Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (45 page)

The disparities in social status even within families confront us with what we would describe as patron–client relationships, and that the Tudor elite expressed in the language of friendship—not far, in fact, from what Cicero described as the reciprocal friendship between individuals of different status and class, between 
patronus
 and 
cliens—
 while there were the added complexities of a relationship that stretched beyond two individuals. Sallust’s assertion that an association between good men working toward a shared goal is amity but between bad men is faction was as true in the early modern period as it is in the twenty-first century, but “
inter malos factio
”
⁵
is all in the eye of the beholder—we are friends, you are cronies, they are a faction. The theory and practice of friendship and its ramifications exercised Erasmus, Montaigne, Bacon, and their ilk, yet the question of the reception of their ideas, and indeed those of the Classical philosophers, in late Tudor England is still open. The fact that Muriel Parry Lady Knyvet, lady of the privy chamber at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, would have been able to read her husband’s copy of Seneca does not mean she was a dyed in the wool Stoic, any more than fifty years earlier Anne Morgan Baroness Hunsdon revealed an abiding interest in the same school of philosophy by agreeing that her daughter be called Philadelphia.
⁶
I suspect that at best most women drew interesting parallels with their own experience, but nothing that would encourage them to throw over existing patterns of friendship. Far from it, they were more likely to find encouragement—surely theirs, if anyone’s, were friendships that were of benefit to the state, as most of the Classical philosophers believed amity 
(amicitia)
 to be? And this is where we slip into the gray area of 
factio
. For whatever else, the fifty years of Mary and Elizabeth’s reigns saw the rise not of faction and corruption as such, but of their identification, and subsequent rejection by a vocal and ambitious section of the elite, with devastating results in the next century.

Moreover, apart from the occasional maverick such as John Dee and Walter Ralegh, and no women on record, no one at the Marian and Elizabethan courts is likely to have viewed their friendships solely in the harsh light of the classical philosophers, when they had before them the religion that encased their entire existence. The Bible has a great deal to say about altruistic love, 
caritas
, bu
t strikingly little to say on friendship
as such, other than the occasional dour observation—“A friend loveth at all times.”
⁷
St. Augustine, with his disquisition on the influence of bad friends, pear theft, and all, and on the companionship of good friends in his journey to God, was more inspirational in this regard, although the question remains how widely the 
Confessiones
 were read at this time.
⁸
What is more, in Christianity there was even less differentiation between male friendship and female friendship than there was in the classical authors; indeed, neither Ancients nor Fathers of the Church specifically rule out
amicitia
, amity, between women on the same terms as men. Although the question of friendship at the Tudor court is one that may well lend itself to being viewed through the prism of gender, the answers will always revolve around birth, status, and political influence.

Who were the women of the late Tudor court? The Tudor court was a large institution, some two thousand strong, with strong hierarchical divisions between its different sections: the household (with twenty-five departments that supplied food, drink, heating, and light); the chamber (the guard, the chapel royal, the musicians, the physicians, and the staff of the queens’ privy lodgings); and free-standing entities such as the council, the stables, the toils (hunting), the wardrobes, the artificers, the works, the posts, and the office of masks and revels. My interest is in the largest single political elite of the period, the women who served in the privy lodgings. These were the gentlewomen and aristocrats, sworn in before the lord chamberlain, who held specific posts in the privy chamber and bedchamber as the queens’ body servants. In both Mary’s and Elizabeth’s reigns they usually numbered twenty: three ladies of the bedchamber, seven ladies and gentlewomen of the privy chamber, four chamberers, and six maids of honor. There were also the women, as a rule aristocrats, who were invited by the queens to attend court yet who did not hold official court posts; at any one time there might be perhaps three or four in residence. The privy chamber staff and attendants together amounted to perhaps 1 percent of the court as a whole. Their importance derived generally from their access to their queen and parity with government officers, personally from their ability to use that access to exert influence. The world in which they operated was a fiercely hierarchical construct of kinship, friendship, and honor, in which formal institutions such as the exchequer existed but were run from officers’ private houses, in which merit equated to birth, and in which a profession was a public declaration, not a vocation. Against this background, I will offer a few observations on the nature of friendship and memory.

