The Elizabethans (56 page)

One of the women in Forman’s casebooks was Emilia Lanier, daughter of Battista Bassano, a court musician. While her husband was away at sea with the Earl of Essex, Emilia consulted Forman about Mr Lanier’s chances of a knighthood and professional promotion. She was a spirited, highly sexed woman, and Forman clearly came to know her tastes and habits intimately. She ‘hath a mind to the quent, but seems she is or will be a harlot. And because . . . she useth sodomy’ says a marginal note in his casebook (it might in fact refer to some other woman, but it gives the flavour of the levels of Forman’s interests in his clients. Another entry speaks of a man who wanted to know his chances of ‘halek’ with a woman and sent his servant to explore her body. She did not allow the servant to ‘halek’, but it is clear – unless this is a lurid fantasy of Forman’s – that the man ‘felt all parts of her body willingly and kissed her often’.

Emilia Lanier was the woman who became the mistress of the Queen’s cousin, Lord Hunsdon. What Forman’s casebooks reveal so interestingly – and we derive exactly the same impression from Shakespeare’s plays and poems – is a sexual free-for-all. The existence of syphilis and gonorrhoea with no real palliatives, and the fact that everyone in London was nominally Christian, did not diminish the rampant sexual energy of an expanding city. Forman happened to be there, with his inkhorn and his notebooks. But the men and women who pass through his pages, all sexually obsessed, are only a tiny fraction of the whole. No one especially expresses feelings of sexual guilt, and none are especially deterred by the morality propounded by the Puritans. Monogamy, chastity and even celibacy must have been practised by some Elizabethans, but one does not derive the impression from their writings that such conditions of life were the norm. As so often happens in a city where great cultural change is afoot, and where the population of immigrants from other lands, and from the country, is high, there is encountered this pulsating energy that irrepressibly takes sexual expression. The Berlin of the Weimar Republic, or the New York of Andy Warhol’s generation, was perhaps comparable in this respect to Elizabethan London.

Whether it was especially homosexual, or simply highly sexual, is quite hard to assess. Was Shakespeare gay, or did he simply – as well as enjoying sex with women – fall for boy actors from time to time? The word ‘Homosexuality’, like the word ‘Anglicanism’, did not exist in sixteenth-century English. The two words are so closely associated in twenty-first-century parlance that it is inevitable that one should ask whether the
thing
existed, even if they had no word for it. I have suggested in an earlier chapter that the word ‘Anglicanism’ did not exist because the Elizabethans had no concept of it. They had Catholic or Protestant ideas about the Church, but their quarrels and debates centred around the extent to which they accepted the Church of England, not whether they believed in a thing called ‘Anglicanism’. Modern readers will probably be less inclined to accept the idea that, because there was no word, there was also no ‘homosexuality’. But the sexual climate was very different, as is demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands of confused words written about the sexuality of Shakespeare. But when we go back in time and say that Marlowe and James VI and I were gay, I suspect that we are committing an anachronism. We can say that if they were alive
nowadays
they would have been gay; or that, viewed by our way of classifying human beings, they were gay. But the idea of classifying human beings
at all
, still less of dividing them according to sexual preference (or, come to that, skin pigmentation), is a by-product of nineteenth-century science. Just as Victorian collectors wanted to classify different species of butterfly or beetle, so they divided the human race and invented words such as ‘homosexual’.

One useful corrective to the idea that there were gay Elizabethans is the legal evidence. ‘During the forty-five years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign and the twenty-three years of King James I’s reign only six men are recorded as having been indicted for sodomy in the Home Counties assizes, for example, with only one conviction.’
¹²

It is an astonishingly low statistic, and when same-sex activity was punished by law, it was nearly always because some act of violence had accompanied it: buggery itself being in many cases a form of violence, whether performed upon a member of the same or the opposite sex. Rape, incest and adultery were the ingredients, for example, that made John Atherton’s acts of buggery seem worthy of death. He was hanged in 1640. The case made something of a stir since he was Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, and the woodcuts show the Right Reverend gentleman being hanged in his bishop’s outfit – Canterbury cap, rochet and chimere.

