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

The 6 February issue of the venerable TLS Courage Under Fire divx offers, if such a thing is possible (or advisable) a Donoghue-smorgasbord, with no less than four themes in common with Open Letters’ garrulous Managing Editor. In Henry Power’s chatty and fascinating review of two new books about the art of translating in the history of English letters, he naturally makes mention of the great John Denham, whose translations of parts of Virgil concludes with “On the cold earth lies th’unregarded King/A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing.” Power astutely connects this to the circumstances of Denham’s own life:

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The execution of Charles I intrudes on Virgil’s narrative; cold earth suggests Whitehall in January, rather than the sands of the Hellespont, where Priam’s corpse was dumped.

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And in the course of examining Denham’s life, Power makes mention of the fact that the poet was always welcome in the homes of the Earl of Pembroke, which might prompt readers to wonder about that art-loving noble family – and to read all about them

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, in one of Donoghue’s essays for Open Letters.

The inimitable J.C. turns in a brief notice of the sarcastic writing manual How Not to Write a Novel by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark, remarking:

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For a full – and perhaps more accurate – account of what it is that Newman and Mittelmark say in their book, hark back to X and read Donoghue’s breezy walk-through of the whole thing.

A breezy walk-through of a decidedly more thorough nature is also on hand to counter-balance Elizabeth Scott-Baumann’s “In Brief” squib on the new anthology Tudors and Stuarts on Film, in which the tawdry necessities of the film industry are taken to task:

Using a strategy of “bait and switch”, writers and directors claim historical authenticity, only to wriggle out through the loophole of artistic licence.

Naturally, Scott-Baumann can’t get into much detail in 300 words, but you can bask in all the detail you can handle by reading Donoghue at 3000 words on Tudors in film (the Stuarts will have to fend for themselves, at least until Donoghue gets around to them).

But surely the biggest OLM-echo of this issue is Steven Gunn’s long and wonderfully readable piece on two new biographies of Henry VIII – books Gunn introduces by mentioning the relative paucity of their particular genre:

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Yet full-scale biographies of the King are strangely rare. In part it is the magisterial quality of J. J. Scarisbrick’s work of 1968 that has enabled it to hold the field for so long. But there seems also to be a sense that Henry is so large a character, the evidence so bulky, the controversies so fierce, that the task daunts those who consider it.

To which Donoghue would no doubt respond with a hearty “pFah”! Certainly the task of biographizing Henry VIII seems not to have daunted him – readers are invited to survey the full results.

The next issue of the TLS will no doubt be less Donoghue-centric, although we can never be sure. One of the inevitable side-effects of rattling on The Legend Trip movie as often and as variously as Donoghue tends to do is that echoes abound. Readers seeking a little temporary relief are advised to curl up with the latest issue of Vogue Weddings until they get their strength back.

Those of you who read the TLS with any regularity may have noticed a piece a couple of weeks ago by Professor Clifford Davies in which he asserts, with the satisfied solemnity of a cherry-bomb-hurler, that both historians and the hoi-poloi have been wrong for centuries, that there isn’t any such thing as the Tudors and there never was. In his commentary, “A Rose by Another Name,” Professor Davies maintains that nobody at the time – including the monarchs in question – thought of themselves as “Tudors,” or as living in the “Tudor era.”

I can hear your rumbles of confusion already! What about those historians, you’re asking? What about all the poets and playwrights and novelists and movie producers and TV researchers? What, indeed, about Open Letters’ monthly “A Year with the Tudors”? Has all of that been one protracted mistake, stalking some fraudulent ideological boojum? Can the magisterial pouting of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (from Showtime’s apparently calamitously named “The Tudors”) have been in vain?

Let’s all stay calm and listen to what Professor Davies has to say, shall we? Perhaps he and I might yet find a way to live with each other.

Item: Davies says that when young Henry Tudor took the crown from Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, he “did so as the ‘Lancastrian’ claimant, tracing his descent, through his mother, from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (by way of his third wife), after the end of the main Lancastrian line with the deaths in 1471 of Henry VI and his son Edward, Prince of Wales.”

