The Elizabethans (48 page)

So, the places you think of now as the big English cities were often quite small in Elizabethan England. Manchester, where Dr John Dee became warden of the ‘college’ of priests in 1594, was described by John Leland in 1540 as ‘the fairest, the best-builded, quickest and most populous town of all Lancashire’. By Elizabethan times, the population of Manchester was probably about 3,300 – with three big cullings caused by plague in the course of the reign.
¹

To be the most populous town in Lancashire was to have a population that later times would think of as a village. Cheshire was a more populous county than Lancashire at this period – an era when Totnes was much bigger than Liverpool, when Leeds, Halifax and Wakefield were tiny villages, when Sheffield was a small manor governed by a castle belonging to the Earl of Shrewsbury.
²

In this England, the growth of London appeared all the more prodigious, and made the capital – even more than it had been in the Middle Ages – the hub of power and cultural interest. (York, the largest city in the North, had a population that is hard to estimate, but was probably around 10,000 in the mid-sixteenth century.)
³

It is in this context that the population boom of London appears so prodigious – from 50,000 or 60,000 in the mid-1530s to perhaps 85,000 in 1565, and 155,000 in 1603 when the Queen died. (It was to continue rising with ever-greater rapidity during the first half of the seventeenth century, reaching half a million by the time of the Great Plague of 1665.)
⁴

The population growth was not ‘natural’. It was not caused by Londoners breeding at an unusual rate. In fact, so plague-ridden was sixteenth-century London that the population would have fallen without the migrants who entered the city in such numbers, from the English provinces, and from Europe. Protestant refugees from the Low Countries and France accounted for the larger proportion of foreign migrants – between 3 and 4 per cent in the course of the reign – some 4,700 in 1567 and 5,450 in 1593.
⁵

English migrants to London fell into two broad categories. There were those who came driven by ambition, and there were those who came driven by hunger. ‘In London we find rich wives, spruce mistresses, pleasant houses, good diet, rare wines, neat servants, fashionable furniture, pleasures and profits the best of all sort’, as one such ambitious young man wrote.
⁶

On the other hand, there were those who had been driven off the land for the simple Malthusian reason that existent crops could not sustain an increased workforce. Population growth in the country produced land shortage, reduced the size of smallholdings and led to a fivefold increase in food prices. In the course of the sixteenth century the real value of wages halved. The poor became poorer. Living-in servants, apprentices and day-labourers were the lucky ones. Many simply drifted towards London with the vague hope that it would provide them with some form of livelihood. The number of homeless beggars was vast.

In 1581 Elizabeth was riding by Aldersgate Bars towards the fields of Islington when she found herself surrounded by a crowd of beggars, ‘which gave the queen much disturbance’. That evening, William Fleetwood, the Recorder, arrested seventy-four of them who had dispersed in the fields, where they lived in a kind of shanty-town. Eight years later, a mob of some 500 beggars threatened to disrupt Bartholomew Fair. They had formed their own collective and were trying to sell stolen goods at a fair of their own – Durrest Fair.
⁷

Yet it was a fluid underclass, never a settled one. No state-sponsored social-welfare system existed. In the absence of religious houses, there was nowhere for the indigent or the starving to find charity. The beggars took what they could, and then found work or moved on. It all had a cruel effectiveness. The authorities, ever anxious about the double dangers of plague and insurrection, kept a merciless eye on the swarming hordes. In 1580 the Privy Council noted, ‘the great number of dissolute, loose and insolent people harboured in such and like noisome and disorderly houses as namely poor cottages and habitants of beggars and people without trade, stables, inns, ale houses, taverns, garden houses, converted to dwellings, ordinaries, dicing houses, bowling alleys and brothel houses’. The instinct of civic authorities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be to house the poor, and where possible to keep them clean and disease-free. The instinct of the Elizabethan Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London was to discourage them from coming to London in such numbers – and their expedient was to forbid any building within three miles of the City. These decrees were ignored. The Privy Council itself in 1598 warned JPs about landlords letting out tenements in Shoreditch and Clerkenwell to ‘base people and to lewd persons that do keep evil rule and harbour thieves, rogues and vagabonds’. They were unable to limit the population themselves. Plague did it for them. Without bubonic plague, the Elizabethans would have had real political and social problems on their hands. Plague killed rich and poor alike, but whereas the prosperous were sometimes able to get out of the City to escape the plague – and they had somewhere else to go – the waifs and strays of the Elizabethan shanty-town stayed to die, until the next wave of beggars came to town; 17,500 people (the size of the entire population of England’s next-biggest city, Norwich) died in London in 1563; 23,000 in 1593; 30,000 in 1603, with many a more minor outbreak in between, and disease everlastingly rife in that filthy, overcrowded city with no drainage and no sanitation.
⁸

