Bloody Mary

Mary Tudor, the daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, was buried in Westminster Abbey December 14, 1558 after only five years on the throne as Queen. Everyone ignored her dying wish to be buried with her mother. Mary had come to be known as “Bloody Mary” for her brutal opposition to the wave of religious reform that she inherited from her step-brother Edward VI, and for authorizing the burning of 282 Protestants. No one that day thought that 44 years later, her half-sister Elizabeth's coffin would be placed on top of Mary’s in the same grave in the Abbey. When Elizabeth died, King James I erected an effigy only to Elizabeth with this bare mention of her sister: "Partners in throne and grave, here we sleep Elizabeth and Mary, sisters in hope of the Resurrection." It was the long-reigning Queen (the "Elizabethan Settlement") that fixed the Church of England's identity once-and-for-all to the historic formularies of Reformation Anglicanism: the two books of Homilies, the 1571 Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, and the 1559/1662 Book of Common Prayer.