Reprobates

The Cavaliers of the English Civil War

JOHN STUBBS

VIKING

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PENGUIN BOOKS

VIKING

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First published 2011

Copyright © John Stubbs, 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-67-091978-9

Contents

Introduction

  1. Fathers and Sons

  2. The Quixotic Prince

  3. The End of Steenie

  4. Dancing to the Drum

  5. Backslidings

  6. Blind Mouths

  7. The Court and the Covenant

  8. Northern Discoveries

  9. Plots and Prodigals

10. Incivilities of War

11. Sulby Hedge

12. Angling for Quiet

13. Twigs of Bay

14. Aubrey

Notes

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Index

By the same author

Donne: The Reformed Soul

For Katja, Lana and Martin

Note on the Text

Superscribed numerals refer to notes at the end of the text, which are mainly bibliographical. Early modern spelling has been preserved except where it would no longer be intelligible to the general reader. Dates are given according to new style – i.e. following a calendar beginning on 1 January rather than on 25 March.

Introduction

1

In mid-March 1641, a military rider was dispatched to London from a defeated army in the north. Captain John Chudleigh bore a letter from a council of officers at York intended for their commander-in-chief, the Earl of Northumberland. ‘Wee complayne as gentleman,’ they wrote. They were owed pay, they were supporting their men out of their own pockets, and they were despised in the towns and villages where they were billeted. But it was more important to them that they be allowed to redeem their honour against the rebel Scottish army currently occupying the north-east of England. Their forces had been routed by the Scots at Newburn the summer before.

The capital Chudleigh entered on 21 March was on the verge of a coup d’état. The king was being plucked of his powers by Parliament: his two chief councillors faced a trial for their lives. Mobs regularly took to the streets demanding the head of ‘Black Tom Tyrant’ – Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

Given the urgency of his assignment, it was strange that Chudleigh did not immediately seek out Northumberland, who harboured grievances of his own from the worsening quarrel. For instead, on riding past the mews and into the rambling precincts of the palace of Whitehall, he shared the letter with the poet laureate, Sir William Davenant, a playwright and masque-maker with an amiable bearing and a ruined countenance.

Davenant was both troubled and excited by what he read. The officers’ words were formal and restrained, but the depth of feeling behind them was obvious and sent a stronger message – this, he told Chudleigh, was a matter ‘of greater consequence than he imagined’. He persuaded the captain to come and meet some friends.

Chudleigh may already have been acquainted with Sir John Suckling, infamous for his losses at the card table and the bowling green, and for his drubbing in a dispute over an heiress. Only a complete stranger to the court, meanwhile, would have been unfamiliar with Henry Jermyn, the queen’s favourite. Davenant convened their meeting hastily, ushering in the courier to a back-room and urging him to share the contents of the letter once more. Chudleigh was willing, yet again, to do so.

Suckling and Davenant were brother officers and veterans of the two disastrous campaigns against the Scottish rebellion. Suckling and Jermyn were also long-standing associates, although a pair of figures less alike would be difficult to find. Suckling was a slight, ‘light-timbered’, almost boyishly built man; Jermyn, the court’s most notorious philanderer, was louche and heavy-limbed, with the shoulders of a drayman and the backbone – said Andrew Marvell – of an elephant. Both, however, were equally coiffeured – Suckling with a well-brushed reddish mane – attired in rustling silks, and marked by an arrogant demeanour. Both also shared the burden of disgrace. Jermyn had returned not long before from banishment. He had been packed off to France after one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting became pregnant with his child.

The two courtiers agreed with Davenant. The letter meant more than the messenger could know; and could be made to mean more than its writers intended. With practised circumspection Jermyn asked Chudleigh if he might show the letter to the queen. At this point Chudleigh remembered himself. He refused to leave the paper with them before delivering it to Northumberland.¹

Why should this meeting of minor personages matter, to the civil war which was to follow or to the longer course of English history? Davenant was the chief writer of royal entertainments. His contemporaries noted him chiefly by his all but destroyed nose, burnt off by a cure for syphilis. Suckling was a gambler and a showman. Jermyn was rumoured to be the queen’s lover. Meanwhile Chudleigh had a walk-on, walk-off part in the conspiratorial drama. When he rode from London a week later, bearing notes for his comrades in the north, his significance in the larger story came to an end.

The hasty conference established in the minds of Suckling, Jermyn and Davenant that they might rely on the army to come south and take London for the king. They could set in motion a plot which, until that point, had seemed little more than fantasy. They were willing to use force against Parliament, to free the king’s chief minister and regain control of the capital. Now it appeared that the military lay at their disposal. The impression they took from their interview with Chudleigh placed them, for the first time, in a state of civil war. It also brought about the creation of a faction and the coining of a byword for impractical heroics, dash, disdain and debauchery. When Davenant, Suckling and Jermyn met the dusty horseman on that early spring day in 1641, they were courtiers of varying influence in an embattled royal entourage. When they let Chudleigh go on his way, displeased at his reluctance to give up his missive but stirred by the sea-change it suggested, they merited the name their enemies would cast upon them in the streets: they were cavaliers.

