Henry Garnet, by Jan Wierix, 1606–18. Garnet, the most senior member of the Jesuit mission in England, was captured along with Edward Oldcorne in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot and executed.
Most notorious, and most hated, of these survival strategies was the Jesuit practice of ‘equivocation’ – juggling with words to mislead or evade answering under oath, but with unspoken mental reservations. ‘Equivocation’ drew special condemnation for its dishonesty and slipperiness. In Macbeth, written around the time of the Gunpowder Plot, the Porter voices the popular view of the treacherous Jesuit priest:
PORTER: Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator.
In Shakespeare, while disguise is often a frivolous affair, the idea of dissembling – hiding or misleading one’s real character or purpose, leading the innocent to trust the untrustworthy – is the hallmark of the true villains, from Richard III to Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear:
RICHARD: I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
For undercover Catholic priests, however, deception was essential for self-preservation and for moving around the country. Disguised as itinerant salesmen, they would have effectively had freedom to travel anywhere. The fabrics and furbelows in the trunk, as well as the beads and an everyday pewter cup, could easily be mistaken for legitimate goods. The pink bonnet found at the top of the pile may have been placed there to mislead whoever opened the trunk.
Shakespeare’s audience were well aware of this closet religious practice, and everyone would have recognized the pattern of disguise, constant movement and equally constant fear. Gloucester’s son Edgar in King Lear is in flight because, if caught, he will be killed:
EDGAR: I heard myself proclaimed,
And by the happy hollow of a tree
Escaped the hunt. No port is free, no place
That guard and most unusual vigilance
Does not attend my taking.
He decides that the only safe way forward is to disguise himself as a wandering beggar:
EDGAR: Whiles I may ‘scape
I will preserve myself; and am bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast. My face I’ll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots,
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky.
Persecuted, endangered, travelling under a false identity in order to do good for his blinded father – Edgar is a striking parallel of an outlaw Catholic priest, disguised and on the run.
The unmasking of disguise in Shakespeare’s plays is usually a cause for delight: Viola is reunited with her brother Sebastian; Portia and Nerissa are restored to their astonished husbands; Rosalind at last revealed to her lover Orlando. If you were a Roman Catholic in England around 1600 and your pedlar unexpectedly turned out to be a priest, it must have been a moment of similar intense rejoicing – despite the risks associated with discovery. Thanks to a trunk like this one, what you believed could now be celebrated in the ritual of the mass that was at the heart of your faith – forbidden by law, but now miraculously possible. In your own home, a room could become a church, where with these vestments, this plate and cup, family and friends could gather in a rare forbidden communion.
Bill Nighy as Edgar in King Lear, National Theatre, 1986. Edgar’s role as the beggar Poor Tom is among the most sustained episodes of disguise in Shakespeare’s plays.
In the next chapter we examine another group of people that many Elizabethans viewed with suspicion – not Roman Catholics, but what Shakespeare in Henry V called ‘the weasel Scot’.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Flag That Failed
FLAGS FOR GREAT BRITAIN
On the night of 26 March 1603 Sir Robert Carey galloped up to the front of Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh with eagerly awaited news. He had ridden straight from London, where, two days before, at three in the morning, Queen Elizabeth had died. It was the event that everyone in England had long been dreading.
CRANMER: She shall be, to the happiness of England,
An agèd princess; many days shall see her,
And yet no day without a deed to crown it.
Would I had known no more! but she must die –
She must, the saints must have her – yet a virgin;
A most unspotted lily shall she pass
To th’ground, and all the world shall mourn her.
But while all the world was mourning, English politicians had to act. An hour or so after Elizabeth’s death, James VI of Scotland was proclaimed her successor by the Privy Council, led by Sir Robert Cecil. At 10 o’clock the next morning Cecil again proclaimed James I King of England, France and Ireland, this time openly at Whitehall. At Holyrood in Edinburgh, the news was received with rapture. Elizabeth had proved very un-Tudor in her longevity, and James had had a long, uncertain wait. Now, after just eight days to prepare and pack, he left Holyrood on 4 April 1603 to claim his new and much richer crown in England.
Ten years later, in their jointly authored play Henry VIII, William Shakespeare and his collaborator John Fletcher looked back at the pivotal moment when James had succeeded Elizabeth, and the hopes that surrounded the new king.
CRANMER: So shall she leave her blessèdness to come –
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness –
Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fixed. Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,
That were the servants to this chosen infant,
Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him.
For the first time in history, the whole island of Britain was under one rule – something that even the Romans had failed to achieve. Everybody knew that with James as King of England and King of Scotland a new political world had been born. But it was not at all clear how things were going to change. Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Archbishop Cranmer predicts that:
CRANMER: Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honour and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and make new nations. He shall flourish,
And like a mountain cedar reach his branches
To all the plains about him; our children’s children
Shall see this, and bless heaven.
