Elizabeth I

Always Her Own Free Woman

Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754607977
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351940993
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This interdisciplinary collection by historians, cultural critics and literary scholars examines a variety of the political, social, and cultural forces at work during the English Renaissance and beyond, forces that contributed to creating a wealth of artistic, literary and historical impressions of Elizabeth, her court, and the time period named after her, the Elizabethan age. Articles in the collection discuss Elizabeths' relationships, investigate the advice given her, explore connections between her court and the arts, and consider the role of Elizabeth's court in the political life of the nation. Some of the ways Elizabeth was understood and represented demonstrate society's fears and ambivalence about early modern women in power, while others celebrate her successes as England's first and only unmarried queen regnant. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students in a wide range of disciplines, including literary, cultural, historical and women's studies, as well as those interested in the life and times of Elizabeth I.

PART I
ELIZABETH AND A PROBLEMATIC COURT

CHAPTER ONE
Queen and Country?: Female Monarchs and Feminized Nations in Elizabethan Political Pamphlets

Jacqueline Vanhoutte

Because of the extent to which it aroused Elizabeth I’s anger, John Stubbs’s The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England is Like to be Swallowed (1579) is something of a cause célèbre in Elizabethan studies. The pamphlet presents a series of closely argued objections against a proposed match between the queen and François, Duc d’Alençon.¹ While the aging Elizabeth professed herself enthusiastic about marrying her ‘very dear Frog’, and was supported in this by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the marriage was violently opposed by several other privy councilors, including Sir Francis Walsingham and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.² These recalcitrant courtiers ‘mobilized’ what Susan Doran calls a ‘widespread propaganda campaign’ against the controversial match.³ Of the works contributing to this campaign, only the Gaping Gulf provoked a drastic governmental retaliation: immediately upon its appearance, the pamphlet was recalled, a proclamation against it issued and its author incarcerated.⁴ The queen’s displeasure found a fuller expression still in the punishment visited on the unfortunate Stubbs and his printer, whose right hands she ordered removed.⁵ According to Ilona Bell, Stubbs’ misogyny and paternalism occasioned the vehemence of the royal response, so uncharacteristically in excess of the offense.⁶ No doubt the fact that Stubbs referred to Alençon as a ‘venemous toad’ did little to help his case.⁷

By casting the pamphlet not just as a polemical treatment of a specific topic but also as a broad attack on Elizabeth’s authority, the royal proclamation suggests an additional explanation for the queen’s intemperate reaction. Charging that Stubbs attributes a lack of ‘motherly or princely care’ to Elizabeth herself and a superabundance of ‘unnatural intentions’ to her counselors, the proclamation claims that his ‘popular libels’ grant ‘authority’ to the ‘meanest person of judgement … to argue and determine … of the affairs of public estate’.⁸ These accusations raise a number of interesting questions: how does the queen’s alleged lack of maternal care lead to a redistribution of authority among her subjects? And in what sense are the counselors cooperating with the queen in supporting the French match ‘unnatural’? What sort of ‘authority’ has Stubbs made available to the ‘meanest person’?

