{"id":17,"date":"2018-02-01T16:29:21","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T16:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/?p=17"},"modified":"2018-06-20T14:46:12","modified_gmt":"2018-06-20T13:46:12","slug":"individual-blog-post-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/2018\/02\/01\/individual-blog-post-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wars of the Roses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mary\u2019s Pix\u2019s Queen Catharine<\/em> is set in the midst of social unrest. This unrest is a key precursor to the Wars of the Roses, a fierce familial struggle (not unlike a popular television show<\/a>) over the English Throne which lasted almost three decades and cost an estimated 50,000 lives.<\/p>\n

A Summary of the Wars<\/h2>\n

I\u2019m going to try to keep this as simple as possible, but the war itself and the family trees at its heart are quite complex, so bear with me here. The term ‘Wars of the Roses’ was actually coined by historians in the 19th century. Contemporary sources refer to the conflict as the ‘War of the Cousins’ alluding to how close the familial links were on either side. Christine Carpenter summaries the unrest:<\/p>\n

What there\u00a0was from about 1437 was quite simply a crisis of kingship, which threatened eventually to become a crisis of the crown.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although the conflict began in 1455, battlelines were drawn back in 1376 which the death of Edward III\u2019s son Edward the Black Prince during the Hundred Years War with France. Although The King had three sons, tradition dictated that the throne must pass to the Black Prince\u2019s son, Richard, who was just a child. Richard II was crowned King in 1377 much to the anger of his uncles, John, Duke of Lancaster, and Edmund, Duke of York. The struggle of these figures and their descendants over the same throne led to the eruption of the Wars of the Roses in 1455.<\/p>\n

The war itself began under King Henry VI (Queen Catherine\u2019s son.) Due to his weak-willed nature and the continuing economic fallout of defeat in the Hundred Years War with France, a power struggle emerged between Henry\u2019s General and Lord Protector Richard, Duke of York, and his wife Margaret of Anjou, who was allied to the\u00a0 Lancasters. Despite her husband’s somewhat mixed position, as\u00a0 Michael Hicks states in his Book\u00a0The War of the Roses,\u00a0 <\/em>Margret pursued a ‘stridently anti-yorkist line’ (p. 72).\u00a0 Tensions in England finally erupted in 1455. York forces attempted to remove Lancaster influence from the throne, by\u00a0 gathering armies in the north of England and invading Lancaster territories, officially beginning the Wars of the Roses. To retaliate, Margaret made a deal with the King of Scotland for an army, attacking and severely weakening York\u2019s power, leaving London without a king in 1460. \u00a0The York family retaliated by swearing in a new king, King Edward IV, and defeated the Lancasters again in 1461. A few revenge plots and betrayals later, a Lancaster army invaded from France in 1470. York then re-invaded in 1471, killing Henry VI and his son and capturing Margaret, seemingly removing the Lancaster problem. Things then remained\u00a0 stable until 1483, with the death of Edward IV. Yet another power struggle occurred, this time between Edward\u2019s brother Richard and Henry Tudor (The grandson of Catharine and Owen Tudor), both sought a claim to the throne. Tudor crossed the channel in 1485 and killed Richard. To prevent more bloody rebellion, Henry Tudor married the former King Edward\u2019s daughter, thereby uniting the two roses under his reign and finally ending the Wars of the Roses.<\/p>\n

So How Accurate is the Play?<\/h2>\n

Phew\u2026 after all that, it might be difficult to locate Mary Pix\u2019s play in the middle of all these plots and invasions. The Queen Catharine that the play\u2019s title refers to is Katharine of Valois, who married King Henry V in 1420 and gave birth to his son who later became Henry VI. As I\u2019ve said, Henry V died in France in 1422 leaving a young windowed Catharine, who was, by all accounts still marriageable.\u00a0 This left a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the English Throne: as a Frenchwoman Catherine was rumoured to be seeking French suitors due to an infant king leading to a serious power vacuum in the county.\u00a0 As Christine Carpenter states\u00a0 in her book (again aptly titled) Wars of the Roses,\u00a0<\/em>at this time, English parliament was ‘anxious’ about the possibility of having to ‘subvent an English government in France'( Carpenter p. 75).\u00a0 This suspicion and uncertainty led to old familial divisions becoming apparent.<\/p>\n

Such tension is matched by the tone of Mary Pix\u2019s play. However historically speaking, divisions between Lancaster and York were yet to erupt into violence at this time.\u00a0 Although the violence in Pix\u2019s tragedy is thus not wholly accurate, perhaps Pix\u2019s tragic emblems were an attempt to represent the tense zeitgeist of the time in general. Pix also seems to settle a historical debate surrounding Catharine\u2019s death. It has been recorded that Catharine died shortly after childbirth. It is unclear whether she died as a direct result of childbirth in Westminster or from a childbirth related illness in Bermondsey Abbey. As seen here<\/a>, Pix sets\u00a0 the ending of the play on Catharine\u2019s journey to the Abbey for safety.<\/p>\n

The play\u2019s main glaring historical inaccuracy is in its royal figures. King Edward was only born five years after Catharine\u2019s death in 1437. This creative decision could have been based on two factors. Perhaps historical records at the time were not accurate or readily available. The far more likely factor however, is that by the time of Henry V\u2019s death, the York influence in court lacked a centralised royal figure. Due to the royal-centric nature of theatre in 1698, a political battle between two opposing families would have been best represented through the eyes of a pair of royal antagonists. Pix may have bent history in this way to make her play more accessible and entertaining. In a modern context, it\u2019s kind of like Jeremy Corbyn and Winston Churchill competing in an election. They are figures of different political eras, but PMQs would be very entertaining if they went at each other!<\/p>\n

Pix and Shakespeare<\/h2>\n

The play makes for an interesting comparison to Shakespeare\u2019s work on a similar period in history. Shakespeare penned a tetralogy surrounding the subject of Catharine\u2019s husband and son, Henry V and Henry\u00a0VI. \u00a0Catharine is depicted as Princess Catherine, getting married to Henry V after the famous battle of Agincourt. However, Shakespeare largely avoided the period of uncertainty surrounding Henry V\u2019s death, focusing more on the character development of Henry VI in the wake of his father\u2019s death. During the Restoration period, Shakespeare regained a nostalgic following, with pre-restoration actors claiming to maintain Shakespeare\u2019s very commands. Pix\u2019s addition to a popular Shakespearean period of history is, to use a modern word, a form of reboot, capitalising on the theatrical popularity of the historical era and providing a unique perspective of an understood and widely known story. This can also be seen in the unique exploration of the secret relationship between Catharine and the Welsh courtier Owen Tudor. As audiences would be very aware of the Tudor family and its series of monarchs, an exploration into its familial history allows Pix\u2019s play to allude to and expand on hundreds of years of English Royalist history, encompassing the three royal dynasties in its scope.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mary\u2019s Pix\u2019s Queen Catharine is set in the midst of social unrest. This unrest is a key precursor to the Wars of the Roses, a fierce familial struggle (not unlike a popular television show) over the English Throne which lasted almost three decades and cost an estimated 50,000 lives. A Summary of the Wars I\u2019m … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Wars of the Roses”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dermot-ohare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":341,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-queen-catharine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}