The predicament of King Charles was truly dire; and he shouldered his share of the blame. In 1639 he had faced a rebellion from his subjects in Scotland. His campaign that year to crush the Scottish covenant ended in an anti-climax that his officers found humiliating. The next year he took up arms against the Scots again; and this time his forces were routed. In the meantime the situation in England had shifted against him. Mistakes in foreign policy touched old insecurities. Long-held grudges against his rule rose up at the worst possible moment. Yet he needed money for his war in the north, and for this he was obliged to summon a Parliament for the first time in eleven years. A strong party of critics in the House of Commons, directed by a set of dissatisfied peers, insisted on reparation for old wrongs before they would grant the king funds. He dismissed them disgustedly. Recalled, however, after his army’s defeat in the summer of 1640, the Commons began forcing Charles to give up key powers and renounce much-hated ministers. The Archbishop of Canterbury was locked up in the Tower. Other councillors fled – one making for France in a rowboat.

Charles’s dictator in Ireland, the Earl of Strafford, walked calmly into the lions’ den. He too was imprisoned by order of Parliament, and was put on trial for his life in the spring of 1641, when Davenant, Suckling and other court-based conspirators began to think of taking action. As the year softened, their thoughts took shape in a climate of deepening chaos. A respite in the summer that year was then violently broken by the onset of rebellion in Ireland. Clashes broke out in the streets of Westminster between demobbed officers defending the king and crowds of petitioners protesting on behalf of Parliament. ‘And from those contestations,’ recalled the chief royalist chronicler of the time, ‘they who were looked upon as servants to the King being then called “Cavaliers,” and the other of the rabble [were] contemned and despised under the names of “Roundheads”.’²

These two camps afforded compelling caricatures. Everyone who knows anything about the civil wars which ensued in each of Charles’s three kingdoms knows that those wars were fought between cavaliers and roundheads. In myth the cavaliers were elegant gentlemen, chivalrous if sometimes dissipated, while the roundheads were religious and social revolutionaries. Everyone can picture him, the cavalier, with his lovelocks, his broad hat, his mantle and bucket-topped boots, the basket-handled rapier at his side, a buskin covering his satin doublet. The roundhead, meanwhile, is a more prosaic character, his cropped hair suggesting that he served in peacetime as an apprentice, his clothes plain, his armour better made and more efficient, betokening the higher levels of equipage and organization which would eventually defeat King Charles. He despises luxury and mere show; he believes in and follows the Word of God, not the ornaments and vestments to be found in the king’s Church.

In reality ‘roundheads’ and ‘cavaliers’ looked similar, depending on their rank. There were many officers in Parliament’s army who dressed every bit as dandily as Suckling or Jermyn; and many in the king’s service who frowned on such luxurious garments as effeminate and decadent. The enlisted men on both sides came from labouring or manufacturing backgrounds, and were equally likely to wear their hair short – because it made sense practically or because an indenture required it.

The king himself at times looked awkward among his glamorous courtiers, and for some that loomed large among his failings. ‘It is fit for the Kinge to doe somethinge extraordinary,’ Suckling told Jermyn, in a letter which shortly found its way to the press. Others saw strength in Charles’s willingness to make concessions to Parliament, as they did in his characteristic reserve and reticence, his stiffness of manner and discomfort with levity. Who more than Charles, in fact, was so puritanical in his private and public worship? He spent hours before bed and on rising in prayer and meditation, and would insist on hearing part of the liturgy before eating – even on his hunting trips, no matter how late he came in or how hungry he and his servants were. He was scrupulous to a fault in attending daily chapel, and insisted that a great many of his nobles joined him. He was at best, then, an imperfect cavalier.

His one stroke of pure panache came early in adulthood when, on an impulse, he and the royal favourite Buckingham rode unattended all the way to Spain. He journeyed to Madrid to court the Spanish Infanta Maria in person; and the mission, for all its show of gallantry, was an unqualified disaster. The episode marked a turning point in Charles’s life and in his politics, and a chapter will be devoted to it in due course. After another string of military catastrophes in the late 1620s, the young king became cautious in the extreme in his attitude to arms. He insisted on quiet and mannerly behaviour in his court. Through this, and through his handling of the crisis before the civil war, he gained an unwarranted reputation as a somewhat shambling, thin-blooded character. Yet while his icy reserve concealed the doubts inherent in a thoughtful, introverted personality, he never made a poor show in the saddle. ‘He was a person, tho’ born sickly, yet who came thro’ temperance and exercise, to have as firm and strong a body, as most persons I ever knew, and throughout all the fatigues of the wars, or during his imprisonment, never sick.’³

