In March 1559, Elizabeth I’s government had a serious problem on its hands. The first Parliament of the reign had been meeting for two months, but the crown’s flagship legislation to bring back Protestantism had run into trouble. With some difficulty, a bill had been passed to restore the royal supremacy over the Church, but the powers granted fell short of what Elizabeth wanted, while plans for reviving Protestant worship had stalled. The House of Commons was broadly in favour of these changes, but in the Lords, where committed Protestants were in the minority, the Catholic bishops were very effectively obstructing the government programme. As the Protestant observer John Jewel reported on 20 March:

the bishops are a great hindrance to us; for being … among the nobility and leading men in the upper House, and having none there on our side to expose their artifices … they reign as sole monarchs in the midst of ignorant and weak men, and easily overreach our little party, either by their numbers or their reputation for learning. (Zurich Letters ed. H. Robinson (Parker Society, 1842), 10-11)

By this point, the situation was so bad that Elizabeth was seriously contemplating an early dissolution of Parliament, so that she could use her new powers to deprive the existing bishops and appoint new Protestant ones, before pressing on with the reform programme. In the event, the queen decided against this course, but action was clearly needed to weaken the bishops’ hold over the lay peers.

The government’s solution was to arrange a public conference or disputation between two panels of Catholic clergy and Protestant divines. According to a subsequent official account of this exercise, the objective was to thrash out differences of opinion about religion, and reach agreement on the best way forward for the Church. In reality, the government’s objective was to discredit the bishops, and sway public opinion in favour of Protestantism. From the outset, everything possible was done to place the Catholic participants at a disadvantage. Their leader in the Lords, the widely respected Nicholas Heath, archbishop of York, was appointed to help preside over the disputation in his capacity as a privy councillor, a move which would effectively sideline him during the debates. Similarly, the three propositions which the Privy Council selected for discussion were all designed to win support for the government’s reform programme: that church services should be conducted in the vernacular tongue rather than in the traditional Latin, which most congregations didn’t understand; that national Churches had the power to alter the format and content of services; and that the Catholic doctrine of the sacrificial mass was not based on the teachings of the bible.

There’s some confusion over exactly how many people took part in the disputation, though there seem to have been eight or nine men on each side. The Catholic camp comprised a mix of bishops and other senior clergy, while the Protestant delegation was made up almost exclusively of clerics who had spent Mary I’s reign in exile on the continent. In effect, they represented the existing and prospective hierarchies of the English Church. The Catholics wanted to debate in Latin, which would have made it harder for the audience to follow the arguments, but the government insisted on proceedings being conducted in English, and selected the spacious Westminster Abbey as the venue, to allow as many people as possible to attend. As expected, a substantial number of lay peers turned up, precisely the individuals whom the government most wanted to influence.

Perceiving that the odds were stacked heavily against them, the Catholic camp looked for ways to sabotage the debates. The Privy Council had ruled that each side should prepare a written statement on each proposition, which would be circulated in advance to the opposing group, and read out on the day. The Protestants seem to have stuck to this format, but the Catholics chose not to cooperate. Invited to open debate on the first day of the conference, 31 March, they claimed that they’d misunderstood the rules, and therefore didn’t have a written statement to present. Instead, Henry Cole, dean of St Paul’s cathedral, launched into a violent and colourful diatribe against Protestantism in general, before finally sketching out the Catholic position on the correct language for worship, essentially defending the use of Latin by appealing to tradition. Once Cole had finished, his opponent Robert Horne read out a learned argument in favour of the local vernacular, with copious references to the bible and early Christian writings. Horne prefaced his remarks with a lengthy prayer appealing to God to reveal the true way forward. As this prayer was introduced, all the privy councillors present except Archbishop Heath fell to their knees, further demonstrating which side the government favoured. Once Horne had finished presenting the Protestant case, the Catholic disputants asked to respond, but were told to wait until the next debate, three days later.

When the conference resumed on 3 April, the Catholic camp tried to pick up where they’d left off, but were informed that they must first set out their arguments on the second proposition, concerning the power of national churches to modify their liturgies. However, the bishops began to complain that they were being treated unfairly, and the conference rapidly descended into a row over the format of the disputation. Recognising that if the Protestants always spoke second, their arguments were likely to carry more weight with the audience, the Catholics called for the order of debate be switched around. When this demand was rejected, the bishops again tried to change the topic, asserting that they represented the true Church, and attacking their opponents as schismatics. At length, once it became clear that the Catholics had no intention of addressing the second proposition, the disputation was brought to a premature close.

Predictably, Catholic commentators on the conference, such as the Spanish ambassador, the Count de Feria, maintained that the bishops had trounced the Protestant divines. John Jewel, who had been present as one of the Protestant disputants, took a rather different view: ‘It is altogether incredible, how much this conduct has lessened the opinion that the people entertained of the bishops; for they all begin to suspect that they refused to say anything only because they had not anything to say.’ (Zurich Letters, 16)

Whether or not Jewel himself was exaggerating, the conference had a decisive impact on developments in Parliament. The five bishops who participated in the debates were all charged with contempt of the crown for failing to follow the agreed format. Two of them, the bishops of Winchester and Lincoln, were imprisoned in the Tower of London until after the end of the session. This unsurprisingly served to dampen opposition in the Lords to the government’s programme. Several staunchly Catholic lay peers suddenly decided to absent themselves, while others dropped their objections to the Protestant legislation. The bill for the royal supremacy was duly revised, though the measure to reintroduce the Book of Common Prayer still only scraped through the upper House by three votes.  Without the Westminster conference, it might not have passed at all. The disputation strategy was clumsy and underhand, but it weakened the Catholic cause, broke the parliamentary deadlock, and helped pave the way for the Elizabethan religious settlement.

PMH

Further reading:

N.L. Jones, Faith by Statute (1982)

G. Burnet, History of the Reformation of the Church of England ed. N. Pocock (1865), vol. 5

The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe ed. S.R. Cattley (1839), vol. 8

Biographies of all the clerics mentioned above will appear in due course in our volumes on the House of Lords 1558-1603.

On a clear, calm evening in April 1580, south-eastern England, as well as the Low Countries and parts of northern France and Germany, were struck by a violent earthquake. In London, as the ground moved, church bells rang uncontrollably, water courses ‘shook and frothed wonderfully’ and many chimney stacks collapsed. At a church near Newgate Market, falling masonry killed an apprentice named Thomas Gray and fatally injured his servant, Mabel Everitt. At Sandwich, in east Kent, a sound like the discharge of several cannons was heard before the ground shook, the sea swelled and the gable end of St Peter’s church collapsed. Down the coast at Dover part of the cliffs fell, while Saltwood Castle, overlooking Hythe, suffered damage. The quake was followed by as many as four aftershocks, the last of which occurred on 1 or 2 May. Tremors were evidently felt as far afield as Edinburgh; in October the Master of Gray reported that his house ‘did shake and rock in the night as with an earthquake’.

These sudden bursts of violent seismic activity struck terror into the populace. Two days after the main quake, the court jester Richard Tarlton recorded that many in the Royal Exchange ‘wept with fear’. At the same time the writer Thomas Churchyard reported that in one London theatre those in the balcony were so frightened that the gallery would collapse that they leapt ‘from the lowest standings’. In Kent, according to a contemporary chronicler, many of those woken by the last of the aftershocks during the night of 1 May ran to the local church to pray.

