#honestly i'd argue about the untrained for rule bit here

[marianrevisionist]

“The oddest thing about Mary’s reign, like that of her grandfather’s, was the fact that it happened at all. A hundred years before, the accession of a woman to the English throne was all but unimaginable. Sir John Fortescue, the most influential constitutional thinker of fifteenth-century England, had flatly denied that a woman could wear the crown. Nor was her sex the least of the obstacles in Mary’s path. Untrained for rule and unmarried, declared illegitimate and excluded from the succession in 1534, subsequently restored to it in 1544 (though with no revocation of her illegitimacy), a convinced Catholic who by 1553 stood almost alone against the religious policy of the Protestant regime, Mary looked likely to be baulked of her rights when the Duke of Northumberland married off Lady Jane Grey to his son, Guildford Dudley, and Edward VI willed the crown to Jane by virtue of her descent from Henry VII. The fact that the duke hoped to frustrate the accession of one woman by running another as her rival is a commentary on how much things had changed, as well as on the lack of a plausible male alternative. The account of how Mary overcame these formidable obstacles, a veritable Renaissance history of virtù dominating fortuna, is the most romantic and appealing episode in what has generally been seen as an unappealing and drab reign.” — Richard Rex, The Tudors

#historyedit #perioddramaedit #dailytudors #gifshistorical #becoming elizabeth #Mary I Of England #Rex tag #history #romola garai #becomingelizabethedit #beedit #Henry VII of England #succession #parallels #*mine #honestly i'd argue about the untrained for rule bit here #given she was sent to administer to ludlow as de facto prince of wales at age 9 #if that's not training i don't know what is