![]() Sometimes a story insists on being told in a particular way. When I started work on The Poison BedI had published four novels about historical women embroiled in the dangerous power play of the Tudor and Elizabethan courts. The place and time of their setting was defined by jeopardy, when those who stepped out of lived under the threat of execution. These novels certainly had elements of the political thriller; but my aim in writing them was primarily to shine a light on these remarkable and half-forgotten women. I had assumed I would take a similar approach when writing about the infamous beauty Frances Howard. A contemporary portrait shows her looking out at the viewer with a knowing half-smile. Her gaze is unusually direct, seeming to challenge the prevailing notion that women of her time should be seen and not heard. This image captivated me and when I dug into her story, discovering that she was at the heart of a scandal that rocked the Jacobean court right up to its highest echelons, I knew I wanted to explore her life and the notorious murder trial in which she became ensnared. The Jacobean period was an age steeped in paranoia with divided political and religious loyalties, giving rise to some of the bloodiest dramas ever staged. I only had to think of Othello, Macbeth and The Duchess of Malfi, with their themes of revenge, power and manipulation to understand that the atmosphere of my novel would be dark and fraught with tension and danger. Central to Jacobean tragedy is the figure of the disruptive female. Clever, mysterious and dangerous, these women seemed to me the forerunners to the femmes fatales of classic noir films. Invariably in Jacobean tragedy a woman is blamed for the collapse of moral order in much the same way as Frances Howard was blotted by the scandal that surrounded her. ![]() On researching her story, it seemed clear to me that the Howards had used Frances as a pawn for their political ambitions. The Howards were a powerful and ruthless bunch who saw an opportunity to align themselves closely to the King by marrying Frances off to the royal favourite Robert Carr. Carr was a man on the rise but the proposed marriage was not a straightforward business, because Frances already had a husband. Behaving much like a mafia don, the Howard paterfamilias negotiated an annulment which initiated the beginnings of the scandal Frances became caught in. But then a man who had vehemently opposed the annulment was found dead, poisoned whilst imprisoned in the Tower of London, and the newlyweds found themselves under arrest. The more I explored the historical record, the more I came to understand that the circumstances of this murder were condiserably more complex than they first seemed. There were several people in very high places for whom the death might have been most convenient. It seemed possible, probably even, that there had been a cover-up and various plea bargains that obscured the real circumstances of the case. The truth remained frustratingly elusive and I came to see, in a light-bulb moment, that the only way to recount Frances’s story was to place this crime, with all its untied ends, right at its heart. It became clear that Frances and Robert would each narrate their separate stories, so the reader could understand the circumstances of this controversial marriage from two differing perspectives. In my mind it had become a tale of Jacobean noir, dependent on a central femme fatale, intricate plotting, pace and the meticulous, slow release of information. As such it had more in common with its contemporary cousin, the twisty, domestic psychological page-turner, than the historical court novel I had initially imagined. I had no choice but to write it as a thriller.
Now I have turned to the dark side it would seem there is no going back and I am working on a companion piece to The Poison Bed, a revenge thriller, inspired by another true crime, called The Honey and the Sting,to be published next year. The Poison Bed by E. C. Fremantle is published by Michael Joseph. This article was first published in Shots Magazine
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Two men, intimate friends, who call each other husband and wife, from our modern perspective, offers little ambiguity. We would assume them gay, on that evidence alone. But as many historians have pointed out the language of friendship between men in Early Modern England tended to be uninhibited and overblown with terms like ‘love’ thrown about liberally. Masculinity was differently defined at the time – you only have to consider the clothes men wore: festoons of pearls and lace and pom-poms on their shoes the size of cabbages. So, the letters, though compelling, and certainly convincing to this writer, are not sufficient evidence to prove James’s homosexuality. The recent discovery of a secret tunnel at Apethorpe House, one of James’s favourite residences, between his and George Villiers’s bedchambers, caused a flurry of supposition. But this too has a plausible and mundane explanation. Corridors between bedchambers were unremarkable in palaces of the period. Privacy, as we recognise it, didn’t exist in such buildings, which were designed to house a court of hundreds. The bed chamber was as much a place for political activities as for sexual, and corridors like this would have allowed access to the king’s close circle, including the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, of which Villiers was one. All Early Modern kings had Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, several young courtiers who had close access to the monarch and were required to sleep in his room on a rota, as a security measure.
