Abstract
The Henrician and Edwardian Reformations of the 1530s and 1540s were marked by successive waves of iconoclasm in English churches and cathedrals. Statues, screens, wall paintings, and windows were among the idols targeted. While some objects and artworks were destroyed or effaced entirely, others remained in situ, bearing the marks of iconoclastic violence. Even today, many English cathedrals harbour numerous examples of defaced images which have suffered beheading or scoring of the face and hands, but have been neither repaired nor removed. This article explores how various post-Reformation observers including Protestants, Catholics, antiquaries, and poets understood and responded to defaced images, arguing that traditionalists and reformers found a paradoxical common cause in the curation of iconoclasm.
In the easternmost chapel in the south aisle of Exeter Cathedral lies the tomb of Hugh Oldham (d. 1519), the last Bishop of Exeter to die before the Reformation. Represented in effigy, Oldham looks serene and cheerful, with the hint of a double chin; his robes of red and white, repainted several times over the centuries, have a glossy sheen. Yet this healthful figure takes his repose in the midst of a sculptural massacre. The statuettes on the stone altar, once depicting the miraculous mass of St Gregory, have been decapitated (Figure 1). Within the chapel and in the niches of its ornate screen, almost every saint and angel has been neatly beheaded. These images still bear the marks of violence they endured in the early years of the English Reformation. They have never been removed; they have never been repaired. Time, for these defaced statues, seems to stand still.
Defaced reredos, Chapel of St Saviour, Exeter Cathedral. Photograph by Diane Walker.
Such beheaded or defaced figures can be found in almost every older English and Welsh cathedral, as well as countless churches. In the Lady Chapel at Ely, all but one of the countless figures in the niches has been beheaded, supposedly by a commissioner on horseback in 1539. On Archbishop Morton’s splendid tomb in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, not only the mourners and angels but even the several eagles representing John the Evangelist have been decapitated. What makes the example of Oldham’s chantry at Exeter particularly striking is not only the meticulousness of the iconoclasm but also the fact that the chapel was so new when it was attacked. Its little statues wore their heads only for some 25 years. 1 For another 480 years (more than 95% of their existence), they have been as they are now, headless. Given the short space of time between creation and desecration, as well as the apparent expertise and care of the iconoclasts, it is not inconceivable that the defacement was undertaken by some of the same artisans who created the figures in the first place. Should we regard these headless statues as medieval artworks which suffered a subsequent attack in the Reformation era? Or should we rather see them as sixteenth-century sculptures for which headlessness represents their finished and, in a sense, perfected state? Is defacement something that happened to them along the way, or is it part of what they are?
The apparent stasis of the defaced figures in the Oldham chapel contrasts markedly with the treatment of damage and decay elsewhere in the fabric of Exeter Cathedral, which is by no means unusual in this regard. A few paces west in the south aisle, a number of wall monuments present the appearance of successfully solved jigsaw puzzles, the myriad cracks showing where they splintered when a bomb struck the cathedral in 1942. On the spectacular medieval image screen that adorns the west front, several of the more badly weathered angels and patriarchs have been successively replaced by new statues in the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such composite structures complicate efforts to assign elements of the fabric to a specific period and suggest instead a kind of collaborative, hybrid temporality. The appearance of the oldest churches and cathedrals today is the product of ceaseless if juddering cycles of decay, repair and replacement. Yet by a curiously widespread consensus, these processes have left alone images damaged in the first decades of the Reformation. 2 When, and on what terms, did this consensus emerge?
Ironically, the image-breaking of the 1530s and 1540s has left behind an enduring gallery of images. 3 In Joseph Koerner’s phrase, the image-breakers were image-makers (2002: 164–213). In many cases, the visual impact of these defaced or beheaded figures rivals or exceeds that of figures that were left unharmed. Can this be what the image-breakers had in mind? Injunctions and sermons calling for the removal of offensive images generally refer to their defacement only as a step towards their eradication. From the Reformation to the Civil War, orders were issued on both national and local levels for images to be ‘utterly defaced, broken, and destroyed’, ‘defaced and burnt’, ‘defaced, burned, and stamped to powder’, ‘defaced and removed out of the church and … destroyed’ or ‘taken away, defaced, and utterly demolished’. 4 In some cases, it is not clear whether we should understand ‘defaced’ to mean ‘marred’, or in its alternative and now obsolete sense of ‘destroyed’. In any case, the defacement of an image was almost always ordered as a prelude to and in the context of its inevitable obliteration. The prisoner was to be tortured and then executed; the bomb was to be defused before it could safely be destroyed.
