Heretic Queen (42 page)

These tinkers terms, and barber's gests first Tarleton on the stage,

Then Martin in his books of lies

Hath put in every page.
8

A Whip for an Ape,
also thought to be by Lyly, identifies “Martin” as a performing ape, who attacks Lady Divinity. In later plays, the ape Martin appeared with “a cock's combe, an ape's face, a wolf's belly, cats [
sic
] claws.” Full of scatological metaphors and imaginative insults against the established church, they simply had to be suppressed.
9
After all, “thinking” audiences couldn't always catch the full impact of the references during a performance, so they sought out the printed versions to which the plays referred. The only way to stop the proliferation of profanity was to find the clandestine Marprelate press and its printer and close down his business.

The Martinist plays were causing widespread disorder and generated myriad complaints from London's Puritan aldermen. As the irreverence toward the Puritans grew, so the objects of these raw satires fueled further public disorder. Thomas Phelippes, Walsingham's right-hand man, wrote, “The division between the Protestants and the Puritans is not other than it has been for a long time.” Martin's words were in “everyman's mouth.” The pamphlets were instant bestsellers.
10

Burghley gave the order to find the Marprelate printing press, smash it, and bring in the printer for questioning before the Star Chamber. One man's name kept popping up in the investigations, the Worcestershire-born printer Robert Waldegrave. How the talented Waldegrave, by and large printer of Puritan pamphlets by divines like Laurence Chaderton, John Field, and John Knox became embroiled in the Marprelate Controversy remains a mystery. Perhaps there is a hint in his 1580s incarceration at the hands of Archbishop Whitgift? Seemingly, the archbishop had had Waldegrave imprisoned at least twice at the White Lion, the favored prison for obstinate Puritans.
11
Still, these Puritan divines had had their works legitimately published in London and registered in the Stationers Company without jeopardizing the livelihoods of their printers. So what had changed?

Was it the Armada threat? Was it the Jesuit missions? Whatever the reasons, Elizabeth's bishops were ill prepared for Martin's biting satire and upped the ante. On the first Sunday of the Parliament in February 1589, Bishop Richard Bancroft took to the pulpit at St. Paul's Cross—the official place to disseminate the government's take on current events and religious policy, and just around the corner from the churchyard, where most of the printers worth their salt had their stalls. Bancroft, of course, preached about the evils of Martin Marprelate's invective. The following Wednesday
A Proclamation against Certain Seditious and Schismatical Books and Libels
appeared with a particular message from the queen: “These secretly published schismatical and seditious books and defamatory libels and other fantastical writings … tended to the abridging or rather to the overthrow of Her Highness's lawful Prerogative allowed by God's law and established by the laws of the Realm.”
12
Elizabeth had decided that Martin was calling the Anglican settlement into question, and she was unamused.

Shortly after the proclamation, someone on the hunt for the press noticed that one of the works of the Puritan divine John Udall had been printed on the “Marprelate press.” The searchers, led by John Wolf, beadle of the Corporation of London, barged into Waldegrave's premises under the sign of the Crane in St. Paul's Churchyard, smashed his press, and took his cases of type and copies of John Udall's
State of the Church of England.
Fortunately for Waldegrave, he had had wind of the raid and had already escaped to the West Country and from there by sea to Scotland. Within the year, Waldegrave had become the official printer to the court of James VI.

The furor about Martin Marprelate was condemned by Francis Bacon, youngest son of Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon, who had died a decade earlier. Francis had been seeking high office, without any success, and seemingly had not had the backing of his uncle Burghley. The controversy gave him a platform for speaking out. The ribald style was roundly condemned as “this immodest and deformed manner of writing … whereby matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage.”
13

*   *   *

Yet the Marprelate Controversy
was nothing new to the world of theater. The Puritan aldermen of London had never made a secret of their view that theaters and stage plays were “an offence to the godly.” They broke the Sabbath, and yet “two hundred proud players jet in their silks” under the protection of the queen. Since the formation of Leicester's Men in 1572, all playing companies had to be licensed by Elizabeth and wear the livery of their lord sponsor. This separated them from “masterless men” and vagabonds who clogged England's roads, making them quasi-servants of their lords' households. If the affiliation between the company and the lord who sponsored them became interrupted either by death or disgrace of the lord or any reportable misdeed of the company, then the license to play would be revoked, or worse.

Still, there were other threats to the world of theater and its influence on English hearts and minds. The “plague time” quotas had been instituted out of concern for public health, and once fifty deaths or greater per week due to plague were logged, the theaters were closed. Plague, however, never closed the other places where people congregated, most notably London's churches, Westminster Abbey, or St. Paul's Cathedral. When the plague didn't close the theaters as hoped in the long, hot summers, the Lord Mayor, as in 1586, closed them on the
presumption
that the warm summer
might
breed a plague.
14

*   *   *

By 1590, censorship
by the Master of the Revels on behalf of the commission was commonplace, with Tilney using his “learned judgment” to strike out or demand a redraft of “such parts and matters as they shall find unfit and undecent to be handled in plays, both for Divinity and State.” Just in case the impresarios or the playwrights and players didn't understand the penalty, that, too, was spelled out: “Perpetual disabilities are threatened to those who produce any pieces not so allowed.”
15

Paul's Boys, the theater company of boy players of the cathedral, was dissolved in 1590, presumably for offenses similar to Marprelate. They only regrouped around 1600. Even Shakespeare had a brush early in his career with Tilney. When Shakespeare had been brought in as one of the “fixers” of the “stale” manuscript of the play
Sir Thomas More,
he soon discovered the sensibilities of the crown. The play remains officially anonymous to this day, though five playwrights seemingly comprise its authors. There were at least three sets of alterations, with the final and latest set believed to be one of the rare glimpses of William Shakespeare's handwriting—Hand D.
16
The problem with the play arose around the scene of the “ill May Day” of 1517 when Thomas More as Lord Chancellor refused to recognize Henry VIII's position as head of England's church while entertaining the Lord Mayor and the aldermen of London at his home. More is sympathetic and tragic throughout, since he had remained a figure of admiration in the public's psyche. The sympathy of the playwrights, as always, remained with their audiences.
17

With prohibitions following each proclamation against the playhouses and inns situated within London's walls, it is little wonder that the entrepreneur impresarios like Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn took action. They decamped throughout the 1590s over the Thames River to that haunt of pleasure and vice, Southwark, which fell outside the Liberties of London. A large part of Southwark had been under the control of the bishop of Winchester for over half a century, and he happily derived much of his income from the brothels and the “Winchester Geese” (their prostitutes) within its boundaries. The words of Thomas Aquinas were often repeated to the bishop, that “prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace; take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil-smelling place.”
18

To avoid such a catastrophe, the church provided a ready solution. The Episcopal Court required “stewholders” (brothel-keepers) not to detain any woman who wished to give up her “craft” and to prohibit any married women or nuns from partaking of their establishments' shelter. Further, whores could not solicit or “throw stones” at passersby to get custom. In this way, the bishop of Winchester's conscience was assuaged. Local burghers could happily run the bishop's businesses. The Thames wherry men were delighted with the increase in their trade, and the owners of the playhouses, Henslowe and his son-in-law Alleyn, joined in, finding brothel-keeping at least as profitable as the theater.
19
Soon, Francis Langley planned to build the Swan theater on the Bankside, much to the objection of the powerless Lord Mayor. Even Elizabeth's cousin Lord Hunsdon had taken on the farmed-out enterprise of the Paris Garden from the bishop of Winchester. While the Lord Mayor fulminated, sometimes more successfully than others, this happy solution ultimately provided us with the plays by Marlowe, his successor Shakespeare, and the flowering Renaissance of English theater.

*   *   *

There were other
religious winds blowing against the theater and its players beside those of the Puritan aldermen in London. The Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's “Sweet Robin,” had died shortly after the failed Armada invasion in September 1588. Francis Walsingham followed in April 1590. William, Lord Burghley, was gnarled with arthritis and crippled by gout and old age. Though he remained her councillor until his death in August 1598, his voice in the affairs of state had become fainter. These pillars of Elizabeth's Privy Council had deserted her to death and infirmity.

The new generation of councillors, advising or alternatively coercing Elizabeth, was brash, ambitious, and looking toward their personal futures. Leicester had brought forward his bright, beautiful stepson Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, as his proposed successor in the mid-1580s. Elizabeth undoubtedly saw a young Robert Dudley in Essex, and a past long forgotten. Where Essex relied on his charm, talent, and wit, Burghley's chosen successor, his younger son, Robert Cecil, used his ambition, Machiavellian streak, and raw intellect in the service of the crown. Essex was born to a title and wealth; Cecil as the younger son was not. Walter Raleigh had come to court slightly before Essex and was one of the reasons for Leicester's bringing his stepson into the limelight when he did. Though Raleigh had begun without a personal fortune to his name, Elizabeth had made him one of the wealthiest men in England and the largest landholder by far in Ireland. Francis Bacon, most likely the brightest of them all and Robert Cecil's first cousin, had been barred from high office due to an unwise inaugural speech in Parliament, as much as by a lack of support from Burghley. Where Elizabeth had been adept in her younger days at keeping warring factions at bay, her royal will would be tested by the new dramatis personae.

If Essex represented Elizabeth's heart, Cecil stood up for her steely will. He knew he was dwarfish and misshapen, as over 25 percent of all Tudor children were due to the poor diets of their mothers while pregnant. He knew he would never win any beauty contests as Essex could. Nor did he have Essex's gift of verse-making. So Cecil made up for his lack of physical presence with a mind like a steel trap and a skill for oratory that would develop in the coming years.

Though Walsingham had died in April 1590, a year later, no one had been appointed to replace him. Essex had been spurned for the job. Not only had Elizabeth refused to consider him for Walsingham's vacant position, but she refused to appoint him to the Privy Council. When Elizabeth visited Burghley's home at Theobalds in May 1591, Cecil put on a not-too-subtle play for her in which a messenger delivered a dispatch for “Mr. Secretary Cecil.” Three months later, with a strong shove center stage from his father, Robert Cecil, aged only twenty-eight, became a privy councillor. Essex fumed that the “elf” had been singled out for this exceptional honor. Raleigh was livid, and perhaps it was this that threw him into the arms of Elizabeth Throckmorton that year.

Still, Burghley wasn't dead yet. Nor was he quite ready to allow the baton of defender of the Elizabethan settlement to pass into the hands of his son. In October 1591 Burghley issued a royal proclamation “Establishing Commissions against Seminary Priests and Jesuits” as part of his
Declaration of Great Troubles Pretended against the Realme by a number of Seminary priests and Jesuits.
It was deliberately intended to accuse Philip of prolonging “the former violence and rigor of [his] malice” against England with renewed Armada threats.

Burghley, for once, wrote quite stirring words. He accused Philip, with the authority of the new Pope Gregory XIV “hanging at his girdle,” of practicing “with certain principal seditious heads, being unnatural subjects of our kingdom … to gather together with great labours upon his charges a multitude of dissolute young men, who have, partly for lack of living, partly for crimes committed, become fugitives, rebels, and traitors, and for whom there are in Rome and Spain and other places certain receptacles made to live in and there to be instructed in school points of sedition.”
20

The new, and short-lived, Gregory XIV (Niccolò Sfondrati of Milan), was more concerned with the French wars of religion, which were not going well, despite his excommunication of the Protestant Henry IV. Nonetheless, both the pope and Philip were outraged by Burghley's accusation that they were guilty of fomenting disloyalty to Elizabeth. Burghley knew better, though. He had already learned that they were actively seeking a suitable heir to the English throne—a topic of discussion long outlawed by the queen.