Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (10 page)

CHAPTER 3

GODLY QUEENS: THE ROYAL ICONOGRAPHIES OF MARY AND ELIZABETH

Paulina Kewes

I

Mary and Elizabeth Tudor are routinely cast in opposition to one another. Unlike Elizabeth, the supreme icon of Protestantism and Englishness, the Catholic Mary is judged to have failed to capture the hearts and minds of her subjects or to win for herself a reputation as a powerful godly queen. She was hopeless, we are told, at self-promotion and her government backward in exploiting the resources of spectacle and print. But is that how things looked at Elizabeth’s accession?

Unfavorable comparisons between Mary and her sister abound in the ever-proliferating studies of Elizabethan image-making, politics, and culture. Yet we still know very little about how Mary’s life and reign were viewed by contemporaries other than her evangelical enemies. As a result, the immense debt of early Elizabethan pageantry, panegyric, historiography, and martyrology to the writings of Marian apologists has gone unrecognized. Scholars relish listing opprobrious terms heaped on Mary by her Protestant critics— Jezebel, Athaliah, Domitian, Nero, and so on—even as they ignore the bulk of propaganda and literature produced in her reign. Yet in vilifying the Catholic queen and extolling her Protestant successor, early Elizabethan publicists were responding to the tremendous power of the Marian example.

Mary Tudor, England’s first queen regnant, had triumphantly ascended the throne having defeated attempts to exclude her and crushed Northumberland’s coup; she had successfully suppressed the Wyatt rebellion and married a foreign Catholic prince of her choice; she had brought England back to the papal fold; and taken it to war. Her sister had to be schooled in how to undo the damage. Mixing praise and instruction, militant Protestants, many of them veterans of Edwardian reforms, outlined an ambitious program for the new reign. Above all, they defined the ideal of godly queenship that Elizabeth must emulate. The language and iconography deployed to convey the reformed agenda are commonly assumed to have been framed in direct opposition to the Marian precedent. In fact, both were extensively indebted to the encomia once lavished on Mary.

The earliest and most public act of appropriation occurred during Elizabeth’s coronation entry into London on January 14, 1559. The clothes Elizabeth wore on the day were second-hand: inherited from Mary who had sported them during her coronation progress five years earlier, the mantle and kirtle of “Clothe of golde and silver tissue” were refurbished to fit the new monarch.
¹
Elizabeth’s coronation pageantry too was secondhand: the inaugural tableaux recycled a host of images and tropes previously used to exalt her Catholic sister. Hailed as a divinely ordained savior of her country, Mary had been saluted on her accession with an outpouring of enthusiastic tributes—pageants, poems, ballads, sermons, and pamphlets—that figured her as Deborah, Judith, Esther, David, Daniel, and Time’s daughter Truth and celebrated her survival and elevation as nothing short of miraculous. Now much of the same imagery and providential rhetoric was being commandeered for Elizabeth. What does this tell us about contemporary hopes for and anxieties about Protestant queenship?

II

Mary died on November 17, 1558. Elizabeth’s succession went smoothly; the burnings ceased; and England withdrew from the continental war. Yet even if the danger of national disunity had seemingly diminished, fundamental questions and uncertainties remained. What would be the shape of the new religious settlement? Would Elizabeth marry and, if so, would she choose an Englishman or a foreigner? A Protestant or a Catholic? How would she interact with her parliaments? What would be the tenets of her foreign policy? Like the published and unpublished addresses with which she was inundated during the preceding two months, the coronation pageantry and the speeches that accompanied it were designed to give the new queen advice on how to deal with most of these issues. Throughout the entertainment, the City’s—and by implication the nation’s—love and loyalty were being pledged even as their expectations of the new sovereign were being spelled out.

