Young Woman at Writing Desk, by Elizabeth Murray, nineteenth century. The Art Institute of Chicago, Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection.
Lapham’s Quarterly has been running a series on the subject of history and the pleasures, pain, and knowledge that can be found from studying it. For more than fifty issues, contributors from antiquity to the present day have participated in millennia-spanning conversations on themes including friendship, happiness, death, and the future. But what did they make of the idea of studying the past in the first place? Here is the final installment.
Over the course of the 1840s, Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland published their twelve-volume history of the queens of England. Only Agnes’ name appeared on the title pages of Lives of the Queens of England, as her attention-averse older sister preferred. Few people knew that these queen biographies were the work of a team, but, as their sister Jane Margaret Strickland (six of the eight Strickland siblings became writers) points out, it would have been quite the feat if “one person…produced the serial volumes in such rapid succession.” The sisters went on to write histories of bachelor kings and bishops, as well as a number of other queens. Agnes had started her career writing books intended to give children the same appreciation for the past that her father, and her own self-guided curriculum, had instilled in her.
In her 1887 biography of Agnes, Jane lovingly discusses her sister’s early love of history.
She read and reread the two mighty folios of Rapin’s History of England, translated by Tindal, and improved by his learned notes; and strange to say, from that dull source she derived her historic inspiration, and was perhaps the first young girl who ever perused it without compulsion.
Harrison’s Survey of London was also a favorite book. Plutarch’s Lives gave her great delight, and perhaps turned her thoughts afterward to the composition of biographical history. Elizabeth shared all her studies, but not her amusements.
Their work won Agnes and Elizabeth many fans but also a few notable enemies, including former patrons. Before the publication of Lives of the Queens of England, young Queen Victoria commissioned a two-volume biography of herself from Agnes. Judging from the voluminous marginalia, the monarch considered the book that resulted three years into her reign, Queen Victoria from Her Birth to Her Bridal, trash. “No,” she tersely wrote next to a line about the “tinge of melancholy” she wore on her wedding day. While Queen Victoria hated Agnes’ point of view because of her unparalleled proximity to the subject, Thomas Babington Macaulay loathed her historical work because he was fighting for the attention of the same audience of readers. He called her a “vulgar, mendacious, malicious scribbler” in his journals, “whom I abominate as a detestable writer, and who abominates me as a successful one.” The antipathy was mutual: Jane wrote that when Agnes met Macaulay for the first time, she “was by no means impressed by his manners and appearance, for he seemed to her ugly, vulgar, and pompous—the merits of the popular historian being overlooked in the unprepossessing person of the man. Probably this impression would have vanished if they had had much conversation on English history, as on certain points…they entirely agreed.”
Despite such criticism, the Stricklands’ histories kept selling and delighting audiences that wanted history to be accessible and fun—and for historical figures to be presented as morally complex instead of being conscripted into historical armies of heroes and villains. As the historian and novelist Antonia Fraser wrote in 2011,
She founded a whole school of vivid utterly readable history, aimed to capture the general reader who felt himself inadequately served…either by the pedantic scholar or the overimaginative historical novelist. And if the art of historical biography today is practiced by the many—not the least of them women—it must be remembered that Agnes Strickland…was a pioneer. It was fitting that as an old lady when she went down to Oxford, Agnes Strickland should be acclaimed by the undergraduate with the merry cry: “The queens! The queens! Three cheers for the queens!”
In the preface to volume four of Lives of the Queens of England, on the wives of Henry VIII, Agnes (who covered Anne Boleyn, Anne of Cleves, and Catherine Howard) and Elizabeth (who wrote the sections on Catherine of Aragon and Jane Seymour) discuss their historical methods, their love of pressuring officials to give them access to long-hidden primary sources, and their deep annoyance with most of the existing literature on the women they considered such fascinating subjects.
In detailing the successive historic tragedies of the queens of Henry VIII, we enter upon perilous ground. The lapse of three centuries has done so little to calm the excited feelings caused by the theological disputes with which their names are blended that it is scarcely possible to state facts impartially without displeasing those readers whose opinions have been biased by party writers.
It is to be lamented that the pen of the historian has been too often taken up rather for the purpose of establishing a system than to set forth the truth. Hence it is that evidences have been suppressed, or shamefully garbled, and more logic wasted in working out mere matters of opinion than is commonly employed by barristers in making the best of a client’s brief or in mystifying a jury.
