Many people blame Mary for burning Protestants. The Spanish Inquisition was much worse. I mean, MUCH worse than what Mary did. Religion was a matter of life and death in the 16th century. Mary was abandoned by her father in pursuit of a male child. Mary's life was in serious danger for not recognizing his acts. I believe she relied on her ministers more than was nessesary. Mary did not have the heart of a saint when Elizabeth was born. Anne Bolyen was crying out for Mary's execution when she didn't recognize Elizabeth as princess.

Mary Tudor was the daughter of the infamous Henry VIII and his Spanish wife Katharine of Aragon (the daughter of Ferdinand and the indomitable bellicose Isabella of Spain.)
Mary was a Roman Catholic who succeeded to the throne following the early death of her young half-brother Edward VI
the son of Henry and Jane Seymour.Mary was religious, smart,
tough and infertile! She wed Phillip II of Spain arousing hatred in England against her wedlock to a Roman Catholic Spaniard. Only a year after Mary's death in 1587 the Spanish Armada sailed against England and their new queen Eliabeth I. She was Mary's
half-sister the daughter of the bewitiching and beheaded Anne
Boleyn.
Mary was a good woman who lived in perilous times. During Henry's affair and wedlock to Anne Boleyn her life was in danger.
She and her mother Katherine were exiled from court; the cynosure of several plots against Henry and the hope of Catholicism in Great Britain.
Mary's reign was short and bloody. During her monarchy hundreds of Protestants died at the stake or were beheaded for their beliefs. Mary was incapable of producing a child and heir to the throne. Her half-sister Elizabeth and Mary had a lifelong rivalry with Elizabeth emerging as the stronger and more successful of the siblings. During Eliabethan rule religious toleration was advanced.
Erickson is an expert on Tudor England and she writes like a
novelist making the convoluted tale of plots, murder, executions, dynastic jousting and descriptions of 16th century
England and European politics palatable for modern readers.
Erickson illuminates a dark,violent, cruel and frightening time when thosands died for their beliefs in fire, dungeon and
by sword.
This is a well researched, well written and well illustrated book on Mary Tudor England's first real reigning queen. The book is very detailed and is long. If you stick with it to the end you wil never forget the sad tale of Mary and the sad age in which she lived and ruled.

I found this book extremely interesting and absorbing to the point where I did not want to put it down. I would recommend it to anyone who, like me, wanted to find out what the foundations were of Mary Tudor's policies and also what she was really like as a person. The detail is so great that one learns even what her voice sounded like. It is as though Mary were alive again and not a figure from the 16th century. As some other reviewers have noted here somewhat critically, the book spends a lot of time discussing Mary's life before her accession to the throne. To me, this is to its' credit as an understanding of the forces, personalities and occurrences in Mary's early life are ESSENTIAL to answering questions about Mary's policies and actions as queen. I enjoyed Carolly's writing style. She is able to convey the complex interweaving of people and events in Mary's time in a manner that is easy to understand and follow along. Highly recommended, as is "Great Harry" also written by Carolly which I am reading now.

After years of failed pregnancies and infant deaths, a daughter was born to Henry III and Katherine of England.She was the first female child in England's history to be given the throne as a birthright.But it would be a life of strife and emotional turmoil for Mary Tudor. After being declared a bastard for the sake of her father's notorious romances and being prosecuted for her religion, Mary gradually makes her way past all the hardships only to face a new set of challenges.

I thought this book was smart, albeit rather dull. I would reccommend this book only to readers who find this subject interesting and who have a large vocabulary. This book won't pull you in, you have to walk. In comparision to other books, this book is really quite eloquent and shows the intensity of Mary's struggle to keep her principles, yet to remain loyal to her father.

Queen Mary's life has been a craddle of loneliness, failure, hopelessness, tumult, lost hopes and sorrow... And the book represents it all in a very true historical context... However, the writer seems to have lost her objectivity during the process of research... The person she portrays is not the hated and incompetent ruler the history proved her to be... Instead, Erickson's Bloody Mary is rather a misunderstood "good leader" which is not in compliance with the reality...

A good story, but Carolly Erickson is too soft on her subject and there's too little time spent on her reign as queen. These two factors means that the burnings of Protestants and other heretics are considerably down played. That said it's nice to get the other side of a story for which John Foxx's list is generally the only contact (another example of victors writing the history). This book is extremely well written and I'd recommend it highly to anyone with a passing interest in this period of English history

A good story, but Carolly Erickson is too soft on her subject and there's too little time spent on her reign as queen. These two factors means that the burnings of Protestants and other heretics are considerably down played. That said it's nice to get the other side of a story for which John Foxx's list is generally the only contact (another example of victors writing the history). This book is extremely well written and I'd recommend it highly to anyone with a passing interest in this period of English history

a good story, but Carolly is too soft on her subject and there's too little time spent on her reign as queen

The major merit of this book -- and that merit is considerable -- is that Erickson provides a sympathetic portrait of a monarch who is usually dismissed as a Papist monster or an irrelevant prelude to the great Elizabeth I. Erickson does not pretend that Mary was a particularly competent, effective, or even ethical monarch, but she gives insight into how Mary's upbringing and her experiences as a woman of her times shaped the kinds of mistakes she made as Queen. At the very least, the book is a detailed portrait of an interesting failure.

