I recently read a magnificent novel, The Crown
by Nancy Bilyeau, which deals with the fate of some English Dominican nuns during
Henry VIII's "reform." I was delighted and honored when Nancy agreed to
be interviewed. I will be reviewing the book as well in a future post. To quote from the
book description:
An aristocratic young nun must find a legendary crown
in order to save her father—and preserve the Catholic faith from
Cromwell’s ruthless terror. The year is 1537. . .
EMV:
Nancy, welcome to Tea at Trianon! Congratulations on your magnificent novel, The Crown, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I
was especially impressed by the research that went into making it one of the
most authentic novels of the Tudor era that I have ever read. You bring to life the beauty and peace of the
cloister even as it is about to be destroyed. Can you tell us a little
about how you began your journey into the past, and where you found the best
sources on such a turbulent, controversial epoch?
NB: I’ve been interested in English history since I
was 11 years old and saw a re-broadcast of “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” on
television with my parents. Ever since that time, the Tudor period was my
particular passion, and I read the major books about the time. I pored through
the major biographies, from J.J. Scarisbricke’s Henry VIII to Garrett Mattingly’s Catherine of Aragon. Every time a new biography on Anne Boleyn was
published, I bought it. I do think I have all of them. When I began the
research for The Crown, I dove into
all books and sources on the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Pilgrimage
of Grace, which was the 1536-1537 rebellion in the North against the Protestant
reforms. I found some of the most helpful books written almost a century ago:
F.A. Gasquet’s English Monastic Life
(1906) and Cranage’s The Home of the
Monk: An Account of English Monastic Life and Buildings in the Middle Ages
(1926). On the other end of the
spectrum, British History Online is an amazing Internet source of contemporary and
secondary source documents.
EMV:
There are very few novels that tell the story of the dissolution of the
monasteries under Henry VIII from the point of view of an insider. The only
other novels in a similar vein that I have read are The King’s Achievement by R.H. Benson and Miracle at St. Bruno’s by Philippa Carr. What inspired you to have
a nun as your heroine? And why a Dominican nun in particular?
NB: I wanted to write my book from a woman’s point
of view but it took me a while to decide which woman. I wanted to write a
mystery thriller because I enjoy reading them so much myself. I fused two of my
favorite genres: the historical novel and the thriller. So would I have a
“real” woman—a queen or princess or lady-in-waiting—as the protagonist? I
decided no, that would be too difficult and possibly contrived to have, say,
Queen Catherine Parr solving murders when she’s not fending off conspiracies to
drive her off the throne. I wanted a fictional heroine, someone who is doing
interesting things in a turbulent time. I have always been intrigued by nuns,
and so I thought it could yield high drama, to write a nun’s story at the most
fraught moment of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. I picked the Dominicans
because I’d read a little bit about Saint Catherine of Siena and she interests
me. And Dartford Priory was where I wanted to set the book, and that was the
only house of Dominican sisters in England pre-Reformation.
EMV:
Your heroine, Joanna Stafford, is a zealous soul, in love with God and ready to
serve Him with all her heart. However, she sometimes has trouble with obedience
which make some of the nuns question her vocation. The upheavals of era disturb
the course of her novitiate as well. Do you think, under normal circumstance,
that Joanna would have been happy being a nun?
NB: Yes I do. In my conception of her, Joanna finds
a peace and a sense of fulfillment in Dartford Priory that she’d known nowhere
else in her life. And she has the intelligence and resilience to succeed at it.
I thought a lot about the spirituality of my heroine. I didn’t want to make her
a nun forced to enter a priory. For one thing, my research yielded the fact
that that didn’t happen very often in late medieval England. The image of the
wild and restless girl imprisoned in a convent—it’s not too accurate. When
Henry VIII’s commissioners seeking to “reform” the monasteries made their
visits across the country, the nuns were asked, together and sometimes
separately, if they wanted to leave, and very few did. And after the
dissolution, some nuns continued to live in small groups and try to carry out
their vocations for the rest of their lives. In Dartford, a half-dozen of the
real nuns ended up leaving England after the reign of Queen Mary and lived in
near-poverty in Holland.
EMV:
I thought that your portrayal of Katherine of Aragon was especially powerful.
She knew Henry better than anyone, having been married to him the longest, and
the pieces of information that slip out when she makes her brief appearances in
the novel are tantalizing. What made you focus on Katherine rather than the
other wives?
NB: Oh her image has suffered so badly. Today
people seem to feel that the middle-aged, stout woman should have stepped aside
for the young, sexy lady-in-waiting. Just give up your husband, throne—and your
dignity. I think you’ll agree that very few women today would feel that way
about a friend who had been married to a man for 20 years. Katherine of Aragon
was a very, very popular and beloved woman with the commoners, the nobility,
and the monastic orders of her country. There was a reason for this! She was
kind, generous, highly intelligent, gracious, decisive, and devout. She was
fierce in time of war; when Henry was in France she defended the country
capably against Scottish invasion. In her youth Katherine was beautiful.
Katherine supported what we would consider today a feminist position: She believed
her daughter Mary could rule the kingdom as a queen. Katherine’s mother,
Isabella, ruled in her own right, and that family had a history of very strong and
capable female rulers: Margaret of Austria and Mary of Hungary spring to mind.
