| Gender, Religion, and Early Modern Nationalism: Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and the Genesis of English Anti-Catholicism | The American Historical Review, 107.3

Gender, Religion, and Early Modern Nationalism: Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and the Genesis of English Anti-Catholicism

ANNE McLAREN

God send our mistress a husband, and by him a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession.

William Cecil to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, 1561¹

In October 2000, the European Human Rights Convention was incorporated into British law. In December 2000, The Guardian, a left-leaning national daily, announced that it would use that step toward European integration to contest the legality of the 1701 Act of Settlement. That act was designed to limit succession to the throne to Protestant heirs in the Hanoverian line. Geoffrey Robertson, the human rights lawyer spearheading the campaign, argued that the act infringed the convention by discriminating first and foremost against Roman Catholics but also against women, adopted children, and bastards. The Guardian's campaign highlights yet again the militant anti-Catholicism that has been one of the defining traits, and lasting puzzlements, of English history from the late sixteenth century onward. Equally revealing are the subordinate groups that Robertson identified as having been disadvantaged by the 1701 Act. The drive to secure the constitutional innovation that had given the crown to the Dutchman William III—in his own right and, in the last resort, as a consequence of his Protestant virility—also privileged male primogeniture (although it did not exclude women from the throne) and blood right, albeit in limited terms.² The Guardian's campaign quickly fizzled out. It seems to have been intended primarily to call attention to the institutional constraints that, in theory at least, prevent Britons from freely debating whether they want to end the monarchy and, after a hiatus of 350 years, once again establish a republic.³ But, for historians, this contemporary interjection in a very long-running debate over the nature of British kingship raises fascinating questions. When and why did anti-Catholicism become such a powerful element in English national identity? When and why did it begin the career that established it as an ever more secure hallmark of English, and then British, nationalism through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?⁴ What relationship can we discern between the constituent elements of gender, blood, and religion in the construction of early modern nationalism? 1

     In this article, I want to try to answer these questions. I want to argue that anti-Catholicism became central to English national and political life in the late sixteenth century in response to a particular problem. That problem was immediate and gender specific: from 1561 until Mary's execution in 1587, committed Protestant men were faced with the existence of "two queens in one isle"—Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary Queen of Scots, each with comparable blood claims to the English imperial crown.⁵ And it was not, in the first instance, Mary's Catholicism that was at issue. Instead, as we see with William Cecil's anguished ejaculation above, it was the fact that her existence raised the specter of a "feminine succession": the English imperial crown—and the embryonic British Empire—handed from Elizabeth to Mary as next legitimate heir on the basis of her possession of the blood royal. The centrality of gender to this scenario cannot be overstressed. In the early years of the reign, Elizabeth's most telling riposte to those Protestants prepared to accept her queenship on the grounds that it betokened God's special providence, despite her sex, was to raise the issue of a feminine succession, even through her loins. What would happen, to whom would the crown descend, she asked, in the event that she died, "leaving issue a daughter"?⁶ Mary's blood status, combined with Elizabeth's failure to marry and produce a legitimate male heir, confronted staunchly Protestant councilors of state with a nightmare vision of a world turned permanently upside down, feminized and Catholic. Faced with this specter, key political actors, in England and in Scotland, sought to nullify Mary's claims to political authority. In this particular context, paradoxically, Mary's Catholicism presented a potential solution to the problem of the two queens. The conflation of Mary's identities, as "woman" and as Catholic, enabled the "Protestant ascendancy" to attaint her blood claims to political authority.⁷ It did so by means that commanded loyalty to their envisaged Protestant nation while—most important—they did not immediately challenge Elizabeth's right to rule. Indeed, the strategy actually promoted Elizabeth's exceptional status, as the Protestant Old Testament heroine Deborah, and hence her tenure of the throne. 2

     To secure this precarious equipoise, an official campaign was conducted from 1570 onward. The campaign transformed the character of English anti-Catholicism. As Carol Weiner wrote in her important study of English anti-Catholicism, hatred of Catholics changed from being "the private obsession of religious extremists . . . into part of the national ideology."⁸ It did so in large measure because it provided a literal target, in the form of Mary Queen of Scots, for a powerful fusion of misogyny and anti-Catholic sentiment. By the 1590s, the Puritan divine Thomas Brightman could write that he wished to "see this impudent harlot [the Roman Church] at length slit in the nostrils, stripped of her garments and tires, besmeared with dirt and rotten eggs, and at last burnt up and consumed with fire"—an utterance still shocking for the immediacy of its personification as much as for its virulence.⁹ Both were to become increasingly characteristic over the seventeenth century. From this point on, anti-Catholicism was identified with virility (understood as a male entitlement) and, in response to the vicissitudes of Anglo-Scottish relations, specifically English national character. The success of this campaign enabled a small but influential cohort of ideologically committed Protestants eventually to take the English male political nation at least part of the way with them on their ideological trek: to the way station of equating rabid anti-Catholicism with loyalty to the English state—if not, necessarily, to the next stage of self-identification as British, much less to the promised land of the True Church that they envisaged as their terminus.¹⁰ 3

     The specter of a feminine succession ended with Mary's execution, in 1587. Thereafter, the parameters of debate over kingship shifted in ways that have obscured the centrality of gender to the genesis of English anti-Catholicism and thus to early modern English nationalism.¹¹ "It is certain that the English [will] never again submit to the rule of a woman," the French ambassador de Maisse wrote shortly afterward, in the last decade of Elizabeth's forty-four-year reign.¹² He was wrong. Over the seventeenth century, certainty of male succession reinforced the shift in the episteme that identified and privileged in new ways what Carole Pateman calls "masculine right," in the family and in the nation.¹³ Attention shifted to, and remained on, the threat to English Protestantism posed by Catholicism—by "that scarlet whore the Pope," in the words of one contemporary.¹⁴ In this new world, the most potent threat to English Protestant national identity was perceived to be posed by virile Catholic males of the blood royal. And from the 1680s on, as the British nation mobilized against the might of Catholic France, this threat came to life in the persons of James II and his Catholic male descendants. It was this that the 1701 Act sought to guard against: in excluding Catholics from the throne, in admitting the lesser blood claims of the Hanoverian line, and in accepting female Protestant rule as a faute de mieux bar to papal pretensions. 4

