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The Renaissance Englishwoman in Code: ‘Blabbs’ and Cryptographers at Elizabeth I’s Court

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Abstract

In this essay I argue that the marginalisation of women’s work in the early modern period was, sometimes, an enabling condition. Shakespeare’s Bianca converses with her lover in a secret language, and Mary Stuart similarly smuggles letters out of prison to her supporters in code, trying to circumvent Elizabeth’s spies and cryptographers. Women writers did not always seek to circulate their words or see them in print, in other words, and what looks like illiteracy on the part of women – poor spelling or garbled syntax or a crabbed penmanship – may instead mark a skillful command of letters, a dazzling ‘high’ literacy which rivals Latin learning, and occasionally disables it. Many women at Elizabeth’s court during the years of Mary Stuart’s intriguing display a similar expertise in cryptography. I also explore Jane Seager’s 1589 New Year’s gift to Elizabeth as well as some of Elizabeth’s speeches about Mary Stuart as evidence that early modern women writers might represent themselves as practitioners of secret knowledge, disdaining publication, courting misreading.

The great number of noble women at that time in England [were] given to the study of devout science and of strange tongues. It was a common thing to see young virgins so nouzled and trained in the study of letters, that they willingly set all other pastimes at nought for learning sake.1

Almost a generation ago, Betty Travitsky and Anne Haselkorn edited an important anthology of essays entitled The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon (1990) which collectively explored the ways that print had given early modern writers, both male and female, an authority premised on a readership with access to a wide range of textual materials. Although the editors sought, as they explain in their introduction, to ‘correlate

Critical Survey Volume 22, Number 3, 2010: 1–20doi: 10.3167/cs.2010.220301 ISSN 0011–1570 (Print), ISSN 1752–2293 (Online)

2 Critical Survey, Volume 22, Number 3

writings by men that have traditionally been contained within the literary canon with writings by women that have traditionally been marginalized’ as a way to ‘be faithful to the expansive, experimental, uncanonical nature of the enterprise of letters’ during this period,2 this ‘correlation’ does little to disrupt the canonical status of early modern men’s literary works or to explore exactly how the mechanics of print contributed to the way tradition ‘traditionally’ works. Just as important to the study of ‘the enterprise of letters’ is considering how the ‘marginalization’ of women’s writings was sometimes a significant enabling condition, or seeing that there may have been less desire for print than our scholarly habits or sympathies have acknowledged. Indeed, what was long neglected in early modern women’s writings remains purposefully obscure even to us still, and to force these writings out of marginality – or to make what seems illegible legible – is to distort their meanings and their aims.

A generation after the appearance of The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, scholars often look at the same textual materials with very different eyes. For one thing, we know that many writers of this period, both male and female, did not circulate their work extensively or hope to see it in print, and we also recognise that manuscripts could be exchanged among a familiar group of readers, so that a widely printed text might actually lose important ties to its most valued audience. My essay takes up another challenge to the picture of the Renaissance Englishwoman in print by looking at the examples of women who wrote in secret or used codes and ciphers, women like Shakespeare’s Bianca Minola and the real-life Mary Stuart. These female figures view privacy in terms of subversive possibilities, and did not want to have their words understood, much less seen in print. A recent essay on Lady Mary Wroth’s 1620 Urania makes a related point about the goals of women’s writing in the early modern period, arguing that ‘it is anachronistic to use “the voice” to represent women’s discursive agency; we cannot assume early modern women aspired to have the same audible, public voice valued by twentieth-century feminists.’3 I would only add that we should be just as careful about using ‘author’ or ‘writer’ in this period, for a good number of women might be eager, even determined, to disown the works produced by their hands and to separate themselves from any papers in their belongings.

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‘Blabbs’ and Cryptographers at Elizabeth I’s Court 3

Like Shakespeare’s Bianca, Mary Stuart’s code-making should be explained with special reference to the five years between 1584 and 1589. This was a period marked by intense literary activity at some of the highest levels of Elizabeth’s court, where a handful of women were immersed in ‘the study of letters.’ Perhaps Shakespeare’s picture of Kate’s studious sister (probably drafted between 1590 and 1592) is even drawn in the wake of Mary Stuart’s hidden and dangerously treasonous activity. Both a linguist and a musician, Bianca is no ‘breeching scholar’, as she announces in The Taming of the Shrew: ‘I’ll not be tied to hours nor “pointed times”’, she explains, ‘But learn my lessons as I please myself’ (3.1.18–20).4 Yet such intellectual independence is at odds with Bianca’s need for concealment, something shown to us in the obfuscating wordplay she deploys with her suitor Lucentio, himself disguised as Cambio, ‘master of letters’ and rival to Bianca’s music teacher Hortensio. In on her game, Lucentio pretends to teach Bianca something she’s already mastered, Penelope’s letter to Ulysses, written in Latin by Ovid. In this way, the two can admit their secret love for each other without arousing suspicion about their relationship or about Bianca’s control of the situation. ‘Now let me see if I can construe it’ Bianca says, and she then proceeds to carefully misconstrue things: ‘“Hic ibat Simois”, I know you not, “hic est Sigeia tellus”, I trust you not; “Hic stererat Priami”, take heed he hear us not, “regia”, presume not, “celsa senis”, despair not’ (3.1.40–43).

