The Tudors for Dummies (AvaxHome Download) (33 page)

Grumbling with the Godly

If you let in something like the Reformation, you open the floodgates to all

sorts of oddballs. Religion was at the heart of everybody's life in the 16th cen-

tury and what began in Martin Luther's day (see Chapter 6) as an attack on

the abuses of the Catholic Church became a fertile breeding ground for ever-

more wacky ideas.

The new `left' in religion were the Puritans � Anabaptists, Calvinists and

Presbyterians � who took a leaf out of John Calvin's book in Geneva,

Switzerland. They were staunchly against the following:

Blasphemy: If you took the Lord's name in vain you were punished with

an iron spike through the tongue.

Flash clothes: The sign of the worst sin of all � vanity. Puritans stuck to

simple clothing.

Playing cards: These were the `Devil's picture books' and were banned.

Plays: Don't even go there! (See the following section.)

As early as 1565 a hard-line group of Puritans was emerging in the Commons

and Cambridge University had a nest of them, especially in St John's College.

The following year the tolerant, even laid-back Matthew Parker, archbishop

of Canterbury, had to send out his advertisements (see Chapter 13) to remind

both `right' and `left' in the country what the Church of England actually

believed. Puritan priests were refusing to kneel to take communion, make the

sign of the cross in baptism or wear surplices, which they called `the livery of

Antichrist'.

Thrashing the theatres (and

everything else enjoyable!)

The Puritan killjoys were soon at work attacking the `vices' of Elizabeth's

England. Philip Stubbes wrote his Anatomie of Abuses in 1582, which attacked

almost everything from country dancing to the size of gentlemen's ruffs:

Football (a 300-year-old street game in Elizabeth's day) was `a bloody

and murdering practice rather than a fellowly sport and pastime'. (Fair

enough!)

Bowling alleys were wastes of `time, wit and money'. (Okay.)

Maypoles were `stinking idols' (and they were phallic symbols � penis

worship for the sake of fertility � so were doubly naughty). Chapter 14: Gunning for Elizabeth 247 But Stubbes saved his best lines for the theatres.

Stubbes said that theatres were invitations to debauchery of all kinds:

Mark the flocking and running to Theatre and Curtains [two London

playhouses in the 1580s] daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide . . .

where such kissing and bussing [canoodling] such winking and glancing of

wanton eyes . . . is wonderful [not in a good way] to behold. And what happened after the show? `Every mate sorts to his mate . . . and in their secret conclaves they play the sodomites or worse.' Worse? Steady on! Can't you just see the steam coming out of Stubbes's ears?

And he wasn't alone. John Stockwood complained that thousands went to the theatre where barely a hundred went to church. Theatres taught you to lie, cheat, steal, scoff, mock, murder, `devirginate maids' and to ignore God's laws.

By 1588 various tracts signed by `Martin Marprelate' � not a real person, and the surname means `evil bishop' in Latin � appeared on walls all over London attacking the bishops in the Church of England. The Godly were gaining ground.

Remember that brilliant scene in Shakespeare in Love where a Puritan preacher is ranting outside two theatres in London � `A plague on both your houses,' he screams. It's a good phrase and Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), passing at that moment, overhears the words and pinches them for his forthcoming Romeo and Juliet. Genius!

Pressing the Presbyterians In Chapter 13 we explain that some Puritans wanted a church run by synods (assemblies of clergy and important laymen), not bishops. One Puritan sect, which came to control the Scottish church, was the Presbyterians. They didn't believe in bishops, but wanted a church run by elders who were responsible to their local community. All Presbyterians were Puritans, but not all Puritans were Presbyterian.

What bothered Puritans most was the cop-out clause that allowed people to go to Anglican services now and again (occasional conformity) while they were actually secret Catholics. They realised they wouldn't get anywhere in Parliament so they did their own thing and set up prophesying, group train- ing sessions for Bible study. Elizabeth wasn't happy with prophesying and banned it.

Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who succeeded Matthew Parker as archbishop

of Canterbury in 1576, ignored Elizabeth's ban on prophesying and lost his

job. His replacement, John Whitgift, was an Anglican hard-liner who blasted

both Presbyterians and Catholics from his pulpit.

Anthony Cope tried to push Puritan legislation through the Commons, want-

ing to abolish Elizabeth's Church and set up a Presbyterian model instead.

Most of Parliament was horrified and the queen had the move stopped.

