ERITudor during her "Elizabeth Addresses the Troops at Tilbury" program.

As you may be already aware, this year I added a new section to the site called ‘Tudor Talk’ where I share my interviews with people who are experts in various fields of Tudor history and/or who on a daily basis are immersed in the sixteenth century for work or pleasure.

Today I am delighted to share with you an interview with Ashlie Jensen, who runs a website called ‘Being Bess‘ dedicated to the celebration of the life and reign of Elizabeth Tudor, Queen Elizabeth I of England.

Ashlie is employed in Museum Education and regularly performs first-person interpretations of Elizabeth Tudor. She has dedicated her life to bringing Elizabeth and her legacy to modern audiences and is incredibly knowledgable and passionate about her work.

I would like to thank Ashlie for being a part of On the Tudor Trail and for responding to my questions in such a detailed and sincere manner. Her enthusiasm and love of the sixteenth century are clear.

Read our full interview here.

Scandalous Women by Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History’s Most Notorious Women by Elizabeth Kerri Mahon sounds really interesting.

Product Description:

Throughout history women have caused wars, defied the rules, and brought men to their knees. The famous and the infamous, queens, divorcées, actresses, and outlaws have created a ruckus during their lifetimes-turning heads while making waves. Scandalous Women tells the stories of the risk takers who have flouted convention, beaten the odds, and determined the course of world events.

* When Cleopatra (69 BC-30 BC) wasn’t bathing in asses’ milk, the last pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt and forged an important political alliance with Rome against her enemies-until her dalliance with Marc Antony turned the empire against her.
* Emilie du Châtelet (1706-1748), a mathematician, physicist, author, and paramour of one of the greatest minds in France, Voltaire, shocked society with her unorthodox lifestyle and intellectual prowess-and became a leader in the study of theoretical physics in France at a time when the sciences were ruled by men.
* Long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1928) fought to end discrimination and the terrible crime of lynching and helped found the NAACP, but became known as a difficult woman for her refusal to compromise and was largely lost in the annals of history.
* Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) had a passion for archaeology and languages, and left her privileged world behind to become one of the foremost chroniclers of British imperialism in the Middle East, and one of the architects of the modern nation of Iraq.

I have it on good authority that Anne Boleyn even makes an appearance! Check out Elizabeth’s great blog at http://scandalouswoman.blogspot.com/

Anne Neville

Today’s post is a guest article by author Anne O’Brien. She has very kindly written a mini-biography on Anne Neville, the daughter of Richard, Earl of Warwick and wife to the last Plantagenet King Richard III.

Anne was Queen of England for almost two years but history has all but forgotten her.

One person that has not overlooked this young queen is author Anne O’Brien whose latest novel, ‘The Virgin Widow’, is told through the eyes of Anne Neville.

The Virgin Widow is described as a “tale of intrigue, betrayal and desire in medieval England” and a book that I am most eager to read.

Read Anne’s guest article entitled ‘Who was Anne Neville? The Facts’ here.

Read my interview with Anne O’Brien here and discover more about this author and what sparked her interest in the tumultuous reign of Edward IV and the Wars of the Roses.

Sandra’s latest novel, Pale Rose of England: a novel of the Tudors, is a story of love and defiance during the Wars of the Roses.

In our interview we discuss the lure of Elizabeth of York, the mystery of the Princes in the Tower and, among other things, I ask Sandra whether or not she sees Richard III as a villain or a hero.

Read Sandra’s responses to these questions and more in our interview here.

Sandra has also very kindly written a guest article for us at On the Tudor Trail entitled ‘Uncovering the Mystery of Perkin Warbeck.’ Read it here.

Enjoy!

The Raven's Heart by Jesse Blackadder

I just received an email about a new book by an Australian author, Jesse Blackadder. The book is called ‘The Raven’s Heart: The story of a Quest, a Castle and Mary Queen of Scots’ and will be available in Australia in February 2011.

The Harper Collins description reads:

On a winter’s day in 1561, Alison Blackadder watches as a queen is rowed ashore in Edinburgh to claim her throne. Alison has been disguised as ‘Robert’ most of her life to protect her from the murderous clan who stole Blackadder Castle from her family. Now she must gain the favour of Mary Queen of Scots to have the castle restored to her father who is in perilous danger.

Queen Mary can trust nobody, not even her new husband Lord Darnley, and so Alison, with her ability to dress convincingly as a man when the situation requires, becomes the Queen’s valued spy.

Alison loves her queen almost enough to be distracted from her quest but then Mary betrays her unforgivably, and Alison’s renewed drive to reclaim the Blackadder birthright is relentless, setting off a chain of events that threatens to bring down the Scottish monarchy. Just as Mary can trust nobody, Alison discovers lies, danger and treachery at every turn. Then unexpectedly, she finds love …

Sounds like a very interesting read. I will have to add this to my long list of ‘to-read’ in 2011.

