Henry Viii - Tumblr Posts

Episode stills of Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Tamzin Merchant and Laoise Murray as Henry VIII, Katherine Howard and Elizabeth I in The Tudors.

I think that when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.

A Man for All Seasons (1966) dir. Fred Zinnemann

“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”

A Man for All Seasons - 1966

doomed couple: ↳ Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII 

The love affair between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn is shrouded in historical myth, romantic legend, cliché and half-truths. Much of their story remains fiercely debated by historians – everything from why Henry fell for Anne, to why he destroyed her in the end.

“Thanks be to God, my own darling; you are saved and the plague is abated. The legate which we most desire arrived at Paris on Sunday or Monday last. I trust by next Monday to hear of his arrival in Calais and then I trust within a while to enjoy that which I have so longed for, to God’s pleasure and our own.  No more to you now, my darling, for lack of time; but that I would you were in my arms or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed you.”

“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.”

Are you out of your senses?                                     Don’t talk of s u c h m a t t e r s again.

“During the first year of her marriage, Anne perceived no diminution in Henry’s attachment. The birth of a daughter, however contrary to his anticipations, [did not reduce] his tenderness [towards her]; and he received, with becoming gratitude, the infant Elizabeth, who was universally acknowledged his presumptive heiress.”

— Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Vol II. Elizabeth Benger (1821)

“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 ]

“If a lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him” ‘

Thomas More

“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

❝ Henry VIII was ‘ever inch a king’ both physically and mentally; he was ‘no more vicious than many kings who have maintained a fair reputation in history’ and as for ‘the greatest and most critical of changes of his reign’, he himself was their ‘main originator’. The king, in fact, was ‘neither the puppet of parties nor the victim of circumstance, nor the shifty politician, nor the capricious tyrant, but a man of light and leading, of power, of force and foresight, of opportunities and stratagems and surprises, but not less of iron will and determined purpose ”

William Stubbes

This letter snippet is “Ma Maitress etc Amy” — My Mistress and Friend.

It is the first letter in the bound book of love letters at the Library.

(Courtesy of the Vatican Library)

hand of henry viii

itaglio facsimile of a letter written by king henry viii. plate between pages 60 & 61 of the 1945, houghton mifflin edition of The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey; book designed by bruce rogers & printed at the riverside press, cambridge, mass.

“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

Upon the Lady Anne waited a young fair gentlewoman, named Mrs. Gainsford; and in her service was also retained Mr. George Zouch. This gentleman, of a comely sweet person, a Zouch indeed, was a suitor in the way of marriage to the said young lady: and among other love tricks, once he plucked from her a book in Englishe, called Tyndall’s Obedience, which the Lady Anne had lent her to read. About which time the Cardinal had given command ment to the prelates, and especially to Dr. Sampson, dean of the king’s chapel, that they should have a vigilant eye over all people for such books, that they came not abroad; that so as much as might be, they might not come to the king’s reading. But this which he most feared fell out upon this occasion. For Mr. Zouch (I use the words of the MS.) was so ravished with the spirit of God speaking now as well in the heart of the reader, as first it did in the heart of the maker of the book, that he was never well but when he was reading of that book. Mrs. Gainsford wept because she could not get the book from her wooer, and he was as ready to weep to deliver it. But see the providence of God:  -Mr. Zouch standing in the chapel before Dr. Sampson, ever reading upon this book; and the dean never having his eye off the book, in the gentleman’s hand, called him to him, and then snatched the book out of his hand, asked his name, and whose man he was. And the book he delivered to the cardinal. In the meantime, the Lady Anne asketh her woman for the book. She on her knees told all the circumstances. The Lady Anne showed herself not sorry nor angry with either of the two. But, said she, ‘Well, it shall be the dearest book that ever the dean or cardinal took away.’ The noblewoman goes to the king, and upon her knees she desireth the king’s help for her book. Upon the king’s token the book was restored. And now bringing the book to him, she besought his grace most tenderly to read it. The king did so, and delighted in the book. “For (saith he) this book is for me and all kings to read. ”And in a little time, by the help of this virtuous lady, by the means aforesaid, had his eyes opened to the truth, to advance God’s religion and glory, to abhor the pope’s doctrine, his lies, his pomp, and pride, to deliver his subjects out of the Egyptian darkness, the Babylonian bonds that the pope had brought his subjects under. And so contemning the threats of all the world, the power of princes, rebellions of his subjects at home, and the raging of so many and mighty potentates abroad; set forward a reformation in religion, beginning with the triple crowned head at first, and so came down to the members, bishops, abbots, priors, and such like.”

- Strype’s Ecclesiastical Memorials , vol. i. p. 112.

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

My love. My Queen.