PORTRAIT OF THE TUDOR DYNASTY
The really big political questions – in Britain at least – have often been the ones that nobody has dared to speak about. As late as 1936, the constitutional crisis threatened by King Edward VIII’s relationship with Mrs Simpson was widely discussed in the American and Continental press, but the topic was entirely absent from British newspapers.
In the 1590s, the people going to see Shakespeare’s plays would certainly have been talking among themselves about the big constitutional issue of their day, but Queen Elizabeth had by law forbidden any public discussion of it. It was the question that had been central to English politics for over a generation: who would succeed the ageing monarch? In 1936 the constitutional crisis was largely about sex and religion, much as it had been exactly 400 years earlier, in 1536, when Henry VIII had had Anne Boleyn executed and begun to dissolve England’s monasteries. In the 1590s, it was about something even more important – national survival.
On the London stage at the same time the popular genre of the history play was being redefined, in fact reinvented. The anonymous history dramas of the earlier sixteenth century have now largely been forgotten, obliterated by the vigour and sophistication of the plays written by Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe in the 1590s. At their core, Shakespeare’s history plays are a dissection of the disputed succession and civil wars of the fifteenth century: the Wars of the Roses. Indeed, it was Shakespeare who created the imaginary moment that came to define the Wars, when a red rose and a white rose were symbolically plucked as a statement of loyalty to either the House of Lancaster or York:
Henry VI, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 4. The garden scene, in which rival lords – the Duke of Somerset and Earl of Suffolk (Lancastrians) and the Earl of Warwick and Richard Plantagenet, then Duke of Gloucester, later York (Yorkists) – chose different-coloured roses to indicate their allegiances, seems to have been invented by Shakespeare.
WARWICK: And here I prophesy: this brawl today,
Grown to this faction in the Temple garden,
Shall send between the red rose and the white
A thousand souls to death and deadly night.
RICHARD: Good Master Vernon, I am bound to you
That you on my behalf would pluck a flower.
VERNON: In your behalf still will I wear the same.
It was a new dynasty, the Tudors, who eventually ended the Wars of the Roses by uniting the different feuding branches of the old royal house. Richard III finishes with a stirring speech by Richmond, the victorious Henry VII, who is about to marry Elizabeth of York and so eventually become Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather:
OVERLEAF: Allegory of the Tudor Succession, by Lucas de Heere, 1571–72. A poem on the frame reinforces Elizabeth’s claims as rightful heir of her predecessors: ‘Successyvely to hold the right, and vertves of the three’.
RICHMOND: We will unite the White rose and the Red.
Smile, heaven, upon this fair conjunction,
That long have frowned upon their enmity!
What traitor hears me, and says not amen?
England hath long been mad and scarred herself,
The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood,
The father rashly slaughtered his own son,
The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire:
All this divided York and Lancaster,
Divided in their dire division;
O, now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if Thy will be so,
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days!
In these lines, Henry VII, the first Tudor king, is not mincing his words. Hunchbacked Richard (who had brutally murdered his nephews in the Tower) has himself just been killed; Henry is about to install the new Tudor dynasty and put an end, he hopes, to the horrors of the civil wars which had ravaged England in the second half of the fifteenth century.
But from the beginning, one question always remained unanswered: for how long could such a settlement last? There was never not a succession crisis in sixteenth-century England, from Henry VII’s establishment of the insecure new royal house of Tudor, through Henry VIII’s desperate search for a son, and the problems of who would be the next heir during each of Edward’s, Mary’s and Elizabeth’s reigns. It was this contemporary drama of royal succession that gave Shakespeare’s history plays so much bite for his public. If the monarch fell, everybody at every level of society would feel the misery that followed. Fear of instability stalks these plays, and the kings who tensely inhabit them:
HENRY IV: Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-son in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
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From the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, who would succeed her was the critical question. But while the succession issue could not be openly discussed in the 1590s, it could be pictured – and the pictures that reached the widest possible public were prints, cheap to produce and easily distributed. If you want to know what large parts of the population were thinking, the prints they were buying are valuable evidence, and there is one print that goes straight to the heart of the matter. It was produced in the early 1590s and it shows, on the right-hand side at the front, Elizabeth I. Behind her, seated on the throne, is her father, Henry VIII, on his left Edward VI, his short-lived son, and on his right Mary Tudor, his elder daughter, with her husband, Philip of Spain. The striking thing about this, of course, is that in the 1590s all the Tudors depicted here except Elizabeth were dead. Henry VIII had died a long time before, and his two other children had also died without producing an heir.
Susan Doran, of Jesus College, Oxford, says the print:
was as near as anyone could get to asking Elizabeth to name her successor. The issue of the succession was a totally taboo subject; it had been so from 1571, when the Treasons Act was passed, which made it treason to discuss the succession, and particularly the title of any potential successors to Elizabeth. This silencing of the issue became an even more significant concern as her reign went on: another Act was passed in 1581, which reinforced the need for silence on the succession. This was the great elephant in the room in Shakespeare’s early life, the fear that dared not speak its name. So when you go to see a Shakespeare play about dynastic difficulties or problems with succession, the English history plays or Julius Caesar, this question was in the air, but not spoken. And of course this was not just in Shakespeare’s plays, but in other plays as well, in masques and entertainments, and the subtext of succession would have been easily read by contemporary audiences.
