Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  Beyond the court, urban corporations also commissioned royal portraits and maintained minstrels or waits to perform on ceremonial occasions. Ordinary people sang carols in church – indeed, the Reformation encouraged lay participation – and folk songs and printed ballads in taverns and out-of-doors. The ability of ordinary people to read and sing from ballad sheets reminds us that literacy was rising in late Tudor and early Stuart England. With the increasing number of endowed parish schools, and the printing press, much popular culture was transmitted through cheap, easy-to-read chapbooks and almanacs. But most such culture was traditional and oral: that is, its authorship was unknown and it was transmitted by word of mouth from generation to generation and place to place by roving minstrels, ballad singers, and players who often appeared at fairs and markets. In 1606 one contemporary complained that many people knew more about Robin Hood, a legendary figure since the fourteenth century, than they did the Bible. The popular calendar was full of holidays like St. Valentine’s Day,

  Shrove Tuesday (the day before Ash Wednesday), and May Day which once had religious significance but had now become an excuse to relax and have a good time singing, drinking, playing football, or, on the last of these, dancing around a Maypole. Puritan social reformers scorned such activities, but other members of the elite were not so hostile. Early in the seventeenth century James I even issued the Book of Sports, noting which recreations and revels could be performed on the Sabbath.

  The art form for which the Elizabethan and Jacobean age is best known is, arguably, the theater. The first plays in the English language were medieval mystery and mummers’ plays and pageants, mounted on religious feast days in communities large and small all over England and Wales. These were suppressed at the Reformation, but successive Protestant regimes sponsored anti-Catholic plays of their own. These and other short, secular interludes were performed in private houses by strolling bands of players. By the time of Elizabeth’s accession, full-fledged five-act plays were being mounted by young men at the universities and Inns of Court, especially during the Christmas holidays. The greatest of these university wits was Christopher Marlowe (1563/4–93), who wrote Dr. Faustus, Tamburlaine, and the History of Edward II. The queen occasionally attended such productions while on progress or on visits to the Inns for their Christmas revels. She enjoyed these plays so much that she began to encourage their performance at court, establishing the office of master of the revels in 1579 to supervise their production. She also gave royal protection to a company of actors, the Queen’s Men, as did Leicester and other court peers. This allowed such companies to tour the country and mount plays for paying audiences. In fact some scholars think that they were part of Walsingham’s spy system.

  Such protection was necessary because the law was hostile to roving bands of masterless men: in particular, the Poor Law of 1572 outlawed “common players in interludes & minstrels, not belonging to any baron of this realm” (14 Eliz. 1, c. 5). Actors ran into the stiffest opposition from the civic authorities of London, who disliked the idea of ordinary people – their employees – idling away their time watching plays. In fact, large crowds of any sort were thought to be dangerous nurseries of sedition, crime, and disease. This explains why the earliest theaters were built outside of the city walls, beyond Guildhall jurisdiction. The first was the Red Lion, established north and east of the city in Whitechapel in 1567. In 1576 James Burbage (ca. 1531–97) founded a public playhouse called, appropriately enough, “the Theatre” in the London suburb of Shoreditch. In 1577 a large open-air public theater entitled “the Rose” was established in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames. This was followed in 1598 by the Globe. Here, all London could come together in the afternoon to see the latest play. But even here, hierarchy obtained: the wealthy sat in upper boxes, the middling orders sat below them, and relatively common people stood in the large open area on the ground level – hence their designation as “groundlings.”

  As readers of this text will know, one player and writer among the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was a young immigrant to London from Stratford-upon-Avon named Shakespeare. No historian, and quite possibly no scholar, can do justice to, let alone explain, the dramatic power, the beauty of language, or the insight into the human condition demonstrated in the plays of William Shakespeare. For over 20 years, among a host of talented authors including Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare produced a series of comedies (Much Ado About Nothing; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Twelfth Night; The Merry Wives of Windsor), histories (Richard II; Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2; Richard III), and, above all, tragedies (Hamlet; Macbeth; King Lear; Romeo and Juliet) that delighted Londoners then and continue to speak to humanity now. It remains for the historian to note that these and similar masterpieces would not have been possible without, first, the royal protection and patronage which gave Shakespeare and his compatriots their start; second, the courage and ruthlessness of impresarios like Richard Burbage (1568–1619), who drove their authors and players hard in order to scrape together a profit; third, the rise of a popular audience with some disposable income and an interest in being entertained; and, finally and most remarkably, the development of the English language to a point of sufficient refinement and versatility by the end of the Tudor century that it could be deployed by playwrights to such great effect, and yet still be understandable to people of all social ranks.

  Ultimately, the language of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline England may be its most powerful and lasting cultural achievement, for it was during this period that English became eloquent, expressive, and comprehensible in a wide variety of forms of writing. Historians have offered a number of reasons for this development. First, the public controversies over the divorce and the Reformation encouraged publication generally, and directness and refinement of the language in particular. Thomas Cromwell and his successors patronized a torrent of closely argued pamphlets and treatises in support of the royal position. Related to this was the temporary relaxation of censorship under Edward VI and, with it, the increasing use of the printing press. Protestantism was also associated with the growth in schooling and rise in literacy noted above, which fueled a hunger for the books so printed. Where 800 books had been published in the decade 1520–9, that number rose to 3,000 in 1590–1600. Many of these books went to the great libraries of the nobility, gentry, or scholarly community: the mathematician and astrologer John Dee (1527–1609) had a personal library of 4,000 books. But an even greater number seem to have trickled down to the lower levels of society: in the city of Canterbury in the 1560s only 8 percent of household inventories (usually compiled when someone died) listed books. By the 1620s that percentage had risen to 45.

  Most of these books are little known today, but some have achieved immortality. We have noted the philosophical and historical works of Bacon, Foxe, and Ralegh, as well as the plays of Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare. In poetry, the English language made possible the works of Sidney noted above, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609), Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), the epic poems of Michael Drayton (1563–1631), and, later, the metaphysical poetry of John Donne (1572–1632) and George Herbert (1593–1633), and the cavalier lyrics of Sir John Suckling (1608/9–41?) and Abraham Cowley (1618–67). In geography, Richard Hakluyt (1552?–1616) promoted new exploration in Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589, 1598–1600), while William Camden (1551–1623) described the homeland in Britannia (1586, trans. into English 1610). English history was recorded in the Chronicles (1577) of Raphael Holinshed (ca. 1525–80?) and Camden’s Annales (1615, trans. 1635). In theology, Richard Hooker (1554–1600) provided the first thoroughgoing rationale for the Church of England in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (many volumes published between 1593 and 1682). In a lighter and more popular vein, there was the satire of Thomas Nashe (1567–ca. 1601) and the doggerel of the “water poet” (formerly a Thames “cabbie,” i.e. a waterman) John Taylor (1578–1653).

  But if one had to sum up the Elizabethan and
Jacobean achievement in language and, indeed, in culture generally, one might best turn to a work commenced at the behest of the Crown which became the most widely read and influential book in the English-speaking world: the Authorized Version of the Bible. It was commissioned by King James I in 1604 and labored over by a panel of 54 scholars for seven years. The King James version was, in fact, heavily dependent on the scholarship of previous English translations – that of Coverdale and Tyndale, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, etc. Whatever the source of its scholarship or theology, its language has captured the imagination of all users of English to the present day, from its opening “In the beginnings…” Consider these passages from Isaiah foretelling the coming of a savior, later set by George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) in his great oratorio, Messiah:

  Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God, Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. … The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low; the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed .… The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 40: 1–5; 9: 2, 6)

  Modern translations are more accurate to the ancient Hebrew and Greek, but it was language like this which captured the imaginations of contemporary English men and women and convinced them that their struggles against Spain, Catholicism, and the Devil were Biblical, if not apocalyptic. Its cadences and actual phrases still reverberate through our language and literature. Perhaps the most astounding thing about this document is that it was produced by a committee. There could be no more eloquent indication of how the vocabulary and cadences of Shakespeare, Hakluyt, Camden, and Hooker had permeated the educated classes.

  We have ended our extended portrait of later Elizabethan and early Jacobean society with, perhaps, its greatest achievement. But even here, as in so many other aspects of the Tudor inheritance, there was cause for worry as well as selfcongratulation. This eloquent and powerful language was, like the Bible itself, able to inform, but also to inspire and inflame. The printing press which spread the Word of God and the First Folio of Shakespeare was capable of spreading more revolutionary ideas, such as the notion, embraced by some Puritans, that all who had a Bible were perfectly justified in interpreting it according to their own lights. It was no accident that the government soon reenacted censorship after the Edwardian experiment with a freer press: statutes of 1549 and 1554 forbade the publication of heretical or seditious books. In the 1580s, when fears of Catholic restoration and Puritan sedition were increasing, these prohibitions became capital. In order to enforce them, Star Chamber decreed in 1586 that all printing presses had to be based in London, apart from those of the two universities; that all such presses had to be licensed by the Stationer’s Company; and that no book could be printed unless it had first been perused, then licensed, by a bishop. In 1637, Star Chamber imposed even stricter censorship: new books had to be licensed and registered with the Stationer’s Company, printers were required to enter a bond of £300 in pledge that they would print only licensed books; and the number of master printers was limited to 20, most of them congregated on Fleet Street in London. These prohibitions were enforced: when in 1579 the unfortunately named John Stubbs (ca. 1541–90) managed to publish a piece questioning Elizabeth’s proposed French marriage to the Duke of Alençon (see chapter 4), she ordered the public removal of his right hand. In 1593 John Penry (b. 1562/3) was executed for his role in publishing a series of Puritan tracts critical of the bishops.

  As this implies, if places like London and the New World were safety valves, they were also sources of new, potentially unsettling perspectives and ideas. For example, experience of the American wilderness would promote in England discussions of natural law, and its relationship to statute and common law. Given the existence of wildly different societies in America, how could the English claim that theirs was the one best way, or that royal power and elite domination, paternalism, and deference were perfectly “natural” or “God-given”? London was itself a thriving example of a capitalistic society, one whose hierarchy was based not on birth but on wealth and hard work and, therefore, it could be argued, on merit. The very idea of mobility, both geographical and social, which London and America represented was revolutionary and, potentially, corrosive of the Great Chain of Being. Finally, the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible might be used by King James himself to assert his Divine Right to rule; but it might be used with equal effectiveness to challenge that notion. Clearly, the English polity was full of tensions: local and national, political and geographical, economic and social, religious and cultural. Many of those tensions would come to a head in the next generation, during the first years of Stuart rule.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Early Stuarts and the Three Kingdoms, 1603–1642

  The great triumph of the Tudor State was, arguably, not the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. That was as much a matter of luck as pluck, of poor Spanish planning and bad weather as English prowess. The great triumph of the Tudor State was, rather, the peaceful accession of their successors, the Stuarts, in March 1603. Despite war with Spain, division at home, and an ambiguous and foreign claim, James VI of Scotland was proclaimed Elizabeth’s successor as James I of England without a hitch.1 While Edward IV and Henry VII had won their crowns in bloody battle and were forced to rush to London at the head of their armies to make good their titles to the throne, James won his through delicate negotiation with the sitting government, specifically Elizabeth’s secretary of state, Sir Robert Cecil. As a result, the new sovereign was able to take his time, embarking on a leisurely six-week progress south to his new capital. In the meantime, the Privy Council continued to run the country from London; the lords lieutenant, sheriffs, and JPs continued to run the countryside beyond it; and Cecil’s spy system continued to keep watch in between. It is a measure of the stability and competency of late Tudor government that all did so in the king’s name, but without the necessity of his actual participation. James finally arrived in London without incident, to cheering crowds, in May 1603. They cheered, in part, because, popular as Queen Elizabeth had once been, over a decade of economic depression, war, and high taxation, presided over by an increasingly miserly and reclusive head of state, had left many of her subjects yearning for something new.

  Who could have guessed that within two generations, on the morning of 30 January, 1649, the son of the monarch they were cheering so wildly, Charles I (ascended 1625), would march through the streets of the capital to a very different end? Who could have imagined a royal procession accompanied not by acclamation, but by stony silence, punctuated by the muffled drums of a military guard; the undisputed king of England going not to a crown but to a scaffold, where he would be executed by parliamentary order in the name of the very people who had turned out so enthusiastically to greet his father? This event would be the climax of a series of bitter Civil Wars which would rage in England, Scotland, and Ireland for over a decade (1637–51), destroying many of the gains of the Tudor State and dividing those countries more thoroughly than the Wars of the Roses had done.

  Because historians, blessed with hindsight, know that the British Civil Wars happened, they have had difficulty writing the history of these kingdoms under James I and Charles I with any objectivity: how can one judge their rule on its own merits knowing its disastrous end? For most of the last 400 years the early Stuarts were seen as directly causing the Civil Wars. In this view, every government policy, parliamentary debate, or local protest was part of a
continuous struggle between the king and the forces of autocracy on one side and the people and the forces of liberalism and democracy on the other. This interpretation has been labeled “Whig,” after a political party which developed later in the seventeenth century and which was generally associated with limiting monarchical and promoting parliamentary power (see chapter 9). The Whig interpretation was especially popular during the nineteenth century, when liberal ideas and representative institutions seemed to triumph all across Europe and the Americas. British historians could not help but see these developments as rooted in the strife between king and Parliament which culminated in the British Civil Wars.

  More recently, during the first half of the twentieth century, Marxist historians saw the Civil Wars as the climax of a struggle between the landowning and the merchant classes which dated back to medieval times. According to Marxist theory, the Civil Wars were the most dramatic stage of a long-drawn-out fight between a feudal aristocracy, trying to retain its hegemony over British society, and a rising class of merchants and professionals, trying to seize that hegemony and remake England, in particular, into a bourgeois society. Toward the beginning of the last century, another group of historians, influenced by the writings of Max Weber, attributed the causes of these wars to primarily religious factors, in particular the rise of an aggressive Puritanism. According to this view, Puritans emphasized property, rationality over tradition, and individual conscience – first in religion, but then in civil matters – over obedience to institutions like monarchy. They demanded reform not only of the Church of England but of society itself. Since the Stuart kings were apparent enemies to Puritans and to such reform, they had to go.