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thornswithroses · 5 years

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I’ve been a ghost in this hellsite, and I decided to do a book questionnaire based on @dhaaruni‘s own take on the New Yorker’s “By the Book.”

Here we go.

What books are on your nightstand?

I used to keep what I’m currently reading on my nightstand, but unfortunately, said nightstand is too small for the number of books I am reading. Right now, the nightstand holds my sleeping mask, bookmarks in a box, hand cream, and my Himalayan salt lamp.

Marie Kondo has been a blessing for my bedroom, so I keep all the books that I have, including library books, on my shelves.

What’s the last book that really excited you?

Oh, so many. I’ve checked out from my library the Jacob Tobias memoir, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story. I am close to done with Patricia A. McKillip’s elegant Alphabet of Thorn. I also checked out We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter by Celeste Headlee. There is also California dreamin' by Penelope Bagieu.

And to show off just how often I abuse my library card, I also have on interlibrary loan: The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher, The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis, and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films by Kier-La Janisse.

I recently bought two titles that I am enthused to read as soon as I get the chance. Olivia Waite’s The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics and C.S.E. Cooney’s Desdemona and the Deep.

Now you can see what I meant about my nightstand being too small!

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

Oh, lord, too many to name! Angela Carter has been getting more notice as of late, but I still think she needs more recognition. I feel the same way about Caitlín R. Kiernan. I also think everybody should give Sarah Monette/Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor a try!

What book should everybody read before the age of 21?

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter.

What book would you recommend to people over 40?

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. I can’t say precisely how, but it feels like it captures the pain of youth. I think they should also read Francesca Lia Block. I think she captures what young women dream about and what they hurt over really well.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

C.S.E. Cooney is marvelous. I have also been enjoying Courtney Milan’s romances as well as her contemporaries’ works. There is Sarah Monette, Sarah Waters, Donna Tartt, Beverly Jenkins, so many women to admire. If anyone ever decries writing today as not being “good as it used to be,” they’re fucking hacks.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

When a character realizes they deserve better, especially if it’s a woman that recognizes this.

Do you prefer books that reach you emotionally or intellectually?

I think they have to be intelligent to know how to get to me emotionally. There is no distinct line between emotion and intelligence, in fact, it can be argued that you cannot have one without the other. Otherwise, intelligence just becomes a coldness, and emotionality becomes hysteria.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

I think Marie Kondo’s work really taught me to value the things I own. When I was doing the KonMari method, I discovered these birthday cards that my late grandfather had given to me as a child. They had been buried under useless papers that I never bothered to toss aside. It is scary to think about U.S. consumerism, but then again, I do have socialist leanings so hah.

Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I love romance. I am a romantic person, so I always get excited about romance in a romance novel, or within a horror story, fantasy, and so forth. I like reading about different relationships, such as siblings, parents-and-children, in-laws, friendships, and so forth. I think the complexities of human relations is essential to me as a reader.

I don’t like Westerns, I will be honest. I see them, and I think propaganda. I’m Mexican and Palestinian, and I can’t unsee the subtext of white people moving to the west, using God as a tool to justify taking from Native Americans. John Wayne is no hero.

I think the closest to a Western I have ever enjoyed was the anime, Trigun. And that deals with human beings of all backgrounds settling in a new planet, so there you go.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

My dad got me a book that was entire of Grimm’ fairy tales, from the famous ones to the least-known. And these stories were the version where Cinderella’s doves took out the eyes of her sisters. So, you can imagine how this influenced eight-year-old me to become the person I am today.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

Oh, this is hard. I’m going to have to give a cop-out answer and say there are too many to name.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I was a late-bloomer. All the kids in my first-grade class already knew to read since kindergarten. I did not. I had these two fantastic reading teachers that eventually taught me. I may have started later than all my classmates, but I ended up becoming more well-read than they did. I would go to the elementary school library three-to-four times a week to check out books. The librarians really enjoyed me.

I was bullied a lot growing up, so books were my way to heal. Francesca Lia Block’s Violet and Claire really shaped me as did fairy tales and Greek mythology. I also read Blood and Chocolate in middle school, and I had never met a main character as unapologetically sexual as Vivian. I think that book really influenced some of my feminism, despite its other issues. There was also The Witch from Blackbird Pond. Oh, and the Animorphs series. There was also the Babysitter’s Club books, which really made me want female friendships portrayed more often in other stories. A Corner of the Universe, which is also by Ann M. Martin, really impacted me--it is troubling how much I ended up relating to Adam in that story.

