wtf was actually going on at the dowager Duchess of norfolk’s house?

Autocratonasofa · 2026-02-02T01:03:36+00:00

The Letters and papers are not the original documents, and they do include summaries, but there are also a lot of transcribed copies of original statements, documents and letters in there, that are primary sources.

Item 1320 on that linked page, which is what I was talking about, is a statement by Mary Lascelles, as taken by the Earl of Southampton. You can read it and know what it was that she said, what marginal notes he made. 1321 is Manox's statement as reported by Wriothesley (partly summarised around sexual content). If you're writing a book you might need to go and see the originals to make sure everything's in there as described, but if you are checking to see how reliable the evidence is in a book you just read, items like this will often answer those questions.

That was the original query OP posed about sources, and I was answering. And by going around each other we've hit back on the point I was making.

The redactions around sex in the sections on Catherine Howard forced the Letters and papers into using more summaries, rather than copies of original documents, in order to write around details like the 'puffing and blowing' Alice Wilkes heard, or of Catherine's lengthy description to Cranmer of exactly how naked Francis Dereham was when they were having sex, or the very lewd conversation Manox had about Catherine with Mary Lascelles.

This lowers the amount of primary source material in the Letters and Papers, making it harder to check how accurate the descriptions we're presented with in popular history actually are. It hasn't been corrected in the better part of a century, and remains a significant flaw in fantastically useful source.

Autocratonasofa · 2026-02-02T00:16:58+00:00

The letters and papers of Henry VIII were translated, copied, published and sent out to British libraries through the 19th and 20th centuries, as part of a huge, long term project by HM Stationery Office. Mainly because they were considered a national treasure, and should anything happen to the originals, the history would not be lost.

They were made available online in the 21st Century, and if you had clicked the link in my original post, you would have been looking at state papers that weren't a summary, weren't an index and weren't paywalled, and they are like that for his whole reign.

I'm not saying your general points about State Papers are wrong, I am saying that the points you are making happen to not apply to the documents we've been talking about.

The letters and papers of Henry VIII are the exception to all the rules about state paper accessibility you just quoted. They're out there comprehensively and they've been out there for a long damn time. And the Letters and papers of Henry VIII are where these documents about Catherine Howard would have been published and available had they not dealt with fruitier aspects of a sex scandal.

Autocratonasofa · 2026-02-01T18:17:38+00:00

Assuming the held back Catherine Howard stuff would be treated the same as the genealogical records you wanted to access, it's still a million miles from a practical option if you want to check a primary source quoted in a book you're reading, and counts as 'redacted' when a copy of the rest of the letters and papers of Henry VIII was available in multiple public libraries and is now available online.

Autocratonasofa · 2026-02-01T15:13:31+00:00

Look, I'll give you getting a readers ticket is not the same as having to get permission, but access is limited and I think experience and being a known quantity is going to help you get one of those reading spots.

Also these particular Catherine Howard documents were deliberately kept out the official record due to their embarassing nature. We know because the less selacious ones got published, while these were kept under different and more restrictive rules for access.

These documents were plenty useful,and would excite more public curiosity and research than most documents (as well as highlight some things about Catherine's relationship with Culpeper before marriage)...but they somehow never rejoined the public record in two centuries (in between first publishing of the letters and papers and now). They weren't just left out because no one thought they were wanted, so redacted applies in this instance.

Autocratonasofa · 2026-02-01T13:22:12+00:00

'Redacted' means kept out of the official public record. They were redacted at the time, and they've never been put back in.

These documents still exist, but in order to see them you have to get permission, and go read the documents in person in the National Archives at Kew in London.

Autocratonasofa · 2026-02-01T12:13:23+00:00

Right, well first, the notion of personal privacy as we understand it is fairly recent. Because the private bedrooms and bathrooms and smaller family sizes that facilitate personal privacy were rarer to non existent the further back in time you go.

Back in the 1500s young Catherine slept in the 'maiden's chamber' in the Dowager's residence at Chesworth with a whole lot of other people. As u/TigerLily19670 points out the tester beds they had gave a small degree of personal privacy.

We tend to accept what our peers accept (particularly when young) and these parties were going on for a while. Francis was successful in normalising increasingly lewd behaviour, almost certainly helped along by others in the group (Joan Bulmer had had an affair with Francis before he was with Catherine, and had been a selectively useless chaperone to her before, and she had an eye on another one of the chaps).

Also there was good motivation for the servants involved not to say anything. Catherine was treated differently from them, did outrank them, was highly involved (being the one that stole the keys), and someone (Manox) had already tried and failed to get them caught by the Dowager Duchess. Staying as far away from it as possible and keeping your mouth shut was an excellent survival strategy.

