Stephanie Mann, author and Tudor scholar, reviews The Countess of Salisbury, Hazel Pierce's biography of Blessed Margaret Plantagenet Pole.
This is an excellent biography: Hazel Pierce does not speculate, she does not dramatize, she does not invent emotion or try to read her subject's mind and heart. She just tells the story of this magnificent woman's fascinating life. Link to Plantagenet England, friend and confidant of Catherine of Aragon, godmother and governess to Princess Mary, mother of Reginald Pole, future Archbishop of Canterbury, Margaret Pole was the richest woman in England, with lands and houses in her own name. From being favored by Henry VIII she fell to being imprisoned in the Tower of London, losing all her holdings; one son executed, another son exiled, she was unjustly condemned and horribly executed. She was not even legally tried, and was given an hour's notice of her death. Winston Churchill summed up Henry VIII's reign with the sad commentary on the failure of the once great promise of the Renaissance prince, noting the executions of queens (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard), chancellors (Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell), a holy bishop (Fisher) and numerous monks and abbots (Richard Houghton and the Carthusians; Richard Whiting and the monks at Glastonbury), and 'almost every member of the nobility in whom royal blood ran'--Margaret Pole was one of those nobles. Hazel Pierce ensures that she is known for more than being one of Henry VIII's victims.Share
6 comments:
Thank you, Elena, for posting this review. I emphasized the restraint of the biography after reading some recent lives in which the author speculated on what the subject must have felt or thought. When biographies become filled with comments like "we don't know if she was there, but if she was, she must have thought . . ." I begin to think that the author is projecting her own thoughts on the subject!
Such biographers should just become novelists and be done with it. Thanks for sharing this excellent book.
I think that's very true. (I also can't wait to read a proper biography of Lady Salisbury.) I noticed this fairly irritating habit of speculation in a recent biography of Jane Boleyn which, as with so many other books (both fact and fiction) on the Boleyn family either end up returning all the focus to Anne or only manage to avoid doing so by altering history or foisting anachronistic or improbable feelings onto their subjects.
There is a time and place for it, when the evidence is so overwhelming and precise that we can legitimately speculate what the subject might have been feeling. (For example, when Lady Antonia Fraser or Deborah Cadbury wrote on the lives of Marie-Antoinette or Louis XVII, respetively, we do not need to guess how the widowed Queen or the child King were feeling during their separation simply because we do not have page after page of detailed documents from either detailing their inner-feelings.) However simply to infer the interior from the exterior or project one's own sentiments onto a historical subject is a failing that too many historians are guilty of.
I agree, Gareth. I do think that sometimes Antonia Fraser goes a bit too far in her speculations, although I know what you are saying. I am dying to read the book on Margaret Pole recommended by Stephanie.
For a moment, I completely forgot about the Fersen theory and the uber-speculation used to support it (something rife in Stefan Zweig's work, as well.)
When it comes to Fersen, some biographers break all the rules of historical analysis.
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