There are a number of puzzling facts about teen Elizabeth Tudor’s relationship with her charismatic stepfather Sir Thomas Seymour. In his second year as Elizabeth’s new stepfather, he was arrested for a score of misdeeds, including behaving inappropriately with her. A number of people were put in prison and many more were questioned, including Elizabeth herself, who was put under a sort of house arrest. The resulting 652 pages of “confessions” are an amazing historical record of 16th-century Tudor England. (See links below.)
One detail I’ve not been able to come to any satisfying conclusion about is this account in the “confession” of Elizabeth’s governess Kat Ashley:
At Hanworth, the queen told Mrs. Ashley that the Lord Admiral looked in at the gallery window and saw Princess Elizabeth cast her arms about a man’s neck. The which hearing, Mrs. Ashley asked Princess Elizabeth, who denied it weeping, and bade ask all her women. They all denied it. And Mrs. Ashley knew it could not be so, for there came no man but Grindle, Princess Elizabeth’s schoolmaster.
Kat Ashley goes on to say that she thought that Dowager Queen Kateryn Parr had made up this story so that Kat would keep a closer eye on her 15-year-old charge. This doesn’t seem plausible to me. If Kateryn Parr was making this up, she could have said that someone else had seen Elizabeth; why involve her husband?
Might Thomas Seymore have made up this story, told his wife that he’d seen their stepdaughter in the arms of a man? The only motivation I can think of is that he had in fact embraced Elizabeth and was nervous that they might have been seen, creating an “It wasn’t me!” defence by throwing Elizabeth under the bus. Cad that he was, this is possible — cover a crime with a crime — but would that have been to his advantage? Elizabeth would have known it was a fib. Thomas Semour was impulsive by nature and not always savvy in his often shady dealings, but this seems too shabby even for him.
Young Princess Elizabeth, http://www.luminarium.org/, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Also: might it have been true? Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth was constantly in the company of attendants and it would not have been at all in character for her to embrace a man. That her schoolmaster was entirely out of suspicion is, if anything, charming, giving a rare impression of what the distinguished Cambridge scholar might have been like.
For my novel, I’ve taken a fictional path — created whole-cloth, but not historically impossible — by creating a scene where Elizabeth is accosted by her stepbrother. John Neville, the Queen’s stepson by her second marriage, was a troubled youth who was later charged with rape and murder.
I write historical fiction, but I like it to be as close as possible to the known facts. I’m not entirely comfortable creating a fictional account of this episode, so I keep coming back to this breadcrumb of a clue: What really happened? What was going on? If only we could know.
A Collection of State Papers: relating to Affairs In the Reigns of King Henry VIII, King Edward VI, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth: From the year 1542 to 1570, edited by Samuel Haynes, available online at https://tinyurl.com/HaynesStatePapers, pages 99-100. I’ve reworded this quote for clarity.
The post above was first posted on Substack, where I can be found at https://tinyurl.com/SandraSubstackNews. I’m enjoying Substack quite a lot, both as a reader and writer. I recommend it! Please subscribe there if you wish to catch all my musings.
The image at top: “Unknown man,” recently identified as possibly Thomas Seymour, a sketch by Hans Holbein the Younger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
For a lock-it-down quiet pandemic life, my husband and I have been moving around quite a bit. In November, we closed down our rural house in Ontario in anticipation of going to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico for the winter. We’d last seen our house there over two years before when we returned to Ontario unexpectedly for medical reasons. And then Covid, of course, and the world closed down.
Fast forward to last November. En route to San Miguel, we stayed in Kingston, Ontario, not far from where our daughter and her family live. Our son and his wife came up from New York State with their baby, and a wonderful family time was had by all. We’d all self-tested negative before getting together, and so could hug freely and without worry, making for a very special holiday season.
Richard and I were due to fly south on January 7, but did an abrupt swerve because of the Omicron surge, heading back to our house up north. I’d hardly even settled when I went by ambulance to a local hospital to be operated on for a burst appendix. Yes, quite a surprise!
My operation was a little over two weeks ago. I’m feeling more and more myself, and so have ventured down to my “bunker” — the lovely little room off our basement that’s my writing space.
This is how I found it:
It felt like time travel. What had I been working on? What was I researching? And why?
