The White Queen: Witchcraft

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BBC, Elizabeth Woodville, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, James Frain, Janet McTeer, Kings and Queens, Legal Stuff, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Philippa Gregory, Rebecca Ferguson, Richard Neville, The White Queen, Witchcraft

My first post about the BBC series The White Queen took a ‘So Close and Yet So Far’ approach. But a few people thought that it was more close than far. That’s mostly because I decided to save a couple of big things for separate posts. Here’s where we really get into the Far parts.

 

Throughout the series the Rivers women, including Jacquetta (Janet McTeer), Queen Elizabeth (Rebecca Ferguson) and Elizabeth of York (Freya Mavor) all practice witchcraft. In the first couple episodes it’s entirely about predicting the future, and so I thought that the show was taking the approach that Jacquette was just engaging in a little folk magic that happened to give the right answer about whether her daughter was going to get married.

But no, the women are in fact witches. As the series goes on, not only do they occasionally use magic to predict or shape the future, such as ensuring that Elizabeth gives birth to a boy, but they also go for larger-scale things. Over the series they conjure a small hurricane that nearly sinks Warwick (James Frain) and George of Clarence (David Oakes), create a fog that covers Edward IV (Max Irons) as his army approaches Warwick’s at the Battle of Barnet in 1471, and produce a storm that prevents Henry Tudor from sailing from Brittany to join Buckingham’s Rebellion in 1483. (In all three cases, this weather did actually happen historically.) They also curse Warwick and George to die for killing Queen Elizabeth’s father and brother; that one takes a long time to play out, but the show suggests that the curse really did work. Elizabeth briefly curses Richard with a pain in his hand that he feels. The Elizabeths also curse whoever killed the princes in the Tower; the show suggests that Anne Neville’s death in 1485 was due to that curse. All three women ‘have the sight’ and periodically get visions that correctly predict the future.

And everyone around them knows they are witches. Lord Rivers jokingly asks “what spells are you two weaving this time?” Queen Elizabeth jokes that if they burn a portrait of Margaret of Anjou, she and her mother will both get hanged as witches. Clarence and Anne both repeatedly accuse them of witchcraft, blaming them for everything that goes wrong in their personal lives. Clarence hirers an astrology to protect himself from Woodville magic, but it get misunderstood as an attempt to kill Edward. The only person who doesn’t think the Woodville women are witches is Edward.

Elizabeth and Jacquetta working a spell

 

So, to be clear about what the show does, it purports to be a historical narrative about the Wars of the Roses and it shows the Woodville women successfully using magic to manipulate the events. Their magic justifies many of the odd twists and turns the Wars took over the years. It never bothers to address why these magically powerful women didn’t just use their magic to directly kill their enemies like Clarence and Richard, so the narrative is just sort of ham-fisted about it.

There is an increasing trend in the past decade or so of ancient and medieval historical films and show throwing in magical elements. I have no problem with movies and shows depicting ancient and medieval magical practices; nearly all societies have magical practices of some sort, so it’s not unreasonable to show medieval women occasionally resorting to magic in hopes of achieving their ends. But I have a big problem with stories that claim to be historical showing those magical practices as producing real effects. At that point, a film or show crosses the line from history into fantasy.

 

The Basis for the Claims

Philippa Gregory’s idea that the Woodvilles were actual witches does have a small nugget of fact in it. In 1469, during the period when Warwick had taken control of Edward and was trying to run the government through him, Jacquetta was accused of witchcraft. A man named Thomas Wake gave Warwick “an image of lead made like a man of arms of the length of a man’s finger broken in the middle and mage fast with a wire, saying that it was made by [Jacquetta] to use with witchcraft and sorcery.” Wake got a parish priest to support this by claiming that Jacquetta had also made two figures of the king and the queen, presumably some form of love magic to ensure that Edward would marry her daughter.

A drawing of Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick

 

The charges were obviously political. Wake’s son had died fighting for Warwick against Edward and he may have been involved in the death of Lord Rivers. Warwick had just arranged the execution of Lord Rivers and one of his sons, and was clearly now maneuvering against Jacquetta as part of a sustained attack on the Woodvilles.

Jacquetta pushed back by writing a letter to the mayor and aldermen of London, reminding them that back n 1461, she had save the city when Margaret of Anjou wanted to destroy it. Jacquetta had been a close friend and lady-in-waiting to Margaret, so her personal influence apparently helped sway the wrathful queen. The citizens of London repaid the favor by sending a letter supporting her to Warwick via George of Clarence.

