In a book celebrating bizarre performers through the centuries, Ricky Jay makes the claim that Banks and his horse, Morocco, are “the most mentioned entertainers of Elizabethan times.”1 He may be right. The first report of this famous animal comes in 1591; in 1656, he is still being referred to (by Samuel Holland) as “the four-legg’d wonder of the world.”2 The animal and its trainer are cited in many works of the English Renaissance. There are at least seventy instances of the horse’s act being described or alluded to. These references have been collected by a number of scholars over the years—a tradition beginning with J. O. Halliwell-Phillips in an 1879 account. Halliwell-Phillips and S. H. Atkins (1934) have produced long lists of allusions to Morocco, augmented with generous quotations.3 Such an approach is fitting for their essentially bibliographical projects. But it would not be possible discursively to account for all of the early modern allusions to Banks and his horse in a single article: there are too many references to cover. A discussion that attempts to account for the power of the Morocco myth must be selective.
Little is known about the horse’s owner, Banks, and the ultimate fate of the horse itself. Holland goes on to say that horse and master traveled to Rome where “they were both burned by the commandment of the Pope.”4 This notion of Inquisition martyrdom is not credible: Banks himself is known to have lived well into the 1630s, and the horse and he died separately (ODNB). In Marston’s play of 1601, Iacke Drums Entertainment, Planet mocks the amorous pretences of Brabant Junior: the would-be lover’s move on Camelia “shall be Cronicled next after the death of Bankes his Horse.”5 There was a horse called Morocco that performed all manner of stunts. But the reports of the actions are confused and often obviously representational rather than mimetic. Despite Planet’s jibe and Holland’s relation of a slaughter, Morocco defies straightforward chronicling. In 1598, the animal was well known enough to be referred to as “the dauncing Horse” in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.6 Thomas Bastard tells us, in another 1598 publication, that Morocco “can fight, and pisse, and daunce, and lie.”7 The improbable litany of unerring abilities is added to by Richard Braithwait in a 1615 text: the horse can “know an honest woman from a whoore.”8 All these qualities are non-normative. Human-like abilities are being claimed for this exotic horse, the mere name of which is suggestive of non-European otherness. More pressingly, it is apparent that the stunts described are politically and socially loaded. Honesty, probity, and sexual continence are all judged by this animal. That it takes a horse to establish guilt or otherwise is implicitly satirical, for this conveys an impression that early modern society does not feel fit to judge itself. There is little real mystery regarding the abilities of the horse. A colorful, 1926 account of Ben Jonson’s London by N. Zwager asserts that any “modern trained circus-horse might do the same” tricks as the one trained by Banks, and a historian of The English Circus, Ruth Manning-Sanders, writes in a 1952 book that Morocco’s “tricks were not beyond the achievement of any little pony in the smallest of tenting circuses to-day.”9 This point may be made to celebrate advances in animal training in subsequent centuries, but it has to be accepted that the symbolic significance of Morocco outweighs any corporeal achievements.
It is the metaphorical resonances of Morocco’s appearance on the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1601—what Arthur Freeman, in a 1978 book about Elizabethan quirks, calls “the high point of a distinguished career”—that inform this chapter.10 A range of contemporary texts allude to this sensational climb by the horse. When the varying accounts are assessed together, I argue, a palimpsest of Renaissance anxieties becomes apparent. The extraordinary, improbable feat focuses attention on St. Paul’s and illuminates the Cathedral’s central role in early modern divergences of ideological and theological belief. Renaissance England’s eye often followed the spectacular—charavaris, executions, freak shows. Contemporary relations of such spectacular displays often bring attention to fissures in society. These fissures would continue to cause instability in early modern England—for as long as these gulfs in society remained open, Morocco’s eye-turning act would be remembered. Morocco brings attention to political and religious fissures: the horse’s extraordinary equine displays of climbing and dancing bring the Renaissance eye onto cruxes it may have otherwise ignored.
In his General System of Horsemanship, written during the Interregnum that he deplored, William Cavendish argues for the validity of training horses to dance. He expects to be met with skepticism: “Some wagg perhaps will ask, what is a horse good for that can do nothing but dance and play tricks?”11 Cavendish’s remark provides the first indication of what were to be the prevailing critical opinions of Banks and his horse in subsequent centuries. It is notable that a rare eighteenth-century reference to Banks comes in James Caulfield’s Blackguardiana, or A Dictionary of Rogues.12 In this Georgian encyclopedia of the picaresque, Morocco’s trainer is lumped in with fictional and historical unsavories such as Falstaff; Mary Frith, the cross-dressing “virago”; and Jonathan Wild. This placement is a critique of Banks, one that that banishes him and his horse to the seedier annals of counter-cultural history. Writing in 1845, Joseph Hunter refuses to dirty his hands with the Morocco legend. Hunter mentions it in a work that provides background information on Shakespearean plays, but only briefly, for “Quite enough has been done for the illustration of this subject.”13 The frustration felt by curious, contemporary readers of Hunter can easily be imagined. Early modern culture was more susceptible to the insinuations and nuances suggested by an extraordinary animal.
Normally, the interest in extraordinary creatures is linked to anthropocentric concerns. Bosola, in Webster’s play, The Duchess of Malfi (first published in 1623), points to freakish animals that have body parts akin to men’s; such “prodegys” highlight problems with mankind: “Man stands amaz’d to see his deformity / In any other creature but himselfe.”14 Morocco is linked to the discourse of monstrosity—he is seen as one of the monsters cited by Bosola—in the period.15 The prodigious element of Morocco’s act comes in the perceived nonanimal abilities he displays. There is a loaded analysis of the similarity between human and nonhuman animals in Godfrey Goodman’s 1622 work, The Creatvres Praysing God. The discussion tells us that when animals and birds bleat, chirp, or neigh they are engaging in a form of divine worship. This is argued in quite rational Christian terms: “as there is a religion aboue man, the religion of Angels, so there may be a religion beneath man, the religion of dumbe Creatures.”16 Going further into the details of Goodman’s unique work, one can see a satiric energy fired by Jacobean religious conflicts. Goodman writes that animals are instinctively and intrinsically close to the Creator: “they are not troubled or disquieted in their owne thoughts (as we are) that they should be admonished by outward ceremonies.”17 This seems, at first, to be a jibe at the spectacular, outward displays of the Catholic and Anglican Churches that so angered reforming theologians. However, Goodman, in 1628, was reported to Charles I by William Prynne for reinstating colored images of Christ onto the altar of a church at Windsor (ODNB). Such a stunt was seen as Romish by enthusiastic reformers such as Prynne. The message of Goodman’s prose, when seen in this context, seems to be that showy displays of religiousness do little harm—images will not distract a Christian from an edifying union with the spiritual God. Goodman has earned a posthumous reputation for toleration.18 It seems, from this tract’s animal imagery, that persons should be free to worship their God in whatever manner they choose—with or without harmless colored images of Christ. In comparison with all believers’ love and subjection to God above, Goodman’s text implies, the worldly superficialities of worship are irrelevant and trivial.
