The Elizabethans (27 page)

Stow’s
Survey of London
, which was published in 1598, went through many versions. During the earliest years of Elizabeth’s reign Stow’s published work was less localised. He established a canon of English literature, with an edition of Chaucer in 1561; in 1568 he edited thirty-three poems of John Skelton. He also published
The Chronicles of England
(1580) and the
Annales of England
(1592).

An author who was much more obviously a creative historian, and who, as C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘long retained almost Scriptural authority’,
²
was John Foxe (1516–87). A more recent writer than Lewis calls Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments
(first English edition 1563, followed by many revised editions, and known popularly as
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
) ‘perhaps the single most influential work of historical writing throughout Britain and Ireland.’
³
Lewis, himself of Ulster Protestant origins, though in later life an Anglo-Catholic, makes the fair points that Foxe was an honest man who never knowingly wrote falsehoods, and whose horrifying accounts of the treatment of Protestants in the reign of Queen Mary I were true. His earlier original work, the
De Non Plectendis Morte Adulteris
(1548), is a plea for mercy; he confesses that he could never pass a slaughterhouse without discomposure; and when his own party was on top, he interceded (vainly of course) to save Anabaptists from the stake in 1575 and Jesuits from the gallows in 1581.
⁴

Foxe was powerful as an historian (or, if you prefer, a propagandist for Protestant nationalism) precisely because the atrocities he itemised did in fact take place. Foxe provided the English with documentary evidence of what happened when the Counter-Reformation was allowed to influence governments. It is against the tortures and burnings of hundreds of Protestants in Foxe’s book that the modern person must set many of the Elizabethan outrages: Walsingham’s spy-networks and torture methods; Drake’s simple theft of Spanish gold; the torture and killing of virtuous men such as the Jesuit Edmund Campion. The
Acts and Monuments
of Foxe entered the national psyche, so that almost any policy or action that ensured England’s Protestant independence was seen to be justified. This mindset continued long after the actual religious controversies that preoccupied Foxe had faded from memory. Since Foxe taught his readers not simply to be anti-Catholic, but to be independent as an island-race. The huge folios of Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments
did indeed suggest a unique destiny for the English and their Church. This was discernible not only in the text, but in the vivid woodcuts with which the work is illustrated. In the 1570 edition, volume one has a massive (larger than three folio pages) fold-out woodcut of the ‘Heathen Tyrrannes of Rome’ who persecuted the early Christians before the conversion of Constantine. There is at the end of this volume an illustration of the ‘proud primacie of Popes paynted out in Tables, in order of their rising up by litle and litle, from faithfull Byshops and Martyrs’. But this was far from being the end of history. After the period of the popes there arose, in Foxe’s vision of things, the re-emergence of the True Church with the arrival of Henry VIII. With the crowning of Elizabeth, and the continuation of the Tudor dynasty, Foxe could envisage the glad consummation of an historical process that would see the fulfilment of the Bible prophecy (in the eighteenth chapter of Revelations) and the downfall of the papacy.
⁵

If Foxe saw the Tudor Age as a time when true Christianity eventually emerged from a superstitious past, Raphael Holinshed (died
c
.1580), whose
Chronicles
were first published in 1577, looked back to the anarchy of civil war in the fifteenth century and beyond and found further reason for celebrating now. It was a self-consciously political elevation of the present against the past, and of English national identity against outsiders. Hindsight sees Holinshed as a ‘source’ for Shakespeare’s history plays, but it would be truer to say that Holinshed (from the 1570s onwards) and Shakespeare (from the 1590s onwards) were both drawing upon, and giving eloquent voice to, a sense of collective national identity.

