The Queen is Dead!: Katherine of Aragon dies in 1518

That wasn't what I was going for, but I can see it.
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I think it was more this picture, I could imagine a painting of the former French queen riding a horse with her noble lord guiding her.
 
Epilogue VI - Dickon
What is it about Richards, @aurora01 ? ;)

“Having converted publicly at the age of seventeen, Richard, Duke of York and Normandy remained a passionate Calvinist until his death a full twenty years later. Many of the great Reformers of the age praised his beliefs and his protection of them, saying only that he had one great flaw that he never managed to conquer – his equally fervent passion for the gentler, prettier sex.

Differences of religion and a mutual resentment of their forced match served to drive Richard and his Duchess, Beatrice of Portugal, apart, rather than bond them together, and, while Richard managed to do his duty often enough to ensure the Norman branch of the Tudor Rose took root in the form of their son Edward, he was always happier in another woman’s bed.

Many of Dickon’s mistresses have been lost to time, but there are two we know for certain, for their children tied their fates to that of the young Duke irrevocably. First is Anne Cecil, a woman who came over to Normandy on a visit in Lady Lancaster’s train in 1542 and never left, acting as Lady Governess to Lord Edward of York and Normandy in the later 1540s. Her own daughter, Cateline, was born in 1543, two years before Anne married Sir Edward Harington of Ridlington, one of Richard’s favoured retainers. As if that wasn’t proof enough of Cateline’s royal paternity, she was raised alongside Lord Edward in the nursery and bore the surname FitzYork, for Richard’s English Duchy.

The other mistress is the intriguingly nicknamed ‘Minette’. Despite redoubtable scholarly efforts, ‘Minette’ has never been categorically identified, but she was clearly Richard’s favourite mistress, indeed, possibly even the love of his life. Minette bore Richard three children, all of whom he acknowledged, and in a letter dating to c. 1553, Richard claimed that, ‘were it not for the sake of my dear son, in whom all my father’s French hopes once rested, I would throw off the yoke that binds me to Portugal and name you, Minette, my Duchess for all our days, not just a day by the river.’

Of their three children, the daughter, Madeleine, married George Hastings, later 4th Earl Hastings, while their elder son, Henry, became Captain of Calais and Le Havre, and the younger, named Francis for Richard’s schoolroom companion, Francis Hastings, won himself renown as a soldier in the wars in the Spanish Netherlands.

It is my hope that this book, the first to examine Richard’s extramarital life rather than his tempestuous marriage to Beatrice of Portugal, will build up a fuller picture of the women Richard chose to surround himself with, and, in so doing, will show an as yet unexplored side to the first Duke of York and Normandy.

____________________‘“Rosebuds of Normandy”: The Loves and Bastards of Richard of York and Normandy’ by Susanna Filrein



 
Beatrice just gets shafted all the time I see. Her husband to be publicly snubs her in favour of Christina and Richard loves other women instead. The clear lesson here seems to be for Iberian infantas to stay the hell away from England all together.
 
I swear it’s something about the name, though most of my other ones are considerably better behaved...
I couldn't resist tagging you!

I'd love to know more about this Richard.
Well, not about Richard, but it may interest you to know that I created the surname 'Filrein' as a feminine form of the surname 'Fitzroy', meaning 'Daughter of the Queen' 😉

Beatrice just gets shafted all the time I see. Her husband to be publicly snubs her in favour of Christina and Richard loves other women instead. The clear lesson here seems to be for Iberian infantas to stay the hell away from England all together.
They probably should, although I would point out that Beatrice doesn't help herself by publicly scorning her husband's Calvinism. He'd probably have liked her if she hadn't spent much of their marriage decrying him as a heretic...
 
I'd love to know more about this Richard.
Something else I have remembered about Dickon - I was sort of thinking of St Augustine's 'Lord, make me chaste....but not yet' when I sketched out his character, as well as something @The_Most_Happy said about a character in a TL I've been brainstorming with them - '[Minette] would probably be the one thing that made [Dickon] fairly happy...when he wasn't doing penance for loving her'. That's what I was thinking, for this pairing. Minette was the love of Dickon's life, but he was torn between his love for her and his pride and love for his Calvinist faith, and the two did battle for him constantly...
Good for her I say.
Well, yeah, I see your point, but it's not the decision that's going to guarantee her marital harmony, is it? Weren't royal girls told to look the other way and be biddable at bed and at board? Suffice it to say that Beatrice does not do that where her husband's religion is concerned...nor when it comes to the young FitzYorks being raised in the Norman royal nursery... Whereas if she had just decided that Richard's faith was a matter for his own conscience and held her tongue over Cateline's paternity, they might have had quite a content marriage, in their own way. She's pretty enough, and Richard would have appreciated her keeping her silence, so probably would have played the chivalrous husband, at least in public. I'm not saying Dickon wouldn't have met Minette, but he might not have been quite so open in his favour of her and their bastards...
 
