She travelled to the camp by river. A causeway was constructed, enabling her to ride from the boat to the assembled ranks of soldiers, who all fell to their knees as she trotted among them. She wept at the sight, and told them to rise. Then she dined with Leicester under canvas.
The next day they strapped plate-metal armour over her bodice. The breastplate shone ‘like an angel bright’ as the procession made its way among the troops, preceded by the Garter King of Arms and the Sergeant Trumpeter. Then followed Leicester and the Lord Marshal, and Leicester’s stepson, the twenty-two-year-old Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. ‘The air and earth did sound like thunder,’ recalled an eye-witness, presumably because of the tumultuous applause.
When Elizabeth addressed the army, her voice was too faint to be heard at the back of the ranks. That evening, therefore, Leicester told one of the chaplains, Dr Leonel Sharp, to redeliver the oration ‘to all the army together to keep a Public Fast’. Sharp wrote out the words and had them copied as a pamphlet. When he gave a copy to the Duke of Buckingham twenty years later he said, ‘I remember in ’88 waiting upon the Earl of Leicester at Tilbury camp.’ He recalled how the Queen ‘rode through all the Squadrons of her army as Armed Pallas’. And, thanks to that military padre, we have her magnificent words:
My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety to take heed how we commit our self to armed multitudes for fear of treachery, but I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects. And therefore I am come amongst you as you see at this time not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved in the midst and heat of battle to live or die amongst you all to lay down for God and for my kingdom and for my people my honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe should dare invade the borders of my Realm to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your General, Judge and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns and we do assure you in the words of a Prince, they shall be duly paid you.
In the meantime my Lieutenant-General shall be in my stead, than whom never Prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject, not doubting but by your obedience to my General, by your Concord, in the Camp, and your valour in the field we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of God, of my Kingdom and of my People.13
A cynic would say that Elizabeth and Leicester already knew, when the Tilbury display was orchestrated, that the Armada had in fact been defeated. An Elizabethan enthusiast might reply that whatever the truth of that (and we do not know for certain how fast the news of the Gravelines setback reached the Queen), she showed immense courage in riding among so many thousands of men at a time when many Catholics wished her dead. As so often, from the first spectacular theatre of her coronation procession, Elizabeth sensed the mood of her people and provided them with a display that strengthened national unity. England, from 1588 until the 1950s, would be shaped in its self-perception by the experience of the Armada, and by Elizabeth’s eloquent vision of herself as holding out against ‘any prince of Europe’ who threatened the island kingdom. Churchill would draw on all this spirit for one last glorious display of collective insular courage in the summer of 1940. Froude the agnostic, hesitantly Church of England and vehemently anti-Catholic, concluded his essay on ‘The Defeat of the Armada’14 with the cruel but unforgettable sentence, ‘Both sides had appealed to Heaven, and Heaven had spoken.’ If so, it was the pitiless Heaven that overwhelmed the Egyptian chariots in the waters of the Red Sea, rather than the merciful Father of the New Testament who notes even the fall of a sparrow. No English ships were lost.15 The Spanish fleet headed into the North Sea to avoid further confrontations with the English guns off the Essex or Kent coasts. Without hope of returning home via the Channel, they had no choice but to sail round the north coast of Scotland and back down the coast of Ireland. This was a navy that had scarcely collected enough provisions for the initial journey from Lisbon to England. Given this fact, and the appalling weather they had to endure, it is remarkable that any ships returned home. The Spanish lost between fifty and sixty-five ships, but the human losses were more devastating: of the 30,000 men who had left Lisbon, 20,000 died, more than half through sickness, starvation and disease, 6,000 in shipwreck, 1,000 by murder and 1,500 in battle. (Though the English gave out that only sixty-eight deaths had been suffered on their side as war casualties, it has been calculated that as many as 6,800 English sailors died as a result of the filthy conditions on the ships.) So the sailors on both sides had an horrific time, and those on the Spanish side had by far the worst of it because they were at sea for longer. The depredations were horrific and the death-figures speak for themselves. In order to preserve supplies of food and water, horses and mules were hurled into the sea. No one seems to know why they were not eaten.
