Author Topic: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII  (Read 43695 times)

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Elisabeth

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Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« on: October 22, 2005, 02:09:00 PM »
I thought it would be interesting to discuss Elizabeth’s relationship with her father, Henry VIII, in all its aspects. The Venetian ambassador wrote in 1557 that Elizabeth "prides herself on her father and glories in him." And we all know the (probably apocryphal) story that during the procession through London to Elizabeth’s coronation, somebody shouted out, "I remember King Harry the Eighth!" and Elizabeth reportedly smiled.

To what extent do you think Elizabeth revelled in her relationship with her father and to what extent do you think the relationship might have been subconsciously (at least) ambivalent on her part, since he had after all been responsible for the death of her own mother? How and when do you think Elizabeth might have first learned of the nature of her mother’s death and how do you think she might have responded to this information? Do you think, as the common theory goes (first put forward, I believe, by Elizabeth Jenkins) that as a result of this early trauma Elizabeth was inspired with a lifelong aversion to marriage and perhaps even to sex itself? Or are we interpreting Elizabeth too much through post-Freudian twenty-first-century eyes, and perhaps other more important events and/or reasons were involved in her decision not to marry?

Also important for consideration, in what ways did Elizabeth resemble her father, not only physically, in terms of her coloring (auburn hair, pale skin) but also in her style of rule? Did she consciously seek to emulate him in any way? Were there any similarities between her reign and his?

ilyala

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #1 on: October 22, 2005, 03:25:28 PM »
first of all, all children need parents. whether they're in the twenty first or in the sixteenth century. her mother being dead (no matter who was responsible), elizabeth needed her father. how that need was responded to i am not sure, i don't think, really, that henry was the best of fathers. but i think that elizabeth had a strong admiration for his father for two reasons:

1. he was her only parent from a very early age
2. he had a very strong personality. i am sure everyone is aware that especially in parent-children of opposite sex relationships, the parent's strong personality dominates the child.

also, him being probably not the most accessible parent on earth might have turned him into her mind into some godlike figure. i think she felt the need later in life to identify herself strongly as her father's daughter not only because that was, after all, her claim to the throne, but because that was of very big sentimental value to her.

as for her mother, elizabeth did take pride in being anne boleyn's daughter. i think that most of the time she chose to ignore the conflict that must have arose between admiring her father and her mother at the same time. i do believe her pride of being her father's daughter was bigger, but that could have come from the fact that her father was, afetr all, the king. and because she knew him better. her mother was probably somewhat of a fairytale figure fror her.

as for the trauma and all... i don't know. i think that her insecurities later were obviously shown in just about everything she did. in a way that made her the great monarch that she was... those insecurities of course have had a factor of influence in her mother's death, but the truth is that her mother was not the only woman or person for that matter, to die young in dubious circumstances. those were insecure times and elizabeth was very much subjected to that, through her father's constant change of wives, lots of executions for various reasons, katherine howard's death, katherine parr's death, edward's death, mary's rise to power and then unpopularity, her own life being in danger countless times. those insecurities made her what she was and that was  shown in her attitude towards marriage.

the thing that made her not want to get married was, i think, that it is something you are supposed to only do once. once she picked a foreign prince to be her husband she was for life asociated with his country of origin (as seen in mary's example). had she taken an english nobleman she would have risen a family to favour. that has numerous disadvantages. i don't think she could ever make up her mind to support the consequences of such an important decisions, and when i'm saying that i'm not talking only marriage, i'm also talking every other important decision she ever made.

my tuppence :P

bell_the_cat

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #2 on: October 22, 2005, 04:17:57 PM »
Ilyala, I agree !

Offline Kimberly

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #3 on: October 22, 2005, 04:19:42 PM »
Excellent, and me ;D
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ilyala

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #4 on: October 23, 2005, 03:54:50 AM »
*blushes and bows before the audience* thank you... i try  ::)

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #5 on: October 23, 2005, 06:41:56 AM »
As to her feelings about Henry, I think that she, like Edward (but not so much Mary because she was older) both feared and venerated Henry during his lifetime.

When they were told he died, they burst into tears and clung to each other for support. Elizabeth knew that Henry had practically murdered her mother, but she could remember nothing of that time, and so perhaps didn't bear a personal grudge on that account. I think Henry was proud of Elizabeth's charm and intelligence, though sometimes she may have reminded him uncomfortably of her mother.

