The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  The Elizabethan heralds made assiduous visitations to all the English counties to make sure that no one was claiming gentility without entitlement. Robert Cooke, Clarenceux Herald in 1567–93, visited all the English counties of the southern province to this end.44

  Visitations involved punctilious searches through family pedigrees. The Queen, and Burghley, took with intense seriousness the role of the heralds ‘as a buttress for the stability of society’, in Lawrence Stone’s words.45 The heralds were put in charge of public funerals for aristocrats, and so seriously did the Queen believe in such displays of hierarchy that, parsimonious as she was, she footed the bill for the obsequies of the Marchioness of Northampton in 1565, of Lady Knollys in 1569, of the Countess of Lennox (whom she hated) in 1577, and of her cousin Harry, Lord Hunsdon, in 1596 – though when the Earl of Huntingdon died in the same year she jibbed at paying for his funeral.46

  The heralds might well have been buttresses of social conservatism in their symbolic role. In person they were sometimes difficult company. Those who choreograph great ceremonies are often prone to choler, but Sir William Dethick, Garter King of Arms in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign, was a man of exceptional irascibility. He struck his own father with his fist, and wounded his brother with a dagger at Windsor Castle. During Sir Henry Sidney’s funeral in Westminster Abbey he struck a man with his dagger and wounded him and was detained in Newgate Prison. Perhaps the most extreme example of his peppery temper is found in a deposition made by Mary, wife of Dethick’s colleague John Hart, Chester Herald, which she made to Burghley himself:

  May yt please your Honor I beinge alone in my chamber he put me in feare of my life, and almost took my breath from me, in most vyle sort: his cozin Richard Dethicke of Polstide in Suffolk hearing his doings came in and toke him by the middle and prayed him to be contente, I feared Yorke [Herald] wold have killed me els he spurned me downe with his foote so ofte (my hedde was verie neare the fire and my heare like to be burned) as yt maye appear by my cappe, which I had next to my heare. He put a depe cole baskette lined with lether on my hedde with some coles and dust in yt and kept it so longe aboute my hedde and shoulders that my breth was almost gone. Savynge the reverence of your Lordshippe, my chamber pott of urine he poured on my bare hedde and thereafter rubbed hot ashes into my heare and dipt a basen into a stand of newe drincke and flashed so much full on my face that I cold not see for a time. As sone as I came to myself I gotte down even as I was and wold have gone fourth to have showed myself to the gentlemen of the Arches, but my ladie Garter kept the gate, and kept me in by force and there I laide to his charge, how he had misused me and called me (saving your Honores reverence) pockie whore. He saide before Richmonde and Somerset heraltes that I hid like a pockie drable (or a queane) and wold have runed over me agayne with his foote but his mother held him backe . . .47

  The sudden revelation that Dethick’s mother was present during this appalling scene adds, for the reader (though not for the unfortunate Mary Hart), to its grotesque comedy.

  It is strange to think of the aristocratic decorum of the realm being in the hands of such lunatics, but those who desired to establish their gentility did not mind too much about the characters of the heralds who granted them arms. Dethick and his father granted more than 500 coats of arms to aspirant gentlemen. Cook, Clarenceux King of Arms, granted another 500. Brook, when York Herald for ten years, granted 120. The heralds guarded their right to dispense arms with royally sanctioned vigour. When one William Dawkins compiled fake pedigrees for hundreds of families in East Anglia, he was imprisoned and lost an ear.

  The Dethicks? They were an ancient Derbyshire family, and Sir William Dethick used their arms. In fact he was the grandson of one Robert Derrick, a yeoman armourer from Greenwich who died in 1525. He had been brought to the Royal Armoury from Germany by Erasmus Kyrkener. Although Sir William Dethick persisted in claiming kinship with the Derbyshire Dethicks, his fellow heralds enjoyed putting it about that he was really a Dutchman.48

  11

  Histories

  IN THE CHURCH of St Andrew Undershaft in London is the tomb of John Stow (1525–1605), whose Survey of London remains one of the great histories of England’s capital. The tomb is surmounted with an effigy of the historian, a remarkable funerary monument of Derbyshire marble and alabaster, being one of the very few Jacobean tombs that depicts a writer in the act of writing.1 Every two years the Merchant Taylors’ Company, who pay for the lavish upkeep of the tomb, assemble in the church for a ceremony in which Stow is given a new quill pen. Among other resonances, the ritual seems to say that history never ceases to be written. Most writers’ tombs of the period suggest that the work is done. Stow, like Shakespeare over the grave in Stratford-upon-Avon, is still holding onto his pen.