Patricia Parker argues that Bianca presents herself as master of both Hortensio and Lucentio in this scene; I would further suggest that Shakespeare’s student goes so far as to teach her instructor how to lie with his pupil.5 But Bianca’s signals of affection and collusion draw equally on her mastery and her paranoia, her unusual learning momentarily suspended as she tests the waters with her lover. What she knows becomes important in helping her advertise what she doesn’t know, but Bianca is also willing to look like a fool so that she isn’t forced to marry one. She courts misunderstanding and exposure, and returns love by simultaneously keeping her guard (see Parker 203). This is a tough juggling act, but fortunately Bianca’s charms include expertise at cryptography, a skill at which a number of other early modern Englishwomen were unusually adept.

Of course, to describe Bianca’s accomplished errors, or skillful illiteracy, in this way complicates much of the by-now common knowledge about early modern women’s writing, such as the valuable


claim that so many women’s writings of the period, although in manuscript, appear intended for broad circulation.6 The stylistic performances we see in women’s recipe collections, household accounts, and commonplace books and letters, James Daybell maintains, for example, provide evidence that they would be shared and copied, not carefully tucked away or burned upon receipt.7 Margaret Ezell likewise comments on these features as evidence that such works were intended for a wide readership, even when spelling faltered or handwriting grew sloppy or illegible (333).

Yet in some cases, I propose, women’s works were carefully designed to be set apart, read between the lines, or painstakingly deciphered. Many early modern writers who could not claim membership in the Sidney family nonetheless shared its interest in ciphers for this reason, and perhaps the complications which arose in England, as Heather Wolfe recently describes, ‘unique among European countries in having numerous scripts in simultaneous usage’, were obvious even to contemporaries. Wolfe quotes one writing master (whose talents might prove irrelevant in such an environment) who remarked that there are so many hands, ‘so strange and different too, that very few of our own people know or can read them.’8 But there were also advantages to a poor spelling or ‘crabbed’ penmanship, for the same things which made a letter so revealing or valuable to one reader, including an idiosyncratic hand or scrawled signature, might make it less interesting or accessible to a different reader.

At the same time, even members of a well-read audience might be uncomfortable with the secretary hand or unfamiliar with Latin, and the most learned reader might still be unable to determine among the various scripts of husband and wife and copyist, or between servant and master or teacher and student. Perhaps the presence of a rival queen on English territory only exacerbated these pressures to decode the writings of women, but it can hardly be an accident that almost at the same time as many women writers were stretching the meanings of literacy, a new form of statecraft was being shaped at Elizabeth’s court, one intended not to read past but into the problems generated by women’s texts and also exploit some of their most challenging features. In the following pages I map out some reasons for disconnecting our picture of early modern literacy from ideas about education and class at this time, linking early modern women’s writings instead to the courtly cryptography which sought to decode or mirror women’s efforts.


***

Elizabeth’s advisors, despairing of the Queen’s recalcitrance in dealing with a prisoner reportedly plotting against the crown, had to grapple with the problems posed by a menacing kind of female literacy that only looked like illiteracy, using interpretive tools formerly developed to combat dissimulating Jesuit priests against the dangers posed by Mary Stuart. Publicly writing secret letters to her Catholic allies from a jail less than fifty miles from Elizabeth’s court, Mary Stuart gave women’s writings a lethal political shape, and her model of secret writing would loom large even after her execution in 1587. For a long time, her talents had thwarted many readers, however, and before they were able to formally charge Mary with conspiracy, Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham and Elizabeth’ s chief secretary William Cecil had hand-picked spies and moles to root inside Mary’s jail as well as in the French embassy in London.9 But unlike the Tudor network of spies and moles, the cryptography eventually underwritten by Walsingham was a highly sophisticated form of literacy that could make sense of messages written to deceive, and, like Bianca’s artful constructions, fashion its own convoluted messages by employing regular features of women’s writings, like their unusual spellings, mixture of hands, and mutilation of scripts. Ezell’s description of the ‘social life’ of texts might in this case be supplemented by a ‘secret’ or ‘counter’ life of texts, when we consider the effects of codes and code-breaking at the hands of Wasingham’s staff, trained to wrestle with the problem of ‘illiteracy’ without, of course, trying to solve it.

With time, additional funding, or a good teacher, illiteracy can usually be corrected, and eventually Bianca abandons her flawed Latin to converse more easily with Lucentio. Many of Shakespeare’s plays, all performed in the wake of the 1586–87 trial and execution of Mary Stuart, trace the same arc of linguistic crisis and resolution that was being managed at Elizabeth’s court. The plays not only follow this unstable period during which, at one low point in November 1586, Elizabeth is reduced to proffering an ‘answer answerless’ to her Parliament,10 but work out a recovery process along the same lines the Queen herself adopts, marked by renewed confidence in her own language as well as a new scepticism about others’ abilities to read her.11 Yet the faults continue to lie in questionable texts and problematic readings, and not in the stars, according to Shakespeare. In his view, the learned and crafty Bianca is doubled by a sister


unwilling or unable to abandon her new husband Petruchio’s script. In Hamlet (1600–01), Ophelia’s garbled talk is judged insane by the Danish court: her brother in fact calls her ‘a document in madness’ (4.5.175).Yet Ophelia’s words, as Horatio explains, can nonetheless be read:

Her speech is nothing,Yet the unshaped use of it doth moveThe heaven to collection. They aim at it, And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts,Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,Indeed would make one think there might be thought,Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily (4.5.7–13).

