Roanoke Page 6
The most grotesque attraction at Paris Garden is an old, blind bear securely fastened, then struck with canes and sticks by young boys. Bewildered and upset, it can neither see its attackers nor escape; innocent of any crime, too old to be threatening. These children are the hope for London’s future, this their education. The cruelty hits home once when the animal pathetically unfastens its rope and flees to the safety of its own cage. It is enough to bring tears to the eyes, but doesn’t. Instead its antics are greeted by howls of laughter.
To see a strange out-landish fowl,
A quaint baboon, an ape, an owl,
A dancing bear, a giant’s bone,
A foolish engine move alone,
A Morris dance, a puppet play,
Mad Tom to sing a roundelay,
A woman dancing on a rope,
Bull-baiting also at the Hope;
A rhymer’s jests, a juggler’s cheats,
A tumbler showing cunning feats,
Or players acting on the stage,
There goes the bounty of our Age;
But unto any pious motion,
There’s little coin, and less devotion.45
A Religion Called Money
If religion were once the answer, it is no longer. Clergy complain of low church attendance and a general contempt of the ministry. Money has become the worshipped god. Everyone from the highest to the lowest, from the priest to the popular sort is caught up in money. A covetous man may well be compared to Hell, which ever gapeth and yawneth for more.46
Classes of thriftless men and women spring up everywhere, earning a living as beggars, of which there are reckoned to be no less than 10,000 persons in the realm. Some few are legitimate. The rest run scams, communicating among themselves in a thieves’ canting language, counterfeiting illness and disease by the application of corrosives and poisons to their own skins thereby to raise pitiful and odious sores and move the hearts of the goers by to bestow large alms upon them.47 Quite a fortune can be made in this way.
Scams extend even to craftsmen who churn out delightful products curious to the eye, costly to the purse. Shoddy work is quickly shuffled off to the first buyer. Artisans toil in haste and a barbarous or slavish desire to turn the penny and, by ridding their work make a speedy profit. If they bungle up and dispatch many things, they care not how, so they be out of their hands.48 Even the magnificent mansions cropping up throughout the city are rather curious to the eye like paper work than substantial for continuance.49 And so yet another saying is born to cover the work of such swindlers: Claw a churl by the arse, and he shiteth in thy hand.50
Not surprisingly, lawyers proliferate like flies, their numbers increasing incrementally with lawsuits filed. The lawyers, they go rustling in their silks, velvets and chains of gold, they build gorgeous houses, sumptuous edifices, and stately turrets. At the expense of others. As long as one grease them in the fist, then your suit shall want no furtherance until the money is gone…. In presence of their clients, they will be so earnest one with another… but immediately after their clients being gone, they laugh in their sleeves, to see how prettily they fetch in such sums of money, and under the pretence of equity and justice.51 Little wonder that bringing suit is often more headache than it’s worth. The more ye stir a turd, the worse it will stink.52
Decency has been so far displaced, cry the worthy, that blasphemy has become daily sustenance. Just see the farmers of Waiden the year saffron plummeted on the Exchange! Forced to sell fully half their produce as cut flowers, they suffer a grievous economic loss. Yet no one is dead, or injured; crops remain intact. Rather than accept the clergy’s advice and give thanks for abundance, Waiden prays instead for scarcity and reviles God. They in most contemptuous manner murmured against Him, saying that He did shit saffron, therewith to choke the market.53
It is the end of an era. There is widespread belief that the world has gone mad. That the disintegration of English society is at hand. There is a meanness to the times. A self-indulgence. And a corruption. Too much wrong.
This is the world the colonists left behind.
5 OF POPULATION
It is a very populous city, so that one can scarcely pass along the streets, on account of the throng.
Frederick, Duke of Wirtemberg1
Birth Without Control
Perhaps the colonists leave England for the simple reason that there is no longer any room for them at home. A demographic explosion in the 1570s has launched a full-scale assault on the realm, London’s booming population swelling to four times its previous size.2 In Cordwainer Street Ward, grocer and twice mayor Thomas Knowles and his wife Joan churn out nineteen children.3 No great rarity. Some also do grudge at the great increase of people in these days, thinking a necessary brood of cattle far better than a superfluous augmentation of mankind.4
Young people, by marrying too soon, propagate far more offspring than if they had waited until riper years and do nothing profit the country but fill it full of beggars. …5 No one considers the consequences of their actions, even an action as sacred as bearing children — who increase exponentially: ten producing a hundred producing a thousand. Even death from disease and war offers no check upon a population careering out of bounds.
Rural Beauty: Twice the Charm
London’s walls bow and groan from the weight of its massive population until they burst, disgorging into the suburbs. The surrounding countryside is quickly distended. East of Aldgate, development presses on to the common field and ruins it. This common field. being sometime the beauty of this city on that part, is so encroached upon by building of filthy cottages that it is scarcely wide enough for carriages to pass. Much less is there any fair, pleasant, or wholesome way for people to walk on foot; which is no small blemish to so famous a city.6 No quarter is left untouched.
