Research

Mary Queen of Scots & Henry VIII's "Rough Wooing"

When Henry VIII couldn't use the Treaty of Greenwich to take the crown of Scotland through a marriage between the infant Mary and his son Edward, he decided to burn the country to the ground.

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Sources:

Fraser, Antonia. Mary Queen of Scots. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.

Merriman, Marcus. The Rough Wooings: Mary Queen of Scots, 1542–1551. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000.

University of St Andrews. "The 'Rough Wooing' Is Offensive and Wrong, Argues Leading Historian." News, University of St Andrews, March 2026. https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/the-rough-wooing-is-offensive-and-wrong-argues-leading-historian/. Reports Dr. Amy Blakeway's argument that "Rough Wooing" is an anachronistic, 18th-century euphemism that legitimizes the sexual violence of the period and should be retired in favor of "the Anglo-Scottish Wars of the 1540s."

Warnicke, Retha M. Review of The Rough Wooings: Mary Queen of Scots, 1542–1551, by Marcus Merriman. Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 34, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 299–300.

Image Sources:

By order of appearance

Jacob-Ferdinand Voet, Portrait of Anna Caffarelli Minuttiba, late 17th century, oil on canvas, San Francisco, de Young Museum of Fine Art

Hans Holbein the Younger (workshop), Portrait of Henry VIII, 1540, oil on panel. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome.

Corneille de Lyon, Portrait of James V of Scotland, c. 1536. Best candidate: National Trust Collections

Corneille de Lyon, Portrait of James V of Scotland, c. 1536. National Trust Collections

William Scrots, Portrait of Edward VI (1537–1553), 1546, oil on canvas

William Scrots, Edward VI (1537–1553), c. 1546. Royal Collection Trust

John Everett Millais, The Ransom, 1860-62, Getty Museum

R. S. Marriotts, Lord Grey of Wilton’s Charge at Pinkie, 1873, wood engraving. From James Grant, British Battles on Land and Sea, vol. 1 (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1873), 57. Digital image courtesy of the British Library / Wikimedia Commons.

Giovanni Andrea Darif, The Abduction of the Venetian Wives, 1829, oil on canvas

Francis II, King of France, and his wife, Mary Stuart, Queen of France and Scotland, 1573. Miniature illumination on parchment from the Book of Hours of Catherine de' Medici. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Nouvelle acquisition latine (NAL) 82, folio 154v.

Catherine Howard’s Rise and Cromwell’s Death on July 28, 1540: Sources

I read Gareth Russell’s Young and Damned and Fair a few months ago, and it was the best source for this short video on the occurrences of July 28, 1540 in Tudor England: Catherine Howard’s marriage, and her future foreshadowed in Cromwell’s fate. Sources: Russell, Gareth. Young

Thomas Cranmer & Anne Boleyn: Sources

In researching this video, I had so much fun (yes, macabre, I know) reading through the British Library's archive of the letters flying around Henry VIII's court in May, 1536. I've pulled out an excerpt from Cranmer's May 3rd letter to Henry,

Affair of the Poisons at the Court of the Sun King: Sources

Amidst what felt like a deathly cold in late March, I was reading about arsenic poisonings to make myself feel better (as one does when you're ill). It was during this week that I came across the Affair of the Poisons the scandalized the court of King Louis

Queen Isabelle and Her (Bloody) Road to Regency

Watch on Youtube Image Sources: By order of appearance Philippa of Hainault by W.H. Egleton for the book Biographical Sketches of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest to Victoria Note: While I know this isn't meant to be Isabelle, I decided to use it because