MIAMI UNIVERSITY
The Graduate School
Certificate for Approving the Dissertation
We hereby approve the Dissertation
of
Cristy Ann Beemer
Candidate for the Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
_________________________________________
Director
Katharine J. Ronald
_________________________________________
Reader
Katharine M. Gillespie
_________________________________________
Reader
Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson
_________________________________________
Graduate School Representative
P. Renée Baernstein
ABSTRACT
‚USURPING AUTHORITY IN THE MIDST OF MEN‛:
MIRRORS OF FEMALE RULING RHETORIC
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
by Cristy Ann Beemer
In this project, I seek to reclaim the British Isles’ sixteenth-century queens
Lady Jane Grey, Mary I, Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots as public rhetors
and as teachers of rhetorical strategy through an analysis firmly based in
Aristotelian and Ciceronian rhetoric. Prepared for rule by the same texts that
guided male monarchs, yet lacking a history of female rule, reigning women
adapted classical rhetorical strategies to establish authority. The rhetorical
artifacts of these women leaders comprise a unique collection of powerful,
political, and public performances by women who reigned over a maledominated governance in which most women were silenced.
With the sudden succession of several female queens, a new mirror of
female rule was created in their rhetorical acts. Specifically, this dissertation
analyzes the way these women reflected and resisted male strategies of rhetorical
authority. The metaphorical and material mirror, which arrived as a
commonplace and inexpensive item in the early 1500s, and brought with it the
mirror-of-princes genre that provided an image of male rule, frames a
community of women who mirrored one another’s rhetorical strategies. Finally,
I argue that this community provides a legacy of women’s rhetoric for political
women leaders today.
‚USURPING AUTHORITY IN THE MIDST OF MEN‛:
MIRRORS OF FEMALE RULING RHETORIC
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to the Faculty of
Miami University in partial
fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
by
Cristy Ann Beemer
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
2008
Dissertation Director: Dr. Katharine J. Ronald
©
Cristy Ann Beemer
2008
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures
iv
Dedication
v
Acknowledgements
vi
Chapter One
1
The Monstrous Regiment: A Community
of Sixteenth Century Women Rhetors
Chapter Two
37
God Save the Queen: The Kairotic Subject
in the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and
Mary, Queen of Scots
Chapter Three
70
Rhetorical Reflections of Female Ruling Identity:
Embodied Apophasis in the speeches of
Mary I and Elizabeth I
Chapter Four
109
Disembodied Apophasis in the
Rhetorical Acts of Jane Grey and Elizabeth I
Epilogue
137
The Scrying Mirror: The Legacy of
Early Modern Women’s Rule
Works Cited
155
iii
LIST OF FIGURES
1.1
The Monstrous Regiment of 16th Century
Reigning Women Geneology
iv
17
For Larry—ever since I put your picture in a frame.
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I must thank my parents, Joan and Hank Woehling. At every
crazy turn of my life—whether I announced that I was going to be a singing
waitress or a scholar—they responded with, ‚You can do it, and how can we
help?‛ Their generosity and support are endless, and I am eternally grateful.
You gave me so many gifts in my life, but your confidence in me is perhaps the
greatest gift, and it has led me to many journeys and discoveries. Thank you.
My committee—a brilliant, intellectually stimulating, and challenging group of
exemplary women—wonderfully reflects the interdisciplinarity of my project. I
am so fortunate to have outstanding faculty members from Composition and
Rhetoric, Literature, and History on my committee; working with you all
complicated my ideas in truly useful ways and led me to new areas of inquiry
and understanding. Kate Ronald, my mentor and dearest friend, I’ve learned so
much from you about writing, teaching, administrating, and advising. But most
of all, I’ve learned about opening your heart to your students and your work,
and doing it all with grace. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, probably the busiest
woman I know, it meant so much to me to be able to count on your careful
attention to my work. Katharine Gillespie, thank you for letting me rely on your
expertise to guide me along the way. Renée Baernstein, you expanded my focus
in so many ways—starting with our independent study. Susan Morgan, thank
you for your service on my exam committee earlier in this project. I know the
early modern period isn’t your favorite, but you gave me such a gift by
participating. Thank you.
To the Miami University English Department—I have been so fortunate to have
many opportunities and to have been encouraged to create others. Thank you.
Miami also gave me the wonderful gift of lasting friendships. Connie Kendall—
you paved the way and always shared your experience and advice. You can’t
know how many times you made a difference in my life. Lisa Shaver—from the
very start of this crazy ride to the end, I can’t imagine my time here without you.
Jen Cellio—your friendship made all the difference. Sarah Bowles—I simply
couldn’t have done it without you. I am forever in your debt, and you are
forever in my heart. Debbie, Loretta, Jackie, and Trudi—thank you for last
minute forms and constant encouragement!
I am truly grateful for the Miami University English Department Sinclair
Dissertation Fellowship and the Newberry Renaissance Consortium Grant that
allowed me the time and funding to travel, research, and write.
vi
My in-laws, Jan and Michael Hornbuckle—thank you for all of your support over
these years. Thank you for being the best of family and friends.
My dearest Larry—who worked harder than I every hour I spent writing—thank
you for all of your sacrifices, your support, your confidence in me, and most,
your partnership. Thank you for making all of my dreams possible. Finally, my
son Jack, my most wonderful dream come true, and yet, more than I could have
ever dreamed of<thank you.
vii
For those that will not permit a woman to
have power over her own sons, will not
permit her (I am assured) to have rule over a
realm: and those that will not suffer her to
speak in defense of those that be accused,
nether that will admit her accusation
intended against man, will not approval her,
that she shall sit in judgment crowned with
the royal crown, usurping authority in the
midst of men.
—Knox, “The First Blast of the Trumpet
Against the Monstrous Regiment of
Women” 14
A modest silence is a woman‟s crown.
—Aristotle Politics 1.13.11
viii
CHAPTER ONE
The Monstrous Regiment:
A Community of Sixteenth Century Reigning Women Rhetors
In Why History Matters, Gerda Lerner asserts that women ‚have been
presented as though they had no history worth recording‛ (205). While Lerner
concedes that women rulers and queens were recorded, she claims that is
because they ‚did what men did‛ (205); however, just as Ginger Rogers had to
do what Fred Astaire did backwards and in heels, women rulers had to do what
men did through a woman’s body. In the face of resistance and male stereotypes
of women’s appropriate behavior, women had to redefine the role of the
monarch for the people of their realm. While royal women of the early modern
period were members of the white and privileged ruling class, they also
represented, albeit from a position of power, their marginalized gender. The
contradiction between their role as women in a patriarchal society and their role
as leaders within the patriarchy focuses the issues of power and gender creating
a model of women’s political power—not simply a reiteration of the patriarchy.
Unlike most women of the period who were ‚denied any knowledge of their
history, *and<+ were also denied heroines and role models,‛ royal women had a
strong contemporary connection to their heroines, role models, and adversaries,
and learned rhetorical strategies from them (Lerner 207).
Although women leaders do not fall into Lerner’s list of women forgotten
by history, the recovery of their rhetorical acts is a recent endeavor. Recent
recovery work in women’s rhetoric such as Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald’s
Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s) (University of Pittsburgh,
1
2001); Andrea Lunsford’s Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition
(University of Pittsburgh, 1995); Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the
Tradition from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Southern Illinois University Press,
1997); Molly Meijer Wertheimer’s Listening to their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities
of Historical Women (University of South Carolina, 1997) have broadened our
field, have given voice to many women silenced by an androcentric history, and
have complicated our notions of what constitutes rhetorical theory. The
gathering work of these scholars forms, to borrow language from the feminist
movement, a ‚first wave‛ of women’s rhetoric. This project joins the ‚second
wave‛ of women’s rhetoric—extrapolating theory from recovered rhetorical
artifacts. In the absence of a history of women teachers of rhetoric, this project
looks to the rhetorical acts of women to uncover what they taught other women
about rhetoric and reclaims them as teachers of rhetoric through their rhetorical
acts. The community of early modern women leaders taught one another the
rhetorical strategies of their unique and shared context as women establishing
authority within a patriarchy.
Even historical figures not in need of recovery must often be recovered for
their contributions to rhetorical history. The rhetorical artifacts of royal women
have long been cast aside in favor of romantic characterizations of them in
movies and novels. The subjectivity of historiography and the implications of
verifiable authorship are present in any study of this time period, and because
the focus of this project is rhetorical analysis, these texts are examined as the
artifacts we have of women’s rhetorical history. An imaginative approach to
evaluating the validity of texts, like the one outlined by Jacqueline Jones Royster
in Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women, is
necessary when texts are written by members of any marginalized group.
Royster argues that ‚this strategy for inquiry claims a valuable place for
2
imagination in research and scholarship—imagination as a term for a
commitment to making connections and seeing possibility. So defined,
imagination functions as a critical skill in questioning a viewpoint, an experience,
an event, and so on, and in remaking interpretive frameworks based on that
questioning‛ (83). A methodology of imagination allows this project to consider
the rhetorical artifacts of women rulers as influential to our history of women’s
rhetoric, despite arguments about the reliability of a 400-year-old text or a
witness’s account.
A scholarly volume of Elizabeth I’s writing was not compiled until Leah
Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose published Elizabeth I: Collected Works
in 2000 (University of Chicago Press). This important text participates in the
work that Ritchie and Ronald describe in Available Means as ‚gathering women’s
rhetorics together in order to remember that the rhetorical tradition indeed
includes women‛ (xv). ‚In contrast‛ to the previously published ‚undeniably
valuable but small editions that concentrate on single genres [the 2000 edition of
Queen Elizabeth’s Collected Works] offers a sustained, varied presentation of
Elizabeth’s writings across generic boundaries in a single comprehensive
scholarly edition‛ (Marcus xi-xii). This gathering allows this project to consider
these women of history as rhetors and not merely figures of historical
significance. 1 In other words, the gathering together of women’s writing
considers the rhetors’ voices and gives voice back to figures that may be
1
The term “rhetor” is used here to acknowledge the professional context of reigning women‟s rhetoric and
to acknowledge the models that these women provided as teachers for other women in their community. In
Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, Sharon Crowley defines a rhetor as “anyone who composes
discourse that is intended to affect community thinking or events” (Crowley 437). According to the Oxford
English Dictionary (OED), a rhetor is “a teacher or professor of rhetoric; a rhetorician.” (“rhetor” 1). In
using this term, this project does not seek to invoke the derogatory meanings of the second entry in the
OED, “an orator, esp. a professional one. Sometimes in depreciatory use: A rhetorical speechifier, a mere
rhetorician,” although this project does acknowledge the professional nature of a rhetor (“rhetor” 2).
Therefore, the term rhetor more accurately reflects the role of queen rhetoricians as influential, professional
speakers who functioned as teachers of rhetoric to other reigning women.
3
represented in history, but still may not speak for themselves. The gathering of
women’s writing also paves the way for scholars to let the rhetorical act speak
beyond the artifact—to extrapolate theory that may illuminate the past and
influence the future.
While there has been attention paid to the gender play of Queen Elizabeth,
there are also acts of asserting discursive authority by reigning women that are
not marked as masculine, but rather have not been appreciated for their female
authority. As Mortensen and Kirsch state in their 1994 Braddock award winning
article, ‚On Authority in the Study of Writing,‛ ‚authority and gender are so
closely linked that we often have trouble recognizing authoritative gestures that
arise particularly from women’s experience‛ (326). Recent work reclaiming the
discursive practices of silenced women on the margins of society focus on
women who lacked power. The material authority that women rulers held
makes them interesting subjects of rhetorical study because ‚men have
traditionally held most positions of authority, and acts of asserting authority are
often marked as masculine, regardless of the actor’s gender‛ (Mortensen 325).
By highlighting women leaders, this recovery work is further complicated by
expanding our history to include women whose authoritative gestures are
distinctly gendered and overtly powerful. In ‚Style as Politics: A Feminist
Approach to the Teaching of Writing,‛ Pamela Annas states that ‚whenever a
woman sits down to write, she is engaged in a complex political act in which the
self and the world struggle in and through the medium of language‛ (6). This
struggle is apparent throughout the history of women’s rhetoric and continues to
resonate. Annas also suggests that ‚because historically women have been
channeled toward private forms and denied access to more public forms, it has
seemed<particularly important to teach women how to write political
essays<any essay that places the self in the world, is addressed to an audience,
4
and takes a position‛ (70). The rhetorical acts of Lady Jane Grey, Mary I,
Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots comprise a unique collection of powerful,
political, and publicly voiced women who reigned over a male-dominated
governance—a collection that can be useful today as women increasingly join the
boy’s club of politics. Through an investigation of early modern women rulers’
rhetorical strategies, a community of women rhetors who learned techniques for
reinventing the monarchy and redefining the role of women as powerful
speakers emerges.
In Rhetoric Retold, Cheryl Glenn declares that ‚rhetorical history has
replicated the power politics of gender, with men in the highest cultural role and
social rank‛ (2). Women who had agency to speak from the very apex of a
patriarchal society that silenced other women rewrite this rhetorical history to
better reflect the achievements of powerful women at the highest cultural role
and social rank. Focusing on women who had power reveals useful rhetorical
strategies that can be used as we continue to struggle for representation as
female leaders. In any discussion of the ruling class we must, of course,
acknowledge that these subjects are privileged and not representative of their
contemporary non-royal counterparts. In the introduction to Available Means: An
Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s), Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald state that ‚much
recent work in women’s rhetorics tends to valorize exceptional women writers‛
(xix). On the surface, to speak of ‚valorizing‛ them sounds complimentary, but
Ritchie and Ronald imply that the distinction ‚exceptional‛ is a divisive term
that praises and simultaneously marks the female gender as ‚other.‛ To speak
of women leaders as ‚exceptional‛ acknowledges the tremendously limited
opportunities for most women in early modern Europe, but it also implies that
they somehow superseded the abilities of their gender. ‚Exceptional‛ is a
ubiquitous moniker in the scholarship on early modern women’s writing
5
because, admittedly, so few of the women in this period were educated;
therefore, early modern women authors are marked as exceptions to the now
familiar tale of women imprisoned by illiteracy. If any women writing and
speaking publicly in this period can be called exceptional, certainly the educated
female reigning monarchs of the period would qualify; however, marking the
rhetoric of early modern women as ‚exceptional‛ only maintains gender binaries
and marks these subjects as ‚othered.‛ To continue to mark them in this way is
to still consider early modern women writers as people of their own time
considered them—‚learnéd beyond their sex‛—because it was not considered
natural for women to be intellectuals. Certainly, royal women were free from
some of the rigid societal mores that silenced many women of their time, but
scholarship shouldn’t further alienate them from the history of women’s rhetoric
simply due to their privilege. While the female leaders of the early modern
period are members of the white and privileged ruling class, they occupied this
position of power in a woman’s body. The contradiction between their role as
powerful leaders and their role as women in a society where their gender
signified marginalization focuses the issues of power and gender, creating a
tradition, or as Gerda Lerner suggests a history of women’s power that we lack.
While their opportunities for rhetorical education and simply the opportunity to
speak and be heard may not be representative of the entirety of the female
population of their time, they are representative of their smaller community of
royal women. In Man Made Language, Dale Spender asserts that women are a
‚muted group,‛ and that ‚it is not the deficiency of women, but the deficiency of
a social order, a symbolic system, in which they are represented, in which they
have been denied the means to produce and sanction,‛ that mutes them (231).
The extraordinary privilege that royal women enjoyed should not deny them
access to their own community of women who emerged from the ‚muted group‛
6
to be heard. Due to their inherited roles in the social order, the women leaders of
the early modern period emerged from the muted group to assemble their own
group of women who would be heard.
Negotiating the space between their role as leaders and their role as
women, female rulers of the early modern period reigned over a system in which
women did not have a voice; they were heard in a society that generally silenced
women. Royal women used language to claim discursive authority—authority
that was afforded to them by their rank in the social order, but nevertheless had
to be continually reasserted because their bodies signified their marginalized
status as women in a patriarchal society. In fact, rather than portraying these
women leaders as ‚exceptional,‛ this project seeks to portray them as
‚exemplars‛ of female rhetorical expertise.
Unnatural Rule
Centuries before the sixteenth century witnessed a regiment of women
leaders, the earliest attempt at female rule in England caused a civil war and
resulted in the reinstatement of patriarchal sovereignty. Before his death in 1135,
Henry I demanded that his retinue swear allegiance to his only surviving child,
his daughter Matilda, who would inherit his crown. The king’s wishes were
obeyed during his lifetime, but upon his death, the crown went to Matilda’s
cousin, Stephen of Blois, after a bloody civil war. After extensive negotiations
between Stephen and Matilda’s supporters, a compromise was reached that
placed Matilda’s son, Henry II, on the throne after Stephen. The eventual
succession of Matilda’s heir established the precedent for a female line of
inheritance. Although Matilda did not reign, her role in the line of succession
provided a precedent that would make room for a female monarch in the
centuries to come. In the generations that immediately followed, women were
7
simply disregarded in favor of more distant male inheritors to the throne. In
fact, the very king whose throne would go to a niece and two daughters sparking
the longest period of female rule in England, Henry VIII, received the crown in
1509 when his grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, stepped aside for her only male
heir, as was the practice when the succession pointed to a woman. In essence,
Henry VIII inherited his crown from a woman, his grandmother, and bequeathed
his crown to two women, his daughters—albeit only upon the death of their
younger brother, Edward. Less than fifty years after Margaret Beaufort gave
away her crown, Henry’s only male heir, Edward VI, died after a short six-year
reign, and Henry’s daughters began a tradition of female rule that lasted another
fifty years.
Henry had established a line of succession, verified by an Act of
Parliament, that clearly named Edward’s successors as his sisters Mary and
Elizabeth. Despite Edward’s minority and the lack of Parliamentary approval,
and the fact that to challenge Henry’s will was essentially an act of treason,
Edward was persuaded that Henry’s will established a precedent for allowing
the monarch to name his own successor. On his deathbed in 1553, the Protestant
Edward the Sixth, only legitimate son of Henry VIII, declared his sixteen-yearold cousin Jane the heir to his throne—overlooking his two elder sisters, Mary
and Elizabeth. Edward had been convinced by his advisors that he had to
disinherit both sisters, so that the crown would not go to his Catholic eldest sister
Mary, and the Protestant religion could be secured in England. Edward wrote, in
his own hand, a Devise of the Crown that named Edward’s cousin, Jane Grey, the
successor to his throne. Technically, Edward didn’t have the right to name a
successor because the succession could only be determined by an Act of
Parliament. It is a long-held assumption that Jane was the pawn of her father
and father-in-law, used for ambition and abandoned in treason. Jane probably
8
‚did not know the full facts regarding the Devise until Edward was on the point
of death,‛ and her acceptance of the title has been characterized by scholars and
biographers as an unwilling capitulation (Jordan 521). Jane’s reluctant reign
lasted only nine days. The country rallied in support of the rightful heir, Mary,
and on August 3rd, the triumphant daughter of Henry VIII rode into London with
her sister, Elizabeth, by her side. Jane was imprisoned in the Tower.
As a Catholic on the throne after almost twenty years of Protestant rule,
Mary I knew well that the nine-days’ reign of Jane Grey signaled a larger threat
to her monarchy. The scheme to place Jane on the throne had been short-lived
but successful. But despite the threat, Mary was reportedly hesitant to execute a
former queen regnant. While Mary’s father, Henry VIII, had famously disposed
of two of his wives, and therefore queens of England, Anne Boleyn and
Catherine Howard, they had not been ruling monarchs. To become the queen
that killed a queen regnant—even a mere nine-days’ queen—would send a
message to the world. After all, if one can murder a queen, then a queen can be
murdered—a dangerous precedent to set for the female monarch of a
misogynistic, religiously divided country without a clear, male heir to ease the
minds of the populace.
On February 3, 1554, the Wyatt Rebellion’s forces entered London.
Ultimately, it was the failed Wyatt Rebellion that forced Mary’s hand with
regard to Jane. Mary simply couldn’t let Jane, such an imminent threat to her
crown, live in the shadows of the Tower of London awaiting another rebellion.
Ironically, just nine days later—the same period of time for which Jane ruled—on
February 12, 1554, Jane and her husband Guilford were executed in separate
ceremonies. Jane was given the honor of a private execution within the Tower
walls. Guilford’s public execution took place at Tower Hill. Elizabeth, Queen
Mary’s sister, was arrested for suspicion of collusion with the rebels. The Wyatt
9
Rebellion had sought to depose Mary and place her Protestant sister, Elizabeth,
on the throne. Elizabeth maintained that she had no knowledge of the plot, and
at his execution Wyatt said, ‚but as for my lady Elizabeth’s grace, and the Earl of
Devonshire, here I take it upon my death that they never knew of the
conspiracy‛ (Bayley I.ii.xlix). One can only imagine the terror Elizabeth faced as
she entered the Tower, the place of her mother, Anne Boleyn’s execution. Due
most likely more to public pressure and the urgings of a self-interested Prince
Phillip than sibling affection, Elizabeth was released from the Tower on May
19th—eighteen years to the date that her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed at
the same location. Mary’s reign lasted just three years. Daughter of Henry VIII
and his first wife Catherine of Aragon, she was an easy target for Protestants to
attack on the grounds of her zealous Catholicism and Spanish husband. As Mary
approached death from what modern science now assumes was most likely a
pituitary tumor, the queen was lucid enough to name her sister, Elizabeth, the
heir to the throne. Elizabeth I’s forty-five year reign was triumphant—a period
that has come to be known as ‚The Golden Age.‛
The sudden and lasting role of women leaders in England was, in the
early sixteenth century, an alien concept to Englishmen; yet, on the continent,
Catherine de’ Medici was the Queen of France and shortly thereafter ruled as
regent for her young son. Marie de Guise was the Queen Regent of Scotland,
ruling for her daughter Mary Stuart who would later become the Queen of
France for a brief period and ultimately Mary, Queen of Scots. So, both France
and Scotland were ruled by Catholic women. In England, as previously stated,
the first female queen regnant, Lady Jane Grey, was placed on the throne as an
attempt to thwart a Catholic takeover. With the brief interruption of Jane Grey’s
nine-day reign as a Protestant monarch, until Elizabeth’s succession to the
throne, three major countries of Europe were simultaneously under the rule not
10
of merely women, but Catholic women. Catholic women on the throne conflated
two sources of discrimination and anxiety, and allowed Protestant men like John
Knox to become outspoken detractors. However, misogynists couldn’t hide
behind religious controversy and prejudice for long; despite the domination of
Catholic women, the ruling regiment of women ended with the long and
prosperous reign of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I.
Trumpeting Dissent
In the year 1558, Protestant reformer John Knox’s ‚The First Blast of the
Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,‛ published in response to
the growing trend of Catholic women rulers in Early Modern Europe, sounded
the beginning of the crisis in authority that the rule of women initiated in
sixteenth-century England.2 While this is just one document from the period, it
serves as a microcosm of the many patriarchal arguments against female rule.
Knox’s hyperbolic indictments of women, claiming that ‚it is a thing most
repugnant to nature, that women rule and govern over men,‛ leave little room
for counterarguments in support of women’s rule (11). Knox’s tract participates
in the tradition of the querelle des femmes—an explicitly secular literary debate
waged over the equality of women beginning in fourteenth-century Italy. This
debate intensified in Renaissance England as the increase of printing led to the
‚pamphlet wars‛—a public attack and defense of women.3 The debate
2
Susan Doran‟s 2003 History Today article, “Elizabeth I: Gender, Power and Politics,” argues that “Knox‟s
views were extreme and reiterated by only a handful of other Protestants,” and that the legitimacy of female
rule was not widely challenged in part because “Catholics at home and abroad presumably did not think to
use Knoxian-style arguments to challenge Elizabeth‟s right to the throne, because their claimant, Mary,
Queen of Scots, was also a woman” (30). While the Catholic arguments against Elizabeth‟s rule may not
have been widespread, arguments against women‟s rule based in religion illustrate the larger societal
beliefs about gender expectations for behavior.
3
See Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus‟s Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the
Controversy about Women in England 1540-1640, for an annotated collection of the key texts of the
11
established its own conventions including a strong reliance on particular
excerpts from the Bible to provide ethos. Ethos, or the character of the speaker,
‚may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion *a speaker+
possesses,‛ according to Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1.2.14). One of Aristotle’s three
rhetorical appeals (logos, pathos, ethos), ethos establishes the speaker’s ability and
authority to speak on a subject. Here, Knox borrows the already established and
accepted arguments of the querelle des femmes to bolster the ethos of his argument
against women’s ability to rule.
Knox bases his argument in nature, claiming that women were naturally
inferior and therefore, ‚To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion
or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely to
God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and
finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice‛ (11). 4 The
unequivocal nature of Knox’s argument was supported by borrowing the
established conventions of the querelle des femmes. These conventions were the
establishment of ethos in arguing from the Bible and unquestionable ancient,
male authorities. Knox’s participation in this already century-old tradition of the
querelle des femmes made the natural inferiority of the female sex practically
inarguable.
Like many writers before him, Knox invokes the figure of Eve, St. Paul’s
dictates against women speaking in the church, and the early ‚ancient writers‛
such as Augustine and Tertullian to show that women are inferior to men. He
Renaissance “pamphlet wars” including The Schoolhouse of Women (1541), Jane Anger‟s Her Protection
for Women (1589), and Esther Sowernam‟s Esther hath hanged Haman (1617). Other early texts of this
debate include Sir Thomas Elyot‟s The Defense of Good Women (1540?), Robert Burdet‟s A Dialogue
Defensive for Women, Against Malicious Detractors (1542), Agrippa‟s A Treatise of the Nobility and
Excellency of Woman Kind (1542), Edward Gosynhill‟s The Praise of All Women, called Mulierum Pean
(1542), Charles Bansley‟s A Treatise Showing the Pride and Abuse of Women (ca. 1550).
4
The grammar and spelling of the period are not yet wholly universalized. Throughout this project I have
modernized the spelling without changing the syntax of the original sources to facilitate reading.
12
then conflates that history of misogyny with his current dilemma—living under
the rule of a Catholic, female monarch—to claim that women should not rule.
His argument relies on the belief that all women are naturally equal, leaving no
special considerations for a royal woman—despite the established belief that the
monarch was God’s anointed representative on earth. Many participants in the
querelle des femmes used the following Bible verse to establish a hierarchy of
power: ‚Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the woman’s head, and
God is Christ’s head‛ (Tyndale Bible, 1 Cor. 11.3). Knox cites the Bible verse as,
‚man is head to woman, even as Christ is head to all man,‛ but then develops
that comparison into a horrifying image of female power (28). The ‚monstrous
birth‛5 was a popular topic for pamphlets during the period; Knox knew that his
audience would be tantalized by the image of a monstrous body. ‚For who
would not judge that body to be a monster, where there was no head eminent
above the rest, but that the eyes were in the hands, the tongue and mouth
beneath in the belly, and the ears in the feet,‛ Knox asks, placing the argument
once again firmly in the woman’s body (27). But he elaborates on the Bible verse
to appeal to his audience’s imagination invoking freak show horror at the
concept of the unnaturalness of women’s dominance over man.6 Knox uses
elaborate metaphors to keep circling his argument back to a woman’s body
5
See Kathryn M. Brammall‟s “Monstrous Metamorphosis: Nature, Morality, and the Rhetoric of
Monstrosity in Tudor England” in Sixteenth Century Journal XXVII/1 (Spring 1996) 3-21.
6
In a November 5, 1566, speech to a joint delegation of Lords and Commons, eight years after the
publication of Knox‟s pamphlet, the then Queen Elizabeth responded to a request from Parliament that she
marry. Elizabeth deftly reclaimed this argument by embodying the “head” as the ruler and placing the men
of Parliament in the position of the foot, claming that it is “a strange thing that the foot should direct the
head in so weighty a cause” (Marcus 96). This metaphor was also used in a primer from Henry VIII‟s reign
to illustrate the relationship of man and wife: “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands, as unto the
Lord, for the husband is the wife‟s head, even as Christ is the head of the congregations. Therefore, as the
congregation is in subjection to Christ, likewise let the wives be in subjection to their husbands in all
things” (C. of E. Three Primers 71). Given the context of Elizabeth‟s statement, a response to Parliament‟s
urge to marry, the queen pointedly embodies the role of the “head” and avers that she will not be directed to
marry, and perhaps more significantly will not play the role of subject to a husband.
13
because, to Knox, it is the very nature of women’s bodies that makes them
inferior to men.
Turning to nature for a mirror of society, Knox’s societal hierarchy is
confirmed by God who ‚hath set before our eyes, two other mirrors and glasses,
in which he will, that we should behold the order, which he hath appointed and
established in nature: the one is, the natural body of man: the other is the politic
or civil body of that common wealth‛ (27). A monstrous body would be an
aberration; likewise, ‚no less monstrous is the body of that common wealth,
where a woman beareth empire‛ (Knox 27). If the laws of nature apply to all
women—including royal women—then so, argues Knox, should the laws of
society. He heartily believes that the ruling class of men will be on his side.
Instead of arguing about the exceptionality of a queen, Knox argues that a queen
is merely a woman and therefore subject to the same behavioral strictures as any
other woman in their patriarchal society:
for those that will not permit a woman to have power over her own
sons, will not permit her (I am assured) to have rule over a realm:
and those that will not suffer her to speak in defense of those that
be accused, nether that will admit her accusation intended against
man, will not approval her, that she shall sit in judgment crowned
with the royal crown, usurping authority in the midst of men.
(Knox 14)
Knox uses the laws of his country to establish both logos and ethos in his
argument against the rule of women. While Mary’s rule created the exigency,
the problem calling for solution, Knox was also concerned with his close
neighbors to the north because he knew that England could very well end up in
the hands of a Scottish ruler. Knox blames the privileged classes for allowing
themselves to be ruled by women: ‚I have made the nobility both of England and
14
Scotland inferior to brute beasts, for that they do to women, which no male
amongst the common sort of beasts can be proved to do their females: that is,
they reverence them, and quake at their presence, they obey their
commandments, and that against God‛ (32). Using the argument that not just
women, but everyone in the society is therefore lessened by the rule of a woman,
Knox hopes to appeal to his audience’s reliance on gendered expectations of
masculinity to elicit action and support.
What Knox could not have known when he sounded his trumpet to lead
the rebellion against Catholic women rulers was that Mary would soon die and
the crown would go to Elizabeth—the first female Protestant ruler of England.
Knox’s arguments display the anxiety of a patriarchal system facing female rule.
During the sixteenth century, a common use for the term ‚regiment‛ meant ‚to
rule over<especially royal or magisterial authority‛ (1. OED), but later in 1579,
the term came to mean ‚a considerable body of troops‛ (8). This project,
although admittedly slightly anachronistically, reclaims Knox’s term ‚regiment‛
by conflating the two definitions of ‚regiment,‛ to signify the ‚magisterial
authority‛ of these women queens, and also to group them together as a single
body, as in a ‚body of troops.‛ This dual-meaning definition joins the women
leaders of the sixteenth century in a ‚regiment‛ that displays both their power
and their interconnectedness. Knox may have had his ‚First Blast of the Trumpet
Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,‛ but the counterpoint to Knox’s
trumpet melody was the power of this new regiment—the ethos they would gain
from one another, the powerful rhetorical examples they would be to one
another, and the history they would write for the women that followed.
15
The Regiment Reclaimed
In Women Who Would be Kings: Female Rulers of the Sixteenth Century, Lisa
Hopkins skillfully maps out the foremothers of the ruling queens, but what may
be even more striking is the map of the interrelations of these women rulers
during their lifetimes. Replacing a patrilineal history with matrilineal history is
effective, but rather than a linear narrative, a remapping shows women who
cross arbitrary century markers and nation borders. This more dynamic history
allows us to see how they collaborated literally and metaphorically, and this
history also reflects the complicated experiences of royal women. Such a
remapping promotes a feminist agenda. Knox’s regiment of women can be
reclaimed as a community of women who looked to one another for inspiration,
example, warning, and rhetorical strategy to confront their time and situation.
