Catherine Howard

by Lacey Baldwin Smith

  The festival that London loved best was that of the ‘marching watch’, when the constabulary paraded through the streets on Midsummer’s Eve. On these occasions the entire town participated in the spectacle, and rich and poor each contributed their share – the former their gold, the latter their insatiable thirst and empty bellies. Bonfires were lighted in the streets, and cakes and ale were handed out in abundance by men of substance who still held to the paternalistic notions of the medieval past. It was ‘a goodly show’, for every man’s door was ‘shadowed with green birch’, decked with white lilies, and ‘garnished upon with garlands of beautiful flowers’. Shopkeepers and artisans lit ‘lamps of glass, with oil burning in them all the night’, while others ‘hung out branches of iron curiously wrought, containing hundreds of lamps alight at once’. The watch formed in front of St Paul’s, then moved ponderously through Westchepe Street to Aldgate and finally back again via Fenchurch Street. The procession, as it it twisted its way through the city, ablaze with bonfires and torches, must have been an unforgettable sight of varied extravagance. Half the constabulary, dressed in gilt harness, scarlet cloaks and gold chains, held the place of honour, while their less fortunate colleagues continued to guard the city. Behind them followed minstrels and morris dancers, drummers and standardbearers, sword-players and archers in coats of white fustian. There also was the lord mayor with his footmen and torch-bearers, and the twenty-four aldermen of the city, each with his servants.5 Often pageants or floats, representing the work of a particular guild, were incorporated into the procession. Each float depicted a scene, some religious, some nationalistic. Satan was presented ‘naked with a drawn sword so contrived that when he brandished it the serpent (on which he sat) vomited stinking sulphur fire-balls’; a spectacle that must have endangered the entire metropolis. In marked contrast was another float showing the Virgin Mary in the guise of a ‘very beautiful little girl’ surrounded by four boys who chanted their veneration. There were also St George and his dragon, scenes from the Last Judgment, and performing acrobats and animals.6

  For all its display and magnificent pageantry, London remained a place of dark violence and callous crime. ‘Wild rogues’ in company with harlots and armed with picklocks, saws, hooks and ladders nightly roamed the streets, bent on vandalism, murder, and brutality. The little band of constables, which numbered but 240, was no match for the city’s cut-purses, professional beggars, starving vagrants and excitable apprentices. The parishes and wards did their best to maintain order and discipline, but the gap between written legislation and actual law enforcement remained almost insurmountable. The red-light district in Southwark was carefully regulated by municipal ordinances, and the ladies who operated at such establishments as the Cardinal’s Hat, the Cross Keys, the Boar’s Head, and the Swan, were limited to a single customer a night and had to ‘lie with him all night till the morrow’. Both the houses and the ladies themselves were regularly inspected, and, in theory at least, their area of operation was confined to Southwark.7 Actually, however, the streets crawled with bawds and harlots, and any continuous efforts at either medical or financial control of the profession proved impossible.

  The two most troublesome and unpredictable elements of the population were the students of the Inns of Court, and the apprentices of the city. Both were desperately poor, readily incited to senseless riots, and easily excited by stories of witches who cast their evil eye and devils who made merry in God’s churches. Narrow, prejudiced, and intolerant of everything un-English, they made life miserable and at times dangerous for foreign merchants and travellers, who were unanimous in their distaste for the brutish London populace, which yielded ‘to none other in disrespect, outlandishness, boorishness, savagery, and bad bringing up’.8 For most of these students and apprentices, life was centred in London and their horizons penned in by ignorance and incredulity. City dwellers were sufficiently naive to believe that the charcoal which arrived daily on the Thames barges, was grown on trees in some distant part of the realm. The slightest argument or the most casual encounter could result in violence and crime, and hardly a night passed that some local brawl did not endanger the peace and sleep of the city. One June evening a typical riot was started when a tailor and a law clerk, ‘both very lewd fellows’, fell out over a harlot. The tailor called to his aid ‘the prentices and other light persons’ of the neighbourhood, and chased the clerk into Lyon’s Inn. There, some three hundred ruffians broke windows and assaulted the students. Matters became worse and the rioting spread when a baker’s son ‘came into Fleet street and there made solemn proclamation for “clubs”.’9 This last was the cry which was the signal for every apprentice and scholar to grab a cudgel and throng through the streets looting and breaking into shops.

  It was this turbulent and loutish character of the citizenry that earned London such an evil reputation. Reginald Pole described the populace as being made up of incorrigibly lazy rogues given ‘to idle gluttony’.10 Later in the century the Duke of Württemberg complained that ‘street-boys and apprentices collect together in immense crowds and strike to the right and left unmercifully without regard to person; and because they are the strongest, one is obliged to put up with the insult as well as the injury.’11 Estienne Perlin, who deplored all things English, was particularly critical of the common sort, who were ‘proud and seditious, of an evil conscience, and unfaithful to their promises’. In his opinion, and in the opinion of many others, the London masses were nasty, dangerous, and ‘extremely fickle, for at one moment they will adore a prince, and the next moment they would kill or crucify him.’12 The Tudors perceived that the secret of their power resided in the devotion of these same rowdy, ignorant throngs, and they viewed with the darkest suspicion the actions of any demagogue who dared to covet London’s volatile affections. Henry VIII and Elizabeth were accomplished masters in the art of catching and holding the imagination, and though both may have preferred the quiet and security of Hampton Court, Windsor, or Nonsuch, they remained at Westminster and London, for here resided the crucial audience towards which the magnificent pageantry of majesty was directed.

