http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSosx-oZT5U
Henry, the second son of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, was born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich Palace. After the death of his elder brother Arthur in 1502, Henry became heir to the English throne. Henry was obsessed with his health and the health of those around him. He was justified in being paranoid about this because of not having a male heir or the risk of leaving his kingdom to a tiny baby. He laid out rules and regulations ensuring everyone at court must be healthy. Even a sniffle wouldn't be tolerated. People would retire from court at the slightest possibility of anything unhealthy. Combine this with the believe that disease was carried through the smells and miasmas of the air, and you need to keep things clean and healthy. Now, we're not talking hospital sterility here but still...The rooms at court would be kept as sweet smelling as possible and so would the people. There's common sense in a lot of it actually, because if you smell bad, the chances are you're carrying bacteria somewhere..
many of the wives were meticulous about their cleanliness (Kateryn Parr is interesting, using cinnamon lozenges and all sorts to stay smellling sweet) but also there are the laundresses.
The important layer, no matter what class you are, was the linen. This sat next to the skin and that's where all the bacteria would sit. It would be changed daily, if not two or three times a day if needed. It could be sanitised very easily by boiling lye (water run through ashes normally). The outer garments would be regularly changed for activities like riding and dancing (which would raise a sweat), aired, brushed down and have sweetsmelling herbs burnt around them to air them out properly.Stains would be carefully treated individually, depending on what they were from.
The old myth of Elizabeth taking one bath a year is actually a misunderstanding. To bathe in this way (full emersion etc) was often something a doctor would recommend as part of treatment. That doesn't mean they didn't wash - do you take a full bath everyday?Not many people do, they shower or thoroughly wash. There is no reason to doubt (and many reasons to believe) that the Tudor Courtiers at least, washed everyday. They had to! Their careers depending on keeping the king happy. Smelly courtier = unhappy king!
King of England
When Henry VII died in 1509, this popular eighteen-year-old prince, known for his love of hunting and dancing, became King Henry VIII. Soon after he obtained the papal dispensation required to allow him to marry his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon.
In the first years of his reign Henry VIII effectively relied on Thomas Wolsey to rule for him, and by 1515 Henry had elevated him to the highest role in government: Lord Chancellor.
In 1521 Pope Leo X conferred the title of Defender of the Faith on Henry for his book 'Assertio Septem Sacramentorum', which affirmed the supremacy of the Pope in the face of the reforming ideals of the German theologian,
Martin Luther.
The king was never alone. He slept with servants in the room, he ate with servants in the room, he even used the toilet with servants in the room. In fact, there was one lucky high born noble that was hand selected by the king, as he was to be a very trustworthy man, to actually wipe the king’s rear after a bowel movement - this man was referred to as the Groom of the Stool.
Henry VIII's early military campaigns began when he joined Pope Julius II's Holy League against France in 1511. Wolsey proved himself to be an outstanding minister in his organisation of the first French campaign and while the Scots saw this war as an opportunity to invade England, they were defeated at Flodden in 1513.
However war with France
ultimately proved expensive and unsuccessful.
Henry VIII is known as the 'father of the Royal Navy.' When he became king there were five royal warships. By his death he had built up a navy of around 50 ships. He refitted several vessels with the latest guns including the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545.
Henry also built the first naval dock in Britain at Portsmouth and in 1546 he established the Navy Board. This set up the administrative machinery for the control of the fleet.
A male heir
Henry was acutely aware of the importance of securing a male heir during his reign. He was worried that he had only one surviving child, Mary, to show for his marriage to Catherine, who was now in her 40s. So the king asked Cardinal Wolsey to appeal to Pope Clement VII for an annulment and it soon became clear he wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, who had been a lady-in-waiting to his first wife.
But, unwilling to anger Catherine of Aragon's nephew – the most powerful ruler in Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
– the Pope
refused. Thomas Wolsey's
ascendancy was cut short by this failure.Our ideas about Anne Boleyn’s looks tend to fall into two equally inaccurate categories. The movies and television have taught us that she was a ravishing beauty, a la Natalie Dormer. Yet mythology surrounding Anne describes her as six-fingered and sallow, covered with disfiguring moles, sometimes with three nipples. In the “Corpus Christi” festival in parts of Spain, even today, she is depicted in floats as a monster riding on Satan’s back. Which should we believe? The answer is: neither.Anne’s looks were generally not rated among her greatest assets. “Reasonably good-looking” pronounced John Barlow, one of Anne’s favorite clerics. “Not one of the handsomest women in the world” reported the Venetian diplomat, Francesco Sanuto, who praised her dark eyes but criticized her flat chest and “swarthy complexion.” Both Elizabeth Blount and Anne’s sister Mary,
who had both been Henry’s mistresses, were regarded as more beautiful, as they typified the medieval ideal of the blue-eyed blonde, with skin so fair and translucent one could see blue veins through it. The ideal combined equal parts of Virgin Mary and Botticelli’s (1486) powerfully sexual Venus,
both of whom, at the time, were always pictured as blondes. So were all the heroines of the literature of courtly love, from Iseult to Guinevere.
