Every Mans proper Mansion House and Home, being the Theater of his Hospitality, the Seate of Selfe-fruition, the Comfortablest part of his owne Life, the Noblest of his Sonnes Inheritance, a kinde of priuate Princedome . . .
—Sir Henry Wotton, Elements of Architecture [1624], p.82
1Despite the popular fame of Mary I and Elizabeth I, their political lives before acceding to the throne have received surprisingly little attention from scholars.1 This study is intended to shed some light on an aspect of the Tudor queens, which has not yet been the focus of a work based on original published research: their preaccession political careers. These grew out of their roles as heads of their own independent households. Their political activity, and the household context that made it possible, has in turn the potential to add new complexities to the understanding of the daily practice of politics at the elite level in Tudor England. I will argue here that Mary and Elizabeth eventually were able to wield sovereign power not only because they were the legal heirs to the throne (through the 1544 Act of Succession) but also because they were heads of their own independent households.
2This research is not based on some previously undiscovered cache of documents that historians have overlooked. It is both the blessing and curse of the field that many of the records of the English past have not only been preserved, but also calendared and even transcribed in reliable printed editions. The benefits of this are obvious, but the downside is that a scholar can rarely justify their work on the basis of making a new discovery of previously unconsulted sources. This study therefore uses sources that are both widely available and consulted with reasonable frequency by scholars.
3The contribution made by this study is to read these sources—state papers, household instructions and accounts—with a sensibility different from that usually found in works originally conceived on a grander scale. The more limited scope of this study allowed me to privilege seemingly "dry" or "objective" documents like property transactions, patent letters, wills, and household accounts. Because these documents were central to the topics at issue in this project, they have been scrutinized here as if they were novels containing authorial intent, plots, and foreshadowings—in short, all the elements present in more obviously narrative documents such as letters and prescriptive literature. Sources of this latter kind have also been used here. It is the connections between these apparently disparate and unrelated sources that have linked this initially small study of Mary's and Elizabeth's preaccession households to the wider political and conceptual context of mid-Tudor England.
4The cross-comparison of sources as outlined earlier, the recognition of embedded agendas within them, and the paleographic analysis conducted here has given this study relevance to discussions on the separation of the private and public spheres as they related to the household; the political opportunities available to elite women heading or managing their households; the articulation of patron-client relationships within the informal domestic household; and the impact of these relationships on the more formalized patriarchal political network that governed Tudor England.
5Establishing the connections between property documents and more traditional sources has the further benefit of reintegrating Mary and Elizabeth Tudor as women of their time.2 True, as inheriting females, the Tudor princesses are "disproportionately visible in contemporary documents," but this is something they have in common with other contemporary landed women of the period.3 By contrast, their status as single unmarried women living in their own households ensured that their experience was similar to that of many contemporary women, especially non-elite women.4 They need no longer be discussed primarily as "exceptions" whose experience was separate and remote from that of other women both elite and non-elite of sixteenth-century England. Certainly, as royalty, the Tudor princesses shared more cultural assumptions with others of elite status than with those lower down the social scale. But, as I will argue, Mary and Elizabeth headed their own households in much the same way as widows from various economic backgrounds during this period. Just as the wife of a nobleman was in reality the source of local patronage, especially if she was a propertied heiress in her own right, so too did the Tudor princesses acquire political clients by exploiting the patronage opportunities attendant on their roles as substantial property owners.
6The household here serves as a prism through which Mary and Elizabeth are viewed not simply as belonging to the elite class but also as women who, in common with other elite women, were able to exploit one of the crevices in a formally patriarchal system: the authoritarian role of the high-born housewife in an elite household. The hierarchical status of the Tudor princesses merely allowed them to exploit certain fissures—in particular, the resources of the household—to their fullest potential.
