The Queen's Mercy

Gender and Judgment in Representations of Elizabeth I

M. Villeponteaux

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137371751
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

During the Elizabethan era, writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and others frequently expounded on mercy, exploring the sources and outcomes of clemency. This fresh reading of such depictions shows that the concept of mercy was a contested one, directly shaped by tensions over the exercise of judgment by a woman on the throne.

CHAPTER 1

“BY NATURE FULL OF MERCY”: THE CLEMENCY OF THE QUEEN

In his famous defense of queenship, An Harborowe for Trewe and Faithfull Subjectes, John Aylmer valorizes Elizabeth’s mercy as one of the qualities that make her a perfectly virtuous woman. “There is a mervelous mercy and no rigour, an exceding pacience, and no desire of reveng in her.” In these terms Aylmer praises Elizabeth I and disputes the claim of John Knox that a woman’s rule violates the laws of God and nature.¹ Throughout his treatise, Aylmer takes great pains to depict Elizabeth in terms that his age considered ideally feminine. For example, when he praises her learning, he couples his claims about her knowledge with parallel claims about her modesty. Aylmer quotes Elizabeth’s first schoolmaster: “I teach her wordes (quod he) and she me things. I teache her the tongues to speake: and her modest and maidenly life, teacheth me workes to do.” In this way, Aylmer reassures his reader that despite her great learning, Elizabeth retains idealized feminine virtues such as modesty, as well as a “marvelous meeke stomacke.” ² Similarly, he emphasizes her mercy, a virtue often depicted as fundamentally feminine. After recounting Elizabeth’s persecution during Mary’s reign, Aylmer insists that Elizabeth has no desire to seek revenge, and in fact prays for her enemies:

Are not these great tokens thou good subject, of much mercy to follow? Marke her comming in, and compare it with others. She commeth in lyke a lambe, and not lyke a Lyon, lyke a mother, and not lyke a stepdam. She rusheth not in at the fyrst chop, to violate and breake former lawes, to stirre her people to chaunge what they list, before order be taken by lawe. She hangeth no man, she behedeth none. She burneth none, spoileth none.³

Of course, Aylmer means to contrast Elizabeth with Mary Tudor, but his focus on her clemency also contributes to his portrait of a “natural” woman and queen, who is “lyke a mother” in her patience and mercy.

Aylmer seems to praise Elizabeth’s judgment when he describes her as a monarch who follows divine guidance “by using correction without severitie, by sekyng the loste with clemencie, by governing wisely without fury, with weying and judging withoute rashness.”⁴ Yet elsewhere in this treatise, he registers serious distrust of woman’s rule as well as a woman’s ability to make wise judgments. In an earlier passage, Aylmer observes that a woman’s rule could do less harm in England than in most countries because of England’s mixed monarchy.⁵ Aylmer reassures his readers, “If she shuld judge in capitall crimes: what daunger were there in her womannishe nature? none at all. For the verdict is the 12 mennes, whiche passe uppon life and deathe, and not hers.”⁶ Thus, in the course of a single treatise, Elizabeth’s femininity is praised as a maternal wellspring of mercy and denigrated as a “womannishe” nature that renders her unfit to make independent judgments. The mercy expected to characterize Elizabeth’s judgments is depicted as both desirable and disquieting. This tension between veneration and suspicion of monarchical mercy, particularly a queen’s mercy, is the subject of the present study.

The Queen’s Mercy is the first book to study the image of Elizabeth as a clement queen, and the first to consider how attitudes toward her exercise of justice shaped literary representations of mercy.⁷ My analysis of Elizabeth’s image as a merciful queen is informed by studies of her representation by scholars such as Louis Montrose, Susan Frye, and Carole Levin. Louis Montrose’s work on the “shaping fantasies” of Elizabethan culture makes us aware of the imaginative accommodations required by Elizabeth’s role as queen of a patriarchal culture.⁸ Susan Frye’s book Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation draws our attention to the contested images of the queen and the way Elizabeth’s subjects sometimes sought to construct her in conventionally feminine terms in order to bolster their own authority.⁹ Carole Levin’s Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power examines the intersection of gender and politics in Elizabeth’s rule and shows how representations of the queen in many venues, including gossip and other popular forms, respond to traditional constructions of women.¹⁰ My understanding of the dynamics of Elizabeth’s representation as a merciful queen owes a great deal to these and other studies of what Louis Montrose has called the Elizabethan “political imaginary,” a term that designates “the images, tropes, and other verbal and iconic resources that provided a growing and changing matrix for the varied and sharply contested processes of royal representation.”¹¹ The construction of Elizabeth as an icon of mercy was influenced by traditional ideas about women; it was a process that changed over time in response to religious and political pressures, and it was often contested.