The civil wars determined the future of Britain and Ireland. They opened the modern phase of a struggle to define where power lay – in the monarch or in Parliament, in the peerage or in the Commons – and to draw a line between Church and state. Within that ongoing story, the cavalier and the puritan are potent archetypes. The puritan upholds the work ethic and the will to give up pleasure, scourging the soul for its flaws. In the cavalier we have the individualist, more attuned to the passing moment and in greater touch with his desires. He too, though, is capable of self-sacrifice. He sets his life at a pin’s fee, throws himself into the breach for a fleeting triumph or resounding gesture.

If the puritan is more dominant in recent times, present in the astonishing intellectual and physical achievements of the modern era – achieved at crushing human cost – the cavalier also surfaces at crucial moments. He is present erratically rather than constantly. We can glimpse him, for example, in Marlborough’s campaigns, in a number of colonial last stands and, later still, among ‘the few’, the long-haired fighter pilots of 1940.

‘Cavalier’ came to denote the allegiances of half the English nation – and by extension of all those who supported the king in his three kingdoms. From the 1640s on, cavaliers were active across England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales; yet the word took its social, political and indeed literary associations from a particularly English social context, pertinent above all to the English civil war (which is to say, the English dimension of the armed conflict across the British and Irish islands). Yet the sense it carried at the beginning of the war was more specific still.

Thinking of the civil wartime cavaliers, it is probably the famous royalist generals who come to mind – Prince Rupert in particular, the Duke of Newcastle and Sir Ralph Hopton. The title ‘cavalier’ became a badge of partisan pride and the mark of a royalist gentleman; but it is important to remember that it started political life, in the early 1640s, as a term of abuse and reprobation. Militant supporters of Parliament were not thinking of a fine horseman or cavalry commander when they cornered a fashionable officer and branded him a cavalier. They were being ironic. Instead they saw a degenerate creature, bred up on Continental trifles and polluted with popery; a fraud and a boaster, a glossy, superficial type, forever gambling what he had borrowed, in perpetual debt to his tailor. The first ‘cavaliers’, in short, were men of the kind who met John Chudleigh on that day in early spring 1641: the disreputable likes of Suckling and syphilis-scarred Davenant – prodigals and playboys.

As it happened, these two particular cavaliers were also poets, or in slightly heightened parlance, ‘makers’; and through their inventions we can follow the cultural creation of the civil-war cavalier. These were the foot soldiers of degeneracy, with their loose lifestyles, and their poetry celebrating those lifestyles. Writing of Suckling’s part in the army plot of 1641, the historian John Adamson recently described him as a virtual parody of the stock cavalier figure.⁴ Similarly, the works of the poet Thomas Carew, a mutual friend of Suckling and Davenant, were singled out in Parliament for their hideous influence on public morality.

In their interviews with Chudleigh, in a side chamber in Whitehall or a back-room in a Westminster tavern, it is easy to see these characters as the roundheads saw them: courtly parasites, conspirators against the king’s godly subjects. Yet, as scholars have begun insisting over the past thirty years or so, there was more to them than that: many who were supposedly cavaliers were reserved, devout characters and in many cases shared the concerns raised by the king’s opponents. This caveat applies even to Suckling and Davenant. That they were labelled cavaliers at all, as historians now stress, was both unfortunate and inaccurate. For that implies that a cavalier faction existed before the civil war: when it was the war, in fact, that changed the meaning of the word.⁵

Since we cannot cancel the term ‘cavalier’ in the record altogether, we should try to comprehend the depth and variety of qualities it actually denoted. The wits gathered in these pages can help us do just that. Through Davenant, Suckling and others, in a largely forgotten pocket of writers, we gain a view of both the complacencies and the anxieties of the age that made them, and of the world that was altered for ever by the civil wars.

A famous poem, commonly viewed as a cavalier anthem, urged maidens to ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,’ and marry while time permitted. It is in fact an almost austere lyric, gaining pathos from its publication at a time when the number of young husbands available to ‘the virgins’ had been vastly and violently reduced. Our sense of this old standard should also change on closer acquaintance with its author. Robert Herrick, the ‘cavalier’ who wrote the poem, was an Anglican priest who avoided all personal exposure to war after travelling as a chaplain on a disastrous naval mission to the French coast in 1627. The thousands of Englishmen who died off La Rochelle, and the countless more who fought as mercenaries in the Continent’s ongoing wars of religion, gave a limp to the cavalier swagger – and a plangency which is often missed in Herrick’s deceptively simple verse.

