Female Subjects as Counselors of Queens: Anne Dowriche, Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Cary

Abstract

This chapter examines three examples of English women using or translating French texts to offer political counsel to queens. Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie (1589) counsels Elizabeth I to pursue a more vigorous Protestant policy against France, invoking the counterexample of Catherine de’ Medici as an evil counselor responsible for the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Mary Sidney’s Antonius (1590) translates Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine (1578), written during the French religious wars, to counsel Elizabeth against following the example of Cleopatra, who sacrificed Egypt to her passion for Antony, in pursuing the “French match” with Alençon. Finally, Elizabeth Cary’s History of Edward II (wr. 1627; pub. 1680), composed on the eve of the Petition of Right and dedicated to Henrietta Maria, takes as its subject the civil war initiated by French-born Isabella’s attack on her husband Edward’s forces. It constitutes a work of counsel concerning the initially positive but ultimately negative political role of a queen consort.

The Ancient Times doe set forth in Figure, both the Incorporation and inseparable Conjunction of Counsel with Kings; And the wise and Politique use of Counsell by Kings … They say, after Jupiter was married to Metis, she conceived by him, and was with Childe, but Jupiter suffered her not to stay, till she brought forth, but eat her up; Whereby he became himselfe with Childe, and was delivered of Pallas Armed, out of his Head. Which monstrous Fable, containeth a Secret of Empire; How Kings are to make use of their Councell of State.

Francis Bacon, “Of Counsell” (1597)

In “The 1590s: The second reign of Elizabeth I?” John Guy posits that during the last decade of her reign, religious divisions were exacerbated and “the late-Elizabethan establishment felt itself increasingly beleaguered … [perceiving] the enemy within to be even more dangerous than the enemy abroad” (18). During these years, when the threat of the Catholic “enemy within” was palpable, Elizabeth’s courtship with the duke of Alençon became a cause of public concern, with Philip Sidney and John Stubbs advising the queen against the “French match.” Consequently, “the role of ‘counsel’ and ‘counselling’ in monarchies and republics … were put under the lens” (15).¹ An exemplary instance of this focus on counsel can be seen in Francis Bacon’s reflection on the topic that serves as my epigraph to this chapter. I call attention to the highly gendered nature of the “figure”—or allegory—of counsel that Bacon presents here. Jupiter, by swallowing up Metis, incorporates (feminine) counsel, as a figure for how kings “take the matter backe into their owne Hands, and make it appeare to the world, that the Decrees and finall Directions … proceeded from themselves” (64). Although Elizabeth was on the throne when Bacon was writing, he assumes the sovereign to be male and genders feminine the counsel that the male sovereign “eats up” in order to make it appear that the course of action “proceeded from [himself].” Elizabeth was counseled by male aristocrats such as Sidney and Members of Parliament such as Stubbs to refrain from the French match; the public nature of these counsels suggests that Sidney and Stubbs considered Elizabeth’s gender to make it permissible to advise her concerning marriage, though of course the pressing issue concerned a politico-religious controversy. I will be suggesting in this chapter that not only males such as Sidney and Stubbs , but women, such as Anne Dowriche, with family affiliation to a number of MPs, and Mary Sidney, the sister of Philip, published works intended as political counsel to Elizabeth. Moreover, significantly in the context of the Elizabethan crisis regarding confessional division, both Dowriche’s The French Historie (1589) and Sidney’s Antonius (1592) were translations of French works arising from the Wars of Religion that began in 1562 and continued intermittently until 1598.

Nor did the conclusion of Elizabeth’s reign bring about the cessation of confessional opposition, as witnessed in the Gunpowder Plot (1605) against James I, who later pursued an unpopular, and ultimately unsuccessful, “Spanish match” for his son Charles. Evidence of the continuing importance of this opposition can be seen in Elizabeth Cary’s translation of a polemic against James by the French cardinal Jacques Davy du Perron (pub. 1620) for Charles’ French-born and Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria, which could only be published in France (in 1630). Just as Dowriche and Sidney sought to counsel Elizabeth through their works, so Cary wrote The History of Edward II in 1627 to counsel Henrietta Maria—through the counterexample of Edward’s French-born Queen Isabel who instigated a civil war against her husband. Cary’s History remained in manuscript until it was brought to publication in 1680, during the Exclusion Crisis, which threatened a civil war between opponents and supporters of the succession to the throne of the Catholic duke of York, the future James II. By its publication more than fifty years after its composition, Cary’s History reached a much wider readership than its manuscript did, in another moment of civil division. Thus, Cary as author of a work of political counsel achieved the ambition expressed by her predecessor Christine de Pizan for her writings to be consulted by future readers. I will be suggesting that the way in which the History was considered useful for a later historical moment of political crisis indicates its importance as a sophisticated work of political theory that productively engages with its predecessors in political thought, both English and continental.

Warning Elizabeth with Catherine de’ Medici’s Example

Anne Dowriche’s French Historie, a verse adaptation and elaboration of Jean de Serres’ prose chronicle, translated into English by Thomas Timme as The three partes of commentaries containing the whole and perfect discourse of the ciuill warres of Fraunce (1574), was published during a period that saw many publications of English translations of French pamphlets: e.g., Michel Hurault’s A Discourse upon the Present State of France (1588), The Contre Guyse (1589), and Philippe de Mornay’s A Letter Written by a French Catholicke gentleman (1589). J. H. M. Salmon has demonstrated the pervasive influence of the French religious wars on political thought in England during the Elizabethan period and throughout the seventeenth century.² Most likely because of the gender of its author, Salmon did not include Dowriche’s work in his 1959 list of twenty-seven texts published during 1589; yet Dowriche clearly participates in the conversation concerning the French political situation, with implications for England’s own confessional divide, as well as its relationship to Catholic France. Published when the accession of Henri de Navarre in France encouraged hope for the Protestant cause, the year after the English defeat of the Armada, two years after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and three years after the death of Philip Sidney in battle against the Spanish in the Netherlands, The French Historie, I suggest, asks to be read as a work of political commentary and counsel.³

Dowriche was born into a family whose members were prominent landowners and Members of Parliament in southwest England, beginning with her great-grandfather Sir Richard Edgcumbe (c.1443–89), who was Henry VII’s controller of the household as well as a personal friend of the monarch. Her grandfather Sir Peter (1477–1539), a knight and sheriff, accompanied Henry VIII in his campaign against France (Kirby). Her father, another Sir Richard (1499–1562), who was “one of the most respected figures in the southwest,” earned a reputation as a poet (Hyde). Her brother, Peter (or Pearse), to whom she dedicated The French Historie, was an active puritan MP who was returned to eight Parliaments from 1555 to 1593. During Peter’s lifetime the family suffered financial decline; even so, his son, Anne’s nephew, served as an MP well into the seventeenth century (Hasler, s.v.). Anne derived from her birth family a sense of entitlement to be involved in public life fostered over many generations, as well as an interest in poetry that her father cultivated. And the fact that the will of her grandfather, Sir Peter Edgecombe, granted his two younger sons £100 each and his daughter Anne £300, perhaps indicates that Dowriche’s birth family did not value sons at the expense of daughters (Bindoff, s.v.). Indeed, Dowriche’s female relatives held prominent positions in the royal court; her mother may have been one of Catherine Howard’s ladies.

Anne married Hugh Dowriche, a puritan preacher, and contributed to her husband’s work, The Iaylors Conversion (1596); Micheline White discusses Anne and Hugh Dowriche’s collaboration in their efforts to “promote Protestant doctrine and prevent political upheaval,” noting correspondences between their works and arguing for the importance of the support of her husband for Dowriche’s literary production (“Power Couples, 121).⁴ I suggest, however, that because the publication of Anne’s work preceded her husband’s by seven years, and because she dedicated The French Historie to her brother , Pearse, asking for his “patronage” and “protection” (A2^v), she joins other contemporary women writers such as Isabella Whitney, who also dedicated A Sweet Nosgay (1573) to her brother Geoffrey, and Mary Sidney, whose most important literary relationship was with her brother, Philip. In these examples, brothers appear to have been enabling figures for the woman writer’s authorial identity and practices. The appeal to and invocation of the brother at once marks the woman’s place in an appropriately domestic relationship while gesturing toward the public world inhabited by the male sibling who functions as alter ego. Although the political theorist Carole Pateman and seventeenth-century English writers, both male and female, such as John Webster and Aphra Behn, have shown how “fraternal patriarchy” can be as strict and controlling of the lives of women as conventional patriarchy , these writers invoke brothers as enabling surrogates.⁵ Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night conveys a similar understanding of how sisters can benefit from the presence (and absence) of brothers: Viola cross-dresses as a young man and seeks service in duke Orsino’s household when she believes her twin brother Sebastian to have been shipwrecked. Shakespeare underscores their similarity in the apparent willingness of Olivia, who initially fell in love with the cross-dressed Viola, to accept Sebastian in his sister’s stead.

In the case of Dowriche, whose brother was an MP, her dedication, signed “Your louing Sister, Anne Dowriche” (A2^v), brings her work into the public realm, while affirming her own propriety as a sister under a brother’s protection. The close identification of Dowriche with her brother is further signaled by the inclusion of their names in the couplet introducing her moral counsel to Pearse, counsel that aims to establish her own virtue and thus the legitimacy of her political counsel: “The sharpest EDGE will soonest PEARSE and COME vnto AN end. / Yet DOWT not, but be RICHE in hope, and take that I doo send” (A3). In the text that follows, the first letter of each line read vertically spells out his name (Fig. 2.1).⁶

Fig. 2.1

Anne Dowriche, The French Historie. London: Thomas Orwin for Thomas Man, 1589. STC 7159, sigs.A2^v–A3. Photograph by Mihoko Suzuki, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Elaine Beilin, the scholar most responsible for calling attention to the importance of Dowriche’s work, has argued that The French Historie is concerned with the parliamentary controversy concerning free speech, juxtaposing Dowriche’s text to parliamentary texts from the 1570s and 1580s (“Some Freely Spake”).⁷ I will suggest, for my part, that Dowriche participates in what John Guy called the “rhetoric of counsel in early modern England.”⁸ While Elizabeth stressed the limits of Parliament’s authority to counsel in order to protect her sovereignty, the idioms of “counsel” that occur in More’s Utopia (1516), Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor (1531), and Book VIII of Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (wr. 1590s; pub. 1648) “underpin parliamentary debates of the 1560s, 1570s and 1580s concerning the queen’s marriage and the Protestant succession of the throne” (Guy, Politics, ix).⁹ The question of who is entitled to counsel and how was a vexed and volatile one during these years. Thomas Nicolls, “Citezeine and Goldesmyth of London,” presented his 1550 folio translation of Thucydides to Edward VI as useful counsel for the monarch.¹⁰ Yet John Stubbs met the gruesome punishment of having his hand severed for arrogating to himself the right to advise the queen against the French match; and Philip Sidney was rusticated as a result of his letter to the queen containing the same advice.¹¹ Elizabeth was shrewd and perspicacious in her own choice of counselors, elevating to that position both William Cecil (1520/21–98) and William’s son Robert Cecil (1563–1612) (MacCaffrey; Croft). I suggest that as in the case of Christine de Pizan, Dowriche enjoyed Bourdieu’s “status-linked right to politics,” according to which an individual is authorized or called upon to acquire and express political competence (409); for Dowriche, a granddaughter, daughter, and sister of MPs, uses strategic indirection to proffer counsel to Elizabeth through her authorship of The French Historie.¹²

While Christine de Pizan unmistakably fashioned herself as a political counselor, as I discussed in Chapter 1, in England, it was only later in the seventeenth century that women such as Elizabeth Poole, who counseled Oliver Cromwell not to execute Charles I, or Elinor James, a printer’s widow who published many petitions to Parliament and the monarchs of her day—Charles II, William and Mary, Anne, and George I—explicitly construct themselves as counselors intervening publicly in political affairs (Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, 267–75). Literary representation of women as counselors, however, can be found earlier in the century, in Aemilia Lanyer’s calling attention in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) to Pilate’s wife as a wise counselor whose advice concerning the disposition of Christ Pilate failed to heed (83–84, 87); and in Elizabeth Cary’s representation in The Tragedie of Mariam (1613) of Salome as an evil counselor to her brother Herod, one who exhorts him to execute his innocent wife Mariam (IV.vii; pp. 127–34). In A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), Rachel Speght claims that one of the duties of women is “to give good councell unto her husband, the which he must not despise,” giving the examples of Abraham and Sarah, Pilate and his wife, and others (21).

