( Mary Tudor 1516–58)
the queen of England and Ireland from 1553 to 1558. She was the daughter of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon , and became queen after the death of King Edward VI . Among her first acts as queen was the execution of Lady Jane Grey , who also had a claim to be queen. Mary was determined to bring back Roman Catholicism to England, and married the Catholic Philip II of Spain in 1554. Many Protestants opposed this, and she ordered hundreds of them to be burned to death, for which she became known as ‘Bloody Mary’. Among those who died in this way were Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer . Mary had no children, and after her death she was replaced by her half-sister (= sister by a different mother) Elizabeth I .