#Tudor Politics

[hillyreviews]

Bring Up the Bodies: An Epic Drama of Tudor Politics @ Hilly Reviews

Bring Up the Bodies - An Epic Drama of Tudor Politics 📖👑

🔹 Overview of "Bring Up the Bodies"

Hilary Mantel's historical fiction books novel dives deep into the intrigue and politics of Henry VIII’s court, focusing on the downfall of Anne Boleyn. 🏰

🔹 Plot Summary

Cromwell navigates royal tension as Anne Boleyn falls from grace, replaced by Jane Seymour, while the King’s desire for an heir drives events. ⚔️👸

🔹 Main Characters

Thomas Cromwell: Mastermind of political schemes

Henry VIII: Ruthless King seeking a male heir

Anne Boleyn: Queen on the edge of her downfall

Jane Seymour: The new favorite of the King 👑💔

🔹 Key Themes

Power and Manipulation ⚖️

Betrayal and Ambition 🗡️

The Fragility of Status 🎭

Morality vs. Survival 🔍

🔹 Historical Context

Set during Henry VIII’s reign, it explores the brutal nature of Tudor politics and England’s break from the Catholic Church. ⛪

🔹 Writing Style of Hilary Mantel

Mantel’s prose is vivid and dense, using rich historical details to build suspense and emotion, while portraying characters in a deeply human way. 🖋️📜

🔹 Critical Reception and Awards

Highly acclaimed, it won the Man Booker Prize (2012), praised for its immersive narrative and depth of character development. 🏆✨

🔹 Final Thoughts

A gripping continuation of the Wolf Hall trilogy, "Bring Up the Bodies" is a powerful exploration of ambition, loyalty, and the cost of survival in a treacherous court. 📚🔮

Goodreads Rating: 4.34 ⭐

[cryingwanker]

the fact that we know so little about henry the eighth's wives is actually shocking. no portraits of anne boleyn created when she was alive have even lasted until today, and she was the fucking queen of england. catherine parr wrote books, and plays, so that fellow women could be educated, and write like her, all while being a woman in tudor times. most people only know them as one of henry's six wives. the information we have about them is not even confirmed. all because they were women. i know for a fact that if they were men they would be much more well-documented.

the piece of media that i personally think is good, while portraying his wives realistically, and giving them their own identities, is six the musical. its a wonderful piece of work, and the singers are so talented. its bringing history into mainstream media, and making sure more people know how amazing these women were.

[herawell]

A birthday gift for the delightful @malkaleh. Have the King, Queen, and their secret husband enjoying a play (along with bonus father-in-law content).

[malkaleh]

This video actually inspired a lot of my thoughts about fictional fashion within the tudors ot3 universe (also texting my saati @star-anise like ‘so what’s the fashion capital of the early-mid tudor era’) because in universe it went to Italian (Venetian and Florentine specifically) and French but then also obviously the Ottoman influence (I was going to say ‘later’ but actually it’s there even then) as well as earlier medieval looser silhouettes because the Spanish influence under Juana is also very different. But this was the first thing that made me go ‘…OH’

[rahabs]

The Tudors ran so Wulf Hall could shuffle awkwardly around reiterating the same tired old Tudor stereotypes while claiming to be something new.

[1533-secrets-from-history]

580 years ago this day, Lady Margaret Beaufort "mother of Tudor dyatsy" was born.

[fideidefenswhore]

Exeter and Montague's claims to the throne were to make them the next victims of the paranoid king in 1538, and Anne could logically have used this threat to work on her husband's mistrustful nature. (This personal interest in the succession did not imply that they were genuinely trying to sabotage the succession of Elizabeth on their own behalf; presumably they regarded themselves as 'old' nobility opposing the 'upstart' Boleyns in the cause of honest English traditionalism, as on lower social level rural peasantry attacked the self-made minister 'Crummel' for trying to wreck the monasteries). The tradition of the royal kin resenting any 'low-born' intruders on their right to counsel the king was a long-standing one in medieval England; it lay behind similar grudges against 'upstart' advisers and 'favourites' under Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, and Edward IV.

Royal Mysteries of the Tudor Period, Timothy Venning

[une-sanz-pluis]

Henry V having reasserted control and even sponsorship of the most central sites of Ricardian symbolization, Richard representations did not cease, but they lost much of their power to disrupt or dismay. As former monarch, Richard could not be wholly expelled from the symbolic, and he was maintained in royal chronology and genealogy, as negative example, and even (after his reburial) ironically as benign sponsor. But in all those respects he might be said to have survived as a placeholder, a minimized though unavoidable link in a chain, a trace or even a trace of a trace. Richard may be encountered in this aspect in a host of genealogically inspired works of the mid-fifteenth century, in which his image is blandly reinserted in one or another argumentative chain of regal succession, the fact of traumatic rupture suppressed and effectively forgotten. Consider, in this regard, the image of Richard II and Henry IV companionably (or at least unaggressively) occupying the same roundel of the Lancastrian-sponsored genealogy in British Library MS Royal 15 E. vi, or the image of Richard on the carved choir screen at York Minster, unproblematically holding his place in a regnal succession originally culminating in Henry VI. The reinsertion of Richard in an ordered chain of succession signals a suppression of his special woes that amounts to a form of forgetting. But, ironically, such forgetting prepares the way for another kind of return. Precisely in the short-term success of the reburial as a form of respectful commemoration and ritualized forgetting lay the conditions for the long-term failure of Henry's stratagem. With the reburial of Richard, his specter quieted as object of unruly desire and source of unfulfilled demand, he is paradoxically freed for another kind of return. His place as an active contestant ceded to others, he is liable to return, not as king in his own right, but (rehabilitated in ways the Lancastrians could neither imagine nor approve) as martyred sponsor of a new royal line.

