MY FATHER AND I

MY FATHER AND I

September 7th, 1540

Dear Diary

Hi, I’m Elizabeth I called “The virgin queen” or “The good queen bess”. Today I will show you some of me and my in particular and some pages of my personal diary.

I was born in September 7th, 1533. 

I was born at Greenwich Palace, my father is Tudor king Henry VIII and my mum is his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Since my dad ardently hoped that my mom would give birth to a male heir, regarded as key to stable dynastic succession, my birth was a bitter disappointment that dangerously weakened the new queen’s position. Before I  reached my third birthday, my father had my mother beheaded on charges of adultery and treason. Moreover he making me a daughter illegitimate, claiming marriage to my mother invalid. This have emotional impact of me, who had been brought up from infancy in a separate household at Hatfield. What was noted to me was my precocious seriousness.

During my career, “The Elizabethan Age”, England was vigorously as a major European power in politics, commerce, and the arts. I don’t wanna brag myself but who can do this like me?

There are still some divisions but my courage, and majestic self-display inspired ardent expressions of loyalty and helped unify the nation against foreign enemies.

All the adulation I’m receiving now can’t be a spontaneous effusion.

Giosuè De Toffoli e Donola Letizia

Mine was a carefully crafted and executed campaign in which I modeled myself as the shimmering symbol of my nation’s destiny. Although I did not wield the absolute power that the rulers of the Renaissance dreamed of, I tenaciously supported my authority to make critical decisions and establish the central policies of both the state and the church. The second half of the sixteenth century in England is rightly called the Elizabethan age: rarely has the collective life of an entire epoch been given such a distinctly personal stamp.

Schiavo Riccardo

My father is Henry VIII, he was born June 28, 1491, Greenwich, near London, England and died January 28, 1547, London, king of England (1509–47). He had six wives, the most famous are, Catherine of Aragon (the mother of the queen Mary I) and Anne Boleyn (my mother).

Letizia Donola

April 21st, 1541

Dear diary,

My father promised England the joys of spring after the long winter of Henry VII’s reign when, in 1509, he ascended the throne.

My dad’s determination to engage in military adventure is serious. Europe is being kept on the boil by rivalries between the French and Spanish kingdoms, mostly over Italian claims; and my father Henry in 1512 joined his father-in-law, Ferdinand II of Aragon, against France. 

He displayed no military talent, but a real victory was won by the earl of Surrey at Flodden (1513) against a Scottish invasion. Thomas Wolsey was the firs outstanding minister of my father. By 1515 Wolsey was archbishop of York, lord chancellor of England, and a cardinal of the church. Though the world might think that England was ruled by the cardinal, my father himself knew that he possessed perfect control any time he cared to assert it.

The years from 1515 to 1527 were marked by Wolsey’s ascendancy, and his initiatives set the scene. Henry supported Wolsey and Rome would have been a powerful card in English hands. my father’s election to the imperial crown, was briefly mooted in 1519 when the emperor Maximilian I died, to be succeeded by his grandson Charles V. That event altered the European situation e quindi from 1521, my dad became an outpost of Charles V’s imperial power.

Schiavo Riccardo

January 2nd, 1547

Dear diary,

today I’ll tell you how my father lost his popularity.

I assisted while the greatness of England in Europe was being shown up as a sham, the regime was also losing popularity at home. The country was showing increasing signs of its discontent, and Wolsey’s efforts to remedy grievances only exasperated men of influence without bringing satisfaction to the poor. Feelings came to the boil in the years 1523–24. In 1524, the attempt to levy a special tax led to such fierce resistance that Henry rescinded it, he and the cardinal both trying to take the credit for the remission of what they had been jointly responsible for imposing. By 1527 a government policy that, though seemingly Wolsey’s, was really the king’s was facing bankruptcy; 

ineffective abroad, unpopular at home, it made the regime look as empty of positive purpose as in fact it was.

Among his failures so far had been his or Catherine’s inability to provide a male heir to the throne. Henry sought the occasional relief from marriage to a worthy but ailing wife to which princes have generally been held entitled. In Anne he met his match; this 20 year old girl. My dad, needed to marry, to solve the succession problem, it took about six years to achieve their joint purpose. Inadvertently, he provoked a revolution.