7One of the things that the Tudor princesses shared with many of their contemporaries, both female and male, was that they presided over their own households. What set the princesses apart was that they were able to exercise authority formally, as did male householders, and also informally in ways similar to female household managers. The terms "formal" and "informal" are useful but fail to convey the full complexities. The authority of an elite noblewoman over her servants, tenants, and neighbors was openly and explicitly acknowledged. To apply the term "informal" to the authority of an elite housewife should not be read as an argument that the noblewoman's authority was merely tolerated as a practical necessity. Even in the harshest prescriptive literature regarding the subordination of a wife to her husband, there was no suggestion that a male servant had any grounds for evincing superiority to his female mistress. By the same token, a man's "formal" and legal headship of his household did not necessarily translate into greater authority over his servants than that exercised by his wife. A complex interplay of personalities, economics, and kinship ties usually determined whether it was the husband or the wife who commanded greater respect and obedience from servants, tenants, and neighbors.
8The complexities involved in applying the terms "formal" and "informal" should not detract from the overall insight provided by examining the preaccession households of the Tudor princesses. In studying the household as an abstract political concept (as it often appeared in Tudor prescriptive literature5) and the related connection between political agency and property ownership, it has become clear that Mary and Elizabeth were able to exercise political patronage before their accessions by virtue of their positions as heads of households.
9Indeed, this study presents evidence demonstrating that Mary and Elizabeth Tudor lived more like other women of their time than any English princesses before or since. The only female predecessor in the royal family who headed her own household was their paternal great-grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort.6 Mary's and Elizabeth's ambiguous status as potential future sovereigns constrained both their father and brother to treat them more as if they were noble (male) cousins rather than as their dependent female royal relations. Neither Mary nor Elizabeth shared the usual lot of an English princess, which was to live as a dependent of the monarch until marriage. Rather, Mary and Elizabeth lived as other elite women lived in Tudor England, each presiding over her respective household, in possession of valuable property both real and moveable, and dispensing the patronage attendant on those properties in their possession.
10That wealthy/propertied women were able to circumvent some of the more formalized strictures of patriarchy—exclusion from educational, political (except the crown), and judicial offices and institutions—is not an insight original to this study.7 Barbara Harris's overview of elite women's ability to exercise agency in their political and professional lives due to their wealth and social status focused on the political and public role of elite households.8 This study follows this model by exploring the political and public roles Mary and Elizabeth enjoyed before their accessions by virtue of their preaccession status as householders and property owners.
11This study argues that Mary and Elizabeth exploited the resources of their independent households—display, corporate identity, and property—to establish themselves as viable authority figures before their accessions. When Princesses Mary and Elizabeth received visitors, such as foreign ambassadors or their noble friends, they did so in their own manor residences, the furnishings of which were designed to impress onlookers with their wealth and political status. As heads of household, Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth could draw on the loyalty of their staff, who were sworn to their service.9 These servants provided each princess with a corps of dedicated agents who helped to create readily identifiable public personas for their mistress. As property owners, princesses Mary and Elizabeth could dispense offices on their estates, collect revenues so they could patronize scholars, and secure political clients through grants of reversionary interests in their lands. In times of crisis, princesses Mary and Elizabeth could call on their tenants, neighbors, and clients—their affinity—to supply them with military arms, men, and munitions. This enabled Princess Mary to literally enforce her accession in 1553 when it was challenged on behalf of Lady Jane Grey.10 Mindful of this, Princess Elizabeth called out her affinity in 1558 in case her accession should encounter a similar challenge.
12In a society in which women were excluded from all major institutions of power—government, education, the church—the consecutive accessions of two women to the sovereign power calls for explanation. I argue that the female succession was not made inevitable by Henry VIII's failure to sire more than one son. Normally, women who were the last representatives of a patriline, as were Mary and Elizabeth, would be quickly married off in the hopes that such female heirs would transmit their blood claims to their male offspring. Although common law (which governed the royal succession) allowed women to inherit real property and, for royalty, sovereign power, in practice heiresses were usually married off with their inheritance rights exercised by their husbands and male offspring.11 This was the strategy most often employed by the English polity to avoid the spectacle of a female sovereign in a patriarchal state. It was more common for royal women, if they were, like Mary and Elizabeth, the last survivors of the direct patriline, to transmit their claims to the throne rather than to inherit.
