Category: Musings

My Ghost Town Summer – Blue Point, Iowa

Lower Blue Point Cemetery
The entrance to the Lower Blue Point Cemetery, near present day Grinnell, Iowa.

A few years back in 2011, I’d been laid off from my job teaching science to children in a museum and ended up through a confluence of random events living that summer on a small farm near Grinnell, Iowa. That summer was full of unfortunate firsts – unemployment, accidental vehicular homicide of pets, learning how to wrangle calves back to their disgruntled mums. Oh, and my beloved dwarf hotot, Joss, died. There are a lot of things about that summer that while I don’t regret, I certainly wouldn’t like to live over again.

I spent a lot of time by myself that summer as my partner had gotten a job about an hour away working as tech support in a localish school district. Internet connection at The Farm was spotty at best and I was generally pretty isolated. We’d adopted a couple of farm kitties as friends, but the owner of the house said that they had to stay outside. We basically got to feed them, but other than that they were left to fend for themselves. I was never happy about that situation. One, who I named Marlena since she looked like a glamorous little movie star, loved to follow me around as I walked in the humid Iowa heat to explore my surroundings. The other was accidentally killed when I decided to go and pick up pizza in town. RIP Richie.

Marlena, my constant companion, and I would take walks around the little wooded area that was near the farm house, and one day I happened a pioneer cemetery. I found out that The Farm was nearly equidistant to TWO pioneer cemeteries. These cemeteries serviced the town of Blue Point, Iowa, from the mid-nineteenth century until at least the turn of the century. Also – in Iowa, “pioneer cemetery” doesn’t just mean that pioneers are buried there. The cemetery also has to have had “fewer than twelve burials in the last 50 years.” So, these were definitely pioneer cemeteries! My inner historian’s brain kicked in and I immediately turned to genealogical records to find out about who these people had been and how the ended up here of all places.

Elizabeth <I>Carpenter</I> McNabb
Photo by Gail Bonath on findagrave.com

I was drawn first to the memorial belonging to Elizabeth McNabb – not only was she a young woman at her death, 26 years old, she was also the first to be interred in the Lower Blue Point cemetery. I’m not sure why I gravitated to her stone, maybe it was because I had just turned 27 myself, but I wanted to know more about this young woman who now lay between farm fields in the middle of rural Iowa. I figured I probably wouldn’t be able to find much, but any bit of remembering, I think, is appreciated by the universe.

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Doing a bit more digging, pun not intended, I also found the grave markers of her husband, William McNabb, in the Lower Blue Point cemetery and her parents, Levi Carpenter and Susannah Moore Carpenter, in the cemetery just down the road, the Upper Blue Point cemetery.

Upper Blue Point cemetery – just north of the Lower Blue Point cemetery, but home to more recent burials. Photo by Kit and Morgan Benson from findagrave.com

There isn’t much available online about Elizabeth herself, but I was able to find her marriage certificate to William, and a bit more about her husband.

Marriage license from Morgan County, Indiana – William McNabb and Elizabeth Carpenter on February 23, 1846. This would have been at the courthouse in Martinville, Indiana.

So, Elizabeth Carpenter married William just after she turned 15 years old. They had their first child, Eliza Ann, in early 1848. Sometime before their second child, Susan Jane, was born in 1850, William and Elizabeth had moved to Poweshiek County in Iowa. All of their subsequent children, including Susan Jane, had been born in Poweshiek County. They’d been there long enough to be established into township leadership as William was appointed as a township trustee in 1852 after having run for the Justice of the Peace position and losing by three votes.

Elizabeth may have been motivated by strong religious beliefs as in 1852 she herself pops up in the history of Blue Point (although not by name). “Among the charter members of the [Methodist Episcopal] church were R. C. Carpenter and wife and William McNabb and wife” (Leonard Fletcher Parker, History of Poweshiek County, 286). This also is an interesting point – the R. C. Carpenter was Elizabeth’s brother, Robert Campbell, who had moved with their parents, Levi and Susannah nee Moore Carpenter, to Poweshiek County. Guessing by the dates of birth of Elizabeth’s nieces and nephews, most of the Carpenter family moved to Iowa in 1851. It looks like, as pater familia, Levi Carpenter moved his entire family, including adult children and their families, to Washington Township, Poweshiek County. This may have been why William and Elizabeth settled in Lower Blue Point instead of in Upper Blue Point like the rest of the family did. This way, they were close enough to family that they could help and be helped but also have a degree of independence.

