Mary Tudor, like Elizabeth Tudor, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Victoria, were all women trying to make it in a wholly dominated male system, where their survival depended on managing and surviving the males using them for their own various purposes and own ambitions. Jane Grey and Margaret Pole are examples of powerful women who didn't survive the use, and Jane Grey's sisters' lives were dominated and restricted until their deaths simply by the fact of their existing with blood in their veins that made them useful to male ambitions to plot against the throne.
Margaret Beaufort and Eleanor of Aquitaine are probably some of the most independent and powerful women personalities within British history who did succeed in making their own mark on their own terms in a male political system, but both of them suffered badly at the hands of it. Margaret was pregnant at twelve in a political marriage and nearly died giving birth, injured to the point that she never conceived again, and her child was raised by the men with ambitions with her having very limited access. Both were imprisoned and came near execution by the men wishing to control and use them. Katherine of Aragon was another remarkable woman with the strength of her mother who led armies on battlefields, but her achievements, some of which were achieved by carefully managing her husband, are mostly lost behind those of the men of her generation and she was tried, imprisoned, terribly treated and died largely for being in the way of her husband's freedom to re marry.
Their history is much the same problem we still have in the UK with women MPs, that a woman who has risen to the top of the current (male dominated, male led, set up by males for other males) political system and gained power, has power in very limited ways different to the way that a male in the same position would have. A woman has not been allowed to get there by doing or saying anything that would ruffle male sensibilities. They've got there by winning at the game of Patriarchy, which is why these days we see so many willing to be friends to women only in very limited and largely self interested ways. It's also why it's a thing that a woman who has gained a powerful position will actively try to prevent other women reaching positions of power around her and threatening her own male support structure: Thatcher was an example.