In the Days of Good Queen Bess

This novel falls under the heading of "publishers can be deceiving."  Although In the Days of Good Queen Bess: The Narrative of Sir Adrian Trafford, Knight, of Trafford Place, in the County of Suffolk (1897) was published by the Roman Catholic house of Burns and Oates, its author, Robert Haynes Cave, was actually an Anglo-Catholic clergyman near the end of his life.   Cave, a product of Oxford, had had a minor career as a polemicist, ecclesiastical historian, and essayist; this is his only work of fiction.  Both Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic novelists had made something of a joint effort to undermine Protestant historical triumphalism about the Reformation, and the Elizabethan era was their favorite whipping boy: where Protestants focused on Smithfield, Anglo- and Roman Catholics fixed their eyes on Tyborne.  In the Days of Good Queen Bess, however, turns out to be far more ambivalent about the Queen than most of its predecessors, even if the narrative winds up on the brink of considerable historical irony.

In the introduction, Cave, who represents himself as the "editor," remarks that "Elizabeth's England was not mediaeval, but modern" (vii).  And yet, on the next page, he comments that the sixteenth-century Englishman was "of a sterner, tougher fibre" than his equivalent in "modern life" (viii).  Nor is there such a thing as "[r]eligious toleration," which Cave dates to the "nineteenth century" (viii).  The Elizabethan age produces the late-Victorian reader, who shares its modernity; but that same reader is also forever separated from his or her forebears by the coming of toleration.  The Reformation, argues Cave, brought modernity with it, but the nineteenth century makes the Reformation's most brutal elements unrepeatable.  Thus, even if Sir Adrian may be said to speak to late-Victorian religious debates, he nevertheless does so from a world as irretrievably past as the "medieval" world itself.   Here, as in other nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic historical novels, such historicizing carries an implicit political punch: Protestant historical novelists went back to the Marian Persecutions to demonstrate that Roman Catholicism was an eternally persecuting religion, incapable of true modernization or toleration; their Catholic counterparts insisted that both sides persecuted in the sixteenth century, and that both sides were now equally capable of tolerance in the nineteenth. 

Like its near-contemporary Protestant equivalent, the Methodist Joseph Hocking's "Lest We Forget" (1901), this novel plays down theology to focus on the title character's semi-picaresque adventures, punctuated by two graphic martyrdoms.  Over the course of the plot, Sir Adrian treks back and forth repeatedly between country and city, in the process demonstrating his youthful virility by rescuing a young Italian lady from stereotypically murderous gypsies, rescuing Elizabeth herself from an oncoming stag, and unsuccessfully attempting to rescue his brother, a Jesuit, from the infamous pursuivant Richard Topcliffe.  That last failing, Sir Adrian lands in the tower, where his brother is racked (among other things), but he does manage to clock Topcliffe one in the end.  His brother, alas, is not so lucky: accused of participating in the Babington Plot, he is drawn and quartered.  Despite managing to annoy Elizabeth, Sir Adrian lives on in enough royal favor that the family's estates don't disappear under the weight of recusancy fines.

As is common with Anglo/Roman Catholic novels set during this time period, In the Days of Good Queen Bess suggests that English history acquires a double layer of sorts after the Reformation.  Post-Reformation Catholics frequently find themselves displaced and exiled, stripped of their organic connection to the nation; for them, the "domesticity" that so many Protestants felt emerged in the wake of the Reformation not only does not exist, but is constantly under fire from the penal laws.  In this novel, one conformist who returns to Catholicism loses his social position and estates, dying soon after, and "his sons soon abandoned the place altogether, and settled in foreign lands" (198).  Cave and other Catholic novelists in this tradition insist that the "Protestant nation" was forged not just out of positive religious conviction, but, just as importantly, on acts of rigid and frequently violent exclusion.   Catholics even move through the English landscape differently, as we see when Adrian and Frank trek through "Framlingham and Needham" but have to avoid Bury St. Edmunds, with its "strong Protestant faction" (116).   Protestants have true freedom of movement; Catholics must conceal themselves, calculate, look for alternative routes.    Catholics are "un-English" only insofar as Protestants refuse to acknowledge their Englishness; significantly, both of the novel's Catholic martyrs, the fictional Frank Trafford and the real Margaret Clitherow, pledge their allegiance to Elizabeth. Cave pushes this Englishness one step further (and also tips his hat to his own ecclesiastical loyalties) by making his Catholics rather pleased, all in all, with the new vernacular service (3) and not so pleased with the quality of the Douai-Rheims Bible, which Frank finds much inferior to Henry VIII's Great Bible (135-36).

In this Catholic counter-narrative, there are two primary spectacles: theatrical court culture, with its elaborate rituals, showy dresses, and carefully managed spaces; and the moment of martyrdom, with its brutalized, fragmented bodies.  When it comes to Elizabeth, Cave seesaws back and forth between admiring Elizabeth's charisma and intelligence--at the end, Adrian praises the "wisdom and the vigour of her government" (203), despite her treatment of Catholics--and reporting on her false hair, her stinginess, her vanity, and her terrible temper.  Nevertheless, he perceives that court rituals are a mode of power.  As are, of course, the public executions.  In representing Margaret Clitherow's martyrdom, Cave adds both sensation and pathos to John Mush's account of her death: she regards Frank with "piteous eyes of greeting" and prays in "broken, fragmentary words" (126), then, as the execution proceeds, "shriek after shriek rang through the air, mixed with piteous cries of 'Kill me!' and the crowd cried out with groans to despatch her quickly" (127-28).  Afterward, Adrian feels "sick" and Frank loses consciousness (128).  Clitherow here turns into the Queen's saintly yet shattered opposite, engendering the crowd's love much as Elizabeth does, but involving even the Protestant onlookers in an agonized emotional (and physical) reaction that threatens to undermine Elizabeth's policies.  Elizabeth cannily manages her court spectacles, but the spontaneous agonies of martyrdom perform more than the court intends.  Frank's own martyrdom, foreshadowed here, rebounds painfully upon Elizabeth herself when Adrian describes how "[h]is face was covered with a thick sweat, the blood issued from his mouth, ears, and eyes, and the forehead burned with so much heat that I could scarce endure my hand upon it" (187).   Adrian's oral martyrology saves the other men from a similar death, although it does not save Catholics from Elizabeth or the penal laws.  His gory account, though, threatens Elizabeth with nightmares (187), which is quite possibly the best the novel's Catholics can do: haunt the minds of their persecutors, as psychological ghosts of the quite literally repressed.

But this moment also sets up the novel's two closing ironies.  Elizabeth mournfully tells Adrian that "it is like enough that posterity will speak of me as it does of our blood-stained sister Mary, whose memory men abhor" (187).  But which posterity? As the novel's very title indicates, Elizabeth remains "good Queen Bess"; her vision of a self transformed into a bloodsucking monster by future generations has not, in fact, come true, even in a Victorian age where harsh criticisms of Elizabeth were hardly unknown.  "Good Queen Bess" is the Protestant Queen Bess, who has not, after all, been revised out of existence.  Her unwarranted pessimism, however, appears shortly before Adrian's cautious optimism about James I, who has promised "perfect toleration" (199) for Catholics.  Well, maybe, thinks Adrian.  The novel thus closes on Adrian wondering what will happen under James' rule--the immediate answer being, of course, the Gunpowder Plot, another landmark in Protestant narratives about Catholic villainy.   And this moment, which Adrian cannot foresee, helps explain why the novel can still refer to "Good Queen Bess," even in irony.