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“Rowme” on the Street (A Cheshire “Cat Massacre”)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
Extract
I want to begin with a memory of buried faith that speaks rather precisely to the argument that follows about the duplicitous nature of performance during the English Reformation. The memory belonged to Benjamin Franklin, who opened his Autobiography with an account of his Protestant family during the reign of Mary Tudor:
This obscure family of ours was early in the Reformation, and continued Protestants through the reign of Queen Mary, when they were sometimes in danger of trouble on account of their zeal against popery. They had got an English Bible, and to conceal and secure it, it was fastened open with tapes under and within the cover of a joint-stool. When my great-great-grandfather read it to his family, he turned up the joint-stool upon his knees, turning over the leaves then under the tapes. One of the children stood at the door to give notice if he saw the apparitor coming, who was an officer of the spiritual court. In that case the stool was turned down again upon its feet, when the Bible remained concealed under it as before. This anecdote I had from my uncle Benjamin.
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References
Endnotes
1. Franklin, Benjamin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: With Introduction and Notes(New York: Macmillan, 1914)Google Scholar, 5.
2. Green, John, History of the English People, vol. 3, The Reformation (New York: Useful Knowledge Publishing Co., 1882)Google Scholar, 147.
3. Sir Thomas Gargrave, Sir Henry Gate, and John Vaughan to Sir William Cecil, 11 July 1568, in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, Addenda 1566–1579, Preserved in Her Majesty's Public Record Office [hereinafter CSP Dom. Add.], edited by Everett Green, Mary Anne (London: Longmans & Co., 1871)Google Scholar, 52; and Sir Thomas Gargrave to Lord [Burghley], 18 September 1570, ibid., 425. For a general history of the Reformation in the north of England during Elizabeth's reign, see Haigh, Christopher, Reformation & Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.
4. Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntington, to Lord Burghley, 28 December 1572, in CSP Dom. Add., 435.
5. Records of Early English Drama, Chester, ed. Clopper, Lawrence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979)Google Scholar, 252. The Chester volume has received a more expanded treatment with the recent publication of Records of Early English Drama: Cheshire Including Chester, 2 vols., ed. Baldwin, Elizabeth, Clopper, Lawrence M., and Mills, David (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007)Google Scholar. The antiquity of the pageant is among its most overremembered memory, beginning with David Rogers's “Breviary of Chester,” composed in 1608–9, which established the founding myth of the Chester plays (“Randle Heggenet, a monk of Chester Abbey who was thrice at Rome before he could obtain leave of the Pope to have them in the English tongue”); Harley MS 1944, British Library, London. The editors of both the 1979 and 2007 editions of Records of the English Drama for Chester, however, are quick to note that the earliest preserved performance records are dated somewhat later.
6. The deposition from the Mayor's Book here is redacted from Baldwin et al., 1:118.
7. Salter, F. M., Medieval Drama in Chester (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1955)Google Scholar, 50–1, suggests that Trever had destroyed the plays, but see Baldwin et al., 2:1012n118.
8. For the reallocation of Catholic saint days as Protestant holidays, see Cressy, David, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989)Google Scholar. Theodore K. Lerud has argued, logically, that the shift of the festival day from Corpus Christi to Whitsun was a Reformation stratagem to maintain older Catholic practices. Lerud, , Memory, Images, and English Corpus Christi Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 112–14Google Scholar.
9. List of the demands of the Northern Earls, 3 April 1570, in CSP Dom. Add., 269. For a summary of the northern Catholic insurgency during Elizabeth's reign, see Palliser, D. M., Tudor York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 245–59Google Scholar, at 245 ff.
10. Wark, K. R., Elizabethan Recusancy in Cheshire (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1971), 8–10Google Scholar; Mills, David, “Some Theological Issues in Chester's Plays,” in “Bring furth the pagants”: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, ed. Klausner, David and Marsalek, Karen Sawyer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 212–29Google Scholar, at 214.
11. Wark, 8.
12. “List of 23 Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes in the Diocese of Chester,” December 1567, in CSP Dom. Add., 47. Twenty-three were names originally on the list, of which five were removed and replaced with the names of eleven new court appointees.
13. Wark 10, quoting State Papers 12.46. 33. Queen Elizabeth to William Downman, Bishop of Chester, 21 February 1567/68, in CSP Dom. Add. 307.
14. Clopper, 252.
15. Ibid., 81.
16. Though R. H. Morris suggests that the dispute was about renting viewing platforms for the plays, the language of the suit reads quite precisely otherwise: “concerning the claime right and title of A mansion Rowme or Place for the Whydson plaies in the Brudg gate strete within the Cyty of Chester,” which most take to mean a performance space for the mansions. Morris, R. H., Chester in the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns (Chester: Printed for the author, 1893)Google Scholar, 304 n. 2; Clopper, 81.
17. Clopper, 80–1.
18. There are two candidates: John Whitmore and John Whytmore. I pursue the recusant career of the former because as a landholder he formally claimed the title “Esquier,” as is clearly recorded in the case. For the career of the later, the tenant John Whytmore, whose claim was based on a tenancy dated 1542, see Marshall, John, “The Manner of These Plays: The Chester Pageant Carriages and the Places Where they Played,” in Staging the Chester Cycle: Lectures Given on the Occasion of the Production of the Cycle at Leeds in 1983, ed. Mills, David (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1985), 17–48Google Scholar, at 43. The record of Whitmore's long recusant career is gathered in Wark, 25, 71, 82–3, 169–70.