There is little indication in the early injunctions regarding images that defacement might serve as a sufficient and final measure, producing a new and reformed spectacle. Indeed, the obvious unacceptability of a church littered with defaced images was a point on which Protestants and Catholics could agree, albeit with opposite ends in view. Such unity in disagreement is nicely illustrated by the story John Foxe (1583: 2051) tells of the Exeter martyr Agnes Prest, who paid a visit to the Cathedral in the reign of Mary: it happened that she entring in saynt Peters Church, beheld there a cunning Dutchman how he made new noses to certayne fine Images whiche were disfigured in Kyng Edwardes time: What a madde man art thou (sayde she) to make them new noses, which within a few dayes shall all lose theyr heades.
From this inauspicious beginning, the conversation swiftly degenerates into a vulgar insult match. ‘He called her Whoore. Nay (sayd she) thy Images are Whoores, and thou art a Whore hunter: for doth not God say: You go a whoryng after straunge Gods, figures of your owne making?’ (Foxe, 1583: 2051; cf. Exodus 34: 15–16). Yet although they are opposed in so many respects, including in faith, gender and nationality, Agnes Prest and the Dutchman are united on one point of principle. Both regard the prospect of a church adorned with a host of noseless images as clearly unthinkable. The force of Foxe’s anecdote depends on the assumption that Protestants and Catholics were agreed in seeing the presence of disfigured effigies and images as a scandal, though their responses to the scandal are diametrically opposed. Catholics wish to repair the images, restoring them to their original sacred integrity. Protestants naturally want to pursue the programme of iconoclasm to its logical conclusion, effacing and casting them out entirely.
Yet neither Agnes Prest nor the Dutchman seem to have been particularly representative of the movements they are made to stand for. Although the reign of Mary saw the restoration of some traditional church furnishings and the installation of new images, there is little evidence of repairs being made to defaced figures, either at Exeter or elsewhere. 5 There is nothing to indicate Marian restoration of the altar in Oldham’s chantry, for instance. Likewise, Prest’s expectation that a new wave of reform would sweep away the remains of images was to prove false, or at least delayed by most of a century. When Elizabeth’s commissioners came to Exeter in 1559, they predictably ‘defaced and pulled down and burned all images and monuments of idolatry’, forcing those who had installed new images in Mary’s time to build the fire for their destruction (Whiting, 1989: 80). Yet images already defaced under Elizabeth’s father and brother were apparently spared further destruction.
One particular sort of image was explicitly exempted from further iconoclastic attack by Elizabeth’s proclamation of 1560 ‘against breakinge or defacing monumentes of antiquitie, beyng set up in Churches’ (Sherlock, 2008: 166; Weever, 1631: 52–53). Attacks on funerary effigies and brasses had been frequent in the reign of Edward VI, justified by their association with prayer for the dead or simply by their status as representations. Elizabeth’s order largely put an end to such practices, but it did not provide or call for the repair of previously damaged monuments. Defaced tombs and effigies were thus a common sight in cathedral and churches in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as antiquarian surveys make clear. In his Survey of London, John Stow notes more than 20 churches in which monuments have been defaced, as well as the isolated example of St. Olave in the Old Jewry, where ‘to the commendation of the parishioners, the monumentes of the deade remaine lesse defaced then in many other’. 6 John Weever’s more wide-ranging survey of Ancient Funeral Monuments (1631) finds a seemingly endless number of tombs and effigies ‘fouly defaced’ in cathedrals and parish churches within the dioceses of Canterbury, London and Norwich. At Worcester Cathedral, Francis Godwin (1601) noted in his survey, ‘vpon one Marble lying iust before the Quire doore, we see the defaced images of two Bishops’ (p. 362). The effigies of two knights in Sheviock, Cornwall, Richard Carew (1602) feels it necessary to specify, are ‘by the malice, not of men, but of time, defaced’ (sig. 108r-v).