Simon Forman, in a 1591 pamphlet, presses a more personal credo. But a traditional, godly concern is professed as he comments on animals: he writes that “all the creatures of God manifest his power and glory, each one in his kinde and nature.”19 This, however, treats the animals as if they were mere objects—these fauna are no different from the flora that also serve as signifiers of God’s omnipotence. Goodman’s formulation is different because, there, the beasts are capable of an independent agency. This capacity for agency is a direct tribute to the Almighty—not a preordained response. Goodman’s animals are, in short, more human than Forman’s animals. I have discussed the implications of Goodman’s argument here because its intervention, through animal imagery, in early modern religious arguments resembles the ways in which Morocco’s famed climb to the top of St. Paul’s also participates in crucial contemporary religious and spiritual debate.
In a 2006 book chapter, which is to date the only sustained reading of Morocco that transcends the merely antiquarian, Erica Fudge does not engage with Goodman because it is not relevant to her take on the phenomenon of Banks and his performing quadruped. Instead, she is keen to stress that Renaissance writers saw that the horse had human qualities—a possible mental faculty that was as human as animal.20 Goodman has no interest in animals’ brain power. The “dumbe” creatures praise their maker through unconscious means. Fudge’s essay discusses the early modern bewilderment with the powers of Morocco, concluding that the animal worked to blur distinctions between reason and unreason, human and animal. This explains, for Fudge, the wide-ranging Renaissance preoccupation with Banks and his horse: “the very popularity of Morocco reveals a fascination, I think with the mere potential for animal intelligence in the period.”21 This chapter does something different; as with Goodman’s 1622 text, no interest is shown here as to whether or not Morocco has some momentous or supernatural abilities. For me, the crucial question involves the political and religious ramifications of references to his appearance at the top of St. Paul’s. It is argued here that this burlesque entertainment of the animal was a gaudy spectacle, a spectacle that drew attention to the insecurities caused by damaging theological fissures in the Renaissance. Two entities, St. Paul’s Cathedral and religion itself, are humiliated by Banks and Morocco. In numerous texts, the horse is seen as transgressive and unholy. It is associated with sleight of hand; it can be appropriated for either Catholic or extreme Protestant point-scoring; and it signifies a distraction from the proper, Christian business of working for an efficient, responsible body politic. The power of Morocco is that this irreverent spectacle greatly damages St. Paul’s as a uniting point, and, consequently, controversies about the horse unhinge the notion of a single political and religious identity for England.
The Compromised St. Paul’s
The Owles Almanacke of 1618 gives a date for Morocco’s ascension of St. Paul’s. The work, a satirical piece of mock-astrology that laments the past and current follies of a flippant “Great Britaine,” has been described as a comic masterwork and as “the most elaborate of all English prognostications.”22 But this work conveys information about Morocco’s climb in a most straightforward manner, with a brevity that contrasts with other, lengthier relations of the unworldly equine feat. For the more grandiose elements of the comedy to work, a certain accuracy in the dating of previous events is necessary. So, without much ado, the “Owl” tells us that it has been seventeen years “Since the dancing horse stood on the top of Powles, whilst a number of braying Asses stood braying below.”23 The masses who patronized the event are animalized “Asses” with nothing better to do. Spectators of the horse are tainted as animal—a horse that seems to have human capacities criticizes the bestial, herd-like congregation of idle Londoners. The condemnation of Banks’s sacrilege of the Church is to the fore. The date of Morocco’s appearance on top of St. Paul’s Cathedral can be dated more precisely because of a reference to the event in a letter by John Chamberlain, dating from 3 February 1601. That morning, according to Chamberlain, “another caried up a horse and rode upon him on the top of Powles steeple.”24 The word “caried” may imply that Morocco was elevated up the tower with some sort of harness, but the more striking point is the strangeness of the notion of people carrying a horse—it is more usual for people to be “caried” by horses. Chamberlain’s relation of the episode to his friend, the diplomat Dudley Carleton, is one of a number of quite immediate cultural representations of the horse’s sensational climbing feat. In Thomas Dekker’s 1602 play, Satiromastix, the character Horace—apparently a cipher for Ben Jonson—notes with awe that he has “heard a the horses walking a’the top of Paules.”25 Horace’s allusion to the horse’s achievement comes amid a play that is immersed in immediately topical affairs.26 (A [still] unpublished play written around 1601, Arabia Sitiens, also seems to allude to the climb.)27 But a 1654 notice by Edmund Gayton indicates that the climb had a resonance that exceeded a narrow frame of history.
At the very end of his Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot, a lengthy explication and critique of Cervantes’s 1605 novel, Gayton presents a number of poems, spoken in first person by figures from the past.28 One of these figures is Morocco. In “his” poem, “Bancks his Horse to Rosinant,” Morocco boasts about his huge fame and renown, contrasting his abilities with the mediocrities of Rosinant (Don Quixote’s horse—the name means “hack”):
Thou top of Nowles
Of hils hast oft been seen, I top of Paules.
To Smythfield Horses I stood there the wonder,
I only was at top, more have been under.29
The passage draws Morocco as a sexually potent figure, one who will force his way on “top,” unlike those kept “under.” This recalls the language of Thomas Dekker, in his 1608 exposé of London criminality, Lanthorne and Candle-light. In that work, Dekker describes the habits of a deceitful Smithfield horse-trader who lies about the age of the horse he is selling: “he clappes his hand presently on the buttock of the beast.”30 The trader is presenting a physical sign of dominance and mastery over the beast, professing to have an insight into its age and character. With its buttocks firmly held by an owning superior, the Smithfield horse is a subject for an almost sexual ownership, whereas Morocco, in Gayton’s formulation, retains intrinsic agency and identity. Morocco cannot be contained in a humiliating, Smithfield-like manner—he is ageless, haughty, sexually proactive, and visible on the summit of peaks. In Gayton’s poem, Banks’s horse climbs, in contradistinction to the “Smythfield Horses” who are led, not leading and who remain low. The anonymous horses that made up Morocco’s spectators—had they existed—would have been sold at Smithfield Fair, the largest and seediest early modern horse market. Economic historians agree with Thomas Dekker. They, too, argue that Smithfield Fair was rife with disingenuous, mendacious selling. In the words of Peter Edwards, this fair “certainly attracted shady characters from all over the country, intent on selling stolen animals or palming off worn-out jades at inflated prices.”31 Morocco is constructed as a figure of awe for these put-upon animals; he is better than the horses of the seedy market, distinguished by a name, a “voice,” and the astonishing ability to climb buildings. The reason, at least partially, for the survival of the legend of Morocco’s climb of St. Paul’s is in the symbolic importance of the feat in relation to the Cathedral itself. For its true metaphorical significance to become apparent, Banks’s horse’s stunt has to be contextualized within a century of the edifice’s history.
St. Paul’s was a symbol of stability for pre-Elizabethan England. It had played a role in London life for nearly a millennium, being built by King Ethelbert of Kent for Bishop Mellitus in c. 607.32 As the Elizabethan antiquarian John Stow puts it in a history of London, “Ethelbert (King of Kent) builded in the Citie of London, Saint Pauls, Church wherein Melitus began to be Bishop.”33 For Stow, the Church’s foundation is a seminal marker on the long road to the late Tudor contentment attendant upon the official establishment of religious stability—the focus on the role of the Bishop stresses continuity from the past to the present. A 1252 drawing by Matthew Paris, representing London as seen from a vantage point outside the walls, has the Church’s enormous steeple prominent in the image’s center. So, St. Paul’s significance is symbolically presented as being manifest outside as well as inside the city walls.34 The importance of St. Paul’s to environs beyond London is again emphasized in graffiti from the Middle Ages. Ashwell Church, in Herts, had a representation of the Church scratched into its wall. It is believed that the graffiti was produced sometime during the 1300s.35 The image features a body of the Church which is ten inches high—crucially, however, the steeple adds a further six inches. The Church’s steeple-enhanced enormity lasted until 1561.
