Princesses Behaving Badly (11 page)

In reality, the charges were likely punishment for Joan supposedly trying to help her French son from her first marriage to escape prison after his capture by her adopted country’s forces at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Confused? So were everyone’s loyalties. England was in a fog of civil unrest, frequent coups, increasing church power, and unrelenting superstition. In that climate, it was easy to use a charge like witchcraft for political ends.

E
LEANOR
C
OBHAM
, D
UCHESS OF
G
LOUCESTER

Twenty years later, another royal Englishwoman was charged with sorcery. Eleanor Cobham was the second wife of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, who was the brother of the late Henry V and uncle of the young Henry VI. The only thing that stood between Eleanor and the throne was a damp disappointment of a monarch no one really liked—if Henry VI were out of the picture, then the duke would become king and Eleanor queen. In 1441, rumors flew that people near the 20-year-old King Henry were practitioners of the “Black Art” and had been conspiring to kill him with “incantations and witchcraft.” Even worse, the Devil had appeared in a church in Essex not long before. Clearly, something evil was afoot.

What happened may have been wicked, but it had more
to do with politics than sorcery. Roger Bolingbroke, an Oxford priest, physician, and astrologer, and Thomas Southwell, a canon of St. Stephen’s, Westminster, were arrested and accused of plotting to kill the king by means of necromancy. In Bolingbroke’s possession was found a wax figure of the monarch, which authorities claimed was being slowly melted to bring about the deterioration of the king’s health. Both men were tossed in the Tower of London in July 1441. Bolingbroke, under “examination” (read: torture), revealed that he had been instructed by the duchess of Gloucester, who he claimed wanted to use magic to murder the king. Eleanor soon found herself facing charges of witchcraft, a burning offense, and treason, a hanging one. She tried to flee but was caught and brought before the religious authorities, most of whom were her enemies.

At the trial, Eleanor’s two supposed accomplices were joined by a third, Margery Jourdemayne, dramatically called the “Witch of Eye,” from whom it was alleged that Eleanor begged love potions to ensnare the affections of the duke of Gloucester. Faced with the evidence against her, Eleanor admitted to dabbling in sorcery; she claimed the drugs she obtained from the Witch of Eye were to help her conceive a child but denied plotting against the king.

All four were found guilty. The Witch of Eye was burned alive at a market in London; Bolingbroke was hanged, beheaded, and quartered; and lucky Southwell died in prison, probably by his own hand. Eleanor was spared death after the king interceded. Stripped of her title, she was forced to walk through London barefoot, bearing a heavy candle, to the altar of St. Paul’s Cathedral and then to two more London churches to do the same penance. It was winter; the filthy ground cut her feet, and crowds along the way jeered at her. She was then made a prisoner in a castle in Wales, where she stayed until her death 18 years later. Her husband abandoned her to her fate, knowing he could do nothing to save her. There can be no doubt that Gloucester’s political
enemies had a part in engineering her downfall. Eleanor hadn’t made many friends in her climb to the top of the social ladder, and Gloucester had lost some of his own because of both his marriage to her and his efforts to increase his wealth by diminishing that of others. Losing his wife in such a spectacularly public fashion meant the loss of Gloucester’s influence in the affairs of the king; he was fully discredited by her shame and would never again play a major role in England’s politics.

Meanwhile, Eleanor would go down in history as an ambitious sorceress. In Shakespeare’s
Henry VI, Part 2
, Gloucester pleads with his wife to “banish the canker of ambitious thoughts,” but haughty Eleanor cannot. When she and her accomplices raise a spirit to tell them the future, they are caught by Gloucester’s political rivals and arrested. Gloucester, who hears about her crimes from her accusers, banishes her from his “bed and company/And give her as prey to law and shame/That hath dishonour’d Gloucester’s honest name.”