Holinshed’s
Chronicles
are in any event a compilation. They were originally planned as a huge ‘universall cosmographie’ with ‘histories of every knowne nation’ by a canny publisher (printer to Queen Elizabeth) named Reyne or Reginald Wolfe, who died in 1573 before the work got off the ground. The collaborators in ‘Holinshed’ included, as well as Holinshed himself, Richard Stanyhurst, John Hoover (alias Vowell), Francis Thynne and William Harrison, and they in turn drew upon and simply copied earlier histories. As Lewis put it, ‘the “English story” is a sort of national stock-pot permanently simmering to which each new cook adds flavouring at his discretion’.
⁶
Or, as a more recent scholar has put it, ‘Holinshed’s
Chronicle
was itself, or can now be seen, as a giant inter-disciplinary project. It was offered to the late Elizabethan reader, in two editions a decade apart, as the work of a group, a collaboration (the term “syndicate” can be loosely used) between freelance antiquarians, lesser clergymen, members of Parliament with legal training, minor poets, publishers.’
⁷
Like Elizabethan architecture – which, even if it followed the drawings of a great master-mason such as Smythson, was never the work of one mind – Elizabethan history was a collaborative enterprise, a palimpsest of different testimonies shaped into a common sense of the past.

When Wolfe the stationer/bookseller died, much of the contents of his shop was purchased by Stow, and the team of writers mentioned above moved into action to produce ‘Holinshed’. The joint effort, the ‘national stock-pot permanently simmering’, should not, however, be considered a neutral chronicle merely because it was not personal and did not emanate from a single author. It did emanate from a particular place – London – and a particularly volatile political situation. Queen Elizabeth’s failure, or refusal, to marry, and her occasional illnesses, put the regime in a particularly vulnerable position, the more vulnerable as the 1570s advanced and the likelihood of the Queen producing an heir dwindled (by 1580 she would be forty-seven). Not only was the regime vulnerable to attack from abroad, from France or Spain. It had, perpetually, to hold at bay the threats of discontent within: from Catholics (actual recusants who secretly used the services of Roman Catholic priests, and the much larger number who conformed to the National Church) who perhaps had believed that the Reformation was only half-complete. Both sides had a tendency to set their freedom to tell the truth above the need to conform to what the government wanted them to think.

The writing and rewriting of national history in the 1570s and 1580s was not happening in a political vacuum, still less in an atmosphere of easy tolerance, in which one person’s viewpoint was considered just as deserving of hearing as another. In the year after the Pope’s Bull of Excommunication, a new Treason Act was passed making it treason to affirm
by writing
that the Queen should not be queen, or that she was an infidel, tyrant or usurper.

The chronicles – all or nearly all London-based, and coming from the area and class that in a couple of generations would provide the power-base for Protestant republican resistance to Charles I – were as aware as the censors that history could be used as a code by which to make comments about the present. The Puritan
Admonitions to Parliament
of 1572 was highly critical of the bishops and of the government. On 7 July 1573 John Field and Thomas Wilcox, the joint authors of the attack, were imprisoned. Anyone found printing the work, ‘all and every printer, stationer, bookbinder, merchant and all other men . . . who hath in their custody any of the said books [were] to bring in the same to the bishop of the diocese, or to one of her highness’ Privy Council . . . upon pain of imprisonment and her highness’ further displeasure’. The Queen’s displeasure was not merely expressed in words. When John Stubbs, in 1579, published a pamphlet advising the Queen against marriage with the Duc d’Alençon, he was convicted of seditious libel. He, his printer and his bookseller had their right hands chopped off.
⁸

These facts hardly justify an older
⁹
way of reading ‘Holinshed’s’
Chronicles
as being written simply to legitimise the Tudor régime. In the apparent muddle of the
Chronicles
much more is going on. Abraham Fleming, the editor of the 1587 edition, was a supporter of the Elizabethan Settlement, the merger of Church and state; but his late inclusion in Holinshed’s earlier
Chronicles
of recent acts of defiance and nonconformity only emphasised the fact that the new régime, in its persecution of Puritans and other Protestant ‘heretics’ (as well as their persecution of Catholics), sat strangely beside some of Holinshed’s original material. By lumping together stories of very recent repression of free opinion with Holinshed’s stories of heresy-hunting in the old days, Fleming (who probably
intended
to make the reader more conformist, more afraid of stepping out of line) must have made some readers find in the older stories collected by Holinshed a case for believing in freedom of conscience. Thus, far from ‘legitimising’ the Elizabethan regime, the
Chronicles
, together with
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
, became part of the Puritan or Nonconformist library that would in a later generation be packed on the
Mayflower
, America-bound, or would sustain those supporters of the Good Old Cause that marched with Cromwell’s Ironsides.

