Lucy Worsley Investigates

Lucy Worsley, voice-over: London, the 1st of October, 1553.

The next monarch of England is preparing to be crowned.

For the first time, the country will be ruled by a woman-- Mary I... [Thunder] but this monarch will be remembered not as a pioneer, but as a monster.

In her 5-year reign, hundreds are killed in the name of religion, earning her the label Bloody Mary, but does England's first queen really deserve her reputation as one of Britain's most evil tyrants?

In this series, I'm reinvestigating some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters in British history.

Oh, yes.

Here we go, Man: And now you're face to face with William the Conqueror.

Woman, voice-over: They know that sex sells and that violence sells.

Worsley, voice-over: These stories form part of our national mythology.

They harbor mysteries that have intrigued us for centuries... Worsley: It turns very dark here.

Clearly showing us-- Refugees.

There's such graphic images of religious violence.

Worsley, voice-over: but with the passage of time, we have new ways to unlock their secrets using scientific advances and a modern perspective.

He was what we would now call a foreign fighter.

Worsley, voice-over: I'm going to uncover forgotten witnesses.

I'm going to reexamine old evidence and follow new clues...

The human hand.

Worsley, voice-over: to get closer to the truth.

It's like fake news.

Worsley: You're questioning whether we can actually take that seriously as a piece of evidence.

Worsley, voice-over: Hampton Court Palace-- family home of England's original Tudor queen, daughter of Henry VIII-- Mary I.

She walked these cloisters and lived in these rooms.

There are echoes of Mary's presence here, but the real Mary seems lost in history.

Worsley: Mary was England's first crowned female monarch, and this meant she had to create a whole new role-- the role of queen regnant, or ruling queen-- and Mary created a blueprint that all the queens to come would follow, from Elizabeth I to Victoria to Elizabeth II.

I think of Mary as a female trailblazer, but she's all too often remembered as a bloody tyrant.

Worsley, voice-over: During Mary's 5 years in power, more than 280 people were killed for their faith.

Her reputation seems sealed, but Mary lived in a divided time, and, as a historian, I know there's always more than one side to a story, so I want to look at Mary afresh through different eyes-- her supporters', her enemies', and Mary's own-- to examine how she navigated ruling as a woman and if Bloody Mary is really how she deserves to be remembered.

I'm starting my investigation with a very rare glimpse of Mary as a child.

Worsley: "Special Collections."

Worsley, voice-over: In the stores at the National Portrait Gallery, I'm hoping to be able to come face to face with the young princess.

Here are some exciting-looking little boxes.

Worsley: voice-over: I'm here to see what's thought to be the earliest portrait miniature produced in England.

The art form's intended to give a sense of intimacy.

It's an image of Mary dating to 1522.

There she is.

There she is.

Can I touch?

Yeah.

Ah.

Ah, thank you.

You're very welcome.

Yeah.

It's Mary.

Yeah.

Incredible level of details.

She's got really red hair, hasn't she... Yeah.

She does.

like you'd expect from Henry VIII's daughter.

It's such a precious-feeling little thing, and it's 500 years old.

Yes.

Worsley, voice-over: I'm interested in what this painting reveals about Mary's status.

The gallery's state-of-the-art microscope might give me an even closer look.

Worsley: It's just fantastic.

You can see the individual flakes of the paint.

Worsley, voice-over: When this portrait was made, Mary was a much-loved 6-year-old.

Worsley: This was painted for a special reason, and the clue to what that was-- there it is--it's down here.

You can see that on her dress, she's wearing a brooch, a golden brooch, and it says on it in tiny letters, "The Emperor," so this is one of the European rulers.

It's the Emperor Charles V, and the picture's been painted because Mary's just been engaged to him.

This is the fate of a princess.

She's like a little chess piece that her father is using to play the game of European politics.

Worsley, voice-over: The Mary I'm seeing here had her whole future mapped out, but then in her teens, everything changed.

Here we have Henry VIII... and he's married to Catherine of Aragon from Spain, a very devout Catholic.

