But I Must Tell You The Privy Council, Despite These Recent Hurts, Have Pleaded With Me To Venture Once

But I must tell you The Privy Council, despite these recent hurts, have pleaded with me to venture once more into matrimony, in the hope that my bride will produce a legitimate heir.                           I think you know my choice has fallen upon your daughter.

“The relationship between Anne and Henry was always tempestuous. Her outspokenness and involvement in politics did not make her an easy spouse; there was a great deal of love but also a great deal of temper. And Anne, for all her declamations, was less confident than she seemed. There had been many attacks on her and she stood at the centre of a storm that showed no signs of abating.”

— Linda Porter

The Tudors vs History: 21/?

“She was still holding out in the second week of June [1536], but becoming increasingly disturbed that she had received no reply to her letters to her father. On the first day of the month she had written to the king desiring his blessing and asking forgiveness ‘for all the offences that I have done to your grace, since I had first discretion to offend’. She was, she said, ‘as sorry as any living creature.’ […] She also congratulated him on his marriage and asked to be allowed to see the new queen.”

– The Myth of ‘Bloody Mary’, Linda Porter

“ Rejoices to hear of the marriage between his Grace and the Queen now being. Desires leave to wait upon the latter and do her Grace service. Prays God to send him a prince. Hounsdon, 1 June.”

– Princess Mary to [Henry VIII].  

“Henry VIII: June 1536, 1-5.” Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 10, January-June 1536. Ed.  James Gairdner. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1887. 424-440.     

This is what I mean, this seems so cynical ?? It’s like at the price of portraying her as someone in-control at all times that she must be in control her emotions at all times too, to the point of only displaying them strategically.

And then there’s this.... clearly her tears did move him.... because he said something awkward and then left? That sounds less like they ‘moved’ him and more like they made him uncomfortable. Esp. since their private interactions from this point on are decidedly more barbed , angrier, whilst they’re treating each other ‘courteously’ in public.

I’m sorry to keep bringing up Anne Boleyn, but it’s such a sharp distinction in their historiographies here that I have to mention — I cannot recall a time when Henry abruptly leaving Anne is ever interpreted as ‘he did this because he was so emotionally moved’.

It’s oddly reminiscent of how some historians speak about Anne Boleyn, and like, not in a good way-- I’m thinking here of how Starkey wrote about how she “wheedled, pleaded, and cried” to effectively berate~ Henry into exiling Katherine from court/his presence.

I find it weird when Katherine of Aragon biographers try to shoehorn in her being ‘Machiavellian’, like…I think she was politically gifted, I think she used her networks well, I think she knew how to utilize her public moments for public sympathy/approval (famously, like Blackfriars) but sometimes I feel like biographers apply this…weirdly, to private moments?

In discussion of the bill, members of Parliament raised no objection to this dual status of Elizabeth as illegitimate heir, and the result, as Commendone reported, was that Mary was proclaimed 'the legitimate and true successor...and consequently all other women of Henry concubines and not wives, and their offspring bastards.' In her Queen's Title Act, Mary [...] [took] advantage of a public opportunity to settle old scores against those who had harmed her family.

The Birth of a Queen: Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I