The London Dungeon’s new digital poster showing Mary Tudor as a zombie is proof of England’s “knee-jerk anti-Catholicism”, according to a leading historian of the period.
A digital poster for the London Dungeon featuring the sudden transformation of Queen Mary I into a zombie-like character was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority for scaring children.
The advert, which ran on digital screens on London Underground stations, featured an image of the 16th century queen sitting on a chair and then morphing into a monster with sunken eyes, pale skin, a wide-open mouth and a scarred face.
A spokesman for Merlin Entertainments said the advert was supposed to show the “dark side of [Queen Mary’s] personality and portray her as a villain”.
She said: “It really is an example of England’s knee-jerk anti-Catholicism and how our history of the Tudor period has been distorted by post-Reformation propaganda.
“What about Elizabeth? People may be aware of the executions of Catholics, but there were many more people. After the 1569 northern rebellion, Elizabeth ordered that a man was to be hung in every village associated with the rebellions. It was on a similar scale to her father.
“Even after the rebellion of 1553, Mary was very merciful to Lady Jane Grey’s father – he was pardoned. When there was another rebellion in January 1554, one army had swept up to the court in London, she was then advised that the people who threatened her life still threatened her, but her actions were not bloodthirsty by the standards [of the day].
“The burnings were a revival of her father’s law, and a reaction to two Protestant attempts on her throne, one of which got very close to London. People think about the threat to Elizabeth from Catholic Spain, but Mary also suffered threats from an ideological clique.
“In fact even her Protestant enemies called her the merciful princess, although she became less merciful under extreme threat.”
In contrast to the 300 executions carried out by Mary Tudor, her father executed over 70,000 people, equivalent to some of the ideological tyrannies of 20th-century Europe. Mary Tudor was not known as “Bloody Mary” until after the Glorious Revolution of 1689.
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