Protestants Versus Catholics: Religion in Elizabethan England

Shakespeare was well acquainted with the religious tensions of his age between the Catholics and the Protestants, and inevitably drew connections between the violent civil Wars of the Roses and the current threat of civil war over religion that many Elizabethans feared. Although it is highly contested, many historians believe that Shakespeare himself was a covert Catholic and would have intimately understood the secrecy, confusion, suspicion and potential punishment that accompanied following the old religion under Elizabeth. Shakespeare sneakily employs religious references and symbolism that his audiences would have been acutely aware of to talk about his tumultuous age and the way the Queen oversaw the nation’s religious affairs.

The young Queen Elizabeth I.

When Elizabeth was made Queen of England after the death of Mary Tudor on November 17, 1558, her people had good reason to be concerned. Within more or less the past decade the nation had gone from Protestant under Edward VI to Catholic under Mary and now back to Protestant. If famine, plague, inflation, and war with France and Scotland were not bad enough, now there was the threat of religious upheaval and the violent persecution that accompanied it.

Bloody Mary Tudor.

Neither Elizabeth nor her government was very enthusiastic at first about religious reform, knowing the problems that would ensure. At first, she simply banned preaching altogether to try and keep the peace, desperately afraid of Catholic revolt. Most Catholics were equally optimistic, assuming that a Catholic husband was all Elizabeth needed. It was the Protestant population, in fact, who wanted revenge for their fellow Englishmen who were exiled, imprisoned and burnt at the stake under Queen Mary. But as the crown began to seem more unstable in light of Elizabeth’s unmarried status and rumblings of a Scottish invasion that would seat Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne, Elizabeth sought to “reduce the realm to conformity” (Jones 19).

In 1559, Parliament passed the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, which made Elizabeth the head of the Church with the help of an Ecclesiastical High Commission, or religious police, and returned the nation to Protestantism as it had been under Edward VI. Furthermore, anyone who denied the Queen’s authority over the church was punishable by death and those in office in the church and state were required to take an oath declaring as much. Protestants primarily objected to Catholic mass given in Latin, as it was “against the word of God to use a tongue unknown to the people of common prayer,” and the superstitious, ostentation of idols, images, altars, rosaries and Catholic rituals in general. The Book of Common Prayer from 1552 was adopted, which in particular allowed for a looser interpretation of the Eucharist. When it came to the destruction of images and altars, windows were replaced, idols destroyed and tables replaced altars. Elizabeth even sent out inspectors to make sure that it was done, unlike Queen Mary when she instated the Catholic ceremonies.

Elizabethans were very confused about religion. They did not know whether their God was a wrathful or a benevolent one, or what the fundamental differences were between the old and the new faiths. Many became “jacks of both sides” in order to escape notice, and at first, it seemed to work (Jones 18). However, devout Protestants wanted the Catholics purged and Elizabeth herself continued her reforms by creating a new calendar, translating the Book of Common Prayer in Latin for the universities and hanging the Ten Commandments where altars once were. Catholics were associated with witchcraft and necromancy, and even William Cecil, Elizabeth’s closest advisor, used this belief as an excuse to make political arrests.

The Tyburn tree in London, where Catholic martyrs were killed.

1563 marked a real turning point in the treatment of Catholics, and it was after Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were finally accepted in 1566 that Elizabeth no longer looked like a more lenient ruler than her predecessor. The articles were intended to purge the Book of Common Prayer of any vestigial “popery,” clergy were given specific forms of dress, including collars and square caps, grammar schools were to be installed in each cathedral, both clergy members and laity had to be more studious, and the church would reallocate its funds (Jones 51-2). The articles were highly contested on the subject of, what else, uniforms for clergymen, and Elizabeth herself was furious that they had been drafted behind her back.

Edmund Campion and the Tyburn tree.

