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 QUEENSHIP AND POWER

ELIZABETH I
IN WRITING
Language, Power and Representation
in Early Modern England

Edited by
Donatella Montini
and Iolanda Plescia
 Queenship and Power

Series Editors
Charles Beem
University of North Carolina, Pembroke
Pembroke, NC, USA

Carole Levin
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE, USA
This series focuses on works specializing in gender analysis, women’s
studies, literary interpretation, and cultural, political, constitutional,
and diplomatic history. It aims to broaden our understanding of the
strategies that queens—both consorts and regnants, as well as female
regents—pursued in order to wield political power within the structures
of male-dominant societies. The works describe queenship in Europe as
well as many other parts of the world, including East Asia, Sub-Saharan
Africa, and Islamic civilization.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14523
 Donatella Montini · Iolanda Plescia
Editors

Elizabeth I in Writing
Language, Power and Representation
in Early Modern England
Editors
Donatella Montini Iolanda Plescia
Sapienza University of Rome Sapienza University of Rome
Rome, Italy Rome, Italy

Queenship and Power

ISBN 978-3-319-71951-1 ISBN 978-3-319-71952-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71952-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961119

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
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Courtesy of Lambeth Palace Library
 To our dear always
Giorgio and Francesco
Giulio and Andrea
 Acknowledgements

The editors of this collection are grateful to their home institution,

Sapienza University of Rome, for providing funding for the initial phase
of this project. We would like to extend our thanks to Carole Levin and
Charles Beem for welcoming our proposal into the Queenship and Power
series and for their thoughtful suggestions. We would also like to thank
Christine Pardue and Megan Laddusaw at Palgrave Macmillan very
warmly for having been especially helpful and patient throughout the
editorial process.
The staff of the Cambridge University Library Rare Books Room
and of the Senate House Library in London have provided invaluable
help over the years; we would also like to gratefully mention the staff of
Lambeth Palace Library for their assistance in securing image permissions.
Our contributors have been extremely pleasant to work with, and
we would like to thank each of them for devoting their time and effort
to enhancing the book with their essays and insights. It is impossible to
mention all of the colleagues and friends who have also contributed to this
book in a meaningful way, through advice, intellectual conversation, and
material help and assistance at various stages of the manuscript preparation:
our warmest thanks go to Rosy Colombo, Maria Del Sapio, Keir Elam,
Loredana Golob, Maddalena Pennacchia, Paola Pugliatti, Alessandro
Serpieri, among others.

ix
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Donatella Montini and Iolanda Plescia

Part I Elizabeth as Author

2 The Young Princess Elizabeth, Neo-Latin,

and the Power of the Written Word 11
Brenda M. Hosington
3 Ethics from the Classroom: Elizabeth I’s Translation
of Cicero’s “Pro Marcello” 37
Alessandra Petrina
4 Styling Power: A Corpus-Linguistic Approach
to the Correspondence of Queen Elizabeth I 59
Mel Evans
5 “Beholde Me Thy Handmaiden”: The Pragmatics
and Politics of Queen Elizabeth’s Prayers 83
Donatella Montini
6 Elizabeth I as Poet: Some Notes on “On Monsieur’s
Departure” and John Dowland’s “Now O Now
I Needs Must Part” 109
Cristina Vallaro
xi
xii    Contents

Part II Elizabeth Authored

7 A Critical Edition and Discussion of SP 70/2 f.94:

A Letter and Two Sonnets by Celio Magno
to Queen Elizabeth I 129
Carlo M. Bajetta and Guillaume Coatalen
8 “La Comediante Politica”: On Gregorio Leti’s 1693
Life of Queen Elizabeth I 145
Giovanni Iamartino
9 Multilingualism at the Tudor Court: Henry, Elizabeth
and the Love Letter Genre 171
Iolanda Plescia

Part III The Gift of Language, the Language of the Gift

10 What Elizabeth Knew. Language

as Mirror and Gift 197
Nadia Fusini
11 Queen Elizabeth and the Power
and Language of the Gift 213
Carole Levin

Bibliography 233

Index 251
 Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Donatella Montini is Associate Professor of English language and trans-

lation at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, where she teaches history of
English and stylistics. She has published extensively on Queen Elizabeth I’s
political speeches, and is the author of a book-length study on Elizabeth
I and Shakespeare (I discorsi dei re. Retorica e politica in Elisabetta I
e in Henry V di W. Shakespeare, 1999). Other research interests include
Renaissance language teaching and lexicography (with special regard
to John Florio), eighteenth-century letter-writing practices (Lettere su
Clarissa. Scrittura privata e romanzo nell’Epistolario di Samuel Richardson,
2009), and stylistic textual analysis (The Language of Fiction, 2007).

Iolanda Plescia is Researcher and Lecturer in English language and

translation at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, where she teaches his-
tory of English, literary translation, and stylistics. She has devoted her
most recent essays to Shakespeare’s language and style, early modern sci-
entific translation, and the language of science in Shakespeare’s time. She
is the translator and editor of the first Italian edition of Henry VIII’s
love letters to Anne Boleyn (Lettere d’amore di Enrico VIII ad Anna
Bolena, 2013), and has produced a new Italian edition (translation and
notes) of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (Feltrinelli, 2015). She is
currently working on a new edition of The Taming of the Shrew, to be
published in 2018.

xiii
xiv    Editors and Contributors

Contributors

Carlo M. Bajetta, Ph.D., FEA, is Professor of English Literature at the

University of Valle d’Aosta, Italy. His publications include Sir Walter
Raleigh (1998); Whole volumes in folio (2000); Some notes on Printing and
Publishing in Renaissance Venice (2000); and editions of Wordsworth’s and
Shelley’s poems, as well as Reynold’s 1819 Peter Bell poems (2005) and
Thomas More’s English Poems (2010). Together with G. Coatalen and J.
Gibson, he co-edited Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric,
and Politics (Palgrave, 2014). His edition of Elizabeth I’s Italian letters was
published by Palgrave in May 2017.
Guillaume Coatalen is Senior Lecturer in early modern English liter-
ature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, France, with a strong inter-
est in unedited material and unknown extracts in manuscripts and their
implications for the history of reading and composition. He is currently
working on Queen Elizabeth I’s French correspondence. His other pro-
jects include a book-length study on the image of poets in early modern
English plays.
Mel Evans is a Lecturer in English language & linguistics at the
University of Leicester, UK. Her research explores the interface between
language and identity and language change, focusing on early mod-
ern English. She is presently a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded
“Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age” (2016–2020), developing sty-
lometric approaches to Behn’s style and authorship.
Nadia Fusini is Professor of English and comparative literature
at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy. She previously taught
Shakespearean criticism and philology at Sapienza University of Rome.
She has dedicated a number of essays to Elizabeth I and her time, includ-
ing extensive studies on Shakespeare, and she published a narrative biog-
raphy of Elizabeth in Italian in 2004 (Lo specchio di Elisabetta). She has
written widely on the topic of female identity, especially on women in
Shakespeare’s theatre, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Hannah
Arendt, Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff.
Brenda M. Hosington Professor of translation studies (retired) at the
Université de Montréal, Canada, and Research Associate in the Centre
for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick, UK,
 Editors and Contributors    xv

she has published widely on medieval and Renaissance translation and

on Neo-Latin writings. She is the creator and chief editor of Renaissance
Cultural Crossroads: An Online Catalogue of Translations in Britain
1473–1640 and co-editor of the forthcoming Cultural Crosscurrents in
Stuart and Conmonwealth Britain. An Online Analytical Catalogue of
Translations 1641–1660.
Giovanni Iamartino is Professor of English at the University of Milan,
Italy, where he teaches history of English and Middle English literature.
His main research interests focus on the history of English lexicography
and linguistic codification, the history of translation, and the history of
Anglo-Italian relations. His most recent publications include a co-edited
collection of essays on Late Modern English Norms and Usage (2016)
and an essay on “Lexicography, or the Gentle Art of Making Mistakes”
(2017). Iamartino is the current Chair of the Italian Society for English
Studies.
Carole Levin is Willa Cather Professor of history at the University of
Nebraska, USA, where she specializes in early modern English cul-
tural, political and women’s history. She is the author/editor of sev-
enteen books, including The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I
and the Politics of Sex and Power (2nd ed. 2013); Dreaming the English
Renaissance (2008); and (with John Watkins) Shakespeare’s Foreign
Worlds (2009). Her most recent books are the edited collection, Scholars
and Poets Talk About Queens (2015) and (with Anna Riehl Bertolet
and Jo Eldridge Carney) A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern
Englishwomen: Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts, 1500–1650 (2016).
She has held long-term fellowships at both the Newberry Library in
Chicago and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, and in
2015 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of York in England.
Alessandra Petrina is Professor of English literature at the University
of Padua, Italy. She is author of The Kingis Quair (1997); Cultural
Politics in Fifteenth-century England: The Case of Humphrey, Duke of
Gloucester (2004); and Machiavelli in the British Isles: Two Early Modern
Translations of the Prince (2009). She has recently edited The Medieval
Translator. In principio fuit interpres (2013); Machiavellian Encounters
in Tudor and Stuart England (2013), and Natio Scota (2012). Together
with Laura Tosi, she has also edited for the Palgrave title Representations
of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture (2011).
xvi    Editors and Contributors

