Great Tales from English History, Book 2

by Robert Lacey

  Cranmer’s death was a propaganda disaster for Mary’s government. Even loyal Catholics could see the unfairness in someone who had repeatedly recanted being punished just the same. In the forty-five killing months between 4 February 1555 and 10 November 1558, 283 martyrs — 227 men and 56 women — were burned alive for their faith. By June of that final year Londoners were reacting with anger and distaste: the burnings, hitherto held in front of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield, had to be shifted to secret places of execution. And elsewhere, things were looking no better for Henry VIII’s eldest child. Earlier in 1558 her armies had been driven out of the fortified port of Calais, the last vestige of England’s empire across the Channel; and she herself was mortally ill, dying of a stomach tumour that she had imagined to be a baby that would keep the Catholic cause alive.

  The very opposite proved the case — for the reign which began with such popular promise ended by inspiring a hostility to‘popery’ in England that is embedded to this day. It is still impossible for a British king or queen to be Roman Catholic or to marry a Roman Catholic, and the roots of the bitter hatreds that divide Northern Ireland can be similarly traced back to the fires of Smithfield. Stubborn, pious, Catholic Mary had helped make England a Protestant nation.

  ROBERT RECORDE AND HIS INTELLIGENCE SHARPENER

  1557

  ROBERT RECORDE WAS A WELSHMAN WHO studied at both Oxford and Cambridge in the reign of Henry VIII, before moving down to London to work as a doctor — he was consulted, on occasion, by both Edward VI and Mary. But it is for his maths that he is remembered. In 1543 he published The Ground of Arts, the first ever maths book in English, which ran through over fifty editions and introduced English schoolchildren to the tortured delights of such problems as: If a horse has four shoes, each with six nails, and you pay half a penny for the first nail, one penny for the second, two for the third, four for the fourth, and so on, doubling every time, how much will the shoeing of the horse cost?’

  The modern historian Adam Hart-Davis has pointed out that there are, in fact, two answers to this problem:126 pence, if the shoes are counted separately — that is, 4 lots of 6 nails — or 8,388,6075 pence (£34,952) if you continue the doubling process as you move through all the shoes and nails.

  In 1556, in The Castle of Knowledge, Recorde set out some of the revolutionary ideas of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus who had died in 1543. After a lifetime of studying the stars, Copernicus had come to the conclusion that the earth is not the centre of the universe, but moves around the sun, while also spinning on its own axis. Copernicus had been careful to keep his heretical observations to himself in his lifetime — it was an article of Catholic faith that the heavens moved around God’s earth — and Recorde, writing in the reign of Bloody Mary,exercised similar prudence:’I will let it pass till some other time,’ he wrote.

  But the innovation for which the Welshman is remembered today appeared the following year in his algebra book, The Whetstone of Wit (’The Intelligence Sharpener’). Until 1557, mathematicians had finished off a calculation by laboriously writing out the words‘… is equal to…’, which was sometimes abbreviated to ae (or oe), from the Latin word for equal — aequalis. But Recorde had a better idea: why not use a symbol?‘To avoide the tedious repetition of these woords’, he proposed the use of a pair of parallel lines: =.

  Using the simple device that we now call‘the equals sign’ released an enormous logjam in the efficient handling of numbers, and the implications extended far beyond pure maths. It immensely speeded up the calculations of astronomers and navigators — even shopkeepers — and what could be more satisfying for everyone than to round off a calculation with two elegant little parallel lines? As Recorde himself put it —‘noe two things can be moare equalle’.

  ELIZABETH - QUEEN OF HEARTS

  1559

  ELIZABETH I WAS CROWNED IN WESTMINSTER Abbey on 15 January 1559 — a date selected by her astrologer, Dr John Dee. Cheering crowds had lined the route as she set off from the City of London the previous day, and the red-haired Queen had time for everyone, holding hands, cracking jokes and watching with rapt attention the loyal pageants staged in her honour. When the figure of Truth approached her, carrying a Bible, the twenty-five-year-old monarch kissed the holy book fervently and clasped it to her breast.

