Charlie Fenton > Recent Status Updates

‘Until the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century, all books were necessarily copied by scribes. Nearly all medieval manuscripts are decorated in some way, at the very least with coloured initials and very often with gold and pictures. Most are undated and have no title-pages. Pages of books were rarely numbered in the Middle Ages.’

Textbook for university, so will take a while to get through it and not exactly reading from cover-to-cover.

“You are so determined to choose the path of pain. Why would a woman choose to run a business all alone, as a widow, when she might marry and have a man’s protection? It is unnatural, Susan, and wanton foolishness. Times are hard. I am offering you feathers for your nest and you spit at me and go to line it with thorns you have plucked yourself.”

‘My brother was a Catholic and a citizen of Spain. He did not have to answer the Bloody Question Topcliffe had addressed to me: did I value my faith or my country more? The truth was I valued both. I had never wanted war. I did not want to see England part of the Spanish empire. I wanted the faith restored without war and that meant retrieving the papers.’

‘As is famously known, Wotton and Berde whined that they had only seen Anna and Amalia in heavy garments such that only a minuscule part of the sisters’ faces could be seen, to which Olisleger wryly inquired whether the men should be allowed to see the Duchesses of Cleves in the nude.’

‘I had heard the stories of Topcliffe, the Queen’s torture-master. He was renowned for his cruelty. People said he was bestial and took pleasure in his work. I looked around me, revolted, my heart beating so hard that the blood rang in my ears. It was worse than a prison. To think that this vile place was hidden in an ordinary house, full of servants going about their daily business.’

‘It is easy to condemn vices when you have none of them. I had never been greedy or gluttonous. I had always been loyal. I had fought against my feelings for Rob ever since I came into the household. Now they were in full flood and at last I understood how hard it is to fight the devil when he tempts you. I understood Eve in the Garden of Eden and the irresistible glow of that forbidden apple.’

‘Anna von der Mark, Born Duchess of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, was the second child and second daughter of Johann III of Jülich-Cleves-Berg and his wife Maria of Jülich-Berg. As a Born Duchess and not a Duchess Consort, Anna held a place in the succession, as her mother did for the Duchies of Jülich-Berg. Anna spent her early years at Burg Castle.’

“I am commissioned to print Anthony Munday’s account of Campion’s death,” he said as I came in, and looked up at me. “And a very rich pamphlet of lies that will be. What a hypocrite I am, Susan. I am trusted to print these things. I am trusted as a man who can turn Francis Walsingham’s designs into paper and ink and send his lies out across the country.”

‘Those formalities over, the first macabre priority was to stabilise the twenty-eight stone (178kg) corpse, already corrupted by the blood and pus of his ulcerated legs, by ‘splurging, cleansing, bowelling, cereing, embalming and dressing with spices.’ The royal apothecary Thomas Alsop supplied perfumed unguent oils - including cloves, myrrh and sweet-smelling nigella and musk’

’Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles.

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.’

‘Together with the crown, Edward was left all Henry’s plate and ‘household stuff’, artillery and other ordnance, warships, money and jewels - valued at an estimates £1,200,000 or £517 million at 2019 prices. Debts - and Henry, in a remarkable lapse of memory, knew of none - were his executors’ first duty to settle after his burial.’

‘He survived because the king was enjoying his accustomed game of playing one faction off against another, like a malevolent puppet-master, jerking the strings to determine the fate of those around him. Henry sometimes voiced doubts over Gardiner’s support for him as Supreme Governor of the Church and believed the bishop ‘too wilful in his opinions and much bent to the popish party’.’

My rating of this will probably be higher this time around, as I did enjoy it the first time but know I would have enjoyed it more had I not had to this pick apart every sentence for my essay on this for my English Literature A-Level.

‘Jump forward to 1540 and another armour being made. The change is dramatic. Henry’s waist had swelled to a massive 54in and his chest to 58in (137, 147cm). By the time he died just over six years later, he must have weighed at least twenty-eight stone (178kg) with a BMI of 51.9kg/m2. His weight is off the scale used in calculating BMI today.’

