Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia

by Lacey Baldwin Smith

Overview

Lacey Baldwin Smith re-evaluates the Tudor mania for conspiracy in the light of psychological and social impulses peculiar to the age.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691639116
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #570
Pages:	354
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

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Treason in Tudor England

Politics and Paranoia

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By Lacey Baldwin Smith

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1986 Lacey Baldwin Smith
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05463-6

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CHAPTER 1

'TREASON DOTH NEVER PROSPER'

Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason. Sir John Harington, Epigrams

Sir John Harington's terse lines not only contain a grim-fisted truth — success writes its own history and imposes upon sedition a self-fulfilling dynamism whereby treason, by definition, is branded failure — but the rhyme also goes to the core of the Tudor political mentality and poses a question that has baffled historians over the centuries. Why did traitors indulge in a variety of sedition so unbelievably bungling and self-defeating in character that it is difficult to believe they were totally sane or that their treason, as perceived by the government, actually existed at all? If sedition had been nothing more than an occasional aberration upon the normal graph of Tudor political activity, the question might not be worth the asking. The century, however, was a veritable graveyard of unsuccessful intrigues, machinations, complots, and conspiracies. The grisly skulls decorating London Bridge and the mutilated corpses displayed throughout the kingdom were evidence enough that men risked their lives for reasons noble and ignoble, and that they knew the unpleasant consequences of failure. 'To confess the truth', sighed one observer in 1541, 'it is now no novelty among us to see men slain, hanged, quartered or beheaded ... Some for one thing and some for another.' Seventeen years later, Etienne Perlin, whose French distaste for all things English is transparent, reported in his journal the existence of a macabre jest: in order to achieve gentle status, an English family had to have at least one head impaled upon London Bridge. So why then did traitors by their conduct play into society's hands and get caught, and conversely why did society see in such performances motives and actions dangerous to all established order, both human and divine?

Tudor England had a straightforward answer at least to the first half of the question: traitors reckoned with God as well as man. Their treachery could not long remain hidden, for 'God will have that most detestable vice both opened and punished'. It was clearly and logically written: 'The spirit of the Lord fills the world, and that which embraces all things knows all that is said ... A jealous ear hears everything ... So beware of useless grumbling.' Every Englishman knew the words of Ecclesiastes reiterated in endless official admonitions concerning rebellion: 'Wish the king no evil in thy thought, nor speak no hurt of him in thy privy chamber; for the bird of the air shall betray thy voice, and with her feathers shall bewray thy words.' It is little wonder that society believed God loved and protected the prince and detested and destroyed the traitor, for the malcontents of the century entered into sedition with such abandon, naivety and babbling indifference to the most elementary principles of secrecy, and seemed to believe that almost any scheme was possible simply by willing it into existence, that even the humblest sparrow was quite capable of frustrating their evil designs.

Our own age is less willing to accept the deity either as a detective agency or as an instrument of vengeance, and it suspects that God more often than not leaves men to arrange for their own destruction and punishment. Even the sixteenth century acknowledged that the 'bird of the air' had considerable help from the fear of judicial interrogation with benefit of rack and dungeon and from the terror of the traitor's agonizing and humiliating end — hanging, castration, and disembowelment. Erasmus, as was his wont, hedged his bets and warned in words memorized by schoolboys all over Europe that 'kings have many ears and many eyes ... They have ears that listen a hundred miles from them; they have eyes that espy out more things than men would think. Wherefore, it is wisdom for subjects not only to keep their princes' laws and ordinances in the face of the world but also privily ... for conscience sake.' Sir Walter Raleigh was considerably more secular and forthright in his approach to treason. He also did not doubt that 'the evil affection of men may be oftentimes discovered' by inquisition and punishment, but he added a third factor to the formula for discovery: the possibility that the inner logic of treason itself, what he called 'destiny', and not some interfering and righteous deity, determined failure. Tudor conspirators were defeated by a logic that was written indelibly upon the tablets of time: traitors were born incompetent. Caught by an inescapable destiny, they were driven to desperation because they could not make the political system work for them, but the same stupidity, egotism, and greed that led them into sedition in the first place guaranteed their failure, and they sacrificed themselves upon the altar of their own infantile dreams. The intelligent, the lucky, and the ruthless seldom had need for treason; only the inept, the ill-starred, and the weak travelled the inevitable road to Tyburn and Traitors' Gate. Desperation might drive a man to rebellion, and the 'artificial nourishing and entertaining of hopes' were advised as 'the best antidotes against the poison of discontentments', but it was invariably assumed that traitors were basically unthrifty types who 'having consumed their own, seek by violence to possess themselves of other men's goods'. Disloyal subjects without fail, said William Cecil, fell into three categories: those who were unable 'to live at home but in beggary', those who were 'discontented for lack of preferments', and those who were 'bankrupt merchants'.

