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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Of Queen Mary this truly may be affirmed, and left in story for a perpetual memorial or epitaph for all kings and queens that shall succeed her, to be noted, that before her never was read in story of any king or queen of England, under whom, in time of peace, by hanging, beheading, burning and prisoning, so much Christian blood
So many Englishmen's lives were spilled within this realm, as under the said Queen Mary for the space of four years was to be seen. And I beseech the Lord, never may be seen hereafter. So that was the Tudor number one bestseller, the thrillingly titled Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days Touching Matters of the Church.
And it was by an unusually forensic and judicious historian, John Fox, a man of Lincolnshire, hence the accent. And that book went down in English history as Fox's Book of Martyrs, one of the foundational texts you might argue, of English national identity. It was published in 1563, five years after the death of the character he's talking about, Mary Tudor.
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Chapter 2: What role did John Fox's writings play in shaping perceptions of Mary?
Edward is definitely a Protestant. Both of them uphold the notion that the king should be the head of the Church of England and use that to ram through their reforms of the Church of England. Mary, as a Catholic, thinks that the papal supremacy should be restored and does that very quickly.
But even once she's done that, she still operates on the assumption, basically, that she's the head of the Church of England. What she decides basically goes. So she's inherited that assumption as well, I think, from her father and her brother.
But the reason that she doesn't really see any tension there is, as you said, that she doesn't really have a sense of there having been a reformation that needs to be countered. She doesn't really think that the scale of the upheaval that England has gone through is something that has imposed a kind of binary contrast on England.
So to quote Lucy Wooding in her wonderful introduction to Tudor England, which I think is the best single volume on Tudor England that there is, She writes, Mary seems to have had the firm conviction that, bar a few troublemakers, she was essentially ruling a Catholic country with the support of its people.
But that's probably true, isn't it? I mean, in so far as most people, if you'd said to them, are you a Catholic or Protestant, they'd look at you like you were mad. Maybe younger people, as in people under the age of 20, will have been brought up in a more evangelical mindset.
But older people, I mean, people are aware that changes have happened, and many of them will probably say, God, a lot of these changes are a bit bonkers, aren't they? I don't really understand them myself. But they don't think to themselves, well, we're living through the Reformation. I wonder if there'll be a counter-Reformation. I mean, that's not how people think.
I think that's absolutely right.
So to that extent, Mary is correct that there's a kind of bit of spring cleaning that needs to be done. There's kind of damage being done. Yeah, things have gone much too far. Things have gone too far, but you just tidy it up and then things will basically be as they were. Now, it has to be said, we also have this idea, I think, that there's such a thing as Catholicism.
which is monolithic, refusing to change. But that's not the case at all, because the Catholic world, like the Protestant world in the 16th century, is in a constant state of flux. There are Catholic reformers. There are people in the upper echelons of the Catholic church who absolutely feel that reform is necessary. And Mary herself... belongs to that wing of the Catholic Church.
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Chapter 3: How did Elizabeth survive under Mary Tudor's reign?
So Elizabeth, knowing that she's got to prove herself to Mary, early in September, she requests an audience with her sister. She's a great actress. She falls down on her knees, tears streaming from her cheeks, lamenting that Mary seems ill-disposed to her. And to quote, she knew of no other cause except religion.
She might be excused in this because she had been brought up in the way she held and had never been taught the doctrine of the ancient religion. That's a good card to play because Mary knows that's absolutely, you know, she knows that's true.
I'm the real victim in all this.
Yeah. So Elizabeth says, well, you know, can you send me a priest, give me books that I can read up and, you know, learn the error of my ways. And on the 8th of September, she duly attends mass with Mary at the chapel Royal. Although again, a kind of classic Elizabeth maneuver. She does try to get out of it by pulling a sickie, but Mary sends a doctor and says, actually fine.
Yeah. Yeah. So after that quite promising start, things start to get tense again, don't they? And how much of this do you think is the, I mean, it's an interesting question, actually. How much have they inherited the bad blood between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn? So how much does, you know, obviously Mary hated Anne Boleyn because Anne Boleyn was horrible to her.
Does she blame Elizabeth at some subconscious level, do you think? Possibly.
Once the complications of religious divides have been removed, as we've said, Mary has been incredibly kind to Elizabeth and viewed her as a sister. But the moment that religion complicates the picture, then things start to go tense again. Mary, in the first months of her reign, is busy disassembling the Protestantism of her brother.
She knows that Elizabeth is unsympathetic to this, and so she starts to see Elizabeth again as a threat. Specifically, she begins to go on to her advisors that Elizabeth resembles Anne Boleyn. Again, to quote, "...as her mother had caused great trouble in the kingdom, the queen feared that Elizabeth might do the same."
But important to say, Mary's anxieties about Elizabeth are not just on the religious dimension, because there is also a further one, which is that of foreign policy. And Mary is worried that Elizabeth might imitate Anne Boleyn in being a French partisan.
