Queen Elizabeth’s summer progresses provided a regular occasion for ceremonial and entertainment. They presented an opportunity for the Queen to interact publicly with her subjects, from the chosen host, his household, and the travelling court to the wider public who might attend or participate in certain elements of the entertainment; and the publication of pamphlets recounting the events was a way of representing that interaction to an even wider public. The visit to the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth on the summer progress of 1575, however, was unusual in two ways. First, its extended duration and magnificence (lasting nineteen days, at an estimated cost to Leicester, according to some reports, of ?1,000 per day, not to mention the costs of embellishing Kenilworth over a period of years before 1575) were unmatched by any of Elizabeth’s progresses before or after it; and secondly, two printed accounts of it are extant, a situation which allows comparison between two different ways of representing the progress to different audiences.1
The more straightforward of the two accounts (in the sense that its author and purpose are fairly easily identified) was written by George Gascoigne and printed as The Princely Pleasures at the Court at Kenilworth in 1576.2 Gascoigne was one of several authors employed to write and perform in the entertainments for the Queen, and his printed account identifies William Hunnis, John Badger, George Ferrers, Richard Mulcaster, William Patten, and Harry Goldingham as the authors of others for this occasion. He had fought in the Netherlands in 1572-3, supporting the Dutch revolt against the Spanish, an affiliation he shared with the Earl of Leicester, whose Puritan leanings made him a strong supporter of the Dutch. Commissioned by Leicester, then, to help write the entertainments, and politically aligned with him, Gascoigne’s printed text was probably also commissioned by Leicester and likely to reflect Leicester’s interests.
The second account, whose full title is A Letter: Wherein, part of the entertainment unto the Queen’s Majesty, at Kenilworth Castle, in Warwickshire, in this summer’s progress, 1575, is signified: from a friend officer attendant in court, unto his friend a citizen, and merchant of London, was published anonymously, with no publisher’s name or date, in 1575, but names its author within the text by variants of the formulae R. L. and Robert Langham, or Laneham. Its authorship and purpose are considerably more problematic. Though the most recent editor of the Letter, R. J. P. Kuin, remains convinced that it is indeed the work of Robert Langham (a London mercer and Keeper of the Council Chamber), other scholars have argued that it was written by William Patten, named by Gascoigne as a co-writer of the entertainments.3 A private letter written by William Patten to Lord Burghley, dated 10 September 1575, a few weeks after the Kenilworth events, makes reference to an order ‘hoow the book waz too be supprest for that Langham hath complaynd upon it. and ootherwize for that the honorabl enterteinment be not turned intoo a jest’; and this has been read, in tandem with other evidence (such as the characteristic spelling of the Letter), as indicative that the Letter was in fact written by Patten as a joke against Langham. If so, however, it seems to have been a joke that Patten expected Langham to share, since he himself had directed Thomas Wilson to give Langham a copy, and in his letter to Burghley he professes himself‘sory [...] that he [Langham] takez it so noow’.4
' Kenilworth is the first progress for which we have two surviving accounts, and Holinshed’s Chronicle mentions a third, now lost (see Smuts 2000). It was not, however, to remain unique in this respect for long. The Queen’s visit to Norwich in 1578 was recorded in two printed narratives. Smuts further notes that printed records of progresses scarcely existed before the 1570s, while Gabriel Heaton (2007: 232-3) points out that manuscript accounts of Elizabeth’s progresses throughout the reign outnumbered printed pamphlets, and that the cluster of printed descriptions in the latter half of the 1570s was unrepresentative.
2 This edition is now lost, and is known only through the reprint in Gascoigne’s Whole Works, printed in 1587, and through a transcript in Kenilworth Illustrated (1821).
3 The case for Patten’s authorship is made by O’Kill (1977) and D. Scott (1977). Scott quotes Patten’s letter in full (301), and quotations from the letter below are taken from this source.
4 Shortly before this chapter went to press, I was fortunate to have the opportunity of reading in proof Elizabeth Goldring’s very full discussion of the authorship question, which brings new archival evidence to bear in arguing the case for Langham’s authorship. The case against him, she argues, has
Kuin is right, however, to indicate that ‘of the work’s original eighty-six pages, by far the greater number is in fact perfectly straightforward, with no great attempt at humour’, and it is perhaps impossible to resolve the intention of the Letter at this distance in time. What is clear, however, is that it differs in tone and target audience from Gascoigne’s text. While not consistently satirical, it is certainly more colloquial, witty, and knowing in tone than Gascoigne’s rather literary, text-based, and carefully attributed record. It also records parts of the entertainment that Gascoigne dismisses as ‘countrie shews [...] and the merry marriage, the which were so plaine as needeth no further explication’ (Gascoigne 1788:69).