Horatio’s fledgling decoding skills are fine-tuned by Lady Macbeth (c. 1606), who is able to annotate her husband’s letters as well as discern invisible blood on her hands, and Lear’s Goneril will find herself a capable secretary who possesses the liberty to add his own words to her messages if he chooses.12 Perhaps in Oswald Shakespeare supplies a picture of Thomas Phelippes, Walsingham’s most talented cryptographer, who famously added a postscript to one of Mary Stuart’s messages and drew a tiny gallows to flag a particularly incriminating letter (Guy 476). But just as many of Shakespeare’s plays are concerned with the importance and dangers of women’s literacy, early modern women writers themselves drew on the new ‘study of letters’, ones that challenged Walsingham and his staff because they were inaccessible to the languages of diplomacy and statecraft, and untranslatable by the international humanist language of Latin.

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Imprisoned in a series of English castles and manor homes for nearly two decades, Mary Stuart was at the mercy of her English supporters as well as her urgent needs for translators and messengers. It was her reliance on this kind of linguistic assistance that probably damned her, at least according to John Guy, who notes that her first two secretaries double-crossed her with Walsingham, and a third later identified one of Walsingham’s forgeries as his mistress’s writing, and thereby provided a crucial piece of evidence for the prosecution at Mary’s 1586 trial.13 Indeed, the decade before the appearance of


Shakespeare’s plays was rich in the dramatic plots serially hatched by Mary Stuart, and the resulting pressures created by conspiracy fears and detective work form an important background to his plays, utterly consumed with finding murderers, punishing queens, and displaying secrets. Unlike their medieval antecedents, Shakespeare’s protagonists – figures like Malcolm, Hamlet, Hal, and even Othello – are presented as intelligence agents, spymasters and cryptographers themselves, all necessary players in the Elizabethan unfolding of marriage alliances, religious reform, and royal succession. Even the humanist George Buchanan, protégé of Mildred Cecil and tutor of James VI, could be prevailed upon to draw up a dossier of charges against Mary Stuart at the behest of Cecil and the Scottish lords who opposed her (see Guy 374–75). How strange to see Buchanan’s celebrated Latinate learning and versifying abilities put to the project of exposing women’s secrets; when we remember that Philip Sidney was Walsingham’s son-in-law, it’s easy to wonder what women’s revelations might Sidney have authored as well. (How often in Astrophil and Stella does Sidney decide instead to look in his heart and write, or read his words in Stella’s face? ‘My best wits still their own disgrace invent’; Sidney’s speaker tells us: ‘My very ink turns straight to Stella’s name’14). It is unfortunate that the originals of Mary Stuart’s incriminating sonnets to Bothwell – authored by Mary or forged by Buchanan – are lost, but in either case, we can be sure they were designed to be withheld from view.

Aside from her embroidery, according to many biographers, none of Mary Stuart’s classical learning availed her in Scotland or in the damp English prisons she endured for nearly twenty years, smuggling funds and gifts to Catholic supporters and letters to the Pope, her Guise family in France, and Spanish allies. My sense of the artfulness and skill involved in her code-making leads me to disagree. After her imprisonment, all of Mary’s letters first had to travel to the French embassy, where Walsingham eventually had a mole. Castelnau, Henry III’s ambassador to Elizabeth, allowed Walsingham to inspect most communications between him and Mary, although other packets were secretly smuggled. On other occasions, Walsingham managed to read her letters without breaking their seals, and then sent them on to their proper recipients (Guy 437). Mary’s initial efforts at evading surveillance thus failed: in a letter still housed with the rest of Walsingham’s papers, Guy reports, Mary told her French secretary about a secret white ink made out of alum which would


magically reappear when the paper was dipped in a basin of water so that the message could be read while the paper dried (460). After that particular plan failed, Mary advised supporters to send messages in books, instructing them to mark texts containing secret messages with green ribbons. Heidi Brayman Hackel has noted that ‘many early modern gentlewomen’s libraries of herbals, romances, and French New Testaments represent compromises and second choices finally accepted by girls who gave up on their “ebri, grek and laten”’,15 but we might supplement Hackel’s observation with the information that other women’s books could contain equally potent challenges to church and state.

Later, Mary encouraged her new secretary Chatelnault to use an updated code, the key of which she also sent through the regular channels, and which Walsingham therefore easily obtained. In some ways, it’s astonishing that Mary – or anyone else – would be able to fashion a code at a time when spelling was irregular, reading skills so variable, handwriting uneven at best, messengers slow or unreliable; how would any message survive against the more likely odds of foul papers? Indeed, code-making should be counted as another sign of ‘high literacy’ like a personal library or fine italic script. In fact, what was transgressive about female literacy in the early modern period was not that women wrote, or even wrote in Latin, but that some of them could find a way – like some privileged men – to secure proper interpretations for what they had to say, in spite of all the possibilities for misprision.