Light-haired women were also considered to be more “cheerful and submissive” (very desirable.)Anne’s looks were generally not rated among her greatest assets.But Shakespeare said this
In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on Nature's power,
Fairing the foul with Art's false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland'ring creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.
Anne was not seriously deformed, nor was she a conventional beauty (by the standards of her own times). She was something far more interesting than either of those—a reminder that beauty, far from being cast in an unchanging, Platonic mold, is the human body moving through history, accepting or challenging the rules of its time and place. Sometimes, the prevailing rules of beauty are ripe for changing. When Anne came back from France to the English court, English culture was on the cusp of the Renaissance, caught between rigid religious ideology and humanist values, English customs and the discovery of other cultures that knew a thing or two, courtly love and “modern” romance. Perhaps England—or at the very least, Henry–was ready for something new.
The Trobriand Islanders
called eyes “the gateways of erotic desire,” and spent more time decorating them than any other part of the body. The use of kohl to line and accentuate was common in the Middle East. But proper English ladies did not brazenly provoke, issuing a sexual invitation; they submitted, casting their eyes downward. Not Anne, apparently. Nearly every commentator mentions her eyes, not just “black and beautiful,” (according to Sanuto, who was not a supporter) but sexually artful. The French diplomat Lancelot de Carles, who later brought the news of her execution to France, was—being French—more lavish and precise in his description of Anne’s “most attractive” eyes,
In 1533, Henry VIII broke with the church and married the now pregnant Anne Boleyn in a secret ceremony. Henry was excommunicated by the Pope. The English reformation had begun.
After Wolsey's downfall, Thomas Cromwell became Henry's chief minister and earned the confidence of the King by helping him to break with Rome and establish Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. This act also brought him much needed wealth through the dissolution of the well-funded monasteries. Over four years Cromwell ordered that 800 monasteries be disbanded and their lands and treasures taken for the crown.
The cultural and social impact was significant, as much of the land was sold to the gentry and churches and monasteries were gutted and destroyed. Henry's personal religious beliefs remained Catholic, despite the growing number of people at court and in the nation who had adopted Protestantism.
Anne Boleyn
Crucially, her rise was a question of timing, coinciding with the
king's resolution to divorce his first wife Catherine of Aragon
and
remarry.
Catherine's menopause occurred around 1525, after seven childless years, convincing him that she would not bear him a male heir.
By 1527 Anne had secured Henry's attention, which she maintained by refusing to become his mistress. The following year the king told Cardinal Campeggio, the papal legate, that he had not had intercourse with Catherine for two years, although they shared a bed for the sake of appearances.
Was Henry celibate for the entire six years, from 1526 until the end of 1532, when Anne finally succumbed?
No doubt he was enthralled by Anne and their letters testify to their passion and a degree of intimacy but according to Amy Licence, author of a fascinating book examining the sex lives of the Tudors in unprecedented detail, any suggestion of abstinence seems hard to believe.
"Barely months after their marriage, after Anne's pregnancy was apparent, Henry was seeking out other women," she claims.
For Anne's part she wrote that he had "neither vigour nor virtue" in his sexual performance. But the flirtatious and incestuous hot-house of the Tudor court encouraged love affairs and secret liaisons to flourish.
DID this king, with his reputation for leading a "lewd life" and his well known love of women, really refrain from having even casual encounters with the lower-class females with whom aristocratic men were expected to find relief?
"It seems implausible yet few historians have questioned this," says Licence.
An episode at the end of 1537, after Jane Seymour, his third wife, had entered her confinement, illustrates how Henry was prepared to initiate relationships with women who took his fancy.
One William Webbe had been out riding with his lover a month before when the king came upon them, desired the woman, kissed her and "took her from him" to live in avowtry (adultery) where she remained. And age meant nothing then, King Henry VIII started having sex with Bessie Blount (born 1500) when
she was only about 14 years old. As a young girl, she came to the King's
Court as a maid-of-honour to the King's wife, Catherine of Aragon. It
was there that the young teenager caught the eye of the King and became
his mistress, beginning sometime around 1514 or 1515, and continuing for
approximately eight years.There was no legal age for marriage and many girls aged 14 would have
got married at that age. In the homes of the poor, there was almost a
rush to marry off daughters as it was believed that once they reached a
certain age – about 14 – they would have been seen as being too old for
marrying off and therefore a liability at home - one extra mouth to feed
and no extra income coming into the house
Romantic, chaste devotion to Anne, the woman he hoped to make his
second wife, would not necessarily preclude such behaviour for a king
such as Henry.
