Kenau: Women to the Rescue!

Tags

16th century Europe, 16th Century Netherlands, Haarlem, Kenau Hasselaer, Military Stuff, Monic Hendrickx

Kenau (aka 1572: The Battle for Haarlem, 2014, dir. Maarten Treurniet, Dutch with English subtitles) is a Dutch/Belgian/Hungarian film about the Siege of Haarlem in the Netherlands in 1572 to 1573. The film focuses on the legend of Kenau Hasselaer, a folk hero who helped supposedly helped defend the Dutch city against the Spanish during the early phase of the Eighty Years’ War.

 

The Eighty Years’ War

By the 1550s, the territory we now think of as the Netherlands was part of the sprawling and unwieldy Hapsburg Empire that ruled Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Low Countries, but lacked a clear unifying identity. Philip II of Spain was a devout Catholic who was opposed the Protestant Calvinism that was spreading in the Netherlands and sought to crack down on religious dissent, which took the form of an outbreak of iconoclasm, in which Calvinists smashed the statues of Catholic saints. Philip sent in the Duke of Alva, whose aggressive cracked down, combined with the imposition of taxes to help fund Philip’s war against the Ottoman Empire, triggered a rebelliom by the Calvinists, led by William the Silent, the Prince of Orange.

Alva sent his son, Don Fadrique, into Guelderland and Holland with an army of about 30,000 men to pacify the region. Fadrique sacked Zutphen and massacred the population of Naarden. That alienated the residents of Haarlem, who had mostly managed to avoid the religious tensions of the time and had intended to stay loyal to Philip. The town government sent four representatives to Amsterdam to negotiate with Fadrique, but in their absence, Wigbolt Ripperda, the Calvinist governor of Haarlem, deposed the town government and replaced them with Orangists. When the representatives returned from Haarlem, he arrested them. The local cathedral, dedicated to St Bavo, was stripped of its Catholic symbols the same day, an effective gesture of revolt against Philip.

Haarlem is due west of Amsterdam

A few days later, on December 11^th, Don Fadrique’s forces laid siege to the city. He had every reason to expect a fairly quick siege. Haarlem was not a large city and only had a garrison of about 4,000 men, many of whom were mercenaries. The city was walled, but its walls were in poor condition. But it was impossible to completely surround the city because it was built on a large lake, the Haarlemmermeer, which meant that the defenders were able to supplies into the city.

The city managed to repulse an initial assault, and the result was a prolonged and brutal siege. The Spanish attempted to undermine the walls, but the Haarlemers managed to dig their own counter-tunnels and collapsed the Spanish ones. The Spanish cannons blew down large sections of the walls, including two gates, the Kruispoort and the Janspoort, but the defenders managed to fill in the gaps with earth and rock. When the Spanish attacked the city, the defenders threw ‘tar-wreaths’, rings of flammable material soaked in burning tar, onto them.

In March, after 5 months, an army from Amsterdam was able to occupy the Haarlemmersmeer and complete the encirclement of the city, making it impossible to get more food into the city. The Spanish were able to launch a small fleet on the lake. By May, the food situation had become so desperate that the Haarlemers executed all the Spanish prisoners they had taken. Early in July, William the Silent tried to break the siege by sending an army of 5,000 to Haarlem, but Fadrique’s forces crushed the army.

St Bavo’s Church

At that point, with Haarlem virtually out of food, Ripperda’s government admitted the inevitable and negotiated a surrender. Fadrique permitted the town to buy the city’s freedom from sacking with an enormous ransom. But most of the garrison, along with 40 of the leading citizens were tied up and drowned in the river. Ripperda was beheaded. The occupying army violated the terms of the surrender by looting the town anyway.

Although the Spanish ultimately won the siege of Haarlem, it had a profound effect on the war. It bought William the Silent the time to shore up the defenses of Alkmaar further to the north, and the Dutch were profoundly inspired by the resistance the Haarlemers were putting up. When Fadrique tried to lay siege to Alkmaar, it repulsed a Spanish assault and then opened the dikes around the city, forcing the Spanish to completely withdraw. Unable to push further north, Fadrique and his father Alva were essentially thwarted and not long after that Philip II recalled Alva. As a result, the northern provinces of the Netherlands were able to effectively achieve independence, although the war lasted for another 7 decades before the Spanish threw in the towel.

 

Kenau Hasselaer

Kenau SImonsdochter Hasselaer (1526-1588) was the daughter of a brewer who married a shipbuilder named Nanning Borst, with whom she had four children: Guerte, Margiet, Lubbrich, and Gerbrand. After Nanning’s death around 1562, she continued running his business and made a couple logical expansions; she was importating wood from Norway to build ships, so she began dealing in timber as well and she expanded into Baltic commerce, selling Dutch grain into the region. Several of her brothers were shipbuilders as well, while her sister married a noted scholar.

A later essentially fantasy portrait of Kenau

During the siege, the women of Haarlem participated vigorously in the town’s defense, helping the haul earth and rebuild the damaged walls. This sort of thing was extremely common during sieged, since women as well as men stood to die (or be raped) if a town failed to keep out attackers. A single account of the siege, published only a few months after the siege, mentions Kenau as being tireless and fearless in her efforts to haul earth and keep the walls repaired. This probably also involved contributing wood to fortify the walls and gates; as late as 1585, she was fighting to get the town to repay her for wood she had sold them during the siege, and at least part of what she was owed didn’t get repaid until after her death.

Over time, however, Kenau became an object of many legends. Although all we know about her role in the siege is that she worked to maintain the fortifications, in popular stories, she was the one throwing the tar-wreaths onto the Spanish attackers. In the 1673 and 1773 centenary celebrations, she was described as fighting on the walls. By 1873, her role had grown to leading a troop of 300 women. Her name became a synonym for bravery, although it eventually evolved into a word for a shrewish woman. In 1800, a warship was named for her. She became a favorite subject for patriotic Dutch painters and engravers, and numerous images of her survive, none of which are likely to be an actual likeness of her.

A 1954 Romantic patriotic painting of Kenau leading the fighting

But by the 1872 anniversary, a Haarlem historian was starting to puncture her legend. He pointed out the sources from the time do not mention many female fatalities, which is unlikely if the women were actively fighting on the walls. He also argued that if other women had been fighting so hard, it was likely that there would be more than one refence to a specific woman helping defend the town. Although the Spanish executed 2000 male defenders of the town, they do not seem to have executed any women. It’s also been pointed out that during her efforts to get repaid for the timber, she never claims to have fought, although she does say in one court document “as a good patriot, I have sustained this town against the enemy.” If she was such a great war hero, the town was reluctant to admit it after the fact, and in fact many people in town called her a “witch” in the course of legal disputes with her. After her death, her son admitted that both Kenau and his sisters were “dangerous company for all men.”

After the siege, she left the city, managed to get herself appointed as the Weighing House Master in Arnemuiden. This was an important position, one not generally given to women. This seems to have been imposed on the town by William the Silent, suggesting that he appreciated whatever efforts or sacrifices she had made during the siege. In 1588, the captain of her trading ship was taken hostage in Norway. She set sail to get him released and was never seen again, although her son eventually discovered her ship for sail in another town, suggesting that she was captured by pirates and killed, a sad end for such a formidable woman.

 

Kenau in Kenau

The movie tells the story of the siege of Haarlem mostly through focusing on Kenau (Monic Hendrickx). The film jettisons a lot of what we know about her family. Her husband, incorrectly named Ysbrand, is already dead and she has only two daughters, Gertrude (Lisa Smit) and Kathelijne (Sallie Harmsen). She is correctly presented as a shipbuilder and sells some wood to the town when Wigbold Ripparta (Barry Atsma) presses her for it. She quarrels with a wealthy townsman Duyff (Jaap Spijkers), who is dissatisfied with the work she’s doing on a ship for him, and when his arrogance causes an accident that knocks one of her men into the canal, she leaps in and rescues him. She wears a man’s doublet and shirt throughout the film, the clearly the film wants us to view her as a ‘strong woman’. She wants nothing to do with the rebellion that his broken out elsewhere. She forbids Gertrude to embrace Calvinism, saying that she can do whatever she likes after the rebellion has ended.

Atsma as Wigbold and Hendrickx as Kenau

But Calvinists are agitating in Haarlem, and Wigbold’s son persuades Gertrude to go along with a small group of radicals when they break into St Bavo’s and small all the Catholic statuary. They get busted and are hauled off to Utrecht the very next day, Gertrude included, where the bishop immediately sentences them all to burn as heretics. By the time Kenau arrives, Gertrude is already tied to the stake. Kenau pleads with the priest, insisting that her daughter is a good Catholic, but when the pyre is lit, Kathelijne grabs a pistol and shoots Gertrude to spare her the suffering.

