Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (11 page)

It is when by a mannerly interpretation, we doe excuse our own vices, or other mens whom we do defend, by calling them virtues, as when we call him that is craftye, wyse: a covetous man, a good husband: murder a manly deede: deepe dissimulation, singuler wisdome: pryde cleanliness: covetousnesse, a worldly or necessarye carefulnesse: whoredome, youthful delight & dalyance:
Idolatry, pure religion
: glotony and dronkennesse, good fellowship: cruelty severity. This figure is used, when vices are excused.
¹⁴
(my emphasis)

A radical Protestant divine, Peacham echoes the pageant-makers in denouncing Catholics for preaching idolatry under the guise of pure religion. The papists are cunning practitioners of paradiastole, he contends, and the task of the godly is to strip away the veil of dissimulation.

To stigmatize the rhetorical duplicity of Catholicism was to deploy a double-edged weapon. The indictment must be rhetorically effective, but that tactic laid the Protestants themselves open to accusations of verbal artifice, even trickery. The act of exposure inevitably highlighted the gullibility of those who ought to know better. Worse yet, it underlined the similitude of qualities that, in moral terms, should be easily told apart. “The seat of worthy governance” strives hard, perhaps too hard, to differentiate Virtues from Vices—through placards on which their names are displayed, through distinctive costume, through their spatial position. Although there is every reason to believe that Elizabeth will be guided by the Virtues that have made possible her triumphant accession, the conditional phrasing of both the oration and Mulcaster’s prose commentary betrays a worry, or perhaps a warning, that like her sister before her she too might lapse. Should that happen, the queen would lose her subjects’ loyalty and ultimately the throne:

The ground of this pageant was that as like by virtues (which do abundantly appear in her Grace) the Queen’s Majesty was established in the seat of government, so she should sit fast in the same so long as she embraced virtue and held vice under foot. For if vice once got up the head, it would put the seat of government in peril of falling. (83)

Elizabeth’s heartening answer to the pageant was advertized in print: “The Queen’s Majesty when she had heard the child and understood the pageant at full, gave the city also thanks there, and most graciously promised her good endeavor for the maintenance of the said virtues, and suppression of vices” (83). This Elizabethan covenant, couched in simple, unadorned language, seemingly guarantees that moral rectitude, religious integrity, and plainness of speech will now go hand in hand.

V

The contrast between the Marian past and the Elizabethan present was further emphasized in the third tableau located at Soper Lane. There “the city had...erected the pageant with eight children representing the eight blessings touched [upon] in the fifth chapter of St Matthew, whereof every one upon just considerations was applied to her highness” (84). If the Vices in the preceding tableau evoked a generalized image of the idolatry and corruption of Mary’s reign, the point of this display was to remind Elizabeth of her own, personal suffering and miraculous deliverance from her sister’s henchmen. The corresponding oration painted Elizabeth as a victim of ruthless persecution (84–5). For all the praise of her meekness, mildness, mercy, purity of heart, and so on, the crux was not that those qualities ensured her preservation but that she owed both them and her eventual rescue to God’s mercy. This pageant foreshadowed John Foxe’s vivid account of Elizabeth’s tribulations during Mary’s reign in the “Book of Martyrs.” It also echoed and rewrote providential recitals made by Catholic publicists of Mary’s piety and fortitude in the face of schismatic fury.
¹⁵

The concept of Providence was common to Protestants and Catholics. “Providential beliefs,” Alexandra Walsham has shown, “cut across the invisible iron curtain which contemporary polemic erected between Geneva and Rome,” even if each side assigned different significance to particular occurrences.
¹⁶
In Mary’s case the hand of Providence was detected not only in her remarkable delivery from the harassment of Edwardian reformers and the suppression of Northumberland’s coup and, later, of Wyatt’s rebellion but also in her successful restoration of Roman Catholicism. Mary’s confessional integrity made the task of Catholic propagandists easy: unlike Elizabeth who, as John Knox was to remind her, wavered in the face of adversity, her elder sister had clung steadfastly to her faith.
¹⁷