Here is a video of the author speaking about her book.

Fast Tube by Casper

To learn more about the author visit Jesse’s official site here.

The Virgin Widow by Anne O'Brien

Her new historical novel, The Virgin Widow, is the story of Anne Neville, England’s forgotten Queen, wife to Richard III. This is the first of Anne’s novels to be based on the life of an historical character and she is now working on a novel about the early life of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Amazon’s product description of The Virgin Widow reads:

A dazzling historical novel set during England’s War of the Roses- the story of the courageous Anne Neville, future wife of Richard III, who comes of age in a time of chaos…

Anne Neville, daughter of the powerful Earl of Warwick, grows up during the War of the Roses, a time when kings and queens are made and destroyed in an on-going battle for the ultimate prize: the throne of England. As a child Anne falls in love with the ambitious, proud Richard of Gloucester, third son of the House of York. But when her father is branded a traitor, her family must flee to exile in France. As Anne matures into a beautiful, poised woman, skillfully navigating the treacherous royal court of Margaret of Anjou, she secretly longs for Richard, who has become a great man under his brother’s rule. But as their families scheme for power, Anne must protect her heart from betrayals on both sides-and from the man she has always loved, and cannot bring herself to trust.

I am looking forward to reading this book in the very near future!

In our interview we discuss the inspiration behind the novel, what makes Anne Neville such a fascinating subject, the process behind researching an historical novel and much more!

Anne’s responses are sincere, detailed and interesting. Read the full interview here.

Escape from the Tower app

The Historic Royal Palaces has just released their first app! Play Escape from the Tower a new app for iPhone and iPod Touch, and re-enact some of the Tower’s most famous escapes.

The free app can be downloaded from home or on site at the Tower wi-fi hotspot in front of the Tower shop at the main gate. Help prisoners like Henry Laurens, John Gerard and Ranulf Flambard escape from the locations where they were actually held. You may even ‘meet’ other famous prisoners like Anne Boleyn or Guy Fawkes.

The iTunes description states:

“Can you help four worthy prisoners escape from the Tower of London by re-enacting their real-life events? The game is designed to enrich your visit to the Tower of London, as you explore the castle and virtually encounter some of the Tower’s famous prisoners. See how many gold sovereigns you can earn through cunning game play. You can also earn a few sovereigns before you get to the Tower if you do well at the Quiz.”

This game sounds like a lot of fun and can be played at the Tower or from home. Download it from the iTunes store here.

Enjoy!

Fast Tube by Casper

The second is a course offered by The National Archives and is a practical online tutorial to help you learn to read the handwriting found in documents written in English between 1500 and 1800.

Let us begin by looking at the course description for Wendy’s course on Henry VIII.

Introduction

Henry VIII and his Wives have fascinated people down the centuries. An extraordinary royal soap opera – full of love, passion, lust, grief, and joy – it is indeed a subject that runs across the full gamut of human emotions – where figures seemingly larger than life strode upon the stage of English history.

In this course, students will explore the very ‘human’ lives of Henry and his wives by not only using the specified resource materials but also by putting their stories against the context of the times through the examination of primary material – when we listen to the voices from the period recount their hopes, bewilderments and despairs.

The course begins with a teenage king ‘coming into his own’ after his father’s death, and seeking to address a perceived wrong by marrying his brother’s widow. We follow this ‘royal’ youth into manhood – when he discovers grief, disappointment and disillusionment along the way. We see him fall out of love, and into love – not once, but at least three times, the first time of which he turns his kingdom down to achieve his heart’s desire.

Henry VIII came to the throne as a popular King – and he died a popular King. But, in the closing years of his reign, the sleeping lion that Sir Thomas More had perceived at the beginning of Henry’s reign, treading carefully not to awake it, had been long roused, and its jaws dripped blood – not only with More’s own blood, but also with blood coming from at least three of the six women Henry VIII had professed to love, and made his Queens. These women Henry wedded have gone down in history as ‘Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded and Survived.’ Indeed, achieving the status of wife to Henry meant obtaining very little promise of any marital bliss.

The course will be divided into eight segments.

(1) Setting the Tudor stage.

General introduction to the Tudors and the resources we will use during the course.

(2) Loyal Heart

Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. A Spanish princess, brought up in one of the most powerful kingdoms in Christendom, Catherine had been readied almost from birth to be England’s Queen. Intelligent, pious, in love with Henry – who she never stopped thinking of as her husband – Catherine did her very best to provide Henry Tudor with a royal heir.

