The White Princess: Playing Pretend(er)

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Henry VII, Lambert Simnel, Medieval England, Perkin Warbeck, Philippa Gregory, Starz, The Wars of the Roses, The White Princess, Tudor England

The main plot of the first season of Starz’ The White Princess (based on the novel by Philippa Gregory) is the two military challenges to the rule of Henry VII (Jacob Collins-Levy). The show is generally not very interested in the things that are actually important about Henry’s reign, such as his efforts to re-establish the monarchy as dominant over the nobility or his administrative efforts (which, let’s be honest, would probably be a rough sell in a tv series), so it milks far more drama out of two comparatively small incidents than they really deserve.

 

Lambert Simnel

Henry VII was a political upstart with a rather weak claim to the throne who found an opening in the weak political position of Richard III. Both the Yorkists and the Lancastrians had stronger claims to the throne, but the Lancastrian line was extinguished and Henry had succeeded in co-opting the Yorkist claim by marrying the oldest daughter of Edward IV, a woman who arguable had a better claim than her husband did. This weakness left him vulnerable to challengers who could tap into the Yorkist claim somehow.

Not long after Henry became king, he moved against the most obvious challenger to his claim, his wife’s cousin Edward Plantagenet, the Earl of Warwick, a ten-year old boy. Warwick was the only surviving son of Duke George of Clarence, the middle brother between Edward IV and Richard III. George had been arrested in 1477 on charges of treason against Edward. Edward leaned on Parliament to pass an Act of Attainder declaring George a traitor, so he was executed in 1478. The Act of Attainder meant that Warwick could not inherit the throne through his father’s line, but despite that Richard III may possibly had declared Warwick his heir after the death of Richard’s only son.

Henry VII

Warwick had a strong claim—if Richard was an illegitimate usurper as Henry insisted, after the death of Edward IV’s two sons, the Yorkist claims passed to Warwick. The Act of Attainder severed that transmission of the claim, but the Act could have been reversed by Parliament if Henry had been unseated, so Warwick was an obvious focus on opposition to Henry. So Henry did the smart thing and threw the kid into the Tower of London, where he lived most of the rest of his unfortunate life.

However, because Warwick was a young boy out of sight, it was easy for a rumor to spread that he had escaped from the Tower and was trying to unseat Henry. And that’s what happened in 1487. A university-educated priest, Richard Simon or Symonds, decided to put forward a young boy named Lambert Simnel as being Warwick (although he initially claimed that Simnel was Richard of York, Edward IV’s vanished younger son). Simnel was the son of a baker or organ-maker and had no connection with nobility whatsoever. Symonds’ exact motives for this are unknown, but it was probably a combination of Yorkist sympathies and the ambition to position himself as tutor to the king. Symonds managed to win the support of John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln, who was the nephew of Edward IV and Richard III by their sister Elizabeth. It’s not clear whether Lincoln genuinely believed that Simnel was his cousin Warwick or whether he figured that Warwick’s cause was more likely to rally support than his own. Lincoln was able to raise a force of about 2000 Dutch mercenaries by getting support from his cousin Margaret of Burgundy, who hated Henry.

Then he sailed with Simnel to Ireland, raised some Irish troops, and landed in northern England, hoping to seize control of York. But York remained loyal to Henry, perhaps because people disliked the idea of using the Dutch and Irish as kingmakers, but also perhaps because Henry had done the smart thing and brought the real Warwick out of imprisonment to prove he wasn’t wandering around northern England. Rebuffed at York, Lincoln headed south and encountered Henry’s larger and better equipped forces at the Battle of Stoke. Trapped against the river Trent, Lincoln and his forces were wiped out.

Stoke is frequently referred to as the last battle in the Wars of the Roses, because it marked the last time the English nobility had a chance (albeit a rather poor one) to assert control of the kingdom by deposing the king in favor of a rival claimant. Henry treated Simnel with great clemency, giving him a position in the royal kitchens and later making him the king’s falconer.

Henry forced his mother-in-law, the Dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville, into a genteel retirement at Bermondsey Abbey on the southeast edge of London right about this point, causing some to suspect that she had supported the revolt in some way. Her holdings were transferred to her daughter’s control, effectively eliminating her ability to do anything more than cheer from the sidelines.

 

Perkin Warbeck

Three years later, in 1490, another pretender arose, one who became known to history as Perkin Warbeck (or Osbeck). Most of what we know about Warbeck comes from a confession he signed after his capture, which means that its contents are suspect. But Warbeck appears to have been the son of John Warbecque, the comptroller of the Flemish city of Courtrai. When he was 17 he was hired by a merchant who took him to Cork in Ireland, where the local population, staunchly Yorkist, declared that he must be either the still-imprisoned Earl of Warwick or the still-missing Richard of York, younger son of Edward IV. Whether that’s actually where Warbeck got the idea for his imposture or not is impossible to say.

A drawing of Perkin Warbeck

He traveled to the Burgundian court, where Margaret of Burgundy supported his claims. Margaret gave him money and helped him get support from the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian I. They helped keep his cause alive for more than half a decade, making him a thorn in Henry’s side.

In 1491, Warbeck tried to raise a rebellion in Ireland, but failed. In 1495, Henry received intelligence about a small group of nobles who supported Warbeck’s claims, chief among them Sir William Stanley. Stanley was the Lord Chamberlain and thus a key figure in the government. He was also the brother of Henry’s step-father Thomas Stanley and a man who had helped him win at Bosworth Field. The conspirators (although it doesn’t seem to have been a highly-organized plot) were generally executed.

