William Camden: A Life in Context

WILLIAM CAMDEN a life in context

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Portrait of William Camden (1609) by or after Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561/2–1636), oil on panel (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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WILLIAM CAMDEN a life in context Wyman H. Herendeen

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© Wyman Herendeen 2007 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Wyman Herendeen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2007 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge isbn 978-1-84383-126-6 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk ip12 3df, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, ny 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper Designed and typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by David Roberts, Pershore, Worcestershire

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Contents Acknowledgments  vii Abbreviations  ix Preface  xi

part one  Prolepsis: Death, Youth, & Introduction i ii iii

Death and Life of a Minor Figure  3 A London Life: The Educator’s Education  16 Religious Conflict and Coming of Age at Oxford  59 Notes: Part One  80

part two  Elizabethan Camden iv v vi

The Way to Westminster  91 Westminster and the Britannia  180 Antiquarians, Historians, and the Economy of the Past  243 Notes: Part Two  334

part three  Jacobean Camden vii viii ix

Arms and the Man: Antiquarian in the College of Arms  353 Culture Clash: Elizabethan in Stuart London  445 Post-Mortem: The Death and Afterlives of William Camden  493 Notes: Part Three  512

Index  521

For Rosalind As “ wit and fortune will”

Acknowledgments

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his book and I have been the beneficiaries of generous individuals and organizations over many years, and I have William Camden to thank for this. Maurice Powick extended the invitation for a contextual life of Camden, ­ suggested how one might approach it, and what the challenges might be: “A great book might be written about Camden, his life and his works, his wide circle of friends and correspondents and his humanity. It would be a very ­difficult book to write.” While I can not pretend to have achieved the fullness of scope envisioned by Powick, nor to have been able to bring the “learning and imaginative amplitude” that he thought would be needed by its author, he does, however, identify some of my goals for this “life in context”. In my study of Camden I attempt to understand the man and his work within the political and cultural milieu of Tudor and Stuart England, and London in particular. I have also tried to place them in context of the changes taking place in the way that early modern England viewed, valued, and represented history, and thus to show how Camden’s writings emerge from and redirect some of the major literary and intellectual habits of thought that begin to become apparent in his generation. The support that this book has received is a tribute to Camden. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose exceptional generosity provided the time and resources that made this book possible. The Huntington Library, through a Mellon fellowship, ­enabled me to pursue critical research in their collection. Appointment as Senior Fellow at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Vic­ toria College at the University of Toronto, provided ready access to their important collections and the collegial environment in which to write. My research and opportunities for completing this study have also been facilitated by the University of Windsor in the form of a Research Professorship and travel grants, by the office of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social ­Sciences at the University of Houston, and by support from the Martha Gano ­Houstoun Endowment in the Department of English at the University of Houston. The generous help and professionalism of librarians and ­ archivists at the many libraries, records offices, and collections have made work on this project a genuine pleasure. My thanks also go to Rachael vii

William Camden – A Life in Context Havranek, who, as a ­University Scholar, assisted with the documentation for Part One. The friendship and wisdom of friends and scholars have added to my understanding of the many aspects of ­ Camden’s life and the milieu in which he lived and worked. The following pages can only document a part of my debt to friends and fellow scholars. I am particularly grateful to the late Sir Anthony Wagner, Clarenceux King of Arms, who shared with me his ­ knowledge of and interest in William Camden, to Annabel Patterson, Daniel Woolf, Joseph Levine, Richard McCoy, Mervin James, Graham Parry, ­Maurice Keen, ­Darryll ­Grantley, among many others, who have helped shape my thinking about the place of historical writing in early modern ­Britain; their influence hovers over this study and goes beyond the realm of the footnote. And most of all, in addition to the unstinting support of my wife, Mary, the deep love, friendship, and sanity of my daughter, Rosalind, to whom this book is dedicated, have reminded me how the private life nurtures us in our lengthy scholarly labours.

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Abbreviations Libraries, archives, manuscript sources The following is a list of abbreviations of frequently cited sources. BL Bod. COA Hunt. Oxford University PRO Soc. Ant. WAM

British Library Bodleian Library, Oxford College of Arms Huntington Library Oxford University Archives Public Record Office, London Society of Antiquaries Westminster Abbey Muniment Room

Abbreviations of frequently cited books and printed materials Below is a list of abbreviations and short-titles used for works, including Camden’s, that are frequently cited in this study. In my research for this project I have consulted first and relevant subsequent editions of the primary documents, but when possible, I quote from editions that are reliable and more readily available that I identify below. In cases where individual works or authors are discussed or cited extensively in the body of this study, I have inserted short-title abbreviations and page reference parenthetically in the text.

Camden’s works Anglica, Normannica Anglica, Normannica, Hibernica, Cambrica, a veteribus scripta, ed. William Camden (Frankfurt, 1603) Annals t h e h i s t o r y o f t h e Most Renowned and Victorious Princess e l i z a b e t h , 4th edn (London, 1688) Britannia b r i t a n n i a : or, a Chorographical Description of g re a t b r i t a i n and i re l a n d , Together with the Adjacent Islands, ed. and trans. Edmund Gibson, 2 vols., 3rd edn (London, 1753) Epistolae v. c l . g u l i e l m i c a m d e n i , e t i l l u s t r u m v i r o r u m a d g . c a m d e n u m e p i s t o l a e , ed. Thomas Smith (London, 1691)

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William Camden – A Life in Context Greek Grammar Memorabilia Poems

Reges, Reginae

Remains

Institutio graecae grammatices compendiaria in usum regiae scholae Westmonasteriensis (London, 1595) Memorabilia haec sequentia . . . de seipso. In Epistolae, pp. 85–8. Poems by William Camden, ed. and trans. George Burke Johnston. Studies in Philology, Texts and Studies, 72 (December 1975). Reges, reginae, nobiles et alii in ecclesia collegiata B. Petri Westmonasterii sepulti, usque ad annum 1600 (London, 1600, 1603, 1606) William Camden: Remains Concerning Britain, ed. R. D. Dunn (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1984)

Other printed primary materials Curious Discourses Discoverie

Second Discoverie

Jonson Itinerary Vincent, Discoverie

Shakespeare Spenser

A Collection of Curious Discourses Written by Eminent Antiquarians, ed. J. Ayloffe, 2 vols. (London, 1775) Ralph Brooke, A d i s c ov e r i e of Certaine e r r o u r s Published in Print in the Much Commended Britannia, 1594 ([London, 1599]; London, 1724) Ralph Brooke, A s e c o n d d i s c ov e r i e of e r r o u r s Published in the Much-Commended Britannia, 1594 … With A Reply to Mr. Camden’s Apology ad Lectorem, in his fift Edition, 1600 (London, 1723) Ben Jonson, Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52) John Leland, The Itinerary of John Leland, ed. Thomas Hearne, 9 vols., 3rd edn (Oxford, 1770) Augustine Vincent, A Discoverie of Errours in the first Edition of the Catalogue of Nobility published by Raphe Brooke Yorke Herald, 1619 (London, 1622) William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974). Edmund Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 11 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57)



Preface

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have titled this study William Camden – A Life in Context to suggest a wider scope for it than simply a biographical narrative of his life as we know it and think it might have been. Camden, the author of the ­Britannia and first biographer of Elizabeth, educator, herald, poet, and antiquarian, became for future generations and for many in his own life time, the chronicler of Britain in the age of Elizabeth. The Annals of Elizabeth calls attention to the dialogic between the courts of Elizabeth and James I and ­creates a complex tapestry of Britain’s emergence as a major Protestant player in the European political arena. The Britannia evokes a united Britain having an established place in the international history of Europe, and implicitly lends support to one of James’s first acts as king. These two, his most famous works, became landmarks of his generation; as literary products of the man and his generation, they provide windows on the social and intellectual landscape of post-Reformation England, especially from the early restoration of reform under Edward VI, through the stabilization of the realm under Elizabeth, and the redefinition of the monarchy under James. But Camden was greater than the sum of his parts. More than just the national landscape artist and royal portraitist, he and his work capture and also contribute to the subtle changes taking place in the intellectual and political milieu of England and London from Elizabeth’s accession through most of James’s reign. Camden’s place in this process is that of chronicler, witness, and participant, rather than analyst. While these and other of his works are major contributions to the literary legacy of the Renaissance worthy of study in themselves, when linked to his life and career, we see that they were also agents in and illustrations of the subtle but manifest changes in the intellectual history of the period. More particularly, Camden and his work reflect the evolving role of the scholar and scholarship in post-Reformation England, and contribute to the changing ways in which history and the past were valued and represented. Camden, of course, is not alone in this; he was part of a network of individuals and institutions playing parts in a subtle transforma­ tion taking place during these decades, men as different as Francis Bacon, John Selden, Ben Jonson, and Samuel Daniel, and institutions as varied as the universities and schools, the College of Arms, the Society of Antiquaries, xi

William Camden – A Life in Context the Chapter of Westminster, indeed, the monarchy and the court. Camden is unique in that his narrative intersects with this network at countless points and in distinctive ways. For this reason, Camden’s role in the intellectual history of the period must be told in context; as one of many players in this ongoing process, his particular contribution deserves telling. Thus, in placing Camden within the historical, material, and intellectual context of the time, I hope to contribute to the discussion of early modern England and London in particular. At times he is the focus of the study and at other times he is the lens through which we can read more closely some of the issues that have occupied cultural historians in recent years. In this, I follow Maurice Powicke’s lead, seeing Camden as a new kind of scholar emerging from the changing socio-economic, political, and intellectual currents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I try to document and describe some of these subtle transformations that can be identified during those often troubled decades when the reformed church attains increasing stability, and Tudor social policies found their institutional outlets – venues that were the nursery for young Camden and that later became his professional home. Camden is himself a product of an emerging “middle class”, and this informs his originality – in reforming institutions, hybridizing literaryhistorical genres, and casting his influence over literary and intellectual communities in London and internationally. Most important, though, Camden contributes to the changing epistemology and ontology of the period that has preoccupied Renaissance scholars for many years. Such broad concepts will find, I hope, more immediate relevance in my discussion of the contexts of his career and work. Most apparent, though, is his impact on historical writing and antiquarianism. These are areas where there has been much revitalized interest in recent years; scholars including Annabel Patterson, Daniel Woolf, Graham Parry, and Kevin Sharpe, have ­reopened discussions about the nature of the so-called “historical revolution” and how it is reflected in the political and intellectual mentalité of Camden’s and successive generations. While there are major differences of opinion among these scholars, there is agreement that the bridging generation from Elizabeth to James is a critical one in an evolving process of social reform. In exploring how Camden has been shaped by his immediate historical and social contexts, and by examining the hybrid forms that he creates in his work, I hope to contribute to these broader discussions about the cultural shifts of the period. In Camden we see a new valuation of the material and textual past; he helps form a value system by which cultural artefacts are ­appreciated in ways that xii

Preface differ significantly from previous generations, and in so doing, he helps move antiquarian study, collecting, and historical writing to a new place. As I hope to show, examined through his works and in his place in history, Camden, the proto-Elizabethan, can be seen as the har­binger of the changes announced more boldly by his younger contemporaries, ­Francis Bacon and John Selden, and leading to the upheaval of the 1640s.

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part one Prolepsis: Death, Youth, & Introduction

chapter i Death and Life of a Minor Figure A Life in the Margins Here lies in certain hope of a resurrection in Christ, William Camden, by Queen Elizabeth created Clarenceux King at Arms, an indefatigable, judicious, and impartial Researcher into British antiquities, he whom variety of learning, vivacity of parts, and the most candid simplicity were united. He died on the 9th of November, 1623, in the 73rd year of his age.1

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he good life is lived with an awareness of death. A good death will look back on the life that went before, measure the distance travelled from youth, and bring any unfinished business to completion. It is safe to say that Camden, early admitted to Christ’s Church Hospital “newly founded for blue-coated children” (or orphans), and at age twelve infected with the plague, was as conscious of death’s presence as one would want a youth to be: he probably learned early on in his life the stoic ethic reflected in the motto that he adopted for himself and that is reproduced on his portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts, “pondere non numero”.2 With even greater confidence we can say that, nearing death, Camden looked back on his life, recalled who he had been and who he was, and set his house in order. Camden was not an unusually penetrating psychologist, nor was he of Jeremy Taylor’s cast, and inclined to thoughts de contemptu mundi. He had been a schoolmaster, an author, a friend of Ben Jonson, a herald – all calculated (as we will see) to keep him alert to the often uncomfortable realities of this world. His life among the heralds, as contentious a group as any crowded grammar-school class, certainly kept Camden mindful of business and legal matters more than it did of chivalry and concepts of honour. At the time of his death he prepared his estate as he had lived his life, with piety and pragmatics, and with orderly, personable, and honest simplicity reflecting the values that informed his work. These qualities are



William Camden – A Life in Context not the euphemisms of a biography. For Camden they are deliberate, often difficult choices about how to live and work. Depending on our individual interests, we tend to think of Camden in terms of his historical writing, his associations with Westminster School, the Society of Antiquaries, the College of Arms, or his ties with literary figures such as Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, or Ben Jonson. That is, in a ­“service capacity”, as it were, connected with public institutions – including now canonical literary figures. In some measure, noting what he was not makes the extent of his influence on his society and its culture all the more remarkable. Not a figure of “greatness”, born or achieved, he deliberately avoided having it “thrust upon him”, but he was a subject that both Elizabeth and James I respected and privileged. Not a charismatic courtier such as Leicester, nor a master player and policy-maker such as Burghley, he was heeded by them and others of like station. Of humble origin and without large financial resources, he lacked the means necessary to make grand educational or artistic endowments, as John Colet did as the founder of St Paul’s School, for example, or to become a collector on the scale of Matthew Parker, Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, or Robert Cotton. But he was endowed with a spirit that combined industry, acquisitiveness, intellectual curiosity, phil­ anthropy, humility, and patriotism. He modelled himself on the example of civic duty found in an earlier generation, not only in the manner that he lived his life, but also in specific acts, such as his gifts to Westminster School and his endowment of a chair of civil history at Oxford. In its own way, his impact on the world of learning is hardly less certain or permanent than if he had laid a cornerstone or cut a ribbon, and his library, regarded for its importance rather than its size, was the admiration of many. Not a literary figure canonized as Sidney, Spenser, Bacon, and Jonson were, his life and work illuminate theirs and influenced them in important ways. There are many Renaissance figures of far greater reputation whose lives tell us far less about their age than ­Camden’s can. But to turn to Camden only for the information that he provides about major figures, events, or institutions, as commentators have tended to do, is to miss the man himself, to place him at the margin of his own life. His achievement as an educator, herald, writer, and friend of writers was the result of the particular kind of person that he was and the time in which he lived. This is not the sort of statement that one should take for granted – it is an important assumption implicit in Maurice Powicke’s perceptive essay titled “William Camden”.3 To lose sight of the role of character in the interest of 

