Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark! What discord follows;
The medieval social dispensation remained intact as Catholic social doctrines were preserved by the Anglican Church. Its ordering was a replica of that of civil society with the Queen at its head and, below, bishops and clergymen whose authority derived from the Crown. Subsequent theological criticism of this arrangement was treated as a challenge to the social hierarchy and the reasoning which underpinned it. ‘No Bishops, No King!’ barked James I when Puritans questioned the theological justification for the first. ‘Obey them that have rule over you’ (Hebrews 13: 17) announced an inscription on the wall of Burton church in Sussex, placed there by a local squire. Quietism was a Christian duty and parsons regularly read homilies which warned congregations that a blow against the social fabric was a self-inflicted wound on the nation and a defiance of God.
Submission to the Crown meant submission to the nobility. Funeral processions reinforced the eminence of the nobles and the nature of the society they overlooked. Under the Church of England these were secular ceremonies which focused on the deceased’s earthly status. Choreographed by heralds, the funerals of noblemen were stunning pageants in which the sombre black gowns, hoods and horse furniture of the hundreds of mourners contrasted with the dazzling gold, silver, red, blue and ermine of banners and shields.
The funeral of Edward Stanley, the third Earl of Derby, who died in 1593, was typical. First in the procession came two of his yeomen carrying black staves, followed by black-gowned paupers and choristers. Derby was a Christian peer who had fulfilled the duties of charity which the Church insisted were incumbent on all men and women of wealth. He was a figure of authority in the North-West and so next came his huge heraldic banner, a cavalcade of eighty of his household squires, fifty knights and gentlemen and the officers of his household. Behind them were mounted heralds bearing Derby’s sword, shield, spurs and crested helm. Then came the Earl’s coffin conveyed on a chariot and attended by his son and heir, kinsmen and noble mourners. Trumpets (symbolising the Resurrection) blared out and, if Derby had been a noted soldier, there would have been fifes and drums.12
In his lifetime, Derby had been an agent of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth I, enforcing their will and their laws in a remote part of the kingdom. The knights and squires who rode in his cortege had looked for him for favours and danced to his tune, although not always with a good grace. In 1598 some Welsh landowners protested to Elizabeth I that they had no need of ‘a great lord to terrify them’, meaning Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke.13 The Queen was unmoved; the huntress Diana needed her pack of well-bred, energetic and loyal hounds. She had handled them firmly, but generously and they responded well. Harmony between the Crown and nobility and their sense of national destiny was a significant feature of the legend of Elizabeth’s reign as golden age in which Protestant England counted for something in the world. There was much truth in this version of history, which, in the next century, became the touchstone by which James I and Charles I were assayed.
8
Stir Up Your Fame:
A New Breed of
Noblemen
A new breed of aristocrat appeared in the seventeenth century. He was a child of the Renaissance and, through it, heir to the wisdom, experience and intellectual curiosity of ancient Greece and Rome. His mind was agile and his horizons open; he composed and performed music, wrote verses and was a connoisseur of all the arts. He was susceptible to all and was improved by each, as Edmund Spenser observed in one of his dedicatory sonnets at the beginning of his Faerie Queene (1590):
The sacred Muses have always made claim
To be the nurses of nobility.
New accomplishments were grafted on to older qualities. The modern aristocrat shared with his ancestors the conviction that virtue was genetically transmitted, was proud of his ancestry and believed that leadership in war and peace was his birthright.
The Renaissance nobleman aspired to a perfect equipoise between mind and body. According to Sir Thomas Elyot’s highly influential The Book Named the Governor, his overriding aim was service to ‘the public weal’, that is the public good. Its achievement required a prolonged and intensive study of Greek and Roman philosophy, literature and history in their original languages. This was drudgery for some and so printed translations and glosses were soon on the market. These texts contained wisdom for the public man and led the private towards an interior equanimity which made great men proofs against irresolution and mischance. The deeds of ancient statesmen and heroes inspired their modern successors. Elyot directed readers towards the final books of the Aeneid where he promised them examples of ‘audacity [and] valiant courage’ that would inspire them ‘to take and sustain noble enterprises’.
