Elizabethan England in the Year of Shakespeare’s Birth
Shakespeare was born into an England rejoicing in
the peace and prospects of a new reign, but anxious about the future,
writes Joel Hurstfield.
A wedding feast, c. 1569.On
July 6th, 1564, Sir William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of
State, recorded in his journal: “My daughter Elizabeth christened by the
Queen’s Majesty and Lady Lennox. The same night the Queen supped at my
house.” This brief entry of a private celebration reminds us as much as
any major event of the relaxed tension of the year.With France peace had been concluded the previous year, “an honourable and joyful peace,” Holinshed tells us in his Chronicle, and it was “proclaimed with sound of trumpet, before Her Majesty in her castle of Windsor, there being present the French ambassadors.”
The plague, which had ravaged the country for some time, was also over. And on August 5th the Queen on her progress came to the University of Cambridge. She was there,
“honourably and joyfully received in the King’s College, where she did lie during her continuance in Cambridge. The days of her abode were passed in scholastical exercises of philosophy, physic and divinity; the nights in comedies and tragedies, set forth partly by the whole university, and partly by the students of the King’s College, to recreate and delight Her Majesty, who both heard them attentively and beheld them cheerfully.”It was during this year that William Shakespeare was born in the Warwickshire midlands, in the country town of Stratford, a hundred miles from the capital. He was bom in an England rejoicing indeed in the peace and prospects of the young reign but an England weak, insecure and showing all too clearly the effects of war, economic depression and plague.
The Queen herself had passed her thirtieth birthday and was beginning to assimilate her first lessons in statesmanship according to the harsh principles of the age. With Scotland too she was at peace, having been forced into a preventive war by Cecil in 1560 to break the French hold on Edinburgh. Broken it was, and the new Protestant government of Scotland abandoned the “auld alliance” for the untested promise of a new one. It was an uneasy kingdom, the dominion of a romantic young woman, already a Queen and widow of France, who had now changed the gay, cosmopolitan French capital for the bleak comforts of her Scottish throne. Mary Queen of Scots in the years that followed would make many and grievous blunders. But they were blunders that rouse pity rather than censure, when one considers those early tortured years, spent in the unsolicited company of John Knox and his friends, whose first untimely blast on the trumpet against the monstrous regimen of women had already made him almost as unpopular with the English Queen as with the Queen of Scots.
The English and Scottish Queens, profoundly different as they were in temperament, had, however, more than their dislike of John Knox in common. Each governed a nation divided in religion and impoverished by the course of recent events. Each knew that her own insecure hold upon the throne might be disastrously weakened by the political situation in the neighbouring kingdom. Such sisterly affection as, in these early days, was extended between the two reigning Queens reflected a discreet combination of political realism and diplomatic make-believe.
It was at this time that a distinguished Englishman, Sir Thomas Smith, was resident in Paris as Ambassador to the Court of King Charles IX of France. He was a Greek scholar, an economist, a military historian, a diplomat. He had been Secretary of State under the Protector Somerset and would later on again be Secretary of State under Queen Elizabeth. But now, homesick for his native land, and living among a people already engulfed in civil war, he took up his pen to write an account of the English Commonwealth—De Republica Anglorum, as he called it. He would not write it, he said, as Plato wrote his Republic or Thomas More his Utopia, “being feigned commonwealths, such as never was nor never shall be” but “so as England standeth and is governed at this day the xxviii of March 1565.” His book was first printed in 1583, some six years after his death, and frequently republished. It remains one of the most fascinating books about the Elizabethan period.
It is in part a discussion of the nature of political institutions, with which we are not here concerned. But, Smith goes on, when one speaks of a commonwealth, “it is not enough to say that it consisteth of a multitude of houses and families which make streets and villages, and the multitude of streets and villages make towns, and the multitude of towns the realm.” So what we have here is a social analysis, the only one of its kind, of the structure of the English nation in these opening years of the reign.
At its head stands the Queen. In general women are without political authority, he writes (treading in the hazardous footsteps of John Knox), for “we do reject women, as those whom nature hath made to keep home and to nourish their family and children, and not to meddle with matters abroad, nor to bear office in a city or commonwealth no more than children and infants.” But he makes a prudent exception for a reigning Queen, it being understood that “such personages never do lack the counsel of such grave and discreet men as be able to supply all other defects.” Smith, like Froude in the nineteenth century, apparently believed that the Queen’s wisest decisions would be those of her councillors.
