Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (29 page)

I traveled to Dartford while researching my novel,
The Crown
, a historical thriller whose heroine, Sister Joanna Stafford, is a fictional nun of the priory. On a quiet afternoon I walked north of the town’s center and discovered the site of the ruined convent. All that remains is a large gatehouse built by Henry VIII from the rubble in 1540—now, ironically, used for wedding receptions—and a long, low wall that ran the perimeter of the Dominican sisters’ home. This wall kept Bridget of York in—and the world out.

Did she find peace and fulfillment in her vocation? Perhaps Bridget created a family for herself, to replace the one she lost to death and political strife, the last violent cataclysms of the Wars of the Roses. Or did she rebel against the strict, chaste life of a Dominican sister and take a secret lover and give birth to her own baby?

Six hundred years later, as I lingered by the crumbling medieval wall that now hugs a modern road, there is no way for me to know what happened to Bridget of York, what her life was like. But in that moment, I sensed a lingering sadness.

The Worst Marriage of the 16th Century

by Nancy Bilyeau

O
n November 23, 1511, at the age of thirty-six, Anne of York, born a princess, died, possibly of consumption. She had outlived not only her parents,
Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, but her two brothers, the tragic Princes of the Tower, her oldest sister, Queen Elizabeth of York, and, saddest of all, her own four children who died at birth or not long after.

We don’t know how fervently the widower of Anne of York, Lord Thomas Howard, mourned her passing. It had been a prestigious match for Howard, not least because his father, the Earl of Surrey, fought on the wrong side of the Battle of Bosworth and the newly minted Tudor monarch, Henry VII, consigned him to the Tower of London as punishment. But after Surrey, the son of the first Duke of Norfolk, was released a few years later, he dedicated himself to playing the new game in town. With success.

Thomas and Anne’s union was definitely not the last time a Howard married (or attempted to marry) royalty—the 16th century is littered with the carnage of ambitious Howards. Time and again they struggled to climb that final rung of the dynastic ladder but slipped and fell. Decapitation sometimes followed or, if they were lucky, a stint in the Tower. In fact, through a century of Tudor rule, the Howards cycled in and out of the Tower of London more than any other clan.

But to return to the premature passing of Anne of York, the most significant aspect of her death is how it cleared the way for a disastrous marriage, one that, if it weren’t for the truly over-the-top Henry VIII and his “ill conditioned wives,” would take a leading place on a hall of marital infamy.

With apologies to Jane Austen, a childless man who stands to inherit a dukedom must be in want of a wife. Proud Thomas Howard would settle for nothing less than the best, and so he zeroed in on the children of the man who was at that time the sole duke in England: Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham. (Charles Brandon had not yet been elevated, nor had Howard’s own father.) Stafford was rich and had three daughters. The oldest, Elizabeth, was of marriageable age: fifteen. Howard was old enough to be her father. But her own father was not bothered by the age gap—Buckingham approved of the marriage.

The young woman in question did not.

For the rest of her life, the word that would be used most often to describe Elizabeth Stafford was “willful,” and she definitely wanted to exercise her own will in marriage. She had a husband in mind already: her father’s ward, Ralph Neville, her own age and the future earl of Westmoreland. She wrote in a sad letter, years later:
“He and I had loved together two years, and I had married him before Christmas, if the widowed Thomas Howard, the earl of Surrey’s heir, had not made vigorous suit to my father.”

Her wishes were ignored. Elizabeth married Howard on January 13, 1513.

In the early years, it must have seemed to most observers that the marriage succeeded. Elizabeth gave birth to a son within the first year, Henry, the future poet and earl of Surrey; three healthy children followed. Elizabeth traveled with her husband, including two military campaigns to Ireland. She was a success at the court of Henry VIII, becoming a trusted lady in waiting to Katherine of Aragon.

In the late 1520s, two things happened. First, Howard, by then the third Duke of Norfolk, the Lord Treasurer of England, and more than fifty years of age, humiliated his wife by trying to move his mistress, Bess Holland, into official apartments in one of their homes.

And second, Elizabeth and Norfolk took opposite sides on the matter of the king’s divorce. Anne Boleyn was half-Howard, and Norfolk supported his niece’s tireless quest to be queen. But Elizabeth, devoted to Katherine, was outraged by the king’s affair with Anne Boleyn. She tried to smuggle foreign messages of support to the spurned queen in a basket of oranges. It was discovered, and Norfolk was embarrassed.

Politics may have strained the marriage, but infidelity destroyed it. Most wives suffered in silence when their husbands took mistresses. Not Elizabeth. Outraged, she complained to everyone, loud and clear. Bess Holland, she said, was a “churl’s daughter.” She wrote:
“But because I would not be content to suffer the harlots…therefore, he put me out of doors…. He locked me up in a chamber and took away all my jewels.”

