A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  There is no reason to doubt the truth of the story that Drake was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe on 19 July 1588 (Old Style) when he was told that the Armada had been sighted off the Lizard, and that he said that there was time to finish the game before fighting the Spaniards. He was quite right, for it was not until eight hours later that the tide was right for the English ships to be rowed out of the harbour in the face of an adverse wind. The story was first recorded in writing in the eighteenth century, but there is a reference in a publication of 1624 to the fact that the English captains were playing bowls when the Armada was sighted; and as this was only thirty-six years later, there were many people still alive who remembered 1588 and the story may have been told by someone who was present.

  The upper classes also had their sedentary and indoor pastimes. Chess had been played throughout the Middle Ages, but important developments in the game took place in Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. New rules were introduced, which have lasted till the twentieth century; the queen, which hitherto had only been able to move one square diagonally, was given the much greater powers which she possesses today; the bishop’s move was no longer limited to two squares diagonally, with no power over the intervening square; pawns were allowed to move two squares at the first move; and castling was introduced. New openings were developed by experts, especially the Spanish bishop, Ruy Lopez, whose opening is still called after him, at least in the English-speaking countries. The new rules had been adopted in England by the beginning of the sixteenth century. In England, as in Spain, the game seems to have been particularly popular with the higher clergy, for Foxe mentioned that both Cranmer and Nicholas RidIey played a game of chess after dinner every afternoon.

  Many nobles and gentlemen, like Henry VIII, preferred the excitement of gambling at cards and dice. The most usual card game was cent, which was almost identical with the game which was afterwards called piquet. Men of letters also sometimes played cards.

  In the evenings, after supper, dancing often took place at court, especially under Elizabeth I, who enjoyed dancing even more than Henry VIII had done. The Queen and courtiers often danced the pavane, which was so stately that lawyers, merchants and men of letters could dance it in their long gowns. The galliard was more energetic, and the volta, in which the gentleman clasped the lady round the waist and lifted her into the air, was the most energetic and daring of them all. Gentlemen were advised by their dancing-masters to remove their rapiers and hand them to their lackeys when they danced the volta, to avoid the risk of tripping over them, though rapiers could safely be worn while dancing a pavane. Elizabeth I, despite her strict sense of propriety, was prepared to allow the volta and to dance it herself.

  At the beginning of the Tudor Age, the only music that was known, at least at court and among the educated classes, was the Church music of the Middle Ages; and the same type of music was used for dancing and in songs for which it seems most inappropriate to us in the twentieth century. The drinking songs of the German mercenaries who served in England in the last years of Henry VIII and under Edward VI were sung to the doleful tunes of an ecclesiastical dirge, although the words were about the joys and excitements of a mercenary’s life, with food, drink and gold. Henry VIII himself was very fond of music; he not only played the lute but also composed music, writing a Mass as well as several love songs. The tunes of the love songs, and of his cheerful Pastime with good company, sound to twentieth-century ears as lugubrious as the music of his Mass.

  No other type of music was recorded until after 1550, when for the first time the kind of tunes which we know today were sung by the Protestant extremists who a few years later became known as Puritans. Their opponents referred to the doleful psalms which the Puritans sang, but to our ears they sound less doleful than the music to which Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots danced the pavane. It is unlikely that the Puritans invented a completely new style of music, and probably the people had for many years been singing folk songs with this kind of simple tune, which was never heard at court or in church, and was therefore never recorded.

  The Puritans, with their denigration of the role of the priest and their emphasis on the participation of the congregation in the church services, introduced the practice of singing hymns. The hymns were paraphrases of the psalms, put into English rhyming or blank verse, and slightly altered so as to give more emphasis to aspects of Puritan propaganda. The hymn-writer was William Kethe, who escaped from England in Mary’s reign and lived as a refugee in Geneva with Knox, Goodman, Whittingham, Foxe and other extremists. When he returned to England after Elizabeth’s accession, he was appointed rector of Okeford Superior in Dorset; and though he was always suspect in the eyes of the ecclesiastical hierarchy because of his connections with the Puritans, he retained his benefice until his death in 1608. His version of the hundredth psalm, ‘All People That One Earth Do Dwell’, which was written when he heard of Mary’s death and Elizabeth’s accession, called on the people to sing to the Lord with cheerful voice, for the Lord our God is good and His mercy is for ever sure. At the same time he wrote:

  Now Israel may say, and that truly,

  If that the Lord had not our cause maintained . . .

