Family Politics in Early Modern Literature - Hannah Crawforth

FAMILY POLITICS IN EARLY
MODERN LITERATURE
Edited by
Hannah Crawforth and Sarah Lewis
EARLY MODERN LITERATURE IN HISTORY

General Editors: Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield
Early Modern Literature in History
Series Editors
Cedric C. Brown
University of Reading
Reading, United Kingdom
Andrew Hadfield
School of English
University of Sussex
Brighton, United Kingdom
Aim of the Series
Within the period 1520–1740, this large, long-running series, with inter-
national representation discusses many kinds of writing, both within
and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different
theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an
interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and suc-
cessive cultures. Editorial board members: Sharon Achinstein, University
of Oxford, UK; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge, UK; Richard
C McCoy, Columbia University, USA; Jean Howard, Columbia University,
USA; Adam Smyth, Birkbeck, University of London, UK; Cathy Shrank,
University of Sheffield, UK; Michelle O’Callaghan, University of Reading,
UK; Steven Zwicker, Washington University, USA; Katie Larson,
University of Toronto, Canada.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14199
Hannah Crawforth • Sarah Lewis
Editors
Family Politics in Early Modern

Literature
Editors
Hannah Crawforth Sarah Lewis
Department of English Language Department of English
& Literature King’s College London
King’s College London London, United Kingdom
London, United Kingdom
Early Modern Literature in History

ISBN 978-1-137-51143-0 ISBN 978-1-137-51144-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955947
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Acknowledgements
This collection began to take shape in November 2013 when we hosted a

two-day symposium, ‘Family Politics in Early Modern England’, at King’s
College London. Our first thanks, therefore, must go to the Faculty of
Arts and Humanities at King’s, who awarded the research grant which
funded the symposium, enabling scholars from around the world to
travel to London in order to attend. Thanks are also due to the Arts and
Humanities Research Institute, and in particular, Pelagias Pais, who sup-
ported us as we prepared for the symposium and whose impeccable organ-
isational skills ensured its success. Thanks also to Laura Gowing, Gordon
McMullan, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Sue Wiseman, who were kind
enough to act as respondents during the symposium. Their astute obser-
vations and insights were an invaluable part of our discussions, and subse-
quently their reports helped to develop the collection itself. As part of the
symposium, we hosted a public roundtable debate, and we want to thank
Ed Howker, Shiv Malik and Philip Tew for kindly giving up their time to
participate.
The encouragement and support of all our colleagues in the English
Department at King’s and within the London Shakespeare Centre has
sustained us as we worked on this collection over the last few years, and we
are thankful to Jo McDonagh and Richard Kirkland who have both served
as Head of Department during this period. We are hugely indebted to one
particular colleague at King’s, Clare Whitehead, whose feedback on every
chapter and meticulous attention to detail has made all the difference. She
has worked for many long hours on the collection with us, and without
her, it simply would not have been possible to complete this project.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It has been a real pleasure to work with Ben Doyle and Tomas René at
Palgrave, and we are very grateful to them for their guidance and patience
throughout the revision process.
Finally, thanks to our families for their tireless love and support: Ray
and Karen Lewis, Jane, Matt, Evie and Florence Nicolle, Eleanor and Ian
Anderson, Sue, Graham and Eleanor Crawforth, Hadrian, Lucian and
Rufus Green.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Part I Union 17
2 Margaret Cavendish, Wife19

Julie Crawford
3 Reading Overbury’s Wife: Politics and Marriage in 1616 39

Christina Luckyj
4 Representations of the Family in Early Caroline Drama:

Or, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Henrietta Maria? 57
Tom MacFaul
5 Animal Families 75
Helen Smith
vii
viii Contents
Part II Succession 97
6 ‘Good Agreement Betwixt the Wombe and Frute’:

The Politics of Maternal Power in the Letters
of Lady Anne Bacon 99
Katy Mair
7 Allegiance and Alliance: Maternal Genealogies

in the Works of Mary Wroth 117
Naomi J. Miller
8 Mini-Majesty: Dynasty and Succession in the Portraiture

of Henry VIII and Edward VI 135
Naomi Yavneh Klos
9 Beyond the Palace: The Transmission of Political

Power in the Clifford Circle 153
Jessica L. Malay
Part III Rebellion 171
10 Bare-Forked Animals: King Lear and the Problems

of Patriarchalism 173
Su Fang Ng
11 The State, Childhood and Religious Dissent 191

Lucy Underwood
12 Father Figures: Paternal Politics in the Conversion

Narratives of Thomas Gage and James Wadsworth 211
Abigail Shinn
Contents ix
13 Family Politics and Age in Early Modern England 229

Lucy Munro
Bibliography247
Index265
Notes on Contributors
Julie Crawford is the Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities in the

Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University. She works on topics ranging from the history of sexuality to
the history of reading, and is the author, most recently, of Mediatrix:
Women, Politics and Literary Production in Early Modern England (2014).
She is currently completing a manuscript entitled ‘Margaret Cavendish’s
Political Career’.
Hannah Crawforth is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at
King’s College, London, where she is also a founding member of the
London Shakespeare Centre. She is the author of Etymology and the
Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (2013) and co-author,
with Sarah Dustagheer and Jennifer Young, of Shakespeare in London
(2015). She is also co-editor, with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann of On
Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration (2016), a collection of contem-
porary poetic responses to Shakespeare’s verse.
Naomi Yavneh Klos became the first full-time Director of the University
Honors Program at Loyola University New Orleans in 2011, after serving
as the Associate Dean of the Honors College at the University of South
Florida. A Professor of Languages and Cultures, she is the author of
numerous articles on gender and spirituality in the representation of both
the virginal and the maternal body in Renaissance Italy, as well as three
award-winning essay collections on gender in the early modern world. A
former president of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and
founding director of the Council of Undergraduate Research’s Arts &
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Humanities division, she is Vice President of the National Collegiate

Honors Council and Chair of the Honors Consortium of the Association
of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. Her current research project is ‘Not
Just for Jesuits: Ignatian Values in Honors and Beyond’.
Sarah Lewis is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at
King’s College London. She has also lectured at University College
Dublin, University of Roehampton, Royal Central School of Speech and
Drama, and Shakespeare’s Globe. She is currently working on her first
book, Time and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama. She is
also a director of the research network, ‘Grasping Kairos’.
Christina Luckyj is Professor of English at Dalhousie University in
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She is the author of ‘A Moving Rhetoricke’:
Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (2002) and editor of The
Duchess of Malfi: A Critical Guide (2011). She has published a range of
essays on early modern drama and women’s writing, and is currently com-
pleting a monograph entitled ‘Reasonable Libertie’: The Politics of the
Female Voice 1603–1636.
Tom MacFaul is Lecturer in English at St Edmund Hall, University of
Oxford. He is the author of four books—Male Friendship in Shakespeare
and his Contemporaries (2009), Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance
England (2012), Problem Fathers in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama
(2015), and Shakespeare and the Natural World (2016)—and the co-
editor of Tottel’s Miscellany (2011), and has published many articles on
Renaissance literature. He is now working on two further books: Care in
Renaissance Literature and Space in the Romantic Period.
Katy Mair completed her PhD on the letters of Lady Anne Bacon in
2009 at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, Queen Mary University
of London. She is now working as an early modern record specialist at The
National Archives, leading on cataloguing, exhibition and archival training
programmes.
Jessica L. Malay is Professor of English Literature at the University of
Huddersfield. Her recent publications include the first print edition of
Anne Clifford’s Great Books of Record (2015) and a biographical study of
the gentlewoman Mary Hampson that includes an edition of her recently
discovered autobiography (2014). She has also published widely on the
literature and culture of the sixteenth century, including a study on
Sibylline imagery in the Renaissance.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Naomi Miller is Professor of English and the Study of Women and

Gender at Smith College. Her scholarship includes Changing the Subject:
Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (1996),
and three volumes of essays: Reading Mary Wroth: Representing
Alternatives in Early Modern England (edited with Gary Waller, 1991),
Re-Reading Mary Wroth (edited with Katherine Larson, 2015), and
Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England (edited with
Karen Bamford, 2015).
Lucy Munro is Reader in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at
King’s College London. Her books include Children of the Queen’s Revels:
A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (2005), Archaic Style in English Literature,
1590–1674 (2013), and editions of plays by Sharpham, Shakespeare and
Wilkins, Brome and Fletcher. Her edition of Dekker, Ford and Rowley’s
The Witch of Edmonton was published by Arden Early Modern Drama in
2016. Between 2009 and 2012, she was a co-investigator on ‘Ages and
Stages: The Place of Theatre in Representations and Recollections of
Ageing’, a collaborative research project at Keele University and the New
Victoria Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Su Fang Ng is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Oklahoma. She has published Literature and the Politics of Family in
Seventeenth-Century England (2007) and articles in ELH, Studies in
Philology, Comparative Literature, Modern Philology, and elsewhere. She
has won fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the
National Humanities Center, and the University of Texas at Austin. In
2015–2016, she is a visiting fellow at Heidelberg University and All Souls
College, Oxford. She is currently working on imitatio Alexandri and lin-
guistic exchange in east–west transcultural relations.
Abigail Shinn is a Teaching Fellow at the University of St Andrews.
Alongside Andrew Hadfield and Matthew Dimmock, she is the editor of
the Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England
(2014). She has published chapters and articles on Edmund Spenser,
William Painter, conversion narratives and early modern popular culture.
Her current monograph project, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern
England: Tales of Turning, examines the rhetorical form of the English
conversion narrative.
Helen Smith is Director of the Centre of Renaissance and Early Modern
Studies and Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of York.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
She is author of the prize-winning Grossly Material Things: Women and

Book Production in Early Modern Europe (2012) and co-editor of
Renaissance Paratexts (2012), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early
Modern England (2015), and Conversions: Gender and Religious Change
in Early Modern Europe (2016). Her current book project traces the mate-
riality of ideas in early modern England.
Lucy Underwood is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University
of Warwick. She received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge
and has held research fellowships at the British School at Rome and the
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. She is the author of Childhood,
Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England (2014).
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Margaret Cavendish, Natures Pictures drawn by

Fancies Pencil to the Life (London, 1656), p. 271 25
Fig. 2.2 Margaret Cavendish, The Life of the thrice Noble ...
Prince, William Cavendishe (London, 1667), p. 162 32
Fig. 8.1 Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Edward, Prince
of Wales, oil on oak, c. 1538, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C. 136
Fig. 8.2 Hans Holbein the Younger, King Henry VIII;
King Henry VII, ink and watercolour on paper,
c. 1536-37, National Portrait Gallery, London 141
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
By the Law of Nature the King becomes a naturall Father to all his Lieges at
his Coronation: And as the Father of his fatherly duty is bound to care for
the nourishing, education, and vertuous gouernment of his children; euen
so is the king bound to care for all his subiects […]1
Early modern writers repeatedly return to the analogy between family

and politics most famously articulated here by James VI and I. The idea
that political hierarchies and identities might usefully be evoked within
discourses of the family is almost ubiquitous in the period, in which the
metaphor is deployed in a wide variety of contexts and genres. In conduct
literature, for example, it was common to present the family as ‘a little
commonwealth’: ‘[a]s every mans house is his Castle, so is his family a pri-
vate Common-wealth, wherein if due government be not observed, noth-
ing but confusion is to be expected’.2 Conversely, marriage, maternity,
sibling and other familial bonds (including those of master and servants
within the household) served important symbolic functions in the politi-
cal discourse of early modern England. Amongst the best known of these
H. Crawforth (*) • S. Lewis (*)

Department of English, King’s College London, London, UK
e-mail: hannah.crawforth@kcl.ac.uk; sarah.lewis@kcl.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2017 1

H. Crawforth, S. Lewis (eds.), Family Politics in Early
Modern Literature, Early Modern Literature in History,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_1
2 H. CRAWFORTH AND S. LEWIS
figurations was pater patriae, the image of the king as father to his sub-
jects. As James VI and I writes in The true lawe of free monarchies, &c.,
first published in Scotland in 1598 and reissued by London presses on his
assumption of the English throne in 1603, ‘fatherly duty’ motivates the
‘care’ of a monarch for his people, who are in turn figured as ‘children’
subject to his ‘vertuous gouernment’. However, as the chapters in this
collection will show, and as we will begin to suggest in this introduction,
such analogies are not straightforward. Early modern writers are inter-
ested in subverting and questioning the power of such metaphors as much
as they are in using them, and the subtle distinctions between these differ-
ing kinds of familial-political figures need to be carefully scrutinised if we
are to fully understand how they functioned at this moment in England’s
literary history. This collection reveals the complexities behind this seem-
ingly simple motif and explores the nuances that reside in literary treat-
ments of the family as a political unit and of politics as something that can
be imagined by recourse to the hierarchical relationships that structure the
early modern family.
How did early modern writers think about the ‘family’? And what,
for that matter, did they consider to be ‘politics’? This collection shows
how essential it is that we understand these two terms in relation to one
another in the period; their inextricability in early modern literature has
been underestimated and their complex and subtle interactions are funda-
mental to how we approach the literary historical culture of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.3 Critics have begun the work of acknowledging
the complex variability that defines textual intersections of the familial and
the political that we hope to further here. Su Fang Ng’s Literature and the
Politics of the Family in Seventeenth-Century England argues that ‘at the
root of the family-state analogy was not a single ideology but a debate’,
and ‘with a long history dating back to the ancient world, the analogy’s
meaning was not stable’.4 Ng—who contributes a chapter to this book—
recognises the malleability of the family politics analogy, an understanding
that is central to the work done in this collection, which begins by redefin-
ing the terms ‘family’ and ‘politics’ themselves.
All the chapters presented here suggest, in one way or another, that
it is necessary to broaden our sense of the early modern ‘family’ from
a relatively small, nuclear, unit of people who bear a very close genetic
relationship to one another to something much larger and more fluid,
defined by social bonds as much as biological ones. The chapters in this vol-
ume frequently employ the term ‘household’ as a useful way of e xpressing
INTRODUCTION 3
this concept, a word that allows their authors to think more broadly about
families as organisations comprising favourites, wards, guardians, serving
staff, apprentices and even pets and other domestic animals, alongside pri-
mary family members.5 ‘Kinship’ is another key term in several of our
chapters, implying a bond that is social as well as biological, and a familial
structure that is built upon some form of likeness but does not require
shared genetic material.6
The chapters in this collection suggest that if the use of such terms as
‘household’ and ‘kinship’ enable us to reconfigure our understanding of
the early modern family, then we must likewise reconsider the meaning of
‘politics’ in the period. Our contributors engage with a broad definition of
‘politics’, encompassing different forms of governance, such as local and
regional political activity, as much as national, parliamentary or monarchi-
cal politics. The politics of gender, and of age, are also central to many of
the critical arguments put forward in this collection.7 While both ‘family’
and ‘politics’ are potentially problematic terms, then, our juxtaposition
of the two under the composite notion of ‘family politics’ functions as a
productive source of discussion, partly as a result of some of these difficul-
ties and tensions. The complexities we face in defining the terms are, of
course, reflective of those encountered in the period itself, and thus are in
sympathy with the texts and contexts studied in our volume (and may help
us to read these works particularly acutely).
Before turning in detail to the particular concerns of our contributors
and the organising principles behind the chapters gathered together here,
we will first trace something of the history of family politics in early mod-
ern literature, sketching out the inheritance that this surprisingly complex
analogy brought to the writers of the period. From its earliest inception,
the popular analogy between the family unit and larger political organisa-
tions has been troubled. One of the most important originary moments
for the metaphor is Aristotle’s The Politics, a miscellaneous tract of uncer-
tain textual history that is notorious for its assertions that subordinancy is
a state innate to certain people (amongst them women, whom it argues
are necessarily inferior to men).8 The Politics was not much read in the
years following Aristotle’s death in the fourth-century BC; there were no
translations into Latin during the classical period, no flourishing of Arabic
scholarship on the subject, and it was not until the Flemish Dominican
William of Moerbeke produced a Latin version of the text in c.1260–1265
that the ideas the tract contained began to take hold.9 A translation by
Florentine humanist Leonard Bruni Aretino followed in 1438; Albert the
Great and Thomas Aquinas both produced Latin commentaries upon the
text; Louis le Roy, a discipline of Lorenzo Valla, rendered The Politics into
French in 1568, and an English version appeared in 1598 (the same year,
perhaps not coincidentally, as James VI and I’s articulation of pater patriae
in his first edition of The true lawe).10 James Schmidt convincingly argues
that Aristotle’s text is itself a work of translation; the terms he uses in The
Politics are not the conventional ones of the standard Greek of his time.
Aristotle substitutes ‘koinō nia politikē’ for the more typical ‘polis’, for
instance, a rewording that ‘invites an attempt to see what the polis shares
with such other communities as families and villages—the two other types
of koinō nia discussed in Book I of the Politics’.11 This unusual word choice
opens up the possibility of comparison between families, villages and the
state, implying that these differing kinds of political life share something
even as Aristotle elsewhere insists on their incompatibility.
At the core of his political philosophy, Aristotle argues that the natu-
rally occurring hierarchical pairings of man and woman, ruler and ruled
(or master and slave, parent and child), are the foundations of the fam-
ily unit and, more broadly, of a successful society. He describes how,
through the multiplication of those pairings, families become house-
holds, households become villages and villages become ‘city-states’.12
Aristotle therefore seems to suggest that the Greek city-state, through
which men achieve ‘perfection’ and ‘self-sufficiency’, is the family writ
large (1252b27). Households are an ‘association of persons, established
according to nature for the satisfaction of daily needs’, the most promi-
nent of which are preservation and procreation (1252b9). The village is
formed when ‘offshoots of a household are set up by sons and grandsons’,
and subsequently through the ‘association of a number of [these] houses
for the satisfaction of something more than daily needs’ (1252b15). At the
next level, the state is a unification of several villages to facilitate ‘the good
life’ (1252b27). This progression, from the hierarchical pairings of hus-
bands and wives, parents and children, and masters and slaves, towards ful-
filment within the city-state is realised, as Trevor J. Saunders suggests, ‘in
accordance with nature’ (55). The city-state in The Politics ‘belongs to the
class of objects which exist by nature’ (1253a1). It is presented, according
to Saunders, as ‘the natural end and culmination of the other and earlier
associations [families, households, villages], which were themselves natu-
ral’ (55). Aristotle argues that the city-state is directly connected to the
family, and in fact treats these two subdivisions of society as different only
in scale, both having the same species of naturally occurring hierarchical
INTRODUCTION 5
relationships and parallel power structures at their core. Slaves, women

and children differ in their degree of understanding from man, and from
each other: ‘the deliberative faculty in the soul is not present at all in
the slave; in a female it is present but ineffective, in a child present but
undeveloped’, whereas the male, adult ruler, ‘must have moral virtue in
its entirity’ (1259b18). As Aristotle makes clear, these are differences in
degree rather than kind: ‘a king ought to have a natural superiority, but to
be no different in birth; and this is just the condition of elder in relation
to younger and of the father to son’ (1259a37). The complicated sense
of sameness and difference this quote implies, and which is made manifest
simultaneously in both biological and social relationships, begins to sug-
gest the ways in which Aristotle’s use of the family and city-state metaphor
is in fact fraught with contradiction.
Although the first book of The Politics clearly engages the ‘family as
microcosm of the commonwealth’ metaphor, which so strongly influenced
the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli, Jean Bodin and Richard Hooker,
Aristotle’s text also seems to undermine that analogy.13 Aristotle argues
that it is wrong to assume, as others have, that ‘a master of slaves, for
example, has to do with a few people, a household-manager with more,
and a statesman or king with more still, as if there were no differences
between a large household and a small state’ (1252a1). He wants to dis-
prove the argument that the functions of those in power at different levels
of society are ‘the same, on the ground that they differ not in kind but
only in point of numbers of persons’ (1252a1). Although Aristotle argues
that ‘every household is ruled by its senior member, as by a king’, he
goes on to suggest that ‘the rule of a statesman is rule over free and equal
persons’ (1252b15, 1255b16). A king or father, for Aristotle, rules over
inferiors, whereas a statesman rules over equals. There is, therefore, a dif-
ference in kind between the model of authority that structures the family
(consisting of father as king over women, children and slaves, as inferior
subjects), and that which structures the Greek city-state (consisting of
statesmen and equal citizens). Aristotle’s complex manipulations of the
family politics analogy become even more elaborate when he asserts that
within the family unit, ‘over a wife, rule is as by a statesman; over children
as by a king’ (1259a37). This seems to suggest that the family is indeed a
microcosm of both monarchical rule, and of the Greek city-state, and that
wives have some equality with their husbands, despite the fact that they
are necessarily ruled by them. Aristotle describes the male as ‘more fitted
to rule than the female, unless conditions are quite contrary to nature’
(1259a37). There is a natural supremacy of man over woman, ruler over

ruled, which is the result of a difference in kind, not only degree. The ruler
has ‘intelligence to look ahead’, whereas the ruled has ‘the bodily strength
to do the actual work’: they have different natural virtues fitting them to
their prescribed roles (1252a24).
All of this suggests something of the complexity of the family political
analogy that is built into Aristotle’s very early articulation of the idea. This
complexity is borne out by the intricate, sometimes contradictory, nature
of The Politics, which evokes the metaphor only to challenge it, rejecting
any straightforward correspondence between the family and the political
life of the state even as Aristotle’s language seems to encourage the com-
parison. The paradoxes we find in Aristotle—who simultaneously denies
the tenability of the family politics analogy and yet continues to deploy its
metaphorical power—are representative of a duality strongly characteristic
of the early modern texts examined in this collection. Indeed, it may be
to Aristotle’s works that writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries owe the complexity and even contrariness that shapes their attitude
to the figurative relationship between family and politics, we suggest.14
For example, most conduct literature in the early modern period follows
Aristotle in arguing for both women’s inherent inferiority and the nec-
essarily hierarchical structure of social order. However, actually defining
either the nature of women’s inferiority, or of specific hierarchical rela-
tionships within the family and beyond, is a difficult task, and one which
is tackled in a diverse range of ways in the literature of the period. It is
accepted that the family is the foundation of social order, but there is huge
variety in the ways in which the family is used as a model in the political
sphere, in which political figures are used to model familial relationships.
These complexities are also the result of a methodological conflict aris-
ing from the difficulty of reconciling theoretical models of familial and
political life with the realities of quotidian experience. The many and var-
ied roles taken on by women, for example, are often far removed from the
models of female inferiority expounded by the conduct manuals within
either the familial or political arenas, as several of the chapters in this col-
lection suggest. All of the writers discussed so far in this introduction
struggle to maintain their intellectual commitment to the family politics
analogy—specifically their insistence upon a difference in either kind or
degree between king and people, women and men—in the face of their
experience of how such relationships were actually manifested in their own
communities.
INTRODUCTION 7
Many of the writers studied in this collection are troubled by the fact
that any conceptualisation of the family as the state in miniature is, as we
have seen, complicated both by theorisations of that metaphor and by the
practical realities of its application. As Thomas Hobbes notes in Leviathan
(1651), a work printed towards the end of the period surveyed in this
study, ‘Aristotle, Cicero, and other men, Greeks and Romans’, who are
so influential to early modern political thought (and whose writings give
rise to what Hobbes considers a dangerously reprehensible republican-
ism) came to their views via empirical observation rather than theoretical
inference; they ‘derived those rights, not from the principles of nature,
but transcribed them into their books, out of the practice of their own
commonwealths, which were popular’. Hobbes goes on to make a very
perceptive—and instructive—comparison between Aristotle’s method and
that of linguists and rhetoricians who based their ‘rules’ upon descriptive
rather than prescriptive methods: he writes of what he sees, ‘as the gram-
marians describe the rules of language, out of the practice of the time; or
the rules of poetry, out of the poems of Homer and Virgil’.15 One might
argue that the highly pragmatic approach that results generates some
of the constructive ambiguities of Aristotle’s text and its early modern
reception; these are arguments muddied by contact with reality, not pure
idealism. ‘Aristotle is very alive to the fragility of political structures, the
sources of conflict that haunt every political community, and the difficulty
of maintaining political stability’, write Marguerite Deslauriers and Pierre
Destrée of Aristotle’s ‘pragmatic’ belief that political models must fit the
world they are designed to describe. ‘So he is concerned to reconcile cer-
tain political ideals with political realities as he sees them’, they conclude.16
It is this spirit of pragmatism, of reconciling ideals and realities, which the
chapters in this collection discern in early modern treatments of familial-
political metaphors. Its contributors show that in fact it is contact with
reality that causes the imaginative models by which we seek to shape and
understand politics to evolve; realism has much to teach idealism, we will
see.
This brief study of the reception of Aristotle’s influential statement—
and subversion—of analogies between the family and the state in The
Politics has shown how such figurative language is under pressure almost
from the first moment it is deployed. The chapters in this collection
demonstrate that the metaphorical relationship between family and poli-
tics was under particular strain in early modern England, however, a time
in which the religious upheavals of the Reformation and the ideological
turmoil of the Civil War would prompt fundamental reassessments of how

both the family and political life were construed in theory and conducted
in practice. Our volume spans this period, with contributors ranging in
their focus from the early years of Edward VI (who later ruled from 1547
to his premature death in 1553) to the radically altered landscape of res-
toration England. The intention behind this wide sweep of coverage is to
show how ideas about the family—and about politics—shape one another
over time, revealing the subtle shifts in the ways in which the rhetoric of
each is employed in the service of the other over the longue durée. The
juxtapositions of chapters in this volume are revealing in themselves, and
for this reason we do not follow chronological ordering but rather choose
to group contributions thematically. As befits our interest in the effects
of certain points of transition (or even crisis) upon the language of family
politics, we have shaped this collection around three distinct moments:
union, succession and rebellion. Each of these terms has a particular sig-
nificance within the life of the family, as well as in political life.
Our first section, Union is concerned with both the moment of mar-
riage, and also the longer term over which that marriage is played out, the
duration over which its power relations are established and renegotiated.
In Julie Crawford’s chapter, we see how the role of the ‘wife’ is at once
familial and political—and, indeed, has the potential to transform both
family and politics. Margaret Cavendish’s role as a counsellor to her hus-
band allows her a kind of agency that belies her gender. Likewise, the role
of a wife’s ‘counsel’ in shaping the political contributions of her husband,
and even in exceeding his powers by offering an alternative kind of agency,
lies at the heart of Christina Luckyj’s exploration of textual responses to
the Overbury scandal and his incredibly popular posthumous poem, ‘A
Wife’. These chapters, and the two early modern women at their heart,
rehabilitate the term ‘wife’ (and redefine the idea of a ‘husband’) by show-
ing the crucial political powers of married women in the period, revealing
their counsel to be fundamental to the workings of the state.
In addition to this marital sense, ‘union’ also comprises the metaphori-
cal union between a monarch and his or her people. This is evident in the
well-known quotation from James VI and I that we take as our epigraph
above; during his reign, the term is repurposed to yoke together the dis-
parate nations of England and Scotland. In the years leading up to the
Civil War, the metaphor has a particularly rich life, working at once to
provide a language in which to delineate the monarch’s relationship to his
people (as that of a spouse) and at the same time to open up the marital
INTRODUCTION 9
relations of the King to political scrutiny (his moral conduct indicating

his capacity to rule, or lack thereof). Tom MacFaul’s chapter on the ways
in which Stuart drama responds to—and indeed seeks to shape—popular
understanding of the marriage between Charles I and Henrietta Maria
explores such formulations of the royal family in political terms, in the
context of the use of marital metaphors in politics. His piece establishes
just how central Charles I’s marriage was to his political reputation and,
conversely, how damaging suggestions of marital discord were for him.
Marriage is not the sole unifying aspect of family life to take on important
figurative significance in political discourse, however. The ties that bind
families together take on a wider symbolic function in considerations of
the allegiances that constitute a nation. Helen Smith considers the politi-
cal implications of the ways in which the early modern family works to
establish, police, define and develop its own identity through the negotia-
tion of other forms of union. She helps us to further expand our under-
standing of what constitutes both the early modern family and the political
life of the period by demonstrating that such discourses extend beyond
the human; her chapter shows that animals play an important role in the
household, and as such have their own political power in a period where
familial-political analogies are common. Encouraging us to think beyond
the modern nuclear family, Smith’s chapter also shows the difficulties of
Aristotle’s binary model of familial and political life as consisting in the
pairings of ruler and subject, husband and wife. Early modern unions are
far more complex, and more intricately related, than that.
The second section of this book, Succession, further explores the early
modern family’s self-definition as a political unit, this time through the
transfer of its values via inheritance, or the rejection of those values at
moments of intergenerational conflict. In the private sphere, such values
might include monetary worth, property, land and titles, but also comprise
religious, social, intellectual and political commitments transmitted within
the family. Katy Mair’s chapter reveals the political agency of Anne Bacon
as mother to her sons, Anthony and Francis. Anne shapes their political life
in accordance with her own distinctive values, which she passes across the
generational divide, thus extending her own agency beyond her lifetime.
Posthumous influence of a different kind is evident in Naomi Miller’s
study of Mary Wroth’s complex literary inheritances as a member of the
Sidney family. Miller’s chapter shows Wroth’s finely developed political
sense, and her shrewd self-fashioning as the inheritor of her literary and
familial precursors.
Within state politics, succession becomes a national concern for those

individuals in whom political power resides, and the ever-present question
of how this power is communicated once it outlives those who hold it.
Henry VIII is infamous for his preoccupation with ensuring his succes-
sion and his desire for a male heir. The iconography of depictions of his
young son, Prince Edward (later—briefly—Edward VI) forms the subject
of Naomi Yavneh Klos’s chapter. Klos charts the particular values that
Henry is keen to instil in his offspring through the control he asserts over
visual depictions in the portraiture of the period and, more particularly,
explores perceptions of what Edward inherits from his father as reflected
in the iconography of such images. Klos’s chapter thus emphasises that the
transmission of political values within a family works in both directions (the
son’s image contributes to the father’s power, as much as the reverse) and
as such her argument has much in common with Tom MacFaul’s under-
standing of the political importance of royal marriage. Political succession
is not only of importance to monarchists, of course; Oliver Cromwell’s
attempts to pass control of the Protectorate to his son Richard upon his
own death show this all too clearly. In Jessica Malay’s chapter, we wit-
ness Anne Clifford’s highly skilled efforts to secure her rightful familial
inheritance against the backdrop of the political conflicts of the Civil War.
Her family, riven by internal divisions between parliamentarians and royal-
ists, emblematises the difficulties in transmitting assets across generations
in times of instability, as well as providing an especially acute instance of
how political acuity—which Clifford possesses in spades—can be brought
to bear within the household. Malay’s chapter does much to facilitate a
rethinking of how we define the political in the period, demonstrating that
early modern political life operates on many different scales. Politics are
not simply—or primarily—national, but are in fact a local phenomenon,
functioning at a regional, civic or even familial level.
As Clifford’s difficulties indicate, the transferral of values across gen-
erations is not always straightforward. Intergenerational relationships are
often characterised by tension and even outright conflict, as our final sec-
tion, Rebellion, makes clear. Our contributors here consider the family in
crisis—the family troubled, tested and stretched—focusing on the ways in
which moments of intergenerational conflict challenge the familial identi-
ties that individuals work hard to establish and maintain in the previous
parts of the collection. We begin with Su Fang Ng’s study of King Lear, in
which we see Shakespeare—in characteristically iconoclastic mode—break
down the doctrine of pater patriae at precisely the moment James VI and
INTRODUCTION 11
I is working to secure its place as the prevailing trope of his newly inher-
ited and newly united Anglo-Scottish nation. Lear fails tragically as both
a father and a king: his daughters and his subjects rebel. Patriarchalism is
unflinchingly rendered as vulnerable or even obsolete in the play, a move
that Ng connects to the political context in which Shakespeare was writ-
ing, at the moment of transition from the long rule of a female monarch
to that of the new King. As such, her contribution perfectly encapsulates
the way in which chapters in this section (and indeed in this collection as a
whole) read the familial in political terms, situating intergenerational con-
flict in relation to the difficulties of such moments of transition writ large.
This final group of chapters goes on to explore the idea of rebellion in
political terms, considering those who disagree with the prevailing ortho-
doxies of early modern life and act upon that disagreement, with particular
attention paid to the effects of this behaviour upon their families. Our
period is bookended by two clear moments at which such acts of rebel-
lion are especially prevalent, and at which they bring together the famil-
ial and the political in highly acute terms. The Reformation saw families
riven along doctrinal divides, with those who outwardly conformed to the
Protestant national church often living in the same household as recus-
ants, who continued to practice Catholicism in secret (Robert Southwell,
poet and practicing Jesuit in a prevalently conformist family, is a case in
point).17 Many young men were radicalised by Catholic education on the
continent and returned to England more violently Popish than their par-
ents. Lucy Underwood’s chapter shows the deeply problematic political
questions raised by recusancy amongst early modern children. Through
detailed archival work, Underwood shines new light on issues includ-
ing that of who holds ultimate moral responsibility for children, how far
parental rights extend (especially where they are in conflict with those of
the state) and where the private and public spheres intersect. Conversely,
Abigail Shinn’s chapter shows how the rhetoric of paternity shapes the
enthusiastically Protestant conversion narratives of James Wadsworth and
Thomas Gage. Both writers rebel against the religious commitments of
their fathers, renouncing the Catholicism of their families. While they
assert their doctrinal independence from their forbears, however, their
narratives almost obsessively invoke figures of paternity (their own rheto-
ric seeming to enact a rebellion of its own—against its authors).
While the Reformation provoked many such divisions within families,
the Civil War likewise brought national political conflict onto the doorstep
and even sometimes into the home, with fathers and sons, mothers and
daughters taking differing positions in the conflict between the republi-

cans and those loyal to the crown (Anne Clifford’s family, whose varying
political allegiances are charted earlier in the collection, is symptomatic
of a broader tendency in this regard). At the restoration, such rhetoric
would take on an additional Oedipal dimension, when popular figura-
tions depicted the regicides as having killed their own father by execut-
ing the King.18 We might note, however, that it was not always the case
that the more conservative position, that of the old order, was adopted
by the older generation, and there were plenty of monarchical political
reactionaries amongst the sons and daughters of committed republicans.
In the final chapter in this volume, Lucy Munro explores the ‘politics of
age’ by considering the inversion of age hierarchies on the early modern
stage, with detailed reference to three Jacobean plays. In her study of
Thomas Heywood’s play The Late Lancashire Witches, we find traditional
orders turned upside down; fathers are ruled by sons and servants by their
masters. In Nathan Field, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Queen
of Corinth, we are presented with a 56-year-old ‘youth’, prodigalised
and disempowered by his predatory uncle. In Fletcher’s The Humorous
Lieutenant, a king’s lust disrupts the ‘natural’ hierarchical relationships
between father and son, king and heir, ruler and subject. Munro reads
such subversions with reference to the wider cultural orthodoxies that the
plays also wish to challenge—political and social, gender and class-based.
In each of these sections, our contributors examine the ways in which
the family defines itself both in the moment, in response to specific events
and transitions, and through time, from one generation to the next.
Thinking about the family and the state both in time (through a consid-
eration of synchronic relationships) and through time (through a con-
sideration of diachronic relationships), is crucial to all three sections of
the collection. Throughout, we see the family—and politics—defined and
redefined. As these terms are reinvented, so the dynamic between them
must likewise be reimagined, and the complexities inherent in metaphors
that depend upon them both are further revealed.
Notes
1. Charles Howard McIlwain, ed. The Political Works of James I (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), p. 65.
2. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, Eight Treatises, (1622), Cv; Richard
Braithwaite, The English Gentleman (1630), X2r.
INTRODUCTION 13
3. The essays in this collection are indebted to several revisionary historical

works, which have examined early modern families and the affective rela-
tionships around which they were structured. These include Lawrence
Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977), Ralph
Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450–1700 (1984), Margaret J. M. Ezell,
The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (1987)
and Kari Boyd (ed.), Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England
(2002).
4. Su Fang Ng, Literature and the Politics of the Family in Seventeenth-Century
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 7.
5. Studies by Joan Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 1600–1914 (1996) and
R.C. Richardson, Household Servants in Early Modern England (2010),
fuse literary and historical methods to broaden our sense of the early mod-
ern family unit. Other studies focus on the more traditionally defined fam-
ily roles and identities. For example, there are several important literary
studies that have examined childhood within the early modern family,
including Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World (2006)
and Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood (2011), both
edited by contributors to this collection, Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh
Klos. Children, parents, fathers and mothers are examined through the
works of: Patricia Crawford, Parents of Poor Children in England 1580–1800
(2010); Hannah Newton, The Sick Child in Early Modern England,
1580–1720 (2012); Tom MacFaul, Problem Fathers in Shakespeare and
Renaissance Drama (2012); and Felicity Dunworth, Mothers and meaning
on the Early Modern English Stage (2013). Other works have focused on
specific relationships within the family, particularly between husbands and
wives, including Joanne Bailey’s Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage
Breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (1999) and Diana O’Hara’s, Courtship
and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England
(2002).
6. The word is etymologically related to ‘kind’, and encompasses a sense of
emotional allegiance as well as biological proximity, implying a generosity
of spirit, as well as a familial or societal connection. OED, ‘kin’, n.1. OED
Online. (Oxford University Press, December 2015).
7. Relevant recent work in gender and sexuality studies that is pertinent to
our study includes Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern
England (2012), as well studies rebalancing the field by awarding mascu-
linity the same scrutiny that femininity has benefited from over the past
forty or so years, namely Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern
England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (1999) and Alexandra Shepard,
Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (2003). Bernard Capp’s
When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern
England (2003) offers a new perspective on women’s role not only within
the family but also within the neighbourhood as a larger kind of family
unit. Old age has been an important topic in literary studies of late, and
several studies have shaped the way our contributors have explored anxiet-
ies about inheritance and succession within the family. Christopher
Martin’s, Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature (2012),
Nina Taunton’s, Fictions of Old Age in Early Modern Literature and
Culture (2011) and Erin Campbell’s, Growing Old in Early Modern
Europe: Cultural Representations (2006), are all relevant here. The corre-
sponding question of how youth is perceived in the period and—crucially
for our purposes—the political implications of being young within familial
and national governmental structures, is addressed by Paul Griffiths, Youth
and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (1990) and
Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and youth in early modern England
(1994).
8. Marguerite Deslauriers and Pierre Destrée note an emerging counter-
narrative to such responses: ‘There is a growing body of scholarship on
these issues in his political philosophy, most of which now seeks neither to
defend nor to revile Aristotle for his views, but to situate those views in the
context of ancient debates, and to understand the implications of his dis-
cussions for our own political lives.’ Introduction to Cambridge Companion
to Aristotle’s Politics, p. 2.
9. See James Schmidt, ‘A Raven with a Halo: The Translation of Aristotle’s
Politics’, The History of Political Thought, II.2 (1986), pp. 295–318
(p. 298).
10. See Cary J. Nederman, ‘Mechanics and Citizens: The Reception of the
Aristotelian Idea of Citizenship in Late Medieval Europe’, Vivarium 40.1
(2002), pp. 75–102, (p. 86).
11. Schmidt, p. 296.
12. Aristotle, The Poetics, ed. by Trevor J. Saunders, trans. by T. A. Sinclair
(London: Penguin, revised 1992). Aristotle is concerned with the state,
‘by which he means specifically the Greek polis or ‘city-state’ (p. 53).
13. See T.A. Sinclair, Translator’s Introduction, p. 17.
14. See also Constance Jordan, ‘The Household and the State: Transformations
in the Representation of an Analogy from Aristotle to James I’, Modern
Language Quarterly 54.3 (September 1993), pp. 307–326.
15. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 21.9 [111], p. 143.
16. They are thinking particularly of Book IV of The Politics here, in which
Aristotle suggests that ‘a legislator must have knowledge both of the best
possible constitution under ideal circumstances, and of the various consti-
tutions that would suit less ideal circumstances’; see Introduction, pp. 5–6.
INTRODUCTION 15
17. See Hannah Crawforth, ‘“A Father to the Soul and a Son to the Body”:
Gender and Generation in Robert Southwell’s Epistle to his Father’, in
Helen Smith and Simon Ditchfield, eds. Conversions: Gender and Change
in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
18. See, for example, Oedipus: or, The resolver Being a clew that leads to the chiefe
secrets and true resolution of amorous, natural, morall, and politicall prob-
lemes. Sutable to the fancie of all that are ingeniously inclin’d. By G.M.
(London, 1648).
PART I
Union
CHAPTER 2
Margaret Cavendish, Wife
Julie Crawford
Eloquence was an invaluable asset for a statesman; it could turn even a

woman into a senator.1
As most of her readers have noted, Margaret Cavendish was extremely

self-conscious about her status as a wife, particularly as the wife of a peer.
Yet rather than seeing this self-consciousness as a sign of gendered depen-
dence or elitist vainglory, I read it in political terms. In particular, I want to
argue that Cavendish understood and promoted the position of the noble
wife as a kind of political office. In a section of The Worlds Olio (1655),
Cavendish devotes attention to political leaders who ignored the counsel
of their wives (‘Caesar shewed himself a Fool in nothing but in quitting
his Guard, and not hearkning to his Wife’). ‘The Counsels of a Wife’, she
writes, are not ‘alwaies to be despised […] nor to be lockt from the private
Affairs of her Husband’.2 Cavendish evokes a political metaphor here, one
in which, as Francis Bacon puts it in his essay ‘Of Counsel’, ‘Soveraignty is
married to Counsell’.3 Consilium, in this analogy, is the wife to Imperium,
and ought to be listened to. Yet while Cavendish was certainly interested
in the role of aristocratic counsel in a mixed or limited monarchy, she was
J. Crawford (*)
Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University,
New York, NY, USA
e-mail: jc830@columbia.edu
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_2
20 J. CRAWFORD
also interested in the political position of actual wives. In her dedication

to her husband in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (rev. ed. 1663), for
example, she writes that ‘Since your Return from a long Banishment into
your Native Country, retiring to a Shepheard’s Life, I your Shepherdess
was resolved, to imploy all my Thoughts and Industry in good Huswifery,
knowing your Lordship had great Debts after your great Losses’ (sig A2r).
At the same time as she presents herself as a wifely helpmeet, she also
uses what has been called ‘political pastoral’, deploying ‘homely forms’ to
‘glaunce at the greater matters’ of political and economic redress; her hus-
band’s ‘great Losses’ during the Civil Wars and commonwealth needed to
be recovered—Charles II had as yet failed to do so—and her ‘housewif-
ery’ would be the means.4 In this instance, good housekeeping in pastoral
retirement was a form of political performance associated with aristocratic
prominence and power. But it was also a claim on Cavendish’s own behalf
for her abilities, and rights, as a wife. In this chapter, I argue that these
two concepts of the office of a wife inform much of Cavendish’s politi-
cal thought, particularly in her Life of her husband, her most influential
and frequently reprinted text. If, as Markku Peltonen suggests, eloquence
could make even a woman a senator, Cavendish’s literary output was a
material instantiation of this belief, at once a form of advice to princes, and
an advertisement of her own skills.
Interregnum
From the beginning of The World’s Olio, Cavendish draws attention to her
status as wife. In a defence of her authorship against charges—whether real
or strategic—that she was not the author of her books, Cavendish writes
that ‘if any use may be made’ of her books, ‘my Lord was the Master and I
the Prentice’ (26). Both an implicit claim for the utility of her ‘recreational’
book and an explicit statement of her dependence on her husband’s wis-
dom, this statement advertises Cavendish’s partnership with her husband.5
Her subsequent attestation of intellectual (in)dependency—‘I never had a
familiar acquaintance, or constant conversation with any profest Scholar,
in my life, or a familiar acquaintance with any man, so as to learn by them,
but those that I have neer relation to, as my Husband, and Brothers’—is
less a statement of gendered modesty than a statement of membership in
‘the society of the few’, the legitimate, and noble, bearers of sapienta and
virtu.6 That which makes a good poet, she tells her readers, is also that
which makes a good ‘Privie Councellor’: ‘observation, and experience, got
MARGARET CAVENDISH, WIFE 21
by time and company’, and she is in very good company indeed (5). Her
brothers and her husband were all notable royalist soldiers, and time spent
in their company is both an affirmation of their values and of Cavendish’s
membership in their group.
Cavendish also makes it clear that her ‘apprenticeship’ to this company
had a particular kind of outcome. While her husband helped her to disci-
pline her mind into ‘an absolute Monark, ruling alone’—a trope common
in the self-presentation of royalists maintaining a principled resistance to
the various collectivities of the commonwealth and in Cavendish’s own
writing—Cavendish also analogises her life to that of ‘an expert Souldier’,
allying herself and her work with negotium over otium (46). What might
seem to be a statement of wifely subordination and privatisation is thus
better understood as a statement of familial and aristocratic membership
and activism, a delineation of, and claim to, a particular kind of political
position or ‘office’: that of a noble wife.
Amongst the commonplace political maxims on display in The World’s
Olio—‘A Tyrannical power never lasts’ (47); ‘to study Court-ship, is rather
to study dissembling formality, then noble reality’ (48); ‘there can be no
Government without superiority or superiours’ (50)—is the statement
that ‘Kings should be like good husbands’ (50). Its unstated corollary is
that subjects should be like good wives. This analogy was certainly used
in the service of absolutism—wives were wholly subordinate to their hus-
bands’ wills, just as subjects were to their king’s—but it was also used for
a wide range of other ends, not least in the famous parliamentarian claim
that just as there are limits on a wife’s subjection to her husband, so too
are there limits to a subject’s subordination to his king.7 Wives, in various
versions of the analogy, were the partners of, even necessary advisors to,
their husbands—the consilium to his imperium, the codeterminers of the
nature of his governance and sharers in its implementation.
After a series of essays on marriage (‘Of Marriage’, ‘Of Marriages’ and
‘Of Married Wifes’) in The World’s Olio, Cavendish discusses powerful
men from Roman history who courted disaster by refusing to listen to
their wives. Caesar, as we saw above, ‘shewed himself a Fool in nothing
but in quitting his Guard, and not hearkning to his Wife’, thus ‘quit-
ting Prudence and Love’, and dying a violent death (83). ‘And Seianus
quitting the Affection towards his Wife, and placing it upon Julian, raised
such a Jealousie in Tyberius, as it cost him his Life, otherwise he might
have ruled the Empire, and so the most part of the World’. ‘Anthony’s
leaving his Wife for the love of Cleopatra’, she writes in a third example,
22 J. CRAWFORD
‘lost him the third part of the World’ (83). The term Cavendish uses to
describe these relationships is ‘counsel’. The ‘Counsels of a Wife’, she
writes, are not
alwaies to be despised, nor to be lockt from the private Affairs of her

Husband; Portia was able to keep a Secret, and was of Brutus her Husbands
Confederacy, though not Actually, yet Concealing; And if Caesar had con-
descended to his Wives Perswasion, he had not gone to the Senate that day;
and who knows but the next might have discovered the Conspiracy?. (83)
While ‘numberless of the like Examples might be given’, Cavendish is most

interested in general principles: ‘where the Husband and Wife disagree, their
Family is in disorder, their Estates go to decay’, but ‘where the Husband
and Wife are united in Minds, as well as in Body, all prospers’ (83). In this
analogy, the wife stands in relation to her husband in much the same way
as (noble) subjects and rightful counsellors stand in relation to their rulers;
their wisdom is not to be disregarded; indeed, it is often the key to political
success. In Cavendish’s rendering, the marital union is an emblem for just
governance. The political implications of the marital analogy thus undergird
both Cavendish’s self-presentation as her husband’s wife and her view of
the essential and consiliary, rather than silently subordinate, role of noble
subjects. In focusing on the wives of famous Roman politicians, Cavendish
makes her own ‘use of Roman historians’ to offer analogues for the kind of
power she herself embodied as the wife of the Marquis of Newcastle and as
the author, quite literally, of the Cavendishes’ political vindication.8
Cavendish remained interested in the marital analogy and its uses
throughout her pre-Restoration work. Natures Pictures (1656), for exam-
ple, includes the story of ‘The Stoick Lady marryed to a Gallant Heroick
Man’, a barely shadowed account of the Cavendishes themselves in which
the ‘Stoick Lady’ both ‘bear[s] her part [of exile and impoverishment]
patiently’ and knows that the ‘poor, smooth, smiling dissembling policyes’
of unkept ‘court promises’ ‘will sooner pull down Monarchy than defend
it’ (sig. R3r-R3v). In another story in the same volume, ‘The Matrimonial
Agreement’, a couple makes a marital contract on the basis of (his p romise
of) constancy and (her) consent that is nonetheless caveated with her
right, upon cause of suspicion, to ‘depart from him, with such an allow-
ance out of his estate as she thought fit to maintain her’ (sig. R1v). In each
case, the wife serves both as a source of consiliary wisdom and as a caution
on marital and, by extension, political tyranny.
The sixth book of Nature’s Pictures, a story entitled ‘The Contract’,

which takes up similar issues of consent, coercion and obligation, is the
subject of Victoria Kahn’s brilliant argument about the ways in which the
romance genre engaged contemporary theories of contract by ‘helping
the reader both to imagine and to ask questions about a political subject
who consents to be contractually bound’.9 In Kahn’s reading, Cavendish’s
account of a young woman contracted at birth to a man who thereafter
breaks that contract and whom she does not marry until the very end
of the story is a commentary on contemporary debates about political
obligation. Cavendish uses the language of romance, Kahn argues, ‘both
to argue for a more equitable contractual relationship between husband
and wife and to present an account of political obligation that is based on
love rather than on filial obedience, wifely subordination, or a Hobbesian
account of self-interest’ (529).
In keeping her focus on the ‘ongoing consent and affection of the
partners to a contract’, rather than presuming, as Thomas Hobbes does,
an irrevocable one-time-only act of consent, Cavendish’s romance imag-
ines a much more equitable social contract than many of those offered
by her contemporaries. Yet, as Kahn goes on to argue, while an equitable
marriage might be desirable even to a royalist, it could not be the basis
of a subject’s allegiance to an absolute sovereign: ‘In her critique of the
marriage contract’, Kahn argues, ‘the royalist Cavendish ironically draws
near to the parliamentarians’ theory of an original and revocable contract
between the people and their ruler’ (529). As I have been suggesting here,
however, there are many political positions in between royal absolutism
and parliamentarianism. Cavendish’s own royalism was characterised by an
ideal of love, fealty and mutual dependency between the nobility and the
king—she believed, that is, in a mixed, rather than an absolutist, monarchy.
Her promotion of a much debated and much deferred marriage in ‘The
Contract’ thus keeps the focus on the grounds for such a contract rather
than its irrevocability, and her use of romance highlights the central impor-
tance of both the consenting ‘wife’ and the ongoing negotiations inherent
in the relationship. Indeed, there is nothing ironic about Cavendish’s posi-
tion at all; she is consistently invested in the ways in which marriage served
as a figure for a limited monarchy, and ‘The Contract’ is no exception.10
Another story in the same volume, in which a ‘Virgin buffeted by for-
tune’ sails ‘with a constant wind of Resolution’ through an extensively
dilatory series of romance adventures, pays even greater attention to the
rights and affections of the contracting ‘wife’ (Ff3v, 220). The heroine in
24 J. CRAWFORD
‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’, in fact, effects the education of a ‘Prince’,

her future spouse, by teaching him lessons on the mastery of passion and
the necessity of clemency; defending herself from and educating him out
of his tyrannical behaviours; and ultimately, fighting wars and leading gov-
ernments. Over the course of the romance, the Prince learns to give up
coercion in favour of negotiating consent. After he attempts to rape the
heroine, for example, he craves ‘pardon for his former faults, promising
her, that if she would be pleased to allow him her conversation, he would
never inforce that on her which she was not willing to grant’ (sig. Gg1v;
226). His subsequent gambit for her consent, ‘a present of all kindes of
rich Persian silks, and tissues, fine linnen and laces, and all manner of toyes
which young Ladyes use to make them fine and gay’, evokes both Persian
and patriarchal tyranny and thus solicits another lesson from the heroine,
this time on the importance of reciprocity rather than dependence (sig.
Gg2r; 227). ‘[S]he returned them with great thanks, bidding the bringer
tell the Prince, that she did never receive a present, but what she was able
to return with advantage’. She insists, in other words, upon mutual obli-
gation and reciprocity as the grounds for a successful ‘marriage’.
The rest of the story, which proceeds over 52 pages (220–272) and
travels through every available romance trope from shipwrecks and pirates
to undiscovered lands, recounts the difficulties of effecting such an equi-
table contract. When the heroine and her Prince finally do marry, it is
notable that they do so right after they have been made co-rulers of a state.
The Prince’s final words to the heroine are that ‘she should also govern
him’ and hers to him ‘that he should govern her, and she would govern
the Kingdome’ (Mm4r; 271). Their marital contract is thus marked by an
ongoing negotiation of the terms of subordination and sovereignty that
highlights the importance of mutuality and debate rather than hierarchy
and finality. At the conclusion of the story, moreover, Cavendish associates
her romance of contract with her own marital situation. The marriage in
‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ is celebrated, Cavendish tells her readers
in her handwritten marginalia, with verses written by her husband, ‘my
Lord marquis’ (271) (Fig. 2.1).
By signposting her literary collaboration with her husband—a process
she later refers to as ‘our Wits join[ed] as in Matrimony’—in the context
of a romance about a marital contract, Cavendish suggests that there is a
relationship between her own position as the wife of ‘my Lord marquis’
and those of all noble ‘wives’ entrusted with a central rather than subordi-
nate role in the social and political contract.11
Fig. 2.1 Margaret Cavendish, Natures Pictures drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life
(London, 1656), p. 271
26 J. CRAWFORD
The final entry in Natures Pictures is, fittingly, a biographical account

of Cavendish’s own life, particularly of her status as, as she puts it in the
conclusion, ‘daughter to one Master Lucas of St. John’s neer Colchester
in Essex, second Wife to the Lord Marquis of Newcastle’ (sig. Ddd4r;
391). While critics have often read this claim as Cavendish’s plea for rec-
ognition outside a regime of patriarchal coverture (she identifies herself
as ‘second Wife’; she writes, ‘for my Lord having had two Wives, I might
easily have been mistaken, especially if I should dye, and my Lord Marry
again’), it is equally powerfully an assertion of her rights as a noble scion
and wife. ‘A true Relation’ begins with an account of another principled
royalist wife: Cavendish’s mother, Elizabeth Lucas. The Lucas estate was,
famously, plundered during the Civil Wars. After her husband’s death and
throughout the Civil Wars, Cavendish recounts,
my Mother was of an Heroick Spirit, in suffering patiently where there is no

remedy, or to be industrious where she thought she could help; She was of a
grave Behaviour, and had such a Majestick Grandeur, as it were continually
hung about her, that it would strike a kind of an awe to the beholders, and
command respect from the rudest, I mean the rudest of civiliz’d people, I
mean not such Barbarous people, as plundered her, and used her cruelly, for
they would have pulled God out of Heaven, had they had power, as they did
Royaltie out of his Throne. (377)
In this account, Lady Lucas’s ‘husband’ is at once Thomas Lucas and

Charles I and her ‘Heroick Spirit’ that of both a loyal and industrious wife
and a loyal and industrious political subject, ‘industrious where she thought
she could help’. Cavendish thus presents her mother as an exemplifica-
tion of the political analogy between wives and subjects. The ‘Majestick
Grandeur’ that hung about her very person is perhaps best understood as
the apotheotic glow of aristocratic royalism, the divine right of kings slightly
dispersed.12 Yet in focusing on her mother’s adept governance of the Lucas
estate—‘she was very skilfull in Leases, and setting of Lands, and Court-
keeping, ordering of Stewards, and the like affaires’ (sig. Ccc1r; 377)—
Cavendish describes a model royalist wife who was also a model estate
manager and office holder: a singularly effective wife who was, quite literally,
Cavendish’s own forbearer. In her autobiography, Cavendish thus config-
ures her status as a daughter and sister—her inheritance, that is, of a spe-
cific familial political disposition—as equally important as her marital status.
There is a collective imagination here, grouped in the present, but with

roots deep in the past and offshoots into the future.
Cavendish’s subsequent account of the anomalous nature of her own
engagement with the parliamentarian regime—‘for I never was at the
Parliament-House, nor stood I ever at the doore’, but once, when refused
her ‘share of my Lords Estate’ (380)—is thus less an account of her gender
subordination than of her principled and genealogically consistent royal-
ism. During the commonwealth, royalist wives were entitled to a share
of their husbands’ sequestered estates; Cavendish was denied her share
when she petitioned for it in 1651 because her husband was already a
delinquent when she married him. When Cavendish ‘whisperingly spoke
to my brother [John Lucas] to conduct me out of that ungentlemanly
place’, she was both distancing herself from women petitioners and the
regime that spawned them (‘the Customes of England being changed as
well as the Laws, where Women become Pleaders, Atturneys, Petitioners
and the like’) and attesting to her own royalist ‘Confidence’ in the immi-
nent Restoration of the monarchy at both the ideological and practical
levels (sig. Ccc2v; 380). Rather than an indication of political quietism, her
claim to be ‘unpractised in publick Imployments’ and ‘unlearned’ in the
‘uncouth Ways’ of those she had to appear before signals her refusal to be
a ‘flatterer’, that is, someone subordinately subject to power in whatever
‘ungentlemanly’—or parliamentary—form it takes. Instead, as she does
in The World’s Olio, Cavendish presents herself as a principled member of
the society of the few: a counsellor, that is, rather than a flatterer. (While
her two other brothers died as royalist martyrs, the brother she appeared
with at the Committee had received a title, Baron Lucas of Shenfield, as
compensation for his loyalty.) Rather than hanging around parliament’s
doors during the Interregnum, Cavendish reminds us, she was writing and
publishing her books, including the one her readers presently hold in their
hands. ‘For who can tell but my poor Book may have/Honour’d renown,
when I am in the Grave?’ she writes in the volume’s final couplet, seeking
to erect one of the forms of monumentalism, or ‘Majestick Grandeur’,
that she hoped would mark both her political stature and her legacy (sig.
Fff2v; 390). Cavendish’s eloquence may not have made her a senator per
se, but it was nonetheless her means of promoting both the consiliary
rights of the nobility and her own political rights as a noble wife.
28 J. CRAWFORD
Post-Restoration
If Cavendish spent the Interregnum authoring a sustained political argu-
ment for a particular kind of royalism and her own family’s place in it,
the Restoration of the monarchy, and the subsequent re-securing of the
Newcastle estates, enabled an improvement in her personal, if not neces-
sarily political, fortunes. Her jointure was increased to £1125 per annum,
and she was given a life interest in the family’s primary estate, Bolsover
Castle.13 There is also ample evidence that Cavendish did in fact ‘imploy’ a
great deal of her ‘Thoughts and Industry in good Huswifery’ in her post-
Restoration life in the Newcastle estates. This ‘Huswifery’ took the form
of the kinds of stewardship her own mother had effected in Colchester:
the establishing of ‘Leases, and setting of Lands, and Court-keeping,
ordering of Stewards, and the like affaires’, as well as the creation of mate-
rial accounts of the Cavendish losses and records of the family’s military
and political loyalty, and the concerted promotion of their rights of redress
and office-holding.14 For Margaret Cavendish, her family’s basis of power
lay not only in the immanent ‘Majestick Grandeur’ of the (restored) royal-
ist nobility but also in the more material practices of regional aristocratic
power it had always asserted, and could still marshal, in the North. In her
post-Restoration work, Cavendish continued to criticise the Stuart regime
for its failure to reward the loyalty and reaffirm the political status of the
royalist nobility and to uphold the traditional rights of that nobility as
regional governors and counsellors to the monarch. She did so, moreover,
increasingly on the basis of her own rights, encapsulated and emblazoned
in her actively circulated folio volumes.15
In these volumes, Cavendish continued to make use of political analo-
gies between women and subjects and wives and counsellors. Women, she
writes in a preface to Philosophical and Physical Opinions, are
shut out of all power, and Authority by reason we are never imployed either
in civil or marshall affaires, our counsels are despised, laught at, the best of our
actions are trodden down with scorn, by the over-weaning conceit men have
of themselves and through a dispisement of us.16
In contrast to such misogyny, her husband appears here, and in much

of Cavendish’s work, as a supporter of women, praising his wife’s work
as fighting the ‘over-weaning’ prerogative of men. In his epistle ‘To the
Lady Marquesse of Newcastle, On her Book intitled her Philosophicall,
and Physicall Opinions’, for example, William praises her work in favour-
able comparison to ‘old Grave Philosophers’ and other ‘learned men’),
and in a second epistle, he defends her against those ‘laying those false,
and malicious aspersions of her, that she was not Authour of her BOOKS’
by explicitly calling out anti-feminist sentiment.17 In a prefatory letter to
Sociable Letters, he even explicitly describes her writing as having the ‘Style
of States-men’ and criticises those who attack it.18 If overweening male
prerogative was often a sign of tyranny, the defence of women was, in
turn, a sign of political balance: a rights-based argument that placed limits
on claims to absolute power. As the resistant heroine Pamela says to her
misogynist tyrant-tormenter in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, ‘I know thy power
is not unlimited’—a clear articulation of the limits a constant woman places
on overweening power, and, by analogy, of the limits just counsellors place
on kings who claim unlimited sovereignty.19 Cavendish’s promotion of her
own status as an empowered wife was thus a central aspect of her post-
Restoration promotion of her husband; the proto-feminism she ascribes to
him functions as a sign not only of his consiliary wisdom and thus suitabil-
ity for political office but of his own status as a ‘Prince’ in his own right—a
right buttressed by the political perspicacity and eloquence of ‘the thrice
Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle,
His Wife’. Cavendish thus claims consiliar status both within her (equita-
ble) marriage and within her country’s political dispensation. Her books,
moreover, continue to promote, and literally emblematise, these roles.
The official title of Cavendish’s best-known work, her biography of her
husband, illustrates the dynamic I have been highlighting, and I present
it here in full:
The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe,
Duke, Marquess, and Earl of Newcastle; Earl of Ogle; Viscount Mansfield; and
Baron of Bolsover, of Ogle, Bothal and Hepple: Gentleman of His Majesties
Bed-chamber; one of His Majesties most Honourable Privy-Councel; Knight
of the most Noble Order of the Garter; His Majesties Lieutenant of the County
and Town of Nottingham; and Justice in Ayre Trent-North: who had the hon-
our to be Governour to our most Glorious King, and Gracious Soveraign, in
his Youth, when He was Prince of Wales; and soon after was made Captain
General of all the Provinces beyond the River of Trent, and other Parts of the
Kingdom of England, with Power, by a special Commission, to make Knights.
Written by the thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, Margaret,
Duchess of Newcastle, His Wife.
30 J. CRAWFORD
While the title clearly blazons each of William Cavendish’s titles—particu-

larly his status as a ‘PRINCE’, the highest possible rank within the nobil-
ity—Margaret Cavendish is nonetheless the means by which this status
is blazoned. Her account of her husband’s life, defence of his military
actions, account of his losses (the volume includes ‘a Computation of My
Lord’s Losses, which he hath suffered by those unfortunate Warres’) and
argument for his suitability to be a ‘Counselor’ to the King is written by a
‘Wife’ who is both a ‘Princess’ and, as we will see, a strict record keeper,
a scrupulous historian and a remarkably politic, or ‘eloquent’, senator on
behalf of a quite radical set of political critiques and ideas.
As she did in The Worlds Olio, Cavendish presents herself in the Life as
her husband’s creature—his ‘Lordship was [her] onely Tutor’, she tells
her readers, teaching her what he had ‘found and observed by [his] own
experience’ as she was too young when he married her to ‘have much
knowledg of the world’. But she also advertises her own skills, point-
ing out that despite her youth, ‘it pleased God to command his Servant
Nature to indue [endow] me with a Poetical and Philosophical Genius,
even from my Birth’ and illustrating the ways in which her particular
form of ‘Genius’ serves her husband (sig. a2r). Cavendish draws a paral-
lel between her ‘Contemplating and Writing’ and her husband’s ‘Loyal,
Noble, and Heroick Actions’ during the Civil Wars when she suggests
that those whose ‘spight and malice’ has sought to ‘stain’ their actions
are part of the same ‘party’: faced with the same enemies, husband and
wife are thus configured as ‘soldiers’ for the same cause (sig. b1r). Even
though his actions were done ‘publickly in the Field’ with ‘many thousand
Eye-witnesses’ and hers ‘privately in my Closet’ with no witnesses but
her ‘Waiting-maids’ (sig. b1v), Cavendish nonetheless suggests that her
‘Contemplating and Writing’ is a form of political activism.
Cavendish claims a specific political resonance for the kind of history she
sets out to write in the Life. At the beginning of the volume, she claims that
of the ‘three chief kinds of history’—General, National and Particular—the
last is the ‘most secure’ because it goes ‘not out of its own Circle, but turns
on its own Axis, and for the most part, keeps within the Circumference of
Truth’ (sig. c1v). If, she argues, ‘National’ history is dangerous because
‘it teaches subtil Policies, begets Factions, not onely between particular
Families and Persons, but also between whole Nations, and great Princes’,
then ‘Particular’ history is ‘Heroical’, written only by ‘the Prime Actors, or
the Spectators of those Affairs and Actions of which they write’. Cavendish
compares the former, moreover, ‘to an Aristocracy’, and the latter, ‘to a
Monarchy’ (sig. c1r), clearly signalling the political intentions and loyalties
of her own volume (and denying any factional ambitions of her own). It
is not, Cavendish argues, ‘inconsistent with my being a Woman, to write
of wars’ as these are not wars ‘between Medes and Persians, Greeks and
Trojans, Christians and Turks; but amongst my own Countreymen, whose
Customs and Inclinations, and most of the Persons that held any consid-
erable Place in the Armies, was well known to me’. ‘[B]esides all that’,
she continues, ‘my Noble and Loyal Lord did act a chief Part in that fatal
Tragedy, to have defended (if humane power could have done it) his most
Gracious Soveraign, from the fury of his Rebellious Subjects’ (sig.c1v).
Here Cavendish both distances her husband’s actions—and thus her cri-
tique—from the factional self-interest associated with the ‘Aristocratic’
form of government and highlights the singular heroism of her husband in
defending the King against his ‘Rebellious subjects’.
Her account, she goes on to suggest, will avoid recriminating her hus-
band’s enemies. She will not tell ‘Romansical Falshoods for Historical
Truths’, she writes in her preface, nor
write to amuse my Readers, in a mystical and allegorical Style, of the dis-

