Nicole’s Reviews > The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens > Status Update

Shapewear circa 1500s England:

“She wore a bodice designed to flatten the chest and push her breasts up, creating a smooth silhouette for her kirtle, a dress designed to function as an undergown”.

“In May 1527 renegade troops belong so Charles V had sacked Rome and the Vatican and taken the Pope captive. Charles V was Queen Catherine’s nephew, and though he pronounced himself horrified at his troops’ actions he now had the Pope effectively at his mercy”

“Because Catherine has indeed been married to Henry’s brother Arthur, she and Henry had had a dispensation from the Pope to allow them to marry. To ask the Holy Father to now pronounce the marriage invalid and permit an annulment meant that he would have to declare that that dispensation should have not been granted”.

“Why, Henry demanded, had they not had a son? Why so many dead babies? Was God angry with him?”

“Elizabeth’s father the Duke of Buckingham had been summarily executed for high treason. Her father-in-law and husband sat on the jury that convicted him, and her father-in-law, the man now dining at her table, had pronounced the death sentence. Her father’s crime had been one of attitude.”

“If she hoped, she hoped in vain. May Day revelry became violently twisted when habitual xenophobia escalated into a full-blown riot in the city of London. For some time, English merchants had been complaining that foreigners were replacing them in their jobs, their trades and their position in society, and then boasted about it”.

“For not all the Queen’s women could be chosen for the plum parts, and the court must always put its best face forward. Only the prettiest, the most elegant dancers, those who could memorize lines and stage directions and not freeze with fright, would be given a part.

Fortunately, Elizabeth had all these skills in abundance”.

-belly remained round and so she was told, and believed, that she was pregnant with a twin of her lost daughter, a fiction that remains in place even though her periods resumed… didn’t know enough about her own body to realise how unlikely this was, or she was desperate to give birth to a healthy child, and probably so traumatized by her experience that she was willing to convince herself that this was a fact

“For queens, miscarriages and stillbirths were shrouded in shame. What good queen could not birth a live child? Such things were always her fault, not her husband’s, and were considered suggestive of a physical or even moral or spiritual defect.”