A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  Half a dozen inhabitants of London kept diaries which can still be read today, covering the years between 1485 and 1563. They all have a good deal in common. Charles Wriothesley, the herald, wrote rather more than the others about political events; and Henry Machyn, the undertaker, was particularly interested in funerals, the lying-in-state of the Kings and Queens, and the Masses held at the deaths of foreign sovereigns. But together they tell us a great deal about the ordinary life of the Londoners. They refer to the weather, to the very cold Christmas of 1536, when the Thames was frozen over and it was impossible to travel by barge, and the very hot summer of 1540, when the cattle died because the ponds had dried up. They did not have any way of measuring heat, for the first thermometer was not invented by Galileo in Italy until 1597, and the improved thermometer which he developed in 1612 did not reach England until later in the seventeenth century; but the comments of the diarists about the great heat and the bitter cold in the various years are confirmed in nearly every case by the records of the harvests and the price of corn.

  The diarists describe the days of national celebrations, when all the churches in London rang their bells for a day and a night, and the conduits in the streets ran with wine, like the capture of Francis I by Charles V’s army at Pavia in 1525 and the proclamation of Queen Mary during the revolt against Jane Grey in 1553. The executions of traitors and the burnings of heretics are often mentioned, usually very briefly and without comment. The Franciscan monk who kept the chronicle of the Greyfriars of London, both before and after the dissolution of the monastery, recorded very succinctly the burnings of heretics in the autumn of 1538:

  xxx Anno.15 This year the xxii day of November was one Lambert otherwise called Nicolas, was burned in Smithfield for great heresy. And the xxix of November was burned in Smithfield John Mattessey a Dutchman, Peter Finch and his wife, for heresy. And this year in December was beheaded at the Tower Hill Lord Henry Marquess of Exeter, Lord Henry Montagu and Sir Edward Neville. And this year was all the places of religion within the city of London suppressed in November. And this year the xxiii day of December was burned in Smithfield Richard Turner weaver and Peter Florence butcher.

  But Charles Wriothesley, who was never as concise as the Franciscan monk, wrote at greater length about the execution of Lady Bulmer for high treason because of the support which she and her husband had given to the rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace. He recorded that on 25 May 1537, after Bulmer and four of his colleagues had been taken to execution, ‘Margaret Cheyney, other wife to Bulmer called, was drawn after them from the Tower of London into Smithfield and there burned, according to her judgement, God pardon her soul, being the Friday in Whitsun week; she was a very fair creature and a beautiful.’

  Natural disasters are recorded, like the thunderstorm of 4 June 1561, when the steeple of St Paul’s Cathedral was set on fire by lightning and St Martin’s Church in Ludgate was burned down. The diarists, like most of the population, showed great interest in monstrous births; if a child with two heads, or without arms and legs, was born in Oxfordshire or Warwickshire, this was widely accepted as a sign that God did not approve of the government’s religious policy. When a calf was born at Highgate in December 1548 with two heads, four ears, four eyes, eight feet and two tails, it was led into London and exhibited to the Lord Mayor and aldermen and the public in Newgate before it was taken to the fields outside the city and killed and buried.

  The people were fascinated by unusual murder cases, like the case of young Lord Dacre of Hurstmonceux, who was usually called Lord Dacre of the South, to distinguish him from Lord Dacre of Gilsland in Cumberland, who was Lord Dacre of the North. On the night of 30 April 1541 Lord Dacre and thirteen young gentlemen and yeomen from London, Sussex and Kent met at Lord Dacre’s house at Hurstmonceux in Sussex and decided to go poaching on the lands of a gentleman who lived nearby at Hellingly. The party split into two groups, and set out for the woods by different routes. One group, which consisted of Lord Dacre and seven of his friends, encountered three of the landowner’s gamekeepers, and a fight ensued in which one gamekeeper was killed. Lord Dacre and the seven other poachers who had met the gamekeepers were put on trial for murder, and condemned to death. There was much sympathy for the good-looking young nobleman of twenty-four, but Henry VIII insisted that the death sentence be carried out, and Lord Dacre was duly hanged at Tyburn.

