Marigolds, Mary Golds & Catholicism

Seona Anderson, November 5th 2023

Today we remember the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 when King James, the Protestant King, was not killed by Guy Fawkes, Catesby and his fellow Catholics. In Shakespeare’s world the divisions and suspicions of both sides, Catholic and Protestant, were raw, visceral and dangerous. Shakespeare lived his entire life under the Protestant rule of Elizabeth I and then James the VI and I, but the shadow of past religious traumas and the threat of Catholic coups were ever present. The Babbington plot of 1586 to install Mary Queen of Scots as a Catholic monarch, the Spanish Armada of 1588 and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 were the most prominent events but there was a need in many aspects of an individual’s life where it was important to demonstrate your religious credentials.

Of the many changes which the Protestant Reformation brought to England the relationship to the natural world is perhaps the least explored. Under the Catholic world of medieval Europe a series of cultural associations developed between particular plants, animals and birds and religious practices. Many plants were associated with church rituals and feasts, for example the Snowdrops for Candlemas in February. There were many other plants associated with the liturgical calendar of feast days and saints days, for example St John’s Wort which flowers in midsummer around the feast day of St John on the 24th of June. There were also many plants associated specifically with the Virgin Mary in Britain and Europe. If you open a Collins field guide or any other botanical reference work of the 20th or 21st century you are unlikely to find a single reference to a ‘Mary’ or ‘Our Lady’ plant. The names have not disappeared entirely but they have changed to make their religious origins more obscure. The Lady’s Slipper Orchid was formerly Our Lady’s Slipper, Ladies Mantle was known as Our Ladies Mantle,  and the Ladybird was Our Lady’s Bird.

There were of course many plants, trees, birds, plants and animals mentioned in the Bible but very few of the Mary plants or Saints plants were included in the Bible texts. The Protestant worldview emphasised the primary importance of the word of the Bible and the Catholic naming of plants and animals began the process of decline which has resulted in only a handful surviving as common names in the modern era. Early Protestant botanists were more relaxed about the inclusion of Mary and Saints Plants. William Turner, a strident Protestant, included Allelua, Our Ladies Mantle, Marygolds, and St Johanns Grass in his 1548 Names of Herbes. It is Nicholas Culpepper in his Pharmacopeia Londonensis of the mid 1600s, at the height of the Puritan Commonwealth, who states very clearly that he has omitted some of the names used for plants since ‘most of which are superfluous, some ridiculous, some idolatrous; as to attribute one herb to the Virgin Mary, another to St. Peter, and a third to St. Paul. Some blasphemous, as to call one the Holy Ghost, another Allelujah, another an Herb of Trinity....Men may be ashamed so to do.’

In Shakespeare’s works of the late 1500s and early 1600s he includes a few plants and animals which are associated with a more Catholic tradition but the ‘Mary golds on death beds blowing’ of Two Noble Kinsmen written with John Fletcher, and the ‘Mary buds’ of Cymbeline are the only Mary flowers in the whole of his plays or poems. Shakespeare also uses the form more familiar to most of us now, ‘Marigold’ in Lucrece, Pericles, Sonnets, and a Winter’s Tale.

Marigolds or Marygolds were extremely important plants in Shakespeare’s world. They provided food in flower salads, medicines for several different conditions and they were often used as funeral flowers. Their scientific name Calendula officinalis is said to be connected to their potential for being in flower for most of the months of the calendar. Honouring the dead with flowers was as much part of Shakespeare’s world as it is ours and Marigolds were one of the more reliable funeral flowers at different times of year. However Marigolds also had another symbolic side and there were explicitly connected with two important Catholic queens of the period. Marigolds were Mary Queen of Scots personal emblem flower, and a broadside ballad of c.1553 called ‘A New Ballade of the Marigolde’ by William Forrest praises Queen Mary’s ascension to the throne and the return of Catholicism to England.

The Mary flowers have been almost entirely expunged from our modern, English language, field guides and most of us do not recognise that we name and view the countryside through a very Protestant lens. The Mary-golds in Shakespeare are a tiny ripple of a natural worldview that was beginning to disappear beneath the waves of the Protestant Reformation. The Mary flowers remain in other languages of Britain and Ireland including Welsh, Scots and Irish Gaelic. Some of the Welsh Mary Flowers including Mary’s Golds, adorn the Lady Chapel of Llandaff Cathedral. There are Mary Flowers organisations and Mary Gardens which celebrate this particular form of natural and cultural heritage.

More Information

Nicholas Culpepper, Pharmacopeia Londonensis Read Culpepper's Work at Archive.org

English Broadside Ballad Archive Read Forrest's 1553 Marigolde Ballad

Turner’s Names of Herbes, 1548 Read Turner's List at the Wellcome Collection

Mary Gardens Movement Read John Stopes on Catholic Culture

What is a Mary Garden Read University of Dayton Mary Garden Blogs

Llandaff Cathedral: Lady Chapel