     But to understand the genesis of English anti-Catholicism, we must return to the sixteenth century and to the problem of the two queens. Let us begin by exploring the linkage between gender and religion that fueled fears of female rule in the early modern period. Early modern culture defined "male" and "female" as polar opposites. Onto these identifiers were mapped a wide range of associated dualities, ranging from the "natural" (hot/cold, dry/wet, right/left, male/female) to more highly charged moral categories (honorable/dishonorable, legitimate/illegitimate, order/disorder, good/evil, God/Devil). This hierarchical dual classification system—variants of which have flourished in many parts of the world, at many different times—categorically differentiated between male and female, privileging men over women as both spiritual and rational beings in ways that underpinned social order and hierarchy. During the last decades of the sixteenth century, inevitably, confessional identity began to be discussed and considered in these terms—terms that exacerbated religious polarity and misogyny, in England as well as elsewhere in Europe.¹⁵ Yet in the sixteenth century, this schema was not yet fixed to biologically incommensurate categories of male and female, as it was to become over the seventeenth century. Instead, a one-sex model of gender identity prevailed, as it had done from classical antiquity. In this model, writes Thomas Laqueur, "men and women were arrayed according to their degree of metaphysical perfection, their vital heat, along an axis whose telos was male." The dominance of the one-sex model of gender identities meant that these ordering dualities were fluid—contestable—to an extent that we find hard to recapture, and with consequences of considerable significance to the history of political thought. Because they did not obviously inhere in that culturally central metaphor of the body, they constantly had to be rearticulated, reaffirmed, and imposed—from outside and from above. Nowhere is this fluidity better exemplified than in the contemporary conviction that, without constant attention to identifying and shoring up "natural" divisions, even that most fundamental opposition between "male" and "female" might collapse, turning women into men, making men effeminate, and plunging society into chaos.¹⁶ It is equally evident in the gender dynamics of European Protestant reformation, charted by recent historians and characterized by one as "intensely masculine."¹⁷ In the particular case of Elizabethan England, so recently rescued from the dark night of the return to Rome, these assumptions meant that Mary Queen of Scots's status even as queen-in-waiting threatened the triumph of Antichrist, not least because of its implications for Elizabeth's queenship. For, if it were just possible that God might exercise an extraordinary providence and allow Elizabeth a godly role in the British saga of reformation and redemption—the case argued by Protestant apologists from the moment of her accession—this dispensation, by definition, could extend no further without invalidating her exceptional status and hence the promise of reformation itself. Even before Mary returned to Scotland from France in 1561 to take up the role of queen regnant, that fearsome man of God John Knox warned William Cecil that this danger was inescapably attached to Elizabeth's queenship. "The time is come that Christ must reign, and the hearts of inhabitants [of England and Scotland] be joined together," he wrote. Elizabeth's own accession—otherwise utterly repugnant to God's will because of her sex—was proof of the providential moment. But English privy councilors must beware lest, "in establishing one who is indeed godly and profitable to her country [Elizabeth], [you] give interest, and title, to many who would bring their country into bondage, and slavery."¹⁸ 5

     By asserting that antipathy to female rule was central to the orchestrated anti-Catholic campaign that was conducted in the late sixteenth century, I do not mean to suggest that fear and hatred of Catholics and Catholicism had not existed before the latter part of the sixteenth century. Undoubtedly they had. They were an inevitable concomitant of European Protestant reformation, cultivated by reformers of all stripes intent on using every polemical tool at their disposal to hasten the triumph of the True Church. But it is equally true that English anti-Catholicism changed character decisively at this point in ways that have had important consequences for the history of the English-speaking world.¹⁹ Nor has a convincing explanation been advanced for the change. Historians of the sixteenth century often present it, explicitly or implicitly, as the inevitable consequence of Catholic counterreformation aggression, manifested in the near conjunction of the 1569 rebellion of the northern earls and the 1570 papal bull Regnans in Excelsis that excommunicated and deposed Elizabeth.²⁰ Yet the evidence for this view is weak, despite its strenuous assertion by contemporary polemicists. The rebel earls were certainly proponents of the "old religion," and they equally clearly disliked and distrusted the "new men," whom they saw as undermining the principle of blood entitlement in their attempt to promote religious innovation. The rebels thus posed a clear threat to the regime—but this was because their defense of the old nobility, and hence Mary's blood claim to succession, resonated among the elite, not because of their alleged militant Catholicism. As the Protestant earl of Sussex wrote to William Cecil in November 1569, "He is a rare bird, that, by one means or other, hath not some of his with the . . . Earls, or in his heart wisheth not well to the cause they pretend." But he concluded, reassuringly, "The Earls, as you write, be old in blood, but poor in force."²¹ Similarly, the connection between the papal bull and the rebellion seems to have been a retrospective creation, most forcefully elaborated by Thomas Norton, premier anti-papal polemicist for the Elizabethan regime.²² The bull was not actually published until after the rebellion. Indeed, it was not originally even published in England at all. Norton's biographer, M. A. R. Graves, concludes that it seems to have been intended as a theoretical position paper, one that was designed for consumption by a European audience. Like Weiner, he finds himself baffled by the regime's determination to find conspiracy where none existed, its insistence—for which he finds "no real evidence"—that England was an embattled Protestant bastion surrounded by hostile powers and threatened from within by Catholic fifth columnists.²³ 6

     If the near conjunction of the papal bull and the Northern Rebellion does not explain the change in character of English anti-Catholicism, 1570 still remains a key date in its career. The key event, however, belongs to a British history whose parameters and meanings have only recently moved into the historiographical mainstream.²⁴ That event was the assassination in 1570 of James Stewart, the earl of Moray, zealous leader of the Scottish Lords of the Congregation and illegitimate half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots. "God could not have blessed these two kingdoms with greater felicity than, if one of the two queens had been a king," William Cecil told his monarch, Elizabeth, in 1560. For then, the two kingdoms might be united politically, through a marriage that would confirm and entrench the union in hearts that was signaled by Scotland's adoption of Protestantism at the very moment of England's providential return to the Protestant fold. And, indeed, for one brief moment—before Mary's return to Scotland in 1561—it appeared as though this miracle might be effected through the simple human (if revolutionary) expedient of substituting Moray for the absent Mary on the Scottish throne.²⁵ Daunted but resolute once Mary's return made this impossible, English privy councilors and their godly Scottish colleagues pursued an alternative strategy throughout the 1560s—but with the same end very much in view. They explored the possibility of a marriage between England's Protestant princess and a Scottish godly prince. Their proposal of choice was for a marriage to be contracted between Elizabeth and Moray—with James Hamilton, third earl of Arran, another Protestant male near-claimant to the Scottish crown, as first reserve.²⁶ This strategy failed when Elizabeth rejected her proposed suitors. In response, particularly when Mary's deposition in 1567 made Moray regent and acting king of Scotland, they adopted a more radical but still, within these cultural parameters, tenable position. They proceeded on the tacit assumption that, in the terms of this British union in Christ, Moray's royal blood situated him as in effect king to Elizabeth's queen, his illegitimacy counteracted by his ideological conviction and his gender. This move also positioned Mary's son, the infant James VI, as the fruit of this "marriage," possessor of Tudor and Stuart blood royal but protected from maternal taint due to his education and environment—and Mary's incarceration in England after her flight there in 1568.²⁷ 7

     Moray's death thus provoked a succession crisis because it brought the problem of the two queens back into political prominence, in a form exacerbated, as we shall see, by Mary's maternity and Elizabeth's continued sterility. By 1570, the problem for the Protestant ascendancy became, as it remained, how to nullify Mary's claims to political authority without simultaneously invalidating Elizabeth's. Zealous Protestant Scottish and English men, including George Buchanan, William Cecil, John Day, John Foxe, John Knox, Thomas Norton, and Thomas Wilson, grappled with this problem. Their revolutionary circumstances dictated that they must effectually distinguish between two queens. They had to allow for rule by the one and absolutely disallow rule by the other, in order to secure the imperial crown until a true king—a godly Protestant male, figured at this point by the young James VI—arrived to join and rule both realms. How, then, to assimilate Elizabeth to the right hand and convincingly allocate Mary to the left? Their solution lay in articulating entrenched cultural convictions about women's nature to another powerful polarity, under construction from the time of the Henrician Reformation: the history of the ceaseless battle between the True Church and Antichrist.²⁸ Above all, they found inspiration in and drew on the typology of female identities that informed John Bale's contribution to that story in his book The Image of Both Churches. In their writings, a virginal Elizabeth, presented as the Woman Clothed with the Sun and wedded both to God and the male Protestant nation, stood submissively yet valiantly four-square against the ceaseless machinations of the arch-seductress Mary, associated through her female identity with tyranny, treason, the pope, and Antichrist (see Figure 1). Yet the literalization of this apocalyptic typology was intensely problematic. Claire McEachern has shown just how moot, how difficult to sustain, any such binary formulation must be, in a culture that held female subordination to be the ideological norm and in which, consequently, the category of "woman" was itself unstable.²⁹ The anti-Catholic campaign, so assiduously and ultimately so successfully waged from the 1570s onward, was conducted in part to "fix" this duality, and hence to identify securely the homology of monarch, state, and religion as, in England, a masculine political order: one fronted, for the moment, by a queen but headed by God. 8

Figure 1: John Bale, The Image of Both Churches. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Tanner 152. Signature tiii verso–tiv recto, "The Proud Painted Church&The Poore Persecuted Church," from The Image of Both Churches . . . by John Bale (1550).

