Show not tell by Mary Hoffman

I have never liked this piece of advice to writers. Sometimes you just need to tell. It can be something small or trivial that you don’t want to spend time developing into a full-scale scene with dialogue, just a little throwaway so you can get back to your main plot. But how does this fit when writing historical fiction?


The facts are known and can’t be changed. So you go back to “what did X think about this?” or “How did it affect Y?” “Surely, this would have thrown the whole court into an uproar?” 

Tomb of Katherine Swynford and Joan Neville, Lincoln

 

I recently discovered that another HG is writing about the same person that I am. It’s OK; this happens. And it was pretty much bound to happen with regard to this character – a significant female figure in fourteenth century England, who had been the main character in a romantic novel of the 1950s. I made sure not to read that novel until I had written the sixth draft of mine.

I was surprised when I did. Anya Seton made the woman far more of a peasant than I had, with her coming to court in London when she was already fifteen. In my version, she has been brought up there by the king and queen of the time, alongside a bevy of princes and princesses. (Can you have a “bevy” of males? Must check for future reference). 

Anyway, how do you “show not tell” the events of historical characters’ lives? And I had chosen to depict almost the whole of my main character’s life, from the age of about two to her death bed fifty-one years later. Maybe this was a bad idea? I hadn’t done it before. I needed to establish her as having been raised at the English court, with all the advantages of a noble upbringing but no fortune. So she could speak French, go hunting and hawking, do embroidery, read the popular romances of the time and behave with elegance and decorum whether dancing or singing. 

Joan Neville and her ladies

 

Put like that, it does sound a bit dull. But her life was actually full of adventures. Imagine what it must have been like to grow up as a virtual orphan, with no memory of the mother who had given birth to you and little information about your father. Your foster parents were the king and queen of England and you were raised in their lavish court settings of palaces and castles, doing as you were instructed, brought up like a little princess yourself. Your one constant was your older sister, who one day told you that she was being sent away to serve the second prince and his wife in Ireland. And you were only seven.

Then you would certainly know what it was like to be alone. I invented bedfellows for her, my little girl, and friends too. Always having to remember that the fork and handkerchief had not yet been invented. Her exquisite manners had to take this into account. Her clothes were hand-me-downs but of the greatest quality, as they had previously been worn by princesses. 

John of Gaunt feasting in Portugal

 

Her favourite prince, the king and queen’s third son, John, was ten years older than her but he said her name properly, as they had in Hainault. He lived with his oldest brother, the Prince of Wales, though my heroine didn’t know what that meant. Prince Edward was heir to the English throne and did not marry until he was thirty. And then he chose a woman older than him, his father’s cousin, who had been married twice before. Imagine! The most eligible bachelor in Europe, a great soldier and charismatic leader, eventually settled for a woman he had known since they were children. A Papal dispensation had to be sought, not for the first time in Joan’s case.

And when Prince John, at the age of nineteen, married a great heiress, he asked nine-year-old Katherine to go with him and serve his beautiful wife. Of course, she went. There were many women serving the great countess, as she was then, and my Katherine was proud to be one of them, once released from the English court, even in the lowly role of the girl who rocked the wooden cradle. 

The marriage of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster

 

An awful lot here to show and not tell and we are hardly into Katherine’s eventful life. Before long, she has the task of rocking the new princess, Philippa, named after the queen. Prince John is happy. His lovely wife has given him a healthy daughter and there would surely be more to come, male heirs among them. Against this background of court life and princely behaviour, Katherine muses about her life and destiny. As she grows older and the Lancaster nursery is filled with more boy and girl babies – not all of whom survive – Katherine becomes closer to her mistress and is given more responsibility.

You see? I am telling, not showing you. But the novel does both. Through their pregnancies, childbirths and experiences, the two women become friends. Katherine is tall and strong for a girl of fifteen and her employers think it is time for her to have a husband. She fears it might be a warty old man but it is in fact a sturdy knight, Sir Hugh Swynford, who is the same age as her lord. She goes with him to his Manor in Kettlethorpe, but is often needed back in the Lancaster household, whenever her husband has to follow Duke John overseas.

Of course, their marriage is consummated and Katherine is already pregnant when Sir Hugh has to go abroad. She and the duchess both give birth within a month, Blanche to the healthy little boy, who will one day be Henry IV and Katherine to a little girl called Blanche. Such a lot to cover by showing not telling. But the feelings of women for their children, not knowing if their babies will live or die, can’t have been a million miles away from how mothers feel now, whether in grand courts or humble cottages. 

Henry IV

 

That’s what I had to show. Women labouring to bring forth babies, who might be heirs to a great destiny, or brides to European monarchs, or simply the children of a humble knight and his lady. Katherine herself ponders on this: “Men donned armour and rode off to battle, where they might catch an arrow in their face or have an arm lopped off. They seemed extraordinarily brave to me. And yet women did something harder. How could Bess know about the pains of childbed, when she had no children of her own?”

