Tender Youth, A Matron’s Heart

Chapuys congratulating Mary after Fitzroy died and admitting to it in his own documents. Lmao. He is so dude she lets watch her shower coded.

Eustace who stood beside his mother in court as a 14 year old boy helping her fight his uncles for the property rights of his late father watching 19 year old Mary stand beside her mother even as the whole English court discards her and she’s threatened with death. Nobody is doing it like them.

It’s because at first the version of Mary that exists in Chapuys’ head is little more than a sexist, paternalistic remix of her real identity, so thoroughly warped by the age & class difference that he sees her as barely more than a porcelain madonna, a moral/religious figurehead, so sexless she’s barely human. But as Mary ages and their relationship is maintained through less explicitly stressful circumstances then the ones it was conceived under amidst the Great Matter, she begins to grow outside of the parameters he established for her internally. She gets her life back, she’s not just pretty and in pain anymore, she’s energetic, provocative, romantically active, loud. And that scares him, the way it scared him with Cesare’s mother, but it also excites and intrigues him, not least of all because he can’t be physically intimate with Mary the way he was with the mistress who bore his illegitimate son. The illegitimate son he left so he could go perform diplomatic duties in the same country as Mary. Who wants to be a mother. Who loves children. Who is at once everything he’d ever want in a woman and young enough to be his biological child, facts which would be so blatantly immoral if he ever confronted their coexistence that he has to force himself to stay in denial about it. While Mary goes around planning for the future and playing footsie with Phillip of Bavaria, more or less unaware that her very existence is eating this poor bastard’s brain. Eustace is a 50 year old politician with TSwift’s “You Belong With Me” playing in his head every time he meets eyes with his dead friend’s 21 year old daughter. It’s pathetic. It’s disgusting. It’s narratively delicious.