Part One
1603−29
The Hearts of Thy Subjects
1
St James’s Day
When Hempe is Spun, England’s done.
Late Tudor English Prophecy
Probably the strangest way anyone celebrated the accession of King James I of England was when a gentlewoman in the far north of Lancashire organised a mock wedding in a country church, between two male servants.
The old priory of Cartmel was already, by then, a relic of a lost age. Before the Reformation it had been a monastic foundation, with around a dozen canons, working and praying within the cold stone walls. The nearby villagers welcomed the presence of such a great house, and when Henry VIII closed it down along with the rest of England’s monasteries, several of them joined the great northern rebellion that became known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. At least ten of them, plus four of the canons, were hanged for doing so.
After the rebellion failed, the priory was shut. But the surviving villagers were savvy enough to organise a petition to the Tudor king, arguing that in such a poor corner of England they needed the building. Keeping it standing in the centre of the village would ensure, they hoped, that the light of God would continue to shine there. Henry’s government had assented, and Cartmel Priory became Cartmel parish church, spared the destruction visited on most of England’s old monasteries.
The poverty of the village didn’t go away, though, and gradually the lack of investment was bringing the church to a parlous state. By 1600, much of the roof of the chancel was missing, so services were frequently interrupted by the characteristic local rain. Decay had set in.
Around a mile to the north-east of Cartmel church, along a quiet country lane among pasture farms and crumbling stone buildings, lay the rather mediocre grey house of Hampsfell Hall. Crenelated against the Scottish raiders who still occasionally sallied south and took away cattle and sheep, it was the seat of the old gentry Thornborough family.
Thornboroughs had been in Cartmel for nearly two centuries, making fairly little impact, watching the religious makeup of the country change around them as England became Protestant. Around the time of James I’s accession in 1603, they had welcomed a new daughter-in-law, married to Rowland Thornborough, one of the family’s latest sons. Her name was Jane, and she hailed from another gentry family, the Daltons of Thurnham, near Lancaster. The Thornboroughs and the Daltons were locally influential families, possessed of significant farming estates. But they shared another thing, too. They were Catholics.
The day Jane Thornborough picked for her prank was the feast day of St James, 25 July 1604. It was exactly a year since the coronation of the new king at Westminster Abbey, nearly 300 miles away to the south, and to mark this occasion the villagers at Cartmel had organised a special sermon. They had invited one Mr Francis Fletcher, a travelling preacher, to speak. But as Jane Thornborough knew well, St James’s Day was also an important marker in the parish’s festival calendar. For it was the traditional day for the annual ‘rushbearing’ – a ritual in which youngsters garlanded themselves in greenery and carried rushes to strew across the church floor, followed by games and sports in a local field.
It was an unfortunate clash. The festivities would be boisterous, and hardly compatible with the solemnity of a commemorative sermon. Or, to put it another way, the gravity of the sermon was out of keeping with a traditional day of relaxation and sport. So the parish elders had suggested a compromise. Those wishing to bear rushes, they asked, should wait until Mr Fletcher had finished his sermon. Then they could let themselves loose, and the dancing and football could begin. Everyone would be happy.
When St James’s Day came the villagers had gathered in the cool chancel of the church. With the summer morning light shining through the broken roof, Francis Fletcher began proceedings. He ascended the pulpit, opened his Bible and cleared his throat. His audience looked up at him: farmers in their best woollen coats, their wives in their bonnets, squirming children at their sides. As he spoke, ‘dividing the text’, some of the eager parishioners listened keenly. Others settled back and allowed their thoughts to wander, while Fletcher’s words competed with the sounds of the cattle and sheep from the village pastures.
Then, something astonishing happened. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, a noise could be heard in the distance. Gradually, it grew into a deafening cacophony: the thud of drums, the shriek of fifes and the wail of bagpipes. Then came gunshots: loud cracks of powder followed by the fizzing of musket balls against the old stone walls. It was a procession, and soon it had entered the church.