And thus what’s striking in both Guy’s 2004 biography and Bossy’s 2001 account of Walsingham’s spy-ring is that Mary Stuart’s authorship drops entirely out of the story of the circulation of her writings. To this reader, her control of her readers, her texts, and her media is consistently inventive and extensive. Exploiting the many gaps between type and script, for instance – much like a piece of needlework that could contain spot motifs, band designs, and the alphabet – Mary’s codes included Greek letters, Arabic and roman numerals, French, and her own apparent set of designs. Illiteracy is risked here by tremendous art and much learning, and like Bianca’s misconstrued speech, incomprehensibility shares the page with matters of the greatest significance: a woman’s ‘X’ on the page, more frequently taken as the most convincing proof of her illiteracy, in Mary’s hands has the power to raise legions and unseat queens. Many of the encrypted letters warn Mary’s son to be on his guard


or secure payment of soldiers to protect James; one articulates her desire for the archbishop of Glasgow to be replaced.16 In another letter to Dr. Lewis, her agent in Rome and emissary to the Pope, Mary requests that the twenty-five or so Catholic ‘Inglish’ she employs in her lodgings as spies be absolved for needing to attend ‘hertiks prayer’; even the actions of those who worked for Mary might remain unclear, and so Mary decoded them for the Pope, ‘by reason they serve in the conduct of my secret intelligences for Gods cause and myne’ (Richards 49–50).

In 1584, after Castelnau’s demotion, Mary is more sealed off and more desperate, and she falls for the plan Walsingham concocts in 1586, to have one of his double agents (a Catholic defector named Gifford) approach Mary. Gifford offers to transport her letters in a beer barrel with a false bottom so that Mary could correspond with Anthony Babington, a Catholic in league with the Spanish ambassador Mendoza. Mary had most recently developed a set of codes with her new secretary Nau, but Gifford turned these letters over to Walsingham’s master decoder Phelippes before they were resent to her Catholic allies. Among the many decoded letters was one from Babington, who had written Mary of his plans to rescue her and assassinate Elizabeth with the help of Spanish forces. Mary’s letters, usually drafted in French, needed to be sent in English to Babington, so her secretaries did the drafting and then sent the letters in code with instructions to Babington to burn them. He complied in this case as in the others, but Phellipes had already intercepted this letter, which clearly implicated Mary in Elizabeth’s assassination:

I will be gladd to know [Mary writes] the names and quelityes of the sixe gentlemen which are to accomplish the dessignement, for that it may be I shall be able uppon knowledge of the partyes to give you some further advise necesarye to be followed therein; and even so do I wish to be made acquaynted with the names of all soch principall persons … particularlye how you proceede and as sone as you may for the same purpose who bee alredye and how farr every one privye hereunto (SP 18/55; see decoded version in Richards 55).

This odd request for the names of the ‘sixe gentlemen’ had actually been forged by Phellipes after he decoded the letter, ‘reciphered’ it back into English, and also produced a copy of the French code. When Mary’s secretaries confronted what they took to be an original, they promptly confessed without even needing, Guy notes, to be tortured


(476). Mary steadfastly denied that these letters were in her hand, as indeed they weren’t, and also disavowed any guilt in the proceedings, but the circuit of male interpreters was too closed to admit her constructions. The fact that the men she trusted could not read her writing or make out her hand supplied all the evidence Walsingham and Cecil needed to convince Elizabeth to have Mary stand trial.

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These days, cryptography is a technology enabled by mathematics and computer science, but in the early modern period cryptography belonged to other early modern writing technologies like needlework, allegory, graffiti, and the masque, activities for which many women had great skill and made enormous investments of time and interest.17 No doubt Stuart’s example was a cautionary one for the women writers at Elizabeth’s court, however. Elizabeth herself apparently never relied on ciphers, unlike Mary whom, Guy tells us, learned as a girl in France to ‘mark the confidential passages of her letters for encoding in cipher’, which were then completed by her private secretary (78). Other women were similarly instructed in cryptography, so the threat of this kind of women’s writing persisted. In the aftermath of the near-catastrophe with Mary, who had in her possession ‘tables of sixty or so ciphers’ when her belongings were confiscated before her 1586 trial (Guy 470), Jane Seager offers herself as Elizabeth’s code-maker and code-breaker in a 1589 New Year’s gift, an elaborately hand-colored manuscript entitled The Divine Prophesies of the Ten Sibills, now in The British Library.

Jessica Malay argues convincingly that Seager’s source for Barbieri’s text was Sebastion Castalioni’s Sibyllinorum Oracularum, written in Latin and published in 1544,18 but Seager’s prophecies are also accompanied by a translation into Dr. Timothy Bright’s ‘rare Arte of Charactery’, a code whereby letters of the alphabet were assigned a special character and words formed by ‘means of a variety of hooks and/or by changing the position of the initial character’.19 Seager’s secrets, transcribed this way, are explicitly linked, in fact, to the blessing the Virgin Mary carried, for Seager details a sacred birth which ‘shall remove the worldes obscurity: / Unfoulding all the Prophets prophecies/And knotty volumes of the Jewish race’ (‘Samia’ ll. 2–4). Put another way, Mary’s child is as valuable as the story of his birth which Seager tells, for both evade men’s efforts to discover them:


I’ will not be longe, but seilence must be kept,And whosoeuer will laye up this thinge, Within his myndfull hart, he soone shall feele,Th’ exceeding Joye of that great saviour:Who being then conceaved in the wombe Of a pure virgine; without helpe of man (‘Delphica’ ll. 1–6).

