The Tudors for Dummies (AvaxHome Download) (38 page)

Unfortunately, Dee hooked up with con-men like Edward Kelly and the pair

tried for years to bring people back from the dead. Kelly was a convicted char-

latan � he even had the clipped ears to prove it. (A common Elizabethan form

of punishment was to clip the ears of a conman. To this day, people use the

phrase `I'll give him a clip on the ear', meaning `to give a punishment'.) He

spent most of his time convincing Dee that the spirits wanted him to share

Dee's lovely young wife, which eventually happened.

After numerous adventures, mostly in Poland, Kelly was killed jumping out of

a window in Prague and Dee came home to carry on his fortune-telling at the

newly rebuilt house in Mortlake. In 1604 James I had to bail him out when he

was once again accused of sorcery. Dee died four years later in poverty.

John Foxe (1516�1587)

We come across this man several times in this book, and there's nobody

better to record the cruelty of the Tudor age.

John Foxe was born into a middle class family in Boston, Lincolnshire and

went to Brasenose College, Oxford at 16 (which was the usual age then). He

was a bright spark, and could read Latin, Greek and Hebrew fluently. Foxe

got his Masters degree in 1543 and became a lecturer in logic at the uni-

versity. He was already a priest, as indeed were all lecturers, but two years

later he got religion in a more serious way and resigned from the university

because he wasn't happy with the idea of celibacy (no sex) for priests. Broke

and jobless, he went to work as a tutor for the children of the Lucy family

at Charlecote near Stratford-upon-Avon. While there, Foxe married Agnes

Randall and they had six children.

In London in 1547 Foxe got himself a patron (essential in those days) and

found himself teaching the children of the Howard family (the dukes of

Norfolk), one of whom, Charles, would later command the English fleet

against the Spanish Armada in 1588 (see Chapter 15). Foxe was now mixing

with the top flight Protestant reformers of the day, many of whom would be

burned in the years ahead.

Under Mary I from 1553 Foxe was walking a religious tightrope. The queen

was bringing back the Catholic faith (see Chapter 10) and so Foxe got out

of England quickly, the authorities on his tail. He travelled all over Protestant

Germany, writing articles as he went and preaching at the English church

in Frankfurt, where a lot of exiles had gone. There he got bogged down in

a silly argument about which kind of Protestantism to follow. One type

was led by Richard Cox; the other by John Knox (see Chapter 13), so it was

Coxians versus Knoxians. Foxe was with Knox. (We know, it all sounds like

a Dr Seuss book!)

After Mary's death in 1558, Foxe was in no hurry to come back to England.

For a start, he couldn't afford the journey and anyway, he wanted to see

which way the religious wind would blow under Elizabeth. Finally, back in

London in 1559, his friend Edmund Grindal, bishop of London, ordained Foxe.

But Elizabeth's Church wanted priests to wear surplices (white robes) and

Foxe wouldn't. So that was the end of his promotional prospects.

But what we most remember Foxe for is his Book of Martyrs (actually called

Acts and Monuments), which began life in 1554. The book was originally about

the 15th-century Lollards, an anti-Catholic sect. While in exile, Foxe heard

about the burnings of heretics under Mary and decided to expand the book

to his present day. The first edition appeared in Basle, Switzerland in 1559

and a much larger (1,800 page) version in English four years later.

The book was a runaway best-seller, but royalties for writers didn't exist in

those days and Foxe stayed as poor as ever. Catholics, of course, didn't like

the book � Thomas Harding called it `that huge dunghill of your stinking mar-

tyrs, full of a thousand lies'. The 1570 edition had 2,300 pages and the version

of 1583 was four times longer than the Bible. It's a biased book and not much

of a rattling good read today (the full title alone fills half a page), but as a

diary of events of a ghastly time, it's invaluable.

Foxe died in April 1587 and was buried in St Giles, Cripplegate (London)

where the explorer Martin Frobisher would be laid to rest seven years later.

Martin Frobisher (c.1535�1594)

Most of Elizabeth's seadogs came from Devon, but Martin Frobisher was a

Yorkshireman from Altofts, near Wakefield. His father was a squire with quite

a few estates and as a 13-year-old Martin was sent to London to get involved

in business. This was quite unusual for the son of a man who had landed

estates and the boy had no real head for business. We're not even certain

whether he learned to read properly, but his involvement in the get-rich-

quick schemes of the City of London gave Frobisher a passion for the sea and

exploration.

In the 1550s Frobisher was trading with the Africans in Guinea on the West

African coast and fighting off the Portuguese who already had the area sewn

up (see Chapter 12). At one point he was taken prisoner and spent months in

the grim jail of Mina, emerging with the tough resilience he exhibited all his

life.

Unlike Francis Drake (whom Frobisher hated) and John Hawkins (see these

men in Chapters 12 and 15), we don't know a great deal about Frobisher's

life. He was in the West Indies in the 1560s and had something to do with the

spread of English plantations in Ireland, but his activities are shrouded in

mystery and he may have been acting as an agent for Elizabeth's spymaster

Walsingham.

In 1576 Frobisher got the job of searching for a north-west passage to Cathay

(China). Ever since the 1480s the overland caravan route to the East had been

closed by the Ottoman Turks, so the rich spice trade was badly damaged.

This is why explorers like Columbus, da Gama and Magellan travelled all over

the world, trying to find a new way east. If, as clever men were beginning to

believe, the world was round, then by going west, you could end up east.

Frobisher was backed by a London merchant, Michael Lok, and various mem-

bers of the Council. Setting off with 35 men and two ships, the Gabriel and the

Michael, he was the first Englishman to reach Labrador and the land he called

Meta Incognita (Frobisher Bay). Here he found icebergs taller than any build-

ing he'd ever seen and was probably the first white man (except maybe the

Vikings) to see the local native, the Inuit.

In two later voyages (1577 and 1578) he brought an Inuit back with him �

the man could be seen rowing his kayak in Bristol harbour � and some ore

that everybody from the queen down hoped was gold. After much testing,

the `black earth' turned out to be pyrites (fool's gold) and Frobisher fell

from favour.

Frobisher was raiding with Drake in the Caribbean in 1585 (see Chapter 12),

and when the Armada reached England from Spain three years later he was

given command of a squadron and was knighted as a result of his bravery.

Six years later Frobisher was shot in the thigh fighting the Spaniards at

Crozon near the French naval base at Brest. The wound became infected and

he died on the way home. You can see a memorial to Frobisher in Blackwall,

London, from where he sailed on his voyages, and a piece of his ore in a wall

in Dartford, Kent. But the explorer never did find the North-west Passage.

Polydore Vergil (c1470�1555)

Okay, so perhaps this guy shouldn't qualify as a Tudor, because he was

Italian, but he spent so long in England and worked as Henry VII's official his-

torian so we figure he was in the loop.

Italy was the cradle of the Renaissance, the centre of the rediscovery of clas-

sical Greece and Rome that led to new ideas, discoveries and technology; and

Polydore Vergil was part of all that.

The Vergils were a pretty cultured lot. Polydore's great-grandfather, Anthony,

was a doctor and astrologer. One of his brothers taught philosophy at the

University of Paris and another at Pavia in Italy. A third brother (obviously

the non-academic black sheep) was a merchant in London.

Polydore was educated at Bologna and worked for various Italian noblemen

before coming to England in 1501 as collector of Peter's Pence (one of the

taxes that went to Rome � see Chapter 6). As Pope Alexander VI's man in

England he got the job of receiver to the bishop of Bath and Wells three years

later.

Henry VII knew a clever guy when he met one and got Vergil working on a

huge 26 volume Historiae Anglicae (History of the English) in 1505. He was

either a slow researcher or busy on other things, because the book wasn't

finished until 1533 and was published the next year.

Vergil fell foul of Henry VIII long before the publication of his book. The king's

top man was Thomas Wolsey (see Chapters 4, 5 and 6), who wanted to be a

cardinal and probably pope. Vergil didn't back Wolsey and somebody found

a letter he'd written that criticised both Wolsey and the king, so Vergil was

put in prison. Pope Leo X pressured Henry for his release and Vergil was out

after a few months.