The rest of the nation he divided into four groups: gentlemen (in which he includes aristocracy as well as knights, esquires and “simple gentlemen”); citizens, that is men “of some substance” in their cities; yeomen, that is men below the gentry and above artificers; and, finally, “the fourth sort of men which do not rule,”—day labourers, poor husbandmen, even those merchants and retailers who are not freeholders, and copyholders and all artificers.
This would appear to make a somewhat sharply drawn division between the classes; but Smith is at pains to point out, what is quite clear to a modern historian looking back on Elizabethan England, that in practice these general divisions yielded easily to the upward and downward movement between the classes. A yeoman’s grandson could become a peer; a peer’s grandson, of declining fortune, might slide steeply in the social order. Moreover, Smith saw in the Elizabethan Houses of Parliament the full expression of the national will. He was well aware that “the fourth sort of men which do not rule” had no share in the election of Members of Parliament but—such was the Tudor assumption—the governing classes spoke for all their fellow countrymen; and the Queen in Parliament was supreme. The rights of the subject, he goes on, are safeguarded by the English law (which is hostile to the use of torture) and by trial by jury; and, if the jury’s verdict is unfavourable, the criminal recognizes its justice since he has been tried by the men among whom he lives.
All this, of course, carries the warm glow of home thoughts from abroad. Torture was used in England; the punishment for numerous petty crimes was death; juries were notoriously corrupt; patronage exercised enormous influence upon elections to Parliament, that same Parliament that, Smith claims, represented all England; private interest pressed hard on the public good. Yet, in spite of this, there was a large sense of nationhood which united the diverse, thinly populated shires of England and Wales to the Queen’s government in London. The Irish, too, were governed by their distant Queen; but religion divided her two nations; race and culture accentuated the division, and endemic warfare confirmed it with blood. In Ireland, the Elizabethan government inherited an intractable problem, and their failure to solve it was their greatest tragedy.
The Irish in due time found their allies in Spain. For these early years of the reign saw the gradual shift of England’s diplomatic balance away from Spain. For half a century, ties of friendship had been close between them, re-inforced by English trade with the Netherlands, which formed part of the Spanish dominions. Even two unfortunate Spanish marriages, Henry VIII’s with Katharine of Aragon, and his daughter’s with Philip II, had not broken those ties. But soon the Netherlands, driven by interest and religion, would rise against Catholic Spain and find a common cause with their English Protestant neighbours across the channel; soon, too, England would try to force an entry into the closed Atlantic empire of Spain. The year 1564 was that ambiguous interval between friendship and enmity, war and peace. ,
Nowhere is this better revealed than in the instructions that de Silva, the new Ambassador of Spain, brought with him in January 1564 from the Spanish King. “At the first interview with the Queen,” ran his instructions, “you will not introduce business at all but simply deliver my letter of credence to her and visit her in my name, complimenting her with the fairest words you can use.” The Ambassador was to assure the Queen that he had orders “to endeavour to please her in all things,” that his policy would be directed towards the maintenance of “our mutual alliance” and that “nothing will be wanting on our part to this end.” He also carried other instructions “not for the ear of the Queen.” “Many of the English people,” he was reminded, “are depraved and have abandoned our holy and only true ancient Catholic religion”; but others had remained faithful. “These people should be encouraged and supported, and I enjoin you to do this whenever you can, and at the same time to endeavour to keep them in the good will and devotion which, I understand, they display towards us,”—that is the King of Spain. “This however must be done with such secrecy, dissimulation and dexterity as to give no cause for suspicion to the Queen or her advisers, as it is evident that much evil might follow if the contrary were the case.” There were also other small services which the Ambassador was to render, svich as “obtain information with diligence as to the Spanish heretics who may be there, their names, what part of Spain they come from and their rank” and the information was to be forwarded to the King of Spain and to the Inquisitor-General.
After his long journey across Europe and a stay in the Netherlands, the Ambassador reached England in June and was granted an audience on the 22nd. The court was at Richmond and there he met a Queen ready to play her full part in the diplomatic charade. In the presence chamber, where she received him, the Queen was “listening to a keyed instrument that was being played, and as soon as she saw me took three or four steps towards me and embraced me.” She spoke to him in Italian since, she said, she was not sure which language to use. He answered in Latin, handing her his letter of credence. She read it, replied to the Ambassador very warmly in Latin “with elegance, facility and ease,” and enquired very tenderly after the health of the King and his family. She then raised one or two political questions; but the Ambassador, acting on his instructions, asked that these matters be left to a separate occasion since now he wanted to hear only of her “friendship and affection” for the Spanish King. He said, too, that on another occasion he would tell her of the “kindness and brotherhood” that the King felt for her, as did Spaniards in general; a feeling, he added, that was unfortunately not reciprocated by all the Queen’s subjects.