19. Wark, 71, 82–3, 170.
20. A thorough account of the rising and its suppression is preserved in numerous state papers that occupy nearly two hundred pages of CSP Dom. Add. Haigh, Reformation & Resistance remains the standard work on the context of Reformation in the north.
21. William Lord Eure to the Council, 8 November 1569, in CSP Dom. Add., 99–100.
22. George Chamberlain to the Duchess of Feria, 5 April 1570, in CSP Dom. Add., 270.
23. Henry Lord Hunsdon to Lord Burghley, 3 July 1572, in CSP Dom. Add., 416.
24. Clopper, 96–7. Mills concludes that the 1572 production was “decidedly ill-advised”; Mills, 212.
25. Baldwin et al., 1:144.
26. Ibid.
27. Clopper, 388.
28. I am deeply indebted to the letters of this man, Christopher Goodman (quoted in Mills, 215), without which my suspicions would have remained speculations.
29. White, Paul Whitfield, Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 92; for a brief of Goodman's life, see ibid., 98–9 n. 110. For Goodman's commission, see Wark, 9–10.
30. The extracts of Goodman's letters relevant to performance have now been included in Baldwin et al., 1:143–8; quote at 1:143.
31. Ibid., 1:143–4.
32. Ibid., 1:145.
33. Ibid., 1:146.
34. “Printing must at length root him out,” wrote John Foxe of the pope. The role of print culture in the Reformation is a trope of the field and the subject of many studies. I rely here on Alexandra Walsham, “‘Domme Preachers’? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print,” Past & Present 168 (August 2000): 72–123, at 72.
35. More of Goodman's objections are traced in Mills, which discusses as Goodman's “Genevan Objections”; and in White, 92–3, 95–7. For the texts of Goodman's letters, see Baldwin et al., 1:146–8.
36. Baldwin et al., 1:143–44.
37. Christopher Goodman, Robert Rogerson, and John Lane to the Archbishop of York, 11 June 1572, in Baldwin et al., 1:145.
38. Mayor's List 12, 14 October 1574, in Baldwin et al., 1:161.
39. Ibid.; cf. Clopper, 109. The documents of the case of Sir John Savage are collected in Clopper, 109–17. It remains an odd feature of this narrative, but the story recorded in the documents seems to be somewhat jumbled in the introduction to the Clopper volume, where two major story points are confused. The first is the substitution of John Arnewaye (Chester's thirteenth-century mayor, who first produced the cycle plays) for John Savage. The second is the editor's suggestion that the plays of 1575 were collapsed into a single day and a single performance site. The primary documents clearly reveal that the mayor was Sir John Savage and that the plays were intended to occupy four days but some of the plays were left unplayed. Both points are cleared up in the subsequent volume, Baldwin et al. (cf. 161–74). See also the Corporation Lease Book, 21 November 1575, in Clopper, 114–17, at 116.
40. Rogers's Breviary, “Of the midsomer showe or watch in Chester,” 1608–9, in Clopper, 252–3, at 253.
41. Rogers's Breviary, 3 July 1609, in Clopper, 250.
42. Wark, 51–2; for William Brereton, Savage's son-in-law, see appendix I, 142.
43. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. Manheim, Ralph, vol. 5 of Brecht: Collected Plays, ed. Willet, John (New York: Random House, 1972)Google Scholar, 160.
44. Ibid., 162.
45. Hutton, Ronald, “The Local Impact of the Tudor Reformations,” in The English Reformation Revised, ed. Haigh, Christopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 114–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 136.
46. Christopher Haigh, “The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation,” in English Reformation Revised, ed. Haigh, 176–208, at 183.
47. Quoted in ibid., 178.
48. Dickens, A. G., “The First Stages of Romanist Recusancy in Yorkshire, 1560–1590,” Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 35 (1941): 157–81Google Scholar, at 162–3.
49. Haigh, Reformation & Resistance, 220. For prayers, see D. M. Palliser, “Popular Reactions to the Reformation during the Years of Uncertainty, 1530–1570,” in English Reformation Revised, ed. Haigh, 94–113, at 98.
50. Palliser, “Popular Reactions,” 103.
51. Mayor's List 18, 14 October 1574, in Baldwin et al., 162.
52. The incident is treated by Elliott, John R. Jr. in “Queen Elizabeth at Oxford: New Light on the Royal Plays of 1566,” in The Mysteries of Elizabeth I: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, ed. Farrell, Kirby and Swaim, Kathleen (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 31–42Google Scholar, at 37. Elliot's appendix traces the subsequent career of another actor in the cast that day, Miles Windsor, who was expelled from the university in 1568 as a practicing Catholic.
53. For a balanced discussion of such Catholic phrases, see Mutschmann, H. and Wentersdorf, K., Shakespeare and Catholicism (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1952)Google Scholar, 252. Mutschmann and Wentersdorf remind us that such phrases as “by'r Lady” and “by the mass,” which occur in the old Quartos, were almost entirely expunged in the First Folio, “which quite clearly demonstrates that they were regarded as offensive or even unlawful.”
54. Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985)Google Scholar.
55. Ibid., 160–1.