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. All Rights Reserved. http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk. Article Text: Discourses of History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart London Ian W Archer . The Huntington Library Quarterly . San Marino: 2005. Vol. 68 , Iss. 1/2; pg. 205 , 23 pgs Author(s): Ian W Archer Document types: Commentary Publication title: The Huntington Library Quarterly. San Marino: 2005. Vol. 68, Iss. 1/2; pg. 205, 23 pgs Source type: Periodical ISSN/ISBN: 00187895 Text Word Count 8907 Abstract (Document Summary) Historical materials of various kinds, Ian W. Archer observes, were widely available to Londoners, who engaged with the past in a variety of different and probably overlapping ways, although exactly how they did so is difficult to assess. The continuity in forms of historical writing over the sixteenth century has obscured the extent to which the Reformation represented a challenge to identities fashioned through an awareness of the past. Historical writing played contrasting if not contradictory roles: it was crucial in promoting order and continuity, but even chronicle writing could be highly politically charged. Sermons and dramatic treatments might stress Londoners' loyalty, or seek to demonize rebels; but dramatists were in the end unable to banish depictions of London's disloyalty from the stage. Finally, providentialist history reinforced loyally to the monarch as the protector against the Catholic threat, but at the same time implied a program of ongoing reformation and an activist foreign policy with which Elizabeth and her Stuart successors were not comfortable. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Full Text (8907 words) Copyright University of California Press 2005 History and Corporate Identity At a quarter day on 24 March 1620, Master Warden Smyth addressed the assembled members of the Grocers' Company at their hall. He pointed first to the "great care and providence of forefathers in procuring them a corporation whereby they enjoy many immunities and privileges." He "remembered and declared for Imitacion the liberality and bounty of their

forefathers in leaving them a place of assembly." He celebrated the company's charities, including the loan stocks from which many of the assembled tradesmen had benefited, and he particularly drew attention to the money and lands given "for the increase and maintenance of learning and so consequently of religion as well [as] schools in the country as in the universities and to the relief of the poor." He also stressed the wisdom of their predecessors, who "like careful benefactors have not only given means of maintenance but prescribed ordinances and rules for good government." Such a "very religious brotherly and profitable speech" was a regular feature of the company's quarter days. The standard themes were the longevity of the company, the liberality of its benefactors, and the importance of order and unity.1 These themes perhaps needed reinforcement in the Grocers' Company at this time, for its membership had recently been decimated by the separation of the Apothecaries in 1617.2 But the speeches remind us of the importance of continuity and longevity in providing legitimation for the early modern guilds. The Grocers' speeches do contain evidence of the role of historical information that Timothy Bright described in his Abridgement of Foxe's Book of Martyrs: "There is no Burgesse of a Citie, that hath care of his corporation, but would be glad to know, how in times past, the world went with his Corporation, that therby he may understand the better how to behave himself therein, as occasion shall serve: and, not onely woulde desire to knowe the lawes of the same, but also, what examples have any way beene geven, touching the same."3 But this kind of history very much served the needs of the present, and there are reasons for doubting the depth of the historical consciousness of early modern guildsmen. Many clearly had better things to do than listen to homilies on good order and charity. Warden Smyth had gone on to complain, about poor attendance at quarter days, that "there had not been so many appearers of the Livery except the Assistants... as Noah had persons enter the Ark with him."4 John Stow complained of the Fishmongers that they were men "ignorant of their antiquities: not able to show a reason why or when they were ioyned in amiti with the Goldsmiths, do give part of their armes &c." On seeking information from the Vintners, as one of the principal companies, about their antiquities in the later 15905, Stow met with the extraordinary response that "they were none of the principall but of the inferior companies, ... and so willing me to leave them I departed, and never since heard from them, which hath somewhat discouraged me any farther to travail amongst the companies to learn ought at their hands." This perhaps explains the rather thin information on companies in the 1598 edition of his Survey, filled out only to some extent in the revision of 1603.5 Another researcher, Andrew Willet, in spite of backing from the Lord Mayor, shared Stow's frustration, finding the livery companies "nice and scrupulous" in divulging details about their charitable activities.6 Ian Gadd's recent study of printed livery company histories hardly suggests overwhelming interest in their subject: he finds that more effort was devoted to representing corporate coats of arms than to providing historical details.7

Companies were of course interested in producing lists of those members who had served high office in the city, and these formed the basis for heraldic displays that would contribute to the company's honor, thereby reinforcing the legitimacy of the elite as well as flattering the vanity of some current members.8 The iconographie schemes of the decoration of company halls were dominated by the heraldry of the company, the city, and the crown, and increasingly by images of benefactors; but much of the art remained religious in nature, in spite of the Reformation-essentially the biblical stories deemed appropriate by Protestants for domestic decoration.9 The halls of the Merchant Taylors and Turners (the latter from 1619) were hung respectively with tapestries of the lives of St. John Baptist and St. Joseph; the Carpenters' and Vintners' Halls were decorated with murals depicting biblical scenes of carpentry and of the miracle of water being turned into wine at the marriage feast at Cana.10 The Fishmongers were one of a very few companies to have a painting with what might be called a historical theme: in 1623 they were presented by Mr. Haynes, schoolmaster of Christ's Hospital, with a picture "concerning the ancient amytye betweene this Company and the Companye of Goldsmithes with verses underwritten explayning the conceit thereof."11 Perhaps Stow's jibe about their ignorance of their antiquities, now widely circulated in print, had struck home. There was a great deal of respect for custom (things were to be done "according to the ancient order"), and there can be no doubting the importance of the authorizing documents of the charters of incorporation and the ordinances approved by the law officers of the crown, but these also represented the accretion of custom and past practice. Company accounts show payments for translating the charter into English, and the ordinances were regularly (the charters more rarely) read out to members at quarter days. Elections were conducted "according to the charter and grants of the King's progenitors confirmed by His Majestic and according to the yearly custom of this house."12 But the approach to the past in these provisions was distinctly limited and pragmatic: "ancient orders" were a means of justifying the disciplining of refractory members or asserting the companies' claims against outside interests. They were fond of invoking the rhetoric of antiquity, especially when under attack: thus the Vintners complained in 1639 that "notwithstanding their antiquity and dutiful observance upon all occasions for common services and charges yet they are abridged of some privileges which all other companies from the highest to the meanest do enjoy."13 But antiquity was a rather protean concept, essentially a matter of the legitimacy of longevity. The newly incorporated Apothecaries were delighted at the election day sermon given in 1630 by Mr. Henry Valentine, lecturer at St. Dunstan-in-the-West, because he proved "both the lawfulness and the antiquity of the apothecary and taught the right use of the art." His text from Exodus 30 related the Lord's instructions to Moses for making the oil to anoint the tabernacle, "an oil of holy ointment, an ointment compound after the art of the apothecary."14 You just couldn't beat scriptural authorization.

