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Question 1

Were there women who loved women in the 1500s in Scotland?

Yes.

Women who love other women have always existed, just as they exist today.

We know of one such woman in the 1500s specifically, called Marie Maitland. She was born in 1546 at Lethington Castle outside Haddington. Marie was daughter to Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington, an influential judge and royal administrator, and sister to William, Secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, and John, who would later serve as Chancellor to King James VI.

We know that Marie was a woman who loved women, because she wrote about this in a family manuscript now known as the ‘Maitland Quarto’. The Quarto contains a total of 95 poems in historical Scots (still the language of the Scottish kingdom at this time). Most of the poems in it are by Marie’s father, along with some by her brother John, King James VI, and other important men connected to her family - but it also contains around 30 technically anonymous poems, many of which were written by women. We know that Marie compiled this manuscript for many reasons, not least because her name appears twice on the title page and because several poems within its pages refer to her authorship of it.

In one female-authored poem, Marie is compared to 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”. In other poems, Marie herself writes about her love for another woman. In one, Marie expresses her explicit desire to marry the woman that she loves; and her sadness that, because they are both women, this is impossible.

A few decades later, we have another, very different, record of women who loved women. A surviving record from Glasgow, from 1625, tells us that Elspeth Faulds and Margaret Armour were found guilty of the crime of “sodomy” and forced to separate by the kirk.

And in the 1800s, Anne Lister diligently recorded the details of her life in diaries totalling millions of words. They include intimate details of her romantic and sexual relationships with a series of women.

These women – Sappho in the 7th century BCE, Marie in the 1500s, Elspeth and Margaret in the 1600s, Anne Lister in the 1800s – will not have been alone. They are simply isolated examples of women who loved women, who have left us, each in their own way, a record. There will have been many more women who loved women, but who have left us no record.

Question 2

Why is there so little evidence of women who loved women in the 1500s in Scotland?

Severe homophobia, together with gender inequality, strongly mitigated against many such records being created during this time.

Reactionary homophobia was among the factors that fuelled the reformers during Katherine’s time in the first part of the 1500s. Following the success of the Reformation, their ‘purifying’ moral project (which included destroying monasteries and nunneries, suspected as safe havens for ‘sodomy’) was enforced with a vengeance during Marie Maitland’s time, in the later 1500s.

Male “homosexuality” was punishable by state execution. Female “homosexuality” was less explicitly codified and criminalised, but nonetheless represented a monstrous deviation from gender norms and was sometimes punished, like Elspeth Faulds and Margaret Armour, who in 1625 were convicted of female “sodomy” in Glasgow.

Surviving criminal records from the era also show how “sodomy” offences, both male and female, were conflated with witchcraft and the demonic in the courts. Much of the limited evidence for “homosexuality” that we have from this period takes the form of criminal records.

In this societal context, it is not surprising that so few positive records were created of gay lives and loves. To create such evidence was dangerous and risked criminal conviction.

Another barrier to finding evidence about historical women who loved women is lack of literacy, and lack of opportunity and freedom to write. In the 1500s, most women could not write; this was a privilege of the elite - a group of which Marie Maitland happened to be part. It is only recently in our history that women have even begun to have the same opportunities and freedoms as men to learn and to write.

These twin barriers of societal homophobia and gender inequality mean that relatively few records of women who love women - even less so positive records like Marie Maitland’s poetry - have been created and survived.

Question 3

In real life, Katherine was the wife of the Captain of Dunbar Castle. Is it not historically inaccurate to portray her as loving another woman?

No.

That Katherine was married tells us nothing about her sexuality. The fact is, because she left us no record of them, we can never know what Katherine’s romantic feelings were – whether for her husband, another woman, or anyone else.

Scotland in the 1500s was a highly patriarchal society, where women were defined in relation to men, and transferred from their father’s household to a husband’s household.

Marriage was a social, economic and (increasingly) religious necessity; it was not a choice, and it was very rarely about romance. This lack of meaningful choice became only more pronounced post-Reformation, when even the one alternative of becoming a nun was removed.

Love matches - where genuine attraction or affection coincided with necessity - were the exception, not the rule. And there is no evidence of there being a love match between Katherine and her husband. To project romance and sexual attraction onto the fact of a marriage that took place in the 1500s is to anachronistically apply modern ideology and norms to the past.