  No murder case during the Tudor Age attracted as much attention as the murder of Thomas Arden in his house at Faversham in February 155116 by his wife and the servant who was her lover, with the help of her maidservant and other servants and their friends in the town. The case had all the necessary ingredients of violence, sex, and the social standing of the victim, to arouse public interest. Mrs Arden was burned at Canterbury, because she had committed petty treason by murdering her husband. So had the servants by murdering their master; and the maidservant was burned and the menservants hanged, drawn and quartered at Faversham. The criminals from the town were merely guilty of murder, and were hanged. People still remembered the murder forty years later, when the play Arden of Faversham was performed on the London stage.

  It was an age of violence, though gentlemen did not kill each other in duels on anything like the scale on which this occurred in France in the sixteenth century. The common people killed each other in brawls in taverns, and in playing football. Men struck each other when angry, and to avenge an insult. Masters regularly beat their servants, and Foxe obviously considered that Cranmer deserved special praise because he never struck or reviled a servant. The Act of 1543, which enacted that if anyone shed blood within the curtilage of the court he was to have his right hand cut off, expressly exempted a master from punishment if he shed the blood of his servant while he was chastising him.

  Men and women often spat as an expression of contempt. They spat at men in the stocks and in the pillory. Women spat at admirers who irritated them, and clergymen spat at other clergymen with whom they disagreed on questions of theology. When the Protestant martyr, John Philpot, the former Archdeacon of Winchester, was imprisoned in the King’s Bench prison in Southwark in Mary’s reign, waiting to be burned as a heretic, he met a fellow-prisoner who was also about to be burned for heresy. The man was an Arian who, like Arius, denied the divinity of Christ. Philpot spat in the man’s face, and spent his last days before he and the Arian were burned in writing a tract with the makeshift writing materials which had been secretly smuggled into the prison. It had the splendid title Apology of John Philpot written for spitting upon an Arian. He enthusiastically vindicated his action, for the word ‘apology’ in the sixteenth century meant ‘justification’, not an expression of regret.

  Violence was always ready to erupt, particularly against foreigners. The English were famous throughout Europe for their hatred of ‘strangers’. Foreigners who came to England were always encountering this hatred, though sometimes the English would take a liking to one of them, and say: ‘It is a pity he is not an Englishman.’ The feeling against foreigners was especially strong in London. In 1517, a rumour that the Italian merchants there were seducing the wives and daughters of Englishmen started a riot against foreigners, which Henry VIII sternly suppressed; he insisted on hanging several of the rioters to show the foreign merchants that they could safely come to England to trade.

  The hatred of foreigners certainly played a part in turning the Londoners against the Protestants in the reign of Edward VI, when it was estimated that 5,000 foreign Protestants had come to London as refugees from religious persecution in their own countries. They constituted a substantial proportion of the 90,000 inhabitants of London in 1553. The Londoners did not like this, and supported Mary against Jane Grey; but within a few months the hatred of foreigners was a factor working in the Protestants’ favour, after Mary married Philip of Spain, and many Spaniards came to England. ‘The English hate us Spaniards worse than they hate the Devil,’ wrote one of King Philip’s gentlemen, ‘they rob us in town and on the road . . . We Sp
aniards move among the English as if they were animals, trying not to notice them; and they do the same to us.’ The English had better opportunities for displaying their hatred of Spaniards in the reign of Elizabeth I. For every Englishman who fought against Spain out of his devotion to the Protestant cause, there were probably ten who did so because they hated Spaniards and foreigners.

  Women were clearly regarded by everyone as being subordinate to men; but they were accorded a place of some importance and honour in society. Their husbands were expected to treat them kindly, and with respect; and Fitzherbert, in The Look of Husbandry, urged husbands to keep their wives fully informed about money matters.

