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.