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.

Tamzin Merchant as Katherine Howard in The Tudors (4.01)

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 when to be discreet, 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?

“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

For your wit alone many men would bemoan, And since it is so, many still cry aloud. It is a great loss that you are dead and gone,