Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2013, vol. 8 Elisabeth Parr’s Renaissance at the Mid-Tudor Court Helen Graham-Matheson oan Kelly’s ground-breaking article, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Jcenters on four criteria for ascertaining the “relative contraction (or expansion) of the powers of Renaissance women”: women’s economic, political, cultural roles and the ideology about women across the mid- Tudor period. Focusing particularly on cultural and political roles, this essay applies Kelly’s criteria to Elisabeth Parr née Brooke, Marchioness of Northampton (1526–1565) and sister-in-law of Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife, whose controversial court career evinces women’s lived experience and their contemporary political importance across the mid- Tudor courts of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. By taking each reign in isolation, this essay follows Kelly’s call to question “accepted schemes of periodization” and reassesses whether “events that further the historical development of men, liberating them from natural, social, or ideological constraints, have quite different, even opposite, effects upon women.”1 The key point of departure of my essay from Kelly’s argument is that she states that women’s involvement in the public sphere and politics lessened in the Italian cinquecento, whereas my findings suggest that in England women such as Elisabeth Parr increasingly involved themselves in the public world of court politics. According to Kelly, 1 Joan Kelly, ”Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Feminism and Renaissance Studies, ed. L. Hutson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21. 289 290 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Helen Graham-Matheson [n]oblewomen . were increasingly removed from public con- cerns — economic, political, and cultural — and although they did not disappear into a private realm of family and domestic concerns . their loss of public power made itself felt in new constraints placed upon their personal as well as their social lives.2 My research into Parr’s life suggests that some women of the Tudor court took advantage of the divide between public and private activity to con- struct and utilize unprecedented political agency precisely because of their gender and the fact that they were removed from public power. Parr was politically active under all four monarchs (arguably five, including Queen Jane) during this turbulent mid-Tudor period: from her arrival at the Henrician Court ca. 1540 to her untimely death at the Elizabethan court in 1565. Elisabeth’s career trajectory suggests that particular circumstances across the mid-16th century combined to produce aristocratic and noble women with a humanist education and reformist sympathies. Elisabeth Brooke arrived at the court of Henry VIII ca. 1542, and when suggested as a possible sixth wife for the king, the Spanish ambas- sador Eustace Chapuys described her as a “pretty young thing with wit enough to do as the others [Henry’s previous wives] have done should she consider it worth her while.” By 1562, her position at court had improved notably, to the extent that when she was suffering from a severe case of jaundice, William Cecil proclaimed ”Almighty God comfort hir, and per- mitt us to enioye her for I think none shall be more grevoosly lost of a sub- ject of this Court.”3 Elisabeth’s rise to prominence began in 1543 when she formed a relationship with William Parr, Earl of Essex, later Marquess of Northampton, married brother of the new queen, Katherine Parr. I believe that Elisabeth and William’s relationship — their efforts to secure William a divorce so they could marry and their battle to remain married during 2 Ibid., 45. 3 Eustace Chapuys to Emperor Charles V, 9 Feb 1542, vol. 17, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (London: 1894–1910) vols. 14–21; TNA State Papers, 70/40 fol. 239, William Cecil to Nicholas Throckmorton, 29 August 1562. Renaissance at the Mid-Tudor Court 291 the Somerset Protectorate and the Marian counter-Reformation — con- tributed in a previously unseen way to the shape of domestic politics across the mid-sixteenth century. Although there is no space here to discuss more fully her activity and agency, I hope to show that Elisabeth utilized her position and the circumstances in which she found herself to manifest her political significance. It cannot be overstated that the circumstances that led to Elisabeth’s peculiar career were unprecedented and that she herself was paradigmatic of how a woman might operate, though most did not. Her lived experience enables a recounting of the opportunities available to a woman who was well-positioned, highly regarded, and lucky; not neces- sarily in terms of the circumstances she faced, but in how events unfolded across the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I. Almost as soon as Henry VIII died, William Parr appealed to the young King Edward, his “nephew,” for a commission to legalize