Introduction

Guillaume Coatalen, Cy Cergy Paris Université

Preface

 

The letters belong to the Dubrovsky collection at the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, probably the richest archive for early modern French history outside France. They survive in a collection of autograph missives in French whose classmark is Fr. F. v. XIV No 6. [1] The documents were kept because they are addressed to French recipients, namely Catherine de Medici, Charles IX, Henri IV, and the governor of Calais, Vidaussan (François de Saint-Paul, seigneur de Vidaussan). A manuscript copy of a selection of the letters was made by Jules-Auguste Hovyn de Tranchère in the late 19th century, and is housed in the archives of the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (“Angleterre 98”). [2] The transcriber deliberately left out the ‘scratchings’ he found impossible to decipher. When he did manage to read the texts, he thought the letters made very little sense. The Dubrovsky collection contains invaluable holographs, eleven out of twenty-four, which is a high proportion. Writing in one’s own hand was a sign of intimacy, proof the queen was writing to her equals. She felt particularly close to Henri IV.

In the vast body of letters in French, written or dictated by the Queen or bearing her signature, comparatively few survive in her hand. Most of them are addressed to the Duke of Anjou, when he courted her, and to Henri IV. The letters from the Dubrovsky collection have been kept in pristine condition with their seals and silk threads intact. Strickland’s and Harrison’s editions have translations for three of the holographs, but their translations iron out the multiple creases in the queen’s idiosyncratic French. Four letters bear Nicasius Yetsweirt’s signature, who was the secretary for the French tongue and clerk of the signet (c.1555–c.1587; see Bradford 1934). Some of the letters form pairs almost identical in content, addressed to Catherine de Medici and her son Charles IX on the same date, which is common in the queen’s diplomatic correspondence. All the letters were sent, apart from the later copy in a French hand. The Dubrovsky collection contains more letters by Elizabeth I than the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), which has only seventeen letters, two of which are holographs. [3]

The letters span more than thirty years and served a variety of purposes. The first one, a holograph addressed to Catherine of Medici, expresses compassion for Mary Queen of Scots’ miserable fate. More generally, it considers rebellion by one’s own subjects and how treason spreads within a kingdom. The second letter, a scribal final copy to Charles IX, belongs to a conventional sub-genre of diplomatic intercessions for prisoners and contains a rare allusion to the Huguenot navigator Jean Ribault three years after his death. Letter 3, which is signed by Nicasius Yetsweirt and addressed to Catherine, concerns a debt owed by Henri II to Lady Stafford for entertaining guests in Mantes-la-Jolie. Letter 4, also addressed to Catherine, is a letter of introduction for the queen’s ambassador’s second son John Norreys, whom she sends for an important matter. Letter 5 is a short letter in a scribe’s hand in which the queen informs Charles IX she has received his letters of credence. Letter 6, which was written on the same day, is a less formal letter to Catherine of Medici on the same topic. Letter 7’s main function is to strengthen the friendly ties between both countries, which partly rest on the visit of the French ambassador de la Mothe and the messenger Montassier. Letter 8 is on the queen’s and Catherine’s good health, and the sound political situation in France. Montassier’s prominent role as a messenger is stressed. Letter 9 justifies the delay in the queen’s answer, and the choice of Norris instead of Montlouet for ambassador to France, because of the seriousness of the matters imparted. Letter 10 is identical to Letter 9 in content, but the wording is slightly different. Letter 11 is an introduction for António, Prior of Crato (1531–1595). Letter 12 is addressed to Vidaussan, the governor of Calais, and enquires about a possible Spanish attack after the military fiasco at Doullens. The remaining twelve letters are all written to Henri IV. Letter 13 intercedes in favour of the Huguenots assembled in Châtellerault. Letter 14 complains about the poor treatment of the English ambassador, Anthony Mildmay by the king’s advisors at the French court. In Letter 15 the queen worries about Brest being attacked and Henri’s ties with Philip II. In Letter 16 she introduces an unidentified nobleman, and notes the cowardly behaviour of her troops in Brittany. In letter 17, she regrets she cannot send troops to support the king because of her navy’s sorry state. The queen expresses her relief Henri has survived an attempt on his life in Letter 18. Letter 19 prays the French king to welcome António, Prior of Crato. Letter 20 praises Charles de Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers (1580–1637) who made a lasting impression on the queen when he visited the court in 1602. Letter 21 discusses the possibility of a Spanish invasion by sea in Britanny, Ireland, and England. Letter 22 warns the king on certain of his advisors slandering the English queen. In Letter 23, the queen is worried about the king’s recovery and would like to receive visual proof of it. Letter 24 discusses sending forces to Picardie and the defence of Cambrai.