  Flamboyant and theatrical, Elizabeth was very much her father’s daughter — with the dash and temper (as well as the piercing dark eyes) of her mother Anne Boleyn. Tudor to the core, she was spiky, vain and bloody-minded, with the distrustfulness of her grandfather Henry VII whose penny-pinching she also matched. At the receiving end of arbitrary power during her youth, she had lived with rejection and danger and survived to boast about it.’I thank God,’ she told her Members of Parliament a few years after she came to power, that I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the Realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom.’

  On the first day of her reign, the new Queen selected as her principal adviser William Cecil, her efficient estate manager whom she liked to call her‘spirit’. In fact, this hardworking servant of the Crown was anything but airy-fairy — Cecil provided ballast to the royal flightiness. At nine o’clock on the dot, three mornings a week, the dry little secretary summoned the Council to plough through the detail of administration. One early reform was to call in the much-debased‘pink’ silver pennies for re-minting: within two years the coinage was so well re-established that the government actually made a profit. Her reign also saw the creation of England’s first stock exchange. And to build up the nation’s shipping capacity — as well as its seafarers — it became compulsory in Elizabeth’s England to eat fish on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

  But it was religion that was the priority after the trauma of Mary’s excesses. Traditionally minded, like her father, Elizabeth favoured beautiful vestments, crucifixes and candlesticks, insisting there should be ceremony at the heart of Sunday worship. Also like her father, she disliked the new fangled Protestant notion of allowing the clergy to marry, and made clear her disapproval of their wives. England’s Catholics were also reassured when she declined to reclaim her father’s title as Supreme Head of the Church. It was a subtle distinction, but she settled for Supreme Governor.

  For their part, Protestants were pleased to see the powerful rhythms of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer restored, and hear again William Tyndale’s robust English ringing out when the gospel was read. Elizabeth offered both sides a compromise, and she promised no trouble to those who would live and let live — she did not wish to make, in Francis Bacon’s words,‘windows into men’s souls’. Elizabeth’s attempt at a tolerant middle way came to define a certain strand of Englishness.

  One subject on which she disagreed, however, with virtually every man in England — including William Cecil — was on her need to take a husband. It was inconceivable in the sixteenth century that a woman could lead a proper life, let alone run a country, without a better half: in 1566, in a telling display of insubordination, Parliament threatened to refuse to levy taxes unless the Queen took a husband. But Elizabeth was only too aware that if she married a foreign prince England would get embroiled in European wars, while an English husband could not help but provoke domestic jealousies.‘I am already bound to a husband,’ she liked to say,’which is the kingdom of England.’

  Thus came into being the powerful myth of Gloriana the Virgin Queen — bedecked in jewels and an endless succession of spectacular dresses that took on the status of semi-sacred vestments. Homage to this stylised, white-faced icon became compulsory — a draft proclamation of 1563 sought to insist that all portraits of Elizabeth had to be copied from one approved template. When John Stubbs, an evangelical pamphleteer, dared to criticise the Queen’s marriage policy in 1579, he was sentenced to have his writing hand chopped off with a cleaver/God save the Queen!’ he cried out after his right hand was severed, raising his hat with his left.

  This tyrannical,
capricious monarch was the inspiration for the most glittering and creative court England has ever seen. Every year Elizabeth would embark on her‘progresses’ — glorified summer holidays — in which the Queen, accompanied by her court and by a veritable army of horses and carts, set off to cadge free hospitality from the great of the land in their magnificent new windowed country houses.

  Well before the end of the century, Elizabeth’s accession day, 17 November, had come to be celebrated as a national holiday. Bells would be rung, toasts drunk, and poems composed in praise of the Faerie Queen who had made herself the embodiment of a dynamic and thrusting nation. And if by the end of the century the physical reality of Elizabeth in her sixties, lined and black-toothed, scarcely matched the idealised prints and portraits of the young monarch she once had been, people willingly suspended disbelief.

  In 1601 she received a deputation from the House of Commons, furious at the many abuses and shortcomings of her government in these her declining years. But when, bewigged, bejewelled and beruffed, she responded to them directly yet again, they fell willingly under her spell.’Though God has raised me high,’ she declaimed, in what became known as her‘Golden Speech’,‘yet this I count the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves… Though you have had and may have many mightier and wiser princes sitting on this seat, yet you never had nor shall have any that will love you better.’ The frail and fractious old lady was sixty-seven years old. But to her listeners she remained Gloriana, and one by one they shuffled forward to kiss her hand.

  THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

  1571

  AS YOU APPROACHED QUEEN ELIZABETH’S London from the south you were confronted by a ghastly sight. Down from the stone gateway above London Bridge grimaced a row of rotting and weathered skulls — the severed heads of traitors, some of them generations old. Every sixteenth-century town had its hanging place, a purpose-built gallows or a tree where malefactors were executed and left to putrefy, dangling there as a warning to others. There were several gallows in London. Twenty to thirty offenders were hanged every day the law courts sat, reported one Swiss-German traveller in 1599, who was clearly rather impressed.

  In a field to the west of London stood Tyburn Tree, the capital’s busiest hanging place — and hence a major venue for popular entertainment, where rowdy crowds gathered and children, straining to get a glimpse, would be hoisted on to their parents’ shoulders to cheer and jeer. Food and drink stalls did a brisk trade in pies, fruit and sweetmeats at the spot that is marked today by an iron plaque in the middle of the traffic island, near Speakers’ Corner, just across from the fast food and takeaway shops of Marble Arch.

  By 1571 the gallows traffic was such that a large wooden contraption had to be built on which as many as twenty-four bodies could be strung at once. The executioner was a local butcher who would tie a rope round the criminal’s neck while he sat in a cart. When the cart moved on, the victim was left dangling, and his friends ran forward to hang on his legs and try to hasten his painful strangulation. In 1577 the topographer-chronologist William Harrison’s Description of England listed the hanging crimes as buggery, murder, manslaughter, treason, rape, felony, hawk-stealing, witchcraft, desertion in the field of battle, highway robbery and the malicious letting-out of ponds.

  Many Elizabethan amusements were brutal by our tastes. In 1562 an Italian visitor, Alessandro Magno, described a Sunday-afternoon session at one of London’s animal-baiting pits, where admission cost the modern equivalent of £2 for standing room and £4 for a seat:

  First they take into the ring a cheap horse… and a monkey in the saddle. Then they attack the horse with soro of the youngest dogs. Then they change the dogs for more experienced ones… Itis wonderful to see the horse galloping along…with the monkey holding on tightly to the saddle and crying out frequently when he is bitten by the dogs. After they have entertained the audience for a while with this sport, which often results in the death of the horse, they lead him out and bring in bears — sometimes one at a time, sometimes all together. But this sport is not very pleasant to watch. At the end, they bring on a fierce bull and tie it with a rope about two paces long to a stake fixed in the middle of the ring. This sport is the best one to see, and more dangerous for the dogs than the others: many of them are wounded and die. This goes on until evening.

  It is a relief to turn to descriptions of the innovative wooden structures that were being built among the bear-pits of Southwark — the playhouses. In the early Tudor decades, pageants and rudimentary plays had been performed in tavern courtyards and in noble households by touring companies of players. But 1587 saw the construction of England’s first modern theatre, the Rose, an open-air stage and arena surrounded by wooden galleries — an enlarged and exalted version, in effect, of the tavern courtyard.‘They play on a raised platform,’ wrote the Swiss traveller Thomas Platter,’so that everyone has a good view. There are different galleries and places, however, where the seating is better and more comfortable and therefore more expensive… During the performance food and drink are carried round the audience… The actors are most expensively and elaborately costumed.’