I have purposefully opened with some slightly skeptical observations on Londoners' sense of their past, because an awareness of its limits is important in looking at what Daniel Woolf has called the past's social circulation. It is in fact very difficult to get an idea of the degree to which history contributed to Londoners' sense of their identity.15 Even the myth that the city had been founded by Brutus, descendant of Aeneas, appears to have had a fairly shallow grounding by the later sixteenth century. Stow and Camden, among others, expressed skepticism, but they also emphasized the story's utility.16 The Trojan origin myth surfaces in mayoral pageants, and it was useful for royal entries because it placed London's antiquity within a monarchical frame of reference. Apart from the statue of King Lud, the supposed builder of the city walls, on Ludgate, his impact on civic iconography was limited, and the conflicting stories that were told of the Guildhall giants suggest a certain instability in the mythology.17 Nevertheless, a number of studies have demonstrated that historical materials clearly did circulate in London. In this essay I shall try to outline the various ways in which Londoners engaged with the historical project and the evidence for the circulation of history books, but it will need to be admitted that this is in large part an exercise in illuminating the boundaries of our ignorance. I will then try to suggest some of the themes that emerge from these works that were specific to the social situation of Londoners and that helped shape their identities. The Circulation of the Past Londoners engaged with the historical project in a variety of ways. The chronicle form, structured around mayoral lists, proved both durable and adaptable, as Londoners acquired copies of previous versions and added to and revised them.18 By the later sixteenth century it had spawned variants such as Henry Machyn's report of events in London, punctuated by accounts of funerals, described by its author as "my cronacle," and the gentleman Thomas Bentley's discussion of the parochial antiquities of St. Andrew Holborn.19 Londoners were also heavily involved in the task of archival retrieval at the Dissolution. The tailor John Stow was not alone among the citizenry as a"serchar after antiquitis," and in the period before 1600 there does not seem to have been, among people of middling status, as marked a hostility toward the practice of history as would later emerge toward the newly fashionable humanist historiography.20 Londoners' interest in historical projects was also shown by their sponsorship of printing ventures. The first printed edition of Raynulph Higden's Polychronicon and the chronicles of both Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed owed an immense amount to Londoners' support of printers.21 The lack of surviving inventories for pre-Civil War London makes it hard to determine the extent to which historical works circulated. An examination of several hundred Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills in the 16305 turns up only a modest haul of books: only eighty-one wills mention books, often unspecified, forty mention the Bible, five the Book of

Martyrs, and only three more a history book of any kind (A brief of the Chronicles, Paolo Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent, and a Chronicle of England, Scotland, and Ireland).22 But there was some effort to make works of history available to a wider public. In 1534 the aldermen ordered that the 1533 edition of Fabyan's Chronicleby John Rastell should be placed in their court at Guildhall, and in 1571 they required that a copy of "the Acts and Monuments of the last printing" should be placed in the hall of the Orphans' Court "for all men to looke uppon for their better instructions."23 Although the hopes of the bishops, expressed that same year, for all companies to acquire the Book of Martyrs fell on deaf ears, a number of companies and parishes obtained the book over the next few decades.24 Still more intriguing is the effort to provide parishes and companies with copies of Stow's works. To some extent this was due to the marketing tactics of Stow's continuators, Edmund Howes and the irrepressible Anthony Munday. Howes approached numerous livery companies in 1615-17 with presentation copies of his Chronicles, for which he was rewarded,25 while Munday was able to mobilize some powerful patrons: his work in extending the Survey was supported by John King, bishop of London, who in 1618 instructed all parishes to acquire his new edition. Although by no means all complied, the initiative bore fruit in some parishes, and a few companies also acquired the book.26 The achievement was sporadic, and these collections were hardly comparable to the laterseventeenth-century parochial libraries. Only one parish (St. Margaret, New Fish Street) had the Chronicles, Survey, and the Book of Martyrsby 1640.27 Exactly what use Londoners made of their Stow is difficult to say. We know from Woolf's work that readers engaged creatively with historical texts, often comparing an account in one work with that in another, or seeking to apply historical information to their specific family and political circumstances. The Survey is a rather different text: it could not perform the same functions as the county chorographies (to which it owed a lot), for which a degree of dynastic continuity among local gentry families provided a more stable "textual community," because the degree of population turnover weakened the associations between people and place.28 Even so, Woolf provides evidence of a late-seventeenth-century reader, John Gibbon, the herald, making notes on his copy that "connect the text to his own family heritage" and sketching London's buildings in the margins.29 Another reader has updated the coats of arms of the mayors and sheriffs that Munday provided in his edition.30 The theme of the "Honor of Citizens, and worthinesse of men in the same" seems to have struck a chord, for sections of his text were lifted by dramatists such as Thomas Heywood, whose description of the foundation of the Royal Exchange in the play If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part Two drew heavily on the Survey.31 Others used the work rather like a tourist guide. When the traveler William Schellinks wrote up his account of his visit in 1661, he lifted much of his material on places such as the Tower and the Royal Exchange from James Howell's Londinopolis, itself derivative from Stow (interestingly, he talks of the book called "The Survey of London or Londinopolisby James Howel Stow," conflating the two