The same applies to the real-life story of Marie Maitland. For most of Marie’s adult life, she remained - highly abnormally - unmarried. In 1561, when Marie was around 15, her 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, until her father’s death in 1586.

With her father gone, 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 (the average age of marriage for women of Marie’s status was 18). And yet, Marie was quickly married off to the much younger Laird of Haltoun. As with Katherine, there is no evidence of there being a love match between Marie and her young husband - in contrast to her well-documented romantic attraction to other women in the Maitland Quarto manuscript.

Question 4

Why have I never heard about women who loved women in Scotland’s history before?

The societal homophobia and heteronormativity that impacted LGBT+ people in the 1500s has continued down the centuries.

It is only relatively recently in Scotland’s history that LGBT+ people have begun to be treated with equal rights and dignity. We still face many challenges today.

These negative societal attitudes have also impacted the way records of LGBT+ history have been viewed and discussed - and our ability to be taught about them.

For example, it is well-documented that King James VI had romantic relationships with men; regardless of how he may, or may not, have identified in modern terms, whether as gay, bisexual, or anything else. However, scholars have been reluctant to accept this, often on the basis that these are ‘modern’ ways of thinking about sexuality.

For other scholars, meanwhile, that James VI’s documented relationships with men were romantic is not even accepted in the first place; explaining that it was not unusual for men of this era to have ‘close friends’ with whom they  shared a bed, and highlighting the King’s marriage to and children with Queen Anne (despite this being a non-negotiable aspect of kingship, in order to produce heirs).

Less well-known figures than James also experience similar treatment. For example, the most explicitly lesbian love poem in the Maitland Quarto has been variously described as a poem about “friendship”, or the work of an “anonymous male poet” ‘trying on lesbian voice’ – rather than simply accepting the obvious: that it is love poetry authored by one woman, Marie Maitland, to another.

Some of this may be unconscious bias on the part of historians, applying societal prejudices to their interpretation of historical records. But suppressing LGBT+ history has also been an active tool consciously used to oppress LGBT+ people in the present.

For example, in 1921, an MP proposed an amendment to the law to formally criminalise female homosexuality. In doing so, the MP set out three options to deal with such women:

“The first is the death sentence. That has been tried in old times, and, though drastic, it does do what is required – that is, stamp them out. The second is to look upon them frankly as lunatics, and lock them up for the rest of their lives. That is a very satisfactory way also. It gets rid of them. The third way is to leave them entirely alone, not notice them, not advertise them. That is the method that has been adopted … for many hundred years.”

As it was, Parliament opted at that time to ‘continue’ with the third option –keeping queer women ‘out of sight and out of mind’.

Later in the 20th century, local authorities in the UK were banned from “promot[ing] the acceptability of homosexuality” as a “pretended family relationship”, including in schools and libraries. That ban remained in place in Scotland until the 2000s. It was only in 2021 that the success of the Time for Inclusive Education campaign led to LGBT+ inclusive education being embedded in Scotland’s school curriculum, for the first time.

Question 5

Why should we tell LGBT+ history and stories?

Why not?

Different people have made up Scotland’s history, just as many different people make up our present today - it’s just that the stories of some of those people have not been written or spoken about much before.

Their stories are no less important than those of people who have been written or spoken about to date, but their stories have been excluded because of who they were - or certain aspects of those stories, like the fact that someone was gay, omitted from their telling.

It is therefore perhaps better to think of it less as ‘telling LGBT+ history’ than as ‘telling Scotland’s history’: but all of it, not just some of it. When we omit the existence of LGBT+ people, we fail to tell Scotland’s history fully.

History doesn’t just tell us about the past; it also informs the present.

By learning about the existence of LGBT+ people in the past, we learn that different people have always been here, and been important historical figures in their own right - but that they have also all too often been oppressed, criminalised and excluded.

Telling LGBT+ history helps us to learn the lessons of that past and, hopefully, to ensure that future generations of LGBT+ people do not suffer in the same way as those who went before them.

And for LGBT+ people, it holds up a mirror, providing validation and comfort that those like us have, indeed, always been here.

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