Death and Life of a Minor Figure quantifying “achievement” when writing about a “major minor” figure is to make one’s subject a mere cipher, to disenfranchise the person in favour of the event or institution. It is commonplace that in the Renaissance, public, and private dimensions are inextricably linked, identity being a largely public construct. But at this time, for a person born to the lower or middle class, without position, power, or wealth, to have the impact that a Camden, a Shakespeare, a Jonson had, bespeaks unusual inner qualities in addition to the blessing of Fortuna. The fact that there are a fairly large number of such examples is one reason why the English Renaissance is of such interest as an historical period, and why it is often referred to as “early modern”. We can study their achievement in terms of public office or publications, but unless we recognize where they have come from, and what they bring of themselves to the public world, we are liable to ignore the individuals and also to fail to see a salient aspect of a culture that enabled their success. To do so would be to leave important parts of the “life and times” of an individual ­unstudied and unwritten. Camden needs to be historicized if we are to derive any greater insights about his contribution than were offered by Thomas Smith in the biography that he included in the 1691 edition of the letters, Camdeni Epistolae. We can learn much from Camden, not just by studying the Britannia or the Annals of Elizabeth, but by examining the interplay of the material culture in which he lived and how it gave direction to his curriculum vitae. Camden, then, is a good example of what can be gained by revisiting a historical period from the margin. Historians do not generally give him an active role in the evolution of post-Reformation England. But look at any of the large canvases and you will see Camden rather more clearly than you would expect, in a corner that catches the eye of the viewer. Rarely does a major intellectual history of the English Renaissance leave him undiscussed. This is not to say that he is a small figure who should be made larger, but that he is a small figure whose ubiquitous presence is significant both in itself and for what it reveals about his world. There can be no doubt about Camden’s importance for the various groups and individuals that he worked with, but whose greater prominence casts him in shadow. More interesting for the modern student is the importance that such a man earned in his society without achieving “greatness”. He gives focus and perspective to our period ­ studies. That a man like Camden should become the “semi-official” bio­grapher of Elizabeth and the archivist of her era in his comprehensive Annals of Elizabeth speaks volumes about him and the conditions in which he lived. 

William Camden – A Life in Context For his biographer as well as for his contemporary, one of the most important things about Camden is his humanity. Rarely are his accomplishments noted without some kind of accompanying epithet on his character. Powicke speaks of his “spirit of fellowship and easy friendliness”; Rowse too comments on his capacity for friendship, and contemporaries (with the exception of his antagonist Ralph Brooke) invariably speak of him as gentle, learned, and grave.4 The persistent tendency to humanize Camden is striking. In tracing his development and career we will see that there is something about him that gives new depth to the institutions and individuals with whom he comes in contact. In the chapters that follow, I will discuss Camden as poet-historical, as a major shaping “influence” on men and ideas of his and succeeding generations, as a reformer of institutions, and as an example of the emerging class of bourgeois scholar, but in the process I hope too to keep a clear view of his humanity in an age of changing opportunities.

Death Public and Private

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n his death we can see his life: the aphorism has its element of truth   in Camden’s case. The solemnities attending Camden’s funeral remind us how public his life as a herald was. Clarenceux King of Arms, but by his own choosing without any other “title of honour”, he was escorted to Westminster Abbey with ceremony reserved for far more elevated personages. According to custom, all the members of the College of Arms (except Ralph Brooke) were in attendance; others from all estates figured in the procession, and there was an emphasis on form that, by 1623, was often neglected in noble funerals: his funerall was worshipfully solempnized … in the manner following, that is: – first proceeded 26 poore men in gownes, then gentlemen in cloaks, then esquiers, then knights; Sir Henry Bourchier, Knight; Sir Francis Lee, Knight of the Bath; and Sir Robert Cotton, Knight and Baronett; then Mr. Docter Heather, being his executor, and Mr. Docter Sutton, preacher at this ffunerall; next, after the Penon, Phillip Holland, Portcullis, and Augustyn Vincent, Rouge Croix, with their coats on their armes; the Penon borne by Mr. Wyat, his kinseman; his healme and creast by John Phillipot, Rouge Dragon; his coate of armes by Samuell Thompson, Windsor Herauld. On his corps, on the pall of black velvet, was placed the King’s rich coate of armes, with his coronett with which he was crowned at his creac’on, the pall beinge supported 

Death and Life of a Minor Figure by Sampson Lennard, Blewmantle; Henry Chitting, Chester; Henry St. George, Richmond; and William Penson, Lancaster, Heraulds: next the body followed Sir William Segar, Garter, Knight, principall Kinge of Armes; his two assistants, Sir Richard St. Georg, Knight, Norroy Kinge of Armes, and Robert Treswell, Somersett Herauld. After them he was accompanyed with dyvers noblemen – as the right honourable the Lord Keeper, then Byshop of Lincolne; the earle of Leic’; the Viscounte Graundison; the Bishop of London; the Bishopp of Winchester; the Bishop of Durham, with other Byshops; the lord Paget; the Lord Cary; and many more barons, knights, esquiers, and gentlemen.5 If we stop over the scene a moment we can see how it reflects Camden’s life and personality; many of these men will be major players in the pages that follow. With its heavily orchestrated ceremony and ritualistically adorned secular and ecclesiastical celebrants, this is a stately spectacle that would seem to contrast with Camden’s reputation for modesty and humility, and makes a clear statement about the man’s place in the hierarchies of church and state. The ritual has personal relevance for Camden the man. The principal attendants were close associates of long standing, and not just heralds earning their fees. Preceding the coffin was William Heather, the executor of his will and witness of the funeral certificate, but more important, as we will see, an intimate friend with whom Camden had sung in the choir at Westminster and who on occasion brought an ailing Camden into his house to be nursed back to a diminished health. The chief mourner was his friend William Segar, Garter King of Arms; he was assisted by senior and junior members of the college and, significantly, by kin, his cousin John Wyatt, “a painter of London”.6 There was Augustine Vincent (b. 1584; Rouge Croix Pursuivant), who had written an extensive and often moving defence of Camden against his adversary, the missing Ralph Brooke. Others attending included men young and old whose work and careers had been shaped by Camden. His contemporary, translator, and fellow educator Philemon Holland (b. 1552) assisted; he thought of himself as a close friend of Camden’s and the two had worked closely together in preparing the translation of the Britannia for press in 1610. Robert Treswell (Somerset Herald), William Penson (Lancaster Herald), and John Philipot (Rouge Dragon Pursuivant) each served as deputies for Camden and conducted visitations in his name; Camden came to their defence when they were attacked by jealous rivals in the College of Arms. Philipot later (1636) edited and enlarged the Remains. In 1623 each was relatively young, a minor 

William Camden – A Life in Context figure in the College of Arms, and each had been encouraged and protected by Camden in a social world that was not only acrimonious but often dangerous. In addition, and unusual for a man of his degree even though he was a herald, his procession included an extraordinary number of the nation’s most powerful, including the Earl of Leicester, the Lord Keeper, Lord Cary, and Lord Paget, and at least six bishops. The entourage was a social microcosm, a smaller version of the cortege for Elizabeth’s funeral, depicted in the long roll (BL, Add. Ms 5408) reputedly drawn by Camden himself. If Camden’s funeral emphasized formality associated with the College of Arms, it also suggests a dynamic of vital relationships that cross time and social strata. Each attendant was in some way closely connected with Camden, as painter-cousin (Wyatt), as neighbour and fellow music lover (Heather), translator (Holland), deputy (Treswell and Penson), literary protégé (Vincent and Philipot), among others. They drew their identity in some degree from him. None is a major historical figure, but altogether they and the others present make up a sizeable group remarkable for its social, economic, and intellectual heterogeneity. With Camden dead at the centre of the ceremony, and his deputies gathered around him, we have a silent group portrait suggesting the extent of Camden’s influence, which might be characterized in terms of the Renaissance ideal of sprezzatura, particularly the self-effacement that advantages others. Each of these men shone, in his small way, with ­Camden’s light; if none is very important alone, together they make up a group and, in the case of the heralds, an institution that is of importance in its society. Also part of this social mix were more influential close friends, including Robert Cotton, Henry Bourchier, Francis Lee, Fulke Greville, probably Ben Jonson; they too had their natural place amidst Camden’s admirers. Emphasizing family, friendship, and personal indebtedness rather than greatness, the funeral ceremony signified first of all private rather than public values. We will see that Camden was a strong believer in ceremony – strong enough that some people questioned his Protestant convictions. But Camden felt that ceremony should be the outward recognition of inner merit, and that scruple is suggested in the ceremonious but oddly unostentatious funeral procession to the abbey. There is also an appropriateness to his final resting place. After the sermon by Dr Sutton, “he was buried in the South-Isle, near the learned Casaubon, and over-against our incomparable Poet Chaucer”.7 Placed thus, mediating between the European scholar of very ambiguous religious leanings and the first great English vernacular poet, Camden began his afterlife on the same 

Death and Life of a Minor Figure intellectual via media that he travelled during his working life. More fortunate than Spenser had been, thanks to unknown friends (probably Robert Cotton), Camden had a monument in place in the already exclusive south transept, later known as Poets’ Corner. Its inscription commemorates the ­ Britannia, identifies him with Elizabeth, and recognizes his office as Clarenceux, praising his learning, his honesty, and simplicity. However, it is not austere and non-representational, in the plain style favoured by Puritans; nor was it the kind of cadaver tomb that evokes the corruption of the body to warn onlookers against the temptations of this world, popular among many Protestant groups.8 His effigy, a bust in white marble, Camden holding a copy of the Britannia, is handsome, rich in sculpted detail: the intricate lace collar, the finery of his herald’s smock, even the tooling on the binding of the ­Britannia reflects meticulous, but understated attention to physical detail – the kind of monument that “reformers” of the 1540s and the 1640s vehemently disapproved of, and that silently signals his place in the ecclesiastical controversies of the last years of King James. It may well be this representational quality of the effigy that led to its desecration during the years of civil unrest. And finally, apropos of the man who repeatedly urged that we question historical records, who knew how misleading material “evidence” from the past could be, and who best understood the ephemerality of our gestures toward immortality, his monument incorrectly records his age as seventy-four (“aetatis suae 74”), rather than seventy-two. Contemplated from the distance of nearly 400 years, the November death and funeral of a seventy-two-year-old bachelor antiquarian might seem bleak and starkly void of interest.9 Presided over by a dozen or so men in an entourage of over a hundred crêpe-draped souls wending their way to Westminster for the interment, the spectacle will no doubt appear more emotionally austere than it probably was. These people were Camden’s family; his friendship with some of the men officiating went back twenty-five years and more. William Heather and his wife were neighbours of Camden in Westminster and then at Chislehurst – he probably moved there to be near them. They shared a love of music – Heather, following Camden’s philanthropic example, founded a chair of music at Oxford and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Music. He had been a chorister at Westminster and a gentleman of the Royal Chapel, and so their lives overlapped in many ways. Not only did Camden make Heather his executor, but he carefully assigned the profits of the property at Bexley, Kent (approximately £400 per year), to Heather and his heirs for ninety-nine 

William Camden – A Life in Context years.10 Heather himself is buried at the foot of his beloved Camden’s monument. There are other signs of a deep personal life out of sight from the public world of the herald. At the funeral and named in Camden’s will are a number of family members, suggesting enduring relationships that go back to his youth and that also testify to the continued ties to his father’s company, the Painter-Stainers. To his “cousin”, John Wyatt, “painter”, he left a sizeable sum of £100 and the cash value of his heraldic books and ancient seals, to be paid by his successor in the office of Clarenceux. His family roots in the north are recognized in his gift of £20 “to Giles Nicholson of Poulton in Lancashire”. Camden confers gifts to other kin, including £10 to one “Camden of London, Silkman” and £2 each to “my godsonne[s] Christopher Birkhead … Thomas Godwin … [and] to my god-daughter Feild [sic]”. These and other legacies to many family members and friends about whom we know virtually nothing are important reminders of how much the private life of a relatively public man like Camden remains almost entirely invisible – but not altogether inaccessible. They do fill in some of the background depth to the picture of Camden, and give us data that might help future researchers. For example, Wyatt’s inclusion reaches back to Camden’s father and his place among the Company of Painter-Stainers, with which Camden clearly retained friendly and professional ties. In his will he left the company an ample gift of plate (valued at £16) in his and his father’s memory, to be inscribed “Guil. ­Camdenus Clarenceux, filius Sampsonis Pictoris Londinensis, dono dedit”.11 The company, involved as it was with heraldic matters, was traditionally closely associated with the College of Arms, although in the later sixteenth century these ties had become strained through quarrels over jurisdiction. Camden’s abiding attachment to the Painter-Stainers is suggestive, and makes his appointment to the college in 1597 less unlikely than it is sometimes made out to be. Charles Wriothesley, Windsor Herald, died at Sampson Camden’s house in 1562, when William was ten years old.12 Linking the antiquary to the company and the college, then, were deeply personal, rather than just business ties. Although Camden had long before risen beyond the humbler world of the Painter-Stainers, his recollection of his father’s association with them, his implicit expression of indebtedness, and his ongoing friendly and family ties with them suggest personal dimensions, fidelities, a social context that is not readily evident when we contemplate the men in black crêpe who accompanied Camden’s corpse to the abbey. Dangerous as it is to read much of a personal nature into gifts accorded in 10