While these women may not have co-existed in a warm sisterhood of feminist
action, perhaps making the militaristic term ‚regiment‛ a more appropriate one,
this community, while even mortally threatening one another, provided at least a
reflection of the possibility of strategies for women’s rule. 7 This project doesn’t
seek to reclaim these privileged women leaders as feminists, but it does seek to
uncover what we can learn, as feminists, from the strategies they employed to
establish power over a male Parliament and a misogynist country. Rather than a
linear history or a revisionist genealogy that still relies on a patriarchal family
tree, this project maps the contemporary interrelations and close familial ties of
the ‚regiment of women leaders‛8—the royal women of early modern England
and Scotland—in order to more deeply appreciate the unique rhetorical
strategies they employed as powerful leaders in women’s bodies working within
patriarchal systems that fundamentally excluded women’s participation.
7
See Chapter Two, “God Save the Queen: The Kairotic Subject in the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and
Mary, Queen of Scots.”
8
See Figure A
16
The Monstrous Regiment of 16th Century Reigning Women Genealogy
England
Henry VII=Elizabeth of York



Scotland
Catherine of Aragon = Henry VIII = Anne Boleyn = Jane Seymour



Mary Tudor = Charles

Margaret Tudor = James IV King of Scots


France
Mary I
1516-58
r. 1553-58
Elizabeth I
1533-1603
r.1558-1603
Edward VI
Frances Brandon = Henry Grey
Margaret Douglas
James V of Scots = Mary de Guise
1537-53
Henry II = Catherine
de Medici
r. 1547-53
1519-89






Jane Grey
Elizabeth Cavendish
1537-54
(regent 1560-63)

Mary Queen of Scots = Francis II
1542-87
r. 1553
r. 1542-87

Arbella Stuart
1575-1615

Marguerite de Valois
Queen of Navarre
1553-1615

James I of England
James VI of Scotland
Note: r. = reigned. This is not a complete genealogy, but shows the relation of the female leaders of the sixteenth century. This decision to edit was not made without consideration. In The
Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe, Jansen argues against this kind of genealogical editing that has often deleted women claiming that ‚the irrelevant branches
have been pruned‛ (qtd. in Jansen 3). While I agree with Jansen that to delete women who haven’t produced heirs is sexist, in this case it is more important to see the women of this project in their
close relation to one another than to name all of Henry VIII’s wives.
Assembling the Regiment
The eldest daughter of Henry VIII, Mary Tudor, received an extraordinary
education for a young woman because she was the daughter of a king. Henry
VIII insisted that his daughters receive ‚the same scholarly education that he had
had without questioning its propriety‛ (Anthony 22).9 Both Mary and Elizabeth
‚began their classical studies at the age of seven and were instructed by
masculine tutors as strictly as if they had been sons‛ (Anthony 22). But Mary’s
mother, Catherine of Aragon, played a crucial role in young Mary’s education. 10
Catherine commissioned Juan Louis Vives, who advocated chaste, modest,
silence, to write a conduct manual for her daughter Mary. In his The Education of
a Christian Woman (1523), Vives wrote that ‚A woman should live in seclusion
and not be known to many. It is a sign of an imperfect chastity and of uncertain
reputation to be known by a great number of people‛ (126). Considering his
intended audience, the eldest daughter of a king of England, Vives’s advice that
a woman ‚should not think that she deserves honors, nor should she seek them.
On the contrary, she shall avoid them, and if they should fall to her lot, she
should feel ashamed of them as if they were unmerited,‛ seems strange; he falls
just short of saying that if the crown were to come to her, she should deny it
(Vives 117). But Vives, who equates silence with chastity, does not avoid directly
addressing the future queen when he claims that, ‚I think it is abundantly clear
that chastity is, so to speak, the queen of female virtues‛ (118). Surely he is
implying that a queen should be silent or perhaps he is suggesting that denying
an unchaste position as queen would be the most fitting and queenly thing for a
9
This is a brief discussion of the queens‟ educations. For more information, there are several detailed
biographies of these remarkable women such as Erickson‟s Bloody Mary: The Life of Mary Tudor,
Anthony‟s Queen Elizabeth, and Guy‟s Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart.
10
Catherine of Aragon is most commonly spelled with a “C,” Katherine is often used as well. The spelling
of “Catherine” of Aragon is used here to more clearly delineate Mary‟s mother Aragon, Henry‟s first wife,
from Katherine Parr, Henry‟s last wife and stepmother to Mary.
18
woman to do. Vives also strangely redefines the term ‚eloquence‛ in an
unexpected turn as appropriate self-deprecating behavior for a woman: ‚the
most eloquent woman for me is the one who, when required to speak to men,
will become flushed in her whole countenance, perturbed in spirit, and at a loss
for words. O extraordinary and effective eloquence!‛ (Vives 133). Despite
Vives’s chauvinistic beliefs about the content of a woman’s education, Vives was
one of the earliest proponents of women’s education in England. Among the
texts suggested by Vives are Plato, Cicero, and Erasmus. Although we do not
know how closely Vives’s curriculum was followed, Mary undoubtedly had
practice in languages and rhetoric.
As the last wife of Henry VIII, Katherine Parr certainly lived up to her
motto, ‚To be useful in all that I do.‛ Raised by a single mother after her father’s
death when Katherine was five years old, the young Katherine was afforded
educational opportunities that may have been discouraged by her father if he
had lived. Her mother encouraged her education, and Katherine championed
the value of learning all her life—most notably, as an influence over her stepdaughters, England’s first female monarchs. Under her encouragement, the
rhetorical acts of Mary, Elizabeth and even Jane Grey thrived. Katherine
brought all three of Henry VIII’s children together in the same household for the
first time, allowing young Princess Elizabeth to benefit from her brother’s tutors,
and she encouraged Mary and Elizabeth to work on translations. Only four
years older than her eldest stepchild, Katherine fostered a close friendship with
Mary. In a letter to Princess Mary, Katherine encourages her to revise and
publish a translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrase on the Gospel of St. John:
nought now remains but that proper care and vigilance should be
taken in revising, I entreat you to send over to me this very
excellent and useful work<that it may be committed to the press in
19
due time; and farther, to signify whether you wish it to go forth to
the world (most auspiciously) under your name, or as the
production of an unknown writer. To which work you will, in my
opinion, do a real injury, if you refuse to let it go down to posterity
under the auspices of your own name, since you have undertaken
so much labour in accurately translating it for the great good of the
public. (Crawford 219)
Katherine’s insistence that Mary publish her work under her own name
presumes that Mary may have been inclined to the ‚womanly virtue‛ of
humility. Katherine may not have been a mother figure to her peer-aged stepdaughter Mary, but she certainly fostered Mary’s writing—even though the
subject matter was determinedly Catholic. After Katherine was widowed, she
brought Lady Jane Grey to live with her and closely fostered the education of
both Elizabeth and Jane Grey.
In Roger Ascham’s 1571 The Scholmaster, he describes himself as ‚the
friend of Jane Grey, and the tutor of Queen Elizabeth‛ (1). Ascham advocated a
friendly relationship between teacher and student, where the ‚schoolhouse
should be counted a sanctuary against fear,‛ and a firm rhetorical grounding was
established in the classics of Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero (99). The intended
audience of his book is male teachers and students, but Ascham’s exemplar of
learning, ‚one example, for all the gentlemen of this court to follow,‛ is Queen
Elizabeth (120). While this is a flattering description of Elizabeth, Ascham uses
her to shame male students who should, by nature, exceed a woman’s abilities:
‚It is your shame, (I speak to you all, you young gentlemen of England) that one
maid should go beyond you all, in excellency of learning, and knowledge of
divers tongues‛ (120). Certainly, Ascham’s audience includes Elizabeth and her
Protestant ruling class and influences his narrative. Elizabeth’s classical
20
education was an exemplary humanist education that also influenced other royal
women and increased opportunities for women’s education in England—albeit
only for a few members of the royal class. Lady Arbella Stuart, a cousin
descended from Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, benefited from ‚an
education on the model of Queen Elizabeth’s‛ (Steen 24).
Elizabeth’s exceptional education was also due in large part to her close
relationship with her younger brother, Edward who shared his tutors with
Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Edward competed in their schoolwork, and they wrote
letters to one another ‚in Latin and Elizabeth acquired thereby a Ciceronian style
which remained with her through life, pervading her English correspondence
and making her letters read like orations‛ (Anthony 26). It is not merely her
letters that employed the Ciceronian style of rhetoric. In Ascham’s letter to
Sturm (1550), Ascham describes the then 16-year-old princess as a scholar who
‚likes a style that grows out of the subject; chaste because it is suitable, and
beautiful because it is clear. She very much admires modest metaphors, and
comparisons of contraries well put together and contrasting felicitously with one
another‛ (Berdan 340). While public pronouncements regarding the intellect of
royal children are suspect due to the obvious rhetorical aim of flattering one’s
monarch, this private letter provides an unusual view into Elizabeth’s rhetorical
training and ability.
England’s first female queen regnant, Jane Grey, was the granddaughter
of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary Tudor.11 At ten years of age, Jane was sent
with her tutor, John Aylmer, to live with Katherine Parr and Thomas Seymour at
Chelsea. Katherine also had charge of Princess Elizabeth at this time and
11
Jane Grey is the last English queen in this discussion of the queens‟ rhetorical education because,
although she reigned first chronologically, as a younger woman her education occurred much later than that
of Mary and Elizabeth. More importantly, Jane‟s education reflected more progressive, Protestant, and
humanistic values of an education program for women.
21
oversaw the education of both girls. While they were close in age, the difference
between ten and fourteen seems to have kept the young cousins Lady Jane and
the Princess Elizabeth at enough of a distance that no correspondence between
the two or mention of one another exists. These two future ruling female
monarchs—although quite briefly in the case of Jane—were mentored by another
queen, Katherine Parr, and received the best humanist education available.
Jane’s tutor, Aylmer, was a close friend of Elizabeth’s tutor Roger Ascham.
It was a visit to Aylmer that facilitated Ascham’s meeting with young Lady Jane.
Ascham’s now famous description of his brief discussion with the studious Jane
who he ‚found in her chamber reading Phaedon Platonis in Greek‛ is the only
evidence that Jane was a very learned woman for her age and has greatly
contributed to the characterization of Jane as a historical figure and appears as a
defense for women’s ability to learn (96). When he asked why she was inside
reading while her family was out hunting, she replied, ‚all their sport in the park
is but a shadow to that pleasure, that I find in Plato‛ (Ascham 97). Intrigued by
her ability to read Plato in Greek, Ascham asked, ‚And how came you
Madame,*<+ to this deep knowledge of pleasure, and what did chiefly allure
you unto it: seeing, not many women, but very few men have attained
thereunto?‛ (97). Her answer supports Ascham’s thesis that teachers should be
kind: ‚One of the greatest benefits, that ever God gave me, is, that he sent me so
sharp and severe parents, and so gentle a schoolmaster‛ (97). Ascham displays
Jane’s ability and her love for learning, and he subtly reminds the reader of her
great sacrifice as a martyr to establish ethos in his argument. ‚I remember this
talk gladly,‛ he affirms, ‚both because it so worthy of memory, and because also,
it was the last talk that ever I had, and the last time, that ever I saw that noble
and worthy lady‛ (98). The Scholemaster is the only evidence of Jane’s studies to
survive her; Ascham’s depiction of Jane established her as a scholar and
22
appealed to his Protestant ruling class audience. In fact, by the publication of
Foxe’s Acts and Monuments in 1563, Jane’s tragically wasted intellectual potential
became legend:
Between this young damsel and king [sic] Edward there was little
difference in age, though in learning and knowledge of the tongues
she was not only equal, but also superior unto him, being
instructed of a master [Aylmer] right nobly learned. If her fortune
had been as good as her bringing up, joined with fineness of wit,
she might have seemed comparable not only to the house of
Vespasians, Sempronians, and the mother of the Gracchi, yea to
any other women beside, that deserved high praise for their
singular learning; but also to the university-men, which have taken
many degrees of the schools. (Foxe VI, 384)
Of course, Foxe’s publication reflects the values of a Protestant audience ruled by
a female, Protestant monarch, Elizabeth; yet, Foxe’s hyperbolic flattery displays
the positive interpretation of a woman’s education when compared to Knox’s
‚First Blast of the Trumpets Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women‛ just
five years earlier. When Katherine Parr died, the eleven-year-old Jane served as
chief mourner. And it was from Chelsea that Jane was brought to Sion to
participate in the plot that would eventually place her on the throne. The
community of women rulers is, in fact, formed by the influence of other royal
women. To some extent, Katherine Parr oversaw the education of all of
England’s queens.
The education of Mary, Queen of Scots was also supervised by a queen.
Catherine de Medici ensured that Mary, who was betrothed to Catherine’s son,
the Dauphin of France, studied languages, rhetoric, history and poetry. In Queen
of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart, John Guy describes Mary’s education in
23
France as ‚striking‛ because ‚she followed a curriculum almost identical to that
of her male counterpart, the dauphin‛ (68). Guy lists Mary’s texts, which include
Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, Erasmus and Quintilian (68-70). Antoine Fouquelin, one
of Mary’s tutors, ‚was the author of a celebrated treatise on rhetoric, La rhétorique
françoise, published in Paris in 1557, with a dedication to his young pupil in
which he enthused over her abilities and potential‛ (Guy 69). Mary also read
Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Budé’s L’Institution du Prince, the ‚classic
manual for rulers, which was based on his distillation of the works of ancient
authors‛ (Guy 69). While these texts were written to prepare a man for rule,
Mary applied those precepts to her rhetorical situation as a future queen.
According to Guy, when Mary was ‚nearly thirteen she delivered an
extemporaneous Latin declamation<defend*ing+ the education of women and
refut*ing+ a courtier’s opinion that girls should forgo learning‛ (71). While
Mary’s access to a rhetorical education was unique at this time, Mary took the
opportunity to put her rhetorical theory into practice in addressing the larger
concern of women’s education—moving from ‚exceptional‛ to ‚exemplary‛—
providing a model, or mirror, of women’s rhetorical ability.
Mirrors Into History
People are attracted to and comforted by mirrors of ourselves and
society—the validation that we are members of something larger than ourselves,
that we are a community, that we are not alone. As we seek to justify our actions
and our culture, we seek out the naturally occurring models of behavior that
validate our ways of life. Lacan’s mirror-stage theory suggests that an infant
child discovers who he or she is by considering his or her reflection, or in the
important move from ‚the specular I into the social I‛ (Lacan 5). The child
recognizes her own image in a mirror and ‚once the image has been mastered
24
and found empty‛ the child performs ‚a series of gestures in which [s]he
experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image
and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality
it reduplicates—the child’s own body and the persons and things, around h*er+‛
(Lacan 1). One is psychologically knowledgeable of the self and its capabilities
only after one sees oneself from the outside—either in a literal mirror or in the
mirror of another being with which one can identify. The mirror image is a
representation of an exterior self (or ‚other‛) with which one can commune and
form a sense of identity and from which one can learn. The mirror provides a
partner for the infant.
In the absence of a mirror one seeks out other reflective surfaces—other
people perhaps who are in similar circumstances and from whom one can learn.
The development of the self is not a solitary act; it is social. A quick glimpse at
any television program from the news to a reality show tells us that this desire to
seek out mirrors in order to determine our own identity continues throughout
adulthood. We discover we are moral people by shaking our heads at criminals
on television. We discover what we should wear to communicate information
about our tastes, social status, and economic status by noting the fashion on
television. Finally, the medium of the television is ubiquitous; however, the
mirror became an ubiquitous item that influenced society long before the current
technology. Just as the television is a technological development that marks our
time and has become an everyday object in our lives, the mirror was an everyday
object that defined the sixteenth century in several similar ways.
In countless ways we seek out who we are by seeking out ourselves in
others. Innovators, ground-breakers, pioneers in all aspects of society have to
venture out without an exact mirror-image to guide them. Perhaps the image in
the mirror has a different race, gender, or sexual preference, but the innovator
25
will adapt that image to serve its purpose—to take the subject as far as it can go
until it must venture off alone and see only itself in the mirror. Ruling women of
the early modern period found little literal reflection. As the first reigning
women of England, the historical monarch in the mirror was man. Without a
mirror of female rule, reigning women turned to one another, as contemporary
mirrors, to guide them in the discovery of their rhetorical selves.
While people have been fascinated by their own image from the moment a
reflection was glimpsed in a pool of water, the ubiquity of the pocket mirror
contributed to a glut of literary texts employing the mirror metaphor throughout
early-Renaissance England. In The Mutable Glass: Mirror-imagery in Titles and
Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, Herbert Grabes catalogues the use
of the word ‚mirror‛ and its Latin equivalent ‚speculum‛ as it established its
significance in the culture through literature. Just as women rulers were leading
three major countries in Europe, the mirror arrived as an everyday item and
became a cultural icon: 12
Twelfth-century Europe had relearned the ancient art of making
glass mirrors, and the thirteenth century saw the beginnings of a
process whereby the polished metal mirrors of Antiquity and the
Middle Ages gradually became ousted by their glassy rivals; by the
early 1500s, the Venetian glass-manufactories had advanced their
12
As an “everyday” item, the mirror is a part of the material culture. In addition to the genre of the mirror,
the fact that the item was so prevalent and so significant to the formation of selfhood and identity creates a
nexus of theoretical frameworks that mirrors my own project in the collective values, representations, and
practices historical subjects toward a feminist goal of representation and power. In the introduction to
Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, Patricia Fumerton discusses the “further interest by secondgeneration new historicists in materiality” and how the “concept of the everyday, as we are defining it,
foregrounds such materiality” in that “everyday life…expands to include not only familiar things but also
collective meanings, values, representations, and practices; in this respect, second generation new
historicism, like the first, is indebted to cultural anthropologists such as Geertz as well as to cultural
historians/sociologists such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Norbert Elias. At the same time, the
everyday tends to place upfront particular kinds of subjects: the common person, the marginalized, women.
In this regard the methodology is indebted to feminists” (5).
26
technical expertise to a stage where relatively inexpensive, smallformat, mass-produced looking-glasses were made available to the
general public. (Grabes 4)
The availability of cheap mirrors lessened the notion that the mirror was
something only for the aristocracy, but with a larger audience, the mirror
signified in more ways to more people—creating a powerful symbol for
literature, art, and thought. Grabes argues that the ‚employment of the mirror in
metaphorical contexts is so frequent and deliberate a strategy that the mirror can
be said to constitute the central image for a particular word-view‛ (4). This
world-view is complex, at once idealized, imperfect, and illusory. One glimpses
in a mirror and sees placid perfection—objects or people in a world of mere
image without consequence or action. A mirror-image is imperfect and
diminished—a two-dimensional representation of the real three-dimensional
object. Finally, the reflection is inconstant. Once the subject moves, the image in
the mirror disappears leaving no trace, or history of the likeness it once bore.
What lasts is the effect of seeing the reflection—the knowledge of the mirror
image changes the subject.
The effect of the ubiquity of mirrors in sixteenth-century England led to a
world-view that placed the person at the center. When one sees the world
through a mirror, the central object is the reflection of the self and all other
reflected objects are relegated to the margins. However, those reflected objects
are still a part of the image. Instead of merely looking out at the world, suddenly
the subject is a part of the world in that one can be seen among and within the
world in the mirror reflection. In ‚The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors,‛
Debora Shuger argues that the mirror did not spark a ‚new reflexive selfconsciousness,‛ but rather the convex Renaissance mirror miniaturized objects
‚provid[ing] a small-scale version of a large subject‛ (22). In this way, the image
27
in the mirror serves as a performative subject rather than an introspective one.
Shuger states that ‚the preponderance of evidence suggests that the Renaissance
self lacks reflexivity, self-consciousness, and individuation, and hence differs
fundamentally from what we usually think of as the modern self‛ (35). This
explanation of the Renaissance mirror clarifies the function of the mirror in the
mirror literary genre. This genre is encyclopedic and demonstrates expertise—
the small-scale definition of large ideas or topics. Finally, the image in the mirror
is not the self, but ‚typically, the person looking in the mirror *in the renaissance+
sees an exemplary image‛ (Shuger 22). So, rather than seeing one’s self, ‚what
Renaissance persons do see in the mirror are instead saints, skulls, friends,
offspring, spouses, magistrates, Christ‛ (Shuger 37). One uses the mirror to see
another, a model, and in the case of women rulers, a member of the regiment, but
‚it is in this other that one is defined not<reflexively but, as it were relationally‛
(Shuger 37).
In addition to the metaphorical world-view the mirror represents, the
widespread use of ‚mirror‛ in titles and the works’ shared subject matter
establish a genre in this period.13 Grabes delineates four types of metaphorical
mirrors that comprise the literary genre:
1. Factually informative mirrors (the mirror reflects things as they
are)
a. the encyclopedic mirror
b. the comprehensive mirrors of the compendia
c. mirrors of specific branches of knowledge
13
This project uses the term “mirror” in two ways—first, as a metaphor for the rhetorical imitation or
modeling that women leaders employed as a rhetorical strategy which ties these women together in a
relational mirror image as it was understood in the renaissance and second, more literally as the genre of
the mirror—an early modern genre of text that shared the rhetorical aims that Grabes outlines in his text,
The Mutable Glass: Mirror-imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance
(1982).
28
2. Exemplary texts bearing mirror titles (it shows the way things
should or should not be)
a. the mirror of positive models
b. virtues and vices: exemplary and admonitory mirrors
c. admonitory and unmasking mirrors: the deterrent image
3. The prognostic mirror (it shows the way things will be)
4. Fantastic mirror (it shows what only exists in the mirror or in the
writer’s imagination). (Grabes 38-63)
Grabes’s mirror categories reflect the many uses of mirrors as tropes in the
Renaissance. In Allegory and Mirror: Tradition and Structure in Middle English
Literature, James Wimsatt highlights the function of mirror texts that were
‚encyclopedic,‛ but also importantly ‚set up models or ideals‛ (Wimsatt 30). In
fact, ‚the predominant aspect of these books is their setting up of exemplars of
good (or sometimes bad) conduct‛ (Wimsatt 30). The mirror text author displays
encyclopedic knowledge of the topic, but also influences the reader by showing a
model of behavior (Wimsatt 30). The sixteenth century saw a marked increase in
mirror texts: ‚the number of mirror-titles corresponds in ratio to the
unprecedented upswing in new publications taken as a whole (in the second half
of the [sixteenth c]entury, approximately four times as many first editions
appeared as in the first half)‛ (Grabes 32). This mirror genre was a particularly
appealing subject for women writers in this period because the mere claim that a
text is a mirror establishes ethos. 14 As Grabes’ categories show, texts of the mirror
genre inform and provide exemplars—two rhetorical aims that require an
14
Mirror texts include a translation of The Mirror of Gold for the Sinful Soul by Margaret Beaufort,
Countess of Richmond and Derby (ca. 1506), Katherine Parr‟s The Lamentation of a Sinner (1545-6),
Marguerite of Navarre‟s The Mirror of Gold to the Sinful Soul (translated into English in 1507 by Henry
VIII’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort), and a translation of The Mirror of Princely Deeds and
Knighthood by Margaret Taylor (1578), who is the only non-royal woman mirror text author cited in
Grabes exhaustive study.
29
authoritative voice. In this way, the mirror genre provided the opportunity for
women to serve as experts in these texts.
Grabes’ four categories all require the authorial voice to be
knowledgeable. In Allegory and Mirror: Tradition and Structure in Middle English
Literature, Wimsatt singles out ‚works called mirrors‛ for their shared rhetorical
aims of establishing expertise; they ‚generally aim in some way both at
inclusiveness and the presentation of ideals; they are either compendiums of
exemplars or compendiums of more or less corrupted entities in which
exemplars are implicit‛ (139). These mirror works are written about exemplars;
they are models for behavior and discovery. By participating in this genre,
women authors become exemplars. The knowledge of their field of inquiry or
expertise and their ability to produce an authoritative text make them rhetorical
exemplars.
Mirrors for Princes and Princesses
The mirror genre is also especially pertinent to this study of royal women
because the sub-genre of ‚mirrors for princes‛ applied the mirror metaphor to
proper behavior for rulers. The ‚mirrors for princes‛ genre provided a safe
literary haven to give advice to future kings and prepare princes to rule. The
mirror was long used as an allegorical justification for the monarch’s position as
God’s representative on earth: ‚In the case of monarchs, the mirror often reflects
God, Christ or the true Church; where specified the virtues reflected are typically
public ones: martial prowess, nobility, magnanimity, justice‛ (Grabes 79). When
that metaphor is applied to women monarchs, however, the metaphor is also
layered with the semantic meanings associated with women and mirrors. For
royal women, the mirror signifies not only God and public virtues, but private
virtues that wouldn’t apply to male monarchs: ‚In applying the mirror-metaphor
30
to women of high birth, the early courtly poets in particular helped establish the
conventional aura of the metaphor as involving the reflection of virtues relevant
to high status, such a sexual circumspection and quasi-divine beauty‛ (Grabes
79). For reigning queens, the ultimate goal of their rhetorical acts was to have a
public voice while maintaining the chastity that society demanded of women.
The genre of the mirror provided the conflation of both the public virtues of a
leader—as an expert voice—and the private virtues of a woman—as virtuous,
chaste, and beautiful—to serve as the perfect metaphor for female rule. The
genre of the mirror in English literature ‚occurs with especially marked
frequency in the century between 1550 and 1650, both in literary works and in
the titles of books, tracts and pamphlets‛—coincidentally, this century saw the
first reigning women in England and the fifty years or so that followed their
influential rule (Grabes 12). When the texts of the mirror genre turn to religious
themes, women writers are participating in a genre deemed ‚appropriate‛ for
women—devotional literature. A further reflection of appropriateness can be
seen in translated devotional works because translations were considered
appropriate topics of composition for women at the time.
In 1507, Lady Margaret Beaufort, the same Lady Margaret who stepped
aside in the line of succession in favor of her grandson, Henry VIII, and who
would later be remembered as one of the first advocates of women’s education in
England, translated ‚The Mirror of Gold to the Sinful Soul‛ from French to
English. In 1544, eleven-year-old Princess Elizabeth translated Queen
Marguerite of Navarre’s ‚The Glass of the Sinful Soul‛ as a New Year’s gift for
her step-mother, Queen Katherine Parr. The queenly connections do not stop
there; Marguerite knew Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn. It is generally
assumed that the copy of the work Elizabeth translated from was a gift from
31
Marguerite to Anne that Elizabeth found in her library. In her letter prefacing
the translation, Elizabeth asks Queen Katherine to collaborate with her privately:
the file of your excellent wit, and godly learning, in the reading of it
(if so it vouchsafe your highness to do) shall rub out, polish, and
mend (or else cause to mend) the words (or rather the order of my
writing) the which I knowe in many places to be rude, and nothing
done as it should be. But I hope, that after to have been in your
graces hands: there shall be nothing in it worthy of reprehension
and that in the meanwhile no other, (but your highness only) shall
read it, or se it, lest my faults be known of many. (Marcus 7)
Only after Katherine’s revision was their collaboration published. The result was
the future Queen Elizabeth and Queen Katherine’s translation of Queen
Marguerite’s Mirror, a gift to the former Queen Anne Boleyn. In the following
year, 1545, Elizabeth collaborated with Katherine again when she composed a
trilingual translation of Katherine’s own ‚Prayers or Meditations.‛ In the letter
to Henry VIII, the only known letter of Elizabeth to her father, prefacing her
translation of Queen Katherine’s Prayers or Meditations, Elizabeth wrote in Latin
that:
it was thought by me a most suitable thing that this work, which is
most worthy because it was indeed a composition by a queen as a
subject for her king, be translated into other languages by me, your
daughter. May I, by this means, be indebted to you not as an
imitator of your virtues but indeed as an inheritor of them.
(Marcus 10)
In this piece Elizabeth acknowledges the tradition in which she is participating,
the regiment of women royal leaders, and importantly, she makes a distinction
between imitator and inheritor. The mirror is more than a simple reflection, it is
32
part of the regiment. It is her legacy. In a letter by the Princess Elizabeth to
Queen Katherine prefacing her English translation of Chapter One of John
Calvin’s Institution de la Religion Chrestienne (Geneva, 1541), Elizabeth again notes
history in that this work of translating Katherine’s piece is part of a:
custom [that] has always prevailed that to preserve the memory of
notable things that were done in times past, and likewise to
increase their renown, a number of ingenious men, both to apply
their understanding and skill and to have it seen that in every way
with their ingenious art they excelled the rest of all other animals,
have in many places and in divers ways amused themselves by
composing or putting into memoirs the things done in their time
that seemed to them worthiest of commemoration or remembrance.
(Marcus 11)
Elizabeth elevates her own status by placing herself in the company of ‚a
number of ingenious men,‛ but her status is surpassed by the accolades she gives
to Katherine’s work which is ‚worthiest of commemoration or remembrance‛—
and importantly, worthy of participating in the recording of history. Elizabeth
closes her letter, again joining Katherine and describing the rhetorical aim of her
work to ‚hold the lamp and illumine so‛ and ‚assist the fervent zeal and perfect
love that you bear towards the selfsame God who created all things‛ (Marcus
13). Although Katherine’s text is a translation, and not a mirror text, Elizabeth
claims the text as a mirror when, in closing her letter, she addresses Katherine,
‚Whom I most ardently entreat to vouchsafe that you may grow so very
perfectly in the knowledge of Him that the organ of your royal voice may be the
true instrument of His Word, in order to serve as a mirror and lamp to all true
Christian men and women‛ (emphasis added, Marcus 13). Just a couple of years
33
later, Katherine Parr composed her own mirror text, ‚The Lamentation of a
Sinner,‛ taking her place among the community of mirror-author queens.
Elizabeth’s mirror reflects the inheritance of Lady Margaret’s royal mirror
text, and it is a literal reflection, a translation, of Queen Marguerite’s work.
Later, Katherine Parr’s work mirrors Elizabeth’s. These multiple mirrors create
reflections of reflections. When one sees another mirror in the mirror, the image
appears to be repeated endlessly—thus, the tradition, the sequence, the history is
magnified to ostensible infinity. Within their texts are the reflections of a history
of women’s writing and ethos due to participation in an established genre.
Although the ephemeral nature of the reflection betrays the fragile, dangerous,
and temporary state of female rule—the image in the mirror is temporary; when
one looks away it disappears—while one gazes into the mirror, the likeness
appears to stretch to infinity—indicating a past, a present, a future, and a
regiment of women.
Ruling women of the early modern period found little literal reflection.
As the first reigning women of England, the historical monarch in the mirror was
a man. Without a tradition of female rule, and in the absence of a conduct
manual or mirror text for future reigning queens, the mirror text for female rule
was contemporary. It was the speeches and letters of women queens that they
experienced as they happened, as they shared space and time, that modeled
rhetorical strategy and taught the rules of ruling rhetoric to the women of the
regiment. Without a mirror of female rule, reigning women turned to one
another, as contemporary mirrors, to guide them in the discovery of their
rhetorical selves.
Students and teachers of rhetoric, this regiment of royal women was
closely related in education, circumstance, and family, and even published
collaborative texts. These close associations created shared rhetorical strategies,
34
providing this community with the mirror of female rule that they had
heretofore lacked. The emergence of the mirror as an everyday item coincided
with royal women’s collaborative texts of the ‚mirror text‛ genre, or texts of an
encyclopedic nature that aimed to portray virtues and ideals from an
authoritative position. The mirror as a rhetorical strategy, a material object, and
a literary genre guides this discussion of sixteenth-century women’s rhetoric.
Chapter Overview
Chapter Two, ‚God Save the Queen: The Kairotic Subject in the Mercy
Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots‛ analyzes the most consequential
correspondence of these women rulers—letters to one another begging for mercy
in the face of death. In the heightened exigency of literal life and death
situations, these women pointed to the community of which they were members
and their positions as inheritors of a male history to invoke pity and ask for
mercy.
Chapter Three, ‚Rhetorical Reflections of Female Ruling Identity:
Embodied Apophasis in the speeches of Mary I and Elizabeth I,‛ focuses on the
language, imagery, and symbolism of stereotypically female-gendered roles.
Thus the apophasis, or denying in order to affirm, reflects the body of the rhetor.
