The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England
Page 16
One of the richest men in London, Sir John Spencer, who had made his fortune in overseas trade, was engaged in large-scale moneylending to needy gentlemen and peers by the 1590s. His estate was well over £300,000 at the time of his death in 1610. Another well-known moneylender was Juliana (Arthur) Penne. After her death in 1592, her son by her first marriage, Sir Baptist Hicks, carried on the business. Lawyers were also known to provide short-term loans to their clients, particularly in cases of land transfers. Sir Edward Stanhope and Sir Julius Caesar were prominent moneylending lawyers.
The English Crown borrowed from Antwerp at high rates of interest during the period from 1544 to 1574. James I took short-term loans from English merchants. In 1625-28 and 1638-42, Charles I also borrowed money in London.
At the other end of the scale, alehouse keepers made loans to their patrons. So did a peddler named Kit Miller. Miller had a thriving business at fairs, such as the one at Chelmsford, during the 1580s and 1590s. He sold counterfeit magistrates’ seals (to seal travel permits and thus avoid arrest for vagrancy) and forged passports (a license to travel, which had to be signed by two justices of the shire). He also made loans to vagrants. They repaid him with interest “when they had gotten any cheat.”
One way around the maximum interest rate was to offer a “commodity” instead of part of the cash. This commodity was often worth far less than advertised and it was not uncommon for the lender to realize a profit as high as 100%.
IMPRISONMENT FOR DEBT
Going to prison for debt was common, and in some cases was by choice, since it kept a man’s possessions safe for his heirs (death canceled debt). Some even went bankrupt deliberately, after investing the money they had borrowed. They were then unable to repay their loans but could live high in prison (with good food, comfortable furnishings, visitors, etc.) on the proceeds. London’s Fleet, Ludgate, and King’s Bench prisons housed debtors.
When a firm went “bancquaroutta,” everything was seized and sold. The fortunes of the Caves and Johnsons, merchants based at Calais until 1558, are studied in detail in Barbara Winchester’s Tudor Family Portrait (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955). John Johnson was granted a year of grace before he was imprisoned in the Fleet for debt and was in and out all through the next two years, but his wife and children were on their own, dependent on relatives. Had Johnson been able to make a settlement, he could have gotten out of prison, but he would have been literally penniless.
SHOPPING MALLS
The Royal Exchange, Cornhill, was the Elizabethan equivalent of a shopping mall. Queen Elizabeth officially opened the Royal Exchange on January 23, 1571. Built by Sir Thomas Gresham (whose crest, the grasshopper, surmounted the bell tower in the center wing), it occupied a site between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street in London. It was designed by Henri van Paesschen, a Fleming, who took his inspiration from a similar structure in Antwerp.
The gateway from Cornhill gave access to a courtyard decorated with statues of the kings of England. Three brick wings (later stuccoed) rose four stories high and housed some 100 shops, including milliners, haberdashers, armorers, apothecaries, booksellers, goldsmiths, and glass-sellers. In the evening, the shops were lit with candles. During the earthquake of 1580, shopkeepers fled the premises in a panic, but the building stood.
Covered walks supported by marble pillars were gathering places for merchants as well as shoppers. Space under this arcade served as a stock exchange and estate agency. The bells in the bell tower sounded twice a day, at noon and six in the evening. London’s waits (town musicians) gave evening concerts at the Royal Exchange every Sunday and holiday from 1571 to 1642. The Royal Exchange was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666.
