LENT 6: 30/3/23 – Falcon

My weekly Lenten reflections will be on a wife of Henry VIII each week – although not in order

These seek to not retell their stories, but to look at them with a spiritual eye

An illegal book is being held up and thrust at you. It’s yours. What do you do?

Last week’s queen was an author of controversial books. This one wasn’t penned by Anne Boleyn, but contemporary William Tyndale, exiled in Antwerp, where he was put to death the same year as her.

Four hundred and seventy years later, a woman sits in a staffroom, reading. She wafts colleagues who wish to interact away: she is not here, but in 1533…and now even more pressingly,1536! Drawn by the deep purple and gold dress on the cover, awakening nascent historic interest, I spent an intense summer with Anne whom I hitherto knew only in name. Philippa Gregory and Retha Warnicke made me wish for Anne’s end, but Vercors made me want to put flowers on her grave. It is with that French cartoonist’s view – joined by English academic Eric Ives, novelist Jean Plaidy, and historian Joanna Denny – that I have stayed…perhaps until now.

I have saved who I consider the most interesting wife until last; it through Anne Boleyn that we will view Easter this year. Instinctively I knew that the biting prose which first introduced me to Anne was not the truth and that another story was bursting to be known. I found not the ‘strumpet’ who threatened a marriage, a nation and her daughter’s right to reign through her own selfish ambition, but the champion of all the things which I admired, deliberately vilified in the time-honoured way for unusual women who threaten an ungodly fearful status quo: whore and witch.

What I would like to look at today is that book of hers, the reading of which risked her life and that can be argued to have caused the reformation – as it can of Anne herself. Because Anne’s faith is so often missing from books and films, it is only in recent weeks that – despite writing a postgraduate dissertation on her popular depictions – I have started to realise the content of that book and its significance. Since that dissertation, I have learned new things about the reformation and the church of England. So do I still feel the same about the woman who was catalyst and initiator of these? (p132 ch 6 of Denny)

Anne’s faith was – according to Denny and Ives – her driving force. She used her position with a king otherwise not very interested in reform or critical of Rome to effect the most radical change since the Catholic church’s formation. She and her family sponsored, smuggled, and pleaded for reformist works and people. Her reaction to being caught with Tyndale’s tract was to go to the king to ask for it back and share her new reading material with him, for she realised that this tome contained the answer not only to his Great Matter (ie divorce from Katherine of Aragon) but to a new England.

It was Netflix’s Blood, Sex and Royalty – one of a new breed of sexed up documentary with talking academic heads interspersed with graphic sex – that alerted me to this book’s message. I understood that the New Learning, a fascination with which Anne’s brother and father also shared, was about emancipation for the masses by being able to read the Bible yourself. Tyndale clearly advocates the Bible in one’s mother tongue and bats away the excuses of the clergy – that it’s too hard for ordinary people to understand and that biblical languages don’t easily translate into English. He states that Hebrew and Greek ‘agreeth’ far better with English than Latin, in which the Bible was hitherto. He also expects that heads of households instruct in God’s Word – but how can they if it’s not in their language and they can’t have a copy at home? (Henry conceded one in each church).

We’ll think more about the significance of being able to read and own the Bible in July.

The New Learning was also about standing away from the ‘Church’ teaching of salvation by works. Last week I asked: saved – from what?

My understanding is that ‘by works’ means: please the ‘Church’ and pay it to obtain God’s favour, pretending to conflate the two. It means that we have to work to please God and through that alone will we attain Glory and avoid Hell. (The Parable of the Labourers in Matt 20 and much of the New Testament epistles are evidence against that). Reformed theology rightly says: grace is not earned, it is a gift from God. Grace and salvation, for me, are not the same. Were they for Anne?

Last week I also showed my concern for our relationship with God being expressed in legal terms: that of justification, which Tyndale also advocates (that too is the language of the court).

Anne loved to debate theology and did so with those around her constantly. Would we still agree?

I agree that not being ‘saved’ by works doesn’t mean that it isn’t important what you do. Anne Boleyn cared about right action: in that 2022 Netflix documentary I believe Tracy Borman said that Anne introduced charity to the court; several writers state that she had concern for her subject’s wellbeing and high standards for the conduct of her ladies, as well demonstrating her own as refusing to go to the king’s bed until they were contracted to marry and Katherine put aside.

An aspect of action that Tyndale took on in The Obedience of the Christian Man (1528) is one’s relationship with so-called authority. Much of it is conventional, as his his rendering of the New Testament: I tested his translation on the verses prohibiting women teaching (such as 1 Tim 2:12) which came up last week. He endorses violence against one’s children in the name of correction; exhorts that servants obey masters, for they are God unto you (as are parents, and most worryingly, kings). Tyndale said ‘If thou obey, though it be but carnally, either for fear, for vain glory, or profit, thy blessing shall be long life upon the earth’, thus that obedience for any reason will garner you God’s favour whereas the opposite will garner you the opposite. I am highly disturbed by that statement and heartily disagree. ‘Kings were ordained’ and ‘the sword put in their hands’, wrote Tyndale. He also said that kings are God’s vicars upon the Earth (ie stand ins) and may do as they wish. I dread to think how such sentiments fed Henry’s ego. Already believing that he had the divine right to rule and was puffed up with pride, Henry now had in writing – apparently backed up by well chosen theologians – that he should be the supreme authority in his nation. Tyndale attacks all kinds of clerics, including monks, whom he claims were ‘free and exempted from all service and obedience due unto man’ save the pope. He calls men of the cloister marked by the Beast (haven’t many of us wondered if we witness that in our time?). How might that rather unqualified and nonsensical remark have fuelled hatred of the monasteries and their destruction? (We’ll meet some cloistered people this year).

From what I’ve read and understand, I don’t think that Tyndale was as radical an author as Robert Browne later in century, who questioned civic authority more generally. Anne too was questioning only one form – albeit a very powerful one – and one that made England part of an empire: Rome’s. But was she really about making an empire of our own, about seeding a nation state? Vercors thinks so, and he saw our courage to stand alone against Hitler as being rooted in Anne Boleyn. Would she have seen it as good to stand alone from Europe? Had she forseen something deeper when she steered this Sceptred Isle from the Mitred one? I am unsure what I think of the sceptre. I don’t support empires and am ashamed of Britain’s and how far reaching it was. If this is a conscious legacy of Anne’s, it is not something which I admire.

