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Agony and adventure: the hidden histories inside women's diaries
From meditations on grief to musings on motherhood, diaries can reveal a great deal about women’s lives over the centuries as well as the momentous occasions they lived through. Sarah Gristwood turns the pages of some of history’s most fascinating – and overlooked – examples...
On the evening of 7 May 1945, Lancashire housewife Nella Last and her husband, Will, gathered around the radio with their neighbours. They agreed that if the announcer said the king was to speak, they knew that the big day had come at last. When, instead, the announcer, “said so unemotionally that tomorrow was to be VE Day, and that Churchill was to speak at three o’clock”, the group just gazed at each other. They felt, recalled Last in her diary, “no pulse quicken, no sense of thankfulness or uplift, of any kind”. But despite the sense of an anti-climax, Last still felt that she had to find a way to mark the occasion – no matter how small. “I rose placidly and put on the kettle and went through to prepare the salad. I looked on my shelf and said: ‘Well, dash it, we must celebrate somehow – I’ll open this tin of pears’, and I did.” The end of the Second World War in Europe, and the way it was celebrated, is widely documented. But Nella Last’s vivid description shows what a gift we have in women’s diaries: their immediacy, their sense of what it was like being there, and their insight into what the diarist was thinking, rather than what the weight of hindsight would tell them to do. Yet, despite their intrinsic value to historians, women’s diaries remain a largely untapped resource – something that motivated me to compile a new anthology, Secret Voices, bringing together more than 1,200 diary entries written by women all over the world. Diaries: a fresh perspective on history Indeed, diary entries written on the same day as major events can put what we’ve traditionally thought of as being ‘history’ into perspective. As Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, wrote in February 1942: “It is now half-past seven in the morning. I have clipped my toenails, drunk a mug of genuine Van Houtens cocoa, and had some bread and honey.” She described feeling, at that moment, “enormous faith and gratitude that life should be so beautiful”, despite the fact that she had to report to the Gestapo that same day, and would die in Auschwitz the following year. It risks stereotype to suggest female diarists are more attuned to the immediacy of daily life than their male counterparts. The pragmatism of Nella Last’s pears – the ridiculous, rather than the sublime – has many an echo in the diary of Samuel Pepys. Perhaps it is risky even to suggest that women are more willing to be frank about their failure to see the wider perspective. “Oh, what a wretch I am! If I haven’t forgotten to put in the grand news!! SEBASTOPOL HAS FALLEN!” wrote the educational reformer Lucy Cavendish upon hearing of the Allies’ victory during the Crimean War in 1855. More than 60 years later, in 1918, the novelist Virginia Woolf noted wryly that there were three facts on her mind: talk of peace, a visit to London’s 1917 Club and the breaking of her spectacles, though the first was, after all, “the most important of the three”. An overlooked resource A few women’s diaries have been widely studied: Nella Last’s journals were adapted into the 2006 ITV drama Housewife, 49; Etty Hillesum’s contemporary, Anne Frank, is a household name; and Virginia Woolf is one of many professional writers noted as much for her life-writing as for her other forms of literature. Read more | Censoring Anne Frank: how her famous diary has been edited through history But overall, we are still playing catch-up, and women’s diaries are still largely ignored in comparison to those of their male counterparts. Indeed, women make up less than a third of the contributors to one of the most popular anthologies of diaries, and less than a fifth in another readily available volume – all this despite the fact the private, unassuming nature of the form has traditionally been viewed as being particularly suited to women. This past lack of study is now being corrected to a significant degree, but much of the astonishing material in female diaries remains overlooked. When we begin exploring such sources, however, we find that our view of women in the past becomes both more vivid and more nuanced. Women from different walks of life Women’s diaries offer extraordinary stories, reflecting many different walks of life. Ada Blackjack, an Indigenous Alaskan woman recruited to take part in a 1921 expedition to Wrangel Island, off Siberia, describes her experiences as its sole survivor. Regency governess Ellen Weeton laments being thrown onto the street by her husband and denied access to their daughter. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of aviator Charles Lindbergh, records her agony following the kidnap and murder of her baby son. Other diaries are given extraordinary poignancy by the hindsight of history – particularly those written during times of conflict. The First World War diarist Vera Brittain, for example, describes feeling elated as she prepares to meet her fiancé coming home from the front in 1915, only to be stopped by a telegram announcing his death. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/EU006377-2-799ee61.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Ada Blackjack with her son, Bennett, in 1923. The Indigenous Alaskan woman survived for two years alone on a remote Arctic island – an experience she documented in her diary (Photo by TopFoto)" title="Ada Blackjack with her son, Bennett, in 1923. The Indigenous Alaskan woman survived for two years alone on a remote Arctic island – an experience she documented in her diary (Photo by TopFoto)" /> A few women have seen their diaries entering the public domain by virtue of their political position. Lady Bird Johnson, wife of Lyndon B Johnson, writes of seeing John F Kennedy’s presidential cavalcade driving into Dallas on 22 November 1963, and how she first thought that the sounds of gunshots were firecrackers being let off by the crowd. A few years later, she introduced a published version of her diaries by stating that – after unexpectedly becoming America’s first lady – she stood in a unique position and wanted to “preserve [history] as it happened”. Although Lady Bird’s notability came while serving in a conventional female role – that of a wife – some diarists have achieved political prominence in their own right. The Labour MPs Barbara Castle and Oona King, for instance, both had their diaries published shortly after leaving frontline politics. Others again have found their potential developing within the traditional female role of a nurturer or caregiver. In fact, there could be a whole book containing nurses’ diary entries alone, such as those of Cynthia Asquith, who discovered that she could achieve so much more as a First World War nursing volunteer than as a socialite. 5 female diarists and their views on hidden aspects of history Sei Shōnagon, Japanese poet Long before the diary format was familiar in the western world, Heian period Japan (AD 794–1185) saw an explosion of what was in many ways a form of diary writing. One of its most notable exponents was poet and court attendant Sei Shōnagon (c966–1017/1025), who commented on the manners and mores of the era, as well as the natural world around her. “On the third day of the Third Month I like to see the sun shining bright and calm in the spring sky,” she writes in one entry. “Now is the time when the peach trees come into bloom, and what a sight it is!” Lady Margaret Hoby, Protestant writer An Elizabethan gentlewoman reared in the strict Protestant tradition, Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633) is the first woman known to have written a diary in English. Unlike her better-known contemporary Lady Anne Clifford – whose diary reflects her emotional life in a way that is more recognisable today – Margaret Hoby’s journal instead concentrates on her spiritual observance. Nevertheless, it gives us an invaluable insight into her daily routine, as well as her relationship with her husband: “After private prayers I kept all this day [30 December 1600] with Mr Hoby, who was very far out of temper with a looseness, fearing ague.” Charlotte Forten, anti-slavery activist A teacher living in Massachusetts before the American Civil War, the diaries of Charlotte Forten (1837–1914) actively explore the everyday difficulties she experienced as a black woman. On 17 January 1857, for instance, she describes going for dinner with two friends and talking about the “wrongs and suffering of [their] race”. She then pledges to do “all the very little that lies in my power, while life and strength last!“ Forten kept true to her word: during and after the war, she helped to educate freed slaves from the South, and became heavily involved in organisations such as the National Association of Colored Women. Hannah Cullwick, maid who defied convention Victorian maid-of-all-work Hannah Cullwick (1833–1909) kept a diary at the urging of the man she called ‘Massa’ – London civil servant and philanthropist Arthur Munby. Details of the pair’s bizarre sexual relationship, which saw Cullwick donning all manner of costumes and guises, runs side by side with a rare account of ‘downstairs’ life. “I made my mind up that it was best & safest to be a slave to a gentleman, nor wife & equal to any vulgar man,” she writes in an entry from 1873. “I can work at ease. I can go out & come in when I please, & I can look as degraded as ever I like…” Nella Last, observer of the Home Front In 1966, Lancashire housewife Nella Last (1889–1968) submitted her final diary entry to the Mass Observation social research project. The journal, which spans 27 years and runs to some 12 million words, is notable for offering an insight into the life of an ‘ordinary’ British woman, as well as the author’s emancipation during the Second World War, when she worked for the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS). “I reflected tonight on the changes the war had brought,” Last writes on 14 March 1940. “[My husband] told me rather wistfully I was ‘not so sweet’ since I’d been down at the [WVS] Centre, and I said: ‘Well! Who wants a woman of fifty to be sweet, anyway? And besides, I suit me a lot better!’” Being frank about physicality Historical diaries can be surprising for all sorts of reasons, but sometimes their surprise lies in their sense of familiarity today. At the dawn of the 19th century, the Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry wrote about the difficulties of trying to balance her work with her family life, as well as her struggles to bond with her newborn baby. On other occasions, their surprise – or perhaps their shock – instead lies in the merciful unfamiliarity of experiences that must have loomed in the minds of many. I once remember reading novelist Fanny Burney’s 1811 account of undergoing a mastectomy without anaesthetic, and wondering whether I could get out of the library without throwing up on the floor. The privacy of diaries has enabled women to speak with a frankness we do not find in other sources – about, for example, their own physicality. In one entry, Virginia Woolf mentions having been unable to write for what she describes as the “usual reasons”, but which had since “duly delivered themselves” – a reference, one presumes, to her menstrual cycle. Similarly, the 18th-century diarist Hester Thrale Piozzi describes her experiences of going through the menopause, calling it the “Second Critical change” in her life after the menarche: “I believe my oldest Friend is at last going to leave me… nor do I, nor did I then feel any other very material Alteration from the coming or going of Youth.” A 14-year-old Anne Frank writes about her body with even more openness: “Each time I have a period – and that has only been three times – I have a feeling that in spite of all the pain, unpleasantness, and nastiness, I have a sweet secret, and that is why, although it is nothing but a nuisance to me in a way, I always long for the time that I shall feel that secret within me again.” Such accounts serve to remind us that although the records of women from the past regularly dwell on their physicality – from the assaults of witch-hunters to discussions of a queen’s beauty or fertility – women’s views about their own bodies have often been written out of history. A place for feelings and secrets Women have used diaries for other forms of release, too. Sometimes they have been a place to express feelings – anger, resentment, frustrated ambition – that would have been considered unacceptable in the author’s day. Both the landowner Anne Lister (recently the subject of the BBC drama Gentleman Jack) and author Beatrix Potter wrote their diaries in code. But while Lister’s lesbianism was an obvious reason for secrecy, Potter’s youthful despair – before the success of her books gave her a measure of independence – was likewise a transgression in its own way. A disproportionate number of women’s diaries have been written at a time of distress: the scientist Marie Curie is just one woman who briefly found relief in her journal after the death of her husband, Pierre. Meanwhile, the shock that author Mary Shelley experienced following the death of her premature daughter is evident, given the brevity of the entries: “Find my baby dead... a miserable day – in the evening read Fall of the Jesuits.” Read more | Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: the birth of a gothic monster A number of youthful diaries end on marriage, or motherhood. “With