Lord Strange's Men and Their Plays

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Origins of Lord Strange's Men

PATRONAGE: A FAMILY TRADITION

Family tradition was fundamental to the creation and patronage of Lord Strange's Men. From the standpoint of the players who formed the company, aristocratic patronage was both a working condition dating back to the medieval period and, following the 1572 "Acte for the Punishement of Vacabondes," a legal necessity, since the Act declared that "Bearewardes, Comon Players in Enterludes & Minstrels, not belonging to any Baron of this Realme or towardes any other honorable Personage of greater Degree," were subject to punishment as "masterless men" akin to "Roges, Vacaboundes, and Sturdye Beggers." But from the standpoint of the company's patron, Ferdinando Stanley, a key motive for his backing of players lay in a tradition of patronage developed through previous generations of the family.

The Stanley Earls of Derby were landed aristocrats without equal in the northwest of En gland, where their vast estates centered in the two residences of Lathom and Knowsley in southwestern Lancashire. The founding member of the Stanley earldom was the same Lord Stanley familiar from the final scene on Bosworth Field in Shakespeare's Richard III. A cunning politician, Thomas Stanley was able to parlay his inherited position as 2nd Lord Stanley and Lord of the Isle of Man into an earldom from a grateful Henry VII in 1485. Although this Tudor elevation to the higher nobility brought him a windfall of lands and important offices, Stanley had managed to develop political status through two previous Yorkist reigns, serving both Edward IV and Richard III as a privy councillor and lord steward of the royal house hold (1471–85), while accumulating numerous local appointments across the kingdom and offices in Cheshire and Lancashire, where his family had held lands for several generations. A telling indication of his ability to maneuver his way through the upheavals of the time are his back-to-back appointments as constable of En gland, first by Richard III (1483) and then by Henry VII (1485/86). His marriages matched his political strategies. He first married Eleanor Neville, sister of Warwick the Kingmaker, and then in 1472, after her death, took a bride from the other side of the conflict, Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond and, after Bosworth, Henry VII. As the newly created Earl of Derby, Stanley bore the sword of state at Henry VII's coronation, presided at his wedding to Elizabeth of York, and stood as godfather to their son, Prince Arthur.

By 1489 Lord Thomas stood confirmed as a leading member of the new Tudor peerage and, "in consideration of good ser vice," became the landowner of estates in no fewer than fourteen counties, stretching from the northwest through the Midlands as far south as Somerset. In the same decade, the marriage of his eldest son, George Stanley, to the heiress of the Lestrange estates in Shropshire and the Welsh marches had brought further lands and the title Strange of Knokyn into the family. Thus was established "an extensive territorial empire that was to last virtually unchanged for over two centuries."

Numerous members of the gentry, nobility, and royalty in the later fifteenth century are known to have patronized performers, either for their own personal entertainment when in residence or as part of their traveling retinues. Such individual performers or small troupes seem to have toured on their own account as well, though the extent of their circuits can be difficult to trace because of the sporadic survival of records from the period. Members of a traveling retinue wore their lord's livery, thereby claiming his protection while upholding his honor at home, at court, or on the road. This traditional bond between medieval minstrel and lord underlies the later Elizabethan links between player and patron. In the case of the Stanley Earls of Derby, a tradition of patronage was developed to support the family's new prestige in the Tudor era and, we believe, to advance their influence in the northwest of En gland, at court, and, through touring, across the new Tudor nation.

Lord Thomas Stanley does not seem to have been an especially active patron of performers. The accounts of medieval house holds are more elusive than civic records, but one roll of Lord Thomas Stanley's accounts from an early stage in his career happens to be among those extant. In 1459–60 Lord Stanley paid wages for a piper, Thomas, and a trumpeter, Mordoc, attached to his Lancashire household, and there are external records for his "minstrel" or "minstrels" at King's Lynn in 1457–58 and the second a decade later, also for minstrels, in 1468–69 at Grimsby. The most consistent form of entertainment associated with Lord Stanley's name before and immediately after his acquisition of the Derby title is the itinerant bearward who was rewarded eleven times along the southeast coast not far from London between 1474 and 1491.

