Adams Robyn, Cox Rosanna. Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
98 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
7. P. Sidney (1989) The Defence of Poesy in K. Duncan-Jones, ed., Sir Philip
Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press),
pp. 212–50 (p. 217). Subsequent references are to the page numbers of this
edition and are given in the body of the text.
8. Plato (1993) Republic, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University
Press), 598b; Aristotle (1932) Poetics in W.H. Fyfe and W.R. Roberts, eds and
trans., Aristotle, Poetics; ‘Longinus’ on the Sublime; Demetrius on Style (London:
Heinemann), pp. 4–118 (1447a).
9. E. Kantorowicz (1965) ‘The Sovereignty of the Artist: A Note on Legal
Maxims and Renaissance Theories of Art’ in Selected Studies (Locust Valley,
NY: J.J. Augustin), pp. 352–65 (pp. 352–5).
10. K. Eden (1986) Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton:
Princeton University Press), pp. 156–76.
11. Kantorowicz (1965), pp. 360–2.
12. These particular equiparations date to Plato; see Plato (1993).
13. A. Gentili (1585) De Legationibus Libri Tres (London: Thomas Vautrollerius).
14. A. Wood (1691–92) Athenæ Oxoniensis, 2 vols (London: Thomas Bennet), I,
p. 314; B. Kingsbury (1998) ‘Confronting Difference: The Puzzling Durability
of Gentili’s Combination of Pragmatic Pluralism and Normative Judgement’,
American Journal of International Law, 92, 713–23 (p. 715); T. Meron (1991)
‘Common Rights of Mankind in Gentili, Grotius and Suárez’, American
Journal of International Law, 85, 110–16; P. Haggenmacher (1992) ‘Grotius
and Gentili: A Reassessment of Thomas E. Holland’s Inaugural Lecture’,
in H. Bull, B. Kingsbury and A. Roberts, eds, Hugo Grotius and International
Relations (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. 133–76.
15. Hamilton and Langhorne (1995), p. 45.
16. T.E. Holland (1898) ‘Alberico Gentili’ in Studies in International Law (Oxford:
Clarendon), pp. 1–39; Gezina van der Molen’s biography is heavily inde-
bted to Holland’s original research: G.H.J. van der Molen (1937) Alberico
Gentili and the Development of International Law: His Life, Work and Times
(Amsterdam: H.J. Paris).
17. A. Gentili (1593) ‘Commentatio’ in Ad Titulum Codicis de Maleficis (Oxford:
Joseph Barnes), pp. 45–63; A. Gentili (1599) De Actoribus et de Abusu Mendacii
Disputationes Duae (Hanau: G. Antonius?); see also J. Rainolds (1599)
Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes (Middelburg: Richard Schilders).
18. Hampton (2009), pp. 24–5, 164–5; C.N. Warren (2010) ‘Gentili, the Poets,
and the Laws of War’ in B. Kingsbury and B. Straumann, eds, The Roman
Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire
(Oxford: Oxford University Press) pp. 146–62, with thanks to Christopher
Warren for generously sharing his draft in advance of publication.
19. Duncan-Jones (1991), p. 113; F.J. Levy (1986) ‘Sidney Reconsidered’ in A.F.
Kinney, ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney (Hamden, CT:
Archon), pp. 1–13 (pp. 2–3); W. A. Ringler (1986) ‘The Myth and the Man’ in
J.A. van Dorsten, D. Baker-Smith and A.F. Kinney, eds, Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and
the Creation of a Legend (Leiden: Brill/Leiden University Press), pp. 3–15 (p. 5).