Cristina Vallaro is Researcher of English Literature at the Università

Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy. Her main research interests include
the Elizabethan age, Shakespeare, and the teaching of literature. She has
written books on Elizabethan poetry (2004), on Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra (2010), and on Shakespeare and popular
culture (2016). She has published two book-length studies on Elizabeth
I: Queen Elizabeth I on Progress. The Kenilworth and Elvetham Pageants as
Reported in John Nichols’ Work (2011); and Elisabetta I poetessa e regina
(2014). Her current research involves a collaborative study on William
Shakespeare in Chinese youth culture.
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 Top twenty keywords 67

Table 4.2 Top twenty three-word clusters 68
Table 4.3 Top twenty collocates of you/ye 74

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction
Elizabeth I in Writing

Donatella Montini and Iolanda Plescia

It was in the opening lines of a pamphlet published in the spring of

1558, only a few months before Elizabeth’s coronation, that John Knox
famously proclaimed: “To promote a Woman to bear rule, superioritie,
dominion or empire above any Realme, Nation, or Citie, is repugnant to
Nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will
and approved ordinance, and finallie it is the subversion of good Order,
of all equitie and justice”.1 This first blast of Knox’s prophetic trumpet
was directed at three Catholic queens, but Elizabeth was involved in the
anathema as well. Women were barred from the legitimate exercise of
authority by divine order, and rendered incapable of wielding power by
the frailty of their nature. Against such a background Elizabeth began
her reign, which explains why she had to become particularly skilful in

1 John Knox, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, in

David Laing ed., The Works of John Knox, vol. IV (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter,
1895), 349–422; 374.

D. Montini (*) · I. Plescia (*)

Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

© The Author(s) 2018 1

D. Montini and I. Plescia (eds.),
Elizabeth I in Writing, Queenship and Power,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71952-8_1
2 D. Montini and I. Plescia

representing herself and her authority as a monarch. Against all odds, she
managed to capitalize on early modern societal expectations of womanly
behaviour, using them to her particular advantage. Portraits, progresses,
poems and much more: Elizabeth made use of all sorts of occasions, and
all forms of communication available to her, to fashion herself or, rather,
to have herself fashioned.2
Surprisingly, however, despite a wealth of publications on Elizabeth
and her performances, her writing was neglected for a long time. Only at
the end of the 1980s did the The Norton Anthology of English Literature
include Queen Elizabeth as an author, citing two poems, though one
of her portraits had long decorated the book’s cover. Even The Norton
Anthology of Literature by Women made a similar choice, including only
one speech—her celebrated address to the troops at Tilbury—and still
omitting her parliamentary orations. And yet, Elizabeth lived immersed
in a “culture of writing”, as it has been aptly put:3 she had been given
one of the best humanistic educations of her age, William Grindall and
Roger Ascham having been her tutors; she was competent in Greek
and Hebrew, fluent in Latin and Italian; she studied history, theology
and philosophy. She was, to all intents and purposes, “a monarch in
writing”.4
In 2000, finally, a complete modern-spelling edition of Elizabeth’s
works, prayers, poems, letters and public speeches was published thanks
to the work of Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, who
presented for the first time a wide selection of her works in one volume,
thus allowing students and scholars alike to compare texts and genres

2 See in particular Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the

Politics of Sex and Power, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press,
2013); Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); the classic and still very relavant point of depar-
ture for any reflection on early modern self-representation is of course Stephen Greenblatt’s
Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1980).
3 See Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo, eds., Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing

(London: The British Library, 2007).

4 Alessandra Petrina, “Introduction,” in Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern

Culture, ed. Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 1–10. See also Aysha Pollnitz, Princely Education in Early Modern
Britain ​(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 241–61.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

from different periods of Elizabeth’s life and production. A few years

later, in 2003, Marcus and Mueller edited a crucial companion volume
that provides verbatim texts of her autograph works and writings in for-
eign languages.5 Nevertheless, in that same year, Steven W. May’s sur-
vey of the state of criticism on Elizabeth still concluded that “despite
the recent demand for expanding or rewriting the canon, Elizabeth’s
writings have been thus far practically excluded from the chorus of new
voices”.6
This past decade, however, has shown a renewed interest in Elizabeth
as an author: in 2009, Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel devoted two vol-
umes to Elizabeth’s translations.7 Rayne Allinson, Peter Beal and Grace
Ioppolo, Brenda Hosington, Mel Evans, Carlo M. Bajetta, and so many
others have dedicated essays, book-length studies and edited important
collections that have helped to reposition Elizabeth’s writings, bringing
them to the fore within the canon of early modern linguistic and cultural
studies.8
The present collection newly brings together a number of the
authors mentioned so far, further illuminating the multifaceted written

5 Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I. Collected Works
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000); Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus,
eds., Elizabeth I. Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2003).
6 Steven W. May, “Recent Studies in Elizabeth I,” in The Mysteries of Elizabeth I, ed.

Kirby Farrell and Kathleen Swain (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 2003),
279–93; 287.
7 Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel, eds., Elizabeth I. Translations, vol. I (1544–1589), vol.

II (1592–1598) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009).

8 See in particular Rayne Allinson, A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English

Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Beal and
Ioppolo 2007; Carlo M. Bajetta, Guillaume Coatalen, and Jonathan Gibson, eds., Elizabeth
I’s Foreign Correspondence. Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014); Carlo M. Bajetta, ed. and trans., Elizabeth I’s Italian Letters (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017); Mel Evans, The Language of Queen Elizabeth I: A Sociolinguistic Perspective
on Royal Style and Identity (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Brenda Hosington, “Tudor
Englishwomen’s Translations of Continental Protestant Texts: The Interplay of Ideology
and Historical Context,” in Tudor Translation, ed. Fred Schurink (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 121–42; Brenda Hosington, “‘How We Ovght to Knowe God’: Princess
Elizabeth’s Presentation of Her Calvin Translation to Katherine Parr,” in Booldly Bot Meekly.
Essays on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in Honour of Roger Ellis, ed.
Catherine Batt and René Tixier (Tournhout: Brepols, 2017), 353–62.
4 D. Montini and I. Plescia

production of Elizabeth I. The aim of the book is to take a closer,

updated look at the role that textuality plays in Queen Elizabeth’s life as
a powerful, ruling monarch. A range of diverse approaches are adopted
here to shed light both on the queen considered as an author in her own
right, and as someone whose authority is also reflected in, or produced
by, the writing of others, with special regard to the important Anglo–
Italian connection: linguistic and philological analyses are offered along
with literary and cultural-historical explorations, in an eclectic, and, we
feel, particularly fruitful perspective. Of course, the queen’s agency and
the very authenticity and origin of the materials under analysis remain
a permanently thorny issue in studies devoted to her intellectual work.
However, the contributors to this volume choose not to focus specifically
on the problems of authorship attribution, a topic addressed in many
previous studies; these new essays largely build upon the acknowledged
canon, and in any case do not disregard the importance of cultural con-
structs of authoriality, so that even some texts of dubious attribution are
considered as crucial indications of Elizabeth’s status as cultural agent.
The first part of this book is concerned with bringing into relief
Elizabeth’s ability as an author and a scholar: an investigation that ulti-
mately also turns into a survey of the multi-layered strategies that the
queen employed to acquire and hold power, not so much with her politi­
cal speeches as with her translations, letters, poems and prayers. These
are the subjects of the essays in this section, whose main aim is to make a
fresh contribution by encouraging both literary and linguistically minded
approaches that reflect upon the variety of text types, stylistic registers,
discourse strategies, authorial concerns and linguistic attitudes at play in
Elizabeth’s corpus.
In “The Young Princess Elizabeth, Neo-Latin and the Power of the
Written Word”, Brenda Hosington develops a rich exploration of the
young Elizabeth’s relationship to Latin and her involvement with trans-
lation. The essay pays special attention to Elizabeth’s early Neo-Latin
works, which have attracted little critical scrutiny so far: four familiar
letters to her brother Edward, two dedicatory letters to her father and
brother, the Latin translation of Katherine Parr’s Prayers or Meditacions,
and a Latin translation of Bernardino Ochino’s sermon, “Che cosa è
Christo & per che venne al mondo”. In Hosington’s critical reading,
these works demonstrate that at a very early age Elizabeth was acutely
aware of the power of the written word, and of the possibilities it could
offer her as she strove to articulate a certain conception of the monarchy,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

