A woman out of legend: The Life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and Queen of England (Part 2)

After a very long delay to this blog's Lives of the Queens of England series, here is part II of the three-part life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Part I - Daughter of Riches - can be read here.

"My life, when it is written, will read better than it lived. Henry Fitz-Empress, first Plantagenet, a king at twenty-one, the ablest soldier of an able time. He led men well, he cared for justice when he could and ruled, for thirty years, a state as great as Charlemagne's. He married out of love, a woman out of legend. Not in Alexandria, or Rome, or Camelot has there been such a queen."- Henry II in the play The Lion in Winter by James Goldman (1966)

History loves a good romance. Some of its most famous couples, like Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra, are remembered because of the intensity of their love for one another. Others, like Marc Antony and Cleopatra or Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are remembered not so much for the nature of their love, but because of the melodrama that surrounded them. On 18 May 1152, a newly married couple emerged from the cathedral of Saint Pierre in the city of Poitiers in modern-day France (below). They were Henry of Anjou, nineteen year-old heir-presumptive to the English throne, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, the twenty-something ex-wife of the King of France. Henry and Eleanor emphatically belong to the latter category of famous historical couples. With them, it’s the drama, not the sentiment, which entices. Their marriage, celebrated less than two months after Eleanor’s divorce from her first husband, was born from political expediency, but it ended in civil war, rebellion, mutual recriminations, heartbreak and imprisonment.

October 5th, 1789: The revolution reaches Versailles

 

"At first only women showed themselves; the latticed windows of the palace were closed, and the Bodyguard and Flanders regiment were drawn up in the Place d'Armes... General consternation and disorder reigned throughout the interior of the palace... The insurrection was directed against the Queen in particular; I shudder even now at the memory of the fishwives, or rather Furies, who wore white aprons, which they screamed out were intended to receive the bowels of Marie-Antoinette... They mixed the most obscene expressions with these horrible threats." - Extract from the memoirs of Jeanne-Louise Campan, lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie-Antoinette

"The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes dying, dying, dying." 

- From The Splendour Falls by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Versailles, not just the political and administrative centre of France's absolute monarchy for the last century, but also its living, breathing cultural embodiment, fell early to the forces of the Revolution. A full four years and ten days before the guillotine blade sliced through the neck of its last queen, the legendary palace was breached and defiled. Today, it stands as a busy, bustling, slightly soulless museum, with little outward sign of the drama and trauma which swept over it at sunset on October 5th, 1789.

December 10th, 1541: The Execution of the Queen's lovers

Above: Torrance Coombs and Tamazin Merchant as the doomed lovers, Sir Thomas Culpepper and Queen Catherine Howard in Season 4 of the Showtime series The Tudors (2010.)

It had only been five weeks since the 50 year-old King of England, Henry VIII, had been informed at the All Souls' Mass that his teenage queen, Catherine Howard, had been accused of pre-marital promiscuity by a former servant of her aristocratic grandmother, in whose care Catherine had spent most of her childhood. The young queen had been detained in her apartments whilst Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, headed an investigation into the serving maid's accusations. That Catherine had not been a virgin at the time Henry had married her was a serious problem, one likely to bring shame upon the monarchy and result in the annulment of the royal marriage. The maid in question had confided in her brother, a Protestant fundamentalist called John Lascelles, that Catherine had enjoyed a fling with her music teacher, Henry Mannox, and after they had fallen out when he began boasting of their sexual encounters, she had moved onto her grandmother's secretary, the overbearing but dashing Francis Dereham, whom she had slept with for the best part of a year and even (allegedly) promised to marry. Catherine and Francis's engagement had been broken-off when Catherine was summoned to Court to act as a lady-in-waiting to the new queen, Anne of Cleves, in the winter of 1539, but within six months Catherine had, of course, attracted the attention of the ailing monarch and become his fifth wife. 