That’s all fairly improbable. The iconoclasm at Haarlem only happened after WIgbold seized power, so the film has to reverse the order of facts in order to give Kenau a motive to support the revolt. Haarlem had its own bishop, so the iconoclasts probably wouldn’t have been sent to Utrecht and would have been tried in Haarlerm. And there would certainly have been a delay of at least several days to allow for an actual trial. Having vaguely established religion as a motive for the rebellion and giving Kenau a motive to rebel, the movie promptly forgets religion entirely for the rest of the film.

During the initial Spanish assault, Kenau finds herself near the ramparts and, recognizing that hostile troops were in danger of scaling the walls, she organizes the women into a rock-hauling brigade so that the men on the ramparts have something to throw at the men on the ladders. Such things were entirely typical of the way women participated in defense of towns during sieges, and while it’s not there’s no evidence that Kenau actually did this, it’s not at all implausible.

But as the film goes on, the film comes up with increasingly unlikely ways for her to fight the Spanish. She stumbles onto some information that suggests that the Spanish will attack the Janspoort, but Wigbold is convinced the attack will come at the Kruispoort and refuses to allocate men to depend the Janspoort. So Kenau organized a group of women to defend the gate by building a second wall inside the gate. When the Spanish troops breach the gate, they find themselves trapped inside the second wall, where the women start pouring tar down on them and then thrown down a barrel of gunpowder and light it with a fire arrow, causing an enormous explosion that kills the invaders (but somehow doesn’t breach the wooden second wall).

The Spaniards about to get blown up

Then the food starts running out and Wigbold insists that the Spanish food convey from Amsterdam is too heavily protected to attack. Kenau organizes her Amazon commandos to attack the convey as it crosses the frozen Haarlemmermeer. They light fires to blind the convey and then attack the convey on skates, killing most of the troops and getting the food to the city. They manage to plant a spy in Don Fadrique’s (Attila Arpa) tent and she reports that the Spanish have undermined the gate and are planning to set off explosive charges to open a permanent breach in the walls. The Amazon commandos distract the Spanish troops by standing naked on the walls of Haarlem, which allows Kenau to get into the gunpowder store long enough to blow it up.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t get the gunpowder in the tunnel, so Faderique is still able to blow up the gate and the Spanish surge in to loot the town. Kenau uses Duyff’s ship to get an engineer (heretofore unseen) out of the town to Alkmaar but stays behind to find Kathelijne, and as a result she’s captured. She gets tied up and thrown into the canal, but because she knows how to swim she apparently gets away. The film ends by framing the heroic resistance of Haarlem as the reason for Dutch independence.

I’m of two minds about Kenau. On the one hand, the film generally distorts the facts. It attributes a whole lot of heroism to her and the other women of Haarlem that there is no evidence for. While the women of Haarlem certainly made an important contribution to the siege, there’s no reason to think that the women single-handedly saved the town over even actually fought at all, which is the impression the film offers. While Kenau’s various feats do bare a vague relationship to the facts (there was a Spanish plan to blow up the walls, getting food into the city was a serious problem, the defenders probably did pour tar or oil down onto the attackers, Kenau did survive the siege), none of those things happened the way the film shows.

Kenau about the blow up the gunpowder store

On the other hand, it’s pretty refreshing to see a war film in which women are the focus of the story, and the film generally explores women’s experiences during wartime much more than men’s. Except for the first fight scene, the male defenders generally take a back seat, doing their fighting in the background while Kenau’s Amazon commandos deal with a variety of problems the men are too beleaguered to address themselves. The film aces the Bechdel Test, and even when Kenau is talking about men with one of her daughters, the emphasis is generally on the relationship between the women.

The film has an interesting sub-plot looking at the fraught relationship Kenau has with Kathelijne. She is angry at Katheljlne for shooting Gertrude, doesn’t want her to risk her life fighting on the front lines, and doesn’t want Kathelijne to hook up with a particular mercenary. But the script makes it clear that their conflict is driven by deeper issues. While the performances in the film are generally mediocre, Hendrickx truly shines as the ferociously strong-willing Kenau and despite the enormous differences, her Kenau reminds me of no one so much as Holly Hunter’s Ada McGrath in The Piano. Both women are so strong-willed they don’t entirely understand their own motives but cannot be other than who they are.

Is Kenau a brilliant film? No. But I’ve seen far worse war movies and the solidly feminist angle makes it a war movie I’ve never seen before.

 

Want to Know More?

Kenau is available on Amazon under the title 1572: The Battle for Haarlem. 

There aren’t, so far as I know, any books about Kenau. If you’re interested in the 80 Years’ War, check out Revolt in the Netherlands: The Eighty Years’ War, 1568-1648.

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The Agony and the Ecstasy: Watching Paint Dry

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16th century Europe, 16th Century Italy, Charleton Heston, Classic Hollywood, Julius II, Michelangelo, Rex Harrison, SIstine Chapel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, The Renaissance

Many films have attempted to capture the artist’s creative technique. It’s a challenge because making art is by nature usually a solitary act and a very internal one, and it’s hard to find drama in that; as a result, a lot of artist biopics try to mine their drama from the turbulent relationships the artist has. The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965, dir. Carol Reed, based on the novel by Irving Stone) tries to dramatize Michelangelo’s painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by focusing on the tense relationship between the artist and his patron, Pope Julius II.

Before we start, I feel obligated to explain that the Sistine Chapel was so named because it was built on the orders of Pope Sixtus IV, Julius II’s uncle and the holder of one of my favorite papal names simply because it’s amusing to say.

Charleton Heston’s Michelangelo is a brooding man with a profound sense of artistic integrity. He sees himself as a sculptor and resists the efforts of Julius (Rex Harrison) to force him to work in fresco, but having given in, he gradually embraces the project. He refuses to follow Julius’ plan (which just involved painting the 12 Apostles in the triangular pendentives that support the vault, and instead eventually hits on a more sweeping vision. The ceiling will depict scenes from Genesis, the pendentives will depict men and women who prophesied the birth of Jesus, and the zones above the windows will depict the ancestors of Christ.

From that point on, Julius impatiently presses him to finish the work, or at least take the scaffolding down so that people can see whatever work has been done, while Michelangelo defiantly declares he will finish when he finishes. He doesn’t want to take a break because he wants to get the project over with so he can get back to his work as a sculptor.

Julius II

That’s not really enough to hang a 2 hour and 20 minute movie on, so the film has to invent more drama. Michelangelo has a chaste romance with Contessina de Medici, the daughter of his Florentine patron Lorenzo, who chides him for obsessing about the work and not attending gatherings in his honor. Later he falls ill and she has to nurse him back to health. Julius tells Michelangelo that he is going to transfer the commission to rival painter Raphael, but this turns out to be a ruse to goad Michelangelo to getting back to work. (In reality, according to Ascanio Condivi, one of Michelangelo’s students, Raphael attempted to replace Michelangelo on the project, forcing Michelangelo to plead his case before Julius.) Julius periodically threatens to or actually does revoke Michelangelo’s commission, before the two men gradually come to understand each other. Although Julius certainly did lean on Michelangelo to speed up the work, the film seems to be exaggerating the number of obstacles the artist faced, and the relationship with Contessina appears entirely fabricated.

On the other hand, first-hand descriptions of Michelangelo’s process describe how physically grueling the work was. Giorgio Vasari, who wrote an important collection of biographies of Renaissance artists, discusses how hard the work was on Michelangelo’s neck, arms, and eyes, and the film captures that quite well. The film is rather interested in the mechanical process of the frescoing, and it gives the viewer a fairly good sense of the basic technique that Michelangelo used.

The other source of tension in the film is Julius’ military campaign. The film provides virtually no explanation at all of these events, but in 1508, Julius sought to counter the rising power of Venice in Italy by forming the League of Cambrai with France, Aragon, and the Holy Roman Empire. By 1510, the League had succeeded in its goals, but then the alliance collapsed and Julius found himself allied with Venice against France in a Holy League. In 1512, Julius was able to temporarily force the French to withdraw from Italy. He died the next year, and thus did not see the French return to Italy triumphantly in 1515.

Rather than delving into this conflict as a subject in its own right, the film simply depicts Julius as struggling to create a Papacy independent from outside control. He fights unsuccessfully against the French, suffering a wound that gradually weakens and presumably kills him. Thus the film contrasts Michelangelo’s successful effort to complete the frescos with Julius’ unsuccessful efforts to create a political order that will outlast him. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s not developed well enough to be really compelling, since the film just milks Julius’ defeats for more obstacles to Michelangelo’s work. Will Julius find the money to pay for the frescos? Will the French destroy the Sistine Chapel as Julius predicts?

Probably the biggest problem, however, lies in its two stars, who are both miscast. Heston’s famously histrionic acting style leaves no room for subtle characterization, and he is unable to convey any sense of an artist finding his inspiration. The thing that finally gets him on-board with Julius’ project is seeing a cloud formation that rather absurdly suggests that famous Creation of Adam fresco. What drives this Michelangelo is unknowable because Heston can’t show us his process beyond what the script tells him to say.

