'Defiant to the End' by Karen Maitland

Remains of the Novices Dormitory in Battle Abbey
Photo: Giogo, Wikimedia Commons

There are many infamous people in history I am thankful I never had to encounter, but some historical characters I would love to have met. One of those is the redoubtable dowager Lady Magdalen, Viscountess Montague, (1538-1608), mistress of Battle Abbey. Alhough I think, in life, she might have been just as intimidating as the fictional dowager Countess of Grantham, immortalised by Maggie Smith in ‘Downton Abbey’.

For even in her 70th year, Lady Magdalen was still bravely defying King James I and his ministers by hiding Catholic priests disguised as servants in her house and hosting forbidden Masses for as many as 120 people in her secret chapel, right under the noses of the men sent to trap her. She also allowed an underground Catholic printing press to operate from one of her houses. The authorities believed she was using Battle Abbey to smuggle priests into England from Europe and helping fugitives to escape from England. But though the notorious spy-master, Robert Cecil, tried repeatedly, he never managed to bring her to trial.

Mary of England (1516-58)
 & Felipe II of Spain (1527-1598)
Painting - 16th Century
Royal Museums Greenwich

Magdalen Dacre was born at Naworth Castle, Cumbria. At 13 she was sent as gentlewoman to the Countess of Bedford. At 16, she joined Queen Mary’s household, and became the Queen’s great friend and confidante. In 1554, when Mary married Felipe II of Spain, Magdalen was one of the bridesmaids. Magdalen was unusually tall and pretty, but was very religious, spending much time in prayer and wearing a coarse linen smock under her court clothes.

In 1558, Magdalen married widower, Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague. Montague owned three estates, including Cowdray House in East Sussex and Battle Abbey. Magdalen, raised Montague’s twin children from his first marriage, his first wife having died in childbirth, and bore ten children of her own.

In February 1555, her husband went to Rome on Queen Mary’s behalf to try to persuade Pope Julius III to actively back the restoration of Catholicism in England. In 1557, he joined the Privy Council. He was an executor of Queen Mary’s will and chief mourner at her funeral. After Elizabeth became Queen in 1558, Montague publicly denounced proposals to elevate the status of the Protestant religion and was replaced on the Privy Council.

In 1569, Viscount Montague, together with his son-in-law, the Earl of Southampton, and Magdalen’s brother, was implicated in the ‘Rising of the North’, a plot by Catholics to depose Elizabeth, but escaped punishment.

Part of the ruins of Cowdray House
Photo: Simon Burchill, Wikipedia Commons

In 1586, Montague proved his loyalty to Elizabeth as one of the peers who tried Mary, Queen of Scots, King James' mother. In 1588, Montague prepared to defend England against the approaching Spanish Armada, raising a troop of cavalry. 

In August 1591, Elizabeth visited Montague at Cowdray House, where he entertained her lavishly for a week whilst hiding his Catholic priests and servants within the house throughout her visit. But though he was favoured by Elizabeth, he was also kept under close watch, not least because his estates were so close to the coast, where foreign spies could easily come and go.

The 1st Viscount Montague died suddenly in October 1592 and his widow, Magdalen, afterwards lived mainly in Battle Abbey until her death. Battle Abbey was said to contain a subterranean passage through which priests were smuggled into England and it would have been easy for her to move fugitives between her three properties.

Anthony-Maria Browne
2nd Viscount Montague
Circa 1592
Artist: Unknown.
Source: Christie's

Under Elizabeth, Magdalen’s house was searched only twice, and only one of the priests she was hiding was discovered and arrested. But she always refused to aid treasonous plots. However, Guy Fawkes was for short periods in both her husband’s and grandson’s employ, and after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, her grandson, Anthony-Maria Browne, 2nd Viscount of Montague, was arrested because of this association, but released for lack of evidence.

Whereas under Elizabeth, Magdalen’s ‘crimes’ had been largely ignored, King James and spy-master, Robert Cecil, were determined to close down what had come to be known as ‘Little Rome’ and have Lady Magdalen arrested. She drew the particular attention of the notorious pursuivant, Richard Topcliff, who claimed to have discovered a holy well in Battle Abbey grounds to which she led women ‘as if on pilgrimage’. Three men were sent to try to get proof that Lady Magdalen’s servants were priests in disguise, but all three failed. Two she managed to get imprisoned themselves on various charges and the third, Master N. Benet, mysteriously fell into a shallow pit at the end of the town and was killed. This was bizarrely deemed to be ‘suicide’ by the local coroner and Magdalen’s chaplain, Father Richard Smith, records gleefully that as a result Benet ‘was buried like a dog at the roadside’.

