Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633
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Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633

Donna B. Hamilton

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Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633

Donna B. Hamilton

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In this new study, Donna B. Hamilton offers a major revisionist reading of the works of Anthony Munday, one of the most prolific authors of his time, who wrote and translated in many genres, including polemical religious and political tracts, poetry, chivalric romances, history of Britain, history of London, drama, and city entertainments. Long dismissed as a hack who wrote only for money, Munday is here restored to his rightful position as an historical figure at the centre of many important political and cultural events in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633, Hamilton reinterprets Munday as a writer who began his career writing on behalf of the Catholic cause and subsequently negotiated for several decades the difficult terrain of an ever-changing Catholic-Protestant cultural, religious, and political landscape. She argues that throughout his life and writing career Munday retained his Catholic sensibility and occasionally wrote dangerously on behalf of Catholics. Thus he serves as an excellent case study through which present-day scholars can come to a fuller understanding of how a person living in this turbulent time in English history - eschewing open resistance, exile or martyrdom - managed a long and prolific writing career at the centre of court, theatre, and city activities but in ways that reveal his commitment to Catholic political and religious ideology. Individual chapters in this book cover Munday's early writing, 1577-80; his writing about the trial and execution of Jesuit Edmund Campion; his writing for the stage, 1590-1602; his politically inflected translations of chivalric romance; and his writings for and about the city of London, 1604-33. Hamilton revisits and revalues the narratives told by earlier scholars about hack writers, the anti-theatrical tracts, the role of the Earl of Oxford as patron, the political-religious interests of Munday's plays, the implications of Mu

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351957885

Chapter 1
Munday’s First Works, 1577–80: Facts, Contexts and Speculation

‘Many a good Captayne, may goe in a playne coate, and many an honest man, may walke simply arrayde.’
Zelauto (1580), H1r
Munday’s earliest writing, printed during 1577–79, includes an assortment of genres indicative of first opportunities and attempts at entering the world of print: a commendatory verse in A gorgious gallery of gallant inventions; a ballad and translation of a romance that are no longer extant; The paine of pleasure, a collection of moralizing verse; The admirable deliverance of 266 Christians…from the Turkes, a story of triumphant Christians; The mirrour of mutabilitie, a collection of versified Old Testament narratives; and a prefatory verse for Newes from the North. Then, beginning in 1580, he emerged as a writer of news reports and pamphlets on subjects as seemingly wide-ranging as the London earthquake, the morality of the theatre and other arts, the massacre at Smerwick and, after 1581, the execution of priests, including Edmund Campion. Seemingly disparate, most of Munday’s subject matter, both prior to and after 1580, was closely connected to the religious politics of the period and constituent of the public sphere to which he would continue to contribute and within which he would make his living. A review of the relevant religious-political contexts of the late 1570s helps locate the network of relationships and events within which this first work appeared and against which it gains some coherence. As important as tracking unfolding events, an awareness of the patronage networks during this period also clarifies Munday’s place within a system in which writers aligned with each other in support of patrons and responded to writers in opposing factions. Studying Munday from this point of view helps locate his work in relationship to writers who have dominated the literary historical narratives of early modern English literature, especially Protestant writers such as Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, who were also launching their careers at this time. Like these writers, Munday became similarly engaged at an early age with contemporary political issues, albeit on the side opposite theirs. However, two watershed events altered the course on which Munday’s career seems to have been set: the Earl of Oxford’s defection from Catholicism in December-January 1580–81 and the execution of Edmund Campion in 1581. In addition to broadening our understanding of certain aspects of the developing literary system, studying Munday’s earliest writing serves us well in our efforts to come to terms with the changes in Munday’s mode of operating after 1580. Across the years, Munday refined the rhetorical apparatus that represented his loyalty, while inventing various systems for continuing to introduce the opposing ideology.