The sheer volume of rumours suggest that he was very sexually
active. The reports of his having illegitimate children such as Thomas
Stucley, Richard Edwardes and a daughter named Ethelreda, all born in
the late 1520s, would suggest he had numerous flings.
Yet between 1526 and 1532 Anne denied Henry full consummation. A degree of physical intimacy is suggested by their letters but it is clear they stopped short of the final act, increasing his desire and frustration.
But the numerous royal hunting lodges and country manor houses must have provided him with opportunities elsewhere. The king could also rely on the discretion of those involved.
Since the age of 17 Henry had been secure in the affections of
the women of his choosing. After all he was the king; no matter how long
they may resist, few could deny the benefits of an association with
him, either as a short-term mistress or more permanent fixture.
"Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour won their status by holding out for their position in the full intention of the ultimate surrender," says Licence.
During marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry was a devout, traditional Catholic. The strict pre-Reformation line on adultery and illegitimacy couldn't have been clearer: fornication (sex outside marriage or purely for pleasure) was against religious teaching.
A practical method of cooling desire involved cooked lettuce leaves.
Intercourse within marriage was acceptable only for the procreation of children and the penalties for transgression of these rules were harsh and public: severe corporal punishment and fines.
But this didn't square with the reality of marriage at the time. The majority of the Tudor aristocracy took part in arranged unions during their mid to late teens. These were primarily for political, dynastic and financial advancement.
Romantic love and sexual satisfaction were often sought elsewhere. In this regard Henry was out of step with the attitudes of his time.
"He was a romantic, driven by chivalric impulse and in a very
modern sense wished to enter into a companionate marriage and be in love
with his spouse who would be his confidante as well as his bedfellow,"
explains Licence.
Yet for all this his head was frequently turned by a pretty face.
The double standards of the age allowed men to conduct relations with prostitutes or lower-class women, who were considered more sexually gratifying, while aristocratic females were expected to be above reproach in their conduct.
But within the intense, highly charged Tudor court, illicit physical attraction was inevitable. Each of the king's wives surrounded herself with attendant ladies, often beautiful and high-born young women with whom it was possible to flirt in the palace gardens or snatch an embrace from during late-night feasting.
During his earliest marriages this was traditionally the pool from which Henry selected his next wife: Anne Boleyn had served Catherine of Aragon, and Jane Seymour had served Anne.
When temptation occurred, especially among the unmarried courtiers, the "correct" religious or moral choices were either abstinence and avoidance, or submission.
In practice many gave in to temptation. The obvious exception to this was having an affair with the king, the honour and financial advantage of which could outweigh any social stigma.
To bear a sovereign's child, even an illegitimate one, could be the making of a woman and her family
QUESTIONS If you could pick an actress to play Anne—other than those who have done so already—who would it be?
2.Was Henry like Hitler?
3. Were the people dirty then, how did they clean themselves
4.How many people did Henry kill
5.Was Henry a loving man or merely someone who desired women who took his fancy and then got rid of them.
6. Is intelligence more interesting than looks,
as we see with Anne
Henry, the second son of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, was born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich Palace. After the death of his elder brother Arthur in 1502, Henry became heir to the English throne. Henry was obsessed with his health and the health of those around him. He was justified in being paranoid about this because of not having a male heir or the risk of leaving his kingdom to a tiny baby. He laid out rules and regulations ensuring everyone at court must be healthy. Even a sniffle wouldn't be tolerated. People would retire from court at the slightest possibility of anything unhealthy. Combine this with the believe that disease was carried through the smells and miasmas of the air, and you need to keep things clean and healthy. Now, we're not talking hospital sterility here but still...The rooms at court would be kept as sweet smelling as possible and so would the people. There's common sense in a lot of it actually, because if you smell bad, the chances are you're carrying bacteria somewhere..
many of the wives were meticulous about their cleanliness (Kateryn Parr is interesting, using cinnamon lozenges and all sorts to stay smellling sweet) but also there are the laundresses.
