Mary I

• 1. Introduction

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  Mary I came into the world on the 18th of February 1516 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, the only child of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon to survive infancy. She died on the 17th of November 1558, aged 42, at St James's Palace, leaving behind a reign so ferocious in its religious reprisals that later generations simply called her Bloody Mary. More than 280 people were burned at the stake during her five years on the throne. And yet she was also England's first queen regnant to successfully claim and hold the throne, a woman who rode into London on a wave of popular support and governed a country that had never been ruled by a woman in its own right. How did the daughter of a king who declared her illegitimate come to sit on the throne at all? And why did someone who began her reign with a proclamation of religious tolerance end it with hundreds of executions? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

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• 2. A Princess Made Illegitimate

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  Three days after Mary's birth, she was baptised at the Church of the Observant Friars in Greenwich. Her godparents included Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, her great-aunt Catherine, Countess of Devon, and Agnes Howard, Duchess of Norfolk. Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, stood sponsor for her confirmation, a woman who would later become her governess and, much later still, her executioner's victim. From the very beginning, Mary's life was shaped by people whose fates were entwined with hers in dark ways.

  At roughly four and a half years old, Mary entertained a visiting French delegation by playing the virginals, a type of harpsichord. Her mother Catherine consulted the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives on her education and commissioned him to write De Institutione Feminae Christianae, a treatise on the education of girls. By the age of nine, Mary could read and write Latin and studied French, Spanish, music, dance, and perhaps Greek.

  Henry VIII doted on his daughter but was tormented by one fact: she was not a son. In 1525, when it became clear that Henry and Catherine would have no more children, he sent Mary to the border of Wales to preside over the Council of Wales and the Marches, giving her a court at Ludlow Castle. She spent roughly three years in the Welsh Marches before returning to the home counties in mid-1528.

  By 1531, Mary was frequently ill with irregular menstruation and depression, conditions her physicians connected to the turmoil in her household. Henry had been trying for years to have his marriage to Catherine annulled. Pope Clement VII refused, possibly because he was influenced by Catherine's nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. In early 1533, Henry married Anne Boleyn, and in May the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer formally declared the marriage to Catherine void. Mary was stripped of her title, declared illegitimate, and styled simply "The Lady Mary". Her household was dissolved, her servants dismissed, and she was sent to join her infant half-sister Elizabeth's household at Hatfield Palace in Hertfordshire. She and her mother were never permitted to meet again. When Catherine died in 1536, Mary was described as inconsolate, grieving in semi-seclusion at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire while Catherine was interred in Peterborough Cathedral.

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• 3. Restoration and Waiting

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  Queen Anne Boleyn fell from Henry's favour in 1536 and was beheaded. Within two weeks of that execution, Henry married Jane Seymour, who pressed him to reconcile with Mary. Henry demanded that Mary recognise him as head of the Church of England, repudiate papal authority, and accept her own illegitimacy. She attempted a partial submission, but was bullied into signing a document agreeing to all of his demands.

  Reconciled with her father, Mary returned to court. Her Privy Purse accounts, kept by Mary Finch, record that Hatfield House, the Palace of Beaulieu, Richmond, and Hunsdon were among her principal residences, alongside Henry's palaces at Greenwich, Westminster, and Hampton Court. Her expenses ran to fine clothes and card gambling, one of her favourite pastimes.

  In 1537, Queen Jane died after giving birth to the son Henry had always wanted: Edward. Mary was made godmother to the infant and acted as chief mourner at Jane's funeral. The birth of a legitimate male heir displaced Mary in the succession once again. By 1542, she described herself as "the unhappiest woman in all of Christendom".

  In 1541, Henry had the Countess of Salisbury, Mary's old governess and godmother, executed on the pretext of a Catholic plot involving the Countess's son Reginald Pole. A report described the executioner as "a wretched and blundering youth" who "literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces". Henry's sixth wife, Catherine Parr, whom he married in 1543, helped bring the family closer together. The Act of Succession 1544 restored Mary and Elizabeth to the line of succession, placing them after Edward, though both remained legally illegitimate. When Henry VIII died in 1547, Mary inherited estates in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, and was granted Hunsdon and Beaulieu as her own. She was thirty-one years old and had spent more than a decade navigating a court that had treated her as a problem to be managed.

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• 4. The Fight for the Throne

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  On the 6th of July 1553, Edward VI died of a lung infection, possibly tuberculosis, at the age of fifteen. He had spent his final months engineering a succession that would keep Mary off the throne. Guided by John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, he excluded both Mary and Elizabeth from the line of succession in his will, naming instead Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII's younger sister Mary.