Study cultivated inherent virtue. This was comforting for the nobility, which had been discountenanced by Henry VIII’s promotion of humble men of learning to the highest offices of state, most famously the Chancellor Thomas Wolsey and Henry VIII’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell. In 1546, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (a poet and translator of two books of the Aeneid), railed against ‘those men of vile birth’ whom the King had cherished to the shame and injury of the nobility.1 The answer was to beat the upstarts at their own game and, as the century progressed, more and more young noblemen flocked to Oxford and Cambridge. Between 1570 and 1639, 146 sons of peers matriculated at the two universities and eighty-eight were admitted to the Inns of Court.2 A smattering of law was invaluable for peers since it offered some protection against fly lawyers who baffled their clients with arcane terminology before fleecing them. For younger sons, a legal education was a springboard for a career at the Bar.
According to temperament, some young noblemen found intellectual stimulation at university and others were happy to revel with fellows like themselves (the forerunners of the Bullingdon Club), but all believed that they would somehow benefit from contact with academia. Fathers understood this. Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, at thirteen with orders from his father to ‘employ your tender years in virtuous studies, as you might in the prime of youth become a man well accomplished to serve Her Majesty and your country in war as in peace’.3
Whatever erudition young lords absorbed added legitimacy to the aristocracy’s claim to superior sensibilities and wisdom. Learning was soon fashionable, and even if he was happiest in his stables, on the tennis court or at the card table, a noblemen now felt obliged to install a library in his house.
All aristocratic libraries contained treatises, mainly classical, on the art of war. Elyot took it for granted that his readers would prove true to their breeding by testing their honour in the pursuit of danger on the battlefield. ‘Stir up your fame,’ the ninth Earl of Northumberland urged his son in 1595. The times were right for bold enterprises and the boy was pointed towards the current naval war against Spain, which offered the chance of plunder, or the ‘discovery of barbarous countries’ where ‘mountains of gold and silver’ awaited the daring.4 By his own admission, the older Northumberland had been spendthrift and a gambler and no doubt he hoped that a captured galleon or a New World silver mine would restore the family fortunes. Another extravagant peer, the third Earl of Cumberland, maintained his solvency through privateering expeditions against Spanish shipping in the Caribbean.
This was the same spirit which had sent noblemen to France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but now the Americas had replaced France as a source of treasure. An embryonic overseas empire was already luring the aristocracy with dreams of profit and honour. War offered other temptations. ‘All women delight to him safe in their arms, who has escaped hither through many dangers,’ wrote Sir Philip Sidney.5 A veteran of Elizabeth’s Netherlands campaigns, he may have been speaking from experience.
One danger which enhanced the masculinity and sexual attractiveness of young nobles was the duel. Like the battle, the duel was a touchston
e of honour for those who survived and of honourable memory for those who did not. The rise of duelling during the second half of the sixteenth century coincided with the slow eclipse of that less risky test of aristocratic honour, the tournament. Unlike the joust, which was a public spectacle, duels between noblemen were hidden from public gaze, although reports of them circulated widely. Like the tournament, the duel had its prescribed punctilio, with formal challenges and responses which blended politeness with insult. ‘Be master of your own weapons and time . . . the place where so ever I will wait on you; by doing this you shall shorten revenge and clear the idle opinion the world has of both our worths’ ran Lord Bruce of Kinloss’s challenge to the fourth Earl of Dorset in 1613.6 Bruce was killed.
The weapons used in this and other similar encounters were rapiers and, like them, duelling had originated in Italy. Mastering the rapier required long hours of instruction and practice. There were fencing schools in London, the first established by Italians, and swordsmanship could also be studied in Paris or Italy by young noblemen undertaking the Grand Tour of the Continent. Short tempers, real and imagined slights and extremes of touchiness led to an epidemic of duelling amongst the nobility which peaked between 1610 and 1619, when thirty-three duels were reported. Others may have gone unnoticed, for James I had outlawed duelling in 1613.
