Thirty years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a small book appeared in the London market. The frontispiece identified it as ‘The French Historie’ and noted that it was ‘published by A. D.’. Only when the reader perused the dedication in the first pages of the book did it become clear that ‘A. D.’ was in fact ‘Anne Dowriche’ and they were reading one of the few sixteenth-century print books written entirely by a woman.
The Reading Room
Anne Dowriche: War, Treason and Shakespeare.
If you’ve not heard of an Elizabethan writer named Anne Dowriche, you are probably not alone. The early reception history of Anne Dowriche was marred by a dismissal of her literary abilities, as well as the related association of her text with a largely or even purely pious message. Dowriche, like many other female Renaissance writers, benefitted from a recovery process begun in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the growth of feminist and gender histories, and a series of events held through the 1980s, resulting in an explosion of publications by the late 1980s and early 1990s. Recent work has sought to restore Dowriche’s place in the history of political thought, highlighting her ‘hidden’ political messages; rather than a pious text, Dowriche’s French Historie has been recognised as being ‘militantly political’. Even so, she is far from a household name, and even many esteemed specialists in Elizabethan political writing are unfamiliar with her or her work.
Anne Edgecombe (later Dowriche) was the third-eldest daughter of Richard Edgecombe and Elizabeth Tregian. The Edgecombes were a powerful Devon and Cornwall family, with significant ties to the court, though by the time that Anne was born, they had fallen somewhat from the centre of power. Dowriche’s date of birth is not known, though given the birth year of her last known child (1594) and the description of her as a child in her father’s will of 1560, we can surmise that she was born between 1545 and 1559, and probably after 1550. In 1580 Anne Dowriche married Hugh Dowriche (b 1552/3-1598), the Rector of Lapford, Devon. The Dowriches had at least six children; their birth dates suggest that Dowriche was pregnant and/or nursing while she wrote The French Historie, published in 1589.
The French Historie details three events in sixteenth-century French history through a 2400-line poem in poulters measure. The first event is described as ‘The Winning of Saint James his Street’, referring to the rue St-Jacques in Paris, home to the Sorbonne, where a group of Protestants were arrested in Sept 1557 after gathering in a private home to worship. The second event she describes takes place only two years later, in 1559: the ‘Martyrdom of Annas Burgeus’. Annas Burgeus is the Latin form of Anne du Bourg, a French magistrate who had become a councillor of the Parlement in Paris (which Dowriche describes as the ‘Senate’) in 1557. The third and final event, taking up nearly half the text, is ‘the bloody marriage’, more commonly known as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which took place in August 1572.
As noted, one of the issues in the scholarship on this text is one of genre. The suggestion that The French Historie is a work of ‘personal piety’ has led to its exclusion, until relatively recently, from considerations of political texts. Dowriche uses poetical and rhetorical figures to participate in a political space that her sex would have otherwise excluded her. In transforming the passive victims of other histories into active martyrs through their use of parrhesia (frank speech) Dowriche likewise becomes an active frank speaker.
So what is it that Dowriche is saying in her text? Dowriche’s stated purpose is to ‘edify, comfort and stir up the godly minds unto care, watchfulness, zeal & ferventness in the cause of God’s truth’. ‘Edification’ was a central concept to Elizabethan Puritanism, drawn from their focus on ‘godly communities and spiritual growth through the imagery of building’, and – in particular – nation building: an international Protestant nation.
Dowriche does not entirely shy away from the intriguing political implications of her argument. If the Protestant nation transcends and supersedes the realm, Protestants – like Catholics – are not ultimately loyal to their monarch, but to that nation. Puritanism has long been linked to an important strain of resistance theory in England and, more recently, in Elizabethan England specifically. This was not religious thought straying into secular politics (nor vice versa), but rather a perspective in which a religious and political outlook were undeniably intertwined. There are powerful reflections on the notion of resistance that run throughout The French Historie: ‘Obey the King; that’s true, in things that honest be:/ When I obey in wicked hests [biddings], woe worth the time to me.’
