Episode 23 is all about the history of Mary Tudor growing up, and a brief overview of her reign.
Book recommendation:
Mary Tudor by David Loades
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Episode Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host, Heather Teysko. I realized that I’ve been really negligent in my reporting of Renaissance English history. And then I’ve actually never done an episode dedicated to Mary Tudor, the first daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, who reigned in her own right as Mary I.
She was the first woman to successfully reign on her own in England. And though her time as monarch had a lot of strife, there were some rebellions, and she’s left with a nickname Bloody Mary; much of her reputation has suffered because she’s been compared with her half-sister, Elizabeth, who was born into much different circumstances than Mary and benefited from some of the mistakes that Mary made in her reign. If Mary hadn’t died so young, and if she hadn’t been immediately followed by Elizabeth, chances are that the impression that we would have of her would be very different.
So, Mary’s story begins over 30 years before she was born. When her mother Catherine of Aragon, was engaged to Prince Arthur, the oldest son of Henry VII. Her parents were the very famous Ferdinand and Isabella, famous for both recapturing Spain from the Muslims when they captured Granada and for funding a little explorer called Christopher Columbus. Her mother Isabella Castile, was a strong and independent woman who ruled Castile and united with Ferdinand of Aragon to bring together two of the largest kingdoms in Spain. But when Isabel died, she actually didn’t leave Castile to Ferdinand, but to her daughter Juana. So the idea of strong women kind of ran in Catherine’s blood.
So Catherine goes to England as a young teenager, she was married to Arthur, but of course, he died five months into marriage. After her own mother died, Catherine was just this kind of political pawn in the custody of Henry VII, but potentially being manipulated by her father because of his own political will. He tried to capture Castile for himself. And during this time, Catherine was largely kept alone without a lot of money, very few friends, not much in the way of familiarity. And when Henry VIII became king in 1509, the first thing he did was to marry Catherine and the two were jointly crowned king and queen, which is such a romantic story. But as we know, sadly, for Catherine, it didn’t quite turn out that way long term.
So the early years of her marriage, were not fruitful in terms of sons and heirs, which Henry had so desperately needed. She suffered miscarriages and stillborns. She had a son who lived for just under two months before dying, so very sad. And finally, in 1516, seven years into their marriage, she had Mary, the daughter who would live. So here was Mary, born into this kind of swirling mass of the stubborn mother, who seemed unable to deliver on her main job, which was to provide a loving son for her husband, and a father, who as much as he may have loved Catherine at one time, was getting desperate for a male heir. But of course, it wouldn’t all explode for another 10 or 15 years. For now, let’s just say that Mary is a happy child.
She’s precocious and she was bred to be a queen consort rather than a queen herself. So she was brought up believing that she would be married to a prince of Europe, and from her very earliest years, negotiations for her marriage had happened and she was engaged to lots of different Dukes and princes in Europe. She entertained one of her future husbands who was like 15 years older than her on the virginals when she was only four years old. And in case you didn’t know virginal is an early descendant of the harpsichord. So there she is, this little four-year-old, playing the harpsichord for her future husband, and she’s like four and he’s like 20.
So the thing is though, being Henry’s only child for a long time, with the prospects looking bleaker and bleaker for more children, Henry had to choose very wisely for his daughter. And he kept putting off the decision based on who he was allied with. Did he like France? Did he like the Low Countries? Did he like Spain? Who knows. But during this time, she was very much doted upon. Her parents visited her often. They kept her nearby as much as possible. Of course, during that time, it was common for all royalty to have their own households including the children, and she had one befitting a princess in Wales for a while. But all evidence points to a Henry who is absolutely besotted with his daughter, despite his sadness of not having a son.
So then events took rather a downward turn for a poor Mary, as her father tried to put aside her mother in order to remarry and have a son with Anne Boleyn. Mary was in the throes of teenage hormones during this time. And to make matters worse, there’s a lot of evidence that supports the idea that she had some hormonal issues. She had a late onset of her menstrual cycle and it was all very, very painful for her physically. And it really wouldn’t have been surprising given her mother’s history of miscarriages and difficult pregnancies. So it seems like there might have been some hormonal imbalances, I don’t know, that ran in the family. But either way, she had a very difficult time physically, and it must have made the whole thing just so much worse for her.
