4
Elizabethan Voices
No monarch had taken greater care to preserve religion, peace, and plenty than her majesty, declared Lord Keeper Egerton towards the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The queen not only counted upon but deserved ‘the entire love and affection of her good and faithful subjects’. Unfortunately, however, Gloriana’s kingdom also harboured ‘some wicked and traitorous persons, 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’.1 These ‘monsters’ included men and women who were unable to govern their tongues. This chapter tells some of their stories. Rather than simply quoting remarks by way of illustration, I have tried, wherever possible, to reconstruct the circumstances of the exchange and the reactions of the authorities. By combining letters, indictments, depositions, and judicial examinations, it may be possible to retrieve parts of the lost conversations of Elizabethan England, and to recover the audible frisson of dangerous words.
Elizabeth Tudor, like most of her predecessors and successors, was dogged by disloyal rumours and treasonous allegations about her illegitimacy, inadequacy, or failings as a monarch. Despite the prevailing doctrine of majesty and the developing mystique of the Virgin Queen, a sub-current of seditious speech swirled through Elizabethan England. Magisterial pronouncements and customary sanctions failed to silence critics of authority. Attentive listeners heard persistent allegations that the queen was a bastard, a whore, a begetter of bastards, and that her gender, her religion, or her character rendered her unfit to rule.2 Topics of this sort ‘became a common talk in alehouses and such like places, whereupon ensued dangerous or undutiful speeches of her majesty’s most gracious government’, according to a report from the early 1560s.3 Seditious rumours surfaced throughout the reign, shaded by confessional aspirations and reinforced by hopes or fears that the regime would soon change. Petty offenders, as usual, faced the pillory and the loss of an ear, and a brief spell in prison; most were made to acknowledge their fault and to secure bonds for their future good behaviour.4 More serious transgressors risked being tried for treason, especially if they denied Elizabeth’s title to the throne.
Sharp Laws
Many of the strictures and some of the legislative phrases from the reign of Queen Mary were incorporated into new Elizabethan law. A statute of Elizabeth’s first parliament in 1559 gave the new queen the same protections as her sister. It became a felony by ‘express words or sayings’ to ‘say, publish, maintain, declare or hold opinion’ that she was not rightly queen. To compass the queen’s death or to impugn her title was again ‘deemed and adjudged high treason’ (1 Eliz., c. 5). Another statute applied the Marian law against ‘false, seditious or slanderous news, rumours, sayings or tales’ to Queen Elizabeth, with the like punishment of pillorying, disfigurement and prison for offenders (1 Eliz., c. 6).5
Faced with a vulnerable female monarch, a troubled and uncertain succession, disaffections within the nobility, and a populace whose religious loyalties were unproven, anxious Elizabethan councillors sought new weapons to guard against treason. Their sense of urgency was heightened by the northern rebellion of 1569, the papal bull of excommunication in 1570, the Ridolfi plot of 1571, and the machinations of Mary Queen of Scots. Later crises, wars, and rebellions further tested the regime and the law.
Writing from York in 1570, Sir Thomas Gargrave advised Sir William Cecil:
I neither wish bloody laws nor death in matters of conscience, yet by experience I see that in Henry VIII’s days sharp laws kept the evil quiet, where now they be both fierce and stout… Long sufferance of evil breeds hardness, whereof ensue troubles and dangers; it is time to stick earnestly to the church, and stoutly to resist the malice of the enemy.6
It was time to provide new legislation, modelled on the tougher treason laws of the 1530s.
The result in 1571 was ‘an act whereby certain offences be made treason’, declaring it treason for anyone to ‘compass, imagine, invent, devise or intend’ the death or destruction of the queen, or to dispute her title, ‘by writing, printing, preaching, speech, express words or sayings’. As it had been under Henry VIII, now it was again under Elizabeth a treasonable offence to call the queen ‘heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or an usurper’ (13 Eliz. I, c. 1).7
The Elizabethan regime also used proclamations to respond to the threat of sedition. A proclamation of 1570, following the Northern Rebellion, required those seeking pardon to report anyone involved in ‘seditious matters’, including any who ‘speak any slanderous words of the queen’s majesty or of any of her councillors’.8 In 1576, responding to ‘certain infamous libels full of malice and falsehood… tending to sedition and dishonourable interpretations of her majesty’s godly actions and purposes’, the government sought to suppress these ‘villainous, treasonable, and seditious attempts’. A similar proclamation in 1601 addressed ‘traitorous and slanderous libels… stirring up rebellion and sedition’.9
New legislation in 1581 criminalized the seditious words of ‘light and evil-disposed persons’ and others ‘evil-affected towards her highness’ who disturbed ‘the common tranquillity’ of the realm. The new law imposed harsher sanctions against speakers of ‘false, seditious and slanderous news, rumours, sayings or tales against our most natural sovereign lady the queen’s majesty’. Those found guilty of speaking ‘seditious words and rumours’ faced a spell in the pillory and the loss of both ears, a fine of £200, plus up to six months in prison. Simply to repeat or report such words risked similar punishment. The law also criminalized any casting of the queen’s nativity, calculation of her life span, or speculation about who might succeed her on the throne, threatening offenders with the ‘pains of death’ (23 Eliz., c. 2).10 The medieval treason law continued to apply, buttressed by Tudor provisions.
Treasonable, seditious, and scandalous talk was strictly forbidden, but there was no way to close down popular political discourse. Ordinary people felt compelled to comment on the qualities and failings of their ruler, as well as the likely nationality, gender, and religion of their next monarch. Commoners discussed arcana imperii (the secrets of state) in alehouses and markets, churchyards and private homes, and their conversations sometimes came to official attention. Elizabethan assize indictments and Privy Council files dealt repeatedly with people who spoke disparagingly or undutifully of their queen.
Indictments in Elizabethan courts sometimes distinguished between ‘scandalous words’, which touched the person or dignity of the monarch, and ‘seditious words’, which affected the security of the realm. The distinction was by no means rigid, and often collapsed in the course of judicial or administrative process. Accusations of treason might mutate into indictments for sedition, and charges of sedition could be modified to mere speaking of ‘heinous’ or ‘opprobrious’ words. It could be treason to say ‘that the queen’s majesty was base born and not born to the crown’,11 sedition to wish the queen’s reign over or to wish her enemies to invade England,12 but merely ‘scandalous’ to comment on the queen’s sexuality or to say that her Council had ‘no more mercy than a dog’.13 A Kentish yeoman, William Grene of Deal, spoke ‘scandalous words’ when he declared in 1591 that the queen was ‘a maintainer of starched ruffs and pride, which when she was dead it would be laid aside’. His mention of the queen’s death turned merely scandalous speech into words of sedition.14 How such expressions were treated in practice depended on a host of factors, including the religion, status, or gender of the speaker, whether the words accompanied other overt acts, and the public anxieties of the moment. The matter was dynamic and unstable, with councillors, judges, magistrates, and ordinary people disagreeing about the danger in particular words. Not surprisingly, in practice, the application, interpretation, and extension of the law was subject to shifting political pressures.
A society of laws, like Elizabethan England, took care to follow legal procedures, though only so far as was appropriate and convenient. Before punishing the speakers of ‘lewd’ or ‘treasonable’ words it had to be determined that such words had actually been spoken. Much of the examination of witnesses and correspondence between magistrates and Privy Councillors that ended up in the State Papers was concerned with such matters.
