A Brief History of the Tudor Age (36 page)

In 1542 Parliament passed a more extensive Act against unlawful games. It declared that the Act of 1512 was being evaded by ‘many subtle and inventative and crafty persons’ who were
inventing new games, like shuffleboard (shove-ha’penny), to replace those which had been banned by the Act of 1512, and that people were playing these games instead of practising archery. The
result was that the bowmakers, and the fletchers who made arrows, could not make a good living, and they were emigrating to Scotland and making bows and arrows there for
the
enemy. So it enacted that no one was permitted to allow these games to be played on his premises unless he obtained a licence from the JPs. No artisan, husbandman, labourer, fisherman, waterman or
any servingman was to be allowed to play tennis, dice, cards, bowls, skittles, quoits or any other unlawful game, except at Christmas; and at Christmas they could only play them in their
master’s house or in his presence. More penalties were imposed by an Act of 1555 against the owner of any premises where bowls, tennis, dice or any other unlawful games were played.

Another illegal game played by the lower classes was football, which had first been banned by a statute in Edward II’s reign in 1314. The object of the game was to put the ball through the
opponents’ goalposts, which were often as far as two or three miles apart. There were no other rules; the ball could be kicked or thrown, or the players could pick it up and run with it; and
they could be stopped by any means, by holding, punching, tripping, or tackling in any way. There was no limit to the numbers who could take part on either side, and often all the young men of the
village would join in their team; sometimes even women took part. In many towns, a game of football was played in the streets on Shrove Tuesday. The match that was played every year in Chester was
very ferocious until the authorities banned it in 1540 and insisted that there should be a race though the streets on Shrove Tuesday instead.

The game was very rough, and almost all the references to it, in books, letters and plays, are to someone being injured. The players were considered by the upper classes to be men of the lowest
type. In Shakespeare’s
King Lear
, the Earl of Kent contemptuously calls Oswald a ‘base football player’. Sir Thomas Elyot, in
The Boke named the Governour
,
condemned ‘football, wherein is nothing but beastly fury and extreme violence whereof proceedeth hurt, and consequently rancour and malice do remain with them that be wounded, wherefore it is
to be put in perpetual silence’. In Robert Laneham’s description of the festivities at Kenilworth, when Leicester entertained Elizabeth I
there in 1575, he mentions
that one of the actors who took part in a pageant walked with a limp, because when he was young he had broken his leg playing football. In 1576 some football players were prosecuted at Middlesex
Quarter Sessions for having taken part in a riotous football match between the villages of Ruislip and Uxbridge; and in March 1581 a coroner’s inquest at South Mimms in Middlesex returned a
verdict of murder against two men who had killed a member of the opposite team by a blow on the chest when tackling him during a football match on Evan’s Field at South Mimms.

But the other games which were forbidden to the common people were becoming very popular among noblemen and gentlemen. Many noblemen, like the King, had tennis courts and bowling alleys attached
to their houses. Tennis became so associated with the King that when lawn tennis was invented in the nineteenth century, tennis became known as ‘real tennis’ or ‘royal
tennis’. Henry VII played tennis at Windsor. When Charles V visited England in 1522, he and Henry VIII played tennis at Henry’s palace at Baynards Castle in London. They were partners
in a doubles match against the Prince of Orange and the Marquis of Brandenburg, who had come to England with Charles, while the Earl of Devon and Lord Edmund Howard acted as ball boys. The game was
abandoned as a draw after they had played eleven games. Henry VIII also played bowls, and on one occasion, at Abingdon, lost £100 in a game of bowls to his Scottish brother-in-law, the Earl
of Angus.

Bowls was played by gentlemen, priests and university fellows. When Cranmer was in prison at Oxford in 1555, and the authorities were putting the greatest pressure on him to recant and repudiate
his heresies before he was burned, they adopted the well-known technique of varying the hard and the soft approach. After he had been kept for many months in rigorous conditions in the common jail
of Bocardo in Oxford, he was transferred to the custody of the Dean of the college of Christ Church. He was kindly treated, and allowed to mix with the fellows of the college and to play bowls on
the college green.
After a few weeks he was taken back to Bocardo and treated more harshly than before.

