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Valerie Schutte and Jessica S. Hower eds., "Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Re-making of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
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Kristen Vitale Engel
Hello listeners and welcome back to New Books on Early Modern History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. As always, I'm your host Kristen Vitale Engel. Today we'll be talking to Dr. Valerie Schutte about her edited volume, Mid Tutor, Queenship and the Making and Remaking of Lady Jane Grey and Mary the First. Valerie is a specialist of Tudor Queens and is the author or editor of eight books on Queen Mary I, Unexpected Heirs and Queens in Shakespeare. Valerie, welcome to the show.
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Dr. Valerie Schutte
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.
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Kristen Vitale Engel
You're so welcome. So Valerie, before we delve into the book, can you tell us a bit about yourself? That is how you became an expert on the early modern world. If you had any mentors, your overall research interests and and their relations to this book?
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Dr. Valerie Schutte
Sure. I did my PhD in history at the University of Akron in Akron, Ohio, and there I wrote a dissertation on Queen Mary the First and her books and it took a while to get to that subject, but it seems like since then I haven't really left, which is happy. I'm okay with that. I've also broadened my research into the Tudor queens and books more generally. So I've worked on all of the queens and this is reflected in my forthcoming biography on Anne of Cleves, which will actually go to press in a few weeks, but it has a whole section on Anne and books. So just kind of the queens and the Tudor queens and books in general are my main research interests.
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Kristen Vitale Engel
Yeah, I love that. No, I think that's really, really interesting. I mean, I think there's so much still to uncover about Tudor queens in general. And I think, you know, the more books that we see, the better on them. So let's get right into the book. So tell us about your edited volume. How did you come to write and edit mid Tutor Queenship? And can you tell us a bit about the volume editing process? Because it is so different than the just single authorship. So we'd really like to hear more about that too.
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Dr. Valerie Schutte
Sure. I've edited, I don't know, eight books or so and I think I have three or four more in the pipeline that I'm editing or co editing. This one specifically came about when I was working on the two volume set on writing Mary the First and Mary the First in Writing. And my chapter in that book was on literature at Mary's accession, because I think Mary's accession moment hasn't had enough research. And in looking at that moment, I just kept coming back to the interconnectedness between Mary and Jane. So I couldn't look at the sources on Mary's accession or without Jane being there either explicitly or kind of lurking in the background as some type of comparison. And it's just really, really impossible to discuss Mary without Jane. And I approached the topic from Mary. But then as I read more things, the people who work on Jane also can't get away from Mary with Jane as the Nine Days Queen. Their histories in that July 1553 moment are just stuck together. So this book kind of came about as what happens if we look into that moment more and what can we still know about Mary and Jane comparatively separately? Is it possible to separate them out? And then how has that interconnectedness played out over the centuries? So our book kind of starts in 15:53 and then ends several centuries later. And that's kind of how we approach the topic.
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Kristen Vitale Engel
No, that's, that's really interesting. And I think even finding or I, rather than finding, I should say choosing and picking the different pieces of scholarship that go into an edited volume like this, it's really very intricate. Right. Because I mean it all needs to sort of tell this story that fits into the broader context of what it is that you, as the editors, want to be told. Is that right?
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Dr. Valerie Schutte
It is. And the strange thing is that editing. I've never had the same experience twice in all the editing that I've done. So, I mean, the writing, Mary, the first volume, the two volume, it turned into two volumes because I had more than 50 proposals and had a bunch of really great ones and put them together. And then as we worked on Mary and Jane and we sent out another call for papers, you know, it was kind of like crickets, but we got lots and lots of responses like, this is great. Nobody's talked about this, but I don't know what to say either. So it's kind of like people acknowledged that there was a hole, but nobody really knew how to fill it. And it just became evident even as we. So we collected proposals, we picked the proposals, we put the book together. And then as we worked through the first drafts, it became evident too, that everybody knows you can't separate them. But it's also kind of hard to talk about them evenly because you have to compare. And in the comparison, you know, one woman you. You either feel sympathy for or the other you don't, or one woman should have got. Deserved it and the other didn't. So it's hard to talk about them evenly and comparatively and fairly, which was another thing that we kind of exposed, especially in the later literature. You know, it's a comparison, and one is always found as the exact opposite of the other.
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Kristen Vitale Engel
That's really very interesting. I mean, I think too, because as historians, one of the things we're trained to do is, as. As much as we possibly can, is try and really negate any bias that we have in research. That's really, really great, Valerie. Thanks for that. So you have a really interesting focus on the concept and the actual practice of queenship during the 16th century. And many, actually all of these really great authors touch on this subject. As the book says, this book considers the nature and meaning of mid tutor Queenship as it took shape, functioned, and was construed in the 16th century as well as its memory down to the 21st in literary, musical, artistic, theatrical, and other cultural forms. Can you unpack this a bit for us? What did queenship really look like in practice during this time, specifically through Mary and Jane? You did touch on this, you know, a second ago, but if you can unpack it more. What was queenship? What did it look like in practice during this really intricate critical moment? When this. When these accessions happened.