It is probable that Levi was enticed to move out there by Elizabeth and William, as they’d been there since at least 1850 (judging by the birth of Susan Jane). According to History of Poweshiek County, William was a resident of the county since October of 1848. Indeed, he was the first resident of the county (although I assume that Elizabeth and their children were a major part of that!).

The first church/schoolhouse in the township, the Methodist Episcopal church I just mentioned, was built on land originally owned by William and Elizabeth which they sold to Bartholomew Vestal, a preacher who moved to the township in 1853, for $1. It is a rather unfortunate turn of events that Elizabeth was the first to be interred there.

I have not been able to find an obituary which lists her cause of death, but my guess is complications following childbirth. Her final child, Sarah Elizabeth, was born on May 29, 1857, just a couple of weeks before Elizabeth died on June 12, 1857. All in all, she gave birth to at least four children, all of whom survived to adulthood.

William very quickly remarried to Sarah Elizabeth Vestal, daughter of Bartholomew Vestal (who was one of the early preachers in the Methodist church). They didn’t have any surviving children together, and William died almost exactly a year after Elizabeth passed, on June 18, 1858 of a lightning strike.

Their orphaned children lived with nearby maternal relatives, many of them staying in the area until their own deaths.

The church and schoolhouse, built on their land that they sold to the Vestals, was later moved bit by bit into the Heritage Park in the nearby town of Grinnell in 1990.

point
This is how the church/school house/post office looked before it was moved to Grinnell.

Little Marlena and I continued to visit the Lower Blue Point cemetery for the rest of that summer, until her unfortunate death of being run over by a farmer’s truck. We’d begun to catalogue the memorials and to research on the rest of the township, but were stymied by the lack of reliable Internet connection and transportation to the nearby county historical society in Montezuma.

That summer, even though it was my Bad Summer, I learned that maybe, just maybe, I do have what it takes to be a historian. The next year, I went back to school to earn my BS in history, where I worked on German immigrants to the Upper Peninsula, and began down my path of Tudor/Stuart England, which is my main area of research.

I wasn’t able to find Elizabeth’s voice in my research, just a brief chronology of some of her major life events. Women, especially, tend to disappear into the historical record when they are simply “and wife,” utterly replaceable to the historians who do not value their lives and contributions other than the procreation of heirs to important men. Elizabeth was more than that – and I do hope that someday I’ll get to learn more about her.

And now, I have a kitty who stays inside 100% of the time, so I never have to find my beloved furry friend having lost a battle with a Ford F150.

Marital Misadventures of the Sixteenth Century

Scrolling Twitter on my phone this morning, a new article from the BBC caught my eye and I knew I had to read it.

Henry VIII divorces led to copycat splits, Bangor researchers say

To save you a click – researchers from the Universities of Bangor (Wales) and Exeter (England) have found a series of court cases dealing with the marital misadventures of Edward Griffith from Gwynedd. Griffith was a Welshman whose life was contemporaneous with Henry VIII’s.

Griffith had married a young woman named Jane, who died shortly after their wedding, so Griffith married her sister Agnes instead. This apparently didn’t go so well, because Agnes left to live with her family again after a year.

After about two years of living without his wife (around 1529), Griffith decided to marry his mistress, another Jane. So – like the king, Griffith had two living wives. One wonders what Bible verse Griffith used to justify his bigamy, as his king was fond of Leviticus and not as big a fan of Deuteronomy.


“If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing…they shall be childless.”

Leviticus 20:21

Henry used the above quote to assuage his ‘guilt’ at having taken Katherine of Aragon to be his wife in 1509, because it explained to him exactly why they hadn’t had ‘children.’ Of course, they DID have children. Katherine was pregnant at least 5 times and one of their children survived to adulthood to become England’s first undisputed queen regnant. Henry, though, when speaking of ‘children’ he meant sons.

Griffith was probably a fan of Deuteronomy 25:5, as he’d married his first wife’s sister. Having that Biblical permission makes things a bit easier, but in these cases, at least when royals were concerned, a papal dispensation was required.

If brothers dwell together and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead shall not be remarried outside of the family to a stranger; her husband’s brother shall go into her, and take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her.

Deuteronomy 25:5

This happened fairly frequently -when a marriage was negotiated for political reasons but there were some Biblical reasons why it shouldn’t happen. Examples from the sixteenth century abound: marrying your dead wife’s sister (Manuel I of Portugal married two of Katherine of Aragon’s older sisters), marrying your dead husband’s brother (Katherine of Aragon married Henry VIII after the death of his older brother, Arthur), marrying a cousin (Charles V had been contracted to marry Mary, his first cousin), or marrying a niece (Philip II , son of Charles V, married Anna of Austria, and this is AFTER marrying his first cousin once removed, Maria Manuela and the above named Mary).