20. Duncan-Jones (1991), p. 113.
21. Levy (1986), pp. 2–3.
22. The quote is from Robert Stillman’s outstanding recent contribution to
such accounts: R. Stillman (2008) Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance
9780230239760_07_cha05.indd 989780230239760_07_cha05.indd 98 11/8/2010 1:54:06 PM11/8/2010 1:54:06 PM
10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
Joanna Craigwood 99
Cosmopolitanism (Aldershot: Ashgate), p. vii. The only work I have found
relating Sidney’s poetics to his ideas about embassy is R. Greene (1997)
‘Fictions of Immanence, Fictions of Embassy’ in E. Fowler and R. Greene,
eds, The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), pp. 176–202; Greene does not consider embassy
as a mimetic art or Sidney’s relationship with Gentili.
23. Reproduced T.E. Holland (1877) ‘Praefatio’ in T.E. Holland, ed., Alberici
Gentilis De Iure Belli Libri Tres (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. v–xxi (p. viii).
24. Holland (1898), p. 9; Duncan-Jones (1991), p. 191.
25. Van der Molen (1937), p. 44.
26. Holland (1898), pp. 28–9; A. Gentili (1582) De Iuris Interpretibus Dialogi
Sex (London: Johannes Wolfius); the other legal expert consulted on the
Mendoza case, Jean Hotman, was Leicester’s secretary between 1582 and
1584; see Hamilton and Langhorne (1995), p. 45.
27. A. Gentili (1594) De Legationibus Libri Tres (Hanau: G. Antonius; repr. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1924), fols A2
v
, A5
r
. I have silently expanded
contractions. Subsequent references are to the folio and page numbers
of this edition and are given in the body of the text. Translation is taken
from the companion volume to this facsimile reprint: A. Gentili (1924)
De Legationibus Libri Tres, introd. E. Nys and trans. G.J. Laing, Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace Classics of International Law 12, 2 vols
(New York: Oxford University Press), II.
28. Van der Molen and Artemis Gause are mistaken in thinking that this speech
is the same as Gentili’s printed Oxford disputation Legalium Comitiorum
Oxoniensium Actio; the mistake originates in van der Molen’s misreading of
Holland’s notes; see van der Molen (1937), p. 279, note 36; Holland (1898),
p. 11; A. Gause (2004) ‘Gentili, Alberico (1552–1608)’ in ODNB.
29. F.S. Boas (1914) University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon),
pp. 192–3.
30. S. Adams, ed. (1995) Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert
Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1558–1561, 1584–1586 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press for the Royal Historical Society), p. 212.
31. L. Jardine and A. Grafton (1990) ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel
Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present, 129, 30–78 (36, 63–4); H.R.
Woudhuysen (1981) ‘Leicester’s Literary Patronage: A Study of the English
Court, 1578–1582’, unpublished D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford, p. 72.
32. See Stillman (2008), pp. 63–122; J. Ulreich (1982) ‘“The Poets Only Deliver”:
Sidney’s Conception of Mimesis’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 15.1,
67–84; A.L. DeNeef (1980) ‘Rereading Sidney’s Apology’, Journal of Medieval
and Renaissance Studies, 10, 155–91.
33. Stillman (2008); Å. Bergvall (1989) The ‘Enabling of Judgement’: Sir Philip
Sidney and the Education of the Reader (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet),
pp. 42–59; S.K. Heninger (1983) ‘Sidney and Serranus’ Plato’, English
Literary Renaissance, 13.2, 141–61; G. Warkentin (1990) ‘Sidney’s Authors’
in M.J.B. Allen and others, eds, Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements (New York:
AMS Press), pp. 69–89.
34. Plato (1578) Platonis Opera Quae Extant Omnia, ed. H. Estienne and trans.
and introd. J. de Serres, 3 vols (Geneva: Henri Etienne), I, fols **.i
r
–**.v
v
(fols **.v
v
).
9780230239760_07_cha05.indd 999780230239760_07_cha05.indd 99 11/8/2010 1:54:06 PM11/8/2010 1:54:06 PM
10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
100 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
35. Plato (1993), 595a–608a; Plato (1994) Gorgias, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), 502c, 454e–455a, 463a–d.
