Mary Tudor has no monument in England. In her will she had asked that a memorial be raised to herself and her mother, “for a decent memory of us,” but her request was ignored. The day of her death, November 17—the day of Elizabeth’s accession—was a national holiday for two hundred years, and before the generation that remembered Mary as queen had died out the contrast between her “poor, short and despised” reign and the “glory, length and prosperity” of her sister’s was becoming a historical commonplace. Succeeding generations called her Bloody Mary, and saw her reign through the pictures in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs—pictures of Protestant prisoners fettered with leg irons, being beaten by their Catholic tormentors, praying as they awaited execution, their faces already touched with the ecstatic vision of heaven.
The memory of the martyrs still looms large in any appraisal of Mary’s reign, but there were other themes in her story. Mary was a survivor. She outlasted an agonizing adolescence, illness, her mother’s slow martyrdom and her father’s whimsical tormenting. She lived through worse dangers in Edward’s reign, and went on to win the throne when the odds were overwhelmingly against her. Contemporaries saw Mary’s triumphant accession as nothing short of miraculous, and she herself had long since come to believe that she had a divinely appointed destiny to return England to Catholicism. As queen she endured mounting conflicts between her political status and her sexual status, enforced subordination to an indifferent husband, and the shattering disappointment of a false pregnancy.
Mary Tudor bore an extraordinary burden, yet she ruled with a full measure of the Tudor majesty, and met the challenges of severe economic crises, rebellion and religious upheaval capably and with courage. Her resiliency impressed itself on the men around her. In describing her character several of them hit on the same metaphor. She was a single candle, they wrote, which shone on even when battered about by great winds, and seemed to burn more resplendently in the midst of the storm.
In writing this account of Mary’s life I have had help and support from Peter Dreyer, who stood by in friendship as the manuscript took shape, from Dennis Halac, who read the completed draft, and from Hal Erickson and Roberta Phillips, whose interest encouraged me as I went along. I want to thank Michael Ossias of Doubleday for his enthusiastic sponsorship and my research assistant, Martha Moore, for her cheerful and competent work over many months. And to Ron Erickson, who read each chapter as it was written and typed most of the manuscript, I owe a heartfelt debt.
Berkeley, California
February 2,1977