Heston failing mightily to demonstrate nuance

Harrison does a better job as Julius, coming off as a highly-cultured and ambitious man, but ultimately he seems too much a 20^th century Englishman to be a 16^th century Italian pope. I kept expecting him to tell Michelangelo about the precipitation on the Spanish plains. Harrison bears a striking resemblance to Iain Glen, who certainly could have pulled off what the film was going for with Julius. So maybe it’s time for a remake?

Heston and Harrison arguing about Eliza Doolittle the Sistine Chapel

The film also makes the bizarre choice to open with a 13 minute lecture about Michelangelo’s work as an artist. I certainly applaud the film’s desire to educate the viewer about art history and give them a context for the film, but honestly, just fast forward past this bit; it’s deathly dull and nearly kills the whole film.

Want to Know More? 

The Agony and the Ecstasy is available at Amazon. So is Irving Stone’s biographical novel of Michelangelo. Ross King’s Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling is a non-fiction treatment of these events and a good corrective to the film. Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 work, The Lives of the Artists is one of our most important primary sources about the great Renaissance painters and their age.

Reign: Attack of the 16th Century Millennials

Tags

16th century Europe, 16th century France, Adelaide Kane, Bad Clothing, Catherine de Medici, Kings and Queens, Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart, Reign, The CW

So I was on Netflix the other night and it suggested that I watch Reign, the CW show about Mary Queen of Scots. And I thought, “Ok. Let’s give it a try. How bad can it be?” The answer is, it can be pretty darn bad.

The Historical Queen Mary of Scotland

Marie Stuart (which is the French spelling of her name) was born in December of 1542, the only surviving child of King James V of Scotland and his French wife Mary of Guise. The Scots and the French had for centuries maintained a traditional political alliance based on mutual hostility to England. Starting in the 14^th century, it had been very convenient for France to be allied with Scotland, because whenever the English invaded France during the Hundred Years’ War, the French could count on the Scots invading England. For that reason, the two countries maintained what the Scots termed ‘the Auld Alliance’.

Marie’s father died of a fever less than a week after Marie was born, and as his only legitimate child, she then became queen. Henry VIII of England, seeing an opportunity to break the Auld Alliance, proposed that Marie wed his son Edward when she turned six. The Scottish regent initially accepted the offer, but by July of 1543, the deal had broken down and the Scots renewed the Auld Alliance. In response, Henry’s forces invaded Scotland, hoping to seize the young queen. This invasion, which was nicknamed the ‘Rough Wooing’, failed, but made clear to the Scots that it was quite risky for them to keep Mary where the English might grab her.

Eventually, after moving Marie further northward for several years, in 1548, the Scots accepted a French proposal, quite literally. King Henry II suggested that Marie should wed his three year old son, Francis. As a result, Marie was sent to live at the French royal court; it was typical of such arranged royal marriages that the young bride would be raised along her future husband, and the French royal court would be a much safer place for her. She was accompanied by her two illegitimate half-brothers and four Scottish ladies-in-waiting, the ‘Four Marys’ (since all four of them were named Mary).

Marie and Francis as king and queen

In April of 1558, when she was 16, Marie signed a treaty making the French king her heir if she died without heirs. Less than a month later, she married Francis. In November of 1558, when Mary I of England died and was succeeded by Elizabeth I, Marie became the heir to the English throne, since she and Elizabeth were cousins. In July of 1559, when Henry II died, Francis became King Francis II and Marie became his queen. Unfortunately for her, however, Francis died less than 18 months later from some sort of ailment centered on his ear. His 10 year old brother became King Charles IX, and Henry II’s widow, Catherine de Medici, became regent. Catherine disliked Marie and since there was nothing to keep her in France and she had a kingdom in Scotland, she soon returned back to Scotland.

Marie’s Scottish subjects greeted her with some suspicion. She had been raised in France and spoke French as her main language, speaking English only with a heavy French accent. She also chose to spell her first and last name in the French fashion (which is why I’ve chosen to use that spelling here, as well as to keep her separate from the various other Marys of the period). More seriously, having been raised in Catholic France, Marie was a devout Catholic, whereas Scotland was by 1560 torn between Catholics and Protestants. Her reign in Scotland proved to be extremely turbulent. But I’m going to break off her story here and turn instead to Reign.

 

The adult Marie. Note her red hair

Are You Mary Queen of Scots?

Reign opens in 1557, with Mary Stuart (Adelaide Kane) 15 years old and living at a French convent. She and the young nuns play soccer until it’s time to have lunch outdoors. One of the nuns begins bleeding out of her mouth and ears and drops dead in her porridge; it’s revealed that she was Mary’s food taster, and so clearly there is a plot afoot to poison Mary. The Mother Superior decides that it’s time to send Mary back to the French royal court because the convent is unsafe.

Adelaide Kane as Mary. Note the distinct lack of red hair.

None of that actually happened. Mary was raised at the French court. However, the idea that a young Catholic noblewoman could have been raised in a convent is entirely reasonable, and the opening gives the series a chance to show her return to court as a way to introduce the cast and the setting to the audience, so I suppose we can forgive this particular historical liberty.

However, once Mary leaves the convent, the show also substantially leaves the realm of history and quickly finds itself in the realm not of France but of the contemporary teen romance. The pilot offers Mary three potential boyfriends, Prince Francis (Toby Regbo); Sebastian, Francis’ illegitimate half-brother (Torrance Coombs), and Colin (Ashley Charles), a Scottish boy she evidently knew from back home who has come to France to serve her because he’s obviously into her even though he’s technically the boyfriend of one of her ladies in waiting. Suffice to say, of the three, only Francis actually existed.

Mary also learns that the Franco-Scottish alliance is not a guaranteed thing, for reasons that aren’t actually explained (at least not in the episodes I managed to get through). The political arrangements in the series are very simple. The English are bad, and because they’re bad, they want to assassinate Mary. They’re Protestant, whatever that means, while the French and apparently the Scots are Catholic, which means they occasionally carry a rosary. The Auld Alliance, France’s powerful position in 16^th century Europe, and the historic reasons that the French want Mary aren’t relevant, because what matters is that the uncertainty about the alliance means that Mary and Francis can be on-again, off-again as the network’s need to generate suspense requires. And when they’re off again, Mary can be interested in Sebastian, who even gets a cute nickname, Bash, or courted by whatever nobleman happens to be visiting the French court in that particular episode.

Oh, and Francis’ mother, Catherine (Megan Follows) hates Mary, which is accurate, but the series has Nostradamus predict that Mary will be the death of Francis, so Catherine naturally wants to stop the marriage. In the pilot, Catherine either bribes or pressures Colin into attempting to drug Mary so he can rape her and thus render her not a virgin and therefore not a fit wife for the king. Unfortunately it all goes wrong because a mysterious girl who hides somewhere in the palace and wears a bag over her head warns Mary not to drink the wine and so she avoids being raped. Colin gets arrested and has his head chopped off, only it turns out that the executioners accidentally executed the wrong guy and Bag Girl helps Colin escape, which causes Catherine no end of worry.

As the series goes on, it occasionally brushes up against actual events. Mary’s status as a potential heir to the English throne is introduced, although she refuses to claim the throne because that would be political, I guess. At the end of the season, King Henry dies as a result of a jousting injury, which happened (but not while jousting his own son) and Francis becomes king.

But the series wouldn’t be complete without Mary’s cadre of high school frenemies ladies in waiting, who are all lovely young Scottish women without the faintest trace of Scottishness among them (but in all fairness, both the Scots and the French are played as Americans, so at least the series is consistent). Their names are Amy, Greer, Kenna, and Lola, which the scriptwriters presumably got out of a recent high school year book. At least Greer gets a Scottish loconym, ‘of Kinross’.

Mary and her besties. Note the distinct lack of sleeves or anything else to suggest the 16th century

In other words, the series is interested in historical accuracy about as much as 300 2: Rise of an Empire is. The faintest outline of the historical Mary Stuart can be seen through the rather tawdry clothing they’ve put on her.

Speaking of clothing…

Look at All the Prom Dresses!

The costuming in this series is ghastly, about as historically accurate as the typical high school play. The young women in the series all generally wear 21^st century fashions (except for Bag Girl, unless there’s a hot new trend in burlap that I’m not aware of). While many of the dresses are moderately full-length, that’s about as close as they get to period clothing. They are variously off-the-shoulder, sleeveless, low-cut, short skirted, gauzy, glittery, lacey, feathery, and so on. More or less, the young women at the French court dress like they’re going to a 21^st century prom. And they wear high heels. Catherine de Medici gets a more mature, reserved, and slightly more accurate take on those fashions, as befits a queen of France. (Tyranny of Style offer a short, but intelligent discussion of the show’s fashions.)