You’re a digital native, and your publisher describes you as “what Susan Sontag would have been like if she had brain damage from the internet.” Do you find it difficult to tune out distractions and sink into a book?

I do, mostly I blame it on graduate school burning me out. I also work full-time, so my brain sometimes just wants to shut off, and I look up stupid stuff on the Internet. I think I am getting a little better about it though. I try to clean my space as much as possible, and that helps clear my mind.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic. I mean, I did end up liking it, but not too much. I actually forgot most of the plot. I can say that I like Kell and Holland a lot. The rest of the book had great ideas and mostly good executions of those ideas, but the narrative had an air of superficiality that I just couldn’t get over. Also, I was legitimately frustrated by Lila Bard. She had to be one of the cheapest depictions of Strong Female Character I’ve seen in a long time. I couldn’t get into the Hunger Games either. I gave up on A Song of Ice and Fire halfway through.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

I don’t get embarrassed as much about that sort of thing these days. I do want to read Angela Carter’s entire bibliography one day. I also want to read the unread books on my shelves.

What do you plan to read next?

Angela Carter and some progressive Catholic works, hopefully.

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anneboleynresearch · 7 years

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“To the Roman Catholics, it was not just that in order to satisfy his lust Henry had displaced his rightful wife in favour of Anne Boleyn, and broken with the true Church. Anne herself was soon being blamed for what had happened. Reginald Pole claimed that she had never loved Henry and described her as ‘the cause of all evil’ and ‘the person who caused all this’. George Cavendish, in the confidence that God, through the accession of Mary, had restored right to rule to England, produced a series of Metricial Visions in which over forty victims of political disaster, from Wolsey onwards, lament their ill-fortune...

“By the accession of James I, an analysis preserved in the papers of those incorrigible recusants, the Treshams of Rushton, could attribute all the sufferings of Roman Catholics under Elizabeth I’s penal laws to the fact that Anne ‘did beget a settled hatred of them against her and hers’...

“Anne had been of ‘bad parentage, of bad fame afore her marriage, and afterwards executed for adultery.

“Very understandably, the descendants of Thomas More had a particularly nice line in insult...William Roper, the chancellor’s son-in-law, claimed that it was Anne’s personal vendetta against More which encouraged Henry to demand that he conform. It was More’s nephew, William Rastell, a religious exile and (briefly) judge of the court of Queen’s Bench, who gave currency in his lost Life of his uncle to the lie that Henry VIII was Anne Boleyn’s father. He also alleged -- with obvious echoes of Herodias, Salome, and Herod -- that Anne put on a great banquet for Henry at Hanworth where she ‘allured there the king with her dalliance and pastime to grant unto her request, to put the bishop [Fisher] and Sir Thomas More to death’. In this edition of More’s English works, Rastell even edited out remarks by Sir Thomas More which were favorable to the Queen...”

“That more should have recognized Anne as ‘really anointed queen’ was unthinkable; worse still, it must not be admitted that a saint had described a whore as ‘noble’. To Catholics, the deaths of Anne and those accused with her and, later, of Cromwell, ‘and most of all those who procured his death’ were blood sacrifices to expiate More’s murder...”

“Protestants told the opposite story. John Foxe staunchly defended both the queen’s morals and her religious commitment. He hints at the involvement of the papists in her fall and cannot resist assigning responsibility to his bete noire, the conservative champion, Stephen Gardiner...”

“Bishop John Aylmer...hailed Anne as ‘the crop and root’ of the Reformation whom ‘God had endued with wisdom that she could, and given her the mind that she would, do it’; John Bridges, writing in 1573, elevated Anne to the status of ‘a most holy martyr’.

“Protestant writers were not, however, always unanimous in praise of Anne Boleyn. William Thomas...who was to be Northumberland’s clerk of the privy council, and who was executed later for plotting Mary’s assassination, firmly maintained the official version of Anne’s guilt, even after Henry VIII’s death:

“[Anne’s] liberal life were so shameful to rehearse. Once she was a wise woman endued with as many outward good qualities in playing on instruments, singing and other courtly graces as few woman of her time, with such an outward profession of gravity as was to be marvelled at. But inward she was all another dame than she seemed to be; for in satisfying of her carnal appetite she fled not so much as the company of her own natural brother besides the company of three or four others of the gallantest gentlemen that were near about the king’s proper person -- drawn by her own devilish devices that it should seem she was always well occupied.