A better symbol for our classical sense of the cavalier is the diverted songbird in a lesser-known poem by Davenant:

This is a fitting hymn for ‘cavalier poets’ – altering course by pure instinct towards such beauty; they would, however, swerve once more to speak scornfully of the same attractions if their attentions were neglected or rebuffed. These poets were champions of youth and love, frank about their desires and distrustful of matrimony. But the same writers also thought and wrote intently on friendship and the role of art, on matters of religion and political philosophy. A close friend of Thomas Hobbes, Davenant came to see beauty and delight as socially constructive, a means of putting people in touch with their better natures.

One writer who comes to prominence in the following chapters would undoubtedly have protested at being put among such company. This is the statesman and historian Edward Hyde, eventually Earl of Clarendon and Lord Chancellor of England. He was indisputably a reluctant cavalier: although eventually the chief royalist chronicler of the mid-century’s events, he entered the controversy between king and Parliament as a moderate, with deep reservations towards both parties. As his memoirs and majestic history of the age frequently remind us, he was an altogether more austere figure than the original ‘gallant’ cavaliers of Suckling and his ilk. Yet, as these works simultaneously indicate, he was never so very remote from their circles, however critically he viewed the Bacchanalia: his chief social gift, before greatness was thrust upon him, lay in his ability to mingle with all. Although a respectable married man for most of his life and thus no frequenter of disreputable places, he enjoyed social dinners and sociable drinking and was at times to be found at the gaming greens and tables on Piccadilly. In his post-war wandering and exile, even though troubled severely by gout, he was ever alive to the sometimes wearying magic of travel – enriching his autobiography with accounts of the characters, spectacles and incidents he came by. His crowning achievement, The History of the Rebellion, has all the tartness, cynicism and urbanity of lesser royalist wit, even though it takes those qualities to an unequalled level. He was no cavalier in the earlier senses of the word; but his testimony about the cavaliers is crucial. And, as portraits suggest, he too grew his hair down in lovelocks.

Writers such as Davenant and Suckling were important in literary terms, forming a bridge between their heroes Shakespeare and Jonson and the lighter literature of the Restoration. At street level they may have looked foppish, but on closer acquaintance many were thinkers, creators and moralists. And in a period that crushed a great many people – including the most powerful – into claustrophobic categories, they were broader souls, at once coarser and finer than most, more comfortable with irony than with absolutes. They give us something apart from the rhetoric of the age, with its high sectarian stakes, its disputes over the divine rights of kings or the priesthood of the individual soul. They direct us back to the passing moment, the transient plenty of life. They were not, of course, free of the standard xenophobia and misogyny of the time, nor of the class bias peculiar to their courtier lifestyle; indeed part of their historical value resides in their shameless expression of those preconceptions in their poetry, drama and correspondence. But their literary talent and psychological realism make them precious witnesses of an age in which extremism became the norm. This book tells the story of that time from their perspective, covering approximately the reigns of Charles I and II.

2

The making of the cavaliers involved more than the formation of an army or the manufacture of a social stereotype. Understanding it means learning about the variety of temperaments and attitudes which, rightly or wrongly, were tarred with the same war-paint in the early 1640s. Amending such brushwork involves drawing nicer distinctions: the portraiture of the court artist van Dyck, for example, does not embody a cavalier style, and his subjects were certainly not all cavaliers, but the painter himself did conform to the popular image of a fashionable cavalier gallant. Conversely, Thomas Carew, in life a reserved and consistently pacific person, was nevertheless taken to typify the cavalier attitude through his early reputation for promiscuity and his scandalous erotic ‘raptures’. Restoring the complexity of such figures means following their experiences abroad and at home, the art they made and the literature they enjoyed; and it means taking the measure of the period in which their outlook was defined.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the way the word itself was used is that, before 1642, ‘cavalier’ usually occurs in non-military contexts. The historian Kevin Sharpe, in his now classic study of The Personal Rule of Charles I, suggests that it referred most often to a ‘gallant or a gay blade’; it was an epithet encompassing both the more and less reputable elements in the king’s heterogeneous court.⁷ Something in the very odour of the word suggested that these original cavaliers – fashionable, high-spirited and undoubtedly prone to duelling – were less comfortable in the field than at their urban recreations.

One of their favourite haunts is a good place to watch the flow and counter-currents of their time: the ‘private’ theatre of Blackfriars on the north side of the Thames. Once a hall belonging to a dissolved priory, the location affords a long view of English history.

The theatre is easily reached, a short walk past Shoemaker Row and the other lanes of merchants’ houses when you turn off the straggling thoroughfare of Ludgate Hill down one of seemingly innumerable alleys. Alternatively, by river, it is a short pull from the waterside mansions of the Strand or Whitehall itself to a sometimes precarious wharf, where passage to the steps is hampered by many other boats and barges. By carriage, it is always difficult to get near to the front door, so busy are the streets that seem to narrow the closer one gets, complaints about the racket descending from the windows.

