Posterity has not always looked kindly on Mary I, England's first queen, her reign once judged to have been as sterile as her body.1 It is a crass image, but if Mary was anything other than just a religious bigot, then she has been thought a pathetic bigot, a tragic figure to be pitied. Abandoned by her father, rejected by her husband, her womb as barren as her coffers and her nation's fields, Mary's achievements were always going to be few and her disasters many.2 In the words of A. G. Dickens, the reign must “be judged not merely a huge failure, but one likely to have become more monumental with every succeeding year.”3Some four centuries earlier than Dickens, much the same was said by the martyrologist John Foxe during the reign of Mary's half-sister Elizabeth, though his assessment was more obviously the product of a committed anti-Catholicism. According to him, the sad catalogue of events that constituted Mary's reign was evidence that God's “manifest displeasure euer wrought agaynst her, in plaging both her and her Realme, and in subuertyng all her counsells and attemptes, what so euer she tooke in hand.” He went on, explaining that: we shall find neuer no reigne of any Prince in this land, or any other, which had euer to shew in it (for the proportion of tyme) so many Argumentes of Gods great wrath and displeasure, as was to be seene in the reigne of this Queene Mary, whether we behold the shortnes of her tyme, or the vnfortunate euent of all her purposes: who semed neuer to purpose any thyng that came luckely to passe, neither did any thyng frame to her purpose what soeuer she tooke in hand touching her owne priuate affaires.4The appraisal was consistently articulated; in the next century, in his History of the Reformation of the Church of England, Peter Heylyn determined that “hope of comfort” from the Marian disaster came only “by the death of Queen Mary, whose Reign polluted with the blood of so many Martyrs, unfortunate by the frequent insurrections, and made inglorious by the loss of the Town of Calais, was only commendable in the brevity or shortnesse of it.”5Bit by bit, however, the unthinkable has become thinkable and certainties have become uncertain, for, though it may not yet constitute a new consensus, scholars have challenged the traditional interpretation of Mary's reign on a number of fronts.6 Judith M. Richards and others—including the contributors to a collection of essays edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman—have challenged the customary view of Mary as a hopelessly ineffective political operator who was unfit to rule, and as a woman who was governed by emotion, not reason.7 Eamon Duffy, first in The Stripping of the Altars and then in Fires of Faith, has questioned wholly the notion that the Marian regime was “ineffective, half-hearted, complacent, unimaginative, insular, lacking in leadership, trapped in the preoccupations of the 1520s or 1530s rather than addressing those of the 1550s,” and “that it had failed to discover the counter-reformation.”8 William Wizeman, too, in his detailed study of the full range of Marian church writings published between 1553–58, has made a case for a regime that not only “invented what is often called the Counter-Reformation,” but one that also eschewed negative polemic, preferring instead to put the positive case for a renewed Catholicism.9 These last two in particular—along with others, such as Thomas Mayer in his studies of Cardinal Pole—have forcefully shown that the Marian church was anything but “intellectually enervated,” as has formerly been claimed.10In many ways the prompt for this line of inquiry was the work of Jennifer Loach, who had earlier argued for the Marian regime's successful use of print.11 It is an argument that has been subsequently developed by many scholars, including Lucy Wooding, who maintains that the Catholic restoration under Mary had made “intelligent use of vernacular printed literature in its work of rebuilding.”12 The result has been a remarkable transformation of the field, a serious laying out of the Marian “realm of ideas.”13 Yet there is one particular facet of the period's mental landscape, and its modern interpretation, that has remained impervious to the revisionist onslaught: its literary culture. Mary's was a reign in which “literary creativity dried up as the London book trade reverted to the noncontroversial publication that had characterized Henry VIII's reign,” John N. King wrote in 1982. He continued: hers was an age in which “few new writings appeared,” the two most important “new” books published during the period 1553–58 in fact being “retrospective collections: William Rastells’ edition of Thomas More's Workes Wrytten in the Englysh Tonge (1557) and Tottel's Miscellany.”14 By and large, the assessment has stood the test of time. Thus Colin Burrow has written more recently that “Marian writing is particularly prone to go back to the 1530s and rethink them, rather than to dwell on its own