Imperial Dreams? Margaret Cavendish and the Cult of Elizabeth

Women's Writing ISSN: 0969-9082 (Print) 1747-5848 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwow20 Imperial dreams? Margaret Cavendish and the cult of Elizabeth Claire Jowitt To cite this article: Claire Jowitt (1997) Imperial dreams? Margaret Cavendish and the cult of Elizabeth, Women's Writing, 4:3, 383-399, DOI: 10.1080/09699089700200019 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09699089700200019 Published online: 19 Dec 2006. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 114 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rwow20 Download by: [University of East Anglia Library] Date: 24 September 2015, At: 09:15 MARGARET CAVENDISH AND THE CULT OF ELIZABETH Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 W omen’s W riting, Vol. 4, No. 3, 1997 Imperial Dreams? Margaret Cavendish and the Cult of Elizabeth CLAIRE JOWITT ABSTRACT Margaret Cavendish appropriated images of Elizabeth I in order to show her support for an imperialist England and to question the status Restoration society awarded to women. During the seventeenth century hagiographic representations of Elizabeth I were increasingly used to criticise the policies and personalities of the Stuart monarchs. William Cavendish, for example, harked back to England’s glorious past under Elizabeth in order to inculcate in Charles II’s government expansionist and imperialist policies. Margaret Cavendish in T he Blazing W orld demonstrates similar concerns but Cavendish’s work is also interested in using representations of Elizabeth I as a way of exploring both the disenfranchisement of women and, I argue, the possibility of female empowerment. IN 1653 Margaret Cavendish included as part of her collection Poems, and Fancies a short poem describing an imaginary miniature and self-regulating world. Entitled “A World in an Eare-ring” the poem develops the conceit of an entire world – complete with climate, vegetation, animals, and human beings with their social, political and religious institutions – which never impinges on the consciousness of the female wearer of the Eare-ring at all.[1] The poem opens with the somewhat mournful assertion that “we” do “not see” that “An Eare-ring round may well a Zodiacke bee”.[2] The hole in the ear which supports the eare-ring is described as the pole of the world. Cavendish imagines that there may be “nipping frosts” and “winter cold” but the ear and, by association, the wearer of the eare-ring, never appears to feel the chill.[3] The poem briskly moves on from such global descriptions to describe the day-to-day life on this miniature world. There are churches and clergymen, cities, houses, markets, ministers and governors, all going about their ordinary business. Yet the persistent lament of the poem is that this tiny world’s cacophony of noise – with birds singing, bells chiming, battles raging, and rivals duelling – is never heard by the wearer of the eare-ring. Indeed, the poem rather sarcastically describes how a lover may die in “a faire Ladies eare” but, notwithstanding the resulting 383 CLAIRE JOWITT Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 putrefaction of the corpse, the wearer still remains unaware of all this bustling activity.[4] The poem is arresting for two reasons. Philosophically it is astute since it creates a fantasy world out of what Cavendish sees as a linguistic discrepancy. Both the physical “eare” which the poem describes and the “ring” which holds the jewel on to the wearer seem to have no connection to the artefact, the “eare-ring” – a word made of these two linguistic components. In the poem, whilst describing the miniature world, Cavendish writes: T here seas may ebb, and flow, where fishes swim, And Islands be, where Spices grow therein. T here Christall Rocks hang dangling at each Eare, And golden Mines as Jewels may they weare. T here Earth-quakes be, which Mountaines vast down fling, And yet nere stir the Ladies Eare, nor Ring.[5] What seems to be happening here is that neither the ear nor the ring is disturbed by the geographical and meteorological phenomena which are going on in the microcosmic world of the eare-ring. In a sense the “eare-ring” is greater than the sum of its linguistic parts. It is as though Cavendish has created a world whose status as fantasy is made all the more striking because its own linguistic component parts are insensible to its existence. The world she creates in this poem occupies a space which, though it is made up of these linguistic signs, signifies something completely different. The world of the eare-ring is particularly self-reflexive, then, as it takes nothing from, and exists completely independently of, its linguistic component parts. The poem is also arresting for another reason. It is strikingly reminiscent of the “Ditchley” Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the younger in 1592.[6] In this painting an armillary sphere – a skeleton celestial globe which depicts, with metal rings, the equator, ecliptic tropics, Antarctic and Arctic circles – hangs from the Queen’s left ear (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). This painting, as Roy Strong has argued, can be seen as part of what has been termed the “cult of Elizabeth” where likenesses of the Queen were fantastically manipulated in order to express ideological positions.[7] In this painting, then, the Queen stands on a Saxton-style map of England. On the map of England the counties are delineated and many of the principal towns are marked. Such imagery, depicting an enormous Elizabeth standing on top of England with a minute world hanging suspended from her ear, signals in particular the Queen’s great personal power. The relatively large size of the map of England in relation to the diagrammatic and miniature armillary sphere also indicates the importance of England within the world.[8] In the uncomfortable political climate for defeated royalists in the 1650s, it is perhaps not surprising to find the exiled Cavendish harking back to the relatively peaceful reign of England’s illustrious Virgin Queen.