Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (12 page)

What of Elizabeth herself? There is a telling contrast between her conduct on the day as related by Mulcaster and her encounter with her first Parliament. Elizabeth’s responses to the various orations and gifts seemingly marked her unquestioning acceptance of the part assigned to her. The queen gave no hint that she had seen through the rhetorical devices by means of which the didactic message was channeled or that she had reservations about the quasi-covenantal thrust of anything that was said or shown to her. But two weeks later her instructions to the Lord Keeper Bacon made plain her awareness that the principle of 
laudando praecipere
had just been deployed to prime her. “[T]he Queene’s Majestie,” said Bacon relaying his mistress’s reply to the Speaker’s petition, “giveth you most hartie thankes as for a good exhortacion made to her Highnes to become such a one as yee have commended her for.”
³⁹
This statement was made in the more “private” or confidential setting of Parliament; the former had been destined for immediate public consumption via spectacle and print. The image of the pliant queen at one with her people in a dedication to a Protestant future was convenient for both Elizabeth and those who had framed the entry. The savvy monarch signaling to the MPs that she saw through their rhetorical sleight of hand inaugurated a species of relations between Elizabeth and her parliaments that were quite different from the good Queen Bess of the popular, Protestant touch.

VII

Located at the Conduit in Fleet Street, the fifth and last pageant presented a “worthy precedent” to the “worthy Queen”: “
Deborah the judge
and restorer of the House of Israel. Judges 4
.”
⁴⁰
Sporting an open crown, scepter, and Parliament robes and surrounded by representatives of the nobility, the clergy, and the commonalty, this was a thoroughly Anglicized Deborah. If the biblical provenance of the tableau served to boost the status of queenship, the modern dress and the topical emphasis on the need for parliamentary advice hinted at concerns about the self-sufficiency of female rule. Some checks on female monarchs were necessary, the pageant implied, to avoid the chaos of Mary’s reign. Elizabeth was exhorted not to trust her own will and wisdom but to be prepared to accept guidance from the Parliament that was less than a fortnight away.

How original were the pageant-makers, and early Elizabethan publicists in general, in their use of this and other biblical tropes? The final pageant highlights the tangled relationship between Elizabethan and Marian iconographies and the rival conceptions of queenship the two were designed to project. David Norbrook, John King, Judith Richards, and Dale Hoak have discerned in the comparison of Elizabeth to Deborah a dual purpose of justification and instruction. Designed to answer Knox’s ill-timed assault on women sovereigns in 
The First Blast of the Trumpet
against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
 (1558), the biblical tableau was a forerunner of the more elaborate defenses by John Aylmer, Lawrence Humphrey, John Foxe, and others. At the same time, it sought to impress upon Elizabeth the militant Protestant program of the returning exiles.
⁴¹
The double-edged rhetoric that characterizes the transmission later in the reign of this and other scriptural parallels has been analyzed by, inter alia, Alexandra Walsham and Anne McLaren.
⁴²
As with Marian origins of Elizabethan providentialism, however, the requisition for Elizabeth of the biblical models formerly applied to Mary has been largely overlooked.
⁴³
The figuring of the new queen as Deborah, Judith, Esther, David, Daniel, and so on was another seizure by Protestants of a Marian device. The point is not that Protestants ransacked the Bible for new comparisons (though they did that too), but that they strove to repossess and variously transform, refute, or cancel out the ones that Catholic apologists had deployed to exalt, defend, and sometimes instruct Mary.

Three sets of images had been conjured up at the start of Mary’s reign. The first two pertained to her attainment of power, the third to its exercise. The paradox of the queen’s miraculous survival and bloodless victory was expressed by fusing martial and Mariological tropes. A warlike and feisty heroine akin to the biblical Judith and the classical Tomyris, Mary was at once mild and helpless like her namesake the Virgin Mother of God. To bolster Mary’s status as the country’s first queen regnant, precedents of good governance were drawn from classical mythology and the Bible. She was the English Minerva and Nemesis, Deborah, David, Solomon, and Joshua. In the context of the Spanish marriage and Mary’s supposed pregnancy, those associations were supplemented by Old Testament examples of fertility and late motherhood—Sara, Anne, and Elizabeth.

