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“Live still to die, that by death you may purchase eternal life…. As the preacher sayeth, there is a time to be born and a time to die; and the day of death is better than the day of our birth.”
– Lady Jane Grey, 1554
Before Lady Jane Grey was crowned in 1553, the closest any woman had ever come to ruling England on her own was when Empress Matilda attempted to seize the crown in the 12th century. Matilda never got any closer than attempting, before she was run out of the country and her male cousin was put on the throne. Between her and Henry VIII, there had always been at least one male heir on hand to inherit from the previous King — the rules of succession carefully outlined how the crown would pass to the next male relative, and how to compute who that would be if the family tree was female-heavy. And it really wasn’t an issue until Henry VIII’s male heir, Edward, seemed to be about to die without an heir… and literally the only possible successors were all women and girls.
This week, we’ll be looking at Jane Grey, the unlucky teenager who wound up inheriting the crown over her rivals Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. It was entirely unprecedented that, no matter which branch of the family tree was examined, the only possible candidates to take the throne after Edward were female. Bear in mind, of course, this was at around the same time that the notorious misogynist (and Reign supervillain) John Knox was popular for preaching things like, “It is more than a monster in nature that a woman should reign and bear empire over man.” It was also a time of ferocious battles between Catholics and Prostestants — the latter having been the official Church of England ever since Henry VIII exchanged religion for divorce. But all English subjects understood that their monarch was chosen by divine right — whoever God saw fit to rule, would rule. And if it had to be a woman, then every aristocratic family had to decide which woman to back.
Nobody could have known, or even guessed, that three out of these four (Jane, Mary, Mary, and Elizabeth) would take their turn on the English throne; nor that Jane, the first English Queen to ever rule on her own, would wear the crown for only nine days. Her story bears some similarities to those of her rival Queens — disinterested, largely absent parents; being used as a pawn by men far more powerful than she — but her personality and experience were utterly her own. We are also fortunate to know a lot about her from first-hand sources like Jane’s diaries and letters, helping to shape the image of a strong-willed, obstinate, pious, scholarly weirdo who actively never wanted the power thrust upon her.
I don’t want to get into the family tree gymnastics that wound up with Jane eking ahead of Mary and Elizabeth in the family tree, so the gist of it is: Henry VIII had two sisters who both had children. His older sister Margaret married a Scotsman and her family tree led to Mary, Queen of Scots. That whole side of the family were cut out of Henry’s will mostly because he hated Scotland, and also they were Catholic. That’s where Mary, Queen of Scots’s claim to the throne comes in. Henry’s younger sister Mary married his BFF, and because Henry loved them so much, he gave them the title Duke and Duchess of Suffolk. And his official list of who would inherit his throne included the Suffolk offspring, only in the instance that none of Henry’s other children had male heirs of their own. The inclusion of the Suffolks was more of a gesture than anything else; it seemed so unlikely to be impossible that none of Henry’s children would have kids of their own.
And yet! Surprise! Edward, Henry’s heir, was crowned King when he was nine years old, in 1547. (Fun fact; Edward is the “Prince” from Mark Twain’s story “The Prince and the Pauper,” and Jane Grey appears in most movies based on that story.) Edward was a very devout Protestant, continuing his father’s legacy to maintain this as the official religion of England. His older half-sister Lady Mary remained a Catholic, while his other half-sister Lady Elizabeth was also Protestant. Edward was often ill, which made his advisors uneasy because if he died without naming an heir, as per Henry’s wishes, Edward would be succeeded by his Catholic sister. Lady Mary was, by this time, in her late thirties and still unmarried, and childless. Even if she were to marry, it was possible she, too, may die without an heir. She was, basically, not an ideal candidate to succeed Edward.
I should probably mention John Dudley now, which I hate to do, because he was The Worst. He was a highly ambitious and scheming aristocrat who wormed his way into Edward’s trust. It was partly Dudley’s influence that led to Edward deciding to release his own line of succession document, one that would discount both Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth on the basis of both of their technical illegitimacy (Mary, as the daughter from Henry’s annulled marriage to Katharine of Aragon and Elizabeth, as the daughter of Henry’s quasi-illegal marriage to Anne Boleyn). Edward may have wanted to keep Elizabeth as a potential successor, but there wasn’t a way to discount Mary without Elizabeth being removed as well. As Mary, Queen of Scots was also not a possibility (largely due to her Catholicism; partly due to her Scottishness), this meant that Edward’s direct successor would be from the Suffolk family, of which Jane was the oldest child.
So this is like a lot of backstory, but without it, none of what happens to Jane next makes any sense. If you remember anything from the above several paragraphs, make it: John Dudley is the worst, he strong-armed Edward into disinheriting Lady Mary, and was suspiciously keen on having Jane Grey named heir.
So, what was Jane like as a person? What we know about her childhood is typical for an aristocratic girl at this time. She was the oldest of three sisters, all of whom were raised on their family’s country estate while their parents hung out in London, being sort of trashy new-money. Jane first enters the historical record in any major way when, at age ten, she was sent to be a lady in waiting to Henry VIII’s widow and sixth wife, Kathryn Parr. It was likely in the household of Kathryn, a devout Protestant and keen scholar, that Jane leaned into her inclinations toward religious study. Kathryn’s step-daughter, Elizabeth Tudor, also lived in the house. And also living in the house is the second Terrible Man in this story, Katherine’s new husband, Thomas Seymour.
How much of a dirtbag was Thomas Seymour? Well, on the one hand, he seemed preoccupied with assaulting and/or romancing teenage Elizabeth, perhaps with an eye on marrying her so he’d be closer to power if she wound up becoming Queen. And on the other hand, he paid two thousand pounds to Jane Grey’s parents to buy her as his ward, with an eye on having some control over her, in case she became Queen later on. Bear in mind, his literal wife was Katherine Parr, who gave birth to her first child with Thomas in 1548. Within a week of the child’s birth, Katherine had died, leaving Jane both heartbroken and out of a job and a home.
She returned home to be with her parents, and it is at this point that her personality as an insufferably self-righteous religious zealot began to be documented. Not only did she frequently criticize her parents’ lifestyle, but she also voiced her displeasure to houseguests, and even requested that the local chaplain use his sermons to call them out for being shitty. Her extreme piety made some notable religious scholars of the day write about her admiringly, apart from one letter that criticized her interest in music and her appearance.
Meanwhile, Dudley was still working his gross powers of persuasion over Edward, clearing a path for Jane to inherit the throne. With this in mind, he decided to do a very Thomas Seymour-ish thing and get his family closer to the crown by marring his son Guildford to Jane. Jane’s parents, always happy for money and power, had no problem with this match. Jane? Not so much. It wasn’t an issue with Guildford, who was about her age, handsome, and probably a lot less terrible than other husbands she may have wound up with. But Jane’s issue was, rightly, with Guildford’s horrible father, John Dudley. She was smart enough to both fear and mistrust him, and didn’t want anything to do with him, or his family. But of course, she was sixteen and it was the 16th century so after what was likely some physical abuse, Jane agreed to marry Guildford and the teens were wed on May 25, 1553. This is where the specific dates start becoming important, so bear that in mind.
Edward was invited, but was too ill to attend. It was this bout of illness that would eventually be the death of him. He had been, not that Jane knew about this, finalizing his own wishes for who would take the throne after him. He officially removed both of his half-sisters from the line of succession, leaving the Suffolks as his sole heir. Frances, Jane’s mother, was not an ideal Queen as she was already past childbearing age and everything really hinged on someone having a male child to continue the dynasty. Also, her husband Henry Grey was widely seen as untrustworthy, and the sense was if she was named Queen, he’d actually be in control, and that wasn’t what anyone wanted either. So, Frances was excluded from the line of succession, leaving ‘the Lady Jane and her heirs male’ as Edward’s named successor. Shortly after this paperwork was all finalized, the King died of tuberculosis on July 6, 1553.
Dudley had arranged this all perfectly for himself — his new daughter-in-law would now be crowned Queen, making his son the new King, making him the most powerful man in the realm. One slight hiccup was the continuing popularity — and alive-ness — of Lady Mary. He couldn’t make the British subjects stop supporting her, but he hoped that maybe hiding her away would help them to forget about her. As such, he sent out a messenger for Mary, asking her to come to be by her dying half-brother’s bedside. On her way there, Mary received word that IT’S A TRAP!!! And so she doubled back. Dudley tried to track her down, but was unable to. His whole plan to basically steal control of the country was a sort of shock and awe thing, so he forged ahead, hoping that he’d throw so much change at the country all at once that they wouldn’t have time to miss Mary.
On July 9th, he had Mary and Elizabeth both publicly declared bastards, and highlighted how dangerous Mary in particular was due to her Catholicism and ties to foreign Catholic countries.
Jane, still unaware of how her life was about to change, was still coping with her new marriage to Guildford Dudley. Unlike the sweet romance portrayed in the excellent 1986 film Lady Jane, where Guildford is played by Cary Elwes in his Princess Bride days, the real Jane despised her husband and his family so much that she almost immediately ran back home to be with her parents. Considering how much she disliked her parents, this speaks volumes to how terrible the Dudleys must have seemed to her. At one point, she fell ill and accused them of trying to poison her — which is both such a soap opera twist, but also speaks to her naïveté as to what was really going on. Without her continued survival, none of the Dudley family’s plans could go ahead, so they would have no motive at all to poison her.
After Edward’s passing, Jane rode with her sister-in-law to one of the Dudley family estates. Upon arrival, she was greeted by her family, all of the Dudleys, and a number of important aristocrats. She was then told the news of Edward’s death, and that she was now the Queen. Her documented reaction was not one of happiness or even resignation: as they all knelt before her, Jane was heard to say that she was insufficient for the task, then said a quick prayer, promising to fulfil God’s will and take the throne. Her lack of enthusiasm was noted with confusion and dismay by those in attendance, and did not bode well for her new reign.
On July 10, 1553, Queen Jane was brought to Westminster, then to the Tower of London on a barge, as was the custom for all new sovereigns. An eyewitness account of her arrival described her as:
“[Very] short and thin, but prettily shaped and graceful. She has small features and a well-made nose, the mouth flexible and the lips red. The eyebrows are arched and darker than her hair, which is nearly red. Her eyes are sparkling and reddish brown in color. Her complexion was good, unmarked by the pox, but freckled; she had sharp white teeth and a lovely smile… Her husband Guildford… [was] a very tall strong boy with light hair… clothed in white and silver velvet, [who] paid her much attention.”
OK, here’s a really important bit: that same day, Jane was moved into the royal apartments in the Tower of London, where she was brought a sampling of royal jewels to try on, including the crown. John Dudley was there, urging her to try on the crown, but she refused several times. She finally put the crown on, but never actually requested it. Keep that in mind. Anyway, in the course of conversation, Dudley “casually” mentioned that Guildford would get a crown, too, after Jane made him King (men weren’t automatically named Kings when their wives became Queens, the Queen had to decide to do this). Jane was having none of this, and insisted that she may name Guildford a Duke, but that was it. Guildford freaked out, bringing in his mother, who screamed at Jane; the Queen would not change her mind. When word came to Jane that Guildford and his mother were trying to flee the Tower, she had guards stand by the exits to keep them inside.
Two days later, on July 12, Dudley announced he was going to muster an army, with Jane’s father in charge. Jane burst into tears, not wanting her father to go to war, and so the Council decided to send Dudley to lead the forces instead. This had absolutely not been his plan, but he couldn’t back out now. His troops headed across the country, finding themselves in town after town which had decided on their own not to accept Jane as Queen, but rather to declare Lady Mary the true ruler. Dudley had thought of everything in his quest for power — except for the feelings of the actual citizens of the country. Even those opposed to Catholics could somehow sense that unfairness of Jane being crowned instead of Mary.
The wind had clearly shifted back in London as well. While Dudley was off with his troops, members of the Privy Council attempted to flee the palace. Again, Jane had guards keep them inside; she also locked the main gates of the Tower to prevent escape. They finally squirrelled their way out one way or another, running to the Spanish ambassador and claiming to have always supported Mary, and having been forced against their will by Dudley to back Jane.
Jane was eating supper with her father when she learned that she had been deposed as Queen — from her father. This gross man then said Mary was Queen, and left the Tower to return to his home in London. Jane, alone, was removed from the royal apartments and brought to another facility while everyone tried to figure out what to do with her. Mary, accepted by basically everyone as the true Queen, was en route to the Tower to take over. Dudley and his entire family were arrested and taken to the Tower; Jane’s parents were too, briefly, but Dudley’s wife and the Greys were released pretty quickly. When Mary arrived on August 3, to cheering crowds, she ordered Jane to be imprisoned in the Tower.
Jane herself appealed to her in a letter, outlining how she never wanted any of this — that she accepted it was a mistake to accept the crown (remember, earlier, when I said that bit was important??), and claimed she had been misled by others into thinking this was the right thing to do. Mary believed that Jane was guiltless and had been manipulated by John Dudley, and was reluctant to put her to death — she had no such doubts about Dudley, who was put to death in August 1553.
Jane’s imprisonment was unusual, as she was permitted to have a small salaried staff, an allowance, and the freedom to read and go for walks in the Queen’s garden. She was said to spend much of her time either reading or writing, and is through her writing during this period that we know as much as we do about her life. Eventually, Mary came to accept that Jane’s continued survival would always be a threat to her power; the very existence of a Protestant option would mean that those opposed to Mary’s reign could have a figurehead to rally behind. And so, still reluctant, Mary ordered Jane, Guilford, and the other Dudley brothers to stand trial for the charge of high treason.
The trial was quick, with each of the defendants pleading guilty to this charge and being swiftly sentenced to death. However, it was widely believed — and basically was true, at the time — that Jane’s sentence would never actually be carried out. Her family, all of whom had converted back to Catholicism, had regained their position of privilege. Her mother and sisters were given positions as ladies in waiting to the Queen, where her mother was specifically noted as one of Mary’s favourites.
But then, of course, things went sour again. Mary, still unmarried, was intent to marry the King of Spain — an extremely unpopular move with both her advisors and her subjects. Uprisings in the countryside began to rally against her, and Jane’s role as a figurehead started to become a real threat to Mary’s reign. Making things worse, Jane’s ever-useless father joined in with this rebellion, actively working to try and depose Mary. And yet, Mary was still reluctant to actually execute her cousin. She sent a prominent Catholic scholar to speak with Jane in hopes of convincing her to convert to Catholicism, and such, save her life. Jane had been basically preparing her whole life for this conversation, and very capably rebutted every debate point over several hours. She made such an effect on her visitor that their visit concluded not with her conversion, but with him offering to escort her up the scaffold for her execution. The date was set for her beheading to occur on February 12, 1554.
Jane was very organized in preparing for her death — choosing her dress, writing a speech, and deciding which members of her staff would dispose of her body. From her vantage point in the Tower, she witnessed Guildford’s execution, and watched the construction of the scaffolding for her own. She appeared for her own execution poised and dignified, dressed all in black, carrying her beloved prayer book. While there had been a larger crowd at her husband’s execution, her own was witnessed by only a small crowd, out of respect for her royal blood.
Jane gave prepared remarks at the top of the scaffold, again admitting to committing treason by putting the crown on her head, then reciting a psalm. Things clearly were going as she had planned, until the executioner stepped towards her to take her cloak — it was a custom at the time for the executioner to get to keep the outer garments of his victims. Jane either didn’t know or forgot about this, and jumped back, asking him to leave her alone. She then got back on script when he did the customary kneeling before her to beg forgiveness. She granted it, of course, and was also heard to ask him to dispatch her quickly.
And then, again, things went sideways. Jane asked the executioner for instructions about when and how to put on her blindfold; after she had put it on, she couldn’t find the wooden block where she was to lay her head. She cried out for help, asking, “What shall I do? Where is it?” This was unexpected, and nobody on the platform moved to help her. Finally, someone came up from the crowd and helped guide her into the proper position. Her final words were, “Lord into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
More of Jane’s careful planning didn’t pan out, as the church her body had been meant to be brought to had recently reverted back to Catholicism and so her body may no longer be welcome. Her body remained on the ground, exposed for almost four hours, as this matter was sorted out. Her servants kept an eye on the body during this time. Finally, her body was permitted in the now-Catholic church, where she was laid to rest between two other beheaded Queens — Henry VIII’s second and fifth wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. Jane’s father was executed eleven days later.
When the Protestant Elizabeth Tudor succeeded her Catholic sister Mary as Queen, Jane Grey was celebrated as a martyr to the Protestant faith.
There are not as many works about Jane as there are about the other notable women from this period of English history, perhaps because her own story was so short and so much of it was beyond her control. That said, I adore the 1986 Helena Carter/Cary Elwes film, just titled Lady Jane. I wrote a short review of it a bit ago and fair warning, this movie will make you ship Jane/Guildford. There is a bonkers (in a good way!) new YA novel called My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows in which Jane and Edward live in an alternate history where many people are able to shape-shift into various animals. The YA novel Namesake by Sue MacLeod adds a time travel element to Jane’s story, while the nonfiction work Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey by Jane Tallis is a thorough examination of Jane’s short life and reign.
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Lady Katherine Grey was born on August 25, 1540 at Bradgate Park, the family property of the Grey family. Just to put this in a place and time, in 1540 the King was still Henry VIII, who was then in the midst of his brief fifth marriage, to Catherine Howard. Katherine was the second surviving child born to Lady Frances Brandon and her husband, Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk. She had an older sister, Lady Jane Grey and five years later, a third Grey sister was born, Lady Mary Grey. The three Grey girls were royalty because their mother’s mother was Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary. The girls didn’t have the title of princesses, but were treated with the respect appropriate to royalty. Henry VIII died in 1547, succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Edward VI.
At this point, Katherine was fourth in line to the throne (behind Henry VIII’s daughters Mary and Elizabeth, and Katherine’s older sister, Jane). While it was unlikely that Katherine would ever become Queen, she and her sisters were all seen as valuable marriage prospects. Like any famous set of sisters, each Grey girl had their own thing: Jane was intellectual and studious, Katherine was pretty and vivacious, and Mary was sweet and kind. The girls were all provided with a thorough education (including learning Latin, Greek, French, music, and the arts), and were raised in the new Protestant faith.
When fifteen-year-old Edward VI fell ill, his advisors began scheming to marry their sons to the Grey girls so that these adult men could be closer to the increasingly powerful Grey family. Because unlike Edward VI’s presumptive heir, his older half-sister Mary I, the Greys were Protestant. It was incredibly important to both Edward VI and his advisors that the realm remain Protestant, the religion his father Henry VIII had basically invented. So, with the help of his advisors, the dying teen King rewrote his own will to remove Mary from being his heir. It wasn’t possible for him to just remove one of his half-sisters, so even though he’d have been fine with Elizabeth taking over, he had to disinherit both Mary and Elizabeth. Which meant that the new Queen would be his cousin, Lady Jane Grey. And until Jane had a child, Katherine would be her heir.
A few months before Edward died, fifteen-year-old Jane and twelve-year-old Katherine Grey were married off in a double ceremony. Jane’s husband was Guildford Dudley, the son of the King’s powerful Chief Minister, John Dudley. Katherine’s husband was Henry, Lord Herbert. Mary Grey, just eight years old, was betrothed to their cousin Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton. The double wedding was a huge event, with lots of feasting and partying. Edward VI attended the event, one of the last he attended before dying, aged fifteen. Upon his death, Lady Jane Grey was declared the new Queen.
Click here for the whole story of how Jane wound up the Nine Days Queen, executed at age sixteen. Basically: being a pawn did not work well for Jane, or anyone who had worked to get her named Queen. Mary I took over, throwing Jane, Guildford, and her father into prison. Seven months later, all three were executed. All of their lands and money were confiscated, leaving the Grey sisters and their now-widowed mother essentially penniless. The Greys newly poisonous reputation spoiled the matches for both sisters, as the Herberts quickly annulled Katherine’s marriage, and the Wiltons ended Mary Grey’s betrothal. Katherine, now fourteen years old, orphaned and with only one sister left, was now the eldest Grey sister. And, despite their bad reputation and current poverty, until Mary I had a child of her own, Katherine was again a potential heir to the throne.
At this low point, the Greys found support from a surprising person: their cousin, Mary I. Taking pity on her young cousins and their mother, the Queen invited them all to royal court. Frances, specifically, was still eyed with some suspicion for her probably role in the Jane Grey Situation, but clearly Mary I felt some fondness for her relatives. The Greys were given precedence at state events — ahead of Elizabeth, Mary I’s actual heir. Katherine took on a special role at the coronation of Mary I, and was among the guests at the Queen’s marriage the following year to Philip II. Katherine and Mary Grey were treated as princesses, including having their trains carried by their own ladies in waiting during important court events. The Queen appointed both to the prestigious role of ladies of the bedchamber, the most important role any woman could hold at court. There were even rumours that Mary I intended to adopt one or both Grey sisters, perhaps to make their status as her possible heirs even more iron-clad.
One year after Mary I became Queen, Katherine’s mother Frances Brandon suddenly remarried (remember, her husband had been executed after the Nine Days Queen scenario). In order to avoid causing any further controversy, Frances chose to marry Adrian Stokes, her Master of the Horse (aka a man far below Frances’s royal social status). If she and Adrian had any children, they would be low-born and therefore outside of contention to become the new King or Queen. Because of this new marriage, Frances was removed from royal court. As such, Katherine was sent into the care of Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset (the widow of Edward VI’s former, now executed, Lord Protector). Although Anne was technically now her guardian, Katherine remained at court where she became best friends with her fellow lady-in-waiting, Anne’s daughter Lady Jane Seymour* (*not the one who was married to Henry VIII, this Jane Seymour is the niece of that other one).
Sidenote: This Lady Jane Seymour was also one of three sisters. The Seymour sisters (Jane, Anne, and Margaret) were writers whose published work includes the poem Hecatodistichon. Written in 1550, this was the first female-authored English-language encomium, the only work by Englishwomen published in Latin in the 16th century, and the only work by any Englishwomen published in any language before the 1560s. It was written as a tribute upon the death of Queen Marguerite de Navarre, herself also a writer.
Katherine Grey and Jane Seymour were close in age (Katherine two years older), had both gone through having their fathers executed, and had known each other most of their lives. Jane was also tangentially related to the royal family, as the former boy king Edward VI had been her cousin. Jane Seymour was, for awhile, a possible wife for him (Katherine’s sister Jane Grey had also been considered for this position) but of course the boy-King had died unmarried. Katherine and Jane, like other girls at this time, would share the same bed for warmth and probably also some fun gossiping. Katherine confided in Jane that she hoped to be able to reconcile with Lord Herbert, her brief childhood husband.
An influenza epidemic tore through England (and the royal court) in the summer of 1558. Lady Jane Seymour was among those affected, and she was sent to recuperate at her family home of Hamworth with her BFF Katherine sent along to keep her company. While they were there, Jane’s brother Edward aka Ned happened to be at home visiting. What did they look like? Well Katherine, by now seventeen years old, was gorgeous with golden red hair, blue eyes, and a striking profile. Ned, nineteen years old, was slim with dark eyes and dark hair, a nose that people writing about him seemed to have found very appealing, and an arrogant, asshole sort of air. Ned was also distantly descended from the medieval English King Edward III, meaning that he wasn’t directly in the line of succession, but was closer than many other aristocrats. And if he and Katherine happened to get married and have a child, the combined claim that child would have — between Ned’s ancestors and Katherine’s Tudor pedigree — a strong claim to the throne. And if that child was a son? All of the Protestants would be so relieved, because then they wouldn’t have to worry about having a gross woman Queen at all! So keep in mind that Katherine and Ned falling in love was, basically, a threat to the Queen and to the entire succession.
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But did these teens care? No, they did not!! Jane Seymour, on the mend from influenza, helped out by sending messages between her BFF and her brother all summer while they hung out at Hamworth. Ned even brought up the idea of marriage, secretly, in letters! His motives are unknown, but if he was just after Katherine for her money and connections, he likely wouldn’t have done all this sneaking around. After all, in order to use Katherine in that way, their marriage would have to be officially sanctioned. And the thing is, as a close relative to the Queen, Katherine couldn’t get married without the Queen’s permission.
But oh noes! Ned’s mother, Anne Somerset, found out about this borderline treasonous teenage summer romance. Anne had seen a lot of her relatives executed in the last decade, so she was understandably concerned about her son’s potentially lethal love match. She ordered Ned to forget about Katherine, but he was like, “Is is so wrong for two young people who enjoy each other’s company to spend time together???*” (*not an exact quote) and refused to stop hanging out with his girlfriend. But anyway, summer ended and so did the influenza epidemic, and Katherine and Jane were sent back to royal court. It was just like in Grease, the young lovers’ summer dreams ripped at the seams! But I’m sure you suspect that wasn’t the end of this ill-advised and dangerous love story.
