Search

This article examines the ways in which changes in Marian theology and the defaming and execution of two of Henry viii’s queens affected early modern literary representations of female power. It argues that, through the translations of Thomas Wyatt, Petrarchan poetry entered into a world of state-sponsored iconoclasm, a world where images of the sacred feminine, once revered, could be destroyed, and queens, once exalted as beloveds, could quickly be reduced to “whores” and executed. The first part of the article considers Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” a translation of Petrarch’s “Rime 190,” as a lens for examining the female body as both object of desire and site of violent destruction. The second part of the article considers English Petrarchism late in the reign of Elizabeth i, examining how John Donne’s “Love’s Progress” and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book ii) construct violent fantasies of male control over the powerful female.

In this chapter, I consider Henrietta Maria as she appears in academic studies, as well as in two works of historical fiction: Myself, My Enemy by Jean Plaidy, and Cavalier Queen by Fiona Mountain. These novels present the queen’s transgressive behavior—advocating for her Catholic faith, advising her husband, and leading the Royalist army into battle—in ways that contain the threat of the powerful woman. In addition, the reductive way these texts represent Henrietta Maria raises the question of how much license fiction writers should take with history, particularly in the case of historical figures such as queens consort whose life stories may be unknown to the majority of readers.

This chapter begins with a discussion of images of female power in Tempe Restored. It continues with an examination of Walter Montagu’s The Shepherd’s Paradise and the 1634 revival of John Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess. Read together, these two plays present a powerful image of Catholic community, female empowerment and options for rethinking the sacred space. For Catholics, this entertainment would have presented an image of Catholic utopia. For the Protestants, the plays represented Henrietta Maria’s extravagance and her immorality. The final portion of this chapter draws connections between Tempe Restored and John Milton’s Masque at Ludlow Castle to suggest the influence of the queen’s entertainments as well as the Protestant response to them.

This chapter examines Salmacida Spolia, the last masque performed by Charles I and Henrietta Maria in the context of coming civil war and the last gasps of a monarchy. The final Caroline masque provides a lens through which to view Henrietta Maria’s relationship to the English people. Although William Davenant presents the royal couple in opposition to the forces of disorder, this juxtaposition of the queen and female representations of disorder threatens to collapse. The chapter will show that in the rhetoric leading up to civil war and continuing into the Restoration, Henrietta Maria herself increasingly becomes connected to the iconography of Discord and disorder, a position that would persist in modern scholarship.

This chapter presents Anna’s transformation from Danish princess to Scottish queen. Using the juxtaposition of the royal marriage and witchcraft persecutions, the chapter considers societal concerns about women, sexuality and danger. This chapter examines the representational dichotomy that pits deviant female sexuality against appropriate female sexuality. As is often the case with such dichotomies, Anna could not fully remain on the side of appropriate feminine performance. In her plotting, her temper and her Catholicism, she moved dangerously close to the very image of disruptive female power that spurred on the witch trials and continued to haunt the nation. As such, Anna and the witches were part of a representational dichotomy that frequently collapsed, leaving Anna to take the role of the disruptive, subversive woman.

This chapter explores what Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria’s confessional identities meant politically and artistically, and how their identities fit into a larger framework of representations of Catholicism, female power and queenship. It explores not only the historical facts of the Reformation, but also the myths that informed people’s fears of Catholic plots against the English church. This chapter also considers how the queens used Catholicism and the images of the sacred feminine in the court entertainments they commissioned. Finally, the chapter concludes with a consideration of Catholic models of female autonomy, early modern stereotypes of Catholicism as a religion, and the ways in which fears of Catholicism and the Catholic woman influence attitudes toward the early Stuart queens.

This chapter uses Henrietta Maria’s court masques to trace the queen’s transformation from a young French princess in a foreign land to a powerful queen consort who pushed her agendas in a variety of personal, political and theatrical ways. The chapter examines the ways in which Henrietta Maria sought to carve out a space for Catholic worship in her new Protestant home. In particular, the chapter will consider Henrietta Maria’s religious and political interests and alliances as presented in three of her well-known masques Chloridia, The Temple of Love and Luminalia. In these masques, feminine beauty and chastity act in ways that foreground the female sacred as a source of authority and support the queen’s desire to restore Catholicism to England.

Anna’s masques, which at times weave Catholicism into their symbolic economy even as they deploy subversive representations of female power, played into societal fears at a particularly unstable and potentially dangerous time in terms of Jacobean religious politics. This chapter examines five of Anna’s significant early masques (A Vision of Twelve Goddesses, The Masque of Blackness, The Masque of Beauty, The Masque of Queens, and Tethys’ Festival), considering the ways in which these masques depict female power, the female body and, ultimately, the queen herself. In addition, the chapter considers how the combined threat of the powerful female and the Catholic sovereign elide in Anna’s court entertainments.

This chapter examines Anna’s influence on the arts both through her patronage of Jacobean artists and through oblique representations of her in the works of artists such as Shakespeare. In particular, it examines representations of Anna as a fecund queen, bringing life and progeny to a throne that had but recently been occupied by a powerful virgin queen. Her fecundity brings hope for the future, but it also brings the unruly aspects of female sexual desire to the foreground. As the chapter comes to an end, it will return to the discussion of early modern witchcraft, teasing out parallels between Anna and Frances Howard, whose connection to adultery, murder and the occult make her the very embodiment of the dangers of female sexuality and power.

In the summer of 1567, a rebellion forced Mary Stuart off the throne of Scotland. Mary’s political failure resulted, in part, from her unwise personal choices: her preference for her court favorites, particularly David Rizzio; her inability to extricate herself from the suspicion surrounding the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley; and her hasty marriage to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, who was also suspected of taking part in Darnley’s murder. By 1567, the queen, whose “grace and good humour [had] made her appeal to the general populace” earlier in her reign, could no longer command the loyalty and respect of the nobility or the people.1 As Mary was taken to Edinburgh as a prisoner, the crowds revealed their contempt for their queen, crying out “burn the whore!… burn her, burn her, she is not worthy to live, kill her, drown her.”2 Their response to the fallen monarch, presented in unambiguously gendered terms, reveals a preoccupation with Mary’s physical body and her alleged sexual transgressions. In the eyes of her people, Mary was not only a murderess, she was a whore, and her sexual “taintedness” proved as deplorable as her other “crime.” Because of her position as queen, Mary’s physical body possessed political significance, and the crowd’s condemnation of Mary suggests anger at a woman who had sullied not only herself but also, by extension, Scotland.