Long before it hosted tragedies and comic misunderstandings, Blackfriars was wholly accustomed to dramatic struggles. In the first half of the sixteenth century, in the days of Henry VIII’s Great Matter, tranquillity could still be found in the orchards and gardens to the west of the priory buildings by London’s great river. But the priory complex, at the south-west corner of the walled city, sat at the hub of the kingdom. A two-storey gallery across Fleet Ditch connected Blackfriars to Bridewell Palace, the main London residence of King Henry. To the north-east lay St Paul’s, its legendary spire still intact, harpooning the clouds bringing lightning to strike it. At ground level, like the cathedral, Blackfriars was something of a thoroughfare for citizens, and those wishing to travel by river could wander down a lane from the top entrance, past the church and vast refectory, to the water gate and the traffic of the Thames. The intersecting cloisters themselves were no isolated conclave for the Dominican friars whose dark robes gave the priory its popular name. The friars, unlike monks, were bound by their vows to go out and seize hold of the world, not to retire from it. For centuries they had roamed London’s streets and beyond in pairs, begging their bread and spreading the word. They had no fear of living beside royalty. Hundreds of years before, when Blackfriars was still relatively young and the Dominicans needed more space, they were permitted to change the very line of London’s Roman walls.

The proximity of the palace and the court, since a fire in the royal apartments at Westminster, politicized the priory further: it became the regular venue for Parliament. There was, however, nothing in its past to equal the divisive affair of state fought out in the summer of 1528. Early in the morning of 21 June King Henry left Bridewell and was called into the priory’s Parliament Chamber to challenge the legality of his marriage to Catherine of Aragón. This would open the way for him to marry his new love, Anne Boleyn. His councillors sat as judges behind a table covered with cloth of gold. For the first time in English history a monarch was summoned by his subjects to account for himself, when the call went out for ‘Harry, King of England’ to enter the chamber.

This was the ‘Great Matter’: Catherine’s spirited defence, the predetermined verdict and the women of London’s mass outrage at her abandonment formed the opening scenes of a drama that transformed the nation. To get his divorce, Henry renounced the jurisdiction of the pope and made himself head of the Church in England. The English Reformation began. Ten years after the trial, the black-robed Preaching Friars of London, familiar presences in the city since 1275, were dispossessed, as the monasteries across the kingdom were dissolved and their vast properties distributed among the new Protestant ascendancy. Having been tacked ever more closely to the royal palace, Blackfriars was now absorbed entirely, reconstituted, and split into smaller domiciles. Some of its green spaces provided private gardens. Many of its ancient fruit trees were felled and dragged away to make room for more building.

A whiff of controversy lingered over the precincts after Catherine’s rough treatment, for towards the end of the sixteenth century, Blackfriars remained a subject for opprobrium, and a source of trouble to its neighbours. In 1576 a section of the old priory changed nature again, when one of the great chambers was leased to the master of the Chapel Royal choir for the boys to have their rehearsals (‘For that it is meet that our Chapel Royal should be furnished with well-singing children from time to time’). This was closed, however, under protest from city officials, less than ten years later. Then at the end of the century, ‘a collection of rooms, large and small, cellars and yards and including seven great upper rooms’ was taken over by the theatrical entrepreneur James Burbage, who needed a new venue. The terms of the licence made it clear that this was to be a private auditorium, not a public establishment open to all. Disgruntled neighbours and critics were not convinced, but despite periodic rushes of plague that shut all public places down, this time the theatre’s roots held. The smell of mutton-wax candles and oil from the cressets expunged any lingering odour of incense.

Local residents were quickly up in arms again, arguing that the theatre would become intolerable because of the ‘vagrant and lewd persons’ consorting there. The protests were sustained over the following decades, and the furthest they came to closing down Blackfriars was in 1619: ‘for such is the unruliness of some of the resorters to that house … in those narrow and crooked streets, that many hurts have heretofore been done.’⁸

In truth, the indoor theatre attracted a more well-mannered – at least wealthier – clientele than the open-roofed round theatres on the other side of the river. It was, admittedly, no more a ‘private’ theatre than its competitors; but here one did not see the regular pitched battles that took place between ‘gentlemen’ spectators and apprentices in Southwark. Yet as the seventeenth century progressed it became associated nevertheless with a more aristocratic form of delinquency, a dilettante set of which Sir John Suckling was one of many champions. There was no remedy for what Davenant dubbed the ‘gallant humour of the age’: for this was:

