Carole Levin

The Significance of the King’s Children in The Tudors

People’s fascination with sixteenth-century England appears unending. From The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933 to The Other Boleyn Girl in 2008, the public has shown a growing enthusiasm for historical movies and television shows on this time period. Showtime’s The Tudors—actually only about Henry VIII, not the later Tudors—is mostly known for its sexualized view of history and sometime grotesque violence. As Jake Martin puts it, the show is “part stilted historical drama, part soft-core pornography.”1 But there are aspects of the series that go beyond that, with some interesting characterizations and shifting points of view, so that characters who are sympathetic at one point become far less so, and unpleasant characters gain our understanding. One theme is the occasional deep tenderness that Jonathan Rhys-Myer’s Henry shows toward his young children. Along with all the adult drama, The Tudors shows that the royal children and the king’s deep concern for a legitimate heir to the throne are central to understanding the political events that occurred in sixteenth century England.

Queen Margaret in Shakespeare and Chronicles: She-Wolf or Heroic Spirit

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI part III, Richard, Duke of York, calls Queen Margaret—Henry VI’s wife known to history as Margaret of Anjou—“the she-wolf of France.” Margaret is furious with her husband for giving the power of the crown to York, and even more with York for taking it, thus nullifying the rights of her son Prince Edward. Margaret—not her weak husband Henry— raises an army to challenge York. Margaret’s army defeats York’s and he is captured. Earlier versions had York die in battle. Here he is brought before the queen who mocks him and crowns him with a paper crown: Ay, this is he that took King Henry’s chair And this is he was his adopted heir. … Off with the crown, and with the crown his head! And whilst we breathe, take time to do him dead.1

Why Elizabeth Never Left England

Like her siblings Edward VI and Mary I, Elizabeth I never left England to visit other realms in the British Isles and the European continent during her reign. This was in marked contrast to her father, Henry VIII, and nearly all his predecessors going back to the Norman Conquest, and many of her contemporaries, the princes of other European states. Elizabeth did routinely show herself to the citizens of London and her subjects in the Thames valley and, occasionally, in the Midlands and East Anglia during her summer progresses. But her subjects in northern England and Wales, Ireland, the people who populated the royal courts of European states, an undetermined number of Muslims, and select groups of peoples in the Americas only knew Elizabeth through secondhand sources. As such, they obtained knowledge of the queen through the mediation of various forms of representation, such as the reports of ambassadors, literary and iconographic depictions, and letters sent directly from the queen herself to the princes of western Europe, Russia, and various states in the Islamic world.

“I Trust I May Not Trust Thee”: Queens and Royal Women’s Visions of the World in King John

The political world of Shakespeare’s play King John is morally challenged. Except for the character of the Bastard Faulconbridge, the male characters participate but have no self-awareness about the corruption. The royal women of the play, Eleanor, mother of King John, Constance, widow of John’s brother Geoffrey and mother of rival claimant Arthur, and Blanche, John’s niece, and future wife of the French Prince, are far more insightful about the world in which they live. As the play unfolds, we see more and more the painful lessons of powerlessness that both Constance and Blanche, and even sometimes Eleanor, experience. This chapter examines both their understanding of the dangers of power politics and how little they can do about it. It also examines what it means to be mother, wife, and widow for these royal characters.

Queen Elizabeth and the Power and Language of the Gift

Gift exchanges in the early modern period often had much to do with power. This is especially true in the gift exchanges between Elizabeth I and other women both before she became queen and throughout her reign. This essay analyses such exchanges between Elizabeth and her sister Mary I, her cousin Mary Stuart, and the female relatives of the Earl of Essex at the end of her reign. While the material objects in this essay focus on clothing and jewelry, there is a further argument that the most important gifts offered, asked for, accepted or refused were not objects at all, but promises and advice.

“I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys”: Turquoise, Queenship‚ and the Exotic

One of the most poignant moments in The Merchant of Venice is when Shylock learns that the turquoise ring he valued above anything was not only stolen by his daughter Jessica, but also traded for a monkey. This essay uses Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice as a lens for exploring the value of turquoise in the early modern period. Shakespeare’s deliberate use of a turquoise ring in his play is profoundly emblematic, meant convey cultural contentions and serve as a touchstone for questions of trade and exoticism. But the turquoise, coming from Persia and Arabia, was also a valuable stone in sixteenth-century England. It was worn by queens and also given as gifts to and from queens. Mary Stuart received a turquoise ring when she was being pressured to abdicate the throne of Scotland. For Queen Elizabeth, her turquoise jewelry worked as a symbol of expansion of empire and exchange.

