Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (16 page)

Many Elizabethan amusements were brutal by our tastes. In 1562 an Italian visitor, Alessandro Magno, described a Sunday-afternoon
session at one of London’s animal-baiting pits, where admission cost the modern equivalent of £2 for standing room and £4
for a seat:

First they take into the ring a cheap horse… and a monkey in the saddle. Then they attack the horse with soro of the youngest
dogs. Then they change the dogs for more experienced ones… It
is wonderful to see the horse galloping along…
with the monkey holding on tightly to the saddle and crying out frequently when he is bitten by the dogs. After they have
entertained the audience for a while with this sport, which often results in the death of the horse, they lead him out and
bring in bears — sometimes one at a time, sometimes all together. But this sport is not very pleasant to watch. At the end,
they bring on a fierce bull and tie it with a rope about two paces long to a stake fixed in the middle of the ring. This sport
is the best one to see, and more dangerous for the dogs than the others: many of them are wounded and die. This goes on until
evening.

It is a relief to turn to descriptions of the innovative wooden structures that were being built among the bear-pits of Southwark
— the playhouses. In the early Tudor decades, pageants and rudimentary plays had been performed in tavern courtyards and in
noble households by touring companies of players. But 1587 saw the construction of England’s first modern theatre, the Rose,
an open-air stage and arena surrounded by wooden galleries — an enlarged and exalted version, in effect, of the tavern courtyard.‘They
play on a raised platform,’ wrote the Swiss traveller Thomas Platter,’so that everyone has a good view. There are different
galleries and places, however, where the seating is better and more comfortable and therefore more expensive… During the performance
food and drink are carried round the audience… The actors are most expensively and elaborately costumed.’

Today one can get a taste of Elizabethan theatregoing by visiting the Globe, a modern reconstruction of the original
theatre that opened in Southwark in January 1599. By that date there was a little clutch of playhouses on the south bank of
the Thames, safely outside the jurisdiction of London’s City Fathers, who disapproved of the low and licentious shows that
tempted people away from work in the afternoons. The best-designed playhouses faced south-west so they could catch the afternoon
sun as it set; the outstanding productions were honoured by an invitation to go and perform at court in the presence of Elizabeth.

William Shakespeare is the most famous of an entire school of English playwrights who were the equivalent of the TV programme
makers of today, churning out soap operas, thrillers, comedies and even multi-part series: we watch docudramas on the world
wars and on twentieth-century history — the Elizabethans sat through
Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and
3. To appeal to the groundlings in the pit, the playwrights wrote slapstick comedies at which the Queen herself was known
to slap a thigh — Shakespeare’s most farcical play,
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
was written at her request. But they also invented a new dramatic form — the introspective soliloquy that showed how a harsh
age was also becoming reflective and questioning:’To be, or not to be — that is the question…’

w
ALTER RALEGH WAS A SWAGGERING
West Country lad who started his career as a soldier of fortune. He was only sixteen when he crossed the Channel to fight
on the side of the Huguenots, the French Protestants, in the religious wars that divided France for much of the sixteenth
century. Later he fought against the Catholics in Ireland.

Ralegh was six feet tall by the time he came to court in the late 1570s, handsome and well built, with a jutting chin and
dark curling hair shown off to perfection with a double pearl drop-earring, He has gone down in history for his rich and flashy
clothes, and for many twentieth-century British
schoolchildren the name Ralegh (or Raleigh — the T was added in later years) stood for sturdy bicycles and for cloaks in the
mud:

This Captain Ralegh, [runs the earliest version of the famous story] coming out of Ireland to the English court in good habit
—his clothes being then a considerable part of his estate — found the Queen walking, till, meeting with a plashy place, she
seemed to scruple going thereon. Presently Ralegh cast and spread his new plush cloak on the ground; whereon the Queen trod
gently over, rewarding him afterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a foot cloth.

This gallant tale was not recorded for another eighty years, but something like it almost certainly happened: one version
of Ralegh’s coat of arms featured a visual pun on the story — a plush and swirling cloak. Sir Walter epitomised the peacockery
that danced attendance on the Virgin Queen, and Elizabeth was entranced by the style with which he played her game. She made
him her Captain of the Guard. She liked‘proper men’ and Ralegh was certainly one of those — though, not quite properly,‘he
spake broad Devonshire till his dying day’.

As a West Countryman, Ralegh made himself the champion at court for the growing number of Elizabethans who were drawn towards
the New World. Among these were relatives like his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert, who vanished in 1583 while searching for
a route that would lead him to the riches of China through the ice floes and mist-laden inlets that lay beyond Newfoundland
— the‘North West
Passage’. Adventurers such as Francis Drake and Richard Grenville saw good Protestant duty, as well as piracy and plunder,
in capturing Spanish galleons and challenging the Catholic King of Spain (who after 1581 also took over Portugal and its colonies).
The guru of the New World enthusiasts was Dr John Dee, the Merlin-like figure who had cast the Queen’s coronation horoscope.
Dee put forward the ambitious idea of a’British Impire’ across the Atlantic — a land first discovered, he said, not by John
Cabot in 1497 but by Madoc, a Welsh prince in the King Arthur mould, who was said to have crossed the Atlantic centuries previously.

