Chapter 14
In This Chapter
● Plotting for Mary of Scotland
● Lighting the powder keg: Ireland
● Posturing with Parliament
● Dealing with Puritans
● Getting magical with witchcraft
As Chapter 13 explains, the first ten years of Elizabeth’s reign had mixed reviews. Then, she was feeling her way along while carrying all the baggage of the earlier Tudors. But between 1570 and 1590 the queen found her feet and became a legend, even though these were dangerous years - a time of plots and intrigue, international tension and the rise of two new phenomena - pushy parliaments and prickly Puritans.
Attempting to Remove Elizabeth
Pope Pius V had been a shepherd in his early life and became grand inquisitor under Paul IV (see Chapter 13). He lived on vegetable soup and shellfish and wore a friar’s hair shirt under his papal robes. He hated Spain, Jews and heretics and aimed his beady eyes (check out his portrait in the Vatican in Rome) at the highest profile heretic in Europe - the queen of England.
Pius V published Regnans in Excelsis on 27 April 1570, which told all good Catholics that they had no need to obey ‘the English Jezebel’. The papal bull was virtually a declaration of war.
The Bull caused a conundrum for Catholics, forcing them to choose between their monarch and their faith:
● If you obeyed the pope (as good Catholics should) you couldn’t regard Elizabeth as your lawful queen.
● If you obeyed your queen (who, after all, had been put there by God) you couldn’t be a good Catholic.
Those loyal followers of the pope who opted to obey him had a choice of two ways to get rid of Elizabeth:
● Mount a Catholic rebellion - not likely after the attempt by the northern earls. Most Englishmen of whatever religious persuasion stayed loyal to her.
● Send out hit men to kill her.
The first casualty in this religious war was John Felton, who pinned a copy of the pope’s Excommunication Bull to the bishop of London’s palace gates. Felton was tortured and executed, the first of several martyrs to die in the cause of removing Elizabeth.
In the meantime, Mary of Scots’ adventures in Scotland (see Chapter 13) had led to her imprisonment in England from 1568, and a number of plots against Elizabeth were hatched in Mary’s name.
In the 16th century the powers that be would usually obtain information about plots through torture. Not only would this be inadmissible in any Western court today, but it means we can’t rely on the information being true.
Bring back the rack
By the early 16th century barbaric torture contraptions had almost disappeared from England, but they made a big comeback under the later Tudors. Only the monarch of the day could allow their use.
Margaret Clitherow, a devout Catholic, was pressed to death in the Tollbooth, York on 25 March 1586. She was tied to posts on the ground and a stone placed under her back. Then her executioners piled stones on top of her so that her ribs broke and pierced the skin. She died in about 15 minutes.
The rack was a frame on which you were tied that stretched until your joints were dislocated.
For the Tudors, the rack was the ultimate torture implement. In England it was called the Duke of Exeter's Daughter. Skeffington's Gyves, an iron hoop that constricted the body and crushed the chest, was popular too.
Elizabeth's top torturer was Richard Topcliffe, the member of Parliament for Beverley in Yorkshire. He used the Iron Maiden (a sort of coffin with spikes on the inside) and strappado (hanging people up by their thumbs) as well as thumbscrews in the Marshalsea and Clink prisons in London. It was ironic that Topcliffe was using the same objects used by the hated Inquisition (see Chapter 10) , which was banned in England.
Plotting with Ridolfi, 1572
Mary of Scotland’s first serious attempt to oust Elizabeth took place with the backing of Roberto Ridolfi, a Florentine banker living in London. As with all plots before and since Elizabeth’s time, it involved very prominent people and was half-baked and high risk.
The Ridolfi Plot involved (in theory) Philip of Spain, the duke of Alba, the pope, the duke of Norfolk, as well, of course, as Mary and Ridolfi himself. The idea was that Alba would land at Harwich on the Essex coast with 6,000 men and march on London. The duke of Norfolk, who’d already been implicated in the Northern Rebellion (see Chapter 13) and was lucky to have kept his head, would grab Elizabeth and a cold war standoff would ensue; the rebels would trade the queen for Mary. Then Mary would marry Norfolk, rule over England and Scotland and restore the old faith, knocking the hated Protestant John Knox off his pulpit and probably having Elizabeth executed.
