King John’s Post #3: Some bodices were ripped in the writing of this post

The Bodleian Library. Photo by Paul Joseph via Flickr

Previously: Lady Moppet of Yorkshire, time-travelling mistress of King John, was alarmed to discover that Elizabeth Woodville was writing an erotic historical novel about her entitled The Wicked Mistress, under the pen name Melusina Granger. The Wicked Mistress was largely based on a thirteenth-century manuscript, the Historia Moppetae by Brother Walter, editor of the Waltham Chronicle of the Universe. While Lady Moppet was shocked to learn that King John was collaborating with Brother Walter on the project, she was relieved that it seemed unlikely that The Wicked Mistress would find a publisher, due to the excessive number of sex scenes. Meanwhile, John, discovering that Moppet had secretly been using contraception, promptly imprisoned her before leaving, ostensibly to visit his northern territories. He takes up the tale from the time he decided to leave Moppet in the charge of his brother, William of Salisbury.

I sent for Oscar. He dashed in and skidded over the rushes to a kneeling position. I picked him up and held him up high. He kicked his little legs and stared down at me with Moppet’s blue eyes.

It’s never wise to get too attached to a small child. They’re too fragile. They’re like goldfish. Swimming happily round in their pond today, floating dead on the surface tomorrow. For no particular reason. So I’d never spent much time with any of my young children before. But Oscar was different. He would live to a great age. He would save the English monarchy. Moppet had brought him to me across the centuries so that he could fulfil his destiny. And I would never let him go.

That was why I was taking him with me. If Moppet escaped – and I didn’t put it past her – she might take Oscar with her. If she returned to her own time, I could send my mercenaries after her, to chloroform her and drag her back, as I had with Mrs Kensington (although God knew my to-do list was long enough). But if she hid somewhere else – somewhere in the past, or somewhere even further in the future – I might never be able to find her. Or Oscar. And I wouldn’t risk that.

[Warning: further on in this post Mary Boleyn will be using foul language.]

Royal Mistress Challenge: the allure of the mistress

Photo by John Cunliffe for Abigails Ateliers. All rights reserved.

When I began collecting the titles of novels for the Royal Mistress Challenge, I realised that this amounts to a sub-genre in itself. What is the perennial allure of the mistress? I think it comes down to five things:

1. Beauty
2. Power
3. Money
4. Sex
4. Mystery

Beauty first. We like reading about beautiful people, otherwise People magazine would go out of business pretty darn quick.  Mistresses were nearly always renowned for their beauty; the few who weren’t, like Mlle Choin, the mistress/secret wife of the Grand Dauphin, Louis XIV’s son, don’t tend to get written about very much.

Power. Mistresses and favourites were hated figures, because they were blamed for the poor decisions made by the king.  One of the reasons Marie Antoinette was so unpopular for much of her husband’s reign was that he did not have a mistress, so when things went wrong, there was no-one to blame but her.

How much power the mistress actually had varied.  In the medieval period the mistress was a shadowy figure, there for the king’s convenience, and baronial families objected to their daughters being ‘despoiled’ by the king.  By 1500 the mistress was emerging as a power player, and during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries families backed potential mistresses like political candidates.  In return they expected their piece of the pie.  And that leads us on to:

Money. The early modern period was the heyday of the mistress, who, in addition to houses, jewels and art, gathered land, money, offices, privileges and pensions and redistributed them to supporters and relatives.  By the nineteenth century, with the decline of royal autonomy, the mistress was less rapacious, but still enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle.

Sex. By definition, a mistress is desirable.  We like reading about desirable people.  Otherwise InStyle magazine would go out of business pretty darn quick.  An aura of exciting sex hangs around the mistress.  Whether she was enjoying all this sex as much as the king is another matter, which merits further discussion.  When she was having sex with the king, that was.  Anne Boleyn held Henry VIII off for six years because she didn’t want a hit-and-run romance like the one he had with her sister Mary.  Madame de Pompadour made the transition from mistress to best friend and confidante of Louis XV without losing any of her influence over him.

Mystery. The mistress might be a public figure, but unlike her counterpart, the queen, she was not constantly on display.  She wasn’t crowned, she didn’t eat in public or have crowds of people trooping through her apartment.  Often surprisingly little is known about her relationship with the king.  While sources abound for the reign of Louis XIV – we know what he was doing every day for much of the time – almost no letters survive between him and his mistresses, none of whom wrote their memoirs.

And maybe there’s an X-factor that defies analysis.  One thing is certain: looking at reviews of royal mistress novels, a theme quickly emerges.  Major Mary Suedom.  Wikipedia is pretty good on popular culture, so I’ll leave the definition of a Mary Sue to them:

A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in literary criticism and particularly in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers.

And so I decided that the heroine of every one of these novels I read, and I mean every one, will have to undergo that most dreaded ordeal of any fictional character.

