Bloody Mary

MARY TUDOR (439 pp.)--H.F.M. Prescott--Macmillan ($5).

For three and three-quarter years the grisly processions went on. Bishops, preachers and laymen--some 300 of them, all convicted of heresy--were marched to the stake, and the smoke of their burnings hung like a pall over England. It did not stop until death came one day in 1558 to the woman in whose name the executions were carried out: Mary Tudor, Queen of England.

Few historians have ever tried to defend "Bloody Mary." Roman Catholic Historian Hilaire Belloc sought to soften the impeachment by showing how bloody was the age in which she lived and how well-deserving of the same epithet were "Bluff King Hal" (her father) and "Good Queen Bess" (her half sister). But none has succeeded in presenting Mary against the background of her time with quite the acumen and diligence of H. F. M. (for Hilda Frances Margaret) Prescott, a sometime Oxford lecturer and novelist (The Man on a Donkey--TIME. Sept. 22. 1952). First published (under the title Spanish Tudor) in 1940, Mary Tudor is an enlarged, revised version of a first-rate work of scholarship.

The Two Kingdoms. Biographer Prescott's aim is to show how and why a princess of "patient, untiring affection" grew into a soured, suspicious queen who was incapable of compromise in the matter of religious heresy. So the real story of Mary has to begin with the canceling of the marriage of her mother, Katherine of Aragon, and Henry VIII.

As Henry saw it, nothing mattered more than that he should have a son. As Katherine saw it, the kingdom of Heaven was of vastly greater importance than the kingdom of England. "I would rather," she said, "be a poor beggar's wife and be sure of Heaven, than to be Queen of all the world and stand in doubt thereof." When Henry pressed her to agree that their marriage had been "unlawful" because she had been married briefly to his dead brother, she retorted that this would be "to confess to having been the King's harlot this 24 years." After Henry broke with the Roman Catholic Church and married Anne Boleyn, Katherine instructed adolescent Mary: "[Obey] the King your father in everything, save only that you will not offend God and lose your own soul."

Mary obeyed. She loyally obeyed her ferocious father in all matters temporal, defied him in all matters spiritual. What saved Mary from the block was not her father's mercy, but the fact that her cousin was King Charles of Spain, and any injury to Mary might have been Henry's undoing. One result was that Mary grew up to believe that her only friends were Spaniards, and when her mother died the Spanish ambassador became Mary's closest adviser. Exiled from court, she made her various homes in the countryside strongholds of the Roman Catholic faith.

A Small, Plain Woman. "If you were [my] daughter," one of Henry's bullies once bellowed at Mary, "I would beat you to death and knock your head against the wall till it was as soft as a baked apple." Before long it looked .as though Henry, regardless of Spain's warnings, intended just some such fate for Mary. Terrified, she begged the Spanish ambassador for advice, and he instructed her to save her head--if necessary by acknowledging her father as "Supreme Head'' of the Church of England and her mother's marriage as "incestuous."

"The Confession of me, the Lady Mary" (as this surrender was entitled) was destined "to mark Mary for life." She had been "false to her mother and her mother's Church." writes Biographer Prescott. "In every crisis . . . afterwards she remembered it, and . . . made her decision . . . regardless of wisdom, deaf to argument . . . not daring to compromise because once in her life she had known what was right, and had not done it."

But at least she lived, second in line to the throne (after her younger half brother Edward VI), the growing hope of England's "Old Catholics" and a vital pawn in the game of Anglo-Spanish diplomacy. When she mounted the throne at 37, she was a "small and thin.'' unattractive woman, old for her age and with "a loud and deep voice" in which she had "never learnt to lie," but only, as she said, "to be plain with you." She had one fixed intention: to restore the old religion. But she swore "graciously not to compel or constrain" the consciences of those who had accepted the new.

It was Mary's--and England's--tragedy, concludes Biographer Prescott, that no such simple graciousness was workable. The England she had imagined in her semi-exile in no way resembled the England she came to rule. What Mary called the "new" religion was already "old" to many Englishmen. The Protestant party was not, as she imagined, composed of a few erring men who had "been misled, or frightened into the new ways." It was a powerful, well-rooted faction made up partly of ardently religious men, partly of landlords who dreaded that Mary would give back to the Church the rich monastic properties which Henry VIII had shared out. When the "old" service returned to the parish churches, London was strewn with antipapist pamphlets and broadsheets; men gathered together for armed rebellion. And many an Englishman who had welcomed , a return to the old ways hesitated in insular fear when he saw, on Mary's one hand, the long-absent papal legate and, on the other, her new husband, Prince Philip of Spain.

The Deathbed Succession. What Mary faced was a state of "open war." Who, exactly, led and organized "the policy of persecution" with which Mary retaliated. "we do not know," writes Author Prescott. But the burning of heretics, "a principle taken for granted" in Tudor England, now began on a scale never known before or since. "Women at their marketing, men at their daily trade, the cobbler at his bench, the ploughman trudging the furrow--all learned to know the awful smell of burning human flesh, the flesh of a neighbor, of a man or woman as familiar as the parish pump. Mingling with the steam of washing day, or with the reek of autumn bonfires, or polluting the sweetness of June, that stench . . . even in a cruel age, left behind it a memory and a disgust."

Her enemies broadcast pictures of Mary "almost naked, wrinkled and uncomely, suckling Spaniards at her breast, and round about, the legend : Maria Ruina Angliae." There was truth in the legend, for never had England sunk so low, militarily and financially, never had she known such general instability and discontent. And never had Mary herself sunk so low in her own esteem. Her handsome husband, after perfunctorily doing his duty in the hope of providing England with a Catholic heir, walked out on her when she proved barren. Calais, England's proud outpost in France, fell to the French. Ill and miserable, she found that her last days were to be her worst, for it was on her deathbed that the Privy Council forced her to name as her successor the detested Protestant Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn.

Author Prescott tells her story not as a Catholic apologist (she is an Anglican), but rather as a woman writing understandingly of the troubles of another. In her hands, Mary's story is both terrible and unforgettable.

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