#elizabethans

[thatsbelievable]

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[hamletthedane]

Kit Marlowe was really out there in 1590 like ‘‘be gay do crimes spy for the queen pretend to be catholic for the aesthetic flirt with william shakespeare write iconic gay stage play about banging the devil call yourself Merlin get arrested for your jesus slash fanfic collection die in a bar fight at age 29”

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Rosemond Tuve - Elizabethan & Metaphysical Imagery - Phoenix Books - 1968 (cover by Norman Laliberté)

[jurijurijurious]

It is time... To actually learn about Tudor era costumes. Solely for fan art and fanfic which is ofc a good enough reason. And yes, it'll do my casual history reading good too...

[talkingpiffle]

Thou blind man's mark, thou fool's self-chosen snare, Fond fancy's scum, and dregs of scattered thought, Band of all evils; cradle of causeless care; Thou web of will, whose end is never wrought: Desire! Desire!  I have too dearly bought With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware.

--Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, epigraph to Chapter I.

The poem continues: Too long, too long, asleep thou hast me brought, Who shouldst my mind to higher things prepare. But yet in vain thou hast my ruin sought; In vain thou madest me to vain things aspire; In vain thou kindlest all thy smoky fire; For virtue hath this better lesson taught,— Within myself to seek my only hire, Desiring nought but how to kill desire. 

From Sir Philip Sidney’s Certain Sonnets, first published posthumously with the Countess of Pembroke’s edition of his Arcadia in 1598.

Images: “Thou blind man’s mark” from Certain Sonnets in the 1598 edition.

[thewhyldeone]

Sermons at St Paul’s Cross

“If your thirst for sermons was unsatisfied in your parish church, you could try the ones at the cross in the churchyard of St Paul’s...

...Since at least 1214, Londoners had convened at a cross in the northeast part of the churchyard. If you remember that until the Great Fire of 1666, St Paul’s was a huge Norman Cathedral, it is easier to imagine the setting. Covered galleries had been built on the exterior walls of the north transept and the choir, where the great and the good sat in comfort, looking down on the preacher. He stood in a ground-level pulpit with a roof that had a cross on top of it, and a low wall round it. Just like members of the audience sitting on the stage at a play, some favored members of the congregation could sit within this wall. But everyone else had to stand, or squash together on benches, in the space between the pulpit and the cathedral walls...

...There could be several thousand people there, and on a hot day the place stank so badly that ‘many a man taketh his death [there]’. The sermons attracted not only Londoners - not all of whom had attended their parish churches, despite the rules - but tourists from the country and abroad. The Queen came only once, on the last of the days of Thanksgiving for the victory of the Armada. The occasion belonged to Londoners...”

- Excerpt from Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London - Chapter 16: Religion, Superstition, Witchcraft and Magic by Liza Picard

[maximumphilosopheranchor]

