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The Myth of ‘Bloody Maryʼ

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MEILAN SOLLY

e first woman to rule England in her own right didn’t simply inherit the
throne. She seized it with unprecedented ambition from those who sought
to thwart her.

Historian Sarah Gristwood describes the ascension of Mary I as a

“staggeringly bold” course of action undertaken with little chance of success.
Still, she rode into London on August , , to widespread acclaim. In
the words of one contemporary chronicler, “It was said that no one could
remember there ever having been public rejoicing such as this.”

Centuries later, however, the Tudor queen is remembered as one of the most
reviled figures in English history: “Bloody Mary.” is is a story of how a
heroic underdog became a monarch who was then mythologized as a violent
despot—despite being no bloodier than her father, Henry VIII, or other
English monarchs. It’s a tale of sexism, shifting national identity and good
old-fashioned propaganda, all of which coalesced to create the image of an
unchecked tyrant that endures today.

Born on February , , Mary was not the long-awaited son her parents,
Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, had hoped for. But she survived
infancy and grew up in the public eye as a beloved princess—at least until
her teenage years, when her father’s infatuation with Anne Boleyn led him
to divorce her mother and break with the Catholic Church. Declared
illegitimate, downgraded from the title of “princess” to “lady,” and separated
from her mother, Mary refused to acknowledge the validity of her parents’
divorce or her father’s status as head of the Church of England. It was only
in , after Anne’s execution and Henry’s marriage to Jane Seymour, that
Mary finally agreed to her mercurial father’s terms.

Welcomed back to court, she survived Henry—and three more stepmothers

—only to see her younger half-brother, Edward VI, take the throne as a
Protestant reformer, adopting a stance anathema to her fervent Catholicism.
When Edward died six years later, he attempted to subvert his father’s wishes
by leaving the crown to Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey, excluding those
next in line—Mary and her younger half-sister, Elizabeth—from the
succession. ough Mary could have sought refuge with family members in
Europe, she chose to remain in England and fight for what was rightfully
hers. Eluding the armies of her antagonists, she rallied support from nobles
across the country and marched on London. Mary and Elizabeth rode into
England’s capital side-by-side, one as a queen and the other as a queen-in-
waiting.

During her five-year reign, Mary navigated the manifold challenges

associated with her status as the first English queen to wear the crown in her
own right, rather than as the wife of a king. She prioritized religion above all
else, implementing reforms and restrictions aimed at restoring the Catholic
Church’s ascendancy in England. Most controversially, she ordered 
Protestants burned at the stake as heretics—a fact that would later cement
her reputation as “Bloody Mary.”

e queen also set precedents and laid the groundwork for initiatives—
among others, financial reform, exploration and naval expansion—that
would be built upon by her much-lauded successor, Elizabeth I. Mary failed,
however, to fulfill arguably the most important duty of any monarch:
producing an heir. When she died at age  in  of an ailment identified
alternatively as uterine cancer, ovarian cysts or influenza, Elizabeth claimed
the throne.

Prior to England’s break from Rome in , Catholicism had dominated

the realm for centuries. Henry VIII’s decision to form the Church of
England proved predictably contentious, as evidenced by the 
Pilgrimage of Grace uprising, which found some , northerners taking
up arms in protest of the dissolution of the monasteries, banning of feasts
and holy days, and bloody treatment of clergy who refused to accept the
new order. Under Henry’s son, the English Reformation reached new
extremes, with legislation ending the practice of Latin Mass, allowing priests
to marry, and discouraging the veneration of relics and religious artifacts.

According to Linda Porter, author of e Myth of “Bloody Mary," Edward VI

“moved much faster and much further than the majority of the population
wanted, … remov[ing] a great deal that was familiar and depriv[ing] the
congregation of what many of them saw as the mystery and beauty of the
experience of worship.” Protestantism, she says, was the “religion of an
educated minority,” not a universally adopted doctrine. At its core, Porter
and other historians have suggested, England was still a fundamentally
Catholic country when Mary took the throne.