At the time of Elizabeth’s ascension in 1558 the edifice was huge, with the steeple standing pointedly over the city. A copper-plate engraving, discovered only in the late-1990s but dating from the mid-1550s, allows us to appreciate the phallocentric enormity of Paul’s, with its steeple intact, for the first time.36 But the steeple was destroyed on the afternoon of June 4, 1561, starting a process of decline for Paul’s as a unifying center for the nation. (The lasting significance of this episode is—like Morocco’s climb—illustrated by a reference to the event in Gayton’s 1654 exposition, Pleasant Notes.)37 A pamphlet produced hurriedly in the aftermath of the firestorm, The True Report of the Burnyng of the Steple and Churche of Poules, tells us soberly that the lightning “did first smight ye top of Paules steple, and . . . finding the timber very old & drie, did kindle ye same.”38 This practical account is, however, undermined by the same work’s insistence that the lightning was really proof of God’s “deserued wrath and indignacio[n].”39 The precise motivation for the Lord’s vengeance is not stated. Different people read the burning variously: as the historian, E. M. Tenison, writes, “Catholics took it as a judgement upon Queen Elizabeth for her heresy; while Protestants thought it a sign of Heaven’s favor that only a portion of the Cathedral was injured.”40 In a 1607 work, Simon Harward tries to explain the technical causes of lightning, but his assessment of data is colored by religious prejudice. Harward admits that the burning of St. Paul’s steeple was some sort of “fearefull punishmente” but asserts that, numerically, disastrous lightning strikes “farre greater haue bin shewed, heretofore in the time of Popery and blindnesse.”41 So, even in texts that are claimed as products of quasi-scientific objectivity, an overtly sectarian imperative is addressed when this Cathedral is in focus. There was already an awareness of this dual reading of the fire in the seventeenth century. St. Paul’s could not unite the nation now—it would be a locus for diverging political and theological thought throughout this traumatic period.
In a History of the Reformation (1674), Peter Heylen writes that Protestants “affirmed it [the lightning strike] for a just judgment of God upon an old Idolatrous Fabrick, not thoroughly reformed and purged from its Superstitions . . . The Papists on the other side ascribe it to some practice of the Zuinglian Faction.”42 “Zuinglian” is a reference to the Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531).43 His followers believed, for example, that Christ was never present at Mass celebrations—hence, those influenced by this theological thinking are poles apart from Catholicism.44 Conflict between opposite sides mars English society and the legacy of St. Paul’s, it is implied, with the broken steeple becoming a sign of disaffection rather than the righteous pride that it represented in its pre-lightning strike heyday. At the very least, Heylen’s remark shows the continuing interest in the lightning strike—he goes on to relate the apocryphal tale that the careless workmanship of “an old Plumber” led to the beginning of the fire, as if it is a contemporary controversy.45 More crucially, Heylen’s notice of the blame game between religious interests serves as a Restoration acknowledgment that political and theological fissures can affect human interpretations of natural occurrences. The suggestion is that religious conflict adversely affects the objectivity of the senses. The compromised St. Paul’s is, in other words, a symbol of England’s theological divisions.
A number of State Papers from 1561 describe Elizabeth I’s efforts to involve the Lord Mayor of London and Archbishop Parker in a scheme to have the steeple replaced.46 This idea of collaboration is taken up in Holinshed’s Chronicles, first published in 1577. In the chronicle, while stressing the cooperation offered by the clergy, the Lord Mayor, and ordinary citizens, Holinshed marvels how Elizabeth “of her most gratious disposition . . . [gave] a warrant for a thousand load of timber, to be taken out of hir maiesties woods.”47 The loss of the steeple, it is implied, has hurt the Queen herself, to the point where the natural infrastructure of her own realm must be plundered to restore the Cathedral to the state it was in “at the first.”48 Holinshed goes on to underline a sense of cooperation between regions (ignoring the divisions that would lead to the Northern Rebellion a decade later), as “the whole roofe and frame of the said church was made in Yorkeshire and brought by sea to London.”49 Annabel Patterson has argued that the Chronicles are “not presented as a state history, but rather as a project of civic consciousness.”50 But Holinshed’s stress on the material links—in the form of timber for the steeple—between north and south does go some way to imagining a state that is oiled by unity throughout its geographical range. Although this constitutes a possibly fantastic notion, it is still one that holds out the prospect of national harmony in the face of increasing divisions and divergences.
Despite his conspicuous praise for the Elizabethan regime’s efforts to rectify the lightning damage, Holinshed notes that the steeple has not been replaced—not enough money has been raised. The subsequent damage to the City’s morale can be detected in a ballad published in the aftermath of the 1561 disaster. The Burning of Paules narrates how “the blazing fire . . . burnt S. Powles his lofty spyre.”51 This language discovers the Church as a damaged male figure, an entity newly bereft of its pre-Elizabethan, phallocentric pride. In an unusual southward-looking drawing of London from the early 1600s, considerable artistic license is needed to locate St. Paul’s right at the center of the city’s skyline and, by extension, the population’s consciousness. Herbert Berry explains that the anonymous drawing, “The View of London From the North,” “purports . . . to show the city as one would see it in a photograph.”52 But, Berry continues, the artist “made the tower of St. Paul’s Cathedral the middle of his drawing, left to right, although that tower actually stood well east of the middle of his topography.”53 Artificial, non-naturalistic drawing is required to centralize St. Paul’s: without its once enormous topping, it does not stand out from the fuzziness of London’s canopy of pinnacles and roofs. A fully erect Cathedral would have loomed large in any drawing of London’s skyscape, wherever it was placed in a visual representation. The reduction of the Cathedral’s splendor is of significance for a reading of Banks’s horse’s appearance at the top of the wooden tower that replaced the lamented steeple. As Edward Sugden notes in his Topographical Dictionary, “even after the destruction of its lofty spire, [St. Paul’s] was the most conspicuous object in the city.”54 But it was a conspicuously compromised object, as Dekker asserts in The Dead Terme (1608). In that work, St. Paul’s is personified and speaks generally of the abuses of the age, which it is doomed to watch in passivity. A later work by Henrie Farley, The Complaint of Pavles (1616), also has a personified Church. Humiliated, St. Paul’s “speaks” about its “polled steeple” and “bald pate.”55 “Polled” means hornless—again the image of phallocentric loss is paramount (OED). St. Paul’s goes on to say that it is “Cracked, defaced, rent, and almost vndone.”56 The neglect has left the Church “almost vndone” like a virgin who has come close to being raped. The word “almost” indicates the Farley pamphlet’s campaigning intent—it is not too late yet to restore this crucial London landmark.