All of this was potentially deeply humiliating for the Royal Family, but it became ten times more serious when it turned out that Queen Catherine's dealings with these two men had not simply been confined to her youthful folly. Henry Mannox now served on her household staff as a musician, a relatively minor post to be sure, but Dereham, her one-time fiancé had been given the premier and intimate position of being the Queen's private secretary, one which meant he came into contact with Catherine on a daily basis. When the archbishop discovered this, he went straight to the King to say that given her past liaisons with both men, Catherine's appointments of them to her household staff at the very least suggested emotional infidelity to her husband and at worse that she was planning to resume sexual relations with them. If she hadn't done already, that is. "She has betrayed you in thought," he told the King, "and if she had an opportunity would have betrayed you in deed." Henry, for the first time in his life the victim of adultery rather than the perpetrator, burst into floods of tears in front of the eyes of his embarrassed councillors, who had absolutely no idea what they were supposed to say or do in such a situation. Archbishop Cranmer was ordered to extend his investigation into every detail of the Queen's private life in the sixteen months that she had been married to the King and to discover if she had indeed gone to bed with Mannox or, more probably, with Dereham, at any point since July of 1540.

The Other Queen: The Life of Matilda of Boulogne, Queen of England

"In many ways, Matilda of Boulogne was a model consort. As a regent, diplomat, warrior, counsellor and mother, she occupies a position alongside her predecessors Matilda of Scotland and Matilda of Flanders, at the apogee of English queenship, after which many historians concur that the power invested in the office began to decline ... Matilda's husband is one of the great, if misunderstood, failures of English kingship. Matilda herself, though, was never anything less than a great queen." 

- Lisa Hilton, Queens Consort: England's Medieval Queens (2008)

Author's Note

Firstly, a note of apology for having taken so long to write and upload the fourth instalment in this blog’s “Queens of England” series. The last update – “The Fair Maid of Brabant” – chronicling the life of Adeliza of Louvain was posted on August 31st, over two months ago. With writing the sequel to Popular and working on various scripts and my Masters degree in Medieval History, things have rather gotten away from me. This post – the life of Adeliza’s successor (although Adeliza never really regarded her as such) – is the last post chronicling the lives of the queens of the House of Normandy, which ruled England from 1066 to 1154. In terms of time, it was a short dynastic reign; in terms of importance, vast. After this, I shall be posting on the House of Normandy’s genealogy and then moving onto the queens of the House of Plantagenet, who reigned from 1154 to 1399. 

Secondly, a note on structure. Just as the names Eleanor and Isabella were to dominate the lists of their immediate successors, the name Matilda was very much the preferred name of the queens of the Anglo-Norman empire. In fact, with the exception of the decorous Adeliza of Louvain, every Anglo-Norman queen bore the name of Matilda. In part, this was because the British-Norman elite was a relatively tiny and close-knit group. Its first queen, Matilda of Flanders, stood as godmother to her future daughter-in-law and successor, who was thus also named Matilda, in her honour. This Matilda (of Scotland), in turn, stood as godmother to this queen, her niece Matilda of Boulogne. All this would potentially be complicated enough from a narrative point-of-view were it not for the fact that for the entirety of Matilda of Boulogne’s time as queen, her life was fatally intertwined with that of her cousin, also named Matilda (herself the daughter of Matilda of Scotland). At the very same time as Matilda of Boulogne claimed to be the true queen-consort of England, her cousin was claiming to be the true queen-regnant. Needless to say, neither acknowledged the legitimacy of the other’s claim. The two Matildas were intimately aware of one another, but from the perspective of telling their story, having two Matildas appearing so frequently in the text is going to be distracting. Luckily, their world was bi- and sometimes even tri-lingual. “Matilda” was the European version of their name, but their Anglo-Saxon subjects preferred to render it by its more traditional usage – “Maud.” This chapter in the series focuses primarily on the life of Matilda of Boulogne, a French heiress married to the prince who controversially seized the throne of England in 1135 and became known as “King Stephen.” Their cousin and rival, who claimed to be the true inheritor of the English crown, was an English princess and the widow of the German Emperor. She will thus be referred to either as “the Empress” or by the Anglo-Saxon variant of her name, “Maud.”