God’s writing does not need male input, according to Seager, but the counsellors at Elizabeth’s court had avidly greeted any help they could find in wrestling with Mary Stuart’s writings, and Bright’s code had been introduced to such readers in a treatise published a year earlier, Characterie An Arte of Shorte, Swifte, And Secret Writing By Character (1588). Although Bright’s text had therefore already been published when Seager makes her gift, its circulation was limited because Bright’s characters needed to be lettered by hand after the text was printed. Seager’s work, a single presentation book, exposes charactery more widely and simplifies it, too. If Bright’s system is logical, it certainly is hard to master or memorise and, as Patricia Brewerton points out, it would be simpler and faster to write out a word in longhand; in fact, she argues that Bright’s purpose was not speedwriting, but accurate transcription of unwritten speech, useful in recording the sermons of insufficiently reformist ministers (951).

Bright had met Walsingham in 1572; other patrons included Mildmay and Cecil (Brewerton 947). These men’s shared and ardent Protestantism might have encouraged Walsingham to commission Bright as a cryptographer. Bright had stayed with Walsingham in Paris during the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (see Malay 184), and Walsingham’s name appears with Cecil’s in a petition for the radical protestant to be appointed physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1584, even though Bright lacked a license to practice in London (Brewerton 946–48). The connection to Walsginham’s cryptography is made more explicit in a letter by another patron to Cecil, written at the same time that Mary Stuart’s letters had been confiscated and the Babington plot exposed. The patron’s letter suggests that Bright’s talents might be useful ‘as much for you as Mr. Babington’s Barbar had been in a lyke case of using his art and facultie’ (cited by Brewerton 953). Babington’s barber had chopped off the hair of Mary’s conspirator after he fled when his plot was revealed, allowing Babington to stay hidden for ten days. It would be stretching the analogy to claim that Bright was similarly disguised as a doctor to work as a cryptographer, but Walsingham and Cecil’s


strenuous efforts on his behalf, at a time when Mary Stuart’s threats were becoming terrifyingly real, should make us wonder.

Seager’s motives are rather different. Her book is covered in velvet with hand-decorated glass panels on front and back, as if to make transparency the most crucial feature of both these prophecies and Seager’s ‘art and facultie’. Although she employs Bright’s code, she also manages to leave the male cryptographer out of the secret space she has fashioned for herself and the Queen. The ten prophecies in careful italic are placed alongside the encodings in charactery, so that Elizabeth can see and compare for herself.

Malay describes this work as Seager’s ‘bid’ to ‘participate in the gift-giving practices of the period’ as well as ‘to promote protestant political aims’ and ‘herald’ a ‘new age’ or ‘dynastic change’ after the defeat of the Armada and death of Henry III of France, ‘access[ing] and promot[ing]’ a ‘growing sacral and imperialistic consciousness surrounding the Queen’ (176–78, 181). But I’d suggest that Seager’s aims are even more ambitious, since they involve more personal hopes for her own career, perhaps as a tutor to or copyist or spy for Elizabeth – hopes shared by calligrapher Esther Inglis, whom Malay also mentions (183). After all, women’s talents are highlighted within and without Seager’s text. Each of the prophecies describes the birth of a saviour, but they also praise the Virgin Mary as a cipher herself, a woman whose virtues are hidden or unreadable and therefore incredibly powerful: if the analogy between the Virgin Mary and the Queen is deliberate, the links to Seager’s own modest position are clear, too, for both she and Elizabeth occupy the position of the sibills in possession of sacred knowledge: ‘What they foretold, or saw, wee see, and heare,’ says Seager in her ‘Concluding Address’ (l. 3). Especially striking to me is the way Seager aims to instruct the Queen, attesting to the scribe’s loyalty by demonstrating her skills as a prophetic midwife, the way God uses Mary’s body as a vessel for the dissemination of His word: ‘The highest birth shallbe under the fleshe / A Virgine trew without all spot, or blame./ The sacred worde shall fill with heauenly grace/By the prescience of the holye spirit’ (‘Agrippa’ ll. 1–4).

The analogy becomes even clearer at the end of the volume, where Seager and Elizabeth reverse roles and Seager becomes a figure for Elizabeth’s divinity:

Would God I weare a Sibell to divineIn worthy vearse your lasting happynes:


Then only I should be CharacteresOf that, which words with wounder might defyneBut what need I to wish, when you are such,Of whose perfections none can write too much. (‘Concluding Address to the Queen’ ll. 5–10).

The flattery is strained, even blasphemous, perhaps, proposing that the Virgin Mary’s child is an emblem of his mother’s power. But Seager’s talents and Elizabeth’s needs are equally profound. Crain reminds us that the early modern world presented readers and writers with a range of competing technologies – oral, print, visual, classical, vernacular, codes, song, italic, secretary – and very few people, aside from Seager, it seems, as adept at keeping secrets as she is in sharing them, could claim to make sense of them all.