reinforce family relationships, and create for herself the persona of a

learned and pious young woman, thus ensuring her personal safety and
inclusion in the unstable world of the Tudor court. In other words, they
testify to Elizabeth’s skill in enacting strategies of self-preservation linked
to modalities of self-representation.
Alessandra Petrina’s investigation similarly considers the linguistic
expertise of Elizabeth as translator of Cicero and sheds new light on the
circumstances of the production of her English version of Pro Marcello,
which was probably undertaken in 1592; the translation, Petrina shows,
is situated at a juncture that unites the practice of her cursus studiorum
and the work she undertook on Latin classics in the years of her maturity.
This essay would seem to confirm Leah Marcus’s well-known suggestion
that one of the queen’s reasons for translating was to let the public know
that she was engaged in the activity, which she invested with a precise
political significance:9 the translation of Cicero was thus “both a linguis-
tic exercise and a meditation on politics”, allowing Elizabeth to develop
a sort of meditation on a number of “keywords” that were central to her
political practice.
Mel Evans and Donatella Montini go on to discuss Elizabeth’s writ-
ten production from a sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspective. In a
corpus-linguistic approach, Evans compiles and compares two corpora,
one made up of a holograph and the other of scribal letters, drawing
attention to keywords and their frequency, but especially to grammati­
cal forms of self-reference that focus on identity construction, as well
as interpersonal language. Differences between letter types emerge that
have much to reveal about the representation of the royal self and the
positioning of the author in relation to the recipient. The final discus-
sion of a ‘hybrid’ letter, in which scribal and holographic elements are
combined, shows how the text exploits the contrastive potential of both
letter types.
Donatella Montini’s essay examines Elizabeth’s devotional writing, in
particular a small corpus of four prayers in vernacular attributed to her,
which provide a crucial example of the linguistic and discursive strate-
gies used by the queen in her construction of a personal authorial voice

9 Leah S. Marcus, “Queen Elizabeth I as Public and Private Poet: Notes Toward a New

Edition,” in Reading Monarchs Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth
I, and James VI/I, ed. Peter C. Herman (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, 2002), 135–53.
6 D. Montini and I. Plescia

directly addressing God. As highly interactional text-types that stage a

dialogic relationship between two subjects, one mortal and one divine,
prayers as a genre lend themselves to be analysed with the tools of prag-
matics, which help qualify Elizabeth’s pious idiolect and reaffirm her
ability to publicly manage her condition as sovereign, Supreme Governor
of the Church and woman. A form of ‘devotional Petrarchism’ is here
inaugurated in which even the Heavenly Father is assigned a tributary
role in the queen’s self-representation.
Cristina Vallaro’s essay closes the first section and in a way intro-
duces the second part of the collection, considering Elizabeth both as
an author in her talent as a poetess, and as the subject of popular imagi-
nation. The queen’s unhappy French love affair and her marriage nego-
tiations with the duke d’Anjou, celebrated in poetic terms as a clash of
public and private identities in her famous On Monsieur’s departure, are
here connected to the contemporary lute song by John Dowland, Now
O now I needs must part, which describes the suffering of a heartbroken
lover, elaborating on the themes of absence and desire.
Elizabeth I in Writing as a collection also considers a wider web of
relations between the public and private display of language in Tudor
culture. Thus, a second selection of essays moves beyond issues of pro-
duction to consider Elizabeth as she is ‘authored’, in a sense that both
precedes and emanates from her, and includes her dialogue and confron-
tation with foreign-language traditions. The queen is re-considered as
reflected in the writing of her contemporaries, with a special focus on
the Italian Renaissance and Anglo–Italian relations: in Carlo M. Bajetta
and Guillaume Coatalen’s contribution, two complimentary Italian son-
nets composed by the young Venetian poet, politician and diplomat
Celio Magno (1536–1602) and his congratulatory letter are edited and
translated, and commented upon as an example of the charm with which
Queen Bess seduced her contemporaries. In addition, Celio Magno’s
writings yield fascinating information on the relationships between the
Republic of Venice and the queen at the beginning of her reign, a rela-
tively under-researched period.
Giovanni Iamartino further elaborates on the queen “in the words of
others”, in his contribution on Gregorio Leti’s 1693 Vita di Elisabetta.
Leti (1630–1701) was an Italian man of letters whose works were widely
read in Europe, often reprinted and translated from Italian into a number
of other languages: French, Dutch, and even Russian and German. Well
after the queen’s death, and almost at the dawn of a new century, Leti
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

shows just how fascinating her political persona remained—fascinating,

yes, but still also extremely troubling. A woman in power for forty-four
years is something that Leti really cannot explain if not by appealing to
well established gender roles, presenting Elizabeth as a political play-
actress, la comediante politica, dwelling on her outward appearance and
painting her in general as an impostor, especially as far as the queen’s
relations with her Parliaments and her suitors were concerned.
At the end of this section, Iolanda Plescia’s essay proposes to recon-
sider Elizabeth’s much commented-upon linguistic and rhetoric achieve-
ments by adding to the picture of the multilingual environment she was
brought up in. The textual traces of her mother and father’s relation-
ship are followed exploring Henry VIII’s love letters to Anne Boleyn,
which were divided roughly in half between French and English, with
French often used to convey more refined sentiments of affection. Years
later, Queen Elizabeth’s own use of French in her love letters to the
duke d’Anjou, selected here for textual analysis, seems to perform a dif-
ferent function, in which intimacy is constantly intertwined with political
preoccupation.
The two essays that close the collection take the investigation a step
further, by considering other kinds, and other uses, of language inter-
twined with the dynamics of power involved in gift making and receiv-
ing. It is precisely language as a gift that Nadia Fusini considers in her
essay, developing a reflection on a present crafted for Katherine Parr by a
still “powerless”, young Elizabeth as a way to negotiate a complex rela-
tionship with her father and his new wife: her translation of Marguerite
de Navarre’s Le Miroir de l’âme pêcheresse—a text that had been given
as a gift by Marguerite herself to Anne Boleyn. Fusini delves into
Elizabeth’s troubled relationship with the adult figures in her life, con-
sidering the ambiguous material of the text, which dealt with the theme
of incest; and analysing the significance of a number of material errors in
translation that reveal some of her preoccupations as to her own status as
the daughter of a king who had called her a bastard child.
Finally, Carole Levin’s essay on the material objects given and received
by Elizabeth takes into consideration a non-verbal, but no less power-
ful, mode of communication used by the queen as yet another strategy
of self-presentation—in other words, the language of the gift. Levin
analyses in detail gift exchanges between Elizabeth and her sister Mary
I, her cousin Mary Stuart, and the female relatives of the earl of Essex
at the end of her reign, focusing on such tangible presents as clothing
8 D. Montini and I. Plescia

and jewelry; but she takes a step further to put forth the suggestion that
promises and advice may have been even more important than the mate-
rial objects offered, asked for, accepted, or refused by the queen: once
again, language, used with extreme awareness of its consequences, is pre-
sented as a gift in itself.
Collectively, the essays in Elizabeth I in Writing rework the theme of
royal authoriality by orienting the spotlight on the complexities of texts
produced but also inspired by Elizabeth: on the one hand, texts that
although conceived as ‘private’ pieces, have obvious repercussions on the
public sphere due to the very nature of the writing subject; and on the
other hand, acts of writing explicitly conceived as having political value
but that betray the linguistic traces of a personal identity that cannot be
erased. It is this constant attention—paid by the queen, but indeed also
by an entire age—to the fine details, the pragmatic force and the dynam-
ics of social communication that this collection wishes to bring to the
fore and reappraise.
 PART I

Elizabeth as Author
 CHAPTER 2

The Young Princess Elizabeth, Neo-Latin,

and the Power of the Written Word

Brenda M. Hosington

Elizabeth I’s writings, both original and translated, are many and dis-
persed. Most of course are in English but an appreciable number are in
Latin. Her official engagement with this language was confined to for-
mal, diplomatic and foreign correspondence, most of which was com-
posed by her various Latin secretaries, although she would presumably
have cast a discerning eye on the missives before signing them. Her
life-long personal engagement with both Classical Latin and Neo-Latin
was very different in nature, involving correspondence, translations,
poetry and orations, and spanned a half century: letters to her brother
Edward, four of which are extant (1547–1548); one unofficial, private
letter to the Emperor Ferdinand I, announcing her accession and inten-
tion to maintain England’s role as a strong ally, but which is not in her
hand (1558); a brief confidential memorandum to William Cecil admit-
ting her indecision in replying to Mary, Queen of Scots concerning an

B. M. Hosington (*)
Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada
B. M. Hosington
Centre for the Study of the Renaissance,
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 11