13In the twelfth century, Henry I's only surviving adult child Matilda was unable to repel a challenge to her rightfully inherited claim to the throne from her male cousin. Eventually, her son Henry Plantagenet was able to accede to the English throne as Henry II by asserting the claim he inherited through his mother. Later, within the Tudor family, the same pattern was repeated: female heirs transmitted their blood claims to the throne to their offspring, but did not assert those claims in their own right. Margaret Beaufort transmitted her claims to her son Henry VII, the first Tudor king. His queen, Elizabeth of York, was the Yorkist heir to the throne, being the eldest surviving child of her father Edward IV. Instead of asserting her claim to the throne on her own behalf, she allowed it instead to bolster the far more dubious blood claim of her husband, Henry VII; in due course, her claim passed to her offspring, including her son Henry VIII.
14The existence of any unmarried female heir with a strong claim to the throne presented an implicit threat to the patriarchal status quo. One means of neutralizing this threat was to arrange a suitable marriage for the heiress at the earliest opportunity, so that she could transmit her blood claims to her male offspring—though of course this carried as its price the acceptance of the dynastic change that must inevitably follow such a marriage. Initially, this was the expectation behind the negotiations for Princess Mary's hand in marriage throughout the 1520s. Later, when Edward VI attempted to disinherit Mary, his first thought was to designate his Protestant cousins, Frances or (her daughter) Jane Grey as transmitters of blood claims by nominating the male offspring of these women as his heir. He was eventually forced to designate Jane Grey herself as his heir only when the increasingly rapid decline in his health forced him to recognize that in all probability he would not survive to see the birth of any male heir.12
15Not overburdened by a talent for forward planning, Henry VIII failed to arrange marriages for his daughters and so they remained single heiresses-at-law during his reign and that of his son, Edward VI. Nevertheless, Mary and Elizabeth still faced many challenges before they could accede to the throne. I contend that their elite households allowed Mary and Elizabeth to accede to the throne in spite of rival male claimants, their own statutory illegitimacy, their gender-based subordination, and the hostility of incumbent monarchs like Henry VIII and Edward VI. Although it has been largely overlooked until recently, one of the most important factors in their respective successions to the English throne was that they took advantage of the opportunities available to them as heads of household and landed magnates. This allowed Mary and Elizabeth to supplement their blood claims with the resources of their elite households.
16In 1998, when I first began to research the political significance of the preaccession households of Mary and Elizabeth, few scholars had published any serious work involving original research on the topic. David Loades's 1989 biography of Mary Tudor stood alone as the major study of Mary that paid any attention to Mary's preaccession household. Since the completion of my own study (as a Ph.D. dissertation) in 2002, there is now a small but growing interest in the households of the Tudor princesses.13 This study will contribute to the growing consensus that Mary and Elizabeth acquired important political status before their accessions, and that they did so specifically as heads of their respective households.
^topTerms and Conditions
17The term "household" as used here will serve a dual function both abstract and real. In sixteenth-century England, the term designated an economic and political abstraction.14 Conceptually, a "household" referred to the actual collection of people living together as well as the material contents therein, such as furniture. According to Natasha Korda, the material culture of the household assumed greater importance in the sixteenth century because of "England's rapidly expanding market of consumer goods" and this was reflected in increasingly popular linguistic and legal designation of "household stuffe."15
18Although due attention will be paid to the material culture of Mary's and Elizabeth's households (see Chapter 1), this study concentrates mainly on the personal and economic relationships that constituted a household: the head of household (householder) and their dependents (kin, servants, tenants). This collection of people was recognized at law and for tax purposes as a "household" no matter the place of residence.16 A "household" could move from place to place, residential manor to manor, and still remain a household. Sixteenth-century England recognized a further abstraction of the concept in that one person could still be considered a member of another's household even though the two lived in entirely separate dwellings. This earlier concept of "household" incorporated those who were nonresident but still associated with the head of household either through ties of economic dependency or clientage based on service, proximity, lineage, and so on.17
19Therefore, in this study, "household" refers to a collection of people who were identified in contemporary documents—such as accounts and legal documents—as members of a particular social unit, whether or not such persons shared a residence with the head of household. This is fairly straightforward. Further clarification of relationships of nonresident clients of the householder often becomes rather more complicated. In the case of Elizabeth's household, for instance, Foxe related a story involving a grocer, who was not resident in Elizabeth's household, but identified himself as a member of her household and in service to Elizabeth as his "mistress."18 This was a household relationship based on economics and patronage and is not confirmed in any other source. Yet another client of Elizabeth's, one who received from her a reversionary interest in some of her lands, was Edward Fiennes, Lord Clinton. He clearly was not a member of Elizabeth's household but, rather, presided over his own independent establishment.
