A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  Leicester’s players played for some years at the Bull, and other companies acted at the Bell Savage inn in Ludgate, the Blackfriars inn, and the Red Bull in St John’s Street. Then James Burbage, who was the manager of Leicester’s players, decided to build a theatre which would be used for no other purpose except to perform plays to the public. In 1577 he opened the Theatre in Holywell Lane in Finsbury Fields, and the venture was a success. A few years later, a rival company opened a second theatre in London, the Curtain, not far from the Theatre. After these two theatres had survived and prospered for fifteen years, the great boom in stage plays in the 1590s led to three more theatres being opened between 1592 and 1598 – the Rose Theatre, the Swan Theatre in Paris Gardens, and the Globe Theatre, all of them close to each other on the river in Southwark. A sixth theatre, the Fortune Theatre, in Golden Lane, was opened in 1600, and three more theatres had been built by 1613.

  Although the comedies of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare were popular, the dramatic tragedies were appreciated even more. By far the most successful was The Spanish Tragedy. The great feature about all of them was the violence and cruelty in the stories, though unlike more modern examples of violence in the theatre they were dignified by the magnificent verse in which they were written. The violence in the plays matched the cruelty of the broadsheets which were sold in the streets of London, with the accounts of the tortures shamefully inflicted by Catholics on Protestant martyrs in France and the Netherlands, and those most justly inflicted by Protestants on Catholic traitors who attempted to assassinate the Queen and foreign Protestant leaders. These bloodthirsty accounts were often illustrated by horrific woodcuts showing tortures and mutilations in the most realistic and unpleasant detail. Often the imagination of the writers exceeded the worst malice of the torturers. Balthasar Gérard, who murdered William the Silent in the Netherlands in 1584, was horribly tortured before being executed; but the tortures which he suffered were not as appalling as those described in the fictitious account of his execution which was sold in London.

  The Swan Theatre, on Bankside, was out of range of London’s city authorities, in a centre of entertainment including bull-baiting and bear-baiting rings and the archery butts in St George’s Fields. The drawing reproduced here is reputed to have been made by the Dutch artist Johannes de Witt on a visit to London in 1596. The theatre had been built in 1595, and its interior closely resembled the structure of the yard of an inn.

  The dramatists likewise gave full scope to their imagination. The real Timur i Leng in the fourteenth century massacred whole populations in Asia, but the subtle cruelties which he inflicts on his prisoners in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine were invented by Marlowe. The ancient Romans committed many cruelties, but the story of Titus Andronicus, with all its horrors, is pure fiction, which was first invented by an unknown author before 1592, and adapted for the London stage in 1594 by Shakespeare and by several other English dramatists.

  Today, when there is so much discussion about the effect which violence on television has on the violence which is committed by criminals in real life, it is interesting to see how, at the end of the Tudor Age, violence in the theatre and in real life went hand in hand. There was more cruelty in the administration of justice, in the methods of waging war, and in life in general, in 1600 than in 1500 or 1700, and the theatre of 1600 was much more violent than a hundred years earlier and later. There were no eyes gouged out or hands or tongues cut off in the morality plays of Henry VII’s reign; and by 1700, when burnings and hanging, drawing and quartering were almost, if not completely, obsolete, the worst thing that happened to the characters in the plays of Congreve, Farquhar and Vanbrugh was to be mocked and rebuffed by their mistresses or seduced and deceived by their lovers.

  It is not surprising that the theatre of the 1590s was violent, because it had to compete with the counter-attraction of bear-baiting, which was often carried on at the same premises, for Paris Gardens was the most popular place for bear-baitings, as well as a popular theatre. Bear-baiting was already popular at the beginning of the sixteenth century; when Erasmus visited London in 1510, he commented on the number of bears that were kept there for baiting. Bears still roamed wild in English forests and they were captured and placed in the charge of a bearward, who kept them available for baiting. Bear-baiting was popular with all classes. Kings and nobles kept their own bears and bearwards, and watched bear-baitings in the gardens of their palaces and houses; the ordinary people of all classes went to public bear-baitings.

  The procedure was to fasten the bear’s legs to a post by a chain, and then set fierce dogs on him. The dogs tried to tear out the bear’s throat, and although the bear’s movements were restricted by his chains, he had enough room for manoeuvre left to him to evade the dogs and defend himself, and even to kill the dogs with his paws.

  Henry VIII sometimes watched a bear-baiting. According to the Catholic writers, he appointed Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury at a bear-baiting. Elizabeth I enjoyed the sport more than her father had done, and bear-baiting became more popular during her reign than in the earlier part of the century. Soon after she became Queen she attended a bear-baiting with the French ambassador and enjoyed it so much that she stood watching it for several hours until six o’clock in the evening. When she visited Kenilworth in 1575, a particularly grand bear-baiting was arranged for her, with thirteen bears in action against the dogs. The courtier Robert Laneham, who was present, wrote that ‘it was a sport very pleasant’ to see the bear trying to free himself from the dogs, ‘with biting, with clawing, with roaring, tossing and tumbling . . . with the blood and slaver about his physionomy, was a matter of a goodly relief’.

