Mary's Reign Research Articles

Marian Literary Culture: Lydgate, his Heirs, and the End of Tragedy

Marian Literary Culture: Lydgate, his Heirs, and the End of Tragedy

Restoration of Deprived Clergy during the 1559 Royal Visitation of the Eastern Dioceses

It is well known that many of the English clergy took advantage of the statutory authorization of clerical marriage under Edward VI, but then suffered deprivation when that authorization was rescinded in Mary's reign. Less familiar are the proceedings that enabled incumbents who had lost their livings as a penalty for marriage to recover them after Elizabeth I's accession. This article focuses on a neglected source, an act book kept during the royal visitation of the eastern dioceses (London, Norwich and Ely) in 1559. It seems likely that this document records a large majority of the suits undertaken by deprived married clergy for the recovery of their livings in those dioceses. Most claimants were successful, but some suits failed, for a variety of reasons. Other sources, and the work of previous scholars in the field, shed some light on the recovery of their livings by men who do not appear in the act book. Probably rather more than a quarter of the men deprived for marriage under Mary in these dioceses recovered their livings in or after 1559. Many others had died or for various reasons did not seek restoration to the benefices of which they had been deprived.

Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America's Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father and Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire

Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America's Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father and Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire

Restoration and Reaction: Reinterpreting the Marian Church

Although the reign of Mary i (1553–8) was a tumultuous and eventful one, for over four hundred years there was little debate about it or about the queen's efforts to restore Catholicism to England. The reign was almost universally perceived as poor, nasty, brutish and short-lived and the restoration of Catholicism was believed to have been doomed to failure, both because the burning of heretics offended English sensibilities and because Protestantism was already so deeply embedded in England that it could not be uprooted. Yet towards the end of the twentieth century, the tectonic plates of historical research began to shift and the resulting tremors altered the historiographical landscape of Mary's reign, and indeed of the English Reformation.

The Spanish Inquisition Refashioned: the Experience of Mary I's England and the Valladolid Tribunal, 1559

Philip II returned to Spain in 1559 to take up the reins of power and also to support the repression by the Valladolid Inquisition of supposed 'Lutherans' in that city and elsewhere. This study briefly examines the arrested groups in their Spanish context and then focuses on Philip's own experience of religious dissidence, particularly during his time as King of England, in 1554–58. This paper concentrates on the English experience of Philip and his entourage: their direct meeting with Reformed Christianity, in its religious and political aspects. The Spanish input into Mary I's attempt to restore the Catholic faith in England is considered, particularly in the context of the punishment and refutation of 'heresy'. For this purpose, special attention is given to the work of Fray Bartolomé Carranza, who produced influential texts in the context of the English 'restoration'. Ironically, though Archbishop of Toledo from 1557, Carranza himself became a prisoner of the Inquisition, yet his practical and written work, as well as the activities of other English and Spanish Catholic activists in Mary's reign, played a largely inadvertent part in laying down the guidelines of the Counter-Reformation Inquisition in Spain.

Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (review)

Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor. By Eamon Duffy. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 249. $28.50. ISBN 978-0-30015216-6.) Few other living historians have had as much of an impact on the history of the English Reformation as Eamon Duffy. He boldly challenged many longheld assumptions in Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, 1992), proposing that England did not turn into a Protestant nation very eagerly, as had been argued for generations. Opposition to Duffy's Altars was intense. Chief among the charges leveled against Duffy was that of stacking the evidence- that is, hand-picking facts that would support his thesis and ignoring those that would not. Later Duffy offered a counter-blast to his critics, The Voices of Morebath (New Haven, 2001), an exhaustively detailed microhistory of a Devonshire village during the most critical years of the Tudor dynasty. In Voices, as in Altars, Duffy contested the notion that the English Reformation was a smooth and well-received transition. Now, another nine years later, Duffy continues his revisionist campaign in Fires of Faith, a reassessment of the reign of England's most vilified monarch, Mary Tudor, otherwise known as Bloody Mary. Revising the history of Mary's reign is perhaps the greatest challenge yet to be tackled by Duffy, not just because of her role as chief villain in English history and in the dominant Reformation narrative but also because of the indisputable fact that she did execute 284 Protestants during her five-year reign. In our day and age, such unenlightened cruelty seems so unacceptable that it is next to impossible to attribute any positive qualities to those responsible for it. Undeterred by such obstacles, Duffy offers as serious a challenge to the dominant Reformation narrative in this book as in his previous ones. Acknowledging up front that the burning of so many men and women was reprehensible, Duffy quickly moves on to contest a series of longstanding myths about Mary's reign. In the process, ironically, a historian who has never viewed Reformation iconoclasm in a positive light proves himself a master iconoclast. One by one, he gleefully strikes down conventional assumptions. First, he argues that the Marian persecution was not a tactical error in the struggle against Protestantism. Appalling and inexcusable though it was, Mary's reign of terror did manage to cripple seriously the Protestant movement. Moreover, it should not be assumed that all of her efforts were in vain, or that England had already become irreversibly Protestant. Popular support for Mary's policies was intense, Duffy insists. The Marian persecution cannot be ascribed solely to the queen and her rabidly Catholic clergy, he claims, for the persecution of Protestants was also enthusiastically embraced by lay people and especially by magistrates, informers, executioners, and spectators who assumed their roles with evident relish. At the very top, he also argues, cruelty was never the objective: Cardinal Reginald Pole seemed even more tolerant than many in his flock, favoring conversion over punishment. Duffy tackles a long list of long-held assumptions about Mary's reCatholicizing efforts, building up to his central argument: Queen Mary was no mere reactionary, he avers, but a true reformer who in many ways was leagues ahead of the Council of Trent. …

The Life and Career of William Paulet (c.1475-1572), Lord Treasurer and First Marquis of Winchester

Paulet is a frustrating subject. There is not the evidential base for a meaningful biography. We have appointments to commissions, mention of Paulet doing this and that, but nothing with which to get below the surface. Although he lived to a great age (in harness), we do not know his date of birth; Professor Loades makes a good case for c.1475, thus making him 97 or so in 1572. Even the most conservative estimate would make him 86. A lawyer from an upper-gentry family, he did not attain significant government office until 1526, when he became joint Master of the King's Wards. He served Richard Fox and Thomas Wolsey, bishops of Winchester, and, like Thomas Cromwell, survived Wolsey's fall in 1529. For a couple of years he seems to have been considered the more significant of the two. He was especially prominent on unsuccessful missions to persuade Queen Catherine and Princess Mary to accept their diminished status following the Boleyn marriage. (I find it difficult to accept Loades's put-down of Mary's refusal to accept her bastardisation as ‘adolescent intransigence’.) Paulet famously survived the various changes of political and religious regimes, occupying offices in the royal household and becoming Lord Treasurer in 1550 (surrendering the Wards in 1554). Loades seems to be mistaken in suggesting that he voted against the introduction of the 1549 Prayer Book in the Lords, although he did record dissent from religious legislation in 1559. He accumulated, naturally, a considerable estate and built a magnificent house (according to ODNB the ‘largest in Britain’) on his inherited property at Basing. He rose through the peerage to the unusual and exalted rank of marquis in 1551, so promoted only a year after becoming an earl, presumably as reward for his key role in securing John Dudley's rule and thwarting the expectations of those who believed the fall of Protector Somerset would lead to a more conservative religious policy. For a time in Mary's reign, when the only duke (Norfolk) was still a minor, he was the premier peer of the realm. But, for all this, Loades can do little more than tell again the familiar political narrative, inserting Paulet's name where appropriate. The core of the book lies in two useful appendices, on land grants and forfeitures, and on offices, commissions and the like.

Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (review)