Cope's timing was appalling � this was 1587 and a great deal of uncertainty

existed in the country over the plans of Philip of Spain (see Chapter 15). It

wasn't the right time for change of any kind.

Silencing the separatists

By the 1590s many Puritans believed that the Church of England was so cor-

rupt that nothing and no one could save it. The only way forward was to

break with the Church and set up separate sects. Puritans got a real hold on

the country in the next century, and of course the Pilgrim Fathers took their

ideas to America, but separatists didn't make much headway at first.

In 1593 Parliament passed the Act against Seditious Sectaries, which killed

the separatist group in the Commons and in the country as a whole. That

year Parliament was difficult, holding up taxes for war costs (see Chapter 15)

until religious issues were put on the agenda. Elizabeth refused to cooperate,

and dismissed her MPs. On 29 May a leading Puritan, John Penry, was hanged

after a dodgy trial accusing him of printing anti-Church propaganda.

Wondering about Witchcraft

The year before Henry VII became king (see Chapter 2) two Catholic monks,

working on orders from the pope, wrote Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer

of the Witches). The Catholic Church believed (wrongly) that all over Europe

people were worshipping the devil and having sex with demons of the night.

Malleus was a sort of guidebook for recognising witches and a punishment

manual too.

The Middle Ages wasn't crammed full of witches. The actual number of trials

for witchcraft was tiny. It wasn't until the upheavals of the Reformation that

witchcraft's ideas gained ground, and even then different types of witchcraft

existed: Chapter 14: Gunning for Elizabeth 249

White witches were cunning women (and men) who'd been around

forever. They lived in villages, helped at births, looked after the sick and

laid out the dead. Most of their remedies were harmless, some

were (unintentionally) dangerous and some actually worked (the life-

saving miracle drug penicillin is, after all, mould on bread). At a time

when doctors were few, expensive and not very good, cunning women

made sense.

Black witches could be hired for maleficia (bad doings) like making your

neighbour's crops fail or his best cow die. The success of spells was

largely in the eye of the beholder (sympathetic magic) � if you believed

it was possible, then anything could happen.

Punishment for English and European witchcraft differed. In England the crime was a felony, punishable by hanging. In Europe (and in Scotland) it was heresy, punishable by burning. A lot of the information we have about 16th- century witchcraft is European and the so-called confessions of witches were obtained under the torture of the Inquisition (see Chapter 10).

Flying to the sabbat (mass meeting) on a horse or a broomstick may have been the result of taking hallucinogenic drugs like hemlock. And if you had sex with the devil at an orgy, that was either some guy in a goat's head getting lucky or wishful thinking.

Preying on the poor Very few examples of witchcraft affecting anybody with money or status exist. James VI of Scotland changed all that when he became king of England in 1603 (see Chapter 16) because he was obsessed with the subject and even wrote a book about it, Daemonologie, in 1597. Before that, only the poor seemed afflicted (remember, the six-fingered Anne Boleyn wasn't, in the end, accused of witchcraft at her trial for treason; see Chapter 5).

Going bump in the night People were very superstitious in Elizabeth's England. In 1584 de-bunker Reginald Scot wrote A Discoverie of Witches in which he rubbished witchcraft in a very 21st-century way. He listed nearly 80 sprites and goblins that coun- try-folk were afraid of, saying they didn't exist. Few people shared his views.

At Bungay, Suffolk on 4 August 1577 during a terrible storm (writers call it pathetic fallacy today) a black dog rushed into the church during morning service and tore the throats out of two people before dashing out again, leav- ing the shocked parishioners to note the claw-marks on the door and the fact that the church clock had gone haywire. Explanation? You tell us. 250 Part IV: Ending with Elizabeth

The Chelmsford Trials

The first full trial for witchcraft took place at If you look at the case of Agnes Sampson

Chelmsford, Essex, in 1566. Three women were (admittedly in Scotland) in the 1590s, you find

charged with bewitching a child and on the stand out how the evidence for these trials was

one of them, Agnes Waterhouse, told an appalled obtained. She had a bridle put on that pressed

jury that she had a talking cat called Satan that four iron prongs into her mouth and she was

fed on her blood. Like the Elvis song of 400 years kept without sleep. After that, Agnes was prob-

later, the cat was `the devil in disguise'. Satan ably prepared to swear that the moon was

promised her all sorts of riches in exchange for made of green cheese (which, for all she knew,

doing bad works and Agnes was hanged. it was!).