Yes.  You know what I’m talking about.

The Mary Sue Litmus Test.

Anyway.  Having decided this, Moppet felt she’d better put her own house in order before she started calling other people’s characters Mary Sues.  I.e.: make her own alter ego, Lady Moppet of Yorkshire, take the Mary Sue Litmus Test.

The phrase ‘alter ego’ should give everyone a clue that there was never much hope that Lady Moppet wasn’t a Mary Sue.  But there’s always some hope.  Isn’t there?

So, first, Miss Moppet did the Writers’ Mary Sue Test (squeaking with laughter all the way through).  The results:

Lady Moppet of Yorkshire isn’t a character: she’s you, or you as you’d like to be. She isn’t really very cool: she blends into crowds, she hangs out on the fringes at parties, and wearing shades after dark makes her run into things. She may have sometimes thought that she was special, or destined for greater things, but probably dismissed the idea as a fantasy. She’s come in for her share of hurt, but gotten off with minor damage. And you’ve been sparing with the free handouts: whatever she gains, she’s worked for.

You may have let yourself get a little too close to Lady Moppet of Yorkshire. Maybe she’s you as you wish you were, or maybe you’re just afraid no one will like her and are trying to give her a free ride. Have some confidence in your writing! Lady Moppet of Yorkshire is a good character. Give her room to be herself before you stifle her.

I’m not going to use this test for the Royal Mistress Challenge novels because there are too many questions that only the writer can answer, such as ‘do you frequently fantasise about being your character?’  I could have a guess, but it hardly seems fair.

So Miss Moppet found another test, The Original Fiction Mary-Sue Litmus Test.  And did the test again.  Hoping that maybe this one might come out differently!  The way you re-read Gone with the Wind!  Hoping that this time, everything will be okay!

And you were expecting?  She is a royal mistress, after all.

Anne Boleyn: Venus or witch?

The movie tie-in cover

It was the original cover of The Other Boleyn Girl which famously started the trend for ‘headless women’ covers for historical novels.  I may be in the minority in not liking that original cover.  It was the colours: I just found them drab and boring.  I far prefer the vibrant emerald green of the movie tie-in cover.  This was the first copy of the book which I bought, and the green helped sell it to me (rather than the Photoshopping, which I’ve seen better done).

The question I want to answer is: why green?  Why not blue, red or yellow?  Why associate Anne Boleyn with the colour green?

Personally, the first thing that comes to mind is the idea of envy and jealousy: the ‘green-eyed jealousy’ and ‘green-eyed monster’ Shakespeare wrote about in The Merchant of Venice.  That’s pretty appropriate to the storyline of TOBG, which is chock full of envy and jealousy in the form of rivalry between Anne and her sister Mary.  Both envy the other at different times, but it is Anne who is portrayed as devoured by envy, consumed by ambition and determination to shove her sister out of the way and get to the top.

The second thing Anne’s green dress made me think of is another woman who dresses in green – a character in one of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, The Silver Chair.  When Jill and Eustace meet The Lady of the Green Kirtle on their journey to the land of the giants, they think she is lovely.  But their companion and guide, Puddleglum, is suspicious, and rightly so.  The Lady is a witch, with the power to transform into a serpent, ‘shining, and as green as poison.’

Well, Anne Boleyn doesn’t transform into a serpent in the pages of TOBG (don’t want to disappoint anyone who hasn’t read it) but she is shown to resort to witchcraft on more than one occasion.  She also attempts to poison an enemy.  Whether she was really guilty of this or not, it was something of which she was accused.   So again the green dress seems appropriate.

Or at least that’s how a 21st century audience sees it.  Jane Ashelford, discussing the language of colours in the sixteenth century, says that green was then known as ‘the colour of love and joy’ (The Art of Dress: Clothes and Society 1500-1914, London: The National Trust, 1996, revised ed. 2000, p.32).  Why love and joy?  Green was associated with Venus, the goddess of love, who was portrayed rising from green waves, as in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.  This association continued right through the early modern period (about 1500-1800) and was the reason why women’s bedchambers were so often decorated in green.  One of the best examples is the Green Velvet Bedchamber at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, England.  In 1732 William Kent designed a bed for this room with a gilded double shell against the headcloth (which you can just about glimpse through the curtains in the image below) to represent the shell in which Venus was borne to the shore.  There’s another green-upholstered bedchamber (although the colour has faded badly) at Osterley Park on the outskirts of London.  For this, the State Bedchamber, Robert Adam designed an eight-poster bed as a Temple of Venus in 1775-6 – click through the slide show to see it.

So although the ‘green’ Other Boleyn Girl cover may have been designed with the intention of portraying Anne as less than angelic, I like to think that she and her contemporaries would have seen it quite differently – as a tribute to her beauty and desirability.