In Griffith’s case, he went back and forth between living with his second and third wives, eventually having three children with his third wife. Apparently he settled down with his third, his bestest most legitimate, wife after a bit and used the King’s marital misadventures to justify his own. Again, not unlike his king.

As Professor Rebecca Probert said, “Viewed in isolation, Edward appears at best indecisive and at worst a complete cad. But if you put his actions in the context of the actions of the king, it seems he felt bound by the arguments put forward by his ruler.”

Of course, that’s if you don’t think Henry, too, was a complete cad.

Now, the reason why I wanted to write about this today is to address some historical inconsistencies in the article. The work itself, by the scholars Probert and Owen, is fascinating and from what I’ve seen, well thought out and put together. The BBC, though, needs to take a bit more care with its captioning.

Awesome screencap from my phone. Cool. Isn’t technology great?

“Anne Boleyn was executed under Henry’s orders while he divorced Catherine of Aragon.”

This is patently untrue and honestly, unclear. The more I read it, the more I wonder what it is they mean exactly. Do they mean that she was executed during the divorce? Do they mean that Henry gave the orders for her execution during the divorce?

The answer to both of those questions is a resounding NO.

Anne Boleyn‘s fall and execution were due to a few different factors, personal and political. One possible factor was Katherine of Aragon’s death on 7 January 1536. Without Katherine around, Henry didn’t need to be as careful of his relations with European powers (who had generally disapproved of his taking Anne to wife). Katherine, even though she had been a thorn in the side of Anne for years, was a safety net at the same time. Henry was not going to put aside Anne, who he’d struggled FOR YEARS to gain recognition for as his One True Lawful Wife in the eyes of his kingly counterparts, while Katherine was still alive. However, once she was dead, that burden was lifted – he didn’t have to struggle to have Anne recognized as such, because at the time, she was the only wife left.

Another possible factor was the fact that Anne suffered a miscarriage of what is generally acknowledged to be a male fetus in late January 1536. Other scholars, notably Eric Ives (biographer of Anne Boleyn), claim that this put doubts in Henry’s head about the validity of THIS marriage. If God didn’t give him sons with Katherine and that marriage was obviously invalid, then the miscarriage of a son after Katherine’s death, when Anne was THE wife, didn’t bode well.

Suzannah Lipscomb, another brilliant historian, notes that Anne’s miscarriage WASN’T evidence in Henry’s mind that God frowned upon this marriage. Even though Henry was upset at the miscarriage (and who wouldn’t be? Both Anne and Henry desperately wanted this child) and had told Anne, “I see that God will not give me male children,” they recovered from their loss and were excited to try again as there would be no stain of illegitimacy on their next child as Katherine was dead. (Lipscomb, 1536 Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2009), 61 & 63).

After her miscarriage, though, Anne’s downfall came swiftly. She would have been in seclusion (or “confinement”) after childbirth for a little over a month, and would have emerged in early March 1536. This gave other factions jockeying for a position at court the opportunity to push Jane Seymour at Henry. Jane, like Anne, refused to be his mistress (but was seemingly content to engage in courtly flirtations). Now Henry had always had a wandering eye, even if he was generally happily married, so this affair in and of itself wouldn’t have been what led to Anne’s death. Katherine had tolerated Henry’s affairs with more grace than did Anne, but this, too, didn’t lead to her death. As Ives notes in Henry’s ODNB (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) entry, up until a fortnight before her arrest, Henry was still trying to get Anne recognized as his lawful queen by Charles V (Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, was also Katherine’s nephew). So as late as 18 April, Henry acknowledged Anne as his lawful wife.

Ives lays the blame for Anne’s fall squarely on Thomas Cromwell‘s shoulders. Cromwell, Henry’s principal advisor, had been the one behind the divorce, and was a proponent of the Reformed faith (Protestantism). Anne, too, was sympathetic to the Reformed faith, but she and Cromwell were on opposite sides of a debate regarding what to do with all the money that came from the dissolution of the monasteries. Cromwell wanted all of the funds to go into the King’s coffers (and he would most likely be handsomely rewarded) whereas Anne felt the funds should be used for charitable works. On 30 April, the first of Anne’s alleged paramours, Mark Smeaton, was arrested. He, probably after torture, confessed to having slept with Anne. Five more men were accused of committing adultery with Anne (one was acquitted) and she was arrested on 2 May. She was conveyed to the Tower on 6 May for holding until trial.

