The Women of the Cousins’ War

by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin

  The novelist has all this to do; and more. The novelist has to write something that is pleasing on the page and the ear. The very words are chosen with care not just for what they mean; but also for what they conjure, perhaps even for how they sound, or what they look like on the page. Far more than the historian the novelist is concerned with extraneous detail: costume, saddlery, food, hobbies, weather. The novelist is also concerned with the inner life: secrets and the unconscious.

  And a novel, unlike a history, has a choice of narrators. A novel can be written from many points of view. Most often a novel is written in the style called omniscient narrator or concealed narrator, in which the story is narrated by a disembodied voice, someone who sees everything and describes it with apparent neutrality, just like the usual style of a history. When the novel is narrated by the omniscient narrator, the rule generally is that the narrator has to be omniscient and stay omniscient: this narrator knows everything. The omniscient narrator cannot write as a historian who is honour-bound to acknowledge the limits of the research. Readers of history are accustomed to a break in the narrative when the historian explains that the facts are missing and that at this point we are inside the realm of informed speculation. Sometimes the historian will even step into the third-person prose to say why he or she personally cannot be certain about a fact. But this is not possible for the novelist. The reader of a novel doesn’t want to start with a world view, a god’s view, which suddenly breaks down and says ‘actually we don’t really know the facts here, but the most likely thing is . . .’ The reader wants to be captured by the narrator, and the reader wants to stay captured.

  Not all novels are told by an omniscient narrator. They can come from an authorial voice, whose presence is understood by the reader and who sometimes directly addresses the reader. They can be written as if by one of the characters, looking back over their lives. As I have developed my own writing I have come to love the narrational device of writing in the first person, present tense, as one of the characters reporting on the events from her own viewpoint, as they happen. The advantage of this is to put the reader in the shoes of the protagonist, seeing the world from her viewpoint:

  I touch the milestone once more, and imagine that tomorrow the messenger will come. He will hold out a paper sealed with the Howard crest deep and shiny in the red wax. ‘A message for Jane Boleyn, the Viscountess Rochford?’ he will ask, looking at my plain kirtle and the dust on the hem of my gown, my hand stained with dirt from the London milestone.

  ‘I will take it,’ I shall say. ‘I am her, I have been waiting forever.’ And I shall take it in my dirty hand: my inheritance.

  The present tense also has the advantage of avoiding the hindsight of historians who know what is going to happen and whether or not it was a success. Some of my favourite scenes have been when the narrator expected the ‘wrong’ history: thinking that something would happen, that did not, in the end, take place. This challenge has been very stimulating for me as a novelist and sometimes even led to new conclusions for me as a historian. For example, I suggested that Mary Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl was certain that her sister Anne would escape execution. The history indicates this. Anne made an agreement, mediated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, to accept that her marriage with Henry VIII was null and void. She was probably expecting retirement to a nunnery. Historians have not paid much attention to this agreement since they write from the point of view of knowing the end of the story: that the agreement did not save her, and Anne was executed. From the point of view of the history of what happened, the agreement is not very interesting – it made no difference to the outcome, it can be safely all-but forgotten.

  But for me thinking as a historian about what might have happened, or what Anne might have hoped and planned, these days become tremendously interesting. By thinking about them as ‘live’ negotiations and putting aside the eventual outcome, I came to realise the importance of those last days in the Tower. That Anne should have struggled for her life, should have been prepared to set aside her position as queen and the inheritance of her daughter is a most important historical insight. For me as a novelist, writing ‘in role’ as the doomed woman’s sister, this is also tremendously interesting. This is a moment where I (speaking as Mary Boleyn) am absolutely convinced that my sister will survive, that my former lover Henry VIII will let her go. The tension and then pathos of the execution scene are based on the history; but draw all their energy from the fact that it is written from the point of view of Mary, who is expecting a pardon not a death. To write this scene as a novelist, I had to ‘forget’ what I knew of the history.

  ‘Thank God,’ I said, knowing only now how deeply I had been afraid. ‘When will she be released?’

  ‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ Catherine said. ‘Then she’ll have to live in France.’

  ‘She’ll like that,’ I said. ‘She’ll be an abbess in five days, you’ll see.’

  Catherine gave me a thin smile. The skin below her eyes was almost purple with fatigue.

  ‘Come home now,’ I said in sudden anxiety. ‘It’s all but done.’

  ‘I’ll come when it’s over,’ she said. ‘When she goes to France.’

  Interestingly, readers captured by the novel, and by the controlled delivery of the information, seem to accept the convention, and ‘forget’ the history they know. Many people have told me of the sense of great tension in the novel at the prospect of the execution though, of course, we all know that Anne will die.