age,” noting also that the “major literary events” of Mary's reign were the “retrospective volumes” of Tottel's Miscellany and the collected edition of More's English works.15 Despite the energy and intellectual engagement of Mary's subjects in other fields, her poets were apparently silent, assuming that they existed at all.Whereas historians and theologians are becoming more convinced that the Marian regime was forward-looking, literary scholars continue to see a regime trapped in the past, one that sought only to “align present-day literary activity with Henrician and in particular pre-Reformation court culture.”16 It is a sense of déjà vu that still characterizes the literary landscape of 1553–58, and not altogether unfairly. It has long been noticed that this period was witness to the return of a number of works not seen for decades, in addition to the prose of More and the poetry of Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. John Gower, Sir Thomas Malory, John Skelton and Gavin Douglas, are just some of the other authors who were once again in print in these years.17 Consequently, though there is, in the present, renewed interest in the general study of early- and mid-sixteenth century literature—the contours of received literary history having been the subject of keen debate over a number of years—it is also the case that comparatively little attention has been paid to whether a Marian literary culture even existed as anything other than just a retreat into the past.18An important exception to the rule, however, is the scholarship of Tom Betteridge, which has explored “the Marian regime's attempts to create its own literary culture.”19 Of course, there is plenty of very fine work written about individual texts produced during Mary's reign, but Betteridge goes further than most by proposing that, in actual fact, “the Marian Reformation produced its own cultural poetics.”20 In the figure of the poet Miles Huggarde, or Hogarde, for example, Betteridge sees the expression of “an explicitly confessional Catholic sensibility defined against Protestantism,” while the poet John Heywood instead represents “an anti-Reformation agenda that seeks to escape from the violent cultural effects of the religious changes of the 1530s, 1540s and 1550s.” Importantly, it is also argued that in neither instance was there simply “a reactionary attempt to return to a pre-Reformation past.”21 What Betteridge has helped to identify is that Marian cultural nostalgia was not simply a matter of looking backwards, but a purposeful attempt to move forwards.In this essay I aim to develop this line of thought a little further, through the study of the Marian resurrection of the fifteenth-century poet, John Lydgate. In the period 1553–58, there was a commitment to publishing works by Lydgate and his heir, Stephen Hawes, one that can be partially traced back to the political center. In several ways, then, Lydgate became for the Marian age what Chaucer had been to the Henrician age and Langland to the Edwardian: a representative voice that grounded the present in the authority of an ideologically acceptable past. Yet this itself did not involve a simple retreat into a world untouched by the Reformation. Rather, by means of the Lydgatean revival the past was confronted and a line drawn underneath recent events so that it was possible then to look to the future. Accordingly, this Lydgatean revival did not constitute a cultural dead end, but engaged with and informed one of the dominant literary motifs of Mary's reign, which is that her accession brought to an end the tragedy of the Reformation. Indeed, for at least one contemporary poet—George Cavendish—reading Lydgate helped him to make sense of recent events: he turned to the medieval poet not because he shied away from the Reformation, but to understand how and when England had fallen into disgrace. My broader argument is that the revitalized interest in Lydgate formed part of a more general literary revival, one that was distinctly Marian and, at least in part, confessionally Catholic. A Marian literary culture existed, an important part of which was grounded in the republishing, rereading, and reinterpretation of Lydgate and other authors associated with him.During the second year of Mary's reign in 1554 and then again in the very next year, a poem was published that had not been printed for almost forty years. This was Stephen Hawes's The Pastime of Pleasure. Wynkyn de Worde's 1517 edition of this was actually his second, the first having appeared in 1509, but its republication after such a hiatus has been a source of bewilderment in literary criticism.22 “The startling vogue for Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure,” writes King, actually “epitomizes the backward-looking taste of Mary's reign.”23 Certainly the poem has the appearance of belonging to a different age, having been “Inuented by Stephen Hawes, grome of Kyng Henry the seuenth, his chamber” even earlier than its initial