Bloody Mary: The Catholic Queen Who Burned Protestants

In 1555, two Protestant bishops were burned alive in Oxford. Their deaths would become some of the most famous executions of the English Reformation, and they took place under the rule of one of England’s most controversial monarchs.

Mary I of England; remembered by history as Bloody Mary.

In this episode, we explore the life of Mary Tudor and the events that led to the burnings that defined her reign. From the collapse of her childhood world when Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church, to her determination to restore Catholicism when she finally became queen, Mary’s story is one of faith, trauma, power, and a country struggling over its religious future.

We also examine the executions that followed her restoration of Catholic authority, including the burnings of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, and the execution of ordinary believers like Agnes Prest. Their deaths would later be recorded in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, better known as The Book of Martyrs, shaping how generations would remember Mary’s rule.

But the fires of Mary’s reign did not end England’s religious conflict.

When Mary died in 1558, the crown passed to her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth and the struggle over England’s faith would take a new and dangerous form.

That story continues in the next episode.

If you enjoy stories from Christian history where faith, power, and human conviction collide, follow the podcast so you don’t miss the next chapter.

Transcript

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Some people in the crowd refuse to look. They keep their eyes lowered to the ground or fixed somewhere beyond the clearing, as if staring long enough at anything else might make the moment unfolding in front of them feel less real. But the smoke rising into the cold Oxford air makes that impossible. Because in the center of the clearing, two elderly men are tied to a wooden stake, and the fire beneath them has just been lit. For a moment, the flames struggle. The wood is damp from the English air, stacked too long in the cold. The first tongues of fire creep along the timber slowly, releasing a heavy scent of wet bark and smoke. The crowd waits. Some whisper quietly to one another before falling silent again. Others fold their arms tightly across their chests, shoulders drawn inward against the morning chill. Not everyone here came because they wanted to. In a country where religion has begun dividing neighbors from one another, absence can raise questions, and questions can become dangerous. So people come, they stand, and they watch. Even when part of them wishes they didn't have to. Two old men bound to a stake. Smoke is rising around them nonstop, and only later will their names be written into history. Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. Only a few years earlier, both men had stood amongst the most powerful Protestant leaders in England. Ridley has served as a bishop of London, helping guide the religious reforms that reshaped the English Church under the Protestant king Edward VI. Latimer had been one of the kingdom's most influential reforming preachers, a man whose sermons once carried enough weight to shape national debate. But England had changed again. The throne now belongs to a Catholic queen. And the religious world these two men helped build has suddenly become dangerous to defend. Mary Tudor's government has demanded that they abandon their Protestant teachings and return to the authority of the Catholic Church. Doing so would mean admitting that the reforms they spent years promoting were all wrong. Both men were given the same choice. Publicly reject their Protestant beliefs, and their lives might just be spared, but neither of them would. So the wood was stacked, the ropes were tied, and now the fires begin to climb. The flames spread slowly among the timber before finally finding dry wood deep in the pile. Smoke thickens in the air, the cloth darkens first, then everything begins to burn. Somewhere in the crowd, a voice starts praying before the words falter and disappear. Latimer turns towards Ridley through the rising smoke and speaks quietly.

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Be of good comfort. We shall this day light such a candle in England as a trust shall never be put out.

