[This originally appeared on Lauren Johnson's blog on October 21, 2013]

Lauren Johnson

Much has been written about the violence of the Wars of the Roses. Civil conflicts inevitably leave a deeper scar than international ones, and this 15th-century combat has lived on in collective memory.

Anne of York and her second husband, Thomas St. Leger.

However, until recently, one group whose fortunes were  closely affected by the Wars has been overlooked: the noblewomen involved. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of medieval history will know why this is. Chroniclers write about the public deeds of noblemen, surviving records document the actions and decisions of that group because they were the ones who attended Parliament and fought in battles. Finding information about women – even the richest, most influential women – is hard work. And it is only with the increasing interest in social and gender history in the late 20th century that the difficult sleuthing necessary to unravel the lives of women was undertaken in earnest.

However, for every man directly involved in the Wars of the Roses there were numerous female relatives who were not only themselves affected by the conflict, but played an active part in it. Before you think I’ve gone too far, I’m not suggesting there were vast swathes of pseudo-Amazons marauding around 15th-century England. Women did not fight in the Wars, as far as anyone has discovered. Even Margaret of Anjou, who was the leader of the Lancastrian resistance from 1461-1471, never raised a lance. But perhaps our obsession with the bloodiness of this conflict, with the horror of violence on English soil, has blinded us to the essential work of women in this period. That is understandable. After all, attainder law and enfeoffment are definitely not as "sexy" topics as beheadings and battles. How can the ancient countess of Oxford, struggling to resist attempts to steal her estate by writing letters and employing lawyers, compare with the exploits of her son – leaping from castles to escape imprisonment and laying siege to St. Michael’s Mount? But the activities of noblewomen in this conflict were not considered inconsequential at the time. On the contrary, efforts to claw lands back to one’s family by battling through the law courts or pleading with prominent powerholders were deemed essential to those involved, and at a time when many men found themselves on the wrong side of the law or battlefield, and thus lost their authority (or their life), it fell to their wives and mothers to try to save their estates.

Again, at first this hardly seems an  honorable effort. We find the land- and money-grabbing tendencies of our 15th-century forebears rather grubby. But in a time when land determined status, ensured inheritance, and truly reflected power, if you wanted to maintain your influence in the world, it was the absolute essential of noble existence. And to lose one’s estate represented the possibility of extreme impoverishment, not only for you but for all future generations of your family. After land, came your dynasty. The two were interlinked, and both determined your own status and honor before others.

Thus, when Lady Margaret Hungerford spent twenty years struggling to regain the estates lost by her male relatives – firstly by a heavy ransom during the Hundred Years War and then by backing the wrong horse in the Wars of the Roses – no one thought it was time ill spent. The Hungerford men remained loyal Lancastrians, and were attainted (had their estates, titles, and inheritances confiscated by the crown) as a result. With her son and grandsons rendered powerless, Margaret was the only one who could act to save their lands for future generations. She was wise enough to know that courting the new regime, the Yorkist dynasty, might be the only long-term solution to the family’s troubles. She shackled the interests of powerful men to her own family’s by enfeoffing her estates to leading Yorkists like the earls of Warwick and Essex, and by arranging her granddaughter’s marriage to the son of the king’s best friend, Lord Hastings. She also knew how to cheat the system, suppressing the intelligence that certain estates she was holding really belonged to her attainted son. When the duke of Gloucester – future Richard III, and remarkably adept at sniffing out the inheritances of rich elderly women – discovered the truth, Margaret did not simply give up, but repeatedly issued petitions to have the estates restored. When installments of mortgages were due, she made new loans, sold lands and even plate. When Margaret made her will in 1476, she, like her husband before her, complained of having little to leave to her dependents. As a last sign of her political acuity, she stipulated that her grandson could only inherit her lands if he swore loyalty to the reigning Yorkist king for a decade. Even on her deathbed she was determined to save the Hungerford estate.

We know of other women who pursued their family’s interests in defiance of the letter of the law. Anne, duchess of Exeter is a unique case. As the Yorkist King Edward’s sister she was far from supportive of her husband’s loyalty to the Lancastrian cause. Usually, the interests of a woman’s birth family would be abandoned on marriage in favor of her husband’s, but in this case Anne remained firmly on the side of her brother. Her husband was attained in the first Yorkist parliament and fled abroad, but Anne stayed behind – and was immediately granted the confiscated estate of her husband. Later, she divorced him and remarried. According to attainder and divorce law, she should thus have forfeited her dower lands – instead, she not only kept them but also gained control of the entirety of her husband’s estate.