printing, in the “xxi. yere of his most noble reygne,” which is to say in 1505/6.24 And for the printer William Copland, who is meant to have had a hand in the production of at least the 1555 Pastime of Pleasure, revisiting the literary past was the core of his business.25 Copland had inherited from his father, Robert, materials that were once in the possession of Wynkyn de Worde, the senior Copland having been employed by de Worde.26 As a result, in the time of Mary's reign the young Copland printed many works originally in de Worde's stock in addition to The Pastime of Pleasure, including The Four Sons of Aymon, Sir Bevis of Hampton, Valentine and Orson, and The Seven Wise Masters of Rome.Yet it is also the case that Hawes's midcentury rediscovery was not alone the responsibility of those “backward-looking” Marians. For instance, another of Hawes's poems, The conuersyon of swerers, had been “Inprynted at London by Wyllyam Copland, for Robert Toye” in “the yere of our lorde. M.D.LI.” And a decade on, in 1561, the plot and language of The Pastime of Pleasure inspired the Christmas revels at the Inner Temple.27 Though it is true that appreciation for Hawes suffered a dip in the 1530s and 1540s, during which time new editions of his poems were not published, the Marian age was not entirely idiosyncratic in its regard for Hawes.28Moreover, though the evidence is limited, the early-Elizabethan Christmas revels points to an audience for The Pastime of Pleasure that included the fashionable young men at the law courts. This is not as unintelligible as it is usually thought to be, for though The Pastime of Pleasure is a long allegorical romance, its subject is also Graunde Amour's pursuit of “the way, of worldly dignitie | Of the actiue lyfe,” as opposed to the “strayght waye of contemplacion,” finding time also for such things as a discourse on the art of rhetoric (Hawes, sigs. B1, A4v, D3v).29 In the words of Daniel Wakelin, it is a “literature of leisure” turned into the “literature of learning,” which the printer, Richard Tottel, recognized should appeal to young professionals.30 Undoubtedly, he was best placed to judge this, for as J. Christopher Warner observes, Tottel was “part of a large, vibrant, and certainly sophisticated social/occupational network in London, comprising law students, lawyers, and others in the trades and in government who maintained ties to the legal profession.”31 This was Tottel's natural clientele, so it was for them that he published The Pastime of Pleasure in 1555, just one year after the publication of John Wayland's own edition. The notion that this particular group of consumers represented a “backward-looking” market cannot be the full story.On the contrary, a more recent attempt to place The Pastime of Pleasure in its mid-Tudor setting has suggested that “Hawes was understood by his Marian editors as an exemplary poet for the present and future, a modern, perhaps even a postmodern, writer whose text illustrated the way forward from the mistakes of the immediate past.”32 The difference in verdict is wholesale, and by way of an address “To the Reader” that is printed in the 1554 text, Betteridge argues that the Marians hoped to cultivate a model of reading that steered a course between “the Edwardian Reformation's emphasis on reading iconoclastically and the convoluted inquisitorial hermeneutic of the Henrician court.”33 It is an argument to which further pressure could well be applied, first by testing it against the Edwardian and Elizabethan responses to Hawes, but also—and perhaps more critically—by addressing the lack of any equivalent readerly advice in the 1555 print of The Pastime of Pleasure. It is tempting to ask what, if anything, might have happened to the prescribed and specifically Marian manner of reading Hawes between editions? Absences of evidence are notoriously difficult to interpret, and answers to this particular question are not to be looked for here. Instead, another aspect of Hawes's Marian exemplarity is of interest in this essay, and that is his debt to Lydgate.Like others after him would do, Hawes avows that he is an inferior poet to the great medieval triad of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. “O prudent Gower,” he respectfully writes in his Exemple of Vertu, “O noble Chaucer . . . | O vertuous Lydgate . . . | Unto you all I do me excuse.”34 It is a pose that early-Tudor poets like Hawes and John Skelton turned into a convention, save for a particular emphasis in Hawes's case, who wrote repeatedly, and at times at length, of owing a specific debt to Lydgate.35 “Lydgate is,” A. S. G. Edwards writes, “the one poet invoked in all of Hawes's works as example and inspiration,” and although in 1530 Robert Copland would refer to “yonge Hawes” as one of Chaucer's “heyres,” he is more properly thought of as Lydgate's follower.36In his Conuersyon of swerers, for example, Hawes refers in very general terms to the “frutefull sentence and the noble werkes” of “many gret and ryght notable clerkes,” “poetes,” and “hystoryagraphes,” but he reserves special mention for Lydgate. “Amonge all other,” he declares, is “my good mayster Lydgate | The eloquent poete and monke of bury,” who: Dyde bothe contryue and also translateMany vertues bokes to be in memoryTouchynge the trouthe well and sentencyouslyBut syth that his deth was intollerableI praye God rewarde hym in lyfe perdurable37In The Pastime of Pleasure the encomium balloons, Edwards observing that therein “two lines are devoted to Gower, nineteen to Chaucer, and seventy to Lydgate.”38 “Nothinge I am, experte in poetry | As the monke of Bury, floure of eloquence,” Hawes explains, though his ambition is still to “folowe the trace, and all the perfitenes | Of my maister Lydgate” (Hawes, sigs. A3, A3v). Hawes credits “my mayster Lydgate” with having “deryfyde | The depured rethoryke, in englysh language | To make our tongue so clerely puryfyed” (Hawes, sig. G1). He describes how “my mayster Lydgate | The monke of Bury, dyd hym wel apply | Both to contryue, and eke to translate” a number of poems, including lives of the virgin Mary and Saint Edmund, The Fall of Princes, The Chorle and the Bird, The Troy Book, and The Temple of Glas (Hawes, sig. G4). Hawes's “mayster Lydgate” is said to be “the most dulcet sprynge | Of famous rethoryke, wyth balade ryall,” he is the “chefe orygynal of my learnyng,” and since his death “In al this realme his pere did not dwell” (Hawes, sigs. G4v, H1). Though Hawes humbly and dutifully professes to be “lytell or nought expert in poetry,” he repeats his vow to “folowe the trace” of “my mayster Lydgate” (Hawes, sig. H1). And on at least another two occasions in The Pastime of Pleasure, Hawes again writes of his “mayster Lydgate,” who is the subject even of the poem's very last stanza where the Tudor poet beseeches: . . . God, for to geue me graceBokes to compyle, of moral vertueOf my maister Lidgate, to folowe the traceHis noble fame, for to laude and renueWhiche in his lyfe, the slouthe did eschueMakyng great bokes, to be in memoryOn whose soule, I pray God haue mercy. (Hawes, sig. d4)Mentioned in both the opening and closing stanzas of The Pastime of Pleasure, Lydgate is the poem's alpha and omega.The influence that the fifteenth-century poet exerted on his sixteenth-century disciple was “not primarily a stylistic but an attitudinal one,” Edwards comments.39 Lydgate was, for Hawes, the archetype of the poet-counselor who inspired his audience to virtue, and recognizing the fundamental indebtedness of one to the other helps to make sense of Hawes's Marian renaissance. This is because the apprentice did not just follow the master's literary example, he also accompanied him on the same printing presses, the two poets made to serve the same cultural moment. In the same year that John Wayland printed The Pastime of Pleasure—though apparently later in 1554—he also printed an edition of John Lydgate's Fall of Princes.40 The precise date of publication of this latter work is conjectural, yet it is generally accepted that it must have appeared in advance of the printing of a second Marian edition of Lydgate's Fall of Princes, “by Richard Tottel, the .x. day of September in the yeare of oure Lorde, 1554.”41 Of course this is the same Tottel who printed the 1555 edition of The Pastime of Pleasure, Hawes's and Lydgate's revivals being complementary for both of their Marian printers. And although it is not the subject of this essay, in 1555 an edition of Lydgate's Troy Book was printed by Thomas Marshe, The Auncient Historie and [. . .] Cronicle of the warres betwixte the Grecians and the Troyans.If the Edwardian age was the age of Langland—the period in which the first printed editions of The Vision of Pierce Plowman appeared, as well as “the most prolific and vociferous heirs, readers and appropriators of Langland”—then the Marian age was very much the age of Lydgate.42 In fact the two medieval authors’ fortunes were almost the exact inverse of one another. Whereas “there was a striking lacuna in publication of [Lydgate's] ascribed and anonymous works after the beginning of the reformation,” a hiatus that came to an end only in Mary's reign, much the opposite was true for Langland and for ploughman literature more generally, which seems to have been dropped from the printing presses at Mary's accession.43 Chaucer's reputation in print, too, looks to have suffered with the ploughmen, to whom he had been linked since the 1530s via works such as The Ploughman's Tale and Jack Upland, for there are also no Marian editions of The Workes of Geffray Chaucer.44 This is not to suggest that Chaucer's name was suddenly beyond the pale in 1553–58; he is, after all, celebrated by both Lydgate and Hawes, and “Mary not only brought the remains of Chaucer to Westminster Abbey but created what became ‘Poet's Corner’ in that most central church of the nation.”45 Nor is the reverse true: the reading of Lydgate was not unheard of in the