“A school of puritan opinion was prepared to imply that Henry’s second marriage was as much a matter of lust as principle:

“Whether he did it of an upright conscience or to serve his lusts I will not judge for in the burrows of man’s heart be many secret corners and it cannot be denied but that he was a very fleshy man, and no marvel for albeit his father brought him up in good learning yet after...he fell into all riot and overmuch love of women.

“As for Anne herself:

“This gentlewoman in proportion of body might compare with the rest of the ladies and gentlewomen of the court, albeit in beauty she was to many inferior, but for behavior, manners, attire, and tongue she excelled them all...But howsoever she outwardly appeared, she was indeed a very wilfull woman which perhaps might seem no fault because seldom women do lack it, but yet that and other things cost her dear.

“It is indeed noticeable that a number of writers seem almost reluctant to write about Anne Boleyn in any detail. Thus Holinshed remarked:

“Because I might rather say much than sufficiently enough in praise of this noble queen as well for her singular wit and other excellent qualities of mind as also for her favouring of learned men, zeal of religion and liberality in distributing alms in relief of the poor, I will refer the reader unto that which Mr. Foxe says.

“Foxe, however, had already referred to better-informed reports still to appear:

“...because touching the memorable virtues of this worthy queen, partly we have something before, partly because more also is promised to be declared of her virtuous life (the Lord permitting) by others who were then about her, I will cease in this matter further to proceed.

“No vindication of Anne Boleyn was ever published. Her chaplain, William Latymer, presented to her daughter an encomium on her religious activities, and the Scottish Lutheran, Alexander Ales, wrote an account of her fall, placing all blame on the enemies of the Reformation, but both men evidently had patronage in mind. Ales, indeed, included an address for any financial contributions Elizabeth would like to send. The reason for silence elsewhere is not far to seek. Few defenses of Anne Boleyn have been entirely happy. Any vindication of the wife was an implicit criticism of the husband; if Anne was ‘noble’, ‘virtuous’, and ‘worthy’, Henry had either been a monster or a gull.

“One of those who may have been concerned with a project for an official Elizabethan account of ‘the mother of our blessed Queen’ was George Wyatt of Boxley Abbey in Kent. One of the most assiduous of Anne’s defenders, Wyatt claimed that he had begun work at the request of an official biographer who asked him to set down what he knew of Anne Boleyn’s early years, and had continued it under the encouragement of the archbishop of Canterbury. With the accession of James, interest...had waned, leaving him to carry on alone. George had a strong person interest in vindicating the English Reformation in general and Anne Boleyn in particular; he was the youngest son (but also the heir) of Thomas Wyatt, the leader of the 1554 rebellion against Katherine of Aragon’s daughter, Mary I, and grandson of Thomas Wyatt, the poet who had been imprisoned in the Tower in 1536 as one of those suspected of involvement with the queen.

“George Wyatt devoted the latter part of his life not only to her biography but, as we have seen over the business of Anne’s alleged deformity, to an effort to reply specifically to the Catholic propagandist, Nicholas Sander. Sander was no original authority, but his Origins and Progress of the English Schism...had broadcast very effectively the scandalous stories about Anne which circulated in recusant circles. A typical example...is the story that after her miscarriage in January 1536, Anne committed incest with her brother in order to beget a son and so set up the Boleyn dynasty. In the end Wyatt was no more successful than others who had been publishing a defence of a queen, but more because of the grandiose nature of his plans than want of effort. Two, or possibly three, of his attempts have survive: the earliest a brief but completed ‘Life of Anne Boleigne’, the second a vindication of the relations between Anne and Thomas Wyatt the elder, which may not be by, but is certainly after, George Wyatt, and finally...the opening section of a massive ‘History of the English Reformation’.

“The purpose of what George does have to say about Anne is naively obvious. ‘Elect of God’, ‘heroical spirit’, ‘princely lady’ -- the adjectives abound.

“The fact that writers have agendas according to their religious alignments does not, however, make them valueless to the historian. The test is, did they have access to real sources of information? The line from Sander back to William Rastell is direct, but if we are to believe Sir Thomas More, he never discussed Anne with Rastell or anyone else, and the personal recollections of the members of his family were confined to his life outside the council and the court. They certainly breathe no word of More’s dangerous and sometimes highly secret encouragement of the opposition to the king’s divorce. On the other hand, even as the author of a Catholic account as full of picaresque invention as the mid-century Cronica del Rey Enrico Otavo de Inglaterra had from time to time access to genuine recollections -- for example, his report that Thomas Wyatt watched the execution of Anne’s alleged lovers in 1536, which was only confirmed in 1959 when a manuscript containing hitherto unknown Wyatt material was identified in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. As for George Wyatt, he had three particular sources to augment the material he collected about Anne: ‘some helps’ left by his grandfather, the poet, the recollections of his mother Jane, who had married in 1537 and lived to the end of the century, and the memories of Anne Gainsford, later the wife of George Zouche, gentleman pensioner and a target for Catholic investigation in Mary’s reign. Given such links, the volume of material Wyatt recorded is disappointing, but at least one important episode has independent warranty in other sources.

