Derived from Old French traitre and Latin traditor (one who delivers or hands over), ‘traitor’ was a well-established term in Middle English.[1] Early modern English perceptions of traitors were largely influenced by the biblical descriptions of Judas, who was presented as being synonymous with moral corruption and betrayal. Luke 6:16 mentions ‘Judas Iscariot, which also was the traitor’.[2] This passage influenced numerous theologians and moralists. In 1558, Thomas Watson warned that those who ‘live after the flesh, and be fettered in the chains of sin and vice, they receive with Judas the traitor poison, and run to the halter of spiritual hanging in hell, being condemned both for their other manifold sins’.[3] In 1598, the surveyor and author of popular devotional works, John Norden, castigated ‘that notorious Arch-traitor Judas, who for monie betrayed his Master, and Lord, the Saviour of the world Jesus Christ’.[4]
While the figure of Judas Iscariot provided the ethical parameters that defined treason and traitors in popular culture, a ‘traitor’ was any individual who acted against the Crown. Such were the parameters issued in the first statute of treason under Edward III in 1352. During Henry VIII’s reign, legislation against treason was expanded to enforce the Reformation, with established treason becoming an offence against both the monarch and the reformed Church. The emergence of the Counter-Reformation, and attempts made by Catholic powers to destabilize Elizabeth I’s regime, instigated the establishment of new treason statutes throughout the 1570s and 1580s. The papal bull Regnans in Excelsis (1570) excommunicated Elizabeth and denied her royal status. In response, the new English legislation on treason established by the ‘Acte whereby certayne Offences bee made Treason’ (1570) declared the pope and the ‘Romish Religion’ as enemies of the queen and the English state and Church. As a result, all subjects who followed the Catholic Church became potential traitors. The new legislation defined treason as any attack or conspiracy against the life and royal dignity of the monarch, including attempts to ‘maliciously, advisedly and directly publish, declare, hold opinion, affirm or say by any speech express words or sayings, that our said sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth during her life is not or ought not to be Queen of this realm of England and also of the realms of France and Ireland’.[5] The act also made it treasonable to circulate and promulgate papal bulls in dominions ruled by the queen. Subsequently, the ‘Acte to Retain the Queen’s Majesty’s Subjects in the Due Obedience’ (1581) established as traitors any who promised ‘[o]bedience to any pretended Authority of the See of Rome, or to any other Prince, State or Potentate, to be had or used within her Dominions…or shall do any overt Act to that Intent or Purpose; and every of them shall be to all Intents adjudged to be Traytors, and being thereof lawfully convicted shall have Judgement, suffer and forfeit, as in Case of High Treason’.[6]
One of the main elements associated with traitors was their mobility between England and enemy countries. Leading figures of the English Catholic community in continental Europe, such as the Jesuit Robert Persons, were often labelled as traitors for living in hostile countries and rejecting Elizabeth’s authority. The option to live in exile, though not necessarily an act of treason, was a consequence of a rejection of the political and religious regime and symbolically indicated that an English subject accepted a ‘strange and forein law, [which] is both a strange power, and a forein traitor to the Kings crowne’.[7] This observation made by Gervase Babington on the legitimacy of the appeals made by Englishmen based on canon law suggested that those who lived outside England and opted to live according to foreign laws could be considered traitors, since they rejected or lived outside the legal apparatus that legitimated and supported the English Crown. Babington used the expression ‘forein traitor’, and suggested that any act against the Crown, even when performed by a foreigner, could be regarded as treason. This happened in the case of Roderigo Lopez, the Portuguese physician and coverso who was executed for high treason in 1594 for his alleged attempts to poison the queen.