Although the main earthquake lasted for little more than a minute, it was of an unusually high magnitude for the British Isles, where seismic activity is rare. Dr Roger Musson, the author of the historical earthquake catalogue for the UK (maintained by the British Geological Survey), includes the 1580 event among the four greatest earthquakes ever to have struck England. Originating 33km below the seabed in the Straits of Dover, the quake was almost certainly associated with movement of a major structural feature in the eastern English Channel known as the Variscan Thrust Front. This area has a long history of seismic activity. As early as 1382 a synod in London held to examine the writings of the Lollard John Wycliffe was interrupted by an earthquake in the Dover Straits which caused widespread damage in south-eastern England and the Low Countries. In November 1776 another earthquake, of lesser magnitude, originated in the same location. It is because the Straits of Dover are seismically active that the Channel Tunnel was designed to be earthquake-proof.

In early modern England, understanding of earthquakes was limited. One theory held that they were caused by the earth’s expulsion of trapped wind, a view first advanced by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. In the quake’s immediate aftermath, the Cambridge academic Gabriel Harvey agreed that it might have been caused by ‘some forcible and violent eruption of wind, or the like’, occasioned by excessive rainfall the previous autumn. This, Harvey argued, had ‘stopped and filled’ up ‘the pores and vents and crannies’ of the earth with moisture, so that ‘the windy exhalation and vapours pent up as it were in the bowels thereof could not otherwise get out’. However, many contemporaries were sceptical whether the Aristotelian argument was relevant in this case. They included the Essex gentleman Arthur Golding, who argued in print that the 1580 earthquake cannot have had a natural cause since among the places affected were areas ‘which by reason of their substantial soundness and massy firmness, are not to be pierced by any winds from without’. Moreover, quakes that had natural causes were preceded by signs such as tempestuous seas, whereas in this case the weather was ‘fair, temperate and unwindy’.

For many Elizabethan Englishmen – perhaps the vast majority of them – the 1580 earthquake, like most natural disasters, was an obvious expression of God’s displeasure at the nation’s sinfulness. To argue otherwise was, as Arthur Golding saw it, a mere evasion, an attempt ‘to keep themselves and others from the due looking back into the time erst misspent … lest they should see their own wretchedness’. Among the many sins Golding imputed to the English were widespread corruption, hatred, malice, disdain, pride, flattery, dissimulation and the desire for revenge. He also complained that servants behaved like masters; that men adopted ‘the garish attire and nice behaviour of women’; and that women ‘have gotten up the apparel and stomach of men’. To Golding, the 1580 earthquake was just one in a recent series of warnings to the English to mend their ways. Other signs of God’s wrath included unseasonal heavy rainfall and snow, and sharp and long-lasting frosts. Golding could not have known that a temporary dip in solar sunspot activity meant that England, like the rest of the globe, was experiencing what many historians have dubbed the mini ice age.

In fact Golding, who had worked at the London house of the Queen’s chief minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley, during the mid-1560s, was expressing views commonly held in official circles. Immediately after the quake, both John Aylmer, bishop of London, and Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, drew up prayers for circulation in their respective dioceses calling for repentance. The Privy Council approved of these initiatives. It also declared, like Golding, that England had had a lucky escape. Whereas other countries had suffered far greater disasters in recent years, such as civil wars, massacres and the earthquake which had destroyed a large part of the city of Ferrara, in northern Italy, ten years earlier, England had escaped relatively lightly. As the Council put it, God had dealt ‘more favourably with us … than he hath dealt with other nations in the like case’, having sustained little damage and few casualties (just two fatalities in fact).

By comparison, other countries had suffered the loss of whole cities and thousands of people. At the Council’s urging, Grindal’s prayer service was circulated throughout the realm, along with Golding’s short treatise. Urging repentance, it described the quake as ‘the strange and terrible token’ of God’s ‘wrath and indignation’. As if to set an example to her subjects, the Queen shortly after the earthquake urged the principal gentry of every shire to contribute generously to a collection on behalf of the plague-afflicted Huguenots of Montpellier. She cited ‘God’s merciful warning by the late earthquake’ as an ‘extraordinary admonition’ to England to act with Christian compassion.

The 1580 earthquake is unlikely to have been quickly forgotten; a line in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Act One, Scene 3), written sometime in the early 1590s, seems to allude to it (‘’Tis since the earthquake now 11 years’). For a short while it may even have shaken the English in their confident belief that God was an Englishman, an idea which can be traced back to at least the early stages of the Reformation and was still current: in 1559 John Aylmer urged his fellow countryman to fear neither French nor Scots ‘as God is English’, and in 1573 Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, pressed Burghley to advance the cause of true religion because God was ‘so much English’. However, if the 1580 earthquake did give the English pause for thought about their favoured status, these doubts were dispelled eight years later with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, when ‘God blew and they were scattered’.

AT

Further reading:

Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer Set Forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Parker Society, 1847) ed. W.K. Clay

Historic British Earthquakes

Pamphlets on the Earthquake of 1580 – Darin Hayton

Biographies of the 1st Lord Burghley, John Aylmer, bishop of London, and archbishops Matthew Parker and Edmund Grindal will in due course feature in our volumes on the Elizabethan House of Lords.

In 21st-century Britain, clothes are seen as a means of expressing our individuality. Distinctions between smart and casual dress have become blurred, and anyone can buy designer outfits, provided they have enough money. That was not the case four or five centuries ago. Back then, clothing was seen as a key marker of social status, and it was government policy to preserve clear visual distinctions. Poor people were expected to dress cheaply, in linen and coarse woollen cloth, while the most commonly available dyes were drab browns and greys, or pale blues and pinks.

More vibrant colours, such as bright red, deep blue, or purple, were harder to produce, and therefore the preserve of the rich and powerful. Similarly, the finest cloth was made of silk thread, which had to be imported, and was very expensive. Silk might be woven into satin, velvet, brocade, damask or taffeta. For the ultimate in luxury, silk was blended with gold or silver thread, which in Tudor times was also manufactured abroad. Cloth of gold or silver might have a smooth metallic sheen – as seen in Holbein’s portrait of Sir Henry Guildford – or be woven with some sections in relief to create patterns (called tissue). Another approach was to interweave coloured silk with gold or silver threads to produce a sparkly fabric known as tinsel.

These top-quality fabrics were beyond the reach of most of the population, but provided scope for competition within its higher echelons. Wealthier members of the lower classes might also try to dress above their accustomed status as a means of social climbing. To regulate the former, and guard against the latter, Acts of Parliament were brought in from the mid-14th century. Known as sumptuary laws, these statutes dictated which fabrics and adornments were permissible for men of different ranks and income levels. Ostensibly, they were intended to encourage the use of home-produced cloth, and to discourage poorer people from spending beyond their means. But in reality their primary concern was to ensure that only the most privileged classes had access to the most exclusive materials.

The Acts were very precise in their stipulations. Henry VIII’s first such legislation, promulgated in 1510, specified that only the royal family might wear cloth of gold made with purple silk, and that no man below the rank of baron could dress in tinsel. Imported furs were banned for anyone below the status of gentleman (except university graduates, and landowners worth at least £10 p.a.). Another Act of 1515 ruled that only peers, and the sons of dukes and earls, were allowed clothes embroidered with gold, silver or silk thread, while men below the rank of knight were barred from wearing gold chains or bracelets. A subsequent Act of 1555, during Mary I’s reign, denied silk nightcaps to anyone with a landed income of less than £20 p.a. These rules were underpinned by quite stiff penalties: forfeiture of non-compliant garments, and fines of 3s. 4d. a day for the duration of the offence.

It speaks volumes about the essentially patriarchal nature of Tudor society that no regulation of women’s dress was attempted until the mid-1570s, the female population being exempted from statutory oversight prior to this. It’s tempting to speculate that Elizabeth I was worried about competition from her subjects. At this juncture the use of cloth of gold, cloth of gold of tissue, and sable fur was prohibited for anyone below the rank of countess. To wear sleeves trimmed with gold or silver ornamentation, one needed to be at least the wife of a knight. Only women who were at least knights’ daughters were permitted taffeta petticoats.