  I began this book about the Elizabethans with a reflection on our difficulty, in the generation that has put behind us in Britain the nationalist and colonialist mindset, of keeping them in a focus that is fair, truthful and just. Clearly, it is impossible for us to have unmixed feelings of approval of the Elizabethans’ wish to colonise Ireland or to make money from selling West African slaves to the Portuguese, any more than it is possible wholeheartedly to endorse their inflicting torture on an albeit small number of Roman Catholic recusants. Yet equally it is hard to banish the thought that those historians of comparatively recent vintage, such as James Anthony Froude or Mandell Creighton in the nineteenth century, or A.L. Rowse in the twentieth century, who did broadly endorse the Elizabethan historical programme, painted them in colours that were clearer than those, more recent, who wish to arraign them for their crimes.

  The Stow monument, with its repeatedly renewed and renewable quill pen, reminds us that the task of reinterpreting the past is never-ending, and that the Elizabethans themselves were adepts at the historical art, creators in chronicle, in mythology, in pageants and tournaments, in drama and poems – a history that explained themselves, to themselves, and themselves to posterity. Historians of our age have witnessed the dismantling of the nationalist and colonialist England/Britain, which was largely an Elizabethan inspiration. Ireland runs its own affairs. Colonialism as a political concept is dead – at any rate, British colonialism, and American ‘colonialism’ is something rather different. The Church of England exists only in name and is no longer really the natural national Church. In the Elizabethan historians, myth-makers and poets, however, we see the written justifications for an emergent nationalism taking shape.

  Stow was in some ways untypical of the Elizabethan historians. He was not a gentleman (his father was a tallow-chandler). He never studied at a university or an inn of court, though he had good Latin and wrote an excellent, fluent English. A member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, he had a rather humdrum job, as a surveyor of ale-houses. But, just as much as the gentleman-antiquaries such as Dr Dee or Archbishop Parker, Stow had an obsessive passion for presenting and chronicling the past. He had a large collection of manuscripts and books. He was suspected of Catholic sympathies, and when the Bishop of London – Grindal – ordered a search of Stow’s house, they confiscated a number of suspect titles: Edmund Bonner’s An Exposition of the Creed, Ten Commandments, Pater Noster, Ave Maria and other Romanist volumes. Whatever his private sympathies, Stow conformed to the church, however, and it was inevitable that so inveterate a hoarder and collector should have possessed religious books that offended the ultra-Puritan Grindal.

  Stow’s Survey of London, which was published in 1598, went through many versions. During the earliest years of Elizabeth’s reign Stow’s published work was less localised. He established a canon of English literature, with an edition of Chaucer in 1561; in 1568 he edited thirty-three poems of John Skelton. He also published The Chronicles of England (1580) and the Annales of England (1592).

  An author who was much more obviously a creative historian, and who, as C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘long retained almost Scriptural authority’,2 was John Foxe (1516–87). A more recent writer than Lew
is calls Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (first English edition 1563, followed by many revised editions, and known popularly as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) ‘perhaps the single most influential work of historical writing throughout Britain and Ireland.’3 Lewis, himself of Ulster Protestant origins, though in later life an Anglo-Catholic, makes the fair points that Foxe was an honest man who never knowingly wrote falsehoods, and whose horrifying accounts of the treatment of Protestants in the reign of Queen Mary I were true. His earlier original work, the De Non Plectendis Morte Adulteris (1548), is a plea for mercy; he confesses that he could never pass a slaughterhouse without discomposure; and when his own party was on top, he interceded (vainly of course) to save Anabaptists from the stake in 1575 and Jesuits from the gallows in 1581.4

