Tag: anon

Do you know why Elizabeth didn’t get Hever Caste after Anne of Cleves died? From what I’ve gathered Mary I decided to gift it to some random knight in 1557, but that seems so incredibly petty, that I have to wonder if there wasn’t a reason for her not letting the Careys or Elizabeth get it. He could have gotten any random castle (and he did seem to get another one as well), but she decided to give him Hever.

Oh, I didn’t know about that. 

AOC had at first refused to attend Catholic Mass, along with Elizabeth, during the first part of Mary’s reign. Perhaps there was still some resentment there about that.

Elizabeth didn’t seem to try to get it back when she became Queen, tho, she left it to the son of Sir Edward Waldegrave:

“When Anne of Cleves died in 1557 the Hever estate reverted to the Crown. In that year Sir Edward Waldegrave, a member of Mary Tudor’s Council, had been appointed one of the Commissioners for the sale of Crown land and promptly assigned himself the Castle and estate of Hever. When the Catholic Queen Mary died and the Protestant Elizabeth I came to the throne, Sir Edward was deprived of his appointments and was arrested for allowing Mass to be celebrated in his house. Sir Edward was sent to the Tower of London and remained there until his death in 1561.

Edward’s son, Charles, had risen in the world with his father, becoming a Privy Councillor and Master of the Queen’s Horse. However, with the downfall of his father, Charles lost all his appointments and retired to Hever Castle with his wife Jeronyma. As a Catholic, he could play no further part in national affairs and so he spent time refurbishing the Castle.”

have you heard of the book “The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn” by Robin Maxwell? should it be avoided or is it good? or; what are your rec’s for anne fiction?

I’ve read excerpts of it and wasn’t terribly impressed, honestly– but then, I’m incredibly finicky when it comes to Tudor fiction.

Actually, my preference for fiction is 3rd person and I’ve yet to read a fiction book about Anne that I liked or loved in the 3rd person, altho I’ve read a few fics on AO3 that I have.

For YA, I still think ‘Doomed Queen Anne’ is the pinnacle. Apparently ‘Tarnish’ is good but I haven’t read it, so can’t speak to it.

As for 1st person narrations, “Je Anne Boleyn: Struck with the Dart of Love” by Sandra Vasoli I liked with a few qualms. If you want a series that has a good chunk of pages dedicated to the time before she returned to England in 1522, there is ‘La Petite Boulain’ by G. Lawrence, which is free on Kindle Unlimited. I like what I’ve read of it so far.

I saw your post abt how William Thomas reported from abroad that Henry was ‘most liberal in rewarding faithful servants’. Could you expand a bit more on why you think that was his honest opinion?

Sure, a bit–

It’s often said Henry had the “common touch ”. Almost equally often, this trait is dismissed as being mere charm or lip service.

But when we look at the Privy Purse Accounts, the generosity to the commons is real and much-recorded. I’d never say he was an egalitarian, of course– he wasn’t, he was a 16th century monarch and behaved as one– but he was more egalitarian in certain regards that one might expect.

For instance, he made the royal pardons to the commons, more accessible and less expensive than they had ever been– for non-violent crimes, that is.

Another demonstrative instance of this being more than lip service:

Thomas Fiennes, a nobleman, led a party to commit a crime (poaching land), and a servant of the owner of that land was murdered as a result.

In many other reigns, Fiennes would have been charged with a fine and released– perhaps banished from court. He pled guilty probably hoping for some sort of leniency like that.

Instead, he was executed.

And, rather than the precedent of a nobleman being afforded the dignity of a somewhat private execution, and a quicker, less painful method of death, Fiennes was hung at Tyburn.

As for William Thomas’ account of Henry being generous/liberal ‘even to his enemies’; well, sometimes (if only in the post-mortem):

“Additionally, upon Lord Dacre’s execution and attainder, his widow was left quite penniless, but no time was lost in obtaining an Act of Parliament in order to provide a dower for her from out of her late husband’s estates.”

Do you know of any fiction (both published and fanfiction) that portrays Thomas More as the giant, sadistic hypocrite that he was? He wrote Utopia about among other things religious tolerance, but then whipped people in his own garden and burnt people alive for having different views than him. But all fiction seems to portray him as this wise, pacifistic humanist🙄

I guess I’d say Wolf Hall, except imo that goes too far in the other direction (for almost everyone…that is, villainizing/stupidifying figures to ridiculous amount to make Cromwell look a) better and b) more intelligent, which is kind of unnecessary for the latter– his genius is pretty well-recognized, imo– and a bit of a reach for the former…he was ruthless when he felt he needed to be for self-preservation, which isn’t that much different from many powerful figures of the Tudor court). 

As for fics, none of my fav’s really even have more than a passing mention of him…he’s not in the character tags, for instance. 

opinions on elizabeth norton (the historian)?

Hmmm… mixed? I can’t post any excerpts right now because I’m on mobile; but she cited Nicholas Sanders as an ‘Elizabethan writer’ without mention that he was a Catholic priest and polemicist (that claimed Anne Boleyn– who he’d never seen, as he was born 1530 and not at court– had several deformities, and oh yeah, was also Henry VIII’s illegitimate daughter!) in her Jane Seymour bio.

In her bio on Bessie Blount she also said (in a very weirdly…pointed sort of tone) that she had “many traits that would have made her a better Queen Consort than Anne Boleyn, had Henry CARED to notice them” which.. djsjsjsjsj….

I mean, for one, she was already married and had several children with her husband by the time Henry was looking into an annulment, for another, her father was an extremely minor nobleman while Anne’s lineage was far more connected to royalty (for all the pearl-clutchers that are still, in the year 2018, going on about the audacity of Henry ‘diluting the royal line with COMMON blood’…Thomas Boleyn had claims to Ormond and Elizabeth Howard was the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk and the Countess of Surrey).

This isn’t a tudor ask, but were Cesare and Lucrezia incesty irl? They’re always portrayed that way in shows and stuff, and I wanted to know if it was true.

I don’t even have a rudimentary knowledge of the Borgias, so you should probably ask someone else?

My impression is that there were rumors that they were; and that the two of them did have a close relationship, perhaps unusually close for siblings of the gentry in that era. Beyond that, I really don’t know, but I don’t think there’s ever been irrefutable “proof” of incest between the two of them.