When Mary Tudor drew her final breath within the walls of St. James’s Palace on 17 November 1558, she had ruled over England as Queen for five years. She was forty-two and had been sharply declining since late August, although she had never enjoyed particularly robust health.
The only daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon to survive childhood, her father’s relentless pursuit to annul his marriage to her mother and declare Mary illegitimate took an unsurprising toll on her health. Branded with the sharp sting of bastardy, deprived of her mother, and demoted from ‘princess’ to ‘lady Mary’, by the time she matured into adulthood she had suffered from years of chronic, debilitating stress that played no small part in her premature death.
Her early life, shaped by personal tragedies and political turmoil, played a complex role in her illnesses and gradual decline, which, as we shall see, began long before her ascent to the throne in 1553.
Mary I’s Illnesses
Mary Tudor’s complex medical history confounded both physicians and apothecaries of the Tudor age. At the onset of puberty, Mary began to experience irregular and painful menstrual cycles (amenorrhea) and was diagnosed with a ‘strangulation of the womb’, a condition involving menstrual blood retention, initiating a distressing array of symptoms through her teenage years. These included chest and stomach pains, episodes of depression, breathing difficulties, migraines, sporadic fainting, and abdominal swelling.
Affected by the strained atmosphere of her households following King Henry VIII’s rift with Rome, Mary fell victim to severe, often seasonal illnesses and depressions that would plague her for the remainder of her life. In 1531, a Venetian ambassador reported that the King’s daughter was ‘very ill from what the physicians call hysteria’. This report lends credence to the possibility that Mary’s symptoms might have been at least partially psychosomatic, potentially stemming from the overwhelming stress induced by her father’s cruel behaviour and her mother’s banishment from court.
In 1534, torn between her father’s insistence on being acknowledged as head of the Anglican Church and her own deep Catholic faith, Mary was again gravely ill. Her condition was so critical that the King dispatched his own physician, Dr. William Butts, to attend to her. By February 1535, Mary’s life continued to hang in the balance, her illness exacerbated the looming threat of execution or imprisonment should she refuse her father’s demands to recognise her mother’s degraded status as Dowager Princess of Wales. Her daughter now mortally ill, Catherine of Aragon requested to care for Mary herself, though her pleas fell on deaf ears.
For the remainder of her father’s reign, Mary’s health remained volatile, marked by recurrent seasonal maladies and bouts of rheum (mucous discharged from the eyes, nose, or mouth), often coinciding with distressing events such as the executions of Thomas More and John Fisher. Not surprisingly, Mary’s resolve plunged after the passing of her beloved mother in January of 1536.
By the time Mary had matured into adulthood, her constitution was notably poor. During the reign of her half-brother Edward VI, she had lamented: ‘my health is more unstable than that of any creature’. The demands of queenship, a troubled marriage, looming threats of rebellion, two phantom pregnancies, and the inability to produce a Catholic heir to the throne would only hasten Mary’s death.
Although her passing has often been attributed to influenza — and, occasionally, although unlikely, ovarian cancer — analysing Mary’s health through the lens of modern medicine has yielded new theories on what led to the death of England’s first queen regnant. It has been therefore proposed that Mary may have been suffering from hypothyroidism, indicative by a loss of eyebrows, hair, dry skin, and periods of confusion, often the result of large pituitary tumours.
Her passing might have also been expedited by chronic anaemia resulting from the frequent use of ‘therapeutic’ bloodletting, a prevalent (and often dangerous) medicinal practice during the Tudor era.
Phantom Pregnancy
Puzzling to the study of Mary I’s health is the two phantom pregnancies suffered by the queen, in 1554 and 1547, respectively. Mary’s first pregnancy was announced in 1554, just months after her marriage to 27-year-old Philip II of Spain. Although considered old by the standards of the time to be producing children, the hopeful queen Mary went into confinement six weeks before the intended birth of the child, ‘fatter and [with] better colour than when she was married, a sign that she is happier, and indeed she is said to be very happy.’ Among the ladies appointed to serve the queen in her confinement was Elizabeth, Mary’s half-sister.
On 30 April 1555, ‘bells rang, bonfires were lit and there were celebrations’ in London, toasting the news that Mary had given birth to a healthy baby boy. Sadly, these rumours would prove false. By June there was no news of a royal baby, and as the months passed without the birth of a child, it became clear that something was amiss. It is now believed that Mary suffered from pseudocyesis, a disorder that can cause a woman’s body to mimic the telltale signs of pregnancy.