But the thing is, back at royal court everything was a new kind of chaos. Queen Mary I had also fallen ill during the influenza epidemic and, on top of her other medical issues (and her habit of starving herself for religious reasons) she seemed to be dying. There wasn’t an opportunity for Katherine and Ned to get royal permission to get married, if they were even thinking about doing so at this point. Queen Mary I died that November. As one of the late Queen’s ladies in waiting, Katherine helped to lay out Mary’s body for embalming. Katherine also took turns, along with the other ladies, to stand watch in the chapel where Mary’s corpse was set out for a month before the funeral, which Katherine also attended.
As the Queen had died without children, her successor was her younger half-sister, who was named Queen Elizabeth I. Lady Katherine Grey was now next in line to the throne.
Where Mary had sympathized with the Greys and elevated Katherine, her sister, and mother, Elizabeth was wary. For starters, the Grey family still had a toxic reputation for the whole Lady Jane Grey coup, as well as Katherine’s father’s other acts of rebellion (and his later execution). Elizabeth also knew that among the many competing factions of courtiers were some people who felt Katherine should be the Queen instead of her. Lady Jane Grey herself was already seen by some as a martyr, partly because her final letter had been published shortly after her death as propaganda. In one of these letters, Jane identified her sister Katherine as her spiritual and political heir.
Twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth had not yet cemented her reputation as the Virgin Queen, and everyone assumed that she would get married and have her own children pretty soon. She also didn’t yet know about Katherine’s ongoing secret relationship with Ned. As far as anyone knew, Elizabeth and Katherine were both young, unmarried women and therefore very valuable prospects to marry. As soon as either of them had a child, specifically a son, that would tip the scales to make even more people support her above the other.
But also, real talk. Elizabeth was insecure, vain and jealous in the manner of Snow White’s Evil Queen. She saw any younger, prettier woman as a personal threat. And Katherine, being a relative, seems to have been literally a younger, prettier version of the Queen. This tendency would only grow stronger, the older she got and would lead to many future secret marriages of many young, pretty women. Elizabeth, you’re doing this to yourself!
So in a sort of Cinderella moment, Elizabeth immediately downgraded Katherine and Mary Grey’s status within her court. Rather than being gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, the Grey girls were moved over to the Presence Chamber. Katherine and Mary weren’t given any preferred treatment at Elizabeth’s coronation other than that of ladies-in-waiting. This was Elizabeth making clear that she did not trust the Greys, had not forgotten the Lady Jane Grey scenario, and perhaps even did not consider Katherine her own heir. But the thing, of course, is that Elizabeth didn’t want to get married anytime soon because she was in love with her married boyfriend, Robert Dudley.
Sidenote: potential wife-killer Robert Dudley was also Katherine Grey’s former brother-in-law, as Robert’s brother Guildford had been married to (and then executed alongside) Lady Jane Grey. So he and Katherine and Elizabeth and Ned had all known one another for years, like high school but with more pantaloons and murders.
But so, with Elizabeth publicly stating she didn’t plan to get married anytime soon, her councillors turned their attention to Katherine again. Because of the Queen wasn’t going to have a child, then Katherine again began to seem like the potential next Queen. This bothered Elizabeth considerably, because she really hated Katherine. Katherine was obviously aware of how Elizabeth felt, and complained to the Spanish ambassador more than once about how the Queen was sidelining her. Katherine even yelled at the Queen one day in the Presence Chamber, or maybe more like rolled her eyes or something else that was seen as “unseemly” behaviour in the Queen’s presence.
Just to place this in context: Queen Mary I had been married to Philip, the Spanish King. After she died, Philip tried to get Elizabeth to marry him but she sensibly refused. We’re still years away from the whole Elizabeth vs Spanish Armada moment. So the fact that Katherine, Elizabeth’s heir, was bitching about the Queen to the Spanish Ambassador was a big fucking deal. The Spanish Ambassador, whose name was Feria, began scheming if maybe Philip could marry Katherine and then take over England together, etc.. Did Katherine knowingly play along with this scheme? I mean, probably. At the very least, she allowed herself to seem open to his suggestions at least to figure out how she could use him to her advantage. She had stopped talking about wanting to remarry Herbert (because she wanted to marry Ned) but to Feria, this seemed like Katherine was open to marrying anyone. Feria took her seriously, and began figuring out which Spanish Hapsburg royal he could marry her to and sorting out plans to have her kidnapped to Spain.
Meanwhile, Ned had been cooling off with Katherine (due to his mother’s interference) so Katherine may have been using matters of international treason to make a play to make her boyfriend jealous. She also knew that Elizabeth’s plans to travel around the country were coming up, which meant opportunities for Katherine to see Ned for Summer Of Love Part Two. Like, while Feria was literally arranging which ships to use to kidnap her to Spain, Katherine was blissfully fantasizing about reuniting with her boyfriend. Katherine was playing a very dangerous game, and she was LOVING IT!!
But when Katherine set out with Elizabeth (who spent all her time flirting outrageously publicly with Robert Dudley), there was no sign of Ned. He had written that he had fallen ill, but actually probably his mother was making him stay away from her. But guess what, no mother could get in the way of these determined teens, and finally Ned caught up with everyone else! It was during this period that the two of them would later say they fell truly in love, taking walks through gardens and enjoying feasts and just hanging out all the time and being young and in love. Elizabeth, busy with Robert Dudley and fending off her councillors who wanted her to stop seeing Robert Dudley, didn’t know about the romance. Other courtiers did, and some warned Katherine that Ned was maybe just using her. But by October, Ned had set off to visit Katherine’s mother for permission to marry her.
Frances Grey was happy to hear that Ned wanted to marry Katherine because she liked him, and because she knew this would strengthen her daughter’s claim to the throne. After checking with her daughter this was what she wanted, Frances offered her support for the match. She advised Ned to get to work convincing other people at court that this was a good idea, namely, members of the Privy Council. Since ultimately it would be up to Elizabeth, they needed to get as many people advising her to support the match as possible.
Ned’s first attempts to convince people at court to support him were unsuccessful, as he was told the timing wasn’t good and he should wait. But then unfortunately, Frances died that November, before she was able to send a letter of her own to the Queen expressing her blessing for the match. Katherine and Mary Grey were with their mother as she passed, and Katherine served as chief mourner at the funeral (which Elizabeth generously agreed to pay for). Both Katherine and Ned knew that their chances of getting married anytime soon had died along with Frances. Ned wrote Katherine a letter/poem, comparing their romantic challenges to those of the Greek lovers Troilus and Cressida, who had also been kept apart for political reasons. Ned seemed worried that, like Cressida, Katherine might leave him for another lover. The Spanish were again focusing their attention on her, with eyes for potentially using her as a way to overthrow Elizabeth. But Ned needn’t have worried: Katherine was entirely devoted to him.
However, the rumours of the Spanish plot had finally reached Elizabeth. Following the adage to keep friends close and enemies closer, Elizabeth suddenly began treating Katherine much more kindly. Elizabeth planted rumours that she may even adopt Katherine (despite being just seven years older), to formalize her role as heir to the throne. Katherine was probably happy to accept this better treatment, but her main priority was finding opportunities to sneak off with her boyfriend, Ned. And as ever, Elizabeth was too busy running off hunting with Robert Dudley to notice or care what Katherine was doing (as long as it didn’t involve the Spanish Ambassador).
Ned’s sister Jane and brother Henry helped courier letters and tokens back and forth between the lovers. Katherine and Ned found opportunities to sneak off together, and more and more people were noticing their affair. But Elizabeth’s behaviour with Robert Dudley was so much more scandalous that the Katherine/Ned stuff never really took off as the big gossip of the day. (This was around the time that there were unfounded rumours Elizabeth was pregnant with Dudley’s baby, and then Dudley’s wife was maybe murdered by falling down a flight of stairs). Elizabeth’s Chief Advisor, William Cecil, had found out about the Ned/Katherine scenario, though. He warned Ned to stop seeing Katherine due to the regime-destabilizing nature of their possible marriage. Ned listened to him and ghosted Katherine. This made Katherine frantic, especially when she heard rumours he’d been flirting with another woman. And the thing is that Ned just couldn’t quit her, either.
Ned wrote to her, proposing marriage, and Katherine obviously agreed. They snuck off into BFF Jane’s private room, where Jane was the witness to their formal betrothal. Katherine and Ned agreed they’d get married at his London home as soon as she was able to slip away from the Queen. Ned gave Katherine a ring, and the betrothal was made official with a joining of hands and a lot of hugging and kissing.
Katherine couldn’t just run off at anytime to get secretly married, she had to be clever about this. With the help of her BFF Jane, they hatched a plan. When they got to London, Elizabeth announced she was going off on a hunting trip. Katherine claimed at the last minute she had a toothache and couldn’t go. Jane offered to stay behind with her, and Elizabeth was like, “Great, one less Grey girl for me to worry about” and headed off on a business trip with the other ladies in waiting. Ned, who had been there for dinner, was like, “Great, come by my house first thing tomorrow morning.”
The next morning, Ned gave all of his servants the day off so they wouldn’t see what he was up to. Katherine and Jane snuck out of the palace and made their way on foot along the River Thames to Ned’s house. It was late November, and super cold. Ned greeted them at his house, where a few servants (on their way out for their day off) also saw them arrive. Jane ran out into the street to grab a random priest to perform the ceremony, because Lady Jane Seymour was an amazing friend and sister.
She soon returned with a random Protestant priest, who performed the wedding ceremony for them in Jane’s bedroom. Ned gave Katherine a puzzle ring (!!!) engraved with a poem he had written for her:
As circles five by art compact show but one ring in sight, So trust uniteth faithful minds with knot of secret might,
Whose force to break (but greedy death no wight possesseth power),
As time and sequels well shall prove, my ring can say no more.
Jane paid the priest ten pounds, which in today’s money is around $5000 USD and was way more than the priest would have ever expected to be paid for a bedroom wedding ceremony. Jane had some “banqueting meats” prepared for them to eat, but Katherine and Ned had more amorous things on their mind, and so Jane left the room while they consummated their marriage. The lovers, now aged twenty (Katherine) and twenty-two (Ned) had sex for hours, until finally Katherine had to go because she and Jane had dinner plans. The servants in Ned’s house, back from their day off, were well aware of what had happened up in that bedroom and Ned kissed his wife good-bye when she and Jane had to go.
Now (secretly) married, Katherine and Ned had sex as often as they could, wherever they were able to. Jane continued to help them meet up, and Katherine’s servants quickly learned to politely leave the room when Ned arrived. The newlyweds weren’t able to spend a whole night together, but clearly glowed with love and adoration for one another such that everybody started to figure out that they were involved. Cecil, Elizabeth’s minister, disapproved of their affair but even he had no idea that the two had been actually married already. In order to try and keep them apart, to protect Elizabeth’s interests, Cecil arranged for Ned to go on an extended holiday in Europe.
Ned, frankly, was not great at communicating with Katherine because she had to find out about his European holiday plans from Jane. She was like, “I’m sorry what? What happens if I’m pregnant for instance, and you aren’t around when the shit hits the fan?” And Ned was like, “Well, I guess you’ll have to hope the Queen is nice to you,” and she was like, “I’m sorry what??” And then Ned was like, “If you’re pregnant, I’ll stay,” and Katherine was like, “I don’t know, maybe??” And then tragically, just when she needed her BFF the most, Lady Jane Seymour fell ill again, this time with tuberculosis. Lady Jane Seymour died at age nineteen on March 29, 1560. And with her left the only witness to Katherine and Ned’s marriage ceremony (because nobody knew the random priest’s name or how to find him).
Ned really, really wanted to go to Europe. And Katherine honestly did not know if she was pregnant or not (her BFF was dead! Her mother was dead! She didn’t know who to ask for advice!), and finally they agreed he could go but he’d leave her with a letter saying, “In case Katherine is pregnant, please note that we are totally married and also she should inherit my lands in case I die in Europe!”
But in an excessively horrible coincidence/mistake, Katherine lost the letter. And she was very much pregnant.
As you might expect, Katherine kept the pregnancy hidden for as long as she could because this was an extremely dangerous situation for her. The baby she was carrying had a very strong claim to be the next King or Queen of England (from her Tudor pedigree and Ned’s royal ancestry). If the baby was a son, then all bets were off because everyone was still desperate for a potential male monarch to replace Elizabeth.
Once she realized that she was pregnant, Katherine wrote numerous letters to Ned in France, but none of them had reached him* (*potentially because she addressed them all to My Beloved Husband instead of using his name?? Remember how your marriage is secret, Katherine?? How were the couriers to know who to give the letters to**???) (**also my theory is that William Cecil or one of his other spies was intercepting the letters for scheme-related reasons).
Now psychologically, this is a 20-year-old woman who had seen her sister, father, brother-in-law and numerous other people she knew and/or loved be executed for treason-related things and who was now carrying a Treason Baby and her husband was MIA. Plus, Elizabeth had started being cruel to her again. Life was not great for Lady Katherine Grey at the moment. If she couldn’t get in touch with Ned, she needed to find someone else to pose as her husband/babydaddy, and she settled on her childhood annulled husband, Herbert.
Katherine was once again on progress with the Queen, spending a summer now without Ned. She exchanged letters with Herbert while on the road, and in fact he was pleased to hear from her, and she was like, “So our marriage from childhood is basically still valid, right??” And he was like, “Aw, that’s a nice idea” and began courting her. But then she passed along word that she was currently with child, and Herbert knew that babies don’t gestate for ten years, and called things off because her motives were so obvious, and so distasteful to him. Boo, Herbert! You could have saved the day, you asshole.
And so Katherine, by now eight months pregnant, continued on travelling as a lady-in-waiting and everyone must have noticed she was pregnant, right?? Finally, she realized she had to tell somebody. After considering her options, the person she chose to confide in was her childhood friend Elizabeth St. Loe (sister-in-law of Katherine’s friend, Bess of Hardwick), who was one of the Queen’s gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber. This was not a good choice, as St. Loe wept inconsolably and was like, “Why did you tell me this, this is a disaster!” She also clearly was not great at secret-keeping as, by the next morning, everyone at church was whispering about Katherine’s secret pregnancy.
Undeterred, Katherine next turned to Robert Dudley, which is quite a decision. Robert Dudley was her former brother-in-law, but he was also Elizabeth’s boyfriend. And he also kind of hated the Greys for how the Lady Jane Grey scenario had led to the execution of so many Dudley family members. But, she hoped, the tenuous family bond would hopefully outweigh the other stuff. And Robert was like, “Know what? Sure. I’ll go talk to Liz about this.” His plan was, likely, that news of Katherine’s pregnancy might cause Elizabeth to finally agree to marry his wife-murdering ass as the Queen would clearly need a child now more than ever. But surprise! Except not a surprise! Elizabeth freaked the fuck out in the worst possible way. And: understandably.
Firstly, as the Queen, all of her Ladies in Waiting had to get her permission to marry anyone. And secondly, Katherine was Elizabeth’s heir and a possible future Queen, so she couldn’t just marry anyone. But for her to marry Ned? A man with his own claim to the throne? Thereby meaning the Katherine/Ned baby would have a stronger claim to be King or Queen than literally anyone else in England?? Elizabeth suspected this marriage/baby situation was part of a plot, maybe the Spanish, maybe the Scottish, maybe homegrown, but someone was trying to take over the country and she was not having it!!! So for all of the above reasons, Elizabeth had Katherine imprisoned in the Tower of London, and recalled Ned from Europe so he could be thrown in jail too. She also had Elizabeth St. Loe dismissed from the Privy Chamber and sent to the Tower for six months for failing to inform the Queen of the secret intel.
Elizabeth, and basically everyone, assumed that this was part of a more complex political strategy than just two young people falling in love. Because everyone was constantly scheming, and Katherine’s pregnancy with a potential new heir was a majorly serious political move. But the thing is: it wasn’t a scheme. It’s just when everyone is scheming, they can’t wrap their heads around that sometimes a 20-year-old woman marries her true love and gets knocked up.
And so it was that Katherine, now nine months pregnant, was subjected to interrogation in the Tower of London as they tried to get her to implicate other people in this “scheme”. Now being held in the same place where her sister and father had been executed, she behaved bravely. Like her older sister Lady Jane Grey, she had a strong stubborn streak and refused to be intimidated.
Meanwhile, Ned’s mother distanced herself from his “wildness” even as he was being dragged back to England from his European holiday for his own questioning. Rumours were flying that the young couple would be executed, and he (and his mother, in her way) were doing their best damage control to try and at least stay alive. When he arrived at the Tower, he arranged to have flowers sent to Katherine and sought to find out from his jailers how she was doing. Historian Leanda de Lisle hypothesizes he was also at this point working to ensure that his and Katherine’s testimony would line up, so that their marriage was recognized and their child would be considered legitimate.
Because that was the first and most important thing for Elizabeth to deal with. If Katherine and Ned’s marriage was declared legitimate (which would be tricky, with Jane Seymour dead and nobody knowing the name of the random priest), that meant that their baby was also legitimate. That would also make the baby, if a boy, an incredibly dangerous threat to the Queen. But Katherine and Ned’s only defense against charges of illegal fornication were to explain that yes, actually, they were married and so the fact she was pregnant was totally not a problem. Only one side could win; the marriage would either be legally recognized, or not. While Katherine was having obviously a miserably time being nine months pregnant and having to undergo days-long interrogations, Elizabeth was also doing poorly. Like her sister Mary I, she lost her appetite when she was distressed. A courtier who saw her at around this time described the Queen as looking “extremely thin and the colour of a corpse.”
So: nobody was having a good time with any of this. And then things got worse for everyone when Katherine gave birth on September 24th to a boy. This is the perhaps the one time in Tudor history when everyone was hoping very hard for a baby girl, and the arrival of a boy would cause everyone to despair. Katherine named her son Edward Seymour, Viscount Beauchamp. Two days later, baby Edward was baptized in the Tower chapel, feet away from where his aunt Lady Jane Grey, both grandfathers, and other relatives had been interred following their executions. There was finally a Protestant male heir to the throne of England, and this boy was potentially the new heir to the throne of England. The only thing in his way, at this point, was the question of the legitimacy of his birth.
While Elizabeth, Robert Dudley, and literally everyone was running around scheming and screaming, Katherine recovered from childbirth. She had been moved to live within the mansion of the Tower’s Lieutenant, so at least she had a nice place to stay. She was also able to keep her pet spaniels and monkeys (???) with her. (I do not know at what point she acquired pet monkeys, but it’s nice she had them with her). Ned was kept in the same mansion, in a separate apartment about ten feet away. The couple weren’t able to see each other, but through bribery and sympathy, were able to exchange notes via their guards. Ned was determined to appeal if their marriage was found invalid, but for the time being, all they could do was wait.
Elizabeth ordered an official Church commission to investigate the legality of Katherine and Ned’s marriage. Of course the whole point of this was for them to find the marriage invalid, no matter what it took, but they had to give the appearance of actually investigating. The tricky thing is that the only requirements for the marriage to be found legal was for the brie and groom to consent to marry in front of witnesses. Katherine and Ned both said, again and again, that they had done this. But Jane’s death and the mysterious identity of the priest ((Katherine and Ned both said if they saw him in person they probably wouldn’t recognize him) worked against them.
Ned bribed the guards to let him visit Katherine, which he did on May 25th and did they have sex? Of course they had sex! He managed to sneak into see her again four days later, and again they had sex, and do you see where this is going? Because it is going to: Katherine became pregnant again. And now it’s all even more complicated, because by now they had both declared they were married in front of numerous witnesses (e.g. the interrogators) and so this second child would be 100% legitimate, no question about it. Katherine now knew intimately what pregnancy was like, and when she figured out she was pregnant again she had a letter sent to Ned. He was thrilled! She was also happy! Their little jail family would soon get one new member.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s issues with Mary, Queen of Scots were taking up much of her attention. And then Elizabeth came down with smallpox! Everyone was like, “It sucks you’re so sick, but who is your heir?? Mary, Queen of Scots? Katherine Grey? Baby Edward? Who???” And Liz was like, “I won’t tell you because I refuse to die!!!” And she was right, she survived. And she was like, “I’m twenty-nine years old and might have a child one day and will not tell you who my heir is!” And her councillors were like, “But what if we told you that Katherine Grey is pregnant again?” And Elizabeth was like “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???”
Like, she was incredibly upset about this for all of the above reasons. She had the Lieutenant of the Tower thrown in jail for allowing the couple to hook up. Katherine and Ned were brought in for new interrogations. But not even Elizabeth could stop nature, and on February 10, Katherine gave birth to a second son, who she named Thomas Seymour. And although Elizabeth was freaking out, public opinion was very much on the side of Katherine, Ned, and their little family. Of course it was! Because this is an incredibly romantic love story, and if not for the political angle, everyone knows that the pair would have been considered married in the first place! Elizabeth wouldn’t allow a priest to attend Thomas’s baptism, but two of the prison guards agreed to stand up as his godparents, because the jailers were total #KatheriNed shippers and loved their babies.
Elizabeth, of course, had to do something about all of this. The more people sided with Katherine, the more likely it was that her supporters might try and depose Elizabeth. It wasn’t possible to declare Thomas illegitimate, but Elizabeth did what she could: put Ned publicly on trial for 1) “seducing a virgin of the blood royal,” 2) conspiring with the Lieutenant to see her again, and 3) sneaking out of his jail cell. He was found guilty on all charges, and fined £5,000 apiece for each crime. Remember how Jane Seymour paid the random priest £10 and that’s worth $5,000 modern-day dollars? £15,000 is worth, according to this currency converter, infinity modern-day dollars. It was not an amount that Ned would be expected to repay; the point of it was to punish him forever and to show everyone that Elizabeth was not someone to be messed around with.
Now, England was coming up to the ten-year anniversary of Lady Jane Grey’s death and her story was becoming trendy again. Rumour had it that Jane had been pregnant upon the time of her execution (she was not), but this connected her with her sister Katherine, now in jail with a baby and a toddler and facing her own possible execution. Support for Katherine’s claim continued, much to Elizabeth’s chagrin. And the image of pretty Katherine, a married woman with two sons was the ideal foil to Elizabeth’s unmarried childlessness. It was around this time that a portrait was made of Katherine with her son Edward, which was duplicated and spread around as propaganda to support her against the Queen. (It is also apparently the oldest known image of an English woman with her baby).
Later that same year, there was an outbreak of plague in London. Elizabeth (like her father before her) fled for the countryside. Katherine, trapped in the Tower with two sons (and monkeys and dogs) was desperate to avoid the disease. Her advocates begged the Queen to let her move elsewhere, and finally Elizabeth relented, allowing Katherine to be moved into house arrest. But there was a catch: Katherine was to be separated from her husband and one of her children. Ned and baby Edward were sent to live with Ned’s mother. Katherine and Thomas were sent to stay with her uncle, Lord John Grey. Katherine was forbidden to contact Ned, or her sister Mary Grey (who was still a Lady in Waiting), or to visit with anyone while she was in her uncle’s house/jail.
Less than a month after her arrival, Katherine was reported to have fallen into a depression. I mean, understandably given her postpartum status as well as literally everything that had happened in her life to date. She missed Ned and Edward terribly, cried constantly, ate little, and said things like, “I would to God I were buried.” William Cecil still supported her as potential heir, and helped her compose a plea to the Queen to relent. Robert Dudley agreed to deliver the letter, because he was the only person who could safely do so without incurring the Queen’s wrath. Katherine was hopeful that this petition would free them all, and wrote a letter to Ned sharing her hopes and goal of them getting to reunite soon. But Elizabeth rejected her appeal. The lovers were to remain apart.
Katherine’s misery was complete. She wrote to Cecil, “I rather wish of God shortly to be buried… than in this continual agony to live.” Her uncle John Grey was implicated in some scheming in support of Katherine, and when Elizabeth found out, he and the other conspirators were thrown in jail, where John died perhaps by suicide or depression. Katherine and Thomas were moved to a different house/jail, where they remained for the next three years. This time, her jailer fell ill, necessitating her relocation. She continued to communicate via letter to Ned, who replied to her letters with gifts and tokens.
Another major blow to both Elizabeth and Katherine occurred when, in 1566, Mary, Queen of Scots gave birth to a son. Katherine was now no longer the only Tudor heiress married with a son, and Mary (being a literal Queen) had much more power than the depressed, imprisoned Katherine. Elizabeth secretly preferred Mary as her heir, and worked (at this point) to protect her interests while simultaneously punishing Katherine and Mary Grey (who, at this point, had been jailed for her own secret marriage).
But then the whole thing happened where Mary, Queen of Scots’s husband Lord Darnley was found murdered and his house exploded, and it looked like Mary had conspired to murder him. Katherine’s supporters all spread the rumour that Mary was responsible for her husband’s murder, and Elizabeth was unable to continue protecting her. Meanwhile, Katherine herself (and her sister Mary Grey) posed no threats personally; it was just the people working in their names who threatened Elizabeth. To keep Katherine from becoming a figurehead to these rebels, Elizabeth instructed Katherine’s jailers not to let her interact with anyone. Katherine was moved again, to her fifth prison in seven years. When her new jailer saw her, he was shocked at how poorly she looked; pale and thin, shoulders bowed, not a hint of her former vitality or joie de vivre. The various descriptions of her throughout this period sound like those of prolonged depression. She had low energy, ate little, and spoke of wanting to die.
