Was Bloody Mary that bad?

[Music] hello and welcome to the first session of david starkey members q a first to thank everybody who submitted questions through a really interesting lot and they've done the most important thing it made me think a bit so let's begin george in essex asks was mary the first bloody mary as terrible a queen as we've been led to believe or is her current reputation largely due to protestant propaganda well it is indeed largely due to protestant propaganda but propaganda isn't always wrong mary's to be rather rude about a woman is a bit of a mixed bag she's very much her father's daughter although she constantly presents herself as her mother's daughter in other words daughter of catherine of aragon she is passionately hurt by her father's divorce because of course her father divorces when she's a teenager she experiences the terrible humiliation being effectively not only bastardized but turned into a lady in waiting on her half-sister the young elizabeth for that brief three years when elizabeth is heir to the throne and princess of england it's terrible it's humiliating and so much of mary's life is an act of vengeance which both powers her and at the same time as vengeance often does i think it withers you and destroys you it also makes you a very bad judge of important questions on the other hand personally mary seems to have been very kind she loved children she desperately wanted children of her own but of course she is fundamentally and a fundamentalist catholic of passionate intensity she's also of course her father's daughter she only becomes queen because of her extraordinary courage and a degree of military skill if you remember immediately after the death of edward um it looked as though it wasn't going to be mary was going to be queen at all it's jane grey because edward quite unconstitutional in other words in defiance of the will of his father and which was also endorsed by act of parliament edward had unilaterally changed the succession by mere fiat the document is a very remarkable one it's called his device for the succession and in some ways although he's extraordinarily precocious he's a very precocious boy it reads and looks like a kind of crowned adrian mole you know edward aged 14 and three quarters or whatever he was um but it looked as though it was going to work by sheer will against this will that all henry's children inherit he had forced his counselors forced the judges to accept it and and mary was shunted aside and jane grey looked as though she was going to walk to the throne and the imperial ambassador himself takes for granted that mary's cause is lost but it wasn't it wasn't because of her personal courage she raises troops and in frambling framlingham she'd succeeded as part of the inheritance that she'd had in the right of her father's will she'd succeeded to the vast estates of the dukes of norfolk which had been confiscated with their headquarters in the great castle of framlingham she proclaims herself queen she marches south and resistance crumbles and she receives the submission of the man behind edward's coup the duke of northumberland john dudley duke of northumberland at cambridge and he humiliatingly has to throw his cap in the air and the queen acclaimed the queen along with the rest and it's this same courage that preserves her throne because she comes to the throne in july 1553 in january 1554 there is the great conspiracy led by thomas wyatt the son of uh the man who probably wasn't ambulance was certainly wasn't amberlyn's lover uh in a sexual sense but had written extraordinary poems about the poet thomas wyatt anyway his son raises kent in a protestant revolt there's no doubt that um elizabeth somewhere had her finger in the pie although it's arranged to be carefully deniable and wyatt comes within a whisker a whisk of taking london and more importantly of capturing whitehall the queen is all ready to flee her barge is waiting at the previous stair to take her to the tower and to escape abroad and it's within a whisker a whisker of abandonment but once again she shows extraordinary courage and she does something else even before wyatt enters this and actually marches around london even before wyatt's troops appear at the thames crossing what had she done she turned up at the guild hall in london on the hustings that's the platform where people were then competing for office in the city it wasn't bugging's turn in tudor england you actually had to get up there and campaign the hustings you you know you to put your case and she puts her case to the citizens and it's done magnificently she has her father's and indeed half sisters extraordinary ability public speaking she's got this fine contralto rather deep manish voice and it's now for that that that like the receding hairline and everything else might be due to the thing that eventually kills her which is uh cancer uh of the optic nerve uh the effect on the pituitary gland and everything else that flows from that so she shows this extraordinary courage and passion in seizing the throne and moreover she then holds the initiative for the first half of her reign and parliament caves in to the marriage with philip of spain it's very carefully ring fenced in other words the the the marriage treaties make absolutely clear that although philip is going to be king he's he's he's what's called the crown matrimonial but he will be king he actually takes precedence of mary it's the reign of philip and mary from the moment of their marriage in july 1554 the privy council essentially reports to him so here we've got then this this this extraordinary success and parliament continues and restores catholicism and the one thing it won't do is take away the monastic lands from the people who've who bought them or otherwise acquired them but pretty much everything else rolls through and it continues to roll through why why does mary fail she's got her marriage she's got the throne she's restored the right religion and we'll talk a bit of course about the methods by which that religion is restored and the persecution of protestants in a moment and but she's done all these things she's carried everything before her why because people thought she was the future the question of the future is so important so what turns in mary's reign isn't to do with her political capacity it's not to do with her intelligence and it's not to do really i think even with her religious position the evidence is actually that protestantism though there are heroic martyrs some hundreds of them for protestantism protestantism is a minority of faith it's quite clear that the it had been forced certainly the extrema sort of protestantism of the latter part of edward's reign is enforced on the english people they don't want it so none of these things are why mary fails