Mary I on the Son Rise Morning Show

On this the 457th anniversary of her death in 1558, Matt Swaim and I will discuss on the Son Rise Morning Show (at about 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central) the reign of Mary I, the first Queen Regnant of England and the only reigning Catholic Queen of England--there were Catholic consorts after her. Mary's reputation has undergone a change in the past five or so years. The sobriquet "Bloody Mary" is still common, and we certainly can't argue away almost 300 heretics and Protestants burned alive at the stake, but a more realistic view of religion in the 16th century has pointed out that whether the judgement of the government was heresy or treason, religious freedom did not exist in sixteenth century England.

G.J. Meyer's 2010 hardcover survey of the Tudor dynasty was re-issued in the U.K. as a two volume paperback with Henry VII and Henry VIII covered in the first volume and Edward VI through Elizabeth I in the second volume.

Meyer continues the re-evaluation of Mary I's reign in his book, noting that Mary's first Parliament reversed--except for the Dissolution of the Monasteries--all the Reformation legislation of Henry VIII and Edward VI's reign without much dissent at all. Parliament re-established the relationship between the Catholic Church in England and the Papacy and Mary gladly relinquished any claim to headship or governorship over the Church. Unlike her father, half-brother and half-sister, Mary did not want to rule the Church; she would not decide what orthodoxy and heresy were; that was up to the Church, not the State. He also regrets that the same Parliament revived the heresy laws in England--the State would assist the Church in examining, charging, and executing heretics.

In his first chapter on Elizabeth's reign, which begins at the end in March 1603, Meyer notes that the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth followed a similar pattern (the difference was of course duration): their reigns each began with enthusiastic welcome; they share a middle period of success and popularity; they both ended in exhaustion and disillusion. The crucial difference in Meyer's view is that Mary wanted to do more than survive: she wanted to achieve something:

No historian today could dispute that Mary was a capable and conscientious queen, or argue that her government killed or tortured or imprisoned as many people as Elizabeth's. She devoted herself to what she perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be the interests of her subjects, and she might have achieved her objectives if she had reigned even half as long as Elizabeth. The process of winnowing the facts has taken four centuries, but it is clear by now that Mary was the more ambitious of the sisters--that she aspired to much more than her own survival, certainly--and that the reason for her failure many be nothing more mysterious (or shameful) than the fact that at the time of her death she was 28 years younger than Elizabeth would be at hers.

Mary had aimed at the restoration of Catholicism in England and in her brief reign she had done much, with the aid of Reginald Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury and his bishops, to restore the Church and even implement reforms in the Church. When she died on this day in 1558 she thought, because Elizabeth had sworn to her that she was a true Catholic, that her work in England would continue.

Like each of the Tudors before her, she would be betrayed by her successor. Henry VIII betrayed his father by placing glory and pleasure above statecraft and investment; Edward VI betrayed his father by destroying what was left of the structure of prayer for the dead, the communion of saints, and the sacramental order; Elizabeth betrayed Mary by lying to her about the one thing, except for the love of her father and mother, most dear to Mary: Jesus Christ and His Church. Mary had not betrayed Edward: he knew what she believed and what she would do--that's why he wanted Jane Grey Dudley to succeed him.

A New Outlet: The Christian Review

This is my third piece for The Christian Review: on the reputation of Mary I:

In spite of the efforts of several biographers over the past seven years, the rehabilitation of Mary I’s reputation seems impossible. The burning bodies of 280 English men and women haunt her legacy — and the memory of Catholicism in England.

Historians such Linda Porter, Anna Whitelock, Judith Richards, Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, and John Edwards have pointed out that Mary, Henry VIII, and Catherine of Aragon’s daughter forged the path that her half-sister, Elizabeth, would follow. Mary I was the first queen regnant of England; her anointing and crowning broke the taboo of those semi-sacraments being reserved for men; she and Reginald Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, revived and renewed the practice of Catholicism in England; and she possessed the Tudor charisma while being a hard-working and thoughtful monarch.

But for all of Mary I’s historic attainments, the smoke from the pyres of Smithfield still gets in our eyes.

When Anna Whitelock, author of Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen (Random House: 2010) stated in the BBC History Magazine (Christmas 2014) that the campaign to extirpate heresy in England was working, one reader’s response in January 2015 was immediately negative—the heresy campaign was evil, even if it was effective. Eamon Duffy made the same statement in his study The Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor in 2010, arguing that the negative campaign of heresy trials and executions was matched by a positive campaign of preaching, publishing, and rebuilding—and he met with the same response from reviewers like Hilary Mantel and Richard Wilkinson.

The 2lst century biographers follow the lead of H.F.M. Prescott’s 1953 Mary Tudor: The Spanish Tudor to present Mary’s great qualities of generosity, love of children, faithfulness to her religion, dedication to her mother, and adoration of her father, and how horrible her adolescence and early adulthood were; not allowed to see her dying mother, forced by her adored father to swear to her own bastardy, prevented from the normal course of marriage and childbearing.

Read the rest there. Here are my other two pieces: one on William Byrd; the other another review of Jessie Child's God's Traitors. 

Another Brave Blogger on Mary I

Via Tea at Trianon. Conor Byrne sums up Mary I's reign and religion:

It is important to recognise that the negative depiction of Mary I's religious policies ultimately lies in the success of Protestant propaganda and its impact on the creation of national history. As Weikel explains, this propaganda has obscured the many positive aspects of the queen's religious regime. It is virtually impossible to know with any certainty how popular her restoration of Catholicism was, for we lack the attitudes of ordinary people across the country. Historians have uncovered evidence of a desire to return to the old religion, and celebrations across England at news of Mary's accession speaks volumes about her initial popularity among her subjects. In the end, circumstances beyond the queen's control defeated her efforts at Catholic restoration: 'Mary's regime was fatally undermined, not so much by failings in policy, but by disasters beyond human control' (Brigden). Pole was recalled by a vengeful pope, which demoralised both him and the queen, while a 'devastating mortality crisis' in 1558-9 was significant in that the queen was one of its victims. Mary died in November 1558, aged only 42, with no Catholic heir and having been queen for only five years: the shortest reigning of the five Tudor monarchs. Had she given birth to a Catholic heir, had she reigned for longer, it is quite conceivable that England's return to Roman Catholicism might have been, in the long-term, successful. The Marian regime was not 'backward' or 'stagnant' in its religious reforms and policies. It was energetic, vivacious, resourceful and purposeful in seeking to restore the old religion. As eighteenth-century historian John Lingard explained, Mary's policies failed, not because they were unpopular or 'wrong', but because her reign was too short to fully establish them, while natural disasters beyond her control ultimately undid her efforts. Elizabethan propaganda skilfully 'stamped Catholicism as an alien presence in England, and has consequently prevented 'a just assessment of the aims and achievements of the Marian Church'' (Weikel and Duffy). We, however, do not have to uncritically read such propaganda in our own times. We can afford England's first queen regnant respect and admiration for her concerted attempts to restore Roman Catholicism to a country which, in many respects, cried out for its return upon her accession.

In the Christmas 2014 issue of the BBC History Magazine "Anna Whitelock argues that, despite her bloody reputation, Mary I was a highly impressive queen cut off in her prime." In the February 2015 issue, however, one letter writer rejected Whitelock's thesis most thoroughly--those 300 burned at the stake rightly haunt her legacy. Anna Whitelock wrote one of the recent biographies of Mary I which attempts to bring some balance to our view of her reign, which I wrote about here, in First Things online.