1
Sins of the Tongue
Humans alone have the power of words. The ‘noble gift of speech’, which distinguishes man from other creatures, serves ‘to multiply our delights, to mitigate and unload our sorrows, but above all to honour God and to edify one another’, according to the early Stuart minister Edward Reynolds. ‘The force and power of speech’, he continued, ‘can inflame, excite, allay, comfort, mollify, transport, and carry captive the affections of men’.1 Our voices allow us to praise the lord, as God no doubt intended, with words both silver and golden. But they can also be forked and venomous, venting vanities, back-biting, slander, profanity, and sedition. For our tongues, as moralists observe, bring out the best and worst in humanity. ‘No member of the body is subject to so many moral diseases as the tongue is… it is either the best or the worst member of all,’ declared another seventeenth-century minister, Edward Reyner.2
Unruly Tongues
Post-Reformation England inherited some of the language and many of the concerns of early church fathers and medieval confessors about the ‘sins of the mouth’ and the ‘sins of the tongue’.3 Many a tract and sermon addressed the perils of the unguarded tongue. An Elizabethan compendium of biblical verses gathered references to ‘the tongue, and evil speaking’ to demonstrate ‘the vanities of this world, leading the way to eternal damnation’.4 The tongue was ‘an unruly evil’, a source of sin, worse than the serpent and offensive to God, claimed another Elizabethan author.5 The tongue, repeated the Jacobean moralist William Vaughan, was one of ‘the detracting instruments of Satan’.6 Spokesmen for the established order blamed misuse of mankind’s vocal gift for dissension in families, division in churches, and turmoil in the state. The tongue was the instrument of voice, voice the medium of speech, speech the utterance of meaning, and words the elements that gave language its benign or malignant power. All were double-edged instruments, both beneficial and damaging to society.
‘Lamentable and fearful’ were the abuses of the tongue, wrote the great Calvinist educator William Perkins. ‘It would make a man’s heart to bleed’, he wrote, ‘to hear and consider how swearing, blaspheming, cursed speaking, railing, slandering, chiding, quarrelling, contending, jesting, mocking, flattering, lying, dissembling, vain and idle talking, overflow in all places’.7 A chorus of moral reformers complained of ‘scolding, cursing, swearing, slandering, shameless and filthy-speaking’, as well as scorning, scoffing, reviling, and back-biting, that imperilled not just the social order but the soul of the Christian who failed to maintain ‘religious vigilancy’ against these ‘sins of the tongue’. The list could be extended to include grumbling, murmuring, haranguing, defaming, spreading false rumours, and speaking treason or sedition. Other Stuart authors offered ‘a bridle for the tongue’, ‘a cure for the tongue evil’, or a remedy against ‘the abuse of the tongue and speech’ that offended against sociability and religion.8 Offering Some Generall Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God, the Northamptonshire preacher Robert Bolton, condemned ‘men of intolerable conversation and very scandalous discourse’ who spoke ‘the language of hell’.9 His colleague Joseph Bentham cited graphic examples in the Bible where sinners by tongue-smiting ‘escaped not the sharp and smarting punishments of the Lord’.10
An array of aphorisms, scriptural texts, proverbs, and encapsulations of customary wisdom offered counsel on the governance of the tongue. Moral, religious, and civic advisers agreed on the necessity of controlling, bridling or disciplining that unruly member. ‘Keep thy tongue from evil and thy lips from speaking guile’, urged the psalmist (Psalms 34: 13). Those who lacked ‘faithfulness in their mouth’, whose ‘throat is an open sepulchre’, or who rebel or flatter ‘with their tongue’, faced the vengeance and judgement of God (Psalms 5: 9–10). ‘Death and life are in the power of the tongue’, warned the book of Proverbs, ‘the wicked is snared by the transgression of his lips’ (Proverbs 12: 13, 18: 21). ‘The words of a wise man’s mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself’, advised Ecclesiastes (10: 12).
The New Testament amplified these warnings. ‘The tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth,’ wrote the apostle James (James 3:5). ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature… The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison’ (James 3: 6, 8). ‘For he that will love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil’, instructed Peter (I Peter 3: 10). ‘Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness,’ offered Paul (Romans 3: 13–14). There were texts here for countless tracts and sermons, providing counsel to the godly, and reproof to speakers of lewd, light, or dangerous words.