Accordingly, one saw very few long-gowned guildsmen or aldermen in the audience. The actors’ neighbours – hard-working merchants and shopkeepers – kept up their complaints at the danger, noise and inconvenience of the growing numbers of carriages congesting the narrow streets around the theatre on performance afternoons. The nearby feather merchants (or ‘feathermen’) were among the bitterest. Even among those with no specific ideological objections, there was a dislike of the bustle, of the volatility surrounding the playhouse and the frequent riotry of the theatregoers: ‘sometimes all their streets cannot contain them,’ remarked a stern order of 1619, ‘that they endanger one the other, break down stalls, throw down men’s goods from their shops … whereby many times quarrels and effusion of blood hath followed.’¹⁰

Drama sent people out full of possibilities, voices raised, re-running half-remembered dialogues with their companions, simply enlivened by a funny show, or aware of things they had not known about themselves before; and that, if the regular protests and petitions are to be believed, did not feel safe. A good sermon could leave one feeling shattered, awestruck, determined to reform, but nothing else in early modern London had the same effect as theatre. The playhouse did not urge one to mend one’s ways, but implied that human ways were tragically or comically unmendable. This could not be borne by those campaigning, sincerely and tirelessly, for greater civic order.

To the City Fathers and much of the citizenry, the more refined environment Blackfriars claimed to offer was only a charade to cover up decadence. The patrons and practitioners of the stage, in a phrase heard from the 1590s to the 1640s, were only so many ‘roaring boys’ – debauched assailants on true Christian behaviour.

The enemies of theatre had to wait a long time for their moment. But it came in 1642, as England joined Scotland and Ireland in the descent into civil war. Having been suspended for more than a decade, Parliament had reacted to troubles in the north and across the Irish Sea by attempting to take control of his council and the army away from the king. When the English war broke, the city was left in the hands of theatre’s opponents. The playhouses were sealed.

The King’s Men, Shakespeare and Burbage’s old company, was thus immediately disbanded. Most of the troupe became cavaliers, joining the king’s army, ‘and like good Men and true, Serv’d their Old Master, tho’ in a different, yet more honourable, Capacity.’ One can only imagine what the pioneer stalwarts would have felt. As he watched the Globe burn thirty years earlier, John Heminge, founding member of the company, broke down weeping, and was lightly mocked:

He could be forgiven for crying now. At Blackfriars, the carriages no longer clustered around the old priory site. If the locals had not been full of worry or partisan anger, they might have enjoyed the peace in the streets in the evenings.

The occasional play was managed during the war, and now there was much pity for the starving players who put them on. At the interval in the fighting in 1647, while the king lay in Parliamentary custody and the authorities were preoccupied with his future, companies began performing openly across the city. Rudimentary theatres stirred again to life at The Cockpit in Drury Lane, Salisbury Court near Fleet Street, The Fortune in Golding Lane. The Red Bull in Clerkenwell, the roughest venue of them all, kept going longer than any of them. Performances, however, were still officially forbidden on the brisk day in January 1649 when Charles Stuart – no longer addressed officially by royal title – put his head to the block outside the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall. The diminutive, long-haired and plainly dressed prisoner had given a memorable performance at his trial, and met his end with long-practised composure. The blow of the axe brought out one of the city’s most memorable moments of communal empathy. The crowd let out a visceral collective groan, as spontaneous as the gasp any murder or deposition had raised in the ‘wooden O’ in Southwark, or below the beamed ceiling at Blackfriars. Yet for many, even most, in the great crowd that day outside the palace, satisfaction followed the purely instinctual lurch of the gut. Finally, there seemed to be a chance of completing the work begun, indirectly, by Catherine of Aragón’s bitter trial at Blackfriars more than a hundred years before. In 1655, at the height of Cromwell’s English Commonwealth, derelict for some time, the old buildings were pulled down.

By then, Davenant had narrowly avoided a traitor’s death, after many close shaves during the war. His old companion Suckling had committed suicide in Paris many years earlier, before the civil war proper even began, distraught at his country’s course and brought low by the collapse of his personal fortunes. Others of the old school, including Davenant, sought peace with Cromwell. By the 1650s the hey-day of such men during the peaceful years of Charles’s reign had acquired a strong nostalgic glow. This was an aura Davenant sought to recover in his post-war work and which was also nourished by a score of other writers, notably his friend John Aubrey, the antiquary and author of Brief Lives. Later chapters of this book will consider how relics of that former age were recovered or manufactured, and how the next generation of wits sought to regain identity and consensus.

But what must follow first is an account of the experience these survivors and their successors sought to commemorate, and a search for aspects of it they preferred to forget. For a key ingredient in almost any cavalier story is the disappointment or defiance of a father’s hopes. From King Charles downward, this was a generation which defined itself by failing to meet paternal expectations – the demands of both natural and symbolic fathers, authorities ranging from James I to the old poet Ben Jonson. To speak of how that happened, it is necessary to visit decades that were turbulent enough before civil war resulted.

