The Name of a Queen

William Fleetwood's Itinerarium ad Windsor

C. Beem, D. Moore, C. Beem, D. Moore

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349444762, 9781137272010
• eBook ISBN: 9781137272027
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

Itinerarium ad Windsor concerns a central question of the Elizabethan era: Why should a woman be allowed to rule with the same powers as a king? The man who poses this controversial question within Itinerarium is none other than Queen Elizabeth's powerful favorite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. On hand to provide answers are the statesman and poet Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, and William Fleetwood antiquary, Recorder of London, and dutiful chronicler of their 1575 conversation. This critical edition of Itinerarium reproduces Fleetwood's text with annotations and a host of interpretive and contextualizing essays from leading scholars. Taken together, they constitute the definitive introduction to this remarkable discussion of regnant queenship, providing a valuable tool for understanding contemporary notions of and underlying fears concerning the efficacy and desirability of female rule in Elizabethan England.

PART I

THE DIALOGUE

CHAPTER 1

WILLIAM FLEETWOOD’S ITINERARIUM AD WINDSOR

Edited by Dennis Moore

Date and Transmission

Although the date of composition of Itinerarium ad Windsor is unknown, it was presumably not before spring 1575 when the dialogue is supposed to have taken place. The general topic of how a woman could legally rule England offers no help in dating, since it was a timely issue for most of the author’s adult life, not only because Mary I and Elizabeth I occupied the throne but also because women figured so prominently among rival claimants and potential successors. One can speculate about the relevance of possible exigencies (such as Leicester’s desire to marry the queen, which animates the Kenilworth entertainments of July 1575), but nothing definitively ties the writing of Itinerarium to any specific occasion. A number of Fleetwood’s other writings include prefatory epistles with a dedicatee, date of presentation, and background about composition, but the manuscripts of Itinerarium lack such paratexts.

No contemporary manuscript is known to survive. Three copies appear in early seventeenth-century volumes of miscellaneous state papers, designated as follows:

A Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Tanner 84, fols. 201r–217v

B British Library, MS Harley 168, fols. 1r–8v (incomplete)

C British Library, MS Harley 6234, fols. 10r–25v.

Such bound collections of state papers preserve a kind of scribal publication that flourished in Stuart England. In studying such writings, Peter Beal and H. R. Woudhuysen have drawn attention to a corpus of manuscripts featuring the hands of Ralph Starkey and the anonymous “Feathery Scribe,” men apparently linked in a common enterprise: perhaps a scriptorium, perhaps some other sort of commercial syndicate.¹ Starkey’s multifaceted relationship to Sir Robert Cotton gave him access to “the most important repository of manuscripts” in England, many of which the scribe copied for his own collection.² Part of what made Cotton’s collection so impressive was what C. E. Wright characterizes as an “astonishing” quantity of original state papers—not transcripts—from the reign of Henry VIII through James I.³ Starkey likewise did his best to obtain originals, acquiring so many official documents from the library of Queen Elizabeth’s secretary Sir William Davison that in 1619 the Privy Council approved a raid on Starkey’s house to recover them. Texts from Starkey’s collection were disseminated through his own efforts as a copyist and through his collaboration with others, such as the Feathery Scribe. Examination of the volumes containing Itinerarium suggests that this scribal network may have played a significant role in the survival of Fleetwood’s dialogue.

Bodleian MS Tanner 84, containing the A text of Itinerarium ad Windsor, belongs to a group of four volumes Woudhuysen identifies as having been produced by the Starkey-Feathery circle for a single client, Sir Robert Oxenbridge MP (d. 1638), whose crest is stamped on the front of each book. The signature W. Cant. in all four indicates the ownership of William Sancroft, nonjuring Archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1693).⁴ Itinerarium is eleventh of 14 items by several copyists on miscellaneous topics of historic and antiquarian interest, from a list of the sheriffs of Hampshire to Sir Thomas Smith’s popular “dialogue disputing the conveniency of Queen Elizabeth’s marriage.” Two items, amounting to 90 leaves, are in the hand of the Feathery Scribe.