36. Plato (1993), 607c–e; Plato (1994), 503a–b.
37. He has in mind Plato (1994), 450b–e.
38. Plato (1994), 463d.
39. Plato (1930–35) The Republic, introd. and trans. P. Shorey, 2 vols (London:
Heinemann), II, 597e.
40. Plato (1993), p. 348 (597e); S. Orgel (1975) The Illusion of Power: Political
Theatre in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press),
pp. 40, 89; F.A. Yates (1975) Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth
Century (London: Routledge).
41. Plato (1953) Cratylus in Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias,
trans. H.N. Fowler, rev. edn. (London: Heinemann), pp. 7–191 (408a–b).
42. Gentili must be referring to 29b; see Plato (1952) Timaeus, in Timaeus, Critias,
Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, ed. and trans. R.G. Bury, rev. edn. (London:
Heinemann), pp. 16–253 (29b); for the other translations see: Plato (1581)
Omnia D. Platonis Opera, trans. M. Ficino (Venice: H. Scotus), p. 405; Plato
(1561) Platonis Atheniensis Philosophi Summi ac Penitus Divini Opera, trans.
J. Cornarius (Basil: H. Frobenius and N. Episcopius), p. 734.
43. Plato (1578), III, p. 29.
44. Plato (1578), I, pp. 378–80.
45. Heninger (1983), p. 159; M.J. Doherty (1991) The Mistress-Knowledge: Sir
Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie and Literary Architectonics in the English
Renaissance (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press), pp. 133–80.
46. Stillman (2008), pp. 115–18.
47. Heninger (1983), p. 158.
48. Divine fury leads Heninger (1983) to discount de Serres’s influence on
Sidney’s poetics (p. 156), but de Serres glosses divine inspiration in line with
his earlier treatment of poetry before Cratylus (I, p. 528).
49. Greene (1997), p. 182; Greene focuses on diplomatic mediation not
representation.
50. Warren (2010), p. 159.
51. J. Bernard (1996–97) ‘Metanarrative and Desire in the New Arcadia’, Sidney
Newsletter & Journal, 14.2, 33–42 (34); M. McCanles (1989) The Text of Sidney’s
Arcadian World (Durham NC: Duke University Press), p. 157.
52. P. Sidney (1987) The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (New Arcadia), ed.
V. Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 28. Subsequent references are to
the page numbers of this edition and are given in the body of the text.
53. Among others: B. Worden (1996) The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia
and Elizabethan Politics (London: Yale University Press), p. 65; D. Alwes
(2004) Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England (Newark: University of
Delaware Press), p. 95.
54. I would like to thank the Arts Humanities Research Council and St John’s
College, Cambridge for enabling me undertake this research; also Raphael
Lyne, Jason Powell, Christopher Warren, and the editors of this volume for
their helpful comments.
9780230239760_07_cha05.indd 1009780230239760_07_cha05.indd 100 11/8/2010 1:54:06 PM11/8/2010 1:54:06 PM
10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
101
6
Gender, Politics and Diplomacy:
Women, News and Intelligence
Networks in Elizabethan England
James Daybell
An increasing body of scholarship has begun to elucidate early modern
women’s involvement in the circulation of news, and to understand more
fully female roles in news networks, as gatherers, readers, purveyors and
writers of manuscript and printed news.
1
What is less clear, however,
is firstly the extent to which these kinds of informal news-related and
networking activities intersected with the world of diplomacy, statecraft
and intelligence gathering, which has traditionally been viewed as male,
and secondly, the nature and degree of female political influence. Women
could not be appointed as formal ambassadors, and the ‘boy’s own’
world of the spy has largely been depicted as a female-free zone.
2
Taking
this as a starting place it is not too difficult to populate these traditional
narratives with female protagonists and to find examples of women
engaged in diplomatic and intelligencing activities, operating through
informal and familial channels. Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury,
as I have argued elsewhere, was at the centre of a dense news and intel-
ligence network, receiving regular dispatches from court commentators,
members of Elizabeth I’s Privy Chamber and correspondents throughout
Europe. News played a vital function to the countess during the period
that she and her husband were keepers of Mary, Queen of Scots.
