AUTHORS NOTE

MARYS REIGN HAS LONG BEEN CONSIDERED A TERRIBLE FOOTNOTE in English history, her reputation dominated by the great Elizabethan work of propaganda,John Foxes Actes and Monuments , which so graphically depicted the horrible and bloudy time of Queene Mary. It is striking that nearly450 years later Foxes work continues to have a tenacious hold on the popular imagination. Recently this view found dramatic expressionin Shekhar Kapurs 1998 lm Elizabeth, which portrays the dark, brutal, and barren world of Mary in contrast to the light, liberatingaccession of Elizabeth. Mary is maligned as a cruel, obstinant Catholic bigot who burned heretics and married an unpopular Spanishprince. As one early biographer concluded, she had a fatal lack of that subtle appeal that awakens popular sympathies.1

This book seeks to challenge such popular prejudice and acceptance of Mary as one of the most reviled women in English history; torebrand her less as the grotesque charicature that is Bloody Mary and more as the groundbreaking rst crowned queen of England. Inthe last ten years or so the gap between academic writing and popular understanding has grown ever wider, and this has spurred my desireto write. Recent scholarship has questioned twentieth-century verdicts of Marys reign as one of sterility and lack of achievements and ofMary as a profoundly conventional woman.2 A number of important revisions can now be made to the pervasive popular view.

Marys relationship with her mother is key, and Katherine must be understood not as a weak, rejected wife but as a strong, highlyaccomplished, and deant woman who withstood the attempts of her husband, Henry VIII, to browbeat her into submission and wasdetermined to defend the legitimacy of her marriage and of her daughters birth. As one of the most prolic Tudor historians of thetwentieth century argued, Mary had ever been her mothers daughter rather than her fathers, devoid of political skill, unable tocompromise, set only on the wholesale reversal of a generations history. 3 Yet Katherine of Aragon can be understood as a gure ofimmense courage from whom Mary could learn much. Katherine oversaw Marys early education and highly formative upbringing, whichwas not a prelude to inevitable failure but an apprenticeship for rule. Marys Spanish heritage informed her queenship but in a far morepositive way than is popularly acknowledged.

Marys very accession was against the odds and is a too commonly overlooked achievement the scale of which is rarely acknowledged. Itwas, as one contemporary chronicler described, an act of Herculean daring that rarely nds its way into the popular annals. Uponbecoming queen, Mary entered a mans world and had to change the nature of politicsher decisions as to how she would rule wouldbecome precedents for the future. She gained the throne, maintained her rule, preserved the line of Tudor succession, and set manyimportant precedents for her sister, Elizabeth. Less a victim of the men around her but politically accomplished and at the center ofpolitics, Mary was a woman who in many ways was able to overcome the handicap of her sex. For good or ill, Mary proved to be verymuch her own woman and a not entirely unsuccessful one at that.

So the Mary of this book is an unfamiliar queen, and hers is an incredibly thrilling and inspirational story. She broke tradition, shechallenged precedent; she was a political pioneer who redened the English monarchy.