Something about Mary 
Diarmaid MacCulloch
- Mary Tudor: The Tragical History of the First Queen of England by David Loades Buy this book
To understand someone, meet their mother – and so it was with the Tudor princesses. Mary, the daughter of Katherine of Aragon, was straightforward, pious, brave in a crisis, not especially bright. Her whole life was shaped by her mother’s straightforwardness and bravery in a crisis: when Henry VIII wanted Katherine to accept that she had never been married to him, she refused to do so, and by her unchanging refusal, gave her daughter an example of how to behave. Mary spent her life trying to undo the wrong done to her mother and her mother’s world which Henry’s first annulment crisis represented.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford. His books include Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation, Thomas Cranmer and, most recently, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700.
print layout
tell a friend