The First Queen of England: The Myth of "Bloody Mary"
by Linda Porter
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
'Bloody Mary' Tudor was for centuries maligned from all sides. A focus of anti-Catholic prejudice, she was reviled for her Marian persecutions which saw 280 martyred Protestant 'heretics' burned at the stake.
This was unremarkable in an age that saw religious persecution from both sides sweep reformation Europe. Mary's father before her, sister after her and Habsburg cousins alongside her oversaw similar barbaric acts of state, each in no short measure yet over many more years on their thrones - centring on comparably more diluted pictures of what might today be tagged 'tyranny'.
Particularly notable was the rate at which Mary's victims fell in the few short years she reigned.
Her detractors have argued that, had she lived and ruled longer, burning religious dissenters at that same rabid rate, her record could have become outstanding on the basis of numbers alone. Yet hypothetical estimates, no matter how oft reiterated by anti-Catholic commentators, can never translate into historical fact.
Her apologists have maintained that, steering such horrific policies were lawmakers, ministers and parliamentarians rather than any sole monarch - especially not the staid Mary Tudor who, as England's first anointed female ruler, had no predecessors to follow the example of, relying girlishly upon her male decision makers.
Yet rulers of Mary's time held the final authority to accept or reject any policy.
Perhaps the bottom line is that, regardless how classically feminine or modest her regal persona, she had throughout her life displayed such superlative survival instincts and bravery as to well match her majestic pedigree, culminating in the sheer hardiness of successfully fighting for her throne against all odds.
And whatever her perceived passive nature, her victims still burned, at that notoriously high rate.
This book sets out to rationalise Mary's deeds and foibles by examining her tragic personal background and those challenging events, personal and political, influencing her reign.
As England's first queen regnant (excluding the disputed reigns of Lady Jane Grey and the Empress Matilda), she endured the 16th century chauvinism of her ministers and chroniclers, with their sexist attitudes continuing down the centuries by her many male biographers.
Outshone in posterity by her Protestant younger half-sister Elizabeth I, this monarch of only five years, brought down to us as dour, standoffish and neurotic, has stood little chance of a fair hearing to modern generations – until now.
The fourth and penultimate Tudor monarch, remembered for her restoration of Roman Catholicism after the short-lived Protestant reign of her half-brother Edward VI, Mary famously married Philip of Spain against considerable diplomatic advice to the contrary and despite public opposition to a foreign king consort.
Though many years his senior and initially against marrying at all, Mary adored and devoted herself to Philip, who showed little more than contempt towards her, remaining mostly oversees on business. In this loveless marriage she remained childless, dying young and alone after a series of phantom pregnancies.
Elizabeth I devotees will forever know Mary as her younger sister's jailer, as they read of young Princess Elizabeth's time in the Tower of London following her unproven links to various failed rebellions to overthrow Mary and replace her with Elizabeth.
Linda Porter demonstrates, at least in this book's first two-thirds to three-quarters, what a talented biographer she is. Her work sparkles for much of the piece. Her empathic approach, her commendable eye for detail, bring the milieu and its inhabitants beautifully to life, transporting the reader there to judge for ourselves.
The sense of being 'guided' through whom, what and why we ought judge, is apparent throughout, though at first seemingly benign. Porter is protective of Queen Mary like a lioness of her cubs, with only the scantest, tokenistic acknowledgement of her shortcomings.
This partisanship, whilst ever endearing, develops to the point of conspicuity in parts, raising the fundamental question of balance.
Not the first sympathetic take on Mary Tudor I have read, this is one of the most benevolent, verging on sounding agenda driven. Though I enjoyed it immensely, I have two criticisms:
Firstly, the book's last quarter or even third lost its momentum, with those dull patches inevitable to such detailed books extending to drawn out passages penned seemingly just for the sake of listing, rather than wasting, every last ounce of miscellaneous detail researched.
This becomes exasperating towards the book's conclusion, countering an otherwise brilliant telling. This flaw, however, is not uncommon in this increasingly popular genre, with each author competing to cram in the most arbitrary detail, often haphazardly in patches.
My other criticism is that I felt that the author, as a strident apologist of Bloody Mary and her destructive religion in that era, overstated her case throughout. There is a point to this – to counteract the literary destructiveness for so long piled upon this poor queen, who clearly had her good side. The second half of book's title, The Myth of "Bloody Mary", indicates this as being the book's semi raison d'être.
This was, after all, the only daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon and a granddaughter of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. She had to have had some inherent greatness and indeed this was seen in her oratory prowess and her bravery in claiming the throne by force after it being so unjustly snatched from her by hostile forces driven by the politics of religion.
She was also an irrefutably kind and merciful figure – except when it came to religious dissent. Even most of her worst detractors she pardoned on assuming her throne.
We read about her torturous youth, bastardized and disinherited from the line of succession after her parents' history making divorce. About her enforced estrangement from her only close ally, her demoted and ostracized mother Queen Catherine of Aragon, under King Henry's cruel orders. We understand how this was all because of her half-sister Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn. How Mary, in adulthood, saw Anne Boleyn in Elizabeth.
Her many psychosomatic illnesses are well documented and explained. She was indeed a melancholy younger figure before ultimately transcending her sorrows to triumph and take rule. Yet even then, her brief time in power was marred by heartache, right down to the loss of Calais to France, from which she was said to never recover.
Few, on true reflection, could not feel for Mary Tudor the woman, whatever her faults as a queen. Such is the compassionate footing of this biography, which aims to kill off the unjust legend of that bitter religious extremist so long portrayed in books like this. (Other recent biographers too have become kinder in their treatment of this queen).
Yet the overall effect of Linda Porter's unabashedly biased approach is to sound almost unbalanced. The reader becomes wary of being spun a propagandist commentary rather than the more rounded picture we expect from well-formed biographies.
That said, it should be noted that history's most noteworthy commentators, those from the opposing side of this classic propagandist divide, are equally guilty of this transgression.
There is no such thing as an impartial account in this genre – any such dispassionate efforts, so dry and soulless, can only be relegated to school textbook shelves. What makes any such work so heartfelt and gripping is not its indifference but the passion with which it is presented. Such is the key ingredient of an entertaining read, whether fiction or fact.
Despite its glaring subjectivity, which I see as standard in good historic biography, I loved this book.
Recommended reading.
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