works).32 But for many London readers the appeal must have been to their sense of place, physically and in time. Although Stow's preference for documents over oral testimony means that it is frustratingly difficult to get a sense of the link between oral traditions and particular places, his treatment of buildings does suggest a powerful popular awareness of the connections between them.33 As this discussion has made clear, it remains extremely difficult to get an idea of the social depth of Londoners' interest in history. There is a revealing moment at a meeting of common council in October 1549, at the height of the conflict between Protector Somerset and the lords of the council who were competing for London's support, when George Tadlowe, a London haberdasher, rose to make a key speech. As reported by Foxe, Tadlowe observed: In this case it is good for us to thinke of things past to avoid the danger of things to come. I remember (saith he) in a storie written in Fabians chronicle, of the warre between the king and his barons, which was in the time of king Henrie the third, and the same time the barons (as our lords doo now) commanded aid of the maior and citie of London, and that in a rightfull cause for the commonweale, which was for the execution of diverse good lawes, whereunto the king before had given his consent, and after would not suffer them to take place, and the citie did aid the lords.... But what followed? Was it forgotten? No surelie, nor yet forgiven during the kings life. The liberties of the citie were taken awaie, strangers appointed to be our heades and governours, the citizens given awaie bodie and goods, and from one persecution to another were most miserablie afflicted: such it is to enter the wrath and indignation of a prince, as Salomon saith, the wrath and indignation of a prince is death.34 A striking example of the political sophistication of the ordinary Londoner steeped in his city's history and biblical exempla? Probably not. For Tadlowe (d. 1557) was not a typical middling Londoner. He was a merchant, sufficiently well connected (probably with the long-serving bureaucrat, William Paulet, Marquess of Winchester) to serve as M.P. on four occasions for non-London boroughs. He was also a man of some sophistication, a probable sponsor of humanist interludes in his home. It was for him that Ralph Robinson (d. 1577) undertook the translation of Thomas More's Utopia, and it was he who was the "chief persuader" in Robinson's decision to print the work in 1551. Robinson, a future Clerk to the Goldsmiths' Company, had himself been apprenticed to Sir Martin Bowes, Warden of the Mint, another probable humanist sympathizer. What we more probably have in Tadlowe is a fairly well educated (although we are told that his Latin was "not so well seen") member of a humanist coterie.35 But how typical Tadlowe was turns on the educational attainments of Londoners, a subject on which we are still largely in the dark-though we should note how sanguine Caroline Barren is on the topic, claiming that

a high proportion of London males were literate in Latin in the fifteenth century.36 It was customary to satirize the limited cultural horizons of the citizens: the "gull citizen" loved merely "to heare the famous acts of Citizens, wherof the guilding of the Crosse [in Cheapside] hee counts the glory of this age."37 William Scott, in his Essay of Drapery, warned the aspirant tradesman against reading too much: "if hee study the liberall arts, he must do it superficially, so as not to be swallowed up of them."38 But the satirists were writing in part to pander to the feelings of gentle superiority over mechanical citizens, and we should note the linguistic attainments of London merchants such as Robert Langham (fluent in French, Spanish, Dutch, and Latin), whose account of the Earl of Leicester's entertainment of the queen at Kenilworth in 1575, written for his friends in London, draws upon a wide range of texts ( including William of Malmesbury, the Flores Historiarum, Ovid, Terence, Martial, and Virgil).39 Michael Lok, obsessed with the Northwest Passage, claimed to have spent over 500 on his library, mathematical instruments, and maps, and his intellectual interests made him a friend of John Dee and a scholarly resource for Richard Hakluyt.40 Some members of the aldermanic elite likewise read widely. Sir William Garrard (d. 1571) had books in English (including the Book of Martyrs and a copy of More's works), Latin (including a "cosmografy"), and French (including "a frenche cronacle").41 The Oxford-educated Sir Henry Billingsley (d. 1606) was the translator of both Peter Martyr's Commentaries on Paul's Letter to the Romans (1568) and Euclid's Elements of Geometry (1570). 42 All these individuals are doubtless in some respects untypical, but it is noteworthy that William Fleetwood, in his Guildhall oration to Liverymen in 1571, could assume some historical knowledge; or that the Leathersellers petitioning against Sir Edward Darcy's leather-sealing patent in 1593 could cite Edward Hall on Henry VIII's respect for the commons, by way of making a point about Elizabeth's neglect of them.43 As in the past, members of the city legal bureaucracy such as Fleetwood and Thomas Norton took a leading role in the production and consumption of history, but it was by no means exclusive to them.44 Other evidence suggests that the ordinary Londoner concentrated his reading on romances. Francis Kirkman (1632-c. 1680), the bookseller, tells us how as an apprentice he avidly devoured chivalric romances: "believing all I read to be true [I] wished myself squire to one of these knights... and reading how that Amadis and other Knights not knowing their parents, did in time prove to be sons of kings and great personages; I had a fond and idle opinion that I might in time prove to be some great person, or at leastwise squire to some knight."45 Much of his favored reading matter had been in print for a long time: Fryar and the Boy and the hugely popular Seven Wise Masters were printed by de Worde and went through numerous editions thereafter; but the 1580s and 1590s saw an explosion in the availability of these texts, mainly from our friend Munday, operating "single-handedly as a major translation factory."46 The appeal of such romances was perhaps to allow middling Londonersmany, we should remember, in the retailing trades recruited from the younger sons of the gentry class-to participate vicariously in the honor

