This ambivalence was built into Henry’s character from the moment Shakespeare first conceived him. As he leads the English into a morally questionable war with the French, the young English king begins to reveal a latent “Turkish” aspect to his character. In the scene where his forces are besieging Harfleur, Henry warns the town’s inhabitants that failure to surrender will lead him to unleash rape and murder:
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen.33
The threat is reminiscent of Tamburlaine’s massacre of the virgins of Damascus. The image of infants spitted on pikes would have brought to mind the stories of Turkish atrocities in central Europe published in pamphlets across the continent at this time. But it also drew on a much older theatrical traditional: fourteenth-century mystery plays such as Coventry’s The Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors, depicting the Slaughter of the Innocents. The play shows Herod, King of Judaea, slaughtering Bethlehem’s newborn infants to prevent a future King of the Jews from threatening his position. By associating Henry with Herod, Shakespeare presents him as a raging pagan tyrant. The Pageant, which Shakespeare may well have watched as a child, showed Herod embracing idolatry, or “maumetrie”—worshipping and swearing by Muhammad—while dressed in “Saracen” clothing.34 Through these associations Henry is given many faces: he is simultaneously the heroic English king defeating the French, the pagan Herod menacing the Jews and the idolatrous Muslim threatening to slaughter innocent Christians “spitted upon pikes.”
Of course unlike Tamburlaine, Herod or Murad, Henry does not slaughter the innocents of Harfleur. Our qualms are soon alleviated by his adoption of that most quintessential of English icons, St. George. Before Harfleur, after exhorting his soldiers to adopt the ruthless “action of the tiger,” he combines patriotism with religion in his famous rallying call, “Cry God for Harry, England and St. George!”35 His transformation from the dissolute Prince Hal seems complete. But even his adoption of George’s militant purity would not have convinced everyone.
St. George offers a perfect example of how far Christian and Islamic traditions were entangled in the late sixteenth century. Influential Protestant theologians such as John Calvin and John Foxe frequently attacked the veneration of saints as yet another example of popish “idolatry.” In his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), Calvin condemned those who regarded God’s “intercession as unavailing without the assistance of George and . . . other such phantasms.”36 Foxe was similarly dismissive. In his chapter on the “History of the Turks,” published in the 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments, he argued that “if God have determined his own Son only to stand alone, let not us presume to admix with his majesty any of our trumpery. He that bringeth St. George or St. Denis, as patrons, to the field, to fight against the Turk, leaveth Christ, no doubt, at home.”37 Henry denied any association with “Amurath,” but in his invocation of St. George he may have fallen into another trap, this time of Catholic idolatry.
To make matters even more complicated, St. George is not an exclusively Christian saint: he is also a key figure in the Islamic faith. In Christian iconography St. George is shown as a resurrected martyr who appears, from the Crusades onward, slaying the heretical “dragon” of Islamic militarism.38 But in Islam he is associated with Al Khidr, identified in the Qur’an as a servant of God who meets Moses, and as an associate of Elijah in the Hadiths. In Sufism he is known as “the Verdant One,” a mystical warrior whom some sources claim to have been an officer in the army of Alexander the Great. Some versions of his life declare that, like St. George, Al Khidr was resurrected after his death at the hands of a pagan king. In the 1550s the Habsburg diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq traveled through the Ottoman Empire, recounting stories of a similar figure revered by Turkish dervish communities in central Anatolia, “a hero called Chederle, a man of great physical and mortal courage, whom they declare to be identical with our St. George and to whom they ascribe the same achievements as we ascribe to our saint, namely, that he rescued a maiden by the slaughter of a huge and terrible dragon.”39 Busbecq observed that “the Turks are much amused at the pictures of St. George, whom they declare was their own Chederle, in the Greek churches,” and that when they saw such pictures “they prostrate themselves in adoration and imprint kisses all over it, not omitting even the horse’s hoofs. St. George, they declare, was a man of might, a famous warrior, who often in single combat fought with the Evil Spirit on equal terms and was victorious.”40
