the virgin queen’s women
It is an oft-repeated truism that two people independently invented the radio. If something so unique and intricate can be imagined by two different people, what hope does a book idea have? When you get a book idea, you develop a bit of an eye twitch when you walk past displays in bookshops, your semi-conscious always on the prowl for that author who got there before you did, for that dustjacket that will nullify the magnificent octopus in your word processor that you’re going to finish just-any-minute-now. (Redouble this eye twitch if you’ve dared to believe that you’ve a new take on as obscure a figure as Anne Boleyn, by the way.)
My eye twitch was set off in a whole new way a couple of weeks back. It was by Tracy Borman’s new narrative history, Elizabeth’s Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen. This is not fiction, and neither is it about Anne Boleyn. Reader, it is my Master’s thesis.
My MA thesis is called ‘The Other Elizabethan Settlement: the Virgin Queen as materfamilias, 1548-1603′, and dudes, it is a corker. I took up the topic because of an increasing irritation at the lack of imagination displayed by historians when writing of Queen Elizabeth’s privy chamber. In her father’s reign, the privy chamber became a political locus, and the staff of that chamber was little different from the staff of the Privy Council. In short: the guys who got the King dressed in the morning also managed the government of the kingdom. In Elizabeth’s reign this was of course impossible: an earthly queen cannot be dressed by men. So on one hand, there was the privy chamber, staffed with women; on the other, the Privy Council, staffed by men.
It is, naturally, the men who get all the attention. Not only because they held the more overtly powerful positions, but because Elizabeth was on some level a man’s woman, and the prevailing notion is that she developed closer relationships with the power-brokers in her kingdom than she did with the folks who starched her ruffs. But this assumption lacks nuance, obliterates the (many and important) women who surrounded her from her childhood to her death, and to top all, is largely untrue. So when I saw the Elizabethan privy chamber described as ‘a glorified domestic staff’, I decided, in my own tiny postgraduate way, to correct the record.
You can understand, then, that when I saw the Borman book my heart stuck in my throat a little. Yes, my thesis is sitting bound in red leatherette in my living room, and yes, I hadn’t thought about it for a while. Still, though. Another idea gone up in smoke. Worse yet, when I asked the salesman at Foyles where I could find a copy, he told me - get this - that it was sold out.
I eventually found a copy and bought it. I don’t, you see, have a cargo of sour grapes that I carry around with me, and if someone else gets a royalty for my idea, more power to them. People writing about history is important, and such a little-understood corner of history deserves especial attention.
Unfortunately - and I mean this - the book disappoints. (John Guy agrees, but for entirely different reasons from my own, about which another opus may be coming.) I’m here to tell you that while our current understanding of feminism could only be applied in the worst, demeaning, disrespectful and distorted way to sixteenth-century England, it remains eminently possible for historians to take a sexist tack with Elizabeth, and many of them have. Borman’s book promises a ‘hidden story’, but instead it presents a rehearsal of many of the worst generalizations about Elizabeth’s character: that she was embittered, pathologically vain, jealous of other women, possibly barren or otherwise sexually defective; that she was violent with her women; that she was unreasonable about their marriages - essentially, that she treated them unfairly and that life at court as a gentlewoman or maid of honour in the privy chamber was indentured servitude.
What follows is what I believe to be true of Elizabeth’s character and and her relationship to her women. Like all history, it is open to interpretation, new understanding, and rigorous debate. I don’t object to Borman’s book because I disagree with her conclusions so much as because I’m disappointed that nothing new is offered, either in fact or interpretation - or, indeed, imagination. So bear with me: these are my conclusions and I’m willing to fight for them, but I believe in debate and will take all comers.
First off: of course Elizabeth was vain. Of course she was. She had to be. She was the bloody Queen of England.
Observe her evolution from her teenage years to the last months of her life. She grew up wanting nothing more than to foster the image of a demure Protestant princess. This meant simple gowns in dull colours, unadorned hair loose down her back (as befitted a maiden), and the overall bookish look of a young woman who will never inherit the crown and doesn’t want any attention. It was natural, at this juncture, that she not covet attention, because she got plenty enough, and most of it unpleasant. The wooing of a much older (and married) man would have seen her arrested for treason during her brother’s reign in 1549 had she not been so extraordinarily clever as to save not only herself, but her arguably guiltier servants. During her sister Mary’s reign, she was raised up as a Protestant figurehead, possibly the most dangerous position in the kingdom at that time. Rebellions were raised in her name; it was all she could do to keep her head down low enough that it wasn’t cut off.
When she became Queen, it was a different story, and that’s that. She was a queen, and had to look like one. The England she inherited remained a largely Catholic one, despite the Protestant martyrs of the previous reign, and for months Elizabeth’s Council found itself in the terrifying quandary that no English bishop would crown her. There is such a thing as establishing legitimacy, and that’s what Elizabeth had to do, and fast. She had to convince the theatre of the world that the crown was her inheritance, that she intended to exercise sovereignty, with or without a husband. Can you do that in yoga pants and a ponytail (this is why I will never be a queen)? No ma’am. So she got herself decked out, and rightly so.