That didn’t stop the trial, though. Edward was forced to order an examination of the witnesses, but by the time came for the trial before the Great Council (in this case, essentially a session of the House of Lords), Edward was back in charge and the case against Jacquetta collapsed. The witnesses recanted their testimony, and Jacquetta asserted what was, at least in canon law, an entirely valid defense that Wake was a long-time enemy of hers; whether this particular canon law principle was carried over into English Common Law on witchcraft I’m unsure of, but if something similar applied, this would have disqualified Wake as an accuser by establishing that he had an obvious motive to lie.  The Council, clearly understanding where the king’s sympathies lay, acquitted Lady Rivers and agreed to her request to include the proceedings in the official records of the Council. Jacquetta was clearly a smart woman, and knew that having an official note of her acquittal might come in useful if the charges were revived later on.

And in fact the charges were revived in 1484 when Richard III asked Parliament to declare that Edward and Elizabeth had never been legally married because Elizabeth and Jacquetta had used magic to procure the marriage. By this point Lady Rivers was already dead, and Richard needed Parliament to make this declaration because it justified his seizure of the throne. Parliament did as it was told and declared the marriage invalid.

These two incidents, which were clearly motivated by politics, comprise the sum total of all the actual evidence that the Woodville women ever practiced witchcraft. It is out of these false charges that Gregory spun this entire subplot for her books. She worked within the framework of the known facts, which is commendable, but by blowing these details up into a major part of the story and inventing a host of facts that are literally impossible, such as controlling the weather, she took her story off into fantasyland. And Gregory has falsely claimed in an interview that Jacquetta was convicted and spared only by Margaret of Anjou’s intervention.

Philippa Gregory

 

In the show, Warwick tries Jacquetta for witchcraft while he has control of Edward. He brings in a witness (not Thomas Wake) to make the same accusations; Jacquetta protests that she has never seen the man before, rather than trying to disqualify him as an enemy. Since Jacquetta is actually a witch, the whole scene represents very serious danger; although the accuser is making things up, what he’s inventing is somehow correct. She is saved by calling a witness of her own, Margaret of Anjou, who she was close friends with years ago. Her strategy is that Warwick is dependant on Margaret politically and militarily, so he won’t be able to oppose her in this trial. It works and Jacquetta is acquitted. But this all rests on the false assumption that medieval English courts worked like modern ones, a mistake that other tv shows have made as well.

Jacquetta on trial

 

What is really frustrating to me about this is that the series had a perfect opportunity to explore the way that witchcraft accusations were generally motivated not by actual evidence of witchcraft but by political or personal motives. It was a charge that women were vulnerable to because this culture associated witchcraft with women rather than men. (Men were much more likely to be accused of learned magic, such as the malicious astrology charge brought against George of Clarence’s personal astrologer.)

In the later part of the Middle Ages, English society gradually began using accusations of magic for political reasons. In 1419, Henry V believed that he had been a target of a magical plot. In 1431, witchcraft was one of the charges against Joan of Arc. In 1441, Duchess Eleanor of Gloucester was accused of treasonous astrology when she had an astrologer forecast the death of Henry VI. She was convicted, forced to do public penance, divorce her husband and suffer life imprisonment. In 1450, Henry VI’s government accused the rebel Jack Cade of using sorcery. As already mentioned, in the 1470s, George of Clarence was implicated in treasonous astrology. Looking forward a generation of so, Anne Boleyn was accused of witchcraft by Catholic propagandists, although contrary to Internet claims, witchcraft was not one of the charges brought against her at her trial (although Henry VIII may have once made an off-hand claim that she had ensnared him through witchcraft).

So Gregory could easily have written a subplot in which the charges of witchcraft were entirely false and used that to explore the way that women were culturally vulnerable to ideas about witchcraft. Instead, she chose to actually reinforce the cultural bias around women as witchcraft by making them genuinely guilty. That really pisses me off, because in a way, it re-victimizes these two women.

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Want to Know More?

The White Queen is available on Starz, and on Amazon. The three novels it is based on are The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The Kingmaker’s Daughter. They are also available as a set with two other novels.

If you’re interested in this issue, you can read this blog post, which digs a bit further into the evidence for the Woodville women as witches (and explodes it). The author of the post, Susan Higgenbotham, is a novelist and author of The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England’s Most Infamous Family. She’s not a professional historian, but she’s clearly dug into the sources on this.