Fleming, for example, included an account for 13 April 1579 of how:

Matthew Manon, by his trade a ploughwrite of Hetharset three miles from Norwich, was convented before the bishop of Norwich, for that he denied Christ our saviour. At the time of his appearance, it was objected that he had published these heresies following. That the new testament and gospel of Christ are but mere foolishnesse, a storie of man, or rather a mere fable . . . that the Holie ghost is not God . . . that baptisme is not necessarie in the church of God, neither the use of the sacrament of the bodie and blood of Christ. For the which heresies he was condemned in the consistorie, and sentence was pronounced against him . . . And because he spake words of blasphemie (not to be recited) against the queen’s majestie and others of hir councell, he was by the recorder, master sergeant Windham, and the maior Sir Robert Wood of Norwich condemned to lose both his eares, which were cut off on the thirteenth of Maie in the market place of Norwich, and afterwards, to wit on the twentieth of Maie, he was burned in the castell ditch of Norwich.
¹⁰

When Fleming recounted the deaths of Catholics – and in fact he thoroughly
approved
of supporting nonconformity, Catholic or Protestant – against the Elizabethan Church and state, he found
himself
being censored. Queen Elizabeth herself insisted, for example, that he remove a sentence about Edmund Campion, the Jesuit who was tortured and executed for treason in 1581: ‘he died not for treason but for Religion’. The
Chronicles
, which had begun, in part, as an illustration of the intolerance of earlier, Catholic regimes, found themselves taking up the story of Elizabethan intolerance and themselves became a victim of extreme religio-political censorship.

One can trace an amusing and bizarre vision of the historiography of religious persecution in the figure of Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

Sir John Oldcastle (Baron Cobham) was a Lollard, a member of that late-medieval religious group whose beliefs and writings were seen by the sixteenth-century reformers as foreshadowing the Reformation.
The First English Life of Henry V
, and the other Catholic chroniclers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, tell us that Oldcastle was buried alive while hanging in chains in 1417. He had helped to fight Owain Glynd
ŵ
r in his rising against Henry IV and was a friend of Henry V’s youth; but when that king came to power, he was persuaded by Archbishop Arundel to continue the policies of his father in persecuting heretics. Oldcastle’s ‘rebellion’ against Henry V, if it took place at all, appears to have been a hare-brained scheme to kidnap the King and his brothers with a band of some hundreds of Lollard supporters. Royalist propaganda translated this into a rebel army of 20,000. And by the time, for example, that Thomas Walsingham wrote his chronicle in the reign of Henry VIII, Oldcastle had become a sort of demon who needed to be exorcised before the English king could be blessed by God with victory over the French army at Agincourt.
¹¹

For the Protestant historian John Bale (1495–1565), however, Oldcastle was not a villain, but a proto-Protestant hero. In
A Brief chronicle concerning . . . Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham
, Bale instructs his reader, ‘Now pluck from your eyes the corrupted spectacles of carnal or popish judgements, and do upon them that clear sight which ye have by the Spirit of Christ; and that faithfully done, tell me which of these two [Cobham or Thomas Beckett] seemeth rather to be the martyr of Christ, and which the pope’s martyr?’
¹²

Bale, who became Bishop of Ossory in Edward VI’s reign, was appointed to a canonry in Elizabeth’s (having gone into exile in Marian times). Queen Elizabeth took an interest in him. She ordered that those who had taken, or come into possession of, Bale’s papers and books during his exile should be made to return them. She wanted him to have research materials ‘for the illustration and setting forth of the storye of this our realme, by him the said Bale’.
¹³
He died before he had a chance to continue his historical work. Elizabeth probably recognised in John Bale, as have modern scholars, the first English historian to acknowledge the profound historical significance of England’s break from the papacy, which ‘meant the ending of a whole historical tradition’.
¹⁴
It meant a reinvention of history, and to this extent Bale was the father of modern English history. Bale used ‘enemy’ documents and inverted their meaning. Chronicles designed to show that a figure such as Oldcastle was a dangerous heretic were plundered to show him to be a hero. Whereas Catholic chronicles mock Oldcastle’s lack of Latin, Bale salutes the fact that he wrote in that good, patriotic, Protestant language, English.