Along the customary processional route from the Tower to Westminster, the queen saw five pageants accompanied by explanatory speeches: “The uniting of the two houses of Lancaster and York” at Gracechurch Street; “The seat of worthy governance” at Cornhill; “The eight beatitudes” at Soper Lane; “A decayed commonweal,” “A flourishing commonweal,” and Truth and Time at the Little Conduit in Cheap Street; and “Deborah with her estates” at the Conduit in Fleet Street. She was also presented with a purse of gold and a copy of the English Bible. A detailed account of the occasion, 
The Quenes majesties passage through the citie of London
, was available in print within nine days, in time for the planned opening on January 23 of the first Elizabethan Parliament.
²

Many people had had a hand in preparing the progress, and in designing and building the pageants. The verses delivered by the child actors were probably composed by Richard Mulcaster, future schoolmaster and MP, who in due course put together the commemorative booklet. Elizabeth herself authorized the loan of costumes from the Revels Office and not only viewed the tableaux and listened to orations attentively but also responded to them with verve and astuteness. Given the range of those involved in the planning and execution of the entry, its coherence of concept and iconography are remarkable. Spoken by a child dressed as a poet, the “farewell in the name of the whole City” insisted on the structural and semantic unity of the pageant sequence (95). The queen’s replies, in so far as they have been recorded by Mulcaster, too appear to have endorsed its drift. Reshaping the event for a mass audience, the quarto pamphlet publicized it as an auspicious expression of a pact of love between England and her new queen.
³

Individual pageants and the sequence as a whole invited a comparison between the Marian past and the Elizabethan present and future. Albeit united in its opposition to everything that the Catholic sister had stood for, the visual and verbal properties of the entry as much as the new queen’s responses to them drew heavily on the rhetoric and imagery hitherto applied to Mary. So too did the published account. Yet if the stock of materials was old, the uses to which it was put were not.

III

Elizabeth’s entry was exceptional in its preoccupation with the past. Royal entries frequently included name-based pageants of historical personages and presented genealogical tableaux, often with a sharp partisan edge. Yet none of them had focused so persistently on the recent past or deployed historical themes and images so dynamically and with such heavy ideological bias.

The welcoming oration at Fenchurch proffered to the queen the seemingly innocuous gift of the citizens’ “blessing tongues” and “true hearts.” These “true hearts” were not merely loyal but also Protestant. The “triumph” they celebrated in greeting the new sovereign had been obtained through “faithfulness” that “all untruth [had] driven out” (76). To eliminate all vestiges of “untruth” or Catholicism was to exorcize the Marian past as well as reclaim the language of true religion. Whether consciously or not—and the theme is anything if not conventional—the gift of hearts harked back both to Mary’s reception at Ipswich in July 1553, when local children had presented her with “a golden heart inscribed ‘the heart of the people,’” and to her and Philip’s entry into London in August 1554, which had reportedly exemplified the citizens’ “faithful, and unfained hertes to the Quenes highnes & the king.”
⁴
Aside from summoning and dissolving the equation of Truth and Catholicism, made routinely by Marian propagandists, the oration implicitly questioned Mary’s motto 
Veritas Filia
Temporis
, which the fourth pageant, featuring Truth and Time, would comprehensively dismantle.

The display of royal genealogy in the first tableau, “The uniting of the two houses of Lancaster and York,” served to emphasize Elizabeth’s legitimacy. Based on Edward Hall’s 
The Union of the two noble and illustre famelies
of Lancastre & Yorke
 (1548, 1550) and echoing its title, the pageant was “a topical, three-dimensional reworking of the woodcut” from the second edition of the chronicle.
⁵
Child actors representing Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and, at the top, Elizabeth herself were seated on three levels of the arch which was “garnished with red roses and white” (79). The show implied that, like her namesake Elizabeth of York, whose marriage to Henry Tudor terminated a drawn-out civil war, this new Elizabeth would usher in peace and unity after the turbulence of Mary’s reign. The historical parallel now invoked to compliment the Protestant queen had been used five years earlier to celebrate the accession of her Catholic predecessor. Circulating at court in the second half of 1554, a short Latin tract by one of Mary’s East Anglian supporters, Robert Wingfield of Brantham, had emphasized Mary Tudor’s ancestry to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Wingfield had flatteringly compared the advent of “sacred Mary, child of both Houses, and queen by the best right on the death of Edward VI” to “the joining of these two excellent ruling Houses of Plantagenet and Tudor,” implying that now the confessional conflicts and abuses of Edward’s reign would come to an end.
⁶
Elizabethan pageant-makers sought to undo and reverse such associations.

