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"Bloody Mary": Victim or Villain?
March 21, 2010
7:40 pm
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HannahL
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Currently I am devouring Linda Porter's new biography on Mary I, and as an Anne enthusiast, seeing the other side of the story has been quite interesting.  Mary was not always the bitter, dowdy woman popular history often depicts her as.  She was brought up as an elegant and educated princess, a true royal.  I can really sympathize with young Mary as her world was turned upside down at the time of the famous divorce.  However, she did some truly cruel things in her time as queen.  So I was wondering how everyone else feels about her…was she good, bad, or somewhere in between?

March 21, 2010
11:49 pm
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Jasmine
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I have always had a lot of sympathy for Mary.  She certainly experienced terrible emotional trauma just at the time when she was entering her teens and could have expected  a royal marriage and personal power.  The most awful thing for her, no doubt, was the change in Henry from proud father who used to show her off to ambassadors to the vindictive king who took away from Mary her status, her mother and her income.

Mary wasn't cruel and vindictive when she came to the throne – she was magnanimous to her enemies and tried persuasion to get people back to catholicism.  It was only later, when that failed, she chose other methods.  How much she was influenced by the Spanish marriage is difficult to say.  After all it was the Spanish who invented the Inquisition and had “form” for the torture and execution by burning of “heretics” in great numbers.

One of the saddest relics of Mary is her prayer book, where the pages of prayers for women in childbirth are blotted with her tears.

March 29, 2010
9:49 pm
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Impish_Impulse
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I think I've said before that if Mary was a monster, she was made one by her treatment by her father. I don't like the things that happened in her reign, but all the Tudors did things I'm not comfortable with. I do have sympathy for her, but shiver at how close she came to killing her sister, which would have completely changed history. Our world would be different if Elizabeth had never been queen, and I think for the worse.

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March 30, 2010
2:13 pm
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AnneBullen
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I do not know MAry very well, but from what I know, she was a devious princess, as she was her entire life.. I truely only believe that she was in denial as queen, for she could not produce a single child, which at that point left her heart broken. I believe she would have settled for a daughter by that point. If i were her, I would have. So as a teenager, she was a victim of abuse by her father, and transitioning through mothers, must have been hard for her. Especially since she had a sister born from a, a , well, a negative person. But, all in all, MAry deserved better than what she recieved.

March 30, 2010
8:18 pm
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HannahL
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I agree that she deserved better.  I finished the book several days back and will never feel the same about Mary.

March 31, 2010
4:58 am
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Lexy
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I'm always thinking to Mary as the child of a bad divorce: she grew up between doting parents who she thought loved each other, then her father left, treating her as a bastard and allowing his wife to treat her bad. I'm convinced that she suffered a lot when Katherine Howard entered her life: just imagine, a stepmother younger than her and a trophy wife who she probably found dumb. She probably thought that it was unfair: that girl was less intelligent and educated than her, less high born than her and more carefree than her, but her father loved that girl more than her. Children who experience this often destry themselves in a way or the other, at any moment. they are depressed,  suffer from a lack of self confidence and try to be loved: exactly the relation of Mary with Philip of Spain or the Catholic faction.

March 31, 2010
7:55 pm
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HannahL
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I agree Lexy.  As much as I love Anne, the circumstances of Mary's life were certainly tragic.  After reading Linda Porter's excellent (in my opinion) biography, I am in awe of her courage and strength.  I think I would've cracked under so much pressure!  We also have to remember that on top of everything else, Mary had a severe gynological condition that was virtually unable to be treated in her time.  She was a true princess to have survived so much hardship.

April 10, 2010
3:28 am
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Claire
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I loved Linda Porter's biography (by the way, she does an excellent job with Katherine Parr too) because it does challenge the stereotypes regarding Mary including whether Mary's reign was a disaster. It's so easy for us to think of Elizabeth I's reign as a Golden Age and Mary's reign as disastrous and unpopular but Mary was the one who paved the way for Elizabeth.

Psychologically Mary was a product of her father's ill treatment and I doubt that anyone could have had her childhood and become a normal functioning woman. To go from pampered princess to someone who is physically threatened by members of her father's council, to go from number one daughter to the maid of her half-sister, to see her parents' marriage fall apart and then her mother treated like a leper, to be used as a pawn and never know a normal happy relationship – so sad! No wonder she had such ill health and what an achievement to rise above it all and fight for her right to be Queen.

It does seem very unfair too to call her “Bloody Mary” when her father is thought to have killed around 72,000 people during his reign. It is plain that Mary thought of herself as God's chosen person to rule over the country and stamp out heresy. She saw the Protestant faith as an evil heresy and Protestants as followers of Satan, she thought she was doing right by her country and by God. I'm not justifying her actions, I do not believe and will never believe that religion should be used in this way, but I can see her motivation and understand it in the context of the times she lived in.

