A Brief History of the Tudor Age (41 page)

Women were clearly regarded by everyone as being subordinate to men; but they were accorded a place of some importance and honour in society. Their husbands were expected to treat them kindly,
and with respect; and Fitzherbert, in
The Look of Husbandry
, urged husbands to keep their wives fully informed about money matters.

We can form some idea of the attitude of Tudor men towards women by the conduct of the characters in Shakespeare’s plays, though this is not an entirely reliable guide. In every
generation, the heroes and heroines on the stage sometimes behave in the way in which conventional society expects them to behave, not in the way that the majority of the people of their generation
in fact behave. In Shakespeare’s case, he took many of his plots from stories which had been published in Italy more than fifty years earlier, and therefore showed the attitude of Italians in
1540 more than of Englishmen in 1590. We cannot assume that Shakespeare himself necessarily agreed with the sentiments expressed by his characters, even by his heroes and heroines, for he had to
bear in mind what his audiences wanted and what his patrons would tolerate. But Shakespeare could not present on the stage any character who was not at least understandable to his audiences, and to
this extent, at least, the opinions and behaviour of his heroes and heroines show what was acceptable to Englishmen in the 1590s.

Shakespeare’s women have strong personalities and great determination, whether they are playfully mischievous, like Mistress Page in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
or Maria in
Twelfth Night
; admirable and virtuous, like Desdemona in
Othello
, Imogen in
Cymbeline
, Cordelia in
King Lear
, Volumnia in
Coriolanus
and Portia in
Julius Caesar
; evil, like Goneril and Regan in
King Lear
, Margaret of Anjou in
Henry VI
, and Lady Macbeth; or women who show great professional expertise, like
Portia the lawyer in
The Merchant of Venice
, Helena the physician in
All’s Well that ends Well
, and Viola the diplomat in
Twelfth Night
. Lady Macbeth
is wicked, but she shows greater resolve and strength of character than her husband.

The ballads which were sung, and sold in the shops and streets in London, told stories not only of the exploits of English soldiers and seamen who fought against the Spaniards in the
Netherlands, at Cadiz, and on the Spanish Main, but also of a heroic woman warrior; for the idea of a woman disguising herself as a man and surpassing all the men on the battlefield has fascinated
people in every age until, in the twentieth century, it became possible for women to serve as soldiers without disguising their sex. The ballad of
Mary Ambree
, in the 1580s, told the story
of a young English woman who accompanied her sweetheart when he went to fight as a volunteer in the Netherlands and, after seeing him killed in action, disguised herself as a man and performed
deeds of valour against the Spaniards. When she is finally taken prisoner by the Spaniards, who boast of having captured an English knight and captain, she reveals the truth:

and then proceeds to demonstrate the virtue as well as the courage of English women by refusing the invitation of the Duke of Parma to become his mistress. She explains to him
that a maiden of England will never agree to become the harlot even of a monarch.

In Tudor England gluttony, not lust, was the national sin, and the courts of the Tudor sovereigns, and Tudor society, were largely free from the sexual immorality of the court of the French
Kings. There is nothing in English drama or literature to compare with the stories of the love affairs of noble ladies and merchants’ wives in Queen Margaret of Navarre’s
Heptameron
of 1530 and the Abbé Brantôme’s
Lives of Gallant Ladies
fifty years later. Shakespeare’s unmarried young women sometimes flirt and tease, but
the only married women in all his plays who
are unfaithful to their husbands are the very villainous Goneril and Regan. His plays show the double standards which in every age,
at least until the twentieth century, have always been applied to extra-marital relationships when indulged in by men and women. Desdemona is virtuous, and the admirable Cassio never attempts to
seduce his general’s wife; but no one thinks the worse of him because he has a whore, Bianca.