Conventional wisdom taught that the tongue was an ‘unruly member’, a troublesome appendage, that inevitably drew comparison to man’s other boneless member, the penis.11 The character Ferdinand in John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi (1613) observes that ‘women like that part which, like the lamprey, hath ne’er a bone in’t’, explaining, when the Duchess protests, ‘nay, I mean the tongue’.12 The tongue is ‘a little member’, preached the Jacobean cleric Thomas Adams, paraphrasing the apostle James, but ‘what it hath lost in the thickness, it hath got in the quickness’.13 It was remarkable, remarked another Jacobean minister, William Vaughan, ‘how this small member can work such turbulent tumults throughout all the circuits of man’s little world’.14
A misogynist strain held that women’s tongues, in particular, were dangerous instruments. ‘Woman, for the most part, hath the glibbest tongue,’ observed the preacher Thomas Adams.15 A woman’s tongue was ‘bitterer than gall’, wrote one early Stuart writer.16 It was like ‘a poison, a serpent, fire, and thunder’, wrote another.17 No venomous snake ‘stings like a woman’s tongue’, claimed a popular ballad in 1634.18
It was a gentleman’s part to control his tongue, to display ‘temperance and moderation in his language’.19 ‘A well-tempered tongue’ was a mark of good standing.20 ‘Speak not before thou thinkest what thou wouldst deliver’ was conventional advice for ‘decency in conversation’.21 Many moralists agreed with the Italian Jacopo Affinati (translated by Anthony Munday in 1605) that ‘it is much better to keep silence than to talk’.22 But, sadly, even gentle tongues were at risk.
Some people believed, with the classical authority Pliny, ‘that the tongue of a man hath two veins, one correspondent to the heart, the other agreeable to the brain’.23 Even if this proved physiologically unsound, it remained rhetorically persuasive. It was widely accepted that the tongue gave voice to the inward thoughts of the heart, as if that organ, not the brain, was the source of will and action. ‘What the heart thinketh, the tongue speaketh,’ was a common saying.24 ‘The heart’, wrote the Elizabethan Catholic Thomas Wright, ‘is the peculiar place where the passions allodge’.25 Villainous talk proceeded from ‘a corrupt and traitorous heart’, claimed Lord Keeper Egerton in 1599.26 The speech of ‘ill-tongued traitors’ was ‘derived from their own corrupt nature’, declared a well-known book on language.27 A traitor’s words, early Stuart judges agreed, revealed ‘the corrupt heart of him that spake them’, and betrayed the ‘traitorous… imagination of his heart’.28
Early modern moralists commonly remarked that ‘the tongue of man is the heart’s interpreter’, and that ‘speech… is the gate of the soul’. It was observed that ‘he that is rotten in his heart is commonly rotten in his talk’.29 Proverbial wisdom declared speech to be ‘the index of the mind’ or ‘the mirror of the soul’ .30 ‘Fools carry their hearts in their mouths, wise men their mouths in their hearts,’ declared Thomas Wright.31 ‘What his heart thinks his tongue speaks,’ said Don Pedro of Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.32‘The tongue is so slippery, that it easily deceives a drowsy or heedless guard,’ warned Richard Allestree,33 as if the tongue was possessed of a mind of its own.
The tongue ‘betrayeth the heart when the heart would betray God’, warned Thomas Adams. A good tongue knew its task was to praise God, but ‘if it be evil, it is a wild bedlam, full of gadding and madding mischiefs’.34 Speech, another Jacobean author noted, was ‘the key to the mind… to express the meaning of the heart’. The tongue, he repeated, was ‘the mind’s messenger’, but so pervasive was human corruption that ‘wickedness break-eth out’. The tongue was like the rudder that steered the ship, so that ‘he who wanteth a good tongue is in as great peril as a ship in the roughest sea, that wanteth both stern and pilot’. The result could be shipwreck for the commonwealth, church, and state.35
In his Rules for the Government of the Tongue (1656) the Lincolnshire minister Edward Reyner reminded readers that God heard every word and would demand ‘account thereof in the day of judgement’. Even casual words could have dangerous consequences.
The arrows of idle words, though shot out of sight… will hereafter drop down upon the heads of such as drew the bow. Words are but wind, is the common saying, but they are such wind as will either blow the soul to its haven of rest… or else sink it in the dead sea and bottomless gulf of eternal misery, if idle, profane, frothy, and unprofitable.
Though they might think that ‘what is spoken is transient and passeth away’, speakers of ‘tongue transgressions’ needed reminding that ‘histories are full of remarkable judgements upon offending tongues’.36 No matter who else was listening, every word was captured by an all-seeing, all hearing, ever-attentive God.