How much of this version of the plot is based on reality is difficult to say. Norfolk had, for all his dodgy dealings in the north, agreed to Elizabeth’s new Church, and the pope put a lot of restrictions on his offer of help and claimed to speak for Philip of Spain, which of course he couldn’t.
Ridolfi was his own worst enemy. He shot his mouth off, and Mary’s spymaster Walsingham (see the nearby sidebar ‘Enter a spy’) intercepted his letters between Mary, Norfolk and the pope and broke their code.
Luckily for him, Ridolfi was out of the country when his plot was discovered, so he just vanished over the horizon and kept going. The duke of Norfolk was less fortunate: he was held in the Tower until 2 June 1572, when he was beheaded on Tower Green.
Norfolk is a rather sadder character than the scheming villain played by Christopher Ecclestone in Elizabeth. All three of his wives had died in childbirth and he may have had some sort of breakdown as a result.
Not only had the plot to remove Queen Elizabeth failed, but from now on her men would watch Mary of Scotland like a hawk.
Dodging the bullet
There were several one-off attempts to kill Elizabeth after 1570. In one, the half-mad Welsh spy and traitor William Parry got the queen on her own in the gardens at Richmond Palace and was only prevented from killing her by seeing a sudden resemblance to fellow Welshman Henry VII, the queen’s grandfather, in his sovereign’s face. Perhaps Parry was more than half mad, but he was executed in 1585 nevertheless.
Enter a spy
The plots against Elizabeth failed largely because of the attention to detail of Francis Walsingham, the queen's spymaster. As a 16th-century 'M' (think 007) he employed agents both in England and in Europe who fed back vital information to him. Projecters were the rough equivalent of James Bond. They were often multi-lingual, had been recruited from the universities and were licensed to kill on behalf of the queen - men like Christopher Marlowe (see Chapter 17). Intelligencers were lesser fry who listened at keyholes and behind curtains, passing all sorts of useful gossip to their masters upstairs. Walsingham's intelligence system was probably better than anything run by any other country at the time.
Elizabeth sometimes slept with a drawn sword by her bed - bearing in mind, for example, how the Scots had interrupted their queen’s supper parties (see Chapter 13), but she refused to cancel any public appearances. True, she was always surrounded by courtiers (and the men were always armed), but none of them could stop a bullet and in Elizabeth’s time firearms were improving. She was once travelling along the Thames in London in the royal barge when somebody fired at her from the shore. One of her oarsmen was hit in the arm (goodbye, career!) but she calmly gave him her handkerchief (hello, very flog-gable present!) to staunch the blood. ‘Be of good cheer,’ she said to the oarsman, ‘for you will never want. The bullet was meant for me.’
You didn’t actually have to physically attack the queen to feel the rope in Elizabeth’s day. Coining (counterfeiting money) was a hanging offence because it not only debased the value of the currency - something only the Government was allowed to do - but it literally defaced the queen. And in 1583 three Catholics were executed in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk because they’d daubed graffiti on the royal coat of arms in St Mary’s Church. Okay, the graffiti was tasteful - a quote from the Bible - but it equated the queen with the harlot Jezebel, so goodbye, that’s all they wrote.
Plotting with Throckmorton, 1583
The next Catholic conspiracy after Ridolfi’s involved Francis Throckmorton who worked with the clever and dodgy Spanish ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza.
The idea was pretty old hat really - a rising of English Catholics timed to coincide with a joint Franco-Spanish invasion. It’s not clear how much Mary of Scots knew about this plot, but Secretart of State Cecil, Walsingham and the Council were taking no chances. They had Throckmorton watched and his houses seized and ransacked. The searchers found incriminating evidence (surprise!) and under torture Throckmorton confessed everything.
Rooting out Gregory's Jesuits
Plots and rumours of plots came thick and fast during the 1580s, especially as tensions grew between England and Spain over the Low Countries (today’s Netherlands; see Chapter 15).
In October 1584 Cecil and Walsingham drafted a document called the Bond of Association, which asked all loyal subjects (in practice, important men) to pursue plotters to the death and never to back a claim to the throne of anyone who’d made an attempt on the queen’s life. This was clearly aimed at Mary of Scots. Four months later Parliament agreed a modified version of the Act, which also got tough with Jesuits (Catholic priests whose mission it was to win England back to the old faith) and seminary priests, who’d been arriving in England since 1580.