1. Fathers and Sons

1

Leaving Hyde Park, expunge the cold bulk of Marble Arch. There is no imperial stone, no Victorian cast iron, no post-modern steel; there are no tinted panels of inscrutable glass. Place yourself at the landward fringe, north-west, of an irregular riverside city. You have approached London the wrong way, reversing the route taken by those under sentence of death. Only in recent times have the parklands behind you, formerly royal hunting grounds, been open to commoners. Here at Tyburn you might be edified by the spectacle of a hanging, perhaps twenty felons at one go, on the sturdy derrick. From the sparse, open field on which the gallows stands it is a long, melancholy drag up to St Giles-in-the-Fields, once the site of a hostel for lepers, and still a place attracting unfortunates. This is the route of the rag-tag Calvary run that travels one-way in the opposite direction. The wagons bearing felons from Newgate stop here for the condemned to be given a last cup of ale.¹

Beyond St Giles, however, nearing Holborn, the surroundings brighten. ‘On the high street have ye many fair houses built, and lodgings for gentlemen and such-like,’ writes the chronicler Stow.² The signs of the bush are thicker on the ground and the houses lean over you like prepossessing drunkards. Further down the broad thoroughfare, towards Holborn Hill, stand large, exclusive mansions. This is a district of lawyers, scriveners, students and servants of the law: on the corner of the road which takes you up to Hampstead, the gatehouse of Gray’s Inn leads into lawns and courtyards. Just before this, to the right, Chancery Lane runs down to Fleet Street, the Middle Temple and the City. Behind the street front, the trees are still patchily bare around the traders, riders and japers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

One day late in February 1613, in the study of his home among the ‘divers fair houses and gardens’ in Chancery Lane, an elderly man can be found writing a letter. The room may be somewhat spare, yet the collection of books is comprehensive. The letter on the writing table is despondent, and it surely deepens the gentleman’s irreversible frown as he writes. He came to fatherhood at an advanced stage of life, twenty years ago, and has never quite recovered.

He has been cheated of something near £9,000, almost the sum of his estate, in an investment in land. One of his sons, Cromer, is dying of a lingering disease which costs the old man forty shillings a day in medical expenses. The eldest, Mathew, only ‘runneth vp and downe after houndes and hawkes,’ while the other, Thomas, is at the Middle Temple – ‘but I feare studieth the law very little’. Many a dreary and sorrowful day has passed since his last letter (he is writing to his nephew, a man of consequence), and yet all this has still not, inexplicably, been enough to still the letter-writer’s hand; God will not grant him release. The kingdom’s grief oppresses him too. He has lived to see the death of ‘our hopefull prynce’, the never-to-be Henry IX, the previous year. But the Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to Count Frederick of the Palatinate has entirely passed him by, shut up as he has been with sorrow during the masques and nuptial celebrations.

The gentleman is Sir Mathew Carew, a Master of Chancery, gowned and grey. At the Court of Equity he carries much authority and commands great respect for his knowledge of the Civil Law. Beyond his immediate professional circle in Westminster Hall, his word is honoured rather than followed. The news is spreading that he is likely to lose his last farthing.

The letter is looking for a favour, though even Sir Mathew himself is unsure exactly what form that boon might take. In any case, writing it has filled an hour and brought the solace of articulation; it is sealed and dispatched. It will take a good while to reach Venice, where Sir Mathew’s nephew is ambassador, crossing the Channel and making the trip overland to the Adriatic coast. Sir Mathew may well forget it, tightening his brows, permanently knit by age and care, in anxious calculations as the spring comes unnoticed outside his windows:

Sir Mathew is oblivious to waking swallows and candied grass: ‘benumbed Earth’ fills up his mind; a tract of land that has bereft him of his fortune; a smaller plot that will receive his tired body.

It was in fact only a little later in 1613 that Thomas Carew, Sir Mathew’s middle son, arrived in Venice to wait on Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador, as a secretary. Born in 1594 or 1595, Thomas was eighteen at the most when he reached the English residence. He was careful in his dress, and tall, if not quite with the heavy build ascribed to him in later life; a younger son, but a gentleman of the Inns of Court, with a confident, somewhat severe and critical manner. The usual route to Venice was across the Alps, through the Mont Cenis pass under the guidance of incredibly hardy ‘Marrons’, over the staggering path once travelled by King Arthur in the company of a bear.

The Venice Carew reached was already the city so clear yet elusive in the mind’s eye today – Piazza San Marco, Ponte dei Sospiri, Ponte Rialto, the horses treading air above St Mark’s were all components of the scene. St Mark’s itself, fronted with plates of pink marble, sliced from the same perfect block and thus symmetrical, looked much the same, as did the broad magnificence of the Grand Canal. There was the same seasonal bother of high water, requiring walkways to be placed above the flood, the same liquid beauty of the place in sunlight, the same ghostliness in winter cloud.

