Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (32 page)

Dartford Priory, founded by Edward III, drew women from the gentry and aristocracy, even one from royalty. Princess Bridget Plantagenet, youngest sister of Elizabeth of York, was promised to Dartford as a baby. She lived there from childhood until her death in 1517. Elizabeth Exmewe was typical of most of the other nuns—she was the daughter of a gentleman, Sir Thomas Exmewe. He was a goldsmith and “merchant adventurer,” serving as Lord Mayor of London.

It was common for brothers and sisters to enter monastic life together, though at separate places. Elizabeth’s brother, William Exmewe, was a Carthusian monk and respected scholar of Greek and Latin at the London Charterhouse. He was also one of the monks who in 1535 refused to sign the Oath of Supremacy to Henry VIII, despite intense pressure. The king had broken from the Pope because he could not get a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn.

Once the king became head of the Church of England, it was imperative that all monks shift their loyalty to him. But Exmewe would not compromise his beliefs, and he was punished with a horrifying death—he was hanged, disemboweled while still alive, and quartered.

No nun in England was executed besides Sister Elizabeth Barton, a Benedictine who prophesied against the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. Barton was arrested, tortured, tried, and hanged for it. Elizabeth Exmewe did not publicly criticize the king or seek martyrdom. Four years after the death of her brother, she was turned out from Dartford Priory.

Historians studying the dissolution have noted a remarkable fact: in several cases, nuns attempted to live together in small groups after being forced from their priories. They were determined to continue their vocations, in whatever way they could. Elizabeth Exmewe shared a home in Walsingham with another ex-nun of Dartford.
“They were Catholic women of honest conversation,”
said one contemporary account.

A half-dozen other Dartford refugees tried to live under one roof closer to Dartford. Meanwhile, Henry VIII had their priory demolished. He built a luxurious manor house on the rubble of the Dominican Order, although he’s not believed to have ever slept there. It became the home of his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, after he divorced her in disgust in 1540.

Following the reign of Henry’s Protestant son, Edward VI, his Catholic daughter, Mary I, took the throne in 1553. Mary re-formed several religious communities as she struggled to turn back time in England and restore the “True Faith.” Elizabeth Exmewe and six other ex-nuns successfully petitioned Queen Mary to re-create their Dominican community at Dartford, which was vacant after the death of Anne of Cleves. They moved into the manor house, built on the home they had left 14 years earlier, with two chaplains. The convent life they loved flourished again: the sisters spent their days praying, singing and chanting, gardening, embroidering, and studying.

But the restoration didn’t last long. When Mary died and her Protestant half-sister took the throne, one of Elizabeth’s goals was extinguishing the monastic flames. In 1559, Elizabeth’s first Reformation Parliament repressed all the re-founded convents and confiscated the land.

And so the Dartford nuns were ejected again, this time with no pensions. Mary’s widower, King Philip of Spain, heard of their plight and paid for a ship to convey the nuns of Dartford and Syon Abbey to Antwerp, in the Low Countries. Paul Lee, in his book
Nunneries, Learning and Spirituality in Late Medieval Society
, has charted the sisters’ poignant journey after leaving their native land.

After a few months, a new home was secured for them. For the next ten years Elizabeth Exmewe lived
“in the poor Dutch Dominican nunnery at Leliendal, near Zierikzee on the western shore of the bleak island of Schouwen in Zeeland.”
Several of the English nuns were entering their eighties, with Elizabeth being the youngest. All suffered from illness and near poverty.

The Duchess of Parma, hearing of their hardships, sent an envoy to the Dartford nuns. He wrote:

I certainly found them extremely badly lodged. This monastery is very poor and very badly built…. I find that these are the most elderly of the religious and the most infirm, and it seems that they are more than half dead.

Despite his dire observances, the nuns themselves expressed pride in their convent. Their leader, Prioress Elizabeth Croessner, wrote a letter to the new pope, Pius IV, saying they strove to remain faithful to their vows and were interested in new recruits!

In the 1560s the nuns died, one by one, leaving only Elizabeth Exmewe and her prioress, Elizabeth Croessner. Destitute, the pair moved to Bruges and found another convent. They lived through a bout of religious wars, with Calvinists marching through the streets.

The onetime prioress of Dartford, Elizabeth Croessner, died in 1577. Now Elizabeth Exmewe, the daughter of a Lord Mayor and the sister of a Carthusian martyr, was the only one left of her Order. In 1585, she, too, perished in Bruges and was buried by Dominican friars with all honors. Elizabeth Exmewe is believed to have lived to 76 years of age.