In 1607, the Privy Council announced Lady Magdalen should not be sentenced for her refusal to attend Protestant services, because of her age, status and former loyalty to Queen Elizabeth. It was decision which infuriated both Robert Cecil and King James, because ‘age and status’ certainly hadn’t prevented many others being fined, imprisoned or their property confiscated. The influence of a family friend, Lord Buckhurst in the Privy Council probably helped to prevent her from being prosecuted for recusancy in 1607, but after his death, she was left without a protector.

Effigy of Lady Magdalen, 
now in Easebourne Church, Sussex
Source: Tudor Effigies

Lady Magdalen died at Battle Abbey, Sussex on 8th April 1608 at the aged 70. Five priests came to her house the day before to say Masses for her. It wasn’t until after the death of this remarkable woman, that the Privy Council actively pursued and punished her tenants and servants.


Writing as KJ Maitland, her new novel, 'Traitor in the Ice', the 2nd in her Jacobean crime thriller series, is set at Battle Abbey in 1607 when Daniel Pursglove tries to infiltrate Lady Magdalen’s household. 'Traitor in the Ice' is published by Headline, 2022.

THE STUARTS ARE STILL THE NEW TUDORS – Elizabeth Fremantle

For some time now I've been hailing the Stuarts as the new Tudors. Last year saw a number of publications set in the seventeenth century, among others we had Linda Porter's excellent Royal Renegades on the children of Charles I, Andrew Taylor's hugely successful The Ashes of London, a thriller set during the Great Fire and my own The Girl in the Glass Tower, about Arbella Stuart who might have been England's first Stuart queen.

The trend shows no signs of abating with the publication of several more intriguing works of both fiction and non-fiction including the winner of the 2017 HWA Debut Crown, Beth Underdown's brilliant debut novel The Witchfinder's Sister, a beautifully written and chilling story woven around the Manningtree witch hunts.

Another dark offering comes in the shape of Katherine Clement's The Coffin Path, an eerie and compelling gothic ghost story set in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors. Other seventeenth century set fiction includes Jemahl Evans's This Deceitful Light, which continues his English Civil War series with great aplomb and Deborah Swift's Pleasing Mr Pepys, which shows explores the drama and intrigue of Pepys's world through the eyes of his wife.

In non-fiction Benjamin Woolley's fascinating portrait of the Duke of Buckingham, The King's Assassin: The Fatal Affair of George Villiers and James I, not only charts the rise of James I's most successful favourite but also explores the accusation made by a doctor at the King's deathbed that Buckingham had a hand in his benefactor's demise – all very juicy stuff indeed. Looking forward the immensely talented Leanda de Lisle has a new biography coming in January: The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr, which is every bit as thrilling as its title suggests. 

If you're looking for Christmas presents for friends and family who have read everything there is to read about the Tudors, then look no further.

Elizabeth Fremantle's The Girl in the Glass Tower is published by Penguin.

Linda Porter discusses ROYAL RENEGADES with Elizabeth Fremantle

Acclaimed historical biographer, Linda Porter, has turned to the children of Charles I and the English Civil Wars for her latest book. 

An ambitious project with daunting scope Royal Renegades shines a light on a royal family swept away by political forces ultimately beyond their control. The combination of Porter's impeccable research, sharp sense of irony and fluent writing style transforms a period of history renowned for its dryness and impenetrability. The political and martial narrative is cast in a new light when set against the intimacy of the family story, which takes us out into parallel events in France and the Netherlands, allowing us to understand  the wider European impact of the conflict.

Both fascinating and, at times, deeply poignant, Royal Renegades will have you in its thrall until the final page.

Interview with the author:

EF: As with your previous book Crown of Thistles, the scope of Royal Renegades is vast, covering not only the period running up to the English Civil Wars, the wars themselves and the protectorate that followed, but also parallel events in both France and the Netherlands. Do you enjoy the challenge of depicting the ‘big picture’?