There is no reason to doubt the truth of the story that Drake was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe on 19 July 1588 (Old Style) when he was told that the Armada had been sighted off the Lizard, and
that he said that there was time to finish the game before fighting the Spaniards. He was quite right, for it was not until eight hours later that the tide was right for the English ships to be
rowed out of the harbour in the face of an adverse wind. The story was first recorded in writing in the eighteenth century, but there is a reference in a publication of 1624 to the fact that the
English captains were playing bowls when the Armada was sighted; and as this was only thirty-six years later, there were many people still alive who remembered 1588 and the story may have been told
by someone who was present.

The upper classes also had their sedentary and indoor pastimes. Chess had been played throughout the Middle Ages, but important developments in the game took place in Spain at the end of the
fifteenth century. New rules were introduced, which have lasted till the twentieth century; the queen, which hitherto had only been able to move one square diagonally, was given the much greater
powers which she possesses today; the bishop’s move was no longer limited to two squares diagonally, with no power over the intervening square; pawns were allowed to move two squares at the
first move; and castling was introduced. New openings were developed by experts, especially the Spanish bishop, Ruy Lopez, whose opening is still called after him, at least in the English-speaking
countries. The new rules had been adopted in England by the beginning of the sixteenth century. In England, as in Spain, the game seems to have been particularly popular with the higher clergy, for
Foxe mentioned that both Cranmer and Nicholas RidIey played a game of chess after dinner every afternoon.

Many nobles and gentlemen, like Henry VIII, preferred the excitement of gambling at cards and dice. The most usual card game was cent, which was almost identical with the game which
was afterwards called piquet. Men of letters also sometimes played cards.

In the evenings, after supper, dancing often took place at court, especially under Elizabeth I, who enjoyed dancing even more than Henry VIII had done. The Queen and courtiers often danced the
pavane, which was so stately that lawyers, merchants and men of letters could dance it in their long gowns. The galliard was more energetic, and the volta, in which the gentleman clasped the lady
round the waist and lifted her into the air, was the most energetic and daring of them all. Gentlemen were advised by their dancing-masters to remove their rapiers and hand them to their lackeys
when they danced the volta, to avoid the risk of tripping over them, though rapiers could safely be worn while dancing a pavane. Elizabeth I, despite her strict sense of propriety, was prepared to
allow the volta and to dance it herself.

At the beginning of the Tudor Age, the only music that was known, at least at court and among the educated classes, was the Church music of the Middle Ages; and the same type of music was used
for dancing and in songs for which it seems most inappropriate to us in the twentieth century. The drinking songs of the German mercenaries who served in England in the last years of Henry VIII and
under Edward VI were sung to the doleful tunes of an ecclesiastical dirge, although the words were about the joys and excitements of a mercenary’s life, with food, drink and gold. Henry VIII
himself was very fond of music; he not only played the lute but also composed music, writing a Mass as well as several love songs. The tunes of the love songs, and of his cheerful
Pastime with
good company
, sound to twentieth-century ears as lugubrious as the music of his Mass.

No other type of music was recorded until after 1550, when for the first time the kind of tunes which we know today were sung by the Protestant extremists who a few years later became known as
Puritans. Their opponents referred to the doleful psalms which the Puritans sang, but to our ears they sound less doleful than the music to which Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of
Scots danced the pavane. It is unlikely that the Puritans invented a completely new style of music, and probably the people had for many years been singing folk songs with this kind
of simple tune, which was never heard at court or in church, and was therefore never recorded.

