Medieval Women (and a few men) by Mary Hoffman

 

 

The Middle Ages are having a bit of a moment, at least in the UK. This is a boon for me, as I am writing a "Plantagenet novel" covering the rough half century from 1352 to 1403. In January, I went to a day conference on Women of the Wars of the Roses, which is a bit after the scope of the first book but bang on the money for books two and three of what I see, somewhat ambitiously, as a trilogy. More in a couple of months when the first book should be finished.

The day conference, held in Southwark cathedral by Tudor Times consisted of six talks given by experts on six prominent women of the fifteenth century, four of whom were queen consorts of England. Since I have researched all these women, I was hoping to be surprised by one or two nuggets of information.

First up, Marguerite (Margaret) of Anjou.

From the Book of Romances 1445

 

The talk was given by Lauren Johnson, who has written books on Henry Vl, Henry Vlll, and Margaret Beaufort and she gave me what I hoped for early on. I should have known, but didn't, that among the many gifts the young Henry Vl showered on his bride, was a lion. What a wedding present! *

Next up was Cecily Neville:

Neville Book of Hours 1445

The talk was given by Joanna Laynesmith, whose book on the last medieval queens is now insanely expensive to buy on A*a**n. Fortunately, I bought it when it came out. Cecily was one of the two women discussed who did not become queen - though all Yorkists believe she should have. She had to be content that two of her sons, Edward lV and Richard lll were kings. I didn't know that she had been friendly with the Woodvilles in France, or that she had written a book of household management. She died a wealthy woman at eighty, so perhaps she was the winner in her rivalry with Margaret of Anjou, althgough the latter had the title.

Alison Weir talked about Elizabeth of York:

16th century image from Royal Collection

 

Alison told us that Elizabeth, one of the "good queens" and beloved of the people, might have had an iron deficiency. But if she told us the source, I didn't note it down. More research needed.

Elizabeth Woodville:

A copy of a portrait in Queens College

 

Melita Thomas, who wrote The King's Pearl about Henry Vlll and his daughter Mary, talked about this controversial figure. The first Wars of the Roses course I did in Oxford was taught by Lynda Pidgeon, whose subsequent book Brought up out of Nought did her best to rectify the notion that Elizabeth was a grasping, ambitious woman, out to get preferment for her numerous siblings. It is not completely baseless but more nuanced than many historians have seen it.

She was one of the most tragic of queens, losing her husband young and seeing her father, brothers and sons all put to death. Good to know that seven years after Bosworth, she was reinstated as Queen Mother.

Sarah Gristwood thought she might have drawn the short straw, being allocated to talk about Anne Neville:

Salisbury Roll 1483

 

Anne would seem to be the answer to "Who suffered most in the Wars of the Roses?" We know so little about Anne or what she thought of Richard as husband or usurping king. Their only child died and overwhelmed them both with grief, which shows a human side. As Sarah said, "Anne Neville was not a strong or powerful woman." But she is a good example of how heiresses are pawns in the hands of ambitious men.

Margaret Beaufort:

Meynart Wewyck 1510, Christ's College, Cambridge

So much has been written about this remarkable woman, both in history and fiction, that it was hard to see what was left for Elizabeth Norton to say about her. But she has written several books about Tudoe women and queens, including Margaret Beaufort. Her opening statement, that Margaret "did not kill the princes in the tower," was met with a resounding cheer that echoed round the nave of the cathedral.

She attended Richard lll's coronation gorgeously gowned in crimson, blue and gold, at odds with the image of her above, which is how she is usually thought of, as a single-minded and pious mother. She lived long enough to see her grandson crowned Henry Vlll but got food poisonming at the Coronation Feast and died.

I left the conference with sheaves of notes and too many books, energised that there was still so much to say and find out about these women.