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Whether those words were remembered exactly or polished by time hardly matters. Even in that moment, the people watching can feel that something larger than an execution is unfolding. Something that will not end with a fire in front of them. Because the flames in Oxford are not only burning two men, they are burning in the middle of a country tearing itself apart. The year is 1555. England has a new queen, a Catholic one, Mary Tudor. Two men burn in the center of Oxford, and miles away, the woman who allowed it sits on the English throne. The question hanging quietly over that crowd. Whether anyone dare says it out loud or not is simple. How does a queen come to believe that burning people will save a country's soul? To understand that moment, you have to understand the life that shaped Mary Tudor. Mary did not grow up expecting to become the queen history would remember as Bloody Mary. She did not imagine a reign defined by fire or by crowds gathering to watch people burn alive for their beliefs. She grew up believing the world around her was secure. Back then, her mother, Catherine of Aragon, was queen. Her father, Henry VIII, ruled a powerful Catholic kingdom, and Mary herself was the princess that everyone assumed would someday inherit that crown. But Henry's hopes for the future of his dynasty rested on one thing above all else: a male heir. For years he waited for Catherine to give him a son. Instead, the only surviving child of their marriage was Mary. At first, she remained the cherished princess of the court, but as the years passed and no boy arrived, Henry's frustrations began to change the way he looked at his own family. The daughter who had once stood closest to the throne slowly became a reminder of the son he believed England needed but did not have. And when Henry decided to end his marriage to Catherine and take another wife in hope of producing that long-awaited boy, Mary's world collapsed overnight. Her mother was pushed aside, and Mary herself was pushed out of the place she had always known. The crown declared her illegitimate. The princess, who once stood near the center of power, was reduced to simply Lady Mary, separated from her mother and pressured again and again and again to accept that her parents' marriage had never truly existed, even though she knew it did. It was more than a political shift. It was the moment that Mary learned something she would never forget. The world around her could be written by power at any second. And she carried that lesson with her for the rest of her life. Years passed, and England itself began to change in ways that mirrored Mary's own loss of security. But this time it was the faith that she cherished so much. Under Henry VIII, the kingdom severed its ties with Rome and placed the authority of the church under the crown. Then, under Mary's younger half-brother, the prized possession of Henry, her father, Edward VI, the changes moved further still. Under Edward, altars disappeared, the Latin Mass was replaced, and images and relics that had filled English churches for centuries were removed. The familiar shape of Catholic worship slowly vanished from parish life. Mary watched these transformations unfold without the power to stop them. But when Edward died in 1553, everything changed. For the first time in her life, the authority she had spent years watching others wield now belonged to her. Mary Tudor became Queen of England, and she believed she knew exactly what had to be done. Under Mary, Catholic worship returned to churches that had not seen it in years. The Latin Mass was heard again at parish altars. Images and symbols that had disappeared slowly began to reappear. To Mary, this was not cruelty. It was restoration. It was everything she thought that the souls of these people needed. She believed she was bringing England back to the faith that had once given the kingdom its order and stability. But as the restorations moved forward, she began to discover something she had not fully expected. The country had already changed too much. Some resistance came from belief. Protestant teaching had taken root across towns and villages, and many people had come to see the reforms not as temporary experiments, but as the future of their faith. But much of the resistance had little to do with theology, to be honest. Land that had once belonged to monasteries from Rome had been granted years earlier to nobles and wealthy families who had supported Henry VIII's break from Rome. Those properties had since become fortunes and legacies, and few men had any desire to see that land returned to the church. At the same time, many Protestant priests had married during the Reformation, building households and families that could not easily be undone by a return to older Catholic rules. What Mary hoped would restore unity inside revealed just how deeply England had already divided. At first, the tension surfaced quietly, private refusals, cautious disagreements, but as the resistance spread, Mary became increasingly determined that the country would return to the faith she had believed it had abandoned. And she was not going to take no for an answer. That determination would shape the years that followed, and it would give Mary Tudor the name history still remembers her by, Bloody Mary. But the people who would be held responsible for first testing this resolve were not powerful bishops or famous reformers. They were ordinary people. People like a woman named Agnes Prest. It is a crisp morning in the year of 1557. The day begins quietly in a small village. Smoke rises from the chimneys of low cottages. The narrow street slowly fills with the ordinary sounds of mourning. Doors opening, voice drifting between neighbors, footsteps along familiar paths. Among them is Agnes Prest. Agnes is not a noblewoman or a preacher. She is simply part of the village itself. One of the familiar faces people see in the market