According to the The Journal for Nurse Practitioners, pseudocyesis is a ‘rare, but debilitating somatic disorder in which a woman presents with outward signs of pregnancy, although she is not truly gravid.’ Although rare in contemporary times, psuedocyesis was experienced more commonly by women in the Tudor era, in an age before modern medical understanding. Both Mary’s mother and her mother’s rival Anne Boleyn may have experienced psuedocyesis during their marriages to Henry VIII.
The condition is most common among women ‘feeling under significant stress to conceive,’ which in 1554 Queen Mary most certainly was. Psuedocyesis has often been linked to depression and severe stress, although endocrinologic disorders, such as polycystic ovarian syndrome, cannot be entirely ruled out. Mary’s reportedly deep, ‘manly’ voice may also be indicative of a hormonal imbalance.
By August 1554, and with the swelling in her abdomen rapidly deflating, Mary had no choice but to return to the public eye, quietly acknowledging that she was not likely to give birth. The emotional and physical toll of her disastrous pregnancy was readily apparent as the Queen emerged from seclusion. Her phantom pregnancy not only proved a deeply personal tragedy, but a potentially disastrous incident for a monarch without a male heir.
But in 1557, three years after her first ‘pregnancy’, Mary announced once more that she was with child, optimistic that, this time, it would result in the longed-for male heir to unite Spain and England, and succeed her a King. At 41, and suffering from increasingly unstable health, the news was met with scepticism across the country and continent. Nevertheless, Mary once more began to experience symptoms of a pregnancy, including distension of the abdomen, cessation of her menstrual cycle, weight gain, and morning sickness.
As with the first pregnancy, however, Mary’s symptoms were illusory. The months passed by in agony until, finally, Mary was forced to accept, yet again, that there would be no baby. The nursery prepared, a wet nurse employed, and the hopes of two kingdoms resting on the would-be prince the Queen prayed she was carrying, soon became a shattered hope. History had repeated itself — and this time, Mary’s window to try again had irrevocably closed.
The Death of Mary I
By the spring of 1558, Mary was gravely ill, suffering from insomnia, melancholia, and dropsy (swelling of the body caused by fluid trapped in the tissue). The queen was then carefully transported from Hampton Court to St. James’s Palace where she died in the early hours of November 17, her frail body racked with fever, headaches, loss of vision, paroxysms, and long periods of confusion and unconsciousness.
Likely realising the end was near, shortly before her death Mary I had made a codicil to her will: ‘I the said Queen have … made the said last will and testament bearing the date the 30th March last past. And by the same, for that I then thought myself to be with child, did devise and dispose of the imperial crown … unto the heirs, issues and fruits of my body begotten’. Tragically, Mary and Philip II’s longed-for heir was never born, and at her death, Mary’s crown fell to her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth I.
Mary’s final hours, however, were reportedly peaceful. She described to her ladies the joyous dreams she’d been experiencing, witnessing children playing and singing like ‘angels’ around her. The one thing she had craved for most of her life — children, a loving family — had comforted her in her last days on earth. The reign of Catherine of Aragon’s resolute, unflinching daughter had slipped away in the presence of her devoted gentlewomen, gently and unconsciously.
The Burial of Mary I
On December 14, 1558, England’s first Queen regnant was laid to rest, her earthly remains interred in a vault in the north aisle of Henry VII’s Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey. In 1603, her half-sister Elizabeth’s remains would be placed on top of Mary’s coffin, topped with a large marble effigy of England’s “Gloriana”.
Shortly after Mary’s death on 17 November, her body was carefully embalmed in a medley of spices and sealed in a lead coffin. For several weeks, her remains lay in state on a table draped with cloth-of-gold in St. James’s Privy Chamber, her coffin sheathed with black cloth embroidered, fittingly, with Mary’s heraldic symbols conjoined with the arms of Philip II. The Queen’s gentlewomen kept vigil beside the Queen’s lavish coffin until 10 December, when her body was at last removed to the palace chapel. Her cousin, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, served as Chief Mourner.
Finally, on the 13th of December, Mary’s remains were escorted to Westminster Abbey and interred in the Abbey following a Requiem Mass. The lifelike wooden effigy of Queen Mary I, carried at her funeral procession, is still in existence. Both the head and (unclothed) body, once dressed in sumptuous robes of state, are on view in the Abbey’s Jubilee Galleries.
A sermon was then given by John White, Bishop of Winchester, after which, according to tradition, Mary’s officers broke their white staffs of office and threw them into the Queen’s grave. Once sealed, the reign of the Virgin Queen had officially begun.
Mary is mentioned in one of the inscriptions on the tomb she shares with Elizabeth, which reads:
Partners both in throne and grave, here rest we two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, in the hope of the Resurrection.
