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We know humans are complex. And yet, Tudor women have been reduced in popular culture to heroines, victims and villains. I’m tired of reading about the strong, gender-defying Elizabeth I, the submissive pliancy of Jane Seymour or the bad-tempered ambition of Bess of Hardwick. In reality, Tudor women were far more multifaceted and astute than history gives them credit for.
Why does it matter that we’ve got Tudor women completely wrong? Amid the rise in online misogyny, telling the truth about women of the past matters today more than ever. The picture we hold of that past constructs the sort of present we live in.
History is at its most valuable when it challenges what we think we know. Today’s technology allows historians to access a wealth of resources that would have previously been unimaginable. With more evidence comes a clearer idea of what really happened, and how centuries of grime – particularly on our images of women – have obscured our vision.
In our documentary series How the Tudors Lost Their Heads, Dan Snow and I look at the route to the scaffold of some of the Tudor period’s most important players. Along the way, we uncover some of the blind spots that exist today – ways in which the rendering of women’s lives by generations of largely male historians (plus some prim-minded Victorian ladies) have whittled them down to flimsy cut-out figures.
Take Mary, Queen of Scots. She has been thrust into the “weak, hysterical” category for whingeing about her conditions in captivity in England over 18 years under Elizabeth I. This is despite the fact that her final letter, written hours before she was beheaded in 1587, displayed an extraordinary defiance, asserting her right to the English crown. What’s more, a secret cache of her letters – only recently discovered and deciphered – reveal that she was a shrewd analyst of international affairs. In these 57 notes, decoded by cryptographers using codebreaking techniques and computer algorithms, Mary demonstrates acuity and insight, even identifying a mole in the French embassy.
Men in history, even those who die brutally, tend to be remembered for their achievements in life. But Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, is chiefly known for her brutal end; after her sons made enemies of Henry VIII, an apprentice executioner took three blows to displace her head.
Margaret, however, was more than simply a victim. In life, she had pulled off a staggering reversal of fortune. She was orphaned at four years old, her father and brother were executed by successive kings, and she was a widow by her 30s. But she successfully petitioned for the restoration of her family’s lands and title. Henry made her Countess of Salisbury in her own right, with all the legal status of an earl.
And then there’s Anne Boleyn. She’s often characterised as a seductive femme fatale, whose overweening ambition led to her fate. But a narrative poem by Lancelot de Carle, the secretary to the French ambassador in England, produced two weeks after her death, testifies how Boleyn asked the crowd not to believe the charges and that they recognised her to be guilt-free.
Relevant paragraphs were removed from most copies and there’s reason to believe that Henry VIII’s government, attempting to cast Anne as a villain, suppressed the evidence. And it worked: it created the version of Anne handed down to posterity.
Contemporary misogyny seeks to replicate the old stereotypes. Yet the tools of the present now allow us to see the women of the past more clearly than ever before. As a more accurate history is revealed to us, my hope is that it will alert us, in turn, to the clichés that exist about women today.
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