Happy Birthday to Queen Mary I of England!
She came into the world on 18 February 1516, and was the only one of Henry VIII’s six children with Katherina of Aragon to survive past early infancy.
Mary was a pretty little girl, with her father’s strawberry-blonde hair and ruddy cheeks, and she spent her early years being an adored and precocious only child. However, when she was in her early teens her world collapsed as a result of her father’s nullity suit against her mother. Not only was she bastardised and demoted from princess, she was also put into the nearly impossible position of ‘choosing sides’ during her parents’ split.
Since Mary was obviously reluctant to agree with her father’s position — that she was the illegitimate product of an incestuous false marriage — she sided with her mother and the incontestability of the Catholic faith. Nonetheless, she still loved her father and could not psychologically cast him in the role of absolute villain. This meant the only person she could unambiguously blame for the situation was her father’s love, Anne Boleyn. Mary hated her father’s amour with her whole heart, holding Anne solely responsible for Henry’s desire to have a new wife and his slow-growing separation from the Holy Mother Church.
There is an old saw: ‘What’s bred into the bone will come out in the blood’. This old wives’ saying predates human understanding of DNA, but even without the knowledge of genetics people could see heritable characteristics. With all due respect to nurture, Mary I of England’s nature was a nearly perfect admixture of Tudor and Trastámara.
As stubborn as either of her parents, Mary dug in her heels and refused to give way to her father’s demands to acknowledge the invalidity of his first marriage until she literally feared for her life. With the death of Anne Boleyn in May of 1533, Mary thought her father was at last ‘safe’ from evil influence and would welcome her back into the fold without her submitting to her own illegitimacy. Alas for her, it was Henry – not Anne – who was the most truculent about Mary’s admission of bastardy. Coaxed by her advisers, who were concerned that Henry would actually murder his daughter for her resistance, Mary signed a document confessing that her parents’ marriage was never real and that the Pope was not the ultimate pontiff of the Christian faith.
Mary’s capitulation to Henry’s demands was a prudent move, and it is the likely reason that she was eventually restored to his the succession in 1544. Nevertheless, she never forgave herself for signing the declaration of her illegitimacy, or for denying the supremacy of the Pope.
Henry is rightfully regarded as a monster for how he treated his daughter, but Mary was not the stainless innocent she is often portrayed to have been. Less than a year before Anne’s death, Mary had been actively encouraging Charles V to invade England to restore Katherina to the throne and to punish the heresy of Protestantism. Henry was indeed cruel to his daughter, but his daughter was also willing for a foreign power to depose her father in order to restore her place in the succession. Calling for her father’s overthrow was clearly insubordination that would have sent anyone else posthaste to the chopping block. Mary would have been legitimately executed for treason if the king hadn’t still loved his daughter too much to kill her.
Like both of her parents, Mary was as unwilling to compromise or to conceptualise that she might be wrong about anything. Although all human beings have a tendency to justify their actions to themselves, Mary was every inch her parents’ daughter with her assumption that her wishes were God’s will. Like her mother, Mary believed that Catholicism was the ONLY true religion and all others were doomed to eternal hellfire. Like her father, Mary believed ONLY she and the people who agreed with her were ‘good’ people and that those who opposed her were deserving of the death penalty.
When her brother Edward VI died and left his throne to Jane Grey, Mary raised an army of rebels and took the crown by force. Post-usurpation propaganda has done an excellent job of whitewashing these events, leaving most people with the idea that Queen Jane the I was an ‘innocent traitor’ who never really wanted the throne or had the legal right to sit there, but Jane was the queen and Mary’s uprising was the overthrow and murder of a legitimate monarch.
It was Mary’s belief in her right to be queen and her role as a divine agent on earth that led her to become known Bloody Mary. This moniker is unfair in many ways, yet it is simultaneously deserved for just as many reasons. Mary did not kill people with any more wantonness than did many of her predecessors, none of whom are remembered as Bloody Henry or Bloody Edward, but she did slaughter a significant number of Protestants during her five year reign. Hundreds of Protestants fled the country to avoid being burned alive at the stake. Mary may not be able to rival her grandparents Ferdinand and Isabella in terms of religious persecution, or her English ancestors Edward I and Edward III in terms of sheer number of people killed for political consolidation, but she was no shy violet when it came to using executions as the final say in disputes.
Sadly, Mary spent her reign inadvertently undermining her own goals. It was as though she was cursed with some sort of reverse Midas touch; metaphorical gold was constantly turned into baser materials wherever she went.
Her marriage to Philip of Spain, which was meant to keep her country safe from war and to ensure the succession with an heir, backfired and caused Wyatt’s rebellion among Protestant dissenters fearing a return to compulsory Catholicism. Thus in turn spurred her to execute Jane Grey and to persecute the rebellious ‘heretics’ in her nation, which further alienated many people from Catholicism, sharply lessened Mary’s popularity as queen, and eventually led England into war with France. In the end, the marriage wasn’t worth the damage it caused, inasmuch as it didn’t produce a child or even make Mary herself particularly happy.
To make matters worse, her efforts on behalf of the Church were unrewarded even at the highest level, when the ungrateful Pope supported France in a war against Spain. Mary’s popularity was in the toilet and she was constantly faced with potential rebellion — all to defend a Church that turned its back on her at her time of need for reasons of political expediency. It was one more betrayal in a life tragically full of broken assurances.
The unfortunate Queen Mary died in 1558, probably as the result of cancer in her reproductive organs, when she was only 42 years old. She has spent the whole of her short life trying to do the right thing as she perceived it. She had made every effort to be a dutiful daughter, devout Catholic, and good queen, but nevertheless left gory footprints on the historical page. She deserves to be remembered as the complex and complicated woman she was, rather than a stereotype of either a mistreated child or a dogmatic butcher.
So interesting! Love your posts!!
First,even if Edward VI could leave the throne to Lady Jane by will, there is still the fact that Henry”s plans were established, not merely by will but also by act of Parliament. Edward”s will was not. Do you know of any thing that establishes that the act of the council in supporting Edward”s will could actually overrule a formally enacted piece of Parliamentary legislation? Second, Ives said that the council backing Lady Jane Grey would have believed that the act giving Mary the right was invalid in light of her illegitimacy. However, a Parliamentary decree of bastardy that is not popularly accepted appears to be worthless – as is proven by Richard III, who also had a council – and a later act of Parliament – both stating that the children of Edward IV were illegitimate.