This is an excellent biography of Mary Tudor who reigned as Queen from July 1553 until her death in November 1558. During her reign she had over 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake as she attempted to reverse the protestant policies of her half brother Edward VI back to the old catholic religion. She earned the posthumous sobriquet as Bloody Mary, however David Loades gives us a rounded portrait of this troubled queen and woman. He makes no excuses for her religious zeal, but does a good job in explaining why she pursued the policies that looked like religious persecution from our standpoint today. He concentrates on the character and issues facing Mary herself who is the star of this book. There are some social commentaries and pen portraits of the people around the queen, certainly enough to make her story understandable and to demonstrate the pressures that she was under from a turbulent Tudor Court.

Loades reminds his readers that Mary was the first female English sovereign - a ruling queen who was not simply the consort of the king and so faced unique difficulties as a woman in a man’s world. She was 37 years old, unmarried and fiercely proud of her virginity when she became queen and had to face the immediate problem of the succession. She chose to marry the Spanish prince Philip: a staunchly catholic man who had no time or much inclination to get to know the issues facing an English monarch and who proved to be very unpopular with the English people. Mary kept it all together to a certain extant, but failure to produce an heir and the prospect of her protestant half sister Elizabeth next in line for the throne were difficulties that she could not overcome. David Loades ends his biography by saying that “It is time that England’s first queen was better appreciated” and if this means understanding the problems facing her and also appreciating a stubborn, dogmatic and at times indecisive character then Loades has done a very good job.

A very readable and easily digestible history book that uses both primary and secondary sources to provide an up to date (2006) summary of current knowledge on this catholic queen’s reign. A four star read. ( )

Exemplary royal biography, fair, well-written,and interestingly argued. Also pleasingly brief, at 220 pages - though no doubt it helps that Mary's reign was only five years long, and she died at the age of 42.

Loades' book is convincingly anchored in recent scholarship, and comes with interesting excerpts from primary source documents, as well as full "scholarly apparatus." Loades can also use Britishisms amusingly. My favorite example is when he is writing about the shrewd evasions of the then Princess Elizabeth as she "worked" Count Feria, King Philip's emissary at the Royal Court: "It must have been a difficult interview, because even by his own account she seems to have been playing him like a fish." ( )