Mary I of England

Mary I, the elder daughter of Henry VIII, reigned over England and Ireland from 1553 to 1558 as the first queen to rule England in her own right, setting aside the disputed claims of Empress Matilda and Lady Jane Grey. A devout Catholic, she restored papal authority in the English Church after the Protestant reforms of her father and brother, and the burning of more than 280 Protestants during her reign later earned her the nickname "Bloody Mary".

Mary was born at Greenwich on 18 February 1516, the only child of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon to survive infancy. She was well educated, reading and writing Latin by the age of nine, and as a child was treated as heir, keeping her own court at Ludlow on the Welsh border. Everything changed when Henry sought to end his marriage in order to have a son. In 1533 his marriage to Catherine was declared void, Henry broke with the papacy, and Mary was declared illegitimate and placed in the household of her new half-sister, Elizabeth. She refused for years to accept this, and she was not allowed to see her mother before Catherine died in 1536. Later that year, under heavy pressure, she signed a submission accepting her father's supremacy over the Church.

An Act of 1544 restored Mary to the succession after her younger half-brother Edward. When Edward became king in 1547, his Protestant government introduced new forms of worship, but Mary kept hearing Mass in her own household, backed by her cousin, Emperor Charles V. As Edward lay dying in 1553, he and the Duke of Northumberland tried to exclude her by naming Lady Jane Grey as his heir.

Edward died on 6 July 1553. Mary fled to East Anglia, rallied supporters at Framlingham Castle, and Northumberland's support collapsed; Jane was deposed on 19 July, and Mary entered London in triumph on 3 August. She was crowned on 1 October. Northumberland was executed that August; Jane and her husband were executed only after Wyatt's rebellion, a rising against Mary's planned Spanish marriage.

Despite opposition in Parliament and the country, Mary married Charles V's son, Philip II of Spain, at Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554. A marriage act limited his powers in England. In late 1554 she appeared to be pregnant, but by July 1555 it was clear that the pregnancy was false, and Philip spent most of the rest of her reign abroad. He became king of Spain in 1556.

Mary's first Parliament reversed Edward's religious laws, and in 1554 the English Church returned to Roman obedience, although the monastic lands seized under Henry stayed with their new owners. The revived heresy laws took effect in 1555, and the first Protestants were burned that February. Over the following years more than 280 people were burned, among them Thomas Cranmer, the former archbishop of Canterbury, in 1556. Some 800 Protestants went into exile. Even some of Philip's own advisers warned that the burnings were unpopular, and they deepened hostility to Catholicism and Spain.

In 1557 England joined Spain's war against France, and in January 1558 the French captured Calais, England's last foothold on the Continent. Bad harvests and floods added to distress. Mary fell ill in 1558 and died at St James's Palace on 17 November 1558, aged 42, possibly of ovarian cysts or uterine cancer. She was succeeded by Elizabeth, who undid her religious settlement, and the two sisters share a tomb in Westminster Abbey. Protestant writers such as John Foxe shaped her lasting reputation, but since the late twentieth century historians have given a more balanced view of her reign, noting that some later Elizabethan policies, such as fiscal reform, began under her.

Our 1530 map shows the Kingdom of England in her youth, and our 1600 map shows it after Elizabeth's long reign that followed hers.