Although he went under various names, St. George was shared widely among various Christian and Muslim communities, and it was only around the time that Shakespeare wrote Henry V that he began to have a more recognizably English identity. The likelihood is that Shakespeare had no idea of the Islamic version of St. George, but many of his contemporaries placed the saint in a nebulous Muslim context even as they tried to reclaim him for a more parochial version of English Protestantism. Richard Johnson, a popular writer of prose romance now largely forgotten, in his The Most Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom (1596)—a source for Henry V—transferred St. George’s origins from Cappadocia in Turkey to, perhaps surprisingly, Coventry. In Johnson’s hands St. George is somewhat clumsily turned into an “English Champion,” even though his enemies remain Persian Muslims. Johnson’s St. George travels east in search of adventure and is offered the hand of Sabra, daughter of the Egyptian king, but he insists, “I am a Christian, thou a Pagan: I honor God in heaven, thou earthly shadowes below: therefore if thou wilt obtaine my love and liking, thou must forsake thy Mahomet and be christened in our Christian faith.” Sabra agrees, but they are betrayed by the jealous “Almidor the blacke knight of Moroco.”41 George is sent to Persia to be executed.
Johnson depicts George as a militant Protestant iconoclast: “Upon the day Saint George entred the sultan’s court when the Persians solemnly sacrificed to their Gods Mahomet, Apollo, Termigaunt, the unchristian procession so moved the impatience of the English champion, that he took the ensigns and streamers whereon the Persian gods were pictured, and trampled them under his feet.”42 As a consequence George is condemned by a “Soldan” who swears by “Mahomet” and hands him over to his “Janissaries” to be executed. As he is martyred, George vows:
Let tyrants think if ever I obtain,
What now is lost by treason’s cursed guile:
False Egypt’s scourge I surely will remain,
And turn to streaming blood Moroco’s smile.
The damned dog of Barbarie shall rue,
The baleful stratagems that will ensue.
The Persian towers shall smoke with fire,
And lofty Babylon be tumbled down:
The Cross of Christendom shall then aspire,
To wear the proud Egyptian triple crowne,
Jerusalem and Juda shall behold,
The fall of Kings by Christian Champions bold.43
Johnson’s St. George has to go through a series of encounters with Muslims in the Holy Land before he can be martyred and adopted as England’s patron saint.
Much of what Johnson wrote about St. George’s complex heritage finds its way into Shakespeare’s Henry V, culminating at the end of the play in one final striking identification between Henry and St. George. After his victory at Agincourt, Henry makes peace with the French by marrying their princess, Catherine. His rather awkward wooing concludes with his proposal: “Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half-French half-English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?”44 It is hardly a romantic proposal, but rather one of militant Christian expansion, where the compound French and English heir can establish his power at the heart of Islam. As Henry augments his power through a dynastic marriage with the French princess
, he reveals himself a strategic polyglot.
Yet the audience knows there will be no crusade. As the Epilog points out:
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned king
Of France and England, did this king succeed,
Whose state so many had the managing
That they lost France and made his England bleed.
Which oft our stage hath shown.45
In a moment of self-promotion, Shakespeare reminds his viewers that eight years earlier they had seen what had happened to Henry VI. Henry’s great victories were all for nothing. The boy would not conquer Constantinople—quite the contrary, he would lose France, and England would sink into yet another civil war. The dynastic cycle of conflict will begin all over again, and the specter of Carlisle’s prophecy of internecine strife where “Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels” will return like a ghost that cannot be exorcised. Shakespeare intimates that even at the core of England’s greatest ruler there is a touch of Turkish tyranny. Perhaps, he suggests, a Christian is not so very different from a Turk after all.
