"When Marie-Antoinette is going through her shoes while preparing for a big party, one can see a pair of blue Converse All Star 1923 Chuck Taylor basketball shoes. While these shoes were evidently not in existence at the time of Marie-Antoinette, their inclusion in the film was intentional, to show that despite the era, her being of royal blood, and immensely tasked with performing her royal duty to continue the king's bloodline, Marie-Antoinette was still a teenage girl who was trying to find her place in the world."

Four sisters who had risen from near obscurity to become the most celebrated and powerful women of their time. Almost nothing of significance that occurred in Western Europe during the period in which they lived was not influenced by the actions of their family. It is impossible to fully understand the underlying political motivations of the thirteenth century without them. — Nancy Goldstone, Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe

She was beloved by every- one—from the mightiest of diplomats to the lowliest of subjects. During her 17 years as queen, Elizabeth of York was exactly the consort needed by England to help end the ugly, internecine Wars of the Roses. Sometimes, a gracious personality far outweighs the power of the potentate. Elizabeth of York was such a queen. ⎯ Elizabeth of York: Queenship and Power, Arlene Okerlund

spouses of claimants to the english throne

wives of english kings who remarried after their deaths

“The calm with which her graceful effigy held in its hands an open book as it lay alongside theirs marked a cool counterpoint to the violent passions which had fractured her family in life. And that contrast was a fitting memorial to Eleanor. Always a political creature, she had begun as a charismatically unpredictable force of instinct and will- qualities which the trials of her long incarceration had tempered with a sophisticated diplomatic sense and what came to be the surest of political touches. The woman whose rebellion against her own husband had once threatened, it seemed, to overturn the natural order of creation had in time become the the mother of the English kingdom, and the watchful guardian of her beloved Aquitaine.”

To go from being the daughter of a minor noble family to becoming a queen was highly unusual. In the sixteenth century the only recent precedent had been Elizabeth Woodville, whose marriage appears to have been a spur of the moment decision by Edward IV. Anne and Henry on the other hand faced many more obstacles to actually marry and Anne emerged, for a period, as one of the king’s chief ministers and very much a politician in her own right. This was a remarkable achievement and one that was not followed by any of Henry’s later wives (with even Catherine Parr finding it difficult to assert herself politically).

If she had lived longer, Anne would almost certainly be remembered as England’s first Protestant queen (a distinction which belongs to Catherine Parr). At the time of her death, the religious reform movement was heading towards Protestantism, but it was still in its infancy. If she had survived, Anne would also have been regent for her minor children. Perhaps this would have been thirteen year old Elizabeth in January 1547, or a younger son? In her lifetime, Anne was very politically driven. I always think of her as a politician first and I think this would have continued – she would have been a competent and powerful regent.

–Dr Elizabeth Norton

“She was twenty-five years old, vibrant and lively, with an ability to spin from imperiousness to intimacy that would keep a man guessing, pleasurably. If she was not beautiful then she had, like her mother, the ability to project the idea of it. Later in life, she told an ambassador that she had never in fact been a beauty, but had had the reputation of it in her day. ‘Comely rather than handsome, ’ the Venetian envoy had reported her a year or two before; ‘tall and well-formed, with a good skin, although swarthy, she has fine eyes.’ Robert too was ‘of a tall personage’, said the Venetian, who praised his ‘manly countenance’ though regretting his ‘somewhat brown’ complexion. He had hair and beard shading dark to auburn; the legs to stand up to the trying fashion for short breeches, with their padding and pinking, and their prominent codpieces; and the physique, when they danced together the daring Volta, to twirl Elizabeth high.” ⎯ Elizabeth and Leicester, Sarah Gristwood