Reviewed by: Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor Judith Richards Duffy, Eamon, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2009; hardback; pp. xiv, 249; 30 colour plates, 6 maps, R.R.P. US$28.50; ISBN 9780300152166. Despite recent reassessments of Mary Tudor's reign as England's first crowned queen regnant, she is still best known as the monarch in whose reign almost 300 Protestants died by burning. The verbal and pictorial images in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, published in four successively enlarged editions [End Page 205] from 1563 to 1583, ensured those deaths have remained unusually potent in English historical traditions. Now they have been revisited in Professor Duffy's most recent book, a reworking of his 2007 Birkbeck Lectures. The work retains much of his easy lecturing style, but nothing can disguise the challenging nature of some material. His wider argument attacks and subverts the enduring view that Marian Catholicism was reactionary, strong on repression and weak on persuasion. William Wizeman's The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor's Church (Aldershot, 2006) had previously argued for a strong theological renewal which anticipated many Counter-Reformation decisions, but said little about the treatment of religious dissent. Duffy's is a wider-ranging work, covering the whole spectrum of Marian strategies to restore England to its Catholic loyalties. In that, Duffy's Reginald Pole, traditionally the 'invisible man of the Marian restoration', played a crucial part. A cardinal since 1536, and Mary's Archbishop of Canterbury, Pole preached frequently, encouraged others to do the same, and was the primary driver for the entire religious renewal. The tradition that the restored church failed to counter Protestant printed works with effective Catholic printed alternatives is also persuasively refuted. And much attention was paid to the refurbishing of churches to meet Catholic expectations. In brief, Eamon Duffy's new book is a comprehensive assault on the older view of Catholic failure during Queen Mary's reign. If, however, Hilary Mantel's review (London Review of Books, vol. 31, no. 18, 24 Sept 2009) is any guide, nothing could mitigate the horror of those Protestant burnings. Mantel writes: '[d]espite his careful and no doubt deeply felt disclaimers, it sometime sounds as if Eamon Duffy is cheering on the executioners.' His offence, it would seem, is that, instead of simply deploring the burnings, Duffy discusses their place in the much wider process of reclaiming England for the Catholic faith. Although he never disguises his distaste for those deaths, he also offers an entirely fresh perspective. He is insistent (if not always completely persuasive) that although the clerics were the ultimate judges, the pressure for the heresy trials came much more from the Privy Council and from Mary herself. However that may be, the bishops certainly played their part in the examinations. Making creative use of Foxe, as well as many other sources, in a chapter titled 'The Theatre of Justice', Duffy demonstrates that the examinations of many heretics, well beyond the familiar cases of Latimer, Ridley and, [End Page 206] above all, Cranmer, attracted crowds of spectators to whom all participants appealed. There, he argues, despite Foxe's interpretations, Protestant obduracy could alienate, rather than win over, the crowd. The same was true of some burnings, although London was one place where burnings were particularly problematic. Where Foxe saw crocodile tears as examiners failed to persuade their prisoners to recant and perforce proceeded to their condemnation, Duffy – at least as plausibly – sees real distress at the imminent anguish and the eternal torture of yet another soul. Where Foxe sees large crowds at burnings as Protestant demonstrations, Duffy uncovers a range of reasons – including their coinciding with market day and the uncomfortable fact that our forbears were often attracted to public executions. He also uncovers a range of responses to the dying from the entirely sympathetic to the indisputably callous. At the heart of the spectacle was 'an ideological struggle inscribed in the quivering flesh of suffering human beings' (p. 123), but the opportunity for an edifying sermon was seldom missed. One response to what Catholics understood as Protestant 'presumptuous self...

Mary Queen of Scots: An Illustrated Life , and: Catholic Queen, Protestant Patriarchy: Mary Queen of Scots and the Politics of Gender and Religion (review)

Reviewed by: Mary Queen of Scots: An Illustrated Life, and: Catholic Queen, Protestant Patriarchy: Mary Queen of Scots and the Politics of Gender and Religion Julian Goodare Mary Queen of Scots: An Illustrated Life. By Susan Doran. (London: The British Library. Distributed by the University of Chicago Press. 2007. Pp. 191. $29.95.) Catholic Queen, Protestant Patriarchy: Mary Queen of Scots and the Politics of Gender and Religion. By Kristen P. Walton. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. Pp. xiii, 220. $69.95.) Mary, queen of Scots has almost become an honorary Englishwoman. At any rate, it is historians of Tudor England who seem most interested in writing about her. We have had biographies by John Guy (2004) and Retha Warnicke (2006); here are two more. Susan Doran's book is a brief overview of Mary's life, aimed mainly at the general reader but taking account of the latest scholarship; Kristen Walton attempts a thematic treatment of her varied career. Doran's book is a straightforward, balanced, and largely successful narrative. As such, it is rather like Warnicke's book, although with only one-third of the length. It concentrates on international relations, highlighting Mary's importance as a queen of France and prospective queen of England—even, in some Catholic eyes, rightful queen after Elizabeth's accession in 1558. It was then that Mary quartered the English arms with her own—a challenge that Elizabeth never forgave; Doran expertly disentangles the complexities of the issue. By contrast, there is little on military affairs. At the battle of Pinkie in 1547, 10,000 Scots are slaughtered in two sentences (p. 23). There is much about gowns, jewels, and other trappings of monarchy, as well as on pageants and aspects of court culture that are of increasing academic interest. The book is weaker on the internal history of Scotland. Mary's reign was important here, not just for attempts at religious compromise but also for the financial settlement of the Protestant church and for governmental developments like the establishment of commissary courts. Rather than study this, Doran relies on Jenny Wormald's polemical book-length essay that argued that Mary's reign achieved nothing and that she herself was uninterested in governing Scotland. Doran reproduces one of Wormald's key criticisms of Mary by writing, "Unusually for a Scottish monarch, she rarely attended council meetings" (p. 76). However, Wormald's criticisms have not been accepted in full by any significant Scottish historian and have been comprehensively rebutted by [End Page 590] Michael Lynch. What was "unusual" about Mary here was that she had a privy council at all; previously, a privy council had been something for a regency, an alternative to the individual power of decision-making exercised most recently by Mary's father, James V. Mary's councillors evidently wanted to deprive her of that power; was this because she was a Catholic, or because she was a woman? It is one of the weaknesses of Walton's book (on which more in a moment) that, although religion and gender are supposed to be her central topics, she barely mentions the privy council. Doran's own occasional unfamiliarity with Scotland is illustrated in her statement that Mary "ratified the acts of the 1560 Reformation Parliament" in April 1567 (p. 114); the relevant act of the April 1567 Parliament did no such thing. Fortunately, Doran makes few such serious errors. Doran steers clear of Darnley's unsolved murder in 1567 and the Casket Letters that allegedly proved Mary's complicity in it, merely placing herself briefly in the mainstream of scholarship: the Casket Letters are forgeries and there is thus no evidence that Mary was involved in the murder plot, but she was not too sorry to be rid of him. This may disappoint readers keen on the murder mystery; they should read Guy's book, which focuses intensively on the issue. The title of Doran's book draws attention to its illustrations. There are many portraits, not only of Mary but also of people connected with her career. There are surprisingly few artifacts and buildings (no French châteaux, for instance), but many manuscripts, illustrating the rich holdings of the...