The visual impact of defaced images must have been far greater in the century after the Reformation than it is today, when the malice of time has removed some of them entirely, and made it difficult in other cases to distinguish between intentional and accidental damage, between chiselling and weathering. Where statues had stood for only a few years, their unwonted noselessness, headlessness or otherwise mutilated condition must have been visually arresting if not shocking. Indeed, it is likely that many church-goers found their eyes drawn to them as never before. As Michael Taussig (1999) argues, [W]e could say (following Musil) that the statue barely exists for consciousness and perhaps is nonexistent – until it receives the shock to its being, provided by its defacement issuing forth a hemorrhage of sacred force. With defacement, the statue moves from an excess of invisibility to an excess of visibility.
7
(p. 52)
There are many ways of ignoring statues. Even those most inclined to venerate icons would have probably have focused on a few images in the church, disregarding the rest. Yet the dark appeal of defacement is more universal. Whoever looks upon a headless statue is the intended recipient of its message.
The defaced images we see in cathedrals and churches today are undoubtedly only a fragment of those that populated these buildings in the century after the Reformation. From the late 1620s, Arminian enthusiasm for the ‘beauty of holiness’ prompted serious if scattered efforts to repair or replace windows and other ornaments which bore the marks of iconoclastic damage, as well as a new willingness to remove unsightly or obstructive tombs. The great wave of iconoclasm at the outbreak of the Civil War then saw a more thorough removal of images, including many which had survived for a century in a defaced state. 8 So many phases of restoration and reordering have succeeded since that time that the furnishing of a church today offers little guide to how thoroughly it was marked by iconoclasm in the sixteenth century. 9 My aim in this essay is to explore how late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century church-goers used desecrated images as prompts for a range of memories and how their varying responses combined in a largely unspoken agreement to preserve and curate the after-images of iconoclasm. In the final section, I will explore how the spectacle of defacement gave rise to fresh perceptions of the power and shape of time, as witnessed in the poetry of the period.
The curation of iconoclasm
One of the charges laid against Archbishop Laud by his Parliamentary accusers in the early 1640s was the renovation of the picture windows in his Lambeth chapel with ‘Popish images’. Laud insisted that he had simply repaired what was broken, using the ‘fragments and remainders’ of the old windows as his guide, because he was ‘ashamed to behold’ the chapel lie ‘so nastily’. To this, the prosecution retorted that the windows had been broken and demolished by vertue of our Statutes, Homilies, Injunctions … at the beginning of Reformation; ever since which time they continued unrepaired, as Monuments of our indignation and detestation against them, like the ruines of our Abbies and Monasteries. (Prynne, 1646: 462)
Laud, according to his prosecutors, had failed to read the message of defacement correctly. The persistence of unsightly ‘fragments and remainders’ in the chapel windows over a period of as much as 100 years was not the result of oversight or neglect. Rather, they had been preserved in their broken state by intention. The prosecutors’ argument posits two separate, successive and equally godly kinds of iconoclastic activity: first, the actual smashing and breaking, and then the conscientious curation of the remnants for their educative and admonitory value. Permitting fragments of glass and stonework to remain in situ was indicative not of sloth, but of zeal. Broken images and ruined monasteries served to remind viewers of the perils they had escaped through the Reformation – in Alexandra Walsham’s words, they furnished ‘a kind of visible health warning against the dangers of backsliding’ (2010a: 89).
More than a century after the beginning of the English Reformation, Laud’s opponents were attempting to offer an explanation for a puzzling and potentially awkward phenomenon. Why had so many vestiges of Catholic images been allowed to survive, rather than being entirely removed? The ‘monuments of indignation’ thesis is persuasive in many respects. Yet it is important to note that this explicit case for preserving defaced images was rarely if ever advanced in the sixteenth century. 10 Rather, royal and episcopal injunctions from the Edwardian and Elizabethan periods speak consistently in the language of effacement – images must be pulled down ‘so that there remain no memory of the same’ (see Aston, 2015: 122). If the churchwardens and cathedral chapters who failed to follow through with these commands were adhering to a widely understood programme of educative defacement, they did not say so. To have articulated such a position would have been to acknowledge that images could, after all, be instruments of religious instruction, and so to risk undermining a central pillar of church reform.
