She Railed At Him For Debating The Divorce Of His Formidable Wife:Did I Not Tell You That Whenever You

“She railed at him for debating the divorce of his formidable wife: ‘Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand?’ she snapped. Another time, she was in the king’s privy chamber and, hearing that Wolsey was hovering importantly outside, waiting for her dismissal and the commencement of men’s business, she rapped out a message for him to come and join them: ‘Where else should he come, except where the king is?’

As we see from this, she interpreted the role of courtly lady to the utmost of its potential. She became more powerful than any man. Paradoxically, once it was recognised that she and no other– not her father Thomas, not her uncle Norfolk– was now ‘the true inheritor of that ultimate royal favour that had been Wolsey’s strength’, she attracted a degree of enmity more usually associated with hated male favourites than mistresses. Perhaps the manner of her operations – as an incarnation of the eternal feminine – aggravated her enemies’ frustrations by making it impossible for them to compete.

[For] they were men. It was hardly in the Duke of Suffolk’s remit to spring like a nymph onto the back of Henry’s saddle and ride off in pillion with him, laughing and whispering into his ear. But Anne could. With her wit, her dazzle, her ludic, punning Burgundian manners, she melted into his dream of Albion.”

Madonna of the Star, 1424, Fra Angelico

Medium: panel,tempera

The White Princess episode 6 | Perkin Warbeck and Cathy Gordon ✥

“He was thirty-two years old, had reigned two years, one month, twenty-eight days. The only language, it turned out, in which he had been able to communicate himself successfully to the world was the terse idiom of courage, and the chief subject he had been given to express was violence. It had begun for him as a child in violence and it had ended in violence; the brief span between had been a tale of action and hard service with small joy and much affliction of spirit. If he had committed a grievous wrong, he had sought earnestly to do great good. And through his darkening days he had kept to the end a golden touch of magnanimity. Men did not forget how the last of the Plantagenets had died. Polydore Vergil, Henry Tudor’s official historian, felt compelled to record; “King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies.””

— Paul Murray Kendall

‘Comparing Anne Boleyn and Katherine of Aragon in a way that is unfavorable to the latter is evil and sexist’ yeah, well, Katherine of Aragon partisans do this all the time with her elder sister so :)

sigynofasgard replied to your post: ID THIS LOSER

ooc: Googled it - maaaan what a load of - well “propaganda” is a nice term. :-p

I know, that is putting it kindly.

Though I’ve been doing some reading up on the concept of “Tudor Propaganda,” and have come across some pretty convincing stuff that argues that the notion that the Tydder’s admin promoted an active agenda of propaganda blackening Richard III’s legacy is largely false. This really surprised me!

But even more interesting is the point that this author made that Henry’s policy was basically “we don’t talk about that shit” and was more devoted to obscuring the known facts rather than actively manipulating them. Which was its own kind of propaganda, I guess. So a good example is the fact that when Henry’s first parliament repealed the Titulus Regius act of 1484, not only did they not read the act aloud, or even refer specifically to the contents of it, but every copy of it was ordered to be destroyed, or turned in to the authorities for destruction, on pain of serious fines or forfeiture.

A lot of other interesting stuff in the article as well, especially wrt the complete non-treatment of the missing sons of Edward IV during Henry’s reign. The ref: C. S. L. Davies, “Information, Disinformation, and political knowledge under Henry VII and early Henry VIII” Historical Research 85:228 (2012), 228-53.

It’s really pretty fascinating, and makes the point that the Polydore Vergil and Thomas More versions of the events of 1483-85 didn’t gain wide circulation until the 1530s and 1540s.

My mind was pretty blown. I may even have done the dramatic forehead slap a couple of times.