The Drag Queen in the Garden:
Thomas Randolph Dresses Down Elizabeth I
by Jenny (Walicek) Clendenen
San Jose State University | James D. Phelan Literary Award - First Place, Critical Essay (2006)
“On a maide of honour seene by a schollar in Sommerset Garden,” is an undated poem attributed to the early seventeenth century poet and playwright Thomas Randolph. It tells the odd tale of a disgraced scholar who, while walking in a royal garden, sees a woman whose clothing and behavior indicate that she might not be a lady. Although the scholar is told that the person is a maid of honor, he cannot reconcile what he has seen with the terms maid, honoror honesty. The poem seems to be deriding the cross-dressing men or unvirtuous women already villified in anti-theatrical tracts of the time. However, for Randolph the playwright to have written a judgmental ditty about cross-dressing would have been biting the hand that fed him -- and for him to moralize about virtue would have been the pot calling the kettle black. Randolph was a boisterous, often drunk “son of Ben” who wrote witty, licentious satires, squandered his funds and was pursued by creditors before his alcohol-related death at age 34 (“Thomas” Gale). He was not the sort of man one would expect to purse his lips at improprieties.
Instead, like his idol Ben Jonson[1], Randolph was well aware of the metaphoric value of cross-dressing as a manifestation of duplicity. He tailors this metaphor to his “Maid,” fine-stitching it with multi-layered language and unusual images intricately designed to create, as the speaker says, a riddle. Such complexity was unnecessary to simply denigrate cross-dressers or bad women, and deciphering the riddle reveals a more specific target. “Maid” is a carefully constructed mockery of an individual infamous for her duplicity of gender, morality and truth: Elizabeth I, the queen who would be king.
Elizabeth had died in 1603, two years before Randolph was born, but by the 1620’s the “aging, irascible and lukewarm Protestant Queen of 1603 was […] embraced as the savior of the reformed church during the mortal struggle with Catholic Spain” (Cramsie). Randolph’s place in time, at Cambridge, and among the “sons of Ben” would have immersed him in the art and literature that glorified Elizabeth as well as the rife rumors and seditious tracts that had disparaged her. He was in an excellent position to note the duality behind her waxing reputation. And since it was Elizabeth who had enacted sumptuary laws against inappropriate dress in 1558 (Lamar 1), and since female cross-dressing was a current fad in Randolph’s day[2] (“Contesting”), it is easy to see why it occurred to him that a cross-dressed Elizabeth would perfectly personify hypocrisy.
The disguised messages in the title and body of this poem reveal the disguised messages in the title and body of England’s self-proclaimed “Virgin Queen.” “On a maide of honour seene by a schollar in Sommerset Garden” immediately infers royalty both in its subject and location. Elizabeth acquired Somerset House in 1533 when she was twenty (Starkey 84), but more importantly the first Duke of Somerset, Thomas Seymour, had been her stepfather in her early teens and was rumored to have been the ruination of her maidenhood. Somerset had made it clear he wanted to marry the twelve-year-old even before he married her stepmother, Catharine Parr; afterward, he would enter the young girl’s bedchamber “bare-legged” to tickle her under the covers, tease her, strike her “on the back or on the buttocks familiarly,” and try to kiss her. He became more and more aggressive, even “romping with her in the garden” where he “cut her gown, being black cloth, into a hundred pieces” (Hibbert 29-30). His advances progressed until her stepmother finally admitted their impropriety and moved Elizabeth elsewhere, but later the rumors of their conduct caused the princess to be implicated in (and interrogated about) one of his treacherous plots (30-31). In her first of many reactions to slander she wrote a defensive letter to her uncle stating that “there goeth rumour abroad, which be greatly both against my honour and honesty (which above all other things I esteem) […] that I am in the Tower, and with child by [Somerset]. My Lord, these are shameful slanders” (Somerset 95). Yet her affection for the Duke was clear, and her many subsequent suitors often resembled him. In this poem, the word “Somerset” provides both the setting and the perpetrator of Elizabeth’s first disgrace.
The opening lines of the poem, “As once in blacke I disrespected walkt, / Where glittering courtiers in their Tissues stalkt” continue the image of Elizabeth being attacked in the garden, but also give us information about the speaker. This disrespected scholar cannot autobiographically be Randolph, if the subject is Elizabeth, as he was born after her death. However, in keeping with the wit and cleverness of this and his other works, he may have been borrowing the voice and situation of a previous Thomas Randolph (1533-1590), who was Elizabeth’s spy in Scotland and envoy to her cousin Mary.[3] That Randolph was an educated, zealous Protestant who once “cultivate[d] the company of scholars” (“Thomas…(1523-1590”), though he was eventually banished from Scotland in disgrace. He would have been surrounded by the “glittering courtiers” of both the Scottish and the English courts (“tissue” refers to fine cloth interwoven with gold or silver -- hence a “glittering” effect). It was he through whom Elizabeth had suggested that her cousin should marry Lord Dudley, reputedly Elizabeth’s own scandalized lover, to avoid marriage with Darnley. The ambassador was “embarrassed to put forward the name of a suitor who was widely supposed in Scotland not only to be his monarch’s lover but the murderer of his wife” (Hibbert 154). Allusions to duplicity abound in Randolph’s espionage, Elizabeth’s betrayal of Dudley, and Dudley’s adulterous betrayal (at least) of his wife.
The next lines introduce the idea of a masculine woman who may, after all, turn out to be a cross-dressed man: “I cast by chaunce my melancholy eye / Upon a woman (as I thought) past by” (ll 3-4). “As I thought” immediately implies that he is not seeing a woman after all. The spelling “past” instead of “passed” may have significance, as Elizabeth was a figure from the poet’s past, but even more interesting is the choice of attire upon which the speaker focuses in the first of three vignettes:
But when I viewed her ruffe, and beaver reard
As if Priapus-like she would have feard
The ravenous Harpyes from the clustred grape,
Then I began much to mistrust her shape (ll 5-8)
The ruff, or lace collar, is strongly identified with Elizabeth, though worn by both men and women, as was the beaver hat. This androgynous, class-ambiguous wardrobe is masculinized and reclassified by a different reading of “beaver reard,” which, in the sixteenth century, was understood to be the raised visor of a knight’s helmet. This reading, especially considering the ensuing phallic reference to Priapus, would seem to indicate that the person espied is really a man. Priapus was the Roman god of fertility, always represented with an enormous erect phallus. So intimidating is his form that, according to Virgil and Seutonius, it was used as a scarecrow in gardens (Virgil, Eclogue 7.33, Georgics 4.1111; Seutonius On Grammarians XI). No wonder the speaker says that this image caused him to “mistrust her shape” -- and yet he continues to employ the feminine pronoun throughout the entire poem.
This dichotomy is crucial to interpreting the vignette. In this man/woman image, Randolph is evoking Elizabeth’s defining moment at Tilbury in 1588, reviewing her troops as the Spanish Armada made its way across the Channel. Mounted on a white charger, wearing a steel corslet over her dress and ruff, carrying the sword of state, and attended by a page carrying her plumed helmet (Levin 143, Hibbert 223), she gave her famous gender-bending speech: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too […] I will be your General” (Levin 144). Eyewitness John Aske described her as “a sacred Generall” who “marched King-like” among the soldiers (143).
The idea of dressing like a man did not seem to bother Elizabeth (upon the suggestion she pay her cousin a covert visit dressed as a page, she sighed “Alas! if I might do this” [125, 202]), but when the unfortunately named John Stubbs referrred to her as “Eve and Adam,” she had his hand cut off (Levin 141, Hibbert 197). She did not want to physically be a man; she only wanted the power of the gender. She was constantly aware of people’s perception that a woman was not fit to rule -- a perception given voice by a housewife watching the coronation parade: “Oh, Lord! The Queen is a woman!” (Hibbert 66). Elizabeth often referred to herself as a prince, and was proud of her resemblance to her father, Henry VIII. Furthermore, her refusal to marry because she was wedded to (feminine) England implied her maleness, and raised her status to that of a bachelor rather than an old maid. These mixed messages about her femininity naturally led to rumors about her sexuality (68). In fact, in the same year she acted as a General at Tilbury, Cardinal Allen issued a vitriolic tract about Elizabeth’s sexual promiscuity (79-81).
Elizabeth’s manly moment at Tilbury could, and did, scare the “ravenous Harpyes from the clustred grape.” As the “Priapus-like” scarecrow figure, she kept the harpies,[4] symbolizing the marauding Spanish, literally at bay. Not only was Spanish aggression curtailed at Plymouth, but in the Americas, where her forces protected the “land of grapes” described by Sir Walter Ralegh’s exploration party when they claimed and named Virginia for their queen in 1585. They found it "so full of grapes {scuppernongs } as the very beating and surge of the Sea overflowed them, of which we found such plentie, as well there as in all places else, both on the sand and on the greene soil on the hils, as in the plaines, as well on every little shrubbe, as also climing towards the tops of high Cedars, that I thinke in all the world the like abundance is not to be found." (“Exploration”). Two more definitive symbols of the New World are found through zoological readings of beaver and harpies, both creatures uniquely indigenous to the Americas. Randolph uses grapes, beavers and harpy eagles to tell us what the fight was really about -- and to point out that the battle against the Armada was financed by the English plundering of American treasure from Spanish ships.
The first three lines in the second vignette add to this New World imagery and make the connection to Ralegh personal: “When viewing curiously, away she slipt, / And in a fount her whited hand she dipt. ” (ll 9-10). This is a reference to the famous Armada portrait of Elizabeth with her white hand on a globe, most notable for the way in which her fingers rest on the Americas (fig 1). She was known for the natural whiteness of her hands and also for using white lead paint to cover her smallpox scars (“Queen”); in 1552 Huloet defined something whited as “paynted with white leade.” In the seventeenth century “whited” was used primarily as an allusion to the Biblical term “whited sepulchres” (Matt 23:7), which insinuates something unclean that has been painted over -- Milton wrote in Tetrach that “the whole neighbourhood Sees his foule inside through his whited skin” (Hor. Ep. 1 xvi. 40). The “whited hand” is a reference to Elizabeth’s hidden truths (also seen in her deceptively ageless portraiture), and the “fount” to the seas upon which she launched England’s first navy.
Not only do these and the ensuing lines suggest her foray into naval battles and overseas expansionism, but also a scandal connected to the New World explorer, courtier and poet Sir Walter Ralegh, whom she nicknamed “Water” and in whose privateering expeditions she profitably invested. (Hibbert 129). Lines 11-13 read “The angry water as if wrong’d thereby / Ranne murmuring thence a second touch to fly / At which away she stalkes […].” Interpreting “fount” as “poet,” which is how it was most often used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we find the occasion of their spat over Ralegh’s secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton, for which the queen imprisoned them both in the Tower (130). Ralegh, who according to John Aubrey was “damnably proud,” (128), was released in a month but forced to report to the queen’s new, young, hotheaded and inexperienced favorite, the Earl of Essex (230, 232).
Lines 14-18 introduce the third vignette, wherein the woman walks through the rose garden and exposes her stocking:
She viewes the situation of each rose;
And having higher rays’d her gowne, she gaz’d
Upon her crimson stocking which amaz’d
Blusht at her open impudence, and sent
Reflection to her cheeke, for punishment.
This vignette can be interepreted as referring to two notable events in Elizabeth’s life. The most relevant occurred in 1581 after a party aboard the Golden Hind celebrating Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe. Elizabeth and Marchaumont, a French ambassador negotiating her marriage to the Duke of Anjou, were inspecting the treasure-laden ship (“viewes the situation of each rose”[5]) when her garter came undone and began trailing along the ground from under her skirt. The ambassador asked if he might take the memento to his master. Elizabeth saucily replied that she needed it to hold up her stocking, and then to replace it she “raised her skirt to an immodest level” (Watkins 95). Later she sent him the garter, but after protracted marriage negotiations (including demands that outraged the French) and a face-to-face commitment to marry the Duke, she canceled her engagement at the last minute and then fell ill (Hibbert 201) -- perhaps a “punishment” for her “impudence.” Flirtation and vascillation were typical of Elizabeth, who teased all of her suitors endlessly. The dichotomy of her distaste for marriage and her greed for proposals contributed to the image of her as duplicitous (Levin 45, 70).
The other incident related to this vignette occurred in 1562 when, after a walk through the garden which she herself was designing (“viewes the situation of each rose”) Elizabeth went to bed extremely ill and was diagnosed with smallpox, the obvious symptoms of which are small, blistering red (“crimson”) pimples. Even so, she refused to believe she had the disease and banished her doctor rudely, calling him a knave (“Blusht at her open impudence”). He was forcibly summoned back to save her life, which he did by wrapping her tightly in red blankets and placing her by the fire (“sent / Reflection to her cheeke, for punishment) -- a cure which he obtained from the earliest English treatise on medicine, the aptly-named 14th-century Rosa Anglica by John of Gaddesden (Hibbert 86). This episode exemplifies Elizabeth’s frequent rudeness in private, which was in contrast with her projected image. However, it is out of sequence with and unconnected to the New World events described in the other two vignettes, and may have been included because Randolph, who had also suffered from smallpox, found it personally significant (“Thomas” Gale).
The speaker has witnessed the woman’s masculinity, power, and scandalous behavior. Now he asks a passing gardener about her identity: “As thus I stood the Gardiner chaunce to passe, / My friend (quoth I) what is this stately lasse?” There are several clues in these two lines to solidify the identification of the woman as Elizabeth. First, the pronoun used is not “who” but “what,” implying a title or object instead of simply a person; which title or object is implied in the use of the adjective “stately.” Not only does this infer the State, but it also invokes Sir James Melville’s bold comment to Elizabeth: “I know your stately stomach. [If you were married you would be Queen but] now ye are King and Queen baith” (Hibbert 202). Third, the capitalization and misspelling of the word “Gardiner”[6] is intentional: Stephen Gardiner was the antagonistic bishop who locked Elizabeth in the Tower when she was only fifteen and interrogated her about her involvement in Wyatt’s Rebellion against her half-sister, Queen Mary. (According to later rumor, he impregnated her and she disposed of the child.) Elizabeth adamantly asserted her innocence, but Gardiner was convinced she was guilty and should be executed because of her liability to Mary (Hibbert 49-50).
The last three lines give us the “Gardiner’s” response to the scholar’s question, and the latter’s consequent puzzlement:
A maide of honour Sir, said he, and goes
Leaving a riddle, was enough to pose
The crafty Oedipus, for I could see
Nor mayde, nor honour, sure noe honesty.
The allusion to Oedipus is not only about the scholar’s difficulty in solving the Sphinx-like riddle, but also a pre-Freudian reference to the molestation Elizabeth suffered at the hands of her stepfather, and the rumor that she had given birth to his baby (Levin 191). Other rumors of incest surfaced in 1609 when Pruritanus, a tract smuggled from France, raged against Elizabeth as an immodest, dishonest woman who had prostituted herself and had children, and who was herself the product of incest (85), but the poem has effectively ended where it began, on the Somerset scandal. As mentioned earlier, Elizabeth had written a letter in 1550 defending her “honour and honesty (which above all other things I esteem)” (Somerset 95) and now, thirty-eight years later, the speaker concludes -- literally -- that she has neither.
Randolph cannot see a “mayde” in the virginal sense, the youthful sense, or even, given the Tilbury episode in the first vignette, the female sense. He cannot see “honour,” as she had many intimate relationships with many men, some married -- including Sir Walter Ralegh, as referenced in the second vignette. Her contemporary, Henry IV of France, used to joke that one of life’s three unanswerable questions was “whether Queen Elizabeth was a maid or no” (Levin 66, 191). The poet cannot see “honesty” in her marriage intentions, her virginity claims, or her political dealings, as demonstrated in the third vignette. Historian Christopher Hibbert says she was “instinctively deceitful, and so reluctant to reveal her hand that even her closest adviseres were often at a loss to gather what her true opinions were, so adept did she become at obfuscation, masquerade and camouflage” (115).
Randolph has seen through the image Elizabeth cultivated of the maidenly, honorable, honest “Virgin Queen.” This self-proclaimed title was the staunchly Protestant monarch’s attempt to replace Mary as the worshipped Virgin, and to this end the queen appropriated many Catholic symbols (Levin 26, 70). Of these, three of the most potent are included in Randolph’s poem, one in each vignette: grapes (sacramental wine), fount (the word commonly used for baptismal), and roses (rosary and symbol of Mary). Furthermore, the three colors mentioned in “Maid” are black, white and red, the liturgical colors for nuns, popes and cardinals -- and Elizabeth’s three favorites. Randolph’s strategic references to “Virginal” symbolism reinforce the vignettes about her duplicity of gender, morality and truth.
“On a maide of honour seene by a schollar in Sommerset Garden,” opens each vignette with a different tense of the word “view.” It is a poem about seeing and yet not seeing, being and yet not being -- states of disguise and duplicity that are symbolized, in this poem, by the idea of cross-dressing. Under the ruff, the helmet, the raised gown and the crimson stocking is a contrary woman of contradictory behavior, actions and principles. This truth is hidden within the odd title, overdressed structure, ambiguous language and convoluted images of Randolph’s riddle -- and of the Virgin Queen herself.
WORKS CITED
“Contesting Cultural Norms: Cross-Dressing.” Norton Topics Online. Copyright 2003-2004.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 11//27/04. <http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/17century/topic_1/mulier.htm>
Cramsie, John. Rev. of The Reign of Elizabeth I by Carole Levin (Palgrave, London, 2002).
Union College, Schenectady, New York. 12/01/04.
<http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Elizabeth/revcramsie.html>
“Exploration of Roanoke Island, 1584. Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. Updated 12/2/04.
Quoting Barlowe, Arthur’s First Voyage to Virginia 1584. 12/6/04. <http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/hh/16/hh16c.htm >
Gosson, Stephen. Playes Confuted in Five Actions. 1582 tract. Schoenberg Center for Electronic
Text and Image. 12/6/04.
<htttp://dewey.library.upenn.edu/SCETI/PrintedBooksNew/index.cfm?TextID=gosson&PagePosition=1>
Hibbert, Christopher. The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age. New York:
Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1991.
Huloet, Richard. Abecedarium Anglico-Latium, 1552. Facsimile of 1st ed., Londini, Ex officina
Gulielmi Riddel, 1552. Menston, Scolar P., 1970. Online 12/04/04. <http://isbndb.com/d/book/abecedarium_anglico_latium_1552.html>
LaMar, Virginia A. English Dress in the Age of Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1958.
Levin, Carole. The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power.
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
“On Board the Mary Rose.” Learning City. Mary Rose Trust. 12/6/04.
<http://www.maryrose.org/lcity/history/history5.htm>
Nahum, Peter. “Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I.” The Leicester Galleries. The British Antique
Dealer’s Association. 12/03/04.
<http://www.bada.org/provenart/dealer_stock_details.cgi?d_id=253&a_id=1062>
“Queen Elizabeth.” Historic-UK.com Copyright 2004. 12/06/04.
<http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/England-History/QueenElizabethI.htm >
Somerset, Anne. Elizabeth I. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991
“Thomas Randolph.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Gale Literary Databases. Copyright
2003. 10/27/04. <http://0-galenet.galegroup.com.mill1.sjlibrary.org/servlet/GLD>
“Thomas Randolph (1523-1590).” LoveToKnow 1911 Online Encylopedia. Copyright 2004.
<http://57.1911encyclopedia.org/R/RA/RANDOLPH_THOMAS_1523_1590_.htm>
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Early Modern England.” Majorweather.com. From paper presented at 1998 Huntington Library Graduate Seminars in Early Modern British History. Home page. 11/5/04 <http://www.majorweather.com/projects/000040.
[1] Ben Jonson satirized the hypocrisy of the self-righteous moralizers in his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), in which cross-dressed puppets (imitating Hero and Leander) chastise each other for sexual “profanations” and then disrobe to reveal their own immoralities. “The controversy over the supposed acts of puppet transvestism bring into focus the misguided moralizing of those who would maintain ‘order’ at the fair. The play’s most serious transgressors are those who have represented themselves as morally superior but who lack the integrity to uphold the image they project” (Turner).
[2] Ironically, the 1620 pamphlet Hic Mulier responded to attacks on female cross-dressing by “emphasizing the distinctly feminized styles male courtiers were wearing at the time, and with some allusion to the sexual ambivalences introduced by the established practice throughout the Elizabethan period and earlier seventeenth century of male actors playing female roles on the English stage” (“Contesting”).
[3] Another paper might investigate the possibility that the previous Thomas Randolph, who worked for Elizabeth and was in London the last four years of his life, during the events described in the poem, was actually the author.
[4] Creatures who stole people and things, as represented in epic legends like Virgil’s Aeneid.
[5] The Mary Rose was the flagship of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII. Edward Howard described her as... "Your good ship, the flower, I trow, of all ships that ever sailed" (“On Board”).
[6] Another less significant “gardener,” Robert Gardner of Garner, was pilloried for claiming that Elizabeth had had children by her long-time lover Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Levin 83).
San Jose State University | James D. Phelan Literary Award - First Place, Critical Essay (2006)
“On a maide of honour seene by a schollar in Sommerset Garden,” is an undated poem attributed to the early seventeenth century poet and playwright Thomas Randolph. It tells the odd tale of a disgraced scholar who, while walking in a royal garden, sees a woman whose clothing and behavior indicate that she might not be a lady. Although the scholar is told that the person is a maid of honor, he cannot reconcile what he has seen with the terms maid, honoror honesty. The poem seems to be deriding the cross-dressing men or unvirtuous women already villified in anti-theatrical tracts of the time. However, for Randolph the playwright to have written a judgmental ditty about cross-dressing would have been biting the hand that fed him -- and for him to moralize about virtue would have been the pot calling the kettle black. Randolph was a boisterous, often drunk “son of Ben” who wrote witty, licentious satires, squandered his funds and was pursued by creditors before his alcohol-related death at age 34 (“Thomas” Gale). He was not the sort of man one would expect to purse his lips at improprieties.
Instead, like his idol Ben Jonson[1], Randolph was well aware of the metaphoric value of cross-dressing as a manifestation of duplicity. He tailors this metaphor to his “Maid,” fine-stitching it with multi-layered language and unusual images intricately designed to create, as the speaker says, a riddle. Such complexity was unnecessary to simply denigrate cross-dressers or bad women, and deciphering the riddle reveals a more specific target. “Maid” is a carefully constructed mockery of an individual infamous for her duplicity of gender, morality and truth: Elizabeth I, the queen who would be king.
Elizabeth had died in 1603, two years before Randolph was born, but by the 1620’s the “aging, irascible and lukewarm Protestant Queen of 1603 was […] embraced as the savior of the reformed church during the mortal struggle with Catholic Spain” (Cramsie). Randolph’s place in time, at Cambridge, and among the “sons of Ben” would have immersed him in the art and literature that glorified Elizabeth as well as the rife rumors and seditious tracts that had disparaged her. He was in an excellent position to note the duality behind her waxing reputation. And since it was Elizabeth who had enacted sumptuary laws against inappropriate dress in 1558 (Lamar 1), and since female cross-dressing was a current fad in Randolph’s day[2] (“Contesting”), it is easy to see why it occurred to him that a cross-dressed Elizabeth would perfectly personify hypocrisy.
The disguised messages in the title and body of this poem reveal the disguised messages in the title and body of England’s self-proclaimed “Virgin Queen.” “On a maide of honour seene by a schollar in Sommerset Garden” immediately infers royalty both in its subject and location. Elizabeth acquired Somerset House in 1533 when she was twenty (Starkey 84), but more importantly the first Duke of Somerset, Thomas Seymour, had been her stepfather in her early teens and was rumored to have been the ruination of her maidenhood. Somerset had made it clear he wanted to marry the twelve-year-old even before he married her stepmother, Catharine Parr; afterward, he would enter the young girl’s bedchamber “bare-legged” to tickle her under the covers, tease her, strike her “on the back or on the buttocks familiarly,” and try to kiss her. He became more and more aggressive, even “romping with her in the garden” where he “cut her gown, being black cloth, into a hundred pieces” (Hibbert 29-30). His advances progressed until her stepmother finally admitted their impropriety and moved Elizabeth elsewhere, but later the rumors of their conduct caused the princess to be implicated in (and interrogated about) one of his treacherous plots (30-31). In her first of many reactions to slander she wrote a defensive letter to her uncle stating that “there goeth rumour abroad, which be greatly both against my honour and honesty (which above all other things I esteem) […] that I am in the Tower, and with child by [Somerset]. My Lord, these are shameful slanders” (Somerset 95). Yet her affection for the Duke was clear, and her many subsequent suitors often resembled him. In this poem, the word “Somerset” provides both the setting and the perpetrator of Elizabeth’s first disgrace.
The opening lines of the poem, “As once in blacke I disrespected walkt, / Where glittering courtiers in their Tissues stalkt” continue the image of Elizabeth being attacked in the garden, but also give us information about the speaker. This disrespected scholar cannot autobiographically be Randolph, if the subject is Elizabeth, as he was born after her death. However, in keeping with the wit and cleverness of this and his other works, he may have been borrowing the voice and situation of a previous Thomas Randolph (1533-1590), who was Elizabeth’s spy in Scotland and envoy to her cousin Mary.[3] That Randolph was an educated, zealous Protestant who once “cultivate[d] the company of scholars” (“Thomas…(1523-1590”), though he was eventually banished from Scotland in disgrace. He would have been surrounded by the “glittering courtiers” of both the Scottish and the English courts (“tissue” refers to fine cloth interwoven with gold or silver -- hence a “glittering” effect). It was he through whom Elizabeth had suggested that her cousin should marry Lord Dudley, reputedly Elizabeth’s own scandalized lover, to avoid marriage with Darnley. The ambassador was “embarrassed to put forward the name of a suitor who was widely supposed in Scotland not only to be his monarch’s lover but the murderer of his wife” (Hibbert 154). Allusions to duplicity abound in Randolph’s espionage, Elizabeth’s betrayal of Dudley, and Dudley’s adulterous betrayal (at least) of his wife.
The next lines introduce the idea of a masculine woman who may, after all, turn out to be a cross-dressed man: “I cast by chaunce my melancholy eye / Upon a woman (as I thought) past by” (ll 3-4). “As I thought” immediately implies that he is not seeing a woman after all. The spelling “past” instead of “passed” may have significance, as Elizabeth was a figure from the poet’s past, but even more interesting is the choice of attire upon which the speaker focuses in the first of three vignettes:
But when I viewed her ruffe, and beaver reard
As if Priapus-like she would have feard
The ravenous Harpyes from the clustred grape,
Then I began much to mistrust her shape (ll 5-8)
The ruff, or lace collar, is strongly identified with Elizabeth, though worn by both men and women, as was the beaver hat. This androgynous, class-ambiguous wardrobe is masculinized and reclassified by a different reading of “beaver reard,” which, in the sixteenth century, was understood to be the raised visor of a knight’s helmet. This reading, especially considering the ensuing phallic reference to Priapus, would seem to indicate that the person espied is really a man. Priapus was the Roman god of fertility, always represented with an enormous erect phallus. So intimidating is his form that, according to Virgil and Seutonius, it was used as a scarecrow in gardens (Virgil, Eclogue 7.33, Georgics 4.1111; Seutonius On Grammarians XI). No wonder the speaker says that this image caused him to “mistrust her shape” -- and yet he continues to employ the feminine pronoun throughout the entire poem.
This dichotomy is crucial to interpreting the vignette. In this man/woman image, Randolph is evoking Elizabeth’s defining moment at Tilbury in 1588, reviewing her troops as the Spanish Armada made its way across the Channel. Mounted on a white charger, wearing a steel corslet over her dress and ruff, carrying the sword of state, and attended by a page carrying her plumed helmet (Levin 143, Hibbert 223), she gave her famous gender-bending speech: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too […] I will be your General” (Levin 144). Eyewitness John Aske described her as “a sacred Generall” who “marched King-like” among the soldiers (143).
The idea of dressing like a man did not seem to bother Elizabeth (upon the suggestion she pay her cousin a covert visit dressed as a page, she sighed “Alas! if I might do this” [125, 202]), but when the unfortunately named John Stubbs referrred to her as “Eve and Adam,” she had his hand cut off (Levin 141, Hibbert 197). She did not want to physically be a man; she only wanted the power of the gender. She was constantly aware of people’s perception that a woman was not fit to rule -- a perception given voice by a housewife watching the coronation parade: “Oh, Lord! The Queen is a woman!” (Hibbert 66). Elizabeth often referred to herself as a prince, and was proud of her resemblance to her father, Henry VIII. Furthermore, her refusal to marry because she was wedded to (feminine) England implied her maleness, and raised her status to that of a bachelor rather than an old maid. These mixed messages about her femininity naturally led to rumors about her sexuality (68). In fact, in the same year she acted as a General at Tilbury, Cardinal Allen issued a vitriolic tract about Elizabeth’s sexual promiscuity (79-81).
Elizabeth’s manly moment at Tilbury could, and did, scare the “ravenous Harpyes from the clustred grape.” As the “Priapus-like” scarecrow figure, she kept the harpies,[4] symbolizing the marauding Spanish, literally at bay. Not only was Spanish aggression curtailed at Plymouth, but in the Americas, where her forces protected the “land of grapes” described by Sir Walter Ralegh’s exploration party when they claimed and named Virginia for their queen in 1585. They found it "so full of grapes {scuppernongs } as the very beating and surge of the Sea overflowed them, of which we found such plentie, as well there as in all places else, both on the sand and on the greene soil on the hils, as in the plaines, as well on every little shrubbe, as also climing towards the tops of high Cedars, that I thinke in all the world the like abundance is not to be found." (“Exploration”). Two more definitive symbols of the New World are found through zoological readings of beaver and harpies, both creatures uniquely indigenous to the Americas. Randolph uses grapes, beavers and harpy eagles to tell us what the fight was really about -- and to point out that the battle against the Armada was financed by the English plundering of American treasure from Spanish ships.
The first three lines in the second vignette add to this New World imagery and make the connection to Ralegh personal: “When viewing curiously, away she slipt, / And in a fount her whited hand she dipt. ” (ll 9-10). This is a reference to the famous Armada portrait of Elizabeth with her white hand on a globe, most notable for the way in which her fingers rest on the Americas (fig 1). She was known for the natural whiteness of her hands and also for using white lead paint to cover her smallpox scars (“Queen”); in 1552 Huloet defined something whited as “paynted with white leade.” In the seventeenth century “whited” was used primarily as an allusion to the Biblical term “whited sepulchres” (Matt 23:7), which insinuates something unclean that has been painted over -- Milton wrote in Tetrach that “the whole neighbourhood Sees his foule inside through his whited skin” (Hor. Ep. 1 xvi. 40). The “whited hand” is a reference to Elizabeth’s hidden truths (also seen in her deceptively ageless portraiture), and the “fount” to the seas upon which she launched England’s first navy.
Not only do these and the ensuing lines suggest her foray into naval battles and overseas expansionism, but also a scandal connected to the New World explorer, courtier and poet Sir Walter Ralegh, whom she nicknamed “Water” and in whose privateering expeditions she profitably invested. (Hibbert 129). Lines 11-13 read “The angry water as if wrong’d thereby / Ranne murmuring thence a second touch to fly / At which away she stalkes […].” Interpreting “fount” as “poet,” which is how it was most often used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we find the occasion of their spat over Ralegh’s secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton, for which the queen imprisoned them both in the Tower (130). Ralegh, who according to John Aubrey was “damnably proud,” (128), was released in a month but forced to report to the queen’s new, young, hotheaded and inexperienced favorite, the Earl of Essex (230, 232).
Lines 14-18 introduce the third vignette, wherein the woman walks through the rose garden and exposes her stocking:
She viewes the situation of each rose;
And having higher rays’d her gowne, she gaz’d
Upon her crimson stocking which amaz’d
Blusht at her open impudence, and sent
Reflection to her cheeke, for punishment.
This vignette can be interepreted as referring to two notable events in Elizabeth’s life. The most relevant occurred in 1581 after a party aboard the Golden Hind celebrating Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe. Elizabeth and Marchaumont, a French ambassador negotiating her marriage to the Duke of Anjou, were inspecting the treasure-laden ship (“viewes the situation of each rose”[5]) when her garter came undone and began trailing along the ground from under her skirt. The ambassador asked if he might take the memento to his master. Elizabeth saucily replied that she needed it to hold up her stocking, and then to replace it she “raised her skirt to an immodest level” (Watkins 95). Later she sent him the garter, but after protracted marriage negotiations (including demands that outraged the French) and a face-to-face commitment to marry the Duke, she canceled her engagement at the last minute and then fell ill (Hibbert 201) -- perhaps a “punishment” for her “impudence.” Flirtation and vascillation were typical of Elizabeth, who teased all of her suitors endlessly. The dichotomy of her distaste for marriage and her greed for proposals contributed to the image of her as duplicitous (Levin 45, 70).
The other incident related to this vignette occurred in 1562 when, after a walk through the garden which she herself was designing (“viewes the situation of each rose”) Elizabeth went to bed extremely ill and was diagnosed with smallpox, the obvious symptoms of which are small, blistering red (“crimson”) pimples. Even so, she refused to believe she had the disease and banished her doctor rudely, calling him a knave (“Blusht at her open impudence”). He was forcibly summoned back to save her life, which he did by wrapping her tightly in red blankets and placing her by the fire (“sent / Reflection to her cheeke, for punishment) -- a cure which he obtained from the earliest English treatise on medicine, the aptly-named 14th-century Rosa Anglica by John of Gaddesden (Hibbert 86). This episode exemplifies Elizabeth’s frequent rudeness in private, which was in contrast with her projected image. However, it is out of sequence with and unconnected to the New World events described in the other two vignettes, and may have been included because Randolph, who had also suffered from smallpox, found it personally significant (“Thomas” Gale).
