#rayedit.

aristocracy in a nutshell

Are you out of your senses? Don't talk of such matters again.

THE SERPENT QUEEN (2022 - )

DEUS SALVE O REI (2018)

People well know and remember Anne Boleyn was my mother. Why can I not?

Surrounded by a huge entourage, Mary I was dressed in purple velvet and purple satin, all richly adorned with gold and pearls, and wore a gold neckpiece closely worked with pearls and precious stones. Even her horse had a purple caparison worked with gold, which reached to the ground. This was perhaps the first manifestation of the female equivalent to that visual majesty recently made familiar by posture and rich dress in Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII and echoed in the stance of Edward VI in several portraits that followed. A properly demure Tudor woman could hardly imitate that masculine stance with legs apart and arms akimbo, but there were, as Mary now demonstrated, other ways to communicate visible female royal power, circumventing masculine stance and military symbols. Mary’s parliament—with, of course, her prior sanction—passed two pieces of legislation defining fully the status of a queen regnant. One act clarified that a queen had exactly the same regal power as the kings of the English realm had always exercised. The other addressed the status of a queen regnant as wife, reiterating the provisions of the marriage treaties (themselves already approved by parliament and widely promulgated) that Mary remained “solye and sole quene” after her marriage. Mary was indeed both “king and queen” of the realm, legally and in practice. – Judith Richards.

Alicent turning herself in Otto