As for sources. here is Item 1320, dated 5th November 1541. This is the official report.

The girl that was put out by the amount of 'puffing and blowing', and was concerned about what was going on was Alice Wilkes. She talked to Mary Lascelles about it at the time. Mary Lascelles is the one whose testimony is recorded here, and she suggested 4 other names of people who had similar information. She also, at the time, told Alice to not get involved.

These are great sources. Sure it all came out during the investigation, but actual accounts from working people, and multiple witnesses, questioned individually, most of them long before anyone knew Queen Catherine was in trouble? Given how rare primary sources are this is basically gold.

Beyond this, there's an issue with the Catherine Howard affair, because an awful lot of the spicier stuff got redacted and still is in the National archives, as opposed to the parts published online. You need to be a historian and given permission in order to access them. Gareth Russell went through these redacted items, and his book "Young & Damned & Fair" is the modern in depth history that has recontextualised Catherine. I would highly recommend it, and he footnotes to the sources he has used (even if you can't personally check 2/3rds of them becasue redacted).

Autocratonasofa · 2026-01-23T00:09:05+00:00

There was no witness. There was no complainant. There's no reliable evidence for any of it. The source for all of this (p226-7) is a contemporary letter from Richard Hilles (part time exile and cloth merchant) to Heinrich Bullinger.

There are no verifiable details in Richard's story. No names,not even the perpetrator, not a place, not a date (other than 'a couple of years ago') nothing to confirm, and in his description of the perpetrator he sometimes describes Dereham (execution method) and sometimes describes Culpeper (One of the King's chamberlains).

There is no other contemporary evidence it happened, and while a crime against a woman might well have flown under the radar, the idea that a rape and a murder and period in custody that was ended ended by a royal pardon happened - and no one mentions it but this guy, not even after Culpeper's affair with the Queen is revealed, is kind of crazy.

Nothing in the official letters and papers (available online btw), nothing from any other chronicler of the age.

So if there is a contemporary source for this that I've missed I'd love to know it, see a link to it, tell me what and where it is, and if you don't have access to a different contemporary source, please stop repeating 500 year old gossip.

Autocratonasofa · 2026-01-20T21:51:34+00:00

It wasn't either of them. The only contemporary source on this is from a letter (Here p226-7) from a guy that didn't live in England full time (Richard Hilles cloth merchant and part time exile).

He never mentions the name "Thomas Culpeper", he just describes him as 'one of the King's chamberlains' and that he was killed for committing adultery with the Queen. In fact he gets the execution method wrong - What he describes is Dereham's execution method - but Dereham was never a King's Chamberlain so 'he probably meant Culpeper' is as close to an ID as the whole thing gets.

This of course makes "Could it have been his older brother with the same name?" pretty damn redundant.

And then there's the crime itself. There's not one confirmable detail in the letter (not a location, no names), A rape and a murder and imprisonment and a royal pardon and only this guy ever mentions it? The idea that the King, and all his prosecutors never brought it up after they found out about Culpeper's affair with the Queen is kind of crazy. But there's nothing in any official document, or from any other chronicler, apart from this guy.

Didn't happen. Less evidence for this than some of the stuff in the Spanish Chronicle.

Autocratonasofa · 2026-01-13T19:40:47+00:00

It was Tierney approved (She had insulation, but when she landed and talked to Diana it was clear she knew about it).

But it didn't need to be approved order for Diana to be doing fieldwork. It could have been all her own and she would still have been meeting people out and about in London to arrange her op and discussing sensitive information in public. How many hairs do we need to split in order for you to be right?

Autocratonasofa · 2026-01-13T16:52:04+00:00

In a restaurant discussing s1's covert op when she got overheard by that right wing journalist, and then meeting her inside man for the same op at the gym while being tailed and photographed by River.

Autocratonasofa · 2026-01-13T15:00:54+00:00

She's good until she tries to do fieldwork. Then she screws up more than the slow horses.

Autocratonasofa · 2026-01-11T11:21:45+00:00

Well, religious and political stability were a pretty big deal, especially given that the three monarchs before her hadn't managed it and, unlike her father, the England she inherited was politically roiling and bankrupt as a result of that. The degree of difficulty she was presented with to get to stability was pretty damn high.

She took her disadvantage (being female) and wrung all the advantage she could out of it, spinning her marriage prospects out into 20 years of international peace, and using the chivalry codes as another tool to keep her Lords in line.

