Abstract
In this essay, I explore the physical features of the six French holograph letters written by Elizabeth I to Francis, Duke of Anjou (1555–84) edited in the previous chapter in this volume. All six of these letters can be found in the collection of Cecil Papers (CP) at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, alongside other letters from Elizabeth to Anjou, scribal copies of other letters from Elizabeth to Anjou, letters from Anjou to Elizabeth, and other documents associated with the negotiations for the French match at the turn of the 1580s.
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Notes
James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 10. Other studies include
Sara Jayne Steen, “Reading Beyond the Words: Material Letters and the Process of Interpretation,” Quidditas, 22 (2001): 55–69;
Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe, Letterwriting in Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004);
Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Daniel Starza Smith, “Early Modern Letters: A Reader’s Guide,” http://www.bessofhardwick.org/background.jsp?id=143.
Although I borrow this term from Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), McGann’s concept of a “bibliographical code” differs slightly from mine: he focuses solely on the meaningful physical features of printed literary texts (“typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format, and all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to ‘poetry’ or ‘the text as such’” [13]) and prioritizes less than I do meanings that we can be sure would have been understood by contemporary readers. For a very acute analysis of McGann’s methodology and its difference from the approach of D. F. McKenzie, the founding father of the “material” or “sociological” turn in textual studies, see
Wim van Mierlo, “Reflections on Textual Editing in the Time of the History of the Book,” Variants, 10 (2013): 133–61.
Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 42.
Aysha Pollnitz, “Christian Women or Sovereign Queens? The Schooling of Mary and Elizabeth”, in Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock, eds., Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 128–42.
“In the case of the Queen’s letters, written in French or English, Latin epistolary style and in particular the style of Cicero, seems to be the model” (Guillaume Coatalen, “‘Ma plume vous pourra exprimer:’ Elizabeth’s French Correspondence,” in Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture, eds. Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], 83–104).
Rayne Allinson, A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
As Lisa Jardine vividly demonstrates, in “Reading and the Technology of Textual Affect: Erasmus’s Familiar Letters and Shakespeare’s King Lear,” in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 77–101, doubt and anxiety about sincerity, and the potential for deceit, was at the very heart of these supposedly artless, straightforward bits of writing. The disjunction between the rhetorical approach to letter-writing (valorizing artful strategy) and the ideal of the familiar letter genre (holding up for admiration artlessness and sincerity) was problematic: both attitudes are important in Erasmus’s huge letter-writing manual, De conscribendis epistolis (Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 3: De Conscribendis Epistolis; Formula/De Civilitate, ed. J. K. Sowards [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985]). Early modern correspondents were, in effect, simultaneously pressurized both to use rhetorical devices and to give the impression of not using them. For further complications, see
Jonathan Gibson, “Letters,” in A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 453–60.
Cf. Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 3: De Conscribendis Epistolis; Formula/De Civilitate, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 65.
Cf. Conyers Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (London: Cape, 1960).
The explanation for these items’ presence at Hatfield probably lies, as Conyers Read argued, in a letter from Burghley to Walsingham written just after Anjou’s departure after his second visit to England in February 1581–2. In this letter, Burghley reports that Marchaumont’s lodgings have been robbed and that somebody who has found a trunk of the diplomat’s papers abandoned in a yard has, embarrassingly, brought Burghley a financial agreement between Marchaumont and Walsingham. Burghley tells Walsingham he suspects “whoredom in the house bred the theft”; Read suspects that the affair was less accidental than Burghley lets on (Conyers Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth [London: Cape, 1960], 271; CSPD 1581–90, 45; Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham, vol. 2, 99, note 2). The early dockets on these letters were clearly not made by Du Bex, De Marchaumont or their clerks, as most of them record the addressee rather than the sender (e.g., “A mr de Marchaumont,” “A mr du Baix”) and some are in English (‘to Mr du Bays”).
Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham, vol. 2, 7–8, note 3. For the “want of secrecie and dispatch” among Walsingham’s clerks, see Charles Hughes, “Nicholas Faunt’s Discourse Touching the Office of Principal Secretary of Estate, &c. 1592,” English Historical Review 20 (1905): 499–508 (500). Such examples can be multiplied: cf. the casual reference of Bernardino de Mendoza, Spanish ambassador to England, to a letter written on behalf of Anjou that has “fallen into” his hands (CSPSp 1580–6, no. 1).
As she did in the case of the Earl of Essex (Grace Ioppolo, “‘Your Majesties Most Humble Faythfullest and Most Affectionate Seruant.’ The Earl of Essex Constructs Himself and the Queen in the Hulton Letters,” in Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo, eds., Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing [London: British Library, 2007], 43–69 [68]).
Luke MacMahon, “Tomson, Laurence (1539–1608),” ODNB. Many examples of Tomson’s cursive hand can be found in the State Papers in The National Archives, including plentiful material from the period of the Anjou negotiations, for example SP 104/163, f. 151, a copy of an English letter of the queen’s from April 1578–9. Tomson was also responsible, with Burghley, for taking notes on the meetings on the French marriage held by an informal inner grouping of the Privy Council (Natalie Mears, “Love-making and Diplomacy: Elizabeth I and the Anjou Marriage Negotiations, c.1578–1582,” History 86 [2001]: 442–66 [454]).
For the dispersal of Walsingham’s papers, see Hsuan-Ying Tu, “The Pursuit of God’s Glory: Francis Walsingham’s Espionage in Elizabethan Politics, 1560–1588,” PhD thesis, University of York, 2012, 17–34; Tomson’s letter to Robert Cecil is CP 179/99 (Salisbury, vol. 9, 399). Tu exaggerates the extent to which Walsingham was frozen out of the Anjou marriage negotiations: with her account, contrast Simon Adams and Alan Bryson, rev. Mitchell Leimon, “Walsingham, Sir Francis (c. 1532–1590), principal secretary,” ODNB.
Daybell, Material Letter, 34; Mark Bland, A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 29–30, 43–48.
H. R. Woudhuysen “The Queen’s Own Hand: A Preliminary Account,” in Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo, eds., Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (London: British Library, 2007), 1–27; Coatalen, “Ma plume,”; Bajetta, “Editing,” 65, note 28. A different eagle watermark (Briquet, no. 143) is used in the letters to Maximilian II edited by Carlo Bajetta elsewhere in this volume, 147, note 35.
Lee Hendrix and Thea Vignau-Wilberg, Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta: A Sixteenth-Century Calligraphic Manuscript Inscribed by Georg Bocksay and Illuminated by Joris Hoefnagel (Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992), 412.
I have written in more detail about this practice elsewhere (Jonathan Gibson, “Significant Space in Manuscript Letters,” The SeventeenthCentury, 12 [2002], 1–9); for a recent study, see Daybell, Material Letter, 90–95.
A famous fictional example is Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which the steward Malvolio believes an intimate letter to him forged by his fellow servant Maria to have been written by their mistress Olivia, deceived both by the use of Olivia’s small seal and by the similarity of Maria’s handwriting to Olivia’s (William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, eds. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 2.5.
David Starkey, “Representation Through Intimacy,” in Symbols and Sentiments: Cross-Cultural Studies in Symbolism, ed. loan Lewis (London: Academic Press, 1977), 187–224
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© 2014 Carlo M. Bajetta, Guillaume Coatalen, and Jonathan Gibson
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Gibson, J. (2014). “Dedans la plie de mon fidelle affection”: Familiarity and Materiality in Elizabeth’s Letters to Anjou. In: Bajetta, C.M., Coatalen, G., Gibson, J. (eds) Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448415_3
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