Elizabethan culture—its literature, political and legal treatises, religious writing, as well as visual representations—was engaged in an ongoing conversation about the rightness and efficacy of clemency. Controversy about mercy was generated not only by the presence of a woman on the throne but also by the Tudor program of centralizing power in the hands of the monarchy. The decades of Elizabeth’s reign witnessed a struggle over the site of legal power, a struggle that encompassed both the role of equity and the Chancery court in the English system of justice as well as the related question about the monarch’s prerogative. Furthermore, zealous Protestants were chronically unhappy with Elizabeth’s failure to support their causes, which often involved prosecuting and punishing the enemies of Protestantism, whether at home or abroad. At a moment when political and religious factors produced a climate in which debates about justice were inevitable, the presence of a queen on the throne intensified questions about mercy and shaped the debate.

Mercy was a problematic concept even without the complications of the monarch’s gender and the particular political and religious circumstances of Elizabeth’s reign. Monarchs have an obligation to be merciful, according to Christian beliefs based on scripture: “Mercie and trueth preserve the King: for his throne shalbe established with mercie” (Proverbs 20:28).¹² Yet, while mercy is regarded as an essential attribute of a Christian monarch, it is also a quality regarded with suspicion in classical and Christian philosophy as well as in sixteenth-century political discourse. For many writers the problem lies in the relationship between mercy and its misguided counterpart, pity. For instance, Seneca praises mercy but warns against pity, which he describes as the product of a weak nature.¹³ In The City of God, Augustine takes issue with this Stoic depiction of pity as a vice, but he too distinguishes between the human emotion of pity and divine mercy, which comes from God’s goodness. Acknowledging that pity is “a kind of fellow-feeling in our own hearts,” Augustine argues that such “passions” may nonetheless be virtuous if they are subordinated to God; passions are not vices if they do not undermine a wise man’s reason. Augustine stipulates that pity must be shown in such a way that it does not encroach upon justice.¹⁴ Sixteenth-century political theorists often attempt to make a similar distinction between the mercy appropriate for a prince and the inappropriate clemency that might be a product of human weakness. For example, Elyot in The Governour devotes a chapter to the importance of mercy but near the end asserts that mercy must always be “joyned with reason” if it is not to degenerate into that “sickenesse of the mynd” that he calls “vaine pitie.”¹⁵ Nevertheless, despite such attempts to differentiate between mercy and pity, the distinction between the two erodes during this period. It is not unusual to find writers using the terms interchangeably, as does Lipsius in his Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine: “It is profitable for a good, and gracious Prince, sometimes to passe the limites of equitie, to shew his clemencie, were it but in regard of mercie, & pitie, to which all other vertues do in honor give place.”¹⁶ Mercy is a contested concept in the sixteenth century: while some writers take pains to separate virtuous mercy from emotional pity, others, like Lipsius, ignore this distinction, and increasingly the two terms, mercy and pity, are treated as though they are synonymous.

If mercy and pity are considered one and the same, then mercy is regarded as springing from human passions. Political writers often voice strong concern about the impact the passions can have on governance, and argue that mercy, despite being a Christian virtue, can weaken the commonwealth because it is a product of human emotion. Religious and political tradition demands that mercy be venerated, but more often than not, early modern writers who ostensibly revere mercy are much more fervent in blaming clemency than they are in praising forgiveness. For example, Elyot not only tries to distinguish between princely mercy and weak pity; he also registers his suspicion of clemency in his own age by stating that “at this daye the more parte of men be disseased” with the “sicknesse” that is pity.¹⁷ Yet, monarchical mercy—the virtue that Shakespeare’s Portia describes as “enshrined in the hearts of kings”—can never be completely dismissed because of its importance in Christian tradition. Even those who are the most suspicious of the deleterious effects of too much mercy at play in the governance of the commonwealth do not reject it outright. Jacques Hurault omits discussion of mercy almost entirely in his Politicke, Moral, and Martial Discourses, but even while warning that clemency “is a kind of consenting to the sin, when it is willingly permitted to goe unpunished,” he feels compelled to acknowledge the common understanding that rulers should be merciful, and rather grudgingly states, “I know well it will be said, that a prince ought to be mercifull, and I deny it not.”¹⁸

