Melita Thomas is the co-founder and editor of Tudor Times, a repository of information about Britain in the period 1485-1625 www.tudortimes.co.uk  

Melita has loved history since being mesmerised by the BBC productions of ‘The Six Wives of Henry VIII’ and ‘Elizabeth R’, when she was a little girl. After that, she read everything she could get her hands on about this most fascinating of dynasties. Captivated by the story of the Lady Mary galloping to Framingham to set up her standard and fight for her rights, Melita began her first book about the queen when she was 9. The manuscript is probably still in the attic!  

Whilst still pursuing a career in business, Melita took a course on writing biography, which led her and her business partner to the idea for Tudor Times, and gave her the inspiration to begin writing about Mary again. ‘The King’s Pearl: Henry VIII and his daughter Mary’ is her first book. She is now working on a study of the Grey family – Lady Jane Grey’s predecessors – for publication in 2019.

In her spare time, Melita enjoys long distance walking. She is attempting to walk around the whole coast of Britain, and you can follow her progress here. https://mgctblog.com/

Video Transcript:

Melita Thomas
Tudor Times

Heather: So the next speaker from Tudor Summit is Melita Thomas and as you can see we’re actually together in person [Both Laugh] and we’re together because we’re actually doing our podcast live at this Todor 17th century experience home which is amazing to be at, so we’ve come a little early to record this talk. So Melita is going to talk about Ladies-in-waiting at the Tudor court, it’s a really exciting topic that I’m really excited to learn about.

Melita: Yeah, it was very interesting one to research in fact , you remember Downton Abbey and we all remember Downton Abbey, and probably many people who saw Downton Abbey saw the relationship between Lady Mary and Anna, long suffering Anna I have to say, and they might have wondered that’s the maiden’s maid but what was it like in the Tudor period, because you hear about the Queens having their ladies in waiting and their maids of honor and, you know, was it a similar sort of relationship or was it very different? And in fact, I think it was very different in the Tudor period because Tudor Queens were actually much closer to that domestic servant, they weren’t servants in the same way that in the Victorian period, the lady’s maid was a servant.

Heather: Because they were other nobility and things like that.

Melita: And the whole concept of service in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries was very different from what it was in the 19th and 20th centuries, because everybody, other than the King and royalty basically, everybody waited on somebody else, it was a very hierarchical society but there was a concept of the servant and the master having a relationship that conferred obligation in both ways and the theory was that if you didn’t know how to serve, you couldn’t command, so even royalty in fact, Queen Margaret of Denmark, she was Queen of Scots to James III, she insisted that her son, who was later King James IV, was trained as a page so he could wait on her so he knew what it was like to serve and that was the whole concept for both men and women; that you went into the household of someone of a similar rank or higher than yourself and you learned to be a servant in their house, but the word servant didn’t mean what it meant at the time of Downton Abbey.

Heather: And you also might go into their house to get marriage prospects.

Melita: Exactly, so typically a girl when she was about 12 or 14, she’d go into the household, often of the man she was going to marry or one of the brothers and she would wait on the mistress of the house, and then she would learn the trade of being the mistress of the great house and when she married the son, she became the mistress and she could take on another generation of young women; so there wasn’t that gulf that there was in the later period and at the very top of society, the Noblemen’s daughters waited on the Queen, and they would have their own ladies who then would have their own waiting woman who would write down all the way to the people who were at the bottom.

Heather: It’s like a pyramid scheme.

Melita: Exactly, people moved in the uprack echelons, they moved up those sort of levels as they got older, so in Elizabeth of York’s household, for example, Cecily of York and Anne of York, they both had official positions as ladies of her bedchamber, first Cecily was chief and when she got married it was Anne; and 50 years later Katherine Parr’s household, her sister Anne Herbert was her lady in waiting and her cousin was another one of them. There were of course people below who were called the chambermaid who did the laundry, changed the bedding, etc, but even they could be close to their mistress, Catherine of Aragon left, I wouldn’t say she because she wasn’t in the position she was as a queen, she mentioned mistress Marjorie who had been one of her chamberess in her will so you could even have a close relationship with someone who seemed to be low down the pecking order. So within the Royal House you had the ladies in Waiting and then you had the Maids of Honor; and the Ladies in Waiting would be usually older women, married, probably closely related to the Queen and her friends.