By 1580 the Pope was Gregory XIII, an ex-lawyer with a bastard son. He unleashed two Jesuits on England - Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons. A two-man mission might not seem very impressive, but they led a larger team and Campion in particular was brilliant at appearing and disappearing at will, leading the authorities a merry chase.
Campion went north from Dover in Kent through Oxfordshire into the north of England, while Parsons hit the counties of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. They held the mass in secret in people’s houses and one justice of the peace complained, ‘This brood [the Jesuit missionaries] will never be rooted out.’ People were hiding priests in their homes (see the nearby sidebar ‘The priest holes’.
Walsingham’s men were pretty thorough, however. Of an estimated 13-strong Jesuit mission eventually sent by Pope Gregory, only one, Parsons, got away. Campion was caught in July 1581 and racked three times before they hanged him. At his trial at Westminster Hall he was too weak to hold up his hand to plead and had to be helped. The Council were impressed by his courage - ‘It was a pity he was a Papist’.
The priest holes
Anybody who lives in an Elizabethan house will tell you it once had a priest hole. This is an exaggeration but they certainly existed. Towneley Hall in Burnley, Lancashire once had nine! Priest holes were small spaces, often under stairs, below floorboards or in toilet crevices, where nervous householders stashed Jesuits on the run.
In 1592 the Council ordered Richard Brereton, a justice of the peace in Cornwall, to examine 'all rooms, lofts, studies and cellars, keeping an eye open for secret and suspicious places'.
The previous year in Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire, ten men hid for four hours in a dank dark pit while their pursuers ransacked the floors over their heads.
Plotting with Babington, 1586
This plot involved the Guise family, who were still in Scotland (see Chapter 13), a Franco-Spanish invasion (every good plot has to have one) and a very silly young gentleman called Anthony Babington.
A Catholic priest, James Ballard, persuaded Babington to send a letter to Mary of Scots, now imprisoned at Chartley Manor in Staffordshire, to back the plot that would put her on Elizabeth’s throne. It didn’t take long for Walsingham’s people to find the incriminating letters smuggled in and out of the house via beer barrels and the inevitable torture and confessions followed.
London rejoiced at Babington’s execution on 20 September - it was party time and a specially high gallows was been built on Tower Hill so that the crowd could have a good view.
Counting the costs of the plots
The cunning plans of the popes, the Jesuits, the disgruntled gentlemen and the just plain madmen all came to nothing. In fact, they backfired. Elizabeth became even more popular each time a plot was uncovered. Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, was kicked out in January 1584 and wasn’t replaced. And Mary of Scots was shown to be up to her neck in murder attempts on Elizabeth and the clamour to kill her grew.
What a way to go!
The official method of execution for treason under the Tudors - and it survived until 1820 - was hanging, drawing and quartering. First, the victim was shown the implements that the executioner was going to be using - murderously sharp knives, saws and axes. Then the victim was hanged with a rope until he passed out, then taken down, revived and his stomach ripped open and his entrails burnt in front of him (this was the drawing bit). Quartering followed - the executioner cut through the joints of the victim's arms and legs and horses pulled him in four directions.
For how much of this ghastly business anybody stayed conscious or alive is difficult to say. The crowd loved the spectacle, but Elizabeth was so horrified by Babington's execution that she ordered that the second day's batch (a further seven conspirators) should be hanged until they were dead before the rest of it began.
For as long as she could, Elizabeth tried to pretend that cousin Mary was innocent. Cecil had wanted the woman dead over the Darnley murder (see Chapter 13) and most Englishmen agreed.
By keeping Mary alive, Elizabeth could have damaged relationships with the Scots Government and she’d have become the focus for ongoing plots and rebellions. But the Babington affair left her no choice and so she put Mary on trial for treason.
Mary stage-managed her trial brilliantly at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire (check it out, but it’s only a grassy mound today). She pointed to a chair with the royal coat of arms on it and said, ‘I am queen by right of birth and my place should be there.’ She’d been a prisoner for 17 years by this point and was wracked with rheumatism. She denied any knowledge of attempts to overthrow Elizabeth, saying, ‘I have only two or three years to live and I do not aspire to any public position.’
