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I
CONTOURS AND CONNECTIONS
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1
PEOPLES, PERCEPTIONS, PREJUDICE: TUDOR ENGLAND AND THE DISCOVERY OF ‘EUROPE’
Why should Europe be so called, or who was the first author of this name, no man has yet found out.
From the introduction by Abraham Ortelius to his atlas of 1570, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
In an impassioned oration of 1599, the French scholar and political philosopher Louis Le Roy bewailed the condition of ‘our common mother Europe’, which, ‘as though in answer to Mohammedan prayers’, now found herself ‘soaked in her own blood’. Some three decades or so earlier, the religious reformer John Calvin had also spoken of ‘Europae concussio’ – ‘the shattering of Europe’ – as he reflected upon the divisions that he, in no small measure, had actually helped to propagate. Yet when England’s first Tudor ruler readied for battle on Bosworth Field in the high summer of 1485 with the intention of ending once and for all the meandering thirty-year contest that we now call the Wars of the Roses, the vast majority of his 8,000-strong force, including those very continental mercenaries whom he had enlisted to his cause, neither recognised nor remotely comprehended any such term as ‘Europe’. Nor, indeed, would matters alter appreciably for the majority of Englishmen over many decades to come. For when Falstaff staked his claim in Act IV of Henry IV, Part 2, to being ‘simply the most active fellow in Europe’ – ‘an I had but a belly of indifferency’ – Shakespeare’s intentions remained purely comedic, as he sought to lay bare the underlying ignorance of the braggart knight who, like most of his contemporaries, equated ‘Europe’ with little more than what later generations might have considered ‘Timbuktu’.
As early as 1471, in fact, the astronomer Johannes Müller had seen fit to declare Nuremberg ‘the middle point of Europe’, while in 1505 Jakob Wimpheling became another to employ the expression in his eulogy for Strasbourg’s splendid cathedral:
I would say that there is nothing more magnificent on the face of the earth than this edifice. Who can admire this tower sufficiently? Who can adequately praise it? With its stone tracery, its sculptured columns, its carved statues which describe so many things, it exceeds all buildings in Europe in beauty.
But if a negligible minority of mainly French and German writers were slowly sleepwalking their way towards a broader sense of identity beyond their national boundaries, the process proved markedly more tentative on the English side of the Channel – and for good reason. For although the fighting was sporadic, the armies small and the material losses inconsiderable, the tortuous struggle between the two rival branches of the Plantagenet line during the second half of the fifteenth century had nevertheless been more than sufficiently disruptive to ensure that Henry VII’s new kingdom remained an inward-looking and comparatively insignificant backwater on the Continent’s damp and misty fringe. The Crown, after all, had become little more than a political football when Henry VI lost his throne to Edward IV at Towton in 1461, only to retrieve it in 1470 with the help of Edward’s former henchman, Warwick the Kingmaker. Nor had things improved eight years later when the restored king once more made way for his resurgent rival. And in the meantime England’s entire strategic relation to ‘Europe’ had altered accordingly in the wake of the events of 1453 when she was forced to forsake the last of her French lands, excepting Calais.
For it was only at this point, at the end of the Hundred Years War, that England, without realising it, became once again an island of the sort that it had been before 1066 – that is, an autonomous political unit, territorially and psychologically distinct from Europe. Until this turning point, despite the Channel, the North Sea and the Straits of Dover, the kingdom had been intimately linked with France in particular, to the extent indeed that the long conflict between the two realms had actually taken place at what amounted to a more or less provincial level. In other words, England – or more specifically its elites – perceived the Anglo–French domain as a single entire unit that became, in consequence, both battlefield and prize until the two sides gradually disentangled themselves from the huge field of operations that had sapped their resources for so long. Even then, however, the notion of England’s physical linkage to Europe through France was not dead, as Henry VIII subsequently revived the dreams of his Lancastrian forebears, and sallied forth once more with bold ambitions to recapture the French Crown – notwithstanding the warning delivered to the House of Commons by Thomas Cromwell in 1523 that a war of conquest ‘would cost just as much as the whole of the circulating money in the country’. Such a policy, he suggested, was likely to force England to adopt a leather currency, which would become especially problematic if the king were taken prisoner and ransom became necessary, since ‘the French … would probably refuse to return the English king on payment of leather, as they refused even to sell their wine except on payment of silver’. In the event, no such expedient proved necessary, as the second Tudor’s ambitions foundered on reality’s reef even more decisively than Henry V’s had ultimately done before him, and Calais finally fell to the French Crown eleven years after his death. Its return was insincerely promised at the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, and the last Tudor ruler of England would briefly gain possession of Le Havre before its recapture in 1562. But more than a century earlier, the die had already been effectively cast. Thereafter, the Channel, the Straits of Dover and the North Sea were not so much a gateway to the perceived natural inheritance of England’s ruling class as a heaving watery bulwark protecting the island from alien influences and hostile foes.