That having been said, it would be a mistake to regard the Elizabethans as being without any charitable impulses. Compared with a modern welfare state, designed to cater for the social problems of a population numbering in the tens of millions, it was obviously haphazard. One reason for this was that the numbers of people living in Elizabethan England were, by modern standards, so tiny. Nevertheless, there did exist a kind of micro social-welfare system. Each parish was expected to organise ‘poor relief’. Prosperous parishioners were specially taxed for the purpose. In many city parishes much care was given to foundling babies, to the old and to the sick; even, on occasion, to strangers and ‘blackamoors’. In parishes that contained prisoners, local people would feed the prisoners through the bars and gratings. It was common for wealthier parishioners to adopt orphans, often seeing that they were taught a skill or a trade. Parish registers provide an abundance of evidence of such charitable activity.

There were also almshouses in many towns designed to house the poor. One thinks of Edward Alleyn’s at Dulwich or of Archbishop Whitgift’s at Croydon. Naturally there were many poor people who slipped through the net and who found themselves homeless, but so there are in any system. The Queen was regarded, among other things, as a source of bounty, and wherever she travelled, ladies-in-waiting took purses to distribute among suppliants. The aristocracy imitated this more-than-ritualised generosity. The household accounts of Lady Anne Clifford, or Lord Berkeley, to name but two, record frequent giving to the poor. Lord Berkeley not only entertained all his retainers and tenants in true feudal style each Christmas, but made sure that suppliants at his door were rewarded all through the year. There was a brutality about life in early modern times, when so few effective cures for disease or hunger had been discovered. But Lear’s compassion for the ‘poor naked wretches’ was something felt by more than just one old king upon a stage. It was a society which, perhaps more self-consciously than others, since religious debate was so much to the forefront of contemporary discourse, was aware of its Christian obligations.
⁹

Crime, nevertheless, was widespread. From the records of the courts, as from the drama, fiction, diaries and pamphlets, we find a city of filthy, narrow streets swarming with pickpockets, confidence tricksters (known as cony-catchers), whores, pimps and swindlers. We also find a world where authority criminalised the population as a method of draconian control. It has been estimated that 6,000 people were executed in the modern Greater London during the reign of Elizabeth. Translate that statistic into the population of modern London, and you are talking of the equivalent of thousands of people a year being killed. The 200 or 300 recusant spies or martyrs are lost in this ghoulish statistic, where to be indigent, or a thief, or a careless pamphleteer could earn you the most terrible punishments. As well as those killed, there must be remembered the thousands who endured whippings, mutilations, brandings or being placed in the stocks for quite trivial offences. Evelyn Waugh, in his life of Campion, likened the regime to the brigand states of the twentieth century. But surely here is a case where analogy is misleading. As when we attune our ears to Elizabethan poetry and sentence structure, so, when attempting to acclimatise ourselves to their socio-political realities, we must resist the laziness of parallel. Sir Francis Walsingham was not Dr Goebbels. None of the monster regimes of the twentieth century would have retained ‘benefit of clergy’ as a defence in law, not only for bishops and curates, but for the educated. When Ben Jonson killed a fellow actor in a duel in 1598 he pleaded guilty, but escaped hanging merely by demonstrating to the judge that he could recite the penitential Psalm
Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam
(50 in the Vulgate, 51 in the Hebrew Bible) in Latin. So the sixteenth century was another country.

You cannot draw a parallel between the early modern age and the mechanised dictatorships of the twentieth century. By proportion, Stalin and Mao and Hitler killed infinitely more of their own dissident population even than Mary Tudor did, or the Habsburg regime of Philip II in Spain and the Low Countries. Rather than draw modern parallels, we must continually re-enter the Elizabethan world to try to acclimatise ourselves to its atmosphere. The Catholic recusants have a surviving constituency in our own day, who continue to revere their struggles and their martyrdoms. But they were not alone in falling foul of a system that was completely repressive.