The Florentine coronation pageant compared Mary to Judith, Tomyris, and Pallas Athene. Liberators of their people and slayers of mighty men, Holofernes and Cyrus respectively, the Hebrew Judith and the Scythian Tomyris were apposite models for Mary, not least, as Sydney Anglo has noted, because “both ancient ladies had decapitated the enemy—and Northumberland had gone to the block only a month before the royal entry.”
⁴⁴
But both parallels savored of blood and vindictiveness. That was awkward, for it was becoming expedient to stress Mary’s pacifism and forgiving nature. No wonder references to Tomyris were omitted from subsequent apologias, while those to Judith, to which the Wyatt rebellion lent a new lease of life, came to be carefully circumscribed. The ostensibly uncontroversial invocation of the virgin goddess of wisdom, the Greek Athene or the Latin Minerva, was likewise bent to partisan uses.

The restoration of papal supremacy in November 1554 and ongoing campaign for a Catholic reformation reinforced the efficacy of depicting Mary as Truth, Lady Faith, Helena, Handmaid of God, and His chosen instrument of England’s delivery from schism and heresy. Her status as a godly monarch was promoted by references to Old Testament rulers Joshua, Esdras, and Judas Machabeus, and her learning and wisdom extolled by analogy with Roman noblewomen (Cornelia and Hortensia), early Christians (Paula and Blesilla), and King Solomon.
⁴⁵

Scholarly accounts of Elizabethan iconography and political rhetoric have focused on the writings of militant Protestants. Continuities with Edwardian depictions of godly kingship too have been recognized. Given that in the late 1550s the examples of Deborah the judge, Huldah the prophetess, and other Old Testament figures were bandied about by reformers at home and abroad, it is natural that modern scholars have looked to them as both source and context of Elizabeth’s coronation pageantry. However, this near-exclusive concentration on Protestant polemic has overshadowed another set of origins of equal, perhaps greater significance: Marian apologetics of the preceding five years.

VIII

The Marian legacy was ambiguous. Elizabeth was at once eulogized and instructed on how to govern so as to avoid the errors of her predecessor. Yet the obsessive if submerged concentration on Mary attests to abiding worries not only about the weakness of female monarchy but also, perhaps especially, about its strength. From one angle, the fact that Marian panegyric served as an unacknowledged model for encomia on Elizabeth should not surprise us given the profusion of positive images of the Catholic queen. It is those images, not the clandestine diatribes by Mary’s evangelical critics, that were widely disseminated from the pulpit and in print. Unlike modern scholars, moreover, Protestant polemicists were hardly dismissive of Marian propaganda. John Bale, John Knox, John Aylmer, John Foxe, John Plough, Robert Crowley, Lawrence Humphrey, William Heth, and many others took encomia on Mary and apologies for the Catholic religion seriously enough to rebut them in print. As soon as Elizabeth came to the throne, the Protestants set out to wrest the most potent images and tropes from the Catholics and apply them to their queen.

Responses to Marian propaganda took several forms. There were attempts to suppress favorable depictions of Mary and censor writings documenting popular enthusiasm on Mary’s accession and the restoration of Catholicism. Then there were point-blank refutations of Marian providentialism and iconography, typically accompanied by efforts to replace adulatory images of Mary with derogatory ones. By far the most common and effective way of dealing with the Marian legacy, however, was to commandeer it, as did the architects of Elizabeth’s coronation entry. The takeover of images formerly applied to Mary such as those of Deborah or Truth is one example; the troping of Elizabeth’s preservation and accession as miraculous, not least by the queen herself, is another.