Victim or Villain? Both I suppose. A flawed human who was a product of her upbringing and of society.

Debunking the myths about Anne Boleyn

April 11, 2010
12:54 pm
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HannahL
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I like your definition Claire Smile and LP's biography on Katherine Parr is one of many books I can't wait to get my hands on!

October 12, 2010
4:32 am
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Kim
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I have always felt so much sympathy for Mary (and in fact one of the things that I love most about “The Tudors” is that for all their historical inaccuracies, they portray Mary in a more sympathetic light). I think that she was simply the product of the environment she was raised in. 

It has also been shown that at the beginning of her reign, when she had the full support of the English people, she could be kind and gracious (as shown by her delay in signing Jane Grey’s death warrant), however towards the end of her reign, once she had lost that support and she could not produce an heir, she turned into a very cruel woman. But I think she probably also got that behavious from her father a bit as well. Henry could be the most generous man in the world when things where going his way, but the moment the tide turned against him he lashed out at everyone around him. If I’m not mistaken Elizabeth also had a mighty temper when provoked as well. Maybe it was more of a case of ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’?

October 15, 2010
12:21 pm
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Sharon
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 I am saddened by the way Mary’s parents, and Anne, treated her, and it is understandable how their actions affected her.  I certainly feel they destroyed a beautiful girl.  For all intent and purpose her mother was lost to her at a most critical age for a young girl, and she was abandoned by her Father for many years.  It is not surprising that she wanted a husband to love her and give her children. Even this, was not to be.  She was denied love from Phillip, who could not wait to get away from her, and she was never able to have the child that she would have loved with all her heart. Mary counted on a husband who was not there, and it broke her heart.  It is unfortunate that she was so conflicted when it came to Elizabeth.  I believe she loved her, but could not bring herself to trust her, and it left Mary without love. She accepted the domination of Reginald Pole and the Church.  In her name, her people were burned at the stake. She had accepted the domination of the Spanish King, who cared only for his own Empire.  What she had left was an angry, resentful nation fearing war.  The Queen’s compassionate attitude led Jane Dormer to say bitterly, “From the time of her Mother’s trouble, this Queen had daily use of patience and few days of content…”

 

October 16, 2010
6:10 pm
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Impish_Impulse
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Sharon said:

The Queen’s compassionate attitude led Jane Dormer to say bitterly, “From the time of her Mother’s trouble, this Queen had daily use of patience and few days of content…”

 


 As Kim noted above, this was displayed well in The Tudors. For all of the series’ inaccuracies, they got this right.

“I certainly feel they destroyed a beautiful girl.”

This.

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March 14, 2011
11:00 pm
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La Belle Creole
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The euphemism “Bloody Mary” is appallingly misplaced. 

I think Mary had a short-sighted view of her nation and her people.  After years of struggling to uphold her faith in private, she likely saw herself as someone “liberating” England from “heresy.”  Little did she imagine many English nobles were quite satisfied to consume the wealth and lands stolen from Catholic orders.  She was bound to have a biased viewpoint on national religion and her alliance/marriage to Spain did nothing to balance it. 

July 12, 2011
7:08 pm
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anna123
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I think that possibly many of Mary's problems came from wanting to be loved.   Her mother was taken away from her, and her father ignored her, both having an understandably significant negative impact on her life.   After her father's death, she was constantly pressured by her brother to give up Catholicism, which she refused to do, driving a wedge between them.  Her husband couldn't stand her, and she never had a baby to love her unconditionally.  The support of the people mattered to her, and when she lost it, she began the burnings.  I also read somewhere that she substituted religion for love, and her fanatical devotion to the pope (Smile) was an outlet for her personal unhappiness.  

July 13, 2011
12:54 am
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Sophie1536
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I always see Mary as a sad, lonely figure in history and I wish so much she had had a happier life, sadly a lot of her life was down to circumstances. I think her parents divorce definitely had the biggest impact on her life and she never came to terms with any of it and somehow it shaped the rest of her adult life sadly missing out on the love she could have gave and been given. Yes she did many cruel things in her reign , maybe this was her way of hitting out her unhappy life who knows……

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July 14, 2011
5:13 am
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Bill1978
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As a high school student I used to think Mary was a villain. But after getting 'obsessed' with the Tudor world of late. My opinion has changed. Through watching The Tudors, Lady Jane , reading brief bits about her in biographies and her wikipedia article I am beginning to think especially by the time she died she was suffering from a mental illness. In fact, I would say the moment she became Queen was the moment the illness began to take over Mary. She was torn in so many directions and really didn't know what was the right thing to do with so many people in her ears. I really feel sorry for her, she wanted to do what was right, but had no idea what that really was.

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