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2 - A hammer in her hand: Katherine Chidley and Anna Trapnel separate church from state

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Katharine Gillespie
Affiliation:
Miami University
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Summary

Before the starry threshold of Joves Court

My mansion is

From Comus (The first Scene discovers a wilde Wood)

and walking in a curious garden … I began to sing forth his praises, and continued while it was so late in the evening, that my friends that walked with me thought it convenient to lead me into the house

Anna Trapnel, Report and Plea

But while I was singing praises to the Lord for his love to me, the Justices sent their Constable to fetch me

Anna Trapnel, Report and Plea

In the “revelatory” conclusion to Thomas Carew's Stuart masque, Coelum Britannicum (1634), King Charles I and Henrietta Maria are deified. Mercury plays their Attendant Spirit, conducting his Lady, the actual Queen, and her king into the hallowed halls of sanctified sovereignty: “Then shall you see / The sacred hand of bright eternity; Mould you to stars, and fix you in the sphere / To you your royal half, to them she'll join / Such of this train as with industrious steps / In the fair prints your virtuous feet have made, / Though with unequal paces, follow you” (186). Here Carew even grants Henrietta and Charles, the royal twins, “carlomaria,” a virtual monopoly over this Platonic realm of representation and visibility, of personhood, perfection, and power. It was, the masque proclaimed, these two alone who were graceful and “formed fit for heaven” (189) enough to “dispense to th' world a pure refined influence” (168).

Type
Chapter
Information
Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century
English Women Writers and the Public Sphere
, pp. 62 - 114
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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