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“…It was in the twelfth century that Mary’s identity as Queen of Heaven became a popular motif throughout western Christendom, particularly in images of the Coronation of the Virgin. Mariology was influencing and being influenced by the ideology of queenship, which, at this time, according to Honeycutt, was being remodeled by churchmen to consist of the roles of ‘peacemaker, mother, nurse, benefactress, and intercessor’, in contrast to earlier notions of sharer in the king’s authority and head of his household. Although such ideology constructed new differences in kingly and queenly roles, the association with Mariology meant that queens should not necessarily be seen as decreasing in status.

…As Parsons has argued, this association of queenly and Marian intercession was made explicit in thirteenth century England too, shaping coronation ritual and leading to Marian allusions in the rites of royal childbirth. Such Marian associations, no longer necessarily identified with intercession, persisted into the fifteenth century, not only in the words of the pageant scripts quoted above, but also in the painted images of the queens. The most explicit instance of the latter is a picture of Elizabeth Woodville in the records of the Skinners of London, produced in the 1470s to record her membership of their Fraternity of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary - Plate 1.

The red dress beneath a blue cloak with loose blonde hair beneath a crown was a familiar representation of the Virgin Mary - Plate 2. Moreover, the orb and scepter which she held were not the regalia with which a queen was crowned, although queens were commonly depicted carrying them, as were kings and the Virgin Mary. The roses and gillyflowers in the background were both flowers associated with the Virgin; the rose particularly with her virginity and the gillyflower with her purity and motherhood.”

- Joanna L. Chamberlayne, English Queenship 1445-1503

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“The precise chronology of Catherine’s affair with the king is unclear. A few clues are provided in grants made to her by the royal household, one of which made Catherine a woman of moderate means in her own right – at the end of April, the goods of two condemned criminals, a father and son both called William Lidbeter, who had been convicted of murder, were signed over to her. By modern standards, the second-hand goods of two killers might lack in romance, but the Tudors were incorrigible recyclers. In May, the king bought her twenty-three brand new quilts of sarsenet, a light silk, which was perhaps a welcome choice of fabric given the mounting temperature in the capital.”

— Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair

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“Legh’s recall from exile [in March 1540] was, therefore, the earliest indication, albeit a heavily veiled one, of King Henry’s interest in Katherine [Howard]. The next clue was less subtle. It came on 24 April 1540, when Henry granted Katherine the goods and chattels of William Ledbeter, a Sussex yeoman, and his son, who had been indicted for murder the previous February. The following month, ‘twenty-three quilts of quilted sarcenet, bought of Baptist Borowne and Guilliame Latremoylle, [were] given to Mrs Haward’ from the royal wardrobe. Since gifts were a recognised part of the ritual of courtship, much might have been read into these awards to a mere maiden of honour.”

— Josephine Wilkinson, Katherine Howard

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What is remarkable, however, is not the amount of land Alice (Perrers) received passively as gifts of the king, but that she actually acquired the majority of her estate through her own initiative. Of her total landholdings, she independently obtained forty-three manors and twenty-seven other properties compared to the twenty-five manors and twenty-five other properties she received directly from the king. In terms of cash outlay, Alice spent an impressive £3,360 purchasing just fourteen properties. Moreover, because a large number of the lands from the king were granted as part of wardships, the number of manors therefore represents a much smaller number of individual grants. In contrast to this, each of Alice’s own acquisitions generally encompassed only one or two manors and associated properties at a time. Many of these lands were not held or acquired by Alice directly. Instead, she employed the legal mechanism of enfeoffment-to-use, whereby a select group of loyal men owned and disposed of the property on Alice’s behalf, taking the profits to her use. This process could be extremely complex, and in theory meant that the landowner could avoid feudal incidents from the crown and loss of land through forfeiture. Undoubtedly aware of the vulnerable position she would find herself in following Edward III’s death, Alice used enfeoffment-to-use on no fewer than seventy-eight occasions to either acquire or transfer property. Unfortunately for her, however, the greatest testament to Alice’s use of this device is the fact that the terms of her forfeiture were specifically expanded to cover property held in this form, something which set a precedent for all future parliamentary forfeiture and attainders. Although Alice undoubtedly used her position as Edward’s mistress to her advantage in these transactions—in terms of both influence and resources—this proactive, independent, and intelligent acquisition and management of her estate is, therefore, nonetheless remarkable for any individual, male or female, of her time.