On January 26, 1568, a doctor was sent for. He found there was little to be done for her. She seemed to have starved herself, and would no longer eat. Katherine recited prayers and had psalms read to her. The household servants surrounded her, one encouraging her to that she could yet live a long life. Katherine replied, “No, no. No life in this world; but in the world to come I hope to live ever. For here is nothing but care and misery, and there is life everlasting.” After several hours, Katherine passed along her final requests. She asked for a message be sent to the Queen, begging forgiveness for marrying without permission; she also wished the Queen be asked to be good to her children and to Ned. Katherine then asked that Ned be sent tokens: the pointed ring he gave her upon their betrothal, her wedding ring, and a third memento mori ring. This third was engraved with a message for Ned: While I Lived, Yours.
Katherine’s final words were, “Lord Jesus receive my spirit.” She then closed her eyes with her hands. Her death was recorded at 9 o’clock that morning. She was twenty-eight years old.
Four-year-old Thomas Seymour was moved to live with his father, Ned, and six-year-old brother, Edward. Queen Elizabeth ordered Katherine’s final jailer to oversee the her cousin’s internment and burial. Katherine was buried in a chapel near her final prison-home in Yoxford, rather than in Westminster Abbey as her royal relations (including her mother) had been. However, much as Elizabeth wanted to downplay Katherine’s importance, she was a Tudor and certain protocols had to be adhered to. Just as had been done for Mary I, Katherine’s body was embalmed and set out for a round-the-clock vigil, watched over by servants. Seventy-seven official mourners were dispatched from London, who arrived with an impressive entourage. Elizabeth did not attend the event, but was said to have unconvincingly performed grief back at home. Nobody bought her act, obviously. Katherine’s death was a relief to her as, noted the Spanish ambassador, the Queen had long been afraid of Lady Katherine Grey.
Two years after Katherine’s death, Ned was freed from house arrest. He would go on to marry twice more, weirdly both of them secret elopements, landing back in prison once more for this odd habit of his. Throughout his life, he worked to try and have his sons Edward and Thomas restored to the royal succession. They never were.
When Edward was nineteen years old (and, coincidentally, staying in the same house where his parents had first met), he fell in love with a gentlewoman named Honora Rogers. Queen Elizabeth happily permitted this marriage, as this would effectively remove Edward from ever being King because his wife wasn’t grand enough. One less heir for her to worry about.
When Elizabeth died in 1603, she named James Stuart (the son of Mary, Queen of Scots), as her heir. However, a faction continued on to believe that Katherine’s sons were the true heirs. This bothered James nearly as much as it had bothered Elizabeth.
Ned lived until 1621, dying at age eighty-four. In 1625, James was succeeded by his son King Charles I. Charles didn’t much worry about Katherine Grey, meaning that finally her descendants were able to have her remains reinterred next to Ned in Salisbury Cathedral, where their joint tomb can still be viewed. The Latin inscription on their tomb translates to:
“Incomparable consorts
Who, experienced in the vicissitudes of changing fortune
At Length, in the concord that marked their lives,
Here rest together”
Katherine’s Grey’s descendants, through her son Edward, include Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother (née Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon). Through her, Katherine Grey’s descendants include Queen Elizabeth I and all of her heirs, including Prince William and Prince Harry.
The Sisters Who Would be Queen: Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Tragedy by Leanda de Lisle
Elizabeth’s Women: Friends, Rivals, and Foes Who Shaped the Virgin Queen by Tracy Borman
Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey by Nicola Tallis
Devices and Desires: Bess of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabethan England by Kate Hubbard
The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots: Elizabeth I and her Greatest Rival by Kate Williams
https://www.britain-magazine.com/carousel/tudor-of-the-month-katherine-grey/
https://tudortimes.co.uk/guest-articles/love-and-loss-lady-katherine-grey
https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2012/03/born-in-tower-crimes-of-lady-katherine.html
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Like so many of these stories, we’re going to start out with a family tree. Henry VIII had two sisters: his older sister Margaret, who married the King of Scots, and his younger sister Mary, who married the King of France and then Henry VIII’s best friend Charles Brandon. Because Henry hated Scotland, he disinherited all of Margaret’s heirs in favour of Mary’s heirs. This was all theoretical, though, as when Henry died, his teen son Edward became King and if anything happened to him, Henry’s own daughters Mary and Elizabeth would come next in the line of succession. BUT when Edward got really sick, all the assholes advising him panicked because his sister Mary was a CATHOLIC which was a sort of person they hated almost as much as THE SCOTS, and so they were like “what if Mary and Elizabeth aren’t the heirs… what if the heirs are the descendants of Henry’s sister, also confusingly named Mary?” And that’s where the Grey sisters come in.
Best known of these three were the oldest sister, Lady Jane Grey. She had the misfortune of being the eldest, which meant that she was forced — basically against her will — to become the new Queen of England after Edward’s death. She famously only wore the crown for nine days before Henry’s daughter Mary came to town with an army and took over as Queen Mary I. Jane was then put in jail and, months later, executed for her role in this whole horrible situation. But her younger sisters, Katherine and Mary, were still alive and, for family tree reasons, were still heirs to the throne.
Queen Mary I was 37 years old when she took over, with plenty of time to have heirs of her own. Until she did, though, Lady Katherine Grey was her heir apparent (because Elizabeth was still technically illegitimate). Katherine was young and spirited and had zero interest in one day becoming the Queen, and so along with everyone else, waited hopefully for Queen Mary I to have some children. But, of course, the Queen died without having any children. Before she died, though, she reinstated her half-sister Elizabeth as her heir, meaning that the two Grey sisters were able to avoid a repeat of what had happened to Jane. The newly crowned Queen Elizabeth I was 25 years old and unmarried, and again, everyone was mostly relieved because obviously she’d have a bunch of kids soon and all these crises of inheritance could be avoided. But until Elizabeth had a child, her official heirs were… Katherine, and then Mary Grey.
Katherine wound up getting herself removed from the line of succession when she secretly married a man named Edward Seymour and got herself knocked up twice. Elizabeth saw both Katherine and her two sons as threats to her rule, and so she declared the boys illegitimate and sent Katherine to jail as a fornicator (which was a crime back then). Her reputation ruined, Katherine spent the rest of her short life under arrest, eventually dying at the age of just 28. There was only one Grey sister left, Mary. And as Elizabeth continued on, unmarried and without children, the question of Elizabeth’s heir became more confusing to everyone. Lady Mary Grey was still in contention, but there were other women who others were supporting, most notable Mary, Queen of Scots, the Catholic descendant of Henry VIII’s estranged sister Margaret. Like Jane and Katherine before her, Mary Grey did not ever claim to want to be Queen, nor did she seem to ever take any steps toward claiming it. Yet, like both her sisters, Mary’s proximity to power affected the course of her life.
Based on descriptions of Mary Grey by her contemporaries, it seems mostly agreed upon that she was likely a dwarf. Her short stature is often commented upon, and given that due to nutrition most people of this time period were under five feet, Mary would have had to be quite a bit shorter than that for her size to be so significant to others. She also likely had scoliosis, giving her a crooked or hunched back. Similar to the ancient Roman Emperor Claudius (of I, Claudius fame), those around her likely underestimated her intelligence due to their preconceptions of what her physical features meant. This was an era in which religion and superstition were closely entwined, and it was a common belief that if you were a sinner, it would be visible somehow in your body. Mary Grey’s parents, however, offered her all the same advantages of her older sisters. All three girls were raised to the highest standards of their time, with lessons both in the humanities as well as instruction on how to run a household. The Grey sisters were raised according to the tenets of the still-pretty-new Protestant faith.
All three Grey sisters were both intelligent and opinionated as well as stubborn. Without much of Mary’s personal correspondence to guide us, it’s tempting to think that she may have used others’ preconceptions of her intelligence against them. Seeing what had become of her sisters, it certainly may have been wise to pretend not to understand the scheming constantly going on around her. But let’s go right back to that initial defining moment in her life: Mary Grey was just eight years old when, over the course of a few months, her sister Jane became Queen, was imprisoned, and then executed along with their father. As punishment for this gambit, the surviving Grey family was stripped of their property and wealth, and Mary Grey’s betrothal was ended. Almost certainly, Katherine, Mary, and their mother turned to their fervent Protestant faith to get them through these hardships and uncertain times.
Yet, just six months later, Katherine and Mary Grey were invited back to royal court, and their family’s money and property were restored. Their mother, Frances, took as her new husband a commoner named Adrian Stokes, with whom she left royal court with the ten-year-old Mary. Over the next decade, Mary Grey’s life remained mostly unchanged, even as things at royal court were bonkers. Queen Mary I died when Mary Grey was 12, and Elizabeth I took over. The next year, Mary Grey’s mother Frances passed away. Katherine and Mary Grey jointly inherited their mother’s properties, and as Elizabeth I remained childless, the sisters continued on as the first and second in line to the throne. Both girls took on positions as ladies in waiting to their cousin Queen Elizabeth I. And everything was great for like, twelve months!
Because that’s when Katherine’s elopement, pregnancy, and imprisonment occurred. As long as she was alive and Elizabeth didn’t have any children, Katherine was — even in jail — heir to the throne. Lady Mary Grey, clever as she was, could be somewhat comfortable that she herself wouldn’t become Queen anytime soon because obviously Elizabeth would start having children soon. And Mary had bigger things on her mind, quite literally, as she had fallen in love with a soldier named Thomas Keyes, who was like 6’8″ or something like that. Keyes’s role at royal court was as head of palace security, meaning he was often at the front gates and would have seen Mary Grey coming and going. This is all so much of a romcom meet-cute I can’t stand it, like you know these two were so sweet together. And sure, he was like twice Mary’s age and had adult children from a previous relationship, but these things don’t matter when you’re in love. And these two were, for sure, because why else would they specifically go behind the Queen’s back to get married? That was a bonkers, dangerous thing to do, but this short woman and this tall man couldn’t help themselves. They were smitten.
Mary Grey was still technically second in line to the throne, and so everybody knew she wasn’t allowed to choose her own husband: Elizabeth had made it very clear that everyone had to get permission first before getting married. Even so, Keyes brought gifts to Mary Grey, courting her in the sweetest most adorable of ways, and Mary Grey couldn’t help herself. She fell for him. The timing was basically the worst possible: Katherine Grey was still wasting away in jail for her own secret sexy wedding, so the changes of Elizabeth approving another Grey sister marriage — to a commoner!! — was less than zero. But Mary had spent some time with her mother and stepfather, so she knew that a noblewoman could be happy with a commoner. And didn’t Mary Grey deserve to be happy??
Finally, after they deduced that the right time would never come to ask permission, they went the “beg forgiveness” route and got secret married in August 1565, when Mary Grey was about 20 years old. And Mary had it all planned out: they waited until Elizabeth was out of town, and then invited some cousins and friends over for a low key soiree. The only witness they brought to the ceremony itself was a servant girl named Frances Goldwell because, Mary figured, when the Queen found out she’d punish the witness, and Mary didn’t want any of her higher-ranking friends to get in trouble. Frances Goldwell was no fool either, and she sort of lurked around a wall, just slightly peeking in, so as to only vaguely witness the whole thing in hopes that she wouldn’t get punished, either. But Mary Grey and Thomas Keyes had a love that could not be stopped.
But, as ever, Queen Elizabeth found out about the ceremony pretty much right away — likely helped by the fact that Mary Grey and Thomas had invited like dozens of people for a post-ceremony dinner banquet like, way to keep it on the down low, you two. Like ten days afterwards, Elizabeth ordered the newlyweds to be interrogated and throw into separate jails (she’d learned from Katherine Grey that it’s best not to let two people horny for each other be locked up in the same jail, particularly when you’re desperate for them not to have any children.)
Mary Grey’s prison flat-out sucked. She was stuck in a twelve-foot room in a country house called Chequers, which is — fun fact — still used today as a residence for the Prime Minister. The room she was kept in is now known as The Prison Room, and you can still see some drawings and writing she left on the walls while she was in there, going out of her mind with boredom and terror. Mary Grey was forbidden from having any guests, had all her money confiscated, and was only allowed outside for fresh air every once in a while. She spent her time writing letters to Sir William Cecil, one of Elizabeth’s most trusted advisors, begging him to plead her case and convince the Queen to set her free. But Keyes was in an even worse situation, trapped in solitary confinement in a notorious prison called Fleet. He was really tall, remember, and the room he was put in was way too small for him so even just sitting or standing was excruciating for him.
After two years, Mary was sent to live with her step-grandmother Katherine Willoughby, who reported that Mary was so depressed she refused to eat. One year later, Thomas Keyes was released and given a security job at a castle near his home in Kent. Because he was a stalwart and truehearted person, he wrote polite letters to the Queen asking permission to get to live with Mary again, but Elizabeth was like no way. And even though Mary and Keyes’s love was the truest to ever live, they’d both had shitty enough experiences in jail that neither was willing to risk a daring escape to try and reunite at this point. And one year later, Mary was transferred again, this time to live with a famously cranky guy named Sir Thomas Gresham. He and his wife hated having her there, and wrote a series of letters to Elizabeth being like, “Please make her go away” but Elizabeth was like, “Deal with it,” and Mary Grey just sat in her room, reading books, because at least she still had books. Books: they will never desert you in your time of need.
In 1571, six years after the wedding, Thomas Keyes died from imprisonment-related health problems. The news was delivered to Mary Grey in person, and she was inconsolable. She was so upset, in fact, that Gresham began writing more frequently to Elizabeth like “This grieving woman is SO ANNOYING please make her go away,” but Elizabeth continued to ignore him, as well she should, but also: poor, poor, poor Mary Grey. What a shitty situation. At one point, she herself wrote to Cecil like, “Hey, since Thomas Keyes is dead, there’s no reason for Elizabeth to be mad at me so like… how about giving me a pardon?” Which of course didn’t happen.
Until! In 1572, Elizabeth was apparently worn down by the amount of letters she’d gotten about this stuff, and finally granted Mary Grey her freedom. Mary went to live with her stepfather, Adrian Stokes, and his new wife. Both were delighted to have her with them, like finally, someone is being nice to this woman. Mary Grey saved up her pennies, because she was also great with financial management, and after just one year was able to pay for her own house and the servants to work in it. And? She got to just live the gorgeous life she’d always deserved.
Mary Grey hung out with her friends and family, riding her carriage around, just being a glamorous and independent single lady. She became close with Keyes’s surviving children, and was named godmother to one of their daughters. She wrote letters and used her charm and cleverness to try and gain some favour back such that she might be invited back to royal court. In 1574, she sent a New Year’s gift to her cousin Queen Elizabeth I and… Elizabeth accepted it! This was a big deal! It meant Elizabeth was maybe over all the drama. Sure enough, in 1575, Elizabeth gave Mary Grey some of the income from her family property that the crown had been taking this whole time which meant: Mary Grey now had enough money not just to survive, but to thrive! You know she went right out and bought some gorgeous new bespoke dresses and jewels because she’s worth it. And furthermore, you know Mary Grey kept her lips sealed vis-a-vis being an heir to the throne, succession, etc., because she was smart like that and liked being alive and not in jail.
In 1577, Mary Grey got her goal when Elizabeth I appointed her Maid of Honor to the Queen — the same gig Mary’d had back in the day for Queen Mary I. Elizabeth was like, “Thing is, you have to use your maiden name and can’t ever mention anything about ever being married because you weren’t ever married, were you?” And Mary was like, “Married? Me? I can’t remember anything like that happening,” and things were great.
In 1578, plague broke out because it was the 16th century and nobody washed their hands and that’s the sort of thing that happened back then. Mary unfortunately fell ill, and passed away on April 20th, aged 33. As she still had the Queen’s favour, her funeral was marked with a procession and her coffin (described as being “tiny”) was delivered to Westminster Abbey, which is where so many of her royal ancestors had been bureid before. Elizabeth had Mary Grey’s remains lain to rest in the same tomb as Frances Grey.
Mary Grey’s life was upended when she was just eight years old, and she spent much of the rest of her life striving to improve things for herself. She clearly truly loved Thomas Keyes, risking everything just to be with him. Even while imprisoned, she had periods of depression and misery but never gave up. There’s something so admirable in her spirit of tenacity and resiliency, the sort of thing that you either naturally have or you don’t. Her life was short but lovely, and I wish she could have lived so much longer, but it does seem like she truly made the most of what life threw at her and never stopped striving for something better. RIP, Lady Mary Grey.
The most recent Philippa Gregory book, The Last Tudor, is about the Grey sisters and Mary plays a major role. The nonfiction book The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey by Leanda de Lisle also offers a great in-depth exploration of the lives of all three sisters.
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Agrippina (full name: Julia Agrippina Minor) was born on November 6, AD 15. We know this because people gave a shit about her, unlike lots of other people who lived in this place and time, because her parents were both incredibly important people. Agrippina was the fourth surviving child and first daughter born to Vipsania Agrippina and Germanicus Caesar, making her a great-granddaughter of the wildly successful and famous former Emperor Augustus. We’ll take a look at each parent in turn, because Agrippina’s genetics were a major part of how her life turned out.
Vipsania Agrippina (also known as Agrippina the Elder, but we’ll call her Vipsania here for clarity) was the daughter of Julia the Elder, Augustus’s (scandalous!) daughter. Vipsania’s father, Marcus Agrippa, had been an important statesman and was the namesake for both her and her own daughter, because in this era, women were frequently named the feminized version of their father’s names.
Vipsania’s family was incredibly murderous to one another, meaning that she was the only surviving member of her generation, and her children were the only descendants of Augustus. Vipsania’a husband, Germanicus, was the nephew of the current emperor, Tiberius, as well as his adopted son, because this family tree is just like a pile of sticks all thrown together in the most confusing manner possible. Also note that Germanicus was also the grandsom of Mark “mighty thighs” Anthony. Basically, these two were as close to royalty as the very anti-royal Roman Empire could get.
Names were sort of fluid in ancient Roman times, and when a military person did something impressive, their name was often changed to match the thing they had done. Germanicus had, therefore, not been given that name at birth but had the name bestowed upon him in recognition for how he famously conquered parts of Germany for the Roman Empire. And it’s there that our story actually begins, because Agrippina was born in Germany while her family were there for army-related reasons. When the family returned to Rome a few years later, they were greeted as returning heroes (well, a returning hero and his lovely family). And when Germanicus died a few years later, the whole place went wild with grief. Like: riots in the streets, pushing over statues, smashing pottern, people killing themselves so as not to live in a world without Germanicus. This cannot be overstated: the people of Rome REALLY loved Agrippina’s family.
In the absence of her father, Agrippina and her siblings were raised by her mother and two other very powerful women: her paternal grandmother Antonia Minor, and her great-grandmother Livia Drusilla (who was pretty badass herself). In terms of ancient Roman woman role models, you couldn’t ask for anyone better. Vipsania, Antonia, and Livia had not only surived this notoriously murderous and misogynistic place, they had done their best to thrive while doing so. They were all ruthless, devoted to the continuation of their family line, and not opposed to the occasional murder. These three did all of this while technically abiding by the expectations for Roman women to be quiet, to stay out of the way, and to never be seen as acting too “manly”. They were each devoted wives and mothers, who never tried to get any official power which annoy the men in charge; they did everything in the shadows, using influence, blackmail, and pillow talk to get what they wanted.
And honestly, these three women had a lot of room for scheming because the current emperor, Tiberius, was worse than useless. Everybody hated him because he was overly serious, overly pious, and had a tendency to run away and hide out on distant islands rather than do Emperor-y stuff. Note: this is an entirely fine way to live ones life, but is not ideal if you were the Roman Emperor at this point in time. Among his many, many enemies was Vipsania, who was convinced he’d been responsible for the death of his son-nephew, Germanicus. Was Germanicus murdered? I mean, who knows. He was a military man swinging a sword through the ancient world centuries before the discovery of antibiotics, so it’s really as likely he died of tetanus or a paper cut as that he was murdered. But also, the odds of being murdered in ancient Rome were also really high, especially if you had anything to do with Vipsania.
In the midst of this inter-family chaos, 14-year-old Agrippina was married for dynasty reasons to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, a man about twenty years older than her. (Fun fact: Ahenobarbus means “bronze beard” which means he was a ginger). We’ll call him Domitius, because that’s what most people called him back then. These two were sort of related, because everyone in this story is. Domitius’s mother was Octavia, Agrippina’s great-grand-aunt Octavia (aka the sister of Octavian, aka the previous wife of Mark “himbo” Anthony). Domitius was a high-ranking official and was also extremely rich, so in that sense he was a suitable match for Agrippina. However, every source that wrote about him emphasized how his personality and actions were THE WORST.
How bad was Domitius? Well, for instance, one time he was said to have killed a slave for crime of being not drunk enough (as compared to the drunk-enough Domitius, apparently). Another time, he apparently ripped out another dude’s eye for the crime of being rude to him. He also apparently fucked most women he ever laid eyes on, with or without their consent, let’s assume mostly without their consent. Basically: dude was a nightmare of ancient Roman toxic male privilige/masculinity, meaning that our 14-year-old heroine had quite a challenge on her hands. But she’d lived through a pretty chaotic fourteen years so far, and had the instincts of a survivor to get through this situation. She also had the mentorship of her mother and badass female relatives to learn how best to not be murdered by her awful husband.
The early part of Agrippina’s first marriage occurred as things heated up in the Vipsania vs Tiberius cold war. By the time Agrippina was sixteen, her mother and two older brothers had all been sent to exile and/or jail for scheming against Tiberius, where they all died by suicide and/or starvation. So now, Agrippina’s only living relatives were her brother, Gaius, and two younger sisters, Drusilla and Livilla. And she kept her head down and didn’t get murdered, which was probably enough to keep her busy, until she was twenty-two years old and everything changed. Because Tiberius finally died, and Agrippina’s brother Gaius was named the new Emperor! But you probably better know Gaius by his nickname, Little Boots, or as it’s said in Latin, Caligula.
A note on Gaius “Caligula” Germanicus: Caligula was the oldest surviving son of Vipsania and Germanicus. His childhood had been as chaotic as that of his sisters. He’d spent some time in exile when Vipsania had been kicked out for scheming against Tiberius, then after her death, rejoined his three sisters to be raised by their grandmother. As the only male child of this particulary family line, Caligula was unavoidably a threat to Emperor Tiberius, a man who’d become only more paranoid in his later years that someone was going to try and take over being Emperor from him. In order to neuter Caligula as a threat, Tiberius arranged it so that Caligula would be treated like a little boy even up into his late teen years.
Young Roman men got a sort of bar mitzfah moment at around age fifteen where they got to start wearing a toga, at which point they were seen as officially men. Caligula wasn’t permitted to wear a toga until he was nineteen, at which point he was shipped off to live with Emperor Tiberius on an isolated island away from the Senate and all of Roman politics entirely. Knowing that Tiberius could kill him at any time, Caligula had to play-act being friendly and not hating him, and this went on for six years. He grew up being perpetually traumatized, was never taught how to be a functioning adult man, and had been kept isolated from making any alliances within Rome to help him out once he became Emperor. All of which to say: what happened during this upcoming reign wasn’t entirely his own fault. He’d been, in many ways, set up to fail.
Back to Agrippina’s story.
As Caligula wasn’t married or had any children, he had to make everyone see him as a family man because then, like now, it was politically important to seem “relatable”. And also, the more he could remind people that he was the son of their beloved Germanicus and Vipsania, the more positive feelings people would hopefully have towards him. With this in mind, he elevated his three sisters, Agrippina, Drusilla, and Livilla, to be sort of honorary First Ladies of Rome who hung out with him in public all the time. He also granted them the same rights as Vestal Virgins, meaning that they had more rights than any other Roman women but without having the be virgins. These rights included: anyone touching them was punishable with death, they could have their own independent lives, and when they walked down the street they had a sort of honour guard who cleared the way for them. No Roman women in history, including the wives and mothers of previous Emperors, had any of this amount of autonomy or power.
In addition, every day at the start of Senate sessions, the men did a sort of pledge of allegiance moment where everyone promised to respect and adore the Emperor. Caligula had this changed so that everyone had to promise honour both him and his three sisters every time this pledge was said so Agrippina, Drusilla, and Livilla were present in name if not in body at the Senate hearings (women couldn’t attend Senate hearings, so that was about as close as they could get). Caligula also had coins minted with his face and name on one side, and his sisters on the reverse side. This was the first time living Roman women had ever been put on coins, and offers the first visual of Agrippina herself (a tiny image, shared with her siblings, but still the first time we can truly see her as a person).
