – although both remained legally illegitimate.

Henry VIII died in 1547 and Edward succeeded him. Mary inherited estates in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, and was granted Hunsdon and Beaulieu as her own. Since Edward was still a child, rule passed to a regency council dominated by Protestants, who attempted to establish their faith throughout the country. Mary remained faithful to Roman Catholicism and defiantly celebrated traditional Mass in her own chapel. She appealed to her cousin Emperor Charles V to apply diplomatic pressure demanding that she be allowed to freely practice her religion.

For most of Edward's reign, Mary remained on her own estates and rarely attended court. A plan to smuggle her out of England to the safety of the continent came to nothing. Religion continued to divide Mary from her siblings. When Mary was in her thirties, she attended a reunion with Edward and Elizabeth for Christmas 1550, where the 13-year-old Edward embarrassed Mary, and reduced both her and himself to tears in front of the court, by publicly reproving her for ignoring his laws regarding worship. Mary repeatedly refused Edward's demands that she abandon Catholicism, and Edward persistently refused to drop his demands. 

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On 6 July 1553, at the age of 15, Edward VI died of a lung infection. Fearing the throne would fall into the hands of his Catholic sister, Mary, he excluded both her and their sister Elizabeth from succession, in direct contradiction to his father’s Succession Act. Instead, Edward named Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII's younger sister Mary, as his successor. (I do love that every contestant for the throne was a woman though, just one of the reasons I love the Tudor era). Just before Edward died, Mary was summoned to court to visit her dying brother but was warned that this was a pretext on which to capture her and thereby facilitate Jane's accession to the throne. Therefore, instead of heading to London from her residence at Hunsdon, Mary fled to East Anglia, where she owned extensive estates and had powerful Catholic supporters. On 9 July, she wrote to the privy council from Norfolk with orders for her proclamation as Edward's successor.

On 10 July 1553, Lady Jane was proclaimed queen on the same day Mary's letter to the council arrived in London. By 12 July, Mary and her supporters had assembled a military force at Framlingham Castle, Suffolk. Jane’s support crumbled and she was deposed on 19 July. She and Dudley were imprisoned in the Tower of London and Mary rode triumphantly into London on 3 August 1553. She was popular with the public and arrived escorted by her half-sister Elizabeth and a procession of over 800 nobles and gentlemen.

One of Mary's first actions as queen was to order the release of the Roman Catholic Duke of Norfolk and Stephen Gardiner from imprisonment in the Tower of London, as well as her kinsman Edward Courtenay. Mary understood that the young Lady Jane was essentially a pawn in Dudley's scheme, and Dudley was the only conspirator of rank executed for high treason in the immediate aftermath of the coup. Lady Jane and her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, though found guilty, were kept imprisoned rather than immediately executed. Mary was left in a difficult position, as almost all the Privy Counsellors had been implicated in the plot to put Lady Jane on the throne. She appointed Gardiner to the council and made him both Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor and on 1 October 1553, Gardiner crowned Mary at Westminster Abbey. 

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Now aged 37, Mary turned her attention to finding a husband and producing an heir, which would prevent the Protestant Elizabeth from succeeding to the throne. Edward Courtenay and Reginald Pole were both mentioned as prospective suitors, but her cousin Charles V suggested she marry his only son, Prince Philip of Spain. 

Lord Chancellor Gardiner and the House of Commons unsuccessfully petitioned her to consider marrying an Englishman, fearing that England would be relegated to a dependency of the Habsburgs. The marriage was unpopular with the English; Catholics opposed on a patriotic basis, while Protestants were motivated by a fear of Catholicism. When Mary insisted on marrying Philip, rebellions broke out. Thomas Wyatt the younger led a force from Kent to depose Mary in favour of Elizabeth, as part of a wider conspiracy now known as Wyatt's rebellion, which also involved the Duke of Suffolk, Lady Jane's father. Mary declared publicly that she would summon Parliament to discuss the marriage and if Parliament decided that the marriage was not to the kingdom's advantage, she would refrain from pursuing it. On reaching London, Wyatt was defeated and captured. Wyatt, the Duke of Suffolk, Lady Jane, and her husband Guildford Dudley were executed. Elizabeth, though protesting her innocence in the Wyatt affair, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for two months, then put under house arrest. 

Mary was—excluding the brief, contested reigns of the Empress Matilda and Lady Jane Grey—England's first queen regnant. However, under the English common law, the property and titles belonging to a woman became her husband's upon marriage, and it was feared that any man she married would thereby become King of England in fact and name. While Mary's grandparents Ferdinand and Isabella had retained sovereignty of their realms during their marriage, there was no precedent to follow in England. Under the terms of Queen Mary's Marriage Act, Philip was to be styled "King of England", all official documents (including Acts of Parliament) were to be dated with both their names, and Parliament was to be called under the joint authority of the couple, for Mary's lifetime only. England would not be obliged to provide military support to Philip's father in any war, and Philip could not act without his wife's consent or appoint foreigners to office in England. Philip reluctantly agreed to these conditions but agreed to secure the marriage. He had no romantic feelings for Mary and sought the marriage for political motivations only.