From the outset Mary had declared her accession to be the work of Providence. “Having first taken counsel with her advisers,” reported an early biographer, this “godly Queen’ “caused her whole household to be summoned, and told them that...the right to the Crown of England had...descended to her by divine and human law after her brother’s death, through God’s high providence.”
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Within days, Mary’s triumph over the supporters of Lady Jane Grey was being celebrated as God-given in ballads, poems, sermons, pamphlets, and historical narratives, both English and Latin. 
A ninvectyve agaynst Treason
 (1553), a triumphalist ballad by one Thomas Watertoune, chronicled the joy of Londoners at the proclamation of Mary as queen and exulted in her divinely assisted victory: “god had shewed on vs his grace in gevyng a rightful queene.”
¹⁹

The analogy with the Virgin Mary was the encomiasts’ stock-in-trade.
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Its conspicuous absence from the Elizabethan pageants marks the fundamental difference between the Marian and Elizabethan imagery. 
A
new ballade of the Marigold
 ([1553]) by William Forrest, who would soon be appointed one of Mary’s chaplains, painted a picture of a saintly princess maligned and oppressed and yet strong in faith and virtue, a resoluteness for which God rewarded her with his love and protection: “In singler Vertue shee hath growne, / And servyng God, as she well ought; / For which he had her in his thought / And shewed her Graces many folde.”
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Leonard Stopes, another Catholic priest-turned-versifier, sounded a similar note in his broadside paean 
An
 Ave Maria 
in Commendation of our most
Vertuous Queene
 ([1553]).
²²
 
A compendious treatise in metre
 (1554) by the minor Catholic poet George Marshall figured Mary’s conquest as “A wonderfull myracle, ever to be remembred / That God wrought for our Quene, he ever be praysed.”
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Miles Huggarde, an artisan and self-styled “servant to the queen,” developed the theme in 
The Assault of the Sacrament
 
of the Altar
(1554), his dream-vision poem.
²⁴
In a sermon delivered in a church in Luton on July 23, 1553 and printed shortly thereafter, the Roman Catholic priest, composer, and publicist John Gwynneth emphasized “the myghtye operation of god” in placing Mary on the throne.
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So too did Robert Wingfield of Brantham in a Latin biographical sketch of Mary, scribal copies of which circulated at Court in the second half of 1554, and Robert Parkyn, curate of Adwickle-Street near Doncaster, in a narrative of the Reformation written in English and contained in his commonplace book.
²⁶

The providential view of Mary’s accession was not confined to Catholic writings. But although in tributes from her co-religionists its function was purely congratulatory, in Protestant literature it was apologetic or didactic. Both the anonymous 
Narratio Historica
 (1553), a Latin tract printed in Antwerp, and 
A Godly Psalm, of Mary Queen, which brought us comfort
all
...(1553), by the church of England divine Richard Beeard, welcomed Mary as the rightful ruler and pledged the loyalty of her Protestant subjects so as to deflect potential recriminations. Yet they also warned that Protestant support was not unqualified.
²⁷

Catholic writings too had recourse to providential rhetoric to teach the queen a thing or two. But in contrast to Protestants who broadcast their lessons in print, Mary’s Catholic tutors confined theirs to manuscript. In letters that, for all the ideological differences between them, were uncannily similar to the admonitory harangues that Knox, Hales, and Foxe would visit on Elizabeth, Cardinal Reginald Pole put Mary in mind of her providential preservation that she must repay by restoring Catholicism. Her delivery, he insisted, was merely a prelude to God’s plan for England of which she had been made the instrument.
²⁸

Pole’s advice and Mary’s zeal seemed to bear fruit. In addressing the newly married queen, her Spanish consort, and the three estates on November 27, 1554, the erstwhile convicted felon and now a papal legate eloquently expounded on the continued workings of Providence in English affairs. “And see howe miraculouslye GOD of hys goodness preserved her hyghenes,” Pole reminded his audience,

contrarye to the expectacyon of manne. That when numbers conspired agaynste her, and policies were devised to disinherit hir, and armed power prepared to destroye hir, yet she being a Virgin, helpless, naked and unarmed, prevailed, & had the victorye ouer tyrauntes, which is not to be ascribed to any pollici of man, but to the almighty greate goodness & providence of God.
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It would be difficult to find a more exact model for Foxe’s and others’ providential narratives of Elizabeth’s delivery from popish thraldom. The experience of Mary’s reign had significantly changed people’s view of female rule and made them more inclined to be exhortative toward her successor.

