Catherine of Aragon
I don’t know what to tell you, frankly. You were married to Henry for twenty-four years, which apparently wasn’t enough time for you to learn his personality, which was easily irritated and soothed. Are you allergic to noticing which way the wind is blowing? Because that’s the only explanation I can think of for your self-destructive behavior. Henry was a simple man: he wanted literally everyone to love him without reserve or criticism, and he believed God created him to rule England and have sons. That’s it. That’s all you had to get about him. Half the time someone in his court was scheduled for execution, if they managed to get an in-person audience with him, he’d call the whole thing off and reduce their sentence to exile. Give the man what he wants! You’re not in Spain! You have no bargaining chips to speak of and the only thing your queenly pride got you was a drafty castle near I want to say Coventry and an early, lonely death. He loved you, probably, for a while. That’s as good as it gets, with Henry. Take what you can and get out.
When the king of England, who has been trying to divorce you for two years and out of love with you for seven, offers you the chance to say, “My lord! I see now what a mistake I have made, and that I have never truly been your lawful wife. I see it all now! I must have consummated my marriage with Arthur and forgotten, and consider you my dear brother, and will never bother you again,” you say it with a smile on your face. The man believed that your marriage was cursed! There’s no coming back from that. Cut your losses! You could have ended up like Anne of Cleves, rich as the devil and seeing the King every Christmas, when he’d shower you with jewels for being so accommodating. I guess you stuck to your guns, but what did it get you? A handful of servants who were willing to call you the Queen, a hair shirt, and nothing. Plus whenever they make movies about Queen Elizabeth they always make up the actress who plays your daughter Mary to look like a nightmare.
You’re my greatest disappointment. You had perhaps the most bargaining chips of any one of Henry’s queens this side of Jane Seymour, and you didn’t do a damn thing with them.
Anne Boleyn
Annie! ANNIE. What is there to say to you, one of the greats? You came so close, my love. You were an incredible mistress. Superlative. You introduced oral sex to England, probably. And it’s not your fault that Henry’s jousting accident happened on your watch and (probably) destroyed his brain. Plus, you know…Elizabeth. Elizabeth! Without Good Queen Bess, what would Cate Blanchett have done in 1998? Joseph Fiennes’ career would be right out. I honestly don’t know what you could have done differently, except have had a son. Everyone likes to give you a hard time for fighting with Henry and reading Tyndale, but let’s be honest: no one would be talking about your “forceful personality” if you’d just had a son. Henry would have forgiven you everything. (Which, I know everyone wants to blame Henry for nowadays, the no sons thing, but look at Bessie Blount!)
I don’t think you could have done anything differently, except for be a completely different kind of person. It took an iron-willed bitch with a sixth sense for knowing just the right moment to show the king her boobs and when to emphasize her virginal purity to win him; it would have taken a meek and docile simperer to keep those “incestuous witch” rumors from sticking. Your vicious Protestantism, your violence against your rivals, your glorious mean-spiritedness – that’s what made Henry fall in love with you! I can’t tell you to become a wholly different woman after your wedding. Sure, I can say, conduct yourself as the Queen of England in such a fashion that you are unreproachable. I can say that it doesn’t matter whether you cheated on Henry (you probably didn’t, unlike the idiotic Catherine Howard), what matters is that people saw you as the kind of woman who would. But it’s awfully difficult to change horses mid-stream.
You gambled, and you lost. You still played your hand as well as you could.
Jane Seymour
You were smart. You got in, got what you needed, and got out. I’m inclined to dislike you right off and dismiss you as a docile simpleton, but I have to give you credit. Your queenly motto was Bound to obey and serve, an obvious dig at your predecessor. Smart. And you, perhaps wisely, died right after delivering Henry of a son. The son happened to be mostly useless, but Henry never lived long enough to realize it. Maybe the whole “not having a personality” was more of a deliberate calculation for surviving in the Tudor court, rather than a flaw. You actually might have been great, Jane Seymour. I’m sorry you died of puerperal fever. Maybe you were a secret genius.
Anne of Cleves
Catherine of Aragon, are you listening to this? Anne of Cleves not only accepted Henry’s dismissal with gracious good humor, she happily conceded his claims that she smelled bad, had saggy tits, and didn’t ‘look like a virgin,’ whatever that means. That is oceans worse than being asked to say you were the King’s rightful sister! And she did it with a smile on her beautiful German face.
That’s right, friends: Anne of Cleves was an attractive woman. The one downside to her total capitulation is that hundreds of years later, we’ve all fallen for the lie that Henry never slept with her because she wasn’t as babely as her portrait suggested, when what actually happened is that he, like an actual teenaged idiot, snuck into her room in disguise when she got to Dover, days before they were supposed to actually meet, and tried to flirt with her as just Some Fucking Guy, because he thought true lovers should recognize each other, and was absolutely CRUSHED when she rejected him, because OF COURSE SHE DID, because as far as she knew some weird mustachioed gentleman was trying to put the moves on her right before her WEDDING to the KING OF ENGLAND.