III

We still speak of given names today, but no longer see them as just that— gifts. Yet in the sixteenth century it was still true that the simplest and most enduring way of honoring an existing connection, whether friendship or clientship, was one that few of us would consider. Who now would want to record a current political affiliation by naming a daughter Barak or, with the Tudor enthusiasm for feminizing surnames, Obamiana? For Tudor families, names were a permanent reminder of family friendships and loyalties, not to mention ambitions, and were quite literally on every one’s lips. Thanks to the traditions of god-parenting, which dictated that the senior godmother was always the “naming” godparent for baby girls—the one who decided what the child would be called, although not necessarily using her own name—it is possible to trace close political ties in names rippling across the English upper classes. Thus there are exponential leaps in the numbers of Marys in the 1550s and Elizabeths in the 1560s onward, as one might expect, but this was not just a matter of families honoring their queen in name; in many cases, the babies were named not only for the queen, but by the queen, as indicated by the sheer number of the queens’ christening presents for their goddaughters—and, it must be noted, godsons—recorded in the chamber accounts. To be a royal godchild was to join a usefully exclusive group.

In this period, even in Queen Mary’s reign, there is clear evidence of the Reformation taking hold, dislodging older naming practices such as taking the saint’s name for the day on which the child was born (with, for boys, the notable exception of Valentine), and the process only accelerated in Elizabeth’s reign, while the innovation of double given names was a clear indication of humanist aspirations.
⁹
Yet names are more than a record of broad religious or social changes, they are hard proof of friendship or clientship at the individual level. True, in the absence of other evidence it is not easy to match godmothers and goddaughters who had common Christian names such as Margaret or Anne, but it is easier in the case of the newfangled, classically inspired names such as Philadelphia, Theophila, Alathea, and Lettice, and distinctively old-fashioned names such as Winifrid and Frideswide. Then there is Blanche. the reason there were so many Blanches at the late Tudor court was one of Princess Elizabeth’s earliest senior attendants, Blanche Milburn Lady Herbert of Troy, who even after her death in 1558 was the key point of entry for Welsh families to Queen Elizabeth’s chamber. Her career as a naming godmother with in her extended family coincided, unsurprisingly, with her ascendancy in Princess Elizabeth’s household in the 1530s and 1540s, but it had been back in the 1510s that the key christening had taken place—she had named her niece Blanche Parry, and it was 
that
 Blanche, the most powerful member of Elizabeth’s staff, who spread the name to the aristocratic Blanches born during Elizabeth’s reign. The name rose up the social scale in the wake of its strongest example.

Other names started at the top and spread downward, as was the case with the longest lived of the feminized boy’s names. The first English Frances was Henry VIII’s niece Frances Brandon, born in 1517 and apparently named for the king of France, with Catherine of Aragon and Princess Mary as godmothers. Only a handful followed in the 1520s, all women later connected to Princess Mary’s household, thereafter there was a sudden spread when Frances Brandon married the marquess of Dorset in 1533, after which the name appears in a more disparate group of families interested in binding themselves closer to that line of succession. This peaked in Edward VI’s reign when the then duchess of Suffolk’s fortunes were at their height, and families such as the Howards, with an eye to the main chance, were happy for their daughters’ futures to be linked to hers. Following Frances Brandon’s death in 1559, and the final collapse of the family’s political hopes shortly thereafter, the name lived on courtesy of a goddaughter born in 1554—Frances Howard, later countess of Hertford, the queen’s “Good ffrancke” and friend—who was responsible for its spread in the last two decades of the century. Other names were endemic to particular families, as was the case with Douglas, which was first given as a girl’s name in the 1530s by Henry VIII’s niece Margaret Douglas and would continue to circulate amongst the women of the Howard families for many decades.