James never tried to hide these relationships, bestowing honours on them and promoting them to high office. Stuart became Duke of Lennox, Carr, Earl of Somerset and Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and they were given great political responsibilities, though in some cases were not particularly suited for such roles. These men played a key role in James’s life and, in the case of Carr, stretched his good will almost to breaking point. Carr became mixed up in a poisoning plot, for which he and his wife were convicted. There is reason to believe that James’s actions around the trial indicated some fear that Carr might have revealed too much in his scaffold speech, were he condemned to death. It is also a matter of historical record that courtiers schemed to place beautiful young men in the King’s path in the hope of creating some advantage out of it, in much the same way pretty daughters were dangled under Henry VIII’s nose. They saw a weakness to exploit. ![]() I have read more than one indignant tirade directed against those who choose to accept James as homosexual, stating that it casts negative aspersions, or ‘outs’ a man who is no longer able to speak for himself. This pre-supposes that to call someone homosexual is an insult and that to be homosexual, and in this I include bi-sexual, is degrading. This, I refuse to accept. I do however understand historians’ reluctance to take a firm stance on James’s sexuality. Stuart historian, Dr Samantha Smith, is clear as to why: ‘There is no denying that James I was fond of his favourites, who happened to be young men, but we cannot say for certain if this attraction resulted in sexual relations. There is no actual evidence to support such claims and the act of sodomy was in fact illegal and deemed a sin in 17th century England and James was a man who feared sin’. Does this though assume that homosexuality is only about penetration? There is always a fascination about who puts what in which hole – think of the did-they-didn’t-they obsession about Elizabeth and Dudley – but for me this misses the point. (s’cuse the pun!) The focus on the penetrative act as defining sexuality would exclude sex between women, but also other sexual practices between men, that don’t involve sodomy. It was sodomy specifically that was the legal and religious infringement at the time. The law had nothing to say about most other intimate acts. It is possible to imagine, then, even considering his fear of sin, that James may have indulged in practices we might consider homosexual but not in sodomy itself.
For the purposes of my novel The Poison Bed, in which Robert Carr’s relationship with the King is central to the plot, I have made the assumption of both men’s bi-sexuality. This may be audacious and certainly might put some noses out of joint. But fiction is the mode by which we can play with the liminal space between the lines of the historical record. It allows us to imagine what happened behind closed doors and weave a plausible version of the past from what we know and what we can never know.
EC Fremantle’s novel The Poison Bed, about King James’s favourite Robert Carr and the poisoning scandal in which he became embroiled, is published in hardback by Michael Joseph (Penguin) on June 14th
This was no Harry and Megan love match. As was the norm for aristocrats in Early Modern England, it was a dynastic marriage, but unusual in that it was designed to unite two opposing political factions. The Howards had long been a powerful force and were shown great favour by the new King James when he came to the throne. They publically held the same religiously tolerant political position as the King and were keen to strike treaties with old Catholic enemies like Spain. The Essex faction, back in favour having helped James to the English throne, supported a hard-line Protestant agenda and were more inclined to war than ‘jaw’. Consequently, the wedding, as a catalyst for peace between warring parties, heralded an air of optimism and unity in the early Stuart court.
There was a new star at court. Robert Carr had attracted the attention of the King, who had a penchant for beautiful young men, and had consequently risen to a position of power as the royal favourite. Carr, in the market for a wife, was taken with Frances, and her family saw an opportunity to consolidate their close ties to the King. Their intention was to extract Frances from her marriage with Essex, whose star was on the wane, and hitch her to Carr, whose star was rising. But, even with the backing of the King, who could refuse his favourite nothing, this would not be easy.
