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Henry VIII Week– Day 5: Henry VIII + twilight years

“Starkey and [Lacey Baldwin] Smith shared a fascination with the end of Henry’s reign. In Smith’s view, in Henry’s later years– and especially after his health began to worsen in 1541– the ‘mask of royalty’ began to slip and the monster began to emerge. Smith’s Henry VIII was at his worst– suspicious, vindictive, perhaps even paranoid– in his later years. The Renaissance prince of the early years gave way to a nasty and vicious man who went to his reward gracelessly– kicking and screaming almost to the end. Starkey also focused on the end of the reign to support his thesis of the limited degree of Henry’s control, and especially saw the last months of his reign, with the destruction of the Howards and the rigging of his will, as evidence of factionalism run rampant. A vigorous and healthy Henry VIII could control the shape and direction of politics, if not the details; a sick and dying king let events slip out of his hands, permitting a radically Protestant succession that he never intended and, had he been alive to see it, would never have supported.” – If a Lion Knew His Own Strength, David M. Head, 1997

dr stephanie russo, the afterlife of anne boleyn: representations of anne boleyn in fiction and on the screen (springer, 2020), 212

[8; 9]: philippa gregory, the other boleyn girl (london: harpercollins, 2011), 450; 471

[10]:  philippa gregory, the other boleyn girl (london: harpercollins, 2011), 531; retha warnicke, the rise and fall of anne boleyn: family politics at the court of henry viii (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1989)

[11; 12]: alison weir, mary boleyn: the mistress of kings (new york: ballantine books, 2011), xx; xxi

[13]: aileen armitage, the tudor sisters (sutton: severn house, 2005); judith saxton, feather light, diamond bright (north yorkshire: dales large print books, 1974); peggy boyton, the reluctant mistress (london: robert hale, 1977); karen harper, the last boleyn: a novel (new york: three rivers press, 1983)

Mary's triumph has been described as the victory of legitimacy, but the word is misleading in this context. Whatever she might think, it was not the legitimacy of her birth which was proclaimed in July 1553, but the force of her father's will, and of the statute which authorized it. Similarly, the rejection of Northumberland's coup signalled his own  unpopularity, and that of his religious programme, but not a rejection of the whole reforming programme, going back to 1530.

The Reign of Mary Tudor

“Henry’s line of conduct toward his first wife and daughter was so detestable that it tends to blind us to the fact that his victims were guilty of some very doubtful transactions with the enemies of the head of the State, whom the majority of his subjects showed no desire to get rid of. Chapuys, who abused his ambassadorial position to discuss with the malcontents the possibilities of risings in England and the substitution of Reginald Pole for Henry on the throne, who encouraged his master to think of invading England […] was the unceasing inspirer of Katharine and Mary to defy Henry’s commands. They were certainly justified in refusing to recognize the King’s right to repudiate them. But to have dealings with conspirators aiming to attack England from outside was something more than a maintenance of their rights as wife and daughter. We only know of their dabbling with treason through the confessions of their own chief friend. Cromwell, in spite of the activities of his spies, did not succeed in tracking the plot.”

— The Life of Anne Boleyn (1924), Philip W. Sergeant

As for the ordinary people, during the middle ages and during the Renaissance, the masses rarely entered a church, and their private worship was directed toward an array of spirits and supernatural agencies, only some of them recognizably Christian. Alexander Murray's assessment of medieval Italian religious life is typical: 'substantial sections of thirteenth-century society hardly attended church at all.' [The Dominican prior Humbert of Romans] frankly acknowledged that the masses 'rarely go to church, and [when they do attend] rarely to sermons; so they know little of what pertains to their salvation.' Finally, Humbert admitted that the regular clergy were so involved in gambling, pleasure, and 'worse things' that they too 'scarcely come to church'. In similar terms, Blessed Giordano of Rivalto reported that, upon arriving in Florence to preach, he suggested to a local woman that she take her daughter to church at least on feast days, only to be informed that 'It is not the custom' (Murray 1972: 92-94).

Secularization, R.I.P.  (Section: The Myth of Past Piety), Rodney Stark (1999)  

favourite sultana meme: 6 relationships ♦ nurbanu and murad iii

“It was not only in life but in death as well that Nurbanu Sultan enjoyed extraordinary honors. Contrary to the custom whereby the sultan remained in the palace during a funeral, Murad accompanied his mother’s coffin on foot, weeping as he walked, to the mosque of Mehmed the Conqueror, where funeral prayers were said."  – Leslie P. Peirce - The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire

Whew @ the child-molester Thomas Seymour being described as a ‘handsome rogue’

FROM THE VAULTS:

Tudor England

The Love Letters of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn

On turning over in my mind the contents of your last letters, I have put myself into great agony, not knowing how to interpret them, whether to my disadvantage, as you show in some places, or to my advantage, as I understand them in some others, beseeching you earnestly to let me know expressly your whole mind as to the love between us two. 