All in all, the collection offers a comprehensive sample of the types of letters the queen penned or signed when she addressed her equals. Some of these are simple straightforward missives like letters of introduction or intercessions on the behalf of prisoners. Others are lengthy developments on diplomacy and military strategy involving England and the two main Catholic powers on the Continent, Spain and France. On the whole, they do not follow any strict rhetorical arrangement, which is consistent with the looser epistolary genre as conceived by humanists – like Erasmus in his influential Opus de conscribendis epistolis (1522) in the sixteenth century and before them Petrarch, who singles out the letter’s flexibility. The defence of Huguenots in Letter 13, with its appeal to the king’s honour and praise of the Huguenots’ virtues, however, constitutes a textbook example of judiciary rhetoric, as does Letter 2, albeit on a more modest scale. Letter 15 is quite conventional as well, with its declaration of true friendship, a topic at the source of the rich canon of literary letters, starting with Cicero’s letters to his friends. The last letter (24) centers on the conservation of true friendship in a context of open hatred towards the queen by the Catholic league.

Although letters were – theoretically at least, written in the middle style, the queen’s complex syntax is more comparable with that of the high style, even if she does not include full periodic sentences. Hyperboles, the best example being in Letter 18 ‘ceste inique Semence qui a Seme plus de Zizanie en Vn douzain d’ains que tous Le Princes Crestiens pourront estandre en plussieurs Siecles’ (‘this iniquitous seed which has sown more trouble in a dozen years than all the Christian princes could spread in several centuries’), coexist with almost speechlike language. Hyperbole takes a more subtle form when religious terms like ‘devotion’ and ‘penance’ occur in Nevers’ praise (Letter 20), turning his visit into a divine apparition, visitatio in Latin, the etymology of the word ‘visitation’ used in the sense of ‘visit’ in the same letter. Letter 19 begins with a striking opposition between the dead and the living, ‘Si L’esprit d’un defunct pourra fascher vn ami respirante’ (‘If the spirit of a deceased person can vex a breathing friend’), which is echoed a few lines later, ‘Vous ramenteuoir apres sa mort des honorables offertes que Li fistes en bon Viuant’ (‘remind you after his death of the honourable offers that you made when he was alive’). The tense and circumvoluted Letter 21 seems to suggest that the king would rather see Spain victorious at Brest than the English and that he does not agree with his resident’s (La Fontaine’s) plans. The paralysis of diplomatic negotiations is one of the topics of Letter 22, in addition to sincere hearts and the possible manipulation of the letter-bearer by the Catholique league. There is little that is bland about these diplomatic missives.

The queen’s letters may be deceptive when they pursue several goals at once, as in Letter 14 in which she reports Mildmay’s grievances before quickly turning to Fouquerolles’ negotiations concerning England supporting Henri’s recapture of Amiens in exchange for Calais. Letter 17 reads as a complex justification of the queen’s refusal to send troops to help Henri, since it is only in the conclusion that she admits it is impossible for her to do so for material reasons. Before that, she points out that a French king, at the head of such a powerful kingdom, should not find himself in such an awkward position as not being able to recapture a simple town like Amiens, and that he should take heed not to listen to his councillors who are on Spain’s side, while her own subjects are getting tired of English losses abroad. In the opening sentence, Elizabeth stresses how torn she is between the king’s urgent needs and the necessity to act like a reasonable ruler to avoid infuriating court and country.

