Preparations were made and prayers sent up in special Masses for a royal baby. Then came the announcement, met with cannon fire and merriment: A boy! Then a shock: It wasn’t a boy. It wasn’t a girl. There wasn’t a baby at all, just a misunderstanding. It took Mary four more months to admit that she was not pregnant and never had been. It had been what we now know as a classic false pregnancy. Mary believed she had conceived; her stomach swelled, and she even felt the child quicken. Modern doctors speculate she may have had a stomach tumor that stopped her menstruation and caused the swelling. In any case, it was an illusion.

Philip left England for Brussels, writing to say that he would be gone for some time. Meanwhile, he suggested that Mary be temperate in her dealings with Protestant England.

Mary would have done well to heed his advice. Instead, her insistence on reuniting England with the Roman Catholic Church became an obsession. She believed that bringing England back to Catholicism would please her husband, whom she truly loved. If he didn’t love her, that only deepened her longing to find a way to his heart, but he was uncaring and remote; if he had any feeling for Mary, it was probably pity. At times, she suspected he was having affairs. The more coldly he treated her, the more determined she was to make him love her back. When nothing worked, Mary’s feelings for Philip became increasingly volatile. At one point, she took down his portrait and tore it to shreds.

Mary seemed to come unhinged. At the beginning of her reign, her desire for a Catholic England was motivated mainly by her own devoutness. She believed there was only one true Christian church, the Church of Rome, and that an England outside of that church was an England at odds with God, but as her marital unhappiness deepened – and Philip’s travels abroad looked as if they might become permanent - Mary’s mood became vengeful. Laws against Protestantism grew more numerous and the penalties for defying them increasingly severe. The Protestant opposition grew more determined to resist Mary, which in turn led to even more drastic reprisals by the queen.

Eventually, Mary made the practice of Protestantism a capital offense and began burning offenders at the stake. With the exception of her husband and his contingent of Spaniards, she became the most hated person in England. The English blamed Philip for bringing the Spanish Inquisition to their country. In fact, he seemed only to have brought out the darkest side of a ruler whose compassion and kindness were trumped by fanatic piety.

The persecution of Protestants was the worst England had ever seen. The burnings were deliberately slow to add to the suffering of the victims – which Mary believed was necessary to save their souls. Diverging from the custom in Spain, no one was compassionately garroted first, and the executions were public and attended with great fanfare. Initially, only bishops or priests were tied to the stake, but soon there were non-clerical victims. In all, some 300 Protestants were burned at the stake, including more than fifty women and several children. The church went farther still, digging up the bodies of past offenders so they could be mutilated and burned in public. Mary’s subjects lived in fear and smoldering resentment.

Hard financial times made matters worse. Crops were poor again, and a famine set in. Rumors circulated that when Philip returned to England, he would lead a Spanish army intent on overrunning the country and enslaving its population. That fear proved false when Philip briefly returned with only his usual retinue. Mary implored him to stay, but he soon left again. After he was gone, she announced she was pregnant; just as before, she wasn’t.

Plots against the throne were pervasive. In one case, when the ringleader was tried and acquitted, Mary had the jurors thrown in jail. In another revolt, thirty-one rebels who briefly held Scarborough Castle, a soaring fortress on the North Sea, were apprehended and beheaded. They claimed they were acting only to prevent Philip from invading England with the Spanish army.

Elizabeth was never directly implicated in any of these plots, but Mary could never be certain where her half-sister stood. Some leading statesmen and politicians visited Hatfield House, and the queen, always suspicious of Elizabeth, was not pleased by the attention she received. Elizabeth did what she could to keep the men away; one misstep, however well-intentioned, could land her head on the block.

Mary still refused to see Elizabeth, but she continued signing death warrants. Uprisings occurred in Cambridge, Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Sussex, and Warwickshire, all local affairs that were quickly put down. The navy was in poor shape, with its treasury depleted and its seaside forts abandoned. Letters from Philip pleaded for money, and somehow - not always legally - Mary came through for him. Parliament didn’t approve of any of these dealings, and neither did the English people, whose discontent grew by the day.

Then something changed. Rejected by her husband, reviled by her subjects, and in the early stages of an illness that was probably cancer, Mary began to think more kindly of Elizabeth. They started to visit one another and became almost friendly. On one trip into London, Elizabeth was given a parade, and the mood around her visit was celebratory. Mary returned the courtesy by visiting Hatfield with a large contingent from the royal court. The two spent days attending plays and parties and hunting in the countryside.

Mary’s new attitude toward Elizabeth had an important side effect: It made it safe for influential people to treat Elizabeth with courtesy and respect. When Mary’s illness worsened and it became clear that she would not live long, Elizabeth’s influence grew. No one was quite sure what sort of queen she would be, or whether she would continue Mary’s crusade to restore Catholicism. It was clear enough, however, that she would soon rule the country, and the English people adjusted their alliances accordingly.

Mary’s last days were her unhappiest of all. Philip had urged Mary to go to war with France; now the French preempted him, seizing the English fortress at Calais, a town that had been the English foothold on the Continent for two centuries. All of England considered the loss a terrible blow. Mary ordered the navy to prepare a fleet of more than 100 ships for an assault across the Channel, and she asked Parliament to appropriate funds to supply the attack. Parliament was debating the matter when word came on November 17, 1558, that the queen was dead.