this day my journal ends, for I have now a living one to keep faithfully, more faithfully than this,” wrote Fanny Longfellow, wife of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, following the birth of the couple’s first child in 1844. In this case, however, the lure of the diary proved too strong, and Fanny later began a new series of journals on the progress of her children. An eye on posterity There are obvious reasons why the diaries of women such as Fanny Longfellow should have been preserved for future generations. Indeed, looking back through the archives, the wives and female relatives of famous men feature in the known chronicles of female diarists with disproportionate frequency. Dorothy Wordsworth’s description of dancing daffodils, after all, made it into her brother William’s most famous poetry. One question that is begged by Fanny Burney’s vivid account of her mastectomy is: what actually counts as a diary? It was written as a journal letter, covering several months, and sent to her sister Esther. It nonetheless had the stamp of immediacy – like the diaries of, say American pioneer women travelling west, though these were often written for the benefit of the relatives they had left behind. But there is surely a distinction between the diary or journal and the memoir, written perhaps years later with a view to posterity. It would be naive to assume that the apparently private form of the diary was not sometimes written with one eye on its future publication. Virginia Woolf speculated what kind of a book her husband Leonard would make of hers after her death, while the French essayist Anaïs Nin regarded her diaries as her life’s work and made sure she was photographed storing them in a bank vault for safekeeping. It would be similarly naive to ignore the huge role the editor of a published diary may have played, such as Princess Beatrice censoring the diaries of her mother Queen Victoria and destroying the originals. Historically, the ability for a woman to both keep and preserve a diary was restricted to the professional and upper classes. This in turn has impacted the racial diversity of diaries available to us, though considerable work is being done to address that today. Indeed, the last few decades have not only seen the writings of noted anti-slavery activist Charlotte Forten becoming more widely accessible, but the diaries of other key figures – such as free black woman Emilie Davis and former slave Harriet Jacobs – made available in bookshops as well. But if the profile of prominent diarists is changing, so too is the nature of the diary itself. Taking photos on mobile phones and even writing social media posts – though primarily a public medium, rather than a private one – can be considered akin to keeping a diary. One way or another, the creation of women’s diaries is an ongoing story, as will our study of them be too. This article first appeared in the April 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
“Haunted, in more ways than one”: A historian’s review of The Crown S6, part 1
Historian Sarah Gristwood reviews the first episodes of the royal drama’s final season. Centring on the final months of Diana, Princess of Wales, part one invokes an eerie blend of memory and invention, and plays with our knowledge of what lies ahead…
As actor Claire Foy said in the Netflix teaser for the sixth and final season of its flagship drama, the crown is a symbol of permanence. She, in her role as the young Elizabeth II, meant the crown she embodied, the one on her head – but you could say the same of The Crown too. A final sixth season, taking the narrative into the 21st century, was originally on – then off – then on again. It is now being shown in two separate chunks; and rightly so, because although the first four episodes are about the crown and its putative future, in personal terms they are all about Diana, Princess of Wales. Even the evocative poster image shows Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana – alone but always on view – perched on the end of the springboard aboard the Al Fayed yacht in the summer of 1997, seemingly contemplating a dive into an uncertain future. These first four episodes cover a little more than eight weeks, and with such a tight focus its central performance is all-important. Debicki does not disappoint. Her voice – that voice we all remember from the real Diana’s Panorama interview – is almost spookily right. Images we all recognise are recreated with astonishing accuracy (though the famous landmines walk has been transposed from her Angola visit to her Bosnia one in August 1997). But in those very memories lies the challenge – that we’re coming up to, as the New York Times put it, “one of the most analyzed periods in recent British history”. And as they watch this season, many viewers (in the UK at least) will have an alternative narrative running simultaneously in their head as they match up the drama with their own recollection. Read more | The Crown S6 part 1: the real history in the royal drama The Diana of Debicki and writer/creator Peter Morgan is a woman coping with the chaotic circumstances around her –though nods are made to reports which described, instead, a woman adrift, vibrating distractedly between her anti-landmine crusade and a life of luxury. Much in the first two episodes seems almost too much like the story we already knew; though Morgan imaginatively explores also the relationship between Diana and Dodi Fayed (appealingly played by Khalid Abdalla). Dodi’s father Mohamed (Salim Daw) is cast as the ambitious fixer – something of a deus ex machina, indeed – portrayed as pushing his son towards Diana. It’s in episode three that things really get inventive. At the Ritz in Paris, just hours before their death, Diana and Dodi are shown having a profound, insightful conversation which allows them each to recognise past mistakes, and resolve on a path ahead. As promised, the fatal crash is not seen on screen, though heard nonetheless. But it’s in episode four – ‘Aftermath’– that the controversial question of good taste presents itself most clearly. Read more | The Crown season 6 cast vs their real-life counterparts “Uncomfortable viewing” When Peter Morgan first gave us his take on these events, in his feature film, The Queen, 17 years ago, William and Harry (played here by Rufus Kampa and Fflyn Edwards) were kept discretely out of view. Now, by contrast, we see Prince Charles (Dominic West) coming in to tell his sons of their mother’s death, and the boys’ reaction. It makes seriously uncomfortable viewing even for us – and excruciating, surely, for anyone who had actually been there. Diana does indeed, as already reported, appear as a ghost to both her former husband and her mother-in-law (Imelda Staunton, once again). With Charles, Diana’s tone is rueful but affectionate; with the Queen, instructive. Elizabeth II had always, Diana tells her, shown the nation “what it meant to be British”. Now is the moment to prove she could be also “a mother to the nation” as Charles had phrased it, lamenting that the Queen had been unable to be a mother to him. Read more | What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a mother? This season is haunted, in more ways than one. By literal ghosts; by the ghosts of all those other past books, films, documentaries covering these same few weeks; and by the knowledge of what lies ahead (slyly acknowledged from episode one, when the Queen tells Tony Blair – of Diana’s wish for a continued public role – that “it’s hard to be half in anything”, giving shades of Harry and Meghan). And haunted, too, by all of our feelings about Diana, and about the monarchy. The Queen tells the ghostly Diana she has sparked something like revolution. In fact, it proved to be not a revolution, but a much-needed reform. The aftermath of Diana’s death was – as Charles puts it in the series – “the biggest thing that any of us have ever seen”. But lessons were learnt (though the Sussexes have since queried how thoroughly) and history has shown that the popularity of many senior royals bounced back with surprising speed. “A mission statement for the British monarchy” In many ways, this final series of The Crown is a mission statement for the British monarchy. We have Charles bluntly telling his parents they could no longer have it both ways, “being a private family when we want, and a public one when it suits us”. It’s true, and it’s their tragedy. Gyles Brandreth once complained that The Crown was turning the royal family into a soap opera. The easy retort is that they did that to themselves. But that is to ignore the real vulnerable people behind the stories just as surely as did the paparazzi, shown here in all their remorseless brutality. A further six episodes, covering Charles and Camilla’s wedding, and William’s first encounters with Kate, will be released on 14 December (with talk of a prequel to follow). Will this last season help or hurt the reputation of the real monarchy? On the podcast | Dominic Sandbrook on Queen Elizabeth II's century of change Andrew Marr suggested in the Sunday Times that its members should ultimately be grateful to The Crown, for keeping their profile high in ever-less-reverential days. But that is on what one might call a professional level, not a personal one. Dodi’s ghost tells his father we can only heal if we tell the truth. On the evidence so far, it’s debatable whether Peter Morgan’s truth will do anything to heal still-open wounds within today’s divided royal family. Catch up on the real the history behind each episode of The Crown season 5, with our episode guides: The Crown S5 E1: ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’ and a second honeymoon The Crown S5 E2: Prince Philip’s ‘keeper of secrets’ and Andrew Norton’s book on Princess Diana The Crown S5 E3: exiled royals and the al-Fayeds The Crown S5 E4: the Queen’s “annus horribilis” and Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend The Crown S5 E5 real history: ‘Camillagate’ tapes and a “war council” for the monarchy’s survival The Crown S5 E6 real history: the Romanovs’ murder, and Philip’s “spiritual companionship” The Crown S5 E7 real history: the introduction of Martin Bashir, and a royal The Crown S5 E8 real history: Diana’s Panorama interview causes fireworks The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana The Crown S5 E10 real history: the HMY Britannia's final voyage, and a political landslide
Royal sibling rivalry: Henry VIII, Richard III and other monarchs whose fate was determined by their brothers and sisters
Through history, the role of the second or third royal sibling has not always been easy. Here, historian Sarah Gristwood explores 10 of the most famous – and dysfunctional – royal sibling relationships...
In the bad old days of high infant mortality, any royal family needed an heir and several ‘spares’ – north of the border, James V and his daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, are just two of the many British monarchs with elder brothers who died in infancy. William the Conqueror left England to his second son, another William, while the eldest son, Robert, inherited Normandy. Since then, the history of these islands has been littered with famous second – or third, or fourth – royal siblings (or, more specifically, royal sons, since gender continued to trump age right into the 21st century), who for better or for worse have done much to shape the monarchy that we know today. Here are 10 of the most famous... Read more | 'Royal Family’: the fly-on-the-wall documentary the Palace doesn’t want you to see Richard I (1157–99) It wasn’t Richard the Lionheart, but his elder brother, Henry, who was crowned ‘the Young King’ of England, unusually during their father’s lifetime. In the event Henry predeceased his father, but perhaps the fact Richard hadn’t been raised for the job explains why the crusader showed so little real enthusiasm for hands-on rule of England, spending only a few months in the country during his 10-year reign. Richard was himself succeeded by his younger brother, John. Fairly or unfairly, King John has gone down in popular history as a disastrous monarch whose reign was epitomised by his losing the crown jewels in the Wash – but he did inadvertently help to give us Magna Carta. Read more | When and how did Richard the Lionheart die? John of Gaunt (1340–99) By contrast to John I, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster – fourth son of the prolific Edward III – has traditionally been accorded a good measure of respect for the steering hand he kept on the country during the minority of his nephew, Richard II. His harsh fiscal policies, however, made him a particular target of the Peasants’ Revolt – while almost as soon as John himself died, Richard II was deposed by John’s exiled son, the Bolingbroke of Shakespeare’s plays, who took the throne as Henry IV. These were the family divisions that, half a century later, would produce the Wars of the Roses. Richard III (1452–85) The best-known casualty of those wars was of course Richard III, whose death at Bosworth ushered in the Tudor dynasty. Richard was only the fourth son of the York family, but by the time he seized the throne the first, second and third sons were all dead – Edmund killed by the Lancastrians, and George, Duke of Clarence (after plotting against Edward) drowned in the famous butt of malmsey. The grounds upon which Richard took the throne in 1483 – chiefly the supposed invalidity of Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville – are still debated today. So too, of course, is the fate of Edward IV’s sons, the princes in the Tower, and Richard’s role in their possible murder. Either way, Richard – his brother Edward’s most loyal supporter during his lifetime – provides the most dramatic prism through which to examine both the royal sibling bond, and the question of sibling rivalry. Henry VIII (1491–1547) It wasn’t Henry but his elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, who was expected to lead the Tudor dynasty through the 16th century. But Arthur died in 1502 – and if anyone ever forgot that in the glorious early days of Henry VIII’s reign, they had ample cause to remember two decades later, when Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon was endlessly debated, and ultimately declared invalid, on the grounds that she had been his brother Arthur’s widow. Indeed, there has been speculation that Henry’s position as a mere second son – reared with his mother and sisters, while Arthur was sent away to Ludlow – affected his later attitudes, and his infamous marital history. Elizabeth I (1533–1603) Elizabeth was Henry’s second surviving legitimate child; her sister, ‘Bloody’ Mary, Henry’s eldest. But both women accepted that first place in the succession went to their younger brother, Edward VI. After Edward’s premature death in 1553, however, differences between the sisters led to Elizabeth being imprisoned in the Tower, in danger of her life. This was no simple case of sibling rivalry, of course, since religious differences led to real dispute as to whether the Catholic Mary or the Protestant Elizabeth had best claim to the throne. All the same, no one looking for the model of a happy family is ever going to pick the Tudors! Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Elizabeth I Charles I (1600–49) When James VI and I’s eldest son, Prince Henry, died in 1612 of what was probably typhoid, shock waves went through the country. At 18, the vibrant Henry was already the great hope of the Stuart dynasty. His brother Charles, by contrast, was a sickly 11-year-old considered unlikely to survive. Perhaps early insecurities left the adult Charles, as a monarch, particularly susceptible both to the influence of his favourite Buckingham [George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham] and his Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, and to an inflated conception of the monarchy. Elizabeth of Bohemia (1596–1662) It may seem like cheating to list two siblings as separately important, but it’s the descendants of Elizabeth of Bohemia, not of her brother, Charles I, who sit on the British throne today. When Charles I’s eldest surviving son, Charles II, was succeeded by his own younger brother James, the latter’s unpopularity and Catholicism led to his deposition in 1688. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of that year brought in, instead, James’s Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, while the Catholic descendants of James’s second marriage dwindled to the status of pretenders. Anne (1665–1714) When William and Mary died without children, the crown passed to another younger sibling. Mary’s sister, Anne, came to the throne under the Act of Settlement of 1701, which effectively secured the throne to the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty, since it was already apparent that Anne too was unlikely to bear a surviving child, despite 18 pregnancies. Upon Queen Anne’s death the throne was offered to the Elector of Hanover, a grandson of Elizabeth of Bohemia, who became Britain’s George I. He and his Hanoverian descendants would reign, however, on very different terms from those earlier rulers had enjoyed. The stage was set for a modern, ‘constitutional’, monarchy (a position confirmed more than a century later when George’s great-great grandson William IV – succeeding his elder brother George IV – ceded yet further royal powers). George V (1865–1936) You might think that in the modern age the importance of the royal second sibling is outdated – we are, after all, past the days of high infant mortality. King George V was born the second son of the future Edward VII, but his elder brother, Albert Victor, known as Prince Eddy, died of pneumonia in his twenties, while his grandmother, Queen Victoria, was still on the throne. By that time Eddy had been linked to the Cleveland Street scandal, which involved a homosexual brothel, amid wider concerns over his character and abilities. (He has, however unconvincingly, even been identified as Jack the Ripper). His brother George, by contrast, was a formidable figure who, besides taking on Eddy’s engagement to Princess Mary of Teck in 1917, changed the name of the royal family from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. George VI (1895–1952) The first half of the 20th century saw two second sons accede to the throne – both important in shaping the form of the present monarchy. George V was of course succeeded by his eldest son, Edward VIII, the future Duke of Windsor, but Edward’s reign lasted less than a year, and he was never crowned. When he abdicated in order to marry the divorced Wallis Simpson, his younger brother was forced to step up to the plate. Diffident and reluctant – we’d come a long way from the power-hungry days of the medieval monarchy – George VI nonetheless saw the country through the dark days of Second World War. That example of dutiful service would model an ideal for his daughter, Elizabeth II. This article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2018
Free-spirited drama or fake news? How The Crown morphed from ‘safe’ territory to controversy
Drama, comedy, tragedy – even catharsis, the release of emotion. And that’s just from real-life footage of the actual royal family. Oh yes, and then there’s also the fifth season of The Crown. As the Netflix drama tackles new territory, in the 1990s and well within living memory, historian Sarah Gristwood considers the practical and ethical questions around on-screen portrayals of the recent royals…
As The Crown moves into the 1990s, it was always going to have a hard row to hoe. The events of those years are at once too shocking and too familiar. What seemed pleasurably entertaining when the events depicted were safely in the past seems tone deaf once they come within the collective living memory. And that was even before a sinkhole opened up right in front of the plough; the Queen’s death in September 2022, and the transformation of Prince Charles (previously broadly viewed as fair game) into His Majesty King Charles III. Read more about the history behind each episode of The Crown season 5: The Crown S5 E1: ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’ and a second honeymoon The Crown S5 E2: Prince Philip’s ‘keeper of secrets’ and Andrew Norton’s book on Princess Diana The Crown S5 E3: exiled royals and the al-Fayeds The Crown S5 E4: the Queen’s “annus horribilis” and Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend The Crown S5 E5 real history: ‘Camillagate’ tapes and a “war council” for the monarchy’s survival The Crown S5 E6 real history: the Romanovs’ murder, and Philip’s “spiritual companionship” The Crown S5 E7 real history: the introduction of Martin Bashir, and a royal education The Crown S5 E8 real history: Diana’s Panorama interview causes fireworks The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana The Crown S5 E10 real history: the HMY Britannia's final voyage, and a political landslide Why are some people criticising The Crown’s new season? Everyone has joined in the chorus of disapproval. Former prime minister John Major proclaimed his outrage at scenes in the first episode which have him (played by an oddly-cast Jonny Lee Miller) listening, reluctantly, to Charles (Dominic West) suggesting his mother should abdicate in his favour. (Typically for The Crown’s use or misuse of factual detail, the Sunday Times poll prompting the suggestion was not invented – but the presentation of it was skewed.) In a rare moment of political unity, Tony Blair (who succeeded Major as PM in 1997) has likewise declared the portrayal of his relationship with the royals as lacking any validity, and former minister Michael Heseltine declared it was “important” that they spoke out. Actor Judi Dench called for a disclaimer at the start of the series saying it is “fictionalised drama”. The closer it comes to the present day, she wrote in an open letter to The Times, “the more freely it seems willing to blur the line between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism”. The newspaper themselves weighed in, with a prurience not altogether sanctioned by their own past reporting of the Royal Family. The series has become “a monstrous perversion of itself”, the Daily Mail declared. The debate has become as much the story as anything we see on screen. The party line from those involved in the production is that yes, of course there are challenges. Discrepancies in appearance between actor and character stand out more clearly, when we all have the reality lodged in our mind’s eye. The wave of opprobrium itself has made us less willing to suspend our disbelief. But, so show creators say, recent events have only increased public interest in the royal family; and in any case, showing the characters as human only increases public sympathy. Hmmm. Maybe. Of course, the fact that so many of the leading characters are still visible and vulnerable puts fire in the belly of this controversy. It ups the ante, exponentially. At what point does story become the comparatively safer history? The Walter Scott Prize for Written Historical Fiction defines the genre as anything set 60 years before publication; by those standards the first season of The Crown, kicking off in 1947 and shown 2016, is safely within the category. But we’d have to be watching Season 5 in the 2060s for the same cordon sanitaire to apply. The issue of ‘fake news’ There is however, another, broader issue; not entirely related to the fact that the events portrayed took place so recently. An issue about the relation of historical fact and fiction. At what point does free-spirited drama tip over to fake news – or false history? The rights and wrongs of what Antony Beevor called “histotainment” was widely debated regarding, for example, The Tudors – though no-one from Henry VIII’s court was in a position to be hurt. While this season of The Crown is arguably trespassing not only against history but against common humanity. The War of the Waleses – obviously the main plot line for a season covering the 1990s – is of course a matter of extensive public record; but The Crown’s carefully precise recreation of the notorious Panorama interview with Princess Diana (a startlingly convincing performance from Elizabeth Debicki) has to be seen in view of Prince William’s expressed hope it would never again be seen. Another major plot line is the friendship between Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) and Penny Knatchbull (Natasha McElhone) – who would indeed be one of only thirty mourners invited to Philip’s funeral last year. But in exploring its implications for Philip’s relationship with the Queen (a correctly downbeat performance from Imelda Staunton, The Crown must juggle the tempting opportunities for psychodrama with what history records as an enduringly successful royal partnership. On the podcast | Are period dramas damaging history? Fern Riddell and Nicola Tallis discuss issues of accuracy and ethics raised by recent historical dramas, including The Crown and The Lost King Years ago, for BBC History Magazine, I interviewed Michael Hirst, creator of The Tudors, who pointed out that his series had attracted a whole new, youthful, audience to history. It is indeed the principal argument for “histotainement”. There can hardly – can there? – be a comparable need to provoke interest in the present royal family. But actually, there is real concern that – for young viewers, viewers abroad, whose awareness of the British royals may outrun their accurate information about them – The Crown could affect perceptions, in a way damaging to the monarchy. And the series itself, with its forensic and all-too-convincing attention to visual detail, does blur the distinction. Thus episode four of season five, ‘Annus Horribilis’, takes the imaginative leap of recasting 1992 as the year when the Queen was forced to acknowledge she’d ruined the life of her sister Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville) by forbidding her match with Peter Townsend (a cameo from Timothy Dalton). But it ends with a photo of the real Townsend and the real Princess. That represents an implicit promise of documentary accuracy which the episode has surely failed to keep. It’s highly unlikely that, as on screen, the undoubted horrors of 1992 included Prince Charles telling his mother that if social services had come calling on the House of Windsor, he and his siblings “would have been thrown into care – and you’d have been thrown into gaol.” Or indeed Princess Margaret telling her sister that several members of the family, herself included, would have been happy to set the fire at Windsor. This season is at its best representing the quieter, more domestic moments. It’s when attempting to recast dramatic big events that it wobbles, ironically. Read more | What was the Queen like as a mother? There is perhaps another historical saga going on here – the slide, down the years, of the royal family from iconic figures, revered for their symbolic value, towards the characters in a soap opera. The Crown is an observer of that process; but it is also a significant player in it. And we stand at a moment when the pageantry of the Queen’s funeral and the King’s accession has done something to restore that symbolic status. No wonder this latest fictional debunking is being taken so seriously.
Annus Horribilis: what happened in the Queen’s horrible year?
