One of the many sonneteers of the Elizabethan era, the Catholic poet Henry Constable (1562-1613), in an eloquent and sonorous sonnet praises the Blessed Virgin by making specific mention of her relation to each of the three members of the Trinity.
TO OUR BLESSED LADY
In that, O Queen of queens, thy birth was free
from guilt, which others doth of grace bereave
When in their mother's womb they life receive,
God as his sole-born daughter loved thee.
To match thee like thy birth's nobility,
He thee his Spirit for thy spouse did leave,
Of Whom thou didst his only Son conceive,
and so was link'd to all the Trinity.
Cease then, O queens, who earthly crowns do wear
To glory in the pomp of worldly things!
If men such high respect unto you bear,
Which daughters wives and mothers are of kings,
What honour should unto that Queen be done,
Who had your God for father, spouse and son?
(1-14)
The poet painstakingly builds up a strong religious argument in defence of the devotion to the Blessed Virgin, culminating in a rhetorical question which leaves the reader in no doubt as to his personal fidelity in Mary's regard. The sonnet concludes with an extended rhetorical question of four lines, in which the poet expressed his pro-Marian sentiment and juxtaposes the Blessed Virgin as Queen of Heaven with queens who earthly crowns do wear (9).
In his poem titled The Ghyrlond of the Blessed Virgin Marie, Ben Jonson (1573-1637) takes the five letters of the Blessed Virgin's name as it is spelled by the French, Marie, to weave a garland in honour of the Daughter, Mother, Spouse of God (56) : The M. the Myrtle, A. the Almonds clame,/R.Rose, I.Ivy, Sweet Eglantine (3-4). Of these, myrtle forms the base as Love, here studies to keep Grace alive (8). The Almond bloom is used to knit thy Crowne, and glorifie the rest (12). The Rose with its fragrance is used to top the fairest Lillie, now, that growes/with wonder on the thorny regiment (15-16). Humble Ivy (17) is but a basic component of the crown, yet no faith's more firme, or flat, then where't doth creep (20). Eglantine/which of the field is clep'd [called] the sweetest brier (21-22) completes the garland. They embody the three cardinal virtues, Love and Hope, and burning Charities/(Divinest graces) (29-30) and also Mary's Trinity in Union met (36) (of which Dante Gabriel Rossetti will make mention in the Marian poetry of the nineteenth century) : Daughter, and Mother and the Spouse of God/Alike of kin, to that most blessed Trine/of Persons, yet in Union (One) divine (37-39). Jonson's reverence for Mary is second only to his devotion to the Blessed Trinity and it is the threefold relationship she shares with God which accounts for her glory in his sight. Whether the work has any great literary merit, is debatable. This poem, of which even today many variations in honour of mothers and a variety of virtues survive, is memorable rather for its devout intention than for the poet's mastery of any literary technique.
The seventeenth century is a turbulent chapter in English history, fraught with civil wars. While the poet Thomas Traherne (1636?-1674) in his poem Christendom wrote: . . .
. . . holy children, maids and men
make up the King of Glory's diadem
the people of his time continued to believe as in the sixteenth century in the use of torture and the death penalty for individuals practising a Christian belief not in conformity with that of the prevailing mores of the country at the time.
When the unwed Queen Elizabeth I died without issue in 1603:
. . . (T)he 'classical' will of the wisp was still being
fitfully pursued. The heyday of Elizabethan son passed
with Gloriana herself. The closing decade of her reign was
a time of deep disturbance and even of apprehension (and was
followed by the arrival of) poets in whom a graver note
(was) heard.
Sampson 1970:159
James, I, who succeeded Elizabeth to the English throne, was the son of Lord Darnley and his wife Mary, Queen of Scots, also known as Mary Stuart, who was the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, wife of James IV of Scotland and sister of Henry VII and thus next in succession to the English throne after Henry VIII and his children (Barnhart 1956:743). King James I's father, who was distantly related to Mary, Queen of Scots, had been strangled in 1567. His mother in her turn was beheaded in 1587 on being declared guilty of conspiring against Elizabeth I. James was succeeded upon his death by his son, Charles I of England, who became embroiled in political strife and was executed at Whitehall. In January 1651 Charles II was crowned at Scone. In September of that year he was defeated by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell, who was proclaimed England's Lord High Protector in 1653 and ruled England until his death in 1658.
The restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660 marked an end to the civil wars and a new era for literature and the theatre. Charles ruled until 1685 when he died and was succeeded by his son James II, a convert to Catholicism who planned to make himself an absolute monarch and restore the Roman Catholic Church in England. In 1688 the latter's son-in-law, William of Orange, arrived in England at the invitation of a group of noblemen and churchmen. William and his wife Mary ruled England from 1689 to 1702.
Dr Luky Whittle
Edited by Catherine Nicolette
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