loyal Actions of the opposite Party, of the Treacherous Cowardise, Envy and
Malice of some Persons, my Lords Enemies, and of the ingratitude of some
of his seeming Friends. (sig. c2r)
She cannot, she avers, ‘better obey his Lordships Commands to conceal
those things, then in leaving them quite out, as I do, with submission to
his Lordships desire, from whom I have learn’d Patience to overcome
my Passions, and Discretion to yield to his Prudence’ (c2r). Here, she
both highlights her husband’s credentials as an effective counsellor—he is
the stoic, discreet and prudent master of his passions—and, crucially, her
own politic ability to circumvent them. As James Fitzmaurice has shown,
Cavendish did in fact indict her husband’s enemies and expose ‘the ingrat-
itude of some his seeming friends’ in her Life. While she hand-corrected
these ‘few errors’ in the actual copies of the book, her ‘corrections’ actu-
ally drew even greater attention to the ‘errors’ than if she had left them
alone. Her ‘errors’, and her corrections of them, thus allowed Cavendish
both the grounds for deniability and the vengeful exposure of perfidy.20 At
the end of the volume, she includes what seems to me to be the signature
testament to her partnership with her husband: a product of their ‘Wits
join[ed…] in Matrimony’ that is at once a record of their union and of its
32 J. CRAWFORD
status as a political analogy. In the last books, she tells us, she has set down
‘some Essayes and Discourses of My Lords, together with some Notes and
Remarques of mine own’, a series of political observations that both avow
their loyalty and proffer some trenchant criticism. (She introduces them at
sig. D2r; they appear starting on sig. Tt1v; 162) (Fig. 2.2).
Fig. 2.2 Margaret Cavendish, The Life of the thrice Noble […] Prince, William
Cavendishe (London, 1667), p. 162
Throughout the Life, Cavendish reminds readers that ‘before the Wars
my Lord had as great an Estate as any subject in the Kingdom’—an estate,
she points out, ‘descended upon him most by Women’ (sig. Bb1v; 94)—
and that he both raised his army ‘upon his own Interest for the Service
of His Majesty’ and had governance over his own private Princedom. He
had, she tells us,
the Power of Coyning, Printing, Knighting, &c. which never any Subject
had before, when His Soveraign Himself was in the Kingdom; as also the
Command of so many Counties […] and the Power of placing and displac-
ing what Governours and Commanders he pleased, and of constituting what
Garisons he thought fit. (sig. Gg1r)
In presenting her husband as both a regional sovereign and a military

baron, Cavendish reminds her readers of the basis of the English monar-
chy, encapsulated in the Magna Carta and embodied by the titled, prop-
ertied and martially empowered barons of the feudal past.21 While she
spends time offering the history of Charles’s conferral of the ‘Titles and
Dignities of Marquess, and Duke of Newcastle’ (sig. Kk1r; 125) upon her
husband, she spends an equal amount of time on the ‘little Book, or rather
a Letter’, Newcastle wrote to the King from his exile ‘wherein he delivered
his Opinion concerning the Government of his Dominions, whensoever
God should be pleased to restore him to his Throne’.22 Her biography
establishes reciprocity—even at the level of number of sentences—as the
basis of the relationship between the monarch and his noble subject: their
contract is based not only on consent but on mutual obligation: the army
Newcastle raises on ‘his own interest’ fights in defence of Charles I’s pre-
rogative; the titles and honours Charles II offers to Newcastle are balanced
by the letter of political advice Newcastle wrote to him from exile.
As the biography progresses, Cavendish pays increasing attention to
her own role in its economic and political accounting. She highlights her
function as scribe and as interlocutor, relying less on private documents
(the Letter, she tells her readers, was for Charles’s eyes, not hers) than
on her conversations with her husband. She bases her confirmations of
his ‘Natural Understanding and Judgment’ ‘upon some Discourse I held
with him one time’ (sig. Pp1v; 146) and points out that the essays and
discourses she presents are both ‘Gather’d from the Mouth of My Noble
Lord and Husband’ and buttressed by some ‘Notes of mine own’. Often
her formulations of the most trenchant pieces of political commentary
34 J. CRAWFORD
begin with ‘I have heard my Lord say’, or ‘I asked my Lord one time’,
formulations that display a dialogic engagement that is at once a model for
counsel and for the union between imperium and consilium.
Her husband’s ‘Essays and Discourses’ consistently defend the rights of
the great peers: their freedom from taxation, their right to equity (‘many
Laws do rather entrap, then help the subject’ [169]), their crucial role as
local governors and their rightful place as the natural counsellors to the
king (‘Great Princes should onely have Great, Noble and Rich Persons
to attend them, whose Purses and Power may alwayes be ready to assist
them’, [179]). Cavendish records one particularly interesting statement of
Newcastle’s political loyalty as follows:
I have heard him say several times, That his love to his gracious Master
King Charles the Second, was above the love he bore to his Wife, Children,
and all his Posterity, nay to his own life: And when, since His Return into
England, I answer’d him, That I observed His Gracious Master did not love
him so well as he lov’d Him; he replied, That he cared not whether His
Majesty lov’d him again or not; for he was resolved to love him. (sig. Zz2v,
180)
Here Cavendish presents her husband as loyal to the King in a way that is
at once analogous to marriage and a supersession of its bonds. Cavendish
herself functions as the voice of a dissenting critique, at once critical of the
King’s failure to reward those who suffered for the cause (‘I observed His
Gracious Master did not love him so well as he lov’d Him’), and silenced
by the man on whose behalf she is registering the complaint. Cavendish
thus preserves her husband’s unquestioned loyalty—‘a real Friend’ who
‘profer[s his] honest service, either out of pure Love and Loyalty, or in
hopes of Advancement, seeing there is none but by serving the State’
(179)—and subjects the King’s failure of appropriate reward to public
scrutiny and critique.
At other moments, ‘William Cavendish’ corrects his wife’s criticism
of the government of Charles I, touting the inevitable righteousness
of monarchy and the inevitability of Charles II’s return (180); corrects
her insistence that Princes err by focusing instead on the ‘Follies of the
people’ (181); and corrects her assertion that Princes’ ‘splendor proceeds
from the Ceremony which they receive from their Subjects’, by insisting,
in contrast, ‘that all the Honours and Titles, in which consists the chief
splendor of a subject, were principally derived from [Princes]; for, said he,
were there no Princes, there would be none to confer Honours and Titles’
(183). In one dialogue, she naively asks why men of ‘small parties’ want
to be ‘Commanders’ in ‘States Affairs’ and why they are more rewarded
than men of ‘Great Merit and Power’. Her Lord answers that the rea-
son was ‘That it was far more easie to reward Under-Officers, then Great
Commanders’ and allows her comment that ‘States were afraid of [great
men’s] Power’ to stand uncorrected (185). In each of these instances,
Margaret Cavendish’s often sharply critical opinion is negotiated and
(often) mediated, or softened, by dialogue with her husband. Newcastle
and Cavendish’s conversations thus serve as models for political discourse
in much the same way as their marital union serves as a model for an ideal
political union.23
‘The Some Few Notes of the Authoress’ (191) that Cavendish offers
following her husband’s (nearly) unimpeachably loyal words of political wis-
dom thus stand out that much more sharply. Despite the fact that her hus-
band was disadvantaged in raising an army on the King’s behalf ‘by reason a
Kingly or Monarchical Government was then generally disliked’, Cavendish
points out that the impressive army Newcastle did raise was raised ‘most
upon his own and his Friends Interest’ (191). He raised this army, more-
over, ‘upon his own Interest (he having many Friends and Kindred in the
Northern parts) at such a time when his Gracious King and Soveraign was
then not Master of his own Kingdome’ (192). Here Cavendish highlights
both her husband’s sovereignty ‘in the Northern parts’ and the way in which
it was the sole grounds on which the King—not, at the time, ‘Master of his
own Kingdome’—might possibly stand. Thus when Cavendish expresses
her concern that while ‘in other Kingdoms or Countries, to be the chief
Governour of a Province, is not onely a place of Honour, but much Profit’,
the Lieutenancy of a County in England ‘is barely a Title of Honour, with-
out Profit’ (sig. Eee2r; 199), she is at once complaining about Charles II’s
failure to reward her husband—at the time the (thoroughly unremuner-
ated) Lord Lieutenant of Nottingham—and reminding her readers that the
nobility is the very foundation of the monarchy.24 No Nobility, she seems to
tell her readers—including Charles II—no King. The counsels of a wife are
only ever despised at her husband’s peril.
36 J. CRAWFORD
Notes
1. Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English
Political Thought, 1570–1640 (1995), p. 171.
2. The Worlds Olio (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), p. 83. All
subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically within the
essay itself.
3. The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. Edited by Michael Kiernan
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) p. 64.
4. The term ‘political pastoral’ is David Norbrook’s; see Poetry and Politics in
the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). On the
codes of pastoral, see George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. A
Facsimile Reproduction, with an introduction by Baxter Hathaway (Kent,
Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), p. 53.
5. For alternative discussions of Margaret Cavendish’s concern with her sta-
tus as a wife, see Karen Raber, ‘“Our wits joined as in matrimony”:
Margaret Cavendish’s Playes and the Drama of Authority’, English Literary
Renaissance 28.3 (1998), pp. 463–494, and Kate Lilley, ‘Contracting
Readers: Margaret Newcastle and the Rhetoric of Conjugality’, in A
Princely Brave Woman: Margaret Cavendish, ed. S. Clucas (London:
Ashgate, 2003), pp. 19–39.
6. The phrase ‘society of the few’ comes from Earl Miner, The Cavalier Modes
from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton UP, 1971), p. 275.
7. The most famous articulation of this remains Mary Lyndon Shanley,
‘Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth Century English
Political Thought’. The Western Political Quarterly 32.1 (Mar., 1979),
pp. 79–91. See also Victoria Kahn, ‘Margaret Cavendish and the Romance
of Contract’. Renaissance Quarterly 50.2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 526–566.
8. The term comes from Malcolm Smuts, ‘Court-Centered Politics and the
Uses of Roman Historians, c. 1590–1630’, Culture and politics in early
Stuart England, eds. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1993), pp. 21–43.
9. Victoria Kahn, ‘Margaret Cavendish and the Romance of Contract’,
p. 528. All subsequent references to this essay will be cited parenthetically
within the text.
10. Similarly, those who see her work as characterised by an ‘ambiguous royal-
ism’ misunderstand the nature of the kind of royalism Cavendish pro-
moted; rather than any scepticism about the institution itself, Cavendish
believed in a mixed monarchy, what has sometimes been called ‘aristocratic
constitutionalism’. See, for example, Mihoko Suzuki, ‘The Ambiguous
Royalism of Margaret Cavendish’, in Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the
Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688‬ (Ashgate,

2003), pp. 182–202.‬‬
11. See the Ninth Preface to her Playes written by the thrice noble, illustrious
and excellent princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: Printed
by A. Warren, for John Martyn, James Allestry, and Tho. Dicas, 1662), in
which Cavendish emphasises the literary collaboration with her husband
and uses the phrase ‘my Lord’ several times.
12. For a great reading of aristocratic exceptionalism, see Hero Chalmers,
Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689 (Oxford University Press, 2004).
13. Richard W. Goulding, Margaret (Lucas) Duchess of Newcastle (Lincolnshire:
Chronic, 1925), p. 20.
14. On the Cavendish properties and economies, see Goulding, as well as
Thomas Longuville, ed., The First Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-Upon-
Tyne (London: Longman, Green, 1910), Douglas Grant, Margaret the
First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673
(London: Hart-Davis, 1957), Sara Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart
Women: Three Studies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987),
and my ‘Convents and Pleasures: Margaret Cavendish and the Drama of
Property’, Renaissance Drama 32 (2003), 177–223.
15. On her circulation of her work, see my entry on ‘Margaret Cavendish’ in
the Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, eds. Garrett A. Sullivan
Jr., & Alan Stewart. 3 vols. (Blackwell, 2011), pp. 161–169.
16. ‘To the Two Universityes’ in The philosophical and physical opinions written
by Her Excellency the Lady Marchionesse of Newcastle (Printed for J. Martin
and J. Allestrye at the Bell in St. Pauls Church-Yard 1655), sig. B2v,
emphasis added.
17. The philosophical and physical opinions, sig. A: ‘a Lady writes them, and to
intrench so much upon the male prerogative, is not to be forgiven; but I
know Gown-men will be more civil to her, because she is of the Gown too,
and therefore I am confident you will defend her and truth, and thus be
undeceived’.
18. ‘To the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, on her Book of Epistles’, in CCXI
sociable letters written by the thrice noble, illustrious, and excellent princess,
the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: Printed by William Wilson,
1664), sig. Av.
19. ‘And then, Beastly woman (saide she) followe on, doo what thou wilt, and
canst vpon me: for I know thy power is not vnlimited. Thou maist well
wracke this sillie bodie, but me thou canst neuer ouerthrowe. For my part,
I will not doo thee the pleasure to desire death of thee: but assure thy self,
both my life and death, shall triumph with honour, laying shame vpon thy
detestable tyranny’. Philip Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: The New
Arcadia. Edited Victor Skretkowicz. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York:
38 J. CRAWFORD
Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 553–554, emphasis added. I discuss

this scene in Mediatrix: Women, Politics and Literary Production in Early
Modern England (Oxford UP, 2014), pp. 63–72, esp. p. 70.
20. James Fitzmaurice, ‘Margaret Cavendish on Her Own Writing: Evidence
from Revision and Handmade Correction’. Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America, vol. 85 (September, 1991), pp. 297–307. In a prefatory
letter to her husband, she states that she will not ‘mention any thing or
passage to the prejudice or disgrace of any family or particular person’ in
her work (sig. aii), and in the volume itself, she inked out two sections that
seem to be in corrective keeping with this promise: one that claimed that
William’s troops stayed on duty during Bishops’ wars in spite of King’s
failure to provide pay and one that accused Lord Goring and Sir Francis
Mackworth of ‘invigilancy and carelessness’. As Fitzmaurice illustrates, the
attempted deletions of those offending passages were so light one could
still make out the words underneath. In some editions, moreover, the inked
out words are readily supplied in a contemporary hand (Fitzmaurice, 26).
21. On the ‘barons’, see J. S. A. Adamson, ‘The Baronial Context of the
English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series.
Vol. 40 (1990), 93–120.
22. On William Cavendish’s Letter to Charles II, see William Cavendish,

Ideology and Politics on the Eve of Restoration: Newcastle’s Advice to Charles
II, transcribed and ed. by Thomas P. Slaughter (The American Philosophical
Society, 1984), Conal Condren, ‘Casuistry to Newcastle: ‘The Prince’ in
the World of the Book’ in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain,
edited by Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1993), pp. 164–186, and Hilda Smith, ‘“A
General War Amongst the Men… but None amongst the Women”:
Political Differences between Margaret and William Cavendish’ in Politics
and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain: Essays Presented to
Lois Green Schwoerer, ed. by Howard Nenner (Rochester: University of
Rochester Press 1997), pp. 143–160.
23. See also Kate Lilley’s reading of the ‘catachrestic’ dialogue between

Margaret ‘Newcastle’ and her husband, especially her argument that
Cavendish claims a ‘symmetrical, even indivisible, relationship’ with her
husband and presents herself as ‘creator and steward of an internally coher-
ent and yet various, self-sustaining textual estate’ (21, 22).
24. Cavendish includes her husband’s honours in the Life at various moments,
including a section entitled ‘Of his Honours and Dignities’ (pp. 137–138),
which lists 13 different ‘Honours, Titles and Dignities which were
conferr’d upon my Lord, by King James, King Charles the First, and King
Charles the Second, partly as an encouragement for future Service, and a
Reward for past’.
CHAPTER 3
Reading Overbury’s Wife: Politics

and Marriage in 1616
Christina Luckyj
When publisher Laurence Lisle got hold of a manuscript of Thomas

Overbury’s little poem ‘A Wife’ and published it posthumously in 1614, he
could have had no way of knowing that this wildly popular bestseller would
run to 16 editions before the Civil War.1 Initially conceived as a memorial
to Overbury, a prominent courtier supposed to have penned his portrait of
an ideal wife to register moral objections to the proposed match between
Robert Carr Earl of Somerset, the King’s favourite, and Frances Howard,
Countess of Essex, the work took on new meaning in 1616 as both Carr
and Howard were indicted and publically tried for Overbury’s murder.2 The
seventh, eighth and ninth editions of 1616 included a burgeoning number
of witty ‘Characters’ and elegies supplied by professional writers highlight-
ing the scandalous circumstances of Overbury’s death and their origins in
corrupt court culture.3 ‘Great crimes commit the Greater sort, / And bold-
est acts of shame blaze in the Court’, writes elegist W.S, ‘Things so farre
out of frame, as if the day / Were come wherein another Phaeton / Stolne
into Phoebus waine, had all misse-won / A cleane contrary way’.4 Providing a
moral tonic for such crimes is Overbury’s own text, surviving him ‘in pittying
fame, / In [his] sweet Wife, in these most acute lines’, as Thomas Gainsford
C. Luckyj (*)
Department of English, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada
e-mail: luckyj@dal.ca

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_3
40 C. LUCKYJ
writes.5 Building on this Overburian ideal of a virtuous woman—an ideal that

circulated as an antidote to that of the murderous whore—two early modern
readers of Overbury’s Wife generated their own related texts the same year.
The author of several elegies for A Wife, Daniel Tuvill used the same pub-
lisher and printer to bring out his Asylum Veneris, or a Sanctuary for Ladies
(1616), a contribution to the querelle des femmes that promoted the impor-
tance of wifely counsel and catalogued powerful and virtuous female rul-
ers, while Sir John Davies produced A Select Second Husband for Sir Thomas
Overburies Wife, Now a Matchlesse Widow (1616). While Davies is largely
concerned with the qualities desirable in the ideal husband, Tuvill explicitly
suggests that a husband who is less than ideal should be directed by his wife.
In both cases, I shall argue, such domestic rhetoric is loaded with political
meaning that points beyond the family. Yet these texts also suggest that the
notoriously hierarchical relationship between husband and wife, the core unit
of the early modern family, could be fundamentally reimagined in times of
political crisis or change.
Both Tuvill’s and Davies’s texts were products of the intense politi-
cal factionalism with which Overbury’s Wife, like Overbury himself, was
clearly associated. Aligned with what one correspondent called an ‘“aggre-
gation of good patriots”—“patriot” in Jacobean political discourse, having
already acquired a pro-Parliament, pro-Protestant, anti-Catholic tinge’—
Overbury objected to Carr’s affair with Frances Howard primarily for
political reasons, because it ‘pulled him into her family’s orbit, away from
Overbury’s friends in the Southampton group’.6 When, in 1613, Overbury
was imprisoned, the ‘patriots’ suffered a severe blow; Robert Carr not
only married the recently divorced Frances Howard in a lavish wedding at
the King’s expense, but also began to implement the King’s pro-Spanish
policies, brokering the proposed match of Prince Charles to the Spanish
Infanta.7 When Overbury died in the Tower, his death was initially attrib-
uted to illness. Two years later, as ‘a full-scale factional struggle’ at court
broke out amid rumours of an impending Spanish invasion, the Protestant
faction released evidence to suggest that he had in fact been murdered
by Carr, Howard and their accomplices.8 ‘Their political motivation was
obvious to foreign observers’, notes David Lindley.9 As the Protestant
faction engineered Robert Carr’s indictment for murder, they discredited
his ‘promotion of non-parliamentary, pro-Spanish and pro-Catholic poli-
cies’, while their own fortunes climbed.10 The texts of Overbury’s Wife
that circulated in the print marketplace from 1614 onwards were thus
closely associated with the pro-Parliamentary cause. And, while the public
READING OVERBURY’S WIFE: POLITICS AND MARRIAGE IN 1616 41
trials of Carr, Howard and their accomplices staged in 1616 advertised

the justice of the King, his close association with them also led to ‘concern
about the royal capacity to govern the realm’.11 As Lindley observes, ‘the
trials confirmed in the minds of auditors what they already believed of the
court, that it was an immoral and villainous place. This posed something
of a problem for the prosecutors, in that the mud could so easily stick to
the King himself’.12 Associated, like Overbury himself, with the hyper-
Protestant, pro-Parliamentary court faction at a time when James and his
court seemed both corrupt and anti-populist, both Tuvill and Davies build
on the rhetoric of Overbury’s Wife to tap into the well-known political
marriage metaphor in which the wife figures Parliament and the nation,
the husband, her King.
If the early modern family is frequently referred to as ‘a little Common-
wealth’, the state is as often imagined as a family unit, with the monarch
serving as husband to his people.13 After nearly a half century of female
rule, James began his reign by declaring the entire kingdom his wife: ‘I am
the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the head, and
it is my body’.14 Designed to make a divinely appointed king’s power over
his subjects as absolute as that accorded by scripture to husbands to ‘rule
over’ their wives after the fall (Gen. 3:16), James’s typical use of the mar-
riage metaphor accords with the advice he gives his son in Basilikon Doron:
‘Ye are the head, she is your body. It is your office to command, and hers
to obey’.15 In a defence of James’s right to succession written at his behest
at the turn of the century, Thomas Craig deploys the same spousal rhetoric
to reinforce James’s unilateral authority:
The King is the husband of the Commonwealth, and its head also, and the
Faith of Husband and Wife is mutual; yet it does not follow, that the Wife
is Superior or Equal to the Husband, tho’ he swore to be faithful to her.
Neither is the man to be reckon’d inferior, because he plights his Faith to
her, but with her Fidelity the Husband receives Power and Authority over
his Wife, and all her goods, at the same time with an Oath. Now if he beats
his Wife, or uses her ill, or wasts all her Estate prodigally, does he forfeit
his Authority, and Command as a Husband? Or is he to be rejected by his
Wife?16
Such questions were designed to be entirely rhetorical. Yet, as Su Fang Ng

observes, ‘at the root of the family-state analogy was not a single ideology
but a debate. With a long history dating back to the ancient world, the
42 C. LUCKYJ
analogy’s meaning was not stable’.17 The analogy between marriage and
politics had the potential to serve as a foundation for resistance theory;
Mary Lyndon Shanley notes that ‘advocates of parliamentary or popular
checks on the king’s prerogative tried to paint the marriage relationship
as one in which the authority of husbands over wives could be limited or
even broken’.18 While Craig’s defence of absolutism is not inconsistent
with the English law of coverture, he violates the cherished English notion
of mutual consent that normally governed the relation between monarch
and subjects, enshrined in the traditional coronation of the monarch as
a marriage contract in which ‘the sovereign would secure legitimacy by
submitting to law and counsel, while the subject would find security in
the ruler’s might’.19 In a speech to the 1614 Parliament that roughly
coincided with the publication of the first edition of Overbury’s Wife, Sir
Henry Neville declared:
as in private families and all other societies where the straightest bands of
nature or election do concur to unite affections there is almost a continual
necessity of mutual offices of kindness to nourish and maintain that love, so
in kingdoms besides that great bond of protection and allegiance between
the sovereign and the subject there is a like necessary use of the frequent
change of mutual effects of grace and love to cherish and foster that tender
affection that is to be daily renewed between them.20
This affective and familial relation between sovereign and subject, allow-
ing ideals of counsel and shared government to enter the public sphere,
was so fundamental to defining English national identity in opposition
to continental models as to be virtually axiomatic. Since, as Constance
Jordan observes, in the wife as the ‘quintessential political subject […]
many men saw reflected aspects of their own social situations’, discus-
sions of the rights of the wife could be fraught with political implica-
tions.21 Indeed, as she points out, ‘the concept of a wife in relation to
the household-state analogy […] shadow[s] the elements of what was to
become the liberty of the people’.22 Certainly, for those seeking a political
language in which to express growing concerns about the infringement of
royal prerogative on the ancient liberty of the subject, the marriage meta-
phor offered a useful paradigm. While Protestant tracts often appear to be
purely domestic, both their implicit political analogies and the pressures
of their historical moment can work to situate them in a broader political
sphere. As Kevin Sharpe suggests, ‘it is the political historian who may
see the highly topical, immediate and (perhaps) radical comment in the
articulation at a specific moment of the timeless trope or convention’.23
Particular historical events could put pressure on the familial metaphor
and sharpen its political critique.
At first glance, any hint of political critique in the paratexts of the sev-
enth, eighth and ninth editions of Sir Thomas Overburie his Wife with new
elegies vpon his (now knowne) vntimely death (1616) seems swallowed up in
the outpouring of misogyny so characteristic of responses to the Overbury
scandal.24 ‘When Eve fell’, writes John Ford, ‘She tooke a care that all the
Wo-men-kinde / That were to follow her, should be as blinde / As she
was wilfull’. By contrast, Overbury’s Wife is praised precisely because she
is textual and not real, a ‘peece of Vertue, that ne’re tooke her life / From
a fraile Mother’s labor’.25 Daniel Tuvil’s prefatory tribute is representative:
But heere’s a Dame growen husbandlesse of late,

Which not a Man but wisheth were his Mate.
So faire without, so free from spot within,
That Earth seemes heere to stand exempt from sin,
Juno vouchsafe, and Hymen, when I wed,
I may behold this Widdow in my Bed.26
If Overbury’s ‘wife’ here represents an anti-type of the whore, a stereo-

type of female virtue with which to shame women like Frances Howard,
the paradoxically chaste, bedded widow ultimately gestures towards a
lofty public ideal, ‘Lov’d, woo’d, admir’d, by all wise single men’, that is
more masculine than feminine.27 In ‘To a Friend upon Overbury’s wife
given to her’, for example, Henry King begins by associating the virtues
of A Wife with those of his female addressee, but ends by realigning them
with those of her future husband: ‘May he for whom you change your
Virgin-life / Prove good to you, and perfect as this Wife’.28 In 1615–16,
Overbury’s portrait appeared alongside the verses: ‘A mans best fortune
or his worsts a wife: / Yet I, that know nor marriage peace nor strife/
Live by a good, by a bad one lost my life’.29 If Frances Howard was clearly
the ‘bad’ wife responsible for Overbury’s murder, the ‘good’ wife was
identified with the virtuous male subject and counsellor now embod-
ied in his own text. ‘My Wife is my Adopted-selfe; and Shee / As Mee’,
declares Overbury.30 Indeed, the conjugal equality of husband and wife in
Overbury’s poem may also suggest a political alternative to an increasingly
patriarchal ruler.
44 C. LUCKYJ
In light of Overbury’s ‘puritanical spark’, the text of A Wife may in

fact have done double duty in domestic and political spheres.31 As Jordan
observes, ‘If, as James announced, the commonwealth was analogically the
king’s wife, then whatever collective body, assembly or parliament signified
the will of the people most obviously represented her’.32 In this political
context, the egalitarian attitudes to marriage expressed in Overbury’s Wife
are suggestive. ‘We are two halfes, whiles each from other straies, / Both
barren are; Ioyn’d both their like can raise’, the poem observes of hus-
band and wife.33 If the pro-Parliament patriot Overbury declared from
the grave that ‘Mariage doth reunite, / And makes them both but one
Hermaphrodite’, some readers might well understand his domestic advice
to apply to the body politic.34 If so, Overbury’s text gestures towards the
politics with which Overbury himself was associated, the pro-Parliamen-
tary faction of ‘discontented noblemen’ such as the Earl of Pembroke
and ‘the Parliament mutineers’ such as Sir Edwin Sandys, who ‘believed
that mending the King’s relationship with Parliament was the best way to
solve the crown’s financial problems’.35 Indeed, the initial popularity of
Overbury’s Wife may not be unrelated to the short-lived so-called parlia-
ment of love summoned by James in an attempt to remedy his increasing
financial woes that year.36 James began the ill-fated session with an implic-
itly marital metaphor in declaring that the ‘will of the king and the state
cannot be disjoined, for the good of either must subsist with the love of
each’, yet he continued to reject the Commons’ insistence on their right to
debate impositions and offer him advice; in the end, four MPs were impris-
oned in the Tower for outspokenness.37 Yet as David Colclough observes,
‘many MPs in 1614 continued to assert Parliament’s conciliar function:
to present it as their right as well as their duty to advise the king’.38 This
advice could take the form of open criticism, as in Edwin Sandys’ speech of
21 May, who lamented, ‘it is come to be almost a tyrannical government in
England’ and insisted that ‘all kings, howsoever they come in, settle their
states by consent of their people’.39 Overbury’s emphasis on the impor-
tance of a wife’s ‘Conscience’ and ‘understanding’ may similarly remind his
readers of the principle of partnership in both family and state.
Despite the egalitarian notions with which it begins, however,
Overbury’s Wife ultimately falls back on a conventionally patriarchal under-
standing of woman’s place. While Overbury stresses the importance of ‘an
understanding Wife’ whose ‘knowledge’ fortifies her ‘vertue’, he explicitly
rejects ‘Learning and pregnant wit in Woman-kinde’. ‘Domesticke Charge
doth best that Sex befit / Contiguous busines, so to fixe the minde’, he
insists, falling in line with many early modern educational theorists.40

Daniel Tuvill takes a different approach. ‘It hath bin our pollicie from the
beginning to busie them in domestical affaires, thereby to divert them
from more serious imployments, in which if they had not surmounted us,
they would at least have showne themselves our equals, and our parallels’,
writes Tuvill in his Asylum Veneris.41 In this contribution to the contro-
versy about women, Tuvill goes well beyond the conventions of the genre
to offer what Linda Woodbridge heralds as a ‘nearly feminist’ text.42 Yet,
if modern readers appreciate the work’s apparently protofeminist senti-
ments, early modern readers may well have detected its artful use of the
familiar political marriage metaphor.
Tuvill begins his pamphlet with a poem entitled ‘To the looser sort of
women’, which certainly refers obliquely to the Overbury affair:
Hence you, that seek by Philtres, drugs, & charms,

To bring the curl’d-head Youth into your armes;
And doe not feare by poyson to remove
A worthy Husband, for a worthlesse Love.43
Neatly conflating the Earl of Essex with Overbury as victims of Howard’s

pursuit of her ‘worthlesse Love’, Tuvill then goes on to redirect blame from
such women to the men responsible for their falls. ‘But self-conceitednesse
hath like a canker eaten into the hearts of Men, and possessed them with
such an admiration of their owne sufficiencie’, writes Tuvil.
They take upon them to bee their [wives’] Heads, and therefore if they
prove not as they ought, the blame must light upon themselves. […] The
eye is in fault if the foote doe stumble. The Chariot of the Sunne, as I said
before was glorious, and did afford much comfort, but when Phaeton had
the guiding of it, his unadvised rashnesse set all things in combustion.44
Perhaps recalling the elegy in the Wife that associates the Overbury mur-
der with the unruly figure of Phaeton, Tuvill hints here at the p articular
culpability of the men behind the Overbury scandal.45 Entered in the
Stationer’s Register in early May 1616, just before the sensational tri-
als of Carr and Howard but after Howard’s confession in January, his
text reflects the increasing public compassion for Howard who, as Anne
Clifford remarks, ‘was much pitied by all beholders’.46 Indeed, Howard’s
penitence, combined with the public execution of male accomplices, had
46 C. LUCKYJ
the effect of directing most of the remaining rage at Carr—and beyond

him at the King, the man who fostered this serpent in his bosom. ‘Is there
any tumour therefore or inflammation in the Leg, or other inferiour parts
of the bodie? let us see if the defluction which causeth it, proceede not
from the Head’, urges Tuvill.47 Lest we should miss the political impli-
cations of this point, Tuvill notes: ‘The deedes of men in authority, are
alwaies Patrons for those of lower ranke. A subiect usually eies nothing
but the example of his Superiour’.48 ‘Let him consider likewise if his owne
Lordlynesse bee not a maine efficient of her lewdnesse’, he cautions the
husband—and by extension, the ruler who is his pattern.49
In his remarkable effort to expose the masculine scapegoating of
Frances Howard, soon to be rebranded by the authorities as that ‘unfortu-
nate Lady’, Tuvill may also have recognised that misogynistic responses to
the Overbury scandal were in danger of imperiling the political marriage
metaphor on which the pro-Parliamentary faction depended.50 For in the
rest of his text, he suggests not only that women’s sins are primarily the
responsibility of men but also that masculine corruption can be remedied
by allowing the wife equal—or even greater—authority. Denouncing ‘a
countenance any way Tyrannicall’ in husbands, he repeats the maxim ‘that
the woman was taken out of the side of man, to bee rankt in equall esti-
mation with him; and not out of his foot, to become litier for his proud
and insolent ambition to wallow on’.51 This ideal of cooperative equality is
extended later in the metaphor of the ambidextrous body, which provides
a paradigm for the well-governed nation: ‘That as those bodies are most
perfect, and fitting for every action, which can, if occasion require, as well
apply their left-hand to the businesse, as their right: so is that Common-
wealth the most absolute which for good government can make use of
Women, as well as of Men’.52 Yet, mere equality is not enough for Tuvill;
in many cases, husbands should be led by the direction of their wives.
The biblical Sarah ‘was endued besides with such an extraordinarie mea-
sure of knowledge and discretion, that the Lord commanded that worthy
Patriarch hir husband to shew himselfe in all things obedient to hir direc-
tions’, he observes. Female management becomes even more imperative
when husbands fail, argues Tuvill: Queen Helena, wife to King John of
Cyprus, ‘who perceiving that hir husbands weakenesse was a blot whereon
the greatest part of his nobility continually plaied […] tooke the governe-
ment into hir owne hands, to the release of the Land, and the reliefe of
all hir subjects’.53 Indeed, women in Tuvill’s pamphlet not only provide
counsel but understand its value: Queen Isabella of Spain, for example,
clearly understands ‘the chiefest Art that belongeth unto Soueraignetie’

by showing her ‘discerning judgement in the choise and election of
Ministers’.54 In marriage, insists Tuvill, the wife can provide the wisdom
the husband lacks:
He that is deprived of his bodily sight, is content to bee led, though by

a childe: and shall hee, that is blinde in his understanding disdaine to be
directed by her, who by the ordinance of God, and the rules of sacred
Wedlocke, is alotted him a fellow-helper in all his businesses? The Husband
and the Wife are the eyes of a Familie; if the right one bee so bleared, that it
cannot well discerne; the guiding of the Houshold must of necessity be left
unto the left, or on the sudden all will go to wracke.55
In a kingdom widely perceived as going to wrack in the hands of a weak

and corrupt ruler, Tuvill here falls back on the well-understood domestic
analogy to suggest the importance of the guiding hand of Parliament and
of the pro-Parliamentary faction that produced, and were clearly identified
with, Overbury’s Wife.
Entered in the Stationers’ Register six months earlier, Sir John Davies’
Select Second Husband for Sir Thomas Overburies Wife, Now a Matchlesse
Widow builds directly on the bestselling original to offer ‘a prolix and
dense sermon on the righteous man in parallel to the ideal wife, with
admonitions against corruption in high places’.56 Published anonymously
and dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke, ‘one of the leaders of the fac-
tion that had engineered Somerset’s downfall’, Davies’ work marks him
as ‘politically and stylistically allied with the “neo-Spenserian” community
of Jacobean poets inclined toward the “patriot” politics best represented
at court by the Pembroke-Southampton faction’.57 Trading, like Tuvill,
on the Overbury scandal and its implicit indictment of corruption in the
household of the nation, Davies imagines remedies in a domestic sphere
that is saturated with political meaning. Where Tuvill cites the creation of
Eve to ground the idea of marital equality, Davies similarly recommends a
husband ‘love (his bone) his wife, / As his owne flesh; nay, as himselfe: that
is, / Both soule, and body’.58 Such domestic commonplaces occur along-
side explicitly political language: if Tuvill cites the example of ‘Isabella […]
wife to Christierne King of Denmarke, whose discontented subjects, when
they had degraded him from that royall dignitie; would willingly have
conferred the types thereof upon hir’, Davies offers his idealised sketch
of ‘a husband worth a Monarchs wife’.59 If Tuvill extols the management
48 C. LUCKYJ
skills of wives to promote the ideal of Parliamentary counsel, Davies offers

instruction to his King by prescribing the husband that Overbury’s widow
really deserves.
Specifying in detail this model of a ‘Husband-Paragon,/To fitte one
rare, but Ouer-buried Wife’, Davies begins with an anti-type that sounds
suspiciously like James:
But Wit and Knowledge so the mind inflate

As make it most imperious: then, the Wife
That’s matcht to him that is so stiffe in state,
Must live a supple Slave, else die in strife.60
As in his A discoverie of the true causes why Ireland was never subdued
(1612), which alleges that Irish chieftains acquired so much power that
‘the Lord [was] an absolute Tyrant, and the Tennant a verie slave and vil-
lain’, Davies here participates in a ‘radical political discourse’ that marks
his opposition to emerging Stuart discourses of absolutism.61 Not until
the English imported the system of common law into Ireland, argues
Davies in his earlier work, did the Irish understand that ‘they were free
Subjects to the Kings of England, and not Slaves and Vassals to their
pretended Lords’.62 Though ostensibly about Ireland, Davies’ Discoverie
is an intervention in contemporary political debates about the limits of
the royal prerogative. The Irish, he intimates, are not unlike the English
themselves, ‘In which condition of Subjects, they will gladly continue,
without defection or adhaering to any other Lord or King, as long as
they may be Protected, and justly Governed, without Oppression’.63 As he
figured English politics in his history of Ireland, Davies outlines in the
domestic language of the Select Second Husband the core tenets of his
political theory.
‘The greatest Clarks are not the wisest men / And wise-men oft (like
fools) for nought do lowre’, continues Davies in what looks like veiled
criticism of the scholarly, autocratic James. ‘A good wise-man, makes no
good Husband still: / For, hee is wayward, and his Wife must woo / For
kindenesse; yet not bee too forward too’.64 As former MP in Elizabeth’s
Parliament, Davies may here betray irritation at James’s recent threat to
close down parliament altogether and extend his own prerogative.65 As a
corrective, Davies offers the model of an husband ‘of proofe: / Without a
checke, to give a Queene the mate’:
Then let him be divinely wise (like GOD)

Glad without Joy, and Sad, without Offence;
That’s all alike, to beare the Staffe and Rod;
With Temperance, so, to feast his soule and sence:
Kinde, and not Wanton; sober, yet not sowre,
Still having all his Passions in his powre.66
It is hard to resist reading these lines as a comment on James’s notorious

intemperance and prodigality.67 ‘Of outward cares thou must the Camell
be, / And beare them soundly for your Commonwealth’, Davies advises
the husband in a series of barely disguised political metaphors.68 This ide-
alised husband and ruler combines gentle love with stern control, but does
not mistake himself for the God whose virtues he imitates:
Hee is a Lambe, whose All is all so deare

That nought of him is uselesse, love to get:
Hee is a Lyon, making Beasts to feare
His vertues: so, is milde, sterne, small, and great:
Hee is, What not, if good? and yet to God
Hee is not ev’n: yet with him never odde.69
Drawing on the iconography of kingship, Davies’ verses offer an implied

rebuke to a ruler who notoriously proclaimed that ‘Kings are called gods
by the prophetical King David because they sit upon God his throne in
the earth’.70
Like Tuvill, Davies is keen not only to assert the rights of the wife but
also to reinforce the responsibilities of the husband. Since the body’s chas-
tity depends on that of the head, the origin of the wife’s sin is likely to lie
with the husband himself:
Would’st have the body chast, and not the head?

That cannot be: but, she the body is,
Whose head thou art: by thee she’s bred or led
To good or ill: then, do not thou amisse.
“As good the head were empty, as not full
“Of braines to governe all beneath the scull.71
‘Then wakefull be, to keep thy wife from sin, / And running out, that
marres thy commings in’, Davies urges the husband.72 Although such lines
50 C. LUCKYJ
initially appear to be in tension with the text’s otherwise anti-authoritarian

message, the insistence on strong government and husbandly correction
makes sense in the run-up to the trials of 1616, when men like Davies and
his patron Pembroke hoped that James would authorise the execution of
both Carr and Howard. More frequently, however, Davies returns to the
well-worn figure of the wife as a vessel rather than a vassal, as he urges the
husband to ‘love (his bone) his wife / as his owne flesh’.73 In a neat twist
of the usual logic that prohibits wife-beating as a form of self-mutilation,
Davies argues that the husband must apply correction to both his wife and
himself.74 ‘But, must thy selfe bee subject to thy Rodde?’, he asks, citing in
reply the example of God, who ‘Correct[ed] him Selfe as Man, for Man’.75
And if the husband’s identity is inseparable from his wife’s, then his rule
also licenses hers:
So, teach thy wife, by ruling, to obay;

And, by obedience, rule with greater might:
Thou rul’st aright, when she no worse doth sway,
As Kings do when their judges judge aright:
Good Judges make ill Kings rule graciously.76
Though the opening lines initially appear to endorse a husband who rules
and a wife who obeys, their ambiguity soon becomes apparent: in fact,
the wife obeys ‘by ruling’ and rules by obedience ‘with greater might’ as
she ‘no worse doth sway’ than her husband. By equating the wife with
the magistrate Davies constructs both as instruments of and correctives to
the husband/ruler’s will, even as he implicitly urges righteous judgement
on Overbury’s highly placed murderers.77 Like Overbury himself, a vir-
tuous subject who triumphs against court corruption, Overbury’s ‘deare
Wife / Shall live till death be endlesse—Glories life’.78 The posthumous
text and the parliamentary counsel with which it is associated are simulta-
neously evoked as long-lasting public ideals that cannot die.
Davies’ and Tuvill’s domestic language allowed them to fly under the
radar of state censorship, but later texts were not so lucky. Licensed for
the press the same year (1616), the first edition of William Whately’s A
Bride-bush, or a Wedding sermon (1617), which suggested that a suffering
wife had a right not only to her own conscience but also to legal divorce
from an adulterous husband, apparently aroused no official consterna-
tion.79 Yet when, in his expanded edition of 1619, Whately observed more
daringly that adultery ‘brings ruin on the state’, his domestic conduct
book attracted the notice of the censors.80 The analogy between adultery
and idolatry was a locus classicus of Protestant thought, but its deploy-
ment as a justification for divorce must have been particularly risky in the
tense political climate of 1619, when anxieties were rising about James’s
increased toleration for Catholics and lack of support for international
Protestantism. In 1620, King James issued repeated proclamations against
‘the excesse of lavish and licentious speech of matters of state’, and in 1621
Whately was called before the High Commission and forced to acknowl-
edge his position on divorce as erroneous.81 Throughout A Bride-bush,
the extended representation of marriage as ‘this domesticall kingdom or
Monarchy’ allows Whately, in the guise of advising the husband, to offer
criticism of the King. ‘See then (all yee husbands) that your words to your
wives hold agreement with the Lawes of God’, insists Whately, ‘else you
governe not, but tyrannize; and to disobey you is the best obedience’.82 Cyndia
Susan Clegg argues that Whately’s domestic subject matter was a thin veil
for its political agenda, which came ‘remarkably close to resistance theory’,
and the 1621 censorship of Whately’s work certainly offers compelling
evidence for the reception of domestic texts as political discourse.83 Some
five years earlier, however, Daniel Tuvill and John Davies also participated
in this emerging public sphere by building on Overbury’s Wife to deploy
a rhetoric of marriage as political critique and instruction.
Notes
1. Thomas Overbury, A wife now the widow of Sir Thomas Ouerburie, Being a
most exquisite and singular poeme, of the choyse of a wife (London, 1614).
John Considine points out that the original poem is the only work that can
confidently be attributed to Overbury himself, since it is mentioned in an
epigram published before November 1612 (‘The Invention of the Literary
Circle of Sir Thomas Overbury’, in Literary Circles and Cultural
Communities in Renaissance England, ed. by Claude J. Summers and Ted-
Larry Pebworth [University of Missouri Press, 2000], p. 60).
2. ‘It was said by Overbury’s father in a manuscript dating to 1640 […] that
he had written his poem ‘A Wife’ in order to dissuade Carr from marrying
a woman who had pedigree but no virtue’ (Donald Beecher, ‘Introduction’,
Characters, together with Poems, News, Edicts and Paradoxes based on the
eleventh edition of A Wife Now the Widow of Sir Thomas Overbury (Ottawa:
Dovehouse, 2003), p. 21). Alastair Bellany observes that ‘political and fac-
tional capital were also at stake’ (The Politics of Court Scandal in Early
52 C. LUCKYJ
Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair [Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002], p. 52.)
3. For this essay I consulted the eighth impression of the text, held by the
Bodleian Library, made available through Early English Books Online.
4. W.S., ‘Upon the untimely Death of the Author of this ingenious Poem, Sir
Tho. Overbury, Knight, poisoned in the Towre’ in Sir Thomas Ouerburie his
wife. With new elegies vpon his (now knowne) vntimely death. Whereunto are
annexed, New newes and characters, written by himselfe and other learned
gentlemen (London, 1616), sig. 6v. W.S. has been identified with both
William Strachey and William Stradling. See Beecher, Characters, pp. 126,
344–345.
5. Cap. Th[omas] Gainsford, ‘In obitum intempestiuum & lachrimabilem
Illustrissimi Equitis aurati Tho. Overburi magne spei & expectationis Viri’,
Sir Thomas Overburie, sig. A1r. Associated with ‘seditious pamphleteering’,
Gainsford was a hack writer so devoted to the radical Protestant cause that
he was involved not only with the notorious anti-Spanish Vox Populi
(1620) but also with the Dutch news corantos published by Nathaniel
Butter and Nicholas Bourne to report on the wars on the Continent and
promote English intervention in defending Protestant interests (Beecher
in Characters, pp. 345–346).
6. Bellany, Politics, p. 67, 52.
7. Bellany notes that the bill for the ‘outrageously lavish court wedding’ was
footed by the King, who ‘paid most of the steep cost of the wedding and
festivities and lavished valuable gifts on the bride and groom’ (Politics,
p. 57). See also Bellany, Politics, p. 67.
9. David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court
of King James (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 157.
10. Bellany, Politics, p. 67.
11. Bellany, Politics, p. 141.
12. Lindley, Trials, p. 162.
13. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), p. 17.
14. Charles H. McIlwain, ed., Political Works of James I (New York: Russell,
1965), p. 272. In this speech James was also making the unpopular claim
that the hitherto independent kingdoms of Scotland and England were a
single body under his control and should therefore be politically united.
15. James I in The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron, ed. by
Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and
Reformation Studies, 1996), p. 141.
16. Although not published until 1703, Craig’s Right of Succession circulated
widely in manuscript. Craig’s text is cited in Anne McLaren, ‘Challenging
the Monarchical Republic: James I’s Articulation of Kingship’, in The
Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to

Patrick Collinson, ed. by John F. McDiarmid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007),
p. 170, 176 n. 37.
17. Su Fang Ng, Literature and the Politics of the Family in Seventeenth-Century
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 7.
18. Mary Lyndon Shanley, ‘Marriage Contract and Social Contract in

Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought’ in The Family in Political
Thought, ed. by Jean Bethke Elshtain (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1982), p. 84.
19. Melissa Sanchez, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern
English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 13.
20. Henry Neville, in Proceedings in Parliament 1614, ed. by Maija Jansson
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988), p. 249. As the
Protestant faction’s nominee for the position of Secretary, Neville was at
the centre of the factional struggle for power and influence. See Bellany,
Politics, pp. 43–50.
21. Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political
Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 20.
22. Constance Jordan, ‘The Household and the State: Transformation in the
Representation of an Analogy from Aristotle to James I’, Modern Language
Quarterly 54 (1993), 310.
23. Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of
Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), p. 45. See also Ng, who discusses the contextualist approach of
early modern historians such as Pocock and Skinner to texts as political
performances (p. 8).
24. In Politics, Bellany documents the many libels, cheap print publications
and broadsides that participated in this outpouring of misogyny. See, for
example, I.T. The just downfall of ambition, adultery and murder, where-
unto are added 3 notorious sinners (London, 1616).
25. John Ford, ‘On Sir Thomas Overburies Poem The Wife’, Sir Thomas

Ouerburie, sig. A3r.
26. Daniel Tuvil, ‘On Sir Thomas Overburies Poem the Wife’ in Sir Thomas
Ouerburie, sig. A4r.
27. Anon. ‘On the Wife’, Sir Thomas Ouerburie, sig. A5r.
28. Henry King, Poems, elegies, paradoxes, and sonets (London, 1664), p. 8.
29. Simon Van de Passe, Viva Effigies Thomae Overburii, reproduced in

Bellany, Politics, p. 122.
30. Thomas Overbury, A Wife, sig. C1v.
31. On Overbury’s ‘puritanical spark’, see Bellany, Politics, p. 41.
32. Jordan, ‘Household’, p. 308.
33. Overbury, A wife, sig. B1r.
54 C. LUCKYJ
34. Overbury, A wife, sig. B1v.

35. Bellany, Politics, pp. 43–44.
36. See Jansson, p. 417, 422. As James explained, ‘his intent was to breed a
love between the king and his subject’ (p. 247).
37. Jansson, p. 44. Compare James’s similar attempt to reassure Parliament in
1610 by drawing on the metaphor of companionate marriage: ‘The mar-
riage between law and prerogative is inseparable and like twins they must
joy and mourn together, live and die together, the separation of the one is
the ruin of the other’ (in Proceedings in Parliament 1610, ed. by Elizabeth
Read Foster [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966], p. 312). See David
Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 160.
38. Colclough p. 165.
39. Jansson, p. 316.
40. Overbury, A wife, sig. B4r, C1r.
41. T[uvill], D[aniel], Asylum veneris, or a Sanctuary for Ladies, Justly
Protecting Them, their Virtues and Sufficiencies from the foule aspersions and
forged imputations of traducing spirits (London, 1616), p. 100.
42. Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the
Nature of Womankind 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1984), p. 105.
43. Tuvill, Asylum, sig. A6r.
44. Tuvill, Asylum, pp. 142–144.
45. Bellany and McRae observe that ‘Contemporaries commonly compared
James I’s reckless young favourites to Phaeton’; ‘If ever woe possess a stub-
bern heart’ (note 2, ‘Early Stuart Libels: an edition of poetry from manu-
script sources’, ed. by Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae, Early Modern
Literary Studies Text Series I [2005]; http://purl.oclc.org/emls/texts/
libels/). Though Phaeton was clearly to blame for failing to control the
horses of Phoebus’s chariot, Phoebus offered him the opportunity.
46. Anne Clifford, ‘The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford’, Women Writers in
Renaissance England, ed. by Randall Martin (New York: Longman, 2010),
p. 253. Lindley sees in the about-face in attitudes to Howard “evidence of
the way in which ‘character’ in the trials […] was not read as being consti-
tuted out of a unified and continuous ‘personality” (p. 179).
47. Tuvill, Asylum, p. 152.
50. Francis Bacon referred to Frances Howard as an ‘unfortunate Lady’ during
the May 1616 trial (cited Lindley, p. 178).
53. Tuvill, Asylum, p. 17, 108–109.

56. Beecher, Characters, p. 76. Davies’ work was authorised by Thomas Goad,
chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot, who held strongly Calvinist, anti-
Spanish views.
58. [John Davies], A Select Second Husband for Sir Thomas Overburies Wife,
Now a Matchlesse Widow (London, 1616), sig. C1r.
59. Tuvill, Asylum, p. 84; [Davies], A Select, sig. B2r.
60. [Davies], A Select, sig. B8r, B7v.
61. John Davies, A discoverie of the true causes why Ireland was never subdued
(London, 1612), p. 178. In arguing that William the Conqueror contin-
ued to rule ‘both English and Normans by one and the same law; which
was the ancient common law of England, long before the conquest’
(p. 127), Davies not only suggested the priority of the ancient liberties of
the subject protected by the common law but also resisted any suggestion
that the Scottish King James could rule England by conquest. Janelle
Greenberg observes: ‘While neither Camden, nor Owen, nor Davies
explicitly linked conquest theory […] to fears of Stuart absolutism, all were
surely aware that debates and resolutions in parliament did precisely that.
[…] All were familiar with the view that if the king of England governed
by conquest, then he could make laws at his will and pleasure’ (The Radical
Face of the Ancient Constitution [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001], p. 133.)
62. Davies, A discoverie p. 238.
63. Davies, A discoverie, p. 154.
64. [Davies], A Select, sig. B7r.
65. In the 1601 Parliament, Davies ‘attained prominence in the Commons by
his insistence on legislative redress to the abuse of the Queen’s prerogative
of monopoly, much to Cecil’s distaste’ (Sean Kelsey, ‘Davies, Sir John [bap.
1569, d. 1626]’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford
University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008). See Colclough, pp. 166–167.
66. [Davies], A Select, sig. B8r.
67. Puritan courtier Sir John Harington wrote in 1606: ‘we are going on here-
abouts, as if the devil was contriving every man should blow up himself, by
wild riot, excess, and devastation of time and temperance’ (‘Letter from Sir
John Harington to Mr. Secretary Barlow, 1606’ in James I by His
Contemporaries, ed. by R. Ashton [London: Hutchinson, 1969], p. 244).
68. [Davies], A Select, sig. C1v.
69. [Davies], A Select, sig. B8v, emphasis in the last two lines mine.
70. James I, True Law, p. 54.
56 C. LUCKYJ
71. [Davies], A Select, sig. C5r.

72. [Davies], A Select, sig. C4r.
73. [Davies], A Select, sig. D1r, C1r.
74. See, for example, Gouge, Of domesticall duties: ‘The wife is as a mans selfe.
[…] No man but a frantike, furious, desperat wretch will beat himselfe’
(p. 391).
75. [Davies], A Select, sig. D2v.
76. [Davies], A Select, sig. D3r.
77. [Davies], A Select, sig. D3r. The elegy by I.D. that follows Davies’ poem
makes the point explicitly: ‘To let the good-man die / For goodnesse
shewne, without our loudest cry / For Justice, for so damn’d, so div’lish
Crime, / Were just damnation to the Place and Time / Wherein we live’
(sig. D7v).
78. [Davies], A Select, sig. D6v. In 1613, Davies published a verse elegy on the
death of Prince Henry that urged Kings ‘To stretch their power beyond
their power (though great) / But only for the publike-benefit’. He goes on
to suggest that a ruler’s legitimacy comes from the state (and therefore, the
people): ‘A Prince that ties himself himself unto / Doth much mistake
himselfe: For, hee’s not his; / Nor, is the STATE his: but, he still must
do, / As if he were the STATES: for, so he is’ (The muses-teares for the losse
of their hope (London, 1613), sig. A4r).
79. Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 191.
80. William Whately, A bride-bush or a Wedding sermon (London, 1619), p. 4.
81. Cited in Clegg, p. 84. The 1623 edition of Bride-bush includes a disin-
genuous retraction of his position alongside a reprint of the offending text
that, Whately claimed, the printer had neglected to correct as ordered.
Clegg also posits that Whately’s text had become censorable because of the
‘change in the political environment in England’ (p. 194).
82. Whately, Bride-bush, p. 112, 116 (emphasis mine).
83. Clegg, p. 192.
CHAPTER 4
Representations of the Family in Early

Caroline Drama: Or, How Do You Solve
a Problem Like Henrietta Maria?
Tom MacFaul
Late Jacobean drama had been preoccupied with a variety of familial ten-
sions, many of which related, with differing degrees of obliquity, to the
royal family: fathers, both royal and lower-status, were presented as either
impotent, dishonourable or sinful, and sons were increasingly required to
redeem their fathers’ masculine honour.1 Such representations of weakened
paternal authority reflected a sense that James VI and I was a lame duck of
a patriarchal king, particularly in his hesitations over military assistance
to his daughter.2 The drama of that period had been cagey in its attitude
to the future Charles I, who had lacked the public profile of his dead
brother, and who was therefore a rather mysterious or even romantic fig-
ure. Indeed, Charles’s most recent biographer has argued that he was one
of the most ‘inscrutable’ heirs to the throne in English history.3 Plays
like the anonymous Swetnam the Woman Hater (c. 1620), Dekker’s The
Noble Spanish Soldier (c. 1622) and The Welsh Embassador (1623) were
therefore keen to present young heirs to the throne as mysterious and
T. MacFaul (*)
St Edmund Hall and Faculty of English, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: thomas.macfaul@ell.ox.ac.uk

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_4
58 T. MACFAUL
romantic figures, often with redemptive capacities. Once Charles came to

the throne himself, however, other issues quickly came to the foreground,
particularly the trouble over his marriage, and his lack of a bodily heir.
Early Caroline drama, this chapter will show, was particularly concerned
with the former problem, and, though it showed some interest in the lat-
ter issue, seemed reasonably happy not to accentuate its dangers.
Between the death of James VI and I in March 1625 and the birth of
Prince Charles (the future Charles II) in May 1630, England’s royal family
was in a precarious position: Charles I, without children of his own, had
only his sister Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia as his heir, and she was at the
centre of the massive European conflict that would become known as the
Thirty Years’ War. The problem was accentuated by the fact that Charles
married the Catholic Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII of France, very
soon after he came to the throne, but then found himself in intermittent
conflict with France in the early years of his reign, a factor which added to
strains in his marriage.4 Charles’s first major impact on the public stage had
come in 1623, on his return to England from Spain, having failed to marry
the Spanish Infanta; the celebrations of his non-marriage were consider-
able (called a ‘blessed revolution’), and set the tone for continued interest
in the future king’s private life.5 There is no doubt that dramatic audiences
were extremely interested in matters of dynastic politics: the extraordinary
success of Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624) demonstrates that much.
While later dramatists were rather more cautious than Middleton in their
representations of high politics (partly, no doubt, because Middleton’s
play had been banned), they were, however, extremely interested in rep-
resenting family politics, particularly the idea of a husband finding ways
to control his wife. The persistence of an analogy between the family and
the state, in which the king was seen as either married to or the father
of his kingdom, enabled the representation of domestic life to reflect on
political matters, and to do so in a way that was as easily deniable as it was
transparent. Yet in doing so the playwrights also exposed a key paradox in
the family-politics analogy: while the analogy’s patriarchal ideology may
seem tailor-made for an absolutist monarchy, they showed that a wider
masculine—and sometimes feminine—community was needed to enforce
regal authority, just as it was needed to enforce patriarchal authority in
the private sphere. This chapter is based on a reading of all the surviving
plays of the period 1625–30, focussing on those plays which most clearly
represent the resolution of marriage troubles, and which seem to reflect
on the royal marriage in some way or another. As we will see, the English
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FAMILY IN EARLY CAROLINE DRAMA 59
nation’s sense of masculinity was invested in the King’s control of his wife
and was also marshalled to support the King’s position.
Charles’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria was always unpopu-
lar, but by 1628 they were a very happily married couple: Charles even
set a court fashion by regularly sleeping with his wife. After 1630, when
Charles had discharged his principal duty as a monarch by begetting
an heir, his family life became extremely important to his public image
and bolstered his own confidence as a monarch during the period of the
Personal Rule.6 The first few years of the reign, however, had been more
difficult, as Charles’s primary allegiance was to his favourite the Duke of
Buckingham (until the latter’s assassination in 1628). Furthermore, the
vicissitudes of European conflict affected the King’s relations with his
young wife, as he struggled to control her French entourage during con-
flicts with France. At this stage, too, the King’s primary foreign policy
priority was his debt of honour to restore his sister to the Palatinate, a duty
that was more acute for that sister being his heir apparent.
For reasons clearly associated with these political issues, early Caroline
drama prioritizes the re-affirmation of masculinity, focussing on the
regaining of honour, and on the control of wives, but surprisingly little on
the begetting of heirs. For instance, Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay
Old Debts (c.1625) is all about new starts. While it is obviously not an alle-
gory of the royal succession, it does handle issues of the utmost relevance
to that succession: continuity of family honour, changes of moral culture,
the potential for redress of financial problems and the redemptive possi-
bilities of war. It presents the renegotiation of men’s social and economic
positions in the light of the death of a worthy paternal figure. None of the
play’s characters exactly represents Charles I himself, but the play points
urgently towards the need for a new dispensation under that King.
The play’s romantic hero, Alworth, is described as ‘His fathers picture
in little’ (1.2.49); given Charles I’s height, this may be a rather backhanded
compliment to the King.7 His stepmother, Lady Alworth, who is the
play’s most powerfully redemptive figure, says that he is ‘Like virgin parche-
ment capable of any / Inscription, vitious, or honorable’ (lines 78–79). This
was how the new King was imagined, as a blank slate onto whom the nation
could project its various aspirations. The context of this comment is a discus-
sion of whether Alworth will go to the wars, and this perhaps reflects a sense
that Charles I faced varying options in regard to continuing or deepening
England’s at the time rather non-committal involvement in the European
conflict. At the end of the play, the prodigal Welborne will attempt to redeem
60 T. MACFAUL
himself by going off to that war, suggesting that the play is mainly on the
side of the conflict, even if only for honour’s sake rather than as the result
of any deep ideological commitment. As the play’s plot develops, we might
expect that Welborne would marry Lady Alworth but, though she does help
Welborne towards his redemption, she marries Lovell, who has already been
to the wars; Welborne cannot get any amorous conclusion to his plot until he
has proved himself in war. This offers a general lesson in masculine priorities:
as the standard tropes of romance insist, proving one’s martial masculinity
comes before marriage. It is easy to apply this lesson to Charles I: he ought
not to marry until he has proved himself in other spheres.
Lovell, meanwhile, is himself an extremely king-like figure: his ability to
help Alworth in his amours, without at first falling in love himself, shows a
regal generosity that reminds us of the kings in earlier plays such as Munday’s
Fair Em, Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Don Pedro in Much
Ado about Nothing. Lovell insists that ‘The summe of all that makes a iust
man happy / Consists in the well choosing of his wife’ (4.1.211–212), a
generalised sentiment that could easily be applied to Charles I’s need to
make a judicious marriage. Lovell does ultimately marry the widow Alworth:
though this obviously does not suggest that Charles should also marry an
English widow, the slightly surprising outcome is designed to emphasise
the paramount need for wifely virtue in the new Queen. Lady Alworth is a
known quantity, as a foreign wife might not be; she is also a woman of the
highest personal virtue, whose situation as a rejector of suitors makes her
resemble Penelope, that icon of wifely fidelity.8 Yet she is also a model host-
ess, with elements of the sacred, or even divine about her, which her name
obviously reflects. When Welborne brings Marrall to dine with her: Marrall
says, for instance, ‘I am not good enough / To sit at your Steward’s boord’,
and she promises to ‘exalt’ him for his humility (2.2.85–89); the language
here resembles that of the Psalms, and of Luke 14. 10–11, where those who
are humble are exalted to a higher place at the table. Even more strikingly,
Marrall says ‘I shall be conuerted, I begin to grow / Into a new beleefe,
which Saints, nor Angels / Could haue woone me to have faith in’ (lines
73–75). Though Marrall is a weathervane flatterer, and though the main
reason for his wonderment is the hospitality shown to the down-and-out
Welborne, there is still a clear sense of the redemptive power of women.9
Of course, the power of women in the religious sphere was double-edged:
with Charles about to marry a Catholic, her virtue would clearly need to
outweigh the danger that she might bring up Papist children.
While marriage is presented as a matter of urgency in this play, the

traditional motives for such urgency are called into question. There is a
concern that delay in marriage might ‘lose a night / In which perhaps he
might get two boyes’ (4.3.101–102). Yet this urgency is articulated by
Overreach, the play’s villain, and is in fact the device by which Overreach
is duped by Lovell and Alworth. Is there a suggestion that overhasty mar-
rying for the sake of heirs is absurd, and might lead to marital mistakes?10
Overreach, it is clear, represents all those corrupt tendencies which might
creep upon a new ruler, and Lovell rejects him in a very powerful tempta-
tion scene, where Overreach offers to enrich the lord without that lord
having to get his hands dirty (4.1.83–132).11 If the rejection of Overreach
hints at a desire to get rid of corrupt ministers—or at least not to take on
new ones—Overreach’s sentiment about the urgency of marriage comes
in question. Perhaps, correspondingly, the play hints that Charles need not
be in too much of a hurry about getting an heir.12
The Great Duke of Florence, probably Massinger’s next play, also suggests
that an heir of one’s own body is not necessary. The titular Duke Cozimo
is betrayed by his nephew and his favourite, rather as James VI and I was
considered to have been betrayed by Prince Charles and Buckingham when
they went off to Spain in 1623. The betrayal here is of rather a different
kind, though still involving matters of marriage and inheritance: Giovanni
(the Duke’s nephew and heir) and Sanazarro (the basically virtuous favou-
rite) conceal the beauty of Lidia, in order to avoid the Duke marrying her.
The motive for the concealment, though, is not political: it is simply a mat-
ter of both men being in love with the girl, the fair and virtuous daughter
of Giovanni’s tutor. Giovanni ends up marrying her, though she is a com-
moner, and Sanazarro ends up marrying Fiorinda, the princess of Urbino.
Cozimo himself, meanwhile, remains unmarried, leaving his nephew as his
heir as he originally intended. It is possible, then, that the play gestures
towards English dynastic matters, suggesting that Charles might be con-
tent to have his own nephew, Elizabeth and Frederick’s son Henry, as his
heir, or at least hinting that this would be no bad thing. Cozimo is a man
of extreme honour: though he wants to marry Lidia himself, he is forced
to stick honourably by his vow not to remarry. Such a principled stance
might be designed to appeal to the sense of compunctious honour that
was such an important part of Charles I’s own self-image. The play’s final
scene is a striking instance of a monarch being brought around, forced
to change his plans by his subjects, who use his own sense of honour
to effect this. He recognizes that his oath not to remarry is a form of
62 T. MACFAUL
‘necessity’ for him (5.2.197), and he complains that all the other charac-
ters ‘conspire / To force our mercy from us’ (lines 202–203). The quality
of mercy here is strained, but the tensions are acceptable because what is
at issue is personal rather than truly political conflict. When love and hon-
our are at the stake, there is no humiliation in a monarch backing down.
As Ira Clark suggests, the play makes royal sovereignty less absolute, and
this limitation is carried out through the personal rather than the politi-
cal.13 However absolute a monarch may be, his personal life is imagined
as offering room for compromises and emotional reversals, which prevent
him from becoming tyrannical.
On his first appearance, Cozimo receives a petition from his noblemen,
urging him to marry again (specifically to marry Fiorinda, in order absorb
her territories, at 1.2.12–33). Cozimo is quite clear, though, that ‘in our
Princely care we have provided / One worthy to succeed us’ (lines 52–53)
in the shape of Giovanni; Cozimo has preserved his prerogative in making
this plan privately: the word ‘care’ both indicates his sense of duty to his
nation, and a sense of this being only his own business. When Sanazarro
persuades Giovanni to conceal Lidia from Cozimo, the favourite thinks that
he is appealing to the heir’s reversionary interest, but Giovanni is truly in love
with Lidia, a fact that makes the motive for his deceit pure. Giovanni does
not make himself a worse heir, then: personal passion is an acceptable basis for
disobedience in a way that political calculation would not be.
Even Sanazarro can be forgiven: though royal favourites had generally
been presented as vicious characters on the Renaissance stage, he and other
favourites in this period of drama buck that trend.14 His desire for Lidia must
be thwarted, but it is not treated as particularly criminal. Lidia seems so auto-
matically to produce desire that no one can really be blamed for it, and the
situation is rescued when Sanazarro finally accepts Fiorinda’s love. He may be
forced into this as much as Cozimo is forced into forgiveness, in that Fiorinda
leverages her forgiveness into making him love her, but love again offers a way
of short-circuiting tensions between men of different status (5.1.133–138).
The final dissipation of the play’s tensions comes, however, in a much
lower-status form. The foolish Calandrino asks Cozimo’s blessing on his
marriage, insisting that his union with the equally idiotic Petronella will be
good for the Duke because
the whole race