3
It has
also been shown that the calligrapher Esther Inglis used the occasion of
presenting manuscript books as gifts to Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux,
second Earl of Essex for diplomatic ends.
4
Meanwhile, Mary Phelippes,
wife of the master cryptographer Thomas Phelippes took over some of
her husband’s correspondence and intelligence gathering activities after
his imprisonment in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot for his continued
correspondence with the fugitive Catholic Hugh Owens.
5
Thus, a clear prima facie case can be made for integrating women into
this kind of ‘high politics’ diplomatic history. One of the aims of this
9780230239760_08_cha06.indd 1019780230239760_08_cha06.indd 101 11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM
10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
102 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
essay, however, is to delineate the sorts of roles that women could play
in this arena as intermediaries, ‘information-brokers’ and in informal
ambassadorial capacities. Women were able to operate through networks
of family and other social contacts, and were often integral to the lubricat-
ing of socio-political relations through a range of secondary patronage
activities related to sociability. Letter-writing, in that it directly documents
female networking activity, represents a crucial way by which women
fostered networks – and women’s letters and letter-writing form the
primary focus of this essay – but equally, functions such as visiting,
hospitality and gift-giving were vital in cementing personal connections.
Where women’s own letters do not survive, the kinds of roles in which
women engaged can be reconstructed through incidental reports in
general correspondence, ambassadorial dispatches and diaries, as well
as records of trials and examinations. Allied to this exploration of
female epistolary networking is an examination of the gendered nature
of women’s involvement in news and intelligence activities, which
raises numerous questions. How far were women’s roles circumscribed
or shaped by issues of gender? To what extent were early modern news
and intelligence networks gendered? Could women operate outside of
family networks? What was the purpose and nature of news and intel-
ligence? How did the gathering and circulating of news and intelligence
function within patronage networks? In what ways were women able
to engage in political and diplomatic spheres? All too often these kinds
of female activities are viewed by some historians as rather nebulous, as
background functions away from the hard-faced world of policy-making;
women’s influence it seems is sometimes regarded as intangible, distant
from definitions of power as formal and direct, qualities connoted by
office.
6
Nevertheless, the cultural turn of ‘new Tudor political history’
with its emphasis on the personal, and the non-institutional nature of
political relations has facilitated a crucial reassessment of female influence
and the types of power and authority they could wield within the family,
society and on the wider public stage.
7
To this end, this essay focuses on three distinct areas, groups of women
or kinds of activity in order to examine female involvement in informal
intelligence networks. First, it surveys the ways in which women letter-
writers provided a vital channel of communication linking the centre
and the periphery through which news and intelligence flowed, and
considers the extent to which such activities could propel women into
diplomatic activities. Secondly, it examines the broader political activities
of women at court. Close attendance on the royal person provided
women of the Privy Chamber with access to the intimate secrets of the
9780230239760_08_cha06.indd 1029780230239760_08_cha06.indd 102 11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM
10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
James Daybell 103
inner sanctum of royal power. Female influence with the queen was also
widely recognized by contemporaries. Acting as brokers of news and
information women were thus central to the political and patronage
system; as trusty body servants, it will be shown, they were employed by
Elizabeth as intermediaries in a range of ways. Finally, the essay briefly
explores female involvement in Catholic postal and communication
networks, illustrating the ways in which recusant women harboured
and supported Catholic priests, and also sought to influence pan-European
diplomacy.
News, networking and diplomacy
A study of sixteenth-century women’s letter-writing demonstrates the
complex ways in which women participated in wide-ranging news-related
activities. Women were the recipients of newsletters: Jane Dormer,
Duchess of Feria received lengthy newsletters from George Chamberlain
and Sir Francis Englefield; Alice Stanley heard of ‘court news’ from her
nephew Sir Robert Spencer; Elizabeth Ralegh thanked Robert Cecil for
his packet of letters which brought her news of the fire at Durham
house.
