Daughter of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and queen of England from 1553 to 1558. Her fierce persecutions of evangelical Christians in her attempt to restore England to the Catholic Church earned her the monker 'Bloody Mary.'
Like her mother, Mary was highly intelligent and learned, but she had to experience a most painful childhood. Her father was obsessed with a male heir, and his attempts to annul his marriage to her mother must have been excruciating for her especially when she was forced, first, to separate from her mother, and then, at age 21, to be forced to sign the document renouncing her father's marriage to her mother as illegitimate and bastardising herself in the process. It was little wonder that she was constantly sick in her younger days.
More painful still must have been the death of her mother, whose funeral she was barred from attending, accompanied by the threat from Anne Boleyn, her father's new wife, "If I have a son, as I hope shortly, I know what will happen to her." She wanted to flee back to her mother's people but was counseled to stay by the imperial ambassador, with the hope of one day bringing change to the people of England who so loved her mother and hated Anne Boleyn.
Unobtrusively, she navigated the religious storm sweeping over her as the Reformation and anti-Rome sentiments swept over England, until her step-brother Edward VI, who reigned from 1547, died 6 July 1553. Though there was an attempt to make Jane Grey successor to the throne, Mary prevailed.
Once on the throne, she reversed almost every religious reform her step-brother Edward had enacted and, with the return of Cardinal Reginald Pole after 25 years in exile, re-instated the Church of England back into the fold of Rome. In 1554 she married her cousin Philip II of Spain, hoping that a son would secure the kingdom in the Roman Catholic faith. With her marriage came greater confidence to act. The Mass was soon in-instituted in the churches. Then came the campaign to root out the heretics from the land, a campaign that eventually saw more than 300 men and women—including bishops Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley—burned at the stake, and earned her the sobriquet 'Bloody Mary.'
Though she thought she was pregnant at one time, and several doctors confirmed it, she never did have an heir. Bored with life in England Philip left for Spain; his father Charles V had decided to abdicate. He stayed away from, taking up residence in Brussels taking up the rule of Spanish-controlled Netherlands and satisfying his appetite for easy courtesans, until 1557 when he returned asking his wife for help in his war against the French. Thing went well at first, then disaster struck. In the first week of 1558 the French captured Calais, "the brightest jewel in the English crown," a city that the English has held for the last two centuries. The calamity made her ill again, and it fueled the anger of her Reformation-leading enemies. John Knox issued a pamphlet at about this time entitled The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, in which he asserts, "I fear not to say that the day of vengeance which shall apprehend that horrible monster Jezebel of England, and such as maintain her monstrous cruelty, is already appointed in the council of the eternal." The queen did not recover from her illness, and passed away while at Mass on the morning of 17 November 1558. She was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth.
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