Interlude with kings

Helen Castor, who wrote She-wolves: the Women who Ruled England before Elizabeth and has been a guest on the History Girls, has a new book out. The Eagle and the Hart is subtitled "the Tragedy of Richard ll and Henry lV." which is right on topic for what I am writing now. Before this the best book I knew about the first cousins born only months apart was Ian Mortimer's The Fears of Henry lV. It's a fascinatinmg topic: two boys, one born and raised in France, the other in England, both grandsons of Edward lll, both equal in royal blood and so different in their routes to the English crown.

 

Richard was in every way unsuited to be king, except one: he was the undisputed legal heir. His father Edward (known to later centuries as the Black Prince) predeceased Edward lll and Richard's older brother, another Edward, who never set foot in England, was also dead when Richard inherited the throne at the age of ten. Hopes were high, especially when the boy king rode out to face the rebels in what is no longer known as the Peasants' Revolt. It was probably his finest hour. But he had left his cousin Henry in the Tower to take his chances while other nobles were summarily executed by the mob. Richard did not go back for him.

Henry, on the other hand, was robust where Richard was effete, a champion jouster, a soldier, a traveller, an intellectual. He would have made a splendid king at any point before his usurpation. But he wasn't first in line. His father, the fabulously rich Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt, was Edward lll's third son to reach adulthood. The brother in between, Lionel Duke of Clarence, had sired one daughter and her descendant married one of the York line, descended from Edmund, the next brother down. But could a woman inherit? There you have the crux of the Wars of the Roses, as it is still convenient to call them.

Henry was more robust in other ways too: he married Mary de Bohun when they were both young teenagers, having known each other since infancy. As soon as they were old enough to co-habit, they had a child every year, the first four boys. Richard married soon after his cousin, his wife his contemporary, Anne of Bohemia, and she never became pregnant. Both wives died in same year, 1394, Mary in giving birth to her sixth child, a second daughter. 

Was Richard gay? He certainly had "favourites," his relationship with Robert de Vere closer than friendship. When de Vere was exiled and died in France in a boar hunt some years later, Richard arranged for his embalmed body to be brought back to England. At the re-interment, the king ordered the coffin to be opened and, in one of his typically theatrical gestures, gazed upon his lost love's face and held his embalmed hand for the last time. 

But he was also very fond of his queen and had Eltham Palace razed to the ground a year after she died there of the plague. But it was different from the love between Henry and Mary, who made a new baby, every time he returned from his restless travels. It is doubtful whether the marriage was even consummated. And Richard chose as his second wife, Isabella of France, who was a five-year-old child when the marriage was first proposed. Richard's thirtieth birthday was the day after her coronation.

Was it a relief for him not to have to prove his manhood for another decade? We can't know, as he had been deposed and died long before Isabella reached puberty. She was not the grown woman Shakespeare shows us in his play. Her second marriage, to her cousin, Charles d'Orléans, showed she was fertile but she died in childbirth at the age of twenty, her daughter surviving. 

So there are women in the story of the rival cousins but mostly with sad stories. Death in childbirth was very common, even if you were the first lady in the land, with all the medical help money could provide. As Elma Brenner writes in the catalogue to the Bitish Library's Medieval Women: Voices and Visions, "Childbirth and its aftermath marked a moment of significant danger in the Middle Ages, with risks of great pain, infection and death."

She also tells us that Richard's queen in the year before her death bought plantain water, spikenard and theriac from an apothecary, These were all remedies for infertility so perhaps they had been to bed together but perhaps also she didn't at that stage know the facts of life. 

Most of the women in the exhibition, which finished last Sunday, were from periods before or after the one I am working in. But guess who turned up.

 

*The label tells us that this skull, found in the moat of the Tower of London, is that of Margaret of Anjou's lion! It has been carbon-dated to 1420-80, which is the right period. But it seems that Margaret brought the lion with her from France so it wasn't, after all, a present from her husband-to-be.  Presumably it was a lioness, rather than a male, but it lived in the Menagerie at the Tower and wasn't a pet being fed scraps from her table.

