history – Site Title

sansaregina:

my kingdoms do not need me, my husband does not need me, my children do not need me. nobody cares about me, not even my father.

female awesome meme: 2/10 female characters who deserve better ~ joanna of castile (isabel tve and la corona partida)

cleopctra:

Today, 18 February, marks the anniversary of the birth of Queen Mary I (18 February 1516 – 17 November 1558), daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

“When I am dead and opened, you shall find `Calais’ lying in my heart.”

autrenecherche:

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector. [ x ]

“Alongside their very real political value, the energetic revelries at court were meant to be enormous fun. Since political credibility was so closely linked to personal charisma and chivalric display, this is no contradiction. Hall’s description of Henry’s first year, after the excitements of the coronation, is instructive. He describes the king behaving as a chivalrous king should. Henry pardoned the innocent in the person of Henry Stafford, brother to the Duke of Buckingham, making him Earl of Wiltshire; he expanded the company of the King’s Spears; he sent relief to Calais, which was afflicted by the plague; he held Parliament in which Empson and Dudley were condemned.” – [ x ]

“Henry VIII and his councillors barred the [1509] pardon to a few people: they sacrificed Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, chief financial agents to the late king, to appease popular discontent. Most of the others excepted from the pardon received mercy after individually pleading their cases. In the first year of the reign, nearly 3,000 people bought copies of the pardon from Chancery and over the following three years, almost 300 more joined them. Again, people of all social ranks obtained pardons; some pardons applied to all citizens of a town or all members of a monastery.” – [ x ]

“The text [of the general pardon of 1515] listed those offenses that it pardoned, including statutory felonies, contempts, hunting and forest offenses, forcible entries, and usury. It specifically excluded treasons, murder, robbery, and all other common law felonies, as well as concealments and unlawful assemblies of more than twenty people. In this respect, the statute resembled earlier grants. Effecting a striking change, however, this act declared that people did not have to obtain individual copies and thus freed them from the fees demanded by the Chancery. Instead, it voided any future suits concerning matters it pardoned and had no expiration date. It allowed people guilty of the pardoned offenses but not yet charged to rest easy. People currently before the courts for offenses pardoned in the act only had to plead the statute to have their cases discharged. The pardon, then, demanded no fees above the 12d due to the court clerk who entered the plea. This arrangement persisted in all subsequent Tudor parliamentary pardons and presumably made it much easier for greater numbers of people to take advantage of the royal grants of mercy.” – [ x ]

lucreziaborgia:

autrenecherche:

lucreziaborgia:

autrenecherche:

I was talking about this with @lucreziaborgia earlier, and I’m really over people lauding Chapuys as some sort of feminist ahead of his time just because he supported Mary.

a) Having a special affection for one woman doesn’t preclude a man from misogyny,

b) He was about as misogynistic as any other 16th century European man (in his case, from the Duchy of Savoy). He wasn’t anachronistically so, but he still absolutely was.

There’s this tendency to dismiss some of the worst things he said about Anne Boleyn as, “well, those aren’t tones of misogyny, he just didn’t like her because he thought/believed she was threatening Mary”.

That could be a strong point, if he didn’t casually disparage another woman, too.

His initial reports of Jane Seymour were basically “she’s kind of ugly, and too pale, and probably not even a virgin so like…we’ll see.”

Of course, once he found out she interceded on Mary’s behalf he gushed about how she was a mediator, gentle, “we stan” etc. but like…

That he so readily made snide remarks about a woman’s physical appearance and gossiped about his own ideas about her chastity does constitute misogyny, and there’s no getting around that.

A Marian blogger once made a very good point (I’ll have to scrounge it up later) that we see Mary distancing herself from Chapuys once she’s reinstated at court and not being as big a source for Eustace as she had been formerly.

Of course, this is in part because she no longer was so desperate for help and guidance, but it also begs the question if she came to believe (true or not) his advice had hurt her cause more than it helped. It’s a very interesting question to debate, and one that’s always resonated with me.

Chapuys wasn’t a cartoon villain, but neither was he an infallible bastion of morality. There’s this tendency to portray him as either the Tudor Gossip Girl or, my ~favorite, as one who was So Above the English court and their “backwardness.” If he was either, he likely wouldn’t have lasted as long as he did as the Imperial Ambassador to England.