Soon after the ‘conspiracy’ was revealed, Warbeck landed a small force at Deal, in Kent, but local forces repulsed him, forcing him to withdraw. So he sailed to Ireland and tried to seize control of Waterford, but was again repulsed. So he sailed to Scotland, where James IV realized he would be a useful weapon against Henry. James pretended to believe Warbeck’s claims and married him off to a distant cousin of his, Cathy Gordon

A year later, in 1496, James made a desultory invasion into northern England, using Warbeck’s cause as the excuse. He had hoped the Northumbrians might have rallied to Warbeck’s banner, but they didn’t, and when an English army approached, James retreated back to Scotland. A year later, James decided to be rid of Warbeck and gave him a ship that dropped the pretender in Ireland. Warbeck sailed to Cornwall, where the Cornish had recently rebelled because Henry had withdrawn a centuries-old tax exemption from them. Warbeck was able to raise a force of around 6,000 men, but when an English army approached, he panicked and fled to Beaulieu Abbey, where he and his wife surrendered.

Margaret of Burgundy

Henry initially treated Warbeck with the same leniency he had treated Simnel. Warbeck made a full confession of his imposture and lived as a guest of the king. His wife became one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting and served faithfully for about two decades before being allowed to get married again. But early in 1499, Warbeck fled court, only to be quickly recaptured. This time Henry sent him to the Tower. In August of that year, Warbeck and Warwick somehow escaped from the Tower and sought to raise the cause of the White Rose again. But Warbeck was once again captured and both he and the unfortunate Warwick were executed.

 

 

The Rebellions in the Show

The series does a reasonable job with the Lambert Simnel’s rebellion. The only major thing it gets wrong is that it presents Margaret of Burgundy (Joanne Whalley) as masterminding the rebellion. She is shown looking over several candidates to pretend to be Warwick and settling on Simnel (Max True) and orchestrating his rebellion. In reality, Richard Symomds chose him. Margaret supported him, but it is just as likely that she believed Simnel’s claims to be Warwick as that she knew he was an imposter.

But beyond that, the show does a reasonable job of setting up Henry’s decision to imprison the real Warwick (who is presented as so simple-minded that as a ten-year old boy he cannot understand why people calling for “King Warwick” might be a bad idea). Margaret Beaufort (Michelle Fairley) is shown maliciously scheming to have people call out for “King Warwick” entirely so she can have Henry throw the kid in the Tower. There is absolutely zero evidence for this.

True as Lambert

But when it gets to Perkin Warbeck’s rebellion, the train goes badly off the rails. To start with, the show (and The White Queen before it) makes it very clear that Perkin Warbeck actually is Richard of York. Early in the first episode, after Henry has defeated Richard III at Bosworth field, Henry’s men show up to Elizabeth Woodville’s residence to take the queen and her children into custody. Elizabeth (Essie Davis) gives her young Richard instructions to hide in the attic and then flee the country. At this point she has already nicknamed him ‘Perkin’.

This is absurd for several reasons. First, Richard of York had already been taken into Richard’s custody almost three years earlier. When her husband Edward died, Elizabeth had sought sanctuary with Richard at Westminster Abbey, but was persuaded to hand her younger son over to Richard of Gloucester. Within a year, Richard, like his older brother, had already disappeared from sight and was probably a rotting corpse somewhere. In The White Queen Elizabeth passes off a young male servant as Richard and has her son smuggled out of England. So the show is just being counter-factual.

Second, it appears that Elizabeth’s entire household is taken into custody. So how did a 10 year-old boy who knows pretty much nothing about the world escape to the Continent with neither help nor resources? The show just hand-waves this issue and hopes you won’t notice.

Third, ‘Perkin’ roughly means ‘Pierre’s kin’ or a bit more loosely, “Peterson”. Why the hell would Elizabeth give her son Richard that as a nickname. ‘Dick’ or ‘Dickon’ would have been far more likely. Even if we grant this improbability, how would Henry VII’s people have gotten this right a decade later when they decided to fabricate a name and biography for him?

Eventually, however, the adult Richard (Patrick Gibson) shows up at the Burgundian court, where he immediately wins the support of Margaret of Burgundy. It’s not entirely clear whether she believes him to actually be the missing prince or not, but damn near everyone else who meets him is quickly persuaded he’s the real thing. He manages to convince Margaret Plantagenet (Rebecca Benson) who flatly says she never met Richard but still comes away won over by his knowledge of details of the court. Elizabeth of York (Jodie Comer) comes to believe it. Even his mother becomes magically convinced that her son has returned, despite not seeing him or having any way to know the truth. Basically, the show absolutely stacks the facts in favor of Warbeck’s claim. It ignores, for example, that historians have been able to confirm many of the facts of his statement admitting his true identity. The show doesn’t want there to be any ambiguity at all about this.

Gibson as Richard/Perkin

The show also emphasizes that all the royalty in Europe believe his claims except Ferdinand and Isabella. He meets the Holy Roman Emperor! He marries a close relative of James of Scotland! In fact, there’s very little evidence to suggest that most rulers accepted the claims. Instead they threw a few minor resources at him in hopes that if his improbable rebellion succeeded, he would feel obligated to them. Yes, James IV married him to a cousin, but Cathy Gordon was a third cousin (they shared a great-grandfather). The fact that James gave him a distant relative rather than someone closer is actually pretty good evidence that James didn’t believe him.

