Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners

Queens and Commoners

ALISON PLOWDEN

Copyright © 1979 by Alison Plowden

All rights reserved.

Manufactured in Great Britain by

Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London

First American Edition

ISBN: 068910944X

The English, so most sixteenth-century Europeans agreed, were a lazy, arrogant, light-minded race. Their land was so fertile, the climate so temperate, the great tracts of forest so teemed with game, the lush pastures supported so many fat sheep and cattle that their living seemed almost indecently easy to visiting Germans and Italians, who were inclined to pass disparaging remarks about the gluttony, idleness and general unreliability of the islanders. Not that this bothered the islanders in the slightest, since their most outstanding national characteristic was a deeply ingrained contempt and suspicion of all things foreign, coupled with an unshakable conviction 'that there are no other men than themselves and no other world but England'. When entertaining a favoured foreign guest at one of their heavily-laden dinner-tables, they would ply him with food and drink, enquiring with genial condescension whether such-and-such a delicacy was to be found in his country; and the greatest compliment which could be paid to any handsome foreigner was to assure him that he looked like an Englishman.

The splendid self-confidence of the English was shared by their wives, and foreign tourists were all greatly struck by the amount of freedom generally enjoyed by married women. For although, as a Dutch resident in London observed, the women were entirely in the power of their husbands, they were not shut up or kept so strictly as in Spain and some other countries. On the contrary, they had free management of their households and could go out to market to buy what they liked best to eat. 'They are well-dressed,' wrote Emanuel van Meteren, 'fond of taking it easy, and commonly leave the care of household matters and drudgery to their servants. They sit before their doors, decked out in fine clothes, in order to see and be seen by the passers-by.' At feasts and banquets the ladies were shown the greatest honour, being placed at the upper end of the table and served first. The rest of their time was employed 'in walking and riding, in playing at cards or otherwise, in visiting their friends and keeping company, conversing with their equals (whom they term gossips) and their neighbours, and making merry with them at child-births, christenings, churchings and funerals; and all this with the permission and knowledge of their husbands, as such is the custom'. Their husbands, it seemed, would from time to time wistfully recommend the superior industry and care of German or Dutch housewives, but with little result. The English ladies, quite unimpressed, preferred to retain their own customs.

A German, writing in the 1590s, also commented on the fact that the womenfolk of England had far more liberty than was usual in other lands and knew just how to make good use of it; 'for they often stroll out or drive by coach in very gorgeous clothes, and the men must put up with such ways'. Earlier in the century it had been noted that even ladies of distinction could be seen drinking wine in public taverns, and their free and easy manners extended to their own homes. A Greek tourist, one Nicander Nucius, was astonished at 'the great simplicity and absence of jealousy' shown in the attitude of Englishmen towards their wives and was shocked to discover that any chance male guest was expected, indeed encouraged, to salute his hostess by kissing her on the mouth - a lack of discrimination which Nucius considered barbarous. Desiderius Erasmus, on the other hand, thought it delightful and urged an Italian poet friend of his to waste no time in coming over to England, where he would not only find 'girls with angels' faces', so kind and obliging that he would much prefer them to his Muses, but also a native custom 'never to be sufficiently recommended'. 'Wherever you come,' wrote the Sage of Rotterdam enthusiastically, 'you are received with a kiss by all; when you take your leave, you are dismissed with kisses; you return, kisses are repeated. They come to visit you, kisses again; they leave you, you kiss them all round.' Even the stiff, shy Philip of Spain, when he arrived to marry Mary Tudor, painstakingly embraced all the Queen's ladies, 'so as not to break the custom of the country, which is a good one'.

Most people agreed that English ladies were well worth kissing. It was an age which admired blue-eyed blondes, still the predominant English type, and the German Samuel Kiechel described the women of England as 'charming and by nature so mighty pretty as I have scarcely ever beheld'. An Italian captain, Francesco Ferretti, thought them 'of marvellous beauty and wonderfully clever'; while Etienne Perlin, a Frenchman who in general had very little time for England or the English, conceded Englishwomen to be 'the greatest beauties in the world, and as fair as alabaster'. They were also 'cheerful, courteous and of a good address'. A rather less complimentary note was struck by an anonymous Spaniard, who came to England in King Philip's retinue in 1554. In a letter home he remarked on the immodesty of the English ladies' short skirts and gave it as his opinion that they were neither beautiful nor graceful when dancing. 'Not a single Spanish gentleman has fallen in love with one of them nor takes any interest in them,' he wrote sourly. Here he was wrong, for one Spanish gentleman, the diplomat Count de Feria, did fall in love with an English girl and later married her. It's true that this was an exceptional case-probably the tense atmosphere between the two nations at the time was not conducive to romance - and the same correspondent maintains that Englishwomen 'are not the sort of women for whom Spaniards feel inclined to take much trouble'. But even he was moved to pay tribute to their horsemanship: 'for who, in any other land, ever saw women riding forth alone as they do here, where many of them manage their horses with consummate skill and are as firm in the saddle as any man'.

It must, of course, be remembered that the elegant and emancipated ladies who made such an impression on foreign visitors were townswomen and mostly from the prosperous and forward-looking trading and professional classes-the wives of lawyers and government officials, well-to-do merchants and City men. More typical, because far more numerous, were the countrywomen whose daily routine was governed by the inexorable demands of the land by which they lived. The farmer's wife, even the wife of the average lord of the manor, had small leisure for gossiping and card-playing, and few opportunities for jaunts.