And then, as you might suspect, everything rather quickly went to shit. Several important things happened very close together near the end of Caligula’s first year as Emperor, and these things were:
And then, as if this isn’t all enough, Caligula had Agrippina exiled in the year 39 for allegedly conspiring with Livilla against him. Livilla’s husband, Lepidus, was executed for his alleged involvement in this same plot. (He was also accused of having had an affair with Agrippina). Did these three people actually conspire against Caligula? I mean, maybe. And it would make sense if they did, because the Emperor was clearly not doing well and also because Caligula had (in the midst of all this chaos) fathered a son, which meant Agrippina’s son was one more step removed from becoming Emperor one day. And as we will soon see, Agrippina’s entire life seemed to eventually reolve around ensuring her son became Emperor one day (very Margaret Beaufort of her).
Agrippina, now aged 24, was sent to live on a luxury villa on the island of Pontia. For company, she had a household of slaves, a personal bodyguard, and the knowledge that at any point, Caligula could change her sentence to death. So it’s not like being in jail, but it was probably not super relaxing. Bit then!! After just one year of island living, Caligula was assassinated (by their uncle Claudius) and their uncle Claudius was named the new Roman emperor. As one of his first acts in the role, he released his niece Agrippina from exile and invited her to join him back in Rome.
Just to catch us all up to speed because a lot has already happened, Agrippina was twenty-five years old when she returned to Rome to be reunited with her son, who was now four years old. Her awful husband Domitius had recently just died (probably not murdered), so she was now a widow/single mother. The new Emperor, her uncle Claudius, was fifty years old and not particularly well suited for the job. He’d barely held any political positions before, was not widely liked, perhaps had physical disabilities that made some people not respect him, and had a Tiberius-esque personality where he didn’t much like anybody. Claudius also, early in his reign, had Livilla executed for the usual random reasons (scheming, adultery), leaving Agrippina as the only surviving child of Vipsania and Germanicus. Her son was also again supplanted as presumptive heir with Claudius’s teenage bride, Messalina, had a son named Britannicus.
The Roman people still loved Agrippina, through all of this, largely due to their memories for how much they had loved her parents. Claudius, jealous and maybe a bit scared that this affection could turn against him somehow, had Agrippina married and shipped off to Asia to get her and her son out of the way as a threat to him. Her new husband was one of Claudius’s most trusted friends, who also happened to be Agrippina’s former brother-in-law (he’d been married to Domitius’s sister), Gaius Sallustius Crispus Passienus. We’ll call him Crispus, for brevity. The whole thing seems very much like a thing where the Emperor does something nice for his friend, marrying him off to his wealthy niece. It wasn’t good news for Agrippina, though, as Crispus wasn’t at all on her same level, and marriage to him demoted her in importance. So you know she hated that.
And then a very tidy series of events occurred:
Five years pass without Agrippina’s name coming up in any documents, showing yet again how skilled she was at staying low on the radar. During these five years, though, Claudius began colonizing Britain (see my essay on Boudica for more on that scenario). (This is also why his son was named Britannicus). But just because Agrippina wasn’t around doesn’t mean there weren’t sexy scandals happening in Rome, because friends, it’s time to learn a bit more about Claudius’s teenage wife Messalina.
A Note on Messalina: Valeria Messalina was Claudius’s third wife. She was probably about 18 when she married the 50-year-old Emperor and they were first cousins once removed, because goddamn everyone is related to everyone in this story. He married her due to her being a descendant of Augustus, which helped shore of Claudius’s weaker claim to the throne. Messalina, like Agrippina, seems to have been extremely devoted to doing everything she could to ensure her son became the next Emperor. She and Agrippina feuded a lot and seem to have been equal matches to each other in terms of ruthlessness and scheming. As with Caligula, a lot of enemies spread a lot of rumours about her (and a lot of the stuff we know now was written after she had died, when people like Agrippina were busy retroactively making Messalina seem terrible). What bafflingly does seem to be true, and not a rumour, is that one day when Claudius was out of town, Messalina decided to marry her lover in a very public ceremony. When he found out, Claudius had her and eight men suspected of helping her out all put to death, which is frankly a reasonable reaction to such a public humiliation. He also had had her name erased from all historical records and monuments like she’d never existed. The whole story is wild. Here’s more info.
And then, in need of a wife, Claudius married his niece Agrippina less than three months later.
Please note that it was just as weird in ancient Rome for an uncle to marry a niece as it would be in the current day and age. Remember, this is a culture where people frequently accused each other of incest because they knew it was the grossest thing you could accuse someone of doing. So what’s the deal? How the fuck did this happen??
Setting aside for a moment the very weird and messed up fact that Agrippina was Claudius’s niece, let’s look at what made her an appealing potential bride for the 59-year-old Emperor. She was a descendant of Augustus, and was still super popular as the daughter of Germanicus and Vipsania. She also had a son who, through her, was also more directly descended from Augustus than Claudius’s son Britannicus was. She was also rich, and smart, and seems to have had much better diplomatic/people skills than Claudius.
What was in this for Agrippina? Well for starters, she’d be the wife of the Emperor, making her the most powerful woman in Rome. She’d always grown up with a sense she was better than everyone else and destined for great things, and this opportunity may have seemed like her best chance to finally seize the power she felt was her birthright. It would also cement the future for her son, as once she was the Emperor’s wife she’d be better able to manipulate things to get her son to supplant Britannicus as heir.
So, lots of great reasons for them to get married, too bad about the being uncle and niece. But Claudius was really determined to make this happen and, after tricking the Senate into changing the laws for him, the pair were married on January 1, the year 49. In an attempt to spoil the day and remind everyone that this union was really fucking gross, Claudius’s former BFF Silanus died by suicide that same day. And not that same day but pretty quickly, three things happened:
A note on Lollia Paulina: Lollia Paulina had been, briefly, one of Caligula’s revolving door of wives. She had also been mentioned by some Senators as a potential new wife for Claudius after the death of Messalina. Allegedly, Agrippina set events in motion to ensure Paulina’s death in order to remove her as a rival for her uncle-husband’s affections. So just mark that on your score cards for People Potentially Murdered by Agrippina.
After one year of marriage, Claudius had Agrippina titled Augusta. This was a big fucking deal, as only two women before her had ever been given this title. This title meant that she was on effectively equal standing with Claudius. No woman in Western history had ever had this much power before, and none would again for another hundred years*. She wasn’t an old-school Emperor’s wife like her grandmother and great-grandmother had been, wielding their power as influence behind the scenes. Agrippina Augusta was an active figure who sat beside her husband and had involvement in acts of state, whose thoughts were taken into consideration, and who was permitted to oversee projects of her own.
One of these projects was her creation of a Roman colony for retired military personnel in the area of Germany where she’d been born. Originally named Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (which means Agrippina’s Colony), the name of the colony was eventually truncated to just Colonia, and then its current name of Cologne (still a city in Germany). This wasn’t just a thing where she had it named after her and never thought about it again: Agrippina was truly the patron of this colony, ensuring that it had infrastructure in place to allow Colonia to thrive and for the people within in to live as well as possible, both the Roman veterans as well as the indigenous Ubii people of the area.
And then, as a final statement of just how powerful Agrippina had become, she was placed on a coin alongside Claudius in the year 50. Unlike when she’d shared the reverse of a coin with her sisters during the reign of Caligula, this time she was pictured on her own on the reverse side of the coin. She also commissioned statues made in her likeness that wore a diadem, a sort of crown-tiara hybrid that looked cool but more importantly, no living Roman woman had ever been shown to wear in a piece of art.
And then, three years later, Emperor Claudius died in the year 54 of mysterious circumstances that seemed to involve having eaten a dish of poisoned mushrooms. (Also, less interestingly, Claudius was sixty-three years old and had a number of health issues, so he may have just died of natural causes). Instantly, rumours began to spread that Agrippina had killed him. As per usual, these rumours seem to have been one part people who hated her (because any time a woman acquires a lot of power, a lot of men tend to pop up hating her) and one part how she behaved in the aftermath of Claudius’s death. Which was, she was highly organized and took things into her hands and arranged that her son Nero would be named the new Emperor. Essentially, she seemed too capable and not sad enough for some people, which is laughable because if Agrippina had been the sort of person to freak out when someone is murdered in front of her, she’d never have survived this long in this family.
But, if we are to believe the rumours that Agrippina arranged Claudius’s murder, here’s how it allegedly would have happened. There was a famous poisoner in Rome at this time named Locusta, who was a peasant from Gaul (old timey France) who was so skilled at herbs she decided to move to Rome and be a freelance poisoner. She was, obviously, a very interesting person. Locusta’s reputation was such that Agrippina had her freed from jail to work as her go-to poison expert. The trick was that Claudius had a food taster on retainer, which makes sense as everyone was always trying to kill everyone. So Agrippina and Locusta arranged to serve him mushrooms, his favourite dish, and to lure the food taster away when the mushrooms arrived. The mushrooms were laced with poison, and when a doctor came to try and make Claudius vomit up the poison by shoving a feather down his throat the feather was also coated with poison, and so the Emperor died. I mean, genius. Allegedly.
Oh and then the part that would make Jessica Fletcher raise her eyebrows is that this time, Agrippina’s husband had died without any will that anyone cuold find. So one theory is that Claudius was preparing to cut Agrippina and/or Nero out of his will, and that’s why she had him killed. But of course maybe Claudius died of natural causes and just never wrote a will. Either way, Agrippina was like, “Don’t worry! He told me what he wants, and that’s for his adopted stepson Nero to become the next Emperor instead of his biological Britannicus! Trust me!” And everyone gave her a big side-eye, but agreed.
Which is how Agrippina, widowed for the third time, was now the Emperor’s mother.
Agrippina had spent her whole life since Nero’s birth in ruthlessly ensuring he’d become the next Emperor. When he took on the role, she must have been so relieved but also like… what now? She’d had a great run as Claudius’s wife/the power behind the throne, and presumably she was planning on backseat ruling for her son now, too. The detail she’d neglected to properly plan ahead for (if there is a way to plan ahead for such things) is that Nero was 100% a little shit. It’s very much the Game of Thrones Cersei/Joffrey thing, where the mother is so much smarter and would have been a better leader but instead she has to sit and watch her son being an asshole and ruining everything. #spoilers
It started out well, though! Nero, aged sixteen, was the youngest ever Emperor of Rome. And unlike Caligula or even Claudius, he’d been groomed from a young age to actually know how to do this job. He had pre-existing responsibilities within the Senate, he had useful alliances with powerful people, and the people of Rome knew who he was and weren’t confused about where he’d come from. BUT ALSO, Nero’s true dream in life was to be an actor/singer, so although he’d been set up to succeed as Emperor his heart was never in it. But largely because of Agrippina’s backseat driving, Nero was stepping into the role of Emperor already quite popular and with a number of powerful allies who supported him.
Agrippina also seemed to assume that she was effectively Nero’s regent and could now take over even more control running things. And she did, for the first bit. She’d single-handedly turned things around during Claudius’s reign, with way less revolts and treason happening while she was there doing the books; she would have known very well what to do and kept on keeping on now for Nero. Her fatal flaw was perhaps that she really wanted to make sure everyone knew it was her doing this stuff, not Nero. She was never one to quietly fade into the background, Agrippina ensured she was always in Nero’s presence, at least publicly, appearing near him just as she’d been with Claudius so nobody forgot that she had power in this situation as well.
And you knew this was coming, MORE COINS DRAMA!! The latest coins Agrippina had minted put her in her most powerful pose yet, this time of the coin with Nero. On these ones, she and Nero were both in profile facing each other, a display of how they were (allegedly) equals.
But then, of course, things started going to shit because that’s the sort of story this is. The first major blow to Agrippina’s power was when she went in, as per usual, to join Nero and others for a meeting with foreign delegates. With Claudius, she used to sit sort of behind him. For this meeting, her first with Nero in these positions, she went up to sit right next to him. Nero’s tutor, Seneca (who Agrippina had brought back from exile personally) directed Nero to remove her, and Nero did, escorting her to a separate seat further away from him. After this, she never again joined Nero for a business meeting.
The thing that caught her here is that Agrippina had broken new ground for herself, but it was largely based on a common understanding, not law. She hadn’t had laws changed to improve things for other women, or even other Emperor’s wives or mothers: she just started doing new stuff herself, and the men in power let her do these things. So when they changed their mind, she had no law or precedent to turn to in her own defense. She’d side-stepped the obstacles inherent of being a Roman woman by not behaving as a woman or as man; she’d been her own person, a quasi-Goddess outside of this gender paradigm. But when she fell, it was all too easy because all it took was to start treating her like a woman again.
So, Nero was a brat and everyone around him encouraged him to distance himself from his mother. One example is that, in around the year 55, Nero and Agrippina had a huge screaming fight about his new girlfriend, a woman named Acte who was a freed slave. As a kind of fuck you to Agrippina, Nero had his mother sent some jewels and a dress. This was an insult because Agrippina had never ever ever been a woman for whom fashion or luxury was an interest. In fact, she prided herself on her frugality and lack of flash and glamour. For Nero to present her with these gifts was like him saying, “Here, you’re a woman, that’s all you are and all you’re good for,” and was mega dismissive of her. Apparently in response, she said something like, “I gave him the empire, and he gave me a dress,” which: true. Nero was a sucky son.
He was also a shitty step-brother/cousin, as he had his 14-year-old stepbrother/cousin Britannicus murdered via poison sourced from returning guest star Locusta! Britannicus died in the middle of a big dinner party in front of lots of people, including Agrippina, and Nero made everyone stay and continue the party even around the teenage boy’s corpse. This incident was like a formal announcement that Nero was a psychopath whose thesis statement for life was chaos. This was like, one year into his reign so it had all gone apart spectacularly quickly. Agrippina, always a grounding presence in his life, had to go if Nero was truly to go completely feral, and so he had his mother exiled to live in her own villa far, far away from him.
Sort of like Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey, word spread that the formerly untouchable Agrippina had lost her powerful ally and so all of her enemies began to step up and voice their grievances against her. Charges were made against her that she’d been scheming against Nero, and Agrippina literally walked right over to her son’s palace like NERO STOP THIS SHIT and friends, so terrifying was this woman that Emperor Nero The Boy Tyrant stopped that shit. Somehow, these two reached an understanding behind closed doors such that nothing about Agrippina appears in public record for the next four years, meaning that everything was going more or less fine. During these four years, the country seemed to be running pretty well, which suggests that she was allowed back in to run things while Nero spent most of his time putting on plays and forcing people to watch and clap for him.
And then Nero fell in love again, this time with a 29-year-old woman named Poppea Sabina. A bunch happens with Poppea and Nero later on (none of it good) but for the purposes of this story, just note that rumours had it Poppea didn’t like Agrippina and encouraged Nero to murder his mother. Whether or not Poppea directly enouraged Nero to do this, it’s shortly after they began their relationship that Nero began plotting ways to murder Agrippina.
Buckle in.
So, because Agrippina still was very popular with lots of Romans, especially army soldiers with fond memories of her beloved father Germanicus, Nero knew he couldn’t just order some soldier to stab her to death. So, he went to his trusty plan of poisoning her. But guess what: just like in The Princess Bride, Agrippina grew up seeing so many people poisoned to death that she’d long been taking small doses of every known poison in order to make herself immune to all of them. Even Locusta wasn’t able to make this happen, poison-wise. And so Nero turned to Plan C: make it look like an accident. During his failed acting career, he’d seen a stage prop of a boat with a trick floor and commissioned an actor friend of his to build a real life boat like that.
The scene was set! Nero invited his mother to visit him at a villa that required a long boat trek to get to. Agrippina, understandably and correctly suspicious, refused his offer of a boat and instead come on her own boat. They had dinner together, awkward, and at the end of the night Nero had convinced her enough that he wasn’t trying to kill her that she agreed to take his special boat back home. Maybe he was a talented actor after all?
As per the plan, part of the boat collapsed when they were in the middle of open water and the ship started to sink. Agrippina’s servant Polla figured if she pretended to be Agrippina then it was more likely she would be saved, so she cried out she was the Emperor’s mother and wouldn’t someone help her?? But the ship’s crew, working for Nero, hit Polla in the head with oars to drown her, because they were assassins. Along with Polla, numerous crew members died as well. But guess who didn’t die? Agrippina!
Remember when she spent a year on an island in exile? Clearly, she’d practiced her swimming at that point, because she was a strong enough swimmer to get to short. Everyone cheered her survival, because she was still Agrippina The Super Popular, but she was smart enough to know this ridiculous plan was her son’s attempt to kill her. She had a messenger send word to Nero like, “Don’t worry! I’m still alive!” and he commenced freaking out. News of the shipwreck spread around her neighbours and crowds of people stood around her villa, weeping and praying because their beloved Augusta had nearly died.
But then! Plot twist: a group of soldiers arrived, the personification of Nero’s reply to Agrippina’s message about her survival. The soldiers burst into her room and revealed that they’d been sent there to execute her because, Nero claimed, Agrippina had tried to murder him. UGH THAT UNGRATEFUL ASSHOLE!! Agrippina tried to talk them out of it, obviously, claiming that NO WAY would her son ever try to have her murdered. But the soldiers were resolute, and her final act and words were to fling open her robe to reveal her stomach, demanding that they stab her in the womb. And they did. And thus was the death of Agrippina the Younger, aged 44.
*Agrippina achieved more individual power than any Roman woman before her. It wouldn’t be until a century later when the 3rd century Severan women aka the Syrian Matriarchy came along that any Roman noblewomen would ever attain this amount of power. (These women were Julia Domna and her nieces Julia Soaemias and Julia Mamaea, and they were awesome).
My main source was Emma Southon’s biography of Agrippina, which is hands-down the most fun historical biography I’ve ever read. I can’t recommend this funny, vulgar, melodramatic and feminist book strongly enough!!
Other references:
Poison: a history by Jenni Davis
Poison : an illustrated history by Joel Levy
A Woman of Great Power (BBC History Extra podcast)
Consort Introduction and Agrippina (Rex Factor podcast)
Episode XX – Agrippina the Younger (Emperors of Rome podcast)
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The thing with a historical figure as iconic as Cleopatra is that lots of people know about her, but less people know her actual deal. Every October there are lots of Cleopatra Halloween costumes, every few years there’s a new Cleopatra appearance on a miniseries or movie; she’s inevitably included is most posters and fridge magnet sets and books about Important Women From History. The main things most people may know about her are that she was famously glamorous, she drove at least two Roman men wild with desire, and she died from a snake bite. Guess what! All three of those things are maybe true, but are also some of the least interesting and least important things about her. So why is that what she’s best known for? THE PATRIARCHY STRIKES AGAIN.
So the thing is that nobody has found any Egyptian or Greek (because she was also Greek, more on that in a bit) writing surviving from Cleopatra’s lifetime. What does survive are the writings of several Roman men who truly detested her, and who made sure to include every cruel insult about her they could in their histories of that era. It’s not just a “history written by the victors” scenario but also a “slanderous history written by the misogynist haters who were also the victors” situation. But, between their various catty insults emerges the story of a person who was truly impressive, who accomplished a number of incredible things, and who deserves to be remembered for a lot more than for her wigs and who she happened to sleep with.
To set the scene and to understand the chaos she was born into, we need to first take a VERY QUICK sojourn into the history of ancient Egypt.
A very, very long time ago, there were a bunch of independent villages and one day, someone unified them into the kingdom of Egypt in around the year 3150 BCE. The famous Pyramids, etc., came around during what’s known as the Old Kingdom, which was the era from approximately 2686–2181 BCE (remember because this is all before the year 0, the numbers get smaller as time passes chronologically). During this time, Egyptians worshipped their King as literally a God on earth. Part of this stemmed from their belief that the King was directly responsible for water level of the Nile, which flooded every year and which helped with their crops. Because of the Nile, Egypt was able to produce amazing crops, which helped feed everyone and set them up to be really good trade partners with other places. Compared to other nearby areas, Egypt was doing amazing, sweetie vis-a-vis crops and the overall development of a sophisticated cultural identity.
And the centuries went by, passing through the Middle Kingdom era (c. 2030 – 1650 BCE), and into the the New Kingdom era (c. 1550 – 1069 BCE). This is when some names you may recognize, such as Hatshepsut, arrive. Although it was uncommon for women to hold solo leadership roles in Egyptian society, they weren’t entirely opposed to the idea, which is how Hatshepsut wound up ruling for about twenty years alongside her husband Thutmose II (because rule was usually shared in man-woman pairs of Kings and Queens). It was during Thutmose II’s reign (after Hatshepsut had died) that the word “Pharaoh” started to be used to refer to their monarch. Other notable names from the New Kingdom era included Queen Nefertiti, her step-son Tutankhamen, and the later King Rameses The Great (who reigned for sixty-seven years).
And more years went by, and Egypt went from being THE wealthiest and most successful and culturally significant kingdom to being slightly less influential. This had a lot to do with the Nile, which dried up from time to time; without that annual flooding, crops didn’t grow, which meant Egypt lost a lot of its ability to trade with neighbours. And then, suddenly, it’s the year 332 BCE and famous Greek teenager Alexander The Great stormed in and conquered Egypt (which had, at that point, been under the control of the Persians) (the Egyptian people themselves had been under a series of colonizers for awhile). Alexander created a new capital city named after him, Alexandria, and left the kingdom under the care of his trusted general, Ptolemy.
And for the next three hundred years, Ptolemy’s descendants would rule Egypt as the Ptolemiac dynasty. And although the Ptolemies adopted several cultural practices from the Egyptians, including their deities and the concept of incestuous brother-sister royal marriages, the Egyptian people never forgot that these were conquerors. For their part, the Ptolemies didn’t even go to the effort of learning the Egyptian language* (*which was its own dialect during this time period), conducting all of their business in Greek. So it’s a conquest situation, where the Egyptian people were oppressed and the Ptolemies were oppressors, and bear that in mind for what happens later.
Also note that the Ptolemies seem to have only had a handful of acceptable names. All of the boys and men were named Ptolemy, and the girls and women were all named either Cleopatra, Arsinoe, or Berenike. And wouldn’t you know it, today’s heroine was one of four sisters: Cleopatra (not our heroine), Berenike, Cleopatra (our heroine), and Arsinoe. And it’s worth looking at the two oldest sisters to get a sense of this family dynamic.
As previously noted, the Ptolemies were intent on inbreeding in order to maintain the purity of their family line, and also probably because they were so busy murdering and scheming against one another that introducing other people would make it all too chaotic. Like, this was a wildly ambitious and competitive family where, when they weren’t marrying uncle to niece or brother to sister, wives were killing husbands and brothers were killing fathers. Just EVERYONE killing EVERYONE all the time to the point that if you weren’t paranoid, you were probably about to be murdered. In order to survive, you had to gather enough supporters around you for protection; in order to thrive, you had to kill your siblings before they killed you.
This generation’s father was Pharaoh Ptolemy XII, the illegitimate son of Ptolemy XI. He’d only wound up Pharaoh because all of XI’s other sons had been murdered by each other, because, this cannot be stressed enough: this family was very prone to murdering one another. XII’s wife was named Cleopatra V, and their eldest daughter (not today’s heroine, remember) was named Cleopatra VI. When Cleopatra V died (murdered??), Cleopatra VI swooped in to take over because of the whole “there has to be a man-woman pair of King+Queen at all times” thing. However, Cleopatra VI was very quickly murdered, potentially by the next youngest-sister, Berenike. Like imagine Jo and Amy March but in The Hunger Games, and that’s what these siblings were like.
Upon the death of Cleopatra VI, Ptolemy XII took on his daughter Berenike as the new Queen. And then he went on a business trip out of town, at which point Berenike SEIZED THE THRONE FOR HERSELF. In order to get the traditional King and Queen pairing, you’d think she would marry one of her brothers at this point, but her two younger brothers, both named Ptolemy, were basically preschoolers so that wasn’t what she wanted to do. And so Berenike decided to go this alone as a solo female Queen of Egypt.
This freaked out a lot of people, mostly men, who pressured her to marry someone because having a woman in charge made them very uncomfortable. So after a few months, Berenike decided to marry her cousin, Prince Seleucid. But clearly she changed her mind, because he died after one week, seemingly poisoned BY HER. Berenike was NOT messing around vis-a-vis killing anyone who got in her way, or who annoyed her. She then chose a new husband, Archelaos, but she never allowed him to be co-regent and continued to be basically entirely in charge of Egypt herself. Until Ptolemy XII came back to town, with the full support of Roman forces!!
And so Ptolemy XII took over again and had Berenike executed. And it’s at this point that his third daughter, Cleopatra VII (our heroine), enters the scene, aged fourteen, the new Queen of Egypt.