8
Husbands frequently included news of events in London and
the court in dispatches to wives.
9
Thus, John Thynne reported to his
wife Joan the Earl of Essex’s revolt in 1601.
10
The letters women wrote
themselves frequently contained news of family, household and locality,
as well as items of ‘national’ interest. For example, Margaret Hill wrote
regularly from London to her cousin Richard Carnsew in the West
Country, keeping him informed of events in the capital, and in one of
her letters she enclosed a newsbook and a copy of the Earl of Essex’s
funeral sermon.
11
Letters of this nature show that women were among
the early writers of letters that mixed news and rumour with accounts of
family and friends, a form that developed into the professional newsletters
of the early-seventeenth century.
12
Furthermore, female correspondents were central to maintaining
political and kinship relations, contacts that could usefully be brought
to bear on other occasions; and conveyance of news in letters was one
of the chief ways in which these networks were strengthened. News
itself provided a stimulus to letter-writing, forging links between the
capital and the provinces. As a commodity, news kept people apace with
current events at a local, regional, national and international level, and
functioned as important political capital.
13
Thus, Margaret, Countess of
Cumberland implored Sir Julius Caesar to write to her with news when
occasion served.
14
Lady Anne Newdigate took great care in cultivating
9780230239760_08_cha06.indd 1039780230239760_08_cha06.indd 103 11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM
10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
104 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
court contacts by correspondence, an activity that she rather than her
husband undertook.
15
Female letter-writers commonly kept in touch
informally with government officials and male heads of families by
sending letters of thanks, gifts or conveying news. Although seemingly
‘familiar’ in content, many of these letters were in fact written to oil
the wheels of patronage and, therefore, assume an added significance
in the context of the petitioning activity. Indeed, ‘networking’ letters of
this kind often followed, and sometimes preceded, requests for favour.
In 1595 the Countess of Shrewsbury congratulated Robert Cecil on his
appointment as Principal Secretary, and in later years sought to forward
numerous suits through him.
16
Lady Elizabeth Knightley sent gifts of
two boxes of conserve of quinces which accompanied letters to both
Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex.
17
Countless letters of social
courtesy survive written to powerful men such as Burghley, Robert Cecil
and Julius Caesar, offering thanks for favours granted, sending greetings
and commendations to their families and wives, and begging for con-
tinued remembrance in their suits.
The significant degree to which women utilized these social connec-
tions is readily sketched by an analysis of letters of petition or request,
which reveals the parameters of women’s interventions as political
intermediaries on behalf of family, friends, clients and wider contacts.
Well over 1000 such missives survive for the Elizabethan period alone,
written by female letter-writers interceding in a broad range of patron-
age, judicial and business-related matters.
18
Alice, Countess of Derby
wrote to Sir Julius Caesar, Master of the Court of Requests, in support of
a free school to be erected in Dent in Yorkshire, and pressed Robert Cecil
permit one Captain Philips to have a military company; Anne, Countess
of Warwick likewise petitioned Caesar for an old servant, William Dillon,
that he receive a ‘speedy trial’.
19
Frances Devereux approached Lord
Keeper Puckering for an office for a cousin; while Katherine, Duchess
of Suffolk recommended to Burghley that he take her kinsman, Charles
Chamberlain into his service.
20
This kind of direct petitioning activity
seldom happened cold – this was not a sixteenth-century equivalent to
modern-day cold-calling – but in most cases women utilized existing
relationships, channels assiduously maintained through regular contact.
While personal interactions and occasions of sociability helped to cement
alliances, where this was not possible many women relied on letter-writing
to foster positive bonds and keep open lines of communication.
One of the best documented examples of this kind of epistolary
activity over a significant period of time is the correspondence of Lady
Elizabeth Russell.
