Mary I of England - Legacy

Legacy

At her funeral service, John White (the Bishop of Winchester) praised Mary: "She was a king's daughter; she was a king's sister; she was a king's wife. She was a queen, and by the same title a king also." She was the first woman to successfully claim the throne of England, despite competing claims and determined opposition, and enjoyed popular support and sympathy during the earliest parts of her reign, especially from the Roman Catholic population. Catholic historians, such as John Lingard, thought Mary's policies failed not because they were wrong but because she had too short a reign to establish them and because of natural disasters beyond her control. However, her marriage to Philip was unpopular among her subjects, and her religious policies resulted in deep-seated resentment. The military losses in France, poor weather and failed harvests increased public discontent. Philip spent most of his time abroad, while his wife remained in England, leaving her depressed at his absence and undermined by their inability to have children. After Mary's death, he sought to marry Elizabeth, but she refused him. Thirty years later, he sent the Spanish Armada to overthrow Elizabeth, without success.

By the seventeenth century, Mary's persecution of Protestants had led them to call her Bloody Mary. John Knox attacked her in The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regimen of Women, published in 1558, and she was prominently featured and vilified in Actes and Monuments, published by John Foxe in 1563, five years after her death. Subsequent editions of the book remained popular with Protestants throughout the following centuries, and helped shape enduring perceptions of Mary as a bloodthirsty tyrant. In the mid-twentieth century, H. F. M. Prescott attempted to redress the tradition that Mary was intolerant and authoritarian by writing more objectively, and scholarship since then has tended to view the older, simpler, partisan assessments of Mary with greater scepticism. Although Mary's rule was ultimately ineffectual and unpopular, the policies of fiscal reform, naval expansion and colonial exploration that were later lauded as Elizabethan accomplishments were started in Mary's reign.