Margaret Beaufort

A Female Force to be Reckoned With

Leah Jepson

MA History

hiu87a@bangor.ac.uk

Margaret Beaufort; a woman of great historical significance, yet also strangely lacking in academic appreciation. A woman who pursued and achieved her own ends, yet is overlooked as an illustration of female agency within a society where women were typically, and erroneously, assumed to have had none. A woman who is probably better known for her role in historical fiction than in historical reality, more for her intense piety than her role as one of the most prominent players of the turbulent fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. 

Margaret was a woman who, during her long life, was a first-hand witness to the tumultuous years of the Wars of the Roses. Through her efforts, she helped establish the infamous Tudor dynasty in the name of her son, who would become Henry VII of England. Married at twelve to Edmund Tudor, both widow and mother at thirteen, Margaret was a woman who refused to remain idle. She negotiated, integrated, and plotted herself towards success. She risked her life and reputation in her son’s cause, though it is impossible to fully distinguish between it and her own. However, she was also a woman who achieved these things without stepping outside the lines of her accepted sphere as a woman. She was no Margaret of Anjou, ‘interfering’ in matters of government and stomping on the toes of powerful men. She remained, for the most part, behind the scenes, yet also often in plain sight.

An adroit Lancastrian, she integrated herself into the Yorkist court, making connections, forming networks, and working towards a greater goal. Her ‘invisibility’ was perhaps one of her greatest assets, allowing her to establish herself surreptitiously before revealing the extent of her efforts in her son’s triumph at Bosworth Field in 1485.

In many ways, it is easy to over-complicate Margaret, primarily because we often find it difficult to reconcile medieval female experience with the non-domestic. The political triumph of her later years has traditionally been in conflict with her intense religiosity, and scholarship has frequently been divided into two camps; those who celebrate her as an exemplar of piety, and those who condemn her excursions into the ‘masculine’ politic.

However, these approaches typically share two common misconceptions. Firstly, that the domestic had no impact outside the privacy of the household, and secondly, that the political was strictly concerned with matters of government. This, it turns out, was far from the case. The households of medieval noble families were often hubs of activity branching off from the wider context of the royal court. Here, factions grew from close family networks, reinforced through marriage alliances, patronage and feudal hierarchy. The domestic was often far from the private, and in a society where the future of the collective typically outweighed that of the individual, the family was a significant source of agency and power available to men and women alike, albeit often in different ways.

Within this context, the political entailed far more than matters of government. It extended to the intimacy of the marriage bed, the raising and education of children, and the creation of kinship networks, all of which would contribute, directly or otherwise, to the political fabric of the nation. The domestic was a socially acceptable context in which female agency could thrive, and it would be where Margaret would establish the foothold which would ultimately enable her to pursue her own ends.

One of the most obvious means available to her was marriage. Within the medieval context in particular, marriage has received a lot of bad press, thanks to persistent focus on what is perceived as female subjugation. Whilst women certainly did not enjoy equal status with their husbands, the over-generalised assumption that all women suffered as a result of arranged matches and masculine abuse has meant that it is typically seen in the negative, rather than as a potential tool which women often readily employed to their own ends. Marriage itself did not typically carry the same connotations as it does today, and within noble and gentry families in particular, it was understood more as a business arrangement than as a result of mutual love and affection. Whilst these things might develop during the marriage, and some did indeed marry for love, they did not constitute the primary factors when considering potential matches.

For Margaret, marriage offered security and a means of advancing both her own interests and those of her son. By the time Henry was born in 1457, she was already a widow, and aged just thirteen, she recognised the need to remarry quickly. Her latter two marriages, first to Henry Stafford, second son to the Duke of Buckingham, and secondly to Thomas Stanley, a prominent member of the Yorkist court, were pursued and arranged by Margaret herself. They provided her with a safe haven and a legitimate means of advancing her cause through interaction and association with other powerful nobles. Her marriage to Stanley in particular allowed her access to the inner circles of the Yorkist regime, and she would spend the twelve years from 1271 to 1483 integrating herself behind enemy lines.