culture.47 But the taste for this kind of thing was not confined to dreamy apprentices. Arthurianism enjoyed a powerful following within the city elite. A fellowship of Prince Arthur's knights seems to have been established in the 15405, and was at its most conspicuous under the leadership of prominent citizens such as Sir Hugh Offley and Customer Thomas Smythe in the 1580s, who staged a lavish show before the queen in 158/.48 Although civic chivalry had fallen victim to the distaste for its pseudo-heraldry by the turn of the century, it found another outlet in the Honourable Artillery Company.49 Another strand in popular understanding of the past is an interest in the doings of kings and queens and in the royal succession. Nehemiah Wallington tells us of his probably illiterate mother (d. 1603 ) that "she was rife in all the stories of the Bible, likewise in all the stories of the martyrs, and could readily turn to them; she was also perfect and well seen in the English Chronicles and in the Descents of the Kings."50 Later in the century, Samuel Pepys, a London tailor's son, tells us that "I have sucked in so much of the sad story of Queen Elizabeth from my cradle, that I was ready to weep for her sometimes."51 A variety of popular works catered directly to this taste. Some of the most basic chronicles published in the mid-sixteenth century were little more than lists of monarchs, by the turn of the century supplemented by woodcuts depicting them.52 But one of the most important developments in popular appreciation of the past was the explosion of history plays from the 15805 on (see Richard Button's essay in this volume). According to Heywood, plays "have taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot reade in the discovery of all our English chronicles, & what man have you now of that weake capacity, that cannot discourse of any notable thing recorded even from William the Conquerour, nay from the landing of Brute, vntill this day, beeing possest of their true use."53 So, although we have relatively little direct evidence of Londoners' reading habits in this period, we can see that historical materials (whether chronicle or fictional, bearing in mind that the young Kirkman did not see the distinction) were widely available and that Londoners engaged with the past in a variety of different and probably overlapping ways. Perhaps many confined themselves to the merely escapist romances, but for men of the stature of Offley and Smith (the latter a friend of Leicester) in the Arthurian society, romance is likely to have combined with an interest in the British history by Geoffrey of Monmouth. And, among the learned, there were real differences too. Stow shared with his friend Recorder Fleetwood an interest in antiquities, but Fleetwood's scholarship was applied to legal problems; and there is no indication that Stow would have concurred with Fleetwood's defense of the reading of Machiavelli.54 As Stow aged, he would have been still more out of touch with the increasingly fashionable humanist historiography, which would mock his style of annalistic writing, "nothing but of mayors and sheriffs, and the dere year, and the great frost."55

Commemoration and Order The continuity in forms of historical writing over the sixteenth century, as civic annals retained their popularity, has obscured the extent to which the Reformation represented a challenge to identities fashioned through an awareness of the past. But the Reformation represented an act of forgetting or, perhaps more accurately, the erasure of memory. The assault on Purgatory entailed the disruption of personal links between past and present, as parishioners and guildsmen were required to cease the performance of commemorative Masses. The iconoclasts severed many of the physical connections between past and present, as images were destroyed and commemorative inscriptions requesting intercessory prayer defaced.56 What continues to be less well understood are the dimensions of the trauma for Londoners, for their civic identity was bound up with the cult of that most famous medieval London merchant's son, St. Thomas Becket, born in a house on Cheapside on a site later purchased by the city for the hospital of St. Thomas Aeon. Becket's cult may have been particularly popular in London; sections of his life by William Fitzstephen were included in the key collection of city customs, Liber Custumarum by Andrew Horn (c. 1321); some of the many sermons on Becket had a specifically London frame of reference (such as the story of the saint enjoying a friendly tussle with his king in Cheapside before their falling out, or the notion that Becket as chancellor had expelled the Flemings); it is possible that London Bridge was financed through offerings to the saint, as a chapel to Becket stood at its center; the hospital of St. Thomas Aeon became a favored burial site for wealthy Londoners and a focus for the civic ritual life; newly inaugurated mayors prayed at the tomb of Becket's parents in St. Paul's churchyard; and Becket appeared on the city seal with citizens kneeling before him from about 1219.57 In 1538, when the cult was suppressed, "all the glas windowes in the sayd church [of St. Thomas Aeon] that was of his story was taken down, with the image of his puttinge to death that was at the aulter," we are told, "so that there shall be no more mention be made of him never."58 The image of Becket was removed from the city seal in 1539, and the city's coat of arms substituted.59 With the suppression of his cult Becket was presented as a rebel against his prince, reformers such as Jewel claiming that his father was a Jew and a beer-brewer (managing to combine religious deviance and an unpopular craft), and that the true causes of his death were his "vanity and ambition" and his "wilful maintenance of manifest wickedness in the clergy to the great dishonour of God's holy name."60 To Norton, speaking in the Parliament of 1571, he was simply "the reball Bishop Becket."61 Although Stow might have been trying to preserve something of the Becket tradition in using the ideologically neutral sections of Fitzstephen to provide a frame for the Survey, Becket's own presence in the text is extremely muted. Because of the nature of the Reformation in the city, Londoners placed emphasis both on creating a new form of civic commemoration shorn of its popish associations and, consistent with the drive for obedience, on the celebration of the loyalty of Londoners to the crown. These are the