Paul Strohm, "The Trouble with Richard: The Reburial of Richard II and Lancastrian Symbolic Strategy", Speculum, Vol. 71, No. 1 (1996)

[tmarshconnors]

"The court is rife with intrigue and betrayal, with everyone seeking to secure their own position and avoid the King's wrath." (Letter to Charles V, 1537)

Eustace Chapuys, the son of Louis and Guigonne Dupuys, was a Savoyard diplomat who served Charles V as Imperial ambassador to England from 1529 until 1545 and is best known for his extensive and detailed correspondence.

Born: 1489, Annecy, Annecy, France Died: 21 January 1556 (age 67 years), Leuven, Belgium

[k-wame]

Then you are like me…and like all the Romans…and all the barbarians…and all the generations before us…and all those yet to come. For who does not wish, your grace, with all their heart for the quiet mind? Tell me a single soul who has ever found it. [2010 · THE TUDORS · S4·E04 · History]

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

Maybe we should leverage Bridgerton to continue bringing attention to underappreciated historical monarchs we did it with George iii next spin-off is about Henry VII and is mostly about tax reform

[necromancers-incorporated]

Could you imagine being in 1920s America and hearing all this shit about the stock market and shares and shit and thinking "Yeah thats cool or whatever but I'm not into that" and going on with your life.

Then all of a fucking sudden it breaks and all the people who used it get really poor really fast and you're like "damn really glad I wasn't involved in that mess phew" and go on with your life.

But then they fix it over the next like two days and you think "well good for them glad it git sorted out" and then you wake up on Tuesday (less than a week after jt first broke) and you find out that they fucking broke it again and they broke it so badly even you who never had anything to do with it in the first place have lost all your money?

That would be fucked up.

[malkaleh]

I am imagining all the “I was there Gandalf” moments that the Tudors fandom can look back on, including the Triad reveal and the Norwich discovery. A third one that’s smaller but still significant is when DNA testing backs up the Triad reveal. Either they do a paternity test with the royal remains, or they find that the known descendants of Gregory Cromwell and the descendants of George/Owen/Pippa have a distant connection or common ancestor.

I think DNA was still relatively new in the 90s, so maybe it’s several years before they can DNA test 400-year-old skeletal remains or find common ancestors going back sixteen generations. Either way it causes another upheaval and it’s also a nice rebuttal to Restorationists and other doubters.

The Norwich discovery is pretty recent so that’s definitely a Fandom Event (of OW OW FUCK THAT GUY) - I wonder if there’s a ‘fuck that guy (derogatory)’ day on in universe tumblr. And oh gosh, The Triad Discovery. So I’ve been kind of loose on when this happens (The Tudors show in universe happens around like, right now - all the actors are in universe younger) but it’s late nineties/early 2000s plus different tech advancements. So it is by this point extremely well known and taught and also a ‘Listen I Was There When The News Broke’

(With the Triad it is like in retrospect so much makes sense - with the show people are going in knowing about it by this point but oh there’s so much I Was There about the discovery. SO MUCH)

The contents of the chest make it pretty damn clear (spoilers go here about that somewhat) but yep, the current Duchess of Essex + I think one of Owen’s descendants off the top of my head take a DNA test and yep, Related.

(Oh the trainwreck there - they basically stick their fingers in their ears and sing LALALALA CANNOT HEAR YOU - because while don’t get me wrong, they LOATHE Thomas Cromwell and will admit he was uh ‘favoured’ by Henry and have Opinions about the sullied royal bloodlines they are also deeply invested in the two current royal princes being Secretly Of The True Royal Line (and a whole other thing) and so they also refuse to believe that any King would ever be bisexual or love a commoner that much so they mostly just ignore it and huff about how corrupted by the Coarse Commoner Henry Was (in his policies! they were bros! Because Cromwell was a weasel! No homo!)

[wonder-worker]

 It was not just because Arthur was his heir that Henry VII began to grant him titles and offices; he adopted these tactics for his younger son as well. As the king’s second son, Henry was first ennobled as the duke of York and gained several offices while Arthur was still alive: warden general of the Marches of England, lieutenant of Ireland, constable of Dover Castle, and warden of the Cinque Ports. It is interesting that to this point no tradition existed for the second son to be named duke of York, the only exception having been Edward IV’s second son. Henry VII chose to honor his wife’s family by granting that title to his namesake second son, thus beginning a tradition that lasted through the seventeenth century and that was resumed intermittently later."

— Retha Warnicke, Elizabeth of York and her Six Daughters-in-Law: Fashioning Tudor Queenship

*I mean, if Edward IV was the first one to do this and Henry followed his example, I really don't think we can say that Henry began the tradition, lol.

[navree]

well damn now i REALLY wanna write that sansa v arya au huh

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

thing is "revolution" was originally "reactionary" in the most literal sense. it was about returning to an earlier state (from which the revolutionaries believed the current state had degenerated from).

it's literally in the name. revolution. revolving. rolling back. returning to the beginning.