But Anne Boleyn has such a fix on our collective imaginations that readers
today often root against Katherine and Mary—and for Anne to become queen and
have that son Henry wanted. It’s rather bizarre.
EMV:
I also loved your depiction of Katherine’s daughter, Mary. So often she is
shown as being dour, bitter and depressed, but in The Crown she is every inch the granddaughter of Isabella of
Castile, determined, savvy and authoritative. What are your thoughts on Mary’s
complicated psyche?
NB: I feel Mary’s reputation has suffered
enormously too, in this case in comparison to Anne Boleyn’s daughter,
Elizabeth. Mary is seen as weak and vindictive and cruel. Yet how strong she
was! She defied her father’s tyranny for so long and supported her mother in
exile. She only submitted to him when it was a question of her survival and she
was urged to sign the papers by Eustace Chapuys, the Emperor’s ambassador. She
stood up to constant pressure from her younger half-brother to forsake her
religion. Edward and his minsters would certainly have taken harsh measures
against her if not for Mary’s Hapsburg relatives. And then very few people
expected her to raise an army and take the country when Edward died—to fight
for her right to succeed. But she did it and with amazing courage. And Mary
brought forth the same loyalty among friends and servants as her mother
did—more than Elizabeth did later. Mary never minded when her ladies got
married and had children—she gave them presents and stood as godmother over and
over. Now Mary suffered psychologically through all of this. Her naturally kind
and generous nature did darken in some respects, though not as much as people think
today. “Bloody Mary” is such a tragic legacy.
EMV:
In the novel, Joanna and the other nuns have taken the Oath, and yet they
admire the courage of those who died rather than take it, such as the
Carthusians and Thomas More and Bishop Fisher. I never realized that so many
nuns did take the Oath and yet they were dissolved anyway. Why was Cromwell so
determined to destroy consecrated life in England, especially when the monks,
nuns and friars did so much good work in health care, education, and feeding
the hungry?
NB: It was a financial imperative. The country was
approaching bankruptcy. The land grab of the monasteries—that is what it
was—poured more than a million pounds into the royal treasury. The King and
Cromwell assured people that hospitals and schools would replace the abbeys and
monasteries that were emptied and often destroyed but that rarely happened. The
money went to building new palaces and to war, mostly. Also the property was
turned over to courtiers so that they would be more bound to the king than
ever.
There are social problems in the late 16th
century that some historians attribute to the loss of the safety net provided
by the Catholic orders. And there were other sorts of losses. For example, at
Dartford Priory the sisters educated the girls from local families. After the
priory was destroyed, no one else taught the Dartford girls to read in an
organized way for many, many years—centuries, actually. A grammar school was
formed in the town in 1576, but that was just for the boys.
Cromwell
was also someone who supported Martin Luther’s ideas and so he had that
motivation. Henry VIII had an extremely complicated and ambivalent attitude
toward the monastic orders. He tried in the beginning to personally persuade
some of the leading friars—the men who became the Carthusian martyrs—to see the
divorce from his point of view and agree to support him as head of the Church
of England. But when they repeatedly refused, they were starved, tortured and
then killed in the most painful way possible. Henry himself did not ever
support Luther and many times tugged the religion of his country back. One of
the other reasons besides need for money that Henry VIII pushed through the
Dissolution of the Monasteries was that he did not want hotbeds of educated men
and women loyal to the Pope thriving in his country. There was monastic support
for Pilgrimage of Grace, and that strengthened his resolve to crush the abbeys.
Once they were turned out from their homes and could not wear their habits or
practice their faith in the same way, friars, monks and nuns were no threat.
EMV:
One of the aspects of the book which most intrigue me are the Howard tapestries
which contain messages and symbols woven into them. Did such tapestries really
exist?
NB: These specific tapestries all come from my
imagination. Tapestries were a beautiful and thriving art form in medieval and
early modern England. One of the good things about Henry VIII is that he
collected and appreciated tapestries. Nuns wove and embroidered tapestries during
this time period, though the larger ones were woven in France and the Low
Countries. So I took the next step, and had my Dartford Priory become a center
of tapestry production. It helped me strengthen one of my themes and that was
how much the sisters lived and worked as a team. I was absolutely thrilled to
receive an email from a Dominican sister in the United States saying that she’d
read my book and I got right the essential nature of the life of the sisters
and how they interacted with the friars.
EMV:
Do you think England suffered in the long run from the dissolution of the
monasteries?
NB: I can’t say that England would be better off if
it had remained a Catholic country, like France and Spain. That is too enormous
a question. But I can say that England suffered from the destruction of those
beautiful buildings. There is so little to see of these magnificent abbeys and
priories today, it’s just heartbreaking. Most of them were torn down and
stripped for the value of the bricks and the lead. The Dominican monastery in
London called Blackfriars was famous throughout Europe for its beauty and
magnificence. When the Emperor Charles visited his aunt, Katherine of Aragon,
in the 1520s, he stayed at Blackfriars, not at one of Henry VIII’s palaces. It
was a huge complex of buildings. Today all that survives of Blackfriars is a piece
of crumbling stone wall not more than five feet long. I’ve seen it; there is a
small plaque next to the wall in a park. It brought tears to my eyes.
EMV: Thank you very much, Nancy, and I can’t wait to read
more of Joanna’s adventures in the sequel!
(*NOTE: The Crown was sent to me by the publisher in exchange for my honest opinion.)
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