But after several riots over the articles, debates that widened the gap between Protestantism and Catholicism, more plots related to Mary in Scotland, and a new Act of Treason, Catholics were exiled and imprisoned en masse. At first, Elizabeth did not want to outright execute Catholics, attempting to distinguish her own rule from that of Mary Tudor. But the rebellion led by Edmund Campion and Robert Persons proved to be the limit, and these men became the first Catholic martyrs under Elizabeth. After that, Catholics were persecuted no differently than their Protestant counter parts had been, such as the Northern rebellion led by the Earl of Norfolk in 1559 that sought to put Mary on the throne. Elizabeth destroyed the rebel army and plundered the region in response, hanging 800 men in the first month of 1570. Catholics were no longer just enemies of the church to be reprimanded, but intolerable enemies of the nation.

The execution of Mary Stuart in the 2007 Cate Blanchett film, Elizabeth, the Golden Age.

It was around this time that Elizabeth’s suspicions grew of Mary’s involvement in various plots to make her queen. Almost twenty years of plotting went on until, in 1586 Elizabeth finally put her on trial at Fotheringhay Castle and in early 1587, Mary was executed in order to secure Elizabeth’s place on the throne as well as religious control. In 1588, Elizabeth faced yet another Catholic threat from Philip V of Spain, and it was defeating his Armada that finally ensured her English Protestant power.

Defeat of the Spanish Armada

References:

Jones, Norman. The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing Inc. 1995. Print.

“Queen Elizabeth I: Biography, Portraits, Primary Sources.” Tudor Monarchs. Web. Accessed 2-26-10. <http://englishhistory.net/tudor/monarchs/eliz1.html>.

Elizabeth Woodville: Beauty Queen

The lovely Elizabeth Woodville was the daughter of Richard Woodville, Earl of Rivers, epitome of chivalrous knight, and Jacquetta de Luxembourg, Duchess of Bedford. Elizabeth’s secret marriage to Edward IV was not the only scandal she was involved in; her birth was shrouded in secrecy due to Jacquetta’s marriage to her first husband’s favorite, and when discovered Richard was thrown in prison only to be saved by Henry based on Jacquetta’s position as a sort of honorary Queen Mother at court. From a young age Elizabeth was a prominent lady of Queen Margaret’s maids of honor, and she attracted many suitors. She married John Gray, a very wealthy heir and military commander under Queen Margaret, and she became one of the lady’s of the Queen’s bedchamber and a mother of two sons, Thomas and Richard. But when John died in 1460, things looked bleak: her two sons would be deprived of their inheritance and Elizabeth was grief-stricken for two long years.

Marriage to Edward IV.

And then she met Edward. The story goes that Elizabeth heard he was in the neighborhood near her castle at Grafton, so she waited for him beneath a tree now known in Northamptonshire as “the queen’s oak,” with her two sons. When he arrived she begged him to restore their lands and he was love-struck. Of course, Edward, the playboy that he was, did not actually want to marry Elizabeth and she did not want to settle for anything less. Playing hard to get, however, only increased Edward’s fervor and he eventually offered her his hand and they were married May 1, 1464, to the great annoyance of his mother, the Duchess of York. She gave birth to her daughter, Elizabeth, five months later at Westminster palace, helping to ease the tension between the child’s grandmothers (Edward’s mother was probably doubly annoyed when the daughter was christened to flatter his wife and not his mother). She was immediately unpopular at court, being the first royal marriage to an Englishwoman in more than two centuries and bringing with her a whole flock of relatives eager for promotions. It was her secret marriage to Edward and coronation a year later that finally pushed Warwick overboard. Edward not only ruined his plans for a marriage alliance with Bona, the princess of France, but he was also personally insulted when Edward did not go after his own eldest daughter, Isabel. Isabel was instead given to George, Duke of Clarence, and Warwick made war.

