Yes, @marieduplessis told me about that last night!
Apparently it’s mentioned in-script also but I totally missed it. And yet it still came through to me via her acting, which I think is a testament to Ellie Heydon’s skill as an actor, that I was able to pick up on that background– a quick search showed me that while Harlots is her first IMDB credit, she has a long background in theatre, and an education at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama which makes sense considering!
Haven’t done much reading on Anne Brandon, but you’re right about the scandal:
Far as I know, Randal Haworth wasn’t her former ward she was guardian of and wasn’t fourteen years old at the time so…I would say I still like her more than Charles Brandon.
Tbh, Charles Brandon is one of those figures that like…the more I learned about him the less I liked him. And Tudors does so much to make him more palatable to viewers– they aged him down, to the point where it looked like Mary Tudor (his third wife) was older than he was (the opposite was definitely true). And while they wrote that he wasn’t faithful to her (idk if that was true, actually), they made it seem like there was a decent length of time between his third and fourth marriage. IRL, he married Willoughby less than three months after Mary’s death.
They also put in a line about Katherine Willoughby being seventeen when he married her (which confused me, at first– why not eighteen– until I remembered that the age of consent in the UK is lower)– in actuality, she was just fourteen, and Brandon was forty-nine years old.
Tbh?? I’ll probably eventually get to some with this meme, but like:
“We had to stop at every maple candy stand on the way here.” * visibly vibrating*
“There he is, the father of my child, the porn king of the west Village.”
“She said you actually proposed to her.” “Well, I didn’t! I didn’t propose! Unless…. Did I? I haven’t slept in 40 hours, and it does sound like something I would do…”
No, I definitely get what you mean, because often her character is made out to be that way– in Tudors we have a scene where she’s telling Mark Smeaton that her “boring husband” has just dropped dead, and how excited she is to now have a one-night stand…while Perdita Weeks’ incredible delivery and scene where she asks Cromwell to intercede with her sister for financial assistance, and quotes a historically accurate letter she sent him was cut from final editing:
But, y’know, obviously the first one was more important.
Keeping the scenes they did– the explicit one with Henry in Season 1, and the one just mentioned, while cutting the one above– about as transparent as Rihanna’s CFDA dress, with none of its class.
But I digress…truthfully, we don’t even really know if the rumor that she was the mistress of Francis I is true. Claire Ridgway goes over the sources in the article I just linked, and explains how some slander against Anne has actually been misattributed to Mary, much in the way a much-cited quote about Elizabeth Blount has been misattributed to being about Mary Boleyn.
Would Mary have been able to make such a good marriage to up-and-coming courtier William Carey if she had a well-known reputation of promiscuity? Frankly, I doubt it; although I suppose it’s not impossible.
It’s assumed she did, also, because she seemed to have a falling-out with her father, Thomas Boleyn. But this could have had many causes.
All we know for certain is that Mary had sex with three men in her lifetime: her first husband, Henry VIII, and her second husband.
So little is known about the second, most famous one, and mostly gaps have been filled with our imaginations. Frankly, all we know is that they hooked up, at least once, in some fashion, at some point. It could have happened before she was married. It could have happened while she was married, but I wouldn’t get all moralistic about it if did– because Henry was, too.
That “the whole court knew” she was his mistress is a fable, because the only reason even we know is the dispensation Henry VIII asked for. That she was his mistress for as long as Bessie Blount was, that she also had at least one illegitimate child with his paternity, is also imaginations filling the gaps– quite simply, there’s not evidence that proves this or even proves this likely.
But I digress. I would say, no, don’t believe the hype of book titles such as “The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History”.
Elizabeth Boleyn was not a “femme fatale”– she only had sex with her husband. Mary Boleyn was not a “femme fatale”, as having sex with one’s husband wasn’t especially promiscuous even by 16th century standards. William Carey didn’t die from sex with Mary, he died of the Sweat.
I wouldn’t refer to Mary Boleyn as a “femme fatale” for having sex with Henry VIII– it’s not as if she killed him, either.