‘As a young man in 1514, his armour, specially made for him, shows that he was 6ft 1in (1.85m) in height and had a trim waist measurement of 35in and a chest diameter of 42in (89, 107cm). Here was a fit athlete, the muscular embodiment of chivalry and sixteenth-century sporting prowess, with a svelte Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25.6 - 27kg/m2.’

This is really interesting! Feel so sorry for Henrietta, sister of Charles II, who died after being in excruciating pain for 9 hours. She claimed to have been poisoned, but it was more likely to be a perforated peptic ulcer, as she had been having problems before and there was a hole in the stomach. This is where an ulcer has burnt through the stomach wall. How awful!

‘For four centuries, the precious metal content of coins had been maintained in England at 92.5 per cent purity. During Henry’s ‘Great Debasement’ that continued up to 1546, this was reduced to twenty-five per cent by adding base copper to the gold or silver melt.’

‘Henry’s strategic mistake in unilaterally scrapping the allies’ grand plan to march on Parish and focus on capturing Boulogne, failed to deliver a knock-out blow on French military might. Instead, like a small boy mischievously attacking a wasps’ nest with a stick, he had left himself open to angry retribution. The tide of France’s inexorable retaliation, planned since early January, was now in full flood

‘Since I was born, other people have given me names and told me who and what I am. A stranger, a Blackamoor, a little labour-in-vain, a good wife, a whore. I don’t remember my father or my mother and I knew almost nothing about the land of my birth when I was growing up. That has left me with a strange weightlessness, like the swifts that stay on the wing their whole lives.’

‘The armour of jousting on horseback weighed a mighty 110lbs (50kg). The burden of the foot-combat version, at 88lbs (40kg), suggests that only a fit, agile man could fight with a sword or a poleaxe while wearing more than six stone of metal - particularly on a hot day. Henry was that warrior in his fantasy, but reality dictated that instead of fighting alongside his knights, he should sit out any battle’

‘In July 1543, Suffolk and Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, described how they loosened the tongues of two prisoners (‘one a very simple creature’)... They fitted the prisoners with new leather shoes, well saturated with pig’s grease, and set them in stocks, their feet held fast, close to a blazing hot fire. Basically, they fried their feet.’

‘In his heart, Norfolk knew his accident-prone expedition had failed, but he presented a brave face, boasting to Gardiner and Wriothesley, of the ‘great hurt we have done in Scotland’ and that ‘this is the goodliest army that I have seen’. However, if it had invaded two months earlier with sufficient food supplies, ‘we might have done what we would without great resistance’.’

‘Searching desperately for some much-needed kudos, the duke [of Norfolk] now sought to win credit for the discovery of his own family’s crimes against the crown. He reminded Henry that much of what had come to light was contained in his own report after searching Dereham’s coffers at Lambeth.’

“So good old Queen Anne, the one that most people didn’t like, was secretly saving the treasures and the people from certain death. There was a secret group calling themselves the Guardians of the People and they managed to save hundreds of church relics, thousands of people and had them all spirited away in secret locations across the country.”

‘Margaret, countess of Salisbury, was the first to die, at seven o’clock on the morning of 27 May 1541. Such was the unseemly haste, that only a small wooden block was available in the Tower precincts for the headsman’s grisly work. Even the usual executioner was absent, exacting Henry’s justice on the Yorkshire plotters. Instead, ‘a wretched and blundering youth’ was hired.’

‘Behind that stolid exterior, Anne of Cleves was no fool. She had been offered an elegant way to escape a nightmare marriage, with her dignity (and virginity) intact. She would be the premier lady in all England, keep her fifteen-strong household of German servants and receive an annual payment of £500, or more than £300,000 at 2019 prices.’

This is really getting repetitive near the end

Time to try this again now I am further out from surgery and have a bit more concentration

‘Because of the Tudor dynasty’s insecurity, Henry was obsessive about his health. His sweeping reforms of the medical profession outlawed quacks and superstition, removed it from religious oversight and placed it firmly in the realms of science. His regulatory regime laid the foundations of the modern health care system across the world.’