The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  A halfe-penny a month to the poore mans boxe we count our vtter empouerishing. I have hearde trauailers of credite avouch, that in London is not gyuen the tenth part of that almes in a weeke, which in the poorest besieged Citty of Fraunce is gyuen in a day . . . Our dogges are fedde with the crumbes that fal from our Tables. Our Christian bretheren are famisht for want of the crumbs that fall from our tables. Take it from me, rich men expressly, that it is not your owne which you haue purchast with your industry: it is part of it the poores, part your Princes, parte your Preachers. You ought to possesse no more than will moderatly sustaine your house and your family.13

  Pneumonic plague, carried by black rats, is a directly infectious disease that is sprayed into the air by coughing.14 The burial records tell the story. ‘A poor boy that died under St John’s Wall’, ‘a poor wench died in the cage’, ‘a poor child found at Mistress Bake’s door’.15 People were alive and merry one hour, and dead the next.

  In the principal towns the attempts to contain the plague were the responsibility of mayors. In London, the Lord Mayor made the constables, when they took office, swear to report the true numbers of plague victims, should the disease break out. Concealing plague-death was a serious offence punishable by heavy fines and imprisonment.

  Dogs were thought to be especially infectious. Elizabethan London swarmed with dogs.16 Special officers were appointed in 1563 to ‘murder’ and bury dogs found in the streets in plague-time. Many parishes paid dog-catchers – the dog-catcher for St Margaret’s, Westminster, killed 656 in 1592, 502 in 1603. (Daniel Defoe, in his Journal of the Plague Year, 1665 reports the killing of 40,000 London dogs.) Elizabethans tended to leave their dead animals – ‘dead dogs, cats, whelps or kitlings’ – in the street to rot. Plague-houses were marked with a red cross and ‘Lord Have Mercy on Us’. Burials were perforce hugger-mugger. Few could afford coffins. Corpses, covered with a winding sheet, were flung into pest-pits without prayer or ceremony. In 1582 twenty-three parishes were trying to use St Paul’s churchyard as their burying ground and corpses were bursting from the shallow site.

  Few who have read Nashe’s diatribe will ever be able to forget his picture of plague-victims in Gray’s Inn, Clerkenwell, Finsbury and Moorfields. They were domestic servants who had been driven out of their masters’ houses to die ‘for want of reliefe and warme-keeping . . . Cursing and rauing by the high-way side have they expired, & theyr Maisters never sent to them nor succourd them.’17

  The words of the clever, Cambridge-educated, Lowestoft-born Nashe were echoed in Kent by a farm labourer in 1598, who ‘hoped to see such warre in this realme to afflicte the rich man of this countrye to requite their hardnes of heart towards the poore’.18 Nashe’s view survives because he was an incomparably powerful prose stylist. The labourer survives in an indictment.

  One historian has written that ‘the law of sedition in Elizabethan England provided that anyone who criticised the government, reported others’ criticisms, or even speculated about when the government would change or when the queen died, was subject to crushing fines, and cruel corporal punishment, and even death itself’.19 Nine years before audiences rocked with laughter at the antics on stage of Bottom the Weaver. Thomas Bird (a weaver from Sandwich) was arrested in 1586 for loose talk about a planned uprising of 800–900 men, who had declared their intention to ‘hang up the rich farmers that had corn at their own doors’.20

  The statute of 1581 against seditious words decreed that first offenders unable to pay the £200 fine should be set in the pillory and have their ears cut off. ‘Seditious words’ could mean whatever the magistrate chose them to mean. In 1596 James Bradshaw of Oxfordshire asked a fellow ‘conspirator’ ‘whether there were not certain good fellows in Witney that wold ryse & knock down the gentlemen & riche men that take in the commons and make corne so dear’. George Binkes from Essex was overheard bragging that if pressed for military service against Spain it ‘wold goe against his conscience’. He further said that ‘capteyne Drake and his souldiers when they have gone forth into the prince’s service do robbe and spoile the kynge of Spayne his goods which is the right Kyng of Ingland’.21