Elizabeth would have been well aware of the emergent iconography of her sister’s reign. When it was her turn to rule, she emulated Mary’s example, claiming that Providence was on her side. In the thanksgiving prayer in the Tower of London before the start of her coronation progress, the queen daringly compared herself to the biblical prophet Daniel: “And I acknowledge that thou hast dealt as wonderfully and as mercifully with me, as thou didst with thy true and faithful servant Daniel thy prophet, whom thou delivered out of the den from the cruelty of the greedy and raging lions. Even so was I overwhelmed, and only by thee delivered.”
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Publicized by Mulcaster, Foxe, and Grafton, the prayer was eagerly exploited by preachers, poets, and pamphleteers. Like so many encomiastic tropes, however, the analogy with Daniel too had been previously used to glorify Mary. Her awe-inspiring defeat of rebels and heretics, John Elder suggested, had matched Daniel’s miraculous liberation from the lion’s den.
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Both Marian publicists and their Elizabethan imitators gloatingly reflected on God’s suppression of their adversaries and protection of their queen. But whereas Catholics invoked Providence first and foremost to glorify Mary, Protestants deployed it at once to praise and school her younger sister.

VI

To stage the liberation of Truth, as Elizabeth’s fourth coronation tableau did, was to appropriate—and radically redefine—yet another element from the Marian arsenal of images.
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The scene unfolded against a background of two hills figuring two types of commonwealth, one flourishing the other decaying. Unlike the female monarchs in “The seat of worthy governance” and “Deborah with her estates,” the personifications of the two commonwealths were both gendered male. Even so, the tension between barrenness and fertility evoked by the natural imagery of the pageant cannot but have recalled Mary’s conspicuous failure to bear a child and, complimenting Elizabeth on her youth and beauty, intimated that to produce offspring was her queenly duty.
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Against that background, Time’s daughter Truth delivered the English Bible to the queen. Again Il Schifanoya’s report confirms the transparency of the scenic emblem. “The whole implied in their tongue,” he wrote, “that the withered mount was the past state, and the green one the present, and that the time for gathering the fruits of truth was come.”
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Mary’s adoption of Truth as her symbol had been an attempt to wrest the device from the reformers.
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Her personal motto 
Veritas Filia Temporis
appeared on coins and paintings. Catholic publicists capitalized on the association between their queen and truth for all it was worth. “Verity” was one of the characters in the play performed after Mary’s coronation feast in Westminster Hall. Mary was honored as “veritee the daughter of sage old Father Tyme” in Nicholas Udall’s 
Respublica
 at Christmas 1553. The final pageant erected for her and Philip’s entry into London showed “
Veritas
 wyth a boke in her hande, wheron was written, 
Verbum Dei
.” The dedication in a Latin memorial to the occasion by Adrian Junius reproduced Mary’s Latin motto.
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Mary and her publicists had done such a good job propagating the image of the queen as Veritas that by the time of Elizabeth’s arrival the trope needed careful undoing. That is why Elizabeth joined so enthusiastically in the pageant scene unfolding at the Little Conduit in Cheap Street. Her reply on being told that she would encounter the figure of Time showed her keenness to pose as Time’s daughter Truth: “’Time?’ quoth she, ‘and Time hath brought me hither.’”
³⁷
The queen’s highly theatrical acceptance of “the book of truth” finalized her displacement of Mary as the only legitimate daughter of Time (and of Henry VIII).

Yet, as David Norbrook has pointed out, “[t]he harmony between the monarch and militant Protestantism that the pageantry celebrated was more ambiguous and contingent than it appeared.”
³⁸
It is not just that the shape of the future religious settlement was uncertain. The larger issue was the role envisaged for the queen. Like Mary in the writings of her co-religionists, Elizabeth was cast by her champions as God’s instrument and handmaiden. She was the means to an apocalyptic end: the final defeat of Rome and its antichristian ministers. But whereas Mary had needed little encouragement to be getting on with the restoration of Catholicism, there were serious doubts about Elizabeth’s commitment to reversing that process.