Mary: Did you mean...?

British actress and writer Mary Darby Robinson, posing as her famous character 'Perdita', oil on canvas portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1782. Waddesdon Manor.

Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536 CE) was a Spanish princess who famously became the Queen of England and the first wife of Henry VIII of England (r. 1509-1547 CE). When the marriage did not produce a male heir, Henry VIII became desperate to...

Mary, Queen of Scots was the queen of both Scotland (r. 1542-1567) and briefly, France (r. 1559-1560). Obliged to flee Scotland, the queen was imprisoned for 19 years by Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558-1603) and finally executed for treason...

James II of England (r. 1685-1688) reigned briefly as the king of England, Scotland, and Ireland until he was deposed by the Glorious Revolution of November 1688. James, also known as James VII of Scotland, was the fourth Stuart monarch...

The pirate Mary Read (d. 1721), illustration by Alexandre Debelle from Histoire des pirates et corsaires de l'Océan et de la Méditerranée depuis leur origine jusqu'à nos jours, P. Christian, Paris, Cavaillès, 1846.

A wooden statue of Mary Magdalene by the Italian Renaissance artist Donatello (c. 1386-1466 CE). (Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence)

A c. 1790 oil on canvas portrait by John Opie of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), the feminist writer. (Tate Britain, London)

An artist's impression of how the pirate Mary Read (d. 1721) may have looked. Image from the computer game Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag by Ubisoft. © 2013 Ubisoft

The English warship the Mary Rose on the 1540s CE Anthony Roll. The ship was part of Henry VIII's naval fleet but sank in a confrontation with a French fleet in July 1545 CE. (British Library, London)

An 1830s oil on canvas portrait by Richard Rothwell of Mary Shelley (1797-1851), author of Frankenstein. (National Portrait Gallery, London)