Daily Life in Elizabethan England (8 page)

£20; in 1593 recusants were forbidden to travel more than five miles from their home without a license from the local bishop or justice of the peace.

Yet even amidst these rising tensions a Catholic like the composer William Byrd was able to secure a place as a court musician under the patronage of the queen.

At the other end of the religious spectrum were those who felt that the English church was not Protestant enough. Many English Protestants believed that the Church of England needed to go further along the path of reform; they objected to even the limited degree of ritual retained in the church and wanted a more fully Protestant church like those in Scotland, the Netherlands, and Geneva. Some even felt that bishops should be abolished, since their office was not based on scriptural authority. Such people favored a presbyterian church government, run by assemblies of clergy and godly laymen, an idea that Elizabeth considered a threat to her royal authority.

Opponents of the advocates of further reform called them Precisians or Puritans. The Puritans had no label for themselves, except perhaps generally referring to the
godly
or
reformed
—indeed they were not a cohesive movement but represented a spectrum of reformist thinking within the established church.

There were others who saw the national church as hopelessly flawed and founded clandestine religious groups of their own outside the

church’s authority, pursuing what they felt was a purer form of Christian worship. Notable among these were the Anabaptists, who had been an underground presence since the days of Henry VIII, and the
Brownists,
as critics labeled the followers of Robert Browne, who founded a clandestine group in Norfolk around 1580, and eventually established a foothold in London and elsewhere in the country. Such sects formed small independent congregations for worship, but their meetings were secretive, since the government regarded separatism as treasonous. Government suppression drove some of these Separatists to the Netherlands, where they
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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

would later merge with the emigrants who went on to establish the Plymouth Colony in America in 1620.

A certain measure of religious liberty was allowed for foreigners.

French and Dutch (mostly Flemish) Protestants had their own churches in London, although the English were not allowed to attend them. Even the diplomatic representatives of Catholic countries were allowed to celebrate Mass in their residences—again, strictly off-limits to subjects of the English crown. There were even communities of Jews. The Jews had officially been evicted from England in 1290, and would not be officially readmitted until the late 1600s, but there were Spanish and Portuguese Jews in London and other major ports, officially purporting to be Catholics. Such men included Hector Nuñez, an associate of several leading figures in Elizabeth’s Privy Council. The most famous was Rodrigo Lopez, who served for a time as personal physician to the earl of Leicester and ultimately to the Queen herself. Changing political tides led to Lopez’s trial for treason on fabricated charges of attempting to assassinate the monarch, resulting in his execution in 1594—not long before Shakespeare’s
Merchant of Venice
appeared on the stage.

THE STATE

Since the Middle Ages, English government had been organized around the principle of laws. Elizabethan England had a highly developed—in some ways overdeveloped—legal system that guided the roles and operations of the country’s various governmental authorities. Law and government were indistinguishable: any given government authority might fulfill political, legislative, and judiciary roles, and the typical Elizabethan court was an administrative and legislative body as well as a court in the modern sense. Yet Elizabethan law was never embodied within a single written code. It consisted of a variety of traditions, practices, and jurisdictions informed but never defined by written documents.

The entire system rested on the principle of custom: things were done in a certain way because they had been done so since time out of mind.

This system ensured stability, but also accommodated change, since customs could fall out of use if no one was inclined to enforce them, and new practices could become customary over time. It could also lead to conflict when different elements in society adhered to different ideas of which customary practices had the force of law—this dynamic would be a major factor in the story of Elizabeth’s Stuart successors, when conflict between royalist and parliamentarian views of authority came to Civil War in 1642.

Government

The most unambiguously powerful organ of government was the

monarch acting in concert with Parliament. Parliament had emerged as a
Society 31

consultative body during the Middle Ages. By the 1500s, one of its most important roles was to approve taxation. Ordinary royal income, based on such sources as crown lands, customs, and legal fines, was never adequate to support extraordinary expenses such as the costs of war. When additional revenue was needed, Parliament might vote a
subsidy,
a tax on property to supplement the crown’s ordinary income. Equally important, Parliament had become a forum where the monarch could build support and consensus for royal policies among the privileged classes. Henry VIII had made unprecedented use of Parliament in this way in order to legiti-mize his transformation of the English church.

Elizabeth inherited from her father a powerful alliance with Parliament, and she managed her relations with Parliament successfully to ensure support from those who had the ability to facilitate or obstruct her will.

But this relationship was far from a guaranteed success. The House of Commons in particular had become accustomed to playing a more active part in government under the earlier Tudors, and was becoming increasingly assertive and self-confident. Elizabeth’s Stuart successors, lacking her instinct for public relations and political management, would find themselves increasingly at odds with their Parliaments.

Parliament was divided into two houses. The House of Lords was

attended by approximately 50 lay peers, 24 bishops, and 2 archbishops.

The House of Commons consisted of 2 representatives from each English shire (with the exception of Durham—a holdover from the Middle Ages when this was an independent feudal jurisdiction), 2 from each of about 180 English cities and towns (with some exceptions, including London, which sent 4), plus a single representative from each of 12 Welsh shires and 1 each from 12 Welsh towns; the total was around 450 representatives.

The exact means by which the representatives were chosen depended on local practice, but in the shires any holder of lands worth 40 shillings a year was entitled to vote.

A bill passed by both Houses and assented to by the monarch was the highest legal authority in the land. Elizabeth made use of Parliament when she had need of money or of new national initiatives to deal with changing circumstances, but Parliament was not a regular part of the apparatus of her government: only 10 parliaments were summoned during her half-century reign, meeting for less than three years in all.

The actual operation of government revolved around the figure of the monarch, who was the embodiment and guarantor of law, as well as the executive figure at the head of the state. To provide advice and to oversee the day-to-day business of governing, the Queen relied on her Privy Council. The Council numbered a bit over a dozen men, hand-selected by the monarch, and drawing heavily from men of gentry background, in contrast with medieval councils that had been dominated by aristocrats.

The Privy Council supervised national defense, regulated commerce, heard sensitive judicial cases, managed government finances, and supervised the operations of government. They also deliberated matters of pol-32

Daily Life in Elizabethan England

icy, although the Queen always had the final say. The monarch, and the Council acting in the monarch’s name, had some power to issue decrees enforceable at law, but the exact extent of these powers was ill-defined.

Dependent on the crown was a complex network of bureaucracies and

jurisdictions. The Privy Councilors generally held office in addition to their role on the Council, heading up bureaucracies of their own in the Queen’s name: during the latter half of her reign, Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, served as Lord Treasurer; Sir Christopher Hatton was Lord Chancellor; Sir Francis Walsingham was Secretary of State. The treasury and chancery were the largest departments: the former was responsible for administering royal finances; the latter was the chief organ of the administrative and legal bureaucracy. The various government departments were staffed by a modest civil service, numbering about 600 salaried officials, with another 600 serving the monarch in administering crown lands.

Perhaps as important as the formal royal bureaucracies was the informal institution of the court, orbiting around the person of the Queen herself. As modern lobbyists know, face time with people who have power is itself a route to power. Those who were able to speak with the Queen in person could gain access to favors and privileges for themselves and their friends.

These people included government officers such as the Privy Councilors, but also many who were not actually a part of government, such as the ladies-in-waiting who kept Elizabeth company and looked after her needs.

These leading courtiers were sought after by a subsidiary tier of secondary courtiers, and so on downward in a complex hierarchy of patronage.

Royal government operated at the local level through the country’s 39

shires or counties. In the Middle Ages, the crown’s main representative in the shire had been the sheriff, but by Elizabeth’s day, the sheriffs had been reduced to a managerial role. Each shire also had a Lord Lieutenant, responsible for military matters, and a coroner (literally “crowner”), whose investigated suspicious deaths in case the government needed to pursue a criminal indictment.

The most important organ of government in the shires was the Commission of the Peace. Each year the crown appointed a number of local gentry as justices of the peace for their shire. The justices met four times a year in the chief town of the shire to handle important judicial cases in the Quarter Sessions; there were also more frequent Petty Sessions held locally by smaller groups of justices. Individual justices of the peace were also empowered to deliver summary judgment in minor local cases.

At every level the justices of the peace had administrative and quasi-legislative powers in addition to their judiciary functions.

In addition to the local justice of the peace, there were other sometimes overlapping local jurisdictions. Since the Middle Ages, the shires had been subdivided into hundreds (or wapentakes, as they were called in areas once conquered by the Vikings). These had their own courts and officers, although their role had been marginalized by the late 1500s.

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At the local level, royal government more often operated through the parish. Each parish had at least one constable, a part-time officer drawn from the yeomanly class. The parish constable was responsible for local law enforcement and worked closely with local justices of the peace in administering law and policy at the community level. Parishes were also responsible for the execution of national laws: there were Surveyors of the Highway to oversee the implementation of the Highway Act of 1555, while from 1598 Overseers of the Poor were charged with administering the Poor Laws. Boroughs and manors also had their own officers and courts with authority over local matters.

At every level, exceptions were common. London was an exception

among the boroughs, sending four representatives to Parliament—reflecting its importance, but in no way proportional to the city’s wealth, power, or population. The Borough of Southwark on the south bank of the Thames was an exception within London, being administered not by the usual urban forms of government but as a feudal manor owned by the City of London. Within Southwark there were several areas exempted from the legal power of borough authorities:
liberties
such as the environs of the Marshalsea prison, exempted because it was royal land, and
sanctuaries
like Montague Close near London Bridge, which retained privileges from the days when it had been owned by the church.

At all levels government relied heavily on unpaid or underpaid office-holders—by definition drawn from the classes who could afford to spare time from work. Great lords might serve in major offices of the state; local gentlemen served as justices of the peace; and even ordinary tradesmen and yeomen might be called upon to serve in minor local offices of the village, town, or parish. This kind of unpaid work was a cause of governmental corruption; men who had to spend considerable time and money on an unsalaried government office would frequently find other ways to make the post profitable.

Law

One of the most important functions of the royal government was in overseeing a national system of courts to implement the laws. England’s Common Law had emerged in the Middle Ages as the result of royal

efforts to centralize and standardize the patchwork of jurisdictions and practices that had emerged in the feudal environment. The guiding

principles of the Common Law were tradition and precedent: Common

Law was seen as the embodiment of centuries-old customs, guided and informed by legal precedent as embodied in the practice of the courts and documented in the records of prior legal cases. Common Law was supplemented by Parliamentary statute, which was seen as a vehicle for dealing with emerging needs that were not already addressed by existing Common Law.

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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

At the national level, both Common Law and Statute Law were implemented by the Court of Common Pleas, which handled civil matters (i.e., between subjects of the crown); the Court of the Exchequer, which handled cases in which the crown was alleged to have a financial interest; and the Court of Queen’s Bench, which dealt with criminal cases (i.e., those to which the crown was a party) and could also serve as a de facto court of appeal. All of these courts met at Westminster, within walking distance of the city of London. Judges from these central courts were also sent out twice a year to travel circuits of the country, sitting as courts of Assize in the chief towns of each shire, where they would hear both civil and criminal cases.