***

ENGLAND,

In the Year of Grace, 1135

The mystic’s eyes gleamed with certainty as he pronounced his prophecy. It is always difficult to tell where the fire of spiritual surety springs from – either a religious gift or a mental imbalance. But the hermit need not have worried; the prince standing before him was a pious soul, much more inclined to see the old man’s mutterings as visionary, rather than insane. It was a dangerous time in England, dangerous, even, for the prince to be consulting the hermit about the matter in question. An old and sick man, who had long outlived the sons of his first marriage, was sitting upon the throne; his queen, beautiful and charming, was barren. After over a decade of marriage, she had produced no children to replace those lost years ago in a catastrophic shipwreck off the coast of Normandy. A crisis of the succession was brewing, just as surely as there was a God in Heaven. Recently, the King’s only surviving legitimate child - a daughter - had recently been made a widow by the death of the German Emperor. In her widowhood, she had returned to her father’s realm, which placed her back in play as viable contender for the succession. Certainly, it seemed to be the old king’s wish to leave his crown to his imperial daughter. But within the elite of his kingdoms in England and Normandy, there were many great lords who said that for them to be ruled over by a woman would be an abomination. They said that the true heir was not the King’s daughter, but his nephew, Stephen.

It was that prince, Stephen, who now stood before the old man, who years earlier had eschewed the vanities of the world and retreated into a life of religious seclusion and poverty where, it was said, the angels had endowed him with the dubious gift of prophecy. The Hermit fixed his rheumy eyes upon the prince who, despite his quiet and chivalrous exterior, wanted so desperately to take the throne of England when his aged uncle at last died. The holy man spoke: the Queen would remain barren. It had been ordained by Heaven that no child would quicken the womb of Adeliza of Louvain, whilst the Crown of England still sat upon her head. The King would not die in England, the monk said next, but rather in his possessions beyond the sea – in Normandy, the land of his ancestors. Finally, he concluded the prophecy by giving the prince the news he had been so desperate to hear – the Empress would not sit upon the throne when her father died. England and Normandy would pass instead to Stephen. Infused by an intoxicating mixture of piety and ambition, Stephen received the hermit’s blessing and hurried swiftly from the dank cave where the holy man chose to worship Christ in solitude and suffering. 

September 5th, 1548: The Death of Katharine Parr

"She was not a pretty woman, or a beauty, but rather comely with red-gold hair and hazel eyes ... Katherine's looks, however, were not her chief attraction. People were drawn more to her warm and amiable personality and her intellectual qualities; she exuded goodwill... Katherine was also to prove popular with most people, mainly because she had a pleasant manner with both nobility and servants alike. Her chaplain, John Parkhurst, who later became Bishop of Norwich, remembered in his latter years that she was 'a most gentle mistress'. Perhaps the most outstanding thing about her was her formidable intellect, which had been cultivated to an unusual extent by her mother and by the people with whom she associated herself in later life. She was perceptive, articulate, thirsty for knowledge, both general and religious, and industrious. Her virtue, a female quality always suspect in an age that believed that teaching women to write would encourage them to pen love-letters, was beyond question."
- The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir (1991)

On this day in 1548, Katharine Parr, Queen Dowager of England and Ireland, died an agonising death at the age of thirty-six. She had outlived her third, and most notorious, husband by just over eighteen months and had died as a result of trying to give her fourth husband, Lord Thomas Seymour, a son and heir. Instead, the former Queen had given birth to a sickly daughter and she herself was now "lying on my death-bed, sick of body but of good mind and perfect memory".

July 6th, 1535: The Execution of Sir Thomas More

Today marks the anniversary of the beheading of Sir Thomas More (above), the former confidante and adviser of King Henry VIII of England. More, who had provided the eulogy at the funeral of Henry's mother, Elizabeth of York, in 1503, had served as Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532, during which time he became increasingly uncomfortable at his master's ecclesiastical policies. He resigned, but was eventually executed for treason three years later.

Canonised by the Roman Catholic Church in 1935, modern perceptions of Sir Thomas vary - at a recent debate on the role of the Catholic Church in history, the British man of letters, Stephen Fry, thundered at Catholic MP and apologist, Ann Widdecombe, that it was a matter almost obscene that somehow like More should be venerated as a saint, particularly as the patron of private conscience, given his treatment of heretics during his time as Lord Chancellor. Widdecombe defended More's canonisation and something of the differing reactions to him can be reflected in cinematic portrayals of him - be it the hagiographic A Man For All Seasons, the intensely critical God's Outlaw or the more balanced characterisation by Jeremy Notham in The Tudors. As with so many of his contemporaries, what we know (or, rather, think we know) about Sir Thomas is based on hearsay or particularly resilient legends. Chief amongst the more nonsensical stories told about him is the idea that he personally tortured the heretics captured with a cat o' nine tails or that he championed Katherine of Aragon and refused to accept Anne Boleyn as the new queen. In fact, perhaps to his credit, More was one of the few people who personally admired Katherine but didn't see her cause and that of the Catholic Church in England as symbiotic. At the time of Anne's Coronation, the man who would be a saint, wrote: -