The law required the testimony of two reliable witnesses to prove a spoken offence. Cases of treason, misprision of treason, and sedition turned on ‘the testimony, deposition and oath of two lawful and sufficient witnesses’, who were to confront the accused ‘face to face’.15 A key question was whether there was any malice or ‘spleen’ between the parties that might interfere with ‘equity and justice’, or whether the alleged offender was ‘wrongfully charged and molested’.16 When Edward Bell of Chelmsford was charged with speaking sedition in May 1582, he claimed that the accuser James Hapton had a grudge against him, ‘upon some falling out at football play more than a month before at the town of Writtle’.17 Neighbourly and financial disputes sometimes coloured other accusations. If the charge was false, the informer might be made to satisfy the accused’s ‘costs and credit’, although the damage could not be completely undone.18
Short of a confession, and with only one witness, it was almost impossible to obtain a conviction. Yet the Council repeatedly insisted that ‘lewd speeches’ should not go unpunished. Suspects could be held in gaol while further evidence was collected, and while lawyers decided what else should be done.19 In complex cases Privy Councillors sought advice from the Attorney General and the Lord Chief Justice, or ‘her majesty’s learned counsel of law’.20 None could be sure exactly what the law was, or how it might be applied.
Cases usually began with an overheard remark that was reported to a constable or justice of the peace. They might ultimately be determined in local or national courts, like Quarter Sessions, Assizes, King’s Bench, or even Star Chamber. Privy Councillors could intervene at any point in the process, to quicken or direct the justices, or to send the matter to legal limbo. When a Kentish court absolved John Parmore of using ‘certain lewd speeches against her majesty’ in December 1576, the Council considered punishing the jury.21
It was a justice’s duty, according to William Lambarde, to commit ‘any person being vehemently suspected of saying or reporting of any slanderous news or tales against her majesty’. Magistrates were to investigate all ‘seditious words and rumours uttered against’ the monarch, and Quarter Sessions were to enquire ‘if any person have… spoken any false, seditious and slanderous news or sayings of the queen’s majesty’. Cases of treason were supposed to be referred to the assize judges, but in practice the distinction between treason and sedition was blurred. Lay witnesses might think certain words treasonous that a lawyer knew to be unactionable. Magistrates might press for felony charges but settle for a misdemeanour.22
Handbooks for country lawyers instructed that, in the case of a libel concerning a ‘public person, the finder ought presently to deliver the same to some magistrate, to the intent that by the examination and industry of such magistrate the author may be found out’.23 A similar procedure applied to the hearers of seditious or treasonous words, who were supposed to report the offensive speech to a justice of the peace. The justices were supposed to apprehend and examine the alleged offender, and commit him or her to custody pending trial or other proceedings. They were to take evidence from witnesses ‘and put the same in writing’, and then, at their discretion, ‘to send an account immediately of all the particulars to a secretary of state’.24
Failure to report sedition was almost as bad as speaking it oneself. A Kentish yeoman, John Rade of Benenden, was scrupulous in reporting seditious utterance in 1594, so as not to ‘come in danger for not revealing it’, in case ‘it might come to pass according to his speech and then it were too late to redress it’.25 In 1587, when Lewis Herbert was ‘accused to have uttered lewd and undiscreet speeches punishable…by the pillory’, the Privy Council advised the Council of the Marches of Wales that he be duly punished, ‘for the example of others, and restraining that liberty of speech’.26 Dangerous ‘liberty of speech’ was a menace, to be curtailed by all means possible.
Elizabethan assizes typically punished seditious words by making the offender sit in the stocks or stand at the pillory, wearing a paper declaring details of the offence. The written word would thereby recall the sins of the tongue. Some offenders had the additional misfortune to have their ears nailed to the pillory, or to have one or both ears clipped. Others were whipped, fined, held in the house of correction, or remanded in gaol until they entered security for their future good behaviour.
The public execution of traitors was a relatively rare event, after the Henrician bloodbath, and few Elizabethans were convicted of treason by words. The government used its discretionary powers, choosing whether or not to proceed, what sanctions to apply, and whether to be friendly or to proceed in terrorem. While eager to investigate disloyal utterances, the Elizabethan authorities generally exercised leniency and discretion. Hundreds of undutiful speakers were found not guilty, or judged guilty of a lesser offence. The Privy Council often allowed local justices to punish ‘as they should think meet, weighing [the offender’s] corrupt and cankered disposition’.27 Their principal concern was to maintain the boundaries of acceptable public discourse. As Lord Keeper, Nicholas Bacon advised in 1567, with regard to the circulation of libels and rumours, ‘better it were for a man to be twice whipped than once hanged’.28
Faced with clear evidence of their seditious words, and the prospect of painful punishment, some speakers claimed to have been ‘overcome’ by excess drinking, as if the alcohol, not the heart or tongue, did the talking. Though dangerous expressions could not be retracted, their power was diminished because the person who spoke them was not fully in command. Friendly or collusive witnesses made supportive observations about the speaker’s intoxication, as if this excused the torrent of offensive words. In 1600, for example, when Sir Edmund Baynham and his men appeared at Star Chamber for their violent conduct and seditious words, they explained that a long session at the Mermaid in Bread Street had left them ‘in disorder and excess of drink’, and that their behaviour stemmed only from ‘drink and heat’.29 Returned to sobriety, most Elizabethans claimed to be dutiful subjects who, this lapse apart, always accepted the queen’s authority.
Another cluster of speakers was said to be brain-sick, though the insanity defence was not always effective. When Robert Knight in 1575 was ‘taken as a rogue about the court speaking very lewd words not meet to be suffered’, he was held in Bridewell ‘until it may be examined whether he spake it of madness or malice’.30 Robert Threel of Hastings was likewise held in the Tower in 1578 until the authorities determined whether his ‘lewd speeches.. .proceeded of malice or some infirmity’.31 Henry Houghton, an ironmonger from Chester, was gaoled in 1578 for his ‘slanderous speeches against the queen’s majesty’, but evidence emerged that he was ‘commonly troubled with a lunacy’, and that his words may have been ‘misconstrued by his accusers’.32
William Williams of Newport, Monmouthshire, was gaoled at Gloucester in 1581 ‘for certain undutiful speeches uttered against her majesty’, but was freed when the Council determined he was ‘at the time of the speeches uttered, and yet is, frantic’.33 So too was William Calverley, who spoke ‘very undutiful and disloyal speeches’ in 1596. When witnesses testified ‘that he was lunatic at the time of uttering’ them, the Council ordered his release, ‘with sufficient sureties… to be of good behaviour, and not to repair within ten miles of the court’.34
Edward Alive
One recurrent Elizabethan rumour claimed that Edward VI was still alive, so that neither of his half-sisters could be lawful monarchs. This echoed the challenge that dogged the Lancastrian Henrys that Richard II was not yet dead, and the rumour troubling Henry VII that Edward V and his brother had escaped death in the Tower. These virulent fantasies encouraged the emergence of pretenders, and fed the circulation of conspiracy theories. Their tenacity in popular discourse reflects a propensity to wishful thinking as well as anxiety about the royal succession.