Cecil's cynical limiting of the causes of treason to personal greed and simple-minded political and economic ineptitude made no allowance for ideology or governmental policies that could drive a man to sedition. And he totally ignored both the frequency and style of the endless efforts to overthrow the existing order. Tudor treason was protean, but whatever face it assumed — feudal, religious, political, economic, or personal — it tended to be not only unbelievably maladroit but also 'more wildly fantastic than any fiction'. Embedded in this current of deviant malcontent was a self-destructiveness and hysteria that far exceeded mere artless mismanagement and bordered upon the neurotic.

Much of the treachery of the century appears so absurd and so juvenile that some scholars have suggested that many of the plots were, in fact, fictitious. They never existed at all but 'were more or less bogus' figments in which 'agents-provocateurs were sacrificed to the exigencies of party politics'. Historian after historian has echoed those words in one form or other, and has questioned such conspiracies as the Ridolfi plot in 1570 to unseat Elizabeth and replace her on the throne with a partnership of Mary Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk, and Thomas Stafford's 'hare brained and provocative' invasion of England in 1557 with a tiny army of no more than a hundred followers. Certainly contemporaries, especially Catholics under Elizabeth, had their doubts, and although Jesuit special pleading is obvious, their point that, after thirty years of listening to Tudor propaganda, the world was growing 'over well acquainted with these tales of Queen-killing' is well taken. If care is maintained in selecting the evidence, it is quite possible to argue that such plots as the Lopez, Moody, Squire, and Stanley schemes to assassinate Elizabeth by a variety of unlikely means, including deadly perfumes, balls of fatal incense, poisoned potions, and silver bullets, were carefully orchestrated trumperies in which relatively innocent, albeit not overly bright, political small-fries fell victim either to deliberate government efforts to demonstrate the existence of treason or to the political machinations of court factions. Nevertheless, to dismiss such performances as calculated fabrications is to misunderstand the pressures under which traitors themselves operated, the hysterical response their treason generated, and the mentality that could translate real or imagined sedition into a fundamental threat to all good order on earth and throughout the universe.

The evidence dealing with treason is mountainous, and the Tudor archives are filled with information relating to behaviour which the authorities regarded as deviant at best and downright seditious at worst. But three examples of sedition — Gregory Botolf's scheme to betray the port of Calais in 1540, Dr William Parry's so-called plot to assassinate Elizabeth in 1585, and Sir Thomas Seymour's efforts to overthrow his brother, the Lord Protector, in the winter of 1548–49 — will be sufficient to introduce the social and psychological complexities embedded in so much of Tudor treason.

Sweet-Lips Gregory

The Botolf conspiracy was the figment of the facile imagination of a gentleman by the name of Gregory Botolf, better known to his contemporaries as 'Gregory Sweet-Lips'. Sweet-Lips belonged to the most socially restless, economically unstable, and demographically prolific element within Tudor society — the lesser gentry. Born a younger son, he suffered the double affliction of his kind: over-education and under-endowment. Translated into human terms, this meant that Gregory was fated, like the hundreds of other hangers-on at court and in the houses of the great, to a life of boredom and relative poverty. He and his two privy associates in treason, Clement Philpot and Edward Corbett, were grist for the moralists' mill — 'beware of idleness' — and evidence for those educators who warned against too much education. Destined to scrape along on expectations never realized, hopes constantly deferred, and rewards that were always too small, they lounged about the ante-rooms of the mighty, ran messages and did favours for those in command, bowed and scraped before their betters, and took out their frustrations in violence, drink, and bad temper.