his divorce and allow him to marry Elisabeth Brooke. Despite the favorable findings of the commission set up to consider the couple’s right to marry, the Lord Protector Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, ruled against the mar- riage, and in 1548 Elisabeth was sent to live at Chelsea Manor with the Dowager Queen Katherine Parr, Princess Elizabeth Tudor, and Lady Jane Grey. These associations and Somerset’s animosity towards Elisabeth and the Northamptons were the catalysts that shaped her activity and agenda for the remainder of her life. Following the court coup against Somerset in 1549, in which William Parr was second in importance only to John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and the Somersets’ subsequent reduction in power, there is a marked increase in the activity of noblewomen at the Edwardian court. From the mid 1550s, Elisabeth was recognized at court as Marchioness of Northampton for the first time4 and immediately proved herself comfortable in the upper echelons of court society, stepping into the 4 Their marriage was not formally legalized until the Divorce Act of 1552. I believe Elisabeth’s return to court in 1550 marks the change in attitudes following Somerset’s removal as Lord Protector and Warwick’s rewarding of Northampton for his loyalty in the coup. I believe that Northampton’s support of Warwick over Somerset was partly motivated by his desire to have Elisabeth acknowledged as his wife and to exact revenge on Somerset for his treatment of not only himself and Elisabeth but also for his treatment of Katherine Parr, who had earlier married Somerset’s brother, Thomas Seymour. 292 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Helen Graham-Matheson power vacuum created by the absence of a queen consort after the demo- tion of Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset. This was clearly obvious at a banquet hosted by the French Ambassador, the Vidame de Chartres, to celebrate the supposed reunion of the Duke of Somerset and the Earl of Warwick by means of a marriage between Dudley’s son and heir John and Seymour’s eldest daughter Anne. According to Jehan Schefve My Lord the Vidame’s banquet was a brave and rich sight. [The] Marchioness received at table a present from the Vidame, an enamelled chain worth about two hundred crowns. All the other ladies present, and the three daughters of the said Somerset, one of whom was the bride, received a present, each one according to her station. The Vidame did not take par- ticular notice of anyone except of the Duke of Somerset and the Marchioness. He showed himself often in their company, and talked to the said Marchioness through an interpreter, who was mostly my Lord Grey, once captain of Boulogne.5 Elisabeth tried to present herself as a political persona worthy of public and courtly acknowledgment through the strategic commissioning of a secular text — and a decisive Renaissance text at that. Manifold evidence survives to assert that Elisabeth was responsible for commissioning the first English vernacular translation by Sir Thomas Hoby of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Libro del Cortegiano (1528). Book III of The Courtyer, as Hoby’s translation was known, is the book of the Courtesan, or female courtier, and the first edition bears the heading THE THIRDE BOOKE OF the Courtier of Count Baldessar Casti- lio vnto M Alphonsus Ariosto. Englisshed at the request of the Ladye 5 Jehan Schefve to Emperor Charles V, 17 June 1550, Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, ed. Royall Tyler, et al. (London: 1862–1964), vols. 1550–1552, 110 [original in French and ciphered]. Renaissance at the Mid-Tudor Court 293 Marquesse of Northamp- ton, in anno.1551.6 Other paratextual material also reveals Elisabeth’s involvement; Hoby details his “duetie done in translating the thirde booke (that entreateth of a Gentlewoman of the Courte),”7 and Hoby’s Life and Travails relates that he completed the commission upon his arrival in Paris in 1552, claiming that “the first thing I did was to translate into Englishe the third booke of the ‘Cowrtisan’, which my Ladie Marquess had often willed me to do, and for lacke of time ever differred it.”8 By associating herself with the first vernacular translation of this text, Elisabeth Parr was seemingly attempting to align herself with the text’s central female figures — the hostess Elisabetta Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, and the idealized female courtier discussed in Book III, based, one assumes, on the Duchess herself. The text of Book III is replete with references to women’s virtues and modes of behavior that would clearly resonate with the Marchioness at this important time of her career. As Lord Julian, Hoby’s rendering of Guiliano de’Medici, highlights, a woman at court ought also to be more circumspect and take better heed that she give no occasion to be yll reported of, and so to beehave her selfe, that she be not onlye not spotted wyth anye fault, but not so much as with suspicion.