Although Dowriche was writing before these examples of literary and actual female counselors, she could have been familiar with the example of Christine de Pizan, whose Boke of Fayts of Armes and of Chyualrye was commissioned by Henry VII to be translated and published by William Caxton in 1489, so that the king could require his “gentylman born to armes” to read the book (291). Since, as we have seen, Dowriche’s great-grandfather was a close associate of Henry VII and her grandfather accompanied Henry VIII on his military expeditions, it is reasonable to expect that this work by Christine might have been available and known to Dowriche. Given her interest in politics, Dowriche may also have known Christine’s Body of Policye (1521). Although the title pages of these works do not carry Christine’s name, the texts prominently include references by Christine to herself as author, references that call attention to her gender, providing Dowriche with an example of a woman writer who concerned herself with politics.

Dowriche’s interest in counselors is evident in her focus on the courageous speech of Annas Burgaeus as counselor to Henri II, though he was condemned to death for it. Beilin has pointed out the homology between the names of the protagonist and author, Annas and Anne (the French version of Annas’ name is, of course, Anne, and at the conclusion of her poem, Dowriche signs herself as “Anna” [Fig. 2.2b]). Gaspard de Coligny, also featured in The French Historie as a prominent victim of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, was known to be an influential counselor to Charles IX who had been advising him to intervene in the Netherlands. In The French Historie, even after he has been wounded he gives counsel to the king:

Fig. 2.2

a and b STC 7159, title page, sigs.37^v–38. Photograph by Mihoko Suzuki, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Verse

Verse For though that I doo lie heere wounded as you see, The chiefest treason they intend is not alone to me: But to your noble Grace, whose death they daily craue, Whose life by treason long ere this, & now desire to haue. … God grant you see in time your frends from fleeting foe, That still in safetie you may reigne deuoide of griefe and woe. (22^v)

Jean de Serres’ Lyfe of Coligny (1576) also emphasizes Coligny’s wisdom in counseling the king on matters both domestic and diplomatic (Hii^v–Hiii). He notes that Coligny was of a “noble and renowned howse” that possessed “right of souereintie” (Aii^v–Aiii). Dowriche’s own family could be described in these terms, and her focus on these counselors suggests that Dowriche, despite her gender, signals her intent to proffer counsel to Elizabeth. Yet she avoids the fate of Annas and Coligny (or the fate of John Stubbs and his printer) by refracting her political writing through the subject matter of her work, the French history, and by basing it on a chronicle by Serres, translated by Timme. Although Dowriche’s work is not, strictly speaking, a translation, she aimed at the protection that many publishers sought by publishing translations.¹³ In addition, by deploying the literary device of channeling her discourse through two male speakers, she succeeded in avoiding both censorship and punishment.

I have elsewhere discussed the ways in which the example of Elizabeth appears to have enabled female authors and women’s political intervention during the Jacobean period and throughout the seventeenth century (“Elizabeth, Gender”). Previous scholars of Dowriche have apparently been reluctant to acknowledge her critique of Elizabeth—due, perhaps, to the proximity of the categories of “woman writer” and “female monarch.” In fact, the striking device on the title and final pages—the figure of naked Truth wearing a crown with “scourges at her back” (38), surrounded by the Latin motto “virescit vulnere veritas” (truth grows strong at the wound; truth flourishes through injury)—can be read as an emblematic conflation of female monarch and female writer (Fig. 2.2a, b). Yet this emblem can also be read as indicating the superiority of persecuted Truth over the censoring authority, especially given the recent terrible punishment of Stubbs. The verse commentary accompanying the emblem on the final page calls attention to the difference in social hierarchy and power between Truth and her adversaries, contrasting Truth “devoid of worldlie weeds” and those “Who thinke they swim in wealth,” though in fact they are “wretched, poore & vile.” Dowriche ends the poem and her work itself with the defiant couplet: “Yet no despite or paine can cause hir cease; / She wounded, springs; bedeckt with crowne of Peace” (38), recalling Annas Burgaeus’ rhetorical question to Henri II: “If Truth do conquere Kings; if Truth do conquere al?” (11^v). Thus, Dowriche’s gendered identification with Elizabeth not only enables her authorship but also her political counsel critical of Elizabethan policies. To this end, her ambivalent representation of Catherine de’ Medici as an effective architect of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre functions as a demonized double of Elizabeth as a female monarch.¹⁴

Dowriche characterizes Catherine de’ Medici by reference to Machiavelli’s lion and fox.¹⁵ Significantly, the English translation of Henri Estienne’s A Mervaylovs discourse vpon the lyfe, deedes, and behauiours of Katherine de Medicis, Queene Mother (1575) presents not only an indictment of Catherine but also an extended diatribe against women’s rule. The French original was used to indict the female rule of Marie de’ Medici in the seventeenth century and Marie Antoinette in the eighteenth century (Knecht, Catherine de’ Medici, 165).¹⁶ François Hotman’s political treatise Francogallia (1573, 1576, 1583), which includes a more dispassionately presented chapter on “Whether under Francogallican law women are not as much excluded from the government of the kingdome as they are from inheriting it,” was not translated in its entirety until the eighteenth century (122–24)¹⁷; by contrast, Estienne’s Mervaylovs discourse, which purports to be about Catherine, could be translated and published, despite the lengthy disquisition against gynocracy and its implications for Elizabeth’s rule.

While Estienne’s tract exemplifies the use of Catherine to warn against the ills of woman’s rule in general, Dowriche, who depicts the male sovereigns, Henry and Charles, as far from ideal, clearly does not intend her negative representation of Catherine to signify disapproval of female rule. Rather, Catherine very effectively persuades through her “Oration … vnto the King and other of her bloodie counsaile” (23v) to launch the Massacre, so that she is cast in the role of an evil counselor, manipulated by Satan and following the tenets of Machiavelli, rather than a ruler in her own right. At the same time, the similarities between Catherine’s speech and Elizabeth’s addresses to Parliament and to her troops on the eve of the Armada only the year before are inescapable:

Verse

Verse Plucke vp therefore your sprites, and play your manlie parts, Let neither feare nor faith preuaile to dant your warlike harts. What shame is this that I (a woman by my kinde). Neede thus to speake, or passe you men in valure of the mind? For heere I doo protest, if I had bene a man; I had my selfe before this time this murder long began. (24)

Thomas Deloney’s 1588 ballad, The Queenes visiting of the Campe at Tilsburie with her entertainment there attests to the currency of Elizabeth’s speech to the troops.¹⁸ And Geoffrey Fenton’s Discourse of the Civile warres and late troubles in Fraunce (1569) had included a very similar account of Catherine addressing the soldiers in Limoges: “she visited the battels & squadrons of his horsmen one after an other, perswading them to omitte no duetie, to continue their seruice to his maiesty” (88).

Catherine, like Elizabeth who emphasized her woman’s body but also her “heart and stomach of a king” in addressing her troops at Tilbury, calls attention to her female gender in exhorting her son and his men to “play your manlie parts”: “What shame is this that I (a woman by my kinde) / Neede thus to speake, or pass you men in valure of the minde?” (24). Yet, unlike Elizabeth who vowed to lead and protect her people, Catherine, like Lady Macbeth, here taunts the king for being less manly than herself. In representing her as an emasculating “woman on top”—to use Natalie Zemon Davis’ term (Society, 124–51)—Dowriche represents Catherine as one who oversteps her role as counselor as well as transgresses gender boundaries.

Despite these distinctions between Catherine and Elizabeth that would appear to contrast them as antitypes, it is difficult to escape the similarities between them, especially in light of their shared ability as effective orators. As in the cases of Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc and Spenser’s Radigund, characters created by contemporaries of Dowriche and apparent antitypes to Elizabeth, the distinction between type and antitype becomes difficult to maintain.¹⁹ The proximity in the representations of Elizabeth and Catherine points also to political proximity of which Dowriche would be critical: Elizabeth’s government sought to preserve an alliance with the Catholic monarchy of France, engaging in lengthy negotiations over the proposed match with Alençon, which in fact began in 1572, the year of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the general persecution of the Protestants, and continued until 1579.²⁰ Maurice Wilkinson states that Elizabeth personally was not sympathetic to the Huguenots, nor did she approve of rebellious subjects; in order to counterbalance the danger from Spain, she was determined to pursue an alliance with France, against popular sentiment in England especially in the wake of St. Bartholomew. In this, she was “aided by the influence of Catherine on the French side” (22, 26–27).

In fact, Dowriche notably refrains from extensively praising or celebrating Elizabeth in contrast with the French monarchs. Rather, the extended and graphic description of the “bloodie and periuered” (33) Charles IX’s horrible death serves as a monitory example, perhaps recalling the horrible way in which Herod’s body disintegrates—literally rotting apart—in the Chester cycle (see Bushnell, 87).²¹ Indeed, these lines which follow that description closely resemble a passage of admonition from Stubbs’ Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579):

Verse

Verse The Lord grant England peace and mercie from aboue, That from the Truth no trouble may their fixed heart remoue With wished life and health Lord long preserue and keepe That Noble Queene Elizabeth chiefe Pastor of thy sheepe: And that she maie finde out, and hunt with perfect hate The Popish hearts of fained friends before it be too late: And that in wofull France the troubles that we see, To England for to shun the like, may now a warning be. (37^v)

Here is the passage from Stubbs:

For the Lord’s namesake, therefore, O Christian Queen Elizabeth, take heed to yourself and to the Church of Jesus Christ for which he shed his blood, and which he hath shielded under your royal defense; show yourself a zealous prince for God’s gospel to the end; foresee, in a tender love to this people committed to your government, the continuance of the truth among them and their posterity. (29)²²

Dowriche casts the admonition as a prayer, but she strikingly interpellates Elizabeth as a shepherd and hence protector of her people and a determined “hunter” of Catholics. The urgency (“before it be too late”) of her “warning” is in keeping with Donald Kelley’s observation that the Massacre had a traumatic effect, “haunt[ing] an entire generation of Protestants,” causing them to suspect that it might be renewed at any time (“Martyrs,” 202).

As I indicated earlier, these lines are preceded by the account of Charles’ gruesome death, where Dowriche explicitly inserts herself as speaker—“I briefely will repeate / The sentence of mightie God / gainst murder and deceate.” She furthermore presents the French king’s death as an example of God’s striking against “bloodie tyrants” from the Old Testament: “I read also of one Aristobolus by name, / Who hath for murder left behinde a blacke & bloodie fame” (35^v). This page where Dowriche’s biblical glosses multiply and surround the text (Fig. 2.3) generalizes her point concerning the fate of evil rulers and gives her license to dilate on their destruction. Given the gender of the author, perhaps most notable is the case of Abimelech, who met his end when “from a womans hand a milstone downe was sent / From off a wall: which with the weight his brain pan al to rent” (35).