For all of these reasons, Seager doesn’t use Latin, another relatively restricted courtly language. Courtly men had taken possession of Mary Stuart’s writings, and even Bianca’s Lucentio’s right reading of his beloved has little to do with what she’s saying. Seager is thus providing Elizabeth with the means to opt out of an interpretive system which privileges the male writer and male reader. Like many fifteenth- and sixteenth-century midwives’ books which circulated only in manuscript, Seager’s text bypasses the writings of male physicians like Bright, men who in one way or another aimed to control female bodies by supervising how women could read or be read.20

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Seager’s 1589 text provides Elizabeth with both a coded text and a decoded transcription, but perhaps Seager’s services were judged unnecessary. In the Queen’s own speeches and writings in the later years of her reign, Elizabeth often presents herself as a practitioner of secret knowledge, a sovereign magician whose subjectivity coincides with a wish to expose her secrets and manufacture more, if she wishes. And although there is no record of whether Elizabeth had received Seager’s gift, much less if she read it, we know something of Elizabeth’s attitude towards other female secrets from the two speeches made to Parliament in November 1586, after Mary Stuart was judged guilty of participating in the Babington plot and Parliament was urging Mary’s execution. These carefully staged unveilings of Elizabeth’s thoughts and fears about her enemy were published in England and abroad. As Allison Heisch (1975) reports, ‘in each


case, the queen spoke, and … a copy of her text – either prepared in advance or supplied by a stenographer present at the audience – was revised by the queen, converted into fair copy, and revised once more … accompanied by an elaborate, if transparent explanation that one R.C., plausibly Burghley’s son Robert Cecil, had imperfectly transcribed the queen’s words’ (46). We should understand this political machinery as one part of a sophisticated rhetorical repertoire of smoke and mirrors utilised to explain Elizabeth’s delays and tactics, and to create new ones. Elizabeth was unusual in her reliance upon this system, however. As Heisch (1975) also points out, neither Mary Tudor nor Mary Stuart even addressed their own Parliaments, preferring the services of secretaries and messengers to get their words out (35).

At first, it seems that Elizabeth was reluctant to have Mary executed and looked for some other way out, ideally someone else to privately dispatch the problem. Heisch maintains that ‘short of speaking the unspeakable, Elizabeth ha[d] come as close to advocating assassination of her cousin as seems possible’ by referring in her first November speech to The Bond of Association ‘and [the] solemn oath’ of those who signed it to punish with death anyone who conspired against Elizabeth’s throne.21 ‘I perceive yow have well considered of my last message sent unto you,’ the Queen says, ‘ proceeding from an earnest desire and a hungry will in me that some way might be by you for my safety devised without the execution of that Act whereunto by your petition I was moved’ (CW 196, qtd. by Heisch [1993] 52). Elizabeth mentions the act so that she doesn’t have to enforce it.

But the ‘hungry will’ is tempered with caution. Equally unwilling to finance, much less acknowledge Walsingham’s spymastering, Elizabeth was also impervious to the blandishments of Cecil, who wanted the death penalty publicly enforced, ‘propped up by parliamentary statute’ (Heisch [1993] 598). When Elizabeth’s coded messages to have Mary murdered were not received by her male advisors, however, she decides to transcribe her secrets once again in a second speech to Parliament. Heisch (1993) emphasises William Cecil’s skill in directing Elizabeth’s hand in both November speeches to order an execution she found personally distasteful and politically risky, and points to the changes the Queen makes, including alterations which ‘depersonalized the image of Mary’ as coming from him (592, 601). But if Elizabeth takes up some of Cecil’s suggestions, she also adopts a radically different perspective


in describing herself and her rival. For one thing, she continually renders the conflict between her and Mary a personal matter, one that should have involved forgiveness and sympathy rather than the legal manoeuvrings of a criminal trial.22 In Elizabeth’s eyes, on these pages, Mary is a kinswoman, a milkmaid, and a fellow queen, with each role requiring a specific, intimate, and clearly female language, one that is undecipherable or unimportant to the male advisors who surrounded them both.

Indeed, Elizabeth’s first November speech is itself a confession about her relationship with Mary, as she explains her motives in seeking justice:

And that you may the better perceive how maliciously I have proceeded against her, I will declare a matter unto you wherein I shall become a blab: after these last conspiracies and treasons were discovered unto me, of myself I sent and wrote unto her, giving her so to understand that if she wold confess the truth and by her letters advertise me for what cause and by whose means she was induced to consent thereunto, and withal discover the conspirators in this action, assuring her that I dealt not cautiously with her to draw from her the knowledge of anything whereof I was already ignorant, I would cover her shame and save her from reproach. Which offer of mine she utterly refused and steadfastly denied her guiltiness therein (see CW 187; qtd. by Heisch [1975] 48).

It is interesting to note how Elizabeth handles the outpouring of many secrets in this address, ‘play[ing] the blab’ by describing her efforts to make Mary confess a shame that Elizabeth would then cover. Elizabeth is both decoder and master cryptographer here, able to elude Cecil’s strategising and Phelippe’s code-breaking, describing a letter of hers that somehow escaped all of Walsingham’s surveillance efforts and remained outside of the beer barrels. Also striking is Elizabeth’s suggestion that Mary has been coerced by ‘the conspirators in this action,’ and her promise to rescue Mary from them. While the two women write, the men around them commit treason. Elizabeth later corrected this part of her speech for publication:

As it is not unknown to some of my lords here (for now I will play the blab), I secretly wrote her a letter upon the discovery of sundry treasons, that if she would confess them and privately acknowledge them by her letter to myself, she never should need be called for them into so public question. Neither did I it of mind to circumvent her, for then I knew as much as she could confess, and so did I write’ (Heisch [1975] 49; CW 192).


