just a blog to keep my research organized.(‘all spoke to her, and she answered.’ —anne morrow lindbergh)
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Skeins-archive - These Jewel-lakes, These Skeins Of Railroad Line - Tumblr Blog
reassessing elizabeth norton lately and i find i’m liking her work more and more (i still disagree with a fair amount, but that’s how it goes) ...i basically ran out of available titles to read and tried to see what insights of hers i could find on twitter. an interesting one is that she seems to believe that anne boleyn was cruel to mary(i) and that catherine of aragon also could have done more for her daughter. which is fairly plausible on both counts; neither of those things are mutually exclusive.
Crazy how the whole ‘but only Kat Ashley said this’ defense falls apart once you see it’s pretty much corroborated by another witness:
“The newly single Seymour sent his nephew, John Seymour, to accompany Elizabeth as she moved to set up her own household at Hatfield soon after, and (according to Thomas Parry), Seymour told John to enquire of Elizabeth: “whether her great buttocks were grown any less or no?’”
What an extremely normal thing to ask about your fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. He quite clearly not only did it but was arrogant enough to joke/allude to it months later. What a sick fuck. Also afaik he never ‘denied’ it so much as he said it was just horseplay. The only thing he denied was conspiring to marry her. So I’d say why does she believe Thomas Seymour over at least two witnesses and Elizabeth herself (didn’t specifically refer to this incident but what she wrote on the outside of that letter) except the thing is he never specifically denied it, just denied there was anything shameful about it. So it’s not even why does she believe Thomas Seymour over them, it’s why does she believe her own apologist, give every single benefit of the doubt, reach of a narrative, over them (and also almost Thomas himself? Whom she supposedly idolizes)
Also the whole thing with comparing him to Anne Boleyn… I can’t. They were both executed when they both had close relationships with the reigning king and the similarities stop there. He had thirty three charges of treason against him. One of them was counterfeiting money to raise an army without permission of king or council. That would’ve been enough grounds to execute him alone. So the whole idea that he was railroaded and the treason relating to Elizabeth was invented to execute him… it made him look worse, but they had no need to invent that. They already had him on attempting to kidnap the king.
imagine writing this article and not being embarrassed. x
“The Henry of 1521, who received a papal title for writing in defense of the faith, was no more. The young zealous Catholic had undergone a transformation from seeing the papacy as an institution of veneration to one that had little relevance for his personal faith or rule. It was partly the influence of the sack of Rome and the character of Clement VII, but largely the result of Henry’s developing awareness of questions raised by the new learning which he could harness in the hope of reaching his own goals.”
— Catherine of Aragon: An Intimate Life, Amy Licence
“A dispatch from Chapuys to Charles V, dated 28th January, mentions Anne being pregnant and is backed up by a letter from George Taylor to Lady Lisle, dated 7th April, in which Taylor writes ‘The Queen hath a goodly belly, praying our Lord to send us a prince.’
In July 1534, Anne’s brother George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, was sent on a diplomatic mission to France to ask for a postponement of a meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I because of Anne’s condition. Anne was described as being ‘so far gone with child she could not cross the sea with the King.’ “
“There is yet another mention of Anne’s pregnancy in a letter from Chapuys dated the 27th July. Also, Eric Ives writes of how there is evidence that Henry VIII ordered a silver cradle, decorated with precious stones and Tudor roses, from Cornelius Hayes, his goldsmith, in April 1534 and he would not have spent money on such a cradle if he was not sure that Anne was pregnant. “
“It seems very likely that the proposed meeting was cancelled because sometime between 26 June and 2 July, disaster struck – Anne was delivered of a stillborn baby, after which the king[…] left her behind at Hampton Court and commenced his already delayed summer progress.
On 18 July we hear from John Husee that ‘The King is now at Oking [Woking Palace Surrey], and comes hither on Tuesday, and will tarry here and at Eltham till Friday, when he will meet with the Queen at Guildford. Southwark, 18 July.’
The king was planning to visit the Princess Elizabeth at Eltham Palace before joining the queen at Guildford, where they were reunited sometime toward the end of July or the beginning of August. The king and queen had been apart for more than a month, their longest period of separation since 1528, when Anne had retired from court in anticipation of the arrival of Cardinal Campeggio.”