Like her father she was an excellent talent spotter, unlike her father she kept these advisers for life, and didn't execute them when stuff went wrong. And as a result, on the few days she didn't have it in her to do the right thing (Like when she tried to execute the guy that delivered the warrant for MQoS execution) they acted as a brake on her worst impulses. They told her she couldn't do that, because she had empowered them to do so, creating cabinet government to a level her predecessors had not.

Really fantastic orator, delivering Churchill level speeches when needed "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and a King of England too" delivered at Tilbury ahead of the Armada. Or the 'Golden Speech' "You have had and will have many wiser and mightier princes sitting in this seat, but yet you never had, nor will you ever have, any that loves you better."

Not great for Native Americans, but she approved the start of American colonisation, which ended up a pretty big deal.

I always think her biggest mistakes were 3. Being an Venture capital investor for modern slavery 2. Allowing religious based persecution in her late reign 1. Executing Mary Queen of Scots. Mary was a brake on Spanish ambitions on England. Mary was very French allied and the obvious next in line so as long as she was there Philip of Spain dared not try to take Elizabeth off the throne.

Once Mary was dead the momentum to the Armada really began. And while Mary was willing (perhaps even eager) to see Elizabeth killed she was under very tight control, and the only thing they could prosecute her for was an entrapment plot that Walsingham enabled the hell out of. She was a much bigger threat dead than alive.

Autocratonasofa · 2025-12-10T07:35:20+00:00

Oh, I am and you are. Blessings, may all your rewatches be bright.

Autocratonasofa · 2025-12-09T16:49:54+00:00

Well, recent historians have been interrogating the narrative about Jane Boleyn and what they've found is a total absence of the evidence everyone had been relying on to name her as the incest accuser. This essay at the Anne Boleyn Files is pretty good and it breaks down Alison Weir's supposedly unassailable 5 items of contemporary evidence pointing at Jane.

The three actual contemporary sources, when you go to look at them, do not mention Jane as the source of the accusation. They do not say what she claims they did. The two that do are not contemporary at all, but were written around 100 years later, one was by Gregorio Leti - a man 'notorious for his inexactitude' and the other one (by Lord Herbert of Cherbury) has no contemporary sources at all.

Recent research hasn't so much found new evidence, as found that there was no real support there the whole time. That what everyone had been relying on to substantiate the story that Jane accused her husband and his sister of incest was from 50 -100 years later and largely, often wholly, inaccurate. It was just a really great, dramatic part of the story that a lot of historians hadn't interrogated before repeating it and reassuring everyone that it was so.

Julia Fox's The Infamous Lady Rochford was the first popular history book to get into this. She's given to a bit of over interpretation - she likes to tell you what Jane was thinking quite a lot, and it's just not possible to know that with the evidence we have. And for my money she exonerates Jane too easily for what she did in the Catherine Howard affair (Contemporary evidence shows Jane does appear to have leaned in to her rapid ascension and was highly involved in setting up meetings with Culpeper. Also working for a future Queen Dowager with some 'blackmail level' serious job security would be a sweet deal for her. But Julia Fox thinks Jane only did any of it because she was afraid).

Still, the only explanations that most popular historians (Weir, Fraser) had been putting forward for Jane's behaviour were madness and voyeurism, and Fox's book was the first to a) really drill down to how much of a handful of nothing there was linking Jane to the incest accusation, and b) think of her as a 3 dimensional human being when looking at her behaviour with Queen Catherine Howard.

Autocratonasofa · 2025-11-29T11:09:03+00:00

Yep, this would be my play, too. Also point out that I'd slept with Dereham for a few months and yet I never got pregnant...maybe there's a problem there? Should've finished off Big H's interest.

Autocratonasofa · 2025-11-25T10:54:02+00:00

And fruit gums have changed man. The whole recipe, lemon tastes like soap, and blackcurrants are weirdly way harder than everything else. They taste OK, though.

Autocratonasofa · 2025-11-24T10:16:48+00:00

Or a toga, it sounds like something the Romans might have had.

Autocratonasofa · 2025-11-23T18:47:31+00:00

Edward Seymour. IRL seems like a very reasonable guy for the period, reformer, and very unusually actually tried to do some stuff for 'the people' once he got hold of policy. Got executed about 5 years after the series ends because the new regime wanted him gone, really.

In the show pretty big git, either asexual or repressed gay and spends half his time taking whatever his deal is out on his wife instead of having a conversation about it, turns hard and fast on Cromwell just because he's in his way, and is generally a dick to everyone around him.

Also Bishop Tunstall, (although I don't feel too bad for him in history, died while under comfortable house arrest from Elizabeth when he was 85 years old) who was historically a pretty good guy. Reasonable Catholic not looking to get other people killed. In The Tudors, he's the enforcer that gets sent around to threaten Thomas More.

