Mary I: The Daughter of Time

by John Edwards

Mary I (1553-58) became England's ruler on the unexpected death of her brother Edward VI. Her short reign is one of the great potential turning points in the country's history. As a convinced Catholic and the wife of Philip II, king of Spain and the most powerful of all European monarchs, Mary could have completely changed her country's orbit, making it a province of the Habsburg Empire and obedient again to Rome. These extraordinary possibilities are fully dramatized in John Edward's superb short biography. The real Mary I has almost disappeared under the great mass of Protestant propaganda that buried her reputation during her younger sister, Elizabeth I's reign. But what if she had succeeded?

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Tudor Period, Historical, Royalty, British Literature

97 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2016

About the author

Librarian's note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
This is John^^Edwards.

Historian - University of Oxford

Reviews

[Leanda Lisle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mary I is rarely allowed her proper title. She is either Mary Tudor, as if we cannot admit we ever had a Catholic Queen, or the ‘Bloody Mary’ of Whig history. Here she is, at last, Mary I, but in a biography that calls to mind the girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead. Where it is good it is very, very good, and where it is bad it is…just that.

Having John Edwards as the biographer of Mary I was an imaginative choice for Yale’s ‘monarchy’ series. He is an expert on the Spanish Inquisition, and has written a study of Mary’s maternal grandparents Ferdinand and Isabella. Edwards has set her life within its European context better than any of her biographers thus far. It is therefore worth persisting through those parts of Mary’s life that appear to hold little interest for him.

Edwards opens not with Mary’s birth but with that of her mother, Katherine of Aragon. He gives space not only to describing Mary’s childhood education, but also the background of her Christianised Jewish tutor Juan Luis Vives. More conventionally he writes, at time movingly, about Mary’s relationship with her father, Henry VIII. This is especially true of 1536 when Henry forced Mary, on pain of death, to accept that she was the bastard product of an incestuous union, and he the Pope in England.

The ‘curl’ in this biography appears with the reign of Mary’s half brother Edward VI. The startling assertion that a King who died aged fifteen had spent the last ‘years of his life’ working to exclude his ‘step-sisters’ from the succession could be a slip of the pen. But it looks lazy when we are told Edward VI’s chosen successor, Lady Jane Grey, is known as ‘the nine days wonder’. Only Eric Ives’s biography of Jane links her to that phrase. Ives believes Jane was the rightful Queen, and that the sobriquet by which she is remembered, the ‘nine days Queen’, trivialises her reign as a ‘nine days wonder’.

Edwards goes on to describe Jane on the day she was proclaimed, July 10th 1553, dressed in Tudor green. He associates this with the writings of the papal official Giovanni Francesco Commendone. In fact it come from a different Italian source quoted in Richard Davey’s 1909 biography of Jane. I have argued elsewhere it is a fraud created to supply a physical description of Jane, something history has otherwise denied us. What was described in 1553 was Jane’s mother Frances, (Henry VIII’s niece, described by Edwards as his great niece) carrying her train.

Edwards has fallen for another of my personal bugbears: the sexist myth that Jane was a victim of Frances’s cruelty. The sixteenth century offers only two pieces of ‘evidence’ to support this. Both were written years after the events they describe and are contradicted by evidence that is either contemporary, or nearly so. As with the creation of ‘Bloody Mary’, Frances’s cruelty is part of a later, largely Whig tradition, in which Frances is the Wicked Queen to Jane’s Snow White. In reality Frances was obliged to sacrifice her place in line of succession for her daughter, as Margaret Beaufort did for Henry VII.

‘All looked sweet for the new Protestant Queen’, Edwards tells us in a phrase that could turn a delicate stomach. But things soon go wrong for Jane, if not in the way Edwards describes. He claims that on July 18th, the penultimate day of Jane’s reign, her own Council announced rewards for the capture of her father in law and general, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. This would be remarkable if true. But Edwards has got confused with the announcements of Mary’s unofficial Council. Few historians are going to produce a book without mistakes. I certainly haven’t. But my trust in Edwards was left dented by such errors. He describes it as ‘intriguing’ that Sir Henry Dudley, who conspired with the French against Queen Mary in 1556, was, the following year, in the English army that Mary’s husband, Philip of Spain, took to the continent. Has Edwards confused him with Northumberland’s youngest son, Lord Henry Dudley, destined to die on that campaign? His presence would not be intriguing at all. Philip had long since encouraged Mary to pardon Lord Henry and his brothers for their roles in 1553.