By 1600, the ghost of Marlowe was gone, consigned to the occasional parody of largely ineffectual characters. The process of exorcism had given Shakespeare a fascinating new compound figure, the Moor-Turk. Shakespeare had no interest in making moral judgments about such characters. Gradually he transformed the stereotype of the eastern antihero as a murderous villain into something subtler, yet also tragic and conflicted. Shakespeare’s Moors were exotic yet unsettling. Standing on the threshold between Rome and Venice, they threatened to invade the domestic economy, and to pollute English women and bloodlines. For an Elizabethan audience accustomed by now to an extensive exchange of goods and people between England and Morocco, such face-to-face encounters were a distinct possibility. In contrast, Shakespeare’s Turks were more spectral figures, metaphors more than roles, archetypes rarely seen on England’s shores.
• • •
Even as Shakespeare finished Henry V with its unlikely proposal of a crusade against the Turk, a group of Englishmen were involved in a far less heroic but no less extraordinary adventure in Constantinople that would put Elizabeth’s relationship with the Ottomans back at the top of the international political agenda. In January 1598 Edward Barton had died of dysentery, abruptly ending his colorful tenure as English ambassador to the Porte. He was buried with little fanfare in a Christian cemetery on the island of Heybeli Ada, a short boat ride away from Constantinople. Sultan Mehmed had never officially ratified Barton’s position. His controversial Hungarian adventure had further delayed the dispatch of royal presents. It was left to Barton’s successor, Henry Lello, to renegotiate England’s commercial Capitulations in the face of renewed French opposition.
Lello possessed neither the tact nor the dynamism of his predecessors. His colleagues nicknamed him “Fog” and could hardly restrain their glee in reporting his shortcomings. During one of his earliest audiences with the sultan, he stood “like a modest midwife, and began a trembling speech in English . . . sounding like the squeaking of a goose divided into semiquavers.”46 Although he struggled to adapt to his position in Constantinople, he managed to convince London that if reasonable Anglo-Ottoman relations were to continue, gifts and letters confirming his position must be sent immediately.
As Elizabeth’s advisers debated what to send to Mehmed, Richard Hakluyt was in the final stages of preparing the publication of the second edition of his Principal Navigations. Hakluyt had dedicated the first edition to his patron, Walsingham, and would soon dedicate the second to Burghley’s son Robert Cecil, who became one of Elizabeth’s leading ministers in 1596 following his father’s incapacitation due to ill health (he died two years later).
Hakluyt’s dedicatory epistle drew on Bacon’s earlier defense. It turned first to ancient history, arguing, “If any man shall take exception against this our new trade with Turks and misbelievers, he shall show himself a man of small experience in old and new histories, or wilfully lead with partiality, or some worse humor. For who knoweth not, that king Solomon of old, entered into league upon necessity with Hiram the king of Tyrus, a gentile?” It was a carefully chosen Old Testament analogy. Just as King Hiram of Tyre had provided Solomon with the timber needed to build the Holy Temple of Jerusalem, so Elizabeth would do business with whoever enabled her to erect the Protestant Temple of God in England. Turning to the hypocrisy of England’s Catholic opponents, each of whom had merchants based in Constantinople, Hakluyt went on: “Who is ignorant that the French, the Genoese, Florentines, Ragusans, Venetians, and Polonians are at this day in league with the Grand Signior, and have been these many years, and have used trade and traffic in his dominions?” He concluded by taking a global perspective:
Who doth not acknowledge, that either hath traveled the remote parts of the world, or read the histories of this later age, that the Spaniards and Portugales in Barbary, in the Indies, and elsewhere, have ordinary confederacy and traffic with the Moors, and many kinds of Gentiles and Pagans, and that which is more, do pay them pensions, and use them in their service and wars? Why then should that be blamed on us, which is usual and common to the most part of other Christian nations?47
In other words, nobody could blame the English for working with the Turks or the Moors because everyone was at it.
