#but anne has her namesake; whose future is potentially as fragile

[boleynqueenes]

✅ list one or two favorite lines you’ve written and explain why they’re your favorite

traditionally very bad at complimenting myself, but the 'explaining' sounds promising, so let's see...done ,previously, still like this one, and then...scrolling reviews...hmmm yk i might ask for favourite lines a bit more cus while very flattering they're more about plot and character, generally, not line-specific....or they're dialogue which...while easiest to write for me usually, doesn't tend to be my personal favourite of mine, i like unspoken observations because they often reveal more about characters than what they are willing to say aloud...

alright, so this one:

There is a heaven for Mary on this earth, where these heretics will be cast off and herself and her mother restored, like the tale of Griselda, and her own household restored, too, and herself wed to a handsome, pious prince, their own fine household established together. But there is a hell, too, and it is one where the hell she has been living lasts forever, one where she will be made to beg forgiveness for the truths she has told the Boleyns and their party, the truths which they take as insults because they name their lives as lies.

speaking to the nature of 'truth(s)' and 'lies' re: perspective, speaking to her own insight; she does understand why it's a mutual hatred, although her perspective is limited by dint of her place in the world, these are innate truths to her because she was born a princess, she has been asked to deny not only her birthright, but...well, 'birthright' as it was then, her life. she won't voluntarily diminish herself to make the lives of those she hates easier, why would she?

that does speak to why i wrote the beaulieu arc; that confrontation of POVs is quite compelling, as she finds out that her enemies, too, 'take it personally' ("Do not speak of my mother, as if you have any right!" / "Gladly, as soon as you instruct your adherents to cease speaking of mine.") and hold grudges.

and "hell", i use that word as a tool in many of mary's scenes ("lost somewhere in the chasm between the familiar hellish and the unfamiliar unknown.")-- hell is supposed to be punishment, and contemporary belief was not homogenous, but a mass of contradictions: one's present circumstances were god's judgement, or punishment, or they were a 'test', god conferred suffering to test one's faith, god conferred suffering on those he loved most (her mother's letter to her, 'we never come to the kingdom of heaven but by troubles'), the worse the adversity, the better the triumph and reward...even charles v's inaction in this matter can be attributed to this, he took a 'messianic' worldview that enabled him to limit his interference: god's justice would prevail, ie whatever prevailed would prove to be god's justice, re: henry. ie, he would not have been happy with a boleyn prince, but he probably would've accepted it as god's will. mary herself knows that proof has never come, believes it will never come.

okay, one more, a final line that i liked enough to choose it for the chapter edit:

For there is no surety in being the brother of a Queen of England whose succession is challenged, certainly not one within his homeland's recent histories, and he knows that well. Two Woodville brothers met their ends by the blade of an axe, and the fates of the brothers to the born Princess, the once and future queen, Elizabeth of York (the last legitimate English Queen, according to the King, if not all his people, the last before Anne), are equally dark, if not even darker: the youngest two, smothered in the Tower, and the eldest, Richard Grey, met the scaffold's end, same as his uncles. Among those brothers, only Thomas Grey met with natural death, and only Arthur Plantagenet has survived. If history is any indication, the matter of his head remaining on his shoulders is as chancy an outlook as a coin's toss.

i had not really thought of it myself in these terms; but i had wanted to expand on the woodville comparisons that are sort of peppered in as motif. there was always inherent danger in their rise, george would have known that, although i think the fear of his family was more about what might happen to them if henry died, anne's party was obviously strong enough that when the end came for them, it was deemed necessary to destroy those closest to anne&henry both (with smeaton being both the 'collateral damage' and linchpin, the 'weak point'-- not that he himself was weak, but the easiest to threaten and intimidate due to his status), however...henry's will had not yet proved to be strong and impactful enough to resonate past his death, ie, they did not have the hindsight we did (acts of parliament did matter to the populace-- his prince's attempted interference of his final act of succession failed, mary's attempted interference of the same failed); so the potential future past his death presaged bleak. the oft-pearl-clutched-over line of 'she is my death, and i am hers' = a simple truth, as they saw it, in vaguer terms mary's rise=their fall, their rise=mary's fall/diminishment, abasement... and while history didn't quite prove the former in black-and-white (although again, i have to remember none of them knew this), it was understandably something to be feared. a successful imperial invasion and restoration of mary meant their certain deaths (i suppose i double-talked a bit there, history didn't prove that either because it never happened, but reversed successions, as a rule, meant danger and death to the 'former' heir(s) and their kin-- that's why i've mentioned the princes in the tower in several chapters, anthony woodville in this one as the only example and precedent george really has, as such, again, a reasonable fear).