Of such as can act naturally fooles parts,
Are quite worn out, and they that doe survive,
Doe onely zanie us; and we will bring you,
If we die not without issue, of both sexes

Such chopping mirth-makers, as shall preserve
Perpetuall cause of sport, both to your Grace,
And your posterity, that sad melancholly
Shall ne’re approach you. (5.2.228–236)
The whole question of the obligation to procreate is here subverted,

transferred into clownishness rather than the realm of politics. The effect
is to suggest that children are optional: a source of pleasure, perhaps, but
hardly necessities.15
The drama of this period, then, shows a shifting of masculine priorities:
the duty to beget an heir is deprioritised or shelved, but there is a corre-
sponding increase in the priority for men to control unruly wives, which
clearly relates to anxieties about Charles’s inability to master Henrietta
Maria.16 Earlier plays had certainly presented men trying to control their
wives, but most of those plays exhibited considerable sympathy for the
wives involved, and frequently presented the husbands’ efforts as absurd.
D’Avenant’s The Tragedy of Albovine (1626/7) deals with royal marital
problems that have some analogues to Charles I’s, though their very exag-
gerated nature means that their application remains deniable. Like the
Duke in Middleton’s The Witch (1621), the titular conquering ruler has
married the daughter of a man he killed, and adds insult to injury by using
his wife’s father’s skull as a drinking vessel. Whereas Middleton’s tragi-
comic play turns this unpromising situation to a happily forgiving ending,
D’Avenant takes royal marital discontent in a tragic direction. The Queen,
Rhodolinda, is so outraged by the mistreatment of her father’s remains
that she refuses to consummate her marriage, commits adultery, and ulti-
mately, along with her favourite Hermegild, plots the King’s death.
The vicious courtier Hermegild, like the Queen a foreigner, can be
seen as a reflection on Henrietta Maria’s entourage. More importantly,
the non-consummation of the royal marriage may mirror the likelihood
that Charles and his young wife had not got round to regular marital rela-
tions.17 Of course, in the terms of the time, non-consummation meant that
the marriage was not complete and could be quite easily undone; while
that was not the case for Charles, the play’s plot may offer solutions even as
it stands as a warning about the difficulties of marrying a woman from an
enemy country.18 Though non-consummation is a source of frustration for
Albovine, it does prevent him from being completely humiliated: it means
64 T. MACFAUL
that when the Queen commits adultery, the King is not strictly speaking
cuckolded. Though the King dies, he retains his honour.
Having been refused access to Rhodolinda’s bed, Albovine envies
his favourite Paradine, who has been able to consummate his own mar-
riage. He significantly complains ‘I (like the solitary Phoenix) / Expect
no heat but in my funeral flame, / And strive t’ engender of myself’.19
The Phoenix, a standard image for the idea of royal succession, is made
rather absurd here, as the obvious fact that a king cannot reproduce self-
sufficiently queers the pitch of the idealising image. Albovine goes on
to displace his thwarted marital ardour onto passionate embraces of his
male favourite, nodding back to James VI and I’s homoerotic favouritism,
but also suggesting that Charles’s marital frustrations were leading him
to rely excessively on Buckingham, the favourite he inherited from his
father. After Albovine’s death, it turns out that he had a son and heir from
a previous marriage, so the play avoids any sense of succession anxiety.
The play’s only consequence for its kingdom, then, is doing away with
an undesirable queen and her foreign entourage. It is perhaps significant
that the play was not performed: events may have caught up with it, as
Buckingham was assassinated, and Charles and Henrietta Maria became
intimate; D’Avenant himself, meanwhile, became a client of the Queen.
Nonetheless, the play’s anti-French rhetoric (e.g. pp. 46, 95) suggests
that it reflects a real regret and anxiety about the royal marriage.20 At an
early stage, the courtiers of the play mock the King for being ‘In love with
his own wife! that’s held incest / In Court’ (p. 48); that may have been
the normatively subversive attitude of the Jacobean court (and it would
become important again at the Restoration), but soon enough Charles
would start a fashion for displays of marital affection.21
D’Avenant’s next play, The Just Italian (c. 1629), resolves marital dis-
cord through a tragicomic plot which involves the taming of a haughty
wife: as the characters here are nobler than in Shakespeare’s Taming of the
Shrew, the taming does not involve the same degree of husbandly b ullying
and coercion, but the effect is just as assertive of masculine control.22 The
wife Altezza has a gentleman usher, a kind of male servant whose presence
causes huge amounts of anxiety and disdain in early seventeenth-century
drama, and she and her sister are excited about men who can supply enter-
tainers like dwarves (Henrietta Maria was, not incidentally, very fond of
her dwarf, who appears in portraits with her).23 The protagonist Altamont
will not offer any kind of violence to his wife, despite her taking on a
cavalier servente (importantly, she does not get the chance to have sex
with him). Rather, he forces her into repentance by faking his own death
and making her pass judgement on herself. As its title implies, the play
is concerned with marital justice: male control, it suggests, is essential
to domestic happiness and political justice. Female vanity and associated
courtly fripperies are accordingly purged from the play’s world.
The reformation of bad wives is perhaps, then, the major theme of
early Caroline drama: we see it in such minor plays as Arthur Wilson’s The
Inconstant Lady (1629) or in the brief subplot of Robert Davenport’s A
New Trick to Catch the Devil (c. 1625), for instance. But once Charles and
Henrietta Maria had become close, the theme is subtly re-motivated, with
more emphasis being placed on husbandly than wifely reform. Massinger’s
The Picture (c. 1629) deals with two forms of husbandly excess—jealousy and
uxuriousness—concluding with a straightforward moral: ‘to all married men
be this a caution / Which they should duly tender as their life: / Neither to
dote to much nor doubt a wife’ (5.3.223–225). The doting King Ladislaus
clearly relates to Charles I. After the death of Buckingham, Henrietta Maria
had effectively replaced him as the King’s favourite, with the result that ear-
lier drama’s preoccupation with royal favouritism has now disappeared, to be
replaced by anxiety about the power of a queen.24 Queen Honoria (whose
name may reflect Charles’s preoccupation with honour) is ‘The daughter of a
King’ (1.2.96) like Henrietta Maria, and Ladislaus honours her far too much
on this account, at least in the eyes of his good counsellor Eubulus, who needs
to remind Ladislaus that he too is the offspring of a monarch. Eubulus wor-
ries that ‘humility / In a husband and a King markes her the way to absolute
tyranie’ (lines 140–142). Worries about royal absolutism, once displaced onto
favourites, are now projected onto the haughty foreign Queen, to whom
Ladislaus gives ‘absolute command’ (154). In fact, though Charles I may
have doted on his wife, he did not at this stage involve her much in policy
matters; but drama, assuming a fundamental connection between domestic
and political life, expresses concern that problems in the former sphere must
inevitably affect the latter.25
Eubulus compares Honoria to Semiramis (whom her royal husband
gave so much power that she ended up killing him), and she compares
herself to Cleopatra. There is an ominous sense that this proud Queen
must bring disaster to the realm. The King is clearly in sexual thrall to her.
Eubulus warns him about his excessive desire:
If you injoy it
The moderate way the sport yeelds I confesse
A pretty titillation, but to much oft
66 T. MACFAUL
Will bring you on your knees. In my yonger daies

I was my selfe a gamster, and I found
By a sad experience, there is no such soker
As a yong spongie wife; she keepes a thousand
Horseleches in her box, and the thieues will sucke out
Both bloud, and marrow: I feele a kind of crampe
In my ioynts when I thinke on’t, but it may be Queenes
And such a Queene as yours is, has the art—
The general Ferdinand interrupts this extraordinarily indecorous pas-

sage, whose homosocial appeal is clearly designed to downgrade and
dehumanize women, but Eubulus goes on to warn that ‘If you spend
this way to much of your royall stock’ the King’s superiority will disap-
pear (3.4.2–12, 14). The idea that the Queen’s excessive sexuality will
diminish the King so much that he will be no longer a king goes alongside
a sense that her spongy sucking will only absorb his blood, rather than
helping it to reproduce. This exchange is immediately followed by the
King being denied access to his wife’s bedchamber, her lady-in-waiting
pleading medical advice; there is a clear parallel here to the priests denying
Charles I access to Henrietta Maria, but in this case, the Queen’s motives
are even more suspect, as she is planning to try and seduce the martial
hero Mathias.
The worry that Honoria’s pride will not only prevent her from provid-
ing an heir to the royal stock but will also lead her into infidelity is obviated
by the play’s other plot, which has a faithful, humble wife at its centre.
The Queen is jealous of Mathias’s love for his wife Sophia, and envious of
Sophia’s purity; she attempts to seduce Mathias for these reasons rather than
out of real desire for him. When Mathias is slandered by Honoria’s agents,
Sophia (who has, importantly, stayed at home) is briefly tempted into infi-
delity and this has an effect on the magic picture Mathias is carrying around
to monitor his wife’s behaviour; he therefore nearly accepts the Queen’s
overtures, but is stayed when the picture returns to its original purity, as
Sophia ultimately resists temptation. Sophia’s fidelity, acting at a distance,
therefore helps to save the Queen’s honour (though the Queen herself loses
interest as a result of Mathias’s momentary willingness). Domestic virtues
have power to act as a corrective to courtly corruption and pride. Sophia
condemns the impious magic of the picture, but its representational powers
do offer a mediation between the domestic and the courtly sphere, result-
ing in the Queen being ‘disenchanted’ (4.1.82) and coming to humble
renewal in ‘A second and a better marriage’ (line 103). Sophia’s ‘simple

deuotion’ to her husband needs somehow to be translated to the court
(3.2.36). Massinger here picks up on a theme we saw in A New Way to Pay
Old Debts: the ideal of the domestic wife’s virtue, like that of Lady Alworth
in the earlier play, acts as a corrective to the pride of a princess. It is easy
to discern a hint here that Henrietta Maria might learn English domestic
ways (perhaps from the English ladies-in-waiting who replaced her French
entourage) and become a proper, obedient wife to the King.
In a similar but more abrupt manner, Brome’s The Queen’s Exchange
(1630) sees the taming of a ‘Tyrannesse’ (III: 505) by ‘a few nights trial’
of sex with her husband (545). That husband, though, is not the King she
initially intended to marry, but his doppelganger, the son of a lord she ban-
ished for opposing her will in the play’s first scene. That lord (Segebert),
in turn, had opposed her marriage to a foreign king because that must
lead to the subversion of the ‘wholsome Laws’ and ‘the hope / Of flour-
ishing future fortunes’ the Queen’s father had worked so hard to instil in
his country (458–459). The Queen insists on marrying because, as one
of her sycophants says, ‘succession is / The life of Kingdoms’ (459), but
Segebert argues that this could best be achieved by her marrying a sub-
ject. The fear here is of a foreign king’s ‘Innovation’ which will ‘pervert /
Your Priviledges and your Government’ (461). These are very much the
terms in which people would criticize Charles and Henrietta Maria during
the Personal Rule, though the play’s initial situation more resembles the
debates around Elizabeth I’s potential marriage. The play’s very compli-
cated (though elegant) plot ultimately brings about an evidently providen-
tial domestic marriage through the doppelganger device; it also marries off
the foreign King to Segebert’s daughter, who is in any case more attractive
to him than the Queen was. Alliance is created without compromising the
nation’s liberty. The device of the doppelganger is meanwhile neatly sub-
versive: a subject is exactly as good as a king.26 The virtue of ordinary people
may correct the excesses of their monarch.
These issues even find their way into city comedy, where private indi-
viduals can also take on some of the wife-taming power the drama has
imagined at the level of high politics. Brome’s The City Wit (1630) puts its
honest citizen hero in a similar predicament to the princes of early Caroline
tragedy/tragicomedy: bankrupted because of his honesty, Crasy pretends
to travel away from home, leaving behind a wife who has been complicit
in schemes against him and who now plans infidelities with courtiers. He
returns, of course, in a variety of disguises, in order to gull his various
68 T. MACFAUL
enemies, including his wife. Setting himself up as both his wife’s doctor
and her gentleman usher enables him to manage her potential infideli-
ties, and obviate their consummation, getting the various courtiers to beat
each other up (and taking their gifts for himself). When all is revealed, his
wife claims that she knew him all the time, and ‘did but counterfeit, as you
did, to maintaine the jest’ (I: 369); this is a convenient fiction to enable
a happy ending, but the play’s subtitle ‘The woman wears the Breeches’
is indicative of wider anxiety about emasculation and feminine mastery.27
Crasy’s wife Josina wishes that women didn’t have to take their husbands’
names, thinking it would be better if the opposite were true; her maid
responds ‘Men, when they marry, become but halfe men: And the other
half goes to their Wives. And therefore she is called Woman; where before
she was call’d but Mayd’ (I: 299). The sense of masculine diminution we
see in this neat little joke has permeated early Caroline drama, though
now it can be treated comically. Crasy, later in the same scene, asserts his
masculinity by saying that a man can only be humiliated as a cuckold if he
‘knows it, permits, and procures it’ (I: 302). He contemplates divorcing
her as a result of her merely intended infidelity, but decides, with bluff
masculinity, talking to himself as if to a saloon-bar pal, ‘though she be not
a very modest woman for a Wife, thou mayst force her to be a reasonable
private wench for a Whore’, and that she’s such ‘a pretty Drabb’ it would
be hard to find ‘such another’ (I: 302). Only by diminishing and domesti-
cating her in these humiliating terms can he assert himself.
Crasy’s initial masculine failures are nowhere more acutely pointed than
when his mother-in-law observes ‘thou hast been married three years to
my Daughter, and hast not got her with Child yet! How do’st answer that?
For a woman to be married to a fruitfull Fool, there is some bearing with
him yet. (I know it by myself) but a dry barren Fool! How dost thou sat-
isfie that?’ (I: 285). Crasy feebly points out that the ‘defect’ may be in his
wife rather than him, but it seems he needs to prove his wit and mastery
before he can become a father. Significantly, Charles I did become a father
in the year of the play’s production. The play mentions the role of tutor
to a young prince (I: 320), suggesting that hopes for preferment were
already being imagined at the time of (or before) the future Charles II’s
birth. The play’s ability to treat marital discord in a comic manner may be
a result of such emergent hope. Channelling high-political family anxiet-
ies into a relatively lower-class setting is of course a factor that enables the
comic mode, but it seems likely that changes at the higher level enable the
happier thinking at a lower level.
What I hope this chapter has shown is that arguably the major familial
theme of late 1620s drama is the taming of unruly wives—from queens
down to commoners. Of the forty or so surviving plays from the period
1625–30, nearly a third deal with the topic in one way or another, and
around half of the remainder don’t represent wives at all, or are less
focussed on family matters. This surely relates, none-too-obliquely, to
emergent anxieties about the foreign, Catholic Queen. Henrietta’s initial
recalcitrance may have given way to affectionate marriage, but a sense
that the whole of the nation’s masculinity was somehow threatened by
the King’s marriage is not hard to detect. Private individuals are enlisted
in the cause of the theme of wife-taming, suggesting that the King needs
help. At the same time, the anxiety about royal favourites, which had per-
sisted in drama from the Elizabethan period through to the end of James’s
reign, gives way to a new sense of wives as a threat. As Charles’s frustra-
tions gave way to uxoriousness, though, the anxiety did not really change
character, though the representations did become more optimistic. Even
if fears about the succession informed early anxieties, the birth of Prince
Charles in 1630 didn’t seem to make all that much difference to the char-
acter of those anxieties, though they did make their solution seem more
possible. The drama of the period suggests a persistent desire that the
King take control of his wife, and that this is his subjects’ business too: for
their domestic virtues have a mutual relation with the King’s masculine
authority.
The more general issues that emerge from this argument are clear
enough: the family-state analogy, central to this group of chapters,
had a considerable appeal, but worked both ways; the King’s image of
masculinity was not just a way of exerting control, but was also needed to
underpin the masculinity of private individuals, and so those individuals
had a strong investment in their ruler’s private life; that investment, in
turn, was empowering, in that private individuals were able to shore up
the King’s masculinity. Yet all this talk of masculine control should not
mask the fact that men were hugely dependent on the virtues of women:
men’s honour was vulnerable through their wives, and (which is nearly but
not quite the same thing) their dynastic futures depended on their wives’
fidelity.28 The drama also presents high-status men as having very limited
coercive authority over their wives: persuasion, whether that be verbal,
sexual or through plot-contrivance, seems the key means of control.
The more specific issue addressed in this chapter is the unusual dynastic
(that is to say, the most intensely family-political) problem experienced
70 T. MACFAUL
in the period 1625–30: a king whose authority was insistently buttressed

with the rhetoric of patriarchalism, and whose position was the keystone
of a whole patriarchal system, was himself not a father. This generated
imaginative solutions that decisively—if not for the first time—made hus-
bandly authority more important than paternal authority in the construc-
tion of the patriarch figure. That husbandly authority mapped uneasily
onto regal authority as Charles I’s wife was a foreigner. Rule over the
Queen, in such circumstances, was rather different from rule over one’s
domestic subjects. The family-politics analogy did not quite work: familial
rule was in some ways a foreign-policy matter (as she had clear loyalties to
her brother, Louis XIII). But that may have offered opportunities as well
as problems: the subjects’ patriotism could be invested in the King him-
self, as there was little chance of identifying with the Queen. In drama, the
politics of the private family are made to resonate with the politics of the
royal family. Drama offers a medium, a space in which the private and the
public collide, in which the contradictions of the family-politics analogy
can be both displayed and resolved, affirming homosocial bonds between
the men of the nation and their King, and thereby diluting and diffusing
his authority into the wider community. The drama of this particular short
period seems especially keen to represent marriage as an ongoing process
(however fraught), and as part of a community, rather than as a simple
ceremonial moment of dramatic resolution between individuals.
Drama is particularly good at resolving political tensions that have a
human or personal dimension. By transferring political tensions to the
domestic sphere, codes of affection and honour are activated and person-
alized in ways that enable the emergence of compromises that might not
be possible in the public sphere. Other literary forms would later politicize
the person in ways that caused significant trouble for Charles I, but, early
in his reign, the drama seemed willing and able to help him out.29
Notes
1. See Fred B. Tromly, Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: The Debt Never
Promised (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).
2. See Tom MacFaul, Problem Fathers in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapter five.
3. Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow: Longman, 2005), p. 2.
4. On anxieties about Henrietta Maria, see Laura Lunger Knoppers,

Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapter 1.
5. See Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in
the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),
chapter 6.
6. Cust, Charles I, pp. 31, 29, 77, 148–149, 489, Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars:
Promoting Kings and Commonwealths, 1603–1660 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010).
7. References to Massinger’s plays are to The Plays and Poems of Philip
Massinger, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, 5 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1976).
8. A point reinforced by her likening Lovell to Ulysses (3.1.68).
9. On the redemptive power of femininity in the Seventeenth Century, see
Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to
Modern Brain Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006),
pp. 102–103, and MacFaul, Problem Fathers, p. 135.
10. The play is full of allusions to Hamlet (for example, 2.3.7–8), the locus clas-
sicus of dramatic representations of ‘o’erhasty marriage’.
11. See Ira Clark, The Moral Art of Philip Massinger (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1993), p. 231.
12. This argument has the greatest force if we assume that the play’s composi-
tion was in the brief period between the death of James in March 1625 and
Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria in June of that year, but as the
points the play seems to be making are rather oblique and abstract, though,
it is possible to imagine the play anticipating James’s death, and making
hints about royal policy before the issue arose, or even to see the play as
reflecting negatively on Charles for an over-hasty marriage.
13. The Moral Art of Philip Massinger, p. 92.
14. Blair Worden, ‘Favourites on the English Stage’, in J. H. Elliott and L. W.
B. Brockliss, eds., The World of The Favourite (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1999); MacFaul, Tom, ‘“A Kingdom with my Friend”: Favourites in
Shakespeare’, in Literary Milieux, ed. Richard A. McCabe and David
Womersley (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008); Curtis Perry,
Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006). Royal favourites are treated rather
favourably in early Caroline drama, perhaps particularly after the assassina-
tion of Buckingham. For a while, at least, negative representations of
favourites had become too sensitive an issue, not least because, as Cust,
Charles I, p. 80, points out, Charles refused to play the traditional ‘game’
of blaming problems on evil counsellors. The most notably and promi-
nently positive treatment of a favourite comes in Lodowick Carlell’s The
72 T. MACFAUL
Deserving Favourite (1629), where an apparently killed (and very noble)

favourite comes as if back from the dead in order to save the day. As Perry
shows, later in Charles I’s reign, the traditional discourse attacking favou-
rites was redirected onto Henrietta Maria.
15. On the surprising lack of urgency about procreation in early modern

England, see Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England:
Honour, Sex and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999) and Alexandra
Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
16. On the need to control wives more generally, see Laura Gowing, Domestic
Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996).
17. Caroline M. Hibbard’s ODNB account of Henrietta Maria’s life points out
that the royal marriage was initially soured, on the sexual front, by the
Queen’s spiritual advisors insisting on sexual abstinence at certain times,
and controlling access to her bedchamber.
18. Richard Brome’s comedy, The Northern Lass (c. 1629) also turns on mari-
tal non-consummation, and there it is argued that a divorce would be
‘instantly granted’ (5.4), if witnesses could attest to the fact that the mar-
ried couple had not been alone together. However, in order that the cen-
tral couple can be separated, and each can marry another, the play’s plot
also belatedly (and with a hint of inconsistency) reveals that the marriage
was not performed by a ‘lawful Minister’ (5.8) but by a disguised servant.
References are to The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome, 3 vols. (London:
John Pearson, 1873), III: 90, 106 (the edition has no line numbers).
19. The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant, ed. James Maidment and
W. H. Logan, 5 vols. (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1872), I: 48 (the edi-
tion has no line numbers).
20. See Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment, p. 62.
21. Mary Edmond, Rare Sir William Davenant: Poet Laureate, Playwright,
Civil War General, Restoration Theatre Manager (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1987), p. 39, sees this as an ‘obvious’ reference to
Charles, and suggests that this was why the play could not be performed.
22. It is quite rare for noblewomen to be physically chastised or restrained on
the English Renaissance stage, and there’s a distinct trend away from it as
the period goes on. When women such as the Duchess of Malfi or The
Changeling’s Beatrice-Joanna are so treated, it is a sign of their loss of
status, associated with their sexual relationships with lower-status men. See
Kim Solga, Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible
Acts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
23. The fullest definition of this role can be found in Brome’s The Northern
Lass (4.1). For Henrietta Maria’s dwarf, see Nick Page, Lord Minimus: The
Extraordinary Life of Britain’s Smallest Man (London: Harper Collins,

2001).
24. See Perry, Literature and Favoritism.
25. Cust, Charles I, p. 180 points out that the Queen remained a limited influ-
ence even later: she came to real political prominence only after 1641.
26. The play also contains a splendid clown whose name, Jeffrey, may recall
that of Henrietta Maria’s dwarf Jeffrey Hudson—see Page, Lord Minimus
(London: Harper Collins, 2001).
27. It also, more subtly and ironically, refers to the revelation that Crasy’s co-
conspirator, Widow Tryman, is really a man (Crasy’s apprentice Jeremy)—a
denouement that involves him showing off his breeches.
28. It is striking, though, that very few high-status women give birth to chil-
dren not their husbands’ in Renaissance drama.
29. See Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, chapter 2.
CHAPTER 5
Animal Families
Helen Smith
If I should shew at large and copiously, how many things may be collected
out of the knowledge of beasts for familiar and houshold affaires, I might
be infinite …1
In his epistle dedicatory to The House-holder, or Perfect Man: Preached

in Three Sermons (1610), Church of England clergyman Edward Topsell
argued that ‘Houshold Gouernment’ is ‘the Parent & first beginner of
Common-wealthes, the Seminary of Kingdoms, & Counsels’.2 The anal-
ogy between domestic and national politics was commonplace. In an
example that is widely cited by scholars of gender and the family, Robert
Cleaver insisted ‘A Householde is as it were a little common wealth, by
the good gouernment wherof, Gods glorie may be aduanced, the com-
mon wealth which standes of seuerall families, benefited, and al that liue
in that familie may receiue much comfort and commoditie’.3 Applying the
metaphor in the opposite direction, James VI and I explained in The Trew
Law of Free Monarchies (1598) that ‘as the Father of his fatherly duty is
bound to care for the nourishing, education, and vertuous gouernment of
his children; euen so is the king bound to care for all his subiects’.4
H. Smith (*)
Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, York, UK
e-mail: helen.smith@york.ac.uk

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_5
76 H. SMITH
Outlining the contents of his third sermon, Topsell introduces a further

point of comparison, promising to show how the virtues of the ‘perfect’
householder are ‘Exemplified in Beasts and Creatures’.5 The animal, the
household, and civil life are, he argues, tightly interlinked: ‘So our Flockes
and Heards are our Families, our Cattell, our charges Pastorall, and
Magisteriall, kingdoms to Kinges, Monarchies to Emperors, Counties to
Sheriffes, offices to Officers’.6 Cleaver too extends his comparative frame
to animals, though he instead distinguishes between how a householder
treats his livestock and how he should treat his family:
seeing all men be carefull, that their horses and bullocks, should haue
sufficient fodder and prouender, to the end they may haue their labour in
lieu and recompence thereof, it doth consequently follow, that therefore
a christian Householder ought to haue ouer his children and seruants,
a much more christian care, then he hath ouer his dumbe & insensible
beasts’.7
Whilst Cleaver asserts the distance between cattle and family members,
the language in which he describes the householder’s relationship with his
animals—understood to offer their labour ‘in lieu and recompence’ of the
food they receive—blurs the line between rational, contractual man and
‘dumbe & insensible’ beast.
Cleaver’s contractual cattle complicate the terms of political analogy,
exposing the fault lines that consistently fracture apparently orderly
animal analogies. His example, like Topsell’s, underscores Laurie
Shannon’s claim that early modern thought about animals was couched
in ‘a fundamentally political idiom’, whose recognition of ‘legitimated
capacities, authorities, and rights […] set animals within the scope of
justice and the span of political imagination’.8 At the same time, animal
behaviour formed a central model for political life. Ants and bees in
particular were staples of discussions of the commonwealth, a tradition
encapsulated in the title and contents of Samuel Purchas’s A Theatre of
Politicall Flying-Insects (1657).9 In less abstract terms, both Elizabeth
I and James used beastly analogies to shape political relationships, with
the latter in particular developing an elaborate vocabulary of pet names
for his courtiers.10
This chapter, however, deals not with politics and the family, as medi-
ated through the beastly, but with the politics of the family, as conceived
of and experienced in relation to animals. In When Species Meet, Donna
ANIMAL FAMILIES 77
Haraway defines politics through its association not only with the polis but
with ideals of politeness, a connection she develops to describe a respon-
sive ‘cosmopolitics’, ‘with actual animals and people looking back at each
other, sticky with all their muddled histories’.11 Reclaiming ‘a liveable
politics’, Haraway suggests, means ‘learning to be “polite” in responsible
relation to always asymmetrical living and dying and nurturing and kill-
ing’.12 This chapter takes on Haraway’s challenge to extend the scope of
the political, asking how Topsell’s writings illuminate the biopolitics of
the early modern family. I explore how animal exemplars operated as ide-
als whose emotional and oeconomic behaviour was celebrated in terms
which were often distinctly unflattering to the humans with whom they
were compared, before going on to trace the intimate presence of animals
in the spaces and routines of the home. Building on recent work that
extends the early modern family to embrace servants, wards, and appren-
tices, this chapter argues that non-humans did not simply offer convenient
mechanisms to conceptualise the politics and hierarchies of the family, but
became part of the family’s social and emotional, as well as bodily, life.
Constituting what Haraway terms a ‘situated natureculture’, an embod-
ied history ‘in which all the actors become who they are in the dance of
relating, not from scratch, not ex-nihilo, but full of the patterns of their
sometimes-joined, sometimes-separate heritages’, the animal–human rela-
tionships created within and beyond the household were at once intimate
and abstract, affective and analogical.13 The twinned domestic and con-
ceptual presence of animals challenges the dominance of the metaphor of
civil politics as a model for the household and its hierarchies, and prompts
us to investigate forms of household management and affect rooted as
much in ideas of ‘nature’, kind, and feeling as in the ideals of statecraft
and political theory.
‘Considereth the Labors […] of the Emmet’

Topsell is best known today for his compendia of animal knowledge,
The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes (1607) and The Historie of Serpents
(1608), which illustrate the physical characteristics of animal species, as
well as expounding upon their ‘politicall, ciuill, & domesticall vertues’.14
Described by one commentator as ‘a man of very little originality’, Topsell
drew extensively on Konrad Gesner’s famous five-volume Historia ani-
malium (Zurich, 1551–1558), which itself brought together materials
from the Old Testament, ancient writers, especially Pliny and Aristotle,
78 H. SMITH
folk knowledge, and medieval bestiaries. This miscellaneous heritage lends

Gesner’s, and hence Topsell’s, writings an aphoristic and proverbial—as
well as natural historical—force. Alongside this, Topsell paraphrased and
reproduced materials from John Caius’s Of Englishe Dogges (first published
as De Canibus Britannicis in 1570; trans 1576), Thomas Blundeville’s and
Gervase Markham’s accounts of horses and horsemanship, and Thomas
Moffet’s Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum (1634), which
in turn drew on the prior publications of Gesner, Edward Wotton, and
Thomas Penney.15
Topsell’s lack of originality is precisely what makes his bestiaries com-
pelling: they blend fable, folk knowledge, husbandry, natural philosophi-
cal observation, and personal experience, offering a rich picture of both
the complexity and the confusion of ideas about animals in and beyond
early modern England. Termed ‘our English Gesner’, Topsell was influen-
tial; his bestiaries and his sermons were widely cited by contemporaries.16
The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes is referred to in texts as diverse as
John Swan’s popular Speculum Mundi Or a Glasse Representing the Face
of the World (1635), Richard Ward’s Theologicall Questions, Dogmaticall
Observations, and Evangelicall Essays (1640), Izaak Walton’s The Compleat
Angler (1655), and Randle Holme’s The Academy of Armory (1688).
Edward Leigh drew on Topsell’s sermons alongside Four-Footed Beastes
in A Treatise of Divinity Consisting of Three Bookes (1646), whilst John
Bagwell included Topsell among the ‘most approved authors, both ancient
and modern’ he consulted to expand the sixth edition of Thomas Wilson’s
A Complete Christian Dictionary (1661). In a series of comparative tables
designed to explain the diverse metaphors of the Bible, Benjamin Keach
drew heavily on Four-Footed Beastes to flesh out biblical metaphors with
details of observed animal behaviours, juxtaposing these descriptions with
scriptural commentary and quotation to moralising ends.17
An intriguing instance of Topsell’s contemporary reception exists in
the commonplace (or household) book of Lady Ann Southwell. Between
notes from St Augustine’s The City of God and a list of miscellaneous apo-
thegms, Southwell records ‘for my ow[ne] memorye […] some perticulers
that I best affect’ from The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes. Southwell is
drawn not to the domestic exemplars that are my subject in this chapter
(save the cat, which she celebrates as ‘the Epitomie of a shee Lyon’), but
to the more exotic inhabitants of Topsell’s bestiary, including the manti-
core, the lamia, the rhinoceros and the hydra.18 Yet the inclusion of these
brief notes within a commonplace book devoted primarily to religious
ANIMAL FAMILIES 79
writings, household accounts, receipts, and inventories, locates Topsell

precisely within the oeconomic and moral contexts I explore below.
Topsell’s concern for family is made explicit in the title of The House-
holder, but is already evident in his earliest surviving publication, The
Reward of Religion. Deliuered in Sundrie Lectures Upon the Booke of Ruth
(first published 1596), which is centrally occupied with the conduct and
religious politics of the family. Though the encyclopaedic bestiaries for
which Topsell is now known seem at first glance far removed from his
concern for biblical exposition, his sermons routinely employ creaturely
analogies as part of a programme of meditation in which readers are urged
to ‘Turne therefore your eyes to all things, to gather this wisedom, not
onely to Heauen, but to Earth, to Men, to Beasts, to hel, to seas, to all’.19
Equally, Topsell’s expanding bestiary comments repeatedly upon the fam-
ily lives and moral probity of animals, offering a running commentary on
the pertinence of these observations to household management.
The preface to The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes explains that God
preserved the beasts in Noah’s ark (bringing ‘them home to man as to a
fold’) so ‘that a man might gaine out of them much deuine knowledge’.20
‘Who’, asks Topsell,
is so vnnaturall and vnthankefull to his parents, but by reading how the

young Storkes and Wood-peckers do in their parents olde age feed and nour-
ish them, will not repent, amend his folly, and bee more naturall? What
man is so void of compassion, that hearing the bounty of the Bone-breaker
Birde to the young Eagles, will not become more liberall? Where is there
svch a sluggard and drone, that considereth the labours, paines, and trauels
of the Emmet, Little-bee, Field-mouse, Squirrell, and such other that will
not learne for shame to be more industrious, and set his fingers to worke?21
Topsell was not, of course, the first author to emphasise the relevance of
animal behaviour to household life. In 1580, Michael Cope highlighted
the biblical roots of this tradition, directing readers of his A Godly and
Learned Exposition vppon the Prouerbes of Solomon to consider in detail
verses 6 to 8, which instructed them: ‘Go to the pismire [ant], o sluggard:
behold her waies, & be wise. / For she hauing no guide, gouernour, nor
ruler: / Prepareth her meate in the sommer, and gathereth her foode in
the haruest’.22 Noting that the pismire is ‘a litle feeble beast’, Cope links
the observation of animal behaviour directly to household governance,
remarking that men ‘ought to bee ashamed that the wise man sendeth
80 H. SMITH
them […] to learne wisdome and wel to gouerne their houses and fami-
lies’.23 Cope reflects upon the ant community’s lack of political structures,
insisting that the benefits of civic hierarchy should compel men to behave
better than beasts, since, unlike ants, men
haue their parents and neighbours, whose example and counsel they shoulde
folow: they haue maister workmen & labourers, of whome they may learne
to do the necessarie woorks of this life. Besides this, there are the lawes of
v r
the Magistrates for to compel their subiects to labour. (R4 –R5 )
The Swiss Reformed theologian Pierre Viret drew on the same passage
from Proverbs in his The Schoole of Beastes; Intituled, the Good Housholder,
or the Oeconomickes (1585), turning to the examples of diverse animals to
consider the ‘wel and wise gouerning the houses and families’.24
For Topsell, wasps offer a prime example of oeconomia, the art of good
housekeeping.25 Male wasps ‘haue such a tender care ouer their females,
[…] and suffer them so much to haue their owne wills, as they will neither
permit them to take any paynes abroade for theyr liuing, nor yet to seeke
for their meate at home’.26 Whilst to a modern consciousness the energy
of the males ‘flying about [… to] bring all home to their owne dwellings,
thereby as it were strictly enioyning the femalls to keepe theselues within
dores’, seems a peculiar example of the females’ dominant ‘wills’, it chimes
with an ideology of the household which drew upon the classical precepts
of Xenophon. The ideal of oeconomia positions the man as active in the
socio-economic world, expending his energies to earn the substance which
his wife at home manages with thrift and care.27 As Cleaver summarised
it: ‘The dutie of the husband, is to get goods: and of the wife, to gather
them together, and saue them. […] The dutie of the husband, is to get
mony and prouision: and of the wiues, not vainely to spend it’.28 ‘There
is’, asserts Topsell, ‘nothing more frugall then a Spyder, more laborious,
cleanely, and fine. For she cannot abide that euen the least end or peece of
her thred to be lost, or to be placed and set to no vse or profit’.29
Emphasising the mutuality of marital labours, Topsell notes that male
and female spiders take on each others’ roles when one is sick or weak,
whilst Viret admires ‘howe the wife spinneth and maketh the webbes and
threds, and the husband on the other side chaseth and hunteth for their
nourishment’.30 This gendering of action imposes upon arachnids an ideo-
logical division, which maps neatly onto stereotypes of gendered human
work. At the same time, both authors celebrate the spiders’ c ooperation in
ANIMAL FAMILIES 81
order to maintain the household, which suggests the importance of wom-

en’s work to middle and lower-status households.31 Spiders are equally
exemplary of the right way to bring up children, taking it in turns to sit
upon their eggs, and, ‘although […] they haue brought forth three hun-
dereth young ones at once, yet do they traine them vp al alike without
exception, to labour, parsimony, and paynes taking, and invre them in
good order, to fashion and frame all things fit for the weaving craft’.32 The
language of craft and fashioning locates spiders in the world of the eco-
nomic family, sustaining the future of the household through the repro-
duction of both children and skill.
Where animal families model the ideal domus, human families compare
negatively to the innate virtues of beasts. In an elegant chiasmic structure,
Topsell demonstrates the mirroring of the love which a nanny goat bears
for her kids in the attentive affection of her children: ‘the Damme doth
most carefully educate and nourish her young, the younge ones againe,
doe most thankefully recompence their mothers carefulnesse’, grooming
her, and bringing food and water.33 The applicability of this moral behav-
iour is firmly driven home: kids are ‘much like vnto reasonable men, which
keepe and nourish theyr owne parents in their old decrepit age’. In The
Reward of Religion, animal analogies conversely illuminate ‘the gracelesse
generations of our vngodly age’, when parents spoil their children, choos-
ing to ‘put both feete into the graue by their ouer labours, then bring their
vntamed steeres, and vnrulye heyfers, their sons and daughters to the yoke
of diligent trauaile’.34 Complaining about the excesses of modern parents
in The House-holder, Topsell suggests ‘Eyther they bring them vp to noth-
ing but to play, as many of the rich, or else they traine them to nothing
but to delue and digge the earth, as many of the poore’. A marginal note
explains the distinction in animal terms: ‘Mowing Apes. Digging Pigges’.35
Topsell’s and Viret’s concern for good housekeeping begins with the
construction of the home. Wasps, for example, build ‘very large dwellings,
with Chambers and floores, in a round and orbicular forme, with roomes
one aboue another, finely and wittily compacted’.36 Topsell’s emphasis
upon the ‘witty’ buildings of the wasps is mirrored in his account of bad-
gers’ efforts to build an ‘elaborate house’, as well as the ‘wit or naturall
inuention’ demonstrated by beavers in constructing their dens.37 Animal
homes occupy a potentially uneasy space between the built and the natu-
ral; Topsell celebrates beavers’ ingenuity in selecting where their ‘buildings
are to be framed’, a term that invokes at once the practical craft required
to construct a home, and the divine maker’s ability to ‘frame’ his creation.
82 H. SMITH
Creaturely dwelling practices involve the exemplary practice of moral

judgement: Topsell celebrates ‘the wisedome of the Mouse’ in provid-
ing multiple lodgings for herself, and describes swallows as ‘prouident
Birds’, who collect wool from the backs of sheep in order to make ‘their
nestes to lodge their young ones after they bee hatched’.38 Even the pig
is ‘very desirous of a cleane lodging’, which must be maintained by the
swineherd.39 In his sermon on Ruth, Topsell emphasises the direct paral-
lels between human and animal households, warning the uncharitable rich
to ‘take heed, that their owne styes, I meane their houses wherein such
fat hogs as themselues are, liuing in pleasure and in follyes, be not made
worse then the silly houell of [the poor]’.40
For both Viret and Topsell, animals offer copious examples of natu-
ral, even instinctive affection. Viret insists that ‘the cheefest thing that is
required in a good householder, is the amitie and loue of the husbande and
the wife […] and the care that the fathers and mothers of the familie, ought
to haue of their children and families’; his treatise is concerned to explore
the virtues of those beasts ‘whiche haue some singular gyfte more then the
others haue, in the coniunction of the male with the female, and in the affec-
tion towardes their litle ones’.41 Topsell too insists upon the importance of
affective marital bonds; numerous beastly examples of monogamous affec-
tion provide a means to reflect upon humans’ inability to achieve a similar
moral standard. Returning to spiders, he declares:
I will not omit their temperance, a vertue in former ages proper onely to
men, but now it should seeme peculiar to Spyders. […] And as they can-
not abide corriualles, if any wedlocke breakers, & Cockold-makers dare bee
[…] so insolently proude as to presse into anothers House or Cottage, they
reward him iustly with condigne punnishment for his temeratious enter-
prize, & flagitious fact.42
Further from home, crocodiles are cited as doting lovers, with males lov-
ing their mates ‘aboue all measure, yea euen to iealousie’. This intensity of
feeling is considered praiseworthy: it is crocodiles’ ‘naturall affection they
beare one to another, and how they choose out theyr fellowes’ that makes
them ‘as it were fitte wiues and husbands for procreation’.43
Above all, animals were models for parental affection. In The Citie of
God, translated into English in 1610, St Augustine demanded, ‘[f]or what
Tyger is there that doth not nousle her yong ones, & fawn vpon them in
their tendernesse? what Kite is there, though he fly solitarily about for his
ANIMAL FAMILIES 83
prey, but wil tread his female, build his nest, sit his egges, feed his young,
and assist his fellow in her motherly duety, all that in him lieth?’.44 The pas-
sion of animal mothers at the loss of their offspring is frequently evoked.
Tigers in particular, seeing their young carried away on ships, ‘maketh so
great lamentation vpon the Sea shoare howling, braying, and rancking,
that many times she dyeth in the same place’.45 Topsell’s examples partici-
pate in the ‘naturalization of motherhood—that is, its essentialist casting
as adhering in the physical bodies of women’, establishing maternal feeling
as intense and innate by describing it within an animal realm where reason
is only partially or occasionally understood to operate.46 This comparison
is complicated, and more fully endorsed, by Topsell’s insistence that ani-
mals possess moral and affective, rather than simply instinctual, responses.
Where Patricia Phillippy has suggested that ‘maternity is constructed
in the [early modern] period as a unique site of affective and emotional
license’ against which men might establish a mean of mourning, animal
examples at once enable an excess of feeling, and allow something of that
emotional intensity to men as well as women.47 In a striking example
from Sir John Harington’s translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, it is
Rodomont, the epitome of masculinity, who is compared to the grieving
tigress, pursuing his lost love, Doralice, ‘Like as a Tyger’, who, robbed of
her young, ‘Doth follow on the foote through eu’rie cost, / No dikes nor
waters wide can make her stay’.48 For Viret too, the animal world offers
compelling examples of paternal affection. Male pigeons ‘doe take with
their females a part of the care and paine, that they must haue of their
egges & young’, whilst ‘the lampries do beare the bel, and do merite the
crowne aboue all other fishes in case of fatherly loue, and indulgence,
goodnes and gentleness towards their yong-ones’.49 Topsell’s description
of wasps moves between the family and the polis, returning us to the con-
nection between fatherhood and political enfranchisement: wasps ‘want
not a harty and fatherly affection’ manifested in ‘more then heroycall
courage and inuincible fury’, since if anyone is ‘so knack-hardy as to come
neere there houses or dwelling places’, the whole swarm ‘rusheth out,
being put into an amazed feare, to help their fellow Cittizen’.50
The modes of analogical thinking that turn to animals as examples for
the maintenance of family relationships might be taken to support Erica
Fudge’s argument that in early modern literature and culture the animal
‘becomes the thing which the human is constantly setting itself against’.
Fudge asserts that Topsell’s unoriginal compendia, like other literary
descriptions, make visible not the living, breathing animal but ‘the ways in
84 H. SMITH
which humans define themselves as human in the face of the animal’, even
if, as in many of the cases described here, the animal is taken to represent
virtues to which the human should aspire.51 Yet, as Keith Thomas reminds
us, whereas in modern England there are three people to every sheep, in
the early modern period ‘the ratio was the other way round’; animals were
ever-present, in the household, and in village and city streets.52 In Topsell’s
writings—and, I would argue, much more broadly across the period—the
living, breathing presence of the animal, and, at times, the visceral pres-
ence of its parts, constantly asserts itself within the lines of description
and analysis, contrast and comparison. Understood in the context of a
relentless familiarity between man and beast, anthropomorphism is not an
act of abstraction; rather, in John Berger’s neat formulation, ‘anthropo-
morphism was integral to the relationship between man and animal and
was an expression of their proximity’.53 As the next section will show, the
presence of animals in and around the household complicates the meta-
phorical force of domestic and oeconomic beasts, rooting Topsell’s and
Viret’s comparisons in a vital and shifting biopolitics.
Familiar Creatures
Recent scholarship has made a strong case for extending the ideas of fam-
ily beyond immediate kin to encompass temporary and mobile residents.
Susan Broomhall asks us to consider
not the relationships created by the family connected through blood and
marriage, but rather the connections forged by members of household com-
munities. When people lived, ate and / or worked together in a household,
what kinds of relationships were created? What was the nature of emotional
content formed in the household among people drawn together by shared
economic, social and biological needs, rather than necessarily by blood or
marriage?54
Animals likewise lived, ate, and worked with humans, and their biological
and social needs were complexly intertwined; these observations push us
to extend the family to encompass an animal presence.
For Broomhall, ‘master-servant relations were often modelled on the
advice literature for parent-child interactions, suggesting that societies
attempted to find ways to locate interaction between unconnected indi-
viduals residing in the household in familiar emotional paradigms’; a nimals
ANIMAL FAMILIES 85
offered a further model for interactions that were at once hierarchical and
affective, whilst the terms of service structured many animal relation-
ships.55 Bruce Boehrer, in a study of literary animals, identifies the persis-
tent trope that linked the pet parrot and the servant, with the exploitation
of both rendered, as a result, ‘inevitable, commonplace, and therefore
trivial’.56 In contrast, Topsell emphasises mutual obligation between man
and animal: the shepherd ‘must rather be a guide vnto [his flock] then a
Lord or master ouer them […] he must rather vse his chiding voice and
shake his staffe at them, then cast either stone or dart at them’.57 The bee-
keeper must exert himself ‘to keepe these good Pay-maisters, and to make
them in loue with you’, a phrase in which the bees’ position as a source
of income paradoxically establishes them as officers (‘pay-masters’) rather
than employees.58
Dogs, in particular, embodied a relationship of loving service, ‘indur-
ing many stripes patiently at the hands of his maister, and vsing no other
meanes to pacifie his displeasure, then humiliation, prostration, assenta-
tion, and after beating, turneth a reuenge into a more feruent and whot
loue’.59 Citing Caius, Topsell describes the dog as ‘a creature domesticall
or houshold seruant, brought vp at home with offals of the trencher, and
fragments of victuals’, suggesting the extent to which participation at table
constituted the extended family.60 ‘The Dog called Turnespete’, employed
in the kitchen, literalised the service relationship, so diligent in turning the
meat by walking in a wheel ‘that no drudge nor scullion can do the feate
more cunningly’.61 These examples of serviceable animals naturalise the
hierarchies of the household; describing God’s creation as ‘lauta supellex,
our houshold furniture’, Samuel Purchas rejoiced that ‘the tamer beasts,
fishes, fowles, [are] naturall slaues, and houshold-seruants’.62
Animal relations extended beyond the terms of loyal service, however.
Though historians argue that the early modern period witnessed architec-
tural and social changes that separated domestic animals from the family,
who withdrew into the secure private household, there is copious evi-
dence to suggest that these boundaries were, at best, loosely observed.63
As Topsell’s litany of domestic creatures reminds us, humans and animals
lived in close proximity thanks to the structures and materials of the home,
which provided convenient dwelling places for creaturely as well as human
occupants. ‘The little mouse’, Topsell notes, ‘is justly tearmed […] an
inhabitant in our own houses, […] and a knawer of al things’, while ‘the
Domestical weasel like a maide doth continually liue in houses’.64
86 H. SMITH
According to Topsell, when hedgehogs ‘are nourished at home in

houses and brought vp tame, they drinke both Milke and Wine’, whilst
pine martens, ‘taken when they be young […] grow wonderfull tame and
familiar with men and dogs’.65 Topsell’s most frequently used word to
describe animals that have been taken into the home is ‘familiar’, a term
that is etymologically tied to family, and blurs the line between family,
friends, servants, and household animals—as well as, in a different context,
embracing the familiar animals of suspected witches.66 Anecdotes instruct
readers in the example of a bear nurtured at a prince’s table, ‘for he had
vsed her to be familiar at his court, and to come into his owne chamber
when he listed’ and of ‘a holy man, who kept a hind so familiar with him
that in the wildernes he liued vpon her milke’.67
Topsell’s emphasis upon the shaping influence of food and domestic
space extends to a recognition that companion animals may have not
only their family lives but their reproductive cycles shaped by the facts of
cohabitation: it is, he observes, ‘a common thing to al that liue familiarly
among men’ to give birth numerous times in a year, where they would do
so only once in the wild.68 This biological alteration reminds us of what
Haraway terms the ‘politics of animal and human reproduction’ and the
extent to which selective breeding practices are themselves enmeshed in
political structures, a phenomenon perhaps most keenly attested during
the early modern period in the celebration of hunting animals and birds,
which were frequently deployed as gifts within a patronage economy. In
1588, for example, Robert Cecil wrote to his father, Lord Burghley, from
Bruges, revealing that ‘the Duke himself willed Richardotte to speak unto
me for a hound and a brace of English greyhounds’, and that
M. la Motte sent me a cast of hawks when he sent my Lord Cobham his

three hawks. There is no five days but I receive from him one courteous
message or another; with sometimes a pheasant or a hare; which we can here
requite them no way more to their contentment at Bruges than with five or
six hundred oysters.69
The concept of familiarity could render even exotic creatures domestic.

John Pory’s 1600 translation of Leo Africanus’s A Geographical Historie of
Africa, for example, describes ‘serpents so familiar with men, that at dinner-
time they wil come like dogs & cats, and gather vp the crums vnder the
table’.70 Closer to home, Topsell describes how rabbits ‘will very quickly
grow tame and familiar to the hand of man’, whilst a cat is a ‘familiar and
ANIMAL FAMILIES 87
well knowne beast’.71 Squirrels too ‘growe exceeding tame and familiar to
men if they be accustomed and taken when they are young’. Sadly, ‘they
are very harmeful, and will eat al manner of woollen garments, and if it
were not for that discommodity, they were sweete-sportful-beastes, and
are very pleasant play-fellowes in a house’.72
The intimacy of ‘sweete-sportful’ squirrels, which ‘runne vp to mens
shoulders, and […] will oftentimes sit vpon their handes, creepe into
their pockets for Nuttes, goe out of doores, and returne home againe’,
raises the question of the emotional bonds between familiar animals and
humans. Whilst Keith Thomas argues that it was only towards the end of
the period that pets became popular, and that the keeping of ‘useless’ ani-
mals ‘reflects the tendency of modern men and women to withdraw into
their own small family unit for their greater emotional satisfactions’, there
is copious earlier evidence for affectionate relationships between house-
hold animals and humans.73 Topsell, evidently not a fan of the cat, which
he describes as ‘a dangerous beast’, is nonetheless seduced into an engag-
ing description of:
how she flattereth by rubbing her skinne against ones Legges, how she
whurleth with her voyce […] Therefore how she beggeth, playeth, leapeth,
looketh, catcheth, tosseth with her foote, riseth vp to strings held ouer her
head, sometime creeping, sometimes lying on the back, playing with one
foot, somtime on the bely, snatching, now with mouth, & anon with foot,
aprehending greedily any thing saue the hand of a man with diuers such
gestical actions, it is needelesse to stand vpon’.74
His stern reminders that ‘they which keepe their cats with them in their
beds haue the aire corrupted’ and that it is best to ‘auoyde their harmes,
making more account of their vse then of their persons’, reveal that many
early moderns did make much of their cats and went so far as to welcome
them into their beds.75 Equally, Topsell returns on several occasions to
the fashion for lapdogs, which ‘some wanton Women […] admit […] to
their beds, and bring up their young ones in their owne bosomes’.76 Such
excessive affections threaten to disrupt the reproductive politics of the
family; Topsell condemns those ‘who delight more in Dogs that are depri-
ued of all possibility of reason, then they do in children that be capeable
of wisedome, and iudgment’, even as he suggests that this affection may
be the fruit of ‘long lacke of issue’, as the dog comes to substitute for the
longed-for child.77
88 H. SMITH
Such emotional—and evidently pleasurable—attachments did not pre-

vent the use of animals as meat or medicine. As Berger argues of a later
period, ‘[a] peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
What is significant […] is that the two statements in that sentence are con-
nected by an and and not by a but’.78 Early moderns might feel affection
for a wide range of ‘familiar’ animals whilst also employing them to culinary
or medicinal ends. Jakob Rüff’s The Expert Midwife (1637) informs readers
that ‘the ashes […] of a Hedgehog being burnt and tempered with oyle,
affordeth an oyntment very commodious’ to ease phlegmatic humours in a
pregnant woman.79 Topsell describes the medicinal use of ‘litle dogs […] to
aswage the sicknes of the stomack, being oftentimes thereunto applied as a
plaster preseruatiue, or borne in the bosom of the diseased and weake per-
son’. Whilst carrying the dog ‘in the bosom’ suggests an intimate relation-
ship, the cure works by transferral, with the disease observed to ‘changeth
his place and entreth […] into the dog’, transforming a mutually nurturing
embrace into a mortal experience for the canine companion.80
Where nearly every animal is described as possessing medical virtues
which add to its utility, it is those closest to home and most important
to the household economy—dogs, horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs—whose
entries contain details of how to treat their ailments. These cures, often
markedly similar to the medicines Topsell recommends for humans, epito-
mise the kinds of symbiogenesis that Haraway identifies as a hallmark of the
companion species, as humans apply or consume animal parts, and treat-
ment regimes for animals demand physical intimacy and the transmission of
human bodily fluids.81 Within the terms of a medical regimen that insisted
upon the porousness of the body and transformative effects of the envi-
ronment, human bodies could be radically altered by the consumption of
characterful animal flesh.82 These effects extend to the mingling of human
and animal sexual appetites and emotional capacity; Topsell records that:
‘because the Roe-bucke doth wonderfully loue his female, there be some
that affirme, that if a woman eate the bladder of a Roe, it will likewise make
her husband to loue her exceedingly’.83 Animal medicine was instrumental
in creating and perpetuating both family affection and reproductive health;
Rüff’s receipts to cure sterility repeatedly call for the womb of a hare, mixed
with other ingredients and used in baths, pills, and other confections.84
Topsell’s and Viret’s repeated emphasis upon building further sug-
gests the extent to which animals may have been less an analogical than
a practical resource for human observers. Responding to a description of
the kingfisher’s nest, one of Viret’s protagonists, Tobias, exclaims: ‘the
ANIMAL FAMILIES 89
Halcions haue rather taught men the manner to make shippes and boates,
then the Halcions haue learned of them the science & knowledge that they
haue to builde their houses’.85 In similar terms, Viret asks
the silke-weauers and also the lynen cloth makers, & the tapestrie makers,
and imbroderers, and also all those that make threddes come, and compare
their woorke to the spiders webbes, & let them consider in which is most
conning. And who hath learned them that occupation? It was not men, but
rather they haue learned of them.86
There is, of course, a mythic aspect to these comparisons. Nonetheless,

Viret’s characters elide the distinction between human and animal skill,
and emphasise the importance of natural knowledge to building and
household craft.
Topsell applies the terms of human dwelling to animal nests and dens:
mice seek for ‘conuenient lodginges prepared to their hand and they loue
the hollow places of wals, or the roofes of houses’, whilst bees are capable
of so overloading themselves with honey that, ‘they faint in their returne
to their own priuate cotages’.87 He thus simultaneously brings animals
into the domain of the human and naturalises the human domus. As Karen
Raber points out, leading proponents of architectural theory, including
Vitruvius, Alberti and Wotton, ‘saw architecture as a natural activity, analo-
gous to the construction of nests by birds, bees, ants, and other animals—
the best human architects are but belated and often less perfect imitators
of animals’.88 Such a view participates in what Tim Ingold, drawing on
Heidegger, describes as a ‘dwelling perspective’, reversing the dominant
view of buildings as constructions that precede habitation and suggesting
instead that ‘the activities of building—of cultivation and construction—
belong to our dwelling in the world’.89 The building is formed in response
to the environment; in Viret and Topsell, animals offer compelling models
of the techniques and practices of occupying and shaping space.
For Haraway, ‘caring means to become subject to the unsettling obli-
gation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day
than at the beginning’.90 Tracking the behaviour of animals, Topsell and
Viret encourage their readers towards what Ingold terms an ‘educa-
tion of attention’, rooted in observation.91 The term ‘familiar’ embraces
knowledge gained through close association and, specifically, by frequent
perception through the senses.92 Noting the good behaviour of young
swallows, taught ‘to cast donge from their nest’, Viret’s Tobias comments
90 H. SMITH
that this knowledge is ready to hand thanks to swallows’ closeness to

human habitation, nesting in the eaves and above the doors of buildings.93
Though Topsell mingles his sources promiscuously, his text too is rooted
in observation (first-hand or repeated), especially of those animals which
live close to man. Topsell’s text, with its promiscuous and lively mingling
of sources and genres, guides the curious reader to watch and delight in
the behaviour of animals, and to assent to the (divinely inspired) instinc-
tual knowledge and order encapsulated in their actions and relationships.
Wasps, like bees, epitomise political life: Topsell offers it as ‘a good
Argument of their ciuill and politicall manner of life, in that they […] build
for themselues a Citty, both excellent and admirable for the notable build-
ings and houses in it’. Whilst wasp society is monarchical, Topsell notes,
good government is ensured by ‘the mutable and neuer fayling lawes of
Nature’ which wasps observe ‘as well in their daily taskes, as in their dispo-
sitions and affections of mind’.94 Such a construction does not simply natu-
ralise political hierarchies; it suggests that the commonplace link between
household and state government with which I opened this chapter (and
which is explored throughout this collection) was rooted in a cosmopoliti-
cal worldview in which animals occupied domestic space, shaped the bodies
and health of the family, and offered guides for living and for the con-
duct of ‘daily taskes’. ‘Humans’, Ingold argues, ‘are brought into existence
within a world that is inhabited by beings of manifold kinds, both human
and non-human’; in Topsell’s words, God ‘created all kind of Beastes and
creatures before man, that he might bring him into a house furnished and
adorned with all thinges’.95 Whilst Topsell’s viewpoint, like the majority of
his contemporaries, ostensibly establishes animals as secondary and subser-
vient to man, his text’s insistent familiarity with animal habits and relation-
ships flickers constantly between ideals of hierarchy, an elevation of natural
morality over the inadequacies of fallen man, and a responsive attention to
the real moods and needs of familiar creatures. The movement of animals
in and out of the early modern household and the domestic consciousness
renders literal Haraway’s insistence that anthropomorphism is not merely
forgivable but ‘necessary to keep the humans alert to the fact that some-
body is at home in the animals they work with’.96 For early moderns, whose
language and patterns of thought assume ‘a continuity between human
and non-human animal experience’, ‘familiar’ non-humans shaped and
sustained the family, being possessed of moral and emotional attributes,
providing food, medicine, and loyal service, and licensing and patterning
ideals of domestic feeling and household life.97
ANIMAL FAMILIES 91
Notes
1. Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London, 1607), ¶2r.
2. Edward Topsell, The House-holder (London, 1609), ¶4v.
3. Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Hovseholde Government (London,
1598), A7r. On this analogy, see especially Susan D. Amussen, An Ordered
Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988), chapter 2.
4. The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, Iames (London, 1616),
R2r.
5. Topsell, The House-holder, ¶3v.
6. Topsell, The House-holder, I7r.
7. Cleaver, Householde Gouernment, A3r-A3v.
8. Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean
Locales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p.3.
9. A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects Wherein Especially the Nature, the
Worth, the Work, the Wonder, and the Manner of Right-Ordering of the Bee,
is Discovered and Described (London, 1657). On this tradition, see
Jonathan Woolfson, ‘The Renaissance of Bees’, Renaissance Studies 24
(2010), pp. 281–300.
10. Alan Stewart, ‘Government by Beagle: the Impersonal Rule of James VI
and I’, in Erica Fudge (ed.), Renaissance Beasts: of Animals, Humans, and
Other Wonderful Creatures (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2004), pp. 101–115.
11. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008), pp. 92; 42.
12. Haraway, When Species Meet, pp. 271; 42.
13. Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 25.
14. Topsell, The Historie of Serpents. Or, The Second Booke of Liuing Creatures
(London, 1608), Dd2v.
15. C. E. Raven, English Naturalists from Neckam to Ray: A Study of the
Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1947), p. 218; G. Lewis, ‘Topsell, Edward (bap. 1572, d. 1625)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online
edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27557].
16. Stephen Jerome, Englands Iubilee (Dublin, 1625), P2v.
17. Troposchemalogia: Tropes and Figures (London, 1682).
18. The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, Folger MS V.b.198, ed. Jean
Klene, C.S.C. (Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts &
Studies, 1997), pp. 103–105.
19. Topsell, The House-holder, B8v.
20. Topsell, Beastes, A4r.
92 H. SMITH
21. Topsell, Beastes, A5r.