I have so much more to say on Anne: I’ll be saying some of it next Sunday, and have blogged about her previously. For now, I wish to state my disappointment that Blood Sex and Royalty, after having Anne and the glossy lipped professors debate theology and make a point of her having Tyndale, doesn’t end with her legacy as a theologian. Her brother tells her that she’ll change the world, but neither shows nor tells how. Once again, after the axe falls, so does the curtain: the story of Anne ends with the usual coda – a ginger toddler who will become known as Gloriana. Thus Anne’s contribution to England was her genes, not her courageous work in uncoupling from a continental-wide yoke of corruption and inequality. Her downfall is shown for not bearing sons and keeping the king’s favour, not because of the swift work of her enemies. Who and why is something we’ll take up again.

I wish to leave you for now in the final Lenten reflection of this year with Anne Boleyn, not on a scaffold or in a prison (although we’ll sit with her the latter,with Jesus, next Thursday), not as a monogram hastily etched away and likenesses destroyed, but a woman who cared so much about the exciting new faith in Jesus that she was willing to spend ten years with one of the most dangerous rulers of all time to change hearts, minds, laws and history.

We’ll have Tudor themed Maundy Thursday and Easter online services, at 930pm and 8pm BST.

Both will be about 45 mins. The first will be quite and reflective. Both will feature music

Please email me, Elspeth, on betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk if you’re interested in coming live by the end of Weds 5^th as I will make decisions based on that

I shall also be performing a reading of my novella The Jury In My Mind for the 111^th anniversary of the Titanic the following week. It will be online free to listen to (but not download) for a short time from weekend 14/15^th April 2023

Note the change of date for June’s service to reflect an important anniversary

LENT 5: 23/3/23 – Maiden

My weekly Lenten reflections will be on a wife of Henry VIII each week – although not in order

These seek to not retell their stories, but to look at them with a spiritual eye

How would you react if you found a warrant for your own arrest? This lady of the week put it back, but her voluble distress after reading it drew her husband to her. She did not reveal the source of her sobs.

Catherine Parr did not go to the Tower. Perhaps she had learned from Anne of Cleves and Jane Seymour how to at least appear docile and say what the king wanted to hear. Pretending that she did not mean to instruct her husband in faith, only seem to oppose him to draw out his great and superior learning was a very Neck Turns The Head strategy – and one that saved hers. When the warrant she’d no doubt dreaded was served, writhing Wriothesley come to arrest her was turned away by the king.

Catherine Parr’s warrant – which Henry had agreed to – was not for alleged adultery like the other two wives, nor witchcraft, but heresy. Heresy and witchcraft are not far apart – both are beliefs and practices not sanctioned by, and perceived as a threat to, the church and its authority. By authority, it really means the hegemony and solo privilege of that institution.

Catherine may not have begun married life as a heretic – to Henry that is – she was married 4 times. Some historians claim that she was conservatively Catholic when the ever rounder and more irascible king pulled her away from the one she loved – an ambitious man who would try to be de facto king himself, and suffer the fate that she avoided. My interest in Catherine isn’t the relationship that resumed after Henry’s death almost as quickly as his own new spouses. The epithet ‘survived’ – I am bored of that crude rhyme – isn’t just about Catherine 3 outliving Henry VIII – although not for long; it’s that the warrant was not executed. It’s what Catherine believed and was trying to achieve with her reluctant queenship that interests me.

Like next week’s queen and the lens through whom we will view Easter this year, Catherine saw herself as an Esther, alongside the man she called Moses, letting the people go from the oppressive yoke of a man titled P. Catherine felt directed to accept the king – not that it would have been easy to decline (hardly meaningful consent) – because she prayed and felt God reply that this role was divine service to England. Catherine had admired Henry (!) but thought he who had begun so positively in removing the grip of Rome from this country was slipping. Henry didn’t leave the Catholic form of Christianity, just the rule of Rome, which of course, he’d replaced with himself. His 1539 act reiterated Catholicism in all but papacy, creating all other belief as criminal.

I admire Catherine’s courage and the principle of using her queenship – a sacrifice and a risk for her – to further reform, and especially as a spiritual mission. I am not sure that I agree with the content of that mission. Catherine Parr, a published author of theology, is the darling of the conservative reformed modern Christian, such as Lutheran pastor Don Matzat. His synopsis of Henry’s reign is telling: Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard are guilty of adultery; Anne’s faith and mission are conspicuously absent: the break from Rome was because of Henry’s unassailable wish to marry her. Who actually did the reforming of this new independent national church isn’t stated but it’s implied that it was left to others…such as Henry’s final wife.

On discovery of Catherine’s last book, “Lamentations of a Sinner”, Don speaks in delighted terms of Catherine’s abasing herself to gain Christ, echoing Luther’s belief in self-accusation to come to a state of grace. The abasement was controversial for a queen – hence it was not published in Henry’s lifetime. It was an early spiritual autobiography of the new kind: where the author shows their journey from guilty to justified, from wicked to redeemed. It’s a genre which I grew up with.

I sympathise with spiritual epiphanies and honesty about one’s own journey but I reject the Worm Theology inherent in this work and Don’s glee in it. Why is finding God a see-saw of egoes? Why is accusing yourself of sin the first step in beginning a relationship with Jesus?

Catherine was concerned with the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone, as well as his teaching that all spiritual knowledge and authority comes from scripture alone. They were tenets which I was raised with, and kept with…until relatively recently.

Justification is a legal term – reformed theology, as with the apostle Paul’s, is peppered with it. But I do not agree with basing your understanding of God on the flawed and worldly precepts of a broken and ironic system of justice. It came from an ex-Pharisee early on in Christianity, who was still very influenced by the old religion – that of right practice and rules. Paul began developing radical thought away from traditional Judaism, seeing God’s grace as the means of justification. Crudely in my evangelical upbringing we were told this word meant that we are made ‘just as if we’d never sinned’. It is different to expunged, which means blot out (so a record of wrong is gone) but justify goes a step further: it is almost as if time is reversed and the sin wasn’t committed. Actually, legally today, justification is closer to its normal English usage (often legal terms aren’t): it means that an acceptable excuse is given which prevents the guilty party from being punished.

Theological sources tell me that justification is a once and for all rendering of Not Guilty, effected in Jesus’ death. So Jesus’s overcoming death says: we all did do a capital crime that offends God, but a declaration rather than explanation is made which removes from us, the offender, the liability for that offence, and makes us righteous? How very Job.

And what is this crime we all do that earns us the forever fiery pit in God’s eyes – the judge in a courtroom (these terms require courts) to which we are not invited to defend or explain ourselves? Is it the things we could have done different and need to put right? Does it cover the more grievous acts which we may commit? Or is it missing the mark and falling short, like a weak misshot arrow, of a target that can never be reached by humans? What is perfection? And who is an angry, jealous, vengeful god, behaving like Henry VIII, to hold us to a standard that he misses?

Or is our crime not keeping all the many rules in the Pentateuch?

