tribanana

as Edward VI, is lying dying, he is fully aware that he is facing a crisis, it looks
strongly as if the only option for his succession is for Mary to come to throne.
Mary, as we know, has battled against Edward to retain the Mass in her own household,
so this pious little protestant evangelical king is faced with all his work being un
done, the temple being rent asunder, catholicism returning to england, and so he
inaugurates a plot.

Edward's advisers proposed Mary's protestant cousin lady Jane Grey as heir to the
throne, supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, Lady Jane ruled
for only 9 days before Mary who had won the support of London took the throne. She
was not going to let her one and only chance to rule pass her by.

so what made people want Mary and not queen Jane? well, it was actually blood, They
wanted Henry VIII's blood, and that was Mary's slogan: I'm Henry vIII's daughter,
Jane isn't.

and the interesting thing is that Mary did not mention religion, she didn't say a
thing about religion, and that was quite deliberate and quite clever, because she
was being supported now by protestant and as well as catholics, both sides rallied
to that sort of Starlin-like memory of Henry. the power of the old king, and that's
what got her to London in, under fortnight,

in July 1553, Mary Tudor was 37 years old when she was crowned queen of all england
at Westminster abbey, she was determined to restore the catholic allegiance and
punish those who'd made her last 25 years a misery. the same year she cemented her
ties to catholic europe in a marriage alliance with king Phillip II of spain.

Phillip must have been a little crestfallen. shall we say, at the thought of marrying
Mary, she was old, shae was notoriously not much fun. she marries at the age of 37,
she is an old maid by that time, and I think that screwed her up quite considerably
as well.

for the protestant nobility, it was hard to accept a female catholic queen, but
impossible to accept foreign catholic king, within months of taking the thone, a
large scale protestant rebellion was crushed by Mary, she decided to show her enemies
how swift her catholic justice would be.