It would be two centuries before the cult of the sublime would seize on Venice as its holy city, but despite their suspicions of the supposed venality of the place, the luxury goods (which they nevertheless bought and prized), the cost of things and the gondoliers who robbed, kidnapped or knifed you, travellers of Carew’s time were helpless before its wonders. His acquaintance and almost exact contemporary James Howell said that Venice well deserved its title of ‘the maiden city’, and not only because she was ‘never defloured by any Enemy since she had a being’:

London’s bourses – Gresham’s bustling Royal Exchange and more recently the New Exchange – paled by comparison. Early modern travellers took a more mercantile and strategic view than the later aesthetes. Venice was, as Howell put it, ‘a City that all Europe is bound unto, for she is her greatest Rampart against that huge Eastern Tyrant the Turk by sea’.⁴ There was a sense that its sway might be passing; but no city state could be so successful for so long without lulls, without enemies and without critics. To Francisco de Quevedo, the acrid master of Spanish satire, the Venetian empire was ‘the very anus, the drain and sink of monarchies, both in war and peace’, doing nothing more but help ‘the Turks to vex the Christians, and the Christians to gall the Turks’.⁵

It was not necessary to go on the Italian tour to have one’s fancy caught and subverted by foreign influences – papism being much more dangerous than prostitution. The potential power of Venice over the imagination was an example of why parents and guardians were keen that the influence of travel should be censored and directed. For an elegant summary of the expectations a father, a supporting uncle or an elder brother might have of a young Englishman touring the Continent, we can take the views of Sir Philip Sidney, poet, soldier, and the model courtier of the previous generation. In 1578 Sidney wrote a long letter of advice to his brother Robert, who was then abroad, in which he set out his ideas on what should be taken from travel, and how it should be taken. He makes it clear that Robert should not travel merely for the sake of travelling:

The young English traveller was expected to fortify his character from his journeying, not to pick up exotic habits or flashy accoutrements. In that spirit, Sir Mathew Carew was relying on Sir Dudley Carleton, a sober sort of man, to keep an eye on Thomas, and keep him free of ‘disguisements’. He could be reassured that his son was presented to persons of the highest quality. In Florence that first year Thomas met the connoisseur and collector the Earl of Arundel, enjoying a tour of the northern Italian kingdoms after escorting Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Frederick, to the Palatinate.⁷ Also in the earl’s party was Inigo Jones, the royal surveyor and designer, gathering ideas and techniques for courtly spectacles.

Such flourishes, such acquaintances were all fine and well: yet there was no escaping the fact that travel was a finishing touch to the making of a gentleman. Almost sixty years earlier, Carew’s father, Sir Mathew, had luxuriated in his time abroad during the papist reign of Queen Mary. Twelve years he devoted to the study of languages and jurisprudence at Louvain, Paris, Padua, Bologna and Siena. On his return to England he wandered as deep as he could into the mazes of the law, becoming Master of Chancery in 1576.⁸ Yet for all the honour and respect accrued, his fortunes in 1613 suggested he had lost touch with the gentry’s basic concern: maintaining and acquiring property.

The crisis in the Carew estates that year contrasted painfully with the shrewd marketeering of successful landed families. Sir John Suckling the elder, for example, an accomplished courtier and Parliament man holding lands across the south-east and up into Norfolk, closed a deal he had long coveted on the Suffolk manor and advowson of Barsham. The moated house which came with the deeds was a seat in the old style; the hall and stately rooms built about a quadrangle. A spiral staircase ascended a tower on the eastern side, a romancey touch once highly practical in wilder times. It carried the astounding value of £4,000. For the time being, Suckling was unsure what to do with the place: he had bought it not from any need but to avoid the pain of losing its future returns. ‘It is now mine,’ he told his brother; ‘and I trust that the name of the Sucklings shall inheritt and possess it, when I am dead and rotten.’⁹ Thomas Carew seemed all but oblivious to such concerns; and in this respect he typified a neglect which many besides his father would observe in the coming generation.

On arriving back in England late in 1614, Carleton retained young Carew’s services for his next posting, to The Hague, the following spring. He also gave solid practical and financial assistance to the family. Sir Mathew was ailing, and had been obliged to mortgage the property on Chancery Lane to a younger, more prosperous relative. Carleton responded by helping with a large loan, which freed his uncle of this burden. In addition Sir Mathew was heartened by Sir Dudley’s ‘good likeng of my sons service’. His greatest wish amidst his troubles was that ‘Thomas must not [be] lauishe’ while he wrestled with his debts. Of all Sir Dudley’s gifts and acts of assistance, it was his moral guardianship of Thomas for which Sir Mathew was most grateful.