Mary I (1516 – 1558)
The first daughter of Henry VIII and the first ruling Queen
of England, Mary I earned the name Bloody Mary after her brutal to
suppression of Protestants in a vain attempt to bring Catholicism back
to the English court.
Born in 1516, Mary was
the daughter of Henry VIII’s first wife Catherine of Aragon, whom Henry
divorced to marry Anne Boleyn, deeming his first marriage invalid and
Mary therefore illegitimate.
In doing so Henry VIII
defied the authority of the Pope and therefore broke from the Roman
Catholic faith, establishing himself as the head of the Church of
England, under the Protestant faith.
 This left Mary,
still only a teenager, disgraced, expelled from the Royal court and
even banned from seeing her own mother. Mary also suffered the
humiliation of being degrading from being Princess to Lady in Waiting
to her new step Mother and her half sister Princess Elizabeth.
However
the King’s womanising ways soon placed Elizabeth in the same position
as Mary, when he had Anne Boleyn executed and married Jane Seymour, who
produced a son, the later heir to the throne Edward VI.
Edward
was the first Protestant monarch of England, but his reign was short
lived when he died in 1533, still just a teenager. At this time Mary
was the rightful heir, but the powerful and staunchly Protestant Duke
of Northumberland fearing a Catholic monarch attempted to install Lady
Jane Grey, Henry VIII’s grandniece and Northumberland’s daughter in
law. Sadly for Lady Jane, few agreed with him and after just nine days
(Lady Jane Grey is also known as the Nine Days Queen) she was executed
at the Tower of London.
Mary
I was proclaimed Queen of England on 19th July 1533, and soon after she
married Prince Phillip of Spain. This Catholic union on the throne of
England, deeply unsettled England’s Protestant nobles who had profited
greatly from Henry VIII’s Reformation. When Mary set about abolishing
laws made under the Protestant rules of her two predecessors and
re-establishing contact with the Pope in Rome, they feared the worst.
In
1554, the Protestant nobles, led by Sir Thomas Wyatt revolted but were
crushed by Mary. Over the next three years around 300 Protestant
dissenters were rounded up and executed, many by being burned at the
stake, the punishment for heresy.
But Mary died childless in 1558, leaving the throne to her half sister Elizabeth I - tipping the balance of power back to Protestantism.
Mary’s body is interred in Westminster Abbey along with that of Elizabeth.
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