The reformed understanding is and I think was that those lists of Leviticus no longer applied after Jesus. Protestants preach that they no longer need to keep The Law – just the Ten Commandments, and Jesus’ Double Commandment. Oh, and a few exhortations by Paul (these can vary over time and your exact denomination’s beliefs). One of those which hung around in Catherine’s day, and in my background, still may, is that of women not teaching men. Henry levelled this at Catherine. But as anyone who really knows the Bible can tell you – Catherine was likely one; her contemporary who we’ll meet in July was certainly another – Paul doesn’t exactly say that. I’ll give you a full exposition of what I think he does say in July.

I have started something big here that I’ll continue over the year. My issue with Catherine’s doctrine is not to downgrade faith and to have to work one’s way into Heaven and God’s favour, but that she relies on corrupt, patriarchal legalism for her tenet. It is not that church tradition and law is greater than the Bible, but that text is misused, and that God speaks to us with an inner knowing. I’ll say more about that on here, and in my next novel. I stand with Catherine against Rome, but not against the freedom for Catholics to express their faith, nor for an alternative political institution – especially one with the same hierarchy and tyranny at its heart.

Catherine’s radical friends included the fourth wife of someone in last Sunday’s sermon – Catherine Willoughby, who became Mrs Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, and Marguerite of Navarre who influenced next week and Easter’s subject. What these women believed and fought for, and whether we would or should now, we will continue to explore.

We’ll have Tudor themed Maundy Thursday and Easter online services, at 930pm and 8pm BST.

Both will be about 45 mins. The first will be quite and reflective. Both will feature music

Please email me, Elspeth, on betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk if you’re interested in coming

I shall also be performing a reading of my novella The Jury In My Mind for the 111^th anniversary of the Titanic the following week – stay tuned for more information

A Queen and a Duchess

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/a-queen-and-a-duchess

Introit: Theme from ‘The Tudors’ by Trevor Morris [excerpt]

Welcome to Between The Stools on 19^th March 2023. This is the second service in our history year, which will run until January. Last month, we thought about Mary Queen of Scots; during Lent, we are taking a wife of Henry VIII each week (but not in order) and we will be with two other British royal women of the sixteenth century again today. We’ll spend much of 2023 with such characters, although not exclusively.

You may ask why there aren’t more men… I feel on the whole more of a draw towards women, who are often left out of history. These women aren’t unknown, it’s more reframing how they are viewed. I also struggle to find many men of that era whom I wish to spend time with. But there is a more important reason why I’m focussing on the feminine this year.

An obvious special birthday boy this year who you might think I would choose, given my Suffolk connections, is Thomas Wolsey, the cardinal from Ipswich. They’re proud of him – I’m unsure I am. It is not certain that he was born in 1473 – 500 years earlier than me; so I’ve not planned to include him, though he’ll be mentioned in other stories. (Many key 16C figures have unknown birth years).

Tonight, I am choosing two related women who also have Suffolk in common. Instead of being born there like Henry VIII’s advisor, one of our women of the hour died there, and the other had there her finest hour. It was the one who died and is buried in Suffolk’s birthday, yesterday; and in June, it is the 490^th anniversary of her death. The other’s finest hour came 480 years ago.

Before we meet this pair, who share a name, let us open in prayer

We may see many parallels with Tudor times and now: wars, greed, disease, world changes and forced up prices. We don’t have to accept, especially the last (see this article and know there are organisations such as Don’t Pay)

Tonight’s service is called A Queen and A Duchess, referring to our first lady who held those titles in that order. Both tonight’s women were queens and both are called Mary Tudor.

I’d like to start with the elder and explain a confusion. I am firstly going to speak on Henry VIII’s youngest sister. Henry was one of four children of Henry VII: Arthur, who died young and is sometimes excluded from family trees; Henry, who married his widow and became the second king in the Tudor dynasty; Margaret, who married James IV of Scotland – the Johnny Depp lookalike, born on Friday [17th], killed in a massacre led by his wife’s sister in law – and Mary.

If you watched The Tudors TV show with Jonathan Rhys Meyers broadcast from 2007-10, you may remember that Henry had a sister, Margaret; but the show conflated the two sisters into one, named her Margaret to avoid confusion with our second lady tonight – her niece – but gave her the life of Mary. I am appalled by that – it insults our history and American audiences. So, to be clear: you were watching Mary but calling her Margaret.

Mary and Margaret were friends with Katherine of Aragon*, the Spanish princess passed between first and second brothers Tudor. They too understood what it was to be despatched abroad to bed some king and bear his children in the name of friendship between countries. Such marriages are a travesty of friendship. Women were sent to countries that were either rivals, or that you’d like to side with against your rivals. Margaret went north of the border; Katherine had come from overseas; and Mary was going to cross the channel to England’s nearest eastern neighbour. Margaret’s marriage (at 13!) had been arranged by their father, but Mary’s matching was by her brother. Somehow, such transactional engineering by same generation feels even worse. (*I wonder how the Aragon friendship fared after she widowed Margaret and wanted to parade the body of her husband? There’s a great story about the Margarets of James IV…for another time).

Much is made of the tale that Mary Tudor the sister firstly did a deal with that awful sibling: that she’d marry once for state, but should she be widowed – and her regal husband was an older man in poor health – she wished to choose another husband for herself. She was Queen of France and wife of Louis XII for three months, then married Henry’s best friend with whom it is said she was passionately in love. She wed Charles Brandon (another with an unknown birthday) in secret without her brother’s blessing, which was treason. The couple risked Henry’s wrath – the Henry who would execute two wives several friends and advisors (Wolsey would have likely suffered that fate had he not died on the way to the Tower), and up to 72,000 of his subjects.

I just learned this, from more than one source. His daughters each killed c300 people*, but hoary hearty Hal took the lives of the equivalent of a modern county town. In Henry’s time, 72,000 was the citizenship of London, Paris, and Norwich (then England’s second city) combined; so by today’s reckoning, Elizabeth and Mary executed a village each – still appalling – but their father killed about 15 million, or three English regions, or cities like Edinburgh, Liverpool and Bristol each year of his reign. I shall remind you of this fact throughout the year, especially in January.

So it was a risk for Charles and Mary to have displeased Henry. I am angry that it should be the king’s business and right to stipulate his family’s spouse (thus controlling their bloodlines as well as bodies) and worse, for it to possibly be a capital offence. Henry created many of those with his various acts, including one which stated that calling him a tyrant (absolutely true) was treasonable, as was the title of heretic. This again illustrates that law often isn’t about justice.

