A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley: A Catholic response to The Faerie Queene

By Susannah Brietz Monta

Situates the poem in its political and religious context while offering a full textual analysis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784996123

Susannah Brietz Monta

Susannah Brietz Monta is Glynn Family Honors Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame

Book preview

Introduction

Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune (London, 1596) deserves a place in the literary history of the English Renaissance. It constitutes the first major poetic response to Edmund Spenser’s romance epic The Faerie Queene (Books I–III, 1590; Books I–VI, 1596) and must figure in studies of Spenser’s early reception.¹ Written by an English Catholic with an uneasy relationship to the English regime and to poets who praised it, A Fig for Fortune offers a deeply contestatory, richly imagined answer to sixteenth-century England’s greatest poem. In A Fig for Fortune, Copley responds to the final four cantos of Book I of The Faerie Queene. Copley’s poem does not merely rework what one Catholic reader found objectionable about Spenser’s work; it also thinks in its own right and from an English Catholic perspective about romance’s narrative errancy, interpretations of Revelation, Queen Elizabeth I and her established church, and much else. A Fig for Fortune thus challenges a contemporary literary culture in which Protestant habits of thought and representation were gaining dominance. C. S. Lewis remarked that Copley’s studiously old-fashioned poem ignores ninety years of developments in English poetry, but also has ‘a kind of earnestness which is not easily evaded by the reader’.² The quality Lewis reads as ‘earnestness’ may be the poem’s almost frenetic energy; to a modern eye, the work seems more confrontational than courtly, as is appropriate for a man who lived as Copley did. For students of Spenser, reading A Fig for Fortune is profoundly, productively disorienting: the poem contests and imitates the Faerie Queene simultaneously. While it cannot hope to compete with Spenser’s virtuosic literary display, Copley’s poem nevertheless rewards careful attention. This critical edition of A Fig for Fortune, its first, limns the riches of its allegory, traces its perceptive readings and refutations of Spenser’s work, and establishes the poem’s importance to English literary and religious history.

Anthony Copley’s biography

Anthony Copley was born into a prominent English Catholic family with connections to leading literary and political figures. Through his aunt, Bridget Copley, Anthony Copley was cousin to the poet, Jesuit priest, and martyr Robert Southwell, whose literary work was popular with both Catholic and Protestant readers.³ Through his sister, he was brother-in-law to the Irish translator, writer, and historian Richard Stanihurst, who married Helen Copley as his second wife in or about 1586.⁴ Through his father, Thomas Copley, Anthony Copley was linked, if distantly, to William Cecil Lord Burghley (chief adviser to Elizabeth for much of her reign), Francis Walsingham (Elizabeth’s master spy), and Elizabeth I herself. ⁵ The Boleyn family was connected with the Copleys in the mid-fifteenth century through marriage, and the affiliation seems to have been maintained into the sixteenth. Anne Boleyn’s father, Thomas Boleyn, was Thomas Copley’s godfather and namesake; Thomas Copley’s father Sir Roger Copley was a knight servitor at his distant cousin Anne Boleyn’s coronation; in a 1583 letter Thomas Copley describes ‘my sister [Bridget] Southwell’ as ‘her majestie’s ould servant of neer fortie yeeres continuance’; and Elizabeth I served as godmother to Thomas Copley’s eldest son Henry, named after Elizabeth I’s royal father.⁶ The family’s prominence meant that their activities were closely watched by fellow Catholics and the Elizabethan regime. Anthony Copley’s biography highlights conflicts within the English Catholic community and between English Catholics and the English government, conflicts A Fig for Fortune negotiates as it rewrites Spenser’s poetry.