Fig. 2.3

STC 7159, sigs.36^v–37. Photograph by Mihoko Suzuki, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Many of the Old Testament tyrants Dowriche adduces came to a bad end because they refused to heed the prophets who advised them. Burgaeus and Coligny as Protestant leaders and Dowriche as author correspond to these wise prophets who speak against the evil kings. Dowriche’s use of Old Testament prophets as exemplary precedents for her in speaking on political matters anticipates the sectarian women writers during the English Civil Wars who also likened themselves to prophets in order to justify their writings. Just as Elizabeth Poole in A Vision: Wherein is Manifested the Disease and Cure of the Kingdome (1648) warned Cromwell not to execute Charles I, so half a century earlier, Dowriche warned Elizabeth I to pursue a more active role in protecting Protestants from Catholics. The notable congruence between Dowriche and women writing during the English Civil Wars, which has not been noticed before, can be explained by Dowriche’s writing in a context that closely resembles civil war––or posits a danger of one especially in light of the French Wars of Religion––between the Protestants and the Catholics.

In the actual civil war in France, the Catholics as a majority violently persecuted the Protestants, although Arlette Jouanna explains Charles IX’s strike against Coligny on the eve of St. Bartholomew as motivated by his fear that Coligny’s leadership of the Huguenots threatened sovereign control (23–29). Jouanna also points out that Charles was fearful of following the fate of Charles VI in allowing France to fall into civil war (97–109)—against which Christine de Pizan wrote, as we saw in Chapter 1. Ironically, Charles precipitated the Massacre and the outbreak of the third religious war through this preventive strike against the Huguenot leader; in doing so, he broke the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye granting Protestants limited liberty of worship, which he signed along with Gaspard de Coligny, only the year before (170–71).²³

By contrast, in England the Protestants constituted the majority, though fear of a Spanish invasion persisted beyond the English victory over the Armada in 1588. Accordingly, Dowriche seeks a more militant Protestant policy against the Catholics than the declared official moderation of the Elizabethan Settlement and Elizabeth’s foreign policy toward France (which included marriage negotiations with Alençon) and Spain (in which Elizabeth was reluctant to aid the Protestant rebellion in the Netherlands). Although Dowriche does not explicitly call for persecuting the Catholics, her exhortation to Elizabeth to “hunt” them recalls her likening the Huguenots to sheep, hunted by the Catholics likened to tigers and other predatory animals. Moreover, her representation of symbolic violence against the bodies of tyrants participates in what Natalie Zemon Davis has called the “rites of violence” of religious rioters who assumed the roles of “priest, pastor, and magistrate” and resorted to a “repertory of actions, derived from the Bible” because religious and/or political authorities were perceived to be failing in their duties (Society, 152–87).²⁴ Here the religious impulse combines with a political one; the violence works to purge the body politic of tyrannical surfeit and disease. These lines that immediately precede the address to Elizabeth follow accounts of tyrants and heroically resisting subjects—including the nameless “common hangman” of Lyon who refuses the king’s directive to “defile [his] hands with guiltlesse blood” (32) and the soldiers who refuse orders to kill innocent prisoners. They thereby indicate the damage to the institution and prestige of the monarchy that the French civil wars have accomplished.²⁵ At the same time, by graphically representing violence, Dowriche enacts it linguistically, requiting the dismemberment of Coligny by the horrible bodily disintegration of Charles IX. Moreover, as I have already mentioned, she exhorts Elizabeth to “hunt” the Catholics, deploying the same language of predation that she used to describe the Catholic persecution of Protestants in France. Ironically, then, she counsels Elizabeth to mirror Charles IX’s preventive strike against the Huguenots in ordering the execution of Coligny and other leaders on the eve of St. Bartholomew. To this end, Dowriche affirms the retributive justice of the Old Testament, deploying as her first example the fate of Abimelech:

Verse

Verse For wicked King Abimelech who was content to kill. His seuentie brothers all the kingdome for to haue: From iust reuenge he could not long his cursed carkasse saue. For from a womans hand a milstone downe was sent. Frõ off a wall: which with the weight his brain pan al to rent. And after by his Page was thrust vnto the heart. With sword, lest as a womãs stroke his glory shuld subuert. (35–35^v)

This unnamed woman serves as an exemplum for both Dowriche and Elizabeth as bringers of justice—the former as the author of The French Historie and the latter as the Protestant ruler whose responsibility, according to Dowriche, is to avenge the plight of the Huguenots. Abimelech’s attempt to occlude the role of the “womans hand” in bringing about his death by having his page stab him, calls attention to her unusual role as the purveyer of violence––considered to be so humiliating by Abimelech. Unlike Christine de Pizan who called for women to take on the role of mediators in healing civil divisions, Dowriche justifies the necessity of women as agents of violence; she elsewhere affirms civil war because Christ initiated the Protestant Reformation as a civil war against Catholicism. Thus, rather than advocating for national unity and peace (and, by implication, religious toleration), Dowriche exemplifies the less expected or usual case of a woman as the agent—rather than the victim—of violence, to which Cecile Dauphin and Arlette Farge called attention.

The prospect of the French connection is precisely what led Philip Sidney and others to fear the rise of tyranny in England.²⁶ From Dowriche’s own perspective and that of many of her contemporaries, the fate of Stubbs already inscribes the tyrant’s wrath on the body of the subject. Yet as Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish, the exercise of the monarch’s overwhelming power can have unintended effects, eliciting sympathy for its victim. The general support of Stubbs’ position is evidenced by the jury’s refusal to convict him and the judge’s refusal to charge him with conspiring to excite sedition—for which he was removed from the bench and imprisoned. Stubbs was moreover vindicated by his continued and active presence in public life: he was returned as an MP serving on various parliamentary committees (Mears). Dowriche represents the rending of the subject’s body by tyrants as a synecdoche for the dismemberment of the body politic in civil war. Elizabeth’s rhetoric of compassion, mercy, and maternal concern for her subjects was belied by her cruelty and failure to fulfill her promises to aid the Protestants; her violence and hypocrisy resemble those of Charles, whom Dowriche indicts in her poem. Through her celebration of Burgaeus and others who refused to obey tyrants even at the cost of their lives, Dowriche counters the dominant ideology of passive obedience and articulates a stance that is indebted to resistance theory, which in England was closely identified with Catholics rather than Protestants (see Holmes). In taking this anti-tyrannical stance, Dowriche is in accord with Protestant treatises that were published in the wake of St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, such as Hotman’s Francogallia, which, while not mentioning the Massacre or Charles IX, argued that monarchical power needed to be restrained lest it falls into tyranny (155). Dowriche bases her prerogative to speak out to Elizabeth on her repeated statements that God lends monarchs their sovereignty as well as men and women their lives, thereby leveling monarch and subjects as both creatures of God.

Although at the conclusion of The French Historie Dowriche returns to the device of a French pilgrim speaking to the Englishman, she firmly claims her poem itself as “this worke of mine” in asking Christ to bless her creation and affixing her name as “Anna Dowriche,” using the form of her name that most directly recalls the outspoken counselor Annas Burgaeus (37^v). While she declines to base her evaluation of Elizabeth on gender solidarity, and is by no means uncritically celebratory of her, the gender of her sovereign (as well as that of Catherine de’ Medici) appears to have emboldened Dowriche to assume the role of a female counselor, modeling herself after male counselors such as Coligny and Burgaeus. In addition, she found legitimation for assuming this role through her family’s long-standing involvement in counsel as Members of Parliament, the sense of urgency arising from what was perceived as the continuing Catholic threat in England and Elizabeth’s tyrannical disregard of her Protestant subjects, as well as Dowriche’s own learning and ability as a writer. Moreover, she establishes her virtue and moral authority through her counsel to Pearse in the prefatory poem, implicitly contrasting her legitimacy as a counselor to that of Catherine de’ Medici whom she represents as being manipulated, like Eve, by Satan.²⁷

In the dedication to Pearse, she refers to Erasmus’ adage, “Sileni Alcibiades,” to which Thomas More alluded in the Utopia (1516):

if you consider the matter, I assure you it is most excellent and well worth the reading: but if you weigh the manner, I confesse it is base & scarce worth the seeing. This is therefore my desire; that the simple attire of this outward forme, maie not discourage you from seeking the comfortable tast of the inward substance. (A2)

In calling attention to the discrepancy and contradiction between the outside and the inside, and in deliberately deploying poetical devices such as the dream vision to frame her work and the ubi sunt topos (O noble France … / … / Where is thy vernant hiew? Thy fresh and flowring fame? [1]), Dowriche translates Timme’s history into literature, a genre that may have ceded history’s truth claim but was more useful for Dowriche who took cover under literature’s indirection. She acknowledges in her preface that not only did she select the episodes she translated from Timme, but also “amplified” what she found there––most notably in creating lengthy speeches for her characters, as Thucydides had done earlier (and in this, she may be following the example provided by Nicolls’ translation). In self-consciously having her characters speak of themselves as actors on the stage, she at once recalls Elizabeth’s well-known statement to Parliament—“we princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed” (194)—and contemporary history plays, for example, by Shakespeare, that represented monarchs and their officials through their speeches.

Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Gouernour (1531) excuses Homer’s “leasings”—fiction or lies—for their value in advancing counsel, by contrast to the “leasings” he condemned when excoriating fraud and deceit perpetrated by the ruler.²⁸ Dowriche, too, distinguishes the imaginative amplification of history as advancing the aim of counsel from the unscrupulous fraud practiced by tyrannical rulers such as the French kings, and even Elizabeth herself, against their unsuspecting and vulnerable subjects. While acknowledging her imaginative amplifications, she, as a Protestant, at the same time lays claim to a more important “truth ”—moral truth and doctrinal truth—in repeatedly labeling the Catholic tyrants as “false.”

Enabled by the presence of strong female monarchs on both sides of the Channel, Dowriche writes as a female counselor in the tradition of Christine de Pizan, and contemporaneously with the higher-born Mary Sidney, who also wrote to counsel Elizabeth. I will now turn to Mary Sidney’s translations of French texts––published a year after Dowriche’s French Historie––as works that obliquely call attention to the monarch’s responsibility in allowing the country to fall into disorder. In her Antonius, Sidney alters Robert Garnier’s original to make Cleopatra a figure for Elizabeth, constructing a more critical representation of the still-reigning Elizabeth than later Jacobean representations (most notably Shakespeare’s Cleopatra), because it suggests that her rule was marred by passion.

Mary Sidney’s Translations as Political Writing

Sir Edward Denny, the husband of Anne Dowriche’s niece Margaret Denny, was a friend of Philip Sidney, and Julie Sampson states that “it is possible that [Mary Sidney] and Anne were acquaintances and that there were textual links in their writings” (141n). Though the two women were separated by rank, Sidney and Dowriche shared enabling relationships with their brothers. According to Sidney’s editors, “[s]he seems to have begun her literary work to honour her brother”; and her position “as a Sidney, and as an avatar for her brother, gave her voice, as many who sought her patronage recognized” (Hannay, Kinnamon, Brennan, 1:6, 25). Indeed, Maureen Quilligan’s statement concerning Sidney—“[a]llying herself with a male family member, insisting on her sibling status, the female can speak” (Incest, 120)—can apply equally to Dowriche.²⁹ The well-known portrait by Simon van de Passe identifies the subject as “Sidney” and not by her married name, “Herbert” (Fig. 2.4). Not only did Philip write the Arcadia when he resided with Mary at Wilton, dedicating the work to his sister, but she became its editor after his death in 1586. Moreover, she mourned his death in “To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney” and completed his paraphrase of the Psalms .

Fig. 2.4

Simon van de Passe (c.1595–1647). Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke, holding open a volume of David’s Psalms , 1618. Engraving. 17.8 × 10.8 cm. 1959.38.136. Gift of John Hay Whitney. Yale University Art Gallery. Public Domain.