  Foxe was powerful as an historian (or, if you prefer, a propagandist for Protestant nationalism) precisely because the atrocities he itemised did in fact take place. Foxe provided the English with documentary evidence of what happened when the Counter-Reformation was allowed to influence governments. It is against the tortures and burnings of hundreds of Protestants in Foxe’s book that the modern person must set many of the Elizabethan outrages: Walsingham’s spy-networks and torture methods; Drake’s simple theft of Spanish gold; the torture and killing of virtuous men such as the Jesuit Edmund Campion. The Acts and Monuments of Foxe entered the national psyche, so that almost any policy or action that ensured England’s Protestant independence was seen to be justified. This mindset continued long after the actual religious controversies that preoccupied Foxe had faded from memory. Since Foxe taught his readers not simply to be anti-Catholic, but to be independent as an island-race. The huge folios of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments did indeed suggest a unique destiny for the English and their Church. This was discernible not only in the text, but in the vivid woodcuts with which the work is illustrated. In the 1570 edition, volume one has a massive (larger than three folio pages) fold-out woodcut of the ‘Heathen Tyrrannes of Rome’ who persecuted the early Christians before the conversion of Constantine. There is at the end of this volume an illustration of the ‘proud primacie of Popes paynted out in Tables, in order of their rising up by litle and litle, from faithfull Byshops and Martyrs’. But this was far from being the end of history. After the period of the popes there arose, in Foxe’s vision of things, the re-emergence of the True Church with the arrival of Henry VIII. With the crowning of Elizabeth, and the continuation of the Tudor dynasty, Foxe could envisage the glad consummation of an historical process that would see the fulfilment of the Bible prophecy (in the eighteenth chapter of Revelations) and the downfall of the papacy.5

  If Foxe saw the Tudor Age as a time when true Christianity eventually emerged from a superstitious past, Raphael Holinshed (died c.1580), whose Chronicles were first published in 1577, looked back to the anarchy of civil war in the fifteenth century and beyond and found further reason for celebrating now. It was a self-consciously political elevation of the present against the past, and of English national identity against outsiders. Hindsight sees Holinshed as a ‘source’ for Shakespeare’s history plays, but it would be truer to say that Holinshed (from the 1570s onwards) and Shakespeare (from the 1590s onwards) were both drawing upon, and giving eloquent voice to, a sense of collective national identity.

  Holinshed’s Chronicles are in any event a compilation. They were originally planned as a huge ‘universall cosmographie’ with ‘histories of every knowne nation’ by a canny publisher (printer to Queen Elizabeth) named Reyne or Reginald Wolfe, who died in 1573 before the work got off the ground. The collaborators in ‘Holinshed’ included, as well as Holinshed himself, Richard Stanyhurst, John Hoover (alias Vowell), Francis Thynne and William Harrison, and they in turn drew upon and simply copied earlier histories. As Lewis put it, ‘the “English story” is a sort of national stock-pot permanently simmering to which each new cook adds flavouring at his discretion’.6 Or, as a more recent scholar has put it, ‘Holinshed’s Chronicle was itself, or can now be seen, as a giant inter-disciplinary project. It was offered to the late Elizabethan reader, in two editions a decade apart, as the work of a group, a collaboration (the term “syndicate” can be loosely used) between freelance antiquarians, lesser clergymen, members of Parliament with legal training, minor poets, publishers.’7 Like Elizabethan architecture – which, even if it followed the drawings of a great master-mason such as Smythson, was never the work of one mind – Elizabethan history was a collaborative enterprise, a palimpsest of different testimonies shaped into a common sense of the past.