In addition to these two full printed accounts by Gascoigne and Langham, there is also a third and passing reference to the Kenilworth entertainment, addressed to a very different and specific target audience, Gabriel de Zayas, the Spanish Secretary of State. This occurs in a letter written by the resident Spanish ambassador in England, Antonio de Guaras, and provides a strikingly different perspective. The bulk of the letter, written on 18 July, reports on two matters of state before turning briefly to the Kenilworth festivities: first, preparations for arming and inspecting English ships and further rumours which lead de Guaras to believe that the English may soon send aid to the Netherlands in their continuing attempts to resist Spanish domination; and secondly, a Scottish armed raid that had captured or killed over 600 Englishmen. People at court are discussing both these matters, de Guaras indicates, while the Queen, he continues,
Now at a castle belonging to Lord Leicester, called Kenilworth, has been entertained with much rejoicing there, and it is said that whilst she was going hunting on one of the days, a traitor shot a cross-bow at her. He was immediately taken, although other people assert that the man was only shooting at the deer, and meant no harm. The bolt passed near the Queen but did her no harm, thank God! (CSP Spanish 1892-9: ii. 498)
Neither Gascoigne’s Princely Pleasures nor Langham’s Letter mentions this attempted assassination of the Queen, and de Guaras himself, in a subsequent letter of 25 July, writes that ‘There is nothing more said about the prisoner that they took at Court, as I mentioned before, and no one dares to mention the matter, which, indeed, few people can understand’ (CSP Spanish 1892-9: ii. 500).5
Largely been based on the belief that the (auto)biographical detail in it is implausible and that the writing style is ‘suspiciously worldly and learned’ for a mercer (Goldring 2008: 5). Goldring demonstrates not only that most of the detail can be corroborated, but that some of it would have been known only to Langham. She also shows that the mercers generally, and Langham and his father in particular, had close connections with the Earl of Leicester. Patten’s role, she argues, may have been that of putting the letter into print, perhaps with some alterations and probably against Langham’s will. The case for regarding Langham as the author of the original manuscript letter, if not in quite the same form as the printed version that remains extant, is a good one, and, though authorship is not germane to the concerns of this chapter, I will assume Langham as the name of the author on the basis of Goldring’s case. Kuin takes the target audience of the Letter to be a ‘wider’ market (1983:11), but the colloquial tone could designate a more exclusive address to a peer or peer group. It fits well with Goldring’s argument that this is one mercer writing to another with shared interests, anticipating that the recipient may show it to a few mutual friends.
5 Kuin suggests (1983: 91) that this may have been an elaboration of the Savage Man incident discussed below, when a horse was startled by a falling tree close to the Queen.
There is, then, a ‘competition for representation’ between these three texts, each selecting and omitting aspects of the Kenilworth progress for their own very different purposes, which this chapter will explore in more detail.249 But it is worth pausing at this point to notice how powerfully the idea of competition may shape this and other progresses or indeed court performances of any kind. The Queen understood and expected that entertainments staged for her would perform more than mere entertainment. She knew that there was always an agenda. As she famously remarked to an earlier Spanish ambassador at an entertainment laid on by the Earl of Leicester in 1565, presenting a play about marriage: ‘This is all against me’; and though she did not intervene to change anything on that evening, she did the next day, when the Dean of St Paul’s, Dr Alexander Nowell, turned his sermon to abuse Catholic writings and use of images. ‘Do not talk about that,’ she interjected as soon as he began; and when he continued, apparently not hearing her, she raised her voice to tell him: ‘Leave that, it has nothing to do with your subject, and the matter is now threadbare.’ The occasion ended in confusion as the preacher came to a swift close, the Queen left in anger, and many of the Protestants among the audience wept, while the Catholics rejoiced (CSP Spanish 1892-9: i. 404-5). All present understood that any public performance might have a political agenda, and patrons and performers had to tread a dangerous line between making their views and counsel evident in an acceptable way and overstepping the mark.
