October competition

To win one of five copies of Sarah Gristwood's Game of Queens, just anser the following question in the Comments section below:

"Which powerful woman from continental Europe deserves to be better known in the English speaking countries, and why?"



Then put your answer in an email and send it to maryoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk, so that you can be contacted if you win.

Closing date: 7th November


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The girlie side of history by Sarah Gristwood

Our October guest is Sarah Gristwood, who - as well as being a well-respected historian -  is a History Girl Reserve, one of that splendid band of writers who give us "anytime posts" that can be used when one of our regulars needs to take a break for a month.

Sarah has written two bestselling Tudor biographies, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester; and the eighteenth century story Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic which was selected as Radio 4 Book of the Week.  In  2012 she brought out a new  book – Blood Sisters: the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Her latest title is  Game of Queens, about the chains of women and power running through the sixteenth century.

Shortlisted for both the Marsh Biography Award and the Ben Pimlott Prize for Political Writing, Sarah is a Fellow of the RSA, and an Honororary Patron of Historic Royal Palaces.
sarahgristwood.com

Sarah Gristwood by Oliver Edwards

 

The name of the group demands it, really. The History Girls . . , and what I’d call the girlie moments from my particular chunk of history! When, in a publicity meeting for my new book, Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe I offered a list of top ten girlie moments, the women got it instantly. My male commissioning editor was too nice to say anything. But I swear his eyes roamed around the room, hoping the cricket scores would materialise on the walls and sweep him spiritually away.

Where to start, chronologically? The sixteenth century saw an explosion of female rule. Large swathes of Europe were under the hand of a reigning queen or a female regent - mothers and daughter, mentors and proteges. Game of Queens traces the passage of power from Isabella of Castile to her daughter Katherine of Aragon, and on to Katherine’s daughter Mary Tudor. From the French regent Anne de Beaujeu to Louise of Savoy, through Louise’s daughter Marguerite of Navarre to her own daughter Jeanne d’Albret, as well as to Marguerite’s admirer Anne Boleyn and finally to Elizabeth Tudor.

Anne de Beaujeu, regent of France, wrote a manual of instruction for powerful women. Lessons for My Daughter. One piece of advice was not to pay too much attention to clothes - ‘Past 40, no finery can make the wrinkles on your face disappear’. Perhaps Margaret Tudor should have read it. When her brother Henry VIII sent her the present of some wonderful dresses, Margaret was in such pain from sciatica she couldn’t even bear to be turned in bed. But she still made her attendants hold up the dresses so she could see them, every day.

And there was, after all, a serious point here. Clothing was an important signifier of rank. Margaret - widowed when her brother’s armies killed her husband, James of Scotland - had now been forced to flee that country. She wasn’t being treated as a queen any longer - but the dresses made her seem queenly.

While Henry VIII was looking for a new bride, after beheading Anne Boleyn, his eye lit on Marie de Guise. He said that they should get on together, because they were both ‘large in person’. ‘I may be large in person’, she retorted, ‘but I have a little neck!’ Christina of Denmark, similarly honoured, said that if only she had two heads, one of them would be at the English king’s disposal. Sometimes girl power means talking sassy.

And it’s something, after all, to be allowed to be girlie. In the early part of the sixteenth century, the heyday of what I see as the Age of Queens, Margaret of Austria not only ran the Netherlands during the minority of her nephew, the future Charles V, she was at the very heart of European diplomacy. Margaret ‘is the most important person in Christendom, since she acts as mediator in almost all the negotiations between the princes’, wrote her one-time father-in-law Ferdinand of Aragon, flatteringly.

Margaret of Austria

The childless Margaret was called ‘the great mother of Europe’ - but by the time she was succeeded as Regent of the Netherlands by her niece Mary of Hungary, ambassadors were reporting gleefully that Mary was ‘a little mannish’, and that everyone knew she wouldn’t have children - she was far too sporty. When Mary in turn was succeeded by her niece, Margaret of Parma, there was much talk of her moustache . . . After all in a woman in power couldn’t be entirely a woman, could she?

It was Mary Queen of Scots who liked actually actually to dress up in men’s clothes and go roistering around the Edinburgh streets with her ladies. (There was always the joke that the best way to end the troubles between Scotland and England would be for Mary and Elizabeth I to marry.) Her own minister would describe Elizabeth as ‘more than a man - and in truth sometimes less than a woman’. But how’s this for a girlie scene? - in that stereotyping, cat fight kind of way. When Mary sent Sir James Melville on a diplomatic mission to Elizabeth, the Tudor queen kept pressing him as to whether she or Mary were the taller, the better dancer, the prettier. Mary was the fairest queen in all Scotland and Elizabeth in all England, answered Melville - diplomatically.

