The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (15 page)

In London the concentrations of Huguenot settlement were in Southwark, St Katherine’s near the Tower, East Smithfield, Blackfriars and St Martin le Grand, all of them ‘liberties’ - areas that remained, by quirks and relics of old monastic rule, outside the jurisdiction of the city authorities. The precinct of St Martin le Grand, between Aldersgate and Cheapside, was a particular enclave - one might even call it a ghetto. In 1574 the Privy Council expressed concern that it was filled with ‘strangers, inmates and many lewd persons to the great noise [inconvenience] to the governors of this city’. In 1583 there were about a hundred immigrant families in the precinct, which does not sound a lot but it was a small area.
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Stow reports that on the site of the former church, demolished during the Reformation, a ‘large wine tavern’ had been built, and ‘many other houses . . . letten to strangers borne’: he describes the strangers there as ‘artificers, buyers and sellars’ - in other words, craftsmen and tradesmen.
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And it is here, in the environs of St Martin le Grand, that we find the Mountjoys in 1582. In the subsidy roll for that year, in the parish of St Anne and St Agnes on the north side of St Martin le Grand, is listed the following household of ‘strangers’ (see Plate 13) -

John Dewman taylor [assessed on goods value] 40s
His wyfe 4d [poll tax]
Nicholas Armesford his servant 4d
Clause Valore his servant 4d
Anthonye Dewman his servant 4d
Christofer Mongey his servant 4d
——Mongey his wyfe 4d
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The last pair is almost certainly Christopher and Marie Mountjoy. Foreigners’ names were spelt variously and vaguely in these documents, indeed in English writings generally, and ‘Mongey’ for Mountjoy is typical enough. Elsewhere their name is spelt ‘Mongeoy’ (by a Frenchman), ‘Munjoye’ (by an Englishman) and ‘Monioy’ (in Christopher’s patent for denization). The only uncertainty, it seems to me, is with the unnamed wife. It is theoretically possible she is a previous wife of Christopher’s, but we have no hint of her elsewhere, and we would quite soon have to engineer her replacement by Marie, so I will work on the assumption that this is indeed Marie Mountjoy, aged about sixteen, making her first appearance on the historical record in this rather poignantly vestigial form, ‘——Mongey’. The blank is standard in the document - wives are not accorded a forename - but seems to convey also a sense of her anonymity: just another foreign face in the immigrant tenements of St Martin le Grand.

We learn from this that the Mountjoys had arrived in London some time before 1 August 1582 (which is the date of the indenture of the subsidy lists). They were living with - and in the case of Christopher, at least, working for - an immigrant tailor, John Dewman. Christopher is one of four ‘servants’ in Dewman’s workshop. ‘Servant’ in this context undoubtedly means assistant or apprentice. As noted, Mountjoy’s marital status argues that he had completed his apprenticeship, whether in France or England, so here he is more correctly an assistant, perhaps one with specialist expertise.

The tailor John Dewman is traceable in immigrant lists: in some he is John Dueman or Duman, and once he is Hans Du Main. He was a Dutchman, born in the Gelderland town of Lochem. He had come to England in the late 1560s, and in 1577 became a ‘denizen’ - a naturalized foreigner, able to purchase and bequeath property: a course Mountjoy was to follow. By 1582, as the subsidy rolls show, he was living in the parish of St Anne and St Agnes, with the Mongeys or Mountjoys among his employees. His last appearance on the record is in the 1593 Return of Strangers. He is listed with his wife, who is called ‘Barbaraye’, and four children, the eldest a daughter of nine; business was quieter by then, for he has only one ‘stranger servant’.
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But in the early 1580s, when the Mountjoys were working for him, Dewman was apparently doing quite well. Four ‘servants’ are named in the subsidy roll, but another listing of ‘estraingers’ in the area, dated 6 April 1583, adds two more, William Vansutfan and Thomas Henrick, both Dutchmen.
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The same document mentions that Dewman ‘payeth tribute to the Company of the Merchant Taylors’. A workshop with half a dozen workers, and associate membership in the prestigious merchant tailors’ guild: these are signs of solidity.