That said, even in the presence of proof of godparentage, how to be certain that we do not have a system where families have a child named for one woman, yet their long-term interest lay with others? I have yet to find a single family where all the children have names that link them exclusively to one person or group or reflect one particular friendship. Even in families that explored the wilder shores of Christian—and un-Christian—names, as was more common toward the end of the century, children were named by and for a variety of relatives, friends, and patrons, in what amounted to social spread betting. This was the case for Jane Fromonds Mrs. Dee’s family, whose eight children included Theodore Trebonianus Dee and Madimia Newton Dee. Even in Madimia Newton’s case, although she was named for one of John Dee’s angels, the family also sensibly honored one of their more reliable friends at court, the recently promoted lady of the bedchamber, Frances Newton Baroness Cobham.

Friends were thus not something Tudor women had to wait to acquire— they were gifted them by their families when responsible parents made sure their daughters had useful, resonant names. How then to shape their characters to best advantage and, more importantly, line them up for advancement at court and an advantageous match? The answer lay in outplacement, the system whereby girls were placed with a family of their parents’ peers, or occasionally their superiors, from the age of about nine or ten until the end of their teens. It was common, played a formative role in the lives of those concerned, and was generally thought to be an excellent institution. As Princess Elizabeth wrote, “Saint Gregorie sayeth that we ar more bounde to the that bringeth us up wel than to our parents, for our parents do that wiche is natural for them, that is bringeth us into this worlde but our brinkers up ar a cause to make us live wel in it.”
¹⁰
It was also the time when upper-class girls had the opportunity to forge their own friendships, albeit within the social circle of their “brinkers up,” and primarily with the other girls in the same situation, for it was usual for there to be two or three such outplaced girls in any given household. The example that has been most written about but least recognized is that of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, for the women who were to play a crucial role in Katherine Howard’s fall—Alice Wilkes, Joan Ackworth, Katherine Tilney, and Margaret Morton—had all been outplaced in the old duchess of Norfolk’s household at the same time.

Katherine Howard was not unusual in being placed with a senior member of her extended family, in her case her step-grandmother, but rank trumped kinship, and friendship trumped both. Hence Penelope and Dorothy Devereux were sent to the household of a family friend, Katherine Dudley, countess of Huntingdon, where they joined their future sister-in-law Margaret Dakins,
¹¹
and not to the Hunsdon household, which although it was the obvious family alternative was led by a baroness rather than a countess, and an absentee baroness at that, given that she was at court much of the time. Similarly the countess of Huntingdon’s niece Mary Sidney was not placed with her, but with the Sidneys’ family friend Mildred Cooke Lady Cecil.
¹²
Once outplaced in the company of other girls, nearness and shared self-interest might lead to friendship, much like the “two artificial gods” Helena and Hermia, “an union in partition,” but equally there might have been fertile ground for abiding hatred.
¹³
It is certainly an area that we would better understand through a more detailed study. And what of the royal court, that aristocratic household writ large? It too had its role in the outplacement system, although it has not often been understood as being part of this wider social phenomenon. The court equivalent of outplaced girls was, of course, the maids of honor.

How to recruit to the coffer chamber, the maid of honors’ dormitory? The lacunae in the official records make a comprehensive list of all the maids of honor tricky. Queen Mary had a certain total of ten, Queen Elizabeth a certain total of fifty-four. Initially they were all recruited from the immediate circle of privy chamber families, and were often girls with whom the queens were already well acquainted or who had shared their recent tribulations. The shortness of Queen Mary’s reign meant that the sense of collective adversity now happily overcome transcended the age gap between her and her maids of honor. Matters were very different for Queen Elizabeth. The memories and friendships she had shared with her maids of honor at the start of her reign were by its close long gone, a circumstance that played its part in her increasing difficulties with the maids of honor in the 1590s.