The sumptuary laws were not totally inflexible. Further exceptions were made for the robes of office customarily worn by judges and mayors, and for clerical vestments. Other special categories included heralds, minstrels and actors, all of whom were allowed to dress above their station during public appearances. Nor did the government generally attempt to regulate fashion trends, though the wide, padded breeches and elaborate ruffs characteristic of Elizabethan male dress intermittently came in for criticism. The primary objective was to preserve an ordered society, where everyone could tell at a glance who they were dealing with, and where people knew their place.

While it’s clear that the laws were largely ignored, in broad terms they conformed to popular expectations. It was taken for granted that peers of the realm would put on a show. In the later 16th century Henry Stanley, 4th earl of Derby, routinely sported a gold chain and two diamonds, and was also famous for his golden breeches. Conversely, one of his contemporaries, Henry Howard, 2nd Viscount Howard of Bindon, scandalized polite society by periodically appearing in public dressed like a peasant. Accordingly, the sumptuary laws, by prescribing the dress appropriate to specific ranks, helped to define the terms of competition at the highest levels.

We can get a good sense of the sartorial tastes of England’s elite from their portraits, in which the costumes are generally depicted with care and precision. Such paintings are also likely to show their subjects in their most expensive outfits, such as they might have worn at court. There the benchmark was of course set by the monarch. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I in particular were famous for their magnificent clothes. The so-called ‘Ermine portrait’ of Elizabeth (ermine was both a mark of status and a symbol of virginity) clearly demonstrates the aesthetic encouraged by the sumptuary laws. Here the queen is a vision of costly silks, gold and silver embroidery, and lavish and abundant jewellery.

However, there was more than one way to create an impact within the legislative guidelines. In 1590 the 2nd earl of Essex, the queen’s favourite, was in temporary disgrace following his marriage to Frances Sidney. In a public show of penitence, he appeared at that year’s Accession Day tilt at court ‘in sable sad’, sporting black armour. Nevertheless, that was topped by a spectacular black surcoat richly embroidered with silver thread, pearls and gemstones. Having demonstrated that he was literally an ornament to the court, Essex was soon back in favour.

By the closing years of the 16th century the sumptuary laws had in fact run their course. Although Elizabethan parliaments saw more than half-a-dozen government attempts to update the legislation, only one measure was passed, a short-lived Act in 1563 banning the purchase of expensive foreign clothing on credit. While the House of Lords was happy to entrench peers’ existing privileges, Members of the Commons proved increasingly resistant to further restrictions on their own sartorial choices. The queen was instead obliged to issue a string of proclamations enforcing or modifying the sumptuary statutes. Her successor, James I, all but abandoned this struggle, and instead tried to profit from the manufacture of gold and silver thread, which had by now reached England. (Famously, his attempt to introduce silkworms to the country failed when the wrong kind of mulberry tree was employed.)

Even so, the cultural impact of the sumptuary laws lingered into the 17th century. When Richard Sackville, 3rd earl of Dorset needed an outfit for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine in 1613, he opted for this extraordinary ensemble, which featured a doublet of cloth of silver embroidered in gold and black silk, a black velvet cloak embellished with gold and silver, and silk stockings similarly decorated with gold, silver, and black silk thread. In the light of such unashamed excess, it is no surprise that the last sumptuary bills debated by Parliament, during the 1620s, were promoted by puritans intent on banning the elitist luxury which the old legislation had encouraged.

PMH

Further reading:

Eleri Lynn, Tudor Fashion (2017)

Roy Strong, The Elizabethan Image (2019)

Anna Reynolds, In Fine Style: the Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion (2013)

Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (2005)

A biography of the 3rd earl of Dorset features in The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021). Biographies of the 2nd earl of Essex, 4th earl of Derby and 2nd Viscount Howard are in preparation as part of our project on the House of Lords 1558-1603.

In July 1599 the mayor and aldermen of Hull complained to the Privy Council that five ships from their town had been seized by Christian IV, king of Denmark-Norway, while fishing near ‘Wardhouse’ (Vardøhus), a fortress off Vardo, on the north Norwegian coast. Their crews had been placed in irons, and some of the seamen were allegedly tortured. Four of the ships were detained as prizes, while the fifth was sent back to England with a message that no-one was to fish in Danish-Norwegian waters without licence. Hull’s governors were incensed. Even though Hull’s ships had long fished off the Norwegian coast, many of the town’s merchants now faced financial ruin. Moreover Christian’s aggressive actions, if left unchecked, threatened the English trade route to Muscovy. The harsh treatment meted out to the Hull fishermen was undoubtedly due to the fact that Christian IV was then trying to assert his authority over northern Norway. He was engaged in a territorial dispute with Muscovy, which claimed that Vardo and the surrounding Lapp country belonged to the Tsar.

Naturally both the queen, Elizabeth I, and the Privy Council sympathized with Hull’s complaint and agreed to intervene. However, as neither England nor Denmark employed a resident ambassador in the other’s capital, it took several months and the dispatch of a special ambassador to Copenhagen to arrange a meeting to discuss the dispute. Eventually, over the winter of 1599/1600, it was agreed that commissioners from both countries would meet on neutral ground the following Easter. The place chosen was Emden, a quasi-autonomous city in north-western Germany which enjoyed the protection of the neighbouring Dutch Republic. In March 1600, with the conference now imminent, Elizabeth selected three delegates to attend this conference. Unsurprisingly, two were civil lawyers experienced in maritime law, Dr Christopher Parkins and Richard Swale. However, the third figure chosen, and the nominal head of the mission, was a leading churchman, Richard Bancroft, the 45-year old bishop of London.

Perhaps no one was more astonished by Bancroft’s selection for this mission than Bancroft himself. Quite apart from the fact that he had never been abroad and lacked both diplomatic experience and expertise in the civil law, he was the first bishop chosen to serve on a diplomatic mission since Thomas Thirlby, bishop of Ely, had been included on the delegation which negotiated the 1559 treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis. Since her accession in 1558, Elizabeth had broken with the practice of the past and largely restricted prelates to their ecclesiastical duties. The only exceptions to this rule were her appointment of Thomas Young, archbishop of York as lord president of the council in the North in 1564 and the addition of John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, to the Privy Council in 1586.

Elizabeth’s reasons for choosing Bancroft remain unknown. She may have thought that, as a Protestant bishop with well-known anti-Calvinist leanings, he would be acceptable to the Lutheran Danes. However, why choose a bishop at all? Would not a nobleman have been preferable? The answer to this question is probably ‘yes’. But by the late 1590s the queen was having difficulty in finding noblemen capable of performing diplomatic missions, as many peers were either not up to the task or simply lacked the means to subsidise the cost of an official embassy. Bancroft, by contrast, was shrewd and capable, the bane of radical puritans. Moreover, he had neither wife nor children to support and an annual income of more than £1,100 at his disposal. Elizabeth’s only concern was not the depth of Bancroft’s pockets but his notorious thriftiness. For that reason, she reminded him that, as leader of the Emden mission, he would be expected to ‘keep a bountiful house’.

Bancroft was not in the least bit pleased to have been selected for this mission and initially pleaded inexperience and a ‘tertian ague’ (malaria) to avoid having to go. However, once it became clear the queen would not budge, he threw himself into the task with his customary vigour. Determined to make a good impression, he decided to take with him a 40-strong entourage and a large amount of plate, which he borrowed, with the queen’s permission, from the Jewel House. He also got himself admitted to membership of Doctors’ Commons, the professional body to which all leading civil lawyers belonged, presumably in order to improve his credentials in the eyes of the Danes.