Traitors were therefore associated with specific political figures or as outcasts who decided to embrace a life of exile, dependent on the goodwill of more or less sympathetic foreign powers while often moving between home and abroad. According to Elizabeth’s secretary of state, William Cecil, the new statutes on treasonable acts aimed to target these individuals who had ‘escaped into forreine countries, & there because in none or few places rebels and traitors to their natural Princes and countries’, particularly those intelligencers who had ‘falsely informed many Kings, Princes and States, and specially the Bishop of Rome, commonly called the Pope, (from whom they all had secretly their first comfort to rebell) that the cause of their fleeing from their countries was for the religion of Rome, and for maintenance of the said Pope’s authority’.[8] Some of these exiles and fugitives, according to Cecil, led ‘notorious evil and wicked lives’. He evoked the Catholic earl Charles Neville as a ‘person utterly wasted by looseness of life, & by Gods punishment…his body is nowe eaten with ulcers of lewd causes, all his companions do see, that no enemy he had can wish him a viler punishment’.[9] Another rebel, Thomas Stukley, was ‘a defamed person almost through all Christendome, & a faithless beast rather than a man, fleeing first out of England for notable piracies, and out of Ireland for treacheries not pardonable’.[10] The fact that the Catholic Church used these men who were ‘void of all Christian religion’ demonstrated the amorality of traitors who, motivated by ‘wicked purposes’, accepted ‘to take arms against their lawful Queen, to invade her realme with forreine forces, to pursue al her good subjects and their native countries with fire & sword’.[10] According to Cecil, the Catholic exiles who conspired against Elizabeth, by serving a foreign prince and rejecting the Reformation, acted not only against the queen but were ‘contrary to all the Laws of God and man’.[12]
The traitor was not only a political agent. The increasing legislative effort to control and normalize the population favoured the establishment of different analogies between the commonwealth and the household. In the same way that high treason was conceptualized as a crime against the state and social order, petty treason encompassed a series of offenses related both to the morality and organization of the public and domestic order. Among the crimes of petty treason were, for example, the murder of a master by a servant and the adultery committed by married women (25 Ed. II. St. 5, cap. 2) – two crimes which attacked and questioned the socioeconomic and gender hierarchy. Although these treasonable transgressions were rare crimes, they were frequently the subject of literary and dramatic pieces.[13] In John Donne’s poem, ‘The Anniversary’ (c. 1598), the threat of treason or duplicity infiltrates the secret bonds between lovers: ‘Who is so safe as we? Where none can do / Treason to us, except one of us two’.[14] ‘She-traytors’, such as the two women executed in Gloucester, one for stabbing her husband with a penknife and the other for being a ‘wanderer’ and pickpocket, were invoked to detract women from transgressing social and political norms.[15] Women could be condemned by law for high treason, as in the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587 and Elizabeth Gaunt in 1685, though such cases were rare.[16] However, such cases were inevitable at a time that saw the unprecedented rise of women in positions of power in England and beyond.[17] In 1644, the royalist commander Richard Grenville published a tract denouncing the ‘shee Traytor together with the Articles prooved on oath against Her at a Councell or Warre’.[18] After the Restoration, those who had supported the royalist cause lamented that Henrietta Maria, the French wife of Charles I, had been ‘Proclaim’d...Traytor’ by the Parliamentary side.[19] Such discourses around traitors and allegiance cut across the more metaphorical or moral accusations of female treachery or falseness in much love poetry of the time, and reveal the slipperiness of subjecthood and loyalty at a time of shifting political regimes.
One of the difficulties in pinning down the precise meaning of ‘traitor’ was that acts of treason could be performed by anyone, in a variety of ways. Cecil believed that traitors had ‘divers conditions and qualities’ and included not only those who were exiled abroad, but those who lived ‘in beggerie’, those who were ‘discontented for lack of preferments, which they gaped for unworthily in Universities & other places’ or ‘bankrupt Marchants’.[20] Mobility and contacts with rival or hostile countries could instigate treasonable acts, since many traitors spent most of their lives ‘running up and downe, from Country to country’, evading the laws of society that kept subjects in check. Further, to write and share ‘public infamous libels, full of despitefull vile terms and poisoned lyes, altogether to uphold the foresaide antichristian and tyrannous warrant of the Popes Bull’ were treacherous acts.[21] Such remarks on ‘traitors’ as those who used ‘vile terms and poisoned lyes’ as their arsenal reveal a perception that traitors were not only those who threatened the life of the monarch, but, increasingly, their reputation. The rise of print and literacy made it easier to disseminate dangerous ideas, on a scale that was difficult to control. Anyone who spread ideas or used injurious words had the potential to damage the dignity and legitimacy of the monarch. Tudor state authorities went to great lengths, often unsuccessfully, to curb the spread of news and rumour in moments of social or political unrest. Those who spread destructive words were ‘wicked and traitorous persons, monsters of men’, individuals that ‘without regard of duty or conscience, and without fear of God or man’ used their ‘malice’ to attack the queen and her government ‘not only by railing open speeches but also by false, lying and traitorous libels’.[22]