For most of August, the Armada, or what was left of it, stayed together, but during September and October it drifted apart, many ships being wrecked off the Scottish and Irish coasts. Pedro Coco Calderon, the Paymaster General aboard the San Salvador, wrote, ‘from 24 August to 4 September we sailed without knowing where we were, through constant fogs and storms’. Then they found themselves on the Irish coast. In many ships the men were starving, but for those who had cut off their anchors at Calais there was no chance of getting ashore – their only fate was to be wrecked.
Those who did come to land faced further horrors. Sir Richard Bingham, the Governor of Connaught, claimed to have killed 1,100 Spaniards taken prisoner on his watch. He sent armed search parties throughout Clare and Connemara to round up the bedraggled, half-starved boys and young men and to massacre them with axe, rope or sword. His son, George Bingham, went up to Mayo to do the same. And thus, wrote Sir Richard, ‘having made a clean dispatch of them, both in town and country, we rested Sunday all day, giving praise and thanks to Almighty God for her Majesty’s most happy success and deliverance from her dangerous enemies’.16 Sir Geoffrey Fenton took a comparably religious view of the matter: ‘God hath wrought for her Majesty against these idolatrous enemies, and suffered this nation to blood their hands upon them, whereby, it may be hoped, is drawn perpetual diffidence between the Spaniards and them, as long as this memory endureth.’ The only Spaniards spared were those of sufficient wealth to have a ransom paid for them.
The cruelty seemed abominable at the time, but it was not gratuitous. The English in Ireland, even more than those who had watched the Armada make its sinister progress down the English Channel in early August, felt extremely vulnerable. Even the hungry rabble cast ashore from the semi-wrecked Armada could have provided a formidable army against England, if they had reinforcements sent from Spain and had joined forces with Irish malcontents. Fenton was not alone in this belief when he wrote to the Privy Council in December:
It may please your Lordships upon inquiry made of Don Alonso de Leva’s casting away upon these coasts, I have learned that in his abode here he wrote several letters, sent away by special men into Spain, but whether directly from hence or through Scotland, I cannot find out. Only it may please you that if upon this letter, tending as may be thought to that end, there had been but 1,000 men with victuals and powder of both him and his 2,600 men, which now are all rid hence, I see not how but that before I could have given your Lordships advertisement Her Majesty might have been dispossessed of Ireland.17
21
London and Theatre
FROM OUR ENGLAND, industrial and post-industrial, with its huge cities, its road networks and railways and airports, its unstoppably expansive suburbs and its population racing towards seventy million, it i
s difficult to recapture the overwhelmingly rural character of Elizabethan England. The huge majority of the population lived in the country, and worked on the land. Villages, cut off from the towns by primitive roads, were tiny. The larger towns were not, as in the nineteenth century and after, likely to be centres of manufacture; much more likely, they were market towns, such as Norwich, with a population of 17,000, or ports such as Bristol, rather smaller.