[9] Certainly such nostalgia for the reign of Elizabeth I was no new occurrence. 384 Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 MARGARET CAVENDISH AND THE CULT OF ELIZABETH (180mm) Figure 1. The “Ditchley” Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (1592) by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. 385 Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 CLAIRE JOWITT 173mm Figure 2. Detail of The “Ditchley” Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (1592) by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. 386 Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 MARGARET CAVENDISH AND THE CULT OF ELIZABETH During the early- to mid-seventeenth century, after the initial relief concerning the peacefulness with which James I succeeded to the throne, many writers – including George Chapman in Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and T he Conspiracy of Byron (1608), William Camden in T he T rue and Royall History of the famous Empresse Elizabeth Queen of England, France and Ireland (Latin edition 1615; translated 1625) and Thomas Heywood in his two part drama If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1604/ 05; revived 1633) and in his prose work England’s Elizabeth (1631) – became more and more critical of the disorganisation of Jacobean and Caroline rule. Their criticisms were both implicitly and explicitly levelled at James and Charles through comparisons with representations of an increasingly saint-like Elizabeth.[10] Due to Heywood’s revision of his 1604/ 05 drama If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody in the early 1630s, this text provides an especially noticeable instance of this developing nostalgia for the reign and policies of Elizabeth.[11] In the revised edition the scenes at the end of the play – which describe England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 – are much longer and more detailed. For example, a speech by the chorus is added which celebrates the achievements of England’s “undaunted Queene” when she is besieged by her spurned and rather spiteful suitor Philip of Spain, who, “Finding all his hopes in her quite frustrated/ Aimed all his stratagems, plots and designes/ Both to the utter ruine of our Land/ And our Religion”.[12] Furthermore, the character of Elizabeth in this later edition is also given a much longer speech where she inspires her troops mustered at Tilbury: Know my Subjects Your Queene hath now put on a Masculine Spirit, T o tell the bold and daring what they are, Or what they ought to be: And such as faint, T each them by my ex ample Fortitude Nor let the best proov’d souldier heere disdaine A woeman should conduct an hoast of men T o have their disgrace or want of president. Have you not read of brave Zenobia An Easterne Queene, who fac’d the Romaine Legions Even in their pride, and height of potency, And in the field incountred personally Aurelianus Caesar T hinke in me Her spirit survives, Queene of this W esterne Ile, T o make the scorn’d name of Elizabeth, As frightfull and as terrible to Spaine As Zenobias to the state of Rome. Oh I could wish them landed, and in view T o bid them instant battaileere march farther Into my Land, this is my vow, my rest, Ile pave their way with this my virgin brest.[13] 387 Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 CLAIRE JOWITT Here Elizabeth successfully assumes a male militaristic role. Moreover, references to those who “faint” and exhibit cowardliness under the threat of battle seem designed to allude to the failure of her successors’ foreign policies. James I, during his reign, persistently tried to maintain a pacific foreign policy in Europe. James sought to construct England as a diplomatic buffer between the governments of Catholic Iberia, Catholic France and Protestant Northern Europe long after such a role ceased to be tenable.[14] Charles I was hardly more successful in his diplomatic relations with Europe. In the late 1620s he fought expensive wars with both France and Spain which failed to achieve any significant benefits for England and, as Kevin Sharpe describes, left the young King “stained with dishonour and shame”.[15] In the early 1630s, the period in which Heywood revised If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, England maintained an uneasy truce with her major European rivals but again could scarcely be described as occupying a decisive role in Europe.[16] Dissatisfaction, then, with both the domestic and, in particular, the foreign policies of the Stuart Kings was widespread in this period. Even Bishop Godfrey Goodman, an apologist for James, though he asserted in T he Court of King James the First that at the end of Elizabeth’s reign the country was “generally weary of an old woman’s government”, still found himself obliged to chart the development of nostalgia for the old Queen.[17] He wrote: after a few years, when we had ex perience of the Scottish government, then in disparagement of the Scots, and in hate and detestation of them, the Queen did seem to revive; then was her memory much magnified, – such ringing of bells, such public joy and sermons in commemoration of her, the picture of her tomb painted in many churches, and in effect more solemnity and joy in memory of her coronation than was for the coming in of King James.[18] Margaret Cavendish’s husband, William, Duke of Newcastle, certainly used positive representations of Elizabeth I as a way of expressing dissatisfaction with certain Stuart policies. Though staunchly royalist, Newcastle, as a dramatist and political adviser to Prince Charles, later King Charles II, repeatedly employed laudatory images of Elizabeth as a way of instilling chosen ideological values in his respective audiences. As early as 1641, in his second play T he Varietie, Newcastle’s central character Master Manly has a penchant for dressing in Elizabethan costume. A trick is devised by his so-called friend, Sir William, to expose Manly to ridicule by having him parade in his “ghost of Leister” costume before the assembled company at an effete Caroline Ball. The trick backfires and, though verbally attacked and ridiculed, Manly staunchly defends his garb asserting that such clothes “were worn when men of honour fluorish’d, that tamed the wealth of Spaine, set up the States, help’d the French King, and brought Rebellion to reason Gentlemen .