Often, messengers are named and their choice depends on a variety of factors, including how serious the matter at hand appears to be. What is particularly noteworthy is what the letters do not contain, sensitive information to be repeated orally to the recipient by the bearer, as stipulated in Letter 8, ‘oultre ce quil vous scaura dire de bouche de ma part’ (‘apart from what he will be able to tell you orally on my behalf’). In the same letter, the queen concludes by noting that it need not be lengthier since the bearer will give Catherine ample information on her health, ‘sachant que vous en fera plus ample recit les Seigneur de Montassier de ce que Il a ouy de nous et de nostre bonne sante’ (‘That should be enough for now, knowing that the Lord of Montassier will tell you more on the topic, based on what he heard from us and our good health’). Similarly, her ambassador Norris has been tasked to give a longer and more precise answer and should be believed as if the queen herself was speaking in Letter 9, ‘Auquel auons donne charge de vous la faire plus ample et particuliere. Vous pryantz le croire comme feriez nous mesmes’ (‘It has appeared to us to be better to give this task to Lord Norris, our ambassador residing at your court. To whom we have asked to do it more amply and in more detail, praying you to believe him as if he were us’). Letter 16 states that the nobleman will deliver the queen’s message vividly, ‘J’ay faict election de Ce Gentilhomme que Je Cognoy si bon sang de bonnes Moeurs & tel qui ne faillira a Vous representer bien Viuement les Conceptions de mon Aui en Vos Negoces & vous dira bien particulierement La fin que Je Crainde’ (‘I have selected this gentleman whom I know to be of such good birth and manners and who will not fail to represent for you vividly enough the conceptions of my opinion on your matters, and who will tell you more particularly the end which I fear’). Somewhat surprisingly, the messengers may in some cases be fairly obscure lesser gentry, like Montassier, not just powerful diplomats and courtiers. Ultimately, Elizabeth believes in the superiority of the spoken word over the ever fallible written one, as proven by a part of Letter 18, ‘mes motz ne failleront pour en fayreindice de mes redevables pencees eng Vostre endroict & Vous suplie Croyre que me penserois trop heureuse Si quelque heureSi fortune m’arrivast de pouoir par parolle exprimer Les bonheurs & & Contentementz que mon Coeur Vous Souhaitent’ (‘my words will fail to represent adequately my beholden thoughts for you, and I beg you to believe that I would think myself only too happy if I had the luck and the good fortune to be able orally to express the happiness and content that my heart wishes you’). In Letter 23, the queen wishes to have ocular proof of the king’s recovery, which is of more value than written testimony.

 

The queen’s French is notoriously difficult to understand. The absence of punctuation is certainly a problem (See Dauvois and Dürrenmatt 2011). She uses imagery which sometimes does not occur in sixteenth-century French sources, and her choices are often based on Latin forms, as in ‘orphans’ in Letter 19, where she may have decided the Latin ‘orphanus’ made it easy to understand even though the form ‘orphan’ does not occur in French texts. The French found in the clerks’ hands is more formulaic and less idiosyncratic, more similar to the type of French written in France in comparable letters. A comparison between Letters 9 and 10, whose subject matter is identical, reveals that the language used in Letter 10 addressed to Catherine is less formal and may be attributed to the queen, while Letter 9 seems to be composed by the secretary for the French tongue or someone else. Compare the more idiomatic ‘auons Laisse couller quelque temps’ (‘we have left a bit of time pass’) in Letter 10 and ‘nous ont faict differer quelques Jours’ (‘we have deferred by a few days’) in Letter 9. Punctuation marks are more numerous and consistently used as well in the scribal letters.