But no one ever got anywhere by upsetting Henry VIII. Anne sees this. Anne knows this. And do you know what Anne gets in return for letting Henry get what he wants? Richmond Palace. On the Thames. Ever heard of it? Houses in Kent and Sussex. Good counties, not those out-of-the-way marshes Catherine got. Blechingley. Penhurst. She got real estate. Her official position at Henry’s court was “The King’s Beloved Sister.” She was officially, legally ranked as the third most important woman in the country, behind Henry’s current wife and whichever daughter he felt like recognizing at the time. She outlived every other wife and Henry himself. You know how good Anne of Cleves was at surviving? Her brother-in-law was known as the “Champion of the Reformation” and she still converted to Catholicism when Mary took the throne, just to be safe. Anne was the only woman who ever truly understood Henry, I think. You don’t argue with Henry. You don’t try to hold your own, unless you’re reckless and named Anne of Boleyn, or maybe occasionally Catherine Parr. You don’t say no to what he offers you, no matter how much less it is than what you think you deserve. Marrying Henry is like marrying an entire improv troupe: you say “Yes, and” whenever it’s your turn to speak and you get the hell offstage when your part is finished.
Anne of Cleves, I have no advice to give you. I ask only that you teach me how to live.
Catherine Howard
I don’t know how to instruct you. Was it fair that by the time you got Henry, he was gouty and irritable and about thirty years older than you? Absolutely not.
But you were sixteen when Anne Boleyn died. You know the drill, or should have. You know what happens to queens who don’t produce sons and irritate the King. I’m grading you on a curve because you were only twenty when you got married and honestly, I would have cheated like hell on Henry in your position too.
I just can’t understand why you didn’t take your out when Henry offered you one! All you had to do was (probably) lie about your pre-contract with Francis Dereham and submit to humiliation and exile! WHICH IS NOT THAT BAD. Had you forgotten George Boleyn? Henry Norris? Thomas Cromwell? Henry Courtenay? People who don’t accept exile and humiliation when Henry is done with them get killed. You got the short end of the stick, sure, but then you constructed a gallows out of it.
Catherine Parr
The shortest of shrift, that’s what comes from being the last of six wives. It’s not your fault, Catherine! It’s not your fault. You were the first English queen to write a book! You acted as regent during Henry’s last, awful French campaign! You convinced Henry that your Protestant leanings were just something you made up to distract him from the pain of his leg injury! You outlived him! It’s not your fault that competent statecraft is less entertaining than incest witches and unfaithful teen brides and fights with the Pope. Shine on, you stable diamond.
Am listening to the audiobooks of the second of the Wolf Hall trilogy right now, and currently obsessed with this period of history. Which marks the third time this month The Toast has posted something very timely for me.
Are you stalking me, Mallory Ortberg? Because actually that would come in really handy once you’re Prudie, so you’ll already know the questions I want to ask and I don’t have to actually write them up.
ps – Hilary Mantel makes the same “yes, and” observation about Henry VIII in Bring Up the Bodies! Just… not as an improv troupe metaphor.
Are the audiobooks well done? I have them in my wishlist and I loved the books, but they are soooooo loooooooong…
I’m really enjoying them. I have an hour-plus commute in each direction so a great audiobook really helps pass the time, and being really long is actually a plus.
I will say that I preferred Wolf Hall to Bring up the Bodies, because they changed narrators, and I thought the first one was better. His Cardinal Wolsey was particularly awesome. Having said that, the narrators for both books convey the same dour gravity and dry wit for Cromwell himself, which is really the important thing – it’s just the supporting cast that’s not quite as good in the second, I think. Either way, highly recommended!
Thanks! I do like a long book if it’s a good one but it’s a bit of a commitment!! I am dithering over Jonathan Strange for the same reason…
Jonathan Strange is a PERFECT audiobook. PERFECT.
I second this! The narrator does a fantastic job of bringing out all the dry wit that’s there.
COSIGNED YES it’s the only audiobook I have listened to more than three times and always have on my phone for when I don’t know what to listen to. It’s so, SO good.
Truth. That reader was brilliant. A couple shaky accents but he GOT that book and interpreted it flawlessly.
Hilary Mantel made jane Seymour interesting! I didn’t think it could be done – having only seen the “docile and passive” interpretation of her character. But in Wolf Hall and BUTB, she seems asexual, unusually astute, pragmatic, and possessed of a bone-dry humor.
Anne of Motherfucking Cleves, laughing all the way to her SEVERAL CASTLES.
Is it wrong of me to really, super hardcore judge Catherine Howard? I mean, I’m anti-slut-shaming, but I am not anti-calling people out for making really terrible choices.
Lady knew how to make a memorable exit, though
She really did. She was not the brightest bulb, I guess, but she basically went out flipping the double bird to Henry, so: RESPECT.
Well, no she didn’t, not in real life. In real life she made a pretty speech blaming herself – and only herself – and laid her head on the block without a single word about Culpeper.
I think it depends on how much agency you think she had. I mean, if you’re a Howard/Boleyn woman, you are basically stuck with really bad relatives who want to use your sexuality to manipulate the king, but how much freedom do you have to say “uh, guys, I think this is is a bad idea?”
Anne was able to play the hand pretty well, but she still ended up beheaded, and I think Catherine was always going to be in a little bit of trouble with Henry solely by virtue of being from the same family.
She made really bad choices, but how much opportunity did she have to make good ones?
Yeah, no, for sure she had the deck pretty well stacked against her. But I feel like when you’re married to a dude who’s already executed one wife, you maybe think twice about having an affair (as shitty as that is). Just in the interest of self-preservation.
She had basically no opportunity to avoid marrying Henry. I’m not even going to fault her for cheating on him. She wasn’t brought up with any expectation she might be queen, and the way she behaved wouldn’t have gotten her in anything like that kind of trouble if she’d ended up married to a random courtier.