  When all the world against us furiously

  Made their uproars and said we should all die,

  Now long ago they had devoured us all . . .

  God that made Heaven and earth is our help then,

  His name hath saved us from these wicked men.

  Knox used Kethe’s hymns in Scotland, and published several of them in the Form of Prayers and Psalms of the Church of Scotland which was published in 1565. Eighty years later, they became the battle songs of Cromwell and the Puritans during the English Civil War.

  Until the end of the sixteenth century, serious composers wrote music almost entirely for religious purposes. John Marbeck was the organist of St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He would have been burned as a heretic in 1543, along with his three friends at Windsor, for having a copy of the English Bible in his possession, if Gardiner had not persuaded Henry VIII to pardon him because of his music. He was composing Church music until his death in 1585. Thomas Tallis was writing Church music for Elizabeth I’s chapel in 1560; but by 1579 his friend William Byrd, who succeeded him at the chapel royal, was writing the music for songs which had nothing to do with religion, but with the delights of the spring and of love. During that decade of change, the 1590s, the madrigals of Byrd, Morley, Dowland and Weelkes became very popular.

  Music was also used at court in the masques which by the beginning of the sixteenth century were a regular feature of the evening entertainments. The masque was a short theatrical performance with music. The themes were usually stories from Greek mythology, or sometimes from the Bible, or incidents in which allegorical figures like Chastity and Virtue appeared. Masques continued to be a feature of evening entertainments at court throughout the Tudor Age and the seventeenth century.

  Pageants, which were performed out of doors, in the streets of London and elsewhere, were similar to masques. They were a feature of the sovereign’s procession through London on the day before the coronation; the pageants at Elizabeth I’s coronation procession in January 1559 were propaganda for Protestantism and the English Bible. Soon afterwards Elizabeth banned the pageants that were being performed by the Protestants in London in which Philip II was attacked and ridiculed. After the revolt in the Netherlands began in 1566, the English Protestants were outraged by the severity of the persecution there, and some pageants were acted in London denouncing the persecution and attacking Philip II; but Elizabeth banned them at the request of the Spanish ambassador. Philip reciprocated, and banned pageants in Spain which attacked Elizabeth. Even when relations England and Spain had become so bad that they were on the eve of open war, Philip and Elizabeth still prohibited personal attacks on each other by their subjects.

  Pageants and masques were a feature of Elizabeth’s progresses through her kingdom in the summer. At Ox
ford, Cambridge, Kenilworth and elsewhere, she was received on her arrival by youths and maidens dressed in the part of various virtues and reciting odes in honour of virgin queens.

  There were also stage plays, but these were viewed with some suspicion by the authorities, at least at the beginning of the Tudor Age. They were too closely associated with the plays performed by strolling players in the market towns and villages. They were often obscene, and some of them were on the theme of Robin Hood, and incited the spectators to become outlaws and rob the rich, apart from the fact that the authorities disapproved of anything which distracted artisans and husbandmen from performing their work, going to Mass, and practising archery. The Act of 1572 included among those who were to be punished as vagabonds ‘common players in interludes and minstrels not belonging to any baron of this realm or to any other honourable personage of greater degree’; but actors in the companies of various noblemen, like Shakespeare’s actors in the Lord Chamberlain’s company, were allowed to perform not only to their patron but before audiences of artisans and other members of the lower classes in London.

  The plays that were acted at the beginning of the Tudor Age, apart from the illegal Robin Hood interludes, were all on religious subjects – the ‘morality plays’, with the characters pointing out the virtues and vices which should be emulated or avoided. The plays Noah’s Flood, The Death of Pilate, The Fall of Lucifer, and The Incredibility of Thomas were among those which were often acted. One of the last to be written and acted before the repudiation of Papal supremacy was Everyman. The character of Everyman represented all men, with their faults and temptations, and the play emphasizes that the only way to attain salvation is by good works, by penance, especially self-flagellation, and through the sacraments and doctrines of the Catholic Church. Every man is reminded by the character Five Wits that no emperor, king, duke or baron had the power which the least priest has been granted by God, to bear lithe keys to the blessed sacraments:

  Here in this transitory life for thee and me,

  The blessed sacraments seven there be,

  Baptism, confirmation, with priesthood good,

  And the sacrament of God’s precious flesh and blood,

  Marriage, the holy extreme unction, and penance;

  These seven be good to have in remembrance.

  This was at the time when the Protestants were challenging the official doctrine that the seven sacraments were the means of salvation, and asserting that they were merely the channels through which salvation could be attained; and Luther had declared that there were only three sacraments, not seven. In 1552, the Protestant Second Book of Common Prayer declared that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were the only two sacraments, and this again became the official doctrine of the Church of England under Elizabeth I.

  A very different line was put over by the Protestant propagandist, John Bale, in his play King John, which was probably first written in 1538, though in its final form it was only completed after the accession of Elizabeth I, shortly before Bale’s death in 1563. The characters in the play, besides King John himself, include ‘England, a widow’, ‘Sedition, the vice’, ‘Civil Order’, ‘the Pope’, ‘Treason’, ‘Verity’, and the monk Simon of Swinefleet, who, according to a tradition which was constantly referred to by the Protestants in the sixteenth century, had poisoned King John at Swinefleet on the Humber at the orders of the Pope by giving him a cup of poisoned wine, after the monk had sacrificed his own life by drinking first from the cup in order to persuade King John that it was not poisoned. The character Verity, who speaks the words of truth and wisdom throughout the play, declares that a king is, by God’s Word, supreme in his kingdom and must never be criticized, even after he has been dead for 300 years, like King John. In the final scene, a new character enters, ‘Imperial Majesty’, who is clearly meant to be Henry VIII, and Verity extols his absolute power. Imperial Majesty orders another wicked priest to be hanged, drawn and quartered, although he had induced him to confess by promising him his life, for Imperial Majesty is quite entitled to break his word if he chooses to do so; and the priest is taken away to Tyburn, protesting that he will be canonized by the Pope, like Thomas Becket.

  In the reign of Henry VIII, a new type of play was being written; the light comedy, in which some philosophical truths emerge through the humour, reached England with other products of the Italian Renaissance. John Heywood wrote them for nearly seventy years, from his first plays in 1520, when he was a young protégé of Sir Thomas More, to his last works written very shortly before his death in 1587. Nicholas Udall, who was headmaster of Eton and a ferocious flogger until he was disgraced for homosexual offences against the boys, wrote the comedy Ralph Roister Doister in about 1535; it was an adaptation of Plautus’s comedy of 206 B.C., Miles Gloriosus. Gammer Gurton’s Needle, a very coarse farce by an unknown author, dealing with English village life, was first performed in 1552.

  English dramatists also began to write tragedies, usually based on historical themes. Two young students of the Inner Temple, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, wrote a play in blank verse, Gorbaduc, about a mythical early British King who was let down by his two sons when he divided his kingdom between them – a story which may have given Shakespeare the idea for his King Lear. It was first acted before Elizabeth I in January 1562. When Elizabeth visited Oxford in 1566, the scholars at Christ Church performed the play Pelemon and Arcite, based on the story from Greek mythology; but many tragedies were written about English Kings. The villainous Richard III was a favourite subject; eight plays were written about him in the years after 1565.