Poor Catherine had a whole series of miscarriages, stillbirths, children who died young.

Their daughter Mary was the only one of their children to survive.

Worsley, voice-over: But Henry was desperate for a male heir.

He and Catherine had not had the all-important son, so he wanted a divorce to marry Anne Boleyn.

In 1533, he got his way by splitting from Rome and the Catholic Church, opening the door to the English Protestant Reformation and dividing the country.

Mary was now declared illegitimate.

At 17, she was stripped of her royal title and threatened with death as a traitor for her beliefs.

She would come to define her life by her Catholic faith and her right to the throne.

This sounds like a woman with immense self-confidence, and I'm curious about her journey from outcast to queen.

I'm heading to Framlingham in Suffolk, where Mary would make some crucial decisions 6 years after her father's death.

Mary had been Henry's eldest child.

Then came Elizabeth, followed by Henry's longed-for son Edward.

On Henry's death, 9-year-old Edward inherited the throne, but he would die as a young teenager.

Aged 37, Mary could now claim her right to the crown.

Now, there'd never been a ruling queen in England before.

There had been queens, but they'd been the wives of kings.

Unlike some of the countries of Europe, though, there was nothing in English law to stop there being a female ruler.

Technically, at least, Mary could go right ahead and take the throne.

Worsley, voice-over: But King Edward had been influenced by powerful Protestant nobles.

On his deathbed, he bypassed Catholic Mary and declared a distant cousin, the Protestant Lady Jane Gray, as his successor.

To win her crown, Mary would need to fight, and on the 12th of July, 1553, she came here to her castle at Framlingham to rally support for her cause.

Worsley: The stakes couldn't have been higher for Mary at this moment.

If her attempt to seize the throne failed, she'd either have to go into exile or if, they caught her, she'd be executed as a traitor.

Worsley, voice-over: I'm meeting a specialist in Tudor relationships who believes that applying modern analysis to old evidence might reveal Mary's tactics.

Melita, we're sitting on the spot of what was once the Great Hall of Framlingham Castle.

There's bits of Tudor walls up there.

I think we can imagine Mary spending some anxious hours in here thinking, "Who's on my side?"

Can you tell me a bit more about your research into Mary's network?

Yes.

I've been doing what's called social network analysis, so I've put together--and I'm still working on it-- it's a massive database of all of the connections that Mary had to different people.

My goodness, it looks like a Spirograph.

Yes.

Is that Mary right in the middle?

It is Mary, right in the center.

So, Melita, are we looking at the Tudor version of LinkedIn?

That's it, absolutely.

Yes.

Now, the different colors of connection represent different things.

OK. Green represents an award, so it's a grant of office.

We've got also purple lines, and that's gifts in a more tangible sense, so jewelry or quite often clothing or fruit.

We've got quite a lot of records from her Privy Purse expenses from in the 1530s and '40s.

She's given an awful lot of gifts, hasn't she?

Mary was very generous.

And is this how you build up a following if you want to be a powerful Tudor person?

Exactly, yes, because the trick is, you always wanted them to be slightly grateful to you.

Oh, there's a Framlingham filter in the program.

Yes, and we can see who supported Mary immediately.

Now, two in there you can see with little red spots, they were actually members of Edward's Privy Council, and yet they were immediate supporters of Mary.

And if you click on Richard Southwell, we can see-- That over a period of years, he and Mary have exchanged gifts...

Yes.

Oh.

and she's given him more than he's given her.

Oh, yes, so she has kind of... Cultivated.

cultivated him.

Oh, you've got a filter that's actually called Defected to Mary, brilliant.

Look at it doing its thing.

It's amazing.

So one of the people who defected to her was Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel.

His first wife had been one of her ladies in waiting, and of the men who support her in 1553, you can often see that there are relationships through their wives and their sisters.

So it's interesting that she's built up friendships with the females of this family and they bring over their male relatives.

Yes.

I think we can definitely see a connection between family pressure through women's networks.

Was it presumably Catholics who were the fastest in coming forwards?