After his elevation to the earldom of Derby, three "mimi" under his patronage appeared at New College, Oxford, in mid-July 1485 and one or more of his "minstrels" showed up on their own at Rye in 1491, in Salisbury in 1498–99, and at Bridgwater in 1504. There is one more important notice of a Derby troupe, termed "histriones," at Shrewsbury in July 1495, in company with "histriones" of Prince Arthur and of the Earl of Shrewsbury. The occasion, which included a play in the Quarry, was a royal visit by the king and queen to Shrewsbury, where in 1485 Henry Tudor had crossed the Severn on his way to Bosworth and received the final messages of support from his Stanley allies. The king's visit to Shrewsbury, which perhaps commemorated events from a decade earlier, was part of the royal family's progress through the West Midlands on their way to the Derby residences of Knowsley and Lathom, where they were entertained from 28 July to 5 August. Of the events of that visit little is known, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the "histriones" who entertained the royal entourage at Shrewsbury may have been part of the lavish great house hospitality described in the early family verse chronicle known as "The Stanley Poem":

King Henry the Seaventh ... did lye their eight dayes,
And of all houses he gave it the most praise,
And his haule at Richmond he pulld downe all,
To make it up againe after Latham hall;
To speake of his fare was sure so excellente,
The king and his company so well contente,
I hard noble men say that were of his trayne,
They thought they should never se such faire againe.

...

The earles buttry and seller open night and day,
Come who would and welcome, no man was said nay.

Thomas Stanley's grandson, the second Earl Thomas, inherited the title in 1504. His offices and appointments were mostly confined to the northwest, where he principally resided. The only evidence of his patronage of house hold entertainers comes from the Shrewsbury bailiffs' accounts of 1517–21. The fact that Shrewsbury is just a few miles southwest of the residence he inherited from his mother at Knockin Castle may explain why the 2nd Earl's bearward and two entertainers ("histriones") appeared there. They may have made similar neighborhood appearances at Liverpool, adjacent to their patron's residence at Knowsley, or at Ormskirk, near Lathom in Lancashire, but no early sixteenth-century civic accounts survive for either of those towns. The county of Lancashire in this period lacked the diversified cultural life that some southern regions enjoyed. Its parishes were large and somewhat isolated, and its towns were relatively small. The terrain was difficult and underpopulated, with marshland near the coast and higher moorlands to the north and east. Even in the later sixteenth century and early seventeenth, entertainment in the region centered on the private residences of the Lancashire gentry, although a vigorous popular appetite for bearbaiting can be traced in ecclesiastical court records. The first two Derby earls were probably typical of other Lancashire nobility in their limited patronage of entertainers.

There is a notable change in attitude toward patronage discernible in the records for the 3rd Earl of Derby's entertainers that illustrates Edward Stanley's vision of expanding family influence through the use of traveling performers. His troupes appear to have established a wide range of travel, their payments appearing at twenty-two locations, including several in the northeast. Forty-three performances have been found so far, starting with the earliest, to his "ludatores" at Selby Abbey in 1522–23, a year or two after he succeeded as Earl of Derby.

During the earlier years of his long tenure of the earldom, Edward seems to have maintained the modest pattern of patronage inherited from his father. Stanley "histriones" appeared annually at Shrewsbury near the estate at Knockin, and Derby minstrels are found in the Southampton records for 1526–27. But during these formative years, young Edward was a ward in the house hold of Cardinal Wolsey, and Wolsey's opulent lifestyle may have influenced the magnificent house hold and level of hospitality that the 3rd Earl was later to establish for himself in the northwest. After Wolsey's fall in 1529, Edward was married to Dorothy Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, and shortly thereafter was granted livery of his own lands in January 1530/31. He continued to be active at court and brought renewed prominence to the Stanleys as a power in the north when, during the Pilgrimage of Grace, he was granted extraordinary powers in Lancashire. Just as the 1st Earl's role at Bosworth brought power and titles to the family, so Lord Edward's cautious support of the Crown in 1536 resulted in a "combination of territorial and political predominance ... unique in mid-Tudor En gland."

It is perhaps no coincidence that the decade of the 3rd Earl's rise to power, 1530–40, was the most active for his touring entertainers. Although the ever-popular bearward continued to circulate wearing Derby livery, a troupe of players under Derby's patronage becomes distinguishable in the English records for several towns in the 1530s. Pursuing one of the most popular performance circuits in East Anglia, they were touring a region where the patron's in-laws, the Howards, held sway, not far from London and the court. The performance locations—Ipswich, Bury St. Edmund's, Cambridge, Dunmow, and Thetford, where the Latin records use the term "jocatores"—were all new to Derby entertainers. Also new were Bristol and the Seymour home at Wolfhall in the southwest, Leicester in the Midlands, and Skipton Castle in the northeast.