Charles and Mary survived the king’s wrath unscathed; they were fined, briefly shut out, to be re-received later. They risked wrath again by voicing their disapproval of Henry’s relationship with Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth Barton, the Nun of Kent, had done so and been horribly, publicly killed. The Holy Maid lived at St Sepulchre’s nunnery in Canterbury. I see her as a kind of English Joan of Arc, a century later – a visionary virgin who also spoke out against English rule and authority, and who commanded quite a following. The main difference between Ms Barton and the Brandons was that the Kentish Nun predicted Henry’s imminent death and loss of crown. Also, Charles was Henry’s perhaps only lifelong friend whom he held in special regard; without being married to him, would Henry have killed his own sister?

I understand that the Brandons’ married life wasn’t quite happily ever after: Charles was a brute to women; he quickly got married for a 4^th time after Mary died – to his 14 year old ward. Charles Brandon was one of the new kind of noble, when the old aristocracy of birthright and lineage was replaced…not by meritocracy, only insofar as pleasing the king gave you merit. Henry busily destroyed the old kind of peerage who could claim his throne better than he. Brandon was created one of three dukes of England – that of Suffolk, hence he and Mary had a home there.

Charles and Mary’s old home

Westhorpe Hall

I visited the village in which they lived – Westhorpe, in mid-north Suffolk. Its village sign depicts the Tudor rose. Their vast mansion was replaced and is now a nursing home, but there is a public footpath nearby from which you can view the bridge and moat. As a queen, Mary was buried at the Abbey of St Edmundsbury (which we met in November), but when her brother dissolved it, her body was moved to one of the large churches on the site – appropriately St Mary’s. Her tomb by the high altar is not the fat one, but surprisingly modest. There is information and the same picture of her husband and her that Westhorpe uses on its current campaign for its church bells.

St Mary’s Bury St Edmunds

Mary Tudor’s grave at Bury

I’m appalled to learn of the connection of the French Queen and that church. (Not all of her is at Bury)

Mary took back sovereignty when she directed her own fate and defied her brother, but I have not found more that’s inspirational about her – have I missed something? Let me know.

I will have a spiritual perspective on aspects of this story in our second half: how should a good leader handle threats and opposition? And about a new world and means to favour and boon.

[Brief pause]

In speaking of history this year, I’m often going to think about How Do We Know? I’ll rarely give a source unless I’m quoting an original thought, although I’ve done much research. I’m interested in secondary sources – what is said to be true – rather than trusting primary ones. I also believe that we can just know, intuitively. Does that make sense to any of you? I know it flies in the face of academia’s obsession with empirical evidence, but that is much of my ongoing theme too.

———

Let us meet our second lady of the night, Mary Tudor the younger.

Queen Mary I really was the first, because she ruled England indisputably, alone, not as consort.

(Empress Maud and Lady Jane Grey – queen for only 9 days – were contested). Being queen in your own right was unusual in Europe then, although aunt Margaret and her daughter in law Marie de Guise were regents in the same era North of the Border.

Who’s your Mary? Is it a portrait, or do you picture her in your mind from a book – which? Is it an actress? My first Mary I was played by the comedian Kathy Burke – famous for her sketch with Harry Enfield as Waynetta Slob – in the 1998 Elizabeth, for many years my favourite film. Kathy’s Mary is pathetic in all senses, vicious, crazed, unloved, and dying, though she won’t see it. Mary has important East Anglian connections, including with where I grew up; knowing about her infamous deed as a child – when Katherine of Aragon’s only living child was yet faceless – helped cement my early view of Mary as an adult, when I began my interest in history.

I watched a video compilation of ninety years of Mary on screen. It included every depiction I knew of, and some others. I believe several if not all showed Mary’s appearances in their entirety; yet the video was under half an hour. That’s quite shocking; that Mary, our first queen, with many adventures, part of a popular family, has not only – to my knowledge – never got her own show (or play), but I don’t know of a popular book just on her either. Anne Boleyn wasn’t queen for long either, but she has, several times. Her very short lived rival cousin got a movie to herself. So what does it say that Mary is always a small role – the unwanted recalcitrant child made to swear against her conscience and own interest, and the antagonist at the start of Elizabeth’s story?

I feel that there is much richer material for a sermon from Henry VIII’s eldest child. I’m hoping to sketch out a spiritual story, a development, throughout this year. I’m seeing that how the monarch behaved and was behaved towards tells us about their god. It is often not the one with a capital G.

The Tudors are seen as the start of the Modern Era which ended the long mediaeval period, and the catalysts for a watershed for England, especially regarding monarchy and belief. You could compare it to a new testament – indeed I have already seen a parallel, but the renaissance wasn’t about God offering a novel covenant with his people – this is about changes to worldly ruling. Mary’s father’s new way regarding politics and peers wasn’t a progression – only for those it benefited. Thus it felt much like the old system in essence, re-booting the Norman practice of giving titles and possessions as prizes for serving the controversial king. Henry’s new religion was really the old one repackaged. Yes there was some whitewashing, in more than one sense, but the real change was who had power on Earth. Mary was willing to share her ultimate power with a foreign leader, which her father and siblings were not, and took such drastic action to stop papal influence. What was the Pope’s real threat?

Mary was about the Old Way, and not just in religion. Unlike others, I’m not analysing political acumen – I know some claim hers was acute, with many achievements. I’m alarmed at what is seen as success, even and especially by modern historians.

I’ve tried to understand Mary I from a Catholic point of view. Has she been misunderstood – perhaps even wilfully? She is known by her epithet “Bloody” – a description that doesn’t fit since she often burned. Yet she was far less bloody than her father, the same or less as her sister and brother. I watched a German documentary on Netflix about Mary’s rough contemporary, Ivan IV of Russia. He is usually known as ‘The Terrible’. I noted some links with his Russia and Tudor England – bloodthirsty tyrants expanding their empire whilst presiding over great change.

In this documentary, criminologists profile Ivan… what would they make of the Tudors? Yes, I see them all rightly as criminals. Feeding on fear is pertinent, and not just to past despotic sadists.

This may answer my year long question: what really is wrong with the Vatican? (Then and now).

I learned that Ivan’s ‘surname’ came centuries later, and the graphic illustrated accounts of his evils could well be propaganda as much as the mid 20^th C government sponsored pro Ivan film by famous Russian director Eisenstein. I’d like to point out that it’s not only our Eastern rivals who are capable of propaganda, and I think that there’s much about the Tudors – yes, even still.

So – did Mary truly earn her sobriquet? It’s said that Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a Protestant account dating from early in Elizabeth’s reign – also graphically illustrated and with emotive language – was and still is highly influential in making it. I wonder if this statement isn’t counter propaganda.

I acknowledge Mary’s long years of abandonment and loneliness, and her courage to remain Catholic… but no-one denies that Mary burned people alive til they weren’t for having a different faith to hers.

I do wonder if passionate belief – of any sort – is being demonised by our contemporaries.

