Queen Elizabeth I like an Old Testament character
by
Compared
to Judith and Esther,
she was
a new Moses and as wise as King Solomon.
Susan Doran writes in the Abstract to her 2010
chapter, pp 95–110:
“Elizabeth I: An Old Testament King”:
Elizabeth I: An Old Testament King |
Springer Nature Link
Representations of Elizabeth as the Old Testament heroines, Deborah,
Esther, Jael, and Judith, have been widely explored, thanks to the pioneering
work of Professor John King.1 It is now well understood how
these biblical figures were used both to counter attacks on the legitimacy of
female rule and to provide exemplars of godly conduct to a Protestant queen.
Much less fully appreciated, I think, is the extent and variety of associations
made between Elizabeth and a long line of male prophets,
judges, and kings in the Hebrew Bible: David, Gideon, Elias, Hezekiah, Joseph,
Joshua, Josiah, Moses, Saul, Solomon, and more besides.2 Scholars,
moreover, seem not to have noticed that while biblical women tended to drop out
of the contemporary literature after Thomas Bentley’s Monument of
Matrones in 1582, Protestant writers, preachers, and politicians
continued to draw between Elizabeth I and male biblical parallels between
Elizabeth I and male biblical figures—especially David and Solomon—until the
queen’s death.3
And, according to this article:
http://www.ibrarian.net/navon/paper/The_Development_of_the_Cult_of_Elizabet
On one … of the first portraits of [Elizabeth I] as a queen
she appears in a religious context, she washes the feet of twelve poor women at
a Maundy ceremony.
….
On the title-pages of the different editions of the Bible
Elizabeth’s figure appears: she is surrounded by the four cardinal virtues on
the 1569 edition, while on the 1568 edition between the figures of Faith and
Love she personifies the third New Testament virtue, Hope.
At the beginning of the Coronation Entry as she left the
Tower she praised God for her deliverance from prison during the reign of Mary
and compared herself to the prophet Daniel spared by God by special providence:
“I acknowledge that Thou hast dealt as wonderfully and
as mercifully with me as Thou didst with Thy true and faithful servant Daniel,
Thy prophet, whom Thou deliverest out of the den from the cruelty of the greedy
and raging lions. Even so was I overwhelmed and only by Thee delivered.”
….
During the first decade Elizabeth was mostly compared to
figures of the Old Testament. In the fifth pageant of the Coronation Entry she
appeared as Deborah, the Old Testament judge, listening to the advice of three
figures representing the three estates of England, the clergy, the nobility and
the commons. ….
Elizabeth as Judith
In sermons she was compared to Judith who rescued her
people, and to Esther who interceded for her people. …. She was seen also as a
new Moses leading his people out of the captivity of Egypt, and as Solomon the
wise king.
Taken from: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/rest.12258
Elizabeth I as Judith: reassessing the
apocryphal widow’s appearance in
Elizabethan royal iconography
…. Historians and
literary scholars have long noted and analysed the appearance of biblical
analogies as part of Tudor and Stuart royal iconography.
Using the example of a biblical figure,
monarchs demonstrated the divine precedent for their decisions, and subjects in
turn could counsel their monarch to emulate the actions of a divinely favoured
biblical figure. Queen Elizabeth I of England was the subject of the greatest
number of biblical analogies drawn in the early modern period: analogies were
drawn both by apologists and by Elizabeth herself throughout the entire span of
the queen’s reign, and for almost a century after her death. …. Elizabeth’s comparisons
with Deborah the Judge, Queen Esther, Daniel the Prophet, King Solomon, and
King David have all received varying levels of attention in the existing
scholarship: but the analogy to Judith, the chaste widow of the Apocrypha, has
generally escaped detailed analysis. ….
Judith was invoked in various ways throughout
Elizabeth’s reign, and the diverse analogies reflect the changing
religio-political climate of the time. This article offers a re-examination of
the comparisons drawn between Elizabeth and Judith during the queen’s life. In
doing so, I argue that contrary to claims in some of the existing scholarship,
Judith was routinely and consistently offered to Elizabeth as biblical
precedent for dealing with Roman Catholics – with violence, not just diplomatic
rhetoric – and for the providential sanctioning of female rule; and that
Elizabeth, in drawing the parallel to Judith herself, inserted her own voice
into these debates. ….
Judith’s story can be found in the eponymous
book of the Apocrypha.
A prophecy was brought, foretelling that
Bethulia, Judith’s city, would be lost to the invading Assyrians because of the
Jews’ disobedience. Judith attempted to prevent this happening, and prayed to
God that he would give her a ‘sworde to take vengeance of the [invading]
strangers’. …. She and her handmaiden allowed themselves to be captured by the
Assyrians, claiming that they had deserted. The Assyrians took her to
Holofernes, the General of the Army. Judith lied to Holofernes that God had
forsaken the Jews because they ate his offerings before the requisite time had
past, and that he would not defend them until the sacrifices were re-offered,
which would take many days to organize. Holofernes was pleased with this news,
and allowed Judith to stay in the camp. On the fourth night at the camp, after
a banquet, Holofernes passed out, drunk. His servants left the tent, and Judith
remained inside, alone. She picked up Holofernes’ sword, grasped his hair,
prayed, ‘Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, this day,’ and then ‘shee smote
twise upon his necke with all her might, and she took away his head from him.’