In the early 158c s Dee provided Ralegh with a map of the American coastline north of Florida. Ralegh dispatched scouts to
search for a suitable settlement, and in 1585 he presented the results of their prospecting to Elizabeth — two native Indians,
some potatoes, and the curious leaf smoked by the natives: tobacco.

The Elizabethans considered the potato an exotic and aphrodisiac vegetable. When Sir John Falstaff was attempting to have
his wicked way with the merry wives of Windsor, he called on the sky to‘rain potatoes’. As for tobacco, the‘herb’ was considered
a health-giving medicine, which‘purgeth superfluous phlegm and other gross humours and openeth all the pores and passages
of the body’.

Sir John Hawkins had introduced tobacco to England twenty years earlier, but it was typical of Ralegh to hijack the brand
identity with a stunt to match the cloak and puddle. Talking to the Queen one day he boasted he could weigh tobacco smoke.
Not surprisingly, Elizabeth challenged him, and he called for scales. Having weighed some
tobacco, he smoked it in his long-stemmed pipe, then weighed the ashes and calculated the difference. As a final flourish,
he proposed that the land where this remarkable plant grew should be named in her honour — Virginia.

Ralegh’s prospective colonists set sail for the New World in May 1587 — ninety men, seventeen women and nine children — with
all the supplies they needed to establish a self-sustaining and civilised community, including books, maps, pictures and a
ceremonial suit of armour for John White, who was to be the governor. They landed on the island of Roanoke off modern North
Carolina, and established what seemed to be relatively friendly relations with the local Croatoan Indians. But only a month
after landing it became clear that more supplies would be needed, so Governor White set sail to organise a relief expedition
for the following spring.

But White arrived home to find England transfixed by the threat of Spanish invasion. Though chief promoter of the Virginia
colony, Ralegh had not sailed himself with his adventurers, and now he was tied up organising ships to combat the threat of
King Philip’s Armada. There was not a vessel to be spared, so it was August 1590 before Governor White could finally drop
anchor off Roanoke again — nearly three years after he had departed. To his delight he saw smoke rising from the island, but
when he landed he discovered it was only a forest fire. There was no trace of the colonists.

’We let fall our grapnel near the shore,’ White related poignantly,‘and sounded with a trumpet and call, and afterwards many
familiar English tunes of songs, and called to them friendly. But we had no answer.’

Locating the ruins of the palisade and cabins that he had helped to build, White discovered only grass, weeds and pumpkin
creepers. But there were fresh native footprints in the sand — and one sign of Western habitation: a post on which were carved
the letters,’
CROATOAN
’. White had agreed with the colonists that if they moved to a new settlement, they would leave its name carved somewhere
on Roanoke. But when he investigated the nearby Croatoan Island, he found no sign of human habitation.

In later years archaeologists and historians would search for evidence of what might have happened to Walter Ralegh’s‘lost
colony’. Recent diggings have uncovered the English fort and what appears from the assembled samples of flora and fauna to
be a primitive science and research centre, North America’s first. But the only clue to what happened to the colonists — and
that is tenuous — has been found in modern Robertson County in North Carolina. Survivors of an Indian tribe there, called
the Croatoans, speak a dialect containing words that sound a little like Elizabethan English — and some of these modern Croatoans
have fair skin and blue eyes.

w
HEN IT CAME TO DEALING WITH THE
other kingdom that occupied their island, English monarchs sometimes sent armies north of the border, and sometimes brides.
Henry VII’s daughter Margaret Tudor had been the last bridal export — she had married James Stuart, King of the Scots, in
1503 (
see p. 78
), and her glamorous but troubled granddaughter Mary was to provide Elizabeth I with the longest-running drama
of her reign.

Mary’s life was dramatic from the start. Her father James V of Scotland died when she was only six days old — and for the
rest of her life she bore her famous title Queen of Scots. She was Queen of France too for a time, thanks to her
brief first marriage to the French King François IL But François died in 1560, and his eighteen-year-old widow returned to
the turmoil of the Scottish Reformation.

The young Queen was not well received by John Knox, the fiery leader of Scotland’s evangelicals, who had just published his
virulent denunciation of female rulers,
The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.
Marys Catholicism was another black mark against her in Knox’s eyes, and as Protestantism became the official religion of
Scotland in the early 1560s she had to pick her way carefully, prudently confining her beliefs to her own household.

But after several years of delicate and quite skilful balancing, Mary succumbed to the first of the headstrong impulses that
would turn her promising young life to tragedy. In July 1565, she plunged into a passionate marriage with her cousin Henry
Stuart, Lord Darnley, whose good looks masked a vain, drunken, jealous and violent nature — as he proved within months, when
he arranged for a gang of cronies to set upon Mary’s Italian private secretary, David Rizzio. Darnley’s possessiveness could
not tolerate the trust that his wife placed in her chief of staff, and as the hapless Italian clung screaming to the Queen’s
skirts — she was now six months pregnant — he was murdered in front of her eyes.