J
ACQUETTA OF
L
UXEMBOURG AND
E
LIZABETH
W
OODVILLE

Twenty years after Eleanor was forced to take those penitential steps, more accusations of witchcraft popped up on the other side of the family tree. In 1432, 17-year-old Jacquetta of Luxembourg married John, duke of Bedford, a 43-year-old widower who was also younger brother of Henry V and the duke of Gloucester. Three years later Bedford died, leaving Jacquetta a young and wealthy widow; she remarried within two years, to Sir Richard Woodville, a minor knight.

Despite her new marriage, Jacquetta was still the dowager duchess Bedford, and she remained tangentially involved in court intrigues. She certainly would have witnessed the downfall of the only other living duchess, Eleanor. So Jacquetta would have at least been wary of anything that looked like sorcery, knowing as she did how quickly fortunes in the court of England could change. And wow, did they.

In 1461, Edward IV deposed the mentally ill Henry VI, with the help of the earl of Warwick. Three years later, Jacquetta’s daughter, the beautiful Elizabeth Woodville, was secretly married to Edward IV, and the Woodville fortunes seemed to be cemented. But in 1469, civil war threatened to throw everything into turmoil.

Edward was facing insurrection from his former ally, Warwick. Fearing the increasing influence of the Woodville clan, Warwick executed Jacquetta’s husband and son and charged her with witchcraft. Witnesses came forward claiming that Jacquetta had made tiny lead effigies of the king and queen. Gossips claimed that she and her kin could have achieved so much only through witchcraft, and that the little figures were part of Jacquetta’s black magic to pull off the match.

Jacquetta was ultimately cleared of all charges, but the taint of sorcery remained on her and her daughter and grandchildren. After Edward died in 1483, his youngest brother, Richard III, declared that Edward’s children with Elizabeth had no right to the throne. His justification was that not only was Edward contracted to marry another woman before Elizabeth, making Edward a bigamist and their children bastards, but also that the union between Elizabeth and Edward was brought about by magic. Elizabeth’s two sons, the 12-year-old heir to the throne and his 9-year-old brother, were locked in the Tower of London and never seen again.

A
NNE
B
OLEYN

Joan, Eleanor, and Jacquetta all suffered under the accusations of sorcery, but at least they got to keep their heads. Anne Boleyn wasn’t so lucky.

Anne came to the English court in 1522, at age 21, after having come of age in France. Despite her English heritage, she was totally French—pretty, witty, clever, expertly flirtatious, and devastatingly fashionable. Henry had already made her sister his mistress, but Anne was different; she toyed with him,
talked back, and refused to sleep with him (at least for a little while). They became lovers of the everything-but-actual-sex sort. Henry, meanwhile, was dealing with the usual royal problem of a wife, Catherine of Aragon, who had not yet produced a male heir; he believed that Anne could, if only she’d give him a chance to knock her up.

For six years, their relationship was an open secret in the court. Everyone knew that Henry was looking for a way out of his marriage; that the Boleyns were rocketing through the social stratosphere; and that it was Anne who ruled the court and Henry’s heart. But it wasn’t until 1533 that Henry’s advisors hit up on a clever but dangerous way of getting him his divorce. If the Catholic pope wouldn’t grant him one, then why not divorce the pope? Henry’s decision to usurp the power of the Roman Catholic church not only got him excommunicated, it also gave the nation a new state religion, the Church of England, as well as a new queen. With Catherine out of the picture, Henry and Anne had a hasty shotgun wedding, and, already six months pregnant, Anne got her crown.

That year, Anne delivered a healthy baby girl, Elizabeth (the future Elizabeth I). But all of her subsequent pregnancies ended in tragedy; she miscarried a boy who, according to popular lore, was a deformed “monster,” and then another boy. Anne just couldn’t give Henry what he desperately needed, and the couple quarreled constantly. Anne was jealous, she made scenes, and Henry was already starting to size up other court ladies, presumably keeping a weather eye out for birthing hips. His roving gaze hit upon Jane Seymour, one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting, a somewhat unsparkling woman who came from a big family and could be expected to breed well.