In my research over Lent, I’ve been saddened and maddened by how difficult really finding out about people’s faith is. Historians often seem to undermine faith. They celebrate and analyse good leadership, which usually means cunning and violence. I’ve heard it stated that religious tolerance would have been anathema in the 16^th C, but I’ve heard a quote only 50 years after Mary’s time about wanting open belief and worship for all. Was that Baptist leader of the early 17^th century so far ahead, or did the world start to change drastically in a lifetime? For many, allowing the freedom to speak and practice for those who do not agree with you did not come for more than a century: for some, it has still not arrived. We may supposed to be multicultural now but this can manifest as diluting faith in the name of not privileging one. A small but important example: a Scottish university refused to mark the Easter holiday because it wasn’t fair to other faiths, who were quite happy for the extra days’ rest. Religious didactism has become non-assertion. The single view, crushing all dissent, is around other narratives now, as we’ve seen in the last three years: internet censorship of views that the establishment don’t want voiced, whilst the media rarely deviate from the scripts given them, because instead of being critical, they are bought.

So Mary’s world is not so far from our own. We have seen imprisonment (enforced quarantine) of those who refused to recant under the excuse of security and health. The Tudors too claimed that their regime was about protection, of the realm, of our souls. This seemed to be what Mary thought.

The fear of Hell – yes, with a capital H – was vital for the church. Much income and compliance had been made possible with the doctrine. Hell was also intrinsic to the already extant punishment for unacceptable belief. It was apparently thought that burning purged and gave a foretaste of the everlasting torment in store if ‘heretics’ [which means choosers]didn’t recant.

Mary and others must have seen themselves as some kind of avuncular faith guardians steering their subjects away from error. The fact that people lived in terror of torture and death didn’t seem to strike her as an abusive way to parent her grown subjects. Like much authority, such a stance infantilises, because it says that your ‘subjects’ are incapable of making their own faith and moral choices, so you must choose for them and aggressively shepherd the strays.

We may wonder whatever kind of faith, what kind of God, what kind of leader can be worthy and good if this is how it/they operates?

I asked earlier: what does a good leader do when you are threatened? How might Henry have reacted to the Nun of Kent’s prophecies, other than kill her? Would our leaders still do that? Striking out – ie, incarceration, inflicting pain and death – seems to be seen as strength, whereas inaction, like forgiveness, is weakness, and weakness is risky to one’s power. I see Roman values still permeating. I note the roundels of Caesar on at least one of Henry’s palaces.

Yet what did Jesus teach about forgiveness and retaliation? Who submitted to earthly power and abuse to subvert and overcome it? For the supposed head of the church, and a well educated man, Henry doesn’t really seem to get the God he stands in for – nor does Mary.

What else might Mary I done regarding her cousin, Lady Jane Grey? She could have given up the throne; gone abroad, as she was urged to do; she could she have divided the country, or done a deal with the Catholic Maries of Scotland (who may have instructed her in multiplicity of faith). Mary I chose to fight, and after demurring, kill those who kept her throne warm. What else might she have done with Jane and her husband Guildford Dudley? We might understand (but not condone) the death of the father John Dudley, 1^st duke of Northumberland, if he was the mastermind (politically, he was the obvious enemy, being a prominent protestant during her brother’s reign). It parallels Elizabeth’s dilemma with another Mary – Stuart. What do you do with a woman on your turf who also claims your throne? In both cases, capitulate to the corrupt, spiritual imagos of men around you.

In the 1936 film Tudor Rose, Jane asks Mary, on hearing she ‘must’ die: Why build greatness on the graves of others?

Can I point out that Mary and Jane both had fair claims to England’s throne, as did those battling on Bosworth field. It can easily be argued that no Tudor had the strongest suit, and that they were usurpers – hence the propaganda against their rivals to hide this.

Tudor monarchs thought themselves as having divine right to rule, and by extension, vicars of the divine – no wonder that they railed against the pope, who caries the title of Christ’s vicar. These royals’ god has, like that of Exodus, no others before me, forgetting that unlike the true God, as a ruler, you are not unique. You are fallible and mortal, and recallable. Security of the realm was an excuse to fight for personal honour. Did we need a single, unified ruler?

What was missing from the new national church which Mary I and others so missed? What for them made it the true faith? What was the importance of Rome for them…and for Catholics now.

And if you are Catholic, for you? I’d love for you to tell me.

I am nonconformist and ecumenical, and thus open. And I’m starting to see something…

A last point before a pair of rounding off tales. In the 1998 Elizabeth, Kathy Burke (Mary) says to Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth): Do not take from the people the consolation of the Blessed Virgin, their holy mother.

From my earlier faith, I understand why such a sentence was wrong, even offensive to a protestant. Now I see that sentence as truth. Do not take from the people the Divine Feminine. She really is Holy Mother – not this Mary, born in 1516, and not her younger half sister who, in the same film is advised, looking at a Marian statue, “They have found nothing to replace her”. Elizabeth can’t replace Mother Mary, nor her Son; I don’t recognise either in the Tudors. But there is something about Mary – the Blessed one – that Mary Tudor truly had seen. She went badly wrong in how she shared that vision, but perhaps she did try to point to the divine feminine.

I think that Elizabeth pointed away from it, but it’s notable that it’s the 420^th anniversary of her death on Friday, 24^th March – and thus the end of the Tudor dynasty. We’ll think more about what that means in September, and ultimately, January.

Mary’s fine moment was at Framlingham castle with her supporters rallying. Last time I was at Fram, I enjoyed peeking over the parapet, imagining being afraid for my life, and seeing that affirmation is at hand. Two thousand people have come – for me! One writer said that Mary successfully took on central government, and she defeated the man who stopped rebels taking on their local government 11 years before [Kett, mentioned in last Sept’s service].

There is a local tradition that Mary was travelling, pre-queendom, to her supporters at Kenninghall in Norfolk and an ambush was averted by a local yeoman. She acknowledged his service to her that day. But a few years on, she had him burned at the stake as a protestant. It is said in the village that crops do not grow on that field, to this day. I accept that, for I think just as our bodies hold trauma, so do places.

I believe in, and encourage, healing sites of violence. Has their been an atrocity near you, or somewhere you visit? I also encourage not revelling in the gory woodcuts, or their celluloid or pixillated equivalent, which gives further energy to those sites of horror, but prayer, meditation; honour those who suffered, but replace that energy with something entirely opposite. We can do it alone and silently, or even from afar, with an intention, perhaps with a photo of the place.

I believe this work to be important in clearing negative energy and healing the Earth.

So to close tonight, I want to reiterate and affirm freedom of speech and belief, not a world where your livelihood, even life depends on our recanting or converting to please someone else’s ideology; one where we point the way, but do not force; where our greatness and personal sovereignty is not illustrated by our brutality and ruthlessness. It is not a far off world, but one that is being birthed, and very much in reach.

