Abstract
John Foxe supplied the most famous account of Mary I’s deathbed. In Acts and Monuments, he wrote of a queen tormented by the loss of Calais. Three Catholic writers provide a counterpoint to the distress Foxe describes, as the deathbed accounts, full of praise and not Foxean invective, found in Alvise Priuli’s correspondence (1558), John White’s funeral sermon (1558), and Henry Clifford’s The Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria (c. 1613–1616), prove. These texts take a similar view of the virtue of Mary’s life and reign, confirmed by her devout participation in the sacraments and the godliness of her death. She was a kind of saint or, due to her suffering in life, a martyr and so it is fitting that the Catholic texts include hagiographic elements. The genres are obviously diverse, but the forms of writing facilitate the praise of Mary within a framework of right religion.
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Notes
- 1.
John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (1576 edition) (The Digital Humanities Institute, Sheffield, 2011), Book 12, 2015.
- 2.
Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1576 edition), Book 12, 2015.
- 3.
Victor Houliston, “‘Her Majesty, Who Is Now in Heaven’: Mary Tudor and Elizabethan Catholics,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 37.
Rawdon Brown, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1557–1558 (London: Longman, 1881).
The bishop of Winchester’s funeral sermon is reproduced in “A Catalogue of Originals” (Number LXXXI) appended to the second part of the third book of John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, Relating Chiefly to Religion, and the Reformation of It, and the Emergencies of the Church of England, Under Henry VIII. King Edward VI. And Queen Mary I. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1822). The source is listed in the margin of the text as Cott. Libr. Vespasian, D. 18.
Henry Clifford, The Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, ed. Joseph Stevenson (London: Burn and Oates, 1887).
- 4.
David Loades speculates that the cause of Mary’s death might have been gynaecological, precursors of which were menstrual problems and false pregnancy, or the same type of influenza epidemic that killed Cardinal Pole. See Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 310–.311.
- 5.
Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in Early Modern England, 1480–1750, Oxford Studies in Social History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 203.
- 6.
Doran, “A ‘Sharp Rod’ of Chastisement: Mary I Through Protestant Eyes During the Reign of Elizabeth I,” Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, 21.
- 7.
Alexandra Walsham suggests providence “was a set of ideological spectacles through which individuals of all social levels and from all positions on the confessional spectrum were apt to view their universe, an invisible prism which helped them to focus the refractory meanings of both petty and perplexing events” (2–3). Thus, both Protestantism and Catholicism can be associated with providentialism. See Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
- 8.
Catherine Loomis, The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6.
- 9.
Loomis, Death of Elizabeth I, 18–20.
- 10.
On the death, funeral, and tomb of the archbishop, see Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 343–355.
- 11.
Mayer describes Priuli’s homosexuality, Pole’s sexuality, and the relationship between the two men (Reginald Pole, 442–451).
- 12.
Mayer, Reginald Pole, 356.
- 13.
The Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, identifies the recipient of two letters (entries 1286 and 1287, dated 27 November) as Antonio Giberti. Mayer recognizes two distinct recipients: Antonio Priuli (entry 1286) and Antonio Giberti (entry 1287). See Mayer, The Correspondence of Reginald Pole: Volume 3. A Calendar, 1555–1558: Restoring the English Church (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 580, 584.
References to the Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, abbreviated as CSPV, are cited by entry and page numbers. CSPV 1287 corresponds with No. 2312 in Mayer, Correspondence, 584–587.
- 14.
CSPV 1287/1556.
- 15.
Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, 203.
- 16.
CSPV 1292/1566. CSPV 1292 corresponds with No. 2315 in Mayer, Correspondence, 588–590.
- 17.
CSPV 1286/1550. CSPV 1286 corresponds with No. 2311 in Mayer, Correspondence, 580–584.
- 18.
CSPV 1286/1549.
- 19.
CSPV 1291/1565. CSPV 1291 corresponds with No. 2314 in Mayer, Correspondence, 588.
- 20.
CSPV 1286/1550.
- 21.
CSPV 1286/1550.
- 22.
For a discussion of Pole as martyr, see Mayer, Reginald Pole, 5.
- 23.
Loades, “The Personal Religion of Mary I,” in The Church of Mary Tudor, ed. Eamon Duffy and Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 26.
- 24.