The White Queen: So Close, and Yet So Far

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Amanda Hale, BBC, Edward IV, Elizabeth Woodville, Kings and Queens, Max Irons, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Philippa Gregory, Rebecca Ferguson, Starz, The Wars of the Roses, The White Queen

Philippa Gregory’s work as a writer of historical fiction has drawn a great deal of criticism from historians, even though she has a bachelor’s in history and a doctorate in 18^th-century literature. And the BBC series The White Queen, which is an adaptation of three of her Plantagenet novels (The White Queen, the Red Queen, and The Kingmaker’s Daughter), was not well-received by critics. But it’s something medieval, which I needed after my Fall of Eagles sojourn in the 19^th century.

The series focuses on the middle and late phases of the Wars of the Roses, opening in 1461, a few years after the Battle of Towton in which Edward of York and his brothers George of Clarence and Richard of Gloucester have overthrown the Lancastrian Henry VI and established Edward as king. At the start of the first episode he meets, falls in love, and married Elizabeth Woodville .

Elizabeth came from the absolute bottom level of the English nobility. Her father, Sir Richard Woodville, was a mere knight (and technically therefore not actually nobility at all), while her mother was Jacquetta of Luxembourg, daughter of a Flemish count and widow of Henry VI’s uncle. He was only given a noble title in 1466, two years after becoming the king’s father-in-law (although the series calls him Lord Rivers all the way through).

Elizabeth Woodville

This marriage was a problem for several reasons. First, as noted, Elizabeth was essentially a commoner, whereas Edward ought to have married a member of the high nobility. Second, the Woodville clan had been Lancastrians, and only accepted Edward in the wake of the marriage. Third, The Woodvilles were a large family; Elizabeth had two sons by her previous marriage to Sir John Grey and she had a staggering 14 brothers and sisters (although her oldest brother died when he was 12). This huge family had to be provided for out of Edward’s patronage simply to make them appropriate in-laws for the king, and that made them appear as grasping upstarts to the established English nobility. Fourth, Edward conducted the marriage in secret; he was known to be highly-sexed and had already had several flings with women.

Finally, the marriage was a problem because Edward’s chief supporter, Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, had been negotiating to marry Edward to a French princess. Edward allowed Warwick to keep negotiating for some time after his marriage, but finally revealed that he already had a wife, humiliating and infuriating Warwick. Warwick was the most wealthy and powerful man in the kingdom, and his role in the Yorkist revolt against Henry VI had earned him the nickname the Kingmaker. This incident began the fracturing of the alliance between Edward and Warwick that ultimately led to Warwick conspiring with Edward’s brother George and then with Henry VI’s wife, Margaret of Anjou. Had Edward done the proper thing and married the French princess, it’s quite possible that the Wars of the Roses would have ended in 1461 and perhaps the Plantagenets would still be ruling England. So a story that focuses on this marriage and its consequences is certainly a great idea.

So Close…

As I watched the series, I found myself becoming impressed by it. The first half of it does a fairly good job of following the actual events. It opens with Elizabeth (Rebecca Ferguson) presenting herself to Edward (Max Irons) as he rides past her home, hoping to recover her late husband’s estate, which had been confiscated because he had been killed fighting for the Lancastrian cause three years earlier. Edward becomes attracted to her and she initially resists (because in romance novels, women who just give in and have sex are sluts, don’t you know) but accepts Edward’s marriage proposal. In the series, this is presented as Elizabeth being uncertain about her feelings until Edward proposes, but a more plausible scenario to my mind is that Elizabeth intentionally held out for marriage (much like Anne Boleyn did with Henry VIII two generations later) because she knew Edward had a reputation as a womanizer and saw the marriage as a way to advance her family. After all, Jacquetta had been a high noblewoman and certainly understood how the court worked, and that’s somewhat the way the show presents her mother as well. (Janet McTeer’s Jacquetta is one of the real bright spots in the show.)

The next several episodes trace the growing conflict between Warwick (James Frain) and Edward. It presents the Woodvilles as being the catalyst for this alienation, which is basically correct. Elizabeth seeks to find husbands and wives for her siblings and her two oldest sons. Traditionally, this has been seen as evidence that the Woodvilles were seeking to rise about their station, but the series does a nice job of looking at it from their point of view as a family suddenly thrust into the thick of English politics and needing to establish a genuine power base. And Edward begins giving the Woodvilles high offices, thus depriving Warwick’s family of a different source of wealth and power. But Elizabeth’s parents also manage to offend Warwick by insisting on their precedence at court over Warwick.

Warwick favors an alliance, or at least a peace, with France, but Edward begins to favor an alliance with the dukes of Burgundy, who in this period were rivals to France. Jacquetta was related to the royal house of Burgundy, so it’s unclear whether Edward is simply engaging in his own foreign policy or if the Woodvilles were pushing him toward Burgundy. Warwick is eventually revealed to have a secret deal with the king of France for land there, so the series put sthe focus more on why Warwick wants France rather than why Edward is favoring Burgundy.