  It is important to sense the flavour of Tudor London, to catch a sniff of its atmosphere, for in it lies the essence of sixteenth-century society. Elegance and pomp, ceremony and romance, from the perspective of some four hundred years, tend to obscure the realities of life – its cruelty, its viciousness, and its total lack of social inhibitions. Men were as quick to anger as to love; no one walked unarmed through the streets at night; and wise men rarely walked alone. Only the clergy faced such dangers unprotected, and even they might carry a stout club concealed beneath their clerical robes, for thieves and drunkards did not always respect the protection of God. Society suffered little from our modern plague of mental diseases, and there was little need and even less machinery to suppress basic human instincts. The unlit streets and the King’s high roads approaching the city were the haunts of every sort of criminal. Crime was the livelihood of the jetsam of society-gentlemen who had ruined themselves and their families at cards and dice, serving-men ‘whose wages cannot suffice so much as to find them breeches’, discharged and disabled soldiers who knew no other profession, and evicted and starving peasants. With only 240 constables to protect the city from the multitude for whom society felt no social responsibility, and with emotions close to the surface of daily life, authority could do little except make frightful examples of those unfortunate enough to be caught. In the circumstances it is understandable that the watch fortified itself with strong ale or regarded ‘every hour a thousand’ while on duty, and when summoned to exercise police control answered, ‘God restore your loss! I have other business at this time.’13

  In contrast to law enforcement, law enactment was extensive, detailed, and ferocious, and though we can in part dismiss Estienne Perlin’s description as nationalistic propaganda, there is nevertheless considerable truth in his words that ‘in England the legal punishments are very cruel, for a man is put t
o death for a trifling offence; for a crime which in France would be only punished with a whipping, a man would here be sentenced to death.’14 The laws of the realm were far from being so simple, but they were just as brutal as Perlin claims. Treason was the most heinous of all crimes, and with a fine appreciation of the rule that the punishment should fit the crime, society condemned the traitor to death by being ‘laid on a hurdle and so drawn to the place of execution, and there to be hanged, cut down alive, your members to be cut off and cast in the fire, your bowels burnt before you, your head smitten off, and your body quartered and divided at the King’s will.’15 The chronicles are filled with the dreary spectacle of men being ‘hanged, drawn, and quartered’. Poisoners were boiled alive, witches and heretics were burnt at the stake, and murderers were hanged alive in chains. As late in the century as 1595 men were still searching for ways to discourage crime – especially the forger, who, if left to his own devices, was a threat to any well-ordered society. In that year, the Lord Treasurer suggested a modification of the normal punishment for forgery. Since the usual burning of the letter F in the ear and on the hands tended to disappear, he argued that the culprits should be ‘scarified on the balls of the cheeks with the letter F by a surgeon, and that some powder be put there to colour it, so that it would never vanish.’ This improvement was not accepted and the offenders were merely given the usual sentence to ‘stand on the pillory and lose their ears, if they have any, and be branded on the forehead with the letter F, and be condemned perpetually to the galleys.’16

  The most common engine of justice was the gibbet, and any theft over a shilling could be punished by hanging. There seem to have been a number of curious exceptions to this: the man who stole a horse or a sheep was put to death, but he who absconded with an ox or a cow was granted his life, if it were his first offence. The singular logic behind this was that ‘a horse or a sheep may be easily stolen, while an ox or a cow present great difficulty, surrounded as they are in their meadows by ditches.’17 Again, the argument was that the punishment should in all cases fit the crime, and the easier the criminal act, the more important it was to discourage it by the severity of the penalty. Lesser offences were punished with lesser but equally distasteful consequences. The stocks were placed in highly conspicuous locations where drunkards, rioters, name-callers, bawds, and scolds could be exposed to public derision. Fraudulent merchants and slanderers were effectively curbed by the use of the pillory where the culprits stood, neck and wrists pinioned, and, on occasion, with their ears nailed to the board behind their heads. The fate reserved for false jurors was similarly unpleasant; in 1509 the three ringleaders of a false inquest were forced to ride about the city ‘with their faces to the horse tails’’, and paper caps on their heads, and ‘were set on the pillory in Cornhill, and after brought again to Newgate, where they died for very shame.’18 Then there was the ‘cocking stool’, reserved for inveterate gossips and scandalmongers, whom society endeavoured to chasten by ducking in the nearest pond. Whipping, either at the whipping-post or at the rear of a cart, was the usual method of discouraging idleness and prostitution. In all, John Stow estimated that some 72,000 persons were executed during the reign of Henry VIII for criminal offences, while the number who suffered branding, mutilation, and humiliation is beyond reckoning. Even so, social thinkers felt that the laws were insufficiently enforced; crime remained unchecked, and one contemporary complained that this was the result of ‘want of punishment by the day, and idle watch in the night’.19 Others, such as Sir Thomas More, associated the harshness of the laws with the high crime rate, and argued that the constant use of the death penalty was an invitation to murder since, in the eyes of the thief, murder and robbery were equal in terms of the punishment.