The adult Perkin is depicted as almost saintly, forgiving everyone who refuses to accept his claims, nobly enduring imprisonment, and rejecting a plan to enable him to escape. He is so convinced of the rightness of his claim that he’s incapable of recognizing that his cause is completely lost. Cathy (Amy Manson) is depicted as being utterly devoted to him, which seems implausible, given that she served loyally as Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting and seems to have reverted quickly to a version of her maiden name (although since this evidence of this comes from English court records, it may not reflect her personal choice). In the show, the couple have a baby. In fact, she doesn’t seem to have had any children at all by any of her four husbands.

Henry VII (Jacob Collins-Levy) is depicted as being driven almost to insanity by Richard’s purity and refusal to admit the truth. He chews the scenery fiercely as a demonstration of his inability to admit he’s not the rightful king. In reality, Warbeck was little more than a thorn in Henry’s side who enjoyed little support and was at best a minor problem for him. Had Henry actually been upset about Warbeck, he would have simply executed the man, whereas in reality he treated the pretender with mercy and gave him a job.

So, essentially, almost everything the show offers us about Perkin Warbeck is fiction, even more so than usual for the show.

 

Want to Know More?

The White Princess  is available on Amazon, as is the novel it’s based on. But if you’re looking for something historically reliable about Henry and Elizabeth, skip Philippa Gregory. For Henry VII, take a look at Sean Cunningham’s Henry VII or Thomas Penn’s Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England.

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The White Princess: Whackadoodle-doo!

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Elizabeth of York, Henry VII, Kings and Queens, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Starz, Tudor England

 The 2017 Starz series The White Princess (based on the Philippa Gregory novels of the same name) is a sequel to The White Queen series, although not completely. None of the earlier series cast returns (with the exception of one supporting character), and a key detail of The White Princess is incompatible with the first series.

The show also feels cheaper than its predecessor. Instead of finding appropriate period locations for domestic scenes, in the earlier episodes they filmed a lot of scenes in churches and just tried to cover up problematic details like tombs behind large banners on free-standing mounts. Henry wears a lot of black leatherette pants and one of his cloaks is just a big sheet of leather with clasps held on with fibulae. It must be a great cloak, because he has it for years. Frock Flicks really hates the costuming. Henry spends a great deal of time just walking around with a crown on for no real reason. But the show did spend more money on its battle scenes (although tactically they make no sense.)

First, Some Background

Henry VII seized control of England in 1485 by defeating and killing the now-infamous Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Henry VII had a very weak claim to the throne. He came from the lower nobility, his father (who died before Henry’s birth) having been the 1^stEarl of Richmond and the son of Henry V’s widow Catherine of Valois. His mother Margaret Beaufort was a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, third son of Edward III via his mistress-turned-wife Katherine Swynford. Since the Beauforts were related to the Lancastrian kings of England whose line had been stamped out by Edward IV, Henry represented one of the last remaining heirs to the Lancastrian claim to the throne. But his claim was a weak one, because in 1407, when the Lancastrian king Henry IV had legitimized the Beauforts, he had specifically excluded them from the line of succession. Additionally, Henry’s family was not particularly wealthy by the standards of the day, and Henry had spent much of his life outside the British Isles, so he didn’t have deep political connections either. His claim was successful partly due to residual loyalty to the Lancastrians and partly due to hostility to Richard III.

The Lancastrians had been displaced by the Yorkist line, in the person of Edward IV, duke of York. The Yorkists arguably had a superior claim to the throne in a legal sense, because they were descended from both Edward III’s second son Lionel and his fourth son Edmund (directly from Edmund and through Lionel’s daughter Philippa). When Henry IV usurped the throne from Richard II in 1399, he not only violated Richard’s right to the throne, he also passed over Lionel’s claims. As long as Henry and his son Henry V were successful, their questionable legal claims were ignored, but Henry VI proved woefully incompetent as well as mentally ill, which opened the door to Edward of York seizing the throne in 1461.

To simplify a complex story (as told in The White Queen), Edward ruled fairly successfully, with the exception of a disruption in 1470 when Henry VI briefly retook the throne. He married Elizabeth Woodville, a women of the lower nobility, which provoked a great deal of political trouble from the more established English nobles, who resented Edward’s efforts to promote the Woodvilles ‘above their station’. Edward and Elizabeth produced a whole passel of children: seven girls and three boys (one of whom died around 2 years old).

When Edward died in 1483, his older son Edward was 13 and the younger, Richard of Shrewsbury, was 10. But Edward IV’s younger brother Duke Richard of Gloucester feared that the Woodvilles, who were his political opponents, would use the young king to strike at him, so he quickly usurped the throne. Richard III took charge of Young Edward and Richard, who were placed into the Tower of London and never seen again. There has been debate about what happened to them ever since, but there is no real scholarly doubt that Richard either ordered their deaths or made it clear that he would accept someone doing the deed proactively. Given how vitally important they were during Richard’s reign, it’s simply inconceivable that they were killed against his will.

When Richard took the throne, Elizabeth Woodville began negotiating with Henry Tudor, who was one of the few credible opponents of her brother-in-law. In 1483, they agreed that Henry would marry Elizabeth of York, the oldest child of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. Henry went so far as to swear a public oath to that effect. The effect of this marriage would be to join Henry’s rather weak claim to the throne with Elizabeth of York’s rather strong claim. Assuming her two brothers were already dead, Elizabeth was the heir to Edward IV’s claim, meaning that her claim was much stronger than Richard’s, at least legally.

Henry VII

Richard III had only one child with his wife Anne, a boy Edward who died a year after his father took the throne. (He also had two illegitimate children fathered when he was a teenager.) Anne died in March of 1485, leaving Richard in desperate need of a wife and heir. So he immediately began negotiating with King John II of Portugal for the hand of John’s sister Joanna, a nun who was rather disinterested in marrying anyone. To sweeten the deal, Richard also proposed marrying his niece Elizabeth of York to John’s kinsman (and future king) Manuel I.

