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Some historians believe the origin of the words to Three Blind Mice lay with the English Queen Mary I, (1516 - 1558) often otherwise known as Bloody Mary. Mary was the only child of Henry and his first wife, the Spanish princess Catalina (Catherine) of Aragon. Whilst at one time Henry had doted upon Mary and boasted about her publicly, even breaking royal protocol by giving her the title of Princess of Wales, a prerogative only usually reserved for the male first born, Catherine's failure to produce a male heir during their twenty four year marriage sparked a major watershed for English history.

It begin when Henry attempted to dissolve his marriage to Mary's mother, on the grounds Catherine had previously been briefly married, as a sixteen year old, to his elder brother Arthur who then died suddenly only a few days later. In his desperation for a divorce and a male heir, Henry even cited passages from Leviticus 20:21 asserting that it 'If a man shall take his brother's wife it is an unclean thing; he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness and they shall remain childless.' When Pope Clement VII refused his request Henry broke English links with the Catholic Church and declared himself head of the newly reformed Church of England. And then he promptly married Anne Boleyn who was no more successful at producing a male heir than her predecessor. As a result, Catherine lost the title of Queen and Mary was declared illegitimate, demoted to the title of 'Lady' and lost her position at court: one argument goes that that was why she was nicknamed The Farmer's Wife. For Thomas Cranmer, the man who eventually sanctioned the King's second marriage, there would be dire consequences.

Meanwhile Henry began confiscating land from the Catholics and dissolving the monastries. His son Edward (from his third marriage) took things much further and started hunting down and executing catholic priests. During this time the three religious leaders supporting Henry were the Bishops Hugh Latimer & Nicholas Ridley and the ever loyal Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, architect of Henry VIII's English Reformation. Openly catholic, Mary was seen as a real danger to newly Protestant England and the policies and behaviours set in motion by these three were certainly openly unfriendly: (They all ran after the Farmer's Wife)

Unluckily for them Edward only lasted six years. When Mary I finally ascended the throne in 1553, the bitter queen immediately set about restoring the catholic faith as the religion of England and the bloodletting began again . Over eight hundred wealthy protestants fled the country and nearly three hundred were burned at the stake in what became known as the Marian Persecutions. The most high profile of these victims, later remembered by history as the Oxford Martyrs, were Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer who were tortured, some stories say blinded, and then burned at the stake in central Oxford in front of hundreds of shocked spectators (She cut off their tails with a carving knife, did you ever see such a thing in your life).

Another less convincing, theory is that three blind commoners, Joan Waste, John Aprice and a third whose name is unknown, defied Queen Mary's ban on reading the bible in English and between them paid up for a copy to have it read to them in public and so they were also burned at the stake for their protest.

The first written record of Three Blind Mice was published between 1609 and 1611 by Thomas Ravenscroft (1582-1635) whose booklets Pammelia (1609) Deuteromelia (1609) and Melismata (1611) were a collection of street songs, ballards, poems and children's songs that included Three Blind Mice, although with a slightly different lyric to the one we know so well today;

Three Blinde Mice (Thomas Ravenscroft - Deuteromelia, 1609)

Three Blinde Mice, Three Blinde Mice,
Dame Iulian, Dame Iulian,
The Miller and his merry olde Wife,
Shee scrapte her tripe licke thou the knife
The Three Blinde Mice

Published only fifty years after Queen Mary's Persecutions, Ravenscroft, a noted scholar, composer and musician could well have been recording a well known rhyme of its day or, as some believe, may even have composed the lyric himself. Many historians believe Three Blind Mice refers to the brutal slaying of the three bishop's opposed to Queen Mary's religious reforms, one of whom had made the mistake of disolving her mother's marriage to King Henry VII and reducing her status from princess. And it meant that from the moment she became Queen, Thomas Cranmer must have known his days were numbered.