1. Historical. - John Felton
was a wealthy Surrey gentleman who published the bull Regnans in
excelsis, in which Pius V excommunicated queen Elizabeth, by nailing a
copy to the door of the palace of the bishop of London on 25 May 1570,
near St Paul's Cathedral. He was subsequently arrested and tried for
treason on the grounds that he 'declared that the queen . . . ought not
to be the queen of England' (qtd by Lock). He was arraigned at the
Guildhall on 4 August, and executed four days later at the scene of his
crime on 8 August. On the scaffold, Felton refused to repent, denying
that he had offended the queen in any way and thereby asserting his
innocence of the charge of treason. He also refused the comfort of the
Protestant clergy appointed to assist him and made a very public
Catholic end to his life. Knell was at the execution and some details in
his account of Felton's final moments ring true and can be corroborated
by other records (such as his prayer in Latin). But Knell's partisanship
is evident in other details, such as his insistence that Felton refused
to call on Christ but put his faith in the pope. But other reports of
the execution say that Felton's last word was the name of Jesus, and
this would be expected from any Christian at the hour of his or her
death, whether Protestant or Catholic. (b) Thomas Knell the younger
(1543/5-c. 1592) wrote his Epitaph upon Doctor Bonner at the start of
his rather unsuccessful career as a clergyman. He was ordained priest by
Edmund Grindal, bishop of London, on 17 April 1568, and went on to serve
as curate in St James Garlickhithe in 1568, at St Giles Cripplegate in
1569, and back at St James in 1570. Apaprently unable to to secure a
vicarship, Knell may have turned to 'the Elizabethan equivalent of
tabloid journalism' (Usher) to earn a little money and improve his
profile amongst the godly. His first published work was his Epitaph upon
Doctor Bonner#, who died in the Marshalsea in September 1569, but Knell
was soon at work on his Pithy Note to Papists in 1570, and a year later
he wrote his Life and Death of Doctor Story, Bonner's chancellor,
executed in June 1571. Knell's animosity towards these 'papists' is
likely to have been genuine enough, for he seems to have been unable to
conform to the new Elizabethan religious settlement and left the capital
for his native county of Kent in 1573, where he died 20 years later in
1592, as a clerk as a clerk in the parish of Kenardington.
2.
Critical. - Knell's verses are generally assured, though he has a
tendency, still admissible in the early Elizabethan period, of making
lines metrical by repeating pronouns, e.g. 'she ought not haue it shee'
(B1r). His style is relatively plain, and its most salient rhetorical
episode is the forceful use of anaphora which lists the crimes of 'Iohn
Felton Traitor' on sig. B2r. One or two rare words - pleaseman (A4r) and
drail (B3r) - may not have seeemed so striking in 1570. Given the
Calvinist cast of his writing, it is odd that he refers so little to
Scripture. His only references are to Malachi (A2v) and Psalms (A4v). On
the other hand, we are not presented with the display of erudition in
litterae humaniores with which Knell adorns his Epitaph upon Doctor
Bonner. Again, there are only two such allusions: a casual comparison of
Felton to the braggart soldier Thraso from Terence's Eunuchus (A4r); and
a much more important and extended identification of Felton as a 'new
stert up Herostratus' (B2r). Herostratus was one of the great paradoxes
of the tradition of fame poetry: he sought to win fame by burning down
the Temple of Diana at Ephesus; but it was decreed that his name should
be erased from the historical record. The story was well known to
English readers from various sources, particularly, though in slightly
altered form, Chaucer's House of Fame. Knell inverts the tale so that
Felton will be remembered for all time because the memory of his words
and deeds shall be forever inscribed upon the very fabric of the
building in which he was arraigned (the Guildhall), imprisoned
(Newgate), and executed (St Paul's). Knell is especially eloquent in his
description of the Guildhall, where 'Dame Fame with Eccho shall resound
| in eu'ry caue to walke. | Iohn Felton Papist heer was raigned, | that
Traiterous rebel meer' (B2v). Finally, it is worth noting that, for all
his hostility towards Felton, Knell does at least allow that he was an
antagonist worhty of respect. In his libel of Felton, Knell states that
he should not be regarded as a 'papist', 'for Papists are deuout' (A4v).
The allusion to Thraso refers to the soldier as a godless 'scoffer'
(A4r) - a miniature Tamburlaine avant la lettre. But Knell cannot help
deviating from this initial representation when he comes to describing
his resolute defiance of his persecutors in the narrative section of the
poem. Here - try as he might to demonstrate that Felton was a mere
time-server - Knell gives us a portrait of Felton as an example of
principled devotion to the rival sectarian cause. The more he struggles
to hide this portrait beneath a blackwash of calumny and sarcasm, the
more we come to distrust and despise Felton's detractor Knell. Perhaps
Knell felt a genuine though fearful admiratio for the 'papist' Felton as
a mirror image of his own devotion to Protestant reform, hence his
uneasy and overstated response to the contemporary Catholic
interpretation of Felton's martyrdom. |