     It is important to bear in mind that these actors did not intend to disallow, or even significantly to discount, blood right. Instead, their campaign was in the nature of a holding action, necessary until God rewarded their revolutionary actions by establishing a line of virile British Protestant kings. Inevitably, however, despite their intentions, their actions privileged election in relation to blood status and forwarded the definition of election as a secular sanction supported, in a godly nation, by divine right. These developments ultimately allowed for the creation of the English republic during the Interregnum, as they determined much of its character. The genesis of English anti-Catholicism thus provides an example of an important phenomenon identified by Quentin Skinner. Local ideological maneuvers can produce consequences that prove to be both highly significant for the history of political thought and largely if not entirely unanticipated by the original actors, indeed, even counterproductive to their conscious intentions.³⁰ My argument also builds on and extends the work of Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh, among others, who have challenged established orthodoxy by showing that the English Protestant Reformation was forwarded and maintained by a small but remarkably committed and influential zealous minority who faced a population apathetic, if not antipathetic, to what was still regarded, in the 1590s, as the "new religion."³¹ 9

     I will make this case in three stages. I begin by depicting the "fraternal bond" between England and Scotland, with particular reference to the relationship between English councilors of state and the earl of Moray.³² I then investigate the anti-Marian polemic that circulated in the wake of Moray's assassination to establish how an existing language of misogyny was deployed to establish a "good queen, bad queen" opposition. The conclusion explores the fundamental transformation of that polemic that occurred with the move to apocalyptic typologies by examining works by two of its most influential architects, Thomas Norton and John Foxe. Finally, I consider the political consequences for Anglo-American political discourse. 10

Beginning in 1559—when God delivered Scotland from the thralldom of Mary's mother, Mary of Guise—Scottish Lords of the Congregation, English privy councilors, and other similarly ideologically committed Protestant men worked to create a union between the two realms that would secure Britain's status as home and seedbed of the True Church. Their envisaged amity was conceived of in providential—if not yet apocalyptic—terms as a marriage in Christ. Sustained by fraternal bonds among godly men, this marriage would secure a Protestant "masculine succession" for the united isle. From 1566, when Mary produced a son, even more so in the following year, when her deposition cleared his way to the Scottish throne, this project was understood to be centered in the Protestant Stewarts: the child James, protected by his uncle James Stewart, earl of Moray, the "good regent."³³ Although vastly difficult in its early stages, as all revolutions are—and very largely because of Elizabeth's hostility—the amity could be challenged but not overthrown as long as Moray governed Scotland, either through Mary or (after she was deposed) in his own right.³⁴ In 1567, Cecil wrote to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton that he would be "very sorry . . . to behold the loss of the fruits of seven or eight years negotiation with Scotland, and now to suffer a divorce between the two realms" because of Elizabeth's anger over Mary's deposition. He consoled himself with the reflection that "if religion . . . may remain, . . . the divorce will be in words [rather] than in hearts, especially if my Lord Moray takes upon him the government."³⁵ Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, Sir Walter Mildmay, and the earl of Bedford shared Cecil's evaluation of the man whom no less a figure than Theodore Beza identified as Scotland's "illustrious deliverer."³⁶ On August 20, Throckmorton wrote to Cecil, anticipating both Moray's imminent elevation to the regency and his godly political program. Moray would protect James's kingship and defend to the death his fellow revolutionaries: "he will have obedience for the young king of all estates within this realm or it shall cost him his life . . . He is resolved to defend those lords and gentlemen that have taken this matter in hand, though all the princes in Christendom would band against them." In his aims and resolution, he should be compared "rather [to] some which have led the people of Israel, than any captain of our age."³⁷ The anonymous author of A Discourse Touching the Pretended Match between the Duke of Norfolk and the Queen of Scots told Elizabeth that God had raised up Moray in order to secure "perfect union" between the two realms during the nonage of the young king. He admonished her to "make that account of him, that he deserveth."³⁸ Moray's deserts evidently included claiming the throne in his own right to lead a nation of British Israelites, should the young king die without issue. In 1569, Elizabeth felt compelled to deny—rather unconvincingly, in view of the documentary evidence—"Reports on Scottish Succession." In a proclamation addressed to "all persons, both English and Scottish, that are disposed to hear the truth," Elizabeth denied reports that a deal had been done between her and Moray or (a less credible denial) between him and her councilors to secure that perfect union officially. The provisos of this alleged (and denied) deal? First, that the infant James would be "delivered into England" for the use of the English. Second, that the earl of Moray "should be declared legitimate to succeed to the crown of Scotland after the decease of the young Prince or King without bairns": a statistical likelihood, given infant morality rates and Scottish politics.³⁹ 11

     Thus, for councilors of state—and specifically, now, English councilors of state—Moray's assassination in 1570 inaugurated a new and dangerous state of affairs. This peculiar interregnum would persist until their object of desire, the now four-year-old Scottish king James VI, attained adulthood, Protestant rectitude, and the English crown. And, alarmingly, it brought the deposed Mary Queen of Scots back into the political arena, both as potential incumbent of the Scottish throne and powerful claimant to the English, legitimated through her queenly status, her blood, and her maternity. In the first instance, the resulting power vacuum in Scotland provoked a legitimist backlash, with even erstwhile revolutionaries among the Lords of the Congregation pleading that Mary, their legitimate queen, be restored to the Scottish throne, to rule by herself or in association with her young son.⁴⁰ The backlash provided Elizabeth with ammunition to continue her own campaign to restore Mary to her hereditary rights. These inevitably included the right, through blood, to succeed to the English throne, should Elizabeth continue to play the marriage game rather than acting in good faith to secure heirs of her own body.⁴¹ And indeed, Mary's blood entitlement was commanding: she, like her cousin Elizabeth, was lineally descended from Henry VII. Moreover, unlike her cousin Elizabeth, no doubts attached to her legitimacy—and nothing but royal blood flowed in her veins. No wonder that Cecil and his colleagues responded by attempting to prevent declension and counterrevolutionary drift. In October 1570, they drafted "A Declaration How in Certain Cases It Shall Be Ordered That No Innovation Be Made in the Government of Scotland Different from the State Wherein It Was at the Death of the Earl of Moray" (which did not secure Elizabeth's backing).⁴² 12