In a strategy I call ‚embodied apophasis,‛ women rulers point to the figures of the
spouse, the mother, and the maiden to borrow only the part of the reference that
will contribute to their rhetorical authority. In other words, they invoke the
stereotypical figure to deny their fulfillment of the role, while using the
audience’s associations with that role to establish authority.
Chapter Four, ‚Disembodied Apophasis in Royal Women’s Rhetorical
Acts,‛ discusses the popular gendered rhetorical analysis of women leaders,
‚gender play.‛ The term apophasis is defined in two ways, meaning to exclude all
35
definitions except the one that remains, and to deny in order to affirm. In a
strategy I call ‚disembodied apophasis,‛ reigning women invoke male images of
power, such as the soldier, while their female body suggests difference. In this
way, female rhetors borrow the authority of the male images, but exclude the
male definitions of power by performing a new image of power in a female
body.
Finally, the afterword, ‚The Scrying Mirror: The Legacy of Early Modern
Women’s Rule,‛ explores the modern implications for this reclaimed history of
women’s rhetorical strategies of power through a discussion of the rhetorical
strategies used by Democratic Senator from New York and U.S. presidential
candidate, Hillary Clinton. Illustrating the modern applications of reigning
queens’ rhetorical strategies, this analysis proves the continuing relevance of a
rich history of not simply historical, but rhetorical foremothers.
36
CHAPTER 2
God Save the Queen: The Kairotic Subject in the Mercy Letters
of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots
Much suspected by me,
Nothing proved can be.
Quod Elizabeth the prisoner
Written on a window with
a diamond at Woodstock
In my end is my beginning
—Mary, Queen of Scots
Embroidered on a cloth during
her imprisonment in the Tower
In arguably the most consequential time in the lives of Elizabeth Tudor
and Mary, Queen of Scots—the moments they faced death—they wrote letters, as
subjects to queens, to ask for mercy. These letters still exist as examples of
verifiable first-person narratives written within a unique community of royal
women leaders to members who held the power of mercy or condemnation. In
the heightened exigency of literal life and death situations, these rhetors, or as
37
this project names them in this context ‚kairotic subjects,‛ turned to the
community of which they were members to invoke pity and to ask for mercy.
Identifying the speaker as a kairotic subject reflects the complex implications of
the many historical interpretations of the term kairos, as well as the complicated
context of the drastically discordant power relations of an exchange between a
reigning queen and her female subject. Further, kairotic subjects are kairotic
because they were suddenly subjects to the monarch in a constantly changing
situation—the type of situation that calls for a kairotic response. Mary was
Princess Elizabeth’s elder sister, and once even served as Elizabeth’s lady-inwaiting; however, in a sudden power reversal, Elizabeth was subject to Mary as
queen. Mary, Queen of Scots sat on the throne of two countries before she found
herself subject to Queen Elizabeth. In addition to naming the writers of these
mercy letters kairotic subjects, kairos is also identified in the topics or strategies of
argument that both rhetors use to employ kairos in their letters. The kairotic
topics of the mercy letters include the explicit invocation of the legacy of a male
history of kingship, an appeal to their consanguinity, a forceful response, and
entail a performative function. Mary, Queen of Scots’ letter to her cousin, Queen
Elizabeth I, mirrors Princess Elizabeth’s earlier letter to her sister, Mary I, in the
rhetorical situation of the kairotic subject and the kairotic topics they both employ.
The Subject of Kairos
The most common definition for kairos is the ‚opportune moment,‛ but
the concept is much more complicated than this explanation suggests. In A
Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Lanham broadens this notion a bit by drawing
attention to the broader rhetorical context in his brief definition of kairos as: ‚The
Greek word for time, place, *and+ circumstances of a subject‛ (Lanham 94). In
Kaironomia: On the Will-to-Invent, Eric Charles White expands on the implications
38
of the term further by tracing the origin of the word kairos back to two
possibilities. The first origin comes from weaving, traditionally a woman’s art,
when the weaver must draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in
the warp of the cloth. The second possible word origin has to do with archery:
In archery, [kairos+ refers to an opening or ‘opportunity’ or, more
precisely, a long tunnel-like aperture through which the archer’s
arrow has to pass. Successful passage of a kairos requires, therefore,
that the archer’s arrow be fired not only accurately but with
enough power for it to penetrate. (White 13)
White combines the two etymologies to define kairos as a ‚a passing instant when
an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be
achieved‛ (White 13). So, kairos is not simply the moment; it is what is done with
that moment. Kairos is more than opportunity; it’s precision, power, delivery,
response, tact, and convention. Any response from a subject to a monarch has
the additional constraints of protocol; however, when a response ‚must be
driven through with force,‛ it must be carefully negotiated, or artfully crafted, by
a kairotic subject—especially when the charge is treason and the sentence is
death.
White further defines kairos as an ability to adapt to changing rhetorical
circumstances. ‚Since the circumstances enabling success may change at any
time,‛ White claims, ‚kairos implies that there can never be more than a
contingent and provisional management of the present opportunity‛ (13). To
employ kairos, one must ‚*adapt+ to an always mutating situation,‛ and it is the
action of the response that determines the successful rhetorical strategy (White
13). The mercy letters of Princess Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots show their
adaptive skills. After all, the kairotic subjects must drastically reassess their roles
as royals who are suddenly accused and subject to death like any common
39
criminal. It is the nature of this ‚always mutating situation‛ that led to the
temporary loss of kairos within the history of rhetoric.
Kairos originated with the pre-Socratics. Originally a Greek god, Kairos
became the Latin goddess, Occasio, ‚and she had a political connection‛
(Thompson 79). This political connection led to a close association with the
concept of justice. The Pythagoreans defined justice as ‚giving to each according
to merit, that is, generously to those who had worked hard and parsimoniously to
those who had shirked. Justice, therefore, was determined by circumstances:
justice was kairos‛ (Kinneavy 87). The kairos of the mercy letters reflects all the
nuances of this multi-faceted and elusive concept in this small, yet momentous
span of history—of time—where time means confluence, coincidence, and
consequence—consequence perceived as justice from a political ruler that could
be as grave as death.
For the Sophists, kairos indicated a ‚‘point in time’ (as opposed to chronos,
‘sequential time’)‛ (Sloane 529). Therefore, kairos marks a rhetorical response to a
specific moment. Gorgias is perhaps most closely associated with the concept of
kairos in the history of rhetoric because he ‚made kairos the cornerstone of his
entire epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and rhetoric‛ (Kinneavy 81). Gorgias
interprets kairos as:
a radical principle of occasionality which implies a conception of
the production of meaning in language as a process of continuous
adjustment to and creation of the present occasion, or a process of
continuous interpretation in which the speaker seeks to inflect the
given ‘text’ to his or her own ends at the same time that the
speaker’s text is ‘interpreted’ in turn by the context surrounding it.
(White 13-14)
40
Kairos, therefore, is an appropriate lens with which to examine the mercy letters
of Princess Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots because there is so much known
about the inciting incident for the compositon, the relationship between the
author and the audience, the exact circumstances of the moment of composition,
and the effect of the letter on its recipient. These letters are responses to specific,
complex, and certain moments of history. Although the occasions for
composition can shed light on the larger rhetorical contexts of the mercy letters,
the kairotic subjects’ response to those occasions is where rhetorically strategic
kairos become apparent.
The kairos of a written text is necessarily different from the passing
moment of oral discourse:
No writer can account in advance for every such need [as in oral
discourse where an evaluation of what the moment requires can be
assessed+, so ‘occasion’ for written texts must refer to the situation
initially eliciting the writing, whereas kairos itself will pertain more
to the harmonious and appropriate fashioning of a suitable text.
(Sloane 530)
In written texts, especially, the response to the occasion is the crucial element of
kairos. Like the accurate and powerful force of the archer from the etymology of
the term, kairos is about response—not simply occasion.
Kairos signifies the continuous re-evaluation of the rhetorical situation,
and for this reason it was not as easily definable as other rhetorical strategies in
the history of rhetoric. Consequently, the term kairos didn’t fit well into the types
of popular rhetorical ‚playbooks‛ like the Rhetorica ad Herennium, for example,
that listed specific uses of simple rhetorical tropes. In fact, due to the extreme
adaptability of kairos as defined by Gorgias, ‚Plato countered with the stability
and permanence of his world of ideas‛ (Kinneavy 81). Plato’s appreciation for
41
absolutes left little room for the adaptability of kairos. For Plato, kairos was a
jumping off point; he ‚used kairos as the foundation on which to construct his
theory of virtue as a mean between two extremes, the theory developed still
further by Aristotle‛ (Kinneavy 81-82). Because kairos is situational—a response
to a moment—it was associated with action. And so, for Aristotle, who was
‚interested more in the art of rhetoric than in the act of rhetoric,‛ kairos was not a
useful concept. To say, however, that kairos is not artistic is to ignore the careful
negotiations of changing situations that lead to rhetorical choices that cannot be
memorized and performed. In the mercy letters the artistic finesse with which
kairotic subjects address the monarch is consummately apparent.
To reflect the artistic nuance of kairos, ‚the concept of kairos merged with
that of prepon (propriety or fitness)‛ (Kinneavy 82). In fact, it is this merged
concept of kairos and prepon that most accurately describes the sort of artistic
sophistication that a kairotic response should have:
Allied with the concept of kairos is prepon, the fitting, which was
also a term used in the fifth century (Plato, Gorgias 503e8 and
Phaedrus 268d5) and which was to become one of the ‘virtues’ of
style. The two together constitute what may be called the artistic
element in rhetorical theory as opposed to the prescribed rules.
(Kennedy 67)
The diplomacy required in a response from a kairotic subject to a monarch
necessitated consideration of propriety and an artful response to the immediate
and exigent context of the specific moment of composition. Later, Cicero used
kairos as ‚the dominating concept in both *his+ ethics and his rhetoric‛ (Kinneavy
82). ‚The Ciceronian notion of propriety persisted throughout the medieval and
Renaissance periods,‛ and certainly both Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots
were familiar with Ciceronian rhetoric (Kinneavy 82). Therefore, when Princess
42
Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots employ kairos in their mercy letters, it is this
rich definition of kairos they employ. Following the Renaissance, the term kairos
was neglected for centuries.
The concept was reclaimed in 1968 by Lloyd Bitzer who ‚recast the study
of kairos as a consideration of the ‚rhetorical situation‛ comprised of an exigence,
an audience, and certain constraints” (Sloane 531). For Bitzer, rhetoric necessarily
invites action. He posits that:
A work of rhetoric is pragmatic; it comes into existence for the sake
of something beyond itself; it functions ultimately to produce
action or change in the world; it performs some task. In short,
rhetoric is a mode of altering reality...by the creation of discourse
which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.
The rhetoric alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of
such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so
engaged that it becomes mediator of change. In this sense rhetoric
is always persuasive. (Bitzer 3-4)
Simply a good definition of rhetoric, this explanation allows for consideration of
an event in its historical time and in light of the end result of the rhetorical act.
That is, the rhetorical situation is larger than simply the rhetorical act. Mercy
letters are written to persuade an audience to act on behalf of the rhetor. Bitzer
goes on to say that ‚a particular discourse comes into existence because of some
specific condition or situation which invites utterance,‛ calling to mind the
consideration of the occasion of the rhetorical act (Bitzer 4). If, as Bitzer claims,
the rhetorical situation is ‚a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations,
and an exigence which strongly invites utterance,‛ and that rhetorical situation is
kairos, then certainly the mercy letters of Princess Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of
Scots are kairotic (Bitzer 5). Like kairos, the rhetorical situation is both situational
43
and determined by the response of the author who seeks action through words.
In ‚Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric,‛ James Kinneavy returned
to the classical origins of kairos and truly repopularized the term, defining kairos
as, ‚the appropriateness of the discourse to the particular circumstances of the
time, place, speaker, and audience involved‛ (Kinneavy 84). Kinneavy’s largest
contribution to the discussion of kairos was that he successfully applied the
concept to the composition classroom, but he was also a scholar and student of
classical rhetoric and had a great deal of insight into the nuances of the concept.
Where Bitzer seems to echo the timely understandings of kairos, Kinneavy takes
into account that ‚kairos has a dimension of time to it, but it also has a dimension
of measure, which is ethical and aesthetic and has different situations‛
(Thompson 75-76). Again, this understanding of kairos takes into account the
response of the rhetor and the amount of force in their response.
In 1998, Roger Thompson interviewed James Kinneavy about his
influential work with kairos. This interview was published in Rhetoric Review in
2000 after Kinneavy’s death as ‚Kairos Revisited: An Interview with James
Kinneavy.‛ Kinneavy commented that Bitzer’s understanding of kairos didn’t
have the ‚richness of the concept of kairos, especially the concept of due measure,
or a political or ethical dimension, or an aesthetic dimension,‛ and it is this
multi-dimensional kairos that is seen in the mercy letters (Thomspson 78-79).
Kinneavy’s rich description of kairos requires a historical context and a deep
understanding of the larger rhetorical situation and so it is particularly germane
to the larger study of reclaimed texts of women. In order to understand the
rhetorical acts of historical women, it is necessary to consider the strategies they
used to address the particular constraints placed on them in their time due to
their gender. ‚Part of what makes language persuasive at a particular time,‛
Kinneavy claims, ‚is not only the timing of the event, and not only the situational
44
context of the rhetorical act, but also the intermingling, the unification, and the
interdependence of the distinct aspects of timing and propriety‛ (Thompson 74).
The mercy letters are particularly problematic because persuasion depends on
interaction between parties, and the rules for properly addressing a female
monarch are unwritten. Additionally, the societal constraints placed on women
call for silence and humility, but the occasion of the mercy letters calls for force.
The radically changing status of the mercy letters’ involved parties—once
sisters or cousins on an even social status suddenly reft apart as monarch and the
accused—foregrounds the issues of propriety in their rhetorical appeals. This
approach is specifically applicable to the study of a thoroughly documented
historical event. In fact, Kinneavy says, ‚At the risk of simplifying<kairos brings
timeless ideas down into the human situations of historical time,‛ which makes it
particularly appropriate for a discussion of historical figures (Kinneavy 88). This
intricate understanding of kairos, as it has come full-circle in the twentieth
century to reflect the complexities of a rhetorical response in a particular, known
context and time, is only possible in discussions of historical figures whose
situations are well known. Unlike the many women lost to history, the ruling
women of the sixteenth century are well documented. The rhetorical strategy of
the ruling women of the sixteenth century was recorded, and so the kairotic
nature of their rhetorical artifacts can be explored.
Sister, Subject, and Supplicant
In the wake of the failed Wyatt Rebellion and the executions of Lady Jane
Grey and her co-conspirators, Elizabeth was summoned to the Tower. The
young Princess Elizabeth persuaded Mary’s men to allow her to write a letter to
her sister, the queen. Elizabeth was aware of the logistics of a trip to the Tower.
As evening approached, the tides would rise and boats would not be able to
45
safely pass under the arches of London Bridge, making her trip to the Tower
impossible. Elizabeth composed her letter in seeming haste, but actually quite
slowly so that by the time she finished, the tides spared her life for one more day.
The precise moment, or occasion, of the letter’s composition—the Sophistic kairos
as a ‚point in time‛—affects the rhetorical strategy of the author. The letter
reflects this stalling technique by circling back on topics already covered in a
manner quite uncharacteristic of Elizabeth. Although her rhetorical aim to
request a personal interview with the queen was not granted, Elizabeth’s
circumlocutious composition succeeded in delaying her journey long enough for
the tides to rise.
In the letter of Princess Elizabeth to Queen Mary, dated March 17, 1554,
Elizabeth refers to her sister—in whose hands her life now sits—using the male
terms of kingship. She places Mary in a history of men from the first line of her
letter:
If any ever did try this old saying—that a king’s word was more
than another man’s oath—I most humbly beseech your majesty to
verify it in me, and to remember your last promise and my last
demand: that I be not condemned without answer and due proof.
(Marcus 41)
Elizabeth subtly names Mary as the inheritor of a male tradition of kingship. In
calling to mind Mary’s position as an inheritor of a male tradition of power,
Elizabeth creates a kairotic response—in that she responds to this specific context
with an accurate and powerful use of force. In this precise moment, Elizabeth
reminds the queen of her power and her ability to act as a political leader and the
arbiter of justice, calling to mind the Pythagoreans’ understanding of kairos.
Finally, the history of kings creates a duty for Mary to act justly so that her space
in that history is deserved. Without overtly naming Mary a king, Elizabeth
46
invokes the tradition of male kingship. Mary’s role in Elizabeth’s proverb,
would after all, have been the king whose word is more meaningful. The
reminder that Mary is a part of a history of men draws further attention to the
fact that both the accused, Elizabeth, and the queen, Mary, are women, and
unique in this situation. Elizabeth then follows with the gender-neutral address
to Mary as ‚your majesty,‛ which displays her understanding of the prepon
required in this exchange.
In the same sentence where Elizabeth acknowledges Mary’s power as a
king, Elizabeth, a mere princess, younger sister, and kairotic subject, makes a
demand. Such strong syntax displays her desperation and fear as she faces the
Tower. Elizabeth’s demand also shows the kairotic, appropriately forceful
response, of a subject facing her monarch’s condemnation. Just a month earlier,
Mary broke the taboo of executing a reigning queen when she signed the death
warrant for Jane Grey to be executed at the Tower. The Tower held another
haunting memory for Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s mother, Queen Anne Boleyn, was
executed at the Tower when the princess was just three years old. While the
Tower was a place for prisoners, it was also a place where queens could be, and
had been, killed. Elizabeth shares her revulsion for the location of her
imprisonment: ‚without cause proved, I am by your Council from you
commanded to go unto the Tower, a place more wonted for a false traitor than a
true subject‛ (Marcus 41). In anticipation of this dreadful fate, Elizabeth begs for
community. She requests the opportunity to talk to Mary herself: ‚Let me
answer afore yourself and not suffer me to trust your councilors—yea, and that
afore I go to the Tower (if it be possible); if not, afore I be further condemned‛
(Marcus 41). Again, the use of appropriate force in her response causes her to
ask for an audience, yet pull back and qualify her request with the deferential
parenthetical ‚if it be possible.‛ This letter has a great deal of tact for a
47
document that was hurriedly composed under the watchful eye of armed guards
by the young princess, just twenty-one years old. She is respectful, but rather
forward—perhaps not for a letter to a sister, but certainly a letter from a kairotic
subject to her queen. Of course, these two sisters enjoyed a particularly
complicated and tension-riddled history.
When the young Catholic Mary refused to acknowledge her father as the
Supreme Head of the English Church, Henry had her status reduced to one of
her younger sister Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting. Mary’s title, Princess of Wales,
was taken from her and bestowed on the infant Elizabeth. Stripped of almost all
of her attendants, Mary was sent to Hatfield to be a maid of honor to her little
sister, the living reminder of the adulterous affair that sent Mary’s mother away
in disgrace and relegated the princess to merely ‚Mary, the King’s daughter.‛
Mary lived with the baby Elizabeth under the charge of Lady Bryan at Hunsdon.
After Anne Boleyn’s execution, Mary was reinstated as older sister with 42
servants compared to Elizabeth’s 32. Later, the 1536 Act of Succession
bastardized both girls, and it was Elizabeth’s turn to feel the cold sting of
parental rejection. Mary and Elizabeth both knew well the precarious nature of
proximity to the throne in Tudor times. They learned very young that the
pendulum of favor could swing with a monarch’s slightest whim.
When Elizabeth found herself facing the Tower, she knew that her sister’s
favor was crucial to her survival. Elizabeth was far too rhetorically savvy to
unconsciously display presumption in a letter to her sister, the queen. The
precise force that must be used to attain successful kairos is complicated. The
response must be forceful, yet proper, or maintaining prepon, which necessitates
an understanding of the power relation at work; therefore, Elizabeth notes her
‚boldness‛ and blames it on her innocence: ‚Also I most humbly beseech your
highness to pardon this my boldness, which innocency procures me to do,
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together with hope of your natural kindness, which I trust will not see me cast
away without desert‛ (Marcus 41). Elizabeth turns the negative quality of her
bold language into a positive display of her innocence—in that her innocence
dictates her voice in the letter. It is a particularly clever rhetorical turn, an
antanagoge, or ‚ameliorating a fault or difficulty implicitly admitted by balancing
an unfavorable aspect with a favorable one‛ (Lanham 13). So, Elizabeth is guilty
of something—the lesser charge of boldness, not treason. Elizabeth anticipates
the queen’s offense at her kairotic subject’s boldness. She takes account of the
rhetorical situation, and in anticipation of the rebuff for her boldness, ‚defend*s+
*her+self in anticipation of an attack,‛ or uses the rhetorical strategy of
praemunitio (Lanham 194). Elizabeth admits that she is bold because she is
innocent. This praemunitio is a type of prolepsis or ‚forseeing and forestalling
objections,‛ that only bolsters Elizabeth’s argument (Lanham 120). In other
words, if Elizabeth is correct that Mary will think her tone is inappropriate, that
will only prove her innocence. This one rhetorical choice displays Elizabeth’s
rhetorical facility and argumentative skills.
Later in the letter, Elizabeth comes back again to the strategy of recalling
past events, or anamnesis, again placing Mary in the role of a male prince: ‚I have
heard in my time of many cast away for want of coming to the presence of their
prince‛ (Marcus 41). While the title ‚prince‛ is not directly used by Elizabeth to
address Mary, the use of the word ‚prince‛ in reference to early female
monarchs is a persistent strategy and both women later used it to refer to
themselves. In any event, Elizabeth certainly infers that Mary is the prince in this
case. Despite some etymologies of the word that claim ‚prince‛ maintained the
gender-neutral qualities of its Latin origin “princeps” at this time, all the
preceding referents are male, and thus the term allies Mary with her male
predecessors. The pointed comparison of their situations, that Mary is a part of a
49
male history of kingship, and Elizabeth is merely an accused woman, is another
way that Elizabeth shows her deference. As much as Elizabeth’s aim is to
remind Mary of her power, or more likely to remind Mary that Elizabeth knows
that Mary has power, Elizabeth also aims to establish community with Mary and
invoke pity.
Elizabeth reminds Mary that while she is an accused woman, far removed
from Mary’s rank as the monarch, she is not a stranger. Elizabeth engages
another kairotic topic when she appeals to the consanguinity of the sisters: ‚I pray
God as evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other, and all for that
they have heard false report and not hearken to the truth known‛ (Marcus 42).
Their relationship has suddenly changed, and Elizabeth must adapt to that
changing context. A sister just months before and suddenly an accused,
treasonous subject under a female monarch, Elizabeth simply had no rules for
propriety to follow. Elizabeth’s argument vacillates between a show of deference
and respect combined with a desperate need for action. At the very least, Mary
must allow Elizabeth to argue her innocence in person. Elizabeth’s circling logic
can be attributed to her fear, her need to stall in order to wait out the tide, and
even a deliberate show of the rhetorical situation—the exigence, audience, and
constraints of this one moment in time—the kairos required in a letter of such
consequence. The mortal danger Elizabeth faced dictated that her argument be
based on pathos.
Pathos, or the ‚Greek term for emotions or passions,‛ is used to describe
an appeal to the emotions of an audience (Crowley 435). George Kennedy’s
translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric defines pathos as the occurrence of persuasion
‚through the hearers when they are led to feel emotion *pathos] by the speech; for
we do not give the same judgment when grieved and rejoicing or when being
friendly and hostile‛ (2.1.5). In a pathetic appeal the rhetorical choices of the
50
speaker are determined by the assumed reaction of the audience, and this
rhetorical situation necessitates begging. Princess Elizabeth, unable to supplicate
in person, lets her words perform for her. She shows that she is a subject to her
queen, and she uses another kairotic strategy, the use of performativity, when she
drops to her knees on paper: ‚Therefore once again kneeling with humbleness of
my heart because I am not suffered to bow the knees of my body, I humbly crave
to speak with your highness. Which I would not be so bold as to desire if I knew
not myself most clear, as I know myself most true‛ (Marcus 42). In a rhetorical
strategy that derives from desperation, Elizabeth must make this letter act on her
behalf. In How to Do Things With Words, J.L. Austin calls such phrases a
‚performative utterance‛ or a speech act that ‚indicates that the issuing of the
utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just
saying something‛ (6-7). In this performative way, Elizabeth’s words leave the
page and enter the real world to act on her behalf. In other words, by writing
that she is kneeling before Mary, Elizabeth indeed supplicates before her sister.
This letter moves beyond the page as Elizabeth uses her written word to act as a
proxy and enter the physical world for her. Once again, Elizabeth invokes an
antanagoge. Her explanation for her boldness is her honesty.
Elizabeth filled in the space between the body of the letter and the closing
remark with diagonal lines to ensure that no one would tamper with her letter
and write in a confession or other damning statements. This tactic represents the
kairos of this rhetorical act; Elizabeth is in danger in this moment, and she must
address the specific concerns of this one moment. Her life may very well depend
on her response to this immediate rhetorical situation, and so she cannot trust
anyone. Her desperate situation is vividly apparent in the composition of the
material object of the letter—the shaky scratches across the page betray her fear
and distrust. Between the diagonal lines and the signature, Elizabeth reasserts
51
her anxiety by stating: ‚I humbly crave but only one word of answer from
yourself‛ (Marcus 42). Elizabeth’s closing maintains the conventions of a formal
closing to a queen, but her words are carefully chosen. Signing as ‚Your
highness’ most faithful subject that hath been from the beginning and will be to
my end, Elizabeth,‛ the princess pointedly reminds Mary of the life and death
consequences of this rhetorical situation (Marcus 42). The statement ‚to my end‛
paints a picture for the queen. Reminiscent of her performative begging earlier
in the letter, Elizabeth’s words again come off the page by asking the reader,
Mary, to be an active participant in the drama—to imagine herself as a spectator
at her sister’s execution. The kairotic moment of the composition of this letter is
the anticipated beginning of Elizabeth’s end as she desperately tries to delay her
trip to the Tower. Elizabeth hopes that Mary will be horrified by the thought of
her sister’s death. Obviously, Elizabeth survived—although that can hardly be
attributed to her rhetorical skill. It was reported that Mary, so disturbed by the
thought of her burden as literally judge, jury, and executioner to her sister,
refused to read the letter entirely. Almost thirty years later, Elizabeth found
herself a queen on the receiving end of a mercy letter from a female, royal
relation.
Exile, Subject, and Queen
Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots certainly had a complex and
problematic relationship. The two women were cousins and held claim to one
another’s kingdom, which led to complicated plots of intrigue on both sides long
before Mary was a prisoner in Elizabeth’s England. In ‚Queen Elizabeth’s
Conversations with the Scottish Ambassador, William Maitland, Laird of
Lethington, September and October 1561,‛ the English queen addresses the
issues surrounding the Scottish queen’s attempts to dethrone her. Elizabeth
52
begins by stating the familial ties of the two reigning queens: ‚You put me in
remembrance that she is of the blood of England, my cousin and next
kinswoman, so that nature must bind me to love her duly, all which I must
confess to be true‛ (Marcus 62). Casting herself as the innocent and loving
cousin, Elizabeth declares that she has always loved her cousin, despite Mary,
Queen of Scots’ egregious offences:
And as my proceedings have made sufficient declaration to the
world that I never meant evil toward her person nor her realm, so
can they that knew most of my mind bear me accord that in time of
most offense, and when she by bearing my arms and acclaiming the
title of my crown had given me just cause to be most angry with
her; yet could I never find in my heart to hate her, imputing rather
the fault to others than to herself. (Marcus 62)
The reminder that the world is watching the actions of these two queens is a
theme repeated throughout their experiences together. But Elizabeth makes it
clear that she will not allow another to take away what was rightfully hers: ‚As
for the title of my crown, for my time I think she will not attain it, nor make
impediment to my issue if any shall come of my body‛ (Marcus 62). Elizabeth
boldly, yet ultimately ironically, declares ‚For so long as I live there shall be no
other queen in England but I‛ (Marcus 62). Just six years, as a Scottish queen
imprisoned in England, begging for mercy in a letter to her cousin Elizabeth,
Mary, Queen of Scots closely mirrors the rhetorical strategies that Elizabeth used
to appeal to her sister, Mary I, years earlier. While both the Princess Elizabeth
and Mary, Queen of Scots wrote mercy letters to reigning queens and close
relations as their prisoners, Elizabeth was a young woman of twenty-one when
she composed her letter, while Mary, Queen of Scots was a forty-year-old
53
woman and a former queen of France and Scotland imprisoned in exile when she
composed hers.
Mary, Queen of Scots’ November 8, 1582, letter to Queen Elizabeth is a
summary of her fall from grace. Unlike Princess Elizabeth’s rushed letter, Mary
Queen of Scots is already a prisoner with nothing but time on her hands when
she writes this ten page letter; however, many of the kairotic topics used by Mary
mirror Elizabeth’s 1554 letter. Mary had a lot to say, and she was very aware of
the performative aspect of this text—that this, her letter, was not only a
document of the moment that she hoped would persuade Elizabeth to free her,
but it was also a document for the future to ‚serve you *Elizabeth+ as long as you
live after me for a perpetual testimony and engraving upon your conscience‛
(Strickland 39; vol. 2). This text was occasioned by the seizure of Mary’s son,
James, by the pro-English Ruthven family under the Earl of Gowrie. This turn of
events dashed Mary’s hopes that she could return to Scotland and rule in an
‚association‛ with her son, James. Mary begins her plea to Elizabeth, ‚Madam—
Upon that which has come to my knowledge of the last conspiracies executed in
Scotland against my poor child,‛ naming the inciting incident, as the occasion for
the text (Strickland 39; vol. 2). Unlike many texts of this period, much is known
about the kairotic moment of its composition because Mary’s dramatic fall from
grace captured the imagination of her contemporaries, and her letter was
preserved. A widowed former queen of both France and Scotland, a prisoner to
another queen and her cousin, and a Catholic exiled in a Protestant land, Mary’s
situation was so desperate that her words were saved and biographies were
written of her contemporaneously. After her death she was claimed a Catholic
martyr. The ‚Marion mythos,‛ as historian and translator Agnes Strickland
called it, was orchestrated by her rhetorical performances, including this one that
seemed to have an eye toward posterity.
54
In this long letter, Mary recounts her imprisonment in Lochleven,
Scotland where she was confined from June 1567 to May 1568, and where she
was forced to abdicate in favor of her infant son James VI on July 24, 1567.
Considering that she is writing to a reigning queen, the detailed description of
her abdication is striking. Mary tries to put Elizabeth in her shoes as she directly
questions Elizabeth, asking, ‚Madam, would you acknowledge an equal liberty
and power in your subjects?‛ (Strickland 41; vol. 2). This sort of questioning,
despite the appropriate ‚Madam,‛ is a rather forward show of force called forth
by this desperate situation. Mary counters her prepon with a kairotic show of
force. Whereas Princess Elizabeth’s mercy letter to her sister Queen Mary
begged for the opportunity to argue in person for her innocence, Mary Queen of
Scots’ letter has a tone of resignation. Her letter is for posterity—it will
performatively act as a testimony and a warning. At the beginning of her letter,
the action she requests is merely Elizabeth’s contemplation and consideration of
Mary’s son James, ‚This will be to you *a monition+ to discharge your conscience
towards my child, as to what belongs to him on this point after my death,‛ but as
the letter goes on she asks for a written response and for freedom (Strickland 45;
vol. 2). In the earlier letter of young Elizabeth, the princess assumes that she will
have another opportunity to argue her innocence but Mary must rely on this
letter, so she answers her charges in specific, direct terms: ‚I know that you will
allege to me what passed between the late Duke of Norfolk and me. I maintain
that there was nothing in this to your prejudice, or against the public good of this
realm‛ (Strickland 45; vol. 2). Mary anticipates Elizabeth’s position, but unlike
the praemunitio the young Princess Elizabeth used in her mercy letter, Mary’s
assumption is not an anticipation of an attack, but a resigned acceptance of her
accused position.
