hi yes i will happily enable you : 👑

So all the…”X was an usurper” (this isn’t shading for any figure in particular, this is me regarding all the figures of this era)…rhetoric…and I just say…

Who care? WHO care? Who c a r e s ???

I mean as far as analyzing which prominent people of the time viewed X as an usurper, sure, it’s important but as far as like……”I myself think they never should have ruled because they were an usurper”, uh:

a) It was such a mutable definition, it depended on who you asked at the time, and who was around when you asked them, and who won in a battle, and who had more people on their side, and like a myriad of different factors but basically…it was down to who you asked (’is X the rightful ___ or nah?’, that is) 

b) ‘Divine right’ is uh…..like…….they made it up?? Like they very much believed in it but also it was not…real. 

I’m hoping we know by 2018 that no one deserves to rule a country just for being born to two specific people.

And you know that Facebook Group that’s like “if a witch eats the president, the witch should become that president” ?

“If a contender for the throne kills the king, that man should become king.”

Me, a 24-year-old peasant about to die: “That sounds wrong, but I don’t know enough about the Bible to dispute it…”

c) Starkey has said R3 was an usurper. He’s also said H7 was basically an usurper. 

R3 may have taken the throne, but it was technically by legal methods (excluding the executions of Anthony Woodville etc. and I’m def not saying legality equates morality but there is that).

H7 won it in battle. 

So by that definition, if we want to trace back, would Edward IV also not technically be an usurper? He wasn’t born king, that was Henry VI. 

I literally don’t have much of a POV re: preference between these three (actually…Edward IV but also see above what I just said…also all three of them had some sort of blood claim to the throne as well), I’m just using this is an illustrative point in that the word is basically kind of … meaningless.

In that you can apply it to anyone/ anything you want, if you delve into technicalities/precedent deep enough. 

I’ll also see it with COA vs. Anne Boleyn discourse so like….far reaching enough to even apply the term of ‘usurper’ to Queen Consorts (usually applied to Anne), which is very odd. It’s one thing to say “COA believed it was her divine right to be Queen” (true!) another thing to say “it WAS her divine right.”

Like…it wasn’t. See above: they made it…..up.

It wasn’t any more Anne’s, either, although she seemed to believe this as well– she said to a Venetian diplomat that God had inspired Henry to marry her.

Tl;dr, we should all find it very convenient that anyone that sat on a throne essentially said they were there “because God said so.”