Death and Life of a Minor Figure wills, legacies to the metaphoric and legal family can be revealing. In Camden’s case, interspersed in the formal and legalistic language we find the verbal signs of a deeply private man. Camden’s estate was modest but ample. He enjoyed a bourgeois affluence that was one of the cultural by-products of his generation. At his death, he lived in a sizeable house in Chislehurst, Kent, set in two acres of land and surrounded by common, and later to be the emperor Louis Napoleon’s place of retirement.13 He owned land. In 1576 he inherited from his father a house in Staffordshire.14 Around 1620, as he prepared to establish the history chair at Oxford, Camden was wealthy enough to buy an estate valued at £400 per year to endow the position. He also had a small house at Westminster, granted to him by the Queen for his lifetime, and he held a prebend in Ilfracombe, Devonshire. Other property included a sizeable library of books and papers as well as seals and artefacts that a number of people were angling to own, if not inherit. There is no record of other ­material possessions. In short, his years as under-master and then headmaster at Westminster, as herald, and as prebendary, combined with a modest inheritance, left him in comfortable financial circumstances for much of his adult life. His purchase of the Bexley property tells us how prosperous he had become. He used part of the income to endow a staggeringly high annual salary of £140 for the holder of the professorship – by comparison, his own salary as headmaster had been only £20 a year.15 However, significantly this major part of his estate was settled prior to his death when he established the professorship, and so does not figure in his will. This suggests the extent to which his personal identity was tied up with his historical, professional, and intellectual interests; he did not want to leave this important a legacy to be worked out after his death.16 An experienced administrator and (as we will see) one who knew painfully well how universities operated, Camden wanted to oversee the establishment of the professorship himself. He selected the first lecturer and ensured his tenure against those who had candidates of their own for the post. The man who assumed the endowed chair, Degory Wheare, was almost wholly unknown to Camden as of 1620. On 17 May 1622, then, with the lectureship already established, Camden was publically recognized as a benefactor of the University of Oxford.17 Thus, in the manner of one of his humanist precursors, John Colet, founder of St Paul’s, Camden devoted the greater portion of his personal estate – during his own lifetime – to learning and scholarship through the establishment of a non-canonical subject, “civil history”, “as might bee most useful and profitable for the younger students of the University”.18 11

William Camden – A Life in Context As a result, Camden’s will consists largely of gestures of friendship and mementoes. For the most part, though, Camden’s distribution of his estate reflects his image of himself as a public man, with responsibilities to his office and profession, and interested in making public recognition of friendships rather than in passing real property and significant wealth to kin. In this we see a man marked by his particular generation and social and professional class. Driven by a combination of civic and philanthropic duty and a respect for “reputation”, his legacies reveal a belief in the importance of the social institutions, including the university, as means of improvement. His gift to the Company of Painter-Stainers further suggests his sense of indebtedness to a vestigial medieval economic system that enabled his father and himself to prosper. The modest gifts to relatives show him to have been a family man, but he clearly chose not to “set up” cousins with whom he had been, nevertheless, close for a period of many decades. Ultimately, his gifts had symbolic more than material value. They are part of the economy of friendship and acknowledge spiritual debts that go back a generation and more. A piece of plate worth £10 bequeathed to his patron Fulke Greville, “whoe preferred me gratis to my office”, reminds us also of their common affection for Philip Sidney, dead now for thirty-seven years. Similar small behests – to Selden, £5, Peter Manwood, £4, John Chamberlain, £3 – tell us that he did not value his friendships in material terms. Nevertheless, he was careful to acknowledge many friends both high and low, leaving to Janus Gruterus, “librarie keeper to the Prince palatine Elector at Heidelberg, five pounds”, to “Lant the younger, bookseller in Lichfield, five pounds”, to “master Thomas Allen of Gloucester Hall in Oxford, sixteen pounds”, and similar modest mementoes to numerous others. There were also token gifts acknowledging a community of friends and family – to godsons and goddaughters he left small sums; he was generous to his servant, John Halton, leaving him £30. Camden’s piety can be seen in such charitable behests as the £7 that he left to the vicar of Chislehurst and the £8 designated for the poor of the parish where he was to be buried. Other benefactions give special colouration to his religiosity. It may not be just the love of music that moved him to leave to “the singing men of the collegiate church of Westminster, six pounds”; this and gifts to the bell ringers and choristers of Westminster may suggest that Camden thought that salvation was not due to faith alone. Chantries and intercessory songs, dirges, and prayers for the souls of the dead had been disallowed in the Henrician and Edwardian Chantries Acts. Camden could not leave gifts explicitly for prayers or hymns in his name, but these 12

Death and Life of a Minor Figure behests for bell-ringing and songs were made in the spirit of “traditional religion”.19 Another intimate friend who enters Camden’s will is Robert Cotton, whom he had known for over forty years, from the time of Cotton’s early youth as a student at Westminster. In addition to making Cotton the overseer of his estate and conferring on him a gift of £10 and his “blacks”, Camden directs that Robert Cotton be allowed to retrieve his personal books from his library, suggesting how fully their lives overlapped and how their friendship and shared interest in antiquities and books transcended differences in age and social class. As we will see, their lives together were so close that the two were inseparable in the minds of many of their friends and correspondents. Of his other books, those on heraldry and arms he left to the office of Clarenceux King of Arms. This professional gesture reveals the seriousness with which he viewed his efforts to reform the College of Arms. His intention was to create a permanent collection for the office of Clarenceux, and to set a precedent among heralds for leaving their papers to the college. This identifies the herald in terms of the college as an institution rather than as an independent agent or a servant to the monarch or a powerful family. In many ways, Camden’s will is typical of the genre, but we should not take for granted either the symbolic nature of some of the behests, or the good sense of others. Such gestures were, of course, common in the period and they reveal aspects of the social dynamic of the age. In them we can read the sensibility of the man, his place among individuals and institutions of his generation, the influence of his social background, and the presence of some of the political, religious, and socio-economic conflicts that he and his contemporaries lived with. We also know of the flurry of activity before Camden’s death, when embittered legacy hunters took steps to obtain his much-valued papers and books. In scenes reminiscent of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, one longtime friend, John Hacket, later Bishop of Litchfield, when visiting Camden on his deathbed, “filched” some of his papers, while another old friend, Godfrey Goodman, a former student and later Bishop of Gloucester, pressed his “right” to papers and records; meanwhile, the books meant for the office of Clarenceux disappeared mysteriously, and the custom that he hoped to ­ inaugurate by leaving his professional papers to the office foundered.20 With such a backdrop of greed, betrayal, and insensitivity, Camden’s intentions in his will become more understandable and more resonant. There is a moral and political economy to it that is a direct response to the world he lived in and hoped to improve. The analogy with Volpone is particularly apt 13

William Camden – A Life in Context here, for the ideal economy of the spirit rather than of things is one which, as Katharine Eisaman Maus has shown, we see in the work of Camden’s friend and protégé, Ben Jonson.21 Jonson and his work provide useful corroboration of what we will have to say about Camden and his world. The society that he depicts, where characters driven by a blend of greed and lust divest themselves of their humanity and become objects or beasts, is one that scholars have identified more and more closely with Jacobean London.22 Here, among the court-worms wrapped in silk and the mongrel esquires bearing their bought arms (see epigrams 11, 15, and 48, for example), Camden had to make his way; his London was also Jonson’s; it too was blessed with the likes of Henry Savile, Clemont Edmundes, William Herbert, Lucy Bedford, and Mary Wroth, but as a teacher and herald of modest beginnings, Camden’s course was by no means a free and unimpeded flight over the crowd. It is such a socially and personally heterodox world of men and women, children and the aged, titled and untitled, named and nameless that inhabit the community outlined by Camden’s will. If, as I have suggested, his will radiates personal intimacy without material and social preoccupations to weigh it down, if it shows order and good sense rather than magnificence and monumentality, and if it bids farewell to friends and relatives without an effort to make them once for all his debtors the way that Jonson’s Chuffe does in epigram 44, it is because that is what Camden wanted. He chose to give “nothing” as gifts, mere signs of himself; he assumed the role of mere administrator of those things that he could not call his own – real property, books, the artefacts of the past that the antiquarian holds in trust. The significance of his will becomes clear in the aftermath of his death, when the gravitational pull of the material world draws many soi disant friends into its sphere of influence while others – the recipients of a gesture, a sign of their friendship – remain quietly associated with the man himself. Camden left the world in the style that he had lived – understated and selfeffacing. It is a style, not just a personality type – a mode of self-­expression that is subtle but forceful in effect. To understand Camden and why he had the influence that he did, we must be sensitive to that style. As with our reading of poets and playwrights, who live by their style, we must also remember that style is a matter of moral choice that positions a person within the community. Camden has been characterized as a man of quiet benignity and selfless industry dedicated to scholarship for its own sake. He has been cast as a man of letters and the mind, as the ideal collegial scholar. But this reputation also casts him as a political neuter, a moral and ethical idiot – Prince Mishkyn 14

Death and Life of a Minor Figure in the Tudor and Stuart courts. Such a view isolates the man from what we know to be the political realities of his world. However, in leaving the world as in living in it, Camden showed his knowledge of the world and his characteristic (and usually effective) method of engaging it. The construction of Camden as a disengaged scholar in a symposium of attentive and admiring colleagues ignores the politics behind the development of the Society of ­Antiquaries, the ways in which the College of Arms relates to James’s obsession with ­prerogative, the links between educational methods, antiquarianism, the forces of religious and legal reform, and the evolution of the Cult of Elizabeth from the 1590s to the middle of James’s reign. Nobody as central to these movements and organizations as Camden was could remain as politically or morally naïve as he is made out to be. For some contemporaries his was a respected political and moral voice; for others, he was a clever ventriloquist in matters of state and religion. In the gift of a ring, the recognition of an artisan’s company, the return of some books, and the minimalist use of gesture rather than money, we can begin to see Camden the Elizabethan, brought up in the age of restored Protestantism and the high Renaissance (such as it existed in England) in the contrasting light of Jacobean London, parliamentary conflict and growing political restiveness. A Protestant educator and historian, he was also a quiet reformer whose influence give him a noteworthy place on the ideological path leading from Cranmer to Laud and on to Milton; his seeming “neutrality” in political and religious matters was itself a manifestation of a Protestantism that needs to be placed in this historical context. This is the portrait that I hope to develop in the chapters to follow.

15

chapter ii A London Life: The Educator’s Education Ludgate’s Stones In the year 1260, this Ludgate was repaired, and beautified with images of Lud, and other kings. … These images of kings in the reign of Edward VI. had their heads smitten off, and were otherwise defaced by such as judged every image to be an idol; and in the reign of Queen Mary were repaired, as by setting new heads on their old bodies, etc. All which so remained until the year 1586, and the 28th of Queen Elizabeth, when the same gate, being sore decayed, was clean taken down… and the same year the whole gate was newly and beautifully built, with the images of Lud and others, as afore, on the east side, and the picture of her majesty Queen Elizabeth on the west side: all which was done at the common charges of the citizens.23

W

hile we have bits and fragments about Camden’s early life, what we have has remained largely undigested; from Thomas Smith, Anthony Wood, John Aubrey, from Camden himself and his contemporaries, we have data, but no real narrative until after his university years. Not surprisingly, his life seems to come into focus when he gets closer to completing his major published work, the Britannia. This is often the case in early modern biographies, for the simple reason that the early years are ­usually sparsely documented. The result, however, tends to be over-­determined accounts that seem to work ineluctably toward the defining ­artistic, personal, or historical achievement – the appearance of Paradise Lost, the death of Sidney, for example. While in a way this sounds exactly as it should be, most lives are not so coherent or schematic and are more poly­ semous. All biographers run the risk of using the light of hindsight to make the subject’s path to success clear, if not direct or easy. When the person’s youth is relatively undocumented, this tendency to allow the major achievement to become the defining point in the biographical landscape is hard to resist, so strong is the “author function” that motivates biographical study. 16

A London Life: The Educator’s Education For Camden related professional considerations compound the difficulty. His life is fragmented by his different professional activities and accomplishments: he is not just a writer, an educator, a herald, an antiquary, or a historian; nor is he best viewed as the sum of these “parts”. His importance will be different for different people, but no single achievement (the Britannia, the Annals of Elizabeth, his ties to major authors and scholars, for example) captures the essence of what makes him worth studying. For Camden (and his biographer), there are many intersecting paths leading toward several different identities. In illuminating each it is possible to capture his originality without exaggerating his importance in any single endeavour or area. In this way we can appreciate how Camden, a man in the margin of the period’s historical panorama, is able to shed so much redefining light on the larger canvas. All this calls attention to questions of biographical method. Camden’s life cannot be presented through a single lens; it needs to accommodate the diversity of his experience and to give it coherence without losing its complexity. His life does not have a clear linear development heading toward a culminating achievement. Thus, we need a view of character that is dynamic, not essentialistic; struggle and conflict are shaping influences and part of the economy of self rather than simply impediments to clearly articulated goals and personal or career objectives. This will be particularly important in our survey of Camden, whose life is an odd series of litotes: he does not seek out positions, they are conferred on him; others construct him. Paradoxically, biographical accounts of him have been series of negatives – he is not a historian, not an antiquarian, not a poet, not a politician, not a collector, not a herald – that ultimately affirm and qualify his identity. As I hope will become clear, Camden is a cultural construct, a product of the intellectual, socio-economic and political forces of his generation. While this may apply to everyone in a post-Greenblatt era, it is particularly important in a character as multivalent as Camden, and its implications for the biographer are critical: they will influence the shape and methodology of this study, and the nature and use of documentation deemed to be important. As a “life” of Camden, this is not a study of how he wrote the Britannia, how he performed as an educator, or what his influence on Spenser or Jonson was. Rather, as a study of different overlapping segments of his life and accomplishments, approached from their social contexts, this might be called a cultural and critical biography. While I try to identify Camden’s achievements as a writer, scholar, educator, and herald, and to assess his originality in different areas 17