The series also does a nice job of milking tension out of the fact that the first three children after the marriage were all girls. On paper, the fact that Edward’s first son wasn’t born until 1470 seems like a minor detail. But the show explores the reality that until Edward had a son, his hold on the throne was tenuous, because his heir was his brother George (David Oakes). Since Henry VI was still alive, Edward’s opponents could choose to support either the old king or George. That made the Woodvilles all vulnerable as well.

Edward IV, Elizabeth, and their young son Edward

Eventually, Warwick grows frustrated and begins to plot with George. Historically, George married Warwick’s daughter Isabel in defiance of the king’s wishes in 1469 and then he and Warwick rebelled and seized Edward. Rather than deposing him in favor of George (which is probably what George was hoping for), Warwick tried to rule through Edward, keeping him prisoner in Warwick castle, but the English nobility refused to accept this and since Warwick was unwilling to kill or depose Edward, eventually he had to release the king and seek a reconciliation.

But that collapsed quickly. Warwick and George fled the country, made an alliance with Margaret of Anjou to put Henry VI back on the throne, and invaded at the head of an army that successfully forced Edward and Richard of Gloucester to flee to Flanders. Warwick returned Henry (or more properly his wife Margaret) to power. But this realignment encouraged France to declare war on Burgundy, and Burgundy supplied Edward with an army with which he was able to return, defeat and kill Warwick at the Battle of Barnet, and reclaim the throne, deposing Henry for a second and final time.

The Battle of Barnet

As I was thinking about that rather complex sequence of events, I assumed that the series would simplify things the way most historical films do. I expected it to omit Warwick and George’s initial rebellion and attempt to rule through Edward and just jump to the rebellion that deposed Edward in favor of Henry. But much to my surprise, the series played out the events roughly as they happened. The only major details it omitted were things involving people outside the show’s main circle of characters. (For example, neither Louis XI or the duke of Burgundy ever appear in the show, and their actions are barely even mentioned. Likewise the actions of English nobles like the earl of Pembroke and the earl of Devon during the rebellions are glossed over.) That impressed me a lot and I started thinking that I might have to declare this one of the best historical productions I’ve seen. In general, down through the end of Edward’s life, the show hits most of the major events of the reign in the right order. When it simplifies, it usually doesn’t oversimplify.

…And Yet So Far

Sadly, as the series goes on, though, it starts going wrong. One major issue is that it starts employing speculation and gossip as fact. For example, after Edward recovers his throne, he and his brothers go to the Tower and smother Henry in his bed to remove the threat. Elizabeth somehow stumbles upon them and witnesses the murder. The fact that Henry conveniently died the night before Edward’s re-coronation was so suspicious that most people assumed at the time (and still do today) that Edward ordered Henry’s death. A generation later, Thomas More’s History of Richard III says that Richard did the deed, but since More was writing during the reign of Henry VIII, he would have had to write about Richard as a tyrant, and Richard is known to have not been in London at the time of Henry’s death. Edward must surely have ordered the killing; Henry was too important a political pawn for someone to kill him without at least the king’s tacit approval. But it’s absurd to suggest that Edward himself did the deed. That’s what low-level servants are for.

The historical Edward eventually had a falling out with George. After Isabel died in 1476, George began to harbor ambitions to marry the duchess of Burgundy, a move that would have made Edward quite uncomfortable because of its political implications. When Edward refused to consent to it, George left court permanently. Then in 1477, it was learned that George had employed an astrologer to forecast his brother’s death. Trying to predict the time of the king’s death was seen as temptingly close to trying to cause the king’s death. George compounded the mistake after the astrologer’s execution by having a former Lancastrian protest the execution in Parliament. That was the last straw, and Edward arrested George, tried him for treason (personally acting as the prosecutor), and then executed him. Rumor has it that he was drowned in a butt of Malmsey, but no one really thinks that’s how George was dispatched.

However, the series (which gets the basic facts mostly right, if a little simplified) shows him being drowned in wine. On its own, it’s a forgivable moment of melodrama, but by this point, the show is starting to go seriously wrong, including things that are either total speculation or else just plain wrong.

A major problem in the series is its depiction of Margaret Beaufort, the Countess of Richmond and mother of Henry Tudor, who becomes Henry VII after the Battle of Bosworth Field. Margaret was the great-great-granddaughter of Edward III through his fourth son John of Gaunt and Gaunt’s mistress Katherine Swynford. Although Gaunt eventually married Katherine and had his children with her legitimized, the act of legitimation explicitly declared them ineligible for the throne, But after the death of Henry VI and his son Edward, Henry Tudor was the last Lancastrian claimant to the throne.

