Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn, terrified because she has had another miscarriage (Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as dramatized by Peter Straughan, BBC 2015)
Friends and readers
I have been so surprised at Austen’s vehement defense of Mary Stuart in her History of England, that I’ve tended to read her words as ironic, playful, or somehow not really meaning it. But in conversation on the Net here I’ve learnt that Samuel Johnson also empathized with Mary: more, some of the terms in which he put his defense, or one reason he singled out for indignation on her behalf are precisely those of Austen.
She writes in the chapter, Elizabeth
these Men, these boasted Men [Lord Burleigh, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the rest of those who filled the chief offices of 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 & protection; and at length in allowing Elizabeth to bring this amiable Woman to an untimely, unmerited, and scandalous Death.
Johnson, said my friend, reviewed William Tytler’s book on “the casket letters.” This is scheduled to be published in the final volume (20) of the Yale Edition of Johnson’s Works (so it is not yet on the Yale Digital Site), nor (alas) can I find it ECCO, but in a conversation with Boswell recorded in Boswell’s Life, Johnson retorts:
BOSWELL: ‘I here began to indulge old Scottish sentiments, and to express a warm regret, that, by our Union with England, we were no more; — our independent kingdom was lost.’
JOHNSON. ‘Sir, never talk of yourr independency, who could let your Queen remain twenty years in captivity, and then be put to death, without even a pretence [sic] of justice, without your ever attempting to rescue her; and such a Queen too; as every man of any gallantry of spirit would have sacrificed his life for.’ (Life, 5:40)
I took down from one of my bookshelves (the one with books on Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots) and found in Jayne Lewis’s Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation that Lewis has a section on a painting Boswell commissioned by Hamilton of Mary Queen of Scots for which Boswell wanted Johnson to write an appropriate inscription. Johnson would not as the painting is a travesty of what happened.
Gavin Hamilton, The Abdication of Mary, Queen of Scots (Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow)
Her captors (says Lewis) are in classical, she in historical dress. Looking at the image, it does seem to me man is in armor, another in a clerical kind of outfit, with a 16th century cap on his head, and a third is some kind of white cape or overcoast. Lewis remarks they are absurdly “restrained,” and I agree it’s not shown this was coercion. Johnson sent an inscription which ignores the falsely bland (decorous?) picture by Hamilton Boswell paid for, which is (in Boswell’s words) “a representation of a particular scene in her history, her being forced to resign her crown.” Johnson instead produced lines which referred to Mary’s “hard fate,” i.e. her execution.: “Mary Queen of Scots, terrified and overpowered by insults, menaces, and clamours of her rebellious subjects, sets her hand, with fear and confusion, to a resignation of the kingdom.”
Lewis provides an image by Alexander Runciman much closer to Johnson’s response:
Lewis says the review Johnson wrote of the book on the casket letters was “glowing” and that Johnson “reprimanded” the Keeper of the Advocate’s Library in Edinburgh for his countrymen in having “let your Queen remain twenty years in captivity and then be put to death.”
Johnson “understood, even felt the fatal role that the symbols and signs which reduced her to a thing — and thus potentially to nothing — had played both in Mary’s own tragedy and in the patriarchal farce so recently re-enacted by the artists, critics and collectors of Georgian England … it was the will to freeze her in symbolic form (through ‘insults, menaces, and clamours’) that once stripped Mary of her sovereignty, and that does so as she becomes again a sacrifice to the modern frenzy of renown” (Lewis, 118-19)
According to Lewis, Johnson felt personally (“especially”) close to Mary, perpetually aware of how her predicament could be re-enacted in the present. Austen too sees Mary as affecting her close friends and neighbors and about how her family deserted her: readers have been distracted and puzzled by the lines referring to Mary’s Catholic religion:
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 beleived 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 Judgements who accuse her
But these lines show the personal identification that actuates her:
Oh! what must this bewitching Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only ones are now Mr Whitaker, Mrs Lefroy, Mrs Knight & myself, who was abandoned 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 orders for her Death!