D. Montini and I. Plescia (eds.),
Elizabeth I in Writing, Queenship and Power,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71952-8_2
12 B. M. Hosington

undisclosed matter (1564); a Latin translation of Katherine Parr’s Prayers

or Meditacions and a dedication to her father (1545); a Latin translation
of Bernardino Ochino’s sermon, “Che cosa è Christo & per che venne
al mondo”, and a dedication to Edward (1547); two translations from
Erasmus, his Latin rendering of Plutarch’s De curiositate into English
(1598) and his own Dialogus fidei into French, which is the supposed
work that Paul Hentzner reported having seen in 1598 and is now lost;
a response poem in reply to an epigram by the German humanist Paul
Melissus (1580); three extempore speeches (two in 1564, one in 1592);
and a brilliant verbal volley rebuking the Polish Ambassador, Paul de
Jaline, for his inappropriate speech.1 She also translated from Classical
Latin into English works and partial works by Seneca, Cicero, Boethius
and Horace, as well as a section of a choral ode from Hercules Oetatus.
Several of the above have received detailed attention but those com-
posed in Elizabeth’s early years have received little, other than that
found in the current printed editions of her complete works, one arti-
cle containing an edition of the Ochino translation with some commen-
tary,2 and another discussing all four childhood translations of works
by Marguerite de Navarre, Katherine Parr, Jean Calvin, and Bernardino
Ochino.3 This present essay seeks to rectify this situation by exam-
ining Elizabeth’s precocious displays of Latinity in all her early Neo-
Latin works: the four familiar letters to her brother, two dedicatory
letters to her father and brother, and the Parr and Ochino translations.4

1 Elizabeth’s written and extempore original Latin compositions, except the dedicatory

epistle to Edward and non-autograph letter to Ferdinand, are in Janel Mueller and Leah
S. Marcus, eds., Elizabeth I. Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003) and translated into English
in Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I. Collected Works
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000); her Parr and Ochino translations and
dedicatory letters are in Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel, Elizabeth I. Translations, 1544–
1589 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009).
2 Vittorio Gabrieli, “Bernardino Ochino: ‘Sermo de Christo’. Un inedito di Elisabetta

Tudor,” La Cultura. Rivista di filosofia, letturatura e storia 21, no. 1 (1983): 151–74.
3 Roger Ellis, “The Juvenile Translations of Elizabeth Tudor,” Translation and Literature

18, no. 2 (2009): 157–80.

4 Latin quotations from the letters to Edward are from Mueller and Marcus, Elizabeth

I. Autograph Compositions, with page references in parentheses in the text. Latin quota-
tions from the Parr and Ochino translations and their accompanying dedicatory epistles are
from Mueller and Scodel, Elizabeth I. Translations, 1544–1589, again with page references
in parentheses in the text. All the English translations provided are mine.
 2 THE YOUNG PRINCESS ELIZABETH, NEO-LATIN, AND THE POWER … 13

It will argue that they demonstrate, not only her linguistic and rhetorical
skills (honed and no doubt aided by her Latin tutors), but also her under-
standing and use of the power of the pen and the written word as tools with
which to protect herself in the unstable world of the court, to fashion her-
self as a learned and pious young woman, and to give expression to, or even
promote, moderate and acceptable religious beliefs in a milieu of fluctuating
sectarian loyalties. Moreover, in many ways they contain the seeds of some
of her later attitudes and enactment of religious and government policies.
Before turning to these texts, however, we should say something
of Elizabeth’s training as a translator and her reputation as a Latinist
in both her own time and ours. As a princess, she received the fin-
est humanist education possible for a young woman in sixteenth-
century England, with some of the best tutors available. Her first Latin
tutor remains unidentified but in 1544, when she was eleven, William
Grindal, a student of Roger Ascham’s in Cambridge, was appointed;
upon his death in 1548, Ascham replaced him for two years, although he
remained Elizabeth’s unofficial teacher throughout his life and was one
of her Latin secretaries. Like other humanist pedagogues, such as John
Cheke, Edward’s tutor in the Classical languages, he believed fervently in
the importance of the role played by translation in language instruction,
and especially by double or back translation as recommended by Cicero
and Quintilian. As a student of both Grindal and Ascham, Elizabeth
must have spent many hours translating from Latin into English and vice
versa and acquiring in the process linguistic but also rhetorical skills. At
the same time, this humanist education taught her the importance of the
written word and of an eloquent style, both of which represented power.
Elizabeth’s early abilities in Latin earned her many compliments
from her contemporaries. The most famous came from Ascham, who
in a 1550 letter to the German humanist Johann Sturm praised her as
a “star” among other English learned women, surpassing even Thomas
More’s daughter (Margaret Roper), speaking Latin “expedite, proprie,
considerate” (“easily, correctly and carefully”), and reading it with a keen
eye to style.5 In another letter to Sturm in 1551, he praised Elizabeth
for her “genius” and “high level of understanding” attained under the
tutorship of Grindal.6 In his preface to The Scholemaster, he praised her
5 Roger Ascham, in The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, Now First Collected and Revised,

with a Life of the Author, ed. J. A. Giles, 3 vols (London: John Russell Smith, 1864–65),
Vol. I, Pt. 2, Letter XCIX, pp. 181–93 (91).
6 Ascham, in Giles, Vol. 1, Pt. 2, Letter CXVII, pp. 271–74 (272).
14 B. M. Hosington

for her linguistic ability, especially in Latin and Greek, and desire “for
the increase of learning & knowledge”, both greater, he contended, than
that demonstrated by the “yong Ientelmen of England”.7 John Leland
tells Elizabeth in an epigram entitled Ad serenissimam Elisabetham about
a visit he made to her young brother while both children were living at
Ampthill and how impressed he was by her linguistic abilities; at Cheke’s
instigation, he reminds her, he spoke to her: “Utque salutares me tunc
sermone Latino/Egit, ut hunc scirem quantus in ore lepos” (“that then
you greet me in the Latin language, so that I might know how charm-
ingly you speak”).8 Much later, Sir Henry Savile dedicated his transla-
tion of Tacitus to her, lavishly praising her abilities as a translator and
urging her to “communicate to the world” her “most rare and excel-
lent translations of Histories”, adding, “if I may call them translations,
which haue so infinitelie exceeded the originals”, a not uncommon com-
pliment found in Renaissance paratextual discourse.9 Finally, the praise
of Elizabeth’s both oral and written competence in Latin emanated not
only from English courtiers and admirers, but also from slightly more
impartial observers like foreign ambassadors and visitors. Of course, in
Renaissance encomia of the “learned lady”, praise of expertise in the
Classical languages constitutes a topos, yet one cannot dismiss out of
hand all compliments concerning Elizabeth’s Latin.
Two modern-day commentators, however, have done so. T. W.
Baldwin, in his 1944 William Shakspere’s small Latine and lesse Greeke,
remained extremely sceptical of the praise heaped on Elizabeth, reduc-
ing her status of “learned lady” to that of “pedantic poseur” who was
never more than a “learned grammarian”; in a sarcastic and sexist mode,
he adapted Dr. Johnson’s famous comment on his performing dog to
her reputed love of the Classics: “the wonder was not that the sover-
eign learned so well, but that being a sovereign, and a woman to boot,
she should trouble to learn at all”.10 Baldwin endorses various neg-
ative opinions of the translations she did in later years, particularly
7 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster or Plaine and Perfite Way of Teaching Children, The

Latin Tong (London: John Day, 1570), sig. H1r.

8 John Leland, Principum, ac illustrium aliquot & eruditorum in Anglia virorum, enco-

mia (London: T. Orwin, 1589), 58–9.

9 Henry Savile, trans., The End of Nero and Beginning of Galba. Fower Bookes of the

Histories of Cornelius Tacitus. The Life of Agricola (London: R. Robinson, 1591), sig. 2v.
10 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s small Latine & lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1944), 284.