How are these not prom dresses?

The men spend most of their time running around in fitted leather or velvet pants with dark-colored, often unlaced doublets, with the occasional slashed-and-puffed sleeve here and there. In the first regular episode, Simon, the evil English ambassador, wears an 18^th century frock coat because apparently after this he’s going to the Caribbean to hunt Johnny Depp and the rest of the crew of the Black Pearl. The men generally artfully muss their hair, except for King Henry, who has opted for the shaved-head and beard scruff that was so popular a few days ago.

The French court is based in what appears to be an early 20^th century estate somewhere, with lots of furniture and drapery and rugs and nothing that looks particularly 16^th century.

Except that chair. That chair wandered in from some other, more historically-minded show.

In the pilot, the court gathers to marry off some unnamed somebody-or-others, which gives the cast a chance to do some dancing. The adults briefly do a little vaguely medievalish-looking dancing, and then Mary and the girls decide to take over and run into the center of the room and start twirling around to symbolize that they’re free spirits. Apparently the rest of the women of the court are also free spirits in waiting, because they run onto the floor, the band obligingly breaks into some vaguely Celtic folk-rock and everyone joins hands and does a circle dance. In 16^th century Europe, the technical term for this is a branle, and for about two seconds the show accidentally gets something almost historically accurate. But then confetti begins raining down on the dancers and they’re saved from having to pretend to be 16^th century.

The Real Problem with Reign

The real problem with the series is the characters are consistently written as 21^st century millennials, rather than as anyone who might have lived in the 16^th century. They spend lots of time emoting and very little time acting like actual nobles who’ve been taught their whole lives that their marriages are a matter of politics and not personal desire. Despite the plot detail that turns on Mary’s virginity, the rest of Mary’s cohort seem eager to lose theirs, with one of the girls doing the nasty with King Henry in the main stairwell and another slutting it up with Francis. At one point Colin sneaks into Mary’s bathroom, where she’s bathing (in a beautiful 19th century claw-foot tub), and no one seems particularly perturbed that he was able to get in there.

The show does at least have the good sense to recognize that 16^th century princes were expected to have have sexual conquests before and during marriage, but in Francis’ case, he’s treated as a jerk for doing it. So rather than trying to understand the 16^th century, the show simply embraces the sexual ethos of contemporary upper-class New Yorkers.

Francis, in between bouts of being interested in Mary, moans that “Every man, even a king, should have some kind of skill…One that I didn’t inherit.” So he’s decided to take up sword-smithing, in the palace attic. That sound you’re hearing is my forehead hitting the table.

Perhaps the most telling moment in the series comes immediately after that, when Francis comments that his parents are so afraid of anything happening to him that they’re afraid to let him live, unlike his bastard half-brother Sebastian. The line is clearly intended as a critique of modern helicopter parents. In contrast, Mary is a free spirit because she knows how to milk a goat and likes the feeling of mud between her toes.

Rather than seriously exploring how 16^th century teen royals might actually have felt about their lives, the series is content to project modern teen sentiments back on the 16^th century as a way to encourage viewer identification with the main characters. Our heroine is plucky, free-spirited, unpretentious, determined to stand up for herself despite having not real support, and wants to experience real love, just like the intended audience. The good characters aren’t interested in social class, while Catherine is clearly bad because she cares about things like that.

Now, I suppose you might be thinking, “Well, duh! It’s not like the CW is seriously going to attempt an accurate period drama.” Ok. Fair point. But here’s the thing about being a historian watching these sorts of things: I can’t help but think about how much better the series could have been if they had made more of an effort to be accurate. The 16^th century is one of the most fascinating periods in all of history. The political and religious conflicts and the intellectual currents of the period produced an enormously complex set of events that dramatically changed Western culture. And there’s no reason a good scriptwriter couldn’t use that setting to tell stories that modern teens would find compelling while still being a little more true to the period than this series is. The problem isn’t that Reign is targeting a millennial audience; the problem is the Reign is lazily written. It has no ambitions beyond being a 16^th century Gossip Girl, and modern audiences tend to accept it because they’ve been trained to accept bland mediocrity as the best they can get.

Remember, Shakespeare’s plays were 16^th century popular entertainment, not the high-brow fare we think of them as today. Titus Andronicus is a trashy revenge drama that would be right at home on the CW. Sure, it’s unfair to compare modern network tv to Shakespeare, but when you think of the comparison, it’s clear that Reign isn’t even trying to be good. It’s just trying to be watched. The first clue is casting a brunette in the role of a woman who was famous for her red hair.

Oh, and Another Thing

There are pagans living in the woods right outside the royal palace, practicing human sacrifice, because why not?

Want to Know More?

There are a lot of not very good biographies of Mary Stuart. John Guy’s biography on Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuartis probably definitive for scholarly works. But if you’re not up for 600+ pages, try Rosalind K. Marshall’s much shorter Mary Queen of Scots: Truth or Lies(Kindle edition), which focuses on answering the key questions about this famous but somewhat misunderstood woman.

I don’t know of any books on Francis II; his short reign hasn’t attracted a lot of English-language scholarship, so far as I know. But you could read Catherine de’Medici  by R.J. Knecht. Her time in power in France began before Francis was king and continued long after he had died.

Elizabeth: the Golden Age: Is EtGA Anti-Catholic?

Tags

16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Babington Plot, Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Geoffrey Rush, Mary Stuart, Religious Issues, Samantha Morton, Sir Francis Walsingham, The Spanish Armada

When I looked at Elizabeth (1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur), I discussed the accusations that the film was anti-Catholic. Similar accusations were made against Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007, dir. Shekhar Kapur), so I think it’s worth exploring this issue for the sequel.

The accusations came from a variety of different sources. Stephan Greydanus, reviewing the film for the National Catholic Register, said that “Pound for pound, minute for minute, Elizabeth: the Golden Age could possibly contain more sustained [Catholic] church-bashing than any other film I can think of” and argues that the film selectively focuses on creepy Catholic rituals led by imposing clergymen while representing Protestantism with silent prayer and conveniently forgets that Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity made attendance at Anglican services compulsory. Stephen Whitty of the Star Ledger accuses the film of depicting Catholicism as “some sort of horror-movie cult”. Other critiques of the film make similar points.

So far as I can see, the complaints primarily focus on stylistic issues. Spanish Catholics are portrayed in creepy ways (Jordi Molla’s Philip II has an odd sort of duck-walk, for example). Catholic rituals are shown as dark and mysterious in contrast to Elizabeth’s silent prayers in light-filled chapels, the liturgical Latin is left untranslated, and when the Armada sinks, we get several shots of religious paraphernalia sinking into the waters of the English Channel. Some critics also claims that, much like Elizabeth, all the Catholics in the film are villainous.

And it’s hard to deny that the film does present Spanish Catholicism in rather ominous ways, particularly in the person of Philip II, who possesses unwavering certainty about the righteousness of his cause until he is devastated by the defeat of the Armada. The scenes in Philip’s palace were filmed inside Westminster Cathedral, London’s Catholic cathedral, a not particularly subtle touch for those who recognize the location. The crucifix and rosary sinking into the English Channel is rather heavy-handed.

The sinking rosary

In the case of Elizabeth, I concluded that the film was anti-Catholic because it actively twists the facts to present most of the Catholics in the film as bad guys, and all the bad guys as Catholics. EtGA, however, doesn’t do that. The Spanish are pretty much entirely villainous, although some of Philip’s advisors lack his certainty. But most of the other Catholics in the film are not especially villainous. Early in the film Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish) has a brief meeting with a Catholic cousin of hers, who begs her for help. He is frightened of the English government and willing to convert to Anglicanism, but Bess refuses to help and leaves. Soon thereafter her cousin is arrested and tortured to death by Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) in a scene that highlights the gruesomeness of Elizabethan interrogation strategies.

Mary Stuart (Samantha Morton) is shown to be involved in the plot that ultimately gets her executed, but the film makes clear that the plot is substantially caused by Walsingham’s machinations; Mary’s plotting is presented as a justified response to her captivity. Her execution is presented in a way that allows the viewer to sympathize with her; she forgives her executioner, and she is shown going to her death wearing a red dress, the Catholic liturgical color for martyrs. In other words, the film stylistically suggests she is an innocent martyr of religious intolerance and not a villain.

Mary at the chopping block

In both cases, the film suggests that Walsingham’s actions are as much about religious persecution as about protecting his queen. He kills two desperate Catholics, one of whom actively wishes to be a loyal citizen and the other of whom is driven into plotting by his actions.

The film reinforces this with the plot. By executing Mary Stuart, Walsingham is actually playing into Philip II’s hands by giving Spain a justification to invade England. He admits to Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett) that the execution was a mistake, and Elizabeth says that she too has erred by executing her cousin. So the film itself makes a point of saying that the execution of Mary Stuart was the wrong thing to do.