Another 1616 piece on St. Paul’s, this one anonymous, shows on its frontispiece a speaker lecturing a crowd at St. Paul’s Cross—a regular location for early modern sermons.57 Out of all proportion with the speaker in the woodcut, St. Paul’s seems very small indeed—the Church has become diminished in relation to the people who use it for their own purposes. To reiterate the point, the same illustration is reproduced later on in the pamphlet.58 In Dekker’s work, the greatest woe of all is the legacy of Morocco’s climb—a climb that humiliated the church. St. Paul’s speaks bitterly of the horse, which “in despight they brought to Trample vpon me.”59 This reference taints Morocco as an instrument of disrespect, stamping all over the gelded Cathedral’s authority. In A Search for Money (1609), William Rowley remarks on Morocco’s high-altitude spectacle less bitterly than Dekker but with an equal sense of the event’s inherent ungodliness. For Rowley, Morocco’s feat—“transforming the top of Paules into a stable”—was a “madde voiage.”60 Rowley’s language is fantastic, sensationalist, reminiscent of the hyperbole of Renaissance prose romance, underlining the improbability of the event. There is a suggestion that the climb is sacrilegious: a Cathedral steeple should be the closest point in London to God, but instead it is a stable, a place where an animal excretes, feeds, and sleeps. In other words, classificatory humiliation is at work here. This is bodied forth by an expressed confusion about the use of space—a lofty, symbolic asset is being appropriated for the lowly purpose of animal accommodation. Rowley’s hyperbole about a bestial annexation of St. Paul’s is an exaggerated hint at a secular over-running of the Cathedral by nonreligious forces—a sidelining of St. Paul’s central, spiritual importance. This lessening of the significance may be seen when comparing Banks’s horse’s appearance with an episode in the doomed Essex rebellion—which, occurring on Sunday, February 8, 1601, took place only a fortnight or so after Morocco’s presumed feat.61 In a contemporary letter, Vincent Hussey reports that notification of the Essex “affray . . . drew the Lord Mayor, sherriffs, and aldermen from the sermon at Paul’s to put the city at arms, and send force to Whitehall to defend the Queen.”62 The Cathedral is not the focus for action in London anymore—it is now a place to be left whenever there is any danger to the metropolis or to the sovereign. It is becoming marginalized, left to the wiles of the lower sorts with their strange, outrageous stunts. Similarly, a concern to protect the Cathedral at this time is singularly absent from the state papers.
Seventy years after the burning and thirty years after Morocco’s stunt—which surely could not have taken place if a steeple rather than a wooden tower announced the Cathedral’s presence to the surrounding area—the steeple had still not been replaced. The edifice was increasingly the scene of manifest discourtesy for London’s citizens, who—in the words of the historian, Charles Carlton—used the edifice as “a public convenience, selling labor and sex, carrying animal carcasses through the nave (a shortcut) and even moving their bowels inside their church.”63 Consumption and excretion (the basest animal functions) abound in the onetime epicenter of lofty splendor. But now there was some concern from the State about the condition of the Cathedral. Charles I set up a commission in 1631 to raise cash to repair the Cathedral back to former glories.64 In a proclamation, the King worries about “dishonour” that could “fall vpon Vs and the whole Nation” by the neglect of “so ancient a Monument.”65 The “nation” did not back the commission, which was headed by Archbishop William Laud. As the approving Royalists Richard Barker and Edward Phillips write in a 1665 Chronicle, “none was more industrious than the learned Doctor Laud.”66 Like Laud himself, however, the Church project was controversial. There was considerable debate as to whether an ostentatious symbol of “idolatry” and “superstition” should be maintained at all. According to Roger Lockyer, “outside London there was no great willingness to contribute” to Laud’s commission.67 The fiscal carefulness of the targeted citizens was complemented by the ideological objections to the project. The Holinshed notion of a country uniting to repair St. Paul’s was shattered.
Two years later, in 1633, Charles published a further document of anxiety, sharply reminding subjects that the Cathedral could “fall to the ground, which is feared, if there be not a timely care of repaire therof.”68 Again, little was achieved—masses of cash were not forthcoming from the populace. William Dugdale’s massive folio in twelves, The History of St. Pauls Cathedral (1658), is the ultimate statement of lament for the church’s decline. Naturally, the work complains about the fact that previous generations have failed to restore the Church to its former glory: “the Steeple, though divers modells were then made of it, was let alone.”69 But this work’s lasting legacy is the provision of several extraordinarily detailed, large-format engravings by Wenceslaus Hollar.70 Four of these double-leaf illustrations, gathered together between sigs Nn2v and Oo1r, show the exterior of St. Paul’s as it appears in the 1650s. But a representation of how it would look with the steeple is presented between sigs L12v and Mm1r. Both Dudgale and Hollar were Royalists, disenfranchised entirely from Commonwealth society. Dugdale is known to have attended Charles I at the King’s refuge in Oxford in the early 1640s.71 He writes in a later letter that the execution of the King is “the shame of the English nation to this and future ages.”72 Hollar, like many Royalists, spent a number of years on the Continent during the Interregnum that disturbed his career in Britain.73 He was so close to the Caroline monarchy that he taught Prince Charles, later Charles II, to draw.74 Given this, the fantasy image of a restored St. Paul’s seems like a fruitless dream, an elaborate mirage of holy, Royal London. This impression becomes firmer when the second edition of the work is compared to the first. The second edition of The History of St. Paul’s does not appear until 1716.75 All the illustrations are again reproduced. But now they have lost much of their detail. This may be due to less competent engraving, but the impression given is that deftly realizing an idealized Church simply does not matter as importantly. The monarchy is fairly secure, and the old controversy about St. Paul’s is out of date. After the decrepit St. Paul’s was totally demolished by the Great Fire of 1666, a totally new design was chosen by Christopher Wren.76 The new cupola style (to this day) is curved, round. It is no longer a tall, thin focused object, a centralizing locus for the cultural longings and projections of the nation. A 1770 pen and watercolor representation of St. Paul’s, by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm (1733–1794), serves to emphasize the Church’s new, less domineering role in the London skyline.77 There, the rounded tower blends in harmoniously with London life, its grayness merging listlessly into the sky; it is only an unobtrusive backdrop to the scant livestock and idle children playing, and the perspective from which the image is drawn results in the Church’s highest point being at the same level as the trees. Today, Wren’s Restoration rebuild of St. Paul’s stands ever-impressively at one end of the Millennium Bridge over the Thames. But it competes for attention with all manner of surrounding skyscrapers—shrines to capitalism and secularism. The visual and social role of St. Paul’s in the modern city cannot be compared to its domineering status in early modern London. St. Paul’s does not dominate the post-Caroline skyline as it had dominated the pre-1561 physical and mental landscape.
Other religions and sects had eroded away at the centrality of the High Church—many seventeenth-century references to Morocco’s climb seem to sum up this reduction in St. Paul’s Cathedral’s symbolic, omnipresent importance. In his 1604 satire, The Blacke Booke, Thomas Middleton gives a voice to the Devil. The diabolical figure asserts that he is quite likely to be seen in the vicinity of the Cathedral:
May not the Diuell, I pray you, walke in Powles / as well as the Horse goe a toppe of Powles, for I am sure I was not farre from his keeper.78
The association between Banks (the horse’s “keeper”) and the Devil is made quite clearly here: the presence of both in the Cathedral makes them spatially close, but the implication is that they are also proximate in terms of character. This taints Banks in a particularly unsettling manner: it is this representation of Banks and Morocco as a flawed cultural package that the reader should bear in mind in the next section of the chapter. This examines Morocco’s satiric intervention in the anti-Spanish discourses of the time.