Marian publicists had essentially invented the iconography for the first queen regnant as they went along. Yes, they had looked back both to earlier depictions of queen consorts and to erstwhile kingly models, including the royal typology popularized by Edwardian reformers. But unlike the Edwardians before them and the Elizabethans after them, their object, at least in print, had been almost always unadulterated praise and glorification, rather than instruction or criticism disguised as compliment. The absence of didacticism from the bulk of Marian apologetics marks the chasm between the Catholic idea of godly female monarchy and the emergent conception of Providential queenship at Elizabeth’s accession. The latter was deeply conflicted. Early Elizabethan Protestants longed for a strong sovereign dedicated to eradicating Roman Catholicism: that was the imperial and militant Elizabeth, prospective supreme governor of the Church, who, combining male and female monarchical attributes, would be the agent of a thoroughgoing reformation and ultimate victor over the popish antichrist. Such a female ruler would be a fitting counterpart to Mary who, despite having renounced royal supremacy and bowed down to the pope, retained an awesome degree of control and power. But then Elizabeth was still an unknown prospect, and her confessional ambidexterity during Mary’s reign certainly did not inspire confidence that she was, in fact, ready for or fully committed to that task. More worrying still was the memory of Mary’s willfulness and tenacity manifest in her unremitting pursuit of Catholic restoration and succession. It is in a bid to guard against a repetition of history, with another headstrong female Tudor at the helm, that the evangelicals felt compelled to dilute the ideal of Protestant imperial queenship by fusing it with the image of the weak, untested Elizabeth in dire need of support and advice, and by framing it in quasi-contractual terms.

Poised on the cusp of the new reign before any major decision had yet been taken, Elizabeth’s coronation entry was a complex visual and verbal text very much of its moment. In redeploying Marian devices, images, and tropes the entry mapped out a new ideological and artistic program—one that, for all its ostensible hopefulness and optimism, was deeply riven with tensions and contradictions.

Notes

*
The work on this essay was made possible by the generosity of several institutions: the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, the Huntington Library, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Jesus College and the English Faculty at Oxford. I am grateful to Tom Freeman, Helen Hackett, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas F. Mayer, and Rob Hume for valuable comments on earlier drafts, and to the staff of the Huntington Library for their unfailing efficiency and courtesy.

1. Janet Arnold, 
   Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d
    (Leeds: Maney, 1988), 52, 55.
   
2. In the event, the official opening of Parliament was delayed until 25 January. The critical literature dealing with the entry is too voluminous to detail here. What follows is a selective list of major contributions: Sydney Anglo, 
   Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy
    (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, repr. 1997), 344–59; David M. Bergeron, 
   English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642
    (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 12–23, and “Elizabeth’s Coronation Entry (1559): New Manuscript Evidence,” 
   ELR
    8 (1978): 3–9; Richard L. DeMolen, “Richard Mulcaster and Elizabethan Pageantry,” 
   SEL
    14 (1974): 209–21; Helen Hackett, 
   Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary
    (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995; repr. 1996), 41–9; Paulina Kewes, 
   Drama, History, and Politics in Elizabethan England
    (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See also the Introduction to the recent critical edition, 
   The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage and Related Documents
   , ed. G. Warkentin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), to which I shall be referring throughout.
   
3. Judith Richards, “Love and a Female Monarch: The Case of Elizabeth Tudor,” 
   Journal of British Studies
   , 38 (1999): 145ff.
   
4. Sir Robert Wingfield of Brantham, “The 
   Vita Mariae Angliae
    
   Reginae
    of Robert Wingfield of Brantham,” ed. Diarmaid MacCulloch, 
   Camden Miscellany
   , 28 (Camden Society, 4th series, 29, 1984): 269; John Elder, 
   The Copie of a letter sent in to Scotlande
    (London, [1555]), Civv. For discussion, see Paulina Kewes, “Two Queens, One Inventory: The Lives of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor,” in 
   Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England
   , ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 187–207.
   
