The Elizabethans (26 page)

The 1570s were a decade of particular architectural creativity. Longleat was gutted by fire in 1567, but Smythson had no sooner finished his rebuilding than his patron, Sir John Thynne, commissioned him to wrap the existing house with an extraordinary classical encasement of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian pilasters. Vast amounts of stone were required for the embellishments. Thynne bought a whole quarry for the purpose at Haselbury, near Box.
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Wheelless drags pulled by oxen were used to bring the stone through the steep Somersetshire combes and were transformed by Smythson into the crested parapets, the glorious lights, the soaring classical frontages that still awe and delight the visitor to Longleat today.

It is inevitable, when we are telling the story of the Elizabethans, that we should dwell upon their great houses, for these were the places that bore witness to so much of their political, and of their cultural, history as well. Mary Sidney married the 2nd Earl of Pembroke in 1577 and became the chatelaine of Wilton House. ‘In her time,’ wrote John Aubrey, ‘Wilton House was like a college, there were so many learned and ingeniose persons.’
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The house saw Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe – perhaps even Shakespeare went there with Burbage’s theatrical company – but few, even of these illustrious visitors, were as learned or as ‘ingeniose’ as Mary Sidney herself, or as her brother Philip, who probably wrote much of his poetry and of his prose-romance the
Arcadia
at Wilton.

It would be a mistake, however, only to remember the huge houses, and the great palaces of the upper aristocracy, when we try to get our panorama of Elizabethan life into focus. The aristocracy ruled England from Elizabethan to Victorian times (as they had done in the Middle Ages). The Elizabethan aristocracy, however, sprang very largely from the gentry class beneath them. The Cecils, the Bacons, the Russells, the Cavendishes, the Sackvilles were all gentry families who rose to become high aristocratic families.

An essential factor of Elizabethan society was its mobility. At the same time it aspired to a much more rigidly hierarchical social structure than had obtained in the Middle Ages. In medieval England, merchants – the unlanded rich – could have influence not just in the City of London, but in politics: they could serve as JPs or sit in Parliament. No merchant in Essex became a JP after 1564.
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In the great cloth-producing county of Wiltshire not a single clothier was returned as an MP during the reign of Elizabeth. As Richard Mulcaster (Old Etonian and Member of Parliament, as well as headmaster of the Merchant Taylors’ School) could write, ‘All the people which be in our contrie be either gentlemen or of the commonalty. The common is devided into merchauntes and manuaries generally, what partition soever is the subsidivent.’
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Or, as a contemporary put it, even more bluntly, ‘All sortes of people created from the beginning are devided into 2: Noble and Ignoble.’ And in reply to the old question about who was the gentleman ‘when Adam delved and Eve span’, there was a simple answer: ‘As Adam had sonnes of honour, soe had hee Caine destined to dishonour.’
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This meant that all new wealth, if it was to be converted into power, had to be invested in land. This was particularly true of the successful lawyers. Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), a close friend of the Cecil family and Attorney General in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, owned at least 105 properties by 1600 – manors, farms, rectories, advowsons and mills, dotted around Norfolk and Suffolk, as well as two huge houses. He had risen from very minor gentry at Mileham in Norfolk, himself the son of a lawyer.
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In Devon the Prideaux, Pophams, Heles, Pollards, Periams, Rowes, Harrises, Glanvilles, Whiddons and Williamses were all families who acquired or solidified gentry status by buying land with money made from the practice of the legal profession.
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Merchants, too, were not content to remain as rich merchants, as they had in the Middle Ages. They bought themselves into the landed classes. William Offley was a case in point, a burgess of Stafford. He sent his sons to London to be educated at St Paul’s. One, Sir Thomas, became Lord Mayor, and bought the manors of Mucklestone and Madeley, becoming an ancestor of the Earls of Crewe.
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In such a climate it was not surprising that those responsible for drawing up coats of arms for would-be, or new, gentlefolk, were kept prosperously busy. The heralds at the College of Arms were always occupied in the Elizabethan Age. In Lincolnshire, between 1562 and 1634, seventy-eight new names were added to the armigerous gentry. In Wiltshire, between 1565 and 1623, 109 names were added to the original total of 203. In Yorkshire, where there was an especially large number of recusant gentry, some of whom went abroad, 218 out of 641 gentry names in a comparable period were new gentry.
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They were able, if they were lucky in that mineral-rich county, to extract more than just rents from their land. Since only landowners could mine, only gentry in the Elizabethan Age could be industrialists. In 1598 the Privy Council was informed that Hewett Osborne’s mines in Wales Wood, Yorkshire, produced ‘2,000 lodes of coles’ a year – about 2,000 tons. The iron industry in Yorkshire, very lucrative, was exclusively in the hands of the gentry and nobility, with ironworks at Kirkstall, Attercliffe, Wadsey, Lascells Hall, Colne Bridge, Honley, Cawthorne, Rockley, Wortley, Hunshelf, Midgley Bank and West Bretton.
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The coat of arms and the ownership of land were passports not simply to status, but to power.