English Catholicism under Mary Tudor

English Catholicism under Mary Tudor Colin Armstrong Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartolomé Carranza. Edited by John Edwards and Ronald Truman. (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2005. Pp. xx, 235. $94.95.) The Church of Mary Tudor. Edited by Eamon Duffy and David Loades. (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2006. Pp. xxxi, 348. $99.99.) The reign of Mary Tudor remains the Cinderella subject of early modern English history; England's last Catholic Queen regnant, the "Bloody Mary" of popular opprobrium, has been neglected as much as she has been traduced. There has been but one comprehensive scholarly treatment of her reign in modern times, and but one thorough academic biography (both of them by David Loades). Mary's Church has suffered as much as any other aspect of her reign from this neglect. The appearance of two scholarly symposia dealing with various aspects of Marian Catholicism is therefore much to be welcomed. These two volumes complement each other, and at times overlap; indeed, they share a number of contributors—Professor David Loades, Professor Thomas F. Mayer, Dr. John Edwards, Dr. Lucy Wooding, and Father William Wizeman appear in both. With the other contributors including Father José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, Father Dermot Fenlon, Dr. Ronald Truman, Dr. C. S. Knighton, Professor Ralph Houlbrooke, and Professor Eamon Duffy, these volumes gather for the most part a formidable force of scholarship. There can be little doubt that Reforming Catholicism in the Reign of Mary Tudor and The Church of Mary Tudor are considerable works both individually and together, and are the best accounts we possess of Catholicism in Queen Mary's reign. It should be stressed that in general they offer a positive view of their subject. Their broad approach takes to a further stage the 'Revisionist' school of Reformation history which has endeavored to draw attention to the social and intellectual vigor of English Catholicism in the first half of the sixteenth century. Professor Mayer, the leading modern biographer of Cardinal Reginald Pole, Mary's Archbishop of Canterbury, is unambiguous in the title of his essay in [End Page 589] The Church of Mary Tudor: "The success of Cardinal Pole's final legation." He calls his proposition that Pole succeeded "counterintuitive" (p. 149). It may be doubted whether he proves that Pole succeeded, but he certainly demonstrates that Pole received a high number of appeals as Legate. He has found that 315 were submitted (as against a previously calculated total of 45), and concludes (p. 174) that by the end of the Queen's reign—Pole and Mary died almost simultaneously—"a good deal had been done and an administrative and legal framework put in place that would have allowed a good deal more. . . ." Professor Duffy in his "Cardinal Pole preaching: St Andrew's Day 1557" (again in The Church of Mary Tudor) acquits Pole of the faults sometimes imputed to him: inattention to preaching and a lack of realism. Concerning the challenges facing the Marian Church (p. 200), Associate Professor Gary G. Gibbs (once again in the collection edited by Professors Duffy and Loades) notes how the chronicler Henry Machyn composed "frequently positive and celebratory representations of the reign" (p. 296). Not all of the contributions to the two volumes are of equal merit and some contain considerable deficiencies; others are thoroughly vitiated by the approach taken by their authors. The faults to be found in some essays must be dealt with before the stronger articles are considered. Professor Patrick Collinson's essay in The Church of Mary Tudor, "The persecution in Kent," is characteristically opaque and mannered. It is of some interest that Professor Collinson notes that even though Kent saw more executions of Protestant martyrs than any other region outside London (p. 310), Protestantism was not the dominant religious force in the county in Mary's reign (p. 316). It is unfortunate that Professor Collinson twice refers to the executions in Kent, which numbered at most sixty-seven (pp. 310-311), as a "holocaust;" the use of a term properly applied to the extermination of six million European Jews in this context is inappropriate if not indeed insensitive. Other contributors...

