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'We Will Do No Harm with Our Sword': Royal Representation, Civic Pageantry, and the Displacement of Popular Protest in Thomas Deloney's Jacke of Newberie

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SOURCE: "'We Will Do No Harm with Our Sword': Royal Representation, Civic Pageantry, and the Displacement of Popular Protest in Thomas Deloney's Jacke of Newberie," in Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, edited by Alvin Vos, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995, pp. 147–57.

[In this essay, Tribble discusses Jack of Newbury's encounter with Henry VIII in terms of Elizabethan civic pageantry. She suggests that through the ant-king episode and the presentation of the golden beehive, Jack implicitly raises the threat of social disorder if the monarch fails to support the clothing industry.]

In 1596 The lord mayor of London wrote to William Cecil about a seditious ballad written by Thomas Deloney. The ballad, now lost, complained of the scarcity of grain, and was held responsible for causing "some Discontentment" in the realm.1 Part of the offense lay in the way the ballad represented Elizabeth; the queen was said to speak "with her people in dialogue wise in very fond and undecent sort" (xxvii–xxix). As David Scott Kastan reminds us, representation, particularly representation of the monarch, was a dangerous practice in Elizabethan England.2 The direct unmediated "dialogue wise" representation violated social and legal norms. Although a large part of Elizabeth's personal mythology hinged upon her willingness to commune with her "mean" subjects, as witnessed by the extraordinary stress placed upon her accommodation of the poor in the account of her coronation procession, Deloney's representation of the Queen talking with her subjects was condemned as transgressive.3

A year later, Deloney's first piece of prose fiction, Jacke of Newberie, was entered in the Stationer's Register (the first extant edition is the eighth, printed in 1619). This work also features subjects speaking "dialogue wise" with a monarch, but two crucial modifications have taken place: Jacke is set in the past, in an idealized depiction of the reign of Henry VIII; and the meeting between subject and monarch is mediated by the complex semiotic system of civic pageantry. In this essay I juxtapose Jacke of Newberie to accounts of Tudor progresses and pageants, arguing that Deloney's work manipulates the symbolic resources of civic pageantry in order to suspend traditional patterns of deference between subject and monarch. If the problem with the ballad was its "fond and indecent" portrayal of Elizabeth in direct converse with her subjects, its failure to negotiate correctly the gulf between monarch and subject, Jacke of Newberie instead uses the complex semiotics of civic pageantry to mediate this space. Most critical attention accorded to progresses and processions has tended to stress their function as displaying royal power.4 But like other forms that involve a symbolic mediation between subject and monarch—aristocratic courtly entertainments and literary encomia of royalty are two that come to mind—the "entertainment" or pageant presented to the visiting monarch could work both to honor the passing monarch and to display precisely the source of that honor: the good will of her subjects. As I will suggest through my reading of the appropriation of ceremonial form in Jacke of Newberie, ceremony and civic pageantry, far from being monolithic or merely adulatory, could provide a supple and flexible forum for negotiation between subject and monarch.

The civic pageant provided a set of symbolic resources to the citizens of both London and the provinces (as the court entertainment was available to the aristocracy) and was used as a means not only of honoring the monarch but also of promoting the specific interests of the city (or groups within it). When Henry VII visited Bristol, for instance, a pageant was put on to demonstrate that

Bristow is fallen into Decaye,
Irrecuperable, without that a due Remedy
By you, ther Herts Hope and Comfort in this Distresse,
provided bee, at your Leyser convenyently
To your Navy and Cloth-making, whereby I gesse
The Wele of this Towne standeth in Sikernesse
May be maynteigned, as they have bee[n]
In Days hertofor in Prosperitie.5

We are told that "the king comforted" the people and promised to "helpe them by dyvers Means."6

