Category: Uncategorized

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When AB mega-stans are like “Anne would have never been Henry’s mistress because she had too much self-respect” my eye twitches a lil bit. 

Because the implication there is basically that Bessie Blount, Mary Boleyn, et. al any woman that ever did become a king’s mistress didn’t respect themselves and I….hm…….don’t like that. 

Also it’s weirdly…kind of like Starkey’s take? If you replace ‘self-respect’ (and take away his implication that she was essentially playing hard-to-get) with ‘ambition’, in his documentary ep about her he was basically like “OBVIOUSLY Anne was witholding sex up until Calais because Henry would have never bothered to write/send ANY of these letters if she wasn’t…and probably wouldn’t have stayed betrothed to her…it was her chastity that attracted him, etc.”

(In other things Starkey has been like “Henry was not a man driven solely by libido” and then I’ll remember the above and be like so what is the truth, mustard-colored-suit wearing man??)

Idk, I don’t base my admiration on someone based on whether or not they had premarital sex? I find it kind of weird when people are like “she abstained and that was a BALLER MOVE, WE STAN” like uh…aight then. Denotes a weird preoccupation with “purity” that I’m not overly fond of. I think some of it is in response to like, the one-dimensional portrayal of her as Sultry Temptess and nothing else, or the slander and alleged ‘promiscuity’ voiced to smear her name during her trial, but if that’s your focus (She Never Would Have Because She Had R-E-S-P-E-C -T) you’re still…defining her by sex so it’s not great? (i.e. just by an absence of sex vs. by sex alone).

(Remembering a take that referred to her ‘witholding bomb p*ssy–> her p*ssy caused the Reformation’ like… incredibly reductive doesn’t even seem to cover it but that’s kind of what I’m referring to with the ‘baller’ thing). 

Anyway…additionally we don’t actually know whether they consummated their relationship in any way before this date, it could have been either? There’s evidence that supports both possibles, and it could’ve fallen on a spectrum of anywhere in between.

Like, sure… Elizabeth Howard chaperoned their meetings sometimes (but like that would be the first time a couple shirked a chaperone, lol). Anne also had her own private lodgings as early as 1528, and I don’t think her mom accompanied them on their hunting trips.

I’m not definitively saying they did either, I’m just saying we don’t really know which it was. 

I wasn’t like, floating with ye olde popcorn outside their bedroom window pre-marriage so…I can’t really say I know one way or the other. 

montparnasse:

till-proven-guilty:

travellerofmanylands:

my level of fanfiction productivity ranges from “typing 20,000 words over the span of 3 days” or “opening a document and staring at it for a year without typing anything at all.” there is no middle ground.

#the truth hurts #starting another WIP can help

#‘starting another wip can help’ #thats the devil talking #(starts another one anyway) (x)

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Oh gosh contention…ok we’ll go wiiith…reigns of Richard III vs. Henry VII in Discourse:

Personally, I don’t really feel like…comfortable comparing their two reigns? Mainly because I feel like it can’t be an equitable comparison; because Richard’s was only two years and Henry’s was ‘round twenty-four years. 

B.I.G. said ‘Mo Money, Mo Problems’, and I say…mo time, mo opportunities to…uh…fuque up? 

It’s kind of similar to how I feel about the statement that Mary I’s title as “Bloody Mary” is ‘unfair’ because overall she had less executions during her reign than her father had in his own. 

Like…for sure that is technically true (about overall numbers), but also Mary’s reign was only five years, and H8′s was nearly forty years. So that was kind of inevitable; and also likely she would’ve continued religious persecutions had she lived and ruled longer.  

Anyway…if I had to I would say that– as far as policy (especially considering Richard’s enduring legacy and policy in Northern England), that I’d say Richard’s reign was overall more successful, and he was more successful as king.   

But again, talking about hypotheticals again and how there are kind of inherent issues in posing them (esp. with history)…he certainly could have become a worse king with time (or conversely, a better one). We don’t really know. It’s a lot easier to grab power than it is to maintain it, ultimately. And he may have been able to, but even if he had won at Bosworth there could’ve been a future rebellion that deposed him– it is, again, hard to know. 

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While I think Arthur Tudor is interesting, and understand that he’ll always be  compelling in the way figures we know very little about (who were unable to meet the future they were trained for due to tragedy), the idealization of him as a king strikes me as a bit…disengenuous.

I’m not knocking AU’s, of course, or anyone’s edits or gifsets– that’s not really what I’m talking about here. Or dissing anyone’s interests, because personally I really dislike when that’s done to mine. 

It’s more that when I go on history discussion forums online, there is legit “Let us WEEP for the Arthurian England that never was…the world would’ve been so much better for it, COA would’ve been so much better for it, every subject at court would’ve been so much better for it” etc. rhetoric. 

And like…could he have been a better ruler than Henry VIII? Of course he could have. 

But also…could he have been a worse one? Yeah, that’s definitely possible too.

Same with the world at large being better off/ worse off. 

It’s just that we literally don’t know if it would’ve, because it didn’t…like…happen. 

So the certainty I find a bit baffling, but when I yield the second (that his reign could also have been worse than his younger brother’s was, overall), it’s met with a long string of question marks, and “how could ANYONE have been a WORSE king than Henry the [insert fatphobic term here]???”

And…I guess that’s just where my opinion tends to diverge the common one…namely, that I don’t think Henry VIII was the worst king in history. Frankly, I don’t think he was even he worst king England ever had– certainly not as far as governmental policy and national security went. Nor was he the best, but that range is a pretty long one…

As for the worst husband in England? Certainly he’s somewhere on the top of that list…and I think that maybe that is what gets conflated with actual overall policy during his reign, and tends overshadow any accomplishments. [ x ] [ x ] [ x ]