On 15 May, Anne was tried on the charges of adultery, high treason, and incest. Historians generally believe Anne to have been innocent of all charges. She defended herself well in her trial, but the verdict of the 27 peers who sat as her jury was a unanimous ‘guilty’ and she was executed on 19 May 1536.

So… long story short – Anne couldn’t have been executed under Henry’s orders during his divorce from Katherine, as the caption suggests. Katherine had been dead for months before the machinations of Anne’s swift fall had begun.

While the rest of the article is interesting and adds to historical scholarship, the BBC needs to do better with how that work is presented and what is posted alongside that work. Giving this incorrect information as context is disrespectful to the scholars whose work you’re covering. #dobetter

“Mine Eyes Desire You Above All Things”

So I finally (well, finally in this age of Amazon prime shipping means a week later) have my hands on Margaret Sanders’ Intimate Letters of the Queens of England (London: Museum Press LTD, 1957), which is the source Patrick Williams pointed to for his version of Katherine of Aragon’s final letter to Henry VIII.

I wanted to follow the clues like a good detective and see where Sanders found HER copy of the letter which she printed in Intimate Letters.

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Image result for margaret sanders intimate letters

First off – this is a gorgeous old book and you can tell it is meant for a general audience – it says so in the preface. 🙂 Sanders meant to give readers an introduction to these queens as human beings with complicated emotional lives that can’t be distilled down to ‘divorced, beheaded, died…’ and tried to choose letters that display those relationships with others. “Historians must inevitably be prejudiced, either from religious, political, or personal attitudes,” Sanders notes, and then goes on to say that in her introductions to each of the queens and their letters that she just tried to give the bare minimum of factual information, but, like those aforementioned historians, she exhibits her own bias and personal opinions (apparently Henrietta Maria was “the loveliest of all England’s Queens” and Anna of Denmark had “no great pretensions to beauty” but she had a great personality).

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Henrietta to Sanders?
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Anna to Sanders?

This is particularly evident in Katherine’s introduction where she takes at face value Katherine’s virginity going into her second marriage (which, let’s face it, every historian who works on the Tudor period has their own opinion, but it’s far better as a scholar to present it as a complex unknown full of messy political, personal, and religious meanings rather than “In the meantime, this young widow of an unconsummated marriage…” which, technically, if it were unconsummated, it wouldn’t have been a complete marriage, but that’s beside the point).

Sanders includes helpful footnotes to explain who people are and to provide further context when it’s needed for the general audience who may not know who “My Lady of Salisbury” was… although reading through the footnotes, if I didn’t know that Lady Salisbury was Margaret de la Pole, the countess of Salisbury, I’d be further confused – “state-governess to Mary” and “Mary’s best friend next to her mother” are all that’s used to describe who she was. Another confusing point is that Mary I was “brought up in her mother’s Faith as a strict Roman Catholic.” This is certainly true, but it neglects the important consideration that it was also her father’s faith at the time, if you were a practicing Christian at the time, it most likely was your faith as well because the Roman Catholic church was the dominant church in western Europe.

Anywho, after taking the time to peruse the book and finding other fun tidbits that I may post later, I want to give you the transcription of the Final Letter as put in Intimate Letters and then share with you her citation.

My Lord and Dear Husband,

I commend me unto you. The hour of my death draweth fast on, and my case being such, the tender love I owe you forceth me, with a few words, to put you in remembrance of the health and safeguard of your soul, which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and tendering of your own body, for the which you have cast me into many miseries and yourself into many cares.

For my part I do pardon you all, yea, I do wish and devoutly pray God that He will also pardon you.

For the rest I commend unto you Mary, our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage-portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants, I solicit a year’s pay more than their due, lest they should be unprovided for.

Lastly, do I vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.

Sanders, Intimate Letters, 12.

And there’s one last bit that I’ve been saving for the end. I had to order another book to dig into this mystery. Most of the documents that Sanders brings together are from the royal archives at Windsor Castle, the Strickland sisters’ work The Lives of the Queens of England, or other letter collections. As a historian, one needs to be a good detective – even though it can take forever and lead you down rabbit holes that go nowhere, at least for the project you’re currently working on – and to be a good detective, one needs to follow the clues.

In Sander’s bibliography, The Final Letter wasn’t cited as from an archival source – it’s from another letter collection.

