For Thomas White the ‘sumptuous Theatre houses’ were ‘a continuall monument of London’s prodigalitie and folly’; for William Harrison, ‘an evident token of a wicked time’; for William Crawshaw, ‘a bastard of Babylon, a daughter of error and confusion, a hellish device, the divels owne recreation to mock at holy things’.26 John Northbrooke, a Bristol divine, in a frequently reprinted tirade, condemned ‘these schools of all wickedness and vice’ which brought men and women into Satan’s snare of ‘concupiscence and filthie lustes of wicked whoredome’. He urged the righteous to go to a play at least once
To see what reward there is given to these Crocodiles … If you will learne howe to bee false, and deceive your husbandes, or husbandes their wives, howe to playe the harlottes, to obtayne one’s love, howe to ravishe, how to beguyle, how to betraye, to flatter, lye, sweare, foresweare, to allur to whoredone, how to poyson, how to disobey and to rebel against Princes, to consume treasures prodigally, to move to lustes, to ransacke and spoyle cities and townes, to bee ydle and blaspheme, to sing filthe songs of love, to speake filthy, to be prowde, how to mocke, scoffe, and deryde any nation … shall not you learne, then, at such enterludes howe to practice them?27
Echoing such condemnations as these the lord mayor and aldermen frequently petitioned the Privy Council to suppress the London theatres, those promulgators of ‘profane fables, Lascivious matter, cozoning devices, and other unseemly & scurrilous behaviours’.28
Two years after this petition was written, in July 1597, the lord mayor and aldermen wrote to the Privy Council again:
We have signified to your HH many tymes heartofore the great inconvenience which wee fynd to grow by the Common exercise of Stage Playes. Wee presumed to doo, aswell in respect of the dutie wee beare towardes her highnes for the good gouernment of this her Citie, as for conscience sake, being perswaded (under correction of your HH. judgment) that neither in politie nor in religion they are to be suffered … Wee have fownd by th’examination of divers apprentices & other servantes whoe have confessed unto us that the said Staige playes were the very places of theire Randevous appoynted by them to meete with such otheir as wear to joigne with them in theire designes & mutinus attemptes, beeinge aliso the ordinarye places for maisterles men to come together & to recreate themselves.29
Several specific reasons were offered as to why the theatres should be closed: they were ‘a speaciall cause of corrupting Youth, conteninge nothing but unchast matters … & other lewd ungodly practizes’. They were the Ordinary places for … idele and dangerous persons to meet together & to make their matches to the great displeasure of Almightie God & the hurt & annoyance of her Majestie’s people’. They maintained ‘idleness in such persons as have no vocation & draw apprentices and other servants from their ordinary workes and all sortes of people from the resort unto sermons and other Christian exercises’. And in time of sickness ‘many have sores … take occasion to walk abroad & to recreate themselves by hearing a play. Whereby others are infected, and themselves also many things miscarry.’30
The Privy Council responded to the City’s complaints by charging the lord mayor and the justices of Middlesex to arrange for the destruction of all theatres in and about London. This total ban on acting was lifted on 1 November; but on 9 February the next year the Act of Parliament governing both a citizen’s right to act professionally and a gentleman’s right to maintain a theatrical company was drastically amended. Ten days later the Privy Council informed the magistrates of Middlesex and Surrey that ‘licence hath bin graunted unto two companies of stage players retayned unto us, the Lord Admyral and Lord Chamberlain’. All other companies, and in particular a company which ‘by waie of intrusion’ was playing at the Boar’s Head, were to be suppressed.
In June 1600 a further Privy Council order decreed that, since acting was not ‘evill in yt self and might therefore ‘with a good order and moderacion be suffered’ – and since the queen must be supplied with good entertainment by good actors – there must be ‘howses to serve for publique playenge to keepe players in exercise’. There were, therefore, ‘to bee about the Cittie two howses … to serve for the use of Common Stage plaies’. It was emphasized, however, that no play was to be presented, ‘(as sometimes they have bin), in the Common Inns’, and that there were to be no performances on Sundays, in Lent or in times of plague.