Fletcher the preacher had stopped speaking. The heads of the congregation had turned away from the pulpit, and towards the company of young men, bedecked in greenery, carrying rushes, with many wearing masks over their faces. They were led by a man called William Dawson, farm steward at the Thornboroughs’ Hampsfell Hall. He was carrying a truncheon, acting a role. He was a ‘Lord of Misrule’.
Next, the men divided themselves up into two companies, then marched on through the church, casting their rushes onto the floor as they went. After this, they assembled again at the front. Now, two young lads emerged from their ranks. Of these, one was dressed in a woman’s gown. His name was Oliver Staines and the gown – as at least one member of the congregation was able to recognise – belonged to Jane Thornborough herself.
Someone pushed to the front, carrying a copy of the Book of Common Prayer, one of the key texts of English Protestantism. With the Book open, he turned to the parishioners in the church and started reading. The tone he took was mocking, scornful, as he read the words of the official wedding ceremony, marrying the two men as if they had been husband and wife. Then he told the two men to sit down, inviting them to take the seats the parishioners normally reserved for newlyweds.
By now the pranksters were beginning to file back out of the church. As they left, they had one last hurrah. Coming out into the churchyard, Dawson the Lord of Misrule leapt up on a wall and called a ‘Solemn Oyez’ (‘O-yay, o-yay, o-yay!’). Then, one of his fellows made a declaration, aping the formality of an official pronouncement, passing out paper copies to those watching. The days of Momus had gone, he announced. Momus would tarry here no more. And, with that, the men left, heading out onto a nearby hill, where they played football for the rest of the morning.
A change of leadership is always disorientating, but a change of ruling dynasty was all the more so. In March 1603, the last Tudor ruler of England, Queen Elizabeth I, died at Richmond Palace, the grand seat built by her grandfather Henry VII, on the winding banks of the Thames in the tree-shaded landscape of northern Surrey. With the country in a state of high alert, and watches placed on the coastal towns, the plan to bring in a peaceful succession was put into play. A messenger was sent north to Holyrood in Edinburgh, to King James VI of the Scots. Within a few days, the wily and coarse James was on his way south, following a grand procession down the eastern side of England as the great and good of his new southern realm flocked to give allegiance.
In Elizabeth’s reign, a prophecy had circulated widely: ‘When Hempe is spun, England’s done.’ ‘Hempe’ was an acronym for the Tudor monarchs since the break with Rome: Henry, Edward, Mary and Philip (II of Spain, Mary’s husband), and Elizabeth. Prophecies were taken seriously, as signs of God’s plan, and the belief was that once Elizabeth died, England would collapse into anarchy. But the peaceful accession of James allowed a more benign conclusion: now England and Scotland were under the same ruler. England was done: long live Britain.
There were other signs, though, that the older, more apocalyptic prophecy might still be the true one. Intellectuals and commentators of the day pored over cosmic events to assess whether the universe lay unbalanced and whether God’s wrath was imminent. What they saw did not bring comfort. They looked at England and saw a land full of witches: ‘They abound in all places,’ fretted the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Edmund Anderson. People tried to divine signs of the future in meteorological phenomena like unusual tempests, and strange biological prodigies, such as ‘monstrous’ human births, and saw warnings from God. For, as it was said, ‘God doth premonish before he doth punish.’ There were blazing stars in the heavens, which were sure to be signs of cosmic disturbance. Comets, such as those of 1577 and 1580, foretold trouble, and most worrying of all, there were great new stars that shone bright enough to be seen in the daytime. One had appeared in 1572 and another would shine in 1604. No one remembered anything like this ever before.
The Cartmel wedding was a joke about the collapse of the universe. It was about the uprooting of the social order and the world turned upside down. Specifically, it was celebrating the fact that the world was about to be set the right way up again. Momus was a character who symbolised disorder; his expulsion brought balance.
Raucous processions like this, in which humour was made out of the world turned topsy-turvy, were part of the culture of the age. The most famous kind of procession was the charivari, what in England was called the ‘riding’, or ‘skimmington’. Here, some poor local folk would have offended the parish, perhaps two were living together unmarried, or perhaps a wife dominated her husband. The skimmington, which took its name from a kind of wooden ladle with which a wife might beat her henpecked spouse, was a way of ritually humiliating such transgressors. A procession of villagers would pass through the streets, banging pots and pans and making horn gestures with their fingers, symbolising cuckoldry, and leading an effigy of the couple seated backwards on an ass. The disorder, the noise and the inversion of the expected order all symbolised the way in which the subject of the skimmington had turned the world upside down. It betokens a world where the fabric of order is seen as fragile, where small deviations from social norms could take on a cosmic significance.