Thank you for joining me tonight, and blessings to you

Do reach out to me, Elspeth, on betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk

My weekly written Lenten reflections continue. Our next services are at EASTER:

Maundy Thursday 6^th April 930pm BST Watchnight with Jesus and Anne Boleyn

Spend 40 mins contemplating reflectively on the eve of their deaths – with hope

No Good Friday this year – my 7 Sayings is online (2 versions – with and without words inbetween the music)

Easter Sunday 8pm BST service “Esther Not Jezebel” which will be Tudor themed

After that, we meet on May 7^th. And Lady Jane will be back with others in our July service

Hope to see you again, and good night!

LENT 4: 16/3/23 – Phoenix

My weekly Lenten reflections will be on a wife of Henry VIII each week – although not in order

These seek to not retell their stories, but to look at them with a spiritual eye

Next BTS service this Sunday 19th March, 8pm GMT ** Beware time zone changes** “A Queen and a Duchess”. If you want to come live please email betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk by Saturday evening. It will be recorded for all on this site after

The daughter of Wolf Hall is on her knees before her husband and king. She is beseeching him as both. Are others in the room? The tableau I’ve seen enacted is yes, but I am unsure of the source. The reaction of this man, over stuffed with jewels as much as pride (was there yet weight?) indicates that there must of have some sort of onlookers. He is flustered by her supplications, her emotion, and lashes out. He will not have any woman influence him on politics again.

Is it a flash to the wife before? Does he know that Jane Seymour is acting out a very calculated role, hoping that her performance before a carefully chosen audience will perhaps cajole Henry into agreeing? If so, Henry is still brutal and misogynistic, arrogant, shocking, unbefitting his office, and…further evidence against a man I have grown to hate as much as any I know in history.

I have wondered what to make of Jane Seymour, the third wife, usually seen as the vessel and the docile one, the one that gave him what he wanted, and thus the good one. Is she truly the wolf (noting the name of her family seat) in sheep’s clothing, playing the submissive kitten to serve her and/or her brothers’ ambitions? Was she biding her time in at least one other queen’s household, insinuating herself, waiting her moment to strike so subtly that the strikee didn’t know they’d been hit? I’m aware that she wedding shopped as her predecessor was chopped; she was married to Henry the next week. Was there hardness underneath the sweet compliant exterior?

But this, this entreaty before Henry is her finest moment. In it, a see a theme that began with last week’s wife and continues – out of order – to the last. Each queen in part was on a mercy mission, and had something honourable and altruistic to ask of Henry. Jane tried a different way to get it.

Jane was asking that Henry’s violence against the northern rebels cease and that he spare the lives of those leaders accused.

This is interesting as the northern rebellions – known as the Pilgrimage of Grace – were a broadly Catholic endeavour. They stood against the destruction of the monasteries, those independent institutions which answered to the pope alone. These religious houses had much wealth and influence. Some encouraged learning and free thinking. Henry VIII was against the Bible being in the people’s tongue and an absolute monarch. Often friars liked to be without city walls as they were then beyond civic control as well as episcopal. They took up much space in every town and had lands well beyond the footprint of their community and collected public produce in their tithe barns. Being outside of the national church, these spoils did not benefit the episcopal hierarchy and thus, under Henry’s new regime as head of the church, him.

One can see therefore Henry’s real reasons for destroying religious houses – I’ve heard that there were 700 in England and Wales – and that such shocking, swift action (in under 10 years, nearly all were dissolved and most swiftly ruined) – would need justification. Perhaps as leader Robert Aske of York stated, the allegations of corruption against them were untrue, part of the Tudor spin which I am becoming increasingly aware of. I was taught as a nonCatholic that monasteries were corrupt; they were greedy and godless and performed fake miracles for gullible spiritual tourists.

But even if one was protestant, as Jane nominally was – was such bloodshed and destruction ever justified? Of course not. Were these rebels so wicked that horrible death was the only outcome? In the mindset of fear and might, perhaps, but not a higher one. Did the nuns and monks have to be treated thus – especially the nuns? Certainly that is in no way justifiable, but despicable.

Although Henry didn’t grant Jane’s plea, we note that she made one. It is oft implied that she dare not do so again, but in the 2003 Henry VIII, Emilia Fox’s Jane (the only one I can picture) goes into labour and is unable to fight off the illness after because of Henry’s violence to her over this plea.

It is not only this television show that implies that he may have killed her – directly or indirectly.

Jane is celebrated as the wife who gave Henry what he wanted – a son. But far less energy is given to Edward’s short and juvenile reign than his sisters’. (We’ll think of one of those on Sunday). It is not through Edward that the Tudor dynasty continued for another 56 years after Henry.

It is oft remarked how Jane left the world so soon after that son: he was born on 12^th Oct; she took ill on 18^th and died on 24^th. This might seem cruel, to Henry, to her. Was her mission truly complete – not just from Henry’s point of view, but Jane’s own spiritual path? Was she glad to be out of the world before Henry could brutalise her further, and give her the fate of two other wives? Jane’s death is picked out as the natural death, and thus a tragic but positive end. She was the lovely wife, loved and lovable, who did what wives do: obey and conceive. She is thus depicted much like how the Virgin Mary has come to us; the submissive boy-bearer that – in protestant thought – stood back and let the son shine. Yet I’m very aware of another way to see Mary – Mother, BVM. Not as the head bowing woman uttering ‘let it be according to your will’. I wonder about Jane’s motto ‘Bound to obey and serve’. Was she bound – as in tied up, forced by Henry or those brothers who used her son as a puppet? Bound as in destined, or bound as in the likely course to unfold?

Jane, on that day on the floor, did attempt a service for her people, remembering that north and south (Tudors often neglected the North), Catholic and Protestant [at last a reluctant P], Jane was queen for all the country, and that she should have a care for their wellbeing and when atrocities are committed against them.

Jane alone is buried with Henry – not in Westminster Abbey, but St George’s chapel at Windsor.

She had a kind of hagiography created round her – imagined portraits of the unholy family after she’d died; speculation about the happiness that Henry could have experienced if she had lived, and how broken he was because she didn’t. His further misogyny and tyranny is blamed on his grief, and thus her death. The good wife – the meaning of the old Hindu practice of sati…when widows, now deemed useless, cast themselves on the funeral pyre of their husbands. Note how spin and pressure can make people do the unthinkable, and how that’s not just in historic India.

What would have happened to Jane if Henry had pre-deceased her?

