Mary I of England

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  The Age of Reformation

  The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603

  • Alec Ryrie(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Two restorations

  Mary and Elizabeth, 1553–60

  After Edward VI’s death, no English government would make such a brash attempt to impose religious novelties on its subjects until the 1630s. The religious policies of Edward’s two successors, his half-sisters, were both defined by their attempts to restore previous settlements. Mary (ruled 1553–58) made an energetic and controversial attempt to restore Catholicism to England, an attempt which was cut short by her death. The policy of Elizabeth (ruled 1558–1603) was more cautious but no less relentless and centred on a partial restoration of Edward VI’s Reformation. The contrasts between these two restorations are obvious. Mary was Catholic, Elizabeth Protestant; Mary was forthright, Elizabeth subtle in her violence. Mary’s Church avoided and Elizabeth’s pursued theological debate; Mary’s was closely tied into Continental affairs, affairs which Elizabeth strove to keep at arm’s length. Above all, Mary’s failed and Elizabeth’s succeeded.

  Yet there are parallels too. The attitude of the sovereign was always decisive. These were also England’s first reigning queens since the twelfth century, and they dealt with the problems of female rule in similar ways. Both, too, were their father’s daughters. While neither of them had any wish to restore his policies, they could not shake off his legacy. Nor could either act independently, for England – and England’s religion – was entangled in the wider webs of European diplomacy.

  Mary

  Mary’s reign is the most tantalising and controversial period of the sixteenth century. To her defenders down the centuries, many of them Catholic, the reign has been England’s great lost hope: a chance to turn aside from schism and return to the unity of Christendom, a chance cut short by her untimely and childless death. To her more numerous detractors, who have been predominantly Protestant, the reign has appeared a brutal, backward-looking dead end, a doomed project whose most memorable feature was the execution by burning of some three hundred Protestants. The argument cannot be resolved, since it is not really about what happened but about what would have happened had Mary lived longer. The plain fact that her restoration did

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  The Reign of Elizabeth 1

  • Carole Levin(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Mary, Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin and Queen of Scotland, was the granddaugh-ter of Henry VIII’s older sister Margaret, and, by primogeniture, the next heir after Elizabeth. In fact, for some Catholics Mary had a better right to the throne than Elizabeth since the Pope had never recognized the nullity of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, thus making Elizabeth a bastard. Elizabeth might not be an ideal solution from Philip’s point of view, but at least she was not the future daughter-in-law to the French King, his enemy. While Philip failed to convince Mary I that she must force Elizabeth to marry Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, she did at his behest declare war on France in June 1557. The war was a disaster, and the port city of Calais, England’s last holding from the Hundred Years’ War was finally lost. This military defeat only added to the demoralization England was 14 The Reign of Elizabeth I feeling as Mary’s reign drew to a close. On 6 November 1558, the ser-iously ill Mary finally listened to the demands of her Council and for-mally named Elizabeth her heir – something all but the Queen had long assumed. Less than two weeks later, on 17 November Mary died and Elizabeth was now Queen of England. In 1558 the country had a surprisingly smooth transition to Elizabeth, given the crises that had happened only five years earlier when Edward VI had died and Mary’s hostility to Elizabeth as her heir. But though there was a rush of relief over the death of Mary and the endings of the fires at Smithfield that had burned heretics, there was also deep anxiety over whether the reign of a 25-year-old woman would be any more suc-cessful. Many of the English, distressed by Mary’s religious persecution and losing the war with France, were delighted with their new young Queen, though some worried that her reign would be short and chaos would follow.

