The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England
Page 16
These views are to be noted at all levels of society. The playwrights Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher all describe royal personages being drawn in their chariots by black men. James VI of Scotland – Elizabeth’s successor as ruler of England – makes such a scene reality, and has black slaves pull him along in a coach. In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1593), Aaron the Moor is loved by Tamora, the queen of the Goths, who has a child by him; but Aaron is a man party to ‘murders, rapes and massacres, acts of black night, abominable deeds’. He himself murders an innocent nurse to cover up his adultery with Tamora. He is not portrayed as ignorant; indeed, there is a fierce intelligence in him. Shakespeare gives him the line: ‘look how the black slave smiles upon the father, as who should say: “Old lad, I am thine own.”’ But the character is still not a kind one. Not until Shakespeare writes Othello in 1604 does he produce a sympathetic portrait of a black character.
The slave trade does not result in huge numbers of Africans coming to England. In fact, the queen discourages the slavers from bringing them here, on the grounds that there are already too many unemployed people in England. In 1596 she even gives a licence to a Lübeck merchant to transport them out of the country. But a fashion for black servants has begun to take root. The queen herself has one in 1574 and employs black musicians and dancers.43 Sir William Pole, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake all keep black servants. Apart from gentlemen’s houses, you will come across black people most frequently in ports. They are invariably described in ways that makes it clear they are still owned. In Plymouth, for example, in 1583 there is ‘Bastien, a blackamoor of Mr William Hawkins’, and ten years later we learn of ‘Christian, Richard Sheere’s blackamoor’. As the name suggests, the crucial thing for any black person living in England is to be baptised: it is the essential first step towards becoming acceptable in a society that associates black skin with the Devil.44
Scientific Knowledge
The sixteenth century has left us with a number of household names in the world of science. In astronomy we have Copernicus, author of De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium (1543), in which he suggests that the Earth orbits the Sun. In anatomy we have Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), the first detailed look at the workings of the human body. And in medicine there is the work of Paracelsus, whose use of chemical substances to treat ailments has a profound effect on medical science. The silver-nosed Tycho Brahe – who lost his nose in a duel – catalogues the stars, and at the end of the century Galileo not only demonstrates the correctness of Copernicus’s theory, but makes a whole series of discoveries: from the moons of Jupiter to the existence of sunspots, from the constancy of the speed at which objects fall to the regularity of the swinging of a pendulum. You could say that all these men are explorers, in a manner of speaking, and that Columbus is the inspiration to them all, for he has demonstrated unequivocally that the Ancient Greeks and Romans did not know everything. In fact, Copernicus’s discoveries in astronomy have earnt him the epithet ‘the Columbus of the heavens’. But all these men are Continental. Copernicus is Polish, Vesalius Flemish, Paracelsus German, Brahe Danish and Galileo Italian. Is there no English genius to rival these famous pioneers of science?
England is home to a number of groundbreaking scientists – or practitioners of ‘natural philosophy’, to use the correct Elizabethan terminology. Natural philosophy is an enquiry into the truth of the world, and thus there is no conceptual difference between a geographer and a scientist. Someone using mathematics to establish the width of the Atlantic is as much a ‘natural philosopher’ as an astronomer. It is not surprising that English ‘scientific’ discoveries go hand in hand with English imperial ambitions. As explorers set out to find new countries overseas, natural philosophers are in ever-increasing demand to answer questions of navigation, astronomy, mathematics and physics. Discoveries of new lands bring knowledge of new animals, new plants and new medicines; in turn they inspire the classification of all the known plants and animals to assist further enquiries. The scientific and geographical exploration of the Earth and the stars can thus be construed as one great multifaceted experiment: a loop of discovery and enquiry that results in exponentially increased levels of scientific activity.
Dr John Dee and his pupil Thomas Digges are both inspired by Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium and write approvingly of his theory. Soon, however, these astronomers start to ask even more fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. A new comet in the sky in 1572 reveals to Digges that, contrary to Aristotle’s teaching, the stars are not fixed in their places; the heavens are not crystalline in their structure and the moving celestial objects – the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – do not all revolve around the Earth.45 In 1583 Digges revises his father’s almanac, which recites all the pre-Copernican beliefs and the Aristotelian concept of the heavens, and in an addendum explains why Copernicus’s theory of the planets orbiting the Sun is correct. He even shows how Aristotle came to be so wrong.46
There are three other men who are obvious candidates for the prize of the most influential English natural philosopher of Elizabeth’s reign. The statesman Francis Bacon deserves mention not for any particular discovery but because he formulates the modern scientific approach – the ‘Baconian method’ – in his great work, Novum Organum. Although it will not be published until 1620, Bacon is very much a man of Elizabeth’s reign; born in 1561, he is the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon and nephew of Sir William Cecil. Bacon argues that, through a process of experimentation and identifying the criteria for a phenomenon, you can develop a hypothesis which can then be tested. He lays the foundation for a form of research that is intellectually far superior to simply looking for answers in the books of writers from the ancient world. No doubt that sounds obvious to you – but while it is true that many natural philosophers in Elizabeth’s reign are already applying this method, they are being dismissed by contemporaries who will not shift their faith in the old authorities. Thomas Blundeville, for example, publishes a book in 1594 in which he ridicules Copernicus for his theory that the Earth orbits the Sun, stating that ‘Ptolemy, Aristotle, and all other old writers affirm the Earth to be in the midst, and to remain unmoveable and to be in the very centre of the world, proving the same … the Holy Scripture affirming the foundations of the Earth to be laid so sure that it never should move at any time’.47 Anyone who has listened to an ageing professor spouting rubbish and telling you that you must believe it because he read it in a book will surely look at Bacon with gratitude and respect.
The second great English natural philosopher is Thomas Harriot – the same Harriot who teaches himself Algonquian and sails to America in 1584. Having charted the Roanoke area and written his book on Virginia, he devotes his time to mathematics. He works out a means of correcting the apparent distortions of Mercator’s projection of the world in two dimensions. He discovers the sine law of refraction, establishes how to describe the parabola of a cannonball in flight, and makes the first ever astronomical observations using a telescope. Not only does he apply the instrument to the moon’s surface four months before Galileo, he also makes observations about Jupiter’s satellites and sunspots before the great Italian. And astronomy is just his hobby: his main achievement is in the field of algebra.
Probably the greatest Elizabethan natural philosopher, however, is William Gilbert. A trained physician, he is highly successful in his medical practice and obtains a coat of arms in 1577. Being acquainted with the explorers Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, he becomes interested in nautical affairs, especially the mathematics of navigation. He publishes his great work, De Magnete, in 1600. In this book he argues that the Earth is one great lodestone or magnet. He explains how the nautical compass works and puts forward suggestions as to how mariners might calculate longitude as well as latitude. He demonstrates that magnetism is an immaterial force, capable of operating through solid bodies and e
mpty space. He is one of the first to formulate the idea that space is a vacuum and that the Earth revolves along the axis of its magnetic poles. Galileo sits up and takes note. But that is not all. Gilbert is also the father of electricity, on account of his experiments with new electrostatic substances and his observations of the electrostatic properties of matter.48
It is fitting that, when it finally appears, Bacon’s Novum Organum has a picture of a ship as its frontispiece, sailing off in search of new lands. Science as exploration enlarges the understanding of the flora and fauna of the world. William Harrison considers it a wonder ‘how many strange herbs, plants and annual fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americas, Taprobane [Sri Lanka], the Canary Isles and all parts of the world’. William Turner, ‘the father of English botany’, publishes his great three-part listing of all the English plants, The New Herbal, in 1568. Henry Lyte updates it ten years later, and the most famous botanist of them all, John Gerard, produces The Herball, or the Generall Historie of Plants in 1597. This is a truly impressive work, containing references to every plant imaginable, including exotica such as the ‘Indian nut tree’. Coconuts have been known for many years – cups have been made out of them since the late Middle Ages – but Gerard’s book contains an image of the actual tree as well as the fruit, and a description of the leaves and the white flesh of the nut as well as the taste of the milk.49 His work is methodologically much more thorough than that of earlier botanists too. He notes, for example, that although it is commonly supposed that the mandrake takes the shape of a man’s legs and will shriek and cause the death of the man that uproots it, this is
false and most untrue. For I myself and my servants also have dug up, planted, and re-planted very many: & yet never could either perceive shape of man or woman, but sometimes one straight root, sometimes two, and often six or seven branches coming from the main great root.50
The educated elite in Elizabethan society now has the intellectual means to question received knowledge and to direct new research. It is not surprising that one in ten books published during the reign is in a field of science.51
Superstition and Witchcraft
Mathematical brilliance and minds attuned to scientific experimentation are perhaps to be expected among the educated elite, but what about the more humble elements of society? When writers tell you that you can cause a man to feel great pain by burning his excrement, that you should not lend fire to a neighbour or else your horses will die, or that if a woman loses her hose in the street it means her husband is unfaithful, you have to suspect that your world view may not be compatible with those of the locals.52
Today we commonly take for granted that there is a fundamental conflict between scientific knowledge and religious beliefs. It is also widely assumed that, as science expands its reach, so superstition and religion diminish.53 These assumptions are wrong. Just as the typical sixteenth-century man cannot separate the physical from the metaphysical (as we have seen in the previous chapter), so he cannot separate scientific knowledge from his faith. In fact, many discoveries are rooted in religion. One sixteenth-century medical work carries a pertinent quotation from the Bible on its title page: ‘God hath created medicines of the earth and he that is wise will not condemn them.’54 Ordinary people express similar views. Maria Thynne comments to her husband that, ‘Though God’s power can work miracles, yet we cannot build upon it that because He can, He will, for then He would not say He made herbs for the use of man.’55 Some believe that God has created remedies for all the diseases in the world in the form of plants, and mankind has a spiritual duty to discover them through expanding its botanical knowledge. It follows therefore that any scientific discoveries which help men navigate the world and bring back exotic remedies also have their divine purpose. Religion is the father of science.
Given this, it is hardly surprising that natural philosophy extends far beyond what we would consider the boundaries of science. Numerology, alchemy and astrology are just three of the ‘pseudosciences’ that are regarded as quite acceptable subjects for natural philosophers. Numerology has a long history; in the words of John Dee: ‘all things (which from the very first being of things, have been framed and made) do appear to be formed by the reason of numbers’.56 Alchemy is the old chemistry that inspired Paracelsus and which still has many practitioners. In 1564 the queen makes a contract with an alchemist called Cornelius Alvetanus to manufacture 50,000 marks of pure gold each year. Unfortunately for both parties, he fails and is locked in the Tower for his deception.57 As for astrology, while some people deplore attempts to discern the future from looking at the stars, it is a valid branch of scientific investigation for many others. The physician Simon Forman consults his astrological charts not only to know the best time to draw blood or diagnose a sickness but also to predict his clients’ future. In 1601 seventy-two women visit him seeking astrological advice: they ask him about their marriage prospects, whether certain men love them, when and if their seafaring husbands will return home, whether they should set out on a journey and whether they should buy property. Clergymen too rely on the stars: a Mr Broughton comes to Simon seeking information on whether he will be made dean of Chester Cathedral.58 Even the government has been known to ask for astrological advice. Dr John Dee is summoned to cast a horoscope to divine the most auspicious date for Elizabeth’s coronation in 1559.59
Men explore superstitious phenomena in the belief that they are investigating the real world. The very sense that anything is possible is what allows experimentation to be so open-minded. If you can’t distinguish between scientific truth and superstitious belief, it is not irrational to investigate any phenomenon as if it might be a scientific truth. In 1582 Dr Dee embarks on a series of experiments with another alchemist, Edward Kelley; together they seek knowledge of angels through séances. In April 1587 an angel called Madimi orders the two men to hold everything in common, even to the extent of sharing their wives with each other. They seek clarification ‘whether the sense is of carnal use (contrary to the seventh Commandment) or of Spiritual love’. ‘Carnal use,’ replies the angel. Who are they to stand in the way of science? The alchemists and their wives duly comply.