"So am I he among his Grace's other faithful subjects, his Highness being in possession of his marriage and this noble woman really anointed queen, neither murmur at it nor dispute upon it, nor never did nor will, but without any other manner meddling of the matter among his other faithful subjects, faithfully pray to God for his Grace and hers both long to live and well, and their noble issue too, in such wise as may be to the pleasure of God, honour and surety to themselves, rest, peace, wealth and profit unto this noble realm."

A legal defense of Sir Thomas is mounted by the excellent blogger, Claire Ridgway, here.

May 12th, 1536: The Trial of the Queen's Concubines

"So we'll live and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too- who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out- and take upon's the mystery of things as if we were God's spies."
- From William Shakespeare's "King Lear," Act V, Scene III

On Friday, May 12th, 1536, Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower of London, escorted Sir Henry Norris, Sir William Brereton, Sir Francis Weston and Mark Smeaton into Westminster Hall where, three years earlier, Anne Boleyn had been honoured with a lavish Coronation banquet at the height of her triumph.

Built during the reign of King William Rufus, who had ruled England from 1087 until 1100, the Hall would now play witness to one of the most extraordinary and shameful trials in British history. Thomas Howard, 63 year-old Duke of Norfolk, sat as presiding judge and the King's representative over the four men accused of having committed treasonous adultery with Queen Anne Boleyn. According to the indictment created by the Grand Jury of Middlesex who along with the Grand Jury of Kent had jurisdiction over the trials (they were the closest two to London and thus the easiest to control and organise from the Crown’s perspective), the men had been partners in the Queen’s “frail and carnal appetites” and insultingly referred to them as “her adulterers and concubines”. Grim-faced and self-righteous, the Duke ordered the trial of the four men who had dishonoured their king to begin.

May 6th, 1536: The Mystery of the Queen's Letter

“At the close of life, thoughts hitherto unthinkable rise into the mind of one who meets his fate with resignation; they are like good spirits that diffuse their radiance upon the summits of the past.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)

On the fourth day of her imprisonment, legend has it that Anne Boleyn wrote a letter to her estranged husband, King Henry VIII, in which she asked for a fair trial, mercy for her fellow prisoners and hinted at Jane Seymour being the reason for her downfall. This letter was allegedly found amongst the papers of Thomas Cromwell, after he was executed for treason in 1540 – which implies that if the letter is in fact genuine, it was intercepted by Cromwell and never reached the King. Scrawled across the top in what seems to be Cromwell’s handwriting: “To the King from the Lady in the Tower”.

In his The Reformation in England, J.H. Merle d’Aubigny wrote admiringly of the letter, “We see Anne thoroughly in this letter, one of the most touching that was ever written. Injured in her honour, she speaks without fear, as one on the threshold of eternity. If there were no other proofs of her innocence, this document alone would suffice to gain her cause in the eyes of an impartial and intelligent posterity.”

May 4th, 1536: The Public Reaction

“A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.”
– Marie-Louise de la Ramée (1839 – 1908)

In the early afternoon of May 4th, two days after the Queen’s arrest, Sir William Brereton was arrested as the fifth of Anne Boleyn's alleged lovers and conducted to the Tower.

Of all Anne’s lovers, it was Brereton who seemed the least plausible candidate - with the obvious exception of her brother. Mark Smeaton had been noticeably attracted to the Queen physically, Henry Norris had constantly been in her company and Francis Weston was a known womaniser; Brereton, on the other hand, was neither close to the Queen personally, nor particularly attractive. Writing several years later, a palace servant spoke for many when he said, “If any of them was innocent, it was he.”

May 2nd, 1536: The Queen's Arrest

"And down the river's dim expanse
Like some bold seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance --
With a glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott."
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892), The Lady of Shalott

On the morning of May 2nd 1536, Anne Boleyn awoke as usual in her luxurious four-poster bed, with its silken sheets and golden tassels imported from Florence. Despite her husband's abrupt departure from the Mayday jousts the day before, there was no sign that this day was going to be different from any other.

