The Elizabethans (15 page)

‘As for the commissaries court,’ opined
The Admonition to the Parliament
of 1572, ‘that is but a pettie little stinking ditche, that floweth oute of that former great puddle, robbing Christes church of lawfull pastors, of watchfull Seniors and Elders, and carefull Deacons.’
³¹

But it would give a misleading impression to end this chapter on so vinaigrous or negative a tone.

Mandell Creighton, in his superb biography of Queen Elizabeth (1896), said, of the Elizabethan Settlement, ‘England was again independent. Its Church was again free to work out its own problems. Its system has not changed from that day to this.’
³²

It is hard to imagine any member of the Church of England in the twenty-first century who would be able to echo the great Victorian bishop’s words. Since the advent of a multicultural Britain, the ‘C of E’ has become one sect among many, even though its technical and legal status might remain still as it was in the reign of the first Elizabeth. Although, wearing Elizabethan costume, Church of England bishops still, at the time of writing, sit as of right in the British Parliament, this cannot be for long. Their presence there can scarcely be justified to the great majority of citizens who do not share their faith. This is one of the most fundamental signs that the England created in Elizabeth’s reign has been brought to an end. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the Elizabethan Settlement in the Church was not a wholly spiritual thing. Elizabeth’s national Church was a coalition. It was not tolerant of those, such as Roman Catholics or Puritans, who denied its grounds for existence. It did, however, for the huge majority of citizens, teach the necessity of two incompatible parties learning to live together. To this degree, it is possible to see in the workings of the Elizabethan Church the ancestry of a later ‘consensus’ politics.

6

The New Learning

RICHARD MULCASTER, THE
observant recorder of the pageantry and celebrations on Queen Elizabeth’s coronation day, was a northerner and an Old Etonian. His father was one of the two Members of Parliament for Carlisle, and Mulcaster himself would serve in the same capacity in the first of Elizabeth’s parliaments.
¹

In 1561 he was chosen as the first headmaster of the newly founded Merchant Taylors’ School in the City of London. The building selected for the grammar school, at the expense of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, was a house formerly belonging to the Dukes of Buckingham at the Manor of the Rose in the parish of St Lawrence-Poultney. In Shakespeare’s
Henry VIII
, the duke’s ownership of the house is still remembered:

Nor long before your highness sped to France

The Duke, being at The Rose, within the parish

St Lawrence Poultney, did of me demand

What was the speech among the Londoners

Concerning the French journey . . .
²

The Merchant Taylors’ School – destined to become, almost instantaneously, one of the most prestigious of English Renaissance schools – was only one of dozens that were founded, or reconstituted, in these times. John Colet (1467–1519), friend of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, had led the way with the foundation of St Paul’s School in London in 1509 – with the trustees being the Mercers’ Company. With the coming of the Reformation and the removal of monastery schools and charity schools, the need to found new educational establishments became urgent. The monasteries were dissolved between 1536 and 1541. The Charities Act of Henry VIII left many a teacher in a charity school penniless. For example, Libeus Byard, the chantry chaplain at Stamford, Lincolnshire, earned his living as the teacher of young boys, such as William Cecil, the future Secretary to Elizabeth I.
³
Some of the educational damage done by the removal of Church teachers was repaired in Henry VIII’s own time, with the foundation of fine schools such as the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle-on-Tyne. The school song, composed in the 1920s by the school’s historian and history master, J.B. Brodie, was historically accurate when it proclaimed:

Horsley, a Merchant Venturer bold,

Of good Northumbrian strain,

Founded our rule and built our school

In bluff King Harry’s reign . . .
⁴

Yet though Henry promised to raise a subsidy through Parliament to fund schools, he did little about it, and most educational initiatives of the time came from benevolent private means, such as those of Robert Thorn, a Spanish oil merchant and soap-maker who – as it says on his Latin monument in the Temple Church in London – ‘devised certain property for the erection, foundation, continuance and support of a Free Grammar School to be established in Bristol’, his home town.
⁵

Even more schools were rescued, reconstituted or founded in the reign of Edward VI: famous establishments such as Sherborne and the King Edward VI School in Birmingham, as well as many smaller ones. Protector Somerset did much to undo the damage of Henry VIII’s Chantries Act and to re-endow local schools. ‘He should be regarded,’ wrote one historian, ‘as the true patron saint of the Grammar Schools of Grantham and Louth, and Morpeth, of Birmingham and Macclesfield, and of the Public Schools of Sedbergh, Shrewsbury and Sherborne.’ (Of course the distinction between grammar schools and ‘public schools’ is a Victorian one. In the Tudor age Sir Philip Sidney [Shrewsbury] and William Shakespeare [Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar School], whatever differences in the social status of their families, would have made none between their schools.)

