#this is a henry viii hate blog

[sweetfirebird]

yeah yeah there is no such thing as complete historical accuracy in modern media depicting ye olden times and yeah yeah sometimes shows are more about an aesthetic than any truth but every time I see a glimpse of the Tudors with ever young-looking whathisface as Henry, I feel like that show really, really was doing a disservice to his brides. Like let's bring the horror. And let's show his gross infected pus leg as well in all the sex scenes. just make it clear he stinks of puss, and also that the possible age range for Katherine Howard was I think lowest possible age 15 and highest possible 21 but most place her at about 18 at the time of her death so... 16? when Henry (49) married her. And so on. The Tudors is too kind to that piece of shit man and it's one of the many reasons I hate that show.

[thepromisedbride]

A few people seem to be saying that Henry should get a role in the musical so here’s my suggestion!! A cutout of him is brought on, after the show’s over. The queens take turns throwing things at it. After they’re done they stand back and it explodes into glitter and confetti. Everyone’s happy

[mermaidsirennikita]

Lol I was watching the series finale of The Tudors with someone and we reached the scene where Henry said goodbye to Catherine Parr and his daughters and as soon as he’s gone Elizabeth just walks off.  And my friend was like “oh, she’s sad”.

And like...  I never interpreted that as sadness?  I mean, the girl who played Elizabeth on The Tudors was Not Good by any stretch of the imagination, but I kind of interpreted that scene as Elizabeth being like “WELL HE AIN’T GETTING ANY DEADER” and dropping the pretense of the loving daughter as soon as he was out of sight.  (Whereas Mary actually did love Henry on the show--in part, I’m sure, because as much as he abused her she had memories of him as a loving father, whereas Elizabeth pretty much just treated like shit starting from that time he killed her mom and declared her a bastard when she was a toddler.)

Obviously, Elizabeth I likely had very conflicted feelings about Henry irl; but the cynic in me, the part of me that always tends to remember that our concepts of emotion and familial love didn’t necessarily apply to peoples of the past, tends to wonder how much Elizabeth’s public feelings towards her father corresponded to her private emotions.  Elizabeth is famously for that Tudor temper, for losing it every now and then in fits of anger towards Robert Dudley or Lettice or whoever was annoying her at the moment.  But ultimately, many of these incidents were often highly performative--people didn’t see Elizabeth bursting into tears or getting into a catfight.  They saw Elizabeth shouting at people--as her father did--because she was a sovereign and she was not just acting in anger, but displaying authority (often accompanied by actual political acts of authority).  Things like that famous portrait ring might hint at Elizabeth’s private feelings towards people, but it’s not as if she wrote a grand diary full of her honest to God emotions.  Elizabeth PERFORMED as the daughter of this sort of Tudor lion she built Henry up to be, because she inherited the throne as HIS daughter first and foremost.  Anne’s family certainly didn’t help her claim to the throne, and at any rate, regardless of Elizabeth being restored to the succession, her parents’ marriage was iffy in the eyes of... most of Europe, at some point or another.  She could at least trumpet her status as a LEGITIMIZED daughter of a king--which was still questionably to many, of course--if not her status as a princess born legitimate.  That status relied entirely on her father, and not at all on her mother.

The fact is that no matter what public displays of affection Henry showed to Elizabeth when he felt like it, he put her in a constant place of political and probably emotional turmoil beginning when she was little more than a baby.  He came dangerously close to denying paternity of her altogether.  He killed her mother, destabilized her life--as a king’s bastard, she was even more dependent on his favor than she had been as a princess.  Legitimate members of the royal family had rights that bastards lacked.  No matter what sort of different responses to emotion people in Tudor England may have felt compared to those of the twenty-first century, Elizabeth would have grown up well aware of her status as a living reminder of Anne Boleyn; that’s something she would have had to fight against if she wanted her father’s favor.  And whether or not she wanted to be a daddy’s girl in private is irrelevant.  She needed to be Henry VIII’s daughter in public, even after he died.  Before she was queen, she had to curry favor from two siblings connected to her through a shared father--one of which had many reasons to hate Elizabeth’s mother.  If Mary I had been able to prove that Elizabeth wasn’t Henry’s daughter; well, what would have happened then?

This idea of Elizabeth as a daddy’s girl in private is ultimately a bit irrelevant, because we’ll never get to know what her private feelings were.  Even the words of her close companions are ultimately secondhand pieces of information that could very well serve as political propaganda.  If you played with Elizabeth, even as one of her ladies, you were a political person.  She WAS politics embodied, as a ruling queen.  Therefore, I feel as if the myth of Elizabeth as Henry’s loving daughter--his proud daughter--must be acknowledged as a myth, and separate from whatever she felt about him in private.  Maybe she loved him.  Maybe she didn’t.  It seems more likely to me that Mary I would have had reason to feel close to her father on an emotional level in real life--as I mentioned regarding her Showtime portrayal above, she actually lived a portion of her childhood as a beloved princess, whereas Elizabeth likely had few memories of that.  For that matter, Elizabeth seems to have been much better at keeping her emotional truths close to the vest than Mary I--who, let’s be real, perhaps suffered from mental illness--and Mary Queen of Scots.  It’s harder to discern what her private emotions were.  

No doubt, she was proud of being a Tudor.  (The status her father tried to rob her of.)  Being a Tudor let her be queen, after all.  No doubt, she was proud of being the daughter of a king.  But was she proud of being the daughter of Henry, the man?  I don’t know.  I’m not sure about the degree to which she would have thought about it.  Perhaps she was genuinely sad when her father died--she had good reason to be genuinely sad and concerned for herself.  But there’s a part of me that just can’t help but love the idea of a young Elizabeth putting on the :( at hearing of her father’s death, only to :| once the courtiers disappeared.

[sweetfirebird]

I saw an article about that new Catherine Parr movie that was like, "Jude Law's Henry VIII is a Henry for the Me Too era." And... no Henry was always like that.