Chapter 855: Acting Coywardly
On the surface, Isabel seems to be happy to be alone with the Earl of Essex or to accept gifts from each other. In fact, she just accepted the pursuit of herself by this high-ranking aristocratic admirer. However, accepting the other person's pursuit does not mean that she is willing or ready to give anything. Although she wanted to give something substantial, the times, circumstances, and classes forced her not to do so.
Of course, she could have had an illegitimate child with the abbot out of love, as the current wife of the Earl of Essex did. Then, for the sake of true love and children, he eloped with his lover. However, the end of elopement is very tragic and painful, and she will lose the title she has worked so hard to obtain, the honors of nobility, the territory, and the good impression of some nobles and noblewomen she knows. Even when she returned to the north, her relatives would despise her actions.
The Earl of Essex once praised her as the second noble woman to be given a title of noissity and a title after Queen Anne Boleyn. As everyone knows, a series of unexpected events happened around Queen Anne's sister Mary Boleyn. Since his sister Mary had been Henry VIII's mistress, Henry VIII's marriage to Mary's sister Anne was considered illegitimate, as was his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, according to church rules.
On June 1, 1533, her sister Anne was crowned Queen of England and gave birth to her first daughter (Queen Elizabeth I) in the autumn of that year. In 1534, her sister Mary secretly married William Stafford (first husband Sir William Carey, a member of the court, who died of sweat fever in 1528).
Since the second husband was a commoner, with no status and a meager income, people hundreds of years later believed that their union at that time was born of love. When their marriage was discovered, her sister Mary's maiden family denied that she was married to someone of lower status than herself, and Mary was expelled from the court of her sister Queen Anne.
Later, the older sister Mary and her second husband lived in seclusion after being evicted in Rochford, Essex. Retired and destitute, she was reduced to the point of pleading with the king's advisor Thomas Cromwell (then Henry VIII's privy counsellor) to intercede on her behalf. However, his former lover Henry VIII still did not care about her plight, refused to help her with money and materials, and did not care about the feelings of his former lover.
After her former lover ignored her plight, she begged Cromwell to intercede with her father, uncle, and brother instead, but to no avail. Astonishingly, her sister, Queen Anne, treated her leniently, giving her a splendid gold cup and some cash, but still refused to allow her to return to the court as a lady-in-waiting or lady-in-waiting.
Mary Boleyn, who was the mistress of King Henry VIII and sister of Queen Anne Boleyn, lived incognito for the rest of her life and died on July 19, 1543, at the age of 44. Of course, Mary could not have imagined that she would become the distant ancestor of many famous people in later generations.
Her blood descendants include Winston Churchill, Diana, Princess of Wales, Sarah, Duchess of York, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (wife of King George VI, Queen of England from 1936 to 1952, mother of the current Queen ******) and Charles Darwin (British biologist and founder of the theory of evolution).
This is the bloody fate of women in aristocratic families in the era of Henry VIII who married commoners for love. Although Isabel was unaware of what had happened to Mary Boleyn, her relatives would not have been foolish enough to agree to her marrying a commoner (perhaps hundreds of years later, some famous people would emerge from her descendants).
From this point of view, she accepted the pursuit of the Earl of Essex, who was one level higher than her own status and status, and it was certainly not for pure love between men and women. At this time, the ambition hidden in her subconscious is expanding little by little, and she wants to use the title, identity and status of the Earl of Essex to gain more power, wealth and fame for herself.
The American outlook on life and values that used to flow in her blood are about to disappear. The idea that "I personally choose what I want to live and my own life values" was also forced out of her brain by the society and environment around her. While "surviving" in this era, she still adheres to some of the outlook on life and values that she believes are correct.
For example, in this world, I am in charge (she does not believe in the destiny of heaven, believes that things are man-made, and there is nothing impossible); Seeking change (she firmly believes that there is nothing in the world that she cannot do, and everyone has the responsibility to do everything well. I don't like the traditional values that are step-by-step, immutable or continuous and stable, and inherited from our ancestors. ); Future-oriented (good at planning, also good at executing short-term plans); Focus on hard work; pragmatism/materialism; Independence and integrity.
As such, she accepted the Earl of Essex's gift of jewelry, clothing, and the newly tailor-made armor-style high-quality infantry full-body plate. If Baron II Montiger of Lancashire had pursued her after her widowhood, she might have accepted it before she was conferred.
However, after becoming a Baroness Ripley, she would never accept the pursuit of a baron with a lower status and status than her. If the Duke of Richmond, who was close to her, pursued her, she would have seriously considered it. However, her only condition was that the duke had to divorce first. Queen Anne Boleyn is a living example of this, and the very shrewd and more ambitious Queen Anne feared that once she became Henry VIII's mistress, the king would soon lose interest in her and continue to search for flowers and willows in the court. In fact, it is.
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By the time Isabel had spent three weeks with the Earl of Essex, she, Viscount Lyle, and the Maritime Affairs Committee had prepared everything for the raid. At this moment, everyone was waiting for Henry VIII's edict approving the raid.
On May 5, 1545, the day after the Ascension Day, Henry VIII and the Privy Council agreed to carry out the raid on the French fleet. On 6 May, the Duke of Richmond, Viscount Lyle, and Isabel led a large number of armed attendants to rush to the port of Portsmouth.
On 7 May, Queen Catherine, representing Henry VIII, led a procession of attendants to the military port to wish the trio a victorious return. The Earl of Essex, as the Queen's younger brother and Isabel's "lover", also went to the military port.