Mary Tudor: A Most Unhappy Queen

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In the late summer of 1553, Mary Tudor, the eldest daughter of King Henry VIII, was swept to the throne on a tidal wave of popularity greater than any English monarch had ever experienced. Her progress from Framlingham to London, which began in the last days of July, was a triumph punctuated in village and town after town by wildly cheering crowds. The new Queen, the first to rule England in her own right, left behind her a trail of rejoicing and festivity, and when she entered London through Aldgate on 3rd August the streets thundered with a clamor of cheers and the fervour of loyalty. That night saw dancing in the streets; the pealing of bells and toasting and merrymaking were still in full spate when dawn broke on 4th August.

Yet, only five years after England erupted in this outpouring of joy, Mary died detested and reviled throughout the country. No slander was vicious enough to express how completely the English had recoiled from their Queen, nor how much they abhorred everything she was and everything she stood for.

How could such love turn to such hate in so short a time? How could such shining promise for a glorious reign produce such a legacy of loathing? The answer begins with the juxtaposition of two unfortunate factors. Mary, the only surviving child of the second Tudor King Henry VIII and his wife Catherine of Aragon, was the heir to a throne held mainly by that ever-tenuous right, the right of conquest. In 1516, the year Mary was born, thirty years had passed since the end of the Wars of the Roses and the final victory won at Bosworth by her grandfather, the first Tudor King, Henry VII. Thirty years, however, were not enough to calm the great upheavals caused by that catastrophic civil conflict, and until well into the reign of Mary’s father, members of the previous Plantagenet dynasty still survived to pose a threat to the Tudors’ throne. These were violent, volatile times which a Queen could not easily control, and in these circumstances, Henry VIII became convinced that only a male heir could hope to succeed him smoothly and preserve and pass on the Tudor crown.

Henry’s worries about the succession did not prevent his being an indulgent and often boastful father. He spoiled Mary continually, never missed a chance to show her off at court, heaped gifts and honours on her and gave her a luxurious household of her own before she was three. No one, including Mary, was left in any doubt that Henry thought her ‘his treasure and that of his Kingdom and the paramount princess of all time. Naturally, Mary soon came to adore her father and to bask in the boisterous love he so often and so openly displayed.

It was not until about 1525 that Mary’s horizons began to cloud and her pampered life began to alter. In that year, Catherine of Aragon was a sad and faded 40, and after numerous gynecological mishaps, it seemed unlikely she would have more children. At this time, Henry became infatuated with Anne Boleyn, a nubile, ambitious 18-year-old, who was one of the ladies-in-waiting to Catherine. Together with Henry’s concern over the succession, these two situations combined to produce the most controversial and most influential marriage break-up in history.

Mary was not, at first, directly involved in the titanic struggle that developed between her parents after 1527, when Henry first asked Catherine to agree to divorce and she refused. The Pope was called in to arbitrate, but he, too, refused to dissolve the marriage. The upshot was that Henry outlawed papal power in England, made himself Head of the English Church and granted himself the desired decree. In January 1533, Henry married Anne Boleyn, and the following September she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth.

Through understandably furious at the child’s inconvenient gender, Henry determined that Elizabeth should replace Mary as his heir, and it was this that brought Mary into the front line of the family warfare. Until now, Catherine had been the main target. Nagged on by the malicious Anne Boleyn, Henry bullied, threatened and terrorized his first Queen, but the effort was a total waste of time and temper. Catherine remained adamant. She would not declare her marriage void. She would not pronounce her daughter illegitimate. She would not renounce her title of Queen. Henry, therefore, turned his armament on what he supposed to be a more pliable victim. A shock awaited him. Although Mary lacked the guile and steel so characteristic of the Tudor family, she did have a large amount of Tudor stubbornness. Worse, her essentially loving and artless nature prompted her to return soft answers to Henry’s outburst of wrath. When he stripped her of the title of Princess in October 1533 and demanded she acknowledge her demotion, she insisted, at first, that her father was too noble to conceive such a cruel idea. Mary soon learned otherwise, for Henry stormed and raged and threatened dire consequences if she did not do what he wanted. Nevertheless, Mary went on resisting and at one point answered her father’s threats with a request to kiss his hand.

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