Although never specifically countenanced or justified, the display of defaced statues in churches and cathedrals clearly participated in wider discourses of punishment and the body in the sixteenth century. As Pamela Graves (2008) and others have discussed, assaults on unsanctioned idols often echoed and mimicked the treatment of criminals; defacement played a role both in the trial of the idol and in its punishment. Graves argues that the preference for targeting the heads and hands of both sculpted and painted figures heightened the analogy between the idolatrous image and the criminal body. The inhabitants of English cities and towns did not need to go to church to see mangled bodies and dismembered body parts, including heads and limbs, on display. In 1549, as an intense wave of iconoclasm targeted church monuments and chantries, the body of the rebel Robert Kett was hung in chains from the top of Norwich Castle, ‘for a continuall memorie of so great villanie, untill that unhappy and heavy body (through putrifaction consuming) shall fall downe at length’ (Neville, 1615). To the extent that Reformation iconoclasts transformed sacred images into analogous spectacles of righteous punishment, they implied that such spectacles should likewise remain on view.
As Kett’s body decomposed, it manifested the rottenness that, the state argued, had characterized his life and actions. Likewise, the mutilation of holy images could be interpreted as the revelation of their abhorrent essence. Like the whited sepulchres of Matthew 23:27, idols were beautiful on the outside but full of ‘all uncleanness’ within. This is perhaps implied in the claim of Laud’s prosecutors that defaced images served as ‘Monuments of … detestation’. The reformers defaced the images because they detested them and what they stood for; yet in defacing them, they also transformed them into, or rather revealed them as, detestable things. The real face of idolatry was scarred, eyeless and hideous, and in defacing images reformers laid bare that true face. Iconoclasm, seen in this light, is not so much an act of destruction as an art of unveiling. We can draw a comparison with the unveiling of deceptively beautiful Catholic figures in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, most notably the stripping of the witch Duessa (see Gough, 1999: 41–67; Gross, 1995): that witch they disaraid, And robd of roiall robes, and purple pall, And ornaments that richly were displaid; Ne spared they to strip her naked all. Then when they had despoyld her tire and call, Such as she was, their eies might her behold, That her misshaped parts did them appall, A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill fauoured, old, Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told. (Spenser, 2007: 1.8.46)
As Spenser’s Una pronounces, ‘Such is the face of falshood, such the sight/ Of fowle Duessa, when her borrowed light/ Is laid away, and counterfesaunce knowne’ (1.8.49). Having exposed Duessa’s inner foulness, the protagonists neither punish her further nor imprison her, but release her into ‘the world that her discouered wide’ (1.8.50). In stripping the witch, they also refashion her, transforming her into an object lesson against her own brand of deception.
There were, then, at least three ways in which the display of defaced images may have appeared justifiable to sixteenth-century reformers, all of them depending to some extent on an analogy with the bodies of condemned criminals, and all of them compatible:
The image is displayed as a reminder of the evil escaped through the Reformation (‘for a continual memory of so great a villainy’).
The image is displayed as a reminder of the power and righteousness of the Reformation itself (‘monuments of our indignation’).
The image is displayed as the revealed and hideous face of idolatry (‘monuments of our detestation’).
Of course, each of these ways about thinking about the defaced image runs a considerable risk. In what might seem a direct continuation of Catholic practice, images are still being used as a means of religious instruction. Worse yet, to the extent that they are treated as condemned criminals, the images are apparently endowed with personhood, the very thing iconoclasm sought to deny (Koerner, 2004: 108–109). These risks were mitigated, at least for some, by the atmosphere of irony that characterized iconoclasm throughout the period from the Reformation to the Civil War. The ironization of the entire spectacle is the final step that makes it safe – without retreating from the determination to punish the image as a criminal – by reminding the viewer that nothing has really happened. As one Puritan author (The Crosses Case in Cheapside, 1642) remarked on the defacement of the images on Cheapside Cross in 1642, here is no dammage none at all … the Mother can command her sonne as imperiously as ever she did, though halfe her crowne be gone. And the defaced Saint smels as well now without a Nose as before when it was fresh and new out of the Carvers shop. They have received no dammage none at all. (p. 1642)
We can hardly hope to recapture the range of responses to defaced images that might have been experienced within a single congregation, or within the head of a single worshipper. Many, no doubt, viewed such images with righteous detestation, while others were overcome with nostalgia; it is not impossible to experience both feelings at once. Some Elizabethan reformers worried that older people in particular, those who could recall the undamaged furnishings of their churches before the Reformation, might continue to indulge in a kind of inner idolatry, cobbling their icons out of a mixture of memory and the surviving visual evidence. In Thomas Deloney’s (1912) ‘Song between Truth and Ignorance’ (in Deloney, 1912), Ignorance is permitted a remarkably moving reflection on how one looks at absence: To heare the Friers zinging, as we did enter in. and then to see the Roodloft, zo brauely set with Zaints: And now to zee them wanting, my heart with zorrow faints.