To elevate his son to Mary's rank, Emperor Charles V ceded to Philip the crown of Naples as well as his claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Mary thus became Queen of Naples and titular Queen of Jerusalem upon marriage. Their wedding at Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554 took place just two days after their first meeting. Philip could not speak English, and so they spoke a mixture of Spanish, French, and Latin. 

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In September 1554, Mary stopped menstruating. She gained weight and felt sick in the mornings. For these reasons, the entire court – including her doctor - believed she was pregnant. Parliament passed an act making Philip regent should Mary die in childbirth. In the last week of April 1555, Elizabeth was released from house arrest, and called to court as a witness to the birth, which was expected imminently.  Some foreign sources speculated that Philip may have planned to marry Elizabeth in the event of Mary's death in childbirth, but in a letter to his brother-in-law, Philip expressed uncertainty as to whether his wife was pregnant.

Thanksgiving services in the diocese of London were held at the end of April after false rumours that Mary had given birth to a son spread across Europe. Through May and June, the apparent delay in delivery fed gossip that Mary was not pregnant. Mary continued to show signs of pregnancy until July 1555, when her abdomen receded. It was most likely a false pregnancy, perhaps induced by Mary's overwhelming desire to have a child – showing the huge pressure on women to reproduce in this time (no doubt exacerbated by her father’s obsession with a legitimate heir). In August, soon after the disgrace of the false pregnancy, which Mary considered "God's punishment" for her having "tolerated heretics" in her realm, Philip left England to command his armies against France in Flanders. Mary, “extraordinarily in love” was heartbroken at his departure and fell into a deep depression.

Elizabeth remained at court until October, apparently restored to favour. In the absence of any children, Philip was concerned that one of the next claimants to the English throne after his sister-in-law was the Queen of Scots, who was betrothed to the Dauphin of France. Philip persuaded his wife that Elizabeth should marry his cousin Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, to secure the Catholic succession and preserve the Habsburg interest in England, but Elizabeth refused to comply and parliamentary consent was unlikely. It’s strange to think that  reign of “the virgin queen” could have so easily  been prevented had she surrended more easily to her half-sister’s plotting. 

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In the month following her accession, Mary issued a proclamation that she would not compel any of her subjects to follow her religion, but by the end of September 1553, leading Protestant churchmen were imprisoned. Mary's first Parliament, which assembled in early October, declared her parents' marriage valid and abolished Edward's religious laws.  Church doctrine was restored to the form it had taken in the 1539 Six Articles of Henry VIII, which (among other things) reaffirmed clerical celibacy.  

Mary had always rejected her father’s break with and the establishment of Protestantism by her brother's regents. Philip persuaded Parliament to repeal Henry's religious laws, returning the English church to Roman jurisdiction. Reaching an agreement took many months and Mary and Pope Julius III had to make a major concession: the confiscated monastery lands were not returned to the church but remained in the hands of their influential new owners. By the end of 1554, the pope had approved the deal, and the Heresy Acts were revived.

Under the Heresy Acts, numerous Protestants were executed in the Marian persecutions. Around 800 rich Protestants were forced into exile. The first executions occurred over five days in February 1555. Cranmer, the imprisoned archbishop of Canterbury, was forced to watch Bishops Ridley and Latimer being burned at the stake. He recanted, repudiated Protestant theology, and rejoined the Catholic faith. Under the normal process of the law, he should have been absolved as a repentant, but Mary refused to reprieve him. On the day of his burning, he sensationally withdrew his recantation. In total, 283 were executed, most by burning. The burnings proved so unpopular that Philip's own ecclesiastical staff condemned them. Another adviser, Simon Renard, warned him that such "cruel enforcement" could "cause a revolt". Nonetheless, Mary persevered with the policy, which continued until her death and exacerbated anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish feeling among the English people. The victims of the persecutions became glorified as martyrs. 

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Furthering the Tudor conquest of Ireland, under Mary and Philip's reign English colonists were settled in the Irish Midlands. 

In January 1556, Mary's father-in-law the Emperor abdicated. Mary and Philip were still apart; he was declared King of Spain in Brussels, but she stayed in England. Philip negotiated an unstable truce with the French in February 1556. The next month, the French ambassador in England, Antoine de Noailles, was implicated in a plot against Mary. The plot, known as the Dudley conspiracy, was betrayed, and the conspirators in England were rounded up.

Philip returned to England from March to July 1557 to persuade Mary to support Spain in a renewed war against France. Mary was keen, but her advisors opposed the war over concern for French traded. They also warned that it contravened the foreign war provisions of the marriage treaty, and a bad economic legacy from Edward VI's reign added to a series of poor harvests meant England lacked supplies and finances. War was only declared in June 1557 after Reginald Pole's nephew, Thomas Stafford, invaded England and seized Scarborough Castle with French help, in a failed attempt to depose Mary.  As a result of the war, relations between England and the Papacy became strained, since Pope Paul IV was allied with Henry II of France. In January 1558 French forces took Calais, England's sole remaining possession on the European mainland. Although the territory was financially burdensome, its loss was a humiliating blow to the queen's honour. According to Holinshed's Chronicles, Mary later lamented, "When I am dead and opened, you shall find 'Calais' lying in my heart". 