Catholics were definitely amongst her core supporters, but she also had Protestants because she was the legitimate heir.

The Mary you're talking about sounds like she's friendly.

She's generous.

She's well-connected.

She's somebody who knows how to build loyalty.

I think she had the gift of friendship, and Mary's a lot more fun than people give her credit for.

Really?

She loved to dance.

She loved to hunt.

She did archery.

She knew in her heart that she was a queen, and I think that was another element, her self-belief and her determination.

She said, "I'm queen, and I'm gonna be queen, and I'm gonna absolutely insist on my rights."

She was a politician to the tips of her royal fingers.

Absolutely.

Worsley, voice-over: It strikes me that Mary had no hope of seizing the throne without her quite considerable emotional intelligence.

She needed to win hearts and minds to her side.

There's no sign of the cold-hearted tyrant here.

Worsley: This was a woman who was sociable.

She was generous.

This was a leader who people wanted to follow, and follow Mary they did.

Worsley, voice-over: In July 1553, Mary gathered hundreds of her supporters here, ready and willing to fight for the throne.

In the end, no battle was needed.

The tide of support had turned in Mary's favor, so the Protestant nobles conceded defeat.

Mary had thrown off years of bitter persecution and rallied a country behind her to win the throne, but she would now have to deal with the rituals of royalty, which were, until this moment, made for men.

[Bells ringing] Nearly 500 years ago, on the 1st of October, 1553, Mary walked down this very aisle in Westminster Abbey to be crowned.

Mary was at the front of this whole long procession of her knights and her counselors and her dukes.

She did have some ladies with her, but the focus was all on Mary herself.

For the first time at a coronation, a woman was leading the men.

[Men singing Gregorian chants] Worsley, voice-over: But a coronation designed for kings presented some problems for the first queen.

Her coronation regalia included the spurs of a knight, but, unlike kings before her, Mary didn't put them on.

She did receive the sword, a symbol that she was now defender of the realm.

Worsley: It seems to me that Mary had a very difficult line to tread here.

She almost had to blur the genders.

She had to portray herself as a king for legitimacy and authority, but she also had to tear up the rule book and make the ritual suitable for a woman, and what she did would set the pattern for all the female monarchs who followed.

[Choir singing] Worsley: This area up here is off limits because that mosaic is over 750 years old.

It's much too fragile to be walked on, but that's the exact spot where Mary was crowned, and it's still the exact spot where monarchs are crowned to this day.

At the actual moment of crowning, Mary was on the Coronation Chair-- it was placed on a platform-- and the Crown Imperial was put onto her head.

Worsley, voice-over: The coronation service was a full Catholic Mass.

Mary couldn't officially restore the Catholic faith until Parliament reconvened... so she was crowned Supreme Head of the Protestant Church of England.

[Cheering and applause] Worsley, voice-over: The country celebrated, and there were parties in the streets of London, but within just 5 years, hundreds of ordinary people would be killed in Mary's name.

The new Queen's Catholic beliefs would make her rule hugely polarizing.

Naturally, as a historian, I want to interrogate this period from different angles, so I wonder what I can learn from the experience of someone living on the other side of the religious divide.

This is a copy of a page from "Foxe's Book of Martyrs."

Worsley, voice-over: It's an account of Mary's reign by a strongly Protestant critic.

It's very one-sided-- I've got to be wary of that-- but it does give the story of a Protestant woman who found Mary's rule horrifyingly harsh.

Worsley: She's referred to here as "Drivers wyfe," meaning the wife of a man called Driver.

She's presented very much as his property.

She was "about the age of 30 yeares," and she "dwelt at Grosborough...in Suffolke."

It says that, "[h]er husband did use husbandry," which means a subsistence farmer.

Then we get quite a lot more detail about what happens to her, and then here, her name was Alice.

Alice Dryver.

Worsley, voice-over: This young farmer's wife lived just 10 miles from Framlingham Castle, the site of Mary's triumph, but under the new regime, her faith put her at risk of execution.

To get a sense of why a woman like Alice might become a threat to the Queen of England, I've come to Grundisburgh in Suffolk, where Alice lived.