The Queen's ladies of the bedchamber were already waiting to dress her in the morning’s preliminary outfit – a long robe, a bit like a dressing gown, was placed over a relatively simple linen dress and the Queen ate breakfast in the privacy of her rooms before a screen was erected in front of her for Mass. Since she was in her dishabille, it was customary for the Queen to hear the morning service from behind a screen on days which were not holy days or great festivals. So, with a mantilla draped over her head and her prayer book in her hands, Anne heard one of her chaplains celebrate the Mass, before she retired back to her bedchamber to be dressed properly.

Noted for her interest in fashion, as well as for her extravagance, Queen Anne usually spent about £12,000 ($18,000) on clothes in an average month – not counting expenditure for great events of State, when her outfits were famously breathtaking. Even on "normal" days, like this one, she was always immaculately coiffed and styled and even one of her most hostile critics described her as "the glass of fashion."

May 1st, 1536: Mayday

Part of a series of posts beginning today on the downfall of Anne Boleyn

“For her, my lord,
I dare my life lay down and will do't, sir,
Please you to accept it, that the Queen is spotless
I' the eyes of heaven and to you; I mean,
In this which you accuse her.”
- William Shakespeare's The Winter’s Tale, Act II, Scene I

On a warm Mayday afternoon in 1536, Henry VIII and his queen, Anne Boleyn, took their places in the royal box outside the red-brick banqueting house of Greenwich Palace, the king’s favourite river-side home.

Mayday – the first day of May – was one of the English Court’s annual social highlights. It marked the beginning of the summer “Season”, in contrast to the relative restraint imposed by Lent, which had ended a few weeks earlier. At Court, the day was traditionally celebrated with a series of afternoon jousts, in which the most athletic of the male courtiers would compete against one another in the tilt. Ordinarily, the sporty sovereign took great pride in being the centre of attention at such events, but this year – for the first time – Henry was not competing following a particularly dangerous fall from his horse back in January. The King’s injury meant that the most celebrated of the day’s jousters consisted of the Queen’s brother, Lord Rochford, the handsome playboy Sir Francis Weston, the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt and the King’s Master of the Horse, Sir Nicholas Carew – along with a host of other well-born competitors.

Sitting next to one another, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn still cut an attractive – even a magnificent – pair. Admittedly, the King was no longer the “perfect model of manly beauty” that he had been when he came to the throne twenty-seven years earlier, but neither had he degenerated into the monstrous, sweating man-mountain of his later years. In 1536, the muscles on the 6ft 2ins monarch were only just beginning to turn to fat; with the boyish good looks gone but the repulsive obesity still some way off, the 44 year-old King looked every inch the absolute monarch.

Next Week

A bit like my Holy Week posts, from next week (May 1st) I will be posting on the fall of Anne Boleyn (above), beginning with her last public appearance on May 1st following through to her death on May 19th - covering her arrest, her imprisonment, her trial and the fates of those accused alongside her.

Mean Girls (2004)

“I know she's kind of socially retarded and weird, but she's my friend... so, just promise me you won't make fun of her!”
- Regina George (Rachel McAdams), Mean Girls (2004)

Unlike most other movies in its genre, Mean Girls isn’t about some faux-ugly teenage girl who, with the help of a hardened jock who falls inexplicably in love with her once he gets bored of dating the cheerleaders, suddenly becomes beautiful, radiant and beloved, all the while simultaneously and paradoxically proving that it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Instead, Mean Girls is a tongue-in-cheek comedy-drama about a 16 year-old girl called Cady (Lindsay Lohan), the child of two travelling academics, who is about to go to an American public high school for the first time.

There, clueless, plaid-wearing Cady is befriended by the indie kids, Janis and Damien (Lizzie Caplan and Daniel Franzese), who explain to her how the pecking order at North Shore High works. However, since she is a “regulation hotty,” Cady soon attracts the notice of North Shore’s manipulative Queen Bee, Regina George (played superbly by Rachel McAdams.) Spurred on by her indie friends, who want Cady to gather information on “the Plastics,” so they can laugh together later about the popular girls inane lifestyle, Cady reluctantly begins to eat lunch with at Regina’s table, hang-out with them and, bit by bit, she becomes sucked into the intoxicating, gossip-riddled world of the teen it-crowd – including falling for Regina’s ex-boyfriend, school sexpot Aaron Samuels, (Jonathan Bennett) and stirring up trouble between Regina and her brilliantly played sidekicks - “totally rich” Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert) and “the dumbest girl you will ever meet,” Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried.)

