person: elizabeth i – Site Title

peremadeleine:

As well as spending time with her at Hatfield, Anne and the king visited their daughter at Eltham, and Anne derived intense satisfaction from the obvious delight that her husband took in their daughter. “Her grace is much in the King’s favour,” observed one courtier who was present. [Tracy Borman]

After dinner Henry went down into the Great Hall where the ladies of the court were dancing, with his sixteen-month-old daughter in his arms, showing her off to one and another. After several days of such paternal enthusiasm, he evidently decided that something more masculine was called for, and the tiltyard was soon busy with his favorite form of self-exhibition. Even though, as is possible, he paid public court there to Jane Seymour, Anne could be sure that Elizabeth and her unborn child were the true centre of Henry’s interest. [Eric Ives]

He [Henry] entered the Chapel Royal clad all in yellow and Elizabeth, who was visiting the court for the Christmas festivities, was carried into Mass, too, with the sound of trumpets. After dinner, Henry took his little daughter in his arms, ‘like one transported with joy’, and showed her off to the assembled company. [David Starkey]

It is a commonly-held idea that Henry VIII was extremely disappointed, even upset or angered, by birth of his daughter Elizabeth in September 1533. Indeed, many historians and authors judge her arrival as the sort of “beginning of the end” of her parents’ marriage, then not yet a year old. Henry himself is often erroneously portrayed as being indifferent to or disinterested in Elizabeth, even while still married to her mother Anne, due to his disappointment in her sex.

In fact, Henry’s affection for Elizabeth and the pride he took in her were plain for everyone at court to see. The birth of a second daughter, rather than a longed-for son, had hardly been ideal; however, Anne’s quick conception, easy labor, and the baby’s good health all boded well for the future. Henry must have been pleased that the infant princess clearly took after him with her red hair and fair complexion. It may be telling that he chose to name her after his mother, Elizabeth of York, to whom he had been very close.

As was royal custom, little Princess Elizabeth was raised in a household in the country. However, her parents visited her–both together and separately–as often as they could and frequently sent her gifts. When she was brought to court at Christmas in 1535, Henry publicly indulged his paternal side by carrying Elizabeth, already a precocious, pretty, and promising child, among his courtiers to be admired.

Henry does seem to have neglected at least some of Elizabeth’s needs directly following the execution of her mother in May 1536. Perhaps he harbored some doubts about her paternity in light of Anne’s alleged adultery. If so, however, these proved temporary. His older daughter Mary, writing to him that summer, told Henry that he would “have cause to rejoice of [Elizabeth] in time coming.”

Contrary to the popular belief that Henry conveniently forgot Elizabeth during this time, she was at court again by October. Her circumstances had changed dramatically in the preceding six months–yet her father’s feelings had not. One observer wrote that “the King is very affectionate to [Elizabeth]. It is said he loves her much.”

[happy birthday @alicehoffmans–thank you for waiting so patiently for the Henry/Elizabeth set I promised weeks ago!]

autrenecherche:

“She is ‘her father’s daughter’. This phrase is first used about her at the age of six, and constantly thereafter. For contemporaries had only to use their eyes to see that it was true. She looked like Henry, with her father’s hair, skin-colour, nose and lips. She had much of Henry’s character as well: his intelligence, his force of personality, his eloquence, and his ineffable star-quality that made her, like him, the automatic centre of attention.

But in other respects, she is self-consciously different. When her father makes himself Supreme Head of the Church, he begins by reconsidering his coronation, much of whose ritual and language was wholly incompatible with his present claims. In particular, he revised the second part of the coronation service, the oath, which is the equivalent of a contract between monarch and people. And he alters the oath fundamentally. Obviously, the monarch’s promise, central since Magna Carta, to respect ‘the liberties of the Church’ is wholly rewritten. But that is only the beginning. The result is to transform the oath from what it had been since the Anglo-Saxon period, a compact between the king and the people, into a solipsistic promise to defend the rights of the crown. But most interesting are his alterations to the undertaking that deals with the monarch and justice. At his coronation he had sworn, like his predecessors and like all his successors, from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, to do justice not only in truth but in mercy. But now, in his redrafting (which happily was never used), he crosses the word ‘mercy’ out.

Henry does not believe in mercy. Elizabeth does.”

David Starkey | Published in History Today, Volume 53: Issue 5, May 2003