Roaring Boys (2 page)

Note in
The Register
(11 November 1558)

I
f your ambition was to become a celebrated and popular dramatist or a famous and acclaimed actor, then you could not have chosen a better time to be born than the middle or late sixteenth century. No need for Arts Councils, subsidies or writers-in-residence; the theatrical world, desperate to service the new and growing entertainment scene and its huge audiences, was crying out for you and your work. As with Hollywood in the 1930s, the London theatre scene, run by the early entrepreneurs such as Philip Henslowe, sucked in talented writers not only from within the capital (which might be expected), but also from the provinces. A few of the new writers were born into comparative wealth, but far more, including Shakespeare, belonged to the first generation of the sons of artisans to have acquired a secondary education in the new grammar schools.

What might be called the golden age of English theatre lasted roughly from the building of the first proper playhouse in 1576 to about 1620, and there is no doubt that the Queen’s accession in 1558 ushered in an extraordinary era in which the arts could flourish. But before opening a door into the world of the theatre, it might be useful first to have a brief look at what was happening outside in the real world, for there was a dichotomy running through almost every aspect of life and society. Great creativity burgeoned alongside almost routine brutality, awesome magnificence next to appalling squalor, a thirst for new knowledge set against shocking ignorance. Beneath the surface of the Merry England of myth there lurked always the dark, dangerous world of political intrigue, treason, danger and death.

Professional theatre came into being at a time when men were still getting to grips with the idea that the world was round and that it circled round the sun, not the sun round the earth. There was the excitement of the new sciences, of astronomy and mathematics. Secretly and behind closed doors, people were actually questioning the truth of the stories told in the Old Testament, even such matters as how long it really was between the Creation and the present day. We know that such discussions went on because Marlowe attended one such group, often known as the ‘School of the Night’, where questions were asked such as how it could possibly have taken so long for the Jews to reach the promised land, though Marlowe took his criticism of the scriptures further, much further.
¹
But even while the more sophisticated citizenry were considering such matters, conventional religious belief was still virtually universal. Almost everyone believed that there really was a heaven and a hell, that at the end of your life you had to account directly to God for your misdeeds, and that there would be a Judgement Day when the graves gave up their dead. Most people also believed in witches and witchcraft, not to mention fairies.

The extraordinary renaissance had come about in no small part because of the circumstances surrounding the Queen’s accession. She came to the throne to the acclaim of a fearful and demoralised population which had been exposed for the previous six years to the fires of Smithfield and elsewhere, death at the stake being the punishment meted out to heretics on the authority of a woman totally convinced of the rightness of her actions, a woman who had compounded her unpopularity by taking as her husband King Philip II of Spain. Now Mary Tudor, ‘Bloody Mary’, was dead and the country breathed again. The two lines of verse by an anonymous writer at the beginning of the chapter express the overwhelming feeling of relief.

One of the statements made by Elizabeth at the start of her reign was that she had no desire to seek ‘windows into men’s souls’. Although the church had reverted again to Protestantism and she, like her father, was its defender, she did not want to rule over a country riven by religious tensions. Therefore Catholics who behaved themselves and were loyal to the crown were left alone, so long as they paid their fines for missing church of a Sunday. It was a fine aspiration to which, in the early days, the government on the orders of the Queen did its best to adhere, though as time went by dangers, both internally and from Europe, would combine to prevent its continuance.

Elizabeth’s Court was splendid. From the first she dressed magnificently, decked with jewels, her face framed in the finest of lace ruffs, gowned in enormous farthingales covered in beadwork, seed pearls and embroidery. She employed tried and trusted advisers such as William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, who had stood by her throughout some of the worst times of her life, and Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to the Privy Council. She surrounded herself with the most handsome courtiers, the prettiest young women and the best artists, musicians and poets of the day. When she went on one of her great progresses around the country, people turned out in their hundreds simply to watch her pass. She was, indeed, Gloriana. Her Court again offers two sides of the coin. Among the favoured poets of the era were Edmund Spenser and Walter Ralegh. Spenser might well laud Elizabeth in
The Faerie Queen
and Ralegh turn a pretty sonnet when he was not throwing his cloak down for the Queen to tread on, but both were involved in the most appalling acts of violence in Ireland, Ralegh joining in a massacre at which not only unarmed men were put to the sword but where women and children were also slaughtered. Renaissance Man indeed had many facets, but unthinking violence is rarely mentioned among them.