“ The secret of the disaster was so well kept that it was only on 23 September that Chapuys reported that the queen — or “the lady” as he insisted on calling her — was not, after all, to have a child. We have to remember that the ambassador had been out of touch with the court while it was on summer progress. Away from the public eye, with a smaller number of attendants than at other times and with both Anne and Henry desperate to conceal it, total discretion was achieved. “ – Eric Ives
“At The Mercy Of The Queen (2012) has Anne experiencing a stillbirth in late June, and shows us afterwards crying over her son’s body.
“Perfect … he is perfect … see his little fingers, long and slender like my own. And his hair, the color of his father’s. So tiny he is, so frail and helpless … I cannot bear it ! I cannot bear that he never even drew a breath on this earth. Why send him? Why send him to me when he cannot draw one breath?”
Harriet Green as Anne Boleyn in Six Queens of Henry VIII.
The christening of lady Elizabeth, daughter to King Henry VIII., the 25th year of his reign, A.D. 1533.
On Sept 7, between three and four o'clock p.m., the Queen was delivered of a fair lady, for whom Te Deum was incontinently sung. The mayor, Sir Stephen Pecock, with his brethren and 40 of the chief citizens, were ordered to be at the christening on the Wednesday following ; on which day the mayor and council, in scarlet, with their collars, rowed to Greenwich, and the citizens went in another barge.
John Blanke was not the last African to serve King Henry VIII. As a French diplomat remarked to his English counterpart in the summer of 1545: ‘King’s hearts are in God’s hand and he turns them as pleases him from peace to war and from war to peace’. During his final war with France, instead of a skilled musician King Henry required the services of a man versed in an art that was at this time little practised by Europeans, but which people from West Africa were taught from birth: swimming and diving.
Black Tudors: The Untold Story
It is true that John Hawkins masterminded the first English transatlantic slaving voyages in the 1560s, but he was, in an awful sense, ahead of his time. After his final voyage returned in disarray in 1569, the English did not take up the trade again in earnest until the 1640s. Elizabeth I did not ‘expel’ Africans from England in 1596; rather her Privy Council issued a limited licence to an unscrupulous merchant named Caspar Van Senden, who was only allowed to transport individuals out of England with their masters’ consent: a consent that he utterly failed to obtain.
Black Tudors: The Untold Story
history + red haired queens*. (requested by anonymous). * “bonus challenge, try to limit the amount of Tudors”.
Allegorical Portrait of a Woman (also known as Simonetta Vespucci) by Sandro Botticelli
Frank Cadogan Cowper (1877-1958), The Blue Bird, 1918, oil on canvas, 88.4 x 71.1 cm. In a private collection. - The Blue Bird appeared at the Royal Academy in 1918, the last year of the Great War. Military images dominated the exhibition and the picture must have struck an incongruous note amid the portraits of generals, tributes to indomitable Tommies, romanticised accounts of ‘bringing up the guns’, and poignant war memorials. There seems to be no iconographical connection with Maurice Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird, although Cowper must have been aware of the phenomenally successful staging of this 'transcendental pantomime’ at the Haymarket Theatre, London, in 1909-11. The costumes and sets were by Frederick Cayley Robinson, who also illustrated the text when it was published by Methuen in 1911.
The picture does, however, undoubtedly relate to Madame d'Aulnoy’s fairy tale of the same name, first published in 1697. This tells of a beautiful young princess, Fiordelisa, who falls in love with a handsome prince. He returns her love, but her wicked step-mother, wanting him to marry her own ill-favoured daughter, Turritella, shuts her up in a tower and attempts to blacken her name with her suitor. When the prince, refusing to marry Turritella, is transformed into a Blue Bird by her fairy godmother, he flies to the tower and holds amorous tête-à-têtes with Fiordelisa, bringing her presents of jewels as tokens of his affection. Cowper shows the lovers enjoying one of these trysts, the princess holding a rope of pearls that the Blue Bird has evidently just given her.
The Tudors vs. History, 23/?
