Chichester academic explores the secrets of the women who served at the Tudor court

The secrets of the women who served at the Tudor court are revealed in a new book by a senior lecturer at the University of Chichester.

Transcript

00:00Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Lovely to

00:06speak to Nicola Clark of the University of Chichester. Now Nicola, you've got a fabulous

00:10sounding book out, very timely given what's happening at the Festival Theatre in April

00:15and May. Your book is The Waiting Game, The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor

00:21Queens. Now, clearly difficult to research because records don't exist in break rooms

00:27to do that. No, that's true. The turnover of queens after Catherine of Aragon was so

00:33fast that I think it really affected the survival of records and probably sometimes the way

00:39that they were made in the first place. If a queen is no longer in her place, in her

00:46position, then there's no point in keeping the records of her previous household because

00:50they're no longer relevant. So yeah, it's researching in gaps and in bits and backwards

00:57through the men and in places you wouldn't necessarily expect.

01:01So once you can penetrate these gaps and put together some kind of narrative, why are these

01:05women important? What do they tell us that we need to know about the court?

01:10Well, they're never not there. So every queen had ladies-in-waiting and they walk this funny

01:18tightrope. They're her confidants. They're there to be her companions, even her friends.

01:23So a queen needs somebody to talk to at some point, surely, but they're also there to be

01:28her chaperones. So if the queen is doing something that she shouldn't be doing, odds are at least

01:34one lady-in-waiting is going to know about it. And then that's dangerous because if that's

01:38discovered, as the lady-in-waiting, your oath of service is primarily to the king, actually,

01:44and only second to the queen. So it's quite common for ladies-in-waiting then to turn

01:49king's evidence and to shop the queen, their mistress.

01:53That must have been incredibly unsettling, undermining the fact that you couldn't

01:58trust your ladies-in-waiting. You didn't know if you could?

02:04Yeah, although I think, again, they probably expect this to some degree because it's simply

02:09how things were. I think also in Henry's reign, we do get an unusual balance of queens behaving

02:16in ways that perhaps they shouldn't. But it's a very fraught time to be a queen, or to be a woman,

02:21or to be anybody at the royal court.

02:23Yeah, and I think it's even harder to behave in ways that you shouldn't if you can't even trust

02:29the people watching you.

02:30What's correct keeps changing and the rug keeps being pulled out from under your feet.

02:34As Henry breaks with the Church of Rome and starts up his Church of England,

02:38exactly what's right and what's okay and what's not is continually shifting.

02:43So yeah, it's a really difficult environment.

02:46Goodness. Well, it sounds a fascinating book.

02:49Lovely to speak to you about it. Congratulations on this publication.