This order, like previous and subsequent orders, was never properly enforced: unlicensed theatres which should have been closed contrived to remain open, while several companies flourished under the protection of royal patronage. Indeed, in the reign of James I, after a statute had deprived the magistrates of their licensing power, the Chamberlain’s, the Earl of Worcester’s and the Admiral’s men were all taken directly into the royal service as the Companies of the King, the Queen and of Prince Henry, the heir apparent. It was not until the change of political power in the reign of Charles I and with the onset of the Civil War that the City authorities were able to overrule the court and deal with the players as they wished. In 1642, a fortnight after the king raised his standard at Nottingham, Parliament finally pronounced that
Whereas the distressed Estate of Ireland, steeped in her own Blood, and the distracted Estate of England, threatned with a Cloud of Blood, by a Civill Warre, call for all possible meanes to appease and avert the Wrath of God appearing in these Judgements; amongst which, Fasting and Prayer having bin often tryed to be very effectuall, have bin lately, and are still enjoyned; and whereas publike Sports doe not well agree with publike Calamities, nor publike Stage-playes with the Seasons of Humiliation, this being an Exercise of sad and pious solemnity, and the other being Spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lacivious Mirth and Levitie: It is therefore thought fit, and Ordeined by the Lords and Commons in this Parliament Assembled, that while these sad Causes and set times of Humiliation doe continue, publike Stage-Playes shall cease, and bee forborne.31
Even after this pronouncement, however, the theatre did not immediately die. An October issue of Mercurius Melancholicus announced that ‘the Common Inns of sin and Blasphemy, the Playhouses’, had begun ‘to be custom’d again, and to act filthiness and villainy to the life’32 That month Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and no King, formerly acted at the Blackfriars, was advertised as a forthcoming production at the Salisbury Court Theatre which had been built in 1629.
The Sheriffes of the City of London with their officers went thither [according to a report in the newsbook, Perfect Occurrences] and found a great number of people; some young lords and other eminent persons; and the men and women with the Boxes [in which the admission money was collected] fled. The Sheriffes brought away Tim Reade the Foole, and the people cryed out for their monies, but slunk away like a company of drowned Mice without it.33
This raid deterred neither the players nor the playgoers, and in 1648 it was reported that performances were being given not only at the Salisbury Court but at other theatres as well. Provoked by this report, Parliament sent troops of soldiers to the theatres named, arrested all the actors they could find and took away their costumes. The Salisbury Court Theatre was soon afterwards demolished, as the Globe had been in 1644 and the Blackfriars and Hope were to be in 1655 and 1656. The Fortune Theatre was also pulled down after a severe ordinance had been issued by Parliament ordering the authorities in London, Westminster, Middlesex and Surrey,
To pull downe and demolish … all stage Galleries, Seates and Boxes, erected or used … for the acting, or playing, or seeing acted or plaid … Stage-Playes, Interludes, and Playes … And to cause to be apprehended all common players and Actors.34
23 ‘Whole Counties Became Desperate’
When the Royal Standard was raised in the driving rain at Nottingham in 1642 on the outbreak of the Civil War between the supporters of King Charles I and Parliament, there were scarcely more than 1000 men at the king’s command. Many of those who had already declared their allegiance shared the reluctance of Sir Edmund Verney, shortly to be kille
d fighting for him in Warwickshire. ‘I do not like the Quarrel,’ Sir Edmund wrote, ‘and do heartily wish the King would yield.’ But his conscience was concerned ‘in honour and in gratitude; he had eaten the King’s bread and served him near thirty Years’, and he would not do ‘so base a Thing as to foresake him’ now.
Yet this simple loyalty to the Crown, whether displayed by men like Verney or by those who would always support the king, right or wrong, was not sufficiently widespread or deeply felt to gain Charles more than a few supporters. Others who might have supported him hung back: it was harvest time, for one thing, and for another the King was still making overtures to Parliament as though he hoped, even now, to reach a compromise. Men were reluctant to jeopardize their future by openly declaring their support of a cause which might at any moment be abandoned or betrayed.