It all depends, after all, what we mean by ‘girlie’. In 1572 when Catherine de Medici and Jeanne d’Albret met to negotiate the marriage that was supposed to end France’s Wars of Religion, they broke off their discussions for a day’s shopping round the Paris boutiques, disguised as ordinary bourgeoises. Or so it was reported, anyway . . . Were the men who reported it trying to point up their womanly weakness, or did they understand that this could be a real bonding ritual? (‘As woman to woman, make her mad, while remaining calm yourself’, one negotiator on the Catholic side had urged Catherine de Medici.)

When Mary of Hungary heard about the execution of Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII’s hasty marriage to Jane Seymour, she declared that she had to be glad, in a way. Anne had been a Francophile, and thus no friend to Mary’s Habsburg family. But, all the same, Mary wrote ‘It is to be hoped, if one can hope anything from such a man [as Henry], that if this one bores him he will find a better way of getting rid of her. I believe that most women would not appreciate it very much if this kind of habit becomes general. And although I have no inclination to expose myself to dangers of this kind, I do after all belong to the female sex. . .’ It was an expression of sisterhood, even if the term is of today.

Because I’d say this was a sisterhood - at least in that earlier part of the century, before religious differences tore Europe apart, and fractured bonds A band of powerful women, of sisters, who recognised both their own bonds as female, and their ability to exercise power in a specifically feminine way.

Louise of Savoy

In 1529 Margaret of Austria, the Habsburg emperor’s aunt, and her former playmate Louise of Savoy (now mother to the French king François) met to negotiate the ‘Ladies’ Peace’ of Cambrai. War between France and the Habsburgs was the curse of the century, but the women agreed they could probably do something about it, if their men would only stay out of the way. The men would be concerned about their honour, as Margaret put it tactfully. ‘On the other hand, how easy for ladies… to concur in some endeavours for warding off the general ruin of Christendom, and to make the first advance in such an undertaking!’

This idea - of women coming together in the interests of peace - would recur through the sixteenth century and beyond. Perhaps no others would achieve the success of Margaret or Louise . . . But perhaps, too, this is what we ought to mean by ‘girlie.'

The Novel that got Away by Sarah Gristwood

It’s the writer’s equivalent of the dress you can’t quite fit into - but, if you lose a few pounds, then maybe . . . Every author has that back-of-the-wardrobe box of unwritten stories; the ones you can’t quite bear to throw away. But we’re always being urged to de-junk our lives, aren’t we?

So let’s accept this is one historical novel I will never write - I would have called it The Valois Bride. Good title, do we think? A bit old fashioned, maybe?

Elisabeth de Valois

In December 1559, the 14 year old Elizabeth de Valois arrived on the Spanish frontier to marry King Philip II of Spain – a man twenty years her senior, and twice a widower already. We all know a version of the story from Verdi’s opera Don Carlos, itself based on Schiller’s play - though some of us (forgive me) remember it better from Jilly Cooper’s novel Score!. That set Cooper’s trademark Rutshire rumpy-pumpy against the shooting of a film version of the opera; and its trick of making the Spanish royals into Britain’s present day royal family - and the Inquisition into the tabloid press - worked rather well, actually.

There is no historical truth in Verdi’s fantasy of Philip’s son Don Carlos’ spying out the wedding party on their way to Spain, and there falling in love with the French princess destined to become not his bride, but his stepmother. Of Elizabeth choosing duty over love to make peace between their countries . . . Though she would called Isabel ‘de la Paz’, actually. And it’s true Elizabeth had originally been destined for the son rather than the father but, hey, that was tame, by the standards of the royal marriages of the sixteenth century.

Verdi's Don Carlos

But the real Elizabeth seemed more than content with a husband who was after all in a worldly sense the catch of the century, while Philip’s son and heir would soon be spiralling downwards into his brutal madness. The teenage bride awoke a response in her dour husband, and the extravagant chit who never worse the same dress twice was nonetheless allowed, just six years later, to represent Spain in official negotiations with her own formidable mother, Catherine de Medici.

Philip goes down in English history as a dutiful but essentially uncaring husband to his previous wife Mary Tudor, but when Elizabeth was giving birth, he sat by her bed clutching her hand through every pain. When Don Carlos died in 1568, incarcerated and insane, Elizabeth wept for two days, but ten weeks later she herself was dead from another childbearing, still only 23.