… It was never a good time since these cloathes went out of fashion; oh, those honourable dayes and persons!”.[19] His fortitude is rewarded in Newcastle’s text as Manly successfully takes “possession” of the wealthy widow Lady Beaufield’s “heart and fortunes”.[20] What Manly and Newcastle defend in this play, then, is the swashbuckling and opportunistic gallantry of the Elizabethan gentleman adventurer. 388 Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 MARGARET CAVENDISH AND THE CULT OF ELIZABETH Such reminiscences about a glorious Elizabethan past are also harnessed by Newcastle in his advice to Charles II, a “Letter of Government”, written just before the Restoration.[21] By 1660 the ideological messages Newcastle was promulgating by his references to Elizabeth were more sharply defined. In T he Varietie, Manly’s nostalgia for the Elizabethan age referred to the manliness of Elizabeth’s central courtiers – men like Leicester – who, unlike the effeminate men of the Caroline world, as Anne Barton describes, “actually used their bright swords, as opposed to pawning them, or hanging them up for show in an armoury”.[22] These Elizabethan “men of honour”, then, are both militarily and sexually potent compared to their 1640s counterparts. Indeed, Lady Beaufield admiringly comments that Manly’s behaviour and dress “shewes a proper man” and wishes that there were “a noble leader … to make this habit fashionable”.[23] By 1660, Newcastle’s favourable descriptions of Elizabeth and her court are less concerned with the sexual potency and behaviour of a gentlemanly elite and are more urgently and directly focused on the policies of the monarch. Similar to his earlier play, Newcastle, in his “Letter of Government”, looks back to the Elizabethan Age with a sense of nostalgia. Nowhere is this more clear than in his recommendation that, in order to maintain harmony in the kingdom, Charles reinstate a variety of courtly pastimes associated with Elizabethan rule. His proposals include the reintroduction of “masks, balls, and plays, riding horses in the manage” as well as the resuscitation of the Accession Day tilts which had been abandoned during the reign of Charles I.[24] An assortment of rural amusements – “Maye Games, Moris Danses, the Lords off the Maye, & Ladye off the Maye, the foole, – and the Hobye Horse muste not bee forgotten” – should also be included in order to keep the populace contentedly loyal.[25] Indeed, Newcastle idealistically describes rural England as a land of milk and honey; he forecasts that under Charles II, “Feastinge daylaye will be in Merrye Englande, for Englande Is so plentifull off all provitiones, that iff wee doe nott Eate them theye will Eate Use, so wee feaste in our Defense”.[26] Here, the restoration of the monarchy will usher in a new age characterised by an overabundance of food where daily feasting becomes an act of defence against a voracious Nature. However, the majority of the text is much more concerned to outline the political policies Charles II should endorse. Newcastle’s “Little Book” is described rather coyly by Margaret Cavendish in her biography of her husband, T he Life of W illiam Cavendish Duke of Newcastle; it is a document: wherein he delivered his opinion concerning the government of his dominions, whensoever God should be pleased to restore him to his throne, together with some other notes and observations of foreign states and kingdoms; but it being a private offer to his sacred Majesty, I dare not presume to publish it.[27] Cavendish’s circumspection is perhaps understandable since her husband’s representations of the harmony of Elizabeth’s reign – where ceremony and aloofness on the part of Elizabeth from her subjects enshrined the system and idea of monarchy – contrast with the errors “of State … Committed in these two laste Raynes”.[28] According to Newcastle, Charles II should preserve his 389 CLAIRE JOWITT monarchical aloofness from even his most intimate subjects, as Elizabeth did, even in his bedchamber. Margaret Cavendish’s own comments about Elizabeth I, written in T he W orlds Olio of 1655, describe an even more celebratory representation of the Virgin Queen. Cavendish writes that Queen Elizabeth: Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 clothed herself in a Sheeps-Skin; yet she had a Lions Paw, and a Fox ’s head; she stroked the Cheeks of her Subjects with Flattery, while she pickt their Purses; and though she seemed loath, yet she never failed to crush to death those that disturbed her way.[29] This fantastical description of Elizabeth emphasises the politic and astute manner of her government where the Queen successfully manipulates her court and courtiers. But the crucial aspect of Newcastle’s “Letter of Government” is the importance he attaches to trade. In his advice to the monarch Newcastle makes some serious points concerning the benefits of trade for England, stating, “Itt is the merchante thatt onlye bringes Honye to the Hive”.[30] Living in Rotterdam and Antwerp from 1648 to 1660, as well as visiting Amsterdam and the Hague, both Margaret and William Cavendish were daily exposed to the economic and social benefits of trade on the population of the Low Countries.[31] As Simon Schama describes: No visitor to Holland ... failed to notice the pains that the Dutch took to keep their streets, their houses and themselves (though there was less unanimity about this) brilliantly clean. T he spick-and-span towns shone from hours of tireless sweeping, scrubbing, scraping, burnishing, mopping, rubbing and washing. T hey made an embarrassing contrast to the porridge of filth and ordure that slopped over the cobbles of most other European cities in the seventeenth century.