England’s first female monarch, Mary I (1516-1558) ruled for just five years. The only surviving child of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Mary took the throne after the brief reign of her half-brother, Edward VI. She sought to return England to the Catholic Church and stirred rebellions by marrying a Spanish Habsburg prince. But she is most remembered for burning nearly 300 English Protestants at the stake for heresy, which earned her the nickname “Bloody Mary.”
Mary I: Early Life
Mary Tudor was born on February 16, 1516. She was the fifth child of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon but the only one to survive past infancy. Educated by an English tutor with written instructions from the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, she excelled in Latin and, like her father, was an adept musician.
Did you know? Mary I of England and her half-sister Elizabeth I, the first and second queens to rule England, are buried in the same tomb in London's Westminster Abbey.
At age 6 she was betrothed to Charles V, the king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. Charles broke off the engagement after three years but remained a lifelong ally. Henry desperately wanted a son as heir and sought permission from the papacy to end his marriage. When Pope Clement VII refused to grant the annulment, Henry declared himself exempt from papal authority, asserting that England’s king should be the sole head of its church.
Mary I: The Princess Made Illegitimate
In 1533 Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn, who bore him a daughter, the future Elizabeth I. Mary was demoted from her own household and forced to take up residence with her infant half-sister. In 1536 Catherine of Aragon died at her castle in Cambridgeshire, Anne Boleyn was accused of treason and executed, and Mary was forced to deny the pope’s authority and her own legitimacy.
Henry married four more times before his death in 1547. He got his longed-for male heir in the future Edward VI, son of his third wife, Jane Seymour. Upon Henry’s death, the official order of succession was Edward, followed by Mary and then Elizabeth.
Mary I: Path to the Throne
Edward VI remained a minor for his entire six-year reign. The lords of Somerset and of Northumberland served as his regents, working to expand his father’s ecclesiastical changes. They also altered the order of succession to favor the Protestants, placing Henry VIII’s niece Lady Jane Gray next in line to the throne. When Edward died in 1553, however, Mary had her own succession strategy planned: Proclamations were printed and a military force assembled in her Norfolk estates. Pushed by Edward’s regents, the Privy Council made Jane queen but reversed course nine days later in the face of Mary’s popular support.
Mary I: Reign as Queen
After taking the throne, Mary quickly reinstated her parents’ marriage and executed Northumberland for his role in the Jane Gray affair. Her initial ruling council was a mix of Protestants and Catholics, but as her reign progressed she grew more and more fervent in her desire to restore English Catholicism.
In 1554 she announced her intention to marry Prince Philip of Spain, the son of Charles V. It was an unpopular choice for Protestants, who feared the permanent loss of Henry’s reforms, and for those who suspected a Spanish king would herald a continental takeover of England. Nevertheless, Mary moved forward with her plan, persuading Parliament to assent after Charles consented to leave Mary in full control and to keep the throne in English hands if the union produced no heirs.
Mary’s marriage to Philip was nearly as troubled as her father’s unions. Twice she was declared pregnant and went into seclusion, but no child was born. Philip found her unattractive and spent most of his time in Europe.
Mary I: The Protestant Martyrs
Mary soon moved from simply reversing her father’s and Edward’s anti-Catholic policies to actively persecuting Protestants. In 1555 she revived England’s heresy laws and began burning offenders at the stake, starting with her father’s longtime advisor Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury. Almost 300 convicted heretics, mostly common citizens, were burned. Dozens more died in prison, and some 800 fled to Protestant strongholds in Germany and Geneva, from whence they would later import the Calvinist tenants of English Puritanism.
The events of Mary’s reign—including attempts at currency reform, expanded international trade and a brief war with France that lost England its last French enclave at Calais—were overshadowed by the memory of the so-called Marian Persecutions. After her death in 1558, the country quickly rallied behind Henry VIII’s second daughter and England’s second reigning queen, Elizabeth I.
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Mary Tudor was the only child of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon to survive into adulthood. Mary took the throne in 1553, reigning as the first queen regnant of England and Ireland. Seeking to return England to the Catholic Church, she persecuted hundreds of Protestants and earned the moniker "Bloody Mary." She died at St. James Palace in London on November 17, 1558.
Mary Tudor was born on February 18, 1516, at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, England. She was the only child of King Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, to survive through childhood. She was baptized as a Catholic shortly after her birth. Tutored by her mother and scholars, she excelled in music and language. In 1525, Henry named her Princess of Wales and sent his daughter to live on the Welsh border, while he continuously tried to negotiate a marriage for her.
Frustrated by the lack of a male heir, in 1533 Henry declared his marriage to Catherine null claiming that because he had married his deceased brother’s wife, the marriage was incestuous. He broke relations with the Catholic Church, established the Church of England, and married one of Catherine’s maids of honor, Anne Boleyn. After Boleyn gave birth to Elizabeth, she feared Mary would pose a challenge to the succession to the throne and successfully pressed for an act of Parliament to declare Mary illegitimate. This placed the princess outside the succession to the throne and forced her to be the lady-in-waiting to her half-sister, Elizabeth.
Henry had the scheming Boleyn beheaded in 1536 for treason and married his third wife, Jane Seymour, who finally gave him a son, Edward. Seymour insisted that the king make amends with his daughters, but he would only do so if Mary acknowledged him as head of the Church of England and admit the illegality of his marriage to her mother, Catherine. Under duress, she agreed and although Mary did re-enter the royal court, her religious beliefs made her a lightning rod for conflict. This tension continued through the short reign of Mary's half-brother, Edward VI, who died in 1553 at the age of 15.
After Edward's death, Mary challenged and successfully deposed the new queen, Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry’s younger sister, who was placed on the throne in a secret agreement by Edward and his advisors. Mary took the throne as the first queen regnant and reinstated her parents’ marriage. At first, she acknowledged the religious dualism of her country, but she desperately wanted to convert England back to Catholicism.
Spanish Marriage and Death
Mary was 37 at the time of her accession. She knew that if she remained childless, the throne would pass to her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth. She needed a Catholic heir to avoid the reversal of her reforms. To accomplish this goal, she arranged to marry Philip II of Spain.
The public response to Mary's marriage was extremely unpopular, but she pressed on repealing many of Henry VIII's religious edicts and replacing them with her own, which included a strict heresy law. The enforcement of this law resulted in the burning of over 300 Protestants as heretics. Mary's religious persecutions made her extremely unpopular and earned her the nickname "Bloody Mary."
The marriage to the Spanish king produced no children and Philip, bored with his wife, spent little time in England and provided no part of his vast New World trade network to the British crown. Meanwhile, the alliance with Spain dragged England into a military conflict with France, and cost it the area of Calais, the last toehold of England’s continental possessions.
Childless and grief-stricken by 1558, Mary had endured several false pregnancies and was suffering from what may have been uterine or ovarian cancer. She died at St. James Palace in London, on November 17, 1558, and was interred at Westminster Abbey. Her half-sister succeeded her on the throne as Elizabeth I in 1559. Upon Elizabeth's death in 1603, she was buried alongside Mary.
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