Don't worry if you missed the exhibition, as the catalogue is excellent. It covers women from from the continent of Europe, like Joan of Arc and Hildegarde of Bingen, as well as the home-grown Julian of Norwich and Margarets Beaufort and Paston.

 

 

History – fact or fiction? By Mary Hoffman

 

Most of us in this group, since it started in 2011, have been writers of historical fiction. We’ve had “straight” historians, like John Guy, as guests and some of our number, like Clare Mulley have written non-fiction, Some people do both – and it can be quite confusing.



Take Alison Weir, for example. She, who has also been a guest on The History Girls blog, is a prolific writer on historical subjects such as the Wars of the Roses, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry Vlll and the Boleyn sisters. But she also writes novels about some of the same characters, notably her Six Tudor Queens sequence about Henry’s notorious marriages.



So how do they differ, since they inevitably share the same events and characters? I’ve had an opportunity to compare two books that cover some of the same period to see how a novelist chooses to write about the same plots that appear in a historian’s account of the identical events. The novelist is Alison Weir herself, in her new novel, published last May by Headline, Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose. The non-fiction writer is Michèle Schindler, whose De la Pole Father and Son: the Duke, the Earl and the Struggle for Power, was published by Amberley last December.



So, two books about Plantagenet history and those famous roses, partly invented by Shakespeare, who was more a writer of fiction than he was a historian. Elizabeth of York was the daughter of Edward lV and his wife, Elizabeth Wydeville and was destined to become the wife of Henry Vll and Queen of England, uniting the houses of York and Lancaster. Weir’s novel about her is the first in a trilogy.



John de la Pole did not feature in a play by Shakespeare, although his father did. But it’s not that father and son combo Schindler writes about. That was William, the duke of Suffolk who stood proxy for Henry Vl at his wedding to Margaret of Anjou. No, it is John who inherited his murdered father’s title and married another Elizabeth, not Edward iV’s daughter but his sister. Are you muddled enough yet? John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, became Elizabeth of York’s uncle when he married her aunt.



The titles don’t really help: Weir’s doesn’t sound like a novel, although “The Last White Rose” does. Schindler’s might have been “The de la Pole dynasty,” since it begins with William, goes on to John and ends with John Junior, who was Richard lll’s named heir. Those de la Poles continued to be a thorn in the side of Henry Tudor for many years.



But if we look at 1470, we can see how different a novel is from a work of history. In this year, the Earl of Warwick (the “kingmaker”), conspired with George, Duke of Clarence to overthrow Edward lV, with a long-term view of putting George on the throne. In the short term, they made do with releasing the previous king, Henry Vl, from the Tower of London and parading him through the streets as the true king. Edward had fled to Burgundy with his younger brother Richard and Queen Elizabeth, heavily pregnant, had sought sanctuary with her mother and daughters in Westminster. 

Elizabeth Wydeville

 
These events come 130 pages in to Schindler’s book and are described thus: “This must have been a tense time for John and Elizabeth. Since the party seeking exile in Burgundy included two of Elizabeth’s brothers, she must have been very worried about their fate…[T]hey would have learnt that Edward’s heavily pregnant wife, Elizabeth Woodville [sic], and their three daughters had fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, that Elizabeth gave birth to a son shortly afterwards and that Henry Vl had been released from confinement in the Tower after five long years and reinstalled on the throne.”

This paragraph in the de la Pole book summarises twenty pages and more of the opening chapter of Weir’s novel, where the reader is thrust in medias res, as the princess Elizabeth and her sisters are bundled into a wherry and taken down the river, where they are warmly welcomed by the Abbot and given shelter. The long-awaited son and heir is born at the beginning of the second chapter.

But, since Elizabeth is only rising five, a lot of the history that has gone before can by explained to her by her grandmother and Weir can take the reader through recent events by this device, which she does very skilfully.