Heather: And they would also have their own household then?

Melita: Yes.

Heather: How did that work?

Melita: If you were a Lady of Waiting and you were married, which most of them were, you were downrated, so you’d be on for 3 months, there’s no evidence about the exact time schedule, but it’s apparent they had a tour of duty effectively, and then they would go home and have children and they would come back. Eleanor Paston who was the Countess of Rutland, she managed to have eleven children in the period between 1523 to 1539 and she served Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard [laughs] so she was a busy girl, and then when they were doing those things at home, they’d be bearing children and their husband was away and then they would come back on. Later Elizabeth I was very mean about her righteous, so her poor cousin Catherine Carey was almost never allowed any time off, every time she went off to have any of her numerous children, Elizabeth demanded that she come back immediately, Elizabeth wasn’t the best employer, she was very exacting, more than the other Queens.

Melita: So, the Ladies in Waiting would tend to be friends, So Catherine of Aragon’s close friend was Maria de Salinas, who’d come with her from Spain, and Maria’s daughter, Katherine Willoughby, who became friends with Katherine Parr although not to the extent of wanting to take care of Katherine’s daughter when she died so. And the scottish court was the famous Five Marys and they were friends, they were genuinely close, and Mary Seton, one of them, she was a Nobleman’s daughter and she was the hairdresser for the Queen, so she looked after Mary Queen of Scots’ exceptionally beautiful hair, so it wasn’t looked down upon, so the thing that Anna was doing in Downton Abbey, which was very menial was not considered that.

Heather: And surely it would have been a great privilege to be able to work on the Queen’s hair, such level of intimacy, it’s like the Queen was a stool for her.

Melita: They talk casually about the maids and make jokes.

Heather: The Maids of honor were younger, to be in the royal household they were 16; we know that because in 1536 Lady Nile Was trying to find a position for her daughter and in King James’ household and she was told no, she was only 15 so, you know, try again. So the Maids of Honor were younger, they were not married and they had a supervisor called the Mother of the Maids whose job was to keep these young women in check.

Heather: And they all would sleep in dorms or would they have their own room?

Melita: Nobody had their own room, even the King or Queen shared a room so even the Queen Elizabeth had a bedfellow, so the Maids of Honor wouldn’t have slept with the Ladies in Waiting, may have had a little bit more privacy.

Heather: Would they have shared a bed?

Melita: Yes, most certainly, yes. Even the Queen shared a bed, so you’d probably get the Ladies in Waiting tucked up together or if one of the Ladies, if she was one of the Great Ladies who were the ones that weren’t employed exactly but they attended on the Queen if they were called, they  and their husbands may have had rooms. So the household was divided in the King’s side and the Queen’s side so there wasn’t necessarily much interaction between the men and the women other than in the official rooms so eating, and then the Great Hall…

Heather: That is interesting because even the White House has the East Wing and the West Wing where one is the purview of the First Lady and the other is the one where the President does his business.

Melita: I didn’t know that. So yes, exactly the same concept. So the Maids had to bring in their own Linen and they had a single waiting woman each and the Queen determined they got paid 10 pounds a year and I guess it must have been the same throughout the century.

Heather: And where they told what kind of clothing to wear?

Melita: We know most of how they were employed because of Lady Lisle efforts to get her daughter Anne Bassett employed by Queen Jane and she sends endless letters to all the ladies she knows, she knows Lady Rutland, her niece is a Maid of Honor and about to become a Lady in Waiting when she married the Earl of Sussex, letters asking “How can I suck up to the Queen and get my daughter a job?” and eventually Jane said “send me your two girls, Katherine and Anne” one of them can have a place and I’ll decide which I like based on her fashion and her conditions” she told Lady Lisle “send me daughters, but until I choose one they only need to bring two suits of clothing, one in silk and one in damask” and you know the dress, and the things and all the rest of it. Once they were employed and Jane took Anne Bassett, the Maid of Honor had livery, which wouldn’t have been uniform as the other lower servants wore, but it would have been a badge with the Queen’s arms or the royal initials on probably on a gown of black because dark fabrics were more expensive. 