Obviously it had to do with Elizabethan England and my increasingly tangled Young Adult biographical novel about teen-aged Elizabeth Tudor, the future Queen Elizabeth I.
Princess Elizabeth, artist unknown.
I’ve been going through the usual periods of despair known to all writers, alternating with periods of optimism, swinging from one to the other and back again. The last few days have been hopeful — I’m back at work, and that makes all the difference.
The image at top is Moon2 by Netherland artist Rob de Vries (Rookuzz on Flickr). I like how this image evokes feelings of being both lost and found. What I take to be a broom is a special touch. I subscribe to Every Day Poems, which sends out a poem every morning together with an image, usually a photo. Of late, they’ve been showing the work of this artist, and it immediately grabbed me. De Vries very kindly gave me permission to use his images here. He’s described as a photo-realist artist, but I like his abstract work best, which I gather is photo-based. I’d love to know more about his process.
When I’m researching and I see a bit of text relevant to my WIP (either online or on Kindle), I will clip it: shift-command-4 and “pull” rectangle around the text I want.
It’s so easy to do I often end up with a mess on my computer desktop. Here’s a screen shot to give you an idea how things can look at the end of a day:
My next step is to gather up all the clips and drag them into an empty “Today’s clips” folder. That, at least, looks manageable.
Why it’s important to a researcher for all files to be searchable
Research clips are not of much use to me unless I can search the text. For example, if I was looking for clips about Mother of the Maids I should be able to search that title and all relevant files would be listed.
Clips are a png file, a type of photo, so how is this done?
For the text in a photo to be searchable it needs to have OCR — optical character recognition. Basically, OCR makes it possible to search for a word in a photo. Magic.
I’ve messed around with OCR software quite a bit over time. Software such as OneNote claims to convert files automatically, but sometimes so very slowly it’s not practical. Evernote can be touchy and deliver poor results. Also, I need to be able to easily move the OCR’d clip into my writing programmes (Scrivener and AEON Timeline, at this time), which I can’t do — at least not easily — out of Evernote or OneNote.
Why not send a clip directly to Scrivener?
One of the strengths of Scrivener is that I can clip a bit of text from a website directly into my project. However, Scrivener does not offer OCR (at least at this time), so while I will often post a web address URL to Scrivener, I won’t send a clip. I need to be able to search the text of a clip, and without OCR, I can’t do that.
ABBYY FineReader software to the rescue
FineReader is simply an awesome OCR software: fast, powerful and reliable, but at around $150 for Mac, it’s not cheap. (There is a 2-week free trial offered, however.) (Check: is it subscription for Pro?)
I’ll show you what FineReader does with a day’s pile of clips:
I select and drag all of them into the Fine Reader icon in the dock:
It bounces around a bit as it does the work, and then, snap, it’s done.
First I get a “Completed” notice with problem alerts — these I simply ignore and click “Close.”
The next screen shows small images of the clips on the left with enlarged versions on the right. I also ignore all that and click “Export” in the header.
That brings me to this window, which has the PDF option lightly highlighted. I ignore all the options in the middle and click Next in the lower right corner.
The final window gives me the opportunity to name the collection. I type in “Today’s clips” and select where I want them to show up on my computer (desktop, for now).
Caution!
The really, really, really important thing about this final window is to save each clip to a separate file. (Unless it’s a book file: You don’t want a separate file for each page!)
Click “Export,” and it’s done.
Done? Almost …
I now have 24 searchable clips which I rename and file to put into either AEON Timeline (for events and date-specific clips) or my Scrivener project file. I then trash the original unsearchable clips.
I do a computer search for “Mother of the Maids” and of the over 20 pdf files listed, my 3 newest clips that mention “Mother of the Maids” are listed at the top:
Success!
And that’s it, for now. Next up, I hope to write a blog post about Mrs. Stonor (sometimes Stoner), a Mother of the Maids who looked after the young, unmarried Maids of Honour who served most if not all of Henry VIII’s six wives. Four of these maids became the next wife and all four ended up dead.
Now there’s a story. :-)
After not using FineReader for a time, the documents would not come out searchable. I messed with this for hours without luck — until I clicked the “set to default” button in the last frame. :-)
The one problematic part of this process is that the file will come out “untitled,” so I select and copy the title before putting it through the process.
