William Forrest was a royal chaplain to Queen Mary, and he presented the History of Grisild the Second to her in 1558. Prior to this royal service, he had been at Oxford in 1530, when Henry VIII sent to the university to procure a judgement in favor of his proposal to divorce Katherine of Aragon. Additionally, Forrest was also present at Katherine of Aragon’s funeral at Peterborough in 1536, so he was an eyewitness to arguments and events he brings into his reworking of the Griselda story. Forrest also, earlier in his career, wrote for the Protestant Edmund, duke of Somerset, dedicating to him the Pleasant Poesye of Princelie Practise and some Psalm paraphrases. Though some have argued that this choice of patron indicates Forrest was willing to change his religion to accommodate that of the ruler, in fact sections of the Pleasant Poesye resonate quite strikingly with Forrest’s History and his other, later writings, suggesting significant consistence and continuity in his views. Furthermore, after Mary’s death, Forrest dedicated his History of Joseph to the Catholic Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, who received the work shortly before his execution. Forrest’s name also appears, along with the dates 1572 and 1581 (perhaps—the latter date could also be 1561, and his death date is unknown but is given by Peter Holmes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as 1576 or shortly thereafter), in MS Harley 1703, a collection of Catholic devotional treatises and verse focusing on the Virgin Mary on which Forrest evidently worked for many years while living under the rule of the Protestant Elizabeth.
Forrest spent much of his life in an age of female rule, also an age in which Catholicism was strongly associated with transgressive femininity by Protestant reformers and polemicists. As Forrest ponders questions of royal and religious authority and considers how rulers should be advised, he turns to a different part of the Chaucerian corpus than those which occupied the female monastic readers of Amesbury and Syon whom I consider in the previous chapter. While the nuns read the Parliament of Fowls and excerpts from Troilus and Criseyde, along with Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes and Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, in the context of works that model proper behavior and position them potentially to provide political advice, Forrest turns instead to the Clerk’s Tale, retelling the story of Griselda and Walter with the starring roles played by Katherine of Aragon and Henry VIII. His retelling also associates Chaucer with a type of Marian piety and forms of female devotion in some ways quite different from those found among the nuns who engaged with Chaucerian texts or in Chaucer’s own work.
Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale helps Forrest to reanimate a Catholic, medieval past that was an age of female virtue and Catholic religious devotion.
In earlier work, I argue that later medieval and early modern writers often adopted a strategy of “cloistering” such politically engaged women writers as Christine de Pizan and such politically active women as Isabel of Castile, mother of Katherine of Aragon. In many respects, Forrest’s History of Grisild the Second represents another iteration of this strategy, one that draws upon the authority of Chaucer to advocate a feminine, Catholic, nonthreatening mode of queenship. Thomas Betteridge contrasts Forrest’s vision of Mary with that of John Heywood in The spider and the fly, saying that while Heywood’s Mary jettisons the past and restores order in the present, Forrest’s Mary is instead returned to the past. I would add, she is returned by Forrest to a particular version of the past—the medieval, Catholic past envisioned as an age of “cloistered” women who are chaste, passive, silent on matters of religious controversy and political conflict, obedient to male authority figures, and occupied with traditional devotional practices of prayer, contemplation, and good works. That Catholic, medieval past continued to live in Katherine of Aragon embodied as Griselda in the History, and Forrest means by his presentation of her exemplary life to ensure it is revived in Mary and perpetuated in the lives of the offspring he hopes she will have.
Because of the strong support it expresses for Katharine of Aragon, Forrest’s History of Grisild the Second might initially seem to be an instance of imitation of what Amanda Holton describes as Chaucer’s sympathy for women, especially wronged women. I would argue, however, that instead this text written for one queen about another seeks carefully to restrict women’s political agency though the imposition of a model of female conduct predicated on an idealized interpretation of medieval, female Catholic devotion. Forrest’s prescriptions for female virtue and ideal queenship minimize possibilities for women’s activities in the religio-political spheres, particularly the sorts of didactic, autonomous activity represented by the Second Nun and her St. Cecelia, or by the Wife of Bath, or by the nuns of Syon and Amesbury. In the History of Grisild the Second, and elsewhere in Forrest’s writings, the preservation of English religious orthodoxy, which is Roman Catholic orthodoxy, and the assurance of the proper government of the realm, depend on the maintenance of these modes of female conduct and female devotion. As he will do for Dryden and the Catholic controversialists whom I discuss in the following chapter, “Father Chaucer” proves quite useful in Forrest’s efforts to mobilize yet manage medieval legacies and to assert fairly narrowly constrained roles for women in religious and political affairs. As I argue in the final chapter, though, the active, vocal, didactic women of the Chaucerian tradition like the Second Nun and the Wife of Bath do not disappear from the scene, and will come to have a role of their own to play in the writings of the New England poet Anne Bradstreet, who participated in the political and religious controversies of her day.
(excerpted from ch 3)