A visitor from Mantua, who came to England in 1557, suspected that English wives were not always as virtuous as they appeared to be. He thought that many of them had lovers, though they were
very careful to keep this secret, for if they were found out, they might be treated as bawds, and either ducked in the pond or exposed in a cart to public ridicule and contempt. Like many other
foreigners, he found English women very beautiful, and thoroughly approved of the custom in England that when a man met a woman acquaintance, he greeted her with a kiss. The visitor from Mantua
also commented on the fact that when Englishmen met, they usually shook hands, like the Germans did. He noted that there were no brothels in London, for ‘the stews’ had been suppressed
after a big round-up of prostitutes and vagabonds in 1519.

Although Shakespeare’s married women are strong and determined, they do not defy their husbands’ authority over them. The only two who attempt to do so, Katherine in
The Taming
of the Shrew
and Titania in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, are eventually reduced to submission by the punishments which their husbands most properly inflict upon them. But married
women also have their rights, the chief of which is not to be wrongly suspected of having committed adultery. Several of Shakespeare’s virtuous wives are accused of adultery by jealous
husbands who have been persuaded to do so by some villain acting in his own interests. Othello reacts by murdering Desdemona. He is portrayed as a noble character, apart from his one fault of being
too credulous and being deceived by Iago’s lies; and it is clearly implied that if Desdemona had in fact been guilty, he would have been quite justified in smothering her. In this,
Shakespeare is
following the tradition of his Italian sources. There were several cases in Italy and France of cuckolded husbands taking the law into their own hands and
killing their adulterous wives; but if any English nobleman had done this in the Tudor Age, he would have been prosecuted for murder.

The motives of Shakespeare’s villains in slandering these virtuous women tell us a good deal about the Tudor Age. Iachimo slanders Imogen merely because she has rejected his advances; but
lust plays only a very minor part in Iago’s slanders against Desdemona. His principal motive is the hope of gaining more rapid promotion in the army by incriminating Cassio. Don John in
Much Ado About Nothing
is a character that Tudor audiences could well understand. He wrongly accuses the virtuous maiden, Hero, of unchastity in order to prevent her marriage to a
‘young start up’ who may rival his influence at court.

Shakespeare was a friend of Marlowe and Kyd, who were suspected of atheism and sedition. He moved in a circle of unorthodox intellectuals who held opinions on morals which they did not dare to
express openly, but which sometimes emerge in the plays. Hamlet, who is certainly portrayed as a sympathetic character, behaves on several occasions in a way which was outrageous by orthodox
standards of the period. He murders Polonius, thinking that he is killing the King and committing the supreme and unpardonable sin of regicide; and he then proceeds to treat Polonius’s corpse
with a shocking lack of respect. On his way to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he first breaks open a letter sealed with the King’s seal, and then forges the seal, an offence which
was high treason and punishable by death in Tudor England. By these means he contrives for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be put to death without giving them time to confess their sins to a
priest. Finally, in the last dramatic scene, he actually commits regicide by killing the King, after fighting a duel with Laertes during which the Queen states that Hamlet ‘is fat, and scant
of breath’. This remark was sure to raise a laugh from the audience at the Globe Theatre, for Shakespeare’s leading actor, Richard Burbage, who played
Hamlet, was a
fat man who puffed and panted when he had to fight an energetic duel on the stage.

The subordinate position of women in society was not affected by the fact that for fifty years between 1553 and 1603 England was ruled by two female sovereigns. For a thousand years it was
accepted by public opinion that the only position in public life which a woman was allowed to hold was to be head of State; for royal privilege was powerful enough to override the general rule
about the inferiority of women. Elizabeth I, who often referred to the fact that although she was a weak woman she had been chosen by God to be a queen, wished to uphold the conventions of society
and to exalt the royal prerogative by stressing that it was only because she was a queen that she was entitled to meddle in public affairs, which no other woman ought to do. This was accepted by
the great majority of her subjects, though Nicholas Heath, the Catholic Archbishop of York, when opposing the Act of Supremacy in the House of Lords in 1559, said that as a woman could not be a
priest or hold any position in the Church, she could not be its Supreme Head.

