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.

 

 

Who invented the handkerchief? by Mary Hoffman

You might expect an April Fool's Day post, looking at this title, but I promise you it's not that. I actually have a horror of April Fools; like "banter" and "prank" and "practical joke" these are words that make my heart sink.

(I do make an exception for the elaborate Guardian hoax about The Island of San Seriffe in 1977. It was shaped like a semi-colon and its capital was Bodoni.)

No; although my posting day is 1st of every month and once in twelve it will land on the dreaded day, this is a serious post and indeed a review of a fascinating book.

For the possible inventor of the handkerchief was none other than the English King Richard, the second of that name. His tailor, Walter Rauf, describes "small pieces [of linen] made for giving to the lord king to carry in his hand for wiping and cleaning his nose.'

For this fascinating fact I am indebted to Kathryn Warner, author of a new biography Richard ll: A True King's Fall (Amberley Publishing). It is of a piece with what we already knew of him. He was a fastidious, elegant man, much given to spending exorbitant sums on clothing and personal adornment for himself and his queen.

His was also the first known commissioned portrait of an English king. So we have a slightly better notion of what he looked like than can be gleaned from earlier kings' depiction in illuminated manuscripts or funerary effigies.

You can't see the handkerchief but he probably did have one tucked away somewhere in those gorgeous robes, his hands being occupied with orb and sceptre.

I have been interested in this particular king since I first read Shakespeare's play. I think this was when I was still a teenager because Henry lV Part One was a set text for O level and I developed early the habit of "reading round the text." I didn't understand what was going on in the opening scene in which it looks as if there is going to be a joust between Henry Bolingbroke and Sir Thomas Mowbray but then the king steps in and stops it.

I didn't know who Aumerle was but thought he had a very romantic name. And I thought Bushey, Bagot and Green sounded like a trio of stage villains. What I loved was the language. Not so much John of Gaunt's "This royal of throne of kings ..." speech, which had been done to death by singing Parry's setting in the choir, but Richard's "Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings."

I loved it all - even the  gardener - "Go, bind thou up yon dangling apricocks."

But it was only in 2007/8 when the RSC put on the full cycle of Shakespeare's History plays that I got so involved with them.

I saw each play individually and then the whole sequence again in what was called The Glorious Moment, although it was in truth a full weekend from Thursday to Sunday. It was this that fired my interest in the Plantagenets.

"Our" Richard ll was Jonathan Slinger (who also in the rest of the cycle played Richard lll, Fluellen and the Bastard of Orléans). He gave us an epicene, arrogant and ultimately fragile king, incredulous that his people could turn against him.

Kathryn Warner gives a fully rounded picture of the monarch too and reminds us of much that shaped his character. His father, Edward of Woodstock (not known as the Black Prince till two hundred years later), was the oldest of Edward lll's many sons and the recognised heir to the throne. But campaigning in France turned him into an invalid and the heir died before the king.

Then Richard had an older brother, another Edward, who, if he had lived, would have been King Edward lV and changed the course of history. But little Edward of Angouleme died before he was five. Richard's mother Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, had what was regarded even then as a rather colourful marital history. She was, while still a teenager, married to two men at once, had five children with the one deemed to be her legal spouse, then married the Prince of Wales within nine months of her husband's death. She was still only thirty-three.

Not surprisingly, King Edward and his wife Queen Philippa were not overjoyed about their eldest son's infatuation with this woman with the rackety reputation. Her second husband was still alive, and - to make matters even more complicated - she was Edward's cousin so that a dispensation was needed from the Pope. Normally the heir to the English throne would have been expected to marry a foreign princess for dynastic reasons, as his father and grandfather had done before him. So it was clear this was a love match.

But it meant that when Richard ll was crowned at the age of ten, he had the following disadvantages: he wasn't the son of the previous king; he was a minor and his mother had a scandalous past, leaving him open later to rumours of illegitimacy.

At the time of his coronation, Richard had three living uncles: John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Edward of Langley, Duke of York and Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester (all named after their birthplaces, Gaunt equalling Ghent). John of Gaunt had a good claim, being the first living (though third-born) son of the dead King Edward but he didn't pursue it - something he might later have regretted.

When he was fifteen, Richard married Anne of Bohemia, who was a few months older than him. If you think of him as an effeminate king with "favourites" or lovers like the Earl of Oxford, it might surprise you to know that it was a very happy marriage. The teenaged Richard doted on his young bride and took her everywhere with him.

It was imperative for Richard to produce some heirs but sadly there were no children from this marriage and Anne died at the age of twenty-eight. Meanwhile, Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt, was busy producing four sons and two daughters with his wife Mary de Bohun. How galling must that have been?

The having of legitimate male heirs has coloured the history of England's kings. Too few, as with Henry Vlll, and it dominates their reign and causes problems after death. None, like Queen Elizabeth the First and the outcome is the same. Too many, however, like Edward lll and you get the Cousins War (or Wars of the Roses).

Richard was reluctant to name an heir but eventually chose his cousin Edward, the son of his uncle the Duke of York, who later held the title Aumerle (=Albemarle). Richard took a second wife, Isabella of Valois, but she was just a child, only nine when her husband was deposed. There is every evidence that he treated her kindly and was fond of her but she is not the adult beloved of Shakespeare's play, who seems more modelled on Anne of Bohemia.

