A Collection of Maps Owned by England’s First Queen Spent Centuries Overlooked in a Family Library. Now, the Rare Volume Is on Sale for $1.6 Million

When the port city of Calais fell in January 1558, England lost its last remaining foothold in France.

English monarchs had long laid claim to the rival kingdom, arguing that they were its true rulers by right of both inheritance and conquest. But the Siege of Calais dealt a devastating blow to this admittedly tenuous cause, essentially ending any aspirations of uniting England and France under a single crown. The defeat weighed heavily on the Tudor queen Mary I, who is often quoted—likely apocryphally—as saying, “When I am dead and opened, you will find Calais lying in my heart.”

A recently resurfaced book once owned by Mary could hold new insights on how she viewed the loss. The richly bound volume is a 1555 edition of Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia (also called Anglicae Historiae), a chronicle of English history originally commissioned by the queen’s paternal grandfather, Henry VII. Decorated with Mary’s monogram and coat of arms, the tome is accompanied by four custom-made maps of lands claimed by the English crown, including Scotland, Ireland and holdings along what is now the English Channel. Crucially, the map of Scotland is dated to the same year as the defeat at Calais.

In the hand-drawn scenes, St. George’s flag flies over Calais, presenting a “continued cartographic assertion of sovereignty [that] resonates deeply with the English crown’s broader claims in France,” notes California-based dealer Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps in a statement. “The map reflects the queen’s contemporary strategic concerns and England’s enduring vision of itself as a cross-channel power, even as direct control of its continental territories slipped away.”

Individually, the maps are some of the earliest known specimens of their kind. With Vergil’s text, they represent “perhaps the most significant artifact of Tudor intellectual history still in private hands,” according to the statement. Come April 30, Ruderman will put this claim to the test by offering the volume for sale at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. The price tag? A hefty $1.6 million—far more than the £140,000 (£168,000 with buyer’s premium, or roughly $237,000 today) that the book fetched at auction in 2024.

The daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Mary was the first woman to rule England in her own right. Declared illegitimate after the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, she was eventually restored to the line of succession. After her younger brother, Edward VI, died childless in 1553, supporters of a rival claimant attempted to seize the throne, but Mary managed to reclaim her crown. During her five-year reign, she sought to reverse the religious reforms introduced by her father and brother, with the goal of restoring the Catholic Church’s supremacy in England.

Alex Clausen, Ruderman’s president and co-owner, says that the maps capture the state of Mary’s realm at a key moment. “Before this period, there was no series of maps covering England and Scotland and Ireland together,” he explains. “There are only a handful of maps of Great Britain in general.” Clausen argues that the maps anticipate the rise of the British Empire under Mary’s successor and half-sister, Elizabeth I, by treating distinct territories as a collective whole.

Historian Linda Porter, a leading biographer of Mary, says the volume “is of great cultural and historical significance.” Compared with Vergil, whose “conclusions were evidently not always welcome,” she adds, “the mapmaker presented a more positive depiction of English power and influence. The result, beautifully drawn and illustrated, reminds us how much Mary I and her reign are still overlooked and underappreciated.”

Peter Leech, a musicologist at Cardiff University in Wales who specializes in the cultural history of British Catholicism, found the Vergil book in the library of a Leicestershire manor house in 2024. He noticed the binding’s similarities to the work of the so-called Medallion Binder, who was active at the Tudor court between the end of Henry VIII’s reign and the beginning of Elizabeth’s. Knowing that few items from Mary’s personal library survive today, Leech immediately realized the volume’s significance.

The book went under the hammer at Dominic Winter Auctioneers in September 2024, with an estimate of £20,000 to £30,000. (Leech led the auction house’s research on the lot but wasn’t involved in the upcoming Ruderman sale.) Ruderman partnered with HS Rare Books and Clive A. Burden Ltd. to purchase the tome for significantly more than its estimate. “We were willing to pay a substantially higher amount of money than what we ended up paying at that auction, because [it was] just totally unlike anything that we have seen in decades,” Clausen says.

Whether another collector is willing to pay $1.6 million for the book remains to be seen. The volume is under an export ban, meaning its buyer must either keep it in the U.K. or make it available for a British cultural institution to acquire.

So far, neither Leech nor Clausen has found direct evidence of Mary’s copy of Anglica Historia in Tudor-era archival records, raising questions about who commissioned the accompanying maps. A courtier might have ordered the leatherbound volume as a New Year’s gift for the queen. Another possibility is that Mary commissioned it herself.

