Imaginary Betrayals by Cunningham Karen;

Author:Cunningham, Karen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

On the one hand, the Bond retrieves the rhetoric of proprietorship common to discourses of treason: it announces a “natural” affiliation with England among the Commissioners, identifying citizenship with a birthplace. Their “being natural-born subjects of this realm” produces, in this logic, an emotion of loyal defense and a predictable character (reiterating Thomas Wilson’s link between birthplace and criminal or honorable acts in the Arte of Rhetorique). The signers beget an affiliation by subscribing to the same manuscript, and they make loyalty visible by presenting it in documentary form. On and in paper, an abstract England is formed into a shared, physical reality where faithful English men gather and unite in a dispersed yet communal identity. On the other hand, this document is self-conscious about its written status, and its reflexivity highlights its role in bringing about a second Eden. The written bond as document occupies an elusive position; it is partly a transparent conduit to thoughts, and it is partly a materialization in whose substance a transcendent notion of the land inheres and extends over place and time. The association struck herein, the document seems to say, is an effect not only of shared status and geography, but also —perhaps primarily—an effect of shared discourse, the solidarity it announces, an effect of shared documentary presence.14

Following the Babington prosecutions, Elizabeth authorized a Commission to question Mary: “To you, and the greater part of you we do give full and absolute power, faculty, and authority… to examine all and singular matters compassed and imagined, tending to the hurt of our royal person” and, further, “to give Sentence or Judgement, as upon good proof matter shall appear unto you.”15 The Commissioners’ authority derived from another unique legal event, a statute (27 Eliz. c.1) entitled “An act for the Security of the Queen’s Royal Person, and continuance of the realm in peace” that affirmed the Bond of Association and specified that the queen could appoint commissioners to interrogate any persons the noblemen might believe to be traitors.16

Cloistered in the halls of Fotheringay, Elizabeth’s Commissioners began their interrogation by recapitulating many of the themes that characterize discourses of treason throughout the century: a ruling group adopts a proprietary stance and speaks for “the realm” against a “traitor” who (from the authorities’ perspective) threatens to destroy that country’s “felicity” and to fill its lands with those who are foreigners by birth or by imagination. Before the trial Elizabeth’s counselors insisted:

Her Secretaries do write and print, that we be at our wit’s end, world’s end, if she overlive your majesty; meaning thereby, that the end of our world is the beginning of theirs…. [T]his enemy of our felicity seeks to undermine our religion, to supplant us, and plant strangers in the place.17

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.