The person behind the portrait

[operafantomet]

It is kind of funny what witches woman can be toward one another. I can't copy paste the link right now as I'm on my phone and haven't figured out how, but I was reading about Anne after your post, Dona and she really does seem to be power hungry. I laughed when I read of her on Tudor place. Com of refusing to carry Catherine's train and pushing her out of the way during their entances and exits at court. She was quoted as saying she was teaching her manners while Catherine is said to have callled her "That Hell". Lol

Sad though, had she been a man she would be called "determined" and "powerful".

NOT applauding her behaviour, if it was as bad as reported. But men get away with way worse stuff and are called heroes. Take a guy like Alexander the Great. He was known for his violent temper. He had all his rivals to the throne murdered, killed all men of Gaza and sold the women and children as slaves cause they fought for their city, and he burned down the grand Persian city of Persepolis (reason isn't known). We rate this man a hero and a grand figure in history. Sure, times were different, but his idea of a world empire and the ways he went to achieve it is not (in my eyes) something to praise. Same with various knights, kings and popes and whatnot. But if a woman shows similar tendencies, I.E. lust for power, for status, and works to achieve their goal, their name gets a bad scratch.

[Anna Iram]

Agreed. That still holds true today, but especially in the past women who wanted it all had to marry well, or mistress well and keep their eye on the prize.

[DonaCatalina]

Not disagreeing with you; but some of the things she did would have been condemned even in a man. She confiscated the Queen's jewels from the treasury for her own use and reportedly sold access to her husband.

[Anna Iram]

Yeah, she definitly went off the edge. I only read the one article, but it sounds like she was a real fury. I'm sure it wasn't pretty to watch at the time, but I still think it's funny to imagine such behaviour. Not the theft or the other really vicious stuff, but the hissy fits at court.

Same for all those ladies in Charles II court. It's funny now to think of the pranks and such but at the time lives were at stake. Getting tossed from his side meant some pretty rough going and a pretty hard fall. As it was I think Louise, once Charles passed on, struggled with debt until she passed. Her own doing certainly as I believe she was often called "rapacious", but weren't they all in their way to some degree or other? Men and women of the courts struggled daily to keep their positions.

[Rowan MacD]

  You gotta love Anne's dress though.  I love the simple elegance and those artful slashes *sigh*

[Welsh Wench]

Charles really used the theatre as his own personal trolling grounds.  And it was here that he encountered another actress--Moll Davis.

Mrs. Pepys, wife of Samuel Pepys the diarist, called her 'the most impertinent slut in the world'. But she did get a new coach--kind of like getting a car--and a ring worth £600.

Moll had a daughter by Charles the next year but Nell Gwyn was not about to gracefully go gentle into that good night.  Hearing that Moll was due to sleep with the king on a night early in 1668, Nell invited her to eat some sweetmeats she had prepared. Unknown to Moll, her rival had mixed in a hefty dose of the laxative jalap. After that, the night in the royal bed did not exactly go as planned. Charles, too, had a sharp sense of humour, but this time, he was not amused and Moll was summarily dismissed. Being a generous man, though, Charles sent Moll packing with a pension of £1,000 a year.

Maybe it is good Nell didn't know about cannabis butter.

[DonaCatalina]

Charles Brandon 1st Duke of Suffolk portrait c1545 unknown artist.

Charles was born about 1483/1484, the son of Sir William Brandon and Elizabeth Bruyn.
He contracted to marry Elizabeth Grey, 5th Baroness Lisle (1505 – 1519). The contract was annulled. No issue.
First marriage: Before February 1506, he married Margaret Mortimer (née Neville). The marriage was annulled in 1507. There was no issue.
Second marriage: About 1508, he married Anne Browne (d. 1511) daughter of Sir Anthony Browne, Standard Bearer of England 1485 and Eleanor Oughtred.
Third marriage: In May 1515, he married Mary Tudor, Queen Dowager of France (18 March 1496 – 25 June 1533).
On 7 September 1533, he married Catherine Willoughby (1 April 1520 - 19 September 1580)
Fourth marriage: On 7 September 1533, he married Catherine Willoughby (1 April 1520 - 19 September 1580)
Yes, at the age of 50, Charles Brandon married a 13 year old girl. The kinder view of this was that he realized his son would never live to marry the girl and married her to keep from returning the dowry. Less kind are suggestions from some historians that he may have preferred underage girls.
One early incident is used to support this view. On the 15th of May 1513 he was created Viscount Lisle, having entered into a marriage contract with his ward, Elizabeth Grey, Viscountess Lisle in her own right, who, however, refused to marry him when she came of age. Some like to romanticize his marrige to Mary Tudor; but many contemporary sources say that the desire was all on her side and Charles only married her under much pressure. Her brother King Henry VIII was reported to be enraged at the marriage. But Brandon knew he probably had more to fear from Henry if Mary claimed ravishment in the event that Brandon refused to marry her. The truth was that Henry was anxious to obtain from Francis the gold plate and jewels which had been given or promised to the Queen May by Louis in addition to the reimbursement of the expenses of her marriage with the king; and he practically made his acquiescence in Suffolk's suit dependent on his obtaining them. Knowing Henry as well as he did, Brandon probably knew very well that sufficient payment would smooth over any dispute over the marriage.

[Welsh Wench]

Is it just me or does he look like a Weeble?

What is interesting is the bouquet of what looks like dead flowers and the one-gloved hand.
And here MJ thought he had that idea patented!

I don't know what it is but there is something about him.....something cold and callused in the eyes.