In questioning whether it is useful to use anachronistic words such as ‘Anglican’ or ‘homosexual’ in relation to the Elizabethans, I am not, of course, denying the obvious reason why such words
are
used; namely, that they are a clumsy shorthand designed to guide us through the alien world of a very different age. John Atherton was a bishop, and he did not acknowledge the authority of the Pope, and he dressed like twenty-first-century Anglican bishops: easier to call him an ‘Anglican’ or a promoter of ‘Anglicanism’ than to go back into his world and get the feeling of his religious milieu, which is something subtly different from what the word ‘Anglican’ implies. Likewise, it would be folly to deny that there were Elizabethan men who fell in love with one another, or with boys. The most famous of them quipped that ‘All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.’ But sexual preferences need to be understood in social terms. Labels sometimes confuse as much as they illuminate. The emperor Claudius was considered a freak because he exclusively liked women and eschewed young male catamites. That fact stands out. To label all the other Roman Emperors as paederasts might be true, but only true nor’ by nor’-west.

Undoubtedly Elizabethan England provided as much opportunity as any other society for gay love to flourish; possibly rather more, given the number of pretty boy actors, and the male fashions that exposed the legs so alluringly. Given the mode among modern ‘gender studies’ for exploring human character from this angle, however, it is remarkable how
little
mention there is of gay sex in Elizabethan pornography, or accounts of the Elizabethan underworld; equally remarkable is the fact that when men openly express their fondness for their own sex, it appears to have excited no particular shock. Richard Barnfield’s
The Affectionate Shepheard: Containing The Complaint of Daphnis
[male]
for the love of Ganymede
(also male) was published in 1594. His work was quite popular. No printer had his hands chopped off for printing it. Nor did Barnfield, a Shropshire gentleman, graduate of Brasenose and friend of Shakespeare, seem to have ruffled many feathers by his candid sexual and emotional preference for his own sex (though the fact that he was disinherited by his father
could
indicate that what was unremarkable in Oxford and London upset the rustic sensibilities of Market Drayton, where he was buried). Barnfield was clearly one who enjoyed sex with boys. Equally obviously, Shakespeare (whose Sonnets are the only other such poems of the age that are addressed by a male to a male) was surprised by a joyous love for a beautiful youth, which developed into an all-consuming obsession that (in Sonnet 20) was specifically non-sexual. It was the boy’s
youth
and his
face
that enchanted Shakespeare and the twentieth sonnet rather crudely but explicitly makes clear that there was no interest for Shakespeare below the Mason–Dixon line, to use the Duchess of Windsor’s phrase.

What was new in the sixteenth century, and conceivably deserves a mention in this context, is the formulation of buggery as an offence in English law. It was in Henry VIII’s reign that sodomy became a statutory felony, punishable by hanging. This was not because the King had a particular interest in the matter. It was instead almost accidental. Henrician law after 1540 transferred power and judicial authority from the Church of Rome to the Crown. The offence of sodomy had formerly been covered by Church law. When, therefore, Mary Tudor revoked all her father’s law with a view to bringing everything back under papal control, she inadvertently brought in what was effectively a Buggers’ Charter in 1553. It was ten years later, in 1563, that the anomaly was corrected in English law, though all case law subsequently – as has already been said – related to cases where other offences such as rape or incest were involved. It was Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), a Norfolk gentleman, whose
Institutes of the Laws of England
(1600–15) defined the crime in the greatest detail – for example, including bestialism in its definitions and making the distinction that if the act took place between an adult and a minor, only the adult could be prosecuted. Coke, Speaker of the House of Commons (1593), Attorney General (1594), Chief Justice of the Common Pleas (1606), Chief Justice of the King’s Bench and Privy Councillor (both in 1613), was one of the great English law-makers – dismissed by James VI and I for questioning the limits of royal power and prerogative. The language of Coke’s
Institutes
in relation to buggery might make him sound prurient. It is true that he was probably a horrible man, but the description of this particular activity as ‘detestable and abominable’ was something he merely took over from the legislation of Henry VIII; and his concern, disgusting as may be the details that he spells out, was merely with legal definitions – extent of penetration, whether accompanied by emission, and so forth. In this area, as in all others, Coke was concerned to make laws that were clear and which could be established in evidence presented to a court. The language of the laws and statutes (‘Amongst Christians not to be named’),
¹³
which clearly upsets some modern historians, overlooks the fact that when stray remarks made in the workplace about the Queen or the army could be viewed as dangerous acts of sedition; when membership of the Anabaptist sect could result in being publicly disembowelled; and when acts of petty theft could lead to the gallows – then the Elizabethans were very relaxed about same-sex encounters, only bothering to have a word for them when they involved anal rape. Compare this with the England of Elizabeth II, where prosecutions for homosexual behaviour in the early years of her reign were frequent: 480 men convicted for private acts between consenting adults during the period 1953–6.
¹⁴

