Phil Carradice

Fear is one of the strongest and most persistent of all teenage emotions. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of being different; the list goes on and on.

e all-powerful desire for revenge is an emotion that most teenagers experience when things do not go their way, when they are hurt by life or by other people

Mary was as much a classical villain as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, King Lear—yes, Lear—or Richard III

Like those characters she was not unattractive with many pleasing traits but tragic, doomed and with a fatal flaw or two: ambition, need for acceptance, self-aggrandizement and an inability to separate good advice from bad

unlikely to see it, a subtle role reversal turned Mary herself into martyrdom as fine as any of the zealots she sought to eliminate

with her fair complexion, blue eyes and typically Tudor golden-red hair, she enchanted from the beginning.

ry was forbidden to celebrate Mass in public or leave the house without approval

Mary’s health began to deteriorate, partly through stress and partly due to the virtual prison conditions in which she was kept.5

An irregular menstrual cycle—something which was to plague her for the rest of her life—and deep depressions, combined with the delayed onset of adolescent emotions, made Mary’s life far from easy.

Mary was not the only monarch to burn people at the stake. Tortured, her limbs disjointed, Anne had to be carried to the place of execution and burned while seated in a chair.