The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (21 page)

English attitudes as perceived by the foreigners themselves tend to reflect hostility, ignorance and suspicion. The Venetian Michiel Soriano comes out with his ‘hostile to foreigners’ comment (mentioned above) even though the Republic of Venice is relatively tolerant of English people at the time. Alessandro Magno, also of Venice, comments on the suspicious way everyone looks at him when he goes to hear a Catholic Mass at the house of an ambassador in 1562.
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The Dutchman, Emanuel van Meteren, similarly writes that the English are ‘very suspicious, especially of foreigners’.
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The duke of Württemberg’s secretary agrees: ‘because the greater part, especially the trades people, seldom go into other countries … they care little for foreigners but scoff and laugh at them’. Thomas Platter remarks that the lower classes of Englishmen ‘believe the world beyond England is boarded-off’, but adds that gentlemen and those who have themselves travelled are deferential towards foreigners.
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These comments are all by wealthy travellers who are just visiting England. If their experiences are so negative, what are things like for the thousands of immigrants who permanently reside in the kingdom? From the very start of the reign, Protestants come to London seeking safety from Catholic persecution in Holland, Spain and France. In 1563 the government becomes increasingly concerned and creates a census of foreigners in the capital: the total stands at 4,543. The numbers swell dramatically when the Dutch Calvinists flee from the duke of Alba in 1567; the 1568 census reveals 9,302 foreigners in London, of whom 7,163 are Dutch and 1,674 French. Another large influx of Huguenots (French Protestants) arrives in 1572 after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

The presence of so many foreigners worries Londoners. Many fear that the foreign merchants will take away their trade. They also bitterly resent the fact that the newcomers do not have to obey the same laws
and customs as English citizens.
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The government fears (rightly) that there are spies among the immigrants and that the various factions among them are bringing in both radical Protestant and Catholic propaganda.
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Cultural differences are accentuated by the immigrants worshipping in French, Italian and Dutch Calvinist churches; for a short while there is even a Spanish Calvinist church in London.
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Such isolation irritates many people, who remark on the foreigners’ lack of community spirit. Sir Walter Raleigh declares in 1593 that charity is wasted on immigrants, for they do not support the queen and take the profits that should rightly go to Englishmen.
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John Stow echoes these sentiments, stating that thirty years ago, when there were just three Dutch people living in the parish of St Botolph, it used to raise £27 every year to help the poor. But now, with thirty households of Dutch people in the parish, barely £11 can be gathered, ‘for the stranger will not contribute to such charges as other citizens do’.
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For all these reasons, the privy council adopts the policy of moving immigrants out to provincial towns – but they are hardly any more welcome there. In Halstead in Essex, a small Dutch community incurs the hatred of the local populace, which accuses them of practising offensive trades, making the water filthy and causing nuisances. They are forced to leave their homes and return to Colchester.
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Attitudes to foreigners are not entirely negative. French and Spanish dress is deemed sophisticated and alluring, and foreign styles are adopted by everyone trying to create a good impression.
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Dutch starching is enthusiastically taken up in the 1560s. Immigrant Italians are praised for their musical abilities and their instrument-making skills. Quite a large number become naturalised citizens. And some individuals show that immigrants can become accepted in society. No one speaks ill of Sir Horatio Palavicino. He gives up his Italian citizenship and becomes English in 1586 (receiving letters patent to that effect). Moreover, he advises the queen on the economy and has a fortune reputed to be in the region of £100,000 by the time of his death in 1600. That much money commands universal respect.

Racism

Black people, Native Americans and Ottoman Turks are seen by Elizabethans as fundamentally different. Such people are not Christians,
and so it is not possible to appeal to common virtues and morals, which makes them doubly foreign. The result is a cruel racism. This is not a peculiarly English trait; racist attitudes are endemic throughout sixteenth-century Europe. But while Turks are simply dismissed as heathens, and gypsies rejected as vagabonds and thieves, the sub-Saharan African exemplifies all that the Elizabethan Englishman finds strange and incomprehensible.