Hanging with the witches

The witch craze didn't catch on in England until James Stuart became king

and he brought a lot of superstitious baggage with him from the North.

The best portrayal of witchcraft from the time is Shakespeare's Macbeth

in which the three weird sisters can prophesy the future and summon up

Hecate, goddess of the underworld. But the play was written in James I's

England specifically for the king himself, which is why it's about Scotland and

witchcraft � James' two favourite topics. Did Shakespeare believe in it? We

don't know.

Putting things in perspective

Witchcraft stories have been exaggerated over the years to include all sorts

of sexual deviance, pacts signed in blood with the devil and so on. It whipped

up hysteria and was infectious but no statements made by witches them-

selves were obtained without torture.

The old, the lonely and the eccentric were likely to annoy people in a village

and it was all too easy to point an accusing finger at them.

No recorded examples exist of witchcraft being used against the queen or her

Government in Elizabeth's England. On the other hand, one knack that witches

were supposed to have was the ability to cause storms at sea. As you see in

Chapter 15, Elizabeth could have used their services in the summer of 1588,

the summer of the Armada.

Facing the Armada In This Chapter

Getting on the bad side of Philip of Spain

Defending the Dutch

Singeing the king of Spain's beard with Francis Drake

Drumming the Armada up the Channel

T he world was not enough for Philip II of Spain in the 1580s. He owned

huge chunks of the world, his treasure ships prowled the seas and

the 16th century was Spain's si�cle d'oro � golden century. But irritated by

Elizabeth's privateers (see Chapter 12), Philip was eventually forced into

action when England backed the Dutch revolt against him in the Spanish

Netherlands.

Elizabeth's approach was cool and pragmatic, making stirring speeches to

her troops and relying on the most brilliant seamen of the age � and bad

weather � to destroy Philip's Armada: the biggest invading fleet the world

had ever seen.

Provoking Philip of Spain

The king of Spain was autocratic and pious and had no sense of humour. He

was the most powerful man in the world in the 1580s, more than the presi-

dent of the United States today because no one had elected him. He was king

of Spain, the Netherlands and much of the New World because, he believed,

God had put him on the throne, and he never let anyone forget it.

For much of his reign Philip was at war with France and the Ottoman Turks

whom he regarded as something less than human because they weren't

Christian. But he knew Elizabeth personally, had once proposed to her, had

been married to her sister (see Chapters 10 and 11) and had a grudging

respect for her. 252 Part IV: Ending with Elizabeth

Walking a fine line

In Chapter 12 we introduce you to two seafarers: John Hawkins and Francis

Drake. Hawkins had already annoyed the Spanish authorities in the New

World, but he'd now settled down to become treasurer of the navy and to use

his huge talents redesigning ships and reorganising the fleet. Drake, on the

other hand, was still upsetting Spain's apple cart by helping himself to loot in

Spanish America.

The 1570s and 1580s were the decades in which Elizabeth turned a blind eye

to the piracy of her seadogs, infuriating Spanish ambassadors sent by Philip to

sort out the English privateers' antics.

Elizabeth's promise to Philip was half-hearted at best. In theory

All unlicensed voyages must stop.

All plundering of friendly ships must stop.

All loot taken illegally must be handed over to the Lord Admiral's Court

in London.

All this was fine but in practice complications existed. Merchant ships had

been armed for several years for their own protection on the seas and cap-

tains who were a long way from home and without any communication from

land did their own thing, firing on foreign shipping as a matter of course.

Tightening up?

In July 1561 Elizabeth issued a proclamation giving special protection to the

subjects of `her good brother' of Spain and sent out a few warships to arrest

and execute pirates. She gave the Bristol merchants a licence to use armed

ships for their own protection (which may actually have increased violence

on the high seas). In any case, Elizabeth's instruction was too little, too late.

The general trend was for captains to shoot first and sort it out with the lord

admiral later.

By 1569 Elizabeth was distinguishing between acts of piracy that went along

with foreign policy (attacks on Spanish ships) and acts of piracy that didn't

(attacks on anybody else).

The international waters were muddied, however, by what happened in

December 1568. The English grabbed five ships out of Biscay laden with

wool and 450,000 ducats of Spanish silver at Plymouth and Southampton on

the orders of William Cecil, Elizabeth's secretary of state. Technically, the

treasure didn't yet belong to Spain because it hadn't got there, but nobody

could pretend that this was the work of a rogue Devon seadog acting without

orders miles from anywhere.