Motherhood too allowed Margaret to operate within the political in a socially acceptable way. For noble and gentry women, children, particularly sons, provided them with a stake in the great game of court politics, and Henry Tudor afforded his mother opportunities for agency long before he acceded to the throne. Through her son, Margaret had a legitimate cause to pursue which would ultimately draw people to their side prior to 1485. Whilst Henry would spend most of the first half of his life either as the ward of another or in exile, his identity as potential, albeit weak, claimant to the throne meant that, should the Yorkist regime fail, or be overturned, Margaret’s son might well be looked on as an attractive alternative.

However, whilst the Yorks remained in power, it was also a dangerous position for Henry.  History does not tell us exactly when Margaret’s ambitions transitioned from bringing her son home from exile to placing him on the throne of England, if they had ever been otherwise. What we can suggest though is that Margaret played the game well, not revealing her hand or overtly stating Henry’s claims. We also know that, at least by the time Richard III seized the throne in 1483, she had begun to plot his downfall with other nobles, most notably the Duke of Buckingham, who also had a claim to the throne, and Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of Edward IV.

Following the disappearance of Edward’s sons in the Tower of London, Margaret and Elizabeth came together to arrange the marriage of their children, Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York. The plan was that Henry would take the throne and, in order to bolster his shaky claim to it, marry Elizabeth.  In return, her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, would pledge her support to Henry’s cause. Together, the plotting of these two powerful women demonstrated the significance of established networks in promoting female agency.

Whilst initial attempts to unseat Richard were unsuccessful, Henry Tudor would go on to secure his infamous victory at Bosworth Field in 1485, taking the throne as Henry VII, the first monarch of the Tudor dynasty. Following this, her ultimate triumph, Margaret became an active and prominent figure at her son’s court. She was referred to as ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’, and would come to enjoy legal and social independence which most other married women could not. Henry’s first parliament recognised her right to hold property independently of her husband, and towards the end of his reign, she was given a special commission to administer justice in the north of England. Following Henry’s marriage to Elizabeth of York, she was reluctant to accept a lower status, and wore robes of the same quality as her daughter-in-law, walking only half a pace behind her on official occasions. She would sign her name Margaret R., perhaps to signify her royal authority, with R. standing potentially for regina – the Latin word for queen customarily employed by female monarchs.

Margaret’s story not only demonstrates the potential for agency available to women, but also raises questions as to how these women have been recorded and studied. That Margaret receives little attention within the primary documentation prior to her son’s reign might suggest to some that she had little involvement in the politics of her day. I however would challenge this approach by suggesting that she had little direct involvement in matters of government. Historians have since come to appreciate that the political went far beyond the governance of the nation i.e. the type of politics that primarily left its mark on written documents. Today, we can suggest that Margaret’s relative obscurity was more a result of her operating behind the scenes than of her absence from the political landscape. That she pursued and achieved her ambitions is testament not only to female opportunity, but also to how far a woman could and would go.

However, Margaret is far from being a unique case. Whilst her ultimate triumph draws more attention to her experience than many other individuals, her story is also an entreaty for adopting a similar approach to the study of other noblewomen in the past, women who had comparable access to similar modes of agency. Furthermore, it demands a reconsideration of approaches to medieval marriage and motherhood, and a redefinition of the domestic. Whilst Margaret was indeed a pious woman and a learned scholar, she also operated on a similar level to so many other women. Marriage and motherhood should no longer be understood solely through the lens of female subjugation, but also through those of female opportunity.

Margaret’s participation in the great political game as both wife and mother enabled her to establish herself as the matriarch of one of the most infamous royal dynasties in history. It is therefore strange that she has not received much attention in scholarship. However, as history, and women’s history in particular, continues to develop and to reshape approaches to the past, it can be hoped that she will finally get the recognition she deserves as one of the most successful political players England has fostered.