Africans are called ‘Moors’, ‘Blackamoors’, ‘Ethiopians’, ‘Nigers’ or ‘Negros’. Andrew Boorde divides them into ‘white moors and black moors’ and states that the latter are taken as slaves ‘to do all manner of service but they be set most commonly to vile things’. André Thevet, author of
New Found Worlde
(1568), explains that those of the north of Africa are ‘brown coloured, whom we call white Moors, others are clean black: the most parte go all naked’. Thevet adds that the heat of their climate makes black women promiscuous and the men ‘poor, ignorant and brutish’. Robert Gainsh’s account of an English voyage to Guinea in 1554 (which brings back half a dozen black slaves to England) reports that the inhabitants of central Africa live in ‘horrible wildernesses and mountains’ among ‘wild and monstrous beasts and serpents’, adding that ‘women are common for they contract no matrimony neither have respect to chastity’. Writing in 1559, William Cunningham agrees that black people are ‘savage, monstrous and rude’. In 1577 an edition of Richard Eden’s
History of Travayle in the West and East Indies
describes the land of ‘the black Moors called Ethiopians or Negros, all which are watered with the river Negro, called in old time Niger. In the said regions are no cities but only certain low cottages made of boughs of trees plastered with chalk and covered with straw.’ He explains that the inhabitants are, apart from a few Muslims, ‘pure gentiles and idolators, without profession of any religion or other knowledge of God’.
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To be fair to Elizabethans, their views are affected by preconceived notions of the Garden of Eden and the subsequent Fall from Grace. It is possible to discern some respect for the black man: he is living in a natural world, unchanged since Creation. When Elizabeth knights Sir Francis Drake, on 4 April 1581 on the deck of the
Golden Hind
, she gives him a present of a locket: on the inside is a miniature portrait of herself by Nicholas Hilliard and, on the outside, an image of a black man engraved in sardonyx, set in gold and surrounded by pearls, rubies and diamonds.
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The memento combines the queen’s image
with that of a black man. But while you might occasionally notice such indications of respect for the ‘noble savage’, there is no escaping the fact that the vast majority of inter-racial exchanges are fundamentally exploitative and unchristian.

As the slave trade becomes more established and more lucrative, so the racism becomes worse. In 1578 George Best argues that black skin has nothing to do with the heat of the sun (on the evidence that a black African man and a white Englishwoman will produce a black child). He concludes that black people are damned because of illicit fornication by one of Noah’s sons in the Ark. By 1584 black skin is being linked with witchcraft. In this year Reginald Scot publishes his
Discoverie of Witchcraft
in which he describes an ugly devil as having ‘horns on his head, fire in his mouth, a tail, eyes like a bison, fangs like a dog, claws like a bear,
a skin like a Niger
and a voice roaring like a lion’. Soon the godless, naked, sexually promiscuous inhabitants of central Africa are associated with Satan himself, who is often portrayed as black in English religious pictures.

These views are to be noted at all levels of society. The playwrights Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher all describe royal personages being drawn in their chariots by black men. James VI of Scotland – Elizabeth’s successor as ruler of England – makes such a scene reality, and has black slaves pull him along in a coach. In Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus
(1593), Aaron the Moor is loved by Tamora, the queen of the Goths, who has a child by him; but Aaron is a man party to ‘murders, rapes and massacres, acts of black night, abominable deeds’. He himself murders an innocent nurse to cover up his adultery with Tamora. He is not portrayed as ignorant; indeed, there is a fierce intelligence in him. Shakespeare gives him the line: ‘look how the black slave smiles upon the father, as who should say: “Old lad, I am thine own.”’ But the character is still not a kind one. Not until Shakespeare writes
Othello
in 1604 does he produce a sympathetic portrait of a black character.

The slave trade does not result in huge numbers of Africans coming to England. In fact, the queen discourages the slavers from bringing them here, on the grounds that there are already too many unemployed people in England. In 1596 she even gives a licence to a Lübeck merchant to transport them out of the country. But a fashion for black servants has begun to take root. The queen herself has one in 1574 and employs black musicians and dancers.
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Sir William Pole, Sir John Hawkins, Sir
Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake all keep black servants. Apart from gentlemen’s houses, you will come across black people most frequently in ports. They are invariably described in ways that makes it clear they are still owned. In Plymouth, for example, in 1583 there is ‘Bastien, a blackamoor of Mr William Hawkins’, and ten years later we learn of ‘Christian, Richard Sheere’s blackamoor’. As the name suggests, the crucial thing for any black person living in England is to be baptised: it is the essential first step towards becoming acceptable in a society that associates black skin with the Devil.
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Scientific Knowledge