In a speech by the Queen on the 40th anniversary of her succession, she described the year 1992 as her "annus horribilis" – or horrible year. Historian Sarah Gristwood explains what happened in Elizabeth II's life in 1992
In the three decades since Elizabeth II’s famous speech, the phrase annus horribilis has passed into popular currency. Perhaps – at a time the monarchy’s popularity and relevance seemed at a low ebb – the fact that the phrase endured shows that the monarchy still retained its pulling power. Or perhaps the fact the Queen chose Latin, a dead language, to describe 1992 showed the very reason people were finding the monarchy less relevant. “One’s Bum Year” was how The Sun newspaper translated the words, with deliberate crudity. You couldn’t make up the saga of that year. Luckily for the media, they didn’t have to. For the British newspapers locked into a vicious circulation war, it was fortunate, and perhaps even now for the producers of season five of The Crown, due to debut shortly. But even a bald chronicle of events of 1992 shows how the blows kept coming, in a volley as relentless as the fusillade of gunfire on a Balmoral shooting day. Read more about the history behind each episode of The Crown season 5: The Crown S5 E1: ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’ and a second honeymoon The Crown S5 E2: Prince Philip’s ‘keeper of secrets’ and Andrew Norton’s book on Princess Diana The Crown S5 E3: exiled royals and the al-Fayeds The Crown S5 E4: the Queen’s “annus horribilis” and Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend The Crown S5 E5 real history: ‘Camillagate’ tapes and a “war council” for the monarchy’s survival The Crown S5 E6 real history: the Romanovs’ murder, and Philip’s “spiritual companionship” The Crown S5 E7 real history: the introduction of Martin Bashir, and a royal education The Crown S5 E8 real history: Diana’s Panorama interview causes fireworks The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana What happened to the royal family in 1992? January 1992 saw the Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, and his Duchess Sarah, telling the Queen their marriage was effectively at an end; characteristically, she asked them to wait before making any definite decision. But later that same month, the Daily Mail published photographs of Fergie (as Sarah Ferguson was nicknamed by the tabloids) with American millionaire Steve Wyatt. Things looked up briefly in early February as the country marked the 40th anniversary of the Queen’s accession, the BBC’s documentary Elizabeth R attracted a record-breaking audience of around 18 million. In the programme, she memorably stated: “I think as a human being one always has hope.” But celebrations of the anniversary had been generally muted; plans for a commemorative fountain in Parliament Square were abandoned at the Queen’s own request. Soon afterwards, the Queen’s statement about hope began to look almost ironic. In February, a visit by Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, to India saw the princess photographed ostentatiously alone in front of that icon of romance, the Taj Mahal. In March it was announced the Duke and Duchess of York would indeed legally separate; in April Princess Anne’s divorce from Captain Mark Phillips became final. These separations added up to a body blow for an institution that had, since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s days, presented itself as a family monarchy. The marriages of three out of four of the Queen’s children had now, historically, gone down in flames. Read more | Philip Murphy on The Crown: “If scholars can’t write accurate histories of the Queen’s reign, drama is what we’ll continue to rely on” More seriously, also in June came publication (and serialisation in the Sunday Times) of biographer Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story; a damning portrayal of what Diana saw as an unfeeling husband and an uncaring monarchy. The Queen and Prince Philip held a crisis meeting with the Waleses at Windsor and urged greater efforts, but those moves foundered on Diana’s reluctance – and on mounting evidence that she had collaborated with Morton to tell her story. August 1992 saw the Daily Mirror publishing photographs of the Duchess of York by a swimming pool, having her toes sucked by her ‘financial advisor’ John Bryan. Caught accompanying her daughters on the annual royal holiday in Balmoral when the story broke, Fergie had to face the Queen’s cold anger before fleeing south. Worse for the royals was shortly to come when, just a few days later, the Sun published the ‘Squidgygate’ tapes – conversations between Diana (‘Squidgy’) and her friend James Gilbey, in which she complained of the Windsors: “After all I’ve done for this fucking family…” All-out war? The three-year-old tapes emerged now in the context of a tabloid circulation war: The Sun were striking back at the Mirror (which, in turn, would soon retaliate with the transcript of a deeply embarrassing conversation between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles). But what’s significant is the climate that permitted that to happen. Magazines abroad were even less restrained than the British press in their coverage; freelance paparazzi were using ever more extreme methods to try and entrap Diana, in particular, into an undignified reaction – the so-called lucrative ‘loon shot’. There were more challenges on the world stage: a visit to Australia by the Queen and Prince Philip in February 1992 had seen a less enthusiastic reception than had greeted them on previous trips. A state visit to Germany in October – where the memory of RAF wartime bombings was still fresh – saw eggs lobbed at the Queen as she toured Dresden. When Charles and Diana visited Korea in November, the press dubbed them ‘the Glums’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/11/GettyImages-1233282733-adac9bc.jpg" width="683" height="1024" alt="Queen Elizabeth II flanked by her husband Duke of Edinburgh (C) and the Lord Mayor of Sydney Frank Sartor (R) unveils a commemorative plaque at the Town Hall in Sydney on February 20, 1992 during a state visit to Australia. (Photo by Stephen DUPONT / AFP) (Photo by STEPHEN DUPONT/AFP via Getty Images)" title="AUSTRALIA-BRITAIN-QUEEN-ELIZABETH II" /> On the home front, the monarchy was facing tough questions; as far back as the spring, there had been gloomy discussions about the long-term future of the monarchy. There was talk about the Queen’s exemption from paying tax, about the extensive royal family supported by the Civil List – and that was even before the Windsor fire. The 1992 fire at Windsor Castle On 20 November 1992, the Queen’s 45th wedding anniversary, fire from a workman’s light ripped through a hundred rooms of Windsor Castle: historic home of the monarchy, uninsurable and uninsured. When Elizabeth II arrived to view the damage, her devastation was plain to see. As always, she played down her feelings, but in a letter to her mother said the latter’s support that day had made all the difference to her “sanity”. The trauma was compounded when the press – and a public in the grip of a recession – rejected the Conservative government’s instinctive declaration that the nation would pay the multi-million pound repair bill. Even newspapers from whom the royals might once have expected support joined the critical voices. The Mail wrote that “the impression given is of an out-of-touch Government pandering to the wealthy insensitivity of an out-of-favour Royal Family.” In The Times, one columnist voiced the feelings of many: “While the castle stands, it is theirs, but when it burns down, it is ours.” Calls for the Queen to pay repair bills on what (not altogether accurately) was seen as her own home were linked to suggestions that she should pay taxes. In fact, that question was one to which many in the Palace had already proved receptive. Talks with the Inland Revenue had begun in February. Now, some four months before any announcement had been expected, came news that the Queen and Prince Charles would indeed pay tax on their incomes from the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall. Elizabeth II would, moreover, take over financial responsibility for many of her family members formerly subsidised from public funds; and open the state rooms of Buckingham Palace to the public to help with the Windsor repair costs. The Queen's Annus Horribilis speech It was only four days after the Windsor fire that the Queen appeared in London at a Guildhall lunch to mark her 40 years on the throne. In a voice husky from a heavy cold – made all the worse by the smoke at Windsor – she told her fellow guests that 1992 “is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an Annus Horribilis.” (The correspondent was later revealed to be her former assistant private secretary, Sir Edward Ford. The term is a riff on the ‘annus mirabilis’, wonderful year. But in the 1990s the royal family weren’t having many of those.) Reporting the speech the next day, the Telegraph declared that “the Queen broke with tradition yesterday by publicly admitting the human frailty of members of the Royal Family.” Though “no institution” could or should expect to be free from scrutiny, she had said, “Scrutiny… can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humour and understanding. This sort of questioning can also act, and it should do so, as an effective engine for change.” Change would be a recurring theme, an often-heard word, in her speeches ahead. The year, sadly for the royals, was not yet over. In December 1992, Buckingham Palace announced “that with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate”. The statement declared that “their constitutional positions are unaffected”, but that opened the window in a whole new vista of problems. Bookmakers William Hill narrowed their odds regarding Prince Charles being forced to renounce his position as heir to the throne. The Queen and Prince Philip were said, as well they might, to be ‘saddened’ by the situation. There was better news when, only days later, Princess Anne married Commander Timothy Laurence at Crathie Church in the town of Crathie, near Balmoral (the Church of Scotland, unlike that of England, allowing remarriage after divorce). But the ceremony was almost excessively low-key, the Queen being one of only 30 guests regaled on a reception of sandwiches. The Queen’s Christmas message in 1992 declared that though, like “many other families, we have lived through some difficult days this year”, she would meet the challenges of the new year with “fresh hope”. Even that message, however, brought trouble in its wake when The Sun leaked a transcript of the speech in advance of the broadcast. Uncontroversial though the Queen’s words might have been, the breach of protocol was an affront; and for the first time the palace sued for, and received, damages for breach of copyright. (The money was given to charity.) Of course, the royals’ problems continued through the 1990s; and other years in this 21st century have been described as anni horribiles. But 1992 had been pivotal – a benchmark against which to measure future difficulties. Small wonder that – just 30 years on – there’s establishment concern about its traumas being revived in the controversial season five of The Crown. Sarah Gristwood is the author of Elizabeth: Queen and Crown and The Tudors in Love.
Why the real Beatrix Potter was more than her children’s tales
As a new exhibition at the V&A Museum in London celebrates the life and inspirations of the beloved children’s author, Sarah Gristwood considers how the much-forgotten elements of Beatrix’s Potter’s work make her so extraordinary…
Everyone – surely – knows Beatrix Potter? The creator of characters such as Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck, and Tom Kitten and Pigling Bland? Her creations are familiar, but as is often the case the real person behind them is rather surprising. This month, a new exhibition at the V&A, ‘Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature’, is celebrating the beauty and accuracy of those countless, eponymous, drawings. But it also pays tribute to her whole, wider, legacy. Beatrix Potter’s life fell into three distinct phases, and the ‘little books’ that made her famous occupied only the shortest of them. Born in 1866, she spent more than 30 years in education, as a Victorian young lady dominated by her family. Perhaps unexpectedly, as she was later famous for her stories of the countryside, she was forced to spend much of her life in city streets. “My brother and I were born in London because my father was a lawyer there,” she wrote in her later life, “but our descent – our interest and our joy was in the north country.” Her salvation was the long summer holidays her family spent first in Scotland, then in the Lake District. A sheltered childhood She and her brother Bertram would travel north and back with a menagerie of pets – a jay and an owl, a hedgehog (called Mrs Tiggy), rats and bats, and a whole succession of rabbits, which Beatrix used to take out on a dog lead. “Even the usually idiotic hutch rabbit is capable of developing strong character, if taken in hand when quite young,” she wrote. But though devoted to her pets she was quite unsentimental, even boiling the skeleton when an animal died to study bone structure for her drawings. As a 15-year-old, she wrote in her journal: “The chestnut horse is disposed of at last. Papa sent Reynolds to the Zoological Gardens to enquire the price of cat’s meat: £2 for a very fat horse, 30/-[shillings] for a middling one, thin ones not taken as the lions are particular.” That coded diary, which Potter kept from her mid-teens until the age of 30, often recorded feelings of despair. (The code was not cracked until the 1950s, years after her death.) As she grew up in the restricted world of an unmarried daughter at home, she wrote of how she feared the future, how she longed to be “underground”. “Only a year,” she once wrote, “but if it’s like the last it will be a lifetime… There is nothing to be done, I must watch things pass.” She wrote of how only painting could help “when I have had a bad time come over me”. In the 1890s, Potter’s interest in the natural world turned to serious research in mycology – though, she wrote, “of all hopeless things to draw, I should think the very worst is a fine fat fungus”. She tackled the vexed question of how fungi reproduce themselves, formulating the theory that they spread through an underground form, a mould. On 1 April 1897, the prestigious Linnean Society of London recorded a paper being read: ‘On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae’ by Miss Helen B Potter (Beatrix’s full name). The paper was sponsored by George Massee of Kew Gardens since, as a woman, Potter could not present it herself; though well received it was not then published. Her accurate drawings, however, are still admired by scientists. Though some of her conclusions, inevitably, have now been superseded, in 1997 the Linnean Society acknowledged that she was “treated scurvily”. But Potter’s real problem was that life in the family home was still a