Now, I absolutely love Mean Girls – unsurprising, I know. Yes, I hate the ending, but then, who doesn’t? But long before Tina Fey was famous for her side-splittingly hilarious impersonations of Vice-Presidential contender, Sarah Palin, on Saturday Night Live ,she was critically acclaimed for writing this funny, bitchy exposé of high school cliques and popularity contests. (She also plays the schools Maths teacher, Miss Norbury.) Sadly and probably quite dysfunctionally, Mean Girls makes me miss school and the glory days of secret house parties, sexuality panics, dress code fears, crash dieting, needlessly overcomplicated scheming and the endless deliciousness of being slightly ridiculous on a daily basis – oh... to be 17 again. Also, another very good movie. (See what I did there?)

Spy Wednesday

“Judas then, having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees, cometh thither with lanterns and torches and weapons.”
- The Gospel according to Saint John, Chapter 18

"No, it makes perfect sense. Unfortunately. But I imagine that it will only make complete sense to you in the end. When that moment comes, Judas, remember my words: we were both chosen, but we were not helpless. It was not pre-destined. At any moment, we could have rejected the mission God gave us, but neither of us did. That is because God, in His infinite wisdom, knew that we were both entirely suited to the tasks He would assign to us. Remember, if your presentiment is correct, that you were the most suitable candidate for whatever task you shall eventually perform. You may not know why exactly; you will simply know that you were the right choice. For you, even more so than it was for me, I imagine it will be an overwhelming burden."
- The Virgin Mary, Act II, Scene VI, Magdalene by Gareth Russell

The fourth day of Holy Week is sometimes known as "Spy Wednesday," because it commemorates the day on which Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ to the Sanhedrin, agreeing to facilitate His arrest on the following day, in return for the princely sum of thirty pieces of silver.

Judas, as a character, is one I have grappled with, with unintentional degrees of success, apparently. In 2006, when The Da Vinci Code mania was at its height, the historical elitist in me took such umbrage at its presentation of early Church history that I began to research the life of Saint Mary Magdalene, with the thought to do a play based on her life, as it is recorded in the Bible and the Apocrypha.

The result, Magdalene, was set in a generic "modern" setting and followed Mary's life from her time as a victim of demonic possession to the Passion of Holy Week. Apart from the main characters of Mary, Jesus and the Virgin Mary, the supporting characters included three of the Apostles (Saint Peter, Saint John the Evangelist and Judas Iscariot) and three of Christ's female followers (Saint Johanna, Saint Veronica of the Veil and Christ's aunt, Mary, the wife of Cleopas, whose name was changed to 'Maria' in the play to avoid confusion with the other two Marys.) Christ's adoptive father, Saint Joseph, also featured briefly in two scenes early in the first act.

In fairness, some apparently found the play irksome - a few objected to the presentation of the Virgin Mary, Maria Cleopas and Johanna as aristocrats, although I was simply following the ancestry given to her by 1st century Jewish evangelists and, in Johanna's case, the Bible describes her as the wife of a palace aristocrat. Others thought that it was pushing female priesthood or that, paradoxically, it was "too Catholic," that it was promoting the idea of the Virgin Mary as a mediatrix, that it rinsed the idea of Justification By Faith or that it was too pro-Christian in general. Others were more kind and I was delighted with the very kind letter of recommendation Rev. Dr. Andrew Moore of Oxford's Faculty of Theology wrote for the second run of Magdalene in 2007.

As I have said, Magdalene has so far been performed twice - once in Oxford in December 2006 and again in Northern Ireland in September 2007. Recently, when I was discussing some of my work, a friend (who has seen every play I have written since All Those Who Suffered in 2004) declared that he thought Judas was the best character I had ever written. I was somewhat taken aback - flattered, certainly, but also surprised - because during the writing of Magdalene, I had spent far less time crafting Judas than I had some of the other characters and, moreover, Judas only speaks at length in three scenes during the entire play. When I put this to another friend, they also concurred that Judas was the best-written, alongside Gabrielle de Polignac in The Audacity of Ideas.