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Live footage of me right now

“Chatterton: Royal Letters” is all we get in Sander’s bibliography to note where SHE got this letter from. So I used my Googlefu and found that this citation refers to Royal Love Letters by E. K. Chatterton, originally published in 1911.

After a little more searching, I found a hardcover copy that will be winging its way to me from England soon. As soon as it does, I will update with more information.

The game is afoot!

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Katherine of Aragon’s “Last Letter”

Listen up let me tell you a story, a story that you think you’ve heard before…

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/sixthemusical/images/0/03/CST_SIX_01_LizLauren.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20190724190210
The Girl Power Cast of SIX

One of the things that is most fascinating to me in history is all of the things that we just plain don’t know – but sometimes – we think we know. History is, of course, a bit of detective work, a bit of scientific information gathering and positing theses, and a lot bit of writing delicious prose that may have been left in the oven too long and comes out dry enough to gag you like my mom’s Thanksgiving turkey.

Now, I work in the early modern period, which is generally understood to have started after the end of the medieval period but ends before the really modern modern period. Got that? Not confusing at all, right? Periodization (or the naming and grouping of ‘periods’ together into larger chunks of time) is so fun to me – but in all seriousness, the early modern period looks differently when you’re talking about different places. In England, where we will focus on for this post, the early modern period roughly/exactly starts when Henry VII usurped the throne of Richard III (also known as ‘the Usurper’). So, 1485, at the beginning of the Tudor dynasty’s spin at running England. The modern period typically is understood to begin at the French Revolution as a blanket date, so the early modern period is roughly 1485-1789.

That’s a lot of time to work with. And it happened, well, several centuries ago, and I can’t find the receipt I got from Whole Foods last week, so it’s understandable that letters, documents, diaries, etc go missing from even further back.

Sometimes, historians are lucky enough to actually find documents that have survived in homes, archives, etc, to work with. Like this:

“Officers of the household of the late Sovereign Lady of blessed memory Queen Elizabeth”

This is taken from inventories of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)’s household at her funeral and is part of a collected set of documents which describe the materials and costs of those materials needed for her funeral. Having a list of all the people in her household, what jobs they did, and what rank they held was important so that they got the appropriate amount of black cloth to make into clothing for the funeral (as well as any other pensions due to them). So if you’re interested at all in the people who worked Elizabeth’s household on the day to day basis – it’s in here (at least those who were in her employ at her death). This is a pretty fantastic document to have survived four hundred years!

There are other documents which, while the original hasn’t survived, copies of them have. These copies, while they are super helpful still to historians, are more difficult to work with than the originals. Copies, in the early modern period, were all made by hand or by printing and errors could easily creep in during the copying process. So even if we have one copy, it may not tell the whole story and it’s important to find other copies and compare them to one another to see if there are differences and if there are, what are they?

So the point of this post is to look at one letter in particular – Katherine of Aragon’s ‘last’ letter. Supposedly written at the very end of her life to her husband, Henry VIII, it is very much in character for what we know of and believe to be true about Katherine’s attitudes and language usage.

This is believed to be the text of this letter – which you can’t find in an archive, as reported in Giles Tremlett’s fantastic biography of the queen:

My Lord and dear husband,

The hour of my death now approaching, I cannot choose but, out of the love I bear you, to advise you of your soul’s health, which you ought to prefer before all considerations of the world or flesh whatsoever. For which yet you have cast me into many calamities, and yourself into many troubles. But I forgive you all, and pray God to do so likewise. For the rest, I commend unto you Mary, our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father to her. I must entreat you also to look after my maids, and give them in marriage, which is not much, they being but three, and to all my other servants, a year’s pay besides their due, lest otherwise they should be unprovided for until they find new employment. Lastly, I want only one true thing, to make this vow: that, in this life, mine eyes desire you alone. May God protect you.

Tremlett, Giles, Catherine of Aragon: The Spanish Queen of Henry VIII (New York: Walker & Company, 2010), 364.

Tremlett takes this last letter with a healthy dose of skepticism. While it is very much in character for what we as modern readers would expect from Katherine on her deathbed (supposedly she signed it as “Katharyne the Quene”), there aren’t any other corroborating pieces of evidence which make it undeniable that this is the letter she wrote. There’s no mention of it in diplomatic missives – Eustace Chapuys, who was the ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire and Katherine’s nephew Charles V, never mentioned it when writing to his lord. He did write, however, of a request that Katherine made of Henry to take care of her servants after her death (it cannot really be termed a will as at the time English law forbade women from writing wills if their husbands were living – as technically everything the wife owned belonged to the husband).