I don't think her style of rule resembled his - it was more like that of her grandfather - but I do thing she inherited his somewhat autocratic attitudes. I was reading a historical novel about her a while ago, and it depicted her being furious at her council not advising her to do something or other, to which she replied 'Had my father been alive none of you would have dared say no to him!'

This is just pure fiction, of course, but it made me wonder whether sometimes, when being pestered by her council, did Elizabeth reflect with irritation that they would never have dared spoken thus to King Henry.

I think she delighted being compared with him, though, in both physical terms and in her personality, as Ilyala says - partly perhaps because of the Mark Smeaton accusations.
"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"
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rskkiya

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #6 on: October 23, 2005, 09:35:28 AM »
Quote
As to her feelings about Henry, I think that she, like Edward (but not so much Mary because she was older) both feared and venerated Henry during his lifetime.

When they were told he died, they burst into tears and clung to each other for support. Elizabeth knew that Henry had practically murdered her mother, but she could remember nothing of that time, and so perhaps didn't bear a personal grudge on that account. I think Henry was proud of Elizabeth's charm and intelligence, though sometimes she may have reminded him uncomfortably of her mother.

I don't think her style of rule resembled his - it was more like that of her grandfather - but I do thing she inherited his somewhat autocratic attitudes. I was reading a historical novel about her a while ago, and it depicted her being furious at her council not advising her to do something or other, to which she replied 'Had my father been alive none of you would have dared say no to him!'

This is just pure fiction, of course, but it made me wonder whether sometimes, when being pestered by her council, did Elizabeth reflect with irritation that they would never have dared spoken thus to King Henry.

I think she delighted being compared with him, though, in both physical terms and in her personality, as Ilyala says - partly perhaps because of the Mark Smeaton accusations.


I agree although I feel that Elizabeth incorporated more of her father's 'drama and show' rather than her grandfather's parsimonious recalsitrancy...(that is her dad was a flashy fellow while her granddah was a cheap penny pincher  :P)
Then again she was like both of them...

rs

rskkiya

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #7 on: October 23, 2005, 09:49:26 AM »
Quote
To what extent do you think Elizabeth revelled in her relationship with her father and to what extent do you think the relationship might have been subconsciously (at least) ambivalent on her part, since he had after all been responsible for the death of her own mother?  Do you think, as the common theory goes (first put forward, I believe, by Elizabeth Jenkins) that as a result of this early trauma Elizabeth was inspired with a lifelong aversion to marriage and perhaps even to sex itself? Or are we interpreting Elizabeth too much through post-Freudian twenty-first-century eyes, and perhaps other more important events and/or reasons were involved in her decision not to marry?


     I feel that her precocious intellect and the trauma of her childhood (imagine - your dear mother called an incestuous witch and executed by your darling father!)  made her very wary of close relations and the later experiences of  seeing Daddy's "other wives" suffering dreadfully or in states of constant fear, made her connext marriage and sex with extream danger.
    Elizabeth chose to be androginous (male and female) and by claiming to be "Married to England" (nice touch) she calmed any national fears of being coopted by foriengers (sp).
    She was neurotic but she used it well!

rs

Arianwen

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #8 on: October 23, 2005, 12:12:46 PM »
You know, 'ditto' just gets old after a while...;)

I think after Elizabeth's experiences with her mother, her step-mothers, her sister, etc, just to discuss the women for a moment, she had complete grounds not to want marriage or sex. Loss of virginity ---> loss of self-sovereignty ---> loss of actual sovereignty ---> loss of life? Kathryn Howard was executed for having sex, basically, and Anne Boleyn was executed on the false charges of adultery. It could be argued that had Anne not given in to Henry, she would have stayed alive. That alone has to hit a child hard, to know that your father killed your mother for not bearing a son. I think there was probably also an element of responsibility in Elizabeth for Anne's death, and she likely wished at times that she had been born a boy so that she could have had her real mother. Perhaps she felt she owed it to Anne not to make the same mistakes and end up dominated by her husband. Elizabeth was fiercely independent, but so was Anne...

I think Elizabeth really wanted her father's approval. Getting close to her step-mothers was risky, given the rate at which they were discarded, but her father was the more permanent fixture. Henry was a scholar, so Elizabeth became one. Henry was a musician, so Elizabeth took up music. Henry was an enthusiastic dancer and horseman, so Elizabeth made sure she was the best at dancing and riding. I think she took her similarities with Henry and played them up for all they were worth.