  When the German traveller, Paul Hentzner, visited England in 1598, he attended a public bear-baiting in London. After the usual baiting by the dogs, there followed another sport, whipping a blind bear. The bear, having been blinded, was fastened to a post by a chain. Five or six men then stood round the bear in a semi-circle with whips, ‘which they exercise upon him without mercy, as he cannot escape from them because of the chain; he defends himself with all his force and skill, throwing down all who come within his reach, and are not active enough to get out of it, and tearing the whips out of their hands, and breaking them’. The proceedings sometimes ended with the torture of a pony; a monkey was tied to the pony’s back, and dogs bit the pony’s legs, while he desperately tried to shake off the monkey and the dogs.

  It seems extraordinary to the twentieth-century mind that the Tudor legislators, who passed statutes which made it illegal for the lower classes to play tennis, bowls or skittles, should have allowed bear-baiting as almost the only sport which the people were permitted to see. It was actually protected by legislation. Bear-baitings were usually held on Thursdays. In 1591 the organizers of bear-baitings complained to the Privy Council that attendances at the baitings were falling off, because stage plays were being performed on Thursdays and were a powerful counter-attraction. The Privy Council thereupon sent an order to the Lord Mayor, commanding him to ban all stage plays on Thursdays, because ‘in divers places the players do use to recite their plays to the great hurt and destruction of the game of bear-baiting and like pastimes which are maintained for Her Majesty’s pleasure’. The Puritans condemned bear-baiting, and thought it was a judgment of God when the stand collapsed at a bear-baiting at Paris Gardens in 1583 and killed and injured many of the spectators; but bear-baiting continued throughout the seventeenth century, and was not finally stopped until it was banned by an Act of Parliament, on humanitarian grounds, in 1835.

  Hentzner wrote that at the bear-baitings and in the theatres in London there were people walking around with baskets selling apples, pears and nuts at the various seasons of the year, and that nearly all the spectators were smoking tobacco in long clay pipes, ‘into the farther end of which they put the herb, so dry that it may be rubbed into powder, and putting fire to it, they draw the smoke into their mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils like funne
ls; along with it plenty of phlegm and defluxion from the head’. Drake and his fellow-explorers had brought back tobacco, as well as gold and jewels, from the New World.

  For many years after Columbus and the Spaniards first found the natives in America smoking tobacco, they had no wish to imitate them; but by 1550 tobacco was being imported from the West Indies to Spain on a considerable scale, and many Spaniards were smoking cigars. In 1559 the French ambassador in Spain, Jean Nicot, sent some cigars to the French court. They became popular there and elsewhere in France, and the substance in them was called ‘nicotine’ after Nicot. But tobacco was almost unknown in England before 1585, when Drake, after one of his expeditions to the Spanish Main, brought back some tobacco and sold it to Raleigh. Thanks to Raleigh, smoking became fashionable at court, as well as in the inns frequented by sailors; but the habit did not really catch on in England for some years.

  The situation changed after 1595, when smoking suddenly became very popular. Tobacco was sold in shops, not only in London and the ports, but in towns all over England, and was smoked everywhere, even in polite society. The English always smoked tobacco in clay pipes, as many Frenchmen and Spaniards did; but the Spanish habit of smoking cigars was quite unknown in England. In the words of a popular song which was probably first sung in the last decade of the Tudor Age:

  If all the world were sack [sherry], O!

  O then what should we lack, O!

  If, as they say, there were no clay

  How should we take tobacco?

  Perhaps because tobacco was a new commodity, and was only beginning to be imported on a large scale, its price varied considerably from year to year and from place to place. In 1597 a pound sold for 35s. in London; in 1598, prices varied between 12s. and £4 10s. per pound. In 1600 it was at 16s. a pound, and in 1603 at 30s. a pound. At all times it was very expensive by modern standards, with an ounce of tobacco costing at the least nearly two days’ wages, and often three days’ wages, for husbandmen and artisans; but this did not prevent a very rapid increase in smoking among all classes. Many people disapproved of smoking as much as others enjoyed it. Some physicians claimed that it had beneficial effects on health, and others argued that it was very harmful; and many people pointed out that smoking increased the risks of fire in houses.

  In Ireland, it was mentioned in 1598 as one of the vices of the army captains who had been sent to suppress Tyrone’s rebellion. A report to the government accused some of them of embezzling their soldiers’ pay in order ‘to buy them rich apparel, to maintain their pride and lasciviousness, their drunkenness and quaffing carouses, their tobacco and tobacco pipes’.

  The controversy between smokers and non-smokers had become a well-known feature of English life when Ben Jonson’s comedy Every Man in his Humour was first performed at the Globe Theatre in September 1598, with Shakespeare acting the part of old Knowell, a country gentleman. Knowell’s young cousin, Stephen, who is a silly young man, not only talks a great deal about hunting and hawking and soldiering, but extols the delights of ‘divine tobacco’, which he offers to his friends. The old water-carrier, Cob, does not agree.

  By God’s me, I marvel what pleasure or felicity they have in taking this roguish tobacco; it’s good for nothing but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke and embers; there were four died out of one house last week with taking of it, and two more the bell went for yesternight. One of them, they say, will ne’er scape it; he voided a bushel of soot yesterday, upward and downward.

