Abstract
Although the date of composition of Itinerarium ad Windsor is unknown, it was presumably not before spring 1575 when the dialogue is supposed to have taken place. The general topic of how a woman could legally rule England offers no help in dating, since it was a timely issue for most of the author’s adult life, not only because Mary I and Elizabeth I occupied the throne but also because women figured so prominently among rival claimants and potential successors. One can speculate about the relevance of possible exigencies (such as Leicester’s desire to marry the queen, which animates the Kenilworth entertainments of July 1575), but nothing definitively ties the writing of Itinerarium to any specific occasion. A number of Fleetwood’s other writings include prefatory epistles with a dedicatee, date of presentation, and background about composition, but the manuscripts of Itinerarium lack such paratexts.
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Notes
H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts1558–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 186–88;
Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chapter 3, esp. 88–94.
On the general practice of “agglutinative compilation” that produced collections of state papers, see Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 134, 137.
Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 51. Sharpe describes Starkey as Cotton’s friend, a fellow “antiquary and collector” who lived in Cotton’s house in 1625 (e.g., Cotton, 35, 57, 235); Beal interprets their relationship more in terms of clientage, documenting that on one occasion Starkey solicited Cotton’s patronage as a commissioner for the navy, and that when he lived in Cotton’s house in 1625, it was to serve as steward while the baronet fled the plague (In Praise of Scribes, 90–91); Woudhuysen’s focus on the scribal profession leads him to present Starkey as a hired man, employed by Cotton as a copyist (Sir Philip Sidney, 126). Beale rejects Simon Adams’s claim that Starkey served as Cotton’s secretary.
C. E. Wright, “The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries and the Formation of the Cottonian Library,” in The English Library before 1700, edited by Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright (London: Athlone Press, 1958), 195.
Alfred Hackman, ed., Catalogi codicum manuscriptorum bibliothecae Bodleianae, pars quarta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), col. 421. The table of contents in the catalogue is incomplete, lacking three items.
John Bruce, “Particulars Respecting Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, with a Fragment of the ‘Itinerarium ad Windsor.’ Written by Mr. Serjeant Fleetwood, Recorder of London,” Archaeologia 37 (1856): 351–62; Dictionary of National Biography (London, 1885–1900), s.v. “Fleetwood, William” (Walter Baker Clode).
A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum (London, 1808–1812), 1:56. Andrew G. Watson describes the volume as “Transcripts of historical tracts, tempore Elizabeth I… Items 3–9 and 11–125 are in Ralph Starkey’s hand”: The Library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (London: British Museum, 1966), 321. A. F. Pollard includes MS Harley 168 among the more important Starkey volumes purchased by Sir Simonds D’Ewes, whose collection formed the basis of Sir Robert Harley’s: Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900), s.v. “Starkey, Ralph.”
Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts, 3:345. MS Harley 6234 has the binding William A. Jackson describes as typical of Gwynne’s collection, with his name stamped in gold on the upper cover and E. G. on the lower: “Edward Gwynne,” The Library 4th ser., 15 (1934): 90–96. The volume also bears the armorial bookplate of John Holies, Duke of Newcastle upon Tyne (1662–1711): Cyril Ernest Wright, Fontes Harleiani: A Study of the Sources of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts … (London: British Museum, 1972), 193.
Most helpful of the sources is N. R. Ker, “Liber Custumarum and Other Manuscripts Formerly at the Guildhall,” Guildhall Miscellany 1.3 (1954): 37–45.
Fleetwood was well suited to help Leicester administer forest law. Among the Recorder’s most substantial works is A treatise upon the charters, liberties, laws, and customs of all forests, parks, chases, and free warrens within the realm of England—written at Buckhurst’s suggestion, as Alsop and Zim note in their chapters below. Of the numerous manuscripts, see especially the 1571 text in BL MS Harley 5194 and the 1581 autograph version in Harvard Law School MS 15. Bruce suggests that Leicester’s business at Windsor involved not only forest matters but also the queen’s extensive alterations of the castle, which he describes as “then in full progress” (“Particulars,” 352). However, “in 1575, nothing was done until October,” according to H. M. Colvin, D. R. Ransome, and John Summerson, The History of the King’s Works, vol. 3, part 1 (London: HMSO, 1975), 324. Leicester is presumably the addressee of Fleetwood’s December 12, 1582 letter about “your justice seat of Wyndesor” (BL MS Stowe 850, fols. 339–41).