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  Tudor and Stuart Britain

  1485-1714

  • Roger Lockyer, Peter Gaunt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  She was intelligent, powerful and courageous, actively leading a campaign of Catholicization that was often innovative, energetic and quite successful, it has been argued. More broadly, some go on to claim that in 1553 Catholicism was far stronger, at least at parish level, and Protestantism not as advanced and entrenched as the older interpretations allowed; on those grounds, they suggest that had Mary lived longer or had she had a child and left a Catholic heir her dream of bringing England back to Rome and restoring Catholicism might have succeeded and been cemented. But even some of the revisionists who are generally more sympathetic to Mary find that part of the story unconvincing and concede that, for all the vibrancy of late medieval and early Tudor Catholicism, that time had passed and that by the 1550s it was too late to reverse the Reformation. On that reading her early and childless death, knowing that the throne would pass to her Protestant half-sister – while never formally nominating her, near the end she sent a message to Elizabeth acknowledging that she would succeed – ended a hopeless quest. Early on the morning of 17 November Mary I died at St James’s Palace. On the other side of the river Cardinal Pole was also lying ill in his palace at Lambeth. He survived Mary by only a few hours. The Catholic reaction had ended as abruptly as it began.

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  Know All About British Monarchy

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The English Press

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Mary I's reign Mary I, by Anthonis Mor, 1554 Edward VI died on 6 July 1553, aged 15. His will swept aside the Succession to the Crown Act 1543, excluded both Mary and Elizabeth from the succession, and instead declared as his heir Lady Jane Grey, granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Mary, Duchess of Suffolk. Lady Jane was proclaimed queen by the Privy Council, but her support quickly crumbled, and she was deposed after reigning nine days. Mary rode triumphantly into London, with Elizabeth at her side. The show of solidarity between the sisters did not last long. Mary, the country's first undisputed queen regnant, was determined to crush the Protestant faith in which ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Elizabeth had been educated, and she ordered that everyone attend Mass. This included Elizabeth, who had to outwardly conform. Mary's initial popularity ebbed away when it became known that she planned to marry Prince Philip of Spain, the son of Emperor Charles V. Discontent spread rapidly through the country, and many looked to Elizabeth as a focus for their opposition to Mary's religious policies. In January and February 1554, uprisings broke out (known as Wyatt's rebellion) in several parts of England and Wales, led by Thomas Wyatt. Upon the collapse of the uprising, Elizabeth was brought to court and interrogated. On 18 March, she was imprisoned in the Tower of London, where Lady Jane Grey had been executed on 12 February to deter the rebels. The terrified Elizabeth fervently protested her innocence. Though it is unlikely that she had plotted with the rebels, some of them were known to have approached her. Mary's closest confidant, Charles V's ambassador Simon Renard, argued that her throne would never be safe while Elizabeth lived; and the Chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, worked to have Elizabeth put on trial.

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  Tudor and Stuart Britain

  1485-1714

  • Roger Lockyer, Peter Gaunt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Over the past generation, attempts have been made to revise this view and to present Mary and her policies in a more positive light. She was intelligent, powerful and courageous, actively leading a campaign of Catholicization that was often innovative, energetic and quite successful, it has been argued. More broadly, some go on to claim that in 1553 Catholicism was far stronger, at least at parish level, and Protestantism not as advanced and entrenched as the older interpretations allowed; on those grounds, they suggest that had Mary lived longer or had she had a child and left a Catholic heir her dream of bringing England back to Rome and restoring Catholicism might have succeeded and been cemented. But even some of the revisionists who are generally more sympathetic to Mary find that part of the story unconvincing and concede that, for all the vibrancy of late medieval and early Tudor Catholicism, that time had passed and that by the 1550s it was too late to reverse the Reformation. On that reading her early and childless death, knowing that the throne would pass to her Protestant half-sister – while never formally nominating her, near the end she sent a message to Elizabeth acknowledging that she would succeed – ended a hopeless quest. Early on the morning of 17 November Mary I died at St James’s Palace. On the other side of the river Cardinal Pole was also lying ill in his palace at Lambeth. He survived Mary by only a few hours. The Catholic reaction had ended as abruptly as it began. 162 EDWARD VI AND MARY I

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  Catholic Queen, Protestant Patriarchy