Bancroft and his two fellow commissioners sailed from Gravesend on 18 April 1600. However, a persistent easterly wind meant that as late as the 29th they were still at Queenborough, in north Kent. By the time they reached Emden on 10 May the Danish commissioners were on the point of departure, their commission being about to expire, having awaited the English delegation for more than a month. Thoroughly angry, the Danes refused to confer with the newly arrived delegates unless the English rowed out to their ship, an offer which Bancroft and his colleagues rejected as humiliating. Eventually the English were forced to relent, whereupon one of their number, perhaps Bancroft himself, took to the water. On seeing this the Danes immediately spread sail and departed.

In the immediate aftermath of this fiasco, the English delegates were obliged to return home empty-handed. As a result, the governors of Hull had no choice but to renew their suit for redress later that same year. The queen did not blame Bancroft for the ignominious failure of his mission, though, but rather thanked him for undertaking the journey.

In the aftermath of this, his first and only diplomatic mission, Bancroft managed to retrieve something from the wreckage. During his short time at Emden, he had succeeded in cultivating some useful contacts in the town, where he was evidently wined and dined. Consequently, over the next few years, he was able to keep the queen’s chief minister, Sir Robert Cecil, informed of events in north-west Germany, a not unimportant service in an era when reliable news was often in short supply. Bancroft may have derived a further benefit from his trip to Emden. According to the newsletter-writer John Chamberlain, a well-informed observer, he did not return to England with his two colleagues but instead travelled alone and incognito through the United Provinces. This raises the intriguing but hitherto unconsidered possibility that Bancroft, who liked to study his religious enemies up close, used the opportunity of this unplanned adventure to witness Dutch Calvinist practices at first hand. Whatever the truth of the matter, Bancroft’s trip to Emden is notable as being the last occasion on which a bishop headed a diplomatic mission until 1712-13, when John Robinson, bishop of Bristol, represented Great Britain at the Congress of Utrecht.

ADT

Further reading:

P. Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 2013)

S.B. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London, 1962)

Although neither of these studies discusses it, Bancroft’s trip to Emden will feature in the biography now in preparation for our volumes on the Elizabethan House of Lords. For the bishop’s later career, see also his entry in The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (Cambridge, 2021).

On 26 Feb. 1549 a private bill ‘to dis[in]herit William West, [for] attempting to poison’ his uncle Thomas West, 9th Lord De La Warr, received a first reading in the House of Lords. The De La Warr estates were entailed on the male line and, as the 9th Lord had no children, his heirs were his half-brother, Sir Owen West, who had no sons, and then William West, the son of his next half-brother Sir George West. It was also assumed that William would inherit the De La Warr barony, although the peerage was a barony by writ and consequently not tied to the heirs male (indeed it had passed to the West family in the fifteenth century through the female line).

Sir George West had died in 1538, when William was still a child. De La Warr had then taken his nephew ‘into his keeping and service … tendering him as his natural son to his great cost’, employing him to serve him at his table. However, the baron alleged that, on reaching the age of 18, William had grown impatient of waiting for his inheritance and plotted to kill his uncle, though in the first instance this would have benefited Sir Owen, who survived until 1551. William procured poison, which he mixed with the drink he was to serve to De La Warr. However, one of the other servants, ‘perceiving certain powder about the brim of the … cup otherwise than was accustomed’, alerted the 9th Lord who, ‘having suspicion thereof and of nature somewhat abhorring the same, refrained to drink thereof’.

William was imprisoned in the Tower of London and evidently signed a confession. Surprisingly however, attempted murder was not in itself a felony at this date, and consequently De La Warr decided to proceed against his nephew via private legislation. The bill passed rapidly through the upper House, but, for reasons unknown, the Commons redrafted it. The new bill was given a first reading on 14 Mar. 1549, but proceeded no further because the session ended that same day. De La Warr tried again when a new session began in the following November; once more his bill quickly passed the Lords, but the Commons again insisted on redrafting it. Moreover, the lower House wanted to hear William’s side of the story. Consequently he was brought from the Tower on 23 Jan. 1550, when he insisted that he was not guilty and had only signed the confession out of fear. However, three witnesses (possibly servants of De La Warr) testified against him. This appears to have convinced the Commons of his guilt and they passed the bill, which was duly enacted. William was then released from the Tower the following June.

The 1550 act did not break the entail. Instead it empowered De La Warr to appoint trustees to hold the estates during William’s lifetime, after which they would pass to the next male heir. It also banned William himself from inheriting the barony, but without disbarring his heirs. Despite William’s attempt to murder him, De La Warr felt bound to make provision ‘towards the maintenance of’ his nephew’s ‘living and degree’. Consequently, when the baron made his will in 1554 he provided for William ‘of my charity and nothing of his desert’. He granted his nephew a £350 annuity and the use of three houses, two in Sussex and one in London. He also referred obscurely to William’s other ‘vices and evil demeanours’ which, ‘for that he is of my blood’, he had ‘passed over in silence’.

De La Warr died shortly after making his will, and William subsequently persuaded his uncle’s trustees to surrender their interest to him. In February 1556 Mary I formally granted William possession of his uncle’s lands, describing him as ‘Lord La Warr’. Nevertheless, he was not summoned to Parliament. The following summer, having been indicted for plotting against Mary, William tried to claim the privilege of a peer to be tried by his fellow noblemen. However, the heralds ruled that he was a commoner, not because of the 1550 act, but because, as a barony by writ, the De La Warr title had descended de jure to the heir general, the 9th Lord’s niece. William withdrew his claim in order to enter a ‘not guilty’ plea, but was convicted of treason regardless. He was pardoned in April 1557.

Shortly after being pardoned, William crossed the Channel as part of the English forces sent by Mary to aid her husband, Philip II of Spain, against the French. William took the opportunity to present a petition to Philip containing ‘such matter … as is neither true nor justifiable’, which suggests that he had renewed his claim to the De La Warr peerage. He was imprisoned on his return to England, but released in March 1558. A year later, following the accession of Elizabeth I, William signed himself merely ‘Wyllyam West’, when he wrote to the secretary of state, Sir William Cecil, lobbying for an act to reverse his conviction for treason. He was also described merely as William West in the subsequent statute, which was passed in 1563. However, this was presumably a legal necessity, as he had been convicted of treason as a commoner. Elsewhere William called himself De La Warr in the 1560s, indicating that he had not abandoned his claim to the peerage.

The issue of William’s status came to a head when he was appointed joint lord lieutenant of Sussex in November 1569, alongside Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montagu and Thomas Sackville, 1st Lord Buckhurst. In the commission William was named as a commoner and was ranked last; but if he had indeed inherited the De La Warr peerage (which dated back to 1299), he should have been placed above Buckhurst, whose barony had been created in 1567. Queen Elizabeth probably did not want her kinsman Buckhurst to be relegated to third place in the commission. The problem was solved in February 1570, when William was prevailed upon to accept the De La Warr title as a new creation, which positioned him below Buckhurst in the hierarchy.

Following William’s death in 1595 his son, Thomas West, 2nd Lord De La Warr, claimed the precedence of the old De La Warr barony. This question was referred to the Lords in 1597, when the upper House found in his favour, a verdict which effectively set aside the rights of the heir general. The 1550 act was thereafter almost forgotten until it achieved contemporary relevance in the twentieth century. In 1955, Tony Benn cited it as a precedent when he sought to introduce a bill enabling him to renounce the inheritance of the Stansgate peerage – and even facetiously offered to attempt to poison his father.