two most insistent themes in the way London's authorities wished to present their past (and they are both present in Warden Smyth's oration, with which we began), but as we shall see, the enterprise could be accounted only a partial success. I have written at some length elsewhere on the theme of commemoration and will not dwell on it too much for the present.62 It was one of Stow's main concerns, as he sought to salvage something of the heritage of charitable giving, which the Reformation had profoundly disrupted. And it was given new emphasis. The fifteenthcentury chronicles had been quite reticent about charity: the Great Chronidehas very little to say, for example, about the charities of Richard Whittington, which assumed such prominence in Londoners' consciousness by the later sixteenth century.63 In Stow's hands the enterprise was somewhat polemical: he was selective both about the types of charity he recorded (leaving out the private support for preaching in Elizabethan London) and about individuals (leaving out the monuments of those he identified as iconoclasts). But as Chloe Wheatley has indicated, successive editions of the Summarie recorded ever greater numbers of donors in ever greater detail.64 Stow's biases were, as Julia Merritt has demonstrated, silently countered by his continuators; Munday and Howes added details about donors of a decidedly Protestant hue.65 The chroniclers' efforts at commemoration were reinforced in word and image and in a variety of media-in funeral sermons, charity sermons, and epitaphs; in boards of benefactors and recitals of donors at public occasions; in drama and civic pageantry; in paintings, figurative sculpture, and heraldry; and in ritual acts of procession and prayer. The celebration of charity was firmly hitched to the cause of anti-Roman Catholic polemic in works such as Andrew Willet's Synopsis Papismi, and in the appropriation of Thomas Sutton, founder of the Charterhouse, as a "Master-Piece of Protestant Charity." The rhetoric of commemoration was insistent and pervasive.66 It served to legitimate the inequalities of power in the civic community. As Warden Smyth explained to the Grocers, it was to their pious benefactors that they owed the customs by which they were kept in good order. The other theme of order was bound up with the notion that London's relationship with the crown was one of mutual benefit and interdependence. After the Norman Conquest, as Camden put it, London, "through the speciall favour and indulgence of princes obteined verie large and great Immunities, beganne to be called the Kinges Chamber, and so flourished anew with fresh trade and traffique of merchants."67 The British history myths were given a strongly loyalist spin: identifying London as "lusty Troynovaunt" underscored the city's imperial destiny and intertwined its fortunes with those of Brutus's descendants. Manley has suggested that the effect was to ensure that London's destiny was "framed by the language of feudal loyalty and chivalric honour."68 The theme of the citizens' unwavering loyalty to the crown assisted the chroniclers in tackling the difficult subject of popular rebellion, as they struggled to distance themselves from the charges of inciting criticism. According to Hall, the purpose of his chronicle was to demonstrate "what mischief

hath insurged in realms by intestine division"; Stow described his purpose as being "the incouragement of nobilitie to noble feates" and "the discouragement of unnatural subjects from wicked treasons, pernicious rebellions & damnable doctrines."69 The episode in which William Walworth killed the rebel leader Wat Tyler at Smithfield in 1381, and was knighted by his grateful sovereign, became a defining moment in London history. Walworth's act was celebrated on his funeral monument in St. Michael Crooked Lane, restored in 1562, in Lord Mayor's pageants for Fishmonger mayors by Nelson of 1590 and Munday in 1616, in Richard Johnson's Nine Worthies of London (1592), and in the play The Life and Death of Jack Straw (?1594)-70 Popular opinion, endorsed by no less an authority than Lancelot Andrewes in his Easter Spital sermon of 1588, claimed that the cross in the city's coat of arms represented Walworth's dagger, a story corrected by Stow, who pointed out that it was the emblem of St. Paul.71 The theme of the loyalty of Londoners was adopted by Heywood in 1 Edward IV (1599), on another rebellious incursion into London, that of the Bastard of Falconbridge. Here the defense of the city is masterminded by the energetic mayor, firing up apprentices, reminding them of Walworth's heroic act, to which the apprentices respond enthusiastically. The play emphasizes the ways in which London's civic freedoms were closely intertwined with the fortunes of the crown. As the goldsmith Matthew Shore puts it, he fights "first, to maintain King Edward's royalty; next to defend the city's liberty."72 There was a tendency, particularly marked in much of the drama, to demonize the rebels by removing any elements of sympathy for their grievances and by portraying the leaders as ruthless (and often irrational) demagogues. Thus Shakespeare's Cade was markedly at odds with the reformer of the commonweal to be found in the chronicle accounts. By omitting the rebel demands, suggesting that Cade was a tool of the Duke of York, and portraying the rebellion as an indiscriminate attack of the illiterate on the written word, Shakespeare aligns himself with the forces of order. With the slogan "kill and knock down," Cade works by lynch law, looking for a bloodbath of all "scholars, lawyers, courtiers and gentlemen."73 In the play Jack Straw, there is an apparently principled appeal to communitarian values in the speech of John Ball, but this is undercut by his lack of commitment to his clerical duties and his vaulting ambition to be archbishop of Canterbury. The drama works to promote the notion that the rebels are "the multitude, a beast of many heads, / Of misconceiving and misconstruing minds," as it mutes the criticism of the councilors to be found in the chronicles.74 These demonizing strategies were assisted by the tendency to conflate rebels, so that they became undifferentiated: hence the confusion over whom Walworth stabbed, Jack Straw or Wat Tyler75 Thus the Students Lamentation, produced in the wake of the serious apprentice riots of 1595, asked, "of Jacke Strawe, Will Waw, Wat tiler, Tom Miller, Hob Carter and a number more such seditious inferiour ringleaders to seditions and conspiracies most notable, what hath been the end?"76 Falconbridge, in Heywood's 1 Edward IV, seeks to distance himself and his followers from "Tyler, Cade, and Straw / Bluebeard, and other of that rascal rout," but he is assimilated to them by

