Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England
Maria Hayward
Ashgate Publishing, 2009

Henry VIII issued four sets of sumptuary laws during his reign, in 1510, 1514, 1515, and 1533, each designed to place restrictions on what kinds of clothing (made from what kinds of materials) his subjects could wear. Warnings were frequent, like the one issued in 1520 in preparation for Henry’s meeting with France’s king at the Field of the Cloth of Gold: “All noblemen and others are to be apparelled according to their degrees, and no man must presume to wear apparel above his degree.”
Such warnings in such numbers were necessary (at least from the royal point of view) because 16th century England saw an explosion of ways to warrant them. The traditional strata of feudal society – the king, the nobility, the clergy, and then pretty much everybody else – were rapidly blurring as more and more of the ‘middling’ sort, lawyers, businessmen, traders and the like, were amassing fortunes and land holdings great enough to give them aspirations their grandfathers would scarcely have dreamt. Henry VIII was not hidebound enough to scorn employing such men, even swelling their fortunes – but their increasing power made him all the more protective of his own. And then as now, a great deal of power lay in perception.
Maria Hayward does remarkable, often eye-opening spadework on this subject in her comprehensive new book Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (solidly put together by Ashgate Publishing). She focuses her study first on the pinnacle of English power, the king – who was, as she shrewdly points out, “the one individual for whom there were no clothing constraints” – and then on downward, through the landed nobility, the clergy, and spreading out to that burgeoning mercantile class. She scrutinizes wills, estate inventories, guild regulations, import and export figures, and of course she’s as grateful as everybody else for the scrupulous details preserved in the paintings and sketches of court artists like Hans Holbein. Her goal is to lay before the reader as wide and detailed a picture of the role apparel played in Tudor times as the primary sources will allow, and she succeeds admirably.
Readers should be cautioned that this is expository, almost testamentary historical writing – there is no unifying narrative, no bursts of rhetorical fireworks, no argumentative conclusions. It can often be quite technical too, although here it’s uniformly saved by Haywood’s clear, evocative prose:

Taffetas and sarsenets originated in the East but by the fourteenth century were being woven in a number of Italian cities. Both were lightweight, thin silk fabrics that were often used for linings. Both could be woven incorporating metal threads, often to produce a striped effect. Taffeta could also be produced as a shot, tabby weave (with the warp and weft a different color to produce a slightly iridescent effect).

Rich Apparel contains many charts, and its appendixes feature the texts of several Tudor wills and inventories – coming after so many pages of Haywood’s astute use of their contents, the documents themselves prove unexpectedly interesting. The guiding intelligence here makes the entire book interesting, although the steep incline of the scholarship may deter all but the most dedicated fans of the Tudor era. The book’s one major shortcoming (an utterly astounding one, given the subject matter) is that aside from the cover portrait of insufferable hatchet-faced Tudor moneymaker wunderkind Thomas Gresham, none of the book’s other illustrations is in color. True, color plates would add to Rich Apparel’s already considerable price tag, but considering the fact that clothing’s appearance is at the very heart of Haywood’s topic, the addition would certainly be worthwhile in future editions.

Steve Donoghue

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Margaret Lawrence

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Delacorte Press, 2009

While she was alive, Queen Elizabeth I Trekkies release was always as much phenomenon as woman, a monarch who could hesitate and prevaricate like any other – but one who could also overwhelm when it suited her. In intellect she was the match of Francis Bacon; in bravura showmanship, she was the match of Walter Ralegh; in cold-clear insight into the human heart, she was the match of that most mysterious of her subjects, William Shakespeare.

Even now, five hundred years after her death, this is still true. Glenda Jackson’s Elizabeth steals the show from Mary Queen of Scots’ star Vanessa Redgrave, and Judi Dench’s

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Falstaffian Elizabeth is the most memorable thing about Shakespeare in Love despite the fact that she only had a few minutes of screen time.

Likewise Elizabethan historical fiction. Margaret Lawrence’s lean, fantastic new novel Roanoke is, as you’d expect, about the doomed early English expeditions to America – arduous voyages and strange new worlds encountered by English colonists and our two main characters, court spies Gabriel North and Robert Mowbray. The bulk of Lawrence’s novel is concerned with their adventures and their agonized later inquiries into what caused those expeditions to fail, and there are innumerable moments of beautiful description throughout, as in a scene between the two men very late at night beside the Thames:

It was very late, even the packs of wild dogs gone to bed. There is something about London at that hour, especially in the rain. It precludes all self-interest, all self-deception. My friend’s face gleamed with mist and innocence.

The problem is, this is at heart a novel of intrigue, and that keeps the action coming back to the royal court – and every time that happens, Elizabeth once again steals the show. This is by no means a bad thing: Lawrence has the voice and character of the old monarch down to a science, as when she’s confronting a too-smug councilor with things he thought secret:

Little man, little man. I know more than you imagine. I know of certain cellars in which private torture is a game of greater delight than the baiting of a bear. I know of little men found dripping wet on foggy river banks. Oh, I know of such deeds, such strivings in secret, as cost decent folk too dear for compass. A queen, you see, may have spies of her own. For such little good as they do her.