55
Mary’s resignation does not preclude her from forcefully declaring her
innocence, and like Elizabeth, Mary acknowledges the impertinence of her
response: ‚But, madam, with all this freedom of speech, which I can forsee will
in some sort displease you‛ (Strickland 47; vol. 2). But Mary doesn’t apologize
for her boldness like Elizabeth before her; she simply states that ‚it is but the
truth itself‛ (Strickland 47; vol. 2). This strategy is highly reminiscent of
Elizabeth’s praemunitio; however, where Elizabeth claimed that the offense of
boldness proved her innocence, Mary simply states that she will likely offend the
queen, but her statements are simply the truth. Mary is, after all, a prisoner
already and her tone is not (at this early stage in the letter) yet as desperate as the
young princess Elizabeth’s was as she attempted to stay the tide; however,
Mary’s resigned tone rather quickly disintegrates into desperation as she poses
her request for freedom.
Mary anticipates Queen Elizabeth’s reaction suggesting ‚you will think it
still more strange, I am sure, that I importune you again with a request of much
greater importance, and yet very easy for you to grant‛ (Strickland 47; vol. 2).
Mary’s statement that her request would be ‚very easy‛ for Elizabeth to grant
implies that she will ask for something of little consequence. Instead, Mary then
launches into a long sentence, complete with a lengthy parenthetical diversion, in
which she is reduced to begging and pleading for her life:
This is, (that not having been able hitherto, by accommodating
myself patiently for so long a time, to the rigorous treatment of this
captivity, and carrying myself sincerely in all things, yea, even in
such as could concern you ever so little, in order to give some
assurance of my entire affection for you, all my hope being taken
away of being better treated for the very short period of life that
remains to me,) I supplicate you, for the sake of the painful passion
56
of our Saviour and Redeemer, Jesus Christ, again I supplicate you,
to permit me to withdraw myself out of your realm, into some
place of repose, to seek some comfort for my poor body, worn out
as it is with continual sorrows, that, with liberty of conscience, I
may prepare my soul for God, who is daily calling for it.
(Strickland 47; vol. 2)
Like Elizabeth before her, Mary uses a performative utterance to supplicate
before the monarch she addresses. Her appeal is suddenly desperate and
forceful as she appeals to Elizabeth’s Christianity to invoke pity. Finally, Mary’s
imploring petition rests with the suggestion that if she were to go free, it would
simply be to die, and she would therefore not pose any threat to Elizabeth. Mary
suggests that any threat she may have represented to the throne has expired due
to her failing health, and this also suggests that she has already been punished
enough by her imprisonment so that Elizabeth’s mercy could be justified before
the world.
Mirroring Elizabeth’s mercy letter, Mary Queen of Scots requests a written
response directly from Elizabeth: ‚Do me this favour, to let me, or the
ambassador of France for me, have your intention in writing‛ (Strickland 49; vol.
2). Mary repeatedly refers to the ‚rules of correspondence‛ that they established,
claiming that Elizabeth told Mary to come to her directly: ‚Besides this, the last
time I wrote to those of your council, you gave me to understand that I ought not
to address myself to them but to you alone‛ (Strickland 49; vol. 2). And so,
Mary’s appeal for community—to request a personal communication from the
queen—is also part of the propriety of this rhetorical situation through her
assertion that the rules were previously established. Elizabeth previously
granted Mary permission to communicate with her directly. Toward the end of
her letter, Mary quite pointedly says, ‚But you will set a very bad example to the
57
other princes of Christendom, to act towards their subjects with the same rigour
that you will show to me, a sovereign queen, and your nearest relation, which I
am, and shall be as long as I live, in spite of my enemies‛ (Strickland 50; vol. 2).
This paraenesis, or ‚warning of impending evil,‛ effectively places Elizabeth in
not merely a history of kings, but a contemporary association of kings—kings,
who like the female members of the ‚monstrous regiment of women rhetors,‛
may mirror the actions of another ruling monarch (Lanham 107).15 Mary signs
her letter, ‚Your very disconsolate nearest kinswoman, and affectionate cousin,
Mary R.‛ (Strickland 54; vol. 2). She reminds Elizabeth of their consanguinity;
Mary is the queen’s ‚nearest relation,‛ and the ‚R‛ for ‚Royne,‛ or queen,
reminds Elizabeth that Mary is also a member of her own ruling community.
Although Elizabeth’s response did not survive, from the existing digest of
Elizabeth’s response to Mary, Queen of Scots, dated October 6, 1586, it is clear
that Elizabeth’s letter was intended to justify her actions for the ‚other princes of
Christendom.‛ Elizabeth wants history to note that she is genuinely saddened
by the turn of events that led to the imprisonment of her cousin and fellow
queen, and that she will ensure that Mary’s guilt is proven by several respected
and knowledgeable men of her realm:
Whereas we are given to understand that you, to our great and
inestimable grief, as one void of all remorse of conscience, pretend
with great protestation not to be in any sort privy or assenting to
any attempt either against our state or person; forasmuch as we
find by most clear and evident proof that the contrary will be
verified and maintained against you, we have found it therefore
15
Chapter One, “The Monstrous Regiment: A Community of Sixteenth Century Women Rhetors” claims
that Jane Grey, Mary I, Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots taught one another rhetorical strategies for
ruling as women through their contemporary rhetorical action. Chapter One also seeks to reclaim Knox‟s
term “monstrous regiment” from his 1558 pamphlet “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous
Regiment of Women Leaders.”
58
expedient to send unto you divers of our chief and most ancient
noblemen of this our realm, together with certain of our Privy
Council, as also some of our principal judges, to charge you both
with the privity and assent to that most horrible and unnatural
attempt. (Marcus 287-88)
Elizabeth also clearly proves her jurisdiction over Mary, Queen of Scots: ‚And to
the end you may have no just cause (lying as you do within our protection, and
thereby subject to the laws of our realm and to such a trial as by us shall be
thought meet, agreeable to our laws) to take exception to the manner of our
proceeding‛ (Marcus 288). Finally, in the one part of the digest of Elizabeth’s
letter that directly addresses one of Mary’s kairotic topics, Elizabeth denies
Mary’s request for community. Elizabeth makes it clear that her councilors will
act on her behalf and a personal audience with the queen will be unnecessary.
Elizabeth tells Mary that ‚*I+ do both advise and require you to give credit and
make answer to that which the said honorable personages so authorized by us
shall from time to time during their abode there object or deliver unto you in our
name, as if it were to ourself‛ (Marcus 288). Mary’s reminders that Elizabeth told
her to write to her directly, the use of the kairotic topic of an appeal for
community, was unsuccessful.
It would seem that Elizabeth heeded Mary’s warning that the ‚other
princes of Christendom‛ were aware of the actions of the two queens in England.
In ‚Queen Elizabeth’s first reply to the Parliamentary petitions urging the
execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, November 12, 1586,‛ Elizabeth states: ‚To
your petition I must pause and take respite before I give answer. Princes, you
know, stand upon stages so that their actions are viewed and beheld of all men;
and I am sure my doings will come to the scanning of many fine wits, not only
within the realm, but in foreign countries‛ (Marcus 189). In this same response
59
to Parliament, Elizabeth also casts the two cousins as fictitious milkmaids to
explain her reluctance to sign a death warrant. Elizabeth states that
‚Notwithstanding, I assure you, if the case stood between her and myself only, if
it had pleased God to have made us both milkmaids with pails on our arms, so
that the matter should have rested between us two; and that I knew she did and
would seek my destruction still, yet could I not consent to her death‛ (Marcus
188).16 But as a queen, Elizabeth has the power to decide Mary’s fate, and she
must. It is simply strange to consider what Elizabeth would do if the two queens
were milkmaids and Mary plotted to overthrow her fellow milkmaid, Elizabeth.
It is strange because the occasion could never arise, but also because in this
moment where Elizabeth must act as queen, she takes off her crown and casts
herself as caricature of pastoral femininity. After all, any other woman would
never have the authority to have such weighty problems to consider, so it once
again draws attention to the unique community of reigning women of which
both Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots are a part.
Queen Elizabeth very publicly stalled her decision regarding Mary, Queen
of Scots’ fate. Whether her delays were caused by genuine equivocation or a
show of equivocation for the audiences of the world watching this prince on a
stage, Elizabeth formally addressed Parliamentary petitions urging Mary, Queen
of Scots’ execution twice. In ‚Queen Elizabeth’s second reply to the
Parliamentary Petitions Urging the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,‛ given
November 24, 1586, Elizabeth’s tone appears rather exasperated. The resolve of
her first response has weakened, and what is left is an intense fear of what her
actions will mean for her reputation: ‚What will they not now say when it shall
be spread that for the safety of her life, a maiden queen could be content to spill
16
See Chapter Three, “Rhetorical Reflections of Female Ruling Identity: Embodied Apophasis in the
speeches of Mary I and Elizabeth I” for a discussion of Elizabeth‟s 1610 Parliamentary speech where she
refers to herself as a milkmaid.
60
the blood even of her own kinswoman?‛ (Marcus 201). The imagined horror of
her actions is intensified by the close familial relation of the queen and the
accused, but also by Queen Elizabeth’s virginity as if such actions from a woman
are necessarily worse or more of an affront to decorum, and therefore more
scandalous than they would be if a king were to exact punishment on a traitor in
his realm.
However, even in the proclamation ‚Declaring Sentence against Mary
Queen of Scots,‛ published December 4, 1586, Mary’s consanguinity and her
position as a member of the royal community of which Elizabeth is a part are
both mentioned:
and though in very truth we were greatly and deeply grieved in
our mind to think or imagine that any such unnatural and
monstrous acts should be either devised or willingly assented unto
against us by her, being a princess born, and of our sex and blood,
and one also whose life and honor we had many times before saved
and preserved. (Hughes 528; vol. 2)
Indeed, Elizabeth did stall the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots for several
years before finally signing her death warrant—although it is believed that she
signed it reluctantly.
After receiving the news of her death sentence, Mary wrote one more
letter to her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, from Fortheringay on December 19, 1586.
In this letter, Mary again invokes all of the kairotic topics. She immediately
identifies her two-fold rhetorical aim. She wants to claim her innocence, and she
wants her words to ‚serve‛ Elizabeth. It seems that Mary’s request for
community was granted at this point: ‚Madam—Having, with difficulty,
obtained leave from those to whom you have committed me to open to you all I
have on my heart, as much for exonerating myself from any ill-will, or desire of
61
committing cruelty, or any act of enmity against those with whom I am
connected by blood‛ (Strickland 200; vol. 2). Mary appeals to their
consanguinity in this first sentence, and then goes on to describe what function
this letter will perform: ‚as also, kindly to communicate to you what I thought
would serve you, as much for your weal and preservation, as for the
maintenance of the peace and repose of this isle, which can only be injured if you
reject my advice, you will credit, or disbelieve my discourse as it seems best to
you‛ (Strickland 200-201; vol. 2). In consideration of the rhetorical situation,
Mary contemplates how her letter will be received by Elizabeth, but she also
warns the queen that Elizabeth’s England will suffer if she does not heed Mary’s
advice. In her second letter to Elizabeth, Mary again uses the rhetorical strategy
of paranesis to warn of disastrous consequences.
In her earlier letter, Mary allied Elizabeth with the ‚other princes of
Christendom,‛ creating a contemporary community of ruling men that included
the female Queen Elizabeth; however, in this later letter Mary explicitly reminds
Elizabeth of her own participation in a long history of kingship. Mary’s
reminder that they are family serves to reiterate that they are both descendants of
kings: ‚But I know that you, more than any one, ought to feel at heart the honour
or dishonour of your own blood, and that, moreover, of a queen and the
daughter of a king‛ (Strickland 202; vol. 2). In other words, Mary takes the
reminder of the history of kings even farther than anyone has heretofore. She
explicitly places herself in the history of kingship as well. Mary’s concern then
turns to her final resting place. She asks to be buried near other French queens,
especially her mother, since ‚as I shall suffer in this country, a place will not be
given to me near the kings your predecessors, who are mine as well as yours‛
(Strickland 202; vol. 2). This is Mary’s final appeal to Elizabeth, and it is
relentless in the reminders of the kairotic topics of an appeal to their
62
consanguinity and the history of kingship. As if to ensure that this tactic will not
be overlooked by Elizabeth, Mary refers to their shared ancestor by name: ‚I ask
them, in the name of Jesus Christ, and in respect of our consanguinity, and for
the sake of King Henry VII, your grandfather and mine, and by the honour of the
dignity we both held, and of our sex in common, do I implore you to grant these
requests‛ (Strickland 204; vol. 2). Mary also appeals to the kinship they share in
faith in God (although Mary is Catholic and Elizabeth is Protestant, they are both
Christian), family, title, and gender, and it is these shared qualities that should
have protected Mary:
still will I accuse no one, nor give way to presumption—yet, while
leaving this world and preparing myself for a better, I must remind
you, that one day you will have to answer for your charge, and for
all those whom you doom, and I desire that my blood and my
country may be remembered in that time. For why? From the first
days of our capacity to comprehend our duties, we ought to bend
our minds to make the things of this world yield to those of
eternity! (Strickland 205; vol. 2)
Mary ends her letter in this hyperbolic statement of duty and the promise of
salvation right after again warning Elizabeth of future evil in a paranesis. In a
kairotic use of force, Mary almost seems to curse Elizabeth. Using the word
‚doom‛ to describe Elizabeth’s actions in condemning prisoners resounds in this
portion of the letter, coming as it does right after an admonition of reckoning.
Finally, Mary signs her letter, forgoing the usual compliments of protocol. She
simply describes herself, ‚Your sister and cousin, Prisoner wrongfully, Marie
(Royne)‛ (Strickland 205; vol. 2). Despite the mirroring of their situations and
rhetorical strategies, despite their close familial ties, despite publicly stalling the
inevitable, Mary’s death warrant was carried out on February 8, 1587.
63
The Unkairotic Subject
Lady Jane Grey also wrote a mercy letter, of sorts.17 Clearly, not all mercy
letters use the strategies and topics identified as kairotic. It is not simply exigence
that ties these letters together; it is the kairotic responses of Princess Elizabeth and
Mary, Queen of Scots that make the rhetors kairotic subjects. The fact that Jane’s
letter does not employ the rhetorical strategies of the later rhetors serves to prove
that kairos is an art that requires an appropriate response. After nine days ruling
as queen from the Tower of England, Jane Grey’s palace turned into her prison.
The Tower was, after all, a fortress, and Jane’s father, Henry Grey, Duke of
Suffolk, and her father-in-law, John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland,
planned her ascent to the throne well. There was hardly a better place to stage a
defense than the Tower. However, when support for Jane quickly waned, and
Mary Tudor was proclaimed queen, Jane remained in the Tower as a prisoner.
News that Mary accepted the proposal of Spain’s Prince Philip led to widespread
anger at the thought of a foreign king of England, ultimately leading to the Wyatt
Rebellion.18 When Suffolk’s participation in the Wyatt Rebellion was confirmed,
young Jane again found herself the unwitting center of suspicion. With the
country divided over religion, and further discontented by the thought of a
foreign king, Mary was left with little choice with regard to Jane’s fate. While
imprisoned in the Tower, Jane, the erstwhile queen and sudden subject, wrote a
letter to her successor, Queen Mary I. Unlike later mercy letters by Princess
Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots, this piece does not employ any kairotic
strategies or topics. Despite the similar occasion that the letters all share, Jane’s
17
Chronologically, Jane wrote her mercy letter first; however, because it does not mirror the kairotic topics
of the other mercy letters, a brief discussion follows here.
18
For more information on the Wyatt Rebellion, see Chapter One, “The Monstrous Regiment: A
Community of Sixteenth Century Reigning Women Rhetors.”
64
letter reads rather like a statement or testimony in which she accepts
responsibility for her part in her reign, but also largely deflects fault to the
architects of her rise to the throne of England. Jane does not address her letter to
the queen, nor does she sign it. In part because her letter is not explicitly directed
to a queen, Jane’s letter does not use the same strategies of argument as Princess
Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots; however, Jane’s letter does reflect the same
diffuse sentence structures as the other letter written by a prisoner, Mary, Queen
of Scots, who, like Jane, also has a tone of resignation:
Although my fault be such that, but for the goodness and clemency
of the Queen, I can have no hope of finding pardon, nor in craving
forgiveness, having given ear to those who at the time appeared,
not only to myself, but also to a great part of this realm, to be wise,
and now have manifested themselves the contrary, not only to my
and their great detriment, but with the common disgrace and
blame of all, they having with such shameful boldness made so
blamable and dishonourable an attempt to give to others that
which was not theirs, neither did it become me to accept (wherefore
rightly and justly am I ashamed to ask pardon for such a crime).
(Sanders 37)
Jane chooses not to directly argue for her innocence; however, she blames her fall
from grace on the architects of her destruction. In fact, she doesn’t even argue
that others are to blame; she assumes that it is already an accepted fact. Jane
claims that ‚it *is+ known that the error imputed to me has not been altogether
caused by myself‛ (Sanders 37). Whether due to her age and inexperience, her
devout faith, or her belief that she would be censured and released, Jane does not
use the effective kairotic topics to argue for mercy. She does not place Mary in a
history of kingship; she does not remind her cousin of their consanguinity; she
65
does not use force in her response; and she does not use the letter in a
performative manner. Jane’s acceptance of guilt is only provisional; she lays the
blame on the Dukes of Suffolk and Northumberland, her father and father-inlaw. This deflection results in a complaint rather than an argument for her
innocence:
Because, although my faulty may be great, and I confess it to be so,
nevertheless I am charged and esteemed guilty more than I have
deserved. For whereas I might take upon me that of which I was
not worthy, yet no one can ever say either that I sought it for my
own, or that I was pleased with it or ever accepted it. (Sanders 37)
Although she concedes that she did not ask for these honors, she admits her
acceptance of them. Her appeal virtually comes down to an admission of guilt
and of feeling guilty, which is not a kairotic response to the mortal danger of the
occasion of her letter.
Jane gives a detailed account of her acceptance of the throne, and this may
actually work against her. Just as Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots ask the
reader to imagine their fates—to witness their future executions in order to
invoke pity—Jane paints a vivid picture of her acceptance of the crown and the
supplication of her followers. If her innocence was a remote possibility, the
description of the dukes and earls who ‚did me such reverence as was not at all
suitable to my state, kneeling down before me on the ground, and in many other
ways making semblance of honouring me,‛ proves her guilt (Sanders 38). In
perhaps the most damaging rhetorical choice of her letter to Mary, Jane outlines
the argument against Mary that led to Jane’s ascent to the throne:
He [the Duke of Northumberland] then said that His Majesty had
well weighed an Act of Parliament, wherein it was already resolved
that whoever should acknowledge the most serene Mary, that is
66
Your most serene Majesty, or the Lady Elizabeth, and receive them
as true heirs of the Crown of England, these should be held for
traitors, one of them having been formerly disobedient to her
father, Henry the Eighth, and also to himself, concerning the truth
of religion, and afterwards also capital enemies of the Word of God,
and both bastards. (Sanders 38)
After reminding Mary of her greatest sorrow, Jane does not apologize, nor does
she ask for mercy. She simply states that ‚all these things I have wished to say
for the witness of my innocence and the disburdening of my conscience‛
(Sanders 40). In this letter, probably the most consequential document of her life,
Jane does not use her rhetorical training and skill; perhaps it is the myopia of
youth that clouds Jane’s ability to argue for her life. After her death sentence is
passed and her fate is sealed, however, a very different Jane emerges. Although
the accounts of her correspondence at the end of her days is largely colored by
the Protestant biographer John Foxe, her final rhetorical artifacts portray her as a
pillar of grace and acceptance.19
The Kairotic Response
When Princess Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots wrote mercy letters as
subjects to female monarchs, they had to quickly adapt to their radically altered
social status. On the occasion of composition, each woman had experienced a
fall from a position at the very apex of society to a position as the lowest,
disenfranchised individual in society—an accused prisoner facing death. It is
not, however, simply the sudden shift in status that makes them kairotic subjects.
A kairotic subject must respond to the mutating situation with appropriate force,
19
These final texts of Jane‟s are discussed in Chapter Four, “Disembodied Apophasis in Royal Women‟s
Rhetorical Acts.”
67
encompassing the complex and nuanced implications of the term kairos as an
artistic strategy that reflects politics, justice, and adaptability. Princess Elizabeth,
in her 1554 letter to Queen Mary I, and Mary, Queen of Scots, in her 1580s letters
to Queen Elizabeth I, are both kairotic subjects in their appropriate use of force.
They argue for mercy using four kairotic topics: the reminder of the legacy of a
male history of kingship, an appeal to consanguinity, a forceful response, and a
performative function. Lady Jane Grey’s letter does not achieve kairos because
she simply does not respond with appropriate precision and force to her
rhetorical situation—the exigence, audience, and constraints of her position as a
prisoner in the Tower of London.
The reminder of a male history of kingship is a rhetorically forceful move.
It aligns the audience with a legacy of power, and in doing so aligns the rhetor
with that same legacy as well. This strategy also recalls the early associations of
kairos with politics and justice, and so it is fitting (prepon) or appropriate to the
context. The appeal to consanguinity is perhaps an obvious choice, but Lady
Jane does not employ it in her mercy letter, and it may not be a certain path to
pathos. Princess Elizabeth and Queen Mary I had a troubled history as sisters and
so the reminder of that sisterly bond must be handled with tact and the
appropriate amount of force to be kairotic. Likewise, for Mary, Queen of Scots to
remind Queen Elizabeth I of their close familial relation is to remind her of the
threat to the queen that Mary poses as the next in line for the throne. The artful
way they wield the force of the topic of consanguinity is kairotic in their mercy
letters. The two kairotic subjects also employ explicitly forceful responses in their
letters. Each makes a demand or uses strong syntax that appropriately reflects
the gravity of their situations. Finally, both Princess Elizabeth and Mary, Queen
of Scots used their letters performatively because they were responding with
what they had available in that moment to argue for mercy. With a deep
68
understanding of their rhetorical situations, Princess Elizabeth and Mary, Queen
of Scots became kairotic subjects through their understanding and use of kairos in
a time of greatest consequence.
69
CHAPTER THREE
Rhetorical Reflections of Female Ruling Identity:
Embodied Apophasis in the speeches of Mary I and Elizabeth I
Lady Jane Grey, Mary I, Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots mirrored
one another in circumstance and in rhetorical strategies for asserting power.
While it was necessary for women leaders to find mirrors for themselves,
creating a communal regiment and a history of powerful women, it was equally
important for those leaders to establish an image of female rule for their
subjects.20 As the earliest ruling queens of England, the sixteenth-century
monarchs established iterations of power that would provide a strong image—an
immediate signifier—for their people. The people of England needed that
mirror. After all, the monarch is England—interchangeable as a signifier for the
person and for the land and its people—and so the monarch’s image is a
reflection of the country and its people. However, a mirror-image is not an exact
copy; it flips an image from left to right. It appears to be an exact likeness, but on
further inspection, it is reversed. In a similar rhetorical strategy, royal women
employed apophasis as a mirror to reflect back society’s expectations for gender
roles while subverting them. Apophasis is a type of occultatio, or ‚emphasizing
something by pointedly seeming to pass over it‛ (Lanham 104). Occulatio and
paralipsis or paralepsis are interchangeable terms. Paralipsis ‚occurs when we say
that we are passing by, or do not know, or refuse to say that which precisely now
20
Chapter One, “The Monstrous Regiment: A Community of Sixteenth Century Reigning Women
Rhetors,” aims in part, to reclaim Knox‟s malicious term “regiment,” and in so doing, construct a
community of reigning women rhetors.
70
we are saying‛ (Cicero 37; vol. IV).21 Paralipsis ‚is useful if employed in a matter
which it is not pertinent to call specifically to the attention of others, because
there is advantage in making only an indirect reference to it, or because the direct
reference would be tedious or undignified, or cannot be made clear, or can easily
be refuted‛ (Cicero 37; vol. IV). In A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, (1550),
Richard Sherry defines paralipsis as an interchangeable term with preterition
meaning an ‚overpassing;‛ he further defines preterition as ‚a kind of an
irony<when you say you let pass that which notwithstanding you touch at full:
or, when we say we pass by a thing, which yet with a certain elegancy we note;
speaking much, in saying we will not say it‛ (Sherry 165). Apophasis is a type of
occultatio or paralipsis.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the first use of the term
apophasis is in John Smith’s The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d (1657). Smith
defines the term as ‚a kind of an irony, whereby we deny that we say or do, that
which we especially say or do‛ (164). However, in the November 1938 issue of
Modern Language Notes, Warren Taylor points out several discrepancies in the
OED ‚concerning the first appearance in English of the names of figures of
speech‛; in particular, apophasis is corrected from the 1657 reference above to an
earlier, contemporary reference for Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, Richard Sherry’s
1550 A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes. In essence, apophasis is defined in two ways.
It is used to argue that the remaining point is the intended, valid point after
dismissing others as in Sherry’s definition where he calls apophasis ‚expeditio,
expedition, whereby a thing might be done or not, the other are taken away, and
one left that we intend‛ (Sherry 514). In Shakespeare’s Uses of the Arts of Language,
Sr. Miriam Joseph also equates apophasis with expedition, or ‚the figure<whereby
21
This Loeb Classics edition of the Rhetorica ad Herrenium credits Cicero as the author; however, it is
generally accepted as the work of an unknown author writing at approximately the same time as Cicero.
71
all alternatives are rejected except one‛ (187-88). Sr. Joseph further claims that
apophasis is also interchangeable with disjunctive syllogism in which ‚the minor
premise affirms one of the two alternatives presented in the disjunctive major
premise, and the conclusion denies the other, or contrariwise‛ (362). The second
definition for apophasis, and the one most pertinent to this study, states that
apophasis is a type of occultatio in which one ‚pretend*s+ to deny what is actually
affirmed‛—specifically in the rhetorical strategy of ‚embodied apophasis” to
pretend to cede to societal conventions of women’s behavior, while breaking
them (Lanham 19).
Reigning women used apophasis in a larger sense than the more simplistic
application of the term to a turn of phrase. Women rulers repeatedly used
apophatic strategies that encompassed the metaphorical implications of self
representation in imagery as a challenge to gender roles.22 Women rhetors use
these strategies to establish community with the audience by stating seemingly
shared beliefs. Oftentimes in this rhetorical analysis, the apophasis lies in an
image or extended metaphor—a larger rhetorical focus that appears to say one
thing, put forward one image, but is actually proving the opposite. In order to
establish ethos, queens regnant relied on a rhetorical appeal to the values of their
people. An argumentum ad verecundiam is a fallacious argument that relies on an
outside authority, or an argument ‚to reverence for authority, *or+ to accepted
traditional values‛ (Lanham 21). Aristotle defines argumentum ad verecundiam as
a fallacy in which an argument is founded on some ‚decision already
pronounced‛ which is ‚most effective if every one has always decided thus; but
if not every one, then at any rate most people; or if all, or most, wise or good men
22
Although apophatic is simply the adjectival form of apophasis, it has been strongly associated with
religious texts and has come to signify religion in particular (describing God by describing what God is
not). In this project it is only meant to signify apophasis as a rhetorical strategy independent of religious
associations.
72
have thus decided‛ (Rhetoric 1398b.18). This fallacy is also known as ipse dixit, or
‚he himself said it.‛ Where Aristotle defined this argument as a fallacy,
deference to an outside authority or an accepted traditional value is not
necessarily fallacious. More recent scholarship points to the circumstances
where an authority is an acceptable foundation for an argument because,
‚whether or not to charge that a fallacy has been committed is often obscured by
the plain fact that sometimes an appeal to authority is perfectly sound‛ (Woods
136). The term is redefined because ‚it is often said that such an appeal commits
a fallacy only where the appeal in question is to an authority that does not exist,
to expertise of questionable or debased credentials‛ (Woods 136). An
argumentum ad verecundiam can be non-fallacious if used appropriately with a
reliable source or value. More recently, this fallacy is referred to as an appeal to
inappropriate or irrelevant or questionable authority.
To borrow the ethos of traditional values, reigning women employed three
traditional female roles and reclaimed them as images of power. Mary I and
Elizabeth I employed the figures of the spouse,23 the mother, and the maiden to
embody traditional roles for women in Tudor society or to remind their audiences
of those roles as they fulfilled them in ways that may not have been traditional,
but were appropriate to their unique status. For women rhetors, these images
may seem the obvious rhetorical choices, but the audience’s associations with
and visceral reactions to the figure of a spouse, mother, or maiden ruler are
extensive and complicated—particularly for unmarried women rulers in a maledominated governance. The audience’s view of the roles of mother and wife are
real whether the appropriateness of those views can be argued or not. These
traditional values can be interpreted as stereotypical images of the patriarchy.
23
Mary I is the first woman to “marry” the realm. Although she invokes the familiar image of a wife and
mother, she carefully, subtly plays the role of husband as this chapter will later explain.
73
Women rulers seemingly ascribe to stereotypical roles for behavior even as they
break them; however, although they are invoking stereotypical patriarchal roles
for female behavior, they are also challenging the patriarchy in an effective
rhetorical strategy that exploits the audience’s understanding of the stereotypical
referent as women using ‚embodied apophasis.‛
Invoking the traditionally stereotypical roles for female behavior of the
spouse, mother, and maiden, women rulers draw attention to their female
bodies, embodying those roles, while their actions deny the roles. In embodied
apophasis, the role that is invoked is reflected in the body of the speaker, and then
that role is denied by the speaker. The community that is established with the
audience also contributes to the speaker’s ethos in that the speaker demonstrates
knowledge of societal conventions by pretending to ascribe to them; thus, they
create a position of authority from which to speak. Ethos, or ‚the character or
reputation of a rhetor,‛ is one of Aristotle’s three rhetorical appeals—logos,
pathos, and ethos. Aristotle asserted that ethos, or the character of the speaker,
‚may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses‛
(Rhetoric 1.2.14). As part of their apophatic strategies, reigning women used ethos,
or ‚ethical appeals *that+ raise emotions favorable to the rhetorician’s moral
character‛ (Bizzell 171). This appeal is necessarily dependent on the
interpretation of the specific audience. In other words, reigning women who
appear to show deference to societal conventions of women’s behavior are
indeed bolstering their ethos in front of a male-dominated governance. For this
specific audience, the exclusively male Parliament, seemingly deferring to
stereotypical female roles would have added to the female reigning rhetor’s
ethos. Finally, this strategy gives the speaker permission to break the conventions
of society. Just as it is acceptable for authors to play with the conventions of
grammar after they have established fluency with them, female rhetors implicitly
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grant themselves permission to speak by acknowledging the societal gender
expectations for women’s silence. They grant themselves permission to exert
power by acknowledging the powerless role of women. Unlike strategies of
gender play where women ‚cross dress‛ or take on the language and imagery of
male power,24 embodied apophasis uses female images to create rhetorical power.
The deference to what was considered ‚appropriate‛ female behavior
granted female rulers authority to speak, but also subverted stereotypical
expectations for the behavior of these specific women. It is a viable strategy for
this unique community of women. After all, a reigning female is the antithesis of
societal expectations—she embodies the authority of her position while
embodying a female form that signifies the marginalized position women held in
sixteenth-century England. In this way, the female rulers of the sixteenth century
are themselves apophatic while they employ the rhetorical strategy, ‚embodied
apophasis” to establish rhetorical authority. To clarify further, as women rulers,
these rhetors are apophatic as reigning women in traditionally male positions of
authority, and they employ the strategy of apophasis as women in unique
positions of authority in similar ways. The metaphors of embodied apophasis that
they use draw attention to their female bodies and stereotypical roles for women
while their rhetorical choices reject, surpass, or comment upon that role.
In Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured, Susan Jarratt defines
the methodology of a revisionist historian; she ‚will not look for superficial
similarities which group themselves quickly into ‘species’ but will persist in
confounding categories by looking longer and discovering finer and finer shades
of difference—more and more varieties‛ (19). The aim of this project is not a
revisionist history, but rather a revisionist rhetorical inquiry into the discursive
24
Gender play is discussed as a strategy of reigning women‟s rhetoric in Chapter Four, “Disembodied
Apophasis in Royal Women‟s Rhetorical Acts.”
