The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (34 page)

Toward the end of
Henry IV, Part 2,
with his father dead and himself about to succeed to the throne, Hal suddenly makes a striking comparison with an Ottoman sultan that has puzzled critics. As he enters Westminster Palace dressed as the new king, he turns to his three brothers and tells them:

This new and gorgeous garment, majesty,

Sits not so easy on me as you think.

Brothers, you mix your sadness with some fear.

This is the English, not the Turkish court;

Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds,

But Harry Harry.
³⁰

Hal’s first pronouncement as king seems straightforward enough. He assures his brothers that his accession is as strange to him as it is for them and that they have nothing to fear. Hal promises his younger brothers that they will not be murdered like Murad’s five younger brothers or his nineteen sons. But perhaps the prince doth protest too much. The speech’s awkwardness betrays the problem. Hal claims he will imitate his father, not Murad, but the audience has already experienced one version of Henry IV as the calculating pretender whose political usurpation triggers civil war. If young Harry is just the same as old Harry, then perhaps he will reproduce the same sectarian divisions. By trying to erase associations between his family and despotic Turks, Hal succeeds only in reminding us of the comparison. Everyone hopes the reformed son will metamorphose into the perfect Christian prince, but the fear remains that he might still turn Turk.

The anxiety recurs throughout the final play in the series,
Henry V,
written in the summer of 1599. For generations of English-speaking readers, the play has represented England’s greatest warrior king, a patriotic celebration of Henry’s plucky English “band of brothers” triumphing over the French at Agincourt in the face of impossible odds. But perceptive critics have identified a more ambivalent side to Henry. The great essayist William Hazlitt saw in Hal “a very amiable monster, a very splendid pageant,”
³¹
who preferred brute force over right or wrong. More recently the American critic Norman Rabkin argued that the play points in two different directions: Henry can be seen as the militant Christian warrior, or as the scheming Machiavellian prince.
³²
Today, in an age when the idea of a crusade is more problematic than ever before, audiences are similarly attuned to Henry’s slipperiness.

This ambivalence was built into Henry’s character from the moment Shakespeare first conceived him. As he leads the English into a morally questionable war with the French, the young English king begins to reveal a latent “Turkish” aspect to his character. In the scene where his forces are besieging Harfleur, Henry warns the town’s inhabitants that failure to surrender will lead him to unleash rape and murder:

Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,

Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused

Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry

At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
³³

The threat is reminiscent of Tamburlaine’s massacre of the virgins of Damascus. The image of infants spitted on pikes would have brought to mind the stories of Turkish atrocities in central Europe published in pamphlets across the continent at this time. But it also drew on a much older theatrical traditional: fourteenth-century mystery plays such as Coventry’s
The
Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors,
depicting the Slaughter of the Innocents. The play shows Herod, King of Judaea, slaughtering Bethlehem’s newborn infants to prevent a future King of the Jews from threatening his position. By associating Henry with Herod, Shakespeare presents him as a raging pagan tyrant. The
Pageant,
which Shakespeare may well have watched as a child, showed Herod embracing idolatry, or “
maumetrie
”—worshipping and swearing by Muhammad—while dressed in “Saracen” clothing.
³⁴
Through these associations Henry is given many faces: he is simultaneously the heroic English king defeating the French, the pagan Herod menacing the Jews and the idolatrous Muslim threatening to slaughter innocent Christians “spitted upon pikes.”

Of course unlike Tamburlaine, Herod or Murad, Henry does not slaughter the innocents of Harfleur. Our qualms are soon alleviated by his adoption of that most quintessential of English icons, St. George. Before Harfleur, after exhorting his soldiers to adopt the ruthless “action of the tiger,” he combines patriotism with religion in his famous rallying call, “Cry God for Harry, England and St. George!”
³⁵
His transformation from the dissolute Prince Hal seems complete. But even his adoption of George’s militant purity would not have convinced everyone.

St. George offers a perfect example of how far Christian and Islamic traditions were entangled in the late sixteenth century. Influential Protestant theologians such as John Calvin and John Foxe frequently attacked the veneration of saints as yet another example of popish “idolatry.” In his
Institutes of the Christian Religion
(1536), Calvin condemned those who regarded God’s “intercession as unavailing without the assistance of George and . . . other such phantasms.”
³⁶
Foxe was similarly dismissive. In his chapter on the “History of the Turks,” published in the 1570 edition of the
Acts and Monuments,
he argued that “if God have determined his own Son only to stand alone, let not us presume to admix with his majesty any of our trumpery. He that bringeth St. George or St. Denis, as patrons, to the field, to fight against the Turk, leaveth Christ, no doubt, at home.”
³⁷
Henry denied any association with “Amurath,” but in his invocation of St. George he may have fallen into another trap, this time of Catholic idolatry.

To make matters even more complicated, St. George is not an exclusively Christian saint: he is also a key figure in the Islamic faith. In Christian iconography St. George is shown as a resurrected martyr who appears, from the Crusades onward, slaying the heretical “dragon” of Islamic militarism.
³⁸
But in Islam he is associated with Al Khidr, identified in the Qur’an as a servant of God who meets Moses, and as an associate of Elijah in the Hadiths. In Sufism he is known as “the Verdant One,” a mystical warrior whom some sources claim to have been an officer in the army of Alexander the Great. Some versions of his life declare that, like St. George, Al Khidr was resurrected after his death at the hands of a pagan king. In the 1550s the Habsburg diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq traveled through the Ottoman Empire, recounting stories of a similar figure revered by Turkish dervish communities in central Anatolia, “a hero called Chederle, a man of great physical and mortal courage, whom they declare to be identical with our St. George and to whom they ascribe the same achievements as we ascribe to our saint, namely, that he rescued a maiden by the slaughter of a huge and terrible dragon.”
³⁹
Busbecq observed that “the Turks are much amused at the pictures of St. George, whom they declare was their own Chederle, in the Greek churches,” and that when they saw such pictures “they prostrate themselves in adoration and imprint kisses all over it, not omitting even the horse’s hoofs. St. George, they declare, was a man of might, a famous warrior, who often in single combat fought with the Evil Spirit on equal terms and was victorious.”
⁴⁰

