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Anna Whitelock
MARY TUDOR: PRINCESS, BASTARD, QUEEN New York. Random House. 2010. 432 pages ISBN 1400066093 reviewed by patrick killough (1) biblio.com MARY TUDOR - ENGLAND'S FIRST QUEEN (English title?) Would you recommend this book to other readers? review: Queen Mary I of England lived from 1516 until her death at age 42 in 1558. She was the first woman to rule England with uncontested Kingly powers from 1553 until she died. Professor Anna Whitelock's scholarly biography underlines a handful of things about Mary Tudor which many seem to have forgotten: -- (1) Mary Tudor was not only the sole surviving legitimate offspring of King Henry VIII and Queen Katharine of Aragon, but she was also the granddaughter of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile. As Isabella had been the first woman ruler of Castile, so Mary was the first woman to rule England with a clear, undisputed title. -- (2) Mary Tudor's mother Katharine was raised by her mother Isabella in the consciousness that daughters of kings could expect to be rulers, as was Isabella's designated successor to the throne of Castile, her daughter Joanna "The Mad," mother of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Katharine raised her daughter in the clear consciousness that Mary Tudor was the only legitimate heir of King Henry VIII and was destined to rule England. -- (3) Mary Tudor, nonetheless had to fight for her throne when her young half-brother Edward VI died in 1553. All the forces of government were then marshalled against Mary. But key supporters rallied to her and she was crowned. -- (4) Once on the throne, Mary Tudor deliberately set precedents making it clear that any future female monarch was truly "king." This smoothed the succession of her half-sister Elizabeth I in 1558. Thus Mary created Knights of the Garter and participated in their initiations. On Holy Thursday 1556, Queen Mary moving from one to another on her knees washed the feet of and fed 12 poor women, and gave them money. The next day, Good Friday, she pressed her hands in the form of a cross on the sores of four women suffering scrofula. All English Monarchs were thought uniquely to have "healing powers" and by her action Mary thus demonstrated that she was truly King. Professor Whitelock carefully reviews Mary's early life as heir apparent, the shock at age 17 when Henry VIII divorced his wife and had Mary declared illegitimate and every subsequent stage of her life. These included her childless marriage to her cousin King Philip II, son of Charles V, her restoration of unity with the papacy, her warring against heresy and her burning of hundreds of religious dissenters. In an Epilogue, Professor Whitelock sums up Mary's strengths and faults in a couple of pity pages. Strengths include: the first woman to rule England, her religious faith and belief in self, leading "the only successful revolt against central government in sixteenth century England," namely to have herself proclaimed queen against enormous odds. She was conscientious, worked long hard hours often until after midnight. As a woman she showed weakness, notably her "personal infatuation with Philip, her Spanish husband." He married her for political reasons and didn't even bother to visit her when she was dying. But Mary loved Philip passionately. He led her into an unwise war with France in which England lost Calais, its last remaining foothold on French soil. Mary put down rebels in January 1554 when her advisers counseled flight. She suffered ill health most of her life and was strongly melancholic. She was very well educated, spoke, read and wrote five languages and was a Renaissance prince of high order. "In many ways Mary failed as a woman but triumphed as a queen." A good, solid read. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/cheap-book/mary-tudor-englandanna -whitelock~46a72~328645942 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 09/23/2010 review title: the first woman to rule england with full kingly powers - MARY TUDOR rating: * * * * review: Mary Tudor (1516 - 1558) lived a busy 42 years. Her mother was Katharine, Princess of Aragon and Castile. Mary's father was King Henry VIII. When Mary was 17, Henry divorced her mother, saying that the Old Testament cursed his marriage to his brother's widow. Until she ascended the throne of England in 1553, Mary was treated as illegitmate, hated by her mother's successor, Anne Boleyn, and pressured by her father to recognize his role as head of the Church in England. But Mary Tudor was a fighter. Her grandmother, Queen Isabella, was the first woman to be monarch in her own right in Castile. She taught her daughters, including Katharine of Aragon, that they had to be prepared to be rulers in their own right. From her birth Queen Katharine raised Mary Tudor as heir apparent to Henry VIII and, like her grandmother Isabella, ruler with full kingly powers. The odds were against Mary's becoming monarch when her younger brother Edward VI died in 1553. All the established powers of government opposed her claims, sought to arrest her. But