22. Michael Cope, A Godly and Learned Exposition vppon the Prouerbes of
Solomon, trans. Marcelline Outred (London, 1580), R4r.
23. Cope, Godly and Learned, R4v.
24. Pierre Viret, The Schoole of Beastes; Intituled, the Good Housholder, or the
Oeconomickes, trans. I. R. (London, 1585), *2r. This is a translation of part
II of Viret’s 1561 Metamorphose chrestienne.
25. On oeconomia as it was interpreted in early modern England, see Viviana
Comensoli, ‘Household Business’: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), esp. pp. 65–109; Keith
Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 27–112.
26. Topsell, Serpents, L1r.
27. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of
Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), chap-
ter one.
28. Cleaver, Householde Gouernment, M4v-M5r. See also Jared van Duinen,
‘The Obligations of Governing Masculinity in the Early Stuart Gentry
Family: The Barringtons of Hatfield Broad Oak’, in Susan Broomhall and
Jacqueline Van Gent, eds, Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern
Period: Regulating Selves and Others (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp.
113–130.
29. Topsell, Serpents, Dd2r.
30. Viret, Schoole of Beastes, C1r.
31. Amy Louise Erickson concludes that for yeomanry families, ‘women’s

work was not only essential but appears to have constituted at least half of
the total household economy’ (‘Introduction’ to Alice Clark, Working Life
of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992), p. xix).
32. Topsell, Serpents, Dd2v.
33. Topsell, Beastes, Y3r.
34. Topsell, Reward, K7v.
35. Topsell, The House-holder, M2v.
36. Topsell, Serpents, I1r.
37. Topsell, Beastes, D5r; E6v.
38. Topsell, Beastes, Aaa2v, Lll2v.
39. Topsell, Beastes, Ppp1r.
40. Topsell, Reward of Religion, Q6r.
41. Viret, Schoole of Beastes, ¶3r.
42. Topsell, Serpents, Dd2r.
43. Topsell, Serpents, N2r.
44. Augustine, S. Augustine, of The Citie of God (London, 1610), Ttt6r.
ANIMAL FAMILIES 93
45. Topsell, Beastes, Ss1r.

46. Patricia Phillippy, ‘London’s Mourning Garment: Maternity, Mourning
and Royal Succession’, in Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh (eds), Maternal
Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2001), pp. 319–332 (p. 323).
47. Phillippy, ‘London’s Mourning Garment’, p. 320.
48. Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse, trans John
Harington (London, 1591), M4v.
49. Viret, Schoole of Beastes, C8v-D1r; D7r.
50. Topsell, Serpents, K8v.
51. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern
English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000), p. 1.
52. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in
England, 1500–1800 (rpt. Penguin, 1984), p.94. Karen Raber too sug-
gests that scholars need to attend to questions of ‘animal embodiment’,
recognising the historical presence of ‘actual animals with actual bodies,
animals that have more than just conceptual proximity’ (Animal Bodies,
Renaissance Culture [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2013], p. 12).
53. John Berger, About Looking (London: Bloomsbury, 1980), p. 11.
54. Susan Broomhall, ‘Emotions in the Household’, in Broomhall (ed.),

Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),
pp. 1–37 (p. 1).
55. Broomhall, ‘Emotions in the Household’, p. 4.
56. Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in
Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 132.
57. Topsell, Beastes, Iii5v.
58. Topsell, Serpents, H2v.
59. Topsell, Beastes, N5r.
60. Topsell, Beastes, Q1v cf. John Caius, Of English Dogges, trans Abraham
Fleming (London, 1576), C8v.
61. Topsell, Beastes, Q5r; Caius, Dogges, F1v.
62. Samuel Purchas, The Kings Towre and Triumphant Arch of London
(London, 1623), B6r.
63. See Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 95.
64. Topsell, Beastes, Vvv6r; Ttt5r.
65. Topsell, Beastes, Bb1v; Vv3r.
66. OED, ‘Familiar’, n., adj., and adv. (n., defs 1a, 2a, 3a; adj. defs 1a, 2a, 2b,
3a, 4a). OED Online. (Oxford University Press, December 2015).
67. Topsell, Beastes, L4v; E3r; N2v.
68. Topsell, Beastes, Ooo5v.
94 H. SMITH
69. National Archives SP 77/3 f.42, Robert Cecil to his Father, Lord Burghley,
April 5, 1588.
70. Leo, Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa, trans John Pory
(London, 1600), T5r-v.
71. Topsell, Beastes, K4r.
72. Topsell, Beastes, Nnn5v.
73. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 119.
74. Topsell, Beastes, K5r.
75. See, however, Boehrer, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early
Modern Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010),
chapter three, for numerous examples of festive violence towards cats.
76. Topsell, Beastes, P4r.
77. Topsell, Beastes, Q2v.
78. Berger, About Looking, p. 7.
79. Jakob Rüff, The Expert Midwife (London, 1637), N1v.
80. Topsell, Beastes, Q2v.
81. Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 15. Raber notes that ‘consuming urine,
excrement, and (to us) odd body parts is a commonplace of Renaissance
medical texts and husbandry manuals’ aimed at humans, and explores ani-
mal medicines which use human urine, as well as licking or sucking infected
areas (Animal Bodies, p. 104).
82. See Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Environment and
Embodiment in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007); Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean
Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Michael Schoenfeldt,
Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in
Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge
83. Topsell, Beastes, L5r.
84. Rüff, The Expert Midwife—for example Dd1r.
85. Viret, Schoole of Beastes, D5v.
86. Viret, Schoole of Beastes, B8v-C1r.
87. Topsell, Beastes, Aa2r; Serpents, H1r.
88. Raber, Animal Bodies, p. 130.
89. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 185.
90. Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 36.
91. Ingold, ‘From the Transmission of Representations to the Education of
Attention’, in Harvey Whitehouse (ed.), The Debated Mind: Evolutionary
Psychology Versus Ethnography, pp. 113–153 (p. 144).
92. OED, ‘Familiar’, adj. def. 5a. OED Online. (Oxford University Press,
December 2015).
ANIMAL FAMILIES 95
Viret, Schoole of Beastes, D1r.

93.
94. Topsell, Serpents, H6v.
95.
Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 5; Topsell, Beastes, ¶4r.
96. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant
Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 50.
7. Boehrer, Animal Characters, p. 3.
9
PART II
Succession
CHAPTER 6
‘Good Agreement Betwixt the Wombe

and Frute’: The Politics of Maternal Power
in the Letters of Lady Anne Bacon
Katy Mair
Mother-love is supposed to be continuous, unconditional. Love and anger

cannot coexist. Female anger threatens the institution of motherhood.1
At times tender and caring, at others accusatory and manipulative, the

letters between Lady Anne Bacon (c.1528–1610) and her sons Anthony
and Francis reveal the ambivalence and ambiguity of the maternal role in
the early modern period. Whilst the role of the mother was clearly defined
in the early years of the child’s life, the adult relationship was less so,
resulting in conflict and confusion as to where nurture ended, and control
began. This intergenerational tension was exacerbated by Anne’s expe-
rience of spheres not usually traversed by women, as the extent of her
education, her experience in court politics and estate management, as well
as her respected status as a Puritan patron all combined to ensure there
were few topics on which her maternal advice was not worth listening to.
Although Anne’s humanist education and her involvement in the early
K. Mair (*)
The National Archives, London, UK

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_6
100 K. MAIR
parenting of her children created an intellectual affinity between mother

and son, her status as a widow and the responsibilities she came to bear
for her sons’ financial stability and their professional advancement worked
to dismantle the empathy between them. The dual impulses of Anne’s
maternal role, namely the affection and care she desired to extend to them
as a result of their biological relation, and the direction she was obliged
to provide them for the secure establishment of the family line, created a
paradoxical correspondence, one that flickered from affection to malice
in a flash. Behind this polarised expression of motherly emotion lay the
complex internal family politics of the Bacons, the pressures of compe-
tition within their wider kinship group, and their attempts to establish
themselves politically in the court of Elizabeth I. This chapter will explore
instances where the negotiation of family and courtly politics came to the
forefront of Anne Bacon’s correspondence, focusing particularly on how
the role of the mother was delineated at different points in her relation-
ships with her sons. The first section will sketch Anne’s role as a mother,
examining how her role was explicitly political as she attempted to estab-
lish the careers of her sons. Section two will focus on moments of fam-
ily conflict that demonstrate how the concept of mothering shifted and
changed depending on the interests of the parties involved. Throughout
her life Anne performed a succession of maternal roles: a stepmother, a
mother as a wife and then a mother as a widow. The political power of her
maternal role and the expectation of the control she can enact over her
sons are altered at each stage.
Family Relations
The correspondence between Anne and Anthony is the largest collec-
tion of letters between mother and son from the late sixteenth century,
and offers an unparalleled insight into family politics. As the daughter
of a respected humanist, Sir Anthony Cooke, Anne had received exten-
sive training in classical and modern languages.2 Her talents were put to
good effect in her translations of Bernardino Ochino’s sermons (editions
published in 1548, 1551 and 1570), and John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae
Anglicanae (published in 1564).3 Both texts established her national and
international reputation as a proponent for reformed religion, one that
was still in place in 1581 when French theologian, Théodore de Bèze,
dedicated a book to her.4 In 1553 Anne married Nicholas Bacon, a lawyer
and later Lord Keeper of the Great Seal when she was about twenty-five
‘GOOD AGREEMENT BETWIXT THE WOMBE AND FRUTE’: THE POLITICS... 101
years old. The kinship network that developed as a result of the marriages
of Anne’s sisters meant that Anne’s connections stretched across the fabric
of Elizabethan society, and linked her to humanist, political, and noble
circles of power (Mildred married William Cecil later Lord Burghley,
Elizabeth married Thomas Hoby and after his death John Russell second
Earl of Bedford, Katherine married Henry Killigrew, and Margaret mar-
ried Ralph Rowlett).
The letters between Anne and Anthony survive only for a concentrated
period of their relationship, beginning from the point of Anthony’s return
to England from France in 1592 and ending abruptly in 1596. They cover
a tense phase in their relations, as after his father’s death in 1579 Anthony
travelled abroad working as a spy, eventually settling in France. During
Anthony’s absence abroad his mother took on heavy responsibilities for
managing his estates back in England, but once he returned he was able to
reassume control of his affairs. The letters demonstrate the practicalities of
negotiating an adult mother and son relationship, a dynamic that is under-
studied in this period. Indeed much of the work on early modern mother
and son relationships focuses on the early years, and draws heavily on the
genre of mother’s advice books, which outline the priorities and objec-
tives of mothering from the perspective of the mother.5 These texts offer
a model mother–child relationship, in which maternity becomes the basis
of authority from which women could counsel and guide their children
through classical and biblical quotations, references to their own experi-
ence and to their physical connection with their children, as well as with
frequent references to their imminent demise.
Although these maternal objectives and rhetorical strategies are rep-
licated to some extent in mother–son correspondence found in private
papers, as prescriptive texts they lack what Raymond Anselment describes
as the ‘spontanaeity’ and the ‘new dimension of intimacy and affection’
that can be found in family letters, such as those between Brilliana Harley
and Katherine Paston and their sons.6 The advice books also fail to address
the readjustment of roles when the child reached maturity, and this is
also where family letters offer more evidence. The potential that letters
offer for understanding the mother–son relationship has been explored
in a number of studies. Graham Williams analyses the significance of Joan
Thynne’s decision to use scribes to write her letters to her son Thomas,
and persuasively argues that Joan’s later choice to write in her own hand
signals the healing of a family rift between mother and son.7 Most perti-
nent for this essay is Gemma Allen’s work on Anne Bacon, in which she
102 K. MAIR
argues that although Anne (and her sisters) reflected the ‘prescriptive lit-
erature in highlighting that their counsel derived from the responsibilities
of motherhood’, they give further credence to their advice by emphasising
the extent of their humanist learning through her use of classical language,
quotations and allusions.8
Each of these readings prioritises the close reading of the correspon-
dence between a mother and son in order to understand their relationship;
they also demonstrate a concern with the material nature of the epistolary
sources, a development that draws heavily on James Daybell’s pioneering
work in the field of women’s letters. Letters have proved vital for trac-
ing the political activities of women as they show the intersection of the
domestic and the political, especially the way in which ‘upperclass women
were inevitably drawn into a world of high politics through performing
conventional tasks’.9 For Anne ‘family remained the basic political unit’,
and provided an acceptable arena within which she could flex her power,
as well as a justification for her actions in the public sphere.10 The elision of
the domestic and political spheres is important for this reading of Anne’s
letters, but there is perhaps a further argument to be made, drawing on
Andy Wood’s suggestion that ‘politics is understood where power is reas-
serted, extended or challenged. Politics is therefore the product of delib-
erate, human agency and is pre-eminently about conflict and change’.11
Mothering was not a static role, nor one that was confined to the nuclear
family, and the letters of Anne Bacon show how it was shaped and re-
shaped by mother, sons, wider kin and friends at different moments in the
life-cycle, for different purposes.12
‘Good Agreement Betwixt the Wombe and Frute’13

The merging of maternal and political objectives that can be found in
Anne’s letters is unsurprising given her social connections and educa-
tion. Barbara J. Harris interprets motherhood in Yorkist and early Tudor
England as one of many commitments that lay within the remit of the voca-
tion that was aristocratic wifehood, with affection for the child expressed
in a practical manner by securing the future for the child both financially
and professionally.14 Whilst this model is relevant to Anne, newer trends
in family dynamics drawn from Christian humanism, whereby the mother
was encouraged to develop the son’s participation in civil life, and the
burgeoning Protestant culture of mothering, which extended the author-
ity of the mother over the spiritual life of the child and demanded that the
children actively protected and advanced the new religion, seem particu-
larly relevant for understanding the dynamic between her and her sons.
For the proponents of reformed religion, the raising of faithful subjects
committed to the service of God was imperative, as they needed to ensure
the survival of the new church. Margot Todd suggests that ‘the exalted
ideal of the family which most Puritans held rather expanded this goal [of
procreation] into the production of good commonwealth men and citi-
zens of the kingdom of God’.15 The humanist mother’s duty was therefore
to produce and raise a son who would become ‘an eloquent and cultivated
individual equipped with the urbanity and civility necessary for full social
participation in the higher echelons of civic life’, whilst at the same time
the Reformation demanded that Protestant mothers also ensured that
their children became active champions of the new religion.
Anne’s role as a stepmother to six children (from Nicholas’s first mar-
riage to Jane Ferneley) is also indicative of the vocational nature of moth-
erhood. Anne’s responsibilities probably involved directing the early
education of her stepchildren, and the decision of Nathaniel Bacon to
place his wife, Anne Gresham, with his stepmother for an extended period
of training suggests that her reputation as an educator was respected. His
stepmother’s guidance in this area was sought despite Nathaniel’s ambiv-
alent relationship with her, as ‘in this respect I have ever liked of her,
though in other thinges, as cause moveth me, it maie be I have great
mislikinge of her’.16 The discord hinted at is no surprise given the prob-
lematic nature of step-parenting—domestic advice books often referred to
the fractious nature of the relationship, as it was commonly understood
that interests of the biological children superseded the interests of the
stepchildren.17 The figure of the stepmother had undeniably negative con-
notations in early modern England, and as Jacqueline Vanhoutte argues:
‘[t]o Elizabethans, stepmothers clearly represented an aggravated insis-
tence of the “subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice”’.18 With
the birth of Anthony in 1558, and Francis in 1561, the newly formed
Bacon family became one of the ‘reconstituted’ and ‘blended’ families
created as a result of widowhood and remarriage in the period.19 It is
therefore perhaps unsurprising that after the death of Nicholas Bacon the
relationships between the two halves of the family unravelled. The broth-
ers argued over where the money for their father’s debts should come
from, and over certain lands and leases that had not been explicitly dis-
cussed in the will.20 The elder brothers questioned the neutrality of Lord
Burghley’s position as executor, and Nathaniel accused Anne of manipu-
lating Burghley to arbitrate in her favour, and protested to him that ‘by my
Ladys meanes your Lordship was styrred greatlie againste me’.21 Furious
104 K. MAIR
at these allegations and what he reads as their obstructive behaviour, and

offended by their lack of epistolary etiquette in not replying jointly to his
letters (the manner in which he had written to them), Burghley remained
adamant that the matter could be resolved without resorting to court
proceedings. He urged Nicholas and Nathaniel to treat Anne with respect,
as a stepmother who had ‘yelded so much unto you for your benefitt as
suerly no naturall mother could have yeilded more to hir own childeren’.22
To counter the evil stepmother trope, Burghley depicted Anne as a fair
mother to both parts of her late husband’s family. His assessment opposes
the concept of biological mothering with surrogate mothering, and argues
for the validity of the latter in family relations and kinship circles. Anne
also attempted to resolve the disagreement, and pleaded with Nicholas
that they continue their previous good relations:
I pray ^yow^, goode Syr Nicolas Bacon, let it do no hurt betwyxt us where
there hath ben so long a continuance of more common amytee. Yow being
the sonne, and I the wyff, and now the weedoe of the same ^good^ father
and husbande.23
Anne eloquently attempts to secure their ‘amytee’ through their shared

relationship to the deceased Nicholas Bacon, and tellingly does not claim
an explicitly maternal role towards her stepson. In spite of the kindnesses
she had shown to her stepfamily, we can assume that after Nicholas’s death
Anne did everything in her power to secure a beneficial outcome for her
own two sons. Anthony’s residence at Redbourn (one of the properties
over which the two sides of the families had argued) in the 1590s suggested
that the newer family was successful in defending their claims against the
older part of the family. Few letters between the two halves of the family
survive from after the dispute over the will, hinting that it permanently
damaged their relationship.24 Anne’s navigation of the tricky family politics
of the wider Bacon family can ultimately be seen as successful, and her
negotiation of the transition to new family structure a testament to her
political power.
Anne’s role as a mother changed substantially upon the death of her
husband. Anne had been left a generous settlement, and was charged with
‘the well brynginge upp of my twoo sonnes Anthonye and Fraunces that
are nowe lefte poore orphans without a father’.25 There are no extant let-
ters between mother and sons during the lifetime of her husband, but the
letters that do survive from the period when she is a widowed mother give
some sense of the enhanced responsibility Anne felt towards her sons, and
the increasing power she wielded to influence their lives. The authority of
the mother over the spiritual life of her children was culturally accepted,
and Anne’s letters are steeped in religious guidance. Anne’s publications
and letters allow us to trace a nuanced confessional identity that is shaped
by the political currents around her—her translation of Ochino’s sermons
position her as an evangelical, yet through her service to Queen Mary she
managed to protect her husband and brother-in-law William Cecil from
persecution for their roles in Edward VI’s government.26 Her translation
of Jewel’s Apologie allowed her to defend the Elizabethan settlement,
yet her dedicatory verse formed part of a manuscript of Bartholo Sylva’a
Giardino cosmografico, compiled to rehabilitate the reputation of Puritan
preacher Edward Dering.27 Anne’s letters suggest that she underwent a
conversion experience in the 1570s, and from this point on her sharp
criticisms of the church allow us to define her as a Puritan. The nature
of Anne’s support for her brand of Protestantism altered as the politico-
religious climate became more censorious towards Nonconformists, and
her letters illustrate more covert and personal attempts to help the cause
as she offered patronage and financial assistance to Nonconformist preach-
ers. By the time Anthony returned from France her letters demonstrate
a passionate commitment to the Puritan cause, which she attempted to
press on her sons. Anthony was welcomed home with a letter that framed
her priorities in no uncertain terms, with primary concern for the state of
his soul:
This one cheffest cownsell your christian and naturall mother doth geve
yow, even before the Lorde, that above all wordely respects yow carie your-
self even at your first coming as one that doth unfeinedly profess the tru
religion of Christ and hath the love of the truth now by long continuance
fast settled in your hart.28
In her postscript Anne urged Anthony to ‘use prayour twyse in a day’, in

contrast to his brother who is ‘to negligent herin’, setting her two sons
against each other.
In the context of the Puritan struggle for the further reformation of
the Elizabethan church in the 1590s, Anne’s role as a Christian humanist
mother was intrinsically politicised. Anthony’s return engendered expec-
tations that his experience abroad would be developed in some sort of
professional capacity, and she prayed that ‘god make yow able for his ser-
vice and your cowntry and be carefull every way for it’.29 She assumes
106 K. MAIR
that his time in France has not been for the benefit of his country, and
was particularly frustrated by his failure to present himself to the Queen,
pointedly conveying rumours to him that ‘her Majesti marvelled yow came
not to see her being now so longe a tyme’.30 By this point, Anthony had
been home for over three years. But undercutting her ostensible desire
to see Anthony secure a position at court is a strong sense that he is ill-
equipped to do so. Her firm belief that Anthony lacked the experience and
knowledge to be able to negotiate court politics led her to offer advice on
his conduct:
yow are sayde to be wyse, and to my comfort I willingly thynk so, but surely,
sonne, on thother syde for want of home experience by action and yowr
teadious unacqwaintance For yowr ^own^ cowntry by ^continuall^ cham-
ber and bedkeeping, yow must nedes myss of considerate judgment in yowr
verball onely travayling.31
Anne reiterates the damage his absence has done to his political capabili-
ties and highlights how his physical disabilities have affected his prospects.
She believes herself to be in a position to offer political advice because of
her past experience:
I think For my long attending in coorte and a cheeff cownsellours wyffe

few preclarae Feminae meae sortis [distinguished women of my sort] are
able or be alyve to speak and judg of such proceadings and worldly doings
of ^men^. But’.32
The ‘But’ is signals that she knows her sons may not listen, despite her
extensive acquaintance with such matters. Anne frequently justifies her
role as political advisor, but is under no illusions that her advice will be
accepted or acted upon, as she complains to Anthony ‘my cownsell in this
is mos[t needful] and allweyes hath ben both at your being abrode and at
home, but too li[ttle] regarded, the Lorde knoweth’.33
The political vulnerability caused by her sons’ fatherlessness is all
too apparent to Anne, and during Anthony’s time abroad she writes to
Théodore de Bèze of her concerns: ‘[I]n my judgement they particularly
miss and need the guidance of a father’s authority and the solicitous con-
cern of a loving parent’.34 Their lack of a father to guide (and control)
them becomes even more acute as Francis’s failure to gain office drags
on. Anne’s kinship connections allowed her to intervene in the affairs of
her sons at a high level, and in an interview with her nephew Robert
Cecil Anne attempts to unravel why Francis was continually passed over
for preferment. She complains to Cecil that her son ‘is but strangely used
by mans dealing, God knowes who and why’, and that considering his tal-
ents and achievements he would be well-suited to the position of solicitor-
general.35 She complains that her sons ‘feel the smarting want of a father
now in their ripe age’, demonstrating that the influence and power of
parenting extended beyond the early childhood years. Although Cecil
asserted his support for Francis, Anne’s description of his tone in a sepa-
rate letter implies her suspicions as to his sincerity: ‘[T]ruly his spech was
all kindely owtward and dyd desyre to have me think so of him’.36 Anne
keenly perceives the negative effects of Francis’s persistent attempts to gain
office, and advises her sons to dismiss such ambitions, complaining that
‘yow and your brother specially yow be still occupied and entangled with
state and wordely matters above your calling’ and that she ‘had rather yee
both with God his blessed favour had veri goode health and well owt of
dett, then eny office’.37 Their failure to secure the patronage of the Cecils
drove Anthony and Francis to seek the support of the Robert Devereux,
the Earl of Essex. Both Anthony and Anne framed this patronage in terms
of parental relations; Anthony describes how ‘the earle declareth himself
more like a father then a frende unto him’, and Anne pleads that they
‘use his favour in goode and pertinent matters for your selffs and your
own farthering’.38 However Anne ultimately grew to dislike their alliance,
and after Anthony had taken possession of rooms within Essex house on
the Strand in 1595 she warned him ‘yow have hetherto ben estemed as a
worthy frende, now shalbe accounted his folower’.39 Her political acumen
is undeniable, and although Anthony was not formally implicated in the
infamous 1601 rebellion his fortunes faded dramatically after Essex’s fall.
‘The Checks and Admonitions of a Mother’
Anne’s position as a woman with political influence gave her counsel an

extra potency, which seems at times to have threatened the stability of her
relationship with her sons. The scope of her maternal power was increased
yet further by Anthony’s absence from England, as this gave her even
more leverage over his financial and professional affairs. Anne was willing
and able to promote her son’s interests at court when she supported them,
but when Anthony’s actions were at odds with her religious and political
views she attempted to block him by any means necessary. The conflict
created by such opposing views necessitated the intervention of a wider
108 K. MAIR
circle of acquaintances, as they attempted to negotiate the fraught world

of adult mother–son relationships. Barbara J. Harris notes that the death
of the patriarch was extremely difficult to negotiate, a fact evidenced by
the ‘frequency of feuds between widowed mothers and their eldest sons’,
and whilst relations between Anne and Anthony did not deteriorate to
such an extreme extent, their correspondence shows how difficult their
relationship became after the death of Nicholas.40
Anthony had left England shortly after the death of his father in 1579,
and became an agent for Francis Walsingham’s intelligence network.41
Anne supported his wishes, and provided practical assistance in securing
him an extension of his licence to pass beyond the seas in 1581 by instruct-
ing Anthony’s messenger, Nicholas Faunt, to arrange for Walsingham to
prepare a new licence, and further advising that it would be best to have
the Queen sign it before she left London, as ‘shee feared in the progresse
tymes her Majestie wold not be drawen so easily to signe such thinges’.42
Anne herself agreed to take responsibility for negotiating with Burghley.
But her son’s deepening financial troubles in spring of 1585 led Anne to
alter her opinion, and she petitioned the Queen to recall Anthony.43
The severity of Anthony’s communication and financial problems drove
him to desperate measures, and in return for the conveyance of his recus-
ant servant Lawson, and a loan of a thousand crowns from the Bishop of
Cahors, Anthony was compelled to provide a letter of recommendation for
two imprisoned Welsh Jesuits.44 For Anthony toleration of Catholics was
part and parcel of his intelligence gathering work, allowing him to monitor
English recusants and Spanish affairs. Both Francis and Anthony Bacon pro-
pounded what Alexandra Gajda has described as ‘a politique ideal of tolera-
tion and political stability’, but this was a step too far for their mother.45 As
soon as Lawson reached London he was imprisoned on Burghley’s orders,
and in Anthony’s later relation of these incidents he accused his uncle of
having given way ‘to my mothers passionate importunitie grounded upon
false suggestions and surmises’.46 Anne’s maternal authority is used to very
practical effect in this instance, and her objections to the company her son
kept go far beyond the verbal protest that we see in her later letters, instead
taking the form of practical action. Burghley’s acquiescence to her demands
illustrates his recognition of her maternal rights, and shows how, in this
instance, her kinship connections bolstered her power.
Anne proved immune to all the methods that Anthony used to try
persuade her to drop her vendetta against Lawson. Anthony dispatched
one of his associates, Captain Francis Allen, to mediate with her, and the
e motional—and financial—exhaustion that Anthony has caused his mother

is clear from her confession to Allen that ‘the grife of mind, receaued dayly
by reason of your stay wilbe her end also saith her iewlls be spent for
you, and that she borrowed the last mony of 7 parsons’. Allen had ‘neuer
sien nor neuer shall see a wislady an honorable woman, a mother more
perplexed for her sons absence, than I hau sien that honourable dame
for yours’. Allen shows a respect for her opinions and seems to recog-
nise the validity of her position. Even in the climax of her railings against
Anthony, when she wishes that Anthony ‘had bin fairly buried’ as long
as he had died a faithful Protestant, Allen recognises that these are senti-
ments expressed in anger, and notes that ‘she spoke it in her passion, and
repentid immediatly her words’.47
Anthony also arranged for an interview between Anne and theologian
Thomas Cartwright, in the hope of improving their relations. Cartwright’s
account of the meeting showed that the conflict between Anne and
Anthony occasioned a redefinition of their relationship, and he outlines a
new understanding of the obligations of both mother and son. His media-
tion attempted to re-establish the reciprocal nature of the relationship,
and he writes to Anthony that:
as there is a duetie of yours towarde her Ladyship in indifferent things rather

to liue to her liking then unto your own: so is there dutie of her Ladyship
towarde yow in the same things by so much themore sparinglie to use her
autoritie as boeth by age and by instinction.48
Cartwright suggests that whilst Anthony’s duty is to submit to her wishes

in the case of unimportant matters, so Anne should not wield her author-
ity too heavily. He recognises that her power over Anthony emanates from
the respect due to her because of her age, as well as from the natural power
granted to her by motherhood. Cartwright, however, is no more success-
ful than Allen, as Anne repeats that she will ‘never condescend’ to allow
the release of Lawson.
A further test of her affections occurs when Anthony became involved
with helping Anthony Standen, an imprisoned English Catholic and
double agent. Rumours floated back to Anne that her son was actively
aiding the recusant cause, and it was this that drove her to make her most
extreme rejection of her son. In a letter to another servant of Anthony’s,
she is reported by Standen to have ‘forbidden all kynde of speeches of him
110 K. MAIR
in her presence giving him oute for illegitimate and not to be borne of her
bodye’, and advised that:
the checks and admonitions of a mother are to be deliuered motherly in

more couert and close maner, to babes and children proportionable to their
tyme, to men of years experience and counsel as he is in a more mylde and
wary maner.49
Standen drew a distinction between the control a mother is permitted over

her son before and after he reaches majority, and implies that the public
voicing of ‘admonitions’ was inappropriate. He views her anger as incom-
patible with her role as a mother, in contrast to Allen and Cartwright who
seem to accept that Anthony’s behaviour is reasonable grounds for her
fury.
Indeed the predominant tone in Anne’s letters to Anthony is one of
anger, hurt and exasperation, in stark contrast to the kindness and concern
found in the letters of other mothers from the period, or to the emotional
distance expressed in the letters of Yorkist and Tudor aristocratic mothers.
Although Anne rarely used affectionate terms of endearment, her letters
are not empty of emotion, however. Instead her evident anger might be
seen to reflect her emotional involvement, rather than indifference to her
sons. At the same time, the expression of anger was also viewed as a sign
of weakness, as Standen writes:
You haue done exceedynglye well to be playne and specially with a woman
which is a vessel so frayle and variable as euery wynde wavereth as you knowe.
Although I well knowe my Ladye your mother to be one of the sufficientest
without comparison of that sex, yet att the ende of the cariere [career] il y a
toujours de la femme, with the perfyttest [perfectest] of them all’.50
Anne’s anger in this instance is viewed as a ‘challenge to patriarchal author-

ity’, and as such is defused by aligning it with gendered traits signalling
intellectual inferiority.51
‘Have Yow No Hope for Posterite?’

As well as her concerns regarding Anthony’s religious continence Anne
was also unnerved by the unstable financial position of her sons. Despite
Anthony’s income from leases and rent, both Anthony and Francis over-
spent significantly and were forced to live on credit. Although it was

considered a ‘last resort’ to sell-off a family’s patrimony (as it depleted
the family’s status) the Bacon brothers had no qualms about using such
tactics, and on Anthony’s return to England they whittled away at the
family estates that their father had acquired.52 Anne saw this as a direct
rejection of familial care, and lamented ‘[h]ave yow no hope of posterite?
Only my chyldern cownted in the worlde unworthy their father’s care and
provyding for them’.53
In searching for ways to repay his debts, Francis wished to sell Marks,
an Essex manor he held jointly with Anne. Acquiring the complete transfer
of the ownership of the estate from his mother to himself was no easy mat-
ter, and required delicate arbitration by Anthony, who skilfully exploited
Anne’s maternal anxieties to achieve their aims. In this sequence of letters
we see the sons pitted against the mother in a generational battle of wills.
Both sides play with the attendant meanings of mothering as they argue
their case, casting a rhetoric of unquestioning and generous maternal care
against accusations of self-serving behaviour and overreaching power. The
letters demonstrate the divergence of the Bacon family interests, and illu-
minate the politicking undertaken by both sides as they fought for their
position.
Anthony’s initial letter of persuasion begins by reminding her of a
promise she has made in regard to Marks:
I assure my self that your Ladyship as a wise and kinde mother to us both
wyll neyther finde it strange nor amise, yf tenderinge first my brother’s helth,
which I know by myne owne experience to depend not a litle upon a free
mynde and then his credit, I presume to put your Ladyship in remembrance
of your motherlie offer to him …54
Anthony implies that her actions as a mother will have a direct impact
on Francis’s health, thereby mobilising her maternal concerns for his
own interests. By describing the transference of property as a ‘mother-
lie offer’, he suggests that material means are perceived to be an expres-
sion of maternal care, whilst also implying that such a gesture would be a
voluntary action. Anthony suggests that he has initiated the request on the
grounds of his ‘brotherlie care and affection’, and emphasises the Bacon
family’s ambitions for Francis’s advancement as he attempts to persuade
Anne to release Marks.
112 K. MAIR
Anne’s response to this request is a superb illustration of the contradic-

tory impulses of her maternal feeling as, on the one hand, she is swayed
by their appeals to her natural instinct to help them and, on the other, she
is protective of the financial interests of the family, and seeks to maintain
her authority. The physical structure of the letter reflects this confusion, as
in a departure from Anne’s usual practice it is written on separate leaves.
The first part rails against her sons’ ingratitude and lack of responsibility,
whilst in the second leaf—seemingly appended later—she unexpectedly
submits to the request. The letter opens with a direct response to the
fraternal bond that Anthony had evoked in his letter: ‘For your brotherly
care of your brother Francis’s state yow are to ^be^ well lyked and so I do
as a christian mother that loveth yow both as the chyldern of god’, thereby
establishing from the outset that any criticism of them has to be set against
the baseline of her maternal affection.55 This serves as a foil against the
next section of the letter, in which she protests that the ‘state of yow both
doth much disqwiett me’, and threatens not to make them the executors
of her will. She then proceeds to blame Francis’s men for his actions,
and makes explicit reference to her disappointment in him: ‘[H]e was a
towardes yowng gentleman and a sonne of much goode hope in godli-
ness. but truth he hath norished most synfull prowde villans wylfully’.
The unconventional manoeuvre of adding another note on a separate leaf
suggests that the anger of her initial response has cooled. In a dramatic
volte-face she agrees to sign over the interest to Marks so that Francis can
pay off his debts upon the condition that he ‘reqwyre it him ^selff^’ and
that he ‘make and geve me a true note of all his detts’. She emphasised her
role in the resolution of the situation, as ‘it shalbe performed by me to his
qwiett discharge withowt combring him and so his credit’. Anne clearly
sees this decision to help him financially as a method by which she can
exert control over him and strike a blow at the associates she disapproves
of; she continues: ‘For I wyll not have his cormorant seducers and instru-
ments of Satan to him committing fowle synns by his cowntenance to the
displeasing of god’.
As we have seen, Anne’s promise of financial aid carries obligations, and
she appears to have overestimated the extent to which her sons were will-
ing to accept her involvement, as Francis seemed to have strongly objected
to her terms. Although his letter of reply does not survive we can glean
some of the content from Anne’s next letter to Anthony. Anne enclosed
the letter from Francis, asking Anthony to ‘constru the enterpretation. I
do not understand his enigmaticall fowlded writing’.56 Her letter indicates
that Francis had accused her of treating him as ward, and she denies this
charge, writing that the ‘scope of my so called by him circumstances, which
I am sure he must understand, was not to use him as a warde; a remote
phrase to my playn motherly meaning’. The practice of wardship could
be highly beneficial to the wardship-holder, and often detrimental to the
ward. Francis therefore places this business-like perception of guardian-
ship in direct opposition to the affective mode of parenting as maternal
care, implying that Anne’s behaviour is unmotherly and self-serving. That
she places her ‘playn purpose’ in opposition to his ‘enigmaticall fowlded
writing’ suggests a battle of rhetorical styles as well as wills, and her asser-
tion that she wants the money only to ‘discharge his detts’ indicates that
she believes that she has been accused of wanting overstep the bounds of
her role as a mother. She continues ‘I am sure no preacher nor lawyer nor
frende wolde have mislyked this’, and by casting herself in the role of this
alternative type of counsellor she attempts to move away from the confines
of maternal advice in order to give a different validity to her words. Her
conditional submission to their demands is justified by the greater family
imperative to promote Francis and, rather poignantly, she notes that ‘he
was his Fathers first chis [choice] and God wyll supply yf he trust in him
and call up upon in truth of hart, which God grant to mother and sonnes’.
To break up the family estates goes against her vocation as a mother; it is
for this reason that she argues against them. However, Anthony cleverly
deflects her frequent assertions of maternal care back at her, resulting in a
guilt-inducing bind that ultimately forces her to submit to their demands.
Conclusion
The letters of Lady Anne Bacon demonstrate the complexity of negotiat-
ing the world of courtly and family politics as a mother. Anne’s role can
be seen as explicitly political through her promotion of her sons’ material
and professional interests and her successful management of the transition
from stepmother, to mother and finally to widow. Mothering was not a
politically neutral role however, and the frequent clashes with her sons
over their best interests and the interventions of friends and family give
some indication of the true threat her power posed.
114 K. MAIR
Notes
1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution,
rev. edn (London: Virago, 1986), p. 46.
2. For a more detailed background to Anne’s education see Gemma Allen,
The Cooke Sisters: education, piety and politics in early modern England
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). For her biography see
The Letters of Lady Anne Bacon, ed. by Gemma Allen, Camden fifth series,
vol. 44 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical
Society, 2014).
3. John Jewel, An apologie or answere in defence of the Churche of Englande,
trans. by A[nne] B[acon] (London, 1564). Bernardino Ochino, Sermons of
Barnardine Ochine of Sena, trans. anon (London, 1548); Bernardino
Ochino, Fourtene Sermons of Barnardine Ochyne, trans. anon (London,
1551); Bernardino Ochino, Sermons of Barnardine Ochyne, trans. A[nne]
C[ooke] (London, 1570).
4. Théodore de Bèze, Chrestienes meditations sur huict pseaumes (Geneva,
1581).
5. For example Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscelenea. Meditations. Memoratiues.
(London, 1604); Dorothy Leigh, The mothers blessing (London, 1616);
See also Mother’s Advice Books, ed. by Betty S. Travitsky, (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2001).
6. Raymond Anselment, ‘Katherine Paston and Brilliana Harley: Maternal
Letters and the Genre of Mother’s Advice’, Studies in Philology, 101
(2004), pp. 431–453 (p. 433).
7. Graham Williams,‘“yr Scribe Can proove no nessecarye Consiquence for
you”?: The Social and Linguistic Implications of Joan Thynne’s Using a
Scribe in Letters to Her Son, 1607–1611’, in Women and Writing, c.1340–
c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture, ed. by. Phillipa Hardman and
Anne Lawrence-Mathers (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2010),
pp. 131–145.
8. Allen, Cooke Sisters, p. 99, and Letters of Anne Bacon, pp. 11–17.
9. James Daybell,‘Women, Politics and Domesticity: The Scribal Publication
of Lady Rich’s Letter to Elizabeth I’, in Women and Writing, ed. by
Lawrence-Mathers and Hardman, pp. 111–130 (p. 111).
10. Allen, Cooke Sisters, p. 158.
11. Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular politics in Early Modern England,
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 16.
12. Naomi Tadmor ‘Early Modern English kinship in the long run: reflections
on continuity and change’, Continuity and Change, 25 (2010), pp. 15–48
(p. 31).
13. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, Letters of Lady Anne Bacon, 77, pp. 157.
14. Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women 1450–1550: Marriage, Family,

Property and Careers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 100.
15. Margot Todd, ‘Humanists, Puritans and the Spiritualized Household’,
Church History, 49 (1980), pp. 18–34, (p. 22).
16. Nathaniel Bacon to Lady Anne Gresham, undated, The Papers of Nathaniel
Bacon of Stiffkey, ed. Alfred Hassell Smith and others, 5 vols, (Norwich:
Norfolk Record Society, 1979–2000), I (1979), p. 12.
17. Jacqueline Vanhoutte, ‘Elizabeth I as Stepmother’, ELR, 39 (2009),

pp. 315–335 (p. 323).
18. Vanhoutte, p. 328.
19. Tadmor, p. 30.
20. The fall-out between the brothers caused by the will is outlined in Lisa
Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis
Bacon (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998), pp. 67–69.
21. Nathaniel Bacon to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, 13 July 1579, Stiffkey,
II (1983), pp. 101–102.
22. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, to Sir Nicholas Bacon, 2 July 1579, Stiffkey,
II (1983), pp. 93–94.
23. Anne Bacon to Nicholas Bacon II, [May-July 1579], Letters of Anne Bacon,
15, pp. 79–80.
24. Hostage to Fortune, p. 69.
25. Will of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Stiffkey, II (1983), pp. 25–29.
26. Letters of Anne Bacon, p. 8.
27. Louise Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 41.
28. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 3 February 1592, Letters of Anne Bacon,
22, pp. 99–100.
29. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 31 January 1594, Letters of Anne Bacon,
22, pp. 160–161.
30. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 9 October 1595, Letters of Anne Bacon,
144, pp. 233–234.
31. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 10 July 1596, Letters of Anne Bacon, 158,
pp. 248–249.
32. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 12 May 1595, Letters of Anne Bacon, 131,
pp. 216–217.
33. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 3 December 1594, Letters of Anne Bacon,
114, pp. 195–197.
34. Anne Bacon to Théodore de Bèze, 24 July 1581, Letters of Anne Bacon,
16, pp. 80–82.
116, pp. 198–199.
116, pp. 198–199.
116 K. MAIR
37. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 2 August 1595, Letters of Anne Bacon,
139, pp. 226–227; Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 5 August 1595, Letters
of Anne Bacon, 140, pp. 228–229.
38. Anthony Bacon to Anne Bacon, 21 September 1593, Letters of Anne

Bacon, 69, pp. 148–149. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 2 August 1595,
Letters of Anne Bacon, 139, pp. 226–227.
39. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 20 August 1595, Letters of Anne Bacon,
142, pp. 230–231.
40. Barbara J. Harris, ‘Property, Power and Personal Relations: Elite Mothers
and Sons in Yorkist and Early Tudor England’, Signs, 15 (1990),
pp. 606–636 (p. 630).
41. Joyce Treskunof Freedman, ‘Anthony Bacon and his World, 1558–1601’
(unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Chicago, 1979), pp. 34–35.
42. Nicholas Faunt to Anthony Bacon, 15 April 1581, Lambeth Palace Library,
MS 647, fols 125r-126v (art. 59).
43. Freedman, p. 43.
44. Hostage to Fortune, pp. 111–112.
45. Alexandra Gajda, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 125.
46. Anthony Bacon to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, 12 September 1596,
LPL MS 659, fols 24v-25r (art. 21).
47. Francis Allen to Anthony Bacon, 17 August 1589, LPL MS 647 fol. 245r
(art. 121).
48. Thomas Cartwright to Anthony Bacon, 23 March 1591, LPL MS 653 fols
199r-120v (art. 108).
49. Anthony Standen to Edward Selwin, 5 September 1591, LPL MS 647 fols
86r-87v (art. 51); Hostage to Fortune, p. 127.
50. Anthony Standen to Anthony Bacon, 1 September 1591, LPL MS 648 fol.
94r (art. 58).
51. Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early
Modern England (Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
2000), p. 4.
52. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and
Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998),
p. 119.
53. Anthony Bacon to Anne Bacon, 25 January 1597, Letters of Anne Bacon,
188, pp. 278–280.
54. Anthony Bacon to Anne Bacon, 16 April 1593, Letters of Anne Bacon, 42,
p. 121.
55. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 17 April 1593, Letters of Anne Bacon, 44,
p. 123.
56. Anne Bacon to Anthony Bacon, [18 April 1593], Letters of Anne Bacon,
45, p. 125.
CHAPTER 7
Allegiance and Alliance: Maternal

Genealogies in the Works of Mary Wroth
Naomi J. Miller
Coming of age in the late years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and develop-
ing her voice as a writer in the court of Queen Anna of Denmark and King
James VI and I, Lady Mary Wroth stands out as an early modern woman
and author who learned to navigate the cross-currents of court politics
through the familial framework of her identity as a Sidney. In her poems,
play and prose romance, Mary Wroth represents intersecting networks of
intergenerational bonds that at once reproduce and transmute familial
prototypes, both within and beyond the political boundaries of the court.
Recent critical re-evaluations of the assumed patriarchalism of the tradi-
tional family-state analogy open new space for assessing the stratagems of
early modern women authors in particular, whose works frequently offer
non-traditional constructions of the social and political authority of early
modern women within as well as without the domesticised arena of the
household.1 Considering manifestations of political boundaries in the early
modern world as well as in the example of Mary Wroth in particular, my
discussion defines ‘family politics’ as the negotiation of individual identity
in relation to the family group within the larger political framework of
N.J. Miller (*)

Department of English Language and Literature, Smith College,
Northampton, MA, USA
e-mail: njmiller@smith.edu

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_7
118 N.J. MILLER
the society. My chapter juxtaposes the facts of Mary Wroth’s family iden-
tity—daughter, niece and godchild to socially powerful members of the
Sidney family, and lover of her cousin William Herbert, one of the most
influential political ‘players’ in King James’s court—with familial narra-
tives running through her works, from her sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus, and her play, Love’s Victory, to her prose romance, Urania,
in order to consider how Wroth negotiated the boundaries at once distin-
guishing and linking family and politics in early modern England.2
Familial Bonds
Mary Wroth was born Mary Sidney in 1587, the first child of Robert Sidney
(later Viscount de L’Isle and Earl of Leicester), and his wife, Barbara Gamage.
Niece to both Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke,
Wroth spent her childhood at Penshurst Place, the Sidney family estate, and
came to court in the late years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Following her
marriage to Robert Wroth in 1605, Mary Sidney Wroth maintained an active
presence in court circles. She gave birth to a son, James, one month before her
husband’s death in 1614. When her son died two years later, the Wroth fam-
ily estates reverted to her husband’s uncle and brother, leaving Mary Wroth
to shoulder the burden of her husband’s considerable debts, accumulated by
Robert Wroth in service to the monarch as the King’s Forester. Subsequently,
she engaged in an affair with her cousin, William Herbert, third Earl of
Pembroke, bearing illegitimate twins, William and Catherine, and maintained
ties with her circle of friends and family despite her reduced visibility at court.3
The first portion of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania was likely
composed during these years, and was published in 1621 with her lyric
sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Her pastoral play, Love’s Victory,
and the second portion of Urania were probably written in the early
1620s. Wroth’s considerable cultural production as a writer engaging with
the social and political mores of the Jacobean court across a multitude of
literary genres was clearly shaped by her position within the talented net-
work of writers that comprised the Sidney and Herbert families.
While the literary influence of Sir Philip Sidney, Wroth’s literary forefather,
has been much discussed by critics, in fact the first signal of family ties appear-
ing on the title page of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania is the declara-
tion of her identity as ‘daughter to the right noble Robert Earl of Leicester’,
followed by her identity as the niece to Philip Sidney and to Mary Sidney
Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke. In many ways this reference to her
father, who was serving as the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain at the time of pub-
ALLEGIANCE AND ALLIANCE: MATERNAL GENEALOGIES IN THE WORKS... 119
lication, might have established Wroth’s courtly credentials more significantly

than the succeeding references to her uncle and her aunt, both deceased by
the time her work was published. Moreover, any understanding of the role of
family politics in Wroth’s works must be considered in relation to the shaping
influences of both her father and her mother, Barbara Gamage Sidney.
The letters that Robert Sidney received from his steward, Rowland Whyte,
during his frequent absences abroad throughout Mary’s childhood, and the
letters he wrote to his wife, Barbara, throughout their married life together,
document in explicit terms his relation to his firstborn daughter, while implic-
itly conveying the existence of a distinctly separate mother–daughter bond.
For instance, when Robert encourages his wife to consider visiting him abroad
without the older children, he observes that ‘they are not so young now, but
that they may well be from their mother’—released, in other words, from
the bonds of maternal authority, viewed as potentially excessive in the eyes of
the father. Along these lines, Robert adds: ‘I do not fear anything so much as
your too much fondness.’4 At that time, the term ‘fondness’ conveyed both
‘folly’ and ‘foolish affection.’5 Revealing the ongoing stratagems of family
politics, Robert acknowledges his wife’s maternal care on the one hand, while
questioning from a patriarchal perspective, on the other hand, the impact of
excessive maternal affection on the political self-fashioning of his sons.
Indeed, Robert’s concerns in letters to his wife rest much more directly with
the upbringing of his oldest son than with his firstborn daughter. Reminding
Barbara of the distinction between paternal and maternal spheres of author-
ity, Robert tells her that he will not meddle in the care of the girls, but that
he must have his way when it comes to the care of the boys. Robert writes:
For the girls, I cannot mislike the care you take of them: but for the boys,
you must resolve to let me have my will. For I know better what belongs to
a man than you do. Indeed I will have him lie from his maid, for it is time,
and now no more to be in the nursery among women.6
Robert’s assertion of his ‘will’ can refer at once to his fatherly authority
and to his firstborn son, William Sidney, whom he desires to be released
from the ‘too much fondness’ of his mother’s governance. In deciding to
relegate him to the care of a male ‘schoolmaster,’ Robert maintains that
his son ‘lieth still with his maid and doth not learn anything,’ and advises
Barbara to ‘have the boy delivered to his charge only, and not to have him
when he is to teach him to be troubled with the women.’7 Fatherly author-
ity in Robert Sidney’s letters seemingly works in opposition to, rather than
in conjunction with, the troubling domestic authority of the women of
the household where sons are concerned.
120 N.J. MILLER
Growing up ‘in the nursery among women,’ Mary Wroth learned to

speak in the language of her father when she moved into the public arena
of the court, even while constructing women with autonomous voices and
political agency in her own poetry, drama and fiction. In one of the few
surviving letters in Mary Wroth’s own hand, she writes in 1614 to urge
her father to protect the interests of her son from her husband’s male rela-
tives by assuming the wardship of the boy.8 Mary Wroth enacts her mater-
nal responsibility for her child by calling upon the paternal authority of
her father. Moreover, Wroth writes her mother’s voice into the conclusion
of her letter, explicitly mentioning that her mother has instructed her to
write with this message. In fact, the family dynamic that emerges in much
of the Sidney correspondence for this period reflects a frequently absent
father, abroad or at court, with a firm and constant mother holding both
family and household together in her husband’s absence.
Wroth’s aunt and godmother, Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of
Pembroke, who was another author-mother, can be recognised as a fur-
ther figure of female familial authority. Margaret Hannay has explored, in
illuminating detail, indications of the bond between Wroth and her aunt,
which originated with Mary’s frequent visits to her godmother’s homes
at Baynards Castle and Wilton House and continued into adulthood
with the Countess’s assistance in the preparations of Mary’s wedding to
Robert Wroth.9 In a letter to Barbara Sidney during Mary’s childhood,
the Countess of Pembroke sends ‘my blessing to my pretey Daughter’,
who was also her namesake.10 The Countess not only turned her estate at
Wilton into a gathering place for a group of writers that likely included
Mary Wroth, but also wrote poetry and plays of her own. Raised ‘among
women’ such as her aunt and her mother, who governed Penshurst in
her father’s absence, Mary Wroth fashioned her own role as author and
mother in relation to a significant matrilineal heritage.
Gender Politics
Considering Mary Wroth’s cultural production in the context of the
Sidney family circle, as an author whose works at once reflect and engage
with the politics of the court, it is instructive to review her poems, play
and prose romance for signs of family politics.11 When explicitly matrilin-
eal self-fashioning navigates the political constraints of patriarchal court
structures, genealogies become a matter not simply of collective identity
under the name of the family patriarch, but of the individual voices and
identities of mothers and daughters, godmothers and even grandmothers.
The instances in the popular mothers’ advice books of early modern

mothers claiming speaking positions for themselves not simply as repro-
ductive bodies but as authors epitomise gendered negotiations of fam-
ily politics. Those women writing about their roles as mothers, such as
Dorothy Leigh in The Mother’s Blessing (1616) or Elizabeth Joceline in
The mothers legacie to her unborn child (1624), articulate their authority in
specifically matrilineal terms. Indeed, Leigh references the family politics
of her household in assuring her sons that ‘if you get wives that be godly
and you love them, you shall not need to forsake me’, whereas ‘if you
have wives that you love not, I am sure I will forsake you’, manifesting an
extraordinary matrilineal alliance with her future daughters-in-law.12
Mary Wroth’s poems in particular offer several alternative and sometimes
competing configurations of maternity that extend the discursive construc-
tions of early modern mothers’ advice books, illuminating gender differences
in procreative terms, as did the Countess of Pembroke in her translations
of the psalms. At the same time, Wroth’s explicit reconfigurations of lyric
forms and strategies common to the sequences of her father and uncle indi-
cate the parameters of her ongoing efforts to transmute the boundaries of
her ‘paternal’ inheritance in order to fashion a voice of her own. Wroth’s
attention to maternity, for example, extends from the opening sonnet of
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, where Venus’s maternal authority results in the
speaker’s subjection to love—when Cupid shoots Pamphilia upon his moth-
er’s order—to many other sonnets in which she transforms the Petrarchan
conceit of Night, referred to as ‘unjust night’ by Robert Sidney’s speaker
(Sonnet 6), into a comforting maternal ally.13 Wroth thus writes mothers as
social and political entities into a lyric form previously dominated by a mas-
culine obsession with women as bodily parts to be ‘emblazoned’.
Elsewhere in the sequence, Wroth rewrites the gender dynamics of famil-
ial authority within the home. During much of Wroth’s childhood, as evi-
denced in the family letters discussed above, it was not her father, frequently
absent, but her mother and herself who inhabited the family home. Where
Robert Sidney’s speaker journeys perpetually, Mary Wroth’s speaker appar-
ently dwells. Welcoming an alliance with the maternal presence of ‘Night’
in the face of male absence (P 43), Wroth’s female speaker finds comfort, if
not ‘in the nursery’, then certainly ‘among women’. In effect, Wroth writes
her mother into her father’s house, where she has been, for Wroth, all along.
Moreover, Wroth’s attention to the maternal body itself diverges
sharply from the approach adopted by her other paternal forebear, Philip
Sidney, who appropriates pregnancy as a metaphor for his male speaker
Astrophil’s discursive fertility: ‘great with child to speake, and helplesse
122 N.J. MILLER
in my throwes’ (AS 1). Significantly, Wroth’s godmother, the Countess

of Pembroke, completed Philip Sidney’s translation of the psalms with an
attention to the connections of pregnant mother and child that achieves a
distinctive maternal stamp quite different from the imagery adopted in the
King James Bible of 1611. Even as the Countess of Pembroke intensifies
the imagery of miscarriage in her metaphrase of Psalm 58, by describ-
ing the ‘formlesse eyes’ of ‘the Embrio, whose vitall band / breakes er it
holdes’, so her niece and matrilineal successor lays claim to the authority
of maternal discourse with her own lyric inscription of miscarriage.14 In
Wroth’s sequence, love leads to disappointment, just as pregnancy leads to
miscarriage, conveying the body’s betrayal of its own fertility, which comes
to represent the female speaker’s recognition of the precarious relation
between hope and desire: ‘Faulce hope which feeds butt to destroy, and
spill / What itt first breeds; unaturall to the birth / Of thine owne wombe;
conceaving butt to kill’ (P 40). Writing not as a man borrowing a conve-
nient metaphor from the body of the opposite sex, but rather as a woman
who, like her aunt, has herself suffered the physical and emotional loss of
miscarriage, Wroth represents the cost of self-deception in distinctly female
terms. ‘Faulce hope’ placed in an unfaithful lover results in a miscarriage
of desire, and a concomitant challenge to the (re)productive authority of
the female poet. Certainly the (pro)creativity in Wroth’s sequence exhibits
more commonality with the pattern of gestational losses recorded in other
early modern women’s diaries and correspondence than with Astrophil’s
phallic fertility.15
As Wroth’s sequence progresses, metaphors of pregnancy and childbirth
resurface in a pointed attack upon the falsehood of male sonneteers, who
disguise their lust with the name of love in order to ‘beget / This childe
for love, who ought like monster borne / Bee from the court of Love, and
reason torne’ (P 85). In Wroth’s dramatic reconfiguration of the obstetri-
cal terms of Philip Sidney’s opening sonnet, then, Astrophil’s claim to be
‘great with child to speake’ (AS 1) only underscores the monstrosity of
‘lust […] faulcely nam’d’ as love (P 85), resulting not in true (re)produc-
tive fertility, but rather in ‘faulce hope which feeds butt to destroy […]
conceaving butt to kill’ (P 40). Far from being the product of her male
lover’s discourse, like Philip Sidney’s Stella, Wroth’s Pamphilia under-
mines the ‘faire shows’ (P 40) of lustful male lovers by exposing the false
premises of their discursive fertility. In place of the miscarriage of desire
resulting from the deceptive practices of such male lovers, Pamphilia cele-
brates the ‘light of true love’, which ‘brings fruite which none repent’ and
offers a ‘wombe for joyes increase’ (P 78). Focusing upon the womb and
drawing upon the models of her mother and her aunt, Wroth produces her
own matrilineal inscription of female (pro)creativity, which relies upon the
marks of gender difference to assert the capacity of women, both as lovers
and as poets, to give birth to their own language of desire.
Maternal Authority
In moving from Wroth’s poems to her play and prose romance, it is instruc-
tive first to notice instances in the literary texts of Wroth’s own family where
paternal restraint operates as a powerful force to balance a perceived excess
of maternal ‘fondness’. Wroth’s uncle, Philip Sidney, in fact introduces the
central female characters in his Old Arcadia in the context of their political
containment by the male head of the family, when Gynecia appears with
her daughters in the protective custody ordered by Basilius. Almost imme-
diately, the issue of ‘too much fondness’ arises in inverted terms which
undercut the reliability of maternal authority, when Gynecia sets herself
against her own daughter, vowing that she will not allow Philoclea to sup-
plant her in ‘Cleophila’s’ affections: ‘the life I have given thee, ungrateful
Philoclea, I will sooner with these hands bereave thee of than my birth shall
glory she hath bereaved me of my desires’ (OA, 92).16 Gynecia’s bond-
age to passion transforms the familial bond between mother and daughter
into an occasion for intergenerational conflict rather than alliance. Soon,
Gynecia comes to perceive the domestic hierarchy itself in inverted terms:
‘The growing of her daughter seemed the decay of herself. The blessings of
a mother turned to the curses of a competitor’ (OA, 382).
Sidney expands upon his representation of maternity as a threat to
patriarchal power with the figure of Cecropia in the New Arcadia, whose
excessive fondness for her son, Amphialus, works directly to undermine
Basilius’s political authority as governor of the community. Only Gynecia,
in fact, is able to recognise Cecropia’s hand in the intrusion of a lion
and a bear into the pastorals (NA, 125), and her maternal warning to
Pamela and Philoclea prepares them for their later persecution by their
aunt. Cecropia’s maternity, even more than Gynecia’s, works malignantly
in inverse proportion to the heroism of her offspring. Thus Amphialus
is described as ‘being (like a rose out of a brier) an excellent sonne of an
evill mother’ (NA, 363). In Sidney’s configuration of gender, male hero-
ism can evidently flourish despite a man’s origin in the mother’s body.
Indeed, Philip Sidney’s Gynecia and Cecropia serve in both versions of
124 N.J. MILLER
the Arcadia less to signify maternal power than to reify, through their very
failings, the forces of fatherly authority that they unsuccessfully attempt
to displace. Whether in the examples of Philip Sidney’s prose romance or
Robert Sidney’s letters, family politics can apparently pit fathers against
mothers in literary texts as well as marital correspondence that renegoti-
ates the boundaries of familial authority.
Wroth’s play, Love’s Victory, explores the constraints imposed by fatherly
authority in conjunction with both the triumphs of maternal authority
and its limitations. The play features two mother-figures whose alter-
nately destructive or generative control over story-making, in the literal
absence of fathers, compels the protagonists to rewrite the narratives that
shape their paths. In contrast to the renditions of mothers in many male-
authored romances, from Sidney’s Arcadia to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline
and The Winter’s Tale, where maternity can be used to express heightened
emotions felt by the male patriarch, Love’s Victory examines the poten-
tially destructive consequences of placing mothers into fathers’ roles.17
Resuscitating the discourse of the father in the figure of the mother,
Love’s Victory offers a new romance paradigm, where performing mater-
nity enables the construction of alternate narratives that redraw the family
politics of the genre. In Mary Wroth’s play, the mother’s will both can
and must be distinguished from the law of the father in order for maternal
authority to achieve victory in its own right.18
Wroth’s dramatic romance opens with the voice of the mother implied
in its title: Venus, goddess of Love, who appears through much of the play
to be concerned with causing the lovers to suffer. While in some way, the
forcible and domineering maternity of Wroth’s Venus might seem to echo
the characteristics of Sidney’s Gynecia and Cecropia, the most striking
difference is a question of absence: there are no fathers in Love’s Victory to
share the stage.
The other maternal figure in the play is the widowed mother of Musella,
given no name but ‘Mother to Musella’ in the dramatis personae, so that
she is defined solely by her role as the only mother other than Venus in the
play. In this instance, Wroth represents a mother–daughter bond in a fam-
ily in which the father is dead and there is no son, producing a domestic
configuration, lacking any male presence, that in itself diverges from the
paternally dominated romances of Sidney and Shakespeare. The mother–
daughter bond in Wroth’s play is threatened, however, by fatherly author-
ity from beyond the grave, when Musella’s mother betrothes her daughter
to a country bumpkin called Rustic, according to her late husband’s
instructions but against Musella’s will. Bound by the father’s will, Musella
and her mother find themselves forced to enact a story not of their own
making.
Musella’s mother is no insensitive tyrant like Cecropia, however, but
a woman bound by the strictures of a marriage not wholly unlike that
of Mary Wroth’s own mother, Barbara Gamage Sidney, whose husband
would write to her that ‘for the boys, you must resolve to let me have my
will’. The difference is that in Mary Wroth’s family, the father’s will per-
tained more directly to ‘the boys’ than the girls, and Barbara Sidney main-
tained ties with her daughters whether her husband was present or absent.
Mary Wroth, herself, however, was well-acquainted—both through the
family politics of her own arranged marriage and her financially straitened
widowhood, as well as the legal battles of a friend such as Anne Clifford—
with privations that a father’s will could impose upon children, quite
beyond the powers of a mother to redress.19 Although set within a pastoral
romance frame, the simultaneous suffering of mother and daughter within
Wroth’s play shifts the narrative focus beyond the traditional boundaries
of romance that ultimately reify patriarchy, to expose the familial inequi-
ties of a contemporary patriarchal system in which, on a social level dis-
tinct from the mythic maternal authority of Venus, a daughter might not
be able to benefit from a mother’s advice after all.
At the climax of Wroth’s play, however, after the lovers have been
revived from their seemingly tragic ends by the priests of Venus, mother
and daughter find not only their bond restored, but also their shared
discourse renewed. Significantly, Wroth puts into words the fruition of
a mother’s blessing in motherhood itself: ‘Pardon my fault, enjoy and
blessed be, / And children and their children’s children see’ (5.7.77–82).
Musella’s reply to her mother is a concomitant request for forgiveness
and expression of affection, recognising and affirming her mother’s ‘care’
from the start. Multiplying the generativity of maternity, Wroth’s Philisses
addresses his beloved Musella’s mother as ‘Mother, for so your gift makes
me you call’ (5.7.87), in thanking her for her blessing. Rather than repro-
duce the paternal appropriation or erasure of the mother’s part that marks
the behaviour of romance father-figures such as Philip Sidney’s Basilius
and Euarchus, Wroth locates a sufficiency of parental authority in a female
figure. Initially disparaged by the other characters, Musella’s mother finally
receives honour from all for her enduring love for her daughter. Beyond
the world of the text can be glimpsed an allusive reference to the family
politics of Mary Wroth’s own forced marriage to a man she hadn’t chosen,
126 N.J. MILLER
where her father’s will determined her domestic fate as a wife. Her ongo-
ing bond with her mother, manifest in her letters to her father from her
mother’s side shortly before her mother’s death, addressing the wardship
of her son, attest to her continuing need for strategic self-fashioning in a
patriarchal family as a daughter who is also a mother. In her play, Wroth
could fashion an outcome not available in her life.
Ultimately, in Love’s Victory, the destructive potential of a human
father’s will is deflected by an even more powerful mother and ruler, the
goddess Venus, ‘whose love to you / Made her descend on earth, and
your cares view’ (5.7.93–94). Rather than dislocating the familial author-
ity of the patriarch so frequently represented by male-authored romances,
Mary Wroth redraws the boundaries of political authority that frame the
patriarch’s power, so that a daughter can negotiate a future not proscribed
by the father’s literal will enacted by the mother, and a mother can affirm
her core alliance with her daughter outside the scope of her husband’s
control.
Allegiance and Alliance
Wroth’s Urania offers even more extended attention to the impact of

maternal genealogy on familial identity and political authority than her
sonnet sequence or her play. Urania’s opening lament over her lack of
knowledge of her family origins signals Wroth’s acknowledgment of the
importance of familial identity to any definition of individual identity.
Moreover, among the early modern prose romances, only Mary Wroth’s
Urania situates maternity as a generative force in shaping female iden-
tity in particular.20 Urania’s lament offers an opportunity for Wroth to
locate the mother as an originary figure for identity construction. After
initially mourning the absence of parents whose identities could stabilise
her own, Urania particularises her lament to the absence of the mother:
‘Miserable Urania, worse art thou now then these thy Lambs: for they
know their dams, while thou liue unknown of any’.21 Subsequently, when
she comes upon a lamb wandering lost, she returns to the subject of her
own desire for a maternal genealogy: ‘Poor Lambe, said she, what moane
thou mak’st for losse of thy deare dam? What torments do I then suffer,
which never knew my mother?’ (16). Like the authors of the mothers’
advice books, Wroth privileges maternal identity over physical nourish-
ment in giving voice to Urania’s search for self-definition in relation to
maternity. Urania’s recognition of the importance of mothering to the
development of ‘knowledge’ of oneself shapes her subsequent mothering

of other female characters seeking to define feminine parameters of self-
fashioning throughout the narrative.
Pamphilia, on the other hand, inhabits an overdetermined familial
identity, not only as a royal patriarch’s daughter, but also as the King
of Pamphilia’s ‘Neece, who by his gift was to enjoy that kingdome
after his decease, and therefore bore that name likewise given by him’
(82). Far from experiencing Urania’s problem of not knowing her par-
ents, Pamphilia finds herself flanked by a strong father and a strong
uncle—recalling Wroth’s own familial identity—while being courted
by Amphilanthus, the most heroic of princes, long associated by Wroth
scholars with William Herbert, her cousin and lover and the King’s Lord
Chamberlain. Wroth further acknowledges her own familial heritage by
forming Pamphilia’s name from a combination of syllables that echoes the
names of Sidney’s Pamela and Philoclea. Small wonder, then, that Wroth
represents Pamphilia’s concern with asserting and preserving authority as
an author, as well as political autonomy as a ruler.
Throughout Urania, Wroth locates individual identity in relation to
family bonds, exposing the problematic gendering of authority within
a frame of family politics. One male character takes care to distinguish
between the sexes, for example, in commenting upon the admirable self-
control of a lady following the death of her beloved: ‘O women how
excellent are you, when you take the right way? else, I must confesse,
you are the children of men, and like them fault-full’ (36). This judge-
ment of course depends upon a male conception of ‘the right way’ in
the first place, and assumes a masculine capability to evaluate the faults
of women as fathered by men. On the other hand, when another male
character inveighs against women’s lightness and jealousy, having lost the
favour of his own beloved, it is Urania’s future husband, Steriamus, who
reminds him that ‘your mother was a woman, and you must be favour’d
by an other, to be blessed with brave posterity’ (159). Such a reminder
balances the earlier construction of women as ‘the children of men’ with
a recognition of the engendering role of women as mothers. Moreover,
Wroth’s distinction between the reproductive agency of mothers and the
limitations associated with ‘the children of men’ underscores her own
capacity to move beyond the characterisations of her male predecessors in
the romance tradition, transforming those ‘children of men’ through her
representation of alliances within the family structure itself.
128 N.J. MILLER
Steriamus’s acknowledgment of maternal power additionally recalls