5. Sydney Anglo, 
   Images of Tudor Kingship
    (London: Seaby, 1992), 89. Both the first and second editions of Hall’s 
   Union
    had been published by Richard Grafton, the likely deviser of this pageant.
   
6. “
   Vita Mariae
   ,” 251.
   
7. Queen’s Majesty’s Passage
   , 80. On Mary and Elizabeth’s dynastic claims, see Paulina Kewes, “The Exclusion Crisis of 1553 and the Elizabethan Succession,” in 
   Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives
   , ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 45–57.
   
8. For Elizabeth’s reply, see 
   Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I
   , ed. T. E. Hartley, 3 vols. (London: Leicester University Press, 1981–95), I: 44–5.
   
9. Anglo, 
   Spectacle
   , 334–6; King, 
   Tudor Royal Iconography
   , 215–16.
   
10. Richards, “Love and a Female Monarch,” 149–50.
    
11. On the symbolism of the closed crown, see Dale Hoak, “The Iconography of the Crown Imperial,” in 
    Tudor Political Culture
    , ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 54–103.
    
12. Queen’s Majesty’s Passage
    , 82.
    
13. CSPVen
    , VII: 13. Naturally, many spectators may well have missed the topical allusions altogether or, depending on their religion, nationality, education, social standing, gender and so on, understood one and the same pageant or oration in strikingly different ways.
    
14. The Garden of Eloquence...Corrected and augmented
     (London, 1593), Niiiiv.
    
15. Kewes, “Two Queens, One Inventory,” 197–200.
    
16. Alexandra Walsham, 
    Providence in Early Modern England
     (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 225.
    
17. The Works of John Knox
    , ed. David Laing, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Thomas George Stevenson, 1864), II: 29–31.
    
18. Wingfield, “
    Vita Mariae
    ,” 251–2.
    
19. See 
    Old English Ballads 1553–1625, Chiefly from Manuscripts
    , ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 7.
    
20. Hackett, 
    Virgin Mother
    , 34–7; King, 
    Tudor Royal Iconography
    , 197–9.
    
21. Old English Ballads
    , 10–11.
    
22. Old English Ballads
    , 16.
    
23. George Marshall, 
    A compendious treatise in metre declaring the firste originall of Sacrifice
     (London, 1554), Ciiiv–Civr.
    
24. Miles Huggarde, 
    The Assault of the Sacrame[n]t of the Altar
     (London, 1554), Eiiir.
    
25. John Gwynneth, 
    A brief declaration of the Notable Victory given of God to oure
    soveraygne Ladye Quene
     (London, 1553), Biv.
    
26. “
    Vita Mariae
    ,” 268, 287; “Robert Parkyn’s Narrative of the Reformation,” ed. A. G. Dickens, 
    EHR
    , 62 (1947): 78, 81.
    
27. Narratio historica vicissitvdinis rervm
     ([Wittenberg,] 1553) translated into English as 
    Historical narration of certain events that took place in the kingdom of Great Britain in the month of July, in the year of our Lord 1553
    , trans. J. B. Inglis and ed. J. Ph. Berjeau (London, 1865); 
    A Godly Psalm, of Mary Queen, which brought us comfort all, Through God, whom we of duty praise, that gives her foes a fall
     (London, 1553), A4r. See Marcia Lee Metzger, “Controversy and ‘Correctness’: English Chronicles and Chroniclers, 1553–1568,” 
    SCJ
    , 27 (1996): 440.
    
28. Pole’s letters to Mary of August 13, 1553, August 27, October 2, and November 18, 1553, in 
    The Correspondence of Reginald Pole
    , ed. Thomas F. Mayer, 3 vols. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002–), II: 162–3, 172, 207–8 and 231–2 respectively.
    