Paradoxically, what the Crown and Parliament denounced as wanton manslaughter contributed to public order, since peers now settled their differences man to man, rather than mobilising retainers and servants. Affrays between noble retinues still occurred and, as ever, their cause was honour. In 1573 Lord Grey felt he had been dishonoured when a neighbour, John Fortescue, forbade him to hunt on his land. Backed by his servants, Fortescue confronted Grey and his huntsmen. ‘Stuff a turd in your teeth,’ snarled Grey. ‘I will hunt it and it shall be hunted in spite of all you can do.’ His followers then pitched into Fortescue’s.7
Old bad habits lingered despite the Tudor state’s concerted efforts to outlaw private feuds and the disorders they generated. Taming the peerage and, for that matter, anyone else who believed that they could bypass the law and settle their differences with swords, bows and cudgels was the task of the royal council, which could sit as a court, and Henry VII’s Court of Star Chamber, in which councillors and senior judges arbitrated disputes which had ended in violence. By bringing these cases before tribunal in London, where local magnates were unable to use their influence to pull strings and evade justice, provincial stability was achieved.
Appealing to two earls to cancel their duel over contested lands, the royal council urged them to ‘try their controversies in Westminster Hall’, in other words the royal courts. By 1600, more and more peers were taking this course and submitting their differences to litigation. They did so with a belligerent spirit. John Smyth, a lawyer and steward of two Lord Berkeleys, drolly observed that during his lifetime the law courts at Westminster had become a ‘cock pit of revenge’ in which aristocratic litigants settled their quarrels with the same vindictive passion which their ancestors had applied to private feuds.8
In the lower courts corruption had replaced coercion. Advising his son Thomas, the future Earl of Strafford, on how to handle his legal affairs, Sir William Wentworth suggested that judges responded well to ‘gifts’. Under-sheriffs needed bribes to empanel a sympathetic jury and, if they gave a favourable verdict, they were to be feasted.9 A long purse was always better than a persuasive argument in the courts of early modern England.
Royal policy towards occasional aristocratic waywardness and a propensity for violence had always to be tempered by the knowledge that instincts which were intolerable in peace time were invaluable in war. Noblemen continued to use their networks of kinsmen and dependants to raise armies, and impetuous and pugnacious young lords led them into battle. The path to martial glory was mapped by the courtier poet Sir Philip Sidney, whose death at the siege of Zutphen in the Netherlands in 1586 transformed him into a Protestant paladin. His heroic example aroused the spirits of the ‘green headed youths covered in feathers, gold and silver lace’ who rushed to join the second Earl of Essex’s Cadiz expedition in 1596. The Earl imagined himself Sidney’s heir in honour and he scattered knighthoods among his adoring followers, which displeased the Queen, although as a field commander he was within his rights.
Noblemen remained royal councillors and companions. That athletic hearty, the youthful Henry VIII shared the pleasures of the tiltyard, tennis court, hunting field and dinner table with rowdies like himself. Their counterparts were the muscular but urbane bloods who were beguiled by the charms of Elizabeth I and vied for her favours like lovesick swains. At New Year 1588 Essex presented Elizabeth I with a jewel which showed a naked man within a gold setting to symbolise his dependence on her affection and patronage.10
A ‘heroic life’ required ‘a mausoleum of immortal memory’, a churchman advised Ludovick Stuart, the first Duke, Richmond and Lennox, when he was contemplating a tomb for his younger brother.11 The richness and extravagance of Renaissance sculpture made it ideal for the monuments of the nobility. Status-conscious peers patronised immigrant sculptors who were familiar with the most recent Continental styles. This was why, in 1591, the Manners family commissioned Gerard Jansen, a Flemish sculptor, for the carving of the colossal tombs of the third and fourth earls of Rutland. The monuments were made in sections which were transported by ship to Boston in Lincolnshire and by cart to Bottesford in Leicestershire. Jansen supervised their construction in the church, which involved demolishing and rebuilding the wall of the chancel and reinforcing the floor.12 Painting the profusion of heraldry on the tombs was undertaken under the close eye of the Manners family. The aristocracy was pernickety over such matters and made a fuss when errors were made.13
New, imported styles favoured flamboyant, pretentious memorials on a huge scale. In 1628 Sir Charles Morrison demanded that his effigy in armour should be ‘royally’ carved and that the sculptor clothe him ‘in such habiliments, ornaments and jewels’. Additional specifications were made for the depiction of Morrison’s children, now universal on all memorials to peers and gentry.14 The result in Watford church is overwhelming and somewhat pompous, but it satisfied the same need as earlier memorials: the perpetuation of honourable memory.