Knowing that according to English law a wife can make no will while her husband survives, she would not break the said laws, but by way of request caused her physician to write a little bill, which she commanded to be sent to me immediately, and which was signed by her hand, directing some little reward to be made to certain servants who had remained with her.

Eustace Chapuys to Charles V, 21 January 1536.

This is kind of a baller move by Katherine. It shows, one last time, that she never stopped treating herself as Henry’s wife. If she had proclaimed a last will and testament, she would have acknowledged that they were no longer wed, under English law. To her last, she fought to retain her status as queen of England.

Still, though, Chapuys does not mention anything about a last letter to Henry. Chapuys was one of Katherine’s staunchest allies – who fought to protect her rights as queen and her daughter Mary’s status as princess. It would make sense for her to trust Chapuys with the knowledge of such a letter – but there is no mention.

Other scholars take it at face value that such a letter existed – Patrick Williams is one. In his new biography of Katherine, which is exceptionally detailed when it comes to the political intricacies and machinations of the time, Williams writes of Katherine’s last letter as a matter of course – no interrogation of its veracity. His version is different from the one that appears in Tremlett’s biography and I’ve quoted it below:

My Lord and dear husband,

I commend myself to you. The hour of my death draws near, and my condition is such that, because of the tender love that I owe to you, and in only a few words, I put you in remembrance of the heath and safeguard of your soul, which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters and before the care and tendering of your own body, for the which you have cast me into many miseries and yourself into many anxieties.

For my part I do pardon you all, yes I do wish and devoutly pray to God that He will also pardon you.

For the rest, I commend unto you Mary, our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father to her, as I heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage-portions, which is not much, since there are only three of them. For all my other servants, I ask for one year’s pay more than their due, lest they should be unprovided for.

Lastly, do I vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.

Williams, Patrick. Katharine of Aragon: The Tragic Story of Henry VIII’s First Unfortunate Wife (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2013), 374.

So while they largely say the same things, they do so in completely different tones. One of the jobs of an early modern wife was to guide her husband to godly behavior and choices – which ‘Katherine’ does here in her letters. Tremlett’s letter seems more of the devoted wife- ‘because of the love I bear you’ rather than Williams’- ‘because of the tender love I owe to you‘ which sounds more like an obligation rather than her choice. Although, honestly, I can’t really blame her for treating the performance of love as an obligation to Henry at this point.

Tremlett doesn’t say where he got this particular copy of the letter – but it has been circulating and taken as fact for generations. Williams, though, cites another Amberley publication, that by Margaret Sanders (who Williams names “Saunders” in his bibliography). Now I’ve not gotten ahold of her book yet, Intimate Letters of England’s Queens, but it is on the way, and I will write an update when I have it. I hope that she includes her archives for the letters she edited in her collection which will help bring light to this (or make it even more confusing).

As a historian, I have a hard time saying that these letters are totally fake. I can’t, for absolute certain, say that they are fictitious, but the most important question to me is not whether they are fake or real (which, let’s be real here – is super important) but why they exist at all. Let’s say that they are fake – what story is being told by them? How are Katherine and Henry represented by the story told by these letters? Who benefits from presenting the historical figures in this particular way?

That, my friends, is the subject of another blog post.

Stay tuned! Same bat time, same bat channel. Oh, and Carthage must be destroyed.

Combating Loneliness

This is a tough post for me to write, y’all. I have been cooped up for the last couple of months – working on my dissertation. I’ve got two chapters drafted, only four more to go, which is super exciting. In these last few months I have made a lot of progress, and I plan on making more.

I know this is one of the things that you can’t really plan for once you become ABD (all but dissertation), but when you’re not in coursework anymore, when you’re not stopping by the office to say hi to your colleagues or to do a spot of work before heading to teach or to class, it’s incredibly lonely. Some people thrive on that – when it’s just you and the screen all day long.

I am not one of those people.

I thought I could be, but I am most certainly not.

I spend my day obsessively making and drinking tea, researching, and writing. I’ve been trying to be better about getting out of my lovely apartment (much to the chagrin of my needy, needy cat), but I’ve been largely unsuccessful.

So… that’s why I’m writing this today. I want to be better. I want to find a way out of this little lonely hole that I’m putting myself into through intentional isolation. I don’t want to be isolated, or at least to feel that way. There have been days where I don’t see or talk to anyone pretty much all day (luckily my wonderful husband comes home from work in the evenings!) and it’s gnawing away at me, and making it harder for me to concentrate on my work.