[32] Furthermore, while resident in Antwerp, every afternoon when the weather permitted, Margaret Cavendish was driven round the city in her coach, passing the splendid Palace of the Oosterhuis which was the offices of the Dutch East India Company.[33] Though Antwerp was declining in this period as Amsterdam in the North became the major trading capital of the world, the relics of Antwerp’s past affluence – symbolised by the magnificent 300-windowed offices of the Dutch East India Company – were apparent to all those who visited the city. What all these laudatory representations of Elizabeth I emphasise is the sense of nostalgia for a time when England was “great”. For example, as we have seen, Heywood’s descriptions of the glorious English defeat of the Spanish Armada, written in 1633 when English foreign policy was no longer perceived to be successful, hark back to a time when England was capable of defeating, against the odds, a foreign aggressor. These persistent references to the perceived successes – military, economic, diplomatic – of Elizabeth’s reign perpetuate the myths about the Queen that paintings such as the “Ditchley” portrait sought to emphasise. Long after Elizabeth was dead, writers revived images of her as a way of establishing the values they wished to encourage. 390 Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 MARGARET CAVENDISH AND THE CULT OF ELIZABETH What I want to concentrate on for the remainder of this article is the way in which Margaret Cavendish brought together hagiographic representations of England’s Virgin Queen with concerns about England’s economic and trading success in her prose text A Description of a New W orld Called the Blazing W orld (1666). I will not be suggesting that Cavendish was anything other than a firm believer in the restored monarchy of Charles II. I will, however, be arguing that she appropriates images of Elizabeth in order to argue for the expansion of the English Empire. Similar to her husband, Margaret Cavendish yokes together images of England’s glorious past under the Virgin Queen with ambitious foreign policies; but more than this, Cavendish also uses images of Elizabeth as a way of questioning the disenfranchisement of women in Restoration society. A Description of a New W orld Called the Blazing W orld, which was published as an addendum to Observations upon Ex perimental Philosophy, is described by Cavendish herself as a hybrid text; it is part “romancical”, part “philosophical and the third is merely fancy or (as I may call it) fantastical”.[34] The text describes the adventures of a beautiful young woman who is abducted by a merchant “travelling into a foreign country”.[35] The wrath of Heaven is visited upon him for his presumptuous crime as his ship is blown across the North Pole into another world. All on the ship die, save the beautiful lady who is transported through this new world, the Blazing World, by a succession of hybridised men including bear-men, fox-men and bird-men who conduct her to the city of the Emperor of the World, Paradise. Here the Emperor marries her and, as Empress of the Blazing World, she reforms various institutions of Church and state. There then follows a discussion about science with the different inhabitants of the Blazing World – each of whom have their own experimental society – which has been seen as a critique of the misogyny of the recently established Royal Society which Cavendish visited in 1667.[36] The Empress, increasingly dissatisfied with the answers to her philosophical questions which her subjects offer, decides to make a cabbala in order to increase her understanding of the world. At this point in the text the character of the Duchess of Newcastle is introduced as the Empress’s scribe. Unlike the other contenders for the position of the Empress’s helper – Galileo, Gassendus, Descartes, Helmont, Hobbes, and Henry More – who are “so self-conceited that they would be scorn to be scribes to a woman”, the Duchess of Newcastle is a “plain and rational writer” and will “be ready to do you all the service she can”.[37] The Empress and the Duchess soon become fast friends, travelling between each other’s worlds. The Duchess expresses her ambition to be “an empress of a world” and to live and die in “the adventure of noble achievements” in order to acquire “a glorious fame”.[38] To realise the Duchess’s ambitions, the women begin designing imaginary worlds similar to the one Cavendish describes in “A World in an Eare-ring”. These pursuits are interrupted by the news that the land of the Empress’s birth is under attack by hostile nations and the Empress decides to intervene. It is in this second section of A Description of a New W orld Called the Blazing W orld where Cavendish most strikingly appropriates representations of Queen Elizabeth I. When the Empress goes to war, Cavendish describes the costume she wears in detail: 391 CLAIRE JOWITT Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 on her head she wore a cap of pearl and a half-moon of diamonds just before it; on the top of her crown came spreading over a broad carbuncle cut in the form of a sun; her coat was of pearl mix ed with blue diamonds and fringed with red ones; her buskins and sandals were of green diamonds. In her left hand she held a buckler to signify the defence of her dominions, which buckler was made of that sort of diamond as has several different colours, and being cut and made in the form of an arch, showed like a rainbow. In her right hand she carried a spear made of a white diamond, cut like the tail of a blazing star, which signified that she was ready to assault those that proved her enemies.[39] Here, the Empress’s “rainbow diamond” is reminiscent of the “Rainbow” portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, painted by Gheeraerts at the end of the reign in 1600.