Elizabeth said that her husband ordered women who served in his household to bind her and sit on her
“until I spat blood and he never punished them.”
(Elizabeth also later claimed that her husband had assaulted her days after she gave birth to their daughter, but he furiously denied it.)

She had no support. Her father, the Duke of Buckingham, had been executed for treason years ago; his son, Lord Stafford, would not agree to his sister’s return to the family home because of her “sensual and willful” nature. Stafford wrote to his brother-in-law Norfolk:
“Her accustomed wild language does not lie in my power to stop.”

For his part, Norfolk claimed his wife was unbearable, that she told
“false and abominable lies and has obstinacy against me.”
He desperately tried to get her to shut up. She wouldn’t. He offered her a divorce, which she refused (at that time divorces were difficult to obtain).

At certain points, intermediaries went back and forth, suggesting reconciliation. But the couple’s mutual hatred ran too deep. They permanently separated in 1533. Elizabeth lived alone in a house in Hertfordshire her husband leased for her; their children did not visit, taking the side of the powerful duke, now the earl marshal of the kingdom. She wrote angry letters for years to Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister, and even to the king himself, protesting her ill treatment. Elizabeth wrote Cromwell:
“Though I be left poor, yet I am content with all, for I am out of danger from my enemies and of the ill life that I had with my husband since he loved Bess Holland first…she has been the cause of all my troubles.”

Norfolk, freed of his hostile wife, had his ups and downs. He turned against Anne Boleyn after she married Henry VIII and was not damaged by her fall. He even presided over her trial. Four years later, when another niece, Catherine Howard, married the king of England, he did not fare as well. The family suffered from the scandal of Catherine’s adultery. They seemed to have righted themselves but the eldest son of Norfolk and Elizabeth, the earl of Surrey, was executed for treason shortly before Henry VIII died.

The duke himself was imprisoned in the Tower and was thought to have been spared the axe only by the death of the king. During Norfolk’s long imprisonment through the following reign of Edward VI, the duke’s daughter, Mary, petitioned for his release. At one point the Privy Council said that Norfolk’s
“daughter and wife may have recourse to him.”
The duke naturally recoiled from the prospect of visits from his long-estranged duchess.

When Mary took the throne, Thomas Howard, then an incredible eighty years of age, emerged from the Tower of London and plunged into organizing the queen’s coronation and wreaking revenge on his various enemies. He even led a command against the rebels in the Wyatt uprising. But in 1554, the old warrior and schemer died. There was no mention of his surviving spouse in his long will.

Elizabeth seems to have found a place in the family again. She was, after all, on good terms with Queen Mary, the daughter of her friend, Katherine of Aragon. In June 1557, she served as godmother for her great-grandson, Philip Howard, named after Mary’s husband, Philip of Spain. (In 1595 this same Philip Howard would die of dysentery following a hunger strike in the Tower of London, accused of treason against his second-cousin Elizabeth I.)

But four years later, it was Elizabeth’s turn, and she died in London at the age of sixty-four. Amazingly, she asked to be buried in a Howard chapel. This wish, finally, was not ignored. Elizabeth and Thomas Howard are not buried together but they are joined in a chapel effigy. Reunited at last.

For Sale: Rich Orphans—The Tudor Court of Wards

by Barbara Kyle

I
n the late 1400s a young woman named Jonet Mychell was abducted. Her step-father, Richard Rous, wrote to the Chancellor of England asking for help.

According to R
ous, Jonet had been living with her uncle in London when some “evil disposed” people led by one Otis Trenwyth took her away so that
“neither father nor mother, nor kin nor friend that she had could come to her, nor know where she was.”
She was subsequently forced to marry against her will to
“such a person that was to her great shame and heaviness.”

To modern eyes, the crime of a man abducting a young woman is a sexual one. But Tudor eyes saw things differently.

The main dispute in Jonet Mychell’s abduction was about wardship and marriage, and what those two things entailed, above all, was money. What concerned Tudor bureaucrats was the abduction of young women who were heirs to property.

Abduction of heiresses was not uncommon. Certainly it occurred frequently enough to necessitate a statute passed in 1487 under Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch:
“An Act Against Taking Away of Women Against Their Will.”
A stolen heiress meant lost revenues for the Crown.

The revenue stream went back for centuries. The wardship of minor heirs of any tenant-in-chief was one of the king’s ancient feudal rights, a royal prerogative dating back to the feudal principle of seigneurial guardianship. It entitled the king to all the revenues of the deceased’s estate (excluding lands allocated to his widow as dower) until the heir reached the age of majority: twenty-one for a male, fourteen for a female. The king generally sold the wardships to the highest bidder or granted them
gratis
to favoured courtiers as a reward for services.

