Princess of Wales? Mary Tudor and the History of English Heirs to the Throne

Abstract

For the first 37 years of her life, the future Queen Mary I of England negotiated a sometimes precarious and often tortuous march to the throne. Born February 18, 1516, in Greenwich Palace, the only surviving issue of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon, she was the first woman to hold such a position since the twelfth-century Empress Matilda’s failed attempt to become England’s first female ruler.