constrained one. She was in her mid-thirties before, in 1901, she paid for The Tale of Peter Rabbit to be printed privately. The birth of the famous Tales The Tale had begun life as a picture letter, sent to the son of her old governess. Though the mischievous Peter has always been the public’s favourite character, he was no favourite of Potter. “At one time I almost loathed Peter Rabbit, I was so sick of him”, she later wrote. Soon, however, a publisher brought out a commercial version of Peter’s Tale. It had to be reprinted six times within the space of a year, and other books quickly followed: The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, of the hedgehog Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, of Two Bad Mice and Mr Jeremy Fisher. The vast majority of her famous ‘little books’ would be written over a comparatively short period – the next dozen years. Potter would be passionately involved in every aspect of her stories, from the layout of the books to the materials used for the merchandise. They were accompanied by everything from rabbit dolls to wallpaper, slippers to stationery; “sideshows’, as she called them, that were as successful as the books themselves. Her flow of stories had brought her increasingly close to her publisher Norman Warne, and in July 1905, despite her parents’ disapproval, they agreed to marry. But it was not to be. Just a month after the engagement, Warne died, leaving Potter once more a ‘spinster daughter’ at home – facing “painful unpleasantness” from her parents about her work – although she was almost 40. Finding solace in the Lake District Potter had, before Warne’s death, begun negotiating to buy Hill Top farm in the Lake District, in the village of Near Sawrey where she had spent family holidays. The weeks she was able to snatch up to spend there, away from her parents, became a lifeline as, for the next eight years, she continued to produce her twice-yearly books. The house and village – and the animals she knew there – featured regularly in her stories. “It is in here I go to be quiet and still with myself”, she once told a young relative. And it was in the Lakes that the next great phase of her life would begin. In October 1913 Potter married the Lake District solicitor William Heelis, who had helped with her continuing purchases of property in the area. “He is 42 (I am 47) very quiet – dreadfully shy, but I’m sure he will be more comfortable married,” she wrote in a letter to her cousin Fanny. “We have every prospect of happiness – if it pleases Heaven.” Happily, it did – despite Potter’s evident qualms. A relative described Beatrix and William as two horses in front of the same plough. They settled into Castle Cottage, just across a meadow from Hill Top, which was kept as a writing retreat, a repository for all Potter’s treasures – and it remains a place of pilgrimage for Potter fans today. By this time in her life, she had already begun to produce books less frequently, and more reluctantly. Now the flow dwindled to a trickle, as other interests evidently came to the fore. The recently-released 1921 census lists ‘Helen Beatrix Heelis’ under the profession of ‘farmer’. “Somehow when one is up to the eyes in work with real live animals it makes one despise paper-book-animals,” she wrote. She was immersed in the practical business of farming; the “horrid slaughter” of the turkeys; crops and cost; knowing her sheep and the fells on which they grazed “like a shepherd”. She became a breeder, judge, and conservator of the tough Herdwick sheep, and a famous local figure in her well-worn tweeds. She also, in the 1920s and 30s, became a passionate defender of the Lake District, which was threatened with extensive development for holiday homes. Working together with the National Trust, which had been founded in 1895, she was able to buy and to preserve some of Britain’s most spectacular scenery, from the dramatic beauty of Tarn Hows to the brooding mystery of Troutbeck. “It seems that we have done a big thing”, she wrote, after purchasing the huge Monk Coniston estate to leave to the Trust in her will, on the understanding they would give her half the cost once they could raise the money. She bequeathed the Trust, in the end, more than 4,000 acres – some 15 farms, forests and houses. It is a vital part of her legacy. An enduring legacy But interest in her other world, the world she created, never died away. More than 150 million copies of Beatrix Potter’s books have been sold; they’ve been translated into more than 35 languages, from Latin to Lowland Scots; while screen versions of Peter Rabbit keep on coming. And she herself, though she may have stepped back from the books’ production line, never ceased to inhabit the world of her characters, often writing to young fans with the continuation of their stories. In the 1920s (as we know from the 2020 TV film Roald & Beatrix: The Tail of a Curious Mouse) a young Roald Dahl was just one of the admirers who travelled to meet her at her Lakeland retreat. A hitherto unseen letter in the V&A exhibition, to another child, has Squirrel Nutkin writing to Old Brown Owl requesting his tail back… only to be told crossly that Owl has eaten it, and it nearly choked him. That letter displays not only the way in which her characters continued to live for Potter, but the lack of sentimentality that came from her observations of the natural world. Read more | From Austen & Brontë to Woolf: literature’s forgotten female friendships Alongside the sheer naturalism of the animal drawings, the ‘little books’ breathe another kind of almost brutal reality. Think of Peter Rabbit, told not to go into Mr McGregor’s garden: “Your father had an accident there – he was put into a pie.” Jemima Puddle-Duck is rescued from the fox, but the dog rescuers themselves gobble up her eggs. Little Pig Robinson sobs with terror on a ship’s deck when he realises just why the cook brought him on board. Beatrix Potter’s work takes us into the terrors and harsh realities of that world of childhood. Perhaps that’s why it still feels fresh and urgent. Beatrix Potter often described herself as a child who never grew up – who never ceased listening to the fairy voices she heard coming from the hills and fells. When she died in 1943, she left instructions that her ashes should be scattered in a secret location, on the slope above Hill Top where her creation Jemima Puddle-Duck had managed to take flight. (She’d been, she said, like Jemima, flapping around the village of Sawrey.) The V&A exhibition, ‘Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature’, aims to celebrate all the many ways in which she related to the natural world – as artist and naturalist, farmer and conservationist, humourist and dreamer. At a time when we are all – individually and as a society – exploring that relationship, perhaps the multi-faceted nature of her approach is what still makes her so fascinating even today. A new exhibition, Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature, opens at the V&A on 12 February 2022
Elizabeth Woodville: Edward IV’s controversial queen consort
Could she have saved her sons from Richard III? Did she mastermind an uprising against Henry VII? How did she react to the death of the princes in the Tower? Sarah Gristwood unpicks the mysteries surrounding Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s controversial queen...
Why did Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage to Edward IV appal so many people? When, in the autumn of 1464, Edward IV informed his councillors that he had made a secret marriage, his choice of bride – Elizabeth Woodville – went against all the conventions of his day. Kings were supposed to marry in order to cement a foreign alliance – Elizabeth would be the first English queen since the Norman Conquest. Kings were also supposed to marry fellow royalty – Elizabeth was the daughter of a mere knight. The secrecy of the ceremony was another problem. In the years ahead, the first parliament of Edward IV’s brother, Richard III, would denounce this as an “ungracious pretensed marriage”, having taken place “secretly, without Edition of Banns, in a private chamber, a profane place”. Worse still, in an age when many people believed a king’s bride should be a virgin, Elizabeth was a widow. If that wasn’t bad enough, her first husband had been killed in the Wars of the Roses fighting for the Lancastrians against Edward IV’s Yorkists. And she was even five years older than Edward – though, as the king pointed out, with two young sons by her first marriage, she had at least proved her fertility. More seriously, it was later alleged that Edward had no right to marry Elizabeth at all, having been earlier secretly precontracted to someone else. The charge was raised in 1483, after Edward’s death, when Richard of Gloucester signalled his intention to take the throne as Richard III on the grounds that Edward’s sons – Richard’s nephews – were illegitimate. One Bishop Stillington was said to have declared that he had earlier married Edward to Eleanor Butler (née Talbot), daughter to the Earl of Shrewsbury. The evidence for Stillington’s accusation is, at best, circumstantial – Eleanor was dead by 1483, so no one could ask her, and the earlier marriage hadn’t been an issue in 1464. But for it to be raised at all shows that the marriage was, indeed, hugely controversial. Did she marry for love – and, if so, why was that so shocking? It wasn’t only Elizabeth’s lowly background and colourful past that proved so shocking to England’s court, it was also the fact that she and Edward may have married for love. For a king to choose his wife for love or lust – for “blind affection”, as the Italian historian Polydore Vergil would put it at the beginning of the 16th century – was so odd as to amount almost to an indecency. So much so that it would later be alleged that Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta, had used witchcraft to bring the two together. But is it true that Edward and Elizabeth genuinely loved one another? Popular early versions of their first meeting certainly suggest so. Several describe a lustful king trying to force himself on a virtuous lady, who refuses to live with him “unchastely”. One tale even has Elizabeth defending herself with a dagger; another has Edward holding a knife to her throat. But all the tales end happily. The king was so struck by the lady’s virtue that he married her, in secret. Read more: Marrying for love: Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville And yet it’s possible that cold political calculation had some influence in Edward’s decision to marry Elizabeth. The king may have seen some propaganda value in an alliance with a woman with connections to the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses, and even in choosing an English bride. Edward’s choice of Elizabeth may also have signalled his growing independence from the powerful magnate Warwick the Kingmaker (who had alternative marriage plans for Edward). And it wasn’t as if Edward was marrying a peasant – though Elizabeth’s father was a mere knight, her mother sprang from the royal line of Luxembourg. For all that, there’s no reason to doubt that this was a match made chiefly on the grounds of personal attraction. In fact, it was perhaps the first such in English royal history – but not the last. It could be argued that it was with Elizabeth Woodville that the notion of marriage for love as a viable option entered the chronicles of British royalty. Following her lead, all of Elizabeth’s royal grandchildren – Henry VIII, Margaret Tudor and Mary Tudor – displayed a belief in their right to personal happiness; a belief that marriage and love should not be wholly different matters; a belief which, in May 2018, we witnessed once more in the wedding of Meghan Markle to Prince Harry. An ultimate guide to the Tudors Did she exploit her power to enrich her cronies? Of all the charges levelled at Elizabeth down the centuries, the one that she unreasonably enriched her whole extensive family has arguably proved the most damaging. The way the Woodvilles and their connections hoovered up positions and advantageous marriages was certainly remarkable. (One of Elizabeth’s brothers, aged around 20, was married to the Duchess of Norfolk, in her sixties.) A Milanese envoy reported that the Woodvilles “had the entire government of this realm”. But Elizabeth was only doing what any contemporary would have done, and it is debatable how much of the Woodville advancement was really implemented on the queen’s initiative. In an age when kin was key, Edward himself may have used these marriages and gifts of offices to strengthen his own power base. And on a broader point, what can we say of Elizabeth’s role as queen consort? Clearly not everyone in the English court was enamoured of Edward’s choice of wife, but the king himself certainly thought highly of his queen’s abilities. So much so that, when he crossed the English Channel to lead an invasion of France in 1475, he left his small son, Edward, as ‘Keeper of the Realm’, and that son in Elizabeth’s charge. The will he made then names her the first of 10 executors: “Our said dearest wife in whom we have most singularly put our trust.” Yet despite being loaded with such great responsibilities, Elizabeth was not a political animal. There is no evidence of her having exercised overt political influence – and, having witnessed the influential role that Margaret of Anjou played during her husband, Henry VI’s fraught reign, many of Elizabeth’s contemporaries would have regarded this as a good thing. Away from the political arena, Elizabeth seems to have had a lot going for her as a queen. She was beautiful, a patroness of arts and industry, and a gracious presence at ceremonies. For example, in 1472, she entertained the visiting Flemish courtier Lord Gruuthuse to a great banquet with dancing in her own chamber, and was noted as having ordered the resplendent cloth of gold hangings for his bed. Above all she was fruitful, presenting Edward with 10 children, most of whom survived the perils of infancy. In other words, for as long as her husband was alive, Elizabeth seemed the model of what a late-medieval queen was supposed to be. Read more | How to be a medieval queen Could Elizabeth have saved her sons from Richard III? When in April 1483 Edward IV suddenly died, he left the throne to his 12-year-old son, another Edward, who was being raised in Ludlow, Shropshire under the tutelage of Elizabeth’s talented brother Anthony Woodville. Elizabeth’s first instinct may have been conciliatory – one contemporary chronicler described how she “most beneficently tried to extinguish every spark of murmuring and disturbance” as the crown was passed to her son. But this wasn’t enough to allay the fears of some people – notably Richard of Gloucester – that the boy would grow up wholly under Woodville influence. When Richard intercepted Edward and Anthony Woodville on the journey to London, Elizabeth immediately fled with her other children and her belongings into the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. In June, Richard wrote to York for men to assist him “against the