The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

by Mortimer, Ian

  Sailing with Hawkins on that ill-fated 1567 voyage is a young man from Devon called Francis Drake. The trip leaves him with a vision of the wealth to be seized, and a thirst for revenge on the Spaniards who have killed so many of his fellow mariners. In 1572 Drake manages to capture the annual Spanish convoy bringing bullion back from the New World. Eight years later he achieves an even greater feat when he completes a circumnavigation and, in so doing, becomes the first man to captain a ship all the way round the world (see chapter 7). He returns to England a hero. Quite how much money he brings back to Plymouth only Drake himself knows, but the Spanish believe it to be 1.5 million pesos – more than £600,000 or twice the English government’s annual revenue. Drake surrenders a large portion of this to the queen and in exchange receives a knighthood. Unsurprisingly, his success and fame prompt other men to follow his example. The second English captain to sail round the world, Thomas Cavendish, sets out in 1586; when he returns in 1588 blue damask sails decorate his ships and gold chains the necks of his men.

  The success of men like Hawkins, Drake and Cavendish facilitates the expansion of England’s overseas trade. But the idea of an empire – overseas dominions – does not come from an explorer but a historian. In November 1577 Dr John Dee is studying the history of the Celtic people of Britain. Learning that the Welsh prince Madoc sailed to America in the twelfth century and that King Arthur conquered not only parts of France and Germany, but also the North Pole (according to the old romances), Dee believes that Elizabeth should reclaim these lost territories because she is the heir to both the Welsh princes and King Arthur. On 22 November 1577 he rides to see the queen at Windsor.27 The intellectual seeds of empire are planted.

  In June 1578 Humphrey Gilbert receives official letters from Elizabeth that give him the right, for six years, to search out and settle remote lands that are not already in the hands of a Christian monarch, and to hold them from the queen as his own lordship. Elizabeth’s government has gone beyond sanctioning armed trading and piracy and begun a policy of conquest and settlement. Gilbert claims Newfoundland for the queen (and himself) on 5 August 1583: it is Elizabeth’s first territorial acquisition. Gilbert dies on the return voyage, but his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, is inspired to take up where he left off, sending out expeditions to Virginia, where Roanoke is founded in 1585. It does not thrive. English sailors return the following year to find the inhabitants starving, and by 1590 the settlement is abandoned. Raleigh sends another expedition in 1587 to establish a farming colony, but that too is unsuccessful. Nevertheless the English persevere. The first permanent settlement in America is established at Jamestown in 1607.

  Geographic knowledge does not just remain with the captains and navigators who sail with Hawkins, Drake and Cavendish. Crew members write accounts of their voyages. The remarkable Thomas Harriot, who learns Algonquian from two native Americans in England before travelling to Roanoke, publishes his Brief and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia in 1588. Other writers collect eyewitness accounts. By far the most influential of these is Richard Hakluyt, who publishes Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America in 1582 and the first edition of his greatest work, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, in 1589. And it is not just English travel accounts that are published; many writers, including Hakluyt himself, search out works by foreign authors about their discoveries. The first of these, giving details of the Spanish discoveries in America, is Richard Eden’s Decades of the New World, published in 1555.

  As for knowledge in the other direction, Englishmen have been travelling across northern Europe to Asia since the Middle Ages. There were English agents in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy (modern Russia) in the fourteenth century, and the English maintain close contact with the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden through the trade in Baltic timber and fish. During Elizabeth’s reign, such ventures are placed on a more formal footing with the establishment of large companies to finance them. The Muscovy Company is established in 1555; many London merchants regard trade with the Grand Duchy as much more profitable than venturing into the New World, as it does not entail fighting with Spaniards. Another important group of international traders, the Merchant Adventurers of London, is given a new charter in 1564. Martin Frobisher establishes his Cathay Company in 1577 and tries three times to sail to China through the North-West Passage – an impossible task in the sixteenth century. In 1579 the Eastland Company is established, with a depot at Elbing in Poland, and the following year sees the foundation of the Levant Company. The Barbary Company trading with Morocco is set up in 1585.