Nationality in Crisis
Anti-Spanish xenophobia and anti-Catholicism—the two are linked indelibly—feature prominently in many aspects of early modern English culture. A. J. Hoenselaars, a critic focusing on the representation of non-English peoples in Renaissance drama, dates the strengthening of English antipathy to Spain to the marriage of Philip II to Mary Tudor in the mid-1550s.79 Laura Hunt Yungblut, a specialist on emigration to England, dates the increase in hatred of Spain to the same date, but stresses that this antipathy was apparent “most especially in London and the south east.”80 St. Paul’s, then, was located right at the epicenter of an area where political and sectarian unease was rife. The antipathy continued for decades. During the last two decades of Elizabeth’s rule—with Armada attacks always seemingly imminent—the fear of Spain intensified. The Banks and Morocco exhibition exploited this fear, emphasizing the virtues of keeping one’s distance from Spain. The horse expressed disgust at the mention of the King of Spain—so famous was Morocco’s contempt for Philip II that it had become proverbial. In his 1596 work, Have With Yov to Saffron-Walden, Thomas Nashe needs a secure symbol to underscore the inevitability of a number of scenarios. Morocco’s hatred of Spain is chosen as a yardstick of certainty: “as true as Bankes his Horse knowes a Spaniard from an English-man.”81 However, both the performance of Morocco’s proverbial distaste for Spain and nostalgic references to the act depend on contexts of place and time: Banks does not (according to known references) show the Spain-hating act in France, where anti-Spanish distaste was less significant than in England, and English commentators do not refer to the stunt when the nation is at peace with Spain.
The Treaty of London (1604) had sealed a peace between the new Jacobean régime in London and Philip III’s (Philip II had died in 1598) Spain. But the ejection of King Frederick (who had married James’s daughter, Elizabeth, in 1613) from the throne of Bohemia by the Spanish in 1620 started the Thirty Years’ War, reigniting English fears of Spanish aggression.82 A poem written around 1620, by John Fletcher and addressed to Elizabeth Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, seems to imply that there was considerable discussion about possible English intervention in the European conflict.83 Fletcher tells us that he will not talk about a possible war:
I will not treate of you
. . . whether ytt bee true
wee shall haue warrs with Spaine: (I wold wee might:)84
For Gordon McMullan, the statement comprises “an overt wish for war with Spain.”85 But the passage may instead refer to the desire for the poet to be able to engage with the Spanish situation—in this dedicatory poem, encased within the patronage system, addressed to a member of the nobility, Fletcher cannot freely express political opinions. (The chaotic controversy surrounding the 1624 Middleton play, A Game at Chess, which was suppressed due to complaints from a Spanish ambassador, illustrates the potential for dramatists and poets to get embroiled in political troubles.)86 By the mid-1620s, the desire for war with Spain by some English writers is indisputable. There is no agreement among historians about whether Spain did actually want to hold onto its peace deal with England: H. R. Trevor-Roper insists that Philip III’s regime had no desire to challenge England, whereas Paul C. Allen asserts that Philip III would have wished to engage militarily with England if it wasn’t for “the worsening situation in Flanders.”87 But, for some English commentators of the period, there was no doubt that Spain was a Catholic aggressor whose voracious, proprietary urges would seek to overrun Protestant England.
In 1624, an edition of Thomas Scot’s Workes was published. Many of the pieces featured call in a direct way for action against Spain.88 Among them, Vox Populi claims to offer an insight into aggressive Spanish plans, as they are discussed in the Madrid Parliament: The Proiector demands that the Stuarts crush the Papist “Troian Horse”; and Symmachia applauds James I’s offer of assistance to the Spain-beleaguered Netherlands and advises him (with a rather threatening tone) to maintain that support. Scot’s Workes were published abroad, not in London, but this does not eliminate the possible influence of this and similar calls for militant action against Spain: England did take up arms against Spain in 1625. Now it was possible for a text such as W. P.’s 1625 translation of the (mythical?) Jose Teixeira’s The Spanish Pilgrime, or, an Admirable Discovery of a Romish Catholicke to appear. This text uses a plethora of abusive terms to paint the Spanish nation and its people: “crueltie,” “enmitie,” “hatred,” “malice,” “tyranny,” “unjust,” and “unlawful.”89 A 1629 narrative by James Wadsworth, The English Spanish Pilgrime, also contains a mine of hostile invective against Spain and the Spanish. The author claims to have escaped (unlike his father, who had been seduced into the Jesuitic way) from Spain—hence the volume’s strikingly oxymoronic title. Among many memorable escapades is an encounter by an anonymous man with the homosexual hopes of a Friar: “the Fryer well obseruing the comelynesse and ingenious lookes grew forthwith inamoured with him, insomuch that he desired to be his bedfellow.”90 The man escapes from the amorous cleric, but the point is made clear—Spain and its Popish, unnatural ways must be destroyed. It is against this backdrop of Spanish hatred that John Donne’s reference to Morocco makes an extraordinary contextual impact.
Donne’s “Satire I” recounts the narrator’s frustrations as he walks around town with a gallant, gregarious, and impecunious fellow. This irksome friend would fawn obsequiously at any “fine silken painted foole”:
But to a grave man, he doth move no more
Then the wise politique horse would heretofore,
Or thou O Elephant or Ape wilt doe,
When any names the King of Spaine to you.91
The poem was written in the early 1590s, when memories of the 1588 Armada were, of course, still potent.92 Its uncensored, published form of the 1620s appears at a time of rising concern within England about James I’s apparent willingness to cooperate with Spain. Donne’s work depicts Morocco—and other animal performers—refusing to bow to Spain. It is a late construction of the horse as anti-Spanish. But this appropriation of the anti-Spanish Morocco was insensitive after 1630, when Articles of Peace between Britain and Spain demanded that “all Offences, Iniuries and Damages [between Britain and Spain] be taken away and forgotten.”93 Consequently, the last two quoted lines were removed from the 1633 printed version of the poem. Wadsworth’s English Spanish Pilgrim was printed six more times during 1630—but, after the November Treaty, was never published again.94 The explanation for the appearance and disappearance of the textual references to Morocco’s disdain for Spain is, then, obvious. Despite the freakish, apparently other-worldly abilities of the horse, representations of these attributes were subject to the same quotidian restrictions as any other cultural entity.