Queering the Tudor Hunt

Audrey Thorstad

Lectuer in Early Modern History

a.thorstad@bangor.ac.uk

The popularity of queer theory in the historical discipline has steadily increased over the last few years, but it is not a new approach to the past. Thirty-five years ago, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985) and it is widely recognised as one of the foundational works for queer theory, particularly thinking about male sexuality. In the monograph, much of her argument is structured around an asymmetrical erotic triangle wherein men who desire each other (sexually or otherwise) transmit that desire through a woman, thus creating a triangulation. This trope, Sedgwick argues, was commonplace in literature from the pre-modern to our own contemporary. According to Sedgwick,

‘…in any erotic rivalry, the bond that links two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: that the bonds of ‘rivalry’ and ‘love’ differently as they are experiences, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent…and within the male-centered novelistic tradition of European high culture, the triangles…are most often those in which two males are rivals for a female’.[1]

 For Sedgwick, the beloved – almost always a woman – then becomes the object, or conduit, of relationships between two rival men. The rivalry creates a common cause: to win the heart of the beloved, but their rivalry relationship is just as strongly desired as the desire for the object of their infatuation. For Sedgwick, then, homosocial desire – encompassing platonic friendships, affection, sex, and more – is a given amongst men within the triangle. As a result, the homosocial is drawn back into the orbit of ‘desire’, of potential eroticism, and creates not a binary of sexuality and gender, but an unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual, and thus broadens our understanding of sexuality.

To illustrate the erotic triangle and the homosocial desire that it creates, I want to look at hunting during the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547). On 24 June 1509, Henry VIII had a joint coronation with his wife of two weeks, Catherine of Aragon. Edward Hall (c. 1496-c. 1547) provides a detailed account of the ceremonies in his contemporary chronicle, including a rather interesting hunting scene that was performed in front of the new queen and her ladies:

‘like a parke, paled with pales of white and grene, wherein wer certain Fallowe Dere, and in the same parke curious Trees made by crafte, with Busshes, Fernes, and other thynges in likewise wrought, goodly to beholde. The whiche Parke or diuyse, being brought before the Quene had certain gates thereof opened, the Dere ranne out thereof into the Palaice’.[2]

The pageant-like [3] issuing a challenge to all comers. This challenge was answered by eight servants of Diana.[4] A deal was struck between the two groups of men: whoever vanquished the other group of knights in their ‘dedes of armes’ kept the deer that were killed and the greyhounds that helped kill them. After the challenge was accepted Queen Catherine called for her husband, Henry VIII, to oversee the competition and to ensure the rules were fair.

performance continues with eight mounted knights calling themselves the scholars of Pallas

This scene was very much for entertainment, it was a make-shift park with trees ‘made by craft’ and it was all set up within the palace. It did, however, have real deer, real greyhounds, and real men, and we should not forget that several deer were killed for the narrative. For our purposes, this episode as described by Hall, can be approached through Sedgwick’s asymmetrical erotic triangle with the two groups of rival knights as the rival opponents chasing the beloved: the deer. Although women are mentioned in the narrative – it is performed in front of Queen Catherine and her ladies – it is not their favour that the knights desire. The deer, at least in this episode, is more important, and I would argue that the violence and bloodshed that came along with the killing of their prize is the activity that helped link the two rival groups together. Moreover, with the deer as the conduit for male homosocial desire it meant that the ingredients for heterosexual desire were not all accounted for: the woman was of course missing. The ladies’ favour as the ultimate prize was usurped by that of the slaughtered animals. With the arrival of Henry VIII to oversee the hunting scene, we get an added element. Not only do the groups of knights want to win the prize of the deer and greyhounds, but they now want to impress their king, who is young, physically fit, and an avid hunter. The goal, then, is to impress other men rather than women. Their ambition to impress the king and win the challenge are the ingredients for creating a situation in which ‘homosocial desire’ can be fostered. The prize is simply an object to be won. The importance of the exchange comes in the form of emotional closeness to the other men in the triangle. Rivalry, competition, teamwork, and physical exertion can all create emotional closeness, and all were needed in the hunt. In this sense, it might be argued that homosocial desire can be obtained outside the parameters of the heterosexual pursuit of the lover/beloved scenario with the woman – the beloved – easily replaced with another object to be won.