  Mary Queen of Scots and the Politics of Gender and Religion

  • K. Walton(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Wingfield’s description of the marriage of Mary and Philip, though, and her granting him the crown demonstrates how important the patriarchal ordering of the kingdom was, and how women, even queens, were supposed to act in a manner subservient to their husbands. The Parliament also recog- nized the usual manner in which wives were supposed to act towards their husbands by securing through statute that the case of Mary, as queen regnant of England, was different from that of most women. In I Mary 3.1, the Parliament declared that Mary’s power was to be as full and absolute as it had been in any of her progenitors, the kings of the realm, with ‘all regal power, dignity, honour, authority, prerogative, preeminence, and jurisdiction pertain’. The fact that this statute was passed in the second Parliament of Mary’s reign demonstrates that it was directly in response to the nuptials with Philip, and that Parlia- ment wanted to secure the power of the crown for the English queen and not let her inheritance fall into the lap of her foreign husband. 24 Mary Tudor’s marriage to a foreign prince resulted in the early dis- cussions and actions that occurred in response to female rule in the British Isles, but her religion sparked the major debates about women’s rule in the period. Despite the underlying basis of religion as a reason to argue for the exclusion of a woman from the political sphere, the desire not to subject a state to a foreign prince remained an important aspect of the debates. The reign of ‘Bloody Mary’ and the reinstitution 30 Catholic, Queen, Protestant Patriarchy of the Catholic faith in England mortified the English and Scottish exiles in Geneva and across the continent.

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  Queenship in Early Modern Europe

  • Charles Beem(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Over the course of the early modern period, British queenship went through several distinct phases. In the sixteenth century, Tudor queenship was primarily a domestic affair. Out of nine queens, seven were queens consort, and two were queens regnant, with only two foreign-born queens. Of the seven native-born queens, three were the daughters of kings, while the remaining four derived from the aristocracy and gentry classes, making Tudor consortship relatively free of foreign influences, although Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn brought continental understandings to their queenships. This type of domesticated queenship continued under Mary I, whose reign broadened the meaning of English queenship, as she and her successor Elizabeth I were considered within Tudor political theory to have combined the body politic of kingship with the body natural of a woman. Both women were also queens, performing a broad array of queenly functions, surrounded by women in their privy chambers. Nevertheless, they diverged on the question of marriage; while Mary chose her own husband, Elizabeth I effectively ruled simultaneously as king and queen, avoiding both marriage and naming a successor while presiding over “the Elizabethan Age,” as England experienced the full flowering of the European Renaissance. Elizabeth’s decision to remain unmarried was quite influential on later unmarried European queens regnant.

  In contrast, sixteenth-century Scottish queenship was entirely a foreign affair, as was common on the European continent, with Margaret Tudor of England and Mary of Guise of France bringing English and French understandings of queenship to Scotland. Both were widowed as mothers of infant monarchs, but while Margaret chose to remarry, which destabilized her regency, Mary of Guise remained unmarried and entirely fixated on preserving her daughter’s Scottish throne. Mary Queen of Scots went through several phases of queenship, as a minority queen regnant, queen consort of France, and ruling queen of Scotland. Mary’s queenships were as wide ranging as European queenship could get, playing the role of minority queen, consort of France, queen regnant, and later dowager of Scotland. Anne of Denmark brought a particularly Danish approach to queenship that put her at odds with her husband, James VI, particularly over the raising of their children. Nevertheless, in the face of James’s relationships with his male favorites, Anne carved out an autonomous queenship for herself in the breadth of her patronage of the visual arts and architecture. Anne also converted to Catholicism, creating a pattern for her seventeenth-century successors as British queens consort, Henrietta Maria, Catherine of Braganza, and Mary of Modena, all of whom reigned as the Catholic queens of two Protestant kingdoms. Nevertheless, all of Britain’s seventeenth-century Catholic queen consorts were champions in creating forms of material culture and patrons of the visual and musical arts, adding cultural pollinator to the resumé of British queenship.122

