#i felt oh so kh in the tudors

[fideidefenswhore]

Who is your most hated Seymour? For me, it's John, Thomas, Edward and Jane.

roflmao, tbf, i know intellectually that there's not enough there there to justify hating john seymour, but he does give me bad vibes...whatever happened with catherine fillol was weird and i do get the sense he was involved even if not in the rumored way. and also, when siblings hate each other to such an extent, it's often bcus they were pit against each other by their parents, so i get the sense he was not a good father (there's some debate on whether he died late 1536 or 1535, tbf, but if it was the former it's strange that none of children seemed to mourn his death, that he wasn't mourned at court as the queen's father, etc) . margery doesn't have enough about her known for me to judge; it's sort of weird to me that this stereotype has fallen she and jane had a bad relationship and her favorite child/daughter was elizabeth (this occurs in like...several...novels). we don't have an equivalent positive remark to 'next to mine own mother, no woman alive i know better' (AB, about her own, and to bridget wingfield), nor any records of them often being in each other's company during significant events or eras, but we don't have anything negative either. i get you have to make choices in fiction and 'neutral' is not an interesting one but like...damn.

what's interesting about edward and thomas is that, even before their sister becomes queen, edward is not spoken of well by his contemporaries. very early (iirc, 1535) on, his 'small conscience' is decried, and he becomes such an avaricious figure that cromwell and the king have to interfere in his attempts to manipulate and loophole property laws to his own advantage and the impoverishment of others (and, not usually in his favor, despite him being a royal in-law). thomas, however, seems like he's better liked in the 1530s, although this can maybe be attributed to him being more of a nonentity (a comparative example is some tudor authors insisting GB was 'better liked' than his sister anne-- not true, it seems-- or more often, that their sister mary was...which is probably true, but also probably more indicative of relative lack of power and positions and leverage than 'kinder' personality)...it's not until the 1540s that we get comments of the same genre ("somewhat empty of manner"). thomas thus seems more like a figure of gradual corruption, his arrogance was increased by his nephew becoming king, it seems, and resentment brought out an ugly side of his character (arguably, the same with edward, just earlier on).

it's extremely unpopular to say this on here, but yeah, jane is definitely not a favourite of mine, either. but i don't think my reasons for this are really common...i don't care if she slept with henry before marriage, i don't care if she didn't, i just find her biographers weirdly contradictory in their judgements of her character, the nature of her rise, and her own beliefs. there's also like, this sense of historic illiteracy from some of her defenders...joining a royal household (as far as the most prestigious positions, that is) was not the equivalent of serfdom (as in, they could leave at any time). jane's supporters were courtiers who hated anne, so it's reasonable to assume she did, as well. so, there's this sort of moral hypocrisy about jane as a figure and her advancement and how she came to her position that has always prevented me from warming to her as a figure. 'she hated anne and all she stood for' explains her involvement in her downfall, but not her securing the position in her household in the first place. and by virtue of her close proximity to anne as queen, she also knew that it was nigh impossible that she was actually guilty of the accusations of adultery.

what else...her defenders insist that the oaths of supremacy and succession were anathema to her moral compass, yet she likely did have to have had taken them herself, just as a subject, and if not that then definitely as a member of anne's household. this wouldn't have martyred/imperiled her life, althought it probably would have her career (elizabeth darrell never took these, so i wonder if the penalty for women was different...? barton is often cited as an example but this was not in her indictment. princess mary seems to almost have been a victim of this, but it might've been more that her signing was more important since she was a rallying point for dissenters).

and even if jane never took these, the presence of noblewomen serving anne as queen lent to her greater image of royal legitimacy. she had to have known that, and if she didn't believe her position was legitimate...then why be part of that tapestry? there's not an equivalent to her predecessor to be made here, not when anne left her own predecessor's household and began her own as soon as she came to believe catherine was not legitimately queen or henry's wife. any credulousness towards contemporary report of this time would suggest anne was extremely hostile towards her rival, but there is a difference between declaring that you'd sooner watch your rival hanged before revering them and, well...actually doing that (...effectively, if not literally).

