I think many ordinary Catholics in the reign of Mary fill the burnings of Protestants with horror, although the Catholic families may not like the prevalent English and may not like the fact that during the reign of Edward VI that the church is being cleansed, or the Catholic liturgical kit that they were so retouched, this does not mean the Catholic families want see their neighbors burnt at the stake, and make no mistake about it, burning someone at the stake is a very nasty business, it takes a long time to die. When you have mass burnings, when you have numbers of persons being burnt at the same time, the smell of human burning fat would be overpowering.
The persecution is a duty, religious duty, because in order to save the souls of her subject, she has got to eradicate the virus of heresy. She is a fanatic.
While Mary’s religious persecutions proved unpopular with her subjects, her marriage with Philip was a sham.
That he ever loved her in a conventional romantic sense, I think is very doubtful, but he did always regard her as a czaritza, armada.
Mary was 11 years older than her husband, she failed to bear him a child—something she refused to accept.
We know that she has two fatal pregnancies, exactly what caused them, we don’t know, and what we assume is must be something imbalance between something physical, maybe some kind of tumor, who knows, something psychological in the plain meaning, she is desperate to have a child to continue the Tudor line and to continue her Catholic religious settlement by having children of her own rather than things pass on to Elizabeth.
It’s obvious to everybody except Mary herself that she’s never gonna have a child, but a barren wife, he’s not used to having it at all.
In the end, Philip went back to Spain, he got a lot else to do than being in England, so he left the Queen, nursing her delusions of pregnancy. And in the last year, her health was going, she became clear that she is dying.
With her health failing, Mary was determine to exact merciless revenge to those who wronged her in the past. It’s clear that the breakup of her parents’ marriage was enormously important to her, and the key to that is seen how relentlessly she pursue the man whom she blamed for that breakup, Thomas Cranmer, he became the archbishop of Canterbury, precisely in order to break up her parents’ marriage. Cranmer is a criminal in Mary’s eyes, he committed serious crimes—the first was to end her mother’s marriage, the second was to be part of the break of Rome, the third was then to change the church to the Protestantism and the fourth was to support Lady Jane Grey.
[ 本帖最后由 dorothydeng 于 2009-4-7 11:44 编辑 ] |