She sided with her mother. And for a time, Henry was very indulgent with his daughter and his soon-to-be ex-wife communicating regularly with each other. He had sent Catherine away from court, and had forbade Mary from seeing her but he knew that letters passed between them and he did very little to stop it. So of course, Anne Boleyn the newcomer feels threatened by all this, and she does her utmost to stop it. Mary would not swear the oath recognizing Henry as the Supreme Head of the Church.
And then once Anne was securely on the throne and pregnant, poor Mary was declared illegitimate. She was no longer considered a princess. She was to be referred to as the Lady Mary. She still wasn’t allowed to see her mother and her treatment got much worse, she was eventually forced to be a lady-in-waiting to Princess Elizabeth and Anne Boleyn’s daughter, which must have been this huge insult for her and she didn’t leave home to go to Elizabeth very easily.
There are stories of her kicking and screaming as they were taking her. And there’s evidence that Anne tried to befriend Mary and so that if Mary would only give her the respect that she was due as queen, that they can be friends and she could come to court. But Mary, who was in her late teens by now was showing her father some stubborn streak, and she just completely refused.
And there’s also a little bit of evidence that she might have even been fearful for her life. It would have been a lot more convenient for the Boleyn clan, if both her and her mother were just gone from the picture. So she had tasters. And, sadly actually, she didn’t even get to say goodbye to her mother when she died. When Catherine’s final illness came, it came so quickly and she died before anyone could get word to Mary. So Catherine died only about six months before Anne’s very sudden downfall. And during that time, those six months it appears that Anne did try to be friends with Mary again, now that her mother who was seen as the big obstacle was gone. Mary still refused.
She didn’t have to wait long though as Anne’s fall was swift and complete. She was beheaded in June of 1536, when Mary would have been about 21. So Henry’s next wife was the friendly and submissive Jane Seymour, who favored the old ways of religion, and was a peace broker between Henry and his first daughter. Mary though had incorrectly assumed that because Anne was gone, things would go right straight back to normal, which they didn’t. Henry still wanted to be the Supreme Head of the Church. And beheading Anne Boleyn didn’t change that, if anything, it probably made his desire to be the Supreme Head even stronger.
So Henry told Mary that she still needed to take the oath saying that his marriage to Catherine was invalid, and that he was the Head of the Church and if she did that, she would be seen as the obedient daughter. And eventually, she did do it. Many people said that she did under duress, and she didn’t mean it. But considering she was still only in her early 20s, still in a marriageable age and a good candidate for a good marriage, legitimate or not, she probably gave her oath in all earnestness and just really wanted to come back to court and be in the good graces of her father, now that her mother was gone too. And it doesn’t appear that she really regretted these oaths until much later on.
Once Henry had a had a son, Edward, things changed for Mary again. The pressure was off as she wasn’t the presumed heir any longer. She grieved for the loss of Jane Seymour who died in childbirth, and was part of the mourning. But it didn’t seem to affect her life that much otherwise. She did become closer to her father, and when he married his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, it appears that Mary and Anne actually became good friends, despite their religious differences. Of course, Anne came from Protestant Germany. And after the divorce, Mary and Anne still corresponded.
Mary was still unmarried, and that seemed likely to change. She promised the emperor, Charles who was her cousin that she would not marry without his permission. And while there were kind of some sporadic negotiations here and there, it was all a bit complicated. She wasn’t the official heir anymore. Her status was officially illegitimate, but she was still a king’s daughter, and he still needed her as a potential bargaining chip, since he didn’t have that many children. So she had her own household now though, and she had more independence than she’d had up until that point. And it seems that she enjoyed hunting and going out into nature. And these were some of the happier years of her life.
When her father died, and Edward became the king, as a very young teenager, I guess he was actually less than a teenager, he would have just been about 10 or so. I should look that up. But things shifted for Mary again. At first she was in a home with Elizabeth and the king’s uncle Thomas Seymour. So Mary seemed to be a bit more wary of Seymour than Elizabeth would be. And later on, there would be this huge scandal when Thomas Seymour had married Catherine Parr, Henry’s sixth wife. And while he’s married to Catherine Parr, and while she was pregnant, he flirted with Elizabeth just a little too much. And Catherine Parr who was pregnant was just like, “No, you’re not going to be in my house flirting with my husband while I’m pregnant. That doesn’t work. And she needed to be sent to another home.”
So Mary actually kind of could tell this guy was a bit of a sleazeball earlier than Elizabeth. Elizabeth was only like 14 or something at the time, so she actually asked for her inheritance early so that she could set up her own household, and it appears the Parliament and the new king gave it to her.