Outside the Court in the City, the hub of commerce, visitors from overseas marvelled at the wealth of the merchants in their great mansions, the shopkeepers and tradesmen of every kind, the thriving markets. England’s great merchant venturers sailed their argosies to every corner of the known world bringing back with them, to City harbours like Billingsgate, exotic cargoes of silks, spices and ivory along with tales of strange people in stranger lands. Outside, in the country, the nobles and the wealthy built themselves grandiose stately homes which they decked with tapestries and furnished with fine furniture. To complete the picture, common land was enclosed to make their parks and great, formal gardens. Yet around the walls of the City of London itself huddled the shanty towns of the poor and those who had trudged up from the provinces to seek their fortune, clusters of dwellings in what we might describe now as ‘no-go areas’, looked on by honest citizens as nothing more than cauldrons of disease and crime. The picture Elizabeth offered to the people of England, and indeed to the world outside, was one of immense confidence, conspicuous consumption, success at home and abroad and the feeling that the English were indeed living in a golden age. But underneath it all that dark, disturbing and dangerous world remained, only a hair’s breadth away.

From the first the Queen had been well aware of the dangers besetting her. All those endless negotiations over marriages which she never had any intention of going through with, the delicate and secret embassies to Europe, the stately dances of diplomacy, were designed with only one end in mind: to keep the Queen on the throne and the country safe from foreign invaders. The obvious threats were from Spain and France but there was also danger much nearer home. In 1560, two years after Elizabeth’s accession to the English throne, King Francis II of France died and the following year his widow, the young Mary, Queen of Scots, returned home. Unsurprisingly, given her charm, looks, position and lack of judgement, she soon became a honeypot for ambitious men wanting to marry her and get their hands on the levers of power. She chose disastrously, marrying her cousin, Lord Darnley, in 1565. Within three years she had given birth to the heir to the Scottish throne, had very possibly been complicit in the murder of her husband, had scandalised her government by involving herself with the Earl of Bothwell and, after arrest and imprisonment, had escaped to England seeking sanctuary.

Despite the long history of enmity with Scotland, Elizabeth reluctantly agreed to her plea with the result that from that day until her death over twenty years later, Mary was the ready-made figurehead with a claim to the English throne around which malcontents and Catholic plotters could gather. Indeed, within a year of her arrival the Catholic Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland were planning rebellion, while the Catholic Earl of Norfolk, Thomas Percy, was making overtures of marriage to her, which she was encouraging for all she was worth. Popular romance has Mary as a martyred heroine, taking little or no part in the activities undertaken in her name, but she was soon sending messages to the Spanish Duke of Alva asking for help for the Earls. ‘Tell your master’, she wrote to him, ‘that if he will help me, I shall be Queen of England in three months.’ No doubt about that then.

The Privy Council got wind of what was afoot and Norfolk was sent for and shrewdly advised to be honest with the Queen. Later, as he faced execution, he wished he had been. Instead, what followed was the abortive Northern Rebellion which was put down with great savagery, some eight hundred of the Earl’s followers being hanged. Northumberland fled to Scotland but was later returned to England and executed. Elizabeth refused to act against Mary on the grounds that there was no certain proof that she had been party to the plot, but so major an insurrection thoroughly unnerved both the Queen and her government, and matters were soon to deteriorate further. In February 1570 Pope Pius V issued his notorious Bull of Excommunication against the Queen, the result of which was to make it almost impossible for her government to separate faith from politics as had hitherto been the case. The Pope had put English Catholics in an impossible position: if they remained loyal to the Queen they were disobedient to the commands of the Holy Father in Rome, yet if they obeyed his edict it followed that they were traitors to the Queen. The Bull made the position quite clear: all the subjects of the English realm were freed from their oaths of allegiance ‘and all manner of duty, fidelity and obedience’. But even that was not enough. The Pope ‘commanded and enjoined all and every subject and people whatsoever that they shall not once dare to obey her or her laws, directions or commands, binding under the same curse those who do anything to the contrary’. In other words those remaining loyal to the Crown faced automatic excommunication. More than that, it was now open season for assassins.