There was competition, not only between those who represented the performance after the event in writing, but also between those who commissioned it, performed it, and witnessed it. In reading accounts of the Kenilworth progress more than four centuries after the event, we must try to read between and across them as well as in and through them; and we must try to supplement that complex reading of written texts with an awareness of place, images, and persons derived from other written and pictorial records too. Place, as any Elizabethan spectator knew, was as much a maker of meaning as scripted performance; and part of the struggle for representation is played out through the opposition or complementarity between the performed content and its space. But Kenilworth itself, as Elizabeth Woodhouse notes, has hitherto been the neglected performer in scholarly examination of the Kenilworth entertainments (1999:127). The uncertainty as to whether there really was an attempt on the Queen’s life hinges on the different agendas of the reporters, and in turn on the tension between the places they occupy: the court, a place of diplomatic interaction, rumour, and intrigue, and Kenilworth, a beautiful park constructed on the occasion of the Queen’s visit as a locus amoenus, a refuge from the daily events of political life (though it tacitly also seeks to convey a carefully constructed political agenda, one which, as we shall see, is prevented from going ahead as planned). If there was an attempt on the Queen’s life within the bounds of such a pleasurable place, that event would have constituted an equally carefully constructed disruption of a supposedly protected and idealized environment.
Even before the Queen reached Kenilworth, the tone was carefully set. Leicester had a spectacular tent constructed at Long Itchington, 7 miles outside Kenilworth, where Elizabeth dined on Saturday 9 July, before arriving at Kenilworth itself later that evening. According to William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (first published in 1656), ‘the Earl of Leicester gave the Queen a glorious entertainment here [...] erecting a tent of extraordinary largeness for that purpose, the pins belonging whereto amounted to seven cart-loads; by which the magnificence thereof may be guessed at’ (Furnivall 1907:5). The word ‘tent’, however, has misleading connotations for modern readers. Tudor traditions of temporary building, including royal building, routinely used canvas structures for some of the most extraordinarily rich banqueting halls, and Leicester’s Long Itchington building was evidently in this tradition. The Letter calls it ‘a Tabernacl indeed for the number and shyft of large and goodly roomz [...] that justly for dignitee may be comparabl with a beautifull Pallais, and for greatnes and quantitee with a proper Tooun, or rather a Citadell’ (1983: 75).7 Dining in such a place before even arriving at Kenilworth was intended to give the Queen a foretaste of the scale of the entertainments that awaited her.
Leicester had spent considerable time and money (?60,000 according to Dugdale) rebuilding and adding to the house at Kenilworth and enhancing the natural beauty of the park, so that the estate as a whole became one great theatre waiting to receive the Queen as chief spectator, and in a sense also chief performer.8 Just as Jacobean masques found their centre (literally) in the monarch’s throne, placed at the single point from which the perspective stage could be totally and perfectly viewed, so the Elizabethan great house and garden came fully into being only when the Queen stepped into them. Both Burghley and Sir Christopher Hatton built Theobalds and Holdenby respectively with a view to hosting the Queen there. Hatton openly copied Theobalds, and spoke of Holdenby as a ‘shrine’ dedicated to Elizabeth, although in fact she never stayed there (Cole 1999: 67).
Besides constructing one of the first Italianate gardens in England, Leicester incorporated further architectural features such as the bridge, the arbours, and the first recorded grass terrace in England specifically as viewing platforms for both the scripted shows and the estate itself (see Woodhouse 1999). Yet, as Leicester constructed all this to impress and win favour from his queen, the estate itself was at the same time a source of competition between them. Besides showcasing the park and gardens by using them as locations for spectacular shows (the Lady of the Lake being borne across the lake, fireworks erupting out of the fountain, strange music emerging from an arbour), the scripts called attention to the host as provider of such rich entertainment, and the park and gardens everywhere displayed the personal emblems of Leicester. Elizabeth lost no time in reminding Leicester whose property Kenilworth ultimately was. When, on the evening of her arrival, the Lady
7 For an extensive account of such a building, see, for example, Hall’s account of the temporary palace built for Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, in Dillon (2002: 73-6).
8 Simon Adams (2002: 326) revises Dugdale’s estimate down to ?40,000.
Of the Lake floated towards the Queen ‘upon a moovabl Iland, bright blazing with torches’, uttering verses that recounted the castle’s history down to its present ‘owner’ and, with seeming courtesy, offered her ‘The Lake, the Lodge, the Lord [...] to command’, the Queen responded with acerbity: ‘we had thought indeed the Lake had been oours, and doo you call it yourz noow? Well we wyll heerin common more with yoo hereafter’ (Langham 1983: 40-1; cf. Gascoigne 1788: 61).