Here's a piece of 16th-century evidence that I think might give an insight into Alice's life here.

This is Fitzherbert's "Booke of Husbandry" from 1523, and here's a section called "The Duties of Wyves."

Presumably, this is the sort of thing that Alice was expected to do.

"It is a wyves occupacyon to winow all manner of corne..." "in tyme of nede to helpe her husbande to fyll the mucke wayne," the muck wain being the "dounge carte"... [Rooster crows] and she also has to "dryve the plough," which sounds quite masculine, actually-- a bit surprised about that-- and she also has "to go...to the markette to sell the butter, "the chese, the mylke, the egges, the chekens, the hennes, the pygges."

That sounds like a pretty hard life with a lot of hard labor in it, long hours, I guess.

Worsley, voice-over: At the heart of village life when Alice lived here was the church, and Alice would likely have worshiped in this very building nearly 500 years ago.

Look at these amazing angels on the roof with their big wings.

Now, Alice, extraordinarily, would have been here in the service with them up above her.

Worsley, voice-over: This church building would have been a constant in Alice's life, but the religion practiced here varied.

She was just 5 when Henry VIII turns this from a Catholic church to Church of England.

Alice grew up in the Protestant faith, but 20 years later, it would change back again.

Worsley: It was maybe here at the church that Alice learned that Queen Mary had come to the throne and that this church would once again become Catholic.

Worsley, voice-over: Mary's restoration of Catholicism meant Alice would no longer be allowed to worship in here as a Protestant.

She would now need to convert or risk getting into trouble.

Mary herself had experienced pressure to convert.

She had fought hard for her Catholic faith.

Now as Queen, her drive to make the whole country Catholic set her on a collision course with Protestants across England... but those who supported Mary must have had a very different view of her reign, so I've come to Cambridge University Library in search of a source that should offer a much less familiar take on Bloody Mary-- a Spanish one.

Mary was half Spanish on her mother's side.

I've enlisted a Spanish historian to help me decipher this perspective.

This is quite exciting, isn't it?

Oh, look how dinky it is.

It's like a little toy book.

So there's his name, which I fear I'm going to make a terrible job of pronouncing.

Will you say it for me?

His name is Pedro de Ribadeneira.

And he was a Spaniard who came to England?

Yes.

He did.

He came to England in 1558.

He was a Catholic priest, and he stayed in the kingdom for a few months.

I am reading this.

I think it says, "The virtues of the Queen."

So "Delas virtudes de la Reina dona Maria" is, as you very well said, "On the virtues of Queen Mary."

What are they?

What are the virtues?

Take me through it.

Well, Ribadeneira thinks that Mary is a good Catholic who's leading her kingdom towards salvation.

She respects the primacy of the Pope.

She cares for her people.

May I just say, he would say that, though, wouldn't he, with his Catholic perspective.

Of course he is going to be seeing her in such a good light, which contrasts a lot with what other Protestant historians were writing about Mary in the 16th century.

Does he give any comment about her performance once she's in the role as queen?

Yes.

He does indeed.

The economic situation that Mary inherits is not an easy one, but from the very beginning of her reign, she decides that she's going to make changes and reforms.

According to Ribadeneira, she reforms the Court of the Exchequer, and she creates a new book of rates that increases the Crown's income.

So she cuts taxes, she reforms bureaucracy, and she increases crown revenues.

She's doing a great job.

She is indeed.

We usually tend to see the beginning of Elizabeth's reign and the prosperity as something that is achieved by Elizabeth...

It was achieved by Mary.

but she is the one achieving it.

She's the one that is setting base for that future prosperity.

And how does she go about restoring Catholicism?

How does she actually do that in practice?

Now, she's cautious at the beginning in the sense that she doesn't want to force people.

She understands that there has been a lot of upheaval, and she is very pragmatic.

On this page, she is talking about how those who had acquired church land during the dissolution of the monasteries of her father's reign are being allowed to keep that land, and over, here we see that she allowed all marriages that had taken place through the Protestant rite to remain valid.

