Bellicose Verse

Abstract The final poem that Heywood published during the reign of Mary Tudor, and perhaps the last new poetic work he would publish in his lifetime, was a rather more overtly loyalist and patriotic work, the Brief Ballet [Ballad] touching the Traitorous Taking of Scarborough Castle, printed by Thomas Powell in 1557 and known as ‘Scarborough Warning’. This chapter examines this little-known ballad, which condemns the brief, treasonable seizure of Scarborough Castle by Thomas Stafford and a group of English exiles with French support. It sets the poem’s agenda in the complex circumstances of Anglo-French diplomacy in the later Marian years, and demonstrates how it contributed to the campaign to persuade the privy council and City of London to support Queen Mary’s intention to declare war on France in support of her husband, Philip II.