THE FIRST BLAST

TO AWAKEN WOMEN DEGENERATE

"To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature; contumely [an insult] to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice." John Knox  "The First Blast of the Trumpet; Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women"  (1558)

WHY 1558?

Mary I  (18 February 1516 – 17 November 1558) was queen regnant of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death.  She is remember as 'Bloody Mary'  but it is too simple to say she was evil.  Her father, Henry VIII succeeded in getting a divorce from her mother, Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Ann Boleyn. After this mother and daughter seem to have been kept apart and Mary was removed from court and treated as a bastard.  She was required to give up the dignity of princess, acknowledge the illegitimacy of her own birth, and to act as lady-in-waiting to her own infant half-sister, Elizabeth I.

Her life was marred by one intrigue after another: her hand in marriage was used as bait for foreign alliances, her religion (Catholic) became a power struggle between the ascendant Protestants, fat with all their confiscated Catholic property and the papacy hopeful of recovering its loss.  Her eventual husband Philip of Spain, cared little for her.  He wanted England to join Spain in war with France. 

Upon her father's death, her half-brother, Edward VI was crowned king.  He held the throne from 1547 to 6 July 1553 (his death at 15).  His regency (he was still a child) council was dominated by Protestants who attempted to establish their faith throughout the country.

In the month following Mary's accession, she issued a proclamation that she would not compel any of her subjects to follow her religion, but by the end of September leading reforming churchmen were imprisoned.  Mary's first Parliament, which assembled in early October 1553, declared the marriage of Henry and Catherine valid.  This was important because it declared her birth and therefore her reign as legitimate.  It also abolished Edward's protestant religious laws. Church doctrine was restored to the form it had taken in the 1539 Six Articles, which, for example, re-affirmed clerical celibacy. Married priests were deprived of their benefices.  One thing led to another and over 280 people were burned at the stake for crimes under the Heresy Acts.  With the conniving of her husband and a French supported invasion meant to depose her, the country was drug into war with France.  England became full of factions and seditious pamphlets of Protestant origin inflaming the country against the Spaniards.

Mary died during an influenza outbreak in May, 1558 and was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth who proceeded to establish an English Protestant church.  John Knox should have been tickled pink with this woman on the throne.

Which one would you invite over for dinner?

Comments

[supra shoes]

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[colorado chiropractor]

Indeed a blast. My professor didn't taught us about this.