The Sooner Disquieted
Pegasus Books, 2017 Historian Elizabeth Norton begins her thought-provoking new book
The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women: A Social History with a promise of helpful syncretism: through examining the lives of half a dozen Tudor-era women of different backgrounds, social standings, and personal missions, she will arrive at a composite picture of what life for all women was like in 15th and 16th century England. This approach is further underscored by her appeal to Shakespeare's oft-quoted “Seven Ages of Man” bit from
As You Like It; these are the stages by which Norton will approach her composite woman – “infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, the justice of the peace, the ageing retiree, and, finally, the infirm elder.” She looks at a handful of Tudor women as their lives reflect as many aspects of Shakespeare's ages as the records will show. Despite the somewhat lurid title, the book is soundly based on extensive research into said records; the UK title,
The Lives of Tudor Women, is not only grander but more accurate.The focal-point women occupy many different points on the Tudor spectrum. There's Cecily Burbage, the wet-nurse of Henry VIII's sister Elizabeth; there's Elizabeth Barton, the peasant woman-turned-prophetess who was lauded as “The Holy Maid of Kent;” there's Katherine Fenkyll, the forthright widow of a London draper; there's outspoken provincial religious reformer Joan Bocher; there's Protestant merchant's wife Rose Hickman, who lived in exile during the reign of staunchly Catholic Queen Mary I; and there's Queen Elizabeth I herself, followed from her youth to the pinnacle of her power to the public spectacle of her old age. Norton wrote very shrewdly about Elizabeth in her previous book,
The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor; her newest book's final three sections breathe with a confidence born not only of that wealth of experience but also with a certainty that's necessarily missing from most of her accounts of her other characters. The main reason for this difference is the obvious difference between Elizabeth and most of those other women: she had power, and they didn't.And even in Elizabeth's case, the power she had was circumscribed to a far greater extent than fans of the later “Gloriana” legends like to admit. Elizabeth could indulge in flashes of her infamous Tudor temper when the mood suited her, but her councils were the councils of men, and her struggle to remain unwed was conducted at least as often in whining, pleading tones as it was in the barking tenor of actresses like Bette Davis or Judi Dench. She characterized herself as a devoted housewife to the nation, a sometimes foolish housewife, and she wasn't above simulated fainting to sway the sympathies of her onlookers. For her entire reign, she existed as a freakish anomaly whose own declarations on the subject of matrimonial future were openly doubted, as Norton put it:
The most prominent Tudor woman of them all had, at least so far, always resisted marriage. Elizabeth I had swept to the throne at the age of twenty-five amid public celebration, having passed through much danger. She was determined to maintain her position, adeptly batting away offers of marriage that would have reduced her authority. In February 1559, Parliament formally petitioned her to marry and provide England with a king to share her rule. Her response, although courteous, was surprising. She intended, she said, to remain 'a virgin pure until her death'. No one believed her: the queen must have a husband.
And if this kind of straining and dissimulating and contorting was so often necessary for the Queen of England, how much more exponentially must similar compromises have ruled the lives of all other women? Norton quotes from the very popular Homily on Matrimony that was read from pulpits in churches large and small throughout the Tudor era, a discourse that refers to women as “the weaker vessel” and describes them as basically a lower form of primate than men, only roughly capable of approximating human behavior, and then only under close male supervision. “The woman is a weak creature,” the Homily thunders, “not endued with like strength and constancy of mind: therefore they be the sooner disquieted, and they be the more prone to all weak affections and dispositions of mind, more than men be; and lighter they be and more vain in their fantasies and opinions.”This is the tremendous cultural momentum that crushes all of Norton's key players, though Norton herself might wish it weren't so. She tells the stories of her characters with tremendous energy, wonderfully fleshing out the details of how non-royal women made their way through life in a world entirely, legally dominated by men. Women in 
Tudor England had virtually no rights, almost no recourse to the law, and no agency except the piecemeal and largely unofficial kinds they could wrest from the men around them through hazy tradition or exemptions bought at great personal cost (widows could often prosper and go about their business, for instance, because they were seen – and encouraged themselves to be seen – as now desexualized, third-gender beings). The daily condescensions and routine physical intimidations endured by women under radical Islamic societies in the 21st century would have been immediately recognizable to women under Elizabethan rule, however beautifully male Elizabethan poets might have lied about that fact.It was of course this dichotomy that sparked the sharpest outrage in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own nearly a century ago, when she consulted Trevelyan's august social history and confronted the stark realities of the subject. “Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction,” she wrote. “In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.”We don't know how many of Norton's principal characters were ever locked up, beaten, or flung about the room. We know from many accounts that casual violence was sometimes exercised against even high-born women by members of their own family as a means of compulsion (the infamous horse-whipping scene in Trevor Nunn's 1986 film Lady Jane was decried by many viewers at the time as a bit of cartoonish violence, but we have every reason to believe such scenes were commonplace in homes grand and small in the time Norton examines). We know that for most women in Tudor England, just as for most women in every society in the history of the world, Taliban-reality was the norm, not the exception.