The novel I’m writing now is set in mid-16th century England. During this time period episodes of black plague and the quickly lethal “sweating sickness” came and went. With each epidemic, enormous numbers of people died.
Long ago, when I started to research, these events were simply blips on a timeline. With the advent of our Covid-19 world, such facts became far more vivid to me. I hadn’t understood the fear and heightened state of caution epidemics caused.
A 16th-century story to set the stage: a man and woman in a village in England lost children to the plague. Another child was born, and when plague returned to their town, they sealed shut the windows and doors of their home. Thanks to their precautions, their child survived: his name was William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” (and “Macbeth,” and “Antony and Cleopatra”) during plague years when the London theatres closed down. (The rule was that once the death toll went over 30, playhouses had to close.) In short, he was out of work and had time on his hands.
“King Lear” is one of his bleakest plays, written while living in a bleak time:
The mood in the city must have been ghastly – deserted streets and closed shops, dogs running free, carers carrying three-foot staffs painted red so everyone else kept their distance, church bells tolling endlessly for funerals … (The Guardian, March 22, 2020)
Plague also changed the nature of the plays he wrote. Plague killed off men in their 30s, so the demographic of both his actors and audience changed.
Although A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is not, in fact, a contemporary account—Defoe was a master of what I would call fact-based fiction—it is thought to have been well-researched. I was struck, reading it, how well-organized England was in combating epidemics. For example, if infected, people were prevented from leaving their homes. One needed a certificate of health in order to travel. Interesting!
Certainly, it is reminiscent of what we are going though today:
City authorities are sane and composed concerning the spreading plague, and distribute the Orders of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London. These set up rules and guidelines for the arrangement of searchers and inspectors and guardians to monitor the houses, for the quieting down of contaminated houses, and for the closing down of occasions in which enormous gatherings of individuals would assemble.
Here’s a truly contemporary word of caution from 1665:
This poem by U.S. poet Daniel Halpern was published—astonishingly—seven years ago in Poetry Magazine. (Likewise astonishingly, he doesn’t remember writing it.)
Pandemania
There are fewer introductions
In plague years,
Hands held back, jocularity
No longer bellicose,
Even among men.
Breathing’s generally wary,
Labored, as they say, when
The end is at hand.
But this is the everyday intake
Of the imperceptible life force,
Willed now, slow —
Well, just cautious
In inhabited air.
As for ongoing dialogue,
No longer an exuberant plosive
To make a point,
But a new squirrelling of air space,
A new sense of boundary.
Genghis Khan said the hand
Is the first thing one man gives
To another. Not in this war.
A gesture of limited distance
Now suffices, a nod,
A minor smile or a hand
Slightly raised,
Not in search of its counterpart,
Just a warning within
The acknowledgement to stand back.
Each beautiful stranger a barbarian
Breathing on the other side of the gate.
I’ve been putting research documents into Scrivener, assuming that they were searchable. After all, one oft-stated advantage of using Scrivener is that you have all your documents in one place.
It’s true that I can put everything and anything into Scrivener, but I also need to be able to search within those documents. I mistakenly assumed that one of Scrivener’s many superpowers was the ability to make all documents searchable. In other words, I assumed that Scrivener utilized OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Not so. :-(
Having searchable documents is important for my current WIP because it’s set in the 16th century, and a number of the resources are rare and/or ancient and only available on BooksGoogle or InternetArchive. I’ve taken to clipping relevant parts of such documents (shift-control-4 on a Mac) or exporting them whole as PDFs before sending them to Scrivener. The clips are a type of image, so they need OCR to be searched, and most PDFs are not searchable as well.
And so I began to look at ways to make documents searchable before putting them in Scrivener. In the process, I discovered that anything to do with OCR opened a bottomless pit. I will try to keep this simple.
Dedicated OCR software
One possibility would be to invest in a software programme dedicated to making documents OCR searchable. The highest-rated programme for Mac is ABBYY FineReader Pro, available on trial for 30 days. I tested it out on a clip (below), and in seconds had a searchable Word document that beautifully preserved the formatting of the original.
This is the original clip:
And this is the searchable Word document:
Wow.
Databases that make documents searchable
The other possibility would be to use a database that automatically makes documents OCR searchable. The advantage of using such a database is that it is—duh—a database, a logical place to store research documents. … which brings me to OneNote and EverNote.
