Royal Brides and National Identity, 1603–25

Abstract

At the opening of the seventeenth century there is some evidence that the English church saw itself as unique—as the true Bride of Christ in a Europe increasingly encroached on by the Whore of Babylon, the Catholic Church. What in some contexts was to become an individualistic, spiritualised trope—the Bride of Christ as a single soul—thus took on a communal, and somewhat nationalistic identity. The true Bride of Christ became the Church in a nation which in its own mythology, strengthened by the defeat of the Spanish Armada and confirmed by the events of the Gunpowder Plot, was the heroic opposer of the Antichrist. Thus, via that joint national and spiritual entity, the Church of England, which could plausibly be represented as the Bride of Christ, public discourse of the Jacobean period came perilously close to assuming that the English state itself was the Bride. Fortunately, the dominant Calvinist theology, which believed in a transnational body of believers that collectively made up the true Church, did not allow for such a jingoistic identification to flourish: and in any case, towards the end of James’ reign, the discourse of the Song of Songs took on a stance that was theologically and culturally oppositional to the Crown.