The distribution of the quotations here between the two texts is indicative: Gascoigne gives the full text of the Lady’s verse and tells us that ‘M. Ferrers, sometime Lord of Misrule in the Court’, penned them; only Langham records the Queen’s somewhat testy response. Thus, as Elizabeth and Leicester play out a contest for the ownership of Kenilworth, Langham and Gascoigne play out a contest for the ‘ownership’ of the entertainment, setting different representations of its nature and achievement against each other. Gascoigne likes to maintain the appearance of a relatively smooth and unruffled performance of homage and receptivity between Leicester and his queen, recording in full even performances that did not take place and giving clear priority to the ideal scripted drama. The Letter, by contrast, more readily incorporates moments where performance deviated from the script to let failures, revisions, and possible clashes of interest show through (though Langham avoids reporting certain kinds of politically inflected clashes, as we shall see). Thus, for example, Gascoigne’s account of the pageant of the Savage Man, like his account of the Lady of the Lake, prints in full the verse dialogue between Echo and the Savage Man, ending by noting that these verses were written by Gascoigne himself, while the Letter, after summarizing the verses, tells us of how spectacularly this show actually went wrong in the performance:
But shall I tell yoo maister Martyn by the mass of a mad aventure? az this Savage for the more submission brake his tree asunder, kest the top from him, it had allmost light upon her highnes hors hed: whereat he startld and the gentlman mooch dismayd See the benignitee of the Prins, az the footmen lookt well too the hors, and he of generositee soon callmd of him self, no hurt no hurt quoth her highnes Which woords I promis yoo we wear all glad too heer, and took them too be the best part of the play. (46)
Some degree of spontaneity, on the other hand, was frequently built into the genre of the progress entertainment, since the Queen as performer was scripted personally to complete some of the shows in the same way as her presence completed the estate that hosted her. Potential competition, even conflict, always lurked within such shows. Elizabeth, as scholars have often noted, was an adept performer, as she demonstrated from the inception of her reign, when, being handed a copy of the English Bible by the figure of Truth on her coronation progress, she ‘kissed it, and with both hir hands held up the same, and so laid it upon her brest, with great thanks to the citie therefore’ (Holinshed 1807-8: iv. 168). Her graciousness in dealing with the Savage Man’s mishap is as notable as was her sharpness with the Lady of the Lake. But the point is that the tension was always present. Even without the kind of random bad luck that poor Gascoigne (who himself played the Savage Man) was subject to, the potential for offence sat alongside the potential for flattery (see Gascoigne 1788: 65).
Fig. 37.1 A knight brings home a wild man captured in the woods. Henry Watson, Valentyne and Orson (1555), L2v.
Progress entertainments were risky affairs, subject to changes in the weather, to the failures or loss of confidence to which amateur actors are prey, or to the Queen’s own refusal to play her expected role or to allow the entertainments to go ahead as planned.250
Sometimes ‘failures’ of one kind or another could give unexpected pleasures, as did one spontaneous moment not reported by either Gascoigne or Langham:
There was a Spectacle presented to queen Elizabeth upon the water, and amongst others Harry Goldingham was to represent Arion upon the Dolphins backe, but finding his voice to be very hoarse and unpleasant, when he came to performe it, he teares of[f] his Disguise, and sweares he was none of Arion not he, but eene [even] honest Harry Goldingham; which blunt discoverie pleasd the Queene better, then if it had gone thorough in the right way; yet he could order his voice to an instrument exceeding well.251
Langham, but not Gascoigne, reports some of the other less scripted and controlled entertainments included in the sequence of events. Though not scripted specifically for the progress, events such as the bride-ale and the Coventry Hock Tuesday play must at the very least have been allowed, if not invited, into the grounds by the Earl of Leicester, but Gascoigne clearly considers them too rustic to be worth including in his account of events. He dismisses them in a sentence as too ‘plain’ to need further description (69), moving straight on instead to a show of his own composition.
Langham, by contrast, greatly enjoys recounting at length the rural eccentricities and failures of courtliness, as he sees it, of the popular offerings. He mocks the appearance of both bride and groom, openly insulting the bride as ‘ill smellyng [...] ugly fooul ill favord’ and foolishly keen to dance before the Queen, and dwelling in mock-heroic detail on the rough and unpolished performance of the groom in running at the quintain. He is less scornful about the Coventry play, which he calls ‘good pastime’, but notes the poor timing of both, being presented too soon beneath the chamber window, while the Queen was still watching ‘delectabl dauncing’ within (55). This mistiming, however, demonstrates the risk and the potential for both good and bad outcomes inherent in this kind of performance: whereas the bride-ale, obviously, is unrepeatable and simply has to go ahead without the Queen’s attention, the Coventry men are treated with great grace to compensate them for their wasted effort: the Queen rewards them with both money and an invitation to repeat their performance the following Tuesday, on which second occasion she takes care to pay attention and laugh (presumably appropriately). By contrast, the show that Gascoigne moves swiftly on to describe, after dismissing the popular entertainments, is one that did not even take place. Gascoigne devotes about a third of his total text to giving the full text of this show, which focuses on Diana’s loss of her nymph Zabeta (a deliberately transparent variation on Elizabeth) and culminates in Iris’ advice to Zabeta to marry. Gascoigne’s explanation as to why this show was not performed sounds somewhat faux-naive in context: ‘being prepared and redy (every Actor in his garment) two or three days together, yet never came to execution. The cause whereof I cannot attribute to any other thing, than to lack of opportunity and seasonable weather’ (80). If extended rain or cold were really the issue, we might expect him to report them specifically. Instead, the curious vagueness of phrasing and indirectness (‘two or three days’, ‘cannot attribute to any other thing than’, ‘lack of opportunity’) suggests awkwardness, as does the fact that this incident is immediately followed in Gascoigne’s text by the Queen’s ‘hasting her departure’ (80).
