“A queen, and by the same title, a king also”: Mary I: Queen-in-Parliament

Abstract

In the proclamation announcing her accession, Mary assured her subjects that she was the rightful heir of the ‘crown imperial’ and they would find her their ‘benign and gracious sovereign lady, as other most noble progenitors have heretofore been’.¹ Given the unprecedented circumstances of her accession, it was something of an audacious claim. Though triumphing in the succession crisis of July 1553 as Henry VIII’s daughter and the legitimate Tudor heir, Mary’s status as England’s first crowned queen was a matter of great speculation and uncertainty. Anxieties were expressed about the nature of female monarchy with many fearful that it would give rise to tyranny.² In the words of John Knox in his infamous diatribe, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, as a consequence of the Fall, woman was ‘no longer mistress over [her] own appetites, over [her] own will nor desires.’³ As such, according to Knox, ‘a woman ought to be repressed and brideled be times, if she aspire to any dominion.’⁴