Pregnant Monarchs, English Protestantism, and The Innocent Usurper

John Banks’ Restoration tragedy The Innocent Usurper, or, The Death of the Lady Jane Gray (1694) features a heroine with little resemblance to such other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portrayals of Lady Jane Grey as Nicholas Rowe’s The Tragedy of The Lady Jane Gray (1715),¹ Thomas Dekker and John Webster’s The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat (1607), and the account of Jane in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563). Banks’ Jane is like these other Janes in her virtue and innocence, but while they are often passive and helpless, she is active and aware of her influence. These differences are particularly notable in how these Janes regard their recent marriage. The Jane of Rowe’s Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray is so disdainful of worldly pleasure that she remains a virgin despite her marriage to Guilford Dudley, telling him they must delay their wedding night because of her double duty in mourning the death of Edward VI and as England’s new queen (Rowe 2.1.148-53; Marsden 515). On the other end of the spectrum, Banks’ Lady Jane Gray² is more sexual, speaking often of her husband and the joys of their union. Unlike Rowe’s Jane, she is more interested in her new marriage than in being queen. Throughout The Innocent Usurper, Jane declares her passion for Gilford (again unlike Rowe’s Jane, who speaks of him with platonic detachment). The extent of this passion is proved in Jane’s final speech before her death, as she declares her loyalty to Protestantism:

S[h]ou’d all your torterous Racks on me be try’d;Broil me on Grid-Irons, turn the other side,Till the Abortive Infant where it layShou’d from my flaming Intrails burst its way,To my vow’d Faith I’ll be for ever true,In spight of all your Roman Gods, and you.

(Banks 60; act 5)

Jane’s claim of pregnancy comes as a surprise to even the most attentive reader; none of Banks’ other characters mention the possibility of Jane’s pregnancy, nor do any stage directions hint at it. Furthermore, considering that the play begins the morning after Jane and Gilford’s wedding night, it would be impossible for Jane to be certain of her pregnancy. The action of the play appears to take approximately four days, although Gilford claims there have been almost twenty days between their marriage and their preparations for execution (44; act 4). Regardless of whether the play occurs over a few days or a few weeks, aside from Jane’s claim, there is no other reference to her pregnancy. Because of this, Jane’s “Abortive Infant” line is often interpreted as either Jane’s last effort to save herself by pleading “benefit of belly,”³ or Banks’ overly dramatic attempt to raise his tragedy to new levels of pathos. Through a close reading of this line and its sources, however, this essay argues that Jane’s claim to pregnancy is at the center of a vigorous seventeenth-century debate regarding state religion, the monarchy, and their unsettling dependence on women’s reproductive bodies.

While most modern readers would consider Jane’s claim of pregnancy—and the play as a whole—to be melodramatic, seventeenth-century readers would have recognized The Innocent Usurper as part of a newly fashionable genre of Restoration theatre, of which John Banks was one of the foremost playwrights: the she-tragedy. She-tragedies replaced the popular heroic tragedies of the 1660s and 1670s, centering on a female protagonist who was either “a model of virtue or fallen heroine,” and “whose protracted ‘distress’ represents the tragedy’s main action” (Marsden 502). Formerly dismissed by Restoration scholars as an “unfortunate lapse in taste, a product of a low craving for sensationalism, an expression of the playwrights’ willingness to pander to audience demands for the cheap thrills of melodrama,” she-tragedy is now a well-studied genre in its own right, considered an important element in Restoration drama (Tumir 411). Like other she-tragedies, The Innocent Usurper revolves around pathos, and if the...