Because we’re mostly depending on Roman writings to learn about Cleopatra, she’s first mentioned when she begins having dealings with powerful Roman men. So we don’t know much about her early years specifically, but based on how she turned out and what’s known about Egyptian society at the time, we can assume several things. She was clearly extremely well educated in every subject known at the time, including math, politics, history, philosophy, reading, and writing. She was fluent in as many as nine languages, including Egyptian, because for a welcome change she figured she’d give a shit about the language of her literal subjects.
(Conspiracy corner: there may have been another reason for her to learn the Egyptian language, and that’s that she was potentially at least part Egyptian. Now, the Ptolemies had been intermarrying among their Greek family for three hundred years but genetically, there’s no way any of them would have children after that long without introducing any foreign DNA. Cleopatra’s father, remember, was an illegitimate child. Surely earlier in the family tree, other nationalities had been introduced as well. And although XII had been married to a woman named Cleopatra V, it’s unclear if that woman was our Cleopatra’s mother. In fact, nobody knows who her mother was. As such, it’s possible that she was half-Egyptian.)
It is almost certain that Cleopatra was probably not conventionally beautiful. This point is extremely important so let’s just repeat that: Cleopatra was probably not conventionally beautiful. From the coins that have been found from her lifetime, she’s presented as certainly impressive, but is not styled to resemble the beautiful faces of statues from that era. Considering the amount of influence and power she would later amass, it’s somehow easier to assume she must have been gorgeous because that could explain why people agreed to work with her. But isn’t it more interesting to know that she may not have been beautiful, and that it was her magnetism, charisma, intelligence, and wit that won people over to her side.
She also clearly learned from the death of her two older sisters that a) her immediate family was not at all trustworthy and b) if she was going to stage a coup, she had to make sure she had powerful allies on her side. And so she waited for her chance.
And surprise! When she was around eighteen years old, having been Queen and successfully not having been murdered for four years, her father died. As per his will, Cleopatra was married to her younger brother, who became her co-ruler Pharoah Ptolemy XIII. Can you blame Cleopatra, this extremely smart and capable person, for deciding she’d rather not job-share with her tweenage brother-husband? She set to work straightaway cutting him out of most of the job duties, including having his name removed from official documents, and minting new coins that showed only her face instead of both of them. These were MAJOR declarations of war and Ptolemy XIII’s advisors and regents (because Ptolemy himself was still a kid) got extremely pissed off about all of this. Not only had she snuck around everyone’s back to claim extra power, she’d upended the expectation that Queens should be subordinate to and supportive of Kings: a woman wasn’t expected to rule on her own, that was SHOCKING to them.
And so, although she had her own supporters, her brother had more supporters and they exiled her from Alexandria. Cleopatra was like, “Screw you, I didn’t want to be here anyway!” and grabbed her younger sister Arsinoe (yes! Another sister! Don’t worry, she’s going to be amazing also) and took off to Syria, probably scheming all the way because she was obviously not going to accept this turn of events. And her plan involved taking advantage of the currently ongoing Roman civil war to get the back-up she needed to defeat her brother-husband.
There’s no time to get into the very long and complicated history of ancient Rome, so we’ll cut right to the point right now which is that Roman men hated a) women and b) the entire idea of hereditary monarchy. Cleopatra, as a woman and a Queen, was basically their worst nightmare. Women in ancient Roman society were considered property/children for their whole lives, and had no rights at all. In fact, their medical and philosophical understanding of the concept of sex was that women were mutated, incomplete men who hadn’t fully turned into men in the womb. Like, basically women had slightly less rights than barnyard chickens. It was a BAD SCENE.
Also, since 509 BCE Rome had been ruled by a non-King-based system where sometimes two and sometimes three consuls ruled at the same time, for no more than five years per person to ensure no one person would ever become too powerful. Not just anybody could become a consul, you had to be descended from one of the oldest noble families in Rome (which is not entirely unlike a hereditary monarchy, but don’t tell them that). The point is that there was more than one person in charge. That didn’t stop a number of civil wars from breaking out, though.
Twenty years before Cleopatra was born, there was yet another Roman civil war. In this one, a man named Sulla took over as sort of emergency Emperor because the multiple-consuls model wasn’t working very well in a time of great crisis. Having seen this in action, younger men like Julius Caesar and Pompey decided they’d each like to have that sort of power, themselves. As they didn’t want to share, Caesar and Pompey began fighting against each other and just kept on fighting and suddenly it’s 48 BCE and we’re caught up to where Cleopatra was (on the run with her sister, at war against her brother-husband).
Pompey wound up fleeing to Egypt, where he thought he could find refuge for awhile but SURPRISE he was stabbed to death basically upon arrival because that’s just how fast things happened when Ptolemies were around. And, although Caesar had been at war with Pompey, he wasn’t a fan of this assassination, and ordered Cleopatra and her brother-husband to reconcile and get out of his way, basically. Cleopatra had no intention of doing so, and so she headed off to try and convince Caesar to join her side against her brother-husband. (Note: this is where, if the people of Egypt had been bigger fans of the Ptolemies, they may have stepped up to offer her assistance. That they didn’t is maybe one small clue to the fact that they viewed both her and her brother-husband as their oppressor, not as their legitimate rulers).
Anyway, this is the bit where, in legends based on some very dramatic writings, she may have hidden herself in a rolled-up carpet to sneak into Caesar’s room to SEDUCE HIM. That may or may not have happened. But for sure she snuck off without telling her brother-husband, and whatever she said to Caesar totally worked: he was now willing to ally with her against Ptolemy XIII. And a power couple emerged!
This is where Cleopatra being very beautiful and very sexy would be an easy way to explain how she so quickly won Caesar over to her side. But remember: Cleopatra was not conventionally beautiful. And, having been married to her tweenage brother for the past several years, was likely not very sexually experienced (in fact, let’s just state for the record now, the only men we know she ever slept with were Julius Caesar and Mark Antony). What she was, was extraordinarily well educated, in possession of almost supernatural amounts of personal charm and charisma, and was unlike any woman Julius Caesar had ever encountered before. Because, not only was she assertive, extremely well educated and overflowing with charisma, she was self-assured and likely the sort of spoiled one becomes when one spends ones formative years being told you’re literally a Goddess and you’re made Queen at age fourteen.
Did she go to Caesar willing to seduce him? And if she did, was it to manipulate him with her sexy ways, or was it because this was the Ancient world, and often alliances were sealed with marriages and/or babies? What’s mostly definite here is that she knew without the support of Egyptian forces, and with most of the palace supporting her brother-husband, she needed to find an outside source of support for her claim to the throne. And if that meant sleeping with the enemy, she was all in. Again, remember what her family and entire childhood and teen years had been like: she knew that to succeed, you had to do WHATEVER it took, and having a baby was nothing compared to murdering a family member. So she went full Ptolemy and won Caesar over to her side.
But then, twist!! Because Cleopatra’s younger sister Arsinoe was just as badass as her three older sisters, and she also knew that you have to shoot your shot when you get the chance. Just fifteen years old, Arsinoe decided to try and take over Egypt herself with their other brother, also named Ptolemy, as her co-regent. These Ptolemy sisters, honestly!! It’s just like Little Women, but in ancient Egypt and with brother-sister marriage and murder. Honestly, this move has Big Amy March Energy and I’m very into it.
As anyone who has read Little Women and/or Pride and Prejudice knows: one should never underestimate a younger sister. Arsinoe had spent time on the run with Cleopatra, and knew firsthand just how badass a young women could be. She was like, “So what if I’m just fifteen years old? I am fully prepared to DEFEAT JULIUS CAESAR!! Let’s do this!!”
Here’s what went down. Arsinoe fled down with her mentor/eunuch/pal, Ganymedes, and declared herself Queen Arsinoe IV and took control over the Egyptian army. She also named Ganymedes as her second in commend. She commanded the Egyptian army in battle against the Romans, utilizing clever tactics like closing off some streets in order to trap Caesar and Cleopatra in the palace, where they were trapped for basically an entire year. Ultimately, Caesar recognized he was about to be defeated by one of history’s coolest teenagers, and so he took off his identifiable cloak and armour and swam away. During this time period, Ptolemy XIII drowned to death, and Ganymedes died in battle.
The Egyptian army then decided they weren’t big fans of Queen Arsinoe anymore, and so they decided to exchange Arsinoe for Ptolemy XIV (her brother-husband, who at this point was being held captive by the Romans because everything is chaos). And so, Arsinoe wound up a Roman prisoner. She was forced to be included in Caesar’s victory parade, humiliating herself in front of everyone as a captive Queen, and then was sent into exile. Pour one out for Arsinoe, teen Queen of Egypt: she was a real one.
So by now, it’s the year 48 BCE and Julius Caesar’s term as consul was due to expire. He managed to get one extra year as Emergency Dictator, because who else but him would be able to settle the dynastic troubles in Egypt? And so he appointed Cleopatra co-ruler alongside her other, even younger brother, Ptolemy XIV. Did she have to sibling marry him? Yes, because that’s just how these things were done. She was 22 and pregnant with Julius Caesar’s baby, and in order to rule Egypt had to marry her 12-year-old brother. Sometimes, that’s just how things go. But re: her love life, Cleopatra continued to live with Caesar as long as he was in town. Also FYI: Caesar was also already married to someone else, a Roman woman named Calpurnia.
Julius was out of town when Cleopatra’s son was born on June 23, 47 BCE. She named him Caesarion, which means basically Caesar Jr., and told everyone that Julius Caesar was his father. Caesar, though, never officially acknowledged Caesarian as his son for various reasons, mostly because he was married to someone else and Cleopatra was married to someone else and this was all kind of messy but they both loved drama so you know they were living for it.
Cleopatra and her new boy brother-husband went to hang out in Rome, leaving baby Caesarion behind. They moved into a villa just across from where Caesar lived with his wife, which sounds kind of awkward, and which Caesar’s advisors also found kind of odd. But Caesar had always done his own thing, never mind what other people think* (*this is part of why he winds up murdered in the next paragraph). For instance, Caesar was busy overseeing the construction of a new temple to the goddess Venus, which included a huge gold status of the goddess herself. And he was like, “Sculptors! I need you to make a second statue, also in gold, of my lover, Cleopatra!” And they did, and put that statue up next to the one of Venus, and that statue stayed there for like two hundred more years because it was apparently just that gorgeous a piece of art.
But then came the Ides of March, which is when Caesar was stabbed to death by a bunch of his former friends who were mad about his whole “doing what I want, don’t care what you think, I’m dictator for life” routine. Cleopatra was like, “Great, so my son with Caesar, Caesarion, will become the next Emperor, right?” And the Romans were like, “Actually, we all hate you, and also Caesar named his adopted son Octavian as his heir so…” and so Cleopatra packed up her things and peaced out of Rome, headed back to Egypt to regroup. Knowing what we know about Cleopatra, it’s unclear if she was unprepared for this contingency. She likely had sussed out who was who in Rome, who hated who, and which dude would be her best option to get what she wanted.
While en route back to Egypt, Cleopatra’s brother-husband Ptolemy XIV died of either some sort of illness, this is not suspicious at all except for the part where it’s suspicious as fuck so I think it’s pretty apparent she probably poisoned him. Because guess what, with him out of the way and no more little brothers waiting in the wings, her only choice for her co-regent was her son, three-year-old Caesarion! Would you look at that, she was now for all intents and purposes the solo queen of Egypt. And yet, without the support of the people of Egypt, she knew she’d need another assist from Rome if she was going to stay in power.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that if a woman can get on without a man, she will do so. So the fact that Cleopatra moved onto her Plan B indicates that she knew in her politically-savvy, resilient, survivor’s mind of hers that the odds were too great for her to tackle this next stage of her Queenship on her own.
Which is why she turned to Mark Antony.
Given that Julius Caesar had been assassinated partly for wanting to begin a dynastic monarchy in Rome, it makes sense that the leaders there were reluctant to declare his nephew Octavian the new Emperor. Instead, they set up a Triumvirate of three leaders: Octavian, Caesar’s former right-hand man Mark Antony, and a third guy who mostly doesn’t matter or do anything, named Lepidus. These three men, as you might imagine, weren’t eager to share this power with each other and the in-fighting and power plays began almost right away. By 42 BCE, Octavian was controlling most of the Western part of the Roman Empire, and Antony was controlling most of the Eastern part (Lepidus didn’t really do anything but be the third point in the triumvirate’s triangle), and it seemed obvious that either Octavian or Antony was going to kill the other.
A note on Mark Antony: please note that Mark Antony was a piece of man candy of the first degree. In writings by people who knew him, he was described as basically gorgeous, with “mighty thighs” and a perfect face and curly hair and just a total dreamboat. All the stuff you think these Roman dudes would have written about Cleopatra re: gorgeousness, they actually wrote about Mark Antony. He was not just gorgeous, he was also one of the most successful and brilliant military generals ever, everyone adored him, he was a major heartthrob and hero to everyone in Rome*.
* This was an issue for Octavian, who was working very hard to make everyone in Rome hate Antony. Octavian was a skinny and sickly teen with blond hair (Romans preferred dark hair) who had nowhere near as many impressive military victories as Mark Antony. How could Octavian win everyone over to his side against this Roman Star Quarterback with the mighty thighs??? STAY TUNED.
So anyway, famous dreamboat Mark Antony was in need of some funding to help pay for these continued battles against sickly teen Octavian, and figured he’d ask for an assist from the wildly wealthy Egypt who he remembered had helped out his pal Julius Caesar once or twice before. He sent out an invitation for Cleopatra to come by and chat with him about this and she was like, No thanks, am busy washing my hair, etc. Several refused invitations later, she finally agreed to come and meet him and then the most Rihanna BDE situation you could ever possibly IMAGINE WENT DOWN. GET READY.
So, purple was the most expensive and rarest dye in this place and time, because it was made from the slime of thousands of sea snails which meant it took forever to make the dye let alone to dye SAILS let alone to dye ALL OF THE SAILS ON A SHIP. But guess who had a ship with all purple sails? Cleopatra. And her ship didn’t have regular oars, she was using SILVER OARS that just cut through the water like gigantic KNIVES, glinting in the Mediterranean sunshine.
So just imagine Antony, hanging out waiting for this meeting, to be met by this incredible display of wealth just cruising up next to him. When the ship got closer, he’d have seen Cleopatra making THE GREATEST ENTRANCE IN WORLD HISTORY. She was dressed up like the goddess Isis, covered in jewels, and surrounded by incense so you could literally SMELL the decadence. On top of that, she had little children dressed like CUPIDS running around her with little BOWS AND ARROWS to fully paint the picture which was: My name is Cleopatra, and I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly. And then??? Rather than pulling up her ship next to him to meet with him, Cleopatra’s BOAT OF LUXURY just kept on sailing past, leaving Mark Antony like, “WTF just happened and also? I think I’m in love.”
Because Cleopatra did not come when you invite her; she summons you to her and that’s just how it goes. Antony headed over to greet her on her ship, where she was like, “Sit, enjoy some wine and music and jewels and opulence for two days while we chat,” and he was like, “HEART EYES EMOJI” and two days later, a deal was struck where she’d help support him in his battle against Octavian, and he would worship and adore her for the rest of his life. And: can you blame him.
During this luxury yacht sex summit, Cleopatra got Antony to agree to have Arsinoe (who was still alive! In exile, back in Rome) put to death because that was a loose end, and Cleopatra didn’t like loose ends. Antony was like, “Anything you want, babe” and arranged for Arsinoe to be murdered on the front steps of the temple where she’d been living. Now note, killing someone on the steps on a temple was not the usual Roman way, and in fact this action upset a lot of people quite a lot, and is the first hint that Antony maybe wasn’t the best at winning over the Roman people to his side. But he was so good-looking, he was able to get away with a lot. FOR NOW.
Now, while the whole Cleopatra and Julius Caesar relationship was clearly sexual in the sense of she got pregnant with his child, those two never had the PALPABLE SEXUAL CHEMISTRY of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. She was ruthless, brilliant, and unstoppable and he had mighty thighs and and insatiable appetite for LIFE and the two of them together just make all the sense in the world. Also, she’d gone from marriage to her tweenage brother to an affair with a very intense but not very fun fifty-year-old man, and she deserved to have some fun with Rome’s Sexiest Man Alive*.
* He was not, however, Rome’s Most Eligible Bachelor as he was already married to a woman named Fulvia.
And once these two paired up, it was like LOOK OUT, THE ANCIENT WORLD! Mark Antony had already been known for throwing the most amazing parties, and Cleopatra was known for being amazing at everything, and they were both young and having fun. They started a social organization called the Inimitable Livers which was basically a party/drinking club, spent literally days in bed together, and were just doing The Most. Bear in mind, they were also both still being successful leaders, and Antony was happy to use his power as part of the Triumvirate to help Cleopatra out by restoring some of the her family’s former lands back to her.
Think about how Cleopatra’s entire young life had been spent being constantly almost murdered by one of her siblings; after she made her first big power move, she wound up exiled from Egypt, and only fought her way back with the help of Julius Caesar. She’d lived a paranoid, cautious, dangerous and stressful life and FINALLY now as Queen on her own terms, she could let loose and enjoy herself. This relationship brought out both wonderful things in each other (shared ambitions and goals) as well as, perhaps, some of their shared toxic qualities (overindulging in a way that Octavian was able to easily use against them). And it’s here that Cleopatra may have made the substantial error of underestimate Octavian, who was becoming more powerful and influential and still had it out for Antony.
In around the year 40 BCE, Cleopatra gave birth to boy-girl twins named Cleopatra (of course) and Alexander (after Antony’s ancestor, Alexander the Great). Unlike Caesar, Antony acknowledged both as his children even though, like Caesar, he was already married to someone else. But shortly after the twins’ birth, Antony’s wife Fulvia died (probably not poisoned, because this is the sort of story where you have to note that sort of thing). This death brought out a brief period of detente between Antony and Octavian. In the whole “it’s the ancient world, so we solidify alliances with marriages” style, this peace was confirmed by Antony agreeing to take as his next wife Octavian’s sister, Octavia the Younger. #AWKWARD
Meanwhile, Cleopatra was busy raising three small children and had to contend with a new rival, the Judean King Herod (the one from the Bible, who demanded that all the babies be killed in case one of them was Jesus; not a cool guy, even if he accidentally sort of invented Christmas). The thing is that Egypt and Judea were both kingdoms allied with Rome who were geographically nearby to each other, and Cleopatra sided with Herod’s mother-in-law against him and they made a sort of Girl Gang, and I could never tell this story any better than Anne Thériault did in this Longreads article so maybe pop over there and come back here when you’re done.
You’re back? Great! BUCKLE UP.
In around 37 BCE, Cleopatra went to visit Antony, which is when he met their three-year-old twins for the first time and he was like, “Look how cute they are! I love them!” because, unlike Caesar, Antony was happy about having children with Cleopatra and because the twins were probably super cute and Cleopatra probably dressed them in adorable costumes. One year later, Cleopatra gave birth to another child, a son named Ptolemy (because you know she had to throw that name in there somewhere) Philadelphus. But just as her reproductive abilities were going strong, Mark Antony’s military prowess was starting to become less amazing and his psychological state was becoming more paranoid. And, despite Cleopatra’s continued financial support, the Antony vs Octavian battles kept going on, complicated by the fact that Antony was married to Octavian’s sister, who he was constantly abandoning to hang out with Cleopatra. Even Lepidus (remember him? The third part of the Triumvirate?) got involved, rebelling against Octavian and winding up under house arrest. Nice try, Lepidus, but everyone knows you’re the least interesting part of this whole story.
It all sort of came to a head when Cleopatra and Antony staged a huge festival-party called The Donations of Alexandria. They threw this event partly because they both had always loved parties, partly because Cleopatra was really good at spectacles, and partly to try and convince everyone that Antony’s campaigns in Parthia and Armenia had gone amazingly well (the one in Parthia had not gone well, but the one in Armenia had, and he wanted to emphasize the latter). The party was planned to be similar to a Roman triumph, and included a bit where Antony’s prisoner of war, the Armenian leader Artavasdes, was walked in front of everyone in humiliation (as had been done with Arsinoe years before). The Armenian royal family was brought before Cleopatra and told to kneel, but they did not, and she freaked out, and that’s maybe a sign that things weren’t actually going as well as Cleopatra and Antony were pretending they were.
Anway, for the grand finale, Antony dressed up in a costume blending the Roman god of wine Dionysus with the Egyptian god of the underworld, Osiris, and Cleopatra dressed as a mixture of the Roman god of love Aphrodite and the Egyptian goddess of life and magic. Her son Caesarion was dressed up as the god Horus, who is the son of Isis. And then everyone in Cleopatra’s family got a new name and/or title:
It is also speculated that Cleopatra and Antony were officially married during this event, and certainly they began acting like he wasn’t married to anyone else (although he wouldn’t divorce Octavia the Younger for awhile yet). The whole thing was loud, in your face, over the top, and totally on brand for Cleopatra+Antony. But to the people of Rome, it was all tacky and tasteless and made them all dislike both Antony and Cleopatra even more because this whole time, Octavian had latched onto the idea that he could win the PR battle by making himself seem pious and respectable vs Antony’s famously decadent lifestyle.
And if you’re wondering how a PR campaign is run in ancient Rome, in a time before the invention of the printing press, the answer is: hand-calligraphed flyers!! It’s from this time of PR wars that a lot of the mean rumours and popular misconceptions about Cleopatra first came into existence. All the greatest hits started out from this era: “She’s sexy and manipulating men with her beauty!” “She’s using witchcraft to bend Mark Antony to her will!” “She seduced Caesar and then Antony because she wants to destroy Rome!” “She’s too powerful and smart, it’s unnatural for a woman!” “Mark Antony does whatever she says, which is gross, because women aren’t people and men should be in charge!!” etc.
(So the next time you’re around someone who says something like this about Cleopatra, you can be like, “Oh, how original, where’d you get that idea, one of Octavian’s flyers from the year 31 BCE?” Because the idea that strong women are DANGEROUS SCHEMERS whose feminine wiles can trick POPULAR YOUNG PRINCES INTO MOVING TO CANADA AGAINST THEIR WILL is literally a story as old as time. Time for a new narrative, misogynists!!)
Honestly, Cleopatra’s connection with Antony was fucking up her life a lot more than it was his. When they’d started their relationship, he was the Roman Heartthrob/Hero who seemed destined to become the next Emperor. But as time went on, his hard-drinking/partying lifestyle caught up with him, as did probably a lifetime of PTSD from his years of military service, and he seems to have started breaking down psychologically. Their whole deal was based on him being an amazing military leader and her bankrolling him, but with him losing battles (and Octavian’s forces getting stronger all the time), he was starting to look like a poor investment on Cleopatra’s part. But bear in mind, she’d been running Egypt like a literal boss this whole time too, with forward thinking decisions about taxes and budgeting, and doing her best to lead a country that was entirely dependent on whether the Nile flooded or not every year which is a CHALLENGING JOB TO DO.
And THEN!! So, Octavian was re-elected as a consul but Antony’s time had ended, making him now just a regular Roman citizen. As such, the fact that he continued to battle against Octavian with Cleopatra’s funding, became sort of illegal. And so in a totally genius but also terrible act of using a loophole, Octavian had Rome declare war on Cleopatra for providing military support to a Roman citizen. So now the war was not Octavian vs Antony, but All Of Rome vs Antony, leaving Cleopatra in yet another awkward situation. But she of course was here to support her man, so off she went in her purple-sailed ship to help out.
This war was waged mostly at sea, where Cleopatra and Antony initially seemed to have the advantage as they had more ships. However, Octavian’s smaller fleet was comprised of professionally-trained Roman soldiers who were better equipped to battle than were their mercenary forces. It all came down to the Battle of Actium, which began on September 2, 31 BCE. The battle ended with a massive number of defections of Cleopatra and Antony’s troops to Octavian, and with Cleopatra and Antony themselves fleeing the scene. Cleopatra headed back to Egypt, where again, her family’s history of oppression was likely part of the reason that the Egyptian people weren’t prepared to stand up for her and fight Octavian. They’d do their job and be her royal guards, etc., but don’t seem prepared to lay down their lives and fight for her as they may have done for a non-Greek monarch.
Cleopatra, now trapped in Egypt and capture by Octavian seeming an inevitability, began to figure out a new scheme. Octavian seemed intent on keeping her alive so that he could parade her through the streets in a triumph as had been done to her sister Arsinoe years before. Cleopatra, proud as she was, was determined not to give him the satisfaction of humiliating her. She also knew that he was intent on looting her treasure for his own coffers, so she sent word to him that she was prepared to light herself and all of her treasure on fire. This got his attention, and Octavian sent a representative out to negotiate with her.
These negotiations did not go well, obviously, because Cleopatra and Octavian were equally stubborn and strong-willed, and so Octavian decided to invade Egypt. Antony was taken prisoner as he attempted to protect her, and he died by suicide while in captivity. He was 53 years old. Octavian permitted Cleopatra to attend Antony’s funeral, where she participated in the mourning rituals of the time and place: screaming non-stop and beating and clawing at her skin. As a result of this, she wound up with septic wounds. She stopped eating, perhaps hoping to die in this manner rather than by execution or after having had to parade through town as a prisoner of war. Octavian was not going to let his prized prisoner get away so easily, though, and she wound up recovering from these wounds.