[40] In the same way that Queen Elizabeth assumed a “male” role as she surveyed her troops awaiting the Armada at Tilbury in 1588 – a situation which Heywood emphasised in If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody – Cavendish’s Empress transgresses ascribed gender roles as she successfully enters the male public domain. The war which the Empress conducts for her home nation, ESFI, is represented by Cavendish as a trade war. Several nations in the Empress’s world have combined together to “make war against it [ESFI] and sought to destroy it, at least to weaken its naval force and power”.[41] The Empress easily defeats these hostile forces, compelling them to pay “chargeable tribute” to the King of ESFI with the result that he “became absolute master of the seas and consequently of that world”.[42] Any dissent or rebellion against ESFI’s trading control is ruthlessly suppressed by the Empress as she resolutely champions her policy to make ESFI the “absolute monarchy of all that world”.[43] Indeed, upon accomplishing ESFI’s supremacy, all the “greatest princes” of the nations of this fantasy world desire to see the Empress. Again, the descriptions Cavendish gives of this meeting are reminiscent of the imperial, absolutist and fantastical representations of Queen Elizabeth in the 1590s where realism had been disregarded in favour of deification: And all being met; in the form and manner aforesaid, the Empress appeared upon the face of the water in her imperial robes. In some part of her hair, near her face she had placed some of the star stone, which added such a lustre and glory to it that it caused a great admiration in all that were present, who believed her to be some celestial creature, or rather an uncreated goddess, and they all had a desire to worship her, for surely, said they, no mortal creature can have such a splendid and transcendent beauty, nor can any have so great a power as she has, to walk upon the waters and to destroy whatever she pleases, not only whole nations but a whole world.[44] The Empress’s furtherance of ESFI’s naval control and commercial dominance in T he Blazing W orld indicates the importance Cavendish attached to trade. Similar to the advice her husband offered to Charles II in the “Letter of Government”, Cavendish in T he Blazing W orld also can be seen to champion imperialist policies. 392 MARGARET CAVENDISH AND THE CULT OF ELIZABETH The major trading rivals for the English in the 1660s were the Dutch who were often antagonistically represented during this period.[45] Andrew Marvell, for example, satirically described the Dutch in a poem “The Character of Holland” which was originally written under Cromwell’s regime in 1651 but found new currency in 1665 during the second Anglo-Dutch war: Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land, As but the off-scouring of the British sand … T his indigested vomit of the sea Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.[46] John Dryden in “Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders 1666” expressed similarly hostile feelings to the Dutch whilst describing a sea battle between English and Dutch naval forces. The Dutch, according to Dryden, have become indolent and soft from luxurious living as the weight and quality of the spices and perfumes which they gather in the East weakens, and then destroys, the possessor. Dryden describes how “by the rich scent we [the English] found our perfum’d prey”: Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball, And now their odours armed against them fly: Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die.[47] Here, the inflammable cargo of spices carried by the Dutch sets fire to their ships, turning their “perfume” against them; porcelain fragments into lethal shards and valuable wood to barbed spears.[48] Margaret Cavendish’s own hostility towards the Dutch is apparent in the Empress’s protection of her native land from foreign invaders and traders. Furthermore, her animosity is also revealed at the beginning of the text when it is a foreign merchant – presumably a native of one of the nations that later attacks ESFI – who lustfully and illegitimately abducts the Empress. His impertinence is harshly treated by the text as he swiftly dies and putrefies. It seems, then, that Cavendish’s text functions as a fantasy of English imperialism. ESFI becomes the most important nation in the Empress’s world as all other nations have to pay it trade duties. The fantasy world of T he Blazing W orld expresses Cavendish’s imperial dreams concerning England’s future role as world leader. Published in 1666, Cavendish’s text represents an imaginative fantasy of the national success she wishes the Anglo-Dutch war of the mid-1660s would achieve for England. In reality, in 1667, the Dutch triumphed as Charles II’s naval forces were scuppered at Chatham, and England, on the verge of bankruptcy, was forced to concede various economic demands to the Dutch in the Treaty of Breda.[49] However, Cavendish’s text represents an important articulation of the sort of success she fantasises that the English could enjoy with the protection of a female, absolutist and quasi-divine monarch. Cavendish’s representations of a female absolutist monarch in T he Blazing W orld also express her proto-feminist concerns. As well as articulating English imperial ambitions through similarities between the Empress and Elizabeth I, this text uses female absolutism to express dissatisfaction about the position of 393 Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 CLAIRE JOWITT women in Restoration society. In this text, as Catherine Gallagher and Rachel Trubowitz have argued, Cavendish attempted to mesh competing feminist and royalist ideologies.[50] Cavendish’s absolutism, revealed by the phrase “I endeavour to be Margaret the First”, was predicated on her political disenfranchisement.[51] According to Catherine Gallagher, “of the two available political positions, subject and monarch, monarch is the only one Cavendish can imagine a woman occupying” as “exclusion from political subjecthood allows female subjectivity to become absolute”.