Anyways, you make great points re: his misogyny toward Jane. I believe he also made a remark it must have been Jane’s capacity in bed that captivated Henry, although I may be confusing that with another envoy. Chapuys may have had genuine fears about what Anne could have been capable of doing to Mary in her height of power, but it’s undeniable hysterical misogyny fed into that.

16th century men will be 16th century men.

Honestly, I didn’t even disclose the worst of what Chapuys said about Jane:

Keep reading

lmao yes that’s the quote I’m referring to, like if that’s not showing his true colors then what is 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️

kosemsultans:

Pietro Bragadin, ambassador in the early years of Süleyman’s reign, reported that while both were still resident in the imperial palace in Istanbul, Mustafa was his mother’s “whole joy”. Mustafa was sent out to his princely post at Manisa in 1533. Describing his court at Kara Amid (Diyarbakır) near the Safavid border, Bassano wrote around 1540 that the prince had “a most wonderful and glorious court, no less than that of his father” and that “his mother, who is with him, instructs him in how to make himself loved by the people.”

The Ambassador Bernando Navagro, in a 1553 report, described Mahidevran’s efforts to protect her son: “[Mustafa] has with him his mother, who exercises great diligence to guard him from poisoning and reminds him every day that he has nothing else but this to avoid, and it is said that he has boundless respect and reverence for her.”

– The Imperial Harem by Leslie P. Peirce.

ellemoncoeuranavera:

“We tend to think about Anne Boleyn in black-and-white terms. So, she’s either a sexual predator, or she’s sexually chaste; she’s either pious, or she’s worldly; she’s either innocent or sophisticated. And yet, actually, what I’ve learned here is that her French education, her time at the French court, was such that it prepared her to be a much more complex character than that.

“Her nine years on the continent transformed her from a teenage girl into an extremely desirable woman. The Anne that emerges back in England is one who’s been shaped by many different influences. Who is both pious and worldly; who’s both sophisticated and something of an innocent. She’s one who can both play musical instruments, who can sing, who can dance, who can speak French, who is sophisticated and witty, who’s been exposed to a world of cosmopolitan glamour. And she’s such an attractive prospect because, precisely because, she’s so complex.”

– Dr. Suzannah Lipscomb, on the effect of Anne Boleyn’s formative years on the continent, Henry & Anne: The Lovers Who Changed History

I definitely agree with Lipscomb’s assertion that people too often view Anne as a superficial figure, both thanks in part to television, film, literature (TOBG, Philippa Gregory’s works, and oversimplified analyses of historical events), and, most odiously of all, the perusal of primary sources (which are, admittedly, usually the most accurate accounts of people/events in history) from individuals who have a clear antipathy and vendetta against the subject of their writing, and their words being taken, at nominal value, as gospel. In Anne’s case, a few being Eustace Chapuys (whose credibility and verisimilitudinous I called into question in a https://ellemoncoeuranavera.tumblr.com/post/180022089505/it-is-chapuys-too-who-is-largely-responsible

%20%20″>post from a few weeks ago), Nicholas Sanders, an embittered Elizabethan Catholic exile and author of the anti-Protestant De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani (Of the Origin and Progression of the English Schism), and Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, a close friend and confidante of Mary I, and, after the queen’s death, married Gómez Suárez de Figueroa y Córdoba, 1st Duke of Feria, and became a protector of English, Irish, and Scottish Catholics seeking asylum in Spain.

An oft-quoted part of Sanders’s De origine, which is often thought to have been written in response to John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (which depicts Anne in a positive light, albeit a false one, as https://alicehoffmans.tumblr.com/post/179676943078/would-you-consider-anne-boleyn-a-feminist-martyr

autrenecherche:

Beautiful singing as always. But I think that might be the first time I’ve ever heard Henry VIII called “great”.

There are many ways to describe Henry the eighth. Never though[t] “great” would be one of them.

These are two of the comments on Karliene’s song on her album dedicated to Elizabeth the I, all because of the lines on the song Fire and Gold:

Can I be great like my Father?/ Will I be loved by my people?

Between this, and Henry VIII being voted “Worst Monarch in History”, it’s easy to assume his subjects– and his children, by that token– viewed him in the same light.

