John Shakespeare's world

How England was organised

Henry VIII  seems like the distant past, the twilight of the Middle Ages. Elizabeth reigned in the same century, yet to me, she is the dawn of the modern era.

In the late 16th century, drama and poetry came bursting forth. In Parliament, the Commons began to wield increasing power. Europe and the Middle-East were involved in struggles that resonate to this day. The world opened up as never before with a series of English attempts to colonise the New World – it was, in effect, the start of the common era of Europe and North America.

So how did things work then? How was England organised? Here is a brief run-down…

The Privy Council: the rough equivalent of a modern-day Cabinet of ministers. During Elizabeth’s reign it varied in numbers from ten to twenty. The Queen did not attend meetings, but the proceedings were reported to her assiduously and she had the final say over matters of policy. Generally, she expected her ministers to get on with the day-to-day business of running the country. As well as executive powers, the Council also acted as a court when it sat in Star Chamber (the old council chamber at Westminster). Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham were the dominant Privy Council men for much of the reign.

Army and Navy. Unlike the professional troops of Spain, England did not have a standing army. In times of trouble, such as the threatened Armada invasion of the late 1580s, militias were raised by the nobility from among their tenants and by the great craft guilds. Nor was the Navy a permanent fixture. Many of the galleons used in battle had a dual role as fishing vessels or merchant ships. Thanks to the enthusiasm for privateering (piracy) of Drake, Hawkins and others, the English had become great sea warriors. Their ships were designed to be faster and more nimble than the towering Spanish galleons which had an advantage in close combat, but were easily harried and outgunned by the English at longer range.

Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 8 August 1588, by Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg.
© National Maritime Museum

Prison: there were fourteen jails in London, Westminster and Southwark. A wide variety of offences could land someone there, ranging from vagrancy, debt or fortune-telling to the most severe of crimes. The conditions prisoners had to endure depended largely on how much garnish (bribe money) they could afford to give the Keeper. They were surprisingly open, however, enabling fugitive priests such as Fr Robert Southwell and others to visit prisoners and say mass.  The Marshalsea and The Clink in Southwark were seen as softer options than the City jails such as Newgate, Bridewell, Wood Street Counter and the Fleet. Southwell’s companion,  Fr Henry Garnet, wrote of feeling “safe from danger” while visiting prison.

Printing and newspapers: some historians believe that half the population of England could read by the end of the 16th century. Londoners, particularly, were hungry for news and bought up broadsheets (or broadsides) as fast as they could be printed. Illustrated by woodcuts and often written in ballad form, they would look very different from newspapers as we know them.

Weapons: firearms were rapidly replacing the medieval crossbow and longbow. The most frightening innovation for monarchs was the wheel-lock pistol, which was replacing the matchlock. Wheel-locks had a mechanism which spun a serrated steel edge against a piece of iron pyrite, sending sparks into the gunpowder, which exploded and discharged the ball or bullet. Previously, with matchlock weapons (including the cumbersome old arquebus, familiarly known as hagbut or hackbut), the gunpowder had to be ignited by a pre-lighted taper, or match. The big advantage of wheel-locks was that they could be held in one hand, be primed and loaded in advance and be small enough to be concealed under a cloak or in a sleeve. This made them greatly feared by monarchs – Elizabeth banned them from court, fearing assassination. Ornate wheel-locks became the must-have accessory for men of substance and whole cavalry squadrons carried them into battle, each man carrying two or more primed weapons in their hands and belts. Men commonly armed themselves with swords and daggers. Guards carried pole weapons - pikes and halberds. The pike was little more than a pole with a spear head, while the halberd had a three-edged head: axe, pike and hook.

English wheel-lock pistol and powder flask; damascened in gold and silver; circa 1580.
© V&A Images/Victoria and Albert museum, London

Pursuivants: state-employed officers with the power to execute warrants of search and arrest. They were a rag-tag bunch of armed mercenaries, often hastily assembled from local people, court hangers-on, legal officials and even convicts, all made legitimate by wearing the Queen’s escutcheon. They were particularly used in hunting Roman Catholic priests and those who harboured them. Christopher Devlin in The Life Of Robert Southwell describes them as “hounds to whom harrying women was cheaper and more sensational than stag-hunting”.

Intelligencers: spies reporting to the Principal Secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, who is seen as the father of the modern secret service. His network of agents and correspondents encompassed Europe and the Middle East, yet he was expected to fund the operation himself and was so impoverished at his death in 1590 that he was buried privately at night to avoid the cost of the splendid funeral so immense a figure might have warranted.

Jesuits:  members of the Society of Jesus, a highly-disciplined religious order founded in 1534 by the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola with the aim of converting heathens to Christianity. They took vows of poverty, chastity and pilgrimage to Jerusalem (though this was, at that time, impossible). They were known for their unflinching obedience to the Pope and for their care of  the sick and destitute. Jesuits soon became the “shock troops of the counter-Reformation” (well, that’s the way the Protestants saw them), sending the likes of Robert Southwell and Edmund Campion to martyrdom in England. Elizabeth I and her ministers regarded Jesuits as traitors ready to resort to assassination to restore the Pope’s authority. In 1606, the Jesuit Fr. Henry Garnet (who had arrived in England with Southwell in 1586) was hanged, drawn and quartered having been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot.

Whores: it is curious that the seamier side of life flourished so well at a time of great religious fervour. Southwark was famous for its brothels, which the London authorities could do nothing to control, being outside the City walls. Prostitution was illegal but bribery of constables was commonplace. Whores were often called Winchester Geese, as much of Southwark came under the control of the Bishops of Winchester. A brothel madam was known as “Mistress of the Game”, and her clients were called “commiters” or “hobby horse men”.  Sexually-transmitted disease – the French Welcome -  was rife and, in the days before antibiotics, virtually untreatable (though that didn’t prevent early quacks devising and selling so-called cures).