Other references to Banks’s horse’s hatred of Spain are extant. James Shirley’s notice in his 1646 Poems is more useful to judge in relation to the material circumstances of the writer. The poem, “A Fayring,” imagines a trip to see “the horse that dances.” Neither Banks nor Morocco is named, but the piece clearly refers to the Morocco legend because the tricks described (counting money, dancing, differentiating virgins from whores) were all associated with Banks’s horse:
This beast must be an understanding creature,
For he will snort you by instinct of nature:
If you but name the Pope.95
There is a particular element of aggression in the actions of the horse, as represented in Shirley’s poem. The key word is “snort.” A snort is short, monosyllabic, and has a certain simplistic finality to it. It is also threatening because of its otherness—the reader would be hard pressed to know exactly what an equine, anti-Catholic “snort” entails. The point is that, in this representation of Banks’s horse, the animal seems particularly dangerous. Shirley, a Royalist, probably a Catholic, is suffering because of the sectarian crisis of the Interregnum. He is not earning a living from the stage—that is probably the only reason for Poems’ publication. (Since the beginning of his career, around 1625, Shirley had published only dramatic texts.) The dislocated status of the Monarchist dramatist is encapsulated in the depiction of the offensive capabilities of a long-dead horse, just as the declining fortunes of the nation’s Cathedral is refracted in the more condemnatory commentaries on Morocco’s ascent up the tower.
Conclusion
St. Paul’s in the period is seen as a shamed entity, a humiliated and humiliating symbol of a shamed, divided nation. The horse’s power to shame can be seen in its connection with other shameful displays of early modern dissipation—other references to the horse come amidst a context of anxiety concerning alcohol abuse, transgendering, and fiscal irresponsibility. The two main citations in this conclusion demonstrate that Banks and Morocco were seen as shameful themselves. This does not detract from their satiric potential: rather, their notoriety and linkage to other controversial Renaissance figures serves further to castigate the target of their satire. The target is the illusion of a politically and socially united England.
One of these other references to Morocco has not been recorded in previous accounts of Banks allusions. A ballad, dating from sometime shortly after 1628, The Little Barly-Corne, warns of the dangers of strong alcohol:
It hath more shifts than Lambe ere had,
Or Hocus Pocus too,
It will good fellowes shew more sport,
then Bankes his horse could doe.96
This constructs Morocco, like alcohol, as a dangerous divergence from a responsible existence. The drink and the horse offer seedy “shifts” and “tricks”: engaging with either is irresponsible. The allusion to the early modern conjurer, Hocus Pocus, accelerates this wildfire accusation of shiftiness: that performer was so synonymous with transparently fraudulent, professed sorcery that his name became an adjective to descry any unbelievable magical practice.97 This ballad quotation also represents the only extant textual association of Morocco with another, very different, suspected conjurer, John Lambe. Accused of a range of offences ranging from bootlegging wine to pedophilia and witchcraft, Lambe was beaten to death by a mob after attending a play at the Fortune Theatre in 1628.98 A sensationalist pamphlet published in the immediate aftermath—one of a number works addressing this figure’s notoriety—describes the fatal incident:
(After the manner of the common people, who follow a Hubbubb, when it is once a foote) began in a confused manner to assault him, and offer violence.99
The pamphlet’s author stresses the role of supposed mass hysteria in the pursuit of the transgressing violator. The keyword is “Hubbubb.” It refers to a general public outcry—but it has particular etymological roots in the description of behavior that corresponds with Irish mob anarchy.100 Lambe is so dangerous, the pamphlet suggests, that he inspires Englishmen to behave like the wild Irish. In the Barly-Corne ballad, Morocco is taken to inspire similarly undisciplined behavior: his followers behave like consumers of strong liquor. The audience present at the exhibition of Banks’s horse humiliate themselves, it is implied, by behaving according to racially degenerate standards and by displaying tendencies of psychological laxity.
Morocco is connected with another shameful incident involving another shameful figure, Mary Frith, Moll Cutpurse. In the fictional/historical “autobiography” of Frith, The Life and Death of Mal Cutpurse (1662), the narrator tells how Banks provokes her into riding “from Charing-Crosse to Shoreditch a straddle on Horseback in Breeches and Doublet, Boots and Spurs, all like a man cap a pe [from head to foot].”101 This posits Frith as a sexually aggressive figure: her legs are “a straddle”—wide apart, suggesting receptive openness—and the transvestism obviously demolishes Christian norms. Morocco is linked to this shameful episode through money. Banks has bet Frith “20l” (twenty pounds) that she will not carry out the public ride. Frith, when describing Banks, refers to him as the man “who taught his Horse to dance, and shooed him with silver.”102 In the bet and in the equine shoeing there is an extravagant flippancy about economics. Poor, disenfranchised citizens are mocked and humiliated by these two instances of facetious treatment of elusive lucre.
In an article about Frith, Ungerer mentions “Moll’s alleged ride or progress through the City of London on Banks’s famous ‘dancing horse’ Morocco.”103 This is immediately rather strange, because there is no allegation in The Life and Death—or anywhere else—that Morocco was the horse ridden by Frith. But a further comment by Ungerer is even more baffling. He writes that the story of this ride on Morocco “may give us an inkling of what her street performance may have been like.”104 In what is now the definitive account of Mary Frith, Ungerer sticks to his own brief—apart from the speculation involving Morocco. The lasting enigma of “Banks his Horse” has confounded Ungerer, as it has many critics before him. Like the cross-dressing Frith, Morocco works as a non-normative register of Renaissance anxieties. Morocco does not help to account for Frith’s factual career, and the writings on Frith offer no realistic account of the idiosyncratic horse. But the juxtaposition of these two unique figures makes more visible their shared capacity both to color and focus passionate early modern difficulties of ethics, gender, and theology.
There is no point trying to exactly map the bizarre equitation act that constitutes the phenomenon of Banks’s performing horse—accounts are variable, contradictory, and often politically or socially loaded. In a satirical duologue between horse and master, Maroccus Extaticus, or Bankes Bay Horse in a Trance, published many years before the work of Gayton, Morocco speaks “in person,” bemoaning many abuses of late Elizabethan London. In this 1595 pamphlet, the horse seeks to underline the efficacy of many pithy aphorisms. Many of these have burlesque, animalistic undercurrents. One of them tells us that “He that will thrust his necke into the yoke, is worthy to be vsed like a iade [poor horse, coltish woman].”105 Zwager is surely to be questioned when he remarks that “the tract seems carelessly written and is of no literary value.”106 However, he is to be applauded in noticing that the pamphlet has a potential power in the scenes where Morocco shows his “juggling tendency, be it only in words.”107 Morocco’s yoke-rejecting aphorism reads like a warning to antiquarian or literally minded scholars: don’t try and categorize me—I won’t be bridled like a conventional horse or a conventional historical subject.” It is better to acknowledge the political, religious, and social ramifications of the period’s many appropriations of the imagery of Morocco. Seeking to tie the Banks-trained animal down will only result in the critic’s humiliation, with the scholar’s pate being that which is danced and trodden on. Morocco, then, is a marker for fragmentation. The horse confounds historical description because the accounts are varied—there isn’t even a consensus about the animal’s color. This is important because it illuminates the contradictory messages that Morocco sends to early modern commentators. They all read his portentous act differently. They all have different agendas. That is the exact point of this chapter: the Tudor dream of a homogeneous England was collapsing. Never again would England be “one nation.” The nation’s shaming by a shameful beast, Morocco, is an abrasive symbol of this intellectual and social dissolution.
Notes
1. Ricky Jay, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women: A History of Unique, Eccentric and Amazing Entertainers (London: Robert Hale, 1987), 105.