THE MOST OBVIOUS PROBLEM that England faced at this time was the war: an 18-year-long conflict, affecting most of western Europe, that dominated these years. This had multiple separate theatres. The Anglo-Spanish conflict was played out at sea, in naval raiding and counter-raiding, both large (as in the Armada) and small. Secondly, Elizabeth sent troops to support the Protestant Dutch in their fight for independence from Catholic Spain. English troops also fought in the final phase of the 30-year long religious wars in France. The death of the last Valois king, Henry III, in 1589 had left the Protestant Henry of Navarre as claimant to the French throne, facing the ultra-Catholic Guise faction, backed by Philip II of Spain. Again, Elizabeth agreed to aid her fellow Protestant and in 1589-95 she sent nearly 20,000 troops to do so. (..) War was extremely challenging to the early modern state: this was the main reason Elizabeth had carefully maintained a peaceful foreign policy for over 20 years earlier in her reign. Combat demanded resources, primarily money and soldiers. During this period taxes rose to the highest point in the reign. Such demands were risky, since tax demands were a common cause of rebellion. Yet even these relatively high taxes were not extortionate in the overall scheme of things. Back in the 1540s Henry VIII had raised twice as much per year. Elizabeth was able to keep taxes as low as possible by ruthlessly minimising the extent of her commitments abroad. In contrast to many early modern monarchs, she never spent more than what was needed and she made a virtue of her frugality. Her people could see that she was not wasteful with their money. THE GOVERNMENT also minimised its need for funds by relying on the counties to supply resources. Almost every year in the 1590s the county militias mustered and trained their troops in case of Spanish attack. The Privy Council implored them to buy newer and more up-to-date weapons. On top of this, the counties frequently had to supply fully equipped units of men to fight overseas, service from which many would never return. Both the militia and the troops levied have typically been regarded with some contempt by historians, as a poorly trained, poorly equipped rabble. Again this judgement has been far too sweeping. It was certainly the case that the troops were of variable quality and no doubt some were badly equipped. But, alongside the criticism, there are plenty of contemporary reports indicating that the equipment was sufficient and the recruits themselves were adequate and even, on occasion, brought credit on their counties. After all, they did what was asked of them in the field. One risk for the government was the length of the war. It must have seemed that the Privy Council was sending a never-ending series of expensive, tiresome and irritating demands into the counties. Many expressed their unhappiness at these requests, something that has led historians to detect a widespread war weariness. But this is to mistake the function of the complaints. We should not be surprised that Elizabethans complained about having to pay their taxes, to serve in the militia, or to work towards the war effort. Throughout history people have tended to be negative about taxation. This seldom means that they refuse to pay, however. Typically, people do both: pay and complain. Much the same is true of the Elizabethan wars. Historians should focus less on what people said and more on what they did. The evidence shows that despite the war going on for almost two decades, the counties continued to be remarkably obedient to the Council’s demands. WHY WAS THIS? There are several reasons. First, the Council had set up a carefully designed system to manage these demands. Each county had a lord lieutenant providing a single figurehead, either a privy councillor or a leading nobleman, supervising military affairs. These were assisted by deputy lieutenants, carefully chosen from the leading gentry for their loyalty, efficiency and devotion to Elizabeth’s Protestant regime. This hierarchy of officials smoothed the process of carrying the orders of the queen and Privy Council around the country. It was also a matter of winning the battle of ideas. Historians like to point to the Tudor ‘propaganda machine’ as one of the dynasty’s great successes. Yet it is something of a myth. There never was any kind of machine: Elizabethan government simply didn’t work like that. To imagine this supposed machine bamboozling the country into accepting 18 years of war through ingenuity or sheer persistence is to imagine that the political classes of England were fools. As historians are increasingly recognising, early modern English people, especially the wealthy, had access to plenty of news and information about the wider world. The government had some influence over this distribution of knowledge, but it had far from a monopoly. The government did of course make efforts to mould opinion, but the nation’s acceptance of the war lay above all in the rational conclusion on the part of the politically active sector of the population that a genuine risk existed. This should not be surprising. In 1588 those on the south coast might literally have seen the sails of the Armada as it sailed up the Channel. The threat was frighteningly palpable. Even when the war was a matter of defending England’s allies, the Dutch and French, the government made sure that the gentry understood that it was better to fight Spain on its soil than in the fields of Kent. Elizabeth’s subjects knew very well that almost all of England’s neighbours had experienced religious wars: the Netherlands, Germany, France and, at times, Scotland and Ireland, too. In these circumstances, broadly speaking, there seems to have been a national mood of cooperation with the government. Those who argue that the war was stirring up intolerable pressures in the body politic need to explain how, in such circumstances, the government managed to continue the war for so long with so little actual resistance. While historians might like to see the late Elizabethan period as the beginning of a process whereby English government and politics slid into the dysfunction which eventually led to civil war, this is simply not borne out by the evidence. There was in no sense a fundamental breakdown of relations between government and people. What of social problems, then? The burdens of the war have been interpreted as coming alongside a series of other woes of the commonwealth. This was already a point at which living standards were being eroded by population growth; the poor were getting poorer and villagers were becoming polarised between the minority of prosperous landowners and poorer, often landless, peasants. These longer-term problems were accentuated in the 1590s by food shortages. The harvests of 1594 and 1595 were both disappointing and those of 1596 and 1597 were even worse. Rural society could absorb one or two bad harvests, but four on the trot was serious. Mortality rose, especially among the poor. There was also a serious outbreak of plague in London in 1593. In itself we might question whether this supports the case of a 'crisis of the 1590s’. After all, famine and plague were by no means unique to the period – any decade of the 16th century saw such outbreaks. This was a subsistence economy in which disease and famine were expected elements of life; from time to time they struck. One notable feature of the 1590s, however, was that the government took an increasingly active role in managing these problems, continuing an approach that can be seen throughout the 16th century. The Privy Council issued 'Books of Orders’ to the JPs, directing them on how to manage supplies of grain and prevent hoarding and profiteering and so forth. Local officials worked hard to implement these directives. It was in everyone’s interest to prevent starvation and death and the accompanying discontent and protest. More broadly, the increasing social problems of the period led to the enactment of the Poor Laws by the Parliaments of 1597 and 1601, something supported both by the government and the political nation more broadly. Building on earlier Tudor legislation, the laws directed that every parish collect money from the wealthier inhabitants to provide a basic level of subsistence to the poorest. The sums offered were pitifully small and there were all sorts of problems with the system, but it remained the basis of poor relief in England until the 19th century. These moves scarcely suggest a dysfunctional political system; they were in fact innovative responses to pressing national problems. The government appears to have managed affairs such that discontent was minimised, something that is shown by the remarkable lack of popular uprisings in the 1590s. This is impressive given that the government itself was undergoing a major generational shift. With the deaths of Leicester in 1588, Walsingham in 1590 and Hatton in 1591, some historians have claimed that the regime was closing in upon itself, becoming increasingly exclusive, insular, even authoritarian. The shift is overdrawn. There was still a great deal of continuity within the regime, with experienced councillors, such as Lord Buckhurst and Lord Admiral Howard, working alongside rising stars such as Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex. Above all, it is easily forgotten that William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who had been at Elizabeth’s side since the very start of her reign in 1558, himself survived as an active councillor virtually until his death in 1598. It is true that some younger courtiers chafed at their exclusion from power, and the Privy Council did shrink to an unusually small size, but in fact Elizabeth had always preferred a highly select Council. Only one of the queen’s three archbishops of Canterbury became a councillor and other notables, such as Sir Walter Ralegh, Francis Bacon and many lesser men were also excluded. As the Earl of Pembroke, himself a major figure never admitted to the Council, put it, 'some must govern, some obey’. Ultimately, the evidence suggests that the Council continued to operate in a broadly consensual way, even in a period in which it had to work harder than ever before to deal with the stresses of war. THE OBVIOUS EXCEPTION TO THIS picture of effective cooperation was Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, whose spectacular rise to favour at the start of the 1590s, matched by his disastrous fall at the end of the decade, has understandably fascinated historians. It is often argued that his rivalry with the other rising star of the period, Robert Cecil, dominated political life at court, which became poisoned by their mutual animosity. While there was clearly tension between these two very different men, it is going too far to see the entirety of political life as dictated by their competition for power. Essex and Cecil could and did work together whether they liked each other or not, as political leaders often have to do. Fundamentally the two men were concerned with different areas of public life: Essex was the leading military figure, heading expeditions abroad; Cecil worked at home to raise the supplies that were needed. The evidence demonstrates that this working partnership was remarkably effective. Essex’s final command was no exception. He was sent to Ireland in 1599 to put down the Earl of Tyrone’s rebellion, a problem which by then dominated the political scene. The mission ended in catastrophe for Essex; he failed to achieve any of his objectives and ended up abandoning his command after less than six months in Ireland. His unauthorised return to court was compounded by him bursting in on the queen, soiled with the dirt of travel, in a desperate effort to present to her his side of the story. Having failed so spectacularly, he inevitably fell into a disgrace, which lasted 18 months. His 'rebellion’ in February 1601 was a final, futile attempt to force his way back into the queen’s favour, but instead led him to the scaffold days later. Essex’s failure in Ireland cannot be put down to a lack of support from Cecil and from England – in fact Essex’s army was larger than any previous Elizabethan army – but may best be explained by a combination of ill-luck, a hugely challenging mission and Essex’s own shortcomings, including a distinct sense of paranoia that came to dominate his actions. Once he had removed himself, the Irish situation fell into the patterns established more broadly at this time. The major crisis of Tyrone’s rebellion was contained and controlled by a massive royal army, a formidable effort on the part of the regime. Essex’s replacement, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, led the army in a brutal suppression of Ireland, which was complete by the end of Elizabeth’s reign; news of Tyrone’s surrender arrived in London six days after the queen’s death. THE FAILURE OF ESSEX’S CAREER was in many respects the great disappointment of the 1590s, but it highlights something that is often overlooked: the continuing centrality of Elizabeth herself to her government. The rise of Essex was due to royal favour; without it, he would have remained an impoverished young nobleman. The queen’s identification of the youthful earl as a man of great potential, a possible replacement even for Leicester’s role in government, may, in retrospect, have been a mistake. Certainly she may be charged with having mishandled him to some extent, allowing him too much freedom and failing to set the limits of appropriate behaviour. But once she had made the decision that he had gone too far, that was it; there was no way back into government for Essex, just as there was no room on her Privy Council for men such as Francis Bacon, who had displeased her. The queen’s decision was final and that is what makes it so clear that Elizabeth was still in control. This was even true of the great unresolved question of the reign: the succession. It was widely believed that James VI of Scotland was the most likely successor and Elizabeth never contradicted this. During the 1560s and 1570s she had been under constant pressure to marry and settle the succession; by the 1590s it seems that few people had the nerve to press her on the point. Both Essex and Cecil conducted highly secret correspondence with James and, while we know little about what Essex was saying, Cecil’s letters survive. There was a remarkable and revealing feature to his letters, in that he took great pains to clarify that his first allegiance remained to Elizabeth until her death. In a letter to James of October 1601 he redrafted the ending several times. Having experimented with telling James that he was 'after Caesar, yours above all’ and 'yours to command above all’, Cecil settled for the more direct and carefully formulated statement that he would 'ever remaine in humblest affections after one, and her alone, at your Majesties commandment’. Cecil’s clarity about his order of priorities provides striking evidence of Elizabeth’s continued hold on the loyalty of the most prominent member of her government and suggests the key to the stability of her reign during the early 1600s, something that eventually resulted in the smooth transfer of power to James himself. There is no doubt that the 1590s was a difficult period in certain ways. Yet historians should resist caricature and acknowledge both the good and the bad, the strengths and the weaknesses. Elizabeth’s government faced the challenges of circumstance and often dealt with them highly successfully. There is no need to characterise these years as a period of decline and sterility. They witnessed a government working at the peak of its capacity, dealing with serious problems with remarkable efficiency. Perhaps most impressively, the regime maintained the war effort in Europe at the same time as raising and equipping a large army in Ireland. Significant economic problems at home were contained and controlled by an innovative programme of legislation. At court, Essex’s rise and fall were easily contained. The queen lived to die of natural causes, uncontested on her throne, having maintained her power until the end.

Janet Dickinson and Neil Younger, “Just How Nasty Were the 1590s?,” History Today, vol. 64, no. 7, July 2014, pp. 10-16. Source