Dedicated Determination
Muriel St. Clare Byrne
Funny things happen to people’s faces when I say ‘PhD’. Wise folk nod in apparent interest but allow their eyes to glaze with anticipatory boredom because everyone knows that a doctorate involves spending an unreasonable amount of time on a highly specialised area of research. Other people lapse into mischievous grins before speculating about which dusty corner of literature I might have requisitioned for the duration. Some grimace and shake their heads, baffled, before spluttering, “But fancy dress shops stock those silly velvet caps! You don’t actually have to do all that work.”
On campus, however, identifying myself as a PhD candidate is followed by a wry smile from fellow students or academics and then two rapid questions: ‘Who is your supervisor?’ and ‘Did you get AHRC funding?” Within reach of the university library, people’s concern is less about the nature of the work and more about the quality of the relationships that sustain that work. And both of these things have been on my mind today as I began my investigation of Muriel St. Clare Byrne’s edition of The Lisle Letters (1533-1540).
This six-volume collection represents a fifty year project that dwarfs the 3 - 5 years that most PhD students spend on their doctoral research. Muriel St. Clare Byrne began her undergraduate degree in English at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1914 but could not receive her qualification until 1920, when women became eligible for the award. Thereafter, St. Clare Byrne developed a professional career as an academic and a writer producing work on Elizabethan life and culture, eventually specialising on late Tudor theatre. In the early 1930s, she came across a neglected collection of 3,000 letters held in the London Record Office. These letters formed the correspondence of Arthur Plantagenet, Lord Lisle, an illegitimate son of Edward IV who served as Lord Deputy of Calais (1533-1540). When Lisle was arrested for treason on 19th May 1540, his papers were collected and seized by the Crown. Initially held in the Tower of London along with Lisle himself, this correspondence remained in the State Papers after Lisle’s death but received little scholarly attention until St. Clare Byrne came across them during her Tudor research. Half a century later, in 1981, the Lisle Letters were published as an annotated collection by Chicago University Press.
The scale of St. Clare Byrne’s achievement becomes clear when one looks at fascimilies of the letters. Written in a bewildering variety of hands and without standardised spelling, this collection took decades to decipher. And to understand the letters, St. Clare Byrne had to develop a meticulous knowledge of the Henrician world to which they refer. Nearly a century after she began work - and almost 500 years since it was written - this collected correspondence gives me an unparalleled insight into the life of an elite family amidst the turbulence of the 1530s.
Reading through the shadows of hindsight, I am conscious of Arthur Lisle’s fate and his family’s suffering but when I push this knowledge to the back of my mind, I become absorbed in the letters’ daily details. From Calais, at the edge of the kingdom, the Lisle family relied on correspondence to manage matters of politics, religion, estate logistics, childrearing, education, gift-purchasing, and the endless procurement of household textiles. Someone was, it seems, always in need of new hose, several ells of Luccan velvet, and fine linen for shirts or as swaddling for newborn babies.
These material details are vital for my research but I am easily distracted by the references to a parrot gifted to Lady Lisle, to a pair of water spaniels, and a borrowed cradle for a baby that was never born. Then there is the letter explaining Jane Seymour’s tremendous appetite for quails during her pregnancy. I also find myself distracted by the presence of Muriel St. Clare Byrne herself. In academic terms, the Lisle Letters represent an extraordinary life’s work and alongside this undertaking, St Clare Byrne nurtured a life-partnership with Marjorie ‘Bar’ Barber and a love affair with Mary Aeldrin Cullis, both of whom studied at Somerville. In her non-academic writing, St. Clare Byrne explored queer desire and extant photos document some of the ways in which she challenged gender norms.
In their time at Somerville College, Dr Mo Moulton - now Professor of Modern British and Irish History at Birmingham - worked on Muriel St. Clare Byrne’s life and scholarship during research on queer history and experiments in living. Professor Moulton is now working on an intellectual history of kinship and one of the delights of my own academic rabbit-hole is the hovering presence of assorted Lisles along with St. Clare Byrne and her chosen family. Alone at my desk with a mug of cold tea, I am glad of the chain of kinship that reaches from the quill pens and linen paper of the 1530s as far as my wireless keyboard on a soggy July night in rural Cumbria.