Botolf first made his appearance in history in mid-April of 1538 as Sir Gregory Buttoliff, chaplain to my Lord Lisle, the Deputy of Calais who, as a pleasant, if rather ineffectual, scion of fifteenth-century royal fecundity, was Henry VIII's 'illegitimate' uncle. Arthur Plantagenet Lord Lisle and his wife Honor seem, even in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, to have been taken in by the Latinate tongue, gracious manners, and expensive tastes of the convincing Mr Botolf, for Lord Lisle enthusiastically endorsed his chaplain as a man 'of sufficient literature', 'good discretion', and 'honest behaviour'. Except for the 'sufficient literature', the good lord totally misjudged Sweet-Lips who, according to one of his clerical colleagues, was 'the most mischievous knave that ever was born' and thoroughly deserved to be hanged. Constantly in debt, a consummate liar, and a confessed thief of ecclesiastical property, Botolf's fertile mind and golden tongue concocted a plot that ended at least one of his friends at Tyburn, but for which nimble Sir Gregory appears to have got off almost scot-free.

Gregory Botolf was of the papal persuasion, yet there is not a scrap of evidence to indicate that he was a religious fanatic. He obviously delighted in theological debate and dreamed heroic dreams of striking a blow — appropriately rewarded by money and honour — for God and the Pope, but he was equally at home at the dicing table and was a master of the tavern-room yarn. Moreover, Botolfs decision to decamp to Rome may have had more to do with worldly matters than with any concern for his immortal soul, for evil reports of Sir Gregory's past were being spread about Lord Lisle's household, and he feared that if he 'tarried a day longer' he would be charged with felony. Nor were his two closest associates religious extremists. Clement Philpot was 'a proper young man' who is described as 'the third and wisest' of the sons of Sir Peter Philpot, a Hampshire gentleman and family friend of the Lisles, who had sufficient means and status to consider Lord Lisle's stepdaughter as an appropriate match for his youngest offspring. And it was partly for reasons of matchmaking that he placed his son in April of 1538 in the Deputy's Calais household. Clement was an impressionable youth of 'gentle conversation' who stood to inherit an income of 500 marks a year, an amount which, along with his innocence, may explain why Gregory Sweet-Lips cherished him as his friend and bedfellow. Edward Corbett, genealogically speaking, is a far more shadowy figure. He was a close friend of Clement and was equally well educated. What made Corbett so useful to his colleagues was that he acted as a messenger-cum-secretary for His Lordship and was willing to trick Lord Lisle into signing almost any document, especially those essential passports that permitted the seventy or so members of the Deputy's household to travel and live abroad. Like Philpot, he held an ambiguous position — part retainer, part personal servant on 'petty wages', and part preferment seeker waiting for a vacancy in the Calais Spears, those prestigious and politically determined officers of the Retinue. As a collaborator in and witness to the events that followed, Corbett, one of his interrogators remarked, was 'a man of sense', and his statements, unlike most of the others, have the ring of verisimilitude about them.

