Mary Tudor: A Life - Softcover

"Loades manages the difficult feat of being both a sensitive portrait of a woman treated abominably by her father, and a cool estimation of the religious persecutions she initiated as a result. A sad but not unsympathetic book." (The Week, January 2009) "An excellent and sensitive biography." (Observer) "A weighty achievement." (Times Educational Supplement) "A stimulating and scholarly reappraisal of Marya s career ... Without resurrecting the black legend, he illuminates the shortcomings of an historical figure who was a a good woman, but an ill Queena ." (Spectator) "Loades has written by far the best biography of the queen to date. He has created a deeply moving and penetrating human story in which the lesser characters retain their verity and are gracefully integrated into a drama that is, as the author says, a pure tragedya ." (American Historical Review) "David Loadesa s brisk and unsentimental account is therefore welcome." (The English Historical Review)

Few English monarchs have a worse reputation than Mary Tudor. She has been seen both as a religious fanatic who tried against the will of her people to reverse the course of the Reformation and as the pawn of her husband, Philip II of Spain -- her infatuation with whom led her to betray Englanda s vital interests. How this pious, and by contemporary accounts, gentle woman aroused an antipathy that survives until the present is a central question in David Loadesa s sensitive biography, now in paperback. Based on research into the documents of the time (many newly uncovered) the compelling story of Marya s life is revealed here in unprecedented detail and depth, packed with incident and intrigue, and enmeshed in the politics of secular and religious struggle in England and Europe.