The Puritans, with their denigration of the role of the priest and their emphasis on the participation of the congregation in the church services, introduced the practice of singing hymns. The
hymns were paraphrases of the psalms, put into English rhyming or blank verse, and slightly altered so as to give more emphasis to aspects of Puritan propaganda. The hymn-writer was William Kethe,
who escaped from England in Mary’s reign and lived as a refugee in Geneva with Knox, Goodman, Whittingham, Foxe and other extremists. When he returned to England after Elizabeth’s
accession, he was appointed rector of Okeford Superior in Dorset; and though he was always suspect in the eyes of the ecclesiastical hierarchy because of his connections with the Puritans, he
retained his benefice until his death in 1608. His version of the hundredth psalm, ‘All People That One Earth Do Dwell’, which was written when he heard of Mary’s death and
Elizabeth’s accession, called on the people to sing to the Lord with cheerful voice, for the Lord our God is good and His mercy is for ever sure. At the same time he wrote:

Knox used Kethe’s hymns in Scotland, and published several of them in the Form of
Prayers and Psalms
of the Church of Scotland which was published in 1565. Eighty
years later, they became the battle songs of Cromwell and the Puritans during the English Civil War.

Until the end of the sixteenth century, serious composers wrote
music almost entirely for religious purposes. John Marbeck was the organist of St George’s Chapel,
Windsor. He would have been burned as a heretic in 1543, along with his three friends at Windsor, for having a copy of the English Bible in his possession, if Gardiner had not persuaded Henry VIII
to pardon him because of his music. He was composing Church music until his death in 1585. Thomas Tallis was writing Church music for Elizabeth I’s chapel in 1560; but by 1579 his friend
William Byrd, who succeeded him at the chapel royal, was writing the music for songs which had nothing to do with religion, but with the delights of the spring and of love. During that decade of
change, the 1590s, the madrigals of Byrd, Morley, Dowland and Weelkes became very popular.

Music was also used at court in the masques which by the beginning of the sixteenth century were a regular feature of the evening entertainments. The masque was a short theatrical performance
with music. The themes were usually stories from Greek mythology, or sometimes from the Bible, or incidents in which allegorical figures like Chastity and Virtue appeared. Masques continued to be a
feature of evening entertainments at court throughout the Tudor Age and the seventeenth century.

Pageants, which were performed out of doors, in the streets of London and elsewhere, were similar to masques. They were a feature of the sovereign’s procession through London on the day
before the coronation; the pageants at Elizabeth I’s coronation procession in January 1559 were propaganda for Protestantism and the English Bible. Soon afterwards Elizabeth banned the
pageants that were being performed by the Protestants in London in which Philip II was attacked and ridiculed. After the revolt in the Netherlands began in 1566, the English Protestants were
outraged by the severity of the persecution there, and some pageants were acted in London denouncing the persecution and attacking Philip II; but Elizabeth banned them at the request of the Spanish
ambassador. Philip reciprocated, and banned pageants in Spain which attacked Elizabeth. Even when relations England and Spain had become so bad that they were on the eve
of
open war, Philip and Elizabeth still prohibited personal attacks on each other by their subjects.

Pageants and masques were a feature of Elizabeth’s progresses through her kingdom in the summer. At Oxford, Cambridge, Kenilworth and elsewhere, she was received on her arrival by youths
and maidens dressed in the part of various virtues and reciting odes in honour of virgin queens.

There were also stage plays, but these were viewed with some suspicion by the authorities, at least at the beginning of the Tudor Age. They were too closely associated with the plays performed
by strolling players in the market towns and villages. They were often obscene, and some of them were on the theme of Robin Hood, and incited the spectators to become outlaws and rob the rich,
apart from the fact that the authorities disapproved of anything which distracted artisans and husbandmen from performing their work, going to Mass, and practising archery. The Act of 1572 included
among those who were to be punished as vagabonds ‘common players in interludes and minstrels not belonging to any baron of this realm or to any other honourable personage of greater
degree’; but actors in the companies of various noblemen, like Shakespeare’s actors in the Lord Chamberlain’s company, were allowed to perform not only to their patron but before
audiences of artisans and other members of the lower classes in London.