“The importance of persisting with material from partisan sources is well illuminated in the little which John Foxe does record about Anne. Undoubtedly Foxe wished to present Anne in a positive light, but he was equally aware that factual inaccuracy would lay him open to ridicule -- and so too the Protestantism he espoused. In consequence, he regularly revised his account of the queen as his data improved. In his first work, the Rerum in ecclesia gestarum...Commentarii written while he was still abroad, he was little more than hagiographical:

“There was at this time in the king’s court a young woman not of ignoble family, but much more ennobled by beauty, as well as being the most beautiful of all in true piety and character, Anne Boleyn, whom the king greatly loved, as she well merited, and took as his wife and queen.

“’The entire British nation’ he went on, was indebted to Anne, not only for her own contribution to the commencement of the Reformation but as the mother of Queen Elizabeth, who has revived it...

“Anne’s fate he refused to discuss, but he did include her scaffold speech as evidence of her ‘singular faith and complete modesty towards her king’. In 1563 Foxe, now back in England, was able to be more specific in the first edition of his great work, The Acts and Monuments, better known as The Book of Martyrs. He gave details of Anne’s charitable activity, her support of named scholars, the discipline she kept in her household, and her feeding of the reformist ideas of Simon Fish to the king. What is more, he cited sources, for example, Anne’s silk woman, Joan Wilkinson. Seven years later, a second edition added other stories and identified the material about Fish as having come from his widow. Foxe also included a rebuttal of Anne’s alleged offenses, along with the barbed comment that Henry’s immediate remarriage was ‘to such as wisely can judge upon cases occurrant, a great clearing of her’ -- as near to the knuckle as he dared to go. In the last edition (the fourth of 1583), he was able to tell of Anne’s support for Thomas Pastmore, the unorthodox parson of Much Hadham, almost certainly based on the text of a surviving petition. We also have an amount of material which Foxe assembled but did not use, or else abridged. Foxe’s overall purpose was to present Anne as a Protestant role model, but that is no reason ex hypothesi to discard material carefully collected, much of which can, in fact, be verified.

The problem of potential distortion is equally or more pressing with the one source that approaches anything like a regular commentary on English affairs. This is provided by the reports of resident foreign ambassadors, for, as well as regular domestic news reporting being unknown, Tudor monarchs were convinced that it was best for subjects to be told only what was good for them. The resident ambassador was a new breed in northern Europe. Only in the sixteenth century was it becoming generally recognized that a country needed to keep a representative at the court of an important neighbour, to watch over its own interests and to send back a steady flow of news. Older-style envoys continued to be sent to handle special negotiations, but there were now men stationed abroad and, according to the advice manuals, reporting back every few days, with monthly situation reports and, on their return, a relation or written debriefing. Theory did not turn out quite like that in practice, but a series of letters to the home government updating the situation every ten or twelve days -- which is what survives from the best-organized embassies -- is an outside commentary on affairs of unique value to the historian.

“The three principal embassies to England during Anne Boleyn’s career were from Venice, from France, and from the Holy Roman Empire. Venetian ambassadors were primarily concerned with trade questions and international relations...The French had a far greater interest in English domestic affairs, and for much of the time they might hope to keep Henry VIII from allying with Charles V. Anne, indeed, was sometimes wholly identified with French interests, almost another ambassador in residence. Yet the reports of Francis I’s representatives in London are frequently disappointing. Various reasons can be put foward for this. The French diplomat service...was...still in its infancy, and it has not received the editorial attention from modern historians which its reports need and deserve. What is more, the relative ease and greater safety of communication between the French and English courts may have encouraged the use of messengers for more difficult matters, rather than lengthy coded letters.