During the coming insurrection, Edward was captured by Warwick, who tried to convince Edward that his wife’s power over him was actually the result of her mother’s use of witchcraft, which would not be the first time the men of this history have used that line. Edward somehow found his way out of this scrape and returned to a welcoming London, stowing his wife and babes away in the Tower for their own safety while he fled the danger of Warwick’s return from abroad. Of course, this is where the old king, Henry VI, was also being held. Who could blame Elizabeth from making her way up the Thames to Sanctuary at Westminster instead? It was here that she had her first son, Edward V. After briefly and joyfully meeting with her husband, she returned to the Tower while Edward fought the battles at Barnet and Tewkesbury, calling on her brother Anthony to save her during an attack.

Elizabeth's three daughters, including Elizabeth of York.

The Queen not only had her hand in the promotion of her family and friends, whom received many rewards and attentions from Edward, but also did a little match making. In 1477, she walked her almost five-year-old son Richard, Duke of York, down the aisle to meet his three-year-old bride, Anne Mowbray.

The skull of Anne Mowbray.

But the Queen also knew how to exact revenge. She certainly did not try to dissuade Edward from punishing Clarence, under whose name her brother and father had been murdered in 1469, for treason. Shortly after his death, she was celebrating an extravagant festival of the Garter along with Elizabeth’s recent engagement with the dauphin of France, although it was broken by Louis XI shortly after, infuriating the Queen and her husband. Elizabeth also had to put up with the fact that Edward enjoyed his mistresses, especially the clever, lively Jane Shore. Just before Edward’s death, he attempted to resolve the conflict between Lords Stanley and Hastings and the Woodvilles, to little avail. Elizabeth was given very little attention in Edward’s will, which probably has to do with why Shakespeare’s widowed Queen is so worried about her position. And to make matters worse, the one ally she thought she might be able to count on, Edward’s steadfastly loyal but frequently absent brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, proved just the opposite.

Although Richard had sent Elizabeth some very gentle, thoughtful letters of condolences, he then preceded to kidnap her heir and arrest her brother Anthony, Earl of Rivers, and son, Lord Richard Gray. In a somewhat bizarre moment of carelessness, Elizabeth agreed to let Richard, Duke of York, join his brother Edward, probably contented some with the fact that coronation ceremony preparations for Edward V continued as usual. The princes were never seen again. Shortly thereafter, Earl Rivers and Richard Gray were also beheaded by Ratcliffe.

One can image the queasy stomach Elizabeth might have had watching the coronation ceremony of Richard III with her daughters. According to Sir Thomas More, Elizabeth fell apart when she heard the news of her sons’ deaths while in the care of lieutenant Sir Robert Brackenbury. When the new Queen Anne fell ill after her son Edward’s sudden death, her physician, Dr. Lewis, who was then the physician of another important mother, Margaret Beaufort, recommended the alliance of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, with his other patient’s son, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. Elizabeth was overjoyed, although she considered backing out after the failure of Buckingham’s Rebellion. Her patience paid off and in 1586 after the Battle of Bosworth she witnessed the marriage of Henry VII to her daughter and was once again raised from her despair. She received land and wealth to help compensate for her cheated position as Queen Dowager due to the fact that the Duchess of York had seized most of Edward’s properties. She died more or less impoverished in 1492 and was quietly buried in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor.

References:

Jokinen, Anniina. “Wars of the Roses: Elizabeth Woodville.” Luminarium: Encyclopedia Project. 2009. Web. Accessed 2-25-10. <http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/woodville.htm>.

Wagner, John A. Encyclopedia of the Wars of the Roses. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc. 2001. Print.

