David Starkey - Tumblr Posts

Henry VIII Week– Day 5: Henry VIII + twilight years

“Starkey and [Lacey Baldwin] Smith shared a fascination with the end of Henry’s reign. In Smith’s view, in Henry’s later years– and especially after his health began to worsen in 1541– the ‘mask of royalty’ began to slip and the monster began to emerge. Smith’s Henry VIII was at his worst– suspicious, vindictive, perhaps even paranoid– in his later years. The Renaissance prince of the early years gave way to a nasty and vicious man who went to his reward gracelessly– kicking and screaming almost to the end. Starkey also focused on the end of the reign to support his thesis of the limited degree of Henry’s control, and especially saw the last months of his reign, with the destruction of the Howards and the rigging of his will, as evidence of factionalism run rampant. A vigorous and healthy Henry VIII could control the shape and direction of politics, if not the details; a sick and dying king let events slip out of his hands, permitting a radically Protestant succession that he never intended and, had he been alive to see it, would never have supported.” – If a Lion Knew His Own Strength, David M. Head, 1997

✧ The Countess [Margaret Pole] was sent a furred nightgown, a kirtle of worsted, a furred petticoat, a satin-lined nightgown, a bonnet and frontlet, four pairs of hose, four pairs of shoes and a pair of slippers. …One would hope that Katherine’s gifts provided her with at least some comfort. […] Her four recorded acts of intercession demonstrate Katherine’s desire to take her position as queen and its accompanying responsibilities seriously. Her desire to grant prisoners pardons and her bequests of jewellry upon her relatives and ladies suggest a kind and warm young woman. [Conor Byrne, Katherine Howard: A New History]

✦ Katherine continued to show her preference for her cousin Anne Boleyn’s child…who was now seven years old. When she first dined in public, she gave Elizabeth the privileged seat opposite her. To young Elizabeth, this must have been a great moment and she was to remember Katherine’s kindness. [Joanna Denny, Katherine Howard: A Tudor Conspiracy]

✧ Catherine had shown herself to be a model consort: gracious, forgiving, and willing to let bygones be bygones. She also displayed leadership, resourcefulness and independence. […] She was also warm, loving and good-natured. Catherine, in short, had begun rather well. She had a good heart, and a less bad head than most of her chroniclers have assumed. [David Starkey, Six Wives]

✦ Katherine had a kindness of heart and a lack of malice that prevented her from remaining angry at anyone for very long, and was generous and caring towards those less fortunate than herself.

Throughout the summer progress…she had carried out her royal duties impeccably. Her poise and dignity marked the progress as the highlight of her reign so far. Katherine’s past performance held the promise of a happy and successful future; in short, Katherine possessed all the qualities of a fine queen consort.

The evidence she left behind – her eagerness to show patronage, her intercession on behalf of felons, her willingness to fulfil her religious obligations and her kindness – suggests that she would have been as good a queen as any of Henry’s wives. [Josephine Wilkinson, Katherine Howard: The Tragic Story of Henry VIII’s Fifth Queen]

special shoutout to tiny-librarian for browsing her KH collection to help me find a lot of these quotes!

“More, he insists, was quite prepared, when required, to impose Catholic beliefs on dissenters by the exercise of royal might. And now, he suggests, Mantel is compounding the erroneous approach of seeing history in the light of subsequent events by her eagerness to set More against her hero, Cromwell, to make the latter appear a “herald of the future” This is equally as preposterous as Bolt’s approach,” he says. “To reach such a conclusion about More and Cromwell from the very difficult and complicated 16th-century sources is just silly. Both men believed in the idea of enforcing ideas on others by persecution and execution. They only disagreed which ideas.” And if he had to choose between the two? “Well, More at least died nobly with magnificent insouciance. The night before Cromwell was executed, he was screaming ‘Mercy, mercy’, like a stuffed pig. That alone tells us all you need to know about the moral quality of the two.””

— Sir Thomas More: Saint or Sinner, David Starkey’s view.

“For three years of Anne’s reign, Chapuys’s correspondence had been filled with predictions of rebellion. Now, five months after her death, the predictions were fulfilled. First Lincolnshire and then the north rose in revolt. The rebels found a charismatic leader in Robert Aske […] [and they formed a list of demands]. The monasteries were to be restored. Mary was to be declared heir. Cromwell, Rich, and Audley were to be executed or at least exiled. And Anne’s heretic bishops, Cranmer, Latimer, Shaxton, and Hilsey, were to be burned.”

— The Queens of Henry VIII, David Starkey (via madamedepembroke)