His friends testified that though he was unable to perform with his wife, he was certainly capable with other women – they had seen it for themselves. One can only imagine the atmosphere in court while the discussion of the young man’s erection took place before the bishops. Frances bore the brunt of the public shaming, being labelled a whore and a witch who had made her husband impotent by nefarious means. She was charged to undergo an inspection, which involved several respectable matrons and midwives all having a prod around her nether regions to see if she remained virgo intacta. A scandal of vast proportions blew up with ribald news-sheets having the kind of field day the red-tops have when a footballer beds a woman who is not his wife. It was generally believed that Frances must have been substituted by another, purer, woman for the purposes of hoodwinking the respectable matrons. A contemporary rhyme put it thus: this dame was inspected but fraud interjected/ A maid of more perfection. The church commission deliberated for months and proceedings were further delayed by an old friend of Carr’s, Sir Thomas Overbury, who was vehemently opposed to the plan, threatening to prevent the annulment. He was thrown into the Tower on orders of the King, where he died. Eventually the King, who was keen to see his favourite married for reasons of his own, intervened by appointing two further bishops to push the decision in his favour. The annulment was eventually granted. The favourite, now the Earl of Somerset, was married to Frances Howard by the same bishop who performed her first marriage and in equal splendour. An entire week of court celebrations marked the nuptials.
![]() I swore my devotion to London many years ago. It is where I was born and where I did most of my growing up. Even during a three year sojourn in Paris I was desperately homesick for London, so it has come as something of a surprise to find myself in Norfolk. I made the move to find a new perspective on my writing and have found that the proximity to nature not only stimulates my imagination but also brings me closer to the past. Time obeys different rules here. The rate at which the abundant and vigorous plant life beside the water at the lip of my garden, home to all manner of life, grows gives the sense that without man it would take a mere few years for nature to reclaim its territory and erase all sign of centuries of progress. Yet life also seems to slow here and small but regular events, like the daily 7am battalion of tiny goldfinches that come to feed on the thistles near my kitchen and the little Chinese water buck that leaps out of the barley as I pass with my dogs each evening, or the family of stoats that have made their home beneath the barn, offer simple delight. It is easy to imagine my seventeenth century characters also experiencing such ordinary rural happenings and it no doubt helps that I live in a cottage that dates from their time, albeit altered beyond recognition inside and certainly a good deal more comfortable. I have always found inspiration whilst walking alone and here, in pockets of wilderness with no sign of modernity, the experience is intensified. Nature echoes with the past, whispering things to me as I walk by. The Broads have a topography all their own, vast, constantly-changing skies over a flat expanse of land that is saturated with water and alive with hundreds of species of bird. The act of walking in solitude through this landscape, with only my dogs for company, one trotting at my heel, the other always running on ahead, allows my mind spooling through the heads of my characters, hearing them speak, imagining existing in their bodies, bringing them into vivid life. ![]() A favourite place is St Benet's Abbey, a few scattered ruins that mark the site of a vast medieval religious establishment founded on the site of a ninth century monastery. It seems so remote and tranquil, with just the odd boat gliding past on the nearby maze of waterways and I imagined those early monks at their devotions without the interruptions of ordinary life. But after a little research I discovered that in fact in the past the area around St Benet's was a hive of activity and commerce. By the twelfth century the East of Norfolk was documented as being one of the most densely populated parts of the country. Indeed St Benet's was the site of a rebellion during the peasant's revolt. With the population so large, woodlands were cleared for fuel and building. But once timber supplies grew short, locals turned to peat as an alternative source of fuel. By the fourteenth century the vast holes created by peat extraction began to fill with water as sea levels rose and the whole area was regularly devastated by flooding. Nature's attempt to reclaim supremacy over the land. Before long, humans fought back with complex systems of drainage and the 200km of navigable waterways of the Broads came into being. By the beginning of the twentieth century the Broads were a hugely popular tourist destination and continue to be so, but still out walking it is possible to wander for miles and barely encounter a single soul. I still find it curious to see at a distance the sail of a boat passing languidly across a vista of marsh and farm