The Letter makes clear that this entertainment was to have taken place at Wedgenall (Wedgenock Park), 3 miles west of Kenilworth. Langham also writes of‘weather not to cleerly dispozed’, but is strangely disinclined to report the content of the cancelled entertainment: ‘least like the boongling carpentar, by missorting the peecez, I mar a good frame in the bad setting up, or by my fond tempring afore hand embleamish the beauty, when it shoold be reard up indeede’ (59).252 He also notes that on this same day there was also ‘such earnest tallk and appointment of remooving that I gave over my notyng, and harkened after my hors’ (59). He is, however, quite willing to spend the next several pages of his letter describing another unperformed entertainment centring on an ancient minstrel. It seems likely, then, that the content of the cancelled marriage mask gave offence. The topic of marriage was certainly one that had offended Elizabeth on more than occasion before, and one long associated with Leicester. There is no real consensus about how seriously Leicester might still have proffered a marriage proposal to Elizabeth. It was perhaps by this time a set of expected courtly moves aimed to please and flatter a female monarch long accustomed to such behaviours; certainly the question of producing an heir and ensuring the succession was no longer a live issue. On the other hand, Elizabeth Goldring has recently shown that Leicester commissioned four portraits especially for the visit of 1575, consisting of two sets of paired portraits of himself and the Queen that may seem to suggest Leicester as ‘consort manque (2007:174).
Susan Frye argues that the offence lay in the mask’s representation of Elizabeth’s imprisonment prior to the start of her reign, in that it emphasized her vulnerability and helplessness and showed her marriageability, rather than her courage or selfpossession, as the key factor in her delivery. But this would be to highlight matters almost twenty years before, which scarcely makes sense unless the immediate context renders such matters still relevant; and their relevance may have been to Leicester’s present feeling about his prolonged courtship of the Queen and her rejection of him, together with her expectation that he maintain a continuing posture of abject devotion. Henry Sidney, writing nine years earlier, in 1566, reported Leicester’s response to the Duke of Norfolk’s advice to abandon his suit as follows: ‘he [Leicester] would do as he [Norfolk] advised if it could be so arranged that the Queen should not be led to think that he relinquished his suit out of distaste for it and so turn her regard into anger and enmity against him which might cause her, womanlike, to undo him’ (CSP Spanish 1892-9: i. 518).12 Though Leicester may have accepted the position that he would never marry the Queen, and may not have been pressing the advice to marry in any expectation that she might still marry him, he may have relished the opportunity to remind her of what she had lost and of his long-serving devotion to her. Alternatively, or perhaps at the same time, he may have wished to give her a final opportunity to confirm her rejection of his suit before taking the radical step of marrying another woman, as he was to do in 1578, at which point the Queen was indeed furious. Leicester had been involved with Lady Douglas Sheffield since 1570 or 1571, and this mistress had borne him a son in 1574. He had been refusing to marry Sheffield for some time, being quite clear in his mind that ‘yf I shuld marry I am seure never to have favor of them that I had rather yet never have wyfe than lose
(Langham 1983: 56). As Kuin himself notes, however, this was clearly an indoor mask, and the show Gascoigne scripted was equally clearly an outdoor entertainment and surely to be equated with the cancelled ‘devise of Goddessez and Nymphes’ scheduled for Wednesday 20 July (Langham 1983: 59).
12 McCoy (1989: 42-3) discusses the question of when Leicester abandoned his suit, noting the Spanish ambassador’s report some months after this that ‘It is easy to see that he has not abandoned his pretensions’ (CSP Spanish 1892-9: i. 575).
