30th September 2013
Essay taken from The Wall Street Journal Speakeasy
I seem to have spent most of my life tracing and telling the stories of women in history and now that this long-standing work has become public property with a six-book series and a ten-part television series, it is challenged by people who say, one way or another: “Pull the other one! You know, and I know, that women were doing nothing but being forcibly married and dying in childbirth and anything that says they were doing more than this is feminist special pleading.”
Sometimes the criticism is more polite than this, (and sometimes more abusive) but it is always misguided, depending on a traditional account of history that has, for centuries, ignored, neglected, or misdirected the story of women.
Why this should be, is explained by how history is written, how an account emerges after a number of exploratory, almost experimental versions. The first written description of any woman in the medieval period will, most probably, have been written by a man trained by the Church, writing a record of the important events of the times to be kept at his monastery.
An example of this is the so-called Croyland Chronicle, which was produced intermittently in the Benedictine Abbey of Crowland in Lincolnshire from 655 to 1486. Much of what we know of the times of my series “The White Queen” comes from the Croyland Chronicle. But how much did the author of the Chronicle actually know? And how much did he know about women?
The Chronicle was written by a series of clerks, trained and educated and living inside a monastic celibate. All women that the chroniclers approved were apparently dutiful, obedient to male control, modest, fertile, and holy. Even women who were personally unknown to the medieval historians, Queens of England that they had never even seen, would be allocated these virtues in the historical record. It was simply how a church-trained man would think of a “good” woman.
One such is Margaret Beaufort, who appears in the series “The White Queen” as a driven, ambitious matriarch in the making. To me, a modern-day historian, she seems to be a girl driven from an arduous childhood into a grandiose ambition – that her son should become king of England. I anticipate and find traces of her struggle against the society she was born in, her determination to engage in politics, even in warfare. Despite the enormous difficulties in her way, she plotted rebellions, forged alliances and even married the head of the greatest private army in England to put her son on the throne. When I look at the accurate record of Margaret Beaufort’s deeds – I see a woman of enormous determination, ambition, drive and killer instinct.
But to the historians which she hired, to the chroniclers who benefited from her sponsorship of the church, to the Archbishop who wrote the eulogy at her funeral, she was a woman near to sainthood, who lived entirely for others, who married three times but never for lust, who had been blessed by good fortune but never believed it would last, whose ambition was a holy “calling,” and whose tremendous victory was God’s choice for England.
Of course, a woman who clearly did not fit the medieval stereotype of what makes a “good” woman was described as ambitious, out of the control of men – disobedient to her husband or father, perhaps even sexually promiscuous, selfishly trying to get power and wealth. This is how the chroniclers at the time saw Margaret of Anjou – the queen of the House of Lancaster, married to Henry VI.
Just as with Margaret Beaufort, I am struck by how the facts of an individual woman’s life can be composed to support a view of women generally. To the chroniclers she was a “she-wolf” – a woman who escaped from the control of her invalid husband to take to the battlefield, who marched with an army of men, a woman who tried to become Regent of England. They called her unnatural, and unwomanly. If a woman even spoke up for herself she was disobeying the natural order of the world.
“Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” 1 Timothy, 2:11.
All chronicles share this bias, those few private letters and briefing documents that survive are also mostly written by men, who, understandably, had no analysis of the gender bias of their world. They describe a world in which women are passive, silent and often barely present. They ignore or deny the events where women were powerful, active and commanding. And so we a have an event like the “Buckingham Rebellion” against the newly crowned Richard III – the single greatest challenge to his reign. It takes its name from the unlucky military commander, the Duke of Buckingham. But at the time it was called the “Beaufort Rebellion” because everyone knew that the mastermind had been Margaret Beaufort. When her son took the throne after her second well-plotted attempt – at Bosworth Field – she made sure that the historians wrote her name out of the history of treasonous rebellions. She was not going to be associated with anything as unladylike as a battle or as unwomanly as rebellion.
Finding and telling the true stories of these women is like a piece of detective work. I have to see the traces of 500-year-old conspiracies, and speculate about whispers from lips that have been dust for centuries. I read the chronicles and when they remark that a woman was not present I wonder what she was doing – traveling? In confinement? Escaping? In hiding? When they say that a woman was present at a battle I do not assume that she was accidentally caught up in violence – I wonder if she led her army to the front? When the chronicle says that she is married, I check to see if her parents are dead, and then I wonder if this marriage can have been her free choice, and if so, what she hoped to gain?
Just like the medieval chroniclers, I bring my own prejudices about women to the work – of course I do. But I don’t believe that I fall into the trap of special pleading against the facts. I believe that women are active brave and enterprising, and when I look for these women, I find them in the historical record – and I find many of them – just where history left them.