What Jane Thornborough organised at Cartmel was a skimmington against Protestantism. Momus, who was widely known from the bestselling Aesop’s Fables, was the Greek god of satire. He represented a world turned upside down. He, the discordant music and the transgressive wedding were saying something straightforward enough: Protestantism had overturned the natural order, it had turned things topsy-turvy. After the procession had left the church (very symbolic), a mock-proclamation announced the end of Momus’s time. The Protestants were being cast out of Cartmel church, fittingly enough a former priory. Their unnatural religion would reign here no more, and the old order could return. Such were the hopes of Catholics like Jane Thornborough when James I came to the English throne.
It was fashionable among some English churchmen to decry the irreligion of the age. It was said that ordinary English folk knew more about Robin Hood than they did the stories in the Bible.7 In Cartmel, when a thorough-minded minister was appointed to the parish in the 1640s, the unfortunate cleric fell to discussing Jesus Christ with an aged local. ‘Oh, sir,’ the old man informed him, ‘I think I heard of the man you speak of, once in a play at Kendal, called a Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree, and blood ran down.
But clergy always bewail the lack of piety shown by their neighbours, and rural folk like the old man at Cartmel have always found ways of mocking over-earnest outsiders. The reality is that the English under James I were profoundly religious. The church remained the focus of life, the most durable building in most parishes and one which hosted not just baptisms, marriages and funerals, but parish meetings, and – of course – regular services which people were obliged to attend by law. The landscape was dotted with reminders of the Christian faith, from wayside crosses and holy wells to the very many features that were associated with the saints or with the devil. The very idioms with which people spoke were saturated with Scripture.
As the Stuart age began, England was entering a new phase of what was now an old battle. In the sixteenth century, the country had ripped itself away from Roman Catholicism, much to the shock and terror of her own people. Most of the old monasteries had been torn down in the ‘fatal thunderclap’ that followed Henry VIII’s break with centuries of tradition, and despite a temporary swing back to Catholicism under his eldest child, Mary I (r. 1553−8), England had slowly clawed its way towards being a truly Protestant nation. Mary’s younger sister Elizabeth had forged a new Church, backed by conformity enforced by law. In some ways it ploughed a middle path, the famous via media between the Catholicism of Rome and the hardline Protestantism practised in Geneva, but Elizabeth’s Church was firmly Reformed, and although tradition claims she didn’t wish to ‘make windows into men’s souls’, the apparatus of her state was quite happy to do so, fining those who refused to come to Protestant church services and executing Jesuits and the roving Catholic priests who began coming into the country as European powers tried to win England back to Rome.
Within English Protestantism there was still considerable debate about church government, about the liturgy (ritual practice during worship) and about grace (how one got to heaven). The central texts, the English Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles (which stated the doctrine and practice of the Church of England), contained enough ambiguity for a range of viewpoints to have developed. Broadly speaking, most churchmen in 1603 were Calvinist, that is, they subscribed to a form of Protestantism rooted in the works of John Calvin, a Frenchman who had settled in Geneva and turned it into a beacon of the Reformed faith. Calvinism held that man was inherently depraved, but God’s grace had been made available to a small subset of humans, who were thus predestined to heaven, while the remainder of mankind were predestined for hell. Calvinists saw the word of God as especially important, and thus emphasised sermons, private prayer and the reading of Scripture. The elaborate ceremonies of pre-Reformation worship they viewed with suspicion.
Among the English Calvinists some of the trickiest debates were over the organisation of the Church and the faithful. One particularly difficult issue was the role of bishops. Were they sanctioned by divine law, or merely by established custom? Or should they be abolished outright, and churches ruled by elected assemblies of elders.
Copyright © 2023 by Jonathan Healey. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