Herself still a Catholic, Mary’s initial attempts to restore the old Church
were measured, but as historian Alison Weir writes in e Children of Henry
VIII, grew more controversial following her marriage to Philip of Spain, at
which point they were “associated in the public mind with Spanish
influence.” During the first year of her reign, many prominent Protestants
fled abroad, but those who stayed behind—and persisted in publicly
proclaiming their beliefs—became targets of heresy laws that carried a brutal
punishment: burning at the stake.

Such a death was an undoubtedly horrific sentence. But in Tudor England,

bloody punishments were the norm, with execution methods ranging from
beheading to boiling; burning at the stake; and being hung, drawn and
quartered. Says Porter, “ey lived in a brutal age, … and it took a lot to
revolt your average th-century citizen.”
During the early modern period, Catholics and Protestants alike believed
heresy warranted the heavy sentence it carried. Mary’s most famous victim,
Archbishop omas Cranmer, was preparing to enact similar policies
targeting Catholics before being sidelined by Edward VI’s death. According
to Gristwood’s Game of Queens: e Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century
Europe, “at obdurate heretics, who refused to recant, should die was an all
but universal tenet.”

To the th-century mind, heresy was a contagion that threatened not just
the church, but the stability of society as a whole. Heretics were also deemed
guilty of treason, as questioning a monarch’s established religious policies
was tantamount to rejecting their divinely ordained authority. e
justification for one heretic’s death, writes Virginia Rounding in e Burning
Time: Henry VIII, Bloody Mary and the Protestant Martyrs of London, was the
“salvation of many innocent Christians, who might otherwise have been led
astray.” Even the gruesome method of execution had an underlying purpose:
Death at the stake gave recalcitrant heretics a taste of hellfire, offering them
one final chance to recant and save their souls.

Mary and her advisors hoped the initial spate of burnings would act as a
“short, sharp shock” warning errant Protestants to return to the fold of the
“true” faith. In a January  memorandum, the queen explained that
executions should be “so used that the people might well perceive them not
to be condemned without just occasion, whereby they shall both understand
the truth and beware to do the like.” But Mary had grossly underestimated
Protestants’ tenacity—and their willingness to die for the cause.
“In mid-th-century Europe,” writes Porter, “the idea of respecting another
person’s beliefs would have provoked incredulity. Such certainties bred
oppressors and those who were willing to be sacrificed.”

All that said, inextricable from Mary’s legacy are the  Protestants she
consigned to the flames. ese executions—the main reason for her
unfortunate nickname—are cited as justification for labeling her one of the
most evil humans of all time and even depicting her as a “flesh-eating
zombie.” ey are where we get the image of a monarch whose “raging
madness” and “open tyranny,” as described by th-century writer
Bartholomew Traheron, led her to “swimmeth in the holy blood of most
innocent, virtuous, and excellent personages.”

Consider, however, the following: Even though Henry VIII, Mary’s father,
only had  people burned at the stake over the course of his -year reign,
heresy was far from the sole charge that warranted execution in Tudor
England. Estimates suggest Henry ordered the deaths of as many as ,
to , of his subjects—including two of his wives—though it’s worth
noting these figures are probably exaggerated. Edward VI had two radical
Protestant Anabaptists burned at the stake during his six-year reign; in ,
he sanctioned the suppression of the Prayer Book Rebellion, resulting in the
deaths of up to , Catholics. Mary’s successor, Elizabeth I, burned five
Anabaptists at the stake during her -year reign; ordered the executions of
around  Catholic rebels implicated in the Northern earls’ revolt of ;
and had at least  Catholics, the majority of whom were Jesuit
missionaries, hung, drawn and quartered as traitors.
If numbers are the main reasoning behind such sobriquets as “Bloody
Mary,” then why aren’t Mary’s family members dubbed “Bloody Henry,”
“Bloody Edward” and “Bloody Bess”? Why has the myth of “Bloody Mary”
persisted in Great Britain’s collective imagination for so long? And what did
Mary do that was so different from not only other Tudor monarchs, but
kings and queens across early modern Europe?

ese questions are complex and predictably fraught. But several recurring
themes persist. As England’s first queen regnant, Mary faced the same
challenge experienced by female rulers across the continent—namely, her
councillors’ and subjects’ lack of faith in women’s ability to govern, a
dilemma best summarized by contemporary Mary of Hungary: “A woman is
never feared or respected as a man is, whatever is his rank. … All she can do
is shoulder the responsibility for the mistakes committed by others.”