In developers’ plans, there is no room for beauty, antiquity, or history. Suffolk House, a sumptuous mansion in Bridge Ward, is sold to merchants who pulled it down, sold the lead, stone, iron, etc; and in place thereof built many small cottages of great rents.7 Indeed, land is at such a premium that the poor, lodging in the Queen’s almshouses in Bishopsgate, have no qualms about accepting their welfare pensions and moving to cheaper districts, illegally leasing their former quarters for great rent and pocketing that money too. Forcing the beleaguered parish priest to challenge tithes of the poor.8
You have such teeming cities, mused a Hungarian visitor, that unless you build them upwards so that houses scrape the sky, your land, however broad, will not support your people.9 An incongruous and overwhelming thought. Tall buildings blot out the sky.
Rural areas suddenly find themselves the object of intense interest from land investors. Soon the squeeze is on, and farmlands are ploughed under for development. Without regret. Available lands tighten up, crushing rural people and driving them off their holdings. By encroaching and joining of house to house, the country people are reduced to beggary, devoured and eaten up. … Howbeit, what care our great encroachers?10
An expanding population confined to a finite land mass makes a volatile cocktail. The population explosion nears critical mass, rising faster than the market can keep pace. Heaping up woes, inflation runs rampant. In the midst of this crisis, 1586 emerges as a famine year. The wool industry takes a tumble and bottoms out, resulting in tremendous losses and an alarming increase of landless indigents — unfortunate, in an age in which vagrancy is condemned as a felony.11
Timber! And the Trees Come Crashing Down
England’s growth rate impacts the countryside in other ways; it is wedded to an unprecedented need for wood. There must be houses aplenty to accommodate everyone. Their size swelling far beyond the functional.12 Shipyards hum with activity; saws bite into timber for masts, decks, and forecastles. For merchantmen and men-of-war; galleons, pinnaces, shallops, and barges; boxes and crates; and cranes and carts and wagons and warehouses. And lumber and mills.
The result is wholesale demolition. Nowadays a man shall
oft ride ten or twenty miles for wood … and find very little or rather none at all It is now possible to speak of individual groves remaining, as in Chatley Moor, in Shropshire, in Amounderness, and a moss near Manchester, not far from Leicester’s house, although in time past not only all Lancashire, but a great part of the coast between Chester and the Solve were well stored.13
A man would think, laments William Harrison, that our laws were able enough to make sufficient provision for the redress of this error … But such is the nature of our countrymen that. they will rather seek some crooked construction of them to the increase of their private gain.14
Nor is it only woodlands that suffer, but water too. No river in Europe exceeds the Thames in fish production, despite public protest over man’s insatiable avarice and all for commodity’s sake. There are those of all ages who lament for nature. Oh, that this river might be spared but even one year from nets, & etc! cries Harrison.15
But such is our nature and so blind are we in deed that we see no inconvenience before we feel it, and for a present gain we regard not what damage may ensue to our posterity.16
Ah, America!
Our image of London is becoming more dimensional. To many it is a city exciting in its rapid change and multinationalism. Marred only by crowding. The prospect of unlimited land resources in America therefore holds enormous appeal.
Just as many Londoners, on the other hand, are appalled by the changes raging around them. With disapproval and dismay, they stand by as time-tested values crumble before social ills run rampant. To them, America offers the quiet promise of a different sort of life.
Who were the colonists? On which side of the debate did they fall? To consider this, there is still another aspect of London to view….
6 OF RELIGION
Surely common election of ministers, and this deciding of matters in controversy by a multitude, will breed greater strife and contention, than without danger will be appeased.
Bishop John Cooper1
A Cry for Reform
Religion, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, is in large measure a political concern. A strong church means a unified country in an age when religious divisions are spewing deadly civil wars across Europe. To prevent this, Elizabeth severs ties with the Vatican and forms the Anglican Church.2 It is a uniquely English endeavor. In the interest of national security, allegiance to the Church is synonymous with allegiance to the Crown.
Nevertheless, a Puritan movement catches fire. At the universities, young people rebel against the fanatical Catholic gang controlling the administration, accusing Anglican officials of being too Catholic. At Trinity College, Cambridge, student protesters hack the tail off a horse belonging to the College Master, shearing its forelock into a popish crown. There are window smashings and other demonstrations, and on October 12, 1565, the fellows of St. John’s College collectively tear off their surplices, greatly alarming the Chancellor and Tudor government officials.3
Reverend Turner of Wells — old Doctor Turner — an avid reformer, seizes the day by teaching his dog to leap up and steal the corner caps off the heads of visiting bishops.4 Yet such champions of reform rarely advocate the overthrow of the Church. Continuing to operate as part of the established system, their protest is merely for more sweeping changes within it.