LP: Yes, I do. I think it is important to convey the wider backdrop of the story. Events in Europe had a significant impact on the lives of the Stuart royal children, especially after their father’s execution. It is also important to remember that their mother was French – their Bourbon inheritance is often overlooked. I also wanted to convey something of the complexity of the period, both within Charles I’s three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland, and beyond. It is a wonderful period to write about, perhaps the richest in our history. I would have liked to write more about the eleven years of the English republic but it was beyond the scope of this book. However, I felt it necessary to include a chapter on the background to the restoration of Charles II because I had never really understood what happened in England after the death of Oliver Cromwell. I now feel that I do and hopefully readers of my book will as well.

EF: With your focus on the Royal children you manage to make the political highly personal and very poignant. What inspired you to approach this period of history in such a way?

LP: I think because it is very much an untold story. Most people I have spoken to about the book are unaware of the fact that Charles I had six children living at the time of his death, and know nothing about their fates, beyond the fact that Charles II was restored in 1660. It is also a story that mirrors that of many families during the Civil Wars – of dislocation and loss, of a world turned upside down. I don’t think even I had realized quite how sad it was before I began to work on it.

EF: I have the impression that you didn’t warm to Queen Henrietta. I wonder if you could explain why this is and whether you developed particular favourites from your cast of characters.

LP: You are right, I don’t care much for Henrietta Maria. This may be a little harsh. She has had a bad press – then and subsequently – but she is not an easy woman to like, though her husband came to adore her after a very rocky start to their marriage. In portraits of her in her twenties you can see something of the youthful charm that won him over. But she had no political sense at all, was always, at heart, contemptuous of the English and she was a very difficult mother. Her treatment of Prince Henry, her youngest son, was utterly deplorable. She was, however, a loyal wife and her many years in exile were stoically born.

EF: The Civil Wars are notorious for their complexity, yet you have managed to write about them in a way that is so clear. What were the particular challenges of achieving this?

LP: The main challenge was to digest a great mass of material without getting sucked into years of research. When I first had the idea for ‘Royal Renegades’ I thought it would be an easier topic than my previous book, ‘Crown of Thistles’, which was on the rivalry between the Tudors and the Stewarts in the previous century. After all, a book about six royal children should be relatively straightforward, or so I thought. This was naïve, to say the least. Nothing about the Civil Wars is straightforward. And I had not worked on the 17th century since I was an undergraduate, when I did my long essay (a seemingly quaint term these days for something that was actually not really the same as an undergraduate dissertation) on the Civil Wars. Scholarship on the period has changed beyond recognition in the years since then, and I like to reflect the latest scholarship in my books. I think it is something I owe to the reader.

EF: I have the sense that people are turning from the Tudors to the Stuarts. As someone who has written acclaimed works about Tudor figures would you agree with this and why do you think it is the case?

photo: Russell Harper

LP: Yes, I think there is a change. I certainly hope so. Charles Spencer has written about Prince Rupert and about the regicides to great effect. Anna Keay’s biography of the duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son, has led the way on reviving interest in the 17th century among women writers. It has previously been very much a male preserve. Leanda de Lisle, Anna Whitelock and Jessie Childs are also moving away from the Tudors. I think that we have just about reached saturation point with Tudormania though it may take a while before the media and even the general public catch on to this. The effect of Tudormania has been to give a very Anglocentric view of our history but the truth of the matter is that England was not a major player on the international stage in Tudor times and the compulsive fascination of Henry VIII and his six wives has skewed our understanding of our past. Having said that, I’ve just been working as historical consultant on Lucy Worsley’s upcoming BBC I series on Henry and his wives and it has quite a novel approach to the topic, which is what you would expect from Lucy, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing the end product.

EF: What’s next for you as a writer?

LP: I’m starting work on a companion volume to ‘Royal Renegades’ with the working title of ‘Godly People: the family and friends of Oliver Cromwell.’ And you haven’t asked, but, yes, I am at heart, a supporter of the other side. This is my chance to give them their due.

Royal Renegades will be published on 6th October by Macmillan and is available for pre-order.
You can read an extract from the book here.

Elizabeth Fremantle's latest novel The Girl in the Glass Tower is out now.

ARE THE STUARTS THE NEW TUDORS? Elizabeth Fremantle

I've been wondering if we have yet reached peak Tudor.