2. Samuel Holland, Don Zara Del Fogo: A Mock-Romance (London, 1656; Wing H2437), I1v.
3. S. H. Atkins, “Mr. Banks and His Horse,” Notes and Queries, 167 (1934), 39–44; J. O. Halliwell-Phillips, Memoranda on “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “King John,” “Othello,” and on “Romeo and Juliet” (London: James Adlard, 1879), 21–57. Other useful pieces not subsequently cited in this article include a chapter on “The Dancing Horse” in Jan Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1–18; Emma Phipson, The Animal Lore of Shakespeare’s Time (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1883), 108–11; and Raymond Toole Stott, ed., Circus and Allied Acts: A World Bibliography, 5 vols. (Derby: Harpur, 1958–92), I, 30–31.
4. Holland, I1v.
5. John Marston, Iacke Drums Enter-tainment (London, 1601; STC 7243), B3r.
6. William Shakespeare, A Pleasant Conceited Comedie Called Loues Labors Lost (London, 1598; STC 22294), B2v. A lengthy footnote to the allusion is provided in Horace Howard Furness, ed., A New Variorum Edition of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1904), 45.
7. Thomas Bastard, Chrestoleros: Seuen Bookes of Epigrames (London, 1598; STC 1559), 62.
8. Richard Braithwait, A Strappado for the Diuell: Epigrams and Satyres Alluding to the Time (London, 1615; STC 3588), 159.
9. N. Zwager, Ben Jonson’s London (Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1926), 49; Ruth Manning-Sanders, The English Circus (London: Werner Laurie, 1952), 23.
10. Arthur Freeman, Elizabeth’s Misfits: Brief Lives of English Eccentrics, Exploiters, Rogues, and Failures, 1580–1660 (New York: Garland, 1978), 125.
11. William Cavendish, A General System of Horsemanship in All its Branches (London: J. Brindley, 1743), C2v.
12. “Banks’s Horse, a horse famous for playing tricks, the property of one Banks, it is mentioned in, Sir Walter Raleigh’s Hist. Of the World . . . also by Sir Kenelm Digby and Ben Johnson,” James Caulfield, Blackguardiana, or A Dictionary of Rogues, Bawds, Pimps, Whores, Pickpockets (London: John Shepherd, 1795), A4v.
13. Joseph Hunter, New Illustrations of the Life, Studies and Writings of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (London: J. B. Nichols, 1845), I, 265.
14. John Webster, The Tragedy of the Dvtchesse of Malfy (London, 1623; STC 25176), D1r-v.
15. “S’Heart, hee keeps more adoe with this Monster, than euer Bankes did with his Horse,” Ben Jonson, The Comicall Satyre of Every Man Ovt of His Hvmor (London, 1600; STC 14767), M4v.
16. Godfrey Goodman, The Creatvres Praysing God, or, the Religion of Dumbe Creatvres (London, 1622; STC 12021), B3r.
17. Goodman, D4r.
18. “Goodman was in advance of his times in proclaiming his belief in religious toleration,” Geoffrey Ingle Soden, Godfrey Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester, 1583–1656 (London: S. P. C. K., 1953), 126.
19. Simon Forman, The Grovndes of Longitude (London, 1591; STC 11185), A3r.
20. Erica Fudge made her chapter on Morocco available to me before it was published: I thank her for this and for making useful comments on an earlier version of my chapter on Banks’s horse.
21. Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 140.
22. F. P. Wilson, Shakespearian and Other Studies, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 275.
23. The Owles Almanacke (London, 1618; STC 6515), B4r.
24. The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), I, 118.
25. Thomas Dekker, Satiro-mastix, or the Vntrussing of the Humorous Poet (London, 1602; STC 6521), C2r.
26. On the topicality of Satiromastix, see Matthew Steggle, Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1998), 48–61.
27. See Madeleine Hope, “A Dreame of a Drye Yeare,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 32 (1933), 172–95, especially 192.
28. The nature of Gayton’s appropriation of Cervantes is discussed in the Edwin B. Knowles’s essay, “Cervantes and English Literature,” in Angel Flores and M. J. Benardete, eds., Cervantes Across the Centuries (New York: Gordian, 1969), 279–81. On the popularity of Cervantes in seventeenth-century England, see H. R. Woudhuysen, “Great Quixote Goes on Sale,” Times Literary Supplement, December 1, 2000, 39.
29. Edmund Gayton, Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot (London, 1654; Wing G415), Oo4r.
30. Thomas Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-light (London, 1608; STC 6485), H4r.
31. Peter Edwards, The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 98. See also Edwards, 102, 114, and 145.
32. Charles Arnold-Baker, ed., The Companion to British History (Tunbridge Wells: Longcross, 1996), 1096.
33. John Stow, A Survay of London (London, 1598; STC 23341), Cc7v.
34. The Paris drawing is reproduced in John Clark, Saxon and Norman London (London: HMSO, 1989), 44.
35. The remaining fragments of the graffiti are held at the Museum of London; the Museum also retains a large wooden model of the pre-1561 St. Paul’s.
36. Dalya Alberge, “Missing Piece of Tudor London Map Found,” The Times, March 30, 1998, 22. The article accompanies a large reproduction of the map, which is held at the Dessau Art Gallery, Germany.
37. The work includes a passing reference to “St. Pauls Steeple, before it was a Tower,” Gayton, B2V.
38. The Trve Report of the Burnyng of the Steple and Churche of Paules in London (London, 1561; STC 19930), A7r.
39. Ibid., 125.
40. E. M. Tenison, Elizabethan England: Being the History of this Country in Relation to all Foreign Princes, 11 vols (Leamington Spa: Dove with the Griffin, 1953–56), I, 207–8. A lengthier discussion of the religious controversies surrounding the loss of St. Paul’s steeple can be found in Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 232–4.
41. Simon Harward, A Discovrse of the Severall Kinds and Causes of Lightning (London, 1607; STC 12918), A3v.
42. Peter Heylen, Ecclesia Restaurata: The History of the Reformation, of the Church of England (London, 1674; Wing H1703), Rr4v.
43. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1783–4.
44. Alister McGrath, “The Transition to Modernity,” in Peter Byrne and Leslie Houlden, eds., Companion Encyclopaedia of Theology (London: Routledge, 1995), 245.
45. Heylen, Rr4v.
46. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series: Of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, 1547–80, ed. Robert Lemon (London: Longman, 1856), 177–8.
47. Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1807), IV, 202.
48. Ibid., 203, marginal note.
49. Ibid., 203.
50. Annabel Patterson, Reading “Holinshed’s Chronicles” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 15.
51. The Burning of Paules, in W. Sparrow Simpson, ed., Documents Illustrating the History of St. Paul’s Cathedral (London, Camden Society, 1880), 126.
52. Herbert Berry, “‘The View of London From the North’ and the Playhouses in Holywell,” Shakespeare Survey, 53 (2000), 196. The drawing is reproduced in the article, 198.
53. Ibid., 207.
54. Edward Sugden, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), 398. The constant presence of St. Paul’s in the culture of the period is obvious from the catalogue of allusions to the Cathedral gathered together in Sugden’s work, 395–9.