  We can form some idea of the attitude of Tudor men towards women by the conduct of the characters in Shakespeare’s plays, though this is not an entirely reliable guide. In every generation, the heroes and heroines on the stage sometimes behave in the way in which conventional society expects them to behave, not in the way that the majority of the people of their generation in fact behave. In Shakespeare’s case, he took many of his plots from stories which had been published in Italy more than fifty years earlier, and therefore showed the attitude of Italians in 1540 more than of Englishmen in 1590. We cannot assume that Shakespeare himself necessarily agreed with the sentiments expressed by his characters, even by his heroes and heroines, for he had to bear in mind what his audiences wanted and what his patrons would tolerate. But Shakespeare could not present on the stage any character who was not at least understandable to his audiences, and to this extent, at least, the opinions and behaviour of his heroes and heroines show what was acceptable to Englishmen in the 1590s.

  Shakespeare’s women have strong personalities and great determination, whether they are playfully mischievous, like Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor or Maria in Twelfth Night; admirable and virtuous, like Desdemona in Othello, Imogen in Cymbeline, Cordelia in King Lear, Volumnia in Coriolanus and Portia in Julius Caesar; evil, like Goneril and Regan in King Lear, Margaret of Anjou in Henry VI, and Lady Macbeth; or women who show great professional expertise, like Portia the lawyer in The Merchant of Venice, Helena the physician in All’s Well that ends Well, and Viola the diplomat in Twelfth Night. Lady Macbeth is wicked, but she shows greater resolve and strength of character than her husband.

  The ballads which were sung, and sold in the shops and streets in London, told stories not only of the exploits of English soldiers and seamen who fought against the Spaniards in the Netherlands, at Cadiz, and on the Spanish Main, but also of a heroic woman warrior; for the idea of a woman disguising herself as a man and surpassing all the men on the battlefield has fascinated people in every age until, in the twentieth century, it became possible for women to serve as soldiers without disguising their sex. The ballad of Mary Ambree, in the 1580s, told the story of a young English woman who accompanied her sweetheart when he went to fight as a volunteer in the Netherlands and, after seeing him killed in action, disguised herself as a man and performed deeds of valour against the Spaniards. When she is finally taken prisoner by the Spaniards, who boast of having captured an English knight and captain, she reveals the truth:

  No captain of England; behold in your sight

  Two breasts in my bosom and therefore no knight,

  and then proceeds to demonstrate the virtue as well as the courage of English women by refusing the invitation of the Duke of Parma to become his mistress. She explains to him that a maiden of England will never agree to become the harlot even of a monarch.

  In Tudor England gluttony, not lust, was the national sin, and the courts of the Tudor sovereigns, and Tudor society, were largely free from the sexual immorality of the court of the French Kings. There is nothing in English drama or literature to compare with the stories of the love affairs of noble ladies and merchants’ wives in Queen Margaret of Navarre’s Heptameron of 1530 and the Abbé Brantôme’s Lives of Gallant Ladies fifty years later. Shakespeare’s unmarried young women sometimes flirt and tease, but the only married women in all his plays who are unfaithful to their husbands are the very villainous Goneril and Regan. His plays show the double standards which in every age, at least until the twentieth century, have always been applied to extra-marital relationships when indulged in by men and women. Desdemona is virtuous, and the admirable Cassio never attempts to seduce his general’s wife; but no one thinks the worse of him because he has a whore, Bianca.

  A visitor from Mantua, who came to England in 1557, suspected that English wives were not always as virtuous as they appeared to be. He thought that many of them had lovers, though they were very careful to keep this secret, for if they were found out, they might be treated as bawds, and either ducked in the pond or exposed in a cart to public ridicule and contempt. Like many other foreigners, he found English women very beautiful, and thoroughly approved of the custom in England that when a man met a woman acquaintance, he greeted her with a kiss. The visitor from Mantua also commented on the fact that when Englishmen met, they usually shook hands, like the Germans did. He noted that there were no brothels in London, for ‘the stews’ had been suppressed after a big round-up of prostitutes and vagabonds in 1519.

