The Tudors Dynasty Podcast.

Welcome to our new series based off the memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth.

On the 7th of September, 1533, at the Royal Palace of Greenwich in Kent, was born under circumstances as peculiar

as her afterlife proved eventful and illustrious, Elizabeth, daughter of King Henry VIII, and his

queen, Anne Boleyn. Delays and difficulties equally grievous to the impetuous temper of the man and the despotic habits

of the prince had for years obstructed Henry in the execution of his favorite project of repudiating

on the plea of their two near alliance, a wife who had ceased to find favor in his sight,

and substituting on her throne the useful beauty who had captivated his imagination.

At length, his passion and his impatience had arrived at a pitch capable of bearing down every obstacle.

With that contempt of decorum, which he displayed so remarkably in some former and many

later transactions of his life, he caused his private marriage with Anne Boleyn to proceed

the sentence of divorce, which he had resolved that his clergy should pronounce against

Catherine of Aragon. And no sooner had this judicial ceremony taken place than the new queen was

openly exhibited as such in the face of the court and the nation. An unusual ostentation of magnificence appears to have attended the celebration of these August

nuptials.

The fondness of the king for pomp and pageantry was at an all-time excessive, and on this

occasion his love and his pride would equally

conspire to prompt an extraordinary display. Anne, too, a vain, ambitious, and light-minded

woman was probably greedy of this kind of homage from her princely lover. And the very consciousness of

the dubious, inauspicious, or disgraceful circumstances attending their union might secretly augment

the anxiety of the royal pair to dazzle and impose by the magnificence of their public appearance.

Only once before, since the Norman conquest,

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