The B text, in BL MS Harley 168, breaks off in mid-sentence about halfway through the dialogue, the remaining pages having been lost. Unfortunately, this was the only manuscript known to John Bruce, who first published Itinerarium, so Fleetwood’s dialogue was long described as incomplete (for example, in the original Dictionary of National Biography).⁵ B consistently supports A when A differs from the third manuscript, and the Starkey-Feathery connection suggests that the strong resemblance between A and B may be more than a coincidence: the Harley MS is “A Collection of small Tracts, and Papers of State matters, mostly written by the Hand of Mr. Ralph Starkey.”⁶ In fact, of 125 items in the volume (nearly all Elizabethan), all except three are in Starkey’s hand, Itinerarium being one of the exceptions.

The possible association of the C text with the Starkey-Feathery circle is more speculative, yet worth noting. BL MS Harley 6234 is described in the print catalogue as “A thin Book in folio, containing three treatises,” and belonged to the important collector Edward Gwynne of the Middle Temple (d. 1650).⁷ Itinerarium follows treatises by Sir Robert Cecil on the state (and perils) of a secretary’s place and John Selden on the office of lord chancellor, both of which were part of the repertoire of Ralph Starkey and the Feathery Scribe. Two copies of Cecil’s discourse survive in the hand of the Feathery Scribe (both at the University of London), one copy by Starkey (BL MS Harley 354), one more in a volume containing work by Starkey and Feathery, and another in a volume with work by Feathery. Likewise, there are two copies of Selden’s discourse by Feathery (Harvard Law Library and Yale University), and although no copy in Starkey’s hand has been identified, the work was found among his papers according to the list in Huntington Library Ellesmere Papers EL 8175.⁸ Such patterns are suggestive but inconclusive, given the existence of many copies of these works.⁹ It may be significant that the Itinerarium text in MS Harley 6234 seems to derive from a different exemplar.

If Kevin Sharpe’s statement that Cotton had obtained Fleetwood’s papers were true, Starkey’s association with Cotton would account for the circulation of Itinerarium within the Sharkey-Feathery group. However, the sources Sharpe cites do not justify his sweeping claim, their testimony being limited to several Guildhall volumes (including Liber Custumarum and Liber Fleetwood) in Fleetwood’s possession when he died, which then passed to Cotton from Francis Tate.¹⁰ When the library of Fleetwood’s Missenden Abbey estate was sold at auction nearly two centuries later, it still contained many of his books and manuscripts.¹¹ Fleetwood and Cotton were both members of the late Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, as documented by Tate’s journal (where Fleetwood’s name heads the list), and Fleetwood borrowed manuscripts from Cotton, as documented in the latter’s borrowing lists, so it would not be surprising for Itinerarium to have found its way into Cotton’s hands, but that is as far as the evidence goes.

Editorial Procedures

Scribes experienced considerable difficulty with Fleetwood’s syntax and with various proper names and technical terms. Certain errors shared by all three manuscripts point to a common ancestor; B’s strong tendency to support A against C suggests a branching line of transmission. The present edition is based on A, which usually seems preferable to C (the other complete text) when they disagree. The incomplete B usually agrees with A and is never preferable to it. The textual notes record all substantive variants among the three manuscripts, as well as all emendations (nine from C, nine conjectural). When not obvious, the rationale for each conjecture is explained in an endnote. Most readers can afford to bypass the textual notes, which reveal no major differences between the texts of A and C (or B, so far as it goes).

The spelling of A has been retained, save for expansion of contractions and modernization of i/j and u/v. Words have been divided or combined according to modern usage, so that aswell and shalbe become as well and shal be, my selfe and a nother become myselfe and another, and so on. Variations in spelling among the manuscripts have not been recorded, nor have differences in the style of legal citations (whe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: “The Name of a Queene”
• Part I   The Dialogue
• Part II   The Participants
• Part III   Itinerarium ad Windsor as History
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index