With Mary’s reign underway there is, however, a great deal to enjoy and learn from Edwards. If he repeats old myths about Jane, he confronts many of those that persist about Mary. Far from being the backward looking, vengeful, politically inept woman of tradition, Mary is revealed as decisive, astute, pragmatic and – at first – both merciful and populist. There is no evading Mary’s responsibility for the burnings of Protestants after 1555. It is however, explained in its historical and contemporary context. I was fascinated by Edwards’ revelation of Spanish influence on the burnings and by his sketch of what was happening in Europe. Pope Paul IV had declared Mary’s husband Philip a heretic just as increasing numbers were being burned for heresy under their auspices in England.

Philip is rarely fleshed out in biographies of Mary. He is here. Many of the Spanish documents for this period are lost, but Edwards is brilliant with what material there is. Indeed I wish Edwards had written a dual biography of Mary and Philip as King and Queen of England. As it is this an often interesting, but flawed portrait of the woman who remains our most controversial Queen.

[Paige · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly a little disappointed by this. There was a lot about her father, the religious figures in her life, her husband, but honestly not all that much about her which is frustrating and something I've repeatedly seen happen when books about female monarchs are written by males.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good, short, quick (I read it in an hour and a half), and myth-busting biography of a queen whose reputation is, shall we say, troubled.

Edwards does a good job of setting Queen Mary in her historical context, especially the decades of neglect at the hands of her father as he strove for an annulment of his marriage to her mother. What effect could this kind of treatment have had upon Mary? We can't really know, though Edwards is able to show Mary trying her best to be a loyal daughter, even after Henry has her legally declared a bastard and Parliament does its best to exclude her from the line of succession.

Her relatively short and tumultuous reign is handled well, with John Foxe's propagandistic "Bloody Mary" image effectively contextualized and revised down to the level of reality. Notably, despite advice to eliminate her half-sister Elizabeth as a potential subversive, Mary did not do so, a step Elizabeth herself would not scruple to take later in regard to Mary, Queen of Scots.

The more I've studied the Tudors and 16th-century England, the more Henry VIII and Elizabeth have come to look creepier and creepier while "Bloody Mary" has looked more and more sympathetic. Mary may not have been a great queen, but her reputation has suffered more through decades of mishandling by political and religious enemies than by the facts of her reign itself.

[Thomas James · Rating 3 out of 5]

More a book about Henry VIII’s influence on Mary and the influence of those around her than a book on Mary and her policies. However what this book does well is show you how, she was quite terribly treated by her father and the impact that had on her as a Queen.
She was a Catholic, so of course she was going to reinstate Catholicism, her nickname of ‘Bloody Mary’ is somewhat unfair as she is hardly the only monarch in history to have slaughtered their own people for not believing what the crown wants you to believe.
Regardless of being born into royalty, she led a life where she believed she was an impediment to her father’s rule, a mistake who just by being alive was letting her father down. She was born to a father who followed her religion but then ended up almost being a heretic to her father when he decided to divorce.
Mary was a strong woman who, much like her brother, didn’t really have enough time on the throne for a real analysis on the success of her rule. If the country had remained Catholic, Mary would be regarded in a far different light. She wasn’t, so the propaganda of the winning side took hold.

[Carolyn Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent introduction to the reign of Queen Mary I. For centuries, Mary has been dismissed as a "Bloody Mary" and compared unfavourably to her half sister and successor Elizabeth I. Recent scholarship has emphasized her achievement as England's first uncontested female ruler. In common with his longer biography of Mary "The Catholic Queen" for Yale University Press, Edwards, an expert in Spanish history, carefully analyzes Mary's Catholicism, Spanish influences including her mother Catherine of Aragon and husband Philip II and her place in continental European politics. The focus is Mary's education and reign and there is little attention paid to her personality beyond the traumatic impact of the breakdown of the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. There is an extensive further reading section at the end of the book.

