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Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit,

the podcasts in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs,

from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise,

relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft.

Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

Mary the First is so often overshadowed by her half-sister, Elizabeth I first. In parts, it's

understandable because Elizabeth's reign stretched for 45 years, while Mary's only lasted five.

But Mary has also become saddled with the epithet Bloody Mary, because of the burnings of

mainstream Protestants that occurred on her watch and seemingly at her command.

And yet the image of Mary that has come down to posterity is not an unbiased one.

It was largely shaped during the reign of Elizabeth and subsequent generations

when it served the politics of England and late at Britain to deem Catholicism as something foreign

and the rise of Protestantism as inextricably bound up with the fate of the nation and a form of ineluctible progress.

Mary the first was the daughter, the only surviving child of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

Born in 1516, she was raised by her mother to rule.

Catherine, having grown up in Trasdemardo Spain,

where her mother Isabel had been sovereign and proprietary queen of Castile,

...