In 1572 the Ridolfi Plot led finally to the execution of the Earl of Norfolk, a deed accompanied by a demand from Parliament for Mary’s head. Again Elizabeth refused. Then in August, while she was staying at Warwick Castle, the news was brought to her of the horrific massacre of Huguenots which had taken place on St Bartholomew’s Eve, first in Paris then spreading out to other towns and cities, bringing with it an influx of asylum seekers into England. By the 1580s storm clouds were gathering from every direction. In 1583 there were two more plots, those of Somerville and Throgmorton, both designed to pave the way for a Spanish invasion. That both failed was due in no small part to the intelligence-gathering skills of Sir Francis Walsingham’s agents. Then, in 1586, intelligence reached the Queen’s spymaster of yet another, the initiator being a naive country gentleman by the name of Antony Babington. The government had had enough and were absolutely determined that Mary should go. To ensure this she had to be implicated beyond any shadow of doubt; Walsingham therefore infiltrated into the circle of the conspirators his own best secret agent, Robert Poley. The result, as everyone knows, was not only the downfall and unpleasant deaths of the plotters but the eventual execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.

But no sooner had one hazard been put behind her than the Queen was beset by others. Although ‘the Spanish Armada’ of 1588 is usually referred to as the single attempt by Philip II to conquer the English, Spain had actually prepared for an invasion the previous year, not with flotillas of galleons but by vessels towing barges full of soldiers over from the Low Countries; and it might well have succeeded had it not been for the English raid on Cadiz which destroyed some of the fleet. The real Spanish Armada was a far more hazardous venture for the Spaniards than the first would have been and was soundly defeated by a combination of superior English seamanship in more manoeuvrable ships and the appalling weather. Her leadership of the country during that time and the vanquishing of the Armada was Elizabeth’s finest hour, her speech at Tilbury worthy of Shakespeare. But Spain’s determination to invade did not end there; there were at least two other abortive attempts afterwards, with Ireland being used as a base. No one can pretend that what England did in Ireland during the last half of the sixteenth century was anything of which to be proud, but it should also be remembered that the government considered their western neighbour to be their Achilles’ heel.

The great flowering of the dramatists in the 1590s was therefore accompanied by increasing paranoia on the part of the government, the implementation of draconian laws against Catholic ‘Mass priests’, along with other repressive legislation to deal with civil unrest. In 1593 the latter would catch in its net both Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, at the scene of whose murder we come across once again that very same Robert Poley who played such a vital role in the bringing to justice of the Babington plotters. From then until the Queen’s death in 1603, there was war in Ireland, continuing uncertainty as to the succession since Elizabeth refused to name King James of Scotland as her heir, and the abortive final plot, that of the Queen’s last great favourite, the inept Earl of Essex, whose arrogance finally brought him to the block. Nor did the death of the Queen and the subsequent coronation of James VI of Scotland as James I of England make the profession of dramatist any less hazardous. Anti-Catholic feeling became even more ferocious, factionalism even more intense at Court where the King was swayed by a succession of favourites. It was an age in which almost anything could be bought.

Throughout it all, mostly unaware, or uncaring, of the affairs of state (with the exception of the threat from the Armada), the people of London packed the playhouses. The times might be dangerous but the people were well able to live with that. Death was ever present and, in Marlowe’s words, they lived ‘on the slicing edge’ of it: death from disease, particularly from the regular epidemics of plague, death at the hands of a robber in the street, or following a quarrel at a time when insults led easily to fights and men routinely wore swords and daggers, while for women there was always the very real fear of death in childbirth or the dreaded puerperal fever associated with it.