I do judge her a bit for not realizing when she was trapped and confessing to the betrothal when she had a chance.
That’s a fair point about the fidelity standards being different when you’re married to someone at court who *isn’t* king. And we can all agree that Henry was pretty gross (the descriptions of his ulcerated wound…*shudder*) but she just needed to be a tiny bit cleverer (either clever enough to know she’d better not cheat on him, or clever enough to do a better job at it).
When you play the game of Cheat on the King, you win or you die.
Oh wow, I once went through a phase of just intense obsession with the Howards under the Tudors… I’m still kind of a little bit in love with all that history. They’re just such an *interesting* microcosm of all the shifts and changes and upheavals that were going on in that period. PLUS there are just so many interesting characters and bad choices involved.
I don’t remember where I read it, but I read somewhere the hypothesis that Catherine Howard’s affair was actually quite calculated on her part — that Henry was either impotent or not visiting her bed enough, and she knew the only way she would be secure would be to provide him with a son. So she slept with what men she was allowed access to (her relatives) in the desperate hope that she would get pregnant and buy herself some time. Of course it backfired, but if that was the reason for her decision, I can’t fault her for it.
Right? All my friends seem to be Team Boleyn, but I have always been for Anne of Cleves. Got away clean *and* rich, yo. Smartest of the lot.
Plus, she’s tall. As a fellow giant, I love me some Anne of Cleves. Smart, sassy, and statuesque.
On the one hand I sympathize with her because she wasn’t at all educated, she came from the Howard menage which allowed the girls to run wild and she was very young.
But.
Really, really terrible choices.
Can we all just agree that Thomas Seymour was THE WORST?
Absolute 2nd worst to Henry, for sure.
Yes. Yes, we can.
And to think those Slate commenters thought you were unqualified to give advice, when you are giving advice to QUEENS.
I’m really confused, because when I scrolled down this comments section for the very first time, this post was “liked.” I can only conclude that The Toast’s recent upgrade included a worryingly psychic algorithm that pre-likes posts that it knows the reader will appreciate.
It has been doing that for me too! I don’t get it, but hey, I like most comments that people post here, so I’m not complaining.
I’m pretty sure comments start off with one like, for some reason.
I think registered commenters start off with one, and one-offs start with zero.
Everything you say about Catherine of Aragon is valid, but I would just like to bring up her sending Henry the bloody shirt of James IV after the Battle of Flodden Field, having previously addressed the army in full armour whilst heavily pregnant.
I’ve never gotten the impression Catherine of Aragon backed down from anything.
Advice to Catherine: bone Arthur like 80% more, just all the time, sex the shit out of Arthur. Try to like hell to get knocked up in those five precious months with “amiable and gentle” Arthur.
Then if you have a daughter, lean into being the Spanish Ambassador. Have the daughter marry the son of whichever poor Seymour or Boleyn gets fobbed onto making Henry happy. There. No backing down required, just hella Arthur sexing.
I remain saddened that Arthur never made it to the throne, because I’ve been dying to know if he’d be Arthur I or acknowledge Pendragon as real and go with Arthur II, which would be slick as hell.
Nobody has been able to tell me what would have happened, and there have been no more Arthurs.
There SHOULDA been one, but King John probs had him murdered.
Quit with all the Georges and Williams and Charleses and give us some more Arthurs, ENGLAND.
I want to believe that the British royal family, for going on a thousand years, has been carefully avoiding the name Arthur. That name is reserved. Pendragon is, after all, going to return someday.
Prince William’s first middle name is Arthur!
Honoring revered ancestors who may or may not be fictional is what middle names are for.
(yeah I have no actual idea what the actual royals think about using the name)
I mean, there have been a couple of Arthurs slated for the throne- but bad things have happened to all of them. Coincidence???
The kingdom isn’t ready for him to come back, so no Arthurs are permitted to ascend to the throne.
No, you’re right, I love this idea SO MUCH.
I have heard that a) they’re avoiding it on purpose because terrible things have happened to all the Prince Arthurs but b) Charles is planning to change his name when he becomes king, which is a terrible waste of a King Arthur, urgh.
Charles has said repeatedly that his favorite historical king is George III; he shares his predecessor’s interest in farming. I’d think it far more likely that he’d decide to be George VII than Arthur the AnyNumber.
What?! This explains a lot about Charles. Thank you for this trivia.
I strongly support the next English queen renaming herself Arthur just because it’d freak everybody out.
At least one bio I’ve read posited that Catherine thought she was pregnant from Arthur and miscarried, so she was taking your advice!
She backed down from sending James’s corpse, if that counts. Not your soft yielding maiden, Catherine of Aragon.
For this reason, Catherine of Aragon might be my favorite historical lady-figure, even more than Elizabeth I herself. Can’t recommend Sister Queens enough for more on her and her poor sister Juana.
I went to put that on my amazon wishlist but it was already there! Must actually buy it now.
between this and our chat about Wolf Hall I feel like we should be Amazon wishlist besties <3
best historical lady-figure is clearly Eleanor of Aquitaine, I will fight about this forever
I will definitely not fight you on this, that is an EXCELLENT rebuttal.
I am intensely fond of Emma of Normandy as well. For some reason Eleanor of Aquitaine always reminds me of her.
Definitely accurate and also one of the main reasons that I plan to name my future daughter Eleanor.
I am ride or die for Anne Boleyn, though. Like, to the point where I feel like maybe I knew her in my past life or something because if I spend enough time thinking about it, I can definitely start crying about my sadness that she was murdered.