  Shocking as this picture is, two observations should be made before passing judgment upon Tudor criminal procedure. The infliction of pain and the carefully calculated cruelty were not the result of any sadistic desire for pleasure. Instead, they reflect the general level of brutality of the age and the conviction on the part of most people that the evil-doer deserved everything that society could inflict upon him. There is some evidence that men were slowly awakening to the knowledge that crime is a social phenomenon, but most denizens of the Tudor world were sufficiently close to their medieval heritage to view crime as a sign of sin. Man, not society, was held as the source of evil; society was still viewed as being of divine inspiration, and consequently it could not be held accountable for the wickedness that was everywhere so manifest in a city such as London. The individual was born into a divinely ordained system with certain prescribed duties, rights and obligations, and when he failed in those responsibilities, when he fell into vice and corruption, then society held him fully responsible for his actions. Pride, avarice and vanity were the breeders of crime, and as the tree was known by its fruits, so man would be judged by his actions.

  The more vicious the act, the more evil and sinful the actor. Pride was aIways viewed as the most noxious of sins; and nothing burns quite so fiercely in a Christian hell as the sin of insatiable pride. What could be more arrogant than treason; who could be more ‘puffed up with insatiable pride’ than the traitor who sets his own egotism above the will of society? What could be more suitable than that he should be made to suffer for his sinful pride by any instrument society could devise? The source of crime, wrote one Tudor citizen, was to be found in ‘the excess of apparel. Hose, hose! Great hose! Too little wages, too many serving men, too many tippling houses, too many drabs, too many knaves, too little labour, too much idleness.’20 Here is an interesting mixture of the sociological and the religious view of crime, a blending of the modern thesis that crime stems primarily from economic distress and alcoholism, and the medieval notion that the personal sins of vanity and idleness are the culprits.

  The ferocity of the laws also reflects the savageness of life itself. The world in which men lived was just as cruel, just as barbarous, as the laws of the realm. ‘At any season,’ lamented Bishop Fisher, one could see ‘beggars or poor folks that be pained and grieved with hunger and cold, lying in the streets.’21 When death, disease, torment and starvation are common phenomena, men learn to accept them as an inevitable part of life. Though the good bishop might preach compassion, for most men pity went little farther than speeding their criminal associates into the presence of their Maker. Condemned criminals were placed in carts, ‘each one with a rope about his neck’, and the hangman drove his doleful passengers:

  Out of the town to the gallows, called Tyburn [roughly where Marble Arch stands today], almost an hour away from the city. There he fastens them up one after another by the rope and drives the cart off under the gallows which is not very high off the ground; then the criminals’ friends come and draw them down by their feet, that they may die all the sooner.22

  It was not easy to show much inward compassion when the pitiful was everywhere, and every city had its share of those who lacked ‘their arms, feet, hands, and other features of their bodies’, or who had ‘their arms broken or else the flesh eaten away with divers sores and infirmities’. How many, grieved Fisher, ‘lie in streets and highways full of carbuncles and other uncurable botches’?23 The citizens of London town lived under the shadow cast by the heads of traitors pinioned upon the pikes of the portcullis of London Bridge, and at times as many as thirty skulls were collected there as a grim reminder to those who harboured the thought of treason. A grisly boast evolved, a perverted Tudor sense of humour, for it became the mark of a gentleman to have at least one unfortunate relative or ancestor hanged and quartered and his head elevated for public inspection. In the circumstances there is little wonder that Henry Bullinger could write in 1541 that ‘to say the truth, people did not inquire much, as it is no new thing to see men hanged, quartered, or beheaded, for one thing or another.’24

  Indifference to the death and suffering of others was the mark of a society that itself lived upon the brink of eternity. The calm acceptance of the torment
of the poisoner being boiled alive is understandable, for what was ‘piteous’ was not the sight of his agony (which was not far removed from that of soldiers and plague victims, who knew not the blessings of anaesthesia), but that his sinful heart should have brought him to such straits. It was almost as if life were too short for the luxury of moderation, and the manifest moral of a criminal dangling by the neck was too easily lost upon an audience whose senses were blunted to the sight of human anguish.

  There was one aspect of Tudor life that could and did cut through the coarse veneer of indifference, and strike terror into the souls of men grown accustomed to cruelty. This was the twofold threat of bubonic plague and the sweating sickness – both silent, merciless dreads that gripped even the stoutest heart. Sir Thomas More recorded something of the senseless caprice of the plague, and the fear it could invoke, when he described the ironic death of his good friend, Andrew Ammonius:

  He thought himself well fortified against the contagion by moderation in diet. He attributed it to this that, whereas he met hardly anyone whose whole family had not been attacked, the evil had touched none of his household. He was boasting of this to me and many others not many hours before his death.25