OVERLEAF: Henry VIII and his family, William Rogers, London, 1590s. The print derived from de Heere’s painting was dedicated to John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury. The Queen’s costume is updated, and a new poem expounds the dynastic message.
By the time this print was published, Elizabeth was nearly sixty, much too old to produce her own heir, so who might succeed her was a very tricky topic. But the astonishing thing is that, although printed in the 1590s, this image is actually a copy of another one made twenty years earlier. If we want to gauge the continuity, indeed the growth, of the national obsession with who would follow Elizabeth, then the twenty years between the print and its source are a very useful measure.
The original painting on which the print is based is kept at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. Its painter, Lucas de Heere, was Flemish; he was born in Ghent and converted to Calvinism, which made him suspect to the Spanish authorities (the King of Spain was also ruler of most of the Low Countries). This probably accounts for his move to England, perhaps in the 1560s. For the Earl of Lincoln he painted a gallery, now destroyed, of the costumes of all nations, in which the Englishman was depicted as unable to choose what to wear, an image that supposedly greatly amused Queen Elizabeth.
The inscription around the frame of De Heere’s painting of Elizabeth and the Tudor dynasty tells us what we are to think of the Queen, her father, and her brother and sister:
A FACE OF MVCHE NOBILLITYE LOE IN A LITTLE ROOME, FOWR STATES WITH THEYR CONDITIONS HEARE SHADOWED IN A SHOWE. A FATHER MORE THEN VALYANT. A RARE AND VERTVOVS SOON. A ZEALVS DAVGHTER IN HER KYND. WHAT ELS THE WORLD DOTH KNOWE AND LAST OF ALL A VYRGIN QVEEN TO ENGLANDS IOY WE SEE SVCCESSYVELY TO HOLD THE RIGHT, AND VERTVES OF THE THREE.
The more you look at the painting, the more you see that the point of it is to tell us, the viewers, how lucky England is to have the Tudors. Because of them, we have enjoyed a hundred years of peace. Philip of Spain, Mary’s unpopular husband, has been seen off and sent home – he is painted on the left wearing black, looking almost like a pantomime villain, and the only royal figure not allowed on the grand carpet. The figure of War lurking behind Philip is a sour reminder of how the Spanish King entangled England in his European wars – in which, disastrously, Calais was lost to France – and how Philip then deserted his former ally. On the right-hand side, hurrying in to support Elizabeth and loaded with fruit and flowers, come Peace and Plenty. Below Peace’s feet are discarded weapons of war. On the throne are the royal arms supported by the English lion and the Welsh dragon. The painting’s purpose is to assert the legitimacy and benefits of Elizabeth’s reign and her place as the culmination of an orderly succession of Tudor rulers.
De Heere’s picture, painted around 1571, has one of the strongest claims to represent Elizabeth as she wanted herself to be seen – she certainly approved it after the fact, even if she did not actively commission it. It is not a great piece of painting. Nobody would thrill to the way that Lucas de Heere has painted the folds of the velvets, or the light (not) sparkling on the jewels. But if its surfaces are lacklustre, its message is still crystal clear: England and Wales were fortunate to have Elizabeth as their Sovereign. And while Elizabethan spectators would certainly have been grateful for what her reign had brought with it, they would also have been apprehensive because this peace and prosperity, although real, was fragile. Everything hinged on the Queen’s survival, and everything would be in jeopardy if she made the wrong marriage, or died without an heir. It is fair to say that all of this would have been immediately understandable to any Elizabethan standing in front of Lucas de Heere’s painting.
Shakespeare was seven years old when this picture was made, and these were the concerns of the world in which he grew up. But the picture was not made for Elizabethan spectators in general: it was made for one in particular. At the very bottom of the picture are written the following words:
THE QVENE TO WALSINGHAM THIS TABLET SENTE MARKE OF HER PEOPLES AND HER OWNE CONTENTE
The recipient of this gift, Sir Francis Walsingham, was Elizabeth’s spymaster, who specialized in foiling conspiracies to kill the Queen. In 1569, a powerful group of Catholic noblemen in the north of England had rebelled against her. Then a foreign banker called Ridolfi had plotted with the Duke of Norfolk to depose Elizabeth with the support of the Spanish. It was Walsingham who unravelled the plot and sent Norfolk to the scaffold. In the early 1570s, as the picture was being painted, the first people who looked at it knew that the Queen had just survived an attempt to overthrow her.
We do not know where Walsingham kept the picture, but we might imagine it hanging over his desk as he despatched his instructions to his queen-preserving network of spies. For the next twenty years, as he looked up at it, he would be able to feel some satisfaction that he played a part in protecting her from a whole series of plots, conspiracies and assassination attempts – indeed Shakespeare was one of the first people we know of to use the word ‘assassination’ in print, and he and all his contemporaries lived in a country used to the idea of plots and regicides. When Walsingham died in 1590, the picture was, we believe, still in his possession – but the problem of who would succeed the Queen had still not been resolved.