With these formal exchanges over, the Queen withdrew, having embraced the Ambassador once more; and he now settled down to the routine business of political intrigue to oust her principal Minister, William Cecil, from office.
The Ambassador was, of course, right in what he said. Many Englishmen, for example the Protestants of the capital, the Puritans in Parliament and those who lived on the seas— especially the pirates—held the Spaniards in somewhat diminishing esteem. (So, too, did the English creditors of the late Spanish Ambassador, de Quadra, who delayed for months the removal of his body until his debts were paid.) The new Ambassador was, of course, perfectly well aware of these hostile sentiments, and his instructions therefore required him also to put heavy pressure on the government to curb the gathering forces of the English enemies of Spain. For Englishmen remembered well enough the time when the King of Spain was also King of England, the husband of Queen Mary, whose soubriquet, harshly imposed upon her, was burned into the Tudor memory by the Smithfield fires. But it was trade more than religion, the emerging resolution to gain access to the New World over which the Spanish King claimed an absolute dominion, unjustly granted and impossible to maintain, that turned the Atlantic into the battleground for an undeclared war.
For two decades the situation deteriorated until 1585, when full-scale war broke out, with both countries heavily committed, the end of which neither the Queen of England nor the King of Spain would live to see. And it was in the 1590’s that William Shakespeare began his work in London. It is perhaps well to remember that all the plays that Shakespeare wrote in the Elizabethan period were written in a time of war. Peace came in 1604; but it was an uncertain peace, unwelcome to some; and right until his death in 1616 English statesmen were uneasy as to when the next gun would be fired. Two years after his death Europe was engulfed in the Thirty Years War, although this time England’s part in it was largely neutral, thanks to the pusillanimity and poverty of the early Stuart kings.
War was close to the daily life of the men and women whom Shakespeare knew as a boy, war on the high seas, in Ireland, in the Netherlands, in the New World. The maimed soldiers returning broken from the wars would have been a sight familiar enough to him in the Warwickshire lanes and, later on, in the streets of London. If Shakespeare tells us of the glory of St. Crispin’s Day, he speaks too of “bloody battles” and of “bruising arms.” And the folk-memory of civil war—the Tudor inheritance from the fifteenth century—is a dominant theme of many Shakespearean passages: nowhere more harshly exposed than in the third part of Henry VI, where the playwright puts on the stage a son who has killed his father in battle, and a father his son. The commentary is given by the king himself:
“O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!The last battle of the Wars of the Roses had been fought long ago in 1485, nearly three generations before Shakespeare was born. But their long shadows lay across the mid-Tudor period; and when in 1570 a new Percy called his followers to arms—and to destruction—old men, and perhaps even a Stratford boy of six, may have wondered whether the wars between “the red rose and the white” had come again.
Whilst lions war and battle for their dens,
Poor harmless lamb abide their enmity, — ,
Weep, wretched man, I’ll aid thee tear for tear.”
But there were even more powerful social pressures upon Shakespeare’s outlook, and they were at their strongest upon Englishmen in the middle decades of the sixteenth century. The economic conditions of the later middle ages were, of course, never as stable as our older text books would have us believe; but it is true that the process of economic change gained momentum in the Tudor period and impressed itself upon contemporary politician and pamphleteer alike. In two ways, in particular, was it felt: in the rise in prices and the eviction from land. They combined to produce fundamental social change.
It used to be thought that the explanation for all this was relatively simple. The argument ran as follows. The debasement of the currency by Henry VIII cheapened money and prices rose; the influx of precious metals from America intensified the price rise. The pound, therefore, bought less, and its value fell on the continental exchanges. It thus became easier for England to export her textiles—her principal commodity—to Europe in increasing quantities. To meet this the demand for wool grew and pressed hard on the land, and corn yielded place to the sheep. The lord of the manor, faced as he was with inflation, built a hedge against it by enclosing arable and common for sheep pasture to increase his profits; and the evicted peasant, driven from his ancient holding, took to the roads, to vagrancy, crime and the gibbet.
We know now that, although this is not wholly false, it is far from being wholly true. Inflation indeed there was, and the contemporaries knew what troubled them. They could see what was happening under their very eyes because, as the silver content of the currency was reduced in favour of base metal, its colour reddened. In the words of the contemporary epigram:
“These testons look red: how like you the same?“Poor fellow never joyed since the price of oats rose,” says the carrier at the Rochester Inn in Henry IV, “it was the death of him.” In 1560, at last, the government took effective action, under the guidance of Sir Thomas Gresham, and a better, more stable currency was introduced. The rise in prices slackened, but it could not be halted.