20Because this study is concerned primarily with the relationships among members of these royal households, rather than with the composition of the households at any given time, it adopts a conservative approach in assigning people as members of either Mary's or Elizabeth's preaccession household. Only when the evidence explicitly indicates their membership, especially their resident membership, are people be listed under the rubric of one or the other's household. So Robert Rochester is listed here as a member of Mary's household because he is listed as her treasurer or "comptroller" in state documents and he appears regularly in her privy chamber accounts, whereas Robert Wingfield, whose Vita Mariae indicates more than a passing familiarity with Mary's household staff, is not claimed even as a nonresident member of her household because there are no contemporary documents that identify him as such.
21Another important term, one that bears directly on how "household" is discussed here, is "corporate." It is used here to characterize the relationships within a household, particularly that between the head/manager of household and the other members of the household. The aim here is to adhere as closely as possible to sixteenth-century usage. Thus, the term is used here to signify a "corporate body" similar to Tudor discussions of the "body politic"; it designates a "persona" created by individual members of the household and represented as a corporate individual by the head of household.
22This conceptualization of the household as a corporation is the leitmotif of this project. The household itself is presented as an organizing concept: a deployment of people and resources to further not just the interests of the householder but also the interests of the household itself as a larger collective body. This sense of corporate identity expressed itself visually in the liveries and badges worn by the household staff, marking them as the loyal servants of the householder. Even common household tools, like masking irons, carried the insignia of the head of household.19
23The preaccession households of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor were "corporate" bodies in the sense that the household as a whole was greater than the sum of its parts—that is, of the individuals who composed it. The head of household received formal and ceremonial oaths of loyalty from members of their household and these individual members often identified with the aspirations and views of the head of household. This is not to argue that the head of household invariably exercised sole agency in shaping the identity and setting the agenda of the corporate household body. In the case of Elizabeth's household, her staff formed a conception of the corporate body that did not always agree with Elizabeth's representations of herself or her household.
24These households are discussed here as "corporate bodies" because the individual members identified with a common goal even if they did not always work in harmony toward that goal. This study demonstrates that while internal conflicts could originate from causes entirely within the household, the most serious conflicts often resulted from external political crises that threatened to undermine the existence of the household itself and certainly destabilized the political status of the nominal head of household. Mary's and Elizabeth's elite households were "corporate bodies" in the same sense conveyed by contemporary usage of the term "body politic": a collection of individual members subordinated to the authority of the head but necessary to the continued existence of the body as a whole.20
25Two other terms are relevant here: "affinity" and "family." Affinity, as understood in sixteenth-century England, meant the tenants and neighbors or clients of a landowner.21 This affinity consisted in part of informal "retainers." These were neighbors and friends of a landlord who behaved as if they were formally sworn to the military service of the landlord. After 1547, the Tudor princesses became significant property owners; as such, they were also regional patrons who held many clerical and local offices in their gift. Additionally, regional magnates—as Mary and Elizabeth were from 1547 until 1558—could secure local clients by awarding reversionary grants in their lands. In return for this patronage, magnates expected their clients, tenants, and neighbors—their "affinities"—to support them with men, arms, and money whenever the need should arise. Thus, when Princess Mary called out her affinity to take the throne by force during the succession crisis in 1553, those who responded behaved as if they were her sworn retainers.22 Nevertheless, they acted in the capacity as members of her "affinity" in providing military service when requested by the princess as their neighbor and patron.