Thomas Copley

Anthony Copley’s father Thomas Copley (1532–84) was a landowner and member of the Inner Temple who served as MP in the Marian parliaments of 1554 (April and November) and 1558, as well as in the Elizabethan parliaments of 1559 and 1563 (until his exile).⁷ On 5 March 1558, Thomas, then a Protestant, defended in Parliament Elizabeth’s right to succeed and was imprisoned for his efforts. Later that year, he married Katherine Luttrell, a Catholic and the co-heir of her father, Sir John Luttrell.⁸ After enjoying royal favour early in Elizabeth’s reign, including an appointment as commissioner of the peace for Surrey (1559–68), Thomas converted to Catholicism in about 1563.⁹ No doubt family influence played a part: his wife, sisters, brother-in-law, uncles, and aunts were Catholics.¹⁰ Frequently remarked upon in religious polemic, his conversion was prompted, Robert Persons claimed, by his unease over errors he detected in John Jewel’s Apology of the Church of England (1562).¹¹ The first chronicler of St Monica’s (an English Augustinian convent in Louvain), probably Thomas’s granddaughter Mary Copley, describes him as a ‘great scollar’ who had been raised a Catholic by his mother but was a ‘hot heretick’ during Mary’s reign; he converted after discovering ‘how the Protestants did falsify the word of god in their translations’.¹² Thomas Copley was arrested in July 1568 for aiding Catholic exiles in Louvain and released after one week and a fine of £50.¹³ In November 1569, he demurred on taking the oath required of justices of the peace by the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, as he feared injury to his conscience; in 1570 he went abroad without permission, ‘thereby forfeiting, under a statute of 1566, his lands and goods for life’.¹⁴ In May 1571 ‘Thomas Copley Esquire’ appears in a list of eight fugitives ‘thought to lurke in Lovayne [Louvain] as students and scholers there’.¹⁵ He spent the remainder of his life moving between the Low Countries, France, and Spain.

During his exile Thomas was paid a Spanish pension, made a baron and knight by the French king, ‘ennobled by Philip II as grand master of the Maes (Maze in Southwark) and lord of Gatton’, and granted Spanish letters of authority to take action against Dutch rebels.¹⁶ These pensions and honours supported him in the face of an English embargo against remitting funds abroad and the loss of his incomes in England.¹⁷ For accepting honours from the Spanish king, Thomas Copley earned the mockery of William Fulke, who referred to him as ‘the great barron of Haie, created by the Spanish, I wot not howe, Lorde of the Maze, an auncient rotten house in Southwarke’, as well as the distrust of William Camden:

it wanted not suspition, that Thomas Copley (a prime man among the English Fugitives, being commended to the French King by Vaulx, Secretarie to Don John) had beene made Knight and Baron. But Copley endevouring to avoide suspition, protested obedience to his Prince, and that he had accepted this Title out of no other reason but for the greater accesse of honour to his wife, his companion in exile, and that his Pension from Spaine would be the greater, because a Gentleman of Title is of more esteeme among Spaniards; and he thought he was capable of the Title of a Baron, his Grandmother being the eldest Daughter to the Baron of Hoo, and his great Grandmother the eldest Daughter of the heires of the Baron of Welles.¹⁸

Camden’s suspicion seems to have been widely shared. Throughout his exile, Thomas Copley wrote about his situation to Queen Elizabeth and various noblemen and ministers, including the Earl of Leicester, William Cecil, and Francis Walsingham, protesting his loyalty to the English crown and insisting that he served foreign princes only for reasons of financial necessity (separated as he was from his English lands and livings).¹⁹ Copley hoped his pleas would placate hostile authorities: just as ‘soft water’ which drops ‘in one place … in tyme … may perce the hard marble stone’, so might his ‘often sutes & many, most humble remonstrances’ of his wish to serve his ‘naturall Prince & contrey’ ‘in tyme perse the harts’ of his ‘hardest enymis’.²⁰

Despite Thomas Copley’s receiving a few favours, however, hearts remained hardened. Copley’s letters suggest that at times he informed on English Catholics living abroad, but such information as he provided – little, and little that was harmful to English Catholic exiles – did not greatly help his efforts to regain favour.²¹ In one letter to William Cecil, Copley expresses gratitude that his wife was permitted to join him abroad and attempts to balance his responsibilities to the English sovereign and to his patron, the King of Spain. He protests to be of ‘dutifull minde to Godd, my Prince & cuntrie’, but notes that he would not act

to the prejudice any lest waye of the mightie & vertuous king Catholique whoo feedeth me in this time, when myne owne living is taken from me for I woolde die a M. dethes [1,000 deaths] rather than to doo thing ageinst my reputacon & credit, either ageinst my naturall soveraigne [Elizabeth] & coontrie, or ageinst that good king by whos goodnes I am received; but that I meane, is sutche a service as shoulde tende to the honour of god with increase of faithfull friendship and strength to his Majestie; & be also to the Queenes Majestie & my coontrie of such importance & availl, by woorking to bothe, securitie.²²

The opportunities for such mutually beneficial service would seem scarce. In another letter dated 3 January 1582 from Paris to his distant relative, Sir Francis Walsingham’s wife Ursula, Thomas articulated a basic ecumenism and a plea for religious toleration:

let not ... a little difference of our opinions in the choise of our severall waies to heaven, be any lett to the loving frutes which the strong bond of nature bindeth us mutually to yeld to ech others comfort ... I doubt not but heaven is the place whereto we all tende. wee believe in one Creator, in one Redeemer, in one holie ghost, three persons and one god, which is the principall foundation of the faith whereby we must be saved. What a pittie is it then to see, such a miserable dissention about particular points of lesse importance, among us that professe all to beleeve in one Christ and to be members of his mysticall bodie?