She is queen of everything.
Will not dispute, but offer Joanna I of Naples as a counterpoint.
Basically, born queen, killed* her first husband by 18.
*I mean, maybe, maybe not. The evidence is sketch. But c’mon. What were you doing at 18?
I named my firstborn daughter Eleanor, so it is fair to say I agree with you AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
Could not convince husband to name our daughter Eleanor. Probably watching The Lion of Winter while pregnant was a bad idea.
Cosigned. Married two different kings and outlived BOTH of them, made it into her 80s at a time when 40 was a good life expectency. Tough broad. She’s on my Historical Ladies Dinner Party list.
Read it a while ago via a library borrow, but I definitely have to pick it up again and keep it this time.
Agreed. I’ve been attending a night class on Henry VIII for the last few weeks (the zeitgeist is real!), and the lecturer’s take is that Catherine had two main reasons for defying Henry on this:
– They had got a papal declaration when they got married that said that it wasn’t incest, and she was hard-core Catholic enough to refuse to believe the Pope was infallible when speaking ex officio, and
– She didn’t want Mary to have the taint of being “a child of incest”. Which Mary was able to fight free of anyway, partially because Jane Seymour (who was the same age as Mary) utterly adored her and persuaded Henry and her to reconcile. Which says an awful lot about how much people liked Jane Seymour.
Catherine Parr was apparently also a very loving stepmother to Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth (in royalty order, not birth order), or at least cultivated the appearance of being so. This was also a good survival technique, because if you’re planning to outlive Henry, there’d be nothing more ironic than letting one of his children off you (see: Cleves, Anne of, for similar strategy).
And Jane Grey. She was the only benevolent mother figure the poor girl ever had, as her biological mother was a horrendous abuser and her father was almost as bad.
:squeak of joy for wives of Henry VIII topic:
Oh, Catherine. I always feel sad for her that people talked about her being old and ugly and fat, since she had gone through ten or twelve or whatever pregnancies by then. It’s probably not wise to assume the guy who can cut off your head is only bluffing.
I fall on the side of Jane Seymour being stealth brilliant, or at least not totally dumb–in her short time she did manage to effect a pretty significant reconciliation between Henry and Mary, and at least make him a little less headchoppy with some of the less enthusiastic CofE nobles, which at least must have taken a lot of tact. (It’s been awhile since I read my Alison Weir nonfiction.)
Also, in so many ways The Tudors was gloriously awful, but Sarah Bolger as Mary was pretty hot! Aside from Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who I kind of just. . .can’t with, I liked quite a bit of the casting there.
But Anne of Cleves is clearly the winner. Keeps her head, rakes it in, and gets to avoid Henry’s stinky, pus-oozing knee? Clearly she is the true winner of the Game of Queens.
eta: also, poor Catherine Parr–finally gets to marry for love, and Thomas Seymour is. . .well, maybe not the worst, since Henry is there, but probably a pretty good contender in the Terrible Tudor Husband rankings.
Sarah Bolger was a pleasant surprise in the Tudors! She just seemed to get better and better and she was GORG.
I really wanted the show to continue post-Henry with her. She was wonderful.
And poor Catherine Parr, FINALLY gets to marry a sexy man she actually likes, gets pregnant and dies. (Plus the whole “tickling” Elizabeth issue.)
Anne of Cleves was portrayed on screen by our gal Elsa Lanchester. Who naturally killed it. Of *course* she was the smartest.
And Joss Stone in The Tudors… she was similarly great as an IDGAF royal lady.
wait hold up is the Anne of Cleves thing for real, because that is a WAY better story than “she wasn’t even hot enough lol”
Yes lmao, I read about it in this great book (Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation Of The Wives Of Henry VIII). He pretty much showed up unannounced at the room where she was staying after her arrival on the continent. Pretended to be a random man trying to woo her/flirt with her. She was pretty repulsed (I mean tbf he wasn’t the attractive youth any more at this point, but she was also ENGAGED to the KING). Henry VIII got all upset and suddenly started claiming she was too ugly to marry. Though previously, all descriptions of Anne of Cleves had called her attractive and such, after this point everyone took up the King’s party line, such as it was, and started describing her as gross basically.
Henry VIII: the original MRA
That is a fantastic book. I re-read it every couple of years and then talk everyone’s ear off about it.
The kicker about that story is that you totally know that if Anne of Cleves had let the King seduce her in his guise as Random Everydude, he’d have subsequently rejected her for being a slutty slut. That’s a situation he set up to make sure she had NO WINNING OPTION.
Yes, the second he got irritated with her over anything, he would’ve been like “YOU TREASONOUS SLUT, remember when you cheated on me with me??? Off with your head.”
Nahhh, this showing up in “disguise” thing was a courting game that was popular at the time. It wasn’t meant to be a trap, Henry was just overexcited about the whole situation and wanted to show up early to see her and play his filrty games with her, but she was foreign and no one had told her about this game (and she didn’t know what the King looked like beforehand – woops). The disguise would not have been designed to really prevent someone from recognizing the dude if they actually knew him.
Ooh another one for the reading list, thanks!
I’ve read the same story in a different book by Alison Weir. Henry was already set against her because of that incident, and the rest of the problem was basically that she was sheltered and foreign. Her clothes were considered dowdy, she didn’t speak English well, and she couldn’t flirt or keep up with intellectual discussions or play cards. Basically, Henry had been spoiled by marriage to his hot older sister-in-law and two of his mistresses, and was being childish about things every other member of royalty learned to deal with.
