Marian Literary Culture: Lydgate, his Heirs, and the End of Tragedy

Posterity has not always looked kindly on Mary I, England’s first queen, her reign once judged to have been as sterile as her body.¹ It is a crass image, but if Mary was anything other than just a religious bigot, then she has been thought a pathetic bigot, a tragic figure to be pitied. Abandoned by her father, rejected by her husband, her womb as barren as her coffers and her nation’s fields, Mary’s achievements were always going to be few and her disasters many.² In the words of A. G. Dickens, the reign must “be judged not merely a huge failure, but one likely to have become more monumental with every succeeding year.”³

Some four centuries earlier than Dickens, much the same was said by the martyrologist John Foxe during the reign of Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth, though his assessment was more obviously the product of a committed anti-Catholicism. According to him, the sad catalogue of events that constituted Mary’s reign was evidence that God’s “manifest displeasure euer wrought agaynst her, in plaging both her and her Realme, and in subuertyng all her counsells and attemptes, what so euer she tooke in hand.” He went on, explaining that:

we shall find neuer no reigne of any Prince in this land, or any other, which had euer to shew in it (for the proportion of tyme) so many Argumentes of Gods great wrath and displeasure, as was to be seene in the reigne of this Queene Mary, whether we behold the shortnes of her tyme, or the vnfortunate euent of all her purposes: who semed neuer to purpose any thyng that came luckely to passe, neither did any thyng frame to her purpose what soeuer she tooke in hand touching her owne priuate affaires.⁴

The appraisal was consistently articulated; in the next century, in his History of the Reformation of the Church of England, Peter Heylyn determined that “hope of comfort” from the Marian disaster came only “by the death of Queen Mary, whose Reign polluted with the blood of so many Martyrs, unfortunate by the frequent insurrections, and made inglorious by the loss of the Town of Calais, was only commendable in the brevity or shortnesse of it.”⁵

Bit by bit, however, the unthinkable has become thinkable and certainties have become uncertain, for, though it may not yet constitute a new consensus, scholars have challenged the traditional interpretation of Mary’s reign on a number of fronts.⁶ Judith M. Richards and others—including the contributors to a collection of essays edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman—have challenged the customary view of Mary as a hopelessly ineffective political operator who was unfit to rule, and as a woman who was governed by emotion, not reason.⁷ Eamon Duffy, first in The Stripping of the Altars and then in Fires of Faith, has questioned wholly the notion that the Marian regime was “ineffective, half-hearted, complacent, unimaginative, insular, lacking in leadership, trapped in the preoccupations of the 1520s or 1530s rather than addressing those of the 1550s,” and “that it had failed to discover the counter-reformation.”⁸ William Wizeman, too, in his detailed study of the full range of Marian church writings published between 1553–58, has made a case for a regime that not only “invented what is often called the Counter-Reformation,” but one that also eschewed negative polemic, preferring instead to put the positive case for a renewed Catholicism.⁹ These last two in particular—along with others, such as Thomas Mayer in his studies of Cardinal Pole—have forcefully shown that the Marian church was anything but “intellectually enervated,” as has formerly been claimed.¹⁰

In many ways the prompt for this line of inquiry was the work of Jennifer Loach, who had earlier argued for the Marian regime’s successful use of print.¹¹ It is an argument that has been subsequently developed by many scholars, including Lucy Wooding, who maintains that the Catholic restoration under Mary had made...