Master Thomas Dudley does not speak in Itinerarium, and his brother John speaks only in the opening, before the entrance of Buckhurst and the Recorder. Distant cousins of the earl, both were among his leading “men of business,” significant figures in his household as they had been in that of his father, the Duke of Northumberland: Simon Adams, Leicester and the Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), esp. 152–57, 220, 332–35. Little evidence connects the brothers to Fleetwood. He was a gentleman mourner at John’s funeral in January 1581, as were Thomas Dudley and Leicester’s nephew Philip Sidney: William Robinson, The History and Antiquities of the Parish of Stoke Newington (London, 1820), 230. Five years later, Thomas (alongside Fulke Greville, Edward Dyer, and Edward Wotton) was a pallbearer in Sidney’s funeral, while the Recorder rode with the Lord Mayor, as depicted in Thomas Lant, Sequitur celebritas et pompa funebris … (London, 1587). Writing to Burghley in September 1577, Fleetwood mentions Thomas having shown him part of a letter from Leicester: Thomas Wright, ed., Queen Elizabeth and Her Times (London, 1838), 2:66–69.
For biographical information about John Dudley, see S. T Bindoff, The House of Commons 1509–1558 (London: Secker and Warburg for the History of Parliament Trust, 1982), 2:63,
and P. W. Hasler, The House of Commons 1558–1603 (London: HMSO for the History of Parliament Trust, 1981), 2:60–61. For Thomas Dudley, see Hasler, House of Commons 1558–1603, 2:63–64.
The margin repeats half a dozen place names alongside their appearance in Master John’s speech: Temple Bar, Ivy Bridge, St. Clement’s, St. Spirit’s Chapell, Savoy, St. James’s. As noted in the Introduction to this volume, he implicitly traces the party’s itinerary from Leicester House to their current position. The named locations can be seen on the so-called Agas map of Elizabethan London, where the old Roman road toward Windsor is labeled “The Waye to Redinge.” Leicester and company would have met the road further west, as can be seen more clearly on Joris Hoefnagel’s map, printed in Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates orbis terrarum (Cologne, 1572). Leicester House is called “Paget Place” on these maps, the earl having purchased this grand property (originally the London palace of the bishops of Exeter) from Lord Paget in 1570. By the time it was labeled “Leycester howse” on the map of Westminster printed in John Norden’s Speculum Britanniae (London, 1593), Leicester was dead, and it had become Essex House. All three maps can easily be found on the internet, with an especially good reproduction of Hoefnagel at Historic Cities (http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/). On the aristocratic townhouses in this area, see J. F. Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community 1525–1640 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 142–46;
and Jill Husselby and Paula Henderson, “Location, Location, Location! Cecil House in the Strand,” Architectural History 45 (2002): 159–93, which reproduces Norden’s map.
Vavasor: a feudal tenant, sometimes especially one who held land of a baron rather than directly of the king; the holding itself was a vavasory (Latin vavasoria). Fleetwood also refers to the vicinity of the Savoy as “a vavasoria” in his treatise on the Duchy of Lancaster: Bodleian MS Ashmole 1157, [p. 96]. In the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer introduces the Franklin as “a worthy vavasour.” In the context of John Dudley’s display of antiquarian lore, “Iven” may be meant to provide an etymology for the place name “Ivy.” On etymology in Tudor antiquarianism, see Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chapter 2.
John Stow locates “a chappie dedicated to the Holy Ghost, called Saint Spirite” (cp. Sanctus Spiritus) between Leicester House and Milford Lane, “uppon what occasion founded I have not read”: A Survey of London (1603), edited by C. L. Kingsford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), 2:92.
All three MSS render the chapel’s name as nonsense (“St. Spicett”). On Stow’s friendship with Fleetwood, see Oliver Harris, “Stow and the Contemporary Antiquarian Network,” in John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past, edited by Ian Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie (London: British Library, 2004), 30.