In 1609, the New Exchange (officially called Britain’s Burse, the name James I chose for it) opened on the Strand as a West End rival to the Royal Exchange. It followed a similar plan, with a long (201’) covered arcade facing the street. Inside, a 10’-wide corridor was flanked by rows of small booths (no more than 5½’ deep) on either side. On the second level, reached by stairs at both ends, there were two corridors with more rows of shops. The shops, an even 100 in all, were to be leased for eleven years, but the rents were a bit high and only twenty-seven shops were leased out when the place opened. Market regulations excluded ordinary perishable goods and encouraged shops like the “China houses” which sold oriental silks and porcelain. Hours were also regulated. The New Exchange was open from 6 A.M. to 8 P.M. in summer and 7 A.M. until 7 P.M. in winter. The New Exchange struggled along at first, but in the 1630s it enjoyed a new prosperity. In 1657, it was occupied by 109 shopkeepers, including forty-two milliners and thirty-two sempsters.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bernard, G.W., ed. The Tudor Nobility. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. Especially useful is the chapter “Henry VII and the English Nobility,” by T.B. Pugh.
Challis, C.E. The Tudor Coinage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978.
Fletcher, Anthony. Tudor Rebellions. London: Longman, 1968.
Stone, Lawrence. Family and Fortune: Studies in Aristocratic Finance in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: WAR AND PEACE
England spent less time at war during the period from 1485 to 1649 than in previous decades, which were filled with civil wars between Lancaster and York. It was not, however, an entirely peaceful era.
Peace treaties between nations were customarily sealed with a royal marriage. Henry VII attempted to rid England of enemies by negotiating such alliances. His daughter Margaret was married to King James IV of Scotland. His son Arthur wed Catherine of Aragon in 1501. And his daughter Mary was betrothed during his lifetime to the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Unfortunately, Arthur died in 1502. The fact that Henry VIII married his brother’s widow in 1509 was the basis for their divorce and the subsequent break with Rome some twenty-four years later. Margaret’s husband was slain by English troops at Flodden. Mary’s betrothal was set aside so that she could be married to the elderly French king, Louis XII, in 1514. He died a few months after the wedding.
Henry VIII, in between marriage alliances involving his sister and his daughter, periodically went to war with France and with Spain. England was at war with France in 1511-1514 (allied for part of that time with the Holy Roman Emperor and the Spanish king), and again in 1522-1525 and 1543-1545. That always meant war with Scotland, too, for every time the English were occupied in the south, the Scots attacked across her northern border. In 1528, Henry was at war with Charles V, but when Charles signed the Peace of Cambrais the next year with Francis I of France, Henry also abided by it.
Under Edward VI, another war was waged against France and Scotland, lasting from 1547 to 1550. Mary’s marriage to Philip II of Spain brought England into the Spanish war against France in 1557. Under Elizabeth there was initially a period of peace, but enmity with Spain eventually brought on first a trade war and then a declared war. Connected to this was the war in the Low Countries. Private individuals were urged to finance armies to fight at the side of the rebels there. Under the Stuarts, foreign relations were mostly peaceful, although Elector Frederick of the Palatine (James I’s son-in-law) did accept the crown of Bohemia in 1619, the start of what later became known as the Thirty Years’ War.
EMBASSIES
The idea of a permanent resident agent at another court originated in Italy in the fifteenth century and became quite common throughout Europe in the sixteenth. Spain had an embassy in England from 1495 until 1584. France also sent an ambassador to England. There were English ambassadors at the courts of the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, France, and Venice until 1558, but by 1570 the only remaining English ambassador on the Continent was in France.
In 1557, the duke of Muskovea, the first ambassador to England from the tsar of Russia, arrived at court. In 1582, Ivan the Terrible suggested he might marry Queen Elizabeth’s distant cousin, Lady Mary Hastings, but no one in England looked very f
avorably on the idea. For one thing, Ivan had recently married his seventh wife.
THE PALE OF CALAIS
This outpost in France was English until 1558. It extended nine miles inland at its deepest point and along eighteen miles of the English Channel from Gravelines to Cap Blanc Nez. With an area of about 120 square miles, mostly marshland, the English Pale had an approximate population of 12,000, including Picards and Flemings as well as English. From 1536 to 1543, Calais was represented in the English Parliament. The normal military garrison at Calais (as at Berwick) was less than 1,000. A mile outside the walled town of Calais, on the road to Boulogne, was another small garrison at Newenhambridge, which controlled the sluices that regulated the flow of the Hammes River. This allowed the defenders of Calais to flood an extensive area to the west in case of enemy attack.
