2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

Left-Handed Letters
Christopher Burlinson
ENGLISH STUDIES I Jesus College Annual Report 2012 25
O n 3 November 1579, the lawyer and pamphleteer John Stubbs was brought from the
Tower of London to Westminster, where his right hand was publicly chopped off.
Earlier that year, he had published The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is Like to be
Swallowed by an Other French Marriage, an eighty-page pamphlet sharply criticising the
possible marriage between Queen Elizabeth and François, the catholic Duke of Anjou,
which had been under negotiation for over a year. Stubbs’s pamphlet infuriated Elizabeth,
who issued a proclamation condemning it as a “fardel of false reports, suggestions and
manifest lies”. And as he stood on the scaffold awaiting his punishment (alongside
William Page, his bookseller), Stubbs made use of the occasion to deliver a speech
protesting his loyalty to the queen and urging his audience to “use your hands holily”. He
subsequently told Sir Christopher Hatton, of the Privy Council, that after his mutilation
he had cried “God save the Queen” before falling unconscious and being hauled back to
the Tower; this story also appeared, with embellishment, in William Camden’s Annales:
“I can remember that standing by John Stubbes, so soone as his right hand was off, put off
his hat with the left, and cryed aloud, God saue the Queene”.
I became interested in Stubbs in 2008, while studying sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury
student notebooks in the British Library. In one particular book, among scores of
pages of theological notes probably compiled by a Cambridge student during the 1580s,
I came across translations of twenty or so Psalms, apparently written by Stubbs and copied
out about eleven years later, long after his death. They were signed ‘John Stubbs Scaeva’,
a Latin nickname referring to Gaius Mucius Scaevola, a young Roman who in the sixth
century BC had attempted to assassinate the King of the Etruscans, and who, when
captured, had thrust his right hand into a fire to demonstrate his courage and devotion to
Rome. The poems were preceded by a letter written to Stubbs’s brother-in-law, the famous
Puritan divine Thomas Cartwright, who at that time was in Antwerp, taking up a position
as preacher to a church of English merchants.
Stubbs’s Psalm translations are not the most elegant of poems, and it is perhaps for
that reason that they have never yet been studied (and barely even noticed by their
librarians). But as I made the connection with the Stubbs of The Gaping Gulf, it became
clear that they were an exciting find. Scholars of English literary history are currently
fascinated by the various Psalm translations written by sixteenth-century prisoners in the
Tower, to whom this book of the Bible seems to have allowed a shared voice of repentance
and humility. And in spite of Stubbs’s occasional clumsiness, his letter to Cartwright
actually speaks about his own poetry in an extremely thoughtful and self-conscious way,
recalling other Protestant poets of the time – not least Edmund Spenser, who as a
Cambridge student in the 1570s would have heard the Presbyterian lectures that led to
Cartwright losing his university chair in divinity. Stubbs’s poems, then, provide further
evidence about the debates on poetry, nationality, and godliness that were clearly animating
Cambridge circles in the 1570s and 80s.
As I continued to work on Stubbs’s Psalms and letters, in fact, I became even more
interested in what they had to say about his place in those very Puritan circles – about
the peculiar ways in which Protestants and Puritans might have corresponded with
one another, and the place that godly poetry might have had in their exchanges and
friendships.