It is not clear from Ignorance’s lament whether the images of saints have been excised from the rood loft, or the loft itself has been removed. Elizabethan injunctions called for the removal of the loft, yet in many parishes this step was resisted and delayed (Chapman, 2013: 79–85). Even where the loft was taken down, the survival of the screen beneath it could serve as a reminder of its presence, and where the screen was also removed the vacant space could still stir memories (Parry, 1987: 153). As the ‘Dialogue between Truth and Ignorance’ suggests, only an inner reformation, or (more practically) the dying out of a memorious generation could finally expel from the church the after-images of the saints.
For those who favoured the old religion, even the new spectacles offered by the reformed church served as prompts to remember what was lost. The martyr Richard Gwyn (d. 1584) drew the contrast between the old sights and the new: Yn ller creirie, tinker tôst Yn gwneuthyr bôst oi gnafri Yn ller delwe, gwagedd sal ….
11
Instead of holy things, a miserable tinker, Making a boast of his knavery; Instead of the images, empty niches …
The literal sense of Gwyn’s ‘gwagedd sal’ is ‘poor emptiness’, and it may be taken to refer not only to empty niches but to the general evacuation of meaningful sights. (Another manuscript of the carol has the reading ‘gwragedd sal’ [poor wives], suggesting that when the congregants can no longer gaze on holy images, they are left to look at each other. 12 ) Gwyn finds no comfort in the small vestiges of Catholic imagery surviving in the church, yet he cannot unsee what he has once seen nor cease to find prompts for memory in the spectacles the church offers now. His complaint resonates with the bard Siôn Brwynog’s lament ‘Cor ni bydd cwyr yn y byd,/ Na chennad yn iach ennyd’. (‘There is no wax in the world, nor a single candle in any chancel for a moment to make us whole’; Williams, 1997: 180.) Even darkness can be understood as a defacement, and a reminder, of light.
For these Welsh poets, as for the English author of the ‘Lament for Walsingham’, the absence or marring of sacred spectacles seems purely distressing. Yet it is also probable that some worshippers continued to view defaced images with veneration, and even empty niches with a sense of reverence for what they had contained. Walsham (2010b) recounts the story of a man who had rescued a reliquary containing a nail from the Holy Cross from Glastonbury Abbey: After [John] Jewel took the offensive item away, the old man transferred his attachment to the empty reliquary – to the impression left in the linen case in which it had been enclosed, which itself required a reputation for working miraculous cures. The very void left by the Protestant onslaught became the focus of veneration. (p. 126)
Reformation iconoclasm produced a remarkable array of such signifying voids, from headless statues and empty niches to the anthropomorphic indentations in church floors and tomb slabs left after the lifting of sepulchral brasses. The effigial brass of the reputed saint Edmund Lacy, pulled up in Exeter Cathedral in 1539 by the order of the zealous Dean Heynes, has left such an indentation, which may well have attracted a contemplative gaze from those who once came to pray at his tomb 13 (Figure 2).
Tomb of Bishop Edmund Lacy (d. 1455), Exeter Cathedral. Photograph by Diane Walker.