The Biblical Origins of Nationalism

March/April 2006 · Historically Speaking 21 The Biblical Origins of Nationalism Anthony D. Smith Nationalism is generally assumed to be a secular ideology and a modern movement. While there may be some debate about the nature and dating of nations, there is little or no disagreement about the character and modernity of nationalism. Yet, even here, things are not that clear-cut. Not only do we find strands ofnationalist ideology in earlier periods of history, but closer inspection reveals an early modern form of nationalism, one with an ancient religious pedigree, which I shall term "covenantal" nationalism.1 What can such a term imply? Pacts and oath swearing were common enough in the French Revolution and its successors. In Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere the formation of more or less secret societies whose members were bound to each other by oaths and rituals was a common prelude, or accompaniment, to mass agitation. There were also open, public oath ceremonies. An early example was the celebration of the Fete de la Federation on the Champs de Mars in 1790, when the tricolor was flown and the participants swore to defend the patrie using the selfsame gestures of the Roman oath sworn by the three Horatii brothers in Jacques-Louis David's painting ofLes Horaces of 1784. The point of such oath ceremonies was not to enter into mutually beneficial contracts. It was to bind the nation to its own image of itself. As such it was an act ofworship, and its god was as exclusive as that of any previous monotheism . As the Petition ofAgitators put it in 1792: "The image of the patrie is the sole divinity whom it is permissible to worship."2 In other words, this secular doctrine was embedded in a sacred context and had a religious purpose. Ofcourse, this was not religion in a transcendental mode. It did not seek salvation from a suprahuman, otherworldly cosmos . The salvation it offered was entirely of this world—to be part of the nation progressing through time and history. The immortality it conferred was equally terrestrial: the judgment ofhistory and the praise ofposterity. But it was not less religious for that. Better than any Durkheimian totemism, the rituals of nationalism created social solidarity through collective effervescence in national self-worship , if only temporarily. They also set the nation apart from others and imbued its members with strength and purpose, including aggression and expansion, as happened in Revolutionary France from 1793. Yet these rituals were not the first of their kind. They possessed a lineage, not so much in France perhaps, but certainly in England, Scotland, and the Netherlands. Though these mation was a growing identification of England as an elect nation, a view encouraged by the ideal of the Covenant found in the Hebrew Bible. This in turn encouraged a return to the study and inspiration of the Old Testament (long regarded in Catholic theology as merely a prelude to the gospel of the New Testament), with the laws of the Pentateuch Colonel Titus addresses Oliver Cromwell, undated. The James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. are not the only cases—we may cite the cases of Ulster, the northern colonies of the United States, and the Afrikaners—they are the first, and the most striking. Here, we can clearly discern the biblical lineage ofnationalism and the image ofthe ancient Mosaic Covenant.3 Let me start with England. Here the Henrician Reformation, much like those of Denmark and Sweden from the 1530s, was undertaken by the state and elevated the Royal Supremacy in place of papal authority. But it was succeeded by a more radical Protestant reform, whose main legacies were a vernacular Bible and Book of Common Prayer. However, it was the bitter experience of the Marian exiles from 1553 to 1558, reflecting on the Protestant martyrs of Mary's reign, that established a specifically English mode of Protestantism with growing Calvinist tendencies . Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1560-1573) became, after the Bible, the most widely read Protestant text. One of the fruits of this reforand the moral examples of biblical heroes serving as models for the Puritan...