[Helene Harrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do really like the Penguin Monarchs books that I've read so far - a really good introduction to different monarchs, though the ones I've read I have generally known quite a bit about the monarchs in question. I'm looking forward in future to reading one of these books from the point of view of not really knowing a lot about them!

I think, when it comes to Mary I, I actually knew more about her childhood and upbringing than her queenship, being the daughter of Henry VIII. Her childhood gets a good covering here, discussing her early years, the difficulties caused by the annulment of the marriage between Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, her religious convictions, and her life under Edward VI and the reign of Jane Grey. When it comes to her queenship I did feel a little like I was entering quite unknown territory.

There were a couple of small errors I noticed, though one I'm not sure wasn't a deliberate one, though it makes no sense:
* Katherine of Aragon and Henry VIII had a son born 1 February 1511 who died 3 weeks later - sources show that they had a son born 1 January 1511 who died 7 weeks later.
* Margaret Beaufort described as a queen consort - she was never married to a king, but was the king's mother.

A good book to add to your collection if you're interested in the Tudors, and a good introduction to England's first female monarch, who is often overlooked.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy read. Really enjoyed learning more about Mary I.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pocket-sized guide to Bloody Mary felt a little weird, but I'm glad I read this. Has Mary, Britain's first queen regnant, been wrongly portrayed all these years? Always seen as the dark shadow that preceded her brilliant sister, Elizabeth I, was she perhaps not the monster we've all assumed from our school history lessons? But let's see now, who would have written those history books? Ah yes, men! She was certainly responsible for some extreme, unpopular acts, but her life was awful. Terrible. From childhood right through. I think Mary deserves something of a reappraisal, and it looks like historians are in fact taking a second look.

[Callum Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am currently studying the Tudors at a level and despite Mary being one of my least favourite of the monarchs of this period I really enjoyed this short recap of her reign. Despite being short in length, it touches on many of the major events of the reign including religious policy, foreign policy and very briefly society and economy. The main reason why I enjoyed this book so much however was the real challenge that Edwards puts up to traditional interpretations of ‘bloody Mary’ which he effectively argues are very unfair. Overall a good read and my favourite in the series so far. Now on to Elizabeth l.

[Matthew Devereux ∞ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this short biography of Mary I. It went through her youth and upbringing and then on to her marriage to Philip of Spain and her brief reign before dying and being replaced by her sister Elizabeth. I found it particularly interesting on the religious turbulence of the time. I would personally have had a predilection towards Protestantism rather than Catholicism and it is appalling how Protestants were treated under Mary with all the inquisitions and burning at the stake. I don't warm to Mary much for this reason and I didn't change my mind when I got to the end of this book. Very enjoyable analysis of a fascinating historical period.

[Harald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary I by John Edwards details the life of Queene Mary I, the first Queen of England since Empress Matilda of the 1200s (Not including Lady Jane Grey, but she too was influential despite her 9 day reign)

Edwards tells the life and reign of Mary I and what an impact she made at undoing Edwardian religion law and making the Prayer Book of 1558 was deemed illegal.

Edwards tells an interesting tale about Mary and it is certainly a good read to fill the gaps in which various other books leave out.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of the book discusses Mary before she becomes queen and glosses over the actual reign. Too much focus on the marriage to Philip and a lot of information on Reginald Pole which defeats the object as it was discussing men involved in Mary’s reign rather than Mary herself and her policies. Foreign policy and the economy was covered in 3 pages!

[Mădălina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed it. Bloody Mary's short reign is really fascinating.

[Clare Shepherd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to the subject. Very good bibliography. This book demolishes some of the myths about " Bloody Mary". A very balanced view of a controversial queen.

[naomi · Rating 3 out of 5]

short n sweet innit x

[Susanna Robertson-Sheath · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally interesting. Didn't feel too long - not a slog to get through.

[Kieran · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good summary of the current state of historiography around Mary I, and her co-monarch Philip, doing a lot to dispel the older view of Bloody Mary which still prevails.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

not especially inspiring, and not tempted to read a full biography.

[Lois · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 Rounded up

This is an excellent concise explanation of the times Mary lived in.
Very bare bones.