In any society that was changing as rapidly as the early-modern period in England, however, there were bound to be dissidents of all kinds: those who did not conform to the norm decreed by the all-powerful, all-centralising Council, dominated by the inner ring of Burghley, Walsingham and the Protestant junta, who both accepted the capricious absolutism of the Queen and judiciously manipulated it. That caprice could take off the head of a Duke of Norfolk. Burghley himself had come close to being sent to the Tower. If she had positively insisted upon a dynastic marriage with a European prince who disliked them, the position of the junta would have been precarious indeed. But, for the most part, the coalition between the Queen and the inner ring was mutually beneficial and this fed and strengthened the arm of Walsingham’s spy-network. Anyone who threatened the state, anyone who threatened the prevailing orthodoxies, was in danger of losing ear or hand or tongue or life. Yet – and here was one of the great differences between Elizabethan England and the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century – there was a palpable sense in the country at large of rebirth, of creative energy, of newness and expansion. There was a new religion; or at any rate, a National Church which ratified the Reformation. Perhaps many disliked it, for not being the old Latin rite, or for not following the new Reformed paths. But it was itself new. There were new schools. Ships – English ships – sailed to new lands, and brought back not merely undreamed-of treasure, but the sense of an expanded world. In churches, halls, palaces and country houses, new music delighted the ear. You could not be alive in Elizabethan England and not feel that it was a young country, full of the capacity to reinvent itself.

And central to its stupendous flowering, its intense magnification and its Herculean self-discovery was the vastly expanding capital of London. In this teeming womb of new life, new disease, new squalor and new glory, we should expect strange things to emerge. Patrons, such as the Sidneys, or as the young Earls of Oxford or Southampton, might bring on poets and musicians, courtly writers who could embroider new verses as finely wrought as their tapestries. But the masque, the madrigal or the privately circulated sonnet-sequence would not be enough to contain all the loud, sharp, all-but-unutterable matters that this changing world was bringing to birth. Novels, pamphlets and, above all, plays began to emerge as fascinating expressions of their times, and as subversions of them.

Sidney’s
Arcadia
, in its developed and unfinished revision, was by far the most interesting work of prose-fiction of the times, but it was never intended by its author for publication, as far as we know: his sister saw it through the presses in 1590 in a somewhat mangled form.

John Lyly (
c.
1554–1606), who was probably roughly of Sidney’s age, was one of the so-called University Wits to emerge onto the literary scene, a figure of interest not merely for what he wrote, but for what he represented: namely, that first generation who emerged from what we should call higher education into an entirely Protestant world; where, if you were not lucky or clever enough to become a don, or to enter one of the professions, you needed a combination of a patron’s help and your own wits to keep afloat. From figures in such circumstances was to emerge much of the most interesting literature of the time. The explorer among the Elizabethan bookshelves encounters Lyly in several modes – as proto-novelist, as playwright, as government lickspittle and as a Member of Parliament.

Lyly, like Sidney, was an Oxford man (Magdalen College), but from a far less-exalted family background. He was born in the Weald of Kent, and when he matriculated his university described him, with a no doubt accurate lack of mercy, as ‘
plebeii filius
’, a son of a pleb. This would not have meant that he was the son of the lowest rank. It meant he was not a gentleman. Edmund Spenser, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe – they all came from the middle rank, from the class who made or sold things rather than living, as their sons would do, by their wits. Lyly was of slightly higher stock than this: the grandson of an Eton master and the nephew of two masters at St Paul’s. This is the class that in later generations and other countries would produce the French revolutionaries, the Russian communist-anarchists. It is the class from which dissent and discontent and change comes, but it is also the class that in a creatively successful society wishes to ‘better itself’. One of the measures of a society’s health is what this class does to the greater group. In Weimar Germany, the discontented shopkeeper, the clever weaver or glover or tanner would help the ‘extremes’ of Right or Left to devour the Common Good like cancers. In Victorian England, the clever aspirant classes actually became the new order. Lord Salisbury, Burghley’s Cecil descendant, could sneer at the
Daily Mail
as being written by and for office boys, but he ended his career wooing the political votes of office boys. In the pre-industrial world of Elizabethan England, those who were too clever to belong to the class in which they were born did not create a petty bourgeoisie, as in Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham. But they were emerging all over the place, entering the professions, entering the universities, and when successful – as was the glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon – wanting to make themselves into gentlefolk. To be able to write the letters MA (Master of Arts) after your name made you, in this world, ‘
generosus
’, a gentleman.