If a hit is composed with your nickname as the song title, it’s not about you! It happened to the English Queen Maria I, and the culprit was Lady Gaga. In the number Blood Mary the American chanteuse sings about the mother of Jesus, and not the queen of the house of Tudor who had ‘earned’ this nickname with her fanatical persecution of Protestants.
Mary was the only child of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII, a king famous for marrying six times. He usually had the wives who didn’t like him beheaded, but Catherine was more merciful. She bore Henry no son and was therefore disowned in favor of Anna Boleyn. After the forced divorce in 1533, Catharina spent the rest of her life in distant castles, while her daughter Maria was declared a bastard.
Amendment
Because the pope opposed his divorce, Henry VIII had not only dumped his wife, but also the Catholic Church. He embraced the Protestant faith, with one glaring change: the king became the head of the church in England.
Mary was all this an abomination. She remained faithful to the faith of Rome. After Anne Boleyn was beheaded in 1536, she was allowed to return to court – provided she acknowledged her father as boss of the church. The princess agreed, but at heart she remained Catholic.
All this would have been insignificant if Edward VI had lived. This boy—the son of Henry and his third wife Jane Seymour—had been brought up in a proper Protestant manner when he took over his father’s throne at the age of nine. Unfortunately, he died six years later, after which a power struggle broke out at the English court.
Mary’s party came out on top, and in 1553 England’s first female monarch ascended the throne. She married the Catholic Philip II, son of Emperor Charles V and later King of Spain. Philip was busy waging war and the couple saw each other little. Maria thought she was pregnant twice, but here the wish turned out to be the mother of the thought. She remained childless.
Pyre
In the meantime she energetically took up the fight against Protestantism. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the theological mastermind behind Henry’s reform, was burned at the stake in 1556. It earned her the nickname ‘the Bloody’.
This name could last because fate intervened again in 1558: Mary died, and with her the omnipotence of the Catholic Church in England disappeared. She was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth, the daughter of Anna Boleyn, who was a Protestant and has gone down in history as one of the greatest English monarchs.
Maria is left with nothing but a bloody reputation and ditto nickname. It found its way into a cocktail (vodka and tomato juice) and a pop song in which the wrong Maria was sung.