TOTAL BURN on THOMAS MORE

Ok, it has been about five hundred years, and I know ALL of us are thinking the EXACT SAME THING: who in the HELL decided that Thomas More was some kind of great guy? Much less a saint or something?

Not only do I risk the wrath of the world's largest religion here, so I admittedly get some ice water in my veins as I type this, I also risk sounding like the idiot kid who points out the emperor has no clothes. This guy was one of history's most self righteous JERKS and here he has people in the twentieth century eulogizing his memory even in full presence of the terrible things he did?

I feel like this is some kind of 'Behind the Music' version of More but the evidence really speaks for itself. And not only am I doing the equivalent of posting grainy paparazzi photos of this terrible Tudor, it makes me look like some sort of meanie that should be exposing the real story behind Brittany Spears. Brittany Spears hasn't gone down in history, recent or ancient, as being some kind of 'Saint' or something, literally. This is a guy whose terrible cold-hearted grasp was only limited by his reach. In the brief period that Henry VIII decided he was deserving of the office of right hand man, the king gave him a free hand to deal with religious heretics as he saw fit.

So the end result was that this hypocrite was mincing words with the king about whether or not his royal divorce should be sanctioned (on the which matter he could have made a big difference if he actually had spoken out like Cardinal Fisher did, he did so while he was BURNING PROTESTANTS like Simon Fish. Now to be fair to history, Simon Fish died of the plague (phew what a relief) but More did condemn him to death, after which his widow married his best friend, who was then in turn actually among the burning victims of More. That story would be exquisitely depressing if someone wanted to make a movie of it someday. Fish and his compadre usually get the press of some type of composite protestant martyr but individually each story is still fairly illustrative of the types of terrible things More did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Fish

Let's see what we might be missing. What is the REAL RAP on why we all think that this cruel bigoted monster is getting an overly sanitized reputation.

I really think that this self righteous hypocrite's actual character is NOT up for debate because among other egregious crimes he goes down in history saying that the only reason that he didn't go into the clergy even though he believed it was the only profession worthy of himself is that he didn't want to look bad for not keeping his hands off the ladies.

This is why, for a lesser sacrifice, Tom More ended up with the movie about all the stupid 'Seasons' et. and Cardinal Fisher ended up with only obscure but dignified martyrdom. The only thing that I can think of is that Cardinal Fisher, who was actually LESS equivocal about Henry's divorce, didn't get much sympathetic press because he actually WAS a devout Roman Catholic who had never married or fathered children despite his better religious scruples.

And thus because Margaret Roper and his other WHINY, BRATTY descendants have had five hundred years to polish this thug's memory, his reputation looks a bit brighter than poor Cardinal Fisher's whose righteous celibate lifestyle resulted in no one really giving a damn about him at all. Fisher went to the block more valiantly than More, but no kids equals nobody really cared one way or the other.

And yeah, he was beheaded by Henry VIII but what else is new. I actually think Thomas Cromwell is a much more sympathetic figure, even though Hal had him done in specifically by a teenaged axman who was doing it for the first time with a dull axe. Thomas Cromwell's last words are pure guts, as Henry had probably given the signal that if he said anything critical a much worse job should be done on purpose, etc. Thomas Cromwell said that he was about to go out having

"Most patiently suffered the axe by a most cruel boocher."

What I think is a total BURN on Thomas More, though, (HAHA, pun intended) is that he wrote a lot of his legal argument stuff about five years too early. It was right before the Gutenberg printing press (which was really responsible, more than any person could, for successfully ending the hold of Roman Catholicism), standardized English spelling for GOOD!

So even though Thomas More was like the pinnacle of enlightened humanist thinking and education at the time, via historical accident he goes down on record looking like a kindergartner that can barely read or write!

LOL... Burn on Tom More. Now no one says stuff like that, and whether or not it is a good thing, it is obviously a fact. Having an opinion that differs from half a millenia of a propoganda machine is not an easy thing to do. So pardon if I perform the office like a bit of a "boocher" myself.

Anniversary of Anne Boleyn's death today 5/19

Today in 1536, Anne Boleyn Queen of the Protestant reformation was killed on the Tower Green in the Tower of London. Her co-conspirators or whatever they were called were killed two days prior.