  When Wolfe the stationer/bookseller died, much of the contents of his shop was purchased by Stow, and the team of writers mentioned above moved into action to produce ‘Holinshed’. The joint effort, the ‘national stock-pot permanently simmering’, should not, however, be considered a neutral chronicle merely because it was not personal and did not emanate from a single author. It did emanate from a particular place – London – and a particularly volatile political situation. Queen Elizabeth’s failure, or refusal, to marry, and her occasional illnesses, put the regime in a particularly vulnerable position, the more vulnerable as the 1570s advanced and the likelihood of the Queen producing an heir dwindled (by 1580 she would be forty-seven). Not only was the regime vulnerable to attack from abroad, from France or Spain. It had, perpetually, to hold at bay the threats of discontent within: from Catholics (actual recusants who secretly used the services of Roman Catholic priests, and the much larger number who conformed to the National Church) who perhaps had believed that the Reformation was only half-complete. Both sides had a tendency to set their freedom to tell the truth above the need to conform to what the government wanted them to think.

  The writing and rewriting of national history in the 1570s and 1580s was not happening in a political vacuum, still less in an atmosphere of easy tolerance, in which one person’s viewpoint was considered just as deserving of hearing as another. In the year after the Pope’s Bull of Excommunication, a new Treason Act was passed making it treason to affirm by writing that the Queen should not be queen, or that she was an infidel, tyrant or usurper.

  The chronicles – all or nearly all London-based, and coming from the area and class that in a couple of generations would provide the power-base for Protestant republican resistance to Charles I – were as aware as the censors that history could be used as a code by which to make comments about the present. The Puritan Admonitions to Parliament of 1572 was highly critical of the bishops and of the government. On 7 July 1573 John Field and Thomas Wilcox, the joint authors of the attack, were imprisoned. Anyone found printing the work, ‘all and every printer, stationer, bookbinder, merchant and all other men . . . who hath in their custody any of the said books [were] to bring in the same to the bishop of the diocese, or to one of her highness’ Privy Council . . . upon pain of imprisonment and her highness’ further displeasure’. The Queen’s displeasure was not merely expressed in words. When John Stubbs, in 1579, published a pamphlet advising the Queen against marriage with the Duc d’Alençon, he was convicted of seditious libel. He, his printer and his bookseller had their right hands chopped off.8

  These facts hardly justify an older9 way of reading ‘Holinshed’s’ Chronicles as being written simply to legitimise the Tudor régime. In the apparent muddle of the Chronicles much more is going on. Abraham Fleming, the editor of the 1587 edition, was a supporter of the Elizabethan Settlement, the merger of Church and state; but his late inclusion in Holinshed’s earlier Chronicles of recent acts of defiance and nonconformity only emphasised the fact that the new régime, in its persecution of Puritans and other Protestant ‘heretics’ (as well as their persecution of Catholics), sat strangely beside some of Holinshed’s original material. By lumping together stories of very recent repression of free opinion with Holinshed’s stories of heresy-hunting in the old days, Fleming (who probably intended to make the reader more conformist, more afraid of stepping out of line) must have made some readers find in the older stories collecte
d by Holinshed a case for believing in freedom of conscience. Thus, far from ‘legitimising’ the Elizabethan regime, the Chronicles, together with Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, became part of the Puritan or Nonconformist library that would in a later generation be packed on the Mayflower, America-bound, or would sustain those supporters of the Good Old Cause that marched with Cromwell’s Ironsides.

  Fleming, for example, included an account for 13 April 1579 of how:

  Matthew Manon, by his trade a ploughwrite of Hetharset three miles from Norwich, was convented before the bishop of Norwich, for that he denied Christ our saviour. At the time of his appearance, it was objected that he had published these heresies following. That the new testament and gospel of Christ are but mere foolishnesse, a storie of man, or rather a mere fable . . . that the Holie ghost is not God . . . that baptisme is not necessarie in the church of God, neither the use of the sacrament of the bodie and blood of Christ. For the which heresies he was condemned in the consistorie, and sentence was pronounced against him . . . And because he spake words of blasphemie (not to be recited) against the queen’s majestie and others of hir councell, he was by the recorder, master sergeant Windham, and the maior Sir Robert Wood of Norwich condemned to lose both his eares, which were cut off on the thirteenth of Maie in the market place of Norwich, and afterwards, to wit on the twentieth of Maie, he was burned in the castell ditch of Norwich.10