This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mary I came to the English throne in 1553 determined to reverse the break with Rome her father, Henry VIII, had begun in 1534. Her Parliament repealed Edward VI's Protestant religious legislation and restored England's obedience to the Pope, undoing two decades of reform in a matter of months. From 20 January 1555, heresy laws again let the crown punish those judged guilty of heresy against the Roman Catholic faith, and the persecution that followed was sustained rather than symbolic.
Over the next three years, at least 280 to 287 Protestants, 56 of them women, were burned for heresy, with roughly 30 more dying in prison awaiting trial or execution. Prominent reformers who could leave England did, fleeing abroad and becoming known to history as the Marian exiles; those who stayed and died for their faith were remembered afterward as the Marian Martyrs, a title the Church of England itself preserved in its own commemorative calendar once Mary's reign had ended.
Mary died in 1558, and her sister Elizabeth I's 1559 settlement, Anglicanism's own earliest recorded founding event, resettled English Protestantism directly against the reversal Mary had forced. What her five years on the throne changed for the tradition's spread was continuity under duress: a Protestant church driven fully underground and then restored, its martyrs and exiles carried forward as part of Anglican memory rather than erased by the attempt to erase them.