Some of the reviews comment that the film reinforces the notion of murderous Catholic priests in the character of Richard Reston, who is actually John Ballard of the Babington Plot renamed. But what this complaint fails to acknowledge is that John Ballard was actually a Jesuit priest seeking to assassinate Elizabeth, which is exactly what Reston does in this film. Reston is shown killing one of Walsingham’s spies, which never happened, but his role as a planner of the assassination attempt is broadly historically accurate. It’s unreasonable to say that his depiction as ‘murderous’ is anti-Catholic when the man was in real life seeking to orchestrate murder.

So in my opinion, claims that the film demonizes all its Catholic characters are false, and fail to recognize that the film presents Walsingham as driven to unjust actions because of an excess of zeal that he himself eventually recognizes to be a mistake.

Kapur’s Response to the Accusations

Shekhar Kapur insists that the film should not be read as anti-Catholic. “It is anti-extreme forms of religion…So it’s not anti-Catholic. It’s anti an interpretation of the word of God that can be singular.” And this is definitely born out by the structure of the plot itself. Walsingham’s zeal (which is an ambiguous mixture of Protestantism and loyalty to his queen) leads him into a strategic mistake that he repents of. The Armada leaves itself vulnerable to attack by Raleigh’s fire-ships because everyone is praying for victory. At the end of the film, Philip attributes his defeat to his own pride and begs forgiveness of God while his daughter and his clergy turn their backs on him.

Additionally, if the film has wanted to make Catholicism explicitly evil, it could easily have included a famous historical detail. After the Armada was defeated by storms that drove it around the British Isles, the English government issued a commemorative medal that said “Jehovah blew and they were scattered” (Flavit Jehovah et dissipati sunt). In doing so, the English government was asserting that the Armada was defeated through divine intervention because Anglicanism was God’s preferred denomination. The film makes no mention of God’s help in defeating the Armada, which instead happens through Raleigh’s cunning and Spanish zealotry.

The Armada Medallion

As fellow scholar Paul Halsall pointed out to me after my post on Elizabeth’s anti-Catholicism, the traditional English view of English history is heavily steeped in Protestantism and hostility to Catholicism. England’s two post-medieval Catholic monarchs, Mary I and James II, are typically viewed in a very negative light. Elizabeth is praised for her efforts to establish some sort of religious compromise (even though that compromise was fairly prejudicial to Catholics), and the victory over the Armada is seen as a great patriotic success at a time of extreme danger. ‘Good Queen Bess’ was one of the greatest of English monarchs, and her Protestantism is a key part of her identity (even if Elizabeth’s personal religious beliefs are a little unclear). So I think if there are anti-Catholic elements in the film, they are more an artifact of traditional English ideas about Elizabeth and the Armada than any conscious animus on Kapur’s part.

So while the film certainly demonizes the Spanish Catholics, I think Kapur is fair in saying that he’s condemning religious extremism rather than Catholicism per se. The plot of the film depicts both Protestants and Catholics as being capable of religious intolerance. It punishes the Spanish for their intolerance, shows how vulnerable Walsingham’s actions have left England, and displays sympathy for both Protestants (Elizabeth) and Catholics (Mary, Throckmorton’s cousin) who are simply practicing their faith. It may avoid addressing some of the ways that Elizabeth persecuted Catholics, but it does acknowledge that Catholics were persecuted. Its representatives of zealotry are both forced to repent of their actions. The film does resort to some tropes of Catholicism as dark and mysterious but I think that is more due to the fact that, having taken Elizabeth as the heroine of the story, the Spanish must inevitably be cast as the bad guys. If Kapur crosses the line in some of the details of how he depicts Spanish Catholicism, I think he more than balances it out with the way the plot is structured. The film lacks the egregious historical distortions that villainize the Catholics in Elizabeth. So I’m inclined to disagree with the accusations of anti-Catholic bias directed against Elizabeth: the Golden Age.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis available on Amazon.

Elizabeth: the Golden Age: All Romance, All the Time

Tags

16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Abbie Cornish, Bess Throckmorton, Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Geoffrey Rush, Kings and Queens, Sir Walter Raleigh, Tudor England

Like Elizabeth, Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007, Shekhar Kapur) is as much about Elizabeth’s (Cate Blanchett) lack of a love life as it is about the plots swirling around her. In this film, the object of her erotic fixation is Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), the famous soldier, explorer and pirate.

Raleigh was something of an adventurer. He fought for the Huguenots in France, helped suppress a rebellion in Ireland, explored the Atlantic Coast of North America (and later on, South America) and founded the ill-fated Roanoke colony in Virginia. He acted a privateer against Spanish ships in the Caribbean, played a minor role in the defense of England during the Armada War, and eventually helped capture Cadiz. He served in three Parliaments and served as governor of Jersey. Perhaps because of his exploits, he became a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, but after Elizabeth died, he was implicated in a plot to prevent her cousin, James Stuart, from inheriting the throne. He was tried and sentenced to death, but James initially spared him. Later on, he participated in an attack on a Spanish colony, and the Spanish ambassador persuaded James to reinstate the death sentence, with the result that Raleigh was executed in 1618. Overall, he lived a life filled with colorful incidents, and his inclusion in EtGA is a reasonable one.

As I noted in my previous post, the film substantially misrepresents his contribution to the Armada War, but since I’ve already discussed that, I’ll focus in this post on the romantic sub-plot.

Early in the film, Elizabeth is being courted by various suitors, including a young Austrian prince who is obviously not a good match for the queen. (Historically, this happened much earlier in Elizabeth’s reign). Raleigh returns to court and immediately attracts the queen’s attention because of his rather more blunt and bold personal style. Unlike the Austrian prince, Raleigh is a real man, and the queen quickly finds herself being fascinated by his stories of adventure. He clearly represents a life she might have had under different circumstances.

Raleigh being typically studly.

Her intermediary with Raleigh is her lady-in-waiting, Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish). The coincidence that the queen and her handmaiden both have the same name allows the film to create a love triangle in which Elizabeth is infatuated with Raleigh, who is interested in her in return but cannot make headway with her because she refuses to marry. So instead he becomes attracted to Bess. Elizabeth herself encourages this, seeing Bess as a stand-in for herself. So in one scene, she orders Bess to practice dancing the volta with Raleigh, despite his protestations that he doesn’t know the steps. (This is clearly a call back to Elizabeth, in which the queen dances twice with the earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes), in two rather erotically-charged scenes.) But Elizabeth’s voyeuristic impulses unwittingly encourage Bess to fall in love with Raleigh. Bess gets pregnant and the couple quickly marry.

Elizabeth getting her voyeuristic freak on with Bess and Raleigh

The problem with this as that since Bess is legally Elizabeth’s ward, it is illegal for her to marry without Elizabeth’s permission. When Elizabeth learns the truth, she furiously beats Bess, expressing both her sexual jealousy and her sense of betrayal. “My bitches wear my collars!” she shouts. The queen imprisons Raleigh, only agreeing to let him out to help fight the Spanish. By the end of the film she has forgiven them. She visits them after the birth of their son, giving him her blessing in a scene that makes it clear she thinks of the baby as the son she cannot have.

The facts here are basically correct, but the chronology is wrong. Raleigh and Throckmorton only married in 1591, three years after the events of the film. Their son died in infancy, and the clandestine marriage remained secret for about another year before Elizabeth got word of it. Both were imprisoned, and Raleigh was released to help in a different campaign against the Spanish.

Overall, this is probably the most accurate portion of the film. All the basic facts are right, and the adjustment of the chronology to make it coincide with the Armada War is not too outrageous. The major problem is that the film assumes that he was Elizabeth’s favorite because she was sexually attracted to him. While that’s certainly possible, there isn’t any special reason to assume that it is so, and it’s another example of Hollywood films reducing the complexities of history to simple romantic relationships. Given that Elizabeth was in her mid-50s by the time of the film, the prospect of a romantic relationship between Elizabeth and Raleigh is a bit unrealistic (although, obviously, older women can certainly develop romantic or sexual fixations), but the fact that Blanchett was in her late 30s when she made this film helps get around that. Presumably Kapur concluded that no one wanted to see a woman in her mid-50s playing a woman in her mid-50s.

