Collection Connections: Magic and Mayhem in the Tudor Court: Juno Dawson's "Queen B"

Queen B by Juno Dawson is a prequel to her popular series, Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, which centers on four young witches who join a secret coven overseen by Queen Elizabeth I. Queen B examines the beginnings of this coven under Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn. Taking place over a period of ten years, the novel follows the events after Anne’s execution by Henry VIII, calling back in vignettes focused on her rise to power. The narrative is told primarily through the eyes of Grace Fairfax, a young noblewoman from Yorkshire, and Cecilia de la Torre, a former lady-in-waiting to the deposed queen, Katherine of Aragon. Both women are Anne’s ladies-in-waiting and members of her coven. Anne’s great vision, a witch on the throne of England, has been realized. But when Anne is executed, that all comes crashing down. The remaining witches know her death could only happen as the result of a betrayal of the most acute kind—a betrayal from within Anne’s inner circle. Grace, enraged by the death of the woman she loved in many ways, sets out to seek vengeance. But darker plots are brewing—witch finders are coming to court, and soon the entire coven may be in danger of discovery. 

A spellbinding novella with feisty characters, Dawson’s writing pays homage to the Tudor court during one of its most tumultuous periods. Although her focus remains on the women in the seat of power, she doesn’t neglect more ordinary people—some of the best characters in the book are witches who live in and around London proper: “cunning women” of lower social birth, but who are by no means less powerful. Dawson likewise doesn’t forget that there is more to England than London—Grace’s Yorkshire roots are never far away, and members of the coven take the reader outside of the court and the City of London to country estates, the coast, and the English Channel. Cecilia de la Torre, among others, also reminds us of England’s multicultural makeup in the sixteenth century. England might be a literal island, but it is still (with apologies to Donne) a part of the wider world. The Folger’s collections reflect this interconnectedness, as well as providing a deeper look at Tudor people, Anne Boleyn, witchcraft, and early modern experiences of gender and same-sex love. 

Beginning as Dawson does in the court of King Henry VIII, we start with a book owned by another Anne—Anne of Cleves, Henry’s fourth wife following the death of Jane Seymour. This prayer book, a Catholic book of hours, is inscribed by her on the back flyleaf: “I besiche your grace h[umbly?] when ye loke on this remember me. yo[u]r gracis assured anne the dowgh[t]er of cleues.” Samples of Anne’s writing are scarce, and this is an intriguing survival—although Henry had retained Catholic forms of worship in the newly-Protestant England, Anne herself came from a religiously blended family. Does the inscription imply that this book was a gift for Henry? Printed on vellum in Paris in 1533, this prayer book was made the same year that Anne Boleyn ascended to the throne. The first Anne may have owned books such as this—richly decorated and illuminated in gold and fine pigments.

Prayer Book owned by Anne of Cleves and inscribed to Henry VIII, 1533
View in Digital Collections

Although paintings of Anne Boleyn are well-known to many people interested in her life and brief reign, it is interesting to consider that there are few surviving portraits of her that were created during her life. A worn coronation medal from 1533 is the only uncontested likeness made during her lifetime that has survived. This print, made from an engraved copper plate by 17th-century printmaker Wenceslaus Hollar in 1649, was based on a preparatory sketch for a portrait of a woman who may have been Anne Boleyn, by the Tudor court painter Hans Holbein. The portrait does not survive, and scholars continue to debate whether this woman really is meant to be Anne. Regardless, it is a lovely depiction of a sixteenth-century woman who may have been Anne–an idea that scholars continue to debate. In the book, Grace saves a portrait of Anne, in which she is described as wearing a sumptuous green gown and a French hood encrusted with pearls. This seems to be a reference to a possible lost portrait very like this one.

As mentioned, Dawson doesn’t neglect more ordinary people. Her elite, court-based witches come into contact with witches of different social ranks, who play important roles in the plot (as ordinary people did in real life). This warrant, which likely accompanied a woman accused of witchcraft in the 1650s, provides important insight into the life and activities of an ordinary woman in seventeenth-century England. It begins: 

Jone Micholson, dubbed the “Witch of Wapping,” was ultimately hanged on 12 April 1652, in the course of a convoluted legal battle. The obverse side includes a list of payments to various lawyers, as well as witnesses. I’ve written more about Jone and her trials here in the past. This case is an important reminder that while today we might find witchcraft to be fun and interesting, historically it was used as an excuse for the extrajudicial murder of real people–people who likely lived on the margins of society, and who had often only committed the “crimes” of being poor, sick, elderly, or disabled. In this case, Jone’s “crime” in reality seems to have been one of non-compliance with authorities.

But, people in the past were also fascinated by the idea of magical spells, just as we are today. This document includes several spells, including a spell to “get the love of a woman,” “To know when a woman is w[i]th a man chylde or a woman chylde,” and “To know whether newes be trow or false.” The first and lengthiest spell in this manuscript, dated around 1600, instructs the bearer in how to conduct a coercive love spell. 

First, the person wishing to use the spell must draw the image “of ^a woman her whom thow doste love / or whom thow wylte haue” on a blank tile on a Friday. The caster must then offer specific words and prayers to both Venus and God. The spell gives helpful guidance in how to draw the object of the person’s desire, along with specific symbols to include, where to place them, and what they mean. If the worker of this spell is successful, the woman will have “nether reste in slyppynge nether wakynge…lyenge nether standdynge nether settynge & how so ever she move that so she maye burne in the love [of him] & that she maye so thynke vppon hym contynyally wth owte sessynge, where by she maye com & full fyll his wysh & re queste in all thynges…”

Finally, one of the things that Dawson’s writing does best is to convey the queer and trans possibility that historical figures present. History is, in many ways, a way of looking at ourselves and who we want to become as much as it is about looking backwards. We don’t know much about the internal lives and identities of the overwhelming majority of people who lived in the past, and it is likely that how they conceived of themselves or expressed their identities would be very different from how we think of ourselves today. Yet, Dawson does something important in infusing queer, trans possibility into this historically fictional account of Anne Boleyn and her contemporaries. She reminds us that the past is indeed a foreign country, and that while many people will have learned that society mostly operated in the open under strict ideas about gendered binaries and heterosexual romance, the truth is that early modern ideas about gender were far more complex and nuanced than that. We must be careful not to read the familiar restrictions of our own world onto a past that, yes, was violent and oppressive in many ways, but was also (perhaps surprisingly) more open and permissible in others. 

This is an extremely rare engraving, not a reprint, from the Life of Mrs Mary Frith, of Moll Cut-purse, the main character from playwright Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s play The Roaring Girl. First published in 1611, the play documents the life of Mary Frith, alias Moll Cut-purse, a real person who lived in London in the early seventeenth century. Moll presented in a masculine manner, wearing male dress and engaging in stereotypically male activities like smoking tobacco and brawling. 

Recently, scholars have begun paying attention to the queer possibilities Moll presents, and what her life and activities have to tell us about attitudes towards gender in early modern England.

Another example is John Milton’s epic account of Satan’s fall from grace, Paradise Lost, first published in 1688. 

Milton describes his angels as decidedly gender fluid, writing that “when they please / Can either sex assume, or both, so soft /And uncompounded is their essence.” Milton’s attitude seems to extend to his human subjects, as well, taking a Christian materialist approach—or as one scholar puts it, envisioning the “softened boundaries of embodied selves.”

These ideas from early modern England lend historical authenticity and strength to Dawson’s gender-queer vision of Anne Boleyn, witchcraft, and early modern England. In our fights for a more just world for all, the past can be an interesting and important way of re-envisioning who we are and where we have the potential to go, if only we take the time to imagine it.