In Any Case I Have Something For You.

…In any case I have something for you.

What has been overlooked, however, is that in the same conversation, Cromwell claimed that it was a prophecy made in Flanders ‘threatening the king with a conspiracy of those who were nearest his person’, which had ‘roused his suspicion and made him enquire into the matter’. This suggests that Anne was not simply the victim of a pre-planned attack, but rather that Cromwell undertook an investigation into Anne’s circle based on a prophetic warning of danger to the king.

Andy Holroyde

 Queen Nzinga of Ndongo (Angola)

Why she kicks ass:

Nzingha a Mbande (also known as Ana de Sousa Nzingha Mbande) was a 17th century queen (muchino a muhatu) of the Ndongo and Matamba Kingdoms of the Mbundu people in southwestern Africa.

She has been called the “greatest military strategist that ever confronted the armed forces of Portugal.” Her military campaigns kept the Portuguese in Africa at bay for more than four decades. 

Her objective was nothing less than the complete and total destruction of the African slave trade. 

She sent ambassadors throughout West and Central Africa with the intent of enlisting a huge coalition of African armies to eject the Portuguese. 

Queen Nzingha died fighting for her people in 1663 at the ripe old age of eighty-one. Africa has known no greater patriot.

Nzinga left an impression after making a fool of Portuguese Governor, Correa de Souza. 

Princess Alix and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia preparing for a ball, 1888.

history | powerful women

It was to Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Beaufort, rather than Henry VII, that the early Tudor court owed its reputation for splendour. Margaret penned a book that laid out the minutiae of royal etiquette and it was adhered to well into the next reign; Elizabeth, who as Edward IV’s daughter had grown up at a court praised for its luxury and pomp, helped add a sophisticated lustre to the royal household that it might otherwise have been lacking. And Henry needed these women to help him. What is often overlooked about Henry VII is that he spent the first fourteen years of his life in Wales and the next fourteen in Europe, so in 1485 he found himself king of ‘a country he neither knew nor understood.’ New palaces arose, with the many-towered riverside wonder at Richmond proving a particular high point of the Renaissance style in northern Europe; the court glittered, its behaviour monitored by the king’s mother and its style augmented by his wife. The queen’s cousin, the Duke of Buckingham, appeared at state events wearing a sumptuously bejewelled outfit, said to have cost £ 1,500, at a time when the average weekly wage for a skilled worker was about forty pence and in the period pre-decimalisation of the currency there were 240 pence in every pound. All of the glamour was designed to project an image of a monarchy sedate in its magnificent. Margaret Beaufort and Queen Elizabeth helped create a system which recast a man who had lived life in a kind of shadow as the leading figure in an elaborate political show. The decision to retain many of the advisers who served Henry VI or Edward IV was another reflection of the king’s conservatism as well as the necessity of having people at his side who actually understood England and the English.

— An Illustrated Introduction to the Tudors, Gareth Russell