Tudor Monarchs survivor (Mary I is a survivor)

[Senator Kalwejt]

I'd do another brief survivor, since it appears I'm addicted again

Monarch from the House of Tudor:

Henry VII (1485-1509) - eliminated round 5
Henry VIII (1508-1547) - eliminated round 1
Edward VI (1547-1553) - eliminated round 2
Jane Grey (1553) - eliminated round 4
Mary I (1553-1558) - survivor
Elizabeth I (1558-1603) - eliminated round 3

Enjoy!

[Senator Kalwejt]

Bloody Mary

[Χahar]

Jane Grey

[Sibboleth]

The man that had to use a system of pulleys to lift himself upstairs.

[Ghyl Tarvoke]

The man that had to use a system of pulleys to lift himself upstairs.

[big bad fab]

Henry VIII

[dialectical fetishist]

Bloody Mary

[Fmr. Emperor PiT]

     Edward VI

[JohnFKennedy]

Elizabeth I

[Senator Kalwejt]

The man that had to use a system of pulleys to lift himself upstairs.

Henry VIII I presume...

Please be more clear

[Senator Ben]

Bloody Mary.

[JohnFKennedy]

To those saying 'Bloody Mary', do you actually know even the slightest bit about her reign or the Tudor dynasty in general?

[Deldem]

To those saying 'Bloody Mary', do you actually know even the slightest bit about her reign or the Tudor dynasty in general?

She wasn't a great ruler by any measure. Trying to restore Roman Catholicism was a losing battle anyways, and her methods were a little extreme. Plus, she looks bad in comparison to her successor.

To get back on topic:

BLOODY MARY

[Jbrase]

Henry VIII

[Senator Kalwejt]

Since I'll be back at home really late today, I have to end sooner the round:

Henry VIII: 4
Mary I: 4
Jane Grey: 1
Edward VI: 1
Elizabeth I: 1

Great, tie. I'll flip a coin of course. Not good opening.

Bye, bye Henry (Not pleased with such a result)

[Senator Kalwejt]

Mary, duh

[Sibboleth]

The bitch who was in Blackadder.

[Vasall des Midas]

Not playing. Not one of those bastards deserves to survive.

[big bad fab]

Edward VI

Irrelevant.

[JohnFKennedy]

To those saying 'Bloody Mary', do you actually know even the slightest bit about her reign or the Tudor dynasty in general?

She wasn't a great ruler by any measure. Trying to restore Roman Catholicism was a losing battle anyways, and her methods were a little extreme. Plus, she looks bad in comparison to her successor.

To get back on topic:

BLOODY MARY

Trying to restore Roman Catholicism was a losing battle? The only reason in turned out to be a loss was because both she and the man chiefly responsible for the restoration (they were really his methods and not hers), Reginald Pole, died (they died within twenty-four hours of each other). In actual fact, the documentation from the time seems to suggest that people were largely willing to conform, which leads on to why she has a bad reputation: her successor. Not because her successor was necessarily a better ruler - historians disagree on her strength, but there are many who would argue she was a very weak ruler and that it was only through William Cecil, Lord Burghley that anything really got done - but because her regime pursued a brutal propaganda campaign against Mary in the same way that the Tudors generally did against Richard III. You didn't really think he was the guy from Shakespeare did you? Well, it's the same with Mary and John Foxe - his Actes and Monumentes (or Book of Martyrs as it is normally referred to) is a very successful and effective piece of propaganda.

Unfortunately, the picture of religion under Mary is not quite entirely how Foxe presents it. Firstly, he groups the martyrs together as though they were all of the Protestant faith that would come to dominate Elizabethan England which is not true; plenty of them were unitarians or professed doubts about the sacrament or any number of other doctrines which would have been seen as heresy in Elizabeth's reign as well as in Mary's (and incidentally, at the height of her reign I believe Elizabeth had more heretics killed than Mary, it's just that she didn't burn them). Not only does Foxe conceal these facts, but he also ignores most of the people who were brought before members of the religious authorities and recanted their Protestant beliefs, returning to Catholicism. If you don't believe me then I will happily direct you to the British Library's manuscript collection of the Foxe papers where you can see the original records of their interrogations, complete with the questions asked of them and the answers that they gave, as well as the signatures of all involved parties (several of the accused whose interrogations I have seen sign with an X signifying they were illiterate in the sense of being able to write or not). A good number recant and a good number express beliefs that would have led to their persecution under Elizabeth as well; the picture of Marian religion is a propagandistic construction of the Elizabethan reign and particularly the work of John Foxe.

I'd be happy to go on further explaining why Marian Catholicism was actually a very vibrant and popular religion - if you want evidence of popular commitment to Catholicism you could also look back at the Pilgrimage of Grace during Henry VIII's reign or the 1949 uprisings under Edward VI - but unfortunately i need to dash off fairly soon.

Anyway, i vote for Elizabeth, or as Al put it, 'the bitch who was in Blackadder.

[Ghyl Tarvoke]

Elizabeth I.

[Χahar]

Jane Grey

[Fmr. Emperor PiT]

     Edward VI

[12th Doctor]

Edward VI

Irrelevant.

I also vote Edward...

but he wasn't irrelevant... he was a major persecutor of Catholics.  Because history is written by the victors, his persecutions go largely forgotten, while those of Mary, which were a response to his acts, are not... not to excuse everything Mary did... She'll be my next vote.

[JohnFKennedy]

Edward VI

Irrelevant.

I also vote Edward...

but he wasn't irrelevant... he was a major persecutor of Catholics.  Because history is written by the victors, his persecutions go largely forgotten, while those of Mary, which were a response to his acts, are not... not to excuse everything Mary did... She'll be my next vote.

It's more than a bit of a stretch to say the Marian persecutions were a response to Edwardine ones. As I said in my previous post, the driving force behind the Marian campaign was not Mary, but Reginald Pole (who incidentally had a rather good claim to the throne of England) who pushed Mary to go further than she had initially in the restoration of the Catholic faith. Pole's a very intriguing character; aside from his decent claim to the English crown, he also could quite easily have been elected Pope, but was convinced that his mission was to restore Catholicism to England; he was a zealous man and I would argue that that was far more important than any notion of vengeance for the Catholics persecuted under Edward; the burnings were largely autochthonous. Here's an extract from his 1557 St Andrew's Day Sermon:

'Such S. Paule lykenethe to a grounde, that havinge received raine in dewe tyme, and well laboured, yf yt bringe furth thornes and bryers, cannot be but a nawghty grounde, touchede with malediction, to be destroyed at last with fyer' (taken from John Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials)

Incidentally, Pole does discuss the Henrician persecution of Thomas More and John Fisher in that sermon, contrasting their martyrdom with what he believed the pretend martyrdom of the victims of Marian restoration, but he doesn't discuss Edwardine persecutions.