 2 THE YOUNG PRINCESS ELIZABETH, NEO-LATIN, AND THE POWER … 15

Pemberton’s concerning the Boethius, Plutarch and Horace render-

ings,11 which of course are scarcely relevant today, given the sea-change
that has taken place in translation studies in the past few decades. As for
Elizabeth’s childhood Latin translations and letters, Baldwin completely
ignores them, contenting himself with mocking her erroneous identifica-
tion of Horace as a source for a Latin proverb in an English letter.12
We have fortunately moved on since Baldwin’s day, although as
recently as 2000 Dana Sutton went little beyond this. While failing to
mention a single Latin work composed by Elizabeth, he claims her por-
trayal as a humanist scholar of Latin emanated solely from the Tudor
propaganda machine, which sought to make her palatable to the English
educated elite and help them forget her gender, since Latin was the pre-
serve of the country’s male meritocracy. Her fictitious “conspicuous
prowess” as a Latinist made her a legitimate participant in the form of
male “bonding” that Latin promoted and was born of a state policy.13
Sutton’s reference to male “bonding” echoes Walter Ong’s view of Latin
as a puberty rite for young boys, restricted to males, and available only to
women who were but “occasional exceptions”.14 His energy, however, is
expended above all in rather reductively demolishing Elizabeth’s reputa-
tion as a Latinist, much in the vein of other, earlier male commentators
on women’s Latin translations and writings. Jane Stevenson’s Women
Latin Poets and the three-volume anthology entitled Women Writing
Latin from Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe have resulted in a

11 Caroline Pemberton, ed., Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings of Boethius, De consolatione philoso-

phiae, A.D. 1593; Plutarch, De curiositate [A.D. 1598]; Horace, De arte poetica (Part), A.D.
1598. Early English Text Society, orig. ser. 113 (London: Early English Text Society, 1889).
12 Baldwin, 1944, 276. Baldwin actually mistakenly identifies her source as Publilius

Servus, whose wording is “Feras non culpes quod mutari non potest” (“what cannot be
changed must be endured”). It is, in fact, Erasmus’s “Feras non culpes quod vitari non
potest” (“what cannot be avoided must be endured”, Adagia 214, my italics). It appears
more than once in his De conscribendis epistolis, a widely used letter writing manual with
which Elizabeth was most certainly familiar. Mueller and Marcus also mistakenly attribute
the saying to Publilius Servus, although they also mention Erasmus’s Adagia; however,
they do not comment on the “mutari”, “vitari” variation, which clearly makes Erasmus the
source (Mueller and Marcus, 2003, 26, n. 4).
13 Dana Sutton, “The Queen’s Latin,” Neulateinisches Jahrbuch. Journal of Neo-Latin

Language and Literature 2 (2000): 233–40; 238–9.

14 Walter J. Ong, “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Studies in

Philology 56, no. 2 (1959): 103–24; 108.

