la dame infortunée

Dyanna dearly enjoys visiting Jena.

It is a welcome respite to spend a few days sharing family dinners. The two woman laugh as they watch the children intercept their fathers whilst playing with wooden swords.

“On Sunday morning, accompanied by all the said lords and gentlemen, she went on foot from her lodging to the church, the whole of the road being covered with cloth, and being about the length of the garden of Chantilly. All the bishops and abbots went to meet her, and conducted her to the church. After hearing mass, she mounted upon a platform before the great altar, covered with red cloth. The place where she was seated, which was elevated on two steps, was covered with tapestry. She remained there during the service, after being crowned by the archbishop of Canterbury, who delivered the crown to her, and consecrated her in front of the high altar. That day the duke of Suffolk was Grand Master, and constantly stood near the Queen with a large white rod in his hand. My lord William and the Great Chamberlain were also near her. Behind her were many ladies, duchesses, and countesses, attired in scarlet, in cloaks furred with ermines —such as are usually worn by duchesses and countesses,—and in bonnets. The dukes, earls, and knights were likewise clothed in scarlet robes, furred with ermines, like the first presidents of Paris, with their hoods. The coronation over, the Queen was led back again with the same company as she came, excepting some bishops, into a great hall, which had been prepared for her to dine in. The table was very long, and the Archbishop was seated a considerable distance from her. She had at her feet two ladies, seated under the table to serve her secretly with what she might need ; and two others near her, one on each side, often raised a great linen cloth to hide her from view, when she wished “s'ayser en quelque chose.” Her dinner lasted a long time, and was very honorably served.”

It was possible at the time for a rector to hold multiple livings, they would install a curate for about £50/year and pocket the rest of the income.

Also, it was nigh impossible to remove a clergyman once he was installed at a living. This example is from the book Fashionable Goodness, Christianity in Jane Austen's England by Brenda S. Cox (TW: violence against pregnant women):

Dr. Free seduced his housekeepers, resulting in five illegitimate children; caused one of the women to miscarry; let his pigs desecrate the graveyard, and kept cattle on the church porch; sold the lead off the church roof; cut down and sold trees not belonging to him; left the parish for long periods of time; and refused to marry and bury his parishioners. Eventually, when he offended a gentry family over a burial, they lodged a complaint. This led to seven years of expensive trials, at the Bishop of Lincoln's personal expense. Finally Dr. Free was removed from his living, eventual dying as a beggar. (Ch 10)

(And now you can see why Darcy really didn't want Wickham to be given a living!)

Princess of Dragonstone

"winter kiss" by bubug (Magdalena Korzeniewska)

— Excerpt from the Croyland Continuator / David Horspool, Richard III: A Ruler and Reputation

Even though Edward IV’s death was unexpected, after twelve years of peace there need not have been too much of a sense of foreboding about the succession. The great dynastic wound from which the Wars of the Roses had grown had not so much been healed as cauterized by the extinction of the House of Lancaster. There was no rush for London, as had happened in earlier, disputed successions. The royal party didn’t set out from Ludlow for ten days after hearing the news of Edward IV’s death, while Richard took his time, too. And the new king had [his mother the dowager queen and] two uncles to support him: his mother’s brother, the sophisticated, cultured, highly experienced Earl Rivers; and his father’s, the loyal and reliable Duke of Gloucester, to whom Edward IV had entrusted unprecedented power and vital military command.

... [Richard of Gloucester] had achieved his goal by a mixture of luck and ruthlessness, and if he made it appear, or even believed himself, that destiny played a part, this only made him a man in step with his times. Modern historians have no time for destiny, but sometimes the more ‘structuralist’ interpretations of the events surrounding the usurpation can come close to it. When we read that ‘the chances of preserving an unchallenged succession were . . . weakened by the estrangement of many of the rank-and-file nobility from . . . high politics, which was partly a consequence of the Wars of the Roses and partly of Edward IV’s own policies’, it is hard not to conclude that an unforeseeable turn of events is being recast as a predictable one. But without one overriding factor – the actions of Richard, Duke of Gloucester after he took the decision to make himself King Richard III – none of this could have happened. That is, when the same author concedes ‘Nor can we discount Richard’s own forceful character’, he is pitching it rather low*.