After a few years to acclimate herself fixed basically all of Henry’s objections to Anne, and for the rest of her life she was admired for being well-adjusted and good-looking and well-dressed. Henry apparently even thought about reinstating her as queen after Catherine Parr was executed – I think she deserves extra credit for somehow managing to avoid that fate.
TEAM ANNE OF CLEVES FOREVER
Do you mean he thought about reinstating Anne after Catherine *Howard* was executed? Catherine Parr outlived him.
Yes, Catherine Howard, sorry! I got my Catherines mixed up for a moment.
IIRC, she came to England firmly believing that playing cards were the Devil’s psalm book and ended her days as a mad card shark. Party on, Anne.
That’s what I’ve read too. She apparently picked gambling up very quickly, which makes me suspect of claims that she was the wife who wasn’t all that smart (I also grumble a bit at that being supported by the fact that her main hobby prior to marriage was needlework, which always seems to be stereotyped as the boring girl’s hobby in history and fantasy). Learning the concept of playing cards, the strategies of a specific card game, and the tells of the various people you play with is already pretty challenging. She apparently did that in a language she’d only recently learned.
Antonia Fraser tells the same story – but adds that no one had bothered to have The Talk with Anne. Shortly after the marriage, but pre-annulment, a lady-in-waiting asked after the royal sex life. Anne answered that Henry came to kiss her goodnight every evening, and was surprised to learn that the lady-in-waiting didn’t think this was going to result in a son.
That said, Lord only knows what the poor girl thought Henry was doing – or, um, not doing – on the wedding night, because it seems like he did make some halfhearted attempts at consummation at first. He just wasn’t especially young or especially healthy at that point, and since nothing was ever his fault, he blamed Anne for his impotence. Because of course he did.
Here to defend Anne Boleyn if needed… though I trust the lovely Toasties enough to think it won’t be needed, haha.
No, but, read Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation Of The Wives Of Henry VIII, if you can. Great book, and a total eye opener. On all of them, but especially on Anne Boleyn, who is again and again portrayed by patriarchal historians as this gold-digging seductress when really, she was a woman hunted by Henry VIII, a man who couldn’t take a hint and who would have been incapable of taking no for an answer even if she had been able to SAY no to a King. He pretty much harassed her until she had no other option but to marry him, because he had ‘marked’ her as his own, and no one else would marry her. If she had tried to refuse any harder than she did (she literally ran away from him with her mother at least once and it didn’t work) he would have ruined her and her entire family. So she made the most of a really, really shitty situation, and turned it around to be his wife instead of just a mistress.
“In spite of his promise to let her stay ‘in the place by you chosen’- the place of a loyal subject only- Henry kept up the pressure. Today Henry’s approach to Ann[e] would be instantly identifiable as sexual harassment. Ann[e], however, had no social or legal recourse against the man who ruled the country. She continued, as so many women before and since have done, to dodge her pursuer’s advances while sparing his feelings. It didn’t work.” (From the aforementioned book.)
Anyway Mallory’s advice is pretty on point considering there was no way for her to avoid all this in the first place, not by the terms of the time anyway.
that sounds GREAT adding it to my long long list
Yes, highly recommend! (I lent my copy to my sister, lol, haven’t got it back yet. Good reminder to ask, haha.)
Found my next Tudor history book!
Anne Boleyn: Your Hero and Mine: http://the-toast.net/2014/08/06/anne-boleyn-hero-…
Ahahahahahaaaaaaa
Anne of Cleves isn’t goals, exactly, but I admire her work ethic. In a world in which her only job was to marry rich, she found her man, made a reasonable case for herself, and charmed her way out of the soon-to-be-discarded-wife box into the friend zone- even rarer for Henry, the ALIVE-friend zone. Damn, girl.
A+ stealth Hamilton reference. (I’m hoping Mallory doesn’t spot me down here in the replies.)
the people won’t know what we know
You have to hope she found some secret lover (male or female) and had the good sense to build herself a little nirvana, and only popped out a couple times a year to put on the show Henry required, then POOF, right back to her happy place, no annoying husband, lots of free time, plenty of CASTLE.
Anne of Clever 5EVER.
I love that one of Henry’s conditions of divorce were that she couldn’t marry again and she was like “NO PROBLEM!”
Like, why would any woman at that time want to get married if they had enough money to support themselves?
“Madam, the condition of your remaining alive and enormously wealthy is that you have to live by yourself, in complete control of your household and finances.”
Anyone have any ideas on how to name my (future and hypothetical) daughter after Anne of Cleves without naming her after all the other Annes ever?
She ad a sister named Amelia, so Anne Amelia?
She was born Anna, you could go with that. She died in Chelsea manor, old and happy. You could check out the badass princesses of her mother’s line: Maria, Sophia, Adelaide, and Sybille.
Annacleves? (Anne of, Anna, sounds about the same right?) I don’t know, kids today have weird names, I’m sure you could just call her “Anne of Cleves LastName” and no one would call you on it because at least it wasn’t Apple or North.
What about just Cleves. It might work with the yuppy hipster set.
On that I was just thinking Aycee? Like A.C. but sounded out. or even Caycee so you have the C for Cleaves in there.
Anne of Cleves slayed the Tudor era and I don’t care who knows it. SHE KNEW WHAT WAS UP.