The language used varies greatly and is generally plainer in the letters written or copied by scribes. These may be in some instances translations from drafts in English sometimes produced by the queen’s chief adviser William Cecil. At other times, notably in the holograph letters, the queen’s language is decidedly more flowery. Among her figurative expressions, the following are remarkable: ‘Les monuments de Leur sang’ (‘the monuments of their blood’, Letter 13), ‘Et pour ne vous que fashes les yeux de mes esgratigneures’ (‘to avoid tiring your eyes with my scratches’, Letter 14), ‘Les fruicts de mon Amitie ne se conteyent en L’escorse ni en fueilletz ni fleurs’ (‘The fruit of my friendship are contained neither in the bark, nor in the leaves, nor in the flowers’, Letter 15), ‘de quelles boutiques ces beaus drogues sont sortis’ (‘from which shops did these beautiful drugs come?’, Letter 18), ‘Les Leps aux talons du messagier’ (‘male hares at the messenger’s heels’, Letter 22).

Such expressions may be instances of wit or at least attempts to impress the recepient by regaling him or her with remarkable phrases. Elizabeth does include a play on words in the form of a polyptoton, or two words based on the same root, in Letter 18 ‘la Licence du Licentius’ (‘‘the licence of the licentious’). The image of the spur in Letter 22, ‘mon affection en Vostre endroict ne fust oncques si froidi qu’elle euct besoing d’esperon’ (‘my affection for you would never have been so cooled that it would need a spur to use it’), is related to the recurrent trope of horse-riding (Iannaccaro 2014: 177).

Traces of patterning, in the form of parallelism often based on pairs of synonyms or synonymic compounds, occur in the queen’s epistolary style in French, in both the holograph letters and the scribal copies, as in ‘Lauons ouy bien au Long et entendu sa charge’ (‘we have listened to him at length and heard his message’, Letter 5) or ‘valeur et prouësse’ (‘valour and feats’, Letter 11). The second sentence in the same letter displays an artful series of such pairings ‘hasards et fortunes […] aymer et cherir […] qualite et merite’. Its ultimate model seems to be Ciceronian oratorical prose (see Gotoff 1979). This influence should however not be overstated. If patterning does occur, it is by no means systematic but rather discreet as in the typical binary ‘vostre honneur et bien publiq’ (‘your honour and public good’, Letter 7) or ternary pattern, ‘telle audience, credit, et responce’ (‘such audience, credit and response’, Letter 4). The ternary rhythm is particularly striking in Letter 13, ‘ny d’humeur d’alteration, ny d’ambition, ny d’aultre desseing, que celuy de La seureté de Leur vies, biens et consciences’ and strongly reminiscent of Cicero’s. [4] The looser syntax, while not informal, does not exhibit the full characteristics of periodic prose. The letters sent to addressees equal in rank may at times sound almost familiar but they never depart from the particular rhetoric of diplomacy and royal power for which no particular rhetorical rules existed in print or manuscript. [5]

 

The queen’s hand leads to the common confusion between ‘u’ and ‘n’ for the transcriber. The ‘q’ is written like a ‘g’ and the ‘e’ like an ‘i’. The initial letters of words may be capitalized as in ‘Leur’ or ‘Vn’ or certain letters within words like the ‘v’ in ‘mauVais’. Apart from the first holograph which is written in an italic hand, the other later holographs are all written in her ‘skrating’ hand analysed by Woudhuysen (2007) and Gibson (2011; see also Allinson 2012: 17–36). Note her use of the Greek letter ‘phi’ in the words ‘metamorphose’, ‘cipher’, ‘phregmatique’ and ‘orphans’.