Nobody thought that words were harmless. Though words were but wind, they had the power of flying arrows or stinging bees. To one Stuart author they were not just wind ‘but whirlwinds’.37 To others they were instruments of destruction. ‘The stroke of the tongue breaketh bones,’ declared the Bible, which several times likened the tongue to a sharp sword.38 ‘The tongue breaks bones, though itself has none,’ said a popular proverb. ‘Her tongue is no edge tool, but yet it will cut,’ repeated another.39‘Malicious tongues, though they have no bones, | Are sharper than swords, sturdier than stones,’ rhymed the early Tudor poet John Skelton.40 ‘Talk may brew drink of damnable blame,’ warned an early Elizabethan ballad, for an enemy might strike ‘with knife or tongue’.41 William Vaughan concurred: ‘a wicked tongue is worse than any weapon.’42 ‘I would be loath to trust his hands, that bans me with his tongue,’ wrote another Stuart moralist.43
‘Though slanderous speeches and menaces be but words, and may be taken but only as a smoke, a breath, or blast of wind and so to vanish and be dispersed in the air like dust, yet… they be used as firebrands of private and open grudges, quarrels, conspiracies, and most other tragical and turbulent stratagems,’ explained the Jacobean lawyer Ferdinando Pulton. ‘The very root and principal cause’ of the kingdom’s ills, he thought, could be found in the ‘menaces, threatenings, and other bitter words… gushing out of contentious spirits and venomous tongues’. There was no limit, he feared, to ‘the sea of mischiefs, miseries, and calamities, which daily do flow from evil tongues’.44 Majesty, magistracy, order, and piety were all imperilled by unruly tongues or corrupt conversation. So too did ‘scoffing speeches, railing voices, and slanderous words’ undermine ‘the true church of God’, according to the Elizabethan minister Anthony Anderson.45 Seventeenth-century statesmen knew to their cost ‘that grievous words do but stir up strife’.46
‘Tattling news carriers… intermeddlers… makebates… and wranglers’ disturbed civil quietness, wrote the Jacobean preacher George Webbe.47 The ‘poisoned arrows’ of gossips, rumour mongers, and backbiters robbed people of their credit, and sowed discord in the community, complained the Restoration minister Stephen Ford.48 To Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a smiting tongue could inflict sharp wounds, ‘worse than any lash; a bitter jest, a slander, a calumny, pierceth deeper than any loss, danger, bodily pain or injury whatsoever’.49 Stephen Ford agreed, that ‘a reproaching and back-biting tongue is so full of deadly poison as that it will kill a man at a great distance, yea further than any other viper, adder, or any serpent can’.50
Innocent of ‘speech act theory’, early modern authors knew that words had consequences, that spoken utterance caused situation-altering effects.51 They knew from the Bible, from literature, from legal proceedings, and from everyday discourse that speech could provoke violence, discord, unhappiness, or sedition. An oath or a slur, an insult or a curse, a joke or a lie, could all intensify divisions within communities and erode the fabric of society. These ‘sins of the tongue’ could damage reputations, set neighbour against neighbour, and undercut the authority of the crown. They became ‘crimes of the tongue’ when the state retaliated and its proceedings entered reports of spoken words into the written historical record.
The standard explanation for the sins of the tongue held that people were inherently sinful, and the sinful were naturally loquacious. ‘The nature of the ungodly is to be quarrellous and contentious,’ observed one Elizabethan author.52 Because ‘the heart of man by nature is a bottomless gulf of iniquity’, wrote William Perkins in 1593, it was small wonder that people so often engaged in ‘imprecations and cursings, either against men or other creatures’.53
The worst culprits, by common account, were the vulgar masses. They were ‘light and seditious persons’ who spread ‘vain rumours and bruits, rashly discoursing upon the great and most weighty affairs touching the queen’s highness’ royal person and state of the realm’, claimed a proclamation of 1553.54 They were ‘the idle, the ignorant, the unfortunate … which have no good success in their own affairs’, who were most likely ‘to deprave the doings of other men, and give themselves to speak evil’, claimed a later sixteenth-century treatise.55 It was ‘the rude and ignorant sort of subjects… the wicked and wilful needy sort of inferior’ people, who gave in to ‘ambition, envy, malice, heart burnings, discontentment of mind, murmurings and grudgings’, according to an early Jacobean treatise. Led by ‘the devil, that old experienced and thoroughly practised enemy of mankind’, they had ‘blind, ignorant, obstinate, wilful, rebellious, malcontented hearts and busy brains… to murmur, grudge and mutiny against government’.56
Speech against Power
The most dangerous abuse of the tongue was when it whipped against magistrates and monarchs. A powerful strain of sanctions addressed the politics of language, linking the sins of blasphemy and sedition. Relentlessly deployed by preachers and propagandists, a battery of biblical verses de-monized speech against the crown: ‘Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people,’ commanded Exodus (22: 28). ‘Curse not the king, no not in thy thought,’ enjoined Ecclesiastes (10: 20). It was a filthy sin to ‘despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities’, wrote the apostle Jude (1: 8). Other well-worn texts gave royal authority scriptural blessing: ‘By me kings reign, and princes decree justice’ (Proverbs 8: 15); ‘Where the word of a king is, there is power: and who may say unto him, what doest thou?’ (Ecclesiastes 8: 4); ‘Fear God. Honour the king’ (1 Peter 2: 17); ‘The powers that be are ordained of God’ (Romans 13: 1).