Regards,
Arianwen

Elisabeth

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #9 on: October 23, 2005, 12:36:44 PM »
It occurs to me that any inner conflict, however unconscious, that Elizabeth might have felt towards her father because of the manner of her mother's death, might have been resolved or even avoided all together by the execution of Thomas Cromwell in 1540. Whoever informed her about the fate of her mother (and surely it would have been around this time, when she was about 7 years old, that she was informed of it, or learned of it by accident) could have said, it was all a plot of Cromwell's, it was all his fault, and now as you see he's been executed for treason, so he got his just desserts.

Whatever blame Elizabeth attached to the loss of her mother could then very well have been placed squarely on Cromwell's dumpy shoulders, and thus Elizabeth might never even have viewed her father as ultimately responsible for the death of Anne Boleyn. Whatever trauma there was would have been centered around the loss of her mother (not an uncommon event in the sixteenth century) and the fact that Anne Boleyn was viewed as a pariah, an unmentionable, for the rest of Elizabeth's life. But still, she no doubt blamed all this on Cromwell, not on her (poor, misguided, well-intentioned etc.) father.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by Elisabeth »

bell_the_cat

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #10 on: October 23, 2005, 12:44:12 PM »
Quote
It occurs to me that any inner conflict, however unconscious, that Elizabeth might have felt towards her father because of the manner of her mother's death, might have been resolved or even avoided all together by the execution of Thomas Cromwell in 1540. Whoever informed her about the fate of her mother (and surely it would have been around this time, when she was 7 years old, that she was informed of it, or learned of it by accident) could have said, it was all a plot of Cromwell's, it was all his fault, and now as you see he's been executed for treason, so he got his just desserts.

Whatever blame Elizabeth attached to the loss of her mother could then very well have been placed securely on Cromwell's dumpy shoulders, and thus Elizabeth might never even have viewed her father as ultimately responsible for the death of Anne Boleyn. Whatever trauma there was would have been centered around the loss of her mother (not an uncommon event in the sixteenth century) and the fact that Anne Boleyn was viewed as a pariah, an unmentionable, for the rest of Elizabeth's life. But still, she no doubt blamed all this on Cromwell, not on her (poor, misguided, well-intentioned etc.) father.


If this is true, she must have been rapidly disillusioned by the fate of Katherine Howard. I personally think she took this conflict about her parents with her to the grave. :(

....but as Rsskiya has said, she was able to turn it into something positive. :)
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by bell_the_cat »

Elisabeth

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #11 on: October 23, 2005, 01:08:41 PM »
I think it's quite possible that Elizabeth viewed Katherine Howard as guilty, as most of her contemporaries did, since the evidence that Katherine had committed adultery against the king was fairly  overwhelming... It's more likely, IMHO, that Helen_A is right to suggest that Elizabeth's experiences at the hands of Thomas Seymour were even more traumatic to her, long-term, than the deaths of either Anne Boleyn or Katherine Howard... Taken all together, though, no doubt all of these events had a particularly deep and insidious cumulative effect on the future queen.

Offline Prince_Lieven

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #12 on: October 23, 2005, 02:37:10 PM »
Wasn't she apparently greatly upset when Katherine Howard was executed?
"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"
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"Men forget, but never forgive; women forgive, but never forget."

Elisabeth

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #13 on: October 23, 2005, 02:42:24 PM »
That's according to Elizabeth Jenkins, who reports Elizabeth as saying to Robert Dudley, at the age of eight (1542, the year Katherine Howard was executed) that she would never marry. But I have never found another source for this quote and I have to wonder if Jenkins, as much as I admire her (her biography of Liz ranks among my all-time favorites), perhaps made it up. Frankly I don't know. Has anyone else come across the original quote and its original attribution?

Offline Prince_Lieven

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Re: Elizabeth I and Henry VIII
« Reply #14 on: October 23, 2005, 02:51:54 PM »
No, I've never found the actual source - a few bios mention how upset Elizabeth was, but can't back it up with anything . . . hmm . . . well, do we know if she and Katherine were close? Or is that unsourced too? Because if they were, it would be perfectly natural for Elizabeth to be upset.
"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"
-Sherlock Holmes

"Men forget, but never forgive; women forgive, but never forget."