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  The Lioness Roared

  The Problems of Female Rule in English History

  • C. Beem(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  57 But an equally powerful source of legitimacy was widespread acceptance of the basic common law right of the daughter to inherit her father’s and her brother’s estate (kingship in the six- teenth century entailed both an office and an estate). Although her staunch Catholicism unnerved her Protestant subjects, most Englishmen nonetheless considered it just that Henry VIII’s eldest daughter succeeded by common law right, “as sister of the late king Edward VI, and daughter unto the noble Henry VIII.” 58 But all these factors simply secured Mary’s recognition as Edward’s heir. As the new monarch was crowned and seated on her throne, the need to alter aspects of her male gendered office became apparent. Mary’s immediate task was to construct a viable public representation of a woman in possession of the regal office. The obvious model Mary chose for this task was English queen- ship. As Susan Amussen has argued, contemporaries perceived the stability of the Tudor kingdom to be based on the interdependent relationship between hierarchy and patriarchy, reflected in the analogy between the state and the family. 59 Mary’s task, then, was to inhabit her role as a female ruler without seriously damaging the structure of male dominant political theory. While Mary conceptu- alized her occupation of the regal office in the recognizable form of an English queen, queenship before her accession had been a status conferred by marriage to a king. In contrast, Mary was a sole queen who, in the first year of her reign, lacked a king, the means by which queenly power had previously been legitimized. The anomaly of a sole queen became apparent at Mary’s coronation. 60 Prior to her accession, nearly all postconquest English Mary I and the Gendering of Regal Power 77 queens consort had been crowned in ceremonies usually conducted separately from their husbands’.

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  Tudor Lives

  Success and Failure of an Age

  • Michael Foss(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Michael O'Mara

    (Publisher)

  Spoiled, pampered and the darling of all eyes from his earliest years, Henry had no doubts about the righteousness of his cause, and the opposition he now met infuriated him. Behind him, he heard the persuasive, nagging tones of Anne Boleyn and her family, daring him to complete the business he had begun, for they knew that their fates were bound up in this cause. He resolved that he would have his way. If the Emperor could play politics with the Pope, he too could bring pressure to bear on the Pope and gain his point by any means. The obstinacy and outrage of his wife also offended him and the two fell into miserable bickering which only drove Henry to the solace of Anne’s arms. The policy of Anne was to keep the royal family divided, and under her influence Mary was only allowed short and infrequent visits to her mother. Mary was going through puberty, and suffering with it; already she was showing those symptoms which later caused the French ambassador to ask anxiously if she were capable of bearing children. She was ill, in low spirits, and the doctor bled her too often. She begged to be with her parents, but Henry refused. In the summer of 1531, greatly angered by a summons to appear in Rome, he cut himself off from his obstinate family. Mary was sent to Richmond and Catherine to an insignificant manor called the More. King and Queen never met again. In the five years left to her Catherine was progressively moved to quieter, gloomier, more constricted lodgings, ending finally in one room at Kimbolton Castle, watched at every moment and allowed out for nothing except the Mass. She had with her one or two elderly, unpaid servants. She did her needlework, prayed, smuggled a few letters to her daughter and her friends. She would not give up her claim to be Queen of England. In January 1536 she died; there was some suspicion of poisoning, but death, to one of her faith, could only be a relief from a wretched and tedious existence.

  Though Henry had put Catherine away, the influence of the mother on the daughter could not be so easily set aside. The women were too much alike; both were straightforward and courageous, with simple, clear principles undisturbed by subtleties. In a world of shifting policies they inevitably appeared obstinate and bent on self-destruction. At first, Mary was not harassed. Henry’s early concern was to break Catherine and the Pope to his will. From 1529 onwards, with the help of a frightened and subservient Parliament, he began to attack the papal rights and privileges in England. In this fortuitous way he began the Reformation in England, though he himself still failed to get what he wanted from the Pope. In 1533 events forced Henry’s hand. Anne was pregnant and if the Pope would not annul the marriage with Catherine he must arrange a divorce by his own hand. In April he was secretly married to Anne; in May the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, pronounced the marriage to Catherine invalid; and on 1st June Anne was crowned to no applause from a sullen populace. On 7th September the baby Elizabeth was born and the King now had the embarrassment of two daughters.