Some people don't like her because she is said to have seduced the king and acted immorally with him. I don't buy this. He sought her out and threatened her family, and what are you going to do in that case if you were her or them? She had precontracted with a decent young man that she probably would have rather married at some point, saying to Henry that the whole affair resulted in "farewell to her youth having spent it to no purpose at all, when [she] could have born sons which is a woman's greatest conslation in this world."

Whatever her deserving of her fate, she is said to have died with dignity, saying of King Henry "a kinder more merciful prince there never was." I think she accomplished with irony what she wasn't able to say directly for fear of how it would impact her family and supporters.

Here is my analysis of how they tried her with so little evidence:

http://www.helium.com/items/1041337-people-tragic-queen-boleyn

This post is TOTALLY disgusting

But then again so is most reference to medicine during this period.

I think everyone is sort of familiar with the four bodily humors: blood, bile, yellow bile and black bile.

It is interesting to me to think of how those would be thought to be the main liquids in the body except to realize what it would be like to live during that time and have being violently sick to your stomach be a part of life.

I hav progressed through the first two colors of bile, just not the third. But what is sad is to think that black comes eventually.

It is REALLY sad to think that many people died of this. I usually have the concillation when I am puking my guts out that it won't be literal, but many people that got that sick knew that it wouldn't end and would be fatal. Pretty sad way to go. It really makes me greatful for advances in medical science to not only get rid of diseases like cholera but eventually overcome the supertstitions and firmly entrenched philosophical systems that existed in medicine for hundreds of years.

Why the Tudors are interesting to me

I have asked myself this question many times. After all, I am a person with a high level of potential to be interested about topics. I am somewhat intelligent, if IQ test scores mean anything, but I think more importantly I am a thinker. I am never satisfied with what I know or think I know. I am always willing to evaluate it based on what someone else thinks THEY know, which as I bump into more and more people, I think is my most rare quality and actually comprises what most people mean when they say 'smart.' It is an issue of personality and values rather than wiring.

History fascinates me. I am always amazed that I have ancestors that have survived the deplorable conditions that preceded electricity, modern medicine and the industrial revolution. I always wonder what would happen if someone with me on the inside encountered a pre-modern world on the outside.

The Tudors are really the best indication of what it would be like for that to happen. Before that, everyday life was very sparsely documented, archaeologically and anthropologically it is all guesswork at this point. But during the Tudors' reign things like everyday life started to be recorded at a pace never seen before. Additionally, while I don't believe that monarchs really are different than anyone else or deserve special attention, they were the most readily recorded of all who lived there. They are a window into what it would be like to live before antibiotics, electricity, free expression of religious conscience, Copernican astronomy--a lot of the things that modern people take for granted.

Because I like history and am always voracious in my appetite for it, I have been a wee bit frustrated about The History Channel lately. Probably not in proportion to what it deserves. But I have been needing to vent about it.

http://www.helium.com/knowledge/140962-network-reviews-history-channel

Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart and the incriminating post script.

By golly I think I have solved the 400 year riddle of whether Elizabeth was complicit in Mary's judicial murder. It is possible I haven't, but I am surprised that this particular fact hasn't been more prominent in the discussion one way or the other.

I wrote an article about it on Helium:



http://www.helium.com/tm/907549/stuart-otherwise-known-queen

Henry VIII's Six Wives

I did a post on another site about whether Henry was a traditional husband or not. He obviously didn't succeed, but I argue that he tried, and tried harder than one might suspect, and he tried the impossible:

http://www.helium.com/tm/777515/henry-reputation-notorious-womanizer

Tudor diet: myths/reality, etc.

The characters' diet on the recent Tudurs series was a bit half baked. Literally--way too much of it was raw, and that would have never flown in Henry's court.
is the pressure to perpetuate falsehood.

Read about it here.

Also, there is a cool living history exhibit at Hampton Court palace that if you ever travel to England you should be sure to visit. It is getting about as good a look into Tudor live and Henry VIII's world as you can get.

Read about visiting the living historians at Hampton Court.