26The other term that needs to be clarified here is "family"; its modern usage is at considerable variance with that in sixteenth-century England and the early modern period in general.23 In the Tudor period, "family" did not mean blood relations as it (mostly) does today but, rather, those who lived together in one household.24 The head of household would refer equally to live-in relatives and servants living under his roof as his "family." Blood relations not living in the household were termed "kin" or, more usually, in a generic usage, as "cousin." Indeed, in sixteenth century usage, the terms "family" and "household" were largely interchangeable. The domestic servant was "family," whereas the relative was "kin." Today householders would not refer to their servants (living with them or nonresident) as "family", but a sixteenth-century householder would have done so. This study follows the sixteenth-century usage of both these terms; to minimize confusion, however, "family" is used only when necessary.
^topOverview
27This study presents evidence demonstrating that Mary and Elizabeth exploited the resources of their elite households, most especially those concerning display, corporate identity, and property, in order to take full advantage of the political status inherent in their preaccession positions as heads of household. Therefore, Chapter 1 concentrates on "display" with an examination of the material culture of the preaccession households of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. This chapter discusses the connection between material display and political status.
28Henry VIII regulated the quality and quantity of the material resources of Mary's and Elizabeth's childhood households (also that of his son Prince Edward) to indicate publicly which of his three children was his preferred heir. Domestic nobility and foreign emissaries judged the political status of a princely householder by the quality of hospitality offered, which itself was determined by the quality of the material goods within the household. After the death of Henry VIII, the princesses were able to assume full control in furnishing their households. Both Mary and Elizabeth demonstrated that they had learned the value of the relationship between political status and its outward display by deliberately selecting textiles from Henry VIII's Inventory, which underscored the history and benefits of female rule.
29Chapter 2 traces the development of the distinct court cultures of the princesses' households. This chapter focuses on the interaction between the princesses and their household officers. The evidence is shown to indicate that Princess Mary's household was an expression of her will; her staff rendered unquestioning loyalty and she ruled absolutely. In contrast, Princess Elizabeth's household staff treated their young mistress with a mixture of parental indulgence and dominance. She, in turn, relied on her household staff for emotional and political support. Both households exhibited strong corporate identities which provided the princesses with dedicated followings. At times of political crisis, princesses Mary and Elizabeth relied on the efforts of their household staffs to shield them from blame and to publicize their political and religious agendas.
30Chapter 3 goes on to examine the princesses' careers as property owners. Land acquisition was the preferred method for consolidating political and social power amongst the elite in sixteenth-century England. Land was the currency of patron-client exchanges. By considering princesses Mary and Elizabeth as landowners, this study restores to them their full participation in this traditional form of political maneuvering.
31To a certain extent, this move to situate Mary and Elizabeth within the same sociopolitical context as other contemporary elite women runs counter to current trends within feminist scholarship. It is now considered more useful and historically valid to emphasize the economic and social differences between women in the past.25 This is a trend that I wholeheartedly support. It is not the intent of this study to generalize about the experiences of all women in Tudor England by claiming that Mary and Elizabeth were representative of contemporary female experience. Indeed, as single, never-married women, even among the landed aristocracy (which included female heiresses), Mary and Elizabeth were anomalous in their status as regional magnates and householders in their own right.26 The intent here is to question the necessity for perpetuating the stereotype that Mary and Elizabeth functioned as honorary men in their society. Considering them primarily as "exceptions" proving the rule of Tudor patriarchy has resulted in the Tudor princesses being studied, not as historical figures responding to and contributing to the events and culture of their particular society, but rather as aberrations whose lives and choices provide insight only into their individual selves and not into their society. This study advances the argument that the Tudor princesses functioned both as elite men in heading their own households and as elite women in managing their own households. In this way, Mary and Elizabeth enjoyed the same social, economic, and political status as that of other elite male householders and elite female household managers before their accessions. (It should be noted that a few other elite women both managed and headed their own households during this period.) Like other contemporary householders, the princesses exercised political authority. What makes this particularly interesting is that the princesses thus functioned as authority figures many years before they became sovereigns.