The sixteenth century has left us with a number of household names in the world of science. In astronomy we have Copernicus, author of
De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium
(1543), in which he suggests that the Earth orbits the Sun. In anatomy we have Vesalius’s
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
(1543), the first detailed look at the workings of the human body. And in medicine there is the work of Paracelsus, whose use of chemical substances to treat ailments has a profound effect on medical science. The silver-nosed Tycho Brahe – who lost his nose in a duel – catalogues the stars, and at the end of the century Galileo not only demonstrates the correctness of Copernicus’s theory, but makes a whole series of discoveries: from the moons of Jupiter to the existence of sunspots, from the constancy of the speed at which objects fall to the regularity of the swinging of a pendulum. You could say that all these men are explorers, in a manner of speaking, and that Columbus is the inspiration to them all, for he has demonstrated unequivocally that the Ancient Greeks and Romans did not know everything. In fact, Copernicus’s discoveries in astronomy have earnt him the epithet ‘the Columbus of the heavens’. But all these men are Continental. Copernicus is Polish, Vesalius Flemish, Paracelsus German, Brahe Danish and Galileo Italian. Is there no English genius to rival these famous pioneers of science?

England is home to a number of groundbreaking scientists – or practitioners of ‘natural philosophy’, to use the correct Elizabethan terminology. Natural philosophy is an enquiry into the truth of the world, and thus there is no conceptual difference between a geographer and a scientist. Someone using mathematics to establish the
width of the Atlantic is as much a ‘natural philosopher’ as an astronomer. It is not surprising that English ‘scientific’ discoveries go hand in hand with English imperial ambitions. As explorers set out to find new countries overseas, natural philosophers are in ever-increasing demand to answer questions of navigation, astronomy, mathematics and physics. Discoveries of new lands bring knowledge of new animals, new plants and new medicines; in turn they inspire the classification of all the known plants and animals to assist further enquiries. The scientific and geographical exploration of the Earth and the stars can thus be construed as one great multifaceted experiment: a loop of discovery and enquiry that results in exponentially increased levels of scientific activity.

Dr John Dee and his pupil Thomas Digges are both inspired by Copernicus’s
De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium
and write approvingly of his theory. Soon, however, these astronomers start to ask even more fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. A new comet in the sky in 1572 reveals to Digges that, contrary to Aristotle’s teaching, the stars are not fixed in their places; the heavens are not crystalline in their structure and the moving celestial objects – the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – do not all revolve around the Earth.
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In 1583 Digges revises his father’s almanac, which recites all the pre-Copernican beliefs and the Aristotelian concept of the heavens, and in an addendum explains why Copernicus’s theory of the planets orbiting the Sun is correct. He even shows how Aristotle came to be so wrong.
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There are three other men who are obvious candidates for the prize of the most influential English natural philosopher of Elizabeth’s reign. The statesman Francis Bacon deserves mention not for any particular discovery but because he formulates the modern scientific approach – the ‘Baconian method’ – in his great work,
Novum Organum
. Although it will not be published until 1620, Bacon is very much a man of Elizabeth’s reign; born in 1561, he is the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon and nephew of Sir William Cecil. Bacon argues that, through a process of experimentation and identifying the criteria for a phenomenon, you can develop a hypothesis which can then be tested. He lays the foundation for a form of research that is intellectually far superior to simply looking for answers in the books of writers from the ancient world. No doubt that sounds obvious to you – but while it is true that many natural philosophers in Elizabeth’s reign are already
applying this method, they are being dismissed by contemporaries who will not shift their faith in the old authorities. Thomas Blundeville, for example, publishes a book in 1594 in which he ridicules Copernicus for his theory that the Earth orbits the Sun, stating that ‘Ptolemy, Aristotle, and all other old writers affirm the Earth to be in the midst, and to remain unmoveable and to be in the very centre of the world, proving the same … the Holy Scripture affirming the foundations of the Earth to be laid so sure that it never should move at any time’.
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Anyone who has listened to an ageing professor spouting rubbish and telling you that
you
must believe it because
he
read it in a book will surely look at Bacon with gratitude and respect.