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Dr. Valerie Schutte
Well, that's. I mean, it's important what you say, that it was critical. So in 1553, it was the first time England was going to have a regnant queen, unless you want to count Matilda, and most people don't. So you have to think this is the first time there was going to be a regnant queen. And. And it was either going to be Jane or Mary. And frankly, even if you consider Edward's device and how he tried to alter the succession, I think the first seven or eight people in line for the throne were women, you know, so you couldn't get away from. In 1553 or upon Edward's death, with no children, there was going to be a woman on that throne and she was going to have to be both king and queen or navigate what it meant to be a queen with power and perform both masculine and feminine roles. So she would have to invent queenship, essentially for what it meant for her. Now, there were other, of course, continental examples, so you could look to Isabella of Castile, you know, and see what did she do. But. And she was also married to a king of his own. So how do you navigate being a queen? With queenly expectations, you know, intercession, mercy, behaving virtuously, having babies and, you know, just surviving childbirth wasn't a guarantee. And then at the same time, sit in the Privy Council and tell a bunch of men what to do and hope that they did it. Whenever you left the room or because of Henry viii, you know, taking the. Becoming supreme head of the Church of England, all of a sudden you have a woman who's the supreme Head of the Church of England. Well, that's just unprecedented, you know, anywhere, to have a female sit at the head of religion. So. So I think queenship was really interesting and tricky, and they had to navigate it, you know, very well to be successful. And that's where Mary and Jane came in, was which one essentially was more qualified. And perhaps Edward thought Jane was more qualified because they followed the same religion. But Mary and her followers very much believed in tradition and legality, and as the daughter of a former king, she just made more sense. But then she had to deal with very difficult things like, you know, facing threats both internal and external. So queenship was just, I think, very tricky and it was new and people didn't know what to make of it. So this volume interrogates those roles, how each woman performed them, and then later reinterpretations and representations of those roles and how they were Understood.
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Kristen Vitale Engel
No, I love that. I think too, like you said, it makes such sense to sort of have these different sectors in an edited volume, because what actually happened versus how it's interpreted and written during that time and then now is just. I mean, those are three different things. And I think unpacking those and navigating those is really, really important to come and accurate representation as close as we possibly can to what queenship really meant during this time, specifically, as you say, with Jane and Mary. So that's amazing. I love that. So now let's really get to sort of the meat of what we're talking about. Let's focus on your chapter in the volume titled Representations of Edward Underhill at the Accessions of Jane Grey and Mary Tudor. Can you give us an overview of the chapter, its arguments, the sources you use, just everything about it?
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Dr. Valerie Schutte
Sure. So Edward Underhill is a really interesting guy. He was a gentleman pensioner under Henry viii, under Edward VI and Mary, so it's surprising, but not really. So he was a Protestant, but he served all three monarchs. And my chapter specifically looks at his memoir. So in the Midnight he wrote he served these monarchs and then in 1561 wrote a memoir of his service, specifically focusing on Mary's reign. So in the mid 19th century, extracts of his journal were printed and used as evidence of Mary's reign, and usually very negatively. So he talks about, you know, the Protestant burnings and his service and how he was imprisoned. And in 1840, William Harrison Ainsworth, a famous Gothic novelist, used Underhill's memoir in his novel the Tower of London. And this novel is all about Mary's accession and Ainsworth uses the memoir very differently. So my chapter focuses on Underhill's memoir, its transmission in the 19th century, and then how Ainsworth uses it to come up with how there are different ways to understand Mary's reign and untraditional sources to look at. And I point out Ainsworth's attention to detail and his use of source material in his novels. As no previous Ainsworth scholar realized, Underhill was a real person, so they just kind of thought he was a made up character. So I show the connections between the historical Underhill and his memoir and Ainsworth's novel as a comparison of a contemporary, you know, eyewitness view to Mary and Jane and then how that view was used 300 years later. And I argue that Underhill's memoir and Ainsworth's later use of it, you know, it really complicates our perceptions of Mary and Jane as both queens and rivals.
