“Thomas Cranmer, the Architect of the Church of England, [was] burnt at the stake under Mary. Of course I realize Henry couldn’t foresee that Mary would become Queen regnant, yet smart monarchs consider such possibilities.”
I’m just gonna say it…people are adamant about a lot of things on Quora on the Tudor history questions, and most of them are wrong.
What’s actually annoying is that the answers that are balanced and provide facts and citations rather than just a lot of assumptions are usually not the most upvoted. The answers with the most upvotes are always like 12+ paragraphs but they’re … wrong.
“Thomas Cranmer, the Architect of the Church of England, [was] burnt at the stake under Mary. Of course I realize Henry couldn’t foresee that Mary would become Queen regnant, yet smart monarchs consider such possibilities.”
i’m not sure if this is worse than the take that all the burnings under mary i were actually henry’s fault (because she wouldn’t have ‘had to’ … ’had to’, yes….????– if he hadn’t ‘invited heresy in’, as if every single englishman was 1001% catholic until 1533 and then all those messy heretics came pouring in) or just an extension of it (i.e. henry could’ve prevented his execution if he’d just never annulled his marriage in the first place, so really he should’ve thought of that first).
cranmer in his prison cell: i’m so mad at henry for not asking mary to not execute me if she were ever queen before he died; this is all his fault…
Also ‘couldn’t have foreseen that’ like…I mean obviously he was able to foresee it a little, or he wouldn’t have included her in the succession in the first place??
“ A similar pattern had been played out with the King’s first marriage when, for the first four years, Henry had revelled in Katherine of Aragon’s role as Spain’s de facto ambassador to London, but then, after 1513 – perhaps upset at her success as Regent during his absence – he accused Katherine of duplicity and set about deliberately sidelining her from politics.”
Hm…I don’t think this really holds up.
Counterpoint:
“In The Tudors, Catherine is too easily dismissed by Henry. When she expresses her dislike of the Anglo-French alliance, Henry snaps, “Since when are you a diplomat? You are my wife, you are not my minister.” In fact, the French ambassador is recorded to have said that on making such representation “as one would not have supposed she would have dared to so, on this account she is held in greater esteem by the king and council than she ever was (in1520).“