The concern with treason by words exposes the state’s attempts to respond to, and control, the growing print market that different political and religious groups used to transmit their ideas. As Edward Nisbet noted in 1601, ‘seditious thoughts like an inwarde maladie, bee hurtful to the heart, wherein they rest, therefore are they to be avoided: but seditious words like a contagious disease do infect others, therefore are they more to be abhorred’.[23] Apart from an attempt to censor the contents and impact of the polemical works published in early modern England, the Elizabethan and Stuart concerns with words reveal a perception that speech could reveal the mind and intentions of a traitor, with speech in some ways actualizing their thoughts. In the case of Arthur Crohagan, an Irish Dominican friar who in a heated discussion with English merchants and sailors in Lisbon stated that he would kill James I, Crohagan’s words revealed ‘his traitorous intent, and the imagination of his heart’.[24] Nonetheless, as David Cressy has observed, few Elizabethan and Stuart subjects were executed as traitors for using words against the sovereign. One of the leading Elizabethan and Jacobean jurists, Edward Coke, emphasized ‘that bare words may make an heretic, but not a traitor without an overt act’ and that ‘merely speaking scandalous words of the king was not treason’, although the use of ‘words which incited to his murder were an overt act’ could deserve the capital punishment.[25]
Coke was an expert in cases of treason. He was the attorney-general in the trials that condemned Walter Ralegh for his involvement in the Main Plot of 1603, a conspiracy to overthrow James I and invite foreign troops to invade England, and those involved in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a failed regicide attempt by a group of Catholics including Robert Catesby and Guy Fawkes. These two conspiracies revealed the initial fragilities and anxieties of the king regarding the loyalty of his subjects, where confessional dispute bred traitors at home at a time when subjects were no longer united politically through their religion. While the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot seemed to confirm perceptions of the ‘traitor’ as an English Catholic who followed foreign interests, Ralegh’s trials and eventual execution for high treason in 1618 revealed a perception of the figure of the traitor as a deviant character who rejected the social and political order. Commenting on the trials of the Main Plot, John Cowell defined treason in 1607 as ‘an offence committed against the amplitude and majesty of the commonwealth’ and high treason as ‘an offence done against the security of the commonwealth, or of the King’s most excellent Majesty’.[26] The trial, condemnation, pardon, and execution of Ralegh reveal the different levels of treason at play in how individuals were identified according to various interests of state. Although James initially pardoned Ralegh, the English aristocrat and Elizabeth’s old favourite was executed in 1618 following Spanish diplomatic pressures to annul the king’s pardon following the explorer’s botched expedition to Guiana and modern-day Venezuela in 1617. In other words, Ralegh’s trial confirmed the traitor as a pariah who acted against the interest of the community or attacked the royal dignity and authority of the monarch, who embodied the commonwealth.It was the necessities of state and laws on treason that led Parliament to condemn their own king, Charles I, as a ‘traitor’ in 1649. Although the king was head of state, members of Parliament considered his authority to be limited. Parliament framed Charles’ decision to ‘levy War against the parliament and Kingdom of England’ as an act against the true sovereign power in the realm, Parliament and English laws. Although the execution of Charles was the ultimate consequence of the royalist defeat in the English civil wars, the fact that the king was put to trial as a traitor was both an innovation and a confirmation of English legal and moralist perceptions of treason. The king’s execution was justified by citing his actions against the commonwealth and the sovereign institutions of the state, but also from a moral perspective which associated treason with wickedness, cruelty, and unlawful behaviour, rendering Charles ‘a Tyrant, Traitor and Murtherer...a Publique Enemy to the Comonwealth of England’.[27]
After the Restoration, supporters of the House of Stuart used the same image of the traitor as a morally corrupt enemy of the commonwealth, this time to support the royalist cause. In a post-Restoration account of Charles’ trial, John Nalson presented the execution of the king as the unprecedented act of treason perpetrated by ‘Enemies of Mankind’, ‘[t]raitors’ who ‘with the most plausible Pretences of the Public Good’ had reached ‘unheard of flights of insolent Wickedness, so as not only to subvert the Government, and dethrone their Sovereign, but to Arraign and Judge, Condemn and Execute their King’.[28] Regicide was an act that ‘with all the solemn and impudent Formalities’ only brought ‘pretended Justice, even in the Face of the Sun, and view of the whole World, as if they would at the same instant defy both the Vengeance of Heaven and Earth’.[29] ‘Traitor’ was thus described in a way that seemed unnatural; a figure that operated against the laws of man and God and even the ‘[f]ace of the Sun’. Although the growth of the early modern state made ‘traitor’ a heavily political term, the term remained grounded in ideas of liegance articulated in terms of personal betrayal and broken trust. ‘[T]he blackest’ monster was ‘the Traytor-Friend’, one who chose to break the bonds of amity and loyalty.[30] It was the slipperiness of the traitor, his or her willingness to abandon ‘Englishness’ for cross-confessional or cross-national loyalties, that made such individuals the locus of mistrust and double-dealing.