land,on an invisible ribbon of water hidden by the raised dykes on either side. As I walk, aware of small birds fidgeting in the reeds, the rustle of something, an otter perhaps, in the undergrowth, a quick smatter of raindrops, time folds back on itself and I am in the past. ![]() -Being a huge fan of Sarah Waters I was curious about The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook's adaptation of her novel Fingersmith, a particular favourite of mine. Had I needed further incentive to see Park's film, which had an impressive 95% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the the critics were gushing with a chorus of praise, dubbing it a 'masterpiece', 'intoxicating' and 'an erotic triumph.' When a favourite book is adapted there is inevitably a sense of disappointment on finding the screen version doesn't live up to that conjured in the mind of the reader. But as The Handmaiden had transposed Waters' narrative from nineteenth century England to 1930s Japanese occupied Korea, I was prepared for a radically different retelling and that is what was delivered. Visually glorious and languidly paced, the film utterly seduced me as young Soo-kee, magnificently played by newcomer Kim Tae-ri, was sent to the remote estate of an aristocratic book collector, as maid to his niece Hideko. However, faithful to the original material, Soo-kee has been planted there by a con man on a mission to persuade the wealthy Hideko to marry him, with the ultimate intention of having her committed to an asylum. Without revealing too much and spoiling it, I can say that this is a film of two halves. At a certain point the perspective shifts from Soo-kee to Hideko, exposing things about which Soo-kee unaware. Problematically the film suffers at this point on, from the loss of the captivating Kim Tae-ri as protagonist and much of the seductive tension is lost when it descends to relentless girl-on-girl prurience. I'm not averse to a little tasteful lesbian erotica in a film but this was of the sort that was so explicit as to make me want to gouge my eyes out with embarrassment. As for the scenes of hard core torture and finger-chopping, suffice to say I couldn't look at all. It's not that these scenes didn't have a place in Park's film, they made sense within the narrative as he set it up, and there was the triumphant pay-off for the two manipulated women. But something left me uneasy about the adaptation as a whole. My reading of Fingersmith was (as well as being a beautifully written, cunningly plotted page-turner) as a feminist critique of the male gaze and the infantilisation of women. Park's film, however, seemed to undermine Waters' central themes. Whilst masquerading as a celebration of female wiles by allowing the women to spectacularly out-fox the men and putting them at the centre of the story, it also undermined the gender politics of the original by offering a lurid lesbian fantasy for the male viewer. For me an adaptation must be faithful to the spirit of the original and in this The Handmaiden failed. As for those panting critics, strangely all male. Perhaps they were thinking with something other than their heads. Elizabeth Fremantle's latest novel The Girl in the Glass Tower is published by Penguin. There has been a ruffling of feathers amongst the authors of historical fiction since Claire Armistead's piece in The Guardian suggested that Hilary Mantel, speaking at The Oxford Literary Festival, 'appeared to let slip the dogs of war against her fellow historical novelists'. Armistead's inflammatory article, it turns out, was based on a single comment about bibliographies, in a talk rich with fascinating detail about Mantel's writing, Cromwell, history and the imagination.
I was there, in the gods at the Sheldonian Theatre, listening to Mantel and, as one of those historical novelists Mantel was supposed to be attacking, I couldn't have been less aware of the alleged assault. Indeed, I felt that Mantel was mounting a lively defence of historical fiction and its authors, implying that the novel about past events has a legitimacy all of its own. In her opinion it is not necessary for novelists to 'burnish their research credentials' with a lengthy bibliography, or engage in what she termed 'apologetic cringing' because they think they are 'some inferior form of historian.' She seemed to me to be saying that, far from inferior and purveying a misleading version of the past, much historical fiction stands on equal footing with the work of academic historians. Armistead's piece had many of my historical novelist friends mounting their own defence of their use of bibliographies in their work and their reasons for doing so: all legitimate. Personally, with regards to my own work, I felt Mantel had hit the nail on the head. My first two novels included vast and unwieldy bibliographies precisely because I felt I needed to prove the depth of my research – was a little ' apologetic' and 'cringing', if you like. As my confidence has grown I have felt more able to allow my fiction to stand alone. Of course Mantel's comments must be seen in the context of the talk itself which was a discussion with Diarmaid McCullough, the foremost Reformation specialist, whose biography of Thomas Cromwell will be out in the