Mary Tudor did have a miserable life and she was treated horribly by her feckless, cruel father, Henry VIII. She also by the standards of her time was a merciful person towards rebels and was quite good to her ladies in waiting. However her reign was justifiably regarded as "sterile" by her contemporaries and she did real harm to the future of Catholicism in England. Erickson is a good story teller rather then a detailed historian and she obviously is quite fond of and sympathetic to the aging spinster who was the first female monarch since Queen Matilda in the 12th century. Yet no amount of whitewashing can absolve Mary and her Council (primarily Cardinal Reginald Pole, Bishop Edmund Bonner and various hangers on politicians and Lords who changed their religion to suit whatever monarch was on the throne) from the unprecedented holocaust of burnings of well known prelates such as Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley and poor artisans such as a blind girl rope maker at the stake. Erickson goes quickly through these stories, yet these stories so movingly written about by John Foxe in his "Book of Martyrs" played a leading role in the anti Catholic reaction in Britain that lasted at least 500 years from the death of Mary. It is unfair to compare a Queen who reigned for only 5 years to one that reigned 45 years, yet her half sister Elizabeth was a far better ruler then Mary could ever hope to be. Despite her obvious revulsion toward sex with a man, Mary married her first cousin once removed Philip II of Spain and subordinated England's foereign policy to that of Spain, which led to the lose of Calais. This sincere, but well meaning pathetic gray haired spinster with 'a mannish voice and no eyebrows', actually thought she was doing God's work by roasting the flesh of 283 Protestants from Feb. 1555 to Nov. 10, 1558 (exactly a week before her own death). To get a better sense of the Terror that England was subjected to by "Bloody Mary" I would recommend the new book by Jasper Ridley called "Bloody Mary's Marty'rs: The Story of England's Terror." In it, Ridley unlike Erickson puts the blame for the terror squarely on Mary. Erickson tries to shift most of the blame to other people such as Stephen Gardiner and Cardinal Pole. It was Mary who made the unprecedented decision to burn Archbishop Thomas Cranmer despite his recantations - such a thing was unheard of. This showed a vindictive side of Mary that Erickson does not like to deal with. Cranmer had helped mellow Henry VIII's attitude towards Mary back in 1536 when she was in real danger of her life. His reward for the kindeness he showed to her was to be burned 20 years later.
All in all the book is a good description of the Tudor times but for a real feel about the Marian reign I would look to other authors.

I gave this book 3 stars because it's the only full length biography of Mary Tudor that I've found, but I think Erickson woefully misjudges her subject. Mary was certainly a tragic character, and had a life filled with misery, but she was not a competent monarch. She came to the throne filled with a determination to restore Catholicism to England, which given her personal history was totally understandable. However, she was completely out of touch with the political reality that England did not want Catholicism restored, at least not by force. She then proceeded to make England's treasury and foreign policy a cat's-paw of her Spanish husband, to the great fury of her subjects. This is NOT a success story. I am also puzzled by Erickson's double standard with regard to Mary's conduct versus Elizabeth's before each came to the throne. Mary was in frequent contact with the ambassadors from Spain/Holy Roman Empire, and even plotted with one of them to be smuggled out of England to the continent, probably to be married eventually to a Catholic prince and used as a figurehead in a Catholic conquest of England. Erickson relates this without any editorial comment. However, when Elizabeth, during Mary's reign, is even SUSPECTED OF being in touch with the French ambassador, she's a traitor and locked up in the Tower for betraying her sister. So how come Mary wasn't a traitor to her father for doing the same thing?
Erickson also does not point out that after five years on the throne Mary was a burnt-out shell who'd suffered at least one hysterical pregnancy -- whereas Elizabeth ruled for 45 years and showed no sign of burn-out or exhaustion til she was on her deathbed at the age of 69 -- and her life was certainly as miserable and unstable as Mary's.

C'mon, Erickson, either apply your standard equally or acknowledge your bias.

As one with a passion for studying the Tudor era, I was surprised to find this work to be quite disappointing overall. The research, especially regarding life at court (which, in fact, too often was the topic rather than Mary herself), is painstaking and thorough. Yet the style of writing, and tangents related to "minor players," somehow is very tedious, or even downright boring.

To her credit, Carolly Erickson well develops the thesis that Mary was not only a fervent Catholic but one who, in view of her life's circumstances, saw everything in monumental terms, and herself as one with a divine mission. She does capture the pain and misery which Mary endured, with the portrait becoming sympathetic enough that even those (such as myself) for whom Mary is hardly a favourite can empathise. Yet it is a bland portrait, leading me to page through tedious sections waiting for some "bite."

Of all the Tudors, and for all of their less than commendable traits, Mary is the one about whom there is the least positive material to counterbalance, and Carolly Erickson's balanced portrayal of her does fill a gap in what is available. Still, even for a Tudor buff, this is not an engaging read.

In Carolly Erickson's "Bloody Mary", the life of Mary Tudor, the author provides an in-depth analysis of a monarch much maligned in her own -- and our -- time. From her early years as Henry VIII's cherished daughter, to his rejection of her and her mother (Catherine of Aragon), to the parade of wives Henry used and abused, Erickson paints a vivid picture of English court life during the mid-1500s. Sometimes, the picture is too vivid and the digressions from the main story of Mary and her trials and tribulations are too extensive. By the time Mary miraculously becomes queen in 1553, the reader is exhausted; the author also seems to have run out of steam, and all the painstaking research and background give way to an almost cursory examination of Mary's brief reign. The book also stresses Mary's Catholic piety a little too much, perhaps as a justification of the persecution of Protestants that earned her the nickname of "Bloody". On the good side, Erickson makes Mary a real person -- a very troubled real person; on the slightly negative side, Mary gets lost in the details provided on the court, the machinations, and the politics of the age. You'll need a lot of time and patience to finish this book, but the reward is an excellent interpretation of a woman who paved the way for her much more popular sister: Elizabeth I.