By Nancy Bilyeau
In the town of Dartford, a 40-minute train ride
south of London Charing Cross, is a building called the Manor Gatehouse. Inside
you will find a registration office to record the births, marriages, and deaths
that occur in Kent. This handsome red-brick building, fronted by a garden, is
also a popular place to book a wedding reception. “It looks amazing in the
official pictures,” gushed one satisfied bride in a website testimonial.
But when I first walked up that path to the
Gatehouse, I was filled with awe, and definitely not because I was planning a
wedding. I was thinking of who stood on this same piece of ground six centuries
ago. Because it was then a Catholic priory—a community of women who constituted
the sole Dominican order in England before the dissolution of the
monasteries—and it is where I chose to tell the story of The Crown.
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| The Gatehouse of Henry VIII's Manor |
This is where Sister Joanna Stafford, my
half-English, half-Spanish protagonist, prayed, and sang, and wept, and
struggled.
I didn't create a Catholic novice as a protagonist
for my book because of a religious or political agenda. A lifelong Tudor
fanatic, I felt I had no choice but to set a story in the 16th century. I
wanted to write about someone different, and so I plunged into researching the
life of a young nun at the most tumultuous time in the Dissolution of the
Monasteries. What would it be like to have your way of life taken from
you--would you try to stop the destruction, or accept the inevitable?
At one time, like many others, I accepted a series
of "truths" about life in the time of Henry VIII: people did not
often live to old age; women were rarely educated outside of the royal family
or high aristocracy; women outside of the court of the king, and the carnal
grasp of the king, were not as interesting to our modern sensibilities; the
monastic life was in decline, most likely corrupt, and deserved to be ended;
and nuns were either forced to take vows or ended up in convents because they
were not as "good" as the women who married--ie, they were
rejects.
My years of research revealed to me how wrong all
of those stereotypes were.
The true story of one woman's life, Prioress
Elizabeth Cressner, illuminates some of the complex truths. A "good
and virtuous woman," she was the leader of the priory in Dartford for 50
years; she died in December 1536 at somewhere between 75 and 80 years of age,
just as Henry VIII was putting intense pressure on the monasteries to submit to
his will.
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| Edward III |
Dartford Priory had been founded with great care by
Edward III, although the idea of establishing a house for Dominican sisters is
attributed to Edward II. Did he feel some obligation to carry out the wish of
his deposed father? Impossible to know. Once the pope approved the founding of
the order, four Dominican sisters were recruited from France, for whose
expenses 20 pounds was paid from the Exchequer.
The English priory soon established a reputation
for "strict discipline and plain living." Dartford was known for the
value put on education and contained a library of books. It also drew
aristocratic nuns, even royalty, most famously Princess Bridget of York, the
daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville.
Prioress Elizabeth Cressner took on her tasks with
great energy and a bold temperament. She executed wills for people in the
community and appointed priests to celebrate Mass in the parish church and
masters to oversee the local almshouse for the poor. She administered much of
the property owned by the priory, even though it was technically the job of the
friars assigned there.
In the 1530s, Thomas Cromwell was turning a
speculative eye on the monasteries. Undaunted, Prioress Elizabeth sent Henry
VIII's minister a series of firm letters over a recent appointment of a certain
Friar Robert Stroddel as president at the Dartford community. The prioress
found him unkind and even dishonest.
The prioress wrote Cromwell:
"And now of late I understand {Stroddel} hath
purchased letters of your good lordship under our most gracious founder's seal
to be president here the term of his life, by feigned and untrue suggestion,
for as much as he hath governed the office so well, as he himself
reporteth."
Despite such fiery letters, the prioress was unable
to dislodge Friar Stroddel. When Elizabeth Cresssner died, the convent at
Dartford was still intact. There was no corruption found at the priory by the
king's investigators. But her successor, Joan Vane, was forced to surrender it
just the same to the king, and all of the nuns were expelled with small
pensions and no place to go.
The king did not award the priory to a favored
courtier, as he usually did. He took the priory for himself, ordered it
demolished and a luxurious manor house raised on the property. Henry VIII never
slept there, though his ex-wife, Anne of Cleves, lived there for a time.
The manor house was given to Sir Robert Cecil by King James I, and passed
through various hands before being demolished by the 19th century. All that
remains is the red-brick gatehouse, although that was built by Henry VIII.
Nothing is left of the priory itself, except for the stone wall that ran along
its perimeter.
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| The priory wall, seen at right |
One a cloudy afternoon, I walked the perimeter of
the centuries-old wall, as the cars whizzed by. There are no Dartford Priory
gift shops, as exist at the carefully preserved Tower of London. No mugs for
sale bearing the face of Prioress Elizabeth Cressner. But her life was
significant all the same.
I paid her homage on my solitary walk.
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