In 1578, for example, the London yeoman Robert Mantell was indicted for telling people at Maldon, Essex, ‘that King Edward was alive’, and that he (Robert) was that king, and that if he ‘would find one that was trusty he could disclose that which should rejoice them all’. The case became more complex in July 1579, when Mantell managed to escape from his confinement in Colchester Castle. Lord Darcy and Sir Thomas Lucas were sent to investigate, and eventually the gaoler of Colchester, Richard King, spent six months in the Marshalsea ‘for the escape of one Mantell, naming himself King Edward’. The pretender was eventually re-captured, held at Newgate, then sentenced to a traitor’s death at the 1581 Essex Lent assizes.35
In March 1587 an Essex blacksmith, William Francis, faced indictment at Chelmsford for perpetuating the rumour of Edward VI’s longevity. When Edmund Earle asked him ‘what news was at London’, Francis replied knowingly ‘that there was one in the Tower which sayeth he is King Edward’. When Earle observed, sensibly enough, that King Edward was dead, Francis replied, ‘I dare not say so’, and claimed ‘he did know the man that carried King Edward in a red mantle into Germany in a ship called the Harry’. Edmund Earle, by his own account, scorned this information, pointing out that Edward was dead and buried ‘where they use to bury kings’. To this Francis objected ‘that there was a piece of lead buried that was hollow, but there was nothing in it, and that it was but a monument’. Attempting to terminate a potentially dangerous conversation, Earle declared that ‘these are naughty words, which ought not to be spoken’. To which Francis concluded: ‘I will say no more …. [I] will not say that he is dead or alive.’ This remarkable fragment of historical discourse allows us to eavesdrop, at least at a distance and with all sorts of mediations, on a conversation among Elizabethan artisans. And it finds them conversing on topics of high significance and great risk, well above their station, some twenty-nine years into the virgin queen’s reign. The assize judges found William Francis guilty of spreading false news, presumably to face the pillory and imprisonment but nothing worse.36
A variant rumour claimed not that Edward VI was alive but that he had been foully murdered. A Colchester yeoman, Gregory Clover, was indicted for seditious words in 1579, for claiming that Lords Warwick and Leicester were traitors who should have lost their heads ‘for making away of King Edward’. The Privy Council urged that Clover be used ‘with as much severity of law as may be’ for ‘speeches so maliciously devised… to stir up some tumult’. Found guilty at the Chelmsford assize, his punishment was to stand in the pillory at Colchester ‘on market day with one ear nailed to the pillory’.37
Elizabeth’s Bastards
No subject drew such lively interest, or such creative speculation, as the queen’s sexuality. While some of Elizabeth’s subjects complained that the queen could not rule because she was a woman, and the realm wanted a good governor, others linked her womanhood to whoredom and sin. Scurrilous comment was recurrent about the queen’s claimed virginity, and her alleged dalliance with prominent courtiers. Robert Dudley, later Earl of Leicester, was only the most commonly mentioned of her majesty’s putative lovers. The queen’s Catholic enemies may have spread some of this gossip, but it flourished among tattlers perennially interested in dirt.
While visiting London late in 1559, Thomas Holland, rector of Little Burstead, Essex, heard the rumour that the queen was with child. He learned from a Hertfordshire minister (who might have picked up gossip from Elizabeth’s household at Hatfield) that someone had been sent to the Tower for words to that effect. Holland then apparently disseminated this falsehood in Essex. By June 1560 he was under investigation for words ‘by him maliciously uttered against the queen’s excellent majesty’. As soon as report of Holland’s words reached local justices, they took him into custody and delivered him to the Earl of Oxford, John de Vere, Lord Lieutenant of Essex, for further interrogation. Oxford, who was concerned to demonstrate his own trustworthiness to the new Elizabethan regime, sought harsh treatment for one who had so foully slandered the queen. But, Oxford wrote:
being but words, the punishment of the law extendeth but to the loss of his ears or one hundred pounds fine, so far as I can learn; and yet the heinousness of the offence might have tended very much to withdraw her majesty’s subjects from their allegiance and due obedience. It standeth doubtful unto me what might thereof be construed.
Not sure whether Holland’s words verged on treason, and unable to derive more information from his questioning, the earl asked the Privy Council for guidance.38 We do not know what legal penalty Holland paid for his indiscretion, but it appears to have cost him his ecclesiastical living. Collated by the Marian bishop Bonner, he had been rector of Little Burstead only since November 1558, and he had ‘resigned’ by the time his successor was installed in February 1561. Local records suggest that he was a conservative cleric, who fell foul of parish evangelicals associated with Richard Lord Rich.39
Examined a few weeks later in August 1560 for ‘words spoken and spread abroad’ that touched her majesty’s honour, Anne Dowe of Brentwood, Essex, was held in gaol while local magistrates considered her offence. She had spread the gossip that Robert Dudley ‘had given the queen a new petticoat which cost twenty nobles’, prompting the retort, ‘no no, he gave her a child I warrant’. One witness reported Anne saying ‘that Dudley and the queen had played legerdemain together’, and that, if he had not fathered a child on the queen already, Dudley ‘hath put one to making’. Another recalled her saying ‘there is a Dudley which beareth more rule than ever did his father’ (the executed Duke of Northumberland)—a breathtaking reflection on high politics from the mouth of a plebeian woman. A local tailor who heard Anne Dowe’s words warned her ‘that greater fools than he or she did talk of that matter’, adding, ‘take heed what you sayest, though thou be drunk now thou wilt repent these words when thou art sober’. Whether she did repent and how she was punished remains unknown, though most likely she was whipped and sent home.40
The rumour of royal indiscretion was impossible to suppress. A Suffolk man, Edmund Baxter, was held in Melton gaol in January 1563 for saying ‘that Lord Robert [Dudley] kept her majesty and that she was a naughty woman and could not rule her realm, and that justice was not administered’. These were not only slanderous comments on the queen’s chastity, but seditious remarks about the governance of the realm. Baxter’s wife Joan had passed on a comment from Lady Willoughby, that while the queen was at Ipswich she looked very pale, ‘like one lately come out of childbed’. It was not surprising that women should share such gynaecological observations, but it became dangerous when gossips’ chatter touched matters of state. When the menfolk repeated the rumour, it became the concern of magistrates, who dutifully informed the Privy Council about these dangerous expressions.41
Commentary on the queen’s liaison with Dudley continued beyond his elevation to the earldom of Leicester in 1564. It was not confined to alehouse gossips, but also resounded in more reputable quarters. At the time of the Northern Rebellion in 1569, the dean of Lichfield cathedral, Lawrence Nowell, allegedly remarked ‘that this realm was plagued by the sins of the queen and of the Earl of Leicester’. There was no need to identify those particular sins. Loyal listeners judged Nowell’s speech to be ‘foul words’, ‘evil words’, ‘lewd and slanderous words’, ‘lewd and malicious words’, or even ‘traitorous words’ against the queen’s majesty. His enemies invoked them in a dispute between vicars choral and the cathedral chapter, and, although dean Nowell ‘utterly denyeth the said speech’, there was strong evidence of his effort to cover it up. However, he weathered the storm and remained dean until his death in 1576.42
The rumour about Elizabeth was still going strong a decade or two later. Stern investigation and exemplary punishment failed to halt its circulation. Although vulgar comment sheds no light at all on the queen’s actual conduct, it reveals a popular propensity to imagine her majesty as a lustful woman, no better than anyone else. Thomas Playfere, an Essex labourer, was indicted for treason in 1580 for claiming that the queen had two children by the Earl of Leicester, ‘and that he did see them when they were shipped at Rye in two of the best ships the queen hath’. The assize at Brentwood found him guilty not of treason but of seditious words, and sentenced him to the pillory and a brief spell in prison.43
In March 1581 came news from Norfolk that one Henry Hawkins was making ‘certain traitorous speeches’, to the effect that ‘my Lord Robert [Dudley] hath had five children by the queen, and she never goeth in progress but to be delivered’. The preacher Thomas Scot, who relayed these words to the Council, described them as ‘heinous’ and ‘villainous’, and blamed their circulation on ‘papists’ who preyed on the credibility of the ‘unruly … multitude’. It was, he thought, the work of England’s enemies to spread traitorous and scandalous remarks about the queen.44 Catholic propagandists certainly embraced every dark story about the so-called virgin queen, but the tale spread ecumenically among Protestant parishioners. A Surrey woman, Alice Austen, faced indictment in 1585 for saying that ‘the queen is no maid, and she hath had three sons by the Earl of Leicester’.45 Such remarks would be demeaning and defamatory to any woman, but were especially scandalous and seditious when applied to the anointed queen.