[Welsh Wench]

 
In his idleness during his exile, Charles had little to do but womanize. After all, what's a monarch to do with that free time? I mean, you can't hunt and fish all the time but it looks like Charles could do a lot of other things all the time.

The first pretty girl to catch his eye was a Welshwoman, Lucy Walter whom he met in The Hague in the summer of 1648. Lucy took up with Charles shortly after his arrival , and in 1649 gave birth to his first child, James, later Duke of Monmouth. Lucy was her lover's constant companion, but he made the mistake of leaving her behind when he left The Hague in 1650. He returned to find she had been 'intriguing' with Colonel Henry Bennet. Charles ended the affaire there and then. She died 'of a disease incident to her profession'  in 1658.
 
Poor Lucy.
The saddest tragedy of Lucy's life is that at this time when she most needed to be calm, reasonable, and disciplined, she instead turned into a hysterical, unreasonable nag. She came from a broken home as her father abandoned her mother when she was about eleven, and her mother had to go to court to obtain his financial support. Lucy was naive and excitable. Probably only the most stable personality could have resisted the pressures she was under. Her desperate need of money, her frustrated sense that she should be treated as queen or at least as mother of the royal heir, her need for powerful supportive parents or advisers, and her lack of a stable household of her own, took a great toll. She demanded the large allowance Charles had promised her and her son, but which he literally had not a shilling to pay. She neglected the education of her young son, she threatened Charles, and worst of all she created public scandals around him while he was himself still dependent upon the good will of foreign royalty for his own support.

Sounds like Lucy could have used some 21st century medication.

Then there was the controversy of the 'black box'.
Did Charles really marry Lucy? Or was it just a ploy to get in Lucy's bloomers?
 
Antonia Fraser in 1979 wrote that Lucy was "neither a whore, as one legend suggests, nor the chosen bride of the Prince of Wales.... But she did belong to that restless and inevitably light-moralled generation of young ladies who grew up in the untrammelled times of the Civil War.... As their brothers, who had grown up frequently without fathers, became the undisciplined high-spirited bucks of the 1660s, so those young ladies who survived to the merrier times of the Restoration became the great ladies of the Court."
 
Sounds like Court was a fun place to be! 
 
 

[operafantomet]

What is interesting is the bouquet of what looks like dead flowers and the one-gloved hand.

My immediate thought was that the portrait presents him as a suitor or groom. Holding flowers like that usually implies a marriage or love affaire. It doesn't make sense that he is presented in such manner in a portrait painted the same year he died, though. He was around 60 at that point. But I don't think the flowers are meant to be dead, it's more that the square shapes and dry quality of the portrait due to... well, the style of an artist who wasn't in the top league. Compared to another portrait of Charles Brandon the first one posted really is second rate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Brandon_Duke_of_Suffolk.jpg

[DonaCatalina]

James V of Scotland was King of Scots from 9 September 1513 until his premature death at the age of 30.
He was the nephew of Henry VIII of England, and was just seventeen months old when his father was killed at the Battle of Flodden Field on 9 September 1513. The young king was controlled as a virtual prisoner by the 6th Earl of Angus until 1528 and assumed the reins of government himself.
James sailed to France for his first marriage and fathered his only legitimate child, Mary Stuart.
According to legend, James was nicknamed "King of the Commons" as he would sometimes travel around Scotland, disguised as a common man, describing himself as the Gudeman of Ballengeich. Also according to legend, what he learned of the Scottish people while out like that convinced him that his heir should not marry Edward, Henry's son. The memory of Edward, Hammer of the Highlands, was strong among the common people. The 'rough wooing' that Henry VIII pursued reinforced fears of what would happen to Scotland if an English monarch sat on the throne. By the time of James V death, most of the nobility had come to agree with him, regardless of bribes and blandishments from England. Who know how history might have turned had he lived longer.

[Lady Kett]

James sailed to France for his first marriage and fathered his only legitimate child, Mary Stuart.

I really should know this, and I know I can go look it up on any of a gazillion websites, but the Mary's in English and Scottish history continually confound me as to who is who...so...

Is this Mary Stuart the same as Mary, Queen of Scots that QE1 had imprisoned and executed?

Many thanks friends...

[Lady Rebecca]

Yes.

[Welsh Wench]

 
Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II of France. And what a looker she was!

 http://www.dianedepoitiers.sharibeck.com/king.htm

So...Henri gave her the chateau next door to his and then there was a passageway that connected the  two chateaus...Catherine d'Medici must have been fit to be tied!

Anyways her tomb was desecrated during the French Revolution and buried in a mass grave. Unearthing her remains years later revealed an inordinate amount of gold in her system. It seems she drank gold as an elixir to stay beautiful.

You know--I like her!

[DonaCatalina]

Juana de Castilla also known as Juana la Loca.
Below is a rare portrait of herself with her two oldest children Eleonor(later Queen of France) and Carlos (later Emperor)

Juana (6 November 1479 – 12 April 1555), was the first Queen regnant of both the Crown of Castile (1504–55) and the Crown of Aragon (1516–55), a union which evolved into modern Spain.
Besides the kingdoms of Spain, she also ruled the kingdoms of Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples in Italy; a vast colonial empire in the Americas; and was Countess of Burgundy and the consort of the Burgundian Netherlands, thus initiating Spanish interests there. She was the last monarch of the House of Trastámara and her marriage to Philip the Handsome initiated the rule of the Habsburgs in Spain. Throughout most of her long reign she was under the regency of either her husband, father or son, and she was long confined to a nunnery under the pretense of mental illness. She was insanely jealous of her husband's paramours and her violent outbursts gave her husband and father ammunition to convince others of her madness and bolster their own power.