“Relations between London and Paris may...have been mainly at an official level, with the French ambassadors, representatives of the traditional enemy, finding it difficult to penetrate to non-government sources. In February 1535, when English suspicions of French treachery were running high, apparently even Anne Boleyn herself felt it was unwise to talk freely with Francis’ envoy, Gontier. There was also a sense in which the French took Anne Boleyn for granted. She was there by Henry’s will and they would use her, but policy was not determined by the need to support her position. Even more important, perhaps, was the brevity of French ambassadorial tours -- the 1533 resident was complaining after six months! This did not impede the ambassador’s representative duties, but it did limit his usefulness as a news-gatherer. Ambassadors tended to get better the longer they stayed. As a result in...1532, the year most critical for the English Reformation and for Anne herself, we have very little first-hand evidence from French sources. The ambassador, Giles de la Pommeraye, was new to the job but was gone within a year, and from 5 May to 17 June he was away in Brittany ‘consulting with his government’. He was a strong supporter of Henry’s wish for a divorce; he worked hand in glove with the king and his ministers, even helping them put out the official explanation for the anti-papal statute conditionally ending the payment of annates to Rome; above all, he was close to Anne. Yet none of this do we know from La Pommeraye himself.

“No contrast would be more marked than with the third of the principal foreign embassies resident in England. The Burgundian-Habsburg diplomat service was the oldest in northern Europe and the best organized -- essential in view of the far-flung territories in which Emperor Charles V had inherited and the issues he had to cope with. Furthermore, Charles was simply not interested in affairs in England because of their possible impact on his chronic rivalry with Francis I. He had a family interest in the treatment of his aunt, Katherine of Aragon, and the legitimacy of his cousin Mary. Thus, when it was suggested that the reports he received might contain too much about Henry’s marital problems, the emperor requested even more information. Not that Charles was allowing himself to be governed by sentiment; the traditional alliance with the Burgundian Low Countries would have powerful backing in England so long as Katherine could be supported as queen and Mary as the acknowledged heir.

“The sophistication of diplomatic technique and depth of interest goes some way to explaining the fullness and utility to historians of reports from the imperial embassy in England. Yet what really makes the difference is the identity of the ambassador. Eustace Chapuys, a lawyer from Annecy in Savoy, was not merely a highly efficient and assiduous envoy, writing between thirty and forty reports a year to the emperor, plus letters to his officers. Far more important was the length of time he spent in England; he arrived in 1529 and remained until almost the end of Henry VIII’s life, retiring only in 1545 at the age of 56. This continuous residence enabled Chapuys to overcome many of the obstacles in the way of an ambassador seeking news...It took time to discover sensitively placed individuals who would supply information, or servants who could go out freely enough to be able to verify reports. Moreover, funds did not stretch to the employment of many agents and...the real secrets were at court...The answer Chapuys adopted was the answer of the diplomatic manuals: speak French, make yourself persona grata with the elite, and news and contacts will come to you. And this is where his training and experience came in, and especially his standing as a humanist and a friend of Erasmus. A man of address, he was worth conversing with and soon passed everywhere. Even in times of Anglo-imperial tension when another envoy might expect to be cold-shouldered, Chapuys continued to be welcomed as an individual. Henry VIII clearly enjoyed sparring with this shrewd, brilliant, cynical cosmopolitan. And Chapuys soon discovered something else as he worked tirelessly for the cause of Katherine and Mary. He became the focus for all those who disliked what was going on, who believed as he did. Here was a ready-made set of contacts as anxious to give him news as he was to collect it. His ear became almost the confessional for the king’s critics, and Chapuys dabbled a good deal more deeply in English politics than the emperor either knew or would have sanctioned.

“The professionalism of Charles V’s envoys, and especially the personality of Eustace Chapuys, come to us clearly over the centuries, and it is easy to succumb to their authority. Friedmann went as far as to write that...’...they never gave an essentially false idea of the events they had to report.’ We must remember...there were pitfalls awaiting even the ablest ambassador, and disadvantages as well as advantages in Chapuys’ ready acceptance by English society, and especially by Anne’s opponents...his reporting on the court tends to derive from individuals who share a single point of view...and pass news with the gloss which that view gave. Thus, when Chapuys reports bad feelings between Anne and Henry he is relying on informants who wanted to believe that Anne was falling out of royal favour and were ready to see hopeful signs...many of those who spoke to him were out to serve their own agenda...An instance of this which is specially relevant to Anne is the series of conversations Cromwell had with Chapuys during the crises of 1536...the envoy was well aware that Henry and his ministers would be trying to ‘feed’ him...but evaluating private individuals was far more difficult...An ambassador could also let his own feelings mislead him...Ambassadors with Chapuys’ level of commitment can easily find themselves in the business of self-fulfilling prophecy. It is also true that however long he remained in England, Chapuys continued to see things through Habsburg eyes...thus his continual description of Anne Boleyn as ‘the concubine’ completely missed the point that to appreciate the situation in England as it actually was, it was vital to recognize that to Henry his marriage with Katherine had been, and would always be, a nullity. The ambassador’s failure to see this cost Katherine’s daughter dear in the summer of 1536.