  Today one can get a taste of Elizabethan theatregoing by visiting the Globe, a modern reconstruction of the original theatre that opened in Southwark in January 1599. By that date there was a little clutch of playhouses on the south bank of the Thames, safely outside the jurisdiction of London’s City Fathers, who disapproved of the low and licentious shows that tempted people away from work in the afternoons. The best-designed playhouses faced south-west so they could catch the afternoon sun as it set; the outstanding productions were honoured by an invitation to go and perform at court in the presence of Elizabeth.

  William Shakespeare is the most famous of an entire school of English playwrights who were the equivalent of the TV programme makers of today, churning out soap operas, thrillers, comedies and even multi-part series: we watch docudramas on the world wars and on twentieth-century history — the Elizabethans sat through Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3. To appeal to the groundlings in the pit, the playwrights wrote slapstick comedies at which the Queen herself was known to slap a thigh — Shakespeare’s most farcical play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, was written at her request. But they also invented a new dramatic form — the introspective soliloquy that showed how a harsh age was also becoming reflective and questioning:’To be, or not to be — that is the question…’

  SIR WALTER RALEGH AND THE LOST COLONY

  1585

  wALTER RALEGH WAS A SWAGGERING West Country lad who started his career as a soldier of fortune. He was only sixteen when he crossed the Channel to fight on the side of the Huguenots, the French Protestants, in the religious wars that divided France for much of the sixteenth century. Later he fought against the Catholics in Ireland.

  Ralegh was six feet tall by the time he came to court in the late 1570s, handsome and well built, with a jutting chin and dark curling hair shown off to perfection with a double pearl drop-earring, He has gone down in history for his rich and flashy clothes, and for many twentieth-century British schoolchildren the name Ralegh (or Raleigh — the T was added in later years) stood for sturdy bicycles and for cloaks in the mud:

  This Captain Ralegh, [runs the earliest version of the famous story] coming out of Ireland to the English court in good habit —his clothes being then a considerable part of his estate — found the Queen walking, till, meeting with a plashy place, she seemed to scruple going thereon. Presently Ralegh cast and spread his new plush cloak on the ground; whereon the Queen trod gently over, rewarding him afterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a foot cloth.

  This gallant tale was not recorded for another eighty years, but something like it almost certainly happened: one version of Ralegh’s coat of arms featured a visual pun on the story — a plush and swirling cloak. Sir Walter epitomised the peacockery that danced attendance on the Virgin Queen, and Elizabeth was entranced by the style with which he pla
yed her game. She made him her Captain of the Guard. She liked‘proper men’ and Ralegh was certainly one of those — though, not quite properly,‘he spake broad Devonshire till his dying day’.

  As a West Countryman, Ralegh made himself the champion at court for the growing number of Elizabethans who were drawn towards the New World. Among these were relatives like his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert, who vanished in 1583 while searching for a route that would lead him to the riches of China through the ice floes and mist-laden inlets that lay beyond Newfoundland — the‘North West Passage’. Adventurers such as Francis Drake and Richard Grenville saw good Protestant duty, as well as piracy and plunder, in capturing Spanish galleons and challenging the Catholic King of Spain (who after 1581 also took over Portugal and its colonies). The guru of the New World enthusiasts was Dr John Dee, the Merlin-like figure who had cast the Queen’s coronation horoscope. Dee put forward the ambitious idea of a’British Impire’ across the Atlantic — a land first discovered, he said, not by John Cabot in 1497 but by Madoc, a Welsh prince in the King Arthur mould, who was said to have crossed the Atlantic centuries previously.

  In the early 158c s Dee provided Ralegh with a map of the American coastline north of Florida. Ralegh dispatched scouts to search for a suitable settlement, and in 1585 he presented the results of their prospecting to Elizabeth — two native Indians, some potatoes, and the curious leaf smoked by the natives: tobacco.