Contested portrait

Many thanks for another issue of BBC History Magazine. Always a great read!

I appreciated the article on Queen Mary (Mary: Brutal but Brilliant, April) in that Alexander Samson set out all that could be said in favour of Mary: a helpful yardstick against which to measure other views. But in my opinion, he unearthed little. He concludes: “Surely we should recognise that Mary wasn’t just ‘bloody’, but also saintly and wise.” Yet what kind of a ‘saint’ has such blood on their hands as Mary?

Alexander argues Mary had high ability, a happy marriage and a sense of humour. I can think of several 20th-century dictators possessing these three characteristics, especially the first, but all were paranoid or insanely bigoted. Granted, Elizabeth I didn’t shine in her treatment of Catholics, but there was a sort of casus belli, in that, in 1570, the pope excommunicated Elizabeth, thereby setting her Catholic subjects against her. In contrast, the martyrdom of several hundreds of Protestants at Mary’s instigation was religious persecution of the worst kind.

It was a historical accident, not a stroke of genius from Mary, that she preceded Elizabeth to the throne. If Mary had any ‘genius’, it was in the rapid alienation of her subjects – witness Wyatt’s rebellion. Where Mary did bequeath Elizabeth a legacy was in the negative lesson on how not to alienate a nation. To me, the one fascinating fact the article unearthed was that Mary died during an influenza epidemic. Now that does give us something to ponder!

Roger Fay, Ripon

We reward the Letter of the Month writer with a copy of a new history book. This issue, that is Ireland’s Forgotten Past by Turtle Bunbury. You can read our review of the book on page 59