’Tis a token of grace: they blush for shame.”
Evictions too there were, especially in the midland counties: and vagrants in plenty. These are represented in the vagrants (called thieves) who protest to Timon of Athens:
“We are not thieves, but men that much do want.”and again, a little later:
“We cannot live on grass, on berries, waterBut what, above all else, drove prices up, and drove people into want and crime and social disorder? It was the pressure of population itself, which, for decades before Shakespeare’s birth, was growing faster than the land could feed them or agriculture and industry absorb their labour. The population was still small: around three million when Shakespeare was born. But the whole framework of the English economy itself was small and slightly developed.
As beasts and birds and fishes.”
The textile industry, the only major industry of the country, could sometimes take on a few more hands; but, in the countryside, where much of the work was done, it was essentially a bye-employment, a cottage industry, intermittent, primitive, without any capital investment. It gave no adequate subsistence wage and assumed therefore that some of the living would be earned on the land. But the land could not contain everyone, especially if part of it were cut off for sheep runs or parkland. Some of the later textile processes were, of course, carried out in the towns.
But here, too, there was no continuous employment. The textile industry was the only significant export industry, and it was at this time heavily dependent upon conditions in Antwerp, and to a lesser extent conditions elsewhere in Europe. One of the lessons of modern history, presented over and over again—in Ireland, Brazil, Egypt, Africa—is that a nation that is dependent upon a single export industry runs the gravest dangers of cyclical depressions, unemployment, low standards of living and grave social instability. “The clothiers all,” the Duke of Norfolk tells the King in Henry VIII,
“not able to maintainIn the play, this is attributed to taxation and blamed on Wolsey; but in real life Wolsey thought otherwise and blamed the clothiers, whom he ordered to keep their men at work. But such instructions were hardly of much help after the Netherlands market had collapsed.
The many to them ’longing, have put off
The spinsters, carders, fullers, weavers, who,
Unfit for other life, compell’d by hunger
And lack of other means, in desperate manner
Daring the event to the teeth, are all in uproar,
And danger serves among them.”
When, under the pressure of unemployment, men therefore took to the roads towards York, Bristol, Norwich, Ipswich, and pre-eminently London, they sometimes found work in the houses of the great citizens or statesmen, sometimes in a branch of industry. But for many of them there was nothing but unemployment, over-crowding, starvation, the diseases of malnutrition, or the plague, which swept through London in the years preceding Shakespeare’s birth and nearly carried off the Queen herself in 1562. To the Tudor people it seemed at first that all this—including the price rise— could only be explained in terms of the greedy clothier, the land-hungry grazier and the intruding sheep who eat up the corn land. Hence the bitter syllogisms of a contemporary:
“The more sheep, the dearer is the wool.But it was not the sheep, it was the men who were growing more numerous than the means of subsistence. By the time that Shakespeare had come to London, writers such as Hakluyt could clearly see that population was rising. So could others. And in the next century was begun the long uneven history of English colonization overseas.
The more sheep, the dearer is the mutton.
The more sheep, the dearer is the beef.
The more sheep, the dearer is the corn.
The more sheep, the skanter is the white meat.
The more sheep, the fewer eggs for a penny.”
But Englishmen in 1564 saw things differently. To them it was the knowledge and fear that so many people were on the move, without roots, without employment, without a sense of belonging, that made Parliament take steps, the year before Shakespeare’s birth, to restrain the movement of prices and population alike. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 is the most important piece of industrial legislation of the Tudor period; and it lasted on, unrepealed, into the reign of George III. It established compulsory apprenticeship over a wide field. The original intention of the Bill brought before Parliament was to stabilize agriculture and wages so that they would not add their pressure to the price spiral; but in the hands of the Parliamentarians the Bill was enlarged to include compulsory apprenticeship in industry and thereby vastly extend its range and power. And if in social history the year 1563 is memorable for the Statute of Artificers, it is memorable also for its Poor Law, which for the first time laid upon the community the duty to pay for the relief of the poor.
These measures introduced no social revolution, nor did they formulate major principles for a new society. But with all their faults, their injustice and even cruelty, they contained the tacit acknowledgment of social responsibility imposed upon the nation as a whole. It is something of an anti-climax therefore to follow enactments like this out into the provinces and see them drain away in irresolution. For Tudor provincial administration was a rudimentary affair. Neither the Queen, nor the Privy Council, nor Parliament, nor any other authority could enforce the legislation. Only the justices could do that; and few of them roused themselves to play any active part in the business, even with the threat of a summons before the Privy Council. Among those who were active there were undoubtedly some with a strong social conscience, with an acute understanding of the evils and distress of their time and a zeal to redress grievances; but many more of these justices of the peace bought, sold and delayed justice as occasion offered. There is some evidence of Tudor paternalism, a paternalism that in many places was real enough. But there were also deep social divisions that ran the length of the nation.
There was also another deep division that the Queen sought especially to heal: the gulf in religion which the ten years before her succession had vastly widened. When, in 1559, she had tried to obliterate the memory of the swing to extremes, first under her brother to severely doctrinaire Protestantism, then under her sister to a no less doctrinaire Catholicism, she found that memories and moods were too deeply engaged to permit the slate to be wiped clean. The Protestant—soon to become Puritan— opposition massively organized its forces in Parliament and Convocation to thwart the Elizabethan compromise, but was itself thwarted. Thwarted—but not destroyed. In London, East Anglia, the west country and elsewhere it offered a continuous resistance to the Anglican settlement; and, before the end of Shakespeare’s life, the Puritan movement was a fiery and unquenchable threat to the whole system of the early Stuarts.
Elsewhere in England the other opposition, that of the Catholics, was in 1564 a demoralized force, deprived of its leadership, its links with Europe broken, its weaker members drifting into the Established Church. It was saved by the missionaries, Jesuits and seculars, who came in the 1570’s with their high idealism, their martyrdom, their ruthless dialectical skills in first isolating and reviving the Catholics and then remoulding them along the lines laid down by the Counter-Reformation.
But if the England in which Shakespeare grew up was a divided country, it was becoming in time a united one. To many of the Queen’s subjects the thunder of ideological warfare was rarely heard—or if heard, scarcely marked. The Established Church made a virtue of its weakness: its very lack of definition gave it strength and breadth. Meanwhile, for all its faults, the rough outlines of a welfare state came into view and modified the bitterness of social discontent. And Elizabethans, on land and sea, lived with that gay courage which has won them an enviable place in English history.
There were many other signs of promise. Already the Queen had attracted to her service the kind of men who would win lasting fame in any generation. They included Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley), astute, reserved, worldly, capable of political work of a scope, detail, depth and volume which has never been surpassed in English history; Sir Nicholas Bacon, whom the Queen remembered long afterwards, at the end of her life, as one of her great ministers, and whom we remember also as the famous father of a more famous son; Matthew Parker, a reluctant Archbishop of Canterbury, but a wise churchman and a fine scholar; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose emotional entanglement with the Queen has somewhat obscured his very considerable talents and devotion in the service of the state; and there were other statesmen in the making.
For at least another six years the Elizabethan government would be far from secure. But with the collapse of the Rising of the Northern Earls in 1570, the first—and last—major internal challenge to its power, the government demonstrated to England and Europe its support at home, its mounting strength and its purpose to endure.
In politics, then, there was a great age in prospect. In literature the promise was dazzling. If in this context we think first of Shakespeare, no one can forget the richness of the contemporary scene. In 1561, Francis Bacon was born, in 1563 Michael Drayton, in 1564 Christopher Marlowe. In the 1560’s Walter Ralegh was a youth in his teens; so were Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. It was not until the eighties and nineties that Elizabethan literature drew near to its full maturity. But it was in the 1560’s that a young Queen and her vigorous ministers strove for and established the stability, unity and independence of England, and made it ready for so abundant a harvest.
The historian who tries to depict and analyse the English people in the year 1564 is faced with a dilemma. If he is faithful to his calling, he must reveal something of this many-faceted world, of the high—and sometimes false—splendours of Elizabethan court life, as well as the treachery and deceit that lay not far below its surface. He must show something of the rough bustling capital, the many ports, some flourishing, some already retreating from the sea. He must show the extraordinary range, colour, vitality and diversity of the intellectual life, and the squalid poverty of town and country alike, which sapped that same vitality, colour and endurance from so large a part of the people. Yet he must always think of all these Elizabethans with these many contradictory qualities as living at the same time, under the same Queen, and on the same small island. For the historian is an artist, too; and he is driven somehow to search for a pattern and a theme that will bring these many scenes together on one canvas. It is an impossible task; and I think that historians usually fall short of these high aims—at least, those historians who have aims. But fortunately for us, there was one man, born at this time, who combined the qualities of an historian and an artist with unmatched genius as a dramatist and unparalleled glory as a poet.
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