Edward was surrounded by Protestant tutors, and he was unquestionably a Protestant. He passed laws and enforced the new beliefs on his subjects and forbade the old mass to be said. Mary still had mass in her household though, and her brother was lenient with her for it, saying that they would not prosecute her. But then she pushed it just a little bit too far. And she opened up her household to any Catholics who wanted to hear mass. This, of course, ticked off the council, who wrote her letters telling her to stop, and her standard kind of cagey response was that when her brother came of age, he was still in his very young teens at this time, she would be his faithful subject, but until then, she thought that he was being ruled by the Council and the Protector who ruled in his name, and she was not actually their subject.
So they finally told her that she could celebrate the mass, but again, it was for her and her close servants only no letting in outside people or general household staff. And she talked to her brother and he said that, “Yeah, that’s the way it has to be.” So she was kind of put in her place there. Mary stayed away from court during this time as much as possible.
She was now in her early 30s. So the court of a teenage boy didn’t really hold much attraction for her. Plus, she wanted to avoid the Protestant church services that were held at all of the holidays. And she was again kind of in a period of feeling a bit martyred, and alone in the world, similarly to when her father was shaking off Catherine, and courting Anne Boleyn and they were kind of all alone in the world. And that’s sort of how she felt again.
But then, Edward dies suddenly of tuberculosis in 1553, and Mary is queen in her own right. I did an episode a few years ago on Lady Jane Grey. This is where the first few weeks of Mary’s reign are the most tested. Edward desperately wanted a Protestant heir to carry on his reforms, and of course so do his Council and the parliament who had all declared for the Protestant side. So if Mary becomes queen, they’re all kind of like “Oh crap, not only are we going to lose everything we fought for, but we’re probably in deep doo doo as well. So they work to get Jane Grey named is Edward’s heir.
Jane Grey was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister, who had married Charles Brandon, Henry’s good friend. So she was I guess, Henry VIII’s grandniece, I suppose. Henry decided to name her and her male heirs as his heir. She was a good Protestant. He didn’t actually do it in a way that given full legal power, though. And while his counsel was busy bringing Jane to court to the tower for her coronation, Mary was riding around gathering support for her. And to be honest, most people didn’t understand the whole Jane Grey connection in the first place. They’re like, why would we have the grandniece of Henry VIII when we have his daughter right here? It doesn’t seem to make sense. And so she got a lot of support.
And within just a few days, she’s riding victoriously into London, and poor Jane Grey was still in the tower getting ready to be crowned. Only this time, she was moved just a little bit down the hall, to the part that was reserved for prisoners, not queens. So Mary truly did see Jane as a victim in the whole thing. And she really wanted to spare her. She was incredibly lenient, but then several months later, there was another rebellion over her proposed marriage to Philip of Spain. Jane was the figurehead that the rebels gathered around, including really stupidly, her own father, who had been spared once the first time and decided to press his luck, fatally for him, his daughter, and his son in law, and the rebels were rounded up and killed, including our poor Jane.
So, Mary’s reign has been remembered for three things primarily. First, her marriage to Philip of Spain. Second, her inability to have children and her phantom pregnancies. And third, her killing of Protestants, which wound up getting her the nickname “Bloody Mary”. Philip was the son of Emperor Charles V, who was Mary’s cousin, and to Catherine had appealed to so many times during Henry’s attempt to end their marriage. He was a widower with one son of his own already, though he was still over 10 years younger than Mary. And the idea of marriage with a pious woman in her late 30’s, was so not attractive to him.
But the marriage would unite all the lands that are on Spain, Italy, in the Low Countries with England against France, and he would be a king in England if he married her. And so Mary knew that since she was getting older, she really didn’t have a lot of time to waste. And so she made her marriage one of her biggest priorities. It made many people in her counsel have to think about what would happen when a queen married and what the role of the sovereign actually was. So legally at the time, everything a woman had would go to her husband for his lifetime.
So if Mary married Philip, did that mean that suddenly he owned England? Like what was the role of the sovereign? And what legally made it different if it was a woman? So the council was throwing these kind of philosophical questions that nobody ever had to think about before. And eventually, they agreed that the office of sovereign of monarch was bigger than the person holding it, and the office itself could not be transferred.
