The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (12 page)

Despite their vulnerability, children under the age of ten constituted a quarter of the entire population of England in the mid sixteenth century. Though hardly silent in their own time, they have almost no voice in history. Others wrote for them, or about them, when they remembered them, but no children, even the most precocious, even King Edward VI, quite spoke for themselves. Certain statistics about their lives are telling. Children, whether rich or poor, had brothers and sisters, for in marriages where births could hardly be planned one child followed another. Many brothers and sisters were step-brothers and sisters, because perhaps as many as 30 per cent of all those marrying in the mid-century were widows or widowers, and many brought children from the first marriage to the next. Children lived to learn the sorrow of the deaths of parents and siblings.

The pain experienced at the death of a child reaches down the ages. The Church taught that the child was a gift of God whom God might take back again, and bereaved parents wrote conventionally of their departed children enjoying the ‘joys of Heaven’. Ben Jonson, at the end of the century, dutifully acknowledged at the death of his first daughter: ‘All heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due/ It makes the father less to rue’. Yet he recollected the loss of his first son, dead of the plague in 1603, with less tranquillity:

Parents loved their children and, loving them, they had to chastise and warn them of the spiritual danger that surrounded them. Children were taught from an early age that there was hell as well as heaven, and that the Devil waited to tempt them. As a child John Stow, London’s chronicler (born in 1525), was told often of the terrible apparition that bell-ringers saw at St Michael Cornhill during a storm on St James’s Eve: it was the Devil. Stow poked feathers in the clefts the Devil’s paw
had raked in the tower. Children were taught the dangers of sin because they were not invariably regarded as innocent, as Christ had seen them, but as tainted by the Fall and ready, as Bishop Bonner wrote, to ‘take and embrace vice, unthriftiness and all manner naughtiness’. They must be kept from that sin to which their nature impelled them. Freedom in a child was not seen as an inalienable right but as wantonness. John Johnson, a London merchant, wrote to his brother-in-law, to whom he had sent his four-year-old daughter Charity to safeguard her from the plague: his wife feared that ‘you will make Charity a wanton in suffering her to have her will’. This was no favour; it would ‘cause her to have strokes [be spanked] thereafter. I pray you, therefore, let her be kept in awe’.

Children must, above all, remember the Fourth Commandment: ‘Honour thy father and thy mother.’ In a society which was founded upon obedience, obedience began with a child’s duty to parents. They learnt to ask, kneeling, for their parents’ blessing: ‘Mother, I beseech you of charity, give me your blessing.’ And parents should respond, making the sign of the cross and saying, ‘In the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen.’ The duty remained while the parents lived. Discipline, obedience, manners: these were inculcated early, when the child was most amenable, and by force where persuasion failed. Tudor parents were taught that ‘who spareth the rod, hateth the child’, though the correction must be given ‘in charity’. ‘Let not the feminine pity of your wives destroy your children’, wrote Edmund Dudley; ‘pamper them not at home in furred coats and their shirts to be warmed against their uprising… Dandle them not too dearly lest folly fasten on them.’ So constant were the admonitions against spoiling and pampering (‘cockering’) children that we may imagine the ambivalence of parents torn between tenderness and duty. Sabine Johnson, the same mother who wished little Charity to be ‘kept in awe’, asked her husband: ‘I pray you, cast away a little money for some baby [doll]’, for their son. The same parents who could bear to send children away to be nursed for two years showed the greatest solicitude for their welfare. Some teachers, at least, knew that beating was not the best way to lead a child to study. The Abbot of Reading, tutor to six-year-old James Basset, ‘playeth him to his learning, both to Latin and to French’.