But making a new nation turned out to be very difficult. For much of the previous 300 years England and Scotland had been at war; they had very different political and legal systems, a different established church, different currencies, separate parliaments and a long history of intense dislike and deep suspicion. James’s central ambition was to make these two very foreign countries into one new state, with a new name – Great Britain.
The Royal Palace of Holy Rood-Hous, by James Gordon (1617–1686). It was at the sixteenth-century Holyrood Palace, his Edinburgh residence, that on 26 March 1603 James VI heard of Elizabeth I’s death and his accession to the English throne.
The succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603 created a dynastic union, and a personal union of political authority, but it did not create a union of the crowns in constitutional, legal, ecclesiastical or economic terms. Forging such a union was James’s paramount aim. In some ways, it was not a bad time for an ambitious project of nation-building. It followed half a century of unbroken peace between Scotland and England (give or take the usual Border skirmishings) and a growing sense that, in spite of a bloody history, England and Scotla
nd shared a common language and a common Protestant faith.
In 1604 James set out the framework for a legal and political union, including a certain amount of free trade, the abolition of the special laws governing the Scottish Borders (to be renamed ‘the Middle Shires’) and the naturalization of Scottish subjects living in England. John Morrill of the University of Cambridge explains:
Initially James pushed for all-out union: political union, an economic union and a religious union. But very quickly he saw that the scale of the opposition was too great, so instead he proposed what he called the ‘union of hearts and minds’. The problem was the English wanted to create common institutions covering the whole of the island, so there would be one parliament, one system of law and one church. Whereas the Scots preferred a federal structure in which both countries retained independent institutions but ones which would work together, using some new mechanisms for increased cooperation. In a sense the Scots would always prefer devolution to integration. They would always like to have their law and their particular style of Protestantism protected.
James I of England and VI of Scotland, by John de Critz, 1604. De Critz, an English painter of Flemish descent, was appointed to be one of James I’s ‘sergeant-painters’ in 1603, soon after the new king’s accession.
The full union James dreamed of was impossible without legislation, and this required parliamentary approval. The negotiated proposals for union were passed by the Scottish parliament in 1607 (the Scottish parliament was a single-chamber assembly consisting overwhelmingly of royal tenants-in-chief and usually obedient to the king), but that decision was conditional on the agreement of the English parliament. The Scottish king quickly discovered that the less subservient English parliament was having none of it, and the Treaty failed.
Yet some things James could alter without parliament. He could use his prerogative powers to make the union at least a symbolic reality, what were called ‘outward marks of government’. He issued a new £1 coin and called it the ‘Unite’. He changed his title to King of Great Britain – some of his supporters even urged that he should call himself ‘Emperor of Great Britain’, although he declined to go that far. He famously began his great project to create a new version of the Bible in English that would be used in both kingdoms. And he set about designing a new British flag.
In the National Library of Scotland, there is now housed a set of flag designs made around 1604 – the earliest designs for James’s new flag. They are drawn on a piece of paper about the size of a large placemat, and on it six flags are flying. They look a bit like pictures in a child’s colouring book, all outlined very simply in ink and then brightly coloured in – there are six red, white and blue variations on how you combine the Scottish cross of St Andrew and the English cross of St George, annotated in almost illegible seventeenth-century writing. They are a strikingly straightforward attempt at visual propaganda. Each design sought to capture what James optimistically, if rather naively, called ‘this happy marriage’. Here, the flags say, are not two nations, but one; no longer England and Scotland, but now Britain.
As well as the parliamentary and personal programme, there was a major campaign in print and on the public stage in 1603–6 in support of James’s project. In 1605 the Lord Mayor’s pageant presented Antony Munday’s Triumphes of Re-united Britannia, in which the three kings Locrine of England, Camber of Wales and Albanact of Scotland resign their crowns to Empress Britannia (‘I yielded long ago,’ says Camber wistfully). William Herbert’s Lamentation of Britaine, published the following year, urging the English to become British, begins:
Oh where is Britaine? Britaine where is shee?
What? Smothered in forgetful sepulcher?
Exilde from mans reviving memorie?
Oh no, let England like a childe prefer
That well knowne title of her ancester.