This is my public promise to myself. I will try to treat myself how I would treat my friends and loved ones – by following my own advice. I will get out to the climbing gym to do what I love and what helps to keep me focused. I will make it a point to talk to someone, every day, even if it’s just a text or email. I will try to take care of me, and to care as much about my mental and physical health as I do about that never-as-much-as-I-want-it-to-be word count.

I will slip. I will have some days where I utterly fail. That will be OK. It’s the trying again that matters.

I’m also trying something new – I love living the quantified life (woo Fitbit and Garmin!) but I’m a little iffy on gamifying my life… but we’re giving it a go with SuperBetter. It’s a super positive app that wants to help you to make yourself better (by your own definition) in some way. It will give you little bits of encouragement along the way and is bright and colorful and happy and all of those things that I love in an app.

Wish me luck, I’m trying to screw my courage to the sticking place.

Reflections on the Newberry

This last weekend I had the honor and opportunity to attend and present at the Newberry Library’s Annual Graduate Student Conference.  It was wonderful to be surrounded by my peers and to become part of the community of young scholars.

I didn’t get to go to all the panels I wanted to attend (who does?) but the ones I did get to sit in on were fantastic.  They were filled with fascinating research and thought-provoking questions.  I particularly enjoyed the one on LGBT research in medieval/renaissance literature/musical performances.  Listening to the papers made me really think about my own research, and to think about incorporating more theoretical frameworks into my analysis.  How each of the presenters managed to do the theory and to have it flow seamlessly into the history was skillful and that is something I hope to work on this semester with an article I’m writing for a research seminar.

I also got wonderful questions about my own research that made me think about how I wrote the paper, how I presented the work and where I am going from there.  I also got a great book suggestion that will stretch me out of my temporal comfort zone (but still sticking with my subject, consorts!) that I immediately ordered from Amazon and will devour when it arrives.  I really want to look at the foreignness of Henrietta Maria and how that played a part in her reception in England (which I did to some extent, but I think looking at it more would yield more insights) and I’ll incorporate a bit of that into my article, where I am looking at Anna of Denmark’s masquing career as well.

 

I do a lot of comparative work.  I’m OK with that. 🙂

Semper Eadem indeed.

It seems as though the name of my blog was indeed prophetic.  Ever the Same – not posting.  If I had a more solid YouTube presence, I would be soliciting punishments from my viewers to atone for my lack of posts.

Luckily for me, that is not the case.    Huzzah, a lack of popularity can be a benefit!

So why am I not posting?

Currently, I am in the process of getting my classroom ready for the next semester.  As an early child hood educator, that means a lot more than just lesson planning.  I am configuring possible rearrangements of the furniture in the room, compiling student staff schedules, creating anecdotal record summaries and developmental growth charts for all of the children in my classroom.   This is after completing my room’s NAEYC portfolio.

For those of you who are not involved in Early Childhood education, NAEYC is the National Association for the Education of Young Children and they are an independent organization that provides accreditation for children’s centers.  To earn this accreditation is a very involved process and not every center can earn the distinction of being a NAEYC center.  UWM Children’s Learning Center, where I currently work, has held NAEYC accreditation since it started operations over 40 years ago.

Part of the process is at the room level (there are many levels to this within the center) is to create a portfolio of artifacts and explanations which demonstrate to the NAEYC assessors how our program, and specifically our room, meets all of the criteria that NAEYC sets down.  Something new for this year is that the portfolios can be created, saved, housed, and submitted digitally.  Ours lives in the Cloud.  I believe that ours, as an Infant and Toddler room, has to demonstrate how we meet over 60 criteria.  Some rooms, the Infant rooms, have less criteria to complete.  Others, like the Kindergarten rooms, have almost 100.

Because our portfolio is digital, I get to have the pleasure of completing the Sisyphean task solo.  Not a problem, and honestly, I’m looking forward to what I get to do with my room next semester.  Even if it’s exciting and fun that doesn’t mean it’s not time consuming.  It’s taken up quite  a bit of my bandwidth in terms of energy and mental capacity.  This, combined with graduate school applications, has taxed me quite a bit and when I get done with the work day I am basically a zombie.

Only now as we get closer to the New Year, am I gaining some of my energy back.  I’ve been chatting with my undergrad supervisor and found a fantastic list of books that he’s using for a class this year that I am going to be buying and reading on my own.  I need to stay in touch with this world.  I try to on my Twitter, so far, it’s been a fairly successful endeavor.  One that I don’t have to carve out time for daily as it neatly fits in with my morning commute.