the play's unfolding action.77 The process was taken to its logical end by Shakespeare's transposition of elements of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 into his dramatic representation of the events of 1450.78 Another tactic was to deny any complicity by the citizens in popular revolts. It is quite clear that the "real" Peasants' Revolt and Cade's Rebellion had substantial citizen involvement, but in the hands of the dramatists, rebellion is seen as an irruption of hostile outsiders into a peaceful city. Londoners were "victims rather than agents." The play Jack Straw puts the blame on the men of Southwark; Heywood in 1 Edward IV associated the rebels with the forces of suburban license,"idle swaggering mates, / That haunt the suburbs in time of peace." The rebels are often seen as hell-bent on violence in the city: "set London Bridge on fire, and if you can, burn down the Tower too."79 The emphasis on Londoners' loyalty was reinforced, in much the same way as their charity, in a variety of commemorative and celebratory media. Banners of the monarch's arms had long featured alongside those of the company and city on occasions of civic ritual; the royal coat of arms was painted in glass and carved in wood, often painted and gilded. By the later sixteenth century the wealthier citizens were proclaiming their allegiance by incorporating royal coats of arms into the decorative schemes of their homes and acquiring portraits of reigning and previous monarchs.80 By the early seventeenth century, the livery companies were likewise acquiring portraits of the monarch to adorn their halls: by 1625 the Carpenters possessed portraits of the king, Prince Henry, and the Elector Palatine. The Clothworkers commissioned statues of James I and Charles I in 1633 at a cost of 50.81 Elizabeth I had appeared on the rebuilt Ludgate in 1586; gilded images of James I adorned the new gates of Aldgate (1607-9) and Aldersgate (1617). From the 16205 the city gradually realized Sir Thomas Gresham's original vision in setting up statues of all the monarchs from Edward the Confessor in the niches in the Royal Exchange.82 City institutions vied for royal connections, most lavishly in the Merchant Taylors' entertainment of James I and Prince Henry in July 1607 on the occasion of the prince's becoming a member, when their clerk Richard Langley presented the king with a roll call of the kings and aristocrats who had been members. They were perhaps overcompensating for being pipped to the post by the Clothworkers, who had recently secured the king himself as an honorary member. 83 Order Subverted It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the twin discourses-benevolent philanthropy exercised by rulers operating within unequal power structures, hallowed by custom and precedent, and unquestioning loyalty to the crown-were totalizing and hegemonic. It is clear from the subtext of some commemorations that members of the audience, hearing of the virtue of the recently departed, knew otherwise, while in a situation where power was unequally distributed within the companies and where much was kept secret from the rank and file, charity could become a site for contest between rulers and ruled. In 1529 the yeomanry of the Goldsmiths

(or a group of them), claiming to "speak for their liberties of the king's grants, licence and commandments," demanded of their rulers "that they may be informed where the lame, blind, and sick persons be found, with the 10 lands that were purchased by licence in the days of King Edward III and King Richard II."84 In cases like this, where the interpretation of the charter was at issue and relationships of trust had broken down, the rhetoric of charity was shown to be fragile indeed. Even Stow could be read against the grain. He attacked social upstarts and enjoyed their comeuppances; he named and (presumably) shamed some of those who had profited from the Reformation iconoclasm such as Sir Martin Bowes; his celebration of civic commonwealth values could be seen as implying criticism of aldermanic policies current in his time; he was constantly harping on (presumably wealthy) executors who did not fulfill the will of the dead.85 One wonders what the assistants of the Drapers' Company made of Stow's possibly defamatory onslaught (conducted in the margins of the Survey) about Sir John Melbourne's charity: "These poyntes not performed: the Drapers have unlawfully solde these tenements and garden plots and the poore be wronged."86 One begins to understand why companies were so unenthusiastic about antiquaries snooping around in their records! Nor did the artisans who comprised the rank and file necessarily share the interpretations of the charters and customary practices that supposedly underscored the rule of the company elites. In circumstances of conflict, artisans might articulate understandings that differed radically from those of their rulers. Thus, in the 1640s, demands for broader participation in the companies' electoral processes drew attention to charters that apparently vested electoral rights in the whole body of freemen. The Artisan Weavers drew on the first charter, alleging that "there is not any one liberty that is granted to them but what is granted to the meanest member of the said Company." They struck at their rulers' invocation of custom, arguing that corrupt customs do not become legal by long usage, because they are valid only when reasonable. As for the claims by the rulers that they had precedent on their side, these were dismissed as "but rotten props to support their worm-eaten sovereignty."87 Nor was the attempt to present London as consistently loyalist entirely successful. It could not be denied that London's liberties were themselves the outcome of political conflicts between city and crown. John Norden was followed by Munday in emphasizing the city's gradual "empowerment" (in Manley's phrase) as it "cast off the yoke of strange confusion."88 In his mayoral pageant of 1631 Heywood drew a politically incorrect parallel, comparing king and populace in early Rome to London's relationship to the crown: "In processe of time the Tarquines being expeld... the prime soveraignty remain [ed] in the consuls," who created the post of "praetor urbanus or Mayor."89 Indeed, the myth of civic loyalty ran up against some embarrassing facts: London's dissidence under Henry III, her role in the downfall of Edward II, tensions between court and city under Richard II, support within the walls for the rebels of 1381 and