“The letters show a young woman who, through a mixture of pride and naivety, completely misjudged her situation. This was not entirely her fault; her friends, rejoicing at Anne Boleyn’s removal, did not realise they had been used either. But used they were. Cromwell never intended that the old, conservative, Aragonese faction […] should triumph. Now that they had served their purpose, he intended to remove the conservatives. And it was easy to do this, by depicting them as disloyal subjects who were plotting to overturn religious change and restore Mary, the king’s illegitimate and disobedient daughter, to the succession.”
– The Myth of ‘Bloody Mary’, Linda Porter
“Will submit to him in all things next to God, humbly beseeching your Highness to consider that I am but a woman, and your child, who hath committed her soul only to God, and her body to be ordered in this world as it shall stand with your pleasure.“
– Princess Mary to [Henry VIII.] Hounsdon, 1 June.
“You will see I have followed your advice, and will do so in all things concerning my duty to the King, God and my conscience not offended; for I take you as one of my chief friends next his Grace and the Queen. I desire you, for Christ’s passion, to find means that I be not moved to any further entry in this matter than I have done; for I assure you I have done the utmost my conscience will suffer me, and I neither desire nor intend to do less than I have done. But if I be put to any more (I am plain with you as with my great friend) my said conscience will in no ways suffer me to consent thereunto. Except in this point, neither you nor any other shall be more desirous to have me obey the King than I shall be ready to do so. I had rather lose my life than displease him. I beg you to take this letter in good part. I would not have troubled you so much, but that the end of your letter caused me a little to fear I shall have more business hereafter. Hownsdon, 10 June.”
– 1108. Princess Mary to Cromwell.
ab. 1663-1665 Peter Lely - Margaret Brooke, Lady Denham
(Royal Collection Trust)
EDIT REQUEST MEME | anon asked: jane seymour + favourite costume
Rosalba Carriera, 1675-1757
Caterina Sagredo Barbarigo as Berenice, ca.1741, pastel on gray-blue laid paper, mounted onto thin canvas, 45.7x34.5 cm
Detroit Institute of Arts, Inv. 56.264
What are your top 10 Tudor History nonfic/biography books, and why?
the creation of anne boleyn by susan bordo, i’ve always been into the tudors, but reading that book in 2014 reigniting my passion for them and it has been steady on sense, it’s a really interesting book that will def i think changune your mind on the “standard” anne story
the life and death of anne boleyn, eric ives, there’s a reason they call it the anne boleyn bible and it meets the expectation
black tudors by miranda kaufmann, i think i’ve recced this book a LOT and i’m going to do it again, really changed my perspective of 16th century england, if you like the period, it’s a must
game of queens by sarah gristwood, just a great read if you love 16th century queens and get a good look into the 16th century politics that made them
arbella: england’s lost queen, while arbella is not “technically” a tudor she is very tudor like and this book has a lot of great information on elizabeth’s later reign and how she felt about the candidates for her throne
uncrowned queen: the fateful life of margaret beaufort, absolutely wonderful book, loved it start to finish
anna duchess of cleves: the king’s beloved sister, heather r darsie, i actually didn’t know there was so much more information about anne of cleves until i read this and it was really interesting to read so much of her life from the german sources darsie found on her
crown of blood: the deadly inheritance of lady jane grey nicola tallis, this book honestly really made me love jane
elizabeth the great, elizabeth jenkins, my favourite bio on elizabeth by far
the rise of the tudors: the family that changed english history by chris skidmore, a really really great book on the situation that created the tudors, if the 15th century seems really confusing, this is a good place to start
Mary, by the Grace of God, Queen of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and of the Church of England and of Ireland on Earth Supreme Head.
Another abridged account, similar to that in Hall and Grafton. At the end is the following sentence : “See the works of God and the mutability of this world ; for this queen Anne, that (as afore is showed) was so triumphantly crowned, within three years next ensueing was attainted of high treason, divorced from the King, and her head stricken off ; and this child that was christened with such pomp was, within three years and less, in open court parliament, declared for a bastard, and deprived of the name of princess.” The sentence in italics is erased.