American Minute with Bill Federer (with marked additions from Alan Franklin) "Bloody Mary," daughter of Henry VIII, sentenced 300 people to death during her 5 year reign. (“Bloody Mary”… was a relentless Papist and mass-Murderer Mary had always rejected and resented the break with Rome that her father instituted and his subsequent establishment of the Anglican Church that had flowed from her half-brother's protestantism, and now she tried to turn England back to Roman Catholicism. (This effort was carried out by force, and hundreds of Protestant leaders were executed. The first was John Rogers (a.k.a. “Thomas Matthews”), the printer of the “Matthews-Tyndale Bible”. His execution was followed by the execution of former Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who was primarily responsible for the printing of the “Great Bible”. (Hundreds more would follow in Mary’s bloody reign of terror. This earned the queen the title of “Bloody Mary”. This Catholic terror was egged-on by Spain and is a good example of the true face of the brutal, anti Christian Roman Catholic Church, which all true Christians should shun.AF) At her death, on NOVEMBER 17, 1558, her half-sister Elizabeth became Queen. During Elizabeth's 45 year protestant reign, freedom flourished ,Shakespeare wrote plays, Francis Bacon began the scientific revolution and Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to settle a colony, which he named Virginia in honor of the "Virgin Queen Elizabeth." When word came of a plot to assassinate her, Elizabeth executed dozens, including her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, who was mother of England's next monarch, King James I. Spain sent its "Invincible Armada" to conquer England and return it to the Papacy, but Sir Francis Drake, aided by a hurricane, defeated them. The Anglican Church separated from Rome but retained many rituals, to which "Puritans" objected. At her Coronation in 1558, Queen Elizabeth stated: "Christ was the Word that spake it, He took the bread and brake it, And what that Word did make it, I do believe and take it." Of her epitaph, Elizabeth said: "I am no lover of pompous title, but only desire that my name may be recorded in a line or two, which shall express my name, my virginity, the years of my reign, and the reformation of religion under it."