Another conversation in Surrey in 1586 moved into dangerous territory when Thomas Bellowe (or Le Ballewe), buff leather dresser, a Huguenot refugee from Picardy, claimed that in France the papists commonly said that ‘the queen of England is a whore and hath two bastards’. Bellowe was drinking with other Southwark artisans, including leather dressers, a nail maker, and the keeper of a victualling house, when he made his ‘vile and slanderous speeches’ against Queen Elizabeth. Stirring resentments against resident aliens, he also said ‘that the queen of England… did love strangers (Walloons and Frenchmen) better than she loved Englishmen’. Rising to this, Thomas Ashley, nail maker, upheld the honour of his queen and country by telling the Frenchman, ‘hold your peace, ye villain, a pox upon thee… get hence’. Bellowe repeated his assertion ‘six or seven times’, and Ashley ‘very sharply rebuked’ him in exchange. Eventually the company ‘caused the goodman of the house to send for a constable and to apprehend [Bellowe] and so they did’.46
We are fortunate in this case to have the Privy Council report and some of the related judicial records. Arrested by the Southwark constable, Bellowe was examined by magistrates and indicted at the Surrey assizes, where he was identified as a yeoman. Witnesses claimed that they had rebuked Bellowe for asserting that the queen ‘is a whore, and that she hath had two children… but he spake the more earnestly, uttering the said speeches after that a three or four times’. Although Bellowe attributed this canard to ‘the papists’ in France, his enthusiastic repetition of it was an act of sedition. Found guilty, he was sentenced to stand in the pillory, to have his ears cut off, and to spend three months in prison, unless he paid a fine of a hundred marks.47
One of the by-blows of Elizabeth’s dalliance with Dudley allegedly turned up in Spain in 1588, the year of the Armada. The English agent Edward Palmer reported to Secretary Walsingham that ‘the varlet that called himself her majesty’s son is in Madrid, and is allowed two crowns a day for his table, but cannot go anywhere without his keepers, and has a house for his prison’. The claimant named himself as Arthur Dudley, the Earl of Leicester’s illegitimate son by a royal mother, but was most likely a shipwrecked mariner trying his luck.48 The Spanish were willing to sustain the story, even if they did not believe the teller.
Remarks about the virgin queen’s children followed Elizabeth into old age. Some accounts were graphic and specific. Denise Derrick, a widow of Chipping Hill, Essex, reportedly remarked in April 1590 that the queen
hath had already as many children as I, and that two of them were yet alive, the one being a man child and the other a maiden child. And further, that the other[s] were burned… She said my lord of Leicester was father to them, and wrapped them up in the embers in the chimney which was in the chamber where they were born.
Found guilty at the Chelmsford assize of speaking ‘slanderous words against her majesty’, Denise was sentenced to stand in the pillory during market time with a paper on her head acknowledging her fault.49
Robert Gardener, an Essex husbandman, was similarly sentenced in 1590 for publicly saying ‘that my lord of Leicester had four children by the queen’s majesty, whereof three of them were daughters and alive, and the fourth a son that was burnt’.50 Tattle tales about the Virgin Queen’s childbearing never fully dissipated, and variants would persist for the rest of the queen’s reign and beyond. The Cornish recusant John Trevelyan declared in 1628 that ‘Queen Tibb (meaning Queen Elizabeth) was as arrant a whore as ever breathed, and that she was [tupped?] by Essex and Leicester and others’.51 Well into the 1670s there was popular report that Queen Elizabeth had a daughter named Jane.52
Some time in 1596 one Edward Francis of Melbury Osmond, Dorset, employed the rumour of the fornicating queen in his attempt to seduce Elizabeth Bayley ‘to lead an incontinent life with him’. When she refused, ‘alleging the foulness of the evil before God, and the danger of the law in that behalf’, Francis replied ‘that the best in England [meaning the queen’s majesty] had much desired the pleasure of the flesh, and had also three bastards by noblemen of the court… two sons and a daughter, and was herself base born’. Elizabeth Bayley’s mother then joined the conversation, not to protect her daughter’s honour but to ask if it was known ‘who should be heir apparent to the crown?’ Francis answered that ‘it was’, but he did not identify a particular claimant. He did, however, venture the opinion ‘that this land had been happy if her majesty had been cut off twenty years since, that some noble prince might have reigned in her stead’.53
This was dangerous talk, not just ‘familiar speech’ but words approaching treason. Edward Francis was made to understand that in compassing the queen’s death he had gone too far. ‘A learned man told him’ that for ‘wishing the cutting off of her majesty twenty years past’ he might hang, whereas ‘the rest of the words were but a pillory matter, which he cared not for’. At first he tried to minimize his remarks, saying, ‘tush, tush, they are nothing’. When Elizabeth Bayley recalled his speech, he told her, ‘they were foolish words… and though I spake them I did not think to hear of them again’. He then set out to discredit the Bayleys as ‘simple creatures’ and ‘base creatures of no credit’, mere women. When this failed he offered ‘great gifts… to stay his accusers from proceeding against him’ and ‘to deny the words they had charged him with’. The bribes apparently had some temporary effect, but in 1598 he was bound over to answer at the Dorset assizes, then summoned to appear before the Privy Council. Rather than face justice Francis fled the county, forfeiting his £500 bond. Before leaving he gave away his horse and some prized candlesticks, as though he knew he would never need them again.54
Outlandish tales of Elizabeth’s bastard-bearing re-emerged among the English community in Germany in 1600. The Council heard that year of a traveller, Hugh Broughton, who fell in with another Englishman, William Knight, on the road from Frankfurt to Strasbourg, where Broughton made ‘most monstrous and unnatural speeches of her majesty our sovereign’. Shocked by these ‘untruths’, Knight understood his duty as a ‘true subject’ to report them to London. Broughton, he wrote, ‘has sown such lies about [the queen] in these parts of Germany that I could not suffer longer in silence, and have signified this, that his tongue should be shortened’. It was not just that Broughton maintained that the queen was ‘an atheist and a maintainer of atheism’, nor his unwise speculation about the English succession that upset William Knight. It was the lurid story of sex, murder, and deception that recalled him to his duty. According to Knight, Broughton ‘said that her majesty had a daughter, which should be or was affianced unto the Prince of Condé, to succeed after her majesty’s decease; also that her majesty had been, of long time past, married to Lord Chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton had not Mrs Ratcliffe hindered the same’. But this paled besides Broughton’s next recitation. He told of a midwife, ‘taken in a coach by sundry ways to a palace at Hampstead, and carried up into a secret chamber where a lady lay in travail’. There she was commanded to do her best and preserve the lady, whatsoever became of the child. The newborn, by this report, was a daughter, who was immediately destroyed ‘in a very great fire of coals’. The midwife, her work done, was rewarded with gold, was given a drink of poisoned wine, and died six days later, ‘but revealed this before her death’. The lady, the story insinuates, was ‘her majesty’.55
All the elements of this story had been circulating in England for decades, but it was still shocking to hear such ‘monstrous speeches’ about the virgin queen. A barrage of black propaganda emanated from Catholic Europe, and malicious rumours about Queen Elizabeth stirred conversations on both sides of the Channel. False rumours swept Antwerp in August 1589 that Elizabeth of England was dead, and the following month at Brussels there was ‘continued bruit of the queen’s infirmity, said to be madness’.56
A Pox on the Whore
A stream of anti-authoritarian belligerence plagued every early modern monarch, and Elizabeth came in for her share of abuse. Like most of the Tudors and Stuarts, she was sometimes called a ‘bastard’, a ‘rascal’, or a ‘rogue’, words with cruelly demeaning connotations. In Elizabeth’s case, however, the insults were strongly gendered. Some subjects disparaged her majesty because she was a ruler, but others expressed contempt because she was a woman who presumed to govern. Some of the same language that defamed market women and village wives—’whore’, ‘quean’, ‘jade’—became attached to her royal highness, the governor of England’s church and head of state.
Customary home-grown invective was also fed by vituperation from abroad. The doctors at Louvain insisted that Elizabeth was ‘not a righteous queen, and ought to be put out of her seat’.57 Another ‘seditious and hurtful’ book circulating in Flanders described her as ‘the She of Babylon’.58 It was well known that continental Catholics and Irish rebels called her majesty ‘Jezebel’ and ‘the worst of names’.59 The rebel Sir Brian O’Rourke defaced a statue of Queen Elizabeth and had his men beat it with axes. Another Irishman in France, Patrick Dones or Duffe, ‘often called the queen Jezebel, and said he hoped to see her dragged at a horse’s tail’.60 Even Sir John Perrot, Elizabeth’s lord deputy in Ireland, railed against her majesty as ‘a base bastard pisskitchen woman’.61 (The word ‘pisskitchen’, not in the Oxford English Dictionary, suggests a slovenly housekeeper or an incontinent skivvy—grossly defamatory to the queen.) Reports of these insults enjoyed an international currency and a surreptitious domestic circulation.