Ugh, this takes me back to my college days when I took a seminar on Henry VIII and my professor was a delightful little Canadian man who referred to Catherine of Aragon in her later years as “a Tudor bowling ball”.
hey Mallory can we have some hot Plantagenet content next, please?
<a href=”http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=175″ target=”_blank”>http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=175
this is exactly what i wanted, thank you
This is one of my favorite things ever. The expression on Thomas Becket’s face and the fact that Henry is just poking him right in the head never cease to crack me up.
MAN I love Kate Beaton. Cannot get over ALL of their expressions, especially the dude being stabbed in the face and the one doing the stabbing.
I am 100% here for that all day and all night. Screw Tudors. Plantagenets and Stuarts were so much sexier. It’s almost Lion in Winter season and everything.
A PROUD TASTE FOR SCARLET AND MINIVER, BITCHES.
FUCK YES PLZ
YESSS!
the blood sisters by Sarah gristwood has been fantastic; recommend to all in this sub-reply
YES. I asked my husband the Bartlett “which Plantagenet would I be” and he didn’t know. I feel like the Toast could help me with this.
I am a total Anne of Cleves fangirl. She is the only one who was pragmatic enough to get her happily ever after.
Anne of Cleves: queen of everything.
HERE FOR IT.
THAT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE TOP-TIER INTERNET FRIEND. LET US GO AND SLAY DRAGONS TOGETHER. (Dragons, in this instance = “people who refuse to recognize the glory that is Anne of Cleves”.)
Anne of Cleves! Also, a lot of the time I think maybe Mallory and Kate Beaton are the same person or maybe accidental clones from a transporter accident?
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=348
Ahhhh… I am happy each time I see that comic. I cannot get over – nor do I want to – seeing Anne of Cleves standing there when Henry sees her for the first time. It makes me giggle endlessly.
Have never seen this, and it is the BEST. Thank you.
Look, Anne Boleyn said she was gonna give Henry a son who would be a great king, and she delivered on that promise. Except for the part about the kid being a boy, and think how much better all of history would be if we were all more willing to overlook the small matter of penises.
“…think how much better all of history would be if we were all more willing to overlook the small matter of penises.”
May be the best thing I have read all week!
“‘A boy without a winkle! God be praised!’ Then someone remembered that a boy without a winkle is a girl, and we were all so disappointed.”
I AM SO HAPPY ABOUT THIS POST/THE COMMENTS I CAN’T EVEN TRY AND BE WITTY OR CLEVER.
(In case my all caps didn’t give it away.)
I am constantly fascinated by Henry VIII and his wives — because of what so many commenters have expounded on already — we have history’s version, and then we have all of these different theories from scholars over the years. I always wish I could know what really happened, or what happened for sure. But the only way to do that would be to BE THERE, and I QUITE LIKE MY HEAD ON MY NECK, thank you. God, what a horrible time for women.
Oh, and thanks, Toasties — I’ve just ordered Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation Of The Wives Of Henry VIII off of Amazon (free two day shipping with another Amazon Prime trial!) so I know what I’ll be doing this weekend.
I hope you enjoy the book, you’ll have to let me/us know. It’s my favorite of any Tudor-lit I’ve ever read, tbh.
I was at Hampton Court, and there’s a portrait of a potential match for Henry VIII and the caption said that her response to the proposed marriage was, “I’d say yes, if I had an extra head” or something that basically boiled down to “yeah, lol, no thanks”. I’m looking for the details…. I think it was Christina of Denmark. Off to find the exact quote, because it’s pretty dang good.
Found it (more or less still): “If I had two heads, one should be at the King of England’s disposal.”
UH AMAZING
“Because 100% I’d lose it, have you seen the shit he kills wives for?”
God, were all the women this AMAZING? brb, swooning forever.
I can only imagine Old Henry raging about how he’s the freakin KING of ENGLAND and what’s with all these women who won’t just be his sweet cinnamon roll and be gorgeous and faithful and all that? Man… women be trippin.
I’ve also heard “But i have a slender neck,” as a rumored retort.
I’ve heard that as coming from Anne Boleyn, believe it or not. Because Henry was such a swell guy, he let her be executed by sword, rather than the usual clumsy axe. Supposedly Anne said that she had heard the imported French swordsman was very good, which was just as well, because she had a slender neck.
“While I am flattered to be offered the position, I am concerned about the retirement plan.”
And considering Christina was all of 16 when Henry was pushing 45- yeah, I’d want a better option too.
It was the Duchess of Milan that made this quip.
She was considered a great beauty in her time. 😉
Hey there, Jane Seymour. I know this advice is going to sound a little odd to you, but you know how your husband has a weird fixation about everything being clean? I’m sure you’re smart enough to have emulated that a bit already. Maybe you want to insist that your midwives and attendants all do the same. Clean clothes, clean bedding, clean hands. Be a little obsessive about the hands. If you have a healthy son, I suspect no one will hold this eccentricity against you. And who knows, it might end up bringing you some luck.
this is EVERYTHING to me right now as i am about to begin season 3 of The Tudors <3
i a RenFaire nerd but have always been shit at learning Tudor family history (i like the clothes, OK, and thank you Cate Blanchett for what little i do know). i recently decided to binge on Wolf Hall and Reign as well, and bless you Mallory for giving me this to flesh out my curriculum.
Season 3 is a little slow but Season 4 picks back up!
I am bingeing Reign right now!
I love Reign so much! It is utterly bonkers in every way but somehow it brings me such joy.