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, Margaret Lawrence has written a rare thing: a plot-driven mystery novel that can be re-read and savored as a piece of historical fiction. No library of Tudor fiction should be without it.

Steve Donoghue

Aloha, Scooby-Doo dvd “Men are men,” says our dour, redoubtable hero Matthew Shardlake in C. J. Sansom’s fourth Shardlake mystery, Revelation, “and always will be.” Sansom – and, come to think of it, all historical novelists – put a great deal of faith in such a pronouncement, since the strongest allure of historical fiction is how it filters the past through the prism of the present, underscoring the ways in which the past is both always with us and another country altogether.

Sansom’s Revelation is his strongest and most thrilling Tudor novel to date, and that gulf between present and past is at its heart: specifically, what sense would – could – the people of the Tudor era (the book is set during those same final years of Henry VIII that proved so perilous for our old friend the Earl of Surrey) make of a phenomenon that has become depressingly common in our modern era, the serial killer?

Gosford Park movie download We are awash in such creatures today, especially in murder mystery fiction, where anybody who only kills a single person is instantly put down as a malinger. Nowadays, killers need not only a body count but a baroque imagination, coming up with more and more outlandish and gruesome ways to prop and stage their victims (in this Sansom’s latest bad guy, patterning his crimes after the psychotic ramblings of the Book of Revelation, does not disappoint). We tell ourselves we understand such villains – yet what would protagonists in a less scientific age tell themselves? As one character in Revelation says, “But have you ever heard of a man who was mad, yet could plan and execute such an ambitious scheme?”

Sansom’s hunchbacked lawyer Shardlake must grapple with the crimes of such a man, and he’s aided as always by his assistant Jack Barak, as well as by a small and well-drawn cast of historical figures such as Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, Lady – later Queen – Catherine Parr, and Edward and Thomas Seymour, who would later be the architects of young King Edward VI’s reign). And although the book may be set 500 years before C.S.I.

, some of the inferences our sleuths draw will necessarily sound familiar:

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“Belief in God and human sympathy can be very different things. Yet the killer is something different again. That obsessive savagery … He still has three murders to commit. And if he succeed, I, like you, do not think he will stop. I told Cranmer so today.”

“No. Such a momentum would have to be carried forward. Till he is caught, or dies.”

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Revelation has all the hallmarks of classic hitorical mystery fiction: the hero is completely steadfast, his assistants get all the good jokes, the female characters are largely ciphers (note how often this applies even in series where a woman is the main character; quick, tell me one personal fact about Jane Marple), the great and mighty of the era walk on and off stage using using bigger strides than everybody else, and the villain ends up having been in plain sight all along. And if the era prompts our characters to suspect their serial killer is possessed by a devil, is that really so much less believable a theory than neurochemical imbalance, or a deprived childhood?

Whichever type of explanation you favor, don’t miss Revelation: this series just gets better and better.

Steve Donoghue

“A Year with the Tudors” may have concluded at Open Letters, but of course the torrent of Tudoriana flows on unabated: tv series, movies, stage plays … and books. One of the latest of the latter is The Queen’s Sorrow by Suzannah Dunn (the UK cover of which racks up, so to speak, another example of a curious trend), an adroit and deeply affecting novel about the infamous “Bloody Mary” of English history, Mary I, the oldest daughter of Henry VIII.

The novel is narrated through the viewpoint of young artisan Rafael Prado, one of the many attendants of Mary’s new husband, Philip of Spain. These attendants came in their dozens expecting employment in England, only to find the Queen had already provided a household for Philip – leaving them at odds, haphazardly quartered with families throughout London, pining for the warmer climes of home (Dunn lives in Brighton, a fact that could perhaps be divined from the near-incessant rain in her book; she’s bloody fed up with this bloody weather, and so is poor Rafael).

This being a historical novel aimed at a popular audience, there’s of course a love story, but the highlight of the book is Dunn’s subtle rendering of the serpentine paths emotions take through the people feeling them. The effect is often almost theatrical in its intimacy:

Then she [Mary] looked around at him [Rafael]. ‘I’m happy,’ she insisted, staring at him as if to stare him down; ‘I am happy,’ her words so at odds with her expression that, despite everything, he could have laughed. ‘I’m scared, though. And I shouldn’t be. I should have faith in God.’ She corrected herself: ‘I do, but’ – incredulous – ‘I’m still scared.’

As Rafael’s interactions with his English hosts grow more and more complex, Mary’s sad story unfolds in the background, and by the time the book reaches its climax, the Spanish artisan is a fan of the English queen:

He wanted to say, She has great dignity – which has survived intact despite years of assault on it – but no airs and graces, none. And for England’s sake, she’d weathered great changes in her life in a mere year, changing herself from spinster noblewoman living a life devoted to God, to monarch, wife, and expectant mother. She will see you through: he was certain of that. She’d need to stop the burnings, though, yes. The burnings were a mistake, of course. And she would stop them, he was sure.

Readers of The Queen’s Sorrow will see for themselves where this sureness leads Rafael; the concluding scenes are indelibly memorable. I heartily recommend the book, easily one of the strongest Mary Tudor novels ever written, worthy of a place on the shelf next to Hilda Lewis’ I am Mary Tudor.

Steve Donoghue