You're talking as if Bloody Mary the tyrant was actually quite reasonable and sensible and pragmatic.

Compared to other rulers of her time, I would say absolutely.

Wasn't that fascinating to get a Spanish perspective on Mary, one that sees her as a pretty effective ruler?

Now, I do concede that Ribadeneira is a partial witness.

He's very pro-Catholic, pro-Mary, but he does admit that she has some flaws.

There's a bit of balance there, almost as if Mary wasn't entirely good or entirely bad, almost as if she was a human being.

Worsley, voice-over: According to this side of the story, at the start of her reign, Mary wanted to restore Catholicism but didn't want to use force.

Protestants like Alice Dryver were left in peace for now.

So if this is true, why did Mary change direction?

In the summer of 1554, about 9 months into her reign, Mary got married.

She needed a husband because she needed an heir... Hi there.

Hey, madam.

Could we go to the Spanish Embassy, please?

Certainly.

Belgrave Square.

Thanks.

Worsley, voice-over: but a man at her side could potentially undermine Mary's position as queen.

Her new husband was a devout Catholic and a cousin on her mother's side-- Philip of Spain.

Mary and Philip married in July 1554.

Philip was the son of the emperor Charles V, ironically the very man Mary had been betrothed to as a child.

Philip was heir to the Spanish throne and an enormous European empire.

Even before the wedding took place, a group of Protestants mounted a rebellion to try to stop the marriage and overthrow the queen... so how does a married woman rule with authority in a traditional society where men dominate?

To find out, I'm meeting an expert in 16th-century marriage treaties.

Worsley: Alexander, we've got a completely unprecedented situation here.

We've got Mary, a female ruler, with a male consort, and he's a foreigner, as well.

Yes.

How are they going to rule in practice?

How's she going to make sure that he doesn't boss her about?

Well, one of the key, key ways of doing that is through the stipulations that they have in their marriage contract, and here we have the copy from the National Archives of the English draft that formed the basis of the document that they both eventually went on to sign.

So this is like a prenup.

Exactly, yes, setting out all of the kind of legal limitations on his power and also settling her position constitutionally.

This is one of my favorite clauses down the bottom-- "That the said noble prince shall nothyng do, "whereby anything be innovate in the state and right publique."

So he's not allowed to make new laws or anything like that.

He's not allowed to make new laws or to change anything, effectively, constitutionally particularly... Stay in your lane, Philip.

so I think we can see that in this first clause here that he "shall not promote, admit, or receive "to any office, administration, "or benefice in the said realm of England "anyone who is not a natural born subject of the Queen of England."

So he's not going to be allowed to put any of his own people into English jobs and positions and offices.

Exactly that.

He is excluding specifically powers of patronage, taking them away from Philip, ensuring that Mary retains complete control of who is in the key offices of state.

There were people who saw the Spanish marriage as very dangerous.

People in England did not want England to become a satellite state of this broader Hispanic monarchy, this broader European empire.

For Mary, it's obviously really important that her subjects and parliament know that power will be not given away to Philip too much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How does she circulate that news?

She has the terms declared and proclaimed to all the people of England, and in addition to this, the English Parliament passes in 1554 the Act for the Queen's Regal Power, which essentially settles constitutionally her right to rule in her own right, and so the name of king and queen are kind of made equivalent so that all legislation which refers to kings now applies to queens, and, in fact, it's the constitutional basis for Elizabeth's authority in the Elizabethan period which follows on straight from this one.

Worsley, voice-over: On paper, Mary had successfully managed the power dynamic with Philip, but I've got proof that she still had something of a PR problem.

For the first time in the English coinage, we've got two people on the money.

There's Philip, there's Mary, and a little floating crown to show that they rule together, but you can also see the scale of the problem that she had because the person on the left in a double portrait is the person who's more dominant, and in this case, that person is Philip.

A craftsman who would earn a shilling as his day's wages would get this in his hand, and he'd think, "Oh, yes, Philip and Mary.

They are our rulers now."