Henry VIII’s stinking, gangrenous leg has been endlessly speculated upon, every layer of Elizabeth I’s petticoats has been lifted and thoroughly searched beneath and Anne Boleyn’s execution has been read, learned and inwardly digested from all possible angles. There are even novels that speculate upon what might have been, had Anne and Henry produced a son. But still, doyenne of the period, Alison Weir, is bringing out a series of novels about each of Henry’s wives, Philippa Gregory, has returned from the Plantagenets to give us her version of Katherine Parr, I too have recently completed a Tudor Trilogy and, lest we forget, Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels have spawned an arts’ industry all of their own. Surely there is no stone left unturned on Henry’s marital mismanagement, but even so both the BBC and channel 5 are dishing up the six wives. It is not surprising then that Charlotte Higgins recently asked in the Guardian, Tudormania: Why can’t we get over it?

I have a hunch that when such questions begin to be asked about fads – like when people wonder
about why house prices have risen stratospherically high or why beards in Hoxton have begun to walk into rooms before their owners – it signals that their days are numbered. Interestingly two acclaimed Tudor biographers have lately turned to another equally dysfunctional family of royals: the Stuarts. Linda Porter will publish Royal Renegades, about the children of Charles I, in the autumn and Leanda de Lisle’s next book, The King’s Story, will unravel the enigma of Charles I himself. Also published this year are Andrea Zuvich’s, A year in the Life of Stuart Britain and Andrew Lacey’s, The Stuarts: A Very British Dynasty.

The Stuarts offer just as much in terms of drama as that of their Tudor cousins. The period was torn by dark sectarian troubles. The thwarted Gunpowder Plot was an event that – had it succeeded as intended, to wipe out the entire new dynasty – would have been as dramatic as the attack on the Twin Towers. It was a time of witch hunts, espionage, the exploration of the globe, a Queen who unceasingly promoted the dramatic arts and in James I, an openly homosexual king. James was a complex, flawed and unpopular individual whose son would be tried and executed in Cromwell’s revolution – a regicide that would irrevocably change the path of English history.

The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death this year, with all the celebratory exhibitions and seasons of plays, also shines a light on the early Stuart period. We tend to think of the bard as an Elizabethan but some of his greatest and most enduring work fell in the Jacobean period. Think of Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest. James Shapiro’s recent, and brilliant, 1606, Shakespeare and The Year of Lear, argues that this year, early in James I’s reign, was the apotheosis of the playwright’s career. Drama holds up a mirror to the culture it comes from, and so Shakespeare’s late plays, with their moral complexity and ambitious reach, suggest the society that gave rise to them must be infinitely fascinating.

Indeed, Shakespeare wasn’t alone. The Jacobean period is characterized by a thriving of the literary arts. Even The Bible had its James I makeover and poets such as John Donne and Ben Johnson remain familiar today; women were finding their voice too and publishing for the first time. In 1611 poet, Aemilia Lanyer, published Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a brilliant defense of Eve that sought to shake up received thinking about women’s position in the world. Women stepping outside the box so publically gave rise to an anxiety about the female sex, which was articulated by tragedians like Webster and Middleton who, along with Shakespeare, were producing some of the most bloodthirsty heroines in all of English literature, with Lady Macbeth as flag bearer.

The cultural flourishing that reached its zenith with the early Stuarts was abruptly suspended when Cromwell closed the playhouses. But it returned in force with the restoration of Charles II, the most charismatic of the Stuarts, whose reign saw actresses on the stage, and in the King’s bed, for the first time. A recent exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution thoroughly explored the events of the Restoration period as will Rebecca Rideal’s forthcoming book 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire.

The intrigue of the Stuart century is endless, so it is unsurprising that fiction writers have also had their heads turned. A couple of years ago Rose Tremain revisited the eponymous anti-hero of her 1989 Booker shortlisted novel, Restoration with Merivel, a brilliantly funny and touching rendition of debauched Restoration society. Katherine Clement’s duo of novels, The Crimson Ribbon and The Silvered Heart, tell of women leading extraordinary lives during the chaos of the Civil War. Andrew Taylor’s latest thriller,The Ashes of London, is set in the aftermath of the Great Fire and I am working on a Stuart Quartet, with the first, The Girl in the Glass Tower, about Arbella Stuart, who might have been England’s Stuart queen.

So prepare yourselves for the Stuarts: every bit as flawed, dysfunctional and fascinating as the Tudors.


Elizabeth Fremantle’s novel The Girl in the Glass Tower is published by Penguin