(3) Without Male Heir

Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Sexy, talented, quick witted, Anne Boleyn was no doubt the grand passion of Henry’s life, and Henry VIII turned his kingdom upside down to have her as his bedmate, and wife. But his bright passion soon flickered out after the birth of another daughter, with such tragic consequences for her mother.

(4)Entirely Beloved

Henry VIII and Jane Seymour. Plain Jane, and quiet like a mouse – or was she really? Who was this woman like that gave to Henry the only ‘royal’ son to live to succeed him – and the woman Henry wished to be buried next to after death.

(5) My Wife, My Sister

Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. Bad body smell, long nose, flabby breasts – Henry’s soon divorced Flander’s mare. But did Henry and Anne just simply get off on the wrong foot? (Or is that hoof?)

(6) The Rose Without a Thorn

Henry VIII and Katheryn Howard. From the light relief of Henry and Anne of Cleves, we go to more Tudor tragedy – when an ‘old before his time’ King becomes besotted with a teenage girl with a shady past she wanted to forget.

(7) Surviving Henry

Henry VIII and Katherine Parr. Married for the third time, Katherine was wise enough to survive her marriage to this royal spouse – but that doesn’t mean all went smoothly in time as Queen, and before she could marry the man she really loved.

(8) The Legacy of Henry and his Wives.

Final conclusions about Henry and his six queens, and additional resources for further research.

Here are just a few of the questions we shall explore during this course:

• How and why did Henry VIII become the ‘absolute tyrant’ King England so well remembers?

• Was it the King’s belief that his marriage was ‘unclean’ through Catherine’s prior marriage to Henry’s own brother, and thus accursed in the eyes of God, the only reason the King sought to divorce Catherine of Aragon?

• Or was the true reason this: Henry had fallen in love with another woman and now wished for a new wife?

• Was Anne Boleyn indeed the main reason for English reformation?

• What were the personalities of the women who became wives?

• What was life like in Tudor times?

It is not necessary for students to possess previous knowledge of this subject; during the course detailed background information will be supplied.

Start Wendy’s free course now!

Now let us take a look at Palaeography: reading old handwriting, 1500-1800. This web tutorial aims to help readers learn how to read the handwriting found in documents written in English between 1500-1800. The good news for us is that the tutorial offers lots of great practical tips and then lets you put the tips into practice by working through a number of primary sources.

The even better news is that five out of the ten documents supplied are Tudor! One being a letter dated 16 March 1554 from Elizabeth I, as princess, to her sister Queen Mary I.

Start the Palaeography course now!

If you know of any other quality online courses related to Tudor England please contact me or leave me a comment.

Let’s take a look at what C.W.Gortner thinks.

Grief and Coffins: Was Juana of Castile really mad?

Juana of Castile by Pradilla

One of the most iconic images of Queen Juana of Castile, known to history as la Loca, or the Mad, is of her standing over a coffin, black veils blowing in the wind as she reaches out a long, trembling hand to open the lid. About her, the courtiers of her retinue look on in silent horror, powerless to stop the demented queen from gazing in disconsolation upon her husband’s shrouded corpse. The coffin, brought with her from the northern city of Burgos, has crossed most of Castile with her and will remain by her side until her own death nearly fifty years later in the castle of Tordesillas. In death Juana has found the devotion she never had in life and the devastation of her loss mingles with irrational relief that no other woman will ever compete for her husband’s affections again, that Philip of Habsburg is finally hers forever. . . .

This scene, recorded by a chronicler who allegedly witnessed Juana’s very public descent into insanity following Philip’s demise, was immortalized by the romantic nineteenth century artist Francisco Pradilla, in a painting that is now one of the star attractions of El Prado. Haunting and executed with uncanny realism, it shows a woman in unrelieved black, standing motionless beside the coffin, as her exhausted retinue sags about her and tapers sputter in the wind. Nothing has cemented the image of Juana as the insane queen more eloquently than Pradilla’s painting, offering in vivid color the reason why she was deprived of her right to rule.

But, is it true? Was Juana of Castile truly mad?

Four hundred and fifty four years after her death, reams of nonfiction and fiction, as well as spools of vivid celluloid, have been devoted to this one aspect of her character, which, as with most legends, eclipses all other aspects of her complex personality. Scholars who believe she was unbalanced cite the taint of insanity that ran through her family. Isabel of Castile’s own mother Isabel of Portugal was so unbalanced that Isabel kept her in isolation at the castle of Arévalo until her death. This dowager queen, a dazzling Portuguese beauty when she first came to Spain to marry Isabel’s father, descended into an unimpeachable melancholy following her husband’s death and her banishment from court, reputed to float about the old castle at night talking to the specter of her husband’s male lover, whose execution she’d contrived at. Isabel never spoke of her mother’s illness, or at least not in a way that has come down to us, but the fact is the dowager queen never was seen at her daughter’s court.