  Dissent was by no means limited to religious minorities, such as the Anabaptists, or to Roman Catholics, who were probably very numerous. We find it everywhere we look. The government, both the central government in London and its provincial arms, the Justices of the Peace, were mercilessly efficient at silencing ‘seditious words’. Seventy-eight people in Devon were killed in 1598 alone for sedition. When there was actual danger of starvation after poor harvests and a hike in grain prices, local corporations sold cheap bread: 725 people a week in Coventry were buying it during the dearths of 1597 and 1598. Add these to the miserable unpaid or impressed troops in Ireland and Holland, and a large proportion of the population are seen to be unhappy. Moreover, Elizabeth had succeeded politically by failing to give either side, in any of the great political questions of the day, what they wanted. The Roman Catholics were as displeased by the Established Church as were the Puritans. The Succession Question was unsatisfactory – especially to those who had hoped the Queen would marry and have children of her own. No one knew anything about James VI of Scotland, Elizabeth’s heir. Elizabeth survived, and actually thrived, on ambiguity and unresolved questions. Her policy was après moi, le déluge. The establishment of a colonial bolthole in America, which became a place to which dissidents could imagine taking themselves, actually increased the strength of religious dissent at home. And population growth, especially in London, created social dislocation of all kinds. Crime and disease were only part of it. Deep-seated questions about the nature of authority, and clashes between monarch and parliament were laid down by Elizabeth for her successors to deal with. By the end of her reign the divisions in society, and the political divisions at its apex, had become incorrigible.

  The ‘cult of Elizabeth’ – the exaggerated worship of Elizabeth as a goddess – was in part a ritual, limited to a small number of courtiers or would-be courtiers. There was no doubt that she was popular, and indeed loved, by much of the population throughout her reign. But the Queen and the people of England were like the cynical lovers in Shakespeare’s sonnet (the first version printed in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, the second in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1609):

  Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,

  And in our faults by lies we flattered be.22

  Even in the most apparently basilolatrous of her poets, Spenser, Elizabeth could have read criticism: some have found in his work outright republicanism. Her dearest favourite of the late phase was the Essex who betrayed her. Ted Hughes, the late-twentieth-century Poet Laureate, made a rich imaginative reading of the sixteenth century’s greatest writer, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Of course Hughes was not an Eng. Lit. don and his book would be eschewed by what Thomas Nashe in a different context called ‘scholasticall squitter books’.23 But Hughes was surely right to see that Shakespeare was a manner of prophet who saw into the life of what was happening to his society: ‘The Zeitgeist itself, it seems, conscripted Shakespeare’s synapses to rehearse all those regicides (malevolent and pitiless like Richard III; possessed yet noble like Macbeth; noble and selfless like Brutus; shrewd and evil like Edmund) before it finally stepped out (after quirkish flashes in the pan – the giddy Essex, its attempts to incriminate Raleigh) into flesh and blood and history. In about the year that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, Oliver Cromwell (another apocalyptic dreamer) dreamed he would be King (and told his master and was whipped for it).24

  Francis Walsingham, a lynchpin of the old regime, died in April 1590. In his final illness his duties as Secretary had passed back to the seventy-year-old hands of Burghley, who, in the atmosphere of court rivalry that grew ever more malicious and frenzied, was desperate to promote the interests of his clever, efficient, physically deformed and charmless son, Robert, against those of the rising Earl of Essex. What Elizabeth needed at this juncture was a new young advise
r who combined Robert Cecil’s administrative skills with the flair and sex-appeal of the young Earl of Essex – and without Essex’s appallingly spoilt-brat displays of temperament. Instead, she held the two men endlessly at odds, undermining the stability of governance. It could be said that after the death of Walsingham the Elizabethan tapestry began to unravel. Its foreign policy came more confusedly to reflect the Queen’s Hamlet-like indecisiveness. Its Church Settlement looked increasingly unsettled. And Ireland entered one of the saddest and bloodiest decades in its history, a situation exacerbated – but, in reality, almost entirely caused – by the meanness of the Queen and the corrupt dealings of the ageing Burghley.

  It was the fall of Sir John Perrot that brought these unpalatable facts to the surface. Perrot, like Sir Henry Lee, with whose delightful pageants we began this chapter, was said to be yet another son of Henry VIII. It was a plausible speculation. Like the dead king, Perrot was a huge, angry ladies’ man. He had been born in 1527, out of wedlock, and his mother, Mary Berkeley, married Thomas Perrot, esquire of Pembrokeshire, a rising star of the Tudor Taffia.