75
acts of women who wielded power in the face of male-dominated governance. It
is this finer shade of rhetorical difference, rather than a discretely female
strategy, that is uncovered by noting apophasis as a strategy of rhetorical
empowerment shared by women leaders in the Tudor period. As defined in
Chapter One, ‚The Monstrous Regiment: A Community of Sixteenth Century
Reigning Women Rhetors,‛ this project acknowledges that reigning women did
little to change the status of the women over which they ruled, and admittedly
the deference to expectations of gender roles is a problematic strategy for women
working within a patriarchal tradition; however, this rhetorical strategy of
foregrounding the issue of gender while exceeding gendered expectations of
behavior is a persistent and effective strategy for voiced, rather than silenced,
women of the period. Recent work in the recovery of women’s rhetorical acts
has valiantly turned to the silenced members of society. Cheryl Glenn’s recent
publication, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, is the latest contribution to the
narrative of silence as a rhetorical act; however, women leaders of the sixteenth
century who were not silenced, but admittedly benefited from the privileges of
class and wealth which afforded them a humanist education based on classical
rhetoric, had a public position from which to speak. Women leaders also had to
negotiate their way as women in a powerfully patriarchal society despite the
advantages of their privileged lives. While they were certainly free from some of
the rigid social mores that dictated chaste silence for women, and they were
therefore voiced, they had to address many of the same conventions of society
that silenced others. In this way, their rhetorical acts are models for action.
While there has been much scholarly attention paid to the gender play of
Elizabeth,25 and invoking the language of the male gender to identify oneself as a
25
Because these female bodies were leading the country in roles previously filled by men, their acts of
rhetorical transgression make them objects of gendered rhetorical analysis. In other words, it is easy to fall
76
powerful ruler was a strategy that was shared by the sixteenth century reigning
queens as is discussed in Chapter Four, ‚Disembodied Apophasis in Royal
Women’s Rhetorical Acts,‛ there are also acts of asserting discursive authority
that are not marked as masculine, but rather have not been appreciated for their
female authority. As Mortensen and Kirsch state in their 1994 Braddock Awardwinning article, ‚On Authority in the Study of Writing,‛ ‚authority and gender
are so closely linked that we often have trouble recognizing authoritative
gestures that arise particularly from women’s experience‛ (326). The material
authority that women rulers held make them particularly interesting subjects of
rhetorical study and pertinent to any discussion of women’s rhetoric because
‚men have traditionally held most positions of authority, and acts of asserting
authority are often marked as masculine, regardless of the actor’s gender‛
(Mortensen 325). Strategies of embodied apophasis appear to be self-deprecating
reiterations of women’s stereotypically weak rhetorical acts, but upon closer
inspection, they challenge gender roles as assertions of female authority.
Invoking some or all of the rhetorical images of the spouse, mother, and maiden
at different times throughout their public lives, royal women knew that in order
to lead they had to rhetorically invent a self that would be accepted as a ruling
body—despite their outward appearance as women. One strategy to do so was
to fully embody that gender and exploit stereotypical gender roles. The
invocation of these traditional roles, however, was complicated by the
contradiction of the roles that they portrayed as reigning female monarchs.
into a discussion of gender that uses discrete labels like “women” and “men”; however, as Judith Butler
states, “women are also a „difference‟ that cannot be understood as the simple negation or „Other‟ of the
always-already-masculine subject” (Gender Trouble 25). Therefore, the discussion of these women and
their rhetorical acts in gendered terms does not seek to uphold the binary, but rather seeks to find the ways
these women rhetors superceded the limitations of a gendered binary.
77
Royal Marriage in Tudor Times
For royal women, even before attaining the crown, marriage would have
always been understood as an importantly consequential act. After all, royal
daughters were regularly betrothed in complex political arrangements in which
they had no part. Father to Mary I and Elizabeth I, Henry VIII divorced his way
through two wives, executed his way through two more, watched one wife die
after childbirth and finally enjoyed marriage to his sixth wife for four short years
before his death. Henry VIII set an alarming precedent when he broke with the
Catholic Church to divorce his first wife and Mary’s mother, Catherine of
Aragon, in 1533. His next wife and Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, was
executed after widespread rumors of her treason, infidelity, and supposed incest
with her brother disgraced her. After watching their parents’ marriages end in
disgrace, Mary and Elizabeth were certainly wary of the institution of marriage
and more importantly, they were certainly aware of the mortal danger a
marriage could signify for a queen. Henry’s daughters, the female rulers of
England for fifty years, knew the impermanent nature of marriage despite the
insistence present in conduct literature, such as Juan Luis Vives’ The Education of
a Christian Woman, that ‚marriage is a knot that cannot be untied‛ (157). Even
the highest authorities of the church allowed for the dissolution of marriage due
to adultery or abandonment. But for royalty, the Pope granted divorce when the
marriage did not result in children because marriages had to produce heirs in
order to maintain the succession of the thrones of Europe. In fact, Henry VIII’s
wives are often written and unwritten in genealogies based on their ability to
provide heirs—reducing them to the contributions of their bodies to the realm.26
26
See Sharon Jansen‟s The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe, where
the author argues against this kind of genealogical editing that has often deleted women claiming that “the
irrelevant branches have been pruned” (3).
78
The expectation that royal women would marry in a union that would be
beneficial to the realm and produce preferably male heirs reduced them to their
bodily worth as vessels of political exploitation. Ultimately, the bodies of royal
women were not their own. Their bodies were the property of the state—
exploited to ensure advantageous marital affiliations and provide heirs, and not
even holy marriage could protect them from an expectation of performance
placed on their bodies. Reigning women addressed the issues of marriage and
succession using embodied apophasis—a strategy they learned from one another.
Unwed and Reigning
Royal women were married off in careful diplomatic processes because
they could essentially give birth to peace between nations, across territories, and
across religions. But when those royal women were queens regnant the stakes
were raised even higher. An unmarried woman on the throne left the adjacent
throne an empty space pregnant with the possibilities of prosperity or
usurpation—after all, the mysterious husband-to-be is, according to scripture, to
be ‚obeyed,‛ and so the ‚real‛ power behind the throne is a frightening
unknown when the queen is unmarried. The possible allegiances that a foreign
match could provide were also packed with the real fear that a foreigner could
take over the kingdom of England as the king to an English queen; an unpopular
choice could lead to civil war. Because of the subordinate position of a wife in
Tudor society, a diplomatic marriage could essentially place the rule of England
in the hands of a foreign man. Two queens who ruled England for fifty years
from 1553 to 1603, Mary I and Elizabeth I, came to the throne as single women.
In ‚The First Entering of Queen Mary to the Crown‛ (1553), from Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments, admittedly written with the express purpose of establishing
Protestant martyrs and also, in part, to indict the rule of the Catholic Queen
79
Mary, Foxe notes the apprehension of the citizens at Mary’s very first appearance
as Queen.27 Foxe places the fear of a foreign king before, and on an equal plane
with, the fear of religious chaos after a generation of confusion, persecution, and
bloodshed based on religious matters:
The causes laid against lady Mary, were as well for that it was
feared she would marry with a stranger, and thereby entangle the
crown; as also that she would clean alter religion<and so bring in
the pope, to the utter destruction of the realm, which indeed
afterward came to pass, as by the course and sequel of this story
may well appear. (Foxe 384; vol. VI)
The fears of her people were well-founded. Marriage to a foreigner is at the
heart of the criticism of Mary I’s reign. Mary’s marriage to the Spanish Prince
Philip in 1554 led to civil unrest and has been blamed for the Wyatt Rebellion
and the general opinion that her reign was not a successful one. In The Lioness
Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History, Charles Beem writes that
‚historians have generally considered Mary I, as well as her predecessor and
half-brother, Edward VI, as ‘minor’ Tudors, monarchs not in control of their
reigns, which served as stormy interludes between the more glorious reigns of
Henry VIII and Elizabeth I‛ (65). This interlude has been called ‚the mid-Tudor
crisis.‛ 28
Elizabeth learned from Mary’s trouble and escaped the intrusion of the
state on her physical body by avoiding marriage. However, the view that
27
In Chapter III, “Foxe‟s Book of Errors” from Studies from Court and Cloister: Being Essays, Historical
and Literary, Dealing Mainly with Subjects Relating to the XVI th and XVIIth Centuries, J.M. Stone discusses
some of the proven falsehoods in Foxe‟s text and concludes that many of Foxe‟s “fables” are so entrenched
in British history that they are simply unquestioned as historical fact. The aim of this project, however, is
not to interrogate the historical accuracy of these rhetorical artifacts, but rather to investigate the rhetorical
legacy of these powerful women. That legacy includes this popular, influential, and certainly biased text
whose Protestant agenda must be acknowledged.
28
See Stephen J. Lee‟s The Mid Tudor’s: Edward VI and Mary 1547-1558, which explores
historiographical and historical sources to, in part, uncover whether there was a mid-Tudor crisis.
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Elizabeth deliberately avoided marriage to ensure her safety in the face of threats
to her authority has been challenged by historians. In ‚Elizabeth I: Gender,
Power, and Politics,‛ Susan Doran asserts that ‚it has become almost a cliché that
the Queen was determined to stay single so that she could rule as well as
reign<yet there is little evidence that Elizabeth rejected the idea of marriage as a
deliberate act of will‛ (32). Doran goes on to cite Lord Robert Dudley and
Francis of Anjou as two suitors who did not win Elizabeth’s hand, not because
she was unwilling, but rather because her council would not approve them. In a
review of her book-length study, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of
Elizabeth I, David Loades agrees with Doran and claims that ‚most historians
have made the mistake of assuming that there was a single key to the intricacies
of Elizabeth’s matrimonial politics, and have chosen their key in accordance with
their own predilections for interpreting the Queen’s personality and policies‛
(169). Despite the arguable sincerity and intention behind the many marriage
negotiations of Elizabeth’s reign, Elizabeth came to the throne unmarried and left
the throne unmarried at the time of her death after a lifetime of addressing the
issue of marriage before Parliament.
Mary Marries the Realm at Guildhall
Mary I was proclaimed queen on July 19, 1553. Just six months later, on
January 14, 1554, the proclamation, ‚Announcing Articles of Marriage with
Philip of Spain,‛ was published declaring that ‚it is covenanted and agreed, etc.,
that as soon as conveniently may be, a true, pure, and perfect marriage shall by
words of the present tense be contracted, celebrated, and consummated between
the forsaid noble Prince and most noble lady the Queen in their proper persons
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in England‛ (Hughes 21, vol. 2).29 The announcement of this intended union was
then followed by several pages that outlined the ruling boundaries, rights to
land, and the possibilities for succession and inheritance for the many possible
outcomes of their marriage, including death or childbirth. In an attempt to quell
the fears of the people, the proclamation limited the possibilities for a foreign
takeover to the marriage: ‚the said most noble Prince Philip shall for so long as
the matrimony endureth be allowed to have and enjoy jointly together with the
same most noble Queen his wife the style, honor, and kingly name of the realms
and dominions unto the said most noble Queen‛ (Hughes 21, vol. 2). In other
words, the proclamation allows for the joint rule of Mary and her husband
Philip, and for inheritance by any children of their union; however, it is explicitly
stated that a foreigner will not rule alone. Upon death, all properties and titles
would revert to the families that held them before this marriage both in England
and Spain, ensuring that each party could only exert power in the foreign nation
during the marriage with the personal interest of the native party as a mediating
influence. Despite the attempts to publicly limit the power of the foreign prince,
forces did rise in an attempt to take over the throne.
On January 25, 1554, just eleven days after the publication of the marriage
announcement, Thomas Wyatt raised his forces and began the march on London.
On February 3, 1554, Wyatt reached London. The Wyatt Rebellion’s aim was to
displace Queen Mary and place the Protestant Elizabeth on the throne. 30 Mary’s
29
This text is attributed to Mary because it is an official proclamation of her reign. While most likely
prepared by members of the Privy Council, Mary‟s approval of the language within is implied. Regardless
of the author, the document is used here only to demonstrate the complicated concerns that arose from the
marriage of a reigning queen to a foreign prince.
30
The effects of the Wyatt rebellion on Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey are further discussed in Chapter
Two, “God Save the Queen: The Kairotic Subject in the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of
Scots.” Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower for two months, but no evidence was ever found to
implicate her, and Wyatt proclaimed her ignorance of the plot all the way to the scaffold. Ultimately, it
was the failed Wyatt Rebellion that sealed the fates of Lady Jane and her husband Guilford Dudley, who
were executed in separate ceremonies on February 12, 1554. Although tortured, Wyatt never confessed
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reign could no longer be tolerated by the rebels when she intensified the
religious issue of bringing Catholicism back to England by announcing her
marriage to a Catholic, Spanish prince. Mary gave her first speech at Guildhall
on February 1, 1553, just two days before Wyatt would arrive in London.
Occasioned by impending danger and rebellion, Mary uses the imagery of
marriage to establish ethos. In this moment of great exigency, Mary chooses the
metaphor of marriage to rouse the spirits of her people to defend her.
The queen begins her speech by unifying her people and joining them as
potential victims of the oncoming revolt. ‚I am come unto you in mine own
person,‛ Mary declares, risking the imminent danger of the rebellion, ‚to tell you
that, which already you see and know; that is, how traitorously and rebelliously
a number of Kentish-men have assembled themselves against both us and you‛
(Foxe 414; vol. VI). Mary wishes to divert attention away from her upcoming
marriage as the cause for the rebellion, and instead places the root cause for the
rebellion in the crisis of her religion as a Catholic on the throne after Henry and
Edward’s protestant reigns. The rebels ‚pretence,‛ for their actions, ‚(as they
said at the first) was for a marriage determined for us;‛ however, ‚the matter of
the marriage seemed to be but a Spanish cloak to cover their pretended purpose
against our religion‛ (Foxe 414; vol. VI). Mary shifts the cause of the rebellion
from her marriage, and instead uses the language of marriage to marry her
people and unify them against the impending threat.
Mary I establishes ethos and requires fidelity by rhetorically marrying
England:
Now, loving subjects, what I am, ye right well know. I am your
Queen, to whom at my coronation, when I was wedded to the
Elizabeth‟s involvement in his plan. Elizabeth, of course, always maintained her innocence. (See Chapter
Two‟s discussion of Elizabeth‟s mercy letter written to Mary.) Wyatt was eventually executed and
quartered on April 11, 1554.
83
realm and laws of the same (the spousal ring whereof I have on my
finger, which never hitherto was, nor hereafter shall be left off), you
promised your allegiance and obedience to me. (Foxe 414; vol. VI)
Mary begins her first rhetorical act as a queen by telling the audience that they
already know—that she is their queen. This statement presumes the knowledge
of her audience and firmly places Mary in an authoritative position. She
dismisses an introduction in this first sentence, but then goes on to introduce
herself. The people of England did not have an image of a queen regnant, so
Mary must go on to explain what that means to her people. After all, it is not
simply who she is, but ‚what I am‛ that she explains to her audience (emphasis
added). Employing an image with which the English would be familiar, Mary
establishes her identity as a spouse to England. This move, however, is terribly
problematic in a time when wives were seen as necessarily inferior to their
husbands. Rather than elaborating the metaphor and the relationship between
the assumed wife and her husband, the realm, Mary turns to the promise of
fidelity inherent in the marriage vow and consequently the vow of allegiance in
the coronation ceremony. It is notable that Mary never refers to herself as a wife,
but rather indicates the wedding ceremony—placing the referent in the language
of the ceremony rather than merely the role of the spouse—a role that would
certainly, assumptively, cast Mary as the wife. The queen does not refute this
assumption; instead, Mary allows the audience to view her as a dutiful wife. She
allows the murky reference to marriage so that her body represents the female
wife, a role with which her subjects would have been comfortable, but her
rhetorical act embodies the role of the husband, a figure of male power—albeit
not overtly. She uses the ethos that her body represents in an embodied apophasis
while subtly placing herself in the role of the husband. This marriage metaphor
is implied in the coronation ceremony and a ring is worn by all monarchs, male
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and female alike; however, the Church of England’s marriage ceremony required
different things of a man and a woman up until the twenty-first century.
In the wedding vows of The Book of Common Prayer, as authorized by
Mary’s father, Henry VIII, and published by the Church of England in 1552, the
year before the start of Mary’s reign, the husband promises ‚to love and cherish‛
his wife ‚till death us depart *sic+,‛ but the wife promises to ‚love, cherish, and
to obey‛ her husband (emphasis added).31 This language, in fact, is repeated
twice in the marriage ceremony—in the vows and during the exchanging of the
rings. During the vows the man is asked, ‚Wilt thou have this woman to thy
wedded wife to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of
matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor her, and keep her, in
sickness, and in health? And forsaking all other, keep thee only to her, so long as
you both shall live?‛ But the woman’s vows are: ‚Wilt thou have this man to
thy wedded husband. To live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of
matrimony? Wilt thou obey him and serve him, love honor and keep him, in
sickness and in health, and forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him, so long
as you both shall live?‛ (C of E London 1552, emphasis added). During the
exchanging of the rings, the statements of the husband and wife are again
identical except for the blaring exception of the word ‚obey.‛ The husband says
‚I N. take thee N. to my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day
forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health, to
31
In fact, this discriminatory wording was used by the Church of England as recently as October, 2006
when the Church feared that the wedding vows could be used to rationalize domestic violence. In a report
entitled, “Responding to Domestic Abuse, Guidelines for Pastoral Responsibility,” which was backed by
the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Church pointed to sexist language as a possible
contributing factor to the growing epidemic of domestic violence in England: “Viewing man's relationship
with God in terms of domination and submission and „uncritical use of masculine imagery,‟ the report says,
can validate „overbearing and ultimately violent patterns of behavior" responsible for domestic abuse.‟
(“Viewing God”).
85
love and to cherish, til death us depart, according to God’s holy ordinance: and
thereto I plight thee my troth‛ (C of E London 1552). The woman then says: ‚I
N. take thee N. to my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day
forward for better for worse for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to
love, cherish, and to obey, til death us depart, according to God’s holy ordinance
and thereto I give thee my troth‛ (C of E London 1552, emphasis added). Since
obedience is only required of the woman to her husband, in Mary’s reference to
her people’s promise of ‚allegiance and obedience,‛ it is the people who promise
to obey; Mary casts herself in the role of the husband.32 Under great exigency—
the imminent arrival of rebellious forces—Mary takes on the male role. While her
female body signifies her female gender, she metaphorically embodies the role of
the husband. Like kings before and after her who ‚married‛ the realm in the
coronation ceremony, Mary will be obeyed. It is a clear message to her people
who would have been familiar with the marriage ceremony. In one of the first
examples of the strategy of gender play that female monarchs used to establish
ethos, Mary will not be a wife to England, but rather, a husband.
Later in the speech at Guildhall, Mary elaborates on this spousal
relationship, but again, in a complicated manner:
And I say to you, on the word of a prince, I cannot tell how
naturally the mother loveth the child, for I was never the mother of
any; but certainly, if a prince and governor may as naturally and
earnestly love her subjects, as the mother doth love the child, then
assure yourselves, that I, being your lady and mistress, do as
earnestly and tenderly love and favor you. (Foxe 414; vol. VI)
32
In The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History, Charles Beem states that
“Mary declared herself to be her kingdom‟s wife” (63), which has been the prevailing interpretation of
Mary‟s speech, but this project asserts that on closer inspection, Mary places herself in the role of the
husband.
86
Mary simultaneously refers to herself as ‚prince‛—a persistent strategy of
female rule—while invoking the language of motherhood. Because this language
of male rule reflects her role as a monarch but does not reflect her body it is an
example of disembodied apophasis. Although embodied in the male role of
‚prince,‛ she uses embodied apophasis to also borrow ethos from the role of
mother. The Oxford English Dictionary claims that the first reference to a woman
as ‚prince‛ is Geste’s 1560 reference to Elizabeth, but Mary’s speech, although
published later, would have been performed earlier. If Foxe’s account of Mary’s
first speech is an accurate version of the events at Guildhall, Mary’s invocation of
the word ‚prince,‛ to refer to herself, a woman, preceded Geste’s by six years.
Elizabeth did indeed later mirror this strategy, referring to herself as a prince
throughout her reign.33
Immediately after marking herself male—both implicitly with a veiled
reference to herself as the husband of England and explicitly with the male title,
‚prince‛—Mary further casts off the conventional female role of the time by
noting that she is not a mother. As a forty-year-old unmarried woman Mary
certainly broke traditional gender roles of the period, and her first rhetorical act
as monarch seems to foreground the ways in which she is not subject to
expectations for female behavior by proclaiming herself ‚prince‛ and by
33
In “Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the Self-Representations of Queen Elizabeth I,” Janel Mueller
claims that Queen Elizabeth “most often styles herself prince and her rule or throne princely in what, at this
period, sustains its gender-neutral sense: the derivation of prince from Latin princeps, a noun of so-called
common—or indifferently masculine or feminine—gender” (42). In footnote 20, Mueller directs her reader
to the Oxford English Dictionary entry “prince” Ib. However, the Geste entry cited above is the first entry
for the term “prince” as “applied to a female sovereign,” and it refers to Elizabeth. Mueller also claims that
“Carole Levin‟s failure to register that prince can be gender-neutral at this period lessens the value of her
discussion of „Elizabeth as King and Queen‟” from Heart and Stomach of a King (Mueller 59; f.n. 20). To
claim that the term “prince” would not have, for an English audience, a long history of male referents to
which the audience would be reminded verges on depoliticizing the term. Also, if the first reference to a
female sovereign is a reference to Queen Elizabeth, then it seems that the term “sustains” no meaning if her
application of the term essentially changes it by changing the gender of the referent. In other words,
Elizabeth‟s invocation of the term “prince” is necessarily political because she is a woman and the
preceding referents, at least for the English people, were exclusively male.
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highlighting her unfamiliarity with motherhood.34 This renunciation of the role
of mother adds gravitas to the male title ‚prince.‛ Rhetorica ad Herennium defines
gravitas of delivery as ‚the dignified, or serious, tone of conversation is marked
by some degree of impressiveness and by vocal restraint‛ (Cicero, III.xiii.23).
One of the virtues of Roman society, gravitas is defined as dignity, seriousness, or
duty in a sense that is much more profound than ‚gravity.‛ While Mary sets
herself apart from the expected female role of nurturing mother, she still wants
to borrow the rhetorical effect of that role. She cannot unequivocally reject the
role of mother because, despite her unmarried state, she is a woman on the
throne and the image of the mother is a powerful signifier. So, Mary embodies
the role of the mother to her people through an analogy, and so ‚as the mother
doth love the child,‛ Mary loves her people. In this way, Mary borrows the ethos
of the role of mother as a powerful figure of authority and the pathos of the role
of mother as a loving nurturer while she rejects the label and proclaims herself
outside the constraints of the social expectations of mother by her single status.
Pathos, or the ‚Greek term for emotions or passions,‛ is used to describe an
appeal to the emotions of an audience (Crowley 435). George Kennedy’s
translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric defines pathos as the occurrence of persuasion
‚through the hearers when they are led to feel emotion *pathos+ by the speech;
for we do not give the same judgment when grieved and rejoicing or when being
friendly and hostile‛ (II.i.5). Kennedy’s glossary defines pathos as ‚emotion, a
temporary state of feeling awakened by circumstances; in the Rhetoric especially
the emotions of members of an audience as moved by a speaker‛ (318). In a
34
As David Cressy notes in Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and
Stuart England, “more than 90 percent of those reaching adulthood in the sixteenth century would marry”
(Cressy 285). Since the “mean age of first marriage varied little from around 27 or 28 for men and 25 or 26
for women,” it was unusual that Mary was still single at forty (Cressy 285). Mary‟s single status, however,
left her “available” to many marriage negotiations in her youth and the potential benefits of a marriage as a
woman in close proximity to the throne (even during periods when she was excluded from succession by
her father) were continual issues until her marriage to Phillip was solemnified.
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pathetic appeal, the rhetorical choices of the speaker are determined by the
assumed emotional reaction of the audience. Mary chooses to invoke the image
of mother for its rhetorical effect yet deny the label ‚mother,‛ and therefore deny
the social restrictions that may be associated with the referent. Even in the
metaphor she embodies, she rejects the role in an embodied apophasis. Mary’s
use of a term that she is rejecting is her apophasis, and because, as a woman
speaker, she embodies the form of a mother, this is an example of embodied
apophasis. Mary is simultaneously denying and affirming the role of mother as
she invokes it for rhetorical effect and rejects it by overtly stating that she is not a
mother.
Mary goes on to anticipate the reservations of her audience. Mary’s
position as a woman on the throne was further complicated by her unmarried
state. Trying to quell the fears of her audience so shortly after the announcement
of her marriage plan, she anticipates the argument believed strongly at the time
that women are more sexual creatures and susceptible to desire. Mary assures
them that, ‚I am not so bent to my will, neither so precise nor affectionate, that
either for mine own pleasure I would choose where I lust,‛ but she doesn’t stop
there (Foxe 415; vol. VI). Mary continues, ‚or that I am so desirous, as needs I
would have one,‛ seemingly announcing that she doesn’t feel that she needs a
husband at all (Foxe 415; vol. VI). While there was certainly a portion of the
populace that didn’t approve of Philip, the fear that the queen would leave the
succession of the throne unstable was a much more frightening prospect to the
people of England. Mary then confirms her chastity, appearing to evade the
marriage subject entirely: ‚For God, I thank him, to whom be the praise
therefore, I have hitherto lived a virgin, and doubt nothing, but with God’s grace,
I am able so to live still‛ (Foxe 415; vol. VI). Again, she reiterates that she is not
subject to the desires of the flesh and she invokes a truly powerful female
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image—the virgin. As a Catholic on the throne after years of religious turmoil
under her father’s reign, the invocation of a virginal Queen Mary as a figure of
the Virgin Mary could only strengthen her position as an incomparable woman
beyond reproach.
When Mary finally addresses the topic that is really at the heart of the
matter—the birth of an heir to the throne—she again employs embodied
apophasis by at once calling to mind the male rulers before her and discussing her
female body as a vehicle for childbirth: ‚But if, as my progenitors have done
before, it may please God that I might leave some fruit of my body behind me, to
be your governor, I trust you would not only rejoice thereat, but also I know it
would be to your great comfort‛ (Foxe 415; vol. VI). Mary’s careful choice of the
word ‚progenitors‛ is rhetorically savvy. Unlike the neutral gender marking of
the Latin origin of ‚prince,‛ ‚princeps,‛ ‚progenitors‛ is gendered masculine in
the Latin. Like the male princes before her, Mary’s ruling progenitors are
exclusively male. Evoking a history of men, the discussion of succession is
changed. Mary places her fertility on a level playing field with the men who
came before her; the issue is one of succession only and not complicated by her
gender. Although her female body signifies difference, she rejects the difference,
refusing to be ‚othered,‛ by employing embodied apophasis to join her male
progenitors. Therefore, her single status is no more problematic than any of the
single men who came to the throne before her. Again, she borrows only what
she needs from an association with both her own gender and the opposite
gender. She maintains the pathos of a virtuous, virginal woman while she
borrows the ethos of her progenitors.
After establishing herself as the descendant of kings, and a morally
superior woman, Mary carefully assures her audience that this does not mean
that she will marry without their consent. ‚And on the word of a queen,‛ she
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promises her people, ‚that if it shall not probably appear to all the nobility and
commons in the high court of parliament, that this marriage shall be for the high
benefit and commodity of the whole realm, then will I abstain from marriage
while I live‛ (Foxe 415; vol. VI). While this may seem to be just what they would
like to hear—that the queen will defer to her counselors—ending the subject with
a declaration that she would be happy to remain a single woman on the throne
had to frighten her male audience and confirm her power. On the heels of the
Wyatt Rebellion, the idea of an unclear line of succession was a frightening
prospect. Mary then ends her speech with a show of her courage: ‚And now,
good subjects, pluck up your hearts, and like true men, stand fast against these
rebels, both our enemies and yours, and fear them not; for I assure you, I fear
them nothing at all‛ (Foxe 415; vol. VI). Mary seems to be appealing to her
subjects’ egos by asking them to behave courageously ‚like true men,‛ but she
then tells them not to fear because ‚I fear them nothing at all‛ in a rhetorical
move that asserts her superiority over these men. She points to their gender
difference by asking her audience to behave ‚like true men,‛ but then doesn’t
need to borrow the male gender to assert her own bravery. As a woman, she
doesn’t need to behave like a ‚true man‛ because she is not afraid.
Elizabeth Mirrors Mary
As fate would have it, Mary died childless on November 17, 1558. The
throne went to her closest heir, her sister Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth reigned as a
single woman for forty-five years and had to address the issues of marriage and
children repeatedly. In her first speech before Parliament on February 10, 1559,
Elizabeth already had to answer questions regarding her marriage. In a deft
rhetorical turn that mirrors Mary’s strategy, Elizabeth claimed, ‚I am already
bound unto an husband, which is the kingdom of England, and that may suffice
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you;‛ however, where Mary took on the role of husband, Elizabeth casts herself
in the role of the wife (Marcus 59). Elizabeth’s assertion that she is already
bound to a husband allows her to rhetorically comply with societal expectations
for her gender without actually having to marry a man. She stands before
Parliament a married woman—embodied in a female form and role as wife;
however, the wifely role is an ironic one, and therefore this is an example of
embodied apophasis. After rhetorically fulfilling her duty to marry, the only issue
left to address was providing an heir to the throne. But for that question,
Elizabeth also had a ready answer that countered the objections of Parliament:
‚And reproach me so no more<that I have no children: for every one of you,
and as many as are English, are my children and kinsfolks, of whom, so long as I
am not deprived and God shall preserve me, you cannot charge me, without
offense, to be destitute‛ (Marcus 59). Again, this rhetorical act mirrors Mary’s
mothering of England in loving her subjects ‚as the mother doth love the child‛
(Foxe 414; vol. VI). But Elizabeth goes a step further—removing the conditional
‚as‛ creating a metaphor, in contrast to Mary’s simile, claiming to be the mother
of England. Once again, Elizabeth takes on the role figuratively through the
metaphor in an embodied apophasis while she uses the argument to deflect the
real-life pressure to marry and provide an heir. Elizabeth often employed an
enthymeme, or a rhetorical syllogism, to establish logos, or an appeal to logic, in
her arguments. In this case, if she is married to England, then the English are her
children and both issues are already resolved.
According to Aristotle, an enthymeme is a syllogism in which a premise is
implied or probable. In The Rhetorical Tradition, Bizzell further explains that ‚the
enthymeme is a form of deductive argument also called the rhetorical
syllogism...A common view is that in the enthymeme the first premise is based
on probable, not certain, knowledge, and the entire train of reasoning may be
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truncated‛ (Bizzell 171). Bizzell summarizes Kennedy’s definition from Aristotle
on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, pointing out that ‚George Kennedy, a
historian of rhetoric and translator of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, suggests that, in
general, the enthymeme is the kind of reasoning an audience of non experts can
easily understand‛ (Bizzell 172). Kennedy’s glossary defines enthymeme as ‚a
rhetorical syllogism, i.e., a statement with a supporting reason introduced by for,
because, or since or an if…then statement. In contrast to a logical syllogism, the
premises and conclusion are ordinarily probable, not necessarily logically valid.
A premise may be omitted if it will be easily assumed by the audience‛
(Kennedy 315). Therefore, the use of an enthymeme implies shared knowledge, or
a shared assumption, on the part of the speaker and the audience. This strategy
also demonstrates Elizabeth’s power in that she doesn’t have to explain the
unstated. The premises of her enthymeme are simply logical. This appeal to logos,
or ‚any arguments found in the issue or the case,‛ is powerful because it is based
on a logical, rational argument (Crowley 434).
In language that closely mirrors Mary’s speech at Guildhall, Elizabeth
points to the coronation ring to prove her married status: ‚Once I am married
already to the realm of England when I was crowned with this ring, which I bear
continually in token thereof‛ (Marcus 65). But where Mary then defended her
virtue, Elizabeth simply proclaims her power: ‚Howsoever it be, so long as I live,
I shall be queen of England; when I am dead, they shall succeed that has most
right‛ (Marcus 65). Elizabeth does not answer the question of who shall succeed
her, but rather ends with an inarguable maxim that ‚they shall succeed that has
most right‛ (Marcus 65). Again, Elizabeth establishes power by turning to an
irrefutable premise. A maxim, according to the Rhetorica ad Herrenium, is ‚a
saying drawn from life, which shows concisely either what happens or ought to
happen in life.‛ (Cicero IV.xvii.24). ‚Simple maxims<are not to be rejected,
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because, if no reason is needed, the brevity of the statement has great charm,‛
and so power and charm are employed by Elizabeth in equal measure
addressing the sensitive topic of succession (Cicero IV.xvii.24). Her maxim
addresses the issue of succession by reducing it to a non-issue. Because the
future of England relied on the inherited succession of the throne, the issue of
naming an heir chased Elizabeth for the rest of her life.
