Tudor links

[selenak]

No more Agent Carter this week, woe. Also, no Midwives for me, due to, err, technical problems. So, have some Tudor history links, both of the lighthearted and the serious type.

The Head that Launched a Thousand Books is a great site about all Anne Boleyn centric fiction, from obscure 17th century French novels to current day bestsellers, and best of all, it has a sense of humor about it. (Which isn't true of many history related websites.) A great example is this post:


Support group for maligned queens: Henry VIII edition, in which all six of Henry's wives have a witty go at their presentation by novelists.

In a similar vein, from a different blogger and author, here are the hilarious Fifteen Aids to Grey, aka Rules for Writing About Lady Jane Grey. (You'd think Jane Grey, aka the Nine-Day-Queen, had a tragic enough fate in real life, what with being executed at age 16, but fiction has tried its best to make it worse, and this post has a well deserved go at some of the most favourite clichés, puncturing them.


Same blogger, different queen:


Jane Seymour's Christmas 1536 Newsletter. ("Marriage was a big adjustment for both of us (well, maybe not so much for Harry), but I’m happy to report that both of us are settling in now.")


Now, after the parodies, a serious link:

The man who died with Cromwell: no, I hadn't known he wasn't executed on his own, either. Nor did I know that the guy in question, Sir Walter Hungerford, had been charged with ""the abominable and detestable vice and sin of buggery" according to the Buggery Act (which had been sponsored by none other than Thomas Cromwell himself, and passed by Parliament in 1533; this certainly didn't make it into Wolf Hall, either book or tv, either). Hungerford seems to have had a nervous breakdown en route to the scaffold, and Cromwell, about to die (horribly) himself, was kind enough to calm him down and comfort him, which speaks well of Cromwell in his last hour of life. (Mind you, given that Hungerford then had to watch the incompetent executioner making a butchery out of Cromwell's execution, I doubt Hungerford managed to stay calm and comforted.

Comments

[legionseagle]

Tell me, did people in the 16th century spend their time thinking up Witty Yet Sensitive stuff to say on the gallows/scaffold? And do you suppose there was some sort of 16th century TripAdvisor, RateTheirNeckSpeech? ("Derivative -- too like Mary Queen of Scots -- excellent use of imagery -- touch of inappropriate Manicheaism --")

[selenak]

Oh, I wouldn't be surprised, given the crowd attendance to executions, if the people hadn't had a rating system going. And if you look at the famous death speeches, usually the people in question did have time to think about what to say, not to mention that a certain pattern seems to have been obligatory (thank the king, confess yourself a sinner, express faith in God, ask everyone to pray), so the challenge would be in individual variation. Of course there's always the possibility of the chronicler making it up wholesale, but given that quite a few prominent people die without their last words being deemed worthy to be recorded (like Katherine Howard, since the Spanish Chronicle is the only one to deliver the "I die a queen, but I would rather have died the wife of Culpepper" sentence, and the Spanish Chronicle has her interrogated by the very very dead Thomas Cromwell, so its reliability is not the greatest; no other chronicle mentions more than confessing herself a sinner and dying), and given that with people like Anne Boleyn you have more than one chronicler reporting those speeches independently from each other, it's likely that they did say this.

Also, Cromwell and More were lawyers very familiar with executions before it became their turn. They must have wondered, on occasion, what they would say?

I can definitely see people going home arguing about the executioner's style and the attitude of the condemmed and who made the best speech. Though I wonder whether executioners who badly bungled their job ever got fired, given that the guy who butchered Cromwell sounds much like the guy who butchered Margaret Pole later...

[wee_warrior]

Ah, links. Awesome! Thank you so much.

And that poor guy Hungerford. How bizarre is it to be both executed with, but also consoled by the man who made your death possible in the first place?

[selenak]

I suspect the French Revolution was the next time such a scenario was even possible. (Without looking it up: I'm thinking of Danton and Camille Desmoulins here, who were executed with some allies - and one can make the case that D & D certainly made the laws allowing the Terreur and those executions possible.) (But I don't know whether they were in the mood to console any of the others.)

Mind you, I'm not surprised that the two presentations of Cromwell's death I've seen so far left Hungerford out. An audience would probably think "who is this? Did he show up before?" I'm curious how Hilary Mantel will handle it in the last volume of her trilogy.

[kalypso]

Well, Hungerford doesn't sound like the nicest man of the 1530s (though that's probably not a strong list), but I suppose I must be sorry for his death. Though let us hope that the executioner was getting the hang of it by the time he'd finished off Cromwell.