Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, Elizabeth, Mary, sanctuary, daughter of debate, Scottish queen
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murder of her husband, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley.
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The first line of Elizabeth’s poem crystallises and dismisses many of the sentiments found in Mary’s in which she expresses doubts about her future safety if Elizabeth refuses her sanctuary in England. The first two stanzas of Mary’s poem, as translated by Betty Travitsky, are as follows:
A longing haunts my spirit, day and night,
Bitter and sweet, torments my aching heart;
’Twixt doubt and fear, it holds its wayward part,
And, while it lingers, rest and peace take flight.
Dear sister, if these lines too boldly speak
Of my fond wish to see you, ’tis for this –
That I repine and sin, in bitterness,
If still denied the favour that I seek. (ll.1-8)
By claiming that her “doubt of future foes” prevents her present peace of mind Elizabeth echoes Mary’s sentiments of dismay, but whereas Mary claims that Elizabeth is her sole hope of salvation, Elizabeth rejoins that Mary is the root cause of her own distress and a threat to the commonwealth. She argues that Mary would become a cause of strife and “annoy” in England were she to be given the safe haven for which she pleads, and interprets her offer of friendship as time serving expediency (l.4). Mary has only become amicable, so Elizabeth maintains, because of her altered circumstances, or “By changèd course of winds”, and she is the “daughter of debate” who might incite her subjects to rebellion (l.12 and l.21).
The Scottish queen was not the only audience that Elizabeth Tudor had in mind. Steven W. May notices rightly that Elizabeth’s poem also “functioned as a royal proclamation”.
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It is meant both as a rebuke to Mary and as a warning to the people of England not to conspire with or abet the queen’s enemies, which, as Puttenham recollects in his discussion of this poem, “fell out most truly by th’exemplary chastisement of sundry
107 See Neville Williams, Elizabeth I, Queen of England (Sphere, 1971), pp.149-50.
108 Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts (Asheville, NC: Pegasus, 1999), p.48. See also Summit (1996) who likewise discusses the effectiveness of
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