     Even Mary's sex was not an unqualified drawback in this campaign, perhaps especially since it was conducted in circumstances where her nearest royal blood relations were a woman and a child, her cousin Elizabeth and her son James. Patriarchal (or "well-ordered") societies allowed for female rule, as the Catholic polemicist John Leslie never tired of pointing out, because in "well-ordered" societies female rulers were subsumed in the headship of the pope. It was only "maister Knox his own good scholars, and such of his affinity, that have set up and erected a jolie new school . . . teaching that it is not lawful for a woman prince to have civil governance."⁴³ Moreover, Mary's claims were very much strengthened by her status as mother of a king (present or future, depending on one's political alignment). Men from across the ideological spectrum could agree on the natural superiority of male rule. The question that increasingly dominated political debate over these years throughout a Europe torn by confessional strife was how far one might or should go in adopting artificial means to achieve "natural" ends, and related attempts to categorically identify the True Church. Mary's motherhood suggested that time itself—like maternity, a powerful symbol of natural process—would heal the rupture in the natural order represented by the two queens, at least with regard to gender hierarchy and blood inheritance. In glaring contrast to Elizabeth, John Leslie pointed out, Mary had produced "a noble imp," to succeed to the throne "when the time and law calleth him thereto."⁴⁴ His implication, here as in his Defense of the Honour of Marie Quene of Scotland as a whole, was that the male succession desired by all parties would be more safely and legitimately secured by reversion to customary law in place of revolutionary principle. If the prospect of Mary as Scottish or English queen was, and remained, anathema to Elizabeth's councilors—on the grounds both of her sex and her religious convictions—there is little evidence that their aversion was widely shared in the quarters where it mattered. In England at this time, seemingly, blood trumped Protestant ideological conviction and sanctioned even female Catholic rule, especially in the case of a married woman who had produced a male heir of the blood.⁴⁵ The 1566 Parliament, which met after James VI's birth, gave rise to heated discussion about the succession. On November 13, the Scot Robert Melville reported to the archbishop of Glasgow that Elizabeth and her privy councilors had agreed that the matter should be dropped, despite the likely unpopularity of this decision. According to Melville, their agreement arose from (revealingly) different causes: the queen objected to discussion in the Lower House of a matter that she regarded as her prerogative, her councilors because "in case the title had come to voting it was thought the judges and grave men with the most part of the nobility" would have recognized Mary's claim.⁴⁶ Finally, perversely, from the point of view of her opponents, Mary's position may well have been strengthened by the attention to union in Christ between the two realms that had suffused political discourse since the accession to power of the two queens. Might it not be the case that Moray's death signaled not the withdrawal of God's grace from the isle but rather His decision to effect union, in time, through the person of a woman who could claim, through blood, status, and maternity, to be "King and Queen of England and Scotland"?⁴⁷ 13

     The dangers of this new situation were considerably increased by the likelihood of a marriage between Mary Queen of Scots and Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk. This marriage, which had been under consideration since 1568, would add another potent layer of legitimacy to Mary's claims. Given the contemporary understanding of the marriage bond, she would, at its consummation, be subsumed in the person of the "chief peer of the realm of England," a position that could be seen as largely offsetting her Scottish and Catholic identities.⁴⁸ After Moray's assassination, the proposed marriage certainly fueled the depiction of Norfolk as at best a crypto-Catholic, as we shall see. But it was only symptomatic of the larger problem that English councilors confronted in this changed political landscape: how to distinguish effectually between the two queens, in terms that would promote allegiance to Elizabeth's queenship in anticipation of a Protestant king. This continued to be the central question in English politics until Mary's eventual execution in 1587. 14

     Their initial response was to draw on the propaganda that had paved the way for Mary's deposition from the Scottish throne—propaganda that they themselves had both connived at and actively forwarded. This attack announced a figure whose character compounded women's natural weaknesses with perversities engrafted by her position and upbringing. It vilified Mary as sexually incontinent and hence murderous and tyrannical. The three traits—here arranged in ascending order as they were difficult to prove—were asserted as interdependent propositions.⁴⁹ In English hands, it became a means of contrasting a woman whose constitution should disqualify her from the exercise of political authority with "our natural lady and mistress," Queen Elizabeth.⁵⁰ Confessional allegiance was certainly central to this attack, as English councilors of state fought a rearguard action against Mary's new status, but it was conceived and formulated in traditional gendered terms. John Knox's voice was characteristically forceful but as yet out of tune, in his denunciation of Mary as irredeemable first and foremost on the grounds of her religion.⁵¹ 15

     Both the attack and the use made of it by English councilors in their hour of need are demonstrated by a pamphlet written by George Buchanan, but amended and published in London in 1572 as Ane Detectioun of the Duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes. Buchanan, the author of the best-known defense of Scotland's revolution, De Jure Regni apud Scotos, was both a zealous Protestant and a partisan of the earl of Moray. He had links with English statesmen that ran through the English ambassador to Scotland, Thomas Randolph, to, among others, William Cecil, the earl of Leicester, and Francis Walsingham. Symbolic of his status in the new order was the fact that he was charged with the education of James VI, appointed his tutor when Moray's death deprived the young king of the man who should have been his model and guide. Buchanan had already composed libels against Mary Queen of Scots; he may have forged the notorious Casket Letters that sought to implicate Mary in the murder of her husband by "proving" her adulterous passion for the earl of Bothwell.⁵² Buchanan's original Detectio Mariae Reginae depicted Mary as a woman overmastered by lust, drawing on the powerful homology of the person of the monarch and the state of his or her realm to justify her removal from office. Mary was "a woman burning in hatred of her husband, and in love of an adulterer, and in both these diseases of corrupt affections unbridled, untemperable by her estate."⁵³ Her rage to possess the earl of Bothwell inflamed her lust for absolute power: "greedily coveting untempered authority, [she] esteemed the laws her prison, and the bridle of justice her bondage." Only one man could act as "bridler of her licentiousness"—Moray, "a man of great reputation and power, and in highest favour with all estates." Him she plotted to destroy, along with her son, to forward her intention "to set up a tyrannical regiment." Buchanan's gendered reading of matrimony enabled him to argue that the simple fact of Mary's (alleged) adulterous passion, quite apart from these particulars, signaled her determination to "dissolve and confound all order of nature": "For matrimony (as the Apostle [Paul] saith) doth truly contain a great mystery. For . . . it compriseth within it all inferior kinds of duties, so being broken it overthroweth them all. Whoso hath misused his father, seemeth to have cast out of his heart all natural reverence: but for the husband's sake, one shall leave both father and mother." In this passage, he also explicitly links "the violating of matrimony and of royal majesty," so that by its end Mary stands accused of transgressing against varieties of majesty represented by herself and four male figures: her son, her brother (Moray), her husband Lord Darnley, and God himself. "[W]hoso not only violateth, but also despiseth [matrimony and royal majesty] . . . seemeth he not, as much as in him lieth, to have a desire to pull God out of heaven?" After Darnley's murder, on this reading, her status as "king and queen" announced itself not in the form of a legitimate claim to a conjoined crown but through blatantly transgressive perversion. She "went daily into the fields among ruffians . . . to exercise manly pastimes, and that among men and openly. So lightly she despised the opinion and speech of her country."⁵⁴ 16

     The English version of the Detectio announced itself simply as a translation "out of the Latin quhilke [which] was written by G.B." (George Buchanan). But, as James Phillips has shown, it was actually produced by English councilors, specifically William Cecil and Thomas Wilson, ably assisted by their printer and publisher of choice, the ardent Protestant John Day.⁵⁵ Day paved the way for this English version by first printing Buchanan's Latin original, with some additional material and three of the more incriminating Casket Letters. The revised pamphlet was presented as having been authored by Buchanan, but the additional material was actually written, with Cecil's knowledge, by Thomas Wilson, Marian exile, militant Protestant, and (from 1578) privy councilor and secretary of state. Wilson then translated both the Latin Detectio and his own additional material into what he referred to (in a letter to Cecil) as "handsome Scottish." This production, to which was appended all eight of the original Casket Letters, was printed in London, probably by John Day, in 1572. But it differed in one significant particular from Buchanan's work. The last page concluded the sustained attack on Mary's chastity with a dramatic adjuration—in the very large typeface used at the time to announce important material (and in Wilson's "handsome Scottish"): 17