And this footnote remembering Charlotte Smith’s first novel, Emmeline, or The Orphan of the Castle reinforces Austen’s sense of Mary and Elizabeth’s contemporaneity. Austen writes of Robert Devereux Lord Essex.
This unfortunate young Man was not unlike in Character to that equally unfortunate one Frederic Delamere. The simile may be carried still farther, & Elizabeth the torment of Essex may be compared to the Emmeline of Delamere. It would be endless to recount the misfortunes of this noble & gallant Earl. It is sufficient to say that he was beheaded on the 25th of Feb:ry, after having been Lord Leuitenant of Ireland, after having clapped his hand on his Sword, and after performing many other services to his Country. Elizabeth did not long survive his loss, & died so miserable that were it not an injury to the memory of Mary I should pity her.
So when Johnson tried to convince Hester Thrale not to marry Piozzi, that “only some phantoms of the imagination” could “seduce her to Italy,” “eased [his] heart” “by reminding Thrale of Mary Stuart’s fateful flight from Scotland into England:
When Queen Mary took the resolution of sheltering herself in England, the Archbishop of St. Andrew’s attempting to dissuade her, attended on her journey and when they came to the irremeable stream that separated the two kingdoms, walked by her side into the water, in the middle of which he seized her bridle, and with earnestness proportioned to her danger and his own affection, pressed her to return. The Queen went forward. — If the parallel reaches thus far, may it go no further. The tears stand in my eyes” (quoted by Lewis, 119)
Johnson and Austen bring Mary into the present, and also acknowledge her distance from them, Austen by alluding to a novel which sets Mary in the world of “the fancy” (imagination), Johnson by saying “the parallel can go no further.”
Lewis goes on to say Mrs Thrale herself copied one of Mary’s poems into her private journal (244, n42). I don’t know which one but offer this as an example of Mary’s use of the sonnet form in a poem
First the original French:
Que suis-je hélas? Et de quoi sert ma vie?
Je ne suis fors qu’un corps privé de coeur,
Une ombre vaine, un objet de malheur
Qui n’a plus rien que de mourir en vie.
Plus ne me portez, O ennemis, d’envie
A qui n’a plus l’esprit à la grandeur.
J’ai consommé d’excessive douleur
Votre ire en bref de voir assouvie.
Et vous, amis, qui m’avez tenue chère,
Souvenez-vous que sans coeur et sans santé
Je ne saurais aucune bonne oeuvre faire,
Souhaitez donc fin de calamité
Et que, ici-bas étant assez punie,
J’aie ma part en la joie infinie.
Then a good modern English translation:
Alas what am I? What use has my life?
I am but a body whose heart’s torn away,
A vain shadow, an object of misery
Who has nothing left but death-in-life.
O my enemies, set your envy all aside;
I’ve no more eagerness for high domain;
I’ve borne too long the burden of my pain
To see your anger swiftly satisfied.
And you, my friends who have loved me so true,
Remember, lacking health and heart and peace,
There is nothing worthwhile that I can do;
Ask only that my misery should cease
And that, being punished in a world like this,
I have my portion in eternal bliss
— from an excellent Mary Stuart site.
For good measure Lewis shows how “in private life” David Hume reacted spontaneously, personally and viscerally to aspects of Mary’s character and in his printed History did all her could to make Mary’s suffering present to readers (120-21). To all these later 18th century people Mary had not yet become wax-work, or an abstract site of scholarship.
I see close parallels in thinking between Austen and Johnson — how people are oblivious, dismissive, show a total failure of the imagination when it comes to the injustices towards the suffering of others — which offers another explanation for why Austen so devotedly and vehemently favored Mary Stuart.
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Hitherto when I’ve discussed Austen’s History of England or her ardent defenses (and attacks) on Tudor queens, I’ve tried to show a fervent feminism at work (For Austen’s birthday: what she said about Tudor queens, especially Katharine Parr).