queen, her bloody adherents and affinity” who he claimed were trying to murder him. But he had not yet declared any intention of seizing the throne for himself; and it was on this basis that Elizabeth was persuaded – or coerced – into allowing her younger son, Richard, to be taken away from her to join his brother in the Tower of London. Immediately afterwards, the elder Richard’s adherents started spreading stories that the marriage of Edward and Elizabeth was invalidated by the former king’s precontract to Eleanor Butler. Their sons were thus declared illegitimate, and as the summer wore on the boys disappeared from view, their fate one of the most debated mysteries of British history. Listen: In the opening episode of our exclusive eight-part podcast series on the Princes in the Tower, we explore how the mystery of their disappearance has captivated people for centuries – and still provokes fierce debate... When did she learn that the princes in the Tower were dead? In that summer of 1483 Elizabeth, still in sanctuary, entered into a conspiracy with an unlikely ally: Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry Tudor, who since the death of Henry VI had been the Lancastrian claimant to the English throne. A marriage was agreed between Elizabeth’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, and Margaret’s son, Henry, and both ladies would raise their supporters against Richard. Read more: Did Richard III really kill the Princes in the Tower? It is often said that Elizabeth Woodville’s actions showed she believed her sons were dead. Why else would she support a plan to promote Henry Tudor? Polydore Vergil, a few decades on, dramatically described how she heard of their murder, and “with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring, she struck her breast, tore and cut her hair”. But it is unclear whether the rebellion initially planned to place Henry Tudor on the throne, or whether that came only after rumours of the princes' death began to spread. Edward IV himself had discussed the possibility of marrying his daughter to Henry, and thus bringing the Lancastrian heir safely into the fold. Either way, the rebellion failed, and in January 1484 Elizabeth Woodville was stripped of her queenly status and income. Two months later, “dame Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England” was persuaded to leave sanctuary and allow her elder daughters to go to their uncle Richard’s court. It has been argued she would never have done so unless she had by now come to believe Richard was innocent of her sons’ deaths – or even that they had not died at all. Elizabeth disappears from the records for the rest of Richard’s reign, which paves the way for one theory that the younger of her sons, at least, survived and was given into her charge, in an obscure part of the country. But it is equally possible that she was enough of a pragmatist simply to realise that some sort of life had to be made for her surviving daughters, whatever had happened to her sons. They could not remain in sanctuary indefinitely. Watch | HistoryExtra Masterclass – Queens Consort with Tracy Borman Did she support a revolt against Henry VII? Yes – and no. After Henry seized the English crown from Richard III – and brought the Wars of the Roses to an end – he fulfilled his promise to marry Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth of York. He also restored his new mother-in-law to her rank as queen dowager, giving her a grant for life of six manors in Essex and an annual income of £102. When Elizabeth of York gave birth to a son, the infant’s godmother, Elizabeth Woodville, carried the little prince to the high altar at the christening. Read more about the battle of Bosworth But less than a year into the new reign, Elizabeth had already begun negotiating a lease on a manor within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. Her position at court might well have been difficult given the pre-eminence of that other dowager figure, Margaret Beaufort, ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’. Soon Elizabeth would, willingly or otherwise, find her plans changing again. In February 1487 all the lands granted to her were taken away from her – albeit only to be given to her daughter. She was given a small annuity and, abruptly, took up residence in Bermondsey Abbey. Elizabeth may herself have chosen this retirement, but the timing is suggestive, coming hard on the heels of a threat to Henry VII’s throne. In 1487, Lambert Simnel was made the figurehead of a Yorkist uprising against Henry and at first claimed (though he later changed his story) to be the younger of the princes in the Tower. There may have been some fear that a discontented Elizabeth – resentful that Henry seemed determined to keep his wife, Elizabeth’s daughter, in the background – might lend a rebel her support. Certainly Elizabeth’s life ahead lay mostly in the convent, with only a very few recorded appearances at court, and her death on 8 June 1492 was followed by a humble and almost shabby funeral with (as a herald noted) “nothing done solemnly”. This article was first published in the May 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
The Argyll divorce: the society scandal that rocked 1960s Britain
New BBC drama A Very British Scandal will catapult viewers into a vicious society divorce battle that saw one woman’s reputation raked over in the 1960s tabloids. Biographer and historian Sarah Gristwood considers the real figures at the centre of the drama – including the so-called ‘headless man’ – and how the case reflects the changing attitudes of a nation…
Margaret Campbell, the famously beautiful Duchess of Argyll, had been a celebrity – and a source of scandal – from even before her debutante days. But she would be remembered for just one thing: the so-called ‘divorce of the century’, which ended her marriage to the Duke of Argyll in 1963. Polaroids, forcibly snatched by her husband and produced in evidence, showed her – naked except for her recognisable signature pearls – engaged in what the presiding judge called “a gross form of a sexual relationship” with an unidentified man. The divorce convulsed the Britain of the 1960s, reflecting a changing mood in the country. What has perhaps been lost along the way is a sense of the duchess, and indeed the duke, as a living, breathing human being. The new miniseries A Very British Scandal, with Claire Foy and Paul Bettany playing the Argylls, must hope to change that. But this is the story that gives meaning to the old cliche – this truth really is stranger than any fiction could be. The child of a Scottish self-made millionaire, raised largely in New York, the young Margaret Whigham had been reared in an atmosphere of privilege, but emotional insecurity. By the time she was 19 years old, she was already the veteran of four engagements – to the Prince Aly Khan; the Earl of Warwick; the son of the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook; and the married millionaire sportsman Glen Kidston. She had also, as she told one would-be biographer, become pregnant by a young David Niven and undergone an illegal abortion. In 1933, at 20, she married the rich American-born socialite and businessman Charles Sweeny; there was such public excitement around her wedding dress that the event halted traffic in Knightsbridge for three hours. Such was her status that a lyric referencing ‘Mrs Sweeny’ would feature in one version of Cole Porter’s hit song ‘You’re The Top’. But after 13 years, two children, a stillbirth, and eight miscarriages, the couple divorced in 1947 – comparatively amicably, by the standards of what was to come. Read more about the real history behind our pick of historical TV and film <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/12/23352078-low_res-a-very-british-scandal-f38316f.jpg" width="2000" height="1332" alt="Paul Bettany and Claire Foy as the Duke and Duchess of Argyll in 'A Very British Scandal'." title="Paul Bettany and Claire Foy as the Duke and Duchess of Argyll in 'A Very British Scandal'. (Image by Blueprint Pictures - Photographer: Alan Peebles)" /> By contrast, Margaret’s marriage four years later to the 11th Duke of Argyll was troubled from the start. Ian Campbell was chief of his clan, Hereditary Master of the Royal Household in Scotland, with many other resounding titles. But he was also – still suffering from wartime trauma as a prisoner of war in Germany – addicted to drink, gambling and prescription drugs. His two earlier wives spoke of his physical violence and emotional cruelty; his ruthless determination to use their money for the preservation of his family seat, Inveraray Castle. The writer Norman Mailer, who married the Duke of Argyll’s daughter from a previous marriage, described him as “one of the coldest, nastiest men I’ve ever known”. Why did the Duke and Duchess of Argyll divorce? The divorce case of 1963 was only the culmination of a long battle in which for some five years the estranged Argylls had sued and countersued each other. During the protracted legal process, Margaret faked documentary evidence to suggest the duke’s children by a previous marriage were illegitimate, and accused the duke of infidelity with her own stepmother. In turn, the duke took out an injunction to keep her away from Inveraray, and ransacked her home for her private papers. And among them were the damning polaroids. The explicit photographs showed a woman – ostensibly Margaret, identified by her signature three-strand pearl necklace – fellating a man. When the images were submitted as evidence during the divorce case, public interest centred on the identity of the man, whose head could not be seen, and who Margaret would never name. Who was the ‘headless man’? Known lovers of Margaret’s included Duncan Sandys, Minister of Defence and Winston Churchill’s son-in-law; the German diplomat Sigismund von Braun; two wealthy American businessmen; and the Hollywood star Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. It would be said during the case that there were 88 possible candidates – that Margaret was, in the judge’s words, “a highly-sexed woman who had ceased to be satisfied with normal relations”. It was also suggested during the course of the trial that an accident – a fall down a lift shaft two decades before – had triggered in her what the day described as nymphomania. It would be said, by contrast, that many of the men whose company she enjoyed were gay, but that she refused to jeopardise them by saying so, at a time when homosexuality in the UK was still illegal. A year of scandal Those early months of 1963 saw the breaking of not one but three extraordinary scandals: all linked in the minds of press and public. The Vassall Affair saw John Vassall, a government clerk at the British embassy in Moscow, caught in a ‘honey trap’ operation: he was photographed in bed with three other naked men, and then blackmailed by the KGB. Returning to England and working in various intelligence offices, he continued to leak documents to his KGB masters until his discovery, arrest, trial and sentence in October 1962. Through the following winter the case continued to spiral outwards until it triggered the resignation of a Lord of the Admiralty, and sparked something of a witch hunt in official circles – the goal, as Vassall described it, being less to hunt out communists than to hunt out gay people. More famously of course, that same spring of 1963 – when the Argylls’ battles reached a climax – brought the Profumo Affair into the public gaze. In the summer of 1961, Secretary of State for War John Profumo had met ‘good time girl’ Christine Keeler in the swimming pool at Cliveden. Also present was another of Keeler’s lovers; Eugene Ivanov, Russian naval attaché and spy. The brief affair between Profumo and Keeler saw farcical scenes of the British minister coming to visit her by the front door as the Russian agent was leaving by the back. It was a year later that, in autumn 1962, a knife fight between two of Keeler’s other lovers brought her to police and public attention. In January 1963, she told the papers that if they wanted stories, there was another, better tale she could sell. And an angry press was eager for anything that might bring discredit on Harold Macmillan’s government: that February two journalists would be jailed for refusing to reveal their sources over the Vassall Affair. Read more | Sex, lies and spies: the real history of the Profumo Affair As in all three of those high-profile stories that made the spring of 1963 a veritable season of scandals, there were other tense relationships in play in the Argyll case. The case shone light on relationships between Fleet Street and the Establishment, and between sex and politics. At this crucial moment of the early 1960s there was, after all, a new sexual morality on the way. Just weeks after the Argyll divorce was finalised, and after Profumo resigned from the government and Commons, Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls – commissioned to prepare a report into the Profumo case – had a confidential interview with the duchess as well as with the men considered most likely to be her headless lover. It was deemed that her relationship with Duncan Sandys, prominent in her circle of acquaintances, opened the possibility that she too was a security risk. Listen | Virginia Nicholson explores how some of the radical changes of the 1960s shaped the lives of women from different backgrounds What happened to Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll? Margaret’s reputation would never recover from the scandal surrounding her divorce, and – though she outlived the Duke of Argyll by two decades, dying only in 1993 – her later years were not happy. (In tune with the attitudes of the day, the duke would be less vilified.) Judge Lord Wheatley's blistering 50,000-word judgement had described her as “a completely promiscuous woman”. Famed for his harsh stance on sexual morality, he sniffed that her attitude to marriage “was what moderns would call ‘enlightened’”. But women who had watched the case from the public gallery wrote expressing their support. And Sarah Phelps, writer of the new television drama, describes her as having “been punished for being a woman, for being visible, for refusing to back down, be a good girl and go quietly.” Viewed through today’s lens, the duchess was ‘slut-shamed’, abused in a domestic setting, and with her private communications hacked. It isn’t the way she has been seen over the last half century, but A Very British Scandal may yet see Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, become a heroine for today. Where to watch A Very British Scandal series 2? Series two of A Very British Scandal is three episodes written by Sarah Phelps that explores the very public breakdown of the marriage between Margaret Campbell (Claire Foy) and her husband Ian (Paul Bettany) in the 1960s. All three episodes of are available to stream on BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Amazon Prime in the US, Canada and New Zealand
The power behind the throne: women in the Wars of the Roses