Mary Sidney also published A Discourse of Life and Death, a translation of Excellent discours de la vie et de la mort (1576) by Philippe de Mornay, her brother’s close friend. Philip Sidney met Mornay in Paris in 1572 at the time of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. According to Charlotte de Mornay, Sidney was one of her husband’s “chief friends in England” when Mornay was sent there by Henri de Navarre in 1577–78. Charlotte also states that Sidney “did M. du Plessis [Mornay] the honour to translate into English his book on the ‘Truth of the Christian Religion’” and also became godfather of their daughter Elizabeth, born in 1578 (169–70). Sidney’s death cut short his work on the translation, which was completed by Arthur Golding and published as A Worke concerning the Trewness of Christian Religion (1587).

Mary Sidney’s translation of Mornay was published together in 1592 with Antonius, a translation of Marc Antoine (1578), a tragedy by the French magistrate, playwright, and royal counselor Robert Garnier (Fig. 2.5). Belying the long-held critical assumption that women’s translations were self-effacing forms of authorship, Sidney proclaimed on the title page: “Both done in English by the Countesse of Pembroke,” identifying herself by her aristocratic title rather than by her name.³⁰ In 1595, Antonius was published separately as The Tragedie of Antonie, again, with the designation, “Doone into English by the Countesse of Pembroke.” Later editions of Discourse of Life and Death were published in 1600, 1606, and 1607.³¹ Her editors state that “an important, although probably unintentional, result of printing … some of her own [works] was to help break down the stigma against print ” (21). ³² Sidney’s “French connection” from these translations can be evidenced in an engraving by Jean de Courbes that celebrates her as a contemporary Pallas Athena , with the goddess’ “mind, face, and voice”; here as in her English portrait , she is identified as “Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke,” evidencing the importance of her brother Philip for the French as well as for the English (Fig. 2.6).

Fig. 2.5

A Discourse of Life and Death. Written in French by Ph. Mornay. Antonius, A Tragedie written also in French by R. Garnier. Both done in English by the Countess of Pembroke. London: William Ponsonby, 1592. RB 46,000, title page. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Public Domain.

Fig. 2.6

Jean de Courbes (b. 1592–active 1630). Mary Sidney Herbert, countess of Pembroke, 1624. Line engraving. 150 × 92 mm. 7754i. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain.

Mornay was a leader of the Huguenots in France and called “the Pope of the Huguenots”; he served as an advisor to Henri IV before his conversion to Catholicism. He was the author of the anonymously published Vindiciae, contra tyrannos (1579), which justified popular resistance against tyrants.³³ Mornay and his wife, Charlotte, became friends with Mary Sidney during their sojourn in London. Mornay wrote his Excellent discours at the request of Charlotte before they were married, and addresses her as his sister in the dedication; this dedication of a work by a brother to a sister of course carried resonances for Sidney, though she translates neither the dedication nor the poem Mornay addressed to Charlotte.

The text belongs to the genre of ars moriendi, stating, for example, “what evill is there in death, that we should so much eschue it? Nay what evill is there not in life? and what good is there not in death?” (230); and “Death … is the issue of our miseries and entraunce of the porte where wee shall ride in safetie from all windes” (247).³⁴ Patricia Phillippy points out the relevance of the text for Sidney, who had experienced the deaths of her three-year-old daughter in 1584 and her father, mother, and brother in 1586 (222).³⁵ Yet along with statements of contemptus mundi—such as, that we are all on a voyage to death from the moment of our birth—Sidney’s translation of Mornay includes criticisms of the life of the courtier: “You see them appareled in purple, in scarlet, and in cloth of gould: … But men know not how heavy an ounce of that vaine honor weighes, … and how dearely they pay for an ell of those riche stuffes.” The life of the courtier is to be avoided because it is in service of “the pleasure of a Prince, that more regards a hundred perches of ground on his neighbours frontiers, then the lives of a hundred thousand such as he.” A courtier is “foolish to thinke himself in honor with him, that makes so litle reckening to loose him for a thing of no worth.”³⁶ This implicit criticism of the monarch becomes explicit when Sidney’s Mornay goes on to say that he “lov[es] none but himself, and thinking every one made, but to serve, and please him” (235). Kings such as Pyrrhus and Alexander are guilty of limitless ambition: “till God laughing at their vaine purposes, … thunderstriketh all this presumption, breaking in shivers their scepters in their hands, and oftentimes intrapping them in their owne crownes” (240). To those who fear not death, “threatnings of tyrants are to him promises,” and “the most mortall woundes can make him but immortall” (253). Such statements, together with “Thinke we to banish him his country? He knows he hath a country other-where, whence wee cannot banish him” (252), are significant for Sidney in light of her brother Philip’s conflict with Elizabeth, his exile from court following his criticism of the French match, and the “mortall woundes” he received at Zutphen. Moreover, as David Norbrook points out, Philip’s Arcadia associates “courtly ceremonial … with violence and imprisonment rather than delight” (Poetry and Politics, 95).

Mornay also calls attention to the relationship between the macrocosm of civil war and the microcosm of self-division: “when we are out of these externall warres and troubles, we finde greater civill warre within our selves: the flesh against the spirite, passion against reason, earth against heaven” (242); the “Sinon within” constitutes the “separation” and “perpetuall contention” between the spirit and the flesh (243). The imbrication of civil wars (which became external wars by the involvement of European powers such as Spain) that Mornay experienced firsthand and the “warres within our selves” links this text to Garnier’s Antonius that follows Mornay’s Discourse in Sidney’s volume of translations.³⁷

Garnier, the author of Marc Antoine, was, in contrast with Mornay, a Catholic, though he too was deeply involved in French politics; a magistrate, he is identified as “conseiller du roy” on the title page of his works. His dramatic output, which takes as its subject the civil wars in Rome, closely tracks the course of the French religious wars: his first play, Porcie (1568) was published after the Second War of Religion; Cornélie (1574) appeared after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Fourth War of Religion; and Marc Antoine (1578) followed the Sixth War of Religion (Lebègue, 14). In addition, Antigone (1580), which I discussed in the Introduction, takes as its subject the fratricidal war over Thebes between Eteocles and Polyneices.

In the epistle dedicatory to Guy de Faur, seigneur de Pibrac—a poet, magistrate, and diplomat—prefacing Marc Antoine, Garnier calls attention to the correspondence between the civil wars in Rome and France: “But above all, to whom but to you—who have held in such horror our dissensions and the unhappy troubles of this Kingdom—should be addressed the tragic representations of the civil wars of Rome” (Oeuvres, 1:165). While Alexander Witherspoon contends that Garnier appealed to Sidney because of his targeting an “educated and cultured” audience, for his “intellectual superiority,” and for “moral and philosophic” sentiments (78, 82), I suggest that Garnier’s political focus on civil war was in fact of paramount importance in her choosing to translate Marc Antoine.³⁸

As a case in point, in Act IV of Antonius, the chorus of Roman soldiers laments, “Shall ever civile bate / gnaw and devour our state? / Shall never we this blade, / Our bloud hath bloudie made, / Lay downe? … / Our hands shall we not rest / To bathe in our owne brest?” (1731–35, 1739–41). This graphic description of civil war, based on Garnier’s own experiences of the religious civil wars, functions as a warning in Sidney’s translation, in the context of the English situation in the 1590s.³⁹ As in Mornay’s text, the emphasis, however, is on a psychological “civil war” : the “perpetual contention” between Cleopatra’s passion and her subjects, who exhort her to fulfill her duties as ruler. Yet this civil war is not limited to the psychological level but extends to represent the political conflict between ruler and subjects. In fact, the subjects suffer the consequences of actual, rather than metaphorical war: as the Chorus laments, “Warre and warres bitter cheare / Now long time with us staie, / … / Our harmse worse dayly growe” (I.231–32, 235).

At the beginning of Act II, Philostratus, identified in the dramatis personae as “a Philosopher,” in his only but lengthy speech, calls attention to the plight of the “poore people tir’de with ceaseles plaints,” exhorting them to “[w]ith tearse and sighes make mournfull sacrifice” in order to “soften Caesar and him piteous make / To us, his pray” (275–79).⁴⁰ He attributes their desperate condition to “Love, love… [that] / Hath lost this Realme inflamed with his fire,” and which “hath ashes made our townes. / … / … with deaths our lands have fill’d” (283–84, 286, 288). This generalized, allegorical invocation of the destructiveness of Love—akin to Spenser’s in The Masque of Cupid (III.xii)—is followed by the example of “Priams Sonne,” Paris, responsible for the destruction of “Trojan towers” and the clogging of “redd Scamander” by the dead (290, 292, 295). Even though Philostratus never names Cleopatra, it is nevertheless clear that her dereliction of her duty as ruler is responsible for the subjugation of Egypt by Rome : “So are we in the mercy of our foes: / And we hencefoorth obedient must become / To lawes of them who have us overcome” (322–25).

Yet in contrast with Antonie, who at the beginning of the play blames Cleopatra for his plight, Cleopatra unequivocally and repeatedly takes responsibility: “I am sole cause: I did it, only I” (II.455); “this was not his offence, but mine” (459). Although her servant Charmian provides her with excuses, such as the “rigour of … destinie” and the “power [of gods] on mens affaires,” Cleopatra forthrightly insists on her free will: “Such was my errour and obstinacie” (474, 478, 475). However, Cleopatra’s insistence on her passion for Antonie that overrides all else—“[h]e is my selfe” (595)—is cast in a critical light by her subjects’ exhortations to fulfill her responsibilities as Egypt’s sovereign. The “female heroism” that Mary Ellen Lamb sees can characterize Cleopatra if she is a surrogate for Mary Sidney; her steadfast loyalty to Antonie—“I am with thee, be it thy worthy soule / Lodge in my brest” (546–47)—can represent Sidney’s own loyalty to her brother Philip. Yet as sovereigns, Cleopatra—and Elizabeth—cannot be simply admired for their steadfastness to those they love, for sovereigns have responsibilities to their subjects that differentiate their duties from those of their subjects. Tina Krontiris suggests that in Cleopatra, the “idealist and the realist aspects come into conflict. The play’s sympathy for the woman (the lover) clashes with its criticism of Cleopatra the ruler,” though she concludes, “this conflict is not reconciled, or even clearly focused.”⁴¹ As I have already mentioned in my discussion of Dowriche, Philip Sidney wrote to counsel Elizabeth against the French match, arousing her ire, and John Stubbs claimed that in proposing to marry Anjou, the queen’s passion was clouding her reason . By contrast with Lamb and Krontiris, Margaret Hannay argues that Sidney’s Antonius and Daniel’s Cleopatra both “stress the dangers of privileging private passion over public duty and warn of civil tumult” (Philip’s Phoenix, 129).⁴² Following Hannay’s reading that considers Mary Sidney to be continuing in the admonitory tradition of her brother Philip (“Princes”),⁴³ I suggest that Sidney’s criticism of the queen is in line with that expressed by Dowriche and Stubbs.

These contradictory interpretations of Cleopatra—as a constant lover and an exemplar of female heroism or as a sovereign who falls short of her public duty—indicate that Cleopatra can stand for either Sidney herself or Elizabeth, or both.⁴⁴ In fact, Margaret Ferguson has argued that the lines in which Cleopatra “hearing sceptered kings embassadors / Answer to eache in his owne language make” (731–32) can refer “to Sidney herself, as a skilled translator,” or “to Queen Elizabeth whose skill in languages and diplomacy was famous.”⁴⁵ Such fluidity and uncertainty of the analogy enables Sidney’s political critique of Elizabeth without making herself open to censure or censorship.⁴⁶ In addition, the coexistence of the praiseworthy Cleopatra who exhibits constancy toward Antonie and the Cleopatra who, heedless of her subjects, subordinates her responsibility toward them to her love for Antonie suggests that a quality appropriate for Sidney as subject would be detrimental in Elizabeth as sovereign. Similarly, in “Even now that Care,” the dedicatory poem of the Psalm translations addressed to Elizabeth, Sidney calls attention to the graver responsibilities of the monarch in comparison to those of her subjects.