32Chapter 4 details the ways in which princesses Mary and Elizabeth, through their position as heads of household, exercised political agency in much the same way as contemporary widows, heiresses, and other elite women who either headed their own household or managed that of their husbands. The position of head of an elite household, which often entailed owning land, endowed the head with authority as overlord over her/his servants, tenants, neighbors, and clients. The chapter closes by examining the way in which the princesses harnessed all three of the households' primary assets—display, corporate identity, and property—to ensure their accessions.
33The final chapter presents conclusions drawn from the evidence. It considers questions concerning the representativeness of these households; the role they may or may not have played in the female succession; and the ways in which this study contributes to a further understanding of the period in general. In particular, this chapter demonstrates that the evidence presented supports the thesis that Mary and Elizabeth enjoyed an easier and smoother transition to becoming heads of state because they had first been heads of elite households.
34Before bringing this Introduction to a close, it is important to note that some of the initial findings offered in this Introduction may appear surprising to the reader. Women's history now has a long and distinguished record of offering novel insights, and continues to do so.27 This has not always been welcomed in fields with established "grand narratives" such as Tudor history. This grand narrative has predetermined the view of Mary and Elizabeth as political actors prior to their accessions and even, to a certain extent, afterwards.
35Few scholars have questioned the depiction of Mary and Elizabeth as "genealogical accidents", as established by Lawrence Stone and Mortimer Levine.28 In this interpretative context, Mary and Elizabeth found themselves obliged by circumstance to assume traditionally male roles as authority figures despite their female gender, causing much anxiety both to themselves and to their male contemporaries. During the period 1516–1558 considered in this study, however, evidence for such gender-based anxiety is sparse.29 Except for a few stray remarks by Henry VIII, there little evidence for widespread fear or unease regarding the possibility of a female succession. Rather, the evidence suggests that those who thought about the succession prior to 1553 preferred Mary as their next ruler, rather than any of the leading male candidates such as James V of Scotland, Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, or the Darnley brothers (sons of Margaret Douglas Lennox).30
36This study invites the reader to weigh the evidence presented that it was precisely because Mary and Elizabeth functioned very much as other elite contemporary women—heading and managing households, dispensing patronage, presiding over household staffs—that their future subjects already regarded them as authority figures before their accessions. In a society as hierarchical as Tudor England, the social status of a person—female or male—counted as much as gender (perhaps more in some cases) toward their ability to implement their political agendas. The conclusion I present here took me by surprise as it took shape during the course of my research: the household, traditionally depicted as the place of women's containment and marginalization from political power, actually played a determinative role in the elevation of two women in succession to the throne in a patriarchal society. It is the goal of this study to ensure that by the time the reader finishes the book, this conclusion, surprising to me in the course of my research, will strike the reader as painfully obvious.
Notes
Note 1: The most published recent work that devotes substantial attention to Mary's and Elizabeth's preaccession careers is a popular biography: D. Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship [London, 2001] back
Note 2: Mary and Elizabeth, as princesses, exploited their households and roles as property owners in much the same way as the women studied by Barbara Harris in English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers [Oxford UP, 2002] back
Note 3: Harris, English Aristocratic Women, p. 22 back
Note 4: A. L. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England [London, 1993], p. 192 back
Note 5: For example, R. Cleaver, A Godly Form of Household Government . . . [London, 1603], p. 13 back
Note 6: M. K. Jones and M. G. Underwood, The King's Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort Countess of Richmond and Derby [Cambridge UP, 1992], pp. 93–170 and F. Kisby, "A Mirror of Monarchy: Music and Musicians at the Household Chapel of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Mother of Henry VII," Early Music History, 16 (1997), p. 212 back
Note 7: See, in particular, Jones and Underwood, Lady Margaret Beaufort . . . , p. 5 back