What the proclamation appears to single out for reprimand is the Gaping Gulf’s reproduction of the conventional images and assumptions of emergent nationalism. Indeed, the allegedly ‘popular’ nature of Stubbs’ libels results from his tendency to judge behavior according to nationalist criteria that challenge the queen’s dynastic prerogative. His strategic reliance on maternal tropes permit him to label as ‘unnatural’ men who act in accordance with the queen’s desires, and so to imply that the queen’s desires might themselves pose a threat to the nation. In its censure of Stubbs’ presumptions of authority, the royal proclamation draws attention to his preoccupations with what constitutes a ‘natural’ Englishman and what makes for a loving mother. The two are closely related issues, as the Gaping Gulf’s first direct address to the queen demonstrates. Stubbs reminds Elizabeth that ‘a senseless and careless foreigner cannot have the natural and brotherlike bowels of tender love towards his people which is required in a governor, and which is by birth bred and drawn out from the teats of a man’s own mother country’ ([1579] 1968, p. 34). The biological attributes mentioned by Stubbs correlate to specific cultural meanings, invoked for rhetorical purposes: as the spleen is the site of envy, the liver of lechery, so the bowels host the affection between parents and children.⁹ The allusions to the ‘bowels’ of Englishmen, just like the emphasis on England’s ‘teats’, sanction a particular version of the bonds among nationalist subjects and between these subjects and the nation. As Deborah Shuger notes, during the early modern period the term ‘natural affection’ refers to ‘the bond between child and parent that transgresses status distinctions and creates the depoliticized space of bodily and emotional intimacy’.¹⁰ By calling attention to his countrymen’s bowels and to England’s breasts, Stubbs creates a sense of such ‘bodily and emotional intimacy’, and evokes what Benedict Anderson calls the ‘horizontal comradeship’ of the nation.¹¹

Although the comment on the nation’s ‘brotherlike bowels of tender love’ apparently aims only at the foreign Alençon’s exclusion from the position of ‘governor’, it thus achieves a number of other ends. Most obviously, Stubbs establishes a ‘natural and brotherlike’ standard of behavior for Englishmen against which the queen’s pro-French counselors, and the queen herself, may be measured; again and again, he accuses these counselors of lacking in ‘natural sense’ and duty to England (e.g. [1579] 1968, p. 58). The ‘tender love’ that is ‘by birth’ bred into the English subject authorizes these unflattering characterizations, since presumably any son of England, even the ‘meanest’, should protest when ‘the affairs of public estate’ endanger the welfare of the ‘mother country’. Stubbs’ depiction of England is democratizing, or, as the proclamation puts it, ‘popular’, in its implications: at the breast of the mother-nation, all Englishmen are created equal. By urging the claims of this ‘fraternity of equals’,¹² the pamphleteer discriminates between the ‘sweet Englishmen’ such as himself, who ‘reason of the dishonor and servitude which comes to the nation’, and those who consider merely ‘the honor that comes to the prince’ ([1579] 1968, p. 53). In other words, the idea of ‘the mother country’ generates a distinction between nationalist and dynastic allegiance and legitimizes the privileging of the one over the other. Implicitly, Stubbs encourages readers to view Elizabeth I’s own behavior as ‘natural’ only insofar as it coincides with the nationalist sentiments that he expresses.

Although this in itself might have inflamed the queen’s wrath, the impact of Stubbs’ invocation of the motherland can only be measured by considering the history of this rhetorical trope in sixteenth-century English culture. As Victor Turner emphasizes, symbols are contextual as well as textual: they are ‘social and cultural dynamic systems, shedding and gathering meaning over time and altering in form’.¹³ By the time Stubbs wrote his pamphlet, his appeal to mother England is distinctly subversive; however, this symbolic embodiment of the national community first served a mediating function during the Henrician reformation. Pro-government writers like the pamphleteer Richard Morison and the dramatist John Bale used maternal representations of England to argue for a transfer of allegiance from Pope to monarch and from Rome to England.¹⁴ In doing so, Morison and Bale contributed to what Liah Greenfeld has called ‘the birth of the English nation’, which she argues persuasively occurs around this time.¹⁵ But Morison and Bale also promoted a royal agenda: they personified the nation to justify Henry VIII’s appropriation to himself of powers once vested in the Pope. In her earliest incarnation, mother England served the interests of dynastic power.