William Camden – A Life in Context and works, I see Camden as shaped by, but also himself shaping the cultural forces of his time. The methodologies brought to bear on such a study, those of cultural historian, literary critic, textual scholar, and biographer, are ones that seem to be dictated by the subject himself and by my efforts to make sense of very diverse material that does not readily announce its significance. Camden was deeply sensitive to the semiotics of the material world around him; by virtue of his social and economic background, he was always strongly influenced by the forces at work in his society. He was a subject, not an agent; a servant, not a master. The life of service also has its own ideology; it can be, among other things, Christlike or patriotic. Over time Camden made political reality a virtue, transformed his object-status to a position of agency, and made the life of service one of originality and reform. But, as all must, he had to learn his place before he could take his place. “Place” is, of course, both a material and immaterial construct, and Camden, topographer, herald, and educator, understood both dimensions, and how one learned and mastered one’s place. The records of Camden’s formative youth are not plentiful and are insufficient for a master-narrative. But it is safe to say that the man shaped by the cultural currents of Tudor and Stuart London was fathered by the boy born in the Old Bailey. As anyone who has worked on Renaissance topographical writing knows, the material landscape bears the imprint of its political and socio-economic history. Because Camden is so much the product of his Elizabethan society and because in his young adulthood he was so acutely aware of the politics of landscape, the immediate setting of his early years is of interest. As the epigraph quoted from Camden’s contemporary John Stow suggests, the area around the Old Bailey, by the founding gates of the city, is something of a palimpsest for the cycles of change evident in the life and material fabric of Camden’s London. It conveys the “lived” quality of the historical environment for Camden and his contemporaries, and so is a “passage” worth our consideration. Stow’s topographical anecdote, a narrative excavation of Ludgate, is set in the neighbourhood where Camden grew up, and the last date that he mentions corresponds to the publication of the Britannia. Camden was born in 1551, the fourth year of Edward VI’s reign, in the Old Bailey. The Old Bailey (ancient site of the “court of the chamberlain of the city”) lies at the western-most extreme of the City, in the shadow of two prisons – Newgate (established by 1218) and Ludgate (established in 1378), 42 perches, or 231 18

A London Life: The Educator’s Education yards apart, according to Stow, and in view of St Paul’s (the cathedral and the school) on the east.24 It was the site of the city’s legendary foundation by King Lud in 66 bc, and the ancient city gate where on 8 February 1554 Thomas Wyatt and his rebel band tried unsuccessfully to storm the city in an attempt to remove Catholic Queen Mary and install Princess Elizabeth. The area was an old and poor working-class and Jewish neighbourhood, and, as Stow suggests, it reflects the city’s ongoing cycles of change. Stow’s antiquarian snapshot of the Old Bailey between Ludgate and Newgate is an interesting example of politically astute descriptive writing. He describes some relatively unobtrusive changes in the urban landscape – “historical” renovation and restoration of the ancient Ludgate; in the process, he presents changing social attitudes toward certain monuments that also reveal historical revisionism; urban renewal here is part of ongoing religious and political conflicts in the city and the kingdom. Interestingly, Stow’s account of the area dwells on the fate of the sculpted reliefs set in the wall at Ludgate. It reflects the popular interest in local history that informs his Survey of London, and he trusts his reader to be semiotician enough to draw conclusions independently. Stow, writing in 1598, tells the story of a gate – his method of unveiling the several historical layers of the scene and letting the landscape tell its own story is one that Camden had perfected in the Britannia a decade before. The gate, decorated with sculpted busts of its legendary founder and his successors, was built by King Lud, its antiquity recorded in the commentaries of Caesar and in Geoffrey of Monmouth. In 1215 the rebel barons broke through the gate to enter the City and despoil the houses of the Jews in the district. The stones of their houses were then used to rebuild the gate. In these repairs of 1260 the legendary history of Lud was memorialized in the stone images carved on the gate, which in 1378 was incorporated into a “free prison” for those convicted of debt, trespass, and like misdemeanours; Newgate Prison, nearby, was reserved for felons convicted of treasons and criminal offences. Camden’s Old Bailey, the early site for the city’s courts, lies between these two imposing portals and prisons; “without the walls”, it is part of the City but is also an embarking point for Westminster to the west. In sixteenth-century England city gates were still points of strategic importance as well as of antiquarian interest; city descriptions conventionally record such topographical details.25 They are by nature liminal points, and their histories are records of transgression, rebellion, definition, and affirmation; they are real and symbolic thresholds. Here, when Camden was three years old, 19

William Camden – A Life in Context Thomas Wyatt and his forces found Ludgate barred against them. In his narrative, Stow captures these elements, using the interplay between myth and history to give it meaning. Working from the mythic Lud to the historical rebels, and turning from the classical record of Caesar to the accounts of Geoffrey and other more fabulous sources, Stow’s narrative has a diastolic movement from affirming myth to disruptive history. Embodied in the gate are different kinds of history – that is, stories with different claims to veracity. These distinctions will figure later on in our discussion of Camden’s historical methods. For our present purposes, Stow’s historical picture of the area around the Old Bailey shows us two kinds of behaviour – creative and destructive. Embedded in the account (and more literally, in Ludgate) are exempla of rebellion, delusion, anti-Semitic cruelty, civic philanthropy, crime and punishment, and always the struggle for domination. The account records cyclical patterns of decay and growth; the historicity of Lud, Geoffrey’s or Caesar’s, has no bearing on the truth of the historical pattern itself. We see in Stow’s survey of Ludgate an epitome of the kinds of historical problems that Camden works out in the Britannia, but more immediately, that are recognized as part of the lesson of local history. Concentrating on the physical evidence (rather than the narrative), Stow, like Camden, exposes various antitheses on the surface of his narrative: in the struggles for power, the persecution of the Jews, the desecration of historical images and their reconstruction and later renovation, we see the clash between classic and vernacular, fact and fiction, politics and propaganda, the swinging pendulum of religious controversy, and monarchs’ use of local settings to validate themselves – in short, the daily, often disconcerting process by which nations grow through destruction. These are matters that the mature Camden certainly concerned himself with, and they are also the forces of history and change that are embodied in Camden’s neighbourhood. In the passage quoted from Stow, we see how he uses the physical setting to focus major ideological and political cruxes. In about the year of Camden’s birth and the founding of Christ’s Church ­Hospital, early in the short reign of Edward VI, the comely images of Lud and his successors were regarded as idols by the reformers, who, like Jonson’s Zeal of the Land Busy, took all images for idols, and had the reliefs decapitated. The ironic intent of Stow’s version is understated but certain (in the first edition of the Survey he calls the reformers “unadvised”; here, in the more diplomatic 1603 text, his irony is drier). With the new monarch, the return to Catholicism and the restoration of the bishops, the stone sculptures are resurrected body and soul; Stow’s account of the restoration of the heads to the 20

A London Life: The Educator’s Education ­vandalized figures echoes with a synecdoche suggesting religious and political “heads” as well as statues. These “Catholic images”, if you will, sit on the bodies of the legendary kings until 1586, the year of the first edition of the Britannia. Then, this time in the name of antiquarian “restoration”, the ­effigies are again removed, temporarily; the entire gate was “clean taken down; the prisoners in the meantime remaining in the large south-east quadrant to the same gate adjoining”, and “the whole gate was newly and beautifully built, with the images of Lud and the others, as afore, on the east side”. To the once-heretical images is added the bust of another head-of-state aspiring to like-mythic status – Queen Elizabeth; in a characteristic act of appropriation, she adds her figure to the “restored” heads of Lud and her predecessors, placed politically at a discreet remove on the west side of the gate. This architectural enactment of the Elizabethan settlement was completed at the citizens’ expense, in excess of £1,500. In its way, this second half of the tale of a gate subtly recapitulates the first. It records a sequence of events that Stow and Camden both lived through, the significance of which both men could read in the landscape. The fate of those seemingly innocent heads tells the story of the Elizabethan domestic policy, with all of its major ramifications for the poet, the historiographer, the political scientist, and the social historian. Acted out through the puppet-like busts were the ideologies of the reformers, whose iconoclasm embraced the particulars of statuary and the broad traditions of history; of the Catholics and their investment of belief in the outward and material form of its images; and of the would-be reconcilers who appropriate the iconography and assert its secular status. Elizabeth assimilated history and myth, and in so doing accommodated both Protestant and Catholic ideologies into a secular lore centred on her and maintained by the people. As in earlier centuries, it was a historical process that symbolically deconstructed the past, in this case peacefully, and reconstructed it in the idiom of the times. These are the times and this the compromise that Camden grew up in and that he absorbed through his environment before he studied it in the state papers that Burghley later provided him for writing the Annals of Elizabeth. What we see in the neutralization of the offending images is the political process that set the tone for Elizabeth’s reign; it is a tone that was assumed by writers as diverse as Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and William Camden, each of whom used the image of Elizabeth in a similar way – to repossess the past in the terms of the Protestant present. The compromise that reconstructs the effigies and places them with Elizabeth’s own obviously 21

William Camden – A Life in Context does not solve religious problems that they symbolize: it diverts our attention – from the controversy, even from the stigma of the prison, by reconstituting the fabric of history. In placing herself among the legendary figures, she joins myth and history, legitimizes one with the other, thus short-circuiting Puritan objections; instead of destroying the images Mary replaced, she removes them and “repairs” them in her own image. Strategic rehabilitation is an effective way of achieving conformity, at psychological and personal, as well as at political and social levels. Cities have been built on such tactics, and modern landscapes are transformed in the same manner.26 Both cunning and control are at work. The power to destroy is asserted but not exactly used; factions are invited not to see what they saw before. Statues once heathenish are now civic responsibilities beyond the pale of religious controversy. The lesson contained in the stones illustrates why it is more prudent for people like Stow and Camden to write of landscape rather than of political figures. The rhetoric of topographical writing is one of indirection; to relate the vicissitudes of Ludgate’s stones is “antiquarianism”; to comment on the motives for changing the landscape would be political analysis. Topographical writing relies heavily on the expressive force of the physical and gestural; its language is one of accommodation and equivocation. It is learned in the streets before it is learned in handbooks and grammars; that is where Camden and Stow, a tallow chandler’s son and self-taught man, learned what might be called the semiotics of place.27 The forces that are at work in the restoration of Ludgate pervade Camden’s world. The pressures of religious controversy and compromise couched in Stow’s narrative are among the most important to keep in mind as we try to comprehend Camden’s development. This is not because he was himself directly concerned with these controversies, but because they permeate all aspects of social, educational, and political movements throughout the second half of the sixteenth century. The need to cultivate a reformed ideology that worked socially and politically pervaded the material as well as the mental environment of the period. Camden’s seeming uninvolvement in religious controversy in later years is itself part of the political tone and style that I have identified with the Elizabethan compromise. We will see that his work is not so much silent on matters of controversy as it is indirect in its engagement of them. As we look more closely at the fragmentary details of his youth, we will see how the presence of religious reform enters unobtrusively into most aspects of his life.

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A London Life: The Educator’s Education

The Post-Reformation Student: Camden at Christ’s Church Hospital

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amden was born on 2 May 1551, in the fourth year of Edward the Sixth’s reign, the year before John Leland’s death and the conversion of Greyfriars, the monastic house, into Christ’s Church Hospital. His was a northern family lately settled in London. Sampson Camden, his father, was originally from Litchfield. His mother, Elizabeth, was daughter of Giles Curwen of Poulton Hall, Lancashire, a connection recalled by William when he prepared his will. In the Britannia he notes his family connection to the Curwens of Workington, Cumberland, a politically well-connected family descended from the controversial Earl of Northumberland and reputedly related to Catherine Parr.28 There is no evidence of material consequences, either positive or negative, from his northern lineage. Camden remembered and respected these origins, and it may be that his maternal connections provided introductions and assistance for his family when they settled in London. The Camdens were part of the influx of people coming to London from the provinces, although Camden himself was a true denizen of the city. There were other Camdens in the city at this time – Mark Eccles notes the existence of a “William Cambden of Fleet Lane” who was assessed at £5.29 Our William makes a generous behest of £10 to “Camden of London, a Silkman”. There were William Camdens who were Painter-Stainers in London as early as 1529 and 1535,30 so it may be that Sampson Camden moved to the city to join an established branch of the family. This was a time of growth for the city, and also of political and religious unrest. As a member of the Company of PainterStainers, Sampson was perforce a man having a good deal to do with images of all sorts, including those that would be inventoried by the heralds on their visitations. The Reformation, with its wide-ranging prohibitions against “religious” images, marked the decline of the company and the beginning of territorial struggles between them and the College of Arms, as the guild’s ecclesiastical market dried up and they had to compete for the lucrative trade in heraldry. Little is known about Sampson; judging from William’s will, he seems also to have been a member of the Company of Cordwainers. Family circumstances are not very clear: Camden’s mother presumably died when he was still young, and Sampson remarried – in 1575, to Avis Carter.31 He left his son some property in Staffordshire, but in the early years finances were tight 23