  Between 1584 and 1588 Perrot had been one of those unfortunates who found himself Lord Deputy of Ireland. As the reader of this book will have discovered, I do not defend the Elizabethan policy in Ireland, which was not only unjust and unworkable in itself, but stored up misery for generations to come. Within the Elizabethan terms, however, Perrot was a good Lord Deputy. When he stood down, returning to his native Pembrokeshire and becoming MP for the fine old town of Haverfordwest, he left Ireland in peace. In that Armada year, had Ireland had a different Lord Deputy, the Spanish troops who came ashore might well have joined forces with one or another of the rival Irish clans and made war against the English. As it was – a terrible thing in human terms, but a stabilising one politically – the young Spaniards were massacred.

  Perrot, brutal and choleric as he may have been, was a good administrator. He rode roughshod over various vested English interests in Ireland and fatally made enemies, but he had been a success. He was replaced by Sir William Fitzwilliam, a very different character, who happened to be a cousin of Mildred Cooke, who happened to be married to Burghley. As well as the feuds among the Irish themselves, and the everlasting hostility between the Irish and the English, the faction-fighting among the English administrators in Ireland helped to spoil any chance of happiness for that island. Perrot still had his supporters on the Irish Council and they did their best to make life difficult for William Fitzwilliam. He in turn decided to ‘frame’ Perrot as a traitor. First, he got one Sir Dennis O’Roughan, a double-agent Catholic priest who had been used by Perrot as a ‘priest catcher’, to write letters to the Queen, alleging that Perrot was a crypto-papist-Spanish spy. O’Roughan claimed he had said secret Masses for Perrot (highly unlikely) and (even less likely) that Perrot had negotiated with the King of Spain, offering Philip II support in exchange for an hereditary grant in Wales.

  While Fitzwilliam was a cousin by marriage of Burghley, Perrot was loosely connected with Burghley’s new bête noire, the Earl of Essex (Perrot’s son was married to Essex’s sister). Burghley persuaded the Queen to appoint a commission, consisting of himself, Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, Howard, the Lord Admiral, and Lord Buckhurst. Hatton was someone else who had it in for Perrot, as Burghley well knew that Perrot had seduced and impregnated Hatton’s daughter. Burghley and Hatton breached protocol by using a servant of Fitzwilliam’s, rather than the Queen’s official messenger, to collect and deliver O’Roughan’s very questionable written communications, none of which survive – another very suspicious fact.

  O’Roughan came to England. There a woman in Chester who accused him of having married her bigamously, a charge he denied – but it gives us some flavour of this priest-spy’s character. Perrot answered all O’Roughan’s insinuations robustly: ‘it is as possible for me to perform the contents of that forged letter as it is for me to dance around with Paul’s steeple on my thumb’.25

  The Crown prosecutors could see that Perrot would have no difficulty in refuting O’Roughan’s lies, so they changed tack. They now turned to Sir Richard Bingham, the Chief Commissioner of Connaught. Burghley had come to hear that there were some rhymers in Connaught who had composed poems against the Queen and claimed that she was not the lawful Queen of England. The poems themselves were in Irish, but even here Perrot utterly denied the charge that he had been soft with these supposedly seditious verses. He had taken the trouble to have them translated, and the ‘worst’ of them, addressed to the O’Connor Don, expressed the wish that ‘he should be a wise hungry greyhound and should drive all Englishmen over the salt sea’. So, there was nothing treasonable in the rhymes and Perrot had not, in any case, encouraged them. Perrot was then accused by Fitzwilliam of having encouraged the rebellion of Brian O’Rourke, Lord of West Breifne, recently shired as County Leitrim. In 1586 O’Rourke had set up an image of a woman, inscribed it with the name ELIZABETH and then got his gallowglasses to drag it through the mud and chop it up.

  In fact, as Perrot was able to demonstrate, he had not known of this incident until three years after it happened – years in which he had had some dealings with O’Rourke. In 1591, when O’Rourke came to Scotland to recruit mercenaries, he was extradited to England. Meanwhile, hearsay evidence was being collected against Perrot, remarks that he had made about the Queen when Lord Deputy. Obviously Perrot was extremely intemperate in his remarks about the Queen. I have already quoted ‘Silly woman, now she shall not curb me, she shall not rule me now’, and his view that taking orders from Elizabeth was ‘to serve a base bastard piss kitchen woman’. Those who knew Perrot were aware that he was quite capable of such outbursts. Quite whether they merited the expensive palaver of a trial for high treason, with its inevitable gruesome outcome, was another matter.