This was a sound move on Richard’s part. First, it would have helped secure him an ally, had the marriages gone through. Second, it would have weakened Henry’s political position and claim to the throne, thus undercutting his ability to threaten Richard. Third, the Croyland Chronicle claims that there were rumors that Richard had an inappropriate desire for his niece. Given that Richard’s position was already shaky, he may have decided that he didn’t need rumors of incest circulating about him, so he sent her away from court almost immediately after Anne’s death; her marriage would have completely removed any scurrilous gossip about a supposed relationship.

However, it’s unclear how reliable the Croyland Chronicle’s claim is. The author of this part of the Chronicle is anonymous, and historians disagree about who he was, although he clearly had access to the Yorkist court. This section was written around 1486, after Henry had become king, so it’s quite likely that the author was a former Yorkist hoping to curry favor with Henry by making Richard look as bad as possible. So the Chronicle’s claim that there were rumors about Richard’s incestuous interest in his niece cannot be assumed to be true, although it can’t actually be totally discounted either. But it’s worth noting that the claim is that Richard was attracted to Elizabeth, nothing more. There’s no evidence that he actually wanted to marry her, which would have been wildly unacceptable, or ever tried to do anything with her.

Elizabeth of York

Henry defeated Richard on August 22, 1485. He retroactively dated his accession to August 21^st, meaning that anyone who fought in support of Richard was by that fact guilty of treason against Henry. He had himself crowned king in October of the same year, pointedly not marrying Elizabeth of York until January 18^thof 1486, which means that he was king of England not because of his wife’s legal claim but by his own right of conquest. He even made a point of claiming the throne by right of conquest in some of his proclamations. His first son, Prince Arthur, was born on the 19^thor 20^thof September of that year. Elizabeth was crowned queen in November of 1487.

The White Princess           

At the start of the series, Elizabeth of York (Jodie Cromer) is in love with Richard and has had sex with him. Consequently, she passionately hates Henry (Jacob Collins-Levy) as the man who killed her lover. Her relationship with Richard seems to be widely known, because both Henry and his mother Margaret (Michelle Fairley, striving mightily to bring some semblance of plausibility to a religious maniac) refer to her as a whore and Richard’s lover.

I cannot emphasize enough how totally whackadoodle this is. Not only does it depend on the thinnest of evidence, it goes far beyond the claims of the Croyland Chronicle. The idea that a royal princess would have been openly having premarital sex is ludicrous, because it would have severely undermined her value as marriage partner. Elite women of this era were essentially required to be virgins on their wedding day. It also completely ignores the fact that uncle-niece incest was as unacceptable then as it is today, arguably more so, given the very complex rules about consanguinity that medieval society dealt with. No one at any point bothers to comment on the fact that not only is Elizabeth having premarital sex, she’s breaking one of the biggest taboos of all. Since Elizabeth of York is the audience identification character, it’s clear that the show wants to avoid making viewers queasy by reminding them that her first great love is her uncle.

And despite all this, Henry insists on putting blood on the bedsheets the night they are married. The whole point of doing that is offer evidence that the bride is a virgin, but if everyone knows she’s not a virgin, it’s pointless.

In the show, Elizabeth and Henry hate each other from the moment they meet. Henry doesn’t like the idea of marrying his enemy’s lover and she doesn’t like the idea of marrying her lover’s enemy. He openly suggests marrying someone else, including Elizabeth’s jealous younger sister Cecily (Suki Waterhouse), but his council includes former Yorkists who insist that he keep his promise to marry Elizabeth.

It’s a little-known fact that Margaret Beaufort could spit venom up to six feet when threatened

So Henry decides that he can’t marry her until he knows for certain that she’s fertile. So he essentially rapes her to see if he can knock her up quickly. When it becomes clear that she has gotten pregnant, he marries her. There’s no virtually no evidence to support this. They did reside in the same household before their marriage, so it’s possible they could have had sex before their marriage, but the only reason to think they did so is that Prince Arthur was born 8 months and 1-2 days after their marriage. So either he was conceived in late December or he was born a month premature. But there was no practice of ‘testing’ a woman’s fertility with premarital sex, and given that Henry needed to build his claim to the throne, it would have been risky for his heir to be an obvious product of premarital sex, because it would have opened the door to claims that Arthur was a bastard, the last thing Henry would have wanted. (This is another reason why the idea of Elizabeth having an affair with Richard is so crazy. If Elizabeth were known to have not been a virgin on her wedding day, the legitimacy of all her children would have been suspect.)

Also, as an aside, can I just point out that the trajectory of the show has Elizabeth fall in love with Henry gradually, after he’s raped her? There’s something really fucked up about Philippa Gregory here.

Finally, the show’s timeline presumes that not only did Elizabeth get pregnant from that first, very quick, act of intercourse but also that it was clear to her that she was pregnant just a couple weeks later and that a very hurried marriage could be arranged without anyone noticing the rush. Remember, for Arthur to be born after nine months, there’s only room for a month between his conception and his parents’ wedding. While it’s possible that Elizabeth might have realized she was pregnant just a week or two after conceiving, it’s more likely for a woman to take 5-6 weeks to realize she’s pregnant. Elizabeth lived in an age when women were discouraged from having a clear understanding of such matters and even physicians and midwives weren’t always clear on the relationship between a missed period and conception. Would Elizabeth have understood what a single missed or very late period meant? It’s hard to know, but the show is relying on much more recent ideas about pregnancy than were common in the 15^thcentury.