But this does not help us understand her particular reactions to particular figures, e.g., “Lady Jane Gray, who tho’ inferior to her lovely Cousin the Queen of Scots, was yet an amiable young woman & famous for reading Greek while other people were hunting.” Now I’m thinking the analogy to make for Austen’s History of England is also our modern historical romances and historical films, where women writers especially mirror women’s modern experiences of victimhood.
The scene of Anne at the window parallels one close to it in time in the film where she looks out to show Thomas Cromwell how her beloved dog, Purkoy, has been cruelly killed in an act of surrogate threat:
Honestly, I look forward to when the 20th volume of the Yale edition of Johnson appears with that review of an 18th book on the casket letters. I still remember what deeply moving use Stephan Zweig made of them in his biography of Mary, and how by contrast, Antonia Fraser acted as a prosecuting attorney whose interrogation demonstrates Mary could not have written them (at least as is). Gentle reader you also owe this blog to my having begun to teach Wolf Hall: A Fresh Angle on the Tudor Matter and how much in love I have begun to be with Mantel’s first two novels of her trilogy on Thomas Cromwell. I think very highly of Bring Up the Bodies too.
Mary Queen of Scots by Federico Zuccari or Alonso Sanches Coello — an image from yet another era.
I will go back to my notes on Scott’s The Monastery and The Abbot and see what they yield. Scott is of Austen’s era, historical fiction begins with his Waverley (1815), though I admit the one early illustration for The Abbot I could find seems to encapsulate all the failures of historical imagination Austen, Johnson, Hume, Hester Thrale and now Hilary Mantel work against.
Getty image
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
See also Overturning Gender Stereotypes:
https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2015/10/17/the-tudor-matter-overturninggenderstereotypes/
In class today I went over the material here about Mary Boleyn:
https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2015/10/06/the-tudor-matter-lowthorpes-2003-other-boleyn-girl-ives-ann-weirs-mary-boleyn/
E.M.
Graham Christian:
In the painting Boswell commissioned, Mary’s captors are certainly not in Classical garb–I don’t see a toga or peplum anywhere. It’s all vaguely 16th century–don’t mistake the white robe (very unlikely color, true) on the bearded gent for a toga.
Also, I see Austen’s defense as rooted in a perceived failure of courtesy. In order to see the Elizabethan establishment’s point of view, you’d have to have a feeling for statecraft, in which Austen, whatever her brilliance elsewhere, never evinced any interest.
My reply: It was Lewis who called the clothes classical garb. But you are right. I’ll amend it. I write these blogs in the wee hours of many mornings. Ellen
Thank you, Ellen. I’ve often thought that Johnson and Austen shared some important fundamental values but hadn’t looked for evidence. I think, for sure, he would have liked her.
Ellen,
You might be interested to know a new film about Mary is coming out in
December:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Queen_of_Scots_(2018_film)
Tyler
Manny: “Ellen, Remember that some of,Mary Queen of Scots is an aspect of the heavenly ascent of Richardson’s Clarissa.”
Irwin Primer: “Bit of a cult, by now? Why give so much support and credence to that queen?”
Since this came onto C18-l, I’ll reply I am not so involved with Mary Queen of Scots. What interested me was to see the parallel thinking between Austen and Johnson. I had been bemused why Austen was so vehemently devoted (she said). The blog is also (the last couple of paragraphs) about historical fiction and romance. I am involved with those genres. I know that in general Mary Queen of Scots and other victim queens like her (Marie Antoinette, Anne Boleyn) became exemplary icons and copy out here what I wrote in a review of an anthology where there is an essay on the topic by Pam Perkins:
Pam Perkins explains why by the mid-eighteenth-century in European art the Catholic and sexually transgressive Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, a political failure, and probably an accomplice to murder, was depicted as a model of exemplary femininity while (as her rival), the Protestant and apparently chaste Elizabeth I, successful on her own behalf, and an effective powerful leader on England’s behalf, was depicted as a seething sexually-frustrated Machiavellian. Like Arbella Stuart and Lady Jane Grey (whose depiction Perkins also examines), Mary Stuart’s life could fit a stereotype which presented images of beautiful women coerced into renouncing power while they continued to wield it. Mary’s regalia of power endowed erotic interactions in which a beautiful woman submitted, resigned herself or despaired with glamorized importance. Elizabeth Tudor was too clearly powerful to be assimilated into such compensatory iconographies of victimhood. Her learning and unmarried state, which the majority of her audience would not identify with, were ostracized, and she became a grim projection of the miseries of unsubmissive women who do not aim to be loving wives. Perkins suggests that the flexibility and incongruities of these myths reveals the “normative” demand for female desexualization, domesticity, and submission might not have been as “suffocatingly oppressive” as later critics have assumed (133). The problem with Perkins’s argument is she neglects the role of Catholic propaganda, a century of Stuart power, and eighteenth-century conservative Tory and anti-Jacobin reactionary politics. The sentimentalized Mary Stuart also stands in for Charles I, Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette.