Nor would I refer to Anne Boleyn as a femme fatale, as she, like her mother, only ever had sex with the man she married. And the men that were executed along with her in May 1536 didn’t “die because she had seduced them”, while Anne had the last laugh and survived– and that’s the linchpin of the whole femme fatale trope in the first place.
lmao smh this WOULD be me….
hi!
september 20.
*Another one.*
While I definitely agree that Mary I suffered mistreatment as a teenager, I do not agree that this either justified or necessitated the later violence in her reign.
There’s a lot of this rhetoric in comment sections on YouTube documentaries– “is it any wonder that happened”, even going as far as saying that if those years at Hatfield had never happened (even going as far as blaming Anne Boleyn, in a roundabout way, for them– that her specific mistreatment of Mary guaranteed Mary doing this later), the violence wouldn’t have either, or at least not to the extent it did.
I’m sure it affected her psyche in some way, and it’s awful to have to to balance between two parents that want you to do different things. Surely she felt humilitation at being made a servant after a life of pomp and importance (de facto Princess of Wales), surely she was made to feel uncomfortable for not signing the Oaths she was asked to, and pain at being ignored/not acknowledged by Henry for doing so (besides to call her, later, his “worst enemy in the world”). While her mother’s treatment of her certainly didn’t match Henry’s callousness, and she always insisted she was legitimate, nor can I say it was entirely selfless, and much as Mary loved her, it was probably hard to know she wouldn’t do anything for her. COA begged to be allowed to visit Mary when she was ill, but wasn’t willing to take the actions that would have allowed her to do so. She was certainly capable of being manipulative, implying that she risked hell if Mary did anything to make her living situation more comfortable and reconcile with Henry (that is, to sign the Oaths) in a letter:
Answer with few words, obeying the King, your father, in everything, save only that you will not offend God and lose your own soul.
Even that to put up with any discomfort made her more holy:
“…we never come to the Kingdom of Heaven but by troubles.”
I’m not implying their treatment of Mary was equitable in any way– Henry’s, obviously, was much worse– but she did receive a significant amount of pressure both parents, and that has an effect.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t go as far as saying this mistreatment guaranteed the later violence. Maybe if her parents had continued to live together, maybe if COA had agreed to an annulment and Mary stayed legitimate in good faith it wouldn’t have happened, maybe if Henry and Anne married but Mary was allowed to keep her own household in the comfort and luxury in which she was accustomed to, and allowed visits with her mother, it wouldn’t have happened.
But I think the only potential scenario in which we can say it was guaranteed that Mary wouldn’t have had hundreds burnt at the stake is if, quite simply, she never had the power to do so.
Hm idk if I have a contentious opinion on Cromwell, all mine have probably been said before?
I think he was very adept at adjusting to shifts in power, and even pushing them himself at times.
Don’t agree with the take that he was Henry’s puppet, don’t think Henry ‘forced’ him into ‘finding a way to get rid of Anne’ early as April.
Cromwell was aligning himself with Chapuys and apologizing to him directly “for having promoted the King’s marriage to Anne” in April:
True, it was (he said), that seeing the King so much bent upon it, and so determined, he (Cromwell) had paved the way towards it. Although the King, his master, was still inclined to pay his court to ladles, yet it was generally believed that in future he would lead a more moral life than hitherto—a chaste and marital one with his present Queen. This Cromwell said to me in such a cold indifferent manner that I had a strong suspicion that he meant just the contrary. Indeed, I observed whilst he said so…he leant against the window close to which we were both standing, and put his hand to his mouth to prevent the smile on his lips, or to conceal it altogether from me should it come on;
“Put his hand on his mouth to prevent a smile on his lips” …. doesn’t really strike me as him being pressured by Henry to do something he doesn’t want to do….or like the prospect of Anne being ousted is something he’s really torn up about.
He was aligning himself with the Seymours, and with Mary.
He benefited from the events of May 1536 as well (at least, in the short term):
“The cui bono evidence is also interesting: Cromwell replaced Anne’s father as Lord Privy Seal and obtained a valuable stewardship as a result of George Boleyn’s execution; his servant Sadler received William Brereton’s freehold estate near Greenwich.”
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