When Knighthood Was in Flower or, the Love Story of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor the King's Sister, and Happening in the Reign of His August Majesty King Henry the — Inside the Classic

Defiance and Collapse: Mary's Two Bodies

Mary's speech in the excerpts is consistently aggressive: she calls Wolsey a "butcher's cur," threatens to have Edwin's "miserable little tongue torn out by the root," and swears oaths. Yet this verbal violence is repeatedly undercut by physical breakdown. After throwing the necklace, she "broke down and hastily left the room." When Edwin accuses her of abandoning Brandon, she falls upon the bed "shaking as with a spasm," unable to weep. The text pairs her imperious commands—"Go home and tell your imbecile old master I scorn his suit"—with stage directions of tears falling "unheeded down her cheeks." This pattern suggests a character whose power exists only in language, not in sustained action. The narrator notes that at the limit of feminine nerve "should always be found a flood of healthful tears," framing Mary's collapses as both natural and strategic. The reader watches a princess who can rage but cannot sustain that rage against the king's authority.

The Narrator's Divided Loyalties

Edwin Caskoden, the first-person narrator, does not maintain a fixed stance toward Mary. He arrives at her chamber "hoping to see the girls" but also carrying "a stock of indignation." He accuses her of "selfish neglect" and declares her behavior a "frightful shame," yet he admits that "her beauty could well cover a multitude of sins." This wavering is not resolved; he both condemns and excuses her within the same scene. The excerpts show him shifting from anger to softening "at the sight of her grief," then back to accusation. His role as confidant and moral commentator is unstable—he is simultaneously Mary's ally, Brandon's defender, and a man who cannot resist her charm. This internal conflict gives the narration a restless quality, as if the story itself cannot decide whether Mary is victim or perpetrator. The reader must navigate this uncertainty without the narrator's steady guidance.

Objects as Instruments of Power and Pain

Three physical objects carry disproportionate weight in the excerpts. The necklace that Mary throws at Wolsey is not described in detail, but the act of throwing it—a piece of jewelry meant to adorn—becomes a weapon of contempt. The broken door, mentioned as having been "placed on its hinges again" after a battle in Mary's bedchamber, marks a prior violent confrontation that the text does not fully recount; its repair signals a fragile restoration of order. The bed itself, left "tumbled as Mary had left it," remains a site of emotional wreckage. These objects are not merely props; they are evidence of struggle. The necklace signifies the gulf between gift and rejection, the door between intrusion and privacy, the bed between intimacy and despair. Major uses them to externalize internal conflict, giving the reader concrete markers of the power struggles that words alone cannot contain.

Readers approaching When Knighthood Was in Flower should attend to the gaps between what characters say and what their bodies do. Mary's threats and tears, Edwin's accusations and apologies, the king's rage and his absence—these contradictions are the novel's engine. The excerpts offer no resolution, only a series of confrontations that leave relationships in tatters. Pay particular attention to the narrator's unreliability: his judgments shift with his mood, and his affection for Mary colors every report. The story's tension lies not in plot twists but in the unstable ground between performance and sincerity.

That rainy afternoon, I kept returning to how Mary’s necklace weighed more than her crown. Later, shelving the book, I noticed a slim volume, Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches — Context and Discussion, and recognized the same quiet ache—objects as silent witnesses to grief. I only meant to glance, but the afternoon slipped away, one small saga folding into another.