     NOW JUDGE ENGLISHMEN IF IT BE GUD TO CHANGE QUENIS.⁵⁶

     Evidence for the perceived importance of this editorial amendment comes from two different sources. First, the nearly simultaneous publication of the anonymous Copie of a Letter Written by One in London to His Friend concernyng the Credit of the Late Published Detection of the Doings of the Ladie Marie of Scotland. Written to persuade Englishmen of Buchanan's exemplary status—and his sole authorship of the Detectioun—the Letter begins by describing the treatise with explicit reference to its conclusion: it contains "a very excellent comparison for all Englishmen to judge whether it be good to change Queens or no." (It also eggs the pudding with regard to Buchanan's authorship. "I have for your more easy understanding changed the Scottish orthography," in the appended text of a Scottish Act of Parliament, he informs us, "which I would to God had been done for Englishmen's better satisfaction in master George Buchanan's book."⁵⁷ ) Similarly, Alexander Hay, clerk of the Scottish Privy Council, wrote to John Knox describing the English publication: 18

They have set in English our Queen's life and process . . . wherein is contained the discourse of our tragical doings . . . In appearance they leave nothing unset out, tending to her infamy, and to make the Duke of Norfolk odious, who has a great benevolence of the people . . . [I]n the end of which English book their sentences or conclusion are written, which I thought not good here to slip:

Now Judge, Englishmen, if it be gud to change Quenis,
O uniting confounding!
Quhen rude Scotland has vomited up ane poison, must fine England lick it up for a restorative?
O vile indignity!⁵⁸

     Scottish polemic against Mary had its limitations, however, in this post-assassination context, no matter how skillfully adapted to insist on the importance of loyalty to Elizabeth. Most important, it did not effectively damn, because it did not address, the Norfolk marriage proposal. After Moray's assassination, this proposal dramatically changed its meaning to the politics of succession. It threatened to give Mary another trump card and, indeed, the winning hand. Before, the project of Mary's marriage to a godly English peer had constituted a central plank of the Scottish-English amity. Subordinate to—subsumed in—her husband, Mary would be neutralized as an autonomous political agent. The marriage also signaled a means by which her royal blood could be assimilated to—as it were, encased in—his status. Their alliance would thus forward the prospect of a godly united isle. James VI's birth in 1566 added a powerful incentive for this project. It raised the likelihood that Mary would produce more male offspring. These would shore up the Protestant male succession invested, after her deposition, in James VI and the earl of Moray, as we have seen.⁵⁹ Boys born to this dynastic union would be legitimate by birth, carriers of Tudor and Stuart blood royal, and protected against any taint of Catholic identity (and Scottish nationalism) by virtue of their father's status.⁶⁰ During the 1560s, various candidates had been considered for the role of husband in this all-important "marriage to England," as the project was known, including the earl of Leicester and Elizabeth's cousin George Carey. From 1568, the duke of Norfolk, "second person of this realm . . . of credit great, with both nobility and commons" emerged as the favored candidate. His formidable credentials included his membership in the Privy Council, his inherited status as Earl Marshal, and—most important—his Protestant conviction, inculcated from his earliest years by that man of God, his tutor John Foxe.⁶¹ 19

     After Moray's assassination, this marriage project, and this projected marriage, appeared to portend that mere blood, divorced or seduced from confessional conviction, might carry the British succession, and do so at the expense of Protestant confessional unity. Given the power vacuum at the heart of British politics, Norfolk—any English peer—might lapse from the highest degree of Protestant rectitude, even while retaining a personal commitment to "true religion." He might marry the Scottish queen for the wrong reasons: not in order to safeguard a male succession in Christ of the conjoined realm but rather in order to become king through possession of her blood. Elevation on these terms would produce a bi-confessional imperial crown (on the probability that Mary remained wedded to Catholicism) and hence reintroduce at least a version of papal supremacy in England. And this outcome might be accepted, even actively welcomed by "great numbers, both of noblemen and gentlemen," even those who defined themselves as Protestant.⁶² The danger was that such men either would not appreciate the peril or would regard it as a reasonable risk in pursuit of a legitimate (because legitimist) solution to England's succession crisis. After all, was not Norfolk "naturally" Mary's superior—male to her female? English to her Scottish? Even Protestant to her Catholic? The interrogation of Norfolk's servant, Laurence Bannister, over the affair gives an indication of what English councilors were up against. Bannister claimed—as did Norfolk himself—that Norfolk had pursued the match at the behest of English councilors, including the earl of Leicester and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, and did so "to secure religion" (that is, Protestantism). Elizabeth's rooted opposition meant that the task of informing her that the match was to take place was to be devolved to the Scottish brethren, "either Lethington, or some other that would come out of Scotland," once they had prepared the ground by invalidating Mary's marriage to the earl of Bothwell. After a day-long interrogation by Sir Thomas Smith and Thomas Wilson, however, he realized that he had misinterpreted the meaning of the marriage: "Now, upon better advisement and knowledge . . . I do utterly mislike . . . all the aforesaid devices, and do wish that the Duke my master had taken better ways."⁶³ 20

     How far did loyalty to Elizabeth as a Protestant queen extend? How many men, regardless of religious conviction, were prepared to accept a momentary political upheaval—the deposition of a childless queen, last of her line, and herself of disputable legitimacy—in order to invest monarchical authority in demonstrably fertile "persons . . . capable of the Crown both of England and Scotland," the (superior) male a Protestant, the (inferior) a woman who possessed undeniable blood claims?⁶⁴ At this point, the survival of both James VI and Elizabeth seemed linked and threatened, for this legitimist alternative could most readily be effected if James VI did not survive until adulthood and Elizabeth were deposed. 21

     In tracts written at this time, we can see the outlines of the campaign now conducted to cut away this legitimist middle ground. It entailed persuading "good Englishmen" to commit to Elizabeth and the national Protestant church as a prophylactic against foreign conquest. And it included the move to apocalyptic discourse that would promote anti-Catholicism as a mode of national identity. The new agenda involved utterly disallowing union between the two realms—now (in Wilson's additions to the Detectioun) "rude Scotland" and "fine England"—because of its association with Mary's claims, either in her own right or in company with Norfolk. The Copie of a Letter, so evidently written to be read in conjunction with, and as a gloss on, the English version of the Detectioun, argued that Englishmen seduced into recognizing Mary's claims forwarded not "beneficial uniting" but rather "maleficial confounding, intending to join the realms in other persons, excluding . . . [our] sovereign Lady."⁶⁵ Polemicists now argued that union signaled not a means of reinforcing English national autonomy but the vehicle for conquest by foreign (Catholic) powers. This case was buttressed by depicting both Mary and Norfolk as flawed nobles and as the pope's minions—despite Norfolk's unwavering allegiance to Protestantism. (Norfolk always maintained, and with sufficient conviction to persuade even his interrogators, that he had never deviated from his commitment to Protestantism: "I protest, even before the Lord, that I have been a Protestant, ever since I knew what religion meant."⁶⁶ ) In April 1570, George Buchanan wrote An Admonition to the True Lords Maintainers of Justice and Obedience, to the King's Grace—this with editorial assistance from William Cecil. He urged the faithful to continue the good fight against "enemies to God" by demonstrating absolute loyalty to "the two princes," James VI and Elizabeth. He described Norfolk, in virtually Miltonic terms, as a prince of darkness. He is a "proud tyrant," chosen by his fellow conspirators to be "King of Scotland and England." The "virtues" that entitle him to this status are "arrogancy, cruelty, dissimulation and treason," all shared in lesser degree by the "filthy idolaters" who are his followers. He is, in fine, "the principal enemy of the religion of Christ in this Isle."⁶⁷ The author of A Discourse Touching the Pretended Match opened by acknowledging that his readers might believe "that the continuance of the Gospel here among us, and the safety of our sovereign, should depend upon a match to be had between the Duke of Norfolk and the Queen of Scots," in part because it would secure the "uniting of these two realms." This pious hope was predicated on the assumption that Norfolk's nobility, ambiguously of birth and breeding, would preserve him from ambition and supply her "defects" ("ambitious, a born Scot, a defamed person, who hath made shipwreck of all honour and reputation, and lastly a branch of the house of Guise"). But the hope is illusory. Rather more circumspectly than Buchanan, he argues for Norfolk's guilt by (papist) association—his chief men of trust are papists, one educated his son, he married one and proposes to marry another. His nobility thus tainted, he becomes another Solomon, forbidden by God's law from marrying with "the Scottish idolatress": "Did not [Solomon] by matching with an idolatress Egyptian, become an idolater, whereby ensued to him God's high displeasure, to the great plague of his kin and posterity? . . . That law which forbade Solomon to marry with the Egyptian idolatress, standeth in force still."⁶⁸ 22