In this story, we’re tempted to conceive that conception gave Jane’s life meaning and success. But we are more than the children we create, more than who we marry or the family we’re from. We are not rated by God for the kind of obedience which Henry wanted, expected of wives and children alike. God does not value sons over daughters, nobles over commoners, Protestant more than Catholic. God is bigger than our egos, our fears, our ambition, any earthly power, however absolute and tyrannical, and especially those acting in His name.

I want to leave Jane, not confined to her bed, birthing or dying, nor on the floor supplicating for mercy – for mercy implies rightful power and judgement – but celebrating her in daring to ask.

We’ll have a Tudor themed Maundy Thursday and Easter service, both in the evening.

I shall also be performing a reading of my novella The Jury In My Mind for the 111^th anniversary of the Titanic the following week – stay tuned for more information

LENT 3: 9/3/23 – Rose

A teenage girl has two gentlemen visitors to her dorm in one night. One is cast off hurriedly to receive the other – her uncle, the duke. In a celluloid scene I can scarce bring myself to describe or watch, Thomas Howard inspects his niece, roughly exposing her, and decides she is suitable for the role he wants for her. I have henceforth hated Mark Strong for thus portraying Norfolk in the 2003 Henry VIII TV series. O that Emily Blunt as Katherine Howard had plunged a bosom dagger into his heart!

(Some spell her name Catherine or Kathryn)

The 3^rd duke of Norfolk seems to be someone evil who got away with it – in this lifetime anyway. The miniseries ends that Norfolk, at last in the Tower that he had sent so many others to (including two nieces) awaiting trial for treason, was let off when the king died. And then he got his lands and titles back. When I saw his much vaunted, vain tomb in Framlingham church, I wanted to kick it.

Why do the wicked prosper?! Where is their satisfying downfall? I asked it with Job in January.

I’m constantly asking myself that of Norfolk’s king.

Unlike Mary Queen of Scots, where I could gleefully enlist all the evil courtiers who had died before her, quite often violently, I can’t (yet) tell you of this premiere duke’s comeuppance.

He was responsible for three of his own family’s executions, putting the rest of them at risk. One of them is our lady of the week, who’d be considered a minor today at 15*, but was considered then a ripe bride for a king three times her age, a dangerous, unlovely man.

Katherine is oft skipped over as the silly young one who palely paralleled Anne Boleyn. Apart from their fate, family, and reason for treason – adultery – wives 2 and 5 have little in common.

*They also have unknown birthdates, so Katherine’s age fluctuates with accounts; but she’s likely somewhere between 17-21 at the end of the story.

What I garner about Katherine is the huge double standards of Henry: he could have affairs where he wished, but for ‘his’ women to do so was an affront to his ego so great that they must die. Katherine was old enough to be in his bed, but that she’d (allegedly) had other lovers made her promiscuous and precocious. Note that despite her behaviour being fairly common and normative in our times, that many contemporaries continue to judge her.

Rather than being a tart, Katherine can be seen as a woman exercising her sexuality, which seems to frighten many men, especially in previous times. Again, that feminine force is feared, and so it is bound by those who see that they will be undone if it is.

Even if you saw Katherine’s sexual activities as unwise…even sinful….are they so heinous that she must be violently taken from the Earth, along with her two lovers? What harm has she really done, what threat is she? This comes from a deeply misogynous view and Henry’s inflated sense of self and his kingship. It is a very Old Testament – misread Old Testament – view, that God is jealous and avenges all those who disobey his (sometimes quite random and unreasonable) commands. If that were true of the Real God, wouldn’t Henry have been swallowed by the ground several times?

In January, I’ll tell you something I recently discovered about him which I found most satisfying.

The question isn’t: why was Katherine stupid enough to let history repeat, knowing what Henry would do to her and others…but why was he? He’d started a precedent that he seemed unable to stop; one of hatred but also judicially. But it was still his choice – he had others. He was given a similar situation and invited to do different this time: he didn’t.

I wonder if this wasn’t those Seymours at work, who’d lost their sister (read: chance for a puppet on the throne) and now sought another. For a while, they were successful…but they did get their comeuppance, although not during Henry’s reign. Both Seymour (and Pepe – a Muppet reference) brothers were executed. One of them behaved like Henry did when faced with a major rebellion (Aske/Pilgrimage of Grace to Kett/Commotion) – give false promise then butcher them anyway.

But where is justice for Katherine Howard, and Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpeper, the men who died before and for her? Do we gain any satisfaction from the interpretation, as with the 2003 TV series, that Henry was hurt, even devastated, that another chance of love ended in betrayal?

Jane, Lady Rochford, the middlewoman of the affair, also was executed – but many paint her as accessory if not mastermind to the other Boleyn deaths. Is that true and fair? Karen Lindsey says that Culpeper was a rapist and murderer, let free by Henry. Katherine petitioned him that others, including Thomas Wyatt (the only nice man in Tudor England that I’m aware of) were too, successfully. In that way, she is not unlike her cousin. Is there more that we’re not hearing?

I did hear something in my research; it saddens me that if true, it’s not better known, despite all our feminist revisionists. What if instead of freely exercising her sexuality (and thus her sovereignty), Katherine Howard was at the mercy of those exercising theirs on her, against her will? What if Culpeper and Dereham were both rapists? And her music teacher Mannox was committing child abuse on poor Katherine, separated from her family at a young age, to be preyed on ultimately by her supposed sovereign and uncle – even if he didn’t do what Mark Strong did, Norfolk was part of abusing her. What if Katherine didn’t lie, but others did, or felt compelled to acknowledge their knowledge of her alleged early affairs before they were murdered horribly for treason for keeping it secret? My ire burns more against the king and his acts of treason – pun deliberate.

I note Katherine’s motto – ‘No Other Will But His’ and how that reflects the views of kings, husbands and God….all wrongly represented and conflated.

Despite being supposedly the man presiding over the renaissance – a new era, and rebirth – I see Henry VIII as re-birthing the worst misunderstanding of God. I have been able to find out little about what Queen Katherine II understood of God. I hope that she found in Him (or Her) great comfort, especially at her end. I hope that like Mary of Scots, she found in it a beginning.

I am beginning to have an understanding…it concerns the themes of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth films and really, all the Tudor enactments. But my understanding now takes a very different lens, which I will point and sharpen throughout this year. I do not wish to gaze on what so many others behind the camera have, and focus on this or any other monster, excusing their behaviour as of its time, and worst – admiring them.

My theological insight for this week is that Katherine, from a nominally Catholic family, may have like her previous namesake, represented the old way, which frightened the Protestants, who lost their ‘champion’ Cromwell on the day that Katherine married. Yet most of the cast of the Tudors were less interested in a real or right relationship with God – more in how it served them politically.

