Bloody Mary

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The legend of Bloody Mary is centuries-old and appears in many folkloric variations. In the West, she borrows her name from Queen Mary I, the infamous monarch known as a burner of heretics. To summer campers and slumber parties, though, Bloody Mary appears in bathroom mirrors — not as a murderous queen, but a howling woman drenched in blood. Sometimes, she’s said to be clutching a dead, blue baby. Other times, her arms are empty and outstretched as the conjurer taunts her: “I stole your baby,” or “I killed your baby.” In any variation, the ritual is as macabre as it is childish. But while most children outgrow the game even before outgrowing camp, there is a strange, sad, and very true story wound up in this myth. Queen Mary I was born unwanted. She was the only living child of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. While loved by her parents, and by all accounts remarkably intelligent, the fact that she was born female meant she was openly and constantly regarded as a disappointment — not merely to her royal family, but all of England. It was his lack of a male heir that (primarily) incited Henry’s historic series of marriages, leaving Mary caught in his dreadful wake. At 14, she was permanently separated from her mother, forbidden even to visit Catherine’s deathbed. Depending on which wife was on the throne, Mary was alternatively banned from court as a bastard or ordered to come make appearances, suddenly a princess again. She’d been born to Catholic parents in a Catholic country. When Henry broke with Rome to marry Anne Boleyn, her fervent faith became heresy. From puberty, she suffered crippling menstrual pain and irregular cycles, as well as periods of “very deep melancholy” — perhaps due to the stress of simply being her father’s daughter. Though the firstborn, Mary was pushed down in rank, first by her younger half-sister, Elizabeth, and then their half-brother, Edward. While these much younger siblings suffered trauma of their own, it was Mary who witnessed the whole of her father’s tyranny. She would survive, but by no means unscathed. Despite all odds, in 1553, Mary took the throne, becoming England’s first queen regnant (as in, a queen who rules on her own, rather than being the wife of the king or the mother of a child king too young to rule). It had been six tumultuous years since Henry’s death and she ascended on a new wave of popularity and hope from the English people. She knew better than anyone what they were hoping for, and, at 37, she knew that there was no time to waste. Like her father, she needed an heir. Mary married Philip of Spain two days after meeting him. Like all royal marriages, it had been preceded by a long negotiation process, during which Mary had fallen in love with Philip — though he (10 years her junior) almost certainly did not return her feelings. “Starved of affection from her childhood, deprived of the fulfillment of sexual love and children during her adult years, she was ready to lavish all her frustrated emotions on the husband she had acquired so late in life,” writes historian Alison Weir writes in The Children of Henry VIII. “For the first time since she was 10, when her father's eye had first lighted on Anne Boleyn, she was truly happy.” Two months after the marriage, her greatest wish came true. She was pregnant.