We need not think this means the Mountjoys themselves were doing well economically. While Dewman is assessed for the subsidy at 40 shillings, doubled as an alien to £4, his employees all pay the minimum poll tax of 4d. Against the names of both the Mountjoys is the marginal notation ‘affid’, standing for ‘affidavit’. This signifies that the tax-collectors - in this case Marmaduke Franck, cordwainer, and John Stevens, brewer, ‘petty collectors’ for Aldersgate ward - had declared that the tax owed was not collectable, as the person in question had ‘no distrainable goods or chattels’ within the ward.
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The purpose of the affidavit was to exonerate the collectors, not the defaulting taxpayers. It seems the Mountjoys were unable or unwilling to pay the combined sum of 8d for their poll tax. There are many possible reasons for this, as there are for Shakespeare’s later and rather larger defaultings, but one notes that in this earliest documentary record of him we find Christopher Mountjoy doing precisely what he does later in the case of his daughter’s dowry - not paying up.

The parish of St Anne and St Agnes lay just outside the city walls, in the north-east corner of Aldersgate ward, running up to the gate itself. The church, on the north side of Pope Lane, was also known picturesquely as St Anne in the Willows, but a note in Stow’s
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shows this was an image from the past - ‘Some say [the name is] of willowes growing thereabouts, but now there is no such voyde place for willowes to grow, more [i.e. other] than the churchyard, wherein do grow some high ashe trees.’
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This conveys the packed-in feel of this immigrant enclave - no open ground is left.

Living there the Mountjoys were already very close to Silver Street. St Anne’s Lane (now Gresham Street) ran east from St Martin le Grand into Noble Street. If they moved directly from St Anne’s to the house on Silver Street it was a journey of a few hundred yards.

Christopher Mountjoy was probably not the only member of his family to emigrate to England, and in the same subsidy rolls for 1582 there is an interesting reference to ‘John Mountoye, stranger’ living in the parish of St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate.
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The surname is specifically French so we can take ‘stranger’ to mean he is a Frenchman. He may well be related to Christopher.

John Mountjoy was a fairly prosperous man: he was assessed for the 1582 subsidy on goods valued at £10. But after this promising start the trail goes cold - he is not found in other subsidy rolls, nor in the 1593 Return of Strangers, nor in the registers of St Botolph’s, written in the neat hand of the former author and controversialist Stephen Gosson, who was then the vicar. The lost registers of the French Church may have contained information on him. I was about to consider this a cul-de-sac - an interesting name and no more - when I came upon another John Mountjoy, who was of immediate interest because his occupation is given as ‘tiremaker’. He lived out in the rural suburb of Stepney, east of London. He is found in the lists of marriage licences: ‘22 November 1610, John Montjoy of Limehouse, parish of Stepney, co Middx, tiremaker, bachelor, licensed to marry Anne Blackwood of the same parish, spinster’. They were married at St Dunstan’s, Stepney six days later.
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Was the French John Mountjoy of Bishopsgate connected to the tiremaking John Mountjoy of Stepney? It seems likely, for by 1617 the latter was living in the former’s parish of St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate. On 10 April 1617 ‘Katherin daugh[ter] of John Mountioy & Anne’ was christened there. They were still in the parish in 1621, listed in the subsidy roll as ‘John Mountjoy et uxor’.
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They were assessed to pay the poll tax of 4d per head, and so were not prospering. A William Mountjoy who married at St Botolph’s in 1638 may be their son.

These John Mountjoys, recorded over nearly forty years, could be the same man: an immigrant French tiremaker who moved from Bishopsgate to Stepney and then back again, who married and had children rather late in life, and whose fortunes declined. Or it could be that the Bishopsgate householder was the father of the Stepney tiremaker. Either way, a connection with Christopher is hard to resist. Tiremaking was a very specialist craft, and to find another French tiremaker with the same name suggests family kinship. Could John Mountjoy of Bishopsgate be the brother of Christopher, and John Mountjoy of Stepney his nephew?