I recently started watching Reign and it is so mad but I love it.
I feel like your point about Anne Boleyn needing to be a different kind of person could also apply to Catherine of Aragon.
Guys, if you haven’t already done so, order It Ended Badly: Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History by Jennifer Wright. The author seems like an utter delight, and in between the historical recountings, she offers encouragment and advice to people currently undergoing breakups. Have you imprisoned anyone to die in an ice palace, or castrated a boy and pretended he’s the wife you killed? No? Then you’re doing GREAT and should be proud of yourself. She also hates Norman Mailer with the appropriate verve.
Have you imprisoned anyone to die in an ice palace, or castrated a boy and pretended he’s the wife you killed?
100% always here for Dylan Moran gifs. (is this Black Books??)
It is, it’s the episode where they go on holiday.
I have this in my “to read” pile and I’m so excited!
Wow, life really had it in for that castrated boy (even more than it sounds):
“Nero rebounded by castrating a slave boy, Sporus, who looked like Poppaea ‘and using him as a stand-in for her,’ Wright writes. The agony didn’t end there for Sporus — he ended up married to Otho, Poppaea’s ex, and then another emperor, before committing suicide.”
From this article on It Ended Badly: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/20…
It’s one of the saddest and most tender things in the book, the way she talks about Sporus. That poor, poor boy.
Wait, isn’t the whole point of “flirt with your true love in disguise” to get them to reject you? Because they will remain true to their word, even in the face of flirtation from the most charming seducer in the world (you)? Like, that’s the plot of 1/28th of Don Quixote right there. Anne of Cleves made the appropriate move, even for contemporary literature!
Henricus, I’m shocked that such a fair and even-tempered king would entertain such a ridiculous double standard.
I have not one but two sets of coasters that are The Wives of Henry VIII. I always claim Anne for myself because she is my favorite and I love her.
My brother just started watching The Tudors, so he and I have been having some conversations about it lately and it actually got me thinking about what an alternate history timeline would have looked like if Anne had just said, “Yeah, you know what, just have your way with me and find me a boring husband for the sake of propriety.” There would be no Elizabeth I. What does English history look like without Elizabeth? Does Mary Stuart become Queen of England as the only real successor to Mary Tudor? Is there an imaginary timeline where Mary Stuart is Queen of Scotland, England, and France? (You guys, I like Elizabeth a lot but I also have a definite soft spot for Mary Stuart.)
Following up on that, though, do we think Henry would have pushed so hard for that divorce from Catherine if Anne hadn’t made being Queen one of her requirements for letting Henry sex her? If it hadn’t been Anne, would some other noble lady with an ambitious family have filled the void?
Please talk about imaginary alternate histories with me, people! 😉
Well, Francis was still going to die, so probably not France. But Mary Stuart might have had a good shot at Scotland and England.
Well she married Francis in 1558, the same year that Mary I died. So her reign as Queen of all three would have been short, for sure, but still theoretically possible in my imaginary timeline. 😉
Ooh, alternate history! I think the biggest contribution Ann had on English history was she basically forced Henry’s schism with the Catholic church, so without Ann, England would have remained Catholic, the dissolution of the monasteries would never have happened and Cromwell would never have risen to power. Henry would never have excluded the Stuarts from ruling England in his will and Mary would have had a legitimate claim to the English throne after Mary Tudors death.
This is true. Though Jane Seymour and Katherine Parr were both pretty big fans of the Reformation. But if Henry hadn’t been so hellbent on divorcing Katherine of Aragon and just waited for her to die, maybe he wouldn’t have kept marrying commoners and instead would have tried to get another European princess as a wife. This is the problem with alternate histories. There are so many variables!!!
and now I am franticly googling where to buy Wives of Henry VIII coasters…
They sell them at the gift shop at the National Gallery in London, I know that much. But I have one set of the sort of flimsy cardboard ones (that one can find at the National Gallery) and another set that are ceramic. My mother got them for me as a gift and I’ve no idea from whence they came.
The first one completely ignores Catherine’s primary motivation. She wanted Mary to be an heir, that’s it. I’m not sure she cared about the rest. If she followed Anne’s path what would become of Mary? She might have gotten around it, but she might not have. From the time she was making the choice she did what she had to for her child.
Indisputable point. If her marriage wasn’t legit, then presumably neither was Mary.
Yeah, if Catherine’s first concern was for her own wealth and comfort, then Mallory’s advice makes sense. But it wasn’t. I’m sure her Catholic faith played a role in her actions as well.
I’m don’t think she would have ended up like Anne of Cleves regardless. Before the annulment business, Henry was trying to get her to join a nunnery, so not exactly the same thing as getting multiple swanky palaces.
Plus, she was looking at the long game, which for her included a very real belief in an eternal afterlife. If she went along with Henry’s demands, sure, she could live a few more years in comfort, but not only would she destroy Mary’s future, she believed that she would condemn her soul for all eternity and ensure Henry’s damnation as well. Five to ten more years of comfort on earth vs eternal reward or damnation? If I’m Catherine, with Catherine’s beliefs and convictions, that’s a no-brainer (no matter how much it sucks in the short term during my lifetime).
(Disclaimer: I’m not making any comment one way or another about religion, but looking at this from Catherine’s viewpoint as a devout Catholic woman later in life)
I may have missed it in the comments but if not, this needed to be posted:
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=348
OK but wasn’t Catherine of Aragon’s motivation partly to keep her daughter in the succession? Because if she had allowed him to divorce her under the conditions that he wanted, Mary would have been considered a bastard and her position completely gone, as well as any marriage prospects she might have had. So I mean, I kind of get it. MAYBE she could have negotiated something with him about that, but I doubt it. Plus she had a lot of supporters at court! She was loved by the people! She thought she had it in the bag!