Cleopatra died, aged 39, sometime that same month. Two of her loyal maidservants, Eiras and Charmion, died with her. Her manner of death was most likely poison, although the rumours of a poison snakebite are likely false. After all, Cleopatra had always been smart and organized, and she’d never leave something like this to chance. She had a small window of opportunity to kill herself; why risk it on a snake who may or may not bite her in the right time? Allegedly, the poison was smuggled in a basket of figs, which would also be a terrible way to sneak a venomous snake in to someone. She likely ate poisoned food or applied a poisoned ointment, as did her maidservants.
Conspiracy corner: If you look at ancient Roman history and mythology, women dying by suicide is a weirdly common theme of women being sort of quiet and not wanting to be a bother, which was how Romans wanted their women to behave, and which was certainly not how Cleopatra ever would have behaved. The news of her suicide came out from Octavian, and was written about by other men who hated her and who were writing to please Octavian, so it’s possible that was a cover-up story for something else. Perhaps Octavian actually killed her. Perhaps she tried to rally up supporters and stage a big coup and escape prison, but it failed and she died in the battle. In a story this wild, with a woman as prepared to do whatever it takes, anything is possible.
Whatever the manner of her death, Cleopatra almost certainly died on her own terms, and Octavian was super frustrated, so if she had to go at least her death was a final fuck you.
Cleopatra’s son Caesarion, renamed Ptolemy XV, reigned for just eighteen days before he was tricked to come visit Octavian, who murdered him. Upon his death, the Ptolemiac dynasty came to an end and Egypt was absorbed as a province of the newly-created Roman Empire.
Cleopatra Selene married King Juba II of Numibia and Mauretania, with whom she had one daughter and one son. Her son, Ptolemy (what else would she have named him) was later murdered by his cousin, CALIGULA!! (A story for another day). Three hundred years later, Syria’s Queen Zenobia, who faced off against the Roman Empire in her own badass story, claimed to be a descendant of Cleopatra Selene.
The fates of Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philodelphus are unknown, though they seem to have been sent to Rome to be raised by Antony’s widow, Octavia the Younger, following the death of their parents.
Octavian renamed himself Augustus, and became the first official non-emergency Roman Emperor. He re-named the month of August after himself, to celebrate his defeat of Cleopatra, which is just such a dickish move I hate him and now I kind of hate the month of August out of loyalty to Cleopatra. This fucking guy. Ugh.
Much of the legend of Cleopatra developed based on the Roman writings from around the time of her downfall, which describe her as a witch/ slut/ seductress/ femme fatale who single-handedly destroyed Mark Antony’s life. These are the most widely known sources of information about her life, however, other sources focus more on other aspects of her political career and persona.
Some medieval Arabic writings seem to have been drawn from Greek histories that may present Cleopatra similarly to how she’d portrayed herself. These sources do not refer at all to her beauty (or lack thereof) or even to her love affairs. Instead, she is depicted as a scholar known as “Cleopatra the Wise” or “The Virtuous Scholar”; a woman revered for her intelligence and inventiveness, with keen interests in philosophy, alchemy, mathematics, and medicine.
The primary source I used to write this essay was Stacy Schiff’s excellent biography, Cleopatra: A Life. I also referred to Kara Cooney’s book When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt as well as getting background info on ancient Rome from Emma Southon’s Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World.
Other sources include:
6 things you (probably) didn’t know about Cleopatra (BBC History Extra)
Episode LX: Cleopatra (Emperors of Rome podcast)
Cleopatra: Ms. Understood (Stuff You Should Know podcast)
Cleopatra’s Little Sister vs. The World (Drunk History)
Cleopatra VII: Scholar, Patron, Queen (Ancient Research Center in Egypt)
The Virtuous Scholar: Cleopatra seduced through intellectual prowess not physical beauty, says new book (University College London)
Cleopatra: Scientist, Not Seductress? (Seeker.com)
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A note on names: the woman we’re talking about here was Hungarian, and her given name in that language is Báthory Erzsébet (in the Hungarian lastname/firstname manner). But since she’s become notorious as a sort of folktale villainess under the Anglicized version of her name, and since I’m writing this in English, I’ll be referring to her as Elizabeth Báthory.
To begin with, we need to dip our toes into the history of Renaissance Hungary. Now, like the history of most places on this planet, this is very very very complex, so just to set the scene we’ll focus only on what was happening during Elizabeth’s life. When she was born in 1560, Hungary had already been partitioned into three bits: the north-west was the Kingdom of Hungary, ruled over by the Habsburg monarchs as a part of the Holy Roman Empire (this is the part where Elizabeth Báthory was from); the middle bit was “Turkish Hungary” and was overseen by the Ottoman Empire, and the eastern bit was Transylvania, which was ruled over by elected Hungarian Princes.
At the time of her birth, Elizabeth’s Uncle András was the Prince of Transylvania; during her lifetime, he would be replaced by his son and her nephew, Gábor, as Prince. There are other royal and noble connections too, but basically: being part of the Báthory family meant Elizabeth was raised in an extremely privileged way in a time and place where the rich were incredibly wealthy and the poor were extremely poor and nobody was in the middle. The Báthory family name traces back to a legendary Medieval knight named Vitus who is said to have fought a dragon and, the grateful villagers he saved, bestowed upon him the name Báthory (which means “good hero.”)
To put the year 1560 into the context of other royals you may be familiar with, the year Elizabeth was born: Queen Elizabeth I had been in power in England for two years; Charles IX had just taken over as France’s Boy King following the death of his brother Francis (who’d been Mary Queen of Scots‘s first husband), much to the delight of his mother Catherine de’Medici; and in Spain, Philip II (the widower of Queen Mary I, and the grandson of Juana of Castile) . Basically, the Renaissance was in full swing all over most of Europe, and it was happening in Hungary in its own particular manner. Female rulers were suddenly seemingly everywhere, which meant that educating women wasn’t seen as weird and unnatural, which meant that Elizabeth Báthory was provided with a well-rounded education (she was fluent in four languages!) because that was one way that the rich people differentiated themselves from the poor people around them.
Now, another sort of important background thing to know is that fairly recently, the peasants of this area had fully revolted against the upper classes. Things had simmered down once the aristocrats started brutally torturing and murdering the peasants. But the poor people, many of whom had been trained as soldiers, were known to be unhappy and there was a sense that revolution could break out at any moment. To retain this tenuous status quo, the wealthy landowners — like Elizabeth’s family — ruled in an extremely torture/murder-based sort of way. And the thing is that if they’d relented at all, pretty much for sure the peasants would have turned on them, so it was an ongoing thing where the wealthy people were constantly cruel towards the poor people who also worked as their servants. In order to survive in this environment as a young heiress, Elizabeth would have been trained and learned from example just how brutal she would need to be.
As per what happened to rich tweens everywhere in Europe at this time, Elizabeth’s family arranged her marriage when she was around eleven years old. Also as per what the usual deal was, she didn’t actually get married until she was older, probably around age fifteen. Her husband’s name was Lord Ferenc Nádasdy. At the time of his birth, Ferenc’s father was the Palatine of Hungary, which was an elected role that was basically second only in power to the King, so he came to the union with his own huge amount of money and influence.
In the later folklore surrounding Elizabeth’s life, Ferenc is often presented as an unintelligent and/or bloodthirsty oaf. In the records that remain about him, though, he was at least as well-educated as Elizabeth was herself. They spent the four years of their engagement on parallel courses of education and training, each staying in separate noble houses where they were taught the skills they’d need for life as noble adults in Renaissance Hungary. When Ferenc was seventeen years old, he was noted as perhaps the most promising young nobleman at his court and great things were expected of him. Marriage to Elizabeth would only improve his situation, as her family was even more impressive than his own and improved Ferenc’s prestige. In fact, Elizabeth’s family was so much more powerful than Ferenc’s that she continued to use the name Elizabeth Báthory, even after her marriage, rather than change her surname to match that of her husband.
Note: years after Elizabeth’s death, rumours spread that she had secretly given birth to an illegitimate child at some point during the four years of her teen engagement. There’s nothing to back up this claim, and it can likely be discredited.
Elizabeth and Ferenc were married on May 8, 1575 in the palace of Varanno (now Vranov). She was fifteen years old, he was twenty. There were somewhere in the area of 4,500 guests, not including the peasants from the nearby countryside who would have been permitted to join in the celebrations. It was an extraordinarily lavish event, and the young couple headed off for their new life and man and wife with each now owning some new castles as wedding gifts from their various super-rich friends.
Now, the point of marriages like theirs was to cement and ally family dynasties by having children. Elizabeth and Ferenc did not have a child for ten years. Medical knowledge in this time and place would certainly have blamed her for their failure to conceive, and she almost definitely would have turned to folk remedies and perhaps witchcraft to try and assist with her reproductive abilities. This was an environment where, despite Elizabeth and Ferenc’s high level of education, medical knowledge was often guided by superstition. Happily to both of them, Elizabeth gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Anna, in 1585. This child was followed shortly after by a another daughter, Orsolya, and a son, András, both of whom died in infancy. Elizabeth gave birth next to another daughter, Katalin, and a son, Pál.
Ferenc was often away on military campaigns against his country’s main enemies, the Turkish, because this was the sort of situation where the richest and most powerful men were also the ones on the front lines of battle. While he was away, Elizabeth very capably managed their household and estates; surviving letters of hers show that she was very direct, to the point, on top of her duties, and extremely well organized.
** A very weird historical tidbit: do you know who fought alongside Ferenc in some of these battles? Oh just an English mercenary soldier named John Smith aka the same man who’d later sail to Virginia and become famous for his involvement with the story of Matoaka aka Pocahontas!! Basically, having made his fortune and been given the title of Captain during these wars, he then went back to England and became part of the crew sent to Virginia and then he misrepresented what happened with him and Pocahontas, because he was a shitty person, and I am astonished at his connection to this whole story. Like, WHAT.
By the turn of the seventeenth century, Elizabeth’s highest-ranking household staff included two high-ranking servants whose names become super important later on: a young man named János Újváry (known as Ficzkó), an older woman named Anna Darvulia, who served as governess to the children and also, perhaps, helped oversee the female household staff.
** A note on Anna Darvulia: she’s a cipher in this whole story, and not much is known about her as a person. The name “Darvulia,” which is how she was referenced by more than one person later on in court transcripts, seems to be a nickname but which has neither Hungarian nor Slovak roots. In 1602, a minister from nearby left record of a complaint of alleged cruelty committed by Elizabeth and Ferenc, implicating another woman who was likely Anna Darvulia. Her duties may have included overseeing the young female servants of Elizabeth’s home, and it seems certain that Darvulia’s methods were exceptionally cruel. Elizabeth and Ferenc were denounced along with her because, as her bosses, they were responsible for her behaviour which — and this is all like fourth-hand information by this point — this one minister found to be inappropriate.
Around this same time, while away from home, Ferenc was afflicted by a mysterious disease which left him suddenly unable to use his legs. By 1604, he knew he was on his deathbed and, as per the usual conventions for very rich Hungarian nobles at this time, he sent a letter to the new Palatine of Hungary, György Thurzó, formally requesting that he look out for Ferenc’s wife, children, and estates. (**Thunder crashes, lighting strikes, the ghost of Elizabeth Báthory screams down from above because this is where everything all starts to go incredibly wrong**)
So the thing is that, even though Elizabeth was still extraordinarily wealthy and her family and in-laws were super-powerful and well-connected, as soon as she became a widow she lost a substantial amount of her personal independence. Now forty-four years old, and having very capably run the household and estates throughout all the time Ferenc was away at war, she seems to have planned to continue on without remarrying. After all, her combined holdings included all of the Báthory lands that she owned as part of her dowry, but also all of the Nádasdy properties she’d attained through her marriage to Ferenc. She wasn’t just a landowner; she was the landowner, possessing more and bigger properties than anyone else. But of course with great power comes great risk, and as soon as she was widowed, a bunch of men all set their sights on taking over some of her property.
Who were these men? They were: György Thurzó, the Palatine of Hungary; Imre Megyery, the guardian and tutor of Elizabeth’s son and heir Pál (Pál himself was just ten years old); and her two sons-in-law, her daughter Anna’s husband Count Miklós Zrinyi, and her daughter Katalin’s husband, György Drugeth of Homonna. (And Anna and Katalin don’t seem to have been opposed to this plan either, so basically everyone wanted Elizabeth’s money).
Of this group of terrible men, Thurzó was already the most powerful and best-placed to begin an operation to force her from her home. He had another reason for wanting to get rid of her: he was enemies with her nephew, Gábor Báthory the Prince of Transylvania, because Thurzó wanted to take over that region and make it part of the Kingdom of Hungary, ideally with himself as the new Prince. By weakening the Báthory family, he may have seen a way to force Gábor from his throne. Note: Thurzó also, and this has been proven, schemed to have Gábor assassinated but the plot was foiled at the last minute.
A point to remember as we go on with this story: EVERYONE in this story is AWFUL. And György Thurzó is THE WORST ONE OUT OF EVERYONE.
** A note on György Thurzó: He, along with John Smith, had also fought in battle alongside Ferenc Nádasdy, was perhaps even more thoroughly educated than Elizabeth or Ferenc had been, and was A HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE PERSON. To compare him to a fictional character, he’s like if Littlefinger from Game of Thrones had been also incredibly wealthy and powerful, far more evil, and somehow even more ruthless. By the time he set his sights on destroying Elizabeth Báthory, he had left a string of ruined nobles behind him — most of whose possessions and property he himself had taken over because he was AWFUL. But at the same time, everyone around him also seem to have been awful, so he was just sort of the being at being the worst, if you see what I mean.
** ALSO!! A note in 17th century Hungarian law: basically, it was not against the law to mistreat or even kill lower-class people such as servants. This is a horrible law OBVIOUSLY but also just bear that in mind as things unfold. Like, likely lots of rich people were responsible for the deaths of lots of poorer people, and while awful it was not against the laws of the time. This isn’t the story of some morally upright person storming in and demanding a change to this law in order to protect lower class people from murder. This is the story of Thurzó sneakily finding a way to condemn Elizabeth for allegedly killing people, even though that act itself wasn’t illegal, and finding a way that her downfall would make him more rich and powerful. So nobody’s goals here are HONORABLE.
Despite it being totally legal for rich people to kill poor people, Elizabeth seems to have suspected what Thurzó was up to because she went to a local authority with the mother of a servant who’d died in her care to explain that the girl had been ill. Now this is interesting because, as noted above, it wasn’t at all illegal for Elizabeth to have killed this girl in the first place, so why would she go to the trouble of stating her innocence? Also, if anyone dared to bring charges against Elizabeth, she was so rich she could counter-sue and/or have that person killed, so why would she have been concerned someone was bringing charges against her? But then we look at the four-dimensional chess Thurzó was up to, and it all makes a bit more sense.
See, despite Thurzó’s role as Palatine and his own personal wealth and power, Elizabeth was still richer and more powerful than he was. So he knew if he brought charges against her he’d be putting himself at risk from her counter-suing him. And so, Thurzó found a loophole in this law which was that, if a rich noble person was caught red-handed committing a crime, they could be punished without ever having to be put on trial. And so Thurzó began planting seeds for his masterwork, a really complicated and truly awful scheme to ruin Elizabeth Báthory’s reputation and steal all of her land and property.
It was based on the old complaint about her servant Anna Darvulia, as well as other gossip he’d learned about regarding the allegedly cruel treatment of young female servants in the Báthory home. So the thing is that, pretty inarguably, some girls seem to have been treated poorly while employed in this home. I will note at this point that lots of servants were treated poorly in a lot of other places in Renaissance Hungary too, because that’s just what this society was like. Remember the whole thing about how the rich people had to be extra-firm and cruel to their servants to prevent them from rebelling? That’s just kind of how everyone operated, not that that’s a good thing, but it means that the way servants were treated in Elizabeth’s home wasn’t necessarily wildly different from how they were treated elsewhere. BUT THEN AGAIN, the minister had written up his concerns about their mistreatment, which means maybe things were worse in her home than in other places.
But then again, if it was just servants being killed, why would anyone be investigating that? Which is why that’s not what Thurzó began investigating her for; he alleged that she’d, yes, murdered lots of servants but also had murdered some wealthy girls, too. Luckily for him, Elizabeth (like other rich women did) had regularly taken in young noblewomen for the same sort of schooling and training that she herself had received as a teenager. If Thurzó was able to claim that Elizabeth had harmed — or even killed — one of these rich young women, that would be a crime he could prosecute her for. But, again, he had to somehow catch her in the act.
Now, legend has it that he walked in on her in the act of killing a young girl, but that’s likely not the case. What seems to have happened is, on December 30, 1609, as Elizabeth was sitting down for a post-Christmas feast with her nearest and dearest, Thurzó burst into her castle and arrested her. He also apprehended four of her servants: Helena Jó, Dorothy Szentes (known as Dorkó), Katalin Benecká, and the young man called Ficzkó. He claimed to have seen her killing a girl, and when asked what happened to that girl, was like “… hang on” and 24 hours later, he presented the body of one dead girl and one injured but still alive girl. The dead girl (probably) been dug up from outside because servants who died of plague etc were buried like that. But of course, Thurzó claimed this was the body of the girl that Elizabeth had murdered and secretly buried. He further claimed that the injured girl was the one he himself had caught Elizabeth attempting to murder. And with this “evidence” and the other secret plots he’d put into motion, Elizabeth Báthory was arrested for the murder of multiple young woman.
Sort of.
So, what Thurzó was doing was something that he had personally done before to other enemies of his bosses the Hapsburgs, and also something that the Hapsburgs had done to others of their enemies. Basically, when someone was arrested for something, they sort of became an unperson; someone without rights at all. So you could do whatever you wanted with them, as long as they were arrested. Show trials, in which the accused person wouldn’t have the opportunity to appear or testify on their own behalf, were a way to control public perception of the person and their crimes. So Thurzó’s plan was to arrest Elizabeth, keep her hidden away, and put on an incredibly public show trial in which her reputation would be destroyed. Even without the trial coming to a conclusion, as long as she was under arrest, she was effectively powerless.
So, again, to be clear: Elizabeth very possibly was responsible for the death/s of some young women who’d been in her care, either as servants or as houseguests. But that wasn’t a crime, in that time and place. And if she really was guilty, why would Thurzó use such underhanded means to arrest and try her for her actions? Both things can be true: Elizabeth killed people, and Thurzó was working to ruin her reputation. But the thing that gets me is how single-minded Thurzó was in ensuring she was cut off from all of her power and money. He wasn’t putting her on trial from a sense of justice; he was doing it so that he could do away with her and divide up her money among other nobles. Whether or not she was guilty, what he was doing was shitty on its own.
Upon the arrest of Elizabeth and her four servants, Thurzó began a series of interviews/interrogations. Between the four servants, a consensus fell that between 36-50 young women died during the ten or so years in which they worked for Elizabeth. Given the way that the plague rolled through town more than once, and the overall shitty health conditions for anyone (let alone lower-class servants), this number is not necessarily damning at all. When asked about the cruelty towards young women, the servants mostly seem to have blamed Helena Jó and Dorkó, along with the mysterious Anna Darvulia. Jó and Dorkó, whose work included overseeing the female servants, would likely have been the ones in charge of punishment meted towards these young women. Katalin noted that she refused to adopt some of the more cruel practices, for which Jó and Dorkó then punished her.
A few weeks later, in early January 2011, the four servants were put on public trial. The transcripts of their interviews were taken as confessions of guilt, and all four stated that any crime they had committed had been at the request of Elizabeth. More than three hundred witnesses testified, many of whom were related by blood or marriage to György Thurzó but I’m sure that’s just a wild coincidence. Also totally just a coincidence? That the many of Elizabeth’s servants offered contradictory evidence and the fact they’d been tortured before making witness statements was hidden from the records before Thurzó sent his report off to the King. Almost like Thurzó knew that a bunch of tortured servants weren’t the most convincing of witnesses, especially when the other witnesses were his friends and relatives.
Also note: servants, who weren’t considered people, didn’t usually get to testify anyway, so the fact they were called upon was REALLY STRANGE.
A woman known only as Susannah appeared at this point, who stated that her friend had seen a list that Elizabeth kept, listing the names of 650 people she’d murdered. Another witness stated that she believed Elizabeth practiced witchcraft, and had been secretly plotting to kill the King and Thurzó himself using poison. Again, no evidence was provided to support these claims. Witnesses both spoke about Elizabeth’s purported acts as well as those of her servant Dorkó; at the conclusion of this trial, all four servants were found guilty. Three of them were executed for their crimes. The fate of the fourth, Katalin Benecká, is not known. She was of a slightly higher class than the others, so may have been returned to her family.
Later that same month, Elizabeth’s longtime healer and wise-woman, a farmer’s wife named Erzsi Majorosné, was burned at the stake for her alleged complicity in Elizabeth’s crimes — specifically, for allegedly assisting Elizabeth in baking a magic cake intended to destroy her enemies. Erzsi was not given a trial or a chance to defend herself, but was taken and killed immediately based on evidence from the servants’ trial and from the increasing anti- Báthory momentum building around the scandal.
And what of Elizabeth Báthory? Although the Hungarian King requested, repeatedly, over three years that Thurzó hold a new trial in which Elizabeth would be able to defend herself, Thurzó never did. Why? Well, partly because her various male relatives had agreed that in exchange for her never being put on trial, they and Thurzó would divide up her money and estates. So she was kept in house arrest in her own beloved castle home. But not just house arrest, no, it was the gruesomest thing where she was literally bricked into a room without a door, and just a little hole for plates of food to be slid under. And who moved into her castle while she was trapped in there? Oh just Thurzó and his wife, who literally got a citation for being gross people and taking all of Elizabeth’s jewels and things??
Everybody in this story is terrible.
Elizabeth died on August 21, 1614, aged fifty-four, having spent the last four years of her life bricked into a room while her lands and wealth were divided between her family members and her enemies. She had never been actually convicted of any crimes against her or even put on trial. One year before her death, her nephew Gábor, the Prince of Transylvania, had been murdered — likely murdered either by Thurzó, or by someone working on Thurzó’s instruction. His death marked the end of the Báthory family’s power and influence in Eastern Europe.
More than a century after Elizabeth’s death, a man named László Turóczi recounted this story, including for the first time the detail about Elizabeth allegedly bathing in the blood of her “murder” “victims”. Of note: László Turóczi was a Jesuit, ie a Catholic, ie someone with a vested interest in making the Protestant Elizabeth sound like a horrible villain. To be sure, this claim of blood-bathing didn’t come up AT ALL throughout the three testimonials given by three hundred tortured witnesses, all of whom were actively defaming Elizabeth. Like, even “Susannah” didn’t suggest this. But today, this is a key part of the myth of Elizabeth Báthory: mass murderess.
The myth of Elizabeth Báthory basically goes like this: she was sort of a real-life version of Snow White’s evil stepmother, an aging woman desperate to cling to youth and murderously jealous of younger women. And so, she murdered 650 of them (that random number from the witness known as “Susannah”) and would then bathe in their blood. Sometimes, she’s presented as a vampire as well. She is still, as of this writing, listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific female murderer, based again on Susannah’s third-hand testimony.
Yet, if not for György Thurzó’s scheming, we’d likely not know her name today nearly as much as we do. In popular culture, “Elizabeth Báthory” has appeared as a character inspiration for numerous books, films, video games, and more. But who she was as a real person, and what may truly have happened to her, is even more interesting to me than the numerous lesbian vampire properties inspired by her myth.
Čachtice Castle, the estate where Elizabeth Báthory lived her final years, was abandoned in 1708 and its ruins are now a tourist destination in modern-day Slovakia. The nearby town of Čachtice also offers a museum, and is also home to the church where Elizabeth’s body was originally interred.
The main source I used for research was Tony Thorne’s biography Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of Elisabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess, which I absolutely recommend to really dig into all of the secondary people involved here, and how the socio-cultural context of Hungary at this time set the stage for all of what happened.
I also recommend the essay on Elizabeth Báthory from Rejected Princesses, which both balances her myth with what truly seems like her unjust treatment.
The films Bathory: Countess of Blood (2008) and The Countess (2009) are both retellings of Elizabeth’s story; the first is a horror movie that leans into the folklore/horror aspect, while the second is more of a straight-up biography without the paranormal bits.
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Content warning: miscarriage, invasive gynecological details, animal cruelty and animal death
Jane and John Denyer were working-class farmers living in the poverty-stricken English village of Godalming. They had five children and the eldest, Mary, was baptized on February 21, 1703. Nothing at all is known about Mary Denyer’s life until she, aged seventeen, married eighteen-year-old Joshua Toft. While the common misconception is that people in olden times got married super-young, this was a bit younger than the usual for people in the year 1720. So this was either a love match, Mary was pregnant, or both.