Margaret Beaufort

In the series, Margaret (Amanda Hale) has two major characteristics: a profound, if not obsessive, piety and an absolute conviction that her son will become king some day. Margaret’s piety, at least in later life, is well-established, so that’s a reasonable take on her. However the show depicts her as a hard-core Lancastrian, but it’s a little unlikely that Margaret was personally opposed to the Yorkists. Her second husband, Edmund Tudor, was a Lancastrian, but she was married to him at 12 and widowed at 13, barely having enough time to get a child with him. Her third and fourth husbands were both Yorkists whom she got along well with. She was close enough with Elizabeth Woodville to be chosen as the godmother of one of her younger daughters. And during Richard III’s reign, she was actively plotting with Elizabeth against him.

Any Lancastrian sympathies she had must have been because her son was the Lancastrian claimant, which means that while Henry VI and his son was alive, she probably had no serious expectation that her son might inherit; his claim was weak and the king had a son who had plenty of time to have children of his own. Even after 1471, it is improbable that she had high hopes, because Henry was a long way from the throne; he would only inherit if Edward; both his sons; Edward’s brother George; George’s son Edward; Richard; and Richard’s son Edward all died (and that’s ignoring all the daughters, who had claims as well). In fact, they did all die, but it probably wasn’t until Richard seized the throne that Margaret might have begun thinking her son had a good shot at the throne.

But Hale’s Amanda is insistent from the very first scene she’s in that the Yorkists are all illegitimate and that her son is destined to be king. She obsessively nags her third husband and Henry’s uncle Jasper about it, and after she marries Lord Stanley (Rupert Graves), the two of them begin to actively scheme for it. By Richard’s reign, the two of them are playing both Richard and Elizabeth in a hare-brained scheme to get rid of the princes in the Tower, engage Henry to Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth and then depose Richard. Historically, Margaret and Elizabeth Woodville did decide to unite their two families, but that was only after it became fairly clear that Elizabeth’s two sons were dead.

Hale as Margaret

In my next post, I’ll talk about one the show’s HUGE problems.

Production Choices

I normally don’t say much about production issues, but for some reason the series’ production choices really caught my eye. Frock Flicks has a few pointed observations about the generally boring outfits the women were given (especially Anne Neville and Margaret Beaufort, both of whom are stuck wearing one dress for several years). But the show has a charming dearth of black leather and open doublets, so it deserves a little praise.

The show was filmed in Belgium, and they used a lot of historical sites to stand in for places like Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, and various royal and noble palaces. There are definitely a few issues, such as many of the staircases having metal railings, and some of the paintings in the background are clearly 16^th century or later. A An enormous bath-tub Elizabeth uses in the second episode really stands out. And much of the architecture just screams that the show wasn’t filmed in England. The windows, for example, are all wrong.

Normally that sort of thing doesn’t bother me at all. The nature of historical filmmaking often requires compromises like that. The actual locations might not survive, or might not be open to film crews, or might just not be available. Appropriate buildings often have modern features like railings that make finding good shots tough. Production budgets can be tight, so using locations that are already furnished with quasi-medieval furniture and decorations helps save money. But for some reason, in this series, the locations were constantly knocking me out of the story-telling. It just doesn’t look like England, despite the frequent inserted shots of London’s White Tower.

More problematically, the show spans 21 years (1464-1485), but there is almost no effort made to age the actors appropriately. For the first five episodes or so, that’s not a problem, because only about 6 years pass, but in the last several episodes, it starts to become an issue. Several of the male characters grow beards, and some of them are giving a little grey at the temples, but that’s about as far as it goes.

Margaret Beaufort is a particular problem. The actress looks the same in 1485 as she does in 1464. When she’s playing scenes with the boy Henry Tudor, this isn’t a serious problem. But in the last episode, when she’s opposite Michael Marcus as the adult Henry she could plausibly be playing his girlfriend instead of his mother. A little bit of make-up would have gone a long way in this series.

See what I mean?

 

Want to Know More?

The White Queen is available on Starz, and on Amazon. The three novels it is based on are The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The Kingmaker’s Daughter. They are also available as a set with two other novels.

If you’re looking to learn about Edward IV, for my money the best book is Charles Ross, Edward IV. His The Wars of the Roses is a very good introduction to the events. David Baldwin’s Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower is a good look at Edward’s queen.