The Cross in Elizabethan England: an Image in an Age of Iconoclasm
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THE CROSS IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND: AN IMAGE IN AN AGE OF ICONOCLASM Paul Joseph Stapleton A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2015 Approved by: Robert G. Babcock A. Reid Barbour Patrick P. O’Neill Jessica L. Wolfe Robert V. Young © 2015 Paul Joseph Stapleton ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Paul Joseph Stapleton: The Cross in Elizabethan England: An Image in an Age of Iconoclasm (Under the direction of Jessica L. Wolfe) The cross was arguably the most hotly contested image in all of Elizabethan England. For some the cross was an object of devotion, but for others of idolatry and superstition; for some, the triumphal standard of Christ, but for others, the instrument of his torture; it was the banner of Christian identity, but also an abstract spiritual ideal; a symbol of the holy Roman Catholic church, but also of the pagan Whore of Babylon; the shield of crusaders and the Templar knights, but also of the English patron Saint George and the knights of the Order of the Garter; the marching flag of the northern Catholic rebels, but also of the soldiers of the Tudor armies; the ensign of the Spanish Armada, but also of the royal navy led by Charles Howard, Lord high Admiral, and Sir Francis Drake. For Elizabethans, no matter how they identified themselves in matters of religion, no matter where along the spectrum of religious identity, whatever their shade of Protestant or Catholic, and no matter how they regarded sacred objects, whether as iconodules or iconoclasts, or somewhere in between, the cross was a phenomenon indicative of far more than as one apologist claimed, “nothing,” and another, “onely barres laide a crosse.” For all practical purposes, the various attempts in Elizabethan England to strip the cross of meaning were predicated on the same set of circumstances that historically (and ironically) undergirds almost all forms of religious iconoclasm: sacred objects like the cross are so utterly saturated with meaning that they inevitably come to be regarded as rivals to the sacred entities they are intended to represent, and thus, as inimical to “pure” forms of belief. So for some iii Elizabethans the cross was the primary symbol of the Christian deity, but for others it was an idol that had displaced the true Christian god. Furthermore, another circumstance was also at work for Elizabethans: in a sixteenth-century culture undergoing tremendous flux, the multifarious politico-religious connotations of the cross fractured it with paradox. So the cross came to be adopted as the primary symbol of political entities directly in conflict with each other, for example, imperial Catholic Spain and Protestant Elizabethan England, and among the English themselves, anti-government subversives like the Northern Catholic rebels and Jesuit-supported recusants. Nonetheless, the cross is the image Edmund Spenser chooses to give us at the outset of Book One of The Faerie Queene in the form of the crosses on the armor of the Redcrosse Knight. My purpose in this study is to explore the “bloodie Crosses” on the Redcrosse knight’s breastplate and shield in their relation to the politico-religious culture of Elizabethan England, which assumed for the cross a central role in the defining of English religious and national identity, albeit that role was predicated for some on a positive relation, while for others, a negative one. The fact of the matter is that devotion towards the cross was regularly regarded in post-Reformation England as a definitive marker of “papism,” if not outright allegiance to the church of Rome, and therefore, was frequently placed in a negative relation to English identity. For some like Spenser, however, such “negative” associations were simply not the case. This is partly due to the medieval setting of The Faerie Queene, which allows for the presence of anachronistic cultural residue like the crusader armor that the Redcrosse Knight wears. Yet the Legend of Holiness is also intended as a spiritual allegory for contemporary Elizabethans, and the Redcrosse Knight is a moral exemplar, whom some have even described as an English Protestant Everyman. The central role of the “papist” cross in Book One, therefore, cannot be iv dismissed as a mere factor of the medievalism of the poem, but it must also be recognized as a necessary contributing factor to Spenser’s depiction of Post-Reformation Englishness and holiness. Thus, I believe Spenser’s deployment of the red cross reveals what many historians have come to recognize about Elizabethan England in general: that religious beliefs were far more pragmatic, malleable, and tolerant than any attempts at hardline uniformity could ever suppress; and this seems to be equally, if not more, true of literary writers like Spenser. v IN MEMORIAM Angela Cruz Stapleton (1998-2003) vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the members of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Chapel Hill, including the staff, faculty, my fellow graduate students, especially my officemate and good friend Luke Mills, and the undergraduate students in my classes, all of whom made my years at UNC superlatives. I am especially grateful to the five members of my committee, each of whom in their own way inspired me to write this dissertation: Robert G. Babcock, A. Reid Barbour, Patrick P. O’Neill, Jessica L. Wolfe, and Robert V. Young. I reserve gratissimum, however, for my director Prof. Wolfe, who encouraged me at every turn, yet kept me grounded. Some believe that all good labor involves its crosses and can even become a cross itself. I would never have been able to complete the good labor of this PhD without my wife, Karen Cruz, the Cruz who softens all my crosses. Yet in completing her own PhD in English at Chapel Hill in the summer of 2012, Karen also modeled for me the tenacity and inner toughness requisite for completing a doctoral degreee. Thanks, too, to my stepson Mike Corsetti, who never failed to pull me out of the past for a respite, drawing me into the fun and intricacies of whatever ballgames were being played in the here and now; and to my stepdaughter Jessica Corsetti, who always enlivened our house with her visits, young Abigail and Benjamin in tow. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: WHY THE “BLOODIE CROSSE”? .....................................................................31 CHAPTER 2: THE IMAGE OF THE CROSS AND THE CONTESTED ORIGINS OF ENGLISH IDENTITY...................................................................................................................85 CHAPTER 3: THE CROSS CULT AND ELIZABETHAN HISTORIOGRAPHY...................121 CHAPTER 4: SPENSER’S THEOLOGIA CRUCIS AND THE LEGEND OF HOLINESS.....169 WORKS CITED: ........................................................................................................................210 Primary Sources...............................................................................................................210 Secondary Sources...........................................................................................................230 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 – “The Martyrs’ Picture”..............................................................................................66 Figure 1.2 – The Vision of the Emperor Constantine....................................................................71 Figure 1.3 – St. Helena and the Invention of the Holy Cross........................................................74 Figure 1.4 – St. Edwin, first Christian king of the Northumbrians................................................77 Figure 1.5 –St. George, soldier of Christ, martyr, and patron of England.....................................82 Figure 2.1 – St. before King Ethelbert of Kent in the year 596.....................................................97 Figure 3.1 – Panel of Illustrations of the Saxon King Oswald....................................................123 Figure 3.2 – Title page of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments...................................................155 Figure 4.1 – The Redcrosse Knight slaying the Dragon..............................................................171 ix INTRODUCTION In the various studies of iconoclasm in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the only comment about the cross appears as follows: “Spenser clearly sets himself apart from those who would object to any representation of the cross as idolatrous.”1 Beyond this remark, true though it may be, nothing more about the cross presents itself, despite the fact that the cross was arguably the most hotly contested image in all of Elizabethan England. The cross was considered to be an object of devotion for some, but of idolatry and superstition for others; the triumphal standard of Christ, but also the instrument of his torture; the banner of Christian identity, but also an abstract spiritual ideal; a symbol of the holy Roman Catholic church, but also of the pagan Whore of Babylon; the shield of crusaders and the Templar knights, but also of the English patron Saint George and the knights of the Order of the Garter; the marching flag of the northern Catholic rebels, but also of the soldiers of the Tudor armies; the ensign of the Spanish Armada, but