William Camden – A Life in Context enough that young Camden attended Christ’s Church Hospital, intended for the poor and orphaned children, and went to Oxford as a chorister and servitor. One should assume nothing about the family’s religious persuasion; given Sampson’s generation and the place where he would have made most of his money – the Roman Catholic Church – we cannot take for granted an enthusiastic reform-minded guild member. A cautious approach to this subject is important since I will be questioning the traditional view of Camden’s ardent anti-Catholicism. Little that there is to say about Sampson Camden, we must not forget that his was the swing generation in the decades of reform. Sampson’s and Elizabeth’s son was a true child of Edwardian reform, and his first years coincide with those of intense religious disorientation in England. He received his Protestant legacy early in a form that would pervade his life and personality. His first schooling was at the newly re-established Christ’s Church Hospital, and this has led some biographers (notably Thomas Smith) to speculate incorrectly that Camden had been orphaned.32 As it would be for Milton, education for Camden became a way of life; he felt its invigorating force in his working-class bones, and whatever he may have learned at Christ’s Church Hospital, over the years he seems to have been keenly aware of its formative influence and to have recognized that education was his first step on the ladder of opportunity. It was a ladder firmly grounded in the historical present. Each stage in his education bears the imprimatur of the new phase of Tudor reform that would pave the way for his growth. The young Camden was admitted to Christ’s Church Hospital at around the age of seven in 1557 or 1558, the usual age to begin school at the “petties”; he would have entered as one of the many poor children, rather than among the foundlings or orphans who were also part of the “hospital’s” 400-plus charges. Christ’s Church was created along with other hospitals and schools five years before, in 1552/3, in “the late dissolved house of the Gray Friars”.33 A product of the Chantries Acts enacted by Henry VIII and continued by Edward VI, the “hospital” was meant to provide for the poor (not just children) and orphaned of the city as well as to serve as a school; it continued to serve those functions under Queen Mary. Still in its first decade of existence when Queen Elizabeth took the throne and restored Protestantism, it was imbued with the spirit of reform. Indeed, the foundations established by the Chantries Acts were designed as a social no less than a religious answer to the errors of a Roman Catholic past. As the reformers viewed the changes, monastic orders that were largely devoted to praying for the souls of the dead were converted to hospitals for the maintenance and 24

A London Life: The Educator’s Education education of the poor and infirm. The utilization of these dissolved church properties was linked specifically to doctrinal issues, particularly the Catholic church’s “misguided” views on purgatory and its preoccupation with the wellendowed dead at the expense of the needs of the living. Educators will appreciate the irony that, effectively, in the Chantries Act of Edward VI, grammar schools and social programmes were reconfigured out of purgatory: a great part of superstition and errors in Christian religion has been brought into the minds and estimation of men, by reason of their ignorance of the … perfect salvation through Christ Jesus, and by … vain opinions of purgatory and masses … to be done for them which be departed. Having thus identified the problem, the Chantries Act specifies that amendment of the same, and converting to good and godly uses, as in erecting of Grammar Schools to the education of youths in virtue and godliness … and better provision for the poor and needy [can best be done] by the advice of this most prudent council.34 The religious doctrine and political policy outlined in the Act itself provides the rationale for further reallocation of monastic houses, to be carried out according to specific warrants issued by the king and his council. The rhetoric of religious reform cannot conceal the social and political designs couched in the Chantries Acts. Turning the religious houses to ostensibly secular humanitarian purposes which, however, also promulgated the reformed liturgy, was an astute if not original political move. Indeed, it would be surprising if a boy like Camden did not associate the life of opportunities that he could not otherwise have hoped for with the newly restored religion under Elizabeth. Along with Leach, we may question whether the educational reforms in fact amounted to a renaissance of education in England.35 He argues rather that what took place was (if anything) a re-christening: that a relatively effective system was dismantled in the name of religious reform and redesigned to bear witness to the magnanimity of Henry and his son. This is precisely the remaking of the political landscape that we have seen in Stow’s survey of Ludgate. According to Edward VI’s critics, the overall effect of these changes was a net loss to the educational system itself: as church lands were confiscated, the schools “received very little, if any, endowment … and were like Christ’s Hospital and the other London hospitals, cheap advertisements of their royal patron and his advisers”.36 Grumpy in tone and, one suspects, 25

William Camden – A Life in Context not altogether disinterested, the passage reminds us that Renaissance education is not all hornbooks, double translation, and Ramist logic. The controversies surrounding Edwardian educational reform add brush strokes and colour to the portion of our canvas that deals with Camden’s early schooling. Whatever their educational strengths, the reformed schools, and particularly Christ’s Church Hospital, had a clear political and religious mission that was directed at working-class youth. Young and newly restored to its Protestant mandate, the school can hardly be thought of as a quiet haven of learning for its own sake. In Camden, we see one young beneficiary of Henrician and Edwardian policy, and can watch his uneven career as he rides the wave of reform and steers an indirect course to security and, depending on the criteria we use, success. We do not have to know precisely what Camden’s status was at Christ’s Church Hospital to make a modest assessment of his experience there and to fit it into a loose narrative framework. Ludgate was one of the oldest districts of the city, with notoriously narrow streets and having some of the exotic quality of a Jewish quarter. Looming magisterially in the midst of the area were the walls of the debtors’ prison and the prison for traitors and felons – potent manifestations of two aspects of authority and social order that would also have influenced significantly the economic, commercial, and social activity of the neighbourhood. The third and equally impressive neighbourhood institution was Christ’s Church Hospital. Occupying the massive historic complex of the Greyfriars – the church itself was the second largest religious edifice in London (after St Paul’s) – it fits well into this urban setting; under Henry VII, its church subsumed a number of nearby parishes, including St Sepulchre. With the double mission to serve the indigent and orphaned and to provide education for the children of the poor, this physically imposing group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century buildings, including the church, the fratry, the library, dorter, chapter house, the great cloister, and “lesser tenements” cast their long shadow of authoritarian presence over the area.37 Together accommodating large numbers of the city’s more marginal inhabitants, these three institutions set the tone for the working-class community that they served. It is in this shadow that the Camdens lived. Many of the Edwardian grammar schools, even those designated for the poor, were frequented by the children of the middle and more prosperous classes.38 While this is no doubt true of Christ’s Church Hospital, its broader mission secured its reputation as a haven for the “relief of the poor children” of the city.39 How near the margin 26

A London Life: The Educator’s Education were the Camdens? Their domestic circumstances suggest certain habits of living, a sense of family tradition, and comparative economic stability. His father was well enough connected, judging from his friendship with Charles Wriothesley, a prosperous and distinguished herald who was with the Camdens when he died in 1562. Assessed at £8 per year, Sampson made “a very good income for the time”, according to Mark Eccles.40 The Camdens of Old Bailey were probably a proud family of modest but growing financial means. You do not need to be rich to be proud – nor do you have to be impoverished to be affected by the presence of poverty, marginality, and an overpowering authoritarian presence. Here was a community where the extreme forms of punitive authority, social assistance, and the demands of conformity are palpably present. Certainly not affluent, Camden was exposed early on to Elizabethan society’s systems of punishment, reward, and restraint. His was a working-class boy’s introduction to the patronage system – patronized (in the old and new senses of the word) by an education system presenting ­genuine opportunity to its young, and built on the importance of hierarchy and conformity as well as learning. A more prosperous environment would have subtler forms of authoritarian presence and influence, but here, in the overlapping shadows of prisons and what was effectively an almshouse, Camden began to learn the plain, austerer forms of the language of understatement, restraint, and indirection necessary for advancement. We know from the spare autobiographical records left by Camden that after some years at Christ’s Church Hospital he was infected with the plague and removed to Islington, only to return sometime prior to 1566 to attend St Paul’s School.41 His diary entry for 1563, “peste correptus Islingtoniae”, is the first such record in a lifetime of frequent illness. Camden was diligent observer of health and physical symptoms. The habit probably began as he and his family or nurses watched the course of his symptoms and convalescence during this plague year when (as he explains in the Annals of Elizabeth) English soldiers evacuating the infested and besieged camps at New Haven “were brought back into England sick of the Plague” and spread so “con­tagious [a] Pestilence, that it grievously afflicted the whole Realm: and out of the City of London alone … there were carried forth to burying about 21,530 Corpses”.42 When Camden entered St Paul’s School, probably in 1563, he came with an educational and social background that a new grammar school student entering directly into Paul’s would not have. How he managed financially to attend St Paul’s is not clear: whether in recognition of his scholarly ability, because 27

William Camden – A Life in Context of the influence of a patron or friend, or because his own family could afford it, we do not know. But few would wonder why he would transfer there from Christ’s Church Hospital if it were possible to do so.

St Paul’s School and the Traditions of Reform

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lthough st paul’s was virtually in Camden’s backyard, it was in an   entirely different neighbourhood. Presided over by the cathedral rather than a dissolved friary turned hospital, it was a prosperous neighbourhood with a solid middle-class economy associated with (among other things) the legal profession and publishing rather than prisons, debt, and treason. Inverted mirror images to one another, the two districts and their schools stand in ironic contrast. Law, the Church, authority in various guises dominate both settings but in markedly different forms. If at Christ’s Church ­Hospital Camden saw socially more of the stick than he did of the carrot, at St Paul’s this was reversed. Literally and figuratively Camden was moving into the heart of the medieval and Renaissance city from its marginal western limits, where the pull of Westminster rivalled that of the City. In later years he would reverse the direction and move west to the new political and social centre, at early modern Westminster and Whitehall. But in the mid-1560s, on his school route from the Old Bailey, he could see the cathedral and beyond it, the royal presence of the White Tower. Travelling the short distance to St Paul’s, young Camden was leaving home-territory and penetrating a landscape perhaps familiar but not his own. No schoolboy would be insensitive to the symbolic and real differences in the landscapes he passed as he moved into Paul’s Yard, the threshold opening east towards Guildhall on the left, Baynard’s Castle on the right, the White Tower ahead. This is the heart of medieval London; the humanist school, newly built by John Colet in 1512, signalled the trajectory for changes to come in a reformed, early modern city. St Paul’s had a unique place in the emergence of the Protestant city; its active role in the early years of reform became the powerful traditions that persisted with great vitality even as late as John Milton. Being at St Paul’s was unlike being at Christ’s Church Hospital, and the difference is part of what helped to mould the character of William Camden. Christ’s Church Hospital and St Paul’s were very different in spite of common ideological foundations shared by Reformation schools. Their ­curricula were probably very much the same, however much the quality of 28

A London Life: The Educator’s Education education might have differed: the curriculum at St Paul’s was still the model followed by other schools. The differences were primarily in the size and nature of the student body, and in the ways in which religious and political ideologies were present in the social milieu of the two schools. Given the very nature of English schools after the Reformation, both were politically and religiously wholly conformist. Under supervision of the Bishop of London, employing authorized texts incorporating a generally uniform curriculum and religious instruction, both schools functioned within the same political and religious environment. In sixteenth-century England, goals for religious uniformity and political control came together in the educational system under the same authority. Notwithstanding this centralized and outwardly homogeneous system, schools had markedly different relationships to the sources of political control; indeed, some (St Paul’s being one) enjoyed a significant degree of political autonomy while also maintaining an essentially conservative ideology. For student and for master, life at St Paul’s, Christ’s Church Hospital, and Westminster School would be very different. And Camden was to be affiliated in different ways with all three. The differences are entrenched in the physical as well as the fiscal and statutory foundations of the schools. The architecture of the massive walls of the Franciscan complex, enclosing an impenetrably quiet quadrangle, makes an important, if not very subtle architectural statement. Turning inward away from the urban world, combining restraint and protection in an institution that carries the idea of in loco parentis to the extreme, the religious house of the Gray Friars provided a monastic paradigm that was implicitly adapted to the secular institution of Christ’s Church Hospital. With about 400 young students, the reformed facility was no doubt rather less quiet than it had been, although behind its walls, its buildings and quadrangles served many of the same functions. Now, however, under the auspices of a royal patron, it withdrew its poor charges from the world, cared for and educated them in things secular and spiritual. St Paul’s School, on the other hand, stood in a completely different relationship to religious and political authority. A new building erected by its founding patron, it stood adjacent to but distinct from the cathedral. The school was designed as an urban school, for children of merchants from the City as well as for international students, and was entrusted to the management of the “felowshype of the mercery of London”.43 Not residential and having no quiet close, it was not intended to act in loco parentis; rather, it looked into the cathedral yard, itself an English piazza, a meeting place, not 29

William Camden – A Life in Context a cloister, and its students commuted to school from their homes in the City. The school is conspicuously an urban, Renaissance construction reflecting in many ways the bourgeois values of the merchant class, the “married citizens of good character” that Colet stipulated should run the school and whose children would occupy it.44 Its physical situation in the city, like its educational objectives, was not ecclesiastical, monastic, or medieval, but rather secular, mercantile, and self-consciously “modern”. In these details alone we begin to see the different relationship that St Paul’s had to the dominant forces affecting the lives of its students. Indeed, it was carefully conceived by its founder as having greater autonomy than that of cathedral or parish schools.45 St Paul’s and Christ’s Church Hospital were founded in radically different political climates, and the differences are reflected in their statutes. The forty-three years that separate their establishment measure the distance between a humanist, Renaissance school and a post-Reformation school. Their founding statutes betray different relationships between the members of the educational community and the local and national political hierarchies. Thus, when John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s, founded the school in 1510, he took pains to make it independent of ecclesiastical authority, and to keep it separate from the cathedral, from himself and his own office as dean, and from the cathedral school that had once existed on the site. Colet’s carefully designed statutes for the school reveal his awareness of the political realities behind educational institutions. The paradox that the Dean of St Paul’s should create a school as far beyond ecclesiastical jurisdiction as possible is not wholly explained by the enmity between him and his bishop. Rather, what we see in the statutes is a design fully a part of the spirit of reform in 1510, that is, the period when reform was gradually emerging rather than being legislated by acts of conformity. The Erastian institution that Colet wanted to create required certain fiscal, administrative, and educational conditions, and the measures that he took to realize them are part of the intellectual heritage that influenced Camden and others of his generation. Thus, the school was established – by an individual, not by royal decree – in a time of educational zeal but a generation before the creation of schools was being used as a palliative for the appropriation of church lands. Colet’s foundation is a product of the first wave of humanism brought to England by such pioneers as William Grocyn and John Linacre.46 Colet and his school had a significant role in fuelling the humanist movement that, in turn, gave rise to the religious reform that was to follow. Being in the vanguard of reform, 30

