Canterbury Cathedral, Tudor Heroines, and My Writing Life

A Pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral’s Cloister – Where My Tudor Heroines Finally Appeared

“And here she stands, touch her who ever dare.”

                     – The Taming of the Shrew, III.ii

🌌 A Heraldic Galaxy Set in Stone

Whether it is Chaucer’s, Queen Elizabeth I’s or my own pilgrimage, they all end here, at  Canterbury Cathedral.

Centuries of pilgrims’ knees have worn hollows in the floor of Canterbury Cathedral near St. Thomas Becket’s shrine and the tombs of Edward the Black Prince and Henry IV. But slip through the heavy wooden door off the left aisle and listen as the cathedral’s echoes hush. Then tilt your head back to look up at Canterbury Cathedral’s cloister’s ceiling. A heraldic galaxy of more than 800 shields painted on stone stretches across fan vaults high above your head and wraps all the way around the cloister. Lions in azure, crosses in argent, golden leopards, all linked by blood and marriage. It’s a roll call and group chat of England’s nobility holding up the firmament as they knew it.

Thomas Arundel, a 15^th century Archbishop of Canterbury, decided plaques inside the cathedral were passe, and immortalized those who paid, prayed or politicked for God’s and Canterbury’s glory with family shields here instead.  Whether still blazing or faded, they form a Tudor LinkedIn of stone, with power couple connections and the occasional awkward in-law endorsement.

✍🏻 A Writer’s Pilgrimage

My latest stopover in Canterbury began as a simple quest to check out an Elizabethan portrait that I suspected was misidentified and might be of one of my main characters. I’d visited Canterbury Cathedral several times over years. There was no reason to go again. But something about its newly scrubbed exterior, freed of its suffocating scaffolding, tugged me inside. And for the third time, I stood staring at the cloister’s phenomenal ceiling with absolutely no idea why I was there.

I tried hailing the 14^th century pilgrims from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Surely, the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Prioress, would come clomping in to give me a hint. But no. They tipped their hats, waved vaguely like the elderly celebrity stars they are, then paraded out again, leaving me clueless.

🛑 How Queen Elizabeth I Convinced a French Duke to Take a One-Way Road Trip

Seven of the 800 shields in Canterbury Cathedral’s cloister’s heraldic galaxy –  a Tudor Who’s Who set in stone overhead. Recognize any?

I mentally fast-forwarded history’s pages to February 1582 when Queen Elizabeth I made her own pilgrimage to Canterbury. It wasn’t a religious experience for anyone.

Elizabeth had hauled her weary court away from their creature comforts for an irksome, personal reason: to ditch her overripe royal French suitor, Hercule Francoise the Duke d’Alençon. Everyone agreed that the man had to ship out, the sooner, the better. The only way was to move Queen, court, food, wine and entertainment onto icy roads towards Dover.

Elizabeth herself traveled no further than Canterbury. Her court sulked and roamed about the small town in the snow waiting for the good-bye between queen and duke to (finally) play itself out.  Check out: 👉 A Mid-winter Night's Nightmare: The Queen, the Duke and the Drama 

Quarters were tight. What better place to avoid cranky fellow courtiers and irritable ladies-in-waiting than in the Cathedral’s cloister?  So, maybe I was wandering that cloister for a similar reason -- to escape everyone and think.

📜  Why I Travel to Write Tudor History

At my desk, with books, maps and the internet (a modern scribe’s crystal ball), I can conjure my 16^th century characters moving through their time and place. But, sometimes a Wi-Fi world doesn’t cut it.

Inevitably, there are the gaps in the historical record. Historical voices survive in letters to some extent, but conversations rarely do. Four hundred years later, how can I judge the veracity of a chronicler who might have embroidered or twisted the truth to serve his own agenda? (William Cecil, Lord Burghley and Lord Henry Howard, I am looking right at the two of you.)

A case of mistaken identity? This portrait of “Susan Bertie” is likely her sister-in-law, Mary Vere Bertie. Shakespeare thought Mary’s mind sharp and strategic enough to be worthy of the rank of general.

With time travel still maddeningly unavailable, I go on a writer’s pilgrimage to find out what I can because the place can tell you what books, maps and the internet cannot.

My trips start with deliberate research. I want to walk exactly where I know my characters walked. While I am there, I jot down details: sounds, smells, angles of light. Sometimes I post on Instagram from the very spot – 21^st century proof of a 16^th century past.  👉 📸 https://www.instagram.com/ddickerman01 .  But whenever I use a real place, I don’t tamper much. Places teach me what I never knew I needed to learn.

For example, on this last trip to Canterbury Cathedral’s cloister, I realized that I needed to use a heraldry book like a dictionary. My historical characters could read the galaxy over my head  fluently. They’d known the family shields and how places in that celestial ceiling had been earned since their childhoods. It spoke to them in a wordless language because they were all cousins through blood or marriage, with the occasional bad egg cousin thrown in (still looking at you, Lord Henry Howard).  

🎭 When Lady Mary Vere Bertie Met Mistress Elizabeth Trentham

Cue the hush, lower the cloister lights. What happened next wasn’t Chaucer at all. It was Elizabethan. Two of my heroines finally showed up. Lady Mary Vere Bertie, Lady of the Privy Chamber, braver than most men, highly strategic, and a daughter of England’s second oldest earldom, paced alone in the empty cloister, trapped, restless and bored during the Queen’s mid-winter ditch-the-Duke road trip.

Maybe her portrait, misidentified as her sister-in-law’s in the town museum, was exercising its influence on my subconscious, but I swear, to repurpose a line Shakespeare wrote about her:  

There she stood. I could have touched her, if I’d dared.

What’s in a name? This “Portrait of a Lady, Probably Elizabeth Southwell” is likely Elizabeth Trentham, Countess of Oxford, hiding in plain sight under another’s name.

The next moment, Mistress Elizabeth Trentham, maid-of-honor to Queen Elizabeth, only a year at court but earning a reputation for level-headedness and fending off the court’s Casanovas, softly closed the cathedral’s side door and slipped into the cloister. She tucked her hands deep into her sleeves under her cloak.

One aristocrat. One commoner. Both bound to serve their queen. They passed each other once, taking measure of the other’s need for private thoughts and silence. Then they walked side by side. Did Elizabeth look up and note the de Vere shields above their heads as a conversation ice-breaker?  Did Mary test the new arrival by casually mentioning the current Tudor court intrigue about her scandal-shadowed brother, the Earl of Oxford, who had just reunited with his wife after seven years of separation?  Did Elizabeth parry with a smile that said “I see through you, and I’m not saying”?

Well, I’m not saying either. My job here is to tease, not to plot spoil. Let me just say: court life was a blood sport, after all, even when cloaked in velvet and edged in fur. You had to choose what to reveal to whom carefully.

 ⛪️ What I Learned on My Pilgrimage in Canterbury Cathedral‘s Cloister 

I discovered that Canterbury Cathedral’s cloister is naturally closed-lipped, but tugs persistently. It drew me back three times before letting me in on this secret tete-a-tete, which will appear in two of my novels. Sometimes the place takes its sweet time before it decides you can understand what it has to tell you.

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