Women in Tudor politics

Women in Tudor politics

Family factions at court

While previously overlooked, we now understand the importance of the role of women in Tudor politics. This article explains why

Nicola Clark

 

Noblewomen had a greater role in Tudor politics than is often appreciated. Experts at survival, negotiating the competing demands of their families and queen, ladies-in-waiting were serious political players.

Women could not hold office in Tudor England: there were no female chancellors, privy councillors, or Justices of the Peace. For much of the twentieth-century, historians therefore assumed that women were outside of the sphere of political power. However, work by David Starkey and others made it clear that informal personal relationships were often the key to political influence. Historians like Olwen Hufton and Barbara Harris argued that this meant women were more important than previously thought. They were often ‘the oil on the wheels’ of these relationships. Taking a female perspective also sheds a different light on court ‘factions’, or political interest groups, which are often perceived to have been grouped around families.

Ladies-in-waiting

Noblewomen with positions in the queen’s household were especially close to the centre of power. Service to the queen came in two forms: ‘ordinary’, which meant live-in, daily attendance, and ‘extraordinary’, which meant temporarily covering for somebody else’s absence, or a noblewoman who had ‘popped in’ while in town.

There were usually around twenty women in ordinary service at any one time: between two and four ‘great ladies’ of high status, seven or more ‘ladies’ or ‘ladies and gentlewomen’ and between two or four chamberers, women of lower status whose job it was to look after the queen’s rooms and belongings. As the sixteenth century progressed, it became normal for there to be around six ‘maids of honour’ — usually young, adolescent women in their teens. These girls were under the care of the ‘mother of the maids’ a more mature woman, often a former maid or lady-inwaiting, who trained, supervised and protected the maids themselves. Extra noblewomen would also be drafted in for ceremonial occasions like coronations.

Role

With only twenty women in the queen’s service in a royal household that could number more than five hundred, ladies-in-waiting were conspicuous. Their role was wide and varied. In essence, they were there to serve the queen in whatever way she required. This could include personal service, such as helping the queen to get dressed and undressed, taking care of her clothes and jewels, keeping her chambers clean and attending her wherever she went and whatever she was doing, from banquets with foreign ambassadors to sharing her bed at night. While elsewhere these might be considered menial tasks, at court these were duties of great honour.

Female courtiers, then, needed a large and diverse skillset. They had to be able to talk with a variety of people of different genders, statuses, and nationalities, meaning that language skills were an advantage. They needed to be able to dance, sing and play musical instruments, to ride and hunt and be able to stay up late and get up early repeatedly without flagging. Evidence from the Lisle letters in the mid-1530s shows that the concept of the virtuous female courtier was taken seriously. Lady Lisle was advised to make sure that her daughters hoping to enter the queen’s service were:

‘Sober, sad, wise and discreet and lowly above all things, and to be obedient…and to serve God and to be virtuous, for that is much regarded, to serve God well and to be sober of tongue.’

Loyalties

It is usually said that women were placed in court service by their families, who wanted eyes and ears near the monarchs. Women in service might well see and hear all sorts of important information that they could then pass on. They also had access to areas of the court which were barred to most or all men: only the queen’s women would enter her bedchamber. Women therefore functioned as barometers of the queen’s mood, and might be her confidantes, or be used by her to dispense patronage, or even to send out specific political messages. Natalie Mears has described how Elizabeth I used her ladies-in-waiting to give out false information about her willingness to marry, which affected international diplomacy.

Sometimes, however, a woman’s family interests and those of her mistress might clash, and she had a difficult choice to make about her loyalties. In the 1530s, Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk, was one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting. Anne Boleyn, however, was her niece-by-marriage, and the rest of the family, including Elizabeth’s husband, were supporting Anne’s bid for the throne. Elizabeth had to decide where her loyalties lay, and what was safe for her to do.

Spies behind the scenes

On 27 November 1530, Eustace Chapuys, Spanish ambassador, reported to his master the Emperor that the Duchess of Norfolk had sent Catherine a present that enclosed a letter from the king’s ambassador in Rome. Chapuys did not say, and perhaps did not know, whether the letter in question was addressed to the queen or to somebody else, and so we cannot know whether Elizabeth was merely acting as a go-between for an established chain of illicit communication, or whether she was acting on her own initiative. In either case, Elizabeth was clearly giving the queen information about progress in Rome that she did not already have access to: she was spying for her.

This continued over the next six months. At one point, Elizabeth sent a message to the queen to tell her that her opponents were ‘at their wits’ end, being further off from their object than the day they began.’ The queen’s ‘opponents’ were, of course, Anne Boleyn and her supporters: Elizabeth’s own family, the Howards, including her own husband, the Duke of Norfolk.

If, as seems likely, the Duke was leaning on his wife to renounce her support for the queen, she was clearly refusing to do so. This was a direct clash of loyalties. Elizabeth’s actions show that women took advantage of the access that they had on both the king’s and queen’s sides of the household. When Elizabeth was at court during this time, she was lodged on the king’s side with her husband, and this is undoubtedly how she was able to gain the information that she did. Her access to the queen’s chamber then allowed her to pass it on without suspicion.

In May 1531, she was sent home ‘because she spoke too freely, and declared herself more than they liked for the queen.’ Evidently, women’s roles at court were more than simply backing up the family interests, and loyalties could get complicated when courtiers were forced to ‘take sides’ in this way. It might be pertinent to note that Elizabeth absented herself from Anne Boleyn’s coronation in 1533 on account of her support for Catherine of Aragon.

Family factions?

The exploits of the Duchess of Norfolk’s daughter Mary, Duchess of Richmond, also show that for women, being a courtier involved more than simply supporting your family’s interests. For Mary, this is partly because — as must have been the case for many individuals — ‘family interests’ could be many, and varied, and were not necessarily collective. What one individual thought was good for the family might not enjoy a general consensus.

This was the case in July 1536, when an affair and contract of marriage was discovered to exist between Mary’s cousin, Lord Thomas Howard, and her close friend Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s niece. The inevitable investigation found that the couple had ‘loved’ for a year and had been married since Easter 1536. Mary had known about their affair and marriage since it began. A witness stated that Lord Thomas would wait until everybody else had gone and then sneak into Lady Margaret’s chamber while Mary was present. She had therefore acted as the couple’s accomplice and chaperone.

The fact that they had had to sneak around and wait for other people to leave shows that they clearly understood that what they were doing was not altogether a good idea. People with royal blood were not allowed to marry without royal permission: the king would not approve. On the other hand, Mary may have thought that she was doing her family a favour by enabling her cousin to marry into the royal family. This highlights the difficulty with seeing aristocratic families as collectives or ‘factions’ at court. The Howards were such a vast family that it would be naïve to expect them to all hold the same views all of the time.

The power of women

It was not easy to be a woman at the Tudor court. As Henry VIII changed wives, and changed the country’s religion alongside this, these women had to make choices about loyalty that simply didn’t exist before, and would never exist like this again. The actions that they took shaped the nature of change going forward, and those actions were not always on behalf of, or in accordance with, broader family goals or allegiances.

Nicola Clark is senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of Chichester.