“The inherent dangers in ambassadorial reports have led some scholars to play down their utility...The diplomatic reports of Eustace Chapuys...provide the only relatively continuous commentary on English politics and the royal court during the lifetime of Queen Anne; on particular episodes they are often the only evidence. Thus to dismiss them as inherently unreliable is to accept that we shall never know...The professionalism of the historian lies in reading such partisan material critically.

“The danger of distortion is much less acute with administrative records, always assuming these were not prepared for public consumption. They are...uninformative. Anne only became important in her mid-twenties and until then such material tells us no more about her than about other women of her age and class...Even when she did become prominent, even when she was queen, we continue to know almost as little of her day to day as we do of the other women in Henry VIII’s life. The first is the account of Henry’s private expenses which survives for just over three years from November 1529 to December 1532. This gives us a lively picture of the king’s disbursements on Anne’s behalf in the crucial period during which she was moving from being a recognized rival to Queen Katherine being queen herself in all but name...From the autumn of 1532, Anne was in receipt of a regular direct income -- first as lady marquis of Pembroke and then as queen -- and many of the costs previously borne by Henry would now have gone through her own accounts...The second important official source is...the inventory drawn up after Henry’s death. Despite the decade and more since Anne’s execution...it provides substantial evidence of her lifestyle, vivid details found nowhere else.

“Where significant information about Anne Boleyn is to be found, as so often for her contemporaries, is in judicial records. The most important is the material covering her trials and that of her alleged accomplices. This includes commissions, writs, lengthy indictments detailing the supposed offences, jury lists, and verdicts. After the trials these were all put in the Baga de Secretis -- the Tudor equivalent of the file marked “Top Secret” -- and they survive virtually intact. Other judicial material of value is the evidence which the Crown assiduously collected with a view to possible prosecution of Anne’s critics, evidence which provides a clear indication of her general lack of popularity and the gossip which circulated about her. Even post-mortem material can be of use...In the autumn of 1539 the reformer, George Constantine...set down his first-hand memories of the execution of Anne’s supposed lovers three years earlier. In all such evidence, it must be remembered that the deponent has an ulterior motive...

“Another obvious resource for the biographer might appear to be correspondence. Anne’s own letters are disappointing. Few have survived and most are strictly concerned with practicalities...There is...a letter she is supposed to have written to Henry VIII on 6 May 1536, after her committal to the Tower. It exists in many copies but none is contemporary, and although the tradition is that it was originally discovered among the papers of Thomas Cromwell, its ‘elegance’...has always inspired suspicion. It would appear to be wholly improbable for Anne to write that her marriage was built on nothing but the king’s fancy and that her incarceration was the consequence of Henry’s affection for Jane. Equally it would have been totally counterproductive for a Tudor prisoner in the Tower to warn the king...that he is in imminent danger of the judgement of God! There are practical objections, too. The ladies who watched Anne night and day in the Tower were charged with reporting all she said and did, but they made no mention of any such missive and it certainly could not have been smuggled out. Similar improbabilities must also rule Anne out as the author of the lament O Death, O Death, rock me on sleep, even though it existed at least by the start of Elizabeth’s reign...

“The scarcity of genuine letters from Anne is nothing to wonder at. Except in diplomacy or matters of exceptional importance, people at this period did not normally keep copies of letters they sent. Correspondence is generally known only if the original has survived in the papers of the recipient. Letters to the queen are...more plentiful and more revealing...the seventeen love-letters from Henry himself, ten in French and the rest in English, which have ended up...in the Vatican. These letters have no dates; although some belong to the summer and autumn of 1528, there is...no firm agreement about the order in which they were written. Letters between third parties are also valuable, particularly to and from correspondents within court circles such as Lord Lisle, the governor of Calais, and his wife, but with one proviso: communicating political information or gossip could get people into serious trouble, so that sensitive material was normally conveyed by word of mouth.

“...a number of eyewitness accounts have survived of several episodes in Anne Boleyn’s career...These are...confined to the more public events, from her creation as marchioness of Pembroke in September 1532 to her execution in the Tower three years and nine months later...they are the subject to the prejudices of the various eyewitnesses...

