#v; the king and his queen

[words-of-elfhame]

Her breath leaves her lungs in a rush as she lands on the hard stone floor, the rough movement jarring every cut on her body and every ache in her bones. For a moment, she’s aware of nothing except the pain as she tries to get the air back into her lungs, the fade of the guards’ footsteps muted by the rush in her ears. 

But Cardan’s voice cuts through everything. That singular word brings her back to herself, breaking through even the pain as she clings to the knowledge that he’s there, so close, but not close enough. 

She takes a deep, shaky breath before rolling over slowly, a groan leaving her lips against her will. She presses her palm into the ground, shaking as she struggles to push herself into what can only vaguely be considered a sitting position. When she’s sure that her arms aren’t going to buckle under her own weight, she lifts her gaze to find Cardan. 

Oh, it’s good to see his face. She can’t even remember the last time she saw him; it could have been hours or days. 

“I’m alive,” she says roughly, a mirthless smile attempting to curl the corners of her lips. 

"You'll kill them! Stop!"

Continued from x

[philibetexcerpts]

“Rumors circulated that Margaret was deaf and dumb because the public was not allowed to see her. This annoyed King George so much that, when the royal family were standing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after a royal wedding, he bent down and whisked her off her feet and stood her on the balustrade. Years later Margaret told her confidant Christopher Warwick that she had no head for heights and found the whole experience ‘terrifying.’ His action, however, had the effect of dramatically dispelling the rumors.”

Elizabeth & Margaret: The Intimate World of the Windsor Sisters by Andrew Morton

[jj-pines]

More Fionna and Cake redraws

[mo-ok]

would you like a red boy? hold out your hand i'll give you a red boy 🥰

[wonder-worker]

"As for the government of the kingdom, [Edward V] had complete confidence in the peers of realm and the queen."

"According to the Crowland continuator, [Elizabeth Woodville] seems to have taken the king's place in listening to his council immediately after Edward IV's death. It does appear that she expected to have some role in her son's kingship, and the Crowland continuator’s report of the letters sent to her by [Richard of Gloucester] indicates that she had good reason to expect to be able to work with him and the other councillors: 'the duke of Gloucester wrote the most pleasant letters to console the queen; he promised to come and offer submission, fealty and all that was due from him to his lord and king, Edward V, the first-born son of his brother the dead king and the queen'."

"[However], in what was Gloucester's first coup, Edward V was separated from his household and Woodville advisors. When the young king questioned the move, Buckingham was reported to have told the boy 'It is not in the business of women but men to govern kingdoms'. The blunt remark referred to the authority of Elizabeth Woodville as queen and the power she must have anticipated within the new political climate left by Edward IV's sudden death [...] While the veracity of this scene is questionable*, the words attributed to the duke no doubt seemed plausible to Dominic Mancini who believed they exemplified the popular sentiment held by men [...]."

-Dominic Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard the Third / J.L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445-1503 / Alexander R. Brondarbit, Power Brokers and the Yorkist State, 1461-1485

*One of Mancini's key sources seems to have been Edward V's own doctor, John Argentine, who attended to him in the Tower. It's very likely that he was the one who recounted this scene to Mancini, which suggests that it should probably be considered more credible than not.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Today is the first occasion on which The King will open Parliament as Sovereign.

Pictured here, the then Prince of Wales first attended State Opening in 1970, alongside The Princess Royal, accompanying his mother Queen Elizabeth II and his father The former Duke of Edinburgh.

7 November 2023

—

Take a look back at previous State Openings of Parliament. 👇

📷 Edward VII travels to Parliament in 1910.

📷 King George V and Queen Mary leave Parliament in 1930.

📷 Queen Elizabeth II, accompanied by the former Duke of Edinburgh, opens Parliament for the first time in her reign in 1952.

📷 The former Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, accompanied by the then Duke of Cambridge, proceed behind the Imperial State Crown in 2022.

[merevide]

caved and watched the first 5 episodes of hotd and rn all i gotta say is i wouldn't even wish the fate of being a high ranking offical's daughter/wife in the GoT universe onto my worst enemy godddd

[mzcain27]

The Grammy’s mean nothing until MY favourite artists win GET THAT SHIT PARAMORE

[elboxitracio]

Now why would my dad, this cishet construction worker pushing 60 who spend his life watching only action movies and the occasional comedy movie, suddenly got VERY into mostly romantic K-dramas ??

[v-thinks-on]

Uther Pendragon, the conqueror, died leaving only a daughter to succeed him. And thus the young Queen Guenevere ascended to the throne. Uther Pendragon was a warlike king, and his daughter took after him in spirit, though she was not trained to lead the charge as a son would have been.

In those days, even a warlike queen—and perhaps especially a warlike one—was regarded with mistrust, and no sooner had the King’s body been laid to rest, then there was a cry for the new Queen to find a husband. But with the fearsome pride of her father, Queen Guenevere refused to surrender herself to any noble lord or prince—and perhaps wisely so, for favoring one house would mean making an enemy of all the rest.

