Great Tales from English History, Book 2

by Robert Lacey

  At the other end of the social scale, Henry VIII had a private throne to suit his style and status. Decorated with ribbons, fringes and two thousand gold nails, his‘close stool’ was a black velvet box concealing a pewter chamber pot whose regular clearing and cleaning was the job of the groom of the stool’.

  His daughter Queen Elizabeth probably had a similar device, but in 1592 she was offered a novel alternative. While staying with her godson Sir John Harington at Kelston near Bath, she was invited to test his invention — the first modern water closet, complete with a seat and a lever by means of which you could flush water down from a cistern above. The Queen liked it so much she had one installed in her palace at Richmond.

  Harington publicised his invention in a joke-filled book, The Metamorphosis of Ajax. The title itself was a pun — Jakes’ was the Elizabethan slang for lavatory — and the author supplied a helpful diagram for do-it-yourselfers showing how, for 30s 8d (around £250 today), you could build your own WC. It would make‘your worst privy as sweet as your best chamber’, he promised — and his drawing showed that you could even keep your pet goldfish in the cistern.

  Harington’s WC was not the first. The Romans had flushing cisterns. But his design does seem to have been the original product of a lively mind. Elizabeth’s multi-gifted godson amused her court with his translations of risque foreign verses and, not surprisingly, bold wit that he was, he was never afraid to mention the unmentionable:

  If leeks you leake, but do their smell disleeke, eat onions and

  you shall not smell the leek.

  If you of onions would the scent expel,

  Eat garlic—that shall drown the onion smell.

  But against garlic’s savour, if you smart,

  I know but one receipt. What’s that? A fart.

  BY TIME SURPRISED

  1603

  BY MARCH 1603 IT WAS CLEAR THAT ELIZABETH was dying. The faithful Doctor Dee had looked at the stars and advised her to move from Whitehall to her palace at airy Richmond. There she sat on the floor for days, propped up with embroidered cushions. With her finger in her mouth and her features, as ever, plastered with white, lead-based make-up, the sixty-nine-year-old monarch refused to eat, sleep or change her clothes.

  ’Madam, you must to bed,’ urged Robert Cecil, who had become her chief minister following the death of his father William, Lord Burghley, in 1598.

  ’Little man! Little man!’ retorted the Queen.’Your father would have known that “must” is not a word we use to princes/

  The closing years of her reign had not been happy ones. The great triumph of the Armada had been followed by still more warfare — with Spain, in Ireland, in France and in the Netherlands. War cost money, and three times more taxes had been levied in the fifteen years since 1588 than in the first thirty years of her reign. Harvests had been poor, prices high, trade depressed. Parliament complained bitterly at the growth of’monopolies’, the exclusive trading licences the Queen granted to favourites like Ralegh, who controlled the sales of tin and playing cards, and also the licensing of taverns. Steel, starch, salt, imported drinking glasses… the list of these privately controlled and taxed commodities was read out one day in Parliament.‘Is not bread there?’ called out a sarcastic voice.

  In 1601 discontented citizens had marched through the streets of London in support of the Earl of Essex, the arrogant young aristocrat who had dared to criticise and defy Elizabeth. She sent him to the block — a last flourish of the standard Tudor remedy for troublemakers — but that did not stop people laughing at her behind her back. Even her godson John Harington, the Jakes inventor, sniggered uncharitably at the out-of-touch monarch‘shut up in a chamber from her subjects and most of her servants… seldom seen but on holy days’. Sir Walter Ralegh put it more gallantly. The Queen, he said, was‘a lady whom time had surprised’.

  Elizabeth had always refused to nominate an heir. She had no wish, she said, to contemplate her‘own winding sheet’. But by 1603 it was clear there could be only one successor — King James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary Queen of Scots. Now thirty-six, James had proved himself a canny ruler north of the border, and his bloodline was impeccable. He was the great-great-grandson of the first Tudor, Henry VIL

  Robert Cecil had been corresponding secretly with James for months, and all through February and March the horses stood ready, staged at ten-mile intervals so that news of the Queen’s death would reach Scotland without delay. On the evening of 23 March she fell unconscious and, waking only briefly, she died in the small hours of the 24th. As the messenger headed north, trumpeters, heralds, judges and barons were already processing through the streets of London to proclaim the new King James I.

  Elizabeth I, Queen of Shakespeare, Ralegh, Drake and the Armada, had presided over one of the most glorious flowerings of English history and culture, and her success owed not a little to the adroitness with which she had avoided marriage. But this also meant that she was the last of her line. Her successor James Stuart and every subsequent English and British monarch has taken their descent not from Gloriana, but from Elizabeth’s hated rival, Mary Queen of Scots.

  5/11: ENGLAND’S FIRST TERRORIST

  1605

  WITH HIS FLOWING MOUSTACHE AND LUXUrious beard, Guy Fawkes cut an elegant figure — he looked like anything but a household servant as he lurked in one of the cellars-to-rent below the Houses of Parliament on the afternoon of 4 November 1605, He was wearing a dark hat and cloak, and had strapped his spurs on to his riding boots, ready for a quick escape. But when the Lord Chamberlain’s guards came upon Guy in the candlelit cellar, they believed his story He was a domestic servant, he told them — John Johnson was the cover name he had prepared — and he had been checking on the piles of firewood stacked against the wall The search party went on their way, not thinking to rummage behind the dry kindling, where, if they had looked, they would have discovered thirty-six large barrels of gunpowder…

  The notorious Gunpowder Plot was born of the injustice and disappointment that many English Catholics came to feel at the beginning of the reign of King James I. Their hopes had been high that the son of Mary Queen of Scots, their Catholic champion and martyr, would ease the legal persecution from which they suffered — and James duly had his mother’s body dug up and reburied in Westminster Abbey. Mary lies there to this day, in a splendid tomb alongside Elizabeth — the two cousins, Catholic and Protestant, honoured equally in death.

  But James knew he must live with the reality of a nation that defined itself as Protestant, and soon after his arrival in England he summoned a conference at Hampton Court to submit the Church of England to review by the growing number of evangelicals who wanted to weed out the‘impure’ practices left over from Catholicism. As far as doctrine was concerned, the new King gave these’Puritans’ less than they wanted, but he did bow to their demands to enforce the anti-Catholic laws that Elizabeth had applied with a relatively light touch.

  These laws were fierce. Anyone caught hearing the mass could be fined and sent to jail. Priests — many of whom survived in‘priest holes’ hidden behind the panelling in the homes of rich Catholics — were liable to be punished by imprisonment or even death. Catholic children could not be baptised. The dying were denied the ceremony of extreme unction, their crucial step to heaven- Catholics could not study at university. If they failed to attend their local Anglican church they were classed as’recusants’ (we might say Ve-fuseniks’), and became liable to fines of £20 a month. The enforcement of recusancy fines was patchy, but £20 was a quite impossible penalty at a time when a yeoman, or‘middling, farmer was legally defined as someone whose land brought him forty shillings, or £2, per yean

  ’Catholics now saw their own country,’ wrote Father William Weston,‘the country of their birth, turned into a ruthless and unloving land.’

  State-sponsored oppression, frustration, hopelessness — from these bitter ingredients stemmed the extravagant scheme of Guy Fawkes and a dozen aggrieved young
Catholics to blow up the King, his family, the Royal Council and all the members of the Protestant-dominated Houses of Parliament in one spectacular blast. Modern explosives experts have calculated that Guy’s thirty-six barrels (5,500 pounds) of gunpowder would have caused‘severe structural damage’ to an area within a radius of five hundred metres. Not only the Houses of Parliament, but Westminster Abbey and much of Whitehall would have been demolished in a terrorist gesture whose imaginative and destructive power stands comparison, for its time, with the planes that al-Qaedas pilots crashed into New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001,

  But as the Gunpowder Plotters’ plan for scarcely imaginable slaughter became known in Catholic circles, someone felt they had to blow the whistle:

  My Lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation… [read an anonymous letter sent to a Catholic peer, Lord Monteagle, on 26 October 160$] I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament… [and] retire yourself into your country where you may expect the event in safety.

  Delivered at dusk by a tall stranger to a servant of Monteagle’s outside his house in Hoxton on the north-east outskirts of London, this‘dark and doubtful letter’ can be seen today in the National Archives, and has inspired fevered debate among scholars: who betrayed the plot? The letter’s authorship has been attributed to almost every one of Guy Fawkes’s confederates — and even to Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, James’s chief minister, who organised the investigation after Monteagle handed over the letter.

  ’John Johnson’ fooled the first search party on the afternoon of 4 November, but not the second, who, lanterns in hand, prodded their way through the cellars in the early hours of the 5th, the very day Parliament was due to assemble. Once arrested, he made no secret of his intention to blow up King and lords. His only regret, he said, was that his plan had not succeeded. It was the devil and not God’ who had betrayed the plot.

  Torture soon extracted from Guy Fawkes that he was a thirty-four-year-old Catholic from York who had fought in the Netherlands on the Spanish side against the Dutch Protestants. Like the letter that betrayed him, his successive confessions can be read today: his signature starts off firm and black, then degenerates to a tremulous and scarcely legible scratching as the rack does its dreadful work. Once Parliament had been destroyed, it turned out, the conspirators were planning to seize the Kings nine-year-old daughter Princess Elizabeth, and install her as their puppet rulen

  Guy and his fellow-plotters suffered the ghastly penalties prescribed for traitors: they were hung, drawn and quartered. When Parliament reassembled, the first order of business was to institute’a public thanksgiving to Almighty God every year on the fifth day of November’ — the origin of our modern‘Bonfire Night’. But furious Protestants were not content with executions and prayers.

  ’This bloody stain and mark will never be washed out of Popish religion,’ declared Sir Thomas Smith, one of the many who called for vengeance. Half century after the fires of Smithfield, the Gunpowder Plot marked a further stage in the demonising of English Catholics, who, in the years that followed, were banned from practising law, serving in the army or navy as officers, or voting in elections. In 1614 one MP suggested Catholics be compelled to wear a yellow hat and shoes so they could be easily identified and‘hooted at’ by true Englishmen.

  This last proposal was, happily, judged to be unEnglish and went no further. But the Gunpowder Plot raises important moral issues to this day. Is violence permissible to a persecuted minority? And if you do strike back against a government that subjects you to state-sponsored terror — why are you the one called a terrorist?

  KING JAMES’S‘AUTHENTICAL’ BIBLE

  1611

  ’NO MOR ENGLAND BOT GRATE BRITAINE: noted a patriotic Scot in his diary, as James VI of Scotland and I of England rode out from Edinburgh to claim his southern kingdom in the spring of 1603. When the new King opened his first Parliament in London, he urged his English subjects to join more closely with Scotland — he called for a‘Union of Love — and on 16 November he signed a decree creating a new Anglo-Scottish currency featuring a twenty-shilling piece called‘the Unite’. Sadly for James, his McPound proved impractical, but in 1604 he did initiate a project that would, over the years, make for unity in another sense, and in a context far wider than England and Scotland.

  As the clerics debated at the Hampton Court conference in 1604 one of them suggested that there should be’one only translation of the Bible to be authentical’, and the King seized on the idea.‘One uniform translation’ should be produced, he agreed,‘by the learned of both universities’, to be reviewed by the chief learned of the church’, then ratified by himself,‘Were I not a King,’ he informed his bishops proudly,‘I would be a University man.’

  Seven years, fifty-four translators and six committees later, the result of the King’s initiative was the Authorised Version’ that bears his name — the so-called King James Bible,‘Newly Translated out of the Originali tongues & with the former Translations diligently compared and revised by his Maiesties Speciali Comandement — Appointed to be read in Churches’.

  For two hundred and fifty years the King James Bible would set the standard for phraseology, rhythm and syntax wherever in the world English speakers gathered — an English grammar and literature lesson in its own right. Sunday after Sunday its sonorous cadences filtered into the English consciousness, shaping thought patterns as well as language — and this was just as King James’s scholarly committees intended: the surviving records of their deliberations make clear that they searched constantly for the words that would not only read better but sound better, for this was a lectern Bible, designed above all to be read out and listened to.

  The dream of William Tyndale — and before that of John Wycliffe — had finally come true. Here was a Bible that could be understood by every ploughboy built on a spare and simple vocabulary of only eight thousand different words — and time after time the reviewing committees de-cided that William Tyndales translations were the best. They made only small changes to his original phrases, so that, in the end, eighty per cent of this royally authorised’ version came from the man who had been tracked down by Henry VIII’s agents seventy-five years earlier and had been burned at the stake.

  ’Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…’ Even today, in our relatively non-religious age, these memorable Tyndale-King James lines may well be the most frequently repeated set of sentences in the English language.

  ’SPOILT CHILD’ AND THE PILGRIM FATHERS

  1616

  IN THE SPRING OF lòlòTHE TOAST OF LONDON was an exotic young arrival from the New World —‘Pocahontas’, the beautiful twenty-one-year-old daughter of Powhatan, chief of the Algonquins of coastal Virginia. Her tribal name had been Matoaka, but her family had nicknamed her the‘naughty one’, or spoilt child’ — and it was under her nickname that she had been brought to London to celebrate the nine-year survival of Jamestown, Virginia. This was England’s first permanent colony in North America, established in Chesapeake Bay, a hundred miles or so north of Ralegh’s‘lost colony’ of Roanoke.

  Wined and dined and taken to London’s flourishing theatres, Pocahontas was presented to King James I, after whom the new settlement had been named. Her visit spearheaded a publicity drive by the investors of the Virginia Company who were looking for new colonists and partners. Much was made of the young woman’s conversion to Christianity and her marriage to a wealthy tobacco planter, John Rolfe, by whom she had a son. Even before Pocahontas died of pneumonia (or possibly tuberculosis) in March 1617, to be buried at Gravesend in Kent, the Indian princess’ had come to symbolise the prospect of good relations between the new colonists and the native population.

  That hope, we now know, was a cruel illusion. The modern United States of America has been built upon the systematic destruction and dispossession of its native population — an
d the few reliable facts we possess about the life of Pocahontas place a question mark over her myth. In 1612 she had been captured and held to ransom in the course of a savage series of attacks and reprisals between colonists and locals, and according to the Powhatan nation of American Indians who champion her cause today, the marriage of Pocahontas to the older, wealthy widower John Rolfe was anything but a love match: it was the price of her release.

  The Never-Never Land aspects of transatlantic exploration were made clear the following year when Sir Walter Ralegh, now sixty-seven and a creaking relic of the glory days of Elizabeth, sailed into Plymouth after a failed attempt to locate El Dorado, the fabled city of gold that was said to lie in the rainforests of South America. Having flirted with ill-judged notions of conspiracy in the early months of James’s reign, Ralegh had spent a dozen years imprisoned in the Tower before winning temporary release on his far-fetched promise to bring back the treasures of El Dorado. But he failed to locate the city. Furthermore, his frustrated followers attacked a Spanish settlement, and it suited James to sacrifice the old Elizabethan to the Spanish protests that followed- “Tis a sharp remedy/ Ralegh re-marked as he felt die edge of the axe in New Palace Yard on 29 October 1618,’but a sure one for all ills/

  The flamboyant champion of England’s empire overseas went to his death not long before his dream — or something like it — became reality. In September 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers set sail from Plymouth in their merchant ship, the Mayflower. They came mainly from the village of Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, where they had pursued a category of Puritanism known as‘Separatism’. Abandoning the hope that they could‘purify’ the Church of England of its papist taints, the Scrooby Separatists looked abroad, and in 1608 had exiled themselves to Protestant Holland. Among their leaders were the local postmaster William Brewster, and a fervent Yorkshireman, William Bradford, who would later write the story of their great adventure.