In other words, all orphans, male and female, who were heirs to significant property became wards of the king, who then sold the wardships. Gentlemen bid for these sought-after prizes because control of a ward’s income-generating lands and their marriage was a significant source of revenue. The guardian pocketed the rents and revenues of the ward’s property until the young person came of age, at which time the guardian often married the ward to one of his own children.

When Henry VIII, the second Tudor monarch, came to the throne, he fully exploited the royal right of wardships. Monarchy had to be a money-making business and wardships provided an excellent way to replenish the royal treasury.

Surveyors were appointed to search for potential royal wardships throughout the realm. Managing all of this was a Master of the King’s Wards who supervised royal wardships and administered the lands and revenues of wards during the period of crown control, and sold those not to be retained. The revenues went into the king’s private funds.

In 1540, Henry VIII replaced the office of Master of the King’s Wards with the Court of Wards, which assumed complete control of wards and the administration of their lands and the selling of the wardships. Eventually, the Court of Wards became one of the Tudor crown’s most lucrative ministries.

In the reign of Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch, the Court of Wards was supervised by Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) who exerted enormous control over this court, keeping several lucrative and important wardships for himself.

I became familiar with the situation of royal wardships when I wrote
The Queen’s Lady
. My book features Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s chancellor, who famously went to the execution block rather than swear the oath that Henry was supreme head of the church in England, a title Henry created in order to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn.

Sir Thomas More had two wards, Anne Cresacre and Giles Heron. He brought them up in his household where they were educated alongside his children. Eventually, Anne married More’s son John, and Giles married More’s daughter Cecily. The marriages seem to have been happy ones.

Anne Cresacre’s story inspired me to create another ward for Sir Thomas More: Honor Larke, the heroine of my novel
The Queen’s Lady
. Honor grows up revering More and becomes a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. Forced to take sides in the religious extremism of the day, Honor fights to save the church’s victims from death at the stake, bringing her into conflict with her once-beloved guardian. She enlists Richard Thornleigh, a rogue sea captain, in her missions of mercy, and eventually risks her life to try to save Sir Thomas from the wrath of the King.

The Execution of Sir Thomas More

by Barbara Kyle

A
   Man For All Seasons
, the 1966 film based on Robert Bolt’s play and starring Paul Scofield, imprinted on a generation a glowing picture of Sir Thomas More as a warmhearted humanist: a loving fam
ily man, a brilliant lawyer and writer, and a steadfast friend of Henry VIII until the rift over Henry’s break with the Roman church brought More to the execution block.

A child of the ‘60s, I was drawn to More the humanist when I began to write my novel
The Queen’s Lady
, the first in what became the seven-book
Thornleigh
Saga
. What I discovered in my research was a complex and conflicted man. As Henry’s Chancellor, More banned books and burned men at the stake. He was a child of
his
time, of course, and his time—the Reformation—terrified him.

Deeply conservative, More loathed and feared the radicalism of the German Lutherans. He was shaken by the news of the sack of Rome, a barbarous rampage by a mixed brew of Spanish, Italian, and German mercenary troops who, unpaid after fighting for the Emperor Charles, mutinied and stormed the city.

They massacred a third of the population, prodded cardinals through the streets to be butchered, auctioned off nuns who were then raped at their altars, and shredded precious manuscripts of the Vatican library to use them for horses’ bedding. The carnage stunned Europe.

As Chancellor of England, More was vigilant at upholding the church’s authority as the supreme pillar of the state. At that time Bibles printed in English were illegal (the church allowed only Bibles in Latin), and More authorized raids on secret gatherings of people who had smuggled in English Bibles. He destroyed the books and sent the criminals, if they did not recant their heresy, to the stake to be burned.

Like complex ideologues of our own time, More, while condemning others to death, was also a caring and loving father. He wrote affectionate letters to his children whenever he was away on his business for the king, and, quite unusually for the period, he educated his daughters on an equal footing with his son. He was so proud of his daughter Margaret’s erudition he encouraged her to correspond regularly with his friend, the great Dutch intellectual humanist, Desiderius Erasmus.

More himself was eventually and famously forced to choose sides in the religious extremism of the day and a horrifying choice it was, when his friend Henry, the king, demanded that all men swear an oath acknowledging him as supreme head of the church in England. Henry’s break with the Roman church was the result of his implacable drive to get the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn. The penalty for refusing to take the oath was death. The vast majority of Henry’s subjects complied. But Sir Thomas More believed that no king was, or could ever be, the supreme head of the church, and that if he swore the oath he would perjure his immortal soul. Along with several Carthusian monks and Bishop John Fisher, More chose death.