Queen Elizabeth’s regime was barely half a year old when the vice chancellor of Cambridge wrote to Secretary Cecil in March 1559 about ‘a young man of St John’s College named Clyburne’ who was held under surety for speaking ‘unseemly words of the queen’s majesty’, referring to her as ‘a rascal’. This was a serious breach, for the word was deeply demeaning. The informers, George Withers and George Bond of St John’s, declared, ‘this is treason to slight the honour’ of the queen, but vice chancellor John Pory allowed in mitigation that Clyburne’s ill speaking ‘was found to proceed of a cross stomach’. Cecil noted the accusation and the excuse, and took no further action.62
In November 1577 the mayor of Doncaster, Robert Birks, informed the Earl of Huntingdon (President of the Council in the North) about the ‘open, vile and threatening speech’ of a fellow Yorkshireman, Richard Keddye, who had ‘repeated such words against her majesty as I am not only ashamed but afraid by word or writing to recite’. Keddye, it transpired, had already had his ears clipped for a previous indiscretion, and on this occasion, the mayor warned Huntingdon, he might not reach York alive: ‘The grudge is so great in people’s hearts that… the people would needs have torn him in pieces.’ We do not learn what Keddye said, but it was evidently outrageous. Huntingdon referred the matter to Secretary Walsingham, describing it as ‘a lewd action in speech which deserves a sharper punishment than Mr Gargrave [a fellow councillor in the north] thinks can be imparted by law, for hanging is too good for him’.63
Justice Manwood weighed into the issue, reviewing the arsenal of punishments available by common law and statute. Keddye, for his ‘lewd and detestable slanderous speeches towards her majesty’, had been justly punished ‘by pillory and cutting of his ears according to the statute’. But having ‘aggravated’ his offence by speaking again against the queen, he now deserved ‘a more grievous punishment’. All the resources of the law and state should be used to make him an example and secure his repentance.
The statute provided perpetual imprisonment and forfeiture of goods for a second offence. But common law also allowed mutilation, blinding, and even dismemberment for ‘slanderous rumours and speeches against the nobility and council of the prince’. In light of the heinous quality of Keddye’s offence, Manwood suggested, he should suffer ‘burning in the face with letters… gagging his two jaws… so he cannot speak any words… burning through his tongue, or perchance cutting off his tongue’, though it is unlikely such mutilations were implemented.64
Among other Englishmen who spoke disparagingly of her majesty, the Middlesex yeoman Peter Moyses of Bromley was cited in 1584 for telling a neighbour ‘the queen is a rascal’.65 John Pullyver, clerk of Writtle, Essex, was pilloried in 1580 for saying ‘that some did say that we had no queen’.66 Mark Wiersdale, another Essex minister, talked himself into trouble by saying in 1588 that Queen Elizabeth was not queen of France. The archdeacon’s official who heard this remark said it tended to high treason, and Wiersdale conceded that he spoke in ignorance.67
Few went so far as Jeremy Vanhill, a labourer of Sandwich, Kent, who declared before witnesses on 1 April 1585: ‘shite upon your queen, I would to God she were dead that I might shit on her face.’ He further ‘wished that the queen were as sick as Peter Aveger then was’, referring to a neighbour who was gravely ill and died that night. The Rochester assizes found Vanhill guilty of speaking seditious words, and sentenced him to a felon’s death by hanging (not the traitor’s death with quartering), but what other crimes he had committed and whether the execution was carried out cannot be readily determined.68 In 1592 two sailors were set in the pillory at Wapping, Middlesex, after ‘scandalously and seditiously’ saying ‘shit upon the queen’.69
Casual curses of this sort kept coming, with predictable consequences. A London yeoman, John Clarke, found himself before the Middlesex sessions in June 1602 after using ‘scandalous and seditious words to the queen’s defamation’ at Uxbridge. When the constable invoked royal authority, Clarke allegedly responded, ‘why dost thou tell me of the queen? A turd for the queen.’70 A similar encounter with a minor official the same year led another London yeoman, James Doggett, to cry ‘a pox and a vengeance’ on all authorities and ‘a pox of all those that would follow her majesty any more’.71
Because she is a Woman
Gendered insults abounded, not all of them compounded by sexual derision. They were as likely to emanate from women as from men. Mary Cleere of Ingatestone, Essex, disparaged the queen’s authority in 1577 by saying ‘that it did not become a woman to make knights’.72 A Surrey woman, Joan Lyster of Cobham, spinster, declared scandalously in 1586 that ‘the bishop of Canterbury and the Council make a fool of the queen’s majesty, and because she is but a woman she ought not to be governor of a realm’.73
When the minister of Aldham, Essex, John Wylton, allegedly ‘spake openly in the church’ in 1589 ‘that the queen was a whore’, his parishioner, the tailor John West, claimed to be ‘stupefied’ by these ‘horrid and diabolical words’. The report was apparently stirred up by the yeoman Thomas Wenden, who explained that ‘the queen is a dancer, and Wylton sayeth all dancers are whores’. In the event the minister was exonerated, but Wenden was bound over for a year for spreading misinformation.74 A London baker, Thomas Garner, told listeners at Rotherhithe in 1590 ‘that the queen’s majesty was an arrant whore and his whore, and if he could come to her he would tear her in pieces, and he would drink blood; and that he would set London on fire, and it would be a brave sight unto him’. The Surrey assize judged this ferocious outburst to be ‘seditious’ and remanded the speaker in gaol.75
‘Let us pray for a father, for we have a mother already’, remarked John Feltwell, labourer, of Great Wenden, Essex, in the summer of 1591. When his neighbour John Thurgood asked, ‘what mean you by that?’ Feltwell replied, ‘let us pray for a king’. Thurgood rebuked him, ‘we have a gracious queen already, wherefore would you pray for a king?’ To which Feltwell answered:
the queen was but a woman and ruled by noblemen, and the noblemen and gentlemen were all one, and the gentlemen and farmers would hold together one with another so that poor men could get nothing among them, and therefore we shall never have a merry world while the queen liveth, but if we had but one that would rise I would be the next, or else I would the Spaniards would come in that we may have some sport.
For this seditious outburst Feltwell was set in the pillory for two hours and remanded to the next sessions.76
Much higher in the social hierarchy, a nobleman and a knight were charged with speaking against the queen. In July 1601 the Council dealt with ‘certain speeches used by the right honourable the Earl of Lincoln at his house in Cannon Row two or three days after the arraignment of the Earl of Essex’ the previous February. Lincoln’s indiscretion was to say, in the hearing of servants: ‘I cannot be persuaded that the queen will be drawn to consent to the death of one with whom she has been so familiar, as with the Earl of Essex…. I myself have seen her kiss him twenty times, and methinks in reason that she should not then cut off his head.’ The servant William Wright, who reported these words, also accused Lincoln of involvement in a confederacy on behalf of the king of Scots.77
Wright also reported speeches of Sir Arthur Gorges ‘concerning her majesty’s growing tyrannies’. But because he spoke them ‘only in the hearing of the Lady Elizabeth his wife, I durst not without further proof reveal them’. As Gorges’s servant, Wright continued, he ‘stood in fear to deal against one so mighty who might at his lordship’s pleasure bring actions of account against me of great reckoning’. Now, however, when the mighty were falling, he was willing to present his information.78
The charges against Lincoln and Gorges may have emerged from backstairs gossip, but they had potentially dangerous consequences. Lincoln in particular was concerned to rebut them, in order, he said, to dispel slanders and to retain her majesty’s good opinion. The accusations, he told Secretary Cecil, were ‘vexatious charges… false and ridiculous… malicious surmises’. He was incensed that a traitorous ungrate (William Wright) should ‘alter the sense of words spoken at my table’. The word of a nobleman outweighed that of a backbiting servant, and Lincoln’s indiscretions, if that is what they were, were soon forgotten. Indeed, his lordship might even bring charges of scandalum magnatum.79
It was Never Merry World
Seditious remarks were sometimes driven by undutiful thoughts in favour of a different religion or an alternative occupant of the throne. Many were couched in the form of aggrieved nostalgia or hopeful yearning, as ‘it was never merry world since (a regretted past event, such as the death of a former monarch)’, or ‘it would not be merry world until (a future happy occurrence, such as the succession of a prince)’. Some subjects went further than regretting the queen’s accession, and forecast or wished for her imminent death.
