Elizabeth And Thomas Boleyn With Their Daughters Mary (left) And Anne (right) In The Spanish Princess

Elizabeth and Thomas Boleyn with their daughters Mary (left) and Anne (right) in The Spanish Princess 2x05, “Plague”

Idk if I explained that well, but I don’t totally disregard Chapuys as a source at all— what I don’t like is the treatment of him as an infallible source, something Lauren MacKay has unfortunately contributed to. Chapuys got things wrong sometimes, to take all his reports at face value and not compare them to what other contemporaries were saying at the same time is going to lend itself to an extremely myopic view of the Tudor court and its major players.

“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.

Harlem in the 1920s.

“Harlem was the end of the line, the promise land, the place where all our fantasies came true. If I had to choose between Heaven and Harlem… Harlem, of course, would win everytime.” - Ossie Davis

Jane Boleyn, Viscountess Rochford

“When [Princess] Mary had left Greenwich to go to Eltham, a great many women, in spite of their husbands, had flocked to see her pass, and had cheered her, calling out, that notwithstanding all laws to the contrary, she was still their princess. Several of them, being of higher rank than the rest, had been sent to the Tower. On the margin of that report … we find (written by Dinteville himself): ‘Note, my Lord Rochford …’ The ambassador clearly meant that Lady Rochford … was among those who had cheered Mary.” - Paul Friedmann, Anne Boleyn: A Chapter of English History.

Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1833.