Although he went under various names, St. George was shared widely among various Christian and Muslim communities, and it was only around the time that Shakespeare wrote
Henry V
that he began to have a more recognizably English identity. The likelihood is that Shakespeare had no idea of the Islamic version of St. George, but many of his contemporaries placed the saint in a nebulous Muslim context even as they tried to reclaim him for a more parochial version of English Protestantism. Richard Johnson, a popular writer of prose romance now largely forgotten, in his
The
Most
Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom
(1596)—a source for
Henry V
—transferred St. George’s origins from Cappadocia in Turkey to, perhaps surprisingly, Coventry. In Johnson’s hands St. George is somewhat clumsily turned into an “English Champion,” even though his enemies remain Persian Muslims. Johnson’s St. George travels east in search of adventure and is offered the hand of Sabra, daughter of the Egyptian king, but he insists, “I am a Christian, thou a Pagan: I honor God in heaven, thou earthly shadowes below: therefore if thou wilt obtaine my love and liking, thou must forsake thy Mahomet and be christened in our Christian faith.” Sabra agrees, but they are betrayed by the jealous “Almidor the blacke knight of Moroco.”
⁴¹
George is sent to Persia to be executed.

Johnson depicts George as a militant Protestant iconoclast: “Upon the day Saint George entred the sultan’s court when the Persians solemnly sacrificed to their Gods Mahomet, Apollo, Termigaunt, the unchristian procession so moved the impatience of the English champion, that he took the ensigns and streamers whereon the Persian gods were pictured, and trampled them under his feet.”
⁴²
As a consequence George is condemned by a “Soldan” who swears by “Mahomet” and hands him over to his “Janissaries” to be executed. As he is martyred, George vows:

Let tyrants think if ever I obtain,

What now is lost by treason’s cursed guile:

False Egypt’s scourge I surely will remain,

And turn to streaming blood Moroco’s smile.

The damned dog of Barbarie shall rue,

The baleful stratagems that will ensue.

The Persian towers shall smoke with fire,

And lofty Babylon be tumbled down:

The Cross of Christendom shall then aspire,

To wear the proud Egyptian triple crowne,

Jerusalem and Juda shall behold,

The fall of Kings by Christian Champions bold.
⁴³

Johnson’s St. George has to go through a series of encounters with Muslims in the Holy Land before he can be martyred and adopted as England’s patron saint.

Much of what Johnson wrote about St. George’s complex heritage finds its way into Shakespeare’s
Henry V,
culminating at the end of the play in one final striking identification between Henry and St. George. After his victory at Agincourt, Henry makes peace with the French by marrying their princess, Catherine. His rather awkward wooing concludes with his proposal: “Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half-French half-English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?”
⁴⁴
It is hardly a romantic proposal, but rather one of militant Christian expansion, where the compound French and English heir can establish his power at the heart of Islam. As Henry augments his power through a dynastic marriage with the French princess, he reveals himself a strategic polyglot.

Yet the audience knows there will be no crusade. As the Epilog points out:

Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned king

Of France and England, did this king succeed,

Whose state so many had the managing

That they lost France and made his England bleed.

Which oft our stage hath shown.
⁴⁵

In a moment of self-promotion, Shakespeare reminds his viewers that eight years earlier they had seen what had happened to Henry VI. Henry’s great victories were all for nothing. The boy would not conquer Constantinople—quite the contrary, he would lose France, and England would sink into yet another civil war. The dynastic cycle of conflict will begin all over again, and the specter of Carlisle’s prophecy of internecine strife where “Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels” will return like a ghost that cannot be exorcised. Shakespeare intimates that even at the core of England’s greatest ruler there is a touch of Turkish tyranny. Perhaps, he suggests, a Christian is not so very different from a Turk after all.

By 1600, the ghost of Marlowe was gone, consigned to the occasional parody of largely ineffectual characters. The process of exorcism had given Shakespeare a fascinating new compound figure, the Moor-Turk. Shakespeare had no interest in making moral judgments about such characters. Gradually he transformed the stereotype of the eastern antihero as a murderous villain into something subtler, yet also tragic and conflicted. Shakespeare’s Moors were exotic yet unsettling. Standing on the threshold between Rome and Venice, they threatened to invade the domestic economy, and to pollute English women and bloodlines. For an Elizabethan audience accustomed by now to an extensive exchange of goods and people between England and Morocco, such face-to-face encounters were a distinct possibility. In contrast, Shakespeare’s Turks were more spectral figures, metaphors more than roles, archetypes rarely seen on England’s shores.

•   •   •

Even as Shakespeare finished
Henry V
with its unlikely proposal of a crusade against the Turk, a group of Englishmen were involved in a far less heroic but no less extraordinary adventure in Constantinople that would put Elizabeth’s relationship with the Ottomans back at the top of the international political agenda. In January 1598 Edward Barton had died of dysentery, abruptly ending his colorful tenure as English ambassador to the Porte. He was buried with little fanfare in a Christian cemetery on the island of Heybeli Ada, a short boat ride away from Constantinople. Sultan Mehmed had never officially ratified Barton’s position. His controversial Hungarian adventure had further delayed the dispatch of royal presents. It was left to Barton’s successor, Henry Lello, to renegotiate England’s commercial Capitulations in the face of renewed French opposition.