The Elizabethans (55 page)

The trial began on 27 April 1592. Perrot was brought by barge from the Tower to a packed Westminster Hall. He defended himself with the utmost vigour. Essex tried in vain to get the Queen to stop the proceedings. Although he failed, the Queen stayed judgement against him six times. Lord Chief Justice Anderson condemned Perrot to hang at Tyburn, but Perrot in fact died in the Tower of natural causes. It was clear that the Queen did not believe his guilt, since it was normal for the Crown to confiscate the lands of traitors, and Sir Thomas Perrot inherited most of the Welsh estate from his father.

It would seem that Sir John Perrot was put through these proceedings solely because Sir William Fitzwilliam had concocted his foolish conspiracy. To admit the folly and malice of Fitzwilliam would be to discredit the cousin of Burghley’s wife. Burghley’s credit as a factional leader would thereby have been irreparably damaged. Perrot was condemned to death not because he was a traitor, but because Burghley needed to maintain his Polonius-grip on the tiller. It was an incident that revealed how wildly out of control English policy could fly after the death of Walsingham.

24

Sex and the City

FOR A SOCIETY
that worshipped its Head of State as an unblemished Virgin, Elizabethan England has left behind plenty of evidence of advanced, collective sexual obsession. Ben Jonson, gossiping in his cups after the reign was over, could speculate that Elizabeth had ‘had a Membrana on her which made her uncapable of men, though for her delight she tryed many, at the comming over of Monsieur, there was a French Chirugion who took in hand to cut it, yett fear stayed her & his death.’
¹
Perhaps the cult of Elizabeth’s virginity by the politicians was fed by the fact that Elizabethan society was, by the standards of later ages, especially open in its use of sexual language and in its discussion of sex in its most detailed and physical aspects. In the second Queen Elizabeth’s reign the BBC actually noted, with a horror that would have been excessive, had the person concerned actually performed the sexual act – the first time the word fuck was used on television, and in the mid- to late twentieth century there were special organisations, such as Mary Whitehouse’s Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, that monitored the number of times lewd acts or sexually suggestive allusions intruded themselves into public broadcasts.

Had Mrs Whitehouse and her friends spent their evenings rereading the works of William Shakespeare, they would have found that almost every play and poem that he wrote was full of sexual allusion, much of it rather childish. A man’s bauble – as in ‘hide his bauble in a hole’ (
Romeo and Juliet
II.iii.93) – his thing, his prick, dial, poperin pear, cod’s head, capon, cock or holy thistle is hard to avoid. If a tail or a tale is mentioned, some character is bound to make a pun, such as Mercutio’s ‘Thou desistest me to stop in my tale against the hair’ (from the same scene in
Romeo and Juliet
). Hair only sometimes in Shakespeare means the hair on someone’s head. To meet with a pipe, a needle, a pig’s tail or a parson’s nose is to know that someone is on the lookout for a hole, a placket-hole, a sluice, a gate, a thing, an organ, an et cetera, or the ‘dearest bodily part’. It would be fanciful to attribute the enormous population explosion during Shakespeare’s lifetime to an increase in popularity in playing the beast with two backs, rutting, scrambling, mounting, riding, sluicing, ravening or picking the lock, but as any of Shakespeare’s audiences knew, these were all synonyms that he enlisted in his fertile and varied sexual vocabulary.
²

Shakespeare’s work both mirrored and fed the erotic obsessions of the age. The Roman erotic poet, Ovid, was his inspiration, and Shakespeare soon became the Ovid of his own epoch. His two long poems dedicated to the Earl of Southampton feature on the one hand, Venus, the goddess of love, as an older woman attempting to initiate a coy and unwilling Adonis into her own sexual obsessions; and Lucrece, brutally raped by Tarquin. Many of his most popular plays reflect not merely an artist, but a society, obsessed by sex.
Romeo and Juliet
, the most triumphantly successful of his early erotic comedies, concerns a thirteen-year-old girl whose mother wishes her to marry:

Younger than you,

Here in Verona, ladies of esteem

Are made already mothers.
³

It was followed by
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
with its Ovidian metamorphosis of a working-class buffoon into a donkey – notoriously the best-endowed of male beasts – drawing the Fairy Queen into a physical obsession that is hilarious, sexy, but also humiliating. For while being the Ovidian celebrant of the rites of Eros, Shakespeare is the ultimate sexual cynic, whose Thersites in
Troilus and Cressida
exclaims: ‘Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery, nothing else holds fashion. A burning devil take them!’
⁴
The same association between lechery and burning – lust and hell; sex and the scalding sensations of venereal disease – are expressed in the starkest and most personal form in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In those twenty-eight sonnets that reflect the twenty-eight days of his dark mistress’s menstrual cycle, he berated her for having infected both him and his beautiful young male friend:

I guess one angel in another’s hell.

Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,

Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
⁵

Measure for Measure
, that sex-obsessed play in which extramarital sex is a capital offence, and in which the man of power, Angelo – another angel like those of Comfort and Despair in the sonnet just quoted – is willing to commute Claudio’s death-sentence in exchange for the nun-sister’s maidenhead, enters into the darkest places of the human sexual life, and the blowsy bordello and tavern-life of Mistress Overdone, Lucio, a ‘fantastic’ (that is, an extravagant dresser), Pompey the Clown and friends is one not merely familiar to Shakespeare, but a world of lechery that was known to the theatre audiences; which, indeed, when the Globe theatre had been built on Bankside in the thick of the capital’s brothels, was absolutely visible all around them.

When Pompey and Mistress Overdone bemoan, at the beginning of
Measure for Measure
, the possibility that the priggish Angelo is going to demolish the seedy ‘suburbs’ of the city and close the brothels, they are speaking of something that the Londoners of Shakespeare’s day would know had been tried during the reign of Henry VIII.

Scholarly opinion divides between those who do and do not believe that the
morbus gallicus
of venereal syphilis was brought to Europe from the New World, and that this explains the rampant growth of the disease in the sixteenth century. If it were a consequence of the Old World’s greed for the treasures of the New World, there would be an emblematic fittingness to the story that is perhaps too neat, and which explains perhaps why some medics believe a mild form of syphilis existed in Europe in the fifteenth century, but transmuted itself into the ravaging disease that so laid waste humankind until the discovery of penicillin.
⁶

Henry VIII, who had attempted to enact the
Measure for Measure
-style anti-bordello laws himself, died in an agony of syphilitic periostitis at the age of fifty-five. This great ox of a man had survived smallpox, malaria and the tuberculosis that had killed his father; he had survived dangerous sports; but eventually the symptoms of syphilis became unmistakable: ulcers on both legs, a collapsed nose, an increasingly erratic mental state. When he died his vast corpse was put in a lead coffin and slowly transported from London to Windsor. It was rested overnight at Syon House, where the coffin split and leakage spattered on the floor, to be licked by the household dogs. If ever there was a character who exemplified the Divided Self, described by Friar Lawrence in
Romeo and Juliet
, it was Henry:

Two such opposèd kings encamp them still

In man, as well as herbs – grace and rude will.
⁷

At war with his destructive sexual nature, Henry VIII had closed the brothels, which his son Edward VI reopened in 1550. ‘For the Stews’, as a priest said in a sermon at Paul’s Cross, ‘are so necessary in a commonwealth as a jaxe in a man’s house.’
⁸

Thomas Nashe’s
The Choise of Valentines
– alternative title
Nash his Dildo
– is a poem with hilarious candour: the ‘offertory’, before entering the ‘Oratorie’ to the ‘foggie three-chinnd dame’ at the door; the choice of ‘prettie Trulls’ offered him; the eventual selection of ‘gentle mistris Francis’, who pretends she has only come to this ‘dancing-schoole’ ‘to avoide the troblous stormy weather’; the slow undressing; the preliminary cunnilingus:

his mouth beset with uglie bryers

Resembling much a duskie nett of wyres –

The penis flagging until she:

dandled it, and dance’t it up and downe,

Not ceasing, till she rais’d it from his swoune,

And then he flue on hir as he were wood [mad],

And on her breeche did thack, and foyne a-good

The age-old cry of womankind:

Oh not so fast, my rauisht Mistriss cryes

. . . Togeather let our equall motions stirr . . .

. . . She ierks hir legs, and sprauleth with hir heeles,

No tongue may tell the solace that she feeles . . .

