Bloody Mary’s Tragic False Pregnancies

In 1553, Mary ascended to the English throne, having survived one of the most tumultuous successions in Tudor history. She was the daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and was 37 when she became queen. Being unmarried left her with a pretty urgent problem: she needed an heir. She was also a Catholic and sought to undo the Protestant religious reforms enacted by her father and, more importantly, her half-brother, Edward VI. If Mary died without issue, Elizabeth, her Protestant half-sister, would have a strong claim to the throne.

In 1554, at the age of 38, Mary married Philip of Spain. By that time, a woman’s fertility would have been waning. Within two months of the marriage, Mary had apparently ceased to menstruate. Her body changed in other ways too, and she and the doctors who treated her became convinced that the queen was pregnant.

It seems that the belief only became more undeniable after Mary felt the child move. At the time, the first movements of a fetus were called “quickening,” and were an essential part of pregnancy. Mary reported that she had felt something that she and others around her recognized as such. Now, that would not be nearly enough to determine anything. A doctor can administer a pregnancy test, or perform an ultrasound, and the question could be answered easily. But Mary did not have this luxury.

In the days of Tudor medicine, there were no pregnancy tests, ultrasound technology, fetal heart monitors, or blood work done to check for hormones. One of the only ways a woman could be certain she had been pregnant was by delivering her baby. Poor Mary, however, would have to wait several months until it became clear that something had gone terribly wrong.

If Mary’s pregnancy was real, then the government had to begin planning for the succession of a new monarch, which was no small matter at the time. If she did have a child that survived infancy, Elizabeth’s claim to the throne might evaporate, and a Catholic child could preserve her own attempt to return the country to Catholicism. Childbirth was hazardous, and Mary might die in the delivery, leaving the crown to an infant. So officials had to decide what would be done with the kingdom if the queen died but left behind a living son or daughter.

With the due date coming up in the spring of 1555, Mary retired to her lying-in chamber at Hampton Court. Royal childbirth typically included a time called lying-in where the pregnant queen would retire from public life into private rooms while she awaited labor. The room would be sealed, heated, and darkened, as per custom for a woman about to give birth. While some later writers have blown this out of proportion and portrayed Mary’s confinement as though it were some sort of nightmare Tudor cave prison, the practice was not one developed exclusively for her.

Late April 1555 saw reports that Mary had given birth to a boy. There was much rejoicing and bells were rung; the birth of a longed-for male heir was greeted with great excitement. Only there was no such heir, nor did Mary have a baby.

The delay in the birth didn’t immediately seem so unusual. After all, in those days a doctor couldn’t determine the due date as precisely as today’s obstetrician, so perhaps they’d just miscalculated the date. But then more and more time went by. And still, no baby. May passed. June followed.

But come the summer of 1555, the idea that there would soon be a baby in the house was looking ever less plausible. The Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Michieli, reported growing doubts about whether Mary was pregnant; people said that the Queen’s belly had ceased to resemble that of a woman close to giving birth. Rather than bringing forth an heir, Mary’s apparent pregnancy faded away.

Mary’s story today would be called pseudocyesis. Pseudo, as in “false.” It describes a false pregnancy. When I heard about it, I thought, “This person has definitely lost their mind. They just think they’re pregnant and pretend to be.” But it doesn’t mean that. Mary was not necessarily pretending. She and others believed she was really pregnant!

In theory, Mary may have been suffering from a separate condition that happened to have symptoms similar to those of pregnancy, so there was little reason for them to think otherwise. Some have suggested that Mary had ovarian cysts, uterine tumors, hormonal problems, or some other reproductive disease, though we’ll never know for sure. What’s interesting, though, is that a physical ailment and pseudocyesis need not be mutually exclusive.

Mary may also have had cancer of the reproductive organs, due to the abdominal issues she had and the serious illness she contracted in her final years. Others have raised similar theories about her reproductive health, but no one at the time was diagnosing Mary with ovarian cancer by any standards of modern medicine, nor do we have enough evidence today to diagnose her with it from so long ago.

It is possible that Mary was pregnant and then miscarried. There is no way to exclude an early pregnancy or miscarriage from the data we have, but there is no specific record of a fetus, miscarriage, or stillbirth which could explain the 1554-1555 period of time. Rather, people observed as the anticipated birth never occurred, and the physical symptoms of Mary’s apparent pregnancy disappeared over time.

The failed pregnancy was also a setback for a marriage tied up in the wider tangle of European politics. Philip left England for the Low Countries in September 1555, the failed pregnancy still unresolved and the marriage no closer to producing an heir.

Politically, there was one person who always stood a better chance the longer Mary had no children: Elizabeth. Should Mary and Philip have produced a child, that child would have moved Elizabeth even further away from the crown. However, since Mary remained without children, Elizabeth’s prospects grew. Philip later had reasons of his own to favor Elizabeth over other possible candidates. Mary, Queen of Scots, for instance, was a close ally of France. An Elizabethan England was perhaps more desirable than one increasingly entangled with the French. And then Mary gave everyone reason to hope or worry all over again.

Philip went back to England in 1557, and Mary again believed that she was pregnant, expecting another heir. The baby was said to be due around March 1558. But March passed, and, well, there was no baby. Again.

By 1558, it was evident that Mary was seriously ill. Some scholars now wonder if she may have been experiencing signs of the disease that would eventually contribute to her death during the period when she was believed to be pregnant for the second time.. But what exactly her illness was remains unknown.

Mary died at St James’s Palace on November 17, 1558. She was 42, and it is not known what she actually died of. It was a time when there was an epidemic of flu in England; Cardinal Reginald Pole also died on the same day. Other theories range from diseases of the womb to whatever ailment finally struck her down. Whatever it was, Mary’s lack of an heir to take her place ensured that the crown passed to the woman whose succession she might otherwise have disrupted by becoming pregnant.

When Mary died, Elizabeth succeeded her as queen, and ruled England for more than 44 years. There’s an irony I think is funny about all of this. Henry VIII broke up his marriage with Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon, because she couldn’t give him a surviving son. His need for a son contributed to the English Reformation and changed Mary’s childhood forever. Then Mary became queen herself and faced her own agonizing dynastic problem.

It is tempting to dismiss Mary’s phantom pregnancies as another of those macabre Tudor tales that stretch credulity. Yet they were real events, and behind the clinical description was something even more disturbing: Mary really did think she would be a mother.

This content was created with the help of AI.