Sidney interpellates Elizabeth as David in “Even now that Care”—“For ev’n thy Rule is painted in his Raigne” (1:102, l.65)—while Samuel Daniel praises Sidney as David in his Tragedie of Cleopatra (1594) that he wrote under her patronage: “Those Hymnes which thou dost consecrate to heauen, / Which Israels Singer to his God did frame” (3:25). This double identification of David as both Elizabeth and Sidney—though not in the same work—provides another instance in which Elizabeth and Sidney share the same prototype and example. Sidney’s praise of Elizabeth by her comparison to David enables her to liken his victory over the Philistines to Elizabeth’s defeat of the Spanish Armada. Though the conflict with Catholic Spain is far from over and Sidney’s intent in the poem is to exhort Elizabeth to continued militancy, she escapes the danger of proffering presumptuous advice by strategically praising Elizabeth’s past achievements which cannot but be unobjectionable.⁴⁷

Annabel Patterson has shown that the delicate negotiation between author and censor enables texts to escape censorship.⁴⁸ In the case of Antonius, the negotiation functions in a number of different ways. First and foremost, the status of Sidney’s work as a translation provides her with important “plausible deniability” of any seditious intent. Indeed, in crafting her translation, Sidney notably softens Garnier’s graphic language of embodiment in Cleopatra’s closing speeches, substituting “breast” for “entrailles” and “rise” and “flow” for “vomir.”⁴⁹ In addition, I have suggested that the uncertainty of the topical reference to Cleopatra and the ambiguity of her character—as exemplifying female heroism or neglect of public duty—goes far toward deflecting the possible accusation that she represented Elizabeth in a less than favorable light. In advancing the useful concept of the “unease of topicality,” Leah Marcus states, “the [topical] meanings generated by a given text may well be multiple or self-canceling, or both. Instead of striving for a single holistic interpretation of a text, we may find ourselves marking out a range of possibilities or identifying nexuses of contradiction” (37–38).⁵⁰

Mornay’s text that precedes Antonius embeds monarchical criticism within a text whose overt message is ars moriendi and contemptus mundi. While the juxtaposition of these texts appears to affirm Cleopatra’s desire to die along with Antony, I suggest that the criticism of the prince’s capricious treatment of his courtiers in Mornay’s text could be used as a key to the interpretation of the second which indicts rulers who do not fulfill their responsibilities to their subjects.⁵¹ Finally, Sidney’s ingenious balancing of the radical Huguenot author with another who supported the Catholic League (though he was earlier a Protestant) parallels the ambiguity of Cleopatra’s character and renders uncertain the political position from which Sidney writes. ⁵²

Considering Samuel Daniel’s Tragedie of Cleopatra (1594), written under the patronage of Sidney, to be a collaborative work between author and patron would support this reading of Sidney’s Antonius. Stéphanie de Genlis’ history of women writers included female patrons—some who were not themselves actual authors, unlike Sidney—based on an understanding of the role of the patron as a collaborator of the author (see Chapter 6). More recently, Julie Crawford’s Mediatrix has argued for the central role women patrons played in the production of texts in early modern England. The dedicatory poem that prefaces the play provides ample evidence that Daniel considered his relationship with Sidney as a collaborative one. He begins by praising his patron, who “impose[d]” the “labor” of writing the play and “[w]hose influence did predominate [his] Muse”; who raised him from the “low repose” of Delia—in which he “plaind mine owne vnrest”—“to sing of State, and tragicke notes to frame” in Cleopatra (3:23).⁵³ By announcing his play as a complement to her Antonius in lines that recall the creation of Adam and Eve, Daniel emphasizes the collaborative nature of their authorship in fashioning the two plays: “Madam, had not thy well grac’d Antony, / (Who all alone hauing remained long,) / Requir’d his Cleopatras company” (3:24). In the first edition, because Sidney is herself an author, Daniel revises the conventional representation of poets affording immortality to their patrons through their works by asserting that he will gain immortality through the work dedicated to her: “Then though I die, I cannot yet die all; / But still the better part of me will liue, / Deck’t and adorned with thy sacred name.” However, in the 1623 edition, he revises the final line to “And in that part will liue thy reuerent name” (3:25), thus reverting to the conventional assertion of poets claiming to bestow fame on their patrons. Yet even the second version emphasizes the unusually close and reciprocal relationship between Daniel the author and Sidney the patron (and author). Accordingly, he praises her own work as a “monument,” which even after “Wilton lies low leuell’d with the ground: / … cannot be ouerthrown” (3:26), alluding not only to Cleopatra’s “monument” but also to Horace’s well-known ode “Exegi monumentum” (3.30), in which he boasts of his own poetic immortality.

Elizabeth enters his dedication covertly in a comparison of Sidney to David (“Israels Singer”)—in allusion to her translation of the Psalms (“Those Hymnes which thou doost consecrate to heauen”): here Daniel alludes to Sidney’s own comparison of Elizabeth to David. Thus Daniel compares David as poet to Sidney, while Sidney’s extensive comparison of David to Elizabeth emphasizes their shared role as monarchs: “A King should onely to a Queene be sent” (103, l.53). Daniel’s transfer of the tenor of the comparison from Elizabeth to Sidney suggests that Sidney as a poet has the ability to accord fame to Elizabeth, occluding the queen’s own role as poet, which Sidney had acknowledged, along with her role as monarch to be praised by poets, in the final chiastic line of “Even now that Care”: “Sing what God doth, and doo what men may sing” (104, l.96). Similarly, Daniel praises Sidney’s works as deserving to be translated into other languages, so that “declined Italy / … / Might learne of thee, their notes to purifie” and they might “teach to Rheyne, to Loyre, and Rhodanus, / Our accents, and the wonders of our Land, / That they might all admire and honour vs.” However, and by contrast, Daniel appears to subordinate Elizabeth as a poet to the authors her age produced: “great Sydney and our Spencer … / … / May shew what great Elizaes raigne hath bred. / What musicke in the kingdome of her peace, / Hath now beene made to her, and by her might, / Whereby her glorious name shall neuer cease” (3:27). The juxtaposition of Sidney and Elizabeth through the mediating comparison with David also resonates with Sidney’s bold association of Cleopatra with both Elizabeth and herself in Antonius.⁵⁴

Daniel’s play, which does not include Antony (because it takes place after his death), pits Cleopatra directly against the Chorus, so that the Chorus in Act IV, critical of Cleopatra for “mak[ing] us prey of disordered lust,” repeatedly revises her assertion of “honour” as “license, lust, and riot” (3:76). In Sidney’s version, Cleopatra’s neglect of her subjects may have been somewhat mitigated by her steely constancy, but Samuel’s licentious Cleopatra has no redeeming qualities.⁵⁵ The Chorus’ assessment is supported by the “Philosophers” Philostratus and Arius. This repeated demystification of the monarch’s actions as “momentary pleasures, fugitive delights,” results in the Chorus advocating for a “revolution,” changing the ruler and purging the world of inequality (3:42, 61). Paulina Kewes suggests that Daniel’s negative representation of Cleopatra amounts to severe criticism of Elizabeth, though “there is no question here about the viability of the monarchy” (263).⁵⁶ Yet in alluding to and supporting Philip Sidney’s critique of the lustful Basileus—whose Greek name means “king”—in the Arcadia, Daniel’s Cleopatra carries political implications that go far beyond topical, contemporary matters; it functions as a work of political theory, anatomizing tyranny. In this respect, the play has affinities with Mornay ’s Vindicae, contra tyrannos, Fulke Greville’s A Treatise on Monarchy (pub. 1670), which presented a pessimistic idea of monarchy that declines into tyranny due to the “frailty” of subjects, and his Tragedy of Mustapha (1609), which concerned itself with tyranny and resistance (1:56–57).⁵⁷

A year after he published Cleopatra, Daniel published The First Fowre Bookes of the ciuile wars between the two houses of Lancaster and Yorke (1595), dedicated to Charles Mountjoy, in which he “sing[s] of civil wars, tumults broiles and bloody factions” (2:9).⁵⁸ Daniel presents the anatomy of civil war in terms that recall Christine de Pizan: “Upon themselves, turne back their conquering hand: / Kin their kin, brother the brother foyles. / Like Ensignes all gainst like Ensignes band / Bowes against Bowes, Crowne against the crowne / Whilst all pretending right, all right throwen downe” (2:9–10). As the last line suggests, Daniel traces the responsibility for the Wars of the Roses to both the inadequacy of the ruler (Richard II) and the illegitimacy of the usurper (Bolingbroke), though he considers the latter to be more blameworthy.⁵⁹ Through this analysis he calls attention to the present danger of civil war, in the threatened conflict between Elizabeth and Essex.⁶⁰ Just as he emphasized in Cleopatra the consequences of the ruler’s actions from the perspective of the subjects, so here he focuses on the effect of civil war on women, by giving Richard II’s queen Isabella a prominent speaking role—even greater than Shakespeare did in Richard II, who perhaps followed Daniel’s example. In the 1609 edition of The ciuile wars betweene the howses of Lancaster and Yorke, which he dedicated to “the Lady Marie, Countesse Dowager of Pembrook,” Daniel addresses his female readers in calling attention to his portrayal of Isabella, which he acknowledges may not suit her “14 yeares” (2:7). Unlike Christine de Pizan, however, Daniel does not envision the queen consort Isabella as a potential mediator, although her loyalty to her husband—“Our state being one, let vs not part our care” (2:86)—serves as a foil to an indictment of the division in the body politic. Thus Daniel’s account of the Wars of the Roses, which he states in his 1609 dedicatory letter “was long since undertaken … with a purpose, to shewe the deformities of Ciuile Dissension” (2:6), is in keeping not only with his Cleopatra, published only the year before the First Fowre Books, but also with Sidney’s Antonius, in warning against the danger of civil war .

Mary Sidney, like Anne Dowriche, deployed translations of French texts arising from the religious wars in France to counsel Elizabeth. Higher born than Dowriche and more proximate to Elizabeth, Sidney’s shadowing of Elizabeth through Cleopatra goes beyond Dowriche’s warning to launch a carefully couched critique of the queen’s rule. Sidney took care to conceal her critique and maintain deniability of seditious intent through the status of her text as a translation of a play whose author switched sides in the French Wars of Religion. Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra, a continuation of his patron’s Antonius, confirms Sidney’s critique of Elizabeth as Cleopatra; his verse chronicle of the civil wars in England proffers a trenchant analysis of civil war that closely parallels that of Christine de Pizan.

Both Dowriche and Sidney, unprecedented among English women writers in venturing to address political subjects explicitly, place themselves in the tradition of earlier male counselors such as Sir John Fortescue (De laudibus legum Angliae [wr. 1468–71)] and Sir Thomas Smith (De republica Anglorum [wr. 1562–65; pub. 1583]), whose political writings compared England to France. These women writers use the French subject (in Dowriche’s case) and translation from a French text (in Sidney’s case) to enable their intervention in the prestigious but hitherto exclusively male domain of political writing.