  Sometimes the playwrights ventured to write plays about contemporary events, which had been expressly forbidden by Henry VIII’s Privy Council in the period of repression in 1543, but was possible under the more tolerant régime of Elizabeth. The King of Scots, a tragedy about the assassination of Darnley, was performed in London within a few months of his death in 1567. The ‘Spanish fury’ at Antwerp in 1576, when Alva’s soldiers killed, raped and looted, was the subject of a play, Alarum for London, performed a few months later in London, which warned the Londoners of what would be in store for them if Spanish soldiers were ever to capture the city. In one scene, two little boys plead for their lives with a Spanish soldier, who pitilessly kills them both.

  These tragedies paved the way for the remarkable output of great dramatic plays which were produced, as well as the comedies, on the London stage in the last fifteen years of the Tudor Age. They began with Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine which was produced in 1587. Marlowe was a slightly suspect character in the eyes of the authorities. At Cambridge he was thought to have come under the influence of Francis Kett, an ‘Arian’ who followed the teaching of the fourth-century theologian, Arius, and denied the divinity of Christ. Kett was one of the few people to be burned as a heretic in Elizabeth’s reign, suffering at the stake in Norwich in 1589. There was a passage in Tamburlaine which was interpreted by Marlowe’s critics as suggesting that he did not believe in God. But Marlowe escaped from the persecution which he would almost certainly have suffered thirty years before; according to one theory, this was because he was protected by Walsingham in return for agreeing to act as an agent in the government’s secret service.

  Marlowe lived for six years after writing Tamburlaine before being killed in a brawl in 1593, when he was on the point of being arrested for atheism and sedition. During this time he wrote five more tragedies in blank verse – Dr Faustus, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris (the Massacre of St Bartholomew), Edward II, and Dido, Queen of Carthage. In 1589 Marlowe’s friend, Thomas Kyd, wrote The Spanish Tragedy containing the Lamentable End of Don Haratio and Bel-imperia, with the Pitiful Death of Old Hieronimo, a very popular play about murder and revenge. Kyd was suspected of being involved with Marlowe in the circulation of atheist and seditious leaflets, and after being arrested and tortured, died in 1594 before he could write another tragedy, unless he was the author of the play Titus Andronicus, which is u
sually attributed to Shakespeare. In 1592 Shakespeare’s first play was performed, The Contention betwixt the Two Noble Houses of York and Lancaster, which is now known as Henry VI, Parts II and III. His Tragedy of King Richard III, and his three comedies, A Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, followed within a year. Before the end of the Tudor Age, in the eleven years between 1592 and 1602, twenty-four of his plays were performed in London, including Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Julius Caesar and Hamlet.

  Elizabeth I herself came to see several of Shakespeare’s plays performed, and particularly enjoyed The Merry Wives of Windsor. Her approval enabled him to survive the difficulty in which he became involved when his play Richard II was revived, six years after it had first been performed, at the time of Essex’s rebellion in 1601. Apparently Essex’s supporters paid the actors to perform it, thinking that a play about a successful coup d’état and the deposition of a king would be good propaganda at the time of Essex’s rising. Elizabeth was very upset, and complained that the play had been performed forty times in London and had led people to say that she was Richard II. The scene in the play in which Richard abdicates in Westminster Hall was cut out in the remaining performances that year; but Shakespeare escaped without any loss of the royal favour.

  The advance in the quality and status of the theatre since the days when plays had been included among unlawful games and actors were regarded as vagabonds was due to the patronage of the nobility; for in view of the Act of Parliament which exempted actors from the whippings and ear-croppings which were the fate of vagabonds, only if they were attached to the household of a nobleman, this patronage alone made it possible for the theatre to survive. Much of the credit must go to the Earl of Leicester, who in 1574 was the first nobleman to arrange for his actors to perform to the general public in London. The stage was in the courtyard of an inn, the Bull in Bishopsgate, and for some years all plays were acted in the courtyards of inns. The parts were played by professional actors, but no women acted in plays until after 1660, and the women’s parts were played by young boys.