The Other Boleyn Girl, Philippa Gregory

“Jane,” I said quietly.  She opened her eyes, she had been far away in prayer.  “Yes, Mary? Forgive me, I was praying."  "If you go on flirting with the king with those sickly little smiles, one of us Boleyns is going to scratch your eyes out.”

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It’s not as if we had a choice.

The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes By His Fool Will Somers, Margaret George

To recount these histories is like unravelling a thread: one means only to tell one little part, but then another comes in, and another, for they are all part of the same garment — Tudor, Lancaster, York, Plantagenet.

Dissolution, C.J. Sansom

In worshipping their nationhood men worship themselves and scorn others, and that is no healthy thing.

The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Alison Weir

Katherine of Aragon was a staunch but misguided woman of principle; Anne Boleyn an ambitious adventuress with a penchant for vengeance; Jane Seymour a strong-minded matriarch in the making; Anne of Cleves a good-humored woman who jumped at the chance of independence; Katherine Howard an empty-headed wanton; and Katherine Parr a godly matron who was nevertheless all too human when it came to a handsome rogue.

The Life of Elizabeth I, Alison Weir

Relations between Elizabeth and her male courtiers reflected the age—old ideals of courtly love, in which the lover pays hopeless court to his unattainable mistress.

“Tolerant, ruthless, hesitating, bold, intensely aware, and talented to the point of genius, he was always looking for the new and the original– and he found both in Anne Boleyn.”

— The challenge of Anne Boleyn (Hester W. Chapman), [ 1974 ]

“During spring 1532, Stephen Gardiner led the unsuccessful defence of the church’s liberties against Henry VIII, a stand which probably cost him his chance of becoming archbishop of Canterbury. During summer 1532, Cranmer did something even more crazy; he got married.“ 

–Diarmaid McCulloch, Cranmer 

“Henry [VIII] earliest encounter with the solemnity of death, occurred when was nine when Prince Edmund died. The warrant shows the household at Eltham was plunged into. Black clothes were ordered even for Jane Poppincourt and ‘The Lady Mary’s scolemaster’. Twelve months later the whole gloomy procedure was repeated at Arthur’s death, but Elizabeth of York was there to comfort and pray with her reamaining children. What Henry never forgot was his mother’s death. Four years after the event, on a January day in 1507, the adolescent prince was replying to a letter telling him the Holy Roman Emperor’s son, Philip of Castile, had died. Henry explained that he had already 'with great unhappiness the report about the death of the King of Castile, my deeply, deeply regretted brother…no less welcome news welcome news has ever come here since the death of my very dear mother’. He wrote from Richmond Palace, where the previous year Elizabeth’s apartments, closed since her death, had opened up for the visit of Philip and his wife Queen Joanna. Briefly Henry VII’s court, dreary since his wife’s passing, had sprung to life again. Prince Henry’s mind slipped back to the dreadful scenes where his mother had died in childbirth and his father’s grief was unrestrained. 'I was less enchanted with that part of your letter’ he wrote tersely 'it seemed to open a wound which time had healed’ Then the schoolboy prince remembered he was addressing the great Erasmus, mended his manners and praised his corespondent elegant Latin.”

— The Sisters of Henry VIII: The Tumultuous Lives of Margaret of Scotland and Mary of France, Maria Perry

Hello! I really want to start getting into the fandom (14 15 16 centuries England) and i also want to learn history. What are 5he best books and articles about it, and where can i learn history if i am not from England?

Thank you kind Tudor bitch Xx

Hi there!

I mean, I basically mainly know Tudor stuff but I’ll mine and see what I can find / rec ...

I’ve also answered this to a degree in other asks, so I’ll link those:

Ask 1

Ask 2

Ask 3

Ask 4

Ask 5: Podcasts (I’ll update this, if anyone would like me to do so)

And then, the last university level thing I did, was a 20-page research paper on the historiography of the relationship of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Before that, it was a research paper on the historiography of Henry VIII (particularly through the lens of how, why, and in what terms and language he was regarded as ‘monstrous’), and before that, it was a presentation on the Great Matter.

Here is part of the bibliography for the above:

Benger, E. (1821). Memoirs of the life of Anne Boleyn, queen of Henry VIII. By Miss Benger, author of memoirs of Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, John Tobin, &c. In two volumes. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster-Row.

Cavendish, George, and Samuel Weller Singer. 1825. The life of Cardinal Wolsey. London: For Harding, Triphook, and Lepard.

Froude, J. (1856). History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Gowing, L. (2017). Gender Relations in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, p.17.

Herbert of Cherbury, Edward Herbert, Mary Clark, Anne Mearne, Thomas Sawbridge, and William Faithorne. 1683. The life and reign of King Henry the Eighth.