How Women Function in "Richard III"

In her book Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, Nina S. Levine describes how Richard’s simultaneous dependence on and hatred of women that results in his “warring with women” throughout the play was ultimately reflective of the crisis of succession and a female monarch experienced by Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience (99). Levine argues that while Richard makes a claim for the women as unnatural, sexually perverse enemies, an Elizabethan audience would have seen their lamentation and cursing as “an acceptable model for female heroism” that allows the female characters “a place in politics [beyond] Richard’s misogynistic construction of women as either aggressors or victims” (102). Rather than portraying Margaret as a passive victim, she is aligned with Richard as a foil character, equally implicated in the play’s bloody conflict while actively reasserting her last “vestiges of power” in the form of elaborate curses (102). Anne on the other hand embodies the contradictory role of women within a patriarchal lineage system, in which she becomes trapped within Richard’s manipulation of “courtly discourse” to confirm both his power over her and his dependence on her. Finally, Levine illustrates how Elizabeth functions as a positive symbol of maternal heroism and aggression, battling for her children rather than herself (107-8). However, the women also represent a maternal source of destruction that mirrors contemporary concerns with “the female Tudor body politic” and Richard’s own misogynistic discourse on the subversion of masculine power and proper sexuality (110). Levine suggests that the women “turn their grief into vengeance” in an attempt to “[right] the monstrosity they have engendered” in Richard, or as an Elizabethan audience would have seen, in the Queen’s England (115). Ultimately, the play “interrogates the differences between the patriarchal myth of Tudor origins and the political realities of the 1590s” by underscoring Shakespeare’s ending that “[restores] patriarchal authority…and [returns] women to their place, off the political stage” as fictional and unrelated to the reality of England’s reliance on “women’s roles…in ensuring the succession…and the nation’s welfare” (120, 122).

Not only does this essay provide the role of women in the play with historical relevance, suggesting what they might have meant to Shakespeare’s audience, but it also demonstrates how Shakespeare’s use of Tudor propaganda might be used to critically examine patriarchy and its cultural myths. According to this essay, the women of Richard III are actively engaged in politics in a way that undermines traditional gender roles and empowers them, even when they are potentially implicated in the destruction and chaos of the play. This essay establishes the world of the play as destabilized in a way that empowers its female characters, providing them a crucial place in the political sphere even within a system that attempts to exclude them. Levine’s essay also allows a modern production to situate the play within the frameworks of post-modernism, cyborg feminist theory, and the current political scene that has just experienced a comparable overturning of traditional white, Western, patriarchal notions of who is fit to rule a country.

References:

Levine, Nina S. Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. 1998.

Timeline of Elizabethan England

Courtesy of my lovely assistant, Mary Margaret Kunze.

Margaret of Anjou: Queen of England, She-wolf of France

It’s hard not to love Margaret of Anjou. First of all, she has some of the greatest lines in the entire tetralogy. For example, in Henry VI, Part III after her spineless husband has agreed to make Richard of York his heir, she tells him that

Had I been there, which am a seely woman,
The soldiers should have tossed me on their pikes
Before I would have granted to that act.
But thou preferr’st thy life before thine honor.
And seeing thou dost, I here divorce myself
Both from thy table, Henry, and thy bed” (1.2.245-249)

Descriptions of Margaret tell us that she was “intelligent and energetic,” “charming and attractive,” and the complete opposite of her “gentle” husband (Wagner 158, Gillingham 58, Luminarium). In Henry VI, Part III, Richard of York challenged her womanhood, calling her “stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remourseless,” with a “tiger’s heart wrapped in woman’s hide" (Shakespeare HVI3 1.4.143, 138). Even her own son calls her a woman of “valiant spirit” who would infuse the breast of a coward with magnanimity (HVi3 5.5.39). But who exactly was this “she-wolf of France?” (HVI3 1.4.112).

Margaret of Anjou was born 23 March 1430. Her father was René of Anjou, but more importantly, she was the niece of king Charles VII. This made her the perfect candidate for a political marriage and when an Anglo-French treaty was negotiated by William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, Margaret sealed the deal. Her marriage to Henry VI was settled when she was just fourteen years old, and she was brought to England in 1445 by a fleet of fifty-six ships where she was crowned at Westminster Abbey. She was given a large procession from the Tower to St. Paul’s weraing white damask and powdered gold with her hair about her shoulders, while the “city conduits ran with red and white wine” (Gillingham 58). She remained close to Suffolk and his faction at court and did her duty, ensuring that England returned the region of Maine to France, until England lost Normandy and Suffolk in turn fell from power. Margaret was not a very popular Queen, since she brought no dowry and sapped England of several French territories. Of course, it would be her husband who lost all of France but Calais during his rule, not to mention he was deposed on multiple occasions.