By the age of seven, children became helping hands in a peasant household; both boys and girls were expected to work. Girls helped their mothers, fetching water, building fires, cooking, and watching
younger siblings; boys herded cattle, tended geese, sheep and pigs, gleaned in the fields, collected firewood and fished. In a census of the poor in Norwich of 1570 children as young as six, if they had no particular occupations, were called ‘idle’. Children might become the main breadwinners of pauper families. An Italian observer in about 1500, who charged English parents with want of affection, and with sending their children away from home at a pathetically early age, was correct, at least in his second charge. For the poor, there was little choice. In families living in cottages crammed with children, with too many to a bed and too many mouths to feed, a boy or girl who reached the age of ten or twelve left home by necessity to seek work as a servant or labourer. The vulnerability of young people setting out alone can be imagined, and sometimes proved. In 1517 a man returning from a pilgrimage to Our Lady at Willesden encountered a young girl by the wayside, seeking honest service in London. She entrusted herself to the man’s protection, but he took her to the Bankside stews, London’s notorious brothels, and engaged the ‘maiden’ to service with a prostitute. The girl implored a waterman’s wife ‘for Our Lady’s sake’ to save her, and so she did. Others were less fortunate. Yet most children, sent away from their families to find work, and rarely returning to them, found new homes of a kind with their masters and mistresses.

The sons of the nobility were also sent away: in the early sixteenth century to be brought up in another noble household; and a century later, to go to school. Girls of noble and gentry families went as ladies-in-waiting to other households, or might be contracted in marriage very young and sent to be brought up in the household of their future family. Elizabeth Plumpton was only three when in 1464 she was contracted to marry John Sotehill, and went to live in the Sotehill household. When the Italian observer asked why people sent their own children away from home and received the children of strangers, ‘they answered that they did it in order that the children might learn better manners’. Manners were part of the larger duty to ‘reverence, honour and obey’ superiors.

When they left home, children were expected to have received the last sacraments of childhood: penance and the Eucharist. Little children were supposed to attend church – quietly – with their families, to learn the paternoster (the Lord’s Prayer) and Ave Maria (Hail Mary) as soon as they could talk, and receive the benediction of witnessing the elevation of the Host. Some time between the ages of seven and fourteen they
were judged to have reached the age of spiritual discretion, the age at which they could tell right from wrong and appreciate the mystery of the Mass. A true understanding of sin, of penitence, and of salvation was needed before they could confess, be absolved and be worthy to receive Communion. God knew every sin already. ‘You are always in the presence and sight of God… He seeth and is not seen,’ as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry VIII’s courtier and diplomat, reminded his fifteen-year-old son in 1537. Sorrowful penitence alone would restore the sinner to God, but only contrite repentance expressed before the priest in confession could restore the sinner to the body of the faithful.

The seven deadly sins – pride, envy, wrath, covetousness, gluttony, sloth, lechery – all had malign social consequences and were transgressions against the community. Forgiveness and absolution depended upon tangible restitution for wrongs. The priest was empowered to impose penitential exercises and pronounce penitents absolved from sin and reconciled to the community of believers. In the confession, which was secret, the priest should comfort the penitent, telling him that Christ had died for our sins, reminding him that he was not the first in the world to sin, and that the greatest sinners had been saved through repentance and calling upon Christ. Much better to confess sins in this world than to come to universal judgement in the next, ‘when no man of law may speak for us, nor any excuse may serve’; better to perform penance now, in the time of grace, than in purgatory. The sinner was questioned in detail concerning his failings: of the five senses; of the seven deadly sins; against the twelve articles of faith in the Apostles’ Creed, the seven sacraments of the Church, and the seven corporeal works of mercy (feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, visiting the sick, aiding prisoners and burying the dead). Confessional manuals were full of advice regarding youthful failings, especially concerning that sin that most obsesses adolescents. Confession brought consolation, freedom, and a lifting of the burden of sin, but it also imposed its own burdens, of ecclesiastical discipline and social control. The duty might have seemed more evident than the liberation.