[52] As a result, she identified with the paradoxical figure of the Interregnum monarch. During the 1650s the exiled Charles Stuart was neither a subject nor a monarch since he was the ruler of merely a fantasy kingdom.[53] However, by 1666, with Charles II once more established on the throne of England, Cavendish’s central concern was to examine how she, and other women, could become absolute monarchs, since this seemed to be the only way in which women could achieve political subjecthood. For Cavendish, the ambition to be a queen was an expression of her marginalisation within Restoration England. Cavendish’s immediate models of queenship were problematic. Henrietta Maria, the Queen whom she had previously served as maid-of-honour, was, through the 1650s, a Queen without a King. Henrietta Maria was now merely the dowager Queen, the widowed mother of an exiled King. Charles Stuart, the future Charles II, was, in this period, both a Queenless and kingdomless monarch. Furthermore, when Charles II did marry in 1662, his Queen, Catherine of Braghanza, was a marginalised figure in Restoration England, possessing little influence over her husband and, famously, sharing his favours with several mistresses.[54] It was to the reign of Elizabeth I that Cavendish looked for an appropriate role model to express an enabling fantasy for a woman writer. Like Elizabeth I, Cavendish (in T he Blazing W orld) scripted her subjectivity through images of absolute monarchy. These images accorded a quasi-divine status to the sovereign, but this identification was problematic because the enabling fantasy figure of the Empress was, crucially, not a monarch in her own right. The Empress’s rule had been authorised by her husband, the Emperor, who, though he remained a shadowy figure in T he Blazing W orld, still licensed his wife’s actions. Through this figure, Cavendish examined the differences between inherited monarchy and queenship by marriage. Elizabeth I was a monarch by birthright; Cavendish and the Empress were not. To achieve full subjecthood, Cavendish needed to create further worlds, over which she could be monarch by descent. But, Cavendish’s penchant for solipsistic fantasy worlds – such as the one she described in “A World in an Eare-ring” – could easily be ignored or attacked by her contemporaries as the nonsensical ramblings of “Mad Madge”. To combat such criticism Cavendish radically revised the traditional philosophical hierarchy between fact and fiction. To make her female-dominated and female-created worlds manifestos for change, Cavendish sought to educate her readership out of the traditional and patriarchal assumption that reason, or truth, was superior to fancy, or the imagination. As Cavendish reveals in the preface to T he Blazing W orld, natural philosophers’ speculations, even whilst searching for “the one truth in nature”, 394 Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 MARGARET CAVENDISH AND THE CULT OF ELIZABETH still operate in the realm of “fancy”.[55] Traditionally, such imaginative speculations “as they swerve from the only truth” have been, Cavendish observes, perceived to be “in the wrong”.[56] Cavendish, however, in T he Blazing W orld – an imaginative text that was “joined … as two worlds at the end of their poles” to her “serious philosophical considerations”, Observations Upon Ex perimental Philosophy – sought to revise the customary relationship between “reason” and “fancy”.[57] For Cavendish, there was no discrete separation between “fancy” and “reason”, as both were “effects, or rather actions of the rational part of matter”.[58] Though Cavendish admits the study of “reason” to be more “profitable”, “useful”, “laborious” and “difficult”, she writes that “reason” “requires sometimes the help of fancy to recreate the mind and withdraw it from its more serious contemplations.”[59] Cavendish’s fantastical texts are not merely the ramblings of an untutored mind; they represent a philosophical, political and feminist manifesto which argued for the importance of a fertile female imagination to reinspire male reason. According to Cavendish, worlds created in the imagination should be recognised as programmes for social change. This was an idea which, as we have seen, she rehearsed in her poem “World in an Eare-Ring”. Concerned with atomisation, this poem develops the conceit of the miniaturisation of a world as it hung suspended and self-contained, without impinging upon the consciousness of the wearer of the earring at all. The conceit appropriated the armillary world represented on the “Ditchley” portrait, but significantly, in this text, Cavendish switched the focus from, in Gheeraert’s painting, the power of the Queen to the solipsistic and microcosmic private world of the earring. The earring’s power, rather than the monarch’s control, reflects the fact that in the 1650s Charles II, like all women since the death of Elizabeth I, was only the ruler of a fantasy kingdom. By 1660, with Charles restored to his throne, he once more had a real kingdom to govern; Cavendish did not and consequently in T he Blazing W orld, though the Empress appears to be a female absolute monarch, she can only enjoy this sort of power in a fantasy world and because the Emperor has allowed her to do so. The theme that her poem rehearses – of private, self-created and internally coherent worlds – anticipates the ideological position Cavendish explores in T he Blazing W orld, but there is a significant modification. Like England under Cromwell and the Republic in the 1650s, the world of the eare-ring exists independently of its monarchical wearer. In the 1650s Charles II occupied a disenfranchised female position. However, by 1666 Charles II once more had control of his kingdom, but women’s positions remained unchanged. In her prose text it seems that ultimately Cavendish realises that her dual beliefs of absolute monarchy and feminism prove unworkable in Restoration England as the Empress and the Duchess retreat into the solitary