1558 Death of Bloody Mary and Accession of Elizabeth I
Mary Tudor was born in 1516, the only child of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon to survive. She was considered a princess and heir to the throne until her father divorced her mother (essentially for failure to provide a male heir) and married Anne Boleyn. Mary was stripped of her title, deemed legally a bastard, and was forced to wait upon her half-brother Edward, the product of her father’s third marriage.
Mary clung fiercely to her Roman Catholic faith through her father’s renunciation of the pope and her brother’s Protestant era. She refused to marry a Protestant and her father and brother refused her permission to become the bride of a foreign Catholic prince so she remained single. When Edward died in 1553, Mary survived a palace coup that put Lady Jane Grey on the throne for nine days and was proclaimed Queen of England. She was now 37. In 1554 she persuaded Parliament to allow her to marry Prince Philip of Spain, but the notion of a foreign Catholic prince produced a series of short-lived rebellions. Her groom, eleven years younger than she, was more enamoured of the throne than of his bride who was besotted with him.
Mary was determined to return England to the Catholic fold but had to wait on Parliamentary approval which she obtained late in 1554. The next year her government embarked on the extermination of the Protestant religious leadership of the country; those who did not flee to Europe were arrested and burnt at the stake. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and bishops Latimer, Ridley, Hooper all went to the fire but so did over 200 ordinary English men and women: bricklayers, weavers, farmers, maids and widows. This policy, which was disliked by her husband’s Spanish advisers, earned her the nickname Bloody Mary.
Despite two episodes in which she appeared to be pregnant Mary remained childless. Philip stayed out of the country as much as he could except when he needed English support for a European war. She grew increasingly ill, perhaps from uterine cancer, and died in November 1558. She begged her half-sister Elizabeth (with whom she was never on good terms) to bury her next to her mother, to keep the country in the Catholic faith, to pay her debts, and provide marriage portions for her maids. Elizabeth, who was not at all a nice person, honoured none of her wishes. The two queens are, ironically, buried in the same Westminster Abbey tomb.
It is this tomb that contains a fictional manuscript on which my novel Neddy and the Virgins is based. Look for it after I find a publisher.