Elizabeth too was often importuned in this way on her various progresses into the countryside and her journeys through London. The pageants presented to her in her coronation procession both display her subjects' deference to the new Queen and the demand (for instance) that "she might by this be put in remembrance to consult for the worthy Government of her People."7 When Elizabeth visited Norwich, she was presented with an elaborate "pageant of weavers," in which their formerly woeful state was contrasted with their present prosperity. Implicitly, the Queen was urged to continue to support favorable conditions for the cloth trade.8 The progress or procession, then, could provide a framed space for the articulation of subject interests. The very physical form of the progression, a reversal of "the ceremonial order of stationary monarch and approaching, supplicating subjects," allowed a more fluid staging of power relations than was possible at court, where petitioners moved "through the public rooms at court to more private royal quarters where a restricted group had an audience with the queen."9

The protagonist of Jacke of Newberie exploits this form to suspend the normal rules governing converse between subject and monarch. The work presents an idealized vision of both royal authority and proto-bourgeois enterprise. At its center is the spectacle of Jack, a former apprentice risen to become a "famous and worthy Clothier of England," demonstrating to Henry VIII "how hee set continually five hundred poore people at worke, to the great benefit of the commonwealth" (2). As Deloney represents it, Jack uses the conventions of civic pageantry as a means of negotiating power relations among monarch, aristocracy, and an emergent artisan-business class. Often in popular fiction there is a fantasy of unmediated discourse between king and subject, a "naive monarchism" that assumes that problems between royalty and commoners can be sorted out by frank talk.10 Such a fantasy was to become a feature of Deloney's later works, most notably in The Gentle Craft, better known perhaps in its dramatic version, Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday. But Jacke represents a much subtler and more challenging use of this tradition. There are throughout the text hints of potential questioning of class order, as when, early in the narrative, Jack dresses up in armor and outdoes the noblemen in providing troops for the king's war with Scotland. Further, as will become apparent, the pageant he stages mixes popular and courtly symbolic traditions.

When Henry VIII goes on progress in Berkshire, Jack dresses his servants, thirty "tall fellows," in a sumptuous array of "blew coates, faced with Sarcenet" (35). They find an anthill in a meadow on the king's route and Jack takes "vp his seate there, causing his men to stand round about the same with their swords drawne" (35). This is of course a dangerous move; positioning thirty armed men on a meadow the king is to cross could certainly be construed as an overt threat to royal authority. Yet it simultaneously suggests the May Day festivities of which Henry VIII was so fond; Hall reports two incidents in which disguised courtiers intercepted Henry and his entourage as they went out to "fetch May."11

When the king sends his messenger to demand "to what end you stand here with your swords and bucklers prepared to fight?" Jack replies:

Harrold (quoth he) return to his Highnesse, it is poore Iacke of Newberie, who beeing scant Marquesse of a mole hill, is chosen Prince of Ants: and heere I stand with my weapons and Guard about mee, to defend and keep these my poore and painefull subjects, from the force of the idle Butterflyes, their sworne enemies, least they should disturbe this quiet Common wealth, who this Sommer season are making their Winters provision. (35)

Jack's answer is designed to signal, in Gregory Bateson's terms, that "this is play," that "these actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote."12 The whimsy of the response frames the apparent threat as ceremonial representation, a symbolic gambit.

The king, observing that "this seemes to bee a pleasant fellow," asks Jack to approach (36). But Jack here pushes the pageant frame even further. He refuses to come to Henry, telling the herald that "his Grace hath a horse and I am foote; therefore will him to come to me" (36). The implications of such a request are profound and can only be understood by considering the violation of ceremonial space that has just occurred. To demand that a monarch approach a subject is a staggering reversal of courtly protocols. Shakespeare exploits this powerful convention in Richard II when Northumberland tells Richard that Bolinbroke "in the base court … doth attend / To speak with you, may it please you to come down."13 Richard's "glistring Phaeton" speech which follows dramatizes the connection between the breaking of ceremonial convention and the breaking of bonds between subject and monarch. Such a connection is also made in Jack Straw, when the Lord Mayor tells the king that the "greatest wrong" done by the rebels is "that in Honour [they] do your person touch / I meane they call your Majesty to Parle / And o'er beare you with a multitude / As if you were a vassall not a king."14

Only within a pageant frame such as the one Jack has arranged can the threat to royal honor be tolerated. Henry does agree to enter the fiction and to see, as he puts it, the "Emperour of Ants, that is so careful in his gouernment." At his approach, the narrative continues, "Iack of Newbery and his seruants put vp all their weapons, and with a ioyfull crie flung vp their caps in token of victory" (36). When he speaks to them, the natural monarch/subject order is apparently reasserted: "lack Newberie and all his seruants fell on their knees, saying: God saue the King of England, whose sight hath put our foes to flight, and brought great peace to the poore laboring people" (36).

