Sunday, August 26, 2012

Young Bess at Home

The trials of Elizabeth Tudor as a child and young girl were mitigated by the loyalty and loving care of her household.
On the 19th May 1536, Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed as a traitor and adulteress. Just 11 days later, Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, married Jane Seymour and within two months of her mother’s death Parliament had confirmed that her parents’ marriage was invalid and that Elizabeth was illegitimate. Elizabeth went from pampered princess, the apple of her father’s eye, to ignored bastard. Elizabeth was so forgotten that her governess, Lady Margaret Bryan, had to write a letter to Cromwell begging for him to intercede with the King as Elizabeth had outgrown all of her clothes and her household had no money to buy more. J. L. McIntosh points out that “there is no evidence to suggest that Henry even saw his younger daughter from January 1536 until September 1542″ and “thereafter, they encountered each other only during Elizabeth’s infrequent and short visits to court from 1543 until Henry’s death in 1547.”1 With her mother gone and her father intent on producing a legitimate male heir, Elizabeth’s household became her family.
But who made up her household? Who were the people who Elizabeth depended on in her childhood, the people she was talking about when she said “we are more bound to them that bringeth us up well, than to our parents”? (Read entire post.)
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