She was bound to be found guilty, but Elizabeth did some monumental fencesitting for nearly three months. Her hesitation was partly due to genuine compassion, but Elizabeth also knew that signing a death warrant for a fellow queen was risky. What if someone signed hers one day?
Elizabeth eventually signed (much to the Council’s delight) and as soon as the deed was done everybody ran for cover to avoid the queen’s explosive wrath. She wailed and screamed for days.
Catholics far and wide were outraged by the planned execution, but did nothing to stop it. Elizabeth was wracked with guilt, but Mary was almost certainly guilty of treason and politically, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots made sense. It meant that any later plotters couldn’t use Mary as a figurehead. So on 8 February 1587 Mary went to the block (see the nearby sidebar ‘I am resolved to die in this religion’ for the gruesome details).
Dealing with Irish Rebellion
Elizabeth followed the advice of most of her ministers who believed that the infighting between the Irish tribes and chieftains could only be stopped by military conquest.
'I am resolved to die in this religion'
On the night before her execution Mary lay awake, fully dressed, while her ladies read to her from the Bible. At 6 a.m. she got up, said her prayers and walked to the Great Hall of Fotheringhay, dressed in black with a long transparent veil. Three hundred ladies and gentlemen had crowded in to see her off and the dean of Peterborough tried to bully her into renouncing her faith. 'I have lived in this religion,' she told him, 'and I am resolved to die in this religion.'
There was a gasp as her weeping ladies removed the veil and dress, to reveal the bright red petticoat - red being the colour of martyrdom - underneath. Mary knelt and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin before being blindfolded and helped down to the block.
Bigger gasps were to follow. The executioner was a blunderer and took three strokes to get the former queen's head off. As her head rolled across the floor, her wig fell off - she was completely bald. And her little lapdog, terrified, ran out from under her skirts, yelping hysterically.
Tackling the O'Neills
Shane O’Neill played right into the queen’s hands by going back on the deal he made with her (see Chapter 13) and going on the rampage against the Maguires in Ulster. It took the earl of Sussex’s troops four months to bring him to heel.
The Irish complained about the harshness of Sussex’s soldiers and opposed the English plantations in Leix and Offaly, and by the spring of 1565 O’Neill was at it again, this time attacking the Macdonnells at Glenshesk. (See Chapter 2 for a map of Ireland in the Tudor period.)
In the following year O’Neill burned the cathedral in Armagh and attacked local villages. Elizabeth proclaimed him a traitor and put a price on his head. To make matters worse, O’Neill tried to make the whole thing an international affair, asking Charles IX of France for help against the English.
In November 1565 Henry Sidney, now lord deputy in Ireland, mounted a big campaign against the rebel would-be earl. Sidney’s men lived off the harvest and destroyed anything they couldn’t eat or carry, and English ships from Bristol trailed them along the Irish coast. Sidney restored Calvagh O’Donnell to his rightful place in Tyrconnel. And as soon as Sidney had gone, of course, O’Neill attacked Derry.
But what O’Neill hadn’t reckoned on was the fickle nature of his Scots allies. On 2 June 1567 O’Neill arrived at their camp at Cushendun in County Antrim.
He didn’t know his hosts were in the pay of the English and a fight broke out. O’Neill was hacked to death and his head, carried to Dublin pickled in a barrel, was placed on a spike on the castle wall.
But nobody imagined that was the end of Irish rebellion.
Stamping out the past
Sidney put down another rising in September 1569 by the Fitzgeralds in Munster with his usual ruthless efficiency. But this endless game couldn’t go on, and by December 1571 the new president of Munster, Sir John Perrot, laid down some new rules:
● Townspeople could no longer wear traditional Gaelic dress - cloaks, Irish coats or great shirts.
● Men must cut their hair and their beards.
● Women mustn’t wear linen cloth on their heads but must wear hats, caps or French hoods.
● The bards (poets) were to stop singing about Ireland’s past - the songs were un-English and the language barbaric (ironically, six months earlier John Kearney had published the first ever book printed in Ireland - the Gaelic Alphabet and Catechism).
The fine for breaking any of these rules was a massive £100.
Proliferating plantations
In Chapter 10 we explain that the English were muscling in with plantations in Ireland, and another spurt of plantation building went on in Ulster between 1572 and 1573. Around 100 colonists landed at Strangford Lough under the leadership of Thomas Smith, but yet again this was just papering over the cracks and the earl of Essex, now in the driving seat, clashed with a number of chieftains who were furious at the way their land was being parcelled up.
