God Save the Queen

I'm not a nostalgic person. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that I am occasionally, selectively nostalgic. Sometimes I miss places that no longer exist. Sometimes, I miss having little children. But most of the time, I am clear-eyed and unsentimental about the past. Things change, as they should. Time marches resolutely on and that's mostly to the good

I'm especially not nostalgic for the 20th century; at least not for most of my life during the last half of that century. But I miss a shared frame of reference. I miss the feeling of a solid foundation beneath my feet. 

For my entire life, my understanding of the world included knowledge that across the ocean Queen Elizabeth reigned over the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. Her reign began years before I was born, and continued sometimes eventfully and sometimes quietly but constantly either way for the next five decades. The Queen was part of the landscape. She was a structural element. She was, almost literally, an institution. I'm an American, through and through, and even I feel disoriented and a little unmoored today. I'm sorry for England's loss but it's our loss too, a little bit. It's a loss for everyone in the world who doesn't remember or who has never known a world without Elizabeth Il. God save the Queen.

Hilary Mantel: (parenthetical) Author of the Year, 2020

If I were to create a dashboard or a visualization of my reading history for 2020 (in theory, I mean--I will spare you in reality), then it would be all about Hilary Mantel. I read six of her books last year: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light (the Wolf Hall/Henry VIII/Thomas Cromwell trilogy); AND Giving Up the Ghost, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, and Mantel Pieces. I wrote about the Wolf Hall books several times. I feel like I know Thomas Cromwell. I don’t want to hang out with him or anything, but I know him. 

After I tore through the Wolf Hall trilogy, I read Giving Up the Ghost.  Then I wanted to read another novel, so I read Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which was loosely based on Hilary Mantel’s own experience as an expatriate living in Jeddah. She wrote somewhere else, perhaps in an essay, that the day she left Saudi Arabia was one of the happiest of her life. And if her life there was anything like the eight months depicted in this book, then I don’t blame her. 

Eight Months reminds me very much of a Muriel Spark novel. This is very high praise, coming from me. Hilary Mantel reminds me of Muriel Spark in general; but specifically, Eight Months reminds me of the novels The Hothouse by the East River and The Takeover, and the story “The Go-Away Bird.” Eight Months is a first-person narrative told by Frances, the young wife of an engineer hired to work on a major building project in Jeddah in the early 1980s. Frances is a modern Englishwoman who struggles to adjust to her position as a woman in Saudi Arabia. She is also a person who is constitutionally unable to keep her feelings to herself, and unable to see things except as they are. She lacks the ability to deceive herself or to talk herself into accepting the unacceptable. Events occur and situations develop that a less observant person would fail to notice and a more astute and cynical person might notice but decline to acknowledge. But Frances is not capable of failing to notice; and having noticed, failing to act. People like Frances tend to struggle in places and times when the truth is not particularly valued. And I don't know that Hilary Mantel intended the book to be allegorical, but I think it is. I'll leave you to decide what it's an allegory for. 

*****

My last Mantel for 2020 was Mantel Pieces, a collection of essays and reviews. And reviews of reviews, if that’s a thing; and it is, if Hilary Mantel says it is. This collection includes what was apparently a famous essay about the bodies of royal women; both in general and in particular; and especially Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge. The press coverage about this essay focused more on Kate Middleton herself and far less on what Hilary Mantel actually wrote about her, which was a little bit about Kate Middleton herself and a lot more about how famous women’s bodies are assessed and critiqued and generally treated as public property.  Hilary Mantel doesn’t suffer fools or foolishness; but she also has no patience for criticism that is cruel for cruelty’s sake. I don’t know how better to describe this than that she takes a jaundiced eye toward jaundiced eyes. Having now read Hilary Mantel’s fiction, autobiography, and essays, I am naming her as my author of the year for 2020. This is an honor that conveys absolutely no prestige or financial reward, but I do congratulate Ms. Mantel anyway. A win is a win.