Elizabeth Cary, the French Connection, and the Politics of Confessional Division

Although Mary Sidney was a committed Protestant and Elizabeth Cary converted to Catholicism, Cary has been considered the heir to Sidney in publishing her closet drama, The Tragedie of Mariam, the Faire Queene of Jewry (1613). Another significant connection that has not been remarked upon is that just as Sidney translated Philippe de Mornay, so Cary translated cardinal Jacques Davy du Perron’s Reply to James I. Du Perron had been a determined adversary of Mornay’s; he challenged Mornay’s treatise against the Eucharist by accusing him of using false citations and the two engaged in a public “conference” at Fontainebleau presided over by Henri IV in which du Perron was considered to have bested Mornay.⁶¹ The English translation of an anonymous account from Mornay’s perspective, A discourse of the Conference Holden before the French King at Fontain-Bleau, betweene the L. Bishop of Eureux, and Munsieur de Plessis L. of Mornay, the 4. of May 1600 (1600) claimed that the conference was organized “to give the Lord of Eureux whatsoeuer advantage he might desire: and to deny the said Lord of Plesis of whatsoeuer Iustice he could require” (8); the penultimate sentence of the work constitutes an ominous warning to Henri IV, whom Mornay helped place on the throne and who publicly supported his adversary, du Perron: “But let his Maiesty in discretion, take order that this sparke, cast out at aduenture, and husbanded contrary to his meaning, by the enemies of quietness, proceed not to a fire of sedition among his people” (56).⁶²

Du Perron challenged not only Mornay and Henri IV, but also James, for his assertion of monarchical prerogative, which he wrote in response to du Perron and published in French in 1615. The English translation was published the following year as A Remonstrance for the Right of Kings, and the Independence of their Crownes, against an Oration of the Most Illvstriovs Card of Perron, Pronovnced in the chamber of the Third Estate. Ian. 15. 1615 and included in James’ complete works.⁶³ James undertakes to “rip vp” du Perron’s “Oration tending to the reproch of Kings, and the subuersion of kingdoms,” asserting the divine right of kings : “[f ]or well I wot vnto what sublimitie the Scripture hath exalted Kings, when it styles them Gods” (174). Du Perron’s response remained in manuscript at his death, but was published in 1620 and its first part was translated by Cary and published in Douai in 1630 (Fig. 2.7).⁶⁴ Like Cary, du Perron was a convert to Catholicism, and she included his portrait and a poem addressed to him in the presentation copy to the dedicatee, Henrietta Maria—to whom she also targeted the History of Edward II, as I will be arguing (Fig. 2.8). The characterization of du Perron below his portrait as the “matchlesse terrour of the new-found Sect” and the “translatesse”’s aim “[t]o recommend this work to eu’rie hand / Whose braine it fitts” along with the final exhortation to her readers, “Let men but reade, and understand; and liue,” underscore the centrality of confessional division and the promotion of Catholicism in Cary’s project. Similarly, the dedicatory poem in manuscript facing the printed dedication calls attention to the queen’s French origin and her Catholicism: her “pious zealous hart” has attracted the Catholic author (as embodied in Cary’s translation of his work) to be “translated” from France to England, just as the queen herself has been. Moreover, Cary praises Henrietta Maria as the sister of the French king Louis XIII, rather than as the wife of the English king Charles I (Fig. 2.9).⁶⁵ In fact, she pointedly refrains from mentioning Charles, the son of James, to whom du Perron addressed his work. In line with this occlusion, the Reply concludes by promoting the English monarch’ s submission to the papacy, which “could bring noe more dimunition to their temporall glory, then the submission of Alexander the great brought to him when he prostrated himself before the high Priest of the Iewish lawe” and that “it is himself [the king] as S. PAVL saith, that he [the pope] desires, and not the things that belong to him” (464). Although Gunilla Florby suggests that Cary’s translation of du Perron sought to “build bridges” between Catholic and Protestant, the proposed reconciliation is predicated upon the king’s acceptance of papal supremacy—despite the pope’s promise that he will not encroach upon the monarch’s temporal authority.⁶⁶ Thus Cary’s du Perron challenges James ’ claim of absolute authority over his subjects expressed in his demand that they submit to the Oath of Allegiance (1606), in which they swore obedience to the king over the pope. In ordering the destruction of the copies smuggled into England, the authorities made evident their understanding of this text as a challenge to monarchical authority, rather than as a proposal for reconciliation.

Fig. 2.7

[Elizabeth Cary, trans.] The Reply of the Most Illvstriovs Cardinall of Perron to the ansvveare of the most excellent King of Great Britaine. Douai: Martin Bogart, 1630. ME65 D925 + R4G 1630, title page. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Author photo. Public Domain.

Fig. 2.8

Portrait of Jacques Davy du Perron; “Translatesse to the Author.” ME65 D925 + R4G 1630. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Author photo. Public Domain.

Fig. 2.9

Manuscript dedication to Henrietta Maria, preceding the printed dedication. ME65 D925 + R4G 1630. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Author photo. Public Domain.

Despite writing from opposing sides of the confessional divide, both Sidney and Cary translated works that challenge claims of monarchical absolutism. While Sidney and Dowriche feared the ascendancy of Catholicism as a source of internal conflict that they figured as civil war—in Rome and France—Cary had personally experienced the acute conflict between confessions when she converted to Catholicism and came under pressure from both her husband and James I, as described in her Life (131–36). Another important parallel not only with Sidney but also with Dowriche is that Cary too sought to provide political counsel to the queen, in her case, Henrietta Maria, to whom she dedicated The History of Edward II, as she had du Perron’s Reply (see Britland, “Kings are but Men”).⁶⁷ Cary counsels Henrietta Maria, who will assume a prominent role in the English Civil Wars, as I will discuss in Chapter 3, through the negative example of Isabel, the French queen of Edward II, who waged civil war against her husband. She thereby uses a strategy strikingly similar to that of Dowriche, who exhorts Elizabeth through the negative example of Catherine de’ Medici. Thus, Dowriche and Cary affirm women’s capability to act as counselors, especially to female monarchs or consorts; and their authors both turn to history as a proper vehicle of counsel. Following Foucault , who argued for the close relationship between the notion of counsel and the history of political thought (see Introduction), I suggest that Cary intends the History as at once a work of political counsel and an intervention in the history of political thought. In this, she joins her contemporary Francis Bacon, who sent the manuscript of The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622) to James I and dedicated the published version to the future Charles I. Bacon’s reflections on the relationship between the monarch and his subjects and his engagement with Machiavelli find parallels in Cary’s History.

The History of Edward II, composed in 1627, remained in manuscript until its publication in 1680 during the Exclusion Crisis—when the specter of another civil war hung over England—under the initials E. F., for Elizabeth Falkland.⁶⁸ (While Mariam carried the initials E. C. on the title page, Cary slyly revealed her identity by naming its dedicatee—another Elizabeth Cary, whom she addressed as her sister-in-law.) Although scholarly consensus now firmly attributes the work to Cary, the uncertainty concerning her authorship lay not only in the initial attribution of the work to her husband, Henry Cary, Viscount Falkland (c.1575–1633), but also, I suggest, in the difficulty, though not impossibility—as I will argue—of locating a gendered, female author in the text. This difficulty is exacerbated by the genres to which the text belongs: history and political thought, genres inextricably linked with one another and the most inhospitable genres for women authors in the early modern period, but which, as I have been arguing, are taken up by women during times of civil war or internecine division.⁶⁹ Barbara Lewalski has shown that Cary uses historians such as Thucydides, Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus (203); I propose to demonstrate that Cary, in addition, engages political theorists such as Christine de Pizan and Machiavelli as well as the metaphor of the body politic and resistance theory, both Catholic and Protestant. In so doing, I will suggest that Cary’s History of Edward II represents an exemplary instance of an intervention by a woman in the history of political thought.⁷⁰ The publication of Cary’s History in 1680 during the Exclusion Crisis when monarchical prerogative was again under debate and Charles II was under attack for ceding too much power to his mistresses (as Edward II was criticized for being under the sway of his favorites) indicates that its publisher, though not crediting Cary as author, and referring to the author as a “Gentleman” (A2), considered it an effective intervention in the contemporary situation of political conflict (Fig. 2.10).

Fig. 2.10

The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II. London: J.C. for Charles Harper, Samuel Crouch, and Thomas Fox, 1680. Case folio E5.E251, frontispiece and title page. Newberry Library. Author photo. Public Domain.

In order to achieve this more expansive understanding of the history of political thought, Cary’s text can be fruitfully placed in the context of political theory in England as well as France, to which she maintained a close connection. While Cary’s gendered critique of the hierarchical metaphor of the body politic parallels that in Christine de Pizan’s Book of the Body Politic, she revises Machiavelli’s The Prince by representing a female ruler, Isabel, as exemplifying virtù. At the same time, she follows Machiavelli’s Discourses in her focus on and characterization of the commons and its relation to the monarch. Cary also belongs in the tradition of English political thought that advances limited monarchy, exemplified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, as well as of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English Catholic and French Protestant resistance theory, advanced by Robert Parsons and Philippe de Mornay’s Vindiciae, contra tyrannos, which saw many editions and translations between 1579 and 1660, and which was often published as a separately paginated supplement to Machiavelli’s The Prince.⁷¹

Christine de Pizan and the Gendering of Political Discourse

In declining to voice an explicitly feminine perspective, Cary’s History of Edward II resembles Christine de Pizan’s Book of the Body Politic, which was translated into English as The Body of Policye in 1524. As I have already mentioned, Cary’s History was attributed to her husband when it was first published, and the publisher’s introduction “To the Reader” praises its author, a “Gentleman … every way qualified for an Historian” for “express[ing his] Conceptions in so Masculine a Stile” (A2).⁷² Whether Cary knew Christine’s text in translation or in its French original, and although it does not carry Christine’s name as author, at the very beginning it prominently announces that it is written from the perspective of a woman: “If it is possible for vice to give birth to virtue, it pleases me in this part to be as passionate as a woman, since many men assume that the female sex does not know how to silence the abundance of their spirits” (I.1, p. 3).

Although, unlike Christine, Cary never explicitly announces herself as a woman author, we can discern a feminine subject position in her wry and deflating use of what we may call homely tropes in satirizing male political actions. For example, Cary debunks homosocial alliances among men, specifically the unassailability of the king’s favorite by comparing his followers to sheep: “Where one particular man or faction is alone exalted and onely trusted, his words, be they never so erronious, finde seldom contradiction, and his unjust actions pass unquestioned; all men under him seeking to rise by him, sing the same tune; the Flock ever bleats after the voice of the Bellweather” (75). The king himself is not exempt from this type of satiric debunking:

a Declaration is sent out to all the Kingdom, that taints the Honour of the Queen, but more [the king’s] Judgment. The Ports are all stopt up, that none should follow: a Medicine much too late; a help improper, to shut the Stable-door, the Steed being stoln: but ’tis the nature of a bought Experience, to come a day too late, the Market ended. (94)

Here the language of everyday life among the lower ranks serves to demystify kingship and further to link, on the rhetorical level, the queen with the commons. In both instances, the perspective stands outside the world of politics dominated by the king and his male courtiers, as articulated in Christine de Pizan’s characterization of her position, seulette à part.

Christine’s account of the polity also serves as an antecedent to Cary’s understanding of “equivalences” between women and male subjects, an understanding that anticipates Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s notion that subaltern groups can articulate new subject positions through an awareness of “equivalences” with others in relation to the dominant order (64–65).⁷³ Cary agrees with Christine in recognizing the importance of women and the commons as participants in the body politic; while Christine divides her attention to these two types of subjects by focusing on female rulers in the City of Ladies and on the commons in the Body Politic , Cary focuses on both types of subjects in the History of Edward II. Although the Body Politic does not explicitly address the place of women (aside from the queen) in the polity, Christine’s positive characterization of herself in linking her feminine “passion” to “courage” and “virtue” in authoring the text, together with the book’s focus on the importance of the commons, suggests the equivalence of women and the commons.