So, the places you think of now as the big English cities were often quite small in Elizabethan England. Manchester, where Dr John Dee became warden of the ‘college’ of priests in 1594, was described by John Leland in 1540 as ‘the fairest, the best-builded, quickest and most populous town of all Lancashire’. By Elizabethan times, the population of Manchester was probably about 3,300 – with three big cullings caused by plague in the course of the reign.1
To be the most populous town in Lancashire was to have a population that later times would think of as a village. Cheshire was a more populous county than Lancashire at this period – an era when Totnes was much bigger than Liverpool, when Leeds, Halifax and Wakefield were tiny villages, when Sheffield was a small manor governed by a castle belonging to the Earl of Shrewsbury.2
In this England, the growth of London appeared all the more prodigious, and made the capital – even more than it had been in the Middle Ages – the hub of power and cultural interest. (York, the largest city in the North, had a population that is hard to estimate, but was probably around 10,000 in the mid-sixteenth century.)3
It is in this context that the population boom of London appears so prodigious – from 50,000 or 60,000 in the mid-1530s to perhaps 85,000 in 1565, and 155,000 in 1603 when the Queen died. (It was to continue rising with ever-greater rapidity during the first half of the seventeenth century, reaching half a million by the time of the Great Plague of 1665.)4
The population growth was not ‘natural’. It was not caused by Londoners breeding at an unusual rate. In fact, so plague-ridden was sixteenth-century London that the population would have fallen without the migrants who entered the city in such numbers, from the English provinces, and from Europe. Protestant refugees from the Low Countries and France accounted for the larger proportion of foreign migrants – between 3 and 4 per cent in the course of the reign – some 4,700 in 1567 and 5,450 in 1593.5
English migrants to London fell into two broad categories. There were those who came driven by ambition, and there were those who came driven by hunger. ‘In London we find rich wives, spruce mistresses, pleasant houses, good diet, rare wines, neat servants, fashionable furniture, pleasures and profits the best of all sort’, as one such ambitious young man wrote.6
On the other hand, there were those who had been driven off the land for the simple Malthusian reason that existent crops could not sustain an increased workforce. Population growth in the country produced land shortage, reduced the size of smallholdings and led to a fivefold increase in food prices. In the course of the sixteenth century the real value of wages halved. The poor became poorer. Living-in servants, apprentices and day-labourers were the lucky ones. Many simply drifted towards London with the vague hope that it would provide them with some form of livelihood. The number of homeless beggars was vast.
In 1581 Elizabeth was riding by Aldersgate Bars towards the fields of Islington when she found herself surrounded by a crowd of beggars, ‘which gave the queen much disturbance’. That evening, William Fleetwood, the Recorder, arrested seventy-four of them who had dispersed in the fields, where they lived in a kind of shanty-town. Eight years later, a mob of some 500 beggars threatened to disrupt Bartholomew Fair. They had formed their own collective and were trying to sell stolen goods at a fair of their own – Durrest Fair.7
Yet it was a fluid underclass, never a settled one. No state-sponsored social-welfare system existed. In the absence of religious houses, there was nowhere for the indigent or the starving to find charity. The beggars took what they could, and then found work or moved on. It all had a cruel effectiveness. The authorities, ever anxious about the double dangers of plague and insurrection, kept a merciless eye on the swarming hordes. In 1580 the Privy Council noted, ‘the great number of dissolute, loose and insolent people harboured in such and like noisome and disorderly houses as namely poor cottages and habitants of beggars and people without trade, stables, inns, ale houses, taverns, garden houses, converted to dwellings, ordinaries, dicing houses, bowling alleys and brothel houses’. The instinct of civic authorities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be to house the poor, and where possible to keep them clean and disease-free. The instinct of the Elizabethan Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London was to discourage them from coming to London in such numbers – and their expedient was to forbid any building within three miles of the City. These decrees were ignored. The Privy Council itself in 1598 warned JPs about landlords letting out tenements in Shoreditch and Clerkenwell to ‘base people and to lewd persons that do keep evil rule and harbour thieves, rogues and vagabonds’. They were unable to limit the population themselves. Plague did it for them. Without bubonic plague, the Elizabethans would have had real political and social problems on their hands. Plague killed rich and poor alike, but whereas the prosperous were sometimes able to get out of the City to escape the plague – and they had somewhere else to go – the waifs and strays of the Elizabethan shanty-town stayed to die, until the next wave of beggars came to town; 17,500 people (the size of the entire population of England’s next-biggest city, Norwich) died in London in 1563; 23,000 in 1593; 30,000 in 1603, with many a more minor outbreak in between, and disease everlastingly rife in that filthy, overcrowded city with no drainage and no sanitation.8
That having been said, it would be a mistake to regard the Elizabethans as being without any charitable impulses. Compared with a modern welfare state, designed to cater for the social problems of a population numbering in the tens of millions, it was obviously haphazard. One reason for this was that the numbers of people living in Elizabethan England were, by modern standards, so tiny. Nevertheless, there did exist a kind of micro social-welfare system. Each parish was expected to organise ‘poor relief’. Prosperous parishioners were specially taxed for the purpose. In many city parishes much care was given to foundling babies, to the old and to the sick; even, on occasion, to strangers and ‘blackamoors’. In parishes that contained prisoners, local people would feed the prisoners through the bars and gratings. It was common for wealthier parishioners to adopt orphans, often seeing that they were taught a skill or a trade. Parish registers provide an abundance of evidence of such charitable activity.
