I was so honored to have had the chance to speak with Alison Weir this month! Here are some of the links to the things we talked about:
Alison Weir’s page on Amazon with links to buy all her books
Amazon’s Norah Lofts page
Norah Lofts on Goodreads
Her upcoming novels: The Six Tudor Queens
Christina Pisan, the early feminist writer whose books Margaret of Austria had (and may have influenced a young Anne Boleyn)Christina Pisan’s work on Amazon
Margaret of Austria
Episode Transcript:
Hey, it’s Heather, and I want to remind you about our very special tours to the UK. In 2,017 we’ll be doing tours focusing on the Evensong experience. The Evensong service comes from Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer from the midcentury. It’s been dubbed the Atheists favorite service because it requires so little and it gives so much it’s simply divine choral music sung in some of the most historic chapels, abbeys and cathedrals in England. We’ll be spending 10 days visiting places like Cambridge, Oxford, Bath, the Cotswolds, Winchester and Windsor with walking tours, free time to explore and then gathering back each afternoon for the Evensong service.
If you choose to attend, it will be 10 days of beautiful countryside, historic cities and villages, and so so much music. I invite you to go to Englandcast.com/tours for full itinerary and pricing information. Again. Englandcast.com/tours. Thanks so much. And now to the show.
Hello and welcome to a very special edition of the Renaissance English History Podcast, part of the Agora Podcast Network. I am your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m so thrilled that I was able to have a conversation with Alison Weir earlier this month.
But before we get into that, just a couple of bits of admin, first, the Agora Podcast of the Month this month is American Biography, which is the American story told through American stories. So it’s a podcast all about biographies of people who had a lot to do with American history but are often overlooked because they aren’t the biggest names. So cabinet members, Congressmen, things like that. So check that out.
And also I have put up show notes for this conversation with Alison Weir on Englandcast.com so you can go to England.cast.com and there are notes and links to all of the different books that she mentioned, upcoming books that she’s working on. Everything like that. And while you’re at the website as well, you can sign up for my mailing list. Newsletter subscribers get access to extra mini casts as well as exclusive content. Things like that and it’s free. It doesn’t cost you anything. I don’t spam you and I’m not going to sell your email address or anything like that. So sign up for my mailing list and you get all kinds of fun free content there as well.
Alright. So without further ado, let me introduce Alison Weir. Alison Weir is a New York Times bestselling author of the novel’s Innocent Traitor and the Lady Elizabeth, and several historical biographies, including Mistress of the Monarchy, Queen Isabella, Henry VIII, Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Life of Elizabeth I and the Six Wives of Henry VIII, which is the first Tudor history book that I ever read. I love it. She lives in Surrey in England with her husband and two children
The Renaissance English History podcast welcome, Alison Weir. This is such a thrill for me to be able to talk to you. And I really do appreciate you taking the time. So I’ll jump right in, I guess, to the questions. And also some of these are from my listeners. I throw it out to my listeners, asking them what kinds of questions they had for you as well. One of the first questions you probably get asked a lot is that your timing with writing all of your books. It really seems to you kind of were on the zeitgeist with this whole Tudor, everything being so popular. Why do you think that the Tudors have become so popular? And what do you think their appeal is to us today?
Alison:
It’s a big question. But first of all, this is a larger-than-life dynasty, and it’s a dramatic story. And you’ve got these vivid royal characters that for the first time in our history, are really fleshed out by individual source material, because this is an age of the spread of literacy, with the development of printing and also the development of diplomacy, which comes to the forward in the Tudor period. And we’ve got so much more information. And Henry it’s matrimonial activities, particularly his marriage. His attempts to divorce Catherine of Aragon made the whole marriage a subject of legitimate public focus for virtually the first time. This was a sensational thing, and after that, it was open season. It’s virtually a tabloid press work here.
So we’ve got a lot of information about the personal lives of monarchs and it’s also a period of great magnificence. It’s a proper concept for the Renaissance, as you will know, because what if you had it, you’ve flaunted it and that they were the trappings of power and authority and Majesty. And so we’ve got the remains. We’ve got a good visual record for this period. It remains of wonderful palaces, wonderful artifacts, art, painting, portraits in particular for England. The costume is magnificent at this period. And we also have portraits coming into their own with Lucas Hornebolte. Hans Holbein is the greatest artist of the period, and we’ve seen really the world faces of England for the first time properly. And I think all this, this visual record to this written record, combined with the dramatic events. I mean, you can’t make this period up. You’re talking about a king with six wives. He beheads two, divorces 3 and a 17, 16-year-old girl who becomes Queen later. Jane Grey reigns in nine days and is beheaded. But adds the stuff of drama. 300 martyrs burned under Mary Tudor. It is great personal tragedy driving through because of problems with the succession. And Elizabeth, this is an age where it starts off at an age where female monarchs are seen as a complete no-no. Women are not supposed to wield dominion over men, and it ends with the most successful monarch ever to reign in England. Elizabeth I who comes to a bankrupt kingdom and is still there 45 years later, having emerged triumphant over the Armada.
Heather:
Yeah. And even Elizabeth, you talked about the martyrs under Mary and then with Elizabeth with the Catholics. Also, because of the concern with the succession and Mary, Queen of Scots,
Alison:
You’ve got the religious story as well. So, Yes, it’s a dramatic period full of amazing stories.
Heather:
And since you first began your research in the 16th, 17th century I guess a little later, how do you think the interpretation of women, particularly it’s something I’m very interested in how this interpretation of women has changed even in this past century, even in the last four or 5 decades, the idea that these women wouldn’t have played much of a part in public policy to then swinging that the women were all in charge of wielded all this influence over Henry. And then I don’t know. How do you think the interpretations of women have changed during this time period?
Alison:
Vastly, vastly. Some of the women I have actually published biographies about would never have got a biography, never merited a footnote. When I started out researching, there were biographies of women, they weren’t considered very important because it is true. David Starkey is right. Most European history has been made by middle-class white males. But the thing is, I mean, I think women’s histories are interesting in their own right. They should be retrieved.
Now where perhaps overstating the case. Take Anne Boleyn, for example. When I started, most historians, male at that would have said we’re saying things like Anne Boleyn was not the cause of the Reformation. She couldn’t have been instrumental in it. Now you’ll have a historian like … saying Anne Boleyn is the chief cause of the Reformation, which I wouldn’t quite agree with. I think that’s slightly overstating the case. And because there’s been such a focus on women’s history and rightly too in the last decade and more to which I’ve contributed, we’re probably overstating the case. Women seem to assume more importance than they did, but I think their histories are interesting in their own right and should be retrieved.
Heather:
Absolutely. And then it’s interesting that so much of your Tudor writing as you get later into Elizabeth’s time, there’s sources. But then you also write about these medieval women like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Katherine Swynford. And how is that process different for you?
Alison:
It’s very different because you’re talking about piecing together fragments of information to make a cohesive life. And that’s the challenge of all medieval biography, even of kings. But for women, you can imagine it’s far more complex because there just isn’t the source material. A lot of it is biased. A lot of it comes from monkish chroniclers, ecclesiastical sources, and they’re not going to look very favorably on someone like Eleanor of Aquitaine, who live a very colorful life.
So I mean you have bias in the Tudor period as well. You’re Protestant, Catholic, that kind of thing. You know, you have a nationalistic bias, too, and you have to see how close people are to events. But with medieval biography, particularly Katherine Swynford, I mean, there’s very little visual evidence of her everyday life. There’s not one letter. There’s not one quote biography, so you just have to take… information.
Heather:
But, Yeah, that’s why I asked. You just take what you can get to corroborate the different chronicles, and then piece together something out of that.
Alison:
Yeah, you do. You do, absolutely. And sometimes It comes from boring financial records, which are grants to her. Which, probably, if you get a flurry of grants every couple of years, something like that. It suggests the birth of her bastard children by John of Gaunt, that kind of thing. Sometimes, if you look at the movements of other people close to your subject, you get something.
