Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [153]
Mary quickly became a figure of opprobrium, as Protestants returning from exile sought to ingratiate themselves with the new regime. In The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, written on the eve of Mary’s death, John Knox condemned her as a “horrible monster Jezebel” and described how during her reign Englishmen had been “compelled to bow their necks under the yoke of Satan, and of his proud ministers, pestilent papists and proud Spaniards.”4 Knox argued that women were incapable of effective rule as they were by nature “weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish: and experience hath declared them to be inconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment.”5 Female rule was “the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.” Yet Knox quickly had to refine his views to accommodate the accession of a Protestant queen.6
In his Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes, John Foxe, the most infamous returning exile, celebrated the passing of Mary’s reign. “We shall never find any reign of any Prince in this land or any other,” he wrote, “which ever shows in it (for the proportion of time) so many great arguments of God’s wrath and displeasure.” His detailed account of the lives of the Protestant martyrs graphically portrayed “the horrible and bloody time of Queen Mary.”7
Coinciding with the rise of the Accession Day festivities was the promulgation of an order that a copy of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments be installed in every “cathedral church.”8 By 1600, Catholicism was firmly understood to be an “un-English” creed and Protestantism an entrenched part of England’s national identity.
Foxe’s account would shape the popular narrative of Mary’s reign for the next four hundred and fifty years. Generations of schoolchildren would grow up knowing the first queen of England only as “Bloody Mary,” a Catholic tyrant who sent nearly three hundred Protestants to their deaths, a point made satirically in W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s 1930s parody 1066 and All That.9 Mary’s presence in a recent survey of the most evil men and women in history is testament to Foxe’s enduring legacy.10
But there is, of course, a different Mary: a woman marked by suffering, devout in her faith and exceptional in her courage. From a childhood in which she was adored and feted and then violently rejected, a fighter was born. Her resolve almost cost her her life as her father, and then her brother, sought to subjugate her to their wills. Yet Mary maintained her faith and self-belief. Despite repeated attempts to deprive her of her life and right to the throne, the warrior princess turned victor and became the warrior queen.
The boldness and scale of her achievement are often overlooked. The campaign that Mary led in the summer of 1553 would prove to be the only successful revolt against central government in sixteenth-century England. She, like her grandfather Henry VII and grandmother Isabella of Castile, had to fight for her throne. In the moment of crisis she proved decisive, courageous, and “Herculean”—and won the support of the English people as the legitimate Tudor heir.
Mary was a conscientious, hardworking queen who was determined to be closely involved in government business and policy making. She would rise “at daybreak when, after saying her prayers and hearing mass in private,” she would “transact business incessantly until after midnight.”11 As rebels threatened