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Chapter 4: Why did Edward VI choose Lady Jane Grey over Elizabeth and Mary?
Yeah. But Mary's queen, she's a Tudor, she's the daughter of Henry VIII, and so she's not having any opposition in Parliament at all. So she swats all criticism aside in a very imperious manner. We shall marry as God shall direct our choice to his honour and to our country's good. And again, a very Henry VIII development. She ponders disinheriting Elizabeth completely.
And of course, Henry VIII was always doing that. He was always disinheriting his various children. Mary now wants to disinherit her sister because she sees her as too heretical, too popular with the mass of the people. She suspects her of being in league with the French. There are all kinds of good reasons, it seems to Mary. But her counselors say this would be a really, really bad idea.
So as one of them puts it, Since Parliament had accepted the Lady Elizabeth as proper to succeed, it would be difficult to deprive her of the right she claimed without causing trouble. And what does he mean by trouble? Well, there are those 2,000 horsemen. There's the fact that Elizabeth is the second largest landowner in the country. Let sleeping dogs lie is basically the advice.
So Mary does, but of course she remains very suspicious of her. And all the more so because the marriage with Philip is unpopular for the reasons that we've been saying. And she's nervous about whether Elizabeth might be kind of causing trouble. So Elizabeth, by December, is aware that she is really not flavour of the month with Mary.
And so she decides to withdraw from London, withdraw from the court, and she goes back to Hatfield. and hunkers down there. At the same time as she does this, in closed rooms across the capital, across the south of England and into the Midlands, conspirators are starting to plot rebellion. The object of these conspirators is to depose Mary and to replace her with Elizabeth.
The man who gives his name to this plot is a kind of young dashing blade called Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of the man who introduced the sonnet into England. He's a very experienced soldier. He's a Protestant, and he loathes the Spanish because his father, as well as bringing the sonnet into England, had also been an ambassador to Spain.
And so the young Thomas had been there and had seen the Inquisition doing its stuff and had fully bought into the idea of Spain as a kind of a nest of Catholic tyrants.
And because he's a swashbuckling charismatic character, Wyatt, everyone calls this Wyatt's Rebellion. But actually it's kind of Lady Jane Grey too, isn't it?
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How did Elizabeth's relationships with her siblings influence her fate?
This is the day, of course, that Wyatt's rebellion had been scheduled for. There is nothing from Mary. She doesn't reply to Elizabeth's letter. And so Elizabeth is resigned to her fate. If there be no remedy, she says, then I must be contented. So she gets into the boat. She's rowed up the river towards the tower. It's bucketing down with rain.
Underneath London Bridge, the boat goes and they pull up to the tower and moor there. And according to John Fox, who describes all this in great and loving detail, she was rowed up to the traitor's gate. And she initially, she refused to get out of the boat. And then when she did so, she declared, here landeth as true a subject being prisoner as ever landed at these stairs.
And this becomes a kind of famous, famous scene, famous lines. However, we know from a contemporary witness that this didn't happen, that actually she entered the tower across the drawbridge. So she got out of the boat and entered through the main entrance.
And I think this would have been no less chilling for Elizabeth because that is the same gateway through which her mother, Anne Boleyn, had entered the tower. And when Elizabeth passed inside the tower, she would have seen the scaffolding on which Lady Jane Grey, her cousin, had just been executed. And that had been built on the very spot where her mother had been executed.
And when she is led to her quarters, these are the royal quarters which her father had rebuilt for her mother's coronation and where Anne had stayed until the hour of her execution. So massive psychological pressure, and I think completely deliberate. Um, partly, you know, you asked is, is Mary avenging herself on the ghost of Anne Boleyn?
I think to a degree here she is, but I think she's also doing it because she needs Elizabeth to break. She needs Elizabeth to confess because if Elizabeth doesn't confess, then there isn't really any hard evidence against her. This really matters because, just to reiterate, Elizabeth is very popular. She is a very powerful figure in her own right.
It would be very dangerous for Mary to prosecute her own sister without extremely solid evidence. Elizabeth is probably confident that there isn't hard evidence against her. And so when she's brought before the council on Good Friday, it soon becomes very clear that they haven't really got anything on her.
That said, in Henry VIII, Henry VIII would undoubtedly have executed her. I mean, he didn't need hard evidence. He made it up. But Mary is not quite as capricious. And I guess for a woman, it's maybe harder to be quite so secure that you can just make stuff up. as Henry VIII was. Yeah, I think her position is less stable than Henry's. Exactly. So there is a danger, isn't there?
Wyatt... He's still on the scene. And he's going to be executed on the 11th of April. And there must have been some doubt in her mind, some fear that basically he turns up on the scaffold and says, Elizabeth made me do it, but she was part of it. She knew about it all along. But he deliberately doesn't do that. Why doesn't he do it? Because it's not true? Or...
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