In 1525 Vergil published a book on Gildas, the historian-monk from

Strathclyde, Scotland in the 6th century. Vergil was a naturalised English

citizen from 1510, but after 1538 he went back to Urbino in Italy for prolonged

periods and he died there in 1555.

Vergil is important because in some ways he was the first of the real histori-

ans. We usually call historians of this period chroniclers, and the earlier ones

were always churchmen (the only people trained to read and write in the

middle ages). Vergil was sceptical and critical, as historians are supposed

to be, but he was accused of burning manuscripts to cover his mistakes and

stealing books from English libraries to ship them off to Rome.

His Book 27 of the History of the English covers the reign of Henry VIII and his

hatred of Wolsey comes across very clearly. Even so, no better historian of

the Wars of the Roses (1455�1487; see Chapter 2) existed.

William Shakespeare (1564�1616)

The man from Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire has a huge reputation. He

was Man of the Millennium in 2000, the greatest playwright ever and you find

more quotes from him than anybody else in a dictionary of quotations. In the 294 Part V: The Part of Tens

Dictionary of Biography Shakespeare gets three times the page space given to

his queen, Elizabeth I!

Shakespeare's private life is so ordinary and boring that many people believe

he didn't write the famous plays and sonnets at all. His father was a glove

maker and wool dealer in Stratford. Young Will probably went to the local

school and he married local girl Anne Hathaway (we discuss her house in

Chapter 19) when he was 18 and they had three children: Suzanna and the

twins Judith and Hamnet. At 25 Shakespeare went to seek his fortune, Dick

Whittington style, in London.

In the big smoke Will became an actor-playwright in the trendy new world

of the theatre that was opening up in the 1580s, which the Puritans hated

(see Chapter 14). He made a reasonable fortune out of theatre profits in the

Lord Chamberlain's Company and spent it on a new state-of-the-art house in

Stratford, but he seems to have only rented in London.

In his late 40s Shakespeare pulled out of his theatre commitments, went back

to Stratford and died there, neatly, on his birthday, 23 April 1616.

Shakespeare (whoever he was) wrote some superb plays that today are

divided into comedies, tragedies and histories. Everybody's heard of Hamlet,

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth and so on, and some of the phrases he

invented have become part of everyday speech � neither a borrower nor a

lender be; more sinned against that sinning; parting is such sweet sorrow; the

world's [your] oyster.

Check out the brilliant Shakespeare in Love starring Joseph Fiennes as the

Bard. Tom Stoppard, who wrote the screenplay, cheats: he has a very 21st-

century Will with writer's block going to a psychiatrist and falling in love with

a very unlikely heroine who's disguised as a boy. Fiennes has got far too much

hair for what we think Shakespeare looked like � but then, what did he look

like? Accurate it may not be, but the film is great fun from start to finish.

Shakespeare wasn't always popular in his day because he was so successful.

Fellow writer Robert Greene called him an `upstart crow'. Like everybody

else in his day, the only reason Shakespeare's plays were put on and his

poetry published was that he had a patron, probably the handsome Thomas

Wriothesley (pronounced Risley), the third earl of Southampton.

Later generations turned Shakespeare into a literary saint and the word genius

doesn't begin to describe him. He only ever lived in Stratford and London;

he was never an explorer, a soldier or politician. But his plays are rich with

experiences. For example, he never went to Italy in his life, yet plays like the

Merchant of Venice and Two Gentlemen of Verona are vivid. Will's real skill, Chapter 17: Ten Top Tudor People 295 then, was pinching ideas from everybody else, knowing his theatre market very well and having a brilliant turn of phrase.

The Globe Theatre in Southwark, London, has now been rebuilt and is a working playhouse � check it out. Shakespeare's birthplace is a fascinat- ing museum in Stratford, but New Place, the superb house that his success bought him, is just a space surrounded by a wall. You can visit his tomb too in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. 296 Part V: The Part of Tens