I Want To Tell You That In This Slippery World, You Represent For Me All That Is Innocent, Everything

I want to tell you that in this slippery world, you represent for me all that is innocent, everything that is good, unsullied, uncorrupted.

The example that came to mind for this was actually Julia Fox, because when she talks about the first time Henry told KoA he was seeking an annulment, and that “all would be for the best”, and how she cried when he told her this, she was like “oh she was probably using tears to manipulate him” and I was like.......uhm....that seems...decidedly unkind?

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?

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.

On one of her visits to court, [Mary] heard the Venetian organist, Dionysius Memo, playing for her father’s guests and ran after him calling, ‘Priest, priest!’ , not because she was interested in his religious role but to encourage him to play more. Henry was proudly indulgent of this slight lapse in his child’s otherwise dignified behavior. Her taste he could not fault, since it had been Henry himself who brought Memo, the organist of St. Mark’s, to England not long after Mary’s birth.

– The First Queen of England: the myth of ‘Bloody Mary’, 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,

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?