I mentioned that she got herself and her servants out of some serious soup in 1549. One of these servants was her governess, Katherine Ashley, an important figure in the world of a girl who is, on every practical level, an orphan. She wrote the following in Mrs Ashley’s defence during this difficult time:
First, because that she [Ashley] hath been with me a long time, and many years, and hath taken great labour and pain in bringing me up in learning and honesty; and, therefore, I ought of very duty to speak for her; for Saint Gregorie sayeth, ‘that we are more bound to them that bringeth up well than to our parents, for our parents do that which is natural for them that bringeth us into the world, but our bringers up are a cause to make us live well in it.’
This is only the loudest and most obvious example of Elizabeth’s love for a diverse number of women over the course of her lifetime. They weren’t only mother figures, either: her peers as well as much younger women stand out as favourites and confidantes over the course of her lifetime. If she cuffed them, she mimicked the age - and also, as Paul Johnson says, her father: she inherited the ‘unfortunate tendency’ of nipping and slapping those who displeased her (men and women alike, I should say, loudly).
As she got older, she changed. Don’t we all? The era of her marriageability came and went. Look at the apoplexy on the web and on television and over drinks after work today when any woman over the age of thirty-five isn’t in a committed relationship of some kind - it’s never her decision, right? ‘That poor girl, I bet no one ever even looked at her.’ People today - in our enlightened epoch - continually attach a red letter S-for-Single on any woman past a given age who hasn’t a proper outlet for her fertility and her Inner Housekeeper. Now. Today. Imagine what this was like for a bloody queen in the bloody sixteenth century - especially in a kingdom that had just finished kicking out all the nuns. There was no contemporary wisdom - none - to suggest that a woman should remain unmarried unless she was defective in some way. And yet Elizabeth elected not to for the sanest reason in the world: a husband would pull the rug out from under her. A husband would try to take her job away. The story of Elizabeth’s life is one riddled with the playing out of miserable marriages. What woman would want to marry, given Elizabeth’s kickline of stepmothers?
And so the time came and went, and after a certain point she couldn’t marry. The people were fussy - couldn’t abide foreigners, couldn’t abide Catholics, couldn’t abide seeing a subject raised up - and she was past her Change of Life. And I’m all for women deciding not to have children, but Elizabeth was faced with a very unique problem: because she had no children, no younger siblings - because she had, in fact, no close relatives at all - she was continually faced with the question of who would come after her. If all anyone wanted to talk about was what happened after you were dead, that would make you a little cranky, no? Especially if you didn’t have an answer. So she developed an answer: while delaying the inevitable, she set out to make herself immortal.
Or at least to look that way. The governing motto of the last years of her life was ex illo tempore: above, beyond, and outside time. I quote myself:
It was an open secret during this period that Elizabeth was, in reality, an old woman who had left an irredeemable vacuum in the succession. Her people hid their anxiety gamely enough: a presentation to Elizabeth … in 1602 [when she was 68] … featured Time ‘with clipped wings and a stopped hourglass’ in deference to her putative immortality. Before the court, her appearance took on a compensatory superhuman quality as agelessness became a necessary feature of her self-presentation.
You see why it was important? At the turn of the seventeenth century people were worried; Elizabeth was worried. Who came next? We know it was James I, and at the time people thought it would probably be him, but they weren’t sure - they weren’t sure about rival claimants and civil wars. Elizabeth had to behave and appear as though she was never going to die. That’s not vanity: that’s expediency. And it worked.
Was she irritable? Of course; all her life she was notoriously irritable. Does this mean she didn’t form close relationships with women, that her women didn’t serve an irreplaceable and unconventionally political role? No, a thousand times no. Does this mean that to be a maid of honour to Elizabeth was a prison sentence, that young women and their parents didn’t fight tooth and nail to secure a place? Hell’s no. Competition for those spots was stiff. And why? On top of all the other advantages it presented, women went to the Elizabethan court to find husbands. To get married. And with very few exceptions, all of them did. So enough of this backchat that Elizabeth didn’t let her women marry. All she did was a) encourage deep circumspection about marriage; and b) lose her shit a little bit when her maids - for whom she was as responsible as a parent - did it behind her back.
Borman’s book is a bestseller, and rightly so: it’s an excellent story, written in an engaging, accessible way. But I had hoped that it would do something novel to the conventional wisdom surrounding Elizabeth’s relationships with the women around her - in short, that someone would stand up and defend her behaviour and her decisions as eminently sane, governed by insight and careful thought in the face of extraordinary circumstances. That the human face painted on Elizabeth by historians could be one of both flaw and virtue, not a caricature of cattiness, jealousy, and violence. After all, who could fail to love a woman who, at the age of sixty-six, was caught ‘dancing a Spanish Panic to a whistle and tabor, none being with her but [one of her closest friends] my lady Warwick’?
(Careful not to ask me about this whilst putting a drink in my hand. I’m stone sober at the moment and look how I’ve gone on. I am geeky to the point of alienation on this subject.)
Till next time, &c &c.