It was a vicious circle. As soon as rebellions occurred, the English seized the rebels’ lands and created plantations, adding to the bitterness and the likelihood of further rebellion.
Attempting to liberate Ireland
By 1579 all hell was ready to break loose. The fighting that eventually followed is called the Nine Years War, Tyrone’s Rebellion or the War for Irish Independence, depending on whose side you’re on.
Gregory XIII wanted Protestantism out of Ireland as much as the English wanted to control the country, so he backed the Irish by sending a number of adventurers.
● Thomas Stukeley was a maverick and not the right man for Gregory’s job. He set off with 1,000 men and what limited resources the pope could give him, got side-tracked in Morocco (don’t ask!) and was killed there.
● James Fitzmaurice had fewer men than Stukeley, but at least he landed in Ireland in July 1579. A confused revolt broke out in Munster. Six hundred Spanish and Italian troops landing as Fitzmaurice’s reinforcements gave the governor, Lord Grey de Wilton, a headache. He cornered the rebels on the Dingle Peninsula, and butchered them. Crops were burnt and animals slaughtered in the kind of killing orgy that burned itself into Irish folk memory for years to come.
● Viscount Boltinglass, hot from Rome, led a rising in Leinster. He won a skirmish against English troops at Glenmalure in August 1580.
Imposing the peace ?
Since 1575 Henry Sidney had been trying to calm down the Irish situation by replacing protection money, the so-called ‘coyne and livery’, with a tax called composition. He hoped his change would help in two ways:
● The ordinary people would be happy because the new tax was lower than the coin and livery amount.
● Landlords would save money because they could now disband their private armies (who’d policed protection) and not have to pay them.
But many, even in the Pale (see Chapter 2 for a breakdown of Irish geography), were suspicious of Sidney’s reform, and were reluctant to accept English rule.
During a spectacular piece of fence-sitting, Elizabeth recalled Sidney and her endless vacillating led to his resignation in September 1578. By the end of 1580, Lord Grey, Sidney’s successor, was seeing Catholic conspirators behind every bush.
On 10 November, English troops under Nicholas Malby out down the rising by James Fitzgerald with viciousness. Perhaps it was the sight of the pope’s banner on the battlefield at Smerwick that annoyed them. A series of trials and executions followed - Ireland had never seen such systematic slaughter. The earl of Kildare was arrested and in Munster the earl of Ormond had his commission taken away from him. William Nugent, the chief justice for the Court of Common Pleas, was executed for treason.
Grey’s actions - passing out confiscated lands to his cronies - led to the Council recalling him in July 1582, but the revolts continued.
By November 1583 Gerald Fitzgerald, the earl of Desmond who was the leader of the Munster rebellion against the English, had been murdered by Daniel Kelly in Tralee and the violence died down, at least for a while.
John Perrot, the governor from January 1584, could work with the earl of Ormond and days of peace seemed to lie ahead. But the peace was only as strong as the English garrisons in Ireland, however. Nothing had been resolved and the old resentment - of Irishmen versus Irishmen; of Irishmen versus Englishmen; of ‘old’ English versus ‘new’ English - seethed under the surface.
Handling Parliament
In Tudor times Parliament comprised the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and it met in Westminster Hall in London and represented the top end of society.
The Lords was the senior house and was made up of:
● Peers of the realm (whose titles had been granted by the monarch)
● Bishops
The Commons had two types of seat:
● Borough seats, held by burgesses (citizens) of towns big enough to be allowed them
● County seats, held by knights of the shire (county) - usually two per county.
By the start of the Tudor period many knights and gentlemen bought borough seats from the burgesses who were struggling to afford them (the cost of attending Parliament was huge), and so only cities like York, Norwich and London were represented by people who actually lived there.
By 1560:
● Most MPs had legal training, status and knew what they were talking about. (Even today, no direct training for the job of MP exists. It must be the only job in the country today for which no skills qualifications exist at all, scary, or what?)
● Parliament made laws (as Nicholas Bacon said) ‘for uniting of the people of this realm into a uniform order of religion to the honour and glory of God, the establishment of his Church and the tranquillity of the realm’.
● Parliament voted for cash to be given to the Government by raising taxation to pay for wars, the upkeep of the navy and so on.
● The members of the Commons regarded themselves with a new confidence - they believed that they spoke for the whole country. This last was hot air, of course. The Lords only represented themselves and the Commons only represented their own (gentleman) class. The middle class and poor weren’t given a look in and the only woman in government was the queen.
One problem for Parliament was that it didn’t meet often - only 13 sessions (never more than ten weeks long) in a 44-year reign isn’t very much. So members of Parliament had to make their views known when the moment presented itself. And because the queen alone could call Parliament and could also suspend and dismiss it, MPs’ hands were tied.
Sparking religious fervour
The Commons was always more Protestant than Elizabeth and it welcomed her Bill of Uniformity, drafted by the Council, in 1559. The 1559 Parliament had been concerned with the Church Bill and paying for the war against France, but the one in 1563 was all about religion. Several exiles had now returned from Europe (see Chapter 13) and a mood of reform was in the air. An increasing number of MPs were extreme Protestants (they came to be known as Puritans) who wanted the Church to be changed still further and were disappointed that Elizabeth didn’t share their view. The Parliament of 1571 tried to make sure that the queen’s religious settlement was strictly enforced, but Elizabeth torpedoed attempts by William Strickland to bring in a new prayer book because she didn’t approve.
In the 1570s and 1580s three campaigns were going on in the Commons:
● Anti-Catholicism reached its height. Plots against the queen, the arrival of Campion’s Jesuit mission (see ‘Rooting out Gregory’s Jesuits’, earlier in this chapter) and the ever-growing threat from Spain (see Chapter 15) meant that everybody was on their guard.
● The push for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots was clearly tied in with anti-Catholicism.
● A small minority worked for a complete overhaul of Church government.
Parliament got heavy with Catholics:
● In 1571 anyone bringing papal bulls into the country was a traitor and could expect to be executed.
● In 1581 anyone not attending Church of England services got a crippling fine of £20 a month.
● In 1585 anyone joining the Catholic Church as a priest would be hanged and Jesuits in England had 40 days to get out or face the consequences.
● In 1593 non-churchgoers (Recusants) had their freedoms curtailed.
They were spied on and the only way some of them coped was to go to Anglican services and let their wives carry on in the old faith in secret, explaining to the Almighty their husband’s predicament.
Controlling the MPs
Members of Parliament believed their purpose was to discuss the big issues of the day - religion, plots, foreign policy. Elizabeth and the Council saw Parliament as a milk cow for cash and a means to get backing for their policies in law.
The next two monarchs in English history - James I and his son Charles - handled their parliaments so badly that it led to civil war and Charles I’s execution. So how did Elizabeth avoid all that?
● She turned the full Tudor charm on MPs, sending them home to spend the Christmas of 1584 with their families, returning their thanks to her ‘ten thousand thousand fold’. In 1593 (a particularly difficult Commons session) she assured her MPs that nobody could have loved and appreciated them more than she did - except, she added to get the old-stagers on side, her father.
● She intervened to hold up various bills and suggested changes to them.
● She used the royal veto, chucking out bills she didn’t like.
● She had troublesome MPs arrested. In 1576 Peter Wentworth, MP for Barnstaple in Devon, complained no freedom of speech existed in the Commons because the queen might object to MPs discussing certain topics. Wentworth was kicked out and cooled his heels in the Tower for a month.
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 century 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 evermore 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).
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 training 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, wanting 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 corrupt 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:
● 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 lifesaving 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 country-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, leaving 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.
The Chelmsford Trials
The first full trial for witchcraft took place at Chelmsford, Essex, in 1566. Three women were charged with bewitching a child and on the stand one of them, Agnes Waterhouse, told an appalled jury that she had a talking cat called Satan that fed on her blood. Like the Elvis song of 400 years later, the cat was 'the devil in disguise'. Satan promised her all sorts of riches in exchange for doing bad works and Agnes was hanged.
If you look at the case of Agnes Sampson (admittedly in Scotland) in the 1590s, you find out how the evidence for these trials was obtained. She had a bridle put on that pressed four iron prongs into her mouth and she was kept without sleep. After that, Agnes was probably prepared to swear that the moon was made of green cheese (which, for all she knew, 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 themselves 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.