The elder Suffolk is barely mentioned in Weir’s novel, unsurprisingly since Schindler tells us how he kept himself out of politics and was not often at court. But there are occasional references in the novel to “Aunt Suffolk and her son Lincoln” and the younger John assumes an ever more important role. He was the Earl of Lincoln and would have inherited his father’s title if he had not come to a sticky end. 

Coat of Arms of John, 2nd Duke of Suffolk

 

One thing that emerges both from the history book and the novel is the sheer number of children born to noble and royal women and the number of babies and children lost. John Senior and his wife Elizabeth, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, had thirteen children. Elizabeth of York’s parents had ten together and Elizabeth Wydevile had already had two sons by her first husband, Lord Grey.

What the novelist does is show you that a factual history can’t (and mustn’t): the emotions stirred by every birth and death. Even, or perhaps especially, the loss of an older child, is a cause for great grief. Here is Weir describing the death of Elizabeth’s closest sister, Mary, at fifteen:

“Elizabeth slept in her chair that night. She woke to find Mother rocking a corpse in her arms, keening softly, her cheeks streaked with tears. She burst out wailing.

Father came running, summoned by the doctor. He folded Elizabeth in his arms and held her tightly. ‘She is with God now. You must be glad for her.’ His voice broke, and he turned to the bed. ‘Our sweet angel is at peace, Beth.’ He embraced both the Queen and his lost child, then gave way to the most piteous weeping.”

There are many such losses described in the novel - siblings, infants, young adults - and it is touching to read in the Autor’s Note that Weir herself lost a son in 2020, which must have informed her accounts of royal grief.

Back to John Junior, Earl of Lincoln, who in 1480 married Margaret FitzAlan, a union arranged by the King, Edward lV. His wife was much younger than his eighteen years and they did not live together. Indeed his marriage doesn’t seem to have affected the Earl’s life at all and his star was rising at court. He played a part in the baptism ceremony for Bridget, the youngest child of the King and Queen. 

Edward lV

 

Then came the shock of the unexpected death of the King in 1483. “The King’s eyes had closed. His face looked grey; his lips were blue. Gradually, his rasping breath slowed – and then there was silence.” Or, as Schindler succinctly puts it, “Edward’s death was sudden and shocking.” He was forty-one.

John Junior was chief mourner at the King’s funeral and soon came out in support of his uncle Richard of Gloucester as the new king. One of the new king’s closest friends, Francis Lovell, had been John’s foster brother and they were both part of the new court.

Elizabeth of York, however, was back in sanctuary at Westminster with her mother and siblings. In Weir’s novel, Richard is referred to as “the Usurper” and Elizabeth is stunned that her kindly “Uncle Gloucester” could have behaved so badly towards her family. 

 

So we come to the most crucial events in Richard’s brief reign: the disappearance of “the Princes in the Tower” and Richard’s plan to marry his niece. The princes, Edward’s heir and his younger brother, the Duke of York, were kept in the Tower of London while, in justification of his seizing the throne, Richard claimed they were bastards, as King Edward had made an earlier, secret, marriage, before wedding Elizabeth Wydeville.

Weir’s novel is divided into sections: Princess, Bastard, Queen and Matriarch, the second section set during her uncle’s reign. Her mother is convinced that Richard has had her sons murdered and is prostrate with grief. Their old life has disappeared and everything is uncertain.

In Schindler’s book, John Junior “chose to remain loyal to his uncle,” as did his parents. In Weir’s novel, Elizabeth embraces all the different theories that have been put forward about the princes’ fate, beginning by sharing her mother’s belief. Then, when she has returned to court, Richard convinces her that the boys were put to death on the orders of Buckingham and he knew nothing about it.

Later, after Richard’s death, she suspects that her husband to be, Henry Tudor, or his mother might have been responsible for removing such strong claimants to the throne, smoothing the way for his accession. Towards the end of the novel, she hears evidence from relatives of Sir James Tyrell that he commissioned two named thugs to carry out Richard’s orders.