In ‚Queen Elizabeth’s answer to the commons’ petition that she marry,
January 28, 1563,‛ Elizabeth used her female gender to delay a commitment on
her part:
The weight and greatness of this matter might cause in me, being a
woman wanting both wit and memory, some fear to speak and
bashfulness besides, a thing appropriate to my sex. But yet the
princely seat and kingly throne wherein God (though unworthy)
hath constituted me, maketh these two causes [marriage and
succession] to seem little in mine eyes, though grievous perhaps to
your ears, and boldeneth me to say somewhat in this matter, which
I mean only to touch but not presently to answer. (Marcus 70)
Elizabeth’s use of her gender is particularly interesting here. Using embodied
apophasis, she is simultaneously woman, hiding behind the veil of female
chastity, and male, seated on the ‚princely seat‛ and ‚kingly throne.‛ Elizabeth
seems to comply with the societal expectations of appropriate female behavior,
but she then breaks them by speaking. Like Mary before her, she maintains the
pathos of her role as a woman in a male-dominated society by fulfilling society’s
image of proper female conduct, while claiming the ethos of the established role
of previously male authority that she embodies as prince. She also
simultaneously shows deference to God as his ‚unworthy‛ subject, and
establishes the ethos of her divine place on the throne as determined by God. All
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of these tactics establish her authority and prolong her independence as an
unmarried monarch. In a 1550 letter, Elizabeth’s tutor, Ascham, tells Sturm of
the sixteen-year-old princess’s affection for rhetorical antithesis, ‚She very much
admires modest metaphors, and comparisons of contraries well put together and
contrasting felicitously with one another‛ (Berdan 340). Ascham’s description of
Elizabeth’s rhetorical strategies betrays his own gender expectations as he casts
Elizabeth’s metaphors as ‚modest,‛ and her contraries as ‚felicitous.‛ The queen
continued to delight in contraries, seeking out the rhetorical potential of apophasis
throughout her long reign.
Elizabeth’s Petticoat speech
As Elizabeth’s reign continued, and the anxiety over Elizabeth’s physical
ability to bear children grew, she would have to address the issue of succession
repeatedly. Possible heirs threaten any reign, but for an unmarried female ruler,
the threats of possible successors were particularly dangerous. After all, an
unmarried queen’s successors aren’t loyal children, but relatives perhaps already
mature and developing a following—in essence, they are potential usurpers. In a
speech occasioned by the pressure from Parliament to marry and provide an
heir, Elizabeth—and we can safely attribute this speech to Elizabeth due to the
fragment in her own hand that has survived—utilizes her education in classical
rhetoric while drawing attention to her body using embodied apophasis in a
November 5, 1566, speech to a joint delegation of Lords and Commons. This
speech has come to be known as ‚The Petticoat Speech.‛
Parliament had been urging the queen to produce a male heir. Elizabeth’s
cousin Mary, Queen of Scots married Lord Darnley and gave birth to the future
James I just five months prior in June 1566. This complicated Elizabeth’s position
with Parliament. There were others to threaten a claim to the throne if Elizabeth
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did not have a child, and the birth of a male son intensified the threat. The
discovery of a pamphlet ‚setting out the case for Catherine Grey‛ led to Lord
Keeper Bacon’s exclusion from the Council and the court, and the imprisonment
of John Hales, a senior Chancery official. With such threats to her throne
looming, Elizabeth not only had to answer questions regarding a future marriage
and children, but she had to establish her legitimacy on the throne. Elizabeth
had to address the urgings of Parliament when she was forced to ask for a
subsidy bill.
There is evidence that suggests that this speech was edited by Elizabeth
several times before she delivered it to Parliament. The careful editing has been
attributed to Elizabeth’s tact; her ability to maintain her strength while quelling
her anger was legendary. The speech begins by addressing the occasion of her
speech, the airing of her private business before the House of Commons.
Elizabeth’s rhetorical technique is to interrogate her audience:
Was I not born in the realm? Were my parents born in any foreign
country? Is there any cause I should alienate myself from being
careful over this country? Is not my kingdom here? Whom have I
oppressed? Whom have I enriched to others’ harm? What turmoil
have I made in this commonwealth, that I should be suspected to
have no regard to the same? How have I governed since my reign?
(Marcus 95)
From this questioning perspective, the unstated assumption is that she indeed is
the rightful heir to the throne and also that she has proven herself to be an
effective and just ruler already.35 As the questions become increasingly pointed,
35
In “Virtue and Virtuality” Janel Mueller cites stock-taking as an example of Elizabeth‟s “grand refrain,”
a “reciprocal relation” of “love and care” that Elizabeth establishes with her people (42). “This
benevolent, affective bond,” Mueller states, “is what Elizabeth seeks to establish as the norm of who she is
as a sovereign of England and what her relations are to her subjects throughout her reign” (42).
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Elizabeth employs epanaphora; the phrase ‚Whom have I‛ is repeated twice.
Epanaphora is ‚a figure wherein a rhetor repeats words at the beginning of
successive colons; the repeated words are used in different senses‛ (Crowley
431). According to the Rhetorica ad Herrenium ‚Epanaphora occurs when one and
the same word forms successive beginnings for phrases expressing like and
different ideas‛ (IV. xii.19). The alliterative ‚h‛ sounds seem to express her
exasperation as she repeatedly asks these rhetorical questions. The paragraph
ends with an occultation. ‚I need not to use many words, for my deeds do try
me,‛ she states as she draws attention to her good deeds by refusing to explain
how she has governed (Marcus 95).
Elizabeth then moves to the divisio. Divisio, or ‚the third part of a six-part
classical oration. It set forth points stipulated (agreed on by both sides) and
points to be contested‛ (Lanham 60). Division is ‚a sophistic topic that separates
out and lists the parts of any whole; also, a figure that does the same‛ (Crowley
431). The Rhetorica ad Herrenium states that ‚division separates the alternatives of
a question and resolves each by means of a reason subjoined,‛ therefore it leads
to an organized argument guarded from challenge (Cicero IV.xl.52). Elizabeth
divides her argument into ‚two points: *<+ my marriage and *<+ the limitation
of the succession of the crown‛ (Marcus 95). Elizabeth employs the practiced
rhetorical convention, the apophasis she saw modeled by Mary, by referring to
herself as a prince in order to firmly establish her authority while she addresses
the issue of her status as a single woman. She reminds the audience that she has
already told the Parliament that she would marry, ‚But that was not accepted
nor credited, although spoken by their prince‛ (Marcus 95). She goes on to say
that she ‚will never break the word of a prince spoken in public place for my
honor sake‛ (Marcus 95). She simultaneously discredits Parliament by
suggesting that they have ignored the solemn word of a prince, and she overtly
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solemnifies her word. Elizabeth relies on logos. She dismisses the topic with the
confirmatio, or ‚the part of a discourse that elaborates arguments in support of a
rhetor’s position,‛ saying that she ‚will marry as soon as I can conveniently, if
God take not him away with whom I mind to marry, or myself, or else some
other great let happen‛ (Crowley 430; Marcus 95). Elizabeth does not reject the
expectation of marriage, but rather delays the argument by announcing her
intention to comply.
Once the marriage topic is addressed, Elizabeth moves on to define and
divide her next topic in the Platonic style of rhetoric. It is here that Elizabeth
turns to the topic of succession—the topic of bearing a child—that Elizabeth’s
anger truly shows. Her statement, ‚And I hope to have children; otherwise I
would never marry‛ differs from Mary’s point of view in an important way.
While Mary promised that she wouldn’t marry unless the ‚nobility and
commons in the high court of parliament‛ agree that a marriage was for ‚the
high benefit and commodity of the whole realm,‛ Elizabeth reduces marriage to
a vehicle for creating an heir to the throne (Foxe 415; vol. VI). Learning from
Mary’s example where marriage to a foreign prince caused fear, suspicion, and
doubt in her ability to rule, Elizabeth knows that a marriage not wholly agreed
upon by Parliament will not benefit her reign in any way—save to insure an heir.
Her decision to maintain her power by remaining single is a confirmation of
women’s power. In a thinly veiled insult to her audience, the male members of
Parliament, Elizabeth implies that she does not need a man for anything except
perhaps biology.
Elizabeth’s next statement that it is ‚a strange thing that the foot should
direct the head in so weighty a cause‛ is reminiscent of Plato’s Phaedrus in which
Socrates says that the art of rhetoric is a precise art; ‚every discourse must be
organized like a living being, with a body of its own, as it were, so as not to be
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headless or footless, but to have a middle and members, composed in fitting
relation to each other and to the whole‛ (Marcus 96; Plato 159). However, this
metaphor is also closely associated with a description of marriage originating in
the Bible verse ‚Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the woman’s
head, and God is Christ’s head‛ (Tyndale Bible 1 Cor. 11.3). This image was also
used to illustrate the relationship of man and wife in a primer from Henry VIII’s
reign: ‚Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands, as unto the Lord, for
the husband is the wife’s head, even as Christ is the head of the congregations.
Therefore, as the congregation is in subjection to Christ, likewise let the wives be
in subjection to their husbands in all things‛ (Three Primers 71). Given the context
of Elizabeth’s statement, a response to Parliament’s urge to marry, the queen is
pointedly embodying the role of the ‚head‛ and averring that she will not be
directed to marry, and perhaps more significantly, that she will not play the role
of subject to a husband. She also expertly volleys back the argument that a
woman’s reign is monstrous by asserting that she is the head, and for Parliament
to rule her would be monstrous. She establishes her authority as the head of the
realm and also highlights the order and eloquence of her argument. Elizabeth
again displays her rhetorical education by invoking Plato when she states: ‚As
for my own part, I care not for death, for all men are mortal‛ calling to mind
Socrates’ famous syllogism ‚All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore
Socrates is mortal" (Marcus 97).
Elizabeth uses embodied apophasis by calling attention to and addressing
her gender in seemingly apologetic terms when she states that ‚though I be a
woman, yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father
had;‛ this is also an example of anamnesis, or ‚recalling events or persons from
the past,‛ in that Elizabeth invokes her father’s authority (Marcus 97; Lanham
188). Her deference to society’s expectations that women wouldn’t have courage
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is apophatically rejected in the invocation of her father, but Elizabeth is embodied
in the role of woman. Elizabeth’s maxims of power follow including a refusal to
be bullied and the ultimate assertion of female authority: ‚I am your anointed
queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything‛ (Marcus 97). In a
bold embodied apophasis, the queen takes off her crown declaring: ‚I thank God I
am indeed endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in
my petticoat, I were able to live in any place of Christendom‛ (Marcus 97).
Elizabeth’s representation of herself is shocking in its sensuality. Rather than
taking on the role of her male predecessors, here Elizabeth establishes power
precisely by drawing attention to her female body. In essence, Elizabeth rejects
the audacity of Parliament to question her about the intimate subject of having
children, and her response is to highlight Parliament’s inappropriate intimacy by
rhetorically undressing.
Metaphorically scantily clad in a petticoat in front of Parliament, Elizabeth
utilizes her female body as a strategy to establish her authority. Here she does
not apologize for her gender; she does not deny it. She is not an extraordinary
queen; she is ‚everywoman,‛ who could go anywhere and still be a powerful
woman. Elizabeth throws off the trappings of royalty, and what is underneath is
not the prince, but the woman—powerful and ruling. Elizabeth declares herself
the ‚anointed‛ queen, and then bares her female body. She invokes her father
and the divine right of kings, and then portrays herself stripped and living
anywhere in the world. To disrobe for Parliament is her ultimate show of her
female power. It is this overtly female show of power that is her embodied
apophasis, displaying the female body, but breaking gendered behavior by
demonstrating power and courage.
In the 2003 History Today article ‚Elizabeth I: Gender, Power, and Politics,‛
Susan Doran asserts that ‚writers today should really stop making simplistic
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assertions that Elizabeth capitalized on her ‘feminine characteristics’ to secure
obedience and achieve her goals in stagecraft‛ and refutes the claims that
Elizabeth had to fight to be accepted as a female ruler (32). Doran’s point that
Elizabeth did indeed rule and was not challenged outwardly as a leader does not
exclude the fact that as a female leader, her rhetorical acts were essentially
different from those of her male predecessors. Doran claims that ‚the monarchy
was excluded from patriarchal assumptions and a female monarch was given
rights by God which permitted her to rule over men‛ (31). Elizabeth’s rhetorical
aim may not have been to be accepted as a female ruler, but she certainly
employed rhetorical strategies to assert power in ways that differ from the male
rulers who came before her. Doran’s debunking of several generally accepted
intentional fallacies regarding Elizabeth’s re-gendering, virginity, and single
status are worthwhile; however, that does not preclude an investigation of not
her feminine characteristics, but rather her rhetorical strategies as a ruler in a
female body. Embodied as Elizabeth is in a female form, her rhetorical acts are
necessarily female, not feminine.
In Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the
Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn notes that Elizabeth ‚always played gender to her own
advantage‛ (162). Glenn states that:
Elizabeth self-consciously composed herself as uniquely superior,
relegating herself to the very top of a stratified society. To
distinguish herself from all the English kings who had gone before,
as well as from all other women in the realm, she appeared an
androgyne, the perfect trope for an imperialistic, nationalistic state.
Elizabeth thereby transformed the feminized margins of political
power into a masculinized body of actual strength. (Glenn 159)
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Elizabeth often ‚re-gendered,‛ to borrow Glenn’s term, herself masculine in
order to express power, as is seen in her Tilbury speech and her use of the term
‚prince.‛36 However, in ‚The Petticoat Speech‛ she is not ‚compos*ing+ herself
as uniquely superior;‛ she is composing herself as a woman—embodied in her
female form. She is not ‚a masculinized body of actual strength,‛ but a female
body of actual strength. The occasion of this speech, the pressure upon her to
marry and produce an heir is uniquely female; this is an occasion where her very
femaleness could not be ignored. Elizabeth concludes ‚The Petticoat Speech‛
with a dismissal that ‚at this present, it is not convenient‛ to discuss the
succession, but the reason for the inconvenience of the topic is particularly
interesting in light of the context, subject, and metaphors of this rhetorical act
(Marcus 97).
This speech, occasioned by pressure to marry and provide an heir, in
which Elizabeth displays an image of herself in a petticoat—a necessarily female
and personal article of clothing—ends with the queen proclaiming the danger
she is in as the head of government in England. ‚At this present, it is not
convenient, nor never shall be without some peril unto you and certain danger
unto me,‛ Elizabeth states comparing the weightiness of the issue and declaring
that she is indeed in certain danger (Marcus 97). She then casts herself as the
protector of the people and says that ‚as soon as there may be a convenient time
and that it may be done with least peril unto you, although never without great
danger unto me, I will deal therein for your safety and offer it unto you as your
prince and head‛ (Marcus 98). This sentence ends with the pointed note
‚without request,‛ in a rhetorical move that silences future challenges and
reminds the audience of their current transgression. Elizabeth concludes the
36
Again, the gender play strategies of ruling Tudor queens is discussed more fully in Chapter Four of this
project, “Disembodied Apophasis in Royal Women‟s Rhetorical Acts.”
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speech repeating again that ‚it is monstrous that the feet should direct the head,‛
again invoking Phaedrus, but also extending the metaphor by subtly embodying
her rule, because she is the ‚prince and head‛ (Marcus 98). Again, she calls
attention to her body—this time as a symbol of staunch resolve, protection, and
supreme authority—a female body that can be stripped to the petticoat—and yet
still protect and reign. In Cecil’s report to the full house of Commons written
after the speech, he states that ‚all the House was silent‛ (Marcus 99; f.n. 1). It is
no surprise that Elizabeth’s strip tease left the audience dumbfounded.
Elizabeth’s Handmaid Speech
Perhaps it was Vives’ definition of eloquence espoused in The Education of
a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual in which ‚the most eloquent
woman<is the one who, when required to speak to men, will become flushed in
her whole countenance, perturbed in spirit, and at a loss for words. O
extraordinary and effective eloquence!‛ that Elizabeth was addressing when in a
speech at the close of the parliamentary session on March 15, 1576, ten years after
the Petticoat Speech, she chastely claimed, ‚If any look for eloquence, I shall
deceive their hope‛ (Vives 133; Marcus 168). In this way, Elizabeth’s statement is
an embodied apophasis, an affirmation of her skill and confidence as a woman,
while seeming to deny that very skill. Elizabeth’s self-deprecating claim is
embodied in her female form because her audience expects that a woman would
be so chaste; however, the apophatic rhetorical turn affirms her skill as she
continues her eloquent rhetorical act. Although Elizabeth’s ability is apparent in
her speeches, she also understands her audience well enough to placate them by
small displays of female chastity. In this speech Elizabeth gives credit to God for
her country’s prosperity: ‚I cannot attribute this hap and good success to my
device without detracting much from the divine Providence, nor challenge to my
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own commendation what is only due to His eternal glory‛ while claiming that
she cannot sing her own praises because, ‚My sex permits it not‛ (Marcus 168).
Elizabeth speaks publicly while claiming to be silenced as a woman. This
embodied apophasis is the key to her rhetorical success in appeasing her male
audience while making herself heard. She directs the audience’s attention to the
constraints placed on her as a woman as she asserts that the rules do not apply to
her as queen—as a reigning queen in a role previously held exclusively by men.
In what has come to be known as the ‚Handmaid Speech,‛ Elizabeth uses
the rhetorical strategy of embodied apophasis to gain authority. Here she places
herself on a stratum of society in deference to one—God. This speech culminated
the Parliamentary session and reaffirmed her power over her realm by
attributing the power in her realm to God. Elizabeth’s exordium immediately
draws a connection between God and the monarch. Exordium, or ‚the Latin term
for the first part of a discourse,‛ is derived from the Latin ‚beginning a web‛
(Crowley 432; 303). It is translated in the Rhetorica ad Herrenium as an
introduction. Elizabeth begins by asking if her speech will be as misunderstood
as the word of God has been: ‚Do I see God’s most sacred, holy Word and text of
holy Writ drawn to so divers senses, being never so precisely taught, and shall I
hope that my speech can pass forth through so many ears without mistaking,
where so many ripe and divers wits do after bend themselves to construe than
attain the perfect understanding?‛ (Marcus 168). The queen is on an equal plane
with God; Elizabeth and God are both misunderstood orators. But her
introduction is also preparatory in that she apologizes for her inadequacy as a
rhetor: ‚If any look for eloquence, I shall deceive their hope‛ (Marcus 168). This
statement confirms that her tone in this speech will be one of self deprecation, or
embodied apophasis because it is followed by Elizabeth’s establishment of her
authority through a veiled reference to her many successes as ruler: ‚I cannot
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attribute this hap and good success to my device without detracting much from
the divine Providence, nor challenge to my own commendation what is only due
to His eternal glory‛ (Marcus 168). Elizabeth’s next line demonstrates why she
cannot sing her own praises: ‚My sex permits it not‛ (Marcus 168). In just these
first few lines she has discreetly pronounced her success, her alliance with God,
and most discreetly, her awareness of the gender role Parliament would have
wanted to see Elizabeth embodying. She employs embodied apophasis as she
claims to participate in society’s expectation of women’s chaste silence while
mentioning the success of her reign and allying herself with God.
Elizabeth takes credit for the success of her reign by pronouncing that she
cannot take credit for them: ‚*the+ rare and special benefits which many years
have followed and accompanied my happy reign, I attribute to God alone, the
Prince of rule, and count myself no better than His handmaid‛ (Marcus 169).
Elizabeth subtly inserts herself between her people and their guiding God. She
promises future prosperity by reflecting on the past: ‚These seventeen years God
hath both prospered and protected you with good success under my direction,‛
but she stops short of taking any responsibility for the future: ‚and I nothing
doubt but the same maintaining hand will guide you still and bring you to the
ripeness of perfection‛ (Marcus 169). Elizabeth appears to be promoting the idea
that she is merely a handmaid of God, but in doing so, she illustrates the extent
of her power. First, even the most demurred agent of God wields more power
than the most powerful man in Elizabethan society. She appears to be expressing
her humility when in fact she is reminding her audience of the divine nature of
her authority. This embodied apophasis demurs as a woman, but asserts power as
an agent of God. Second, Elizabeth’s choice of the term ‚handmaid‛ evokes the
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image of the Virgin Mary.37 Therefore, to be ‚no better than His handmaid,‛ is to
be like the Virgin Mary—certainly a figure that holds great significance and
respect even among the mostly Protestant members of Elizabeth’s Parliament.
In a speech to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at Whitehall on
March 21, 1610, Elizabeth’s successor, James I, would say that, ‚the state of
monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth. For kings are not only God’s
lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they
are called gods‛ (McDonald 329). As king, James was ‚God’s lieutenant,‛ but
Elizabeth before him adroitly navigated the hostile terrain of a parliament of men
by simultaneously drawing attention to her marginalized female body and her
superior divinity as a monarch chosen by God. She is not ‚God’s lieutenant,‛
she is not called a god by God, but she has a direct relationship with God. She is
God’s domestic servant—a role that would, on the surface, show her respect for
God and her willingness to be defined in a role appropriate to her gender; but at
the same time, it shows her superior status to the male members of Parliament
who can never enjoy such intimacy with God. Again, Elizabeth employs
embodied apophasis by seemingly deferring to a gender-determined expectation
of female behavior while asserting her superiority and power.
Elizabeth’s deference to God is more striking as she further domesticates
her role as the handmaid. In a rhetorical caricature, Elizabeth draws herself as a
farm girl as a response to the petition of the Lords and Commons to deflect their
praises: ‚if I were a milkmaid with a pail on mine arm, whereby my private
person might be little set by, I would not forsake that single state to match myself
with the greatest monarch‛ (Marcus 170). Extending the metaphor, Elizabeth
draws a picture for her audience of the milkmaid. The ‚pail on mine arm‛
37
Luke 1:38 and Luke 1:49.
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verges on the ridiculous and her audience would have certainly seen the image
as one unfitting for the queen. Elizabeth’s fictitious female construction is a
private woman of no political consequence and therefore able to cede to gender
constructions, but the implication of privacy in her metaphorical image is no less
ridiculous than the implication of domesticity when applied to the queen.
Elizabeth enters the male-dominated sphere of Parliament and takes the position
they expect her to take—a role entirely female and entirely subservient; however,
within the context of the speech in which she allies herself with God, even a
milkmaid is closer to God than the men of Parliament.
Embodied Apophasis
As the field of Rhetoric and Composition seeks to reclaim the rhetorical
acts of women, it is particularly important to acknowledge how women rhetors
represented themselves. As Janel Mueller notes in ‚Virtue and Virtuality:
Gender in the Self-Representations of Queen Elizabeth I,‛ there is a great deal of
scholarship on Elizabeth, but ‚the Queen’s own agency in self-representation has
drawn far less notice‛ (37). As powerful figures with the opportunity to speak
and portray a woman’s experience—albeit a privileged one that did not
represent women as a whole in their time—reigning women had to redefine the
terms of rule. The reigning women of the sixteenth century spoke at a time when
most women didn’t have a voice, so their rhetorical acts are transitional. In the
rhetorical strategy of embodied apophasis, Mary and Elizabeth seemingly defer to
previously established societal expectations of appropriate behavior for the
female gender; however, while their bodies signify these roles for their people,
they break them.
Elizabeth’s rhetorical choices mirror Mary’s so closely that it can be
surmised that Elizabeth learned these strategies from Mary—contributing to the
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regiment of Tudor reigning women rhetors. From a twenty-first century feminist
perspective, it is easy to be critical of Mary and Elizabeth’s strategies of showing
deference to patriarchal views. It is easy to be critical of their disinterest in the
lives of the women of their realm. However, reigning women of the sixteenth
century ruled at the apex of a male-dominated governance. They reinvented the
language of the monarchy in ways that newly signified a female body. Most
importantly however, the acts of embodied apophasis displayed female power
and authority in a new form—the female form. As the antithesis of societal
expectations—reigning women embodied the authority of their regal position
while embodying a female form that signified the marginalized position women
held in sixteenth-century England. Using embodied apophasis they created anew
the language, metaphors, and images of women’s power.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Disembodied Apophasis in Royal Women’s Rhetorical Acts
Without a history of female rule, sixteenth-century monarchical language
was necessarily marked male. The preceding referents for all the terms of
monarchy and rule were gendered male, but once the terms of kingship were
applied to women, they changed. The terms transformed and became not simply
identifying terms, but terms that highlighted difference. Female rulers took on
the language of male kingship to participate in the language of rule—the
inherited conventions of the only history of monarchy—a male history. Lacking
a mirror of female rule, women rulers used the language of their inheritance, and
changed the signifier to include a woman. Reigning women employed a strategy
this project names ‚disembodied apophasis‛ to repudiate the behavioral
constraints placed on women in their patriarchal society. These rhetorical acts of
apophasis, or a rhetorical strategy in which ‚one pretends to deny what is actually
affirmed,‛ are disembodied in two ways (Lanham 19).38 In the first type of
disembodiment, reigning women invoke male images of power, such as the
soldier, in order to borrow the authority of the male image. They cast off their
female identity to establish power using an already established, male image of
power. The second type of disembodiment is the casting off of the human body
altogether. In this type, reigning women seek to supersede the limitations of
their female bodies by adopting a spiritual embodiment that transcends the
constraints of the body. Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth I deny their female
bodies, but these strategies unintentionally result in an affirmation of their
38
See Chapter Three, “Rhetorical Reflections of Female Ruling Identity: Embodied Apophasis in the
speeches of Mary I and Elizabeth I,” for a larger discussion of apophasis.
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female bodies. Therefore, the apophasis they employ is a passive apophasis
because in this rhetorical act their intent is not to affirm what they deny—their
bodies; however, that affirmation is a consequence of the act. The apophasis of the
disembodied images is not intentional. When Jane and Elizabeth deny their
bodies, they aim to employ an image more powerful than that which the female
body signifies in their culture. However, the use of disembodied images
paradoxically highlights the female body of the rhetor. Specifically, in using
images of male power, women rulers reaffirm their female gender, and in using
the imagery of spiritual disembodiment, the earthly female body is also affirmed.
Because all of the previous monarchs were male, the female body simply did not
signify political and military power to patriarchal sixteenth-century England, so
in order to portray an image of power, Jane Grey and Elizabeth I rejected their
female bodies for transcendent images of power. Disembodied apophasis is the
strategy they used to surpass the limitations of their roles in society as women.
Gendered Disembodied Apophasis
Royal women simply co-opted the male gender because the language of
rule that they inherited was entirely male-marked. A ruling man was a familiar
image of power, and in an effort to establish power the obvious choice was to
simply continue to use the language and imagery already accepted as powerful.
Royal women also used their female gender when it was rhetorically effective.
Essentially, the rhetorical situation determined the gender associations of the
monarch. Mary Beth Rose calls this type of gender play the ‚multivalence‛ of
gender in Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature. The female
monarch does not deny her gender, but rather takes on another gender in
addition to her own when she needs the authority easily communicated by a
male term. This strategy does not negate the female gender, but buttresses the
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monarch’s power by supplementing her female identity with a male identity.
Ultimately, reigning women had to use the terms that were in place at the time of
their succession to the throne, but these terms had to be regendered and
reinvented.
A female-specific word simply could not construct a female ruler with the
same semantic meaning that the male word would, because ‚women are
constructed in the domain of a male sign, and therefore they are, as Lacan put it,
‘excluded by the nature of things, which is the nature of words’‛ (Cameron 125).
Perhaps, as Ann Weatherall suggests in Gender, Language and Discourse, ‚another
strategy that individual women were understood to have employed,‛ and may
be applied to this strategy of reclaiming male terms of power for women, ‚was to
psychologically disassociate from other women and use men as their reference
group‛ (Weatherall 127). This strategy is problematic because, ‚a limitation of an
assimilation strategy is that it preserves the values and belief systems of the
dominant group, and thus does not seriously challenge the status quo,‛ but
sixteenth century reigning women did not use these strategies in order to
challenge the gender roles of women; they simply challenged the gender role of
the monarch so that they could rule (Weatherall 128).
Distancing from other women
Women chose to use the pre-existing language of monarchy—despite its
male gender—to establish authority, but they also used male language as a
strategy to distance themselves from other women. This distance allowed them
to evade the societal, behavioral constraints laced on all women in their
patriarchal society. In her 1984 article, ‚Book-Lined Cells,‛ Margaret King
discusses the ‚learnéd women‛ of Cinquecento Italy. As humanism spread and
the availability of women’s education extended from Italy to France and
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ultimately arrived in England, a dichotomy existed between the burgeoning
influences of humanism and the traditional gender prescribed roles of
appropriate female behavior. Margaret King describes a phenomenon that
extends to the women of England who broke gender boundaries in the early
modern period: ‚Not surprisingly, learnéd women on occasion regretted having
been born female and attempted to distance themselves from other women‛
(King 72). Margaret King’s subjects, the ‚learnéd women‛ of Italy, often allowed
their patriarchal society to affect them in such a way that they silenced
themselves:
The ambitions of the learnéd women of the Renaissance were
thwarted in part because, being women, they were vanquished
from within: by their own self-doubt, punctuated by moments of
pride; and by their low evaluation of their sex, which undermined
their confidence further and which was confirmed by the behavior
of other women for whom the intellectual strivings of a few
threatened their condition of comfortable servitude. (King 74)
England’s female monarchs were certainly never models of ‚comfortable
servitude.‛ Their positions in the social hierarchy and their extraordinary
educational opportunities granted them authority, but they still experienced, or
at least performed, some of the same self-conscious ‚low evaluations of their
sex.‛ Moments of apprehension are seen in their rhetorical acts. Or, at the very
least, they performed moments of apprehension that they believed their audience
would find appropriate for their sex. Elizabeth’s self-doubt about joining the
society of the learnéd can be seen in her 1564 Latin oration at Cambridge. Her
extemporaneous speech, reluctantly delivered in Latin, begins: ‚Although
feminine modesty, most faithful subjects and most celebrated university,
prohibits the delivery of a rude and uncultivated speech in such a gathering of
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most learnéd men, yet the intercession of my nobles and my own goodwill
toward the university incite me to produce one‛ (Marcus 87). The societal belief
in ‚feminine modesty‛ begins her speech as if to beg forgiveness for her talk, and
then the monarch displays her self-doubt by describing her forthcoming speech
as ‚rude and uncultivated.‛ While Elizabeth’s wavering confidence will not
thwart her ambitions like the women of Cinquecento Italy that Margaret King
discusses, the queen is still affected by the same behavioral constraints placed on
women by a society experiencing a burgeoning class of learnéd women.
Whether or not Elizabeth’s reluctance to speak is sincere, or merely a
performance of a rhetorical strategy that Elizabeth thought her audience would
find appropriate for a woman extemporaneously speaking in Latin at Cambridge
will never be known. As a part of Elizabeth’s rhetorical artifacts, her selfdeprecating language displays her rhetorical strategy of publicly confirming a
marginalized position of women in English society and then moving on to prove
that she is different.
Replying on January 28, 1563, to a petition that she marry, Queen
Elizabeth introduces the idea that a woman should be reticent to speak in public
before she quickly explains that she must because of her male-gendered role in
society as a prince and a king:
The weight and greatness of this matter might cause in me, being a
woman wanting both wit and memory, some fear to speak and
bashfulness besides, a thing appropriate to my sex. But the
princely seat and kingly throne wherein God (though unworthy)
hath constituted me, maketh these two causes to seem little in mine
eyes, though grievous perhaps to your eares, and boldeneth me to
say somewhat in this matter, which I mean only to touch but not
presently to answer. (Marcus 70)
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Elizabeth does not argue that women should speak; she sets herself apart from
other women and argues for the necessity of her own public address in a male
role. In fact, Elizabeth claims that it is ‚appropriate‛ for a woman to be fearful of
speaking. The topic of this reply’s petition is the ‚most honorable issue of your
*Elizabeth’s+ body,‛ and so the indecorousness of the topic may indeed evoke
embarrassment or bashfulness, but Elizabeth also makes the public statement
that women generally lack ‚both wit and memory‛ (Marcus 73). Elizabeth does
not simply use the moment to claim surprised embarrassment, but she also joins
the narrative of women’s naturally inferior state. In the very next statement,
Elizabeth quickly shifts to the male-marked ‚princely seat and kingly throne‛ to
convey her unique position as one who is between two genders simultaneously.