William Appleforth, curate at Newington by Tottenham, was walking home from the Temple in London late in 1561 when someone told him of a man being examined before the Council for saying that ‘her grace should not live unto Christmas’, and that ‘the old laws should be up again in despite of all that would say nay’. Arrived at home, ‘by the fire talking… thinking therein no harm’, Appleforth repeated this news, not reflecting that it might be dangerous or seditious. One of those listening, perhaps a servant, reported that the curate spoke ‘certain words against the queen’, and Appleforth was hauled to the Gatehouse for sowing sedition. Though he had not originated the offensive words and did not endorse them, they still caused him difficulty. Simply repeating seditious words, or reporting their utterance by someone else, was an offence against the law. It emerged, however, that Appleforth had made other remarks that attracted the government’s attention. He struggled to explain: ‘I said that an archbishop is above a queen, because I have heard it spoken of learned men in the old times… Where I spake of tempestuous weather, death and sickness, I did read it in the prognostication of the year last past.’ As to the suggestion that he did not love the queen or her laws, Appleforth protested, ‘I do pray for her daily and hourly’ at all religious services. ‘If this be not true,’ he concluded, ‘let me be hanged, drawn and quartered.’ Talk of a traitor’s death, however, was unnecessary, for the offence, if any, was the misdemeanour of speaking sedition. The evidence was inadequate to determine whether Appleforth posed a threat to the regime, or whether he was just another loose-tongued religious conservative.80
Seditious remarks by the Kentish yeoman Bartholomew Taylor on May Day 1568, that ‘we shall never have a merry world so long as we have a woman governor, and as the queen lived’, led to his indictment at the Maidstone assizes. Found guilty, he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of £10.81 A few years later Randall Duckworth, a labourer of Bradwell, Essex, was made to stand in the pillory with a paper on his head for saying that ‘it was merry England when there was better government, and if the queen die there will be a change’.82
When Richard Jones, servant to a Shrewsbury merchant, allegedly declared in 1574 that ‘there should be wars shortly in this land, and that before Michaelmas next this land should be conquered by strangers, and that the old religion should be up again’, his words were reported to the Council in London. These were ‘seditious words’, according to the report, prejudicial to the crown, the realm, and the law, and ‘tending to the ruin of them all’. Though the speaker belonged to a papist network, supporting the claims of Mary Queen of Scots, local magistrates were lax in their duty and allowed the offender to escape.83
It could also be seditious to report that the queen had been targeted for assassination. Richard Lockie of St Albans was examined in March 1579 for saying ‘that her majesty in the fourteenth year of her reign [1572] should have been [i.e. was] shot at with a gun’. The Council construed this to be a seditious rumour, and perhaps also a compassing of the queen’s death.84 Once again, a casual conversation veered onto dangerous ground.
‘This world will be in better case shortly’, prophesied the Essex labourer William Medcalfe in 1586, who expected the king of Spain and the Earl of Westmorland to ‘avenge the death and blood of the late Duke of Norfolk’ and remove Elizabeth from the throne. Apparently a Catholic as well as a traitor, Medcalfe was given ‘judgement according to the statute’, presumably execution.85 Similar words shocked listeners in other counties. ‘There would never be a merry world before there were a new alteration … and, by god’s wounds, the queen is a whore,’ alleged the Kentish tailor, John Massee of Minster, in 1591. Indicted at the Kent assizes, he was pilloried and ‘well whipped’ for scandalously repeating these words.86
Also in 1591 a Middlesex yeoman, Nicholas Haslewood of Islington, allegedly ‘spoke with malice and feloniously against the queen, saying he wished her death’. Haslewood, who was most likely a Catholic, also declared that ‘he hoped to see his enemies burnt in Smithfield before Michaelmas’. The sessions court found him not guilty of a felony, but guilty of trespass and contempt, and sentenced him to appear in the pillory with a paper on his head explaining the nature of his offence.87 Edward Ewer, a husbandman of Beckenham, Kent, allegedly said in 1596 ‘that it would never be a merry world till her majesty was dead or killed; and that her majesty was ruled by her lords at their pleasure, but we must not say so’. At the Kent assizes he was sentenced to death by hanging, but other felonies, including horse theft, compounded his offence against the state.88
A few of those who wished the queen dead had the means, or at least the inclination, potentially to achieve their ends. A few were desperate plotters, Catholic malcontents, men of action as well of words, who conspired to have Elizabeth killed. Among them was Sir William Stanley, a former military commander, who plotted with Catholics at Douai in 1593 to kill the queen. One of Stanley’s associates, the soldier William Polewhele, revealed the details of the conspiracy. Singing for his life in February 1594 before attorney general Thomas Egerton and solicitor general Edward Coke, Polewhele accused Stanley of ‘using many vile speeches’, including the remark that ‘if mistress Elizabeth were dead (meaning the queen) we should have good sport’. Stanley also allegedly said that ‘if they can by any means procure the death of her majesty upon the sudden’, then Spanish forces from the Netherlands would ‘repair into England and hope to have all at their own pleasure’. One of the conspirators, Jacques di Francischi, steeled Polewhele to the task of killing the queen, warning him that, if the attempt failed, ‘then all the devils in hell will not be able to prevail against England’. The achievement, said Jacques, ‘would make him glorious before God, she being a wicked creature and like to be the overthrow of all christendom’. Polewhele was supposed ‘either to stab her majesty or to shoot her with a pistol as she should go abroad or to a sermon’. But his courage failed him and he abandoned the enterprise and told his tale to the authorities.89 It was a conspiracy of words, whipped up by bravado and hatred, but perhaps not unique in the late sixteenth century.
The Wrong Religion
The stressful circumstances of a contentious and unsettled reformation produced dangerous talk among religious enthusiasts. Unreconciled Catholics sometimes veered towards treason, while Protestant zealots sometimes spoke sedition. The papal bull of excommunication, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and the long war with Spain exacerbated religious tensions. The crown used the prerogative court of High Commission as well as the network of magistrates to quash or quarantine deviant opinions, and their effort preserves scattered remarks in the documentary record.
From the very beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign some subjects challenged their monarch’s religion. ‘The queen is not worthy to bear rule or to be supreme head of the church,’ asserted Peter Hall, a Kentish clergyman, who also remarked in 1559 that ‘the queen’s proceedings are not of God’. When Robert Nethersole, gentleman, reported these words to a neighbouring husbandman, the neighbour retorted, ‘said he nothing but this? He might lawfully say these words.’ But others judged Hall’s words to be seditious, and secured his indictment at the Maidstone summer assizes.90
Thomas Bedell, esquire, of Writtle, Essex, faced indictment in 1574 for ‘scandalous and seditious speeches against the queen’ after demanding of a local official in the churchyard, ‘what, is the queen become a papist now?’ This challenged Queen Elizabeth’s stated position, which, as the indictment insisted, abhorred ‘all papal and papistical doctrine’ and strove ‘to eradicate and abolish the same within her realm’. Bedell had spoken in defence of the vicar of Writtle, Michael Mayshort, who had just delivered an anti-papist sermon. It was the issue of a writ against the vicar, in the queen’s name, that triggered his outburst. He did not help his case by enlisting the support of ‘others who are called puritans’, including the presbyterian Thomas Cart-wright, who he said made similar allegations about the queen and popery. The sessions jury at Brentwood found Bedell guilty of ‘false, scandalous and seditious words… indecently and irreverently spoken’. As a gentleman, however, he was unlikely to lose his ears at the pillory, and with the Council’s approval Bedell compounded by paying a fine of a hundred pounds and expressing his repentence in writing.91
Another cleric, John Williams alias Floud of Grays Thurrock, Essex, drifted into sedition in 1578 when he preached on God’s anger at Balaam’s covetousness and Israel’s fornication with the damsels of Balak, which caused ‘the chief rulers of the people … to be hanged up against the sun’. ‘Even so,’ said the preacher, ‘if Elizabeth with the Council and other magistrates were hanged up against the sun there would not be so much wickedness done as there was’. Thomas Kightle, gentleman, reported the preacher’s ‘seditious words’, but the county assize found him not guilty.92
In the following year John Flower of Northampton spent a month in gaol, awaiting further investigation by the Privy Council, for asking in conversation, ‘What if we have a wicked prince? What, shall we obey her conscience? No, I will not!’93 Resistance theory had few open advocates, and the correct answer, at least from the official viewpoint, was that subjects should endure and obey.
Roger Nowell, the Puritan vicar of Heybridge, Essex, was indicted in 1582 for speaking ‘false, seditious and scandalous [words], advisedly and with malicious intent of his own imagination and contradiction of the queen… in pernicious example to other subjects’. He had apparently declared: ‘If I am an enemy to the word preached, the queen is an enemy to the word preached,’ saying this in church, ‘in disturbance of the queen’s people’, some of whom reported him to the authorities.94 A Kentish labourer, Thomas Farrington of Leysdown on Sea, was indicted at the Rochester assizes in 1599 for saying ‘that the queen’s majesty was antichrist, and therefore she is thrown down into hell’. Farrington confessed to these seditious words, and was sentenced to time in the pillory and the loss of his ears.95
The regret and nostalgia of religious conservatives led to dangerous and seditious utterances. A pamphlet of 1588 laid much of the blame for seditious discourse on ‘the envious tongue of false and lying papists’, whose ‘false lying speeches… strike a terror in the hearts of the common people, or else to make them dislike of those that are in authority’.96 Scraps of evidence from the courts and Privy Council show the authorities working to restrain the more reckless expressions.
‘It was never merry in England since the scriptures were so commonly preached and talked among such persons as they were,’ declared John Howard, petticoat-maker of Bury St Edmunds, over dinner in November 1577.97 ‘It was a merry world when the service was used in the Latin tongue, and now we are in an evil way and going to the devil and have all nations in our necks, for there is no Christian prince that hath such cruel laws as to burn men through the ears, which are now used in this realm,’ protested David Brown, a husbandman of East Tilbury, Essex, in 1581. The only remedy, he suggested, was for the exiled Earl of Westmorland to come into England from Ireland with Spanish military support. ‘And being demanded that if the Earl of Westmorland should come in to this realm whether he would help him and take part with him to the best of his power, he answered that he would do the best he could.’ Brown’s ‘scandalous words’ brought him before the Essex assize, which judged him guilty, though his ultimate fate is unknown.98
Another Roman Catholic, Henry Beare, was detained at Salisbury in 1581 for ‘most lewd and slanderous speeches… affirming that mass [was] said daily in her majesty’s chapel’. The Council advised Wiltshire authorities to consult someone ‘skilful in the law… to consider how far the said Beare may be touched either by the late statute for slanderous speeches against her majesty, or by some other statute heretofore made for the punishing of the like’, and to deal with him at the next assizes.999
In 1582 the authorities charged John Hamerton of Hellifield, Yorkshire, ‘for certain traitorous words by him… most undutifully and wickedly spoken and uttered against the queen’s majesty and her highness’s proceedings’. Hamerton was a militant Catholic who said that the queen and her Protestant subjects were all heretics, and that Campion and other martyrs had been unlawfully put to death. He drew further attention to himself by claiming to have been ‘Bonner’s man, and helped to set fire to the faggots in Smithfield [burning heretics under Mary], and rejoice[d] to think how they fried in the flames, and what service he had done God in furthering their death’.100 As late as 1590 a Catholic yeoman in Shropshire, William Wier, labelled priests’ wives ‘whores, and their children bastards’, and said ‘it was pity the queen did reign, to suffer them unhanged or unburnt’.101
In 1596 Tristam Cotterill of Lincoln’s Inn reportedly ‘fell into speeches against the queen, denying the supremacy… and said that in Spain the queen was commonly called the whore of Babylon’. Cotterill allegedly made these remarks while riding with Richard Vennard in Hampshire. But there were reasons to suspect that the proceedings were malicious, because by the time Vennard reported these words he was imprisoned in the Fleet for debt, blaming his troubles on ‘certain recusants’ connected to Cotterill, who was now his enemy.102 Joan Gurr, a spinster of Lamberhurst, Kent, who said in 1596, ‘I pray God either convert or confound her highness,’ may also have been a member of England’s Catholic community.103
An Uncertain Succession
The question of the royal succession concerned humble Elizabethans as well as privy councillors and magnates. An illicit buzz of conversation flared up whenever this topic was raised. Clandestine books from Edinburgh and Antwerp fuelled the debate on behalf of Catholics or Protestants, Spaniards or Scots,104 but the principal discourse was local and domestic. Its ingredients included recurrent prophecy that the queen was likely to die, false reports that she was already dead, and speculation about her likely successor. Among those mentioned were Mary Queen of Scots, her son James Stuart, the Earl of Essex, Lord Beauchamp, the king of France, and the king of Spain. The statute of 1571 made it treason to dispute the queen’s title, and the act of 1581 threatened death for illegally discussing the succession, but the law was incapable of imposing silence.
Mary Cleere was convicted at the Essex assize in March 1577 for saying ‘that the queen’s majesty was base born and not born to the crown, and that another lady [presumably Mary Queen of Scots] is the right inheritor thereunto’. She also said ‘that it did not become a woman to make knights’. Her sentence was to be drawn and burnt (trahatur et comburatur), not drawn and hanged, as has been mistakenly recorded. Burning was the designated punishment for female traitors, though we cannot be sure that in this case it was actually carried out. Associated with Lady Petre’s Ingatestone Hall, a hotbed of Catholic recusancy, Mary Cleere had espoused the position of Catholic Christendom. Her sentence, which seems to have been unique, may have been the response of a panicked government at a moment of heightened emergency. John Payne, a Douai priest, had been arrested at Ingatestone Hall in February 1577, just a month before Mary’s trial.105
Discussing the potential aftermath of Queen Elizabeth’s death, a yeoman of Southwark, John Carre, told friends in 1584 that he ‘heard in a song that the Scottish king shall be our governor’. When a woman in the company questioned him, Carre responded, ‘hold your peace woman, for the king of Scots shall be your governor’, adding ‘that this realm was spoiled for want of a good governor’. These were seditious remarks, for which Carre was judged guilty at the Surrey assize.106 Another Surrey yeoman, Matthew Freeland of Esher, was likewise indicted in 1600 for saying ‘that the king of Scots was right heir apparent to the crown of England’, although in this case he was found ‘not guilty’.107 Hugh Broughton, an Englishman in Germany, was reported for saying in 1601 ‘that the king of Scots is the right successor to the crown’, among other scandalous remarks about her majesty.108 The variability in sentencing and punishment points to the difficulty of policing seditious and treasonable speech.
George Binks, a tailor of Finchingfield, Essex, and a diehard papist, was indicted in 1592 for saying ‘that the pope is supreme head over all Christendom, and that King Phillip is right king of England’. If the queen commanded him to do any service, he said, ‘the same would go against his conscience’. As for Sir Francis Drake and his men, who had sailed against Portugal in 1589, Binks declared they ‘do rob and spoil the king of Spain of his goods, which is the right king of England’. These were bold words, apparently treason, but the evidence to convict was insufficient and Chelmsford assize found him ‘not guilty’.109
In the course of a complicated and controversial episode at midsummer 1596, a leading Essex gentleman spoke treason and his principal retainer uttered dangerous and seditious words. Sir Thomas Lucas was exercising the trained band of citizen soldiers in the windmill field outside Colchester when Sir John Smyth rode up with other gentlemen and attempted to raise the troops in rebellion. Riding up and down among the bowmen and pikemen (mostly Colchester clothiers and tradesmen), he appealed to them as ‘my fellow soldiers’, and declared ‘that there are traitors about the court, and that the Lord Treasurer is a traitor of traitors’ who intended ‘to bring in the king of France’. ‘About the queen there are many traitors, and the king of France shall be brought in,’ he repeated. Smyth asserted ‘that the common people had been of long time oppressed’, and invited the men to join with him for ‘redress’ and ‘a reformation of your troubles’. He told the troops, ‘you have long been in bondage, but if you will go with me you will be free’, but none of them stirred. As further inducement he introduced ‘a nobleman of the blood royal, and of the house of the Lord Beauchamp, that shall be your captain’, thereby raising the stakes and turning a social protest into a dynastic insurrection. (The nobleman, younger brother to Edward Seymour, would have been in the line of succession had the Grey—Seymour marriage not been invalidated.)
Several witnesses reported Smyth’s words, though some claimed not to understand them. The loyal Sir Thomas Lucas collected the testimony of ‘gentlemen of good account and sufficiency’, other ‘witnesses of good credit’, and the words of ‘a plain honest man, and well thought of amongst his neighbours’, and sent them to the Privy Council.
Smyth was quickly arrested, but excused himself by claiming ‘that he was overcome by drinking that morning of a great deal of white wine and sack’. Lucas, however, was able to ascertain that Smyth’s company, ‘being at the least a dozen persons’, had only consumed three pints of wine and three pints of sack between them. Half a pint per person was not enough to render them senseless or reduce their culpability. Lucas also found out that Smyth had stockpiled arms, bullets, and other ‘things for war’ at his house at Coggeshall, and this too he reported to the Council. Rather than an impulsive folly driven by drink, a piece of midsummer madness, it appeared that Smyth and his company had planned to raise rebellion. For this they could have been executed, but Smyth was held in the Tower and eventually released on house arrest.110
News of Sir John Smyth’s ‘attempt’ spread rapidly, and grew with the telling. Later that evening, villagers at Aldham, a few miles west of Colchester, sat on a bench in the midsummer twilight, recalling the exploits of the day. One of them, Thomas Wenden, described by Sir Thomas Lucas as a man ‘most desperate and lewd both in word and deed’, repeated Smyth’s claims about the traitors at court. He also spread rumours of ‘five or six thousand men slain about Greenwich, and lay upon heaps, that men might go over the shoes in blood’. When Clement Cowey of Little Tey heard this gory news, he prayed, ‘God save the queen’, to which Wenden responded, ‘I pray God it be not too late’, adding that ‘by Monday morning if not this night… you shall hear all the bells in the country ring’. Although he did not say it outright, he seemed to be anticipating, and perhaps compassing, a change of regime.
Thomas Wenden was a retainer to Sir John Smyth and a party to his intended rebellion. (He was, perhaps, the same Thomas Wenden, yeoman and trouble-maker, who had been bound over for a year in 1589 for implying that the queen was a whore because she was a dancer.) Wenden’s mouth now brought him more woe, and he was indicted at the Essex assizes in 1596 for ‘certain seditious words’ spoken of the queen. Sir Thomas Lucas advised the Council that Wenden ‘by law ought to have lost his ears, for which he was a long time after kept in gaol, yet by means made to Sergeant Puckering, then justice of assize, had no trial but was delivered, for that Sergeant Puckering said it was too filthy a matter to be brought in open place’.111
The question of the succession prompted more chatter as the childless queen aged. In 1597 an Essex labourer, William Stevens, told neighbours ‘that he had heard that our queen’s majesty is made away and dead’, and that councillors ‘were gone to fetch another prince’.112 Lancashire Catholics in 1599 heard ‘bruits of her majesty’s death’ and speculations ‘that the Earl of Essex was the worthiest to [be] king’.113 Even in 1603, when King James of Scotland was preparing to move south, there was popular chatter on behalf of other candidates.114
Cheering for Spain
A surprising strain of seditious discourse spoke favourably of the king of Spain, who had shared the throne with Queen Mary and hoped to govern England again. The Essex tailor George Binks, indicted in 1592, was not alone in considering Philip II ‘the right king of England’.115 Nor were all Elizabethan Hispanophiles Catholics in search of a religious champion. Some were deeply disgruntled Protestants, fed up with queenship, or led on by bravado and drink.
The London weaver Stephen Slater declared in 1585, the year that war broke out,
that King Philip was a father to England and did better love an Englishman than the queen’s majesty did, for that he would give them meat, drink and clothes. And that he thought that the queen was not queen and supreme head of England but said, I pray God she be. And being afterwards charged for saying he thought her majesty was not queen and supreme head of England, he said, he said so and so would say before the best in England, for he was pressed to serve as a soldier in Flanders by commission, and had not those things which he was promised, and that if her majesty were queen, she had villains under her.116
Not a papist but a man with a grudge, Slater talked himself into serious trouble. So too did John Feltwell, labourer, of Great Wenden, Essex, who in the summer of 1591 invited his neighbours to ‘pray for a king’. ‘We shall never have a merry world while the queen liveth’, he continued, ‘or else I would the Spaniards would come in that we may have some sport’.117
Another Essex man, Wilfred Lutey, a scrivener of Aveley, was indicted at Chelmsford in 1594 for saying ‘that all those that her majesty sent over into the Low Countries were damned because the king of Spain is our anointed king… and that all the estates of the Low Countries were drunkards and cobblers, and all those that her majesty sent over were rebels and damned, because they fought against their lawful king’. Notwithstanding the scandal of these ostensibly treasonous words, the court found Lutey not guilty, and bailed him to the next assize. He was apparently the victim of malicious prosecution.118 By contrast, a Southwark yeoman, William Whiting, was found guilty at the Surrey assize for saying, in 1594, ‘that there were better laws and justice [and charity] in Spain than is here in England’.119
Other commoners faced indictment in 1596 for disloyal remarks in favour of Spain. A brickburner, John Feer, was remanded at the Hertford assizes in March 1596 for saying: ‘I would that all the Spaniards of Spain were landed here in England to pull out the boors and the churls by the ears; and that twenty thousand of them were about Mr Capell’s house (meaning Arthur Capell of Little Hadham, esquire) for then he … should be much set by.’120 Nicholas Howlett, labourer, of Snodland, Kent, was indicted at Maidstone assizes in July 1596 for publicly saying: ‘I would [the Spanish] would come. I would strike never a blow against them.’ Charged with treason, he was found guilty of the lesser crime of speaking seditious words, and was sentenced to the pillory and to further remand in gaol.121
Another Kentish labourer, Alexander Oven, was indicted in 1596 for complaining that the Spaniards ‘be long a coming; it is no matter if they were come, and I would they were come, for the people here be all nought. A plague of God light upon them all (meaning the queen’s subjects).’ Tried at the Kent Quarter Sessions, he was found guilty of speaking these words, but ‘not of speaking them maliciously’.122 At Hertford assizes in March 1597 a gentleman, Roger Slye, was found guilty of saying that the Spaniards ‘would shortly come amongst us, whereby he hoped to see such rule in England as he should domineer over that knave Ralph Conningsby’, a local adversary.123 Like scores more Elizabethan men and women, these people spoke recklessly and unguardedly, and paid the price of enmeshment with the law.