Nor was it permitted in that far-from-free society to pass yourself off as gentry if you were not. It was forbidden by law for common people to play bowls or tennis, for example. They were games for gentlemen.
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Norroy King of Arms was empowered to confine the wearing of a hood and tippet to esquires and seniors. In 1562 there was a detailed search of women’s clothes to make sure they were not getting above themselves (though Elizabeth I never went so far as Charles I, who in 1636 forbade the wearing of imitation jewellery).
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It was Burghley, as Chancellor of Cambridge University, who distinguished the noblemen by ornamenting their academic dress with gold lace in 1578 – a custom that continued until the nineteenth century. These were the so-called ‘tufts’. Snobs who sought out their company were ‘tuft hunters’.

The Elizabethan heralds made assiduous visitations to all the English counties to make sure that no one was claiming gentility without entitlement. Robert Cooke, Clarenceux Herald in 1567–93, visited all the English counties of the southern province to this end.
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Visitations involved punctilious searches through family pedigrees. The Queen, and Burghley, took with intense seriousness the role of the heralds ‘as a buttress for the stability of society’, in Lawrence Stone’s words.
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The heralds were put in charge of public funerals for aristocrats, and so seriously did the Queen believe in such displays of hierarchy that, parsimonious as she was, she footed the bill for the obsequies of the Marchioness of Northampton in 1565, of Lady Knollys in 1569, of the Countess of Lennox (whom she hated) in 1577, and of her cousin Harry, Lord Hunsdon, in 1596 – though when the Earl of Huntingdon died in the same year she jibbed at paying for his funeral.
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The heralds might well have been buttresses of social conservatism in their symbolic role. In person they were sometimes difficult company. Those who choreograph great ceremonies are often prone to choler, but Sir William Dethick, Garter King of Arms in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign, was a man of exceptional irascibility. He struck his own father with his fist, and wounded his brother with a dagger at Windsor Castle. During Sir Henry Sidney’s funeral in Westminster Abbey he struck a man with his dagger and wounded him and was detained in Newgate Prison. Perhaps the most extreme example of his peppery temper is found in a deposition made by Mary, wife of Dethick’s colleague John Hart, Chester Herald, which she made to Burghley himself:

May yt please your Honor I beinge alone in my chamber he put me in feare of my life, and almost took my breath from me, in most vyle sort: his cozin Richard Dethicke of Polstide in Suffolk hearing his doings came in and toke him by the middle and prayed him to be contente, I feared Yorke [Herald] wold have killed me els he spurned me downe with his foote so ofte (my hedde was verie neare the fire and my heare like to be burned) as yt maye appear by my cappe, which I had next to my heare. He put a depe cole baskette lined with lether on my hedde with some coles and dust in yt and kept it so longe aboute my hedde and shoulders that my breth was almost gone. Savynge the reverence of your Lordshippe, my chamber pott of urine he poured on my bare hedde and thereafter rubbed hot ashes into my heare and dipt a basen into a stand of newe drincke and flashed so much full on my face that I cold not see for a time. As sone as I came to myself I gotte down even as I was and wold have gone fourth to have showed myself to the gentlemen of the Arches, but my ladie Garter kept the gate, and kept me in by force and there I laide to his charge, how he had misused me and called me (saving your Honores reverence) pockie whore. He saide before Richmonde and Somerset heraltes that I hid like a pockie drable (or a queane) and wold have runed over me agayne with his foote but his mother held him backe . . .
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The sudden revelation that Dethick’s mother was present during this appalling scene adds, for the reader (though not for the unfortunate Mary Hart), to its grotesque comedy.