…. She stowed the head in her handmaiden’s
bag, and the two left the camp. She returned to Bethulia, and showed the head,
saying, ‘Beholde the head of Holofernes the chiefe captaine of the army of
Assur . . . the Lord hath
smitten him by the hand of a woman.’ …. Without their general, the Assyrian
army fell into disarray, and the attack was abandoned.
In the existing scholarship, the most
comprehensive study of Elizabeth as Judith remains England’s
Eliza, by Elkin Calhoun Wilson. The first chapter
of Wilson’s book is called ‘Judith in the Broadsides’, which, despite its
title, focuses on ‘the concept of Gloriana taking form’ throughout Elizabethan
literature, including pamphlets and dramatic productions. ….
Rather than systematically analysing Elizabeth
as Judith, Wilson used the concept of the widow Judith – the chaste,
God-fearing woman who saved her people – and attempted to trace this theme in
depictions of the queen. Wilson ends his discussion of Judith, however, by
noting the familiarity the English felt for Judith: ‘in the study of Elizabeth
idealized as Elisa [sic], Diana, and Gloriana, it is always to be remembered
that the Judith . . . is an elder
cockney cousin of these court ladies; in her homely style she testifies to
their honest English stock.’ ….
John N. King’s study of Tudor iconography
remains the key work that argues for Judith’s potency and longevity. King
observes that, ‘Judith, in her victory over Holofernes (now considered a type
for militant Catholicism) . . . embodies
triumphal power conventionally relegated to kings.’ …. By arguing that Judith’s
gender did not prevent her from saving the Israelites, Elizabeth’s apologists
were able to assert that God’s defence of England would continue, even with a
female king on the throne. …. The analogy to Judith thus asserted Elizabeth’s
position as England’s providential monarch, who would be given the necessary
strength by God to overcome England’s enemies.
While I do not argue that Elizabeth was the
first English monarch to be paralleled with Judith … the examples assembled
here demonstrate that Elizabeth was both the first monarch to be compared to
Judith in a sustained and systematic way for religio-political purposes, and
also the first monarch to affirm the analogy in her own words. The importance
of these two facts is often sidelined in the scholarship that does discuss the
Judith analogy. Helen Hackett’s study of Elizabeth and the cult of the Virgin
Mary is excellent, but dismisses Judith’s longevity by claiming, ‘biblical
heroines like Deborah and Judith dominated early Elizabethan royal
iconography.’ ….
The Victorian era, in which the Tudors were utterly
lionised as perfect “Englishmen”, had no small difficulty, though, fitting in
to their a priori view of things the unusual Elizabeth, who never
married, nor (presumably) had children.
And similarly have scholars had trouble with
Judith. For, as I wrote in my (2007) thesis (Volume Two, pp. 75-76):
The Heroine’s Character
Moore has, in a
section of this same title, “The Heroine’s Character”, written perceptively:[1]
In commenting on
Judith’s character and conduct, scholars have often said, in effect, as much
about themselves as about Judith. For example, at a time when Christians found
themselves mortally threatened by pagan persecutions, scholars like Clement of
Rome [C1st AD] saw Judith as a brave and godly woman ….
Later, in the days
when religious persecutions were not so much a threat to the Church Fathers as
sexual temptations to a celibate priesthood, such theologians as Tertullian [c.
200 AD], Methodius of Tyre [C3rd], and Ambrose of Milan [C4th] … praised Judith
highly, not so much for her courageous assassination of Holofernes as for her
self-imposed celibacy ….
…
The values and
priorities of a Victorian England, with its patronizing and protective attitude
towards “the fairer sex”, are well exemplified in the observations of Edwin
Cone Bissell, writing in 1886:
The character [of
Judith] is not simply objectionable from a literary point of view, but even
more from a moral stand-point … Her way is strewn with deception from first to
last, and yet she is represented as taking God into her counsels and as having
his special blessing in her enterprise … she assents to his [i.e., Holofernes’]
request to take part in a carousal at his tent and to spend a night in his
embrace ….
…
Although the women’s
movement is recent, it has already provided some new insights and radically
different perspectives on Judith. According to Patricia Montley … Judith is the
archetypal androgyne. She is more than the Warrior Woman and the femme fatale, a combination of the
soldier and the seductress …
Just as the
brilliance of a cut diamond is the result of many different facets, so the
striking appeal of the book of Judith results from its many facets. ….
[End of quotes]
Stocker will, in her
comprehensive treatment of the Judith character and her actions, compare the
heroine to, amongst others, the Old Testament’s Jael[2]
– a common comparison given that the woman, Jael, had driven a tent peg through
the temple of Sisera, an enemy of Israel (Judges 4:17-22) – Joan of Arc (as
already alluded to), and Charlotte Corday, who had, during the French
Revolution, beheaded the likewise unsuspecting Marat.[3]
“If viewed negatively – from an irreligious perspective, for instance”, Stocker
will go on to write,[4]
“- Judith’s isolation, chastity, widowhood, childlessness, and murderousness
would epitomize all that is morbid, nihilistic and abortive”. This, though, is
not how her fellow Bethulians, and fellow Israelites, were to consider Judith,
as we shall learn from their rapturous praise of her and her lasting fame.
Craven, with reference to Ruskin,[5]
writes: “Judith, the slayer of Holofernes; Jael, the slayer of Sisera; and
Tomyris, the slayer of Cyrus are counted in art as the female “types” who
prefigure the Virgin Mary’s triumph over Satan”. ….
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