They masterminded coups, brokered peace deals and may even have led troops into battle. Sarah Gristwood unlocks the stories of the women who shaped one of the bloodiest dynastic clashes in English history
The events of the middle and late 15th century were, we have always been told, driven by men. It was a story of the battlefields on which kings, dukes and earls fought for control of the country during the Wars of the Roses; a great dynastic confrontation that saw the houses of York and Lancaster battle for control of the English crown from 1455–85. This assumption of male dominance is as automatic as the one that saw Margaret Beaufort ignore her own claim to the throne in favour of her son, Henry Tudor, or as the heiress Anne Neville being passed between Lancaster and York as though she were as insentient as any other piece of property. Yet the actions of the women forged during the Wars of the Roses would, ultimately, prove to matter as much as the battlefields. Referred to as that “great and strong-laboured woman” by Sir John Bocking in 1456, Margaret of Anjou, with her determination to hold onto the reins of power, played a vital part in pushing England into civil war. It was two other women, Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville, who brokered the marriage that sealed the peace deal. From Henry VI’s wife to Henry VII’s mother, it was women who acted as midwives to the Tudor dynasty. The women behind the so-called Wars of the Roses were playing a game of thrones. The business of their lives was power; their sons and husbands the currency. The passion and pain of the lives echo through William Shakespeare’s history plays – and yet, those plays apart, most of us know very little about their extraordinary stories. This is due, in part, to the patchy nature of the source material. The sources for this particular period are “notoriously intractable”, as JR Lander, an expert on the Wars of the Roses, put it – and more so for women who fought on no battlefields and passed no laws. The detailed records – and the aristocratic letters you find even from the days of Henry VIII less than 50 years later – are largely absent. What’s more, the years that saw the disappearance of the princes in the Tower of London hold more than their fair share of insoluble mysteries and popular history has traditionally preferred to deal in certainties. But it is worth persevering and trying to unlock these women’s stories. The more you look at their actions, their alliances and at the connections between them, the more you start to see an alternative engine of history. The she-wolf: Margaret of Anjou (1430-83) Wife of Henry VI When Margaret of Anjou was brought to England in 1445, to wed the Lancastrian king Henry VI, she was widely regarded as little more than a pawn in a marriage contract designed to cement a truce in the long war with France. Within a matter of years, her single-mindedness would prove a major catalyst in sparking the Wars of the Roses. In fact, such was Margaret’s impact upon her adopted nation that, a century or so after her death, Shakespeare immortalised her as a “she-wolf”, with a “tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide”. Despite Shakespeare’s verdict, it’s possible that Margaret would never have figured so prominently in the political arena if events had not forced her hand. In 1454 the queen (who was, to contemporaries, “a manly woman, using to rule and not be ruled”) made a bill of five articles – “whereof the first is that she desires to have the whole rule of the land”, or so one correspondent said. By then, just as she gave birth to Edward, their only son, her husband fell into a catatonic stupor. Margaret was desperate to prevent power falling entirely into the hands of Henry’s cousin the Duke of York and his party, who she saw as dangerous rivals to royal authority. As rivalry turned to armed conflict, the queen, as a woman, could only act through deputies. (Though 30 years before, legend had it, her grandmother Yolande of Aragon, a powerful protector to Joan of Arc, had donned silver armour and led her own troops against the English.) But time and again, reports would speak of Margaret’s Lancastrian forces – rather than of her husband’s – and at the second battle of St Albans in 1461 one reporter, the Milanese Prospero di Camulio, seems to suggest that she was in the fray. “The Earl of Warwick decided to quit the field, and… pushed through right into Albano [St Albans], where the queen was with 30,000 men.” The chronicler Gregory wrote that in the midst of the battle, “King Harry went to his queen and forsook all his lords, and trust better to her party than to his own…” An anecdotal report of a speech once credited to Margaret is as heroic in its own way as Elizabeth I’s at Tilbury. “I have often broken [the English] battle line,” she told her men. “I have mowed down ranks far more stubborn than theirs are now. You who once followed a peasant girl [Joan of Arc] now follow a queen… I will either conquer or be conquered with you.” After Richard of York’s heir, Edward IV, captured Henry VI’s crown in 1460, Margaret by no means ceased campaigning. The next decade saw her tirelessly touting for support around the continent and in Scotland, where she won help from another prominent woman, Mary of Guelders, ruling as regent for her infant son James. Indeed, it would be Margaret’s unlikely alliance with a former Yorkist, the powerful Earl of Warwick, the ‘Kingmaker’, (cemented by a marriage between her son and his daughter Anne Neville) that led to Henry VI’s brief reinstatement in 1470. But the following spring, the deaths of her husband and son at Yorkist hands left Margaret no pieces to play on the political stage and she died in France impoverished and embittered. The Rose of Raby: Cecily Neville (1415–95) Mother of Edward IV and Richard III Born the beautiful ‘Rose of Raby’, daughter of the powerful Earl of Westmorland, Cecily Neville was 15 years older than Margaret of Anjou, and already long married to Richard, Duke of York when Margaret, her sometime friend and rival, became queen. Ironically, it was the death of Cecily’s husband (and her second son) at the battle of Wakefield, a decisive Lancastrian victory fought in 1460, that gave her a political role. Only three months later, her eldest son took the throne as Edward IV and, in the early days of his reign, it was said of her that she, “holds the king at her pleasure”, to rule as she wished. Perhaps that perception did not last long; certainly it did not survive Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville – but it is Cecily’s subsequent role that has been a matter of most debate among historians. Where, firstly, did she stand over the dissent between Edward IV and his younger brother Clarence? The dispute led ultimately to Clarence’s execution – allegedly drowned in a butt of malmsey – in 1478. Even more importantly, what was her view of her son Richard’s seizure of the throne and dispossession of her grandsons after King Edward’s death in 1483? How did she react to suspicions that Richard had murdered them in the Tower? One theory – that of historian Michael K Jones – suggests that Cecily supported Clarence’s claim that his elder brother (Edward IV) was illegitimate, and that he himself was the rightful heir. She may even have been the guiding spirit behind Richard III’s coup. It would be at her house that the meetings that prepared his takeover were planned. Evidence is, however, somewhat scanty. It is possible that Cecily took a large step away from the spotlight in the years following Clarence’s death. She was, after all, already in her sixties, which was old, by the standards of the day. It would have been quite understandable if she were simply as punch drunk as any other old fighter, keeping herself out of the fray. Cecily is perhaps the best example of the comparatively poor biographical legacy of the last Plantagenet women. Though her long life was beset by conflicts as shocking as can ever have rent any family, we cannot, rather frustratingly, be sure where her own strongest allegiance lay. The tragic lady: Anne Neville (1456–85) Wife of Richard III Born the daughter of the powerful Earl of Warwick, Anne Neville was first married off by her father, the ‘Kingmaker’, to the Lancastrian Prince of Wales, to cement an alliance with Margaret of Anjou, hitherto Warwick’s bitter enemy. After both the prince and Warwick himself were killed in a crushing Yorkist defeat of the Lancastrians at the 1471 battle of Barnet, Anne (the great niece of Cecily Neville) passed into the hands of the Duke of Clarence. He, according to one contemporary chronicler, tried to keep her hidden, disguised as a kitchen maid, for fear her fortune should fall into his brother Richard’s clutches. Clarence failed and in 1483, after a decade of largely obscure married life, Anne was crowned as Richard III’s queen. Within two years she was dead amid rumours Richard had caused her demise either through poison or psychological warfare; a figure as tragic, if less scandalous, as Shakespeare imagined her in his Lady Anne (Richard III). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2012/09/GettyImages-51243971-42c8cd9.jpg" width="2339" height="4242" alt="Anne Neville in 1473: rumours surrounded the cause of her death just two years into her marriage to Richard III. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Anne Neville in 1473: rumours surrounded the cause of her death just two years into her marriage to Richard III. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> The commoner queen: Elizabeth Woodville (c1437–92) Wife of Edward IV, mother of the princes in the Tower When Elizabeth Woodville was wed in secret to the young Yorkist king, Edward IV, in 1464, she became the first English woman to be crowned queen consort since the Norman Conquest. She is said to have demanded marriage as the price of her virtue, just as Anne Boleyn would do to Elizabeth’s grandson, Henry VIII. The daughter of a minor peer (though her mother came from a royal European house), Elizabeth was the widow of a Lancastrian knight, with two children already to her name. The idea of a king making a love match with a commoner was itself controversial, and no less anger was aroused by the sudden rise to prominence of the whole Woodville family. Elizabeth Woodville has often been dismissed as a woman of almost unparalleled shallowness, yet the plots of her later years may tell a more complicated story. After her husband died in 1483, news that Richard, Duke of Gloucester (Richard III) had taken possession of her young son, Edward V, sent Elizabeth flying into sanctuary. Her behaviour in the following months has been extensively canvassed. Her decision to allow her younger son to join his brother in the Tower, where the boys disappeared from public view, and the fact that she allowed her daughters to leave sanctuary and go to dance at their uncle’s court – the court of the man who may have murdered their brothers – has been scrutinised. Probably she felt she had no other options, but generations of historians have struggled to explain a pragmatism that seems to verge on sheer insensibility. One theory goes so far as to suggest that at least the younger of the princes in the Tower may have been alive and secretly released into her care. There was something else going on here. The 16th-century Italian historian Polydore Vergil relates how, only weeks into Richard III’s reign, Elizabeth gave her consent to a joint conspiracy suggested by the Lancastrian heiress Margaret Beaufort and relayed to the dowager queen in sanctuary by Margaret’s physician, the Welshman Lewis Caerleon. Vergil reports that Elizabeth promised Margaret that she would recruit all of Edward IV’s friends if Henry Tudor would be sworn to take Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth of York in marriage as soon as he had the crown. Although the 1483 rebellions failed to topple Richard from his throne, this was the deal that would ultimately produce the Tudor dynasty. The fiery plotter: Margaret ‘of Burgundy’ (1446–1503) Sister of Edward IV and Richard III Youngest daughter of Cecily Neville, sister to Edward IV and Richard III, Margaret’s childless marriage to Charles, Duke of Burgundy never deterred her from intervening in the affairs of her native country. Once a mediator between her warring brothers Edward and Clarence, it was after Henry VII assumed the throne that Margaret plotted most actively as chief promoter of the pretender to Henry VII’s throne Perkin Warbeck, as well as of his predecessor Lambert Simnel. With more than a touch of the misogyny displayed by most contemporary commentators, Vergil claimed Margaret, driven by “insatiable hatred and fiery wrath”, continually sought Henry’s destruction – “so ungovernable is a woman’s nature especially when she is under the influence of envy”. The unifier: Elizabeth of York (1466–1503) Daughter of Edward IV & Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Henry VII, mother of Henry VIII As the new Henry VII strove to confirm his rule after victory at Bosworth and bring unity to the country, his own fragile claim to the throne from his mother’s Lancastrian blood was immeasurably strengthened by marriage to the Yorkist heiress. There seems to have been no thought, in the world of practical politics, that Elizabeth of York might actually take the throne herself. A century on, Francis Bacon would nonetheless report that Henry feared he might be seen as ruling only though Elizabeth’s right, and being “but a king at courtesy”. Perhaps that is why she seems to have been sidelined by her cannier husband into anonymous domesticity and a string of pregnancies, the last of which caused her death in 1503. “The queen is beloved because she is powerless”, one ambassador reported, damningly. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2012/09/GettyImages-486781255-6f78d6c.jpg" width="3926" height="5479" alt="A c1500 portrait of Elizabeth of York who, with the birth of her son Henry VIII, ensured that the Tudor dynasty thrived. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="A c1500 portrait of Elizabeth of York who, with the birth of her son Henry VIII, ensured that the Tudor dynasty thrived. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> But once again there is a question mark – a hint of something stranger and stronger behind the placid facade. The 17th-century antiquary George Buck claimed to have seen a letter written by Elizabeth herself early in 1485, expressing her burning desire to marry her uncle Richard III, and her fear that his queen – that same Anne Neville who had once been married to a Lancastrian prince – “would never die”. There are many question marks over Buck’s alleged discovery of the letter, but there were indeed rumours that Richard wanted to marry his niece. He was forced to go into London and deny them publicly. Whatever doubts may have remained, Elizabeth’s marriage to Henry VII seems to have been broadly happy. The union certainly fulfilled the main, dynastic imperative, producing the prince who would become Henry VIII. Looking back to the sometimes turbulent lives of medieval queens it might almost be argued that a quieter and more predominantly domestic model for the consort’s role was on the way. Except, of course, that Elizabeth of York was grandmother to two queens (Mary and Elizabeth) who did assume the throne in their own right; and that, too, is her legacy. The ambitious Tudor: Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509) Mother of Henry VII Margaret Beaufort was England’s wealthiest heiress when, at the age of 12, she was married to Edmund Tudor, who was a comparatively humble Welshman. Margaret was something of a dark horse throughout the years of Yorkist power yet, crucially, she was – through her descent from John of Gaunt – a vital carrier of the Lancastrian bloodline. She was still only 13 and already a widow when she gave birth to her son Henry, Edmund having died of the plague. The experience possibly damaged her slight physique, since her two subsequent marriages produced no more children and, later in life, she would take a vow of celibacy. This meant that all her ambitions centred on Henry. Yet in 1471 she felt compelled, for safety, to send him into exile in Brittany. She would see her son again only 14 years later and in the most dramatic of circumstances. In the summer of 1485, Henry Tudor landed with a small invasion force on the Welsh coast. He launched a campaign to take King Richard III’s throne, urged on by a flow of money and messengers from his mother. The fact that Margaret was able to offer her son any support at all was, in itself, quite an impressive achievement. She was then being kept under genteel house arrest on the Lancashire estates of her third husband, Lord Stanley – the penalty for her part in plotting with Elizabeth Woodville to launch that earlier rising against Richard. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2012/09/GettyImages-113489560-0712bee.jpg" width="4053" height="5184" alt="A portrait of Margaret Beaufort, who wielded an impressive influence over her son, Henry VII. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)" title="A portrait of Margaret Beaufort, who wielded an impressive influence over her son, Henry VII. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)" /> But just how much influence was Margaret able to exercise on Stanley? It’s a question that historians have been pondering over for years. The Stanleys’ last-minute decision to send their forces to support Henry helped win the day for the Lancastrians and secure Richard III’s demise. Margaret would be quick to claim the power and position she felt was owed to her once Henry had assumed the throne. ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’, as she came to be known, in some ways overshadowed her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth of York, maintaining Henry’s authority in the Midlands, laying down the rules for the ceremonies of court and exercising to the full her own powers of patronage. Outliving her own son by a few months, she survived to play an active role in shepherding her grandson into power – a final coup for the woman who, above all others, did the most to usher in the Tudor century. Sarah Gristwood is the author of Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses (Harper Press, September 2012) This article was first published in the September 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine
Initially presented as the heir to the throne's dutiful, innocent bride, Diana transformed herself into an outspoken and controversial figure. Sarah Gristwood considers a short life lived in the full glare of expectancy and speculation
It’s now nearly 40 years since Prince Charles began courting Lady Diana Spencer; more than 20 since her death following a car accident in a Paris underpass. It feels as if – slowly, cautiously – she is beginning to pass into history. To look back to the early days of her public life is to realise how far we have come. It was 1980 when the 32-year-old Charles encountered the 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer, youngest daughter of Earl Spencer, at a weekend house party. They had met before, since Charles had been involved with her elder sister, Sarah, but then Diana had been a mere 16 – and now, Charles was under pressure to find a bride. His beloved mentor Lord Mountbatten, recently assassinated by the paramilitary Provisional IRA, had urged Charles to “choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she met anyone else she might fall for”. It was Diana’s tragedy to be chosen for what she did not have – experience, any sign of independent opinions – rather than for any more positive qualities. Charles and Diana: a history of their marriage Not that Diana was reluctant; she actively sought the prince’s interest. Unhappy at home, thanks to her parents’ bitter divorce and her father’s remarriage to the daughter of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, she was looking for her path in life. Without a qualification to her name (“thick”, she cheerfully called herself), marriage was the obvious option. That autumn the press spotted Diana sitting beside Charles as he fished the river Dee. Immediately they took up the tale of ‘Shy Di’, the aristocratic English rose, so modestly working as a kindergarten assistant. Her uncle Lord Fermoy assured the press she was a virgin; her biographer Andrew Morton would write that she knew she had to “keep myself tidy”. There have been few high-profile women in the modern western world who were chosen so exclusively for what was valued in their forebears: virginity, aristocracy and fertility. Read more “It doesn’t fall into the trap of making Diana a saint”: a historian’s review of Spencer 8 historical reasons behind Anne Boleyn’s appearance in Princess Diana film Spencer The engagement was announced on 24 February 1981, Charles telling a friend he wanted to do “the right thing for this country”. There is also another quote that sums up his position as neatly. Of course, the pair were in love, “whatever ‘in love’ means”, he told reporters, while Diana smiled shyly. With hindsight, it feels now as if everyone should have seen trouble ahead. But most didn’t, actually. On the contrary, the couple – both of whom were later revealed to have had qualms – were pushed into commitment by the united desires not only of their family, but of press and public. “Here was a fairy story that everyone wanted to work,” Diana later noted, ruefully. The couple were married in St Paul’s Cathedral in London on 29 July 1981 in a show-stopping public ceremony. Queen Elizabeth II was only one of those who felt that at a time of unemployment, rioting and IRA violence, it would cheer up the country – just as her own wedding had done, in the aftermath of war. The guest list was heavy on foreign notables and the bride chose the hymn I Vow to Thee My Country. Princess Diana and Prince Charles’s wedding: everything you need to know Prince Charles later told the TV presenter Jonathan Dimbleby that it was on honeymoon on board the royal yacht Britannia that he first learned Diana suffered from the eating disorder bulimia. The press and public saw a different side of the story. Almost immediately, at the beginning of November, the Palace announced that Princess Diana was pregnant. When Prince William was born on 21 June 1982, Diana said later that she had “felt the whole country was in labour with me”. Their second son, Prince Harry, followed in September 1984 – but the two parents’ approach to their families would come to dramatise the differences between them. There were famous photographs of Diana, warmheartedly flying to hug her sons after a separation, which contrasted with the image of a young Prince Charles, exchanging a solemn handshake with his mother, the Queen, after she returned from a long royal tour. Princess Diana: a mother who ripped up the rule book After the birth of both sons, Diana’s transformation from dowdy posh girl into glamorous icon began. Blond, blue-eyed and ever more stylish, she evoked the romantic image of the fairytale princess. By the tour of the US in 1985 – where Diana danced with John Travolta – she was, so Reader’s Digest declared afterwards: “The World’s Number One Celebrity”. And – though she would famously later complain that there were three in her marriage, thinking of her husband’s affair with his future second wife, Camilla Parker Bowles – Diana too had begun to look elsewhere. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/04/GettyImages-158076479_cmyk-6b4fc04.jpg" width="5067" height="3546" alt="Making a splash: Diana relishes taking her sons on a water ride at the Thorpe Park theme park in 1993. William has since recalled how his mother loved "laughter and fun". (Photo by Getty Images)" title="Making a splash: Diana relishes taking her sons on a water ride at the Thorpe Park theme park in 1993. William has since recalled how his mother loved "laughter and fun". (Photo by Getty Images)" /> Her bodyguard and close confidant Barry Mannakee was transferred to other duties; when he died in a motorcycle accident, Diana, foreshadowing the conspiracy theories that would follow her own death, believed he had been killed, presumably by the British security services. In 1986, she met army officer James Hewitt and, by the end of their 18-month affair – when Diana returned instead to a former flame, James Gilbey – the royal marriage had effectively foundered. The end was nigh. When, in 1992, the couple were persuaded to tour India together, Diana had herself photographed, ostentatiously alone, in front of the Taj Mahal. The same year, Andrew Morton’s biography, Diana: Her True Story In Her Own Words, provoked a hostile questioning of many aspects of the monarchy. At the end of what the Queen called her annus horribilis – her horrible year – Buckingham Palace announced that “with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate”, but that “their constitutional positions are unaffected”. It was hard to see how that could be. History’s most memorable mums Within weeks came ‘Camillagate’, the published transcript of a deeply embarrassing conversation between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. After that, the ‘Squidgygate’ tapes of Diana’s conversation with James Gilbey seemed positively tame, notable chiefly for Diana’s words: “After all I’ve done for this fucking family.” Diana, now, was the saint – visiting hospices and orphanages, embracing lepers and Aids victims, getting 10 times the press coverage that was given to Charles’s activities. She was winning the publicity war – and never more so than on television. In the summer of 1994, Charles’s interview with Jonathan Dimbleby was televised, in which he admitted infidelity and revealed both a lack of sympathy for Diana (shown as “nothing more than a hired womb”, in the words of American biographer Kitty Kelley) and a worrying distance from his family. The programme and Dimbleby’s subsequent book inflicted another injury on the already wounded monarchy, described by even the far-from-radical publication The Economist as “an idea whose time has passed”. Diana was following in a time-honoured line of rebellious royal consorts. On the grand scale, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella of France had both conspired against their spouses for rule of the country. But a closer comparison – albeit one unflattering to Diana – would have to be with Caroline of Brunswick, wife of George IV. Unappealing to her husband and seeking consolation elsewhere – itself the subject of an extraordinary public investigation into her morals – Caroline was turned away from the doors of her husband’s coronation. There was, of course, an echo of the threat that Diana represented closer at hand, one from earlier on in the 20th century. Eyeing both the Princess of Wales and Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York – and recalling the abdication of her brother-in-law Edward VIII over his relationship with the scorned Mrs Simpson – the Queen Mother is reported to have noted: “It’s Wallis all over again.” As she became ever more alienated from the royal family, Diana’s own increasingly eccentric behaviour (nuisance calls, rumoured affairs and New Age therapies) was also being discussed widely and crudely. She struck back. The interview with Martin Bashir on the current affairs TV show Panorama – aired on 20 November 1995 and watched by some 200 million worldwide – is still shocking today. [In 2021, an independent inquiry found that Martin Bashir used deception to secure the interview]. Casting doubt on Charles’s ability to be king, Diana said that her aspiration was not to be queen of England, but “a queen of people’s hearts”. Within weeks, the Queen suggested the Wales should divorce – and quickly. As Diana moved through middle age, would divorced life have represented an opening or a closing of doors for her? Her year as a divorced woman witnessed controversial relationships with surgeon Hasnat Khan and Harrods heir Dodi Fayed, but it also saw the anti-landmines campaign which stands as her lasting memorial. But the events of 31 August 1997 put an end to the possibilities. Diana’s death in Paris prompted an extraordinary outpouring of public grief and a commensurate hostility towards the only people who appeared not to care: the royal family. In the febrile climate of blame – the tears in the street, the mounds of flowers outside her Kensington Palace home, the funeral in Westminster Abbey – it was prime minister Tony Blair who found the popular tribute. Diana had been, he said, “the people’s princess”. And yet, within a comparatively short space of time, royal popularity was climbing again, slowly. In part that was down to a new generation: Diana’s sons. But the older royals, too, had been kickstarted into some adjustment to changing public moralities. On her golden jubilee in 2002, the Queen invited Camilla Parker Bowles to the ceremony. Prince Charles’s happy second marriage is in part his first wife’s legacy. And whatever the short-term effect on the royal family’s popularity, in the long term the Diana story, with its tragic end, may have restored our sense of their humanity. Kate Middleton: a modern royal woman Troublesome royal in-laws through history Without Diana’s wide-eyed appealing presence, the difficulties she caused – as well as those she endured – show up more clearly. It remains true that there is a whole generation of women for whom Diana to some degree symbolised their own challenges. Ironically, providing a unifying symbol for our national concerns has always been the role of the royal family. Since her death, Diana has been portrayed as a victim whose legend still sets her above her oppressors. It’s a popular way to view the women of history. But perhaps the time has come to think about setting that aside – to retain the late Princess of Wales as, above all, an icon of 20th-century celebrity, at once both confessional and celebratory. The combination of glamour and accessibility that Diana injected into the royal family has given it new options for the present day. And, looking at the next generation, her mantle shows no sign of being immediately put away. This article was first published in BBC History Magazine's 'Royal Women' bookazine