Charlie Fenton > Recent Status Updates

‘Dressed in what must be the latest French fashion, her shapely scarlet gown was cut lower at the front, revealing more than Mary considered decent. She seemed to know the count well. As Mary watched, she turned, calling out to a steward in French and holding up Count Charles’s silver goblet to be served more wine. Mary recognised her as one of Queen Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Anne Boleyn.’

‘Brandon refused to discuss the child, as if that would help her forget. Even when she asked him to, he would not tell her the mystery woman’s name or where she lived, although he swore to her it was over. Mary believed it was, although she would always wonder whether Brandon’s illegitimate son would one day emerge into the public gaze, as Henry Fitzroy had done.’

‘God willing, her child would be a boy, a Brandon heir to inherit the Suffolk title and estates. She knew her husband believed so. He’d said her pregnancy have him hope and helped him deal with his grief. At the same time, she knew no child could replace little Harry. They would mourn his loss for the rest of their lives.’

‘She’d woken in the middle of the night and lay awake until dawn, thinking about her brother and Catherine. Henry made no secret of his illegitimate child, proudly naming him Henry Fitzroy, son of the king. Now Brandon told her Henry had a new mistress, Lady Mary Boleyn. She found it impossible to understand how Mary Boleyn had learned so little from her affair with King Francis.’

‘Phelippes was an intuitive and skilled handler of agents. He briefed informants like Berden and Catilun and read the reports they wrote. No less importantly, he made sure that they had money to live on. They received no salary: espionage in the reign of Elizabeth had everything to do with patronage and favour and the financial pickings, though occasionally rich, were infrequent.‘

‘Probably no other character in this book was as accomplished as he at self-deception. Taking an extraordinary risk, in 1583 he [Parry] wrote to one of the Pope’s cardinals with an offer of service for the Catholic cause. Then, just as heroically, he reported to Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham his solo work as a master spy for queen and country.’

‘He confessed to a conversation he had had with King Philip’s ambassador in Paris and the ‘plot laid for the enterprise of the Duke of Guise’. Throckmorton had given the ambassador an account of havens along the English coast and a list of sympathetic Catholic noblemen and gentlemen. Throckmorton said that Philip had promised to fund half the cost of the expedition.‘

‘Only once the dancing ended and they removed their masks did she see that one of her fellow performers was her brother’s not-so-secret mistress, twenty-year-old Elizabeth Blount, known to everyone as Bessie. As Mary watched her catch Henry’s eye and be rewarded by a smile she felt a pang of sympathy for Catherine, who deserved better in return for her faithful loyalty.’

‘The response of the Elizabethan authorities was uncompromising. Of the 471 priests, 116 were executed; at least 294 were sent to prison; 17 died in jail; and 91 were eventually banished from England. To William Allen those priests who suffered on the gallows were glorious Catholic martyrs murdered in a vicious persecution. Edmund Campion was the most inspirational and potent martyr of all.‘

‘The setting sun cast a golden glow over the River Thames as Mary left Greenwich Palace. Like Henry’s court, the glittering surface perfectly disguised the dark, murky waters beneath. It angered her that Henry turned hims back on Catherine for a pretty seventeen-year-old girl but now she understood this was the way of kings.’

‘And so Pope Gregory’s dispensation allowed Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects to obey her without putting their souls in peril. For Catholics this was potentially the untying of a very difficult knot. Significantly, however, Elizabeth’s government did not see Pope Gregory’s dispensation as any relaxation of Regnans in excelsis.’

‘It was obvious that Sledd had produced the most complete reference work then available on Queen Elizabeth’s enemies. He surely knew how important his dossier was. The English Catholic exiles of Bologna, Cambrai, Douai, Florence, Lyons, Milan, Naples, Padua, Rheims, Rouen and Venice, but above all Rome and Paris, were stripped bare.‘

‘Allen was without doubt the spiritual leader of the mission to lead Elizabeth’s England away from heresy back to the Catholic faith. He was passionate, single-minded and determined. At Douai and then at Rheims he trained and drilled the storm-troops of the mission, the young priests who were sent to England to begin the essential work of saving souls.‘

‘“And your intention, Charles? Is it your intention to obey your king or the Dowager Queen of France?” Mary held her breath for the second time, her pulse racing as she awaited his next words.
“I must be mad,” he placed his free hand over hers, “but I will risk everything I own, my reputation, my liberty and possibly my life to marry you, Mary Tudor.”’