  A novel about Anne Boleyn need not end with her death – though every biography does so. Most histories aim for a complete account of their subject and so a traditional biography starts with the birth of the subject and ends with the death. History, as a study of time, tends to be written in a narrative line that follows time from the furthest past to the most recent. But a historical fiction need not do this. It can obey, instead, the requirements of the novel-form to open with a powerfully engaging scene, and this can be a foreseeing, or a flashback, or an event outside ordinary time, or outside the story altogether. Over the years this has become a signature technique for me. I try to make the opening scenes of my novels a powerful insight into the entire story, a vivid freeze-frame moment: a gestalt moment. The first scene for me does not just start the narrative – it symbolises it. My novel The Other Queen opens with Mary Queen of Scots breaking out of Bolton Castle by climbing down a rope made of sheets, a factual event and an act of typical adventure, courage and recklessness, that the more traditional and sentimental portraits of the doomed queen deny. The man who is going to fall disastrously in love with her sees her captured, circled with torches, lit like an angel, ringed with fire like a witch.

  In The Red Queen the novel opens with a dream sequence, the dream which inspires Margaret Beaufort to her life’s work, and which warns her that exceptional women face exceptional dangers. The White Queen opens outside of time altogether, with the myth of Melusina, the water goddess, which is threaded through the novel as both a traditional story and one of the themes of the book: the different worlds of men and women. The Lady of the Rivers opens with the young Jacquetta meeting Joan of Arc, a girl who sees visions and speaks with angels, just as Jacquetta sees visions and hears the singing of spirits.

  THE RECIPE

  But how much fiction should there be in a historical novel? And how much fact? All historical novelists would give their own answer. Personally, I would say: as little fiction as possible in the chronicle of events. A chronicle is a simple narrative that says: this happens and then this happens. I believe that the chronicle should form the structure of the historical novel and it should be as solid as the historical record allows. If we know that a battle happened at Bosworth in 1485 and we know how it was fought and who won, then this must be the fact in my novel as it is in the history book. But what it was like, and how it felt to people at the time: this is where a historical novel can be a far more exciting, inspiring, poignant and beautiful form than a factual
account.

  But however vivid and powerful the historical novel, I believe it should be based on the recorded facts and never deviate from them when they are available. How few facts are available for some periods and lives, and how much the historian has to speculate to tell a coherent story is perhaps demonstrated in this collection of three essays: the factual basis that underpins my first three novels of ‘the cousins’ war’.

  WOMEN AND HISTORY

  When I consider how significant a role these women played in their times, the interest of their own lives, and the importance of their children, it amazes me that their histories have not already been thoroughly explored and recorded. Why are there not many histories of the three women of this book, when one was a queen, one was a royal duchess and the other the founder of the best-known line of monarchs in the world? Why are these three women, and so many of the other women that I write about, either absent from the historical record altogether, or hardly mentioned? Michael Hicks, the medieval historian, explains:

  Historians used to suppose that there could be no history of women; especially medieval women, and certainly none that was worth the recounting. Initially, perhaps, this was because historians (especially male historians) had no wish to write about members of the other sex. They subscribed to the presumption that history was about politics, in which women have traditionally played little part. Women’s failure to participate in what really mattered in the past meant that women themselves were unhistorical and unworthy of the historian’s attention.

  When women do emerge into the historical record, why are they viewed so negatively? Why was Mary Boleyn all-but invisible to history, when the story of her life and her family was so extraordinary? And why is Anne of Cleves almost forgotten, or remembered only as the fat smelly one?

  I believe that women are excluded from medieval history as historical characters because of the traditional view at the time of the nature of women, which was that women were innately incapable of major public acts: ‘The Church provided two models for women: Eve the temptress and Mary, the Mother of God; thus society viewed women as either pure and virginal or filled with the carnal lust of the deceitful Eve. In either case the culture stereotyped them.’

  We can see the consequences of viewing women as Eve the temptress, or Mary the Virgin, when we look at women who have entered the historical record and been firmly categorised as one or the other. Later historians revise in vain; some stereotypes are very tenacious. For instance, Katherine Howard, the young fifth wife of Henry VIII: ‘She was beheaded on 13 February 1542, only nineteen or twenty years old. The drama of her execution lends gravity to a brief life which would otherwise pass unnoticed.’

  Actually, I think that Katherine Howard’s brief life is very worthy of notice, and her beheading is not the only interesting thing about her. But of all the Henry queens she is the one most likely to have been promiscuous, and this ruined her reputation in her own times, and even today inspires a sort of smug tolerance:

  Then there is the question of her sensuality. The long withdrawing roar of Victorian morality inhibited generations of historians from treating this with anything other than disapproval and distaste. But we are past that now. We can confront sex as a fact, not as a sin. We can even, if pushed, see a sort of virtue in promiscuity.

  Katherine benefits enormously from this shift in moral values. True, she was a good-time girl. But like many good-time girls she was also warm, loving and good natured.