“Mary was a highly educated woman, a true Renaissance princess, with command of the classics and several modern languages and a keen interest in exploration and cartography,” Porter says. “The atlas provided a clear idea of the geography of her dominions and must have given her great pleasure.”

The maps are arguably the main attraction of the Ruderman sale. But their pairing with the 1555 edition of Anglica Historia is also of note. This posthumously published third edition of Vergil’s history contains a section on Henry VIII that casts Catherine of Aragon in a highly sympathetic light.

When Mary was a teenager, her father tried to annul his marriage to Catherine so he could wed Anne Boleyn—a cause that would eventually lead him to break with the Catholic Church. The young princess attracted Henry’s ire by refusing to recognize the validity of his claim, instead siding with her mother. Only after Anne’s execution in 1536 on trumped-up charges of adultery and incest did Mary reconcile with her father and begrudgingly accept his new status as supreme head of the Church of England.

In the posthumous edition of Anglica Historia, Vergil described Catherine as “wonderfully armed with true patience.” The historian also quoted a letter that the queen had allegedly written to Henry on her deathbed. In it, she beseeched him to “be a good father” to Mary, before vowing that “mine eyes desire you above all things.”

Vergil claimed that upon reading the missive, Henry “wept lovingly. For who could have been so harsh and hard-hearted that he would not be moved by that pure and sincere expression of goodwill toward himself?” Although one of Catherine’s biographers has deemed the letter “almost certainly fictitious,” its inclusion in Vergil’s chronicle would have struck a chord with Mary, whose youth was marred by the breakdown of her parents’ marriage.

Reading an “authoritative account” that outlined “her own history, her family’s history and the geography of the area that she ruled over” would have been of great value to Mary, Clausen says. More than 450 years later, he adds, “to have such an object that was held in her hands, no doubt, and that she referred to in understanding her own rule and her history is an incredibly special thing.”

Mary’s ownership of the leatherbound tome is evidenced by its royal arms and monogram. But researchers are less certain about how the book ended up in a Leicestershire manor. Leech’s research on the volume’s provenance suggests that it passed from Mary to one of her ladies-in-waiting, Anne Rede (or Reade), who in turn bequeathed it to her son John Fortescue. The book likely stayed in the extended Fortescue family for generations, ending up at Bosworth Hall in the mid-18th century and remaining there until its rediscovery nearly 300 years later.

Clausen outlines a slightly different version of events, theorizing that Mary’s sister, Elizabeth, inherited the book upon taking the throne. He suggests that Elizabeth later gave the book to Fortescue, her onetime tutor. “He was an important intellectual in her life,” Clausen says. “It’s not surprising that he got some of the books that she had inherited, probably as gifts, and then he himself acted as a kind of conduit to pass them on” to other scholars. This copy of Anglica Historia, however, apparently remained in the Fortescue family.

Questions regarding the maps’ creation remain, including the identity of the cartographer who drew the exquisitely rendered pen-and-ink and watercolor maps. As Fine Books & Collections magazine noted in 2024, “There were very few cartographers at the time who would have had the knowledge and resources to draw these maps with such detail and so accurately.” According to Clausen, “There are about a dozen possible makers for the maps, some of which can be dismissed out of hand, but there is also potential for makers that we don’t know about or that we’re not thinking about, because they’re not primarily known as mapmakers.”

Mary died in November 1558, just ten months after the loss of Calais. In the centuries since her death, her many achievements have been overshadowed by her brutal suppression of the Protestant faith. Between 1555 and 1558, the queen sanctioned the deaths of some 280 Protestants who were burned at the stake as heretics—a fact that has earned her the nickname “Bloody Mary.”

But Porter and other historians have argued that Mary was no “bloodier” than her fellow Tudor monarchs, who took a similarly hard-line approach to religious reform. “Mary burned Protestants, [and] Elizabeth disemboweled Catholics,” Porter told Smithsonian magazine in 2020. “It’s not pretty either way.” Mary’s continued vilification is particularly stark when compared with the lionization of her sister, who is often described as having presided over a “golden age” of English history. Ultimately, Mary’s supporters argue that her negative reputation is a product of both sexism and the emergence of a national identity centered on Protestantism rather than Catholicism.

Mary “was an intelligent, politically adept and resolute monarch who proved to be very much her own woman,” biographer Anna Whitelock wrote in Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen. “Mary was the Tudor trailblazer, a political pioneer whose reign redefined the English monarchy.”