There is a natural tendency to see the Tudor passion for education as a Protestant phenomenon, but the distinction is not necessarily a fair one. Colet, after all, was a Catholic. In regions where Catholicism persisted during or after the landmark dates of the Reformation, there was no less zeal than in Protestant regions for maintaining or founding schools. Sir Richard Towneley, for example, a devoted Catholic, together with the families of Haydock, Habergham, Woodneff and Whitacre, was among the founders and first governors of the grammar school at Burnley in Lancashire. ‘The school which was refounded was possibly intended to keep alive the Catholic Faith.’
⁶
The founder of the grammar school at Appleby, in Westmorland – Robert Langton, Archdeacon of Dorset – became a monk of the Charterhouse in London and an Elizabethan headmaster of the school. And John Boste, Master of the school, was a convert to Catholicism who was canonised in 1970 as one of the forty English and Welsh martyrs steadfast to death for their beliefs.

Even within the Merchant Taylors’ Company itself, with which we began, there was by no means a simple religious mono-culture. The school’s founder is usually named as Sir Thomas White, a Catholic Merchant Taylor who, during the reign of Mary Tudor, had founded St John’s College, Oxford.
⁷
The real founder of the school, however, was a Merchant Taylor of a very different complexion, Richard Hilles. A convinced Protestant, Hilles had taken a leading part in the nomination of Lady Jane Grey as Queen. (He was lucky to receive a pardon from the Queen.) For ten years (1539–49) Hilles had lived in Strasbourg and absorbed the tenets of Calvinism. During Mary’s reign, he had maintained contacts with English Protestant exiles on the continent – men such as Miles Coverdale, the translator of our unforgettable Psalter, as still sung daily in England ‘in quires and places where they sing’; or Edmund Grindal, later Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury under Elizabeth. When Hilles set in train the foundation of the Merchant Taylors’ School he had it in mind to establish a distinctly Protestant school. The Elizabethan schools were nurseries in which the Reformation could be planted and nurtured.

The letters of the Queen’s Council to the Archbishop of Canterbury were silent on the subject of any intellectual training for schoolmasters, or on the details of secular life in the schools. What mattered was ‘That all teachers of children shall stir and move them to live and do reverence to God’s true religion now truly set forth by public authority’ and that ‘every parson, vicar and curate shall upon every holy day and every second Sunday in the year hear and instruct the youth of the parish for half an hour at least before evening prayer in the ten commandments, the Articles of the Belief, and the Lord’s Prayer, and diligently examine them and teach the Catechism set forth in the book of public prayer’.
⁸

Just as for the brief years of Mary Tudor’s reign the Catholics had attempted to further their ideas among children, so with the accession of Elizabeth there was a systematic insistence that the children be imbued not only with new learning, but also with the faith of the Reformation. To some extent they went together. Sir John Cheke, Provost of King’s College, ‘Who once taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek’
⁹
(as Milton wrote in a sonnet), was ardent for the Reformation. Mulcaster was at Cheke’s college in Cambridge from 1548 to 1553 and, as well as a mastery of Greek, Latin and Hebrew, which he passed on so successfully to his pupils, he also shared Cheke’s passion for the religion of the continental Reformers.

When the arch-Protestant Bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, made a ‘solempne visitacon’ to the Merchant Taylors’ School, he brought with him as examiners learned Protestants who had gone into exile during Mary’s reign, as he had done himself: in 1562, David Whitehead, Canon Calfhill of Christ Church, and Archdeacon Watts; in 1564, Dean Nowell of St Paul’s and Miles Coverdale himself. They found the children competent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew – Mulcaster had ‘moche profited the schollers there & there for worthy of greate comendacon’. The only feature of Mulcaster’s education to which they took exception was his North Country accent, something shared with the ushers or assistant masters, who ‘therefore did not pronounce so well as those that be brought up in the schools of the south pites of the realme’.
¹⁰