“An additional complication arises when first-hand reports have been worked into consciously produced pieces of literature. One example...is the poetry of George Cavendish. From about 1522 until the cardinal’s death in 1530, Cavendish was one of his gentlemen ushers...but he wrote in Mary’s reign, long after the event...there are some nuggets of value, but the 365 lines covering Anne and her alleged lovers, one after another, contain fewer than twenty points of substance...Furthermore, given that theme is again the fickleness of Fortune, it casts Anne Boleyn as the agent of ‘Venus the insatiate goddess’, called in by Fortune to ‘bate’ Wolsey’s ‘high port’ and humble him to dust.

“Another notable literary source is Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of York and Lancaster...better known as Hall’s Chronicle...who did see much of what he described and tried to investigate more...the finished narrative (to 1532) has only three isolated sentences about Anne, and a short paragraph about her dancing with Francis I at Calais. The rest of the book...has two sentences about Anne’s marriage, another about her pregnancy, a long description of her coronation (in which Hall was involved), details of the birth and christening of Elizabeth, terse reports of Anne’s reaction to Katherine of Aragon’s death, and of her own subsequent miscarriage, six final sentences on her condemnation and a brief version of her speech on the scaffold. Perhaps if Hall had lived to write the material in final form himself we would have had more, but a hint in one passage suggests that he intended to gloss over Anne’s marriage as something on which ‘the king was not well counselled’. A ‘Chronicle’ which is truer to the style of London chronicles...is that of Charles Wriothesley, Windsor Herald...It is immediate -- items were recorded as or soon after they occurred -- and also well-informed since the author was close to government and took part in some of the events he describes.

“The literary account which is closest in time to the events described is the Histoire de Anne Boleyn Jadis Royne d’Angleterre, the French metrical account of Anne’s trial and execution by Lancelot de Carles which we have already encountered. It was completed 2 June 1536, a bare fortnight after her death...although de Carles did not himself witness the trial of Anne and her brother, he was in London at the time; he could have attended the trial of the commoners accused, and undoubtedly had contact with well-informed eyewitnesses...de Carles’ account has been assumed to have original authority...The true source of his information was made clear when research revealed that a presentation copy of his poem, sent to Henry VIII, was listed as a ‘French book written in form of a tragedy by one Carle being attendant and near the ambassador’...in other words, de Carles wrote on the basis of what was known by the French embassy, and the principal source for this would have been the English government. It is therefore no surprise that de Carles’ account agrees with the information Cromwell had sent to Henry’s ambassadors in Paris on 14 May...The Histoire is...the government line in translation...De Carles’ imaginatively elaborated the queen’s response to being found guilty in fifty lines of verse. Her scaffold speech, too, is enhanced and distorted...

“Paul Friedmann closed his magisterial two-volume study, Anne Boleyn: A Chapter of English History, 1527-1536, with the depressing comment: ‘my object has been to show that very little is known of the events of those times, and that the history of Henry’s first divorce and of the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn has still to be written.’ The sources available today...suggest that we no longer need to be as pessimistic. True, there have been no block discoveries since Friedmann’s day, but...valuable new evidence has come to light piecemeal, and despite their distortions and irregularities, the bits and pieces do add up...historical research has transformed our reading of the period; the context into which evidence, old and new, has to be placed is far better understood...we can now see Anne as an active, three-dimensional, proactive participant.

“...The sources for the life of Anne Boleyn stop short of that level of inner documentation which biography ideally requires. Only at a handful of points in the story do we know anything of what Anne thought. Only in Henry’s love letters and in remarks scrawled in the Book of Hours do we know for certain what they said to each other...The limitations are galling, given the fascination Anne Boleyn and her story have continued to exercise over the intervening centuries, and many have concluded that only artistic imagination will bring us to the truth...”

#sources #anne boleyn #eric ives #ives

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump gets some of his worst marks from the American people when it comes to his handling of climate change, and majorities believe the planet is warming and support government actions that he has sometimes scoffed at.

While the administration has rolled back regulations to cut emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from power and industrial plants and pushed for more coal use, wide shares of Americans say they want just the opposite, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

About two out of three Americans say corporations have a responsibility to combat climate change, and a similar share also say it’s the job of the U.S. government.

But 64% of Americans say they disapprove of Trump’s policies toward climate change while about half that many say they approve. That 32% approval of his climate policies is the lowest among six issue areas that the poll asked about, including immigration (38 and health care (37%).

