Edward I's Succession Decision

From The Literary Review, this review of a book coming out later this month, Daughters of Chivalry: The Forgotten Children of Edward I. Catherine Hanley likes the book (mostly):

Edward I and his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, were at the sharp end of medieval infant mortality statistics. Eleanor gave birth to at least fourteen children, only to see five of her daughters die in their first year and – perhaps even more agonisingly – three of her sons reach the ages of five, six and ten before they, too, perished.

The question of how parents dealt with such staggering loss has been the subject of much enquiry; of equal interest but less well researched is how the remaining children dealt with the loss of siblings, and how this affected their relationships with the other survivors. The career of Edward and Eleanor’s only surviving son, the future Edward II, is familiar, but, unsurprisingly, less is known of the five sisters who lived to adulthood: Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth. Daughters of Chivalry is thus a welcome addition to the shelves of medieval history.

Hanley notices one gap in the comprehensive survey of the lives of these five women:

One conspicuous omission is an examination of the question of female succession. It is mentioned in passing that Eleanora was second in line to the throne, but more consideration could have been given to just how significant this was, particularly since the author is keen to stress throughout the book that medieval royal women had political duties as well as childbearing ones.

After the death of ten-year-old Alphonso in 1284, the sole surviving son was a four-month-old baby. Given the high rate of mortality among his children, Edward I was in danger of becoming the first English king for 150 years to die without a male heir (in the twelfth century the death of Henry I without a legitimate son had led to two decades of civil war). This left him with a critical decision to make, and in 1290 he decreed that if this eventuality came to pass, the crown would pass not to his brother, Edmund, but to his eldest daughter and her heirs. This enshrined the precedent of succession via the female line, which would have significant consequences for the English crown in years to come.

I don't think I've ever read about that precedent in any discussion of Henry VIII's decisions about the succession. Usually, the medieval precedent cited is Queen Matilda in the twelfth century (the crisis and civil war cited above after Henry I's death). 

Edward must have felt confident that his daughter would be acceptable as a Queen Regnant--and he and his father Henry III had faced great rebellion among the barons and nobles of England (Simon de Montfort et al). Edward's beloved Queen Eleanor of Castile died in 1290--thus this decision about the succession--and he did not remarry until 1299. His second wife, Margaret of France, bore him two more sons (Thomas and Edmund), so the succession seemed more secure. Nevertheless, Edward I had made the decision in 1290 that if his only son Edward of Carnarvon died before he died, his daughter Eleanora would reign. Of course, Edward II did survive his father and that's another story.

Portrait Miniatures in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Eras

Timed perfectly for the opening of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London called "Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver", The Literary Review has posted this review of a biography of Nicholas Hilliard, one of the great portrait miniaturists of the Elizabethan era:

According to Elizabeth Goldring in this engrossing biography, the earliest recorded use of the term ‘miniature’ in English literature comes in Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance The New Arcadia, written in the early 1580s. Four ladies bathe and splash playfully in the River Ladon, personified as male, and he responds delightedly by making numerous bubbles, as if ‘he would in each of those bubbles set forth the miniature of them’. It’s a pleasing image, calling to mind the delicacy and radiance of the works of Nicholas Hilliard, the leading miniaturist (or ‘limner’) of the Elizabethan age, whom Sidney knew and with whom he discussed emerging ideas about the theory and practice of art. In some ways, a miniature had the ephemerality of a bubble, capturing an individual at a fleeting moment in time, often recorded in an inscription noting the date and the sitter’s age. Yet it also made that moment last for posterity, as shown in this sumptuous book, where Hilliard’s subjects gaze back at us piercingly from many of the 250 colour illustrations.

Miniatures were often referred to as ‘jewels’, a term that captures their glittering beauty and the way that they were worn on the body, often in cases embellished with gemstones. Within the pictures also, Hilliard paid minute attention to costumes and jewellery, developing a new technique of simulating gems by ‘laying a ground of real silver, burnishing it to a shine, and then, with a heated needle, modelling the jewel out of stained resin’. Magnified images illustrate this in astonishing detail. Goldring also provides fascinating information about Hilliard’s techniques: playing cards were used as backing for miniatures; pigments were often mixed in mussel shells; paint was applied with a fine brush made of squirrel hair; silver was treated with garlic juice to guard it against tarnishing. . . .

Read the rest here.

Of Isaac Oliver, the NPG website offers this note:

Oliver was born in Rouen and came to England with his family as a Huguenot refugee. He learnt the art of miniature painting from Nicholas Hilliard but unlike Hilliard, and as a result of his understanding of continental art, he used light and shade (chiaroscuro) to develop a softer, more illusionistic style. Oliver was appointed miniaturist to Anne of Denmark, wife of James I, and later to their eldest son Henry, Prince of Wales.

Crime, Torture and Punishment in the 16th Century

Peter Marshall reviews this new book on torture and execution as practiced in Nuremburg, Germany for the Literary Review:

This is a marvellous book about a fascinating subject. It is, in a sense, a portrait of a serial killer. Frantz Schmidt was employed between 1578 and 1618 as the official executioner (and torturer) of the prosperous German city of Nuremberg. Over the course of his career he personally despatched 394 people, and flogged, branded or otherwise maimed many hundreds more. His life is also a tale of honour, duty and a lasting quest for meaning and redemption.

