Courtly love and Elizabethan politics

Although slightly off-topic, I thought I would share with you a post I uploaded last week to my History SPOT blog for the Institute of Historical Research.  The topic is courtly love as a political tool in Elizabethan England, and, in particular, the poems by Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth.     

Sir Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1554-1618) well known as an Elizabethan explorer and soldier, is also known to have written a sonnet entitled Fortune Hath Taken Thee Away, My Love.  It is believed that Raleigh wrote this sonnet as a response to the rise of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and thus making a complaint over his own fall from influence.  In her publication of the sonnet Gordon Braden has reiterated the belief amongst scholars that ‘Fortune’ was a code name for the Earl of Essex and that Raleigh was informing Elizabeth that this brought him ‘to woe’ and that the Earl was now ‘my mortal foe’.

Fortune Hath Taken Thee Away, My Love

BY SIR WALTER RALEGH

Fortune hath taken thee away, my love,

My life’s soul and my soul’s heaven above;

Fortune hath taken thee away, my princess;

My only light and my true fancy’s mistress.

Fortune hath taken all away from me,

Fortune hath taken all by taking thee.

Dead to all joy, I only live to woe,

So fortune now becomes my mortal foe.

In vain you eyes, you eyes do waste your tears,

In vain you sighs do smoke forth my despairs,

In vain you search the earth and heaven above,

In vain you search, for fortune rules in love.

Thus now I leave my love in fortune’s hands,

Thus now I leave my love in fortune’s bands,

And only love the sorrows due to me;

Sorrow henceforth it shall my princess be.

I joy in this, that fortune conquers kings;

Fortune that rules on earth and earthly things

Hath taken my love in spite of Cupid’s might;

So blind a dame did never Cupid right.

With wisdom’s eyes had but blind Cupid seen,

Then had my love my love for ever been;

But love farewell; though fortune conquer thee,

No fortune base shall ever alter me.

-          Gordon Braden, Sixteenth-century poetry: an annotated anthology [2005], p. 337.

A second sonnet, often argued as having been written by Elizabeth herself, mocks Raleigh in reply.  For more on this have a look at a blog post on Hobbinol’s Blog – Writing the English Renaissance: Elizabethan Courtly Love.

This is just one example of the role that music played at the Tudor court.  Its enactment was political and personal reflecting ideals of courtly love and influencing the process of internal and foreign relations. 

Dr Katherine Butler (University of Oxford) has discussed this topic in more detail on one of the History SPOT podcasts entitled: Recreational Music-Making and the Fashioning of Political or Diplomatic Relationships at the Court of Elizabeth I.  In this paper Butler argues that musical performances in the form of lute or virginal productions carried out in private chambers or in the form of more public displays shaped courtly identity and influence and acted as a carefully staged enactment to express grievances, intent, and personality at court.  Butler gives various examples ranging from Lord Darley, Walter Raleigh, and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex.

PhD Thesis: Rectifying the ‘ignoraunce of history’: John Foxe and the Collaborative Reformation of England’s Past

Front Page from the first edition of the
Acts and Monuments (1563) taken
from The Acts and Monuments Online

My intention today is not so-much to promote my own work, but to state where I am coming from in terms of my own academic background.  The most important element of this is my doctoral thesis which focused on the research and writing by John Foxe and his colleagues to re-appropriate English history in a protestant mould.  John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is the largest evangelical text produced during the sixteenth century reformation in England.  Its main purpose was to promote the reformist agenda at court and to the English population at large. 

Although (from its inception) the Acts and Monuments has been best regarded as a martyrology and memorial for those protestants who were burnt at the stake during the reign of Mary I, it is in actuality an ecclesiastical history which traces the Christian church from its foundations to Foxe’s present day.  It is this element that I studied at the University of Sheffield between 2005 and 2009. 

My thesis focused on Foxe’s attempts to rectifying the ‘ignoraunce of history’ (his words) held by the English people.  In particular, it looked at Foxe’s writing of medieval history from the arrival of the Anglo Saxons through to the thirteenth century.  I attempted (where possible) to track down Foxes’ sources which were sometimes manuscript or printed copies of medieval chronicles, recent publications such as histories, polemics, catalogues, or treatises, or occasionally based upon official documents searched out in archives.  I also tried to trace Foxes’ contacts: names such as John Bale, Matthew Parker, John Day, Edmund Grindal and many more came up time and again and to varying degrees. 

The context in which Foxe wrote brought my attention to the wider international reformation with connections found between Foxe and the Magdeburg Centuriators of Germany (another gigantic ecclesiastical history project from this period) and various continental scholars.  However, the main basis for my work was the identification of source material that Foxe used and the way that he used it – not to tell lies or falsify as some have claimed in the past, but to tell a specific version of the past based upon what is said in his sources (and what Foxe believed was not said in his sources). 

So that is where I am coming from.  A study of how Foxe and others compiled the medieval portion of the Acts and Monuments.  My studies are now shifting towards a wider investigation of sixteenth century scholars and historians but also towards that moment of transformation which occurred during the reign of Mary I.  Exile not only radicalised many scholars from England in the 1550s but it also set English scholarship on a slightly different path – one that showed itself quite clearly during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.