From 1527 my dad pursued what became known as “The King’s great matter”: his divorce from Catherine. My father rapidly assured himself that he was living in mortal sin with Catherine and had to find relief if he was again to become acceptable to God. He appealed to Rome for a declaration of annulment. Moreover, the pope’s reluctance was increased by the fact that he was being asked to declare illegal an earlier exercise of papal power.

Thus, my father attempts to solve his dilemma in the accepted legal way were doomed from the start. Within weeks, Wolsey was ousted, but his disappearance solved nothing, and the councillors who succeeded him could offer little help to their king, who knew only what he wanted, not how to get it.

The chancellorship went to Thomas More, who had told to my dad that he did not approve of the divorce and who wished to devote himself to a fight against Lutheran heresy. Confusion was the keynote of policy for some three years when neither he nor anyone else knew how to convert talk into action.

Letizia Donola

October 17th, 1547

Dear diary,

my dad is always so brutal and selfish and I can’t stand him. I talk to you just to let it out. He just for separate from his actual wife has separated from Rome and the pope after has excommunicated him I’m so happy about thistle pope doesn’t deserve this type of people. My dad now feels like the only king of everything but he is only an inconsistent because earlier in one of his book “Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martinum Lutherum” had attacked Luther then he expressed the absolute devotion to the pope. He had also too many wives because of this He executed Anne because she “failed to produce a male” but he said its adultery such as a monster. He immediately married Jane and she bore a male I remember Edward son but he died in childbirth. He has tried a lot of more times always changing wife for three years and he choose Anne, I’m so sad for her. I only heard it was just an alliance 

with someone, can’t tell who was the other king and anyone lasted a lot with my dad because he always hated her she divorced after the marriage.

Giosuè De Toffoli

July 9th, 1540

Dear Diary, 

a very bad thing happened today: the Cleves fiasco, which destroyed Cromwell. My father is so shocked by this news that he does not speak to anyone and seems very suspicious. I realized however, that with each passing year, it gets worse and worse and I think what happened today was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I’m very scared!

He is starting to have health problems, especially weight: he is very fat!

He is restless, irritable and totally unpredictable; often melancholy and depressed, he is usually in a bad mood and often loses his temper.

I have a rumor that he wants to marry again, with a certain Catherine, she would become his fifth wife, I hope she doesn’t.

My father is now trying to keep the kingdom united but it is not easy with the period that is passing and above all because he intends to return to the war …

I don’t think that’s a good idea: my father right now can’t handle a war and everything that goes with it.

Although by the people he is considered a great king, as a person he is not that great: he presided over the beginnings of the English Reformation also because of all his marriages, he is very attracted to the humanist culture and is a sort of intellectual himself, but he was responsible for the deaths of the eminent English humanists of the time. Formidable in appearance, memory and mind, and fearsome in temperament, he nevertheless attracted genuine devotion and knew how to charm people. Monstrously selfish and surrounded by flattery.

In the eyes of other dads, he seems to be the incarnation of the monarchy but he is not.

He is not a great man in any sense.

But I allow him one thing: he has never felt pleasure in killing;

although he is a cold person, suspicious of the habits of the world with a ruthlessness fueled by hypocrisy.

Giada Niero

July 19th, 1544

Dear diary, 

my father is at war with France and the Scots, it’s the end.

Although she is ill she is showing herself very strong and determined but in any case this war is ruinous: the money had to be raised by selling the monastic lands, which had brought a good income; my father’s desperate expedient of debasing the coin, although it brought temporary relief, led to violent inflation which made matters worse.

Giada Niero

July 12th, 1543

Dear Diary, 

today is my father’s sixth marriage to Catherine Parr. In the meantime, there was a brief marriage with Catherine Howard, but it didn’t go through. Don’t even tell you how long the latter will last, by now I have lost all hope.

Giada Niero

January 28th, 1547

Dear diary, 

my father is dead. He left a disoriented kingdom, refusing to make full arrangements for the government of a boy king …

Giada Niero