The article about this says:

The 16th-century historian John Stow claimed Henry had some 70,000 people executed during his reign; though that was an extreme exaggeration, the number surely reached into the hundreds.

“The number surely reached into the hundreds”…?? So did the number under Mary I. So did the number under Elizabeth I (literally, in her response to the Northern rebellion alone; so much so that Cecil wrote about how he was worried there would not be any civilians left in the villages where people were being executed).

Catholic polemicists like Sanders certainly didn’t view him as “great”, nor did the French ambassador to his court, de Marillac, and many English citizens in later centuries went further than this in their criticsm. To Dickens, he was “a disgrace to human nature…a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England”. To the 15-year-old Jane Austen, “The Crimes & Cruelties of this Prince, were too numerous to be mentioned, (as this history I trust has fully shewn;) & nothing can be said in his vindication…[he was] a Man who was of no Religion himself.”

But this wasn’t the case, by and large, for his subjects.

It certainly wasn’t the case for one of his subjects, William Thomas, who had been educated at Oxford University. Thomas was residing in Italy at the time he heard of Henry VIII’s death, in February 1547.

“Thomas’s work is specially valuable as representing the popular view of the character of Henry VIII current in England at the time of his death. It is not free from mistakes, but the Victorian historian James Anthony Froude wrote of it that it had “the accuracies and the inaccuracies” which might be naturally expected “in any account of a series of intricate events given by memory without the assistance of documents”.

Now, I don’t exactly know the context of this, but given how vehemently William Thomas seemed to defend Henry VIII as a great ruler to all the Italian lads sitting in a pub or w/e, I’m going to assume that after the news of his death was given, someone talked some shit and Thomas went like this:

(Froude assumes, by his speech, and the way in which he took the criticism so personally, that he must have known Henry “in the flesh”).

Here it is:

“Of personage he was one of the goodliest men that lived in his time; being high of stature, in manner more than a man…of countenace he was most amiable, courteous and benign in gesture unto all persons and specially unto strangers; seldom or never offended with anything. Prudent he was in council and forecasting; most liberal in rewarding faithful servants, and even unto his enemies, as it behoveth a Prince to be. He was learned in all sciences, and had the gift of many tongues. He was a perfect theologian, a good philosopher, and a strong man at arms, a jeweller, a perfect builder as well fortresses as pleasant palaces, and from one to another there was no necessary kind of knowledge, from a King’s degree to a carter’s, but he had an honest sight of it.”

Now, I’m not saying all of this was 100% true– with hindsight, obviously, we know his fortresses lasted far longer (many still stand today) than many of those “pleasant palaces” (although some of those were factors beyond his control, like the fire that consumed Whitehall during the reign of Charles II)– but I do think this was what Thomas honestly thought of him. Even though every attribute claimed is not displayed in the handling of every subject (”even unto his Enemies”, especially); they were evidently displayed enough that they were remembered.

It’s good to be skeptical of this account, especially since the historian Froude admitted some errors in it, but any close study of Tudor history would probably tell you that, actually, a lot of this account reflects other records. Sure, there were more ambassadorial accounts of Henry being “amiable”, good-natured, a “strong man at arms” and generous in the 1510s and 1520s than those of the 1540s; but those accounts still exist and those foreign ambassadors were not his subjects; and had no reason to lie about their impressions of him in their accounts. The Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VIII that exist online do reflect that Henry was “liberal in rewarding faithful servants”, especially those that had served his family. Campeggio himself wrote that Henry was “more well-versed as a great theologian or jurist”– not as well-versed/studied as a theologian, but more so. Upon examining all his notes pertaining to books of theology that he studied for the debates of the Great Matter, Campeggio’s observation is of little wonder.

Tl;dr: Henry was viewed as a “great ruler” by many of his subjects. Modern opinion of Henry VIII can’t change that; and moreover modern scholarship pertaining to Henry VIII shouldn’t ignore it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read things like “Henry VIII was far worse than we could ever comprehend”, said with the authority of a person that has time traveled to 16th century England just to catapult to the 21st and type their opinion onto discussion threads on the Internet. People can say that, and similar things, all they want, but the fact of the matter is several foreign ambassadors did not consider Henry to be “terrible beyond comprehension”, and most of his subjects didn’t, either– no matter how much people want to think or state otherwise.