The Marriage of Margaret.

Margaret was pregnant only once, despite the fact that women were pregnant relatively often in this time period, and gave birth to Edward on October 13, 1453. However, it is probably not surprising when one considers that Henry VI was apparently not very big on sex, was counseled “not to ‘come nigh’” his wife, and collapsed into a psychological breakdown when she finally did become pregnant after ten years of marriage (Gillingham 80). Even so, Margaret had a fierce loyalty to her son, which she pursued from the moment she seized power at court during her husband’s absence. On February 1454, she issued a “bill of five articles…whereof the first is that she desireth to have the whole rule of this land” (Gillingham 80). Although York would eventually successfully instigate two protectorates, after Henry put down the second after just three months in1456, she was described as “a great and intensely active woman, for she spares no pains to pursue her business towards an end…favourable to her power” (Gillingham 99). While Margaret put up with Henry’s Love-Day reconciliation in 1458, walking arm-in-arm with York to St. Paul’s, she more or less stayed in control. She knew how to manipulate politics, put her own supporters in power while stripping her enemies of their lands, and keep her husband under her watch away from London in the Midlands.

Margaret was also highly proficient in war. In fact, John Talbot, the English hero of his day, gave her a copy of Christine de Pisan’s Le livre des faiz darmes as a wedding present, another celebrated female authority on war. Margaret knew what she was doing in battle and was a very cunning leader, employing false reports to throw off the enemy, advance troupes of soldiers, and all her skills negotiating control over land to win supporters. It was Margaret who raised an army and defeated the Yorks at the Battle of Ludlow Bridge in 1459, and again in 1460 when she refused to let her son Prince Edward be disinherited by his own father. At the Battle of Wakefield, Margaret’s armies slaughtered York and his supporters, and then went on to restore Henry to the throne at the second Battle of St. Albans in 1461. In Shakespeare’s play, this is the moment when she places a paper-crown upon York’s head just before she stabs him in front his own sons, sending his body off to be beheaded and his head displayed on the gates of York.

Margaret at court with Henry VI.

Unfortunately, it was her unruly northern armies that had wreaked havoc on the southern countryside that made London weary of her forces and ultimately forced her to retreat only to let Warwick and Edward, on of York’s principle supporters and his son, enter the capital and claim the crown. But she didn’t give up. Margaret petitioned for more forces from the French king and continued her campaign, although she was ultimately defeated. She later teamed up with Warwick, who sought her out in France to form a surprising alliance against Edward IV. Supposedly, Warwick had to beg on his knees for her forgiveness and trust, and would not allow the alliance between her son and his daughter, Anne, to be solemnized until they had won. Although Warwick restored Henry VI from his five-year imprisonment in the Tower in 1470, he died the same day Margaret and Prince Edward arrived back in England. She kept fighting, and was finally defeated at the Battle of Tewkesbury and captured and brought to London three days later. Henry VI was murdered and she was locked up for four years until Louis XI ransomed her as part of a treaty, a sort of tragic replica of her start in England. She died at the age of fifty-two and was buried in the Angers Cathedral.

References:

Gillingham, John. Wars of the Roses: Peace and Conflict in 15th Century England. Phoenix Press. 2005. Print.

Hallam, Elizabeth. The Wars of the Roses: From Richard II to the Fall of Richard III at Bosworth Field—Seen Through the Eyes of Their Contemporaries. NY: Weidenfeild and Micholson. 1988. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Henry VI, Part III.

Wagner, John A. Encyclopedia of the Wars of the Roses. CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc. 2001. Print.

“Wars of the Roses.” Luminarium Encyclopedia Project. 2009. Web. Accessed 2-22-10. http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/warsoftheroses.htm.