Mary I of England

1516 – 1558 · Generation X · Queen of England (r. 1553–1558)

Mary I, the first queen to rule England in her own right, was born on 18 February 1516 at the palace of Placentia in Greenwich, the only child of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon to survive infancy. She was a clever, well-taught girl who had a fine singing voice and a gift for languages, and for much of her childhood she served her father as a diplomatic bargaining chip. Before she was ten she had been promised to the infant French dauphin and then to her cousin the emperor Charles V, and neither match came to anything. In 1525 Henry sent her to Ludlow to hold court on the Welsh border, where she was widely called Princess of Wales although she was never formally invested with the title.

Her world fell apart when Henry set out to end his marriage. After Archbishop Cranmer declared the union with Catherine void in 1533, Mary was branded illegitimate, stripped of her rank and made to serve in the household of her infant half-sister Elizabeth. She was kept from her mother and never saw her again, though the two managed to write in secret. Mary refused for years to accept that her parents’ marriage had been unlawful or that her father headed the English Church. Only after Anne Boleyn’s fall in 1536, and under heavy pressure, did she sign a submission, a surrender she came to regret. Jane Seymour helped to reconcile father and daughter, and Mary stood godmother to Jane’s son Edward. An Act of Succession passed in 1544 put her back in line for the throne, behind Edward, while leaving her technically illegitimate.

Under Edward VI she held stubbornly to the Latin Mass in her own household while the regime made Protestant worship compulsory. As Edward lay dying in 1553 he named Lady Jane Grey, a great-niece of Henry VIII, as heir, and on 10 July the Duke of Northumberland had Jane proclaimed. Mary moved faster than her opponents expected. She withdrew into East Anglia and gathered an armed following at Framlingham Castle in Suffolk, and within days support for Jane fell away. Jane was deposed on 19 July, and on 3 August Mary rode into London in triumph. She was crowned on 1 October 1553.

Mary wanted a husband and a Catholic heir, which would also keep the Protestant Elizabeth from the throne. Against the advice of Parliament and of her chancellor Stephen Gardiner she chose Philip of Spain, son of Charles V and eleven years her junior. The match provoked Sir Thomas Wyatt’s rising in Kent early in 1554. Mary rallied London with a speech at the Guildhall, the city shut its gates against Wyatt and the rising collapsed. In the aftermath Wyatt, Lady Jane Grey and her husband were all executed. The wedding took place at Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554, two days after the couple first met. A marriage act styled Philip king for Mary’s lifetime but barred him from acting without her consent or appointing foreigners to English offices.

She then set about undoing the Reformation. Her first Parliament declared her parents’ marriage valid and swept away Edward’s religious laws, and by the end of 1554 England was back under papal authority, with Cardinal Reginald Pole in the country as papal legate. The price was a concession to the landowners who had bought up monastic estates, who were allowed to keep them. The old heresy laws came back in January 1555, and the first Protestants went to the fire that February. By the end of the reign some 280 to 300 people had been burned, among them the bishops Ridley and Latimer and Archbishop Cranmer, whom Mary refused to spare even after he recanted. Most of the victims were ordinary men and women, and the burnings turned many English people against her and against Spain. They earned her the name “Bloody Mary.”

Her private hopes failed as publicly as her policy. In 1554–55 she showed the signs of pregnancy for months, but no child came, and Philip left for the Netherlands soon afterwards. When Charles V abdicated in January 1556 he became king of Spain, making Mary queen of Spain as well. Philip drew England into his war with France, and in January 1558 the French took Calais, the last English foothold on the Continent. Ill for much of that year, possibly with cancer, Mary died at St James’s Palace on 17 November 1558, aged 42, and Pole died the same day. Elizabeth succeeded her. Mary was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the tomb she later came to share with her sister.

Place in the family

• Mary I of England married Philip II of Spain, a son of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

Images

• Portrait miniature of the young Mary, attributed to Lucas Horenbout and painted in the early 1520s, the years of her betrothal to Charles V. (Attributed to Lucas Horenbout, public domain)
• Mary at about twenty-eight, painted in 1544 by the artist known as Master John, the year she was restored to the succession. (Master John, public domain)
• The tomb in Westminster Abbey that Mary shares with her half-sister Elizabeth I. (AFineClaret, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Read more on Wikipedia

Partners

• Married Philip II of Spain (1527 – 1598) in 1554

Life

• 1516 — Born
• 1554 — Married Philip
• 1558 — Died

Sources

1. Mary I of England · Wikipedia
2. Mary I (queen of England) · Encyclopaedia Britannica
3. Mary I (r. 1553–1558) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)