Mary Tudor - tyrannical or tragic?

Portrait of Queen Mary I of England by Anthonis Mor, 1554. Prado Museum, Madrid Spain. Via Wikimedia.

Mary Tudor - tyrannical or tragic?

We all know her as Bloody Mary – the queen whose obsession with Catholicism sent 287 Protestants screaming into eternity on her ‘soul-cleansing’ pyres. It would be easy to label her as tyrannical, evil, cruel, a disaster for the crown and country. But underneath this reputation was a woman with deep feelings, anxieties and dreams which led to great personal tragedy. There is a strange quirk in human psychology that dampens our emotional reaction if an event is either geographically or historically distant. We tend to look at facts and forget the human emotions, fears and, in Mary’s case, fantasies which underpinned those events.

So what was the base of Mary’s psychology? There is no denying she had her father’s stubbornness which was exacerbated by her mother’s staunchness when it came to religious belief. But Mary was hugely impacted by events in her early teens.

History tells us that she was a happy and adored child, precocious in her ability and treated as the little princess she was by all around her. She would not have been aware of her deficit in her father’s eyes – that she was not a boy. Mary’s world would have been one of comfort and security. But at age eleven, that world began to crumble as the whispers grew in the corridors of court. The name Ann Boleyn would be muttered and her beloved mother would weep at the alter begging God to turn her husband’s affections back to his wife. For three years this tension continued and then the cruel decision made.

Today we rail against divorcing parents who use their children as pawns. We understand the distress, the hurt and the psychological damage. But there was no-one to stand up for fifteen year-old Mary when she was separated from her beloved mother as leverage for an annulment, declared illegitimate, stripped of her rank as princess and made a servant to her infant half-sister, Elizabeth.  Today we would talk about trauma. But back then they began a campaign against a teenage girl to declare her mother never married, herself illegitimate and to renounce her one source of strength – the Catholic religion she shared with her mother. When her mother died broken hearted, who was there to comfort Mary?

The following two decades are often portrayed as Mary stubbornly refusing to bend to the will of the country, her brother and her advisors. She fought hard to keep her faith and her household. Was this just stubbornness – or was it a young woman trying to keep the closeness of a family around her? There is no doubt that she kept and protected a close retinue of Catholic friends and servants, she held close all her life those who were kind to her such as her laundress Beatrice ap Rhys, a character in The Conjuror’s Apprentice. Her ladies in waiting were numerous, and not one turned against her publicly unlike those of Ann Boleyn.

Then in 1554, came her great chance to create the family she remembered as a child when she married – against the will of her advisors – Philip II of Spain. Everything about her behaviour indicates she was determined to build the happy, catholic, traditional royal household she recalled from her childhood – even if this meant flying in the face of all political reason and turning her face from her people. She elevated her new and young husband to King and assumed the more subordinate wifely role that her mother had taken with her father, and in doing so lost the faith of her privy council; she brought in heresy laws to ‘cleanse’ her people of Protestantism and return the country to the rigid Catholicism of her youth, and in doing so became the nemesis of her people; she awarded money to Philip’s pursuit of wars as foolish as her father’s, and so lost Calais; she fooled herself that Philip may love her, and brought about terrible heartache and hurt to herself. But the most personal fantasy was her phantom pregnancies, the facts of which defined all reality. She was 37 when she married in July 1554 and old beyond her years after ill-health and anxiety had taken its toll on her body. It would be very unusual for a medieval woman of that age to conceive, but in September she insisted she was with child and even felt it move. This should have been the first warning sign as any doctor or midwife would know that no movement is felt before 16 weeks of pregnancy. But all bent to the dream and preparations were made for a prince to be born.  All Europe was informed of her joy.

The following April she prepared for her confinement, despite the concerns of her ladies in waiting and fears of the doctors. By July she was still in that dark room, nursing a swollen belly and insisting her little prince would come. In reality her life was crumbling again. Yet again the corridors of Court rumbled with whispers. This time of her madness. Physicians tried desperately to claim the time of conception was faulty, false rumours sent the country into celebration only to fall into incredulity when told there was yet no baby, and rumours floated through London of Lord North seeking the new-born of an English mother and Spanish father to plant in the royal cradle. Mary’s distress as she curled up in foetal position and wept was terrible to see as portrayed in The Conjuror’s Apprentice when Margaretta glimpses the scene in the confinement chamber.

In August 1554, the eleventh month of her phantom pregnancy Mary emerged heartbroken, thin, frail and evidently unstable. No-one said anything in front of her but the humiliation must have cut deep. But this was not to be the last fantasy to recreate a happy family. The same scene would play out in 1558 – to be the background of my next novel. But this time a midwife had the courage to tell Mary the truth and she accepted that her dream would never be achieved. She relented to the fact that there would be no child and reluctantly made her half-sister her successor.

So was Mary a tyrant or a tragic fantasist? As a psychologist my assessment is that you cannot untangle these psychologies. Human beings are infinitely complex and one thought or feeling generates behaviours which to others can appear irrational or even unhinged. But we can say, from evidence today, that a traumatised child who is not supported will often grow to create a traumatic adulthood. So maybe the tyranny and tragedy of Mary 1st was rooted in the sadness and distress of a little girl whose life was blown apart by a tyrannical father who turned her young life into a tragedy.

Further reading

The following books are excellent reads and give real insight into Mary Tudor.

Mary Tudor. England’s first queen. Ann Whitelock. ISBN: 1400066093 This factual biography gives a modern and empathic account of Mary and her life. A rounded and balanced view of a complex queen.

The Heretic Wind. The Life of Mary Tudor. Judith Arnopp ISBN 10: 1839451718 / ISBN 13: 9781839451713. This fictional autobiography of Mary gives a fascinating perspective as Mary lies on her death bed recounting her life to a young maid. Heart rending stuff!