Pyrocles’s exploration of his male identity in Sidney’s Arcadia: ‘if I be
anything, […] I was to come to it born of a woman and nursed of a
woman’ (OA, 21). Yet Pyrocles relegates that dependence to his origins
while maintaining the autonomy of his present state, assuring Musidorus
that in spite of his Amazon attire ‘there is nothing I desire more than
fully to prove myself a man in this enterprise’ (OA, 22–23). By contrast,
Steriamus, whose subsequent marriage to Urania represents one of the
most stable unions in Wroth’s romance, underscores the terms of male
dependence upon women as mothers not only as a past connection, but
also as a present and future one: ‘you must be favour’d by an other, to be
blessed with brave posterity’. In effect, Wroth shifts the focus from the
mother’s body as a fortuitous conjunction of womb and breasts to the
mother’s role as author of posterity. Wroth’s emphasis not merely on the
physical procreative potential of women, but on their maternal authority
as well, situates her narrative in relation both to author-mothers such as
Dorothy Leigh and Elizabeth Joceline and to the instructive examples of
her own mother and godmother.
The parental relation to children is not always a benign one in Urania,
particularly when fathers and daughters are involved. In many cases, akin
to the example of Love’s Victory as well as Wroth’s own marriage, the
father’s will enforces upon the daughter an unwelcome betrothal that
results in the daughter’s experience of a divided identity. One female char-
acter named Bellamira, for example, observes regarding the cost of obey-
ing her father’s choice of husband, ‘Thus more then equally did I devide
my selfe’ (334). Another female character, Limena, finds that her acces-
sion to ‘her fathers will’ produces self-loathing, ‘for consenting in shew to
that which was most contrarie to it selfe’ (5). In an echo of the relation
between Musella and her mother in Love’s Victory, when Limena’s mother
comes upon evidence that suggests that her daughter is dead, she is ‘readie
to die with her, as if shee had brought her forth to bee still as her life, that
though two, yet like those eyes, that one being struck in a certaine part of
it, the other unhurt doth lose likewise the sight: so she having lost her, lost
likewise all comfort with her’ (14). In fact, it is Urania who is responsible
ultimately for restoring Limena to her mother, when she urges Limena’s
lover, Perissus, to keep searching for her rather than succumbing to the
passivity of despair.
In writing against the effects of fatherly authority, Wroth encodes within
her text direct references to the influential father-figures in her own life.
After Urania’s first lover, Parselius, abandons her to marry Dalinea, he sees
a vision of Urania in a dream, and explains to his wife that he must tem-
porarily leave her because ‘hee saw all Arcadia on fire, the earth flaming,
and in the midst his father burning, who with lamentable cryes demanded
helpe of him’ (125). As Jeff Masten has pointed out, Wroth here stages
the burning of ‘Arcadia’—not simply the country but Philip Sidney’s text
as well—within a context that exposes male inconstancy, while consign-
ing a ‘father’ to the same flames.22 Certainly, the exposure of Parselius at
this point conveys the insufficiency of fatherly authority to justify male
inconstancy.
Subsequently, however, when Urania is happily matched with
Steriamus, and Parselius proves faithful to his wife, Wroth seems less con-
cerned to focus upon male inconstancy or even, in oppositional terms,
upon her uncle’s and father’s texts, than to stake out a new centre of
discursive authority within her own text, based upon specifically female
as well as familial alliances.23 In the manuscript continuation of Urania,
when Parselius arrives at Tempe in the course of his travels, he compares
the landscape favourably with literary descriptions of Arcadia: ‘[Poets] in
their olde fictions doe most strangely rave on the desarts, and rarenesses
of the pleasant Arcadia, butt to mee this seems as pleasing, rare, and farr
more delightfull because more richly stored with Varieties’ (II: fol. 3v).
No longer preoccupied with ‘burning’ her uncle’s text, Wroth redefines
the family politics of Sidney’s romance in her own narrative, asserting the
‘Varieties’ of her own text to be ‘farr more delightfull’ than ‘olde fictions’
of Arcadia.
In counterbalance to the many subplots in which tyrannical fathers sub-
ject their daughters to unhappy betrothals, and mothers accede to patriar-
chal objectification or oppression, Wroth represents the familial ties among
the major female protagonists of Urania in unusually supportive terms,
including a number of strong maternal figures as well as several illegitimate
children who are accepted by their extended families rather than associ-
ated with maternal shame or failure. Over the course of the narrative, one
of the strongest political and familial alliances is that between Pamphilia
and her widowed aunt, the Queen of Naples—widely recognised by schol-
ars as a figure for the Countess of Pembroke—who is at once ‘her most
honord friend’ (314) and the ‘matchlesse’ mother of Amphilanthus (316),
as well as being ‘rare in Poetry’ (415–416).24 Describing the conversa-
tions between the Queen of Naples and Pamphilia, Wroth emphasises the
intellectual substance of their discourse across time as well as generations:
130 N.J. MILLER
‘No time was lost betweene them, for each minute was fild with store of
wit, which passed betweene them’ (316). The strength of this surrogate
mother–daughter bond resides in what ‘passed betweene them’, manifest-
ing a clear matrilineal succession which reflects their political as well as
familial allegiance and alliance.
Wroth expands upon Pamphilia’s closeness to both her mother
and her aunt in the course of the narration of Pamphilia’s wedding to
Rodomandro, king of Tartaria, which epitomises a strategic political alli-
ance in the form of a marital bond. Even as Pamphilia’s mother takes her
aside for a supportive conversation during the days preceding the wedding
(II: fol. 19), so the Queen of Naples assists Pamphilia during the wedding
ceremony itself (II: fol. 22v), in an echo of the assistance provided Mary
Wroth by her own mother and aunt in preparation for her wedding to
Robert Wroth. Furthermore, when the Queen of Naples becomes aware
of the prior bond between her niece and her son, she arranges that the
two remain in contact after Pamphilia’s wedding, and remains close to
Pamphilia herself (II: fol. 23v). Wroth represents intergenerational alli-
ances fostered by the sympathy and agency of women when Pamphilia
takes over the maternal role of her aunt in offering aid and counsel to her
own niece and nephew.25
The Queen of Naples, of course, turns out to be not only the mother of
Amphilanthus, but the long-lost mother of Urania as well, and her bond
with her own daughter proves as significantly enduring as that with her
niece. In the manuscript continuation of the romance, Wroth describes
the union of Urania and Steriamus, where ‘blessed with many children
they thought fit to looke to the breeding of them, and soe resolved to send
their eldest daughter to her grandmother the brave and discreet queen
of Naples’ (I: fol. 8). The mother–daughter connection that was broken
when Urania was not raised by her mother can now be restored by her
decision to allow her mother to ‘looke to the breeding’ of this grand-
daughter. Over time, the Queen of Naples receives several other grand-
children and great-nieces and nephews into her charge, becoming the
central matriarchal figure in the romance.
In constructing a discourse of maternal succession, Wroth moves
beyond the purview even of her female contemporaries, conjoining a pri-
vate rhetoric of authority within the family with a public vocabulary of
nurture and desire within the state, thus giving voice to the dynamic of
family politics that informed her own family and well as the familial lan-
guage and practice of leadership employed, separately, by King James and
Queen Anna. Transfiguring the primarily youthful protagonists populat-

ing the romances of Sidney and Shakespeare, Wroth crafts family narra-
tives whose protagonists grow from youth to maturity. Maidens become
not only mothers, but also rulers with political as well as familial author-
ity, and ultimately grandmothers with wisdom to offer across generational
boundaries.
In Urania, the nascent maternal subjectivity that underlies Pamphilia
to Amphilanthus and emerges into the open in Love’s Victory proves cen-
tral to the regenerative political alliances of mothers and daughters, aunts
and nieces. Published the year that Wroth’s mother died, and asserting
on its title page Wroth’s allegiance to her author-aunt, the Countess of
Pembroke, who died the same year, Wroth’s Urania represents a spectrum
of family politics. By juxtaposing oppressive instances of fatherly authority
with the frequently liberating effects of maternal presence, in figures rang-
ing from the Queen of Naples to Urania herself, Mary Wroth re-presents
the mothers rendered as absent, dead, malevolent or merely incompetent
in many of the texts of her paternal forebears as speaking subjects in their
own right, whose maternal authority at once establishes and transmutes
political alliances across generations of familial relations.
Notes
1. See Su Fang Ng, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-
Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp.
pp. 6–8, 16–18; also Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s
Writing (Harlow: Longman/Pearson Education, 2001).
2. See my own Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender
in Early Modern England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996)
for an expanded consideration of intersections between Wroth’s cultural
production as an author and her familial identity, esp. Chapter Three,
‘Matriarch’s Daughter: Ties that Bind’, pp. 64–108.
3. For an comprehensive survey of the facts of Mary Wroth’s life as well as her
genealogical pedigree, viewed in relation to her works, see Margaret
Hannay’s comprehensive biography, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Burlington:
Ashgate Publishing, 2010), as well as her Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney,
Countess of Pembroke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
4. Robert Sidney to Barbara Sidney, 20 April 1597, Letter 126 in Domestic
Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of
Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney,
Countess of Leicester, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and
132 N.J. MILLER
Michael G. Brennan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), p. 103, hereafter

cited as Domestic Politics.
5. See historical provenance and usage in the Oxford Dictionary (2007).
6. Robert Sidney to Barbara Sidney, 20 April 1597, Letter 127 in Domestic
Politics, p. 104.
7. Robert Sidney to Barbara Sidney, 20 and 22 April 1597, Letters 124 and
127 in Domestic Politics, pp. 101, 124.
8. Mary Wroth to Robert Sidney, 17 Oct. 1614, De L’Isle MS U1475, C52.
9. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, p. 143, and ‘The Countess of Pembroke as
Mentor’, in Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Naomi Miller and Gary Waller
(Knoxville: University. of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 15–34 (esp.
pp. 20–23).
10. Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, to Barbara Sidney, 9 Sept. 1590,
British Library Add. MS 15232.
11. Modern published editions of Wroth’s works include The Poems of Lady
Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1983); Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory: The Penshurst
Manuscript, ed. Michael G. Brennan (London: The Roxburghe Club,
1988); Love’s Victory in Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and
Documents, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London:
Routledge, 1996), pp. 90–126; The First Part of The Countess of
Montgomery’s Urania by Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts
(Binghamton, NY: Renaissance English Text Society, 1995); The Second
Part of The Countess of Mongomery’s Urania by Lady Mary Wroth, ed.
Josephine A. Roberts, Suzanne Gossett, and Janel Mueller (Tempe, AZ:
Renaissance English Text Society and Arizona Center for Medieval &
Renaissance Studies, 1999); The Countess of Montomgery’s Urania
(abridged), ed. Mary Ellen Lamb (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2011). In this
essay, I’ve drawn from the modern published editions of the poems (ed.
Roberts) and the play (ed. Wynne-Davies), using Roberts’s numbering
scheme for the poems and act, scene and line numbers for the play. For
Urania, I’ve quoted by page number from the 1621 published edition,
and by book and folio number from the Newberry manuscript of the
continuation.
12. Dorothy Leigh, The Mother’s Blessing (1616) in Daughters, Wives and
Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England,
1500–1640, ed. Joan Larsen Klein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1992), p. 302.
13. For additional sonnets by Wroth on Venus as a mother figure, see especially
P85 and P95; sonnets that represent Night as a comforting maternal pres-
ence include P13, P17, and P43. Citations from Robert Sidney’s poems
reference the Poems of Robert Sidney, ed. P.J. Croft (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984).
14. Psalm 58 in The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of
Pembroke, Vol. II: The Psalmes of David, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel
J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998),
p. 62.
15. See Patricia Crawford, ‘The Construction and Experience of Maternity in
Seventeenth-Century England’, in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial
England, ed. Valerie Fildes (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 3–38.
16. Citations from Philip Sidney’s prose romance are drawn from The Countess
of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1973), and from Vol. I (1590 text of the ‘New
Arcadia’) of The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat
(1912); rpt. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), hereafter
cited as OA and NA by page number in the text.
17. See Helen Hackett, ‘“Gracious Be the Issue”: Maternity and Narrative in
Shakespeare’s Late Plays’, in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, ed.
Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1999), p. 26.
18. For more extensive consideration of Wroth’s constructions of maternity in
Love’s Victory, as situated within a tradition of dramatic romance, see my
essay, ‘Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance’, in
Maternity and English Romance Narratives in Early Modern England, ed.
Karen Bamford and Naomi Miller (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing,
2015), pp. 137–153.
19. See ‘Matriarch’s Daughter’, Chapter 9 in Changing the Subject, pp. 74–76,
for additional discussion of analogues between Anne Clifford’s circum-
stances and those of Mary Wroth.
20. Danielle Clarke, ‘“Which is Truth, and Which My Story”: The Countesse of
Mountgomeries Urania (1621)’, in The Politics of Early Modern Women’s
Writing (Harlow: Longman/Pearson Education, 2001), pp. 239–252
(p. 252), offers a perceptive analysis of how ‘Wroth’s rereading and rewrit-
ing of the romance disrupts the genre’, without, however, addressing the
significance of matrilineal authority.
21. Mary Wroth, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (London, 1621), p. 1.
22. Jeff Masten, ‘“All Arcadia on Fire”: Mary Wroth reads Philip Sidney’,
paper delivered at 1990 MLA convention in special session entitled
‘Sexual/Textual Poetics: Mary Wroth and the Sidney Family Men’.
23. See ‘Between Women: Becoming Visible’, Chapter 6 in Changing the

Subject, pp. 217–233, for more discussion of this issue.
24. Margaret Hannay, ‘Your vertuous and learned Aunt’, in Reading Mary
Wroth, ed. Miller and Waller, p. 24; see also the much more extensive dis-
cussion in her recent biography, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth.
25. Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 292.
CHAPTER 8
Mini-Majesty: Dynasty and Succession

in the Portraiture of Henry VIII
and Edward VI
Naomi Yavneh Klos
The best-known fact regarding Henry VIII (other than his break with
the Catholic Church and increasing obesity) was that he had six wives.
An almost equally familiar corollary, intimately tied with the saga of the
first three wives, was Henry’s desperation for a legitimate son who would
bolster and extend the Tudor lineage started by Henry VII. Contrary to
popular view, this desire for a male offspring was not only a reflection of
the King’s ego but also grounded in contemporary political reality: the
birth of a son would reduce the risk of civil war (which might be caused
by the selection of a non-filial or illegitimate male relative as heir apparent)
or the passing of control of England itself to a continental power, as might
occur were a queen regnant to marry a prince consort.
This chapter will focus on the dynastic portraiture of Henry VIII and
his family, with a particular emphasis on the work of Hans Holbein, espe-
cially Holbein’s portrait of the future Edward VI as a toddler, painted as
a New Year’s gift to Henry in 1539 (Fig. 8.1). In that portrait, Prince
N. Yavneh Klos (*)

University Honors Program, Loyola University New Orleans,
75, 6363 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans 70118, LA, USA
e-mail: yavneh@loyno.edu

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_8
136 N. YAVNEH KLOS
Edward is adorable, his rosy cheeks and childish hands emphasised by their
contrast with his elaborate courtly attire. Yet, despite its charm, this gift
for the toddler’s father, Henry VIII, is not primarily designed to capture
the boy’s childish attractions for eternal remembrance. Although Edward
displays many of the physical features of a young child, the pose, colour-
scheme and costume are those habitually used by the artist and his circle
for portraits of the father; these iconographic features, along with his
physical resemblance to his father (red hair, fair complexion, piercing eyes)
function as a visual reminder of the Prince’s role as Henry’s legitimate
heir. In other words, this is a painting of the son, but about the father.
Fig. 8.1 Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Edward, Prince of Wales, oil on
oak, c. 1538, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
MINI-MAJESTY: DYNASTY AND SUCCESSION IN THE PORTRAITURE OF HENRY... 137
This duality—that an official portrait of an heir presents not just the fig-
ure of him or herself but his or her position in a family lineage—is inherent
in the very concept of dynastic portraiture, and becomes a central conun-
drum in the representation of children. In a contemporary example, the
widely circulated official photograph of the British royal family, taken at the
christening of the current Prince George in October 2013, represents an
opportunity to memorialise not only the child’s birth, but the rehabilita-
tion and perpetuation of the House of Windsor. Despite the presence at
the photograph’s centre of the Prince whose baptism is the occasion for
the gathering, the conceptual heart of the image is focused as well on the
impeccably dressed great-grandmother seated to George’s left, England’s
longest reigning sovereign, and on the thriving future of the monarchy
embodied in her son, grandson and great-grandson. With their smiling
faces and tight grouping, the figures in the portrait present joy and unity.
Yet the photograph also serves as a reminder that to examine the meaning
of images, whether contemporary or early modern, is not only to engage in
a study of iconography and convention, but the interaction of such praxes
in a particular historical moment. The photograph draws much of its mean-
ing from the concatenation of both our understanding of the conventions
of family portraiture and our familiarity with the individuals in this specific
representation: the Prince is the grandson of both the heir to the throne and
Diana, the ‘people’s princess’, whose failed marriage and death challenged
the monarchic tradition. This formal portrait offers an official correction:
tradition is continued, but with a contemporary spin that includes a new
wife for the divorced Prince of Wales and the non-royal family of the new
Prince’s mother, who, like the Madonna flanked with saints in a sixteenth-
century Sacra conversazione, holds on her lap the precious baby, the focus of
all attention but, as yet, unaware of his own future role and immense power.
However distant a digital photograph may seem from sixteenth-century
portraiture in oil and precious pigments, the photograph of Prince George’s
christening offers a useful perspective from which to consider dynastic
imagery in general and Holbein’s painting in particular. Yet if the two
images serve a similar function, reading the Holbein portrait is nevertheless
a more complicated process. The impact of the christening portrait derives,
in part, from its simultaneous resemblance to, and distinction from, similar
photographs of ‘regular’ families. How can we understand such discrepan-
cies—and, indeed, the meaning of such images—for a culture temporally
distant from our own? For example, in Northern Renaissance paintings
such as The Virgin and Child Before a Firescreen attributed to a follower
of Roger Campin (c.1440; National Gallery, London), the iconographic
138 N. YAVNEH KLOS
symbolism is enhanced by the placement of the Madonna and Child in a

domestic interior, where homely fixtures (such as the firescreen) double as
sacred emblems (the Virgin’s halo) in order to augment the viewer’s sense
of identification with this human mother, even as they mark her distinction
from other women. This painting, and the firescreen itself (a quotidian
object now rendered obsolete and recherché), highlight the question of
how images communicate across time and of how the modern viewer can
recuperate implications that would have been obvious to a work’s original
intended audience. A related set of issues is raised by a genre such as the
Madonna lactans, in which the Virgin’s bared breast had radically different
associations for the fourteenth-century viewer than it does for us.1
Leo Steinberg has argued that, even armed with a background in ico-
nography, our post-modern preconceptions and readings of images can
cause us to miss important, telling features of early modern art. In The
Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, Steinberg
zestfully discusses, for example, how modern critics have either misun-
derstood or ignored the common presence of Baby Jesus’ erect penis.2
According to Steinberg, this literal ignorance has led to modern oblivious-
ness to an important theological message of such images: the centrality
of the theology of the Incarnation—the mystery of God’s transforma-
tion into human flesh. The shift in emphasis from Christ’s divinity to his
humanity that is visible in the transition from the representation of the
Child as puer senex, prevalent in the fourteenth century (for example, in
the ‘little old man’ Jesus of Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna; c.1310) to
the fleshy bambini of Quattrocento Florence (exemplified in Raphael’s
multiple representations of the Madonna and Child), is underscored in
Steinberg’s reading by the specific emphasis on the genitals as synecdoche
for humanity, and by his use of the controversial term, ‘sexuality’, which
he argues is that humanity’s central attribute. Leaving aside Steinberg’s
loaded terminology, his visual emphasis on the embodied Bambino Gesù
extends beyond the images in which a penis (erect or otherwise) is visible
and is equally present in the lifelike and engaging representations of the
Madonna and Child of a High Renaissance artist such as Raphael. In his
works the affective intimacy of mother and baby draws attention to the
fact that child is simultaneously both like, and decidedly different from, all
other children. In Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair, for instance (1515),
the seated Madonna tightly embraces the chubby toddler who, seated on
her lap, faces her, her encircling arms and their inclined bodies echoing
the tondo format of the painting. Although Jesus is looking directly at
the viewer, he draws back towards his mother, his hand tucked beneath
her shawl, as she draws him close to protect him. This naturalistic repre-
sentation and the developmentally appropriate behaviour portrayed here
(‘stranger anxiety’) underscore the shared humanity of mother and child,
even as they point to the shared suffering his Incarnation will entail.
This simultaneous drawing of attention to the ways in which Jesus and
the Virgin both resemble and are distinguished from secular, quotidian
mothers and their children is central, I will argue, to issues at the heart of
Hans Holbein’s portrait of Edward, completed when the Prince was just
14 months old, and presented to the child’s father a little over a year after
the mother’s death from post-childbirth complications.3 Like the baby in
Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair, this child’s clear skin and round, pink
cheeks render him an exemplar of robust health at a time when infant
mortality was a heart-rending commonplace.
But infant mortality and lack of an heir, of course, have a special sig-
nificance for the Tudor family and for sixteenth-century England. As indi-
cated above, even twenty-first-century viewers are aware that Henry rid
himself of his first two wives (not to mention two others), who failed
to provide him with a son. Sixteenth-century viewers would have been
painfully familiar with the details of the Divorce, the rupture with the
Catholic Church, the coronation and subsequent repudiation and behead-
ing of Anne Boleyn, and the concomitant bastardisation of first Mary and
then Elizabeth. The birth of Edward to Henry’s ‘first true wife’, Jane
Seymour—despite her death 12 days later—marked the clearly legitimate
continuation of the Tudor dynasty founded by the King’s father, Henry
VII. In this portrait, then, Edward may not be the son of God, but he is
the son of the head of God’s Church, the King, as evidenced by his garb
and the clear allusions to Holbein’s own depictions of the boy’s father.
A portrait, of course, is not a snapshot, a seemingly exact and neutral
reproduced likeness of a particular individual at a particular time. Rather,
it represents a series of choices, based on the artist’s abilities and predilec-
tions, prevailing contemporary styles in artwork (and the desire to conform
with or to move away from them), the patron’s wishes and wallet, ideo-
logical concerns, and the intended purpose of the work.4 As we shall see,
for example, whether or not we choose to view such paintings as part of a
political programme of propaganda as some have argued we must, portraits
of Henry VIII would certainly have been designed to show his power,
prestige and wealth.5 The way Henry’s broad shoulders extend beyond
the frame of Holbein’s Thyssen Portrait (Museo Thyssen- Bornemisza,
140 N. YAVNEH KLOS
Madrid, c. 1537) is as much about Henry’s dominance and imperium as it

is about his famous girth. Specific jewels or other accoutrements serve as
markers of prestige and wealth, and may also indicate the sitter’s specific
identity; indeed, sometimes a portrait might be created from clothing after
a subject’s death.6
Although the Prince’s attire is frequently included in websites delineat-
ing the dress of sixteenth-century children, his clothing should be con-
sidered as part of the construct of the portrait—along with his health, his
pose, and physical attributes—rather than as a ‘realistic’ depiction of the
toddler Edward Tudor. Edward VI may or may not have been a sickly
baby (he was clearly in ill health as an adolescent and died at the age of 15)
and perhaps did indeed walk before the age of one, but those matters are
not directly relevant to our understanding of this image, which is a paint-
ing of Edward as he never physically existed.
In order to grasp the complex messages conveyed in this painting of the
son which, I argue, is designed to extoll the father’s glory, it is helpful to
look first at Holbein’s depiction of that father. We see Holbein’s Henry VIII
most notably, but not exclusively, in the Whitehall Mural created in 1537,
either shortly before or after Edward’s birth and Jane Seymour’s death,
and originally located on a wall of the King’s Privy Chamber in Whitehall
Palace. The painting itself was unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1698, and
is therefore only visible to us now through two copies made by Remigius van
Leemput (one commissioned in 1667 by King Charles II; and one, prob-
ably for the Seymour family, in 1669) as well as in a portion of Holbein’s
life-size cartoon (Fig. 8.2), now in the National Portrait Gallery.7 Although
aspects of the original are thus irrevocably lost (its size, disposition in the
Privy Chamber and relation to other features of the room), we can never-
theless consider what we do know about the organisation and iconography
of this image designed, in Susan Foister’s words, to ‘celebrate the Tudor
dynasty for posterity’.8 This image includes what has become an iconic rep-
resentation of King Henry himself, along with depictions of his wife, Jane
Seymour (modelled on the portrait now in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches
Museum), and of his parents Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.
In considering this lost mural, it is also important to understand the role
of the Privy Chamber. Henry VIII, after acquiring Whitehall Palace ‘upon
Cardinal Wolsey’s fall from grace’ had ‘immediately set to work to make it
one of the grandest of his palaces’, but unfortunately neither the building
nor most of the building accounts are extant.9 Foister explains that the
Privy Chamber ‘was at the heart of a sequence of royal lodgings found
in a number of Tudor palaces, leading from the public rooms, the Guard
Fig. 8.2 Hans Holbein the Younger, King Henry VIII; King Henry VII, ink and
watercolour on paper, c. 1536–1537, National Portrait Gallery, London
Chamber and the Presence Chamber, to the Privy chamber and a sequence
of private rooms’.10 In other words, the Privy chamber was a liminal space
between public and private, ‘a room to which Henry could retreat in pri-
vate, but in which he might also dine and receive select visitors’.11 As Erich
Ives argues, ‘With the King the focus of Tudor government and politics,
it follows that government and politics focused on where the king was,
in other words the royal household’.12 The King’s appearances in state
rooms such as the ‘presence chamber’ were, in Ives’ terms, carefully calcu-
lated. Access to the King, then, in the nominally private, restricted space
of the privy chamber, was highly valued; the ‘politics of intimacy’, in Greg
Walker’s terms, was ‘based upon proximity to the sovereign and access to
his person’.13 Henry was accompanied in this space not just by the pages
and grooms charged with its cleaning but a group of privileged gentle-
men, some of them peers, tasked with both entertaining and conversing
142 N. YAVNEH KLOS
with the King and also tending to his personal needs. Because at Whitehall
new construction allowed the King ‘more privacy in rooms beyond the
Privy Chamber’, it is likely, Foister posits, that ‘the Privy chamber […] was
more often used as a public room’, and became, therefore, ‘the most privi-
leged space in which to meet the King’.14 The mural, a visual reminder
of the King’s lineage and status, would underscore the role of the Privy
chamber as a locus of power, controlled access and privilege.
Art historians generally concur that the ornate, classicised setting of
the mural would have fitted the palace’s decor. Equally significant, in
Tatiana String’s reading, is the message that such a setting, along with
some of the mannerist features of the painting (such as the ‘elongations of
Henry’s body’), would have conveyed to Henry’s visitors: that the King
was ‘up to date with current trends, suggesting comparisons with a rival
such as Francis I, and plugged into the prestige and authority of antiquity,
[ … able] to cast himself among the continental elite and to afford to do
so’.15 String’s comments are helpful in understanding how the elements
of contemporary continental painting deployed in this work (placed in the
relatively intimate and politically central location of the Privy Chamber)
underscore not just the artist’s technique but both his own and the patron’s
place in an elite cultural milieu. These underpinnings provide a framework
in which to consider the mural’s dynastic theme visually articulated in the
four full-body portraits of Kings Henry VII and VIII, presented opposite
their wives, Elizabeth of York and Jane Seymour, on either side of what
appears to be a large stone altar. While Henry VII and Elizabeth, Henry
VIII’s parents, stand on a ledge behind the younger couple, the use of
perspective is exaggerated, rendering Henry the dominant figure, looming
large in the foreground, and dwarfing the image of his tiny, pale-skinned
wife, standing demurely with hands folded. Although the altar’s Latin
inscription, discussed below, poses the ostensibly unresolved question of
whether father or son is pre-eminent, Henry VIII’s position and stance,
with bent arms, puffed sleeves and a voluminous cloak that almost extend
beyond the picture frame, infer the unsurpassable power of the reigning
monarch, across from the beloved consort who has borne (or will bear),
finally, his own legitimate male successor.
Roy Strong finds this Henry both definitive and repulsive: ‘No one
ever thinks of Henry VIII in any other way than as this gouty, pig-eyed
pile of flesh, whose astounding girth is only emphasised by the layers of
slashed velvets and furs that encase him’.16 Strong’s language is evocative
in describing Henry’s larger-than-life presence in his elaborate garb, but
the art historian’s reading seems inflected by both Charles Laughton’s

filmic depiction of Henry in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), as well
as by retrospective knowledge of Henry’s final years, when the previously
handsome and athletic King was virtually immobilised by leg ulcers com-
pounded by obesity. Even if the viewer shares Strong’s obvious distaste,
Henry’s bejewelled opulence should be read, I would argue, as a display
of power and richesse. Although the details are not as clear in Remigius’
copy, Henry’s garments are related to those he sports in the Thyssen por-
trait, also by Holbein, which are made of cloth of gold and silver; as in that
image, rubies fasten the slashes in his sleeves, while a chain of gold, includ-
ing yet more rubies, stretches across his neck. The puffed sleeves and cloak
emphasise the breadth of his shoulders, but below the skirt of his doublet
(which is parted by his bulging codpiece), his legs are elongated, with the
shapely, well-muscled calves of a dancer.
The splendours of his fashionable garments both draw attention to, and
are emphasised by, Henry’s pose. Although his torso is slightly shifted to
the left, suggesting the mobility and action created by Renaissance con-
trapposto, his feet are firmly planted in a sign of authority. String points
out that, even dressed in courtly garb, Henry stands as would a man in
armour, with weight evenly distributed rather than shifted to one hip, so
that the pose conflates Henry with the representation of military heroes,
thus conferring ‘the resonance of this physical, combative identity’.17 In
Strong’s reading, his placement has a specific art-historical reference as
well: Henry’s is the heroic pose evolved in fifteenth-century Florence to
represent ‘figures of knightly triumph against tremendous, often supernat-
ural powers’, such as Donatello’s St. George, for example, or Perugino’s
St. Michael. Strong affirms: Henry ‘joins them in the double role of imper-
ator and chevalier’.18 That duality is especially visible in the positioning of
his hands, with one reflecting a courtly role by holding a glove, while the
other reaches towards the short dagger that juts horizontally, with phallic
effect, towards the stone altar. The dynamism created by Henry’s pose is
in marked contrast to the almost passive quality of the bent arms of the
other three figures in the work: the women bring their hands together in
a sedate and modest gesture, and the older King lounges nonchalantly
with his elbow resting on the altar. With or without armour, the image of
Henry VIII reflects power and masculinity.
The representation of Henry VIII in Remigius’ copy of the finished
wall painting differs in one notable respect from that in the cartoon: rather
than looking to one side, he stares straight ahead, a pose made famous
144 N. YAVNEH KLOS
in innumerable copies. Although it is unclear where exactly on the wall

the image was located, in the intimate space of the Privy Chamber, the
perspective implies, in Foister’s terms, that ‘Henry looks out rather than
down’; his head would have directly faced the viewer, his piercing eyes
deliberately meeting our gaze with an impassive stare.19 Citing the words
of a sixteenth-century ambassador, Strong declares that ‘Henry alone
communicates with the onlooker and the effect on visitors was that they
were abashed, annihilated’.
In the conventions of Renaissance painting, a direct look, breaking
the ‘fourth wall’ of Alberti’s ‘window onto nature’, is designed to draw
the viewer into the world of the painting; the Baby Jesus of Ambrogio
Lorenzetti’s Madonna del latte invites us to join him in the Eucharist
symbolised by his suckling, for example.20 But Henry’s gaze is especially
arresting and unusual. The full-frontal portrait is infrequent in sixteenth-
century art; a 1548 treatise by a Portuguese humanist, Francisco de
Holanda, describes such a portrait as ‘graceless’, and twentieth-century
art historian Lorne Campbell notes that ‘the full-face view can give the
impression of so direct a confrontation […] that the spectator may feel
uneasy’.21 Holbein subsequently used a frontal view in his portraits of
potential royal brides Christina of Denmark and Anne of Cleves, presum-
ably to give an impression not of confrontation but artlessness, through a
direct and unfashionable pose. Here, however, the shift from the slightly
turned head found in both the cartoon and related portraiture of Henry
(for example, the Thyssen portrait) to the mural’s direct stare renders this
male figure even more authoritative and imposing.22
Henry is not just powerful but specifically masculine, as evidenced by
his pose, his beard and his codpiece, where our attention, String argues, is
deliberately drawn by the convergence of two triangles:
The splayed legs and the distance between the feet create the first; the shoul-
ders are an equal width and form one side of the second triangle with the
bent right arm acting as the second side and the left arm the third. Holbein
has, thereby, created a clear focal point at the groin, one which forces his
viewers to confront […] the large, protruding codpiece.23
We have already seen that the volume and luxury of Henry’s garments
serve as conveyors of prestige and power. Carole Frick observes that as
clothing for the elite ‘became a powerful visual designator of the more
abstract political and social concerns of those wearing it’, the meaning of
the codpiece was transformed. Although the codpiece had initially emerged
‘as a necessary modest addition to complete the male costume’ comprised
of short doublets and tunics, what had previously served primarily as a
protective component of armour, becomes, along with beards and short
hair, part of the displayed vocabulary of masculinity.24 Ostentatious cod-
pieces, accordingly, are a prominent feature of sixteenth-century fashion
and portraiture, serving as an affirmation of the wearer’s physical endow-
ment and potency. The specific emphasis on the codpiece and the virile
representation of Henry VIII is significant in a work explicitly focused on
genealogy and the perpetuation of the Tudor lineage, established only two
generations previously by Henry VII.
In Remigius’ reproduction of this image the inscription on the stone
altar configures verbally Henry VIII’s almost overweening virility as a
heroic competition he has won: ‘Great the contest (and) the rivalry, great
the debate whether the father or the son were victor’.
If it rejoice thee to behold the glorious likenesses of heroes, look on these,

for greater no tablet ever bore. Great the contest (and) the rivalry, great
the debate whether the father or the son were victor. Each was the victor,
the father over his foes, for he quenched the fires of civil strife and to his
people granted lasting peace. The son, born to yet greater destiny, from the
altars banished the undeserving and in their place set men of worth. To his
outstanding virtue the presumption of popes yielded, and when Henry VIII
in his hand wielded the scepter (true) religion was restored, and in his reign
the precepts of God began to be held in their due honour.25
The inscription’s depiction of the son ‘born to yet greater destiny’ than
that of his peace-bringing father mirrors a progressive view of his succes-
sion evident in the historiography of the Tudor period, as Strong points
out, in which the Kings of England are presented as a pageant of worthy
(or negative) exempla, culminating in the glory of Henry VIII, termed
by Polydorius Vergil the ‘fruit of the union’ of the houses of Lancaster
and York, ‘in whom the true royal lines were joined’.26 As we have seen,
Henry VIII is also the dominant and most active figure in the painting.
Neither Queen meets the viewer’s gaze; rather each stares impassively into
the distance beyond the left side of the painting, her body aligned with her
head. Henry VII’s eyes do engage the viewer, but his face is painted in a
three-quarter view less striking than his son’s full-frontal position, and his
robes, their ermine lining visible at the cuffs and in the long sleeve slits,
146 N. YAVNEH KLOS
bear more resemblance to the gowns of the Queens on the left than to his
son’s fashion-forward and overtly masculine attire.
Critics have frequently pointed out the resemblance of this painting’s
structure to that of Holbein’s Ambassadors, painted in 1534.27 A full dis-
cussion of that work is well beyond the scope of this chapter, except to
note that both images, according to Strong, lack a central focal point; a
dilemma solved for the earlier painting, he argues, by the placement of a
still-life depicting books and instruments at the work’s centre, a position
here occupied ‘unsatisfactorily’ by the mural’s dedicatory inscription.28 In
my view, however, a possible solution to the problem is offered by another
genre of work Strong mentions as ‘an immediate single compositional
source’: the commonly depicted Madonna and Child enthroned within
a room and flanked by saints, known in Italian as a sacra conversazione.
Strong gives as an example an altarpiece by Cosimo Roselli, observing
that ‘by removing the Virgin and Child the group would be reduced to
four figures placed in an ascending order on either side of a marble dais.
The source for Holbein’s great work could not be more succinctly dem-
onstrated’.29 To me, the solution to the ‘missing central focal point’ is
right here and is, in fact, explicitly spelled out in Remigius’ Petworth copy
of the mural, likely created for the Seymour family. In this version, the
inscription of the stone altar is replaced by a representation of Edward
VI, a smaller, mirror image of his father, with the same feathered cap and
an ermine-bordered cloak (recalling his grandfather’s) that—despite his
delicate head, hands and legs—has the same capacious and expansive vol-
ume as his father’s. The white diagonals of his bent arms (the right, like
his father’s, holding a rapier) guide the viewer’s eyes to his hands which,
along with the blue pouch that extends from the right, frame Edward’s
own projecting codpiece that asserts his place in the ascendant Tudor
dynasty—somewhat wistfully, in this retrospective copy, since the Prince
in fact died without issue. In the Petworth version, that generative link is
underscored by the King’s emphasised codpiece, which directs our gaze
to the boy; in the original mural dated 1537 (Edward’s birth year), the
King’s generative organ points directly in front of the altar, suggesting
his son as the definitive resolution to the inscription’s question, and the
absent presence in the painting.
Just as the reading of even as erudite a critic as Strong is inflected by
later, less sympathetic versions of Henry’s iconic full-frontal image, our
understanding of the copies—and of the mural itself, were it still extant—
is coloured by our knowledge of the subsequent events of succession: the
death in adolescence of the sickly Edward VI; the brief reign of Lady Jane
Gray; the restoration of Catholicism under Mary; and the Tudor triumph
of Elizabeth, who of course died without an heir. The ideal, as well as the
real contemporary viewer of the 1530s, knew none of this, but only that
both Tudor Kings depicted had faced repeated threats to their rule. Their
male successor would, it was fervently hoped, settle the succession after
the turmoil caused not only by the attempts at rebellion and assassination
from the outside, but also the internecine strife created by the divorce, and
all the concomitant events surrounding Henry VIII’s first two marriages.
Even the way in which the representation of Henry VIII surpasses that of
VII underscores that the King’s—any king’s—ultimate dynastic triumph
is fathering a son. Paradoxically, however, until that son himself becomes
king, the Prince points to the power of his reigning father.
That understanding of the living king’s son as a projection of his father
can be helpful in reading Holbein’s New Year’s painting of Edward, a
portrait not so much of a toddler but rather a prince, proleptically posed
and wardrobed to reflect his future role as King of England as well as his
status as the son of Henry VIII. The connection is further emphasised by
the verses inscribed on the parapet, exhorting the ‘little one’ (parvule) to
emulate his father:
Little one! Imitate your father, and be the heir of his virtue, the world con-
tains nothing greater—Heaven and Nature could scarcely give a son whose
glory should surpass that of such a father. You only equal the acts of your
parent, the wishes of men cannot go beyond this. Surpass him, and you
have surpassed all the kings the world ever worshipped, and none will ever
surpass you.30
The theme of rivalry that the Whitehall inscription established between

two successive and successful kings is evoked again; here, the c ompetition
serves to praise the father by suggesting that even to equal him is already
to surpass all others. The theme of imitation is reflected in the presentation
of the child within the painting; although his body is turned slightly to his
right, Edward is presented facing frontally in the central foreground of the
painting, mirroring his father’s presentation in the portrait of Henry now
in Rome, and attributed to Holbein’s studio (that Henry likewise appears
against a blue ground, as did Edward, although the colour has now faded).31
Although the Prince is not here popping out of the frame, as Henry does
in the Thyssen portrait, he is the image’s sole figure, and his rich red cloak
148 N. YAVNEH KLOS
creates a monumentality that joins with the parapet to establish a pyramid.

Like the portraits of Henry, Edward faces towards the viewer, although his
blue eyes are cast slightly down, in contrast to his father’s.
Edward has fair skin with a rosy complexion, coral bowed lips, and the
extremely chubby cheeks of a well-fed toddler. His delicate features and
colouring, along with his slightly downcast eyes, recall feminine ideals of
beauty during the period, even as the golden-red fringe along his fore-
head remind us of his father. The cap on his head, topped with delicately
depicted white feathers, recalls the headgear of Henry VIII in his own
portraits, while the close-fitting bonnet beneath seems the only item an
actual baby might wear. Otherwise, he is richly garbed in clothing appro-
priate for an adult male, in expensive red and cloth of gold, with bright
white ruffs at the wrist and at his neck, serving—like the feather in his
cap—to accentuate the rich colours of the rest of his garments.
But if Edward’s garments project authority and privilege, as in his
father’s portraits, his hands are dimpled and baby-like. One is open, wav-
ing in a possible gesture of munificence, while the other holds a gold rattle.
Although it has been argued the rattle is a burlesque of the kingly accou-
trements of orb and sceptre, missing from portraits of Henry but implied
by his prepossessing presence, the shape and colouring of the ornate red
and gold toy also evoke the elaborate codpieces that we have seen to be a
distinctive presence in portraiture of this period in general and that partic-
ularly characterise representations of Henry (notably, the portrait now in
Rome and, of course, the Whitehall mural). In the discussion of codpieces
referenced above, Frick has argued that this ‘socially constructed image of
masculinity’, the codpiece, serves to ‘demonstrate familial stability’. Like
Edward’s clothing, complexion and hair, the codpiece in his chubby little
hand suggests not just his own future power and virility, but that of the
father he is called to emulate.
The Latin inscription by Robert Morison exhorts the parvule patrissa
(the father’s little one) to emulate his father and be heir to his virtue.
It verbally underscores the fact that, despite the boy’s regal bearing, he
remains endearingly a child, albeit one containing the seeds of greatness,
by virtue of the legitimate parentage that shines through his physical
features. Even the rattle, in its resemblance to a codpiece, conjures his
father’s masculinity and prowess (sexual and otherwise), as it proleptically
evokes not just the son’s role as heir but also his status as future father to
future Tudor heirs.
Notes
1. As Margaret Miles and others have argued, a contemporary understanding
of Trecento images of the lactating Virgin would have been informed by
the ubiquity of breastfeeding (including wet nursing) in a society without
refrigeration or formula, and by high maternal and infant mortality rates
exacerbated first by famine and then the Black Death. See Margaret Miles,
‘The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in
Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture’, in The Female Body in Western Culture,
ed. By Susan Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986),
pp. 193–208, passim, and Naomi Yavneh, ‘To Bare or Not Too Bare:
Sofonisba Anguissola’s Nursing Madonna and the Womanly Art of
Breastfeeding’ in Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early
Modern Period, ed. By Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot and
Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2000) pp. 65–81.
2. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern
Oblivion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983, 2nd ed 1996).
3. Edward was born 12 October, 1537; his mother, Jane, died on 24 October.
The presentation of the painting by the artist to Henry VIII on 1 January,
1539 is recorded in the New Year’s Gift Roll in the Folger Shakespeare
Library, Washington, Ms. Z. d.11, dated ‘First daie of January anno xxx’ of
the reign of Henry VIII, ‘By hanse holbyne a table of the pictour of the
prince grace.’
4. An excellent and detailed consideration of portraiture is provided in Lorne
Campbell, Renaissance Portraits (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1990). See also John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance
(New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966).
5. The bibliography and debate on this topic are broad. See, for example, Roy
Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII (London: Routledge and K. Paul for the
Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art, 1967), Tatiana String, Art and
Communication in the Reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot and Burlington,
VT: Ashgate Press, 2008), Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early
Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), John N. King, Tudor Royal
Iconography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
6. Titian, for example, painted a portrait of the Duchess of Urbino, Giulia
Varano, from some of her garments and her husband’s verbal description
of his wife; see Campbell, p. 144. A century after Henry VIII’s death,
Charles I’s niece Sophia, Electress of Hanover, wrote of her surprise to see
Queen Henrietta Maria, ‘whom I had seen so beautiful in her painting [by
Van Dyck], was really a tiny woman … with long, withered arms, crooked
shoulders, and teeth projecting from her mouth like defences.’ My transla-
tion from the French quoted in Campbell, p. 247, n. 9, citing A. Kocher,
ed. Memoiren der Herzogin Sophie nachmals Kurfurstin von Hannover
150 N. YAVNEH KLOS
(Publicationen aus den K. Presussischen Staatsarchiven, iv, 1), Leipzig,

1879, p. 38. That the primary purpose of Renaissance portraiture was
often not simple verisimilitude does not negate that paintings were often
used in arranging noble alliances. Holbein, notably, was sent to the conti-
nent after the death of Jane Seymour to capture the likenesses of several
potential Queens, including Christina of Denmark and, ill-fatedly, Anne of
Cleves. The aims of such portraiture would have determined certain fea-
tures such as the pose: both women are seen frontally (and Christina, full-
length), not fashionable at the time, but designed, presumably, to present
the women in a literally straight-forward manner. That choice, of course,
does not mean that the representation was not in some way idealised or
that no flaws were hidden, any more than in other portraits. Lorne
Campbell suggests that the frontal portrait of Anne might have hid the
very long nose that Henry found distasteful.
7. Strong, p. 35. The 1667 copy is still in the Royal Collections while the
1669 copy is now at Petworth house.
8. Susan Foister, Holbein in England (London: Tate Publications, 2006),
p. 175. The cartoon, which measures 257.8 × 137.2 cm, is in the National
Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 4027).
9. Foister, p. 175.
10. Foister, p. 178.
11. Foister, p. 178.
12. Eric Ives, ‘Henry VIII: the Political Perspective’, in The Reign of Henry
VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety ed. Diarmaid MacCulloch (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 16.
13. Greg Walker, ‘Henry VIII and the Invention of the Royal Court’, History
Today, 47 (1997), p. 13.
14. Foister, pp. 178–179.
15. String, p. 152.
16. String, p. 39.
17. String, p. 146.
18. Strong, p. 39.
19. Unfortunately, the exact structure and design of the Whitehall Privy

Chamber are unknown. According to Foister, Holbein in England, the
chamber was 22 feet (7 meters) wide on the south wall; based on the car-
toon, the mural’s dimensions would have been 11’10” × 8’10” (3.6 × 2.7
meters) or perhaps a little bigger (p. 181). The placement of the mural
within the Privy Chamber is a matter of scholarly debate, especially regard-
ing height. Foister argues that the architectural detailing within the mural
would have made it a continuation of the decorative painting that appeared
on the upper level above a layer of panelling, and below a frieze that
extends in paint into the mural. The work’s perspective is thus ‘that of an
altarpiece, to which people gazed up’ (pp. 51–52). Henry’s ‘dais, chair and
cloth of estate’ would have been placed below his image, framing ‘the
gross figure of Henry VIII’ as ‘the living embodiment of the genealogy of
the Houses of York and Lancaster above him’ (p. 54). More recently,
Foister has proposed that the almost life-size of the figures suggests that
‘they and the space around them were intended to deceive viewers into
believing that they were in the royal presence’, pointing out that ‘the feet
of the foreground figures, who stand on a step, are shown slightly from
above, not from below’ (p. 182).
20. According to early modern humoral theory, milk is blood, whitened.
21. Sanchez-Canton, 1921, p. 63.
22. The frontal pose was a model for subsequent portraiture, for example the
portrait now in Rome.
23. String, p. 149.
24. Carol Frick, ‘Boys to Men: Codpieces and Masculinity in Sixteenth-

Century Europe’, in Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood,
ed. Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh (London and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate Press, 2011), p. 158.
25. Si ucat heroum claras videsse figuras,
Specta has, maiores nulla tabella tulit.
Certamen magnum, Is, quaestio magna paterne.
Fius an vincat. Vicit. Uterque quidem.
Iste suos hostes, patriaeque incendia saepe
Sustulit, et pacem civibus usque dedit.
Filius ad maiora quidem prognatus ab aris
Sumovet indignosi substituitque probos.
Certae, virtuti, paparum audacia cessit,
Henrico octavo sceptra gerente manu
Reddita religio est, isto regnante deique
Dogmata ceperunt esse in honore suo.
Cited by Strong, p. 57, where the author credits Margot Eates with the
translation.
26. Polydorius Vergil, Anglica Historia. Cited in Strong, p. 58.
27. Foister, for example, notes that Henry VII’s pose echoes that of Georges
de Selve, but in reverse; p. 183.
28. Strong, p. 49.
29. Strong, pp. 49–50.
30. Richard Morison on Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Edward, Prince
of Wales, oil on oak, c.1538, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
31. The pigment (according to Foister, pp. 197–198), was the blue glass pig-
ment smalt, also used in the background of the painting of Jane Seymour,
his mother, now in Vienna.
CHAPTER 9
Beyond the Palace: The Transmission

of Political Power in the Clifford Circle
Jessica L. Malay
Lady Anne Clifford is the most well-known member of the Clifford fam-
ily of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her fame arose early
through her administration of large portions of Northwest England
including most of Westmoreland and the northwest of Yorkshire. She also
held significant dower lands in Kent and Wiltshire. Anne Clifford sought
to contextualise her authority through her manuscript publications, most
especially her Great Books of Record.1 Her letters, historical work, and life
writing provide unique insight into how the familial was often the politi-
cal. These texts illustrate Clifford family strategies over the centuries to
secure political power and ensure the continuation of this power into
future generations. Anne Clifford served as a key intermediary figure in
the transmission of political power between her parents’ generation in the
reign of Elizabeth I and her grandchildren after the Restoration and into
the eighteenth century. Her texts provide the documentary evidence that
future generations would use when their rights were challenged, and also
provided a rationale for their political activities. As such these texts reveal
J.L. Malay (*)

Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Huddersfield,
Huddersfield, UK
e-mail: j.l.malay@hud.ac.uk

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_9
154 J.L. MALAY
how one early modern family in the seventeenth century secured and dis-
tributed political power across generations.
In the early sixteenth century the Clifford family was determined to
re-establish its power after devastating loss during the Civil Wars of the
previous century when the Clifford lands were confiscated and the child
Henry, tenth Lord Clifford, was raised quietly on his mother’s lands in
the north, far away from the court of Edward IV. With the restoration of
their northern land holdings during the reign of Henry VII, the Cliffords
aggressively pursued the restoration of their political status, with Henry,
eleventh Lord Clifford, sent to court to be raised with Henry VIII. The
friendship between the two Henries resulted in the eleventh Lord Clifford
being raised to Earl of Cumberland. This first Earl of Cumberland, keen
to capitalise on his relationship with the King, was able to arrange the mar-
riage of his son, another Henry, to Eleanor Brandon, daughter of Henry
VIII’s sister the princess, and at one point queen consort of France, Mary.
Anne Clifford’s father George, third Lord Clifford, was also keen to make
the most of the position bequeathed to him by his father and grandfa-
ther. While his own mother was a Dacre, his half-sister, Margaret Clifford
granddaughter of Mary, was at one point the next heir to the throne of
England according to Henry VIII’s will, and this placed George in an
excellent position to pursue his dynastic aims. But while he excelled as
a courtier, being chosen as the Queen’s champion in 1590, success at
court and power in the north required a great deal of money. George
Clifford believed that adventures upon the seas during the naval conflicts
with Spain would return both financial and political advantages. And while
he found success illusive he was determined to turn his greatest military
success, the sacking of San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1598, to his advantage.
With this in mind he wrote an account of this adventure in a letter to his
sister-in-law Anne Russell, Countess of Warwick in the hopes of securing
further support of the Queen for his sea adventures. In the surviving holo-
graph manuscript, his account of the sacking of Puerto Rico is followed
by a detailed plan for another sea adventure designed to cripple the King
of Spain’s finances and force him to sue for peace, thus securing English
dominance of the seas. Clifford wrote to the Countess that, ‘I take God to
witness before whom wee must all answer, I went this tyme abroad more
to doe her Majestie service, then for getting wealth as it is made apparant
by my proceedings at Porta Rico’.2 And while the comment about his
desire for wealth may be slightly disingenuous, he hoped to enlist Anne
Russell’s support in his plans to defeat the Spanish. Clifford had good
BEYOND THE PALACE: THE TRANSMISSION OF POLITICAL POWER... 155
reason to suppose Russell would be a potent political ally in promoting his

military plans. Her place in court and her access to Elizabeth was nearly
unprecedented. In addition Russell had long supported and promoted
George Clifford. In a letter from the mid-1590s Russell wrote to her sis-
ter, Margaret, wife to George Clifford, that she was ‘careful of hym’.3
Clearly Clifford hoped that Russell’s care would extend to her furtherance
of what he believed was a sure opportunity for defeating Spanish power
in Europe, thus securing his own position in the court of Elizabeth I and
furthering the interests of the Clifford family.4
In the 1590s the Countess of Warwick was an important ally both for the
furtherance of political strategies and the promotion of personal ambition
(so often interlinked in this period). In 1594 Lawrence Smith wrote from
Ireland asking the Countess to assist in the appointment of a new chief jus-
tice of Ireland following the death of William Weston. Apparently Smith as
well as William Russell, Lord Deputy of Ireland (from 1594–1597), could
not get an answer from Lord Burghley concerning the appointment and
turned to the Countess to apply pressure on him.5 William Russell was
Anne Russell’s brother. The Countess continued to participate in affairs in
Ireland, suggesting a captain for the 1596 military expedition (as did her
sister Margaret). There is much evidence that throughout the last decade
of Elizabeth’s life Anne Russell remained one of Queen Elizabeth’s inti-
mates and as such was much sought after as a conduit for favours to and
from the Queen. During Elizabeth’s reign, Anne Russell operated as the
chief protector and promoter of her family’s intergenerational ambitions
as can be seen not only in her support of George and Margaret Clifford,
but also her wider Russell family. Her staunch support of her family reveals
an understanding of the importance of dynasty building and the opportu-
nities intimate access to the monarch could provide.
This understanding is also shown in the ageing Countess’s mentoring of
her niece, Anne Clifford, who spent time in her aunt’s court chambers, in
the ways of the courtier.6 This experience was key to Anne Clifford’s early
political development. During her short time at court, Anne was able to
witness women exercising great power, including Elizabeth herself. This
experience encouraged the development of Anne’s political will and gave
her insight into effective political strategies as discussed below. She used
this knowledge in later years to ensure a nearly unassailable political posi-
tion in Westmorland that secured for her progeny continuity and protec-
tion from the vicissitudes of the wider political landscape.
156 J.L. MALAY
Anne Russell was a member of that select group who stood vigil around
the Queen in the last hours of Elizabeth’s reign, watching her own politi-
cal power ebb with the dying monarch. Anne Clifford remembers the days
after Elizabeth’s death:
At this time we used to go very much to Whitehall and walked much in

the garden which was much frequented by Lords and Ladies, being all full
of several hopes, every man expecting mountains and finding molehills,
excepting Sir Robert Cecil and the house of the Howards who hated my
mother and did not much love my aunt of Warwick.7
This comment, while likely written in retrospect, reveals Anne Clifford’s

developing political instinct concerning the uncertain nature of political
power that depended upon the will of the sovereign.
After the death of Queen Elizabeth, Anne Clifford observed the loss of
power of her aunt and the powerful women who once served the Queen.8
This lesson was not lost upon Anne who came to understand through
this experience that court influence relied on the favour of the monarch
and his or her inner circle. With the death of Elizabeth, Anne Russell’s
influence evaporated. However, George Clifford’s political situation expe-
rienced a vast improvement. Anne Russell’s support for George Clifford
throughout Elizabeth’s reign was useful, but failed to secure for him the
key political positions he craved. On James VI and I’s accession he was able
to broker an advantageous place within the newly established court through
his aristocratic heritage, the useful position of his northern lands and to a
certain extent a set of shared common interests, including hunting. James
entrusted Clifford with the wardship of the borderlands between England
and Scotland and on June 8, 1603 he also appointed Clifford as the warden
of the English Marches and captain of Carlisle. James also knighted 23 men
sponsored by George Clifford in July of 1603, a significant act of favour that
bolstered Clifford’s powerbase in the north. Earlier, barely two weeks after
Elizabeth’s death, Clifford was made a member of the Privy Council—a
position that had eluded him throughout Elizabeth’s reign.9 Anne Clifford
witnessed her father’s advancement within the court, while at the same time
experiencing more painfully her mother’s fall and debasement.
Her aunt Anne Russell’s removal from court power also resulted in the
loss of political influence of her sisters including Anne Clifford’s mother
Margaret and stymied intergenerational transmission of power through
the female line for decades. George Clifford made his brother Francis
Clifford heir to the northern Clifford estates denying his daughter Anne
Clifford any political power in the region. As her mother Margaret Russell
would complain:
Her Uncle of Cumberland have more landes & honours left him than many
other Earles of England hath; she being the first daughter & sole heire to
an Earle since the time of the Conquest left without any land at all, & the
first of all times as I think, that was so deceitfully wrested out of the Lands
of her Inheritance.10
Margaret Russell refused to accept this attempt by George Clifford to

redirect the intergenerational flow of power from his daughter and direct
descendent in favour of the male Clifford line. Unfortunately, the political
climate in the newly established court of James VI and I remained hostile
to the ladies Elizabeth favoured. As political power in this period contin-
ued to be very much centred upon the body of the monarch, the change
from a female to a male monarch resulted in direct access to the monarch
being mediated through male attendants. James VI and I favoured his
male courtiers even to the exclusion of his Queen, creating a further bar-
rier to female influence in his reign.
Margaret Russell, whom Anne described as much loved by Queen
Elizabeth, was clearly loathed by James VI and I.11 Margaret Russell com-
plains in a letter to Lodovick Stuart, the Earl of Lennox ‘I know some
Ladies that were suspected to bee acquainted with the gunpowder treason
that had more grace at the court than I now had’.12 To Henry Howard, the
Earl of Northampton, she wrote: ‘I cannot follow the King’s house, yett
I will attend his going out & coming in & cast aside the thoughts of any
scorns I meet with’.13 While to Edward Bruce, Lord Kinloss she describes
her relationship to King James as that of a mouse to a lion.14 These letters
were written after George Clifford’s death as Margaret Russell fought to
secure the inheritance of the Clifford northern lands for her daughter in
opposition to the interests of leading courtiers, most especially Robert Cecil.
But even before her husband’s death, James showed complete disdain for
Margaret Russell. He made no attempts to enforce an agreement entered
into by George Clifford to provide support for Margaret Russell after their
marital separation. Margaret wrote several pleading letters to James which
the King ignored, and which further incensed George against her.15
In defending the rights of her daughter, Margaret Russell instead turned
to the law and marriage politics in an attempt to secure Anne Clifford’s
158 J.L. MALAY
inheritance, and in this she was initially quite successful. The marriage of
Anne Clifford to Richard Sackville secured the patronage of Prince Henry,
which Margaret clearly hoped would prove an effective counter-balance to
James’s hostility.16 In this way Margaret Russell effectively inserted a male
into the equation in the hopes that the gender bias that had influenced
George Clifford in the disposition of his estates could in some way be
countermanded. In addition several legal victories in the years 1608 and
1609 justified Anne Clifford’s claims to the northern lands of her father.
Many of the records now found in Anne Clifford’s Great Books were
selected because they provided clear proof that George Clifford could not
legally pass over his daughter and leave these lands to his brother Francis.
Unfortunately the death of Prince Henry in 1612 and the marriage of
Francis Clifford’s son, Henry to Robert Cecil’s daughter Frances that
same year, threw the decision regarding the lands back into the hostile lap
of James I.
These experiences in Anne Clifford’s youth were to prove influential
in her own political strategies. Her observations of Elizabeth’s court con-
vinced her that women could exercise political power effectively, while the
deaths of Elizabeth and Prince Henry and the hostility both she and her
mother experienced at the hands of James I illustrated the risks of basing
political power on a position in court. However, these early experiences
did not completely deter Anne Clifford from seeking court-based support
for her goals. Her second marriage to Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke
and Montgomery, was contracted because Anne hoped to leverage his
position in the court of Charles I to ensure that the northern lands of her
father descended to her as stipulated in the 1617 agreement.17 Herbert
was Lord Chamberlain of Charles I’s household, and was an important
and favoured figure in the court when Anne Clifford married him in 1630.
This last foray into court politics was to prove a final salient—though
completely unforeseen—lesson on the dangers of relying on courtly favour
in search of the political power necessary for dynasty building and mainte-
nance. The Civil Wars and the deposition and execution of Charles I could
have jeopardised Anne Clifford’s careful strategy for securing an uncon-
tested inheritance of her father’s lands for herself and her heirs. Fortunately,
her husband, Philip Herbert, managed to navigate the treacherous politi-
cal climate by joining the Parliamentarians, thus ensuring that any claims
she had to the Clifford lands would be respected, while her daughters’
families remained royalist. This allowed Anne Clifford to retain supporters
in both camps. The result of this canny political manoeuvring meant that
she inherited her father’s estate at her cousin’s death uncontested, and
that she retained this estate throughout this period of political unrest.18
As Clifford watched her family, friends, acquaintances, and the royal
family itself suffer unexpected reversals of fortune and loss of power, she
was composing her Great Books. In the Great Books she chronicled over
500 years of Veteripont and Clifford power in Westmorland and Craven
strongholdings in Yorkshire. The vital contributions by women provided
models from which Clifford derived strategies, inspiration, and justifica-
tion as she witnessed the political disarray of the Civil Wars. Much later
Clifford would underline in her copy of John Barclay’s His Argenis, ‘many
of us are sicke of Kings diseases in our private fortune: wee are Kings
to our Suppliants’.19 Clifford had watched the effect of ‘King’s diseases’
on her own fortunes and those of others. Her research on the Clifford
dynasty convinced her that the remedy was to establish regional political
autonomy that could insulate familial interests from the changing fortunes
of the monarchy.
She began to enact this strategy as early as 1643 shortly after she inher-
ited the Clifford lands in Westmorland and Skipton. The Civil Wars made
the north too dangerous for her to travel there herself. Instead she man-
aged her estates through the use of agents, most especially her cousin
John Lowther. Even at a distance Clifford built up loyalties and dispensed
patronage in the region in order to consolidate authority in her hands.
Upon her arrival in 1649 she immediately began rebuilding Skipton
Castle as well as pursuing the reestablishment of her rights in the region,
including the renegotiation of tenancies. These actions illustrate Anne’s
understanding that her power was dependent upon her financial and social
position in the area.
These activities soon elicited resistance from her tenants and unwanted
scrutiny of the Parliamentarian government, nervous at the reestablish-
ment of a possible royal stronghold at Skipton. Clifford had cannily
avoided involvement in the wars, maintaining relations with important
parliamentarian figures, even while her daughters, son-in-laws, and grand-
sons suffered under the penalties imposed for their royalist activities. Her
apparent neutrality served her well when her carefully planned activities in
Yorkshire came under attack. At this point she appealed to Adam Baynes,
a parliamentarian officer also described as a ‘key satellite’ of Cromwell’s
Major General John Lambert.20 Baynes was also a kinsman of Clifford’s
client Richard Clapham, and in 1649 Baynes was appointed as a Member
of Parliament for Appleby by Richard Cromwell—a borough that was
160 J.L. MALAY
increasingly under her own political control. On September 10, 1659