  The arguments about smoking were conducted in a more serious vein in 1602, when a London physician, Dr Bushell, denounced it in a book A Work for Chimney Sweeps, or a Warning to Tobacconists dealing the pernicious use of tobacco. In the same year, his book was answered in another book, A Defence of Tobacco. In 1604 the new King, James I, himself wrote a book against smoking; but the English continued to smoke, undeterred by medical opinion, by royal disapproval, or by the high taxation and price of tobacco.

  14

  BEGGARS AND VAGABONDS

  IN THE TUDOR AGE, there was a fairly large group of people who were outside society and in perpetual conflict with it. The authorities were very concerned with the problem of beggars, rogues and vagabonds, who refused to work as husbandmen on the land or as artisans in the towns, and roamed the countryside or congregated in the city streets, begging, stealing, and defying all authority. They were the sixteenth-century equivalent of the outlaws of the Middle Ages and the hippies of the twentieth century.

  Some of them were soldiers discharged from the army, or sailors who had returned to port after a sea voyage. Some were retainers who had been in the service of a nobleman and had been forced to leave after Henry VII persuaded his Parliament to prohibit the retention of more than a limited number of retainers by an Act of 1504. Another source of vagabonds was provided after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. The problem was not confined to the labouring classes, for there are many references in the statutes to university students who became rogues and vagabonds.

  In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which he wrote in 1601, the Clown refers to the problem in his final song.

  But when I came to man’s estate

  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;

  ’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,

  For the rain it raineth every day.

  Shakespeare was thinking about the vagabonds and the attitude of the law-abiding subjects towards them, as well as of the four wet summers of the 1590s, when it had rained nearly every day.

  The government were guided by three principles in dealing with beggars and vagabonds, which remained constant throughout the Tudor Age, though the means adopted to achieve the desired ends varied from time to time. The first was that law-abiding people ought to give charitable alms to maintain the aged and impotent poor, who were unable to earn their living because they were old, blind, crippled, sick or infirm. The second was that able-bodied men and women, who preferred to beg and live as vagabonds rather than work, should be severely punished. The third was that all beggars, both the deserving poor and the able-bodied vagabonds, should be confined to their native parishes and not allowed to leave them and roam about the country at large.

  When Henry VII became King, the tradition of almsgiving and help for the aged and impotent poor was well-established, and was regarded by the Catholic Church as one of the ‘good works’ which were necessary for a man to obtain salvation. Charity was practised in the monasteries, chiefly in the form of hospitality to the beggars who passed by, along the highway, or who lived almost permanently in the monastery. The law about able-bodied vagabonds was governed by an Act of Richard II’s Parliament of 1383, which had been passed during the period of fear and class hatred that had followed the suppression of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The Act directed judges to treat vagabonds as ‘to them best shall seem by the law’; and though an Act of 1388 provided that beggars should merely be imprisoned for forty days, the earlier statute was sometimes interpreted as allowing judges to impose the death penalty on vagabonds.

  Under Henry VII’s lenient régime, the harshness of the law was modified. An Act of 1495 declared that the King wanted all his subjects ‘to live quietly and surefully to the pleasure of God and according to his laws, willing and always of his pity intending to reduce them thereunto by softer means than by such extreme rigour therefor provided in a statute made in the time of King Richard II’. The Act of Richard II was repealed, and it was enacted that all ‘vagabonds, idle and suspect persons living suspiciously’ should be put in the stocks for three days and three nights and fed only on bread and water; anyone who gave them any other food during this time was to be fined twelvepence on every occasion that he did so. After being released from the stocks, the vagabond was to return to the parish where he was born or was best known; if he failed to do so, he was to be put in the stocks again, this time for six days and six nights. Old or impotent beggars who were unable to work were to be allowed to beg, but
only in their own parishes; if they went outside them, they were to be punished as if they were able-bodied vagabonds. It was to be no defence for a vagabond to prove that he was a university scholar, a soldier or a sailor, unless he could produce a certificate from the Chancellor of his university, his commanding officer or the captain of his ship, authorizing him to beg and go around the countryside.

  A second statute of Henry VII made the law against vagabonds still more lenient. By an Act of 1504 they were only to be put in the stocks for one day and one night for the first, and for three days and three nights for the second, offence. But it was different in the harsher times of Henry VIII. His Parliament in 1530 enacted that the local JPs were to draw up a list of all aged or impotent beggars in their districts and give them a licence to beg in their own parishes only; but anyone else who begged, and any man or woman who was fit to work, who owned no land, had no master, and practised no trade, and who was found roaming the country ‘and can give no reckoning how he doth lawfully get his living’, was to be taken by the constables to the nearest market town ‘and there to be tied to the end of a cart naked and be beaten with whips throughout the same market town . . . till his body be bloody by reason of such whipping’. He was then to be sent home to the parish where he was born, or where he had lived for the last three years; if he did not go there by the shortest route, he was to be whipped again. Anyone who gave food, money or shelter to a vagabond was to be fined any sum which the JPs chose to fix.