In 1477, the Burgundian ruler of the Netherlands, England’s ancient ally, finally yielded possession of the Somme towns, Picardy, and the ancestral Duchy of Burgundy to France; and fifteen years later another old ally, the Duchy of Brittany, was, likewise, annexed to the French Crown. Together these events stripped away the wide belt of possessions and friendly or satellite territories that had formerly served as a land buffer against invasion, and left the entire southern coast of the Channel from Brest to Boulogne directly in French hands – all of which was certain to bring far-reaching changes not only in England’s domestic economy and internal politics, but, no less importantly, in her broader perception of the world beyond her waters. For with Edward IV’s eventual death in 1483, and the subsequent succession of his brother, Richard III, the dynastic merry-go-round had begun yet another giddy circuit, which ended only when Henry Tudor, great-grandson of a fugitive Welsh brewer wanted for murder, at last made his way from French protection to Market Bosworth in England’s midland heart to stake his own flimsy claim to primacy. Outnumbered by two to one, he would ultimately triumph in a particularly foul and inglorious fray fought on blood-soaked fen and moorland, only to inherit a kingdom that had arguably grown more insular than at any previous point in its history.
And how, of course, was it ever likely to have been otherwise when selfinterest and endemic lawlessness had robbed his subjects of any broader vision or direction? ‘The French vice is lechery and the English vice treachery’, ran the saying at the time, and no impartial observer could surely have doubted at least the second half of this maxim when the first Tudor cautiously mounted his throne. For it was no coincidence that one contemporary parliamentary petition justly complained how ‘… in divers parts of this realm, great abominable murders, robberies, extortions, oppressions and other manifold maintenances, misgovernances, forcible entries, affrays and assaults be committed, and as yet remain unpunished’. On the contrary, estate jumping, abduction of heiresses and casual brigandage had become, in effect, a modish pastime for the high-born Englishmen depicted to this day on their tombs and brasses in plate armour. Indeed, no less a figure than Sir Thomas Malory who had written in Morte D’Arthur ‘that we fall not through vice and sin, but exercise and follow virtue’, found himself in prison in 1485 for sheep stealing, sacrilege, extortion, rape and attempted murder. And in such circumstances it seemed only natural that England’s first Tudor ruler should continue to limit his horizons and abandon temporarily his predecessors’ medieval ambitions to win and hold dominions abroad, settling instead for a safer status as ruler of a kingdom ‘off’ rather than ‘of’ Europe, while securing alliances, where possible through marriage, as a guarantee of firm government and sound finance at home.
While that process unfolded, moreover, his subjects, just like the residing majority of their contemporaries overseas, would continue to consider themselves members of ‘Christendom’ rather than ‘Europe’. In 1565, just under half a century after Martin Luther had put paid once and for all to the universalist pretensions of the Roman Catholic Church, a devout citizen of Milan nevertheless saw fit, on the advice of his confessor, to include in his family devotions, a prayer that ‘us and all of Christendom’ be kept ‘in perfect union and love’. And so it was with the young Cornishman Peter Mundy, who as late as 1620, having laboured his way back across the Turkish-dominated Balkans after a trip to Constantinople, passed the boundary of the Venetian enclave of Spalato (Split), to declare with no little relief how ‘wee were no sooner past it, but we entered into Christendome, then seeming to be in a new world’. Long before both men wrote, of course, the realistic prospect of a Corpus Christianorum united by its beliefs and aspirations, first adumbrated by Charlemagne more than eight centuries earlier, was already effectively defunct, to be finally laid to rest amid the ashes of the Thirty Years War of the following century. But the notion persisted stubbornly throughout a long process of transition, which was reflected, aptly enough, in 1590 by the alternating references of the much-travelled English squire Sir John Smythe to the countries of western ‘Europe’ and the ‘nations of the occidental parts of Christendom’ – not to mention the Italian Jesuit Michele Lauretano’s coining of the phrase ‘the Christendom of Europe’ in 1572.