she evaded them, fortified herself and, in short order, leading nobles, both Catholic and Protestant rallied to her cause. As the first woman ever to be anointed ruler of England, Mary Tudor set precedent after precedent. These enabled her half-sister Elizabeth I to assume power without opposition on Mary's death. Later monarchs like Queen Anne, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II have much to thank Mary Tudor for, argues historian author Anna Whitelock in MARY TUDOR: PRINCESS, BASTARD, QUEEN. Whitelock concedes that "Mary failed as a woman but triumphed as a queen" (Epilogue). She was madly in love with her self-selected husband, Philip, son of her cousin Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. But they were childless and her half-sister Elizabeth then undid Mary's returning England to unity with Rome. For his part Philip married her for purely political reasons and didn't bother to visit Queen Mary when she was dying. Historians are busy rethinking the life and reign of England's first female monarch. Her half-sister Elizabeth began blackening Mary's name from the day she replaced her. For a somewhat different positive slant on Mary Tudor, I recommend Eamon Duffy - FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR. Anna Whitelock's biography gives equal emphasis to every aspect of Mary's life. Eamon Duffy by contrast focuses on Queen Mary's religion and her efforts to re-Catholicize England. That project would have succeeded, Duffy argues, had Mary lived another 20 years. -OOO- (3) bn.com 09/23/2010 title of review: "… Mary failed as a woman but triumphed as a queen." rating: * * * * review: Posted 09/23/10: Serious scholars have in recent years set about revisiting Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's daughter.This review is about Anna Whitelock's 2010 biography, MARY TUDOR: PRINCESS, BASTARD, QUEEN. Whitelock gives a balanced overview, essentially favorable, albeit less narrowly focused on the re-Catholicization of England 1553 - 1558 than Professor Eamon Duffy's 2009 FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR. London University Lecturer Anna Whitelock stresses over and over again that Mary Tudor (1516 - 1558) was the first female ever crowned and anointed an English monarch. Mary had to battle long odds to outflank her enemies upon the death in 1553 of her half-brother King Edward VI. But when she came to power she created precedent after precedent, doing things that only male monarchs had done before. These precedents made it possible for Mary's half-sister Elizabeth to succeed her peacefully and for such later female monarchs as Anne, Victoria and Elizabeth II to be kingly in their own right. Mary Tudor's biography moves through 66 Chapters and an Epilogue distributed among numbered parts each prefaced in the Index by "SHE WAS": One: A KING'S DAUGHTER, Two: A KING'S SISTER, Three: A QUEEN, Four: A KING'S WIFE. Mary Tudor became the first female monarch of England because she was the legitimate daughter of the second Tudor King, Henry VIII. But she had a ruler's genes and was raised to expect to succeed her father. Her maternal grandmother was Christopher Columbus's patron, Queen Isabella, first female monarch of Castile. Isabella raised all her daughters to prepare to become rulers in their own right, should that be the will of Heaven. And Mary Tudor's mother was Isabella's daughter, Katherine of Aragon. For 17 years Mary was the apple of Henry VIII's eye. But when Henry divorced Katherine, Mary was declared a bastard and continuously humiliated until she won the throne in 1553. Her great project was to restore England's unity with Papal Rome. With the help of her royal cousin Cardinal Reginald Pole she was well on the way to complete success. But she was on the throne for only five years before dying of cancer at age 42. Another 20 years and England would have remained solidly Roman Catholic, as the argument goes. Mary Tudor was a linguist, a careful dresser, personally devout, free from personal scandal and a woman who worked hard at her duties until after midnight. Her weaknesses: a profound tendency to melancholy and her choice of a husband, her widowed cousin Philip of Spain, whom she adored but who saw Mary solely as a chessman in the great balancing act of international politics. Knowing that she was dying, Philip did not even visit Mary's sickbed. "In many ways Mary failed as a woman but triumphed as a queen." A good solid read. Well researched and end-noted. A keeper. -OOO- recommended reading: -- Eamon Duffy - THE STRIPPING OF THE ALTARS, FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR. -- Thomas F. Mayer - REGINALD POLE: PRINCE AND PROPHET. http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review .aspx?reviewid=1453827 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 09/24/2010 title of review: the first woman monarch of england was granddaughter of the first woman monarch of castile rating: * * * * review: Some contemporaries used to complain that Queen Mary Tudor of England (born 1516, reigned 1553 - 1558) was too Spanish to be a good Englishwoman. But both her mother, Princess Katharine of Aragon and Castile, and Katharine's mother Queen Isabella of Castile, carried Royal Plantagenet English genes. They came from John of Gaunt (Ghent) (1340 - 1399), whose other descendants included the Lancastrian Kings of England Henry IV, Henry V and (through females) Henry VI. Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII. Be it noted that Henry VII, first Tudor King of England, was Mary Tudor's paternal grandfather, just as King Ferdinand of Aragon was her maternal grandfather and Queen Isabella of Castile her maternal grandmother. Now all this interlocking genealogy may be of little weight in the USA of 2010 but in late medieval, early renaissance Europe, it mattered. Genealogy is important to University of London lecturer in history Anna Whitelock who covered the life of Queen Mary in 66 chapters and an epilogue of her 2010 biography, MARY TUDOR: PRINCESS, BASTARD AND QUEEN. Whitelock focuses like a laser on Mary Tudor's having been the first woman monarch ("queen regnant") of England. But this would have come as no surprise either to Mary or to her mother Katharine because their ancestress, Isabella, had been first woman ruler of Castile. And Isabella made sure that her daughter Joanna inherited her throne of Castile, not her husband the King of Aragon. Isabella had to fight for her throne. When she achieved it, she taught her daughters to imagine themselves future queens regnant. Since Isabella felt that she had not been properly educated for high office, she made sure that her daughters became fluent in several languages and steeped in humanist culture. In particular Isabella's daughter Katharina applied the same lessons to her only surviving daughter, Mary Tudor. The example of her queen regnant grandmother may have been Mary Tudor's most powerful instrument for fighting for and achieving the throne of England on the death of her young half-brother in 1553. The government was then in the hands of her enemies. They tried to capture her, but she fled to a fortified castle and rallied enough nobles to her cause that opposition collapsed. Later when a mob threatened London, she declined advice to flee the city and rallied the people to her side. She was raised as Henry VIII's beloved daughter until Henry divorced Queen Katharine. As portrayed by Anna Whitelock, Henry's inamorata and second wife Anne Boleyn poisoned Henry against Mary Tudor, and caused him to style her a bastard. In several episodes Anne is shown as prepared to kill Mary any time she had a chance. There is much else in Whitelock's balanced biography besides Mary Tudor's being the first queen regnant of England. We learn of her ill health, tendency to melancholia, love of high fashion and fun. She was a devout Roman Catholic who did her best to return England to its traditional religious unity with the Papacy. Like Eamon Duffy in FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR, Anna Whitelock argues that Mary Tudor and her Plantagenet cousin Cardinal Reginald Pole were well on the way to a Catholic restoration. But they both died within hours of each other. Mary was only 42. And Elizabeth, Mary's successor, resumed England's transformation into Europe's most powerful Protestant nation. Yes, there is much else to Mary besides her being England's first regnant queen. But author Whitelock worries this theme like a hungry dog with a bone. It is why the biography was written: to show Queen regnant Mary Tudor setting one precedent after another to make a woman ruler an easily accepted reality for future queens regnant including Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II, Anne Stuart and Victoria. Mary was also a hard-working monarch, whose days reading state papers often ended after midnight. As a woman, she was less fortunate: she gave her heart to her cold, detached husband Philip II of Spain. To Philip, by contrast, Mary was at best a chessman on the board of European politics. He gave her no offspring. He enticed her into a ruinous war with France in which England lost its last continental foothold, Calais. He could not be bothered to visit Mary when she lay dying. A book worth reading and enjoying. -OOO- tags: mary tudor, anna whitelock. queen isabella of castile, katharine of aragon, king henry viii, cardinal reginald pole, king philip ii of spain http://www.amazon.com/Mary-Tudor-Princess -Bastard-Queen/dp/1400066093/ref=sr_1_fkmr1 _1?ie=UTF8&qid=1285184490 &sr=1-1-fkmr1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 09/24/2010 Title of review: From Warrior Princess to Warrior Queen Product Rating: * * * * PROS: You will never forget who was the first queen to rule England: Mary Tudor. CONS: Author stubbornly defends Mary's view of things. Some hyperbolic declarations of Mary's greatness and courage. BOTTOM LINE: This is one more good recent scholarly effort to rethink England's first Queen Regnant as something more than "Bloody Mary," one of history's most evil rulers. Sometimes too gushy, pro-Mary. aohcapablanca's Full Review: As long as I can remember, I have questioned history's changes of direction. Why was India partitioned?
