Oh, much-maligned Mary Tudor. Forever linked to the word "bloody." A little like having "the Terrible," "the Cruel," "the Incompetent," "the Dangerously Stupid," or "the Bastard" forever fixed after one's name. Scourge of hot Protestants, Mary has not fared well with historians and other critics. In 1791 a writer in the London Review vented that Mary's wicked use of the Tower of London ranked "as bloody, as cruel, and as horrid, as any of the tales of the castle known by the name of the Bastille at Paris."
Enter Peter Marshall, who reviews four recent books on Queen Mary in the TLS. The title of his piece is particularly
provocative: "Not a Real Queen? What Do Historians Have against England’s Earliest Queen Regnant – a Decisive and Clear-headed Ruler?":England is no longer a Protestant nation, but the cultural templates of the past stubbornly resist resetting. Feminist historians have almost uniformly declined the invitation to laud the achievements of England’s earliest Queen regnant (in fact, much modern scholarship, as Judith M. Richards notes in exasperation, seems almost to proceed from the assumption that Elizabeth I was the nation’s first female ruler). Meanwhile, the judgement of the Enlightenment, in the person of David Hume, that Mary was “a weak bigoted woman, under the government of priests” has proved remarkably tenacious. It continues to characterize representations of the queen in popular culture, from Kathy Burke’s skilful cameo as a gibbering simpleton in Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film Elizabeth, to Mary’s role in a recent Discovery Channel series on “the most evil women in history”. It is revealing that three of these authors begin their books with anecdotes about the negative or sceptical reactions of friends and colleagues on being told they were writing about “Mary Tudor”. >>>
See these related reviews:
Geoffrey Moorhouse, "Burning Questions: Geoffrey Moorhouse Wonders if Mary Tudor Deserves Her Reputation for Cruelty," Guardian, 4 July 2009.
Lucy Beckett, "Cardinal Values," Spectator, 17 June 2009.
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3 comments:
This is indeed an interesting debate. I have just read Eamon Duffy's Fires of Faith and thought his central argument against the prevailing opinion that Mary's Catholicism ignored Counter-Reformation trends was quite well defended. Cardinal Pole was a leader of the Counter-Reformation and his efforts influenced the Council of Trent and Charles Borromeo, the great reformer of Milan. Nevertheless, the succession, as it always was for the Tudor Dynasty was so essential to the success or failure of Marian Catholicism. Since Mary did not have a child, Elizabeth would succeed her.
There are some great recent publications which reassess Mary's reign and policies by Linda Porter and Anna Whitelock.
I also read an interesting article by Eamon Duffy in the London Review of Books which defends her case quite well.
Mary sadly remains one of this figures in British history who always seems to get a bad press, like Prince/King John, Richard III, and Oliver Cromwell.
Luckily today there are more enlightened, sympathetic, intelligent, and academic historians who quite rightly portray Mary in a far better light, and quite rightly so, and this balances out the vitriolic rubbish that has been often written about her by people who should know better, and by people who know anything about her at all.
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