Blanchett at Elizabeth, in one of many great, if somewhat improbable, gowns

Just Because She’s a Queen Doesn’t Mean She Knows How to Govern

In a previous post, I pointed out the ways that Elizabeth undermines the historical Queen Elizabeth I’s agency. It pretty much attributes most of her success to the efforts of Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) while suggesting that her historically-accurate indecisiveness about her marriage was a result of a personal inability to make decisions about her husband. And EtGA unfortunately does the same thing. Elizabeth spends much of the film mooning over Raleigh and then getting viciously angry when another woman beds and marries him. On one level it’s an interesting exploration of the conflicted feelings Elizabeth might have felt about her situation, but on another level it’s demeaning to suggest that one of the most powerful women of her day (perhaps the most powerful) spent most of her time acting like a lovesick cheerleader. The film makes even less effort than Elizabeth to explain that Elizabeth’s decision to remain single was the result of political factors at least as much as personal ones. It’s not especially clear in this film why she can’t marry Raleigh, so the viewer is left to assume that she’s just a fussy woman.

Elizabeth in a stunning gown

On its own, this might not be too serious an issue. As I said, this is an interesting exploration of the feelings the historical Elizabeth might actually have experienced. But Kapur again combines this plot with a political plot in which Elizabeth is almost entirely reliant on men. The main plot is the Babington Plot, the execution of Mary Stuart, and the Armada War, and Elizabeth is almost entirely passive in this plot. She is the object of the assassination plot, and survives purely because actually killing her is not the true goal of the plot. Walsingham is the active figure in that part of the plot, ferreting out what’s going on and then working to persuade the queen that she owes a duty to her people to execute Mary. During the Armada War, Elizabeth is wracked with fears about her death, and Raleigh has to teach her how to be courageous, after which point she mans up, dons her armor and delivers the film’s rather weak version of the Tilbury Speech, which strips out most of the speech’s stony determination. Elizabeth spent her formative teen years under constant threat during her sister’s reign and was a periodic target of assassination plots for much of her life; the idea that she didn’t know how to manage her own fear is absurd, but that’s what the film is telling us.

Elizabeth in another stunning gown

The historical Elizabeth was definitely indecisive. She spent years refusing to decide who she would marry, and spent years after that refusing to formally designate her heir (in fact, she may never have made an explicit statement on the subject). She was deeply reluctant to execute Mary Stuart and Walsingham was smart enough to recognize that she needed help taking that step. But while indecision may have been a personal trait, there were also very powerful political reasons for her to not want to take decisive action on issues where there could be no turning back once certain actions had been taken. EtGA hints at the complexity of issues around Mary Stuart when Raleigh observes “Kill a queen and all queens are mortal.” But even here the film implies that the issue is Elizabeth’s inability to acknowledge her own mortality, rather than her understanding that her political position was stronger when her subjects saw her as being more than human.

Elizabeth in yet another stunning gown

The film offers one other moment intended to reveal her personal feelings. After being out in public all dressed up, she sits in front of a mirror, takes off her wig, and contemplates the fact that she’s aging and starting to have wrinkles. I think this was intended to explore the contrast between her glamorous political persona and the reality of her humanity, but it has the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing the notion that women are primarily concerned about their physical appearance and not growing old. And the fact that Blanchett looks remarkable good for a woman who’s supposed to be in her mid-50s just reinforces the unreasonable beauty standards Hollywood forces on women.

Elizabeth in a stunning..fairy cosplay outfit?

Most films about historical leaders take at least some effort to explore the political issues they dealt with. Imagine, if you will, a film about George Washington in which his only motive for fighting the British was his love for Martha, or a film in which Winston Churchill was fighting World War II out of a sense of sexual rivalry with Adolf Hitler. In Braveheart, Wallace at least claims that his rebellion is about “freedom”, whatever he means by that. And yet, in this film, with its female leader, the politics virtually vanish or are given into the hands of men, and the queen is mostly driven by personal motives revolving around her frustrated sexual desires and her inability to make up her mind about anything that matters.

After watching this film, I think one could be forgiven for assuming that Elizabeth’s primary historical significance is that she had really great fashion sense and knew how to get the best camera angles, and not that she was one of the most effective and consequential rulers in British history. Second-wave feminists insisted that the personal is political, but in this film, the political is all personal.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis available on Amazon.

Elizabeth has been the subject of dozens of biographies, many of them not very good. For a current scholarly view of her, try David Loades’ Elizabeth I.

If you’re interested in Sir Walter Raleigh, you might think about getting Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life and Legend(Kindle edition).

Elizabeth: the Golden Age: Nobody Expects the Spanish Armada!

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16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Battle of Gravelines, Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Military Stuff, Sir Walter Raleigh, The Spanish Armada, Tudor England

Well, except everyone actually. Contrary to a line in Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007, dir. Shekhar Kepur), the preparations for the Spanish Armada were well-known across much of Europe, and the timing of the invasion was actually a subject of considerable public debate. So when the Armada finally set sail for England, very few people were surprised.

Philip II was not only the king of Spain; he was also the ruler of the Spanish Netherlands. But the Dutch Protestants there had rebelled against Spanish rule in the 1570s, with the active aid of the English government. Elizabeth recognized that it was to her advantage to disrupt Spanish control of a territory that was, after all, directly across the English Channel from southern England; it would be a comparatively easy thing for Spanish forces in the Netherlands to launch an invasion of England.

The plan of the Armada when it finally set sail in 1588 was to sail a fleet of 130 ships up the English Channel to the Netherlands, where the Armada would act as protection for a small fleet of barges that would carry about 30,000 Spanish troops across the Channel to act as an invasion force. Since the English army was mostly composed of new recruits, once the Spanish army landed on English soil, a Spanish victory was almost assured. The English correctly realized that the only opportunity to defeat the invasion was to prevent the Armada from meeting up with the Spanish troops in the Netherlands and thereby prevent a crossing.

When the Armada reached English waters, it had a brief opportunity to trap the much larger English navy in Plymouth harbor (because the tide was against the English), but the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who was in charge of the Armada, passed up the chance, which proved to be the great mistake of the campaign.

The English navy, led by Lord Howard and Sir Francis Drake, led two minor skirmishes, in which they were able to capture a few ships before the Spanish reached Calais and took up a tight formation. But they were unable to meet up with the Spanish army before the English sent in a number of fireships, burning ships filled with explosives. The Spanish cut their anchors to avoid the fireships, and the result was that their formation was badly disrupted.

The next morning, the two navies engaged at Gravelines. Although the Spanish ships had more powerful guns, they were so tightly packed with supplies that once the guns were fired, it was nearly impossible to pull them in for reloading. So in the battle, the Spanish tended to fire once and then seek to close in to board the English ships. But this was thwarted by the superior maneuverability of the English ships, who were able to stay just out of range and repeatedly fire their guns. When the wind changed, Medina Sidonia was able to escape to the north-east, with the result that the Armada, which had only lost a few ships, was unable to meet up with the Spanish land forces. So the battle of Gravelines entirely defeated the strategic goal of the Armada.

The Armada Portrait

Instead, the Armada was forced to begin the circumnavigation of the British Isles. Without anchors, however, the fleet proved vulnerable to the remarkably stormy weather; a number of ships were lost off the Orkneys, and due to a navigation error, a large portion of the Armada was driven onto the rocks of the western Irish coast. Only about half of the Armada returned home. The war itself continued on until 1604, but the major battle of the war had already been fought, and the Spanish had lost.

The Armada in Elizabeth: the Golden Age

The film quite drastically distorts the Armada Campaign. The basic strategy of the Armada is explained relatively accurately. But once the Armada shows up in the English Channel, events start to diverge. The English fight a couple of minor skirmishes with the Armada, but the result is a loss of English ships, not Spanish ships. The film emphasizes that the English ships are outnumbered, and cannot afford any losses, when in fact the English navy was considerably larger than the Armada.

The Spanish drop anchors to maintain a tight formation, and then conduct a massive religious ceremony, which means that they don’t notice the fireships being sent against them. As a result, many of this ships are lit on fire (instead of mostly evading the fireships). Then a large storm sets in, and that’s pretty much the end of the conflict. The actual battle of Gravelines is not shown, although there is fighting before the fireships are sent in. There is no explanation that most of the Armada survived the battle of Gravelines, nor is there a depiction of the Armada circumnavigating the British Isles.

Elizabeth watches the Armada burn

The film inverts the roles of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen). In reality, Drake was the Vice-Admiral of the English navy and fought at Gravelines, while Raleigh acted as an advisor to the queen but did not actually participate in any of the fighting. In the film, Drake stands in the background and barely speaks during council meetings, while Raleigh is one of the leading captains of the battle and personally (and more or less single-handedly) sails a fireship into the Spanish Armada, leaping off and swimming to safety when it explodes.

When word reaches Philip that the Armada has been defeated, he is immediately abandoned by both his daughter and the clergy around him, and he begins to lament his pride and beg God’s forgiveness. The suggestion is that the war was immediately over, instead of lasting for another 16 years.

The Tilbury Speech

Almost two weeks after the battle of Gravelines, after the Armada had been driven northward, Elizabeth gathered an army at Tilbury, near the mouth of the Thames, in case the Spanish army in the Netherlands found a way to cross over. At Tilbury, she gave what has become the most famous speech of her life, the so-called Tilbury Speech. She was wearing a white dress with a breastplate over it, and was mounted on a white horse.