A comparison between a fairly formal hand used in a letter to James VI, like TNA SP 52/28 fol. 280, dated 1 December 1580, and the hand used in letters 5 and 6 dated 1 October 1568 suggests the scribe used a similar hand for both English and French except for certain letters like ‘h’ and ‘s’. The typical secretary form of the ‘h’ with the loop does not occur in the French while the more elaborate form of the ‘s’ appears only in the French text. A close model is provided by Pierre Hamon, the French Protestant calligrapher, in his Alphabet de plusieurs sortes de lettres published in Paris by the humanist and printer Robert Estienne, Henri Estienne’s son, in 1567 (see Hamon 1567). It is quite possible that this is the very example followed by the clerks penning letters in French for the queen.

 

[1] See Thompson (1984). The letters were first examined and briefly described by Lana Visharenko, Matti Kilpiö and Matti Rissanen in 2002. They graciously let me work on the material. I am extremely grateful to the University of Helsinki, Leena Kahlas-Tarka, Matti Rissanen and Maria Salenius in particular, for inviting me twice, funding a stay at the National Library in Saint Persburg, and covering the reproduction costs for digital photographs of the letters, and Terttu Nevalainen for hosting the edition in the Varieng eSeries. I wish to thank Natalia Elagina for her help in the manuscripts room of the library. My final thanks go to Samuli Kaislaniemi who made many useful corrections and suggestions. [Go back up]

[2] Jules-Auguste Hovyn de Tranchère (1816–1898), he was a member of Parliament for Gironde and settled in Russia where he dealt with public works and managed the Great Russian Railway Company. [Go back up]

[3] The holograph letters are BnF, MS Français 15782, ff. 431r–432r undated [July? 1586] to Henri IV and BnF, MS Français 15888, fols. 365r-v 18 April 1600, both transcribed and translated in Coatalen (2011). [Go back up]

[4] See, for instance ‘Non igitur facile concedo neque Bruto meo neque communibus magistris nec veteribus illis’ (Tusculan Disputations 5.10.30). [Go back up]

[5] See Potter (2015) for an interesting comparison with Francis I’s correspondence. [Go back up]

 

BnF = Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France. https://www.bnf.fr/fr

NLR = National Library of Russia, Saint Petersburg, Russia. http://nlr.ru/eng

 

Allinson, Rayne. 2012. A Monarchy of Letters. Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bradford, Charles Angell. 1934. Nicasius Yetsweirt: Secretary of the French Tongue. London: Hunger.

Coatalen, Guillaume. 2011. “‘Ma plume vous pourra exprimer’: Elizabeth’s French correspondence”. Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture, ed. by Alessandra Petrina & Laura Tosi, 83–111. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dauvois, Nathalie & Jacques Dürrenmatt, eds. 2011. La Ponctuation à la Renaissance. Paris: Garnier.

Erasmus. 1522. Opus de conscribendis epistolis. Basel.

Gibson, Jonathan. 2011. “The Queen’s two hands”. Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture, ed. by Alessandra Petrina & Laura Tosi, 47–65. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gotoff, Harold. C. & Miroslav Marcovich. 1979. Cicero’s Elegant Style: An Analysis of the Pro Archia. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

Hamon, Pierre. 1567. Alphabet de plusieurs sortes de lettres. Paris: Robert Estienne. https://paleography.library.utoronto.ca/islandora/object/paleography%3A515

Iannaccaro, Giuliana. 2014. “Elizabeth’s Italian rhetoric: The ‘Maximilian Letters’”. Queen Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric and Politics, ed. by Carlo Bajetta, Guillaume Coatalen & Jonathan Gibson, 167–186. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Potter, David. 2015. “The letters of Francis I: Culture, style of rule and the written word”. French History 29(iv): 445–468.

Thompson, Patricia Z. 1984. “Biography of a library: The Western European manuscript collection of Peter P. Dubrovskii in Leningrad”. The Journal of Library History, Philosophy and Comparative Librarianship 19(4): 477–503.

Woudhuysen, H.R. 2007. “The Queen’s own hand: A preliminary account”. Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing, ed. by Peter Beal & Grace Ioppolo, 1–27. London: British Library.