Hume, D. (1778). History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688.

Kewes, P. (2005). The uses of history in early modern England. Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press.

Sander, N. (1877). Rise and growth of the Anglican schism ... Published A.D. 1585, with a continuation of the history, by the Rev. Edward Rishton, B.A., of Brasenose College, Oxford. Translated, with introduction and notes, by David Lewis, M.A.. London: Burns and Oates.

Strickland, A. (1868). Lives of the queens of England, from the Norman conquest, Vol II.. 2nd ed. London: Bell and Daldy, p.271.

Woolf, Daniel R. 2005. Reading history in early modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Wyatt, G., Wyatt, T. and Loades, D. (1968). The Papers of George Wyatt Esquire, of Boxley Abbey in the county of Kent, son and heir of Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger ; ed. for the Royal Historical Society by D.M. Loades. London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, p.21.

Well, a start, at least. I will unearth my USB drive to find the rest.

“...this was in pleasant contrast to the harsh treatment she received from Anne on the few doleful occasions that she was summoned to the Concubine’s court.”

Except Mary was never summoned to the ‘Concubine’s’ (lol) court .... ?

“When Jane was Queen her persistent entreaties on behalf of Mary were the eventual cause of being allowed to return to court from Hunsdon, the latest of her many country-house retreats. On her return she was treated with much kindness, given costly jewels and in due course restored to her rightful dignity of princess; this was in pleasant contrast to the harsh treatment she received from Anne on the few doleful occasions that she was summoned to the Concubine’s court. Jane would have met Mary when she in Catherine’s service, for mother and daughter were not finally separated until the summer of 1531, and obviously she came to like, or certainly feel sorry for, this, small, rather plain and myopic girl, with something of a man’s voice and more moral courage than most men. She may have also been influenced by Mary’s devotion to the old religion, and secretly admired that unshakeable integrity, which burked all attempts to effect a full reconciliation with a father whom Mary never properly understood.”

— Ordeal by Ambition: An English family in the shadows of the Tudors by William Seymour

“Anne, aware that Elizabeth would soon be moved out of London, would not let her out of her sight. Placing her on the floor on a cushion, she spent hours watching her.”

— The Challenge of Anne Boleyn, Hester Chapman (via madamedepembroke)

There is no extant evidence for the queen's reaction to his death, although after a poisoning episode at Fisher's home in 1531 the Imperial envoy had, without any evidence, accused her of causing the tragedy that had killed two of the bishop's servants but had left him untouched. Despite Chapuys' earlier charge, he did not blame her for the bishop's execution, perhaps because the king's angry reaction to Fisher's elevation to the College of Cardinals had been so well publicized. The Imperial envoy also did not blame her for the death of Thomas More that same summer.

The rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, Retha Warnicke

“The early sixteenth century was a time when prophecies were popular and prophets were confident: men and women puzzled over ancient rhymes which might (or might not) be held to have predicted such mighty topics such as the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, the split from Rome, and the dissolution of the monasteries. But no one ever predicted the King would marry six times and, if they had, he would not have believed it. Nor for that matter would any of his six queens have believed the various densities which lay in store for them, if predicted at birth: not one but two princesses were to die cast off; equally surprising, four women of modest enough birth were to become royal consorts; most astonishingly of all…two of these apparently unexceptional women were to die a traitor’s death.” Antonia Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII.

Pictured in order: Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr

“Has Anne Boleyn in these pages appeared the creature of evil which her enemies (and it must be borne in mind that it is almost entirely from the writings of her enemies that we have to disentangle her history) represented her to be? If so, the attempt which has been made to consider her without prejudice has failed. That she was proud, ambitious, a foe to her foes, even to vindictiveness, given to speaking her mind, careless of speech, gaiety-loving, is evident. But she was also brave, true to her friends, lavish with her gifts where liking or charity led her, sincere in her religious opinions, and withal a woman of genuine intellectual power. In the cruel, immoral, avaricious, treacherous and lying age of the Tudors, she crosses the scene a brilliant, perplexing […] figure, and vanishes into the darkness, still only in her youthful womanhood. History — considered in the light of a record of personages, not of peoples — would be more intriguing were there more in it such as Anne the Queen.”

— The Life of Anne Boleyn (1924), Philip W. Sergeant  

“A story is told of Katharine at Buckden, which, if true, probably belongs to the period before the removal of the bulk of her household. It is said that one of her gentlewomen began to curse Anne Boleyn, whereon Katharine dried her streaming eyes and said earnestly, ‘Hold your peace ! Curse not — curse her not, but rather pray for her ; for even now is the time fast coming when you shall have reason to pity her and lament her case ‘The tale, recorded by Dr. Nicholas Harpsfield, has rather the air of being invented after Anne’s tragic death.”

— The Life of Anne Boleyn (1924), Philip W. Sergeant