Mary I, Queen of England, 1516-1558

Mary I (b. February 18, 1516 –d. November 17, 1558), also known as Mary Tudor, was the Queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death. Mary was the only child of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, to survive to adulthood. Her younger half-brother Edward VI (son of Henry and Jane Seymour) succeeded their father as king in 1547 at the age of nine. When Edward became mortally ill in 1553, he attempted to remove Mary from the line of succession because he assumed she would reverse the Protestant reforms. In 1554, Mary married Philip of Spain, becoming queen consort of Habsburg Spain on his accession in 1556. She was referred to as Bloody Mary in the 17th century because she had over 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake. After Mary's death in 1558, her re-establishment of Roman Catholicism was reversed by her younger half-sister and successor Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn.