Ely Cathedral, CambridgeshirebyJoseph Mallord William Turner, 1833.

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

Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914) “Dream Idyll (A Valkyrie)” Gouache and pastel on paper

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

“Thanks be to God, my own darling; you are saved and the plague is abated. The legate which we most desire arrived at Paris on Sunday or Monday last. I trust by next Monday to hear of his arrival in Calais and then I trust within a while to enjoy that which I have so longed for, to God’s pleasure and our own.  No more to you now, my darling, for lack of time; but that I would you were in my arms or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed you.”

Gonna go ahead and say that this is ridiculously oversimplified.

The funny thing about Tudor history? Most of the main players are open to interpretation, discussed and can, perhaps, be redeemed.

Anne Boleyn: “Eh, she was complicated.”

Princess Mary: “Well, she did have a messed up childhood and her own father seemed on the verge of killing her sometimes. No wonder she went mad.”

Cromwell: As Hilary Mantel argues, he was simply making the best of a bad situation and coping with a tyrannical boss.

Katharine Howard: “Just a foolish teenage girl in way over her head.”

But no one, historians or otherwise, ever really made a proper defense of Henry VIII. Because they can’t. He was a sociopathic self-indulgent man-child who ruined a lot of lives needlessly. 

Even The Tudors television show (which tried to present the man as somewhat human) didn’t argue too much on this point. 

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.