More than 300 people were put to death for heresy between 1555 and 1558, most of them burned at the stake. But is there more to the reign of England’s first and only Catholic queen than a legacy of religious persecution?

A small number of English ­monarchs have acquired a reputation in the popular imagination as bad sorts. And once it has stuck, nothing historians do seems able to dislodge it. John is remembered as “not a good man”. Henry VI and George III were mad. Charles I is gleefully memorialised in the corridors of the parliament that executed him. George IV attempted to divorce a popular wife; Edward VIII was determined to marry an unpopular one. And Mary I has become “Bloody Mary”, only remembered for burning Protestants at the stake.

Mary’s fall from grace began in the 1560s when the Elizabethan Protestant preacher John Foxe wrote his immense Acts and Monuments, popularly known as “Foxe’s Martyrs”. Foxe pinned the blame for the burnings firmly on Mary herself. A century later she became Bloody Mary, when James II’s opponents used her story to hound the last Catholic English king from the throne. On the eve of the Great War, the historian A.F. Pollard delivered his much quoted nugget of anti-Mary misogyny, that “sterility was the conclusive note of her reign”. And in 1066 and All That W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman satirised her with their usual perceptive brilliance. “Broody Mary’s reign was, however, a Bad Thing, since England is bound to be C. of E., so all the executions were wasted.”