We have mentioned Christopher Marlowe’s joke about tobacco and boys. It was inevitable, after Marlowe’s violent death, that moralisers should have considered it was no more than he deserved. Thomas Beard, for instance, Oliver Cromwell’s headmaster at Huntingdon Grammar School (the man who whipped Oliver for dreaming he was king), wrote of Marlowe in
The Theatre of God’s Judgements
. Beard’s book is a rich compilation of examples of the vindictiveness of the Deity, and in the chapter that gloats over the grisly ends ‘of Epicures and Atheists’:

It is so fell out that in London streets, as he purposed to stab one whom he ought a grudge unto with his dagger, the other party perceiving, so avoided the stroke that withal catching hold of his wrist, he stabbed with his own dagger into his own head, in such sort that notwithstanding all the means of surgery that could be wrought, he shortly after died thereof.

This was written four years after Marlowe died. The next year, in 1598, Francis Meres, who had overlapped with Marlowe as an undergraduate at Cambridge, added the salacious detail that the poet was ‘stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love’. So it became a brawl in a gay bar. Gabriel Harvey, the gossipy Cambridge don who reckoned he knew what was happening in ‘literary London’, believed that Marlowe – ‘He that not feared God, nor dreaded Devil’ – had been punished by dying of the plague.

In one of the most scintillating works of historical detective work,
The Reckoning
(published in 1992, revised 2002), Charles Nicholl reconstructed the murder of Christopher Marlowe in Deptford, in the summer of 1593. He even speculated whether the misinformation that had been fed to the normally close watcher of events – Harvey – had been deliberately put about by Marlowe’s seedy colleagues in the world of espionage. Nicholl’s book laid bare with devastating plausibility how close Marlowe’s murderer was to the network of spies and government informers who were directly answerable to the Cecils, to Walsingham, to Essex. He unearthed what another historian has called ‘the murky amoral world’, the ‘conspiratorial underbelly of Elizabethan politics’.
¹⁵
One detail alone convinced me of the plausibility of Nicholl’s story: it was that when Ingram Frizier fatally stabbed Marlowe through the eye – an offence that would normally carry an automatic death-penalty – he did not go into hiding, but attended the inquest at Deptford on Friday, 1 June 1593. The inquest found that Frizier had killed the poet ‘in the defence and saving of his own life’. Just four weeks later, on Thursday, 28 June, the Queen issued a formal pardon: it was a remarkably quick outcome of the case by Elizabethan standards. Frizier lived on – at Eltham in Kent – married, became a church warden and died in 1627.
¹⁶

What Nicholl did in his 1992 book, and which had never been done before in anything approaching his level of detail, was to follow up the identities and careers of the three men who were with Marlowe in the Widow Bull’s house at Deptford Strand on the day Marlowe met his end. For a start, Eleanor Bull herself. She was not some blowsy old publican. She was born Eleanor Whitney of a landed family in Herefordshire, known to Queen Elizabeth’s confidante Blanche Parry, who made a number of bequests to the Whitneys. Her husband, Richard Bull, was a sub-bailiff at Deptford and he is styled a ‘gentleman’ in the parish register.
¹⁷
Marlowe was not visiting a low tavern or a bawdy-house on the day he died.