Clifford wrote to Baynes concerning a threatened second slighting of
Skipton Castle:
I have bin informed as well by your kinsman Master Richard Clapham, as

by other hands, howe much I have bin obliged to you for your readines to
afford mee all friendly offices and respects in any of my businesses, wherein I
have had justice and right on my side; which I shall ever thankfully acknowl-
edge to you. Itt is the vindication of my just rights, that hath created mee
(unjustly) some enemyes in theis parts who not beinge able to compass their
ends in a legall manner, seek to doe itt by way of revenge, in endeavoringe
to have my castle of Skipton pulld downe & demolisht and to that end I am
informed, have beene procuringe hands to a Peticion against itt.
I hope itt cannot, by any honest or good men, bee objected to mee as a
crime; in makinge my owne house, att my owne charge; an habitable place;
which before I assure you Sir itt was not nor sufficient to contayne my selfe
and my family [household] with ordinary accommodacion. This Sir, is my
condicion, and I doubt not but I may have the favor and assistance of all
good men to preserve mee from violence; and the continuance of yours, as
opportunitie shal bee offered.21
In this letter Clifford asserts her rights and portrays those who act against
her as intransigent men with no respect for law or decency, attacking her
simply because she has defended her ancient manorial rights. She was at
the time taking legal action against her tenants in Skipton as she sought
to update tenancy agreements. The courts upheld her claims against her
tenants, who were forced to accept Anne’s terms. But resentment lin-
gered and Anne believed—or at least wished to believe—that the threat
to Skipton Castle was a result of these resentments, rather than legitimate
military concerns. She also positioned herself within gender and cultural
norms, which she hoped would elicit a normed response from Baynes. By
describing Skipton as her house and her rebuilding efforts as a response to
the needs of her family or household, Clifford attempted to present herself
as the responsible matron who sees to the needs of her dependents. Her
plea to Baynes and all ‘good men to preserve mee from violence’ works
within this cultural subject position calling upon accepted expectations
(albeit idealised ones) for men to protect women, especially widows, and
for widows to provide adequate care for their dependents.
Her next letter to Baynes, written a month later, again engages with
these norms, but also employs ameliorative language and counter-offers
that address possible military concerns, as well as inferring that her support
is wide-ranging. The subtext suggests that her friends could be Baynes’s
friends should he prove effective in his assistance to her:
I am confident this castle of myne will never bee found to be any such place
of strength if it were viewed by persons of judgement and indifferently. If so
much favour might bee procured for mee from the House either by a refer-
ence to Major Generall Lilburne or some other officers of the army, justices
of peace, or other gentlemen of quality in the countey to view the place and
to certify the untenablenesse strength, or what might bee done to make it
soe with the least prejudice that it may not be left to the giddy-headed mul-
titude to throw it downe, then I should nott doubt that my house would
suffer any greate harme. And to this purpose I have now sent upp your kins-
mann Mr Richard Clapham; both to informe yourselfe & other my good
freindes more particularly of the condition thereof, and to imploy my inter-
est with my freindes in the House and others for the accomplishing of this
my desire.22
It is unclear whether it was Clifford’s political connections, pleas to Major

General Lambert, her argument that Skipton Castle was not militarily
viable, or the march of George Monck and his army from the north in
January and his triumphant entry into London in February, that saved
Skipton Castle. The last months of 1659 were perilous ones, but Clifford
navigated these successfully, preserving her stronghold in Skipton.
The 1650s were a time of consolidation of Clifford’s authority in the
north. Her major challenges were the political instability of the period
and her struggles with her tenants. As her letters to Baynes illustrate, she
maintained political connections in Cromwell’s government while at the
same time avoiding any taint of active support that could have costly con-
sequences should Charles II be reinstated. She was aided in maintaining
this delicate political balance by her daughters and son-in-laws who were
staunch Royalists. When her castles were garrisoned by Parliamentarian
forces, she passively acquiesced.23 Her comments on the summer
disturbances of 1651 give a clear indication of her concern about ‘Kings’
diseases’ when she notes in her summary of that year:
Manie places of Westmorland and especially my castle of Aplebie was full

of soldiers who lay here a great parte of that sommer. Butt I thank God I
162 J.L. MALAY
received no harme or dammage by them nor by the King [Charles II] and
his army who thatt August came into England and within sixe or seven
myles of Apleby Castle though they came not to yt.24
Clifford’s concern is clearly the safety of her lands, not the wider political
conflicts being played out regionally and nationally. Her political activi-
ties during this period, as indeed throughout her life, were designed to
safeguard her lands for posterity, an important goal for both men and
women of the period. If courtly intrigue had suggested to her early in life
the dangers of over-reliance on any one court or monarch, the war made
clear that the wisest political course was to position oneself ambiguously
and attempt to negotiate crises through a network of connections in sev-
eral camps. This political strategy in the last decade of the Interregnum
worked to protect Clifford’s holdings in the north from external political
forces.
However, in order to truly secure her position she also needed to assert
her authority upon the region itself. Initially she attempted to position
herself as a benevolent maternal figure, using rhetoric similar to that
employed by Queen Elizabeth. In a letter delivered to John Lowther in
April 1644 and intended for her tenants in Westmorland she wrote:
This is to desire my good and lovinge tennentts in Westmorland nott to

paye anney renttes or fines thatt are grone due to mee since the deathe of
my cosen garrmain the latte Earl of Cumberland butt to keepe such rentees
or fines due to mee in ther one [own] handes tille you shall receve farder
partichulur derecxciques [directions] from mee under my one hand writ-
tinge […] which will increase my love, and good meninge [meaning] more
and more to all my tennantes in Westmorland hom [whom] I intend iff God
spare my life to bee a good Land Laddy to you all.25
However, a later undated draft of a letter to these same tenants, while

reiterating her commitment to be a good and generous landlady to them,
also strongly defends her ancestral rights and signals her intention to insist
on the tenants’ obedient acceptance of these:
They [the tenants] have moved mee earnestly to limitte my […] suckses-
sors, in the lands to take from them heere-after butt 7d [shilling] fine; which
request I have absoluttley denied. Yett to express my greatt love to this
countrey, and my tennents in it; I do by this writing in my one [own] hand
declare that itt is my ernest desire, and a charge I laye itt on my posterety,
that thay never gooe aboutt to rase unreasonable fines in this countrey […]
Butt to bee good landlordes to them [the tenants] after the commendable
costom of my dessessed Noble Ancisteres the Vetrepontes and Cliffordes;
who hath bin suckcesssley Lorde and Barrons of Westmerland from the 5:
yeare of Kinge Johns time till now; and most of them good to ther ten-
nants […] [However, concerning the tenants claims] In regarde itt is abso-
luttley in my power to give and dispose of my landes in this countrey of
Westmorland to hom I please.26
This mixture of implacable insistence on her rights along with a rhetoric of

benevolence illustrates Clifford’s strategy as she imposed her authority on
the northern lands of her inheritance. Her many benevolent and charitable
works were accompanied by her vigilant defence of her rights in courts,
her eviction of recalcitrant tenants, and in one case the execution of one of
the ringleaders in the disastrously ill-conceived Kaber Rigg plot. Clifford
records his execution in her summary of 1664:
In which time they kept the assizes in the moothall in Appleby towne where
Robert Atkinson one of my tennants in Mallerstang and that had been my
great enemy was condemned to be hanged, drawne, and quartered as a trai-
tor to the King for having a hand in the late plott and conspiracie so as he
was executed accordingly the first day of the month followinge.27
And while technically his execution was a result of his treason, his leader-
ship of the Westmorland tenants against Clifford’s demands was part of his
larger political resistance towards the reestablishment of feudal rights in
Westmorland. His participation in the Kaber Rigg plot and his legal chal-
lenges to Clifford’s rights in Westmorland were part of the same political
impetus.
Clifford sited her rights in her ancestral heritage. Her careful collecting of
documents related to these rights and compiled in the Great Books created
a body of proof that was unassailable, and she was able to defeat her tenants
in Skipton and in Westmorland in the courts. Most (with the exception of
agitators like Atkinson) eventually accepted this defeat and sought a more
amiable relationship with Clifford resulting in a state of mutual reciprocity
in the region (again recalling Queen Elizabeth’s preferred political strat-
egy). Clifford rebuilt the infrastructure of Westmorland and Skipton using
local labour, bought vast amounts of foodstuffs and other goods from local
producers and vendors, provided patronage for young men and women,
increased educational opportunities for many, funded projects to care for
164 J.L. MALAY
the indigent elderly, and even provided support to lessen the suffering of
prisoners in Westmorland jails. She promoted the careers of gentlemen in
the region placing them in lucrative local offices and using her connections
in the south and her network of relatives to provide opportunities for these
gentlemen and their sons outside of Westmorland and Yorkshire, which in
turn increased her own political position more widely.
A particularly good example of the strength of her political position
in Westmorland and Westminster in the later years of her life is the well-
documented attempt to elect Joseph Williamson as a member of parlia-
ment for Appleby, which she opposed. Horace Walpole is the source for
the most famous quotation attributed to Clifford relating to this affair.
Walpole records her stating, ‘I have been bullied by a usurper, I have been
neglected by a Court, but will not be dictated to by a subject. Your man
shan’t stand’.28 George Williamson, in his early twentieth-century biogra-
phy of Clifford makes a compelling case for the apocryphal nature of this
statement. However, letters concerning Joseph Williamson’s unsuccessful
attempt to be elected as the MP for Appleby show Clifford as politically
confident and secure as this quotation suggests.
The episode began after the death of John Lowther, cousin to Clifford
in 1667. Quickly machinations began to place Williamson in the vacant
seat. Williamson was a private secretary to Henry Bennet, First Earl of
Arlington. Arlington was Secretary of State, a member of the Privy Council
of Charles II and was a significant voice in the setting of policy in Charles’s
reign. However, his powerful political position had no effect on Clifford.
Once she heard of the machinations afoot by others to put forth Joseph
Williamson as a candidate, she quickly wrote to Joseph stating:
I received your letter of this 11th of this moneth by the last post, as alsoe
my cozen Mr John Dalston of Acornbanke, his desyres to mee, to yet the
same effect on your behalfe, that I would imploy my interest in Appleby, to
procure you to bee chosen Burgesse there in the place of my cosen John
Lowther lately deceased. I should have been very willinge, Sir, to have done
you service therein, but that I had a prior engagement upon mee both for
my owne grandchildren in the southerne parts, and some of my own kin-
dred and friends in these. Which I hope you will take in good part as a
reasonable apollogie for my selfe in this businesse.29
This letter was Clifford’s first and last word on the subject, though it
took several powerful men of the region and the country much longer
to realise this. Clifford’s confidence in her ability to dictate to the elec-
tors of Appleby reveals how firmly she had established her will in the area
by 1668. And it also provides insight into the way in which Clifford was
working with her daughter Margaret to ensure that her political strength
endured beyond her own life, empowering her descendants.
Soon Arthur Annesley, Earl of Anglesey and also of the Privy Council,
entered the scene in support of Williamson’s candidacy, this time by apply-
ing pressure on Margaret Sackville, Clifford’s daughter. Clifford wrote
to her daughter, ‘I intend not to recede from my first resolves’.30 At the
same time four leading gentlemen of Westmorland sent a joint petition
to Clifford asking that she support Williamson’s candidacy, to which she
replied,
I beg leave to returne you this short, and I hope, satisfactory answere; that I
was engaged to my daughter of Thanet’s three younger sons, John, Richard,
and Thomas Tufton, nor of them shall accept thereof, beside my promise to
other of my kindred if they refuse it. And thus much I signified by a letter of
my owne to Mr Williamson himselfe […] from her who is gentlemen, your
assured friend and humble servant Anne Pembroke.31
The supporters of Williamson refused to accept Clifford’s position and

continued to agitate for their candidate, approaching the Tufton grand-
sons to encourage them to step aside, and sending more appeals to
Margaret Sackville to convince either her mother or her sons to support
Williamson. This activity in and of itself illustrates the vital importance of
Clifford’s endorsement of any candidate, for as Dr Thomas Smith, brother
to the mayor of Appleby, explained to Williamson that while the ‘whole
county wishes to have you chosen […] they of Appleby, having so absolute
a dependence upon her (as indeed they have) it would be vain to strive
against that stream’.32
It was left for Lord Arlington to make the final push to influence
Clifford, which resulted in a forthright letter from her dated February 6,
1668. First she makes clear that it was she, and not her daughter nor her
grandsons, who were responsible for her decision to ‘attempt the make-
ing of one of her [Margaret’s] younger sonnes a Burgesse for Appleby’.
In this way she sought to minimise any political damage to her daughter
and grandsons by focusing Arlington’s irritation on her only. She further
explains that ‘I think I am bound in honor and conscience to strive to
maintaine my owne, as far as it lyes in my power’. She acknowledges,
perhaps slightly disingenuously, that she cannot enforce her will upon the
166 J.L. MALAY
electors, but asserts again her intention to stand firmly for her grand-
sons or kinsmen, ‘If it should happen otherwise, I will submitt to it with
patience, but will never yield my consent’. Finally, she both acknowledges
Arlington’s power, and then turns this back upon him, alluding to his duty
to those beyond his current favourite:
I know very well how powerfull a man a Secretarie of State is throughout all
our Kings dominions; so as I am confident your Lordshipp, by your favour
and recommendacions might quickly help this Mr Joseph Williamson to
a burgesshipp, without doing wrong or discourtesy to a widow that was
but 2 of fourescore yeares old; and to her grandchildren, whose father and
mother suffered as much in their worldly fortunes for the King as most of
his Majesties subjects did.33
Here she upholds the worthiness of her grandsons, the suffering of their
parents and her position as a very old widow. This was a position she used
before in the letters regarding the threatened slighting of Skipton Castle.
In this way she attempted to shame her adversary using contemporary
gender norms, while simultaneously occupying a position of some politi-
cal strength.
This is a brief summary of what was a veritable flurry of letters in the
last two weeks of January and the first week of February in 1668. These
letters reveal the unassailable political position Clifford had secured in her
northern lands, and reveal her determination to ensure that her daughter,
her Tufton grandsons, and her granddaughter Alathea Compton by her
second daughter, Isabella, would enjoy the same political strength in the
region as she did. The successful candidate in the election was Thomas
Tufton, fourth son of Margaret Sackville. Thomas held the Westmorland
and Skipton inheritance for 45 years—after the deaths of his grandmother,
mother, and three brothers who all died within eight years of each other.
Like his grandmother, he would base his political strength on a network
of patronage and financial interests derived from his estates in the north
and in Kent, rather than his position at court. Again, like his grandmother,
he looked to the Great Books as both a place for instruction and proof of
rights. His own additions to the Great Books were concerned with firmly
establishing his rights to the Clifford barony, and maintaining the ances-
tral rights that had come to him through the Veteriponts and Cliffords—
especially the sheriffwick of Westmorland, the only remaining hereditary
sheriffwick in the country. Clifford’s choice of this grandson for the MP
for Appleby reveals a keen judgement, and while she lived he promoted
her agenda on the wider political stage.
Clifford’s early training in the court of Elizabeth taught her valuable
lessons concerning strategies for, and the very nature of, political power.
The Queen’s death and the subsequent humiliations of both her aunt
Anne Russell and her mother, and later the collapse of the court and
execution of Charles I, impressed upon Clifford the dangers of relying
on court patronage for personal advancement. Instead, the history of her
ancestors, with which she became intimately acquainted through the great
legal battles of her youth and her later manuscript productions, convinced
her that political power was built upon the strength of regional author-
ity—in this way her ancestors had survived the political vicissitudes of over
500 years mostly unscathed. It was only in those times when they suffered
from the ‘King’s diseases’, most especially the fifteenth-century civil wars,
that their power was endangered.
When Clifford arrived at the ruined Skipton Castle in July of 1649 she
embarked on a programme of reconstructing the lands of her inheritance
both physically and socially, positioning herself as the centre of social,
political, and financial stability in a region that had been devastated by war.
She did this through the insistence on her ancient—often feudal—land
rights, through the dispensing of patronage and largesse, and with a canny
understanding of the way in which she could turn the cultural restrictions
imposed upon her gender into a strength. She maintained a wide network
of connections in the governments of Charles I and Charles II, and in the
Interregnum parliaments. In her lands in the North she grew to exercise
nearly autonomous control. Her biographer Robert Spence describes her
as behaving like ‘surrogate northern royalty’.34 Certainly this is how she
was viewed both by her contemporaries and later biographers. The bishop
of Carlisle, Edward Rainbow eulogised her as resembling the ‘Great, Wise
Queen’ Elizabeth, while her household officer, the gentleman George
Sedgewick wrote in his private autobiography: ‘A great estate God had
blest her with and given her withall a noble heart and an open and liberall
hand to doe good generally to all’.35 In the nineteenth century, John Craik
commented that she was seen as the ‘Queen of the North’.36 These state-
ments testify to Clifford’s successful political strategy in the ‘lands of her
inheritance’. She bequeathed both this strategy and her political domi-
nance to her descendants, who continued to enjoy considerable authority
in the area for another two centuries and even today retain a degree of
influence in the region.
168 J.L. MALAY
Notes
1. Anne Clifford, Great Books of Record, ed. Jessica L. Malay (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2015). All three extant manuscript sets are
held by the Cumbria Archive Service, Kendal, UK. Each set of the Great
Books is in three volumes and are comprised of copies of historical docu-
ments, biographies and a large autobiographical section that includes both
retrospective memoir and yearly summaries of her life.
2. Earl of Cumberland’s letter to Anne, Countess of Warwick, Cumbria
Archive Service, Hoth A988/7. Spelling will be retained as it appears in
the manuscripts from which the quotations are taken throughout this
chapter.
3. Anne, Countess of Warwick to Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, WD
Hoth, Box 44. Cumbria Archive Service.
4. George Clifford’s brother was Francis Clifford who had a son Henry. It is
clear that the brothers worked together in furtherance of George Clifford’s
elevation in court. At this time Clifford had only one surviving child, Anne,
but evidence suggests that Margaret Clifford may have believed or at least
hoped to have further pregnancies.
5. from 1594 to 1597.
6. Anne Clifford, The Memoir of 1603 and The Diary of 1616–1619, ed.
Katherine O. Acheson (Ontario: Broadview, 2007), p. 43.
7. Acheson, p. 45.
8. Acheson, p. 50.
9. Richard T. Spence, The Privateering Earl: George Clifford, 3rd Earl of
Cumberland, 1558–1605 (Stroud: Sutton, 1995), p. 187.
10. Letter from Margaret Russell to Edward Bruce, December 11, 1608,

Portland Papers, PO/VOL. XXIII, Longleat House Archives, Wiltshire,
p. 52.
11. Great Books, p. 711.
12. Letter from Margaret Russell to Lodovick Stuart, July 1606, WD Hoth,
Box 44, Cumbria Archives, Kendal,; also in Portland Papers, p. 45
13. Portland papers p. 43
14. Portland papers p. 52.
15. Draft petitions to James I, 1603. Cumbria Archives, Kendal. Box 44.
16. See Jessica L. Malay, ‘The Marrying of Anne Clifford: Marriage Strategy in
the Clifford Inheritance Dispute’, Northern History 159.2 (2012),
pp. 251–264.
17. The 1617 Agreement reiterated George Clifford’s intention, stated in his
will, that should the male line of his brother, Francis Clifford fail, the lands
would descend to his daughter Anne Clifford and her heirs. By the late
1620s Henry Clifford’s only living children were daughters and it was
unlikely his ageing wife would bear more children. All three of their sons
died in infancy.
18. This strategy had a high personal cost as members of her family were
imprisoned and exiled while she endured an abusive marriage.
19. John Barclay, His Argenis (London, 1625), p. 197. Anne Clifford’s copy is
Huntington Library, CSmH RB 97024, San Marino, California.
20. David Farr, John Lambert, Parliamentary Soldier and Cromwellian Major-
general, 1619–1684 (Woodbridge, Sussex: Boydell, 2003), p. 94. Lambert
was from a Skipton family.
21. Letter from Anne Clifford to Adam Baynes, September 10, 1659, British
Library, Additional 2145 f. 127. Vertically in the left hand margin, Anne
Clifford writes: ‘I assure you Sir the addition I have made in this castle, is
only a sleight superstructure upon some parts of the Old Wall, not above
two foote thicknes & noe way considerable att all for strength, as hath bin
adjudged, by such as have skill & knowledge in matters of this nature. I
beseech you Sir, present this inclosed letter from mee to my Lord Lambert’.
22. Letter from Anne Clifford to Adam Baynes, October 3, 1659, British
Library, Additional 2145, f. 148.
23. Appleby was garrisoned with Parliamentarian forces in the summer of
1651, and Skipton in the summer of 1659
25. Letter Anne Clifford to Westmorland tenants, April 4, 1644, Cumbria
Archives, Carlisle, DLons/L1/1/28/2.
26. Letter Anne Clifford to Westmorland tenants, c. 1650, Cumbria Archives,
Kendal, Hoth 44.
28. George Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1922),
p. 285. This quotation is found in The World, April 5, 1753.
29. Letter from Anne Clifford to Joseph Williamson, January 16, 1668.

National Archives, SP 29/232, f.191.
30. Letter from Anne Clifford to Margaret Sackville, January 17, 1668.

31. Letter from Anne Clifford to Westmorland gentlemen, January 18, 1668.
32. Letter from Dr Thomas Smith to Joseph Williamson, January 18, 1668.
National Archives, SP 29/232 f.238.
33. Letter from Anne Clifford to Lord Arlington, February 6, 1668. National
Archives, SP 29/234 f.161.
34. Richard Spence, Lady Anne Clifford (Stroud: Stroud: Sutton), p. 204.
35. George Sedgewick, Diary, Cumbria Archives, Carlisle. D Lons/L

12/2/16, p. 75.
36. George Lillie Craik, The Romance of the Peerage, vol. 4 (London, 1850),
p. 128.
PART III
Rebellion
CHAPTER 10
Bare-Forked Animals: King Lear

and the Problems of Patriarchalism
Su Fang Ng
Shakespeare’s King Lear is a tragedy of a king whose political division of

the kingdom sets in motion a domestic breakdown in father–child rela-
tions. Familial relations go badly awry when Lear’s own foolish act undoes
political hierarchy. Lear’s failure as a king stems from this sovereign act,
but the play is both a domestic and a political tragedy. Lear’s doubled
identity as both king and father is central. He names himself as both when
seeking recourse from Regan: ‘The King would speak with Cornwall; the
dear father / Would with his daughter speak, commands, tends service’.1
These lines encapsulate the deeply ironic paradox of his situation: he that
would command must tend service. It soon becomes clear that his act of
dissolution has rendered him neither father nor king, the very ‘nothing’ to
which he condemns Cordelia. By so merging family and state politics, the
play offers a view of the patriarchal political theory espoused by England’s
new King, James VI and I.
Notoriously difficult to read, Shakespeare’s family politics in Lear
sometimes appears to be in opposition to the works of Shakespeare’s own
royal patron. Yet the play invites such a reading. While parent–child rela-
S.F. Ng (*)
Department of English, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA
e-mail: ngsf@post.harvard.edu

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_10
174 S.F. NG
tions abound in Shakespeare, King Lear is more insistent than most on the
identity of father and king and the dire consequences of the father-king’s
failings for the children and for the state. As scholars note, Shakespeare’s
early Jacobean plays seem to comment on matters of interest to the new
monarch, who became patron to his company, renamed the King’s Men
in 1603 with James’ accession. Macbeth (c. 1606), which flatters James,
who traces his line back to Banquo, and Measure for Measure (performed
1604), whose Duke has been compared to James, are among Shakespeare’s
early Jacobean plays responding to issues and concerns brought to the fore
by England’s new King. King Lear too could be viewed as a play that flat-
ters the King with the Duke of Albany (Albania being the old name for
Scotland), the one good kingly character remaining at the end of the play
who, in at least in one version, becomes the new ruler of a united Britain,
much like the Scottish James himself wished to do. As Richard Halpern
notes, ‘King Lear is studded with references to James’ policies and pre-
dilections and was clearly composed with a court performance in mind’,
and further suggests that Lear responds to the ‘Union Controversy’ of
1604–1608.2 Not merely a play that flatters James, King Lear also, in its
dark vision of social breakdown, engages and tests the limits of his theo-
ries of sovereignty, especially the idea of king as pater patriae, father of his
country.
One of the things the English quickly learnt about their new King was
his view of kingship. As King of Scotland, James published, albeit anon-
ymously, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598) and Basilikon Doron
(1599) in a very limited run of seven copies for private distribution. Both
these works were later reprinted more widely (in Edinburgh just before
the death of Elizabeth I, and in London soon after her death and James’
accession to the English throne), and thus were easily accessible by his new
subjects. James’ conception of kingship is encapsulated in the term pater
patriae, the king as father of his country. A notion explored in detail in
both Trew Law and Basilikon Doron, it posits that the king derives author-
ity from his analogous position to that of a father.3 In Trew Law James
claims:
The King towards his people is rightly compared to a father of children, and
to a head of a body composed of diuers members: For as fathers, the good
Princes, and Magistrates of the people of God acknowledged themselues
to their subiects. And for all other well ruled Common-wealths, the stile of
Pater patriae was euer, and is commonly vsed to Kings.4
BARE-FORKED ANIMALS: KING LEAR AND THE PROBLEMS... 175
James’ conception of authority is bolstered by his belief in the divine

origin of kingly sovereignty. In addition, Trew Law avers that the king’s
paternal authority is based on his creation of the state through the legal
act of distributing land, a point important for my reading of King Lear.
At the foundation of patriarchal political theory is the equation of father
and king, positing that the king derives his authority from his status as
father to the nation. Reading the contours of political patriarchalism as
outlined in James VI and I’s works and Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha against
King Lear, I suggest that Shakespeare puts this fundamental assumption
under considerable pressure. Goneril and Regan are shockingly unkind
even when Lear surely remains their (biological) father. The ground of
patriarchalism is unstable. Political patriarchalism’s conflation of father and
king means that paternal authority is transferred as easily as that of a king.
In King Lear, the political deployment of the father-king analogy hollows
out the meaning of fatherhood. Lear has no paternal power without kingly
authority. Ultimately, the king’s engrossing of paternal power—fundamen-
tal to political patriarchalism—is presented as dangerous and politically
destabilising. By the end of Shakespeare’s surprisingly unorthodox King
Lear, neither monarchical nor paternal authority can sustain the state.
Allegiance and Territory
Repeating his error in disavowing Cordelia almost immediately with his

treatment of Kent, who attempts to offer counsel, Lear turns as savagely
on him:
Hear me, recreant; on thine allegiance hear me!

That thou hast sought to make us break our vows,
Which we durst never yet, and with strained pride
To come betwixt our sentence and our power. (1.1.164–167)
The question of allegiance is paramount in Lear’s relations with almost

every character in the play. Lear equates Kent’s allegiance as subject with
his submission to the King’s law-making words. Both Cordelia’s and Kent’s
attempts to offer counsel are utterly rejected. For Lear, allegiance must be
a complete obedience, and he treats Kent and Cordelia similarly. Touching
on crucial issues of authority and allegiance raised in James VI and I’s Trew
Law and Basilikon Doron, Shakespeare’s King Lear calls into question the
unlimited authority attributed to the king based on the paternal analogy.
176 S.F. NG
Familial ties are displaced by relations based on naked power. In this sec-
tion, I consider how the first act exposes power relations between king
and subject in light of James’ belief that kingship is grounded in property.
Showing the weaknesses of patriarchalism’s insistence on absolute obedi-
ence to the father-king, King Lear understands the problem of allegiance
to be tied to land ownership and territory.
James VI and I wrote Trew Law instructing subjects on their duty with
the expressed intent to prevent rebellions. So important is civil obedi-
ence—loyalty and allegiance—that Trew Law ranks it next to religious
faith as ‘a thing so necessarie to be knowne […] especially in a Monarchie’
(p. 63). Responding to tyrannicides like his own tutor George Buchanan,
who argued for the justice of rebellion against bad kings, James begins
with the assumption that ‘Monarchie is the trew paterne of Diuinitie’ and
that ‘Kings are called Gods’ (64), going on to describe the king’s role as
‘louing Father’ (p. 65). Although initially Trew Law stresses the king’s
benevolence, James rejects limits to monarchical power. In an extended
passage arguing by analogy for the king’s fatherly duty to his subjects,
James moves from duty of care to the privilege to chastise:
By the Law of Nature the King becomes a naturall Father to all his Lieges at
his Coronation: And as the Father of his fatherly duty is bound to care for
the nourishing, education, and vertuous gouernment of his children; euen
so is the king bound to care for all his subiects […] As the fathers wrath and
correction vpon any of his children that offendeth, ought to be by a fatherly
chastisement seasoned with pitie, as long as there is any hope of amendment
in them; so ought the King towards any of his Lieges that offend in that
measure. (p. 65)
Although punishment is leavened with pity, James is clear that no resis-

tance from subjects can be justified, no matter how bad the king. To illus-
trate the point, he offers a startling image of a father who attempts to kill
his offspring: ‘Yea, suppose the father were furiously following his sonnes
with a drawen sword, is it lawfull for them to turne and strike againe, or
make any resistance but by flight?’ (p. 77). The only resistance permissible
is the passive act of flight.
The father-king’s absolute right is portrayed by Lear’s arbitrary judg-
ments in the opening scene, raising the question, so paramount in Trew
Law, of whether resisting a bad king is permitted. Because king–sub-
ject relations are imagined in familial terms, the first scene stages Lear’s
isavowal of not one but two children. Thus Kent reminds Lear of their
d
bonds of affection and duty: ‘Royal Lear, / Whom I have ever honoured
as my King, / Loved as my father, as my master followed, / As my great
patron thought on in my prayers’ (1.1.137–40). Lear’s repeated refusal to
listen provokes Kent into rudeness: ‘Be Kent unmannerly, / When Lear
is mad’ (1.1.143–144). Not heeding Kent’s plea that Lear let him ‘still
remain / The true blank of thine eye’ (1.1.157–158), that is, to be his
wise counsellor, Lear threatens him with violence. Like James’ example of
the father who pursues his sons with a drawn sword, so Lear gives Kent
(and Cordelia) only the options of death or exile.
Lear’s response to Kent marks the failure of counsel. For Lear, who
seems a proponent of James’ ideas, the king as father compels absolute
obedience. However, Kent’s dissenting opinion suggests an alterna-
tive view of the analogy as enabling relations of counsel. Sharing Kent’s
view, Cordelia too tries to offer counsel. While her first response is to
say ‘Nothing’ (1.1.85), she has much to say on the duties and obliga-
tions of familial bonds, much that seems critical of James’ absolutism.
The complete devotion Lear demands, as Cordelia points out, elevates the
father’s role and the father–child bond to the exclusion and distortion of
other familial relations: ‘Why have my sisters husbands, if they say / They
love you all?’ (1.1.97–98). Events would prove Lear’s attempt to create a
world without other relations and loyalties foolhardy. Later he would be
respected neither as father nor as king. As William Dodd suggests, ‘The
love test, with its devastating political and personal consequences, starkly
spells out the risks inherent in the absolutist mix of the dynastic and the
familial’.5
Although Lear and James VI and I view wrathful chastisement as pater-
nal prerogative, inherited traditions of counsel emphasise the need for
kings to listen to advisors. James’ Basilikon Doron, an instruction book
for his heir Henry, makes a major generic revision to the genre of mirrors
to princes. The European Middle Ages’ most popular mirror, Secretum
Secretorum, which continued to circulate in early modern England, pur-
ports to be Aristotle’s advice to Alexander the Great. In Basilikon Doron,
James compares Prince Henry to Alexander and himself to Philip of
Macedon, a comparison taken up by others: Isaac Wake, Oxford University
Orator, praises Henry, who entered Magdalen College, as an Alexander
to James’ Philip and Aristotle.6 But playing the role of counsellor, James
shifts the genre’s dynamics. He is both king and counsellor. This closed
178 S.F. NG
world leaves no room for the subject’s counsel. In James’ terms, Lear’s
disinheriting of Cordelia is just since he believes her wicked. But Kent
is a reminder of the older traditions of counsel. King Lear depicts the
problems that arise when the links that tie monarch and subject through
counsel are short-circuited.
These broken links result from the violent power dynamics permit-
ted by James’ theories and enacted by Lear. The love-test may be seen
as a familial version of the Oath of Allegiance passed by Parliament in
1606 against Catholics in response to the Gunpowder Plot. Resting on
the assumptions of Trew Law, ‘the ideological foundations of the oath of
allegiance’, M. C. Questier argues, ‘were potentially a model for the royal
supremacy’.7 J. P. Sommerville contends that James pursued an absolutist
programme: ‘James and his supporters in this controversy claimed that
kings derived their powers from God alone and were therefore account-
able to neither pope nor people. They portrayed kings as sovereign law-
makers, not as bound by the law of the land’.8 By rejecting subjects’ right
to give counsel, Lear declares himself not accountable to the people. The
unbalanced power relation is starkly visible as he demands absolute alle-
giance, which ultimately must be coerced.
Relations of power between subject and king have a material basis in
Shakespeare’s play. Lear tries to gain allegiance by giving or withhold-
ing land. But in disowning Cordelia, Lear undoes the English tradition
of heritability of property, which grounds familial and political rela-
tions. Inviting Cordelia to say her part, Lear offers her the inducement
of property: ‘To thee and thine, hereditary ever, / Remain this ample
third of our fair kingdom’ (1.1.78–79). What was ‘hereditary ever’ with
the doom of his words becomes transferable. Exploring Kent’s associa-
tion with the county’s independent spirit, Ronald Cooley argues that the
character ultimately defends primogeniture, in opposition to the wide-
spread usage of partible inheritance in the county of Kent; King Lear’s
Kent thus represents the interests of the region’s aristocracy, who follow
the nation’s more common practices of primogeniture.9 Cooley follows
R. A. Foakes, who noted that the alteration from the Quarto’s ‘Reverse
thy doom’ to the Folio’s ‘Reserve thy state’ (1.1.147) changes Kent’s
criticism to that of the project of dividing the kingdom.10 However, Kent
defends Cordelia even in the Folio: ‘Thy youngest daughter does not
love thee least’ (1.1.150). Rather than a radical shift from the defence of
Cordelia to the critique of partible inheritance, Lear’s phrase about prop-
erty as ‘hereditary ever’ foregrounds issues of breakable and unbreakable

familial bonds.
The division of the kingdom has been read as an inverted allusion to
King James’ proposal for Union of Scotland and England.11 In Basilikon
Doron, James advises Henry:
And in case it please God to prouide you to all these three Kingdomes, make
your eldest sonne Isaac, leauing him all your kingdomes; and prouide the
rest with priuate possessions: Otherwayes by deuiding your kingdomes, yee
shall leaue the seed of diuision and discord among your posteritie; as befell
to this Ile, by the diuision and assignement thereof, to the three sonnes of
Brutus, Locrine, Albanact, and Camber. (p. 42)
In King Lear the chaos following the division suggests sympathy to the
Union project. Yet the Union question can obscure rather than enlighten.
The first scene may be read instead as the exchange of land for political
allegiance, an exchange Cordelia rejects.
Some time ago Harry Jaffa suggested that Lear is merely anticipating
what would happen after his death. Even if Lear has a son, says Jaffa, he
‘would still have had to gain the support of major powers in the king-
dom—and abroad—for his settlement. And he had to bind them to that
settlement by both pledges and self-interest in order to assure its dura-
bility’.12 Like any English king, Lear needs the support of the lords of
territories in the peripheries to maintain control. The division is to bring
about political unity: as Lear says, that ‘future strife / May be prevented
now’ (1.1.43–44). Jaffa insists that Lear’s ‘delegation of authority to his
sons-in-law remained fundamentally distinguished from an abdication’.13
The love-test ‘was to supply […] pledges of support for the division of the
kingdom which [Lear] was in process of announcing’, whereby Cordelia
would inherit the richest part of the kingdom, and thus support was
sought especially from the other sisters who might conceivably object.14
The scene of the kingdom’s division lends itself to an alternate Jacobean
reading once we recall how King James attributed law-making powers to
the king by linking it to the act of distributing land. In Trew Law James
asserts that by the kings of Scotland ‘was the land distributed (which at the
first was whole theirs) states erected and decerned, and formes of gouerne-
ment deuised and established’ (p. 73). As part of a larger argument that
‘the King is aboue the law’ (p. 75), land turns out to be foundational
to Jacobean sovereignty. Referring to the first King Fergus from Ireland,
180 S.F. NG
James argues, ‘The kings therefore in Scotland were before any estates or
rankes of men within the same, before any Parliaments were holden, or
lawes made’ and thus ‘kings were the authors and makers of the Lawes,
and not the Lawes of the kings’ (p. 73). But kings are lawmakers upon the
ground of property. James describes kings as ‘Dominus omnium bonorum,
and Dominus directus totius Dominij, the whole subiects being but his vas-
sals, and from him holding all their lands as their ouer-lord’ (p. 73).
Richard Halpern argues from this passage that ‘James’s use of feudal
precedent focused far less on medieval theories of royal power than on
feudal property law’ and ‘asserted that the crown was a piece of inherited
property’; indeed, ‘Not only the crown but, in James’s mind, the entire
kingdom and its inhabitants ultimately belonged to him as landlord; and
it is this property relation that secured his political authority’.15 Halpern’s
insight can be taken further. For James, the king is not only landowner, but
establishes law through the original act of distributing land. The distribu-
tion of land is the origin of kingship. Thus, I suggest that we consider Lear’s
act as an emblem of the king’s role as a distributor of land. My argument
is consonant with Curtis Perry’s reading of Lear as King James’ ‘nourish-
father’—or nursing father, a term James takes from Isaiah 49 to describe
the king as nurturer of his people—who is ‘at once an ideal and symptom-
atically unstable’.16 Focusing on King Lear’s engagement with Jacobean
theoretical justifications for absolute monarchy, I emphasise how the royal
munificence Perry examines is given a legal basis, once the link between
Lear’s act and James’ theory of the king as property-giver is recognised.
Lear certainly thinks his act of distributing lands is not one of complete
divestment of kingship. In his instructions to Cornwall and Albany, he
says ‘we will divest us both of rule, / Interest of territory, cares of state’
(1.1.47–48). Still, he tries to retain monarchical privileges: ‘Only we shall
retain / The name and all th’addition to a king. The sway, / Revenue,
execution of the rest, / Belovèd sons, be yours’ (1.1.133–136). Richard
Halpern interprets Lear as located in the timeless space of romance. But
when read against Trew Law, this instruction suggests a particular moment
in that romance: the originary moment of the state’s establishment.
Etiological stories are inevitably mythic, and James’ story of Scotland’s
foundation is no different. James identifies that originary moment in the
legal act of distributing land.
Trew Law’s aetiology of the state as founded in land distribution fits
James’ self-image as a magnanimous king. His well-known munificence,
however, caused him political difficulties as he drained the royal coffers
dry.17 Perry interprets Lear’s distribution as part of a failure of kingly

munificence or generosity in Shakespeare’s play. But if, according to
James, the power to distribute land is what makes kings, Lear is settling
a more stable state and attempting, as Jaffa suggests, to maintain control
over territories represented by Albany and Cornwall (Scotland and the
west country). King Lear’s romance time suggests the scene may be an
allegory of the state’s originary institution: Lear is pater patriae because
he gives out land.
Inheritance’s importance is evident elsewhere in the play. Aside from
the subplot involving Gloucester’s sons (and the connotations of Kent’s
name), there is another allusion to primogeniture versus partible inher-
itance in the rivalry between Burgundy and France. Like the potential
rivalry of Albany and Cornwall, theirs must also be seen in territorial
terms. In the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) fought between England
and France over control of France, with French territories coming in and
out of English power, control over the duchy of Burgundy was separated
from the French crown. John II of France gave it to his youngest son,
Philip the Bold, leading to the situation of the Dukes of Burgundy becom-
ing rivals to France. Although Gloucester’s practice of primogeniture does
not prevent violent conflict over inheritance, John’s historical act of par-
tible inheritance did no better, leading to political division and conflict.18
As primogeniture and partible inheritance are pitted against each other in
the play, familial conflicts are manifestations of territorial disputes.
Interrogating the property-based theoretical foundations of James’
conception of kingship, King Lear shows how land distribution creates the
very problem it is meant to prevent. Allegiance cannot be firmly secured
through this means. By the end of the play, Cordelia’s actions raise the
spectre of rebellion. Her sisters are unfaithful daughters, but she threat-
ens English sovereignty when she leads a French invasion: chiding her
husband, Goneril says, ‘France spreads his banners in our noiseless land,
/ With plumèd helm thy flaxen biggin threats’ (Q1, Scene 16.55–56).19
After slinking off penniless in the first scene, when she next appears
Cordelia is accompanied by a great army. While she says it is ‘No blown
ambition doth our arms incite’ (4.3.27), she raises a force far greater than
those of her sisters. The fear of a French invasion is raised and then per-
haps dismissed: in the first Quarto, the ‘King of France is so suddenly gone
back’ (Q1, Scene 17.1), and Cordelia is described as striving to overcome
‘her passion who, most rebel-like, / Sought to be king o’er her’ (Q1,
Scene 17.15–56). While leading an invasion, Cordelia ‘heaved the name
of “father”’ (Q1, Scene 17.26): this paradox makes manifest her divided
182 S.F. NG
duty alluded to in the first scene, daughter of Britain and wife of an invad-
ing France. The play undoes the fantasy of absolute allegiance.
Domesticating Politics
King Lear interrogates not only political relations and territorial concerns
in relation to patriarchalism’s assumptions, as my first section argues, but
also domestic relations. Two other aspects of Jacobean patriarchalism
come to the fore in the play’s second half, after Lear has been stripped
of his royal trappings. The first is King James’ definition of pater patriae
as the father of the people to supplant their biological fathers: Trew Law
argues, ‘By the Law of Nature the King becomes a naturall Father to all
his Lieges at his Coronation’ (p. 65). The second is Adamic patriarchal-
ism, a biblically based ideology tracing political authority back to Adam.
Although later codified by Sir Robert Filmer in his Patriarcha, whose
work circulated in manuscript in the 1620s (published in 1680), the ideas
may have been available even earlier. James himself gestures at it when
he views monarchical authority as divinely conferred. His patriarchalism
revises the meaning of the word ‘natural’ to elevate political fatherhood
above biological. Playing on the multiple meanings of the word ‘natu-
ral’—both the unnatural son Edmund and Lear as a natural fool—King
Lear shows through reductio ad absurdum the dangers of patriarchalism’s
fundamental tenets, especially the biological father’s displacement.
James’ Trew Law argues from the law of nature for the displacement of
biological fathers by the king as political father. His term ‘naturall Father’
for the king concentrates authority in the ruler. The word ‘natural’ has a
number of meanings in the early modern period, some of which come into
play in King Lear. James seems to use the adjective as an extension of what
he understands to be the basis of political authority, which is natural law,
understood as God’s unwritten law. But in so using the word ‘natural’,
he radically revises its meaning. This shift may be clearer if we compare
this with his use of ‘natural’ in Basilikon Doron. There he d istinguishes
between the good king as the people’s ‘naturall father and kindly Master’
and the tyrant who is ‘as a step-father and an vncouth hireling’ (p. 20).
The opposition between ‘naturall father’ and step-father suggests a distinc-
tion between a biological and an adopted father. If the ‘naturall father[‘s]’
opposite is the step-father, then natural fatherhood ought to be innate
rather than acquired. But by attributing ‘natural’ to political fatherhood,
James transfers authority from biological fathers to kings, identifying the
coronation as a kind of constitutional event of political fatherhood. In

Trew Law, the king as father leaves little room for fathers of families to
exercise authority where the king’s interest is concerned.
The implications of this naturalising of political fatherhood—where the
king is made ‘naturall father’ to exclude biological fathers of families—are
more sinister when read against Basilikon Doron. Like Trew Law, Basilikon
Doron stresses the authority of the king by analogy to fathers, calling the
king ‘communis parens to all your people’ (p. 36). A book of advice for his
son, James underlines the divine right of kings, saying to Henry that God
‘made you a little GOD to sit on his Throne, and rule ouer other men’
(p. 12). For all his emphasis on paternal authority, the biological father all
but disappears in Basilikon Doron as it did in Trew Law, displaced by the
king. The argument for parental authority in Basilikon Doron is specific
to the prince. For James, parental authority is transferred to the king at
his coronation. His advice to Henry about maintaining complete control
over his courtiers makes this clear: ‘Suffer none about you to meddle in
any mens particulars, but like the Turkes Ianisaries, let them know no
father but you, nor particular but yours’ (p. 38). The king’s courtiers are
to be trained like Ottoman janissaries, infantry units legendary for their
discipline, composed of those gathered through the devshirme system (or
child tax), whereby young Christian children from Ottoman colonies of
Albania and Bulgaria were taken from their parents, converted to Islam
and trained to be the Ottoman sultan’s loyal retainers. The popular stereo-
type in Europe represented the Turkish sultan as a tyrant, and the myths
surrounding the janissaries were part of this stereotype. James references
the Ottoman janissaries with approval, even though the devshirme sys-
tem’s complete breaking of familial bonds—where children are removed
from parents and converted religiously and culturally to become enemies
of their biological families—makes janissaries perhaps the most extreme
example of political fatherhood’s erasure of biological fatherhood.
The consequences of the transfer of authority from biological fathers
to kings are explored in King Lear, especially in the subplot of Edmund’s
betrayal of his father. James’ (and Lear’s) command that loyalties be trans-
ferred to the king is so absolute that the subject must recognise no other
father, but King Lear’s dissenting voices remind us of the set of inter-
connecting familial obligations. Cordelia is not the only character whose
duties are divided. When Kent pleads with Lear, his plea sketches the vari-
ous social roles of a subject: ‘Royal Lear, / Whom I have ever honour’d
as my King, / Lov’d as my father, as my master follow’d, / As my great
184 S.F. NG
patron thought on in my prayers—’ (1.1.138–142). Cordelia counter-

balances two potentially conflicting duties, between dutiful daughter and
loyal wife (of a foreign king)—while Kent outlines a series of correspond-
ing roles. Although Kent describes all his roles in relation to the king, they
need not be so: father, master, and patron can be different authorities
demanding different loyalties. Rather than redundancy, his parallels con-
stitute a reminder of the whole structure of hierarchy of which the king is
only a part, even if the most important one.
While Lear does not receive the absolute obedience he demands from
Kent and Cordelia, one character readily sacrifices his own father to his
lord and king. Edmund’s betrayal of Gloucester is quite clearly self-
motivated, but it is significant that his transfer of loyalties is performed
through the specific language of (political) fatherhood. When he falsely
accuses his father of collaborating with the French in a planned invasion of
England, Edmund is rewarded for his ostensible loyalty by Cornwall, who
says, ‘I will lay trust upon thee; and thou shalt find a dearer father in my
love’ (3.5.21–22). When Kent addresses Lear as father, he uses the term
more analogically; in contrast Cornwall offers to supplant Gloucester. By
so elevating political fatherhood, Cornwall, with Edmund’s collaboration,
offers a type of kingship that excludes biological fathers. Cornwall thus
revises the notion of natural to mean instead a relation that is essentially
political. For Edmund, this trade yields him a greater share of family inher-
itance than he had a right to expect; taking Cornwall as father allows him
to become Gloucester, that is, to displace his own father.
In playing with the opposing terms ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, King Lear
recalls Trew Law’s argument that describes the king as ‘naturall Father’.
This opposition is depicted in the play’s various father–children relations.
After his knights are taken away, Lear curses his daughters for being ‘unnat-
ural hags’ (2.2.444). But it is Edmund who exemplifies the deep con-
tradictions of the word’s multiple meanings. Edmund’s deception causes
Gloucester to confound the meaning of the terms ‘natural’ and ‘unnatu-
ral’. In Act 1, Scene 2, he calls the loyal Edgar an ‘unnatural, detested,
brutish villain’ (1.2.73); and in Act 2, Scene 1, he calls the false Edmund,
‘Loyal and natural boy’ (2.1.83). In Act 2, Gloucester puns on the term
‘natural’—Edmund is natural because he is a bastard, but Gloucester also
thinks him natural, meaning having kindly affection, for exposing a plot
against his life. We, however, know that Edmund is both a natural and
unnatural child—natural because he is illegitimate, but unnatural because
he betrays his blood relations. Both Lear and Cornwall would be the
Jacobean king who is ‘naturall Father’ to his people. Cornwall’s fatherly
benevolence towards Edmund, however, demands the elimination of the
biological father—Gloucester is spared from death but has his eyes put
out. Cornwall becomes father to Edmund following a series of vicious
and arguably unnatural acts by all parties—Edmund, Cornwall and Lear’s
daughters.
Cornwall and Edmund’s newly created father-son bond—a political
relation that James argues prevents rebellions, and therefore preserves the
stability of the state—is undermined by a new plot development when
both Regan and Goneril fall in love with Edmund. While Cornwall offers
to be Edmund’s father, Regan has a different familial position in mind.
Edmund’s insinuation into the family perverts the institution. Early in the
play when he discovers Edgar’s supposed treachery, Gloucester already
plans to undo the laws of inheritance, suggesting he will, ‘work the means’
to make Edmund ‘capable’ of inheriting (2.1.83–84). Having supplanted
his elder, legitimate brother, Edmund trades Gloucester for another
father. At the end, he seeks to supplant his new father, Cornwall, in his
marital bed. Edmund’s wickedness is made possible by other characters’
willingness to dissolve familial bonds—Lear and Gloucester are willing to
disown children and Goneril and Regan to divorce husbands—to reforge
new political bonds in the familial mould. The sisters forget their bond as
they fight over Edmund. This fluidity in familial bonds destroys the family,
as new allegiances are forged through the rupture of old ones. Blood ties
give way to self-interest.
King Lear extends its examination of the contradictions of the term
‘natural’, applying it not only to sons but also to fathers. Aside from
Edmund, one other figure is called ‘natural’: in Act 4, Scene 6, when the
mad Lear is found by Cordelia’s men, Lear names himself ‘The natural
fool of Fortune’ (4.6.189). Kenneth Muir’s edition here notes William
Empson’s suggestion that ‘there is a quibble on natural, which can mean
imbecile as well as born’.20 I would like to offer another possible reading of
the word, drawing on the contrast found in James’ writings to argue that
it suggests something related to nature and thus not artificial. Might Lear
be thought of as natural because he is reduced to an Adamic state? At one
point he discards his clothing, a scene played with remarkable verve by
Ian MacKellen in Trevor Nunn’s stage and later 2008 film version. Lear’s
natural, Adamic state, I suggest, has political valences related to discus-
sions of pater patriae.
186 S.F. NG
Although his codification of patriarchalism was completed only in the

1620s, Robert Filmer’s treatise, Patriarcha, is especially interesting for
tracing monarchy’s origins back to Adam. Filmer was not the first to do so,
but his account was in the service of supporting patriarchal political theory.
I am primarily concerned with his claim that power descends from Adam,
made in the first chapter. Filmer draws out the implications of Bellarmine’s
contention that creation made Adam ruler over his descendants:
not only Adam but succeeding patriarchs had, by right of fatherhood, royal
authority over their children […] For as Adam was lord over his own chil-
dren, so his children under him had a command and power over their own
children, but still with subordination to the first parent, who is lord para-
mount over his children’s children to all generations, as being the grandfa-
ther of his people.21
From this assumption, Filmer argues for Adam’s absolute power that forms
the foundation of monarchical authority. It is from the first father that cur-
rent monarchs inherit their sovereignty: ‘This lordship which Adam by
creation had over the whole world, and by right descending from him the
patriarchs did enjoy, was as large and ample as the absolutest dominion of
any monarch which hath been since the creation’ (p. 7). Filmer further
argues for the maintenance of this structure after the biblical flood and
after the dispersion from Babel, even though people were scattered into
several ‘distinct families’ (p. 8). Tellingly, Filmer reads the scene of the
Israelites asking for a king in 1 Samuel as God re-establishing ‘the ancient
and prime right of lineal succession to paternal government’ (p. 9), despite
clear evidence of Samuel’s disapproval of the people’s request—a strong
reading that conforms to King James’ interpretation.
Concerned to show that patriarchal power was never lost, Filmer takes
pains to argue for its transmission from Adam to present-day kings. He
acknowledges that kings are not ‘natural parents’ of their subjects, but,
with a sleight of hand, argues that they might as well be: ‘yet they all either
are, or are to be reputed as the next heirs to those progenitors who were
at first the natural parents of the whole people’ (p. 10). Later in time, it
is political parenthood rather than biological that matters to Filmer: after
the time of biblical patriarchs, ‘true fatherhood itself was extinct and only
the right of the father descended to the true heir, then the title of prince of
king was more significant to express the power of him who succeeds only
to the right of that fatherhood which his ancestors did naturally enjoy’
(p. 10). Although Filmer’s pater patriae is ultimately a title that pertains

to the political power of fatherhood, he insists on its origins in biological
fatherhood, and that the origins go back to Adam himself.
Filmer’s tracing of paternal power back to Adam implies a dispersion of
monarchical power in later generations. Present-day kings share in Adam’s
paternal power and exercise it over their own people. As the progenitor
of all humankind, Adam’s paternal power is the most comprehensive—the
most ‘perfect’ would be the language James might use—and thus the most
absolute. The Adamic state, in Filmer’s view, is a state of all-encompassing
power. But King Lear explores the implications of an Adamic state to
show something quite the opposite.
Act 3, set on the heath, shows Lear reduced to an Adamic state, with-
out his retinue of knights, without possessions, stripped even of clothing.
Far from a state of innocence, Lear’s return to nature is portrayed as a
degradation. Lear’s fall into an Adamic state begins with his giving up of
power; it progresses with his daughters stripping away the little author-
ity he reserves to himself, his hundred knights; and it culminates with
the scene of his descent into madness. Encountering Edgar pretending
to be mad, Lear concludes, ‘Unaccommodated man is no more but such
a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’ (3.4.95–97). His response is to
remove his remaining clothes: ‘Off, off, you lendings! Come; unbutton
here’ (3.4.97–98). Naked as Adam as he may be, Lear does not possess the
first father’s paternal dominion. Instead, the removal of clothing symbol-
ises an acknowledgement of his utter lack of sovereignty. Lear’s progres-
sive fall, even into animality, ironically traces the lines of authority back
to Adam in order to make clear the hollowness of his protestations of his
fatherhood and of his act of parcelling out land. Distinguishing between
the storm’s inhuman ferocity and his daughters’ unnatural cruelty, Lear
shouts at the storm: ‘I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness; / I
never gave you kingdom, called you children, / You owe me no subscrip-
tion’ (3.2.15–17). Daughters whom he fathered and to whom he gifted
land act as cruelly as the storm. Even the enlightenment that comes with
material deprivation exacts the price of his sanity. Lear’s understanding of
his circumstances leads not to an accommodation but a further deteriora-
tion of his mental state. As Edgar notes, these woes weigh far more heavily
on the king: ‘How light and portable my pain seems now, / When that
which makes me bend makes the king bow; / He childed as I father’d’
(Q1, Scene 13.97–99).
188 S.F. NG
On the whole, King Lear is critical of Jacobean patriarchalism. Many

of the tenets and foundations of pater patriae as articulated by James
and Filmer are rejected or subverted. The father-king is inept, blinded by
self-regard. Yet King Lear is by no means a radical or covertly republican
text.22 The dutiful Cordelia is content to be banished; she ‘return[s] those
duties back as are right fit’ but will not rebel even against an unjust father-
king (1.1.95). This is not a wholesale rejection of the society centred
on a father-king figure. Nonetheless, the play shows the potential for an
extreme Jacobean patriarchalism to turn into tyranny, disorder, and rebel-
lion, leading to both political disorder and familial dissolution. King Lear
sets the extremes of patriarchalism against the utter disregard for pater-
nal authority and traditional customs—Lear’s disavowal of his biological
daughter against Edmund’s rebellion and rejection of primogeniture—to
link them together as ‘unnatural’ acts.
Notes
1. William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition,
gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997,
2008). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from King Lear are to
the version from the first folio, The Tragedy of King Lear, from this edition,
and cited parenthetically (2.2.266–267).
2. Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English
Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991), p. 219.
3. Elsewhere I have examined James’ political writings about the role of
father-king in relation to the contradictions of roles within the royal family,
as evidenced by his letters, and to the queen’s role as portrayed in royal
masques; see Ng, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-
Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap-
ter 1, ‘Father-kings and Amazon queens’, pp. 21–48.
4. King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 76. All quotations
from James will be from this edition and cited parenthetically.
5. William Dodd, ‘Impossible Worlds: What Happens in King Lear, Act 1,
Scene 1?’ Shakespeare Quarterly 50.4 (Winter 1999), pp. 477–507
(p. 484).
6. Charles Howard McIlwain, ed. The Political Works of James I (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), 4, 48; Isaac Wake, Rex Platonicus:
sive, de potentissimi principis Iacobi Britanniarum Regis, ad illustrissimam
academiam Oxoniensem (Oxford, 1607), sig. A2v.
7. M.C. Questier, ‘Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern

England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’,
Historical Journal 40.2 (June 1997), pp. 311–329 (p. 321).
8. Johann P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in
England, 1603–1640 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), p. 109.
For the Oath’s impact on literary figures, see Rebecca Lemon, Treason by
Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 109.
9. Ronald W. Cooley, ‘Kent and Primogeniture in King Lear’, SEL: Studies in
English Literature 1500–1900 48.2 (2008), pp. 327–348.
10. Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare, Third Series
(Walton-on Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), 168 n. 150. For a
contrary reading, see Dodd, ‘Impossible Worlds’, pp. 477–507 (p. 504).
11. Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 148–159; Andrew
Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), pp. 181–185.
12. Harry V. Jaffa, ‘The Limits of Politics: King Lear, Act I, Scene I’, in Allan
Bloom, with Harry V. Jaffa, Shakespeare’s Politics (New York and London:
Basic Books, 1964), pp. 113–145 (121).
13. Jaffa, ‘Limits’, p. 123.
14. Jaffa, ‘Limits’, p. 127.
15. Halpern, Poetics, p. 221.
16. Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation
of Elizabethan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 123.
17. See Perry, Making of Jacobean Culture, pp. 115–149, for a reading of Lear
and Macbeth as responses to James as a bountiful father.
18. For Philip the Bold’s establishment of Valois power with the land grant of
Burgundy, see Richard Vaughan, Philip the Bold: The Dukes of Burgundy,
new ed. (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1979, 2011).
19. In the conflated text, the second line is revised: ‘France spreads his banners
in our noiseless land, / With plumèd helm thy state begins to threat’
(4.2.57–58).
20. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen,
1972), 4.5.189, note.
21. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann Sommerville
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 6–7. All further cita-
tions to Patriarcha refer to this edition and are given parenthetically.
22. For a republican Shakespeare, see Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and

Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
CHAPTER 11
The State, Childhood and Religious Dissent
Lucy Underwood
In 1612, George Carew, Master of the Court of Wards, observed that ‘All
Monarkes and Soveraigne kinges, have generally the appellation of Patres
Patria’.1 Carew invoked imagery that was indeed used across Europe to
describe the relationship of kings to their kingdoms.2 Using this metaphor
makes a claim about kingship: a relationship that involves love as well as
authority and obedience, and above all is natural. One can no more cease
to be one’s prince’s subject than one’s father’s offspring. It also suggests
something about allegiance and patriotism: if the king is ‘father of the
fatherland’, he is the source of the patria, and serving the patria neces-
sarily means serving the king. To call the king ‘pater patriae’ also implies
a claim about fatherhood. If the king is ‘father’ to the kingdom, then the
father is ‘king’ to his family, or household. Notions of authority in polity
and family are mutually reinforcing.
This chapter explores what happened when religious dissent caused
conflict between the ‘father’ of the kingdom and the ‘kingdom’ of the
household: when Protestant regimes perceived the Catholic upbringing of
children as dangerous to the confessional state. It examines instances of
state intervention in the education or custody of children, their motivation
L. Underwood (*)
Department of History, University of Warwick, Warwick, UK
e-mail: l.underwood@warwick.ac.uk

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_11
192 L. UNDERWOOD
and justification, as well as cultural forces which limited intervention, and

the English Catholic responses to threats to parental custody. The threat of
religious dissent to family order, as an aspect of its threat to the polity, has
been remarked on; for instance, Frances Dolan noted how wives promot-
ing Catholicism against their husbands’ Protestantism was seen as emblem-
atic of the subversive influence of recusancy.3 Conversions to Catholicism
by children and young people could represent rejection of both state and
parental authority.4 Toleration of Catholicism among wives, children or
servants—the ‘family’—by Protestant householders was also complained
at: when the king of the miniature polity failed to uphold its order, he failed
in his duty to the wider polity and the pater patriae. But still, the problem
was one of inadequate patriarchy, rather than opposition between paternal
authority and the state. What happened when the father’s governance itself
threatened the political order? That is, when fathers educated their children
in a proscribed religion? When obedience within the family meant religious
disunity in the polity, and disobedience to the monarch, familial and politi-
cal order were in direct confrontation. Lena Cowen Orlin examines texts
dealing with household subordinates co-operating in householders’ mis-
deeds, but her focus is on overtly deviant behaviour.5 The systemic prob-
lem of religious dissent represented not disorder, but the deeper threat of
an alternative order which also claimed moral authority.
This conundrum surfaced repeatedly in early modern England, as
Protestant regimes recognised that one reason for the perpetuation of
the Papist problem was that Catholics had Catholic children.6 And they
wondered whether, as William Cecil apparently suggested in 1583, they
might solve this by ‘making the parents, in every shire, to send their chil-
dren to be virtuously brought up at a certain place for that end appointed
[…] by this way their number will be quickly lessened’.7 With the pos-
sible exception of the Interregnum regimes in the late 1640s and 1650s,
there was never a national policy regarding Catholic children; yet there
was always an idea that there should be.8 Statesmen like Cecil and Francis
Walsingham toyed with the idea and Puritan preachers extolled it.9 Cases
where the government intervened in the upbringing of children recurred.
Most Parliaments between 1593 and 1660 considered a bill prescribing
the Protestant education of Catholic children, but none passed such an
act.10 This paradox—of a policy both irresistible and unthinkable—arose
from conflicting cultural assumptions at the intersection of family, politics
and religion. Those conflicts illuminate both the ambitions and the limita-
tions of the confessional state within the society that gave it birth.
THE STATE, CHILDHOOD AND RELIGIOUS DISSENT 193
Wardship, Kingship and Fatherhood

George Carew applied the ‘pater patriae’ metaphor to the Court of Wards:
our king by the auncient lawes of the kingdome hath this further and pecu-
liar, that he is Pater Pupillorum, where there is any tenure by knights service
of the Crowne […] And so being a representative father, his purpose is to
imitate […] the offices and dueties of a naturall father.11
Royal wardship developed from feudal tenure. If a tenant holding land by

knight’s service left an heir either too young to render feudal service, or
female, the overlord regained control of the lands until the heir came of
age (or married if female); he also gained control of the heir’s upbringing
and his (or her) marriage.12 By the mid-sixteenth century, wardship other
than by the Crown had declined; but where families held lands in capite
(directly from the Crown), it meant temporary reversion of estates to the
Crown with rights of guardianship. The Crown usually leased both lands
and guardianship to ‘committees’, making useful revenue. By the early
seventeenth century, there was considerable resentment of this system: a
premature death cost the family money and inconvenience to purchase the
lease on the wardship, assuming someone else did not do so, causing tem-
porary alienation of the estates.13 In this context, Carew’s words attempt
an alternative interpretation of wardship. ‘Pater pupillorum’ [father of the
orphans or wards] links wardship to the king’s ‘fatherhood’ of the nation,
and conflates a legal arrangement with a natural relationship. As Carew
then claims explicitly, this is not about land and revenue, but the king’s
fatherly care for subjects left fatherless: he imitates the ‘dueties of a naturall
father’.
Not that paternalistic care precluded a political function. Through
wardship, the king exercises a paternal role for ‘most of the auncient,
great, wealthy, or generouse families of this kingdome’, ‘in the educa-
tion and well bestowing in marriage of […] the wardes’.14 Ensuring the
good upbringing especially of the ruling classes helps to ensure the king-
dom’s stability. One manifestation of the king’s care was his insistence
on guardians ‘sownde in religion, of good gouernance in theyre owne
families, without dissolution, without distemper, no greedy persons, no
stepmothers’.15 Future tenants-in-chief must be protected from the self-
interested, from wastrels, from inadequate patriarchs, and from religious
dissent. Carew’s allusion to religious orthodoxy refers to a 1606 statute,
194 L. UNDERWOOD
which banned recusants—those identified as Catholic dissidents—from

purchasing wardships.16 Wardship illustrates the link between two crucial
components of early modern state formation: the relationship between
family and polity; and religious uniformity.
Intervention in wardship on religious grounds was justified through
the same linking of familial and political responsibility which Carew’s ref-
erence to the royal ‘pater pupillorum’ suggested. In 1610, James VI and I
ordered the master of the Court of Wards (then Robert Cecil) to require
Lord Mordaunt’s committee to place his ward in the charge of the bishop
of London (George Abbot). The King stated that ‘it is no smale pointe
of our Care that the nobilitie of this Realme be brede both in such sort as
becometh their ranck and in so good instruccon as the religion established
in our Kingdome; as that by receiveing the corrupcon of superstitious and
daungerouss opinions they be not made unserviceable’.17 Lady Mordaunt
and her deceased husband were known Catholics, and the King wished the
young Lord Mordaunt to be brought up as a Protestant. James exploited
wardship to facilitate this intervention, but he framed it in more general
terms: the ‘breeding’ of the nobility is ‘the king’s care’. The aristocracy
exists to serve the kingdom, and religious dissent may make them ‘unser-
viceable’. Lord Mordant’s future public role meant his mother’s domestic
governance could not be considered private.
In this instance, the King’s claim specified the nobility, whose upbring-
ing had particular public significance. But he expressed a concept of the
family’s public liability that was potentially far-reaching, as an episode dur-
ing Elizabeth I’s reign suggests. In March 1600, the Council of the North
(the main instrument of royal governance in the northern border areas)
called upon the local government of York to investigate the education
of the children of Catholics.18 Certain recusants and non-communicants
(Catholics who attended services of the established Church unlike recus-
ants, but refused to receive Protestant communion) were required to sign
financial bonds that they would ‘educate and bring up [their] children in
the knowledge and profession of the religion established in this realm, and
not in Popish religion or in recusancy’.19 Those refusing risked arrest, and
in December 1602 the Council ordered a follow-up enquiry.20
The scope and the grounds of the claim made are interesting.
Elizabethan measures against Catholicism tended not to aim directly at
the abjuration of beliefs, but to penalise specific actions, such as atten-
dance at Mass, or refusal to attend Protestant churches. Accordingly, the
fact of these recusants’ Catholic beliefs is accepted—but they are directed
to teach their children contradictory ones. Practices hindering this are
prohibited: the children are not to be ‘put into any service’ with known
Catholics, taught by ‘any schoolmaster but such as are allowed to teach’
by secular or ecclesiastical officials, or sent ‘out of the realm without suf-
ficient licence’. Unlicensed schoolmasters and Catholic education overseas
were illegal anyway; but the Council of the North aspired to intervene in
domestic religious practice, and in what parents taught their children. The
grounds of their claim catch one’s attention:
It is the duty of all Christian magistrates to have a care of the good education
of all youths and children within their charge, that they may be instructed
and seasoned at the first with the true knowledge of God and His religion,
whereby they are liable to become good members of the Church and com-
mon weal, and dutiful subjects to her Majesty and the State, and therefore to
prevent the danger of such youths and children, whose parents are recusants
or non-communicants, by Popish schoolmasters, in such superstitious and
false religion.21
‘Youths and children’ are ‘in the charge’ of Christian magistrates, whose
responsibility their ‘good education’ is. Parents represent the danger to be
guarded against. Children’s education is the concern of Christian magis-
trates because they are responsible for the Christian commonwealth—and
good education produces ‘good members of the Church and common
weal, and dutiful subjects’. How children are brought up affects how they
behave as adults, and how adults behave benefits or undermines the state.
Yet this reduction of the family to a tool for the commonwealth’s purposes
sounds more like post-enlightenment state ideology than early modern
England as we usually think of it.
One of the influences that enabled such a rhetoric in 1600 was reli-
gious: the responsibility of the ‘Christian magistrate’. Such language
recalls Martin Luther’s exhortation of 1524, urging magistrates of godly
cities to provide schools:
But what if the parents fail to do their duty? […] It therefore behooves the
council and the authorities to devote the greatest care and attention to the
young […] they would be remiss in their duty before God and man if they
did not seek [the city’s] welfare […] A city’s best and greatest welfare, safety
and strength consist rather in its having many able, learned, wise and hon-
ourable and well-educated citizens.22
In Reformed cities, where the Church as a supranational institution had

been disavowed, and where ecclesiastical and civic government were
196 L. UNDERWOOD
increasingly merged, there was an enhanced role for ‘Christian magistrates’.