The presence of Mountjoys in Stepney continues. There is a Robert ‘Mountioye’ whose sons were baptized at St Dunstan’s in the early 1630s, and a Charles Mountjoy in 1688; and at the neighbouring church of St Mary, Whitechapel (also in the parish of Stepney) an Edward Mountjoy in 1660. The name continues into the nineteenth century. And in the Stepney registers we find a further scrap of confirmation that Christopher Mountjoy was connected with this clan. In 1627, seven years after his death, his widow - his second wife, Isabel, whom we have not yet met - married again. She did so at St Dunstan’s in Stepney, the church where John Mountjoy the tiremaker had been married the previous decade.
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Perhaps Isabel was out in Stepney because some of her former husband’s relatives lived there.

The spiritual and social centre of the French community in London was the French Church. Some thirty years earlier, in the time of Edward VI, Protestant immigrants had been granted the use of Austinfriars on Broad Street. They worshipped in the nave in this despoiled and dilapidated church, which had belonged to an Augustinian monastery. In the early 1560s, with the dramatic rise in the number of immigrants, the congregation had to split - the Dutch continued to worship at Austinfriars, henceforth referred to as the ‘Dutch Church’, and the French took over the church of St Anthony’s, round the corner on Threadneedle Street (or as it was then often written, Three Needles Street, probably referring to the emblem of the Needlemakers’ Company). In 1568 the Dutch Church had 2,000 members, the French Church 1,800. In 1593 the two of them together (plus the very small Italian church) had 3,325 communicants.
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There was also a Huguenot church on Leicester Fields near Westminster, now Orange Street Chapel.

A French immigrant in London had by law to be either ‘of’ the French Church or of his or her local parish church. This was certainly the case from 1573, when it was decreed that anyone set down as ‘of no church’ in the immigrant lists should be repatriated. To some extent the choice was between Calvinist strictness and Anglican laxity. The French Church was run by a council or ‘consistory’ of twelve elders, who watched vigilantly over the private lives as well as the religious faith of their congregation. As the registers of the Church are extant only from 1600, we do not know if Christopher and Marie were married there in the early 1580s, or if their daughter was christened there. But those life-events in the family we do know of - two funerals and a wedding - all took place at St Olave’s, Silver Street. Apart from a solitary appearance as a godfather in 1603, there is no actual evidence of the Mountjoys’ involvement with the French Church at all until 1612, when judgment in the Belott-Mountjoy case was referred to the elders, and we gather from their comments then that they considered Mountjoy anything but a pillar of their community.

The Mountjoys’ apparent absence from the French congregation may suggest two things. First, that they were the kind of immigrants who tried to integrate into the community rather than huddle in an expatriate enclave. Second, that to describe the Mountjoys as religious refugees does not mean they were particularly religious people. To be a Protestant in France, as elsewhere, might be as much an expression of locality, or social class, or professional grouping, as of faith; and to be a refugee might mean simply that normal life had become impossible, whether from active persecution or from the chaos and corruption attendant on civil war. This was a broad distinction recognized by the English authorities. In the 1573 census of aliens in London, over a third ‘confess themselves that their coming hither was only to seek work for their living’
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- in the parlance of today, they were economic migrants rather than asylum-seekers.

Christopher Mountjoy is in many ways a typical Huguenot refugee. He comes from north-western France, as (for obvious geographical reasons) the majority of them did. He works as a specialist ‘artificer’ or craftsman in the clothing and fashion industry - again typical: a breakdown of occupations in the 1593 Return of Strangers shows nearly 40 per cent involved in clothworking and clothes-making.
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And perhaps he is typical, too, of that sizeable minority of refugees who came over to ‘seek work’ - or to seek a new life - rather than for particular reasons of doctrine and worship.

11

Success and danger

H
ow long the Mountjoys remained with the Dutch tailor Dewman is not known: for the rest of the 1580s their movements are obscure. There were tiremaking businesses in St Martin le Grand - a Frenchman named Morell and a Dutchman, Jonakyn Swanston, are recorded there as ‘attyre-makers’ - and perhaps the Mountjoys had a connection with one or other of them before setting up shop on their own.
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The only event we can be certain of at this time is the birth of their daughter, Mary, though the date remains approximate. In 1582, Marie Mountjoy was about sixteen and recently married: this seems the earliest reasonable date for the birth of Mary. At the other end of the range, Mary was herself marriageable in 1604, so cannot have been born much after 1589. When Shakespeare took up residence at Silver Street she was perhaps in her late teens, at the most twenty-one.