Tudors and others

When I was reading the Wolf Hall trilogy, I felt sure that I’d rather be burned than beheaded. That’s not a non-sequitur; there was a lot of heretic-burning and traitor-beheading during the time of Henry VIII. Either, of course, would be better than quartering, but women were not subject to quartering, so at least there was that. But I burned my hand today while I was making popcorn and it hurt like a mother and I think it would probably be better to suffer the axe. God willing, I’ll never find out for sure.

Well, that was fun, wasn’t it?

Right now, I’m reading Anna Whitelock’s Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen. Mary is just one of the many Wolf Hall characters whom I need to know better, and I foresee months of reading about Tudors and Cromwells and sundry other royals and courtiers. I’m pretty excited about this.

Queen Mary, sometimes called Bloody Mary, was Henry VIII’s daughter. Like almost every other woman in his orbit, and not a few men, she suffered terribly at his hands. Henry demanded absolute devotion and loyalty from everyone around him, and he offered none in return.

Henry reminds me of someone. I’ll have to rack my brains for a few minutes to figure out who. It’s right on the tip of my tongue.

Anyway, this is so far a very sympathetic portrayal of Mary. I’m still on her early life, when she was stripped of her title of Princess and declared a bastard. I’ll still think of her as Princess Mary, though, because Henry can’t throw me in the Tower. As a defrocked Princess, she was powerless; but I understand that she did quite a bit of heretic-burning in her own right during her short reign as Queen. I’ll find out all about it soon enough. For now, I feel sorry for the poor girl.

****
I’m still reading. Henry is finally dead and good riddance; but his son Edward VI, Mary’s half-brother, is making her life almost as difficult as it was when her father was alive. To save herself from charges of treason and heresy, Mary submitted to Henry’s assertion of authority over the Church, but she’s not about to knuckle under to her teenage brother and his Protestant gangster friends. It’s about to get interesting in Tudor England.

*****
Poor Mary died alone at age 42, and I don’t excuse her for one moment for the terrible things she did as Queen. Lady Jane Gray was used by her power-hungry relatives and Mary could have just banished the poor girl to a convent. She probably would have gone quietly. And I am no admirer of Thomas Cranmer, but that was nothing more than revenge. Even though Cranmer recanted his recantation at the last minute, Mary couldn’t have known that he was going to do that. And of course, she burned 300 other heretics, too, despite all evidence that the threat of burning was not likely to deter anyone from heresy. Mary herself faced death threats for years and she didn’t back down an inch. She should have known.

But still, it’s hard not to feel sadness and pity for a woman so alone, who suffered ill health and phantom pregnancies, who was humiliated and threatened and all but imprisoned by her own father, and whose love for the man she married was not returned. Crown or no crown, it was just about impossible to be a woman in the 16th century. Wealthy widowhood was your best hope.

*****

I took a short break from the Tudors to read something else (I’ll write about it later, maybe), but now I’m back for more with Alison Weir’s biography of Mary’s much more famous sister, Elizabeth I. I know very little about Elizabeth other than what I have seen in the movies. I read a biography of Mary Queen of Scots when I was a teenager; and between my sympathy for the Scottish Mary and my Catholic upbringing, I’ve always been inclined to think of Elizabeth as a villain. But she suffered, too. It must have been alternately terrifying and dreadfully sad to know that your father ordered the execution of your mother on very likely trumped-up grounds (who does Henry remind me of? Who?) Anne Boleyn was no angel, of course. Given the chance, she might very well have killed Katherine of Aragon and Princess Mary; and I’m sure that she made life miserable for everyone who offended or irritated her. But just because she was a  mean bitch who probably thought about killing her husband's ex-wife doesn’t mean that she should have lost her head.

Henry VIII was the worst. He reminds me of someone. I just can’t put my finger on it. Meanwhile, I have some reading to do.

Pilgrimage of Mice

It’s 12:35 PM, Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. In a normal year today would be one of my favorite days of the year but this is not a normal year and today is a little sad.