because mary does fail the failure is the most intimate the cruelest it's her failure to conceive it's her failure to have a child if mary had been able to have a child even if she died relatively soon afterwards as she probably would have done and philip would have been regent england would have been firmly bound to the habsburgs that had been a half habsburg heir to the throne and elizabeth would have been nowhere she would have been shot to decide so it is that failure and it's of course a failure which is profoundly humiliating because mary persuades herself that she really is pregnant there's our extraordinary moment when cardinal poole reginald poole mary's cousin and the papal legate in england and her choice as archbishop of canterbury when he appears in england and is welcomed in england uh in the latter part of 1554 um the king and the queen completely break precedent there at white hall in the great new palace of henry viii when cardinal poole lands at the previous stair now etiquette dictates that the king and queen should receive the cardinal although of course this cardinal and papal legate is a very high status they should receive him in the presence chamber they don't they actually go to meet him halfway along the vast length the 100-yard long privy gallery at that point i suppose the longest room in in northern europe and halfway along the king and the queen on one side and the cardinal leggett on the other meet and what does paul do he greets her with the words hail mary full of grace the words of the annunciation and mary clutches her belly and thinks she feels the babe stirring her womb and then there's the extraordinary charade as it turns out to be of her pregnancy and her taking to her chamber that formal ceremonial moment at which you take to your chamber in other words that what the victorians call confinement in which the queen retires with with her ladies to her bend chamber six weeks or so before she's due to give birth and it's not seen again by the male world until the child has appeared mary does this at hampton court and at least about easter 1554 at easter time 1555. and uh sorry yes give me let's get that right easter time 1555. and she makes she actually breaks rules she stands philip is jousting this isn't george's day joust taking place and mary actually stands at the window to watch phillip joust and she stands sideways on so that her great belly swollen we now think by the problems the glandular problems that result from her illness the swollen barely the swollen breast and whatever she stands there says that they can all be seen and she summonses elizabeth to be present to witness the humiliation she is replaced in the succession by this little child but the little child doesn't come mary keynes mary praise mary prostrates herself on the floor elizabeth watches sardonically and finally mary slinks out of the palace in the summer months and months late after rumors have circulated in london that she'd given birth to a french lap dog or a monkey and she's laughed at by a beggar in the park and at that point now it's clear that she's not going to have a child now it's clear there isn't going to be a catholic heir the rain turns on the pins head she'd lose his control of parliament parliament above all will not agree to confiscate the lands of the protestant exiles those who fled abroad to escape the burnings of the persecutions that guarantees failure that and the survival of elizabeth that and the absolute refusal of the english to remove elizabeth as heir that's why the protestant elite like william sissel like elizabeth herself can sort of pretend to conform but effectively withdraws and waits for events to take place waits in other words for mary to die the consequences of this of course is a terrible moral judgment on mary those hundreds of deaths are to absolutely no purpose amen duffy may write enthusiastically i find shockingly about the effects of persecution yes persecution does work by the end of mary's reign there are very few people volunteering to be burned because remember being burned is a voluntary act if you renounce your heresy the church will pardon you very few people are coming forward to be burned but it actually makes no difference because the future is elizabeth and people more and more know it and moreover mary does something else by her determination for vengeance against the man that she blames more than anybody else for her parents divorce and for the apostasy of england that's thomas cranmer archbishop of canterbury cranmer collapses under the pressure when he's prosecuted for heresy and faces the horror of burning and he recounts now at that point he should have escaped the fire mary insists that he should be burned she was a fool because cranmer he's put up as it were to repeat his recantation on the eve of his fire you can still see the traces uh in saint mary's church in oxford you can still see where the platform was erected says that he could perform this final act of humiliation before his horrible death but faced with the fire crammer recovers his courage he renounces his renunciation and is rushed off uh to to to to to be burned and at the stake he famously extends the hand the hand which had signed his recantation he extends his right hand into the flames so it's burned before his face and at that point protestantism which has lost its moral dignity with the collapse of its leaders protestantism recovers i think it's moral standing if cranmer had died a recanted heretic if you know was reconciled to the church the moral standing of protestantism well it wouldn't have died but it would have been so severely injured instead by his heroic martyr's death he leaves a protestant legacy that elizabeth can benefit from and mary can't destroy and then finally of course and famously there's not only the failure to alter the succession in england which leads to the inevitable triumph of protestantism and at home there is the absolute failure in foreign policy abroad in which you lose cali and it's that double failure that personal failure to produce an heir and that absolute humiliation as the last of england's foreign possessions is lost that enables mary to be branded both bloody and incompetent unfair but then political judgments are never really fair it's the winner and mary and catholicism are losers now as you can see it's a wonderful wonderful topic i explored it very fully in my biography of the young elizabeth and what i will do and and george thank you very much for this question i'll make sure that i do a david stark talks a proper video on mary as one of my very first tudor videos so thank you for that [Music] do [Music]

Channel: David Starkey Talks

Views: 56,631

Keywords: David Starkey, History

Id: uVvNMZG5Obk

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021