A London Life: The Educator’s Education St Paul’s, an independently endowed institution, had a clearer and simpler relationship to political and religious authority than did Christ’s Church Hospital. Colet’s desire to instruct children in “good manners and literature” is free of the polemical politicized zeal informing the Chantries Act. There were certainly “political” factors aplenty in the founding of St Paul’s, but for Colet they involved circumventing the Church and its authority, not the state’s – a distinction that would work to his advantage and that could not be made in 1553. Humanist learning and education could be hazardous business; the kind of social and spiritual reform that Colet hoped to effect through the bonae ­litterae required autonomy from the scholastic, monkish, and medieval system that he associated with every kind of vice and stupidity. The intellectual idealism that strives to work outside institutional structures would be part of the intellectual tradition that shaped Camden’s career. This meant that Colet needed to create an administrative structure that would ensure this independence; the result was a school whose traditions were radically different from those of institutions, like Christ’s Church Hospital, that were the expressions of royal supremacy and agents of conformity. And so Colet defined the aims of his school as secular, and he put its governance into the hands of the Company of Mercers; the education was to be liberal, not ecclesiastical. For Colet, as it would be for Camden, the force of reform came essentially from an educated society rather than from institutional authority. His political realism was tinged with the social idealism that motivated the humanists. It was built on middle­-class families such as the Camdens; eschewing aristocratic and ecclesiastical leadership, Colet turned to the citizens engaged in the new economy because, he said, he “found less corruption in men of that class”.47 In Colet we can see a precursor of the educator and administrator that Camden was to become, and why; the traditions of the first English humanist school were to influence the man who promoted the revival of those traditions in Westminster School. Colet’s goal of intellectual and administrative independence pervades the educational tradition of St Paul’s. His methods, which we will see also in Camden’s work, are typically those of circumvention rather than confrontation, and they made it possible to survive controversy and exert influence. In 1510 St Paul’s took the lead in introducing in England a full humanist education comparable to European models, offering a curriculum designed by Colet himself. In addition to commissioning ­crucial texts from Erasmus, the guru of humanist educators, and stating that the school was to teach “good literature bothe Latin and Greke, and good 31

William Camden – A Life in Context authors” (pagan and Christian), Colet gave maximum freedom to the headmaster of the school.48 Each aspect of the statutes reiterates Colet’s desire not to be dogmatic in prescribing either the form or content of instruction in the school. He states clearly the kind of education he hoped to foster – humane in the fullest sense, combining classical and Christian; he explicitly refuses to be prescriptive, and places his confidence in his instructors’ judgement and in the texts by Erasmus. It would be naïve to think that what is at work here is politically disinterested; after all, this is the education that provided the intellectual rationale for the Reformation, and Colet, a man of deep religious conviction, is commonly regarded as a proto-Protestant. But it is safe to say that Colet’s educational agenda pretends to disinterestedness. From its foundation through its curriculum, it asserted its secular Christianity and successfully sidestepped attacks by the church in various ways – something Colet took some pride in.49 One way that Colet strove to achieve this was by ensuring diversity among the ­ student body and their parents. Thus, while the curriculum of Christ’s Church Hospital and St Paul’s might be virtually identical, the educational experience would be radically different partly because of the demographics and the way that its heterogeneity carried into its governance. In avoiding traditional hierarchic structures, Colet built his school on the back of London’s growing international and commercial importance: “There shall be taught in the scole children of all nations and countres indifferently to the number of cliii according to the number of seates in the scole”.50 Interesting not only for its internationalism but also for its refusal to specify any social or economic group, even avoiding commitment to the children of the Mercers, the statutes are clearly intended to be free of any restrictive admission policy. This nicely opens the doors for a student such as Camden. The desire to establish an international community of scholars in a secular but Christian context sets St Paul’s apart from virtually all other privately endowed London schools of this or the next generation. The school and the education that it professed, then, emerged from a clear awareness of its relationship to the principal forces of authority and power in its society. In this way, Colet negotiated for his school a space that accommodated an intellectual heterodoxy in an otherwise increasingly hierarchic and exclusionary political culture. From within such spaces come realigned intellectual priorities that find their way into the larger political arena. Without such a tradition of heterodox thinking, Camden would not have come into his own; he habitually created for himself such politically demilitarized 32

A London Life: The Educator’s Education zones where he could facilitate rethinking of the organizational and power structures of the communities in which he worked. The particular kind of experience to be had at St Paul’s in the mid-1560s would not be lost on Camden. With his background and as an older student coming to the school from Christ’s Church Hospital, he could not miss the social, political, and religious gradations between them. If Christ’s Church Hospital is unmistakably a product of Henrician and Edwardian policies, the intellectual élitism of St Paul’s is in some measure removed from them. St Paul’s was a school bearing all the marks of its generation – when the move to restore a primitive church was gaining momentum; when the recovery of Greek and classical Latin was becoming the driving educational force; when humanism was still an international movement. These characteristics were part of the legendary, revolutionary character of the school, and they were certainly still potent forces for John Milton.51 Whatever the twelve-year-old Camden’s perception of the school, he certainly learned to appreciate these qualities, for they pervade his life and manner. They are the characteristics of his own approach to scholarship, which was international, secular, and classical, though patriotic and Protestant withal. More specific influences can also be identified. It is Camden, the Paul’s pigeon, who will step back into the educational system in 1575 as an educator and later as the author of a Greek textbook, the Latin model of which he encountered at St Paul’s in William Lily’s Latin grammar. There is no question that the mature Camden in some ways modelled himself as educator on what he encountered at Colet’s school. More important, Camden’s career and the identity that, if you will, was finally created for him, was an Elizabethan and early-Jacobean remake of the earlier Tudor humanist. Remakes are by nature the appropriation of an earlier era’s work; they perpetuate the cult of the earlier work while being the agency for a hybrid new species. Recognizable as part of the humanist tradition originating in England at St Paul’s, Camden, we will see, is just as surely a son of early modern London. We can find many humanist influences on Camden in the academic training offered at St Paul’s. The school’s curriculum throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – through Milton – has been the subject of much thorough research, so that we can focus our discussion on how his education at St Paul’s affected his own work and interests and shaped his future.52 It can probably be assumed that Camden was eminently teachable, and so it is safe to say that the much-discussed details about what authors were taught, when, and how, are not in themselves important to our understanding of 33

William Camden – A Life in Context Camden’s learning. Rather, what will be important is what he carried with him from that learning environment, and how the influence of his education at St Paul’s can be found in the mature Camden’s life as a scholar, educator, and herald. To prepare the context for assessing how Camden figures in the tradition of humanist education it will be useful to revisit some of the generalizations that still persist about post-Reformation English schools. Virtually all of the many schools created from the period of early reform through Elizabeth’s reign had the same two fundamental objectives: to foster Christian virtue and to teach students “good language and literature”, or the “bonae litterae”. There were, of course, specialized schools – choir schools, cathedral schools, parish schools, hospital schools, schools with different admissions requirements, curricula, or programmes. Emphasis on curricular and extra-curricular activities might vary from music, singing, physical exercise, or the school play. The alternatives are much the same that parents will find when looking through the Sunday supplement, pondering places to send the little scion. St Paul’s was a day school for commuting students, known for academic excellence and its emphasis on Greek. Notwithstanding this range of options, the broad educational objectives of the grammar school, however endowed, are those outlined in William Kempe’s The Education of Children in Learning (1588). In his two-pronged attack on the minds and manners of youth, the academic focus is essentially Latin. Although schools aspired to regular instruction in Greek, in spite of what may be outlined in the statutes, when all is said and done, most schools offered a programme that could realistically aspire only to teaching some of the children a tolerable Latin style, over a grammar school career of somewhere between five and eight forms, and covering grammar for about 60 per cent of the time and rhetoric for about 40 per cent.53 As we will see, by the 1560s, well after the rush to revive the language in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Greek and other more exotic languages were on the decline. In Camden’s time, then, the curriculum was essentially training in language and written and oral expression. Darryll Grantley’s recent study of drama and education in the early modern period, Wit’s Pilgrimage, offers an insightful analysis of how education during these decades participates in the changes from a hereditary aristocratic dominant culture to an emergent middle class; both education and the developing formal theatres of the time helped codify and validate the value systems and credentials for upward mobility. His study 34

A London Life: The Educator’s Education complements some of the larger issues raised in this chapter. Although there has been a tendency to speak generally about Renaissance education, we will see that there were major shifts in emphasis from the sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries that relate to Camden’s particular experience. That said, language skills, classical and vernacular, written and oral, were in large measure the focus of English education. The role of classical languages in this mix changed over time, though, and these changes help us measure the evolution of humanist education. Thus, some of the schools, including St Paul’s and Westminster, required that students have a degree of proficiency in reading and writing English and Latin before being admitted. Different subjects such as philosophy, theo­ logy, history, were learned as one subjected the texts to grammatical analysis, double translation, imitation, or (in the upper forms) to explication and analysis. One learned the subjects through the languages, and the languages through the subjects. Particularly in the schools established around the time of St Paul’s foundation, there was a growing emphasis on what we have heard Colet call “pure chaste eloquence” – by which he meant a classical style free of what the reformers perceived to be the monkish scholastic corruption. This aspect of the philological bias of humanism is part of the return to authentic texts and primary sources and the break from commentaries and redactions, and here as in so much else in the realm of Renaissance education, Erasmus was their model. Although there was controversy among Renaissance reformers about what constitutes a “pure, chaste” style, whether it could be found in the work of a pagan author, and whether poets should be included in the curriculum, the evidence shows that in practice, educators, including John Colet and William Lily, and the ecclesiastical inspectors endorsed curricula having both classical and Christian authors. Although the specific texts may vary somewhat, for practical purposes there was a core curriculum of Latin, both pre-Christian and Christian. As in today’s schools, the twin engines of student interest (and ability) and the availability of qualified instructors also affected the course of Greek study – and led to its near stagnation by the late sixteenth century. So, we can assume that Renaissance students are the true forefathers of today’s, and accept that there is a gap between a school’s educational aspirations (as stated in their statutes) and the realities of the classroom and student “outcomes”. The graduating class of 1570 probably consisted of a large number of students reasonably familiar with the canon (meaning in this case classical and Christian texts) in a muddled form of English translation and moderately competent Latin; an almost equal number 35

William Camden – A Life in Context quite capable in both Latin and English languages; and a handful excelling in Latin and having a degree of competence in another language, probably Greek, ­possibly Hebrew; then, there are those few in every school who excel in all their courses. In assessing Camden’s career choices and the literary projects that he pursued, it is useful to have a historically accurate sense of the educational realities of the mid-sixteenth century: the opportunities for scholars interested in following career paths to the court, the universities, or the church had changed significantly between 1500 and 1600. Thus, if in 1500 Greek was the fashionable language to learn, it had to be learned outside England. It was around this time that the revival of the classics found its way to England. Colet was in the second wave of humanist scholars, and among those to do most to disseminate the fashion through his network of graduates, teachers, and friends: [around 1510] the perfection of good letters, Latin and Greek, by the happy advantage of many wits and scholars out of Italy, was spread throughout Great Britain … their example was followed by Dr. John Colet … who about this time created a public school in London, of an elegant structure.54 Colet first made Greek part of the regular curriculum at St Paul’s in 1510: “As touching in this scole what shall be taught of the maisters and learned of the scolers … I would they were taught always in good literature bothe Laten and Greke.”55 The first professorship in Greek at the universities was only established in 1517 at Oxford; it was held by one of Colet’s alumni, John Clement. Following this example, most schools included Greek – some, even Hebrew – among their stated educational objectives. It is through those languages and Latin that the Protestant student could – theoretically – get direct access to the chastest and purest literature and be freed of dependence on bowdlerized classics and “papist” commentators. But by mid-century the rush had dissipated and because of staffing and enrolment problems, few schools could offer either with any regularity. St Paul’s was able to do so fairly consistently – certainly during the period that Camden was there – but it was not altogether immune to the fluctuations in and realities of educational fashions.56 The curriculum at St Paul’s prepared the way for post-Reformation education policies and guidelines. This was the era of the courtier-scholar – Denny, Cheke, Ascham, for example – and much was made of the education of princes and the role of humanist scholars at court. Ironically, in the Catholic Colet’s 36

A London Life: The Educator’s Education statutes and curriculum were found the cornerstones of Protestant humanist educational ideals, and also the core texts and instructional methods to teach secular and doctrinal material blended within a humanist curricular solution. Colet’s statutes provided the prototype for the kind of education institutionalized by Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth, and implemented by the major English educators and administrators, including William Lily, Alexander Nowell, Roger Ascham, Edward Grant, and Richard Mulcaster: And for the entent I will the children learne first above all the catechizon in Englishe and after the accidens, that I made, or some other, yf any be better to the purpose, to induce Children more spedely to Laten speeche. And then Institutum Christiani Hominis, which that learned Erasmus made at my requeste, and the boke called Copia of the same Erasmus.57 With an emphasis on good manners and (at least) good Latin, it approached the task from both academic and practical avenues that made Christian living and humane learning work together according to the best humanist ideals. Considering how much has been written about Renaissance English education, it is surprising how little analysis there has been of the ways in which it fused moral instruction, doctrinal religious training, and humane learning. Instruction in religion and morals were inseparable from study of language and style. Thus, the Catechism was learned in both English and Latin – in Colet’s English text and Erasmus’s Latin adaptation, which was published in 1514 as the Christiani hominis institutum. Latin prayers were prepared for use in the school and integrated into the language instruction. At every stage the student’s “formal” training in grammar and rhetoric was a vehicle for moral, political, and religious training, or otherwise brought into the here and now for the student. The prayers, of course, taught Latin and reiterated lessons on conformity, obedience, and loyalty to the king. In more ways than one, the language was a living one, in that instruction was emphatically oral rather than written, and students were repeatedly called upon to articulate, defend, and debate – to present their ideas in public and affirm their religious and political allegiances publicly. According to John Stow, it was common that outside the school semi-formal debates would take place spontaneously between the piglets of St Anthony’s and the pigeons of St Paul’s.58 As Protestantism became more firmly entrenched as a social revolution, its educational policies evolved along consistent ideological and political lines. The continuity within the educational system represents more than just the 37