  Mary was summoned to London on the pretext of visiting her dying brother, but was warned the summons was a trap designed to facilitate Jane's accession. Instead of travelling to London from Hunsdon, she fled to East Anglia, where she owned extensive estates and where many Catholic adherents and opponents of Northumberland lived. On the 9th of July, from Kenninghall in Norfolk, she wrote to the privy council demanding proclamation as Edward's successor.

  On the 10th of July 1553, Lady Jane was proclaimed queen by Northumberland and his allies. By the 12th of July, Mary and her supporters had assembled a military force at Framlingham Castle in Suffolk. Northumberland's backing collapsed, and Jane was deposed on the 19th of July. Mary rode triumphantly into London on the 3rd of August accompanied by her half-sister Elizabeth and a procession of over 800 nobles and gentlemen.

  One of her first acts was to release Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, and Stephen Gardiner from the Tower of London. She recognised that Lady Jane had been essentially a pawn in Northumberland's scheme; he was the only conspirator of rank executed immediately for high treason. Gardiner was appointed Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor, offices he held until his death in November 1555. On the 1st of October 1553, Gardiner crowned Mary at Westminster Abbey. William Mundy's grand votive antiphon Vox Patris caelestis was sung as she processed through London two days before the coronation.

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• 5. The Spanish Marriage

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  Now aged 37, Mary needed a husband. A parliamentary delegation met her on the 16th of November 1553 and formally requested that she choose an English husband, with the obvious candidates being Edward Courtenay, recently made Earl of Devon, and Cardinal Reginald Pole. But Mary's first cousin Charles V, also king of Spain, had a different proposal: his son Philip, recently widowed by the death of his first wife Maria Manuela of Portugal. A portrait of Philip by Titian was sent to Mary in the latter half of 1553.

  A marriage treaty was presented to the Privy Council on the 7th of December 1553. Its terms clearly favoured England and included provisions that Philip could not act without Mary's consent or appoint foreigners to English offices. Philip was styled "King of England" for Mary's lifetime only, and England was not obliged to support Philip's father in any war. Philip was unhappy with these conditions but agreed for strategic reasons. His aide Ruy Gómez de Silva wrote to a correspondent in Brussels that "the marriage was concluded for no fleshly consideration, but in order to remedy the disorders of this kingdom and to preserve the Low Countries."

  Opposition to the marriage was fierce. Thomas Wyatt the Younger led a force from Kent and rallied about 2,500 men. When elements of a government army under the Duke of Norfolk defected to him, Mary addressed Londoners directly at the Guildhall, securing the capital's loyalty. Wyatt advanced but found Ludgate barred against him and surrendered within sight of the Tower. He was captured. Wyatt, the Duke of Suffolk, Lady Jane, and her husband Guildford Dudley were all executed. Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower for two months, then placed under house arrest at Woodstock Palace.

  Their wedding took place at Winchester Cathedral on the 25th of July 1554, just two days after the couple met for the first time. Philip did not speak English; they communicated in a mixture of Spanish, French, and Latin. To elevate Philip to Mary's rank before the marriage, his father Charles V ceded to him the crown of Naples and his claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, making Mary queen of Naples and titular queen of Jerusalem on the day she wed.

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• 6. The Marian Persecutions

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  In the month after her accession, Mary issued a proclamation that she would not compel her subjects to follow her religion. By the end of September 1553, leading Protestant churchmen including Thomas Cranmer, John Bradford, John Rogers, John Hooper, and Hugh Latimer were imprisoned. Mary's first Parliament declared her parents' marriage valid and abolished Edward's religious laws, restoring church doctrine to the form it had taken in the 1539 Six Articles of Henry VIII, which reaffirmed clerical celibacy among other things.

  About 800 wealthy Protestants, including John Foxe, fled into exile. Those who remained and publicly proclaimed their beliefs became targets of heresy laws. The first executions occurred over five days in February 1555: John Rogers on the 4th of February, Laurence Saunders on the 8th, and Rowland Taylor and John Hooper on the 9th. Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was forced to watch Bishops Nicholas Ridley and Latimer burn at the stake. He recanted and rejoined the Catholic faith. Under the normal process of law, he should have been absolved as a repentant, but Mary refused to reprieve him. On the day of his burning, he dramatically withdrew his recantation.

  In total, more than 280 were executed by burning. The burnings proved so unpopular that Alfonso de Castro, one of Philip's own ecclesiastical staff, condemned them publicly. His fellow adviser Simon Renard warned Philip that such "cruel enforcement" could "cause a revolt". Mary persevered regardless. The victims were widely seen as martyrs, and the persecutions intensified anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish feeling across England.