Three different texts of the speech survive, but most scholars accept that the latest copy of the text, dating from 1624, is likely to be the most accurate one, and this is the version that widely known. Here is a fairly close (though not exact) version of the speech, from a BBC miniseries The Virgin Queen (2005, dir. Coky Giedroyc).

In EtGA, Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett) delivers a speech before the battle of Gravelines. Here the breastplate has become a full suit of armor.

As you can see, EtGA’s version of the Tilbury speech bears almost no similarity to the actual speech, with the exception of Elizabeth’s statement that she is resolved to live and die with her troops. In particular, the speech omits what is probably the single-most famous thing Elizabeth ever said, “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king”. This is an example of how Elizabeth frequently maneuvered herself across the dividing line between male and female, variously presenting herself in masculine or feminine terms as she found useful. It’s possible that they omitted this line because she makes a similar statement in Elizabeth, but it seems unlikely that the audience would have remembered that.

Instead, the screenwriters have simply invented a new speech for Elizabeth, one that sounds more than a little like the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. It’s not a very good speech; it reeks of the sort of machismo that has become so common in contemporary action films, and has nothing of the grace of the original speech. Part of the problem here is that the film wants the Spanish threat to end with the defeat of the Armada, doesn’t want to have to point out that the war continued after Gravelines, and and doesn’t want to deal with the problem of the Spanish army sitting in the Netherlands. So instead of showing us the Tilbury Speech in its proper context, the film relocates the speech to before the defeat of the Armada, and uses it as a way of building up anticipation for the coming battle. But the result is a little clumsy, since it prepares us for a land battle that never happens.

What the film’s version of the Tilbury Speech chiefly emphasizes, I think, is a tendency for modern screenwriters to not recognize good historical material when they see it. It’s a little like a film about Abraham Lincoln and rewriting the Gettysburg Address because modern audiences would probably find the original speech dull.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis available on Amazon.

If you want to know more about the Spanish Armada, you could start with The Spanish Armada: Revised Edition, which combines history with the insights offered by maritime archaeology.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age: There’s Something about Mary (Stuart, That Is)

Tags

16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Babington Plot, Cate Blanchett, Eddie Redmayne, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Geoffrey Rush, Kings and Queens, Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart, Samantha Morton, Shekhar Kapur, Tudor England

In 2007, Shekhar Kapur returned to the life of Queen Elizabeth I, making Elizabeth: the Golden Age as a sequel Elizabeth (1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur). The film brought back Cate Blanchett in the title role and Geoffrey Rush as her loyal spymaster Francis Walsingham, and added Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh. Despite the fact that the two films were shot in a very similar style, had the same director, and had Michael Hirst, the screenwriter from the first film assisting with the script, EtGA did much more poorly at the box office, not even breaking into the top 100 films of the year, whereas Elizabeth was 65 the year it was released, and its lifetime gross has been less than half the first film’s. It also received much less love from the critics. In an overall sense, it’s actually better history, because it hews a little more closely to the facts than Elizabeth did, although that’s not really saying that much.

The Babington Plot

Like Elizabeth, EtGA intertwines the story of Elizabeth I’s love life (or lack thereof) with a story about a Catholic plot to depose her and Walsingham’s efforts to protect her. In fact, it actually recycles part of the first film’s plot. Elizabeth features a plot against the queen that is a composite of the actual Ridolfi and Babington Plots, with the Jesuit John Ballard featuring as the assassin. EtGA shows us the Babington Plot somewhat more accurately, but since John Ballard was already killed in the first film, they decided to rename the Jesuit orchestrater of the plot Robert Reston.

The historical Babington Plot involved a Catholic effort to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her on the throne with her Catholic cousin Mary I of Scotland, who had been captured and held in genteel confinement in England for 19 years. Walsingham understood that Mary was the focus of numerous plots, since as Elizabeth’s closest living relative she was naturally a factor in Catholic plots to remove Elizabeth. Her letters show that Mary was extremely well-informed about multiple conspiracies, but Elizabeth was deeply reluctant to take action against Mary. Since Mary was a crowned queen in her own right, executing her would provide precedent for executing Elizabeth, and it would undermine the mystique that Elizabeth felt was essential to her rule. Walsingham tried without success to get his queen to take decisive action about her cousin.

So when Walsingham captured an English Catholic named Gilbert Gifford who was conspiring to assassinate Elizabeth, he saw an opportunity to eliminate Mary. Gifford agreed to act as a double agent. He met with Mary and arranged to have letters smuggled to her in beer barrels.

As the plot developed, it came to focus around a wealthy Catholic named Anthony Babington, who was in what he thought was secret coded communication with Mary via those beer barrels, never realizing that Gifford and another member of the plot were letting Walsingham decode and read the letters. The Jesuit priest John Ballard was working to gain Spanish agreement to launch an invasion on England in Mary’s name, while Babington was being maneuvered to win Mary’s assent to a scheme in which Babington was to assassinate Elizabeth, Mary would be rescued from confinement, and then placed on the throne. Mary eventually sent Babington a letter laying out what she saw as necessary for any plot to rescue her from captivity. This letter on its own was probably enough to implicate Mary in the whole plot, but one of the spies copied it and added a postscript in which Mary appeared to agree to the effort to kill Elizabeth. That was enough to let Walsingham arrest Ballard and Babington, who were subsequently executed.

Mary Queen of Scots

The Execution of Mary

Mary was put on trial in 1586, based on a Bond of Association passed by the Privy Council in 1584. This bond, which Mary among many others signed, allowed for the execution of anyone in the line of succession (read: Mary) who was aware of any plot to kill the queen, even if they were not actively involved in the plotting. Parliament followed this up with an Act of Association that provided for the execution of anyone who stood to benefit from a plot against the queen. So despite Mary’s insistence that she was not subject to English law, and despite the fact (or rather because of the fact) that she was allowed neither legal counsel nor defense witnesses nor access to the evidence against her, Mary was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.

Elizabeth hesitated to sign the death warrant. She understood that executing Mary would certainly outrage France and Spain, and would remove one of the few active deterrents to a Catholic invasion. She also recognized that it would be very hard for her to control the perceptions and meaning of the execution. Nevertheless, driven by pressure from both Walsingham and the general English population, she eventually gave in and reluctantly signed the warrant. (Walsingham reported eased her discomfort by including the warrant in a stack of other documents that needed her signature.) Then Walsingham conveniently ‘fell ill’, leaving it up to a deputy to dispatch the warrant to Mary’s jailer. Elizabeth was furious at the poor deputy for having sent the warrant without her permission; like Walsingham’s illness, this too was probably a fiction, to provide her with some degree of deniability.

Mary’s last letter shows her being at peace with her impending death, and understanding herself as a Catholic martyr. The execution itself, in February of 1587, was less clean than was desired. The executioner failed to deliver a clean blow and had to take a second stroke. Her pet dog ran up to the body and got itself covered in her blood. When her head was held up, her wig either slipped off or was pulled off (accounts differ), revealing that she had gone grey (Mary, like Elizabeth, was well-known for her red hair). In later Catholic propaganda these details were elaborated to make the execution seem even more horrific than it was; it was claimed that the executioner took three strokes to kill her, so that her death was more like the torture of an early Christian martyr. The dog supposedly howled loudly and ran about the room getting blood everywhere. When the executioner picked up the head, he supposedly grabbed the wig by mistake, so that the head fell out and rolled across the floor. Elizabeth’s concerns were proven correct; she could not control the propaganda generated by the execution, and it triggered the Spanish Armada the next year.

The Death of Mary Queen of Scots

The Plot and Execution in Elizabeth: the Golden Age

EtGA follows the basic facts of the Babington plot, but it does make a few key changes. As noted, Ballard was renamed so as not to conflict with the first movie. The film lays out the messages being smuggled to Mary in beer barrels and Walsingham’s monitoring of the plot, although how he discovers the plot is wrong. In the film, he simply arrests some Catholics who give him the lead he needs; also his (I think fictitious) brother William is a Catholic entangled in the plot.

In reality, the plot never got anywhere near coming to fruition, but in the film, Babington (Eddie Redmayne) bursts into Elizabeth’s chapel and draws a pistol. He hesitates to shoot her but eventually pulls the trigger. It’s unclear at first but eventually it emerges that he was given a pistol that was loaded with powder but no bullet.

Redmayne as Babington, pointing his pistol at Elizabeth

The assassination attempt gives Walsingham enough leverage to persuade Elizabeth to try and execute Mary (Samantha Morton, in a very small but moving performance). Elizabeth is shown waffling before the trial, and has to be persuaded by Walsingham that she has a duty to protect her people by execution Mary. Elizabeth eventually agrees and Mary is put on trial and executed. The emphasis is mostly on the execution, which is shown without anyone of the unpleasantness. The sequence is quite sympathetic to Mary, who appears serene as she goes to her death, whereas Elizabeth is shown to be deeply agitated.