or along the road, your next door neighbor. But in recent weeks, her name has begun traveling through the town. Agnes has been speaking openly about religion. And while others fall quiet, she refuses to. She says the Catholic Mass is all wrong. She says that the bread placed on the altar is still only bread. Neighbors hear her words and warn her to be careful, and some urge her to stop talking altogether, but Agnes does not lower her voice and eventually the wrong people hear. One morning, officers arrive and they ask for her by name. Neighbors watch quietly from their doorways as Agnes is taken away. She is brought before officials and given the same choice that has already been offered to others before her. Withdraw what you said, admit that you were wrong, accept the authority of the church. But Agnes refuses. The questioning continues, priests attempt to persuade her, officials warn her what will happen if she continues. But again, Agnes says no, and she refuses to cooperate. And so the familiar preparations begin. The wood is gathered, the stake is prepared, and a crowd forms, drawn by rumor, curiosity, and obligation. Only two years earlier, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley had burned in Oxford as famous Protestant leaders. Now the fire has reached someone far smaller, a village woman. And for regular people, when someone like Agnes Press burns, the crowd now understands something new. The fire has reached ordinary lives. And for a while, it starts to seem like these fires, these executions are working. The arguments that once filled England's streets about Catholicism and Mary's way of doing things disappear. Loud debates about religion fade from marketplaces and taverns. People stop openly defending Protestant reform, and the voices finally fall quiet. No crowds gather to challenge the Queen's authority. Instead, the country grows silent. And in that silence, Mary must have felt, at least for a moment, that she had succeeded, that resistance had faded. The arguments had stopped. It appeared finally that England was returning to the faith she believed it had abandoned. But the silence she was seeing was not conversion, it was fear. People had watched the flames. They had seen what happened to those who refused to bend to Mary's beliefs, and very few wished to follow them into the fire. So they just all stopped speaking. But the consequences of executions did not end in the town squares where the fires burned, because the people who watched those deaths did something rulers rarely anticipate. They remembered. Stories began to travel beyond the places where the executions had taken place. Witnesses repeated what they had seen. Final words were written down. Accounts of the trials and the burnings began circulating from reader to reader and to reader. Over time, those stories were gathered together into a single book, John Fax's Acts and Monuments. Today, it is better known simply as the Book of Martyrs. For Protestants across England and beyond, the book transformed the victims of Mary's reign into something powerful, witnesses to faith who had refused to abandon their beliefs even in the face of death. The flames Mary believed would extinguish the Protestant movement had done something very different. They had given it memory, and memory is far more difficult to destroy than a body. And while those stories were spreading across England and beyond its borders, Mary herself was beginning to fade. Her reign rested on one fragile hope that she would produce a Catholic heir, who could continue the work she had begun. For a time, she believed that hope had come true. The court prepared for the birth of a royal child. The country waited, and months passed with growing anticipation. Supporters imagined a future in which England would remain firmly Catholic for generations to come. But the child never came. What appeared to be pregnancy slowly revealed itself to be something else entirely: an illusion, something called phantom pregnancy. The future Mary had been building quietly slipped away. Without an air, everything she had fought to restore could vanish the moment she was gone. At the same time, her health was failing. Years of strain, disappointment, and illness began to weigh heavily on the queen. The certainty that had once driven her now gave way to a quieter and more unsettling reality. The country was still divided. The movement she had tried to crush was spreading beyond her borders, and the future she had hoped to secure was slipping beyond her reach. By November of 1558, Mary Tudor was dying. And as the end approached, one question must have lingered in the silence of her final days. Had it all been for nothing? When Mary First of England died in 1558, the fires that had burned in England's public squares finally went out. The smoke that had once drifted above marketplaces and churchyards slowly faded from the air. But the country did not forget what it had seen. Protestants remembered neighbors who had died in the flames. Catholics remembered a queen who believed she was saving England's soul. Those memories settled into the nation like ambers that had not stopped burning but had not grown cold. And when the crown passed to Mary's younger sister, Elizabeth, a Protestant, many hoped the violence might finally end. But the struggle over England's faith was nowhere near finished. The fires would disappear, the executions would change. But the conflict itself would take a whole different shape. Under Elizabeth, England would no longer burn or kill Protestants, but Catholics would soon discover that loyalty to Rome could become just as or more dangerous. Because in a kingdom where religion and loyalty to the crown had become inseparable, Catholic belief itself could be treated as treason, and treason equals death. And that's where the story continues in next week's episode. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review. It helps more people discover the show.