Adolescence – third of the seven ages of man – was judged to last between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, and was recognized as an age which must be ruled, for ‘lusty iuventus’ (youth) was by nature ignorant, ill-disciplined and savage. Against adolescents ‘the Devil doth lay all his ordnance and use all his engines against the soldiers
of Christ,’ warned Erasmus. Living in households together as servants and apprentices, adolescents shared their lives, their rooms, their beds. Richard Whitford, monk and moralist, counselled spiritual exercises upon waking – making the sign of the cross from head to foot, from left to right – but he knew how some ‘who lie two or three sometime together, and in one chamber divers beds and so many in company’ would be mortified by the jeers of mocking bedfellows if they practised such devotions: ‘O Jesu, what hear I now?’ Adolescence was not usually a time for vaunting piety. Boys were notorious for swearing. Curses are chosen because they shock; so in the sixteenth century they would always be religious: ‘God’s passion, God’s wounds, God’s nails, and ever His holy and blessed blood.’ There was a cautionary tale of an apprentice. He swore so often by God’s bones that his own bones cleaved through his flesh; a mirroring punishment for such blasphemy. This was a society in which the young were allowed no authority. For young men to command was against the law of nature: they must obey until they had achieved mastery of their baser desires. The prevailing ideal was gerontocratic; only the old had
gravitas
and wisdom enough to rule. Not until the age of twenty-four were men considered ready to be ordained to the priesthood or emancipated from apprenticeship; only then could they set up independent, single households. Adolescence was ended by another rite of passage, another sacrament: marriage.

Marriage brought profound transformations: new privileges, obligations, freedoms and restrictions. Sons became patriarchs; women exchanged duty to fathers for duty to husbands. Men became householders; women housekeepers. From being dependants – children, apprentices, servants – they became masters and mistresses and bore authority. Women vowed at marriage to be ‘bonere [gentle, courteous] and buxom [compliant], in bed and at board’, acknowledging the sexual duty of marriage. They would bear children and become matrons themselves. And the transformation was irreversible, ‘till death us do part’.

A marriage was easily – too easily – made. The Church had long allowed that the free exchange of vows before witnesses – it did not matter where – followed by sexual consummation constituted a valid, sacramental, marriage. When, in 1553, Mary Blage and Walter Cely told Edmund Parker that they wished to marry, he said, ‘Well, I will play the priest’, and invited Walter to take Mary by the hand and say
these familiar, binding words: ‘I, Walter, do take thee, Mary, to my wife; to have and to hold until death us do part, and thereunto I plight unto thee my faith and my troth.’ Their story, like that of many others, came before the Church courts, as at least one party repented at leisure and asked ecclesiastical judges to find a way to dissolve a union which was virtually indissoluble and which the Church’s permissive doctrine had allowed. Women found themselves married to men who had seduced them but would not stay with them; men married women who deceived them and had plighted troths elsewhere. In the highly charged atmosphere of the royal court, Lady Margaret Douglas, Henry VIII’s niece, and Lord Thomas Howard dared in 1536 to contract a secret marriage. It led Lord Thomas to the Tower, where he wrote some of the most tragic, if stilted, of Tudor love poetry, and where he died.

Clandestine marriage often ended in tears. It excluded parents, family and friends, whose presence to witness the new union celebrated and sanctioned a new affinity. It banished the clergy, who objected to the laity ‘playing the priest’. Marriage without public spousal rites seemed anarchic, not a sacrament in the sense of a social institution. A marriage – wedding – which the whole community affirmed involved the reading of banns, a solemnization before a priest, the exchange of vows, the blessing of the ring, a public pledge at the church door, and ideally the blessing of a nuptial mass inside the church. Marriage feasts and revels followed. The solemnization of marriage was forbidden during Lent, Rogationtide and Advent, and the prohibition was respected. Nor did weddings take place during the busy harvest season, but followed the rhythms of the agricultural year. The most popular period for marriage was at the time of the annual hiring fairs, after the harvest, when young farm servants received their wages and left their masters’ houses to seek new opportunities. This was a time of relative prosperity after harvest, a moment to celebrate at church and bride ales (feasts).