This articulation of a resistance theory of passive disobedience is supported by the repeated claim in the History that the monarch (and those that advise him) is not just ungodly, and not just tyrannical, but treasonous. This word (and associated words: treason, traitor) is used frequently by Dowriche. The ‘traitors’ of the Historie, though, are not those who would wish a different monarch, resist their commands or even consider rebellion, quite the opposite. Instead the king, Charles IX himself, is a traitor, in that he has betrayed his oaths and promises. The ‘Popish treason’ referred to in the text does not have an exclusively or necessarily political meaning, but in the context of a focus on the edification of the community of believers and the espousal of resistance theory, there is the perhaps implicit suggestion that ‘treason’ is something that can be committed by those in government against a group synonymous with the commonwealth. This perspective on the concept of treason will find its fullest expression in England during the English Civil War.
But we need not traverse quite so many decades to speak about Dowriche’s influence. Dowriche influenced others in her local circle, including the translator Anne Lock (Of the Markes of the Children of God, 1590) and her own husband, Hugh Dowriche (The Jaylors Conversion, 1596). Hers is also one of the first English print texts to introduce central tenets of Machiavellianism, as well as the figure of a Machiavel/Devil, who becomes central to the seventeenth-century stage. As Randall Martin has shown, there are close connections between Dowriche’s presentation of Catherine de Medici and the Machiavel, and that of Christopher Marlow, especially in his Jew of Malta (c. 1589-90) and The Massacre at Paris (c. 1592). Jo Eldridge Carney has gone even further and suggested that Dowriche may have inspired a character she suggests is based on Medici: Tamora in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c. 1589-1594). Kate Chedgzoy likewise has suggested a parallel between Dowriche’s presentation of England and that of Shakespeare in Richard II (c. 1595). These are intriguing possibilities, especially alongside a recognition that Shakespeare frequently picked up books of history to inspire his playwrighting.
Dowriche’s surest legacy, however, exists in the acknowledgment of what her text can tell us about the period in which it was written: that in the late 1580s Puritan writers made important political connections between affairs in France and those of England, that there were articulations of resistance theory that drew on the language of tyranny and treason and that rhetoric was employed to give voice to those in the margins of political discourse. That all of this comes to us in a book written by a country gentlewoman is an important part of this legacy, though it does not fully define it.
SourcesAnne Dowriche, The French History, ed. Joanne Paul (Toronto: Tudor and Stuart Texts, University of Toronto, 2024).
Secondary Sources
Beilin, Elaine V. Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Princeton Legacy Library. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Beilin, Elaine V. ‘“Some Freely Spake Their Minde”: Resistance in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie’. In Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, edited by Mary Elizabeth Burke, Jane Donawerth, Karen Nelson, and Linda L. Dove, 119–40. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000.
Carney, Jo Eldridge. ‘“I’ll Find a Day to Massacre Them All”: Tamora in Titus Andronicus and Catherine de Médicis’. Comparative Drama 48, no. 4 (2014): 415–35.
Chedgzoy, Kate. ‘This Pleasant and Sceptred Isle: Insular Fantasies of National Identity in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie and William Shakespeare’s Richard II’. In Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1550–1800, edited by Simon Mealor and Philip Schwyzer, 25–42. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
Collinson, Patrick. The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Martin, Randall. ‘Anne Dowriche’s “The French History”, Christopher Marlowe, and Machiavellian Agency’. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 39, no. 1 (1999): 69–87.
Matchinske, Megan. Women Writing History in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Paul, Joanne. ‘Dowriche, Anne’. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1–6. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020.
Suzuki, Mihoko. ‘Warning Elizabeth with Catherine de’ Medici’s Example: Anne Dowriche’s French Historie and the Politics of Counsel’. In The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe, edited by Anne J. Cruz and Mihoko Suzuki, 174–93. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
White, Micheline. ‘Women Writers and Literary‐Religious Circles in the Elizabethan West Country: Anne Dowriche, Anne Lock Prowse, Anne Lock Moyle, Ursula Fulford, and Elizabeth Rous’. Modern Philology 103, no. 2 (2005): 187–214.