But this pageant is more than play, or rather it is serious play. The beast fable has a clear application: Jack as ant-king criticizes the butterflie "who through sufferance grewe so ambitious and malapert, that the poor Ant could no sooner get an egge into her nest, but he would have it awaie" (37). The blame for the poor state of the clothing industry, which motivated the pageant to begin with, is placed firmly on the chief "butterfly" Wolsey, the "wonderfull proud Prelate, by whose meanes great variance was set betwixt the King of England and the French King … which bred a generall woe through England, especially among Clothiers, insomuch that hauing no sale for their cloath, they were faine to put away many of their people which wrought for them" (38).

The seriousness of the threat of this complaint, not only to the out-of-work clothiers, but also to the stability of the realm as a whole, becomes evident when we examine the historical basis for the incident. While most of Jacke of Newberie is apparently based on local tradition, the historical circumstances referred to here seem to be a conflation of a least two episodes related in Hall: a rising in Suffolk because of Wolsey's 1/6 exactions for war with France; and the "murmuring" which results because of the King's proposed war with the emperor. As Hall (and, later, Holinshed) reports it, the reaction in the provinces to Wolsey's exaction is close to rebellion. In Suffolk, the Duke

by gentle handlying … caused the riche Clothiers to assent and graunt to geue the sixt parte and when thei came home to their houses, they called to them their Spinners, Carders, Fullers, Weauers, and other artificers, whiche were wont to be set a woorke and haue their liuynges by cloth makyng, and saied, sirs we be not able to set you a woorke, our goods be taken from vs, wherefore trust to your selues and not to vs, for otherwise it will not be. Then began women to wepe and yong folkes to crie, and men that had no woorke began to rage, and assemble themselves in compaignies.'15

These companies eventually number around 4000; Suffolk finally managed to persuade the leaders, who claim "povertie and necessitie as their captains," to disperse.16 Two years later, the proposed war with the Emperor has similar results: "when the Clothiers lacked sale, then they put fro[m] them thir spinners, carders, tuckers, & such other that liue by clothworkyng which caused the people greatly murmer, specially in Suffolke, for if the Duke of Norfolk had not wisely appeased them, no doubt but thei had fallen to some riotous acts."17

Both of these episodes point toward the importance of the clothworking trade as a gatekeeping institution which employs a wide range of people, including "sturdy" young men whose unemployment would contribute to an unquiet realm. Further, as William Cecil is said to have remarked, "the people that depend upon the making of cloth are in worse condition to be quietly governed than the husbandman."18 Annabel Patterson has demonstrated the ways in which riots over scarcity of grain, in which weavers were prominent, lurk around the margins of Midsummer Night's Dream, which also addresses the problem of fictional representation and royal audience.19 Weavers were notorious for their involvement in disorders of all sorts throughout our period. Buchanan Sharp has demonstrated that most food riots occurred in centers of the clothing industry and were often instigated by cloth-workers.20 Deloney presents weavers as guarantors of social order, but lying behind this is the vision of social disorder potentially unleashed by the crown's failure to support the weaving trade.

The text then transmutes rebellion into pageantry; the pageant frame mediates the potentially dangerous message. In the episode which follows, in which Jack gives Henry a tour of the weaving factory, the suppleness of the ceremonial and emblematic frame is further demonstrated. Henry is first presented with

a Bee-hive, most richly gilt with gold, and all the Bees therein were also made of gold curiously by Art, and out of the top of the same Hive, sprung a flourishing green tree, which bore golden Apples, and at the roote thereof lay diuers Serpents, seeking to destroy it, whom Prudence and Fortitude trode vnder their feete. (38)

The following verses explicate this emblem: "Loe here presented to your royal sight / The figure of a flourishing common wealth; / Where vertuous subiects labour with delight / Ande beate the drones to death which Hue by stealth" (38). This "emblem" figuratively unites royal authority and bourgeois industry against the "serpents" seeking to destroy it, and is read correctly by Wolsey, who we are told is "gall'd by the Allegorie of the Ants" (39).