From the early 1520s’ when Mary was Princess of Wales, her lower servants were all dressed in her colors of blue and green and that was and that was a livery, and the Ladies and the Gentlemen wore black velvet. So the Maid of Honor should swear allegiance to her mistress and her conduct would be regulated, which told them how they had to behave, there was to be not quarreling and fighting, so what they would do? In less exalted households; this went all the way down the social scale, the women had many real duties to perform and although no Gentleman or Lady would milk a cow, the lady of the manor would look after her dairy, she would supervise what was going on in the kitchens, she wouldn’t cook day to day meals but she would get involved in culinary specialties; so when the ingredients were valuable, such as sugar, the Lady of the house would often make the confectionery herself and her women helped her. 

Lady Lisle made Queen’s marmalade which she sent Henry VIII, much to his delight. Mary Queen of Scots and her marys learned to make marmalade and crystallised fruit, Isabel of Castile brought up her daughters to sew and to understand housewifing duties even though there were best dedicated women in Europe at the time, these women managed the servants, they looked after the children.

Heather: So all the kind of traditional women-taking-care-of-the-home kind of thing.

Melita: Yes, but the mistress would also look after legal business and inspect business while the husband was away, there was no equality in society in the way we think of it, but the women had a position and they had power within their sphere, women ran the household and that was their job. One of the major tasks was sewing, all levels of society, when you see the beautiful embroideries and we’ve looked at some today, that’s what the Ladies of the court did, they did fine embroidery, but Queen Catherine of Aragon sewed her husband’s shirts, she was very famous for doing that; and Henry got himself into trouble with Anne Boleyn when he still went to his wife to have his shirts sewn and Lady Anne was not very happy about that, and if they weren’t sewing, they would be making music, they would be dancing, playing chess, they read aloud, private reading didn’t come in until the end of the 16th century, reading was nearly all aloud, they hunted, Ladies did that as well as Gentlemen, they did archery. 

Mary Queen of Scots in her time played Tennis although it seemed to be fairly unusual for women to do that, they went to the court’s ceremonies, they greeted Ambassadors, they played damask. The first mention of Anne Boleyn in history is at a masque in 1523 where she played one of the ladies in the tower, and they would watch the King jousting and there’s a picture of Catherine and his ladies watching Henry doing his manly bit, and because the role of the lady was public face it was sometimes their place that they had to be good-looking so when Catherine of Aragon was being prepared to come to England, Henry the VII wrote to her parents and said “make sure that she only brings beautiful ladies with her” and the ladies that were chosen for the masques It was on their looks, I’m afraid it didn’t have anything to do with mathematical ability, it was purely on their looks. 

If a princess married abroad she would take her entourage with her and usually she would have an older woman to look after her, Mary of England had Lady Gifford to look after her when she went to France, and sometimes these ladies were well treated and sometimes they weren’t. Catherine of Aragon’s ladies were well treated until she went to to marry an english Nobleman (Maria de Salinas and Ines de Venegas). Some were not so lucky; Mary of England when she married Louis the XII of France, he insisted on sending all of her ladies home. 

And Mary was absolutely distraught and she wrote to Louis “I am left most alone from the morning after my marriage without my Mother Gifford, but with other men, women and maidens, except such have never had any experience, no knowledge how to advice me or give me counseling in a time of need” there she was, 18 years old in a foreign court; but they were luckier than some. 20 years earlier when Joanna of Castile, Catherine of Aragon’s sister married Philip of Burgundy, he was horrible, the costume was that the Queen, or the wife, had her own money to pay her servants, he wouldn’t give her money so she couldn’t pay her servants, and he would not pay her servants so eventually all left her, were replaced by his people and she had no one to turn to, so she was mad, he was not a nice man; so you can imagine she’s stuck in this household with no friends from home, just horrible. 

