Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen Regnant

The reign of Mary I has received much scholarly attention in recent times. Age-old assumptions about its policies, its achievements, its power-brokers, their motives and above all Mary herself have been subjected to extensive revision. The task, however, has had to overcome centuries of misinformation and anti-Catholic propaganda and prejudice that conspired to depict the English Reformation as an inevitable popular revolt against a corrupt and detested Church and of Mary Tudor, as the one who bucked the trend with her cruelty and ineptitude. This volume aims to offer a reassessment of the key controversies of the Marian period. It seeks to demonstrate both that Mary’s sobriquet ‘bloody’ is undeserved and that her reign was considerably more successful than its detractors have claimed. It also posits that the critical anti-Catholic reaction to Mary’s reign helped to define the nature of the ‘liberal’ English/British nation-state as well as contribute to its national ‘ideology’ and self-understanding for nearly five hundred years.