Certainly, the old medieval term carried with it comforting connotations of what amounted to a sacred sheep-fold, within which the Continent’s peoples shared at least the residing ideal of a common faith, while ‘Europe’, by contrast, appeared to embody no intrinsic unity beyond the geographical landmass that it represented and, as the sixteenth century progressed, an emerging sense of the moral and civilising superiority of the states and peoples that comprised it. Nor, in particular, did it seem to foster any special understanding or mutual appreciation, let alone collective consciousness, among the residents of its competing kingdoms, as was clear from the observations of one Venetian visitor to England in 1497:
The English [wrote the author of the so-called Italian Relation] are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman’, and that it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman.
Just over a century later, moreover, in 1598, a German commentator would make almost the identical point, highlighting how his English hosts, upon seeing a foreigner ‘very well made or particularly handsome’, were inclined to reflect how ‘it is a pity he is not an Englishman’. Doubtless, an Elizabethan audience of The Merchant of Venice two years earlier would have been fully conversant with the stereotypes underlying the spirit of Portia’s list of suitors, in which the Italian from Naples – that unrivalled nursery of riding schools – ‘doth nothing but talk of his horse’, and the Frenchman ‘is every man in no man’. ‘If I should marry him,’ she continues, ‘I should marry twenty husbands’, while the weakness of Germans was drink, leading her to conclude disdainfully: ‘I will do anything, Nerissa, ere I will be married to a sponge.’
In Portia’s view, predictably, the Englishman ‘is a proper man’s picture’. ‘But alas,’ she declares with an injection of impartiality not often evident among many of her contemporaries, ‘who can converse with a dumbshow’. And if the traveller Fynes Moryson was at least prepared to reflect favourably upon the fact that ‘the Germans do not make water in the streets’ after his extensive travels on the Continent from May 1591 to May 1595, and to acknowledge the skill of his Teutonic hosts as artificers, even he could not resist adding how:
I think that to be attributed not to their sharpness of witt, but to their industry, for they use to plod with great diligence upon their professions.
They were, he concluded, ‘somewhat inclining to the vice of Dullness’ – a regrettable but altogether less rancid national characterisation than those afforded by Thomas Nash to other ‘Europeans’ in his novel of 1594, The Unfortunate Traveller, in which the hero, an exiled English earl in Rome, holds forth energetically about the shortcomings of a range of his foreign counterparts. What is to be learned in France, he rails, save ‘to esteeme of the pox as a pimple’, in Spain save to copy a ‘ruffe with short strings like the droppings of a man’s nose’, in Italy ‘save the art of atheism, the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poisoning, the art of sodomitry’, in Holland save how ‘to be drunk and snort in the midst of dinner’. ‘No,’ concludes the Earl, ‘beleeve me, no bread, no fire, no water doth a man anie good out of his owne country.’
At the same time, the corrupting influence of the foreigner was an equally familiar Tudor theme. Hans, the first Netherlander to be portrayed on the English stage, in the morality play Wealth and Health of c. 1557, was duly depicted – once again entirely in accordance with the audience’s preconceptions – as a lurching drunkard. And notwithstanding nearly two subsequent generations of English admiration for Dutch art and music – not to mention ongoing co-operation with the northern Netherlands as a military ally from 1585 onwards – this same stereotype could still be trotted out by Sir John Smythe with no apparent inkling of the irony involved in a fellow-Protestant pot calling a continental kettle black. Writing only five years after the outbreak of war with Spain, which England’s Dutch allies had already been waging since 1568, Smythe would nevertheless note how ‘this detestable vice’ of drunkenness had ‘taken a wonderful root’ within his own country ‘that in times past was wont to be of all other nations of Christendom the most sober’. By contrast, a French scholar such as Joseph Scaliger was at least prepared to acknowledge from his quiet seat in Leiden how the Netherlands was not without ‘some good people’ and that the country people, men and women, and almost all the servant girls can read and write’. But English commentators, in the main, remained stubbornly ungenerous.
