Jane Boleyn, Viscountess Rochford

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.

#actual historical quote

eh, it’s not a contemporary quote insofar as it wasn’t recorded at the time it was said. william roper is the source , and he was writing of his father-in-law saying this allegedly in the 1520s, but the book itself was written nearly twenty years after his death (1535). he also reported in this book an exchange that heavily implied that more predicted anne boleyn’s execution so.... it would seem some anecdotes are a little too prescient to be taken at face value .

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

I have received a letter from a cousin of mine. He is Duke Philip of Bavaria and he would like to come to England to pay court to you…

The Tudors | The Undoing of Cromwell

“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.