  The desperate logic of Henry’s action now made his elder daughter illegitimate in his own eyes. The privileges that Mary had formerly enjoyed were to be transferred to Elizabeth; the household of the elder daughter was dissolved and Mary sent to stay with her baby half-sister at Hatfield. Mary understood the implication of the move, but could not believe that her father had ordered it and earned ‘the King’s high displeasure’ for questioning it. Henry now had both Catherine and Mary opposed to his will, for neither would renounce the title and position they thought were theirs by right; and Henry with his usual heartlessness began to play the two women against each other, threatening Catherine especially that her daughter would be sent abroad, forced into a nunnery, or into a base marriage unless both did what the King wanted. But Catherine, who was beyond fear herself, knew exactly the way to steady Mary’s resolution. ‘Daughter,’ she wrote in the winter of 1533, ‘I have heard such tidings that I do perceive, if it is true, the time is come that God Almighty will prove you; and I am very glad of it, for I trust He doth handle you with a very good love.’ She sent Mary a Life of Christ and the Epistles

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  SCOTLAND EB

  • Magnus Magnusson(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • HarperCollins

    (Publisher)

  In November of that year (1558) Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne of England. In Catholic eyes she was illegitimate – Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon had never been recognised by the Catholic Church, so his marriage to Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, had been void. Consequently, Mary Queen of Scots, as a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, was regarded as the rightful heir to the English throne. Henri II of France reflected this by repeating his claim that his new daughter-in-law was the rightful Queen of England as well – which did little to endear Mary to her cousin Elizabeth.

  In July 1559 the political position changed again – drastically: Henri II died from wounds he sustained while jousting at a tournament, and François became King of France as François II, with the sixteen-year-old Mary as his queen-consort. The coronation took place in Rheims Cathedral. Their reign was to last barely seventeen months. Late in 1560 the sickly François II – le Petit Roi, as his subjects called him – contracted an infection in his left ear. The infection (apparently a mastoid abscess) spread to his brain, and after much suffering he died on 5 December 1560. Mary was heartbroken, for she had been devoted to her little husband and childhood companion.

  The death of François II brought an end to the power which the house of Guise had exercised through Mary as queen-consort. François was succeeded by his ten-year-old brother, as Charles IX; his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, seized the opportunity to oust the Guise family from power and had herself appointed regent.

  At once, envoys of various suitors for Mary’s hand were on their way to see her: the King of Sweden, the Archduke Charles of Austria, the third Earl of Arran (former Master of Hamilton, who had been elevated to his father’s title) and Don Carlos, the heir to the Spanish throne, with Mary’s brother-in-law Charles IX of France as a longer shot. But Catherine de’ Medici was resolute against either a Spanish or a French marriage.

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  Danger to Elizabeth

  • Alison Plowden(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ONE

  A wise and religious Queen

  ‘We have a wise and religious Queen’ John Jewel, London, 22 May 1559

  W HEN Elizabeth Tudor succeeded to her sister’s throne in November 1558 she was the same age as Mary Stuart at the time of her flight into England, but Elizabeth at twenty-five was still very much of an unknown quantity. This was partly due to the fact that she had spent most of the previous five years either in prison or living in rural retirement under some form of surveillance, and partly to the habits of discretion and dissimulation acquired during her precarious adolescence, However, as it became obvious that the ailing, unhappy Mary Tudor would leave no other heir, international curiosity about the young Elizabeth had intensified, and in 1557 the Venetian ambassador included a detailed description of the Princess in his report on his tour of duty in England. Her face, wrote Giovanni Michiel, was comely rather than handsome, but she was tall, well-formed and with a good skin, although sallow. She had fine eyes and very beautiful hands which she took care to display.

  Even in her early twenties, the pale, sharp-featured, red-haired Elizabeth had never been able to compete with her Scottish cousin’s fabled beauty, but she possessed other attributes which were to prove of greater value in the long-drawn-out battle between them. As early as 1557, Michiel could comment respectfully on the excellence of her mind and on the wonderful intellect and understanding she had shown when facing danger and suspicion. She was proud, too, and haughty, he declared, in spite of the fact that her birth was regarded as illegitimate by most of Christian Europe and that her mother, the great-granddaughter of a London mercer, had once been commonly referred to as that goggle-eyed whore Nan Bullen. Nevertheless, Elizabeth it seemed did not regard herself as being of inferior degree to her half-sister the Queen, whose mother had been a Spanish princess of irreproachable lineage and virtue. ‘She prides herself on her father and glories in him’, wrote Michiel, adding that her resemblance to Henry VIII was remarked by everybody.

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