Norton gives gripping glimpses into the private lives of women like Margaret, Lady Hoby of Harkness, or Rose Hickman, or Lady Ann Clifford – Tudor-era women who kept diaries that actually survive in whole or in part. And she clearly has great affection for Katherine Fenkyll, describing the peak of her life, after the death of her second husband, in warm tones. Katherine took over her late husband's draper business and made it prosper, and in 1516 she was invited to one of the Drapers' Company's famous guild feasts. “As she dined at the top of the table, surrounded by those familiar with her over a lifetime of trade, Katherine Fenkyll could reflect on her success,” Norton writes. “Although sometimes a wife, she was primarily a draper, her identity tied up in the management of her business and affairs.” It's a wonderful image, but it partly, perhaps involuntarily, obscures the fact that unlike all the other drapers at that feasting table, Katherine was there by sufferance, every bit the anomaly Queen Elizabeth had been. It was custom (and a doubtless formidable personality) rather than law that granted her a seat at that table.Norton's book shifts its focus prismatically across dozens of lives, not just her main figures but many others playing roles large and small. The story of the nursemaid Cecily Burbage shifts naturally into the story of the Tudor ruling family and its women; the story of Tudor nobility's ladies-in-waiting shifts naturally to the lives of courtier-wives like Elizabeth Boleyn, the mother of Anne Boleyn. The story of religious agitator Joan Bocher flows to the stories of religious firebrands like Anne Askew and reform-minded Tudor royal ladies like Anne Boleyn, Jane Grey, and Catherine Parr. These transitions are crucial to the mechanics of a book like the one Norton has chosen to write, a crowd-biography in which the reader is expected to keep track of ten or fifteen people through forty or fifty years of story. And the transitions read with expert smoothness:
By 1526, Katherine Fenkyll had reached the pinnacle of her career – and was close to the end of her life. At around the same time, Elizabeth Boleyn was just beginning to notice her comfortable married life change. More dramatically still, the career of Elizabeth Barton, serving woman to Thomas Cobb of Aldington in Kent, was about to explode on an international stage.
The story of Elizabeth Barton, the “Holy Maid of Kent” who attracted crowds of thousands in 1525, is in some ways the most challenging of the mini-narratives Norton has to tell, and it's another instance in which her reading of the facts subtly lends more agency to the woman in question than she likely had. Norton wants to characterize Barton as a genuine charismatic, but there's at least as compelling a case to be made that she was from the beginning the pawn of Richard Masters, a scheming liar Norton refers to as a “well-read parson,” and “a curious local gentleman” named Edward Thwaites. It's true that Barton's frenzied proclamations grew too outlandish for the comfort of her handlers (“This was the crux of the matter,” Norton writes, “Since God had the power to act upon the world, he might – just might – be speaking through a simple serving maid”), but her notoriety in the first place was entirely the stage-managed creation of men around her.Joan Bocher, the tireless talker who dominates large sections of the middle of the book, is a more fruitful subject for Norton's research, mainly because she embodies the religious upheaval of the times:
Religious reformers during Henry VIII's reign strongly promoted the publication of the scriptures in English, since they wanted to strip away the centuries of Church interpretation that, in their eyes, had come between the Word of God and their faith. For women in particular, who were rarely taught Latin and almost never Greek, an English Bible shone a light into hitherto dark areas. For the first time, a woman with a reasonable level of learning could read and understand the scripture in which she was raised, and some reveled in the experience. Joan Bocher was one such woman.
Norton follows Joan through the repeated troughs of her dissenter's life, her stints in prison, her long periods “laying low,” and the cumulative account is oddly endearing. But the book's most complete and winning portrait is that of Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the newly-restored and immensely powerful Duke of Norfolk. She was a part of the Court as a lady-in-waiting, first for Elizabeth of York and then of Catherine of Aragon, and sometime around 1498 she married the wealthy arriviste social climber Sir Thomas Boleyn, moving with him to Hever Castle (which “then, as now, sat deep in the wooded countryside”) in 1505 and beginning the family that would later become one of the most notorious in English history. “Thanks to her father's eminence,” Norton writes about Elizabeth, “she punched above the weight of a mere knight's wife, being accorded the rank of baroness at the coronation … For all the wealth of the Boleyns, the former Lady Elizabeth Howard had married down.” The glimpses of this friction in her life are fascinating; they allow Norton to match her extensive research and her reconstructive imagination very effectively.She's likewise very effective at her canniest storytelling decision: periodically throughout her text, she inserts self-contained digressions on all aspects of a woman's life in Tudor times. And while it's true that in purely rhetorical terms these inserts sometimes feel like interruptions, the material they contain is uniformly fascinating. About the brutal penal tortures of the era, for instance, we learn a bit about the most gruesome of them all:
Hanging and beheading were among the more merciful forms of execution on offer in Tudor England. The most horrifying, contemporaries agreed, was a form of death that was a Tudor legal innovation: boiling alive. This punishment was so gruesome that, at one execution, when the condemned man 'roared mighty loud' a number of pregnant women in the crowd fell sick or swooned at the sight.
The combination of the multi-part main lives of the book – our small central cast of characters going through the rough equivalent of Shakespeare's stages – and all these fleshing-out digressions builds into something truly impressive, as broad and complete a picture of what it was like to be a woman in Tudor times as readers are likely to get with the documentary evidence we currently possess. The rock-bottom bleakness of that experience is admittedly sometimes blunted in the pages of The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women, but then, it was sometimes blunted for the women themselves in their day-to-day lives – by their friends, by their children, by the men who loved them, and, sometimes, by their fractious sisterhood itself.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston. He reviews for The National, The American Conservative, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.