Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > The Tudors in Love: The Courtly Code Behind the Last Medieval Dynasty > Status Update

‘Elizabeth would do something yet more subversive - with the aid of a doctrine that had itself suborned men's rules. Britain's last medieval monarch would invoke - adopt, adapt - the patterns of a past age to mask the fact that she was doing something revolutionary. And if courtly love had seemed to be coming to the end of its long history, now, on the contrary, it would be reborn.’

‘At the feast which followed the ceremony, Mary Tudor was served on gold plate, and Philip of Spain merely on silver. Philip moved into the rooms once known as the queen's apartments, Mary taking the king's. Two days after his marriage, Philip assured Mary's council that he was available to advise, but that on any question ‘they must consult the Queen, and he would do his best to assist’.’

‘Anne had been speaking to Norris about his dilatory courtship of Madge Shelton, ‘You look for dead men's shoes; for if ought came to the King but good, you would look to have me,’ she told him. Perhaps Anne was losing the lightness of her courtly touch. The anonymous medieval romance Yder has Arthur demanding to know who Guinevere would marry if he died.‘

‘No wonder, in this emotive climate, that Henry wore Catherine's favours in the lists, allegorically proclaimed his devotion; as well as hastening to share books and musicians with her. Perhaps her role in Henry's games was that of an admiring audience: as much an object as the lady in any courtly lyric. But the entertainments he devised were described in the accounts as being ‘for the Queen's pleasure’.‘

‘But we may indeed see this as a gesture from the realm of fantasy. The prince, in best tradition, rescuing at a stroke the Spanish princess who had spent seven years in penurious uncertainty. There was no reason Catherine would not love the tall, fair young giant who saved her from an uncertain and humiliating future, and whose looks foreign envoys noted in almost erotic terms.‘

‘The service a lover owed his lady was modelled on the feudal contract that laid down what a villein owed his lord, or a knight his king. C.S. Lewis pointed out that, etymologically, ‘midons’, a lover's address to his courtly lady, meant not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord’.‘