‘Francis was always at her side, her over-attentive escort while Louis remained in his bed, behaviour which would fan the smouldering embers of inevitable rumours at court... She played along with his games, for now, as she did with Louis. Laughing at the duke’s witty remarks was a small price to pay for her future security if he became king.‘

‘In the later years of Elizabeth’s reign Catholic ‘recusants’ - a word derived from the Latin recusans, a refuser - were fined huge amounts of money and regularly imprisoned for refusing to attend church services. Members of the grandest gentry and noble families in England were held under suspicion by the authorities and were sometimes under active surveillance.‘

‘Simple codes, in which a symbol stood for a name or a topic in letters written in plain prose, were replaced by complicated ciphers. In these, characters stood for letters of the alphabet and false characters (called ‘nulls’) were inserted to fool anyone who tried to break the cipher. Even using an alphabet, it was a painstaking business to unpick a fully enciphered letter’

‘She was going to be Princess of Castile and one day become an empress, one of the most influential women in the world. It was so typical of Brandon, now he was contracted to his young ward and could no longer have her. The man whose love she wished for looked at her with eyes full of desire.’

‘In front of them, Henry’s colourful royal standard and banners flew from the topmast of his magnificent new flagship the Mary Rose. A floating fortress, she bristled with the latest guns and was the pride of England’s growing fleet. Henry told her over six hundred oak trees were used in her construction, making her the most expensive warship ever built.’

“Our father’s advisors found a legal way to rob noble families of their fortunes. They turned his insecurity to advantage and proposed these fines they called recognisances. They demanded payments of hundreds of thousands of pounds in our father’s name.”
“I didn’t know.”
“There is no reason why you should but I can tell you it blackened our father’s reputation.”

‘By the later 1590s it had become a commonplace to speak of the ‘halcyon’ government of Elizabeth, but these were not halcyon years. Rather they were marked by war-weariness, high taxation, inflation, a succession of bad harvests, and recurrent plague. Real wages were at their lowest point in centuries, and there was a corresponding rise in crime and vagrancy.’

‘It had always fed well on children. Many adults could be used without knowing they had been used, and It had even fed on a few of the older ones over the years - adults had their own terrors, and their glands could be tapped, opened so that all the chemicals of fear flooded the body and salted the meat. But their fears were mostly too complex. The fears of children were simpler and usually more powerful.’

‘And yet no privy councillor was ever sacked, and offers of resignation were never accepted, Davison excepted. If the privy council was stuck with Elizabeth, Elizabeth seems to have been stuck with her privy council. She coped with a power relationship which was often troublesome and even threatening by distancing herself from the privy council, whose meetings she hardly ever attended.’

‘In a celebrated essay, ‘The Elizabethan political scene’ (1948), Sir John Neale peered beneath the Renaissance splendour to uncover the squalid, materialistic competition for place and profit which he believed to be the court’s true raison d’être. There were simply nor enough goodies to go round. Like war, life at court was mostly about boredom, as suitors waited and waited.’

‘With Elizabeth’s accession, and for as long as she remained childless, Katherine Grey had an apparent statutory right to succeed, since Henry’s will was annexed to the Succession Act. Mary Stewart had the stronger hereditary claim. However, not only Henry’s will but the common law with respect to aliens was prejudicial to her position in the order of succession’

‘The privy council itself was reconstructed, excluding those who owed their positions to their personal ties with Mary and to their more than formal Catholicism. The result was a smaller and more effective privy council, with twenty former members dismissed (including all the clerics) and only ten new men admitted (none of them clerics). At the same time the royal household was reordered’

‘However, what made Elizabeth a particularly odd kind of protestant was her negative attitude towards preaching, which protestants regarded as the ordinary means of salvation. Her second archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, was scandalised when she told him that three or four preachers ought to be sufficient for a shire.‘

‘Lady Bryan had charge in turn of the three royal infants and was clearly devoted to their welfare. A letter she wrote to Sir Thomas Cromwell in the aftermath of Anne’s fall gives most of what little is known about Elizabeth’s infancy: she was having painful teething problems; she was short of suitable clothes, something which her mother would not have allowed to happen’

‘legacy of the incomer is everywhere in Norwich. Dutch-style gables and pantiles are reminders of their influence. Why are open spaces in the city called Plains rather than Squares? This is a word brought over by refugees, in this case the Dutch word ‘plein’. Weavers’ windows, unusually large windows in attics to allow more light onto the loom, are sometimes called ‘lucams’, deriving from the French word ‘lucarne’.’