The Corporate Metaphor and Theories of Monarchy

As we saw in Chapter 1, Christine de Pizan made a striking use of the corporate metaphor as a cornerstone of her political theory. In her use of the metaphor of the body politic, Cary’s History is in line not only with Christine’s Body Politic, but also with John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (1159), which originated the metaphor. John derives his ideas from Plutarch’s fictitious “letter instructing Trajan” (65–66; see xxi)—an attribution that calls attention to the purpose of his work as political counsel.⁷⁴ John advocated the reciprocity between superiors and inferiors, even granting more importance to the lower orders: “what is to the advantage of the humbler people, that is, the multitude, is to be followed; for the fewer always submit to the numerous” (126).⁷⁵ Based on this notion of the responsibility of the monarch to his subjects, John’s Policraticus represents perhaps the most important and influential text in the English tradition of the theory of monarchy limited by law. Cary explicitly states this principle of interdependence and reciprocity between king and subject that includes within it the limitation imposed on monarchical power:

The power Majestick is or should be bounded; and there is a reciprocal correspondence, which gives the King the obedience, the subject equal right and perfect justice, by which they claim a property in his actions; if either of these fall short, or prove defective by wilful errorur, or by secret practice, the State’s in danger of a following mischief. (68)

Those kings who refuse to recognize these limits on their prerogative are tyrants. John’s recognition that “tyranny exists not among princes alone, but that everyone is a tyrant who abuses any power over those subject to him” (202), represents an important predecessor for Cary’s indictment of husbands who act as tyrants, most notably in The Tragedie of Mariam, but also in the History, where she has Isabel, as the wronged wife of Edward, speak on behalf of the nation in distress. Here she links the claims of a female subject in marriage with the claims of the subjects of the State—both oppressed by the tyrannical rule, private and public, of Edward as husband and king.⁷⁶ This equivalence of the subject’s relation to the king and the wife’s relation to the husband will be asserted by the parliamentarians in theorizing their opposition to Charles I, and by the visionary Elizabeth Poole in addressing the Council of War: “the King is your Father and husband, which you were and are to obey in the Lord, … when he forgot his Subordination to divine Faithhood and headship … thereby is the yoake taken from your necks” (6).⁷⁷ Just as parliamentarian criticism of Charles’ Personal Rule anticipates the grievances that led to the Civil War and his trial and execution, so Cary’s understanding of civil war as oikeios polemos anticipates Poole’s.

In the Body Politic, Christine elaborated on and rendered vividly concrete John’s corporate metaphor. While she follows the traditional designation of the prince as occupying the head of the political body, rather than affirm the hierarchical relationship between the head and other parts of the body, she stresses their interdependence and the indispensability of the lower parts of the body:

The varied jobs that the artisans do are necessary for the human body and it cannot do without them, just as a human body cannot go without its feet. It would shamefully and uselessly drag itself in great pain on its hands and body without them, just as … if the republic excluded laborers and artisans, it could not sustain itself. (105)

According to Kate Langdon Forhan, Christine’s addressing the people themselves in her discussion of burghers, merchants, and artisans, which goes beyond the traditional three orders of warriors, priests, and peasants, and reveals a more subtle and detailed knowledge of classes and ranks than evidenced in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (“Polycracy,” 44). Cary’s views concerning the polity are remarkably similar to Christine’s in displaying an interest in the commons and the lower orders of the commonwealth. She repeatedly emphasizes the responsibility of the king to his people, squarely laying the blame for the “sick State” on “the Head [that] is so diseased” (29). She further asserts that “when the Head is ill … all the Members suffer by his infirmity” (44).

John Fortescue’s extremely influential De laudibus legum Angliae (In Praise of the Laws of England) (wr.1460s) makes the important distinction between dominion political, the rule by the administration of many, and dominion royal, the rule according to the authority of the king.⁷⁸ Fortescue somewhat wishfully advocates the English system of a mixture of the two as superior to the royal dominion of the French, as a defense against tyranny and a better guarantor of justice.⁷⁹ Fortescue agrees with John of Salisbury in his affirmation of the laws, going so far as to say that “all human laws are sacred” (6) and that in the body politic (using John’s metaphor), the intention and interest of the people is transmitted to the head and all the members of the body, and that the king who is the head of the body politic is unable to change the laws of that body (21).

James I’s The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), which includes the most proximate use of the corporate metaphor for Cary, completely overturns the understanding of the body politic articulated by John, Christine, and Fortescue, in affirming the supremacy of the head over the rest of body:

it may very well fall out that the head will be forced to garre [entirely] cut off some rotten member ... to keepe the rest of the body in integritie: but what state the body can be in, if the head, for any infirmitie that can fall to it, be cut off, I leaue to the reader’s iudgment. (78)

James’ claims of a monarch’s independence from the power of the law and his divine right were reiterated in sermons preached before him by William Goodwin in 1614 (A sermon preached before the Kings most excellent maiestie at Woodstocke) and before Charles I by Roger Maynwaring in 1627 (Religion and alegiance: in two sermons). James took care to disseminate his claims by having both sermons published by royal command (Sommerville, Royalists, 42, 121).

It is notable, then, that Cary follows both John and Fortescue in delineating the consequences of royal rule that disregards the limits set by law and a king who flouts the common good, what John calls “public utility,” and Fortescue calls “the protection of the law, the subjects, and their bodies and goods” (22).⁸⁰ In following John, Christine (who also consistently advocated for the common good, as we saw in Chapter 1), and Fortescue, Cary boldly challenged James I ’s use of the corporate metaphor to justify absolute rule .

Theories of Resistance: Robert Parsons and Philippe de Mornay

John of Salisbury goes as far as to state that tyrants can be removed: “As the image of the deity, the prince is to be loved, venerated and respected; the tyrant, as the image of depravity, is for the most part even to be killed” (191).⁸¹ This theory of monarchomachy—William Barclay’s term for armed resistance against and deposition of the king, and in certain circumstances tyrannicide—was elaborated by advocates of Catholic resistance in Elizabethan England. For example, the Jesuit Robert Parsons’ A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594) includes a chapter titled “Of Kings lawfully chastised by their common wealthes for their misgouernment, and of the good and prosperous sucesse that God commonly hath giuen to the same,” in which he explicates how the divine approval of the assassination of evil kings is indicated by the subsequent accession of good ones, such as Edward III (following Edward II ), Henry IV and Henry V (following Richard II), and Henry VII (following Richard III).⁸² The Catholic Parsons notably does not resort to arguments concerning the authority of the pope over secular (or Protestant) rulers in order to support his advocacy of resistance. Taking up the corporate metaphor, Parsons states:

nothing is more pestilent or bringeth so general destruction and desolation as an evel Prince. And therefore as the whole body is of more authority then the only head, and may cure the head if it be out of tune, so may the wealpublique cure or cutt of their heades, if they infest the rest, seing that a body civil may have divers heades, by succession, and is not bound ever to one, as a body natural is. (38)

Since Parsons’ Conference predates James’ Trew Law by four years, James may have been writing in response to Parsons—just as James wrote in response to another Catholic, du Perron, on the issue of monarchical prerogative. In passages I have already quoted, Cary seems almost to be quoting Parsons in laying the blame for the “sick State” on the “the Head [that] is so diseased” (29), further stating that “when the Head is ill … all the Members suffer by his infirmity” (44).⁸³ Consequently, Cary’s assigning blame to the diseased head in adversely affecting the body’s members directly contradicts James’ assertion of the head’s prerogative to sever the diseased limb.

Although Mornay’s anonymously printed Vindiciae, contra tyrannos, by contrast with Parsons’ Conference, was written to justify Protestant rebellion against the Catholic monarchy of France, it also maintains that the king is the head of the civil body and the people its members. It emphasizes the collective identity of the people in allowing for the many, the universi, though not the one, the singuli, to resist the king (59–60). The argument here accords with Cary’s justifying the rebellion against Edward as authorized by the people, as well as her turning against Isabel’s own “Tyranny” in the aftermath of her rebellion against Edward, harshly criticizing the queen for overstepping her bounds. Thus, the Vindiciae, like Parsons’ Conference and Cary’s History, bases its theory of resistance entirely on the rights of the community to overthrow a wicked ruler.

Revising Machiavelli

Just as Machiavelli arguably used and revised Christine, as I demonstrated in Chapter 1, so Cary in turn used and revised Machiavelli. Indeed, early in the History, Cary signals her engagement with his political thought by criticizing Edward’s favorite Gaveston for falling short of the standard of “Machiavilian States-men,” by displaying “publick hatred” and failing to “disguise [his] aims with Vizards, which see and are not seen, while they are plotting.” Since “[h]e that will work in State, and thrive, must be reserved,” Cary ironically voices her suspicion concerning the accuracy of her source which identifies Gaveston as Italian (26). In The English Face of Machiavelli, Felix Raab has shown that the general tenor of political writing during the period 1603–40 was hostile, or at best ambivalent, to Machiavelli, with very few notable exceptions, such as Henry Wright’s The First Part of the Disquisition of Truth, Concerning Political Affaires (1616), which draws on Machiavelli as a source of sound political wisdom (90–91).⁸⁴ Needless to say, Raab’s 1964 study does not include mention of Cary’s History. Her notable departure from the prevailing negative opinion on Machiavelli may be explained partly by her Catholicism, for she does not share her contemporaries’ hostility toward Italy and Italians, associated with Catholicism.

It is neither Gaveston, nor even the wily Spencer, the favorite who succeeds Gaveston in Edward’s affections, but Isabel, Edward’s queen, who exemplifies qualities of Machiavellian statecraft—in accord with the motto Cary had inscribed on her daughter’s wedding ring, “BEE AND SEEME” (Life, 118). By contrast with Gaveston, Isabel “advances her own affairs by all means possible: She courts her Adversary with all the shews of perfect reconcilement” (90). Although Spencer suspected “her Cunning,” and although he himself was “as cunning as a Serpent,” he “findes here a female Wit that went beyond him” (90–91). For example, Cary praises Isabel’s judgment for being “so fortunate” when she “pretend[s] a Journey of Devotion to St Thomas of Canterbury; which by her jealous Overseers … is wholly unsuspected” (90). Isabel’s shrewdness enables her to prevail over Spencer, “thus over-reach’d by one weak Woman” (92). Here Isabel overcomes her disabling gender but also takes advantage of the expectation held by others to lull them into complacency: as one of her adversaries states, “Alas, what can the Queen a wandring Woman compass, that hath nor Arms, nor Means, nor Men, nor Money” (93). Spencer in fact knows Isabel to be “a Woman of a strong Brain, and stout Stomach, apt on all occasions to trip up his heels, if once she found him reeling” (86–87). By contrast, the king mistakenly and fatally believes his monarchical and patriarchal prerogatives to be unassailable: “The King, a Sovereign, Father, and a Husband, did hope these titles would be yet sufficient to guard his Life, if not preserve his Greatness; but they prov’d all too weak” (126).

Cary goes on to devote the second part of the History to the rise of Isabel, beginning with the decline of Edward: “Fortune, that triumphs in the Fall of Princes, like a Stepmother, rests not where she frowneth, till she have wholly ruin’d and o’rethrown their Power, that do precede or else oppose her Darlings” (127). This reference to the famous allegory in Chapter 25 of The Prince of Fortune as a woman who must be mastered by a Prince exhibiting virtù exemplifies Cary’s use of and departure from Machiavelli. As Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has shown, Machiavelli’s text insistently constructs political agency as masculine—in this example of the sexual mastery of Fortune, as well as in the figuration of Italy as a woman, who will welcome a redeeming prince as her lover (see esp. chaps. 2 and 7). While following Machiavelli’s gendering of Fortune, Cary’s text departs from his representation of a sexual relationship between the masculine ruler and feminine Fortune by calling her a “Stepmother” to Edward and by featuring Isabel as Fortune’s “Darling.” In thus designating Isabel as a same-sex favorite of Fortune, Cary suggests a surprising link between Isabel and Edward’s favorites Gaveston and Spencer; this link prepares the way for Cary’s severe judgment on Isabel’s exercise of power.