I know the neighbour sisters of this Ile
Will greatly glory in so good a stile
This revival of Britain was not a new idea; it moved forward behind a phalanx of historical writings and previous political manoeuvrings, and it also rested on James’s bloodline. He was, of course, Scottish, but also English and Welsh through the Tudors – and thus impeccably, predestinedly British. He could even, by several ancestral routes, lay claim as heir to Cadwallader, last of the British kings (a tentative and insecure claim, but one which still made for good propaganda). And his coins explicitly made the link between James and Henry VII, his direct ancestor: ‘HENRICVS ROSAS REGNA IACOBVS’ they read. James was uniting the thrones of Scotland and England just as Henry, combining the red and white roses, united the Houses of Lancaster and York.
Gold double crown of James I, 1604–5. In 1604 James I issued a completely new series of coins using the title Great Britain (MAG BRIT). Their other Latin inscriptions all carried the unionizing message, in this case ‘Henry (VII) united the roses, James the kingdoms’.
Looking at the flag designs, you can see the intractable politics of union being played out in graphic form. All the designs stumble on the one key problem facing James’s project: how do you combine two kingdoms, but allow each to retain equal status? Crudely put, which national cross gets to be on top, St George or St Andrew? And does size matter?
If you have never seen the Union Flag that we have all grown up with, it is surprisingly difficult to come up with an even-handed solution to this problem. The six designs of 1604 tackled it in different ways. Two of them put the Scottish cross unequivocally on top of the English cross, but they make the Scottish cross much smaller. In two others, the English cross hogs most of the flag, but a smaller, Scottish cross gets the coveted ‘pole position’ in the upper left-hand corner. So these four proposals all offer the same compromise: the English cross is bigger, but the Scottish cross holds the position of honour.
The last two designs are much more ingenious. One has four small Scottish crosses, white on blue, filling each of the quarters around a large red English cross. The last design is perhaps the simplest of all. It just quietly sets the two crosses side-by-side, fifty-fifty, English to the left, the Scottish to the right. It might seem to be the obvious solution, but it is conspicuously ugly. Perhaps inevitably it was the one that the Earl of Nottingham, as Earl Marshal and responsible for supervising heraldry, recommended to the King. In a note that Nottingham wrote on the drawing itself, he explained why he thought it a happy conceit, an unimpeded marriage of true minds expressed in flag form: ‘In my poor opinion, this will be the most fittest, for this is like man and wife without blemish one to other.’ But in heraldic terms, there was a problem with this design, because in this seventeenth-century flag couple, England is very much the man, on the privileged position on the inside of the flag. Scotland, as the wife, is relegated to the outside.
The matrimonial metaphor was much in the air. James himself used it with evident relish when addressing the English parliament in 1604:
What God has conjoined then let no man separate. I am the husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife. I am the head and it is my body; I am the shepherd and all the whole isle is my flock…I hope therefore no man will be so unreasonable as to think that I that am a Christian king under the Gospel, should be a Polygamist and husband to two wives.
But the two wives – Scotland and England – were never going to agree, which is why the flag issue was so telling. The Scots wanted absolute parity; the English wanted acknowledgement of their longer history, greater resources and (in their eyes) inherent pre-eminence. Neither side would give way.
These early years of James’s reign were the background against which Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, in which England and Scotland are separate but friendly. Despite the intense royal propaganda for full union, Shakespeare on the whole evades the question of Britain. In King Lear, written around the same time, he draws on a little-known anonymous play, published in 1605, in which a mythical King of Britain breaks up his united realm with devastating consequences. In his source, Br
itain is mentioned over twenty times, but in Shakespeare’s version, Lear’s kingdom strikingly has no name, and the word ‘Britain’ does not appear once. Shakespeare, like everybody else, must have known James’s views. Jonathan Bate says:
Shakespeare always keeps his own cards very close to his chest. One of the things that makes his plays so endlessly open to new interpretations and performances in new cultural contexts is the fact that they set up questions, big questions about politics, the state, the relationship between the individual and the state, between the present and the past. They don’t propose answers, they are not propaganda. You can look at some of the other dramatic works of the period, for instance the court masques written specifically for King James by Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson, and they are overtly propagandistic, celebrating the triumphs of Britannia. Shakespeare doesn’t do that – he is too subtle a writer – but there is no doubt that we can see him cutting his cloth according to the concerns of the new king. I think the thing to remember about King James is that he loves debates…He sees himself as a real intellectual king. So the fact that Shakespeare’s plays present questions, political, philosophical, but don’t actually give propagandistic answers, in a way I think James would have found that very attractive.
Detail from The restoration of Old St Paul’s, by John Gipkyn, 1616, a rare image of the first Union Jack flag, which was little used and usually only on shipping.
Shakespeare’s early history plays written under Elizabeth had taken a very pro-Tudor line, presenting the Queen’s own view of what England was, and the court rewarded him. And he did eventually furnish a ‘British’ play for James, his new patron (Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, was renamed the King’s Men in very short order after the arrival of James in London). Jonathan Bate explains:
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