William Camden – A Life in Context perseverance of school traditions or curricula. What we see over the decades is a process of appropriation and accommodation that shows the considerable political significance of developments in the grammar school curriculum. In terms of the modification of the grammars, Baldwin and Fletcher show how Lily’s Institutio, with its Erastian elements, was increasingly streamlined over the years, until it evolved into the compact form that made it the standard text serving the objective of “uniformity” in educational matters and “conformity” in religion; indeed, the end of Protestant, universal education is religious conformity and the Oath of Supremacy. The pattern that we see is interesting and well known. As religious controversy intensified before the separation from Rome, the grammar texts that incorporated doctrinally sensitive religious material intended to improve the morals of youth began to disappear from the stalls. By 1529, the Aeditio and the De octo orationis partium, texts prepared by Lily and Colet respectively, having their Erastian classical focus and Colet’s brand of reform, had received royal favour and were mentioned by Wolsey as being prescribed throughout England (“o[mn]ibus aliis totius Anglie scholis prescripta”).59 In successive editions from 1529 through 1549, the “streamlining” amounts to the removal of material having a Catholic doctrinal cast to it – that is, it amounts to the “Protestantization” of grammar and by extension of the school curriculum. It is this reformed text, a laundered Lily as it were, that is prepared for use by Edward VI.60 It is no surprise that in 1554, when the sun seemed to shine again for the Catholics of the realm, Bishop Bonner made especial note of “heretical” grammar texts published in Edward’s time that have “streamlined” (in my phrase) the number of sacraments to two. He refers to printers in Paul’s Churchyard who in the time of King Edward the Sixth … heretically, maliciously, and naughtily did imprint a grammar in English and Latin, putting in the Latin Grammar but only two Sacraments, it is to wit, Baptism and the Supper of our Lord; infecting thereby the youth and others to think and believe, that there be no more sacraments in Christ’s Church but those two.61 In the changes to the school grammar we can trace how humanist education was assimilated into Reformation policy and the wide-ranging social reform of Henrician and Edwardian England. Henry, in authorizing the 1543 edition of the grammar, expressed his concern for the proper education and upbringing of “the tendre babes, and youth of our realme”. Universality of education is, in Henrician policy, facilitated by its availability, in the first 38

A London Life: The Educator’s Education stages, in English. The strategy follows that shown in the dissemination of the English Bible (1525), and it is part of the far-reaching social policy that cleverly spreads the ground-level basis of Protestantism in both the educational and ecclesiastical structures, and in a language understood by all. Thus, to secure the well-being of his tender subjects, Henry “commaunde[s], and streightly charge[s] al you scholemaisters and teachers of grammar within this our realme, … to teache and learne your scholars this englyshe introduction here ensuing”.62 During the period of religious reform, the text of Lily’s grammar was reduced, simplified (as the mass was), and generally secularized; in its transformation we can see the same goals of uniformity that are part of the broader religious policy.63 Eventually, even the barest vestiges of its Catholic past are removed, leaving it more clearly a product of an indigenous Protestant system. Thus, when we look at the compilations that scholars such as Baldwin have made of books studied in different grammar school forms, we want to keep in mind that these works were not studied in the quiet of library carrels.64 Education in post-Reformation schools was an active and very public process; the study of Terence, Plautus, Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal, the mastery of an increasingly Protestant catechism and various oral prayers, involved recitation, the analysis and defence of readings and explications, and dramatic performance. Reading included the works of orators, military historians, and ecclesiastical writers, poets, and dramatists; the authors were men of the piazza. Similarly, this public learning was complemented by the oral presentation of prayers, sentences, and other forms of moral instruction that were shared by the members of the community and were themselves made the subject of disputations, so that modern and classical, moral, ethical, political, and religious issues blended. Education of this sort, met with at St Paul’s and elsewhere, aimed not just at knowing, but at doing and saying, and being trained in the arts of verbal self-defence. Reformation humanist education was anything but disinterested scholarly activity removed from contemporary public and political issues, and the students were trained for public discourse rather than for the life of contemplation. Complex cultural forces worked their way through the education system in ways that are important for our understanding of Camden’s interest in languages. Language learning, not just of Greek, was a principal vehicle for the transfer of this energy, and was recognized for its political importance. Although the dream of the humanist educator was the revival and dissemination of Greek, throughout the sixteenth century, as Anthony Grafton and Lisa 39

William Camden – A Life in Context Jardine make clear, it survived as a diminishing dream rather than an attainable reality.65 However, the language maintained its strong symbolic presence in school statutes, linking them with traditions of reformed humanist education. Realistically, though, the curriculum was built around Latin, and it was not long before the importance of mastering English was recognized. The learning of the three languages grew more closely intertwined as the humanist agenda itself evolved. For many, including Roger Ascham, proficiency in Latin was a preliminary step for learning both Greek and English. Erasmus’s Latin De copia was meant to prepare the student for the study of Greek, to enable him to appreciate the Latin masters, and to attune him to the elements of style, in whatever language. Generally, the curriculum reinforces this triangulated language study. Aesop’s fables and other texts were taught first in Latin (through the process of English translation) and then in original Greek. The importance of English increased over the years and there was concern whether Greek was the best way to learn good useful English, or to train a good, useful Englishman. The growing recognition of the importance of English did not generally encroach on the place of Greek in the curriculum. As Baldwin says of the persistence of Greek at the Merchant Taylors’ School, “Mulcaster’s theories of English training were not permitted to interfere with the conventional curriculum. They belonged to petty school anyway, not to grammar school.” And even as staunch a classicist as Ascham speaks emphatically of the need of the master “not onelie to serve in the Latin or Greke tong, but also in our own English language”.66 In England and elsewhere in Europe, the history of Greek instruction outlines the fate of humanism, and it provides one of the intellectual contexts for understanding Camden’s life and career. Even with the inescapable emergence of vernacular study, Greek retained its place as figurehead decorating the pinnacle of secular education. Camden’s place in this history is interesting. During the 1560s, as humanist ideals remained intact although performance in the schools was slipping, he was trained with the rigour of the first humanist zealots; most of his major work – notably the Britannia – dealing with Roman Britain, was written in Latin, not only in order to reach the international community, but also to capture in the work itself the way in which classical and vernacular come together in British culture. In the last decade of the sixteenth century, while under-master at Westminster School, he wrote the standard Greek grammar that would be used throughout England; in humanist tradition, it was modelled in large measure on Lily’s Latin grammar. But this unfeigned respect for the learned languages co-existed with his love 40

A London Life: The Educator’s Education of English and his recognition that for mixed reasons scholars can over-value “other” languages (classical and modern): “Neither hath any thing detracted more from the dignity of our tongue, than our owne affecting of forraine tongues, by admiring, praysing, and studying them above measure.”67 As we will see, his views on and use of language reflect his realistic accommodation of social change. With an extraordinary openness, he celebrates language change – how English has “beene beautified and enriched out of other good tongues”; significantly, he embraces the process of “enfranchising and endenizing strange words”. Language, like culture and society, are never static but are part of a process of negotiated change. These views, articulated forcefully in his Remains, are also the foundation of the cultural history of the Britannia and reveal much about his sense of the political process. He knows how enforced language can be used for the subjection of an occupied nation, but feels that ultimately change and accommodation prevail at the grassroots level. In his Remains, with characteristic realism and adaptability, he writes eloquently of the expressiveness of “the old English” “before the Norman Conquest” and of the versatility of its modern form, in which it shares the fate of other modern languages: “whereas our tongue is mixed, it is no disgrace, whenas all the tongues of Europe doe participate interchangeably the one of the other, and in the learned tongues, there hath beene like borrowing one from another”.68 His admiration for English, felt without compromise to his love and respect for the “learned tongues”, has an eclectic quality reflective of the particular undogmatic, non-essentialist view of the human condition that he characteristically turns to patriotic ends: Omitting this, pardon me and thinke me not overballanced with affection, if I thinke that our English tongue is (I will not say as sacred as the Hebrew, or as learned as the Greeke,) but as fluent as the Latine, as courteous as the Spanish, as courtlike as the French, and as amorous as the Italian.69 Thus, while Camden’s study of English is, as Richard Dunn says, historical – he tried to identify the major waves of linguistic influence on English and also to see the similarities that link languages – his view of language is more complicated, and is understood best in terms of the evolution of English humanism.70 Not only does he travel the via media in contemporary scholarly debates about language and grammar, avoiding the extremes of the proponents of the vernacular and those of the learned languages, but he also sees language as social process, and therefore is able to turn the middle road into a 41

William Camden – A Life in Context way forward. Camden’s stand as a philologist miniatures his position in other matters: undogmatic, adaptable, both conservative and forward-looking.

London Education and the Waning of Reformation Humanism

A

student at paul’s, whether it be in 1566 or 1620, was joined through   the traditions of the school to the original spirit of the Renaissance and the English Reformation. But if there was much continuity, there were also critical differences over the generations. What was originally a curriculum designed to capture the exhilarating new learning available on the Continent before long became ideologically entrenched, buttressing the episcopate and sustaining the policies behind the Elizabethan settlement. So, in later decades, when Milton was at St Paul’s, for example, it was sometimes viewed as a conservative force whose now-distant revolutionary origins legitimized an education that, in the eyes of some reformers, was inhibiting change. A man like Camden, dipped in the streams of the system when he and it were relatively young, had a special relationship to the institutionalized cultural currents of the times. As a product of the humanist learning during the period of school reform, he was both part of the established (or establishment) “curriculum” and part of the changing bourgeois society that was surely transforming once­innovative programmes into anachronisms. Authorized texts, statutes, even school reputations change slowly. True at all times, this is particularly so in a highly centralized authoritarian culture such as Elizabethan England, where stability was the government’s first concern. But it is not always the community’s, and during Camden’s lifetime the religious and social fabric of London evolved in spite of governmental institutions and educational statutes.71 To understand Camden, then, we need to know where he fits into this spectrum. Because his entire life was spent in institutions closely attached to royal policies of one sort or another, Camden offers significant insights into the relationship between public policy and the community itself. In each of the different phases of his life, he served implicitly as an interpreter of the culture that he assimilated. He was a man steeped in the elements of humanism and reform, and his survival and relative success reflect on his ability to negotiate that learning and the complex political and social milieu in which he lived. In one respect, Camden’s success becomes an important legitimizing force for the system that created him. It also testifies to his ability to ­mediate 42

A London Life: The Educator’s Education between those systems and policies and the social realities. Thus, under Camden, Westminster flourished at a time when the Protestant educational system evolved from an agent of reform to one of conservative restraint. We understand Camden better, then, when we recognize his role in the changing humanist institutions that made and nurtured him. We continue to ask where he stands as the reform movement changes character? As we will see, Camden never really leaves “the system”, but at the same time, he never works within it without self-consciously changing it. Camden’s Greek grammar helps to locate him within this trajectory. In a way it is the most obvious product of his experience at St Paul’s, and it places him in the company of humanist educators. Understandable though it is that he should prepare such a work, we should not take it for granted. Published in 1595, it too is the product of various personal and professional forces. But in its own way it is an odd project for him to undertake, and for this reason we might usefully conclude this section with a brief discussion of it. When Camden prepared his Institutio graecae grammatices, he was responding to a legitimate academic need for a usable and inexpensive school text. The grammars commonly used were Clenardus’s Institutiones in linguam graecam (1530) and Meditationes graecanicae in artem grammatica (1531), the work of the humanist scholar-priest from Louvain, and notoriously difficult to use, as Camden knew from first-hand experience. Camden’s mentor and predecessor as first master at Westminster, Edward Grant – himself a close friend of Roger Ascham, the Greek scholar and tutor of Queen Elizabeth – had prepared a new grammar in 1575, but it too proved unusable, and survived only one edition. Camden, probably responding to suggestions from Grant, set about revising it using the format of Lily’s “royal grammar” as his guide. As we have seen, the publication of grammar school texts is not without larger implications. If Camden’s first goal was to design a text for successful use in the classroom, in 1595 it also had a backward-looking quality that served to entrench the linguistic priorities of a previous generation. In modelling his text on Lily’s, Camden follows the path set by Colet, Lily, and Erasmus and reaffirms the educational priorities of the waning humanist curriculum. But on the other hand, he also implicitly acknowledges his own past. Camden stakes his place in the tradition that he was introduced to at St Paul’s thirty years before. Writing his Institutio graecae grammatices is in its way a logical step for the under-master at Westminster to take in order to secure his academic credibility. Published at the time of Camden’s appointment as Edward Grant’s successor as headmaster, the Institutio aligns Camden with Grant and 43