Another random document with
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 “Indeed, one so young as you appear to be! But yours, young
man, are the sorrows, perhaps, of a youthful lover. Yours are not so
deeply rooted as mine.”
These words led to an explanation which told the two strangers
that their concerns were more nearly allied than they had been
aware. Our readers of course need not be informed that the elder of
the two was Mr Primrose, and the younger Mr Robert Darnley. They
were happy, however, in the midst of their sorrows, to have become
thus acquainted at a distance from home. They only regretted that
the distance between their respective situations in India had formed
an insuperable barrier against an acquaintance and intimacy there.
The fact is that, so long as Dr Greendale considered the return of Mr
Primrose as a matter of uncertainty, he had been very cautious of
exciting his daughter’s expectations. He had ventured to consider his
own approbation quite sufficient to allow of the correspondence
between his niece and Mr Robert Darnley, and had in his letters to
Mr Primrose simply mentioned the fact without stating particulars,
thinking that it would be time enough hereafter, should the mutual
affection of the young persons for each other continue and
strengthen. Mr Primrose had, in reply to that information, left Dr
Greendale quite at liberty to make such disposal of Penelope as he
might think proper; for the father was well aware that the uncle was,
both by discretion and affection, well qualified for the guardianship of
his child.
The vessels in which the two gentlemen sailed soon weighed
anchor and put to sea again. So the friends were parted for a time;
nor did they hold any farther communication on the course of their
voyage, for they had not left St Helena many days before the ship
parted company in a gale of wind. That vessel in which Mr Primrose
sailed first arrived in England, as we have already intimated.
 CHAPTER XIV.
England appeared to Mr Primrose quite a new world. He had
sixteen years ago sailed down the river Thames, which presented on
its banks at that time quite as much picturesque beauty as now. But
he did not then observe these beauties. His heart was full of other
thoughts, and his mind was moved by widely different feelings. There
had not been in his soul the sentiment of moral beauty, nor was
there in his heart that repose of pleasure which could admit of
enjoying the external world in its manifestations of beauty or
sublimity. But on his return homewards his thoughts were far
different. He had left England in forlorn hope, but he was returning
under brighter auspices. He had sailed from his native land, bearing
a deeply felt burden of self-reproach; and though he could not forget
or forgive his former self, and though still there were painful scenes
to be witnessed, and melancholy information to be received, yet the
aspect of things was widely different from what it had been at his
departure. And he expressed himself delighted with all that he saw.
The little boats and the lighter craft upon the river spoke of bustle
and activity, and of human interest; and in them he saw the
flutterings of business and prosperity. Though it was winter, and the
trees on the rising grounds were leafless, and the fields had lost their
greenness, yet the very pattern and outline of what the scene had
been in summer, and of what it would be again in spring, were all
very charming to his eye, then active with imagination. His own
bright thoughts gave verdure to the trees and greenness to the
fields; and he thought that England indeed was a blessed land. And
as the vessel made her way up the river, and as at a distance a
dense black cloud was seen, he knew that that was a manifestation
of their vicinity to the great city, and that dark mass of floating
smoke, which rustic eloquence so glibly reprobates, was to his soul a
great refreshment and a most pleasing sight.
 As soon as he disembarked, he first directed his steps to the office
of his agent in the city, to make enquiry respecting the speediest
mode of arriving at Smatterton: for he knew not that his daughter’s
residence was now in London. There is a great contrast between the
appearance of the banks of the Thames and the inside of a city
counting-house; but they are both very pleasant sights to those who
are glad to see them. Mr Primrose was indeed very glad to see his
native land, and to walk the streets of its busy metropolis; and with
very great cordiality did he shake hands with the principal in the
office, and very politely did the principal congratulate him on his
return to England. Mr Primrose did not notice the great contrast
between his own joy-expanded face and the business-looking aspect
of the agent; but he thought that all London looked as glad to see
him as he was to see London. After transacting at the office of his
agent such business as was immediately important, and without
waiting to observe what changes and improvements had taken place
in the great city since he had left it sixteen years ago, he made
enquiry after the readiest and quickest mode of reaching Smatterton,
and finding that the stage-coach was the most rapid conveyance, he
immediately directed his steps thitherward.
There are in the course of human life many strange and singular
coincidences. Now it happened that the very day on which Mr
Primrose was preparing to start for Smatterton, Mr Kipperson also
was going to travel the same road, and by the same conveyance.
Little did the former imagine that he was going away from his
daughter; little did he think that, in his way to the White Horse cellar
in Piccadilly, he had actually passed the house in which his beloved
child and only hope lay sick and ill. The days in December are very
short; and it was nearly dark when, at four o’clock in the afternoon,
Mr Primrose and Mr Kipperson, unknown to each other, took their
seats in the coach. They had the inside of the coach to themselves.
Mr Primrose, as we have said, was in good spirits. He certainly
had some cause for grief, and some source of concern; but the
feeling of satisfaction was most prominent. He had shed tears to the
memory of Dr Greendale, and he hoped that the worthy man had so
instructed the dependent one committed to his care, that no
permanent cause of uneasiness would be found in her. The
intelligence which he had received respecting her alleged and
supposed fickleness came from Mr Darnley, and the father,
therefore, knowing Mr Darnley to be a very severe and rigid kind of
man, and withal mighty positive, hoped that a premature judgment
had been formed, and trusted that, when all was explained, all would
be right. We must indeed do the father of Penelope the justice to say
that, with all his failings, he was sincere, candid, and downright. He
never suffered any misunderstanding to exist where it could possibly
be cleared up. He was plain and direct in all his conduct.
We need not say that Mr Kipperson was in good spirits. He always
was so. He was so very happy that by this last journey to London he
had saved the nation from being starved to death by a
superabundance of corn. What a fine thing it is to be the cleverest
man in the kingdom! What would become of us all were it not for
such men as Mr Kipperson starting up about once in a century, or
twice a-week, to rectify all the errors of all the rest of the world? And
what is the use of all the world beside, but to admire the wisdom of
such men as Mr Kipperson? Our only fear is that we may have too
many such profoundly wise men; and the consequence of an over
supply of wisdom would be to ruin the nation by folly.
Whether Mr Kipperson addressed Mr Primrose, or Mr Primrose
addressed Mr Kipperson, we know not; but in a very short time they
became mighty good friends. To some observation of Mr Primrose,
his fellow traveller replied:
“You have been abroad I suppose, sir?”
“I have, sir,” said Mr Primrose; “and that for a long while: it is now
upwards of sixteen years since I left England, and I am most happy
to return to it. Many changes have taken place since I went abroad,
and some, I hope, for the better.”
“Many improvements have indeed been made in the course of that
time. We have improved, for instance, in the rapidity with which we
travel; our roads are as smooth as a bowling-green. But our greatest
improvements of all are our intellectual improvements. We have
made wonderful strides in the march of intellect. England is now the
first country in the world for all that relates to science and art. The
cultivation of the understanding has advanced most astonishingly.
“I remember noticing when I was in India,” said Mr Primrose, “that
the number of publications seemed much increased. But many of
them appeared to be merely light reading.”
“Very likely, sir; but we have not merely light reading; we have a
most abundant supply of scientific publications: and these are read
with the utmost avidity by all classes of people, especially by the
lower classes. You have no doubt heard of the formation of the
mechanics’ institutes?”
“I have, sir,” replied Mr Primrose; “but I am not quite aware of the
precise nature of their constitution, or the object at which they aim.
Perhaps you can inform me?”
“That I can, sir,” said Mr Kipperson; “and I shall have great
pleasure in so doing; for to tell you the truth I am a very zealous
promoter of these institutions. The object of these institutions is to
give an opportunity to artisans, who are employed all day in manual
labour, to acquire a scientific knowledge, not only of the art by which
he lives and at which he works, but of everything else which can
possibly be known or become a subject of human inquiry or interest.”
“But surely,” interrupted Mr Primrose, “it is not designed to convert
mechanical into scientific men. That seems to my view rather a
contradiction to the general order of things.”
“I beg your pardon,” replied the other; “you are repeating, I
perceive, exploded objections. Is it possible, do you think, that a man
should do his work worse for understanding something of the
philosophy of it? Is it not far better, where it is practicable, that a man
should act as a rational reflecting creature, than as a piece of mere
machinery?”
“Very true, certainly, sir; you are right. Ay, ay, now I see: you
instruct all artisans in the philosophy of their several employments.
Most excellent. Then, I suppose, you teach architecture and read
lectures on Vitruvius to journey-men bricklayers?”
 “Nay, nay, sir,” replied Mr Kipperson, “we do not carry it quite so far
as that.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” replied Mr Primrose, “I had not the
slightest idea that this was carrying your system too far. It might,
perhaps, be a little refinement on the scheme to suppose that you
would teach tailors anatomy; but after all I do not see why you
should start at carrying a matter of this kind too far. The poet says, ‘a
little knowledge is a dangerous thing;’ and, for my own part, I can
see no great liberality in this parsimonious and stinted mode of
dealing out knowledge; for unless you teach the lower classes all
that is to be taught, you make, or more properly speaking keep up,
the distinction.”
Mr Kipperson was not best pleased with these remarks; he saw
that his fellow-traveller was one of those narrow-minded aristocratic
people, who are desirous of keeping the mass of the people in gross
ignorance, in order that they may be the more easily governed and
imposed upon. Though in good truth it has been said, that the
ignorant are not so easily governed as the enlightened. The
ingenious and learned Mr Kipperson then replied:
“You may say what you please, sir, in disparagement of the system
of enlightening the public mind; but surely you must allow that it is far
better for a poor industrious mechanic to attend some lecture on a
subject of science or philosophy, than to spend his evenings in
drunkenness and intemperance.”
“Indeed, sir, I have no wish to disparage the system of
enlightening the public mind; and I am quite of your opinion, that it is
much more desirable that a labouring man”——
“Operative, if you please,” said Mr Kipperson; “we have no
labouring men.”
“Well,” pursued Mr Primrose, “operative; the term used to be
labouring or working when I was last in England: I will agree with
you, sir, that it is really better that an operative should study
philosophy, than that he should drink an inordinate quantity of beer.
But do you find, sir, that your system does absolutely and actually
produce such effects?”
“Do we?” exclaimed Mr Kipperson triumphantly: “That we certainly
and clearly do: it is clear to demonstration; for, since the
establishment of mechanics’ institutes, the excise has fallen off very
considerably. And what can that deficiency be owing to, if it be not to
the fact which I have stated, that the operatives find philosophy a far
more agreeable recreation after labour than drinking strong beer?”
“You may be right, sir, and I have no doubt you are; but, as I have
been so long out of England, it is not to be wondered at that my
ideas have not been able to keep pace with the rapid strides which
education has made in England during that time. I am very far from
wishing to throw any objection or obstacle in the way of human
improvement. You call these establishments ‘mechanics’ institutions:’
but pray, sir, do you not allow any but mechanics to enjoy the benefit
of them? Now there is a very numerous class of men, and women