Margaret Beauchamp (mother of Margaret Beaufort and thus grandmother of the future Henry VII) was certainly no shrinking violet in the law courts. When her second husband, Leo, lord Welles, was attainted and killed she managed to maintain control over dower lands that should legally have been stripped from her. She even went further, and effectively disinherited her stepson Richard by alienating parts of the Welles estate to herself and her son, John.

To modern eyes this brutal stripping away of lands and money from your husband or stepson seems ruthlessly avaricious. But we need to bear in mind what might happen to these women if they did not fight their corner. There are numerous petitions that survive from women left destitute by the loss of their estate.

The widowed Eleanor, lady Dacre, complained in 1467 that "she has been despoiled of her goods by the Scots and other rebels and has no means of support." Maud, lady Willoughby, had not only her estates but also her "clothing and goods" seized by the crown. Anne, lady Neville, was left an unsupported widow "to the great hurt and heaviness and uttermost undoing of your Suppliant, considering that she hath not wereof to find her (money for) her children and servants." In 1464, Eleanor, duchess of Somerset (who lost her husband and all her four sons to the Lancastrian cause) appealed to the Yorkist king that she "hath been in jeopardy of her life, robbed and spoiled in such wise as she was like to have perished for lack of sustenance, had not divers persons of their very pity and tenderness relieved and comforted her."

According to the chronicler, Fabyan, after her husband’s attainder, Margaret, countess of Oxford, had nothing "to live upon, but as the people of their charities would give to her, or what she might get with her needle." However, we should not see the countess simply as a victim of her husband’s actions. A letter sent by the earl to his wife in the wake of his defeat at the Battle of Barnet in 1471 reveals that she was aiding him in his rebellion: "Also ye shall send me in all haste all the ready money that ye can make; and so many of my men as can come well horsed, and that they come in divers parcels. Also that my horse be sent, with my steel saddles, and bid the yeoman of the horse cover them with leather." The countess was clearly sending men, funds, and – not to be underestimated – moral support to her husband. Compare the earl of Oxford’s persistence and ultimate reward (his estates were restored and augmented after he helped Henry VII to the throne) with the miserable end of the duke of Exeter, abandoned and stripped of his estate by his wife, "begging his pittance from house to house" in Burgundy, too poor even to afford hose according to one chronicler.

To demonstrate how we perhaps fail to grasp the sincerity of noblewomen’s desire to maintain their estates in order to protect their children and own persons, we need only consider the recent representation of Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII in fiction. In The White Queen Philippa Gregory presented Margaret as a woman obsessed with her son’s claim to the throne. In reality, Margaret was concerned simply with a) his survival and b) his right to the Richmond estate. Given that during her brief marriage to Henry’s father she had endured losing her virginity at twelve, being widowed a matter of months later, and giving birth at thirteen (probably rendering her infertile due to the stress of the labor), it is little wonder that she would fight to maintain every claim that her son had to her late husband’s inheritance. Something good had to come of her suffering.

Margaret Beaufort represents a microcosm of all of the noblewomen mentioned here, and the many more who both suffered and triumphed during the Wars of the Roses. Sometimes they endured great personal hardship and sometimes they received reward beyond their wildest dreams, and certainly beyond what the law should have allowed them. But their success or failure was not made solely by outside forces. These women were weak or powerful in their own right, and despite the vagaries of war it was their skill, cunning, and acumen (or lack thereof) that set the fates not only of themselves, but of the generations that followed them.

This information is taken from my Masters thesis, The impact of the Wars of the Roses on Noblewomen, 1450-1509, Oxford, 2007.

Brian Bixby

George S. Boutwell’s letters to his daughter Georgianna, “Georgie,” were not just devoted to politics. He wrote about the other cares of his life, whether inquiring about the asparagus on his farm at home or apologizing to Georgie for not writing on her birthday. And he wrote about his career. Boutwell was one of the few specialists in international law, such as it was in those days, and was several times

The Boutwell House, Groton, Massachusetts.

retained by foreign governments to act as their agent in American legal and political matters. In 1885 Boutwell was litigating a case of piracy!

