< BACK to main PROGRAMME

The story of Rona Munro’s heroine Katherine is set around the real-life burning at the stake as a heretic of her brother, Patrick Hamilton, in 1528, and Katherine’s subsequent own trial for heresy. But, moreso, Katherine is a story of love - ferocious love - between two women. And although the love story between these two particular women is imagined, the existence of real such stories is no less historically rooted than the more well-rehearsed facts of Reformation history.

In 1546, another early reformer, George Wishart, met the same grisly fate as Patrick. In the same year, a remarkable real-life woman called Marie Maitland was born at Lethington Castle outside Haddington. And while we can’t know for sure whether Katherine ever really fell in love with a woman (although she may well have), we know for a fact that Marie Maitland did - because she wrote unmistakably erotic and passionate love poetry addressed to her female love, which has survived to the present day.

The men of Marie’s family, the Maitlands of Lethington, were dominant in royal administration and politics. Her father Richard was an influential judge and Keeper of the Privy Seal. Her brother William was Secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots; another brother, John, would later serve as Chancellor to King James VI. If Katherine’s brother was the crucial figure in the course that her life took, Marie’s father was the defining figure in hers. In 1561, in the twist of fate that transformed everything, Marie’s father went entirely blind. Instead of preparing for marriage, teenage Marie thus became her father’s literary and legal secretary - a role in which she would serve for the next 25 years.

In a life path very different to that of her three sisters, who were all promptly married off, Marie remained unmarried for most of her adult life. During the decades that she instead devoted to assisting her father, Marie also had the relative freedom to pursue her own learning and writing - and to fall in love with another woman. 

Thus declares Marie to her female love, in lines of poetry that still pulsate with erotic charge, more than 400 years on. Later in the same poem, Marie states unequivocally her wish that she could marry the woman that she loves. If only they could “with joyfull hairt” be married, they would not be the two “unhappie wemen” that they are, forced apart by the accident of their shared gender and societal dictates. Marie concludes her powerful poem vowing that, formal marriage or not, “no[ch]t but deid [death] sall us divorce” and that “thair is mair constancie in our sex, than ever amang men has been” - which their love will prove.

This poem appears in a manuscript written by Marie, which is full of other female-authored poetry, including several more sapphic poems. Marie’s name is emblazoned on the manuscript’s title page, twice. Several poems within its pages refer to both her authorship of it, and to her reputation as a poet. One poem is an almost tongue-in-cheek celebration of Marie’s steadfast devotion to ‘virginity’, where she is invoked alongside the goddess Diana, who famously eschewed men and dwelt with her nymphs in the forest. In another poem, Marie is compared to no less than Sappho of Lesbos - the ancient Greek poet who lived in the 7th century BCE, wrote explicit poetry about her love for women, and gave us the very words “sapphic” and “lesbian”.

Then, in 1586, Marie’s father died, aged 90. Patriarchy dictated that she now came under the control of her brother - Secretary to James VI, and soon to be further elevated to Chancellor. At this point, Marie was 40 years old. Her father had ensured her financial independence and she was way past optimal marriageable or child-bearing age - and yet, barely was her father cold in his grave than she found herself married off to the young Laird of Haltoun, because her brother, and politics, demanded it.

The fact of her late-stage, politically-motivated marriage tells us nothing about Marie's sexuality - in contrast to her well-documented romantic attraction to other women. In much the same way, Katherine’s marriage reveals absolutely nothing about her inner emotional landscape. At a time when women had no choice in the matter, the fact of marriage to a man is meaningless as ‘evidence’ of heterosexuality. This lack of meaningful choice became only more pronounced post-Reformation, when even the one alternative of becoming a nun was removed.

One decade and four children later, in 1596, Marie died; most likely during childbirth - she would have been 50 years old at the time of giving birth to her final child. She has no surviving grave that we know of. No portrait of her, that we know of, was ever made.

The answer to this question - put provocatively to Katherine by King James  V during the play - is, by and large, no. This erasure only intensifies when it comes to queer women.

First, all else being equal, heterosexuality is assumed as default. But absence of queer evidence is not evidence of queer absence. Often all we know of a woman are the names of the man they were born to, the man they married, and the children they bore. But, as we know, marriage and childbearing tell us nothing about a person’s romantic and emotional inner world. And that’s before we even consider all those women of whose lives we have no record at all.

Second, even where queer people have left us evidence - when all else is not equal - such evidence is all too often ignored and denied.