     For English councilors, then, the task after Moray's assassination was not simply the identification of Mary as sexually promiscuous, hence tyrannical and ineligible for rule in a well-ordered nation, especially one aspiring to follow the true word of God. In this culture, woman qua woman symbolized the subordination of reason to desire and was therefore strongly associated with immorality, disorder, and treason (or tyranny, depending on whether or not she exercised autonomous power); such strictures inevitably implicated Elizabeth.⁶⁹ Moreover, it now appeared that Mary (but not Elizabeth, still resolutely single) might be, if not redeemed, at least cleansed by, because subsumed in, marriage to a noble English, Protestant husband. As we have seen, that match carried with it, besides, the promise of an alternative English male succession. It would subordinate Mary to England's premier noble and hence, through marital hierarchy, join Scotland to England in a subservient role. The Norfolk-Stuart union would thus promote one long-established English ambition for a united isle. But this scenario might not establish, and might even fatally undermine, the amity in Christ of members of the True Church that informed efforts to establish a British union in the 1560s. Under these circumstances, it was simply too difficult for all but the most godly to reach the right decision when asked to "judge if it be gud to change quenis." They therefore had to differentiate Elizabeth from Mary categorically, in order to preserve the Protestant national church over which she, faute de mieux, presided. 23

     Given this background, the 1570 papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth must have aroused powerfully mixed emotions in English councilors of state. On the one hand, it must have confirmed convictions that the time for the climactic confrontation between the True and False Churches was rapidly approaching, with all the dangers that entailed. At the same time, it provided the smoking gun needed to repudiate definitively the legitimist threat posed by Mary, in terms that simultaneously promoted allegiance to the Henrician Reformation as the most effectual preserver of national autonomy. Properly handled, with reference to the ceaseless struggle between the True and False Churches, the papal bull provided convincing evidence of the association between Mary Queen of Scots, treason, and Catholicism. It did so by conflating her alleged sexual incontinence and the spiritual "whoredom" of the False Church to figure Catholics as both degenerate and treasonous. Likewise, it buttressed an opposed associational triad of militant Protestantism, English national identity, and loyalty to a (virginal) Elizabeth—preserved by subjects described by Thomas Norton as "ourselves," armed with "all fidelity and manhoods."⁷⁰ It allowed for the immediate application of John Bale's reading the Book of Revelation to the particular case of England, its future contested by the two queens. And with this resort to apocalypticism, we can date the institution of the myth of England as the "elect nation": an island fastness preserved from papal bondage by its particular reformation history and the unremitting labor of godly Englishmen: a labor now associated (in embryonic form) with the capacity for civic virtue of Protestant English men.⁷¹ 24

     Thus Mary as Jezebel is juxtaposed with the Woman Clothed with the Sun, symbolizing both the English national church and Elizabeth as its protector.⁷² How interesting, in view of the contest over definitions of marriage and maternity that I have described, that this typology positioned Mary as unmarried, and trumped her maternity by presenting the virgin Elizabeth as both (spiritually) married and perpetually in labor! "Jezebel" actually means unmarried.⁷³ And in Revelation, the Woman Clothed with the Sun is "with child and . . . travailing in birth," in an epic endeavor glossed by the Geneva Bible as signifying the True Church's "most fervent desire . . . that Christ should be born."⁷⁴ Helen Hackett has shown that the panegyric celebrating the virginal Elizabeth in these terms erected her as "a figurehead of militant nationalistic Protestantism," and she rightly draws our attention to the "tribal connotations of the term 'cult'" in this period of Elizabeth's reign.⁷⁵ I would add one further dimension. The men who dilated on Elizabeth's material virginity and her spiritual maternity in order to advance Protestant reformation also drew on earlier, especially eleventh-century, conceptions of another virginal figure, the "virgin king." Their purpose was the same as that of the earlier propagandists: to celebrate a childless ruler's sanctity as an anticipatory defense against the succession problems inevitably posed, in lineage societies, by a childless monarch's death.⁷⁶ But in the early modern context of queenship, this appropriation also served to elevate Elizabeth beyond her gender and more effectually differentiate her from Mary. She became, in Robert Cecil's famous phrase, "more than a man and in truth somewhat less than a woman," a move that, in conjunction with the demonization of Mary Queen of Scots, allowed misogyny as well as virulent anti-Catholicism to become hallmarks of the late Elizabethan state. 25

     In conclusion, I want to look briefly at two influential works that established and disseminated this newly apocalyptic dual classification scheme. First, All Such Treatises as Have Been Lately Published by Thomas Norton. The work is dated 1569, but internal evidence makes it clear that it was actually produced after the earl of Moray's assassination.⁷⁷ In it, Norton brought together and revised anti-Catholic pamphlets that he had written before the issuance of the papal bull (they are "newly perused and increased"), adding to them two pamphlets written after that event.⁷⁸ In the pamphlets written after the Northern Rebellion but before the issuance of the bull, we find the vocabulary of marriage and chastity deployed to contrast Elizabeth and Mary, patriotic Englishmen from rebels, and "reformed Christians" from papists. Chastity, moral and political, requires loyalty to Elizabeth: "[Elizabeth] is the Husband of the common weal, married to the realm . . . Shall they [the rebels] sever the knot of love and agreement between her and them, and yield their bodies to a notorious adulter [sic], and yet say they break no bond of this sacred wedlock?" The rebels claim that they wish only to restore "ancient customs and liberties" to the realm. In fact, they have joined a "false religion" that "regard[s] no country, faith, nature or common honesty." They have been seduced to question the "matter of the supremacy [and] the very title of the crown" by a figure identified in the margin as the "Lady of the North" (the Queen of Scots). This alliance wreaks havoc, described in Buchananesque (not to say Knoxian) terms: "It is perilous to think what traitorous rage may do, being armed with drunken superstition. It is a sore thing to consider the impotencie [sic] of ambition, specially when it is joined with the fury of reasonless love. The common experience is, how dangerous those knots of thieves be where there is a woman in the company." Seduced—unmanned—they can be "neither true Christian men nor true English men . . . not worthy to live in the kingdom of England, and . . . sure not to come in the kingdom of heaven."⁷⁹ 26

     In the tractates written in response to the papal bull, Norton goes one crucial step further. He recounts the story of another queen, Pasiphae of Crete, as a means of dramatizing the enormity of the papal bull and implicating Mary Queen of Scots in its enactment. 27

Pasiphae …, not sufficed with men, conceived inordinate, unnatural, and therewith untemperable lust to engender with a Bull. Neither regard of virtue, honour, kindness, nature or shame, in respect of God, her husband, her country, her self . . . could restrain her violent rage of unclean affection . . . [Successful at last in this endeavor] of the Bull she conceived the abomination of the world, and in time brought forth the monster Minotaurus half a Bull and half a man, fierce, brutish, mischievous, cruel, deformed, and odious.