  Although Shakespeare’s married women are strong and determined, they do not defy their husbands’ authority over them. The only two who attempt to do so, Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are eventually reduced to submission by the punishments which their husbands most properly inflict upon them. But married women also have their rights, the chief of which is not to be wrongly suspected of having committed adultery. Several of Shakespeare’s virtuous wives are accused of adultery by jealous husbands who have been persuaded to do so by some villain acting in his own interests. Othello reacts by murdering Desdemona. He is portrayed as a noble character, apart from his one fault of being too credulous and being deceived by Iago’s lies; and it is clearly implied that if Desdemona had in fact been guilty, he would have been quite justified in smothering her. In this, Shakespeare is following the tradition of his Italian sources. There were several cases in Italy and France of cuckolded husbands taking the law into their own hands and killing their adulterous wives; but if any English nobleman had done this in the Tudor Age, he would have been prosecuted for murder.

  The motives of Shakespeare’s villains in slandering these virtuous women tell us a good deal about the Tudor Age. Iachimo slanders Imogen merely because she has rejected his advances; but lust plays only a very minor part in Iago’s slanders against Desdemona. His principal motive is the hope of gaining more rapid promotion in the army by incriminating Cassio. Don John in Much Ado About Nothing is a character that Tudor audiences could well understand. He wrongly accuses the virtuous maiden, Hero, of unchastity in order to prevent her marriage to a ‘young start up’ who may rival his influence at court.

  Shakespeare was a friend of Marlowe and Kyd, who were suspected of atheism and sedition. He moved in a circle of unorthodox intellectuals who held opinions on morals which they did not dare to express openly, but which sometimes emerge in the plays. Hamlet, who is certainly portrayed as a sympathetic character, behaves on several occasions in a way which was outrageous by orthodox standards of the period. He murders Polonius, thinking that he is killing the King and committing the supreme and unpardonable sin of regicide; and he then proceeds to treat Polonius’s corpse with a shocking lack of respect. On his way to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he first breaks open a letter sealed with the King’s seal, and then forges the seal, an offence which was high treason and punishable by death in Tudor England. By these means he contrives for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be put to death without giving them time to confess their sins to a priest. Finally, in the last dramatic scene, he actually commits regicide by killing the King, after fighting a duel with Laertes during which the Queen states that Hamlet ‘is fat, and scant of breath’. This remark was sure to raise a laugh from the audience at the Globe Theatre, for Shakespeare’s leading actor, Rich
ard Burbage, who played Hamlet, was a fat man who puffed and panted when he had to fight an energetic duel on the stage.

  The subordinate position of women in society was not affected by the fact that for fifty years between 1553 and 1603 England was ruled by two female sovereigns. For a thousand years it was accepted by public opinion that the only position in public life which a woman was allowed to hold was to be head of State; for royal privilege was powerful enough to override the general rule about the inferiority of women. Elizabeth I, who often referred to the fact that although she was a weak woman she had been chosen by God to be a queen, wished to uphold the conventions of society and to exalt the royal prerogative by stressing that it was only because she was a queen that she was entitled to meddle in public affairs, which no other woman ought to do. This was accepted by the great majority of her subjects, though Nicholas Heath, the Catholic Archbishop of York, when opposing the Act of Supremacy in the House of Lords in 1559, said that as a woman could not be a priest or hold any position in the Church, she could not be its Supreme Head.

  Knox, who throughout his life worked closely with several devoted women collaborators in the Protestant movement, challenged the concept of the royal prerogative by asserting that queens were no exception to the general rule that a woman could not hold any position of authority in the State. It was because Knox attacked her position as a queen, not her rights as a woman, that Elizabeth considered him to be a dangerous revolutionary.

  The Protestant movement was originally a revolutionary movement against Church and State, and when Mary became Queen its extremist wing became revolutionary again, after a twenty-year interlude during which the Protestants had been the most zealous upholders of absolute monarchy. This may have been the reason why women were attracted to Protestantism. Many women rebelled against their inferior status, as well as the heresy laws, by becoming active in the Protestant movement. Women normally played no part in politics. When, after the suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1537, some women took down the corpses of executed rebels which had been left to hang in chains in the villages in Cumberland, the authorities assumed that they had done so on the orders of their husbands. In view of this, it is very significant that of the 283 Protestant martyrs who were burned in Mary’s reign, as many as fifty-six were women.