21
Well over 50 of her letters survive for the years 1566
9780230239760_08_cha06.indd 1049780230239760_08_cha06.indd 104 11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM
10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
James Daybell 105
to 1608, mainly addressed to her brother-in-law and nephew, father
and son, William and Robert Cecil, with whom she frequently kept in
touch. As such her letters provide a remarkable insight into the ways in
which familial connections were sustained and mobilized for political
ends.
22
Familial in tone, often matriarchal (especially those addressed to
her nephew), the letters mix social niceties with a combination of news,
report and counsel, as well as requests for advice and the supplication of
suits. Writing to William Cecil in 1566, the then Lady Hoby thanked her
brother-in-law for his kindnesses to her and her husband: ‘Althoughe
wordes be verie small recompens for yowr so manie benefitts and
curtesies . . . thus by writing I thought it my parte to shew some litel
part of gratefullnes this waie till occasion serve otherwaies by deede
to recompens y
e
least part to you or some of yours’.
23
The occasion of
her writing was almost ceremonial; the letter itself acting as a gift of
remembrance. Yet beyond the staged courtesies of social decorum, Lady
Russell’s correspondence also reveals an interest in patronage, domestic
politics and even foreign policy. In a letter to Robert Cecil on the death
of his wife, the Dowager Lady Russell consoled her nephew recommend-
ing that he abate his melancholy through a strategy of diversion. She
added in a postscript that she in no way liked the current policy in Spain,
informing him that while it may have had a good beginning she feared
ill success in the end.
24
This example in particular is typical of how her
correspondence blended the ‘personal’ and the ‘private’ with the ‘public’
and the ‘political’. In January 1599 during a rift between Robert Cecil,
Sir William Knollys, Lord Admiral Charles Howard and the Earl of Essex,
Lady Russell offered to come to court to act as an intermediary and do
him ‘any good offices’.
25
Another letter, written in October 1599 at the
time of Essex’s imprisonment on his return from Ireland warned Cecil of
the ‘most vile words that had been openly uttered’ about him; she was
not willing to ‘commit’ them ‘to paper’, but would inform him all in person
in order that ‘being warned’ he was ‘half armed’.
26
Regular contact also
provided opportunities for Lady Russell to act as a political intermediary
with her influential kinsmen, and her letters are teaming with suits for
others: she wrote on behalf of her neighbour, the publisher and book-seller
Ascanius Yetsweirt, to become a master printer; requested a knighthood for
another neighbour, Andrew Rogers; forwarded Matthew Day to become
Master of Requests; asked that John Borlase be excused taking up the
post of Sheriff of Buckinghamshire; and presented numerous staunch
Protestant candidates for ecclesiastical positions (among them the
Cambridge scholar and tutor in her household, Edmund Rockray, her
distant kinsman James Morrice and the preacher William Day).
27
9780230239760_08_cha06.indd 1059780230239760_08_cha06.indd 105 11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM
10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
106 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
The degree to which epistolary activities could thrust women into the
diplomatic arena is further illustrated by the example of Penelope Lady
Rich, sister to the ill-fated Earl of Essex, who in 1589 was intimately
involved in her brother’s diplomatic overtures to James VI of Scotland,
Elizabeth I’s eventual successor. At this time, Lady Rich secretly corre-
sponded with the Scottish King through the auspices of Richard Douglas
(nephew of the Scottish ambassador to England, Archibald Douglas) and
Jean Hotman, a former secretary of the Earl of Leicester, who acted as an
emissary.
28
The weekly letters written in secret code – Lady Rich using
the name ‘Ryalta’ – were on Essex’s behalf and addressed to Douglas to
be passed onto James VI, who ‘commended much the fineness of her
wit, the invention and well writing’.
29
The whole episode, however,
failed and James lost interest when Douglas, whose credit had always
been poor with the Scottish king, proved indiscrete and Burghley soon
learned of the moves from his agent in Edinburgh, Thomas Fowler.