1450, popular rioting against aliens as in Evil May Day in 1517, and the defection of troops to Wyatt's rebels in 1554. The author of the Apologie appended to Stow's Survey tied himself in knots on the question of loyalty. After celebrating the usual episodes of London's resistance to rebels in 1381,1450, and 1471, he moved on to the following observations: "I confesse that London is a mighty arme and instrument to bring any great desire to effect, if it may be woon to a mans devotion: wherof also there want not examples in the English Historie. But forasmuch as the same is by the like reason serviceable and meete to impeach any disloyall attempt, let it be rather well governed than evil liked therefore, for it shall appeare anon that as London hath adhered to some rebellions, so it hath resisted many, and was never the author of any one." The Apologie concludes with an account of the occasions "as have heretofore moved the Princes either to fine and ransom the Citizens of London, or to seize the Liberties of the Citty itselfe." In the conflicts of the reigns of Stephen, John, and Henry III, we are told, Londoners were "not the movers of these wars but were onely used as instruments to maintayne them"; under Edward II the citizen violence was due to "the sway of the time wherewith they were carried"; London's support for Richard II's opponents is excused with the remark that "it is notoriously true that London never led the dance but ever followed the pipe of the nobilitie."90 This was hardly a ringing endorsement of Londoners' previous loyalty, and served as a powerful warning to would-be contemporary critics of the crown as to the likely consequences of their actions. The episodes the apologist mentions were variously inflected in the chronicles. Some of the underlying texts were less than complimentary about the citizens. Froissart, available in Lord Berners' translation, presents them as incorrigible rebels, "for the vyllaynes of London hadde the kyng in suche hate that it was payne for them to here spekynge of hym but to his condempnacion and distruction... they are the peryloust people of the worlde and most outragyoust if they be vp and specially the Londoners and in dede they be riche and of a great nombre."91 Although lacking Froissart's malice, Holinshed and Stow both portray London as more sympathetic to the rebels in 1381: "although the lord maior and other of the best Citizens woulde gladlie have closed the gates against them, yet they durst not doo it, for feare of the commons of the citie who seemed to favour the cause of the rebels."92 Likewise, Stow was responsible for the story (first appearing in the Summarieoi 1566 and repeated in the subsequent editions as well as in Holinshed) taken from Richard Fox, the St. Albans chronicler writing in 1448, about John Tyler's (alias Jack Straw) being provoked into defiance by a tax collector's abuse of his daughter's modesty.93 The effect, as Annabel Patterson has suggested, was to produce a "more even-handed dispersal of judgment against both sides in the contestation."94 Again both Hall and Holinshed give a relatively sympathetic account of the grievances of the London artisans (including the perception that the crown was peculiarly protective of the aliens, thereby highlighting the city-court tensions) that lay behind the Evil May Day riots; Holinshed is especially critical of the "extreme crueltie showen to the poore younglings in their execution" by the

malevolent Howards.95 For all the emphases of the prefaces on the role of historical writing in promoting order, it was for a variety of reasons very difficult to control readers' responses. As Holinshed had put it: "I have collected [the history] out of manie and sundrie authors, in whome what contrarietie, negligence, and rashnesse sometime is found in their reports: I leave to the discretion of those that have perused their works: for my part, I have in things doubtfull chosen to shew the diversitie of their writings, than by overruling them, and using a peremptorie censure, to frame them to agree to my liking: leaving it neverthelesse to each mans judgement to controll them as he seeth cause."96 Widely differing interpretations of the same event were circulating simultaneously, and sometimes even in the hands of the same author. Anthony Bale has recently demonstrated the variety of interpretations (what he calls a "jumbled cacophony") put on the massacre of Jews at Richard II's coronation in 1189: was it the action of the"rude sort of furious disordered people" as Holinshed suggested in 1577, or had the king incited the trouble by refusing the Jews' gift ("here therefore is to be observed, that the people is the princes ape")? Either way, of course, the episode revealed a turbulence at odds with the dominant narrative of harmony between city and crown.97 For all its claims to ideological conservatism, chronicle writing could be highly charged politically. Even the anodyne Stow was accused by Grafton of having "written rather in maintenaunce and fauour of lewde doings, then for suppression of the same whiche also contayne matter to the defacing of Princes doings and wherein the gates are rather opened for crooked subiectes to enter into the fielde of rebellion, then the hedges or gaps of the same to be stopped." It had taken Stow perhaps too long to drop favorable comments on Catherine of Aragon and the popular rejoicing at Mary's accession.98 Truer still was all this of the theater. For all the projection of dissidence onto elements outside the city, the dramatists were unable to banish London's disloyalty from the stage, and the strategies to contain its subversive potential were only partially successful. The hand of the censor fell notoriously heavily across the anti-alien riot scenes of the Boke of Sir Thomas More, probably intended for performance in 1592 at the height of popular agitation against strangers.99 But London's dissidence in Wyatt's revolt was staged by Thomas Dekker, in a scene showing the defection of the London Whitecoats. Dekker sought to contain the force of the dissidence by stressing Wyatt's earlier loyalty to Mary against the illegitimate claims of the Lady Jane. Mary is shown reneging on her promises of religious moderation, thereby providing justification for a patriotic revolt. But the patriotism of Londoners is undercut by the scene in which they abandon Wyatt, choosing, as is their wont, to take the "politique" position of supporting the stronger side. This reflected the ambivalence of the Foxeian history plays on the question of the relationship between crown and subjects, for the Reformation was contested territory between them.100 Even when celebrating citizen loyalty, a play might carry a subversive freightage, as in Heywood's 1