And if a weakness for alcohol was widely held to have infected England’s shores from across the North Sea, so the contagion of decadence and moral collapse from Italy was frequently highlighted with no less vigour. Three years before the death of Elizabeth I, an English translator of Livy reflected mournfully upon the current condition of the classical poet’s homeland, ‘so farre degenerate are the inhabitants now from that ancient people, so devoute, so virtuous and uncorrupt in old time’. But it was Roger Ascham, author of the widely influential educational handbook The Scholemaster, who had first gone so far in 1570 as to claim that the Italianate Englishman was nothing less than ‘a devil made flesh’ – a view echoed by the German Barolomew Sastrow, who later quoted it as a familiar proverb. ‘Italy now,’ Ascham maintained, ‘is not that Italy that it was wont to be, and therefore not so fit a place, as some do count it, for young men to fetch either wisdom or honesty from thence’ – a sentiment that would help explain, perhaps, why Giordano Bruno was jostled and insulted during his stay in England between 1583 and 1585, and one that also pointed the way ultimately to John Webster’s two great tragedies of 1612 and 1623 in which Italians poisoned their victims in four different ways: by the leaves of a book, the lips of a portrait, the pommel of a saddle and an anointed helmet.
Yet it was a companion of Frederick, Duke of Württemberg, writing in 1592, who recorded how the English ‘care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them’, making it small wonder, of course, that those on the receiving end should sometimes have responded in kind. In deprecating the tendency of English women to disdain the advances of his fellow-countrymen, for example, a Spaniard of 1554 duly saw fit to observe how, given ‘the sort of women they were’, this was ‘an excellent thing for the Spaniards’. Four years later, meanwhile, a Frenchman who, along with his peers, had been treated to taunts of knave and dog, and branded a son of a whore, readily concluded that the English were more false and lacking in conscience than snakes, crocodiles and scorpions, while another gibe to have a long history was the aristocratic Italian Pietro della Valle’s dismissal of the English ambassador in Constantinople as ‘a better shopkeeper than a soldier’. Some Englishmen such as George Pettie, the translator of Guazzo, were, it is true, mildly apologetic for the arrogance of their own countrymen, blaming it on the changed behaviour of the English when they crossed the Channel. England, wrote Pettie, ‘is the civilest countrey in the worlde: and if it be thought otherwise by strangers, the disorders of those traveylers abrode are the chiefe cause of it’. But a Mantuan diplomat would nevertheless write home from London to confirm that the land of his current domicile, though a would-be paradise, was actually inhabited by devils, while, in spite of Henry VIII’s best efforts to patronise Italian artists, craftsmen and military engineers, Benvenuto Cellini – who was happy to work in France – flinched at the very prospect of living amongst ‘such beasts as the English’.
The medieval notion – half superstition, half belief among the French – that English invaders sported tails rolled up inside their breeches, had, it is true, faded in the second half of the fifteenth century, only to resurface in a propaganda poem of 1513 when Henry VIII set forth across the Channel in hope of emulating his conquering forebears. The same poem, too, had spared no venom in describing the marauding foe as hideous, loathsome, stinking toads. But when English troops subsequently sacked towns like Ardres and turned their dwellings to charcoal, it was hardly surprising, of course, that French children, long reared on stories about the Hundred Years War when the ‘Goddams with tails’ had pillaged and plundered their land, should once again have regurgitated the myths of their elders. For most English troops remained belchingly contemptuous of French peasants, whom they believed to be so backward and exploited that they drank only water and tended their masters’ fields unshod, while even in times of fleeting peace, French merchants in London were both cheated and intimidated, and deprived of even their most basic dignities. Forbidden to attend English cloth fairs, stripped and searched at every opportunity and imprisoned as spies if found loose upon the streets at night without a candle, they were left in no doubt either that the English king’s incursion upon their homeland in 1513 would not be his last. For no more than one year later, not only in a newly built armoury at Greenwich, but also in rented houses and cellars throughout the capital, German craftsmen were soon busy fashioning weapons of all descriptions for the next invasion, from the finest iron brought specially from Innsbruck.
As late as 1603, the Duc de Sully, when on an embassy to London, would warn Henri IV how ‘the English hate us, and with a hatred so strong and so widespread that one is tempted to number it among the natural dispositions of this people’. And it was small consolation that his hosts were, of long tradition, far from limited in their antipathies, since not only Frenchmen but all foreigners in England’s capital were susceptible to intimidation and indeed violence, as the German mercantile community of the so-called ‘Steelyard’ on the north bank of the Thames, by the outflow of the Wa...