Isabel’s own father, Juan II, also nursed a penchant for brooding. Probably homosexual in an era that didn’t recognize sexual variance, tormented by his guilt over the man his wife had killed, he died broken and defeated. Indeed, Isabel’s House of Trastámara is riddled with odd characters, while Isabel herself once made a tantalizing reference to “[her] black malady” in a letter to an intimate, explaining that only her faith and devotion to Castile kept this mysterious malady at bay. Scholars who support the insanity verdict in Juana’s case suggest that what in fact Isabel fought against was a familial manic depression, which Juana had the misfortune to inherit.  They even go as far to state that Juana herself showed early signs of the disease in her childhood, including marked moodiness, social withdrawal, and extreme temperament.

It’s a compelling theory. Yet there is another, mostly unexplored side of the coin. Temperament aside, Juana was reputedly the brightest of Isabel’s children, gifted and keenly intelligent; and Isabel selected her as the center piece in the queen’s master-plan:  the Hapsburg alliance, designed to bolster Spain’s power base in Europe and corner the French. This alliance, begun when Juana was still a child, culminated in her marriage at the age of fifteen to the Hapsburg emperor’s sole heir, Philip. Juana had supposedly by this time displayed all the alleged signs of instability mentioned earlier, and Isabel, with her previous experience with her mother, would no doubt have been aware of it. Yet the queen did not think twice about sending Juana to Flanders with secret political instructions, into a foreign court where Spanish interests depended heavily on Juana’s ability to influence her husband and lure him away from all attachments to France – even though Philip owed the French king his vassalage for his territories in Burgundy! It would have required a canny and perceptive wife indeed to steer her husband from such obligations, and Isabel clearly believed Juana was up to the task. Isabel was no fool. Why did she send a moody, potentially mentally unstable girl to fulfill a task that, if it failed, could have major repercussions for Spain?

The proof is in the historical record. In the years that followed, Juana sought to fulfill her mother’s behest with single-minded determination; she also bore Philip six children and weathered as best she could the tumultuousness of life as his wife. She displayed remarkable physical resiliency and a healthy, if unorthodox, disdain for his hypocrisy; she never conceded defeat and challenged him to a duel for power that ended up felling him long before it did her. It’s not coincidental that Philip was the first to officially accuse her of being “mad” when she dared to confront him over his gross misbehavior. No prince liked having his wife upbraid him, especially when he depended on her if he was to wear a crown. And from this time onward, tales of Juana’s obsessive jealousy, uncontrollable rages, and disregard for anything save her passion for Philip fill contemporary accounts, as if some massive 16^th century propaganda machine had gone into overdrive. Juana had done the unforgivable for a princess of her era: she had stood up for herself and thrown the gauntlet at her philandering, faithless spouse.

Was she overly temperamental? Perhaps. But that does not make her insane. Aggravated by the near-unbearable stress she was subjected to in later years the fact is that Juana of Castile has been accused of mental instability because it excused the grave injustices perpetuated on her by those who sought to steal her throne.

The Last Queen by C.W. Gortner

C.W Gortner’s The Last Queen is the story of Juana of Castile the third child of Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon.

It is an evocative and vivid portrayal of the life of a Queen that history all but forgot. I was hooked from the beginning and immediately drawn into the world of this beautiful and intelligent woman who spent almost her entire life fighting for her crown, her freedom and, in the end, her life.

She battled and struggled against all odds and I was there by her side every step of the way. The journey takes us from Spain to Flanders, then France and even Tudor England. Juana emerges from the pages a courageous, proud, intelligent and determined woman who endured heartbreaking tragedy and unspeakable betrayal during her lifetime.

I was so immersed in her thoughts, plans, dreams and hopes that at times our hearts raced in unison and I could smell the jasmine dancing in the air around her beloved Alhambra Palace.

The imagery is breathtaking. I feel as though I ‘saw’ Juana’s tale unfold before my eyes. Gortner’s powerful descriptions are unrivalled. Here is a small taste:

“The Alhambra reclined on its hill, serene, tinted amethyst in the dusk. Above its towers, the sky unfurled like violet cloth, in which a spun-glass moon hung.”

The book is meticulously researched and absolutely enthralling! There is not a person in the world that would be left disappointed after reading this intriguing story.

I turned the last page and immediately felt the need to tell someone about Juana. I wanted to yell out that she had been badly done by, that any person in their right mind would begin to unravel if faced with the injustices she’d endured and although history only remembers her as ‘Juana La Loca’ (Joanna the Mad) I remember her as a loving mother and friend, a loyal daughter and a courageous Queen.