They had a regulated number of attendants and competition was fierce so lady Lisle had to send an awful lot of presents to the Queen to get one of her daughters into the household, but she scored because her husband was Governor of  Calais, which was where they hunted quail so she sent lots and lots of quail, as well as suitable other presents to Lady Rutland and people who had the Queen’s ear and eventually it paid off.

Heather: So it’s who you know.

Melita: Absolutely, it never changes, Jane Seymour was quite keen to have a more sedate cour than Anne Boleyn, so, although it seems very, very unlikely that Anne was in any way guilty of adultery, her quite familiar manner with her Gentlemen made it plausible, nobody would have said that Catherine of Aragon was having an affair, it would have just been ridiculous; but Anne Boleyn was more flirtatious so Jane Seymour was always keen to have a very sedate court, and Anne Bassett when she got the job, she was told to be sober, sad, wise and discreet.

Heather: Alison Weir talks a little bit about that in her historical fiction about Jane, she almost kind of separated herself to… she was very determined that she wasn’t going to have a…

Melita: Exactly,she was going to be much more regal and more like Catherine of Aragon, Elizabeth of York, and preserve that distance between the Queen and the lesser beings. of course, when there was a Queen Regnant (Mary and Elizabeth) the role of the Ladies in Waiting changed a bit because…

Heather: They must become in the advisors.

Melita: Exactly, they had much likelihood more political influence than previous ladies in waiting had. There was a Lady who was Mary’s closest friend, she was a mistress of the realm, she was Susan Tonge but she’s known as Susan Clarenceux because her husband was Clarenceux Herald, and she was considered to be quite a conduit to the Queen; so a generous present to Susan got you to all sorts of places. They said the two Queens had the three Ladies in the bedchambers, they had seven Ladies in the privy chambers, and the famous one who was Blanche Perry who cared for Elizabeth since she was a small child, and there were the four chambers that set the more menial tasks, and the Maids of Honor, and there were still the Great Ladies, Margaret Douglas, Queen’s cousin, she was one of the Great Ladies because she was too good even to serve the Queen but she was a fixture in Mary’s court because they were friends; but when Elizabeth came to throne she decided Margaret was no longer welcome and she was send off to her states in the north, and the other one who was denoted was Catherine Grey, in Mary’s reign she was one of the Ladies in the privy chamber, so it shows the complexity of the relationships since Jane Grey, Catherine’s sister, had tried to oust Mary from the throne; but Mary having forgiven her cousin, Jane’s mother…  

Heather: Elizabeth didn’t treat those Grey sisters very nice, did she? 

Melita: No, Mary was kinder to them that Elizabeth was. So catherine was demoted from privy chamber which was actually close to the Queen, to the least she could actually decently give her as her cousin. Elizabeth was an exacting mistress, and that poor Catherine, no matter how many children she had, she had to keep coming back, she wasn’t allowed to have that time off. And later Elizabeth became bad-tempered, she was known for having thrown things at them and there’s a story that she actually broke one Maid’s finger by throwing a hairbrush at her. 

She wasn’t the best person to work for but you would think about the stress of the position and so on, she didn’t like her Maids getting married, she got very, very upset about that. Elizabeth didn’t like eating in public so one of the things that her Ladies had to do was wait on her table so the food would be sent in to her and…

Heather: Why didn’t she like to eat in public? Was it because or her teeth or… 

Melita: I don’t know, you see pictures and the King… it was a very important part of medieval kingship to eat in the great hall and they would sit there, every mouthful is being watched, imagine sitting there and everybody watching you eat dinner, Elizabeth didn’t eat a lot she was actually quite abstemia, she didn’t eat a lot and she didn’t like these long banquets, sitting and eating and drinking just didn’t do it for her, apart from sugar which she ate so much of, so she liked to keep her food private and she would have a woman to share her bedroom with; is not absolutely clear whether she shared the Queen’s bed, I mean they’re known as bedfellows and the beds were quite big, but she would certainly sleep in the same room because because not even the monarch ever slept alone, no one was ever alone, it must have been horrible actually. So the Ladies, they washed her, they dressed her, they did her hair, they put on her make up and they created her image of Gloriana, without the Ladies in waiting 

there would be no Gloriana.