Our queen has given away her power.

Worsley, voice-over: Mary's marriage had reignited anti-Catholic feeling, and, for me, Mary's marriage raises questions about her persecution of Protestants.

Did her husband influence her to take a harder line, or did she feel she had to assert her authority in the face of religious division?

Either way, she tightened her grip.

[Bell tolls] In December 1554, Mary reintroduced heresy laws.

Protestant beliefs were now punishable by death.

It was an act that would come to define her reign, in large part because of a book which claims to tell us what happened next-- "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," the book where I found the story of the farmer's wife Alice Dryver.

Thank you.

Ooh, it's heavy.

Worsley, voice-over: I wonder if seeing an original copy at Trinity College, Cambridge, can help me understand this book's power.

Worsley: This is "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," and it's a history of the church going from the first century right up until the reign of Mary I. Worsley, voice-over: But this is a history book with a clear bias because John Foxe was a prominent Protestant.

Worsley: What John Foxe doesn't like about Mary is her Catholicism, and at the start of her reign, he and his family went to live in exile.

He was out of England when he was writing this.

Let's go to the part of the book where Mary appears.

Here it is, "The comming in of Queene Mary," and the whole of the rest of it, 700 pages here, are basically about the terrible things done to Protestants in her name.

What makes the book so powerful, I think, are the images, the woodcuts.

They're such graphic images of religious violence.

This one shows a man being burnt alive at the stake, the most horrible, long-drawn-out, painful death imaginable, and you can tell he's alive, although the flames are all around him, because he's saying, "Lorde, receive my spirite," and there's a crowd, and the crowd are visibly distressed.

[People screaming] Worsley, voice-over: Looking at Foxe's account, it's easy to believe that Mary was a queen on the rampage... but I think it's time for more of Mary's side of the story.

There's an intriguing source from 1555 that gives some insight into her thinking at the time.

This is a report to the church authorities recording the opinion of the Queen of England, "which she has written out with her own hand," so it's a record of Mary's actual words, and she says that, "Touching the punishment of heretics"-- by "punishment," she does mean burnings and executions-- she says, "[I]t would be well to inflict punishment... without much cruelty or passion," so she's emphasizing moderation.

She says that she wants to target the people who deceive the simple, by which I think she means clever preachers who are out there actively spreading the Protestant message, and the punishments are to be an "example to the whole of this kingdom," so they're supposed to be a deterrent, so that's quite surprising when it comes to the burning of Protestants.

Mary seems to want quite a targeted approach.

Worsley, voice-over: If this is to be believed, Mary was aiming to make an example of the leaders of the faith in the hope the rest would submit, but Alice Dryver wasn't a powerful leader, just a Suffolk farmer's wife.

We don't know who betrayed Alice... but "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," our main source on Alice, tells us that she and another Protestant were hiding from the authorities when they got caught.

Alice was taken to the local town and imprisoned to await trial and her fate.

[Gate opens] From the summer of 1555, the number of burnings across the country were ramping up.

Records show they more than doubled between the first half of the year and the second.

I want to understand how Mary was feeling at this point.

I suspect it's not a coincidence that this was happening during a moment of personal upheaval.

In the spring of 1555, Mary withdrew to her private chambers at Hampton Court.

She believed she was pregnant.

This child would secure Mary's line of succession and the future of Catholicism in England.

These are copies of ambassadors' letters from court-- this lot are in French-- and the hot topic is the Queen's pregnancy.

He's talking about "the size of her stomach and the hardening of her mamelles"-- he must mean her breasts-- "and they are distilling a liquid."

I guess that might mean lactating.

Poor Mary.

These are really intimate details being shared, seems completely inappropriate, but I guess it's her job.

She's supposed to produce the heir to the throne, so her body is public property.

Worsley, voice-over: Documents from this time that Mary herself had a hand in add to the sense of joyful anticipation.

Worsley: These cards-- pre-prepared, ready to be sent out to dignitaries across Europe announcing the birth when it happens-- they've been signed by "Mary the Queen"... and they announced the birth of a prince at Hampton Court... and then a gap's been left blank here just for the date to be popped in when it actually happens.