Pregnancy, False Pregnancy, and Questionable Heirs: Mary I and Her Echoes

In 1607 a man named Bartholomew Helson went about London, claiming to be Queen Mary’s son “and oftentimes gathered people about him.” Sir William Waad had Helson apprehended and then examined him. Helson explained that he had been born at Hampton Court but stolen away. Though Waad told Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, that he considered Helson of more “seditious disposition than any kind of lunacy,” he had him committed to Bridewell, and would continue to keep him there, or, if Salisbury wanted, send him on to Bedlam.2 While there were a number of impostors in Tudor/early Stuart England claiming to be children of royalty or a dead king returned, Helson’s claim may be the most perplexing, as one of the parts of Mary I’s history that was best known was her phantom pregnancies that produced no children.

Itinerarium ad Windsor and English Queenship

As has been argued elsewhere in this volume, William Fleetwood’s Itinerarium ad Windsor strenuously attempted to create a positive image of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, at a critical moment in his relationship with Queen Elizabeth L In fact, at the time he allegedly made that leisurely journey to Windsor with Fleetwood and Buckhurst, Leicester was already laying the groundwork for the extravaganza performed for her at Kenilworth in late July 1575, which represented his last grand attempt to convince the queen to marry him.1 Fleetwood cleverly casts Leicester as sagacious and refined in the Itinerarium‘s dialogue, a significant shift in perception for a man whose life and career thus far had been shadowed by scandal and rumor, much of it concerned with his relations with the queen, who had thus far resisted marriage to her ultimate male favorite. The son and grandson of convicted traitors, Leicester endured a perennial spate of bad press for much of his adult life, especially after the mysterious death of his wife, Amy Robsart, in 1560.2 Even though the scurrilous tract Leicester’s Commonwealth was not published until 1584, nine years after the composition of Itinerarium, the comments about Leicester’s amoral and scandalous behavior circulated widely at court and through the country.

The Queen Elizabeth I Society: The First Ten Years

In 2001 Donald Stump asked me if! would like to help him create an organization for people studying Queen Elizabeth I. So much thoughtful and innovate scholarship had been done about Elizabeth I in the last decades of the twentieth century by people in a variety of disciplines that it seemed like the perfect time for a society to be formed. We wanted an organization that would be welcoming to graduate students as well as to senior scholars, and to scholars from a wide range of disciplines: literature, history, art history, music history, and the like. Thus was the Queen Elizabeth I Society born, with our first sessions at South Central Renaissance Conference in 2002 in St. Louis. In 2011 we celebrated our tenth anniversary of this founding, returning to St. Louis once again, with Donald and St. Louis University as our host. In the intervening years our organization has grown. We have a website. We sponsor many sessions, have our keynote speakers, offer the Agnes Strickland prize for best essays in the open sessions, awarding work by both graduate students and senior scholars. As well as our commitment to excellent scholarship, we are also dedicated to the joy we take in our work. At our conference every year we have an evening entertainment and an auction of what we claim comes from the queens attic. This decade has seen an explosion of brilliant scholarship on Elizabeth I. Many members of our society have been a part of it. In 2009 Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch published the Norton critical edition on Elizabeth, Elizabeth I and Her Age, which in 2010 received the award for best book to be used for teaching by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Scholarship produced for conference presentations has led to members working together on further scholarly projects. A session on Elizabeth I and Foreign Powers was held at the conference in 2008, with papers by Brandie Siegfried, Anna Riehl Bertolet, Nathan Martin, and Nate Probasco. Charles Beem used the four papers as a core set of essays for a collection The Foreign Relations oJElizabeth I (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

The Taming of the Queen: Foxe’s Katherine and Shakespeare’s Kate

In considering the transmission of religious and gender ideologies in sixteenth-century England, we must consider John Foxes Acts and Monuments, one of the most influential and widely read books of the English Renaissance, and a source for much Renaissance drama. Many early modern plays depict queens in perilous situations and some of these works drew on Foxe as a source. Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife Katherine Parr is one such queen in peril whose story is chronicled in Foxe and then retold in part in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1605). While Rowley’s version holds some interest historically, I would suggest the most intriguing parallel between Foxe’s narrative and an early modern play is with Katherine Parr’s namesake in one of Shakespeare’s comedies, the one where Kate is known as a “curst shrew.” I would argue that in The Taming of the Shrew we can see some deliberate echoes of the confrontation between Katherine and Henry, the threats to Katherine, and the cultural anxieties about an educated or strong-willed wife. Though Rowley’s play follows Foxe more closely, it is The Taming of the Shrew that deals more thoroughly with the issue raised by Foxe. Furthermore, these concerns are found not only in the representation of Kate, but even, ironically, in Bianca as well. Though the traditional view of Bianca is that she is a brainless beauty who fools her father by her quiet and ladylike demeanor and then turns out to be actually spoiled and disobedient once married, I would argue that Bianca is really a model of an unruly woman who disrupts societal norms—but unlike both Katherine Parr and Kate—does not revert to the role of the pliant woman at the end of the play.