BC

Further reading:

Sessional Papers. Printed by Order of the House of Lords (1955), iii. 31-2

K.J. Kesselring, Making Murder Public (2019)

L.O Pike, Constitutional Hist. of the House of Lords (1894)

Chronicle. of England … by Charles Wriothesley, II ed. W.D. Hamilton (Camden Society new series xx)

J. H. Round, Peerage and Pedigree (1910)

J. Adams, Tony Benn (1992)

Hampshire in the 1560s was a divided community. Despite the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559, there was still a sizeable Catholic population in the county, which enjoyed the patronage of the leading local magnate, William Paulet, 1st marquess of Winchester. One of the great survivors of Tudor politics, Paulet had been lord treasurer of England since 1550, adapting his own religious opinions to the radically different demands of Edward VI, Mary I and now Elizabeth I, while remaining an indispensable and influential figure at the heart of government. However, many of his own family were openly Catholic, and with the discreet backing of the marquess, they provided the backbone of Hampshire’s recusant community. Set against them was a rival gentry faction, staunchly Protestant, who looked for leadership to the county’s ecclesiastical head, Robert Horne, bishop of Winchester. Horne, who had lived in exile on the continent during Mary’s reign, was a strong-minded character, determined to eradicate Catholicism in his diocese. By the mid-1560s he had already successfully secured the sacking of a number of Hampshire magistrates on religious grounds.

The next major flashpoint came in the autumn of 1566, when a new session of Elizabeth’s second Parliament was summoned. Hampshire’s senior knight of the shire, Sir John Mason, a religious conservative, had died in April that year, necessitating a by-election. Horne was anxious for the new Member to be a convinced Protestant, but there was one very significant obstacle to his plans. The current sheriff of Hampshire, Richard Pexall, was the marquess’s son-in-law, and a leading member of his faction. And as sheriff, Pexall had overall responsibility for managing the election. Writs for the holding of elections were issued by Chancery to sheriffs, who then, in the case of county seats, summoned voters to assemble at the next ‘county day’, a fixed date each month when people routinely gathered to conduct business. In Hampshire, the normal meeting place was the cathedral city of Winchester. On the day of the election itself, the sheriff served as returning officer, assessing the eligibility of both the candidates and the electors, the latter being required to own at least 40 shillings-worth of freehold land in the relevant county. The sheriff also had complete control over the management and duration of the election, and was the sole arbiter of the outcome. In addition, he was responsible for notifying the result to Westminster. Consequently, sheriffs enjoyed considerable scope for manipulating the entire process.

Faced with this situation, Horne responded by trying to wrong-foot Pexall. Already in London for the opening of the new parliamentary session, the bishop used his own contacts, conceivably secretary of state Sir William Cecil or the lord keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, to obtain the election writ from Chancery at the end of September. Instead of passing it straight to the sheriff, as he should have done, Horne sent it to one of his own Hampshire allies, Richard Norton, who hung onto it for several days. Meanwhile, with the next county day looming on 7 October, another of the bishop’s supporters, William Uvedale, the remaining Hampshire knight of the shire, began mobilising Horne’s tenants to turn up at Winchester in force. Pexall finally received the writ just two days before the election was due to be held, which gave him barely any time to rally the Paulet faction.

Horne’s strategy was becoming clear. By law, the election had to be held on the next county day, regardless of how little warning was received, so on 7 October the votes would be heavily weighted in favour of the bishop’s preferred candidate. On the face of things this man was a compromise choice, Sir William Paulet, a Protestant grandson of the marquess. However, there was a catch: Paulet was a Dorset resident, which rendered him ineligible to serve as a Hampshire knight of the shire. Consequently, if he was elected, and Pexall agreed to return him, the sheriff would be liable to a hefty fine and even imprisonment for breaking election law. Pexall subsequently alleged, with some justification, that the Horne camp promoted Sir William as a ploy; assuming that the sheriff stuck to the letter of the law, and disqualified him, that would clear the way for an alternative candidate from the bishop’s faction, the hardline Protestant Henry Wallop. Faced with this unpalatable choice, Pexall himself cheated. On 7 October, around 300 of Horne’s allies assembled at Winchester in anticipation of an election, but the sheriff simply failed to turn up, and instead returned the writ to Chancery unexecuted, complaining that he’d been given too little time to summon the freeholders. Having himself now broken the law in another way, Pexall should by rights have been penalised, but the marquess presumably intervened to protect him, and in the short term nothing happened.

The sheriff’s evasive action restored the initiative to the Paulet camp. After the abortive October election, nothing could happen until the next county day on 4 November, which gave the marquess’s supporters plenty of time to mobilise. A fresh election writ was issued, and this time it was collected from Chancery by Pexall’s under-sheriff. Thus, when the rival factions assembled again at Winchester, the numbers were much more evenly matched. Moreover, the Paulets had now identified their own candidate, Sir John Berkeley, another of the marquess’s grandsons, but crucially also a Hampshire Protestant whose eligibility couldn’t be questioned. Horne’s allies again initially nominated Sir William Paulet, but Pexall debarred him as a non-resident, whereupon Henry Wallop was put forward as a substitute.

The election now settled into a more regular pattern, which again worked in the sheriff’s favour. In the days before secret ballots, votes were conducted in up to three stages, and in this case all three were needed. First, the freemen gathered in the hall of Winchester Castle, where the election writ was read out, and Berkeley and Wallop were formally nominated. There followed a ‘cry’, during which the rival supporters literally shouted the names of their preferred candidate, ‘A Berkeley’, or ‘A Wallop’. After half an hour of raucous bellowing, Pexall ruled that it was not possible to determine which man had the most support, and ordered the voters to re-assemble on the castle green. There, the sheriff took a ‘view’ of the two camps, the second stage available to him. According to Horne’s allies, Wallop’s supporters clearly outnumbered Berkeley’s, but Pexall questioned whether all of the crowd owned enough land to qualify as voters, and again concluded that neither side had a definite majority.

That decision opened the way to the third and final stage of the election, a poll of individual voters, which was again presided over by the sheriff. Unsurprisingly, Pexall opted to record the names of Berkeley’s supporters first, before pausing the whole process around 11 o’clock for a three-hour lunch break. Evidently he hoped that, with winter drawing in, a reasonable number of Wallop’s backers would lose patience and go home before their votes were recorded. When the polling resumed in the afternoon, Pexall began with some more Berkeley voters who had arrived late, then finally turned his attention to the Wallop contingent, who were still present in large numbers. According to subsequent testimony, the sheriff attempted to intimidate some of them into changing sides, threatening to report those that he recognized to the marquess. Eventually, at around eight or nine o’clock in the evening, Pexall declared the poll closed, even though some Wallop supporters who had turned up late insisted that they’d been excluded.

Predictably, the sheriff declared Berkeley the winner, by 216 votes to 209. However, Horne’s faction maintained that they’d been cheated, and that Wallop’s tally should have been as high as 258. Berkeley duly took his seat in the House of Commons, but Pexall was sued in the court of Star Chamber, accused of electoral malpractice. The outcome of that case is unknown, but it had no impact on Berkeley himself. In the event, this contest was the Paulet faction’s last major success. The old marquess died in 1572, and his family declined in importance from then on, leaving Hampshire’s Protestants in control of subsequent elections.