To such a height have some prejudices been carried that it has been regarded as a species of heresy to record the evil as well as the good of persons who are usually made subjects of popular panegyric, and authors have actually feared in some cases to reveal the base metal which has been hidden beneath a meretricious gilding, lest they should provoke a host of assailants.
It was not thus that the historians of holy writ performed their office. The sins of David and of Solomon are recorded by them with stern fidelity and deserved censure, for with the sacred annalists there is no compromise between truth and expediency. Expediency! Perish the word if guilt is to be covered and moral justice sacrificed to such considerations!
It is not always possible, in general history, to diverge into personal details; but in historical biography it becomes the author’s duty to enter within the veil and, without reservation or one-sided views, to bring forward everything that tends to display character in its true light.
The records of the Tudor queens are replete with circumstances of powerful interest and rich in the picturesque costume of an age of pageantry and of romance. Yet of some of these ladies so little beyond the general outline is known that the lives of Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, and Catherine Howard are now, for the first time, offered to the public.
In this portion of the work due care has been taken to present facts in such a form as to render the memoirs of all the queens of Henry VIII available for the perusal of other ladies.
Henry VIII was married six times and divorced thrice. Four out of his six queens were private English gentlewomen and claimed no higher rank than the daughters of knights. Of these, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were cousins-german: both were married by Henry during the life of a previously wedded consort of royal birth and were alike doomed to perish on a scaffold as soon as the ephemeral passion of the sovereign, which led to their fatal elevation to a throne, had subsided. We know of no tale of romance that offers circumstances of tragic interest like those which are to be traced in the lives of these unhappy ladies.
Unencumbered by public history, or details likely to interrupt the chronological order and continuous interest of the narrative, we now place the mother and the queens of Henry VIII before our readers. Such as they were in life we have endeavored to show them, whether in good or ill. Their sayings, their doings, their manners, their dress, and such of their letters as have been preserved from the injuries of time and the outrages of ignorance will be found faithfully chronicled as far as our limits would permit. We have also given the autographs of Elizabeth of York and of five of Henry VIII’s queens. Of Catherine Howard no signature can be found.
Our authorities for the modern series of queens are, undoubtedly, of a more copious and important nature than those from which the records of the consorts of our Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet sovereigns have been drawn. We miss, indeed, the illuminated pages and the no-less-picturesque details of the historians of the age of chivalry, rich in their quaint simplicity, for the last of the monastic chroniclers, John Rous of Warwick, closed his labors with the bloodstained annals of the last of the Plantagenet kings.
A new school of history commences with Sir Thomas More’s eloquent and classical life of Richard III; and we revel in the gorgeous descriptions of Hall and Hollingshead, the characteristic anecdotes of the faithful Cavendish, the circumstantial narratives of Stowe and Speed, and other annalists of less distinguished names. It is, however, from the Acts of the Privy Council, the Parliamentary Journals, and the unpublished Regal Records and manuscripts in the State Paper Office, as well as from the treasures preserved in the Bibliothèque du Roi, at Paris, and the private manuscript collections of historical families and gentlemen of antiquarian research that our most important facts are gathered.
Every person who has referred to original documents is aware that it is a work of time and of patience to read the manuscripts of the Tudor era. Those in the State Paper Office, and in the Cottonian Library, have suffered much from accidents and from the injuries of time. Water, and even fire, have partially passed over some; in others, the mildew has swept whole sentences from the page, leaving historical mysteries in provoking obscurity and occasionally baffling the attempts of the most persevering antiquary to raise the shadowy curtain of the past.
It is a national disgrace, most deeply to be lamented, that so many of the muniments of our history, more especially those connected with the personal expenditure of royalty, should have perished among the ill-treated records of the Exchequer. It has been reported—whether in jest or sober sadness, we cannot say—that some tons of those precious parchments were converted into isinglass. If so, it is possible that the wardrobe accounts of Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr, for which diligent search has been instituted in vain, may have feasted the metropolis in the form of jellies and blancmange instead of enriching the memoirs of those queens. Seriously speaking, the destruction of records is the more to be deplored because the leaven of party spirit so frequently diffuses itself over the pages of history that a clear judgment can be formed on disputed points only by reference to the original documents.
Read the other entries in this series: Polybius, Michel de Montaigne, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hardy, Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, Voltaire, Charles Lamb, al-Biruni, Ibn Khaldun, and Germaine de Staël.