The important layer, no matter what class you are, was the linen. This sat next to the skin and that's where all the bacteria would sit. It would be changed daily, if not two or three times a day if needed. It could be sanitised very easily by boiling lye (water run through ashes normally). The outer garments would be regularly changed for activities like riding and dancing (which would raise a sweat), aired, brushed down and have sweetsmelling herbs burnt around them to air them out properly.Stains would be carefully treated individually, depending on what they were from.
The old myth of Elizabeth taking one bath a year is actually a misunderstanding. To bathe in this way (full emersion etc) was often something a doctor would recommend as part of treatment. That doesn't mean they didn't wash - do you take a full bath everyday?Not many people do, they shower or thoroughly wash. There is no reason to doubt (and many reasons to believe) that the Tudor Courtiers at least, washed everyday. They had to! Their careers depending on keeping the king happy. Smelly courtier = unhappy king!
King of England
When Henry VII died in 1509, this popular eighteen-year-old prince, known for his love of hunting and dancing, became King Henry VIII. Soon after he obtained the papal dispensation required to allow him to marry his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon.
In the first years of his reign Henry VIII effectively relied on Thomas Wolsey to rule for him, and by 1515 Henry had elevated him to the highest role in government: Lord Chancellor.
In 1521 Pope Leo X conferred the title of Defender of the Faith on Henry for his book 'Assertio Septem Sacramentorum', which affirmed the supremacy of the Pope in the face of the reforming ideals of the German theologian,
The king was never alone. He slept with servants in the room, he ate with servants in the room, he even used the toilet with servants in the room. In fact, there was one lucky high born noble that was hand selected by the king, as he was to be a very trustworthy man, to actually wipe the king’s rear after a bowel movement - this man was referred to as the Groom of the Stool.
Henry VIII's early military campaigns began when he joined Pope Julius II's Holy League against France in 1511. Wolsey proved himself to be an outstanding minister in his organisation of the first French campaign and while the Scots saw this war as an opportunity to invade England, they were defeated at Flodden in 1513.
However war with France
ultimately proved expensive and unsuccessful. Henry VIII is known as the 'father of the Royal Navy.' When he became king there were five royal warships. By his death he had built up a navy of around 50 ships. He refitted several vessels with the latest guns including the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545.
Henry also built the first naval dock in Britain at Portsmouth and in 1546 he established the Navy Board. This set up the administrative machinery for the control of the fleet.
A male heir
Henry was acutely aware of the importance of securing a male heir during his reign. He was worried that he had only one surviving child, Mary, to show for his marriage to Catherine, who was now in her 40s. So the king asked Cardinal Wolsey to appeal to Pope Clement VII for an annulment and it soon became clear he wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, who had been a lady-in-waiting to his first wife.
But, unwilling to anger Catherine of Aragon's nephew – the most powerful ruler in Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
– the Pope
refused. Thomas Wolsey's who had both been Henry’s mistresses, were regarded as more beautiful, as they typified the medieval ideal of the blue-eyed blonde, with skin so fair and translucent one could see blue veins through it. The ideal combined equal parts of Virgin Mary and Botticelli’s (1486) powerfully sexual Venus, both of whom, at the time, were always pictured as blondes. So were all the heroines of the literature of courtly love, from Iseult to Guinevere. Light-haired women were also considered to be more “cheerful and submissive” (very desirable.)Anne’s looks were generally not rated among her greatest assets.But Shakespeare said this
In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on Nature's power,
Fairing the foul with Art's false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland'ring creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.
Anne was not seriously deformed, nor was she a conventional beauty (by the standards of her own times). She was something far more interesting than either of those—a reminder that beauty, far from being cast in an unchanging, Platonic mold, is the human body moving through history, accepting or challenging the rules of its time and place. Sometimes, the prevailing rules of beauty are ripe for changing. When Anne came back from France to the English court, English culture was on the cusp of the Renaissance, caught between rigid religious ideology and humanist values, English customs and the discovery of other cultures that knew a thing or two, courtly love and “modern” romance. Perhaps England—or at the very least, Henry–was ready for something new.
The Trobriand Islanders
called eyes “the gateways of erotic desire,” and spent more time decorating them than any other part of the body. The use of kohl to line and accentuate was common in the Middle East. But proper English ladies did not brazenly provoke, issuing a sexual invitation; they submitted, casting their eyes downward. Not Anne, apparently. Nearly every commentator mentions her eyes, not just “black and beautiful,” (according to Sanuto, who was not a supporter) but sexually artful. The French diplomat Lancelot de Carles, who later brought the news of her execution to France, was—being French—more lavish and precise in his description of Anne’s “most attractive” eyes,In 1533, Henry VIII broke with the church and married the now pregnant Anne Boleyn in a secret ceremony. Henry was excommunicated by the Pope. The English reformation had begun.