Given the earlier pamphlets, it is impossible to read this story without identifying Pasiphae primarily with the "Lady of the North."⁸⁰ Norton does, however, cast the net wider by asserting that "Lecherous Pasiphae may . . . be applied to treason in high estates addicted to papistry." Mary Queen of Scots, in other words, might be joined by fellow conspirators: those seduced Englishmen—men like Norfolk—whom we encountered in the earlier pamphlets, now reconfigured as sodomites: "such treason . . . kindleth vile and beastly desires, and among all other none comparable in filthiness to the lust of yielding themselves to bear the engendering of the great Bull of Basan or rather of Babylon, the oppression, incumbency, and tyranny of Rome." And sodomy most effectually represents the threat posed by Mary, her minions, and the pope to chastity, represented in the earlier tracts, as we have seen, by Elizabeth, true Englishmen, and Protestant reformation: 28

And surely no more sodomitical is in nature the unnatural mixture of a Bull and a woman, than is sodomitical in policy and religion the intermeddling of the popish usurpation of Rome with a temporal prince, yielding his or her realm to popish jurisdiction, or with the spouse of Christ the universal church ravished by that Bull's force or defiled by his abuses. But as in Pasiphae, so where such rage of traitorous and superstitious desire entreth, God's grace forsaketh, honest fear departeth, shame flyeth, and the lust is untemperable.⁸¹

     If any readers doubt the truth of his central proposition—that Englishmen show themselves to be both virtuous and virile when they resist the blandishments of the Bull and his Whore and remain true to their spiritual "Husband"—Norton urges them to turn to John Foxe's book, the Acts and Monuments of the Book of Martyrs. Significantly, 1570 witnessed the publication of the much-expanded second edition of John Foxe's famous book and also the republication of John Bale's The Image of Both Churches. As recent work by the John Foxe Project has shown, the new edition of the Acts and Monuments featured changes that made it consonant with the immediate application of biblical typology to the two queens that I have described. First, it signaled a shift in historical mode from prophetic to apocalyptic.⁸² The shift was expressed in important changes in its iconography. In this edition, for the first time, images of the persecuting papacy came to the fore. Tellingly, too, these were accompanied by the introduction of an associational opposite. The 1570 edition presented for the first time the monumental woodcut of Henry as an image of Justitia, captioned "The Pope suppressed by K. Henry the eight" (see Figure 2).⁸³ Commanding the contents of the 1570 edition, Henry VIII plays a complex role. On one level, he emerges as the symbolic king of the godly nation, empowered by his generation of the English national Protestant church, the fruit of his marriage with his realm.⁸⁴ On another, he stands as the guarantor of a Protestant masculine succession through his blood, to be secured through Englishmen's ongoing commitment to his legacy, represented inter alia by Elizabeth: his daughter and their queen. 29

Figure 2: Henry VIII as Justitia in the 1570 edition of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments. By permission of the British Library, John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church …, 2 vols. (London, 1570), vol. 2, 1201, Shelfmark 4705.h.4.

     And Elizabeth? There is only one representation of Elizabeth, in the decorated capital letter "C" that begins the work. Here, as Margaret Aston and Elizabeth Ingram have shown, Elizabeth is depicted in an "oblique" role that does not directly attach her to the anti-papal theme of the book.⁸⁵ Yet Elizabeth was crucially present in the 1570 edition of Foxe's book, like her father, in symbolic form. The woodcut illustration on the title page of both the 1563 and 1570 editions features a modified version of depictions of the Last Judgment. This version assimilated that Christian climacteric to Protestant apocalyptic in a series of panels contrasting "true religion" with Catholicism. In the 1570 edition, John Day added a legend—"The Image of the persecuted Church/The Image of the persecuting Church" (see Figure 3). The legend drew John Bale's explication of Christian history in The Image of Both Churches into the narrative of the Acts and Monuments (see Figure 1), and hence directly into contemporary politics. Alert readers—those "morally acute compatriots" to whom the second edition was addressed, informed by the kind of polemic that I have described, could understand that the two queens themselves represented these two churches and see beyond them to their ur progenitors, Henry VIII and the pope, God and Satan.⁸⁶ They could themselves participate in sacred history by aligning themselves with good against evil, the True Church against the False Church—Elizabeth against Mary. They would thus learn the lesson in patriotic allegiance trumpeted by Thomas Norton: "WE CAN NOT WELL SPARE OUR QUEEN," either in her immediate incarnation or in her anticipated progeny—a figure who is ambiguously Christ and James VI.⁸⁷ 30

Figure 3: Title page of the 1570 edition of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Mason F 142. Illustrated title page from Actes and Monuments by John Foxe, vol. 1, 1570.

In The Poetics of English Nationhood, Claire McEachern concludes her discussion of the significance of Bale's typological identification of the two churches with a question. If, as she suggests, Bale's 1545 commentary on Revelation in The Image of Both Churches provided "a poetics, a narrative shape, and an affective model for subsequent vocabularies of nationhood," which she so eloquently explores in the late Tudor and early Stuart period, why was its application so long delayed? Why do we find an Elizabethan nation, not an Edwardian one? Why, when it came into being, was it "xenophobic and aggressively misogynist"?⁸⁸ In this article, I have sought to answer these questions. The English nation identified by William Haller and McEachern, in their different ways, was born when the male Protestant monarchical succession that the "Protestant ascendancy" deemed necessary to its preservation and fulfillment was uniquely threatened by the coexistence in Britain of two queens. That threat reached critical mass in 1570, when James Stewart, the earl of Moray, was assassinated. His death destabilized the innovative, and fragile, equilibrium between blood, election, and male identity, in the persons of Moray, James VI, and Elizabeth, that had underpinned the amity in Christ of England and Scotland during the 1560s. And the resulting instability strengthened Mary Queen of Scots's entitlement to rule over a conjoined realm of England and Scotland, her deposition from the Scottish throne in 1567 notwithstanding. Paradoxically, the measures that ideologically committed English and Scottish brethren had adopted in the 1560s to nullify her claims to political authority—the emphasis on her nature as a sexual woman and, in particular, plans for a "marriage to England"—rebounded in her favor at this juncture: she was a princess of the blood, and she was the mother of a son. These facts strengthened her claim to be queen of Britain in the view of significant numbers among the ranks of the political nation, English and Scottish—and even among convinced Protestant men.⁸⁹ This result was inevitable, for in the early modern period men's models of political order were still very much rooted in conceptions of inheritance and descent based on gender, kinship, and family relations. Indeed, given the near equivalence of the two queens' blood claims, but their different marital and maternal outcomes, there was a real danger that Mary would triumph. She was the claimant who combined royal blood, untainted by aspersions of illegitimacy, with demonstrable willingness to marry—and the ability to produce male heirs. Confessional allegiance could challenge these older conceptions, and it did so with increasing success as the sixteenth century gave way to the seventeenth. But in the 1560s and 1570s, only a very few shared the conviction most stridently and consistently voiced by John Knox: that Mary's claim was wholly unacceptable, because ungodly, on the grounds of her sex and her religion, notwithstanding the claims of blood and maternity. Even those who did found the expression of this conviction, like its political consequences, almost unbearably problematic. 31

     Faced with these tensions, English councilors upped the ante. In the 1560s, they had called Mary's status as queen-in-waiting into question, and sought to buttress Elizabeth's legitimacy as queen of England, by articulating a "good queen, bad queen" opposition. The antithesis was couched in gendered terms. It contrasted the two queens with reference to their womanly characters: "our natural lady and mistress" Elizabeth versus Mary, "a woman . . . of corrupt affections . . . untemperable by her estate." After Moray's death, they moved to biblical typologies to "fix" the contrast in apocalyptic terms. This move was necessary in order to undercut the legitimist middle ground on which Mary's claims to political consideration flourished.⁹⁰ It worked by undermining the salience of blood qua blood as a determinant of monarchical identity. In this context, it also privileged "virtue" (defined, for queens, as confessional conviction) in relation to blood—and situated virginity as the antithesis, not of maternity but of tyranny. This move proved to be spectacularly successful in paving the way for Mary's execution in 1587, as it kick-started the "cult" of Elizabeth that dominated Elizabeth's later years. Increasingly, Elizabeth was depicted as the handmaid of the lord—the lord ambiguously her father Henry VIII and God Himself—and, in that role, both "England's Eliza" and a surrogate Virgin Mary.⁹¹ 32

