Mary, Mary Quite Contrary

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells, and cockle-shells,

And pretty maids all in a row.

What a sweet, charming and innocent picture those four short lines evoke.

A lady-of-the-manor perhaps, standing in her garden surrounded by innumerable varieties of herbs and scented flowers while, hanging from the branches of trees and shrubs, silver bells tinkle brightly in the gentle summer breeze. The shells of cockles, bleached white in the sun, line the edges of the garden paths while a number of pretty maids, dressed in their best gowns of satin and lace, stand in a row smiling appreciatively at the scene of beauty around them.

But how ironic that scene would be!

For the lines of this popular nursery-rhyme do not relate to goodness, love and beauty; but to cruelty, torture and execution; the blame for which was laid squarely at the door of Mary Tudor.

Mary Tudor, or “Bloody Mary” as she came to be known, was the daughter of King Henry V111and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon; becoming Queen of England in 1553 following the short, ten-day reign of Lady Jane Grey.

A staunch Catholic, Mary set about restoring Catholicism to England, attempting to reverse Henry V111’s introduction of the Protestant faith. One of her early acts was to imprison in the Tower of London for eight weeks her half-sister, Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn.

On the orders of Mary Tudor, many leading Protestants were rounded up; and in order to extract information or confessions, subjected to extremes of torture.

A widely used instrument of torture at the time, because of its portability, was the use of the thumbscrew (the “Silver Bells” of the rhyme) which had the effect of literally crushing thumbs and fingers.

Another was a lesser-known torture device (Cockle Shells) that was attached to the genitals of a male prisoner and extreme pressure applied. In Tudor times there were no laws restricting the use of torture on a prisoner, so in effect the torturers were given free hand to act however they wished.

And if all of this was not enough to bend the reluctant English citizens to her will, Mary went one step further; she had “Maidens” (the Pretty Maids all in a row), an early form of guillotine, erected at many of the public execution sites in and around London.