Introduction: Princess, Bastard, Queen, Villain

Abstract

Queen Mary I was not born to rule. Although she would later be crowned Queen of England on 1 October 1553, her birth on 18 February 1516 to King Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon was not greeted with the same lavish celebrations that had been bestowed upon the child, named Henry, who had been born to the royal couple in 1510. Had he lived beyond a few scant months, Henry would not only have been Mary’s older brother but undisputed heir to the throne. The birth of a healthy daughter was an occasion of joy, to be sure, particularly after the death of little Henry, another short-lived son, and multiple miscarriages, but it did nothing to ensure the succession of the English throne upon the Tudor line, as the oft-quoted comment made by Henry VIII—“if it is a girl this time, by God’s grace boys will follow”—bears out.¹ When she was christened on 21 February 1516 there was no guarantee that she would live to adulthood, nor any precedent to indicate that she would one day become the first queen to rule England; her path to the crown was not an easy, or even straightforward, one. Throughout her lifetime, the roles that Mary inhabited would be marked by their unconventional nature and pattern: in her youth, as princess and royal heir, then bastard child of a nonvalid union, finally illegitimate but restored to the line of succession; in her adulthood, as regnant queen, first single, then married; and in her final years and after her death when she was characterized as a bloodthirsty villainess, the latter role is the one that has continued to define her until very recently.²