THE INVASION OF FRANCE IN WAR
In 1513, when Henry VIII brought his army to France, he took with him a portable wooden house, carried in twelve carts. It had two rooms, windows of “lantern horn,” and a fireplace and chimney. The exterior was painted to resemble bricks. Henry also brought his own bed on campaign, and three more wagons transported a tent of cloth-of-gold and other tents and marquees, which connected to the prefabricated timber house to cover an area of some 4,000 square feet with additional “rooms,” including one which held the royal close-stool.
The officers, including captains, lived in smaller tents. Henry’s minstrels and players traveled with him. So did a corps of 600 yeomen, fifty “King’s Spears” (then of noble blood, each with an archer, light cavalryman, and mounted attendant), and the garrison troops (some 3,000 men normally scattered at over 100 royal castles).
The army of 30,000 was supported by a baggage train of 10,000-15,000 wagons. A soldier’s typical daily ration was a pound of biscuit, a pound of beef, and eight pints of beer.
THE INVASION OF FRANCE IN PEACE—THE FIELD OF CLOTH-OF-GOLD
The English made a peaceful “invasion” of France in 1520, to compete in tournaments and showmanship. In some ways it was not so different from 1513. Determined to compete with Francis I on a personal level, Henry VIII brought his entire court and then some. Not only did every courtier attend, but they were each entitled to a retinue, the numbers determined by rank. Every earl brought thirty-three servants, twenty horses, three chaplains, and six gentlemen. Every knight was entitled to one chaplain, eleven servants, and eight horses. Even an esquire had a chaplain, six servants, and eight horses. The ladies were similarly escorted. Each countess was allowed three gentlewomen, four menservants, and eight horses. Each gentlewoman had a woman servant, two menservants, and three horses. Even the chamberers were allowed one manservant and two horses each.
Including time at Calais, the English were in France from May 31 until July 18. They were in Henry’s “temporary” palace at the site of the main events near Guines from June 7 to 20. The palace lodged approximately 820 people and had four towers at the corners and a gatehouse at the front. There was an inner court around which the four ranges of the building were grouped. There were three floors with a chapel on the ground floor. The choir was hung with cloth-of-gold and silk. The altars were covered with cloth-of-gold embellished with pearls. The gilded wooden roof had a frieze below it. On the high altar, under a rich canopy, were five pairs of candlesticks, a large crucifix, and statues of all twelve apostles, each as large as a four-year-old child. The state apartments were on the first floor and the king and queen had oratories which looked down into the chapel. A separate banqueting house stood outside the castle wall. There was a large hall at the back of the structure, 328’ long, reached by a broad staircase. Divided by two tapestries, its ceiling was of green sarcenet with gold roses.
For entertainment there were banquets, masques, and dancing, but the main event was the tournament and its goal was to see who could break the most lances. The score on Saturday the sixteenth of June was Henry 18, Francis 14. In all, over the days of the event, 327 lances were broken.
THE ROYAL NAVY
Henry V made the first attempt to create a royal navy. Henry VII was the first English king to launch an active warship-building program. Henry VIII followed his father’s lead and in the first half of the sixteenth century Portsmouth became a major naval base.
In the wars Henry VIII fought with France, his navy played an important role. On April 28, 1513, the English fleet engaged French galleys in Conquet Bay on the coast of Brittany. Sir Edward Howard was Lord Admiral. He had just boarded a captive vessel when a cable slipped (or was cut) and Howard found himself adrift on an enemy ship under the command of French admiral Prigent de Bidoux. Nearly fifty Englishmen, including the Lord Admiral, were dispatched with pike thrusts or thrown into the sea. A short time later, Bidoux returned Howard’s embalmed body to the English, but he kept the heart, an act which provoked so much outrage in England that King Henry was able to muster popular support for his war and continue until he’d had his revenge.
