Mary Tudor: A Most Unhappy Queen

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None of this shook Mary out of her starry-eyed dreams, and on 25th July 1554, the universally detested Spanish Marriage took place in a splendid ceremony at Winchester. A few weeks later, Mary began to show all the signs of pregnancy, and on 28th November, a service was held at Whitehall to give thanks for the Queen’s quickening. The proud and ecstatically happy Mary sat richly appareled and her belly laid out that all men might see she was with child. To the Queen, this pregnancy seemed to denote miraculous deliverance from all the hardship and difficulty that had marked her life. Her subjects had different ideas.

However, in early 1555 the unpalatable prospect of a child of the Spanish marriage took second place to a dangerous turn in Mary’s efforts to restore the Catholic faith in England. Soon after the formal ceremony of reconciliation with Rome on 30th November 1554, the mediaeval heresy laws were revived. They came into effect on 20th January 1555 and brought an end to Mary’s attempts at gentling her people along the path to the only true faith. This meant that Protestant heretics now faced the hideous penalty of death by burning at the stake, a not uncommon proceeding in that age of dogmatic religion. The stake and the fire were, in fact, more or less accepted as an occupational hazard for religious dissenters, but during Mary’s reign in England, they took on quite another and a far more horrific connotation.

The first Protestant heretic to be publicly burned in Mary’s reign was John Rogers, a religious scholar, who died at Smithfield on 4th February 1555. Rogers was, of course, a professional establishment figure, as were the two Protestant bishops who followed him to the stake in the same month. The five laymen who were burned in London at the end of March were, however, of quite a different status. The deaths of these ordinary humble Englishmen unleashed a flood of fury, and the storm rose in intensity with each successive burning of such people as artisans, housewives, farm workers and other lay folk. These people, in fact, comprised the majority of the 300 or so men and women who died at the stake in the next three years. They bore the brunt of the persecution mainly because they were too humble or too poor to emulate richer Protestants who had escaped abroad. What is more, most were branded heretics only through their own pitiable ignorance, the effect on simple, uneducated minds of too many years of violent religious change. The idea soon grew that these heretics were dying not for the Protestant religion, but because submitting to Catholic authority meant betraying England and turning it over to foreign and papal influence.

It was this notion–and it did not lack foundation–that was the main source of the public uproar, and the fuel behind the near riot which occurred at one burning in Essex, when eight heretics died. In London, the main site of the executions, churches were robbed, priests were assaulted, sedition was rampant and blasphemies were rife. Spaniards were attacked, robbed beaten up. Virulent pamphlets made their appearance vilifying Mary, Philip, the Privy Council, Parliament and the Catholic religion.

In the course of all this, the last shreds of Mary’s popularity vanished, to be replaced by disgust. Her pregnancy, which turned out to be a phantom, became a national joke. There were plots to murder her. One William Fetherstone, who was later mutilated and whipped as punishment, claimed to be Edward VI returned to assign his harridan half-sister to Hell.

With anarchy raging around her, even Mary had to admit that the false paradise she had built for herself was crumbling away. The child she longed for had never existed. The faith she hallowed was loathed and slandered by her subjects. Elizabeth, the half-sister she hated, was enjoying a peak of popularity. And perhaps more bitter that any of these, her adored husband was tiring of her and itched to leave England. Philip left on 3rd September 1555, to escape the cloying attentions of his aging wife. From her apartment at Greenwich, Mary watched Philip step aboard the state barge, tears flooding down her face. Except for a few months in 1557, she never saw Philip again, and even then, he returned only to pester her for money to help finance a war against the Papal States.

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