Charles’s behaviour in the months before his arrival in Nottingham had certainly, to say the least, been equivocal. Following the advice of various recent and moderate adherents to his cause, he had appeared to be willing to accept all the reasonable constitutional reforms which had been introduced, and to be concerned to present himself as the upholder of legality and of the Church of England. But at the same time he had shown how ready he still was to be influenced by the firebrands and reactionaries at Court who urged him to crush the rebellion by force, to get help to do this from anyone, foreigners and Catholics included. It was not only his enemies, but also his potential friends who distrusted him. And in the end it was Parliament itself which enabled him to attract sufficient support to offer battle.
For on 6 September its members declared that all men who did not support it were ‘delinquents’ and that their property was forfeit. This meant that those who would have been happy to stay neutral were virtually obliged to fight in their own defence; it meant, as the Parliamentarian Sir Simonds D’Ewes admitted, that ‘not only particular persons of the nobility’ but ‘whole counties’ became ‘desperate’. Men whose fortunes might well have been lost had Parliament won, now undertook to raise troops to fight for the king in whose victory their own salvation might be secured; while gentry whose income from land was declining and whose fortunes depended upon the rich perquisites which only the Court could offer, needed no further persuasion to fight.
If self-interest provided the spur for this early surge of support for the Royalist cause, other reasons, no less important, played their part in swelling the numbers of men who eventually decided to throw in their lot with the king. It was not only that the king’s majesty was considered by many, including Edmund Verney, to be sacrosanct. ‘I beseech you consider,’ Verney wrote to his brother who had made up his mind to support Parliament, ‘that majesty is sacred; God sayth “Touch not myne anointed.”’ There was also the strong feeling that the king was the defender of the true Church; and although religion became of much more importance later in the struggle than it was in the beginning, it was even now of grave concern. Moreover, while it was never primarily a class struggle – at least the gentry were fairly equally divided – there was an undeniable fear among many of the king’s supporters that the lower classes would use this opportunity to turn upon their masters, that the predominantly Puritan merchants and shopkeepers of the towns were intent upon upsetting the structure of power to their own advantage, that the king’s opponents represented rebellion and chaos as opposed to law and order. These fears and beliefs were not, of course, general throughout the country; they were strongest in the north, except for the more industrialized parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, in the west Midlands and Wales and in the West Country. Parliament, on the other hand, derived its strongest support from south-east England, London and in East Anglia where Oliver Cromwell, himself a gentleman farmer with a small estate near Huntingdon, helped to organize the ‘Eastern Association’. But there were no firm lines of division: most trading towns declared for Parliament; many areas endeavoured to remain neutral; a large number of landowners changed from side to side with the fortunes of war; hundreds of families were divided in their loyalties as the Verneys were; thousands of country people found themselves drawn into the conflict on the side that their landlords and masters elected to support; thousands more were not too sure what all the fuss was about or, as Sir Arthur Haslerig said, did not really care what government they lived under ‘so long as they may plough and go to market’. Some did not even know there was a conflict at all, and only about three men in every hundred took an active part in it. Long after the war had started, long after the first battles had been fought, a Yorkshire farm labourer, when advised to keep out of the line of fire between the king’s men and Parliament’s learned for the first time that ‘them two had fallen out’.1
Yet, even if unaware of all the issues involved, the poor of England had long had cause for grievous discontent. Prices, which had continually risen and so reduced the value of their wages, had not become steadier until the 1620s, and thereafter there were years of bad harvests, of plague, of distress in the woollen industry, of adverse balances of trade. There were seven good years between 1629 and 1635, but these were followed by intermittent years of hardship and unemployment and of outbreaks of discontent. In Yorkshire and Lincolnshire there were riots against the draining of the fens which threatened a way of life traditional there for centuries; in Wiltshire and Cornwall there were riots against enclosures and against interference with the people’s rights on common lands. Elsewhere there were widespread protests against the diminishing areas of land around the cottages of farm labourers which, when newly built in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, had been required by law to have four acres at least. There were frequent complaints, too, that the shilling a day upon which most workers were required to live was barely adequate for life’s necessities.2
