Something about Mary

Diarmaid MacCulloch

  • Mary Tudor: The Tragical History of the First Queen of England by David Loades
    National Archives, 240 pp, £19.99, September 2006, ISBN 1 903365 98 8

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.

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Vol. 29 No. 20 · 18 October 2007 » Diarmaid MacCulloch » Something about Mary (print version)
Pages 15-16 | 2936 words