Counterculture
Separatists and nonconformists are an entirely different matter. Flourishing in underground communities in London, their identities are kept hidden from the authorities. With good reason, for their claim to worship not in bondage and subjection, but freely and purely, to hold separate assemblies and ordain their own ministers, is treason.5
What would happen, exclaims the Church, if a subject were allowed to determine what is tyrannical? Neither monarch nor master would be safe! What lord of the council, cries Matthew “Nosey” Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, shall ride quietly minded in the streets among desperate beasts? What master shall be sure in his bedchamber?6 Suspicions flare that Separatism will translate into a wider attack on education, class, and property. Indeed, Richard Bancroft, a member of the Court of High Commission and the first to expose the secret activities of the Separatists, links it to an international conspiracy.7
Martin Marprelate
Although most Separatists regard themselves as loyal subjects, they are increasingly distrusted. Fears of a plot are confirmed by the outbreak of the Marprelate Controversy in 1588, a series of political satires attacking Anglican abuses, composed by an anonymous “Martin Marprelate.” Bishop Cooper immediately condemns the railing comedy as a wicked and malicious libel.8
What sayest thou, man? cries Martin, naming the bishops individually, though sparing John of London for it may be he is at bowls, and it is a pity to trouble my good brother, lest he should swear too bad). These lord bishops, with the rest of that swinish rabble, are proud, popish, presumptuous, profane, paltry, pestilent, and pernicious Prelates.9
The Marprelate tracts, though immediately outlawed, are wildly popular — even at Court. This only encourages the libelers to further desperate boldness, as if they thought there were neither Prince, nor Law, nor Magistrate, nor Ruler, that durst control them or seek to repress them.10
Martin lashes out with invective, enraging the clergy. As long as Bishop Overton, Bishop Bickley, Bishop Middleton, the Dean of Westminster, Doctor Cole, Doctor Bell, with many others are living, he mocks, I doubt me whether all the famous dunces be dead. And if you would have an ill-sample of an excellent pulpit man, indeed, go no farther than the Bishop of Gloucester. This man, while preaching at Worcester, came at the length unto the very pith of his whole sermon, contained in the distinction of the name of John; which he, then showing all his learning at once, full learnedly handled after this manner. “John, John; the grace of God, the grace of God, the grace of God. Gracious John; not graceless John, but gracious John. John, holy John, holy John; not John full of holes, but holy John.” If he showed not himself learned in this sermon, then hath he been a dunce all his life.11
Whitgift’s Reign of Terror
Suddenly Separatists find themselves under attack on all sides. Cooper labels them the most dangerous element in the commonwealth, worse even than Papists, who pose great perils.12 The Puritan party condemns them as ignorant, rash and heady, reducing discipline to bedlam with their new-found equality, infuriated by their desire to separate from a Church that merely needs reform.13 The issue boils down to a single question: How much of a person’s life should the Crown control? It is unreasonable, cry the Separatists, that there should be thrust upon me a governor of whom the everlasting salvation or damnation of my body and soul doth depend… unless those upon whom he were thrust were fools, or madmen, or children, without all discretion of ordering themselves.14
Autumn 1583. The turning point comes when John Whitgift is consecrated the new Archbishop of Canterbury His regime is denounced by a shower of Puritan publications churned out from secret presses. Cambridge University erupts in protest, assailing Whitgift with slander nailed to college doors. Separatists and radical Puritans call on their members to fight a good fight, calling Whitgift’s authority Antichristian, ergo not to be obeyed.15 Their outcry, in turn, prompts a royal proclamation banning seditious literature, equating attacks on the Church with attacks on the government.16
Whitgift swings into action, pursuing dissidents with such rigor that even Burghley, Lord Treasurer of the Queen’s Privy Council, condemns the policy as entrapment and smacking of the Inquisition. By 1587 Puritans can complain of tyranny and dangerous days. I see a miserable desolation, writes Richard Parker, like to come upon us.17
He is right. The crackdown begins in earnest later that year. Leaders of the Separatist movement are thrown into prison. Minute books of their clandestine meetings are confiscated and culled for the names of conspirators. A nationwide manhunt for Martin Marprelate is launched and prosecuted with vigor. Arrests proceed madly, but the Marprelate tracts remain unsilenced. The bishops, like furious and se
nseless brute beasts… spare none, but with tooth and nail cry out, “Down with that side that favoureth the Gospel so! Fetch them up with pursuivants; to the Gatehouse Prison, to the Fleet, to the Marshalsea, to the Clink, to Newgate, to the Counter with them." 18
Brownists
1593. Amid the furor, a Brownist bill is brought before Parliament, directed against a Separatist sect led by John Browne. Those who refuse to attend Anglican services are to be banished from England, the death penalty invoked against any who return. Raleigh, a Member of Parliament, opposes the bill, claiming there are twenty thousand Brownists in England. Who, he asks significantly, will take care of their families? Who will incur both charge and responsibility? One of Raleigh’s shipping captains is a Brownist.19 Are there others connected to him? Could he be thinking of White’s colonists? Had he given compensation to the families of the missing?
May 28, 1593. John Penry, one of the authors of the Marprelate tracts, is executed. To espouse the cause of Separatism in this highly charged atmosphere is to assume very Dangerous Positions indeed.20
Lost Colonists as Separatists
Let us now return to the Lost Colonists and reexamine their behavior in their final moments on Roanoke. Something had gone wrong. They were in trouble. In the midst of it, John White returned to England for help. The sequence of events seems straightforward enough. Or does it?