Queenship: Politics and Gender in Tudor England

AbstractIn the Tudor century both queens consort and queens regnant presided at court. The role of consorts reflected that of noblewomen, who were expected to produce a male heir to continue their husband's line, to oversee some household functions, to supervise their female attendants, and to support religious enterprises deemed appropriate to women. In addition, their royal status offered consorts opportunities to engage in court politics and to influence patronage. Because giving birth to a male heir defined the success of their reign, their inability to reproduce or to protect their honor sometimes endangered their position as consort, as Henry VIII's wives discovered. By contrast, in addition to marrying and securing the succession, Mary and Elizabeth Tudor were expected to rule as monarchs. The perceived inability of women to govern led to demands that they heed their male councilors’ advice. Concerns about whether her husband would dominate royal decision‐making raised questions about Philip II's role in Mary's reign. Elizabeth compensated for her singleness by devising strategies for dealing with her male councilors and through representations of her public persona as male.

A Tudor cupboard at Cotehele, Cornwall

The presence of the remains of a Tudor cupboard displayed at Cotehele (Cornwall) has for many years been explained by the marriage of Catherine, the widow of Sir Gruffydd ap Rhys (the son of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, a leading figure in south Wales during the reigns of both Henry VII and Henry VIII) to Sir Piers Edgcumbe in 1523; thus dating this piece of furniture to the 1520s. By contrast, costume experts have always considered that the piece should date to the middle or later sixteenth century. This paper links the Cotehele cupboard to other pieces of carved work from the Welsh March in Shropshire—at Lower Spoad Farm, near Clun and in the church at Llanfair Waterdine—suggests an association with two of the major landowners there, the earls of Arundel and Shrewsbury; and places the cupboard in the context of Queen Mary's reign.

Intrigue and Treason. The Tudor Court, 1547-1558 (review)

Reviewed by: Intrigue and Treason. The Tudor Court, 1547-1558 Ralph Houlbrooke Intrigue and Treason. The Tudor Court, 1547-1558. By David Loades. Harlow:Pearson Longman. 2004. x, 326 pp. £19.99. ISBN 0582772265. This study of the mid-Tudor court focuses on the interaction between political and institutional developments. Biographer of Mary Tudor and John Dudley, historian of the major conspiracies of Mary's reign, and anatomist of the Tudor court, David Loades is well-qualified to write such a study. After an initial definition of the court and analysis of its functions during the early 1540s, he devotes most of his book to a brisk political narrative covering the years 1540-59, punctuated by accounts of changes in organization and personnel, together with descriptions of court entertainments, viewed as magnificent manifestations of royal power. A final chapter pulls together the book's thematic strands and succinctly demonstrates that its lurid title is deceptive. 'The court was always a place of intrigue, and inevitably it was fiercely competitive' (p. 288). Nevertheless, such intrigue caused few if any of the major political upheavals of the period. Neither the fall of Southampton in 1547 nor that of Somerset in 1549 resulted from it. Control of the court was not enough to save Somerset from being stripped of his protectoral dignity by the conciliar majority opposed to him. Thomas Seymour used his personal relationship with Edward VI in his attempts to involve his royal nephew in his dangerous intrigues, but he had no power base or party in the court. 'Both Northumberland and Mary were confronted with numerous protests and conspiracies, but none of these had either root or flower in the court' (p. 291). Mary's court, indeed, 'seems to have been remarkably free from plotting and faction, and completely free from anything that could be called treason' (p. 293). According to Loades, Edward VI, unprompted by any courtier, was the original author of the attempted exclusion of Mary from the throne in 1553, and the ensuing struggle was 'fought out partly in the council and partly in the country', at a time when 'the court was virtually in abeyance' (p. 291). The years covered by this book did nevertheless see notable episodes of political turbulence. In giving them a central place [End Page 267] in his narrative, Loades supplies a valuable corrective to the impression of purposeful consensus given by some recent accounts of Edward's reign in particular. He is almost certainly right to suggest that Northumberland was too hard on himself when, before his death, he confessed that he had fabricated the case that brought Somerset to the block. The erstwhile protector's disgruntled indiscretions had made him seem a dangerous liability. The most thought-provoking chapter among those Loades devotes to Edward's reign is however about the king's education and entertainment. Loades casts no doubt on Edward's commitment to godly kingship, but nevertheless suggests that William Thomas, under Northumberland's aegis, imparted aMachiavellian moral relativism to the king's studies which was the antithesis of his tutor John Cheke's approach. Among the chapters concerned with the Marian court the most interesting is perhaps the one about 'King Philip', which demonstrates how well Mary's much maligned husband fulfilled the very difficult role of king consort and how positively he influenced the English regime. His participation in knightly combats brought a touch of sorely needed glamour to Mary's court. Loades exploits in some of his most vivid passages the contrast between Mary, the pious, dowdy queen utterly without charisma who embraced marriage out of duty, and her sister, the perhaps unwilling virgin, 'an instinctive flirt . . . a young woman whose sexuality was as lively as her mind' (p. 257), who used to the full her power to excite and manipulate men. [End Page 268] Ralph Houlbrooke University of Reading Copyright © 2006 Edinburgh University Press Ltd.