These rhetorical resources were available to every monarch, but they had extra purchase at times of crisis or rebellion. They were deployed in the context of the Pilgrimage of Grace against Henry VIII, the northern uprising against Queen Elizabeth, and the wars and revolutions that engulfed Charles I. The same texts helped to sanctify divine-right kingship under James I, and to remind subjects of Charles II of their dutiful subjection.
Early modern monarchs were especially sensitive to challenges to their authority, and took pains to guard against verbal affronts. Writing in 1536, the Henrician propagandist Richard Morison excoriated sowers of sedition ‘that with their venomous tongue sting and poison the fame of them that are set in office’. Unguarded speech led to sedition, and sedition to rebellion, which Plato called ‘the greatest sickness that can come to a commonwealth’.57
‘Contemptuous talk’ and ‘unbridled speeches’ led to ‘factions and seditions’, warned Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper Bacon in 1567. They ‘maketh men’s minds to be at variance with one another, and diversity of minds maketh seditions, seditions bring in tumults, tumults make insurrection and rebellions’. Unquiet tongues could be ruinous to the kingdom, Bacon argued, for disorderly talk became sedition, and sedition was the harbinger of treason.58
Drafted a few years later, in the wake of the northern rebellion, the Elizabethan Homilie agaynst Disobedience and Wylful Rebellion warned ‘murmurers against their magistrates’ that they risked a ‘horrible punishment’ in this world and the next. God was so ‘displeased with the murmuring and evil speaking of subjects against their princes’ that he had such speakers ‘stricken with foul leprosy … burnt up with fire … consumed with the pestilence … stinged to death … [and] swallowed quick down into hell’. Even ‘speaking once an evil word against our prince, which though any should do never so secretly, yet do the Holy Scriptures show that the very birds of the air will bewray them’.59 They were ‘monsters of men, that without regard of duty or conscience, and without fear of God or man, cease not in the abundance of their malice, to traduce her majesty… and to slander her counsellors and ministers, not only by railing open speeches but also by false, lying and traitorous libels’. So declared the Star Chamber judges in 1599.60
Merely to think disloyal thoughts was dishonourable, thought some Elizabethan theorists, but to voice them was both dangerous and damaging. ‘Seditious thoughts, like an inward malady, be hurtful to the heart wherein they rest, therefore are they to be avoided; but seditious words, like a contagious disease, do infect others, therefore are they more to be abhorred,’ argued Edward Nisbet in 1601. Such words, he wrote, ‘pierceth the head and heart of my sovereign’.61
Catechists routinely taught that the fifth commandment—’honour thy father and thy mother’—applied not just to natural parents but to ‘all that be in authority or worthy of reverence … as princes, magistrates, ministers of the church, schoolmasters, learned men, wise men, aged men, men of worship, and such like’. If anyone disobeyed or dishonoured his superiors, warned Alexander Nowell, they ‘shall come to a sudden, speedy, and shameful death, or else shall lead a life more wretched and vile than any death; and finally, for their disobedience and wickedness, shall suffer everlasting punishment in hell’.62
William Gouge’s early Stuart catechism (seven editions by 1635) demonstrated how the fifth commandment required ‘reverence to all that have any excellency above us, and obedience to all that have authority over us’.63 John Ball’s catechism (eighteen impressions by 1637) likewise taught inferiors to be ‘subject, reverent and thankful to their superiors, bearing with their wants, and covering them in love’.64 John Dod’s Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandements (eighteen editions by 1632) took sixty-four pages to expound the six words from the Decalogue, ‘honour thy father and thy mother’. Subordinates should exhibit ‘reverence, obedience, and thankfulness’ to their masters and betters, and should never use rough, unseemly, or undutiful words. To do otherwise, Dod instructed, risked ‘the curse of God’. ‘Cruel and bitter words are heard oft times from the mouths of wicked and unnatural children’, so evil speech was a mark of childishness as well as rebellion and sin.65