When Richard’s heir, the Prince of Wales, dies in 1484 he makes John Junior his heir. John is heir presumptive anyway, as the oldest son of Richard’s older sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. (He is also the eldest living grandson of Richard Duke of York).

Soon after their son died, Anne Neville, the King’s wife, also succumbed, probably to tuberculosis. But before she died, rumours were flying around that Richard planned to marry his own niece, Elizabeth of York.

This is a major plotline in Weir’s novel. Quite apart from what seems to us like incest and the need for a Papal dispensation, how could Elizabeth even consider marrying the man who usurped her young brother’s throne and probably killed him and his younger brother? And yet the historical Elizabeth did write a letter to the Duke of Norfolk to advance her marriage to the king, vowing she was “his in heart and in thoughts, in [body] and in all.” 

Elizabeth of York

 

Weir’s explanation is reasonably convincing: Richard had been a favourite uncle when he was Duke of Gloucester and Elizabeth couldn’t rid herself of the idea that he was kind and loving. He had explained away the absence of her brothers by blaming Buckingham and he implied in his proposal to her that his wife, her cousin Anne Neville, knowing she was dying, had virtually blessed the match, encouraging him to take another wife, one young and healthy, to give him more heirs. It works, more or less.

Schindler barely mentions this part of the story, dismissing it as rumour. And anyway, in January 1485, Richard let it be known he was pursuing a marriage with a Portuguese princess. Shortly after Anne’s funeral he made a public announcement that he had never intended to marry his niece. It looks remarkably as if he had flown a kite and been deterred by the negative public reaction. 

Richard 111

 

Richard was famously defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field and Henry Tudor claimed the throne by might and right. His claim was pretty tenuous, as, with the deaths of the princes and the impossibility of the young Earl of Warwick inheriting, since his father Clarence had been attainted as a traitor, the rightful heir was Elizabeth of York. Weir is excellent on this angle, with Elizabeth wanting to reign jointly with Henry and not just to strengthen his claim by their marriage. And marry him she did, though her coronation was put off for some years.

And what of John de la Pole, Richard’s heir presumptive as long as the Yorks were excluded by the parliament ruling that they were illegitimate? Although the new king imprisoned several Yorkists, he seems, as Schindler informs us to have taken rather a shine to John Jnr and given him positions at court. His trust soon proved misplaced, as Lincoln and his foster brother Francis Lovell were fiercely loyal to the dead Richard and were plotting Henry’s overthrow.

Some embryonic rebellions fizzled out but then the opportunity came with the claims of Lambert Simnel. Simnel was a Pretender from Ireland, who claimed to be the young Earl of Warwick. The problem was that Warwick was still imprisoned in the Tower. But the boy had been so well coached that Henry suspected another Yorkist was behind the plot and his eye fell on John Junior. 

Henry Vll

 

Indeed, Weir does not buy Schindler’s notion that Henry found Lincoln trustworthy: “He means to be king, Bessy. I have suspected it all along.” Lincoln had fled to Burgundy under protection of the Duchess, Margaret, Elizabeth’s aunt, who seems to have been convinced by Simnel’s imposture. Simnel was crowned in Dublin as “King Edward” and Lincoln and Lovell’s forces joined and fought the king’s army at Stoke in June 1487.

It was to be fatal for Lincoln, who died fighting bravely, thwarting Henry of the chance to have him executed. The king took no revenge on John Senior but when he died and his son Edmund inherited the dukedom, Henry took back all John Junior’s possessions. Edmund was so short of funds that Henry demoted him from Duke to Earl and turned the whole family against him.

First Elizabeth John’s widow and then her sons Edmund and Richard fled to the Duchess of Burgundy. The unfortunate William was imprisoned in the Tower where he stayed till his death in 1539. Both his brothers continued to make attempts on the English thrones until their deaths. 

Both books are handsomely produced, especially Alison Weir’s novel and both have the family trees, which are so essential to histories and, increasingly, to Historical novels. I think there is room for both for anyone as obsessed with the Plantagenets as I am.