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Despite Mary's marriage to Philip, England did not benefit from Spain's enormously lucrative trade with the New World.  The mercantilist Spanish guarded their trade routes jealously, and Mary could not condone English smuggling or piracy against her husband. In an attempt to increase trade and rescue the English economy, Mary sought out new commercial opportunities. She granted a royal charter to the Muscovy Company under governor Sebastian Cabot, and commissioned a world atlas from Diogo Homem.^[144] Adventurers such as John Lok and William Towerson sailed south in an attempt to develop links with the coast of Africa.

Financially, Mary's regime tried to reconcile a modern form of government—with correspondingly higher spending—with a medieval system of collecting taxation and dues.  A failure to apply new tariffs to new forms of imports meant that a key source of revenue was neglected. To solve this, Mary's government published a revised "Book of Rates" (1558), which listed the tariffs and duties for every import. English coinage was sullied under both Henry VIII and Edward VI. Mary drafted plans for currency reform but they were not implemented until after her death.

After Philip's visit in 1557, Mary again thought she was pregnant, with a baby due in March 1558. She decreed in her will that her husband would be the regent during the minority of their child. Yet again, however, no child was born and Mary was forced to accept that her half-sister Elizabeth would be her lawful successor.

From May 1558, Mary was constantly weak and ill. She died a painful death in November 1558 aged 42, possibly from ovarian cysts or uterine cancer. She was succeeded by Elizabeth. Philip, who was in Brussels, wrote to his sister Joan: "I felt a reasonable regret for her death." Wow, I hope my husband is so broken hearted after my death (!)  

Although Mary's will stated that she wished to be buried next to her mother, she was kept apart from her as in life and instead interred in Westminster Abbey on 14 December, in a tomb she eventually shared with Elizabeth. The inscription on their tomb, affixed there by James I when he succeeded Elizabeth, is Regno consortes et urna, hic obdormimus Elizabetha et Maria sorores, in spe resurrectionis ("Consorts in realm and tomb, we sisters Elizabeth and Mary here lie down to sleep in hope of the resurrection"). 

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Since Mary first took the throne, Protestant writers condemned her reign. By the 17th century, the memory of her religious persecutions had led to the adoption of her sobriquet "Bloody Mary". John Knox (puke) attacked her in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), and she was prominently vilified in Actes and Monuments (1563), by John Foxe. Foxe's book remained popular throughout the following centuries and helped shape enduring perceptions of Mary as a bloodthirsty tyrant.  

Mary is remembered in the 21st century for her vigorous efforts to restore the primacy of Roman Catholicism in England after the rise of Protestant influence during the previous reigns. In the mid-20th century, H. F. M. Prescott attempted to redress the tradition that Mary was intolerant and authoritarian, and scholarship since then has tended to view the older, simpler assessments of Mary with increasing reservations. A historiographical revisionism since the 1980s has improved her reputation among scholars to some degree. Christopher Haigh argued that her revival of religious festivities and Catholic practices was generally welcomed. 

Catholic historians, such as John Lingard, thought Mary's policies failed not because they were wrong but because she had too short a reign to establish them and because of natural disasters beyond her control. In other countries, the Catholic Counter-Reformation was spearheaded by Jesuit missionaries, but Mary's chief religious advisor, Cardinal Reginald Pole, refused to allow the Jesuits into England. Her marriage to Philip was unpopular among her subjects and her religious policies resulted in deep-seated resentment. The military loss of Calais to France was a bitter humiliation to English pride. Failed harvests increased public discontent. Philip spent most of his time abroad, while his wife remained in England, leaving her depressed at his absence and disgraced by their inability to have children. After Mary's death, Philip sought to marry Elizabeth but she refused him. Although Mary's rule was ultimately ineffectual and unpopular, the policies of fiscal reform, naval expansion, and colonial exploration that were later lauded as Elizabeth’s feats were initiated in Mary's reign. (11)

Growing up, I always had a deep sympathy for Mary for how she and her mother were treated by her father and his wives. I admired Mary’s dedication to her faith and pitied her cold marriage and her inability to have children. It is easy to see how she could have developed such a hatred of Protestantism given that for her it was the force that killed her mother, displaced her from the throne for decades, cast her as an outsider amongst her siblings, and made her whole worldview illegal. However, it is hard to pardon her violent persecution of those who’s faith differed from her own, and while it may be understandable to a certain extent, it seems she inherited her father’s bloodlust and disregard for human life when it interfered with their vision. However, Mary I should be remembered as a formidable lady, who for better or worse changed the religious shape of England and paved the way for the long reign of her sister, Elizabeth I.