Botolf's plan was predicated upon the role of Philpot and, to a lesser extent, of Corbett as Trojan horses inside England's last toe-hold on the Continent, the Calais pale. The port city with its 120 square miles of surrounding marches was a religious-political weather vane exposed to all the doctrinal and diplomatic winds of the Reformation. Caught between two worlds, a decaying Catholic and medieval past when England had been a great European power and a future that was not yet Protestant and insular, Calais was a sink of spying, railing, and informing. Each side, Protestant reformers and Catholic conservatives, struggled in the hot-house environment of a beleaguered military bastion and panicked every time Henry's government sent over inspectors to observe and report on the condition of the defences, the state of religion, and the loyalty of His Majesty's officials. As Catholic Europe in 1538–39 talked more and more loudly of joining together in a crusade to punish schismatic England, the denizens of Calais lived in a constant state of agitation, made more frantic by the knowledge that religious informing for profit and political preferment had become a way of life. John Foxe's description of the city in the spring of 1540 is laden with Protestant exaggeration but it is probably an accurate picture of the atmosphere in which Sweet-Lips and his friends lived and out of which the Botolf conspiracy emerged: 'Such fear and distrust assaulted all men, that neighbour distrusted neighbour, the master the servant, the servant the master, the husband the wife, the wife the husband, and almost every one the other ...'

What triggered Botolf's decision to go over to Rome is not known; possibly it had something to do with his ill-advised and alcoholic confession to his 'friend' and fellow chaplain, Sir Oliver Brown, that a number of years before he had 'liberated' church plate belonging to the Chantry House of St Gregory in Canterbury. Sir Oliver proved to be of Sir Gregory's own ilk, for he immediately used this damning information as a weapon in the ceaseless domestic rivalry and backstairs warfare that beset most lordly establishments, and by February of 1540 Sweet-Lips felt that he had too 'many foes' for his own good. By the 5th of the month he had found the necessary funds for a whirlwind trip to Rome, where, as he later boasted, he, His Holiness and Cardinal Pole met 'no more but we three together in the Pope's chamber' and worked out plans to betray Calais to French and papal forces. Rewarded with 200 crowns and the advice to leave Calais as soon as he could arrange to get Lord Lisle's licence to go as a student to the University of Louvain, Botolf returned on March 17th. He remained in town scarcely forty-eight hours — just long enough to settle his affairs and indulge in a violent row with Sir Oliver and others over seating precedence in the great hall — and took himself to Bourbourg, immediately over the Flemish border. Safe in imperial territory, he wrote to Corbett asking him to do a series of favours and to arrange for Lord Lisle to sign his licence for travel to Louvain.

At Bourbourg on Good Friday, March 26th, 1540, Clement Philpot met Sir Gregory and was introduced to his grand design. The two friends had missed each other in Calais, for Clement had been away in England, and their reunion at Bourbourg was fervent: 'My most joy of the world, welcome as my own heart!' cried Botolf, 'for you are he that I do put most trust and confidence in ... And there is none on earth that I dare trust so well as you ... I dare no less disclose the secrets of my heart to you as to God.' It was a fatal disclosure, and never was friendship bought at a greater price. 'Gold', Sweet-Lips assured Clement, 'ye shall have plenty. And whereas we now be inferiors, we shall be superiors. The world shall be ours.' Having whetted the appetite and excited the imagination, Sir Gregory then proceeded to details. He had, he explained, already been given 200 crowns; shortly he expected to travel to the imperial court at Ghent where the papal ambassador was residing, and there he would receive still more money. The betrayal would be planned for 'the herring time' when, between September 29th and November 30th, Calais was crowded with herring buyers and sellers, and when, as a consequence, the guard on the Lantern Gate, located just off the market square, would be greatly reduced. Philpot 'with a dozen well appointed' followers would seize the gate in the dark of the night, and defend it from within while Botolf scaled the outer walls of the city with 500 to 600 men.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Treason in Tudor England by Lacey Baldwin Smith. Copyright © 1986 Lacey Baldwin Smith. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• IN THANKS, pg. ix
• I. 'Treason Doth Never Prosper', pg. 1
• II.'The Black Poison of Suspect', pg. 36
• III. 'The Agreement of Its Minds', pg. 72
• IV. Tudor Cosmology and Commonality, pg. 118
• V. 'The World is Queasy', pg. 143
• VI. A 'Wonder to Behold', pg. 178
• VII. 'Win the Queen', pg. 192
• VIII. 'If You Have Any Enemies', pg. 218
• IX. 'Give Losers Leave to Talk', pg. 239
• Notes, pg. 277
• Bibliography, pg. 317
• Index, pg. 334