documentary: the lovers who change history

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Henry and Anne: The Lovers Who Changed History

Mine own Sweetheart, this shall be to advertise you of the great elengeness [loneliness] that I find here since your departing; for, I ensure you methinketh the time longer since your departing now last, than I was wont to do a whole fortnight. I think your kindness and my fervency of love causeth it; for, otherwise, I would not have thought it possible that for so little a while it should have grieved me. But now that I am coming towards you, methinketh my pains be half removed; and also I am right well comforted in so much that my book maketh substantially for my matter; in looking whereof I have spent above four hours this day, which causeth me now to write the shorter letter to you at this time, because of some pain in my head; wishing myself (especially an evening) in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty duckkys I trust shortly to kiss.

Written by the hand of him that was, is, and shall be yours by his own will,

H.R.

“David Starkey examines the letter in Six Wives and explains that the word ‘elengeness’ means loneliness, dreariness or misery (Pg. 339). He states that Henry would have encountered the word ‘in the continuation of the Romaunt of the Rose by a follower of Chaucer’:

She had a ….scrippe (bag) of faint distresse

That full was of elengenesse.

He goes on to say that Anne would have been familiar with the poem in its original French as well as in the English translation and would have understood the meaning immediately.

‘Elengenesse is a word for lovers, to describe the pangs that only lovers – separated by distance, or necessity, or a false parade of virtue – know. (Starkey, Pg. 340).”

As for “some pain in my head”; this is probably due to the chronic migraines he suffered from after the jousting accident of 1524; in which he forgot to lower his visor and “the duke [Charles Brandon] struck the king on the brow right under the guard of the headpiece on the very skull cap or basinet piece.”