For a full discussion of the funeral sermon, see Carolyn Colbert, “‘Mary Hath Chosen the Best Part’: The Bishop of Winchester’s Funeral Sermon for Mary Tudor,” in Catholic Renewal and Protestant Resistance in Marian England, ed. Elizabeth Evenden and Vivienne Westbrook (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 273–292.
- 25.
For a biography of White, see Kenneth Carleton, “White, John (1509/10-1560),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
- 26.
Judith M. Richards, Mary Tudor, Routledge Historical Biographies (London: Routledge, 2008), 230.
- 27.
Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, 311.
- 28.
Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, 312.
- 29.
According to Houlbrooke, “Preachers often felt able, in the end, to provide solid grounds for hope, or reasons to believe, that the deceased had gained by their deaths, or had enjoyed a happy dissolution. The departed were frequently said to be in peace, perfect happiness, sharing the glories of heaven, enjoying the crown of life or a glorious reward” (Death, Religion, 317).
- 30.
Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 545.
- 31.
For a discussion of the iconography of the Virgin Mary in panegyrics to Mary I, see Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 34–37. For the queen’s personal connection to the Mother of Christ, see John Edwards, Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 346–347, and Loades, “Personal Religion,” 20–21.
- 32.
Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 538.
- 33.
Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 545.
- 34.
Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 545.
- 35.
Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 169.
- 36.
For a brief discussion of ecclesiastical supremacy and Mary, see William Wizeman, “The Religious Policy of Mary I,” in Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives, 153–154.
- 37.
Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 546.
- 38.
Richards, Mary Tudor, 122–123.
- 39.
The figures in both sculptural and painted pietàs would undoubtedly be familiar to a mid-sixteenth-century audience. The pietà had developed into a popular devotional art form during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. See Sally Cunneen, In Search of Mary: The Woman and the Symbol (New York: Ballantine, 1996), 188–189, and Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 80.
- 40.
Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 546.
- 41.
The source of the biblical quotation is the Douay-Rheims edition.
- 42.
Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 547.
- 43.
Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 547–548.
- 44.
Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 548.
- 45.
Doran mentions the existence of Marian apologists during the reign of James I (Mary Tudor, 35).
- 46.
For a discussion of the relationship of Jane Dormer and Queen Mary, see Richards, Mary Tudor, 237.
- 47.
Two relatively recent biographies that list The Life of Jane Dormer as a source are Edwards, Mary I, and Anna Whitelock, Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen (London: Random House, 2010).
- 48.
Judith Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
- 49.
Anderson, Biographical Truth, 2.
- 50.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 87.
- 51.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 2.
- 52.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, xiv. The dating of this manuscript is rather complicated. Stevenson estimates that the composition of the Life probably started in 1613, after the death of the duchess in January of that year, but work was still being done to it in 1616 (xiv). The Dormer manuscript was, according to the editor, “written in the year 1643, and it was then presented to Charles Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon and Lord Baron of Wing; but it had evidently been drawn up at a much earlier date, while the incidents which are here recorded were fresh in the memory of the author” (xiii).
- 53.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 69.
- 54.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 64.
- 55.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 82.
- 56.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 83–84.
- 57.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 70–71.
- 58.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 69.
- 59.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 69–70.
- 60.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 70.
- 61.
Clifford, Jane Dormer,71.
- 62.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 72.
- 63.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 72.
- 64.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 71.
- 65.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 71–72.
- 66.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 151.
- 67.
Thomas, Decline of Magic, 153–154.
- 68.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 70.
- 69.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 66.
- 70.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 98.
- 71.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 100.
- 72.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 99.
- 73.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 98–99.
- 74.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 99.
- 75.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 98.
- 76.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 94. Clifford accused Elizabeth of many other evils and irregularities during her reign, including lying about her virginity, her involvement in the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the heavy burden of taxation, providing help to foreign rebels, her sanction of piracy, and her treatment of Philip of Spain (96–98).
- 77.
Clifford, Jane Dormer, 99. Although Thomas does not specifically discuss witchcraft involving a nail and a playing card, he suggests that the use of such “technical aids” is less common than physical contact and curses (Decline of Magic, 519).
- 78.
Doran, “Sharp Rod,” 35.
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Colbert, C. (2022). “She …Yielded a Mild and Gracious Spirit into the Hands of Her Maker”: Three Catholic Accounts of the Death of Mary I. In: Schutte, V., Hower, J.S. (eds) Mary I in Writing. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95128-3_11
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