Coming so quickly after self-deprecating statements that were ‚appropriate to
*her+ sex,‛ the sudden affirmation of her male roles as prince and king imply that
her earlier apologies were merely a performance to appease the gender biases of
her audience. In other words, Elizabeth acknowledges that women are
intellectually inferior as a strategy to gain favor with her audience rather than as
a statement of her actual belief in her diminished nature as a woman. Elizabeth
must separate herself from the other women of her gender who, according to
society’s expectations, should rightly be silenced and join the conversation
because she is a prince and a king; where decorum may have silenced other
women, it cannot silence the queen.
Jane Rhetorically Armed
In ‚A Certain Effectual Prayer‛ (1554), Lady Jane Grey employs an
extended metaphor to beg God to arm her with faith. Chapter Six of Paul’s letter
to the Ephesians begins with a discussion of the first commandment: ‚Children
obey your fathers and mothers in the Lord: for so it is right. Honor they father
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and mother that is the first commandment that has any promise‛ (Eph. 6.1-2).
Jane is just sixteen years old as she composes this prayer, and her choice of this
chapter is a painfully heart-rending reminder of her youth. Since Jane’s father
essentially condemned her to death through his selfish and greedy actions, the
advice of Ephesians 6.4 is particularly poignant: ‚And you fathers move not your
children to wrath: but bring them up with the nurture and information of the
Lord‛ (Tyndale). Jane then goes on to prepare herself to face the gallows.
The image of the sixteen-year-old Lady Jane outfitted from head to toe in
armor is a striking example of a woman borrowing power from a male image.
Imprisoned in the Tower and anticipating the executioner’s axe, Jane asks God to
arm her so that she may bravely face her fate:
Only, in the meantime, arm me, I beseech thee, with thy armour,
that I may stand fast, my loins being girded about with verity,
having on the breastplate of righteousness, and shod with the shoes
prepared by the gospel of peace: above all things taking to me the
shield of faith, wherewith I may be able to quench all the fiery darts
of the wicked; and taking the helmet of salvation, and the sword of
the Spirit, which is thy most holy word. (Foxe 423; vol. VI)
While the language of Jane’s armament is practically a verbatim reiteration of
Ephesians 6:
Stand therefore and your loins gird about with verity having on the
breast plate of righteousness And shod with shoes prepared by the
gospel of peace. Above all take to you the shield of faith wherewith
you may quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the
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helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit which is the word of
God. (Tyndale Bible, Eph. 6.14-17) 39
Because the speaker is female, her metaphorically armed body signifies in a
distinct way that differs from the Biblical passage.
Like the Ephesians passage, Jane’s request for masculine armor begins
with the location of her sexual organs, her ‚loins‛; however, because she is a
woman, the referent is altered and the image is a striking one. She continues
with an appeal for a breast-plate—once again drawing attention to her female
form. Although Jane asks for courage, the armored image of her young, female
body apophatically reaffirms her female gender. Jane attempts to arm herself to
give her strength and courage, but the image of her young, female body
methodically donning each piece of armor verges on bizarre. In effect, as she
puts on the armor of a soldier, she draws more attention to her female body in a
disembodied apophasis. Again, this apophasis is passive because her intent is to
draw an image of a powerful soldier ready to combat the trials she faces, but
instead, one is left with an image of a young girl burdened down by heavy armor
and her impending fate. The metaphor extends to a description of the shoes,
shield, helmet, and sword that will arm her with faith and prepare her for death.
Again, although the metaphor is taken from scripture, the rhetorical effect of a
young woman rhetor metaphorically, methodically arming herself in preparation
for her execution is striking in its pathos. It’s also striking because it exemplifies
the availability and accessibility of scripture to women that came with the
Protestant Reformation that ‚granted women relative autonomy in spiritual
matters; it recognized women’s right to read and interpret the Scriptures and
39
Although no evidence pertaining to the specific Bible Jane would have used remains, after a study of the
two English Bibles available before her 1554 death, the language of the Tyndale Bible most closely reflects
the language of her prayer. Jane uses “verity” which Tyndale uses in Eph. 6.14. Coverdale‟s 1535 Bible
uses “truth” in this verse. Likewise, Jane uses the phrase “shod with shoes” that mirrors Tyndale‟s Bible,
but Coverdale uses “shod up your feet” in Eph. 6.15.
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even to disagree with men’s interpretations‛ (Glenn 150). Jane not only knows
the scripture, but she interprets it and applies it to her rhetorical situation, which
would not have been possible if she was raised Catholic. Under Catholicism, a
woman would not have had direct access to the Bible. Born after Henry VIII’s
conversion and raised as a staunch Protestant and a serious student, Jane was
uniquely prepared for this demonstration of Biblical knowledge and interpretive
ability.
Elizabeth’s Two Bodies40
Upon Henry VIII’s death, his eldest son, nine-year-old Edward, succeeded
to the throne in January of 1547. Edward VI’s short reign ended when he died in
July of 1553, at the age of fifteen. A theory of the king’s two bodies was
articulated during his reign to address concerns over his youth:
For the king has in him two bodies, viz. a body natural, and a body
politic. His body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a body
mortal, subject to all infirmities that come by nature or accident, to
the imbecility of infancy or old age, and to the like defects that
happen to the natural bodies of other people. But his body politic
is a body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of policy and
government, and constituted for the direction of the people, and
the management of the public-weal. And this body is utterly void
of infancy, and old age, and other natural defects and imbecilities
which the body natural is subject to, and for this cause what the
40
For an exhaustive discussion of the theory of the king‟s two bodies see Ernst H. Kantorowicz‟s The
King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology.
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king does in his body politic cannot be invalidated or frustrated by
any disability in his natural body. (Plowden image 534, vol.1)41
Just a short time later, female monarchs used this argument to address the
believed deficiencies of their female bodies. Ruling queens did not argue for
women’s equality. In fact, reigning women distanced themselves from other
women in an attempt to maintain power without introducing divisive gender
politics. They didn’t even attempt to defend themselves against the patriarchy’s
fallacious assumptions about women’s inequity. They simply accepted that they
have special dispensation because their body politic is void of ‚natural defects,‛
and so they were above reproach.
The female body was a frequent target for arguments against the ability to
rule.42 Elizabeth famously avoided the issue of the inferiority of her female body
by taking on two genders, adopting the argument of the king’s two bodies from
Edward’s reign. Elizabeth’s ‚two bodies‛—one politic, powerful, and male, the
other natural, sensualized, and female—were often rhetorically employed by
Elizabeth to satisfy different rhetorical aims. Elizabeth’s first reference to her two
bodies is in her very first speech given at Hatfield on November 20, 1558:
And as I am but one body naturally considered, though by His
permission a body politic to govern, so I shall desire you all, my
lords (chiefly you of the nobility, everyone in his degree and
power), to be assistant to me, that I with my ruling and you with
your service may make a good account to almighty God and leave
some comfort to our posterity in earth. (Marcus 52)
41
Plowden‟s The Commentaries or Reports of Edmund Plowden, of the Middle-Temple, esq. an Apprentice
of the Common Law: Containing Divers Cases Upon Matters of Law, Argued and Adjudged in the Several
Reigns of King Edward VI, Queen Mary, King and Queen Philip and Mary, and Queen Elizabeth. To
Which are Added the Queries of Mr. Plowden was published in 1571 as the first printed law report. It is the
first law case book and is considered the best source for England‟s official policy of the king‟s two bodies.
42
See Chapter One, “The Monstrous Regiment: A Community of Sixteenth Century Reigning Women
Rhetors,” for a larger discussion of challenges to women‟s natural ability to rule.
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Elizabeth uses the exact language of Edward’s parliamentary proclamation,
‚body politic,‛ to subtly remind her audience that she is her people’s leader
despite her female body. She reiterates the terms of the relationship she expects
to have with her advisors twice in this short excerpt. Her nobles will be
‚assistant‛ to her and will ‚serve‛ where she will ‚rule.‛ Although her female
body is apparent, God grants her a male body politic through which she can
reign over men.
‚Queen Elizabeth’s Armada Speech to the Troops at Tilbury,‛ given on
August 9, 1588, is perhaps the best known example of the queen’s gender
multivalence, although Elizabeth’s speech and appearance at Tilbury have been
questioned by historians. In ‚The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury,‛ Susan Frye
claims that ‚there is no contemporary evidence that Elizabeth wore armor, no
evidence in all the commemorative paintings and engravings that she so much as
carried a truncheon, and no contemporary evidence that the famous speech was
the one actually delivered‛ (96). In The Word of a Prince: A Life of Elizabeth I from
Contemporary Documents, Maria Perry claims that there was contemporary
evidence of this legend. Perry suggests that although Thomas Deloney’s ‚eyewitness account, The Queen’s Visiting of the Camp at Tilsburie,” has been
challenged throughout history, his version of the events was immediately
printed on a ballad broadsheet and followed in November by James Aske’s
version, Elizabetha Triumphans (Perry 284). Therefore, true or not, Elizabeth’s
venture into cross-dressing was certainly part of the cultural imagination of
Elizabethans. Deloney’s version includes an account of Elizabeth’s arrival at
Tilbury: ‚When Elizabeth disembarked she passed briefly through the camp
and<the army fell on their knees. She bade them stand up and wept to behold
them‛ (Perry 284). This revered and feminine monarch then transforms into a
soldier:
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The following day they found a breast-plate for her to wear, for
there were those in the Council who thought it a rash plan for her
to ride about the open camp site. They strapped the plate armour
over her bodice and it shone magnificently between the lace of her
ruff and the rich fabric of her gown. She rode ‘on prancing steed
attired like an angel bright.’ (Perry 284)
This account shows a monarch who does not completely transform into a soldier;
she wears a gown with her armor. Elizabeth takes advantage of this unique
opportunity to portray herself as a ruler of legend. She does not conceal her
female body for a male body of power; she performs two genders at once, using
both to inspire her men to protect her and follow her. Despite the
historiographical debate over the appearance of Elizabeth at Tilbury, the editors
of Elizabeth I: Collected Works, Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose,
claim that, ‚Although there has been much speculation about Elizabeth’s warlike garb and demeanor on this famous occasion, there can be little doubt that
her speech was actually delivered, and in language reasonably close to that
reproduced here‛ (325). The legend of Elizabeth’s armor has contributed to the
enduring popularity of the Tilbury speech; and despite the inability to verify the
appearance of the queen, her appearance is only part of the rhetorical artifact that
remains of this occasion. Elizabeth’s rhetorical legacy certainly includes her
armor at Tilbury, but it is not the only way Elizabeth performs two bodies in this
speech.
Regardless of her dress, the queen—reified and reigning female
monarch—would have been a stupefying image of displacement as she arrived
at the dirty and dangerous battleground of Tilbury. The next day, after galloping
through the battleground, she has the opportunity to address her troops. In her
August 9, 1588, speech at Tilbury, Queen Elizabeth inspires her troops to protect
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her, and she inspires them to follow her: ‚I know I have the body but of a weak
and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of
England too—and take foul scorn that Parma or any prince of Europe should
dare to invade the borders of my realm‛ (Marcus 326). Elizabeth’s statement
begins with an admission that her body is weak and feeble and in need of
protection. Elizabeth then goes on, employing anamnesis, or ‚recalling events or
persons from the past,‛ to recall the strength of her father and a legacy of male
monarchs before him in her ‚heart and stomach of a king,‛ and show her
courage in battle (Lanham 188). The queen ends by warning that the realm is her
body, as she is England, and no one should dare invade the realm—again,
invoking the sensualized, natural, female body as if the very country of England
was her chastity, and it is in need of protection. Inspiring her troops to fight for
her and defend her, she is simultaneously the male monarch who will lead them
to victory and the woman who must be protected from violation. Elizabeth
staged this rhetorical performance with a balance of wonder and intimacy. She
also balances the power of the male image in the ‚heart and stomach of a king‛
in a disembodied apophasis and the vulnerability of the female body in the same
speech.
Through her acceptance of the vulnerability of her ‚body natural,‛
Elizabeth can safely assert her authority over the men she rules. In Rhetoric
Retold, Cheryl Glenn calls this deferential strategy a ‚humility topos‛ that
Elizabeth ‚thought appropriate to a woman, particularly a queen who so
successfully wields and asserts power in a man’s world of wars and troops‛
(Glenn 167). Elizabeth acts appropriately, or at least acceptably, for her sex and
appropriately for her position—a nearly impossible feat for a female ruler still
attempting to define female power for her people. Again, Elizabeth’s skill is not
denying her gender, but rather taking on another gender in addition to her own
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when she needs to have the authority that the male gender easily conveys. She
does not negate her own gender; she supplements her power by supplementing
her feminine identity with a masculine identity using disembodied apophasis.
This strategy allowed Elizabeth to ‚keep silent as a queen yet pronounce, decide,
and rule as the mightiest of kings, always playing gender to her own advantage‛
(Glenn 162). The careful manipulation of her gender performance allows
Elizabeth to maximize her rhetorical effectiveness. But Elizabeth doesn’t stop at
the power of kings. She also understands and exploits the power of her male
subjects.
Instead of continuing to ally herself with the kings of her male tradition of
rule, Elizabeth changes her rhetorical strategy and allies herself with the common
soldier by claiming that she desires to risk her life on the field alongside her
troops: ‚Wherefore I am come among you at this time but for my recreation and
pleasure, being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die
amongst you all, to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my
people mine honor and my blood even in the dust‛ (Marcus 326). Elizabeth
knows her monarchical inheritance. She knows that kings before her have
proven their valor on the battlefield, but she also knows that, as a woman, she
cannot. She promises her men that they will be paid for their participation and
success defending her realm, and then she again suggests that she will join them
in this endeavor: ‚I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of your
virtue in the field‛ (Marcus 326). However, the queen cannot join in the battle,
and so she defers to her representative: ‚In the meantime, my lieutenant general
[Leicester] shall be in my stead, than whom never a prince commanded a more
noble or worthy subject‛ (Marcus 326). Elizabeth’s reportedly armored
appearance and her rousing speech will be her only actions on the battlefield, but
they are enough to create legends. The Spanish armada was defeated at sea with
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the aid of a well-timed storm, but Elizabeth’s inspirational performance led to a
depiction of her as a military leader that endured throughout her reign and long
after. Although Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech made a lasting impression on her
people, the queen had to repeatedly reassert her authority throughout her reign.
In 1601, Elizabeth faced a rebellion that threatened her rule.
In 1599, Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was named
Lieutenant and Governor-General of Ireland and sent to quell the Tyrone
Rebellion. Armed with more than enough men to drastically overpower Tyrone,
Essex’s foray to Ireland was expected to easily win him military accolades;
however, Essex disappointed his queen at every turn. Instead of a large show of
his overwhelming force, Essex chose to meet Tyrone in several smaller battles
that weakened England’s forces and allowed the Irish the advantage of the
terrain. While Essex’s military failings could be blamed on his inexperience, and
Elizabeth could have borne some of the burden of placing an inexperienced
person in such an important position, Essex’s personal behavior in Ireland was
unforgivable. While in Ireland, Essex promoted several men to the status of
knight, hoping to secure their loyalty, but angering the queen who rarely
bestowed such power herself. Ultimately, he entered an unauthorized truce with
Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, and abandoned his post in Ireland without the
queen’s permission. Essex was a disappointment militarily and personally.
Essex’s promotion of knights not only insulted the queen, but was essentially the
beginning of his treasonous behavior. Essex believed he was amassing a
personal army of loyal followers by granting men knighthood on the fields of
Ireland. As one of Elizabeth’s favorites, Essex was convinced that he had a
powerful reputation, and more importantly, he was convinced that he had
influence over his queen. He fled his command in Ireland and returned to
England to confront the queen about what he felt was his exile in a fruitless
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enterprise in a foreign land. Upon his return he reportedly stormed into
Elizabeth’s bedchamber before she was dressed. This egregious insult from any
subject, even a sometime favorite, was not tolerated by the queen. In June of
1600, Essex was placed under house arrest for abandoning his post in Ireland and
entering into an unsanctioned truce with the enemy.
Nearly a year later, when Elizabeth, still steaming over Essex’s pluck,
refused to renew his highly profitable patent for sweet wines, Essex organized a
rebellion. The former favorite foolishly believed that his popularity at court
would sway the masses and with the help of his loyal knights, the people of
London would rally behind him. To communicate his displeasure with the
queen’s censure of him and to point a finger at her councilors, Essex
commissioned Shakespeare’s troupe, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to mount a
production of Richard II for the day before the rebellion. This play includes the
return to England of an exiled, popular usurper who is supported by the
common people and the forced abdication of the monarch. It was intended to
subtly argue for his cause. Essex, however, overestimated his appeal. The next
day when Essex marched through the streets of London, the commoners did not
join his rebellion. The Essex Rebellion was practically over before it began.
Essex was hurriedly tried for treason and executed on February 25, 1601.
Although the Essex Rebellion was quickly extinguished, the issue of
monopolies and patents creating severe economic disparity remained on the
minds of Londoners. ‚The Golden Speech,‛ or ‚the queen’s most celebrated
parliamentary speech, copied, recopied, and reprinted many times in the course
of the seventeenth century *sic+,‛ given nine months after the execution of Essex,
on November 30, 1601, was a ‚royal assent to the redress of public grievances‛
(Marcus 336). Elizabeth again performs two genders:
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To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them
that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it. For myself, I was
never so much enticed with the glorious name of a king or royal
authority of a queen as delighted that God hath made me His
instrument to maintain His truth and glory, and to defend this
kingdom (as I said) from peril, dishonor, tyranny, and oppression.
There will never queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country,
care to my subjects, and that will sooner with willingness venture
her life for your good and safety, than myself. (Marcus 339)
She begins by invoking pathos due to her difficult position as a king. Using the
male language of her inherited tradition as monarch, Elizabeth employs a
disembodied apophasis. Throughout this speech, even when she claims a position
of supreme authority, she maintains a tone of humility. The occasion of this
speech is a response to the concerns of her people, and Elizabeth is careful to
obtain her people’s sympathy and trust. Her people are poor and hungry, and so
Elizabeth attempts to downplay the benefits of kingship, claiming that it is ‚more
glorious to them that see [the crown] than it is pleasant to them that bear it‛
(Marcus 339). Elizabeth even vacillates between the title of king and queen
within a single sentence. In the second sentence, Elizabeth attributes a male
gender to her title and a female gender to her authority in ‚the glorious name of
a king or royal authority of a queen,‛ which is an interesting turn. She is, in fact,
titled a queen who often borrows the authority of the title of king. Her title as a
queen is unquestioned; it is the royal authority of the history of kingship—the
male history—that Elizabeth borrows in her gender play. But Elizabeth does not
enjoy the title or the authority of her position; she is content to be God’s
instrument. Elizabeth then claims an exceedingly powerful role as the defender
of God’s kingdom. But again, this powerful image of rule is tempered by
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tenderness: ‚And though you have had and may have many princes more
mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had or shall have any that will
be more careful and loving‛ (Marcus 340). The two genders Elizabeth embodies
enable her to lead and love.
Immediately following this tender characterization, Elizabeth expands on
the female attributes of her character, and claims that she cannot take credit for
any of her good works:
‘Shall I ascribe anything to myself and my sexly weakness? I were
not worthy to live then, and of all most unworthy of the mercies I
have had from God, who hath ever given me a heart which yet
never feared any foreign or home enemy. I speak it to give God the
praise as a testimony before you, and not to attribute anything to
myself. For I, O Lord, what am I, whom practices and perils past
should not fear? Or what can I do’—these words she spake with a
great emphasis—‘that I should speak for any glory? God forbid.’
(Marcus 340)
She leads as an instrument of God despite the defects of her female, body
natural. This version of the Golden Speech, taken from Hayward Townshend’s
diary, includes the editorial observations of the author. Townshend testifies to
Elizabeth’s direct address, or apostrophe, to God. The queen’s performance
dramatizes her subservience to God while she asserts leadership over her people.
Metaphysically Disembodied Apophasis
Another strategy that women leaders used to assert power was to cast off
their bodies altogether and portray themselves as religious icons. Some royal
women claimed the language of religious iconography to portray themselves as
powerfully exempt from the behavioral constraints placed on early modern
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women. The use of the martyr image had such intense significance in this time
of religious turmoil that it invoked deep-seated semantic meanings in a
shorthand for a sphere of power that women could inhabit. During such a
tumultuous period of religious unrest in the battles between Catholics and
Protestants, the shifting allegiances of the ruling classes led women leaders to
strategically represent themselves as symbols of their faith. Lady Jane’s
martyrdom and Elizabeth’s self-fashioning as a figure of the Virgin Mary were
powerful rhetorical moves in a society that silenced women.
Martin Luther’s 1517 Ninety Five Theses argued against the sale of
indulgences in the Catholic Church and sparked a religious revolution. In 1521,
Henry VIII wrote the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, defending the church and
was rewarded by Pope Leo X with the title ‚Defender of the Faith,‛ but when the
Pope rejected Henry’s request to divorce Katherine of Aragon, Henry broke with
the Catholic Church and declared himself ‚Protector and Supreme Head of the
English Church‛ in 1531. In 1553, Mary I succeeded to the throne of England and
brought Catholicism back to England, but only during her five-year reign.
Elizabeth reclaimed England for Protestantism. Under the 1559 Supremacy Act,
Queen Elizabeth was given the title ‚Supreme Governor‛ of the Anglican
Church, rather than ‚Supreme Head‛ like her father and brother before her.
Although her title was revised due to her gender, she remained the leader of the
Church in England. The religious confusion begun by Henry was not truly
resolved until Elizabeth, the ‚Great Compromiser,‛ led the church. The constant
confusion over religion that existed during the sixteenth century was dangerous
for many, but particularly for royal women. The shifting allegiances of the ruling
classes did not shake the firm religious foundation of Lady Jane and Queen
Elizabeth; both rhetorically portrayed themselves as symbols of their Protestant
faith.
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Jane the Martyr
Lady Jane left behind a few letters and prayers, and she delivered a
dignified, pious, speech at the scaffold that enabled her to later be reclaimed as a
Protestant martyr by John Foxe. Jane’s words were most exhaustively recorded
in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments published in 1563, but Foxe’s text has its own
rhetorical aim, namely the establishment of a history of Protestant martyrs.
While it underwent some later revisions, and other versions of Jane’s story were
published with varying degrees of authenticity, Jane came to embody the picture
of graceful martyrdom to the Protestant cause after the reign of Catholic Mary I
ended and the nation was restored to Protestant rule under Elizabeth I. Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments, or Book of Martyrs as its more popular abridged version has
come to be known, is considered the most authentic source for Jane Grey’s
rhetorical artifacts despite its political agenda.
Sixteen-year-old condemned prisoner, Lady Jane, composed a letter to her
father before her death. Her father, Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, was the chief
architect of her rise to the throne and her downfall. Following her short reign,
Suffolk’s role in the 1554 Wyatt Rebellion ultimately sealed Jane’s fate. Despite
her tragic situation, Jane turns to the positive in this letter: ‚meseems in this I
may account myself blessed, that washing my hands with the innocency of my
fact, my guiltless blood may cry before the Lord, Mercy to the innocent!‛ (Foxe
417; vol. VI). Although this can be read as a tacit indictment of her father—the
guilty player in her downfall—Jane does not overtly blame him for her fate. In
fact, in a display of her emphatic faith, Jane embraces her death: ‚to me there is
nothing that can be more welcome, than from this vale of misery to aspire to that
heavenly throne of all joy and pleasure with Christ our Saviour‛ (Foxe 418; vol.
VI). Jane has already left this earth in her letter. She casts off the misery of this
world and looks toward the redemption of paradise where she will experience
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only joy and pleasure. But again, in casting off her body, she sadly reaffirms her
mortality.
In ‚A Letter written by the Lady Jane in the end of the New Testament in
Greek, the which she sent unto her sister the Lady Katherine, the night before she
suffered,‛ Jane does not simply look toward the heavenly kingdom; she counsels
her sister about how she too can reach heaven. Jane intends that her gift of the
New Testament will ‚bring you *Katherine+ to an immortal and everlasting life.
It shall teach you to live, and learn you to die‛ (Foxe 422; vol. VI). It is not
simply the New Testament that will assist Katherine; Jane advises her sister in
her own words:
Live still to die, that you by death may purchase eternal life; for as
soon (if God call) goeth the young as the old: and labour always to
learn to die. Defy the world, deny the devil, and despise the flesh,
and delight yourself only in the Lord. Be penitent for your sins,
and yet despair not: be strong in faith, and yet presume not; and
desire, with St. Paul, to be dissolved and to be with Christ, with
whom even in death there is life. (Foxe 422; vol. VI)
Jane counsels her sister to live in order to die well because Jane’s faith is so
complete and unwavering. Jane advises Katherine to follow her example and
cast off her mortal body so that she will live in death.
When sixteen-year-old Jane turns to the subject of her own impending
death, she doesn’t express self-pity or fear: ‚And as touching my death, rejoice as
I do, good sister, that I shall be delivered of this corruption, and put on
incorruption. For I am assured, that I shall, for losing of a mortal life, win an
immortal life, the which I pray God grant you‛ (Foxe 422; vol. VI). Jane’s advice
to her sister then turns truly pathetic, in that it invokes great pathos, when she
warns her sister not to fall from grace and suffer a fate like her own: ‚I exhort
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you, that you ever swerve, neither for hope of life, nor for fear of death. For if
you will deny his truth for to lengthen your life, God will deny you, and yet
shorten your days‛ (Foxe 422; vol. VI). As if anticipating her sister’s pity, Jane
does not dwell on her short life. Again, Jane gladly turns to her own future in
paradise as an example of an eternal reward for a life well-lived: ‚And if you will
cleave unto him, he will prolong your days, to your comfort and his glory: to the
which glory God bring me now, and you hereafter, when it pleaseth him to call
you‛ (Foxe 422; vol. VI). Facing death, Jane’s concern is beyond this world. In
casting off her mortal body and looking toward the afterlife, Jane reaffirms her
tragically fragile mortal body in a disembodied apophasis.
When Jane publicly addressed the crowd gathered for her execution, she
was the epitome of the self-proclaimed, ‚true Christian woman,‛ recalling the
image of the martyred Catholic saints (Foxe 424; vol. VI). Jane admitted her part
in the usurpation of the crown, but she appeared on the scaffold an absolved
young woman:
Good people, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am
condemned to the same. The fact against the queen’s highness was
unlawful, and the consenting thereunto by me: but, touching the
procurement and desire thereof by me, or on my behalf, I do wash
my hands thereof in innocency before God, and the face of you,
good Christian people, this day<I pray you all, good Christian
people, to bear me witness that I die a true Christian woman, and
that I do look to be saved by no other mean, but only by the mercy
of God, in the blood of his only Son Jesus Christ. (Foxe 424; vol. VI)
Jane’s admission of guilt and her explanation that she did not seek out any
accolades establish her role as a victim. The many references to Christianity, and
even more pointedly to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, further establish a
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correlation between her own sacrifice and that of Jesus Christ. Her disembodied
apophasis is the spiritually transcendent image she invokes—an image that only
reaffirms her mortal body and the fate she is about to suffer. Absolved of her
sins against the state, Jane did not portray herself free from sin against God: ‚I
confess that when I did know the word of God, I neglected the same, loved
myself and the world; and therefore this plague and punishment is happily and
worthily happened unto me for my sins‛ (Foxe 424; vol. VI). This statement adds
to her pathos and invokes pity in her audience. As a young woman, she is of this
world, but her composure and her references to Christian absolution suggest that
she is already beyond this world in a disembodied apophasis. Jane’s rhetorical
aim is to make a final statement before she leaves this world, and Jane enlists her
audience to help her—if not by saving her from the executioner’s axe, then
simply by praying with her: ‚and now, good people, while I am alive I pray you
assist me with your prayers‛ (Foxe 424; vol. VI). Perhaps the most memorable
part of Jane’s story, and Foxe’s moment of greatest pathos in retelling her tale, is
the image of Jane reaching for the executioner’s block. The pinnacle of grace
under pressure, young Jane holds her composure until she is blindfolded and
cannot find the block: ‚Then tied she the handkerchief about her eyes, and
feeling for the block she said, ‘What shall I do? Where is it? Where is it?’‛ (Foxe
424; vol. VI). Although her attempts to cast off her body and meet her fate as the
composed spiritual body of peace, this panicked moment of vulnerability created
her image as a fragile young girl who faced death with as much dignity as
possible. Her dramatic final performance, in its grace and its human weakness,
created empathy that long outlived her.
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Elizabeth the Virgin
In the century before Elizabeth’s reign, the ‚learnéd women‛ of Italy,
humanist foremothers of the sixteenth-century queens, had two choices—maritar
o monicar—marry or take the veil. In Elizabeth’s first speech before Parliament
she had to address the issue of marriage. As a single woman on the throne,
marriage represented great potential and the stability of a certain heir, but also
the fear of foreign usurpation. In the aftermath of Mary I’s politically disastrous
marriage to Prince Philip of Spain, the new female monarch, Elizabeth, would
have to be noticeably careful in marriage negotiations. Elizabeth declares that ‚in
the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a
queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin‛ (Marcus 58).
Elizabeth chose to deny her physical body by using the virgin image in this
proximate vow of chastity, but this characterization also reminds her audience of
the Virgin Mary. Elizabeth casts off her human body altogether and becomes a
supernatural, saintly being. A second version of this speech from William
Camden’s 1615 Latin translation actually rhetorically inscribes the queen’s future
tombstone: ‚Lastly, this may be sufficient, both for my memory and honor of my
name, if when I have expired my last breath, this may be inscribed upon my
tomb: Here lies interred Elizabeth, / A virgin pure until her death‛ (Marcus 60). This,
more widely known version, vividly describes Elizabeth’s virginity as virtually a
solemn oath, adding to the narrative of Elizabeth’s intentional commitment to
remaining single (Marcus 58; f.n. 1). In addition to this first speech, the accession
portrait, where Elizabeth was painted with her hair flowing loose, established an
early, popular, and lasting portrayal of a Virgin Queen.
In ‚Book Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian
Renaissance‛ (1984), Margaret King explores the implications of humanism on
women’s education. As humanism gained favor in Italy, young women were
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increasingly encouraged to study through adolescence, but were forced to
abandon their scholarly pursuits when the prospect of marriage presented itself.
Many of the young women, who chose to ‚seek freedom in the book-lined cells
of the solitary life,‛ found that life interrupted by marriage (King BLC 69). The
solitary life could not be led by the early modern woman alone; she had to
choose between ‚marriage and full participation in social life on the one hand; or
abstention from marriage and withdrawal from the world‛ into the convent
(King BLC 69). Either choice required the loss of freedom: ‚to marry implied the
abandonment of beloved studies. Not to marry implied the abandonment of the
world,‛ the world that was broadened by humanist study (King BLC 69). There
is a large tradition of the dominant voice of the woman writer that emerges from
behind the walls of the cloister, but for the women who chose marriage, it often
ended their humanist studies because it ‚inhibited the learnéd woman from
pursuing studious interests, and certainly prevented her from realizing
ambitions she might have cherished for greatness‛ (King BLC 69). The veil was
often the more liberating option for a learnéd woman (King BLC 69).