Fleetwood recounts the relevant history in his treatise on the Duchy of Lancaster: Bodleian MS Ashmole 1157, fols. 87–102. Alsop (ch. 5 below, n. 31) lists four other copies of this treatise, to which may be added BL MS Additional 26,741, fols. 4–35. (The British Library copies lack Fleetwood’s epistle to Heneage.) Fleetwood was deeply involved with the duchy and its liberty of the Savoy. One of his early patrons was Sir Ambrose Cave, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, who appointed him to a number of duchy offices including steward and bailiff of the Savoy, which he held for over 30 years. Fleetwood’s parliamentary seats included Lancaster (1559, 1563). Indeed, Fleetwood’s service to the duchy began even before Cave’s chancellorship: Alsop, “The Act for the Queen’s Regal Power, 1554,” Parliamentary History 13.3 (1994): 263.
For excellent background with an emphasis on administration, including details of Fleetwood’s service, see Robert Somerville, The History of the Duchy of Lancaster, Volume 1: 1265–1603 (London: Duchy of Lancaster, 1953) and The Savoy (London: Duchy of Lancaster, 1960).
By saying “I do read that,” the earl signals the start of a long quotation. From “the most antient statutes” to “unto the king,” his words come from the Act for the Queen’s Regal Power: Anno Mariae primo. Actes Made the Seconde Daye of Apryll (London, 1554), fol. ii. Thus, the Recorder is again quoting the Act when he repeats Leicester’s question (fol. 212r). Tudor controversies over the question of queenship have received a great deal of attention from historians in the past 40 years. Amanda Shepherd, Gender and Authority in Sixteenth-Century England: The Knox Debate (Keele: Ryburn, 1994), remains an indispensable introduction to key primary texts.
Among discussions better attuned to feminist perspectives, see especially Constance Jordan, “Women’s Rule in Sixteenth Century British Thought,” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 421–51.
Outstanding among earlier studies is James E. Phillips Jr., “The Background of Spenser’s Attitude toward Women Rulers,” Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1941): 5–32.
Prerogative and preeminence are not paired simply for mellifluousness but mark a crucial distinction. In the dialogue on the succession that Baker attributes to Fleetwood, Serjeant Browne describes two kinds of prerogatives (Cambridge University Library Additional MS 9212, fols. 24r–24v). The lower kind, which “properlie may be termed praeeminences,” are given to the ruler by the laws of the realm. The higher kind, “termed properlie praerogatives,” do not derive from the laws but, on the contrary, “are above the laws and make the crowne” (i.e., are constitutive of regal power). This “high praerogative” is “parcel of the crowne and therfore above al lawes and statutes of the realme.” For the increasing political significance of this latter, “inseparable” prerogative during the period, see W S. Holdsworth, “The Prerogative in the Sixteenth Century,” Columbia Law Review 21.6 (1921): 554–71, esp. 558–62.
For an example, consider Thomas Norton’s objection to one of Archbishop Whitgift’s 1583 articles of subscription as being “much injurious to her Majestie” because it describes her ecclesiastical authority as having been bestowed by the laws of the realm, whereas in truth it “is originallie incident to the regali crowne of Christian Kinges without geveinge it by the Civili Lawes”: Albert Peel, ed., The Second Parte of a Register, Being a Calendar of Manuscripts under That Title… (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 1:194, reading regall for Peel’s reall.
On the laws of Oleron, see Prichard and Yale, Hale and Fleetwood on Admiralty Jurisdiction, xxxiii–xxxvi, 59–63. On lex mercatoria, see J. H. Baker, “The Law Merchant and the Common Law before 1750,” in The Legal Profession and the Common Law: Historical Essays (London: Hambledon, 1986), 341–68.
The MSS read “per leges trengarum,” apparently an error for “per leges treugarum,” that is, by the laws of the truces. Compare A Commentary of the Services and Charges of William Lord Grey of Wilton, K. G., edited by Sir Philip de Malpas Grey Egerton (London: Camden Society, 1847), Appendix XI, 53–58.
For March treason, see C. J. Neville, “The Law of Treason in the English Border Counties in the Late Middle Ages,” Law and History Review 9.1 (1991): 1–30. Outlawry in the Scottish Marches gave rise to expressive names for a variety of cattle thieves, highwaymen, and other “filed” (i.e., defiled, corrupt) persons. For “outputters,” see Neville, 29; for “limmers” and the rest, see OED Online.