As you can see, ignorance shades into superstition and credulity, and these in turn shade into faith and knowledge, just as they do today. Dreams are interesting: no one can deny that they happen, but why do they happen, and what do they mean? Many people believe that dreams can be interpreted systematically to establish the future, just as the biblical Joseph explained the pharaoh’s dreams. In 1576 Thomas Hill publishes his The Most Pleasant Art of the Interpretation of Dreams. If you open his book at random, you find the statement that ‘if a woman dreameth that her lover cometh to present her a swine’s head as a friendly gift, declareth that she shall after hate her lover and forsake him, for the hog is ungrateful to Venus’s works’. On the facing page there is something even more bizarre: if a man: ‘dreameth that he hath three privy members standing together’, it means he was an apprenticed servant and is now a free man and will have three names where once he had but one. But if he dreams that three ears of corn are growing out of his breast, and he has them plucked away, he will have two sons who ‘through an evil calamity and mishap shall be slain and thieves also beset his house’.60 Odd, you may think, and hardly scientific. But dream interpretation intrigues all generations – you only have to think of Freudian psychoanalysis to realise that Thomas Hill is not alone in trying to interpret dreams meaningfully.
Ghosts are another interesting case. In the modern world many people still believe in ghosts. In the sixteenth century, the denial of Purgatory by Protestants implies that the souls of the deceased go straight to Heaven or Hell and so they cannot return to Earth. The Puritan William Perkins is therefore astounded that good Protestant folk can be so ‘ignorant’ as to believe that the dead might reappear. However, as Shakespeare’s plays Hamlet and Macbeth both show, the belief that the ghosts of the dead might appear between midnig
ht and cockcrow is as current in Protestant England as it was in the Catholic Middle Ages. In 1599 Thomas Platter remarks on a building near Tyburn so haunted that no one can live in it.61 Yet there are many superstitions which are not shared by all. While William Horman’s Vulgaria includes such lines as ‘old witches do make a great matter of paring of a man’s fingernails’, you are also told that ‘the readers of dreams often times expound them more to please than to say truth’ and that ‘the world can never be delivered clearly of superstitious opinions’. Clearly Horman himself is one of the less superstitious. Another line reads:
some make search and divination by water, some by basins, some by axes, some by glasses, some by the nail of the finger, some by dead carrion, some by conjuring of a soul, and such other and all be accursed or peevish; yet lewd folk take great heed and credence of such things.
There you have it. Although sixteenth-century knowledge incorporates much that we call superstition, there are Elizabethan sceptics who disbelieve many of the old wives’ tales and folklore of the time. Given that most people don’t rightly know whether Earth goes round the Sun or the Sun goes round the Earth, it is hardly surprising that people have doubts about the meanings of dreams and the existence of ghosts.
WITCHCRAFT
In 1552, when Elizabeth is still a young woman, Bishop Latimer writes: ‘a great many of us, when we be in trouble or sickness, or lose anything, we run hither and thither to witches or sorcerers, whom we call wise men’. Eighteen years after her death we read in Robert Burton’s famous Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘sorcerers are too common; cunning men, wizards and white witches, as they call them, in every village, which, if they be sought unto, will help almost all infirmities of body and mind’.62 Across the reign, therefore, you will find a widespread belief in the power of witchcraft. In some places it is the fourth most common form of crime, after sexual offences, non-attendance at church and violent assault.63 You might think of it as a superstition, but in Elizabethan England witches not only exist, but are officially recognised in law as having the power to hurt and kill people with their cunning. If you are accused of bringing about someone’s death through witchcraft, you might end up being sentenced to hang for the crime – even if you have no idea of how to cast a spell.