Magistrates should not only behave like Christians, but were responsible
as magistrates for the Christianity of the commonwealth. Luther does not
give magistrates the ‘charge’ of children, but he exhorts them to intervene
in case of parental failure. The Elizabethan Council of the North applied
this reasoning to religious orthodoxy. Neither example suggests remov-
ing children from parental custody, but the underlying concept (the state
must educate children in the right values) is relevant to such conflicts.
Discourses of household and patriarchy were also relevant. Lena Cowen
Orlin has discussed how applying patriarchal household models to politi-
cal theory affected the household: making the polity a supra-household,
and the king a supra-father, created a hierarchy of households.23 A house-
holder was ‘responsible for the maintenance of moral order in his immedi-
ate sphere but to macrocosmic benefit’.24 If he failed, he might not only
forfeit his domestic subjects’ loyalty, but be superseded by the supra-
household.25 In the patriarchal polity, arguably the commonwealth or
kingdom was the prior entity of which each household was a microcosm;
it was a valid household only insofar as the pater faithfully deputed for the
pater patriae. Hence one could refer to children as the charge of the com-
monwealth’s representatives.
Similar claims are implied by the 1606 act which debarred recusants
from holding wardships: it is baldly observed that ‘Recusants convict are
not thought meete […] to have the Educacon of their owne Children,
much lesse of the Children of any other of the Kings Subjectes’.26 No stat-
ute ever deprived recusants of their own children’s custody (though recus-
ant mothers of wards were prevented from being guardians); the sweeping
statement is the relic of a clause for removing Catholic children from their
parents, which (malgré the Commons) had been deleted by the Lords.
The assertion that recusants are not ‘meet’ to be parents, let alone guard-
ians, is a claim of moderation—king and parliament are attempting less
than would be justified. It is also a claim to adjudge what is ‘meet’ in the
upbringing of children; and to judge what is normative—‘recusants are
not thought meet’ expresses a universal assumption, not a proposition. To
describe wards as ‘the Children of […] the Kings Subjectes’ prioritises this
relationship: to raise children is to raise the king’s subjects. And the oft-
expressed doubts of Protestant statesmen as to whether Catholics could be
good subjects dominated the discourse about Catholic dissent, and were
invoked to justify virtually all measures against Catholicism. Here it is sug-
gested that bad subjects cannot be good parents.
The Commons argued for retaining the ‘education’ clause in reveal-

ing terms: ‘it is not unnaturall; for though the Parent have much in the
Childe, yet the Common-wealth hath more Interest in every mans Person
then himselfe; Therefore in every mans Childe […]’.27 The exclusive claim
of the state over the individual could hardly be put more strongly. But,
while the statute includes language reminiscent of this overpowering ide-
ology, the Lords’ assertion that the measure was ‘unnaturall, dangerous,
exceeding difficult, and scandalous’ carried the legislative day.28 Through
wardship and other channels, outright claims to supersede the patriarchal
household and deny parental custody on religious grounds were made,
but not enshrined in law. Even accountability fell short in practice: York’s
recusant householders were required to govern their domestic subordi-
nates to ‘macrocosmic benefit’ as defined by the Protestant state. But only
three of the twelve parents signed recognisances. Five refused, one was
dead, and three avoided appearing.29 The campaign does not seem to have
been repeated. This invites the question of what prevented such attempts.
What principles or cultural assumptions challenged the polity’s claim to
supersede the family?
In 1593, William Cecil made some observations on anti-recusancy
measures under discussion in Parliament, which included a proposition
for taking custody of the children of recusants.30 But Cecil felt that ‘to take
his childe from hym as sone as he is eight yeares ould is thought hard’.
Former laws had ‘stood with the honor of our appollogies’, that no-one
was persecuted for ‘matter of Conscience’; this bill ‘hathe a discordance
[…] for wee ever condemme on the Churche of Rome the reducynge
of consciences by terror’. It would ‘exasperat the humours abroade and
make our Government odious’.31 An Act further penalising recusancy was
passed in 1593, but it did not include the removal of children. Cecil and
his colleagues did not fear using physical coercion. Existing statutes pro-
vided for: imprisonment as penalty for hearing Mass; execution if a priest
ordained abroad entered England; execution for harbouring or assisting
a priest and execution for being reconciled (or reconciling anyone) to the
Catholic church. A law governing children’s education would not have
resulted in anyone being tortured, executed or even imprisoned. Why did
Cecil fear that it, like no other policy, would be a ‘resort to terror’? The
House of Lords’ description in 1606 of such measures as ‘unnaturall’ may
be pertinent. Forcible separation of parents and children amounts to ‘ter-
ror’ because it is ‘unnatural’: this implies that the parent–child bond is part
of human nature, not merely societal convention. By speaking of ‘terror’
198 L. UNDERWOOD
and ‘hardship’, Cecil acknowledges the value placed on affective ties of

kinship. The Lords’ comment indicates that, though treating the family as
a political unit, early modern society also recognised it as a natural entity.
This made it difficult for the state to trump the family, unless one argued
that the polity was as, or more, natural than the family—which is what
the pater patriae metaphor suggested. The appeal to ‘nature’ was used to
challenge state intervention in religious upbringing. Crucially, the recog-
nition of ‘natural ties’ takes both the assault on, and defence of, parental
rights beyond questions of patriarchy.
Family Beyond Patriarchy

Conflict between the micro-polity of the family and the macro-household
of the kingdom invites focus on paternal rights. But concepts of household
and family order went beyond that, as disputes over child custody involv-
ing Catholic mothers and other relatives illustrate. Since the father usu-
ally had to be dead for a child to become a ward, in wardship cases wider
familial rights were at stake. The Court of Wards could intervene against
Catholic mothers because all relatives lacked legal rights until 1610 (when
the Court granted, as a concession not a right, priority to close kin in
purchasing wardships); thereafter, Catholic families were peculiarly disad-
vantaged. Excluding recusant relatives from the 1610 concession asserted
that Catholic religious dissent negated natural rights. But for Catholic
mothers to lose practical custody (rather than only legal guardianship) was
rare, suggesting that this assertion was contentious. Protestants helped
Catholics to circumvent restrictions because they did not think it reason-
able to take children from their families—even if they were teaching them
popery.
In December 1626, Dorothy Fowler was ordered to surrender her
six-year-
old son, Walter, to Matthew Cradock, his committee, to be
‘vertuously and religiously educated’.32 A lawyer’s casebook notes that
Cradock had ‘suffered the ward beinge very yonge to bredd with his
mother a Recusant’, but was ordered ‘to remove him & to breede him
virtuouslie & religiouslie’.33 Cradock, a distant relative of the Fowlers,
was employed as a lawyer by many Staffordshire gentry; he may have been
sought as a complaisant guardian.34 The Court of Wards disallowed this
strategy: Protestant committees were to ensure Protestant wards, not
merely to maintain legal restrictions on Catholic adults. But eventually
Cradock sub-let the wardship to Walter, Lord Aston of Forfar, former
ambassador to Spain. Aston later became a Catholic, and probably already

had Catholic sympathies.35 There is no evidence of Dorothy Fowler’s part
in this transaction, but a wealthy, powerful, crypto-Catholic committee
was what a recusant family with an heir in ward might look for if they
needed to avoid pressure from the Court. In another case, the mother of
15-year-old Thomas Skrymshere was ordered in 1625 to hand him over
to the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield ‘to be by his Lordship religiously
educated’; a further injunction was addressed also to ‘Gataker’, probably
Thomas’ maternal grandfather, and a recusant.36 This suggests suspicion
of wider Catholic kin networks influencing a ward.
In 1645, during the Civil War, the Parliamentarian government intro-
duced the closest thing attempted to a policy on Catholic upbringing. They
stipulated that the wives and children of those whose estates were seques-
trated for being royalists or recusants would be allowed one-fifth of the
confiscated income, but this would apply only to children ‘educated and
brought up in the Protestant religion’.37 This measure did not explicitly
deprive parents of custody—it financially penalised Catholic upbringing.
Most instances of intervention from 1643–1660, however, did not strictly
operate by this ordinance, and they indicate what rights and obligations
Parliamentarian regimes claimed towards families: were they less likely
to challenge paternal rights than maternal ones? Did they attack paren-
tal custody directly, or exploit financial penalties? Eleven cases involved
heirs of deceased fathers: where a child inherited estates sequestered for
recusancy, the government sought proof of Protestant upbringing before
lifting the sequestration. This might mean supplanting Catholic moth-
ers with Protestant guardians, as when the Committee for Compounding
ordered the guardian of John Thornton to bring him up Protestant, his
widowed mother being a recusant.38 In six cases, the Committee set con-
ditions on property assigned to the heirs of living recusants: for example,
rents set aside by Sir Robert Brett for his children were exempted from
sequestration, but nothing was to be paid until Protestant education was
demonstrated.39 These cases combined financial sanctions with direct
orders for Protestant education, and involved fathers and mothers.
Of two known cases in which children were removed in connection
with the 1645 ordinance one involved a widow and the other two liv-
ing parents. The Dorset County Committee ordered Sara Keynes to be
brought up by Protestant guardians, who were paid £10 out of her par-
ents’ estate—presumably Sara’s share of the one-fifth (in fact, Mrs Keynes
was only a reputed widow: she and her husband faked his death in order
200 L. UNDERWOOD
to release the estate from sequestration).40 Three children of Christopher

and Alethea Anderton were removed from their parents around 1646.41
Christopher died in 1650; Mrs Anderton later ended the sequestration
by swearing the Oath of Abjuration, a formal denial of Catholic beliefs.
One recusant mother prevailed over her recusant husband; Lady Morley
requested, in 1651, that her son Thomas be placed with Protestant guard-
ians, whereas her husband (then in prison for hearing Mass) was, she said,
‘ready rather to give assistance to those that would undo the child’.42 To
‘undo’ is an emphatic yet ambiguous term. It implies total ruin, but does
not specify how: it might mean unorthodox political allegiance (that is to
say, royalism), false religion, or simply the financial cost imposed on open
Catholicism. Calling the 15-year-old a ‘child’ emphasises his vulnerability
and lack of culpability. The real reasons for Lady Morley’s ostentatious
compliance remain unclear; she herself apparently remained a recusant.43
But her case proves that the father’s rights would not prevail over the
mother’s if religious orthodoxy was on her side.
Cultural preconceptions about ‘family’ beyond parent–child rights
(whether paternal or maternal) also affected how governments dealt with
dissident parents. The Court of Wards may have found intervention eas-
ier when they could appeal to wider kinship against a Catholic parent.
In 1625, Sir William Spencer’s recusant mother, Margaret, attempted
to ‘seduce’ her children to Catholicism. The ward’s committees were
Protestant relatives of the deceased father, and the Court ordered not
only the ward, but also his younger brothers to be handed over to them.44
In 1620, immediately on his father’s death, the Privy Council commanded
the bishop of Chester to secure 12-year-old Christopher Anderton, to
ensure that his wardship went to a reliable Protestant, rather than Catholic
relatives. The ensuing conflict saw the bishop send magistrates in four dif-
ferent directions to hunt for the child while his Catholic friends, led by
one John Preston, physically hid him. Christopher’s father had attempted
to boost chances of a Catholic guardian by creating new family ties: he
had contracted the boy in marriage to Preston’s 12-year-old daughter,
and Preston involved himself on behalf of his ‘little son-in-law’. Eventually
Preston consented to hand Christopher over, provided he was committed
to ‘some one of his own bloud’.45 On this occasion, the claims of wider kin
were not only part of the conflict, but also finally facilitated a compromise.
If the perceived rights of different relatives had an impact, what about
those of the children themselves? Modern debates about state and fam-
ily are frequently framed as questions of children’s rights or ‘best inter-
ests’; one may ask whether early modern sources offer anything analogous.
Children were invoked in favour of intervention; Cornelius Burges, advo-
cating legislation for Protestant upbringing in 1641, urged that ‘the souls
of many thousands would for ever blesse you, by whose means they should
be delivered out of the power of that Aegyptian darknes’.46 Whether chil-
dren’s rights likewise helped to limit intervention is unclear. In 1593,
Cecil seemed to fear the repercussions of violating parental rights rather
than unjustified detention of children: ‘to take his childe from hym […]
is thought hard’, not ‘to take him from his parents’. It is possible that the
conscience which would be ‘reduced by terror’ is that of the child, placed
in the control of strangers. The Lords’ assertion in 1606 that taking chil-
dren from parents was ‘unnatural’ presumably acknowledged a two-way
bond. But these seem rather slight (and uncertain) nods towards chil-
dren’s rights.
Cultural assumptions that militated against intervention in children’s
religious upbringing were not limited to notions about patriarchy, though
these were certainly important. Attempts to prevent the generational
transmission of religious dissent also had to reckon with a sense of the
decorum of household and family in general.
Catholic Responses to State Intervention

The tensions awakened by attempting to import the confessional state
into the family constrained intervention in practice; cases remained small
in number, and relatively isolated. But the idea that this could happen
became incorporated into English Catholic narratives of persecution. To
Catholics, challenges to parental custody were an example of tyranny.
In condemning such tyranny, their accounts tend to emphasise the chil-
dren—as both victims and agents—more than government sources do.
Reporting on religious persecution in 1591, the Jesuit Robert Southwell
wrote that ‘the children of Catholickes have bene somtimes taken from
their parents and forced against their conscieunces’.47 These children are
Catholics with their own consciences to be ‘forced’, not passive objects of
education. The description of the attempted re-education of four broth-
ers named Worthington, captured en route overseas in 1584, emphasises
their active resistance. They refuse to attend church, despite threats and
beatings; they debate with a Protestant schoolmaster when made to
attend school; even the 11-year-old argues with the Protestant bishop.
Their conduct inspires adult Catholics to firmer resistance. The project of
202 L. UNDERWOOD
Protestant indoctrination fails primarily because the children defend their

Catholicism.48 In 1633 a Catholic newsletter reported of a royal ward, Sir
Charles Shirley:
young S[i]r Charles Sherly a youth of ten yeares of age baronett, since he
was taken from his mother my Lady Dorothy & given to her brother, his
uncle the Earle of Essex to be bred in Protestantisme, hath never since
shewed any ioy, and still refuseth to go to church, or to praiers with them,
seeing that his father charged him upon his death bedd [with] his religion,
yea it is reported further that his father appeared severall times unto him &
spoke to him in this effect, but I suspend my belief for that matter till I have
heard better proof than I have donn yet.49
Charles’ fidelity consists in his refusal to ‘go to church’ and his unhappiness
rather than in actively challenging Protestant authorities. More empha-
sis is placed on the paternal relationship: the child respects his father’s
dying injunctions, what was ‘charged him upon [his father’s] death bedd’.
Including possible visions in which that ‘charge’ is repeated implies that
the paternal role continues after death: this protests against the assault,
through wardship, on even a dead father’s authority. But it is still the
child’s resistance which validates the rejection of Protestantism.
When challenges to parental custody actually occurred, Catholic par-
ents usually responded with evasion rather than confrontation. George
Jerningham did not plead the inviolability of patriarchy when his sons
were placed with a Protestant schoolmaster in 1593; he petitioned the
Privy Council that sickness was spreading in London and he had to take
them home for their health.50 In 1620, when the Privy Council summoned
Viscount Montague and his son, saying that they wanted the boy educated
at a Protestant school, Lord Montague replied that neither of them could
travel due to poor health—and that there was no law which could force
him to send his son to Eton.51 Perhaps Catholics feared that challenging
the grounds of interference was an invitation to shift that ground. They
relied instead on the cultural assumptions that would keep government
claims in check, and guarantee allies in their evasion.
If a parent did lose custody of a child due to recusancy it created a pecu-
liar dilemma: not simply that religious constancy brought hardship, but
that professing the faith meant sacrificing one’s children’s faith. Both Mrs
Keynes and Alethea Anderton eventually took the Oath of Abjuration.
The Catholic account of the Andertons says that after about five years’
absence, ‘their mother found how to get them home’.52 The records of
the Committee for Compounding indicate that the means she found was
to swear her denial of Catholicism. But having regained her children,
Mrs Anderton encountered another problem. Alethea and Dorothea had
reportedly spent two years with abusive guardians, who ‘allowed them
scarce meat or cloths & kept [them] bare leg’d in sackcloth […] Besides
that, they did beat them with whips that had croocked pins in them’.
They were then moved to other guardians who treated them better—
and achieved what brutality had not: young Alethea ‘became great in the
bible’, and assimilated Protestant beliefs such that ‘Catholic religion she
could not abide’. Returned home, ‘she would not say the Ave Maria unles
her Mother whipt her, & even then […] she would afterwards spit out
again the words’.53 One can only guess at the confusion in the child’s
mind, but if Mrs Anderton had committed apostasy in order to be able
to re-Catholicise her children, both guilt and desperation may have moti-
vated her severity.
This account (based probably on Alethea’s testimony) emphasises the
cruelty to the children involved in re-education attempts, but does not
avoid the fact that, often enough, they worked. And therefore they had
to be resisted: parents wanted to keep custody of their children not only
because it was ‘natural’, but because they cared as much as did any gov-
ernment official about the children’s religious orthodoxy. To people for
whom life’s ultimate aim was salvation after death, this was as much part
of parental love as providing food, clothes and affection.
Conclusion
One battle over child custody, fought between 1636 and 1641, epito-
mises the key issues: patriarchy, the household’s integrity, its public liabil-
ity, natural rights, and the merits of evasion versus challenge. When the
first Viscount Fairfax, of Gilling, Yorkshire, made a will providing that his
eldest grandson be educated by the Protestant Sir Thomas Wentworth
(future Earl of Strafford), rather than by Fairfax’s Catholic son, one could
easily argue that it had little legal force. So in backing Wentworth, the Privy
Council made the largest possible claim for the state’s right to enforce reli-
gious conformity over paternal rights. Resisting this claim, the second vis-
count was driven to articulate the theoretical questions more clearly than
any other Catholic. When he died only a few years later, wardship achieved
204 L. UNDERWOOD
what grander claims could not: the new Lord Fairfax was committed to
Protestant guardians and removed from his mother’s custody.54
Lord Fairfax’s reply to the Privy Council’s demand in 1639 begins with
defence rather than defiance:
1. that he is resolved rather to lose the 1200li. then part wth. his sonne
and (soe conceiving that this being in his choyce) his fathers will is
in that behalfe performed.55
Fairfax argues first that his father’s will can be fulfilled other than
by his son’s Protestant education. Only then does he risk an actual
objection. The law backs paternal rights:
2. ‘that the lawes of the land gives [sic] the father ownly an interest in
the disposicion of his eldest sonne’.
His father, he suggests, was not competent to make such a will, and
as such, the Council has nothing to enforce. But, as though aware
that this proposition was as ideologically contentious as it was legally
unanswerable, Fairfax moves on to persuasion, producing various
subsidiary reasons for the Council to leave him alone.
3. that he is not ownly ready to spend his life, but also his estate to
doe his Majesty service and hath in obedience to his Majesty and
his lawes paid his Irish subsidies for his title, compounded for his
Recusancy […] And soe hee humbly desires hee may be noe worse
in the good favour of your Majesty then the rest of the Recusants
in England.
4. that he hath many younger children to provide for, and that the
estranging of the eldest sonne from him and his mother, may pro-
duce such effects by the discontents of their mind, as might be
inconvenient to all three, besides the hope of the advancement of
his younger children (hee being but tenant for life) dependes onely
upon the value of his eldest sonnes marige, which probably may be
lost by the separacion of his sonne from him, and his mother.
5. that hee is in noe way either factious or seditious, but one that in all
things hath expressed as much duty and obedience to his Majesty
and his lawes, as any other of his ranke and quality.
6. that there are noe presidents of this nature, for either they were
Peeres of the Realme in warde or such as might other ways endanger
the state of the Realme.
As well as emphasising Fairfax’s loyalty, citing the recusancy fines he obe-

diently pays links the removal of children to persecution in general: he
asks to be ‘noe worse’ treated than ‘the rest of the Recusants’. But this is
as close as Fairfax treads towards the actual centre of the case, religious
orthodoxy. Fairfax pleads for household integrity: ‘estranging’ the future
head of the family will break its unity, perhaps disrupting the household
order whereby the head willingly cares for his dependents. Only by impli-
cation does he suggest that religious division might be the cause of such
disruption. In his last objection, Fairfax continues to avoid his biggest
liability, that education by Wentworth would be Protestant and by Fairfax
Catholic, claiming that ‘if he were to part with his son’ he would not
object to Wentworth: ‘7. Lastely, that if hee were to parte with his sonne,
hee would part with him as soon to the Lord Deputy [Wentworth] as
any other: but the Lawe of nature gives the mother the custody of her
owne childe’.56 Finally, Fairfax cites the ‘law of nature’: while he can plead
English law only for the father, not the mother, he more than compensates
by invoking nature itself in favour of maternal custody. Fairfax appeals
both to the polity’s laws favouring patriarchy, and to cultural assumptions
about the natural family.
The Privy Council did not detail its counter-arguments for rejecting
Fairfax’s case. But the terms in which the chosen Protestant guardian pur-
sued his claims are instructive. Wentworth, like Fairfax, avoided the con-
fessional issue when he took up the first viscount’s bequest. He wrote to
the new Lord and Lady Fairfax (in April 1637) in courteous terms which
assumed they would co-operate. He offered himself as ‘a ready Instrument
to the task of the Education of the Heir of that House to which I am allied
in Blood and of that Person that ever was esteemed and beloved in my
Family’.57 When co-operation was not forthcoming, Wentworth invoked
the Privy Council. But his initial letter is more than a threat worded nicely.
Wentworth’s ally in the rescue of young William Fairfax was Henry Fairfax,
the new viscount’s brother. In November 1637, after Wentworth’s first
attempt had failed, Henry wrote about his brother and sister-in-law’s con-
tinued evasion. He told Wentworth, ‘I thinke myself made happy by your
Lordships Noble and Free Expression of your Affection in the memory of
my Father, the wellfare of our howse, and accomplishment of his will’.58
Wentworth’s reply referred again to ‘the trust of my Lord your Father […]
the beleefe his Lordship had in me’. He enclosed a letter directly to Lord
Fairfax, in which he declared that ‘It was a Legacye left me by my owne
Father to Honour and Serve the Howse of Walton […] I hereby desire
your Lordship’s full Resolution, whether I shall receive that pledge of
your Fathers trust from you or noe’.59 Wentworth and Henry Fairfax were
206 L. UNDERWOOD
also invoking the family polity. Wentworth is resolved to serve the ‘house’
and ‘family’ of his kinsman, the first viscount; among other reasons, he
is obliged by his own filial duty (‘a legacy left me by my own father’).
Henry Fairfax thanks Wentworth for his concern for the ‘welfare of our
house’. An appeal to ‘family’ and ‘household’ thus enables a challenge to
the rights of a father.
Catholicism is the elephant in the room. In defending the rights of
father and family, Lord Fairfax avoided saying that these rights held abso-
lutely, and religious dissent was irrelevant. But that was necessarily what
he meant. Wentworth and Henry Fairfax did not say that removing the
heir was necessary for the welfare of the house because its current head
was a Papist, but that is their implied argument. If transmitted to his son,
Lord Fairfax’s Catholicism will damage the family. His religious dissent
negates his headship of the house. The first viscount’s headship has to
continue posthumously, as it were, bypassing his disobedient son’s aberra-
tion in order to restore—in the next generation—right order in the house-
hold, and thus between the household and the polity. The Privy Council’s
response to Lord Fairfax’s declaration of 1639 was simply that they saw
no reason to reverse their order in Wentworth’s favour. But when Lord
Fairfax died, in 1641, his son was still with his parents at Gilling (it was
only then that the wardship was sold to Protestants, and young Fairfax
was sent away to a Protestant school).60 Lack of action by the Council may
imply an acceptance that in practice they could not push the law that far.
But the theoretical argument was not conceded.
Religious dissidence profoundly threatened the cohesive imagery of
the paternal monarch and the household kingdom. The results were that,
firstly, English rulers sometimes tried to prioritise one imperative over the
other. Secondly, as far as English Catholics were concerned, the household
won. As persecution in general decreased during the later seventeenth
century, we hear little more about intervention in religious upbringing.
This demonstrates the power of confessionalisation in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries; it drove statesmen to attempt the dissolution of the
family. But it also demonstrates the limits of confessionalisation: though
religious practices might be criminalised, religious uniformity could not
encompass the household. It further indicates the practical limits of state
ideology: private rights still superseded the perceived responsibilities of the
state. Yet there was no ideological triumph for parental rights. Whether
the state should protect children from their parents’ errors remained an
open question; what became clear was that, in the seventeenth century, it
could not.
In a way, the debate remains open. In modern Britain, it is accepted
that the state can replace parents as guardians when necessity arises—
though necessity is not currently deemed to include teaching children the
wrong religion. Early modern statesmen assumed that formation in the
wrong religion was a bad thing, but were less sure about the state’s rights
over children. Modern states are more likely to use a discourse of the
rights of children, while early modern politicians spoke of the state’s right
and obligation to ensure national religious unity; one perhaps expresses
greater individualisation, while the other prioritises the larger unit. Both
approaches, though, find the ‘middle unit’ of the family—an institu-
tion smaller than the state to which the individual also belongs—uneasy.
Despite changing contexts, similar questions recur. What are the boundar-
ies between state and family? What, if anything, justifies state intervention
in the upbringing of children? To whom do children belong?
Notes
1. TNA, State Papers (SP from here on) 14/69/69. See also Lucy
Underwood, Childhood, youth and religious dissent in post-Reformation
England (Basingstoke, 2014), chapters 4–5. Material in these chapters is
used here.
2. Richard Huscroft, ‘The State’, in Cavallo, S. & Evangelisti, S., A cultural
history of childhood and family in the early modern age (Oxford, 2010)
pp. 127–144; B. Premo, Children of the father king: Youth, authority and
legal minority in colonial Lima (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2005) esp.
pp. 27–31.
3. F.E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, gender and seventeenth century
print culture (Ithaca & London, 1999).
4. Lucy Underwood, ‘Youth, religious identity and autobiography at the
English Colleges in Rome and Valladolid, 1592–1685’ in Historical
Journal 55:2 (2012), pp. 349–374; Underwood, Childhood, chapter 2.
5. L.Cowen Orlin, Private matters and public culture in post-Reformation
England (Ithaca, 1994), pp. 115–125.
6. Cornelius Burges ‘Another Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of
Commons now Assembled in Parliament, November the Fifth, 1641’ in
R. Jeffs (ed.), The English Revolution I: Fast Sermons to Parliament, 34
vols. (London, 1970–1971) I, pp. 333–401 (p. 371); British Library
Lansdowne Ms.97 ff. 156–158.
208 L. UNDERWOOD
7. ‘advice in matters of religion and State’, attributed to William Cecil, Lord

Burghley., in J. Somers & W. Scott (eds.) Somers Tracts, 13 vols. (London,
1809–1815), I, p. 166.
8. Underwood, Childhood, pp. 73–112.
9. See Underwood, Childhood, pp. 73–74, for examples.
10. A.C.F Beales, Education under Penalty: English Catholic education from the
Reformation to the fall of James II (London, 1963) pp. 61–62, 93–97,
101–103.
11. SP 14/69/69.
12. H.E.Bell, An Introduction to the History and Records of the Court of Wards
and Liveries (Cambridge, 1953).
13. Bell, Court of Wards, chapter 7; P. Croft, ‘Wardship in the parliament of
1604’ in Parliamentary History 2 (1983), pp. 39–48; N. Cuddy ‘The real,
attempted ‘Tudor Revolution in Government’: Salisbury’s 1610 Great
Contract’, in G.W. Bernard & S.J. Gunn (eds.), Authority and Consent in
Tudor England (Aldershot, 1988) pp. 249–270.
14. SP 14/69/69.
15. SP 14/69/69.
16. Underwood, Childhood, chapter 4.
17. Salisbury Mss. 214/66; Underwood, Childhood, pp. 83–84, 85. Mordant’s
commitee, Sir Henry Compton, was probably a Catholic sympathiser, but
an outward conformist.
18. J. Morris, Troubles of our Catholic forefathers related by themselves, 3 vols.
(London, 1872–1877), III, pp. 287–288; York City Archives, York
Housebooks B32 f.79v-81; Underwood, Childhood, pp. 100–102, 109.
19. Morris, Troubles, III, pp. 288–289.
20. Morris, Troubles, III, pp. 291–292; YCA B32 f.241–242.
21. Morris, Troubles, III, p. 287.
22. Martin Luther, ‘To Councilmen of all cities in Germany that they establish
Christian schools’ (trans. J.Pelikan and H.T.Lehman), in T.F. Lull (ed.)
Martin Luther’s basic theological writings, 2nd edn. (Minneapolis MN,
2005) pp. 460–478 (p. 465).
23. Orlin, Private matters, pp. 85–86.
24. Orlin, Private matters, p. 3.
25. Orlin, Private matters, chapter 2.
26. Statutes of the Realm, IV.ii, 3 Jac I c.5, p. 1081. Beales, Education, p. 92;
House of Commnons Journal I, p. 264; D.H.Wilson (ed.) The Parliamentary
Diary of Robert Bowyer, 1606–1607 (New York, 1971) pp. 30, 106,
160–163, 170–175, 183–184.
27. Wilson, Bowyer’s Diary p. 172.
28. Wilson, Bowyer’s Diary p. 172.
29. Morris, Troubles, III, pp. 289–290.
30. Catholic Record Society Records Series, vol. 53 (1961), pp. 116–117,
from Cecil Papers.
31. Catholic Record Society Records Series, vol. 53 (1961), pp. 120–121,
from Cecil Papers.
32. TNA WARD 9/299 (unfoliated) 2 Dec 1626.
33. Notebook of Henry Cole, British Library Lansdowne Ms.608 f.53v; TNA
C142/404/126; TNA WARD 9/207 f.47.
34. He appears as witness, trustee and so on, in various Chancery documents
relating to Staffordshire families. I am grateful to Simon Healy of the
History of Parliament Trust for this information.
35. A.C. Clifford (ed.) Tixall Letters, 2 vols (London, 1815), I, pp. 63–70;
ODNB Walter Aston 1584–1639; G.M. Bell, A handlist of British diplo-
matic representatives 1509–1688 (London, 1990) pp. 258–259.
36. WARD 9/299 19 February 1624/5; WARD 9/299 31 May 625; WARD
9/299 20 February 1625/6; Underwood, Chilldhood, p. 78
37. Acts and ordinances of the Interregnum, I, p. 769; see also Underwood,
Childhood, pp. 102–108.
38. Underwood, Childhood, pp. 103–104; M.A.E. Green, Calendar of the
Proceedings of the Commitee for Compounding [CCC from here on], 5 vols
(London, 1889–1892, repr. 1967) IV, p. 2591.
39. CCC: III pp. 1644–1646; see also, CCC: IV pp. 2503–2504, 2539–2541,
2492–2494; CCC: III pp. 2226–2228; SP 23/19/f.1116r.
40. Underwood, Childhood, p. 106.
41. The main source is a Catholic report. Records of the Committee for
Compounding offer circumstantial corroboration; see Underwood,
Childhood, pp. 106–107, and below.
42. CCC: III pp. 2276–2283 (pp. 2278–2279); A.K.Tompkins, ‘The English
Catholic Issue, 1640–1662: Factionalism, Perceptions and Exploitation’,
(unpublished PhD. dissertation, University of London 2010), pp. 103,
112–114. Underwood, Childhood, pp. 104–105.
43. CCC: III pp. 2279, 2282.
44. Underwood, Childhood, p. 79.
45. Underwood, Childhood, pp. 82–83; SP 14/112/59.I; SP 14/112/9.
46. Cornelius Burges, ‘Another Sermon’, p. 371.
47. CRS: 52, pp. 1–16 at p. 6.
48. John Gibbon, Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia (Trier, 1588)
pt.2. Addenda sig.A1v -sig.C2v; Beales, Education, pp. 59–60.
49. Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster, B47, f.68 (13 Dec 1633). I
am grateful to Michelle Howell for this reference.
50. Underwood, Childhood, pp. 94, 110.
51. Acts of the Privy Council vol. 37 (1619–21), pp. 363–4; SP 14/120/20
f.30.
210 L. UNDERWOOD
52. Chronicles of St Monica’s Convent, Louvain, property of Augustinian

Canonesses of Windesheim, Kingston-near-Lewes, held at Douai Abbey,
Reading, pp. 607–611, 615. I am grateful to Caroline Bowden for her
transcript, and to the Canonesses for permission to quote; Underwood,
Childhood, pp. 106–107.
53. Chronicles of St Monica’s Convent, pp. 607–611, 615.
54. See J.C.H. Aveling, ‘The Yorkshire Fairfaxes’, in Recusant History 4:2,
pp. 61–101; Underwood, Childhood, pp. 81–82, 110–111.
55. The funds provided by the first Viscount for his grandson’s Protestant
education, to go to the 2nd viscount’s brother if he did not comply.
Aveling, ‘Yorkshire Fairfaxes’ p. 64
56. Quotations from text printed in full in Aveling, ‘Yorkshire Fairfaxes’,

pp. 64–65. Abbreviations expanded.
57. Aveling, ‘Yorkshire Fairfaxes’, p. 62.
60. Aveling, ‘Yorkshire Fairfaxes’, pp. 65, 75–76, 78.
CHAPTER 12
Father Figures: Paternal Politics

in the Conversion Narratives of Thomas
Gage and James Wadsworth
Abigail Shinn
In what follows, I will consider how two seventeenth-century converts

to Protestantism, Thomas Gage (1603–1656) and James Wadsworth (b.
1604), employ father figures as a powerful and multivalent anti-Catholic
trope.1 Paying particular attention to the literary construction of their
conversion narratives I will argue that both Gage and Wadsworth use
paternal metaphors as a way of organising and justifying their conversions
to Protestantism. Most commonly this is figured as a renouncement of
the faith of their paternal biological parent and a turn towards a heav-
enly father. This is not the only way in which the language of father-
hood is employed, however, and both men compose elaborate chains of
paternal association which encompass God, Christ, the Pope, monarch,
magistrate and confessor, while always looking towards a moment of
divine judgement. By focusing upon the father figure in these texts it is
therefore possible to identify fatherhood as a key metaphor for religious
and national affiliation, and to demonstrate that the language of paternal
A. Shinn (*)
School of English, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
e-mail: as364@st-andrews.ac.uk

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_12
212 A. SHINN
r elationships and inheritance, and the correspondent framing of the con-

vert as a child, provided converts with a powerful way of articulating their
spiritual transformation.
In order to uncover the central role played by ‘father figures’ in
Wadsworth and Gage’s texts I will firstly consider how these converts
describe their motivations for abandoning the faith of their fathers in
order to embrace Protestantism. I will then examine how they utilise the
paternal language of hierarchy employed by religious orders such as the
Jesuits and Dominicans and reframe it to outline a Catholic perversion
of the filial bond between father and son; an image further emphasised
by Gage’s and Wadsworth’s description of Protestant England as a true
mother. This will culminate in an analysis of the slippage between pater-
nity, patrimony and patronage when discussing issues of inheritance, a cor-
relation of particular importance for writers looking to secure patronage
for their work. Finally, I will map this paternal language onto Wadsworth
and Gage’s view of their conversions as a teleological progress towards
redemption and resurrection, a process which they tie to the model of
inheritance via primogeniture.
James Wadsworth’s father (also called James) converted to Catholicism
while working for the English ambassador to Spain, Sir Charles Cornwallis,
in 1605 and he subsequently conveyed his family to Andalusia and placed
his son in a Jesuit school.2 Wadsworth Jnr. details his renouncement of his
father’s Catholicism in The English Spanish Pilgrime (1629), a description
of his time in Catholic schools in Spain and St. Omer, his realisation of
the truth of Protestant teaching and subsequent desire for a return to the
country of his forefathers. His narrative vacillates between accounts of the
workings of the Jesuit school system, descriptions of false miracles perpetu-
ated by the Jesuits in order to convince their charges to remain, descrip-
tions of sea battles, and an account of his kidnapping by pirates, identified as
‘Mooriscoes’ who sodomised Wadsworth’s young companions and smoked
opium until ‘halfe drunk’.3 His intent is to ‘rippe vp the very bowels of
these treacherous […] Fathers [the Jesuits]’ and display their perfidy to
an English readership (D2r).4 The English Spanish Pilgrime was popular
enough to secure the publication of Fvrther Observations of the English
Spanish Pilgrime Concerning Spaine in 1630, indicating that his insider
knowledge of both Catholic institutions and the Spanish court—where his
father acted as tutor to the Infanta—was of interest to the English reading
public.5 Wadsworth’s narrative publicised the names of English, Scottish
and Irish fugitives in Spain, including the traveller and Catholic convert
FATHER FIGURES: PATERNAL POLITICS IN THE CONVERSION NARRATIVES... 213
Anthony Shirley, and provided details of his experiences acting as an inter-

preter for the young Charles I while he was at the Spanish court in 1623.
He also outlines his later career working as a (rather unsuccessful) spy for
the English crown and as a pursuivant hunting recusants.6
Thomas Gage came from a prominent recusant family in Surrey and
both of his parents were condemned to death for harbouring priests but
were later reprieved. Like Wadsworth, he was educated at St. Omer. Gage
wrote about his conversion to Protestantism in The English-American his
Travail by Sea and Land (1648), a narrative which addresses his spiritual
transformation alongside an account of his travels in the New World as a
Dominican missionary. Gage’s conversion is associated with an early dis-
satisfaction with Catholic doctrine but culminates in a moment of doubt
prompted by watching a mouse eat the communal wafer (S3r). Appended
to The English-American is a ‘Grammar’ of the native language of ‘Poconchi,
or Pocoman’ (titlepage) which he identifies as the ‘Indian tongue’ used in
Guatemala and Honduras, and he goes to considerable lengths to describe
the native peoples of the West Indies and their habits and environments,
dedicating a chapter to chocolate (T5r). One of Gage’s primary concerns
is the barbarity of Spanish colonialists and he argues for greater English
involvement in South America in order to counter both Spanish imperial-
ism and Catholic domination: ‘Of wronged indians, whom you shall set
free / From Spanish yoke, and Romes Idolatry’ (A6v).7
Gage’s text also details his decision to join the Dominican order
rather than the Jesuits as his father, John Gage, had wished; a reso-
lution that causes an irreparable breach with his family. Gage would
famously turn informant during the Civil War years and testify against
his former Catholic brethren, including his own brother, Father George
Gage; his evidence leading to the execution of at least three priests he
had known previously.8 This aspect of his biography has led to succes-
sive editors of The English-American excising his more virulently anti-
Catholic opinions. Uncomfortable with Gage’s ‘foul infamy’ they have
‘deleted the greater part of those unpleasantries’ or reframed the text
as an adventure narrative focused primarily on Gage’s interactions with
the native peoples of South America, turning the text into a Boy’s Own
adventure.9 This was a trend that would start as early as 1655 with the
publication of an edition of The English-American, newly titled A new
survey of the West-India’s, or, The English-American, his travail by sea
and land, this was structured as a travel narrative and included a series
of detailed maps.10
214 A. SHINN
There are many similarities between Gage’s and Wadsworth’s narra-

tives besides these biographical details and the conflated national affili-
ations indicated by their books’ titles, particularly in their descriptions
of the foreign cultures of Spain and the Americas and their recollection
of experiences within Catholic institutions. The dates of the two texts
(The English Spanish Pilgrime was published in 1629 and The English-
American in 1648) also place the publication of their narratives within
periods of heightened anti-Catholic feeling in England. In the 1620s there
was increased anti-Catholic sentiment associated with negotiations over
the Spanish match (1614–1623) and anxieties about a number of promi-
nent conversions of English noblewomen connected with the court of the
Catholic queen Henrietta Maria.11 In 1628 a proclamation called for the
arrest of all Jesuits and the return of children educated in Catholic institu-
tions overseas—a shift in the treatment of the English recusant community
which appears to be mirrored by many aspects of Wadsworth’s narrative,
particularly when he recounts how the sons of noblemen are tricked into
remaining in Jesuit schools and constrained from leaving and returning to
their families.12 For example, Wadsworth includes the story of Estenelaus
Brown who made a bid to escape by forging a letter from his father but is
discovered. The fathers inform his parent that ‘if euer hee should bee in
England […] he would turne Protestant’ (E2r).
In the 1640s the Irish rebellion was being painted as a confessional
conflict and presses associated with the parliamentarian John Pym were
disseminating anti-Catholic material in the hopes of influencing the fur-
ther radicalisation of the parliamentary cause.13 Given Gage’s support for
parliament’s persecution of Catholics during the Civil War, it is possible
to connect his conversion text to this period of politically motivated anti-
Catholic feeling, and he may have opportunistically sought to publicly ally
himself with growing anger over perceived Catholic involvement in the
Royalist struggle. Wadsworth and Gage are therefore engaging in wider
debates about the threat posed by Catholic communities and religious
orders overseas, and use their conversion narratives as a vehicle for reli-
gious polemic which allies them to prominent anti-Catholic movements
in England.
Wadsworth and Gage renounced the faith of their fathers and after
extensive periods in Catholic institutions, returned to England and con-
verted to Protestantism, (although for Gage this is a considerably more
drawn-out process than it is for Wadsworth).14 Beyond the many similari-
ties in their conversion experiences, however, their efforts to disseminate
proof of their change in confessional affiliation result in texts which are

fundamentally structured around the use of different father figures and
they cleverly use the image of true and false paternities to organise their
anti-papal and anti-Catholic discourse.
From Father to Faith

Wadsworth’s conversion begins when aged 18 he reads the scriptures in
secret:
[…] when I came to be 18 yeeres of age or there abouts, I vndertooke in

secret to read and peruse the sacred scriptures […] after I had conferred one
thing with another, I found more resemblance and probability of the truth
in the Protestants religion than in our own. (L3v)
His clandestine reading of what may be an English translation of the Bible

is accompanied by a growing distaste with the behaviour of his Jesuit
teachers. He claims they ‘make spels of their reliques’ and that in contrast
the Protestants he meets are ‘modest, religious, and honest, quite con-
trarie to the report of the Iesuites’ (L4r, M1r). Wadsworth’s focus upon
scripture acting as a catalyst for conversion is a commonplace of Protestant
conversion narratives, but the text makes clear that his conversion is fun-
damentally shaped around a rejection of his father’s Catholicism and not
truly complete until his father dies and he returns to England: ‘my Father
being dead, and I at my owne disposal, I came for England’ (M1v).15
The title page to The English Spanish Pilgrime immediately signals
Wadsworth’s position as the son of a Catholic convert:
Composed by James Wadsworth Gentleman, newly conuerted into his

true mothers bosome, the Church of England […] Sonne to Mr. Iames
Wadsworth, Bachelor of Diuinity, sometime of Emanuell Colledge in the
Vniuersity of Cambridge, who was peruerted in the yeere 1604. and late
Tutor to Donis Maria Infanta of Spaine.
The text informs the reader that Wadsworth Jnr.’s conversion is a move-
ment from a ‘peruerted’ father to a ‘true mother’, a father who, regard-
less of his apostasy, is university educated and affiliated with the Spanish
court. Wadsworth is clearly anxious to stress his father’s social position,
thereby allowing his secular paternal inheritance to remain intact even as
216 A. SHINN
he renounces his father’s faith. This is later mirrored by Wadsworth’s insis-

tence that his father ‘grew into dislike with the Iesuites’ after hearing his
son recount stories of their behaviour (G3v). This is an instance where
Wadsworth attempts to rehabilitate his parent by dwelling upon his place
in Spanish society and his later susceptibility to reconversion. Wadsworth
does not shy away from his paternal history but rather glosses it in such
a way as to emphasise his status as a legitimate gentleman’s son and a
Protestant with unique access to the workings of the Spanish court.
Wadsworth’s description of his father’s death echoes the language of
the title page in its attempt to simultaneously rehabilitate his Catholic
parent while foregrounding Wadsworth Jnr.’s position as a gentleman.
Before his death, Wadsworth Snr., having lost faith with the Jesuits and
informed that the Order was developing ‘plots and information against
him’, leaves the Infanta’s employ and returns home only to fall sick and
die ‘after eight dayes space’ (H2v). Wadsworth Snr. is depicted by his son
as a convert who at his death regrets his turn to Rome, a narrative rein-
forced by Wadsworth’s discovery of some of his father’s letters in which
he infers he expressed doubts about Catholic doctrine: ‘his Letters […]
gaue me to vnderstand, that the Romane Faith was not the surest way to
Saluation’ (L4v). Wadsworth is also careful to list the number of gentle-
men and noblemen of the court, including the ‘Earle Gondamor’, who
attend his father’s funeral (H3r). This foregrounding of his father’s posi-
tion in the Spanish court is followed by the description of Wadsworth and
his brother going to ‘kisse the Infantas and Don Oliuares’ hands before
receiving his father’s pension (H3r). Wadsworth is critical of his father’s
decision to convert, and his death allows his son the freedom to return to
England, but nonetheless he maintains that his father is well respected by
those in power and that the family retains proximity to the Spanish crown.
As James VI and I had sought a possible alliance with Spain through the
proposed marriage of Prince Charles to the Infanta, (negotiations which
potentially touched upon the two Wadsworths in their positions as tutor
and interpreter), the implication is that the Wadsworth family were also
affiliated to the English monarchy. It is likely that Wadsworth Jnr. sought
to exploit this tenuous link while rehabilitating his parent in order to pro-
mote his later career as a spy for the English crown.
Wadsworth details how his return to his ‘true mothers bosome, the
Church of England’ (title page) follows the death of his father, a journey
which is also prompted by what Wadsworth sees as a natural affinity for
his native country: ‘I was still (as all men are by naturall inclination) well
affected towards my natiue soyle’ (L3r). This is a homecoming described

as a return to his family’s Protestant past, a self-conscious mapping of his
conversion onto the story of the prodigal son, although in this instance
the return is an act of repatriation which is only made possible by the
death of his father.
In contrast to Wadsworth, Gage’s text is much more circumspect about
his paternal lineage. His break with his father happens well before his con-
version and is based upon his decision to join the Dominicans, a rupture
which provides the inspiration for his travels. When Gage is living with a
Dominican order in Xerez in Andalucía, a group of friars arrive with the
intent of recruiting men for a mission to New Spain. Gage knows one
of them, a man called Melendez. Melendez invites Gage to supper and
proceeds to get drunk: ‘Bacheus metamorphosed him from a Divine into a
Orator, and made him a Cicero in parts of Rhetoricall eloquence’ (B6r). In
his cups, Melendez describes a fecund world in the Indies which exceeds
even the bounty associated with the land God promised to Abraham in
the Book of Genesis: the Indies are ‘paved with tiles of silver and gold, the
stones to be Pearls, Rubies, and Diamonds […] the fields to be planted
with Sugar Canes, which should so sweeten the Chocolate, that it should
farre exceed the milk and hony of the land of promise’ (B6v). Intrigued
by Melendez’s account of the riches of the Americas, Gage retires for the
night and unable to sleep he contemplates an ‘angry and harsh’ letter
he has received from his father (B6v). Incensed that his son has joined
the Dominican order rather than the Jesuits, Gage Snr. writes that ‘he
would have thought his money better spent, if I had been a Scullion in
a Colledge of Jesuits, then if I should prove a Generall of the Order of
Dominicans; that I should never think to be welcome to my Brothers nor
kindred in England’ (B6v). Gage’s father, as further punishment, cuts his
son off from the family’s money, ‘a childs part due unto me’, leaving him
dependent upon the Order (D1r). Ruminating upon this Gage decides to
embark upon the mission to New Spain, vowing
to visit America, and there to abide till such time as Death should surprise
my angry Father […] and till I might there gain […] treasure that might
Counterpoise that Childs part, which for detesting the foure Cornered Cap,
and black Coat of Jesuits, my father had deprived me of. (D1r)
His role as a missionary is therefore shaped by his father’s stipulation

that he remain in exile and by his desire to recoup the wealth lost from
218 A. SHINN
his inheritance in a land he believes is ‘paved with tiles of silver and

gold’. Gage’s narrative is initially just as indebted to a paternal figure as
Wadsworth’s, but he makes no attempt to rehabilitate his parent. Instead,
his father’s disapproval provides the initial catalyst for Gage’s travels and
thereby for his later conversion.
Early in the text Gage describes feeling doubts about ‘some chief of the
Popish tenents’ prior to leaving for the Americas, and he makes it clear
that he is able to explore these concerns when distanced from his father’s
influence in England (C1r). This space for contemplation is described by
Gage as one of the opportunities presented by travel. Travel provides ‘the
increase of knowledge naturall by the insight of rich Americas and flour-
ishing Asia, and of knowledge spirituall by a long contemplation of that
new planted Church, and of those Church Planters lives and conversa-
tions’ (C1r). The missionary church in the Americas provides both new
spiritual knowledge and conversation and crucially removes Gage from the
sphere of influence associated with his father. Gage’s return to England,
like Wadsworth’s, follows the death of his father in 1626. Gage, however,
only begins his journey home in 1637, returning to England after two
decades abroad. Gage fails to allude to his father’s death in the text until
after his return to England—a glaring omission considering his motives
for leaving Europe. But while his father’s death is not mentioned before or
immediately upon his return, Gage later describes his attempts to recover
his inheritance. When he questions his younger brother about his father’s
will he is told that while his father left money for his other siblings and
second wife he has left nothing for Thomas: ‘to mee nothing, nay that at
his death he did not so much as remember mee’ (T1r). It is perhaps this
moment in the narrative which signals the final, and permanent, severing
of the bond between father and son, thereby allowing Gage to complete
his conversion to Protestantism. This occurs five years after his return to
England, a change formally acknowledged by the publication of a sermon
titled The Tyranny of Satan Discovered in the Tears of a Converted Sinner
(1642). Throughout the text, every stage in Gage’s movement towards
Protestantism, from his initial journey to the Americas, to his return to
England, is typified by a step away from the obstacle represented by his
father.
Despite Wadsworth and Gage’s differing approaches to the role played
by their biological fathers in their conversions, perhaps defined by the
Gage family’s long-standing recusancy and Wadsworth Snr.’s status as a
new convert (it would have been very difficult for Gage to rehabilitate the
memory of his father), in both their narratives the father is formulated as

a barrier which has to be surmounted before the son can return from exile
and embrace Protestantism.
Ghostly Fathers and the Confessor

While both The English-American and The English Spanish Pilgrime
depict a movement away from a biological parent, these are not the only
fathers present in these texts. Both Gage and Wadsworth spent consid-
erable time within Catholic institutions modelled on paternal hierar-
chies: the Jesuit and Dominican orders. As such, they both identify the
language of Catholic fatherhood with a perversion of familial roles. For
example, Wadsworth compiles a satirical ten commandments which he
says all Jesuits live by, these include ‘To be still jocund and merry’ and ‘To
gouerne their neighbours wife’. The eighth commandment is ‘To make a
slave of their ghostly child’ (E2v). Throughout the text Wadsworth refers
to the Jesuits as ‘ghostly Fathers’ implying that the ‘ghostly child’ is the
child to whom they act as confessor (D1v). Wadsworth argues that the
priests within the Jesuit school in St. Omer abuse this relationship, turn-
ing the students into slaves. He describes confession as an ‘Interrogatory’,
allying the priest with the interrogator and torturer (D2r). These ghostly
fathers can also be linked to the Pope, whose title is derived from the Latin
papa or father, a connection highlighted by Gage in The English-American
when he describes the Pope in the following terms: ‘the head of Rome, who
sacrilegiously stiles himselfe Holinesse and most Holy Father’ (M1v).
Wadsworth reinforces his focus upon the corruption of fatherhood
within the Jesuit order by referring to the priests collectively as the ‘pater-
nities’ (C2r). He also details the story of one Colonel Simple who founded
the Scottish seminary in Madrid with the intention of making his ‘base
sonne’ the prefect (I4v). These multiple fathers, whose names are always
presaged with ‘father’ in the text, may therefore themselves stem from
a dubious paternal line, one which bars them from legitimate paternal
inheritance. Due to clerical celibacy the expectation is also that the priests
themselves will not bear children, including sons who will carry on their
bloodline. This is contrary to a common focus upon the social and cul-
tural importance of reproduction for men, although as Helen Berry and
Elizabeth Foyster have argued, childless men could still assume paternal
roles within a wider household.16
220 A. SHINN
Wadsworth also describes how a monastery in Antwerp controls nun-

neries made up of the daughters of English gentlemen and ‘Chambermaids
[…] hauing been by the Iesuites well rigd [sic] of their maidenhead’ (L1r).
The implication is that clerics may also be fathering illegitimate sons and
daughters. This image of priests as both potentially illegitimate and unable
to take on the role of biological parents, unless by producing illegitimate
children, allows Wadsworth to highlight the irony inherent in their posi-
tion as Fathers or ‘paternities’. This is exacerbated by the fact that the
English students at St. Omer have been transferred by their biological
fathers into the care of the Jesuits and ‘their [the students] chiefest qual-
ity is noble blood’ (C3v). By educating the male children of noblemen
the Jesuits presumably hope to secure influence with their parents. The
focus here is upon religious inheritance through primogeniture, although
for Wadsworth this is the transferral of error rather than religious truth,
a progression from fatherly perversion to corrupt Jesuit paternities that
is mirrored by his own experience. Using the example of a boy named
Herbert Crafts, Wadsworth argues that occasionally the Jesuits will even
steal a child away against the parent’s wishes, severing the natural bond
between father and son (D3v). Wadsworth consequently paints a multi-
layered image of corrupt Catholic paternity as a means of critiquing the
Jesuit school system.
Similarly, Gage employs the language of paternity to highlight the cor-
ruption of both the Catholic faith and the Dominican and Jesuit orders.
He criticises the way that Catholics ‘all yield […] to blind Obedience, and
their most holy Fathers infallibility’, associating submission to the Pope
with perverted filial obedience (B1r). Like Wadsworth, he talks about the
Jesuits’ interest in educating the children of the nobility as a way of secur-
ing power over their parents: ‘strive they so much for the education of
Gentlemens Children in their Colledges, that by teaching the sonnes, the
love of the fathers and mothers may bee more easily gained’ (B2v). In
accordance with his own experience of being disinherited, he reserves par-
ticular venom for Jesuits who persuade fathers to leave all their wealth to
the church rather than their rightful son and heir, using the example of a
Venetian senator:
They politickly drew him to make his will according to their will and plea-
sure, leaving to his son and heire no more then what they should think fit to
afford him […] appropriating to themselves the chiefest part of the young
heires meanes. (B2v)
For Gage this is an unnatural perversion of the line of inheritance and

evidence of the Jesuits’ corruption of familial bonds in service of their
avarice.
Gage also details the enmity between the Jesuits and the Dominicans,
claiming that the Jesuits are the more ambitious, but that the Dominicans
have secured the role of ‘ghostly father’ [confessor] to the King of Spain,
a position which the Jesuits covet (B3v). Priests consequently subvert the
natural filial relationship between father and son in order to further their
claim for a universal Catholic church. But Gage also frames them as having
the ability—through the confessional—to corrupt and influence those in
power, including monarchs.
The confessional was one of the key points of divergence between
Catholics and Protestants and in anti-Catholic discourse it was associated
with the sophistry of Machiavellian priests who could use the relationship
between penitent and confessor to manipulate and corrupt the vulnerable.
For both Wadsworth and Gage, paternal power in the hands of priests
represents a distortion of natural filial obedience. Ghostly fathers sever
the bonds between fathers and sons, replacing the biological parent with a
confessor who manipulates the child into serving devilish error rather than
divine truth. In this case the father figure has become a warped mockery
of the paternal bond—not only between father and son but also between
man and God.
It is significant that both Gage and Wadsworth figure their conversion
and return to England as an abandonment of Catholic paternities and a
return to a maternal bond signified by Protestant England. For Wadsworth
this is demonstrated by The English Spanish Pilgrime’s advertisement that
he has been ‘newly conuerted into his true mothers bosome’ (title page).
Gage also figures the church as a mother who ensures the virtue of good
magistrates (G4v). Furthermore, Gage, upon his return to England, is
worried that he can no longer speak his mother tongue of English: ‘I was
much troubled within my selfe for want of my Mother tongue’ (S6v). He
thereby identifies his first language as a maternal force, which stands in con-
trast to Catholic paternities. There is an echo of this connection between
mother tongue and Protestant identity in Wadsworth’s recollection that
the Jesuits refused to allow the students at St Omer to speak English: ‘The
losse of […] breakfast is their punishment whose names had beene giuen
vp to the Prefect for hauing spoke English the day before’ (C4r). This
transfer of familial power from false fathers to true mothers subsequently
222 A. SHINN
runs parallel to Gage and Wadsworth’s conversions to Protestantism and

reinforces their reading of Catholicism as a corruption of fatherhood.
Paternity, Patrimony, Patronage, Patriarch