The frontispiece to Hall’s chronicle presented the complete Tudor genealogy culminating in Henry VIII. By contrast, the pageant was tendentiously selective, omitting Henry VIII’s other wives and offspring. Though absent, Mary was the target of this dynastic display. By insisting on the validity of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the tableau endorsed his divorce from Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon. Mary was thus retrospectively bastardized. The accompanying verses implicitly cast her reign as a period of continued unrest and national suffering akin to the Wars of the Roses: “Therefore as civil war and shed of blood did cease / When these two houses were united into one / So now that jar shall stint, and quietness increase, / We trust, Oh, noble Queen, thou wilt because alone.” Reassuringly, Elizabeth “promised that she would do her whole endeavour for the continual preservation of concord, as the pageant did import.”
⁷

The pageant’s devisers were hopeful that Elizabeth would succeed where Mary had failed, and they suggested how best to go about it. Henry VII was paired with Elizabeth of York, Henry VIII with Anne Boleyn. The appearance of the solitary figure of Elizabeth graphically conveyed the need for the queen to marry and produce an heir. The point was made directly in the Latin oration penned by Mulcaster and delivered by a pupil of St Paul’s School (90). In this respect both pageant and oration again looked ahead to parliamentary concerns, for within two months, on February 9, Elizabeth would receive a Commons petition beseeching her to choose a husband for the security of the realm.
⁸
“The uniting of the two houses of Lancaster and York” was a riposte to, or perhaps a retraction of, the spectacle of Anglo-Iberian genealogy during Mary and Philip’s entry. That dynastic tableau had highlighted the pair’s common descent from Edward III in order to establish the Spanish prince’s claim to Englishness.
⁹
To the Marian pageant’s assertion of England’s historic involvement in continental Europe, the Elizabethan show opposed a strong call for disengagement. Above all, it celebrated the fact that in contrast to her half-Spanish half-sister, the new queen was English 
par excellence
.
¹⁰

For all its complimentary-didactic bent, however, “The uniting” evinced the limitations of Elizabeth’s regime no less than its might. Like the alter egos of Henry VII and Henry VIII, the child impersonating the queen seems to have worn a closed imperial crown, symbol of England’s independence and sovereignty.
¹¹
The explanatory oration credited Elizabeth with the power to heal the rift in the body politic. Yet it also unceremoniously pressured her into making a wholehearted commitment to that goal, which the queen duly did and which the pamphlet duly publicized. If four years earlier, in mounting a flattering welcome for Philip, the City had anticipated the wishes of the Catholic queen, now her Protestant heir was issued with an injunction, however obsequious.

IV

The use of allegory in the next tableau, “The seat of worthy governance,” served to disparage Mary’s reign by attacking its religion and morality. Here too the provisional nature of Elizabeth’s hold on power was in evidence. The throne occupied by the royal figure representing the queen was supported by Virtues that were shown suppressing their opposite Vices: “
Pure religion
 did tread upon 
Superstition
 and 
Ignorance
; 
Love of subjects
 did tread upon 
Rebellion
 and
Insolence
;
Wisdom
 did tread upon 
Folly
 and
Vainglory
; 
Justice
 did tread upon 
Adulation
 and
Bribery
.”
¹²
The anti-Marian drift was instantly recognized by one of the foreign spectators, the Italian Il Schifanoya. “On the other side, hinting I believe at the past,” he noted “were
Ignorance
, 
Superstition
, 
Hypocrisy
, 
Vain Glory
, 
Simulation
, 
Rebellion
, and 
Idolatry
.”
¹³

From Il Schifanoya’s perspective, the contrast between the Elizabethan present and the Marian past, between Protestantism and Catholicism, was expressed through a sort of visual paradiastole or rhetorical redescription, a classical figure widely distrusted in the Renaissance because of its disturbing capacity to misrepresent the true moral character of an action, a person, or a belief. The strategy common to Protestants and Catholics was to charge the other with heresy, idolatry, rebelliousness, avarice, and hypocrisy, and to cast the accusation in the form of a dramatic unmasking of the enemy by attributing to him verbal duplicity and fraud. The definition of paradiastole given by Henry Peacham in his 
The Garden of Eloquence
(1593; first edn. 1577) neatly exemplifies this ideological bias: