The indomitable Jane Austen has no love for “Bloody” Mary, but it’s intriguing and amusing that she sees her in the light, or should we say the shadow, of “Bloody” Bess who would be her successor.
There is no denying Jane Austen’s status as one of the greatest novelists of all time. Her works are awash with Aristotelian sense and Christian sensibility; they are infused with charmingly disarming humour and are informed by the author’s almost unrivalled perspicacity as an observer of the human condition. These multifarious attributes and gifts were present in nascent form in a dazzlingly precocious piece of juvenilia, written when the indomitable Jane was only fifteen years old, which she entitled “The History of England by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian”.
In this delightful work, the young Miss Austen offers brief biographical vignettes of English monarchs from Henry IV to Charles I. She is unflinchingly candid in her scorn for the Tudors. Henry VIII’s “only merit was his not being quite so bad as his daughter Elizabeth”, which must rate as one of the greatest backhanded compliments ever written. She continues: “The Crimes & Cruelties of this Prince, were too numerous to be mentioned & nothing can be said in his Vindication, but that his abolishing Religious Houses & leaving them to the ruinous depredations of Time has been of infinite use to the Landscape of England in general, which probably was a principal motivation for his doing it, since otherwise why should a Man who was of no Religion himself be at so much trouble to abolish one which had for Ages been established in the Kingdom?”
The indomitable Jane has no love for “Bloody” Mary, but it’s intriguing and amusing that she sees her in the light, or should we say the shadow, of “Bloody” Bess who would be her successor. “[A]s she [Mary] died without children, she would be succeeded by that disgrace to humanity, that pest of Society, Elizabeth…. She died without issue & then the dreadful Moment came in which the destroyer of all comfort, the deceitful Betrayer of trust reposed in her, & the Murderess of her Cousin succeeded to the Throne.”
The “cousin” to whom Miss Austen refers is of course Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, whom Miss Austen champions with unabashed verve and vigour. She vilifies not only Bloody Bess as being Mary’s “murderess” but also the queen’s malicious and malevolent advisers for being her partners in crime: “It was the peculiar Misfortune of this Woman to have bad Ministers – Since wicked as she herself was, she could not have committed such extensive mischief had not these vile & abandoned men connived at & encouraged her in her Crimes.” Lord Burleigh, Sir Francis Walsingham and other chief officers of Elizabeth’s state were “such Scandals to their Country & their Sex as to allow & assist their Queen in confining for the space of nineteen years a Woman who if the claims of Relationship & Merit were of no avail, yet as a Queen & as one who condescended to place confidence in her, had every reason to expect Assistance and Protection; & at length in allowing Elizabeth to bring this amiable Woman to an untimely, unmerited, and scandalous Death. Can anyone if he reflects but for a moment on this blot, this everlasting blot upon their Understanding & their Character, allow any praise to Lord Burleigh or Sir Francis Walsingham?”
There is little doubt that the unfortunate Queen of Scots has found in the irrepressible Miss Austen a worthy champion of her cause. This is evident still further in the manner in which Miss Austen imagines the heroism of the Queen’s final moments:
[A]bandoned by her son, confined by her Cousin, abused, reproached & vilified by all, what must not her most noble mind have suffered when informed that Elizabeth had given order for her death! Yet she bore it with a most unshaken fortitude; firm in her Mind; Constant in her Religion; & prepared herself to meet the cruel Fate to which she was doomed, with a Magnanimity that could alone proceed from conscious Innocence. And yet could you Reader have believed it possible that some hardened & zealous Protestants have even abused her for that Steadfastness in the Catholic Religion which reflected on her so much credit? But this is a striking proof of their narrow Souls & prejudiced Judgments who accuse her. She was executed in the Great Hall at Fotheringay Castle (sacred Place!) on Wednesday the 8th of February 1586 – to the everlasting Reproach of Elizabeth, her Ministers, & of England in general.
Having seemingly canonized the Queen of Scots for the holiness of her death, Miss Austen addresses the sins and crimes of which the Queen had been accused during her tumultuous and turbulent life. She does so with the nuanced subtlety with which she addressed the sins and crimes of the fictional heroines of her novels. The Queen of Scots had “never been guilty of anything more than Imprudencies into which she was betrayed by the openness of her Heart, her Youth, & her Education”.
It is telling that Miss Austen should conclude her discussion of the Tudor Terror with a eulogy to the Earl of Essex, “this noble & gallant Earl” who, like the Queen of Scots, would be beheaded on Elizabeth’s orders. Such praise indicates Miss Austen’s sympathy with the cause of the Essex Rebellion, a sympathy which she shares with Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton. As the Earl of Southampton languished in prison for his role in the Rebellion, Shakespeare exposed the “something rotten” in Elizabethan England in his depiction of Hamlet’s anger at the wickedness of a Machiavellian monarch and his self-serving and duplicitous ministers. And so we see that England’s greatest writer, William Shakespeare, speaks as one with Jane Austen, arguably England’s greatest novelist. In this, as in so much else, we can trust the incomparable Will and the indomitable Jane, whose wit and wisdom is a witness to the truth in the darkest of days.
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The featured image is The Allegorical Portrait of Elizabeth I with Old Father Time at her right (“English School” painting, dated around 1610). This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.