At last, Merlyn, the renowned sorcerer, proposed a solution: an enchanted sword embedded in a stone, and who-so-ever proved himself worthy by successfully pulling it free would have the Queen to wed. The Queen called a great tournament, which drew every knight in the land to fight and to test the sword in the stone. Among them was the newly knighted Sir Kay, and with the young Sir Kay came his squire, Arthur.

(Read More on AO3)

[crawlingforwardx]

Alice grins at him, trying her damnedest to keep from picturing him in a leather jacket at this very moment. “I have all kinds of things in my closet,” she tells him. “I’m sure I can make it happen.”

If Alice had pants tight enough to resemble Sandy's at the end of Grease then he had never seen them. Or just hadn't been paying attention before. "Want to help me find a leather jacket then? We really need to shine at that party and I think you have a better eye for those kind of details."

[stromuprisahat]

Though none doubted that Aegon Targaryen was the final authority in all matters relating to the governance of the realm, his sisters Visenya and Rhaenys remained his partners in power throughout his reign. Save perhaps for Good Queen Alysanne, the wife of King Jaehaerys I, no other queen in the history of the Seven Kingdoms ever exercised as much influence over policy as the Dragon’s sisters. It was the king’s custom to bring one of his queens with him wherever he traveled, whilst the other remained at Dragonstone or King’s Landing, oft as not seated on the Iron Throne, ruling on whatever matters came before her.

Fire and Blood (George R. R. Martin)

“...seated on the Iron Throne, ruling on whatever matters came before her?” Jaehaerys would never.

[elizabethan-memes]

"His public role, together with the eccentricities of his private life, ensured a constant stream of records of his deeds."

I love this description of Humphrey of Gloucester. He's doing his bit to keep the gossip columnists in business. Thank you for your service, king.

[northernember]

drawing cal with longish, messy hair because i reject the written word, i deny and refuse victorias insistence on giving him that military white boy cut, okay that hair style is Ugly. the only thing keeping me from giving him long flowing locks is my inability to draw him in a consistent, recognizable way but oh Boy, trust me once i get his body and face shape down its Over for you guys

in fact i got a man trained on aveyard as we speak okay if she so much as dares to try and describe cal’s hair with any words that resemble the style of a military cut its on Sight

[wonder-worker]

"The feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist being appointed as the day upon which the coronation of the king [Edward V] would take place without fail, all both hoped for and expected a season of prosperity for the kingdom."

-Excerpt from the Croyland Continuator / David Horspool, Richard III: A Ruler and Reputation

Even though Edward IV’s death was unexpected, after twelve years of peace there need not have been too much of a sense of foreboding about the succession. The great dynastic wound from which the Wars of the Roses had grown had not so much been healed as cauterized by the extinction of the House of Lancaster. There was no rush for London, as had happened in earlier, disputed successions. The royal party didn’t set out from Ludlow for ten days after hearing the news of Edward IV’s death, while Richard took his time, too. And the new king had [his mother the dowager queen and] two uncles to support him: his mother’s brother, the sophisticated, cultured, highly experienced Earl Rivers; and his father’s, the loyal and reliable Duke of Gloucester, to whom Edward IV had entrusted unprecedented power and vital military command.

... [Richard of Gloucester] had achieved his goal by a mixture of luck and ruthlessness, and if he made it appear, or even believed himself, that destiny played a part, this only made him a man in step with his times. Modern historians have no time for destiny, but sometimes the more ‘structuralist’ interpretations of the events surrounding the usurpation can come close to it. When we read that ‘the chances of preserving an unchallenged succession were . . . weakened by the estrangement of many of the rank-and-file nobility from . . . high politics, which was partly a consequence of the Wars of the Roses and partly of Edward IV’s own policies’, it is hard not to conclude that an unforeseeable turn of events is being recast as a predictable one. But without one overriding factor – the actions of Richard, Duke of Gloucester after he took the decision to make himself King Richard III – none of this could have happened. That is, when the same author concedes ‘Nor can we discount Richard’s own forceful character’, he is pitching it rather low*.

Edward IV had not left behind a factional fault line waiting to be shaken apart. Richard of Gloucester’s decision to usurp was a political earthquake that could not have been forecast on 9 April, when Edward died. After all, Simon Stallworth did not even anticipate it on 21 June, the day before Richard went public. We should be wary of allowing hindsight to give us more clairvoyance than the well-informed contemporary who had no idea ‘what schall happyne’. This is not to argue that Richard’s will alone allowed him to take the Crown. Clearly, the circumstances of a minority, the existence of powerful magnates with access to private forces, and the reasonably recent examples of resorts to violence and deposition of kings, made Richard’s path a more conceivable one. But Richard’s own tactics, his arrest of Rivers, Vaughan and Grey, the rounding up of Hastings and the bishops, relied on surprise. If men as close as these to the workings of high politics at a delicate juncture had no inkling of what might happen, the least historians can do is to reflect that uncertainty [...].

(*The author who Horspool is referencing and disagreeing with is Charles Ross)

[thepastisalreadywritten]