reign of Edward VI, for example.46 Nonetheless, in Mary's time there was a discernible shift in Lydgate's favor at the printing press, and this provides an intelligible context for the apparently incomprehensible rediscovery of Stephen Hawes.But how is this cultural adjustment to be explained? It is the contours of the Reformation, Joseph Dane and Irene Beesemyer have argued, and the twists and turns in sixteenth-century religious policy, that account for the divergent print histories of medieval poets and their verse, not changes in literary taste. In general terms, religion rather than aesthetics determined the Tudor reception of this earlier poetry.47 Thus, though there may be debate over the extent of Chaucer's sixteenth-century “Protestantisation,” there is general agreement that efforts were made to market both him and Langland as proto-reformers, “as Reformation prophets.”48 By contrast, though Nigel Mortimer has observed that it “does not seem to be the case that the Monk of Bury ever became solely associated with any one ecclesiastical party,” still Lydgate's most natural readers were “those who remained loyal to the old religion,” such as “the fiercely Catholic” Sir Francis Englefield.49 Allowing for the fact, then, that sixteenth-century readerships did not always divide neatly along confessional lines in this religiously blended age, there is still some sense in which “Catholic Lydgate” was the Tudor counterpart to “Protestant Chaucer” and “Protestant Langland.”On the title pages of the Marian editions of The Fall of Princes and The Troy Book, the author—or more accurately, translator—is addressed, with slight variations in the spelling, as “John Lidgate Monke of Burye.” It is the way that Lydgate repeatedly designated himself in his poetry, and Hawes refers to him in precisely the same manner. But one effect of the consistent emphasis on Lydgate's identity as a Benedictine monk is that all engagements with his work are thus filtered through the lens of a presumed ideological commitment. This is especially so in the wake of the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries, which comprehensively swept aside the type of religion he represented. As a consequence, the naming of Lydgate's office was a far from neutral act, and it is one that Catholicism's restoration in England further magnified. If “potential readers of Lydgate . . . rejected him,” Dane and Beesemyer write, it was “because they imagined the ideological content of his works was what would be expected of a Monk of Bury,” and some suspicion there was.50The Elizabethan John Lawson, for example, allowed that Lydgate “Myghte be in equale prase with maister Chawcer truly,” but this was despite the fact that “he was a monnke at that Abbay late Bury.”51 More doubtful was William Webbe, who held that whatever flattering comparison might be drawn between Chaucer and Lydgate, the latter was “yet more occupied in supersticious and odde matters.”52 Meanwhile, earlier in the century, the committed antipapist and twice religious exile John Bale omitted Lydgate from his catalogue of the faithful through the ages, his list of those men and women who had stood witness to Christ's true faith even in the face of the pope's false one. Writing at the beginning of his Marian exile in his autobiographical The vocacyon of Johan Bale, he claims that there were: alwayes some in that miste of palpable darkenesse / that smelled out their mischefes / & in part maintened the syncere doctrine / as Mathew Parys / Oclyf / Wickleff / Thorpe / White / Purveye / Pateshulle / Paine / Gower / Chaucer / Gascoigne / Ive / & now in our time William Tindale / Johan Frith / Bilneye / Barnes / Lambert / & a great sort more.53And Philip Sidney, too, chose to “fragment the poetic triumvirate in his An Apology for Poetry (printed 1595), mentioning Chaucer and Gower but passing over Lydgate in silence.”54On other occasions, Bale could not so easily ignore Lydgate, such as in his comprehensive bibliographical English literary history, Scriptorvm Illustrium maioris Brytanniae [. . .] Catalogus. There, instead of bypassing the poet, Bale simply glosses over what was most unpalatable about his life. He heaps lavish praise on Lydgate for his eloquence and learning, but also “underplayed Lydgate's monastic profession, stressing instead his humanistic achievement.”55 Naturally, there was good reason for Bale to be wary of Lydgate's religiosity, for as Hawes notes, he “dyd compyle than full nyally | Of our blyssed lady, the conuersacion | Saint Edmundes lyfe martred with treson,” in addition to penning religious lyrics and other saints’ lives (Hawes, sig. G4).56 Indeed, as recent scholarship has argued, Lydgate was not just a religious poet but he was a specifically “Benedictine poet,” one whose “eucharistic poetics” explicitly “affirm[ed] the orthodoxy of transubstantiation.”57 In both respects, Reformation theology was entirely antithetical, so it is to be expected that only the “secular Lydgate” would