taking a bite out of warm, freshly baked bread? thats what love is
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Tbh, I think it makes a lot of sense to read Emily Lacey as a lesbian, her combative relationships and competitiveness with other women could easily be read as her being uncomfortable with her own attractions (plus her fears about her future, which I’m not denying, but two things can be true at once) and attempting to hold herself away from that. And while I do think she cared for Charles Quigley in her way, I don’t necessarily think she was ever that attracted to him and that their relationship such as it was was built much more on gratitude and feeling like nobody had treated her with tenderness before. I do think you could also potentially read her as bi (the whole thing about Holland’s “firm flesh” could just be her hustling, but it reads possibly genuine) but I think it’s way easier to read Emily’s romantic/sexual interactions with men as comp het than with, say, Charlotte, who has always seemed solidly bi to me.
Anyway, Emily Lacey is a lesbian, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
Thomas, I swear to you I intend to be a just ruler.
~ The Tudors season 1 , episode 1
Do you think Henry believed Mary’s submission to be genuine? He did leave her a place in the succession although he would have known that she was still a papist at heart and would undo all his work. Or is it a matter of Henry’s sentiments not really being anti-Catholic as they were anti-Pope? Or did he view England falling into the hands of Scottish relatives or others as a worse fate than his own daughter sitting on the throne?
Hmmm….I don’t really know but I honestly don’t think it matters, that much? What was most important about Mary signing the Acts was the symbolism of those signatures; not so much whether they were genuine (so long as she wasn’t also publicly speaking against him).
The reason More was executed, despite his former close relationship with Henry VIII, was due mainly to the symbolism of that act of defiance. He couldn’t, as a ruler, demand all his subjects sign but make exceptions for those close to him. This would undermine the Church of England, and his kingship, in the following ways:
A) it would have made Henry look a fool/incompetent leader, one that could not gain loyalty from his subjects
B) it would have given others that may have dissented but signed out of self-protection, and also rebels, a rallying point/figure to center around, and possibly offer support to– it would give them a symbol of rebellion
I don’t think he thought, in all honesty, that it was likely that Mary would become ruler. It was a fail-safe. However, Henry did care about the security of England (I’ll challenge anyone that says he didn’t– I’m so tired of people reducing the succession crisis/Great Matter to Henry’s megalomania, given the precedence of the WOTR and the civil war that erupted after Empress Matilda was left as heir apparent, I cannot even tell you), and he had known the death of male heirs/family close to him, even after they’d survived to teenage years, with Arthur Tudor and Henry Fitzroy.
So, yes, I would say Henry viewed England falling into the hands of Scottish relatives or other relations as a worse fate– because it would jeopradize the security of England.
He knew it was possible, and on what he viewed as the slim chance that Edward VI wouldn’t survive, or would survive but wouldn’t have issue by whoever his future consort would be for whatever reason, he knew a secure line of succession was vital. Mary had been his de facto heir for a time, the North had known her and loved her (and did still), and Edward was his only legitimate son (only legitimate child, actually, by the law and in his eyes, I suppose). If he’d had another, of course then the second in line would be another legitimate son, then Mary (most likely, I think)– but he hadn’t.
Failing Edward, it was Mary, then Elizabeth for the succession because they were the most likely heirs that English subjects would unify under and accept. They were the ones that could, if duty and tragic circumstance called, secure the Tudor line and continue out the legacy with their own issue. The issue of either of Henry’s sisters probably wouldn’t have; there was neither enough recognition of them by the people to warrant such a thing, nor was it as direct a descendancy as Henry’s own issue (and Mary Tudor’s were solely female besides– hence Edward VI choosing Jane Grey).
Helena Bonham Carter as Jane Grey in Lady Jane – 1986
i’m rewatching harlots s1 and…while i don’t think they really intended to set up a love triangle in the traditional (or really, any typical) sense, i’m realizing how early haxby/charlotte/daniel was set up (because i’m only on the second episode).
because haxby is actually there and sees her reaction at the “this life is full of wonders” and it is…incheresting.
also i miss betsey/violet…
Goblin Market and other poems by Christina Rossetti
Blackie & Son
London, Glasgow and BombayArtist : Florence Harrison
« My heart is like a singing bird »
i’m rewatching harlots s1 and…while i don’t think they really intended to set up a love triangle in the traditional (or really, any typical) sense, i’m realizing how early haxby/charlotte/daniel was set up (because i’m only on the second episode).
because haxby is actually there and sees her reaction at the “this life is full of wonders” and it is…incheresting.
“She is ‘her father’s daughter’. This phrase is first used about her at the age of six, and constantly thereafter. For contemporaries had only to use their eyes to see that it was true. She looked like Henry, with her father’s hair, skin-colour, nose and lips. She had much of Henry’s character as well: his intelligence, his force of personality, his eloquence, and his ineffable star-quality that made her, like him, the automatic centre of attention.
But in other respects, she is self-consciously different. When her father makes himself Supreme Head of the Church, he begins by reconsidering his coronation, much of whose ritual and language was wholly incompatible with his present claims. In particular, he revised the second part of the coronation service, the oath, which is the equivalent of a contract between monarch and people. And he alters the oath fundamentally. Obviously, the monarch’s promise, central since Magna Carta, to respect ‘the liberties of the Church’ is wholly rewritten. But that is only the beginning. The result is to transform the oath from what it had been since the Anglo-Saxon period, a compact between the king and the people, into a solipsistic promise to defend the rights of the crown. But most interesting are his alterations to the undertaking that deals with the monarch and justice. At his coronation he had sworn, like his predecessors and like all his successors, from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, to do justice not only in truth but in mercy. But now, in his redrafting (which happily was never used), he crosses the word ‘mercy’ out.
Henry does not believe in mercy. Elizabeth does.”
David Starkey | Published in History Today, Volume 53: Issue 5, May 2003