I want to leave Katherine in a delightful, apparently true tableau – dancing. Gouty Henry’s gone to bed, and ex-Lutheran ex-wife Anne of Cleves and she are romping round the room together, free of that monster, finding enjoyment in what they have endured. Don’t they both deserve a little joy?

And during a time traditionally about curtailing joy and pleasure, I especially like that image. I trust they are dancing in Heaven, where I’m sure they are. I cannot be as generous about their husband.

We’ll have a Tudor themed Maundy Thursday and Easter service.

I shall also be performing a reading of my novella for the 111^th anniversary of the Titanic the following week – stay tuned for more information

LENT 2: 2/3/23 – Escarbuncle

My weekly Lenten reflections will be on a wife of Henry VIII each week – although not in order

These seek to not retell their stories, but to look at them with a spiritual eye

In Rochester’s bishop’s palace, the woman about to wed the head of the church is looking into the courtyard at bear baiting. It appals that a spiritual leader should allow animal cruelty and a bawdy, money-making activity in the grounds of his home. I wonder if the onlooker is unfamiliar with it, for she comes from a land – a part of Germany – which discourages dancing and much music. Might she wonder: Is this the culture of her adopted new country? Anne has endured a long, cold, wet journey. Indeed, the slowness suggests that like Maggie Hemingway’s heroine in The Bridge, that ‘she could not bring herself to arrive’. Anne is on the way to meet her husband, literally – for the first time. He has seen a portrait of her; he may well have had the advantage. But even if Anne has not yet seen Henry’s likeness, she has heard all about him. She is aware that his three previous wives are dead; at least one was executed – rumours say more. Many others have refused this ogrous monarch their womenfolk’s or own hand, he who has also executed not a few friends.

What might Anne have expected even dared hope for?

Suddenly, a band of disguised men burst into Anne’s room. Anne is surprised and affronted, especially by the heavy set middle aged leader, who attempts to embrace her. It may have been a game of courtly love, but Anne of Cleves sees nothing courteous in it. She behaves honestly, betraying her real reaction to the man that is, in six days, to be her royal husband.

Much discussion about Henry VIII’s fourth wife is around whether she was or was not attractive – belying a shallowness at the heart of academic discipline.

We may have an Anne of Cleves wound to heal – of being cast off for not being attractive enough – which I doubt was true. Beauty is subjective; we know of Anne through court opinion, unlikely to be a solid source of information. What did she make of Henry?! Did he repudiate her as he felt rejected? (Karen Lindsey thinks so).

Anne of Cleves is oft portrayed as the short-lived dumpy one, quickly glossed over onto more exciting wives. I confess my preference for the previous Anne – both of which are Annes with an E, Karen Lindsey! I can only find one other aspect that these Annes have in common, although this week’s Anne parallels and reverses his first queen and last week’s subject – Katherine of Araagon.

The Pitkin guides – inexpensive and readily available British booklets – are powerfully influential of popular views. They do not keep to facts (which they never verify) but espouse strong opinions. A telling feature of the Six Wives of Henry VIII volume is that Anne of Cleves’ badge is described not by the main image it bears (these are the titles of my weekly reflections) but that the crown all queens had is her brother’s. In fact, Anne of Cleves’ badge is an 8 armed heraldic device (called an escarbuncle) ending in fleur-de-lys. This stylised lily is associated with French royalty, a key rival.

None of the spouses receive feminist revisions in Pitkin, but Anne of Cleves’ page is the least positive. But rather than being naive and docile, Anne may have played her hand well. I think her comments to her ladies – including the widow of George Boleyn, instrumental in killing him and his queenly sister – are calculated. If Anne seemed not to know what sex is, perhaps she can soon end this terrifying charade of a marriage on grounds of nonconsummation? How awful that this act of union is seen here merely as a legal bond. She may also have realised that in accepting her new title of King’s Sister that she may do well in the English royal family – better than if she’d been sent home. She is alleged to have told Henry that she forwent a prior engagement to wed him – a further legal excuse to annul the marriage, whether true or not. Thus she freed herself without pain or danger.

One might say that Anne of Cleves was the most successful wife, with the happiest ending; she is the favourite for that reason of at least one writer.

Anne C lived in Anne B’s former home, not that the guidebook of Hever Castle gives the second Anne much page space. But Anne of Cleves had it for 17 years, receiving Henry’s children there. Anne C had other property: the town mansion in Lewes named for her, which is a museum, and Richmond Palace! This major royal home was a riot of pinnacles and turrets just outside London. She had her German ladies and a fairly good annual sum. Austere Anne learned cards, dancing and music – and to speak English. Considering that she didn’t when she arrived and was divorced within 6 months, her responses to Henry and his court were pretty nifty.

However, my reflections are not about admiring niftiness, but what we learn spiritually.

Anne may have been cunning, but feigning female stupidity and obedience aren’t especially original or impressive – fuelling these stereotypes was hardly helpful or trail blazing. The outcome was riches and ease and a more than comfortable lifestyle – hardly admirable. I question myself as I’m tempted to judge that.

What I do find interesting is that Anne C is one of only two wives to have outlived Henry. She alone did so by some margin – 10 years. She lived to see the second of Henry’s children on the throne.

I am interested that Anne befriended princess Mary and Elizabeth, and I’ve even heard, a subsequent wife. I hope she was the friend and parent that the young Tudors lacked, and had in them the children which she did not bear.

I was tempted to switch the Escarbuncle and put her last as the culmination as the One That Got Away – not under house arrest like Katherine of Aragon or Mary Queen of Scots, but as a free woman….free as long as she remained in this country, and let Henry read and dictate her letters.

I was intuited to put Anne C now, and as I think on her and research, I feel that she is right to come early on. I see that Henry seemed to live out various marital permutations and soul contracts – in one lifetime! This was his one brief experience of allowing others to choose his wife politically (he was being steered in others) and via 3^rd hand reports, not personal knowledge.

Anne’s is a story of a burden cast off; a life orchestrated by others which you are able to turn to your advantage. There’s a hymn, Words of Praise…‘when the life I wanted gives way to one much better.’ Here, we are shown that a life not wanted can also be the means to a better life.

If Wife 1 was about constance and refusal to be deposed, Wife 4 was about empowerment through acceptance; the husband is the head, but the Wife Turns The Neck policy; freedom via singleness.

Accounts I’ve found don’t make Anne of Cleves a theologian and game changer… if readers know of any, please let me know; for I feel that whereas there is a hopeful lesson in Anne C’s story, it is not an inspirational one. I hope we will find one as Easter (9^th April) draws nigh.

I shall also be performing a reading of my novella for the 111^th anniversary of the Titanic the following week – stay tuned for more information (The anniversary of the launch of Britannic was on Sunday, 26th Feb – I am giving talks on a survivor of the 3 sisters)