She was survived not only by Philip, but by two other women whose voices I might have used to tell her story. One of them was the Italian painter Sofonisba Anguissola, invited to Spain by Philip and given rank as a lady of Elizabeth’s court. The other was the Princess of Eboli, with her beauty and her patch over one eye. In Verdi’s version, she is Philip’s mistress and an arch manipulator. In real life she was a schemer indeed - widow to Philip’s first great minister, Ruy Gomez (more than twenty years older than she), whose intrigues only mounted after his death - but one who loved and mourned Elizabeth sincerely. Her involvement in a scandalous political murder saw her spending the last ten years of her life under house arrest in one of her castles from where, looking back (yes, cue a time-honoured writer’s device here!), she had no doubt her memories.

Sofonisba Anguissola self-portrait

So why won’t I ever write it? One reason is, I don’t know enough. My limited experience of writing historical fiction (and my far larger experience of writing historical fact) has shown me that the former is more demanding, in many ways. You don’t just need to know the great political events against which the character is placed - you need to know what someone of that age and rank, in that day, would have done when they go out of bed each morning. The sixteenth century court equivalent of switching off the radio and shoving a piece of bread in the toaster . . . And I don’t, for sixteenth century Spain, quite simply.

Could I research it? Maybe - though factual information on that kind of detail can be quite hard to come by. And the trouble is that with Spain, I don’t even have a gut feeling for the rhythm of the seasons or the way the light falls on the landscape - the things that don’t change through the centuries. Research might hack it, for a story set in England, or any country I know well. But I suspect the research would lie dead on the page if I were to write about a place still truly foreign to me.

The other reason is that I know too much. The real Elizabeth is making a very minor - but her mother Catherine de Medici a major - appearance in the non-fiction I’m currently writing: Game of Queens, about the chains of women and power running, from mother to daughter through the sixteenth century.

Catherine de' Medici

So I know about the stream of self-revelatory letters Catherine sent across the border to and about her daughter in Spain: I know that the last of them, a maternal warning as to what should be done about her daughter’s increasing weight, arrived only after Elizabeth’s death. I know that when the two met for that summit meeting, as queen regent of France and queen consort of Spain, Elizabeth would have felt the tug of loyalties known to so many a princess, between her natal and her marital country. ‘How Spanish you have become, my daughter’, said Catherine to Elizabeth, coldly.

I know that as a child in France, Elizabeth was set to sleep in the same room as that other little girl newly arrived at court - her future sister-in-law, Mary Queen of Scots. I’ve read the letters Mary wrote after Elizabeth’s death - distraught not just by the death of her old playfellow, but by the loss of a possible ally, who might have persuaded King Philip to help the Scots queen in her long English captivity.

Of course I’d love to explore these things further - but I’m not sure fiction is the way, for me. Of course anyone who were writing a Valois Bride would have read up on all this and much, much more - but I’m not sure I’d be able to get past the huge rock of facts I’m still discovering, to let the fiction fly free.

Though mind you, the madness of the historical Don Carlos did in the end lead him to an obsessive crush on his step-mother . . . Hmm. Maybe I was a bit quick to jettison this one, actually.

Thanks to Sarah Gristwood for this post. Carol Drinkwater will be back on 26th September.

Cabinet of Curiosities: Taxidermy by Sarah Gristwood

Other people have friends who take up tennis or tatting. I have friends who take up taxidermy. (Also skull collection: ‘Can I call you back? I’m beheading a badger’, has to be one of the best can’t-talk-now lines in history.) Drop in on Jane for coffee, and you find the emptied skin of a magpie draped over the kitchen tap to dry, the way a tea towel might be. An open taxidermy supply catalogue advertises plastic eyes and false tongues, each modelled for the species, precisely.

Sarah's stuffed jay

Not that I have a problem with that - on the contrary, the stuffed jay she gave me is one of my favourite possessions. The first thing any taxidermist today is keen to tell you is that they are using creatures which died naturally. Roadkill, birds brought in wounded to the local vet. Or, in the case of some professionals, beloved pets whose owners can’t quite bear to say goodbye.

Of course it wasn’t always that way, as the heads on the wall of any country house can testify. But then the form has gone through a lot of changes, since some stuffed rarity was first part of any collector’s cabinet of curiosities. The oldest piece of taxidermy in existence is said to be the crocodile suspended from the roof of a church in Lombardy, and documented as having been taken down (later found stored in the roof) in 1534. The horse of Sweden’s king Gustav Adolphus, shot from under him in the Thirty Years War, and skinned and mounted as a trophy by his German enemies, can still be seen today.

