Comparing Anne Boleyn And Katherine Of Aragon In A Way That Is Unfavorable To The Latter Is Evil And

‘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 :)

She is a paradise

-Sebastian Giustinian, Venetian Ambassador to Henry VIII

“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

Ruta Gedmintas as Bessie Blount in The Tudors

“Mary and her half sister Elizabeth had never been reconciled, and to the end Mary had cherished hopes of producing an heir to succeed her. For sometime though, she had known that ‘the eyes and hearts of the nation already fixed on this lady as successor to the crown’. Eventually, she had no choice but to accept the harsh reality -motherhood had evaded her-and with considerable reluctance, on 6 November she acknowledged Elizabeth as her heir, to the great joy of the people. The twenty five year old Elizabeth, now became Queen Elizabeth I of England, According to her admirer Camden, who always spoke favourbly of her she was ‘of beauty fair and worthy of a Crown/ On the day of her accession it was reported that 'the bells in all the churches in London rung out in a token of joy and at night bonfires were made and tables set out in the streets, where plentiful eating and drinking and making merry"”

— Elizabeth’s Rival: The Tumultuous Life of The Countess Of Leicester, Nicola Tallis (via glorianas)

Mary was born on the 18th of February 1516 in the Palace of Placentia in Greenwhich. She was the only child of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII to live past infancy. Mary’s gender would continue to be an issue for Henry who would divorce her mother in 1533 thus declaring Mary illegitimate and barring her from the throne. Henry would marry four more times and finally produce his longed for son Edward in 1537. Her brother Edward would not reign long and die at only 15 in 1553 not before writing Mary and their sister Elizabeth out of his will in favour of their cousin Lady Jane Grey. However Jane would not be accepted as queen and was deposed on the July 19th 1553 after only nine days. Mary was finally crowned on October 1st 1553, she would be the very first queen regnant of England.