The most active years on record for Derby's troupe of players seem to coincide with a time of strong connection with the south in their patron's life, either through a continuing need to appear at court or through affiliation in East Anglia with his first wife's family. There is a noticeable gap in the record in the 1540s and 1550s. It appears that with the rise of a Protestant regime in London, Derby infrequently attended Privy Council meetings and became less interested in life at court than in establishing a splendid lifestyle in his own northern power base. By the 1560s, Christopher Haigh explains, "the earl had a house hold staff of 120, and it cost £1,500 a year to feed this vast concourse and the family and its guests. The Stanley house hold formed the core of the earl's local power, and the patronage he provided gave him considerable influence over the county gentry." It is impossible to determine what role entertainers played in this great Lancashire house hold, since most of the family's records have been destroyed, many probably during the siege of Lathom in the Civil War. Only one manuscript survives for the 3rd Earl's era, an account of his expenses in 1560–61 as well as his house hold regulations for 1568. But the expenses are not itemized, so the summary totals for servants' livery and wages cannot be broken down further to help in the search for entertainers retained by the earl. What the totals do indicate is that he spent at least seven weeks and four days "in progress" to and from London. Most of the year his house hold was likely in Lancashire, where he was famous for his lavish hospitality. (William Camden noted in his succinct eulogy that with the 3rd Earl's death "the glory of Hospitality" was "layd asleepe.")

The evidence for Derby entertainers in other extant 1550s and 1560s sources is fragmentary. In the county records of Cheshire and Lancashire, we find no trace of them, although it must be admitted that almost no house hold or civic accounts survive in that region to shed light on the touring players of the period. Elsewhere players under Derby's patronage show up at Newcastle upon Tyne in the spring of 1566 and at New Romney sometime during 1569–70.

That other traditional entertainer type, the minstrel, was affiliated still, however loosely, with Derby's retinue in this period. "The Lament of Richard Sheale," a ballad surviving in manuscript, pays tribute to Sheale the minstrel's "good lord & master, whom I sarve / In my greatist povertie from me dyd neuer swarve, / But dyd wryt for me frendly aftar a lovyng facion, / And my lord Strang also on me dyde tak compassion." Sheale's patron and "good lord" was Edward, the 3rd Earl, and Lord Strange was Henry, his eldest son and heir. One of Sheale's poems makes it clear that his task was not just to compose poems but to "syng," to offer "myrry tawke," and to "play the myrry knave." Andrew Taylor has proposed Sheale as the possible author of "The Stanley Poem," the longest and most elaborate in the numerous ballads and sagas devoted to the Stanley family.

Like the poems in similar cycles celebrating the Percys and the Howards, these works were produced either by the minstrels who performed them or by "the dependents of the great families whose deeds they celebrated." Dating for the most part from the mid-Tudor period, these poems—which include "The Rose of En gland," "The Song of the Lady Bessy," "Flodden Field," "Scottish Field," and "The Stanley Poem"—recount the family's history from its mythical origins in the eagle-borne Oskell, 1st Lord Lathom, through Stanley heroics at Bosworth, Flodden, and Tournay, to the largesse of Earl Edward. They laud the family's power in Lancashire and Cheshire and cement the links between leading gentry and loyal supporters in the region. While the ballad form of these works suggests that they may have been sung or recited at the great houses of Lancashire, the existence of multiple manuscript variants indicates that the Stanley legend circulated widely in the family's domain and beyond.

The compassionate support of the 3rd Earl's son, Henry, Lord Strange, was praised by Sheale alongside his father's. Like his father's, Henry's roots, through family, marriage, and later office appointments, were in the northwest, but his formative years and early career were influenced by court culture and its splendors. Edward's eldest son by his first wife, Dorothy Howard, Henry Stanley, spent much of his youth at court as companion to Edward VI and as a gentleman of the privy chamber, both to Edward and to Philip I. Revels accounts for March 1546/47 record the making of "pleyers garmentes for the Kinges person, the duke of Sulffolke & my lorde straunge." In 1555 he married Margaret, daughter of Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland. Through her mother, Lady Eleanor Brandon, a daughter of Henry VIII's sister Mary, Margaret Clifford was a second cousin to Elizabeth I and thus a possible claimant to the throne. Intended to create an alliance between two of the most powerful families in the Catholic north, the marriage was celebrated in a lavish ceremony at Whitehall in the presence of Mary and Philip. Not long after his marriage, Henry bore the sword of state at the feast of St. George.

In January 1558/59 he was summoned to Parliament and began, with his young wife, to lead a prominent life at the court of the new queen, Elizabeth. He led a pro cession of one thousand horse through Fleet Street to escort a French embassy to court in 1561, and he was at the side of his old friend from the court of Edward VI, Sir Robert Dudley, when Dudley was created Earl of Leicester in 1564. That same year he accompanied Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, and "diuerse knights and gentlemen" on an embassy to France to invest Charles IX with the Order of the Garter. Lady Strange was among the ladies in waiting when the queen visited Cambridge in 1564 and 1566, and Lord Strange served as a member of the advance party preparing the queen's visit to Oxford; he was awarded on honorary M.A. during the festivities.