Currently, as my grad school apps are all in and I am awaiting my judgments, I am working on writing a little something on the Rose of Versailles and as soon as I am done with it, a review on John Guy’s biography on Mary Stuart.  I’ve also ordered Mark Kishlansky’s abbreviated biography on Charles I, which I am excited to read!

For now, I will most likely maintain a reading interest in Stewart/Stuart history, and I’ve been toying around with a few ideas for possible MA theses/PhD dissertations.  We’ll have to see what happens, it all depends on where I am accepted!  Wish me luck!

 

For now, I’ll sign off – I just wanted to post to remind myself that I can and that I am not dead online.

 

Happy Holidays!

Remember, remember…

Truthy Tuesday: Remember, Remember…

 

This week marks the 409th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, which was an attempt to kill James I of England, kidnap his daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, and replace him on the throne with her as Queen. The attempt was, of course, unsuccessful, or else it wouldn’t still be celebrated today, in the form of Bonfire Night. Bonfire Night is exactly as it sounds, it’s a holiday where bonfires and fireworks are lit to celebrate something NOT being lit on fire. A delightful irony that.

Religion had much to do with the origins of the Plot, which was pinned on Guy Fawkes and a group of Catholics. This band of men hatched a plan to explode the House of Lords on the State Opening of Parliament, which was to take place on November 5th, 1605. However, a last minute search of the belly of the building revealed 36 barrels of gunpowder and Fawkes. Fawkes played off like the was a serving man and almost got away, but he was apprehended and brought before the King the next day.

James questioned Fawkes and tried to pressure him into revealing who worked with him, but Fawkes, under the alias John Johnson (yes, quite original), resolutely denied the existence of any co-conspirators, and insisted that he acted alone. While he gained some measure of respect from the monarch. However, that did not save him from torture. He held out for two days, but eventually recanted his story of working alone and gave up his comrades.

His story does not end there. He was found guilty of high treason and sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered. When the time came for his death, he jumped from the scaffold, breaking his neck. Now, he is burned in effigy each year at Bonfire Night and his name, alone out of all of the conspirators, is remembered by the general public in connection with the Plot.

There were others, and why did they do it?

Catholics had had a hard time in England since Henry VIII’s break from the Church of Rome in 1534, with the Act of Supremacy which stated that Henry was the Head of the Church in England. His successor, Edward VI, was a staunch Protestant, but his eldest half-sister, Mary, was just as devoutly Catholic. During her reign, Catholics enjoyed a brief respite in the campaign against the Church. Mary’s reign was short-lived, and her younger half-sister, Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558. While still not religious tolerance, Elizabeth’s punishments for Catholicism were less harsh than those of her brother and her church was more of a Protestant one, with a dash of Catholicism. Her successor, James I, was far more tolerant than any of the Tudors in the matters of religion. He had been head of the Church of Scotland since ascending the throne of his homeland while still a young child, and became head of the Church of England in 1603.

While he had been tolerant to a point that ended after several Catholic plots to assassinate him had been uncovered. If it was one thing that scared James, it was threats to his life. He began to change his stance on just what punishment was visited upon recusants. This riled up the Catholic community and Fawkes and his ilk decided to take action. Kill the King, kidnap his daughter the Princess Elizabeth, and set her on the throne as Queen. That was foiled and now the night is celebrated instead. So please, friends, celebrate this night, but…

 

Remember, remember the fifth of November

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.


 

 

 

Trying Something New! And Posting!

So, this post is coming from my Microsoft Word program on my computer. I’m interested in seeing what it can do for me! I draft most of my posts in Word anyway, so this saves me the middleman of copy/pasting it to my blog to post. We’ll have to see how it goes!

 

I’ve been working on constructing my CV and Personal Statements for my grad school apps over the past few weeks. I’m finally getting to a point where I feel comfortable with them, where I will send them to the gracious individuals who have offered to write me letters of recommendation. J After that, I’ll be working on fixing up one of my papers to use as a writing sample (It’s probably going to be my paper on Anna of Denmark, of which I presented an excerpt in England). Then… application time! I’ve narrowed my choices down to a small number of schools, but at least the pool is larger than last year’s. One of the benefits of not being a student this time is that I’ve got more money to use for the application fees, GRE sending fees, and transcript sending fees. Lots of fees.

Hopefully this time it will pan out a bit better, and more in the “acceptance” letter range rather than the “rejection” letter range. We’ll have to see!

 

OK, well, I must be back to work now. I’ll be working on a post on the history of Rose of Versailles as well as a vlog series on which I am tinkering.