Mary I

Mary I (1516–58), queen of England (1553–8). Few lives can have been sadder nor few reigns more disastrous than that of Mary Tudor. From birth she was a pawn in the diplomatic game and in 1518, at the age of 2, was betrothed to the dauphin of France. But two years later there was a marriage treaty with the Emperor Charles V and by 1523 rumours that she was to marry James V of Scotland. By this time the shadow of her father's possible divorce was falling across her.

The effect of the annulment of her parents' marriage in 1533 was shattering. In the hard dynastic world of 16th‐cent. Europe, her matrimonial prospects plummeted. Worse followed. The execution of Anne Boleyn and her father's remarriage to Jane Seymour brought no respite, since the king continued to demand that she acknowledge that her mother's marriage had been invalid. But in June 1537, with the assistance of Thomas Cromwell, she submitted, was granted her own household again, and restored to precarious favour. The birth of a half‐brother Edward in October 1537 appeared to remove any chance that she would ever be queen.

The remaining years of Henry's life were quieter for Mary and she was on good terms with his last wife, Catherine Parr. In 1543 a statute restored Mary to the succession, after Prince Edward and any children Catherine Parr might have. From 1547 Edward VI's reign brought new trials. The king's two chief advisers, Somerset and Northumberland, promoted protestant doctrines and the young king grew up an eager reformer. When the Act of Uniformity of 1549 forbade the use of the mass, Mary continued to hear it and was warned. In March 1551 Edward summoned her before the council, declared that he ‘could not bear it’, and was told in reply that ‘her soul was God's and her faith she would not change’. Her release from this stalemate came with the first signs of the illness that killed Edward on 6 July 1553.

Even then, Mary's succession was by no means certain. Edward had declared Lady Jane Grey his heir and on 9 July she was proclaimed queen. Mary had already fled to Kenninghall in East Anglia and on 10 July proclaimed herself queen. Northumberland's support collapsed within days and on 7 August Mary entered London to begin her reign. She was 37. She had triumphed against all odds and she attributed it to her steadfastness in her faith and to the help she had received from her co‐religionists in Europe.

Mary had, as the imperial ambassador Renard pointed out, no experience of government at all. She turned at once to Renard for advice. The twin objectives of her reign were to restore the catholic faith and to negotiate a marriage which would hold out some hope that the succession would not pass to her half‐sister the Princess Elizabeth.

Healing the breach with Rome was not simple. The mass could be celebrated and certain protestant bishops were soon suspended. But many of the ecclesiastical changes had been introduced by statute and would require a parliament to abrogate them. Mary's first Parliament in the autumn of 1553 made a beginning by declaring her mother's marriage legal and by repealing most of Edward VI's religious legislation. But the gentry and aristocracy showed little enthusiasm for disgorging the monastic estates they had acquired.

In view of her age and the need for an heir, marriage had to be arranged at once. When the Emperor Charles V suggested his son Philip, who had just become a widower, Mary was attracted by the Spanish connection and agreed readily. Wyatt's rising against the Spanish marriage—part of a wider conspiracy which misfired—threatened for a moment, but Mary stood firm and it collapsed. At first the marriage seemed to have fulfilled its main purpose. In 1554 Mary announced herself pregnant. In the summer of 1555 an ornate cradle was prepared and rockers appointed. But no child arrived and in August 1555 Philip left for urgent business in the Low Countries.

Meanwhile the work of reconciliation to Rome went on. It was a joyful day for Mary in November 1554 when Pole returned at last from the continent and pronounced absolution from the sin of schism, and in March 1556 he succeeded Cranmer as archbishop of Canterbury. The supreme headship of the church was revoked by Parliament in December 1554 and acknowledgement made of the authority of the pope. Mary's instincts at first had been for patience towards protestants. But as opposition developed, her attitude stiffened. A first victim, John Rogers, a London preacher, went to the stake at Smithfield in February 1555, and some 300 others followed. Moderate catholics were dismayed: ‘haste in religious matters’, wrote Renard to Philip, ‘ought to be avoided. Cruel punishments are not the best way.’

Though the articles of marriage forbade England going to war to assist Spain, that was the intention, and in June 1557 Mary declared war on France. In January 1558 the French seized the initiative and besieged Calais. The great outpost of empire, English for more than 200 years, surrendered within a week.

There was little comfort in the short time remaining to Mary. Philip's second and last visit in 1557 lasted a bare three months. But in January 1558 Philip was told by Mary that she was once more pregnant and the arrival of the child imminent. This time she deceived nobody but herself. By the summer she was obviously ill and more and more people were paying their respects to Elizabeth. In October Mary added a sad codicil to her will, ‘as I then thought myself to be with child’. She died on 17 November 1558, twelve hours before Cardinal Pole.

Mary's failure was total and she died with no earthly hope. Modern historians have pointed to the constructive achievements of her reign—reform of the currency, attention to the navy, reorganization of the customs. Mary herself would have counted them as nothing against the collapse of her grand design. The burnings discredited the church she loved, sowed a harvest of hatred, and dogged the catholic cause for centuries to come. Mary did more than anyone else to make England a protestant nation.