Are You Out Of Your Senses? Dont Talk Of S U C H M A T T E R S Again.

Are you out of your senses?                                     Don’t talk of s u c h m a t t e r s again.

Two more strong-minded, forceful and determined people could hardly have been matched. Eleanor, who was about thirty, had already been queen of France for fifteen years through her first marriage and by her second she would soon be queen of England. Daughter and heiress of William X, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitou, she was beautiful, wanton, capricious, sophisticated, highly intelligent and accustomed to having her own way. Henry was nineteen years old, bull-necked, stocky and freckled, a man of electric energy and ferocious impatience, compelling charm and an ungovernable temper. The two would have a tempestuous marriage, but Eleanor bore Henry eight children and two of them kings. [x]

‘Comparing Anne Boleyn and Katherine of Aragon in a way that is unfavorable to the latter is evil and sexist’ yeah, well, Katherine of Aragon partisans do this all the time with her elder sister so :)

Mary was born on the 18th of February 1516 in the Palace of Placentia in Greenwhich. She was the only child of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII to live past infancy. Mary’s gender would continue to be an issue for Henry who would divorce her mother in 1533 thus declaring Mary illegitimate and barring her from the throne. Henry would marry four more times and finally produce his longed for son Edward in 1537. Her brother Edward would not reign long and die at only 15 in 1553 not before writing Mary and their sister Elizabeth out of his will in favour of their cousin Lady Jane Grey. However Jane would not be accepted as queen and was deposed on the July 19th 1553 after only nine days. Mary was finally crowned on October 1st 1553, she would be the very first queen regnant of England.

“She railed at him for debating the divorce of his formidable wife: ‘Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand?’ she snapped. Another time, she was in the king’s privy chamber and, hearing that Wolsey was hovering importantly outside, waiting for her dismissal and the commencement of men’s business, she rapped out a message for him to come and join them: ‘Where else should he come, except where the king is?’

As we see from this, she interpreted the role of courtly lady to the utmost of its potential. She became more powerful than any man. Paradoxically, once it was recognised that she and no other– not her father Thomas, not her uncle Norfolk– was now ‘the true inheritor of that ultimate royal favour that had been Wolsey’s strength’, she attracted a degree of enmity more usually associated with hated male favourites than mistresses. Perhaps the manner of her operations – as an incarnation of the eternal feminine – aggravated her enemies’ frustrations by making it impossible for them to compete.

[For] they were men. It was hardly in the Duke of Suffolk’s remit to spring like a nymph onto the back of Henry’s saddle and ride off in pillion with him, laughing and whispering into his ear. But Anne could. With her wit, her dazzle, her ludic, punning Burgundian manners, she melted into his dream of Albion.”

“Elizabeth had always been popular, and though Mary had once been equally so, by the time of her death the warmth of feeling towards her had faded. She had become unpopular as a result of the religious persecution she had imposed upon her people, and for involving her realm in her husband Philip’s foreign wars. This had also resulted in the loss of Calais in 1557, England’s last remaining possession in France, which came as a devastating blow to the English. It was little wonder then that her subjects greeted Elizabeth’s succession with genuine heartfelt enthusiasm. Indeed, for the entirety of her reign Accession Day [17 November] would be enthusiastically celebrated each year.”

— Elizabeth’s Rival: The Tumultuous Life of The Countess Of Leicester, Nicola Tallis