GKC wrote:
I'm sure you do read more, as to the 16th-century goings on, outside the British Isles. I have little interest there. I have maybe 25 general histories of the period, multiple bios of Luther, and other flotsam and jetsam. OTOH, Total Tudor and late 15th & early 17th century related stuff on hand is maybe 200. I've been at my major hobby horses longer, and with a far greater ...manic obsession. No, I've not read them all. But I've used practically all, in part at least, to chase threads of topics of interest through the various authors. I commend your good beginning. Don't stop now. Get bios of everyone you can. Mary Tudor is not easy to get, casually (which is how I buy Tudor material now, the flame burns that low). I only have 2 for her, 1 for Pappa Hank VII, one for baby Edward, etc. And as you know, there are three large bios of Hank stacked in the ready locker, latest being Bernard's. Eventually, something will click, and I'll start reading this again. But right now it's Lewis (last month it was primarily Oppenheimer). And then I bet I'll have to dig into the Chesterton commentaries to say something useful about TMWWT when I can find the time. There's an Ignatius Press Collected Chesterton volume due in a day or two. I hadn't realized I had not bought the last volume of his collected ILN columns. Which meant I didn't own the one that was his very last such, in which he again mentions TMWWT. Can't have that. Someone might ask what that book means.
So keep up the good work. You're young yet (though I was far younger when the fever hit). There's time for you to get a totally unnecessary number of tomes.
Oh, I already own more books that I can possibly hope to read in one lifetime, just not Tudor related stuff. At the beginning of this year, I counted all the books on my Kindle that I have never read, and it was 104, and I made the commitment that I wouldn't buy any new books until I got at least some of then read, but I haven't been able to stick with that resolution. So far this year, I've read 21 books, and I'm almost finished with my 22, of those 22, 18 of them are new books that I have bought since January. I haven't counted recently, but I'm sure the number of unread books is now greater than it was 4 months ago.
In the lack of a good biography of Mary I, I am hoping that Alison Weir's 'The Children of Henry VIII' will provide at least some insight.
I am not interested in an apologetic defending Mary, per se, but I do think that her story is usually only ever told through the eyes of Protestants of the Elizabethan era, in which she is portrayed as 'evil' to distinguish her from the supposedly heroic and noble 'Virgin Queen'. I want to try to understand her on her own terms. Even 450 and more years after the fact, Tudor era propaganda still has a powerful hold on the popular imagination and most of the so-called 'common knowledge' about that era reflects that propaganda, from the supposed 'evil' of Richard III to the 'evil' of Mary I.
As a king who began his reign with very little real 'legitimacy' by way of a blood claim, since there were no fewer than 6 other Plantagenets that had a stronger claim to the throne that he did, Henry VII needed propaganda more than most other kings to get the public behind his reign, and he created a propaganda machine to rival Napoleon Bonaparte or modern dictators like Hitler or Stalin, and the propaganda continued into the Elizabethan era, and even though professional scholars were long ago able to discern truth from myth, in the popular mind, the Tudor mythology is still alive and well.