When the ambitious Tudor matron Lady Lisle was preparing to ship her teenage daughter, Anne, off to court to become a lady-in-waiting to the new queen, Jane Seymour, they were supplied with a back-to-school packing list of sorts.
Anne, who’d grown up in Calais, could “wear out” her French fashions, “but then would need new, English gowns,” as was the queen’s preference. Similarly, she was required to swap her fetching “French hood” (with its unfortunate Anne Boleyn associations) for the frumpy English “gable hood,” in velvet.
“Women at court did not move with speed,” writes the author and historian Nicola Clark in “The Waiting Game,” her lively and vivid new book. The three-tiered headpieces made it difficult to both see and hear.
But what these ladies lacked in agility owing to layers of velvet, fur and wire, they made up for in the mental gymnastics required to stay alive at Henry VIII’s increasingly despotic court.
The subtitle bills this as an “untold story,” but that’s an unnecessary oversell. Many of these names will be familiar to hard-core fans. But it’s true that by grouping these women together, Clark has found a compelling side entrance into the Tudor industrial complex. Henry VIII’s rule is defined by physical and historical enormousness — big palaces, reforms, codpieces — but behind all that, the Tudor court reveals itself to be human-size and small.
The book is, in part, a warning against the dangers of favoritism within any inner sanctum. Much better to be overlooked and underappreciated than in the sovereign’s good graces. Consider the case of Lady Lisle, who hoped to establish two of her daughters: Anne, young, fair and lively, and Katharine, older and unremarked upon.
Anne was brought to court with Jane Seymour, an honor that involved possibly having to sleep with King Henry. She would serve three more queens, shifting her loyalties according to the terrifying whims of the king, even as her own parents were imprisoned for their suspected Catholic sympathies.
Katharine spent years languishing as a lady-in-waiting to a lady-in-waiting. She finally ended up serving the castoff Queen Anne of Cleves during her forced retirement. Far from glamorous, but also far from the executioner’s ax.
Unlike poor Jane Parker. Anne Boleyn’s widowed sister-in-law managed to survive Anne’s downfall, only to live on in a kind of golden-handcuffed servitude as lady to three more queens, before losing her own head. As Clark writes, we may never know why Jane chose the risk of arranging rendezvous for Queen Katherine Howard and her lover. But while many ladies-in-waiting suffered as their queens fell out of favor, Jane has the distinction of being the only one to lose her actual head.
Catching the eye of King Henry remained another constant threat. By the time the lady-in-waiting Catherine Parr became his final wife, her bridegroom’s ulcerating leg was so pungeant she ordered perfumes for her chambers and bed.
The book is resplendent with smells. Clark describes the scene that awaited Maria de Salinas, who served Catherine of Aragon for 30 years. Entering London, travelers “were engulfed by the stench of rotting meat, sewage and all manner of dangerously disgusting things dumped into ditches, back streets and the river.”
Embroidery emerges as a theme. “Needlework was a sharp, pointed and unanswerable form of resistance for women who had no other outlet.” The Duchess of Norfolk was forced to abandon a “complex embroidery work” when her husband banished her so he could carry on an affair. The work, described in inventories as “a great pomegranate of gold,” had perhaps been her silent form of protest at the treatment of her queen, as the fruit was Catherine of Aragon’s symbol.
In one scene, Queen Catherine and her ladies are embroidering when they’re interrupted by two cardinals, come to brief the Catholic queen on her divorce trial. “But as her ladies came to remove the skeins of embroidery silks she had draped around her neck she stopped them,” Clark writes, to emphasize Catherine’s domestic femininity.
Lest we think all these women did was sit around rage-embroidering, Clark describes the dual roles they held at court and as chatelaines of vast estates. With war and uprisings a frequent threat, they’d be called home for months at a time as their husbands headed for the borders. As one lord noted, they “rather playeth the part of a knight than of a lady.”
Clark brings these ladies — traditionally the window dressing of Tudor literature — forward and casts them as the heroes of their own dramas. What Clark calls the “girlbossification” of exceptional historical women has opened up a new subgenre; recent years have brought star-studded reimaginings of the nine-days-queen Lady Jane Grey and Kathryn Parr. But such Hollywood embellishment is hardly necessary. While Clark reminds us that “women’s history does not need to be exceptional to be relevant,” her subjects are anything but ordinary.
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