Mary I to James I

LIKE her husband, King Philip II of Spain, Mary I was a Roman Catholic, and ‘Bloody Mary’ restored England’s religious and political ties to Europe with the violence her father had used in breaking them; but the policy was duly reversed by her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn’s daughter, on her accession in 1558.

Elizabeth’s reign was a high-point of culture and adventure, remembered especially for William Shakespeare’s plays, and in 1588, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, an attempt by Philip to seize the English crown. Her forty-four years on the throne helped to define English identity at the transition from the Middle Ages to Modern History.

However, the Protestant Reformation remained a source of grievance and intrigue, and Elizabeth was forced to have her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, beheaded in 1587 for plotting her overthrow. Yet it was Mary’s son James VI of Scotland, Henry VII’s great-great-grandson, who succeeded the childless Elizabeth in 1603, as James I of England.