An oddity appears on the tomb of the second Earl of Rutland at Bottesford: he holds a book in his hand. It is an unusual conceit which, if the volume is a Bible, may indicate his Protestant sympathies. Or else it was a reminder that noblemen were the natural patrons of learning. Knowledge opened minds, disseminated virtue and its fruits accelerated the advance of civilisation. These assumptions were central to Renaissance Humanism which was slowly infiltrating the aristocratic consciousness in England and Scotland during the sixteenth century. It was absorbed by men and women eager to embellish their public character through the patronage of learning and the arts.
Old responsibilities were given a fresh and powerful imperative. Sir Thomas Elyot appealed to noblemen to promote the general good of the nation through the patronage of scholarship, schools and universities. Even ostentation acquired a moral and instructive purpose. According to Elyot, a felicitous choice of pictures, ornaments and silverware is a reflection of a nobleman’s honour, the more so if they reproduced ‘histories, fables, or quick and wise sentences, comprehending good doctrines or counsels’.15 All the arts exercised and elevated the nobleman’s mind; Elyot recommended dancing not because it was fun, but because its movements symbolised the ideal harmony between men and women.
Patronage of all the arts was a patriotic duty. The prestige of a Renaissance state was measured by the brilliance of its scholars, writers and artists and those princes and nobles who encouraged their genius. What was to the common advantage added to the pleasures and kudos of the patron thanks to the intellectual and creative reciprocity between him and the luminaries who gathered around him; their reflected glory added lustre to the aristocratic courtier and sharpened his wits. In the ear
ly 1630s young noblemen with literary aspirations clustered around the aged and fragile Ben Jonson at various London taverns to drink with him and listen to his epigrams and memories of Shakespeare.
One acolyte Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, hoped to tempt the playwright to his house at Great Tew in Oxfordshire. Falkland was the epitome of the Renaissance nobleman; he had been educated at Oxford and Trinity College, Dublin, briefly played the soldier and then retired to Great Tew where he studied Greek and wrote poetry. He was the open-handed host to a circle of poets, philosophers and theologians who turned his house into a living Pantheon. Falkland was the presiding genius who charmed, stimulated and encouraged with what his friend Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, described as ‘a flowing delightfulness of language’. Another admirer, the poet Abraham Cowley, hailed him as the ‘great Prince of Knowledge’.16
Falkland loved knowledge and abstract thought for their own sake; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, regarded them as the means to political and religious ends. He was Elizabeth I’s beloved ‘Robin’ (some of her more impudent subjects claimed he was her lover), a soldier and a leading councillor with strong views. These were expressed in various ways in many of the ninety-three books dedicated to him between 1559 and his death in 1588. History and theology predominated (both original works and translations) and all were responses to the urgent political needs of the Elizabethan state. Histories helped to create a flattering national identity by conjuring up a heroic past, populated by patriotic and warlike leaders, and readers were pointed in the direction of an even more glorious future. Religious texts vindicated Protestantism and confounded Catholic doctrines, in particular the supranational authority of the papacy.
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