Them’; yet, as he went on to assert, there was ‘nothing in the world next that favor that I wold not gyve to be in hope of leaving some childern behind me, being nowe the last of our howse’ (ODNB). The birth of his son the previous year may have helped to move him closer to the view that he must risk losing the Queen’s favour in order to sire a legitimate heir. Besides the liaison with Sheffield, rumour also linked Leicester with Lettice Knowles, Countess of Essex, from 1575, so that when her husband died in 1576 the story circulated that Leicester had poisoned him. In any event, it was Lettice Knowles whom Leicester secretly married in 1578, thereby incurring the very fury he had anticipated from Elizabeth when the marriage was revealed.
Whatever the offence of this Kenilworth mask, if offence there was (and there is no clear evidence that censorship rather than the weather was responsible for the cancellation of this entertainment), the fact that it was one of at least two cancelled entertainments heightens the probability of censorship. The other cancellation is differently dealt with in the two texts, but provides much clearer evidence of intervention. Since a show did take place on this occasion, Langham is able simply to describe it without mentioning any alterations to the script. In his text it is a graceful compliment to the Queen, whose presence delivers the Lady of the Lake from thraldom to Sir Bruce sans Pity (57). Gascoigne, however, while recounting the same event (noting the detail of Merlin’s prophecy that the Lady of the Lake ‘coulde never be delivered but by the presence of a better maide than herselfe’), closes by remarking at some length on the wonders of the show as first devised:
Surely, if it had bene executed according to the first invention, it had been a gallant shewe; for it was first devised, that (two dayes before the Ladie of the Lake’s deliverie) a captaine with twentie or thyrtie shotte shoulde have bene sent from the Hearon-house (which represented the Lady of the Lake’s Castell) upon heapes of bulrushes: and that Syr Bruse, shewing a great power upon the land, should have sent out as many or moe shot to surprise the sayde Captayne; and so they should have skirmished upon the waters in such sort, that no man could perceive but that they went upon the waves: at last (Syr Bruse and his men being put to flight) the Captaine should have come to her Majestie at the castell-window, and have declared more plainly the distresse of his Mistresse, and the cause that she came not to the Court, according to duetie and promise, to give hyr attendance: and that therupon he should have besought hyr Majestie to succour his Mistresse [...] This had not onely bene a more apt introduction to her deliverie, but also the skirmish by night woulde have bene both very strange and gallant; and thereupon her Majesty might have taken good occasion to have gone in barge upon the water, for the better execution of her deliverie. (69)
The length of this digression reveals some degree of investment in its content on the part of either Leicester or Gascoigne or both. And on this occasion Gascoigne offers no explanation for the omission of the skirmish and makes no reference to the weather. The reason here is clearer, since the potential allegory at stake is selfevident, given the political moment. Leicester’s active concern to do more to protect the Protestant Netherlands against their Spanish overlords was well known, but Elizabeth’s approach was more cautious, and she was unwilling to commit herself openly against Spain. Events were at a crucial point over that summer, and the fear that England might take decisive military action is evident in the Spanish ambassador’s letters. In the same letter of 18 July in which de Guaras recounts the rumoured assassination attempt at Kenilworth, he also notes the fitting out of two ships at Plymouth and warns: ‘When least expected they will carry the business through, and I have been told that [...] by St Bartholomew’s Day [24 August] a great service would be done’ (CSP Spanish 1892-9: ii. 498). In his next letter, written on 25 July, he notes that the two armed ships have immediately put out to sea and repeats the warning: ‘It will be found that support will reach them in this enterprise by land and sea as soon as they begin it, and the sending of these two ships with such wonderful diligence is a sign that the day for the attempt is not far distant, and no doubt the day will be St Bartholomew’s’ (CSP Spanish 1892-9: ii. 499). Though the Netherlands are nowhere explicitly mentioned, the letter is between two people who both know what they are talking about, and the reference to St Bartholomew’s Day, the date of the Huguenot massacre in Paris three years earlier and, as a Catholic atrocity, an obvious moment to intervene against Spain on behalf of the Netherlands, leaves the subject in no doubt.
