EP 01 - Bloody Mary Tudor?

Bloody Mary Tudor?

- Episode 01 -

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

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Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Wednesday 18 May 2022

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Philip and Mary ruled England & Wales (1554-58) and yet Mary is the bloody ogre of history

Bloody Queen Mary? we owe it to the victims to get the story right

Mary by Anthonis Mor - or María I de Inglaterra - queen consort of Spain 1554-1558

At the latest count, 313 people were killed for their beliefs in England and Wales between 1555 and 1558, during the reign of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary Tudor. One was hanged, drawn and quartered and 26 died in prison. All the others were burned alive, including a number of women and teenagers.

No wonder the first Tudor queen has for centuries been known as ‘Bloody Queen Mary.’ She killed protestants, we are usually told, because she was a stupid religious bigot. It was part of a doomed attempt, after Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the reign of his protestant son Edward VI, to make England Catholic again.

Historians now know that almost everything in this traditional ‘Bloody Mary’ story is completely wrong. It’s certainly true that over 300 people were killed. But exactly why is becoming more and more of a mystery. How could such a chain of tragic events ever have come about? We find ourselves starting almost from scratch.

We believe that we now all owe it, at the very least, to the victims to get the story straight.

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Episode 01 - Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Why we have to dismiss what we think we know about Mary

Pope Paul IV 1555-59, former head of the Roman Inquisition, who said he would burn his mother if she stepped out of line

In 2020 the historian Alexander Samson looked up from a desk covered in academic books and papers about Mary Tudor and wrote that, when it comes to understanding her reign, ‘it feels as we are at the start.’ That’s an extraordinary thing to say, 460 years after Mary died. But the fact is that, over the last 10 or 20 years, academic historians have entirely rewritten the history of Mary’s reign. Anything you read that’s older than that – with one or two honourable exceptions – is now completely outdated. It is just not worth reading any more.

Ever since Mary died childless, at the age of just 42 in 1558, the history of her reign was written almost exclusively by English Protestant historians.

Mary, the daughter of a Spanish queen, Katherine of Aragon was born before her father split with Rome, brought up a Catholic and had briefly restored the Catholic Church in England in the 5 short years of her reign.

When she died, without an heir, her half-sister Elizabeth abruptly and – as it turned out – permanently switched England back to being Protestant again. So English historians, writing from a strongly Protestant point of view, always jumped to the conclusion that Mary was a failure. In fact, they portrayed her as bigoted, stupid, short-sighted and old-fashioned. And – for what it’s worth – ugly.

We have discovered that we have to stop thinking about the reign of Mary Tudor from a Protestant point of view. We also have to stop thinking about her in a parochially English way. We need to know what was going on in the rest of Europe.

Philip by Titian, 1550 - 4 years before his marriage to Mary (Mary had been engaged aged 9yrs to his father Charles I of Spain and V of Germany aka Holy Roman Emperor)

It was Philip and Mary (1554-8) just like William and Mary (1689-1694)

Philip was 27 in 1554 when he married Mary, who was 38. It was, of course, a diplomatic marriage, intended to encircle the French, bitter enemies of Philip’s family, the Habsburgs. Had Philip and Mary had a child, he or she would have inherited a joint kingdom of England and the Netherlands.

Since by far the most important English trading connection abroad was Antwerp, this joint kingdom would have been an extraordinarily powerful, cross-channel trading, banking and sea-going entity.

It was not, of course, to be, since Mary died childless, for reasons that have long been misunderstood and which we’ll later sort out. But the point here is that in 1554 little, impoverished, feeble, marginal, widely ignored England briefly joined what was then the world’s greatest Empire. Indeed, for a number of months in 1554 and 1555, and again in 1557 when Philip was in London, the city became one of the world’s great capitals.

It was also the case that a married woman, even a queen, was in sixteenth-century thinking expected to obey her husband. This, you recall, was the problem that Elizabeth faced – and eventually avoided by not marrying.

Philip signed himself el Rey, the king. In documents and on its coins, England was ruled by joint monarchs Philip and Mary, just as 130 years later it would be jointly ruled by William III and Mary. In fact it’s more than high time we stopped talking about the reign of Queen Mary and started referring to the period from 1554 to 1558 correctly as the reign of Philip and Mary.

The story we never hear is that when in 1554 Mary married her cousin Philip of Spain, he was one of the most powerful men in the world. Foxe however simply wrote Philip and his huge Spanish entourage of 4000 courtiers out of the story. The reasons are not difficult to discover.

Woodcut from Foxe's Acts and Monuments (aka Book of Martyrs) depicting a dual martyrdom from 1558

Ever wondered why Foxe exclusively blames Mary?

Mary’s reign has also until very recently been badly misunderstood because so much of her history – and especially the burning of so-called heretics – has been taken from a single source.

That source, known as ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’ (but originally with a ridiculously long title that almost filled a page!) was written by John Foxe, a protestant preacher and author writing in Elizabeth I’s reign after Mary’s death.

Any thirteen year-old school student could tell you that a narrative of Mary’s Catholic reign written by an Elizabethan Protestant would have to be treated with extreme caution.

When Foxe was writing, during the 1560s, relations between Elizabeth’s Protestant England and Philip’s Catholic Spain were strained but still, against the odds, holding up. Philip needed English support against the French. The English needed any allies they could get – and the Spanish had historically been the obvious choice. In particular, Philip had so far succeeded in persuading successive popes not to excommunicate the protestant Queen Elizabeth.

It was inconceivable that Foxe, writing in 1563, could possibly blame the Spanish for what had happened during Mary’s reign. But to leave them out altogether was a travesty of what had happened.

NOTE: Not that we end up blaming Philip. We share the blame with the fascinating group of men in charge of policy in England and Wales 1555-8, and we look at the hostile atmosphere of Europe struggling with schism between protestants and Catholics, and (MUCH AS NOW) between traditional and reforming Catholics! The point is that this should never have been a story about lonely, childless, bigoted Mary.

More info and photos here.

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