Knox, who throughout his life worked closely with several devoted women collaborators in the Protestant movement, challenged the concept of the royal prerogative by asserting that queens were no
exception to the general rule that a woman could not hold any position of authority in the State. It was because Knox attacked her position as a queen, not her rights as a woman, that Elizabeth
considered him to be a dangerous revolutionary.

The Protestant movement was originally a revolutionary movement against Church and State, and when Mary became Queen its extremist wing became revolutionary again, after a twenty-year interlude
during which the Protestants had been the most zealous upholders of absolute monarchy. This may have been the reason why women were attracted to Protestantism. Many women rebelled against their
inferior status, as well as the heresy laws, by becoming active in the Protestant movement. Women normally played no part in politics. When, after the suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace in
1537, some women
took down the corpses of executed rebels which had been left to hang in chains in the villages in Cumberland, the authorities assumed that they had done so on
the orders of their husbands. In view of this, it is very significant that of the 283 Protestant martyrs who were burned in Mary’s reign, as many as fifty-six were women.

Their Catholic opponents wrote a great deal about the wicked and presumptuous Protestant women. One of the points at issue between Catholics and Protestants was that the Protestants believed
that priests should be entitled to marry. The Catholics thought that the Protestant priests had only become Protestants in order to gratify their lust by marrying women. As the Catholics did not
recognize the validity of a priest’s marriage, they called the wives of the Protestant priests their ‘harlots’. From here it was only a step to asserting that all Protestant women
were immoral. This became one of the main themes of Catholic propaganda. Sir Thomas More, in one of his scurrilous books against the Lutherans, wrote that Protestant men and women copulated in
their churches during their religious services. The London shoemaker, Miles Huggarde, who wrote poetry, and in Mary’s reign was granted a licence by the authorities to write and publish
vitriolic tracts against the Protestants, repeated all the old libels about the immorality of Protestant women, and thought out a new one of his own: Protestant women encouraged their husbands to
become martyrs so that they could be free to fornicate with their lovers and marry again as soon as their husbands had been burned at the stake.

One of the most prominent Protestant women was the Lincolnshire gentlewoman, Anne Askew. She had married a gentleman named Kyme, but showed her rebellious disposition by leaving her husband and
calling herself by her maiden name of Askew as she went around London distributing Protestant tracts. She was suspected of secretly giving the tracts to various ladies in the household of Queen
Katherine Parr, including Katherine’s sister, Lady Herbert (afterwards the Countess of Pembroke), and the Queen herself; but she refused to incriminate them when she
was
tortured on the rack, though her legs were so badly injured that she had to be carried in a chair to her execution when she was burned at Smithfield in July 1546. The simple and moving account of
her torture, which she wrote and smuggled out of the Tower, was published by John Bale when England became a Protestant state under Edward VI less than a year after her execution.

It was about this time, according to Foxe, that Katherine Parr defended some aspect of Protestant theology in an argument with Henry VIII, and so enraged Henry that he angrily left the room,
lamenting the day when women had become clerks, and gave orders for Katherine to be arrested and sent to the Tower. But Katherine was warned about this by Henry’s pro-Protestant physician, Dr
Butts. She went to Henry, acknowledged her fault in presuming to argue with him, and obtained his forgiveness.

There were a few individuals in the Tudor Age who had ideas which were far in advance of their contemporaries’. In 1516 Sir Thomas More wrote a book in Latin,
The Best State of a
Commonwealth and the Island of Utopia
; it was an account of an imaginary island off the coast of America which he called Utopia, a word derived from the Greek word meaning
‘nowhere’. He thereby introduced a new word into every language in the world. The system of government which he described as existing in Utopia was even more regimented and
authoritarian than life in Tudor England; but everything was based on strict logic and equality, and no one was exempted from the regimentation because he was above the rank of a lord or owned land
which brought him rents of more than £100 a year.