Note 8: For the public and political importance of elite households from late medieval to early modern period, see D. Herlihy, Medieval Households [Harvard UP, 1985]; D. Starkey, "The Age of Household: Politics, Society, and the Arts, 1350–1550," in S. Medcalf, ed., The Context of English Literature in the Late Middle Ages [London, 1981]; and K. Mertes, The English Noble Household [Oxford, 1988] back
Note 9: I use the term "princess" here in the modern sense to refer to royal female heirs to the throne. In sixteenth-century parlance, powerful unmarried royal women were often referred to as "my lady"—for example, the widowed Margaret of Austria when she was Regent of the Netherlands for her nephew Charles V; e.g., L&P Hen.VIII, 3/2, 58. Before her disinheritance in 1536, Mary bore the title "my lady princess" analogous to the modern "princess royal"; e.g., L&P Hen.VIII, 3/2, 118 back
Note 10: Since my initial treatment of the determinative role played by Mary's household in the 1553 succession crisis, in "Sovereign Princesses: Mary and Elizabeth Tudor as Heads of Princely Households and the Accomplishment of the Female Succession in Tudor England, 1516-1558" [Ph.D. thesis, Johns Hopkins University, 2002], others have begun to document the importance of Mary's household; see especially A. Whitelock and D. MacCulloch, "Princess Mary's Household . . . " [2007] back
Note 11: E. Spring, Law, Land and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300-1800 [North Carolina UP, 1993], p. 15 back
Note 12: M. Levine, Tudor Dynastic Problems, 1460–1571 [London, 1973], p. 81; Levine assigns to John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, sole agency in diverting the succession away from Mary to Lady Jane Grey back
Note 13: D. Starkey's popular biography of Elizabeth centers on her preaccession career and household, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship [London, 2201]; Whitelock and MacCulloch, "Princess Mary's Household and the Succession Crisis, July 1553," Historical Journal 50/2 (2007), pp. 265–287 back
Note 14: For example, R. Cleaver, A Godly Form of Household Government . . . [London, 1603], p. 13 back
Note 15: N. Korda, Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England [Pennsylvania Press, 2002], pp. 1–2 back
Note 16: D. Herlihy, Medieval Households [Harvard UP, 1985], p. v back
Note 17: See, e.g., Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, pp. 23, 29, as cited in V. Comensoli, Household Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England [Toronto UP, 1996], p. 17 back
Note 18: Foxe, Acts and Monuments . . . [1570], Bk.12, p. 2296; available at http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/johnfoxe/main/12_1570_2296.jsp back
Note 19: See list of Princess Mary's household items in LP IV, pt.1, 1577, which notes that the princess's insignia was branded on her household masking irons back
Note 20: The classic discussion of the political dimensions of premodern corporate identities is E. H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology [Princeton UP, 1957]. back
Note 21: D. Loades, Mary Tudor, p. ix back
Note 22: Further support for this view can be found in A. Whitelock and D. MacCulloch, "Princess Mary's Household and the Succession Crisis, July 1553," The Historical Journal, 50/2 (2007), pp. 265–287 back
Note 23: C. Shammas, "Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective," William and Mary Quarterly, 3/52 (Jan.1995): 104–144; esp. p. 105 back
Note 24: R. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450-1700 [London, 1984], p. 19 back
Note 25: M. E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe [Cambridge UP, 2000], pp. 3, 7 back
Note 26: Harris, English Aristocratic Women, p. 88. Harris's study does not encompass heiresses—the sole primogeniture family heir to land and title—who never married, presumably because such heiresses often came under intense pressure to marry and were betrothed at young ages by their families to secure political, economic and social alliances back
Note 27: Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, p. 3 back
Note 28: L. Stone, "The Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England: The Patriarchal Stage," p. 50 from The Family in History, ed. C. E. Rosenberg [Pennsylvania, 1975]; M. Levine, "The Place of Women in Tudor Government," p. 109 from Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G.R. Elton from his American Friends, ed. J. D. Guth and J. W. McKenna [Cambridge 1982] back
Note 29: A. Shephard, Gender and Authority in Sixteenth-Century England [Keele UP, 1994] unearthed six treatises in the sixteenth century debating the advantages and disadvantages of female rule; only four of the six were printed back
Note 30: LP, XI, 1246. Printed in Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions, p. 128; see also M. Bateson, "The Examination of Robert Aske," English Historical Review, V, [1890], pp. 652–654 back