#Tudor court

[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

[travellerthroughtime]

Hans Holbein, Holbein at the Tudor Court, Queen's Gallery, London, 2024

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

They flee from me sometime that did me seek by Thomas Wyatt

[bottegapowerpoint]

Hans Eworth, Portrait of Mary Fitzalan, Duchess of Norfolk

[apollolovescheesecak]

The Venetian Lovers by Paris Bordone repainted with the lovely (ineffable) ladies of the court, tudor designs courtesy of @dingledraw!!

i haven’t been able to stop thinking about the tudor wives since i read the comics of featuring their character designs, hope i did it justice!

[autumncottageattic]

wordyelaine

Barrington Court

[mywingsareonwheels]

How to tell if you are in Henry VIII's court:-

There is...

Henry VIII (back away slowly)

his wife, who deserves better (statistically it'll be Katherine of Aragon, but whichever one it is, she deserves better)

one or more hyper-competent arseholes called Thomas (who also frankly deserve better than what happens to them, but they are still arseholes, and they are all called Thomas)

depending on the year, there may also be the Duke of Norfolk in the middle of totally selling out one of his nieces

and finally Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys, being extremely snarky in all of his letters

On the upside, depending on the year there may be some absolutely banging music, but is it worth it? No.

[austin-friars]

It just occurred to me that we've not had an in depth portrayal of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour since the Tudors. Or just, Jane Seymour in general. So I am really curious to see how Mirror and the Light/Wolf Hall is going to handle them.

We get to know about her family, we'll learn about Elizabeth Seymour as well, and how important she is.

[royalty-nobility]

An Allegory of the Tudor Succession

Artist: Unknown artist, Formerly unknown artist sixteenth century after Lucas de Heere (1534–1584)

Date: c. 1590

Medium: Oil on panel

Collection: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, United States

Depicted People

William Sommers, Court fool

Henry VIII (1491–1547), King of England and Ireland

Philip II, King of Spain (1527–1598)

Elizabeth I (1533–1603), Queen of England and Ireland Mars

Mary I (1516–1558), Queen of England and Ireland

Edward VI (1537–1553), King of England and Ireland

[enyoalkis]

I think about sometimes how 2000s Scarlett Johansson would've been better cast as Catherine Howard in a different Tudor drama than Mary Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl if you believe the Portrait of a Young Woman, by Hans Holbein the Younger, is Catherine.

[fideidefenswhore]

the downfall and execution of a tudor queen (2023) / the boleyns: a scandalous family (2021) / the king's pearl: henry viii and his daughter mary (2017), melita thomas / anne boleyn (tv miniseries 2021) / the mirror and the light (2024) / elizabeth (1998)

[historyartthings]

Because I’ve got my finger right on the pulse, I’m gonna make a meandering post about a long-cancelled period drama rather than the major one currently airing. But this has been in the drafts for ages, and yeah I just really didnt like the depiction of Kett’s rebellion in Becoming Elizabeth. And I need to complain about it lol. I wish i could say it was a good effort but im not sure i can even give it that...

a looong post because i cannae haud me wheesht

Firstly, and perhaps one of the most important things, is they have the rebels in the show rally around the cry, ‘kill all gentlemen!’ This wasn't a phrase used by the rebels at the Mousehold camp - it's been attributed to the revolts in the West, but i'd agree with recent research that it doesn't seem to actually have been said by anyone. The sentiment in of itself - the tearing down of the elite class - isn't something expressed in the articles the rebels produced, even if there were underlying tensions between the two groups. You do see it appear in individual testimonies sometimes, like here:

'the pore peple are now Famysshed but C of us wyll rise one daye agenst them & I wylbe one day he'.

I'm also not saying they were nice to the gentlemen they captured, or that they didn't want to confront these landed elites, because they did. But the rebels weren't, as shown in BE, slitting the throats of random nobles they came across. That kind of indiscriminate, murderous loathing isn't something i've seen represented in the sources describing their actions. There were few murders at all committed by the rebels - the battles against crown forces excluded - and fewer still can be confirmed to have been gentry. (although i should point out, whilst I'm focusing on Norwich because the show did, iirc there were killings of elites, and more talk in that sort of vein, in yorkshire). In the south, their violence seems largely to have been aimed at property, and chosen enclosures/deer parks and houses/household goods. that was the consistent thread running through their physical responses. For example:

'So some of the common people rose in Kent, Surrey, and Sussex under a captain they called Common-wealth and made havoc on the wild beasts in many of the parks in these parts.  But they paid for their food in every place'.

or,

'they have pluckyd downe Sir Wyllyam Harberde’s parke that ys abowte hys newe howse, and dyverse other parkysse and commonse that be inclosyd in that cuntre, but harme thay doo too parson (nobody).... They saye thay wylle obaye the Kynges maiste and my lord Protector with alle the counselle, but thay saye thaye wyll nat have ther commonse and ther growendes to be inclosyd and soo taken from them.'

and from Holinshed,

'ditches and hedges, wherewith the commons abrode in the countrie were inclosed, were throwne downe'

Their violence was a response to land, economic, religious, as well as highly local factors. To my understanding, it didn't represent a desire to either kill or eradicate gentlemen as a social group. The Norwich articles do suggest aims to minimise their interference in the community, and it did represent a radical restructuring of local rights and spheres of influence - at least, as i understand it.