In The Prince, Machiavelli offers a similarly ambivalent account of mercy, but for him, the value of mercy has nothing to do with its being a Christian virtue. Rather, Machiavelli regards a merciful reputation as beneficial to a monarch’s public image, but detrimental if it goes too far. “Every prince should prefer to be considered merciful rather than cruel, yet he should be careful not to mismanage this clemency of his.”¹⁹ For Machiavelli, a virtuous image can help the prince, but vice—if it is a vice that might help save the state—is often preferable to virtue. Thus, if cruelty might bring order and unity to the state, then cruelty should be practiced. “No prince should mind being called cruel for what he does to keep his subjects united and loyal; he may make examples of a very few, but he will be more merciful in reality than those who, in their tender-heartedness, allow disturbances to occur, with their attendant murders and lootings.”²⁰ It is in this chapter that Machiavelli raises the famous question, “Whether it is better to be loved or feared.” He answers that, although every prince would like to be both, it is safer to be feared than to be loved. Machiavelli implies that a merciful prince will be more greatly loved than a cruel one, an idea that Elizabeth clearly embraced. But Machiavelli also insists that the people’s love is fickle; their fear gives better assurance of their support—thus cruelty can be salutary to the security of the ruler. However, Machiavelli implicitly genders his prince as masculine in this particular discussion; for instance, he says that the most important time for a prince to display cruelty is when he leads an army in wartime; without a reputation for cruelty, he cannot hope to control his men.²¹ This example is not one that would be meaningful for Elizabeth; and as we shall see, when a woman has a reputation for cruelty, early modern culture condemns her as monstrous.

That a prince truly should be merciful is a tenet of Christian belief; outside of a Christian framework, Machiavelli still recommends that the prince seem merciful, if possible. Indeed, it is a commonplace in classical thought that a merciful ruler wins the loyalty and support of his subjects. As Seneca says in De Clementia, “Mercy, then, makes rulers not only more honored, but safer.” The merciful ruler is secure on the throne because by mercy he earns the people’s loyalty: the king “who is inclined to the milder course even if it would profit him to punish . . . such a one the whole state loves, defends, and reveres.”²² In sixteenth-century England, monarchical mercy was not regarded only as a Christian virtue; it was also understood in these practical terms, as a means of displaying and consolidating power. K. J. Kesselring has argued that Tudor monarchs deliberately reduced the common law courts’ power to pardon in order to have a monopoly on public displays of clemency designed to enhance their authority, and expanded and consolidated the royal pardon along with the power of the royal courts in an effort to increase the power of the crown.²³ And while she does not think that the monarch’s power to pardon was ever seriously questioned or challenged during this period, the larger question of the monarch’s prerogative was indeed debated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, partly in terms of the concept of equity.

Equity is a concept often invoked in the Renaissance. Its most frequently cited source is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which explains equity as correcting the law in order to bring about greater justice. According to A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   “By Nature Full of Mercy”: The Clemency of the Queen
• 2   “The Sacred Pledge of Peace and Clemencie”: Elizabethan Mercy in The Faerie Queene
• 3   “Proud and Pitilesse”: Elizabethan Mercy and the Sonnet Tradition
• 4   “A Goodly Musicke in Her Regiment”: Elusive Justice in The Merchant of Venice
• 5   “Pardon Is Still the Nurse of Second Woe”: Measure for Measure and the Transition from Elizabeth to James
• 6   “Good Queene, You Must Be Rul’d”: Feminine Mercy in the Plays of Heywood and Dekker
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index