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Kristen Vitale Engel
No, I, I mean, I think that's so interesting because I do think and, and, and I found this was with some of the most interesting sort of secondary sources from scholars that I read is that some of the most unconventional sources can be used in such an analytical and interpretive way to uncover perspectives on certain topics from the past that are really, really interesting and add such depth and sort of just like meat to that historical moment. So, I mean, I know when I was reading it, I just thought it was really, really interesting to use Underhill and his accounts sort of to fashion this narrative. So I loved it. Now, we did sort of talk about the comparative approach between Jane Gray and Mary. You know, we've already sort of touched on that. But I just, I was wondering if when delving into Jane and Mary, I know you said that really their histories were very intertwined and I couldn't agree more. I'm not, you know, an expert on, you know, the time of Jane and Mary, but I do even, you know, just know the tutors more broadly. I can see that as well. So I do think just to sort of ask about your opinion when we're talking about a comparative approach on Jane and Mary, what was one of the things that you saw comparatively when discussing Jane and Mary? Like, what stood out to you the most? I know you said usually one is favored, but is it more like a religious Favoring. Was it a political. Was it one had a right to the throne and the other didn't. So it was two stolen. Could you just delve into that a little bit?
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Dr. Valerie Schutte
Sure. So in later centuries, it is typically a religious comparison. So Protestant martyred Jane versus bigoted Bloody Mary. So you can kind of. And you can just kind of get in the way the adjectives that describe them. Somebody's position on the two women. At the time, at least for the sources I used, the comparison was between inheritance and tradition versus a usurper. And most people did not blame Jane for taking the throne. And no one was going to blame Edward because you never blame the monarch, you blame his bad counsel. So there was a lot. Almost all the blame was kind of laid at the feet of Gilbert Dudley Robert, his father, Jane's father in law, as kind of, okay, let's marry the kids and then I'll be the power behind the throne and Jane will do whatever I say. So. But there was all the texts at the accession say, you know, Northumberland didn't have the authority to do that. Mary was queen by right of inheritance and a tradition. So there's all those kinds of comparisons that are being made. And then for my own chapter, I found the Underhill narrative first and then came to the Ainsworth novel. And they're both interesting because we typically see Mary being compared to Elizabeth and this happens all the time. Mary's compared to her half sister and almost always negatively. You know, she remains Bloody Mary while Elizabeth remains Gloriana. So I liked that this text that both texts, well, Ainsworth specifically compare Mary and Jane and then how they're compared in the 16th century and then in the 19th century using the same sources. And in fact, Ainsworth often has nice things to say about Mary, so he doesn't fall into the typical, like, stereotypical pitfalls of terrible Catholic Mary doing these hideous things to poor victim Jane. And he kind of portrays the women much more nuanced and evenly. And it's comparisons such as these that kind of need explored to better understand. Well, for me to better understand Mary and her reign and kind of fight against the bloody nickname that just kind of comes up and up and up because of comparisons like this. You know, she's bloody compared to Jane, who she killed. She's bloody compared to Elizabeth, who did nothing wrong in 45 years. So. Right. So, for example, in Ainsworth's novel, Underhill is a religious fanatic who even tries to kill Mary inside the Tower of London. And he's not successful and he's brought to her, you know, so she can give him a punishment. And over the course of the novel, he becomes surprised by her kindness and compassion and shows remorse for trying to kill her. Now, it doesn't stop him from being burned to the stake at the end of the novel, which did not happen in real life, but the novel needed, you know, an antagonist. But he kind of gets this glowing opinion of Mary. You know, she's not that bad. It's much more nuanced. You know, she was a woman who was trying to put her duties first, and she thought that returning England to Catholicism was the right thing to do. He didn't write of her as being willful or hysterical or womanly and changing her mind, which are things that you kind of see written about her. And Ainsworth's portrayal of Mary was actually met with criticism. So notably, Charles Dickens in 1853 basically said that Ainsworth's novel was junk because Mary was terrible and he should have acknowledged it. And it's funny, because that almost parallels some criticism I still see today. So, like, there's all this new Mary, you know, reassessment going on, and sometimes you still get pushback from people who work on Elizabeth. Like, wait a minute, Mary couldn't have been okay. You know, like, you still get that we have to compare her to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth always has to be better. So it's funny, there is kind of a pushback, even if you say something positive, which is why I think comparisons like this still have a place, because we still haven't kind of got at what happened or how to write about. You know, there's gotta be a way to write about these three queens and Mary and Jane, you know, evenhandedly, and not just let's compare them and find one to be worse than the other.
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Kristen Vitale Engel
Yeah, absolutely, Absolutely. Keeping that bias out of it, again, as historians, as much as you possibly can to get a well rounded, you know, accurate picture of these historical moments. So that's amazing. So let's go back to Underhill for just a moment. So Underhill really is such an interesting figure during this time. And I find your methodology of analyzing his ballad, for example, to find out more about his role through religious and political avenues during the 16th century, as well as bringing into question broader conceptions of religious transformation during this time to be really very creative. So tell us a bit more about his role under Henry, Edward and then specifically Mary, and even more importantly, about his representations during the accessions of, you know, Jane and Mary. And, you know, when I say more about you know, his, his role under Henry and Edward. I don't expect a history lesson. I just mean more. If you can see parallels through time, sure.