Both genders have to face painful difficulties. To fight or to give birth, to risk marriage or enter a religious house. Of course the men could do both. And occasionally the women too. Think of Margaret Beaufort, who helped her only child become king, was married four times and yet became a “femme sole” while her last husband still lived. 

Margaret Beaufort

 

My subject, Katherine Swynford, née Roet, was a wife and a widow, a person of great piety, who bore four children out of wedlock to Prince John, while he was married to another woman. Is it a remarkable medieval love story, since the couple do marry in 1396 and their children – the Beauforts – are legitimated and go on to be the ancestors of several English monarchs? Katherine’s son by her first husband is the boon companion of Henry Bolingbroke, raised with him in the same nursery, born only a year later. He is no aristocrat but his half-brothers and half-sister are, through their father. That half-sister, Joan, gives birth to Cecily, who marries Richard of York and is mother to Edward IV and Richard III. 

 

Henry VII’s claim to the throne came from his mother Margaret (see above), whose father was descended from John and Katherine’s union. And hence Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary Tudor; the line ends with Elizabeth I. Six English monarchs is not bad for the line of a woman whose father was a humble knight at the court of Edward III.



Oh, and Katherine's sister Philippa married Geoffrey Chaucer. Thereby hangs another story, to tell or show.

The House of Beaufort by Mary Hoffman

I can't remember when I first became interested in the Beauforts, the children conceived by Katherine Swynford by her lover, John of Gaunt, and later legitimised by their marriage.

Unlike many History Girls, I never read the novel "Katherine" by Anya Seton. It was published in 1954 and has remained popular ever since but somehow passed me by. (The only historical fiction I read before adulthood was the Regency romances of Georgette Heyer).

Perhaps it was the RSC's performances of Shakepeare's History Cycle, from Richard the Second to Richard the Third in Michael Boyd's exhilarating productions of a decade ago. We saw them as they came out, in Shakespeare's writing order and then plunged a terrifying amount of money on seeing all eight in their chronological, historical order in four days, named "The Glorious Moment," in Stratford in the spring of 2008. And there were many glorious moments in that long weekend at the Courtyard Theatre, from the astonishing appearances of Jonathan Slinger as both Richards, and Katy Stephens as both Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou, to John MacKay as the Dauphin, along with the rest of the French court in dazzling costumes on trapezes, while Geoffrey Streatfeild excelled on the ground as Henry the Fifth and Jonathan Slinger (again) popped up through a trapdoor as the Bastard of Orléans.

Thrilling stuff. But what of the Beauforts? Well, it all begins with John of Gaunt, the third son of Edward the Third. Which of us did not learn at school the "sceptred isle" speech from Richard the Second? I remember even singing it in the setting by Parry in school choral competitions.

But I didn't know then that the dying Duke of Lancaster, King Richard's uncle and father of the perplexingly named Bolingbroke, was the richest and most hated man in the England Shakespeare makes him praise so lyrically. The man whose most lavish home, the Savoy palace, was burned to the ground in the People's Revolt of 1371, the proud and arrogant lord who liked to be called king, by virtue of his second marriage, to Constance of Castile, the venal man whose sexual adventures might have caused him to die horribly of an STD and – mind-bogglingly – Chaucer's brother-in-law.

The wedding of Blanche of Lancaster and John of Gaunt

 Finding out all this was to come but in was in another of the History plays that I first encountered my first Beaufort, the Bishop of Winchester, who later became a Cardinal. He is the one who has the huge speech about Salic law in Henry the Sixth, part one, justifying the English right to the French throne.

And Shakespeare dramatises the cardinal's feud with Henry the Fifth's brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and his presiding over the trial of Joan of Arc in the next play.

This Beaufort was Henry, the second child of Katherine Swynford by John of Gaunt and brought up to go into the Church, like many second sons.

Shakespeare doesn't portray Katherine, or her daughter Joan. The only female Beaufort descendants we see on stage are – briefly –  Joan's daughter, Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, who was mother of Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third, and Anne Neville, Cecily's great-niece, who is so memorably seduced at the beginning of Richard the Third.

And yet, the more I researched this remarkable family, the more I became aware that it is the women who drive the story of the House of Beaufort, from Katherine Swynford to Margaret, the mother of Henry the Seventh. After all, Henry claimed the throne through his mother's line and his descent from John of Gaunt; without Margaret we'd have no House of Tudor.

Along comes Nathen Amin's The House of Beaufort: the Bastard Line that Captured the Crown (Amberley Publishing) a beautifully produced hardback that satisfying fills out the history of the women as well as the men who descended from John and Katherine's long-lasting relationship and provided the backbone of the house of Lancaster.