Who was Joshua Toft? He was the sixth of twelve (!!) children born into the Toft family, a well-known family who had been working as clothiers for several centuries. What’s a clothier? Basically, someone who oversaw a fabric and clothing-making organization, employing people all the way from field workers who sheared the sheep to the spinners who turned the sheared fleece into wool all the way to people who made and sold the clothes made from these fabrics. It had been a successful business for them for a long time… until recently. By the time Joshua was born, the Tofts still described themselves as clothiers on census documents, but they were more at the “shearing sheep” level of work than the “overseeing an entire company” level. So Mary’s new husband’s family had a very good pedigree, but they weren’t actually wealthy at all by this point.
Mary and Joshua’s first child, a daughter named Mary (because everyone was called Mary back then, and also in honour of her mother maybe?) was born sometime between their marriage and 1723. In 1723, Mary gave birth to their second child, a daughter named Anne who died of smallpox aged around four months. In 1724, a son named James was born. The family rented a home from a farmer, and as a condition of living there, both were expected to work his fields. This meant that throughout all of her pregnancies and also postpartum periods (and also while mourning the death of her daughter), Mary was expected to walk two hours to the field, to work a long day on the field, and to walk two hours back home afterwards. Between the two of them, Mary worked more in the fields because Joshua’s time was divided between farm work and his clothier responsibilities*. *Joshua was actually a journeyman clothier, one of the beginning stages of that career path but there weren’t many jobs for clothiers so he was basically a poorly-paid labourer at this point.
Just to make sure we’ve all got the scene set: Mary and Joshua were both about twenty-five years old, the parents of two small children (and one who had very recently tragically died), both of whom were working physically demanding, low-paying jobs in a community where the Tofts used to be wealthy. And Mary was pregnant again! So they’d both assume soon there would be one more mouth to feed.
But in August 1726, Mary seemed to have a miscarriage. She later described this involved passing an object “as big as [her arm]” and then experiencing a “flooding” that lasted about a week. This object did not look to her or to the other women who sat with her (including her sister-in-law and mother-in-law, Margaret and Anne Toft) to look like a human fetus, but rather as something more monstrous. She went back to work as soon as she could physically do so (the other women she worked with likely helped cover for her) but then three weeks later, while in the fields, she experienced further “flooding” and great pain. This was clearly some sort of miscarriage, perhaps of an incomplete molar pregnancy (which is what happens when a non-viable fertilized egg implants in the uterus).
And from this situation, her in-laws decided to try and make their fortune by claiming it had been some sort of monster and making Mary famous as The Woman Who Gave Birth To A Monster. This is an unexpected decision, obviously, so let’s take a step back and figure out WTF the Tofts were thinking.
So bear in mind that English culture at this time was very interested in anything they saw as “monstrous”, and so ambitious people would try and round up interesting people or “monsters” to take on exhibit to get rich. For instance, a young feral boy known as Peter the Wild Boy had been the talk of the town just one year before Mary Toft had her miscarriage. Things like freak shows were also popular, which saw people with congenital disorders (or people pretending to have congenital disorders) toured around for the paying public. These people could be paid to attend dinner parties, to take part in exhibitions, and to basically make money for whoever their managers were. The Toft family, dealing with poverty after having previously been much more wealthy, saw this as a get-rich-quick scheme. And the tentpole of their scheme was the “monstrous” object Mary had just recently given birth to.
Now, to be clear, it seems like the instigator of this whole strategy was Mary’s mother-in-law Anne Toft, with an assist from her sister-in-law Margaret Toft. Mary herself necessarily became involved, but the evidence does not at all suggest that she’d ever been enthusiastic about taking part in any of this stuff. As the fleshy bits Mary had given birth to had likely already been disposed of (and didn’t look “monstrous” enough, perhaps), the Tofts killed a cat, removed some of its innards, and inserted a dead eel inside. And wait, it gets worse, because they then inserted this cat/eel combo up into Mary’s vagina. Now, Mary herself would later claim that the cat parts had been inserted into her cervix (which, if you aren’t up to date vis-a-vis gynecology, that’s the bit at the top of the vagina and it’s usually SEALED UP PRETTY TIGHT). I consulted, off the record, with a medical acquaintance of mine who said that it is very unlikely that the cat parts could have gotten in there. The cervix closes up really quickly after birth or miscarriage, and if she’d had cat bits inside likely Mary would have gotten a gruesome infection. But whether or not the cat parts passed the cervix or not they were put up her vagina, and THAT IS NOT OK!!!!
So, pretending Mary was in labour, one of her neighbours was called over to help. This neighbour heard the sound of something falling into a pot (the dead cat/eel, presumably), and then she was sent to go and fetch Anne Toft, the mother-in-law/instigator if the scheme, who was hanging out pretending not to know what was going on. Anne came over, like, “Hey, what’s up, having a baby OH MY GOD A MONSTER??? Did my daughter-in-law just give birth to a headless/tailless cat with an eel skeleton inside of it???” And so she decided to bring the “monster” to a surgeon/midwife who lived nearby so he could tell them what was going on.
This male midwife was named John Howard and, to his credit, was like, “I find it pretty hard to believe that a human woman just gave birth to this headless cat/eel” but not for the reason you’d think, his reasoning was that if Mary had given birth to a cat/eel, surely it would still have its head. That’s your concern, John??? Anyway, curiosity got the better of him, and he headed over to the Toft house to see what was going on.
Anne and Margaret got busy preparing Mary for John Howard’s visit, stuffing more dead cat bits up Mary’s vagina while Mary, presumably, was unable to stop them. When John Howard got to Mary’s house, he happened to just catch Mary “going into labour” again. Anne “delivered” the dead cat bits, and John Howard was like, “OK, this does seem like it’s really happening, but until I personally help deliver her of the cat head and tail, I won’t believe this is really a thing that is happening.” Wouldn’t you know, the Tofts had lost track of the cat head and tail (?????) and so they switched gears and decided to go with rabbit bits since rabbits were easier to find in their area and they were determined to stuff some dead animal up Mary’s vagina because THIS WHOLE THING IS A NIGHTMARE.
Important note on rabbits: rabbits were all over England at this time. A few hundred years before, Medieval lords had built warrens to raise rabbits for meat and fur for their fancy meals and outfits. But rabbits being rabbits, they escaped from these enclosures and became pests to lower status people in rural areas. So, these creatures were the easiest things for the Tofts to acquire but also they had a sort of political implication as rabbits were seen as symbolic of the carelessness of the upper classes.
So anyway, Anne and (presumably, because I don’t think she could do this all alone and Mary wasn’t helping out with this bit) Margaret and/or Joshua began pulling apart a rabbit carcass into vagina-sized pieces. Anne inserted the rabbit’s upper jaw into Mary’s vagina (because they needed a head for their “monster”) and then left. This OBVIOUSLY hurt Mary A LOT and so she called for help and someone (Margaret?? A neighbour???) removed this from her. But then the next day, Anne was back on the scene and she forced the rest of the rabbit skull inside of Mary (who, just remember, had only just very recently had a weeks-long miscarriage). By the time John Howard arrived, Mary was obviously BLEEDING and in SO MUCH PAIN, and John Howard delivered the rabbit skull and was like, “Huh, when you put this with the other bits, it makes a monster so now I believe that this is happening!”
Side note on John Howard: from the way he acted from basically this point forward, he seems to have been largely motivated by money and fame. So whether or not he actually believed Mary had somehow conceived and given birth to a rabbit monster, he knew there was lost of money in it for him if he was the doctor who delivered the rabbit monsters. So we don’t know if he was just utterly fooled by this extremely weird scheme, or if he was in on it, perhaps teaming up with Anne Toft. But from this point on, he was all in. And part of this was that he began giving money to the Toft family every time Mary gave birth to another rabbit bit.
So, now that the rabbit head had been delivered, the Tofts changed their story to try and present a plausible reason for why Mary would have given birth to this “monster.” Mary began to claim that she’d dreamed of rabbits throughout her (recent, actual pregnancy) and had a craving to eat rabbits the whole time. And this all tied in with some of the medical science of the day which suggested the importance of “pre-natal influence” aka that whatever pregnant people think about can affect their babies. Like, not in a 21st-century way where you put headphones on your belly and play Baby Mozart or whatever; but in a sort of if you dream about rabbits, you will give birth to rabbits sort of way.
And so suddenly, rather than just having “birthed” one monster, Mary began delivering entire rabbits on a daily basis, piece by piece. FROM OUT OF HER VAGINA. John Howard delivered them all, like his were the unwashed 18th-century hands reaching up inside of her to pull out the rabbit skulls and ribcages and pointy, pointy claws. Anne and perhaps Margaret were likely the ones putting the rabbit bits up inside of her, and Mary was the one, legs spread, who had to literally embody the whole scheme.
John Howard began spending so much time with her that he decided to move to Godalming so he could be with her 24/7 as one never knew when a new rabbit bit might need to be delivered. By the end of November 1726, she’d “given birth” to twelve complete rabbits, piece by piece. Sometimes she had to keep rabbit bits up inside of her for days or weeks so that John Howard wouldn’t see them beig put inside, and frankly the fact she didn’t die of 1000 different blood infections is pretty remarkable.
As this was all going on, John Howard wrote letters to every rich and important person he knew, hoping for more publicity and therefore, more money for himself. He also pickled all the rabbit bits, and offered to put them on display or give lectures about them, for money. All of this hustling led to a small notice about the rabbit births popping up in a London newspaper, which them gained the attention of some of King George I’s courtiers. Which is how the King’s personal physician, Nathanael St. Andre, enters the whole picture and everything gets EVER WILDER.
A note on King George I: he was the grand-nephew of Queen Anne I (from The Favourite, a film with its own rabbits/fertility imagery now that I think about it). George had become King of Great Britain because Queen Anne I died without any living heirs, and nobody wanted a Catholic to inherit, and George was the next closest family member who was a Protestant. He was also German, and never learned to speak English, and spent most of his reign living in Germany. Which is why, when he needed to hire a personal physician, he chose Nathanael St. Andre — a Swiss man who spoke German, but who was a terrible doctor and an even worse person. But all George cared about was that he spoke German.
A note on Nathanael St. Andre: he was a terrible doctor and an even worse person. He had a long history of odd behaviour, and he seemed to find himself caught up in weird scandals a lot more often than most other people because he loved being in the middle of scandals. And so of course the rabbit births caught his attention, he was a messy bitch who lived for drama and was constantly desperate to keep his name in the newspapers as a famous eccentric genius. So, this is all turning into an Emperor’s New Clothes scenario where John Howard and Nathanael St. Andre were so desperate for fame and acclaim that they got super carried away with it all and forgot to use their logical brains, meanwhile Mary Toft is suffering and having rabbits shoved into her vagina on a daily basis and didn’t want any of this.
Now, by this point, word of Mary’s rabbit births had gotten so locally famous that she couldn’t stay in Godalming anymore, so she was moved to the bigger town of Guildford. Also bear in mind, her husband Joshua had been and still was running around buying dead baby rabbits and being not at all discreet, literally saying things like, “Yep, these are for my wife!” and this was not a smooth operation. Regardless, St. Andre swept up into Guildford just in time to witness Mary’s fifteenth “rabbit birth”.
St. Andre — who was a terrible doctor who didn’t know what he was doing, and also wasn’t a obstetrician, gynecologist or midwife at all — “personally” helped her deliver a skinned rabbit carcass, and than ran off to autopsy it to see what was what. Now, it’s at this point that he noticed the rabbit lungs floated in water, which meant that they had breathed air (e.g. had been part of an alive rabbit that didn’t just emerge from a human uterus). He was called back to Mary’s side again shortly after, and witnessed the “birth” of another skinned rabbit carcass.
This time, St. Andre followed up the “birth” by examining Mary’s vaginal area (note, again, he had no idea what he was doing vis-a-vis gynecology). He was like, “Well, I don’t see any more rabbit bits hidden up there so I guess we’re done for today,” but then he was called back into her room again and she delivered another dead rabbit. This did the trick, as this time St. Andre was like, “Guess what: this whole this is for real!!!”
But, spoiler, in her later deposition, Mary explained that his internal examination of her hadn’t been very thorough, and she’d had the rabbit hidden up inside of her the whole time. That’s right: Nathanael St. Andre was such a useless and unqualified doctor that he didn’t notice an entire rabbit carcass inside the vagina of a woman whose vagina he was inspecting to see if there was a rabbit carcass in it. So basically: St. Andre was a terrible doctor and/or a co-conspirator, and Mary Toft truly needed to stop having dead rabbits put up her vagina because I MEAN COME ON THIS POOR WOMAN!!!
Now, even King George I knew that St. Andre was a terrible doctor, so he sent another doctor up to see Mary Toft to investigate. This new person was Cyriacus Ahlers (great name), the official royal doctor of the German royal family (St. Andre was the physician of the British royal family). Ahlers to his credit was way more skeptical than St. Andre had been, and basically showed up being like, “Mary Toft, I don’t believe you’ve given birth to rabbits, prove me wrong.”
So, the clown car that was this whole scheme didn’t impress Ahlers at all. For instance, when he arrived, he was shown a rabbit skin that she’d allegedly just given birth to. And Ahlers, who was a doctor who at least borderline knew the basic facts of childbirth, was like, “Yeah no, there’s no blood or fluid on this rabbit skin whatsoever. There’s literally no way this was just born out of either a human woman or a female rabbit. Also? This Mary Toft person doesn’t look pregnant at all, like her belly doesn’t stick out, she’s not lactating, and I think she’s literally wearing a corset right now?? And also, she’s walking around holding her knees together like she’s trying to keep something from falling out of her vagina so this is all more than a little SUSPICIOUS TO ME.”
And all at once, Mary suddenly went into “labour” and Ahlers was like, “I’ve got this” but — despite what I just said about him knowing some stuff about human anatomy — he wasn’t an obstetrician and so when he reached his hand inside of Mary, he accidentally shoved the rabbit HIGHER UP INSIDE HER VAGINA which OH MY GOD NOOOOO and Mary screamed and probably passed out from the pain, and John Howard took over the delivery. But then Ahlers sneakily stole some of the rabbit bits, and even though he was supposed to stay in Guildford for three days, pretended to have a headache to go to bed early and secretly left town with the rabbit bits.
Back in London, he tested the rabbit bits and found that a) the rabbits had had their muscles cut from their bones with sharp knives, not something that could have happened in utero and b) the rabbits had pellets in their anuses that had corn and wheat and grass in them, meaning these rabbits had eaten corn and wheat and grass, meaning they had not literally just been born. Ahlers now had proof that Mary’s rabbit births were a total hoax.
At this point, Mary herself was probably holding the 18th century version of bags of frozen peas to her vulva, and sobbing quietly from the pain of it all. But nobody else cared about her, because what happened next was a dick-swinging contest between Ahlers, John Howard, and St. Andre about which of them was the smartest doctor. All three men wrote letters to the editors of newspapers being like, “Mary Toft is a hoaxer!!” and “Ahlers is a hypocrite!!” and back and forth and blah blah blah. As they did that, Anne Toft kept shoving rabbit bits into her daughter-in-law and John Howard kept “delivering” them, Finally, to settle this once and for all, an obstetrician named Sir Richard Manningham (yes, he’d been Knighted!) was commanded by King George I to visit Mary Toft and figure out what the literal fuck for fuck’s sake was going on.
Manningham went to Guildford and thoroughly examined Mary, noting that her breasts were excreting a bit of milk, that there was absolutely nothing weird inside of her vagina, and that her cervix was closed up as per usual for a person who was not in labour. But after Manningham left the room, John Howard ran after him like, “Oh hey, I just delivered these membranes from inside of her! Guess you missed them during your exam!!” And Manningham was like, “Why I never!!” And so he looked at the membranes, which were clearly bits of a hog’s bladder than even still smelled like hog urine. He was like, “bring me a hog’s bladder so I can compare them!” And he did, and they looked just the same. When she heard his accusations of a hoax, Mary started crying because I mean: poor her, honestly. And then Manningham, Ahlers, and St. Andre all agreed to bring Mary back to London for further examinations.
And so onto London! St. Andre was keen for Mary’s next #RabbitBirth to happen publicly so that he could become even more famous, in case anyone had forgotten what his goal was with this whole thing. But in London, Mary was kept under 24/7 surveillance and so there was no opportunity for anyone to bring her a rabbit to put inside of her vagina and THANK GOD!!! THIS POOR WOMAN’S VAGINA!!! Seventeen rabbits! A dead cat with eel inside of it! Repeated invasive examinations from men who DID NOT KNOW WHAT THEY WERE DOING???? MARY TOFT!!!!! God I just want to give her a big hug, and a bag of frozen peas, and let her go off and have a nice bath or something.
But the thing is that Mary was now legitimately sick because NO KIDDING, likely from about 1000 various internal infections. The doctors who tended to her noticed that she went into fits which sort of looked like going into labour, but which were probably involuntary convulsions from VERY SERIOUS INFECTIONS. And then a man was caught trying to smuggle a rabbit into Mary’s room, and he was like, “Her sister-in-law Margaret paid me to do this!” And the jig was up!
Margaret Toft was brought in for questioning and she was like, “Yes, I hired that guy to sneak a rabbit into Mary’s room but it was just for her to eat! Girl was craving rabbit meat!!” And Mary was also brought in for questioning and she agreed the rabbit had just been for her to eat. For two days, Manningham and other men interrogated Mary, trying to get her to admit to the hoax. She refused to give in until finally Manningham was like, “OK, so if you did birth rabbits that means your inside bits are really weird and so we’ll need to literally vivisect and cut you open to look at your uterus” and Mary was like, “OK it’s a hoax!! Please don’t vivisect me!!!”
So it was that on December 7th 1726, Mary dictated her confession. Initially, she claimed that she’d met a stranger on the road who had suggested the scheme as a way for her to “never want as long as I liv’d” (aka, would make her rich). Then, she admitted it had been her in-law’s idea, further implicating John Howard. She was steadfast that she was innocent in all of it and had been a pawn to other peoples’ plans. Based on her confession and all the other evidence, Mary was officially charged with “being a Notorious and Vile Cheat” which apparently was a crime back then, and she was sent to prison.
During her stay in prison, crowds mobbed nearby, hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous Rabbit Queen. It was during this period her time that she had the only contemporaneous portrait made of her, drawn by the artist John Laguerre. In it, she’s posed with a rabbit on her map because Laguerre knew what his audience wanted to see (it’s the first image in this essay, if you’re curious what she looked like).
After three months, Mary was discharged mainly because “being a Notorious and Vile Cheat” wasn’t easy to prosecute. Her health issues now seemingly improved, maybe because she wasn’t having dead animal bits and unwashed men’s hands forced into her vagina on a daily basis, she returned home to Godalming and her husband and two children — and her in-laws, who had put her in this situation to begin with, and who were probably upset with her for implicating them in all the lies. About one year after all of this had occurred, Mary Toft, now aged twenty-six, gave birth to a daughter named Elizabeth.
Though satirists and other writers continued to share the story of the rabbit hoax, Mary herself fades from the public record almost entirely until her death in 1763. Joshua died before her, as upon her death, the parish register recorded her as “Mary Toft, Widow” and included her claim to fame, calling her “the Impostress Rabbitt Breeder.” Although poor women from Surrey weren’t generally written up in London newspapers upon their deaths, Mary Toft’s obituary was included in London newspapers alongside those of aristocrats.
There is a new biography coming out in 2020 called The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England by Karen Harvey. This author has already written several great essays about Toft, one of which I referred to while working on this piece, and I can’t wait to read more of her work on this topic. Harvey is determined to elevate Mary Toft, rather than the male doctors, in her own story.
There is also a fiction book coming out in 2020, called Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer, which sounds intriguing.
Here are some of the works I used to research this piece:
What Mary Toft Felt: Women’s Voices, Pain, Power and the Body by Karen Harvey (History Workshop Journal)
Why Historians Are Reexamining the Case of the Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Sabrina Imbler (Atlas Obscura)
Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England
By Dennis Todd
Lore, episode 45: First Impressions (Lore Podcast)
Mary Toft and Her Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits by Niki Russell (The Public Domain Review)
An Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits by Edward White (The Paris Review)
The Curious Case of Mary Toft (University of Glasgow Special Collections)
The confessions of a rabbit woman and other recently digitized tales from the Osler Library by Mary Yearl (McGill University Library News)
Mary Toft or Tofts (Godalming Musem)
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Lucas Reilly (Mental Floss)
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A note on spelling and also pronunciation: the woman we’re talking about today lived nearly 2,000 years ago so guess what, we’re never going to find out how her name was pronounced or spelled. We also don’t know if this was her name or not as the word bouda is an ancient Briton word for victory so the Romans writing about her may just have been referring to her as “That Woman Who Won A Lot” and maybe never actually knew her name? The most recent references I found suggest that the spelling is probably Boudica, and it’s pronounced like “BOW-dick-ah,” so let’s just go with that. Because you are going to want to REMEMBER HER NAME because she was GLORIOUS.
** Also note, again because of how long ago this all happened, most of these details are alleged and/or potentially but rather than inserting those modifiers in every other word, just mentally pretend they’re perpetually there. Due to the time period involved, everything we know about Boudica is based on two Romans who wrote shortly after she was alive, and later archaeological evidence. But put all these together, and we have enough for a really fucking great story.
So! This all takes place such a very long time ago and as such some scene-setting will likely help orient us all. Boudica was born around the year 30 AD, probably to an aristocratic family from the Roman-occupied city of Camulodunumin in the Southeast bit of modern-day England. Fun fact: Camulodunumin was the first Roman town in the British Isles, and is now modern-day Colchester.
At age eighteen or so, Boudica married King Prasutagus of the Celtic Iceni tribe, making her the new queen of the Iceni. As this was during the period of Roman occupation, Prasutagus had had to make a few shitty bargains. For instance, Iceni was permitted to remain independent of Rome so long as he paid annual fees to the Romans and also supported them politically.
So with all this in mind, chances are that the first part of Boudica’s life would have been that of a Latin-speaking aristocrat, sitting around in a toga, drinking wine, living the Iceni version of Lady Mary’s life in Downton Abbey.
What did she look like? Well, as per the Roman writer Cassius Dio (who never met her, but seems to have read accounts written by people who did):
“In stature she was very tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh; a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden necklace; and she wore a tunic of divers (sic) colours over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch. This was her invariable attire.””
Cassius Dio (c. 155 – c. 235)
Note that her “tawny hair” means it was probably RED which means she was a GINGER and, perhaps, one of the top redheaded women of ALL TIME. As a fellow redhead, I am really really excited about this detail. Also note the description of her “harsh” voice. I’m guessing that what the ancient Roman male author meant is that Boudica spoke in something other than a submissive whisper because guess what: ancient Roman times were incredibly fucking patriarchal and women were to be seen and not heard (and weren’t allowed to own or inherit property, and basically had to hide themselves away all the time; a quite shitty time and place to be a woman), so the fact that Boudica spoke her damn mind was obviously very confusing and disturbing to the Romans. So, the opinion of Cassius Dio — a Roman man who lived decades after Boudica — is perhaps not the most reliable source to know what her voice sounded like.
Although, as we will soon see, Boudica gave several major speeches and yelled a lot during battle so maybe her voice was harsh. WHATEVER. Anyway.
But PLOT TWIST, ancient Briton cultures weren’t at all as patriarchal as the Roman Empire was. While likely not an actual matriarchy, cultures like the Iceni allowed women to own property, to inherit land and titles, and basically to do a whole lot more than Roman women were. Like, you know the ongoing centuries of British Privy Councillors wringing their hands about “but what if there’s no son and a girl inherits the kingdom???” That sort of thing wasn’t an issue among the Iceni, as King Prasutagus had written up in his will that his two daughters would inherit the kingdom once he died. We don’t know how old these girls were, but young enough that they would need a regent to help them out, likely Boudica, continuing on as Queen. Ever the diplomat, Prasutagus also said that the kingdom would be shared with the Roman Emperor Nero, indicating he likely wanted things to continue on with Iceni as a sort of independent suburb of the Roman Empire.
But PLOT TWIST!! The Romans were like, “your will means nothing to us because we’re terrible imperial colonizers BWA HA HA” and they seized control of Iceni. With the Roman Governor of Britain, Suetonius Paulinus, out of town waging war elsewhere, the takeover was messy and brutal and likely led by Roman veterans and others not off with the Governor. And these guys were so shitty to the Iceni: they plundered the palace and the homes of all the Iceni nobility, turned Prasutagus’s relatives into Roman slaves, and stripped all of the Iceni nobles of their property. Claiming that he’d died without paying all of his fees to the Romans, they publicly stripped and flogged Boudica, and raped her young daughters. Sexual violence against women was then — as now — commonly used as an act of war. These acts had specifically malevolent connotations to the Iceni, to whom Boudica (as their Queen) was both a sort of priestess as well as the literal representation of their goddess Andraste on Earth. As such, the Romans had not merely assaulted three women; they had desecrated Iceni’s entire culture and religion.
