Mary's economic policy:
Mary's government had good relations with England's merchants, and were able to increase both the level of custom duties and the number of commodities on which duty was assessed. The new Book of Rates was introduced in 1558 - a boon for Elizabeth, but too late to benefit Mary Elizabeth was also the beneficiary of Mary's continued efforts to restore the currency to purity. Mary issued fine silver coins and devised a plan to withdraw debased coins that came to fruition in 1560-61.  The years 1555 and 1556 saw very bad weather (floods in Fall 1555, followed by drought in Spring 1556). This caused extremely poor harvests. The debilitated population was also hit by an epidemic of influenza that killed about in twenty of the population. The bad economic conditions did not spark peasant unrest. The one serious revolt of Mary's reign stemmed from religious and political discontent.
 "Too much and Too little"A satirical contrast between Marian clothes of 1556 and cutting-edge of 1796
Note: Although the year the draw is comparing (1556) Mary I was the queen of England,the cloth is definately Elizabetan. | Mary's Foreign policy:
- Richard Chancellor and Sir Hugh Willoughby tried to discover a north-eastern route by sea to Asia, but without success. Willoughby died of exposure in Lapland, but Chancellor reached the White Sea and traveled by land to Muscovy, where he established links with Ivan IV.
In 1555, a Charter was issued to the Muscovy Company giving it exclusive trading rights in the region. Further expeditions were made in 1556, 1568 and 1580.
Richard had been in servece of king Edward,Mary's brother, but when Chancellor returned to England in the summer of 1554, King Edward was dead,Mary was now Queen no stigma attached to Chancellor, and the Muscovy Company, as the association was now called, sent him again to the White Sea in 1555. On this voyage he learned what had happened to Willoughby, recovered his papers, and found out about the discovery of Novaya Zemlya. Chancellor spent the summer of 1555 dealing with the Tsar, organizing trade, and trying to learn how China might be reached by the northern route.
In 1556 Chancellor departed for England, taking with him the first Russian ambassador to his country, Osep Nepeja. They left Archangel in autumn; the fleet was Willoughby's ships (relaunched), the Philip and Mary and the Edward Bonadventure. In October/November the fleet tried to winter in Trondheim. The Bona Esperanza sank, the Bona Confidentia appeared to enter the fjord but was never heard of again, and the Philip and Mary successfully wintered in Trondheim and arrived in London next April the 18th. The Edward did not attempt to enter, instead reaching the Scottish coast and being wrecked at Pitslago on the 7th of November. Chancellor lost his life, although the Russian envoy survived to reach London. Chancellor had found a way to Russia, and though in time it was superseded by a better one it remained for years the only feasible route for the English.
- New trade routes for English cloth were opened in Africa - especially Morocco, which provided sugar and saltpeter, and Guinea, a source of gold
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Culture under Mary I:
Mary was a popular heroine and patron of the arts. She let English folk return to the religion they loved, and she encouraged composers to get back to their great flamboyant tradition. There are just two things wrong with this picture. One is that Thomas Tallis, the pre-eminent composer of the period, had a long life and almost none of his music can be dated with certainty to the five years of Mary's reign. The other is that Tallis's single work undoubtedly written for Mary, his splendiferous ''Puer Natus Est'' Mass, suggests not so much a reawakened English medievalism as a grand swerve into the continental Renaissance.Willian Roper biography of Sir Thomas More was written during the reign of Queen Mary nearly twenty years after More's death, but was not printed until 1626, when it became a primary source for More's earliest biographers because of Roper's intimate knowledge of his father-in-law.
source:http://www.nytimes.com (Music review)
Names like Thomas Tallis and John Sheppard are well known for being under Mary's wing.
Mary and Jane Grey:
 They were cousins,and despite their religions differences they werevery respectable to each other;Mary often gave richful dresses to Jane, who denied because was against her faith.When the queen's coucil tried to advice her to execute lady jane,she denied, saying that jane was mich more a pawn and a victim than a guilty herself, although after wyatt's rebellion,Mary was urged to execute her cousin, with regrets the queen allowed her cousin execution,Jane was executed and so was her father and husband.Jane Grey is remembered as a tragic figure,whose father ruined her short life.
Completely stunned with the rejection of her beloved husband,
Mary said that she wanted no more see a men  .
sank into depression. Wrote letters stained with tears to Philip and not receiving the answers, blamed the "incompetence" of the messengers who were not the messages reach their destination. She spent hours and hours with her knees near the chin and around the castle as a ghost. A fever, with the same character of malaria, struck England in the summer of 1558. And the queen was hit by it in September. Also victim of "excess bile", hydrops ovarian and syphilis, Mary has become so weak, she suffered long periods of unconsciousness, to awaken one of them said she dreamed that children were playing and singing around her. On November 17, heard the morning mass, and six o'clock in the morning, died. Pole also victimized by the same plague, died hours after the queen.
| Religious policy:
Although Mary started her religious policies in a tolerant way towards protestants,soon after the "wyatt's rebellion" all changed.Mary was urged by her advisors to leave the "policy of leniency"Lady jane grey her husband and father were executed and so was Thomas Wyatt the younger,her sister Elizabeth was arrested as a suspect.All the heresy laws were reatived and who denied the Catholic faith was send to death;The Archbishops Cranmer, Latimer, Hooper and Ridley (which was called Mary of bastard) and others have been down this path. The four were mentors of the Reformation in England in the reign of Henry VIII, then the reign of Edward VI. And leading this whole religious persecution, was the archbishop Stephen Gardiner.In November 1555, Mary lost a major ally: Gardiner, Instead, the archbishop Bonner assume the killings. Bonner was even more ruthless than Gardiner: the next time, send nearly 400 people to hell. Cardinal Pole, in fact, had no direct participation in persecution. He was by nature almost as sensitive as the Queen - as they used to say, were "made of the same flesh" Pole convinced Bonner to not send to death twenty women. However, said the major heretics were "removed from life as members of the body that had rotten." Unlike Pole's view, Mary I preferred to say that "the punishment of heretics should be done without haste, should, meanwhile, to apply justice to those who, by intelligence, seeking to deceive simple souls." In short, it would end with the Protestant pastors and bishops, not the people who hear his sermons. But with the politics of intolerance that the Bonner required to follow, that would be impossible. Thus, the smell of burned human flesh was unmistakable on the streets of London.  Far fewer people were burnt proportionally than in Continental European repression. However, the burnings were concentrated in time and unprecedented by English standards. The executions became increasingly unpopular and promoted the Protestant cause rather than the Catholic one.Mary is too much vilified because of the terrrible persecutions, but must be remembered that she acted just like any other monarch. WILL DURAN defined Mary:
"In relation to Mary I, can say a few complacent words . Pain,disease and many injustices suffered warp her spirit. Her leniency gave rise to the cruelty that conspiracies only after tried to deprive her Crown. Followed the advice of trust church, which has suffered persecution, sought revenge. By the end, I think, with those performances, was fulfilling its obligations to the religion that she loved as a reason for his own life. She don't deserves the nickname of " Blood Mary, "unless the adjective applied to all of her time; adjective that summarizes the character wrongly, since there was much to love. While it seems strange, it is notable she have taken forward the work of the father [Henry VIII], to separate England from Rome. She showed to the country that was still the worst feature of the Catholic church she served. When she died, England was more prepared than ever to accept the new faith that she strive to destroy. " |
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