The story began all the way back in 1861, when a ship flying a French flag with a captain named Latellier docked in Port Liberté, Haiti. Haitian authorities were suspicious, and rightly so. The ship was American, and the captain’s name wasn’t Latellier, but Antonio Pelletier. More importantly, he had bought the ship to engage in the slave trade, as late as 1861 with the Civil War beginning! The Haitians seized his ship, convicted Pelletier of piracy and slave trading, and sentenced him to death. But his sentence was commuted to a prison term.

The case might have ended there, but Pelletier escaped to the United States a few years later. Angered by his treatment, he requested that the U.S. State Department help him recover $2,500,000 in damages for what he called a miscarriage of justice. There being no international law courts with jurisdiction, the State Department came to an agreement with the Republic of Haiti in 1884 to have a recently retired Supreme Court Justice, William Strong, serve as arbitrator. Boutwell became involved because the Republic of Haiti retained him and the French diplomat Charles A. de Chambrun as their agents in the case.

When William Strong opened the hearings, Boutwell’s opening statement portrayed Pelletier as a liar who had previously engaged in the slave trade and had outfitted his ship for that purpose. Pelletier ducked out of the hearing after listening to Boutwell for no more than half an hour, and was found dead three days later. Yet the hearings continued; the death of the plaintiff was not enough to stop the proceedings of justice. In fact, the hearings ran on for a year. At the end, ex-Justice Strong’s verdict was an anticlimax. He held that while Pelletier’s ship had been outfitted for slave trading, it had engaged in neither slave trading nor piracy. However, Strong rejected most of Pelletier’s claims for damages, awarding him only $57,250 for his imprisonment.

Once they heard the judgment, the Haitian Government, no doubt with Boutwell’s help, protested that any American demand for the Haitians to pay damages to a known slave trader, in 1885, was improper and bad policy. And in a final, ludicrous note, ex-Justice Strong agreed with the Haitian protest! So the State Department agreed to officially relinquish the claim. And with Pelletier dead, the matter came to a close.

Boutwell went home for the summer after the Pelletier case concluded. There he had to manage the shaky finances of his farm, while consoling Georgie for losing her seat on the school committee earlier that year. But he went back to Washington in October, working on patent law cases, and enjoying the spectacle of Democrats fighting among themselves. Of the latter, he remarked to Georgie, “Democrats, with their slouched hats, are common in more senses than one.”

Boutwell often said he had never desired political office, and never really sought it. Yet I couldn’t help reading his letters to Georgianna from 1885 and think that his frequent political observations revealed a man who was still tempted by high office. Perhaps his wife Sarah, who hated Washington, thought so, too. In a letter she wrote to Boutwell back in 1882, on yet another occasion when he was working in Washington, she observed, “A man who holds a public office makes a sacrifice of his independence of thought & actions if nothing more.”

George S. Boutwell died in Groton in 1905, aged eighty-seven. His wife Sarah had died two years earlier. Georgie became the keeper of the family papers after her father’s death. She left the house to the Groton Historical Society when she died in 1933. But no trace of Boutwell’s personal letters remained. People assumed they had been lost or destroyed.

In the year 2000, volunteers were cleaning out the attic of the Boutwell House, which had been plagued by squirrels getting in. One of the volunteers found an old, dusty trunk and opened it up. And there were letters. Hundreds of personal letters between Boutwell and his family! They were all tied up with ribbons, with notes in Georgie’s handwriting about what was in each parcel. And none had been opened in all the years since her death.

That’s how we know Boutwell wrote fifty-one letters to Georgie in 1885. They were in one of those parcels, which was opened for the first time a few months ago. Who knows what other stories are in the many parcels that have yet to be opened?

NPR Staff, "The Voting Rights Act: Hard-Won Gains, An Uncertain Future," NPR, July 21, 2013

. . . . Congress also noted, however, that the Voting Rights Act was still needed, and it had

Fort Scott, Kansas, Tribune, August 6, 1965, p. 1 From the Google News Archive.

been used hundreds of times since 1982 to protect against discrimination.

But in his opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested it is a new era. "Our country has changed," he wrote for the majority.

