Mocked By Life

Some historical persons exude a deep, inner sorrow and thorough disappointment that one may feel even today. Looking at this miniature portrait of the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, the Tudor-Queen Mary I (1516–1558), from her youth makes me feel that she, all through her life, was subjected to so many intolerable sufferings and disappointments that it's almost inhuman. She had, what appears to be, a good childhood with parents who seemed to love her and each other until the day her father set eyes on another woman: Anne Boleyn.

To marry this seductive "Jezabel", he had to get rid of his first wife, the Spanish born Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536), who had failed him in giving birth to the male heir that would secure the new dynasty of the Tudors. That exploit took an annulment and the institution of a new, Protestantic State religion. Also, by declaring his marriage to Catherine Null And Void, he had to change the status of his daughter, Mary, from a legit "Princess" to a mere illegitimate "Lady". Did he have any qualms of robbing his child of her Royal status? I don't think so, and he did the same to his daughter by Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth (I), after beheading her mother.

Mary I 

When I see this portrait of Mary, I sense a disappointment in her life and a deep depression that makes me sad for her. She, being a vengeful Catholic, in a new, Protestant world, that she resented both for religious and personal reasons, was nicknamed "Bloody Mary", which was well deserved by her prosecuting and burning more than 280 religious dissenters at the stake. Of course, she hated her father's new religion as well as the status of illegitimacy that he gave her when he was besotted by Anne Boleyn, but not of course that she took it out on religious dissidents. In my opinion she went too far, and it was even in vain, as England didn't comply with her wishes to become Catholic once again.

Mary wasn't ugly, and she may have had good chances of getting married into another foreign, royal house. After all, originally her mother was a high status Princess out of Spain which should have secured her daughter a fine royal position somewhere out of England, but somehow that never happened. Her father also let her down on that "career move", but after inheriting the throne she decided to marry someone from her maternal family, the only legitimate son of the Emperor Charles V, Philip (1527–1598). 

It seems that Mary had romantic feelings for her husband, which he presumably didn't have for her, but married they were, and the marriage must have been consummated as she more than once thought that she was pregnant. Alas, she didn't even have that much wished for child that, sort of, might have been the bonus that brought some of the missing parts of her life together. No, her dynastic frustrations stayed with her, and when she died in 1558 it, most likely, was from a tumor of the womb that had cheated her into thinking that she was pregnant. Everything in her life seemed to mock her, and although I don't like that about the c. 280 dissidents being burned at the stake, I feel sorry for her. To me, it seems that poor Mary never had the life as a grown-up that she - and everybody else - expected her to have when she was her beloved, but discarded, mother's only surviving child.  

 

Wikipedia 

 

 

Britannica