Michelle Beer, Queenship of the Renaissance Courts of Britain: Catherine of Aragon and Margaret Tudor, 1503-1533. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2018.
Reviewed by Edward Kirsch
Michelle Beer’s history is focused on the nature, power, and expectations of queenship in early modern Europe and Catherine of Aragon’s and Margaret Tudor’s deliberate, most often astute, performances of this role. Beer shows that these two queens purposefully performed their roles of queenship in nuanced ways that utilized material culture, court life, entertainments, pilgrimages, their piety, patronage, and above all their partnership with their husband kings to influence events and legitimize their respective dynasties and their personal queenships. (22) Beer’s history is not chronological. Rather, she juxtaposes the reigns of Catherine and Margaret around common themes, roughly one per chapter, to reveal similarities and differences. The work departs from most prior histories by studying Catherine’s reign on its own terms rather than as an aside to Henry VIII’s “Great Matter” in which she has been reduced to “the themes of dutiful wife, pious Catholic, and wronged woman.” Similarly, Beer focuses on Margaret’s role as queen rather than her regency for her son James V which is the focus of most histories according to Beer. (19-21)
Beer encountered difficulties in following their lives through archives in which the relevant records are fragmentary and “often subsumed within the records of the king and his court” or have simply not survived. (22) She does a remarkable job of piecing together their achievements, concerns and follies by assembling fragments of evidence from a wide range of sources including the king’s accounts, dispatches of ambassadors, gift records, the National Archives at Kew, Calendar of State Papers relating to Spain and Venice, and other sources.
In the first chapter, Beer argues that Elizabeth of York, Margaret’s mother and Catherine’s mother-in-law, provided a model for queenship, piety, Renaissance magnificence, and an exemplar for how queens should participate in the life of the court. (24-25) In Chapter two, Beer discusses how Catherine and Margaret “used their agency and superior social status compared to the men around them in order to maintain royal dignity and their own authority,” particularly when faced with challenges. (45) Beer’s analysis stands in contrast to that of historians that have disparaged Margaret, for example, as “frivolous” because of her frequent pleading with her brother Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey for funds to purchase sumptuous clothing after she fled Scotland in secret in 1515 with few of her possessions. (56) Such criticisms, Beer maintains, reflect a failure to understand that “clothing was self-performance that could carry multiple types of meaning – legitimacy, political relevance, dynastic loyalty” that was essential to the honor of the queen and the king’s honor as well. (69) Henry VIII grasped that “magnificence” was an important “humanist virtue” for renaissance royalty to display and promptly financed her wardrobe.
Beer is a good storyteller. She argues that Catherine cleverly used her own clothing and that of her retinue to subtly express her opposition to the pending Anglo-French alliance at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520. (60) Catherine made her views known while remaining loyal to Henry by deliberately wearing, and requiring her retinue to wear, elements of Spanish fashion in dress such as Spanish sleeves, Spanish hairstyles, and Spanish dynastic symbols in addition to English symbols during the jousts, feasts and other public events. (67-68) As noted by Samson, Catherine’s daughter Mary showed similar understanding of the legitimating power and messaging inherent in magnificent clothing by ensuring Phillip II dressed in the English manner during their wedding. (Samson, 110-111)
In chapters three and four, Beer focuses on both queens’ close relationships with their respective kings and their roles as royal hostesses in displays of magnificence, relaxing court pastimes, and diplomatic discussions, and as the prime audience for the court’s chivalrous displays, which taken together supported their informal role in dispensing patronage. (71) Beer emphasizes that in the lavish courtly pageants, tournaments, processions, and tradition of New Year’s gift giving “the queen and her ladies were . . . the center of attention, the axis around which chivalric events revolved” and the dramatic focus of the performance of these active and competitive kings. (81) Their partnership with the king was publicly demonstrated by these events, underscoring their soft power to influence the king’s patronage. Beer underscores that aside from the King, Catherine had her own ability to bestow patronage relating to her dower estates, as well as arrange elite marriages. (103) A queen’s hospitality was recognized as an important “humanist virtue” by Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier (1528). In their outer chambers, diplomatic dialogue was exchanged along with witty conversation during informal past times such as musical performances, card playing, chess, and dancing. (88) Performing their roles as distinguished, honorable hostesses solidified their relationships with the center of power for the elite to witness. (96)
In Chapter five, Beer analyzes how Catherine and Margaret used public performances of piety including almsgiving, pilgrimages, processions to mass, and the ritual of Royal Maundy, to fulfill queenly duties before God, connect with elites and the common people, and set a moral example for their people. Beer notes that prior historians have largely ignored how their “piety informed their queenship.” (124) Beer describes the Royal Maundy ritual on Holy Thursday as the most important annual almsgiving event and a powerful ritual that bathed queens in “sacerdotal power.” In addition to a public mass and almsgiving, the ritual included the queen and king performing the pedilavium in which the king washed the feet of poor men and the queen washed the feet of poor women. This powerful ritual invoked images of Christ washing the feet of the apostles during the Last Supper. (134) Beer notes that Mary I practiced the Royal Maundy and Elizabeth I used this ritual as “part of a deliberate strategy” to legitimate female rule by claiming “sacred status for the monarchy.” (135) Rituals such as Royal Maundy and Queen Catherine’s joint coronation in which she was “anointed with holy oil,” as well as the commonplace association of queens with the Virgin Mary, gave these astute pious queens an aura of “quasi-sacerdotal status.” (126)
Beer’s analysis of “receiver’s accounts” indicates Catherine gave a minimum of “between £160 and £190 a year from 1525 to 1530” in alms, while Margaret’s cannot be established. (130) This pious giving had the intended effect. Even John Foxe had to admit Catherine was popular. Henry VII and Anne Boleyn understood that Catherine’s displays of public piety were a source of her moral authority. Beer observes, for example, that in 1534 Henry precluded Catherine “from holding her Maundy while she was under house arrest.” (136) Further, Anne Boleyn tried to stop Catherine’s almsgiving because she understood “’the alms she has been accustomed to give have attracted the love of the people.’” Both Catherine and Margaret made public pilgrimages to shrines, particularly those associated with child birth, which provided interaction with the public along their leisurely route and served their political and spiritual purposes. (143)
In sum, Beer’s work is well researched, a great read, and accessible to a general audience. Yet it is also an excellent monograph for both professional historians researching the expectations, challenges, and strategies exercised by these astute queens in performing their role of queenship.