It is strange to think of the aristocratic decorum of the realm being in the hands of such lunatics, but those who desired to establish their gentility did not mind too much about the characters of the heralds who granted them arms. Dethick and his father granted more than 500 coats of arms to aspirant gentlemen. Cook, Clarenceux King of Arms, granted another 500. Brook, when York Herald for ten years, granted 120. The heralds guarded their right to dispense arms with royally sanctioned vigour. When one William Dawkins compiled fake pedigrees for hundreds of families in East Anglia, he was imprisoned and lost an ear.

The Dethicks? They were an ancient Derbyshire family, and Sir William Dethick used their arms. In fact he was the grandson of one Robert Derrick, a yeoman armourer from Greenwich who died in 1525. He had been brought to the Royal Armoury from Germany by Erasmus Kyrkener. Although Sir William Dethick persisted in claiming kinship with the Derbyshire Dethicks, his fellow heralds enjoyed putting it about that he was really a Dutchman.
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11

Histories

IN THE CHURCH
of St Andrew Undershaft in London is the tomb of John Stow (1525–1605), whose
Survey of London
remains one of the great histories of England’s capital. The tomb is surmounted with an effigy of the historian, a remarkable funerary monument of Derbyshire marble and alabaster, being one of the very few Jacobean tombs that depicts a writer in the act of writing.
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Every two years the Merchant Taylors’ Company, who pay for the lavish upkeep of the tomb, assemble in the church for a ceremony in which Stow is given a new quill pen. Among other resonances, the ritual seems to say that history never ceases to be written. Most writers’ tombs of the period suggest that the work is done. Stow, like Shakespeare over the grave in Stratford-upon-Avon, is still holding onto his pen.

I began this book about the Elizabethans with a reflection on our difficulty, in the generation that has put behind us in Britain the nationalist and colonialist mindset, of keeping them in a focus that is fair, truthful and just. Clearly, it is impossible for us to have unmixed feelings of approval of the Elizabethans’ wish to colonise Ireland or to make money from selling West African slaves to the Portuguese, any more than it is possible wholeheartedly to endorse their inflicting torture on an albeit small number of Roman Catholic recusants. Yet equally it is hard to banish the thought that those historians of comparatively recent vintage, such as James Anthony Froude or Mandell Creighton in the nineteenth century, or A.L. Rowse in the twentieth century, who did broadly endorse the Elizabethan historical programme, painted them in colours that were clearer than those, more recent, who wish to arraign them for their crimes.

The Stow monument, with its repeatedly renewed and renewable quill pen, reminds us that the task of reinterpreting the past is never-ending, and that the Elizabethans themselves were adepts at the historical art, creators in chronicle, in mythology, in pageants and tournaments, in drama and poems – a history that explained themselves, to themselves, and themselves to posterity. Historians of our age have witnessed the dismantling of the nationalist and colonialist England/Britain, which was largely an Elizabethan inspiration. Ireland runs its own affairs. Colonialism as a political concept is dead – at any rate, British colonialism, and American ‘colonialism’ is something rather different. The Church of England exists only in name and is no longer really the natural national Church. In the Elizabethan historians, myth-makers and poets, however, we see the written justifications for an emergent nationalism taking shape.

Stow was in some ways untypical of the Elizabethan historians. He was not a gentleman (his father was a tallow-chandler). He never studied at a university or an inn of court, though he had good Latin and wrote an excellent, fluent English. A member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, he had a rather humdrum job, as a surveyor of ale-houses. But, just as much as the gentleman-antiquaries such as Dr Dee or Archbishop Parker, Stow had an obsessive passion for presenting and chronicling the past. He had a large collection of manuscripts and books. He was suspected of Catholic sympathies, and when the Bishop of London – Grindal – ordered a search of Stow’s house, they confiscated a number of suspect titles: Edmund Bonner’s
An Exposition of the Creed, Ten Commandments, Pater Noster, Ave Maria
and other Romanist volumes. Whatever his private sympathies, Stow conformed to the church, however, and it was inevitable that so inveterate a hoarder and collector should have possessed religious books that offended the ultra-Puritan Grindal.