have survived the initial pressures of sixteenth-century religious change.58 But even works such as The Fall of Princes would have offered someone like Bale cause for concern, the “secular” and “divine” Lydgates bearing close relation to one another. Conversely, of course, his appeal at a time of restored Catholicism is also apparent.Hawes describes Lydgate's poem in the following terms: Of the fall of prynces, so right wofullyHe dyd endyte, in all piteous wyseFolowynge his auctoure, Bocas rufullyA right greate boke, he did truly compryseA good ensample, for vs to dispyseThis worlde so ful of mutabilyteIn whiche no man, can haue a certente (Hawes, sig. G4)This long poem is actually an expanded paraphrase of an expanded paraphrase, Lydgate having come to Boccaccio's Latin De Casibus Virorum Illustrium via Laurence de Premierfait's French version, Des Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes.59 The result is a poem of over 36,000 lines that ruminates on the workings of fortune in the lives of the illustrious, and that “Ginneth at Adam, & endeth at king Iohn.” It is a series of de casibus tragedies that proved “that thinges al where fortune may attaine | Ben transitorie of condicion,” and so men should “Set their hertes voyde of vnstablenesse | vpon thinges which that ben diuine,” the poem bearing an explicit religious inflection of the pre-Reformation sort (Lydgate, sig. A1v).60 Thus King Hostilius was able to alleviate the symptoms of a “deadly malady” by means of the “pilgrimage” and temple offerings that he “made with deuout obeysaunce” (Lydgate, sig. N3). The world of the poem is also one where “the breaking of monastic vows” is still regarded “as an apostasy of almost equal weight with that of abandonment of faith altogether,” and where the Virgin Mary remains an intercessor capable of bringing low tyrants.61 Hence the Emperor Julian is branded a “Double Apostata . . . | First to his order and after to our faith,” his death at the hands of “a very heauenly knight” a “miracle of Christes mother dere” (Lydgate, sigs. Kk2–3).In January 1555, Mary's parliament passed the second Statute of Repeal that restored England to communion with Rome.62 Mary had always rejected her father's and brother's claim to supremacy over the church, and there are tales in the recently reprinted Fall of Princes that ask to be read in connection with this. Of particular note are those that emphasize the “proper subservience of the temporal order to the authority of the Church,” and that demonstrate that “temporal rulers who encroach on the spiritual order are guilty of disobedience.”63 Take the example of Theodosius, God's “own chosin knyght,” who ungrudgingly submitted to the authority of Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. Ambrose barred Theodosius from entering the cathedral at Milan because he had “commaunded of hasty wilfulnes” a retributive slaughter of the Thessalonicans. He also exiled him from the church for eight months, in which time Theodosius was to repent his sin. Devastated and compliant, humbled and penitent, it was only through confession that the knight was then “restored agayn to grace” by Ambrose. “To the church,” Lydgate writes, Theodosius “mekely did obey,” making “his scepter, his sweord, his purpose, his diademe | subiecte to Ambrose what hym list to deme,” and so he set a crucial precedent from which “Vertuous princes may example take” (Lydgate, sig. Kk5–5v).64“[P]rudent princes” were also encouraged to learn from the example of “Ozias [Uzziah],” whom God punished with leprosy (Lydgate, sig. K5v). His offense was to have “toke on thapparayle, | of a Bishop,” and: Beyng in purpose on a solemne daye,to take his way vp to the hye altere,falsly vsurpyng whosoeuer sayd naye,To sacrifice holding the censere,tofore ye aulter that shone of gold full clere,for which offence the Bible sayth the same,Azarias the Bishop did him blame. (Lydgate, sig. K5)In a comment that follows this tale, princes are warned to “beware of malice to presume, | agayn his church to do offencion, | for god of right all tyrantes wyll consume.” God will never “suffer their dominacion,” the text continues, “to enterrupt . . . | nor breke ye fraunchise of holy church ryght” (Lydgate, sig. K5v). One Marian poet who saw the contemporary salience of Uzziah's example was George Marshall, who directed its warning not to princes, but to Bible readers who presumed to become Bible teachers. They were “plaged,” he writes, “that didde presume to the office, not being called therevnto, although they did suppose to do God good seruice.”65In their new, mid-Tudor context, other tales begin to read like criticisms of Reformation iconoclasm and its assault on church wealth and property, though the church does not escape censure for its own covetousness.66 The “Heretike” Philippicus, for example, “Bete down ymages & many fresh picture, | of holy sainctes,” for which crime he was blinded, his face disfigured in the same way that “he by great o