Queen Mary Tudor Mary Tudor Author Lauren Johnson Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Intellectual copyright in this entry is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Lauren Johnson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Illegitimacy Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Lauren Johnson Lauren Johnson

Lauren Johnson was an Honors student at Utah Valley University.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Overview

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.

Early Life

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.

Henry’s Divorce

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.

Mary in Disgrace

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.

Mary As Heir

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.

Mary as Queen

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 phantom pregnancies, with documented abdominal swellings which are now speculated to have been the result of undiagnosed uterine or ovarian cancer.

Bloody Mary

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.

Key Print Sources Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor. The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 97, no. 4, 2011, pp. 798–800. Incorvia, Niki. A Threshold of Genocide: Microgenocide in Mary Tudor’s Revenge on Protestant England and Catherine de Medici’s Massacre of the Huguenots. International Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Society, vol. 5, no. 3, Sept. 2015, pp. 53–60. Weikel, Ann. Mary I (1516–1558), Queen of England and Ireland. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Whitelock, Anna. Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen. Random House, 2009.
Key Print Sources Best, Michael. Mary Tudor. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/history/henry%20VIII/mary.html. Accessed 12 Sep. 2018. Biography.com Editors. Mary Tudor. Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 17 Oct. 2017, https://www.biography.com/royalty/mary-tudor. Accessed 14 Sep. 2018. Hanson, Marilee. Queen Mary I: Facts, Information, Biography & Portraits. January 31, 2015. https://englishhistory.net/tudor/monarchs/queen-mary-1. Accessed 12 Sep. 2018. Mary I. Tudor History, 6 Feb. 2012. https://tudorhistory.org/mary/. Accessed 14 Jun. 2023.