To me it is interesting and even significant that the 20th and 21st century Tudor matter in books and films uses some of the same patterns: they have changed with regard to sex.
Separate reply as this is a separate topic: I’d say Richardson’s Clarissa belongs to a different discourse, one which centers on rape — and sexual harassment, hounding, humiliation, and even torture (emotional by Lovelace), too. One we’ve just been having a big plate of on TV and the Internet as we watch a very courageous woman speak up for herself and a man who still thinks he had a right to do what he did have temper tantrum. Mark my words: when he gets onto the supreme court, he’ll get back. Ellen
Thanks to Robert Demaria I now have a pdf of Johnson’s review of Tytler’s book on the casket letters. It seems that, partly as a result of Tytler’s sympathy for Mary, Tytler argues the casket letters are all forgeries by Mary’s enemies. Johnson himself clearly agrees with Tytler, is persuaded him and glad to think (it seems) the letters are forgeries.
I’ve now read more recent scholarship, and essays, and find that in her book on Mary and the murder of Darnley, Alison Weir accepts that the letters are genuine as a whole, but individual ones have been individually manipulated. She analyses each letter differently, seem to think they were written by different people. What is interesting is in order to understand Mary she cannot do without them. By rejecting them, you reject the testimony of a woman made desperate by lack of understand for her, lack of sympathy for how she wants to live.
Gordon Donaldson in his book on the first trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, comes to about the same conclusion as Weir: it is improbable the letters were wholly invented. He is willing to think some of the texts are improbable or invented but then uses them as evidence of her inner state – as we do her poems.
So I conclude by remembering what a raw deal women had in the early modern period, married off as a child to the boy of a termagent, repressed in the way girls were, absolute obedience demanded, I tend to feel this rejection initially by Antonia Fraser, upper class woman of the mid-20th century who often gets things is wrong. I go back to Zweig. Women had no language but that of sin, which condemned them. She and other early modern women had no language and told to obey the parents does not mean they suffered any the less
In this early modern period the language of Petrarchan love offered something, psychological sermons from Protestants something more (that’s why they turned to evangelical sentimentalism) and (like Vittoria Colonna) Mary Stuart seizes on these. . The rare extant letter of frank distress (there is one by Mary Boleyn) tells us they did. Even their poetry was destroyed and until recently her poetry was just not available or dismissed. I’m glad for her she had her Marys most of her life.
A recent essay on Johnson and Jane Austen has appeared in the Johnsonian Newsletter for March 2018, pp 5-15. I regret to say Linda Bree could not find much. She finds three parallels of language that show Austen know Boswell’s Life and the twin journeys to the Western Islands by Boswell and Johnson well. But she overlooks some parallels in P&P, MP, and S&S that show Austen remembering the journalism (Ramblers, Idlers, Adventurers). She shows closeness of style at times but I would suggest the kind of style outlined is also found in Ann Radcliffe. The rest are very general parallels in attitudes towards novels (that doesn’t quite hold up) and moral truth (the tone or feel is close to Johnson but there are others who express this idea).
My find is an equivalent of hers in parallel language but also suggests parallel thinking and if you are interested in what seems the oddity of siding so passionately with Mary Queen of Scots, here their attitudes are explained by their shared sense of justice and obligation betrayed. E.M.