Although Machiavelli considers Fortune’s favors to be beneficial to a prince, Cary turns against Isabel after Fortune has shifted from favoring Edward to favoring Isabel: Cary harshly criticizes Isabel’s “Tyranny” and her departure from “her former Vertue and Goodness” when she gratuitously insults and exults over Spencer. Cary’s criticism of Isabel is not solely based on considerations of Realpolitik, as it would be if she were following The Prince, but also on ethical considerations: her ostentatious humiliation of Spencer “savour’d more of a savage, tyrannical disposition, than a judgement fit to comand, or sway the Sword of Justice … it was at best too great and deep a blemish to suit a Queen, a Woman, and a Victor” (129). The apposition of “a Woman” and “a Victor” indicates that the two terms are not in contradiction—as they would be in Machiavelli; at the same time, Cary criticizes Isabel for falling short of ethical and political standards, suggesting that the two are not in contradiction, either.⁸⁵

While Machiavelli provides a framework for Cary’s political discourse, she departs from his strict gendering of political agency as virtù by her focus on Isabel as an exemplum.⁸⁶ As I discussed in Chapter 1, in The Prince, where exempla of male rulers predominate, Machiavelli provides a brief account in Chapter 20 of Caterina Sforza as a negative example of a ruler who mistakenly trusted in a fortress rather than the good will of her own people; their alliance with Cesare Borgia made her vulnerable to his attack. The Discourses includes another brief, but memorably ambivalent account of the widowed Sforza: the “Madonna of Forlì” defended the citadel against attackers who had taken her children hostage and defied them by “expos[ing] her sexual parts to them and said she was still capable of bearing more” (III.6, p. 419). Through this striking gesture, Machiavelli at once dramatizes Sforza’s intrepidity and reduces her to the fact of her sex and her reproductive function.

While Cary, unlike Machiavelli in his treatment of Sforza, emphasizes Isabel’s ability as a ruler, she nevertheless excoriates Isabel’s lack of what she calls “female pity” (72), just as she criticized Edward’s ruthlessness when he executed his rebellious subjects. Edward’s lapse is not only an ethical error but also a political one: “So many excellent lives, so ingloriously lost, had been able to have commanded a victorious Army while it had triumpht in some forrain conquest” (73). By showing how both examples of “Tyranny” bring about political consequences and contribute to the weakening of the ruler, Cary accomplishes a complex and multifaceted gendered critique of and intervention in Machiavellian political thought.

Despite these explicit references to The Prince, the political thought developed in Cary’s History owes more to Machiavelli’s Discourses. For example, Cary criticizes Edward for following his private will and not being bound by laws or considerations of the common good, in a manner that recalls Machiavelli’s excoriation of tyrants, who “forsaking virtuous deeds, considered that princes have nought else to do but to surpass other men in extravagance, lasciviousness, and every other form of licentiousness” (I.2, p. 107). According to Machiavelli, such a state of affairs leads to a revolt of la moltitudine and i potenti; the governments thus formed are legitimate as long as the people “rule in accordance with the laws” and “subordinate their own convenience to the common advantage,” but they soon degenerate to “avarice and ambition”(I.2, p. 108).

This devolution corresponds closely to the shift in Cary’s representation of both Isabel and the masses. Cary initially affirms the worth of the commons and the legitimacy of their grievance against Edward: “The subjects sensible of the disorders of the Kingdom, and seeing into the advantage which promis’d a liberty of Reformation, make choice of such as for their wisdome and integrity deserv’d it” (58). Calling the Commons a “goodly body,” Cary affirms their judgment against Spencer: “Spencer is, pointblanck charg’d with Insolency, Injustice, Corruption, Oppression, neglect of the publick and immoderate advancement of his own particular” (61). Yet she later expresses disapproval as the people become unruly and violent: “But the actions of this same heady monster Multitude never examine the Justice, or the dependance, but are led by Passion and Opinion; which in fury leaves no Disorder inacted, and no Villainy unattempted” (122). Moreover, the “giddy Multitude, who scarcely know the civil grounds of Reason” (129), approves of Isabel’s cruel actions toward Spencer, of which Cary is harshly critical, as we have seen. Cary further excoriates Parliament for committing “Politick Treason” in deposing Edward: “It ne’re was toucht or exprest by what Law, Divine or Humane, the Subject might Depose, not an Elective King, but one that Lineally and Justly had inherited … they had just cause to restrain [him] from his Errours, but no ground or colour to deprive him of his Kingdom” (131). This apparently contradictory judgment of the commons is in keeping with Machiavelli’s similar assessment of la moltitudine: they can be either benign when bounded by laws and the common good or maleficent if driven by passionate willfulness and private ends. Interestingly, Machiavelli gives Herod’s regret for the execution of Mariam as an example of “reputedly wise princes [who] have put people to death and then wished them alive again” (I.58, p. 253)—behavior often attributed to and blamed on the masses by monarchists. Cary’s Mariam, indeed, features such a repentant Herod.

Machiavelli and Cary seek to level the monarch and the commons since both can be driven by will and unbounded by law: Cary even speaks of “Royal Passions” as “rebellious and masterless, having so unlimited a Power” whereby the monarch’s “Will becomes the Law; his hand the executioner of actions unjust and disorderly” (140). This leveling tends to subvert the hierarchy implied in the influential metaphor of the body politic. Cary’s innovation, however, lies in linking the claims of a female subject in marriage, in this case, Isabel, with the claims of the subjects. When Isabel appeals to her brother, the French king, for aid against Edward, she speaks in the name of a “distressed kingdom,” emphasizing that “tis not I alone unjustly suffer” (96). She shifts her allegiance here from her husband the king to identify herself as a representative of the English people, who answer her “intentions not … to rifle, but reform the Kingdom,” by “com[ing] like Pigeons by whole flocks to her assistance” (118).

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Although Cary explicitly mentions only Machiavelli by name, The History of Edward II constitutes a history of political thought, which places in dialogue both English and continental political theorists. Not only does Cary use these political thinkers to shape her historical narrative, her analysis of the fall of Edward II serves as an exemplary narrative through which she tests political theories concerning monarchical prerogative and the claims of subjects.

The History thereby participates in the contemporary dialogue concerning absolutism and parliamentary prerogative between king and Parliament, during the period leading up to the English Civil Wars. Indeed, its purported composition in 1627 precedes by one year the Petition of Right, “concerning divers Rights and Liberties of the subjects.”⁸⁷ The publication of the History in 1680 during the Exclusion Crisis, over fifty years after it was composed, demonstrates that Cary, who engaged Christine de Pizan’s work, also fulfilled Christine’s ambition for her works to serve as political counsel for a future readership. Indeed, Cary’s History was made much more widely available than she would have initially envisaged, in another political moment of civil division, though very different from her own.

That civil division arose from the disagreement between Charles II and Parliament concerning his prerogative to name James II as his successor—though it is ironic in light of Cary’s Catholicism that those who supported the Exclusion Bill and thereby would limit monarchical prerogative did so in order to prevent the accession of a Catholic monarch. Although Cary’s work is in line with the writings of Catholic resistance theory of the late sixteenth century, as I have shown, it is notable that according to Peter Holmes, Catholic writers, including Parsons, abandoned their earlier positions after 1596 and retreated to nonresistance (205–7). Nevertheless, Cary’s Catholicism and her close engagement with French religious polemic, as evidenced in her translation of du Perron, go far to explain her divergence from the traditional Protestant national historiography of Britain that defines the nation through negation: as anti-French, anti-Italian, and anti-Catholic.⁸⁸ Cary instead advances a different idea of the English nation that is based on an eclectic synthesis of political theory—both English and continental—that advances the importance of the common good.

In addition, the work, in focusing as much on Isabel as on Edward, functioned as political counsel to Henrietta Maria, to whom she dedicated her du Perron translation, in the tradition of The Mirror for Magistrates.⁸⁹ Isabel plays as prominent a role as ruler after Edward’s fall and the narrative concerns her own fall as much as Edward’s; Cary thus adapts the de casibus tradition of deploying negative exempla to advise another French princess, like Isabel, who came to England to be queen.⁹⁰

In fact, Cary’s representation of the female warrior and ruler Isabel diverges sharply from those by Samuel Daniel and Christopher Marlowe. Daniel, whose Collection of the History of England (1621), while considering Isabel to have been “the worst of a Queen [England] ever had,” describes her as “an impotent Woman” who was manipulated by “wicked Councell” and incapable of having acted on her own (5:201–2).⁹¹ That both Daniel and his contemporary Marlowe display an interest in Isabel as well as in other female rulers such as Cleopatra (Daniel) and Dido (Marlowe) can be explained by the presence of Elizabeth on the throne. In granting Isabel agency as well as responsibility for her actions, Cary revises Marlowe, who represents the queen as at first a wronged wife, then as an instrument of Mortimer, whom the fallen and newly sympathetic Edward calls a “tyrant” (V.iii.36). Asserting his power over the queen, Marlowe’s Mortimer declares to Isabel, “Be ruled by me, and we will rule the realm” (V.ii.5) and Isabel acquiesces: “Sweet Mortimer, life of Isabel … / … / Conclude against [Edward] what thou wilt, / And I myself will willingly subscribe” (V.ii.15–20). And it is Mortimer, not Isabel as in Cary’s version, whom the “people love … well” (II.ii.234).⁹² Belying this representation of a passive Isabel, however, Marlowe has Isabel instigate the plan to assassinate Edward even after he has resigned his crown, thereby calling into question her subordination to Mortimer and approximating Cary’s representation of a gratuitously cruel and vengeful Isabel (V.ii.42–45). The difference between Marlowe and Cary can be encapsulated in their concluding focus on the two characters: Marlowe’s Mortimer describes himself as “tumbl[ing] headlong down” (V.vi.60) from the apex of Fortune’s wheel, while in Cary’s version it is Isabel who is foiled by “stepmother” Fortune.

While scholars have recognized the correspondence of Buckingham—the favorite of both James and Charles––to Gaveston, they have not given as much weight to Henrietta Maria’s potential correspondence to Isabel.⁹³ Although Buckingham was James’ favorite, it was Charles who dissolved Parliament to avoid Buckingham’s impeachment. Cary’s representation of Isabel as a ruler, who, recalling Elizabeth I’s similar trajectory, squanders the initial support of her people, could serve as a monitory warning to Henrietta Maria, so that we can consider one of the purposes of Cary’s History to be political counsel to the queen.⁹⁴ Seen in this light, Cary writes the History of Edward II in the tradition of female political counselors to queens : Christine de Pizan’s exhortation to Isabeau of Bavaria to intervene to achieve peace in the civil wars of France; Anne Dowriche’s counsel to Queen Elizabeth in The French Historie to support the Protestants—in both France and England—and also, like Cary’s History, to avoid tyrannical rule as exemplified by Catherine de’ Medici; and Mary Sidney’s counsel to Elizabeth to heed the primacy of the public good. Such a perspective brings into focus the gendered subject position of Cary as a writer, who intervenes in the debate concerning the proper relationship between monarchs and their subjects, as well as concerning the degree to which Isabel acted as a ruler in her own right who made political choices of consequence for the English nation. Ironically, Henrietta Maria will become caught up in the English Civil Wars, raising forces against England—though not against, but in support of her husband. From the perspective of the parliamentarians , Henrietta Maria would come to represent a destructive warrior queen in the tradition of Cary’s Isabel: “Her unwearied indeavours by Sea and Land to raise Forces against the parliament to destroy it, you see she marcheth in the head of an Army and calls herself the Generalissima” (Three Speeches, 17).