Leanda de Lisle

Heresy & Hearsay

Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen

By

Yale University Press 336pp £25 order from our bookshop

Mary I is rarely allowed her proper title. She is either Mary Tudor, as if we cannot admit we ever had a Catholic queen, or the ‘Bloody Mary’ of Whig history. Here she is, at last, as Mary I, but in a biography that calls to mind the girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead: where it is good it is very, very good, and where it is bad it is … just that. 

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