Ann Florence, a 70-year-old retiree and self-described independent from Jonesborough, Tennessee, said she faults Trump on climate change “because he doesn’t believe it’s happening. It is changing if he would just look at what’s happening.”

While a majority of Republicans do approve of Trump’s performance on climate change, his marks among the GOP on the issue are slightly lower compared with other issues. Meanwhile, 7% of Democrats and 29% of independents approve of Trump on climate change.

Ricky Kendrick, a 30-year-old in Grand Junction, Colorado, said he is contemplating leaving the Republican Party, partly over its denial of climate change.

“They don’t see it as a priority at all,” Kendrick, a hardware salesman in the heart of western Colorado’s energy belt, complained of the president and his party. “There are some (weather) things happening that I’ve never seen before. … Something’s changing.”

He was alarmed at Trump’s departure from the Paris climate accord and wants the U.S. to reduce offshore drilling, end subsidies for fossil fuels and ramp up those for renewable energy.

While the poll finds about half of Americans want to decrease or eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels, a similar share say subsidies for renewable energy should be increased.

But will Trump’s climate change denial — often voiced in tweets — matter in 2020?

“Climate has not historically been what people vote on, but I think the tides are changing on that,” said University of Maryland sociologist Dana Fisher, who studies the environmental movement.

She said her research shows that young people, who don’t vote in large numbers, are activated by climate change.

Climate change is becoming more of a national priority among Democrats but not Republicans, said Tony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. It might make a difference in a close race, he said.

According to the AP VoteCast survey, 7% of voters in the 2018 midterm election called the environment the top issue facing the country. By contrast, 26% said health care was the top issue, 23% said immigration and 18% said the economy and jobs. Democratic voters were far more likely than Republican voters to call the environment the top issue, 12% to 2%.

In the new poll, roughly three out of four Americans say they believe climate change is happening and a large majority of those think humans are at least partly to blame. In total, 47% of all Americans say they think climate change is happening and is caused mostly or entirely by human activities; 20% think it’s caused about equally by human activities and natural changes in the environment; and 8% think it’s happening but is caused mostly or entirely by natural changes in the environment.

There’s a large gap between partisans on the issue. Ninety-two percent of Democrats say climate change is happening, and nearly all of those think it’s caused at least equally by human activity and natural changes in the environment. While more than half of Republicans, 56%, say they think climate change is happening, only 41% think human activities are a factor.

Americans are slightly more likely to favor taxing the use of carbon-based fuels than to oppose it, 37% to 31%. If that revenue is turned into a tax rebate to all Americans, approval ticks up to 43%.

About two-thirds of Americans also favor regulating carbon emissions from power and industrial plants.

People say they are more likely to oppose than favor expanding offshore drilling (39% vs. 32, allowing more use of hydraulic fracking to extract oil and natural gas (45% vs. 22%) and building new nuclear power plants (43% vs. 26%).

Compared with five years ago, Americans are somewhat more positive toward policies focused on renewable energy and somewhat more negative toward those that extract oil and gas. In November 2014, 66% of Americans favored funding research into renewable energy sources, while nearly 80% do so today.

“We don’t need coal and oil anymore,” said Brenda Perry, a 77-year-old retired hotel executive and Democrat living in Plymouth, Massachusetts. “We have other ways of doing energy.”

Rodney Dell, 65, likes that Trump has resisted what Dell sees as panic about the climate.

“His direction is correct,” Dell, a Republican who runs a distribution warehouse, said of the president. “I think the climate policies are overblown a lot.”

Still, Dell, of Irving, Texas, worked in his youth assembling solar panels and is proud that his local library is 100% powered by renewables. He wants more subsidies for green energy and less offshore drilling.

“If you can do something to conserve energy by using the sun and the wind that’s there every day, it’d be ridiculous not to use them,” he said.

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,058 adults was conducted Aug. 15-18 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and later were interviewed online or by phone.

BY SETH BORENSTEIN, NICHOLAS RICCARDI and HANNAH FINGERHUT – Sept 12. 2019

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Riccardi reported from Denver.

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Online:

AP-NORC Center: http://www.apnorc.org/

AP-NORC Poll: Trump Gets Some Of his Worst Grades On Climate WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump gets some of his worst marks from the American people when it comes to his handling of climate change, and majorities believe the planet is warming and support government actions that he has sometimes scoffed at.

#AP-NORC Poll #Climate #climate change #Trump&039;s Worst Grades

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