Abstract
The accession of Mary to the throne of England in 1553 marked the inception of successful female rule for the first time in English history. Mary’s image as a ruling queen, however, has always been compared unfavorably to that of her younger sister Queen Elizabeth I. Almost immediately after Mary’s death in 1558, the pageantry ushering in the new queen during her coronation procession highlighted the contrasts between the two rulers. One tableau in particular showcased “two hylles or mountaynes,” one of them “cragged, barreyn, and stonye,” with a withered, dead tree in the middle to represent “the decay of a commenweale,” the other “fayre, freshe, grene, and beawtifull, the grounde thereof full of flowres and beawtte.”1 The barren, decaying hill represented England under the reign of the childless queen Mary I, while the verdant landscape symbolized the hopes that the pageant-makers had for England’s future with a nubile young queen on the throne, thus drawing a sharp contrast between the previous reign of England’s first Catholic queen and that of the new Protestant queen Elizabeth. A fewyears later, with the publication of his book commonly known as The Book of Martyrs in 1563, John Foxe would denounce Mary as an unsuccessful ruler and zealot while detailing “the bloudy murthering of Gods Saintes,…as in this tyme of Queene Mary, were put to death.”2
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Notes
Osborn, J. M., ed., The Quenes Maiesties Passage through the Citie of London to Westminster the Day before Her Coronacion, Anno 1558 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 47. As Paulina Kewes has written in “Godly Queens: The Royal Iconographies of Mary and Elizabeth,” in Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, edited by Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), “The tension between barrenness and fertility evoked by the natural imagery of the pageant cannot but have recalled Mary’s conspicuous failure to bear a child and, complimenting Elizabeth on her youth and beauty, intimated that to produce offspring was her queenly duty” (55).
See, for example, Jasper Ridley, Bloody Mary’s Martyrs: The Story of England’s Terror (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001).
James Anthony Froude, The Reign of Mary Tudor, 1910 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1913), 317, 26.
A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 261, 281;
A. F. Pollard, The History of England from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth (1547–1603) (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 158;
G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 376.
David Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 8, 327.
John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 227;
A. N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46.
Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Doran and Freeman, “Introduction,” 10; Jennifer Loach, Parliament and the Crown in the Reign of Mary Tudor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986);
Ann Weikel, “The Marian Council Revisited,” in The Mid-Tudor Polity, c. 1540–1560, edited by Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 52–73.
Other revisionist works produced at the time include the revisionist overview of Mary’s reign by Robert Tittler, The Reign of Mary I (London: Longman, 1991)
and Dale Hoak, “Two Revolutions in Tudor Government: The Formation and Organization of Mary I’s Privy Council,” in Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration, edited by Christopher Coleman and David Starkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 87–115.
Elizabeth Russell, “Mary Tudor and Mr. Jorkins,” Historical Research (Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research) 152 (October 1990): 263–76, esp. 265–66, 275.
Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 234.
See also Christopher Haigh, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),
and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
Judith M. Richards, “Mary Tudor as ‘Sole Quene’? Gendering Tudor Monarchy,” The Historical Journal 40.4 (1997): 895–924; and “‘To promote a woman to beare rule’: Talking of Queens in Mid-Tudor England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 101–21.
See Judith M. Richards, Mary Tudor (London and New York: Routledge, 2008); Richards, “Mary Tudor as ‘Sole Quene’?”;
zz Richards, “Mary Tudor: Renaissance Queen of England,” in High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England, edited by Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 27–44. See also “Gender Difference and the Tudor Monarchy: The Significance of Queen Mary,” Parergon 21 (2004): 27–46.
Sarah L. Duncan, “The Two Virgin Queens,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 30.1 (2004): 77–88. An expanded version of this article, “The Two Virgin Queens: Embodying Queenship in the Reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I” appears in Elizabeth I and the “Sovereign Arts”: Essays in History, Literature, and Culture, edited by Donald Stump, Linda Shenk, and Carole Levin, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 407 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011).
Alexander Samson, “Changing Places: The Marriage and Royal Entry of Philip, Prince of Austria, and Mary Tudor, July–August 1554,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005): 761–84. Samson has explored other aspects of Mary’s marriage in several articles, including “Power-Sharing: The Co-Monarchy of Philip and Mary,” in Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, edited by Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 159–72.
Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), chapter 2; see also Thomas Betteridge, “Maids and Wives: Representing Female Rule during the Reign of Mary Tudor,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, edited by Doran and Freeman, 138–52.
Linda Porter, The Myth of “Bloody Mary” (New York: St. Martins Griffin, 2007), 231.
Richards, Mary Tudor, 242. Another biography by María Jesús Pérez Martín, María Tudor: La gran reina desconocida (Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 2008) appeared the same year.
Anna Whitelock, Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 308.
Anna Whitelock, “Mary Tudor: The First Queen of England,” in The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern, edited by Liz Oakley-Brown and Louise J. Wilkinson (Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2009), 73; “‘Woman, Warrior, Queen?’ Rethinking Mary and Elizabeth,” in Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, edited by Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 173–89.
J. L. McIntosh, From Heads of Household to Heads of State: The Preaccession Households of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, 1516–1558 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 169.
See also Anna Whitelock, “A Woman in a Man’s World: Mary I and Political Intimacy, 1553–1558,” Women’s History Review 16 (2007): 323–34.
Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock, eds., Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
John Edwards, Mary I: England’s First Catholic Queen (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011);
Sarah Duncan, Mary I: Gender, Power, and Ceremony in the Reign of England’s First Queen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Lucy E. C. Wooding, Rethinking Tudor Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
William Wizeman, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006);
Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartolomé Carranza, edited by John Edwards and Ronald Truman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005);
The Church of Mary Tudor, edited by Eamon Duffy and David M. Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
A reexamination of Marian religious policy has also been carried out by Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 1, 187.
David Loades, Mary Tudor: The Tragical History of the First Queen of England (Kew: The National Archives, 2006), 212.
Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), chapter 8, “Images of Mary Tudor,” has also argued that Mary failed “in selling herself as the champion of the English commonweal and nation” (316).
Judith M. Richards, “Reassessing Mary Tudor: Some Concluding Points,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, edited by Doran and Freeman, 224. See also Richards, “Examples and Admonitions: What Mary Demonstrated for Elizabeth,” in Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, edited by Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 31–45.
Sabine Lucia Müller, “Ageing Out Catholicism: Representing Mary Tudor’s Body,” in The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern, edited by Liz Oakley-Brown and Louise J. Wilkinson (Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2009), 239.
For a discussion of these beliefs see Duncan, Mary I, 113–15; Merry E. Weisner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (1993; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 32–33.
Alice Hunt, The Drama of Coronation: Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 133; Richards, “Reassessing Mary Tudor,” 218.
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© 2013 Charles Beem and Dennis Moore
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Duncan, S. (2013). “Bloody” Mary? Changing Perceptions of England’s First Ruling Queen. In: Beem, C., Moore, D. (eds) The Name of a Queen. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137272027_8
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