The move from ant king to bee-hive is also significant. To be king of the ants might have seemed to Renaissance readers to be something of a paradox, since (following Aristotle) natural historians held that ants had no kings. This supposed characteristic led in the seventeenth century to their associations with republicanism and Puritanism, as in Raphael's description of the "parsimonious emmet" in Paradise Lost: "provident / Of future, in small room large heart enclosed / Pattern of just equality perhaps / Hereafter, joined in her popular tribes of commonality."21 These same qualities could be given strongly negative connotations, as in Richard Lovelace's "The Ant," in which, as Leah Marcus writes, the insect is described as "embodying the commercial stereotype of the Puritan homo economicus, laboring incessantly to increase his own store."22

Ants and bees are often connected in the Renaissance, but usually by way of contrast: ants as a model of self-government, bees as a model for monarchy. But embedded within Deloney's beehive is a reminder of the crucial role of the ants, here transmuted into subjects who "beate down" the drones. We can best see this point by way of contrast to the famous passage in Henry V in which the Archbishop of Canterbury compares the commonwealth to the realm of the honeybees:

creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts,
Where some like magistrates correct at home
Others like merchants venture trade abroad….

their emperor … busied in his majesties … surveys
The civil citizens kneading up the honey,
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate
The sad-eyed justice with his surly hum
Delievering o'er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.23

Deloney's verse describes the subjects as agents, beating down the drones. But in Shakespeare's extended comparison, the royal gaze organizes the activity of commonwealth in a clearly defined hierarchy, and justice is dispensed unambiguously as a function of royal authority delegated first to the justice and then to the executioner. Jack's shift in metaphor from ants to bees, then, works to hold the ultimately conflicting models in a kind of precarious equilibrium, an equilibrium that is perhaps threatened when Jack, having at the end of the visit refused a knighthood, refers to his workers as both "antes whom I seek to defend" and "the Bees which I keepe."24 The resources of the allegorical sign-system upon which Jack relies thus allow him to mount a symbolic challenge to aristocratic privilege and royal authority wrapped in the protections of the pageant genre.25Jacke of Newberie thus uses the complex semiotics of civic pageantry as a way of reimagining the relationship between bourgeois autonomy and royal authority.

…..

Richard McCoy has described how the ceremonial forms of Elizabethan chivalry can be seen as "symbolic power struggles rather than rituals of devotion."26 We are perhaps more willing to see such subtle combinations of resistance and deference in the context of elite rather than popular forms. Such a tendency is in keeping with the tendency of critical work in Renaissance literature to stay within canonical boundaries, as the non-literary or "sub-literary" has been enlisted in the service of understanding Shakespeare or works specifically aimed at a "gentle" audience. This reading of Deloney, however, suggests that not only that boundaries of the elite and popular culture should be seen as more fluid than has generally been assumed,27 but also that we need to include a consideration of popular appropriation of symbolic forms in our understanding of early modern culture.

Notes

I am grateful to the members of the 1991 NEH Institute on "Ceremony and Text in the Renaissance," including Thomas Greene, Douglas Routledge, Douglas Lanier, Hardan Aasand, Nicholas Clary, and Mary Hill Cole, for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

1 Letter written from Mayor of London, Stephen Slany, to Lord Treasurer, William Cecil, 26 July 1596, British Museum Landsdowne MS 81.30, quoted in Merritt E. Lawlis, The Novels of Thomas Deloney (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961), xxviii. All quotations from Deloney come from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2 David Scott Kastan, "Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule," Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 459–72.

3 See The Quene 's Majesties Passage through the citie of London to Westminster the daye before her coronacion, in Elizabethan Backgrounds: Historical Docu ments of the Age of Elizabeth I, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975).