After Wolsey's downfall, Thomas Cromwell became Henry's chief minister and earned the confidence of the King by helping him to break with Rome and establish Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. This act also brought him much needed wealth through the dissolution of the well-funded monasteries. Over four years Cromwell ordered that 800 monasteries be disbanded and their lands and treasures taken for the crown.
The cultural and social impact was significant, as much of the land was sold to the gentry and churches and monasteries were gutted and destroyed. Henry's personal religious beliefs remained Catholic, despite the growing number of people at court and in the nation who had adopted Protestantism.
Anne Boleyn
IT IS not clear exactly when Henry VIII fell in love with Anne Boleyn. The passionate love letters he wrote, dating from 1527-8, leave little doubt that by then his feelings for her were genuine, as was his desire to make her his wife.
and
remarry.Catherine's menopause occurred around 1525, after seven childless years, convincing him that she would not bear him a male heir.
By 1527 Anne had secured Henry's attention, which she maintained by refusing to become his mistress. The following year the king told Cardinal Campeggio, the papal legate, that he had not had intercourse with Catherine for two years, although they shared a bed for the sake of appearances.
Was Henry celibate for the entire six years, from 1526 until the end of 1532, when Anne finally succumbed?
No doubt he was enthralled by Anne and their letters testify to their passion and a degree of intimacy but according to Amy Licence, author of a fascinating book examining the sex lives of the Tudors in unprecedented detail, any suggestion of abstinence seems hard to believe.
The sheer volume of rumours suggest that he was very sexually active
For Anne's part she wrote that he had "neither vigour nor virtue" in his sexual performance. But the flirtatious and incestuous hot-house of the Tudor court encouraged love affairs and secret liaisons to flourish.
DID this king, with his reputation for leading a "lewd life" and his well known love of women, really refrain from having even casual encounters with the lower-class females with whom aristocratic men were expected to find relief?
An episode at the end of 1537, after Jane Seymour, his third wife, had entered her confinement, illustrates how Henry was prepared to initiate relationships with women who took his fancy.
One William Webbe had been out riding with his lover a month before when the king came upon them, desired the woman, kissed her and "took her from him" to live in avowtry (adultery) where she remained.
Romantic, chaste devotion to Anne, the woman he hoped to make his
second wife, would not necessarily preclude such behaviour for a king
such as Henry.Yet between 1526 and 1532 Anne denied Henry full consummation. A degree of physical intimacy is suggested by their letters but it is clear they stopped short of the final act, increasing his desire and frustration.
But the numerous royal hunting lodges and country manor houses must have provided him with opportunities elsewhere. The king could also rely on the discretion of those involved.
"Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour won their status by holding out for their position in the full intention of the ultimate surrender," says Licence.
During marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry was a devout, traditional Catholic. The strict pre-Reformation line on adultery and illegitimacy couldn't have been clearer: fornication (sex outside marriage or purely for pleasure) was against religious teaching.
Intercourse within marriage was acceptable only for the procreation of children and the penalties for transgression of these rules were harsh and public: severe corporal punishment and fines.
But this didn't square with the reality of marriage at the time. The majority of the Tudor aristocracy took part in arranged unions during their mid to late teens. These were primarily for political, dynastic and financial advancement.
Romantic love and sexual satisfaction were often sought elsewhere. In this regard Henry was out of step with the attitudes of his time.
The double standards of the age allowed men to conduct relations with prostitutes or lower-class women, who were considered more sexually gratifying, while aristocratic females were expected to be above reproach in their conduct.
But within the intense, highly charged Tudor court, illicit physical attraction was inevitable. Each of the king's wives surrounded herself with attendant ladies, often beautiful and high-born young women with whom it was possible to flirt in the palace gardens or snatch an embrace from during late-night feasting.
During his earliest marriages this was traditionally the pool from which Henry selected his next wife: Anne Boleyn had served Catherine of Aragon, and Jane Seymour had served Anne.
When temptation occurred, especially among the unmarried courtiers, the "correct" religious or moral choices were either abstinence and avoidance, or submission.
In practice many gave in to temptation. The obvious exception to this was having an affair with the king, the honour and financial advantage of which could outweigh any social stigma.
To bear a sovereign's child, even an illegitimate one, could be the making of a woman and her family
QUESTIONS If you could pick an actress to play Anne—other than those who have done so already—who would it be?
2.Was Henry like Hitler?
3. Were the people dirty then, how did they clean themselves
4.How many people did Henry kill
5.Was Henry a loving man or merely someone who desired women who took his fancy and then got rid of them.
6. Is intelligence more interesting than looks,
as we see with Anne
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