UPDATE: ‘Punish or Pardon’ is being revived at the Tower of London for February half-term: 14 – 22 February 2015.

It was half-term at the Tower of London last week, which meant a pretty busy swirl of visitors and a real mix of English families and the usual excitable tourists. For their delight and delectation – and hopefully also their edification – Past Pleasures (the resident costumed interpretation company) was presenting a rather unusual story. And it is one I researched and directed: Punish or Pardon?, a choose-your-ending style presentation about forgotten women prisoners of the Tower of London.

Tales of prisoners of the Tower are by no means unique, but one looking specifically at a group of women is. This is peculiar on the face of it, given that the most famous prisoner and victim of the Tower is Anne Boleyn. But this week has demonstrated (in a form of rather unorthodox market research) that if you stand in a Tudor gown at the Tower and ask people to guess which prisoner you are who is not Anne Boleyn, most will draw a blank. Some remember Lady Jane Grey (often as another of Henry’s wives, rather than as his great-niece), some Katherine Howard, but very few can name any other residents.

And yet, while women were always outnumbered by their male counterparts, when I first started researching female Tudor prisoners I was positively spoilt for choice. It seemed half of Elizabeth I’s maids of honour ended up in the Tower at some point for marrying without permission. Ladies Catherine and Mary Grey – Lady Jane’s sisters – were only two among them. And what of Elizabeth herself, imprisoned during the reign of her sister, Mary I?

Having narrowed the field to a more manageable era, the reign of Henry VIII, there were still a number of prisoners I neglected. Lady Alice Hungerford was imprisoned for poisoning her husband, but I discovered her slightly too late in my research. Lady Jane Rochford was imprisoned and executed inside the Tower thanks to her role in Catherine Howard’s adultery, but I avoided her story because it was so closely tied to tales people already knew. What I really wanted to do in this event was to present a range of prisoner experiences – high and low born, with the resultant difference in treatment and punishment– and also a range of possible endings. Because in Tudor England, your punishment tended to fit your crime. Thus, a heretic was burnt in a grim foreshadowing of Hell’s flames; a pirate was drowned; a traitor, who had severed their ties to the head of state, was dismembered. But your execution also corresponded to your birth. Thus, if you were a nobly born woman you might have hanging or burning commuted to the ‘mercy’ of beheading.

The women that I chose to interpret represented the changes in Henry’s governance of England and their impact on the country at large:

There was common-born Alice Wolf, whose crime (murder) was committed in a boat and who was therefore a pirate at law – a serious threat to a sea-bound nation with a king trying to improve the navy. She is also the only female escapee of the Tower, a story that deserves to be better known.

Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, represented pre-Reformation England. She was a continuation of the fourteenth and fifteenth century female mystics who believed they had God-given visions and prophecies. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, one of those prophecies included foresight of famine, war and excommunication for Henry if he divorced Catherine of Aragon – a vision that Henry was not willing to have revealed to his people.

Lady Margaret Bulmer (or possibly Mistress Margaret Cheyne, mistress of Sir John Bulmer) was involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the northern uprising resulting from the dissolution of the monasteries and economic unrest of the 1530s. Like many of the noble rebel leaders, she and Sir John had been threatened by the ‘pilgrims’, but they had helped them all the same. They provided shelter, food and arms to the rebels. It is hard to believe there was not a little sympathy for the cause.

Anne Askew was the last link in this chain of religious change, marking the new wave of evangelizing reformers initially encouraged by Henry’s break from Rome and promotion of the Bible in English, but then fiercely suppressed when their religious opinions became too radical – or perhaps too egalitarian. She was an out and out Protestant, possibly supported by Katherine Parr (certainly by some of Parr’s closest friends) and subsequently tortured to try and force a revelation of such support.

Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, represented the old nobility, the last vestiges of Plantagenet blood and fierce Catholic faith. Her son, Cardinal Reginald Pole, was the cause of her association with treason – he, like Barton, spoke against Henry’s divorce and break from Rome, and there were rumours that Margaret was arranging his marriage to Mary Tudor, setting up a rival claim to the throne. But Reginald was in Italy while his mother was helpless in England, and she chastised him for his wrongdoing. She was also 68 at the time of her death, an advanced age for the Tudor period.

Last of the prisoners was Lady Margaret Douglas. She was the daughter of Henry’s sister Margaret, the one-time Queen of Scotland; the niece of the King of England and of the Dowager Queen of France. Perhaps she felt some sense of entitlement as a result, as she was repeatedly imprisoned during her life for various plots against the monarch. However, during Henry’s reign her crime was getting engaged to a Howard without royal permission – twice.

Leading the public through the stories of these women were two other Tudor characters: the daughter of the Lieutenant of the Tower, Mistress Skeffington, and the Solicitor General, Sir Richard Rich. Skeffington (representing the kindly Lieutenant’s daughter who pleaded for Alice Wolf’s shackles to be removed, unwittingly helping her escape the Tower) was the voice of mercy; Rich that of authority. The reason I chose him was simple: he was the King’s man, ruthless in pursuit of ‘justice’ and he personally tortured Anne Askew, contrary to generally understood rules of behaviour.

The public’s role was to move around the Tower, hearing the prisoners’ stories and passing judgment on their crimes – should they be punished and executed, in a manner fitting their crime, or should they be pardoned and released? Most were lenient, with the odd group of manic children shrieking for execution – no doubt a constant from the sixteenth century.

Almost all of the women I chose were ultimately executed. Margaret Douglas was the only one to escape with her life, despite repeated incarceration at the Tower. I would have preferred a more generous division of fates, but the history books didn’t allow it. In this respect, it was interesting that most of the public punished Douglas, but there was always a roughly 50/50 split for the fates of the other women – the aged Margaret Pole tended to be pardoned, while crowds did not have much time for Elizabeth Barton’s visions and last-minute recanting. But by the end of the scenario, when Anne Askew’s appeal for the Bible to be available in English for everyone to read – whether poor or female – resulted in her forcible removal and ‘torture’ inside a closed tower cell, the public were unanimously howling for her pardon. When Anne’s fate, along with all her fellows, was revealed (she was burnt at the stake at Smithfield) there was audible disappointment and sympathy from the crowd.

I wanted to write a post about this event not only because I’m very proud of it and of the crack team of interpreters involved – just as dedicated to telling these stories sensitively as they were to ensuring the public had a good time and didn’t feel preached at – but also because of its unusual nature. I’m by no means an expert, but if you spend any amount of time wandering around castles or looking at heritage advertisements, it becomes clear that most onsite interpretation during school holidays deals with men: re-enactments of exciting battles full of men in armour while women stir cauldrons in a corner; or kings barking out speeches while ladies wear big hats and stare at the floor.

The topics explored in this event are completely gender-neutral: imprisonment, torture, execution, justice. The women were treated in a manner that suited their crime and their class, not necessarily their sex. So it was inspiring to be able to tell stories dealing with questions that are still very much ‘live issues’ from a different perspective, a less-told perspective, while not undermining the fact that these are interesting tales in their own right. It was also telling, I felt, that I did not hear a single member of the public comment on the number of women they were meeting – but they did walk away talking about Tudor imprisonment and Henry VIII’s reign, and they also asked questions of the interpreters after the event to find out more about the characters.

However, this event had the added bonus that alongside those topics, it also offered a voice for women. One of our colleagues (out of costume for this one) said that you don’t always get a sense of women’s role in the past from a single character among a mass of men, but with this event there were so many different female perspectives, it brought women’s history into focus for them. Hopefully this event showed that the public enjoys hearing stories about human beings, regardless of whether they are told by and about women. What matters is that the stories themselves are interesting, and the people telling them good at their job.