PMH

Further reading:

R.H. Fritze, ‘The role of family and religion in the local politics of early Elizabethan England: the case of Hampshire in the 1560s’, Historical Journal, xxv (1982), pp. 267-87

The House of Commons 1604-1629 ed. Andrew Thrush (2010), i. (especially chapter 4)

It has previously gone unnoticed that, during the first Elizabethan Parliament, one of the lay members of the House of Lords took his seat even though he was a prisoner of war, an occurrence which appears to be unique in the annals of English parliamentary history. The peer in question was William Grey, 13th Lord Grey of Wilton, widely regarded at the time as England’s finest soldier. Grey was the former commander of the English garrison at Guînes, in the Pas de Calais. In January 1558 the French captured Calais and laid siege to Guînes. Despite putting up a stout defence, Grey was unable to prevent the town’s capture. Following the surrender of Guînes, Grey was held prisoner in the Chateau de Sainte-Suzanne, south-east of Evron, in the Loire valley. His ransom, set at 25,000 crowns (equivalent to about £8,000 in this period or about £1.9m in today’s values), was not paid until the late summer of 1559, by which time Parliament had been dissolved. Nevertheless, Grey attended the House of Lords on at least three occasions that year, on 1, 4 and 10 February, shortly after the session began. The printed Journal (published in the early nineteenth century) also shows Grey as having been present twice more, on 13 and 17 April. However, the first of these attendances is certainly erroneous as it does not appear in the manuscript Journal. The second also seems to be a mistake, based upon a misreading by the editors of the printed Journal of the manuscript, in which the attendances are carelessly recorded for that day.

Why was Grey able to sit in the Lords, albeit briefly, while still a prisoner of the French? The answer to this intriguing question lies in the relations between England and France at the time. Following the accession of Elizabeth I in November 1558, England’s new queen was anxious to bring about an end to the war with France which she had inherited from her predecessor, her half-sister Mary I. The French king, Henri II, was no less desirous of peace. However, whereas Elizabeth expected Calais and its associated territories to be returned to England as part of any peace settlement, Henri was determined to hang on to his recent conquests. In order to put pressure on Elizabeth to agree to his terms, Henri decided to draw attention to the fact that his daughter-in-law, Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland and wife of the dauphin, had a claim to the English throne which many considered to be better than Elizabeth’s. Unless Elizabeth agreed to drop her claim to Calais, he threatened to promote Mary’s right. Rather than select a Frenchman to carry this unwelcome message, however, Henri offered the task to Lord Grey who, in late December, returned to England, ostensibly in order to attend Elizabeth’s forthcoming coronation.

The terms of Grey’s parole remain frustratingly unclear. However, according to the Venetian ambassador in Paris, Grey was required to guarantee that he would pay a ransom of 40,000 crowns if he failed to return or was prevented by the queen from doing so. From this same ambassador we also learn that Grey’s parole was limited to just two months: on 6 February 1559 he reported that a messenger from Grey had arrived in Paris confirming that the baron intended to return to France shortly.

Thanks to the Mantuan agent at the English court, we know that Grey arrived at Whitehall on the evening of 30 December 1558. Moreover, from a document drafted at the time by the queen’s chief minister, Sir William Cecil, we also know that, after some difficulty, Grey was subsequently granted two interviews by the queen. These meetings, and the discussions which surrounded them, may explain why Grey attended the 1559 Parliament only infrequently. At the first interview, Grey presented Elizabeth with a letter from the duc de Guise, the commander of the French forces which had captured Calais, in which the queen was assured that France now wanted peace. It may also have been at this meeting that Grey delivered the message from Henri II threatening to support Mary queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne if Elizabeth made difficulties over Calais. In the second interview, Grey was told to thank Guise for his letter and to say that Elizabeth, too, desired peace. However, he was to add that Elizabeth wanted to turn the clock back to 1553, when Edward VI had ascended the throne. In other words, she was not prepared to make peace unless Calais was first restored. Grey was told to send this reply in writing ‘by some gentleman well instructed’. At around the same time, Elizabeth sent two members of her Council to the Spanish ambassador to discover whether her ally, Philip II of Spain, would allow Grey to be exchanged for one of the French noble prisoners in Spanish hands. In the event, nothing came of this approach, even though Philip had by now decided, albeit reluctantly, to seek Elizabeth’s hand in marriage.

It seems likely that Grey returned to France in mid-February 1559. As we have seen, his supposed attendance in the Lords on 17 April 1559 can be discounted; he was certainly not on the jury which, three days later, tried the 2nd Lord Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth) for surrendering Calais after barely a fight. Grey remained a prisoner until his ransom was paid later that year. Interestingly, the money was provided by Elizabeth, who accepted Grey’s argument that even if he sold all the lands he owned he could never hope to raise the 25,000 crowns demanded by his captors. However, the queen, in true form, put her own financial needs first by canvassing voluntary contributions from other members of the nobility – crowdfunding before the fact. She also required Grey to pay her back and to put up part of his estate as collateral. In so doing, she condemned the baron, who died in December 1562, to serious financial hardship for the remainder of his life.

ADT

Further reading:

A commentary of the services and charges of William, Lord Grey of Wilton, K.G. by his son Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, K.G. ed. P. de Malpas Grey Egerton (Camden Society, vol. 40; 1847)

One of the most striking features of Queen Elizabeth I’s funeral, held on 28 April 1603, is that the place of Chief Mourner in the procession was taken by Helena, dowager marchioness of Northampton, a member of the privy chamber. Despite having served Elizabeth for the past thirty-six years, Helena was not English-born but a native of Sweden.

Born in about 1549, Helena (or ‘Elin’ as she signed herself before she settled in England) was the daughter of Ulf Henrikson Snakenborg, member of an old Swedish baronial family, and Agneta Knutson, also of aristocratic stock. Helena’s parents enjoyed considerable standing in Sweden. In fact, their marriage five years earlier had been held at Stockholm Castle, in the presence of the king and queen. Not surprisingly, by the mid-1560s their daughter Helena was a maid of honour to Princess Cecilia, sister to the then king of Sweden, Eric XIV.

In September 1565 Helena, aged about 16, accompanied the princess on a fruitless mission to England to persuade Queen Elizabeth to marry King Eric. Cecilia and her entourage were lodged at Bedford House, on the Strand, where they were visited by leading members of the English court. Among the more regular callers was the 53-year old William Parr, marquess of Northampton, the childless brother of Elizabeth I’s late stepmother, Queen Catherine Parr. In all likelihood, Northampton was a keen exponent of a Swedish match, just like his second wife, Elizabeth Brooke (daughter of William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham), who had died of breast cancer five months earlier. However, concern for the queen’s marriage was not the only reason Northampton was drawn to Bedford House. The marquess soon began to take an interest in Helena’s welfare, beginning with arranging for her medical treatment, as she was ill by the time she arrived in England. Despite the age difference Northampton fell in love with Helena, who was reportedly ‘very beautiful’. Before the year was out Helena accepted Northampton’s offer of marriage. However, as a letter to her mother makes clear, Helena’s feelings were affectionate rather than amorous: ‘the marquess has been both father and mother to me’, she explained, and ‘most kind in every detail’.

Following Princess Cecilia’s departure for the Continent in May 1566, Helena remained in England, cared for by eight or ten of Northampton’s servants. However, the planned marriage was placed on hold because of the queen’s disapproval. Though Northampton was now a widower following the death of his second wife Elizabeth Brooke, his adulterous first wife, Anne Bourchier, was still alive. In 1548 a royal commission, headed by Archbishop Cranmer, had concluded that Anne’s unfaithfulness had ended their union. However, the queen disagreed, oddly, as she never challenged the legitimacy of Northampton’s marriage to Elizabeth Brooke, with whom she was great friends. For the queen, there could be no question of Northampton marrying Helena until Anne was dead. When, in November 1566, Northampton joined the chorus of voices demanding that she take a husband, Elizabeth retorted that the marquess would be better advised thinking of arguments to persuade her to let him remarry ‘instead of mincing words with her’.

