Mary I's cause of death is still unresolved — ovarian cyst, uterine cancer, or just the 1558 influenza epidemic that killed thousands of other English people that autumn?
I've been going down a rabbit hole on Mary I's final months and I can't find a
consensus anywhere.
The three candidates I keep running into:
- Uterine or ovarian cancer, would explain the two phantom pregnancies, theabdominal swelling, the amenorrhoea, and the long decline.
- Ovarian cysts / a pituitary or hormonal disorder — same symptom cluster,non-fatal on its own.
- The influenza epidemic of 1557–58, which had genuinely catastrophic mortalityin England. She died in November 1558; so did a large number of hersubjects, and Reginald Pole died the same day.
What bothers me is that most popular accounts pick the most dramatic option
(cancer) and treat the epidemic as background noise, when the epidemic is the
one thing we have decent parish-level evidence for.
Two questions for people who know the sources better than I do:
- Is there any contemporary account describing her symptoms in enough detail to
distinguish these, or are we entirely dependent on Foxe and ambassadorial
reports written by people with an agenda?
- Has anyone actually made the case that she died of the flu like everyone else,
and it's only retrospective drama that gave her a "fitting" death?
Edit: I've found a video of her last six months while researching this, if anyone wants to see it I'm dropping the link here. Flagging upfront the visuals are AI reconstructions, not period artwork.