The first big boost for European taxidermy came from the explorations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the pressure was on to find a way of proving to those back home just how strange far flung nature could be, (Or trying to prove - when the skin and a sketch of a duck billed platypus was sent back from Australia in 1798, it was dismissed as a hoax.) Specimens could be sent home preserved in alcohol, to be skinned, cleaned, and filled with some kind of aromatic packing - herbs, hops, tobacco; later much improved with an arsenic soap - meant to keep the insects away.

What was at first the preserve of the scientific and the wealthy soon became a museum staple: Bullock’s Museum in London at the start of the nineteenth century advertised ‘the Lofty Giraffe, the Lion, the Elephant . . . as ranging in their native wilds’. When taxidermist John Gould put up twenty four cases of humming birds as rival attraction to the Great Exhibition he got 75,000 visitors. But by then taxidermy was moving on in several different ways.

New techniques - such as the creation of moulds onto which the skin could be arranged, in whatever pose - allowed more naturalistic museum display. This, in the hands of great taxidermists like Rowland Ward, was the start of the dioramas on which many of us grew up (and in England places like the Powell-Cotton Museum in Kent, the Natural History Museum at Tring still show their collections with pride; while the National Museum of Scotland is rare in still having a working department of taxidermy). In America Carl Akeley created ‘Jumbo’ and ‘the Feejee mermaid’ for the great showman P.T. Barnard before moving on to the American Museum of Natural History.

Hares in a bookshop in Stamford

Naturalism, however, was never the goal of a whole other strand of Victorian taxidermy. A young and impressionable Walter Potter had seen Hermann Ploucquet’s anthropomorphic displays at the Great Exhibition and was struck all of a heap. Potter’s most famous tableau showed the death of Cock Robin. Guinea pigs playing cricket, kittens at a tea party - nothing was too bizarre for his imagination, and children were still revelling in his creations long after his death in 1918.

Much about the Victorian sensibility - and the Victorian fetishism of death - seems strange to us today. But perhaps it was yet another strand of Victorian and early twentieth century taxidermy that did most to dismiss the form from fashion by the latter part of the last century. That was the huge number of heads collected by ‘big game hunters’; shot without qualm and displayed without artistry. Taxidermy begun itself to look like a relic of the past; while the spread of the motion picture camera meant a Western public could see those same exotic beasts, not framed in a case, but running free.

(That said, of course, fashion never changes completely - or not in my home town anyway. When I was a child in Dover, the pride of the town museum was a stuffed polar bear, donated by the relatives of an Arctic explorer as recently as 1960. It stood in the entrance, just where mothers used to park the pram, sometimes with the baby still inside it. So the child awoke and looked up into the snarling jaws of this rearing monster, claws outstretched . . . Explains a lot about those of us from Dover, actually.)

But in the last years, there has been a widespread resurgence in the popularity of taxidermy - and in the creativity with which it is used. The original shock value of the stuffed birds swirling around above the model’s head, in a fantastical piece of Alexander McQueen millinery from 2001, has dwindled until a dusty decades old bison’s head seems to leer down at you from the wall of every fashionable bar, every house interior in a magazine spread.

At the Hayward Gallery in 2012, artist David Shrigley’s taxidermied Jack Russell held up a placard reading ‘I’m Dead’. Damien Hirst, anybody? As the art critic Brian Sewell said, ‘there may well be more art in a stuffed pike than a dead sheep’; while artist and animal activist Angela Singer makes a point with her use of vintage taxidermy.

A recent TV documentary, All Creatures Great and Stuffed, went straight for the shock horror stories - the man who spreadeagled the corpses of cats, and tried to make them fly. But the work of someone like artist Polly Morgan seems both beautiful and significant to me. A handful of taxidermy quail chicks bursting out of a telephone receiver, obviously in mid-squawk. A taxidermy fox with a silicone octopus bursting out from its belly, Alien-style; the octopus itself being ‘pollinated’ by stuffed wrens. Yes, in a way it’s sinister; but so is nature, actually; Morgan was first inspired by the decaying corpses she saw on a trip to the Serengeti. She like others argues against any idea of disrespect to the animal. ‘It’s a form of recycling as far as I can see.’