Elizabeth’s choice to ‚take the veil‛ metaphorically and become the Virgin
Queen participates in this centuries-old tradition of rhetorically adroit religious
women. Despite her position as queen, Elizabeth had to choose to either marry
or take the veil in order to appease the behavioral gender expectations of her
time. Elizabeth was not Catholic; however, under persistent pressure from
Parliament Elizabeth had to cast herself in the role of a chaste woman whose
service to God exempted her from the limitations of behavioral constraints
placed on other women of her society. Of course, the Protestant Queen Elizabeth
could not have entered a convent, but she deferred to an ‚appropriate‛ choice for
women. Elizabeth seemingly chose the veil (monicar) by participating in her
characterization as a type of Virgin Mother of England, but she did so in order to
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exceed the abilities of woman and to defer questions of marriage. She
metaphorically took the veil, nodding to centuries-old conventions of
appropriate female behavior. Although Elizabeth embraced her virginal
portrayals in portraits, poems, and fiction, the only rhetorical artifacts of her
contribution to this narrative are these early acts.43 However, later in her reign,
much was made of Elizabeth’s virginity during her many marriage negotiations
to confirm the marriageability of the monarch. This depiction of Elizabeth
continued through the marriage talks with Alençon that went on from 1578-1582
when the queen was forty-five to forty-nine years old to counter allegations of
the queen’s infertility.
Another contributing factor to Elizabeth’s image as the Virgin Queen was
her continuance of the practice of the ‚king’s touch.‛ It was believed that a
monarch could cure the disease of scrofula, or the ‚king’s evil.‛ Like Mary
before her, Elizabeth continued this medieval practice. As Carole Levin explains
in The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power,
‚being able to cure through touch suggests the power Elizabeth had as a
religious figure, a sacred monarch, and the value of her self-presentation as
Virgin Queen‛ (16). Levin’s study explores the many connections between
religious holidays under Catholicism and secular holidays under Elizabeth.
Queen Elizabeth also celebrated ‚The Mandatum,‛ or the religious rite of the
Washing of the Feet. On ‚Maundy Thursday,‛ Elizabeth washed the feet of
women in a ritual imitation of Christ. Mary also practiced this ritual and was the
first to adapt the service to include only women since including men would have
been indecorous. Elizabeth also added her own celebrations to the calendar. In
the Protestant absence of saints’ feast days, ‚the queen’s holy day,‛ or the
43
Roy Strong‟s The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry traces the construction of the
Elizabethan image.
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anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession day was celebrated on November 17th.
Elizabeth’s birthday, September 7th, also became a day of celebration that was
‚particularly offensive to English Catholics because September 7 was,
coincidentally, the eve of the feast of the nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary‛
(Levin 30). Although this was just a coincidence, the two holidays were easily
conflated in the minds of the English people.
In her final speech before Parliament given on December 19, 1601, a
seventy-year-old Queen Elizabeth embraces her virginal image and performs an
image of martyrdom: ‚I have diminished my own revenue that I might add to
your security, and been content to be a taper of true virgin wax, to waste myself
and spend my life that I might give light and comfort to those that live under
me‛ (Marcus 347). The image of the Virgin Queen reminds her audience that she
is released from the limitations of her female body, she is disembodied, because
she was chosen by God to serve as the queen; therefore, she rules despite her
gender. In a metaphor reminiscent of Christ, Elizabeth is the light of comfort for
her people while she sacrifices her life for them. This disembodied apophasis
attempts to surmount the human failings of her female body, but Elizabeth’s
metaphor of martyrdom also reminds her audience of the fragility of her earthly
body. The withering queen never spoke in public again after this address.
Borrowing Power
Although the theory of the king’s two bodies gave a female monarch an
argument for the ability to reign through a ‚body politic,‛ despite the failings of
the female ‚body natural,‛ a strategy of distancing oneself from that imperfect
female body helped to establish a familiar and effective source of power.
Women leaders used the inherited language of male monarchy to distance
themselves from their female bodies and more fully embody their roles as
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monarchs. They also distanced themselves from their human bodies altogether
to exempt themselves from the agreed upon imperfection of a female body. By
embodying a spiritually transcendent form such as a martyr or a saint, female
royals were able to establish authority. Ultimately both the gendered
disembodied apophasis and the spiritually disembodied apophasis drew attention
to their female bodies in a strategy that didn’t lessen the effectiveness of the
image. Employing male images showed the courage of the female monarch—
exemplary images of power despite the patriarchal assumptions of women’s
weakness. Employing images of martyrdom and sainthood invoked empathy in
the audience by displaying the fragility of the human body. Although the
rhetorical aim of these strategies of disembodiment were to distance the female
monarch from her female body, both the gendered and spiritual strategies of
apophasis successfully communicated a powerful female image of rule.
Ultimately, both Jane Grey and Elizabeth I used strategies of disembodied
apophasis to borrow the power of male images and spiritual images that their
female bodies did not convey to their sixteenth-century audience. These women
rhetors anticipated the patriarchal gender assumptions of their audience and
invoked images that were inarguably powerful; and therefore, they were not
female. Without an accepted image of female rule, Jane Grey and Elizabeth I
relied on images that they did not physically embody to communicate power.
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EPILOGUE
The Scrying Mirror: The Legacy of Early Modern Women’s Rhetoric
Princes, you know, stand upon
stages so that their actions are
viewed and beheld of all men
Queen Elizabeth
[Hillary Clinton] will be a true
leader on the world stage
Madeleine K. Albright,
Former Secretary of State
As England’s sixteenth-century reigning queens invented the reflection of
female rule for their country, an affordable mirror arrived in England, and
people all over the country began to see themselves in entirely new ways. The
mirror was also used in this period, as it had been for thousands of years, to scry,
or see, into the future. Queen Elizabeth’s conjurer, John Dee, is said to have used
a scrying mirror to advise the queen. In his autobiography, Dee noted that ‚the
queen ‘willed *me+ to fetch my glass so famous, and to show unto her some of
the properties of it, which I did’‛ (Crossley 17). In this epilogue, I would like to
gaze from early modern England into the future as well, to explore the continued
relevance and use of the rhetorical strategies of the ‚monstrous regiment of
137
women.‛ Liberally borrowing language from the feminist movement, this
project participates in what I consider the ‚second wave‛ of the study of
women’s rhetoric. The first wave, the essential recovery of women’s rhetoric, or
the ‚gathering‛ of women’s texts as it has been called by Ritchie and Ronald in
Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetorics, continues to add material to a
newly emerging full-bodied history of women’s rhetoric. And now, the second
wave can continue that important work by analyzing and theorizing the
recovered texts of the first wave. Because there were very few early women
teachers and theorists of rhetoric (in the strictest definition of the terms),
women’s rhetorical theory is often present but not overtly stated; and so, the
theory must be extrapolated. This project identifies rhetorical theories and
shared strategies used by the sixteenth-century regiment of women leaders to
assert that they were indeed teachers and theorists of rhetoric, and we still have
much to learn from their examples. Just as the women of the regiment were
contemporary mirrors for one another to model rhetorical practice, we can still
reflect on their rhetorical practice and explore the tradition of female ruling
rhetoric that we have inherited from them.
In her 1997 article ‚Confronting Continuity,‛ Judith Bennett asserts that
despite changes in women’s experience, women’s status in society has not been
transformed. Her thesis is especially pertinent to a discussion of female rule in
England because despite carving out a rhetorically powerful identity for
themselves, women rulers did not aim to improve the opportunities of women as
a whole in English society. Through a discussion of European history and her
research on brewster’s, or female brewers, in early modern England, Bennett
suggests that we must ‚consider the possibility that patriarchal institutions can
shift and change without much altering the force of patriarchal power‛ (82). The
relevance of her argument still echoes today. The accomplishments of a minority
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of women in political arenas around the world contribute to the narrative of
increasing opportunities for women, but the political field is still
overwhelmingly dominated by men. The work of women historians and
feminist scholars has focused on the ‚transformations in women’s status, or
seeming advances or declines in women’s status over time;‛ but transformation
did not always occur—‚the more important,‛ but more uncomfortable for
modern feminists, ‚story may be about ‘continuity’‛ (Bennett 73-74). The
‚history-as-transformation‛ narrative may assist in the ‚you’ve come a long way
baby‛ narrative of feminism at the cost of a critical perspective of the long road
still ahead. Bennett, however, doesn’t observe that this narrative also neglects
the women of the past who may have actually been farther ahead than we are
today—that our ‚continuity‛ may reside in the strong tradition of women
leaders we have to guide us—the regiment. Anticipating an anti-feminist
reading of her article, Bennett admitted that the focus on ‚continuity in women’s
status is a frightening prospect<for it suggests that women’s subordination
might be rooted in insurmountable obstacles.‛ (80). This project, like Bennett’s,
does not suggest that women have not made tremendous progress and had
enormous political influence in the centuries following Elizabeth’s reign.
However, I do believe that we should closely examine the continuities present in
women’s status as a starting point to focus efforts for even more progress.
The sixteenth century witnessed the commencement of female reigning
monarchs in England; but as soon as there was a viable male option, the
monarchy reverted to male rule. Even under female rule, the machinations of
the patriarchy were still reigning. It is my hope that an interrogation of the
rhetorical practices of women who had to operate within a patriarchal system
and rule at its apex may illuminate the continuities still inherent in our own
political systems today and provide some strategies for transforming the status
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of women as political figures. Bennett calls for ‚new histories to be written—
histories that trace changes in women’s lives without resorting to narratives of
transformations, histories that seek to problematize continuity, and histories that
grapple with the challenge of understanding patriarchy‛ (88). I believe in the
current relevance of the rhetorical contributions of sixteenth-century women
leaders as part of our continuity—a well-established tradition of women’s
powerful leadership.
In Man Made Language, Dale Spender addresses the danger of not knowing
our history and our continuity, and more strikingly, not appreciating the
precarious nature of the advancements we have made as women:
It is absurd—and dangerous—to subscribe to the theory that for
women there has been uninterrupted progress and that we today
are necessarily in a stronger position than were our foremothers. It
seems to me that women’s history could accurately be described at
one level as the pendulum swing from silence to audibility—and
back to silence again. (xiii)
The pendulum swung to audibility in the sixteenth century, at least for the
female monarchs of England. Despite the many opportunities available to
women in the twenty-first century, there is still progress to be made; and in some
ways, the pendulum has swung back to silence. For example, in the United
States, we have never had a woman president. Of course there is a long history of
women leaders in the world since Elizabeth’s reign ended in England. In fact,
England, Denmark, India, Ireland, Germany, Pakistan, Argentina, Bosnia,
Ukraine, all currently have women leaders; however, the United States has yet to
elect a woman to our highest public office. Hillary Clinton’s presidential
campaign is the timeliest illustration of a woman’s ability to lead being
questioned as she attempts to break into an exclusively male tradition in her
140
country. Finally, as an American feminist, I am personally intrigued by the
possibility of witnessing a woman negotiate power as the inheritor of a male
tradition—just as the female rulers of the sixteenth century did in England.
Currently, Hillary Clinton is the running to be the first female President of the
United States. So, in some ways, the sixteenth century was witness to female
leadership in ways that we have not been in the twenty-first century in the
United States.
Identifying the legacy of strategies used to assert power in societies that
silenced most women has lasting impact on women’s civil rights, women’s roles
in politics, and women’s experiences as learners. In ‚‘If We Can’t Know What
‘Really’ Happened, Why Should We Study the Past?’‛ Fran Dolan complicates
the issue of recovering thought or belief systems from documents of the past as a
teacher and scholar of the early modern period. Dolan suggests that the
relevance of the past to the present that should inspire us to ‚*learn+ a great deal
about patterns of representation and interpretation, social and narrative
structures that still mold *our+ own culture‛ (Dolan 250). Like Bennett, Dolan
urges the modern scholar to break from the traditional narrative of
historiography and ‚dislodge‛ students’ ‚dependence on one of two narratives
regarding women’s history: regress or progress, failure or success‛ (Dolan 249).
To frame the full history of women in a simple binary does not reflect many
aspects of life that contribute to history, or the ways that women’s status has
‚continued,‛ or the ways women’s status has ‚swung back‛ to silence. Dolan
chooses to complicate the topic of Renaissance history by complicating students
‚reliance on the most simple of narratives,‛ which she hopes will ‚be more
important than conveying lots of information‛ through an unrealistic, reductive
narrative of history (Dolan 249). The contradictions of current American
society—a culture that boasts superb educational opportunities for women but
141
has yet to promote a woman to lead—are part of this complicated narrative of
women’s progress.
There has never been a successful woman presidential nominee in a major
United States Party, and while it is still unclear whether or not Hillary will win
her party’s nomination, she has already gone farther on the road to the American
presidency than any woman before her.44 In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro was the first
woman vice-presidential nominee of a major United States Party. The MondaleFerraro ticket was unsuccessful, and to date there has not been another woman
vice-presidential nominee. In 2008, eighty-six women (16.1 %) serve in the
United States Congress, sixteen women (16%) serve in the Senate, seventy
women (16.1%) serve in the House of Representatives, and seventy-four women
(23.5%) hold statewide elective executive posts. Although these numbers have
certainly improved over time, they still drastically underrepresent the slight
majority women hold in the population of the United States. Politics is only one
field, and certainly a democratic society is very different from a monarchy, but I
believe that it is useful to consider the long legacy of female leadership that we
inherit as well as the long road still left ahead toward equal leadership
representation. ‚Whenever a woman sits down to write,‛ Pamela Annas states
in ‚Style as Politics: A Feminist Approach to the Teaching of Writing,‛ ‚she is
engaged in a complex political act in which the self and the world struggle in and
through the medium of language‛ (6). Just as the first reigning queens of
England had to redefine ‚king‛ and ‚prince‛ to reflect a woman as well as a
man, we, in the United States, may need to redefine ‚president‛ if Hillary’s run
for the White House is successful. This struggle is apparent throughout the
history of women’s rhetoric and continues to resonate. Annas also suggests that:
44
In this project, I mirror popular media in my choice to refer to Senator Clinton as “Hillary,” rather than
“Clinton,” to avoid confusion with her husband, Former President William Jefferson Clinton.
142
because historically women have been channeled toward private
forms and denied access to more public forms, it has seemed to me
particularly important to teach women how to write political
essays—by which I mean any essay that places the self in the
world, is addressed to an audience, and takes a position. (70)
By reclaiming early modern women rulers as teachers of rhetoric to one another,
this project acknowledges the importance of teaching women, through examples
of the past, how to be successful, powerful, and persuasive rhetors. As Andrea
Lunsford suggested in the introduction to Reclaiming Rhetorica, ‚the tradition has
never recognized the forms, strategies, and goals used by many women as
‘rhetorical’‛ (Lunsford 6). This unwillingness to categorize women as rhetors
comes from a patriarchal assessment of women’s writing that does not appreciate
the different rhetorical strategies used by women. It is my hope that by
participating in the second wave of women’s rhetoric this project identifies some
of the many rhetorical strategies that women employed in distinct ways—
strategies that may still be useful to us in the twenty-first century. Finally, I
suggest that these strategies are still in use today, although there certainly have
been changes in women’s status. Hillary Clinton’s campaign illustrates the
lasting use of rhetorical strategies that mirror the sixteenth-century female
reigning monarchs.
Gathering the Regiment
Due to the omnipresence and accessibility of the Internet, women’s texts
are now gathered in a timely and exhaustive manner, and political women
leaders’ texts are almost entirely available immediately. Hillary Clinton’s official
website, www.HillaryClinton.com, gathers all of the senator’s speeches, press
releases, videos, commercials, testimonials, endorsements, etc. The sheer
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number of available resources is staggering. With this space available for
immediate, public consumption, Hillary and her team are able to post definitive
and authorized versions of the senator’s rhetorical acts. There is also a blog
space on Hillary’s website where, in celebration of Women’s History Month,
March 2008, many women have posted endorsements for Hillary under the
‚Celebrating Women‛ section. This fascinating space is dominated by almost
exclusively female voices, and a recurring theme of these posts is the community
of women created by support for Hillary’s presidential race. Hillary’s words and
the words of her community of supporters still mirror the rhetorical strategies of
the early modern regiment of women leaders.
Chapter One of this project, ‚The Monstrous Regiment: A Community of
Sixteenth-Century Reigning Women Rhetors,‛ gathers together the ruling
women of early modern England to discuss their shared rhetorical strategies and
the history of women’s rule. Without a previous mirror of women’s rule in
England, the first female, English monarchs turned to one another as
contemporary mirrors. Although we have not had a woman president in the
United States, we do have a rich history of women’s leadership in other roles.
Hillary and her supporters repeatedly turn to that legacy to claim our current
inheritance—one that the sixteenth-century women rulers certainly contribute
to—a history of women’s political power. In a speech at Seneca Falls, celebrating
the 150th anniversary of the first Women’s Rights Convention, given on July 16,
1998, Hillary Clinton remarked on the importance of our American history:
Because we must tell and retell, learn and relearn, these women’s
stories, and we must make it our personal mission, in our everyday
lives, to pass these stories on to our daughters and sons. Because
we cannot—we must not—ever forget that the rights and
opportunities that we enjoy as women today were not just
144
bestowed upon us by some benevolent ruler. They were fought for,
agonized over, marched for, jailed for and even died for brave and
persistent women and men who came before us. (Salmanowitz par.
1)
Hillary claims the accomplishments of the early women’s rights’ leaders are
particularly important because they were hard-won; she ironically (in the context
of this project) contrasts American can-do spirit and accomplishments with the
gifts of a ‚benevolent ruler,‛ or a monarch. Hillary made these remarks years
before her presidential run, but she is currently joined by her campaign
supporters in this effort to remember our foremothers.
The many bloggers of the ‚Celebrating Women‛ section of Hillary’s
website repeatedly turn to the past. Kim Gandy, National Organization of
Women Political Action Committees Chair, lists some of the women who
unsuccessfully ran for the presidency of the United States:
Make no mistake, her way was paved by women who went before
her— previous presidential candidates like Victoria Woodhull
[1872 and 1892], Margaret Chase Smith [1964], Shirley Chisholm
[1972], Patricia Schroeder [1984], and Carol Moseley Braun [2003].
And now Hillary is paving the way for countless more women to
run. (Gandy par. 5)
Although certainly brave pioneers and leaders of women’s rights efforts, the
women of Gandy’s list did not succeed in their presidential campaigns. Hillary’s
bloggers frequently list America’s more well-known political foremothers.
Gandy also refers to ‚Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Tubman, Lucy Stone, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Carrie
Chapman Catt, Mary Church Terrell and many more‛ (Gandy par. 8).
Pennsylvania’s Lieutenant Governor, Catherine Baker Knoll, ‚salute*s+ Amelia
145
Earhart, Rosa Parks, Helen Keller, Sally Ride, and Billie Jean King,‛ because
‚What they did in their time encourages us to believe we can do even more in
ours‛ (Knoll par. 11-12). Just as Bennett, Spender, and Dolan assert, the history
of women is crucial to the present status of women as we still attempt to
continue the work of our foremothers, and until we enjoy true equality.
California Congresswoman, Doris Matsui, illustrates again the
complicated narratives of women’s history, when, in her ‚Celebrating Women‛
blog entry, she turns to the accomplishments of the past and the work that still
needs to be done in the future:
There is a Jane Addams quote that I’ve heard Hillary use from time
to time, ‘The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and
uncertain until it is secured for all of us.’ Jane Addams<began her
work long before women were ever granted the right to vote, but
even today, 100 years later women across America still lack the
basic securities Jane sought to provide—health care, child care,
quality education. For too many, they remain promises unfulfilled.
So while we can and should celebrate Women’s History Month for
all that we have accomplished, we must remember all that still
needs to be done. America is ahead of the times in so many ways.
Throughout history, we have worked to celebrate our differences
and encourage equality, but we are still far behind much of the
world. In the House and Senate, women are by far a minority of
legislators and we have yet to see a woman in the oval office.
(Matsui par.1-4)
The narrative of women’s history is as complicated as women’s experience. Our
past includes incredible women like Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jane Addams,
and yet, promises remain unfulfilled. We are ahead of our times, and yet still
146
fighting battles not won 100 years ago. In fact, 2008 marks 136 years since a
woman first ran for the office of United States President. These contradictions
illustrate the difficult issue of celebrating the accomplishments of the past, and
thereby indicating a narrative of progress; and yet also pointing to the work that
still needs to be done, which indicates that the pendulum has swung back in
women’s history.
Although the history and community of women are recurring themes in
the ‚Celebrating Women‛ blogs, the bloggers are careful to point out that they
do not support Hillary merely because she is a woman. Unlike the female
monarchs of England who inherited the throne, Hillary must solicit support from
voters, and must prove her ability to lead before she reaches the position of
leadership. In other words, the bloggers claim that not just any woman running
for president would gain their support; to them, Hillary is uniquely qualified.
Wisconsin Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin clarifies her position: ‚I don’t
support Hillary ‘because’ she is a woman, but instead because she is the
strongest, most capable candidate who happens to be a woman‛ (par. 4).
Maryland Senator Barbara A. Mikulski makes the turn from gender even more
drastically by focusing on Hillary’s political views: ‚But we know this election is
not about gender—it’s about an agenda‛ (par. 3). Although both Baldwin and
Mikulski blog under the ‚Celebrating Women‛ section of Hillary’s site, they
occupy an interesting middle ground; they write in support of Hillary as a
member of their gendered community, but they also remove the issue of gender
from their argument. It is a rhetorical strategy that Hillary herself used in the
1995 Beijing United Nations Conference on Women, when she famously declared
that ‚human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights‛
(Clinton ‚Remarks‛ par. 26).
147
The Kairotic Response
In Chapter Two, ‚God Save the Queen: The Kairotic Subject in the Mercy
Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots,‛ I explore how women leaders
responded to moments of great exigence with kairos. Not merely ‚the opportune
moment,‛ as kairos is often defined, kairos is an adaptable response that includes
the proper amount of force for the context, and it evokes all the implications of
politics and justice. Eric Charles White’s final definition from Kaironomia: On the
Will-to-Invent, probably describes kairos best as ‚a passing instant when an
opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be
achieved‛ (White 13). White also traces the origin of the term kairos back to
archery where, ‚Successful passage of a kairos requires, therefore, that the
archer’s arrow be fired not only accurately but with enough power for it to
penetrate‛ (White 13). In an open letter from nineteen former generals and
admirals posted on Hillary’s website, the former military officers require kairos of
their next president, although they don’t use the term: ‚It is imperative that our
new President knows how and when to use force and diplomacy judiciously, to
know how to deploy the olive branch and the arrow‛ (Clark par. 3).
Hillary employed a kairotic response in the November 15, 2007, Las Vegas
debate. When asked if Hillary was ‚exploiting gender‛ in her campaign because
she had noted that the ‚all-boys club‛ was attacking her, Hillary responded with
the proper amount of force. She used the moment of this debate—the Las Vegas
location—to play with a gambling metaphor, but she also responded to the
‚attacks‛ of her opponents: ‚Well, I’m not exploiting anything at all. I’m not
playing, as some people say, the gender card here in Las Vegas. I’m just trying to
play the winning card. And I understand, very well, that people are not
attacking me because I’m a woman; they are attacking me because I’m ahead‛
(Clinton ‚Democratic‛). Like the bloggers, Hillary removes the gender issue, but
148
also draws attention to it. Hillary ended this reply with a metaphor that placed
her in a stereotypically female location—the kitchen. Hillary’s embodied
apophasis allows her to humorously invoke Truman’s powerfully memorable
phrase, and yet make it clear that her place is not merely in the kitchen: ‚And I
understand, that<You know, as Harry Truman famously said, ‘If you can’t
stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.’ And I feel very comfortable in the kitchen.
And I’m going to withstand the heat‛ (Clinton ‚Democratic‛). While Hillary
employs humor here, her response is quite definitive. After all, she is under
attack, and her response is appropriately forceful.
Embodied Apophasis
In Chapter Three, ‚Rhetorical Reflections of Female Ruling Identity:
Embodied Apophasis in the Speeches of Mary I and Elizabeth I,‛ I explore the
persistent strategy of appearing to cede to society’s stereotypical behavioral
expectations while actually breaking those stereotypes. After Hillary Clinton’s
voice quivered in what has been called her ‚moment,‛ she claimed that she
‚found her voice.‛ Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that showing emotion is
weak or necessarily gendered female; however, there are existing societal
expectations for women with regard to emotion. Hillary has been criticized as a
cold, emotionless woman, and in this ‚moment‛ of emotional disclosure, Hillary
showed not simply her female side, but more importantly, she showed her
human side. Just before the important New Hampshire primary, an interviewer
in a Portsmouth diner asked Hillary a question that seemed to be mere fluff:
‚And my question is very personal. How do you do it? How do you keep
upbeat and so wonderful?‛ (Clinton ‚Emotional‛). Hillary’s answer, and the
tear in her eye and quiver in her voice, shifted her entire campaign strategy:
149
I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don’t want
to see us fall backwards. Y’know, So, this is very personal for me.
It’s not just political. It’s not just public. I see what’s happening
and we have to reverse it. And some people think elections are a
game<they think it’s like who’s up or who’s down. It’s about our
country. It’s about our kids’ futures. And it’s really about all of us
together. Y’know some of us put ourselves out there and do this
against some pretty difficult odds. And we do it, each one of us,
because we care about our country. (Clinton ‚Emotional‛)
The next day, Hillary won the New Hampshire primary, and in her victory
speech she credited her newfound personal focus: ‚I listened to you, and in the
process I found my own voice‛ (Meacham 32).
In the January 21, 2008, Newsweek interview, Jon Meacham asks Hillary to
explain her new rhetorical strategy of disclosure. ‚So your voice now, as you
describe it,‛ Meacham asks, ‚is telling people not only what you want to do, but
who you are, and you are going to be telling that story more‛ (Meacham 36).
Hillary’s response is agreeable, but also reveals the values of her upbringing:
Exactly<Look, I am not great at talking about myself. That is not
my personality, it’s not how I was raised. I am more reserved than
that, I am not someone who will bare my soul at the drop of a hat.
But what I have realized is that in our political environment, for a
lot of good reasons, people need to know, people need to
understand. (Meacham 36)
Hillary’s comment that she was not raised to talk about herself indicates a long
tradition of expectations of humility from women. Hillary was not raised to talk
about herself because she is a woman. Part of the ‚muted group,‛ as Dale
Spender calls women in Man Made Language, Hillary was raised to be silent (231).
150
Many women still experience society’s expectations for silence, and they emerge,
like Hillary, and ‚find their voice.‛ On Hillary’s website, there is a space where
people can blog about where they ‚found their voice,‛ and join in Hillary’s
powerful rhetorical move to share her motivation and her emotions.
Disembodied Apophasis
In Chapter Four, ‚Disembodied Apophasis in Royal Women’s Rhetorical
Acts,‛ I discuss women’s use of male images of power to borrow the ethos that
familiarly powerful images convey. Where Mary I and Elizabeth I used the term
‚king,‛ using a previously male-marked term to describe their roles as monarchs,
Hillary uses the male-marked language of the history of presidency. Hillary
claims her preparedness for the role of commander-in-chief in a rhetorical move
that mirrors the early modern strategy. Although ‚commander-in-chief‛ is not
exclusively male-marked, the previous commanders have all been men, and so to
a modern, American audience, Hillary invokes the legacy of her predecessors to
claim authority. Hillary even crosses party lines to ally herself with an
unquestioned male line of military accomplishment. As a celebrated war
veteran, Senator McCain’s military experience is unquestionable. Clinton
borrows her Republican opponent’s ethos, aligning herself with his ability: ‚And
I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the
commander-in-chief threshold<I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen.
McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his
candidacy‛ (Pearson par. 2-3). Hillary goes on to claim the experience of a
military leader: ‚There are certain critical issues that voters always look to in a
general election. National security experience (and) the qualifications to be
commander-in-chief are front and center‛ (Pearson par. 7). Hillary claims this
role for herself, and her supporters also contribute to this narrative.
151
In another blog from the ‚Celebrating Women‛ section of Hillary’s
website, Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow confirms Hillary’s competence:
‚I’ve watched Hillary on the Senate Armed Services Committee question
Administration officials and hold them accountable. I know that on day one, she
will be ready to serve as Commander-in-Chief‛ (par.8). Although Hillary
doesn’t have personal military experience, she has gained the support of several
former military officers. Nineteen former admirals and generals signed an open
letter to support Hillary’s candidacy. In this letter, the officers support the end of
the war in Iraq and claim that, ‚Bringing our troops home safely will take a
president who is ready to be Commander-in-Chief on day one, a president who
knows our military and has earned their respect‛ (Clark par. 6). In a rhetorical
move that mirrors the early modern women rulers of sixteenth-century England,
Hillary uses a previously male-marked term, ‚commander-in-chief,‛ and
changes that term to include the possibility of a female embodying this role.
The Legacy Continues
As we approach the Democratic National Convention, the likelihood that
Hillary will secure her party’s nomination is diminishing. If Hillary’s run for the
White House ends in August, 2008, it will not indicate that these rhetorical
strategies are irrelevant; in fact, it will indicate that we need to continue to
identify strategies for asserting power and claiming images and voices of
powerful women. No matter what the results of this campaign are, Hillary has
already joined a history of powerfully voiced women, and she will serve as part
of the legacy of women’s leadership. That legacy is particularly important as we
struggle with the continuity of women’s exclusion from our nation’s highest
elected office. Pennsylvania Congresswoman Alyson Schwartz notes the
importance of this election in her ‚Celebrating Women‛ blog: ‚Women are
152
making a huge difference in this election—and could well make the difference.
Working together, every hour and everyday, we are getting closer to shattering
the highest glass ceiling in our country‛ (par. 14). Michigan Senator Debbie
Stabenow also notes the glass ceiling, and places the importance of this election
in the experience of her granddaughter, two generations into the future of our
women’s history: ‚But I’m looking forward to holding *my granddaughter+ in
my arms during the inauguration of our first woman president. I want Lily, and
millions of other girls like her, to dream big dreams. I want Lily to know that the
ultimate glass ceiling has been shattered, and that nothing will stand in her way‛
(par. 10). And until that glass ceiling is shattered, we remain participants in the
narrative of women’s future power and future equality.
But the narrative of women’s future power and future equality is crucial
to accomplishing those goals. If the women of our history did not imagine the
future, then the women of our legacy could not continue to enjoy all of our hardwon freedoms. Certainly, we must consider the rhetorical situation of these
often histrionic testimonials—Hillary’s campaign website. Although these are
the voices of Hillary supporters, it is engaging, as a feminist, to witness
challenges to long-held gender boundaries. Pennsylvania Congresswoman
Allyson Schwartz, points to these challenges and clearly states that we are still
fighting the battles of historic women’s rights efforts:
Hillary Clinton’s race is about you, and your concerns and values.
It’s about every little girl who has ever worn at T-shirts that says, ‘I
can be president.’ It’s about all the 18 year-olds who will go to the
voting booth for the first time ever, and cast a ballot for America’s
first female president. It’s for all the mothers who know, that like
them, Hillary understands what it takes to juggle the huge
demands and enormous joys of both family and career. It’s for
153
every American woman in her 80s and 90s, born before women had
the legal right to vote. And it’s for every woman who has had a
door shut on her simply because of her gender, and for every
woman who has had to work twice as hard for serious praise or a
serious raise. (par. 6-11)
Like many of Hillary’s bloggers, Schwartz describes the communal experiences
of women who are still fighting for equality in the United States. The tone of
these blogs is often, admittedly, effusive; however, we are still attempting to
assert female authority in societal roles that have remained the exclusive domain
of men for centuries. Part of the reason for an effusive tone may also be that
although sixteenth-century female monarchs proved their worth from their
positions as rulers, twenty-first century political candidates have to prove their
worth before they reach the position they seek. In other words, where female
monarchs inherited the throne, presidential candidates have to get elected.
As I discussed earlier in this chapter, there is no simple, progressive
narrative of women’s history. We have witnessed great improvements in
women’s rights, but we have not yet elected a woman President of the United
States. The narrative of progress is, however, enchanting. In an attempt to get
Hillary elected, the ‚Celebrating Women‛ bloggers imply that if Hillary’s
campaign succeeds, the issue of women’s equality will be solved. But all we
have to do is glance back in the mirror to a time when women reigned a country
for fifty years to see how quickly the pendulum can swing from silence to voice
and to illustrate how we must continue to learn lessons from our history of the
‚monstrous regiment of women.‛
154
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