Mary Tudor: England's First Queen [Hardcover]

If you have had limited exposure to the Tudor era, this is a nice introduction to the life and reign of Mary I. It provides an accessible overview without being difficult to follow.

Those with a good grounding in Tudor era history, however, will probably find nothing new in this book. I also found that the short chapters - so thoroughly praised by other reviewers - limit the amount of information that can be imparted about the subject at hand. Thus, one has the feeling that one is merely browsing Mary's life without going into it in much depth.

In short, this is a good book for one who is just discovering Mary Tudor. Those in search of a more in depth examination should look elsewhere.

Mary Tudor, like Richard III, and Oliver Cromwell, remains one of those characters that history has not been kind to after their death, while household names like Henry VIII and Elizabeth I are often remembered more fondly. Luckily there are historians and authors today who now portray Mary in a far more sympathetic and intelligent light.

One such author is Anna Whitelock and her recent historical biography on Mary Tudor had proved to be a good effort and a very successful book. This book has been my first foray into reading about Mary, and as a person who has a more casual rather than an academic interest in history it has been a pleasure to read. It is not a 'heavy' tome and the author's style is eminently readable and encourages the reader to keep going - it is the sort of book that you can't or don't want to put down.

In tandem with other reviewers, I also certainly endorse the Linda Porter book on Mary, and it is a good book to move onto after this one as it takes you up to a higher level.

Mary Tudor has long suffered from the dual historical burden of Protestant propaganda and the long shadow cast by her half-sister, Elizabeth. The first has defined her as a failed queen who executed her subjects in a futile attempt to reimpose her Catholic faith, while the second has long distracted later generations from undertaking any sort of searching historical reevaluation. This is what makes Anna Whitelock's biography of the queen so refreshing. In it, she offers a dramatic reassessment of Mary, one that presents her not as "Bloody Mary" but as a successful monarch who persevered against numerous challenges.

Triumphing against adversity was not new to Mary as a queen, as she had been dealing with it from an early age. As the first surviving child of Henry VIII, she was a major political figure from the moment of her birth, and she became a prominent figure in the marriage politics of the royalty practically as soon as she could walk. Yet Henry's determination to have a son soon turned Mary into a virtual prisoner, cutting her off from her mother, Katherine of Aragon, and many of her potential supporters. It was only under the threat of death that she accepted her father's elevation to the head of a Church of England and her own status as a bastard. Though this helped rehabilitate her in her father's eyes and helped to confirm her right to the throne later, it did not return her to the status of heir apparent, as her half-brother Edward became next in line from the moment of his birth.

Though Mary initially enjoyed good relations with Edward and his subsequent regime, her determination to hold steadfast to her Catholic faith put her at odds with the increasingly radical tone of Edward's Protestant policies. This contributed to Edward's determination to disinherit Mary as he faced an early death. Mary's success in overcoming this effort and in securing the throne for herself is the first sign of the decisiveness and determination that characterized her rule as queen. Whitelock shows her to be a politically astute monarch who navigated innumerable pitfalls in order to govern a religiously fractious realm. She argues that Mary did not intend for the reconversion of her realm to be as bloody as it was, that it was the determination of the Protestants to die for their faith rather than recant that led the burnings to number in their hundreds. Their martyrdom only fueled the discontent that plagued her reign and made Elizabeth such a constant concern for the queen. Whitelock suggests that the strains of ruling contributed to Mary's ill health and death at the age of 42, a death which paved the way for Elizabeth, the ultimate triumph of Protestantism, and the overshadowing of Mary's achievements as queen.

Whitelock's biography is an enjoyably readable account of Mary's life and a convincing rehabilitation of her historical reputation. Yet her focus on the politics of Mary's life dominate the pages of her book; there are only fleeting glimpses of Mary as a person, just passing references to her personal relationships, her addition to gambling, and her other personality traits. Because of this, Whitelock's biography serves better as a political narrative of the events of her subject's life than as a fully realized portrait of Mary. This is not to deny Whitelock's real achievement in recasting Mary as a more successful ruler than she has been given credit for, but readers seeking more than just a study of Mary's political career would do well to supplement her book with Linda Porter's Mary Tudor: The First Queen, which does a better job of presenting Mary as an individual than Whitelock has here.