Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [1]
This book seeks to challenge such popular prejudice and acceptance of Mary as one of the most reviled women in English history; to “rebrand” her less as the “grotesque charicature” that is “Bloody Mary” and more as the groundbreaking first crowned queen of England. In the last ten years or so the gap between academic writing and popular understanding has grown ever wider, and this has spurred my desire to write. Recent scholarship has questioned twentieth-century verdicts of Mary’s reign as one of “sterility” and lack of achievements and of Mary as a “profoundly conventional woman.”2 A number of important revisions can now be made to the pervasive popular view.
Mary’s relationship with her mother is key, and Katherine must be understood not as a weak, rejected wife but as a strong, highly accomplished, and defiant woman who withstood the attempts of her husband, Henry VIII, to browbeat her into submission and was determined to defend the legitimacy of her marriage and of her daughter’s birth. As one of the most prolific Tudor historians of the twentieth century argued, Mary “had ever been her mother’s daughter rather than her father’s, devoid of political skill, unable to compromise, set only on the wholesale reversal of a generation’s history.”3 Yet Katherine of Aragon can be understood as a figure of immense courage from whom Mary could learn much. Katherine oversaw Mary’s early education and highly formative upbringing, which was not a prelude to inevitable failure but an apprenticeship for rule. Mary’s Spanish heritage informed her queenship but in a far more positive way than is popularly acknowledged.
Mary’s very accession was against the odds and is a too commonly overlooked achievement the scale of which is rarely acknowledged. It was, as one contemporary chronicler described, an act of “Herculean daring” that rarely finds its way into the popular annals. Upon becoming queen, Mary entered a man’s world and had to change the nature of politics—her decisions as to how she would rule would become precedents for the future. She gained the throne, maintained her rule, preserved the line of Tudor succession, and set many important precedents for her sister, Elizabeth. Less a victim of the men around her but politically accomplished and at the center of politics, Mary was a woman who in many ways was able to overcome the handicap of her sex. For good or ill, Mary proved to be very much her own woman and a not entirely unsuccessful one at that.
So the Mary of this book is an unfamiliar queen, and hers is an incredibly thrilling and inspirational story. She broke tradition, she challenged precedent; she was a political pioneer who redefined the English monarchy.
INTRODUCTION
RESURRECTION
IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY, AMID THE CHAOTIC GRANDEUR OF ROYAL tombs, lies the marble effigy of a resplendent Tudor queen. It is a striking, iconic image of Elizabeth I, her successes inscribed for “eternal memory” in panegyric Latin verses. Each week hundreds of people file through the north aisle of the Chapel of Henry VII, past this monument dedicated to the great “Gloriana.” Many perhaps fail to notice the Latin inscription on the base of this towering edifice:
Regno consortes et urna, hic obdormimus Elizabetha et Maria sorores, in spe resurrectionis. [Partners both in throne and grave, here rest we two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, in the hope of one resurrection.]
Elizabeth does not lie alone; she inhabits her elder sister’s tomb.
Queen Mary I was buried there on December 14, 1558, with only stones from demolished altars marking the spot where she was laid to rest. When Elizabeth died in 1603, her body was placed in the central vault of the chapel alongside the remains of her grandparents Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. But in 1606, James I ordered that the dead queen be moved.