In this letter as in others, Thomas Copley insists that if readmitted to England and restored to revenues from his lands he would be loyal:

Beleeve it to be treu (Madame) that he is not in that Realme of any Religion, whom proofe shall shewe more affectionat, loyall, or dutifull to the Queens Majestie, our deere Soveraigne; then I meane to be, if I maie be once reconciled to her Majestie’s favour, and by restitution of my living, so many yeares deteined from me, tast at length the frute of Justice, and protection from wrong, which the true subject is with as much right and reason to expect at the hands of his Soveraigne.²³

Despite these vigorous epistolary efforts, authorities continued to doubt his loyalty, as intelligence records make clear. For example, two reports presented to Francis Walsingham in August of 1582 claim that Copley had threatened to hang all ministers and preachers in England (by church bell ropes, according to a colourful detail added to one of the reports).²⁴ Another report of roughly January 1584 claimed that he circulated letters among Catholic exiles (or ‘Rebells to the quenes majestie’) and continued pro-Spanish activities.²⁵ Thomas Copley died never having returned to his homeland, perishing on 25 September 1584 at a Spanish military camp near Antwerp.²⁶ Lewis Lewkenor, a former Spanish pensioner and mercenary who conformed upon returning to England, used Thomas Copley’s life as a cautionary tale in his propaganda against Spain. Lewkenor claimed that Copley died ‘with patience vertuously and well, yet the state of so honourable a Gentleman considered, most pittifully, and in great miserie’.²⁷

Thomas Copley’s literary remains include his letters and translations of writings on justification, a controversial – perhaps the most controversial – theological flashpoint between Protestants and Catholics. The translations were published in Certain Translations touching the said matter of Justification, printed with A Treatie of Justification, Founde emong the writinges of Cardinal Pole (Louvain, 1569). The volume includes an English translation of the Council of Trent’s statements on justification as well as material from church fathers including Augustine, Chrysostom, Basil, Leo the Great, and Cyprian.

The Copley family

After Thomas Copley’s death, his widow returned to England; on 12 March 1585 she proved Thomas’s will.²⁸ She was arrested in September 1586 for harbouring a priest named Nicholas Smith, who was ‘her nephew and a classmate of [Robert] Southwell’s at the English College’ in Rome; after his arrest, Smith had testified that she sheltered him at Roughey (Roffey) in Sussex and Gatton in Surrey.²⁹ A letter dated 22 December 1586 from Robert Southwell, her nephew and Anthony Copley’s cousin, mentions that she and one of Anthony Copley’s brothers were imprisoned ‘in the cause of the faith’.³⁰ After an imprisonment lasting a few months, she was released and left England for Liège, taking her youngest son John with her. She appears in a 1587 list of recusants living abroad.³¹ An unsigned letter of 1590, written as she passed through Calais on her return to England, recommends her interrogation as she was thought to be a ‘great bigot’ and likely to know much about Jesuit activities.³² She seems to have returned to England in or about October 1590, at roughly the same time as Anthony Copley’s return (see below). In January 1595/6, the month of A Fig for Fortune’s publication, a letter from Buckhurst to Sir Walter Covert and Harry Shelley asks them to assist in apprehending her ‘and certayne other daungerous persons remayning with her as [the Council] is enformed very daungerous practizes are in hand’.³³ She conformed in May 1596, perhaps in response to these troubles, and presented the 1596 conformity certificate again in 1600.³⁴ The last record of her seems to be a land grant dated 1603.³⁵

