Abstract
Mary Tudor (1516–58) was the first queen regnant of England. As the only surviving child of the twenty-year marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, her ever becoming monarch was in itself an ironic comment on her fathers long and destructive campaign to ensure a masculine succession to his throne. Mary was reared in the Catholic tradition. She remained faithful to that tradition all her life, and her commitment to the faith she was born into, has long been a potent weapon—and impetus—for critics of her reign. Even before her death, Protestant critiques of her reign highlighted her Spanish lineage and her Catholic allegiance. In 1563, John Foxe produced the first English version of his martyrology, Actes and Monumentes in these latter and perillous dayes. There, Foxe introduced Mary’s reign as “the horrible and bloudy time of Queene Mary.”1 He described, in varying degrees of detail, nearly three hundred martyrdoms suffered by Protestants. Foxe’s widely available work was also soon drawn upon by historians2 and, through several routes, the language of the “Fires of Smithfield” and “Bloody Mary”3 has resonated through the years and well into the twentieth century. Foxe’s outrage has long been the more effective precisely because he was among a very small minority who deplored all heresy burnings at the time.
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Notes
For details of how Holinshed’s initially more sparing use of Foxe was expanded in later editions to render Mary “an object of comic disesteem,” see Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), esp. p. 57.
John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (Oxford, 1822 edn.), Ill, ii, p. 153. Cited in Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England, 3 vols. (New York, Macmillan, 1963), 2: 255.
An extraordinarily popular collection of ‘school-yard’ history asserts that Mary’s brother Edward had forced all his subjects to become Protestant ‘so that Bloody Mary would be able to put them all to death afterwards for not being Roman Catholic’ W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London: Methuen, 1930).
A. F. Pollard, The History of England from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth (1547–1603) (London: Longmans Green, 1910, reprinted New York, 1969), p. 172.
G. R. Elton, England Under the Tudors (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 214.
G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558 (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 376.
D. M. Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 8;
John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 227;
Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds. The Rule of the Tudors 1485—1603 (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2000), p. 199.
A. N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth 1 Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 16. See also, pp. 90–103.
William Forrest, The History of Grisild the Second, ed. W. D. Macray (London: Chiswick Press, 1875). See Matthew Hansen’s essay in this collection for more on this text.
Maria Dowling, “A Woman’s Place? Learning and the Wives of Henry VIII,” History Today, 41 (June 1991), p. 38.
Peggy K. Liss, Isabel the Queen Life and Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 253.
Maria Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 224–25, 226. Significantly, Dowling adds that the collection Satellitium vel Symbola was subsequently used in the education of Prince Edward, who was always educated to rule.
John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography. Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 185. Mary’s will is reproduced in Loades, Mary Tudor, pp. 370–83.
“Letter from Mary to the members of Edward VI’s Privy Council, dated 9 July 1553 from Kenninghall” transcribed (and modernized), Robert Tittler, The Reign of Mary I (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 81–82.
For a significantly modified view of this assertion, see Robert Tittler and Susan L. Battley, “The Local Community and the Crown in 1553: The Accession of Mary Tudor Revisited,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, LVII, 136 (November 1984), pp. 131–39.
Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 530–31,587–89.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 351.
The occasion for this statute, passed only in the third parliamentary session (April 1554), is still the subject of much speculation now, as it was then. See Jennifer Loach, Parliament and the Crown in the Reign of Mary Tudor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 96–97, and Richards, “Mary Tudor as ‘Sole Quene’?” pp. 904–05.
For a brief introduction to the problems, see Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Ferdinand and Isabella (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975), pp. 44–45.
Liss, Isabel the Queen, pp. 97–99; see also Nancy Rubin, Isabella of Castile The First Renaissance Queen (New York: St Martins Press, 1991), pp. 3–5.
J. S. Brewer, The Reign of Henry VIII from his Accession to the Death of Wolsey, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1884), 1: 45.
For an argument for much more power exercised by Philip, see Glyn Redworth, “‘Matters impertinent to women’: male and female monarchy under Philip and Mary” English Historical Review, vol. 112, 447 (1997), pp. 597–613; for another approach again,
see David Loades, “Philip II and the government of England,” Law and Government under the Tudors, ed. Claire Cross, David Loades and J. J. Scarisbrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 177–94.
Sydney Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London: Sealey, 1992), p. 6.
See Dale Hoak, “The iconography of the crown imperial,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 54–103.
Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 223.
Spirituali have been consistently characterized as a group within the Catholic Church who were much attracted to the “protestant” doctrine of justification by faith, but could not accept the Lutheran extrapolation which attacked church tradition and the role of ceremonial in worship. They were, it has been suggested inheritors of “pre-Lutheran Paulinism.” Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole Prince & Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 3. Until the early sessions of the Council of Trent, a number of them had still had ambitions to achieve a reunion of the West European church. That had been the hope of Contarini, another prominent member of the spirituali, and formative influence on Pole, at Regensburg in 1541. See Peter Matheson, Cardinal Contarini at Regensburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England C.1400–C.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 531.
Jennifer Loach, “The Marian Establishment and the Printing Press,” English Historical Review, C I (1986), pp. 135–48.
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© 2003 Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, Debra Barrett-Graves
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Richards, J.M. (2003). Mary Tudor: Renaissance Queen of England. In: Levin, C., Carney, J.E., Barrett-Graves, D. (eds) “High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10676-6_3
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