Protests found voice in numerous pamphlets. After the lifting of censorship in 1641 their number increased from twenty-two the previous year to 1996 in 1642.3 They also found expression in the proliferation of Protestant sects, Calvinists and Baptists, Presbyterians and Quakers, Ranters and Seekers and Muggletonians, all offering their own paths to salvation, feeding resentment against the bishops whom the king employed in the administration of his secular affairs.4
After the Civil War, in which about 100,000 men were killed, the protests were continued and the demands renewed. The Levellers, those radicals in the Parliamentary army, vigorously pursued their campaign for a greatly widened suffrage and the abolition of tithes. The even more extreme Diggers, demanding ‘an end to the ownership of private property and declaring that the poorest man hath as true a title and just right to the land as the richest man’, occupied manorial land and cut down manorial trees. Such provocation united conservative-minded men in their determination to resist the extremists; while Oliver Cromwell, a conservative himself at heart, expressed his wish to preserve ‘the ranks and order of men whereby England hath been known for hundreds of years: a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman’.5
It was the noblemen and gentlemen, indeed, who were the eventual beneficiaries of the Civil War and the years that followed it. Land had certainly passed from Royalist into Roundhead hands, but it passed back again after the Restoration. There were certainly Royalist gentry who had contracted such debts that they had to sell their estates either to richer landowners or to successful merchants and yeomen who were rising into the gentry class: the theme of many plays produced in the reign of Charles II was the hatred of small squires and gentry for the rich lords who were buying their land.6 Yet, while the process of swallowing up small estates in larger as an agricultural advancement had undoubtedly begun, the gentry as a whole emerged from the war with their position in the country enhanced. As Justices of the Peace they exercised greater authority after the Restoration of Charles II than they had in the days of his father, and as landowners they held half the land in the country.7
At the same time, so it seems from contemporary estimates, the Civil War had done little to relieve poverty. These estimates were compiled by Gregory Kin
g, a genealogist and statistician who was born in Lichfield in 1648. After careful study of the records of the population and wealth of the country towards the close of the seventeenth century, King estimated that out of a total population of 5,500,520 people there were 1,275,000 ‘labouring people and outservants’ with a yearly income of about £15 a year per family, 1,300,000 ‘cottagers and paupers’ struggling to survive on £610s per family, and 30,000 ‘vagrants as gipsies, thieves, beggars etc’.8
The Act of Settlement passed in 1662 made no clear distinction between this last group and those poor people who, for reasons beyond their control, found themselves without means of support in a village not their own. All of them were liable to be sent back to the parish where they were last settled when ordered to do so by two Justices of the Peace upon receipt of a complaint from the Overseers of the Poor. Indeed, long before this Act was passed an expensive item in the account books of parish constables was the relief doled out to poor people ordered to return to villages where they had previously lived and where they would almost certainly not be welcome upon their return.
The account books of Upton-by-Southwell in Nottinghamshire record the following doles among many others of the same kind:
Given to a poore man and his wife and five children which lay a day and night in James Bloomer barne … 1s 8d.
Given to a cripple woman being sent from constable to constable in a cart being very weake and feeble, she being releifed with meat and money … 8d.9
Pregnant women and the sick were pushed about with particular haste for fear lest they either gave birth to a child which would then be a charge upon the parish or die in it and require burial. At Wymeswold ‘a Bygg belly woman’ was given 2d to help speed her ‘forth of the towne’; and on 25 June 1631 a Nottinghamshire constable noted in his accounts, ‘Given to a woman that was great with child to gett her away … 2d. Given to a poor man, his wife and three small children. One child being very sore sicke for fear the child should die in this towne I gave them to be gone … 8d.’10
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