Thomas and Katherine’s children included Henry (who died aged nineteen), William (Thomas’s heir), Elizabeth, Margaret, Helen, Mary, Anthony, and John. Elizabeth, the eldest daughter, married one of the Duke of Parma’s captains, Eteves or Teviss.³⁶ Helen became the second wife of Richard Stanihurst. Margaret married John Gage of Haling; Thomas Copley’s will suggests that Margaret had been adopted by his sister Margaret, wife of John Gage of Firle.³⁷ Margaret (Copley) Gage and her husband John Gage of Haling were arrested at a Mass said by George Beesley, who was executed in early July 1591; they were condemned as well but were pardoned on the scaffold two years later.³⁸ Mary married John Musgrave of Hexham.³⁹ Henry, the eldest son (b. 1561), died in Paris at nineteen (thus roughly 1580) of pleurisy, according to the St Monica’s chronicler.⁴⁰ William, previously intended for the priesthood, then became the heir. After serving in the Duke of Parma’s army, William returned to England in 1586 and was arrested but released because he was thought to be ‘very tractable’ or persuadable in religion, ‘easily wonne to become A good Christian’.⁴¹ In 1589, he married Magdalen Prideaux and by 1590 he was living in Madrid.⁴² In 1598 he travelled to the Spanish Netherlands, and in 1603, on James’s accession, returned to England, compounded for his estates, and lived in England the rest of his life, during which he paid recusancy fines of £20 per month.⁴³ The family seems to have remained under authorities’ watchful eyes; as late as 1613, an official document describes William as ‘a recusant convict’.⁴⁴ After his first wife’s death in 1619 he married Margaret Fromonde; he died in January 1644 at Gatton.⁴⁵

Like the young Anthony Copley, John Copley spent time in a Southwell family household, perhaps Thomas Southwell’s household in which Anthony Copley also lived. As a young boy John Copley conformed but was also taught about the Roman Catholic faith. At age nine, upon his mother’s release from her 1586 imprisonment, he left England with her.⁴⁶ He studied at King’s College in Douai, Valenciennes, the English College at Douai, and the Jesuit English College at St Omer, where he was ‘one of the first to enter in 1593 and remained until about 1595’.⁴⁷ He arrived for further studies at the English College in Rome on 26 October 1599.⁴⁸ After studying at English Catholic colleges abroad, he was ordained a priest in 1602 and served on the English mission in London. Banished in 1606 in the Gunpowder Plot’s aftermath, he returned the next year and was arrested, but his religious outlook was soon to change. The shock of the Gunpowder Plot and his failed attempts to answer Protestant challenges after his 1607 arrest led him to doubt Catholic teachings.⁴⁹ Contemporary commentators attributed his 1611 decision to convert to the Church of England primarily to his desire to marry Rebecca Moone, a woman with whom he had fallen in love while serving as chaplain to Anthony Browne, second Viscount Montague (the dedicatee for A Fig for Fortune).⁵⁰ His Doctrinall and morall observations concerning religion (London, 1612) gives reasons for his conversion and notes that his family ‘were alwaies and still are resolute and constant professors of the Romane faith’.⁵¹

Anthony Copley’s life

A complete biographical account of Anthony Copley has not been written, despite a wealth of contemporary sources in which traces of his life may be found. Born in 1567, Anthony Copley was the third son of Thomas Copley and Katherine (Luttrell) Copley. The young Anthony Copley remained in England after his father went abroad in 1570. In an account of his life that he provided to authorities upon his 1590 return to England, Anthony Copley writes that while he was ‘a yong student of Furnveals (Inne)’ of ‘scarce 15 yeares of age’ he was ‘under the charge of a kinsman of myne one Mr T. [Thomas] Southwell, whoe is now him self beyond sea’, and that he escaped Thomas Southwell’s care: ‘(him unwitting) I stole away’.⁵² In that year, 1582, Copley joined his parents in Rouen, where he remained for two years. According to a published autobiographical account included in a 1602 treatise defending his constancy in the Catholic faith, Anthony Copley converted shortly after he left England, in 1583:

since the time of my union to the Catholicke Church, which was in Anno 1583 by the hand of old and good M. Woodward in Rone [Rouen] in Normandie, I never either in schismaticall or hereticall word, deed, or assent, scandalized the same, but have ever held and reputed such my Religion as the apple of my eye, and as a brooch, pledge, piller, and seale of salvation to my soule. Yea, rather then I will ever upon temptation of the flesh, the world or the divell, disparage my selfe herein to the Catholicke Church, I trust in God to endure a thousand deaths.⁵³

The ‘M. Woodward’ responsible for Copley’s ‘union’ with Catholicism may be the priest Philip Woodward (c. 1557–1610). Woodward was a native of Norwich who was ordained in November 1583, entered England on mission (probably first in 1588, though possibly as late as 1595), served as professor of Hebrew at Douai from approximately 1606, and, after returning to the mission, was banished from England in July 1610, and died while journeying to Rome shortly thereafter.⁵⁴

