We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

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СКАЧАТЬ he will bring them soon unto their ends,

      with cruel torments of fierce firebrands.

      The final lines, assuming they really are by Anne Askew and not a later Protestant propagandist, are genuinely horrific. She is going to leave her carcass on earth, she says:

      Although to ashes it be now burned,

      I know thou canst raise it again,

      In the same likeness as thou it formed,

      in heaven with thee evermore to remain.

      Anne was one of sixty-three people listed in the famous Foxe’s Book of Martyrs as being burned alive in the reign of Henry VIII alone. They include priests, courtiers, servants, musicians, professional actors or ‘players’, a tailor, Richard Mekins, ‘a child that passed not the age of 15 years’, Frenchmen and a Scot – a pretty good cross-section of Tudor society. There is also William Tracey, a squire from Worcestershire, the sixty-fourth victim – irritatingly for the authoriries he was already dead, so he was dug up and then burned. In the reign of Henry’s daughter Mary nearly three hundred Protestants were burned alive, and it’s an even fuller list, coming from every social class and almost every trade: upholsterers, shoemakers, candlemakers, bricklayers, servants, carpenters, wheelwrights, glovers, merchants, gentlemen and royal courtiers. Men and women, old and young, they came from every part of Britain. When the Protestants were in the saddle under the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, similar numbers of Catholics, many of them priests, were martyred in turn and beatified by the Vatican.

      The punishment of death by burning alive was an ancient one, but was revived in Tudor times to cause the maximum fear – in a sense it was a terrorist punishment, worse than a public beheading. It was particularly popular for women like Anne Askew for a bizarre reason: male traitors had been traditionally hanged, drawn and quartered. For the crowd to see them being disembowelled alive, and often having their private parts cut off, they clearly needed to be naked. But while it was acceptable to torture and burn women alive, for them to be seen naked in public was indecent. William Blackstone, one of the fathers of English law, explained that ‘For as the decency due to sex forbids the exposing and public mangling of their bodies, their sentence (which is to the full as terrible to sensation as the other) is to be drawn to the gallows and there be burned alive.’

      It’s a bleak view of Tudor London, and to balance it we could do worse than look at the writing of a very different woman. Isabella Whitney was Britain’s first published professional writer of secular poetry. We don’t know a lot about her, but she was from Cheshire and came down to London to work as a servant. Her verse – clear, punchy and very much from a woman’s point of view – is a useful counterblast to the courtly sonnets and sexual innuendo of more famous male Tudor writers. Here she is, warning young gentlewomen and maids in love about how men really behave. ‘Mermaids’ was a euphemism for prostitutes, in this case inverted and subverted to refer to wanton male lovers. Personally, I like to think it’s also a reference here to the Mermaid Tavern, the favoured haunt in Cheapside of so many poets and playwrights, from John Donne to Fletcher and Beaumont. If so, Isabella was writing a direct response to the flamboyance of the Elizabethan wits.

      Ye Virgins, ye from Cupid’s tents

      do bear away the foil

      Whose hearts as yet with raging love

      most painfully do boil …

      Beware of fair and painted talk,

      beware of flattering tongues:

      The Mermaids do pretend no good

      for all their pleasant songs.

      Some use the tears of crocodiles,

      contrary to their heart:

      And if they cannot always weep,

      they wet their cheeks by art.

      Ovid, within his Art of Love,

      doth teach them this same knack

      To wet their hand and touch their eyes,

      so oft as tears they lack.

      Here we have a woman’s-eye view of the swooning swains and untrustworthy lovers described by so many sonneteers in codpieces.

      Trust not a man at the first sight

      but try him well before:

      I wish all maids within their breasts

      to keep this thing in store.

      For trial shall declare his truth

      and show what he doth think,

      Whether he be a lover true,

      or do intend to shrink.

      And that’s an image, I think, you would not find in John Donne or Shakespeare. In another, more famous poem, Isabella leaves her rather scanty worldly wealth to the city of London, a place which is less the doomy moral theatre of Anne Askew than a throbbing cockpit of trade and good things:

      I, whole in body, and in minde,

      but very weake in Purse:

      Doo make, and write my Testament

      for feare it wyll be wurse …

      … First for their foode, I Butchers leave,

      that every day shall kyll:

      By Thames you shal have Brewers store,

      and Bakers at your wyll.

      And such as orders doo obserue,

      And pouring into London thrice a weeke:

      I leave two Streets, full fraught therwith,

      they neede not farre to seeke.

      Watlyng Streete, and Canwyck streete,

      I full of Wollen leave:

      And Linnen store in Friday streete,

      if they mee not deceave.

      And those which are of callyng such,

      that costlier they require:

      I Mercers leave, with silke so rich,

      as any would desyre.

      In Cheape of them, they store shal finde

      and likewise in that streete:

      I Goldsmithes leave, with Iuels such,

      as are for Ladies meete.

      And Plate to furnysh Cubbards with,

      full braue there shall you finde:

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