Heather:
So how for you yourself, after 21 books, something like that? How–
Alison:
23 books.
Heather:
Okay, sorry. 23 books, How is your opinion of these characters of these people? How did that deepen your relationship with them and your opinions of them? Are you still learning new? You’re still learning new things about Anne Boleyn because you’re researching, but tell me a little bit about like, how you felt about them when you first started and how your relationship with them has changed.
Alison:
My interest was born when I was 14 years old. When I read a great trashy historical novel, I would say it now, about Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn and I had sort of had brushes with Tudor history before, and talks about it at my school, I have the exercise books to show they taught me about them. I can’t remember it was so dull. How can you make the Tudors dull, right?
Heather:
Yeah, exactly.
Alison:
But so I started off with a very romanticized view. And you’ve heard it in the broadest sense, Anne Boleyn’s story is a very romantic one. In a way, it would have been seen in the Romantic era of literature. But since coming to research her, I don’t feel so sympathetic towards her. And the Anne Boleyn you see in the media, on the internet on all the bloggers, pages, and everything is not the Anne Boleyn. If you really look at the sources who we are seeing in those sources, she’d become a celebrity superstar, and that’s overlaid everything. A few years ago, you would do an image search for portraits of Anne Boleyn. Now you get Natalie Dormer and Natalie Portman from the films and the Tudors.
Heather:
Yeah, absolutely.
Alison:
So this is what a lot of people fantasize, a lot of people really do romanticize the subject in the modern way. And they need to go back to the sources and look. And I have to say, it’s not easy to make her a sympathetic subject for a novel. It’s not. You can see why she behaves the way she does. But I think some of it has to do with character.
She came from a very ambitious family, but you have to admire her for her courage. And the people by default see her as a feminist before her time. And it was until quite recently, I, myself would have said that that’s a very wrong way to look at a historical character. But actually, there was my good friend, the historian Sarah Bryson, who have just alerted me today. She said, that there actually was a feminist movement in Europe. When Anne was there and was involved. She actually served to the great movers and shakers in that movement. And so yes, she would, she’d certainly imbibed ideas that would have been seen as radical in England, and we would see a feminist. So it enables me to portray her as a very modern character.
Heather:
Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I’m interested in this feminist movement. Who was it? Margaret of Austria?
Alison:
Margaret of Navarre. Anne Boleyn knew her. But yeah, I mean, she later had to backtrack furiously on her views. King Francis took them over more of a hard line, because have you been linked to religious reform as well. And there again, Anne Boleyn comes in. So these are early influences, and this is very crucial, but it’s going back. It’s the culture she would have imbibed when she was over on the continent. They work with Christina de Pizan, a feminist writer in the early 15th century. Of course, they’ve wouldn’t have used the word feminist, but wait, but I certainly think it’s legitimate, looking at these sources in this context.
Heather:
Interesting. Wow.
Alison:
That’s afforded the different views and you can see where she’s coming from. She is the first really modern queen of England. Yeah. Catherine of Aragon is the last true medieval queen of England. Anne Boleyn, all that aside, you can see why she was controversial.
Heather:
Sure, sure. Wow. So okay, let me move on here to my next question. With your writing process, because you write both nonfiction and fiction. What’s the difference with that for you? How does your research differ? And what’s the experience like one versus the other?
