royal proclamation, Northern Rebellion, antigovernment, 1570, 1560s, 1570s, propaganda, Papisticall Byll
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48
of verse answering as a substitute for, or complement to, proclamations. Andrew Hadfield has speculated that the poem was written “at the government’s behest” and, although this is difficult to substantiate, the poem certainly assumes the role of a proclamation selfconsciously since it legitimises itself by identifying itself with the official reaction to the subject it addresses.
84
It was the events surrounding a subsequent rebellion in the north during the reign of Elizabeth that verse answers began to be produced en masse as seconds and substitutes for royal proclamations. Among these is Thomas Knell’s An Answer to a Papisticall Byll Cast in the Streetes of Northampton, and Brought Before the Iudges at the Last Syses. 1570.
85
It appeared in the year that Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth, and although it has been speculated that the Papal Bull had negligible effect in England,
86
it seems to have been responsible for emboldening Catholic propagandists and supporters of Mary Queen of Scots and the Northern Rebellion. There is a rash of antigovernment literature from the late 1560s and early 1570s concerning these events and this coincides with a spate of ballads
84 See Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: CUP, 1994b), p.6. Not only did Holme’s poem appear without royal license (‘cum privilegio’), it was not even printed until it was recycled in 1572 as propaganda against the recent Northern Rebellion. In contrast, the early-fifteenth-century Wycliffian poem, Jack Upland, did appear with royal privilege when it was first printed in 1536. P. L. Heyworth writes that the “Cum privilegio Regali [in Jack Upland] is not a perfunctory and permissive formula but constitutes the royal assent to what is essentially an act of policy”, ‘The Earliest Black-letter Editions of Jack Upland’, HLQ, 30 (1967), 307-14 (p.313). Jack Upland was recycled purposely as state-sponsored propaganda against the friars, whereas the argument that Holme’s poem was commissioned by the government, or even Henry himself, is much more difficult to sustain owing to its unprinted status and its proto-Protestantism, which Dickens notices to be “often […] well to the left of the King’s position” (1956-8), p.124.
85 An Answer to a Papisticall Byll Cast in the Streetes of Northampton, and Brought Before the Iudges at the Last Syses. 1570 (printed by John Awdely, 1570), STC 15030. The attribution to Knell is made in STC (see also SR, I. 438).
86 See, for instance, Thomas H. Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons Party and the Political Thought of the Counter-Reformation in England, 1572-1615 (Chicago, IL: Loyola UP, 1964), p.47.
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