On a normal Memorial Day weekend Saturday,  my kids would already be at the pool, there to remain until 9 PM. My older son would be working his first lifeguard shift of the summer. And now that I remember, my younger son would maybe be working his first lifeguard shift ever. He was supposed to get his certification in March, but his class was cancelled just like everything else. I’d be doing some swim team work, then a little bit of housework, and then I too would be packing my swim bag and heading to the pool to see my friends and celebrate summer, my all-too-short favorite season.

But it’s still summer. I’m still wearing shorts and a t-shirt. The windows are open and the breeze is blowing, and the sun is streaming in and it’s a three-day weekend. Maybe I’ll have a drink later. Maybe I’ll have a drink now. There’s nothing stopping me.

*****
It’s Sunday morning now, late Sunday morning heading toward Sunday afternoon. It seems less summery today. There’s no sun. Well, there’s obviously a sun because the earth is not pitch-dark and frozen over, but it's not blazing overhead.

I didn’t do very much yesterday other than reading and walking and hanging around. We all hung around, and it wasn’t a bad way to spend a day. A holiday weekend always feels like a pause in regular life and so it doesn’t really bother me that nothing is normal now. Talk to me on Tuesday. I won’t be so sanguine.

*****
It's Monday now, Memorial Day. When I wrote this yesterday, I didn’t know what to do with myself, but my company’s proposal manager solved the problem for me, and I spent most of Sunday afternoon and part of the early evening rewriting past performance content. The section that I had to rewrite wasn’t badly written, it was just all wrong from a just-the-facts standpoint. So I fixed it. When I finally finished, I was cross-eyed and tired, and missing Thomas Cromwell and the Tudors; so I poured a glass of wine and rejoined Henry VIII and his courtiers as they discussed how to handle Robert Aske and the rest of the Pilgrims. Right now, Henry is promising safe conduct to Aske if he’ll just come to Windsor to negotiate. And I don’t have a direct line to Aske but if I did, I’d advise him not to fall into that trap because it’s not going to end well for him.

But 16th century gentlemen didn’t take advice from women, especially women of common origins, so he’s on his own. He can take his chances with Henry and the Lord Privy Seal. Maybe if he’s lucky, the execution will be a quick beheading with a sharp axe.

*****
Do you want to know who doesn’t get safe-conduct; not from York to London and not from Antwerp to Calais and DEFINITELY NOT from my house to my backyard or anywhere else? Mice, that’s who. Yes, the little fuckers are back and I do not grant them diplomatic immunity and I will not offer a pardon, not even if they pledge loyalty and recant their grievous heresies.

It’s probably just one mouse, actually. We saw evidence of its presence on Saturday, and then my son saw the actual creature, IN MY HOUSE, on Saturday night. It was very small, he said, so it might even be a vole. Did I not give them fair warning? Did I not state expressly and without qualification that this warning would be their only warning? They probably failed to read my blog that day, but as in Henry’s time, ignorance of the law is not an excuse. The mouse or mice or vole or voles are condemned as surely as Robert Aske and all of the rest of the rebels and eventually Thomas Cromwell himself. I might lure them to engage in peace talks, dangling false promises of clemency, but once they’re on my territory, their fate is in my hands.

*****
So yes, Memorial Day has come and gone, and it’s officially summer, and we’re still on lockdown, and someone has to pay. I’m going to post notices around the house, to give them one last warning. It’s them against me, and I don’t like their chances.

Bring me the head of Charles I

Because, as Mr. Dick often said, the trouble from his head has gotten into mine.  Why, you might ask, does it take me nearly two hours to write a single paragraph?  Could it be, perhaps, because I stop and ACTIVELY LOOK for distractions and diversions after every single sentence I manage to choke out of myself? My work habits suck, and my attitude is no better.

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Would you have been a Cavalier, or a Roundhead? Neither would have appealed to me, and I don't guess that abstaining was an option.

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Which Cromwell would you invite to dinner, Thomas or Oliver?
I'm Catholic, so I assume that neither of them would come.  Just as well.  They were terrible dinner guests.