Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen (review)

This is a thoroughly researched biography of Mary I that gives due weight to the queen’s international situation and Spanish heritage. Mary’s international connections and later marriage alliance with Philip II of Spain made her into a cosmopolitan figure. Unlike her half-sister Elizabeth, who boasted of being “mere English,” Mary took her place on the European stage as the linchpin in the restoration of England to the rest of Catholic Christendom. It is, however, hard to identify the specific audience for this work. It is a bit technical and verbose for a popular audience while too little engaged with recent Marian scholarship to be of much use to specialists.

John Edwards sees many parallels between Mary’s political career and that of her maternal grandmother, Isabel of Castile. They were blood relations, female monarchs in patriarchal states, and married to men who were kings in their own right. All this is certainly true. Yet it is hard to see how these similarities provide any insight into Mary’s situation. After all, she shared these similarities with her Scottish cousin, Mary Stuart; yet there is little to be gained by noting this. Mary did not publicly identify herself with Isabel, nor did she even bother to learn enough Spanish so she could converse with her husband in his native tongue. The one lesson that Mary appeared to have picked up from her Spanish mother, Catherine of Aragon, was to cherish her Habsburg relatives but identify her interests and future with that of England, not Spain.

This biography is reminiscent of H. F. M. Prescott’s inexplicably influential Mary Tudor: The Spanish Tudor (London, 1940). Prescott described Mary as a simple housewife at heart, and Edwards concludes that such an assessment “is not wide of the mark” (p. 345). This assessment runs counter to recent scholarship noting Mary’s humanist education, complex rhetoric, and astonishing near success in restoring England to the Catholic fold.

That Edwards borrows a little of Prescott’s misguided confidence is understandable. Mary resists easy assessment and the biographer’s art. As princess, she advised the imperial ambassador to burn their correspondence, suggesting she may have habitually destroyed hers. Unlike Elizabeth, Mary’s decisive actions rarely match her nihilistic rhetoric. When Elizabeth declared she would rather remain single but would marry if God placed a suitable candidate before her, she followed through by remaining single but also vigorously pursuing a match with a French prince. Whereas Mary assured her subjects during the Wyatt rebellion that she would only marry after consulting the privy council, she had, in fact, already privately sworn to marry Philip regardless of the council’s views. Mary deployed the rhetoric of wifely subordination and dependence in her letters to Philip when he was away to lure him back, yet she failed to seriously pursue the one course of action that would have brought him instantly to her side—arranging his coronation as king of England.

Despite Edwards’s laudable practice of varying the narrative pace so that royal ceremonies in which Mary participated unfold slowly in rich detail, Mary remains elusive as a personality. Perhaps the questioning nursery rhyme hits the mark when it asks: “Mary, Mary, quite contrary/How does your garden grow?” Although Edwards includes an exhaustive bibliography and index, his biography is no closer to answering the rhyme than Prescott was in 1940. This reader was left with the following question: How does one chronicle the lives of subjects whose actions belie their words?