Alison:
Well, obviously, there’s much more of a discipline with writing nonfiction. You are constrained to the original source, contemporary source material, and legitimate speculation. What you can infer from that. But writing fiction, I mean, most of my fiction books have been based on research I have already done for nonfiction. But I have done some extra research, particularly, I mean this new series of six novels on the wives of Henry VIII. It was actually, the idea came to me because I published a biography of the Wives of Henry VIII in ‘91. And it’s out of date now. I mean, I’ve done a lot of research since. And I’ve been really searching and actually rewriting it. It’s going to be different books. And my publishers wanted to publish it, but it’s going to take me years with all the other books I have on contract. So I thought, I just had this idea with coming up through a series of novels and thought I would really like to write six novels on the wives of Henry VIII. No one would take six novels, but they did, because they thought yes, this is going to be a great series. So I had this wonderful freedom. We go back to talking about interpreting research and using new research for these novels. And of course, you do have a degree of freedom in the way you interpret, but I suppose that the historian me, I do try to keep very close to the facts. And although there might be some rather surprising threads in these novels, they are based on original source material. And I think that what you fictionalize in and of in a historical novel, should be credible in the context of what is known about the subject, so I don’t think I’ve been taking too many liberties because that sells short to those who know very little about it and come into it fresh. And they’ll get me on to… And but it also sell short to those who know a lot about it. I mean, if I pick up a historical novel, I get to page two, I think I’ve got to have done it. Right. It killed it for you.
Heather:
Yeah, there was a book like that recently. I’m not gonna name it, but it was set in the 1200’s. And the character went to an even song service, and I just saw and it was like, 10 pages into it. And after that, I was just like, I can’t read this. What do you read for fun?
Alison:
I like Peter Jones. I like thrillers. I like anything supernatural. I like anything with a sort of, mysteries, anything like that. Mostly modern, I do read historical novels. I’ve got some very old favorites. And my favorite writer of all time Norah Lofts And I read the year before last, I reread every single one of her 60 books. She did historical novels. She also wrote modern novels, modern for her time. And a lot of other besides about American history. You know, she wrote some wonderful books and I was instrumental in getting some of them reprinted.
Heather:
Norah Lofts, I’ll put a link up.
Alison:
Yes N-O-R-A-H L-O-F-T-S. Norah Lofts. People are not taking her seriously. She’s going to subjects with one or two theses, you know, PhD theses. I think it’s, it’s, she wrote so beautifully and I would love to write like that and other influences Hilda Lewis another mid 20th-century historical novelist. And some of her books were filmed. But the trouble is, the films don’t do them justice. If you saw the films you wouldn’t think. But that often happens.
Heather:
Yeah, the movies of the 50s didn’t often do justice.
Alison:
But even today, you know, they don’t follow the book.
Heather:
Yeah, no, that’s true as well. A couple questions that my listeners wanted to know was, what do you think Mary, Queen of Scots? Her level of involvement in Darnley’s murder was? And also the casket letters. Do you think they’re forgeries? Talk a little about your opinion?
Alison:
I think they’re forgeries. We know they’re forgeries. I mean, there’s so much internal evidence that shows that they are forgeries. We’ve got to remember that 75% of the evidence about Mary, Queen of Scots comes from her enemies, who were on a mission and had a great justification to save their own necks for portraying her as adulterous and murderous. Her relations with Bothwell up to… discounts the casket letters because I think they’re just no good. No use of evidence because there’s so many errors in them, and so many misconceptions, and some of them don’t even relate to Bothwell. They relate to Mary’s son, James. But we discount those. There is absolutely no evidence before Darnley’s murder to link Mary romantically to Bothwell. Well, in fact, I mean, other people say, oh, she must have known because there were at least two groups of conspirators at Kirk o’ Field on the night that Darnley was murdered. So I have to say it’s a cast of 1000s in the suspect. It’s most of the Scottish nobility involved in this. But she might not have known, she could well not have known because a few months earlier with Rizzio, her Secretary had been brutally murdered almost in her presence. And most of the Scottish Lords were involved in that and she didn’t know about it. It came as an absolute shock. She was in a state of physical and mental collapse with plenty of evidence for that after Darnley’s murder. She’d been through a hell of a lot in her reign. She’d been very ill. Even her contemporaries are saying it was due to stress. She vomited 60 times in one day, she went into a very bad situation. The problem was because of her physical and mental state, she’s suffered in inertia. She didn’t do anything. She kept saying she would do something to bring down these murderers to justice. But the whole point was that I mean, there were rumors that it was Bothwell and Balfour who was certainly there about Kirk o’field, but it wasn’t Bothwell who killed Darnley but people thought he did and of course, he intended to. He was the one who laid the explosion and have the house undermined. We know that there’s plenty of evidence about that. No, it was people far closer to the center of government, it was actually done by his own kinsmen, the Douglases who murdered him. So Mary could not have been involved in that. She certainly shouldn’t have been involved with that. But I mean, I think there was a shock to her conscience because of the previous December, two months before she’d been at a conference at …castle, the Scottish Lords had discussed with her what to do with gambling. And in the end, they just, don’t worry they said, it’ll all be dealt with and you won’t have to worry, that sort of thing. And she said, “Well, nothing must be done against my cleaning on all my conscience.” I haven’t used her words exactly. But that’s what she said. And I think that was a stab to her conscience, because I think it must have been obvious. They realized divorce wasn’t an option. Well how else can they get rid of this man who was plotting against her and being a total general nuisance, very vicious to her as well. To be honest, I think if I be married to Darnley, I’d have killed him. But I mean, afterwards with Bothwell.
