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Mary Tudor ruled as Queen of England and Ireland from 1553–1558, following her half-brother Edward VI and her father Henry VIII, and preceding her half-sister Queen Elizabeth I. She is most famous for returning England to Catholicism during her reign, which earned her the derisive nickname of Bloody Mary due to her government’s persecution of Protestants.
Mary Tudor was born in 1516 to King Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. Mary was the only child of Henry VIII and Katherine to survive past infancy. Mary lived a charmed life as a princess through most of her teens and was betrothed twice to different suitors, though both engagements fell through.
Without a male heir to the throne in the early 1530s and desperate to keep his family’s claim to the royal line, Henry VIII sought to annul his marriage to Katherine on the grounds of incest, as Katherine had been married to King Henry’s older brother Arthur for five months. However, Katherine claimed that she and Arthur had never consummated their marriage, meaning that she was a virgin bride to Henry VIII. She claimed that this, combined with the fact that their marriage had been granted in a dispensation from the Pope, made the marriage religiously sound. Unable to convince the Pope to annul the marriage, King Henry secretly married his second wife, Anne Boleyn, and began the English Reformation when he separated England from the Catholic Church. In 1533, Thomas Cranmer, the new Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, decreed Katherine and Henry’s marriage invalid due to the charges of incest and declared Anne Boleyn the new Queen of England. Henry was now the Supreme Head of the Church of England. This made Mary illegitimate.
Now legally declared a bastard child, Mary was cast out of the royal line and retitled First Lady Mary. Disgraced and even forced to spend two years as a lady-in-waiting to her younger half-sister Elizabeth, Mary took after her Spanish mother and dangerously remained a staunch Catholic. Though forced to sign a legal document recognizing her father as the head of the Church of England and herself as an illegitimate child, Mary continued to practice traditional Catholicism in secret.
Through Henry VIII’s third and fourth marriages, Mary remained in to the royal line, but unlikely to inherit it. Following Henry’s death in 1547, Mary’s half-brother, Edward VI, took the throne at only nine years of age. Due to the Third Succession Act created by Henry VIII to allow any firstborn children to reign, Mary became next in line for the crown. When King Edward became deathly ill in 1552, his council predicted that Mary would try to restore England back to the Church of Rome and tried to bar her from her right to the throne. However, following Edward’s death in 1553, Mary marched to London and claimed her rightful place as ruler.
Taking the throne in 1553, Mary was still unmarried at the age of 37. In 1554, at age 38, she quickly married Philip of Spain, a strong political move as Spain was the most powerful Catholic state in Europe. The marriage turned out to be mostly political, as Philip spent most of his time abroad, leaving Mary alone and, like her father, childless. Mary endured many false or
During these five years as queen, Mary began a brutal persecution of active English Protestants that eventually earned her the nickname Bloody Mary. She stripped Protestant bishops of their office and burned 284 Protestant activists at the stake. While this violence was meant to silence heresy, purify the heretics in the name of God, and return the people of England to the Catholic Church, many feel that Mary’s intentions may not have been entirely altruistic. One of the Protestants burned at the stake was Thomas Cranmer, the same bishop who validated Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn’s marriage. Though Cranmer had little voice in theological discussion during her reign, Mary wanted him burned publicly. This event is one of a few that scholars cite when trying to understand Mary’s motivations towards the end of her life.
When Mary died in 1558, Elizabeth assumed the throne, and Mary’s efforts to restore England to Catholicism were lost. Her reign is characterized as an important aspect of the Counter-Reformation, the efforts to return people to the Church of Rome following the rapid changes of the Protestant Reformation.