Our Tudor Sisters

by Sandra Byrd

H
istorical novelists are sometimes suspected of importing twenty-first century values into sixteenth century novels. While it’s true that most authors seek to connect their readers with their novel’s women of the past, it isn’t necessary to ascribe new values to past women. While we cannot know w
hat conversations between persons sounded like with certainty, we can draw upon what we do know to extrapolate their emotions, desires, and life goals.

They valued education
. Although medieval women’s education was often limited to gentler feminine arts such as dance, needlework, and playing of the lute or virginals, by the beginning of the Tudor era women were much more interested and involved in intellectual education. Queen Catherine of Aragon ensured that her daughter Mary had a strict regimen of demanding studies in accordance with the queen’s own upbringing. Sir Thomas More is often credited with putting into practice the idea that non-royal women deserved as much education as noble or highborn men. His daughters undertook an education complete in classical studies, languages, geography, astronomy, and mathematics.

Queen Kateryn Parr’s mother Maude educated her own daughters in accordance with More’s program for his children, eventually running a kind of “school for highborn girls” after she was widowed. Eventually, educating one’s daughters was seen as a social necessity, and men expected their wives to be able to play chess with them, discuss poetry and devotional works, and be conversant in the issues of the day.

They knew they couldn’t marry for love—the first time—but desired it anyway.
Most historical readers understand that women in the Tudor era were chattel, legally controlled by their fathers and then their husbands. They married for dynastic or financial reasons; marriage was an alliance of families and strategy and not of the hearts. And yet, these women, too, had read Solomon’s
Song of Songs
wherein a husband and wife declare their passion for one another. Classically educated as they were, Tudor women had surely come across the Greek myths, including Eros and Psyche, and perhaps had even read the medieval French love poem,
Roman de la Rose
.

If a woman was left widowed—and that happened quite often—she was free to remain widowed and under her own authority or to marry whom she wished. Henry VIII’s sister Mary married first King Louis XII of France, for duty. When he died, she married Charles Brandon, for love. After Mary’s death, Brandon married his ward, Katherine Willoughby, her duty. Later, she married Richard Bertie for love.

They were working women.
High born women were often ladies-in-waiting to the queen, a demanding, full-time job with little pay or time off. They ran the accounts for their husbands’ properties and juggled household management. Some highborn women, such as Lady Bryan, became governesses. Lower born women were lady’s maids, seamstresses, nurses, servants, or baby maids in addition to helping their husbands as fishmongers or in the fields.

Although there are some notable differences, we have much more in common with our highborn sisters of five hundred years ago than one may think!

The Art of Courtly Love: Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn

by Sandra Byrd

T
he art of courtly love and chivalric romance so popular during the early medieval period saw a revival during the Tudor era. Because the majority of noble marriages were arranged, with the focus being on financial, familial, or political gain, courtly love was a gentle, parrying
game of flirtation wherein people might express true, heart-felt affections.

According to historian Eric Ives,

The courtier, the ‘perfect knight’, was supposed to sublimate his relations with the ladies of the court by choosing a ‘mistress’ and serving her faithfully and exclusively. He formed part of her circle, wooed her with poems, songs and gifts, and he might wear her favor and joust in her honor…in return, the suitor must look for one thing only, ‘kindness’—understanding and platonic friendship.

Many of the plays and entertainments in Henry VIII’s court reflected these values, and Henry himself, early in his reign, was very chivalrous and courtly indeed.

The longest game of courtly love, played out before all of Europe, was undoubtedly between Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. The relationship started out as courtly flirtation but as sometimes happened, it then progressed to a more serious, deeper connection with a significant goal in outcome and purpose.

Andreas Capellanus, in his definitive twelfth century book
The Art of Courtly Love
, set out to inform “lovers” which gifts could be offered (among them a girdle, a purse, a ring, or gloves) and to clarify the signs and signals that indicated such a love game was underway—or on the wane.

Although Anne and Henry’s courtly relationship did not follow each of the thirty-one rules Capellanus lists from the
King of Love
, it did dovetail with some of them—a few of which have been examined below.

Rule II
. He who is not jealous cannot love. This rule immediately brings to mind the incident between Henry and Thomas Wyatt during a game of bowls. Thomas Wyatt used one of Anne’s ribbons and a bauble to mark distance, and he meant to use it to provoke or test Henry’s jealousy. Henry, predictably, flew into a possessive bluster. Anne recovered nicely from Wyatt’s foolishness, but there was no further doubting that she was Caesar’s and not to be touched.