Intrigue and Treason: The Tudor Court, 1547–1558

Intrigue and Treason: The Tudor Court, 1547–1558, by David Loades (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004; pp. 326. £19.99). For many years historians treated the twelve years between the death of Henry VIII and the accession of Elizabeth I as the interval between the first and second acts of the Tudor drama. In his influential Penguin history, S.T. Bindoff labelled them ‘Left-turn and Right-about Face’, contradictory and brief digressions from a correct script. The last forty years, however, have seen a burgeoning of mid-Tudor studies, in part because the reigns of the Henrys and Elizabeth appeared too well-worked, but also because it was realised that intervals can produce significant changes in scenery. David Loades was one of the earliest and most significant scene shifters, and his oeuvre is now very considerable. Perhaps, one wonders initially with this latest book, an oeuvre too considerable. Readers will be surprised that for many of the expected episodes, it refers them to fuller accounts published previously. The reason for this, as Loades reveals in the last chapter, is narrowness of the definitions he is applying. Treason is defined as ‘in the normal sense, plotting the death or overthrow of the incumbent monarch’. Intrigue is restricted to intrigue at court. Thus aristocratic manoeuvres under Edward do not qualify because they owed nothing to the personal intervention of the king. Only limited attention is given to the machinations of Henry VIII's executors in the early months of Edward's reign and there is no mention of the desire of leading peers to get rid of Somerset long before the autumn of 1549. Instead, Somerset's fall is ascribed to his failure to act with restraint and discretion (p. 52) with no mention of the complaint that, following a coup in March 1547, he had felt himself freed of his earlier promise to act only with the majority consent of the council. As for what contemporaries had no doubt was treason—the Lady Jane Grey affair—this is described as ‘fought out partly in the council and partly in the country, and as a political entity the court was virtually in abeyance’. We are also told that ‘Northumberland and Mary were confronted with numerous protests and conspiracies, but none of these had either root or flower in the court’ and that ‘Mary's court seems to have been remarkably free from plotting and faction, and completely free from anything that could be called treason’. Under Elizabeth, the first court conspiracy was the attempt to remove Cecil in 1568–9 and the nearest thing to treason was the Ridolphi plot. In place of the attention to what others might have defined as treason and intrigue, Loades gives space to some issues generally passed over quickly. A welcome chapter called ‘Educating and entertaining a prince’ strengthens the case for seeing William Thomas as Edward's ‘politics tutor’ and provides a useful overview of the court revels provided for him, though more, perhaps, should have been made of Edward's physical activity. He could ride by the age of eight and the summer of 1552 was spent on what Edward bluntly described as ‘the killing of wild beasts’. Like his father he had non-literary interests too, such as music and geography. In dealing with Mary's reign, there is a convincing chapter on Philip and, as one might expect, a perceptive and generally sympathetic portrayal of Mary. Strangely, no comparative use appears to have been made of Pam Wright's work on Elizabeth's female court, nor, it seems of John Murphy's discussion of the fortunes of the privy chamber in the relevant years. Readers who have not read Loades's 1986 account are provided with a helpful appendix on the structure of the court (but ‘bouge of court’ is defined as dining rights rather than basic rations of bread, beer, light and firing), and a list of its principal officers from 1540 to at least the 1560s. Although entries are not always complete, the index is clear. Twelve quality plates are included, principally portraits, though several of those reproduced are way-off in date—Henry VIII (1536), Elizabeth (c. 1575), Philip II (c. 1580) and Cecil (post-1585). But despite merits the narrow definitions adopted here mean that we do not have a rounded study of mid-Tudor politics.