In at least a few cases, the damage wrought by iconoclasm could even enhance rather than neutralize an image’s sacred meaning. There was, after all, a highly developed spiritual methodology centring on the contemplation of wounds. Thus, the clergy of the English College at Valladolid venerated the so-called Lady Vulnerata, an image of Mary mutilated in the face and partially dismembered by English raiders in the 1596 attack on Cadiz (see Aston, 2015: 989; Boldrick and Barber, 2013: 29). John Bargrave of Canterbury, who fled to France in the early 1640s, found the damaged tympanum over the west entrance of Bourges Cathedral ‘much defaced by the civill wars. Yet … more glorious by its intended ruine’. In the depiction of the raising of the dead on the Day of Judgement, ‘the figures being mutilated, and deprived of severall limbs, this man seemeth to looke for his arme that he hath lost; that for his legg, a third for his hand, and forth for his heade …’ (Bann, 2003: 32). Iconoclastic damage could thus be assimilated into traditional ways of reading and responding to sacred images. In this regard, it is worth remembering that decapitated saints were not in themselves an innovation; martyrs who had suffered death in this manner were often represented, well before the Reformation, without their heads. 14
Why were so many defaced statues and other images permitted to survive for so long in English and Welsh churches and cathedrals? The answers must inevitably include merely practical obstacles to their removal, exacerbated in many places by a shortage of funds and energetic leadership in this regard. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that many such images were preserved and effectively curated by an unspoken consensus. Church officials and church-goers who might hold radically different views on the value of images (even within the spectrum of professed Protestantism) could agree on this point: defaced images had a value (see Aston, 2015: 988–989). In an era when the Church of England laid more stress on outward conformity than on making windows into people’s souls, it was perhaps sufficient to assume that when men and women looked at headless or marred images of saints, they dutifully saw them as ‘monuments of indignation’, rather than making them objects of veneration or nostalgic longing. The display and reception of defaced images was an ambiguous ritual, to be sure, but one in which divided communities could participate without discernible conflict.
For the opponents of images, this consensus may have helped cover over an abyss of hopelessness and despair. How could one finally get rid of images, after all? Could there ever be an iconoclasm so complete that it left no remainder? To break the nose is to preserve the head, and to cut off the head preserves the trunk; removal of the statue leaves an empty niche, and removal of the niche leaves a scar on the wall; even plastering the bare wall cannot plaster over memories. There is no end of defacement, until the faces are forgotten. The potential for this despair is implicit in Foxe’s superficially triumphalist story of Agnes Prest, who promised that the images that had lost their noses would soon ‘lose theyr heades’. Prest clearly intended to gesture to the coming expulsion of all images from houses of worship, yet what she describes is in fact only a further stage of defacement, leaving an inevitable remainder.
As Kenneth Gross (1995) has observed, To break an image is not necessarily to break away from images. Hence a complete grammar of iconoclasm would also teach us to look closely at the partial survivals of and substitutions for images, at the forms or fragments left behind and at what was raised up in their place. (p. 11)
As long as memories of a different style of worship survived, no visual sentence within the space of the church could escape conformity to this grammar. It was perhaps inevitable that as memories of the pre-Elizabethan church began to die out, the tacit consensus over defaced images should begin to collapse. This is indeed what happened in the 1620s (with calls for the ‘beauty of holiness’, on one hand, and renewed demands for the expulsion of all idols, on the other), a decade which saw the deaths of almost the last men and women born before the Reformation, and the sharp dwindling of the generation that could recall even the Marian church. 15 To the extent that the consensual curation of iconoclasm had been sustained by the understanding that different members of a congregation held different memories, it was not destined to last forever.
Time the defacer
In addition to stirring a range of powerful and sometimes painful memories, defaced images also prompted new reflections on the nature of memory itself, and on the shape of time. Poets such as William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and Michael Drayton, who in the second half of the sixteenth century grew up worshipping in the company of headless saints and patchwork windows, were drawn to defacement as a theme and a problem. Often but not invariably illustrated by specific references to Reformation iconoclasm, defacement in Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry emerges as the characteristic action of Time.
Shakespeare’s 64th sonnet opens with an image of Time as iconoclast: When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age, When sometime lofty towers I see down razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage …. (Shakespeare, 2016: ll. 1–4)
Every line of the first quatrain gestures to the aftermath of iconoclasm, though never so definitively as to preclude alternative, less controversial interpretations. The second line could point to the defacement of tombs and memorials (‘buried age’) so lamented by Queen Elizabeth and John Stow; yet it could also describe the inevitable slow degradation of medieval monuments, like Carew’s effigies at Sheviock, ‘by the malice, not of men, but of time, defaced’. The third line, likewise, might well refer to the downfall of great monastic buildings after the dissolution, but lofty towers fall from a variety of causes, and Stow records medieval towers being pulled down in London for secular reasons in his time. The image of ‘brass eternal slave to mortal rage’ does seem to point directly to the pulling up of funerary brasses, like that of Bishop Lacy in Exeter Cathedral, as well as the rasing out of offending words and phrases from brasses that remained in place; yet ‘mortal rage’ could conceivably refer to the violence of death itself (as some editors suggest) rather than the rage of mortal reformers. Rather than insisting on iconoclasm as its subject, the first quatrain offers the reader a series of invitations to apply the sense of a given line to spectacles and memories that would have been familiar to every church-goer. To the extent that these invitations are accepted, the recurrent reminder of image-breaking threatens to undermine the sonnet’s over-arching metaphor, as the actions attributed to ‘Time’s fell hand’ are exposed as the work of literal human hands, acting in the recent past. ‘Time’ in this quatrain is perhaps no more than a grand name bestowed by the poet on an assemblage of zealous commissioners and punctilious churchwardens.
