Henry VIII, eh? What a bastard.

[TunipTheVegemal]

I just feel there should be an ongoing thread on what a vile piece of work Henry VIII was where people can leave their opinions on the complete and utter appallingness of Henry VIII.

Of course, this being Mumsnet someone will probably come along and say IABVU and he was actually very nice.

(What sparked this off, btw, was me discovering that the Pilgrimage of Grace marched past where my house is, having mustered troops a mile away. Now every time I have to go into the garden at night I will imagine rotting corpses swinging from the trees - he had some of the rebels hanged in their own back gardens and some women got into trouble for cutting down their husband's bodies when they were supposed to leave them there to rot as a warning. What a bastard.)

I love Elizabeth I. She had the heart and stomach of a concrete elephant, you know!

I've always been interested in the Tudor era. Started with Elizabeth 1st and worked back a bit.

My continuing interest comes from all the :what ifs. .

What if Arthur had lived and Henry never became King? Would he have just become some side note in history?

What if any of his and Catherine?s boys had lived?

With a boy heir, would Mary have been married off as a teenager and had a happier life (as from a lot of references was something she desperately wanted)?

What if Anne had just become a mistress? (Or been sent away permanently out of reach). Would Elizabeth ever have existed? And if she had would she ever have been acknowledged?

What if Edward had lived? Would Jane Grey never been heard of, or there was discussion around her as a potential bride for Edward, could there have been a Queen Jane?

What if Mary had managed to fall pregnant by Phillip?

So many paths etc

There is a certain amount of gender politics going on with how you characterise education, though. Some early modern protestants are really keen on educated women, and by that they mean women educated a bit more like men, and a bit more by men, not women educated by women. You know, you get into this debate about whether it's fundamentally more 'educated' to be a competent accountant and able to make your own clothes, or to be able to read a bit of Cato and talk about Martin Luther. I don't know.

This is a bit of a side-point and me getting wound up into my own interests, I know, so skip if you want. I just do sort of wonder about her education being 'lax'? Even that word implies that if she'd been better educated academically she might have had better sexual morals, doesn't it?

What if Mary had managed to fall pregnant by Phillip?

I think the phantom pregnancies are one of the saddest things.

I think the laxness was mainly due to the fact her grandmother was hardly ever there, preferring to spend her time at court. She had both girls and boys under her wardship.

I suppose its comparable to a foster parent today who had teenagers who she was homeschooling but instead she spent a lot of time away from home.

I think I get you. Educated by a woman, as in, housekeeping, management, sewing etc, essential for a medieval woman to be successful as a wife and mother, against educated by a man, in mathematics, philosophy, literature etc, essential if you want to be sucessful in doing man stuff sitting about blowing smoke out of you arse?
Id imagine that educated by women would give you a much better idea of sexual morals, as there was very little birth control, and little acceptance of women being promiscuous. Women would need to deal with theses issues first hand, and see the need to pass on their knowlwdge.

She only got them when they were 12 or so, is that right? But yes, take your point.

saggy - yes, thank you, that makes sense of what I was trying to get at in a garbled-y way.

And about birth control. Scary thought.

Vagaceratops, not the same era, but I think Queen Anne was more tragic. 17 pregnancies and no adult children!

Also very sad - Katherine Parr. Everyone says she was the lucky one, but she married Thomas Seymour after Henry died, got pregnant, found out her husband was trying to get off with her 14 YEAR OLD STEP-DAUGHTER, then died of some horrible infection after childbirth. Great.

I do agree with you LRD.

I remember reading something about LJG's education being to the standard for males at the time, which is quite sad.

Oh, yes, that's so sad.

My history teacher used to tell us these lovely, old-school anecdotes about people that really brought them to life for me. She said to us that at 17/18 we probably couldn't quite imagine this, but Katherine was 36 and having her first baby, and she must have been so excited and she must have been looking forward to it for years while she was married to people who were basically too old. And she'd been mothering other people's children for a substantial chunk of her adult life. And she died of something we could probably have sorted out with a quick course of antibiotics.

I found it really heartbreaking. I could quibble about the whole philosophy of teaching a class of teenage girls that it's natural to assume all childless 30-somethings desperately want babies (!), but I still think that is the way to teach, to put some human emotion into it and not get detached from thinking about these individuals as people with real interior lives.

I've never got that fad for saying that people before 1800, or whenever 'didn't understand emotions like us' or 'didn't have a "sense of self"'.

vaga - thank you, I'm glad I wasn't coming across as rude/overly invested.

Quite a few people have commented that Elizabeth was less bloodthirsty than Henry. How about looking at Elizabethan policies in Ireland - slaughter, colonisation and famine, anyone?

And the poor child she had (Lady Mary) - mother dies in childbirth then father executed. No-one knows what happened to her after that.

jkklpu - Elizabeth just enabled bloodthirsty noble favourites (like the Earl of Essex - quite fit but an utter BASTARD) to go off and commit war crimes. TBF, not much she could have done about that. Better to let them go off and murder people in Ireland and get it out of their system than start rebellions in England (only from her point of view anyway)

Henry made the Duke of Suffolk pay £24000 to marry Mary Tudor, even though they were friends.

Although Brandon was a bit of a bastard anyway.

I've found the birth episode of RD&D. Apparently Mary very probably had a pituitary tumour. It would have caused milk production, loss of mensturation etc, whilst actually making her infertile. Today, drugs would have fixed her in weeks.
Queen Anne may well have had Hughes? Syndrome, causing her to have thick sticky blood, meaning it would be hard to get blood through the placenta to the foetus and cause her to miscarry. Aspirin would have helped.

I wonder why Katherine Parr only got pregnant by husband 3? Someone said there was a baby's body found and a mystery over a midwife blindfolded around the time Elizabeth, Katherine and Seymour were living together, and it was thought Elizabeth was the Mother.

How long was Henry's last marriage?

For Anne Boleyn, Eric Ives's biography is still definitive, but Antonia Fraser/Alison Weir/David Starkey's Six Wives books are perhaps more readable

I think KPs first husband was old, and I'd imagine that Henry was past it by the time she married him. He must have been a very ill man!

Katherine Parr's (When she was Lady Latimer) life before marrying Henry. Her husband had 2 children already so its unclear why she had no children with him. He did however spend a bit of the marriage in prison.

I am surprised that Henry was well enough to actually have sex with Katherine.

RD&D have just got to Princess Charlotte. (daughter of Goerge IV)
She laboured for 50 hours, 2nd stage for 15 hours, gave birth to a stillborn son and died of a Heamhorrage. The doctor chose NOT to use forceps.