As per the chronicle of the Roman writer Tacitus, Boudica swore then and there to get revenge against the Romans for this, saying:
“Nothing is safe from Roman pride and arrogance. They will deface the sacred and will deflower our virgins. Win the battle or perish, that is what I, a woman, will do.”
Boudica, as per tacitus (c. 56 – c. 120 AD)
One of the ways that the Romans had been able to so completely take over the British Isles was by taking advantage of the inter-tribal rivalries between the numerous kingdoms. But the thing is, that meant that all of these groups now had a single shared enemy. All they needed was a leader strong enough to unite them; they found this in Boudica.
And that’s just what she did. While her arch-enemy Suetonius Paulinus was out of town attacking some people in Wales, Boudica got to work building her army. First up, she (and the Iceni) joined with their neighboring tribe, the Trinovantes (who were possibly the tribe that she herself was from, originally, so a sensible first alliance.) The Trinovantes had been allied with the Romans for nearly one hundred years, during which time they had come to despise these invaders. The Romans had taken over their capital city, Camulodunum, as a sort of retirement community for its military veterans. Romans had also forced the Trinovantes to build a temple there in honour of the Roman Emperor Claudius (who was now dead, but this was to honour his memory). Basically, this city and its temple symbolized everything that all the non-Romans hated about the Roman occupation. Thus, when Boudica suggested to the Trinovantes that they invade her hometown of Camulodunum, they were like, “WHEN and WHERE and SIGN US ALL THE FUCK UP!!”
And then the rebellion BEGAN! Well actually first, Boudica delivered a scathing speech that got everyone excited and THEN she did something I’ll let the Roman write Cassius Dio explain:
When [Boudica] had finished speaking, she employed a species of divination, letting a hare escape from the fold of her dress; and since it ran on what they considered the auspicious side, the whole multitude shouted with pleasure.
CASSIUS DIO (C. 155 – C. 235)
I’ll explain this a bit. So, in Boudica’s culture, the hare was likely some sort of holy symbol. And the thing about which direction it ran is sort of like Groundhog Day traditions, where an animal’s actions are seen to tell the future. My question is, though, how did she keep the hare calm and quiet inside the folds of her skirts until the exact right time to pop out? Such was the power of Boudica! On to sack and demolish Camulodunum! Follow that hare (?)!
When Boudica’s army arrived at Camulodunum, the Roman army was mostly not even there at the moment as they were off fighting elsewhere. Also, they hadn’t been expecting to be invaded by several tens of thousands of irate Britons, and so the Roman veterans who lived there were entirely unprepared. They sent for help from the Governor, but he didn’t think it was a big deal and left them on their own. And so Boudica & co. DECIMATED the city to the point that archaeologists who’ve examined the site millennia later were like, “Oh shit, this city was ENTIRELY destroyed via burning, like there is a layer of burnt ash, underneath which is Roman items from the year 60 or 61; also look how many dead skeleton bodies there are, all of whom have been utterly BUTCHERED???”. And it wasn’t just human bodies that they decimated; in the course of the battle (or maybe the post-battle victory party), her team decapitated the head from a bronze statue to the Roman Emperor Nero, and kept it with them as a trophy. A trophy for BEST REVENGE BURNING OF YOUR ENEMY’S MAJOR ADMINISTRATIVE CENTRE!!
So, this military guy named Quintus Petillius Cerialis tried to be a hero and take the city back with his own forces but NO WAY, Boudica killed almost all of his forces because SHE WAS NOW ON A ROLL. A ROLL OF KILLING ROMANS!! Word of her military amazingness spread around, and her army grew as she marched with people from all different former warring tribes signing on because they all had a common enemy and they ALL wanted ALL OF THE REVENGE. It’s sort of like how in Forrest Gump when more and more people just start running with Forrest, like the further she marched, the bigger her army became until it was up to something like 100,000 oppressed Britons set on destroying their oppressors.
And Boudica was STILL JUST GETTING STARTED!!! So, modern-day London was back then a 20-year-old Roman commercial/trade centre called Londinium where about 30,000 people lived. When they heard Boudica was en route, the entire population was like PEACE OUT and fled without even attempting to defend the city: such was her reputation. Once again, archaeological evidence revealed that Boudica’s team literally BURNED DOWN THE ENTIRE CITY, torturing and murdering any Romans unlucky enough to have been left behind.
Having now destroyed the two largest Roman settlements, Boudica’s army turned next to the third-largest: Verulamium!! So the thing with this city was that it was run by the Catuvellauni tribe, who hadn’t been enslaved by the Romans but who rather sort of rolled over and let them take over. Boudica’s army continued to grow as they headed towards there, like a snowball rolling down a hill until it becomes a HUGE ARMY THAT’S GOING TO BURN DOWN VERULAMIUM! Taking their cue from the people from Londonium, the people of Verulamium dropped what they were doing and ran away rather than face Boudica’s forces. So, Boudica & co. burned the empty city down — then went off to hunt down, torture, and kill anyone they could find.
The Romans, having now low their three main settlements in Britain, were understandably upset by all of this. Adding to their annoyance was the fact that these wildly successful military campaigns were being run by… a woman. The Romans thought that all the Britons were uncivilized monsters, and they thought that all women were just accessories to more powerful men, so to be outsmarted three times by a British woman??? Was just like: their worst nightmare. Also, slightly related, this was all happening just thirty years after Cleopatra had thoroughly challenged the Romans and just a year or two after the execution of Agrippina The Younger (who was a very interesting and powerful and power-hungry Roman woman I’ll write about another day). So on top of the Romans’ cultural hatred of women, they were especially touchy about it in the year 60 AD. As Cassius Dio would write, decades later: “All this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, a fact that in itself caused them the greatest of shame.”
Determined to end this once and for all, the Romans amassed TEN THOUSAND MEN to face off against Boudica’s non-stop band of rebels. And if you think oh no that’s a lot of Romans, I mean yes it is, but Boudica had by now amassed something like THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND former enslaved Britons fighting on her side. And, rather than sitting around waiting to be attacked, Boudica’s growing army marched right over to meet the Romans for a battle. But little did she know: leading the Roman forces that day was the same guy who had been out of town when she started this campaign, the same guy who had underestimated her and refused to send help to the people of Camulodunumin: British Governor Suetonius Paulinus!
The site of this battle is unknown, but we do know that beforehand Boudica rode around in a chariot with her two daughters (Warrior Princesses!!), hyping up her HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF FIGHTERS with an amazing speech delivered in her “harsh” voice. As recorded by the Roman chronicler Tacitus, it included this line among other highlights:
“We British are used to women commanders in war… But I am not fighting for my kingdom and wealth now. I am fighting as an ordinary person for my lost freedom, my bruised body, and my outraged daughters… You will win this battle, or perish. That is what I, a woman, plan to do! Let the men live in slavery if they will.”
Boudica, as per Tacitus (c. 56 – c. 120 AD)
And the battle BEGAN! Boudica’s team was so certain of victory, they’d brought along their families and children to watch all the butchery for a fun family day out.
But the thing is that the Roman army was a highly-skilled, highly trained war machine and they all had armour and state-of-the-art weapons. Boudica’s team had a numbers advantage, rage, and lots of passion — but they all had their own fighting style, most of which didn’t include armour. So, despite being massively outnumbered, the Romans pulled it out to the point that many of Boudica’s allies began to flee in an attempt to escape. But all the tents they had set up for their families to watch got in their way, and so they weren’t able to escape, and the Romans basically slaughtered everyone. The precise body count is obviously not known, but it may have been something like 80,000 dead Britons and 400 dead Romans. The rebellion was over.
In the aftermath of this stunning loss, the lands of the Iceni and Trinovantes were destroyed by the Romans. And so many of the tribes had been busy fighting these battles that they hadn’t had time to plant seeds for the growing season, meaning that many of those who hadn’t died in the battle then died in a famine. Boudica’s daughters vanish from the historical record, and the Queen herself seems to have died shortly after losing to the Romans. She may have fallen ill; another record suggests she poisoned herself to deny her enemies the pleasure of killing her. The Romans would last until 410, with many of their structures becoming crucial elements in later battles between Saxon kingdoms — including battles fought by later warrior Queen Aethelflaed.
Much of what we know about Boudica comes from the writing of the Roman writer Tacitus, whose father-in-law Agricola had been Governor of Britain a decade after Boudica’s revolt. These writings were unearthed during the sixteenth-century reign of Queen Elizabeth I, great timing as she was also a redheaded Queen who wanted to reassure her patriarchal society that yes actually, she was capable of doing this.
Boudica’s rise to prominence as a British folk here came during the reign of another powerful female royal, Queen Victoria. Parallels were drawn between the two women, largely because the named Boudica and Victoria both mean victory. Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, commissioned the sculptor Thomas Thornycroft to create a bronze statue of Boudica in her chariot with her two daughters. This piece, titled Boadicea and her Daughters, was erected in London on Westminster Bridge near the Houses of Parliament, which is all incredibly interesting and let’s think about that. Boudica, the famous anti-imperialist/anti-colonial rebel, became identified with Victoria, the head of another imperialist Empire. And perhaps most pointedly, this gorgeous statue now stands guard over London, the new version of Londonium, the city she had so famously and so thoroughly decimated in her quest for liberation.
I learned a lot about Boudica from the Rex Factor special episode dedicated to her.
The 2016 History Channel series Barbarians Rising was a docu-series tracing the entirety of the Roman occupation of Britain and includes an episode on Boudica (which is where I got the images used in this essay). Here’s a clip so you can get a taste of Kirsty Mitchell’s wonderful portrayal.
The 2003 film Warrior Queen stars Alex Kingston as Boudica and a very young Emily Blunt (in her film debut!) as one of her daughters.
The following websites were also of great help in preparing this essay:
Boudica: scourge of the Roman empire (BBC History Extra)
Boudicca: Meet the Warrior Queen Who Challenged Rome (Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls)
Queen Boudica, A Life in Legend (History Today)
Boudica the warrior queen (aeon.co)
Who was Boudica (History.com)
Boudica (Historic-UK.com)
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Important note: there were quite a few women named Mary running around Western Europe in the 16th century, so let’s all just make sure we know which one we’re talking about here. This Mary Tudor is not England’s Queen “Bloody” Mary I, nor is she Mary Queen of Scots. Today’s heroine is Mary Tudor, youngest surviving child of Elizabeth of York and Henry VII, baby sister to both Margaret Tudor and Henry VIII; she later attained the titles of Queen of France and then, Duchess of Suffolk. Just like her siblings, Mary had a clearly passionate and stubborn nature which seems to always mean a life that’s filled with twists and turns. Yet, unlike either Henry or Margaret, Mary’s story has actually a nearly happy ending. So let’s dig in!
Mary Tudor was born in March 1496. Literally, that is all we know about her birthday so nobody can do up her astrological chart (BUT her energy is VERY Aries so I personally think she was born in the latter part of the month). Why didn’t anyone record her birthday? Probably partly because people didn’t super care about birthdates back then, and partly because daughters didn’t matter as much as sons. Mary was the fourth child and second daughter born to the King and Queen. She was ten years younger than her eldest brother Arthur, seven years younger than her sister Margaret, and five years younger than her brother Henry.
When Mary was around five years old, the teenage Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon arrived to marry Arthur (watch The Spanish Princess to learn more about how that all turned out for all involved). Catherine, who had grown up with several sisters of her own, got along very well with her new sisters-in-law. For a few months, the court was filled with the youthful energy of this whole crowd of royals: Arthur, Catherine, Margaret, Henry, and little Mary. A sort of Tudor-era Von Trapp scenario. But then a series of tragedies would affect and then separate them, because: Tudor era.
First, Mary’s eldest brother Arthur died, which made Henry the new heir to the throne (much to the surprise of everyone, particularly Henry). Shortly after that, Mary’s mother died from complications of childbirth; the baby she’d delivered, a girl named Katherine, died days later. And just after that, Mary’s older sister Margaret was sent away to marry the King of Scots. Henry was sent away to learn how to be the next King; Catherine of Aragon was put on sort of house arrest while everyone figured out what to do with her; and six-year-old Mary was sent off to live in her own household away from all the others.
Perhaps from the emotional toll of all of the above, or maybe from just the general health issues of living in 16th-century England, Mary seems to have been frequently ill as a child. But she overcame whatever had afflicted her, and was trained up in all the skills required of a young Princess: French, Latin, music, dancing, and embroidery. By the time she was a teenager, she was described as both lovely in personality as well as in looks. She was said to be one of the most beautiful princesses in Europe and, while there is some doubt as to what she looked like, we do know reasonably well she shared the same dark red hair as many of the other women of the Tudor dynasty, along with their fair complexion and light eyes.
When she was ten years old, Mary was brought out to dance and play the lute and clavichord for a visiting delegation from Castile, in a sort of audition to see if they’d agree to betroth her to their son. She clearly did well, as a betrothal was soon arranged between her and Charles of Castile (the son of Juana “The Mad” of Castile). But, shortly after this all got sorted, Mary’s father Henry VII passed away and her brother Henry turned into King Henry “yes that one” VIII. He married his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, and Mary was delighted to get to hang out with her friend again. Then, in 1513, Henry decided to toss out the Castilian marriage contract because he’d found a more advantageous match for Mary, because the whole point of her existence was as a pawn in a marriage scheme to cement some alliance or another for England.
Eventually Henry VIII figured out who would be the most convenient person for Mary to marry, and that was the fifty-three-year-old, gout-ridden French King, Louis XII. Just so we’re keeping track, although Mary has by now lived through so much trauma you’d think she was like thirty-five, she was at this point seventeen years old. And more than that, she was also already in love with someone more age appropriate, and that was her brother’s BFF Charles Brandon (played by Henry Cavill on The Tudors, so we all have a visual in mind for how and why Mary was so determined to get a ring on it). She had always been close with Henry, and explained to him that she wanted to marry for love to a man who wasn’t a royal. And Henry, as much as he adored his little sister, was like, “Marry for love? LOL! That’s not how any of this works for royals like you and me!” (It was still a few decades away from him inventing a whole new national religion so he, himself, could marry for love.)
Mary refused to accept this without a fight. Henry refused to back down. They were both smart and savvy young people who also, at this point, still very much respected and loved one another. Eventually, Mary was able to leverage her brother’s affection for her by getting him to agree that, basically, if Mary agreed to marry the French King, she’d be allowed to pick her own next husband after the French King died. As he was fifty-three and quite ill and it was the sixteenth century, she was likely banking on the hope that he’d die within the next few years. And if that meant she’d have to wait a year or two or ten, she was willing to put up with that if it meant she could choose her next husband, who would be Henry Cavill Dreamboat Charles Brandon.
And so it was that, by now eighteen (the negotiations with Henry took awhile), Mary sailed across the English Channel to marry this man who really, really didn’t want to be married to. NOTE: she was accompanied on this journey by an entourage of ladies in waiting that included a certain ANNE BOLEYN (this was before Henry and Anne were romantically involved, but I love a foreshadowing moment). And something clearly happened on this journey to make Mary not the biggest fan of Anne Boleyn, so file that away for later. Mary loves her brother Henry, and loves her sister-in-law Catherine of Aragon, but is not a fan of this Anne Boleyn person.
The most thorough description of Mary’s appearance and personality comes from the record of her arrival in France. She was described as being both gorgeous as well as so graceful and well-mannered that it took your breath away. “She is a paradise,” wrote one chronicler of the effect she had on everyone; Louis XII described her as a “nymph from heaven.” Her personality and spirits seem to be buoyant, cheery and a whole lot of fun, as she is known to have enthusiastically taken part in dances and performances at her brother’s court. When she first met Louis XII, as much as she didn’t want to marry him at all, she apparently blew him a kiss. She may not have wanted to go there at all, but she wasn’t going to let anyone say she didn’t do her best to make a good impression. Mary Tudor, taking one for the team.
BUT THEN, less than three months after this wedding, Louis suddenly DIED!! TWIST!!
Now, his various gout-related health problems were likely what killed him. But Mary was so young and gorgeous, and the marriage so short, that rumours began to spread that the teenage Queen was so sexually voracious that she had, in effect, fucked him to death. If you’ve seen these episodes of The Tudors, you will also know that some people thought/think that Mary intentionally killed him by smothering him with a pillow or that sort of thing. And maybe she did, we’ll never know (and if she did, she hid the murder well because she was clever). Whatever the reason, Mary was now free to marry whoever she wanted, as per her agreement with her brother! And happily for her too, she hadn’t gotten pregnant with the French King’s heirs, so she could truly just cut ties and fly back to England unencumbered.
But guess what: none of the men who controlled her life had expected her to be widowed so quickly. The French royals were keen to find her a new French husband so they could maintain this precarious English/French alliance. Henry was also keen to marry her off to someone French for alliance-based reasons. The English courtiers didn’t want Charles Brandon to get to marry her because then he’d get even more influence in court than the amount he already got as Henry’s BFF. So, although Mary and Charles were both fully on board the plan to get married, nobody else was about to let them follow their hearts.
On top of all that, the French custom at the time was for royal widows to stay indoors for a month following the death of their husbands. So, while all these men in two countries were scheming what to do with her, Mary herself was pacing around a room and not sleeping and going increasingly unhinged.
BUT THEN, for reasons unknown, Henry VIII sent his BFF Charles Brandon to personally escort Mary back across the English Channel. Why did he pick Charles? Was it because he knew they loved each other, and wanted them to get together? NO. Henry assumed that Charles — as his #1 best bro — was the most trustworthy person to care for Mary during this trip. He made Charles promise not to do anything silly like marry Mary, and Charles agreed and they probably did a fancy handshake, etc., to seal the deal. But all of Charles’s promises meant nothing when Mary came bursting out of her month-long confinement, saw him looking so gorgeous, and was like, “WE NEED TO ELOPE LIKE RIGHT NOW. COME ON!” Who was he to turn her down?
And so, Mary Tudor married Charles Brandon in semi-secret (!!!) on March 3, 1515 in front of a ten guests including the new French King. So like: not that secret. But the thing is that this was officially treason, because English law stated that the King had to consent to all royal marriages. Mary and Charles were both hoping that Henry’s well-known soft heart and affection for both of them would mean he wouldn’t be too mad about all this. And so they sailed back to England as man and wife on an English Channel honeymoon!
But to the surprise of literally no one, Henry was SO ANGRY (despite the fact that it was his own fault for sending Charles to France, like what did he think would happen??). Henry’s scheming advisers, who all hated Charles Brandon, were like, “What if you… KILL CHARLES???”,. But Henry’s affection for both his BFF and his darling sister superseded everything and he chose to just punish them by making them pay a pretty small monetary fine, and letting them do so in small annual installments. He also commanded that Mary repay him her dowry from the marriage to Louis XII. Mary and Charles were like, “DEAL!” and Henry was like, “Aww, I can’t stay mad at you two,” and group hug, everything was fine between them all once more. So Mary and Charles had a second, non-secret wedding in England, with Henry VIII among the happy guests. The next year, Henry named his new baby daughter Mary, in honour of his sister, who he was totally no longer mad at.
And so, now aged nineteen (still so young!!), Mary was ready to begin her new life as Mrs. Charles Brandon — no longer a Queen, and effectively not really a Princess anymore either. She was now, by marriage, the Duchess of Suffolk. The first nineteen years of her life had been full chaos, so who can blame her for just wanting to chill out in the country with her new family for the rest of her life? Charles came with a built-in family too, as he was already raising two daughters from his first marriage. Mary, despite being literally a teenager herself, threw herself into being a doting stepmother to these girls, who were named Mary and Anne because those are the only names of any girls in this story. Mary also got to work popping out children to carry on the Brandon surname, giving birth to two sons and two daughters (and the DAUGHTERS become SUPER IMPORTANT TO WORLD HISTORY, but we’ll get to that in a bit).
But, as Philippa Gregory has shown us numerous times, Tudor lives never end happily. Like, you knew another twist was on its was eventually, right? First of all, in 1528, Mary was one of many many many people in England to come down with a gruesome disease called the sweating sickness. At around the same time, Henry got to work trying to convince the Pope to get his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled so he could marry Anne Boleyn. You might recall that Mary was a fan of Catherine and hated Anne Boleyn, so she didn’t support her brother in this. And also, remember how Henry was like, “Mary, you can’t marry for love! That’s not what royals do!”? I hope Mary was like, “Henry you HYPOCRITE!” because he truly was. And she had never been one to keep her feelings to herself, so she told Henry she opposed him, and told everyone else she hated Anne Boleyn, and that led to the next big twist.
In 1532, one of Charles Brandon’s aides was (allegedly) murdered by Anne Boleyn’s uncle and relatives. And why was he killed? Oh just in retaliation for all of Mary’s shit-talking about Anne Boleyn. This poor aide was killed to send Mary a message, which was, “Be nicer to your brother.” Mary, true to character, refused to stop being mad at Henry. The two siblings never recovered the close sibling bond they used to share.
And then, very sadly, Mary died one year later from — probably — ongoing issues related to the sweating sickness. She was just thirty-seven years old. As befitted the Dowager Queen of France/the sister of the English King/daughter of the previous English King, her funeral was a huge affair that lasted for two days. Highlights included a funeral procession in which her hearse, pulled by six horses, was accompanied by 100 torchbearers. Mary’s older daughter Frances Brandon was chief mourner, although her her step-daughters Anne and Mary apparently pushed their way to the front of the procession just as the coffin was lowered into its crypt, which annoyed everyone and makes me picture those two now like Cinderella’s step-sisters, which makes me like them even more.
Mary’s #1 legacy was just being a strong, independent woman who defied the King to marry for love. In that, she is a timeless icon and the true heir to her grandmother, Elizabeth Woodville (and also set the template for several of her descendants, including Lady Mary Grey). Two of Mary’s children survived infancy, her daughters Frances and Eleanor Brandon (her two sons died in infancy or early childhood). And it’s these two girls through whom Mary’s major legacy to history comes about.
So the thing is, when Henry VIII died, his son Edward VI took over from him as a boy king. But when Edward fell ill without having had any children of his own, all the courtiers began panicking over who would be the next monarch. Henry VIII’s next available child to take over was Mary I, who was Catholic. The Protestant government didn’t want her to take over at all, so they started looking back on the Tudor family tree for other candidates. Henry’s sister Margaret (remember she was shipped off to marry the King of Scots?) had some children, but they were Scottish and also Catholic, and nobody wanted them to take over (** this is where Mary, Queen of Scots‘s claim to the English throne comes from). But it’s from Mary’s descendants that we get to the whole Lady Jane Grey scenario.
Here’s how that happened. Mary’s older daughter Frances Brandon grew up, got married to a man named Henry Grey with whom she had three daughters: Lady Jane Grey, Lady Katherine Grey, and Lady Mary Grey. Fairly famously, Jane was named heir to Edward VI, reigned for nine days, and wound up executed. Katherine Grey had two sons, and if you follow that family tree all the way down, you wind up with Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon aka Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mum! Meaning that today’s British royal family are all descended from Mary Tudor’s secret sexy marriage to Charles Brandon.
Mary Tudor’s second daughter, Eleanor Brandon married a man named Henry Clifford (literally, every man in this story is named Henry) and they had a daughter named Margaret Clifford. Margaret Clifford married a man named Henry Stanley and THEY had a son named FERDINANDO STANLEY, the father of LADY ANNE STANLEY, that’s right, it’s from Mary Tudor’s other daughter that the entire Stanley family claim to the throne comes from! Now, Anne Stanley’s saga is sad in a different way from that of the Grey sisters, but also hinges on her having made a terrible and ill-advised marriage. So at this point it’s starting to feel almost like a Tudor curse is at work???
Literally every Tudor woman was fascinating and stubborn and fiery and super smart and where did they all come from? Oh that’s right, mothers of the Tudor dynasty, Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville. Those are some STRONG genes.
There aren’t many biographies of Mary Tudor. For this essay, I referred to the non-fiction works The Sisters of Henry VIII: The Tumultuous Lives of Margaret of Scotland and Mary of France by Maria Perry and Henry VIII: King and Court by Alison Weir.
On The Tudors TV series, Henry VIII’s sisters Mary and Margaret are combined into a single character named Margaret but who basically does everything Mary did — marry the old French King, then run off with Charles Brandon, and eventually die of the sweating sickness. She’s played there with great passion by Gabrielle Anwar.
In the first series of The Spanish Princess, Mary Tudor is portrayed by a young actress named Isla Merrick-Lawless.
Otherwise, Mary Tudor’s most frequent cultural portrayal is as the heroine of historical fiction novels, most recently in Three Sisters, Three Queens by Philippa Gregory and Mary, Tudor Princess by Tony Riches.
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