But Rep. Lewis says race is still very much at the forefront.

"I think there has been a deliberate and systematic effort on the part of certain forces in our country to take the whole idea of race out of public policy," he says. "Race is involved in everything that makes up America, and we cannot escape it. We have to deal with it face on.">>>

John Paul Stevens, "The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent," New York Review of Books, August 15, 2013

In Bending Toward Justice, Professor Gary May describes a number of the conflicts between white supremacists in Alabama and nonviolent civil rights workers that led to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—often just called the VRA. The book also describes political developments that influenced President Lyndon Johnson to support the act in 1965, and later events that supported the congressional reenactments of the VRA signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, by President Gerald Ford in 1975, by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, and by President George W. Bush in 2006.>>>

"The Future of the Voting Rights Act," On Point, WBUR, June 27, 2013

The Voting Rights Act was the monumental achievement of the civil rights movement, a powerful federal response to racist policies like poll taxes and literacy tests that kept blacks home on Election Day. But that was 1965.

Today southern blacks vote at even higher rates than whites. So this week the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the law, freeing mostly southern states to change their election laws without federal approval. Guests: Vernon Burton, Kareem Crayton, and Ronald Keith Gaddie.>>>

John Fund, "A Civil-Rights Victory," National Review, June 25, 2013

The Supreme Court’s decision today to overturn a small part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is actually a victory for civil rights.  As the court noted, what made sense both in moral and practical terms almost a half century ago has to be approached anew. . . . Clint Bolick, director of litigation for the conservative Goldwater Institute in Arizona, says the demise of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act will also reduce the balkanization of racial gerrymandering that has become so popular lately. “Voting districts drawn on racial or ethnic lines divide Americans,” he says. “This decision helps move us toward the day in which racial gerrymandering becomes a relic of the past.”>>>

"New obstacles for voters," Baltimore Sun, July 22, 2013

If there were any doubt the Supreme Court erred badly in the term just ended by striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act designed to protect minorities' access to the polls in states with a history of voter discrimination, it's been dispelled by the swift reaction in states formerly covered by the law's pre-clearance requirement. Officials there have lost no time in using the ruling as a license to start discriminating again.

Barely two hours after the court declared unconstitutional Section 4 of the act, which determined which states were required to get Justice Department approval before changing election laws in ways that disproportionately affected minority voters, Texas' attorney general announced that a 2011 voter-ID law a lower court had blocked as discriminatory would go into effect "immediately." Over the next week, four more former pre-clearance states moved to tighten restrictions on voting.>>>

From Puck magazine, 1912.

Benjamin Railton

In the final stages of my work on The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us About America (Palgrave Pivot, June 21, 2013) I found myself struggling with a challenge that I believe faces all of us who seek to produce works of public scholarship. Much of the history on which my book focuses is well known to academic historians, but is (to my mind) almost entirely unknown (if not indeed often misrepresented) within the broader American community.

For example, the first of the three main “lessons” I seek to draw from the Chinese Exclusion Act has to do with the history of legal and illegal immigration, and more exactly with the commonplace phrase “My ancestors came here legally.” Academic historians are likely to know that there were no national immigration laws prior to the 1882 Exclusion Act (or at least its immediate predecessors/starting points such as the Page Act), that prior to 1921 there remained no laws that affected any immigrants not arriving from China or related Asian nations, and that between 1921 and 1965 the quota laws were directly based on ethnic/national discrimination. Yet most Americans have no sense of that history.

So how do we public scholars bridge that gap? How do we produce work that can speak both to academics and general readers? For me, the answer lies, at least in part, in a two-pronged approach: in my Introduction I explicitly address these questions for fellow academics, arguing that we scholars need to do more to bring our shared knowledge to broader public audiences; and then my three main chapters represent case studies in that approach, that is, efforts to write about subjects currently of interest to academic historians in such a way that will also enlighten a broader audience.

As I take the next steps with the project, seeking spaces and conversations where I can share its ideas, I continue to consider these questions, and to work on finding a voice and approach that can speak to different communities. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject and, of course, on the book!

Ben Railton is associate professor of English and coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State University. He is the author of Redefining American Identity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893 (University of Alabama Press, 2007). He maintains the daily AmericanStudies blog (http://americanstudier.blogspot.com).