4 See Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), as well as Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980).

5 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300–1660 (London: Routledge and Paul, 1959–63), I:71.

6 Wickham, I:72.

7The Quene's Maiesties Passage, 33.

8The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. John Nichols (London, 1823), II:136.

9 Mary Hill Cole, "Ceremonial Dialogue Between Elizabeth I and Her Civic Hosts," forthcoming in Douglas Routledge, ed., Ceremony and Text in the Renaissancz7e (Newark, Del.: Univ. of Delaware Press). I am grateful to Professor Cole for sharing her expertise on Elizabethan progresses with me.

10 Anne Barton has demonstrated the prevalence of the tradition in popular literature; she argues that Henry V's rancorous argument with his soldiers over the question of moral culpability plays off of these expectations. See "The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History," in The Triple Bond: Plays, Mostly Shakespearian, In Performance, ed. Joseph G. Price (University Park: Penn. State Univ. Press, 1975), 92–117. For "naive monarchism," see Peter Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

11 In one May Day entertainment Hall describes, Henry is hailed by a passing "ship" of Fame; in another, a number of the kings' guard dress up as Robin Hood and his men and invited Henry and Catherine for a meal of venison. These incidents may demonstrate the fluidity of popular and elite forms in this period. See The Vnion of the Two Most Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548) (New York: AMS, 1965), 520ff. and 582ff.

12 Gregory Bateson, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy," in Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert E. Innis (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985), 133; italics Bateson's.

13 William Shakespeare, Richard II, in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), III.iii.175ff.

14The Life and Death of Jack Straw (Oxford: Malone Society), III.i.655–59.

15 Hall, 699.

16 Hall, 700. As Hall reports it, the rebels themselves frame their protests within a traditional, deferential framework. See Roger B. Manning's discussion of the theory of a peasant "moral economy" in Village Revolts: Social Protests and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Sandra Billington discusses ritual framing of protest in Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

17 Hall, 745; when Holinshed reworks this incident he does not stress the link to the earlier rising as Hall does here.

18 Quoted in Joyce Youings, Sixteenth-Century England (London: Penguin, 1984), 219.

19 Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

20 Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riots in the West of England, 1586–1660 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980).

21 Merritt Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), 7:85–90.

22 Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), 229.

23 Shakespeare, Henry V I.ii 191–92, 202–4 in The Riverside Shakespeare.

24 Deloney, 49. Frank Whigham discusses the model of the bee commonwealth at some length in Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 151–55. He argues that Canterbury puts the most authoritarian "spin" on the tradition of the bees expelling workers; in The Aeneid, for instance, the Tyrians are compared to bees who "in martial array drive from their folds the drones, a lazy herd" (152). Pliny also stresses the self-regulating activity of the bees, although he also emphasizes that "king bees" are indispensable. See Pliny, Natural History, trans. Harris Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1938), XI.x.24, XI.xviii.54. Annabel Patterson has discussed how Canterbury's metaphor is troubled by the propensity, mentioned in Virgil's Georgics, of bees to "desert the hives under the leadership of another monarch" (Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, 86).

25 Laura Stevenson O'Connell also discusses the bee hive in "The Elizabethan Bourgeois Hero-Tale: Aspects of an Adolescent Social Consciousness," in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, ed. Barbara Malement (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 267–90. She writes: "By implication, then, social power (lordliness, princeliness) depends not solely upon birth or royal favor, but also upon industrious commercial service, and the great wealth that comes from it. Deloney is far from insisting that the aristocracy of trade should replace the aristocracy of birth, but the presentation of the Prince of Ants gropes toward the suggestion that social power and pride could conceivably be determined by economic interest" (281). Our conclusions are somewhat similar, but she does not discuss the weaving trade or the issue of civic pageantry. See also her book (published under the name Laura Stevenson), Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984).

26 Richard McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 2.

27 Barry Reay makes this point in his introduction to Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: St. Martins Press, 1985).

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The Rise of a New Literary Genre: Thomas Deloney's Bourgeois Novel Jack of Newbury

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