Time, however, has many guises. The second quatrain finds his hand at work in the phenomenon of coastal erosion, whereby ‘the hungry ocean gain[s]/ Advantage on the kingdom of the shore’. The sonnet thus situates the legacy of image-breaking within a wider catalogue of instances of degradation and decay, not all of which can be attributed to human agency. The juxtaposition of iconoclasm with the slow action of tides encourages us to perceive both as inevitable and in some way natural processes. A similar comparison is drawn in William Camden’s (1610) Britannia, where the dissolution of the monasteries is likened to a sudden floud (as it were) breaking thorow the banks with a maine streame … which whiles the world stood amazed, and England groned thereat, bare downe and utterly overthrew the greatest part of the Clergie, together with their most goodly and beautifull houses. (p. 163)
Like Camden, Shakespeare seems disposed to interpret the destructiveness of reform as an impersonal force of nature, carried out but not fundamentally influenced by human actors.
Shakespeare was not the only lyric poet of his era to imagine Time as a defacer of images. Possibly influenced by Sonnet 64 (whose date of composition is uncertain), Francis Davison (1602) likewise wished that time and age should have no power over his beloved: no Sicknesse nippe those flowers sweet, Which ever flowring on your Cheekes doo meet: Nor all defacing Time have power to rase, The goodly building of that heavenly Face. (sig. D8r)
Davison is not quite drawing a comparison, yet the huddling together in the last couplet of ‘defacing’, ‘rase’, ‘heavenly’ and ‘building’ suggests the desecration of churches as a parallel example of Time’s all-defacing power. The sense of ‘rase’ hovers a little awkwardly between raze (appropriate to a building) and rase (appropriate to a face); this ambiguity produces the shadowy tertiary image of a building being rased, or scratched out, apt enough as a description of iconoclasm.
The poet Michael Drayton finds an instance of Time the Defacer at St Albans Abbey, a church that had suffered severe assaults on its fabric during the Reformation. In the Sixteenth Song of Poly-Olbion, Drayton (1612) describes both the ‘rich and sumptuous shrine’ of Alban and the noble medieval monuments that surrounded it, ‘Which now devowring Time, in his so mighty waste,/ Demolishing those walls, hath utterly defac’t’ (16.77–78). On the face of it, this passage is so squarely concerned with the effects of the dissolution of the monasteries that the ascription of the deed to Time rather than Henry VIII seems like an evasion. Yet Drayton also has his eye on the adjoining site of Verulamium, the buried Roman city which Edmund Spenser had made his subject in The Ruines of Time (1590). In that earlier poem, the spectre of the city is made to ‘grieue that my remembrance quite is raced/ Out of the knowledge of posteritie,/ And all my antique moniments defaced’ (Spenser, 1912: ll. 177–179). Spenser, of course, is glancing at the defaced abbey as well as Verulamium, just as Drayton, writing about St Albans, is glancing at Verulamium, its predecessor in ruin, and at Spenser, his predecessor in ruin poetry. The proximity of the two locales allows each poet to situate the iconoclastic assault on a monastic church within a wider history of inevitable, entropic defacement.
Overtly or implicitly, Shakespeare, Spenser and Drayton ascribe wilful acts of violence perpetrated within living memory to the abstract and ineluctable power of Time. On the face of it, this may look like a crass evasion designed to ease a troubled Protestant conscience. (Q. How could we have done such things? A. We didn’t.) Yet while this description may just apply to Drayton, it hardly seems appropriate to Spenser, who never shied away from celebrating righteous iconoclasm (nor from criticizing its excesses). 16 Nor does it help us with Shakespeare, who does not evade the fact of historically localized human violence (‘mortal rage’), though he subsumes such actions within his larger theme; it would be difficult to argue that the references to the Reformation in his sonnets (also including the ‘bare ruined choirs’ of Sonnet 73) are more Protestant than Catholic in sympathy.