For Gage and Wadsworth Catholicism degrades the paternal bond in both
earthly and spiritual form. This is not just a sense of fatherhood as compris-
ing both biological parent and God, however. Gage, in particular, employs
the language of fatherhood when discussing political structures which cor-
respond to the ruler and magistrate as a form of patriarch.17 When describ-
ing the covetousness of the Viceroy of New Mexico he argues that such
behaviour is particularly despicable in those with power as greed subverts
the paternal relationship between ruler and subject:
Somewhat might bee observed from the Viceroyes covetousnesse; which

doubtlesse in all is a great sinne […] but much more to bee condemned
in a Prince or Governour; whom it may blind in the exercise of Justice and
Judgment, and harden those tender bowels (which ought to bee in him) of
a father and shepheard to his flock and children. (G3v)
Avarice hardens the bowels of those who should be tender towards their
subjects, but also undermines the ruler’s responsibility to be both father
and shepherd. In this instance, Gage reminds the reader that rulers not
only stand in loco parentis, but in an echo of Psalm 23:1 (‘the lord is my
shepherd, I shall not want’) they should tend their flock in the same man-
ner as Christ. The covetous leader is therefore not only a bad father but
a corruption of the ideal paternity represented by God the father. Given
Gage’s argument that the confessor who gains access to a king has the
ability to pervert the head of the body politic, it is possible to extend the
image of corrupting Catholic paternities to the wielding of political as well
as spiritual power.
Using maternal imagery to describe the church, Gage also goes on to
argue that not only the ruler but also the magistrate—in the form of the
father—must care for and protect their people.
Oh surely the Church so far is a good Mother, as it allowes a Magistrate to

be a Father. And great comfort have those that live within the pale of the
Church, to know that they have the Magistrate a Father to flye unto in their
pressures and discomforts. (G4r)
The maternal role played by the church allows the magistrate to adopt
the position of its gendered opposite and partner: the father. The result
is an image of successful rule modelled on the structure of the family,
a harmonious balance between masculine and feminine which secures
the safety and prosperity of the nation’s subjects, or (metaphorical)
children.
Gage’s association of power structures with paternal images is
accompanied by an awareness of the links between property ownership
in the form of patrimony and a further distortion of paternal power.
Specifically, Gage questions the legitimacy of the patrimony conferred
by the Pope on the King of Spain and his representatives in the New
World:
The King of Spain gloryeth to have received from the Pope power over
those Kingdomes farr greater than any other Princes of Europe have enjoyed
from him. But the pity is, that what power these Princes have, they must
acknowledge it from Rome, having given their own power and strength unto
the Beast, Revel. 17. 13 […] Which Policy since the first Conquest of the
West India’s, and ambition to advance the Popes name, hath granted to the
Kings of Spain, by a speciall title, naming those Kingdomes […] Patrimonio
Real, The Royall Patrimony; upon this Condition, that the King of Spain
must maintain there the preaching of the Gospel, Fryers, Priests and Jesuites
to preach it with all the erroneous Popish doctrines, which tend to the
advancement of the Popes glory, power, and authority. (B1v)
The King of Spain, despite ruling over a vast territory, owes his power to
the gift of the Pope and is therefore committed to the spread of ‘Popish
doctrines’ throughout the Americas. The role of the Spanish in the New
World is hereby linked explicitly to Papal control, a model of monarchy
ruled by the church which is in direct contrast to the English monarch’s
position as head of the church of England. Gage is composing his narra-
tive at the outset of the English Civil War (1642–1651) and he would later
support the Cromwellian religious establishment after the regicide, but
nonetheless, his association of Papal dominance in the New World with
a weak and child-like Spanish monarchy reflects positively on England
following the Henrician Act of Royal Supremacy (1534). His work sug-
gests that a good king—a good father—would assert a royal system of
patrimony that allowed for inheritance through the monarch-as-father
rather than the Pope. The ruler, magistrate and king must all act as good
fathers for the benefit of their subjects rather than allowing the natural
224 A. SHINN
process of patrimony (in the form of power passed down from father to
son) to be superseded by perverted Catholic paternities.
The concept of patrimony as an inheritance through fathers in The
English-American is joined in both Wadsworth’s and Gage’s texts by an
interesting conflation between patron and father in the form of the mas-
ter–servant bond. As we see elsewhere in this collection, the father was
often termed the king of the household and men would also take on a
paternal role in relation to servants and apprentices, regardless of whether
they had children of their own.18 This broad understanding of paternity
allows us to read Gage and Wadsworth’s adoption of the role of servant
in relation to their patrons as another form of filial bond. Wadsworth
dedicates The English-Spanish Pilgrime to William, Earl of Pembroke,
Chancellor of Oxford University. Pembroke has secured Wadsworth a spe-
cial licence for his work, thereby legitimising the publication of this recent
convert’s story. Wadsworth signs his dedication to Pembroke, in which he
asks him to ‘take this booke vnder your protection for the furthering of
my cause’, with ‘Your Honuors most humble and deuoted seruant, James
Wadsworth’ (A3v-A3r). Similarly, Gage dedicates his text to Sir Thomas
Fairfax, the parliamentary general. This signals Gage’s affiliation with par-
liament’s grievances against the king, but it also allows Gage to connect
military leaders with fathers, as he signs the dedication ‘The most devoted
and humblest of your Excellencies servants, THO. GAGE’ (A4v). The
framing of the humble author as a servant was a common form of address
in dedications, but given the focus upon legitimate and illegitimate pater-
nities in these texts it allows both Wadsworth and Gage to frame their
patrons as good fathers who are representatives of the spiritual family of
Protestant England.
The language of fatherhood employed by Gage and Wadsworth is thus
not confined simply to the issue of biological parenthood or to the familial
roles employed by spiritual advisors; it also encompasses power structures
as diverse as those of magistrate, viceroy, king and patron. This allows
the two converts to extend their arguments about the danger of unnatu-
ral Catholic paternities to secular political systems of influence and rule.
The implication is that turning a blind eye to the role of Catholic orders,
both overseas and at home, will have serious ramifications for Protestant
authority: one fraudulent father represents a multiplicity of potential cor-
ruptions to the stability of both social and religious order.
Conclusion: Telos and Inheritance
One of the most important implications of Gage’s and Wadsworth’s use

of father figures in the form of the multiple possible meanings evoked by
paternal metaphor, is the resulting focus upon inheritance. As we have
seen, this can take the form of a critique of the corruption of inheritance
represented by the transfer of Catholic beliefs from father to son, the ille-
gitimate inheritance of patrimony given by the Pope to the Spanish mon-
archy and the corruption of paternal inheritance by priests. Importantly,
however, paternal inheritance can also be linked to teleological progress
in the form of a rejection of corrupt earthly paternities and a movement
towards God the ultimate father.19
A focus upon religious progress was an important aspect of Protestant
discourse, particularly in relation to the problems associated with the
rejection of prior authority in the form of non-scriptural Catholic teach-
ing. The reformer William Tyndale explicitly framed this process as a rejec-
tion of false fathers in The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528). Tyndale
outlines how priests will counter a Protestant focus upon the reading of
scripture by claiming a historical legitimacy for Catholic doctrine: ‘When
they cry fathers fathers, remember that it were the fathers that both
blinded and robbed the whole world and brought us into this captivity
wherein these enforce to keep us still’.20 Tyndale’s repetition of ‘father
fathers’ as an echoing cry made by Catholic challengers to the Protestant
Reformation emphasises the chain of error perpetuated by Catholicism’s
paternal lineage. Protestants must counter the Catholic strategy of calling
on the authority of fatherhood by focusing upon the inheritance of error
and the danger that corrupted paternity perpetuates that error. Those who
belong to the true faith must reject the faith of their fathers and take
their religious inheritance only from God, an argument which can be con-
nected to Gage’s and Wadsworth’s depictions of their conversions from
Catholicism to Protestantism as a movement from false to true paternities.
Gage’s and Wadsworth’s use of the language of paternity simultaneously
denotes biological parent, God, priest, confessor, Pope, magistrate, patron
and king, a multivalency which is connected to the Protestant understand-
ing of conversion as an inevitable and providential transformation which
moves Christian history forwards. The persistence of this motif, span-
ning the distance between Tyndale’s early sixteenth-century text and two
conversion narratives from a century later, testifies to the usefulness and
226 A. SHINN
power of the language of fatherhood for Protestant converts who sought

to justify and explicate their new religious identity.
Notes
1. On the role played by converts from Rome in propagating anti-Catholic
polemic, particularly via systems of patronage, see Michael Questier,
Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 47–48. Peter Lake explores the
role of anti-popery in shaping Protestant identity in ‘Anti-Popery: The
Structure of a Prejudice’, Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in
Religion and Politics 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes
(London: Longman, 1989), pp. 72–106. On the discursive modes of anti-
Catholic discourse produced in the early Stuart era, see Anthony Milton,
‘A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-
Catholicism’, Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English
Texts, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1999),
pp. 85–115.
2. A.J. Loomie, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/28390?docPos=2, accessed 5th September
2015. Wadsworth Snr. published a tract which focused upon sin and
repentance, The Contrition of a Protestant Preacher (St. Omers, 1615).
Questier discusses the conversion of Wadsworth Snr., placing him along-
side other converts who had previously been staunch professors of an alter-
nate faith, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, pp. 79–80. Lucy
Underwood argues that in Wadsworth Jnr.’s narrative, conversion to
Catholicism ‘represents a dereliction of parental duty’; see Childhood,
Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England (Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 176.
3. James Wadsworth, The English Spanish Pilgrime or A New Discoverie of
Spanish Popery, and Hereticall Stratagems (London: T. C. for Michael
Sparke, 1629), F3r–F4r.
4. For a study of the dissemination of anti-Jesuit mythology in this period see
Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and
Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IA:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 42–53.
5. Wadsworth also acted as a translator, occasionally using the pseudonym
Diego de Vadesfoote. Among the texts he translated was Antonio
Colmenero’s A Curious Treatise of the Nature and Quality of Chocolate
(London: I. Okes, 1640), another point of connection to Gage who
included a chapter on chocolate in the English-American.
6. Wadsworth offered his services to the Privy Council when he returned to

England in 1625. He was sent as a spy to Paris and Calais only to be
imprisoned in both cities. Allen D. Boyer, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10274?docPos=1,
accessed 5th September 2015.
7. Thomas Gage, The English-American his Travail by Sea and Land: Or A
New Svrvey of the West-Indias, Containing A Journall of Three thousand
and Three hundred Miles within the main Land of America … As Also his
strange and Wonderfull Conversion and Calling from those remote Parts to
his Native Countrey (London: R. Cotes, 1648), A6v. This quotation is
taken from a dedicatory verse apparently written by ‘Thomas Chaloner’
potentially one of the regicides or the man whose son ‘Henry Challoner’
the Jesuits attempt to convert because a friar wishes him for his ‘bed fel-
low’ H2r.
8. The priests were Father Thomas Holland, Father Arthur Bell and Father
Peter Wright. Holland had been a schoolmate in St. Omer, Bell was a
friend’s chaplain and Wright was the Jesuit military chaplain who had held
Thomas’s brother, Sir Henry Gage, while he died, Boyer, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography.
9. Thomas Gage’s Travels in the New World ed. by J. Eric S. Thompson
(Norman, OA: University of Oklahoma Press, second ed. 1969), p. xiii
and p. xiv; Thomas Gage: The English American A New Survey of the West
Indies ed. by A. P. Newton (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1928).
10. Thomas Gage, A new survey of the West-India’s, or, The English American,
his travail by sea and land (London: E. Cotes, 1655).
11. Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992), pp. 305–306.
12. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I, p. 301. Sharpe also notes that there
was a significant increase in recusancy fines in this period, resulting in many
Catholic families going bankrupt (p. 303). Wadsworth includes the story
of Henry Fairfax who was reluctant to convert until the Jesuits, dressed as
angels, beat him in his sleep: ‘speaking vnto him in Latine that they were
Angels sent from the Virgin to chastise him for some offences by him com-
mitted’, sig. D2v.
13. Michael J. Braddick, ‘Prayer Book and Protestation: Anti-Popery, Anti-
Puritanism and the Outbreak of the English Civil War’, England’s Wars of
Religion, Revisited, ed. Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2011), pp. 125–146 (pp. 125–127). Braddick argues that anti-
Catholicism, rather than being an irrational prejudice, in fact helped to
mobilise public opinion so that parliamentarians could gain control of gov-
ernment institutions, p. 140. The period 1629–1648 is also associated
with the promotion of Arminian anti-Calvinism during the personal rule of
228 A. SHINN
Charles I, and both a resulting backlash on the part of Calvinists and the
perception among Catholics that a reconciliation with Rome was immi-
nent, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism
c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 227–228. On anti-
Catholicism in the lead up to the Civil War see Robin Clifton, ‘Fear of
Popery’, The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London:
Macmillan Press, 1983, first ed. 1973), pp. 144–167.
14. After Gage’s initial return to England in 1637 where he lived with the
recusant community for three years, he travelled to Rome in 1639,
returned once again to England after being kidnapped by French priva-
teers, and in 1642 he preached a sermon announcing his conversion which
was later printed as The Tyranny of Satan Discovered in the Tears of a
Converted Sinner (London: Tho. Badger for Humphrey Mosley, 1642). In
contrast, Wadsworth’s conversion is described as prompting his return to
England and occurs after reading the scriptures in secret.
15. On the large number of Protestant conversion narratives which link con-
version to reading see Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 438.
16. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Childless Men in Early Modern

England’ in The Family in Early Modern England, ed. by Berry and Foyster
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 158–183 (p. 183).
17. The association between the structure of the family and the structure of
the state was a common one, but as S. D. Amussen argues, the role of the
family analogy frequently changed with the demands of enforcement by
the state, ‘Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560–1725’, in Order and
Disorder in Early Modern England ed. by Anthony Fletcher and John
Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 196–217
(p. 196). Debora Shuger associates a sacred fatherly image of kingship with
James VI and I’s divine right of kings, Habits of Thought in the English
Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley, LA:
University of California Press, 1990), p. 156. The analogy could also work
the other way and Su Fang Ng points out that domestic handbooks fre-
quently called the father ‘king’, Literature and the Politics of family in
Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), p. 1.
18. Berry and Foyster, ‘Childless Men’, p. 183.
19. See The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns,
Antecedents and Repercussions, ed. by C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
20. William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. by David Daniel
(London: Penguin, 2000), p. 176.
CHAPTER 13
Family Politics and Age in Early Modern

England
Lucy Munro
All is not well within the Seely family of Lancashire. Overnight, hierarchies
within the household have been turned upside down; the servants have
dominion over the master and mistress, and the children over the parents:
The good man

In all obedience kneels unto his son;
He with an austere brow commands his father.
The wife presumes not in the daughter’s sight
Without a prepared courtesy. The girl, she
Expects it as a duty; chides her mother,
Who quakes and trembles at each word she speaks [.]1
Formerly ‘respected / For his discretion and known gravity’, Master Seely
is no longer ‘master of a governed family’, and the hierarchies of age and
class that would normally structure his household have been thoroughly
inverted; as his nephew, Arthur, comments, ‘The house (as if the ridge
were fixed below, / And groundsels lifted up to make the roof) / All now
turned topsy-turvy’ (speech 88). The disruption to the Seely household
L. Munro (*)
Department of English, King’s College London, London, UK
e-mail: lucy.munro@kcl.ac.uk

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7_13
230 L. MUNRO
is one of a series of magical attacks on the community in Richard Brome

and Thomas Heywood’s play The Late Lancashire Witches, staged at the
Globe by the King’s Men in 1634. A scenario in which the dramatists try
to imagine the worst misfortune that witches could inflict on a household,
it represents in microcosm the witches’ threat against a broader range of
structures and hierarchies—social, cultural and, implicitly, political—and it
is a potent symbol of their disruptive power.
What interests me in particular about the disruption of the Seely house-
hold is the emphasis that is placed on age hierarchies, and the presentation
of age and intergenerational relationships as points of potential vulner-
ability in the well-ordered household. Early modern England had a heavy
social and psychological investment in hierarchies of age, which interacted
with other hierarchies—notably those of gender, nationality and class—
to structure the politics of both family and state. These interactions can
be seen, for example, in the sermons and homilies issued successively by
Edward VI, Elizabeth I, James VI and I, and Charles I. One of these,
‘An Exhortation Concerning Good Order, and Obedience to Rulers and
Magistrates’, reads:
euery degree of people in their vocation, calling and office, hath appoyn-
ted to them their duty and order: some are in high degree, some in low;
some Kings and Princes, some inferiours and subiects, Priests, and Lay men,
Masters and Seruants, Fathers, and Children, Husbands, and Wiues, Rich
and Poore, and euery one haue neede of other, so that in all things is to bee
loued and praised the goodly order of GOD, without the which no house,
no City, no Common-wealth, can continue and indure or last.2
The ‘Exhortation’ traces a set of interlocking hierarchies in which all par-

ties—parents, children, local and national authorities—were expected to
know their place in an ordered society. Within this model, age was both
a source of authority—parents govern their children in part because they
are older and more experienced—and a process that might undermine
that authority through the physical or mental weakness caused by an indi-
vidual’s increasing age. The bewitching of the Seely family thus reminds
us that family hierarchies are not static but transitional and relational: the
play’s inverted set of relationships are not merely fantastic, but potentially
a vision of a future in which age has rendered Master and Mistress Seely
dependent on the goodwill of their children.
FAMILY POLITICS AND AGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND 231
In what follows, I explore the interaction between the politics of the

family and what Paul Griffiths terms a ‘politics of age’.3 While early mod-
ern treatises debated the place of older people in society, and their role
within the state and the family, the depiction of familial upheaval took
on a particular force in the commercial theatre, in which social roles were
enacted, challenges to hierarchy were presented in vivid and often visceral
forms, and the ages of actors were different from those of the charac-
ters they played. Plays experimented with fantastic inversions of famil-
ial and age hierarchies, and imagined situations in which age was both
essential and performative. Moreover, while little was known—although
much might be speculated—about age-related and intergenerational ten-
sions within the real royal household, dramatists could tell stories in which
familiar patterns of distrust and exploitation were played out with a cast of
kings, queens and princes.
I focus here on moments in three plays in which the family’s hierarchies
of age are transformed, exploited or disrupted. In The Late Lancashire
Witches, as we have seen, the Seely family is bewitched and inverted. In
Nathan Field, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Queen of Corinth
(King’s Men, c. 1617), a middle-aged usurer’s son, Lamprias, has been
conned by his predatory uncle into thinking that he has not yet come of
age. In Fletcher’s The Humorous Lieutenant (King’s Men, c. 1619), King
Antigonus’s lust for his son’s fiancée unsettles the relationship between
father and son, king and heir, ruler and subject. These plays deal in varying
ways with local and national politics. The Late Lancashire Witches and The
Queen of Corinth invoke the corruption of local and national institutions
such as wardship and inheritance when age hierarchies within the family
are disrupted, dealing mainly with the ways in which these issues affect
the middling sort and gentry. The Humorous Lieutenant explores similar
issues of family structure, authority and inheritance, but its focus on a rul-
ing family means that it deals more sharply with the politics of state. Yet
certain over-arching concerns unite these plays. In depicting relationships
in which children take on the authority of parents, guardians abuse their
authority, and fathers attempt to take the place of their sons, they not
only explore the social and emotional impact of dysfunction within the
family, but also acknowledge the contingent aspects of kinship bonds, the
instability of age-related hierarchies, and the capacity of family relation-
ships to shape the destiny of the state.
232 L. MUNRO
Age, Authority and The Late Lancashire Witches

When Arthur in The Late Lancashire Witches complains that Master Seely is
no longer ‘master of a governed family’ (my emphasis), he draws on a long
rhetorical tradition that elided structures of authority within the family
with those within the state. Using similar language, The Prince, or Maxims
of State, published under Sir Walter Ralegh’s name in 1621, argues that ‘[a]
man must first governe himselfe, ere he be fit to governe a Family: And his
Family, ere hee bee fit to beare the Governement in the Common-wealth’.4
Yet it was not only witchcraft that could unsettle the capacity of a man to
govern his family, but the tensions between generations and the process of
ageing itself. Early modern England valued age as a marker of authority
and status: as Keith Thomas writes, ‘the prevailing ideal was gerontocratic:
the young were to serve and the old were to rule’.5 The gerontocratic
ideal did not always, however, function smoothly. Griffiths points out that
although early modern society had an investment in ‘static and durable
representations of orderly age-relations’, there was nonetheless an underly-
ing tension, and relationships between young and old might be ‘disputed,
redefined, and renegotiated’.6 Conventional ideology was challenged by
the refusal of the young to stay in the position ordained for them, or by the
perceived failure of parents to ‘train’ or, even, ‘break’ their children effec-
tively. In Observations Divine and Moral (1625), John Robinson writes:
Many parents desire to have their young ones trayned up in such exercises,
and courses, as may inbolden them: But they should, for the most part, pro-
vide much better for them, (specially in our audacious age) if they got them
held constantly in courses of modestie, and shamefastnes.7
Familial, social and political structures would be maintained, he argues, by

both young and old acting in ways that were thought appropriate to their
respective ages, and by their willing submission to hierarchical structures.
A concern with social order pervades Thomas Nash’s dialogue
Quaternio or A Fourfold Way to a Happy Life (1633), which summarises
approvingly ancient customs regarding generational structures:
[T]hey enjoyne superiors likewise to haue a vigilant care and respect of those
over whom they haue authoritie; not to place age where youth should sit,
nor yet youth where age should sit; Mars where Mercurie should sit, nor yet
Mercurie where Mars should sit, for that were to put the Gyants habit vpon
the little Pigmee, and the Pigmees habit vpon the great Garagantua.8
For Nash, the relationship between youth and age ought to be governed
by a universal and trans-historical decorum; to depart from this pattern
results in incongruity, even monstrosity. Other commentators worried,
however, that such an upheaval could be not only conceivable but also
imminent. In Vindiciae Senectutis, or, A Plea for Old Age (1639), Thomas
Sheafe writes that youth ‘stands most in opposition’ to age, and ‘lookes at
it commonly with an eye full of scorne and contempt: repining at its length
of daies, and oftentimes thinking it long ere it succeeds the Old-man in
his offices, lands or goods’.9 Tensions between young and old periodically
became acute. As J. A. Sharpe comments, ‘concern over the age hierarchy,
over the problems of maintaining appropriate behaviour in different age
groups, and of ensuring the authority of older people over younger ones
were all firmly embedded in Tudor and Stuart social comment’, and this
concern could be increased by particular social and political pressures.10
Tensions between old and young were also complicated by various
forms of generational thinking. Multiple generations within the family and
the commonwealth meant that there were gradations within the ‘young’
and ‘old’, such as young children, youths, adults, parents and grandpar-
ents. Although generational thinking helped to maintain structures of
authority within the family, age itself might help to undo those struc-
tures. As Patricia M. Crawford argues, the family was ‘an uncertain social
unit’, shifting over time: ‘Children themselves became parents—“the son
was now the father”—and brothers and sisters extended into uncles and
aunts’.11 Models of authority that depended either on family structures or
on rhetorical configurations of those structures were therefore built on
shifting foundations. Where age was relative, it reinforced the power of
the parent over the child; where age was absolute, it had the potential to
undermine that authority.
The bewitching of the Seely family evokes precisely the processes and
anxieties described above, creating a topsy-turvy dystopia in which tem-
poral changes within the family are accelerated, with the effect that the
children usurp the place of their parents before the latter have proven
themselves unable to govern. Seely is transformed into his ‘child’s child’,
the enchantment similarly transforming Gregory into the bold and shame-
less child criticised by Robinson and other commentators. While Doughty
tells Gregory that he is ‘so beneath / The title of a son, you cannot claim
/ To be a man’ (speech 113), the young man casts himself as the protec-
tor of his own estate, which is put at risk by his father’s prodigal behaviour
and his willingness to financially support his nephew as well as his son:
234 L. MUNRO
Gregory. […] Was it a fatherly part, think you, having a son, to offer
to enter in bonds for his nephew, so to endanger my estate to
redeem his mortgage?
Seely. But I did it not, son!
Gregory. I know it very well, but your dotage had done it, if my care had
not prevented it.
Doughty. Is that the business? Why, if he had done it, had he not been
sufficiently secured in having the mortgage made over to
himself?
Gregory. He does nothing but practise ways to undo himself and me: a
very spendthrift, a prodigal sire! He was at the ale but tother
day, and spent a four-penny club.
Seely. ’Tis gone and past, son.
Gregory. Can you hold your peace, sir?—[To DOUGHTY] And not
long ago at the wine he spent his tester, and twopence to the
piper. That was brave, was it not?
Seely. Truly we were civilly merry. But I have left it.
Gregory. Your civility, have you not?—[To DOUGHTY] For no longer
ago than last holiday evening he gamed away eight double-
ringed tokens on a rubbers at bowls with the curate and some
of his idle companions.
(1.2; speeches 121–129)
Gregory’s description presents his father as a superannuated prodigal who
wastes the household’s resources through riotous behaviour, although
Master Seely’s indulgences are actually comically moderate and he claims
repeatedly to have given up even this low-key revelry. In response,
Doughty again appeals to the conventional relationship between father
and son and to its inversion, saying, ‘Fie, Master Gregory Seely, is this
seemly in a son? / You’ll have a rod for the child your father shortly, I
fear’. Yet even he gets pulled into the warped set of relationships pre-
sented to him, asking Old Seely ‘Alas, did he make it cry?’ (speech 130).
Doughty falls into addressing the old man in a parody of baby-talk, using
the ‘it’ that was conventionally addressed to babies and small children. He
thus recognises linguistically the attack on Old Seely’s authority within the
household even as he attempts to resist it.
Writers such as Robinson, Nash and Sheafe tend to focus on the roles of
old and young men, fathers and sons, in part because this enables them to
make broader political arguments about the stability of society. In contrast,
Brome and Heywood’s play is also interested in the inversion of the rela-
tionship between mother and daughter. Later in the scene explored above,
Joan Seely and her daughter, Winny, display a similar reversal to Seely and
Gregory, although their dispute centres on clothing rather than money
itself, and on disposable income rather than inheritance. In a parody of
sequences in other plays in which young women demand to be allowed to
wear fashionable clothes, Winny demands that her mother conform to her
tastes, asking her ‘Is this a fit habit for a handsome young gentlewoman’s
mother?’ (1.2; speech 153). However, the subordination of the mother
to the daughter carries less narrative and emotional charge than that of
the father to the son. Doughty comments on it only twice in short asides,
and does not attempt to intervene, and Joan and Winny quickly give way
to their servingwoman, Parnell. Although the authority of the wife and
mother was an integral part of the structure of the early modern family,
there is more at stake politically and socially in male authority, whether
it affects the ruler, the father or the male heir. For this reason, anxieties
about age and authority in early modern texts tend to centre on older
men, and The Late Lancashire Witches is unusual in devoting even limited
attention to the situation of older women within the family.
Old Men and Inheritance in The Queen of Corinth

As Gregory Seely’s criticism of his father suggests, a key point of tension
between generations within the family was inheritance. Many early mod-
ern plays feature plots in which heirs are gulled and lose their property,
often to usurers, older relatives or smart young men, as money moves
around or between generations. The Queen of Corinth is notable in that
it makes age not only central to this narrative but also part of the process
through which the heir is swindled. The play’s comic sub-plot explores
the effects on the fifty-something Lamprias, also called ‘Onos’ (Ass) in
the earliest printed text, of a horribly simple scam in which his father’s
younger brother has convinced him that he has not yet reached the age of
21, and is therefore unable to claim his inheritance.12 The unnamed Uncle
has short-circuited the process through which the family’s wealth should
have moved from one generation to another, and has kept his nephew as
his ward ‘this forty yeare’ (4.1.61).
Although the Uncle’s age is unspecified, his treatment of Lamprias raises
questions about the point at which older men were expected to resign
their authority to the younger generation, an issue that was contested in
236 L. MUNRO
early modern culture. Biblical authority could be called on to justify the

continued social and political power of older men: a 1621 English transla-
tion of Simon Goulart’s Le sage vieillard quotes Ecclesiasticus 25.4.5, ‘O
how pleasant a thing is it when gray-headed men minister judgement, and
when the Elders can giue good counsell’, and Proverbs 16.31, ‘Age is a
crowne of glorie, when it is found in the way of righteousnesse’.13 Yet many
commentators were ambivalent about the idea that men should retain
their authority into extreme old age. Goulart himself cites the theory that
the word ‘senator’ is ‘deriued from the Latine word sense, which signifies
old men, who are so styled in honour of their experience, prudence, and
wisedome, inseperable companions of such old men, who are appointed
to haue the superintendency and gouernment ouer others’, and he writes
that a ‘King, Prince, Lord, that is old and wise […] is a true and liuely
image of God among men’. However, he also asserts that ‘old men, who
are of a dry and cold constitution, are lesse fit to vndertake many actions,
exploites, or imploiments. They are not quicke enough of apprehension,
their senses fayling them by little and little’.14 Old age might be described
by the same writer as a ‘safe hauen of rest’, a period in which men would
‘abstaine from humane affaires, and […] be busied in deuine’, and one in
which public service was an imperative: ‘age doth challenge as proper and
peculiar vnto it selfe this care of gouerning of others: For verie often those
times do happen, wherein olde men with their wisedome, and vertue haue
established and strengthened the common wealth, which the rashnesse of
young men hath almost ouerthrowne’.15 Within both state and family, the
position of older people—and older men in particular—was thus ambigu-
ous. Were they to govern others, or to hand over government to ‘younger
strengths’, as King Lear puts it?16
In The Queen of Corinth, the Uncle shows no sign of relinquishing his
authority over Lamprias, and the pernicious effect of this distortion of tem-
poral process within the family is marked in the mockery to which Lamprias
is subjected. Before he appears on stage, Eraton describes him as ‘the youth
/ Of six and fifty’, while Sosicles describes him as having been ‘sent to
travel […] till he came to age, / And was fit for a Wife’.17 The concept
of youth was relatively plastic in the early modern period, often stretch-
ing to the late twenties—the time at which many men would complete
their apprenticeships—or even beyond.18 Yet the idea of a fifty-something
youth would nonetheless have registered as something unusual, even gro-
tesque, and this hint is developed in The Queen of Corinth. Lamprias would
have been 16 when his father died, and when he appears on stage in the
company of his uncle and tutor, it is clear that he has not developed socially
or intellectually in the last 40 years. Instead of conducting himself with the

sobriety that would be expected of a middle-aged man, he enters being
instructed by his tutor to put ‘That legge a little higher’ and to ‘put [his]
face into the Travellors posture’ (1.3.15–16). Sosicles exclaims ‘How they
have trimm’d him up / Like an old Reveller’, to which Neathes replies,
Curl’d him and perfum’d him,

But that was done with judgement, for he lookes
Like one that purg’d perpetually; trust me,
That Witches face of his is painted too,
And every ditch upon it buries more
Then would set off ten Bawds, and all their tenants
(1.3.20–1, 25–7)
Lamprias confuses categories of age and status: he is tricked up to look

like a young gallant, in fashionable clothes, but the illusion is only shakily
maintained through the use of elaborate coiffure and cosmetics that fill
out his wrinkles. The ‘old Reveller’ is, Neathes suggests, unnatural, the
product of witchcraft.
Lamprias’s speech is also more suited to his clothes than his years. His
tutor and uncle describe him as ‘An absolute man. / As any of his years’
(1.3.32–3), and boast of his accomplishments. However, he is capable
verbally only of clichés that would be more usually associated with the
dissolute young men of the early modern stage, and his deficiencies are
underlined by the sardonic comments of the young courtiers:
Neanthes. They have taught him like an Ape,

To doe his tricks by signes: now he begins.
Onos. When shall we be drunke together?
Tutor. That’s the first.
Onos. Where shall we whore to night?
Uncle. That ever followes.
Eraton. ’Odds me, he now lookes angry.
Onos. Shall we quarrell?
Neanthes With me at no hand Sir.
Onos. Then let’s protest.
Eraton. Is this all?
Tutor. These are Sir, the foure new Vertues
238 L. MUNRO
That are in fashion: many a mile we measur’d

Before we could arrive unto this knowledge.
(1.3.50–8)
Where the prodigals of Jacobean city comedy self-fashion themselves

in roles that are appropriate to their youth and inexperience, Lamprias
rather appears—like Seely in The Late Lancashire Witches—to have prodi-
gality thrust upon him. In the place of his adult capital and authority he
is granted only hollow fashionable flourishes which themselves make him
ridiculous. The perversion of age within this family unit is exaggerated
even further at the end of the scene, when Lamprias asks ‘Did I not rarely?’
and the Tutor replies ‘He shall have sixe Plumbs for it’ (1.3.63–64); the
dialogue imitates the conversational structures that we would normally
associate with an exchange between a parent and a small child.
Time has been collapsed, and the process through which Lamprias should
have achieved his majority has been arrested. The role of the guardian should
be to take care of the child’s estate until he comes of age; instead, Lamprias’s
uncle has kept him ignorant of his true age and status. First prodigalised and
then infantalised, Lamprias has been preyed upon by an uncle reluctant to
give up his usurped property and status. Indeed, the Uncle’s ambitions go
even further: ‘Faine would I have his state’, he comments in an aside,
and now of late

He did enquire at Ephesus for his age,
But the Church Booke being burnt with Dians Temple
He lost his ayme: I have try’d to famish him,
Marry he’l live o’ stones: and then for Poysons,
He is an Antidote ’gainst all of ’em;
He sprung from Mithridates; he is so dry and hot,
He will eat Spiders faster then a Monkey:
His Maw (unhurt) keeps Quicksilver like a bladder,
The largest dosse of Camphire, Opium,
Harmes not his braine; I think his Skul’s as empty
As a suckt Egge; Vitrioll, and Oyle of Tartar
He will eat tosts of: Henbane I am sure
And Hemblock I have made his Pot-hearbs often.
(4.1.62–75)
Although the Uncle’s frustrated catalogue of the various ways in which

he has attempted to poison his nephew is darkly funny, it underlines his
utterly unscrupulous treatment of Lamprias and, with it, his perversion of
family structures.
As a result of his ‘education’ at the hands of his uncle and tutor,

Lamprias is repeatedly shown as being out of his depth in adult social
exchanges. Significantly, he is mocked first through his abortive courtship
of Beliza and second in a sequence in which he is attacked by a page. In
the latter exchange, the dispute focuses explicitly on questions of age:
Tutor. He is a Boy,
And we may run away with honour.
Page. That ye shall not, —
And being a Boy I am fitter to encounter
A Childe in Law as you are, under twenty:
Thou Sot, thou three-score Sot, and that’s a Childe
Againe I grant you.
Unckle. Nephew, here’s an age:
Boyes are turn’d men, and men are Children.
(4.1.141–147)
Echoing the cliché also articulated to devastating effect in King Lear,

The Queen of Corinth positions the elderly ‘child’ as paradoxically unnatu-
ral and natural. Old men may be likened to children in popular discourse,
but Lamprias has jumped straight from infancy to the childish dependency
of senescence without achieving the status and position within a house-
hold that his maturity should have granted him. The playwrights underline
the family politics of his situation by making his guardian his uncle, a fact
that is important for two key reasons: Lamprias is owed a double duty of
care through the institutions of the family and of wardship; and his uncle’s
actions prevent him from having a family or household of his own. The
uncle exploits his own age-derived superiority within the family to keep his
nephew ignorant, immature and subordinate. Moreover, in doing so he
imprisons Lamprias in an inappropriate generational position within society.
The Queen of Corinth and The Late Lancashire Witches thus animate
onstage fantasies in which the chronological development of the family
is reversed, stalled or accelerated, and access to its resources is altered
or perverted. Middle-aged men are reduced to the status of a child or a
prodigal, losing or being denied control of their estates, while a son or a
father’s younger brother moves from a subordinate to a dominant posi-
tion, usurping a place at the head of the family. Each play invokes the fears
expressed by commentators such as Nash and Sheafe, but each also keeps
it within tight generic and narrative structures. Moreover, their focus on
the gentry and middling sort means that the political implications of these
240 L. MUNRO
fantasies remain implicit or sub-textual, even though questions relating to

inheritance in particular have implications for both local and national poli-
tics because they affect the ownership of property within the realm. In The
Humorous Lieutenant, in contrast, the inversion of age-related hierarchies
in the family is brought into the heart of government.
Fathers, Sons and the Safety of the Realm in The

Humorous Lieutenant
Set in ancient Greece, The Humorous Lieutenant depicts the aftermath of
Alexander’s conquests. Four kings have inherited his conquered lands in
equal shares, and three of them are engaged in a war against the fourth,
Antigonus. Described in the dramatis personae printed in the second Folio
edition of the works of Fletcher and his collaborators as ‘an old Man with
young desires’, Antigonus does not lead his armies himself; instead they
are headed by his son and heir, Demetrius.19 Thus, while the King main-
tains his position as ruler, he is unable or unwilling to carry out all of the
offices associated with it. His position then becomes more compromised
still when he lusts after Demetrius’s intended wife, Celia, a young woman
taken prisoner at the siege of Antioch. Antigonus takes advantage of the
fact that he can ensure his son’s absence and courts Celia for himself, mak-
ing use of his long-established arrangement with a bawd, Leucippe, and
moving Celia into a secluded apartment at court. The King’s relatively
advanced age is emphasised. Celia asks her governess, ‘What age is the
King of?’, and is told, with tart innuendo, ‘Hee’s an old man, and full
of businesse’ (3.2.102–103). Later in the play, Antigonus comes to her
without revealing his identity and she, appearing to realise that he is the
King, muses aloud on what would befall her
when the good old spunge had suckt my youth dry,

And left some of his royall aches in my bones:
When time shall tell me I have plough’d my life up,
And cast long furrowes in my face to sinke me […]
(4.1.108–111)
In describing her prospects in the topsy-turvy liaison with the aged

Antigonus, Celia imagines a process in which she will be left prematurely
aged, drained by his lust and infected with his diseases.
Antigonus’s attempt to usurp his son is underlined not only in his unscru-
pulous efforts to use magic and a potion to corrupt Celia, but also in his
appearance tricked up in youthful clothes, probably looking not unlike
Lamprias in The Queen of Corinth. Fletcher underlines the visual spectacle
through the comments of his characters. Immediately before Celia enters,
Antigonus asks the bawd, ‘How do I looke? how do my clothes become me?
/ I am not very gray’, and she replies ‘A very youth sir, / Upon my maiden-
head as smug as April: / Heaven blesse that sweet face, ’twill undoe a thou-
sand’ (4.5.8–11). Leucippe’s reference to her virginity highlights the ironies
of the situation: it is presumably long gone, and the King is not in the spring
of his life, but the winter. When she spots him, Celia comments in asides:
Celia [aside]. […] This royall devill againe? strange, how he haunts me!
How like a poison’d potion his eyes fright me!
Has made himselfe hansome too.
Antigonus. Doe you looke now, Lady?
You will leap anon.
Celia [aside].Curl’d and perfum’d? I smell him:
He looks on’s leggs too: sure he will cut a caper,
God-a-mercie deare December.
(4.5.18–24)
While Antigonus imagines erotic activity—Celia may leap on him, or

perform feats of sexual ‘leaping’—she derisively imagines him performing
dance steps that will expose his age and physical deficiencies.20 He mistakes
her scornful smiling for approval, but he is quickly disabused, and when
he threatens Celia with sexual assault, asking her ‘Say I should force ye? /
I have it in my will’, she replies, ‘Your will’s a poore one; / And though it
be a Kings will, a despised one, / Weaker then Infants leggs, your will’s in
swadling clouts’ (4.5.59–62). In the face of Antigonus’s attempt to take
his son’s place, Celia insists that he has not restored his youth but infan-
talised himself, drawing on gerontophobic traditions that emphasised the
incongruity of older people’s sexual desire or ‘will’. The sequence draws
on the same ideas about age as a second childhood that inform the treat-
ment of Seely and Lamprias, but here they are given additional political
force: the King’s attempt to assert his sexual authority leads him to child-
ish senescence that undermines his capacity to perform the role of the ‘old
and wise’ ruler described by Goulart or Carlo Paschal.
242 L. MUNRO
Fletcher places against this backdrop of familial inversion sequences

in which Demetrius repeatedly stresses his loyalty and duty to his father,
and his deference is emphasised in a key scene in which Antigonus lies to
his son, saying that he has had Celia executed because she was a harlot
and a witch who had planned ‘my Empires overthrow’ (4.2.63). ‘Ye are
my father sir’, Demetrius protests, describing him as ‘Dread Father’ and
‘sacred sir’ (4.2.38, 51, 55); eventually, in response to Antigonus’s com-
ment that Celia ‘is dead, deservedly she died’, he says
I am your sonne sir,

And to all you shall command stand most obedient,
Only a little time I must intreat you
To study to forget her […]
(4.2.69, 72–75)
Unaware of his father’s betrayal, Demetrius attempts through his

repeated use of words such as ‘father’ and ‘son’ to maintain the familial
structures of authority to which he is accustomed.
By the end of the play, Antigonus has reformed, Demetrius and Celia
have been reunited, Demetrius has been thoroughly punished for doubt-
ing Celia’s ability to defend her chastity, and Celia has been revealed to be
Enanthe, daughter of Antigonus’s former enemy King Seleucus. Two fam-
ilies are thus reconstituted, and the succession of two kingdoms is appar-
ently secured. Yet tensions may still lurk beneath the surface, as Seleucus
tells Antigonus ‘take what ye please, we yield it; / The honour done us
by your sonne constraines it, / Your noble sonne’ (5.4.1–4). Antigonus
replies with a variation on an old theme: ‘It is sufficient, Princes; / And
now we are one againe, one mind, one body, / And one sword shall strike
for us’ (5.4.4–6), but Seleucus continues to emphasise Demetrius’s indi-
vidual role in his defeat, saying ‘Let Prince Demetrius / But lead us on: for
we are his vowed servants’ (4.5.6–7). Antigonus continues to misinterpret
the structures of the family, and to usurp Demetrius’s position, albeit that
he here uses a metaphor more commonly applied to friends or spouses,
rather than trying to usurp his son sexually.
Fletcher thus depicts a situation in which the old King’s sexual desire
leads him to transgress the structures of age and family on which so much
social and political rhetoric depended. Furthermore, Antigonus appears
ultimately unable to regulate his role within the family and, potentially,
the state. This is a variation on the narrative offered in many early modern
plays, in which the sexual misdemeanours of monarchs provide a relatively

safe space for a critique of the abuse of royal power, examples includ-
ing Robert Greene’s James IV (?Queen’s Men, 1590), Beaumont and
Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (King’s Men, 1610) and Brome’s Queen
and Concubine (King’s Revels Company, 1635).21 Nonetheless, the trans-
gressive potential of the incestuous desire of the father for his son’s partner
means that The Humorous Lieutenant is able to exploit a situation that is
especially politically loaded. As pater patriae the King has a duty not only
to his own heir but also to the country, and his desire for Celia risks desta-
bilising both his family and his realm. Moreover, the juxtaposition of the
scenes featuring Celia, Demetrius and Antigonus with those focusing on
the diseased Lieutenant—who drinks the potion meant for Celia and dotes
on the King in her place—suggest the extent to which the corruption
of the royal family unit is part of wider structures of bodily and political
transgression.22 Some years later, John Ford was to return to this narra-
tive in The Lover’s Melancholy (King’s Men, 1628), in which it is revealed
that some years before the opening of the play the dead King tried to rape
his son’s betrothed wife. The Lover’s Melancholy thus depicts a court and
country in stasis, unable to move on until the lost wife is recovered, and
the father’s crimes against his son are assuaged. The Humorous Lieutenant
does not go this far: Celia is able to defend herself, and the play’s comic
structures ensure that sexual violence is only raised as a passing threat, eas-
ily dispelled. Yet both Ford and Fletcher register what is at stake in these
narratives for both the family and the realm.
Conclusion
When James VI and I wrote, in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, that ‘as
the Father by his fatherly duty is bound to care for the nourishing, educa-
tion and uertuous gouernment of his children; euen so is the king bound
to care for all his subjects’, his analogy depended on the stability of the
hierarchical relationship between parent and child and, especially, father
and son.23 As we have seen, however, writers could imagine all too easily
the collapse of this structure and the other hierarchies on which the con-
ventional family unit depended. Indeed, the imaginative reconstructions
of the family that early modern drama presents can be bleak indeed. The
Uncle in The Queen of Corinth does not nurture Lamprias, educate him
or govern him virtuously; instead, he exploits his authority and maintains
his nephew in a state of juvenile submission. Similarly, although he even-
244 L. MUNRO
tually reforms, Antigonus in The Humorous Lieutenant shows little care

either for his son or his subjects as his sexual desires lead him to attempt
to usurp his own heir. The Late Lancashire Witches presents one of the
most jovial and carnivalesque portraits of household inversion on the early
modern stage, yet it, too, engages with serious issues when it portrays
Master Seely’s new inability to support his nephew financially in the face
of Gregory’s domestic tyranny and his desire to protect his inheritance.
Early modern drama is intriguingly positioned in relation to family poli-
tics in part because it presents a point of intersection between rhetoric and
lived experience. Playwrights were steeped in social and political texts that
drew on images of the family to discuss politics, and images of politics to
discuss the family, but their plays drew some of their power from their
attempts to reflect the lives of their spectators. This is not to say that the
plays are realistic in their treatment of the family; rather, writers were able
to give artificial narratives and situations an affective edge by drawing on
the rich emotional resonances of the shared experience of living, or having
lived, within a family. Dramatic representations of the family are gener-
ally unstable, often radically so. This instability is probably due in part
to the narrative imperative to create dispute and debate, characteristics
on which drama depends. Yet in the plays examined here, the corrup-
tion or exploitation of family structures arouses strong emotion: Doughty
laments the way in which Gregory Seely bullies his father; the Page angrily
criticises Lamprias’s state of childish dependency; and Celia attacks the lust
of her prospective father-in-law. Plays thus provide a space in which writers
and spectators could collectively imagine—and emotionally taste—break-
downs in the structure of the family that might be genuinely traumatic
outside the playhouse. They ponder what it was to be old or young, a
parent or a child, and to live in a culture that was shaped by family politics.
Notes
1. The Late Lancashire Witches, ed. Helen Ostovich, in Richard Brome Online,
gen. ed. Richard Allen Cave (Sheffield: Humanities Research Institute),
http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome, 1.1; speech 92 (this edition uses
speech numbers instead of line numbers).
2. Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appoynted to be Read in Churches, in the
Time of the Late Queene Elizabeth of Famous Memory. And Now Thought Fit
to be Reprinted by Authority from the Kings most Excellent Maiesty (London,
1633), F5r.
3. This is the title of Chapter 2 in Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences
in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 62–110.
4. The Prince, or Maxims of State, Written by Sir Walter Ralegh (London,
1621), p. 1.
5. ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British
Academy 62 (1976), pp. 205–248 (p. 207).
6. Youth and Authority, pp. 62–63. On the ‘the politics of age’, see also
‘Masterless Young People in Norwich, 1560–1645’, in The Experience of
Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and
Steve Hindle (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 146–186.
7. Observations Divine and Morall for the Furthering of Knowledg, and Vertue
(London, 1625), p. 315.
8. Quaternio or A Fourefold Way to a Happie Life set Forth in a Dialogue
Betweene a Countryman and a Citizen, a Divine and a Lawyer (London,
1633), S1v.
9. Vindiciae Senectutis, or, A Plea for Old-Age (London, 1639), H8v.
10. ‘Disruption in the Well-Ordered Household: Age, Authority and Possessed
Young People’, in Experience of Authority, pp. 187–212 (pp. 187–8).
11. Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson,
2004), p. 4. Crawford quotes Peter Porter, ‘Where We Came In’, in Family
Ties: Australian Poems of the Family, ed. Jennifer Strauss (Melbourne:
Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 130.
12. Lamprias is so called in the text, but the speech prefixes call him ‘Onos’.
See Robert Kean Turner, ed., The Queen of Corinth, in The Dramatic Works
in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–1996), 8: 94. Turner
speculates that Massinger chose the name ‘Lamprias’ but Fletcher amended
it to the funnier ‘Onos’.
13. The Wise Vieillard, or Old Man. Translated out of French into English by an
Obscure Englishman, a Friend and Fauourer of all Wise Old-men (London,
1621).
14. The Wise Vieillard, pp. 27, 90, 24.
15. Carlo Paschal, False Complaints. Or The Censure of an Unthankfull Mind,
the Labour of Carolus Pascalius Translated into English by W.C. (London,
1605), pp. 206–207.
16. King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 1.1.39.
17. Turner, ed., The Queen of Corinth, 1.3.7–10. All references are to this
edition.
18. Henry Cuffe in The Differences of the Ages of Mans Life (London, 1607)
writes that youth lasts until the age of 25 (I3r-v), while Randle Holme in
The Academy of Armory (Chester, 1688), describes the ‘young man’ as
being aged between 21 and 30 (p. 403).
246 L. MUNRO
19. The Humorous Lieutenant, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in Bowers, Dramatic Works, 5:
304, l. 1.
20. See OED, ‘leap’, v. 9. OED Online. (Oxford University Press, December
2015).
21. On representations of tyranny in The Humorous Lieutenant and other plays
of the Fletcher canon see Robert Y. Turner, ‘Responses to Tyranny in John
Fletcher’s Plays’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 4 (1989),
pp. 123–141; Philip J. Finkelpearl, Court and Country Politics in the Plays
of Beaumont and Fletcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990);
Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
22. For an excellent account of these aspects of the play see Vimala C. Pasupathi,
‘The King’s Privates: Sex and the Soldier’s Place in John Fletcher’s The
Humorous Lieutenant (ca. 1618)’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance
Drama 47 (2008), pp. 25–50.
23. The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1918), 55.
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B47
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Index
A Bellany, Alastair, 51n2, 52n6–8, 52n10,

absolutism, 21, 23, 42, 48, 55n61, 65, 52n11, 53n20, 53n24, 53n29,
177 53n31, 54n35, 54n45, 55n57
Allen, Gemma, 101, 114n2 Berry, Helen, 219, 228n16, 228n18
Amussen, Susan D., 91n3, 228n17 Bible
animals, 3, 9, 76–80, 82–90, 91n10, David, King, 49
93n52, 93n56 Sarah (story of), 46
Anna of Denmark, 117 body politic, 44, 222
Aristotle, 4–7, 14n8, 14n12, 14n14, Boehrer, Bruce, 85, 93n56, 94n75,
14n16, 53n22, 77, 177 95n97
The Politics, 3 Brome, Richard
The City Wit, 67
The Queen’s Exchange, 67
B Buckingham. See Villiers, George
Bacon, Anne, 9, 99–116
Bacon, Anthony, 108, 111,
114n13, 115n29–33, 115n35, C
115n36, 116n37–9, 116n41, Carew, George, 191, 193
116n42, 116n46–8, 116n50, Carr, Robert, 39–41, 45, 46, 50, 51n2
116n53–6 Catholicism, 11, 147, 192, 194, 196,
Bacon, Francis, 19, 54n50, 60 200, 202, 203, 206, 212, 215,
Bacon, Nicholas, 100, 103, 104, 222, 225, 226n1, 226n2,
115n22, 115n23, 115n25 227n13, 228n13
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51144-7
266 INDEX
cavaliers, 36n6, 64 D
Cavendish, Margaret D’Avenant, William, 63, 64
The Life of Cavendish, William, 32 The Tragedy of Albovine, 63
Natures Pictures, 25 Davies, Sir John
Philosophical and Physical Opinions, A discoverie of the true causes why
20, 28 Ireland was never subdued, 48,
The World’s Olio, 20, 21, 27 55n61
Cavendish, William, 34, 38n22 The Muses Teares, 56n78
Cecil, Robert, 86, 94n69, 156, 157, A Select Second Husband for Sir
194 Thomas Overburie’s Wife, 40
Cecil, William, 101, 105, 107, divine right, 26, 183, 228n17
115n21, 115n22, 192, 197, 198, divorce, 50, 51, 72n18, 139, 147, 185
201, 208n7 domestic, 3, 13n3, 40, 42, 44, 47, 48,
Charles I, 9, 26, 34, 57–60, 65, 66, 51, 65–7, 69, 70, 75, 77, 78,
68, 70, 71n14, 73n25, 158, 167, 84–6, 90, 102, 103, 119, 123,
213, 227n12, 228n13, 230 124, 126, 138, 173, 182, 194–7,
Charles II, 20, 33, 35, 38n22, 58, 228n17, 244
140, 161, 162, 164, 167 dynasty, 135–51, 155, 158, 159
Civil War, 8, 10, 11, 39, 135, 199,
213, 214, 223, 227n13, 228n13
Clarke, Danielle, 131n1, 133n20 E
Clifford, Anne, 10, 45, 54n46, 125, education, 1, 11, 24, 75, 89, 99, 102,
153–69, 168n6, 209n35 103, 176, 191–5, 197, 199, 201,
Clifford, George, 154–8, 168n4 203–5, 220, 239, 243
commonwealth, 1, 5, 20, 21, 27, 41, Edward VI (formerly Edward Prince of
44, 49, 76, 103, 195, 196, 233 Wales), 8, 10, 135–51, 230
coronation, 1, 42, 139, 176, 182, Edward, Prince, 10, 135–6
183 Elizabeth I, 76, 100, 153, 155, 174,
counsel, 8, 19, 22, 34, 40, 42, 46, 48, 230
50, 80, 101, 102, 107, 110, 130, estate, 22, 26–8, 33, 38n23, 41, 99,
175, 177, 178 111, 118, 120, 151n19, 159,
court, 21, 22, 26, 28, 36n8, 39–41, 167, 199, 200, 204, 233, 234,
47, 50, 52n7, 59, 64, 67, 86, 99, 238
100, 104, 106, 107, 117–20,
122, 154–8, 162, 164, 166, 167,
168n4, 174, 191, 193, 194, F
198–200, 208n13, 240, 243 family
Crawford, Julie, 19–38 brother, 57, 70, 118, 155, 185,
Crawford, Patricia, 13n5, 133n15, 205, 213, 216, 218, 235, 239
233, 245n11 children, 1, 2, 4, 5, 11, 13n5, 34,
custody, 123, 191, 192, 196–9, 58, 60, 63, 73n28, 76, 81, 82,
201–5 87, 100, 101, 103, 105, 110,
INDEX 267
119, 125, 127–30, 137–40, with Field, Nathan and Massinger,

168–9n17, 174, 176, 177, Philip; The Queen of Corinth,
183–7, 191–210, 214, 219, 12, 231, 235–41, 243, 245n12,
220, 222–4, 229–34, 239, 243 245n17
daughter, 57, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, Foyster, Elizabeth, 13n7, 72n15, 219,
100, 118–20, 123–31, 154, 228n16, 228n18
157, 158, 165, 166, 178, 182,
184, 188, 200, 235, 242
father, 1, 2, 5, 10, 12, 58, 68, 75, G
86, 104, 111, 119–21, 124–7, Gage, Thomas, 11, 211–27
136, 139, 140, 146, 154, 173, gender, 3, 8, 12, 13n5, 13n7, 15n17,
184, 185, 191, 198, 200, 205, 27, 36n10, 75, 120–3, 151n24,
206, 211–13, 216–18, 223, 158, 160, 166, 167, 228n17, 230
224, 229, 231, 233, 235, 236, government, 1, 21, 31, 34, 35, 42, 44,
238, 239, 242, 243 46, 50, 67, 90, 105, 141, 159,
husband, 8, 9, 19–24, 26–31, 33–5, 161, 186, 192, 195, 197, 199,
37n11, 38n20, 38n23, 40, 41, 201–3, 208n13, 236, 240
43–51, 58, 65, 67, 80, 88, 104, Griffiths, Paul, 14n7, 231, 232, 245n6
105, 125, 127, 128, 158, 181, Gurr, Andrew, 189n11
194, 199, 200
mother, 9, 26, 28, 99–102, 104,
105, 107–13, 119–31, 132n13, H
137–9, 151n31, 154, 156–8, Hadfield, Andrew, 189n22
165–7, 198–200, 202–5, 212, Hannay, Margaret, 120, 131n3,
215, 221, 229, 235 132n9, 133n14, 133n24
sister, 58, 59, 101, 102, 154–6, Haraway, Donna, 77, 86, 88, 89,
185, 205, 233 91n11–13, 94n81, 94n90, 95n96
son, 5, 10, 12, 41, 100, 103, 110, Harris, Barbara J., 102, 108, 115n14,
118, 119, 123, 124, 126, 135, 116n40
136, 139, 140, 146, 154, 158, Henry, Prince of Wales, 206, 208n17,
159, 185, 198, 200, 205, 206, 209n33, 227n7, 227n12,
212, 216–18, 224, 229, 233–5, 245n18
237, 239–43 Henry VIII, 10, 135–51, 154
wife, 5, 8, 9, 22, 28, 39–41, 44, Heywood, Thomas, 12, 230, 235
57–9, 68–70, 75, 80, 100, 103, The Late Witches, Lancashire, 12,
118, 119, 126, 129, 137, 139, 230, 231, 235
140, 182, 184, 218, 219, 229, hierarchy, 24, 80, 90, 123, 173, 184,
235, 236, 240, 243 196, 212, 231, 233
Fletcher, John, 12, 231 Hobbes, Thomas, 7, 14n15 23
The Humorous Lieutenant, 12, 231, Holbein, Hans, 135–7, 139–41, 143,
240–4, 246n19, 246n21, 144, 146, 147, 149n5, 150n6,
246n22 150n8, 150n19, 151n30
268 INDEX
household, 1–5, 9–11, 13n5, L

14n14, 42, 47, 75–82, 84–90, law, 1, 42, 48, 54n37, 55n61, 68,
92n25, 92n31, 117, 119–21, 105, 121, 124, 154, 157, 160,
141, 158, 160, 167, 191, 192, 174–6, 178–80, 182, 183, 197,
196–8, 201, 203, 205, 206, 202, 204–6, 239, 243, 244
219, 224, 229–31, 234, 239, letters, 29, 99–116, 119, 121, 124,
244 126, 153, 157, 161, 164, 166,
House of Commons, 207n6 188n3, 216
House of Lords, 197
Howard, Frances, 40, 43, 45, 46, 50,
52n9, 54n46, 54n50, 156 M
humanism, 102 MacFaul, Tom, 13n5, 57–73
Madonna, 137–9, 144, 146, 149n1
marriage, 1, 8–10, 13n3, 13n5, 13n7,
I 21, 23, 24, 29, 34, 36n7, 39–56,
Ingold, Tim, 89, 90, 94n89, 94n91, 58–64, 67, 69, 70, 71n12,
95n95 72n15, 72n17, 72n18, 84, 101,
inheritance, 3, 9, 14n7, 26, 61, 121, 103, 118, 125, 128, 137, 147,
157, 158, 163, 166, 167, 154, 157, 158, 193, 200, 216
168n16, 178, 181, 184, 185, Maria, Henrietta, 9, 57–73, 149n6,
212, 215, 218, 221, 223–5, 231, 214, 215
235–40, 244 Massinger, Philip
Isabella (Infanta of Spain), 47, 166 The Great Duke of Florence, 61
A New Way to Pay Old Debts, 59, 67
The Picture, 65
J metaphor, 1, 3, 5–8, 19, 41–6, 54n37,
James VI and I 75, 77, 121, 122, 191, 193, 198,
Basilikon Doron, 41 211, 225, 242
The True Lawe of free Miller, Naomi, 13n5, 93n46, 117–33,
Monarchies, 2 149n1, 151n24
Jordan, Constance, 14n14, 42, 44,
53n21, 53n22, 53n32
N
natural law, 182
K Ng, Su Fang, 2, 10, 13n4, 41, 53n17,
kingship 53n23, 131n1, 173–89, 228n17
pater patriae, 2, 4, 10, 91–3, 174,
181, 182, 185, 187, 188,
191–3, 196, 198, 243 O
two bodies, 46 obedience, 23, 50, 51, 91, 92, 175–7,
kinship, 3, 100, 101, 104, 106, 108, 184, 191, 192, 204, 220, 221,
198, 200, 231 225, 229, 230
INDEX 269
Overbury, Thomas recusant, 11, 108, 109, 194–200, 204,

Sir Thomas Overburie His Wife, with 205, 210n54, 213, 214, 228n14
New Elegies upon his (now reformation, 7, 11, 52n15, 65, 103,
knowne) untimely death, 43 105, 225, 226n2, 228n15
A Wife now the Widdow of Sir Thos rhetoric, 8, 11, 12, 36n5, 40, 41, 51,
Overburie, 251 64, 70, 111, 130, 162, 163, 195,
242, 244
Roberts, Josephine, 132n11
P Russell, Anne, 154–7
parliament, 27, 40–2, 47, 48, 54n37, Russell, Margaret, 157, 158, 168n10,
55n61, 55n65, 159, 164, 178, 168n12
196, 197, 207n6, 208n13
parliamentarians, 10, 23, 158, 227n13
patriarchalism, 11, 70, 117, 173–89 S
patriarchy, 125, 192, 196, 198–203, Schleiner, Louise, 115n27
205 Shakespeare, William, 124, 131, 189n22
patronage, 86, 105, 107, 158, 159, 163, King Lear, 10, 173–89, 239, 245n16
166, 167, 212, 222–4, 226n1 Shanley, Mary Lyndon, 36n7, 42,
Perry, Curtis, 71n14, 73n24, 180, 53n18
181, 189n16, 189n17 Sharpe, Kevin, 36n8, 42, 43, 53n23,
portraiture, 10, 135–51 71n5, 71n6, 72n20, 227n11,
primogeniture, 178, 181, 188, 212, 220 227n12, 233
Privy Chamber, 140–2, 144, 150n19 Sidney, Philip, 9, 29, 37n19, 117–18,
Protestantism, 51, 105, 192, 202, 122–5, 127–9, 131, 133n22
211–14, 218, 219, 222, 225 The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia,
Purchas, Samuel 37n19, 133n16
The Kings Towre and Triumphant Sidney, Robert, 118–21, 124, 131n4,
Arch of London, 93n62 131n5, 132n6, 132n8, 132n13
A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects, Spain, 46, 58, 61, 154, 199, 212,
76 214–17, 221, 223
state, 2–8, 10–12, 14n12, 14n14, 24,
34, 35, 36n4, 38n20, 38n23, 41,
Q 42, 44, 48, 50, 51, 53n22,
Questier, Michael, 178, 189n7, 56n78, 58, 69, 90, 105, 107,
226n1, 226n2 112, 117, 128, 130, 132n11,
141, 163, 164, 166, 173–5,
178–81, 185, 187, 189n7,
R 189n19, 191–210, 228n17,
Raber, Karen, 36n5, 89, 93n52, 230–2, 236, 238, 242–4
94n81, 94n88 succession, 8–10, 14n7, 41, 52n16,
rebellion, 8, 10, 11, 107, 147, 176, 59, 64, 67, 69, 93n46, 100, 130,
181, 185, 188, 189n8, 214 135–51, 186, 242
270 INDEX
T V
Thomas, Keith, 84, 87, 93n52, 232 Villiers, George, 59, 61, 64
Topsell, Edward
The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes,
77–9 W
The Historie of Serpents, 77 Wadsworth, James, 11, 211–28
The House-holder, or Perfect Man: wardship, 113, 120, 126, 156, 193–8,
Preached in Three Sermons, 75, 200, 202, 203, 206, 208n13,
79, 81 231, 239
The Reward of Religion, 79, 81 wedding ceremony, 40, 50, 52n7,
Tuvill, Daniel, 40, 41, 45–7, 49–51, 120, 130
54n43, 54n44, 54n47–9, 54n51, Whatley, William, 50, 56n81
54n52, 55n53–5, 55n59 A Bride-bush, or a Wedding sermon,
Asylum Veneris, or a Sanctuary for 50
Ladies, 40, 45 Wroth, Mary
tyranny, 22, 24, 29, 37n19, 188, 201, The Countess of Montgomery’s
218, 228n14, 244, 246n21 Urania, 118
Love’s Victory, 118, 124, 126, 128,
131, 132n9
U Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, 118,
union, 8, 9, 22, 31, 34, 35, 62, 128, 121, 131
130, 145, 174, 179

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FAMILY POLITICS IN EARLY

EARLY MODERN LITERATURE IN HISTORY

More information about this series at

Family Politics in Early Modern

Early Modern Literature in History

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955947

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This collection began to take shape in November 2013 when we hosted a

2 Margaret Cavendish, Wife19

3 Reading Overbury’s Wife: Politics and Marriage in 1616 39

4 Representations of the Family in Early Caroline Drama:

Part II Succession 97

6 ‘Good Agreement Betwixt the Wombe and Frute’:

7 Allegiance and Alliance: Maternal Genealogies

8 Mini-Majesty: Dynasty and Succession in the Portraiture

9 Beyond the Palace: The Transmission of Political

Part III Rebellion 171

10 Bare-Forked Animals: King Lear and the Problems

11 The State, Childhood and Religious Dissent 191

12 Father Figures: Paternal Politics in the Conversion

13 Family Politics and Age in Early Modern England 229

Julie Crawford is the Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities in the

Humanities division, she is Vice President of the National Collegiate

Naomi Miller is Professor of English and the Study of Women and

She is author of the prize-winning Grossly Material Things: Women and

Fig. 2.1 Margaret Cavendish, Natures Pictures drawn by

Early modern writers repeatedly return to the analogy between family

H. Crawforth (*) • S. Lewis (*)

© The Author(s) 2017 1

relationships and parallel power structures at their core. Slaves, women

(1259a37). There is a natural supremacy of man over woman, ruler over

turmoil of the Civil War would prompt fundamental reassessments of how

relations of the King to political scrutiny (his moral conduct indicating

Within state politics, succession becomes a national concern for those

daughters taking differing positions in the conflict between the republi-

3. The essays in this collection are indebted to several revisionary historical

Margaret Cavendish, Wife

Eloquence was an invaluable asset for a statesman; it could turn even a

As most of her readers have noted, Margaret Cavendish was extremely

also interested in the political position of actual wives. In her dedication

alwaies to be despised, nor to be lockt from the private Affairs of her

While ‘numberless of the like Examples might be given’, Cavendish is most

The sixth book of Nature’s Pictures, a story entitled ‘The Contract’,

‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’, in fact, effects the education of a ‘Prince’,

The final entry in Natures Pictures is, fittingly, a biographical account

my Mother was of an Heroick Spirit, in suffering patiently where there is no

In this account, Lady Lucas’s ‘husband’ is at once Thomas Lucas and

There is a collective imagination here, grouped in the present, but with

In contrast to such misogyny, her husband appears here, and in much

While the title clearly blazons each of William Cavendish’s titles—particu-

write to amuse my Readers, in a mystical and allegorical Style, of the dis-

In presenting her husband as both a regional sovereign and a military

Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688‬ (Ashgate,

Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 553–554, emphasis added. I discuss

Reading Overbury’s Wife: Politics

When publisher Laurence Lisle got hold of a manuscript of Thomas

© The Author(s) 2017 39

writes.5 Building on this Overburian ideal of a virtuous woman—an ideal that

2 Margaret Cavendish, Wife19

3 Reading Overbury’s Wife: Politics and Marriage in 1616 39

4 Representations of the Family in Early Caroline Drama:

Part II Succession 97

6 ‘Good Agreement Betwixt the Wombe and Frute’:

7 Allegiance and Alliance: Maternal Genealogies

8 Mini-Majesty: Dynasty and Succession in the Portraiture

9 Beyond the Palace: The Transmission of Political

Part III Rebellion 171

10 Bare-Forked Animals: King Lear and the Problems

11 The State, Childhood and Religious Dissent 191

12 Father Figures: Paternal Politics in the Conversion

13 Family Politics and Age in Early Modern England 229

H. Crawforth () • S. Lewis ()

trials of Carr, Howard and their accomplices staged in 1616 advertised

romantic figures, often with redemptive capacities. Once Charles came to