autumn. McCullough is one of those academic historians whose research must be backed up by a lengthy bibliography, that is the way academia works, and Mantel was bound to take an opposing position in the name of fiction. The novel, she said, interpreting the same material through the prism of the imagination, 'is not about misleading, it is seeing something differently' and tends toward 'symbolic application'. Research, for her, 'is not looking things up' but is dependent upon 'a whole other state of imagination being entered into,' that has its own 'authority'. I understood this as a defence against those who suggest that historical fiction is an inferior form and I for one appreciated such defiance from someone with Mantel's illustrious credentials. I also enjoyed the fact that she referred to herself as a 'historical novelist', a term that is often sneered at, when she might just as easily called herself a literary novelist. So far from launching her attack dogs she seemed to me, in her own idiosyncratic way, to be using her considerable traction to support the genre. What Armistead didn't mention is that those present were offered a tantalising glimpse of the long awaited third book in Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, which she made clear is still very much unfinished. She read the opening passage, which returns to the ending of Bring up the Bodies and the execution of Anne Boleyn but with a different emphasis, looking towards the fallout for Cromwell's part in the downfall of the Queen. It points to a satisfying intention to book-end The Mirror and the Light with execution scenes, as surely it will end with Cromwell's. I for one am eagerly anticipating part three and will leave you with this line to whet your appetites: 'The blade cut through her neck with a sigh, easier than scissors through silk.' Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of four Tudor set novels. Her latest, The Girl in the Glass Tower, is published by Penguin. The heroine of The Girl in the Glass Tower, Arbella Stuart, spent a number of years until her death in captivity at the Tower of London. The Tower of my title refers in part to this but also to her virtual imprisonment during her youth at Hardwick Hall, famously dubbed 'more glass than wall', by a contemporary wag. Poor Arbella was fated to live a life of almost permanent detainment, punctuated only by her increasingly dramatic attempts at escape, because she had the misfortune to be born with a claim to the English throne Alas, there would be no escape from her final detention and the Tower of London casts a long shadow over my novel. ![]() I was invited recently to give a talk at the Tower and rather than just discuss my most recent heroine I thought it would be apt to highlight some of the many women for whom the Tower was the defining site in their lives, either as their place of execution or imprisonment. It was the advent of the Tudors, an upstart family who had to keep a tight reign on any potential usurpers, that saw a spate of women meeting their brutal ends on Tower Green. The stories of Henry VIII's wives have proved endlessly fascinating, inspiring an apparently endless stream of novels and films. This is probably because the sheer barbarity of their treatment at the hands of a despotic husband horrifies us but also resembles the kind of dark fairy tales we were raised on. However there were few happy endings if you were inconvenient to Henry. We all know of Anne Boleyn, committed to death on trumped up charges of adultery and incest, waiting interminable days for the arrival of the French executioner who would dispatch her with a sword rather than the more traditional axe. This was considered a merciful concession from her husband as a sword was meant to be a painless way to go. On my way to give the talk I wandered though the cobbled lanes of the Tower after dark, the grey stone buildings looming, an air of intimidation hanging over the place, and it was brought home to me just how that young woman might have felt facing a death so sudden and unjust: one moment the feted Queen, the next a head rolling into a bucket. How might little Catherine Howard, the other of Henry's queens executed for adultery, have felt, still a teenager, when she asked for the block to be brought to her on the eve of her execution, so she could practice placing her head correctly? It is the stuff of horror stories and we feel that kind of barbarity is far, far removed from our lives now but it is deeply shocking to remember that there are still parts of the world in which adultery is punishable by execution, or more specifically, death by stoning. When we remember a woman like Margaret Pole, one of the last true Plantagenets and deemed a threat to Tudor supremacy, it forces us to confront the reality of past practices to which we must never return, the like of which still persist in in some cultures. Margaret Pole was condemned aged sixty eight, by Henry VIII, and dispatched on Tower Green in a botch job of monstrous proportions. A horrified eye witness described her execution as being performed by ‘a wretched and blundering youth who literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner.’ ![]() And there is Jane Grey, the seventeen-year-old who died, becoming a poster girl for the Protestant cause. It is deeply shocking to think of her age – were she alive now she'd have been studying for her A Levels – still a child really. Reading accounts of her execution affected me profoundly, partly because my own daughter was of a similar age at the time, and provided the inspiration for the opening scenes of my 2014 novel Sisters of Treason. Jane went to the block with extraordinary poise, buoyed up by her faith, no sense of the fear that must have roiled beneath her surface. She had been the victim of her Tudor blood, pushed onto the throne in the name of scheming ambition on the part of the men around her. Her reign lasted only a few days before her cousin, Mary Tudor, raised an army, pushed her out, locked her up and executed the men behind her. But in the end she too was deemed too great a threat to be allowed to live. Jane was not alone in discovering that Tudor blood could be more curse than blessing. She had two younger sisters, who lived in the dark shadow of her fate. The older, Katherine Grey, was to also experience incarceration in the Tower. Katherine had committed the crime of marrying without Queen Elizabeth's permission – with royal blood this was treason. She was twenty-one years old and heavily pregnant with the child that came out of that secret marriage, when she was thrown in the Tower. Elizabeth, whose position was by no means stable at that point, moved quickly to have the marriage deemed illegal, making the son who was born soon after, illegitimate. Elizabeth was right to be paranoid as that boy would have had a strong claim to the throne, and being male, might well have proved to be an insurmountable threat to her position. ![]() Katherine Grey ended up, not under the flash of the executioners axe, but bringing on her own grim and painful end through self-starvation. To die through the refusal of food was not considered suicide, which perhaps explains such an action in the context of a culture bound by religious codes. It might also explain why, in a strange and morbid repetition, this was also the means by which Arbella Stuart finally brought about her own death. It was ultimately for her, in a life of attempted escapes and with her sanity wearing thin, the only possible means of escape from the Tower's menacing walls. Elizabeth Fremantle's novels The Girl in the Glass Tower, about Arbella Stuart, and Sisters of Treason, about Jane Grey and her sisters, are published by Penguin. ![]() I’ve always been interested in early modern female writers. Katherine Parr, the heroine of of my first novel Queen’s Gambit, was one such writer; Parr wrote two devotional and political texts, which were widely read and hugely successful. At the time it was considered controversial for a woman to write, particularly to write secular works and even more so to seek to publish and Parr put herself at great personal risk promoting her politics through her work. An early modern woman was required to be meek, silent and obedient, her domain was the home and publishing placed her in the public realm, which was the male preserve. However as the sixteenth century wore on an increasing number of aristocratic women, like the Countess of Pembroke, who turned Wilton House into a ‘paradise for poets’, were producing secular poetry and dramas for private circulation. ![]() For me one late Elizabethan woman writer always stood out because she wasn’t aristocratic and also because she was the first English woman who could be called a professional poet; yet Aemilia Lanyer is almost unknown outside of academic circles. It is for this reason that I wanted to depict her in The Girl in the Glass Tower alongside Arbella Stuart, to whom she dedicated one of her poems. Aemilia Lanyer was born in 1569 to a family of renowned court musicians the Bassanos. There is circumstantial evidence that they were of Jewish heritage but Aemilia was baptised as a Christian. After the death of her father she was taken under the aegis of the Countess of Kent, who ensured that she received a humanist education, learning Latin. She also spent time in the household of the Countess of Cumberland as a tutor to her daughter, the diarist, Anne Clifford. As a young woman she became the mistress of Henry Hunsdon, the first cousin of Elizabeth I, who was some forty-five years her senior. Hunsdon was a great patron of the theatre, and so Aemilia would almost certainly have been familiar with Shakespeare’s circle. Indeed, there has been much speculation that she was the ‘Dark Lady’ of the sonnets, though any evidence for this is at best sketchy. On becoming pregnant, probably with Hunsdon’s child, she was married to her relative the musician, Alfonso Lanyer. In 1611 she published her book containing several short poems dedicated to prominent women, including Arbella Stuart, alongside the very fine Description of Cooke-ham, the first country house poem published in English, an accolade that is usually given to Ben Johnson’s exceedingly more famous To Penshurst, which was not published until 1616. Dominating the collection is the long poem, Salve Deus Rex Judeorum, a work, satirical in tone and proto-feminist in spirit, which seeks to redeem the vilified women of the Bible, and particularly Eve.