In this context it becomes evident that the scheduled entertainment at Kenilworth was an allegory in which the distressed lady was the Netherlands and the powerful Sir Bruce, Spain. The Captain’s plea to the Queen was to have been the Earl of Leicester’s platform to plead directly for England’s active military intervention on behalf of the Netherlands against Spain. Gascoigne includes it in his text fairly fully, while Langham omits all mention of it. Gascoigne retains the unperformed text, probably at Leicester’s behest, though as an ex-soldier in the Netherlands himself and an ex-prisoner of the Spanish, he presumably shared his patron’s dedication to the Dutch Protestant cause. Since pamphlets recounting entertainments were normally published very soon after the event, Leicester may have seen publication as an opportunity, substituting for the lost opportunity of performance, to influence public sympathy, if not the Queen, towards his political point of view.13
What this discrepancy between performance and printed text generally reveals, a point which has received very little attention in accounts of progress entertainments, is that there must have been a routine pre-vetting of the texts for performance carried out on the Queen’s behalf. The system that came into place for public theatres, whereby the master of the revels vetted all scripts for performance, was a natural extension of the role played by earlier masters of the revels and lord chamberlains in choosing performances for the court. Shakespeare famously shows Philostrate performing this office at the start of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It should come as no surprise to find that performances before the Queen outside her own palaces should also have been subject to inspection prior to performance.
The cancelling of an entertainment and the substitution of another one in its place must have entailed not only someone reading or hearing the intended show before it was performed, but subsequent negotiations about what would substitute and speedy revision or new writing at very short notice. Writing about the Savage Man entertainment, somewhat disingenuously and without offering any indication as to cause,
13 The printer’s Preface to The Princely Pleasures is dated 26 March 1576, at which point the Netherlands question was still a burning one, but Leicester may have expected it to be published within a few weeks or months of the events themselves, as was often the case with such topical pamphlets.
Gascoigne notes: ‘These verses were devised, penned, and pronounced by master Gascoyne: and that (as I have heard credibly reported) upon a very great sudden’ (65).
On the same day as the revised Sir Bruce entertainment went ahead, the Queen also knighted five men and ‘cured’ nine people by touching for ‘the peynfull and daungeroous diseaz, called the kings evell’ (Langham 1983: 58). It would be interesting to know how much of this performance of sovereign, quasi-divine power was pre-planned or how far it was part of a last-minute alternative performance put together to fill the gap left by an entertainment now curtailed in revision or, as Susan Frye argues, to pit the Queen’s agenda against the Earl’s (Frye 1993: 62). It must be borne in mind, however, that, quite aside from the particular competitive valencies operating on a progress hosted by the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s longtime favourite and suitor, the Queen’s performance of her own presence was as much a part of any progress as the performances played before her. A progress may have been conceived by the host as an opportunity to please and perhaps advance himself with the monarch, besides displaying his own estate to best advantage to the most elite possible audience (as well as to all those on and around the estate itself); but it was conceived by the monarch not merely as an opportunity for a rural holiday, an escape from the dangers of plague in London, and a way of rewarding a loyal subject, but also as an opportunity to make herself available to public and popular view in the best possible light. And for most of the spectators, especially those resident in the area visited, the Queen, not the entertainment, was the primary object of attention. As those designing the layout of Christ Church Hall, Oxford, for a visit by King James had to be reminded by visiting court officials in 1605, the question of how much of the play the King could see was considerably less important than the question of how well he himself could be seen.
The Queen’s performance, however, despite its centrality to the event as a whole, can disappear from view in records of the event. Ironically, this is made even clearer by the existence of two printed records of the Kenilworth progress. We have seen how one text may record an intervention by the Queen which is omitted by the other; but both texts become notably coy about the last stretch of the Queen’s visit, to the point where it is impossible to decipher quite what happened, when, or why. As noted above, both Gascoigne and Langham indicate a problem with the cancelled Wedgenall entertainment, the mask of goddesses advising Elizabeth to marry. Gascoigne, without explicitly linking them together as cause and effect, simply begins the paragraph after his possibly arch speculation on the cause of cancellation thus: ‘The Quuenes Majestie hasting her departure from thence, the Earle commanded master Gascoigne to devise some farewel worth the presenting; whereupon he him-selfe clad like unto Sylvanus, God of the woods, and meeting her as she went on hunting, spake ex tempore, as followeth’ (80). What follows is at first not a farewell speech at all but an extended plea for the Queen to reconsider her departure plans and stay. The Queen is obviously proceeding on horseback while Gascoigne delivers this speech (perhaps literally making her way out of the grounds of Kenilworth?) and Gascoigne records how her performance changes from continuing to proceed to kindly staying her horse ‘to favour Sylvanus, fearing least he should be driven out of breath by following her horse so fast’ (82).