Both EverNote and OneNote convert documents to OCR, so I decided to test them both using the test clip above.
It took well over an hour for OneNote to convert it to a searchable text, but EverNote has yet to do so even a day later!
Once made searchable, there is a way to create a copy in EverNote, a copy that can then be put in Scrivener, but it’s weird and basically unreadable, showing every word as a separate object.
In OneNote, once the document has gone through the OCR treatment, it’s possible to easily create a searchable text version. (Control-click the document and select “Copy text from picture.”)
This is what I got from my test clip:
Here comes old Woodcock, the Yeoman of Kent, that’s half Farmer and half Gentleman; his horses go to the plow all week, and are put into the coach o’ Sunday.
Tunbridge Walks or the Yeoman of Kent, act I, sc. 1
Not as pretty as ABBYY FineReader, but not at all bad. (I did clean it up a bit.) This text can now be copied and pasted into Scrivener or wherever I want it.
Note: It would have been nice to be able to send this searchable text directly to Scrivener. I passed on this recommendation to OneNote and discovered 1) that their help menu actually helps (EverNote Help is extremely basic), and 2) that they ask how to improve. What a concept! (But do they listen? That remains to be seen.)
A word about Web Clippers
One beautiful thing about EverNote is its Web Clipper. With it, I can send the contents of any webpage to EverNote and, at the same time, indicate which notebook it should be filed in and how it should be tagged.
OneNote’s Web Clipper is not functional on Safari right now due to recent OS changes at Apple. I trust that this will be solved. In any case, it is available on Chrome or FireFox.
It’s a good clipper, but it’s not as useful as EverNote’s. Although you can choose what OneNote notebook to file it in, you can’t specify beyond that with tags, and you can’t file it in more than one place.
Which brings me to Tags
Being able to add tags to a document in EverNote is great. For example, I’d be able to tag an 18th-century French recipe for roasted swans as 18th century, France, food, recipes and swans. This would allow me to narrow a search for a perfect detail regarding a roasted swan snack.
OneNote doesn’t have a tag function, alas—at least not that I can see.
What about cost?
I use EverNote heavily, so I need their Premium plan, which costs $5.83 US a month when paying annually. For that I get 10GB uploads per month, and am able to search PDFs. (For more information about Evernote pricing, click here.)
OneNote is included in an Office 365 subscription package. (Some claim it’s also now available as a free stand-alone, but I’ve not been able to confirm that.) Since I’m already subscribed to the Office 365 world, I can start using OneNote at no additional cost. With OneNote, I get unlimited uploads, so win-win.
Say what? A scanner app?
Scanning pages from books is too slow to be practical. I’m delighted with the Microsoft app Office Lens, which will send a image directly to OneNote. This will save me lots of time.
For example, I took the image below with Office Lens and sent it to OneNote at 10:30 am. In under 30 minutes, it was searchable and even the all-text extract was surprisingly good.
EverNote or OneNote or … ? My conclusion
I do need a database, but given the pros and cons of OneNote and Evernote, where do I stand?
Because of the expense and inconsistent, slow and inadequate OCR function of EverNote, I have decided to migrate my extensive EverNote database to OneNote.
I should mention, as well, that there are indications that EverNote might be heading into hard times, and I don’t want to be left in the lurch.
It’s possible to import EverNote documents into OneNote using their OneNote Importer app, but judging from this note—
The importer software described on this page is still available for you to download and use, but we’re no longer actively developing or supporting this tool.
—that may not always be possible, so migrating now is perhaps wise.
I’ve never been a Microsoft fan—Mac users aren’t their priority—but OneNote for Mac looks worthy, so I’m going to make the move. I’ve also purchased ABBYY FineReader Pro, and given that I will be unsubscribing from EverNote, I’ll be coming out ahead in more ways than one. :-)
The links below might be of interest.
Be aware that there are differences between OneNote for Mac and the mothership OneNote for PC users. Also, OneNote for Mac has been recently “updated”—but the changes have caused quite an uproar because it’s no longer possible to arrange tabs along the top, as in this example:
I would love to have such tabs back and I’m hoping the OneNote engineers succumb. Some long-time users are even advocating reverting to the 2016 version and vowing never again to upgrade.