Couldn't London have peacefully avoided the American Revolution? Slavery was protected by the U.S. Constitution in 1861? So why did South Carolina secede and run the risk of losing a civil war and seeing the Constitution amended to abolish slavery? Why did things turn out this way? Why? As a cradle Catholic I grew up idolizing Saint Sir Thomas More and the Jesuit martyrs like poet Robert Southwell and others put to death by Tudor Monarchs Henry VIII and Elizabeth I respectively. I asked: why didn't England stay Catholic? I knew that Henry's daughter Mary I had restored relations with Rome for nearly five years. But then her death at age 42 put an end to that experiment. What happened? There are, I think, books better at understanding the brief Marian restoration of English Catholicism than Anna Whitlock's biography of 2010, MARY TUDOR: PRINCESS, BASTARD, QUEEN. Specifically I recommend two good histories of 2009: Thomas F. Mayer - REGINALD POLE: PRINCE AND PROPHET and Eamon Duffy: FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR. But those two histories focus narrowly on only one aspect of Mary Tudor (born 1516, reigned 1553 - 1558): the recatholicizing of England. Anna Whitelock's biography of Mary also hammers away at one theme, but a different one. Whitelock's attention grabbing message is: Look! Here is the first woman ever crowned and anointed as monarch of England! Her 66 chapter biography of Mary Tudor lays out many aspects of Mary's life, personality, ancestry, illnesses, her marriage to Philip II of Spain, her piety, her working at her job day after day until after midnight. But the one thing that stays with me from MARY TUDOR: PRINCESS, BASTARD, QUEEN is that England was never pre-destined to be ruled by women -- though, unlike France, there was no Salic Law forbidding it. But the unthinkable finally happened in July 1553 when King Edward VI, Mary's younger half brother died. Some in Government immediately saw to it that Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen (there were no credible male candidates). But no one in the crowds "cried 'Long live the queen!'" One young man even had his ears cut off for shouting out "that Lady Mary was the rightful queen." "Mary had neither soldiers nor suficient
funds; she was an isolated figure in East Anglia, surrounded only by
her household servants."
On July 9th, Mary asserted in writing her rights to young Edward's Privy Council in London. In response, the Council on July 14, sent John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland and Edward's Chief Minister, with more than 6,000 armed men to arrest Mary. Northumberland never reached her. Before the end of the month, the coup was over. Mary was Queen regnant of England. "The first Queen to rule England was a
small, slightly built woman of thirty-seven. ... She was prone to
melancholy.. ... her frequent acclamation was: 'In thee, O lord, is my trust, let me
never be confounded. If God be for us, who can be against us?'"
When Mary was a marriageable teenager, her father, Henry VIII had rudely divorced her mother Queen Katharine and created schism with the Papacy primarily to avoid "a female accession." Against the vigorous efforts of the Privy Council ... "the English people had put Mary on the throne." "Despite repeated attempts to deprive her
of her life and her right to the throne, the warrior princess
turned victor and became the warrior queen" (Epilogue).