55. Henrie Farley, The Complaint of Pavles, to All Christian Sovles (London, 1616; STC 10688), D1r, F2r.
56. Ibid., D1r.
57. St. Pavles-Chvrch her Bill for the Parliament (London, 1616; STC 10690).
58. Ibid., F1v.
59. Thomas Dekker, The Dead Tearme (London, 1608; STC 6496), D4r.
60. William Rowley, A Search for Money (London, 1609; STC 21424), A4v, A4r.
61. A splendid summary of the events of that day is provided in R. B. Wernham’s chapter, “The Essex Rising and the 1601 Parliament,” in his book, The Return of the Armadas: The Last Years of the Elizabethan War Against Spain, 1595–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 347–65.
62. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series: Of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1598–1601, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Longman, 1869), 550.
63. Charles Carlton, Archbishop William Laud (London: Routledge, 1987), 94. Park Honan claims that earlier, in the late 1580s, a young William Shakespeare would have seen that “girls solicited even inside St. Paul’s Cathedral,” but offers no evidence for this, Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 99.
64. There is an account of Charles I’s involvement in the schemes to refurbish St. Paul’s in Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 322–8.
65. Charles I, His Maiesties Commission Giuing Power to Enquire of the Decayes of the Cathedral Church of St. Pavl in London, and for the Repairing of the Same (London, 1631; STC 9254), F4v.
66. Richard Barker and Edward Phillips, A Chronicle of the Kings of England (London, 1665; Wing B505), Qq2v.
67. Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England, 1603–42 (London: Longman, 1999), 223.
68. Charles I, His Maiesties Commission, and Further Declaration Concerning the Reparation of Saint Pauls Church (London, 1633; STC 9256), A4r.
69. William Dugdale, The History of St. Pavls Cathedral in London, From its Foundation Untill These Times (London, 1658; Wing D2482), Mm1v.
70. There is also a much earlier sketch by Hollar of “London and Old St. Paul’s from the Thames,” reproduced in R. A. Foakes, Illustrations of the English Stage, 1580–1642 (London: Scolar Press, 1985), 39.
71. Peter Newman, Companion to the English Civil Wars (New York: Facts on File, 1990), 44.
72. William Hampe, ed., The Life, Diary, and Correspondence of Sir William Dugdale (London: Harding, Lepard, 1827), 218.
73. Edwin Riddell, ed., Lives of the Stuart Age, 1603–1714 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), 211–2. On Hollar’s associations with “supporters of Church and King,” see Exhibition of a Selection from the Works of Wenceslaus Hollar, ed. Burlington Art Club (London: Spottiswoode, 1875), 7. This catalogue also lists a number of Hollar’s equestrian portraits.
74. Mary Abbott, Life Cycles in England, 1560–1720: Cradle to Grave (London: Routledge, 1996), 244.
75. William Dugdale, The History of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, From Its Foundation (London: Edward Maynard, 1716).
76. A brief, convenient guide to the architecture of St. Paul’s can be found in Ann Saunders, The Art and Architecture of London: An Illustrated Guide (Oxford: Phaidon, 1984), 32–33.
77. Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, St. Paul’s Cathedral from St George’s Field (pen and watercolor on paper, 1770), Ulster Museum, Belfast.
78. Thomas Middleton, The Blacke Booke (London, 1604; STC 17875), D4v-E1r.
79. A. J. Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: A Study of Stage Characters and National Identity in English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1642 (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), 17.
80. Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Among Us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of the Alien in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996), 76.
81. Thomas Nashe, Haue With Yov to Saffron-Walden, London, 1596; STC 18369), D2r.
82. The underlying causes of the Thirty Years War were, of course, considerably complicated and remain controversial. A useful introduction to this is Trevor-Roper’s essay on “The Outbreak of the Thirty Years War,” in Hugh Trevor-Roper, Renaissance Essays (London: Fontana Press, 1986), 275–94.
83. Francis Bickley, ed., Historical Manuscripts Commission: Report on the MSS of the late Reginald Rawdon Hastings of the Manor House, Ashby-de-la-Zouche, 3 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1928–34), II, 58.
84. Samuel A. Tannenbaum, “A Hitherto Unpublished John Fletcher Autograph,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 28 (1929), 38.
85. Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 257.
86. A useful “Chronological Table” of historical events and cultural responses concerning the “Spanish Match” can be found in Jerzy Limon, Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics in 1623/4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 134–45. See also, Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 166–92; T. H. Howard-Hill, “The Origins of Middleton’s Game at Chess,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 28 (1985), 3–14; Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, ed. J. W. Harper (London: Ernest Benn, 1966), xii–xv; Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill (London: Malone Society, 1990), vii; and Martin White, Middleton and Tourneur (London: Macmillan, 1992), 124–39.
87. H. R. Trevor–Roper, “Spain and Europe, 1598–1621,” in J. R. Cooper, ed., The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 267–82; Paul C. Allen, Philip III and the “Pax Hispanica,” 1598–1621: The Failure of Grand Strategy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 107.
88. Thomas Scot, The Works of the Most Famous and Reverand Divine (Utrick, 1624; STC 22064).
89. W. P., trans., The Spanish Pilgrime, or, An Admirable Discovery of a Romish Catholicke (London, 1625; STC 19838.5).
90. James Wadsworth, The English Spanish Pilgrime, or, a New Discoverie of Spanish Popery, and Iesuitical Stratagems (London, 1629; STC 24926), H2r.
91. John Donne, “Satire I,” in John Donne: The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), lines 79–82.
92. Milgate, ed., 125.
93. Articles of Peace, Entercourse and Commerce (London, 1630; STC 9251), B3r.
94. STCs 24926a, 24927, 24928, 24928a, 24929, and 24929a.
95. James Shirley, Poems (London, 1646; Wing S3481), B5r-v.
96. The Little Barly-Corne (London, 1645?; Wing L2546A).
97. See Jonathan Green, ed., The Cassell Dictionary of Slang (London: Cassell, 1998), 599–600.
98. On Lambe’s death, see G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–68), I, 266–68; and Mark Thornton Burnett, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (London: Macmillan, 1997), 44–45.
99. A Briefe Description of the Notoriovs Life of Iohn Lambe, Otherwise Called Doctor Lambe (Amsterdam, 1628; STC 15177), C3v. (Despite the title-page’s claim, the pamphlet was actually published in London.) There is also a Martin Parker ballad on Lambe’s life and death, The Tragedy of Doctor Lambe, the Great Supposed Conjurer (London, 1628; STC 19272); and a lost play, dating from 1634, was apparently called Doctor Lambe and the Witches, see Bentley, V, 1455.
100. Robert Barnhart, ed., The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1988), 495.
101. The Life and Death of Mal Cutpurse, in Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing, eds., Counterfeit Ladies: “The Life and Death of Mal Cutpurse”; “The Case of Mary Carleton” (London: Pickering, 1994), 36.
102. Ibid.
103. Gustav Ungerer, “Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature,” Shakespeare Studies, 28 (2000), 56.
104. Ibid.
105. Maroccus Extaticus, or Bankes Bay Horse in a Trance (London: 1595; STC 6225), B3v. A ballad about Morocco, A Ballad Shewinge the Strange Qualities of a Yonge Nagge Called “Morocco,” was registered by Edward White at the Stationers’ Company in November 1595—a month before the registration of Maroccus Extaticus—but it is lost. See Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of the Stationers of London, 5 vols. (Birmingham: Privately Published, 1875–94), III, 5.
106. Zwager, 48.
107. Ibid.