Edward IV, where the defense of the city by the mayor emphasizes the indolence of the monarch addicted to sexual pleasure.101 Jean Howard has pointed out that the comedies celebrating the so-called "royal citizens" such as Sir Thomas Gresham "subordinated monarchical to citizen narratives."102 The jingoistic plays popular at the time of the Armada celebrated the alliance of crown and people against foreigners, but often at the expense of the aristocracy, seen in The Troublesome Raigne of King John as a "holy knot of catholic consent" thwarting a patriotic king confronting Rome.103 The presumably heavily and clumsily revised printed play text of George Peele's Edward I conveys two contrasting representations of Queen Eleanor of Castile, one the loving spouse, the other the tyrant and adulteress who seeks foreign domination and kills the lady mayoress in a fit of sexual jealousy. 104 The plays thus explore a huge range of possible relations between crown and people rather than adopting a coherently loyalist and uncritical stance. Moreover, the mingling of kings and clowns, and the possibility of altering meaning by voice inflection, deportment, and the use of props, made even the most apparently politically correct plays potentially dangerous. We get a rare glimpse of audience response in Simon Forman's account of a visit in April 1611 to a play at the Globe close to (but not identical with) Jack Straw in content. Rather than seeing Straw as a demonic figure, Forman draws the conclusion that the rebel was too trusting, and therefore easily taken unawares: "in such a case or the like never admit any party without a bar between for a man cannot be to wise, nor kepe him selfe to safe." What was supposed to be the urtext for citizen loyalty provoked in this Londoner sentiments quite corrosive of the social order.105 Contemporaries disagreed about the wisdom of "greatness made very familiar if not ridiculous": for some the representation of heroic aristocrats was inspirational; others perceived only the dangers of exposing the strategies and frailties of power, "the kynges games, as it were stage playes and for the more part plaied upon scafoldes," which Londoners saw through in More's account (transmitted via Hall to Holinshed) of Richard III.106 We should bear in mind that audiences will have brought their own preconceptions to the performances, and among those was a sympathy for aristocratic dissidents: in the sixteenth century, the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Somerset, and the Earl of Essex. Is it this dissident strain that explains the apparent popularity of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, the "good duke," at whose supposed tomb in St. Paul's the water-bearers gathered each year?107 A play such as Woodstock, although lacking a specifically metropolitan context, nevertheless articulated grievances about monopolies that were acutely felt in the capital at the time of its likely performance (1593).108 And if the drama ventriloquized dissent, we can never be sure how far elements of the audience may have identified with the popular sentiments articulated, however much they were subjected to criticism. The expression of anti-alien sentiments that were so explosive in the context of 1592-93 in the play Thomas More were voiced less loudly in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, but they were present. It seems that the populace carried their own memories of Evil May Day, for in 1586 and again in 1623 there were reports

of plots to raise apprentices against strangers on the model of the riots of 1517.109 Finally, another strand in Londoners' sense of the past further weakened the ties of loyalty. The providentialist history of Foxe, which as we have seen was widely available in public places in London, offered through its successive editions, as Tom Freeman has demonstrated, an ongoing engagement with and critique of the supreme governor's religious policy. The force of providentialist history was such as to urge loyalty to the monarch as the protector against the Catholic threat at home and abroad, but it implied a specific program of ongoing reformation and an activist foreign policy with which Elizabeth and her Stuart successors were uncomfortable.110 The new Protestant ritual calendar built around the celebration of Elizabeth's and the reigning monarch's accessions, the defeat of the Armada, and Gunpowder Day was widely observed in London. The liveries of the companies assembled annually for sermons at Paul's Cross on 5 November to mark the "unmatchable and devilish plot of the Gunpowder Treason of the wicked Jesuits and their confederates," sitting down to celebratory dinners afterward. Prominent Londoners endowed commemorative sermons.111 Providentialist history was, as Alexandra Walsham has shown, available in a wide variety of media: the great deliverances were celebrated in countless sermons, prints, puppet plays, ballads, and chapbooks. At St. Michael Queenhithe the churchwardens paid 5 in 1638-39 for "painting 88 and Gunpowder Plot"; Nicholas Crispe paid for a window in the chancel of St. Mildred Bread Street depicting the Armada, Elizabeth, Gunpowder Treason, the plague of 1625, and himself and his family.112 All this fervent anti-popish material was perfectly compatible with loyalty to the monarchy. Another of its manifestations was the proliferation of memorials to Elizabeth in London's parish churches in the 1610s. But their celebration of the queen as "Spain's rod, Rome's ruin" and the "Netherlands relief" entailed a certain amount of re-invention of a queen notoriously reluctant to embark on foreign adventures. The memorials can also be seen as a sign of the growing disillusionment with the pacific James I, which was to burst forth fully with the outbreak of the Thirty Years'War.n3 What were the parishioners of godly St. Antholin's trying to say when they set up a gallery incorporating the badges of all the monarchs of England from Edward the Confessor to James I, concluding not with the Prince of Wales but with the Elector Palatine, the king's son-in-law? Was this London's loyalty?114 KEBLE COLLEGE, OXFORD [Sidebar] Earlier versions of this paper were given at the North American Conference on British Studies and the London Renaissance Seminar. The author is grateful to those present for their comments. Very helpful references have also been provided by Sabrina Alcorn, Susan Brigden, Tom Freeman, and Paulina Kewes.

[Sidebar] ABSTRACT Historical materials of various kinds, Ian W. Archer observes, were widely available to Londoners, who engaged with the past in a variety of different and probably overlapping ways, although exactly how they did so is difficult to assess. The continuity in forms of historical writing over the sixteenth century has obscured the extent to which the Reformation represented a challenge to identities fashioned through an awareness of the past. Historical writing played contrasting if not contradictory roles: it was crucial in promoting order and continuity, but even chronicle writing could be highly politically charged. Sermons and dramatic treatments might stress Londoners' loyalty, or seek to demonize rebels; but dramatists were in the end unable to banish depictions of London's disloyalty from the stage. Finally, providentialist history reinforced loyally to the monarch as the protector against the Catholic threat, but at the same time implied a program of ongoing reformation and an activist foreign policy with which Elizabeth and her Stuart successors were not comfortable. [Author Affiliation] IAN W. ARCHER is a fellow and tutor in modern history at Keble College, Oxford. He is the author of The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (1991), The History of the Haberdashers' Company (1991), and various articles on the social and cultural history of early modern London. He is a literary director of the Royal Historical Society and general editor of the Royal Historical Society online bibliographies on British history.