Henry’s coat here comes from the Late Biker Age

In general, the show wants us to see Elizabeth as a sincere yet politically-engaged woman who often fought with her mother-in-law. She frequently participates in the royal council and writes letters to rally support for Henry against Perkin Warbeck. She successfully rallies English troops that don’t want to fight for Henry. In one remarkably absurd scene, she conducts a marriage negotiation with Isabella of Castile because Elizabeth speaks Spanish and Henry does not, and then lies to Henry about the fact that Isabella has refused the marriage, as if there is no one else in the room who understands both English and Spanish and could tell Henry what was actually being said. (In fact, although Elizabeth was a very well-educated woman by the standards of her day, she never learned a second language beyond some not very good French. Also, the marriage was proposed by the Spanish, not the English. And the idea that Henry would have personally gone to Spain and taken his wife with him as his translator at a time when he was fearful of a rebellion against him in support of Perkin Warbeck is rather silly.)

There’s no real evidence that Elizabeth was very involved in the politics of her day. Her mother-in-law was far more influential at court and Henry appears to have made it very clear that Elizabeth was the mother of his children and not one of his key counselors. Although it is possible that she influenced him during their private (and therefore unrecorded) conversations, there’s no particular evidence that he trusted her except in matters of marriage, where it was traditional for the queen to play an important role. She focused her life on her children and charitable works, which he gave her a substantial income to pursue.

More Whackadoodle

One continuity between The White Queen and The White Princess is that Elizabeth Woodville (Essie Davis) is a witch. And by that, I mean she actually has magic powers. Over the course of the show, she sends a nightmare to trouble Margaret Beaufort, ensures that a stable boy finds a message she has thrown out a window, kills Mary of Burgundy by breaking a statue of the Virgin Mary, keeps Perkin Warbeck from being captured by Henry, and generally miraculously knows things like that Warbeck is landing in England.

As I’ve discussed in a previous post, this is nonsense. There’s literally no evidence at all that Elizabeth Woodville knew or attempted to practice magic of any sort. And one wonders why, if Elizabeth actually could work magic, she didn’t bother to, oh say, kill Henry. Why didn’t she send nightmares against Henry or otherwise curse him? Why didn’t she kill Prince Arthur? Gregory wrote her novel to give Elizabeth power to cause a variety of things that actually happened historically, but the fact that Elizabeth wasn’t able to do the sort of things that would actually have benefitted her cause in a material way shows how silly this idea is.

And as we’ll see in the next post, there’s a lot more whackadoodle stuff around Perkin Warbeck’s rebellion against Edward.

Want to Know More?

The White Princess  is available on Amazon, as is the novel it’s based on. But if you’re looking for something historically reliable about Henry and Elizabeth, skip Philippa Gregory. For Henry VII, take a look at Sean Cunningham’s Henry VII or Thomas Penn’s Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England. For Elizabeth of York, try Arlene Okerlund’s Elizabeth of York: Queenship and Power.  

I am Henry: The Interview

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Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII, I Am Henry, Jan Hendrik Verstraten, Tudor England

I am really excited. Today’s blog post is a first for me. It’s an interview with Jan Hendrik Verstraeten, the writer, director, and producer of 2015’s I am Henry, a wonderful short film about the afterlife of Henry VIII. In it, Henry (Sebastian Street) has conversations with his first two wives, Catherine of Aragon (Maria de Lima) and Anne Boleyn (Fleur Keith). Check it out on Vimeo. But first, read my interview (which has been very lightly edited).

Historian: My understanding is that when you started to write this film, it wasn’t originally about Henry VIII, that your starting point was simply a man in a white room. How did you decide to the man was Henry VIII?

Verstraeten: I just knew it was either Henry VIII himself, or a middle aged man who imagined that he was Henry VIII. Of course, during the process of writing, sudden ideas that pop into your head are quite natural, and as a writer you then have to  decide if it is a good idea or not. Initially I was not convinced that it would work, but I allowed it to take shape, and was curious where it would take me.

H: Once you decided to make this film about historical people, how did that affect the way you approached the characters? Did you approach them differently than you would have approached an entirely fictitious character of your invention?

V: Yes, the approach to use a historic character, and certainly one that is so prominent in the history of England, was quite daunting to be honest. I am not English, and I doubted very much if I could do such a thing. I started by reading Henry’s love letters to Anne and the account of Master Kingston about Anne’s tragic final visit to the Tower, and her execution. I also watched several documentaries. I found especially the BBC documentary Henry VIII with David Starky fascinating. I knew that I wanted to be true to the real Henry, but instead of trying to do an enormous amount of research, I decided to ‘sense’ how the real Henry felt about everything during his life. The interesting discovery for me was that the real Henry, just like most of us humans, was complex and full of contradictions. A king without a doubt, who believed he was chosen by God for this role, but also a man who occasionally was ruled by lust and passion, fear and confusion. A man who in essence was not so different than anyone of us.

Hilary Mantel, who wrote Wolf Hall, said in an interview somewhere that a historian has to create the personality of the historic character as you can never know for sure how they really are, but also for dramatic reasons you need to make a choice as a writer. I think that is true, but for me in this short I chose to ‘sense’ him, and build on that with the facts I found about him. I took the same approach for the other characters, and so I was not aware of Catherine’s last letter before her death in which she claimed that her ‘dead’ children were with her. A fact that I sensed and used in the film, only to discover afterwards from a Tudor expert that it had happened.

H: Where did you shoot the film? Was it on location, or was it a set?

