New biography brings a learned Tudor woman out of the shadows

Traditional accounts of the Tudor age focused on men in power, and the few women who emerged into public view as queens and princesses, but this limited perspective is changing. This book introduces a woman in the mainstream of Tudor court life, whose story belies the conventional view of a ‘lady-in-waiting’ or ‘Tudor gentlewoman’ glimpsed in margins of the historical narrative. In the sixteenth century, as access to education widened through the distribution of printed books, a small number of non-royal women benefitted from an advanced humanist education, and some had a considerable impact on the history of the age. In this new biography, author Deborah Spring uncovers the life of the courageous, fiercely intelligent and highly educated Lady Anne Bacon, who confounds accepted notions of the level of education and influence afforded to women during the early modern period.

The daughter of an Essex gentry family and a contemporary of Elizabeth I, Anne Bacon’s life spanned four Tudor reigns. She achieved national recognition for her published works of translation and, remarkably for a deeply committed Protestant, served both Catholic Mary I and Protestant Elizabeth I as a woman of the Privy Chamber. She acquired the confidence to deal on equal terms with the scholars and lawyers who took on leading roles of church and state under Elizabeth I, and she knew her own worth in that world. An accomplished linguist with a knack for the telling phrase, she turned her skills and education to effective forms of influence and persuasion, supporting the cause of religious reform in England. She married lawyer Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth I’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, took on six stepchildren, and gave birth to four babies of her own. Her surviving children were Anthony, who served as an intelligencer reporting to English spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, and Francis, the philosopher and statesman. As a widow, she ran the family estate of Gorhambury in Hertfordshire for thirty years.

Deborah Spring says: ‘I’ve drawn on original sources, including Anne’s forthright letters to her clever and difficult sons, to build this portrait of a remarkable woman who navigated the tumultuous religious and royal transitions of the age while embedded at the heart of power at the Tudor court. Her extraordinary story deserves to be heard.’

Deborah Spring is a researcher and author who lives in Hertfordshire and was formerly an academic publisher. She has written about sixteenth-century history and garden history. Her book proposal for Lady Anne Bacon was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian prize.