Heather: How do you think it changed from the 1480s’ to the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Do you know much about Anne of Denmark?

[They both drink from their mugs and discuss the drink authentic drink]

Melita: So Anne of Denmark, when she was Queen of Scots, when she became Queen of Scots she was only 15 and , again when we think about them, they’re just young girls, and they’re in a foreign country, and she became very close to some of her scottish ladies and that created a little bit of friction in her marriage because she was sometimes more supportive of her ladies than her husband was comfortable with because there were all these factions in the scottish court; and Lady Huntly who was her favorite Lady was rumoured to be a catholic and then convert which didn’t get on too well although it was kept secret, it was never openly admitted it was widely rumoured. When James inherited, Robert Cecil was in charge of absolutely everything, he decided that who had been Elizabeth’s chief ladies would become Anne’s and so he sent a delegation of them to meet the Queen at the border, but a couple of ladies who hadn’t been chosen by Cecil got ahead and got to Edinborough, so there was Lucy Lady Bedford and Penelope Rich and they more or less became Anne’s favorite ladies until Penelope Rich fell out of favor for her re-marriage. But Lucy, the Countess of Bedford became very close friends of the Queen’s, of course they were young women, Anne was in her 20s’, she didn’t want these 16 year old women hanging about, but in her reign, or her time as Queen, the masques became an even more important part of court life, they were extravagant in the extreme, people complain about the price but it did bring back the English court much more back into line with Europe after the isolation of Elizabeth’s reign, and had her danish and her german relatives, and the King of Denmark visited so it did raise the prestige of the English court, and she had Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones who did the designs and the Ladies had drawings, so her Ladies were also very much a part of the ceremonial of the court.

Heather: So it sounds like, during Mary and Elizabeth, the Ladies in waiting had a more potential role in government, and then it went back to masques.

Melita: Yes, and the King’s personal friends then had lots of influence.

Heather: When do you think it started to turn into this Downton Abbey servant kind of thing?

Melita: It’s not a period I’ve studied but probably in the late 17th or the early 18th century was probably the big change, you started getting the housekeeper, so the lady who might have been a low ranking woman like a Baron’s wife or something, she might have had one waiting woman, who then turned into the Housekeeper, and then there was more stratification so, yeah, 18th century. One of the innovations that came in with the late 18th – early 19th century was the bells. 

Before bells they were just people, so you had someone sitting outside the room or sitting in the room with you so you were much closer to them; but once you had the bell, they were off in the servants hall and that created a big division. It the 15th century, before this period, they were even closer and they would all sleep together in the great hall so you couldn’t help to be more intimately acquainted with people, but as the notion of privacy which came as a Georgian idea, that’s when they changed, and then possibly the public schools for the boys, so didn’t have to go into service.

Heather: Thank you so much for telling us about the Ladies in Waiting, tell me about where people can find you  and you… I need to take some pictures of some of your lovely products over there and, you’ve got your book so, do you want to tell me about some of that?

Melita: Yes, well sure, so in a minute we’re going to be talking about my book: The King’s Pearl, which I’ve talked about in the last two summits, and we’ve got the TudorTimes website and there’s an article on there about the Ladies in Waiting with the bibliography of sources where you can find out some more of the details. We’ve got the TudorTimes shop which has some nice products, some posters; our absolute favorite is “I am no morning woman” by… Elizabeth I said, actually one of the things that Elizabeth and Mary’s women did was walk with them, both the Queens were great walkers, but Elizabeth liked to –she was a late night person and Mary was an early morning person.

Heather: So that’s Shop.Tudortimes.co.uk. Perfect, wonderful… is there anything else you want to say?

Melita:     No, I think that’s it.
Heather:  I think that’s it, we’re done, perfect, thank you so much for watching and see you in the next talk. Bye!