In this revision, Elizabeth invites from Mary a return letter or private communication, avoiding both ‘the public question’ and the ‘appearance of circumvent[ing] her’ or some of the lords to whom this matter ‘is not unknown’. But then Elizabeth confides to her audience something about Mary, not to her, telling them: ‘I thought she truly would repent (as perhaps she would easily appear in outward show to do)’ (see CW 192; Heisch [1975] 50). Elizabeth’s temptation to misread Mary (rather than her letters) is contrasted with the defects of her counsellors’ interpretive habits: ‘But you, my masters of the law, are so fine – you regard so much the words, syllables, and letters thereof more than the true sense and meaning indeed’. In the revision of this speech, Elizabeth faults ‘pettifoggers of the law, who look more on the outside of their books than study them within’ (CW 188). In fact, most women’s secrets, the Queen suggests, are invented by the misreadings of men, and so to counter this potentially deadly situation, the Queen makes herself cryptographer of the scene before all of them. She announces: ‘I will tell you a secret which is most true’ (CW 189), proceeding to lay out another plot: ‘There are yet some living who within fourteen days have undertaken to take away my life, and have offered to be hanged if within a month it be not performed’ (CW 189).

Of course, we can take all of Elizabeth’s carefully crafted ‘admissions’ as pieces of a rhetoric artfully designed to establish the Queen’s feminine sympathy for her prisoner and downplay her aggressiveness, but the effect on her auditors abroad as well as at home would be the same: Elizabeth’s invisible language to another woman – looking in Mary’s heart, and writing – might be more effective, and more just, than the elaborate legal petitions mounted by her learned counsellors. More than once, Elizabeth proposes that the problems between her and Mary might have disappeared altogether were it not for the damaging presence of secretaries in their private chambers: ‘if it had pleased God to have made us both milkmaids with pails in our arms, so that the matter should have rested between us two’ (CW 188). In the corrected version of the same speech, the lines of clarity and dependency are continually and even more extensively blurred, for Elizabeth spills secrets and keeps others, is in command whilst being endangered. Telling them about the latest plot, she adds in the corrected text: ‘Hereby I see your danger in me, and neither can nor will I be so unthankful or careless of your consciences as not provide for your safety’ (CW 195).


Almost twenty years after her initial claim about Elizabeth’s masterful rhetorical handling of the November speeches, Heisch (1993) presents the Queen as a hostage to Cecil’s ‘blue pencil’, failing to acknowledge the magic tricks Elizabeth shares with her audience, her ability to send secret messages and infiltrate secret spaces, as I try to describe above. Yet only in the context of such royal prestidigitation can Elizabeth respond with official unresponsiveness not once but twice in her second speech of 24th November, given after she continually stalls in signing Mary’s death warrant:

But now for answer unto you, you must take an answer without answer at my hands. For if I should say I would not do it, I should peradventure say that which I did not think, and otherwise than it might be. If I should say I would do it, it were not fit in the place and at this time, although I did mean it. Wherefore I must desire you to hold yourselves satisfied with this answer answerless. … There must be deeds and not words which must satisfice your demand (CW 199–200).

In the corrected version of this speech, Elizabeth alludes to her long-established practice of indirection, one that she had hoped her supporters would have been able, at this point, to decipher or, instead, to put deeds over words. ‘For either those put in trust by me to supply my place have not performed their duties towards me, or else they have signified unto you all that my desire was that everyone should do according to his conscience, and in the course of his proceedings should enjoy both freedom of voice and liberty of opinion. And what they would not openly declare, they might privately to myself have revealed’ (CW 201). In other words, the most loyal and secret actor could be assured of the Queen’s invisible gratitude for reading her invisible ‘desires’ and then acting upon them. As if to underscore this division of labour, Elizabeth then repeats her ‘answer without answer’ (CW 204).

***

Seager’s 1589 prophecies liken Jesus’s birth to a textual secret that has been carefully kept by women. The history of women’s blabbing their secrets on paper stretches even further back, though, at least as far as Margery Kempe, dictating her story to an amanuensis in an autobiography she cannot read. Such literary expressions of revealing and concealing are almost always expressions of great power, if not


of linguistic command, as we see in a 1603 poem by a gentlewoman embroideress, who tells us ‘Take all away, the work works in my head.’23

If Latin, as Jane Stevenson (2008) argues, remained a ‘language of authority’ for men and women in the early modern period, then what should we make of the secret languages Bianca and Mary Stuart and Jane Seager employ instead? John Archer (1994) links sovereignty with secret intelligence in his account of Walsingham’s spy ring, but clearer to me from these examples are the ways that women’s writings authorised other kinds of literacy. Of course, Queen Elizabeth also wrested out of her adoring readers countless songs, letters, translations, and poems. Like Shakespeare’s Henry V, at least some of this literary power has very little to do with a sovereign’s own linguistic expertise, as Henry himself tells his new bride: ‘If you will love me soundly with your French heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue’ (Henry V 5.2.104–06). Even Catherine’s defects speak clearly to him. There is no need for an original document to support a bride’s undecipherable pledge, and no need for translation: more important is the confession, and still more valuable – to Shakespeare’s Henry as well as to Elizabeth – is that the tongue or speaker be broken. Sir Francis Walsingham dies in 1590, bankrupted by his labours, buried at night and in secret. Elizabeth’s most famous Golden Speech of 1601 seems to acknowledge her many servants’ tireless efforts, like those of her trusty spymaster, only to cast them aside at the end:

You know our presence cannot assist each action, but must distribute in sundry sorts to divers kinds our commands. If they (as the greatest number be commonly the worst) should (as I doubt not but some do) abuse their charge, annoy whom they should help, and dishonor their king whom they should serve, yet we verily believe that all you will (in your best judgment) discharge us from such guilts (CW 344).