Rule IV
. It is well known that love is always increasing or decreasing. One of the most extraordinary things about Henry’s affection for Anne is that she was able to not only capture it but build upon it over a remarkable period of time—seven years from 1525 when it was clear he had fallen for her, to 1533 when their public marriage took place.

He did not become bored or disinterested in her companionship. This was no mean feat when one considers Henry’s short attention span. He wrote tender love letters to Anne, some of which still exist, a powerful demonstration of his growing love as Henry loathed writing.

Rule XI
. It is not proper to love any woman whom one would be ashamed to seek to marry. Much has been made of the fact that Anne “held out” sexually from Henry for personal reasons, and that Henry wanted his heirs by her to be legitimate, two among other valid reasons why they did not simply have an affair. But there is strong evidence to suggest that Henry found Anne worthy of marriage—he crowned her—and took great pride in displaying her before all the court. In Anne it is clear that for some time Henry believed he’d found a spirited soul mate who was as vibrant as he was, and he desired for her to be his wife.

Rule XIV
. The easy attainment of love makes it of little value; difficulty of attainment makes it prized. We’re often reminded that Henry left his first wife and broke away from the Roman Catholic Church during his pursuit to marry Anne, courting war and ill will in the process.

But Anne, too, made sacrifices. Her child-bearing years were quickly slipping by; there was a rush to judgment as she was reviled by much of the populace as a usurper; she had no official role nor position; and, finally, there was no guarantee that she would even have her marriage. Both of them risked much.

Only one of them, in the end, lost everything.

Rule XXVIII
. A slight presumption causes a lover to suspect his beloved. In the end, it took very little to convince Henry that Anne had betrayed him, a ridiculous acceptance of circumstances that demanded Anne be in places she clearly was not and act in ways that would never have gone unnoticed and that were in stark contrast to her character. One must ask, why?

Cappellanus answers that question for us, too.
“…when love has definitely begun to decline, it quickly comes to an end unless something comes to save it.”

At the point when the King’s affections began their precipitous drop, long after their game of courtly love was over and well into their marriage, the only thing that could have saved Anne was the son she miscarried. Chivalric values included integrity, protecting the vulnerable, and acting with self-sacrificing honor. Sadly, Henry did not turn out to be the “perfect knight” Ives speaks of.

The King, the Archbishop, and the Bear

by Judith Arnopp

B
ishop Burnet, writing a century after the event, relates a bizarre incident that took place in Henry VIII’s reign during the aftermath of the Six Articles. The Six Articles was an act that set out quite clearly and reinforced six points of medieval doctrine which Protestants at that time had begun to undermine.
The act also specified the punishments due to those who did not accept them and was known by many Protestants as “
the bloody whip with six strings
.” As a married man, Archbishop Cranmer must have taken particular exception to Article Three which stated that priests should not be allowed to marry.

He set down his objections quite strongly, making detailed notes, all backed up with citations from the Bible and learned scholars, and it is believed he planned to present his findings to Henry. His secretary, Ralph Morice, duly copied the notes into a small book and set off with it to Westminster.

The king, meanwhile, was attending a bear-baiting across the river at Southwark, and, just as Ralph Morice and company were passing in a wherry, the bear broke loose from the pit and with the dogs in hot pursuit, leapt into the river and made straight for the boat. Bishop Burnet goes on to relate that:

those that were in the boat leaped out and left the poor secretary alone there. But the bear got into the boat, with the dogs about her, and sank it. The secretary, apprehending his life was in danger, did not mind his book, which he lost in the water.

You can just picture it, can’t you? Dripping wet bear, soaked dogs, terrified clerk, wildly rocking boat?

When Morice reached the shore, he saw his book floating and asked the bearward (who was not perhaps as “in charge” of the bear as one might hope) to retrieve it for him. But before he could get his hands on it, the book fell into the hands of a priest who, realising what it contained, declared that whoever claimed it would be hanged.

Burnet says that,
“This made the bearward more intractable for he was a spiteful papist and hated the archbishop, so no offers or entreaties could prevail on him to give it back.”

In no little panic, Morice sought the immediate assistance of Cromwell who, on discovering the bearward about to hand the book over to Cranmer’s enemies, confiscated it, threatening him severely for meddling with the book of the privy councilor—thus saving the life of the Archbishop.

This all sounds rather like a scene from the film
Carry-on Henry
, a farce, far too unlikely to be true. I cannot help but wonder what Henry made of the spectacle.