But although the countrywoman might be less sophisticated, less fashionably dressed and carry a heavier work-load than her London counterpart, she was seldom a mere drudge. The farmer in particular depended largely on his wife's partnership for, as one writer on the subject succinctly observed: 'husbandrie weepeth, where huswiferie sleepeth'. On the vast majority of farms and smallholdings, the dairy, poultry yard and vegetable plot were regarded as the housewife's responsibility. She took her own produce to market and expected a say in the disposal of the profits. Some women became farmers on their own account, and it was not unusual for a widow to take over her late husband's farm or business and run it very efficiently.

Higher up the social scale, where husbands were often away from home for long periods, either on their own affairs or the king's service, wives would be left in sole charge of considerable estates. Almost the only surviving letter of sad, neglected Amye Robsart, wife of Queen Elizabeth's favourite man Robert Dudley, deals with a business matter, and in it Amye instructs the steward of the couple's Norfolk property 'of her own authority' to proceed with the sale of some wool to settle an outstanding debt.

Again and again foreigners, commenting on the amazing freedom and independence of Englishwomen, refer to the common saying that England was the paradise of married women, but sixteenth-century England was still very much a man's world, and for women the entry to even a limited degree of paradise depended on first acquiring a husband. Marriage might provide protection and financial security, and confer status in an intensely status-conscious society, but it also brought with it a tyranny, sometimes a martyrdom, which few wives escaped. From her mid-teens to her early forties (if she lived that long), the average woman could expect to face the ordeal of childbirth if not annually, at least upwards of a dozen times. Most women bore between eight and fifteen children and saw perhaps half of them die.

Henry VII's Queen, Elizabeth of York, reared four babies out of eight and herself died in childbirth on or about her thirty-eighth birthday. Out of nine pregnancies, Catherine of Aragon produced one surviving daughter. Anne Boleyn miscarried of the boy who might have saved her, and Jane Seymour died in her twenties from the results of bearing the longed-for male heir. The misfortunes of royalty naturally attracted the most attention, but it was a story repeated in countless other families whose domestic tragedies are recorded in brass and stone in parish churches up and down the land.

The women did not complain as they faced a constant prospect of pain, heartbreak and death. Such physical servitude had been their lot from time out of mind, and they accepted it with faithful courage while, at the same time, busily attending to the laborious round of household chores, eagerly following the latest fashion, riding abroad with a seat as firm in the saddle as any man, and showing a cheerful, courteous face to the world. These were the women of Tudor England.

The royal House of Tudor was to owe a great deal to its womenfolk. Indeed, it owed its very existence to a woman, although when, in 1452, Henry VI was moved to bestow the wardship and marriage of Margaret, the nine-year-old Beaufort heiress, on his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor, he can have had no notion that he was assisting at the birth of a new dynasty. Henry, a monarch not normally noted for his worldly wisdom, may have been acting out of simple benevolence. He seems to have felt a strong sense of family obligation towards his young relatives, offspring of his widowed mother's enterprising second marriage to her Welsh Clerk of the Wardrobe, and had already made himself responsible for their education. His more hardheaded advisers, on the other hand, were probably considering how the support of the Tudor brothers, a promising pair of warriors, could best be secured for the Lancastrian cause at a time when the House of Lancaster was clearly going to need all the support it could get in the approaching struggle with its Yorkist rivals. Edmund and Jasper had been created Earls of Richmond and Pembroke respectively but the custody of Margaret Beaufort was an even greater prize. Not merely was she her father's heir, and the late John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, had been an extremely rich man; but she was also of the blood royal, a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, third son of the all too prolific King Edward III.

It is not likely that anyone thought of seeking Lady Margaret's views on these new arrangements for her future. Marriages in royal and noble families were made not in heaven but at the council table, with political or dynastic advantage in mind, and frequently planned when those most closely concerned were still of nursery age. Margaret herself was already contracted to John de la Pole, son of her former guardian the Duke of Suffolk, and being a pious, serious-minded child, the thought of breaking a promise made before God caused her a good deal of heart searching.

According to the story repeated many years later by her close friend John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, 'being not yet fully nine years old and doubtful in her mind what she were best to do, she asked counsel of an old gentlewoman whom she much loved and trusted'. This lady advised her to pray for guidance to St. Nicholas, the patron and helper of all true maidens, and, says Fisher, a marvellous thing occurred. That same night, as he had often heard Lady Margaret tell, while she lay in prayer, calling on St. Nicholas, whether sleeping or waking she could not be sure, 'about four o'clock in the morning one appeared to her arrayed like a bishop, and naming unto her Edmund Tudor, bade her take him as her husband'.

Margaret's doubts having thus been resolved by the highest authority and the technical impediment of her prior engagement to John de la Pole dealt with by the canon lawyers, the way was clear for what was to turn out to be one of the most fateful weddings in English history. It took place some time in 1455, as soon as the bride had reached the mature and marriageable age of twelve, but whether or not this unusual pairing was a personally happy one is not recorded. Certainly it was brief, for Edmund Tudor died early in November of the following year. Some three months later, on 28 January 1457, his widow, still not quite fourteen years old, gave birth to a son at Pembroke Castle, stronghold of her brother-in-law Jasper.