Gascoigne-Sylvanus continues his speech, which has up to this point been an elaborately complimentary allegory centring on the lamentation of the gods at the Queen’s proposed departure and beseeching her to remain. As Gascoigne resumes, however, his speech becomes progressively bolder in its tone, turning from lament first to rebuke and then to mischievous obscenity. Gascoigne speaks of the Queen as having ‘so obstinatly and cruelly rejected’ some suitors for grace that he sighs ‘to thinke of some their mishaps’. While allowing the justice of her behaviour towards some, he can scarcely ‘declare the distresses wherein some of them doe presently remayne’ (83-4). A new allegory of two suitors named Deepedesire and Dewedesert, who are turned respectively to a laurel bush and a holly tree by the cruel Zabeta, allows Gascoigne to turn the allegory into a sly mockery of Elizabeth’s unmarried state, which seems both impudent and scarcely plausible as part of a plea for her to forgive and forget any offence taken by the cancelled marriage mask. ‘There are two kinds of Holly,’ says Sylvanus, ‘He-Holly, and She-Holly. Now some will say, that She-Holly hath no prickes; but thereof I intermeddle not’ (85). To reduce the Virgin Queen to a hollybush with no pricks seems more like a dangerously bad joke than an attempt to revoke her decision to leave. Or could it be that none of this is as serious as it seems? Was Leicester really close enough to the Queen to risk this kind of joke and get away with it? Much depends on whether the planned Wedgenall mask really gave offence or was genuinely cancelled because of bad weather.
The closing moments of Sylvanus’ ‘farewell’ (which now does begin to look more like a teasing farewell than a genuine attempt to persuade Elizabeth to stay) bring her to a hollybush, which masquerades as the transformed Deepedesire, who speaks as the Queen approaches, begging her to remain and ‘to commaund againe | This Castle and the Knight, which keepes the same for you’ (86). Was this part actually taken by Leicester himself, who is so clearly represented by Deepedesire? Gascoigne does not tell us, but Deepedesire sings a song of farewell and lament (indicating of course that Elizabeth’s departure was never in doubt, and that the plea to her to stay was a mere conceit of the entertainment). Silvanus concludes with a prayer that Deepedesire ‘may be restored to his prystinate estate’ (87), suggesting that Leicester really has offended the Queen and wishes to be restored to favour; and Gascoigne concludes his account of events at this point, ending with the motto he adopted following his service in the Netherlands: ‘Tam Marti, quam Mercurio’.
Gascoigne’s account thus makes it impossible to tell when the Queen departed or how long a gap there was between the cancelled Wedgenall mask and her departure, though its sequence suggests that the one followed hot on the heels of the other. The Letter therefore comes as a surprise, since it states that, although there was ‘such earnest tallk and appointment of remooving’ on the day of the cancelled Wedgenall mask, dated to Wednesday 20 July, the Queen in fact stayed until the following Wednesday, 27 July; ‘for which seaven daiz, perceyving my notez so slenderly aunswering: I took it less blame, too ceas and thearof too write yoo nothing at al, then in such matterz to write nothing likely’.253 The Letter makes no mention of the farewell entertainment that Gascoigne describes, and at this point moves away from the description of entertainments altogether to a more generalizing meditation on their contents. What is going on here? What happened in these remaining seven days? When did the farewell entertainment take place, if it did, and did the Queen stay on at all beyond it? Why is the Letter silent about the events of that week (or the absence of them)? Did the farewell entertainment take place (as Gascoigne’s detail about the Queen staying her horse implies it did), and, if so, why does the Letter make no mention of it?
While having two texts of the same progress is in some ways so revealing, in other ways what it reveals most emphatically is the limit to what can be known from the extant records. Evidently, in addition to whatever censorship of performance may have taken place at the time of the events themselves, there is a further degree of self-censorship (and perhaps even external censorship) operating over the printed records. The silences indicate points where the texts do not wish to focus attention; but they do not, and cannot by definition, give us clarity about why that focus is unwelcome.
Progress performances, we have seen, offer a characteristic mix of script, spontaneity, and scripted pseudo-spontaneity. They show us the monarch and her subjects both on show and at play, and feigning play even as they are most on show. Records of these performances operate by a similar mechanism, describing what was not performed as well as what was, omitting some of what was performed and feigning all the time a full and frank representation of events. Where two or more records exist, one does not merely supplement the other, but rather contests and exposes it. In the contest and the exposure lies some indication of the potential gap between performance and its records.
PRIMARY WORKS
CSP Spanish (1892-9), Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, Elizabeth I, ed. M. A. S. Hume, 4 vols (London: HMSO).
Gascoigne, George (1788), The Princely Pleasures atKenelworth Castle, in John Nichols (ed.), The Progresses, and Public Processions, of Queen Elizabeth, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, ii. 57-89.
Holinshed, Raphael (1807-8), Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, ed. H. Ellis, 6 vols (London: Johnson).
Langham, Robert (1983), A Letter, ed. R. J. P. Kuin, Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 2 (Leiden: Brill).
World History