Edward IV had not left behind a factional fault line waiting to be shaken apart. Richard of Gloucester’s decision to usurp was a political earthquake that could not have been forecast on 9 April, when Edward died. After all, Simon Stallworth did not even anticipate it on 21 June, the day before Richard went public. We should be wary of allowing hindsight to give us more clairvoyance than the well-informed contemporary who had no idea ‘what schall happyne’. This is not to argue that Richard’s will alone allowed him to take the Crown. Clearly, the circumstances of a minority, the existence of powerful magnates with access to private forces, and the reasonably recent examples of resorts to violence and deposition of kings, made Richard’s path a more conceivable one. But Richard’s own tactics, his arrest of Rivers, Vaughan and Grey, the rounding up of Hastings and the bishops, relied on surprise. If men as close as these to the workings of high politics at a delicate juncture had no inkling of what might happen, the least historians can do is to reflect that uncertainty [...].

Catherine of Aragon and her father’s betrayal

                                               1514

On two occasions she had been able to blind herself to her father’s treachery, and to persuade herself to accept his excuses so that she could persuade Henry to accept them. This time she could not. She had married in England to serve Spain, but not to be a partner in swindling her husband. Catherine loved her father and she believed in the Ferdinand’s good faith. A betrayal from her dear father was unthinkable for Catherine, but the harsh reality and the advices of her confessor and María de Salinas made her open her eyes. She had to choose between her father and her angry husband. So Catherine chose to support Henry. She did not attempt to dissuade him from his pro-French policy. She let her humiliation at the part she had played, her disappointment and indignation be clearly apparent. Catherine told the Spanish ambassador, coldly, that she had nothing to discuss with him, did not wish to see him, and refused to intervene in any way in Spain’s behalf. If she wrote any line to her father, it was not a message Ferdinand cared to keep.

She would never forget Spain, but she had now lived thirteen years in England, five as England’s Queen. In the seclusion ofher widowhood she had preserved much ofher Spanishness, but her life since had opened new windows. There were only a few Spaniards left in her suite; except for her confessor and her favourite lady in waiting, Maria de Salinas, most of her daily contacts were with the English. Though she never lost a faint trace of foreign accent, she was beginning to talk, write, think like an Englishwoman. For five years she had devoted herself wholeheartedly to the activities and interests of her husband’s land; she had made a widening circle of English friends, and during the last year she had felt the thrill of national leadership in a crisis. It still pleased her, on occasion, to talk Spanish and to hear news of her native land. She had believed, she was to believe again, that the true interests of England and Spain were one, and that in fostering the alliance between them she was serving both. But she was Queen of England; she had no doubt, she was never again to show any doubt, where her final allegiance lay. 

Some time in December Catherine gave birth to a boy. Tragically, however, her misfortune at childbirth continued. The baby arrived a month early and, ‘to the very great grief of the court’, was either stillborn or died soon after birth. When the news reached Peter Martyr in Spain, he thought he knew why this had happened. ‘The queen of England has miscarried, as a result of her upset at the quarrel between her father and her husband, the pain of which provoked her to give birth prematurely,’ he said. ‘Her husband was upbraiding the innocent queen with the desertion of her father, and held against her his anger and complaints.’ Grief, he believed, had driven her to miscarry.  

Sources:

Garrett Mattingly, Catherine Of Aragon

Antonia Fraser, The Six Wives of Henry VIII

By that December, as a heavily pregnant Catherine once more went into confinement, Ferdinand’s ambassador Caroz complained that she was ignoring him completely. ‘The queen of England greatly requires a discreet and able person who can take care not just of her soul but also of the government of her house and person, above all so that she can best serve our own king,’ he wrote to Friar Juan de Eztuniga, provincial of Aragon. ‘The reason the queen is behaving so strangely is that her confessor, Friar Diego, has told her to act as though she has forgotten Spain and everything Spanish in order to win the English king’s love and the love of the English. She has become so accustomed to doing this that she will not change.’

Catherine’s few remaining Spanish friends had also turned rabidly pro-English, especially her beloved María de Salinas (now Lady Willoughby), who had become her closest friend. ‘María de Salinas has shown herself to be our enemy,’ wrote Caroz, who suspected her of plotting with the family of Catherine’s old lady mistress, Elvira Manuel. ‘You can see how [little] use I can make of the queen in my negotiations.’