Proquest Dissertations

Library and Archives Bibliothéque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de Tédition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada YourfOø Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-64757-8 Ourfile Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-64757-8 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non- Lauteur a accordé une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant å la Bibliothéque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par Nnternet, préter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and seil theses monde, å des fins commerciales ou autres, sur woridwide, for commercial or non- support microforme, papier, électronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriété du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege ætte thése. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la thése ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent étre imprimés ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformément å la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privée, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont été enlevés de thesis. cette thése. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1+1 Canada The Daughter of Time: The Afterlife of Mary Tudor, 1558-1625 by © Carolyn Colbert A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature Memorial University of Newfoundland September 2009 St. John's Newfoundland Dedication In loving memory of my grandfather, Leo Colbert (22 My 1902-22 My 1987) "For he was great of heart." ii Abstract This project is the first sustained study of the posthumous reputation of Mary I in the early modern period. It examines how the late queen regnant of England, who ruled from 1553 to 1558, was remembered during the reigns of her two successors, Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and James I (1603-25). Because of her notorious reputation as the Catholic queen connected to the burning of the Protestant martyrs, men and women whom she considered heretics, she is often called "Bloody Mary." This epithet, however, obscures the complexity of her posthumous representations. While her religious zeal is usually her most recognizable characteristic, she is also associated with foreign Catholic powers, specifically those of Spain, the homeland of her husband, and of Rome. Even constructions of her as persecutor are complex. Sometimes she is presented as both cruel and vindictive, but not uniformly. Involved in the martyrdoms by her position as queen, she is frequently distanced from complete and primary guilt for them by the institutional responsibility of the Catholic Church and by the sheer number of people who are blamed. Her unsatisfactory marriage and her inability to produce an heir are also preoccupations of her posthumous representations, and these topics facilitate the fashioning of her as a failed and unhappy woman and as the object of divine retribution. Mary's generally negative posthumous reputation has tended to overshadow more positive figurations of her, which are explored in Chapter 1. Correlating with favourable images of the living queen, these Catholic ones present a virtuous Mary Tudor, committed to the faith in which she lived and died. Chapter 2 discusses the text which iii many commentators credit with the blackening of Mary's reputation, the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, in which she is presented, at various times, as disloyal, stubborn, unhappy, disappointed, and misguided. His construction of Mary is inevitably shaped by his concern to show the sufferings of the godly martyrs and to prove that the true and invisible Church is Protestant. The queen, consequently, is implicated in a Protestant-Catholic dialectic, and so the descriptions of her deathbed and domestic life are contrasted with those of the martyrs. Mary's putative pregnancy is, for Foxe, a symbol of a corrupt Catholic regime. In terms of the Protestant persecutions, she facilitates the conditions under which they occur, and she is actively involved in the death of Thomas Cranmer and the torment of her sister, Elizabeth. In many ways, her representation corresponds with aspects of Foxe's characterization of an earlier English monarch, Richard HI. The final chapter explores six Jacobean history plays based on Foxe's Acts and Monuments. These reflect and propagate the construction of Mary in the martyrology. In these plays, Mary remains a powerful symbol of the danger of international Catholicism and becomes a means to interrogate religious and political issues in the past and in the present. iv Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Trustees of the Harlow Campus Trust, as well as the following at Memorial University of Newfoundland: the School of Graduate Studies, the Faculty of Arts, and the Department of English Language and Literature. I would like to thank Dr. Thomas S. Freeman for his interest in my work. He invited me to give papers on panels he organized at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference (2007 Minneapolis and 2009 Geneva) and the Renaissance Society of America Conference (2009 Los Angeles). He was also instrumental in arranging for me to speak at the Religious History of Britain 1500-1800 Seminar Series, held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London (2008). I benefitted greatly from meetings and discussions with other scholars interested in Mary Tudor. Many thanks are due to my supervisor, Dr. William Barker, who has been generous with his time and attention. His encouragement and guidance from both near and far have been invaluable to the development of this project. He has always been an insightful and challenging reader of my work, and his prodigious knowledge of early modern literature has been an inspiration. My mentor, Dr. Linda Vecchi, has helped me enormously with my dissertation, for which she was a selfless supporter and diligent reader. I appreciate her friendship, her always excellent advice, and her efforts on my behalf during my doctoral program. I am also grateful to Dr. Gordon Jones for his rigorous reading of my dissertation v and my writing in general, and for his interest in and encouragement of my work. I thank Sherry Doyle, whom I have known since our days in HR 203 at Holy Heart of Mary, for her contribution to this project. Her generosity of spirit truly exemplifies the school's motto, "Cor unum inter nos." I owe a debt of gratitude to the queen of all things grammatical, Dr. Iona Bulgin, for her remarkably thorough reading of an earlier manuscript, for conversations about books and shoes, and for many years of friendship. Yvonne Hann and I have turned a mutual love of early modern literature into a great friendship. I thank her for sharing this journey with me, for her unwavering support, and for many afternoons of lunches and mindless movies. Much gratitude is due to my family. I am especially grateful to my parents, Maurice and Patricia Colbert, who deserve greater recompense than can ever be paid. Much of the credit for my degree belongs to them. They nurtured an interest in poetry, in narrative, and in history that eventually culminated in this dissertation. Finally, thanks to my nephew, Lochlan Maurice Colbert, who was not born when this project began and who has no idea who Mary Tudor is, for love and joy. vi Table of Contents Dedication ii Abstract iii Acknowledgments v Table of Contents vii Introduction The Late Queen of Infamous Memory: Remembering Mary Tudor 1 Chapter 1: The First Panel Remembering "this innocent and unspotted Queen: The Death and Funeral of Mary Tudor 42 Chapter 2: The Second Panel "[T]ouching the unlawful and rueful reign of queen Mary": Mary Tudor in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1583) 116 Chapter 3: The Third Panel "Enter Queene Mary with a Prayer Booke in her hand, like a Nun": Mary Tudor in the Jacobean History Play 239 Conclusion "A zealus daughter": A Summary of Mary Tudor's Afterlife 347 Works Cited 355 vii Introduction The Late Queen of Infamous Memory: Remembering Mary Tudor Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have Immortal longings in me. (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.280-1) Mary Tudor's reputation as "Bloody Mary," which does have a basis in historical fact, has persisted in the writing of the history of her reign and her life.1 Nearly three hundred Protestants were burned as heretics under her regime,2 a fact that is, in terms of many of her posthumous representations, inescapable.3 Historiographers and polemicists, whether Elizabethan or later, who castigated Mary for her interference with what they believed was the inevitable progress and triumph of Protestantism in England, would undoubtedly be pleased that their view of a cruel and misguided monarch has persisted. What compounds the negativity of her afterlife, constructed in historiography, biography, letters, drama, and poetry, is a combination of bad luck and bad press, so the preponderance of constructions of the late Queen Mary have usually described her reign, in Hobbesian terms, as "nasty, brutish, and short" (89; ch.

Load more