What does the exploration of such case studies tell us about the Tudor period? First and foremost, it demonstrates that a queer reading of the pre-modern past is possible and allows us to see the Tudor court in a new and exciting way. Hunting was one of the most important pastimes that an elite, able-bodied, white, educated man in the sixteenth century could perform, and he needed to perform it well in front of his peers and superiors, usually other men. By applying queer theory to the hunt, we get the sense that it enabled those of the hegemony to perform homosocial desire for one another without stepping outside the boundaries of the expected warrior masculine identity. Being able to perform these pastimes allowed men to become part of the hegemonic power structure at the Tudor court, thus giving them access to high-ranking officials and, more importantly, the king. Secondly, the hunting scene from Hall’s Chronicle demonstrates the role – or lack thereof sometimes – that women played in male homosocial desire. The woman, the ‘beloved’ in the triangle, could quite easily be replaced by an animal. Indeed, in Middle English romance literature the hunt of a deer is often paralleled with the chase of courtly love, both of which liken the ‘prize’ (whether that is the deer or the woman) as an object to be won usually by the pursuer physically exerting themselves in order to prove they are worthy. Thirdly, I do not want to deny the fact that women did hunt and they certainly could be in a hunting party at this time. In these situations, the role of women changes slightly, particularly if they are partaking in the hunt rather than simply spectating. In any case, female homosocial desire and its construction were outside the scope of this short piece; however, I am sure it would prove to be a fruitful endeavour. Finally, to reiterate the fact that ‘homosocial desire’ does not automatically mean sexual desire.  What this concept does is gives us a broader continuum of sexuality, moving us away from binaries and enables more freedom to understand emotions, bonds, desires, and relationships in the past.

In the thirtieth anniversary edition of Between Men, Wayne Koestenbaum writes in the foreword:

‘Sedgwick demonstrates that a good reason for a critic to be clever and to identify buried erotic metaphors in canonical poetry is to figure forth a society in which people are encouraged to take an empathetic and benign attitude toward sodomitical behaviours…she wants to help us dream up a culture that gives ample acreage for unaccustomed pleasure, without shame’.[5]

As purveyors of the past, surely we can grant this to the historical figures that we explore. 

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[1] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), p. 21.

[2] Edward Hall, The union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke […] (London, 1548), p. vi.

[3] Pallas is the epithet given to the Greek goddess Athena who is associated with wisdom and warfare.

[4] Diana is the Roman goddess of the hunt, wild animals, and fertility.

[5] Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘Forward’, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 30^th anniversary edition (New York, 2016), p. xv.

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The Unlawful Games Act 1541

Controlling Recreation and Maintaining the Class Divide

Richard J. Hayton

BA Medieval and Early Modern History

hiuac7@bangor.ac.uk

While the seventeenth-century puritanical laws against entertainments are infamous in English history, it is rather little-known that several Acts had already infringed on the recreational freedom of the working class in the centuries prior. The most complex and intrusive of these arrived during the reign of Henry VIII in 1541; this was the ‘Acte for the Mayntenance of Artyllarie, and debarringe of unlawful Games’, or the Unlawful Games Act. Essentially, it forbade the lower classes from playing most recreational games, such as cards and dice games, but also the likes of tennis and bowling, whilst reserving the privilege for the wealthy and highborn. The ‘middling sort’ – those beneath the gentry – could be met with hefty fines for hosting or playing games, except for at Christmas. The other part of the Act is more notorious, as it was the last in a series of medieval and early-modern laws which required Englishmen to regularly practice longbow archery. Mandatory archery practice and the prohibition of games might seem like an unusual pairing, but as the preamble of the Act explains, the popularity of newly-devised games was seen as the “reason where of archery is sore decayed and daily [was] like to be more and more minished.”[1] Yet, this explanation surely seems terribly inadequate, to believe that the competition of other games was as detrimental to archery as to necessitate a large-scale ban for the lower classes. What else might have inspired such an Act? Was the intention to protect the realm from civil disorder arising from games, or was the Crown inspired by an ever-growing moralism which condemned “noxious, inordinate and unhonest games”?[2] This article assesses potential rationales for the Unlawful Games Act 1541 and, considering it within a sequence of oppressive medieval and early modern laws, exposes a longstanding precedent of conditioning social order, controlling which activities and behaviours were appropriate for different classes. The Unlawful Games Act took advantage of a moralist society in order to reserve recreational games as privileges of the peerage, while maintaining the obligation of the ‘middling sort’ to work in accord with other legislation.