too—for I should think that so enlightened an age would not exclude
women from the acquisition of knowledge;—there is, I say, a very
numerous class of men and women who have much leisure and little
learning—I mean the servants of the nobility and gentry at the west
end of the town. It would be charitable to instruct them also in the
sciences. How pleasant it must be now for the coachman and
footman, who are waiting at the door of a house for their master and
mistress, at or after midnight, instead of sleeping on the carriage, or
swearing and blaspheming as they too frequently do, to have a
knowledge of astronomy, and study the movements of the planets. Is
there no provision made for these poor people?”
“Certainly there is,” said Mr Kipperson. “There are cheap
publications which treat of all the arts and sciences, so that for the
small charge of sixpence, a gentleman’s coachman may, in the
course of a fortnight, become acquainted with all the Newtonian
theory.”
Mr Primrose was delighted and astonished at what Mr Kipperson
told him; he could hardly believe his senses; he began to imagine
that he must himself be the most ignorant and uninformed person in
his majesty’s dominions.
“But tell me, sir,” continued he, “if those persons, whose time and
attention is of necessity so much occupied, are become so well
informed; do others, who have greater leisure, keep pace with them;
or, I should say, do they keep as much in the advance as their
leisure and opportunity allow them? For, according to your account,
the very poorest of the community are better instructed now than
were the gentry when I lived in England.”
“Education, sir,” answered Mr Kipperson, with the tone of an
oracle, “is altogether upon the advance. The science of instruction
has reached a point of perfection, which was never anticipated; nay,
I may say, we are astonished at ourselves. The time is now arrived
when the only ignorant and uninformed persons are those who have
had the misfortune to be educated at our public schools and
universities: for in them there is no improvement. I have myself been
witness of the most shocking and egregious ignorance in those men
who call themselves masters of arts. They know nothing in the world
about agriculture, architecture, botany, ship building, navigation,
ornithology, political economy, icthyology, zoology, or any of the ten
thousand sciences with which all the rest of the world is intimate. I
have actually heard an Oxford student, as he called himself, when
looking over a manufactory at Birmingham, ask such questions as
shewed that he was totally ignorant even of the very first rudiments
of button-making.”
“Astonishing ignorance,” exclaimed Mr Primrose, who was rather
sleepy; “I dare say they make it a rule to teach nothing but ignorance
at the two universities.”
“I believe you are right, sir,” said Mr Kipperson, rubbing his hands
with cold and extacy; “those universities have been a dead weight on
the country for centuries, but their inanity and weakness will be
exposed, and the whole system exploded. There is not a common
boys’ school in the kingdom which does not teach ten times more
useful knowledge than both the universities put together, and all the
public schools into the bargain. Why, sir, if you send a boy to school
now, he does not spend, as he did formerly, ten or twelve years in
learning the Latin grammar, but now he learns Latin and Greek, and
French, German, Spanish, Italian, dancing, drawing, music,
mapping, the use of the globes, chemistry, history, botany,
mechanics, hydrostatics, hydraulics, hydrodynamics, astronomy,
geology, gymnastics, architecture, engineering, ballooning, and
many more useful and indispensable arts and sciences, so that he is
fitted for any station in life, from a prime minister down to a shoe-
black.”
Before this speech was finished, Mr Primrose was fast asleep; but
short is the sleep in a coach that travels by night. The coach stopped
and woke our foreigner from a frightful dream. We do not wish to
terrify our readers, but we must relate the dream in consequence of
its singularity. He dreamed then, that he was in the island of Laputa,
and that having provoked the indignation of some of the learned
professors by expressing a doubt as to the practicability of some of
their schemes, he was sentenced to be buried alive under a pyramid
of encyclopedias. Just as the cruel people were putting the sentence
into execution, he woke and found his coat-collar almost in his
mouth, and heard the word ‘ology’ from the lips of his fellow traveller.
He was very glad to find that matters were no worse.
 CHAPTER XV.
Few indeed are the adventures now to be met with in travelling by
a stage coach, and few also, comparatively speaking, the accidents.
But our travellers were destined to meet both with accident and
adventure. The coach, as our observant readers have noticed, must
necessarily have travelled all night. The nights in December are long
and dark; and not unfrequently, during the long cold silence of a
December night, there gently falls upon the dank surface of the earth
a protecting and embellishing fleece of flaky snow. And the morning
snow as yet untrodden has a brilliant and even cheerful look beneath
a blue and brightly frosty sky; and when a wide expanse of country
variegated with venerably-aged trees, and new enclosures and old
open meadow lands, and adorned with here and there a mansion
surrounded with its appurtenances of larch, pine, and poplar, and
divided into unequal but gracefully undulating sections by means of a
quiet stream—when a scene like this bursts upon the morning eye of
a winter traveller, and shows itself set off and adorned with a mantle
of virgin snow, it is indeed a sight well worth looking at. Mr Primrose
had not seen snow for sixteen years, and the very sight of it warmed
his heart; for it was so much like home. It was one of those natural
peculiarities which distinguished the land of his birth from the land of
his exile. He expressed to his fellow traveller the delight which he felt
at the sight. Mr Kipperson coincided with him that the view was fine,
and proposed that, as they were both well clad, and as the scenery
was very magnificent, they should by way of a little variety seat
themselves on the outside of the coach. The proposal was readily
embraced, and they mounted the roof.
The carriage was proceeding at a tolerably rapid pace on high but
level ground; and the travellers enjoyed the brightness of the
morning, and the beauty of the valley which lay on their left hand.
Shortly they arrived at a steep descent which led into the valley
beneath, and there was no slacking of pace or locking of wheels,
which had been customary in going down hill when Mr Primrose was
last in England. He expressed, therefore, his surprise at the
boldness or carelessness of the coachman, and hinted that he was
fearful lest some accident might happen. But Mr Kipperson
immediately dissipated his fears, by telling him that this was the
usual practice now, and that the construction of stage-coaches, and
the art of driving, were so much improved, that it was now
considered a far safer and better plan to proceed in the usual pace
down hill as well as upon level ground. Mr Kipperson, in short, had
just proved to a demonstration that it was impossible that any
accident could happen, when down fell one of the horses, and
presently after down fell coach and all its company together.
Happily no lives were lost by the accident. But if Mr Kipperson’s
neck was not broken by the fall, his heart was almost broken by the
flat contradiction which the prostrate carriage gave to his theory, and
he lay as one bereft of life. Equally still and silent lay Mr Primrose;
for he was under the awkward difficulty of either denying his fellow
traveller’s correctness or doubting the testimony of his own senses.
The catastrophe took place near to a turnpike house; so that those of
the passengers, who had experienced any injury from the
overturning of the coach, could be speedily accommodated with all
needful assistance. All the passengers, however, except Mr
Primrose, were perfectly able, when the coach was put to rights
again, to resume their journey. Mr Primrose, as soon as he
recovered from the first shock of his fall, was very glad to take refuge
in the turnpike house, and he soon became sensible that it would not
be prudent for him then to pursue his journey. He had indeed
received a severe shock from the accident, and though he had no
bones broken he had suffered a violent concussion which might be
doctored into an illness.
As soon as possible medical assistance was procured. The
surgeon examined and interrogated the overturned gentleman with
great diligence and sagacity. From the examination, it appeared not
unlikely that the patient might promise himself the pleasure of a
speedy removal. The truth of the matter was, that the poor
gentleman was more frightened than hurt. Some cases there are,
and this was one of them, in which no time should be lost in sending
for the doctor, seeing that, if the doctor be not sent for immediately,
he may not be wanted at all. This is one of the reasons why
physicians keep carriages, and have their horses always in
readiness; for by using great expedition they frequently manage to
arrive before the patient recovers.
The surgeon who attended Mr Primrose thought proper to take
some blood from his patient, and to supply the place of the same by
as many draughts as could be conveniently taken, or be reasonably
given in the time. It was also recommended that the gentleman
should be put to bed.
The dwellings attached to turnpike gates are seldom so roomy and
so abundantly provided with accommodation as to admit of an
accidental visitor: but in the present case it so happened that there
was an apartment unoccupied and not unfurnished. The
gatekeeper’s wife, who was a notable and motherly kind of woman,
said, that if the gentleman could put up with a very small apartment,
and a coarse but clean bed, he might be accommodated, and he
need not fear that the bed was damp, for it had been occupied for
the last month, and had only been vacated the day before. Mr
Primrose readily accepted the offer, not being very particular as to
appearance.
“I suppose,” said he, “you keep a spare bed for the
accommodation of those who may be overturned in coming down
this hill? Your surgeon, I find, does not live far off. That is a good
contrivance. Pray can you tell me, within a dozen or two, how many
broken bones the stage coach supplies him with in the course of the
year?”
At this speech the good woman laughed, for it was uttered in such
a tone as intimated that the gentleman wished it to be laughed at;
and as he was a respectable looking man, and carried in his aspect
a promise to pay, the worthy wife of the gate-keeper laughed with
right good will.
“Oh dear no, sir,” said she, “there is not an accident happens here
hardly ever. The coachman what overturned you this morning, is one
of the most carefullest men in the world, only he had a new horse as
didn’t know the road.”
“A very great comfort is that,” said Mr Primrose, and he smiled,
and the gate-keeper’s wife smiled, and she thought Mr Primrose a
very funny man, that he should be able to joke when under the
doctor’s hands. There are some people who are very facetious when
they are sick, provided the sickness be not very acute; for it looks
like heroism to laugh amidst pain and trouble.
Mr Primrose then proceeded; “So you will assure me that the
person who occupied your spare bed last, was not an overturned
coach passenger?”
The poor woman did not smile at this observation, but on the
contrary looked very grave, and her eyes seemed to be filling with
tears, when she compressed her lips and shook her head mournfully.
With some effort, after a momentary silence, she said:
“No, sir, it was not any one that was overturned; but it was a coach
passenger. It was a young lady, poor dear soul! that seemed almost
dying of a broken heart. But had not you better go to bed, sir? The
doctor said you wanted rest.”
Mr Primrose was a nervous man, and tales of sorrow inartificially
told frequently depressed him, and excited his sympathy with greater
force than was consistent with poetical enjoyment. He therefore took
the considerate advice which the good woman gave him, and retired
to rest. To a person of such temperament as Mr Primrose, the very
mention of a young lady almost dying of a broken heart was quite
sufficient to set his imagination most painfully at work. Rapidly did
his thoughts run over the various causes of broken hearts. Very
angry did he become with those hardened ones, by whose follies
and vices so many of the gentler sex suffer the acutest pangs of the
spirit. He thought of his own dear and only child, and he almost
wrought himself up to a fever by the imagination that some villanous
coxcomb might have trifled with her affections, and have left her to
the mockery of the world. He then thought of the mother of his
Penelope, and that she had died of a broken heart, and that his
follies had brought her to an untimely grave. Then came there into
his mind thoughts of retributive justice, and there was an
indescribable apprehension in his soul that the sorrows which he had
occasioned to another might fall also to his own lot. He wondered
that there should be in the world so much cruelty, and such a wanton
sporting with each others’ sufferings. The powerful emotions which
had been raised in his mind from the first hour that he embarked for
