Mary was a sad girl, a bloody queen, a heartbroken wife, an eternal pregnant woman. Catherine of Aragon’s daughter had to face many difficulties before taking the Crown of England in the middle of the 16th century and, once on the throne, she leaned on her husband to restore the obedience of her country towards the Catholic Church through executions. All the political success of the alliance between the English and the Spanish was shipwrecked at the time of leaving offspring. The long series of psychological pregnancies that María recorded ended in 1558 when one of them led her to fall into a deep depression and to die months later. Felipe II, her husband, could not find the time to travel from Brussels to London, despite the letters from his wife begging him to be by her side in those painful moments. He died without seeing him again.
After only two years of marriage to María Manuela of Portugal, Felipe was left single with a sickly son as the only succession. The Portuguese woman, practically the same age as the then Spanish prince, had died after giving birth to Don Carlos, the accursed prince. During the search for the ideal candidate to be the wife of his son, Emperor Charles V ruled out the option of marrying one of the daughters of the King of France, a link that would have sealed the peace between the two countries, or with the beautiful youngest daughter of the King of Portugal, who in the long run could secure the throne of this kingdom; Instead, he recommended that he do it with an old fiancée of his, Maria Tudor. The daughter of Catherine of Aragon had lived a turbulent childhood due to the decision of Henry VIII of England to divorce against the criteria of the Catholic Church. A woman is full of trauma who had Carlos as the man who had watched over his rights in Europe when no one else did.
The daughter of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII. Despite having popular support from the English, Catalina de Aragón –the youngest daughter of the Catholic Monarchs– ended up being repudiated by her husband, Henry VIII, due to the lack of male children. The succession of failed pregnancies, six babies of which only the future Mary I reached the age of majority, disturbed the coexistence between the King and the Queen. Henry VIII proposed to the Pope a marriage annulment because he had married his brother Arthur’s wife. Pope Clement VII, knowing that this was not a possible reason since a previous dispensation had certified that the marriage with Arthur was not valid (it had not been consummated), suggested through his envoy Cardinal Campeggio that that of Alcalá de Henares could simply retire to a convent, leaving the way for a new marriage of the King. However, the stubborn character of the Queen, who refused to have her daughter Maria declared a bastard, prevented finding a solution that would please both parties. The intervention of Catherine’s all-powerful nephew, Carlos V, raised the dispute internationally.
Despite Henry VIII’s threats to Rome, Clement VII even more feared those of Charles V, who had sacked the city in 1527, and forbade Henry to remarry before he had made a decision. Anticipating the outcome, Henry VIII took a radical resolution: he broke with the Catholic Church and had himself proclaimed “supreme head of the Church of England.”
In 1533, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, declared the King’s marriage to Catherine void and the sovereign married Anne Boleyn, whom the people called “the bad bitch.” Also, Henry deprived Catherine of any title except that of “Princess Dowager of Wales”, in recognition of her status as the widow of her brother Arthur, and banished her to the castle of the More in the winter of 1531.
Years later she was transferred to Kimbolton Castle, where she was forbidden to communicate in writing and her movements were even more limited. There, on January 7, 1536, before possibly dying of cancer, Catalina de Aragon wrote a letter to her nephew, Carlos, asking him to protect her daughter. In this way, the “bloodthirsty queen” would never forget that in 1533 she had to renounce the title of princess and that, a year later, an act of the English Parliament stripped her of the succession in favor of Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn. The woman who had triggered the divorce. Not in vain, the execution of Anna Bolena in 1536 caused a change in the situation of Maria.
Henry VIII’s new wife, Juana Seymour, managed to get Mary to capitulate and swear in the new religious laws in exchange for a more advantageous position at court, now her half-sister, Elizabeth, was the one who was marginalized.
As a result of the marriage between Henry VIII and Juana Seymour, Eduardo was born, who was designated the heir to the court. When Edward VI died prematurely in 1553, the outcast girl became Queen of England at 37. One of his first measures was to imprison and execute the Duke of Northumberland, who had hardened the policy against Catholics in those early years of the reign of Edward VI and had maneuvered to prevent Mary from acceding to the throne. Maria never stopped writing with her cousin Carlos V, but their good relations hardly facilitated the negotiations to reach an agreement that was to overcome the internal opposition of the English nobles and their natural distrust of foreigners.
The British demands ended up being humiliating: the queen could not be forced to leave the islands; England was not required to take part in the Habsburg wars; the possible child of the marriage would inherit England, Ireland, and the Netherlands; and, what was ultimately capital, the Spanish monarch would lose any authority if Maria died before him. The King showed his misgivings in private, but eventually swallowed up a deal that promised to fully win back England for the Catholic cause.