  At the same time more and more private merchants are finding their way around the world. For sheer endurance and determination in sub-zero temperatures, you have to take your hat off to John Davis, whose career takes him from the freezing seas of the Falkland Islands (and a diet consisting only of penguin) to Baffin Island west of Greenland. Hardly less inspiring is the journey of Ralph Fitch, who spends nine years travelling through Asia, returning to England in 1591. Partly as a result of Fitch’s experiences, the English East India Company is established in 1600. The company’s first expedition, under James Lancaster, sails from Torbay to Indonesia, establishing an English trading post in Java. The most remarkable of all Eastern adventurers, however, is Will Adams from Gillingham in Kent. Having previously sailed with Drake and searched for a North-East Passage to China by sailing north of Siberia, he serves with the Barbary Company. Changing employer yet again in 1598, he becomes the pilot for a fleet of five Dutch ships sailing to Japan, landing there in 1600. It takes eleven years for a letter by Adams to reach England, but nevertheless, by the end of the reign, Queen Elizabeth’s subjects have travelled the whole globe, met the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, and can tell stories of the splendours of civilisations on every continent – not to speak of disease-ridden tropics and frozen wastes.

  All this is the stuff of legend, but what does the housewife in the marketplace know of far-away lands? Most people know about different types of imported foodstuffs – oranges, pomegranates and sugar – and where they come from, even if they cannot afford them. They are familiar with the most famous exotic beasts, such as lions, camels, tigers and elephants, and can picture them from stories they have been told. But, unless they themselves travel, their knowledge is superficial. William Horman informs his young charges that ‘a camel will bear more burden of packs than three horses’ and ‘will go an hundred mile in a day’; yet he also notes that ‘there is such hatred between the dragons and the elephant that one will kill the other’ and that ‘the ostrich is greatest of all birds and eats and digests iron’. While you might find a cup fashioned out of a coconut in a goldsmith’s shop in London, and even come across a porcelain bowl imported from China, you will find great ignorance of the customs and religion of the regions where these things come from.

  Only the nobility and gentry travel overseas purely for the sake of their education. The Grand Tour through Germany to Italy is beginning to become popular as a good way for a young gentleman to finish his education. The inspiration for it derives partly from the increased teaching of the classics, partly from an awareness of the Renaissance – just think how many references there are in Shakespeare to Italians compared to French, Spaniards or Germans – and partly from new publications in English about the regions of Italy. It is also the result of many English Protestants seeking asylum in Protestant Germany and in the tolerant cities of Padua and Venice during the reign of Queen Mary. When these émigrés return to England in Elizabeth’s reign, they talk glowingly about the wonders of Italy. Richard Smith, journeying in the company of Sir Edward Unton in 1563, writes about all the places they visit. Here he describes a crocodile they see in Venice:

  a certain horrible beast which was taken in Ethiopia nine months before we saw him. This beast was supposed to be a crocodile. He was by estimate about fourteen foot long, his scales so hard and thick that no pike was able to pierce him to do him a great harm. H
is hind legs were longer than his fore legs, his nails great and long, his tail cutting like a saw, his head long, his mouth very wide [and] his teeth very great. He was taken with great iron hooks and a sheep’s head and a great chain of iron.28

  Smith is less impressed with the local people, writing that the citizens of Padua ‘differ much in apparel from the Venetians although little in pride and deceitfulness’, and he regularly castigates the Italians as ‘sluttish’ and ‘crafty beggars’. In 1597 Sir Thomas Chaloner writes to the earl of Essex that ‘a rabble of English roam now in Italy’.29 Everyone wants to see Rome; but they also want to learn the different manners and customs of foreign countries, try the different clothes, taste the strange food and see the pretty women. Commenting on the beauty of the local women is the one thing that English diarists travelling abroad share with foreign travellers in England.

  Attitudes to Foreigners

  The word ‘foreigner’ does not just mean a denizen of an overseas country: it means someone who does not come from the same town or city as you. People make a distinction between English ‘foreigners’ and people from overseas, whom they call ‘aliens’. If you go to the theatre you will see the latter presented in archetypal ways according to their nation. All Italians are shown as deceivers, all Frenchmen are fops and all Dutchmen boors. Turks are always bloody and Moors lascivious and devilish.30 The polymath Andrew Boorde writes about the countries of Europe in a similar manner, describing each nation in rhyme:

  I am a poor man born in Norway

  Hawks and fish of me merchants do buy all day

  And I was born in Iceland, as brute as a beast,

  When I eat candles’ ends I am at a feast.

  Tallow and raw stockfish I do love to eat –

  In my country it is right good meat.

  And so on for each nation. According to Boorde, the Cornish are the worst cooks and the worst brewers in the world, the Welsh are poor and given to thieving, and the Irish are just poor. The Flemish are all drunkards and eat butter. The Dutch make good cloth, but are too partial to English beer. Brabanters are praised except for their similar propensity to drink too much. Germans are idle and will not change their style of costume. Danes too are lazy, and Poles eat honey all the time.

  Attitudes to the French are complicated. England and France have been at war, intermittently, for centuries. The war comes to an end in 1564, after which attitudes are less bellicose; but an undercurrent of hostility remains. Until 1585, when the Spanish war breaks out, the French are the only real Continental threat to English security. On the other hand, if an Englishman has been abroad, he has almost certainly travelled through France; if he speaks just one foreign language, it is almost certainly French. Boorde is noticeably positive about the French, commenting on their inventiveness, especially in clothing. So there can be familiarity and respect as well as distrust towards people abroad.

  English attitudes as perceived by the foreigners themselves tend to reflect hostility, ignorance and suspicion. The Venetian Michiel Soriano comes out with his ‘hostile to foreigners’ comment (mentioned above) even though the Republic of Venice is relatively tolerant of English people at the time. Alessandro Magno, also of Venice, comments on the suspicious way everyone looks at him when he goes to hear a Catholic Mass at the house of an ambassador in 1562.31 The Dutchman, Emanuel van Meteren, similarly writes that the English are ‘very suspicious, especially of foreigners’.32 The duke of Württemberg’s secretary agrees: ‘because the greater part, especially the trades people, seldom go into other countries … they care little for foreigners but scoff and laugh at them’. Thomas Platter remarks that the lower classes of Englishmen ‘believe the world beyond England is boarded-off’, but adds that gentlemen and those who have themselves travelled are deferential towards foreigners.33

  These comments are all by wealthy travellers who are just visiting England. If their experiences are so negative, what are things like for the thousands of immigrants who permanently reside in the kingdom? From the very start of the reign, Protestants come to London seeking safety from Catholic persecution in Holland, Spain and France. In 1563 the government becomes increasingly concerned and creates a census of foreigners in the capital: the total stands at 4,543. The numbers swell dramatically when the Dutch Calvinists flee from the duke of Alba in 1567; the 1568 census reveals 9,302 foreigners in London, of whom 7,163 are Dutch and 1,674 French. Another large influx of Huguenots (French Protestants) arrives in 1572 after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

  The presence of so many foreigners worries Londoners. Many fear that the foreign merchants will take away their trade. They also bitterly resent the fact that the newcomers do not have to obey the same laws and customs as English citizens.34 The government fears (rightly) that there are spies among the immigrants and that the various factions among them are bringing in both radical Protestant and Catholic propaganda.35 Cultural differences are accentuated by the immigrants worshipping in French, Italian and Dutch Calvinist churches; for a short while there is even a Spanish Calvinist church in London.36 Such isolation irritates many people, who remark on the foreigners’ lack of community spirit. Sir Walter Raleigh declares in 1593 that charity is wasted on immigrants, for they do not support the queen and take the profits that should rightly go to Englishmen.37 John Stow echoes these sentiments, stating that thirty years ago, when there were just three Dutch people living in the parish of St Botolph, it used to raise £27 every year to help the poor. But now, with thirty households of Dutch people in the parish, barely £11 can be gathered, ‘for the stranger will not contribute to such charges as other citizens do’.38 For all these reasons, the privy council adopts the policy of moving immigrants out to provincial towns – but they are hardly any more welcome there. In Halstead in Essex, a small Dutch community incurs the hatred of the local populace, which accuses them of practising offensive trades, making the water filthy and causing nuisances. They are forced to leave their homes and return to Colchester.39