-Laura Tompkins, '"Edward III's Gold Digging Mistress": Alice Perrers, Gender, and Financial Power at the English Royal Court, 1360-1377', "Women and Economic Power in Premodern Courts" (edited by Cathleen Sarti)

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“There are fourteen extant books bound by the King Edward and Queen Mary Binder with indications that they belonged to Mary. These fourteen books share a few commonalities. First of all, twelve of them are bound in the same brown leather binding which has actually remained fairly soft and smooth for the last five hundred years, while two are bound in white leather. Some have patches of newer binding or have new spines, but generally, they all share the same type of leather (probably calf). Secondly, each is decorated with similar tool marks in gold. Many have tool marks of Mary’s initials or coat of arms. Thirdly, most of the bound books are printed books, not manuscripts, and almost all of them are religious books that were not printed in England. Finally, and what I find to be most important, is that not one book bound by the King Edward and Queen Mary Binder has any indication beyond the binding itself that the book actually at one time belonged to Mary. The books contain neither marginalia nor even Mary’s own signature. That these books are unmarred and the fact that Mary had at least fourteen books bound by this binder indicate that she took care of her books very well and that she preferred her books to have a sturdy binding so that they could be displayed and possibly even used by other women in her household”

— “To The Mooste Excellent And Vertouse Queene Marye”: Book Dedications as Negotiations With Mary I, by Valerie Schutt, 2014

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“Children were on Catherine’s mind in May 1541. In the same week as Wharton’s letter about the deaths in Scotland, Catherine visited her stepchildren. Until that point, she had only interacted with the eldest, twenty-five-year-old Mary, and she wanted to meet the other two. The visit to her stepson was discussed in one of Chapuys’s letters to the Governor of the Netherlands, but he failed to mention – and perhaps did not know – that on Friday, 6 May the queen’s barge brought her to Chelsea Old Palace, where she received the Princess Elizabeth. The night before, Catherine had stayed at Baynard’s Castle, her official residence in London, while the king visited his son’s household in Essex, and it is interesting that Catherine took the opportunity to meet Elizabeth, away from the girl’s father, before she was introduced to the Prince of Wales.”

— Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair

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"negro’s crest was ‘of a castle broken, and upon the castle a man with a shert of mail and a sword in his hand’. this seems to be a reference to his siege-breaking prowess at haddington. the original grant, preserved in the college of arms, shows such a crest. the face of the man atop the castle is white. [...] the rutland mss also describes negro as ‘spanish’. but his being spanish does not rule out him being black. [...] a more famous moor of this time, leo africanus wrote: ‘when i heare the africans evill spoken of, i wil affirme my self to be one of granada: and when i perceive the nation of granada to be discommended, then will i professe my selfe to be an african.’ however, a letter written to mary of guise from marion, lady hume on 28 march 1549 provides some strong circumstantial evidence: 'als sua i beseik your grace to be gud prenssis to the spangyarttis and lat them cum again, for tha do lyk noble men, and als suay the mour. he is als scharp a man asrydis, besking your grace to be gud prenssis unto him' [...] whether this moor was pedro negro is not certain. sadly lady hume does not mention him by name. but the circumstantial evidence is striking. there was clearly at least one moor in berwickshire in 1549: if it was not pedro negro, then who was it? if not pedro negro, then perhaps jacques granado, another mercenary, knighted by somerset a week after negro on 1 october 1547, at newcastle, whose name suggests he was from grenada, and whose arms include ‘a blackamoor’s head couped sable, wreathed argent’." (kaufmann)