But beyond the political demands, the other stumbling block was the queen’s misgivings about marriage. Her love history was reduced to having ruled out the possibility of marrying Eduardo Courtenay – the son of a nobleman who was beheaded in 1538, then accused of conspiring against Henry VIII – whom she had freed from his prison in the Tower of London for this purpose. After ruling out the marriage to Courtenay, of royal blood, it seemed that Maria would always remain single. At least until the handsome Philip appeared, whose painting by Titian in 1551 was sent to the queen. She was attached to him from the first moment to the last of her life.
Meanwhile, Felipe II understood that the marriage responded more than ever to matters of State and accepted without the slightest complaint, despite the fact that the beauty of Mary was conspicuous by its absence. At 37, the English queen seemed to look close to 50 and kept a perpetually sad look. Before leaving Spain, not in vain, Felipe also received a portrait of his future wife painted by Antonio Moro, where it was evident that the queen was older than him. Once in England, the members of the Spanish entourage agreed to point out how little that portrait resembled the true face of Mary.
The best thing about this business is that the king sees it and understands it that this marriage was not made for meat, but for the remedy of this Reno and preservation of these States,” wrote Ruy Gómez, one of the men who accompanied the British Isles to attend the link, held on St. James’s Day 1554 at Winchester Cathedral. Under the reign of Mary and Philip, nearly three hundred men and women were executed for heresy between February 1555 and November 1558. Not surprisingly, Protestant historiography will nickname her Bloody Mary at her death (“the bloody Mary.” ). Many of those persecuted were old acquaintances from Maria’s traumatic childhood.
Thomas Cranmer, who is Archbishop of Canterbury authorized the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon, was subjected to a process to deprive him of his diocese, and was later sentenced to die at the stake. It was full-blown religious persecution, but also the queen’s efforts to end her political enemies. In anticipation of his marriage to Philip, the Protestant nobleman Thomas Wyatt led an uprising that reached the outskirts of London in January 1554. The coup attempt failed thanks to the support of Londoners, with Wyatt having to surrender and surrender only a month later. . The rebellion ended with the executions of several relatives of Juana Gray – great-granddaughter of Henry VII of England – and the young woman herself.
Felipe II supported his wife at all times and tried to ingratiate himself with his subjects by distributing favors among the nobles loyal to the Catholic cause and organizing jousts and tournaments for popular entertainment. These activities, which had not been held in the British Isles for decades, were remembered for several generations for their magnitude, as the Hispanist Geoffrey Parker recalls in his definitive biography of Philip II. However, the marriage turned into a sad experience when a series of psychological or failed pregnancies accumulated that made it impossible for an heir to be born.
After a year in England, Felipe went to meet his father in Brussels. Carlos had decided to abdicate and thereby bequeath to Felipe and Archduke Fernando, his brother, their kingdoms, and also their wars. Besieged on different fronts by France and Pope Paul IV, the Spanish king asked Maria for his military help, which was specifically prohibited by the marriage agreement. In March 1557, the monarch returned to England for a few months and used his ability to persuade his wife, who was not a small one, to secure her participation in a war that was to end in a terrible loss for England. On the brink of disaster, the Duke of Guise unexpectedly conquered Calais in early 1558, the last major English possession in northern France. After only seven days of siege, the English troops surrendered and surrendered the city without presenting a battle, with the sole objective of discrediting Queen Maria.
According to tradition, Maria was so devastated by this defeat that she predicted that the word Calais would appear at her death engraved on her heart. Sad and supposedly pregnant again, the English woman demanded the presence of her husband in those days, who received the news with “great joy and contentment” but did little to move to London. After accepting that it was a new false pregnancy, the queen fell into a depressive state in mid-1558. Felipe quickly understood that if his wife died, his half-sister, Isabel Tudor, would be the person with the most support to reign. , so, fearing the worst, he began an approach towards what would ultimately be the greatest villain in the empire.
Felipe’s original plan was to marry Isabel to a Catholic prince he trusted, the best candidate being his cousin Manuel Filiberto de Saboya, who had spearheaded his victory at San Quentin. Events, however, were precipitated and the monarch himself offered to marry Elizabeth when he saw that England could be removed from his control forever. At the beginning of November, Maria made a will designating her sister Isabel as her successor in the hope that she would abandon Protestantism; a few days later he passed away at 42 years of age.
The rise of Isabel, with Felipe’s own support, thus meant a posthumous and complete victory for the beheaded Anna Bolena, who is still today equivalent in the Spanish language to be a crazy and trickster woman. Far from accepting Philip’s marriage proposal, Elizabeth refused to return to papal obedience and remained single her entire life.The relationship between the Spanish Empire and England went from bad to worse in the following years. Isabel was implacable with the Catholic nobles who threatened her power and took all possible measures to erase the Hispanic footprint on the islands.
Any possibility of Catholicism returning to the majority in England in the future perished with the death of Mary. However, the Hispanic Geoffrey Parker points out in his work “Philip II: the definitive biography” (Planeta, 2010) that “even without children, Catholicism would have been permanently established in England if the queen had lived to (say) she was 56 years old. like his father”.