Henrician writers brought the feminized country under proper masculine and monarchical control through the metaphoric marriage of king to nation. This solution to the potential conflict between dynastic power and emergent nationalism no longer obtained when a female monarch occupied the throne. During the reign of Mary Tudor, accordingly, maternal representations of England began to signal a divergence of national and monarchical interests. One of the most striking examples of this trend is an anonymous pamphlet printed in 1555 and entitled ‘Certayne Questions Demaunded and Asked by the Noble Realme of Englande, of her true and naturall chyldren and Subiectes of the Same’. The ‘questions’ demanded by ‘Englande’ are rhetorical; all attack Mary specifically and dynastic power generally in the name of the nation. Indeed, the pamphlet suggests that ‘ther be two kynd of tresones, one to the kynges persone, [and] another to the body of the realme’. Having redefined treason to compass crimes against the nation, the pamphlet implicitly charges Mary with that crime on the grounds that she married a ‘straunger’ and handed over English goods, lands, and people to the Spaniards. It concludes by inciting the English to rebellion, asking them to consider ‘whether the Realme of England belong to the Quene, or to her subiectes’. Thus, mother ‘Englande’ takes an anti-monarchical position, insists on a radical re-definition of national sovereignty and authorizes a distribution of authority away from the queen to the meanest of her ‘subiectes’.¹⁶ It is within this radical context that the subversiveness of Stubbs’ ‘popular libels’ becomes more apparent.

Mary may have encouraged such innovative use of nationalist rhetoric by espousing the religion against which Henrician writers had first deployed the persona of ‘mother England’ and by insisting on the view that the country was her own personal patrimony.¹⁷ In any case, during her reign, ‘mother England’ continued to function as a Protestant alternative to what John Bale had called the ‘mother of whordom’, the Roman Catholic church,¹⁸ and the queen’s Catholicism allowed pamphleteers to extend their critique to dynastic authority. Feminine embodiments of the nation became entangled in issues of female governance and monarchical succession, a process facilitated by Mary’s unpopular marriage. Among the questions ‘demaunded’ by Englande of her ‘naturall chyldren’ in the 1555 pamphlet is, for example, ‘whether the Quene may marrye’ someone who poses a ‘daunger to the realme’ and ‘whether that man that maryeth the Quene’ would not in fact assume authority over the country – a question that leads the anonymous writer to conclude that, to avoid the charge of treason, the queen should have married ‘within the realme’.¹⁹ The pamphlet thus introduces the idea that, to ensure the health of the nation, a queen ought to be properly mastered by and married to an Englishman.

When Elizabeth I came to the throne, the ‘mother England’ trope had already been developed to address and criticize the authority of female monarchs. The queen’s status as a marriageable virgin enhanced the trope’s power because discussion of the royal marriage became one of way of talking about who should have authority over the nation. Predictably enough, throughout her reign, the possibility of a foreign marriage gave rise to nationalist diatribes ranging from Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s controlled and manipulative Gorboduc (1561) to Stubbs’ uncontrolled and vituperative Gaping Gulf. Although Elizabeth’s sex ensured that she shared Mary’s vulnerability to certain types of nationalist critique, the new queen was Protestant. Thus, her relation to the central symbol of sixteenth-century nationalist discourse was perforce ambiguous: ‘mother England’ might serve equally to buttress and to undermine the queen’s authority. This ambivalence made the nationalist images a potent tool in the hands of Elizabeth’s male subjects. Where the 1555 pamphlet placed England and Mary in opposition to one another, Elizabethan writers frequently identified queen and country. Such identifications could strengthen dynastic authority through the infusion of nationalist sentiment, even while imposing male control (at least rhetorically) on the queen by conflating her with a vulnerable and threatened nation in need of male assistance and management. The competitive aspect of the relationship between monarch and nation, meanwhile, was projected on a series of monstrous female rulers like Mary or Catherine de Médici, who serve as reminders of what might happen were Elizabeth to refuse the identification with ‘mother England’.

John Aylmer’s An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Elizabeth and a Problematic Court
• Part II: Elizabeth Moves Through her Kingdom
• Part III: Looking at Elizabeth Through Another Lens
• Part IV: Elizabeth Then and Now
• Afterword by Janel Mueller
• Bibliography
• Index