Although the ‘actions’ of ‘divers’ secretaries and spies could easily ‘annoy’, ‘abuse’, or ‘dishonor’ her meanings, the Queen’s ‘commands’ themselves remain untainted and honourable, she says, all versions of her golden speech. And what has seemed like her blabbing has really given nothing away. Elizabeth’s household is locked shut, and the milkmaid is safe within her study.


Notes

1. Nicholas Udall is quoted by Mary Ellen Lamb in ‘The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes Towards Learned Women in the Renaissance’, in Silent But For the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985), 107–25 (107–108).

2. The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty St. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 3–4.

3. Elisa Oh, ‘“The art to desifer the true Caracter of Constancy”: Female Silence in Wroth’s Urania’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 5 (2010): 45–76.

4. All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to the edition prepared by Stephen Greenblatt et al., The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition (2nd edn.) (New York: Norton, 2008).

5. Patricia Parker, ‘Construing Gender: Mastering Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew’, in The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies. ed. Dympna Callaghan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 193–209 (192, 205).

6. That personal touches and other markers of domestic origins in no way interfere with these letters’ political import or bids for publicity is noted by Margaret J. M. Ezell in ‘The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History’, ELR 38: 2 (2008), 331–55. Jane Stevenson is clear about the murky divisions between public and private at work in manuscript writings of this time: ‘It is natural for us now to identify any handwritten as private, anything printed as public. … But an immense amount of recent work on the context of literary production and the circulation of poetry in the sixteenth century disrupts these categories.’ See Stevenson, ‘Women Writing and Scribal Publication in the Sixteenth Century’, in Writings by Early Modern Women: English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 (Vol. 9), ed. Peter Beal and Margaret J. M. Ezell (London: British Library, 2000), 1–32 (1).

7. See ‘“Such newes as on the Queens hye wayes we have mett”: The News and Intelligence Networks of Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (1527–1608)’, in Women and Politics in Early Modern England 1400–1700, ed. James Daybell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 114–31 (118).

8. Heather Wolfe, ‘Women’s Handwriting’, in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writings, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (London: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 21–39 (21).

9. It is hard to say whether this spy-ring was formal or informal. Alison Plowden describes it as part of the Tudor courtly bureaucracy while John Bossy reminds us that the funds typically came out of Walsingham’s pockets. To be sure, code-breaking was just one of many ways employed to infiltrate Mary’s English household and discover the aims of her supporters scattered throughout Europe; Walsingham, John Archer reports, eventually had agents from Calais to Constantinople. For details, see Plowden, The Elizabethan Secret Service (New York: Prentice Hall, 1991); Bossy, Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); and Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 47.


10. See Elizabeth I, Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 200. All further references to the speeches will be taken from this edition, abbreviated CW.

11. Along the same lines, Allison Heisch comments that ‘there is a direct correlation between the political insecurity of her position and the often deliberate obscurity of [Elizabeth’s] language’ in ‘Queen Elizabeth I: Parliamentary Rhetoric and the Exercise of Power’, Signs 1:1 (1975), 31–55 (32).

12. Alan Stewart explores Oswald’s responsibilities in ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations 50 (1995), 76–100 (88).

13. John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 465.

14. See Astrophil and Stella 19 ll. 5–6 in Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

15. Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, gender, and literacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 203.

16. Mary’s ciphers are collected in the National Archives, available through State Papers Online. Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009. National Archives Folio Numbers ff. 1055, Document Ref.: SP 52, 33. For decodings of Mary’s ciphers, see Sheila R. Richards, ed., Secret Writing in the Public Records. Henry VIII–George II (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1974), 21.

17. Juliet Fleming explores some of these alternative forms of literacy in Graffiti and the Writing Arts in Early Modern England (London: Reaktion, 2001).

18. Malay, ‘Jane Seager’s Siblylline Poems: Maidenly Negotations Through Elizabethan Gift Exchange’, ELR 36:2 (2006), 173–93 (182). I rely on Malay’s transcription of Seager’s text.

19. Patricia Brewerton explores the facets of Bright’s charactery in ‘“Several keys to ope” the character: The Political and Cultural Significance of Timothy Bright’s “characterie”’, Sixteenth Century Journal 33:4 (2002), 945–61 (951). Additional details about Seager’s background are supplied by Stevenson, ‘Female Authority and Authorization Strategies in Early Modern Europe’, in “This Double Voice”: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England. ed. Danielle Clark and Elizabeth Clark (Basingstoke: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 16–40 (19).

20. The circulation of midwives’ books and obstetrical texts is traced by Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth in ‘“I wyl wright of women prevy sekenes”: Imagining Female Literacy and Textual Communities in Medieval and Early Modern Midwifery Manuals’, Critical Survey 14:1 (2002), 44–63.

21. See Heisch, ‘Arguments for an Execution: Queen Elizabeth’s “White Paper” and Lord Burghley’s “Blue Pencil”’, Albion 24:4 (1992) 591–204 (597).

22. In fact, Heisch (1992) suggests Cecil was himself present during some part of the ‘editing session’ of the second speech, ‘in part because one of the headings is in [his] hand, and Elizabeth’s revised language reflects alterations he made in the petition drafted by Parliament’ (603 n. 29).

23. This poem is reprinted in Early Modern Women’s Poetry 1520–1700: An Anthology. ed. Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 156.

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