actually, i don't think there's actually much to suggest jane was set against the religious supremacy unless you make some suppositional leaps (the dissolution wasn't so explicitly connected here, her support of mary as princess, even if rather cosmetic, could be seen as support for her decision not to take those oaths herself for nigh on two years...). nor against succession acts as brought by parliament, since the same illegitimized any potential rivals to her future children, and she seemed to make a point in one of her only pieces of writing we have in emphasizing edward's legitimacy (implicitly, at the expense of her stepdaughters).

the narrative fiction i probably dislike about jane the most is this idea that she was so reverent of catherine's memory, it's really fucking weird, honestly... it bothers me because i know it's embellished to increase reader/viewer (the tudors comes to mind) sympathy and somehow for me it does the opposite, lol. there's something about the concept of her trading on the memory of this beloved woman (who, herself, probably didn't even remember jane, there's nothing to suggest any kind of friendship between them) who was exiled, this woman whom jane did not a single thing for (not even abstaining from joining the household of her rival), that just really grosses me out. henry was the one who was her husband, and obviously he was a fucking asshole to and about her, but there's at least something more...direct, in his attempted erasure of her memory. it's always bothered me that it's never acknowledged that the antecedent (which was carried on throughout) to jane's queenship was the erasure of both her predecessors, the illegitimization of both their daughters, both of them being subordinated, and, more or less (mary present for christmas, elizabeth not, but both there during the rebellions) equally expelled from court.

[fideidefenswhore]

@theladyelizabeth

I read the first two and I'm ashamed to say I liked them before I did like ... even slightly deeper than surface level research on Henry's wives lol. 

oh, well, you’ll get no judgement from me, i read the lady elizabeth before i knew what was up re: w/eir, and as for these, i’ve at least skimmed most because they’re one of the few avail at my library...

it’s interesting to contrast how sex is portrayed, like this is one of the instances where you can absolutely judge books by their titles/covers. the c/oa and j/ane novels are always fade to black, sexual desire obliquely referenced but not made manifest (tbqh, catherine’s teenage crush on fray diego is as spicy as it gets, jane is...deeply offended and shocked by the quote about henry’s [lack of] virility in the trial of may 1536 because she’s like ‘that’s not true’,f ahitughfrdjsl;f...) the AB novel if you remember, is fairly sexually explicit but honestly more in the period before marriage than during (there’s no SA, at least not of anne in the novel, but one scene of extreme dubious consent that’s borderline prior to marriage, during betrothal, another than constitues sexual harassment in the form of a forced kiss, before betrothal) and w/eir seemed fairly obsessed with crafting scenes where anne is sexually humiliated in other aspects. the k/atheryn howard novel is extremely sexually explicit; i haven’t read all six but probably the most of all.

the author’s notes are another interesting point of contrast. w/eir spends pages  defending her choice to portray anne as fully conscious and in complete excruciating pain after her execution for an entire paragraph/s (?) by citing some study on deaths by guillotine in the 19th century (was anne killed by guillotine? no? apparently that’s irrelevant); she spends pages in the A/N of the katheryn howard defending henry, insisting he didn’t want katheryn die because he sent her to syon first, as if he could not have completely prevented her execution, and ultimately did not. 

maybe she has learned her lesson from the (limited...limited, for how egregious and voyeuristic and orgasmically schadenfreude it was) criticism that creative choice in novel 2 received, because the closing line of the KH novel is better than the tudors’ version, and at least, implies that she felt no pain, and died instantly, because the novel ends on the hyphen of her prayers:

‘God have mercy on my soul,’ she prayed aloud. ‘Good people, I beg you pray for me! God have mercy —’

not for them, the welcoming embrace of angels that c/oa receives, of course, but then, i would never expect that from w/eir. 

and the jane novel...omg, i have talked about it before, but i am just entirely flummoxed by the attempt, as she has called it, to create a sympathetic character of jane, because it failed so spectacularly. like, i am a hater, and i will fully admit that, but i did read the novel with an open mind and it is just like continually being slapped in the face with what planet does this woman live on, lol... 

as the title goes, she is ‘haunted’, and there’s this scene where she visits a place that henry norris and AB had a conversation that she remembers from when she was a lady-in-waiting. somehow she is convinced by the spirits of the place, or whatever, that they were both entirely innocent of all accusations, and she is...comforted by this? she’s comforted by the recognition/realization that (at the very least) two innocent people were falsely accused and wrongly put to death, rather than horrified by that. it’s...so much.