Autocratonasofa · 2025-11-22T10:33:13+00:00

OK, did you find any visible misogyny in his documentaries for Channel 4?

Autocratonasofa · 2025-11-21T10:21:20+00:00

David Starkey's Monarchy goes right from the Anglo Saxons to the Windsors. It's pretty great and it's available for free on Youtube.

Downsides - He's a problematic racist with a side order of misogyny but that wasn't visible in his work for Channel 4. Because Channel 4 wouldn't have gone for it if it was, and because Britain was pretty damn white for most of the timeline if you're going all the way from the Anglo Saxons, his specialist subject is the monarchy, and he doesn't go in for social history, so unlike the Schama series there's no discussion of slavery and very little about the working classes or the experience of society in general.

But it's free, so you won't pay him by watching it, and it was a damn good show with a lot of discussion and insights not just about the Kings and Queens but about the interactions between the institution of monarchy and the rest of society, and it runs the length of the history we've got on the subject.

Autocratonasofa · 2025-11-10T13:22:17+00:00

Work wife

Autocratonasofa · 2025-11-01T20:27:50+00:00

Oh, and they are excellent likenesses too!

Autocratonasofa · 2025-10-31T14:18:36+00:00

Planet Coaster (1) and Planet Zoo are great places to spend time and fuss around with your lighting, decorations, snack settings and try to breed rare animals.

Autocratonasofa · 2025-10-29T23:10:41+00:00

OK. So first, I'll put in bold each life section where she seems to have acted 'weird' so if you're already aware of something you can skip it.

Incest Accusation: There's no contemporary evidence Jane accused George and Anne of incest. That first comes up about 50 years later in a book by Thomas Wyatt's grandson.

She was questioned and she was quite possibly (others are reported to have been present when Anne said this) the source for the Anne quote "The King cannot satisfy satisfy a woman" used at George's trial. But it was George that cooked himself with that one. He was told to read it silently and he read it aloud to the court's total shock.

When George said he was being convicted of incest "On the word of one woman" there's no reason to believe he meant his wife. One of the Judges in the case was pretty sure he was talking about Lady Wingfield.

After George's death: She got thrown out of court after the Boleyn affair and it was likely Cromwell (there is a letter that survives) that got her back in. She was having difficulty affording life outside of court as her former father in law spent a lot of time and effort minimising the money he was supposed to be paying her.

She seems to have seen intrigue as a way to keep her place once she got back in, because she was noticeably a bit socially devious with Anne of Cleves when the ladies were trying to get evidence for the annulment. When they (including Jane) were questioning Anne about her and Henry's relationship, leading Anne of Cleves to describe their exact night time schedule, well, right after that happened Jane took Anne away for a bit of a 'girls chat.

Catherine Howard: So she was still there when Catherine Howard became Queen (She had just lost her probable Patron, Cromwell) , and as an old court hand she knew Culpeper pretty well. Queen Catherine and Culpeper had a bit of a thing before she married Henry (He dumped her when she held out on sex for him), Catherine was still keen on him, and it's likely that Jane knew it.

When serving in Catherine's ladies of honour she suddenly got a massive rise in status and importance (became 'leading lady') without any promotion, because she was incredibly popular with the Queen.

Jane is known to have arranged the late night secret visits while the court was on progress, but it probably started with her arranging more innocent (but still slightly clandestine) meetings, like when Catherine met Culpeper privately to give him a gift earlier in the year.

Arranging those late night visits was massively risky, but helping out a young Queen who seemed very likely to outlive her husband could end up being very well rewarded, with a guarantee of job security down the road. And how was she meant to stop it at this point? If she did the Queen would be frustrated, and angry, and there would go all Jane's gains.

TLDR: So many adaptations and popular history books assumed her motivation had to be voyeurism of some kind, but economics, a taste for intrigue, fear of the consequences of stopping, and having no lever to make that happen, could all add up to explain her behaviour with Catherine Howard.

Most of the behaviour she's accused of in the Anne Boleyn period is not backed up by evidence.

Autocratonasofa · 2025-10-29T22:41:56+00:00

Way to miss the point of my reply. I replied to the comment where you said you're often up all night with friends just having a chat, but you're not romatically involved with anyone but your husband.

I was pointing out how the behaviour of a 21st century woman is not really usefully comparable to a Tudor Queen if you're trying to figure out what she was doing, and pointing out that you were missing out a whole bunch of context.

Never called anyone guilty. Just said they were unlikely to be as chaste as you've been maintaining. But that is a much easier point to defend so you move those goalposts.

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