Let me conclude this review by underlining what the biography's author wants underlined: Mary Tudor was the first woman to be crowned and anointed queen regnant of England. Deliberately she created precedent after precedent for later queens regnant to follow: notably, the two Elizabeths, Anne Stuart and Victoria. She anointed sores of the poor on Good Friday as only male monarchs had done before. She presided at inductions to knightly orders and on and on. Nor did this happen in a vacuum. Mary's mother's mother, Isabella, Christopher Columbus's sponsor and financial backer, had been the first woman crowned monarch of Castile. Isabella raised all her daughters in the expectation that they might one day either rule Castile (as did daughter Joana "the mad") or another realm. Regretting her own limited education, Queen Isabella saw that all her daughters learned to speak the languages of the Iberian peninsula as well as Latin and French. And this is the way that Queen Katharine raised Princess Mary, as a humanist scholar, ready, as Henry VIII's heiress apparent, to rule England. A second, related point not quite so forcefully noted by Mary's biographer: Mary's enemies criticized her as "too Spanish to be English." Yet, through her grandmother Isabella and her mother Katharine, Princess Mary Tudor had as many royal English ancestors and relatives as did her paternal grandfather King Henry VII. As a descendant of John of Gaunt (Ghent) (1340 - 1399), Mary's broader family tree was ripe with family names like the Lancastrian Kings of England, Henry IV, Henry V and (through females) Henry VI, Edward IV, Richard III and even grandfather Henry VII himself. All European royalty and nobility took genealogy very seriously. And Mary was English Plantagenet royalty as well as an Infanta of both Aragon and Castile. Despite her hammering away at Mary's being England's first legitimate female monarch (the 12th Century Empress Maude, granddaughter of William the Conqueror, was never crowned or anointed), biographer Anna Whitelock's 66 chapters and a pithy epilogue give a reasonably complete, balanced picture of Mary Tudor during every one of her 42 years. Queen Mary re-Catholicized England, she burned nearly 300 heretics, she chose a husband, Philip II of Spain whom she adored but who led her into a disastrous war with France. That icey husband could not be bothered to visit her as she lay dying of cancer. So back to my teenage musings: why couldn't England have remained Catholic? Both Eamon Duffy and Anna Whitelock agree: England would probably have remained Catholic had Mary lived to age 62 instead of age 42. Her experiment failed when her half-sister successor Elizabeth gradually re-Protestantized England. But Mary Tudor and her royal cousin Cardinal Reginald Pole improved Catholic religious education, set higher requirements for bishops and raised seminary standards. These and other Marian innovations took firm hold in Italy, France, Spain and elsewhere in continental Europe of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. "A prophet is without honor in his (or her) own country." I cannot in conscience call MARY TUDOR a perfect biography or anything close to it. It is thoroughly researched and attempts to be unbiased. Anna Whitelock its author (unlike Eamon Duffy) is apparently a non-Catholic (she has Queen Mary and other Catholic laymen "say" Mass, an uncommon locution). From her home page and on-line photos and interviews, Dr Whitelock (2004 PhD in history from Cambridge University) appears young, vigorous, handsome, fun loving and dressed very informally, almost a Fergie wannabe. I don't fault her for any of that. But she does gush from time to time over her heroine in a rather unhistorian-like way. Samples:
-- (When Mary became Queen regnant) "She
was as popular as any English sovereign who had ascended the throne
before her, and her triumph was one of the most surprising events of
the sixteenth century."
From the Epilogue:
-- "From a childhood in which she was
adored and feted and then violently, rejected, a fighter was born."
-- "In many ways Mary failed as a woman but triumphed as a queen. She ruled with the full measure of royal majesty and achieved much of what she set out to do." This is a good book for launching a novice's further reading into Tudor England, the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella and the warring Europe of Francis I of France, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and Turkish invaders. As author Whitelock writes elsewhere: "This book seeks to bridge the divide
(i.e., between scholarship and popular myth) and constructs a new,
popular narrative of the reign and an image of a queen less
weak-willed, unintelligent and politically incompetent but
well-educated, courageous and politically accomplished who ruled as
England's first crowned queen regnant."
And so it was or may well have been. -OOO- Let me thank amazon.com/VINE for sending me at no cost MARY TUDOR to review. I also commend epinions.com category lead pestycide (Carol Knepp) of Houston for making this biography reviewable by epinionators and for her unflagging attention to the violent Tudor dynasty. Recommended: Yes http://www.epinions.com/review/Anna_Whitelock_Mary_Tudor _Princess_Bastard_Queen_epi/content_525727403652 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= whitelock_marytudor http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/whitelock_marytudor.html |