The pleasure being over, despite Nashe’s attempts to contain himself, in quarter of an hour, the ‘gentle mistris’ says that in future she will get more pleasure from her dildo:

That bendeth not, nor fouldeth anie deale,

But stands as stiff as he were made of steele,

And playes at peacock twixt my legs right blythe.
⁹

The brothels had to be painted white and to carry a particular sign: one of the most celebrated of which was the cardinals’ hats suggested less by religious considerations than by the scarlet tip shared by both princes of the Church and excited male organs. The double-think of the human race with regard to this whole area of life was in abundant evidence, with, on the one hand, open patronage of prostitution by those in authority; and, on the other, merciless punishments meted out by the law upon the women caught up in this trade. Cardinal Wolsey reputedly had an inscription over one of the doors of his palace at Hampton Court, which read ‘the rooms of the whores of my Lord Cardinal’. Queen Elizabeth’s cousin, Lord Hunsdon, did not go so far, but he let out properties in Paris Gardens, Southwark, to Francis Langley, owner of the Swan theatre, fully aware of what took place in the region.
A Mirror for Magistrates
in 1584 recorded that a young man might have to part with ‘forty shillings or better’ in ‘some blind [obscure] house about the suburbs’ for ‘a pottle or two of wine, the embracement of a painted strumpet and the French welcome’ – that is, venereal disease. A woman convicted of being a prostitute had to appease the convoluted perversity of male shame. She would have her head shaved, and would then be carted about the streets with a paper labelling her as a whore pasted to her forehead; accompanied by the banging together of barbers’ basins clattering in mockery. Repeat offenders might be tied to the ‘cart’s arse’ and dragged through the streets to the Bridewell prison, where they would receive a whipping. Bridewell was a house of correction, not a long-term prison. Mary Tudor had wanted to close the place down, since so many of the women whipped there revealed the sexual misdemeanours of the clergy; but it was given a reprieve and throughout Elizabeth’s reign it witnessed the regular beatings and thrashings and hangings meted out to petty – and not so petty – criminals.
WHIPPED AT THE BRIDEWELL FOR HAVING FORSAKEN HER CHILD IN THE STREETS
was an inscription on one unhappy head, who had been put in the pillory at Cheapside and then dragged through the streets.
¹⁰

The risks of such terrible punishments did not deter the ‘Winchester geese’, as the women were called, after the Bishop of Winchester who owned so much of the Southwark property in which they plied their profession, any more than the risk of venereal disease deterred their clients. The need to survive in the one case, to satisfy lust in the other, was stronger than the dictates of common sense. Shakespeare’s sense that sex on such terms was an image of Hell was reflected in the writings of his contemporaries. In Thomas Dekker’s
Lanthorn and Candlelight
(1608) a visitor from Hell ‘saw the doors of notorious carted bawds like Hell gates stand night and day wide open, with a pair of harlots in taffeta gowns, like two painted posts, garnishing out those doors, being better to the house than a double sign’.

In
The Honest Whore
, also by Dekker, one of the characters says to Bellafont, the prostitute:

The sin of many men

Is within you; and thus much I suppose,

That if all your committers stood in a rank,

They’d make a lane in which your shame might dwell

And with their spaces reach from hence to hell.
¹¹

Inevitably, in such a world, the doctor was in a position to see more than most. The sordid diaries and casebooks of Simon Forman (now in Oxford’s Bodleian Library), called by some, rather too generously, the Elizabethan Pepys, reveal not only the author’s obsessive sexual pursuits and conquests, but the sexual lives of innumerable Londoners of both high and low degree. Forman practised as an astrologer and as a medic. He first practised medicine in Salisbury, and by the time he was established in London in the 1590s he was noticing whenever he had ‘halek’, his word for sexual congress. A regular mistress was one Avis Allen, the recusant wife of William Allen, who was prepared to pay the enormous sum of £100 to avoid attendance at church at St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate. They first kissed on 20 November 1593, and a fortnight later, ‘she rose and came to me, et halek Avis Allen’ . . . She had come to him as a patient. The Allens, who entertained their doctor to dinner, were evidently in the shipping trade and resided in Thames Street near the river. Throughout the time of his affair with her, and its rather chillingly recounted adulterous encounters, Forman was advising clients about their astrological chances of good business deals, or the potential conception of children, as well as giving them cures for dropsy, venereal and other diseases. Men came to him to establish, via astrology, their chances of ‘halek’ with certain women, and ‘whether she is honest or a harlot’. Forman himself had ample chances of ‘halek’ – in the street, in his consulting rooms and in the houses of his clients. Marriage did not change his habits, though he noted down in his illiterate Latin the occurrences of ‘halek’ ‘
cum uxore meo
’ (
sic
, rather than
mea
; with my wife).