Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

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Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary is an English nursery rhyme.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells and cockleshells

And pretty maids all in a row.

Explanations

Like many nursery rhymes, it has acquired spurious historical explanations. One is that it refers to Mary I of Scotland, with "how does your garden grow" referring to how she was doing controlling the country, "silver bells" referring to (Catholic) cathedral bells, "cockleshells" being an insult, and "pretty maids all in a row" referring both to how ugly Mary was compared to other women and to how she killed people: in rows and rows.

However, Mary Queen of Scots was accounted a great beauty. She was also not known for killing "rows and rows" of people, although one of her lovers, Darnley, was mixed up in a murder.

Another is that it refers to Mary I of England and her unpopular attempts to bring Roman Catholicism back to England, identifying the "cockle shells," for example, with the symbol of pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James in Spain (Santiago de Compostela) and the "pretty maids all in a row" with nuns.

Opie and Opie remark that no proof has been found that the rhyme was known before the eighteenth century. Mary I of England and Mary I of Scotland were also contemporaries.

Another explanation states that the rhyme refers to Bloody Mary, daughter of King Henry VIII. The silver bells and cockle shells referred to in the Nursery Rhyme were colloquialisms for instruments of torture. The 'silver bells' refer too thumbscrews which crushed of the thumb between two hard surfaces by the tightening a screw. The 'cockleshells' were believed to be instruments of torture which were attached to the genitals. Maids were early versions of the guillotine used to seer heads.

References

• The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, Iona and Peter Opie