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“The Anglo-Spanish connection led to a real but still relatively unnoticed result in 1501 when the Spanish princess arrived in England with her royal retinue that had several black people in it. These first black arrivals, mentioned casually in a letter of Ferdinand and Isabella to De Puebla, their ambassador in England, in the detailed lists of the Spanish personnel that the Princess Catherine was taking with her to England as her household staff, and shortly afterwards observed derisively by a youthful Thomas More watching the spectacle of the lavish city pageants put on to welcome what would be their new English queen and the proud, exotic train of her party, were innocuous figures, the objects of a mixed gaze. In the obtrusiveness of their unnamed mention in the Spanish royal letter, simply as ‘Two slaves to attend on the maids of honour,’ which is buried in the midst of a careful hierarchy of fifty-one waiting people and their specific assignments, above ‘servants,’ ‘officers,’ ‘chapel’ staff, ‘pages,’ ‘equerries,’ and ‘gentleman in waiting,’ but at the very bottom of the list of ‘maids of honour,’ high female companions, and attendants, these black figures, who are for that reason in all probability female, are proud advertisements of an ambitious Christian Spain’s recent imperial achievements. Those achievements are highlighted in Spain’s triumphant conquest of the last Moorish stronghold of Granada just nine years earlier, in 1492. This political history, which positions the two slaves as fitting accoutrements for a Spanish princess in her future foreign home, makes their black identity almost a certainty. This certainty is bolstered by the fact that since 1459 the word ‘slave’ (‘escravo’) in common Portuguese usage primarily if not exclusively denotes a black African, an identification that will in fact be confirmed by More’s description. At the same time, appearing as they do in meticulous monarchic arrangements for a royal teenage daughter’s future establishment, they are within their bondage, paradoxically, figures somewhat also of love. These black figures are arguably part of the fiercely protective love with which Catherine will try to look after her personal staff in the years of her pecuniary suffering both before and after each of her two marriages to Henry VII’s two sons. Catherine’s passionate generosity will be so marked in future years that it will prompt some historians even to dub the age as the ‘Age of Catherine of Aragon.’ In contrast, More’s English view cannot see them as anything more than ridiculous pomp. More’s description, which is otherwise fulsome in its praise of the young Spanish princess, is significant in that it shows many of the codes that will operate in the naming and conceptualization of black people over the rest of the century. While the geographic identifier ‘Ethiopian’ is onomastically typical in that it is geographically specific but not regionally precise — for More “Ethiopian” is a stand-in for African generally— it is one of the many such words that will be used to pejoratively designate black persons in England. Even if the identifier seems neutral, however, it already appears negatively marked with the trailing qualifier ‘pigmy,’ with which it is conversely linked, the resulting compound phrase itself being progressively arrived at from ‘ridiculous’ to ‘barefooted.’ The negative marking in the geographic identification is visible now, but will not always be so in later decades.”

— Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible

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More than a century after [Thomas, Earl of] Lancaster's execution, in 1466, Lancaster's tomb bled again. [...] While the main event in 1466 was the coronation of Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV, at Westminster, the answer probably lies elsewhere, in earlier events in Yorkshire. During 1464 Henry VI was humiliated by his adversaries in the north and was finally taken to the Tower of London: the humiliation of his pious name-bearer Henry VI, also at Pontefract, may have been a trigger for the 'bubbling up of blood'. The traumatic executions, at Exham, Newcastle, Middlham and York, of a later generation of Lancastrian supporters could have called to mind the wave of executions following the battle of Boroughbridge, of which Lancaster's was the most memorable: the significance for the dead earl's memory may have caused his blood to flow.

Danna Piroyansky, "Bloody Miracles of a Political Martyr: The Case of Thomas Earl of Lancaster", Studies in Church History , Volume 41: Signs, Wonders, Miracles Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church (2005)

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this book chapter suggesting elizabeth visited prince arthur's tomb because it might be one of the few familial tombs she can is so--

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"Her daughter Elizabeth made little mention of her mother, but her access to the royal library would have put her in contact with some of Anne’s material legacy. Elizabeth could have easily spent time with Anne’s marginalia."

— Michaela Baca, 'Thys Boke Ys Myn': Evolution of Queenly Literary Authority, 1460-1603

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“his choice in this portrait was not so much motivated by a wish to propose a moral to his sitter, but rather to emphasize the boldness of his concetto. presenting a jewel as a petrified body enhances the power of the artist, who can effect the same transformation on his sitter. as a result of his concetto the stone becomes a vivid metaphor of the metamorphosis operated by the portrait.”

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“John Croft, who served his cousin, Jane Seymour, struggled to find a foothold at court for many years after her death in 1537. Sir Wymond Carew, the late queen’s receiver-general, wrote on Croft’s behalf to Anthony Denny and John Gates, of the king’s Privy Chamber, so that he might be appointed as a gentleman waiter to Prince Edward, Jane’s son, ‘even without wages’. ‘I am bound to do for this gentleman, Mr. Croft, all I can’, Carew began, before reminding them that Croft had served Jane ‘honestly’, and the queen ‘did favour him well’.”

— James Taffe, Serving the Tudors

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‘From the 1530s on, there was a sense of a new world of possibilities. The mood had been encouraged by Henry's greatest minister, Thomas Cromwell, who had set bright young men to producing blueprints for the future in a number of areas: finance, law reform, building prosperity in farming and industry. Not many of these schemes came to anything, but the excitement remained, and there was a continuing link with the universities, particularly Cambridge. In the middle of most of Cromwell's projects was the word 'commonwealth'. Characteristically and repeatedly, the projectors had seen what they were doing in terms of the whole community's good. The evangelical dimension was provided by the fundamental Reformation critique of works theology: the medieval church had allowed ritual works to divert and waste people's instinct to do good. As Archbishop Cranmer put it in his 1548 visitation articles: people should 'that bestow upon the poor chest, which they were wont to bestow upon pardons, pilgrimages, trentals, masses satisfactory, decking of images, offering of candles, giving to friars, and other like blind devotions'. The social activism of the Cromwellian reformers represented the same refocusing of energy. The programme of projects and proposals for change and innovation in all areas of society continued after Cromwell's fall'.

- MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant

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Hence it happened once, that at Christmas time a certain great lord brought before him a dance or show of young ladies with bared bosoms who were to dance in that guise before the king, perhaps to prove him, or to entice his youthful mind. But the king was not blind to it, nor unaware of the devilish wile, and spurned the delusion, and very angrily averted his eyes, turned his back upon them, and went out to his chamber, saying: ‘Fy, fy, for shame, forsothe ye be to blame’. [...] The depiction of this episode fits into a longstanding tradition of the sexual trials and temptation of monastic heroes such as St Benedict and St Bernard of Clairvaux, right down to Henry’s ability to discern that this is devilish in origin, even a delusion. The life of St Benedict contains an almost identical episode in which an evil priest attempts (unsuccessfully) to corrupt the monks. As related by Caxton the priest ‘toke seuen maydens all naked / & sente them in to the gardyn to daunse & to carolle for to meue the monkes to temptacion’. Henry’s virtue allows him to turn his back on a spectacle which a lesser man would not have been able to resist. Moreover, he has the strength to do so simply by averting his eyes, turning away, and leaving, without having to resort to rolling in nettles, or submersing himself up to the neck in freezing water (standard remedies or self-inflicted punishments for lust in monastic hagiography). This hagiographic trope derived from monastic constructions of a manly religious identity, which used martial imagery to establish the superiority of monks (and subsequently clerics) to secular men. Chastity forms a significant element in the representation of other king saints and high status lay male saints too; for example Charles of Blois rarely shared his wife’s bed and Caxton explains that Louis was only persuaded to marry in order to safeguard the kingdom by providing an heir, and therefore implicitly not to satisfy his lust. A king saint’s chastity is therefore partly about purity, and partly about his ‘virilitas’: his strength as a leader. It is telling that contemporary didactic texts belonging to the Mirrors for Princes genre make explicit a point which is largely implied in saints’ lives, namely that the truly masculine man is the one who resists the flesh; the man who gives in renders himself unmanly: ‘. . . bowe not to þe vse of women, ffor swylk a vse ys a properte to swine . . . lychery ys distruccioun of body, shortynge of lyf, corypcioun of virtueȝ trespass of þe lawe, And hit engendrys women maners.’ Such invective, which appears frequently in the Mirrors, was at pains to establish that the sexually dissolute man could not be king, for he was unable to rule himself, let alone anyone else. Thus kingly chastity, in these contexts, was seen as desirable and admirable rather than anomalous and problematic. The implication of Blacman’s account may be that the ‘great lord’ was trying to turn Henry into his own definition of a ‘real man’, but Blacman seeks to show that Henry’s self-mastery is truly manly.

Katherine J. Lewis, "‘Imitate, too, this king in virtue, who could have done ill, and did it not’: Lay sanctity and the rewriting of Henry VI's manliness", Religious Men and Masculine Identity in the Middle Ages (The Boydell Press 2013)

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"One of the few letters to survive from (Jane Seymour)’s tenure as queen is an intercessory plea. On 23 November 1536, Jane wrote to Cromwell, asking him to be “good and favourable unto our trusty and wellbeloved Thomas Dudeley,” telling him that “you cannot do a better deed for the increase of your eternal reward in the world to come.” This Thomas Dudley has not been conclusively identified, and his service to the Queen remains unknown, but he might be the Thomas Dudley of Yanwath (c.1475–1549), whose son, John Dudley, would be an MP for Carlisle in 1553, and Helston in 1563. While Jane did not elaborate on the kind of ‘favour’ she envisioned Dudley receiving, the request stirred Cromwell into action, and on 18 May 1537, Dudley was granted a house in Aldgate, London, which was formerly part of Christchurch priory, and was worth thirteen shillings, four pence a year. Of these three acts of intercession, only the one on behalf of Dudley was successful, but by actively participating in one of the central roles of a queen consort, Jane was enhancing her saintly image—even if her husband sought to dissuade her."

-Aidan Norrie, "Jane Seymour: Saintly Queen", "Tudor and Stuart Consorts: Power, Influence and Dynasty"

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— virginia m. vaughan, a study in subversion and containment in king john: new perspectives, deborah curren-aquino (ed.)