Nevertheless, as news began to circulate in January 1599 that a ship carrying a consignment of gifts was ready to leave London for Constantinople, many onlookers expressed their anxiety. The inveterate gossip and diarist John Chamberlain wrote that a “great and curious present is going to the Grand Turk, which will scandalize other nations, especially the Germans.”48 Elizabeth chose the gifts personally and they were indeed “curious.” One was a coach worth £600 intended for Safiye Sultan, a shrewd decision that not only continued their reciprocal exchange of gifts but also enabled Elizabeth to cultivate the woman who it was believed had wielded ultimate power at the Turkish court since her son’s accession. The other gift was even more elaborate—a clockwork musical organ, built and already played before the queen (much to her satisfaction) by a musician and blacksmith from Warrington in Lancashire named Thomas Dallam. Edward Barton had written to Elizabeth back in 1595 suggesting she send Mehmed a “clock in the form of a cock.” Elizabeth clearly felt that a clockwork organ was better than a cock, and along with the coach, a consignment of cloth and a team of artisans, including Dallam himself, the organ was packed up and put on board the Hector, a 300-ton Levant Company ship bound for Constantinople.
On August 28, 1599, the Hector reached its destination. The Venetian bailo (resident ambassador) Girolamo Capello’s report on its arrival was mixed. He noted that the ship’s cargo “consists of an organ very cunningly designed, which serves as a clock and can play several airs by itself, of a carriage and fittings for the sultana, of some silver vases and many suits of cloth which they say are moldy and ruined.”49 The reality was even worse. Lello was horrified to discover that Dallam’s organ had been damaged on the long sea journey, alongside the consignment of ruined cloth, and with it possibly his hopes of receiving Mehmed’s formal blessing as ambassador. Dallam saw that the “gluing work was clean decayed on the organ” and “his metal pipes were bruised and broken.” He blamed “the working of the sea and the hotness of the country.”
Lello’s French and Venetian counterparts had turned up to laugh at the pile of broken pipes. Aside from the fuss over the presents, the Venetian bailo remained concerned about Lello’s longer-term ambitions to establish a Protestant church in Constantinople. Several weeks after Dallam’s arrival, Capello wrote to his superiors:
The English Ambassador will kiss hands tomorrow morning. He goes working away at various chimerical schemes, principally the idea of asking the Grand Signor to give him one of the churches in Galata for the use of a preaching minister whom he has brought with him. Both the French Ambassador and myself considered this design of his to be obviously
important in its effect on the honor of the Holy Church, and we accordingly approached the poor Mufti on the matter. He promised us every support; but now we have had recourse to the Chief Eunuch; nor shall we fail to make every effort in order to thwart this excessive and arrogant pretension of the English, who would endeavor to sow even here the perversity and impiety of Calvin.50
While the French and Venetians worried about Lello’s religious ambitions, the prickly Englishman was more concerned about Dallam. It must have been with mixed feelings that he watched the industrious Lancastrian quickly overcome the initial setback with his organ, spending the next month repairing, then reassembling it in front of a curious and increasingly expectant Turkish audience at the Topkapi Palace. At least the coach had arrived unscathed and proved to be a success. Lello later described the somewhat incongruous sight of the sultan and his mother riding around the city in it. When the organ’s repairs were complete, Dallam was called to perform before the sultan. On September 25 he and his organ were ushered into the inner sanctum of the Topkapi. As the sultan entered he demanded silence, and the twenty-four-year-old blacksmith from Lancashire began to play the organ in front of the most powerful ruler in the world. Dallam recounted what happened next:
All being quiet, and no noise at all, the present began to salute the Grand Signor [Mehmed]; for when I left it I did allow a quarter of an hour for his coming thither. First the clock struck 22; then the chime of 16 bells went off, and played a song of 4 parts. That being done, two personages which stood upon two corners of the second story, holding two silver trumpets in their hands, did lift them to their heads, and sounded a tantara. Then the music went off, and the organ played a song of 5 parts twice over. In the top of the organ, being 16 foot high, did stand a holly bush full of black birds and thrushes, which at the end of the music did singe and shake their wings. Diverse other motions there was which the Grand Signor wondered at.51
The Sultan and the Queen Page 25