     In the wake of the 1570 papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, John Bale's apocalyptic typology contrasting the True and False Churches thus began a new career. It came into its own as a means of persuading Englishmen that it was not, and never could be, "gud to change quenis," because the contest was not only between embodied queens (where the evidence was necessarily equivocal) but also between good and evil, God and the devil. The move to biblical archetypes that I have explored with reference to Norton's and Foxe's works categorically differentiated Elizabeth from Mary. The identification of Elizabeth as the Woman Clothed with the Sun elevated Elizabeth above a bodily female identity that, in perverse mode, was depicted as Mary's domain. The antithetical identification of Mary with Jezebel and the False Church emphasized uncontrollable lust as a specifically female trait, weak men (and, of course, women) as particularly prone to seduction, English national identity as a prophylactic against its worst effects—and the pope as the unholy power lying in wait outside this collective devil's gateway. 33

     The identification of Elizabeth as the Woman Clothed with the Sun had one further consequence, pregnant with meaning for Stuart rule in the seventeenth century. As we saw, it reinforced Elizabeth's exceptional status by prognosticating a godly male succession that would be mystically effected through her queenship. The identification thus attached James VI to Elizabeth symbolically, by means of an abstract relationship that was simultaneously maternal and spiritual. (It is no coincidence that in Shakespeare's Scottish play Macbeth [1606] kingship is cleansed, and James's accession assured, through the actions of Macduff, the man who famously was "not of woman born."⁹² ) That abstraction preserved James's blood from the taint of his mother's—on condition that he occupy the role of godly king. In the seventeenth century, "virtue," for a British king, required the public enactment of virile Protestantism, and it proved to be a moving target. The immediate effects of this legacy are apparent in the triumphalist phrases with which the Lincolnshire rector Henry Hooke greeted James's accession to the English throne in 1604. At James's succession, Hooke marveled, Elizabeth had "died not, but was revived in one of her own blood; her age renewed in his younger years . . . who stood up a man as it were out of the ashes of a woman." And Hooke concluded with what had become the corollary that would definitively legitimate this particular masculine succession. The "elect might hope that what was not possible for a woman to effect, a man should be both able and industrious to perform."⁹³ 34

     The mythic narrative that I have described thus had important consequences not only for Elizabethan politics but also for political thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Anglo-American world. It was elaborated initially as a means of renegotiating existing conceptions of blood entitlement to monarchical authority in order to secure rule by a godly king. Neither the attempt nor the resort to fiction was sui generis; sixteenth-century France, for example, witnessed a turn to "history" to make an analogous move, through recourse to a mythologized version of its Salic Law.⁹⁴ In England, however, the nation that emerged was xenophobic, misogynist, virulently anti-Catholic—and as a consequence the mother of both modern republicanism and constitutional monarchy. This was so because of the peculiar circumstances of sixteenth-century British reformation history that I have outlined, and in particular due to the coincidence of two queens in an island whose manifest destiny it was to be a united kingdom. In this unique context, xenophobia, misogyny, and anti-Catholicism provided conceptual tools that enabled men to imagine—as, in the seventeenth century, they made it possible for them to establish—states in which ideological conviction, in the last resort, counted for more than blood claims to political authority. 35

Anne McLaren is a senior lecturer in the School of History at the University of Liverpool. Her publications include Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (1999), "Reading Sir Thomas Smith's De Republica Anglorum as Protestant Apologetic" (The Historical Journal, 1999), and "The Quest for a King: Gender, Marriage and Succession in Elizabethan England" (Journal of British Studies, forthcoming 2002). She is writing a monograph that investigates the history of seventeenth-century regicide and republicanism with reference to its roots in sixteenth-century Englishmen's experience of female rule.

Notes

I would like to extend my thanks to J. H. Burns, Andrew Hadfield, Keith Mason, and Pauline Stafford for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this article, and to Richard Price for urging me to consider the longue durée. The AHR reviewers' reports, even the bracing ones, made me clarify my argument. For support and encouragement, my thanks to Frances Dolan, Sarah Hanley, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom. I presented an earlier draft at the Early Modern British History Seminar at the Huntington Library and would like to thank its organizer, Barbara Donagan, and those who attended for a probing and stimulating discussion.
¹ British Library (hereafter, BL), Add. 35830, fol. 159v.
² Clare Dyer, "A Challenge to the Crown: Now Is the Time for Change," The Guardian (December 6, 2000): 1. The campaign was covered in the British and American press in December 2000. At the same time, on December 6, the Scottish National Party tabled a motion calling for repeal of the Act of Settlement, after having unanimously backed an SNP-led motion condemning the act as discriminatory and calling for its abolition in December 1999. For the gender dynamics of Restoration England, see Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680–1714 (Manchester, 1999).
³ The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, said, "Since MPs are barred from openly debating the role of the monarch we thought a newspaper might set the ball rolling." Dyer, "Challenge to the Crown," 1.
⁴ In what follows, I try to suggest the connections between English and Scottish Protestant identities and their points of diversion through careful attention to the use of "English," "Scottish," and "British." Limitations of space mean that at best I can only point to the separate but related career of anti-Catholicism in Scotland. The best guide to the formation of Scottish national identity in the early modern period remains Arthur Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: The Apocalypse, the Union and the Shaping of Scotland's Public Culture (Edinburgh, 1979).
⁵ The phrase is the title of Alison Plowden's book, Two Queens in One Isle: The Deadly Relationship of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots (Brighton, 1984).
⁶ Elizabeth's annotations on a letter from John Knox, BL, Add. 32091, fols. 167–69.
⁷ For "woman" as a universal identifier in early modern political thought, see Sarah Hanley, "The Politics of Identity and Monarchic Governance in France: The Debate over Female Exclusion," in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, Hilda L. Smith, ed. (Cambridge, 1998), 289–304, esp. 295–96. The term "Protestant ascendancy" is Patrick Collinson's. He uses it, rightly, to stress the Protestant fervor and ideological homogeneity of the small but disproportionately influential band of brothers that dominated Elizabethan political life. Patrick Collinson, "Puritans, Men of Business and Elizabethan Parliaments," Parliamentary History 7, no. 2 (1988): 187–211.
⁸ Carol Z. Weiner, "The Beleagured Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Anti-Catholicism," Past and Present 51 (1971): 27–62, quote on 27.
⁹ Thomas Brightman, The Revelation of St. John Illustrated, in Works (1644), sig. A2v. Brightman's writings were published posthumously.
¹⁰ For the construction of the English nation as a Protestant male preserve, see A. N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge, 1999), esp. chap. 4.
¹¹ It did not, however, undo this legacy, which remained fundamental to English political culture. See Frances E. Dolan, The Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999).
¹² André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, A Journal of All That Was Accomplished by Monsieur de Maisse, Ambassador in England from King Henry IV to Queen Elizabeth Anno Domini 1597, G. B. Harrison and R. A. Jones, trans. and ed. (London, 1931), 11–12.
¹³ Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; rpt. edn., London, 1989), charts the shift in episteme. Carole Pateman describes "masculine right" as the successor to classical patriarchalism in, inter alia, "'God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper': Hobbes, Patriarchy and Conjugal Right," in Femi