Again, all this isn't to say there wasn't force, that there wasn't any brutality, or that there wasn't bitterness or resentment directed at elites. To take another example from Holinshed, he describes this killing of an Italian mercenary at Mousehold:

‘but they [Dudley's forces] left one of their companie behind them, a gentleman that was an Italian, who… through euill hap being outherthrowne beside his horsse, he was inuironed about with a great multitude if those rebels, that tooke him prisoner, and like vile wretches spoiling him of his armor and apparell, hanged him ouer the wals of mount Surrie. Which act shewed what courtesie might be looked for at such cruell traitors hands… it seemed that their beastlie crueltie had bereft them the rememberance of all honest consideration and dutifull humanitie’.

Having said that, the way the show presents the rebels' violence seems to me to be unrepresentative. BE depicts an overly simplistic picture of the commons indiscriminately murdering nobles w/o compunction or for any particularly complex reasons. Just, showing these people yanking a random man and woman off their horses to slit their throats and then leaving them to die... it really fucked me off. That is not at all accurate to events or the commons' behaviour during Kett's rebellion. At least, not in any sources that i've read. I mean funnily enough people werent too keen on getting hanged, which goes a long way to explaining why they skewed away from interpersonal violence.

The show also understates the sheer scale of the death toll imo. Not only were significant numbers killed at Dussindale, but a large number were executed after the fact. There was also battles near Exeter, and a great many Cornish were killed - I've come across the number as potentially as many as 2 000 before.

'The knight, hearing of this came with 200 men in harness who by his order attacked the commons and slaughtered them like wolves among sheep'

'During this time the Lord Privy Seal saw his opportunity to attack the besiegers [at exeter] before the Cornishmen arrived and killed more than 5,000. ....Then [at Norwich] the captain and many honest men were hanged, many of them without deserving it for any harm they had done, and some who had not even raised a stick to go to the field'

i don't think the figures have to be understood as being 100% accurate to nevertheless impart the sense of scale.

BE sort of glosses over this, even if it shows a handful of rebel leaders being hanged. Local communities such as Norwich, Yarmouth and others involved would have been greatly effected in terms of the proportion of their population who were now dead.

And the number of people hanged, drawn, and quartered at the market cross in norwich.. it was 30 or so i think? i can't imagine watching all those people be brutally killed on the same spot in one day. There were churchmen hanged from their steeples in various towns (oh how funnily ironic of you!) - this also extended to William, Robert Kett's brother,

'likewise hanged on the toppe of Windham [Wymondham] Steeple'

And, ofc, people's hung, drawn and quartered body parts were placed on the town/city gates. There were hangings in many local areas wherever support for the rebellion had existed.

Rebels were also hanged actually from the oak of reformation, which I’d argue is a fairly pointed inversion and disregard for such a key symbol of the revolt. It strikes me as particularly cruel and dismissive. as in, everything they tried to convey about themselves was shown to be utterly pointless and irrelevant.

memories of all this lasted, as you can imagine, for decades afterwards, like in 1596:

'the people that there [oxfordshire] did Rise were persuaded to goe home, and were after hanged like dogges'

This deficit in the show is seemingly symptomatic of the general under-representation of the sheer scale of what was happening. the number of amassed people shown is miniscule compared not only to the numbers at Mousehold but also those across the south - as well as some disturbances in the north. I feel like this couldve been mentioned in the dialogue since showing all that wouldve been very difficult, as the scale was most likely a budget thing. But showing merely the killing of Kett and a handful of others does the whole sequence of events a terrible disservice.

It also glosses over the extent to which this was a factor in Somerset's fall, and it was a big factor. The nobility felt he was prioritising the commons over their own interest. Paulet wrote in a pretty exasperated way about Somerset’s policies, and ofc Warwick grew increasingly impatient with him. The common people actually rose in decent numbers when he asked them, but Seymour turned them away in the end. I think he likely realised it was a bridge too far. Edward was actually allowed to survive for a short time after the risings, but not by much.

Anyway, overall i felt the show was far too harsh towards the rebels and presented them as very one-dimensional. And on the flip-side if anything it was too kind towards the nobility in its depictions of their response, considering they showed only a few hangings and not the overwhelming scale of death and brutality that followed. It’s been a while since I’ve watched the show, but did they mention the battle at mousehold, even? If not I think that’s diabolical

(As an aside to that last point, I do find John Dudley interesting. And I mention that because I want to be clear, I’m not saying you can’t like these people, or find them fascinating or compelling or moving. But when ‘these people’ are Tudor ministers you have to be prepared that they will have done some terrible things. Whether that behaviour is the ‘norm’ then or not, it still makes for difficult, upsetting reading. And I’m saying this as someone who does find the characters of these v competent/influential ministers really fascinating - like Wolsey, Cromwell, Cranmer, Dudley, Cecil etc. I mean, Cecil in the wake of the northern revolt? Reading those documents makes me feel a bit sick actually. It’s chilling. But anyway, anyone in the court can come under this umbrella to varying extents, but the drivers/orchestrators of policy are obviously - next to the monarchs - at the heart of any brutality…)

[fuckyeahstufficareabout]

Hampton Court was cool to see

[unabashedqueenfury]

Reign 2013-17

Toby Finn Regbo as Francis Valois

[elephantlovemedleys]

so i was at hampton court today (my first time visiting) and boy was it humongous! seeing henry’s kitchen, apartment halls, and the chapel was amazing plus i certainly just had a whole vibe that i was indeed inside a palace from centuries back, the galleries were gorgeous aswell and the gardens were such a sight to see! it’s definitely a must visit (most especially if you are super immersed in tudor history like i am)

[harrietvane]

Hampton Court Palace - September 2024