Historian Lucy Wooding says descriptions of Mary tend to have

misogynistic undertones. “She’s simultaneously being lambasted for being
vindictive and fierce” and “spineless and weak,” criticized for such actions as
showing clemency to political prisoners and yielding authority to her
husband, Philip II of Spain. Most experts agree that the Spanish marriage
had an adverse effect on Mary’s reputation, painting her, however unfairly, as
an infatuated, weak-willed woman who placed earthly love ahead of the
welfare of her country.

While Mary’s gender played a pivotal role in the formation of her image—
especially during her own lifetime, according to Porter—arguably the most
important factor in the “Bloody Mary” moniker’s staying power was the rise
of a national identity built on the rejection of Catholicism. A  book by
John Foxe known popularly as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs played a pivotal role in
the creation of this Protestant identity, detailing the torments suffered by
men and women burned at the stake under Mary through word-of-mouth
accounts and visceral woodcut illustrations. (e accuracy of Foxe’s
manuscript remains a point of contention among historians.) e book was
enormously popular during the Elizabethan era, with copies even placed in
local churches alongside the Bible.

“Foxe’s account would shape the popular narrative of Mary’s reign for the
next  years,” writes Anna Whitelock in her biography of the Tudor
queen. “Generations of schoolchildren would grow up knowing the first
queen of England only as ‘Bloody Mary,’ a Catholic tyrant.”

Porter argues that Mary’s burnings might have become a “mere footnote to
history” if not for the intervention of John Foxe; historian O.T. Hargrave,
meanwhile, describes the persecution as “unprecedented” and suggests it
“succeeded only in alienating much of the country.” Either way, after taking
the throne, Elizabeth took care not to replicate her sister’s religious policies.
Writing in Mary Tudor, Judith Richards observes, “It may have helped
protect Elizabeth’s reputation that many [executed] … were hanged as
seditious traitors for seeking to restore Catholicism rather than burned as
heretics.”

To put it bluntly, says Porter, “Mary burned Protestants, [and] Elizabeth

disemboweled Catholics. It’s not pretty either way.”

e myth of “Bloody Mary” is one mired in misconception. England’s first

queen regnant was not a vindictive, violent woman, nor a pathetic,
lovestruck wife who would have been better off as a nun. She was stubborn,
inflexible and undoubtedly flawed, but she was also the product of her time,
as incomprehensible to modern minds as our world would be to hers. She
paved the way for her sister’s reign, setting precedents Elizabeth never
acknowledged stemmed from her predecessor, and accomplished much in
such arenas as fiscal policy, religious education and the arts.

If she had lived longer, says Gristwood, Mary might have been able to
institute the religious reforms she so strongly believed in, from a renewed
emphasis on preaching, education and charity to a full reunion with Rome.
But because Mary died just five years after her accession, Elizabeth inherited
the throne and set England on a Protestant path. Over the centuries, most
significantly in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of ,
Protestantism became a core component of British identity.

Mary’s reputation, says Wooding, was “very painstakingly constructed after

her death [and] had extraordinary longevity because of the fundamental
place that Protestant identity came to take in British identity.” Her enduring
unpopularity, then, reflects a failure to properly contextualize her reign:
Writes historian omas S. Freeman, “Mary has continually been judged by
the standards of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and not
surprisingly, has been found wanting.”

For all her faults, and regardless of whether one falls into the competing
camps of rehabilitation or vilification, Mary—the first to prove women
could rule England with the same authority as men—holds a singular place
in British history.
“She was an intelligent, politically adept, and resolute monarch who proved
to be very much her own woman,” argues Whitelock. “Mary was the Tudor
trailblazer, a political pioneer whose reign redefined the English monarchy.”

As the Bishop of Winchester observed during Mary’s December 

funeral sermon, “She was a King’s daughter, she was a King’s sister, she was a
King’s wife. She was a Queen, and by the same title a King also.”

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