Helena and Northampton finally reached the altar on 6 May 1571, four months after Anne’s death. The ceremony was held in the Chapel Royal, and the queen danced at the wedding feast, which was followed by two days of jousting. However, the marriage proved to be short-lived, as Northampton died just five months later. Northampton’s demise threatened to spell disaster for Helena, as the marquess had neglected to provide his new wife with a jointure, and his entire estate, worth about £1,200 per annum, escheated to the crown. Fortunately for Helena, Queen Elizabeth took pity on the marquess’ young widow. She not only paid for Northampton’s funeral but also assigned Helena lands worth £400 a year. Additionally, at some point Helena was admitted to the privy chamber. Perhaps because of this Helena met the man who was soon to become her second husband, Thomas Gorges. Thirteen years her senior, Gorges was a Wiltshire landowner and one of the grooms of the privy chamber.

The social gulf between Gorges and Helena, who continued to be known as the marchioness of Northampton, was considerable. It was not unknown for women of a high social rank to marry beneath them. In fact, before Elizabeth’s accession Katherine Brandon, dowager duchess of Suffolk had taken Richard Bertie, a Lincolnshire gentleman, as her second husband. However, the queen looked askance at such matches. Realizing that Elizabeth would never agree to their marriage, the couple took matters into their own hands and sometime in 1576 they were secretly wed. When the queen discovered this she was naturally furious. Helena was banished to Gorges’ house in the Whitefriars, while Gorges himself was jailed. However, Elizabeth’s anger eventually subsided and within a year or so she had become reconciled to the match. In January 1578 she and Gorges exchanged New Year gifts; six months later, Elizabeth stood as godmother at the baptism of the couple’s first child, prudently christened Elizabeth.

Helena retained Queen Elizabeth’s favour for the rest of the reign. Formally, at least, her duties were limited, partly because she was an unwaged member of the privy chamber but also because of her gender. Behind the scenes, though, she may have been more active than has previously been supposed. In 1582 her husband was dispatched to Sweden on a mission to recover certain debts owed by the Swedish king, John III. There is no evidence that Helena remained in England. Her presence in Sweden may have been considered essential, as Gorges would not have been selected for this delicate mission had it not been for his wife’s intimate knowledge of the Swedish court. Helena can certainly be glimpsed alongside her husband in September 1586, when Gorges was entrusted with the task of conveying Mary, Queen of Scots from Chartley to Tixall, both in Staffordshire. Mary, fearing that her plotting against Elizabeth had been discovered, reportedly ‘raged and stormed, and showered invectives on Gorges and his mistress’. That same year, Gorges became responsible for the queen’s robes. It seems unlikely that Helena did not share in her husband’s official duties.

Following Elizabeth’s death, Helena lost her position at court. This cannot have been entirely unexpected, especially as Anne, the new queen consort, was Danish, and Denmark and Sweden were longstanding enemies. Nevertheless, in 1605 Helena and her husband were granted the keepership of Richmond Park for life. On the death of Gorges in 1610, Helena largely retired from public view. She lived on until April 1635, dying at Redlynch, in Somerset, the home of her youngest son Sir Robert Gorges, who sat in three parliaments during the late 1620s. At her request, Helena was buried alongside ‘my dear and late husband Sir Thomas Gorges’ in Salisbury Cathedral.

A.T

Further reading:

Charles Angell Bradford, Helena, Marchioness of Northampton (London, 1936)

Raymond Gorges, The Story of a family through eleven centuries illustrated by portraits and pedigrees, being a history of the family of Gorges (Boston, 1944)

‘Although he doth many times go apparelled like a nobleman, yet other times he useth such apparel as the poorest man in London can go no worse…; he lately came to the Guildhall in an old whitish gown girded unto him halting right down, with a staff in his hand, and upon his head a linen cloth very mean, with a coif [cap] upon the same; at the which every light person jested, and the graver sort were very sorry to see a nobleman so disguised.’

At first glance, Henry Howard’s eccentric dress-sense seems merely quirky and amusing. However, in Elizabethan England costume was a key marker of social status, rigidly enforced by Parliament through the so-called sumptuary laws, and the viscount’s refusal to conform to established norms was therefore detrimental to good order. But this was one of the more innocent facets of his character.

Born around 1537, Howard was a grandson of the 3rd duke of Norfolk, and nephew of the recently disgraced Queen Anne Boleyn. His father, Thomas, was created Viscount Howard of Bindon in 1559, following the accession of their cousin, Elizabeth I. As a member of one of England’s leading families, and indeed one with royal connections, Howard was to a considerable degree insulated from the consequences of his own bad behaviour. This was a lesson that he learnt comparatively early; in 1556, while probably still a teenager, he was pardoned for the manslaughter of a servant whom he shot dead while fooling about with a gun indoors. Far from being chastened by that experience, he proved so irresponsible that by 1581 the Privy Council had banned him from keeping arms. Nevertheless, he ignored this command, and, according to one of his Dorset neighbours, continued to go shooting daily, ‘to the no great safety of the country thereabouts’.

Howard’s attitude to money was another source of concern, particularly for his own family. The 1st Viscount possessed a comparatively modest estate, but his heir was an habitual spendthrift who lived only for the present. During the 1563 parliamentary session, Howard’s parents secured an Act to prevent him from simply selling his patrimony in due course to clear his debts. The astonishingly blunt preamble to this legislation stated that such safeguards were necessary purely because of their feckless son, ‘of whose good government … in ordering and disposing of the premises … there is some despair conceived’. However, once again there is no evidence that Howard mended his ways. In 1575 the Privy Council intervened in a bid to secure payment for his numerous creditors, whose complaints he was ignoring. This move was evidently unsuccessful, since the government followed up with a more comprehensive debt-clearing process two years later, after Howard’s father had reluctantly agreed to sell land in order to generate funds.

These money troubles helped to poison Howard’s relationship with his father. In 1572 the viscount accused his ‘most unnatural son’ of recruiting ‘manifest and notorious thieves’ to attack and even murder him. This allegation was all the more credible because Howard himself was on very friendly terms with Dorset’s pirate fraternity, habitually socialising with them, and almost certainly colluding in their criminal activities. Although the government never managed to prove his direct involvement in piracy, Howard made no attempt to hide these connections, and in 1587 even disrupted a trial at the Admiralty Court in London, assuring the jurors that the pirates in the dock ‘were as honest men as themselves’. This intervention was ‘so far out of order’ that two of the judges present walked out in protest, but as usual no action was taken against Howard himself.

Indeed, it generally took a clear-cut breach of law and order before the government was prepared to discipline Howard. In 1580 he violently assaulted the sheriff of Dorset, whom he had apparently mistaken for a covert Catholic. As the sheriff had been on official business at the time, this incident could not be ignored, and Howard was jailed by the Council for seven weeks, until he reluctantly acknowledged his fault. However, the government’s preferred strategy was one of containment, such was the prestige which still attached to the peerage. Accordingly, when Howard succeeded his father as 2nd Viscount in 1582, he was not appointed to any local offices except that of justice of the peace, which for a man of his rank counted as a major snub.

Howard apparently responded by spending more time in London, where he continued to attract adverse comment. His casual disregard for the law did not prevent him from attending the House of Lords occasionally, though his only recorded activity, in 1584, was a failed attempt to secure the release from gaol of one of his servants, using parliamentary privilege. In 1587 he took a shine to the current lord mayor, whose house he began to frequent. There, according to one government informant, ‘he useth very idle speeches, … as in terming her majesty by the name of Bess; and as for meaner men he useth many words against them that are not decent for a nobleman to use’. However, as usual his status and powerful connections protected him, and such reports were filed away, rather than provoking one of the exemplary punishments reserved for commoners who spoke disrespectfully of the queen.

