Charlie Fenton > Recent Status Updates

‘The swift discovery and crushing of the Wakefield plot demonstrated the utility of the new Council of the North. Yet, coinciding with new Scottish border raids, it caused Henry serious concern. He started to adopt a new friendly attitude to France. He took measures to strengthen the border towns against the Scots.‘

‘His policy throughout had been marked by vacillation and inconsistency but now he could await the excuse to exact revenge and vindicate the honour of his house in bloodshed. The terms had never been written down and Henry no more intended to keep his own promise of a general pardon than Norfolk’s that the suppression should be reversed.’

‘The commons of Tudor England, that vast mass of the people who had no formal political role and could only bring their grievances to the attention of the government by riot or rebellion, were conventionally regarded in gentry discourse as fickle, irrational and stupid, and feared as a many-headed monster.’

‘Charles II was certainly a conflicted character and a compulsive dissimulator: he was a monarch of multiple masks. Yet Charles’s complexity was not only a product of the endemic instability of the political world that he inherited and on which he operated, but also appeals to modern interests in the psychological make-up of prominent individuals’

‘In his posthumously published character sketch of Charles, the Marquis of Halifax observed that Charles had ‘lived with his ministers as he did with his mistresses; he used them, but he was not in love with them’.‘

‘despite promoting a majestic image, reinforced by regular ritual, combining the natural informality of his grandfather James I and VI with an innate gregariousness and personal magnetism... Having also experienced at first hand the hardships of civil warfare and years of impecunious foreign exile, Charles had acquired rare royal insight into the lives of many of his subjects’

‘For in September 1666, the Great Fire had provided unexpected opportunity to consider rebuilding London to a degree that would reflect monarchical munificence on a grandiose scale. Seeking to impose an elegant new coherence upon the English capital, Charles could thereby assume the role of the nation’s architect, restoring London‘

‘Charles himself also became the target of mounting personal criticism for, despite having not yet produced an heir by his wife, by 1667 he had fathered at least nine illegitimate children by four different women, the majority of whom were publicly acknowledged in a way that brought inevitable humiliation for his wife, Catherine.’

‘Charles left Scheveningen in the Netherlands and arrived at Dover two days later, before astutely delaying his entry into London until his thirtieth birthday on 29 May. Widely acclaimed as an event of providential deliverance, Charles’s return as king generated a mood of optimistic euphoria... the monarchy’s return had been achieved ‘without one drop of blood and by that very army which rebelled against him’.’

‘At home, Charles was the first prince born as heir to all three crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland, while it was nearly a century since the English had last welcomed a male heir to the throne in the person of Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI. In due course, Charles I and Henrietta Maria also produced an extensive number of spare Stuart heirs’

DNF

‘The masques she sponsored were all variations on the theme of Platonic love, though her feelings for her husband were conceived differently. In rapid succession she gave birth to two princes, Charles (1630) and James (1633), both of whom would rule as English kings. She had nine pregnancies in fifteen years and doted on her family. ‘I had every pleasure the heart could desire; I had a husband who adored me.’’

‘First he left the Commons to its own devices, then he attempted to direct its business. Both courses were equally fruitless. He ignored slights spoken against his reputation and, when they continued, he imprisoned the malefactors... When he made concessions, more were demanded; when he refused them, business ground to a halt.’

‘Charles’s life changed profoundly after Prince Henry died. He inherited a palace, a court and a retinue but not the adulation showered on his brother by those who hoped for a future Protestant renaissance. This dream died with James’s vivacious firstborn and Charles lacked the charisma to reawaken it.’

‘However the old king died, his son unquestionably gave him the largest funeral the country had ever seen, and he walked beside his coffin from Somerset House to Westminster Abbey. The mourning for King James, it must be conceded, was generally more perfunctory than heartfelt. At the time, Charles and even Buckingham were more popular than the querulous old king.’

‘Queen Anne’s death in 1619. Although they had lived separate lives, James always honoured her, and in poem he linked her death to the appearance of a comet. ‘She is chang’d not dead,’ he wrote, ‘for no good prince dies / But like the day-star only sets to rise.’ Her passing brought on deep depression, just as Prince Henry’s death had, and another attack of nephritis.’

‘In 1604, the Earl of Dunbar persuaded James to appoint Robert Carr to a minor bedchamber post, and in 1607, after Carr was injured in a tilting match, the king nursed him and even taught him Latin... While we can only speculate about their sexual relationship, the intensity of James’s feelings for Carr was unmistakable.’

‘He left command that he should be buried at Windsor beside the body of Jane Seymour, his third wife, the only one who had given him a son. And that his soul was to be prayed for, and masses said for it, to release it the sooner from Purgatory. He had abolished Purgatory –he had intended to abolish the Mass –but no matter, one might as well be on the safe side.‘

‘And behind all Bess’s anxiety was the terrifying fact that the Queen’s friend, Lady Anne Askew, had been arrested for denouncing the Mass, and had been tortured in the Tower more than once. Was it an attempt to make her implicate the Queen? Whatever happened, Catherine must not plead the cause of her friend now –let her be tortured, racked, burnt’

‘Horrified by the idea that he, like his father, might die in an explosion, James responded energetically to the Gunpowder Plot. The executioner duly carved up about twenty Catholics, some for involvement in the plot and others for failing to take the new Oath of Allegiance that James required in the wake of the conspiracy.’

‘In Scotland, he left the Privy Council, dominated by the Earl of Dunfermline and his old childhood friend the Earl of Mar. In Westminster, he retained almost all of Elizabeth’s senior officers and added some Scottish friends, most notably the Duke of Lennox, the Earl of Dunbar and the Master of Mar’s son, the Earl of Kellie.’

‘In 1585 after a string of older men - regents Moray, Lennox, Mar and Morton, the Duke of Lennox, the Lords Enterprisers and the Earl of Arran - had dominated his administration, James took charge using several officials, most notably the new Lord Chancellor, John Maitland of Thirlestane, to tighten his grip on the realm.’

‘Handsome young men attracted him, and his emotional life had long revolved around them. The precise nature of their sexual relationship remains unclear. James adopted the role of the older, wiser man, educating surrogate sons. Yet he publicly caressed and slept with them. His sexual tastes puzzles some contemporaries’

‘there is no evidence that he ever ceased being fascinated, as well as alternately infuriated by Anne. She was in high favour as late as Easter 1536, a fortnight before her arrest. The quarrels only mattered because, for so long as Henry’s resentment lasted, he was vulnerable to the sympathising of the queen’s enemies’

‘Further, although we so far know less about the later privy chamber, it does appear that the attendants of the Tudor queens fluctuated less than those of their father had done, and so less readily reflected the play of court faction. Mary’s privy chamber was almost a Catholic ghetto.‘

‘Mary combined the opposed views of counsel by figuring herself as virtuous guide, and allowing counsellors to deal with the daily issues of keeping the ship of state afloat. It was a strong and effective strategy that might have served England well in the tumultuous century to come, but the pejorative connotations of its Spanish Catholic heritage tainted the concept of a Select Council’

Through these two statutes Elizabeth tried to achieve what Mary had so easily done in a single act: reunite her parents in marriage, restore her broken family, and reclaim her filial place as the legitimate daughter of her problematic paterfamilias. The 1553 and 1559 statutes engineered by these two queens reveal the shared yet different family background that empowered and limited them.‘