Morton as Mary; note that red is the liturgical color of martyrs.

Perhaps the biggest change that the film makes, however, comes immediately after the execution. Philip II of Spain declares war on England, and Walsingham suddenly realizes that Philip was behind the whole plot in the first place., because the Spanish king has been reading Mary’s correspondence. Babington’s gun was unloaded so that Elizabeth would survive, execute Mary and give Philip the justification to invade. Walsingham begs the queen’s forgiveness for misunderstanding the whole situation, and Elizabeth admits that she has erred in executing Mary.

Upon examination, this plot doesn’t work. If Elizabeth had been assassinated, Mary would have automatically become queen, and there would have been no need for a Spanish invasion. Executing Mary was the last thing Philip wanted to happen, because it meant that there was no Catholic heir to the throne (the new heir, Mary’s son James, having been raised as a Protestant), which would make controlling England after the conquest a bigger problem, since there is no Catholic heir to put on the throne as a Spanish puppet (although as the widower of Elizabeth’s older sister Mary I, Philip had his own very weak claim). Had Philip simply been waiting for an excuse, Mary’s imprisonment would probably have been enough on its own. In actuality, the execution of Mary forced Philip to take action when he was probably reluctant to do so.

Furthermore, Babington never actually attempted to shoot Elizabeth, and it’s not clear how Philip would have been able to read Mary’s correspondence, since it was passing through Walsingham’s hands.

So the film essentially inverts the relationship between the execution of Mary Stuart and the Spanish invasion. The actual invasion was a reaction to Mary’s execution, whereas in the film, the execution is part of the scheme to set up the invasion. What the film gets right is the broad sequence of events, showing how the Babington Plot led to Mary’s death, which in turn led to the Armada War. With the exception of the detail about the pistol being unloaded as part of a deeper plot, the film’s changes to history are mostly in the way of simplifying the complex details of the plot and making the narrative  clear to the audience. In that sense, I think this part of the film works better as history than Elizabeth does. But as we shall see next time, there are other problems with EtGA.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis available on Amazon.

Like biographies about Elizabeth I, there are a lot of not very good biographies of Mary Stuart. John Guy’s biography on Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuartis probably definitive for scholarly works. But if you’re not up for 600+ pages, try Rosalind K. Marshall’s much shorter Mary Queen of Scots: Truth or Lies(Kindle edition), which focuses on answering the key questions about this famous but somewhat misunderstood woman. The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Series in History & Culture)is a short classroom textbook that addresses her trial and execution and offers the primary sources for those events.

Elizabeth: Is Elizabeth Anti-Catholic?

Tags

16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Elizabeth, Elizabeth I, John Ballard, Religious Issues, Ridolfi Plot, Shekhar Kapur, The Catholic League

When Elizabeth ((1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur) came out, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights accused it of anti-Catholic bias, and it’s worth considering whether the film can reasonably be accused of hostility to Catholicism. (Full disclosure: I’m a Lutheran, which obviously influences how I view the events of the Reformation.)

The 16^th century was a genuinely brutal time for religious tensions, and the film is correct that Catholics participated in the brutality with considerable zeal. The opening scene shows three anonymous Protestants executed under Mary I, out of an actual total of 283. Both the Ridolfi and Babington plots were very substantially driven by Catholic hostilities toward Elizabeth, who for much of her reign was the target of plans by Catholic rulers to remove her from office and replace her with her Catholic cousin, Mary of Scotland. Pope Pius V did support the Ridolfi plot (he made Ridolfi his agent in England, and gave him a letter of support for the plot), and John Ballard really was a Jesuit priest, though he does not seem to have enjoyed papal support for his scheme. So the Catholic League’s complaint about a “scheming pope who sends a priest to plot against and assassinate Elizabeth” is a reasonable only because Pius didn’t send John Ballard; but both details they complain about are historically true when taken separately.

The heart of the Catholic League’s complaint, however, is that the film doesn’t give equal time to Protestant atrocities against Catholics. They object that the movie says nothing about Henry VIII or the execution of Sir Thomas More, an odd argument to make about a film that begins more than a decade after Henry’s death. More was executed by Henry VIII in 1535, and thus can reasonably be considered a victim of Protestant hostility to Catholicism, but More was also an enthusiastic proponent of the public execution of Protestants, so citing his (again, not relevant to a film set twenty years later) example is something of a double-edged sword. This complaint feels like they are simply looking for something to complain about.

Elizabeth did persecute Catholics in the later part of her reign, but she did so largely in response to Pius V’s excommunication of her, which had the unfortunate effect of meaning that a devout Catholic could not be trusted to support Elizabeth as monarch (which is not to say that all Catholics opposed her, only that they almost automatically came under suspicion). The early part of her reign was marked by attempts to reach religious unity between Protestants and Catholics, which the film also largely glosses over. However, later in her reign, some Catholics were executed, such as Cuthbert Maine, and the film entirely fails to acknowledge this. An argument could be made that the film is focusing entirely on court life and therefore the execution of Cuthbert Maine in Cornwall is not relevant, but it’s undeniable that the film does present almost all of the aggression as coming from Catholics.

Another reasonable point is the League’s objection that the film depicts its Catholic characters negatively. Mary I is shown as harsh, fanatical, and somewhat unstable. Norfolk is a sneering villain. De la Quadra is dark and creepy, Henri d’Anjou is just weird, and Stephen Gardiner is given a disturbing cataract in one eye. The film’s chief villain, Norfolk, was not in fact Catholic at all, so making him a scheming Catholic is hard to justify from the standpoint of historical accuracy, even if it does make the narrative simpler. Nor did the earl of Leicester convert to Catholicism. And the film treats the priest Ballard as if he were personally an assassin, for which there is no evidence; in Ballard’s plot, he was the organizer, not the killer. So the film’s strong tendency to associate Catholicism with villainous behavior is definitely a problem. As the Catholic League points out, the film suggests that all the religious tension in England was driven by Catholics, which is not true. There were most definitely Protestants who enthusiastically called for the death of Catholics.

But it is not true that every Catholic in the film is depicted negatively. Arundel is shown as being kind to Elizabeth when he is ordered by Mary to imprison her, and when Arundel is caught during the plot, Elizabeth makes a point of saying that she will remember his earlier kindness to her. Unlike the creepy Spanish ambassador, the French ambassador comes across as a fairly decent man. And of course Leicester, who supposedly converted to Catholicism, is given sympathetic treatment; his conversion is presented as an expression of his frustrated love for her.

The film distorts historical facts in a way that negatively depicts Catholicism. Is the motive for that anti-Catholic bigotry? Obviously that’s hard to know, since only Shekhar Kapur could answer that for certain, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the film’s perspective. Elizabeth and Walsingham are the heroes of the film, and about half the film’s plot revolves around attempts to assassinate her. Having decided to build the film around that aspect of Elizabeth’s reign, it’s easy to see why the Catholics became the villains of the story; from Elizabeth’s viewpoint, the Catholics are the bad guys, and I think that much of the film’s negative depiction of Catholics is driven chiefly by the desire to have clear villains and a simple narrative rather than any strong animus against Catholics. That doesn’t exonerate the film from its strongly anti-Catholic stance, but I do think it helps explain it.

So while a lot of the Catholic League’s charges are, in my opinion, unreasonable, it is certainly true that the film largely makes the Catholics the villains, in a way that distorts the facts. In part this is because the Protestant position is represented by Elizabeth, the heroine of the film and Catholic efforts to kill or depose her must therefore be presented negatively. But the film makes little attempt to explain the Catholic position or explore the deeper religious or moral issues at stake. In fact, the film makes virtually no attempt to explore what the Protestant/Catholic divide was about at all. In that sense, the film could just as easily have been Democrats vs Republicans. The Catholics in Elizabeth are evil mostly because they’re Catholics and Catholicism is bad in this film. So in the end, I think we have to admit that Elizabeth is anti-Catholic the way that Braveheart is anti-English or 300 is anti-non-straight-white-physically-perfect-people. The factual distortions required for the plot create a bias even if there was no actual hostility there.

Patterns mean something, and the meaning of a film emerges from the patterns it creates. This, more than anything, is what I try to teach my students about how to read historical films. The Catholic devil is in the Protestant details, I guess.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth is available on Amazon.

Norman Jones’ The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation focuses on the ways that families tried to manage the challenges of the Reformation over the course of the 16th century. He looks at the ways that families sought to overlook or rewrite the religious differences between three generations while remaining families. It’s a book that really changed my view of the English Reformation.

An interesting window into the plots against Elizabeth is Jessie Child’s God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England, which examines the struggles of one Catholic family to navigate the political currents of Tudor religion.