Bothwell suddenly comes into his own. He’s one of these men, I’m thinking power corrupts, and we see that very quickly. Beforehand, he seemed sort of quite an upright man, he’d been the only one of the Scottish Lords who has not taken bribes from the English. And he comes into his own and he treats her virtually as his prisoner, he kidnapped her, carried her off to Dunbar, and raped her. She then became pregnant from that. We know he raped her looking at the dates. Well, some said it was with her consent. She didn’t seem to do very much to try to escape. And people said it was her collusion. This is the whole point was when he came back to Edinburgh with her and leading her horse by the bridle, which is a symbol of captivity. She married him, but she was very, very unhappy. She was crying a lot. It looks as if he forced her into a situation that she couldn’t get out of. He asked to marry her before he even got the Lords to sign a bond supporting it, and she’d refused. I think he forced that.
I think I mean, you’re innocent until you’re proven guilty. There isn’t the evidence to prove Mary, Queen of Scots’s guilty. Circumstantially, you can make a case for all sorts of things, but there just isn’t the evidence.
I’ve wrote that book having done all research thinking she would be guilty and I had to come all the way around to the other point.
Heather:
Interesting, interesting. Well, someone wanted to know, do you ever plan to do research (And it’s probably difficult with sources as I read this here, into the very poorest people in in Renaissance England? would you consider writing fiction or nonfiction about their daily lives?
Alison:
It’s not my chief interest, no. I’m interested in people who live in the public focus. I mean, for whom there was, it’s very difficult also, such books did not sell. Yeah, I can admit, that’s the problem. You take any one publishers now, they notice it’s a difficult world and it’s a big subject, they want subjects that people are really gonna want to read about. And it’s, I think you’re gonna find it far more interesting to read about a queen who’s beheaded than someone who’s toiling away…
Heather:
Yeah, and who’s harvesting failed.
Alison
Not that I don’t feel sorry for, it’s just not going to have that interest.
Heather:
Yeah, just the same as today. You don’t have like magazines publishing stories about celebrities, not your average person working at their nine to five job or whatever. So what do you think caused the Amy Robsart stuff?
Alison:
I don’t think it was Robert Dudley. Because I think he was painfully shocked. And I certainly don’t think Elizabeth was behind it, because Elizabeth was horrified to find that her lover was actually a free man and might want to marry her. Because Elizabeth avoided all attempts to marry is what as we all know, but it could well have been. As Chris Skidmore suggested a friend of Leicester Robert Dudley who had done it on his behalf for him without his knowledge. But I also think that the theory that William Cecil was behind it. And there again, we’ve only got circumstantial evidence, but who benefited most within Cecil and England because Elizabeth was on a headlong course to marry this man or so Cecil would have seen it. And Cecil himself gave her wide council, he’d been a supporter for a long time. He was her chief, he was a secretary of state. She called him the wisest count, the most honest counselor anyone I’ve ever had. And she relied on him but he went away to Edinburgh that summer in 1550 when the affair with Dudley was becoming notorious and scandalous and he negotiated a wonderful treaty, a really advantageous treaty to Elizabeth with the Scots. He came back and found himself without a favor, she was ungrateful, she didn’t want to know him and badly is riding high. And you can see where Cecil’s coming from, you know, she’s gonna ruin herself, gonna ruin England by marrying this man. He’s already married, whatever her behaviors causing a scandal.