Patronage Networks in a Changing Political-Religious Context, 1577–79

Born in 1560, Munday had grown up in the shadow of the events that produced by the late 1570s, a rapidly changing situation for Catholics in England. The revolt of the northern earls in 1569 had been followed swiftly in 1570 by the papal bull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth. Munday’s master John Allde had, on 15 October 1568, been imprisoned in the Poultry Compter for having printed ‘a booke towchnge the Duke of Alva’,1 a work associated with Thomas, fourth Duke of Norfolk, whose interest in marrying Mary Queen of Scots, pursued with the most rigour in the period coinciding with and following the Northern Rebellion, led to his execution in 1572. The sense of a rising Catholic threat was exacerbated in the mid-1570s with the arrival in England of English seminary priests from the continent, ‘4 in 1574, 7 in 1575, 18 in 1576, 15 in 1577, 20 in 1578, 20 in 1579, 29 in 1580’.2 This influx encouraged recusancy, especially in the north; and increasingly punitive measures against Catholics followed. In 1575 an ecclesiastical commission was created to inquire into offences against the Acts of Uniformity and Supremacy.3 A conference was held in October 1577 to decide what to do, with the result that, by the end of November, certificates were issued to all bishops instructing them to identify the recusants in their parishes and submit ‘an estimate of the value of the lands and goods of each person’, with the provision that ‘recusants should be dealt with both by imprisonment and “by way of mulct” according to their ability to pay’.4 A month later the privy council directed the same action for the Inns of Court.5 In November 1577 Cuthbert Mayne became the first priest to be executed; other executions followed in February. During the summer of 1578 the queen’s progress to Norfolk and Suffolk provided an opportunity for further moves against recusants. These actions coincided with others across a wide area that included ‘the dioceses of Exeter, Winchester, Chichester, Norwich, Worcester, Bangor, St Asaph and York’.6
The Catholic written response to this crackdown was swift, among the most striking early books being exiled Catholic theologian Gregory Martin’s Treatise of schisme (1578), which encouraged Catholics to practise recusancy. William Carter, who printed that book, also printed in 1579 a translation of Gaspar Loarte’s The exercise of a Christian life; officials seized Carter’s press in December 1579 and executed him in 1584 for a passage in the book that urged ‘Catholic gentlewomen to emulate Judith, who refused even to eat with Holofernes’, a passage taken as ‘incitement to murder Queen Elizabeth’.7
Intersecting with these events, the negotiations for the marriage of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou proceeded throughout much of 1578–81 although, because of these negotiations, the persecution of Catholics was temporarily halted in 1579. Anjou arrived in August 1579; there followed a series of on-again, off-again negotiations, a return to France and another arrival in England. While many Protestants feared that a marriage to a Catholic threatened the terms of the Elizabethan ‘settlement’, which had reaffirmed Henry VIIFs break with Rome and restored the monarch’s supremacy over church and state, Catholics anticipating the marriage with Anjou considered that now there would at least be toleration. During this same period, the Jesuits abroad, especially William Allen and Robert Parsons, hoping to capitalize on English interest in the Anjou marriage, were urging the leaders of the Society of Jesus to launch a missionary effort to England, with the combined goals of ministering to English Catholics and laying the groundwork for eventually returning England to Catholicism. The Enterprise of England was finally approved in 1580. In June, travelling separately, Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion entered England. Not until after Campion’s execution in December was it finally clear that the Anjou marriage would definitely not go ahead.
Political alignments on the matter of the Anjou match illuminate aspects of these events related to Munday’s intersection with them. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, led the Protestant opposition to the match.8 William Cecil led the Protestant support for the match, with Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, as its chief patron,9 a person close to members of the Catholic party and second cousin to Henry Howard.10 According to Thomas McCoog’s listing of the pro-marriage group, the Catholic and crypto-Catholic court faction in favour of the match included:
Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel; Henry, Lord Howard, respectively son and brother of the executed Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk; Sir Edward Stafford (whose mother, Lady Dorothy was friend and mistress of robes to Queen Elizabeth) and his wife, Lady Dowglas Howard, daughter of William, Lord Howard of Effingham; Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and son-in-law of William Cecil, Lord Burghley; Charles Arundell, whose mother was sister of Henry VIIFs fifth wife, Catherine Howard, and related to the Howards, Oxford, and Sussex; Francis Southwell, faithful member of the Howard retinue; John Manners, Earl of Rutland; Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland … Thomas, Lord Paget; Henry, Lord Compton; Frederick, Lord Windsor; Sir Walter Raleigh, William Cornwallis, William Tresham, and others. Religious affiliation varied, but most were suspected of favoring Catholicism.11
Sometime between November 1576 and July 1577, Oxford, Charles Arundel, Henry, Lord Howard and Southwell had been reconciled to the Roman Church. Three and a half years later, with officials searching for Campion, ‘Leicester weakened the supporters of the marriage by winning over the Earl of Oxford during the Christmas season of 1580–81’, the trigger being Oxford’s seduction of Anne Vavasour, niece of Henry Howard. Having fallen out with the Howards and reversing himself in religion, Oxford then also revealed the Catholic commitment of Howard, Southwell and Charles Arundell, who were put under supervision in the homes of Sir Christopher Hatton, member of the privy council and vice chamberlain, and Sir Francis Walsingham, member of the privy council and principal secretary of state.12
During 1577–80 these circumstances affected the writers affiliated with these political figures. Writers and translators who received patronage from, or were otherwise allied with, Leicester included Arthur Golding, John Field, Gabriel Harvey, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Abraham Fleming. Oxford, too, had his circle of writers – Thomas Churchyard, Anthony Munday and John Lyly.13 Writers linked to Henry Howard, Charles Arundell and the Earl of Sussex belonged primarily within this latter network of relationships. Although the traditional literary historical narratives written about this period tend to construct the development of English letters as wholly swept up in an uncontested Protestant agenda, in many instances the writing was motivated by ongoing Catholic-Protestant dialogue and debate.14 Nevertheless, the security of writing within a patronage system lasts only as long as the patron is secure and effective. Thus, when Leicester undercut Oxford’s power at the end of 1580 and beginning of 1581, s...

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