30
Analysis of Lady Rich’s correspondence more broadly reveals a Europe-
wide network of correspondents, which included Hotman and his wife
Jeanne (a correspondence conducted in French), two French noblewomen,
Mme de Mirabeau and Mme Chateauneuf, and Antonio Pérez, the exiled
former secretary of Philip II of Spain, to whom she wrote in Spanish.
31
She also received newsletters from Anthony Bacon and he likely sent her
a copy of Henry Cuffe’s ‘True relacion’, a partisan account of the victory
at Cadiz penned by Essex’s secretary and circulated in manuscript form
for propagandist purposes.
32
Her own letter to Queen Elizabeth, written
in support of her brother after his fall from favour, was likewise widely
disseminated in manuscript and print to drum up (in the first stage at
least) support for the beleaguered earl.
33
In combination these activities reveal well Lady Rich’s intercession
in the political arena and the sophistication with which she operated
through the medium of the letter. Yet her example is not unusual; other
women engaged in similar activities. Historians have, for example, long
recognized Mildred Cecil’s influence over her husband Lord Burghley
in the dispensation of wardships, an influence for which she was paid.
Most recently Pauline Croft has shown Lady Cecil’s role as an inter-
mediary in several areas where her influence with her husband could be
used to good effect, including Scottish affairs and the Habsburg marriage
project, and that she was influential with the queen in her capacity as a
Lady of Honour in the Privy Chamber.
34
Likewise, Lady Anne Glemham,
a woman whose influence stemmed from her relationship with her
father Thomas Sackville, the Lord Treasurer, sought to exert herself in
numerous patronage suits, and she appears to have received payments
9780230239760_08_cha06.indd 1069780230239760_08_cha06.indd 106 11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM11/8/2010 4:09:25 PM
10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
James Daybell 107
from clients for favours solicited. In 1603, Robert Cecil wrote to his
secretary Michael Hickes, directing him to give Lady Glemham ‘a purse’
of £100 to deal directly with her father.
35
Alongside her patronage suits
she was also interested in wider political affairs, and in early 1600 wrote
to Julius Caesar asking him to send her a note of all ‘French causes’ and
cases of ‘piracy’ between the French and the English that came before
him and the other commissioners at the high court of the admiralty.
36
In each of these instances, we are dealing with women whose networks
were based on an overlapping nexus of familial relationships and
court connections, the latter providing an important lever of political
influence.
Women and the court
It has long been understood by historians that women were integral to
the political life of early modern courts as Queens regnant, Queens con-
sort, princesses, ladies-in-waiting, maids-of-honour and even mistresses.
37
Olwen Hufton in a survey of recent studies of female courtiers throughout
Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has argued that ‘a
court without women is like a body without a nervous system. Women
are part of a vital system of communications through which messages
are transmitted, channels opened up.’
38
Scholars of the Elizabethan court
have rightly emphasized the role of women as political intermediaries,
brokers of patronage and information.
39
Pam Wright argued that women
of the Privy Chamber were ‘barometers of the Queen’s mood’.
40
In so
arguing she followed Robert Beale, Clerk to the Privy Council, who in his
1592 ‘Treatise of the office of a councellor and principal secretarie to her
majestie’ advised Sir Edward Wooton:
learne before your accesse her majesties disposition by some in the
Privie chamber with whom you must keepe credit for that will stand
you in much steede and yet yield not too much to their importunitie
for sutes, for so you may be blamed, nevertheless pleasure them
when convenientlie you may.
41
Certainly Roger Manners in a letter of advice to his niece Lady Bridget
Manners considered that her acceptance into Queen Elizabeth’s service
in 1589 as a Maid-of-Honour, showed the Queen’s ‘great and spetiall
favor’ towards her, which was ‘to the exceeding great comfort of all
your frends’, who ‘shall rejoice of your well doing’. In his letter Manners
outlined a set of rules for her conduct in ‘her majesties privy chamber’.
9780230239760_08_cha06.indd 1079780230239760_08_cha06.indd 107 11/8/2010 4:09:26 PM11/8/2010 4:09:26 PM
10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14