Mary I of England: Encyclopedia II - Mary I of England - Reign

Mary I of England - Reign

Mary's first Act of Parliament retroactively validated Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and legitimated the Queen.

Now 37, Mary turned her attention to procuring a husband to father an heir in order to prevent her half-sister, the Lady Elizabeth, from succeeding to the Throne. She rejected Edward Courtenay, 1st Earl of Devon as a prospect when her first cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, suggested that she marry his only son, the Spanish prince Philip. The marriage, a purely political alliance for Philip, was extremely unpopular with the English. Lord Chancellor Gardiner and the House of Commons petitioned her to consider marrying an Englishman, fearing that England would be relegated to a dependency of Spain. The fear of dependency was due in large part to the inexperience of having a queen regnant. Insurrections broke out across the country when she refused. The Duke of Suffolk once again proclaimed that his daughter, the Lady Jane Grey, was Queen. The young Sir Thomas Wyatt led a force from Kent, and was not defeated until he had arrived at London's gates. After the rebellions were crushed, both the Duke of Suffolk and the Lady Jane Grey were convicted of high treason and executed. Since the rebellion was designed to put her on the throne, the Lady Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower of London, but was put under house arrest in Woodstock Palace after two months.

Mary married Philip on 25 July 1554 at Winchester Cathedral. Under the terms of the marriage treaty, Philip was to be styled "King of England", all official documents (including Acts of Parliament) were to be dated with both their names and Parliament was to be called under the joint authority of the couple. Philip's powers, however, were extremely limited; he and Mary were not true joint Sovereigns. Nonetheless, Philip was the only man to take the crown matrimonial upon his marriage to a reigning Queen of England; William III became jointly sovereign with his wife, Mary II, pursuant to Act of Parliament, rather than matrimonial right. Coins were to also show the head of both Mary and Philip. The marriage treaty further provided that England would not be obliged to provide military support to Philip's father, the Holy Roman Emperor, in any war. Mary fell in love with Philip and, thinking she was pregnant, had thanksgiving services at the diocese of London in November 1554. But Philip found his queen, who was eleven years his senior, to be physically unattractive and after only fourteen months left for Spain under a false excuse. Mary suffered a phantom pregnancy; Philip released the Lady Elizabeth from house arrest so that he could be viewed favourably by her in case Mary died during childbirth.

Mary then turned her attention to religious issues. She had always rejected the break with Rome instituted by her father. Her half-brother, Edward, had established Protestantism; Mary wished to revert to Roman Catholicism. England was reconciled with Rome, and Reginald Cardinal Pole, who would become an adviser Mary very heavily depended upon, became Archbishop of Canterbury, after Mary had his predecessor executed. Edward's religious laws were abolished by Mary's first Parliament and numerous Protestant leaders were executed in the so-called Marian Persecutions. The first to die was John Rogers (4 February 1555) and the next to be killed was John Hooper, the Bishop of Gloucester (9 February 1555). The persecution lasted uninterrupted for three and three-quarter years. She earned the epithet of Bloody Mary though her successor and half-sister, Elizabeth, more than balanced the number killed under Mary with Catholic persecution, in total, but not in frequency. (Elizabeth reigned seven times as long, and some of her executions were of actual traitors, under any definition). For frequency the persecution of Catholics under the short reign of her predecessor Edward VI is perhaps more comparable or possibly the persecution of Protestants in the early years of their father Henry VIII.

Having inherited the Throne of Spain upon his father's abdication, Philip returned to England from March to July 1557 to persuade Mary to join with Spain in a war against France in the Italian Wars. Meanwhile, England was full of faction, and seditious pamphlets of Protestant origin inflamed the people with hatred against the Spaniards. But perhaps the strangest thing about the situation was that the Pope sided with France against Spain. English forces fared badly in the conflict and as a result the Kingdom lost Calais, its last remaining continental possession. Mary later lamented that when she lay dead the words "Philip" and "Calais" would be found inscribed on her heart.

Mary persuaded parliament to repeal the Protestant religious laws passed by Edward and Henry before her. But it took several years to persuade parliament to go all the way. And to get their agreement, she had to make a major concession: tens of thousands of acres of monastery lands confiscated under Henry were not returned to the monasteries. The new group of landowners that had been set up by this distribution remained very influential.

Mary also set in motion currency reform to counteract the dramatic devaluation of the currency overseen by Thomas Gresham that characterized the last few years of Henry VIII's reign and the reign of Edward VI. These measures, however, were largely unsuccessful and it was only under Elizabeth that economic catastrophe was prevented. Mary's deep religious convictions also inspired her to institute social reforms, although these were unsuccessful as well.

Under her reign, in another of the Plantations of Ireland, English colonists were settled in the Irish midlands to reduce the attacks on the Pale (the colony around Dublin). Two counties were created and, in her honour, were named Queens County and, for Phillip, Kings County. The county town of Queens County was called Maryborough.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Reign", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki