by John Guy
That only two apprentice riots occurred that summer was as much due to fear of the plague as to strong governance.15 Determined to avoid a repeat of Evil May Day, Burghley and his colleagues searched high and low for the authors and printers of the offending libels, but in vain.16 Around the same time, the queen’s Master of the Revels, Sir Edmund Tilney, heavily censored the first draft of a controversial stage play whose working title was Sir Thomas More. Intended for when the theatres reopened and most likely conceived by a playwright or patron with unwelcome Catholic sympathies, the play contained a number of highly inflammatory and topical passages. In these, More did not simply calm the May Day rioters but was a man whose moral fibre was considerably greater than that of the king who executed him for resisting the break with Rome and opposing his marriage to Elizabeth’s mother.17
Fully attuned to the double risk of fresh mob violence and the queen’s wrath, given her legendary resolve to protect her parents’ reputations from slander, Tilney picked up his blue pencil. He knew all too well that less than a year had elapsed since Elizabeth, writing in fluent Italian, had chivvied Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, into suppressing the first edition of a book by Girolamo Pollini, a Dominican friar from the monastery of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, which had defamed both her parents. Drawing on salacious passages excerpted from a biography of More by his favourite nephew William Rastell, a work now known only from fragments and one which for some years had been clandestinely circulated in manuscript, Pollini claimed that Anne Boleyn was actually Henry VIII’s own daughter by an illicit liaison with her mother, Lady Elizabeth Boleyn. In her letter to Duke Ferdinando, Elizabeth had railed furiously against ‘such horrible calumnies and lies’, keeping up the pressure until he publicly burned copies of the book.18
Since much of the inspiration for the play of Sir Thomas More had come from Rastell’s writings and those of his fellow Catholic exiles in Louvain and Douai, Tilney purged from the script all references to prison breakouts, street brawls and apprentice riots, along with a still more daring passage in which, in idioms not dissimilar to those Shakespeare would shortly use of Sir John Falstaff, the queen’s father was lampooned as a glutton by day and a lecher by night.19 Stripped of its bite, the play became a mere shell. Quite possibly in the hope that it might be resurrected, it was then handed over to fresh playwrights for script doctoring. Shakespeare was one of them: his proposed revisions still survive in a rare example of his handwriting, interleaved with the original, censored version of the script. But even his powers of invention were insufficient to rescue a play so denuded of its story arc.20
• • •
As Elizabeth hid away with her much-reduced Court, invisible to her subjects and seemingly impervious to their suffering, she would become unnerved, then numbed by her inability to respond to extreme socio-economic forces so obviously beyond her control. In late June, she renewed her efforts to contain the plague by ordering prayers to be said in the churches and by insisting that Bartholomew Fair and the annual feasts of the London livery companies be cancelled.21 The loss of the feasts was hardly important – the rich could enjoy other things – but the Fair mattered greatly to ordinary Londoners. Held in mid-August in the fields beyond Smithfield, outside the city walls, and complete with horseracing and rabbit coursing, wrestling, juggling, peddlers, dancing and market stalls, it was their recreational highlight of the year. The mayor and aldermen insisted it posed no tangible threat to public health as long as those in contact with known plague victims were kept away. Elizabeth flatly rejected this assertion but was unable to counter the mayor’s argument that the wholesale trades conducted by merchants and entrepreneurs during the Fair were critical to the economic survival of the city’s clothiers. When Burghley threw in his weight on the mayor’s side to help stave off bankruptcies, the queen finally yielded, agreeing that the event could take place but only if drastically curtailed.22
Shortly afterwards, she succumbed to a run of severe episodes of intense depression. It just so happened that the very worst of the plague coincided precisely with Henry IV’s shock conversion to Catholicism. Elizabeth concluded that God had unleashed the epidemic on England and northern France to punish Henry for his apostasy and herself for conniving in it. Utterly persuaded by this apocalyptic interpretation of events, she spiralled downwards into a dark ‘melancholy’ lasting several months.23 So committed was she to the principles of her father’s break with Rome, she believed the French king’s perfidy made him a traitor to God and an ‘unnatural’ brother to herself. Christian rulers conventionally addressed each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’, and in her remonstrations to Henry over the course of that summer she pointedly declared that, from now on, she could see herself only as his ‘bastard’ sibling, a remark replete with resonances relating to her own troubled childhood and feuds with her half-sister Mary, who had many times denounced Anne Boleyn as a filthy whore.24
A month or so after she passed the landmark of her sixtieth birthday, Elizabeth made a concerted effort to reconcile the setback of Henry’s apostasy with her own religious faith.25 She spent her days reading the Bible, the writings of the ancient Church Fathers and Greek and Roman philosophy (chiefly Seneca’s Moral Essays). She held regular audiences with Archbishop Whitgift, her preferred adviser on anything to do with the church or matters of conscience. She also began, and completed, a line-by-line translation from Latin into English of The Consolation of Philosophy by the early-sixth-century writer Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.26
The son of a Roman aristocrat, Boethius was an ardent student of ancient Greek philosophy and Christian theology, who had become first consul and later master of ceremonies to the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great at Ravenna. Accused as a co-conspirator for defending a fellow senator suspected of treason, he wrote The Consolation while under house arrest before his execution. Elizabeth may well have seen a link between Boethius and herself, recalling the terrifying time when she had been imprisoned on suspicion of treason after the failure of Wyatt’s rebellion. During the months she had spent under tight guard at Woodstock in Oxfordshire after her release from the Tower, she had passed her time by reading voraciously and making literary translations of the Latin classics. It was during this highly formative time that she had first encountered Boethius.27 Now, nearly forty years later, as she struggled to cope with Henry’s conversion to Catholicism, she came once again to interpret contemporary events as a test of character imposed on her by God. She clearly believed that humans, even kings, who persisted in their ‘iniquity’ would be severely punished. She had also come to believe that God had called on her to be an instrument for the salvation of northern Europe. This was why Henry’s defection hit her so hard: she suspected he had shunned the clear light of Protestantism in favour of the dark forces of Catholicism entirely for worldly advantage. It was a step on the road to hell.
Elizabeth suppressed much of Boethius’s dialogue, preferring to deploy her own authorial voice to emphasize that God is the only certain hope of human existence. His foreknowledge, the one sure attribute of his divinity, allows him to understand everything, including events that spring from human free will. Her manuscript, half of which survives in her own handwriting and half in a version dictated to a clerk, suggests that, after the watershed of her sixtieth birthday, she found herself battling with the same questions of the interrelationship between human affairs and divine Providence that have troubled theologians and philosophers throughout Christian history. How could a loving God, if he can look into our hearts and has complete foreknowledge of the future course of events, allow evil-doers to flourish in the world? Like Boethius, she consoled herself with the belief that evil men would never be happy, whatever their worldly success, while the virtuous, regardless of their fortunes, would be blessed.28
• • •
In the spring and summer of 1594, the unseasonably hot plague years gave way to months of storms and torrential rain
.29 Barns, church steeples and entire houses were flattened, and in the forests of Worcestershire and Staffordshire nearly five thousand oak trees were felled in a single day. In Sussex and Surrey, a sudden inundation of hail and unrelenting rain caused flash floods that swept away houses, cattle, iron-mills and the coal heaps ready to fire their furnaces. The deluges continued until the end of July, ruining the crops. A brief respite in August enabled a meagre harvest to be gathered in, but during September the monsoon rains returned, causing dozens of rivers to burst their banks and roads and bridges to be destroyed. Grain prices doubled almost overnight, to 6s. 8d. for a bushel of wheat,* and 5s. for a bushel of rye.30
Scarcity of food and high prices encouraged rioting, muggings, lootings and arson attacks in the capital involving up to five hundred people at a time, chiefly apprentices and the young unemployed. Street brawls escalated without warning into mass violence. In an attempt to force speculators hoarding grain to sell it in local markets at fair prices, the Privy Council issued a series of so-called ‘dearth orders’, but these were widely ignored. Enforcement was so patchy that, to a majority of ordinary Londoners, it could only appear as if Elizabeth was markedly more interested in her own entertainment than in their plight.31 By now, the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, had recruited Shakespeare’s company of actors to help satisfy her appetite for new plays. During the festive season, he brought them to Greenwich Palace to perform two comedies for her, for which he paid them £20. One play may have been Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors; the other is unknown.32
Elizabeth lived in great luxury, cosseted, cared for, her every whim satisfied, all financed by the receipts of taxation and the profits from excise duties and the Crown lands. The choicest foods on which she dined were, by the royal prerogative, requisitioned from local markets at artificially low prices set by her officials rather than at market rates. Cocooned within the gilded bubble of her palaces, she feared social revolution but did little to help prevent it beyond exhorting others to action.33 She continued to maintain a cordon sanitaire around herself, personally drafting another proclamation excluding onlookers from her vicinity on pain of arrest and imprisonment.34 Hard on this came yet another, limiting by name, for the very first time, those who might gain admission through her palace gates on the pretext of seeking justice or to petition the Privy Council.35 Finally, she forbade the public from continuing to visit her menagerie in the Tower to view the elephant presented to her by Henry IV.36
Out of touch with the horrendous conditions experienced by the overwhelming majority of her people, Elizabeth did not believe it was her responsibility to take systematic steps to alleviate their hardship. Instead, she saw her remit in terms of the promises she had made when she swore her coronation oath: to offer her people justice in the law courts, to defend the Church of England and to defend her realm from foreign invasion. That was all. And yet in her father’s reign Thomas More had argued in Utopia (1516) that, first and foremost, it was the duty of rulers to protect the welfare of their citizens.37 By Elizabeth’s day, so-called ‘commonwealth’ writers routinely took this line, but she did not adapt to their way of thinking. Her motto, Semper Eadem, remained her yardstick. All she wanted was for the recent apprentice riots and other civil disturbances to end, and she expected the mayor, civic magistrates and the leaders of the merchant guilds to keep control of the capital’s streets in her name.
Inevitably, falling wages and skyrocketing prices caused serious rumblings of mass discontent. While courtiers and city speculators prospered through fraud, bribery and, especially, by supplying inferior clothing, equipment and foodstuffs to the royal navy or the land forces overseas, the poor continued to suffer. Addressing her troops at Tilbury in 1588, Elizabeth had boasted that she regarded the trust of her ‘faithful and loving people’ as her greatest ‘strength and safeguard’. But, once the immediate scare was over, what looked like her heartless refusal to pay her brave mariners and soldiers their arrears of pay had rankled with the victims of her neglect.
Her rhetoric, first used at her encounter with King Philip’s ambassador, the Count of Feria, would never change. In December 1597, she would inform a visiting French ambassador that it was simply unbelievable how much her people loved her and how she loved them no less than they her.38 Lupold von Wedel, the queen’s star-struck Christmas guest in 1584, tells us that, when she rode in an open carriage through the streets of London, she used a stock mantra. To all whom she passed, she cried out, ‘God save my people!’ – to which, somewhat optimistically, he expects us to believe they chirruped heartily in reply, ‘God save your grace!’39
Feria’s celebrated dispatch and the queen’s own rhetoric apart, the primary sources of the myth of ‘Good Queen Bess’ were the fawning glosses in the English editions of Camden’s Annales introduced by his bestselling translator Robert Norton. Thanks to Norton’s fantasies, it was made to appear how, from her accession until she breathed her last, Elizabeth, wherever she went, was greeted by the ‘hearty applause and well-wishings of her people’. This, Norton added, was because of ‘her singular clemency and goodness’, gracious attributes that would inspire her people to ‘continue and increase their love towards her even to her dying day’. Soaring ever higher towards hyperbole, Norton even managed to claim that never in the whole of human history, from the days of Herodotus to the modern era, had any people ‘embraced their prince with more hearty and constant affection, more dutiful observance and more joyful acclamations than they did her during the whole course of her life’.40