Even so, Elizabeth had her own red lines, and eventually Howard crossed them. In 1566 he had married one of the monarch’s ladies-in-waiting, Frances Meautys. The couple had one child, a daughter, but after barely a decade the marriage was in serious trouble, and in 1580 the Privy Council was obliged to investigate reports that Frances was being maltreated. Unabashed, Howard came up to London accompanied by his current mistress, whose husband he was bribing to countenance this illicit relationship. The government’s attempts to achieve a reconciliation failed, and four years later Elizabeth herself intervened, taking Frances and her daughter into protective custody. Howard responded contemptuously to this development, ‘lifting up his leg and letting fly behind’. When the queen’s messengers protested at his lack of respect, Howard asserted that he would have ignored anything less than a royal command, ‘for he was a nobleman, and as good as the best of the lords of the Council’. As Frances departed, Howard fired off one final insult at Elizabeth herself: ‘if her Majesty were a prince, … I should think she sent for my wife to abuse [i.e. seduce] her’.

At length, in 1587, Howard and his wife formally separated, but he then withheld the agreed maintenance payments. Frances took him to court, and he was again imprisoned in London pending a formal hearing. Even now Elizabeth took a lenient view of her troublesome kinsman, instructing the Council to find a resolution, out of the ‘especial regard she hath of those of his quality and birth’. Howard was duly freed, but failed to stick to the revised settlement with Frances.  In late October 1590, he was peremptorily summoned before the queen, but the outcome of that interview is not known. Two months later, the dispute abruptly ended when Howard’s death brought his tumultuous career to a premature close.

PMH

Further reading:

Rachel Lloyd, Dorset Elizabethans: at home and abroad (1967)

A biography of Viscount Howard has been prepared for our Lords 1558-1602 project.

For another badly-behaved Elizabethan peer, the 2nd earl of Lincoln, click here!

The last of the Fitzalans, Earl Henry was a member of one of the oldest aristocratic dynasties in England. Indeed, his family had held the earldom of Arundel since the early thirteenth century. He was also extremely wealthy, having a large estate in Sussex, with other lands scattered throughout southern England. Born in 1512, three years after the accession of Henry VIII, Arundel first achieved high office in 1546, when he was appointed lord chamberlain. However, it was under Mary I that he attained a position of great prominence, as Mary, thankful for his support against Lady Jane Grey, promoted him to lord steward and also made him lord president of the Privy Council.

Seniority of rank was no guide to ability, of course. Contemporary observers regarded Arundel as a light-weight. The Imperial ambassador, for example, thought him ‘silly’, while Spanish diplomats considered him ‘flighty’ and ‘weak’. He was certainly unable to control his temper and did not like to be contradicted. On one occasion early in Elizabeth I’s reign he and the lord admiral, Lord Clinton, quarrelled so vehemently that they ‘fell to fisticuffs and grabbing each other’s beards’, to the considerable embarrassment of the queen, who witnessed this childish behaviour. However, it would be a mistake to write off Arundel as inconsequential.

Despite his character flaws, Arundel was an important figure at the Elizabethan court because he was regarded as potentially dangerous. His wealth and landed estate made him powerful. So too did his connections: until recently he had been father-in-law to the queen’s cousin, Thomas Howard, 4th duke of Norfolk, England’s premier peer. There was also the fact that, like many members of the ancient nobility, Arundel clung to the Catholic faith. Unless handled carefully, he might easily become a rallying point for disaffected members of the nobility and gentry alike. He was certainly a popular figure. When, in April 1567, he travelled to London through Kent, having spent some time in northern Italy, he was accompanied by six or seven hundred members of the gentry of Kent, Surrey and Sussex. By the time he reached the capital, his entourage had reportedly swollen to more than 2,000, including many of London’s aldermen and several of his fellow nobles.

From the very start of her reign, Elizabeth had the good sense to treat Arundel with kid gloves. When Arundel, then one of the commissioners entrusted with the task of negotiating a peace with France, returned to England without her permission in late 1559, Elizabeth neither upbraided him nor sent him back. On the contrary, she let his presumption go unpunished and instead confirmed him in office as lord steward. She also allowed him to retain his seat on the Privy Council, whereas four other Catholics lost theirs, among them Arundel’s Sussex neighbour, Viscount Montagu. Moreover, she allowed Arundel to play a central role in her coronation, appointing him lord high steward and constable of England for the occasion.

One reason Elizabeth trod so carefully was that she could not afford to alienate such a powerful Catholic peer before she secured parliamentary approval for the restoration of the royal supremacy and the Protestant faith. Arundel might otherwise serve as the focus of Catholic opposition in the Lords. This consideration probably explains why, before Parliament met, Elizabeth encouraged Arundel to believe that she might marry him, despite the more than twenty-year difference in their ages. The earl was completely taken in by this deception, and showered the queen’s ladies-in-waiting with jewels in the hope that they would further his suit. A few weeks after Parliament assembled in January 1559, Arundel made himself scarce, pleading illness, presumably to avoid incurring the queen’s displeasure, as he would have found it difficult to avoid allying himself in Parliament with fellow Catholic peers opposed to the reintroduction of Protestantism. Although he resumed his seat some weeks later, he quickly withdrew again.

Arundel seems to have been slow to discover that he had been deceived. As late as August 1559, in a bold attempt to win the queen’s hand, he lavishly entertained the queen at Nonsuch, the former royal palace he had bought from Queen Mary. However, the following year he learned that Elizabeth was amorously involved with Lord Robert Dudley. Thereafter, he proved to be something of a thorn in the queen’s side, though it soon became clear that he was less dangerous than was at first feared.

Arundel, in fact, was his own worst enemy. In July 1564 he lost his temper with the queen and surrendered his staff of office, for which offence he was placed under house arrest for the next five months. He thereby deprived himself of his key position at court. Sullen and resentful, he spent the next few years trying to avoid matters of state. However, he returned to the fray in 1569, when he and the duke of Norfolk began plotting with the Spanish ambassador to overthrow the queen’s chief minister, William Cecil, whom they blamed for Elizabeth’s hostility to her heir apparent, Mary, Queen of Scots. Arundel saw in Mary, by now Elizabeth’s prisoner, the best chance of restoring England to the Catholic faith. However, neither he nor Norfolk was ever able to deliver the coup they promised as they proved unable to win over Dudley, now earl of Leicester.

The following year Arundel became implicated in a plot to marry Norfolk to Mary, which Elizabeth considered treasonable. Indeed, according to Norfolk, the plan actually originated with Arundel. As a result, Arundel was once again placed under restraint, and only released in April 1570, after the suppression of the rebellion of the Northern Earls, the first serious Catholic conspiracy of the reign. Between September 1571 and December 1572 he was again imprisoned, this time in the Tower of London, after it was discovered that he was closely involved in the Ridolfi Plot, a Spanish-backed scheme which aimed to overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. However, his life, unlike Norfolk’s, was spared as it was clearly Norfolk who posed the major threat. Following his release, Arundel was permitted to resume his seat on the Council. This was a surprising decision, perhaps, but as Dr Neil Younger has recently shown, the Elizabethan Privy Council was never the sole preserve of Protestants but included many Catholics and crypto-Catholics, among them the well-known Sir Christopher Hatton. Besides, it may have been expected that Arundel would not live much longer as by then he was in poor health. In fact, he did not die until February 1580, whereupon his lands and titles descended to Philip Howard, the eldest son of his fellow conspirator, the late duke of Norfolk.

ADT

Further reading:

Neil Younger, ‘How Protestant was the Elizabethan Regime?’, English Historical Review, vol. 133 (2018)

Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity (1998)

Wallace MacCaffrey, The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime (1969)