Grand serjeanty was originally a form of land tenure requiring ceremonial service to the king. By Fleetwood’s time, it had evolved into the right to perform such service, a matter of honor as well as material perquisites. For instance, upon the coronation of James I, the Earl of Oxford claimed the hereditary right of the Lord Great Chamberlain to dress the king in the morning, noting that “when the King is apparelled and ready to go out of his chamber, then the Earl should have the bed where the King lay on the night before the Coronation, and all the apparel of the same, with the coverlet, curtains, pillows, and the hangings of the room, with the king’s nightgown.” He also claimed the lesser service of presenting the king with water, for which Oxford would have received “the basins, tasting cups, and towels.” The lord steward denied him the greater service, but the impecunious earl managed to convert even the lesser one to £200 cash. Alan H. Nelson, Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), 422–23.
One can think of authorities and precedents as amounting to much the same thing, and the Recorder seems to conflate them when he goes on to speak of “the speaches and judgementes of those that first sett them downe.” However, they can also be contrasted, as in Constance Jordan’s obervation that opponents of gynecocracy tended to argue from “authority, chiefly scripture and Aristotle,” whereas its defenders relied more on “the evidence of experience”— that is, “references to and examples from history”: “Women’s Rule in Sixteenth Century British Thought,” Renaissance Quarterly 40.3 (1987): 426. History in the form of judicial precedent became increasingly important in legal thought during the sixteenth century: see, for instance, J. H. Baker, “English Law and the Renaissance,” in The Legal Profession and the Common Law: Historical Essays (London: Hambledon, 1986), 461–76.
Aesop’s bird with borrowed feathers has been a familiar image of literary borrowing at least since Horace (Epistles 1.3). Compare the attack on Shakespeare as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers” in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (London, 1592). See Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), 49: “If every BIRD had (should take) his own feathers he should be as rich as a new-shorn sheep (you would be naked).” The Recorder combines the proverbial image of the naked bird with a seasonal allusion to the popular belief that cuckoos spend the winter in hollow trees.
The beginning of the charter of the treaty of Winchester (1153), which is also the source of the Recorder’s information about the participants in the conference: Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum 1066–1154, edited by H. A. Cronne and R. H. C. Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 3:97–99; English translation in David C. Douglas and George W. Greenaway, eds., English Historical Documents 1042–1189 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 404–7. J. Swart confuses the treaty with the Council of Winchester a dozen years earlier (“Antiquarians at Work,” 114). Fleetwood’s account of the treaty is unusual in describing it as a legal judgment of right rather than as a negotiated peace settlement.
Tudor chronicles unanimously echo the latter view, found in contemporary documents as diverse in their loyalties as Gesta Stephani, edited by K. R. Potter (London: Nelson, 1955), and Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum (Douglas and Greenaway, English Historical Documents 1042–1189, 308–13).
The trefoil drawn by the scribe in the margin of A at the beginning of this speech draws attention to the Recorder’s reference to the manuscript, one of the treasures of his library. Raphael Holinshed’s chronicle translates the treaty from “an autentike booke conteyning the olde lawes of the Saxon and Danishe kinges, in the ende whereof the same charter is exemplified, which booke is remayning with the right worshipfull William Fleetewoode esquire, nowe Recorder of London”: The Laste Volume of the Chronicles (London, 1577), 389–90. For a description of Fleet wood’s “autentike booke,” now John Rylands Library MS Latin 420, see Frank Taylor, Supplementary Hand-List of Western Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library, 1937 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1937), 13–14. For Fleetwood’s account of how, around 1551, he acquired “an old booke, wrytten in the Saxons tonge, of the lawes made by Adelstane, Edmonde, and Edgare,” see his epistle to Sir Nicholas Bacon, BL MS Harley 5194, fol. 2. On Fleetwood as “one of the earliest collectors of English legal manuscripts,” with a finding list, see Baker and Ringrose, Catalogue, xlvii–viii; and Alsop, chapter 5 below.