Epilogue VII - Religion 1500-1600
Many Protestants in England trace the seeds of their break with Rome to 1530, when the Marchioness of Lancaster persuaded Queen Mary to make Sir Edward Seymour one of her son Richard’s tutors. Bright and curious, and surrounded by the Huguenot exiles his father found it politically expedient to allow to shelter in his French domains, the young Duke of York and Normandy took to the new school of Christian thought like a duck to water, publicly converting to Calvinism in 1541 at the age of 17. His son, Edward, whom many believe to have been named for Edward Seymour, was likewise raised a Calvinist, despite the protests of his mother, the staunchly Catholic Beatrice of Portugal.

The more central Tudor domains, however, remained orthodoxically Roman Catholic throughout the reigns of Henry and Lionel. It wasn’t until Edward’s only surviving child, his daughter Joan, married John of Monmouth’s son, George and became Queen of England, in 1578, that Reformed believers were openly allowed to worship as they liked. Fifteen-year-old Joan, a staunch Calvinist, scarred by the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre that had taken place in France five years earlier, insisted on freedom of worship being part of her marriage contract. George overrode his council’s protests on the matter, famously saying, “Normandy is worth more than Rome. Let us make no windows into My Lady’s soul.” Three years later, after the birth of their first son, Lionel, George would, in thanks for Joan’s safe passage through childbirth, make freedom of worship universal. Young Lionel would take the throne at just five years old, after disgruntled Catholics had succeeded on assassinating his father. Raised alongside his brother, Lord Henry, and his sisters the Princess Anne and Lady Joan, under a Regency headed by his mother, George was, as might be expected, England’s first Calvinist King. England is alone in the nations of Europe in having had its official state religion change with only minimal bloodshed. It is the purpose of this book to explain how and why this was able to be so.

______________ Graham Banworth, ‘“Make No Windows into My Lady’s Soul”: Religion in the Tudor Empire, 1500-1600
 
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Epilogue VIII - The Dangerous Decades
“Looking at the latter half of the 16th Century, one might be forgiven for thinking the Tudor dynasty was cursed. Starting with the death of Katherine of Aragon in 1518, but gathering pace in the 1550s and 1560s, not a single one of the immediate royal family died of old age.

Henry VIII was the first to go, falling victim to his old nemesis, the Sweat, in 1551. What appears to have been lupus killed Maria Tudor in 1558, and Dickon lost his battle with smallpox in October 1562. Like her namesake, Caitlin died in childbirth with her final child in 1554, while Marie died shooting the bridge in London in 1553.

Surprisingly, given her fragile health as a child, Jacquetta was to outlive all but one of her older siblings, dying in 1570 in a fire at Syon Abbey.

Lionel’s son and heir, John, died in the same outbreak of smallpox as his uncle Richard, while Lionel himself died after a riding accident in 1575.

With all of that in mind, it is almost astonishing that a Tudor still sits on the throne at Whitehall today, particularly when you consider that Lionel’s eventual successor as King, King George I, was assassinated by disgruntled Catholics for his tolerance of Calvinism and other nonconformist beliefs in 1586.

This book will trace each of the fatal occurrences in turn, using new scholarship and fresh readings of primary source material to try to make sense of those dangerous decades: the thirty years when Death seemed to stalk anyone with the surname Tudor and mark them for his own.”

____________________‘“The Gall In The Crown”: The Deaths and Final Illnesses of the House of Tudor, 1550-1586’ by Robert Greenhaigh​
 
Double update today to finish this TL off because I couldn't decide which way around to post these two. Family trees and Cast List will follow over the next week or so, as will a bibliography for the TL, naming all the books I've created within this universe, but we are now all but done. I can't believe it's been nearly two years! Thanks for coming along for the ride!
 
Double update today to finish this TL off because I couldn't decide which way around to post these two. Family trees and Cast List will follow over the next week or so, as will a bibliography for the TL, naming all the books I've created within this universe, but we are now all but done. I can't believe it's been nearly two years! Thanks for coming along for the ride!
I enjoyed it! Don't forget to post a link to your new TL when you start posting it...
 
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