pursuit of creating imaginary worlds. Absolute female monarchy was the ideal role for a woman, but, as Cavendish pragmatically concluded, it was an inherited, not a created, position. However much Cavendish might argue that fancy should occupy an equivalent status to reason, and that those who purported to be only concerned with reason were in fact just as prone to flights of fancy as more obviously imaginative commentators, in the 1660s such pleas would inevitably fall on deaf 395 Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 CLAIRE JOWITT ears. Because of her gender, it was only through “fancy” that Cavendish could ever become “Margaret the First”. So, to conclude, does Cavendish in this text advocate a policy of female retreat away from direct political engagement into increasingly solipsistic and private imaginary worlds? Cavendish’s feminism in this text appears subservient to her absolutism. Cavendish as a royalist did not, in reality, want either herself or anyone else to replace Charles II on the throne of England; neither did she desire to oust any other absolute monarch from their kingdom. This then left her in a situation where she could only discuss absolutism and women in terms of imaginary worlds. Similar to her characters the Empress and the Duchess in T he Blazing W orld, Cavendish’s purpose was to demand that women in the 1660s be recognised for their abilities. Cavendish reflects the acclaimed model of Elizabeth I’s queenship in her characterisation of the Empress as a way of emphasising the intelligence and achievements of women like herself who were not royal by birth. The Empress, for example, in her discussions with her Royal Society-like scientists clearly has the better of the debate. Until there was another Elizabeth I, or the patriarchal society of the 1660s recognised the intelligence of non-royal women, the power and recognition which women sought could only be described in imaginary worlds. Both the characters of the Empress and the Duchess in T he Blazing W orld reveal themselves to be more intelligent, more eloquent and more dynamic than any of their male counterparts. Because the worlds Cavendish situates her enabling fantasies in are imaginary it does not mean, then, that they express less political engagement or have fewer valid points to make about the status of women in the 1660s. Correspondence Claire Jowitt, Department of English, University of Aberystwyth, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion SY23 3DY, United Kingdom. Notes [l] Margaret Cavendish, “A World in an Eare-Ring”, Poems, and Fancies (Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1972), pp. 45-46. All subsequent references and quotations are from this edition. [2] Ibid., p. 45. [3] Ibid., p. 45. [4] Ibid., p. 46. [5] Ibid., p. 45. [6] For a detailed analysis of this painting see Roy Strong, Gloriana: T he Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), pp. 135-141. [7] The “cult of Elizabeth” was first discussed in depth by E. C. Wilson, England’s Eliza (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1939). Subsequently it was analysed by Frances Yates in “Queen Elizabeth as Astraea” (1947) and “Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts” (1957) which were republished in Frances Yates, Astraea: T he Imperial T heme in the Six teenth Century (London: Routledge 396 Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 MARGARET CAVENDISH AND THE CULT OF ELIZABETH & Kegan Paul, 1975). For a more recent analysis see Andrew Belsey & Catherine Belsey, “Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I”, eds Lucy Gent & Nigel Llewellyn, Renaissance Bodies: T he Human Figure in English Culture 1540-1660 (London: Reaktion, 1990), pp. 11-35. [8] Such imperialist and expansionist ideologies about the importance of England’s place within the world revealed in this portrait are echoed in a host of other English texts printed at this time. See, for example, Richard Hakluyt, T he Principal Navigations, Voyages, T raffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1903-1905). [9] For a biography of Cavendish see Henry Ten Eyck Perry, T he First Duchess of Newcastle and her husband as Figures in Literary History (Boston: Athenaeum Press, 1918). See also Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame: T he Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623-1673 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988). [10] For further details see Anne Barton, “Harking Back to Elizabeth: Ben Jonson and Caroline Nostalgia”, English Literary History, 48 (1981), pp. 706-731. [11] Thomas Heywood, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, 2 vols, ed. Madeleine Doran, (Oxford: The Malone Society Reprints, 1934-1935). For details concerning the complex publication history and different editions of this text see I, pp. v-xix; II, pp. v-xix. All subsequent references are to this edition. [12] Ibid., II, I3v. [13] Ibid., II, Kv. [14] Up to 1610 when Spain and France were hostile to each other, James’s policy was moderately successful. However, with the death of Henry IV of France and the establishment of more cordial relations between the two Catholic powers, England’s position as mediator was largely irrelevant. Furthermore, after the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, and the serious political rivalries within Europe which this revealed, James’s pacific policy was increasingly idealistic. The invasion of the hereditary dominions of his Protestant son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, by Spanish forces, in the autumn of 1620 was decisive in showing the inadequacies of James’s scheme. Such Spanish aggression should have signalled that the English King needed to choose between the Spanish match for his son and supporting Protestantism through Europe. However, believing that his influence with the Spanish would hold considerable sway in persuading them to moderate their demands, James tried to maintain cordial relations all round. By the time of his death