Marian and Jacobean Literature

AbstractLiterature of the late Renaissance period in Scotland is best understood in the light of the two monarchs, mother and son, who governed the nation between 1561 and 1603. Scottish court culture in this period was alternately shaped, inhibited and nurtured by the political fortunes of Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots (1542–87) and James VI (1566–1625). Within four decades, the Catholic queen from a powerful Franco‐Scottish dynasty was first deposed, then beheaded; a succession of Protestant regents reigned calamitously; and the young king, exiled and estranged from his mother, inherited a politically and religiously troubled crown which, after twenty‐four years of relatively successful governance, would find union with England's in 1603. The political vicissitudes of the Marian and Jacobean periods in Scotland charted an erratic path for artistic culture. Perhaps because of this, the idea of a ‘Renaissance’ in Scotland, the counterpart of England's Elizabethan one, has yet to find firm root in the literary historiography of later sixteenth‐century Britain. Yet the conventional meaning of the term, ‘Renaissance’, as ‘rebirth’, accurately sums up the prolific efforts of Scottish poets to create art which had national, as well as aesthetic, currency. This essay begins by exploring literary culture in Mary's reign, suggesting that, despite its relative fragility, the long shadow which it cast over subsequent decades proved the necessary impetus for the ‘Renaissance’ of James VI's reign. That ‘Renaissance’ was relatively short‐lived, since regal union in 1603 dictated the end of Scotland's independent monarchy, and of literary art which had emerged out of the enriching conditions of sovereignty. This survey of the distinctive nature of Scottish literature in the reigns of Mary and James traces the major themes and preoccupations of a culture which was geographically placed at the periphery of Europe but which increasingly sought to prove its artistic centrality in the face of political change.1

William Mundy's ‘Vox Patris Caelestis’ and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary

William Mundy composed the votive antiphon Vox patris caelestis during the brief English Counter-Reformation under the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–8). Unlike the majority of earlier votive antiphons, Vox patris refers to a specific liturgical and theological event, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The text is an elaborate network of tropes on the Song of Songs, interwoven with other scriptural and literary topics traditionally linked to the feast of the Assumption, and finds parallels in Conrad of Saxony's Speculum Beatae Mariae Virginis. Vox patris also reflects similar treatments of the Assumption in the Golden Legend, English mystery plays, devotional poems, and contemporary sermons. Archival evidence suggests its precise historical context. The activities of Mundy's own choir at the London church of St Mary at Hill and of other London singers, the musical observance of the Assumption during Queen Mary's reign, and the manuscript sources of Vox patris reveal the likely background for its composition and performance.

The Michael Wood Mystery: William Cecil and the Lincolnshire Printing of John Day

John Day is perhaps best known as the printer of John Foxe'sActes and Monuments, usually referred to as Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Other lucrative Elizabethan patents held by John Day, such as those for the Metrical Psalms, the ABC, and the Catechism, ensured considerable financial return and a revered, if not envied, status among Elizabethan printers. Only the Queen's Printer, Christopher Barker, could compare with Day's volume of output; each man printed in excess of 350 works. Scholarship has primarily focused upon Day's Edwardian and Elizabethan activities. Day's whereabouts and activities have been debated and it has been assumed that any information about Day during Mary's reign has been lost. However, by examining new evidence, new light may be cast not only on Day's Marian activities, but also on clandestine printing in Tudor England and on William Cecil.

"A Godly Wyfe Is an Helper": Matthew Parker and the Defense of Clerical Marriage

Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker (1504-75) defended priestly matrimony throughout his career. His life, library, and letters provide counterevidence to Eric Carlson's argument that the clergy failed to receive marriage enthusiastically and were themselves responsible for its slow acceptance in England. Parker maintained his positive attitude toward marriage through five decades of shifting royal policies, when he delayed his marriage during the reign of Henry VIII, was married prematurely under Edward VI, sacrificed his career because of marriage during Mary's reign, and endured Elizabeth displeasure because of his married state. In contrast to Carlson's premise that Elizabeth harbored no hostility toward married clergy, Parker perceived the queens negative attitude and, therefore, defended clerical matrimony with his policies and publications. His example of a happily married clergyman suggests that Carlson's interpretation might be tempered by study of both the opponents and advocates of clerical marriage.

Mastering the Methods of Manipulation: Who Really Won the Marian Propaganda Wars?

The Tudor monarchy's monopoly of printing—which had peaked in the 1530s when Thomas Cromwell sponsored writers to promote both the royal supremacy as well as the corresponding obligation of political obedience—ended at least temporarily with the accession of Mary Tudor. This watershed in the history of English printing happened largely because many foreign printers left London after Edward VI's death for the continent.1 The relatively little Catholic propaganda printed during Mary's reign has been criticized as pedestrian and medi ocre. For example, it has been suggested that Protestants, many of whom were continental exiles with a broad, humanist education, wrote more convincing, more entertaining pieces than did her own propagandists.2 If one judges the success of these Catholic pamphleteers by tangi ble results (i.e. the success that Maiy had in implementing her major policies), then it would appear that her propaganda campaign was in deed less than a resounding triumph. Certainly no pamphleteer in her