  Attitudes to foreigners are not entirely negative. French and Spanish dress is deemed sophisticated and alluring, and foreign styles are adopted by everyone trying to create a good impression.40 Dutch starching is enthusiastically taken up in the 1560s. Immigrant Italians are praised for their musical abilities and their instrument-making skills. Quite a large number become naturalised citizens. And some individuals show that immigrants can become accepted in society. No one speaks ill of Sir Horatio Palavicino. He gives up his Italian citizenship and becomes English in 1586 (receiving letters patent to that effect). Moreover, he advises the queen on the economy and has a fortune reputed to be in the region of £100,000 by the time of his death in 1600. That much money commands universal respect.

  Racism

  Black people, Native Americans and Ottoman Turks are seen by Elizabethans as fundamentally different. Such people are not Christians, and so it is not possible to appeal to common virtues and morals, which makes them doubly foreign. The result is a cruel racism. This is not a peculiarly English trait; racist attitudes are endemic throughout sixteenth-century Europe. But while Turks are simply dismissed as heathens, and gypsies rejected as vagabonds and thieves, the sub-Saharan African exemplifies all that the Elizabethan Englishman finds strange and incomprehensible.

  Africans are called ‘Moors’, ‘Blackamoors’, ‘Ethiopians’, ‘Nigers’ or ‘Negros’. Andrew Boorde divides them into ‘white moors and black moors’ and states that the latter are taken as slaves ‘to do all manner of service but they be set most commonly to vile things’. André Thevet, author of New Found Worlde (1568), explains that those of the north of Africa are ‘brown coloured, whom we call white Moors, others are clean black: the most parte go all naked’. Thevet adds that the heat of their climate makes black women promiscuous and the men ‘poor, ignorant and brutish’. Robert Gainsh’s account of an English voyage to Guinea in 1554 (which brings back half a dozen black slaves to England) reports that the inhabitants of central Africa live in ‘ho
rrible wildernesses and mountains’ among ‘wild and monstrous beasts and serpents’, adding that ‘women are common for they contract no matrimony neither have respect to chastity’. Writing in 1559, William Cunningham agrees that black people are ‘savage, monstrous and rude’. In 1577 an edition of Richard Eden’s History of Travayle in the West and East Indies describes the land of ‘the black Moors called Ethiopians or Negros, all which are watered with the river Negro, called in old time Niger. In the said regions are no cities but only certain low cottages made of boughs of trees plastered with chalk and covered with straw.’ He explains that the inhabitants are, apart from a few Muslims, ‘pure gentiles and idolators, without profession of any religion or other knowledge of God’.41

  To be fair to Elizabethans, their views are affected by preconceived notions of the Garden of Eden and the subsequent Fall from Grace. It is possible to discern some respect for the black man: he is living in a natural world, unchanged since Creation. When Elizabeth knights Sir Francis Drake, on 4 April 1581 on the deck of the Golden Hind, she gives him a present of a locket: on the inside is a miniature portrait of herself by Nicholas Hilliard and, on the outside, an image of a black man engraved in sardonyx, set in gold and surrounded by pearls, rubies and diamonds.42 The memento combines the queen’s image with that of a black man. But while you might occasionally notice such indications of respect for the ‘noble savage’, there is no escaping the fact that the vast majority of inter-racial exchanges are fundamentally exploitative and unchristian.

  As the slave trade becomes more established and more lucrative, so the racism becomes worse. In 1578 George Best argues that black skin has nothing to do with the heat of the sun (on the evidence that a black African man and a white Englishwoman will produce a black child). He concludes that black people are damned because of illicit fornication by one of Noah’s sons in the Ark. By 1584 black skin is being linked with witchcraft. In this year Reginald Scot publishes his Discoverie of Witchcraft in which he describes an ugly devil as having ‘horns on his head, fire in his mouth, a tail, eyes like a bison, fangs like a dog, claws like a bear, a skin like a Niger and a voice roaring like a lion’. Soon the godless, naked, sexually promiscuous inhabitants of central Africa are associated with Satan himself, who is often portrayed as black in English religious pictures.