in 1625, war with Spain had become virtually inevitable. For a more detailed analysis of the effectiveness of James’s pacific policy with regard to other European countries see Alan G. R. Smith. T he Reign of James VI and I (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 15-18. [15] Kevin Sharpe, T he Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 44. [16] For an assessment of the successes and failures of English foreign policy in the 1620s and 1630s, see ibid., pp. 65-l04. [17] Cited by Anne Barton, “Harking Back to Elizabeth”, p. 714. [18] Ibid., p. 714. [19] William Cavendish, T he Country Captaine, And the Varietie, T wo Comedies (London: Robinson & Moseley, 1649), pp. 39-40. For a fuller discussion of this text see 397 CLAIRE JOWITT Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 Barton, “Harking Back to Elizabeth”, pp. 707-710. See also Perry, T he First Duchess of Newcastle and Her Husband as Figures in Literary History, pp. 112-118. [20] William Cavendish, T he Varietie, p. 86. [21] William Cavendish, “Letter of Government” in A Catalogue of Letters and Other Historical Documents preserved in the Library at W elbeck, ed. Sanford Arthur Strong (London: John Murray, 1903), pp. 173-236. All subsequent references are to this edition. [22] Barton, “Harking Back to Elizabeth”, p. 708. [23] William Cavendish, T he Varietie, p. 42. [24] William Cavendish, “Letter of Government”, p. 226. All these activities were enjoyed by Cavendish himself. He published two books on horsemanship in 1658 and 1667 and, famously, in 1633 and 1634 entertained Charles I and his court at his homes at Welbeck Abbey and Bolsover Castle. The 1634 entertainment, for which Ben Jonson wrote a masque, Love’s W elcome, the King’s and Queen’s entertainment at Bolsover, cost Newcastle between £14,000 and £15,000. For further details see Perry, T he First Duchess of Newcastle and Her Husband as Figures in Literary History, p. 18, p. 92; see also Sharpe, T he Personal Rule of Charles I, p. 230. [25] William Cavendish, “Letter of Government”, p. 227. [26] Ibid., p. 225. [27] Margaret Cavendish, T he Life of W illiam Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, to W hich is Added T he T rue Relation of My Birth Breeding and Life by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. C. H. Firth (London: Routledge, 1906), p. 100. [28] William Cavendish, “Letter of Government”, p. 186. [29] Margaret Cavendish, T he W orlds Olio (London: J. Martin & J. Allestrye, 1655), p. 248. [30] William Cavendish, “Letter of Government”, p. 179. [31] See Simon Schama, T he Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London: Fontana, 1991); see also D. H. Pennington, Europe in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edn, (London and New York: Longman, 1989), pp. 79-85, pp. 469-477; C. R. Boxer, T he Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600-1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965). [32] For further details of the well-ordered and maintained cities of the Low Countries see Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, pp. 375-480, (p. 375). [33] Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame, p. 72. [34] Margaret Cavendish, T he Description of a New W orld Called T he Blazing W orld, ed. Paul Salzman, An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 251-348, (p. 252). All subsequent references are to this edition. [35] Ibid., p. 253. [36] For a discussion of Cavendish’s attitudes to science see Lisa T. Sarasohn, “A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish”, Huntington Library Quarterly, 47 (1984), pp. 299-307; see also S. Mintz, “The Duchess of Newcastle’s Visit to the Royal Society”, Journal of English and German Philology, 51 (1952), pp. 168-176; Claire Jowitt, “Old Worlds and New Worlds: Renaissance Voyages of Discovery”, unpublished PhD dissertation; University of Southampton, l995, pp. 277-285. 398 Downloaded by [University of East Anglia Library] at 09:15 24 September 2015 MARGARET CAVENDISH AND THE CULT OF ELIZABETH [37] Cavendish, T he Blazing W orld, p. 306. [38] Ibid., p. 307, p. 308. [39] Ibid., p. 260. [40] For a full discussion of this portrait see Roy Strong, T he Cult of Elizabeth (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), pp. 46-54. [41] Cavendish, T he Blazing W orld, p. 334. [42] Ibid., p. 336. [43] Ibid., p. 338. [44] Ibid., p. 339. [45] Simon Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, pp. 258-267. [46] Ibid., p. 263. For further details of Marvell’s attitudes to the Dutch see Margarita Stocker, “‘English All the World’: Marvell in Europe and Beyond”, in All Before T hem 1660-1780, ed. John McVeagh (London: Ashfield Press, 1990), pp. 65-80. [47] John Dryden, “Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, l666”, in John Dryden, ed. Keith Waller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 23-70 (p. 36). [48] For further details see David Bruce Kramer, T he Imperial Dryden: T he Poetics of Appropriation in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1994), pp. 68-74. [49] For further details see Ronald Hutton, T he Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and W ales 1658-1667 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 268-275; see also Charles Wilson, Profit and Power: A Study of England and the Dutch W ars, (London: Longman, 1957), pp. 427-158. [50] Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England”, Genders, 1 (1988), pp. 24-39; Rachel Trubowitz, “The Re-enchantment of Utopia and the Female Monarchical Self: Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing W orld”, T ulsa Studies in W omen’s Literature, 11 (1992), pp. 229-245. [51] Cavendish, T he Blazing W orld, p. 253. [52] Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute”, pp. 27-28. [53] Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute”, p. 29. [54] Ronald Hutton, T he Restoration, pp. 182-184. [55] Cavendish, T he Blazing W orld, p. 251. [56] Ibid., p. 251. [57] Ibid., p. 252. [58] Ibid., p. 252. [59] Ibid., p. 252. 399