Did Mary tudor deserve the name "bloody Mary"?

Question

please can you add any links with your answers as this is for an essay and i have to do a bibliography so i need websites and books.

Answer 1

Whereas the Virgin Queen "Good Queen Bess" could do no wrong? She was responsible for the wholesale slaughter of Catholics, but then as we know, that doesn't matter.

Answer 2

Yes, she imprisoned, tortured, and killed many protestant people. She came close to beheading her own sister because she wasn't Catholic.

Answer 3

Yes indeed.

She was very cruel and blood got spilled everywhere from high to commons, that's why the called her" Bloody Mary".

Answer 4

No.  She burned people at the stake.  So, technically, the name is decieving when refrencing Mary Tudor.  However, if refrencing her cousin(which is sometimes done), Mary Stuart, it is possible that bloody is suitable, considering her decapitation.

Answer 5

You'll find information faster if you just Google her name. :)

Answer 6

most certainly she was just as bad as hitler she persecuted anyone who was not a catholic and had them killed

Answer 7

Hi Beverley!

I don't think she deserved that name.

During Mary's time as queen, some Protestants were burned at the stake for heresy.  Mary got a bad press for this, since the Protestants later emerged victorious and used every opportunity to smear her.

What they forget to mention is that the Protestants before Mary were every bit as bloody.  Rulers of the time were expected to choose the religion of their subjects, and those who didn't conform had to leave.  That's the way it was everywhere else in Europe.  Mary's father Henry VIII did not hesitate to execute Catholics, like his Prime Minister Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, who spoke out against the annulment of his marriage to Mary's mother Queen Catherine.

Mary tried to extend tolerance to Protestants, but they spurned the olive branch by launching a major rebellion, known as Wyatt's Rebellion, intending to overthrow her.  Only then did she respond forcefully against them.

One of those who was burned, the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Catholics during the time when he had held power.  In Mary's eyes, he richly deserved the death penalty, but Protestants regarded him as a martyr, even though he had tried to save his skin by publicly converting to Catholicism in the expectation that he would earn a free pardon.

Answer 8

Well, she was given the nickname by Protestants because she burned quite a large number of Protestant heretics during her reign.  However, the majority of her subjects were still Catholic at the time of her reign, and she was not 'bloody' to them.  Moreover, putting heretics to death was normal practice in those days, Elizabeth I executed Catholics, and Henry VIII executed both Catholics and Protestants.

Answer 9

Yes,she killed those who were trying to depose her,even kill her.She even reinstituted heresy laws which resulted in the deaths of over 300 people.

http://www.royal.gov.uk/output/Page45.as...

" MARY I (r. 1553-1558)

Mary I was the first Queen Regnant (that is, a queen reigning in her own right rather than a queen through marriage to a king). Courageous and stubborn, her character was moulded by her early years.

An Act of Parliament in 1533 had declared her illegitimate and removed her from the succession to the throne (she was reinstated in 1544, but her half-brother Edward removed her from the succession once more shortly before his death), whilst she was pressurised to give up the Mass and acknowledge the English Protestant Church.

Mary restored papal supremacy in England, abandoned the title of Supreme Head of the Church, reintroduced Roman Catholic bishops and began the slow reintroduction of monastic orders.

Mary also revived the old heresy laws to secure the religious conversion of the country; heresy was regarded as a religious and civil offence amounting to treason (to believe in a different religion from the Sovereign was an act of defiance and disloyalty).

As a result, around 300 Protestant heretics were burnt in three years - apart from eminent Protestant clergy such as Cranmer (a former archbishop and author of two Books of Common Prayer), Latimer and Ridley, these heretics were mostly poor and self-taught people.

Apart from making Mary deeply unpopular, such treatment demonstrated that people were prepared to die for the Protestant settlement established in Henry's reign.

The progress of Mary's conversion of the country was also limited by the vested interests of the aristocracy and gentry who had bought the monastic lands sold off after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and who refused to return these possessions voluntarily as Mary invited them to do.

Aged 37 at her accession, Mary wished to marry and have children, thus leaving a Catholic heir to consolidate her religious reforms, and removing her half-sister Elizabeth (a focus for Protestant opposition) from direct succession.

Mary's decision to marry Philip, King of Spain from 1556, in 1554 was very unpopular; the protest from the Commons prompted Mary's reply that Parliament was 'not accustomed to use such language to the Kings of England' and that in her marriage 'she would choose as God inspired her'.

The marriage was childless, Philip spent most of it on the continent, England obtained no share in the Spanish monopolies in New World trade and the alliance with Spain dragged England into a war with France.

Popular discontent grew when Calais, the last vestige of England's possessions in France dating from William the Conqueror's time, was captured by the French in 1558.

Dogged by ill health, Mary died later that year, possibly from cancer, leaving the crown to her half-sister Elizabeth."

Answer 10

Yep.  She hed a lot of people murdered because of her beliefs.