The pupils who did such credit to their headmaster included Edmund Spenser, who entered the school aged nine in 1561 and would go on to write
The Faerie Queene
, and Lancelot Andrewes, the incomparable prose stylist who oversaw the Authorized Version of the Bible. By the time he left the school in 1586, Mulcaster had also taught Thomas Kyd, author of
The Spanish Tragedy
; Thomas Lodge, one of the medics among
littérateurs
(with Keats and Bridges and Anton Chekhov), a fine lyric poet; James Whitlocke, who as well as being one of the great judges and law-men of Elizabethan England, was also, thanks to Mulcaster, a fine Hebraist (the Merchant Taylors’ School had a Hebrew master until the 1950s). ‘He red unto me all Jobe,’ Whitlocke remembered, ‘and twenty Psalmes, and a part of Genesis, and after I had taken my lecture from him, which was after five of the clock that I went from school, I wolde daly, after supper, make a praxis of that I had herd, and set it down in writing’.
¹¹

The daily curriculum of an Elizabethan grammar school was demanding. Shakespeare, the product of such an education at the grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon, looked back on his childhood self:

The whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school . . .
¹²

The day began early. At Highgate, founded in 1562 by Sir Roger Cholmeley, but with the enthusiastic blessing of Grindal – who gave the land for the school – they started at 7 a.m. with prayers, the boys ‘devoutly kneeling down on their knees’, and it continued until 5 p.m. in winter, 6 p.m. in summer.
¹³
The Highgate boys had it comparatively easy. At Winchester, a boarding school, the day began at 5 a.m. with a prefect shouting ‘
Surgite
’ (Latin for ‘get up!’ – and the children were praying in the chapel by 5.30. Similar routines were expected of the boys at Eton. At Westminster, Ben Jonson’s old school, it was up at 5.15, say Latin prayers, wash in the cloister and in school by 6 a.m., with lessons lasting through a seven-hour day.

Eighteenth-century prints of the Merchant Taylors’ schoolroom at Suffolk Lane show what would have been commonplace in schools all over England: one large hall with benches and desks arranged down the sides. The whole school would have been taught in the same space, divided into different ‘forms’ – that is, literally forms or benches – according to age or ability. St Paul’s had one of the larger schoolrooms: 122 feet by 33 feet. Manchester Grammar had a schoolroom that measured 96 feet by 30 feet. The average grammar school would have consisted of a room 50–60 feet long by 20 feet broad, and it would have held fifty to eighty boys. It would have been cold in winter and, at any time of year, extremely uncomfortable.

The room would have been kept clean by a ‘poor scholar’. At St Paul’s the admission fee of fourpence was waived for a poor scholar ‘that sweepeth the school and keepeth the seats clean’. At the Merchant Taylors’ School the admission fee was paid to one who had ‘to sweep the school and keep the court of the school clean, and see the streets nigh to the school gate cleansed of all manner of ordure, carrion, or other filthy or unclean things, out of good order, or extraordinarily there thrown’.
¹⁴
Was this the job of Edmund Spenser, described in the Towneley Hall MSS transcribed by the Rev. A.B. Grosart in 1877 as one of the ‘poor scholars’ to whom ‘gownes’ were given (the Merchant Taylors’ also paid Spenser ten shillings ‘at his gowinge to pembrocke hall in chambridge’).
¹⁵

Keeping order in the schoolroom was not always easy. At the worst schools there must have been uproar much of the time. Discipline was maintained, if at all, by physical chastisement. (When a student took a degree as master of grammar in medieval Cambridge he was given as symbols of his office a birch and a psalter.
¹⁶
) There were complaints at the Merchant Taylors’ School from ‘cockering mothers’ and ‘indulgent fathers’ that he should mitigate his severity, but Mulcaster was impenitent about thrashing the boys. ‘If that instrument be thought too severe for boys, which was not devised by our time, but received from antiquity, I will not strive with any man in its defence if he will leave us some means for compelling obedience where numbers have to be taught together.’ On the other hand, Mulcaster was, by the standards of the age, soft-hearted enough to consider that the ‘continual and terrible whipping’ in other schools was deplorable, and that ‘beating must only be for ill behaviour, not for failure in learning’. [Mulcaster, Elementarie]