So Cecil, the whole thrust would have been to get rid of this man who’s causing the scandal. His wife behaved uncharacteristically openly with a Spanish Ambassador who’s an absolute gossip and then moves around Europe in 10 minutes, basically, because he’s gonna report it to everyone all and sundry. He’s not discreet. And he tells a separate topic that Amy is dying and she had a melody in her breath. But she said she’s not … to murder her. And so and that very weekend, two days later, Amy is found out with her neck broken. She also wants to get everyone out of the house, it sounds as if she wants to clear the decks for someone coming to visit her. And of course, as soon as the news comes to Elizabeth, Dudley is out of the door, she sends him to… and he has to stay away from court pending the outcome of the inquest that does clear his name. And that, of course, was found by Chris Skidmore, only a few years ago, but it was misfiled in the wrong year. And yeah, and it shows that there was a definite blow to the style and that she had, she definitely had been, I don’t think they’ve ever caught her just by falling down the stairs.
And so what happens is the scene is done without … court, in come Cecil back in favor. Elizabeth never going to marry Dudley because he’s too tainted by scandal. They remain close. And it’s still rumored that he will marry her. He still hopes it but she never ever does. And she entertains me. And in the end, because Cecil gets on with Dudley who mellows and matures and that to me, they do because they work together, they’re probably even friends, they visit and that kind of thing. But I don’t think that Dudley himself was a murderer. So many people try, you know, accused him of poison, because he was so unpopular. He was actually a man who had great, great Protestant convictions. He was quite puritanical in his views. He had a lot of good qualities, I feel. And he was very supportive of Elizabeth. So that’s my view on that. I think we don’t know for certain, but I just think that, we could see the hand especially…
Heather:
I’m just thinking about his hand and the death of Mary, Queen of Scots as well. So he doesn’t seem like he would have hesitated if he saw that something was a threat to the country. So yeah. Cool. Well, though, those are my questions. Well actually my last question. I live in Andalusia in Spain. And so will you ever do any kind of work on any one in Spanish? I would love to see your work on some Spanish.
Alison:
I actually proposed a novel called Daughters in Spain, The Daughters of Ferdinand and Isabella. My publisher, David among 10 that I propose, I usually propose a selection of subjects to my publishers. And my publishers, they didn’t they turned down the subject. And then of course, Julia Fox published Sister Queens about Katherine and Juana. And I’m fascinated by Juana. I don’t speak Spanish. And the sources would be a real problem. So I have to be honest on that, I mean, it would have been an overview if I’d done foreign subject lives. Like, you can’t do it. Because the language is a problem with foreign subjects, but I’m fascinated by Spanish history right the way through right up to the end of the 17th century. As soon as the … take over now, my interest wanes but the Hapsburgs are fascinating. They really are.
Heather:
Interesting.
Alison:
… these novels tho.
Heather:
Oh, yeah. No, of course there is. Yeah, for sure. Well, I can imagine I’m excited to see your new novels that comes out in May of 2016. May of this year.
Alison:
It comes out here and 31st of May in the state.
Heather:
Okay. Okay, great. So we’ll put links up to that on my website as well for listeners. And yeah, thank you so much. I really, I just can’t thank you enough. I first read the Six Wives of Henry the VIII 20 years ago and it made my life so much richer for having this history. And I just can’t thank you enough for taking your time out of your day with all your rewrites and everything.
Alison:
Very, very kind of you. So thank you, I’ve enjoyed talking a lot.
Heather:
My thanks again to Alison Weir for taking the time out of her schedule to talk to the Renaissance English History Podcast. And again, there are show notes with links to Norah Lofts’ books, and the new novels by Alison Weir at englandcast.com. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you soon.
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