The penal regimes of pre-modern European states were harsh and violent, heavy on deterrence and the symbolism of retribution. Towns such as Nuremberg needed professional executioners to deal with an ever-present threat of criminality through the public infliction of capital and corporal sentences. Punishing malefactors with lengthy periods of incarceration was an idea for the future, and would probably have struck 16th-century people as unnecessarily cruel. Methods ranged from execution with the sword (the most honourable) to hanging (the least), and from the relatively quick and merciful to the dreadful penalty of staking a person to the ground and breaking their limbs one after the other with a heavy cartwheel. This was not a world of mindless violence: the punishments Schmidt imposed were carefully prescribed by the city authorities, down to the number of 'nips' (pieces of flesh torn from the limbs with red-hot tongs) convicts were to receive on their way to the gallows.

This gruesome regimen can be reconstructed because, over the course of 45 years, Schmidt kept a personal journal - not a diary in anything like the modern sense, but a usually terse and impersonal chronological record of all the punishments he had inflicted, including some details of the crimes behind them. The journal is not a new discovery (a version of it was printed as long ago as 1801), but Joel Harrington, drawing on a previously unused, near-contemporary copy, is the first historian to realise its full potential. The source lends itself to a social history of crime and punishment, but Harrington also attempts something more interesting and ambitious: to enter imaginatively into the world-view of its compiler and construct a rounded portrait of a personality and a life. Cleverly, he weaves Schmidt's own words wherever possible into his historical narrative, placing them in italics to let us identify what he has reported and what the author has conjectured or imaginatively inferred (invariably pitched pleasingly between excessive caution and undue presumption). It is a virtuoso performance. Harrington is able to draw on a range of ancillary documents, but this is the best example of making a single, apparently unpromising historical source sing since Eamon Duffy breathed life into a set of dusty English churchwardens' accounts in The Voices of Morebath.

Macmillan, the U.S. publisher, provides some excerpts and other material here. A couple of years ago, I corresponded with Professor Frank W. Barlow of Mount Holyoke College, who is at work on a biography of Richard Topcliffe. I really doubt that Topcliffe would have kept such an impersonal journal of his work of pursuing and torturing Catholic priests. From all that I've read of Topcliffe he took personal satisfaction in capturing priests like St. Robert Southwell and may have even enjoyed inflicting pain.

A Tudor Biographer Reviewing Another Tudor Biographer's Book

Linda Porter and Anna Whitelock wrote biographies of Mary I, Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon's daughter and first Queen Regnant of England. Now, in the current issue of the Literary Review: Porter reviews Whitelock's new book about Elizabeth's Bedfellows: An Intimate History of the Queen's Court:

What Whitelock gives us is a new account of Elizabeth's reign, seen largely from the queen's personal perspective. It is a memorable portrait, though not one that unquestioning admirers of the Virgin Queen may find palatable. The Elizabeth who emerges from these pages is a thoroughly unpleasant woman when stripped of her undoubted statecraft. She was endlessly demanding, vacillating, self-absorbed, vain and occasionally capable of cruelty rivalling that of her father, Henry VIII. Her treatment of the women of her household does not make pleasant reading. To enter her service was, effectively, to give up your own life in order to dance attendance and cater to her every whim. Most of her women were married, but their own lives and families were always subordinated to the needs of the queen. If they became pregnant, they remained at court until shortly before their babies were due and were seldom allowed to stay away for more than a month after the birth. Ladies who married secretly or became pregnant out of wedlock felt, like poor Katherine Grey, the full force of the monarch's wrath. Their treatment grew worse with the passing years, as age withered the toothless and bald queen, despite the best efforts of her ladies to present her to the world as the red-headed vision of perfection she had been in her twenties. Even her memory began to play tricks with her after the Earl of Essex's execution. Sic transit Gloriana.

Of course, Elizabeth was not ultimately the brute her father had been. Acknowledgement of her devoted women's sufferings may often have been belated, but she could be tender and concerned for their recovery. The deaths of Kat Ashley and Blanche Parry, who had been with her since infancy, struck her hard. And Whitelock provides some nice details that allow us to see a more human side of Elizabeth. She was afraid of the dark and suffered from insomnia. Mornings were not her best time, but the whole process of dressing her and making her up provided her ladies with an intimacy simply not afforded to her male councillors. These women really did know everything about her bodily functions, dealing with such things as the lengths of linen used as sanitary towels and the special belt that held them in place. That such accessories existed at all appears to give the lie to the suspicion that Elizabeth never menstruated. It was not a topic her women would ever have talked of openly, and they, like Elizabeth, took such secrets with them to the grave.

It was this proximity to the queen and the unrivalled access it brought, rather than any financial reward, that made what to us seems like a life of self-sacrifice so attractive to high-born ladies. But did intimacy truly carry influence? Elizabeth actually reduced the size of the Privy Chamber when she became queen and made it very clear that her women were not to interfere in politics or have any political role. This did not stop everyone, from their husbands and suitors to foreign ambassadors, courting them, in the hope that they would be a means of gaining the queen's favour. The advancement of one's own family was everything in 16th-century England and the women of her bedchamber, who shared her life and slept beside her, forfeited much in pursuit of this wider goal. As Anna Whitelock notes, Mary Sidney left the court feeling aggrieved and neglected. She lost her looks and three small daughters when in Elizabeth's service, at the same trying to manage the family estates at Penshurst Place in Kent while her husband served the Crown in Wales and Ireland. It was a high price to pay for being one of Elizabeth's bedfellows.

Linda Porter's next book, Crown of Thistles: The Fatal Inheritance of Mary Queen of Scots will be in print in August--will Anna Whitelock review it?