While in exile, Anthony Copley benefited from his connections in the English Catholic community. Anthony Copley’s first cousin, Robert Southwell, whom Copley acknowledged had ‘love toward me’, procured a pension for Copley from Pope Gregory XIII.⁵⁵ Taking up this pension, Copley went to Rome in 1584 and studied for two years at the English College there; at that time, Robert Southwell was Prefect of Studies.⁵⁶ Copley’s published autobiographical account states that upon arrival in Rome he had been ‘but a yeare and a halfe Catholicke’.⁵⁷ According to Copley, he left the College because after Pope Gregory XIII’s death in 1585 his pension was not renewed.⁵⁸ According to Robert Persons, who called Copley ‘that wanton boy’, he had been kicked out of the College for, among other misbehaviours, ascending the pulpit with a rose between his teeth.⁵⁹ A letter Southwell wrote in December 1586, after he had gone to England on mission, expresses disappointment at Copley’s desire to leave the College; Southwell also attempted to secure Copley’s place at the College despite his and his family’s lack of funds to pay for it.⁶⁰ After he left Rome in or about early 1586, Copley’s 1590/1 manuscript account states that he returned to Flanders. By this date his father was deceased, and his mother and eldest brother William were again in England. His published autobiographical account claims that he was first sent from Rome to the English College at Rheims, and that while in Rheims Copley tried to woo a niece of Cardinal William Allen.⁶¹ Allen opposed the match, and it did not come to fruition.⁶² Copley’s published account states that he stayed in Rheims only long enough either to marry Allen’s niece or get a pension in the Low Countries. While he failed in his first aim, he succeeded in the second: with the help of Richard Stanihurst, his brother-in-law, Copley secured a pension from the Duke of Parma.⁶³ Copley then travelled to Paris, Rome, and back to the Low Countries.⁶⁴ In his 1590/1 declaration of his activities abroad, Copley acknowledged that from the time he left Rome until his return to England in 1590 he ‘served the K. of Spaine in his warrs in fflanders, for which I humbly crave pardon of her Majestie and my Countrey, hoaping now heerafter, and protesting it, allwaies to Deserve better in reparation of this my offense’.⁶⁵ It seems probable that Copley travelled to England at about the same time as his mother, in October 1590, though this is not certain.

Copley’s homecoming was a cold one, as he returned without permission and was arrested shortly thereafter. From prison on 6 January 1590/1, he proclaimed to William Waad, clerk of the Privy Council, his loyalty to England and its queen. Copley also indicated his willingness to reconsider his religious position: ‘As for my Religion, I protest … I will so behave my self therin as no scandall shall be geven: neither will I refuse conference, with any learned man, minister or other to th’end to be resolved in an other faith, in case they can of certainty prove it unto me that I beleeve amisse’.⁶⁶ There is no evidence that Copley moved further towards Protestantism, however. He offered as well to ‘make proofes’ of his ‘faith & truth to my Prince & Countrey … in whatsoever way they shall please to employe me’, a statement several scholars have understood as an offer to work as a spy.⁶⁷ Although his offer seems not to have been accepted, Copley did prove his loyalty through providing information. In two declarations to Waad, he decribed the harsh and unscrupulous practices of his former patron the Duke of Parma and gave information on Englishmen abroad such as Sir William Stanley and William Cardinal Allen.⁶⁸ Dimmock and Hadfield observe that Copley is careful ‘only to incriminate those he feels have acted traitorously’.⁶⁹ Copley stresses that there are

divers Inglishe gentelmenn thear are beyond the seas, whoas faith to Ingland & her Majesties happy estate is most syncere & looyal, and whoe only for theyr conscience (for ought I would ever knowe to the contrary) have betaken them selves to forraine infelicitie & misadventures, willing yff occasion well to lose life and all for Ingland & her Majestie might they by your honours favours be but permitted to live at home.⁷⁰

In another communication, Copley complained that the King of Spain considered Englishmen in his service to be ‘vanquished vassals’ and asserted that English Catholic exiles in Spanish service would support Elizabeth in the event of an invasion should they be allowed to come home:

Inglishe gentlemen beyond sea beginne more to looke homeward, and wishe the preservation of the Relme against [Spanish] invasion: surely … upon the least favourable inclination, and mercifull condescent of her Majestie in the behaulf of theyr Demerritts past … thear are amongst them very many … [that] most willingly would retorne home to the Defence of that Relme, and the present estate therof to theyr lives end.⁷¹

Copley insists that ‘very many’ English Catholic exiles are loyal to their country, not