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.
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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.