Well, yes and no. True, Henry made much of his Lancastrian claim to the throne, but he knew better than anybody how shaky that claim was. Yes, once John of Gaunt was able to marry his mistress Katherine Swynford, an act was passed legitimizing the children they’d already had (who’d been born bastards), but that same act explicitly barred their descendants from the succession. In offering to marry Elizabeth of York (Edward IV’s daughter), Henry was offering a union between York and Lancaster, knowing how fragile the texture of peace was after 150 years of internecine strife. It’s hard not to conclude that this union was to take the form of a new ruling house, neither York nor Lancaster. Hard, but Davies manages it.

Item: “Henry,” Davies writes, “did not use his patronymic.”

True enough, if you’re only thinking of London. In the north and west country, he used it quite a bit, and of course he used nothing else in Wales, his homeland. He imported the Welsh red dragon and other Welsh symbolism to his official heraldry, and these things became very visible decorative motifs throughout his reign. Davies says this is inconclusive, since such things were “Welsh” but not specifically “Tudor,” but for Heaven’s sake, what can this mean? Does Davies know of some other Welsh family wearing diadems and issuing edicts in 1490s England?

Item: Referring to the scandalous marriage of Queen Catherine to her steward Owen Tudor, Davies somewhat grudgingly writes, “To their credit, the ‘Tudor’ monarchs seem to have made no attempt to censor the account of their origins.”

The young people today refer to those as ’scare quotes’ – they’re meant to deny (or at least sneer at) the validity of whatever words they contain. The acid test I’ve developed for scare quotes is very simple: remove them, then see what happens to the thrust of the sentence. If, as in this case, nothing happens, then you have caught the author trying to eat his cake and have it too. If the Tudors were actually all just Lancastrians, then this is not an “account of their origins,” since those origins go back to poor old John of Gaunt. And if this is an account of their origins, then they – something – must have originated thereby. Owen Tudor’s seizing of (among other things, the randy dog) the main chance speaks volumes about his intent to create something of his own, something new.

Item: When Professor Davies begins sifting through the evidence, his account takes on its best, most engagingly donnish brio: “If one searches accounts of 1485, of 1509, of the succession crisis of 1553 (the attempt to make Lady Jane Grey Queen), of the accessions of Mary and Elizabeth, even of accounts of Elizabeth’s death in 1603 – occasions on which any historian today could hardly but allude to ‘Tudor’ – the word and concept is conspicuously absent.”

“The only conclusion,” he concludes, “must be that the word was not in common use.”

This is fascinating stuff, and we must give credit for some points well-raised. The caution here comes from the conflation of “common use” with “common knowledge” (that allusion to “any historian today” is something to fear). History must of necessity give names to periods and movements that they might not have thought for themselves while they were unfolding. That doesn’t make those names wrong, even factually. Other than the man himself, no Roman in the first century b.c. thought of himself as living in the age of Julius Caesar. No citizen of the Byzantine Empire ever thought of himself as anything other than a Roman. Millions died of the Black Death without calling it that. Millions more were caught up in the Industrial Revolution without knowing the name it would later be called. The present uses these names because they accurately describe the finished reality of the past, not because those are the names the past itself used. Slapping ‘Lancastrian’ or even ‘psuedo-Lancastrian’ onto the brief line of rulers who sprang from Bosworth Field wouldn’t be accurate, despite how worked up Professor Davies gets on the point.

Item: And he does get worked up! He scolds: “Indeed, historians of the period seem incapable of mentioning kingship, monarchical government, or state without adding the epithet “Tudor” in a sort of reflex action; as if there was necessarily something both special and uniform about the period, ignoring the very different policies, attitudes, and approaches of the monarchs concerned.”

But, as I hope I’ve shown in the last seven months, those monarchs weren’t all that different, despite their very different actions. They had the same drive, the same fierce temper, the same enormous intellectual abilities, and something of the same charisma. Richard III had some of these qualities but by no means all; James I had none, alas. That bespeaks a discreet subset, whether Professor Davies likes it or not.

And he doesn’t like it, not one bit. He ends his jeremiad with a line that deserves to be quoted and discussed everywhere: “We must learn to do without the Tudors.”

Of course this will never be, as Professor Quixote seems to know perfectly well himself. Hundreds of years of usage makes a term impossibly entrenched – you could write a hundred such learned pieces as this one, and it wouldn’t change the central fact: the Tudors aren’t going anywhere.

Nor, in my humble dissent from Professor Davies, should they.