Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England

6. Journey and Ambassadorship in the Marriage Literature for Mary Tudor (1496–1533)

143 Journey and Ambassadorship in the Marriage Literature for Mary Tudor (1496–1533) A. E. B. Coldiron In Age of Iron, Gale Carrithers and James Hardy outline four tropes central to understanding the relations between Renaissance literature and culture. Carrithers and Hardy mean something quite distinctive by “tropes.” In their view, “tropes,” like Debora Shuger’s “habits of thought,” link literary and historical materials. They are “ideas and images animating Renaissance life,” and as such are “engrossing and consequential .” Carrithers and Hardy explain that “in reflecting upon the culture of Renaissance England...we have settled on trope, as opposed, say, to theme or motif....When we employ the term trope, it will always be in this general sense...rather than as a specific rhetorical term (as when one says ‘the trope of chiasmus’).”1 Here I shall explore one particular cluster of evidence for the early, secular, and cross-cultural 6v 144 The Marriage Literature for Mary Tudor applicability of at least two of the four cultural tropes explained in Age of Iron. The four tropes Carrithers and Hardy present—calling or ambassadorship, journey, moment, and theater—help us to understand in terms other than Foucault’s the intersections of love and power in the literature of the late Elizabethans and Stuarts. However, these tropes can also help us to understand texts produced in an earlier phase of the Renaissance. As illustration, I take here the pageants, poems, and narratives written for the marriage of Mary Tudor (1496–1533), Henry VIII’s favorite sister, to Louis XII of France in 1514. This marriage is a crucial event in the history of the consolidation and expansion of Tudor power, the years 1513–15, when English relations with France were being shaken, sifted, and then settled (at least for a while). Carrithers’s tropes of calling or ambassadorship, journey, and theater feature prominently in the texts written in French, English, and Latin about Mary’s marriage. Severalaspectsofthetropeoftheater—performativity,metatheatricality , inwardness, political instrumentality, the theatrum mundi—have been amply discussed by other critics. However, the tropes of “journey” and “calling or ambassadorship ” have less obvious scholarly relevance to the literature written for and about the marriage of Mary Tudor to Louis XII. These tropes are especially interesting because they involve both literal and figurative complications of the juncture between love and power. Mary’s literal journey toward marital union with Louis and England’s journey to political union with France, are elaborately imagined and figured , as is Mary’s journey to queenship of and union with a new people. Mary’s literal ambassadorship or calling to peace and the literal ambassadors taking part in the proceedings are also taken up as images in some of the literature. The actual ambassadors to the event apparently had enough public importance that they, like historical and legendary A. E. B. Coldiron 145 figures from both nations, became characters in the poems; townspeople portray them in various tableaux, and they are called upon in the poems to witness and to ratify the union that is explicitly intended to result in lasting peace. These mixed-media literary events also had a strong metatextual or interpretive component: at every step, the poems and pageants are self-glossing, self-conscious artifacts. Examining the writings in terms of these two tropes can clarify the particular meanings this event held for the people witnessing and participating in it. The historical importance of Mary Tudor’s marriage is unquestionably great, for her marriage promised peace, prosperity , and the continuance of two kingdoms at a moment when both sides needed precisely these things. Mary Tudor was an essential piece—much more than a pawn—in the deadly diplomatic chess games of the early sixteenth century. Her two betrothals (first to Charles of Castile, Archduke of Austria, and then to Louis XII de Valois, King of France) were crucial moves for all concerned. Mary’s father, Henry VII, had arranged the first match early, as part of his diplomatic efforts with the Holy Roman Empire, the pope, Spain, and the Netherlands. The marriage agreements between Mary and Archduke Charles were concluded in December 1507. An anonymous English translation of Petrus Carmelianus’s 1508 account of the betrothal and its ceremonies and feasts explains the utter seriousness of the match: its dual purpose was “as well for a perpetuall peax and amytie...As also for marriage.”Thepenaltiesfornonperformancearespelledoutas well: “right great sommes of...