Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700

Abstract

Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004; pp. 268. £45). This collection follows a conference on the subject held at the University of Reading. Many of the fifteen essays deal with elite women, who acted in a broader sphere and left more evidence than other women. Barbara Harris follows up her earlier work on women and politics by describing the ways in which elite women maintained wide informal family networks as essential reinforcement for patronage and clientage, and Helen Payne vividly depicts the personal power of women at the Jacobean court. Natalie Mears emphasises Queen Elizabeth's informal consultations with politicians, and hence the importance of Privy Chamber women in providing information and access. Elizabeth Throckmorton was a Maid of Honour in the Privy Chamber, but when she secretly married Sir Walter Raleigh in 1592 the pair were banished from the court. Karen Robertson analyses her strategies for seeking help from court contacts, and again in 1603 when Raleigh was in prison. Daybell's contribution shows that political news was not only for men, through a study of the Countess of Shrewsbury's extensive network for gathering and sending of news both national and foreign, from 1569 to 1608. Another essay discusses three generations of the Countess's family enmeshed in danger: her husband had custody of the exiled Queen of Scots, and later her granddaughter Arabella Stuart, a possible claimant to the Stuart throne, secretly married William Seymour—these situations required careful negotiation by the Countess, according to Sara Steen. Women from a wider range of society are revealed well in four other essays. Lynne Magnusson sensitively analyses genres and strategies in female suitors' letters, while Alan Stewart deftly uncovers hidden links between three sisters who married Portuguese merchants in London, thus providing secret cover for a Jewish business, and probably foreign intelligence to the government. For the seventeenth century, Claire Walker illuminates the vigorous political activity of English nuns in Europe hoping for the return of Catholicism and, after 1649, of Stuart monarchy, while Elizabeth Clarke gives a fascinating view of protestant women's spiritual journals and the political motivation for circulating them. Many historians have discussed James VI of Scotland's secret contacts with the English Essex and Cecil factions towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, when the King was hoping to inherit the English crown. Tricia Bracher's effort to tie the famous calligrapher, Esther Inglis, and her husband, Bartholomew Kello, firmly to the Earl of Essex and the succession issue, is interesting but flawed. In 1599 Kello delivered a manuscript of psalms copied by Esther in a range of scripts, as a gift to Queen Elizabeth. Bracher asserts that this and two other Inglis manuscripts prove that Inglis and Kello were working for an alliance between King James VI of Scotland and the Essex faction, arguing that ‘Les Proverbes de Salomon…’, with dedication to Essex dated April 13 1599, was ‘influenced’ (p. 139), later ‘authorised’ (p. 141) by the references to Solomon (and hence the succession) in King James' Basilikon Doron. But since each manuscript must have taken a long time to produce, and since the King's book first appeared in 1599, in only seven copies, Esther may have known of it, but more likely not. Further, Bracher claims that the self-portrait and borders in the three books were identical specifically to ally James with Elizabeth, the succession, and with Essex. But Inglis used exactly the same designs elsewhere as well, as in ‘Le livre de l'Ecclesiaste ensemble des Lamentations de Ieremie’ dedicated to the Earl of Argyll, 1602. More important are the differences between the volume for Essex and that for the Queen: the one for the Queen has embroidery of pearls on the covers, with a central Tudor Rose and Crown. Inglis produced some 59 calligraphic manuscripts, mostly dedicated to noble or royal persons, in hope of financial reward—possibly including the ones dedicated to Essex and Bacon, and to the Queen. Three other essays examine texts—Lloyd de Groot on the Royalist polemic against female pretensions in the English Revolutionary period, and for Queen Henrietta Maria as a model for social order; Susan Frye on the resonances of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII for the Jacobean court conflict between Queen Anne and King James's favourite Robert Carr; Valerie Wayne on the gender question in texts by Middleton, Carleton, and Behn. Essays in this book draw skilfully on correspondence or other writing to provide novel perspectives and rich detail; it is a welcome addition to our understanding of how women mattered, in a supposedly male political world.