Henry had found his next queen, but a second divorce was out of the question, so his advisors devised another solution. In 1536, on the evidence of one possibly homosexual and definitely tortured minstrel who claimed he’d slept with her, Anne was charged with adultery; among the five men accused
of having sexual relations with her was her own brother. She was also charged with treason and conspiracy to kill the king, supposedly having chatted about which of her lovers she’d marry after Henry was dead.

Contrary to lore, Anne was not formally charged with witchcraft, but the public accusations made it easier to convict her. Witchcraft explained the miscarriage of a child at a time when people believed congenital defects were Satan’s work and the fault of the mother. It also absolved Henry from guilt, because he could claim Anne had bewitched him into divorcing Catherine. That Anne was rumored to have an extra digit on one hand and a mysterious mole on her neck were touted as proof of her dalliances with the Devil.

Anne was found guilty on all counts by the presiding judge, her own uncle. She was beheaded at the Tower of London on May 19, 1536. She went to her death denying all charges and still professing love for the king who’d abandoned her. Before mounting the scaffold, she seemed resigned to her fate and joked with the executioner that killing her would be easy. “I have only a little neck,” she said with a laugh, placing her hands around her small white throat.

Roxolana

C
A
. 1502–A
PRIL
1558
THE
O
TTOMAN EMPIRE

I
n 1536 Suleiman, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, had only two people he could trust. One was Ibrahim Pasha, his grand vizier and longtime friend. The other was his wife, Roxolana. She was Ukrainian and a former sex slave who survived the tiger pit of the harem to become sultana. After the grand vizier was found dead, his throat sliced open, Roxolana became Suleiman’s sole advisor and confidante. Guess who was behind Pasha’s murder.

When Roxolana came to the sultan’s court about 1520, the
hasseki
(chief concubine) was a beautiful Circassian woman named Gulbahar who had already borne the sultan a son. Almost immediately Roxolana, then about 17 years old, managed to claw her way up from her status as a servant to become one of the sultan’s favorites. She became his only favorite by losing a fight.

Gulbahar and Roxolana hated each other from the beginning and the rivalry only intensified after the birth of Roxolana’s son. Tensions came to a head one day when Gulbahar called Roxolana a “traitor” and “sold meat” (trust us, a really rude thing to say). Infuriated, Roxolana greased up for a catfight. When it was over, Roxolana’s hair was torn out, her face covered in scratches; she was in no condition to see the sultan.

Which may have been her plan all along. When an envoy came to bring Roxolana to her lover’s apartments, she refused, sending word that she didn’t want to offend Suleiman’s magnificence with her battered appearance, no matter how desperately she wanted to see him. Alarmed, the sultan demanded her to come; once he saw the damage, he sent Gulbahar packing to an outpost of the Ottoman Empire—and just like that, Roxolana became first lady of the harem.

The sultan was so enamored of her that he became nearly monogamous (pretty much as good as it gets with emperors). Once, when he was presented with a gift of beautiful women, Roxolana made such a fuss that he was forced to return them. She reportedly even convinced him to marry off the most attractive members of the harem, arguing that their beauty was going to waste. Roxolana enjoyed other signs of his favor, too. For example, she bore Suleiman one daughter and four sons in rapid succession, in contravention to the age-old “one concubine, one son” principle meant to minimize a woman’s influence and reduce fighting over the throne.

Her meteoric rise was all the more remarkable for her humble origins. The name Roxolana (or Roxelane) means “the Russian woman” and was probably given to her by the court; it’s not strictly accurate, because Roxolana was from Polish-controlled western Ukraine. Though her real name is lost to us, making it difficult to track her origins, it’s generally accepted
that Roxolana was born between 1502 and 1505, possibly the daughter of a priest; one persistent rumor claimed that she was the illegitimate daughter of Sigismund I of Poland, but that was probably just an attempt to gussy up her origins. Whatever her heritage, at age 15 she was abducted by Crimean Tatars during a raid and forced to walk to Caffa, the biggest slave market in the Black Sea region. There, legend has it that the future grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha picked her out as a present for Prince Suleiman (just a bit ironic, given Pasha’s fate).