V: It had been suggested that we film a couple of the scenes in the massive crypt underneath St Mary Magdalene’s Church in Paddington, north London. We ended up filming the entire film on location at the church, as it had everything we were looking for. The crypt with its Gothic architecture and beautiful stained glass windows was recently seen in the film ‘Les Misérables.’

H: Tell us a little about the costumes you used. How closely were you striving for accuracy?

V: When you produce a short film the budget is usually very tight, and costumes are expensive. Even so, we were definitely trying to be historically accurate, and were very lucky with Kristen Ernst Brown, our costume designer. She won Best Costume for I Am Henry, and definitely succeeded without a lot of money to create a beautiful and authentic look, using black and gold as her main colour palette. This complemented the cinematography by Simon Rowling, which was inspired by Rembrandt, the great Dutch master painter.

H: The film’s basic conceit has significant theological implications, and the film briefly touches on the question of whether Henry is in Purgatory. Purgatory was a major issue of Catholic belief in the 16th century, but Henry’s reformation cast the whole concept of Purgatory into doubt. Did you think about this issue when you wrote the script? Did you make a conscious decision to not bring theology into the script?

V: I wouldn’t say that there is no theology at all in the script. You cannot have been a Tudor and not have been influenced by religion or the Catholic concept of Purgatory, although the Church of England dismissed it. Anne after all makes a comment that ‘Clearly no one who relies on the law is justified before God, because the righteous will live by faith and faith alone.’ This can be seen as a very ‘protestant’ remark. Both Anne and Catherine rely on their personal faith, and the strength of that, which is contrasted with Henry’s self-importance. Anne was concerned with salvation, Henry was concerned with the law and protecting himself and his country. But overall, the focus of the film is about the emotions between Henry, Anne and Catherine.

Our plan for the future is to develop this short into a full length feature or mini-series for TV. This would explore the afterlife in greater detail, drawing upon some very dramatic storylines involving other significant people in Henry’s life.

H: I find the idea of the developing I am Henry into a feature film or mini-series is quite exciting, and much more interesting than the usual take on Henry. If it does wind up happening, please let me know and I’ll be glad to provide a plug or do another interview to help promote it on the blog. Good luck with it!

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)

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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: Dissing Queen Bess

Tags

16th Century England, Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth, Elizabeth I, Geoffrey Rush, Kings and Queens, Shekhar Kapur, Tudor England

I mentioned in my previous post on Elizabeth (1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur) that the film reduces the complex political issues around Elizabeth’s (Cate Blanchett) marriage choices to a question of personal interest. Her indecisiveness is depicted entirely as Elizabeth wavering between a man she loves but knows is unsuitable and a repugnant suitor who would be a good choice politically. While her personal feelings were probably an issue in her choice, the real reason for her refusal to commit was she recognized that whichever choice she made would bring with it at least as many problems as advantages. There was no truly good choice for Elizabeth to make, so she changed the terms of the problem and made refusing to choose the best option. Doing this forced her to endure substantial pressure from her Privy Council, her Parliaments, and other European monarchs, as well as to defy social convention, so her choice required her to develop a variety of strategies for successfully managing this pressure.

Blanchett as Elizabeth

In other words, Elizabeth refused to choose a husband because she was an extremely savvy politician, not because she was an indecisive woman, and the way she enacted her choice demonstrated considerable finesse. So by downplaying the political issues and emphasizing her personal feelings, the film strips Elizabeth of much of her political skill and replaces it with a set of issues straight out of a rom-com. In a serious historical film, it’s degrading to one of the most intelligent people ever to sit on the English throne to depict her as little better than Kate Hudson or Drew Barrymore looking for love.

And unfortunately, the film does this fairly consistently. The film only shows her engaging in one piece of actual politics, when she works to persuade the English Parliament to pass the Act of Uniformity that helped resolve the kingdom’s religious problems. In the film, we see her struggling to craft and memorize a political speech that will win over the bishops in particular. On its own, this would be an interesting moment, but when time comes to give the speech, she remains hesitant and off-balance. Gradually she finds her feet, but even at the end of the speech, she doesn’t seem truly confident. We know from many sources, including her speeches, that Elizabeth was an extremely skilled public speaker. She may well have been less skilled at giving speeches when she was early in her reign, but the film never shows us a moment when her oratorical skills truly shine, which leaves the audience with the impression that she was not a gifted speech-maker.

Furthermore, during the speech the camera cuts to six Catholic bishops who are locked in a cellar somewhere, and therefore unable to participate in the voting. (This never happened.) Eventually, it is revealed that Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) is responsible for this, and that Elizabeth won the vote by five votes; if Walsingham hadn’t intervened, Elizabeth would have lost the vote. So according to the film, Elizabeth only triumphed on this issue because Walsingham secretly stacked the deck for her, and not because she skillfully managed the members of Parliament and the bishops to win their support.

As the film constructs its narrative, at the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth is a very emotional woman who lacks inner strength and is easily distressed by the difficulties she encounters. In many of her difficult moments, she requires the intervention of a man to calm her and stiffen her resolve. When her Privy Council bullies her into war with Scotland, Walsingham advises against it, and he proves right. Later on, it is Walsingham who teaches her that she needs to be more ruthless with her enemies, and it is Walsingham who tells her that she has to do without love. So as the film structures events, one of the greatest rulers in English history wouldn’t have been great at all if she hadn’t had a man standing behind her advising her how to win and occasionally intervening to ensure her triumph.