29. Elder, 
    Copie of a letter
    , E6r–v.
    
30. Queen’s Majesty’s Passage
    , 98.
    
31. Elder, 
    Copie of a letter
    , F3r–v. See also Pole’s letter to Mary of February 15, 1554 which confirms that the analogy enjoyed a wide currency (
    The Correspondence of Reginald Pole
    , II: 266).
    
32. Hackett, 
    Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen
    , 47–8.
    
33. Susan Frye, 
    Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation
     (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 43.
    
34. CSPVen
    , VII: 15.
    
35. Fritz Saxl, “Veritas Filia Temporis,” in 
    Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer
    , ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 197–222; D. J. Gordon, “‘Veritas filia temporis’: Hadrianus Junius and Geoffrey Whitney,” 
    Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
    , 3 (1939–40): 228–40; King, 
    Tudor Royal Iconography
    , 189ff.
    
36. C. C. Stopes, 
    William Hunnis and the Revels of the Chapel Royal: A Study of his Period and the Influences which Affected Shakespeare
     (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1910), 38; 
    Respublica: An Interlude for Christmas 1553
    , ed. W. W. Greg (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), Prologue, l. 33; Elder, 
    Copie of a letter
    , Ciiiv; Junius, 
    Philippeis, sive in nuptias illustrissim. Principum Philippi & Mariae...Carmen Heroicum
     (London, 1554), Aiv.
    
37. Queen’s Majesty’s Passage
    , 85.
    
38. David Norbrook, “Panegyric of the Monarch and its Social Context under Elizabeth I and James I” (DPhil, University of Oxford, 1978), 28.
    
39. “Lord Keeper’s speech in reply to the Speaker’s petitions, 25 January 1559,” in 
    Proceedings
    , ed. Hartley, I: 42.
    
40. Queen’s Majesty’s Passage
    , 92, 91.
    
41. Norbrook, “Panegyric of the Monarch,” 21–3; King, 
    Tudor Royal Iconography
    , 227–8; Richards, “‘To promote a woman to beare rule’: Talking of Queens in Mid-Tudor England,” 
    SCJ
    , 28 (1997): 101–21; Hoak, “A Tudor Deborah? The Coronation of Elizabeth I, Parliament, and the Problem of Female Rule,” in 
    John Foxe and his World
    , ed. Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 73–88. See also Anne McLaren, 
    Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585
     (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–64.
    
42. Alexandra Walsham, “‘A Very Deborah?’ The Myth of Elizabeth as a Providential Monarch,” in 
    The Myth of Elizabeth
    , ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 143–68; McLaren, 
    Political Culture
    , 237–8.
    
43. Only Jennifer Loach and John King have noted that comparisons of Mary to Judith and Deborah were later recycled for Elizabeth. See Jennifer Loach, “The Marian Establishment and the Printing Press,” 
    EHR
    , 101 (1986): 140; King, 
    Tudor Royal Iconography
    , 183ff.
    
44. Commendone, “Events of the Kingdom of England,” in 
    The Accession, Coronation and Marriage of Mary Tudor as Related in Four Manuscripts of the Escorial
    , trans. C. V. Malfatti (Barcelona: Malfatti, 1956), 32; Anglo,
    Spectacle
    , 321. See also Judith M. Richards, “Mary Tudor as ‘sole queen’?: Gendering Tudor Monarchy,” 
    HJ
    , 40 (1997): 899–900.
    
45. John Standish, 
    A discourse wherein is debated whether it be expedient that the scripture should be in English
     (London, 1554), B1r–B2r; John Christopherson,
    An exhortation to all menne to take hede and beware of rebellion
     (London, 1554), Ff1r–Ff2r; John Angel, 
    The agrement of the holye Fathers and Doctores of the churche
     (London, [1555]?), A3r–v, A5v; James Cancellar, 
    The Pathe of Obedience
    (London, [1556]?), C1v–C2v. See also Susan Doran’s essay, “Elizabeth I: An Old Testament King,” in this volume.