The speaker has witnessed the woman’s masculinity, power, and scandalous behavior. Now he asks a passing gardener about her identity: “As thus I stood the Gardiner chaunce to passe, / My friend (quoth I) what is this stately lasse?” There are several clues in these two lines to solidify the identification of the woman as Elizabeth. First, the pronoun used is not “who” but “what,” implying a title or object instead of simply a person; which title or object is implied in the use of the adjective “stately.” Not only does this infer the State, but it also invokes Sir James Melville’s bold comment to Elizabeth: “I know your stately stomach. [If you were married you would be Queen but] now ye are King and Queen baith” (Hibbert 202). Third, the capitalization and misspelling of the word “Gardiner”[6] is intentional: Stephen Gardiner was the antagonistic bishop who locked Elizabeth in the Tower when she was only fifteen and interrogated her about her involvement in Wyatt’s Rebellion against her half-sister, Queen Mary. (According to later rumor, he impregnated her and she disposed of the child.) Elizabeth adamantly asserted her innocence, but Gardiner was convinced she was guilty and should be executed because of her liability to Mary (Hibbert 49-50).
The last three lines give us the “Gardiner’s” response to the scholar’s question, and the latter’s consequent puzzlement:
A maide of honour Sir, said he, and goes
Leaving a riddle, was enough to pose
The crafty Oedipus, for I could see
Nor mayde, nor honour, sure noe honesty.
The allusion to Oedipus is not only about the scholar’s difficulty in solving the Sphinx-like riddle, but also a pre-Freudian reference to the molestation Elizabeth suffered at the hands of her stepfather, and the rumor that she had given birth to his baby (Levin 191). Other rumors of incest surfaced in 1609 when Pruritanus, a tract smuggled from France, raged against Elizabeth as an immodest, dishonest woman who had prostituted herself and had children, and who was herself the product of incest (85), but the poem has effectively ended where it began, on the Somerset scandal. As mentioned earlier, Elizabeth had written a letter in 1550 defending her “honour and honesty (which above all other things I esteem)” (Somerset 95) and now, thirty-eight years later, the speaker concludes -- literally -- that she has neither.
Randolph cannot see a “mayde” in the virginal sense, the youthful sense, or even, given the Tilbury episode in the first vignette, the female sense. He cannot see “honour,” as she had many intimate relationships with many men, some married -- including Sir Walter Ralegh, as referenced in the second vignette. Her contemporary, Henry IV of France, used to joke that one of life’s three unanswerable questions was “whether Queen Elizabeth was a maid or no” (Levin 66, 191). The poet cannot see “honesty” in her marriage intentions, her virginity claims, or her political dealings, as demonstrated in the third vignette. Historian Christopher Hibbert says she was “instinctively deceitful, and so reluctant to reveal her hand that even her closest adviseres were often at a loss to gather what her true opinions were, so adept did she become at obfuscation, masquerade and camouflage” (115).
Randolph has seen through the image Elizabeth cultivated of the maidenly, honorable, honest “Virgin Queen.” This self-proclaimed title was the staunchly Protestant monarch’s attempt to replace Mary as the worshipped Virgin, and to this end the queen appropriated many Catholic symbols (Levin 26, 70). Of these, three of the most potent are included in Randolph’s poem, one in each vignette: grapes (sacramental wine), fount (the word commonly used for baptismal), and roses (rosary and symbol of Mary). Furthermore, the three colors mentioned in “Maid” are black, white and red, the liturgical colors for nuns, popes and cardinals -- and Elizabeth’s three favorites. Randolph’s strategic references to “Virginal” symbolism reinforce the vignettes about her duplicity of gender, morality and truth.
“On a maide of honour seene by a schollar in Sommerset Garden,” opens each vignette with a different tense of the word “view.” It is a poem about seeing and yet not seeing, being and yet not being -- states of disguise and duplicity that are symbolized, in this poem, by the idea of cross-dressing. Under the ruff, the helmet, the raised gown and the crimson stocking is a contrary woman of contradictory behavior, actions and principles. This truth is hidden within the odd title, overdressed structure, ambiguous language and convoluted images of Randolph’s riddle -- and of the Virgin Queen herself.
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[1] Ben Jonson satirized the hypocrisy of the self-righteous moralizers in his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), in which cross-dressed puppets (imitating Hero and Leander) chastise each other for sexual “profanations” and then disrobe to reveal their own immoralities. “The controversy over the supposed acts of puppet transvestism bring into focus the misguided moralizing of those who would maintain ‘order’ at the fair. The play’s most serious transgressors are those who have represented themselves as morally superior but who lack the integrity to uphold the image they project” (Turner).
[2] Ironically, the 1620 pamphlet Hic Mulier responded to attacks on female cross-dressing by “emphasizing the distinctly feminized styles male courtiers were wearing at the time, and with some allusion to the sexual ambivalences introduced by the established practice throughout the Elizabethan period and earlier seventeenth century of male actors playing female roles on the English stage” (“Contesting”).
[3] Another paper might investigate the possibility that the previous Thomas Randolph, who worked for Elizabeth and was in London the last four years of his life, during the events described in the poem, was actually the author.
[4] Creatures who stole people and things, as represented in epic legends like Virgil’s Aeneid.
[5] The Mary Rose was the flagship of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII. Edward Howard described her as... "Your good ship, the flower, I trow, of all ships that ever sailed" (“On Board”).
[6] Another less significant “gardener,” Robert Gardner of Garner, was pilloried for claiming that Elizabeth had had children by her long-time lover Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Levin 83).