When we look again at the 1590s print that reproduces the painting of 1571, it is startling to realize that in those twenty years nothing had apparently changed. The print has updated Elizabeth’s costume to keep the dress in line with 1590s fashion, but apart from that nothing on the face of it has altered. Here still is the Tudor dynasty, and here still it comes to an end in the person of Elizabeth. She has produced no heir, appointed no successor. The revival of the ‘Allegory of the Tudor Succession’ as a print in the 1590s can be seen as part of the foreboding felt as Elizabeth began visibly to age and slow down. While the original painting’s purpose was to assert the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s reign, the resurgence of the image as a more widely accessible print in the 1590s captured darker anxieties in the public consciousness about the future. The original text around the painting was now replaced by a new three-stanza poem, more explicitly anti-Catholic and more condemnatory of Mary:
Now Prudent Edward dyinge in tender youth,
Queen Mary then the Royall Sceptre swayd:
With foraine blood she matchet and put down truth,
Which England’s glory suddainly decayd:
Who brought in war & discord by that deed.
Susan Doran explains the important developments that had taken place behind the scenes:
Sir Francis Walsingham, possibly after John de Critz the Elder, around 1587, by which time he was one of the most important figures in Elizabeth’s government.
There was a hope that Elizabeth was going to avoid civil war breaking out on her death, avoid there being a transitional period which might be exploited by Catholics and foreign powers, particularly Spain. The danger in 1591 was now that there might be an international war about the succession. That was what was happening in France at that time. On the death of Henry III, the Protestant Henry IV had been challenged and Spain had come in to oppose his accession to the French throne. There was an anxiety in England that that was going to happen on the death of Elizabeth and so pressure was being put on Elizabeth in parliament, quietly by some privy councillors and by James VI of Scotland, who wanted to be named her successor. It was very much a topical issue in the 1590s.
The threat from Philip of Spain was real and multiple: he was the most powerful ruler in Europe, he had been married to Mary Tudor and had held the title ‘King of England’; he was a legitimate descendant of the House of Lancaster with a claim to the English throne through John of Gaunt; and, by the 1590s, he had heirs who could follow him. For those who wanted a Catholic monarch, Philip of Spain was the ideal choice.
But there was another candidate closer to home. Mary Stuart, Mary Queen of Scots – the main contender in the 1560s – had by now been executed, but she had a grown son, James, who was also descended from the Tudor family. By the 1590s, when this print was made, Mary’s son was an experienced ruler, as King of Scotland, and had a growing family of his own. So for Protestants in England, James VI of Scotland was the great hope.
In England, the Treasons Act forbade any discussion on who could succeed Elizabeth. (Not that some did not risk it. One writer decided what the Queen really needed was a tract that he briskly entitled: A Pithy Exhortation to Her Majesty for Establishing Her Successor to the Crown. This was a foolish move. You could end up, as the writer Peter Wentworth did, pithily exhorting from the Tower.) But concerns about the succession could be addressed in prints and obliquely on stage, provided you were as nimble as Shakespeare was in not espousing too specifically any one particular position. When Shakespeare dramatized the Wars of the Roses in the 1590s, it was partly loyal propaganda to show the terrible crisis from which the Tudors had rescued England. At the same time, however, the plays reveal deep anxiety about succession, as one royal kinsman after another struggles for supremacy: the ever-self-dramatizing Richard II cries to the usurper Henry IV, ‘Here, cousin, seize the crown.’ Rebellion was always very much part of the family.
Final panel of the series The Kings and Queens of England by Hendrik Goltzius, 1584, depicting the Tudors in orderly sequence, ending with Elizabeth I. Male rulers with swords and shields give way to queens with sceptres and diamond plaques.
The Earl of Richmond, about to become Henry VII, had ended the Wars of the Roses with a vision of a reunited England:
RICHMOND: Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,
That would reduce [bring back] these bloody days again
And make poor England weep in streams of blood!
Let them not live to taste this land’s increase
That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace!
Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again;
That she may long live here, God say amen!
But, as we have seen, by the 1590s fears for the future were growing stronger once again. Everybody knew about the civil wars that were going on in France, where foreign powers were intervening in a bloody struggle that had already lasted for a generation. It could easily happen in England.
As it turned out, England was luckier than France. The picture in Cardiff is a kind of history play of the whole Tudor dynasty, and when eventually the leading lady left the stage, the play had an unexpectedly happy ending. The Welsh Tudors were succeeded on the English throne by the Scottish Stuarts. There was no rebellion, no foreign invasion, no civil war. And in 1603 James VI of Scotland came peacefully to London as James I of England. This smooth succession did not, however, end Shakespeare’s dramatic investigation of these themes; indeed his most intense explorations of them were still to come in Macbeth and King Lear. The enduring issues of political violence, stability and legitimacy continued to preoccupy Shakespeare as the world around him shifted towards a new set of uncertainties.