The Real "Bloody Mary" ✓

The Mislabeling of "Bloody Mary"

Regardless, even with the facts presented, people may still cling onto the title of "Bloody Mary." The question remains, why do we still label her as being bloody when we now know that monarchs across Europe have murdered tons more than Queen Mary ever did? The answer, as hinted at earlier involves John Foxe and local sheriffs persecuting Protestants in Mary's name.

Beginning with John Foxe, many historians agree that it was his literary Book of Martyrs that really brought Mary under the spotlight. A respected historian in David Loades explains, "Mary's nearly 300 executions might soon have been forgotten if it had not been for writer John Foxe." [99] John Foxe started the infamous legend of the 'Bloody Mary.' He depicted Mary with so much bias that her character was tarnished and her reputation shattered. Upon talking about the treatment of heretics, Mary explains in a document to her council:

"Touching punishment of heretics, we thinketh it ought to be done without rashness, not leaving in the meanwhile to do justice to such as by learning would seem to deceive the simple. And the rest so to be used that the people might well perceive them not to be condemned without just oration, whereby they shall both understand the truth and beware to do the like. And especially within London I would wish none to be burnt without some of the Council's presence and—both there and everywhere—good sermons at the same." [100]

Mary wished for persecutions to be controlled and not without proper justice. She saw the need for priests to be present at every burning to explain why the criminal was being put to death. Yet, this was not always the case. In reality, local initiatives led to the the arrest and burnings outside of Queen Mary's control. The vast geography, poor communication speeds, and complicated chain of command made sustaining a controlled national campaign for persecuting Protestants very difficult. Thus local sheriffs, who oversaw the burnings of local heretics, were responsible for a vast majority of the victims of persecution under Queen Mary's reign. [101] Thus the label of 'Bloody Mary' originated with the harsh portrayal of Queen Mary by the Protestant writer John Foxe, and the reason why over 300 people were persecuted under Mary's reign was because of local initiatives taken by local sheriffs without proper consent from the Queen's administration.

Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, Mary's father persecuted over 72,000 people throughout his reign. Granted not all of them were related to religion, "tens of thousands of executions [were conducted under] the tumult of the English Reformation." [102] However, some historians do not view many of those he persecuted, even for religious reasons, as heretical persecutions. For example, in Ridley's work Bloody Mary's Martyrs (published in 2001), he only attributes 90 deaths by burnings in over 37 years of King Henry VIII's reign. [103] Although burning a heretic is one way of execution, it is not the only way as seen later with Queen Elizabeth's reign that strangled and disemboweled Catholics.

Yet what Ridley fails to understand is the simple definition of a heretic. Merriam Webster dictionary defines a heretic as: "someone who believes or teaches something that goes against accepted or official beliefs." [104] With this definition in mind, one can truly see that all of the executions conducted by Henry to force people to accept him as the the supreme ruler of the Church of England, was in fact the persecution of heretics. They were heretics because they refused to accept King Henry as the founder and supreme ruler of his own Church. With this clarification in mind, the ultimate question is: why is King Henry not labeled "Bloody Henry?"