And yet, and yet ... Cecily Neville, Katherine and John's granddaughter, married Richard Duke of York, a possibility of uniting the houses of Lancaster and York long before Henry Tudor came along. It was not to be.

Amin reminds us of the entangled and complex relationships within the royal line of England.  John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster by virtue of his first marriage, to Blanche of Lancaster, who inherited her father's great wealth, was the third son of Edward the Third. The first was Edward the Black Prince who died before his father, leaving Richard the Second to inherit the throne when his grandfather died. The second was Lionel Duke of Clarence, who died without male heirs, but his daughter Philippa married Edmund Mortimer and their granddaughter Anne Mortimer married Richard, Earl of Cambridge. The fourth son of Edward the Third was Edmund, Duke of York and it was his second son that Anne Mortimer married.

So if you accept inheritance through the maternal line, as you must if you believe Henry Tudor had a legitimate claim to the throne, then the Yorks had the better case.

(If you find any of this confusing, I urge you to read John Julius Norwich's Shakespeare's Kings, which sorts it all out once and for all.)

Henry Tudor

 These are the amazing "history girls" of the Beaufort family:

Katherine Swynford

Born Katherine de Roet in Hainault, she came to England where her sister Philippa was lady in waiting to Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt's first wife. Philippa married Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote The Book of the Duchess, to celebrate Blanche, at the request of his friend and almost exact contemporary, John of Gaunt. Katherine married Sir Hugh Swynford and bore him at least three children. He died in 1371 and Katherine must have started her affair with John soon afterwards, since their first child John was born a year or two later.

By then Blanche had died of the plague and John had married Constance of Castile, by whom he had one daughter and a son who died in infancy. But in the course of that marriage he fathered John, Henry, Thomas and Joan on Katherine Swynford, who had been governess to two of his daughters by his first wife.

Not laudable behaviour on either side and the medieval equivalent of the tabloids had a field day with the scandalous story. But what was remarkable was that two years after after Constance had died, John married his mistress. She brought no fortune to the marriage or any dynastic advantage, unlike his first two wives, so one must conclude it was a love match.

Whatever you think of Katherine's morals, she was clearly a remarkable person with a strong hold over the richest lord and most powerful person in England after the king.

Joan Beaufort

The children were all given the surname Beaufort, after a lost castle in France. After their parents married, Richard the Second declared them legitimate. Joan, like her three elder brothers, was cousin  to the king and there was clearly some contact between them.

When Bolingbroke deposed his cousin Richard, the Beauforts were now even closer kin to the throne, half-siblings to the new king. Like her mother, Joan married twice, first to  Robert Ferrers by whom she had two daughters before he died. Her second husband was Ralph, Earl of Westmorland, who had also been married before, He had twelve children by his first wife and went on to have fourteen more with Joan. (This is a story of fecundity; if Edward the Third and his wife Philippa hadn't had quite so many sons to war for the succession, history would have been very different).

Joan and Ralph made advantageous marriages for all their children, playing on their close relationship with the king. Their youngest child was Cecily Neville, famed for her beauty and nicknamed "the Rose of Raby." When Joan died she was buried with her mother in Lincoln Cathedral.

Katherine Swynford and Joan Neville's tomb

Cecily Neville

Married Richard, Duke of York, who so nearly became king and fathered two sons who did, Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third. Shakespeare portrays her as a strong matriarch, the Duchess of York, who rails against her youngest son as misshapen and evil.

She was a tenacious and fiercely loyal woman who fought for the rights of the house of York and believed she should have been queen.

 Margaret Beaufort

The granddaughter of John Beaufort and Edmund Tudor, Henry the Fifth's half-brother by his mother's second marriage. She gave birth to her only child, Henry, when she was only thirteen. Although Margaret married twice more, there were no more children and it is assumed that the difficult birth at such a young age damaged her physically. She was separated from her son for most of his childhood and youth, as the Wars of the Roses raged, but remained fanatically attached to her only child and devoted to the idea of his inheriting the throne.

This aspect of her was memorably portrayed by Amanda Hale in the television adaptation of Philippa Gregory's The White Queen, a somewhat fanciful re-imagination of what was known then as The Cousins' War.

Nathen Amin has done his research and filled in a lot of the gaps. No-one interested in the remarkable Beaufort line will want to be without it.

The House of Beaufort: the Bastard Line that Captured the Crown by Nathen Amin (Amberley Publishing 2017)
John of Gaunt by Anthony Goodman (Longman 1992)
Shakespeare's Kings by John Julius Norwich (Viking 1999)
A Pride of Bastards by Geoffrey Richardson (Baildon Books 2002)
Katherine Swynford: the Story of John of Gaunt and his Scandalous Duchess by Alison Weir (Jonathan Cape 2007)