Anne is obviously the One True Genius though, because she didn’t even have to pretend she wanted to bang his smelly, gouty ass! AND SHE GOT PAID FOR IT.
The Catherine of Aragon dissing makes me a little sad. It was TOTALLY pragmatic for her to not back down. The fact that Catherine refused to have her marriage annulled made her and her daughter that much more sympathetic to the public. And I feel like a divorce rather than an annulment made it easier for Henry to change his mind later on and restore Mary as an heiress.
Catherine won the PR war for herself and her daughter, which became pretty important later a couple decades later when the the whole of England defected to Mary and helped her oust Jane Grey and the Dudleys. Badass. And OKAY, Mary was a shit ruler, but she also paved the way for Elizabeth I, and none of that may have been possible if her mother had let Henry walk over her. She had the long-run view of things, you know?
I mean, he had the nerve to call his family “not real” after he had been married to Catherine nearly 25 years. Unlike Anne of Cleves or even Catherine Parr, she was too old for another shot at life. So she spent the rest of her life determinedly making his miserable as possible. How anyone doesn’t consider this a win is beyond me.
I love how Anne of Cleves looks so self-satisfied in her portrait. She did good.
That’s not even a painting *of* Catherine Howard. That’s likely Jane Seymour’s sister.
And Catherine never stood up to Henry on the scaffold. The story about her saying she would rather be Culpeper’s wife comes from the Spanish Chronicle, which is up there with the Weekly World News in reliability. A man named Ottwell who was at her execution wrote of her submission and dignity on the scaffold – she didn’t say anything about Culpeper. Which is probably a good thing, since he might have actually been blackmailing her – unlike Dereham and Manox, whose attentions would these days be considered obvious child sexual abuse. She was eleven when Manox abused her.
Oh, and Anne of Cleves? Had a tolerable life while Henry was still alive, although her movements were constrained and she was constantly spied on and her letters read and her visitors questioned. Once Henry died she was financially cut off, then spent long years dying in agony (likely of breast cancer).
Ohhhh, the Anne of Cleves thing.
This is my favorite bit of Tudor history.
So here’s the thing: this showing up disguised as a random stranger act, it was something Henry did with Catherine. It was something he did with Ann B. (who was Catherine’s lady in waiting), and with Jane (ditto). Wives 2 and 3 had essentially been trained in Henry’s tastes by Wife 1, and Wife 2 probably also had a tutorial from her sister, who was also Wife 3s cousin, and so on. So for his first 3 wives, and most of his recorded or suspected mistresses and flings, Henry is getting women who know how to do exactly what he wants. He maybe (IMO) gets into assuming that women just naturally want what he wants to do to them. After all, everyone he’s been to bed with has!
Enter Anne of Cleves, the very lovely daughter of a repressively religious German court. It would have been like sending Joy-Anna Duggar off to marry Gerard Depardieu. Henry posts eagerly down to meet her and pull off his standard Panty Raid by Robin Hood courtship. She has him kicked out.
She hit the sensitive man in his tender fetish parts, and he never came back from it. I’m sure it was a great relief to her to not have to sleep with the oozing leg ulcer. Catherine Howard steps up, and Anne of C. obligingly dances with her at Christmas parties (the era’s equivalent of hot bi babedom), and then retires to Richmond. She totally won her round.
“like sending Joy-Anna Duggar off to marry Gerard Depardieu”
Allow me to congratulate you on this vivid image.
PEDANTIC NITPICK: Kitty Howard was closer to 13, at the oldest, when Anne Boleyn was executed. I happen to adore her, and the way Henry treated her was appalling. He was a blind idiot who saw her as nothing other than a pretty bauble to display and put away as he wanted, and when he found out she had her own desires, he pitched YET ANOTHER mammoth tantrum and killed a man for having had sex with his wife before he ever met her.
BASICALLY fuck Hank 8.
I love this but I think the points about Catherine of Aragon are totally unfair, she is definitely my favourite- she has so many of the traits that people love about Anne B like determination, pride, ambition, but without being a raving bitch. Yes, it would have been SO much easier for her to go along with annulment, but that would have involved compromising on her convictions and she absolutely refused to do that. That’s pretty badass, if you ask me. Catherine was a devout Catholic, she believed strongly in the sanctity of her marriage (and presumably in the 24 years they’d spent together as a couple), in her rights as a princess of Spain and the motherfucking QUEEN OF ENGLAND, and in protecting her daughter’s inheritance. She stood firm and I love her for that.
Even Thomas Cromwell admits that she was a BAMF- “Nature wronged her in not making her a man. But for her sex, she would have surpassed all the heroes of history.”
You know what would have served Henry VIII absolutely right? If Anne Boleyn had given him twelve sons…and they had made Henry II’s sons look easy to deal with! I think about the time she presented him with #10 or so, he’d begin to wonder if he had too much of a good thing.
And then they’re growing up, wanting to stretch their wings, but there’s Daddy-the-King there…that sort of thing made endless trouble for Henry II, even more than Thomas Becket managed to.
Well, no she didn't, not in real life. In real life she made a pretty speech blaming herself – and only herself – and laid her head on the block without a single word about Culpeper.