Indeed, the theme of Time the Defacer could appeal to openly Catholic poets as well. A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605), a treatise on the Anglo-Saxons by the Catholic exile Richard Verstegan, begins with verses describing his struggle against Time: Tyme overweares what earst his lycence wrought, And also seekes remembrance to deface, Of what himself hath to destruction brought, In that long trackt of his all-altring space That none might of his ruins view the place …. (sig. †††3r)
Verstegan presents himself as seeking to redress the ravages of Time, who is at once a nemesis and a deity: ‘This deep desyre hath lastly moved mee,/ On Pilgrimage Tymes traces to ensue,/ The relykes of his ruines for to see …’ The trope of Time the Defacer arguably works a little differently for Verstegan than for the poets discussed above. While Shakespeare, Davison, Spenser and Drayton view the ravages of time with sorrowful resignation, Verstegan resolves to undertake a ‘pilgrimage’ in search of ‘relics’. The terms are of course explicitly Catholic, but so, arguably, is the response to defacement. Like Richard Gwyn, Verstegan uses the defaced vestiges he can observe to recapture an image of the lost past. Precisely because Time operates by means of defacement, the losses it imposes are never entire; a route of resistance and recovery remains open for those who seek it.
The motif of Time the Defacer as employed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries is at once new and old, in that it marks a distinctive post-Reformation inflection of a classical theme. Ovid, famously, had described time as the devourer of all things: tempus edax rerum, tuque invidiosa vetustas, omnia destruitis vitiataque dentibus aevi paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte. (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15.234–236)
As Arthur Golding (1567) translated this passage early in Elizabeth’s reign, ‘Thou tyme, the eater vp of things, and age of spyghtfull teene,/ Destroy all things. And when that long continuance hath them bit,/ You leysurely by lingring death consume them euery whit’ (p. 190). 17 Ovid’s image of Time’s devouring action is complex and to some extent tautological, in that Time can only be imagined working over time. It consumes all things (causing them to disappear), but does so slowly and lingeringly, leaving nibbled vestiges on view over a long period. Medieval poets, with their fondness for the ubi sunt topos, had tended to lay stress on the way things vanish out of the world: ‘where beth they, beforen us weren?’ (Davies, 1964: 56) The post-Reformation reception of tempus edax rerum is characterized by a shift in focus from Time’s outright deprivations to the marred remnants it leaves, for a while, behind. Rather than measuring the gulf between the present and the past in terms of what is simply gone, these poets gauge time’s progress in terms of what has been defaced, marred or changed. The answer they provide to the age-old query ubi sunt is as direct as it is disquieting. 18
Poetic depictions of Time as a defacer rather than a destroyer reflect the ubiquity of defaced images in English churches and cathedrals in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. As I have argued above, the spectacle of defacement united congregations in an ambiguous ritual which could accommodate a range of personal memories and responses. Like defaced images themselves, the motif of Time the Defacer spoke to Protestants and Catholics alike and could provide support for attitudes ranging from a Versteganian thirst for recovery to Shakespearean resignation. This common understanding of the shape of post-Reformation time relied on a willingness to attribute the visible evidence of recent violence to an abstract entity, rather than historical individuals or movements. The cost of this consensus, in other words, was the occlusion of human agency, both in the initial assault on images and in the preservation and curation of defaced images within churches for decade upon decade. Behind the image of Time the Defacer stands not only the iconoclast with his chisel but also the countless local church officials and congregations who decided, for a host of reasons we can never fully recover, to let the headless saints and angels stay.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am particularly grateful to Paul Bryant-Quinn for advice on Welsh recusant poetry and to Naomi Howell for guidance on the medieval memorials of Exeter Cathedral.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research leading to this article has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust (‘Speaking with the Dead’ Research Project) and the European Research Council (ERC Grant Agreement no. 284085: ‘The Past in its Place’). Early versions of this article were presented at the seminar of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Kent, February 2013; workshop of the AHRC Network on Memory and Community in Early Modern Britain, June, 2013; and the ‘Speaking with the Dead’ Symposium at Exeter Cathedral, November 2013.