Scholars today still equivocate about Marie’s authorship of her manuscript, let alone the lesbian love poetry within its pages. Some have dismissed her most explicitly erotic poem as one of mere “friendship”. Others concede its eroticism, but insist that it is not impossible that it is the work of an “anonymous male poet” trying on lesbian voice.

Nor is this sort of treatment unique to Marie.

This is a tomb painting of two Ancient Egyptian men, Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, from the 25th century BCE. These men were of equal rank, they were buried together, and they are represented through the iconography traditionally used for husbands and wives. Some historians, however, prefer to suggest that it cannot be ruled out that the intimate proximity of the two men is explained by their being ‘conjoined twins’.

These two examples - millennia apart, one female, one male - are emblematic of the default to “explain the gay away”.

Historians wield great power in gatekeeping access to the past, in deciding which histories deserve to be to told, and how - and yet are frequently all too oblivious to the biases and prejudices that influence those choices. And the decision to tell - or not to tell - queer histories is not just an academic concern; it has real social consequences.

I studied Scottish History at the University of St Andrews. I walked over the “PH” and “GW” cobblestones, marking the spots where those men met their martyrdom, many times. I learned all about them, and about countless other men of Scotland’s past. I didn’t learn about Katherine. I certainly didn’t learn about Marie. I heard nothing about people like me. I assumed that we simply were not there.

But we were. And we always have been.

As a gay woman, I know how much comfort and validation there is to be found in seeing yourself in the past. Knowing that people like us have always existed makes us feel less alone, less wrong, than society can often make us feel.

Telling queer histories also removes at least one argument from those who would cause us harm and deny us equal rights and dignity - the notion that being gay is some sort of ‘modern lifestyle choice’ or ‘social contagion’.

That is why I am so proud to be telling the real-life story of Marie Maitland to as wide an audience as possible. Not least through having worked with Time for Inclusive Education to produce classroom resources so that the next generation can grow up knowing even a small part of Scotland’s LGBT+ history. Inclusive education, inclusive storytelling, saves lives.

At the same time, we know that many more queer lives will have been lived than records created. And that is where creative licence can ‘write into the gaps’, with imagined but historically-rooted stories like Rona Munro’s romance between Katherine and Jenny - a love story no less ‘real’ than any other imagined in historical fiction.

Creative licence has also helped to bring Marie Maitland to life: although no portrait (that we know of) of the real woman exists, her modern imagined portrait - her facial features based on surviving portraits of her brothers, her dress based on that of contemporary female portraits - puts a plausible, historically-rooted face to ‘Scotland’s 16th-century Sappho’. 

Pleasingly, a little of the real-life Marie is also woven into the staging of Katherine: the pages of secretary hand script, brandished at Katherine in court as her brother’s writings, are in fact copies of real historical records from the 1500s, relating to the life of Marie Maitland.

And Rona Munro’s 16th-century sapphic “Katherine” is brought to life by the exceptionally talented 21st-century queer woman, Catriona Faint: embodying the powerful message that women who love women have always existed, at all times and in all places.

In the Scottish 1500s, Marie Maitland was definitely one such woman. Katherine Hamilton may well have been, too. Jenny represents all the women of whom we have no record, not even their names, but who we know lived and loved just the same.

Rona Munro reaches into the wrongfully neglected gaps in our telling of Scotland’s history and brings those stories into the mainstream, to those who need to hear them most. I am indescribably grateful to Rona for continuing to use the full force of her platform and talents for such selfless good, in finally beginning to share these untold aspects of our past. Thank you, so much, for this story.

ASHLEY DOUGLAS

Ashley is currently writing the biography of Marie Maitland, which will be the first book ever written about her. Follow her on Twitter @ashdouglasscot for updates or read more at ashleydouglas.scot

A note on terminology:

Women who love women, whatever they might (or might not) have called themselves, have always existed. These days, such women might identify as, for example, "gay", "lesbian", "bisexual" or "queer".

When discussing such women in a historical context, "queer"  is often used as an umbrella term, because modern identities such as "gay/lesbian/bisexual" were not available to them and we don't know how they would have identified themselves.

The term "queer" has previously had negative connotations, but it has begun to be positively reclaimed by many in the LGBT+ community in recent years. It is used here interchangeably with "LGBT+" and "women who love women" when describing women who loved other women in Scottish history.

Learn more :

BACK TO PROGRAMME