The hope was often expressed that God make the queen “frutefull, and the mother of manye chyldren” (Aylmer, Harborowe, sig. I2), but why an old mother? According to the Gospel of Luke, Elizabeth was old and barren when an angel announced she would bear the son who became John the Baptist. A number of prayerful injunctions for Queen Elizabeth to bear a successor combine “old mother” with “mother in Israel” from the song of Deborah (Judges 5:7). For instance, Lord Henry Howard concludes a letter to Lord Burghley, “God make her an auncyent mother in Israeli. Amen” (March 3 [1572?], BL MS Cotton Titus F 6, fol. 16r). Similarly, Jewel’s letter to the queen in Defence of the Apologie concludes, “God evermore enfiarne and directe Your Majestie with His Holy Sprite… that you may live an olde mother in Israel… Amen” (sig. Aiiii verso). The prevalence of this formula raises the question of whether Fleetwood had written “an old mother in Israel,” the final words having been lost in transmission. Like so much praise of Elizabeth, the comparison to Deborah was, of course, double-edged: see A. N McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 23–35, 56–57;
and Carol Blessing, “Elizabeth I as Deborah the Judge: Exceptional Women of Power,” in Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins, Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of Elizabeth I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 19–33.
On the queen’s own use of the trope of motherhood, along with reasons for her to have stopped doing so in the early 1560s, see Catherine Coch, “‘Mother of my Countreye’: Elizabeth I and Tudor Constructions of Motherhood,” English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996): 423–50.
On this and other aspects of motherhood in Elizabethan political discourse, see Jacqueline Vanhoutte, Strange Communion: Motherland and Masculinity in Tudor Plays, Pamphlets, and Politics (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003).
See Bindoff, The House of Commons 1509–1558, s.v. “Skinner, Ralph.” On Skinner’s opposition to Mary’s religious policies, see Jennifer Loach, Parliament and the Crown in the Reign of Mary Tudor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), esp. 217–18; and on this passage of Itinerarium, 96–97.
Contrary to most previous writers, Alsop insists correctly that the author of the tract is not the person who delivers it to the queen (“Act,” 270). Christopher W. Brooks makes the erroneous conflation of author and presenter (ODNB, “Fleetwood”), as I did in “Recorder Fleetwood and the Tudor Queenship Controversy,” in Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Carole Levin and Jean C. Watson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 245–46. Alsop comments that “no likely individual possessing all the specified characteristics has been identified” but goes on to point out remarkable similarities to Anthony Browne of the Middle Temple, who was committed to the Fleet at the beginning of Queen Mary’s reign, suspected of high treason though not charged, and (most strikingly) went “from the superlative degree to the positive” by being demoted from chief justice of Common Pleas upon the accession of Queen Elizabeth. Alsop’s tentative identification has gained added interest from Baker’s attribution to Fleetwood of a dialogue in which Serjeant Browne asserts a series of “errors” supporting the Stuart claim to the English throne, each of which is then confuted at length by his interlocutor. The dialogue replies to arguments developed by Edmund Plowden, adapted by Anthony Browne, and put into print by John Leslie: see Marie Axton, “The Influence of Edmund Plowden’s Succession Treatise,” Huntington Library Quarterly 37 (1974): 209–26; and The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).
Maund: Maundy. For the Maundy Thursday ceremonies of the Tudor queens as, in Carole Levin’s words, “part of a larger theatricalization of royalty intended to achieve and demonstrate power,” see “The Heart and Stomach of a King”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), chapter 1; and Caroline McManus, “Queen Elizabeth, Doll Common, and the Performance of the Royal Maundy,” English Literary Renaissance 32.2 (2002): 189–213.
In chapter 7 below, Sarah Duncan discusses what many readers may see as Fleetwood’s surprisingly positive portrayal of Queen Mary, and one might equally wonder about his treatment of Gardiner. (For instance, see Moore, “Recorder Fleetwood,” 246.) Fleetwood’s anecdote about Gardiner bears a striking resemblance to an incident the bishop himself describes in a 1547 letter to Lord Protector Somerset, widely reprinted in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. In that incident, Gardiner had counseled Henry VIII to reject Cromwell’s advice “to have his will and pleasure regarded for a lawe”: The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, edited by James A. Muller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 399.
At issue was probably the 1539 Statute of Proclamations: Glyn Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 93–94. The similarity of the two stories accords well with Alsop’s suggestion that the Itinerarium anecdote originated with Gardiner’s circle and that “at the heart of Fleetwood’s favourable account of Gardiner’s role in the 1554 intrigue was his perception—in spite of their religious differences—of a kindred constitutional spirit” (“Act,” 271, 273).
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Moore, D. (2013). William Fleetwood’s Itinerarium ad Windsor. In: Beem, C., Moore, D. (eds) The Name of a Queen. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137272027_2
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