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Dr. Valerie Schutte
So, okay, Underhill was a gentleman pensioner for Henry VIII and Edward vi. So he was, you know, he worked for the monarchy in 1553, which is where he starts his memoir. He is imprisoned at the Tower for a ballad that he wrote. Now, the ballad is no longer extant, but he was later released from the Tower. And from what we can tell, his ballad did not criticize Mary and her right to the throne. It was anti Catholic. And this followed in line with other ballads and sources that were printed at Mary's accession. No one really had a problem with Mary coming to the throne. It was a fear of more religious change happening. And what does that look like and how does it come about and what are the consequences of religious change when it has been, you know, 20 years of religious change, what happens now? And there was a fear of what that would look like. And Underhill addresses that fear and his own firsthand look at it now. He was a reformer. He defended reform. He had the nickname the Hot Gospeler because he liked to talk about reform. And I think it's kind of because of that nickname that Ainsworth later chose him to be in his novel. Because, I mean, it's a cool nickname to make somebody the bad guy who's the hot gospel. Erm, and then after Underhill's release, he goes into Mary's service. So he has no problem serving Mary. You know, he has no problem that she's Catholic. He works alongside her Catholic servants. He does say that maybe she treats the Catholic ones a little better. But you can't tell if that's hindsight or actuality, because he writes this, you know, several years after the fact. But what's really important is that Underhill explicitly states that his duty was to the Queen and to the monarchy, no matter her religion. And like I said, I've found other sources where other male courtiers, pensioners, servants to the Crown, propagandists, they all follow that same line. You know, their duty is to the monarchy. They're loyal to the monarchy, no matter the religious changes. And I think that's really, really interesting because sometimes we kind of think Edward and Mary are so opposite. There's no way that the same people, that those two monarchs would maybe show patronage to the same people or vice versa, that the people seeking patronage would, you know, defend both Edward and Mary. But you see lots and lots of loyalty. And Underhill is one such Guy, he knows, you know, the monarchy's more important. You know, kings and queens are gonna change, but, you know, he has. He's there. So his memoir also highlights the first year, maybe first year, 18 months of Mary's reign as really positive. So. And Catholics and Protestants were, you know, kind of finding ways to work together. They weren't so much at odds. And he talks about, you know, her reign was pretty good until the Protestant persecutions were ramped up, and then Protestant dissatisfaction became just louder and louder and louder and Catholicism fighting against it. And the policies, like, they really butted heads. But he noted that the first 12 months or 18 months, you know, things were good, things were positive. Mary was a good ruler. And it's only later, and I think specifically when you see Philip come into the picture, that a more negative perception comes to be. And also what I find interesting is that Underhill doesn't necessarily say great things about Elizabeth's reign either. So he, unlike Fox, he doesn't, you know, say that the whole country rejoiced when Mary died because Elizabeth came to the throne. And I think that's really important, too, because sometimes we have this perception that Mary's reign was so terrible, everybody's glad when Elizabeth comes to the throne. And that's not necessarily the case either. There was just more continuity than is acknowledged a lot of times.
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Kristen Vitale Engel
No, that's really interesting. And I think, sort of, just like you said, that the aspect and concept of continuity when. When different rulers during this time specifically take power, I mean, it does. It. It influences things, you know, even the way things are written and represented. So that's really, really very interesting. So, Valerie, thank you for that wonderful exploration of your book. We have taken up a lot of your time, and I do have to let you go soon. But before you go, can you tell us a bit about what you're doing now or what you're working on next?
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Dr. Valerie Schutte
Sure. I am about to publish, hopefully, a biography of Anne of Cleves that I've been working on for many years. So it is going to the publisher, hopefully in just a few weeks. So I'm excited to get that out. I have several edited collections happening in various stages, so another one on Mary. So on Marian humanism. I have one on Tudors and myths, which I'm really excited about, and then some that just got started on the Tudors and historical fiction, which that kind of was another one that turned into way more than I ever imagined. But I really like talking about the Tudors and historical fiction, which you'll see more of that coming from me. And I just signed the contract for my fourth monograph, which will also be on Mary. But that's about all I'm talking about right now. But lots of projects on Mary. That's what I can say. Lots on Mary. Yeah.
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Kristen Vitale Engel
That's amazing. All things Mary. We love to hear it. We love to hear it from you, Valerie. Well, you know, I'm so excited. I can't wait to sort of, you know, keep up with all these works. They will be amazing, as others have been. And, you know, I just want to thank you for being on the show today. I really enjoyed it. And as I said, I look forward to reading more of your works. Bye. Bye for now.