England, were of a nature so mingled, and in their movements so
rapid, that he hardly knew whether they were pleasurable or painful.
There was so much pleasure in the pain, and so much pain in the
pleasure, that his mind was rendered quite unsteady by a constant
whirl and vortex of emotions. He felt a kind of childish vivacity and
womanly sensibility. His tears and his smiles were equally
involuntary; he had no power over them, and he had scarcely notice
of their approach. Something of this was natural to him; but present
circumstances more strongly and powerfully developed this
characteristic. The accident, from which he had received so sudden
a shock, tended still farther to increase the excitability of his mind.
When therefore he retired for the purpose of gaining a little rest, his
solitude opened a wider door to imagination and recollection; and
thereupon a confused multitude of images of the past, and of fancies
for the future, came rushing in upon him, and his mind was like a
feather in a storm.
The surgeon was very attentive to his patient, for he made a
second visit not above four hours after the first. The people at the
turnpike-house told him that the gentleman had, in pursuance of the
advice given him, retired to take a little rest. The medical man
commended that movement; but being desirous to see how his
patient rested, he opened the door of the apartment very gently, and
Mr Primrose, who was wide awake, and happy to see any one to
whom he could talk, called aloud to the surgeon to walk in.
“I am not asleep, sir; you may come in; I am very glad to see you; I
have felt very much relieved by the bleeding. I think I shall be quite
well enough to proceed to-morrow. Pray, sir, can you inform me how
far it is to Smatterton from this place?”
“About sixty miles,” replied the surgeon.
 “Sixty miles!” echoed Mr Primrose; “at what a prodigious rate then
we must have travelled.” Thereupon the patient raised himself up in
the bed, and began, or attempted to begin, a long conversation with
his doctor. “Why, sir, when I was in England last, the coach used to
be nearly twice as long on the road. Is this the usual rate of
travelling?”
The medical man smiled, and said, “The coach by which you
travelled, is by no means a quick one, some coaches on this road
travel much faster.”
“And pray, sir, do these coaches ever arrive safely at their
journey’s end?”
The surgeon smiled again and said, “Oh yes, sir, accidents are
very rare.”
“Then I wish,” replied Mr Primrose; “that they had not indulged me
with so great a rarity just on my arrival in England. I have been in the
East Indies for the last sixteen or seventeen years, and during that
time—”
Few medical men whose business is worth following, have time to
listen to the history of a man’s life and adventures for sixteen or
seventeen years. Hindoostan is certainly a very interesting country,
but there is no country on the face of the earth so interesting as a
man’s own cupboard. The doctor therefore cut off his patient’s
speech, not in the midst, but at the very beginning; saying unto him,
with a smile, for there is much meaning in a smile; “Yes sir, certainly
sir, there is no doubt of it—very true; but, sir, I think it will be better
for you at present to be kept quiet; and if you can get a little sleep it
will be better for you. I think, sir, to-morrow, or the next day, you may
venture to proceed on your journey. I will send you a composing
draught as soon as I return home, and will see you again to-morrow,
early in the morning. But I would not recommend you to travel by the
stage coach.”
“Ay, ay, thank you for that recommendation, and you may take my
word I will follow it.”
 The doctor very quickly took his leave, and Mr Primrose thought
him a very unmannerly cub, because he would not stop to talk. “A
composing draught!” thus soliloquized the patient; “a composing
draught! a composing fiddlestick! What does the fellow mean by
keeping me thus in bed and sending me in his villanous compounds.
Why, I think I am almost able to walk to Smatterton. I won’t take his
composing draught; I’ll leave it here for the next coach passenger
that may be overturned at the foot of this hill. I dare to say it will not
spoil with keeping.”
The word “coach-passenger” brought to Mr Primrose’s recollection
the melancholy look and sorrowful tone of the poor woman who
mentioned the young lady who seemed almost dying of a broken
heart. His curiosity was roused, his nerves were agitated. He kept
thinking of his poor Penelope. He recollected with an almost painful
vividness the features and voice of the pretty little innocent he had
left behind him when he quitted England. He recollected and painted
with imagination’s strongest lines and most glowing colours that
distracting and heart-rending scene, when after listening with tearful
silence to the kind admonitions of his brother-in-law, he snatched up
in his arms his dear little laughing Penelope, and he saw again as
pungently as in reality, the little arms that clasped him with an
eagerness of joy, and he recollected how his poor dear child in the
simplicity of her heart mistook the agitations and tremblings of grief
for the frolicsome wantonness of joy, and he saw again that
indescribably exquisite expression with which she first caught sight
of his tears; and then there came over his mind the impression
produced by the artless manner in which the poor thing said, “Good
night, papa, perhaps you won’t cry to-morrow.”
Now he thought of that Penelope as grown up to woman’s estate,
and he felt that he should be proud of his daughter: but oh what
fears and misgivings came upon him, and he kept muttering to
himself the words of the woman who had talked of the young lady
almost dying of a broken heart. It was well for the patient that the
doctor soon fulfilled his word and sent a composing draught. But the
very moment that his attentive nurse gently tapped at the door of his
room, he called out:
 “Come in, come in, I am not asleep. Oh, what you have brought
me a composing draught! Nonsense, nonsense, keep it for the next
coach-passenger that is overturned, and give it to him with my
compliments. Well, but I say, good woman, you were telling me
something about a poor young lady who was almost dying with a
broken heart. Who is she? Where is she? What is her name? Where
is she gone to? Where did she come from? Who broke her heart?
Was she married, or was she single? Now tell me all about her.”
“Oh dear, sir, I am sure you had better take this physic what the
doctor has sent you, that will do you more good than a mallancolly
story. Indeed you’d better, sir; shall I pour it out into a cup?”
“Ay, ay, pour it out. But I say, good woman, tell me where did this
poor young lady come from?”
“Lord, sir, I never saw such a curious gentleman in my life. Why,
then if you must know, she came from a long way off, from a village
of the name of Smatterton, a little village where my Lord Smatterton
has a fine castle.”
While the good woman was speaking she kept her eyes fixed
upon the cup into which she was slowly pouring the medicine, and
therefore she did not perceive the effect produced upon the patient
by the mention of Smatterton; for, as soon as he heard the name he
started, turned pale, and was breathless and speechless for a
moment; and then recovering the use of his speech, he exclaimed,
“Smatterton! Smatterton! Good woman, are you in your senses?
What do you mean?”
Now it was very well for Mr Primrose and his composing draught
that the wife of the gate-keeper was not nervous; for had she been
nervous, that sudden and almost ridiculous exclamation, uttered as it
was, in a very high key, and with a very loud voice, would certainly
have upset the cup together with its contents. If ever a composing
draught was necessary, it clearly was so on this occasion. The good
woman however did not let the cup fall, but with the utmost
composure looked at the patient and said:
 “Lawk-a-mercy, sir, don’t be in such a taking. I durst to say the
poor cretter wasn’t nobody as you know. She was a kind of a poor
young lady like. There now, sir, pray do take your physic, ’cause
you’ll never get well if you don’t.”
Mr Primrose was still in great agitation, and that more from
imagination than apprehension. His nervous sensibility had been
excited, and everything that at all touched his feelings did most
deeply move him. He therefore answered the poor woman in a
hurried manner:
“Come, come, good woman, I will swallow the medicine, if you will
have the goodness to tell me all you know about this poor young
lady.”
Now, as it was very little that the good woman did know, she
thought it might be for the patient’s advantage if he would take the
medicine even upon those terms. For she had so much respect for
the skill of the doctor, that it was her firm opinion that the draught
would have more power in composing, than her slender narrative in
disturbing, the gentleman’s mind. She very calmly then handed the
cup and said: “Well, sir, then if you will but take the physic, I will tell
you all I know about the matter.”
Mr Primrose complied with the condition, and took the medicine
with so much eagerness, that he seemed as if he were about to
swallow cup and all.
“There, sir,” said the good woman, mightily pleased at her own
management; “now I hope you will soon get better.”
“Well, now I have taken my medicine; so tell me all you know
about this young lady.”
“Why, sir, ’tisn’t much as I know: only, about two months ago, that
coach what you came by was going up to town, and it stopped, as it
always does, at our gate, and the coachman says to my husband,
says he, ‘Here’s a poor young lady in the coach so ill that she cannot
travel any farther; can you take her in for a day or two?’ And so I
went and handed the poor thing out of the coach, and I put her to
bed; and sure enough, poor thing, she was very ill. Then, sir, I sent
for the doctor; but, dear me, he could do her no good: and so then I
used to go and talk to the poor cretter, and all she would say to me
was, ‘Pray, let me die.’ But in a few days she grew a little better, and
began to talk about continuing her journey, and I found out, sir, that
the poor dear lady was broken-hearted.”
Here the narrator paused. But hitherto no definite information had
been conveyed to Mr Primrose, and he almost repented that he had
taken the trouble to swallow the medicine for such a meagre
narrative.
“And is that all you know, good woman? Did not you learn her
name?”
“Yes,” replied the informant: “her name was Fitzpatrick: and after
she was gone, I asked the coachman who brought her, and he told
me that that wicked young nobleman, Lord Spoonbill, had taken the
poor thing away from her friends, and had promised to make a fine
lady of her, but afterwards deserted her and sent her about her
business. And all because my lord was mighty sweet upon another
young lady what lives at Smatterton.”
Now came the truth into Mr Primrose’s mind, and he readily knew
that this other young lady was his Penelope. This corroborated the
letter which Mr Darnley had written to him on the decease of Dr
Greendale. Happy was it for the father of Penelope that he had no
suspicion of unworthy intentions towards his daughter on the part of
Lord Spoonbill; and well was it for the traveller that he had
swallowed the composing draught. He received the information with
tolerable calmness, and thanking the poor woman for indulging his
curiosity, he very quietly dismissed her. And as soon as she was
gone he muttered to himself:
“My child shall never marry a villain, though he may be a
nobleman.”
 CHAPTER XVI.
Whether it was that the medicine which Mr Primrose had taken
possessed extraordinary composing powers, or whether his mind
had been quieted by its own outrageous agitations, we cannot say;
but to whatever cause it might be owing, it is a fact that, on the
following morning he was much more composed, and the medical
attendant pronounced that he might without any danger proceed on
his journey.
He was not slow in availing himself of this permission, and he also
followed the suggestion of his medical attendant in not travelling by
the stage-coach. After astonishing the gate-keeper and his wife, and
also the doctor, by his liberality for their attention to him, he started in
a post-chaise for Smatterton. No accident or interruption impeded his
progress, and at a late hour he arrived at Neverden, intending to pay
his first visit to Mr Darnley, and designing through him to
communicate to Penelope the knowledge of his arrival, and prepare
her for the meeting.
It was necessary for Mr Primrose to introduce himself to Mr
Darnley. The stately rector of Neverden was in his study. He was not
much of a reading man, he never had been; but still it was necessary
that he should keep up appearances, and therefore he occasionally
shut himself up in that room which he called his study; and there he
would read for an hour or two some papers of the Spectator, or some
old numbers of the Gentleman’s Magazine, or Blackstone’s
Commentaries, or any other book of equal reputation for sound
principles. There is a great advantage in reading those books that
everybody talks about and nobody reads. It was also very proper
that, if any of the parishioners called on the rector, it might be
necessary to send for him “out of the study.” Sometimes also Mr
Darnley gave audiences in his study, and then the unlearned
agriculturists thought him a most wonderful man to have so many
books, and so many large books too; some of them looking as big as