There were also almshouses in many towns designed to house the poor. One thinks of Edward Alleyn’s at Dulwich or of Archbishop Whitgift’s at Croydon. Naturally there were many poor people who slipped through the net and who found themselves homeless, but so there are in any system. The Queen was regarded, among other things, as a source of bounty, and wherever she travelled, ladies-in-waiting took purses to distribute among suppliants. The aristocracy imitated this more-than-ritualised generosity. The household accounts of Lady Anne Clifford, or Lord Berkeley, to name but two, record frequent giving to the poor. Lord Berkeley not only entertained all his retainers and tenants in true feudal style each Christmas, but made sure that suppliants at his door were rewarded all through the year. There was a brutality about life in early modern times, when so few effective cures for disease or hunger had been discovered. But Lear’s compassion for the ‘poor naked wretches’ was something felt by more than just one old king upon a stage. It was a society which, perhaps more self-consciously than others, since religious debate was so much to the forefront of contemporary discourse, was aware of its Christian obligations.9
Crime, nevertheless, was widespread. From the records of the courts, as from the drama, fiction, diaries and pamphlets, we find a city of filthy, narrow streets swarming with pickpockets, confidence tricksters (known as cony-catchers), whores, pimps and swindlers. We also f
ind a world where authority criminalised the population as a method of draconian control. It has been estimated that 6,000 people were executed in the modern Greater London during the reign of Elizabeth. Translate that statistic into the population of modern London, and you are talking of the equivalent of thousands of people a year being killed. The 200 or 300 recusant spies or martyrs are lost in this ghoulish statistic, where to be indigent, or a thief, or a careless pamphleteer could earn you the most terrible punishments. As well as those killed, there must be remembered the thousands who endured whippings, mutilations, brandings or being placed in the stocks for quite trivial offences. Evelyn Waugh, in his life of Campion, likened the regime to the brigand states of the twentieth century. But surely here is a case where analogy is misleading. As when we attune our ears to Elizabethan poetry and sentence structure, so, when attempting to acclimatise ourselves to their socio-political realities, we must resist the laziness of parallel. Sir Francis Walsingham was not Dr Goebbels. None of the monster regimes of the twentieth century would have retained ‘benefit of clergy’ as a defence in law, not only for bishops and curates, but for the educated. When Ben Jonson killed a fellow actor in a duel in 1598 he pleaded guilty, but escaped hanging merely by demonstrating to the judge that he could recite the penitential Psalm Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam (50 in the Vulgate, 51 in the Hebrew Bible) in Latin. So the sixteenth century was another country.
You cannot draw a parallel between the early modern age and the mechanised dictatorships of the twentieth century. By proportion, Stalin and Mao and Hitler killed infinitely more of their own dissident population even than Mary Tudor did, or the Habsburg regime of Philip II in Spain and the Low Countries. Rather than draw modern parallels, we must continually re-enter the Elizabethan world to try to acclimatise ourselves to its atmosphere. The Catholic recusants have a surviving constituency in our own day, who continue to revere their struggles and their martyrdoms. But they were not alone in falling foul of a system that was completely repressive.
The Elizabethans Page 36