I think it’s the respect that for me is the key - the reason it seems strange to me to shrink from taxidermy, while eating meat and wearing leather shoes. The reason I’d be repulsed by an umbrella stand made from an elephant’s foot, while still cherishing my jay . . . All right, so it’s a sliding scale - those anthropomorphising pieces of Walter Potter’s do seem strange to me. But when taxidermy is done right, it is a gesture of rage against the dying of the light, isn’t it, really?

Stuffed crocodile belonging to History Girl Clare Mulley

Blood Sisters - a review by Mary Hoffman

The Plantagenets are the new Tudors, to paraphrase a press release for the book reviewed here and I couldn't be more pleased to hear it.

Last month in my 1st September slot, I reviewed She-wolves by Helen Castor. I admitted to being a bit slow off the mark with reading it but this month, I want to tell you about a book that was published just over two weeks ago.

Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood (Harper Press) begins properly where Helen Castor's book left off, with the time of Margaret (Marguerite) of Anjou. But like Castor, Gristwood begins with a later death in a Prologue - this time that of Elizabeth of York, the princess that Richard the Third wanted to marry and Henry Tudor succeeded in marrying, thus strengthening his distinctly dodgy claim to the English throne.

PD-Art

The Wikipedia entry for this Queen suggests that she is the model for the Queen court card in sets of playing cards and you can see from this image in the National Portrait Gallery why that idea might have sprung up. However, no-one seems to have found any evidence other than anecdotal for the identification.

Back to Marguerite of Anjou, Shakespeare's original "She-wolf." I recently saw the all-male production of Richard the Third at the Globe) with the marvellous Mark Rylance as Richard, and could not believe that the old queen had been cut from the play. Her scenes with Elizabeth Woodville (Elizabeth of York's mother) and the Duchess of York (Richard's mother) are among the most haunting in the tragedy.

Still, at the beginning of Blood Sisters, Marguerite is just the 15-year-old sent from France to marry the sickly young man of twenty-three who had become Henry the Sixth while still a child. The French princess wasn't in good shape herself, having suffered terribly from sea-sickness crossing the channel and had no clothes grand enough for meeting her future husband - a touching personal detail effectively presented by Gristwood.

Indeed the whole book is full of them. It is subtitled "The Hidden Lives of the Women behind the Wars of the Roses." It really lives up to this, sharing facts gleaned from obscure historical documents about Marguerite, Elizabeth Woodville, who married Edward lV,  Cicely Neville, his indomitable mother, Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry Tudor and Anne Neville, the luckless wife of Richard the Third. But Gristwood adds a woman scarcely known today: Margaret of Burgundy, who was sister to Edward lV, George, Duke of Clarence and Richard lll and married off to Charles, Duke of Burgundy, a man ten years older than her.

I hadn't realised what a player this Margaret was and Gristwood brings her so far into the foreground that it is her portrait on the front cover of Blood Sisters. She had no children of her own but was a brilliant stepmother and politician, fighting for her rights at a time when widowed aristocrats were fair game for kings. She it was who sponsored Perkin Warbeck in his claim to the English throne, "recognising" him as her nephew Richard of York (the younger of the two "Princes in the Tower" who disappeared in 1483). Warbeck was executed in 1499 and Margaret of Burgundy did not outlive her protegé for long, dying herself in 1503, the same year as Elizabeth of York her niece.

Margaret Beaufort, mother of the first Tudor King, had four husbands but only that one child, when she was thirteen, at Elizabeth Woodville's Coronation three courses each of fifteen to twenty dishes were served,  At Margaret of Burgundy's presentation at the French court, there were monkeys, a camel and a gilded lion, Cecily Neville was the mother-in-law from hell, Anne Neville wore furs in July at her Coronation ... the details proliferate and melt the centuries away between us and these women, some of whom were used as dynastic pawns while others became forces to reckon with in their own right.

There is a distinct dearth of forenames in the Plantagenet dynasty, which makes for some confusion in the reader among all the Elizabeths, Margarets and Annes, Richards, Edwards and Henrys but Gristwood does an admirable job of both entwining the stories and distinguishing the players.

The family tree at the front is some help but as with She-wolves not nearly full enough. I'd like to see a link to a website that makes it clear that Lionel, Duke of Clarence, from whom the York claim derived, was the second surviving son of Edward the Third not the last, as it would appear here. Just putting in the dates would have helped.

But I am pleased to say we are getting a visit from Sarah Gristwood here on The History Girls later in the year and will have copies of her book to give away.

Effigies of Henry Vll and his Queen, Elizabeth of York
(Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey)