The Elizabethans (18 page)

One reason that Dee was always poor was that he was irresistibly drawn to the acquisition of books and manuscripts. This was a passion he shared with Archbishop Parker, who also had a prodigious collection. The Dissolution of the monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII had led to the destruction of untold, unguessable numbers of treasures. Parker had a particular interest in the discovery and preservation of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, but in the vandalistic mayhem of the 1530s there is no knowing how many
Wanderer
or
Seafarer
poems were used to line pudding basins or how many epics of the quality of
Beowulf
were used as lavatory paper. Nor was the vandalism confined to bumpkin monasteries in the country. The universities were just as gleefully anxious to destroy the past. Richard Layton, the King’s visitor to Oxford in September 1535, delighted in the spectacle of the front quadrangle at New College thick with the leaves of scholastic manuscripts that his assistants had thrown out of the library. They were collected by a Buckinghamshire gentleman to use as scarecrows.
¹⁵

Dee’s collection of books and manuscripts was one of the most significant of Renaissance collections in England – significant, that is to say, for what antiquarian interest sought to salvage from the past, and in what scientific and other directions he chose to expand learning. Some of Dee’s manuscript collection was lost through vandalism. During one of his absences abroad in 1589, his house in Mortlake was attacked by burglars. John Davies the pirate (not to be confused with the lawyer-poet of
Orchestra
) was believed by Dee to be responsible. His pupil Nicholas Saunder also appears to have stolen from him.
¹⁶

Some of the books and manuscripts were sold by Dee himself or were bought by other scholars or libraries from his collection after he died. These were catalogued in 1921 by M.R. James – he of the
Ghost Stories
– and the bulk of the manuscript collection identified by James is to be found in Corpus Christi College, Oxford. As for the books, stray volumes were acquired by such varied libraries as Pepys, Harley and Lambeth Palace.
¹⁷

What M.R. James demonstrated was that Dee’s library was not merely a private antiquarian fad, or an accumulation of old junk by an obsessive collector. His library was possibly as large as 3,000 or even 4,000 volumes. It was far bigger than any university or college library at this date, and it was rich in learning that was all but unknown in universities. ‘The whole Renaissance is in this library,’ said Frances Yates.
¹⁸
F.R. Johnson, the American historian of science, wrote that Dee’s circle and his Mortlake library constituted the scientific academy of Renaissance England.
¹⁹
There were works here in twenty-one different languages, and covering every branch of learning. It was much consulted by those who wished to share in Dee’s learning, not only in science as we should now term those branches of knowledge that relate to outer space and the natural world and mathematics, but also to navigation. Dee was the first man to use the phrase the ‘British Empire’ and he was one of those who encouraged the Queen and her government to expand their interests beyond Europe and colonise the New World. In short, the books and manuscripts that filled room after room at Mortlake (‘4 or 5 Roomes in his house fild with Bookes’, according to the antiquary Elias Ashmole, 1617–92) were the library of Prospero.

Faust is a myth of knowledge as power. Prospero is a myth of knowledge as imagination. Like Dee, Prospero was a magician and a book man and, in his treatment of Caliban and his assumption of lordship over the island, an early exemplar of ‘the British impire’. His library ‘was dukedom large enough’,
²⁰
but this is not a self-abnegating saying, since he achieves more power through knowledge and magic than he would have done through politics.

When we light our eyes on Dr Dee, what was memorably called the Elizabethan World Picture
²¹
comes into focus. Dee’s library, salvaged as it was from the wastes of monasteries, as well as being replenished from the new printing presses of Europe, represents a continuation just as much as it represents a break with the past. Dee and his contemporaries – Catholic or Protestant – had far more in common with the Middle Ages, and indeed with the classical past, than they do with us. They took for granted a fluency in Latin, for one thing. They regarded astrology as a science rather than a chicanery. They might have disapproved of summoning up angel-spirits, but of the reality of angels they had no doubt. Heaven had been shifted by Copernicus, but God was still there. The planets still shed their influence.

8

The Northern Rebellion

NORTH OF TRENT
was another land. If Elizabeth made herself loved by royal progresses and pageants in Berkshire, Hertfordshire, East Anglia or Warwickshire, she was never in the North. During the whole of her reign she limited her travels to the Midlands and the South.

In spite of Cecil’s preoccupation with the threats to the government of the realm by Scotland or the Scottish queen, he overlooked warnings sent from the country in between – the North of England – that not everyone was happy.

In October 1561 the new Bishop of Durham, a learned and Protestant-minded man named James Pilkington, wrote in distraught tones to Cecil, ‘I am afraid to think what may follow if it be not foreseen. The worshipful of the shire’ – that is, the aristocracy and the gentry – ‘is set and of small power, the people rude and heady and by these occasions most bold.’ A month later Pilkington was continuing to warn Cecil, ‘for the nature of the people I would not have thought there had been so forward a generation in this realm . . . I am grown into such displeasure with them . . . that I know not whether they like me worse or I they. So great dissembling, so poisonful tongues and malicious words I have not seen . . . where I had little wit at my coming, now have left me almost none.’
¹

The extent of the bishopric of Durham, the actual landed wealth of the bishop, was enormous. He was by far the biggest landowner in the region, owning whole manors, boroughs, towns and hamlets, and commanding rents of £2,500 per annum.
²
Next to the bishop in landed wealth was the cathedral itself – formerly a great Benedictine monastery, and now a corporation (chapter) of canons, presided over by a dean. The leading lay magnate of the region was the Earl of Westmorland, who owned almost as much as the cathedral – as well as lands in Northumberland and Yorkshire, he commanded the lordships of Brancepeth, Raby, Eggleston and Winlaton. The Earl of Westmorland, of the family of Neville, was the greatest magnate of the Durham bishopric, with other aristocratic and gentry families – Lord Lumley, the Bowes of Streatlarn, the Hiltons of Hylton, the Tempests, the Lambtons – themselves owning much land and owing an almost feudal obedience to the Nevilles. The tensions between the Durham landowners and the new government in London should have alerted Cecil to the potential dangers of a clash with the North. But Durham is a very long way from London. Even in the eighteenth century, after the invention of stagecoaches, the journey from London to York took four days, with a further two from York to Newcastle. The ride made by Sir Robert Carey in 1603 from London to Edinburgh, to tell James VI that he was now the King of England, took a prodigiously brief three days, but this meant averaging a ride of 150 miles per twenty-four hours. Anything that required the movement of luggage, or goods, or military supplies took much, much longer. The only main road was the Great North Road, leading from York to Newcastle and onward to the Scottish border.

The sheer difficulty of communications between North and South did not, however, as is sometimes supposed, cut off the northerners from the South. For example, the coal-mining industry and the coal trade flourished in the sixteenth century (and greatly increased) towards the end of the reign – rising from 56 to 139 tons from 1590 to 1630 – shipped from the Tyne to London. Northern clergy, northern magistrates and northern landowners remained fully aware of what was going on in London and quite often had good reason to resent it. When parliaments were summoned, northern constituents sent members. The great northern magnates were represented in the Council. The problem was not that the North was out of touch with the South, so much as that the South was out of touch with the North, never bothering to go there or to sound out the feelings of those – high and low, urban and rural, landed and mercantile – who lived there.

In 1536 there had occurred one of the great conservative mass movements against the Tudor regime. Sir Robert Aske, a Yorkshire lawyer, drew together an enormous mass protest against the Dissolution of the monasteries: the Pilgrimage of Grace. More than 30,000 pilgrims began to march southwards. It was almost entirely a religious rebellion, though this inevitably – given the nature of the times – was a political gesture against the influence of Thomas Cromwell, and against the extension of the King’s rights to raise taxes. The Pilgrimage of Grace was a failure. The leaders of the movement were put to death: some 216 hangings or executions.
³

In the thirty years that passed after the Pilgrimage of Grace, the North changed. The principal, and crucial, change was in York and urban Yorkshire. When Elizabeth became Queen in 1558 the city of York was laid waste by plague. In 1561 she established the Northern Council, one of whose aims was to reverse the economic decline of the region. From now on there was a palpable increase in the city’s prosperity – more inns, more bakers, more tailors, drapers and clothiers. The increase of prosperity and the combined efforts of the Northern Council and Commission ‘made York a miniature Westminster’.
⁴
When the rebellion of the northern earls occurred in 1569–70, York had completely reversed its position as the champion of Catholic reaction. Not only did York accommodate 3,000-odd of those 14,000
⁵
soldiers who were used to suppress the rebellion, but the citizens of York gave a short-term loan of more than £1,000 to supply the soldiers’ wages.
⁶

Lancashire, more rural, was much more religiously conservative than Yorkshire in Elizabeth’s reign. Only thirteen priests in the county
⁷
were actually deprived of their livings for refusing to take an oath to Queen Elizabeth. These included the warden and Fellows of Manchester College – of which John Dee would eventually become the warden. It is difficult to judge, however, which priests and congregations were ‘church papists’, outwardly conforming to the Elizabethan Settlement while secretly wishing to realign the Church of England with Rome, and how many were, with greater or lesser degrees of muddle, High Church – or content to recognise the Church where they found it. In the later decades, from the 1570s onwards, we shall begin to see the emergence of recusancy, of a refusal to accept the Elizabethan Church and an allegiance, secret or overt, to the Pope and the old religion. Lancashire, was a stronghold of recusancy. This was not to deny that there was some Protestantism in Lancashire, but it was mainly imposed upon them from above by interfering visitations. These visitors often discovered to their consternation that when they descended upon Lancashire parishes, it was ‘business as usual’. In 1564 they found the curate of Farnworth shriving (that is, hearing confessions, as the Prayer Book entitled him to do) and ‘suffering candles to be burned in the chapel upon Candlemas Day, according to the old superstitious customs’.
⁸

The vicar of Huyton (later in history, Harold Wilson’s parliamentary constituency) was found using holy water and persuading people to ‘pray in the old ways’. In Wigan they were still using holy water in 1584. Bells were tolled for the dead at Preston in 1574, and at Manchester, Walton and Whalley in 1571. In 1573 it was still found customary in Lancashire for the congregations to make offerings and to keep up the old ceremonies – the kissing of the celebrant’s hands after he had consecrated the holy bread, and so on – at a priest’s First Mass.
⁹
None of this exactly suggests an upsurge of Protestant fervour from the Lancashire ‘grass roots’.

When it came to supporting the Northern Rebellion of 1569, however, there is no doubt that the hard core of belligerent reaction – those actually willing to take up arms against the government – came from the lands and manors of the Earl of Westmorland himself and of those gentry who supported him. Only 20 per cent of them, however, had feudal links with these landlords. It seems as though they responded to calls to the muster when the earls took up arms. Thirsk, Northallerton, Richmond, Yarm, Darlington and most of County Durham were the places where the diehards were thick on the ground. But before describing the progress of the rebellion, it is necessary to trace its causes and set it in context.

Throughout the 1560s the major threat to Elizabeth’s security as head of state came from the figure of Mary, Queen of Scots. The will of Henry VIII may have been passed into Act of Parliament. This, technically, meant that, in the event of Elizabeth’s death, Lady Catherine Grey would be Queen. Mary Stuart was not even mentioned in the will and the law made no provision for her to succeed Elizabeth. Everyone knew that in reality, however, Mary was seen as the obvious and natural alternative to Elizabeth: alternative, not simply successor. There were plenty of people in England who would have been happy to have Mary as Queen, and to restore the old religion. The paradox is that there were probably more people in England who wanted Mary as their queen than there were such people in Scotland. Though always, and rightly, known as Mary, Queen of Scots, she was only partially Scottish. Her real ambition was to be the Queen of England. Even though the Treaty of Edinburgh, negotiated by Cecil with the French on 5 July 1560, agreed upon the withdrawal of French troops from Scotland, and an assurance that Mary would recognise Elizabeth’s title as Queen of England, Mary would not ratify the treaty. (The previous year Cecil had noted in his diary, ‘On January 16, 1559, the Dauphin of France and the Queen of Scots his wife did, by the style and title of King & Queen of England and Ireland, grant to Lord Fleming certain things.’)