  It seems extraordinary to me that I should be stepping up to defend the reputation of a young woman who was executed in 1542. But new research indicates that – born between 1524 and 1527 – she was even younger at her first sexual experience than was previously thought. So, since her first so-called sexual encounter with her music teacher took place when she may have been a little girl of just eleven years old, this incident cannot be regarded as evidence of female promiscuity; more likely, it is evidence of coercion. Then, at the age of perhaps twelve, in an ill-chaperoned household she made a secret betrothal with an older, sexually experienced, man – Francis Dereham – who may have seduced her for his sexual pleasure and to promote his social advancement. At around fifteen years old she was placed in an arranged marriage to the 49-year-old Henry VIII. It is unlikely that her affections were engaged by this bad-tempered man, old enough to be her grand -father. And then she fell in love with Thomas Culpepper and perhaps became his lover. She wrote to him: ‘it makes my heart die to think what fortune I have that I cannot always be in your company.’

  Surely, these are not the words of a good-time girl seeking a romp? These are the passionate words of a very young woman in love for the first time. So her well-recorded ‘promiscuity’ amounts to inappropriate behaviour by her teacher when she was eleven years old, one incident of grooming at the age of twelve, and one possible love affair. This hardly makes her a ‘good-time girl’. Executed at seventeen, she had no time to establish her own style or morality as a woman.

  The reputation of Anne of Cleves, the king’s fourth wife, is also a slander, but the source of it is the king himself: ‘I liked her before not well but now I like her much worse. She is nothing fair, and have very evil smells about her. I took her to be no maid by reason of the looseness of her breasts and other tokens, which, when I felt them, strake me so to the heart that I had neither will nor courage to prove the rest. I can have none appetite for displeasant airs.’

  One glance at the Holbein miniature of Anne shows a pretty young woman, not particularly dark or slack-skinned. It is unlikely that she carried ‘evil smells’ – the ladies of her bedchamber would not have allowed her to go unwashed to the king’s bed on her wedding night, and no one but the king ever mentioned this. But on that wedding night, when the king found himself impotent, he was quick to blame her.

  At this time Henry VIII was grossly overweight, painfully and regularly constipated with outbreaks of wind, and with an ulcerous sore from an old wound on his leg which had to be kept open to allow the pus to drain. There was indeed a fat stinking unsexy person in the Cleves/Henry VIII bed; but it was not the 24-year-old woman who knew that her future depended on pleasing her 49-year-old husband – a sick man, old enough to be her father. Henry’s tyrannised court had no option but to take his word, against the evidence of their own eyes, and agree that the new young queen was so ugly as to prohibit sexual intercourse. Interestingly, historians have blindly followed this line, taking the word of the divorcing man against the evidence of his wife: not for the first time; nor, I expect, the last.

  Very few women escape this powerful stereotyping. Great queens like Elizabeth I and Victoria receive a huge amount of positive attention, and are cast in the role of the ‘Mary the Virgin’ character. Indeed, admiration of Elizabeth is such a rule that historians are uncomfortable when they want to challenge the heroic myths; as the editor of a collection of essays on Elizabeth discovered: ‘I encountered several versions of the startled response of one scholar, “Oh!” he exclaimed. “I really wouldn’t want to say anything bad about Elizabeth.”’

  The disadvantage for historians celebrating the chastity of historical women is that, just as they cannot see Anne of Cleves or Katherine Howard for the young women they were, because they are dazzled by their bad reputation, they also cannot understand the women that they overly praise. Such historians are uncomfortable about examining women’s personal lives, their lives as normal women. Queen Victoria’s clearly expressed sexual desire for her husband Albert was suppressed until recently, and her loving relationship in widowhood with her servant John Brown was only fully examined in 2003. Queen Elizabeth’s sexual life with a succession of favourites has been blandly described as ‘courtly love’ by historians, who are uncomfortable at the evidence that she satisfied her powerful sexual drive in serial exaggerated flirtations, and sexual play.

  For historians who cannot bring themselves to ascribe active sexuality to respectable women, the controversy of the Katherine of Aragon divorce becom
es quite incomprehensible. They want to believe that Katherine of Aragon, an outstandingly pretty princess, sixteen years old, spent five months in Wales with her young handsome husband on a prolonged honeymoon, without once having sexual intercourse though they had been publicly married and publicly put into bed together. This unlikely claim is Katherine’s own, to defend herself against an attempt by her second husband, Henry VIII, to declare his marriage to her as null – he argued that they would have been too closely related to marry, if she had consummated the marriage with his elder brother Arthur. Katherine had a series of defences: a contradiction in the Bible texts, the opinion of the majority of theologians, a dispensation from the Pope; but she fell back on the simplest argument – that she was not in too close affinity to Henry VIII because her marriage with his brother was never consummated. Despite having been married to a healthy young man for five months, she claimed she had been a virgin-widow.