• • •
Smouldering resentment of the queen first sparked into open revolt in 1595, when the years of excessive heat, plague and flood were followed by the second of what turned out to be four disastrous harvests in a row. The wholesale price of butter rose from £2 10s. to £4 a barrel, and ling (a common, cod-like fish much eaten by the poor) from £3 to £5 5s. a hundredweight. In London, speculators were caught offering three large hen’s eggs for two pence (close to £8 today) and a pound of butter for seven pence. Rumours were rife that the price of wheat would soon soar from 7s. to 16s. a bushel, while wages plummeted to their lowest levels since records began. Near-starvation among the inhabitants of the upland or moorland sheep-farming regions of England and Wales, who grew crops under marginal conditions and were forced to buy grain in nearby markets, encouraged a flood of internal migration from the most depressed regions to the capital. Now thousands of ‘sturdy beggars’ (as the civic authorities liked to call them) roamed the streets by day and slept in doorways and church porches by night, joining the already bulging ranks of war veterans and young unemployed in begging for work and food.41 Meanwhile, the seemingly endless recession smothered most of what was left of the legitimate clothing trade.42
Another flashpoint was military conscription. Able-bodied recruits had long come to dread the queen’s service overseas and would do almost anything to avoid the draft.43 ‘I assure you’, Burghley had warned Sir Henry Unton, Elizabeth’s ambassador to Henry IV, after Essex’s return from his ill-fated expedition to Rouen, ‘the realm here is weary to see the expense of their people for foreign services, having presently in sight great necessity of domestical forces to withstand foreign attempts daily prepared against this realm.’44 Muster-masters were forced to accept the very lowest in society for the army. In counties such as Oxfordshire and Berkshire, and not just in London, they simply emptied the gaols to secure recruits. Even experienced privy councillors were quick to conclude that ‘rogues, vagabonds and other idle, dissolute and masterless persons’ were the perfect cannon fodder, seemingly unaware that the very process of labelling a man a vagrant helped to make him one in the eyes of the local magistrates. Few officials in charge of musters were immune to bribery, and it is easy to see from where Shakespeare’s inspiration would come for the Gloucestershire scenes in Henry IV, Part II.45
Clamouring in vain for butter and fish at the same low prices at which the queen purchased them f
or her palaces, a group of London apprentices twice stormed the market stalls in Southwark in June and took what they wanted. Others pulled down the pillories in Cheapside and Leadenhall and threatened to kill the newly appointed mayor. He was none other than Sir John Spencer, who as sheriff in 1584 had been humiliated by the Privy Council on Elizabeth’s orders after he had arrested her favourite musicians. As the heat of summer returned and tempers frayed again, a horrified Spencer would be confronted by the nearest thing to a reprise of Evil May Day for almost a century. In the late afternoon of Sunday, 29 June, a mob said to be several thousand strong marched on Tower Hill, emboldened by a trumpeter who was a war veteran. Planning first to arm themselves by ransacking the nearby gunmakers’ shops, the rioters intended to pillage the houses of the wealthier merchants, especially foreigners, and to hang Mayor Spencer from a gallows they had set up outside his magnificent house in Bishopsgate.46
About seven o’clock in the evening, Spencer, having raised a well-armed posse, rode to Tower Hill with his ceremonial sword carried before him, the blade unsheathed, to quell the insurrection. He was met by a hail of stones, and his sword was snatched away from his sword-bearer under his very eyes. Not without injuries, but fortunately without serious bloodshed, the posse managed to disperse the crowd and Spencer recovered his sword. Dirty and dishevelled, his ego sorely bruised but his authority intact, the mayor made his way back to the Guildhall to scribble an urgent postscript to Burghley at the bottom of a letter he had written earlier in the day, triumphantly announcing that his men had apprehended the ringleaders and sent them to prison.47 Charged at the Guildhall with levying war against the queen on a very dubious interpretation of the treason legislation, five of the rioters were swiftly convicted by a jury of much-relieved property-owning citizens and were led away, shackled in irons, to be dragged on hurdles to the gallows.48