Elizabeth, Goodyer, polle their toppes, behead, foes, loyalty, Thomas Norton, Richard II , Gorbudoc, 1561
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pardoned. He professes loyalty to Elizabeth and seeks to disassociate himself from the potential foes of whom she writes. The figurative threat Elizabeth issues that she will “polle their toppes”, or behead, those who would conspire against her, is picked up by Goodyer in his plea for forgiveness: “If my good Queene have mercie on her man/ the tree shall live thoughe wounded in the sappe” (ll.35-6).
The gardening metaphor from Richard II is again analogous here, and it becomes yet more pertinent in Thomas Norton’s point for point rebuttal of Goodyer’s poem, beginning “Good ever due distroyed with present yll”.
118
To extend the analogy slightly, by intercepting Goodyer’s poem, Norton situates himself as his queen’s man who mediates between Elizabeth/ the gardener and a treacherous subject. Norton was a zealous Puritan who took on the role of a spokesperson and propagandist for the faith with considerable enthusiasm; having translated Calvin’s Institutes (1559) and Alexander Nowell’s catechism (1570), and also collaborating in Gorbudoc (1561). This poem might be regarded as part of the counter-propaganda war that he waged against Catholicism and its sympathisers. Norton accuses Goodyer of conspiring against Elizabeth and the commonwealth:
Yow did a perilous queene to fortunat
more then advyse agaynst yowr princes heere
by cyphringe sleyghte to daunger the estate
of frend by kynde of queene of neyboure neere. (ll.19-22)
The poem is as unsympathetic towards, and as suspicious of, Goodyer as Elizabeth’s answer is of Mary, the “queene of neyboure neere”, and recalls Puttenham’s estimation of ‘Doubt of Future Foes’ as a reprimand to supporters of Mary who “sought to interrupt the quiet of the Realme”. Like Elizabeth, Norton accuses his addressee of repenting purely from the motive of self-preservation, “with fayn’d teares before my god & queene” (l.14). While he claims to speak
117
Puttenham, (repr. 1968), p.208.
118 Hughey ed. (1960), I. no. 148.
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