  Reginald Pole, the son of Mary's executed governess, arrived as papal legate in November 1554. He was ordained a priest and appointed Archbishop of Canterbury after Cranmer's execution in March 1556. Juan de Villagarcía was appointed to a divinity chair at Oxford, where he claimed credit in obtaining Cranmer's later recantations. The confiscated monastery lands, which Mary and Pope Julius III had hoped to return to the church, remained in their new owners' hands as the price of parliamentary cooperation.

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• 7. Calais and Collapse

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  In September 1554, Mary stopped menstruating, gained weight, and felt nauseated in the mornings. Almost the entirety of her court, including her physicians, believed she was pregnant. Parliament passed the Treason Act of 1554 making Philip regent in the event of Mary's death in childbirth. Mary commissioned Missa Puer natus est nobis from Thomas Tallis for the joint Chapel Royal and Capilla Flamenca choirs to sing together in December 1554, a festive mass setting based on the plainchant "A Child is born for us".

  Thanksgiving services were held at the end of April 1555 after false rumours spread across Europe that Mary had given birth to a son. Through May and June, the apparent delay fed gossip. Susan Clarencieux confided her doubts to the French ambassador Antoine de Noailles. By July 1555, Mary's abdomen had receded. The Venetian ambassador Giovanni Michieli wrote dismissively that the pregnancy was more likely to "end in wind rather than anything else".

  Philip left England in August 1555 to command his armies against France in Flanders. Michieli was moved by the Queen's grief; he recorded she was "extraordinarily in love" with her husband and disconsolate at his departure. Philip returned from March to July 1557 to persuade Mary to join Spain's renewed war with France. War was finally declared in June 1557 after Reginald Pole's nephew Thomas Stafford seized Scarborough Castle with French help in a failed bid to depose Mary.

  In August 1557, English forces achieved a victory in the aftermath of the Battle of Saint Quentin, with one eyewitness reporting, "Both sides fought most choicely, and the English best of all." The celebration was brief. In January 1558, French forces took Calais, England's sole remaining possession on the European mainland. According to Holinshed's Chronicles, Mary later lamented, though this may be apocryphal, "When I am dead and opened, you shall find 'Calais' lying in my heart." Mary became weak and ill beginning in May 1558, dying on the 17th of November 1558 during an influenza epidemic that also took Archbishop Pole's life later the same day. Philip, in Brussels, wrote to his sister Joanna: "I felt a reasonable regret for her death."

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• 8. The Weight of Her Reign

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  At Mary's funeral, John White, Bishop of Winchester, delivered a summary few monarchs receive: "She was a king's daughter; she was a king's sister; she was a king's wife. She was a queen, and by the same title a king also." Mary was interred at Westminster Abbey on the 14th of December in a tomb she eventually shared with Elizabeth. James I later affixed the inscription: Regno consortes et urna, hic obdormimus Elizabetha et Maria sorores, in spe resurrectionis, meaning "Consorts in realm and tomb, we sisters Elizabeth and Mary here lie down to sleep in hope of the resurrection".

  Protestant writers quickly shaped the lasting image of Mary as a tyrant. John Knox attacked her in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in 1558, the same year she died. John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, published in 1563, was widely read for centuries and firmly fixed the label of Bloody Mary to her memory. Historian Lucy Wooding has noted a misogynistic double standard running through those early condemnations; Mary was simultaneously attacked for being "vindictive and fierce" and "spineless and weak".

  Historiographical revisionism since the 1980s has produced more measured judgements. Christopher Haigh argues that her revival of religious festivities and Catholic practices was generally welcomed, and concludes that the "last years of Mary's reign were not a gruesome preparation for Protestant victory, but a continuing consolidation of Catholic strength." Decades after her death, an epitaph for John Throckmorton referred to "Queene Marie of happie memorie". It has been hypothesised that a body of particularly sombre Lamentations settings by composers including Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Robert White, and Osbert Parsley was produced out of Catholic nostalgia for her reign.

  Catholic historian John Lingard argued that Mary's policies failed not because they were wrong but because her reign was too short and because natural disasters beyond her control undermined them. The persistent wet weather of her years on the throne led to famine, trade with Antwerp declined, and poor harvests compounded the economic damage. Policies of fiscal reform, naval expansion, and colonial exploration that were later praised as Elizabethan achievements were in fact started during Mary's reign, including the royal charter she granted to the Muscovy Company under governor Sebastian Cabot and the world atlas she commissioned from Diogo Homem.

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