Rush as Walsingham

This is simply untrue. Elizabeth showed great political skill and savvy during the years of her sister Mary’s reign, when a wrong step could easily have gotten her executed. She prudently dissembled about her religious beliefs and at least nominally embraced Catholicism until she was able to admit she was a Protestant after she became queen. So she didn’t need Walsingham to teach her how to be an effective politician.

Additionally, Walsingham didn’t really become an important figure in Elizabeth’s government until the late 1560s, by which point she had already been in power for more than a decade, and had managed to enact the Act of Uniformity, begin dealing with the issue of her marriage, and confront the French build-up in Scotland; while the Scottish campaign was poorly conducted, it achieved her main goal of getting the French to withdraw most of their forces from Scotland. In all of these matters, Elizabeth generally set her own policy, often to the frustration of the men on her Privy Council. There is no doubt that Elizabeth was a skilled politician even at the start of her reign.

And then there’s the fact that for much of the second half of the film, the main plot revolves around a plot to kill Elizabeth that requires Walsingham to keep her safe. For a movie about Queen Elizabeth, the story is surprisingly dependent on the actions of men.  Indeed, in one scene, the assassin Ballard (Daniel Craig) catches her alone and gets within about 20 feet or so of her. Elizabeth is presented as helplessly demanding that he tell her his name; had other events not created a distraction, Ballard clearly would have killed her. This moment contrasts sharply with a real assassination attempt that she survived. In 1584, Elizabeth was surprised alone in her garden by Dr. William Perry, a member of Parliament and one of her spies, who had decided to kill her. But he was so daunted by her presence that he was unable to carry out the deed. (At least this is how some sources describe the incident; others suggest that he was trying to get her attention to raise his standing with her.) The notion that she was a helpless woman in the face of violence is false.

Elizabeth surviving an assassination attempt (note the emphasis on her fear)

For the film to undermine her accomplishments and attribute them to a man is, sadly, pure sexism. It feels as though the screenwriter, Michael Hirst, and Shekhar Kapur simply couldn’t imagine a strong political woman who wasn’t dependent on a man. If there was ever a woman who wasn’t dependent on men for her success, it was Queen Elizabeth I. Her story is one of a woman successfully navigating a male-dominated world and rising above the limitations men attempted to place on her. That’s a story I would much rather have seen than the one this film gives us.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth is available on Amazon.

If you’d like to know more about Sir Francis Walsingham and his espionage efforts, try, The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I.

Elizabeth: Whose Plot is It Anyway?

Tags

16th Century England, Babington Plot, Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth, Elizabeth I, Joseph Fiennes, Kings and Queens, Ridolfi Plot, Tudor England

So now that start of the semester stuff is more or less done with, I finally had time to sit down at watch Elizabeth (1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur). The film tells the story of the early years of the famous Queen Elizabeth I (Cate Blanchett). Specifically, it focuses on the process by which she went from an extremely emotional young queen to a more mature, emotionally-reserved queen. She has to learn harsh lessons about love and political decision-making over the course of the film.

Let’s Marry the Queen!

After showing the danger Elizabeth was in during her older sister Mary I’s reign, the film largely focuses on two things. The major thread throughout the film, starting once she is queen, is whom she will marry, King Philip II of Spain, the French prince Henri d’Anjou (the future Henri III, played by Vincent Cassel), or Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes). While she loves Leicester and has sex with him, it gradually becomes clear that he is not good choice for emotional reasons; he is a weak man, not faithful to her, and presumptuous of his rights over her. He is also already married to another woman. The shock of learning this fact drives Elizabeth to end her relationship with him and increasingly shut him out.

In reality, Elizabeth knew all along that Leicester was married (Dudley did in fact marry his second wife in secret though, so the film is collapsing details about two marriages); while she was very intimate with him, she disliked his wife Amy, who only saw Leicester for a few days at a time and lived away from court. In 1560, Amy was found dead at her country house, having apparently fallen down a flight of stairs and broken her neck. There is no evidence that this was anything other than an accident, but speculation immediately began that Leicester had orchestrated Amy’s murder, because her death left Leicester free to marry Elizabeth. But many of Elizabeth’s counselors opposed the match, and argued that she could not afford to risk the scandal that would ensue if she married him. Elizabeth seems to have eventually accepted this fact, although she remained close to him the rest of his life.

Fiennes as Leicester

An additional factor in the opposition to Leicester as a suitable husband for Elizabeth was the unfortunate history of his father John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland. He was Lord Protector of the realm during the short reign of Elizabeth’s young half-brother Edward VI. When Edward died, Northumberland attempted to engineer the accession of Edward’s cousin Jane Grey as queen, having married Jane to his son Guildford Dudley. The scheme collapsed in less than two weeks, Mary I took the throne, and Northumberland and Guildford were both executed. As a result, some English nobles may have feared that if he became king, Leicester would avenge the death of his father and brother on the nobles who had supported Mary.

Elizabeth’s other two suitors both brought with them the prospects of an alliance with a great power, but also the enmity of whichever great power she didn’t choose. As the movie emphasizes, England was not a great power in the 16^th century, and Elizabeth was therefore rightfully worried about getting pulled into the orbit of either France or Spain, which would have tended to overshadow her interests. With only a small army, it is unclear whether England could have won if either power had invaded, and France was allied to Scotland, which could easily invade northern England. As one famous British historian remarked, Elizabeth’s marriage was a weapon like a bee sting; it was powerful, but it could only be used once. So Elizabeth adopted a different strategy; instead of marrying, she played France and Spain off against each other, constantly dangling the possibility of marriage before them, but never committing to either side. This strategy kept England out of war for 30 years.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth barely touches on any of these issues. Instead, in general Hollywood fashion, it prefers to explain Elizabeth’s refusal to choose a husband in terms of her personal feelings. She loves Leicester but they are poorly matched as people, and she is shattered by the revelation that he is already married. She is uncomfortable with the prospect of marrying Philip of Spain because he was Mary’s husband. Henri d’Anjou is presented as vulgar, obnoxious, immature, overbearing, and, bizarrely, a transvestite. In reality, Henri never met Elizabeth, and there’s no basis for the film’s depiction of him. While historians have certainly seen deeper feelings in Elizabeth’s indecisiveness, all serious historians agree that her feelings were only one factor, and probably not the major one. By glossing over the political elements of the choice, the film unfortunately reduces Elizabeth to the status of a woman who just can’t make up her mind about whom she wants to marry.