Jacobean authors developed these ideas within the divine right theory of kingship. Although James I faced no popular uprising, the Gunpowder Plot cast long shadows, and the potential for sedition was ever present. It was the duty of ‘every good and true subject’, Jacobean officials insisted, to report ‘all lavish and licentious speeches tending to the scandal, dishonour or depraving of [his majesty’s] royal person, state or government, or of the nobles and great men’ of the realm.66 ‘All railing and evil speaking’ against monarchs and magistrates was forbidden, declared The Doctrine of the Bible, because kings were ‘the anointed of God, and sovereign rulers of the people… to speak against them is to speak against God’. The familiar words from Exodus hammered home the injunction: ‘Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people.’67
Passing sentence against a sower of sedition in 1604, the Star Chamber judges warned: ‘let all men hereby take heed how they complain in words against any magistrate, for they are gods.’68 The honour of the king ‘ought not to be violated so much as in thought, much less in words and action’, declared Attorney General Sir Edward Coke.69 Any ‘spot or derogation’ against princes and governors was laesa maiestas or ‘a high and capital offence’, declared Sir John Melton in 1609.70 ‘The Lord doth expressly forbid all unreverent thoughts and speeches’ against rulers, repeated George Webbe.71
Reared in this tradition, Charles I demanded heightened reverent subjection. Ruling by divine right, he saw himself as ‘God’s instrument… the fountain of government… the light of the commonwealth … like the sun in the firmament’. Like his predecessors, his sacred majesty was supreme governor of the church, commander of the ship of state, head of the body politic, and the keystone of order and justice.72 Since kingly power came from the law of God, to disobey or disparage it was a sin. With church and state so tightly fused together, there was little distinction between blasphemy and sedition. ‘The most high and sacred order of kings is of divine right,’ so to criticize it was ‘treasonable against God as well as against the king’, said the church canons of 1640.73
‘The people must honour, obey, and support their king,’ preached William Laud soon after King Charles’s accession. Any dishonouring of the king and his councillors (the ‘pillars’ of the state) undermined the commonwealth, Laud continued, ‘for to murmur and make the people believe there are I know not what crack and flaws in the “pillars”, to disesteem their strength, to undervalue their bearing, is to trouble the earth and the inhabitants of it’. Scandalous and seditious talk was intolerable, in Laud’s view, because ‘the strength of a people is in the honour and renown of their king; his very name is their shield among the nations’.74 Kingship was ‘sacred’, Laud later preached, ‘and therefore cannot be violated by the hand, tongue, or heart of any man’. It was ‘blasphemous iniquity’ to murmur against kings, a sin to revile any monarch. Only ‘distempered spirits breathe sour’ upon God’s blessings, and ‘that man cannot deserve so much as the name of a Christian, that prays not heartily for the king’. Let no one ‘whet your tongues, or sour your breast, against the Lord and against his anointed’.75
Other supporters of the Stuart crown sustained the attack on seditious speech. They were ‘filthy dreamers (as holy Jude calls them) who despise dominion and speak evil of dignities, woe unto them’, preached the royal chaplain Isaac Bargrave in 1627.76 They were ‘monsters in a kingdom, who endeavour by all means possible to enervate and weaken authority, thereby to make it contemptible’, wrote Thomas Hurste in 1637. They were ‘mutterers and rash discontented people’ who ‘offer[ed] violence with their tongues’.77
Writing in 1639 of ‘the duty of all true subjects to their king’, Henry Peacham called for reverence ‘in words, deeds, as also in our very thoughts… We ought to speak of them with all honour and respect, not to traduce them nor their actions in public or private among inferiors.’78 But alas, railed Henry Valentine in the same year, ‘these latter times have produced a generation of vipers… who instead of rejoicing in their king rail at him… Oh the strife of tongues! Oh the great thoughts and divisions of heart that are amongst us.’79 Alas, ‘the strife of tongues’, the ‘rising up with the tongue’, ‘the licentious looseness of seditious tongues’, and the ‘murmur’ of the ‘virulent tongue’, lamented other supporters of the embattled Charles I.80 Later chapters will expose some of the crimes of the tongue that triggered these reactions.
Restricting the Plebeian Tongue
Early modern authorities firmly believed that the common people had no business discussing the affairs of the kingdom. Their efforts to restrict the plebeian tongue and curtail its political voice reverberated across the Tudor and Stuart era. Misled by ‘blindness… division [and] discord… the weak and vulgar minds of the people’ were unfit for ‘matters of weight and gravity’ or ‘matters of policy’, according to the early Tudor theorist Thomas Starkey. The people, he pontificated, were ‘rude and ignorant, having of themself small light of judgement, but ever in simplicity’.81 Though some of Henry VIII’s subjects ‘daily murmured and spake their foolish fantasies’, their opinion counted little, according to the chronicler Edward Hall, for ‘the affairs of princes be not ordered by the common people’.82 ‘It is no part of the people’s play to discuss acts made in the parliament’ or to ‘intermeddle with no other man’s office’, declared Richard Morison in 1536. State affairs were far removed from ‘the lightness of the people’ and their propensity to ‘false … and lewd judgement’.83
Elizabethan propagandists sang the same tune. It was not for ‘humble men’ to occupy their heads and tongues with ‘great affairs and business’ that passed their ‘wit and understanding’, declared the court preacher John Young in 1576. It ‘cannot well stand with the duty of a good Christian to intermeddle over busily in other men’s callings’, or ‘matters which are too high for them’.84 It was wrong, wrote Thomas Wright later in Elizabeth’s reign, for men to ‘dispute, or rather wrangle about matters exceeding their capacity, as a cobbler of chivalry, a tailor of divinity, a farmer of physick, a merchant of martial affairs’. Men should not ‘meddle with those matters which… surpass their capacity’, for that way lay ‘gross errors and absurdities’ and confusion.85 ‘The vulgar sort’ had no business with affairs of state, declared Secretary Cecil in 1599. To yield to ‘the irregular humours of such base sorts of people’ was to invite recurrence of Jack Cade’s and Jack Straw’s rebellions.86
The early Stuart regime further developed this strain, excluding the king’s humbler subjects from commentary on the public business of the realm. It was not for ‘base mechanical fellows’ or commoners ‘with poorer and weaker understandings’ to ‘intermeddle with the fireworks of court business and state occurrences’, asserted Sir John Melton. Only ‘foolish idiots’ essayed ‘the secretest and deepest mysteries’ of state that did not concern them.87 ‘Meddle not with our princely cares’, instructed a manuscript poem attributed to James I, advising ‘purblind people’ to avert their gaze from ‘state affairs’.88
Prince Charles’s tutor Robert Dallington taught the future monarch to beware ‘the inconstant multitude’ and to despise ‘this many-headed monster, which hath neither head for brains nor brains for government’. It became a maxim of power that, ‘as sacred things should not be touched with unwashed hands, so state matters should admit no vulgar handling’.89 The arcana imperii, the secret business of the realm, belonged only to those called to it by rank and breeding. For the rest, it was no concern, no matter for knowledge or discussion. ‘The scum of the commons, the tags and rags of the people, base mechanicks, men of little knowledge, less honesty, and no discretion at all’, had no business speaking on public matters above themselves, preached Michael Wigmore in 1633.90 The king’s affairs were not to be judged ‘by goodman the cobbler, by master the mercer, by clouted shoes and russet coats’, declared Francis Rogers the same year.91 ‘It is an ambitious ignorance for men to meddle in what they understand not, and first to believe popular tales raked out of the kennel, and after to vent them to the people,’ wrote John Bowles, dean of Salisbury in 1629.92 ‘Study to be quiet, and do your own business,’ urged Thomas Warmstry in 1641. ‘Study to be quiet,’ repeated the London minister Ephraim Udall, ‘meddle not in things that belong not to your calling’.93
The chain of authority demanded deference and acquiescence, and, if ordinary people were permitted to speak at all, they were supposed to keep to the script. Political allegiance and religious conformity both required verbal discipline. The elite expected commoners to know their place and to guard their tongues, and officials were outraged when subjects overstepped their bounds. Popular discourse on political topics could produce only ‘strife and contentions’.94
Everybody Talks
In practice, however, as political commentators well knew, people talked all the time, and sometimes spoke out of turn. Despite repeated injunctions against popular political discourse, there was no stopping the flow of commentary and opinion. There can be no society without conversation, no community without discourse, and early modern England was no exception.
People talked wherever they gathered, shared news whenever it was available, and sometimes rashly spoke their minds. The protocols of silence and deference were widely ignored. Undutiful and unauthorized talk was abundant and distressing, as the courts and councils of every age knew to their chagrin. Everyday conversations veered unpredictably onto forbidden topics, and reports occasionally reached the authorities. Given their belief that humanity was inherently corrupt, and that commoners had weak control of their tongues, officials were not surprised to hear of talk that was scandalous, dangerous, or seditious.
Instead of a cowed and silenced populace, closed off from the great affairs of the realm, we should imagine England energized by a constant hum of chatter. Instead of a dutiful and deferential hierarchy, imbued with the spirit of the fifth commandment, we should see a seething and rumbustious community, overflowing with noise and opinion. Everyday sociability thrived on comment and response, observations about the weather, enquiries about a neighbour’s health, remarks about a minister’s sermon, and occasional reflections on the business of the kingdom or the crown. The common greeting on everyone’s lips was ‘what news?’ and this led easily to controversy and trouble.
A seventeeth-century print depicted ‘the several places where you may hear news… at the bakehouse… at the conduit… at the ale house … at the market… at the church’, as well as laundry places, bath houses, and childbeds, indeed wherever gossips might tattle and where men and women might comment on the world around them.95 The Jacobean poet Richard West identified ‘makebates and tattling gossips’ among participants in this everyday exchange of information:
You that at conduits, and such other
places,
The ale-house, bake-house, or the washing block
Meet daily, talking with your brazen faces,
Of peoples matters which concern you not’.96
John Taylor observed people in ‘taverns, ordinaries, inns, bowling-greens and alleys, alehouses, tobacco-shops, highways and water passages’, enjoying each other’s company, sharing the latest news, and intruding on the arcana imperii.97
Alehouses, notoriously, bred ‘idle and discontented speeches’.98 Here travellers met and workers paused for refreshment. Every encounter was an occasion for conversation, and every drink an opportunity for abuse of the tongue. Much of the seditious murmuring that came to the attention of magistrates originated in alehouses and victualling establishments. It was in ‘alehouses, taverns and tippling houses’ that libellous songs were composed, copied, and performed, before spreading to the streets and market places.99 There neighbours would ‘sit and talk and prate’ of an evening concerning the ‘king or kingdom, church or state’.100 A fiction entitled Newes from the North (1579) recreates such ‘alehouse actions and brabbles’, in which the traveller Simon Certain and the farmer Piers Plowman progress from social pleasantries to discussion of magistracy, authority, and law.101 Joseph Bentham wrote disapprovingly in 1638 of the ‘dunghill scurrilities, quaffing compliments, ridiculous jeerings, obscene ribaldries, irreligious tongue-smitings of men better than themselves, blasphemous oaths, and such like hellish stuff’, to be heard in alehouse settings.102 One such alehouse in Nottinghamshire was known locally as ‘the parliament house of John Jeppson’.103
The church, as much as the alehouse, was a setting for casual conversation. Outside in the porch or churchyard, and inside, even during service time, parishioners shared news, spread gossip, and expressed opinions on both local and national affairs. In some churches, such as Haddenham, Cambridgeshire, it was ‘the custom there used’ after the sermon for the men of the community to ‘sit still in the same church to confer of the affairs of the parish’. One such Sunday conference in April 1619 led to disorderly ‘words or speeches… for the animating or stirring up of the multitude and common people’ against the fenland Commissioners of Sewers.104 Depositions and examination files often describe contentious exchanges or altercations that took place in the church or after worship.
So too were private houses and places of business the sites of dangerous words. We learn of exchanges at market squares and shop windows, on ferry boats and in kitchens. In July 1561, ‘standing in Mr Parker’s house as he was tuning a pair of virginals’, Robert Munds of Norwich remarked: ‘it is a wonderful thing to hear men talk nowadays.’ He was jawing with Edward Boston, servant to a Norwich alderman, who answered, ‘if that you had heard as much as I have done it would make the ears burn off your head’. On this occasion the conversation was about the bishop of Norwich, John Parkhurst, who had been scandalously described as a ‘whoremaster’. Boston recited the words attributed to a local worsted weaver, that ‘nowadays there was none that preach but adulterers and fornicators’.105 But, as we shall see, the conversation could equally have included local or national politics, or even the person of the queen.
At times of political or economic crisis the murmuring grew louder and the flow of chatter more heated. It was hard to be indifferent to war or rebellion, uncertainties about the succession, or alterations in official religion. Royal foibles sparked comment, and the fiscal demands of the state quickened public conversation. A subject’s personality, passion, anger, or intake of alcohol could also affect his or her judgement. People often forgot themselves, or forgot to bridle their tongues. Although it met with their disapproval, commentators repeatedly remarked on the popular appetite for political conversation. There was a primitive public sphere as early as the fifteenth century, where commoners exercised their curiosity about the larger political world.
The late medieval commonalty, though unenfranchised, was not necessarily uninformed. Popular political commentary could be heard at alehouses like the Bell in London’s Fleet Street, the Tabard at Chichester, or the Hart in Salisbury, all sites of discourse that brought patrons under scrutiny. People spoke as though they had a stake in the affairs of the kingdom, and sometimes their commentary verged on sedition.106 The early English morality tract Mum and the Sothsegger observed that everyone was ‘bolde to bable what hym aylid, and to fable ferther of fautz and of wrongz’ regarding ‘the misse-reule that in the royaulme groved’ (people boldly spoke their minds about the ills of the kingdom and the misrule of those in power).107 John Skelton rhymed about the popular taste for information, ‘For men now be tratlers [sic] and tellers of tales: | What tidings at Totnam, what newes in Wales?’108 Cardinal Wolsey worried in 1523 that parliamentary matters were no sooner spoken than they were ‘immediately blown abroad in every alehouse’ in Westminster.109
Though authorized political discourse belonged only to ‘gentlemen of blood and quality… full of duty and understanding’, and to ‘the wisest and best experienced men of the state’, the Elizabethan elite were aware that ‘the vulgar sort’ meddled in matters that did not concern them. ‘Some at ordinaries and common tables, where they have scarce money to pay for their dinner, enter politic discourses of princes, kingdoms, estates, and of councils and councillors, censuring every one according to their own discontented and malicious humours… with many false, malicious and villainous imputations,’ so fulminated Lord Keeper Egerton in 1599.110
Despite inhibitions on ‘meddling’, there were some among the queen’s subjects ‘making evident digressions and excursions into matters of state, debating titles and jurisdictions, quarrelling with laws and acts of parliament, examining treaties and negotiations, and every way presuming to move question of the proceedings both abroad and at home’.111 There was ‘common murmuring amongst the people, continual wresting of the word, derision of God’s ministers, division between father and son’, wrote Charles Gibbon in 1590.112 If anyone wished to discuss the war with Spain, English problems in Ireland, the affairs of the Earl of Essex, or the likely succession to the throne, they were stirring dangerous waters. Yet these were the topics at the tip of many a tongue.
Similar problems troubled the early Stuarts. Despite the frown of authority, commoners persisted in discussing the state of the church, the plight of Bohemia, or the matching of the Prince of Wales. We know that commoners in a victualling house in Lombard Street, London, were ‘meddling’ in the high political world and discussing the affairs of the nobility, because one of them, an illiterate tailor named Harry Bond, was investigated in 1606 for saying that ‘my Lord of Salisbury… was suspected in these businesses about the court’.113
King James would ‘well allow of convenient freedom of speech’, so he said, but not ‘a greater openness and liberty of discourse’ or ‘a more licentious passage of lavish discourse and bold censure in matters of state, than hath been heretofore or is fit to be suffered’. Matters of state (arcana imperii) were ‘no themes or subjects fit for vulgar persons or common meetings’ or for ‘the boldness of audacious pens and tongues’. Repeated proclamations in 1620 and 1621 instructed ‘good and dutiful subjects [to] take heed how they intermeddle by pen or speech with causes of state and secrets of empire … above their reach and calling’.114 But the conversation only grew louder and more reckless.
Under Charles I the popular buzz was as noisy as ever. Sermons were not just preached and appreciated but ‘bruited abroad and commented upon’.115 The affairs of the king, the queen, the duke, or the archbishop were commonly on people’s lips. In country parishes, complained a Northamptonshire vicar, ‘there is such a vein of refractory disposition amongst many, that though some of them speak never so vile against God, the king, and the church, and sow sedition, yet will not the rest be witnesses against them, though they both hear and see disloyalty never so plainly’.116 Ballads, libels, pamphlets, and newsletters circulated alongside spoken observations, in both scribal and printed form. The foreign news corrantos were suppressed in 1632, ‘that the people’s heads might not be filled with idle discourse’,117 but the oral flow of information was unimpeded. Though historians have striven to recuperate the news culture of early modern England, through both scribal and printed sources, they have barely penetrated the ephemeral world of face-to-face conversation.118 Later sections of this book will explore how far that is possible, and will attempt to capture some of the noise.