The reason they're still blank is that 9 months went past and no baby came.

Mary was actually experiencing a phantom pregnancy.

Worsley, voice-over: To delve into this mysterious condition and the impact it would have had on Mary, I'm hoping a psychiatrist can give me a modern medical perspective.

Mary I has had a phantom pregnancy.

Can you tell me what that actually is in medical terms?

Phantom pregnancy means false pregnancy, pseudocyesis, so it means you think you're pregnant because you see the signs and symptoms, but actually, you're not.

Do you ever see this today in your practice?

It doesn't seem like it's a very common condition.

In Western medicine, you wouldn't typically get a case of phantom pregnancy because if you think you're pregnant, you will have a urine test to check your pregnancy.

You will have a Doppler scan, ultrasound scan, a blood test, so automatically right at the start, you would know you're not pregnant.

I've got something to show you.

This is a medical paper from America, 1951, of a variety of cases of pseudocyesis.

Oh, "A Psychosomatic Study in Gynecology," and there are "[b]reast changes...enlargement, tenderness; secretion of milky or cloudy fluid."

They've mentioned here a case study where there were 27 patients who presented as pregnant, and this was confirmed in 9 of the cases by doctors.

The doctors were taken in, so in relatively recent times, people were still having phantom pregnancies, 1951... Mm.

and what causes it?

If we like to categorize, we might think psychological or hormonal, so the psychological side, there's a variety of risk factors-- so if someone has had emotional abuse, if someone's longing to be pregnant, if someone's had difficulty getting pregnant.

There's a variety of reasons.

There's quite a few things that you just listed that do apply to Mary.

She did have a difficult childhood.

She wasn't taken care of.

People threatened her with death and a huge, huge, huge amount of pressure to bear a child.

Is it possible for you to speculate as to what might have happened to her after the phantom pregnancy was over, then?

I imagine a great deal of distress.

It must be quite frightening, actually, because she would have had a distended abdomen and she would have had these bodily changes but no understanding why that's happening.

And I suppose she's lost a whole imagined future.

I mean, if we think, you know, you're longing for a child, you've created a bond, and that's suddenly taken away, so I can imagine she must have felt very anxious, very low in mood, and emotionally, psychologically, it must have been absolutely dreadful to go through it.

[Crying] Mary must have felt like her body had failed her, and she was 39 years old, which, in 16th-century terms, meant that her chances of getting pregnant again were diminishing very fast.

Worsley, voice-over: As a woman, this would have been a huge personal trauma, but as a queen, it was a crisis.

With no heir, the future of Catholic England hung in the balance.

Tensions were rising.

Troops were brought into London to maintain order.

By 1556, a major plot against the queen was uncovered, an attempt to replace her with her Protestant sister Elizabeth.

Mary was now living in fear.

She was sleeping only 3 hours a night.

Worsley: Mary was clearly struggling on a personal level with her mental health, her physical health, and I'm left wondering what that might have meant for her as a ruler.

Was her authority still intact?

Was she really able still to govern the country in the same way?

Worsley, voice-over: In places like rural Suffolk, it was local authorities who wielded the power.

They could decide how to enforce religious policies.

The Protestant source, "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," contains a detailed account of how Alice Dryver's trial unfolded.

Alice is brought to her trial at Ipswich.

She would have been quite likely the only woman present.

Then a lengthy theological debate begins, and during it, Alice shows that she's more than capable of standing up for herself intellectually.

As she says here to the courtroom-- it's amazing, this; she just goes off onto this speech of her own-- she says, "I was an honest poore man's daughter, "never brought up in the universitie as you have bene..." ...but I have driven the plough before my father many a tyme, and I thank God.

In defense of God's truth and in the cause of my master Christ, by his grace I will set my foote against the foote of any of you.

Worsley, voice-over: She's standing up for herself, answering back.

She will set her foot against the foot of any of these men sitting in trial upon her.

It's an extraordinary moment of courage.

Worsley, voice-over: Alice staunchly defended herself and her faith.

She was found guilty of heresy.

What strikes me reading this is that Alice and Mary weren't so very different.

They were both of them women who broke the rules.

They were women who did things that women weren't supposed to do, and they also had such a deep religious faith that they defended it at enormous personal cost... which is why it's so very painful that it's now in Mary's name that Alice is condemned to die.

Worsley, voice-over: There's no paper trail linking Mary to Alice's fate.

It was the church authorities who chose how extreme the punishment should be.

On the 4th of November, 1558, Alice Dryver was burnt alive at the stake.

[Alice screaming] She was one of the last people to be killed under Mary's regime because only two weeks later, on the 17th of November, Queen Mary herself died.

She'd been struggling with ill health ever since her phantom pregnancy.

The likely cause of death was cancer.

She was 42 years old.

Now her Protestant sister Elizabeth I would succeed to the throne, and I believe Mary would become the victim of a smear campaign.

There's no denying the brutal religious persecutions of Mary's reign.

Those Protestant accounts are based on real deaths, but at this time, Europe was bitterly divided between Catholic and Protestant, with mass killings on both sides.

Henry VIII had thousands put to death in the name of religion.

In Edward's reign, around 900 were killed and an estimated 600 under Elizabeth.

Approximately 284 deaths are attributed to Mary.

Obviously, her reign was shorter, but the numbers are pretty comparable, but it's Mary who has been vilified and dubbed a bloody tyrant, and I believe that's thanks to her enemies.

This pamphlet was published in 1558.

This little book by John Knox is called "The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women."

John Knox really makes me see a kind of red mist because he's so massively misogynistic.

He says that women, queens like Mary, are unfit to rule, "made to serve and obey man, not to rule and command him," and he thinks that women are "weake, fraile, impaciet, feble, foolishe, and cruell."

Now, this isn't just about Mary's gender.

John Knox was a very fiery Protestant.

He was against Mary as a Catholic queen, and the way Knox sees the burning of Protestants is as a punishment to everybody for having put Mary, a woman, on the throne in the first place.

Worsley, voice-over: This Protestant pamphlet was a catalyst for more vicious attacks on the reputation of the Catholic queen.

It was soon after that "Foxe's Book of Martyrs" was published.

In 1571, it was ordered that copies be put in every cathedral and church in the country alongside the bible.

Foxe's graphic imagery and unflinching, one-sided stories of what he called the bloody time of Queen Mary now came to be seen as the gospel truth, the definitive history of the period.

I wouldn't describe him as a historian.

I would describe him as a propagandist and an incredibly good one.

It's this book that has given Mary her reputation as a bloody tyrant.

Worsley, voice-over: The long reign of Elizabeth I firmly established England as a Protestant country, and it surely suited Elizabeth that her sister be remembered as a Catholic monster.

I think the smear campaign against Mary has clouded out all that was achieved by our first queen.

As well as having to navigate all the problems of being a female leader in a world made for men, she was also ruling at a time of brutal religious division, and she had physical health problems and such traumatic experiences of her own to overcome, I'm just left astounded by Mary's courage and her completely underestimated political skills.

She really redefined what it means to be a monarch.

Worsley, voice-over: There's one final telling footnote to Mary's story here at Westminster Abbey.

This is Mary's tomb, but it's shared with her sister Elizabeth, and it's Elizabeth whose effigy is on top and whose initials adorn the monument.

There's an inscription right down here like a footnote, and it says that there are two queens here-- Elizabeth and Mary, "et Maria."

Worsley, voice-over: But this tiny reference is the only mention of Mary on the whole tomb.

Worsley: I think the tomb says a lot about how we remember Mary today.

Here, she's literally overshadowed by her sister, the mighty Elizabeth I, but I think that Elizabeth was mighty not least because of what she learned from her big sister Mary.

Worsley, voice-over: For too long, Mary has been misunderstood, overlooked, vilified.

I think it's time we restored England's first ruling queen to her rightful place in history as a female trailblazer.