  The trial began on 27 April 1592. Perrot was brought by barge from the Tower to a packed Westminster Hall. He defended himself with the utmost vigour. Essex tried in vain to get the Queen to stop the proceedings. Although he failed, the Queen stayed judgement against him six times. Lord Chief Justice Anderson condemned Perrot to hang at Tyburn, but Perrot in fact died in the Tower of natural causes. It was clear that the Queen did not believe his guilt, since it was normal for the Crown to confiscate the lands of traitors, and Sir Thomas Perrot inherited most of the Welsh estate from his father.

  It would seem that Sir John Perrot was put through these proceedings solely because Sir William Fitzwilliam had concocted his foolish conspiracy. To admit the folly and malice of Fitzwilliam would be to discredit the cousin of Burghley’s wife. Burghley’s credit as a factional leader would thereby have been irreparably damaged. Perrot was condemned to death not because he was a traitor, but because Burghley needed to maintain his Polonius-grip on the tiller. It was an incident that revealed how wildly out of control English policy could fly after the death of Walsingham.

  24

  Sex and the City

  FOR A SOCIETY that worshipped its Head of State as an unblemished Virgin, Elizabethan England has left behind plenty of evidence of advanced, collective sexual obsession. Ben Jonson, gossiping in his cups after the reign was over, could speculate that Elizabeth had ‘had a Membrana on her which made her uncapable of men, though for her delight she tryed many, at the comming over of Monsieur, there was a French Chirugion who took in hand to cut it, yett fear stayed her & his death.’1 Perhaps the cult of Elizabeth’s virginity by the politicians was fed by the fact that Elizabethan society was, by the standards of later ages, especially open in its use of sexual language and in its discussion of sex in its most detailed and physical aspects. In the second Queen Elizabeth’s reign the BBC actually noted, with a horror that would have been excessive, had the person concerned actually performed the sexual act – the first time the word fuck was used on television, and in the mid- to late twentieth century there were special organisations, such as Mary Whitehouse’s Viewers’ and Listeners’ Associat
ion, that monitored the number of times lewd acts or sexually suggestive allusions intruded themselves into public broadcasts.

  Had Mrs Whitehouse and her friends spent their evenings rereading the works of William Shakespeare, they would have found that almost every play and poem that he wrote was full of sexual allusion, much of it rather childish. A man’s bauble – as in ‘hide his bauble in a hole’ (Romeo and Juliet II.iii.93) – his thing, his prick, dial, poperin pear, cod’s head, capon, cock or holy thistle is hard to avoid. If a tail or a tale is mentioned, some character is bound to make a pun, such as Mercutio’s ‘Thou desistest me to stop in my tale against the hair’ (from the same scene in Romeo and Juliet). Hair only sometimes in Shakespeare means the hair on someone’s head. To meet with a pipe, a needle, a pig’s tail or a parson’s nose is to know that someone is on the lookout for a hole, a placket-hole, a sluice, a gate, a thing, an organ, an et cetera, or the ‘dearest bodily part’. It would be fanciful to attribute the enormous population explosion during Shakespeare’s lifetime to an increase in popularity in playing the beast with two backs, rutting, scrambling, mounting, riding, sluicing, ravening or picking the lock, but as any of Shakespeare’s audiences knew, these were all synonyms that he enlisted in his fertile and varied sexual vocabulary.2

  Shakespeare’s work both mirrored and fed the erotic obsessions of the age. The Roman erotic poet, Ovid, was his inspiration, and Shakespeare soon became the Ovid of his own epoch. His two long poems dedicated to the Earl of Southampton feature on the one hand, Venus, the goddess of love, as an older woman attempting to initiate a coy and unwilling Adonis into her own sexual obsessions; and Lucrece, brutally raped by Tarquin. Many of his most popular plays reflect not merely an artist, but a society, obsessed by sex. Romeo and Juliet, the most triumphantly successful of his early erotic comedies, concerns a thirteen-year-old girl whose mother wishes her to marry: