21st Century Historiography - Tumblr Posts

“More, he insists, was quite prepared, when required, to impose Catholic beliefs on dissenters by the exercise of royal might. And now, he suggests, Mantel is compounding the erroneous approach of seeing history in the light of subsequent events by her eagerness to set More against her hero, Cromwell, to make the latter appear a “herald of the future” This is equally as preposterous as Bolt’s approach,” he says. “To reach such a conclusion about More and Cromwell from the very difficult and complicated 16th-century sources is just silly. Both men believed in the idea of enforcing ideas on others by persecution and execution. They only disagreed which ideas.” And if he had to choose between the two? “Well, More at least died nobly with magnificent insouciance. The night before Cromwell was executed, he was screaming ‘Mercy, mercy’, like a stuffed pig. That alone tells us all you need to know about the moral quality of the two.””

— Sir Thomas More: Saint or Sinner, David Starkey’s view.

“Anne’s final legacy is one of which she would have been entirely unaware. Although Anne can never have realised, she was to be only the second wife of England’s most married monarch. When Anne met Henry he had been married to Catherine of Aragon, a foreign princess, for many years and Henry’s marital career was entirely conventional. Henry and Catherine had no son and, after Catherine’s death he would have been expected to quickly remarry, perhaps to a French princess or another lady of the imperial family. Anne Boleyn changed all this. By insisting on marriage and driving Henry onwards, she broadened the king’s horizons. Marriage to Anne showed Henry the possibility of choosing his own wife from amongst the noblewomen of his court. The marriage also showed other women, most notably Jane Seymour, the possibility of becoming a second Anne Boleyn. More pertinently, the break with Rome gave Henry the ability to rid himself of wives quickly and easy whenever he saw fit. Thanks to Anne, Henry never found himself married to another Catherine of Aragon clinging determinedly to her position. Instead Henry was able to change his wife whenever the mood suited him. This was the work of Anne Boleyn although she can never have expected or wanted it.”

— Elizabeth Norton, “Anne Boleyn: Henry VIII’s Obsession”

“She railed at him for debating the divorce of his formidable wife: ‘Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand?’ she snapped. Another time, she was in the king’s privy chamber and, hearing that Wolsey was hovering importantly outside, waiting for her dismissal and the commencement of men’s business, she rapped out a message for him to come and join them: ‘Where else should he come, except where the king is?’

As we see from this, she interpreted the role of courtly lady to the utmost of its potential. She became more powerful than any man. Paradoxically, once it was recognised that she and no other– not her father Thomas, not her uncle Norfolk– was now ‘the true inheritor of that ultimate royal favour that had been Wolsey’s strength’, she attracted a degree of enmity more usually associated with hated male favourites than mistresses. Perhaps the manner of her operations – as an incarnation of the eternal feminine – aggravated her enemies’ frustrations by making it impossible for them to compete.

[For] they were men. It was hardly in the Duke of Suffolk’s remit to spring like a nymph onto the back of Henry’s saddle and ride off in pillion with him, laughing and whispering into his ear. But Anne could. With her wit, her dazzle, her ludic, punning Burgundian manners, she melted into his dream of Albion.”

“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)

“Elizabeth had always been popular, and though Mary had once been equally so, by the time of her death the warmth of feeling towards her had faded. She had become unpopular as a result of the religious persecution she had imposed upon her people, and for involving her realm in her husband Philip’s foreign wars. This had also resulted in the loss of Calais in 1557, England’s last remaining possession in France, which came as a devastating blow to the English. It was little wonder then that her subjects greeted Elizabeth’s succession with genuine heartfelt enthusiasm. Indeed, for the entirety of her reign Accession Day [17 November] would be enthusiastically celebrated each year.”

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

“She has reigned for fourteen years in peace, and God has shown that in the midst of troubled, most dangerous times [a reference to the religious civil wars in France] he [God] knows how to rule and govern a monarchy under the authority of a princess, which is very rare, but this has made the said Lady the most famous princess who has ever ruled in the world a beautiful princess and full of majesty, whom they [her subjects] see filling this crown’s throne with dignity, [so] they have willingly obeyed her until now.”

— French ambassador Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fénélon to Charles IX of France describing Elizabeth I of England, 28 August 1572. Quoted in Elizabeth I of England through Valois Eyes: Power, Representation, and Diplomacy in the Reign of the Queen, 1558–1588 by Estelle Paranque (via maximumphilosopheranchor)

“Prophecy was a traditional component of English pageantry, especially processions…at Anne Boleyn’s coronation entry, poetry recited during the event repeatedly hailed her as the Just Virgin out of Virgil’s ‘Fourth Eclogue’ who brings in a golden age.”

— Predicting Elizabeth: Prophecy on Progress. Rachel Kapelle.

“For three years of Anne’s reign, Chapuys’s correspondence had been filled with predictions of rebellion. Now, five months after her death, the predictions were fulfilled. First Lincolnshire and then the north rose in revolt. The rebels found a charismatic leader in Robert Aske […] [and they formed a list of demands]. The monasteries were to be restored. Mary was to be declared heir. Cromwell, Rich, and Audley were to be executed or at least exiled. And Anne’s heretic bishops, Cranmer, Latimer, Shaxton, and Hilsey, were to be burned.”

— The Queens of Henry VIII, David Starkey (via madamedepembroke)

“[Elizabeth] was one of the most intelligent young women in the kingdom, and she had been privileged to be taught by some of the finest minds the country, including, William Grindal and the accomplished scholar Roger Ascham. Under Ascham’s tutelage Elizabeth excelled, and her brilliant mind impressed many of her contemporaries, including her tutors. Ascham later enthusiastically praised ‘my illustrious mistress the Lady Elizabeth’ who ‘shines like a star’. John Foxe also wrote about her in complementary terms, relating that she did 'rather excel in all manner of languages, manner of virtue and knowledge’. She was particularly skilled at languages, and wrote and spoke several fluently. These included Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and Greek.”

— Elizabeth’s Rival: The Tumultuous life of the Countess of Leicester, Nicola Tallis

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.

“There are two myths about the Mary Rose: the first is she sunk on her maiden voyage, the second is she was named after Henry VIII’s youngest sister. The first is an injustice, simple to disprove. Henry’s Mary Rose put in thirty four years of active service after she was launched in 1511. While the clue to the real origins of her name can be found in the fact that the Mary Rose was built at the same time as the ship Peter Pomegranate. The rose and the pomegranate were the emblems of the Henry and his new wife Katherine of Aragon the names Peter and Mary are likely to have been allusions to the saints.”

— A Journey Through Tudor England, Suzannah Limpscomb

On the evening of Sunday 11 February 1554 Jane Grey sat writing in the gentleman-gaoler’s house in the Tower of London. She was sixteen. Slightly built, “prettily shaped and graceful” but short enough to require platform shoes, Jane had brown eyes, hair nearly red, and a fair complexion with freckles. She was also frighteningly precocious; her scholarly reputation was talked of as far away as Zurich. But that evening she was not composing one of her elegant Latin missives to a foreign scholar. Jane was saying farewell. In twelve hours she would be dead, beheaded on the scaffold she had watched being built on the the other side of Tower Green. (Eric Ives, “Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery”)

Ella Hunt as Lady Jane Grey

“With the exception of Mary I, as far as the Tudor monarchy was concerned the Howards were very much a house of treason.” -- Robert Hutchinson

“  But what disquiets [Mary I] most of all is to see the eyes and hearts of the nation already fixed on this lady (sopra costei) as successor to the Crown, from despair of descent from the Queen, to whom the demonstration and the thought are by so much the more bitter and odious as it would be most grievous, not only to her but to any one to see the illegitimate child of a criminal who was punished as a public strumpet ...”

“ But yet worse treatment awaited her, for with very great indignity she had to serve as her mistress (come a patrona) a public strumpet (una publica meretrice), her father's concubine, that famous Anne Boleyn ...”

Unless Hutchinson thinks the “criminal punished as a public strumpet” is referring to Henry VIII.... lol.

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

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.     

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

“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

A particular instance in which Chapuys should not be taken as the most reliable source is in regards to Catherine’s housing in the years she was kept separated from the king and court. Catherine would constantly write and complain about her misery and the terrible conditions she endured, but in reality, she was kept in comfortable residences. When she was first sent away, she was sent to The More, one of Cardinal Wolsey’s former residences. It was showing some signs of neglect, but had been refurbished by the Cardinal and had been considered a magnificent residence just a few years before. Catherine was also allowed to retain a large household, including numerous ladies-in-waiting, and including her old friend, Maria de Salinas. Although she was moved numerous times in the last years of her life, she was always housed in relatively pleasant residences.

Politics and Religion During the Rise and Reign of Anne Boleyn, Megan E. Scherrer

The Tudors vs. History, 23/?

“The letters show a young woman who, through a mixture of pride and naivety, completely misjudged her situation. This was not entirely her fault; her friends, rejoicing at Anne Boleyn’s removal, did not realise they had been used either. But used they were. Cromwell never intended that the old, conservative, Aragonese faction […] should triumph. Now that they had served their purpose, he intended to remove the conservatives. And it was easy to do this, by depicting them as disloyal subjects who were plotting to overturn religious change and restore Mary, the king’s illegitimate and disobedient daughter, to the succession.”

– The Myth of ‘Bloody Mary’, Linda Porter

“Will submit to him in all things next to God, humbly beseeching your Highness to consider that I am but a woman, and your child, who hath committed her soul only to God, and her body to be ordered in this world as it shall stand with your pleasure.“

– Princess Mary to [Henry VIII.] Hounsdon, 1 June.

“You will see I have followed your advice, and will do so in all things concerning my duty to the King, God and my conscience not offended; for I take you as one of my chief friends next his Grace and the Queen. I desire you, for Christ’s passion, to find means that I be not moved to any further entry in this matter than I have done; for I assure you I have done the utmost my conscience will suffer me, and I neither desire nor intend to do less than I have done. But if I be put to any more (I am plain with you as with my great friend) my said conscience will in no ways suffer me to consent thereunto. Except in this point, neither you nor any other shall be more desirous to have me obey the King than I shall be ready to do so. I had rather lose my life than displease him. I beg you to take this letter in good part. I would not have troubled you so much, but that the end of your letter caused me a little to fear I shall have more business hereafter. Hownsdon, 10 June.”

– 1108. Princess Mary to Cromwell.

It is true that John Hawkins masterminded the first English transatlantic slaving voyages in the 1560s, but he was, in an awful sense, ahead of his time. After his final voyage returned in  disarray in 1569, the English did not take up the trade again in earnest until the 1640s. Elizabeth I did not ‘expel’ Africans from England in 1596; rather her Privy  Council issued a limited licence to an unscrupulous merchant named Caspar Van Senden, who was only allowed to transport individuals out of England with their masters’ consent: a consent that he utterly failed to obtain.

Black Tudors: The Untold Story