The play deals with  the last year of the king's reign, with Richard's sending his dangerous and fertile cousin into exile and later seizing his lands and property when old John of Gaunt dies. From then on it is inevitable that Henry Bolingbroke will return from exile to claim first his title and rights but then move on to seize the crown.

All of this is covered in Kathryn Warner's excellent biography, along with what is now called the People's revolt of 1381, which was Richard's first test of kingship, his troubles with his uncles and the Lords Apellant, his conflcts in Scotland and Ireland and the uneasy peace with France.

As well as the handkerchief story, there is a the sad anecdote about Richard's dog, who deserted him for the usurper, Henry Bolingbroke. It was "a greyhound of wonderful nature," who had belonged to Richard's half-brother. It then lived alongside the king for two years but when Richard left South Wales, the dog ran away for a hundred miles to Bolingbroke's camp at Shrewsbury Abbey and sat in front of him "with a look of the purest pleasure on its face." Henry took this as a good omen and adopted the dog, letting him sleep on his bed.

(History doesn't relate how Henry knew it was the king's hound).

Maybe this is the source (The Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377-1421) of the touching scene at the end of Shakespeare's play when Richard asks a groom which horse the usurper-king Henry rode in triumph and was told it was his own roan Barbary. Richard exclaims:

"So proud that Bolingbroke was on his back!
That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand;
This hand hath made him proud with clapping him.
Would he not stumble? would he not fall down,
Since pride must have a fall, and break the neck
Of that proud man that did usurp his back?"

Apart from some passages which are inevitably studded with names and genealogical details as a Christmas pudding is with dried fruit, Warner's is a very readable and engagingly written book. It gives you a real sense of the contradictory personality of this capable but ineffective, loyal but vengeful, generous but greedy and ultimately flawed king.

Kathryn Warner

Abdication by Mary Hoffman

Richard ll

Abdication has been in the news recently, with Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands stepping down in favour of her son, Prince Willem Alexander. It's quite a tradition in that country but in the UK carries a much less favourable connotation, because of Edward Vlll's behaviour in 1936. Hence all the jokes about Prince Charles looking rueful at the Dutch abdication ceremony, because no British Monarch would dream of doing such a thing.

And yet it did happen with Richard ll in 1399. He was deposed  by the man who became Henry lV, but had to agree to give up his crown. Shakespeare says it best:

"For I have given here my soul's consent
To undeck the pompous body of a king;
Made glory base and sovereignty a slave,
Proud majesty a subject, state a peasant."
Act lV, Scene  l

"Unking'd Richard" is imagined eloquent in a way he probably wasn't. But he probably was just as reluctant. The following year he was dead in Pontefract Castle, though whether from starvation or stabbing is not universally agreed.

No such fate awaited Edward Vlll; far from being a peasant, he was re-designated Duke of Windsor and lived out his remaining 35 years in comfort in France. Whether it was worth renouncing the throne for the woman he loved only he could say.

But the stain and horror of his actions was surely behind one of the people most affected by it, when the young Elizabeth ll pledged to serve as Queen till her life's end.

No abdication for her. But it has no such taint in the Netherlands, where the last three monarchs have voluntarily given up their titles.

Why should it be seen as so terribly different from retirement, in the case of extreme old age or illness, or resignation in Edward's case? Pope John Paul ll chose to carry on through his increasing weakness from Parkinson's, enacting a kind of personal Calvary that was clearly part of his vocation and dedication. Pope Benedict XVl cased worlwide shock by making the opposite choice earlier this year.

Picture credit: Rvin88

The Press scrambled for precedents in renouncing the Pontoficate and could find nothing more recent than Gregory in the 14th century. It counts as abdication rather than resignation because the Pope is the Head of State of Vatican City, apart from anything else.

But other European monarchs have abdication, often under pressure, since Richard ll. Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, gave up most of his titles in 1555, to retire to a monastery, where he died three years later. His son Philip ll became King of Spain and his brother Ferdinand became Holy Roman Emperor, both Charles and Philip's destinies intertwined with that of the English throne.

As was Mary, Queen of Scots, forced to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son, James Vl of Scotland (and later the First of England) in 1567. Here too, the cause was a marriage disapproved of by the Peers and people, from the Catholic point of view because Bothwell was divorced 12 days earlier and by all sides because it was Bothwell who had murdered the Queen's former husband, Lord Darnley.Queen Christina of Sweden abdicated in 1654 in favour of her cusin Charles Gustavus, because she had decided not to marry and her nobles were tired of her extracagant ways.

Philip V of Spain's was a strange abdication, lasting only seven months in 1724. He gave up the throne to his son, perhaps because of his own mental instability, but had to take it back when Louis died without children in August of that year. Philip carried on reigning till his death in 1746.

Monarchs of Poland, China, Sardinia, France, Portugal, Serbia, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Belgium, Cambodia and Kuwait have all voluntarily abdicated since then, not to mention the ones forced to give up their thrones and go into exile.

It is only in Britain that the issue is regarded with such distaste.

Ex-Queen Beatrix, Photo ©Emiel Ketelaar, FrozenImage

What do you think about abdication? Do you think the Queen should step down in favour of Prince Charles? And in what circumstances?