So still, the treaty with Philip was very conservative. It didn’t commit England to any wars he might undertake or give him any rights to the throne on his own. But the marriage was still hugely unpopular. People didn’t seem to like the Spaniards for whatever reason, and Philip didn’t really make things easier. He was constantly siding with his own merchants in the Low Countries if there were ever any kinds of disputes with London merchants. He didn’t give London explorers the right to use the same trade routes that the Spanish use. It was just this huge mess where he was always favoring his own merchants. He arrived in England with a lot of fanfare, but soon it was abundantly clear that he was not English. He did not speak English, he would never be English, and he wasn’t going to fit in.
But within a few months of their marriage, Mary was convinced she was pregnant, the doctors confirmed it and everyone commented on her changing body. She even said that she felt the baby quicken. She went into confinement in April, but no baby ever came. There were actually announcements circulating in London in June that she had delivered a son, but they were quickly squashed as it became clear that there was no baby, and there had been no pregnancy.
And by the middle of July, the whole charade was up, and the midwives were dismissed, that must have been really a tragic feeling for Mary. She had wanted to be married for so long, and she had wanted a child for so long. And she blamed the doctors telling her that she was pregnant, for making her believe it, but she really had deluded herself the whole time. There’s also some evidence that she had cancer in her womb and in her uterus. And this might have added to kind of some of the feelings that she was feeling, thinking that she was feeling the baby move. She had a second phantom pregnancy closer to the end of her reign. But at that point, nobody even believed it at all. So very sad for her in that respect.
Finally, religion. Mary saw it as her assignment from God to restore the breach with Rome and to persecute the heretics. It was a personal vendetta against those who helped break up her parents’ marriage, but it was also deeply personal for her conscience to restore the true religion to England. So she said about putting England back under people’s jurisdiction and restored the mass. She also brought back bishops who had been in exile. And of course, many people blamed Philip for this, but he was actually a pragmatist. He realized that creating martyrs out of Protestants would only make their case stronger the way it did. And people would revere them. He wanted to maybe punish a few leaders.
But things soon got out of hand. And Mary killed hundreds and thousands of Protestants. There’s actually the book, The Book of Martyrs, that was written about all the people that she killed. And there’s a gruesome case where she had a woman burned who was eight months pregnant. Really horrible stuff. The lucky ones had friends who would bring them gunpowder that they would tie around their neck that would make them die faster. And those who didn’t have that went through absolute agony. And still, there were relatively few who recanted. So people really believed in what they were dying for.
Mary’s relationship with her sister Elizabeth was always quite strange because she firmly believed that Elizabeth was not only illegitimate but probably not even Henry’s daughter at all. She believed her to be the daughter of Mark Smeaton, one of the men who was killed for having an affair with Anne Boleyn. And she commented on how much Elizabeth looked like him, which was completely untrue, Elizabeth looks exactly like Henry. After her second phantom pregnancy though, she had to admit that she was probably never going to have children. And she officially recognized Elizabeth as her heir, which was really good for the country. Elizabeth didn’t have to fight for it. Because it was right there in her will.
History has often been very unfair to Mary. And some of that is due to the Protestant revival under Elizabeth. But she did have a reign that had some very positive aspects for England. And it’s probably true that Elizabeth learned many lessons from watching Mary’s failures. First off, if the marriage with Philip hadn’t been so unpopular, perhaps Elizabeth wouldn’t have shied away from marriage herself. And instead, she became the Virgin Queen, who was married to her people and this whole kind of thing grew up around her.
And if the marriage with Philip hadn’t been that unpopular, Elizabeth might have married herself. She learned the lesson that England doesn’t welcome foreign kings. Secondly, the whole question of women being able to be a sovereign in their own right was settled under Mary and Elizabeth benefited from that. Most of the people who knew Mary personally liked her and even some Protestants after her death, said that they actually didn’t believe it was her who wanted to kill so many, but it was the corrupt clergy who had led her astray. So either way, the portrait that history has painted of her is very one dimensional.
So that’s it for this week, except the book recommendation which is Mary Tudor by David Loades, I’ll put a link up to purchase it on the blog. It’s a really interesting book, a very sympathetic portrait of Mary, but one that I think needs to be told. So you can also visit the blog to send me comments, story ideas, or other general thoughts. And I’ll add some portraits of Mary Tudor there. So the address is Englandcast.com. And you can also find me on Facebook at facebook.com/Englandcast. And for those of you in the US, have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I will talk to you again very soon. Thanks! Bye, bye.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]