In July 1545, when Henry VIII was again at war with the French, the French sent an armada against him greater than the Spanish force that would come in 1588. At least 225 ships left Le Havre carrying 30,000 troops. Henry had sixty English vessels gathered at Portsmouth. There was, however, no decisive sea battle. The French briefly took the Isle of Wight, and there were a few exchanges of gunfire, but after several days the French simply sailed back across the Channel.
Under Edward VI and Mary I, Henry VIII’s shipbuilding program was abandoned. Between 1547 and 1558, the number of ships in the royal navy decreased from over eighty to twenty-six. As soon as Elizabeth succeeded her sister, however, she took up where her father had left off.
The most famous sea battle of the century was that fought against the Spanish Armada in 1588. There were 197 English ships gathered to defend English shores against 130 Spanish vessels. While it is true that the English repulsed the Spaniards, more damage was actually done to the Armada by rough weather during the retreat than by English guns.
After James I’s treaty with Spain in 1604, the navy was once more allowed to decay. Under Charles I, the so-called Buckingham Wars in 1625 and 1627 were naval disasters, finally prompting Charles to begin to rebuild. Ironically, the effort came back to haunt him. When civil war broke out in 1642, the royal navy turned against him.
THE ENGLISH ARMY IN IRELAND
English monarchs traditionally appointed a Governor for Ireland, but in 1541, Henry VIII officially added King of Ireland to his titles. Crown lands were centered in the Pale, the area around Dublin, but the entire island was nominally under English rule. The Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) distinguished between “the king’s Irish enemies” and “the king’s English lieges” in Ireland. All were supposed to speak English and adopt English manners and customs. However, Ireland retained its own Parliament, Privy Council, and law courts, and some English settlers had been there so long that they no longer thought of themselves as English.
From 1477 to 1534, Ireland was controlled for England by the earls of Kildare. In 1534, Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth earl, was recalled and lodged in the Tower, where he died on September 2. There was an attempt to wipe out the entire “Geraldine” faction, as the Fitzgeralds and their followers were called, but young Gerald, aged ten, was spirited away to be educated in Florence.
English-born Lord Lieutenants governed Ireland from that point onward. It was not a position one coveted, since the post was both dangerous and ruinously expensive to maintain. Treaties with Irish lords in the 1540s gave them new titles and this policy of “surrender and regrant” was repeated under Elizabeth in the 1560s. In spite of that, however, there were uprisings against English rule in Ireland in 1568 and 1579-83, in part over religious issues. A more serious revolt began in 1594 and continued through various ups and downs until 1603. In 1599 the English army in Ireland was destroyed at the Battle of Yellow Ford. Under the Stuarts, there was finally peace (though there was a rising of Irish Catholics in 1641), but there was also famine and increased Irish
immigration into England and Wales. In 1628 enterprising ferrymen were charging three shillings each to carry passengers from Ireland to Wales across St. George’s Channel.
HEADS OF STATE
England
Henry VII (1457-1509)
Henry VIII (1491-1547)
Edward VI (1537-1553)
Mary I (1516-1558)
Elizabeth I (1533-1603)
James I (1566-1625)
Charles I (1600-1649)
France
Louis XII (1462-1515)
Francis I (1494-1547)
Henri II (1519-1559)
Francis II (d. 1560)
Catherine de’ Medici (1519-1589), Regent for Charles IX (1550-1574) Catherine de’ Medici (1519-1589), Regent for Henri III (1551-1589)
Henri IV (1553-1610)
Louis XIII (1601-1666)
The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation
(The Low Countries, Eastern Burgundy, Savoy, and much of Northern
Italy)
Maximilian I (1459-1519)
Charles V (1500-1558); abdicated 1556
Ferdinand I (1503-1564)
Maximilian II (1527-1576)
Rudolf II (1552-1612)