No, Let’s Kill the Queen!

Starting in the second half of the film, a second plot element emerges, dealing with a plot to assassinate Elizabeth. The tension between Catholics and Protestants is a major issue throughout the film (which opens with the burning of three Protestants). Partway through the film, there are two unexplained assassination attempts. The first involves someone shooting crossbow bolts at Elizabeth while she is riding on a barge, although they only manage to kill one of her attendants. The second involves a poisoned silk dress that one of her ladies-in-waiting tries on so she can have sex with Leicester. From that point on, the marriage question gets relegated to the back burner as Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) works to uncover a wider plot. (The barge incident is basically true, although the would-be assassin used a gun, not a crossbow. Who was behind it does not seem to have ever been found out. The dress incident is completely fabricated, and seems lifted partly from Medea.)

The main assassination plot involves efforts to smuggle a Jesuit priest John Ballard (Daniel Craig) into England so he can murder Elizabeth. The goal of the plot is to replace Elizabeth with Queen Mary of Scotland and to marry her to Thomas Howard, the duke of Norfolk (Christopher Eccleston), the leading Catholic noble in England. It’s a wide ranging plot, including Pope Pius V (John Gielgud) and the Spanish Ambassador Álvaro de la Quadra (James Frain), as well as Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the earl of Arundel, and the earl of Sussex. De la Quadra persuades Leicester to convert to Catholicism secretly and support the plot, apparently out of bitterness toward Elizabeth. Walsingham captures Ballard and Arundel (who is hiding Ballard) and finds a letter proposing the marriage between Norfolk and Queen Mary. He uses one of his spies to pass the letter to Norfolk, who signs it, thus providing Walsingham the evidence he needs to arrest Norfolk and Sussex. For good measure, Walsingham also assassinates Gardiner and de la Quadra. Elizabeth pardons Leicester so he can live on as a reminder to herself about how close she came to danger. Then the film ends in 1563 (as we know from an epilogue text that tells us that Elizabeth reigned for 40 more years).

Eccleston as Norfolk

There’s a lot wrong with this part of the film. Most importantly, it merges two separate plots against Elizabeth, neither of which had happened by 1563. In 1569, the Ridolfi Plot (as it has come to be known) involved a scheme conducted by a Florentine banker, Roberto Ridolfi, to marry Mary of Scotland to Norfolk and land Spanish troops in northern England; these troops would depose Elizabeth in favor of her cousin Mary. He won the support of Pius V and Philip II, as well as Mary and Norfolk, but the whole plot was badly planned out, and Ridolfi failed to discover that Norfolk wasn’t even Catholic but rather a committed Protestant. Several people warned Elizabeth about the plan and Norfolk was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. He was executed only in 1572. The Spanish ambassador (who was not de la Quadra, who had actually died years earlier) was expelled from the country. Arundel was arrested, spent time in the Tower, but was released and died peacefully in 1580.

In 1586, a different plot emerged, known today as the Babington Plot, after Sir Anthony Babington, one of the chief figures in it. The Jesuit priest John Ballard was seeking to free Queen Mary of Scotland from the house arrest that Elizabeth had placed her in, and he sought to use Babington to get in contact with her. Walsingham figured the plot out and allowed Babington to send a letter to Mary, who responded with a letter authorizing the assassination of Elizabeth. Walsingham used this letter to persuade Elizabeth to execute Mary for treason. Ballard and Babington were executed in such a brutal fashion that Elizabeth agreed to allow a less gruesome execution for the others implicated in the plot, although Mary’s execution also proved a disaster for Elizabeth’s reputation.

Bishop Stephen Gardiner died before Elizabeth even became queen, and de la Quadra died years before either plot. Leicester was never involved in any plot to murder Elizabeth because he was always a supporter of her, and he never became a Catholic. In the film, Ballard gets very close to Elizabeth before a distraction forces him to flee; in reality he got nowhere near the queen.

So the film has basically taken the Ridolfi plot and the Babington plot and just mixed them together. Both involved freeing Mary of Scotland, but the Ridolfi plot involved her marriage, while the Babington plot did not. Pius V and Philip II were involved in the Ridolfi plot, whereas Philip never committed to the Babington plot, and there is no evidence that Pope Sixtus V was involved in it at all. The Ridolfi plan was aimed as militarily deposing Elizabeth, not assassinating her, while the Babington plot involved assassinating Elizabeth but never got close to her. Walsingham was not involved in thwarting the Ridolfi plot at all, and used the Babington plot to entrap Mary, not Norfolk.

So while the first plot thread, about who will marry the queen, is basically accurate but oversimplified, the second plot thread, about efforts to kill her, is badly garbled history, and basically false in the facts it presents. However, the film does manage to tell a coherent story that is true to some of the spirit of Elizabeth’s reign. And it’s the film that brought Cate Blanchett to the attention of American audiences, which is definitely a big mark in its favor.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth is 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.

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.