I take up Lanyer’s story in my novel four years later, after she has been widowed and left penniless by her husband’s reckless spending. I imagine her coming across a manuscript written by Arbella Stuart when she was imprisoned at the Tower of London, telling of her life. Aemilia (or Ami, as she is known in the novel) is forced to reconcile herself with the tragic consequences of a period when her own past coincided with Arbella’s. Almost nothing is known about Aemilia Lanyer during this time and these events are the product of my imagination for the purposes of my novel. But what we do know about Aemilia Lanyer’s later life is that she fulfilled her ambition to set up a school near Covent Garden, though it was not without its problems. She finally died in 1645, aged seventy-six. Ref: Woods Susanne, Ed. (1993) The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer & (1999) Lanyer, A Renaissance Woman Poet, Oxford UP I’ve been happy to learn about the haul of Oscar nominations for La La Land. I thought it a delight of a film, echoing old-style Hollywood, with two phenomenal central performances. It’s not a film that screams either worthiness or weightiness but nonetheless carries serious themes beneath its enchanting surface. Its undisguised relationship to a film I love, Singin’ in the Rain – watched at least once a year for many decades – may well be the reason why I found it so touching. In a strange, sad synchronicity it was the morning after I watched La La Land that I discovered Debbie Reynolds had sadly died bringing the earlier musical, to which it is in many way a homage, back to the fore. Reynolds’ death was perhaps more of a sting for me than that of her daughter. Though I am very much from the Fisher generation I have never seen Star Wars, so Princess Leia is an unknown to me. But Reynolds’ perky, all singing, all dancing Kathy Selden, who finds her voice Hollywood style, feels like an old friend and seeing all those clips on social media of her hoofing alongside Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor brought a bitter-sweet sensation. ![]() The period of filmmaking in which Singin’ in the Rain is set, the advent of the talkies, and its immediate aftermath, produced some of my favourite films. The kind of films I discovered on television as a child, marvelling at their fast talking heroines filled to the brim with smarts. They have remained favourites because they mark the moment when women had top billing and the best lines. Think of Mae West, in I’m No Angel, ‘When I’m good, I’m very good. When I’m bad, I’m better,’ or Irene Dunne in my absolute favourite screwball comedy, The Awful Truth, ‘Yes, tell her I’d love to meet her. Tell her to wear boxing gloves.’ The 1930s was a time when women in film were on top and Singin’ in the Rain for all its light-hearted silliness and slapstick was, at twenty years’ distance, articulating that moment when the voiceless siren, whose power lay merely in the reflection of the male gaze, came off her pedestal to become a real flesh and blood heroine whose wit, charisma and comic timing became box-office gold. It was a short-lived moment, by the advent of WW2 the screwball comedy was on its way out. Now, eighty years on, we are in an era in which most films don’t even pass the Bedchel Test. (This is a test that requires a film to have three things: Two female characters – preferably named; Who talk to each other; about something other than a man.) It is also sadly the case that there are few actresses now who earn as much, or hold equal billing with, their male counterparts. Indeed Singin’ in the Rain itself, though its subject matter was about a young ingénue finding power with her voice, typically for 1952, put Gene Kelly firmly at centre stage. ![]() But I saw a glimpse, in La La Land, of a refreshing spirit of Hollywood gender equality. The two protagonists, each pursuing their dream, come to understand the sacrifices required for personal fulfilment. Stone’s Mia is every bit as intrinsic to the message of the film as Gosling’s Sebastian. She’s not simply the ‘love interest’ or the ‘sidekick’ there to give him a plot and make him look good. Additionally an important difference between this film and the Screwball comedies that I love so much, is that the punch line of the narrative has a divergent gender message: her fulfilment isn’t ultimately dependent on him. This equality is reflected in the fact that unusually both Stone and Gosling won Golden Globes for best actor/actress and have also both been nominated for Oscars. More commonly the actress would be the regarded as supporting his starring role. It’s hardly a seismic change but perhaps it is a tremor that indicates Hollywood’s tectonic plates are making a gradual, and welcome, shift. ![]() In her ambitious new book, Game of Queens, Sarah Gristwood explores the lives of twelve remarkable women, all pivotal figures in sixteenth century European politics. Through their stories Gristwood describes the complex and significant networks of female power running through Renaissance Europe that have often been overlooked by history. We are able to understand the ways in which these women were held to much higher standards than their male counterparts and draw fascinating parallels with our twenty first century female rulers, many of whom continue to face similar challenges. Gristwood casts the familiar Tudor queens such as Anne Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth Tudor in the wider European context alongside figures like Margaret of Austria and Marguerite of Navarre, making for a rich, intriguing and impressive narrative. Here she speaks to Elizabeth Fremantle: Your previous historical biographies have focused on English women and Game of Queens, through the prism of numerous European royal women, allows us to understand the wider context of those women’s lives. What was it that first inspired you to undertake such a vast project? At an impressionable age, as a teenager, I read Garrett Mattingly’s classic book, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, and noted his passing comment that it was sixty years since the parties of religion first squared up, the old versus the new, ‘and always by some trick of Fate one party or the other, and usually both, had been rallied and led by a woman’. When I started looking into that, I was struck by how many of these women were connected – how power and the lessons in how to wield it passed from mother to daughter, mentor to protégé. That lead me inevitably to the women of Europe, rather than just the British Isles – and then I realised that this was in a sense the real story. That there was a real international sisterhood of powerful women, which our very Anglo-centric history has rather forgotten today. I found Margaret of Austria staggeringly impressive in the way she managed to hold onto power, often against the odds. Of all the women you have written about in Game of Queensdo you have a favourite? Yes – and it’s Margaret! I totally agree. Margaret of Austria isn’t necessarily the character who occupies the largest place in our imaginations. It’s Elizabeth I and her mother Anne Boleyn at whom every Tudor historian wants a crack, but if you had to be stranded on a desert island with one of these women you’d choose Margaret, definitely. And the fact that she became in her own words, ‘the most important person in Christendom, since she acts as mediator in almost all the negotiations between the princes’ makes her the closest to a career woman of today. Some might argue that these women were only able to rule with the backing of their male relatives. I believe Game of Queens debunks this notion but can you give us a few of your thoughts about the limitations placed on renaissance women in power. It’s an interesting question – because of course it’s true; even Margaret of Austria was ruling the Netherlands on behalf of her nephew Charles V. But – big but – she took that surrogate authority and really made something of it. One question the book raised for me was about the different aspects of power – how much difference there was (or was not) between a queen regnant, ruling in her own name, and a woman who took a more traditionally feminine path to authority. We are seeing now an interesting parallel with Europe in a state of flux – then it was the Reformation and now it is Brexit. Though your book must have been finished by the time of the final vote there was a good deal of speculation about the future of Europe, was this something you had in mind when writing? Not in the immediate political sense, perhaps – but I was very aware that the sixteenth century (and before) saw a kind of pan-European sensibility. That our sense of national identity has actually taken a wrong turn, when we simply envisage John Bull standing out against his enemies. Things may have felt that way after the Reformation had divided Europe – but not before it, necessarily. Another parallel is the increase of women holding high political office but it is clear that women, even now, are held to higher standards than men when holding public office. How did the early modern torchbearers of Game of Queens negotiate this? The modern parallels are something of which I was aware – acutely! And you’re right – women are and were considered more accountable, blamed more easily, than men. They have to do everything right, to get even to the starting block, basically. At the very beginning of the period of which I’m writing Anne de Beaujeu, who’d ruled France on behalf of her teenage brother, wrote a manual of instruction for powerful women – Lessons for My Daughter. And one of her instructions was ‘guard against being deceived . . . because you can be blamed even for something very slight’. Not all the women managed to avoid this trap – just think of Anne Boleyn! But they were all aware that (as Catherine de Medici once told Elizabeth I) it was through her sexuality that a powerful woman could be attacked most easily. Though maybe that is something that has changed today . . . When working on a project of such vast scope there must be a good deal of material that has to be left out. Are there any favourite stories or anecdotes that came up in your research that ended up on the cutting room floor? It’s not so much stories, as whole personalities! Luckily, there are websites which focus on powerful women from a wider global perspective than I was able to do. I was sorry not to be able to include the Indian ranee who rode into battle on her own war elephant. But I was even more sorry not to be able to include some of the Italian women of our era, who were likewise outside the scope of this story. Women like Caterina Sforza, whom Machiavelli encountered when sent on an embassy. He described how, besieged and with her children taken hostage, Caterina pulled up her skirts and showed the besiegers ‘her genital parts’, telling them she had the means to make more children if necessary. Can you tell us a little bit about your research and writing process – for example do you have particular routines? I’m wondering too whether this book was more of a challenge to research as many of the archives must have been in other languages. Well, this book was a one-off . . . a subject so broad I suspect no academic historian would ever have tackled it. With sixteen protagonists, five countries and a century of history to cover, this was less about original archival research than other books I’ve done, and more about spotting connections between the women. What’s next for you? I haven’t had time yet even to talk to a publisher – but there is a project I’m enormously keen to do. And I can say that it’s once again about women and power – just a bit more recent than the sixteenth century! This interview was first published in Historia Magazine Game of Queens: The Women who Made Sixteenth Century Europe is out now. Find out more about Sarah Gristwood. Elizabeth Fremantle’s latest novel The Girl in the Glass Tower is published by Penguin. |
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