William Camden – A Life in Context Lily, and places him in the humanist philological tradition. The grammar is for him personally an intellectual rite of passage as he returns home with proof of his having earned his intellectual patrimony. In so doing, he perpetuates the humanist-reform cause as though the intellectual terrain were unchanged. In form and content, Camden’s grammar contributes to the persistence of the ideology, based in Henrician reform, that he and his contemporaries absorbed. Its emphasis on poetry and classical rather than ecclesiastical models, for example, is part of the marriage of humanist curriculum and Protestant policy. This is, after all, the educational system that shaped the minds of such contemporary poets as Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare. As Arthur Kinney emphasizes, the school system of the early sixteenth century was the major nurturing force of the “humanist poetic”: “we can date the start of humanist poetics with the statutes of St Paul’s School, London, in 1512”.72 But as we have seen, as it is assimilated into England, it also becomes a Protestant poetic. Unless we believe that Protestant poets are born, not made, we need to ask where that poetic is acquired, and it is acquired in the schools. The inspirational waters they drank came from a reformed fount, just as sure as the texts they studied taught a reformed language. In the 1560s and 1570s authors educated in Edwardian and early Elizabethan grammar schools were in the third wave of humanist learning and the first generation in which Continental humanism was, contractually, married to Protestant education. By 1595 the Protestant landscape – and the literary and educational terrain – had changed considerably. Thus, if we are to appreciate the changing cultural currents during the century from 1560 to 1660, we need a historically more specific understanding of where the mature literary, religious, and political expressions of the times first took root: in what social “soil” the imaginative seeds of writers such as Camden, Sidney, Spenser, Selden, Jonson, Donne, and Milton, were first planted. The poetic of these authors from significantly different generations is as different as their politics. We need to place Camden, educated at Christ’s Church Hospital and St Paul’s in the mid-1560s and publishing his Greek grammar in 1595, on the spectrum outlined by these authors. In doing so, we can locate him and his work in their political chronology: formed in the nursery of these institutions and confirming his patrimony through the 1595 Greek grammar, his identity formation is set in a deeply conservative past. But in 1595 the zeal for Greek had passed: Mulcaster’s modern ideas about language, if they had not actually taken over from Ascham’s fervent Hellenism, were the ones of the day, and we have seen that Camden himself had a 44

A London Life: The Educator’s Education modern and flexible attitude towards both classical and vernacular languages. In the late sixteenth century the recovery and study of vernacular languages was the real subject of discussion among antiquarians and linguists – as we see in Richard Carew’s essay praising the English language (published in the 1614 edition of the Remains), or in the Testimonie of Antiquitie (published by John Day in 1567), and in the pioneering work of John Jocelyn, William Lambarde, and Laurence Nowell. Camden was deeply interested in vernacular tongues, hired a servant to teach him Welsh, and encouraged those of his colleagues who were linguists. But he chose to write a Greek grammar, a homage to Roger Ascham, to Edward Grant, to Lily, to the generation and the ideals that they represent. Indeed, it was in Grant’s edition of Ascham’s letters (1575) that Camden, then a young second master at Westminster, published his first poem. Thus, his grammar should not be viewed in any way as “inevitable” – to do so is to miss the diversity of his generation and the significance of the professional choices that he made. There are critical moments in some people’s lives when various influencing factors (political, material, psychological) are suspended within the medium of will and self-determination. At such junctures, we are in harmony with our cultural “benefactors”; distinctions between present and past are dissolved. For some, this never occurs; they do not work with a retrospective sensibility, but push forward without looking backward. But for Camden, we see such a meeting of past and present in his Greek grammar; in fact, this liminal quality is present in much of his work, and it distinguishes his kind of originality. Publication is never a neutral statement or act: it always amounts to an expression of choice, a moral decision of one sort or another. Camden’s composition of his grammar was almost certainly not the result of a strategic political decision. But as a deliberate contribution to the maintenance of a classical, humanist, and reformed curriculum, it makes a significant statement that is cultural, historical, personal, and political in import. This proleptic survey of educational currents from the early years of Henry VIII through the sixteenth century is important for understanding the academic milieu in which Camden grew up, and also the intellectual patrimony that he carried into the future. I do not think that we can appreciate the subtleties of Camden’s life without due awareness of this milieu. The training at St Paul’s predisposed him to author a Greek grammar that could be used in the schools and would ally him with forebears from Lily to Ascham and Grant. But this path to the humanist past is not the one he ultimately followed. He did not seek to be a pre-eminent Greek scholar; did not hold 45

William Camden – A Life in Context – or establish – a professorship in Greek or pursue a serious scholarly career in once-traditional university or court circles. He forged a new space for the independent scholar. Younger scholars who outstripped him in linguistic ability, such as Selden, followed him and also went down new paths; the humanist scholar in the mode of Erasmus, Grocyn, Casaubon, Denny, Cheke, and Ascham, for example, was a vestige of the past, an extinct breed. If the Greek grammar recalled his debt to an earlier generation of Tudor humanists, there is yet another, perhaps stronger trajectory to his life that linked him with seventeenth-century lawyers, antiquaries, and parliamentary figures such as Robert Cotton, John Selden, and Henry Spelman. As we will see, there are sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Camdens, but the “poetic” that he learned as a youth in London is one that he continued to refine in later years.

St Paul’s and the Seeds of Westminster

C

amden’s career is one thread by which we can follow the course of Tudor reform, and it is also a means of tracking the shifting political demographics of London through the schools and the lives of students and masters. If we can say of Camden that St Paul’s child is father to the Westminster man, perhaps we can see the same relationship between the schools themselves. In his metamorphosis from student to teacher, Camden is part of a general shift from St Paul’s and the City to Westminster and the West End. At this juncture, then, it will be useful to look further at Camden’s experiences in these two differently located schools, and mark the course of change and continuity between early and late Elizabethan Camden. Westminster School was re-established by Elizabeth in 1561; her principal agent in this was Lord Burghley, who took a keen interest in the project and in the community of Westminster generally. This will be important for us since he also had long-standing direct and indirect ties to Camden. Like her predecessors, Elizabeth used educational policy and school and university appointments to set the tone and form the ideological foundations of her reign. We have seen that St Paul’s was appropriated into Henrician and Edwardian reform, and Elizabeth used Westminster School in a similar way. She deliberately identified herself with the school policies of her father’s reign, and was especially careful to forge the association at Westminster, where she endowed Queen’s Scholars as her father before had created King’s Scholars. Her re-establishment of Westminster appears to be an attempt to recapture some of the zeal and respect for learning associated with the early ­Protestant 46

A London Life: The Educator’s Education years and St Paul’s. Although Greek had all but dropped from the regular curricula of most schools, when Westminster was re-established, it was written permanently into the school curriculum in a self-conscious effort to entrench the language and claim the mantle of pre-eminence from St Paul’s.73 The lesson of the stones of Ludgate are repeated often and in different ways. Elizabeth’s interest in Westminster is part of a larger redefinition of the landscape of London, marking a shift in its political nexus to the West End. Just as she rearranged the material and semiotic components of Ludgate, so too she shifted the political geography of London, identifying with parts of her father’s city-scape while transforming them in ways to distinguish them as her own. When Colet founded St Paul’s, London court life centred around the royal residence at the Tower, and city life around the cathedral; he built his school in the intellectual and cultural centre of the city.74 Elizabeth, in turn, created her own urban centre in Westminster. By 1575, when Camden was appointed second master at Westminster School, the area defined by the abbey and chapter complex, including Parliament and White Hall Palace (and, of course, the school), was a far more concentrated and deliberately planned nexus than was the Tower and cathedral complex for Henry. If Camden’s appointment at Westminster was part of her larger effort to identify herself with the educational movement of her father, it is also a small element in the concentration of the court’s energies in the area around the abbey. There, in the chapter, were located the principal government offices, the Houses of Parliament, royal residences, major public records, a prison, and a still vital sanctuary. And, there was the school itself. It is in this eminently visible, geographically centralized area within the precincts of the Westminster Chapter that Elizabeth chose to create a highprofile microcosm of her secular and ecclesiastical power. Westminster was her showcase community where her actions assumed symbolic status. ­Camden’s growth from the time of his transfer from Christ’s Church Hospital to St Paul’s, to the time of his move from Oxford to Westminster School, leads him in the direction of Elizabethan Westminster. Camden, the alumnus of St Paul’s, was part of the revival of Westminster School, which was confirmed with the success of the “Westminster grammar” (as the Institutio graecae grammatices became known). In turn, the shaping of his life in many ways replicates the construction of the “Elizabethan” community of Westminster. Exactly when Camden met Burghley is not known, but his influence was felt early in his life. The one-time guardian of Prince Edward, Burghley was keenly attuned to the political potential of education. At St Paul’s, ­studying 47

William Camden – A Life in Context under John Cooke, the high master, Camden began a long career in the aura of William Cecil, who had been Cooke’s school fellow and later his patron. The Dean of St Paul’s himself, Alexander Nowell, a close confidant of Burghley, was also a prebendary and a powerful influence in the Westminster Chapter, where he first introduced the instruction of Greek when he was master in the school in 1543. Among Elizabeth’s advisors, Burghley saw most clearly the political utility of learning, scholarship, and books, and was most assiduous in exploiting it. He sought out libraries associated with the religious controversies that Henry and Edward were engaged in during the separation from Rome; he manipulated the sequestration of private and ecclesiastical libraries that could be used for Protestant and personal political ends; and he saw as no other politician did how scholarship, including antiquarianism, historical philology, and language training, could serve the mythos of the state.75 For decades scholars working on these related subjects have emphasized Burghley’s interests in history, education, and scholarship, and particularly his involvement in the antiquarian movement and the study of Anglo-Saxon. It would be simplistic and misrepresentative to speak of these far-reaching intellectual interests as being merely politically motivated. Until his death in 1598 Burghley the politician-cum-scholar was an informing spirit directly and indirectly present in all aspects of the career of the Elizabethan Camden. He provides the longest of the many threads linking Camden to the mainstream intellectual and political movements that reached England early in the sixteenth century and that ran their course for a century and a half. This is not to suggest that Camden was a precocious young recruit into Burghley’s secret service. Throughout his life he disliked political intrigue, and as a mere boy in the mid-1560s, as he was being assimilated into the educational system, one would think that he was beneath notice by men of Burghley’s rank. Although history has cast him as a political naïf, Camden was a political creature, and lived in a highly politicized environment. His friends and patrons were part of Burghley’s network, his career as student and teacher was shaped by the rivalries that permeated the system from school to university and court; it relied on personal favours, and his own work, disinterested as it appears, perforce had its political implications. It is not certain if the boy Camden met Burghley or only his protégés at St Paul’s – the dean, Alexander Nowell, and John Cooke, the headmaster; he did not need to – Burghley’s genius pervaded the spirit of reform that is part of the education to be had at St Paul’s, and later at Westminster. As we will see, this 48

A London Life: The Educator’s Education spirit also accompanied Camden to the College of Arms, and it was present in his work on the ­ Britannia and the Annals of Elizabeth. Burghley had a hand – often a fairly light hand for such a weighty figure – in virtually all of these phases of Camden’s career. But following the example set by Colet for his school, as educator, scholar, and herald, Camden studiously maintained the role of the disinterested party, never losing his detachment, however sensitive his work. He seems never to have been Burghley’s, or anyone else’s creature. Unlike Henry VIII, who lacked subtlety in most matters, Burghley saw the advantages of scholarly detachment and the appearance of objectivity. ­Notwithstanding his scholarly integrity, Camden did “naturally” what served the spirit of reform and civic-minded Protestantism. His debts were to the cultural environment that I have tried in part to characterize, and following the path of opportunity that opened up before him, he served a system that in turn served him. If we narrow our scope somewhat as we conclude our study of these early years, we can see Camden the man in the grammar-school student in other ways as well. We have seen that, educator and grammarian that he was to become, Camden was not a classical scholar per se. Like his younger contemporary and admirer, Francis Bacon (b. 1561), he is a product and practitioner of the new learning. If not a classicist, Camden was, however, a true scholar, but one whose learning and research methods crossed conventional disciplinary boundaries, such as they existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His interests – in national languages and literatures, etymology, the history of institutions, arms and titles, geography, antiquities, and material culture, as well as in contemporary European events – reflect a breadth of learning and research that are not contained in the curriculum of the trivium and quadrivium. Rather, they are among the emerging areas of study and new methodologies that were beginning to find a place in the schools and universities. Camden’s greatest interest is ultimately in things vernacular, particularly the vernacular past, and this, of course, fed his voracious appetite for antiquarian study, a passion he dates from his early youth, and fostered by the men and education he encountered at St Paul’s and Oxford. Thus, as we reassess Camden’s career, it will be helpful to recognize that we are looking at a man whose work is more obviously unconventional than it is conventional. Product of the late Tudor reform movement as we have seen, he and his output do not resemble the humanist scholars and scholarship of earlier generations. He – and others of his generation – help to transform the scholar’s role in England. 49

William Camden – A Life in Context In many ways these tendencies can be regarded as the legacy of St Paul’s. His passion for the vernacular past, paradoxically expressed in Latin, owes much to the men and the traditions at the school. Although Mulcaster, the best-known proponent of English study, was at St Paul’s shortly after Camden proceeded to Oxford, vernacular history and language had found their place in the school before his arrival. Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s, was himself an avid antiquarian and, like his kinsman, Laurence, a strong advocate of the study of Anglo-Saxon, as well as the author of the revised catechism, which he sent to Cecil in manuscript in 1563, and which he had translated by Thomas Norton in 1570. St Paul’s developed a reputation for encouraging good English as well as good Latin. It is the conjunction of Camden’s classical and vernacular knowledge and new research techniques that gave the unique originality to his cultural history of Britain. Camden is the first professional scholar that we see in the period who systematically combines the forces of classical humanism and vernacular antiquarianism, and develops a politically influential career through this hybrid writing. In his career we can observe the transformation of the humanist courtier. This is important for it marks a shift in the place of learning in the Renaissance court and the passing of the scholar-courtier such as Roger Ascham or John Cheke. It also qualifies the image of Camden as classical humanist, and places him in his proper relationship to the “new learning” of the early part of the century. A professional independent of the court as his predecessors were not, Camden was a new breed of scholar; over fifty years ago Maurice Powicke described him as the most illustrious of “a new type of scholar, the learned layman”, and this fuller context of his career amplifies the significance of this remark.76 Also part of the generation of anti-­Ciceronians, in certain respects he is nearer to Bacon than to Ascham – a friend of Tacitus rather than an enemy of Cicero. Thus, Camden’s place in history will be better understood when we look at him and his work in their full contexts, and if we do, we will find in him a man determined to meet his classical inheritance on his own terms. Camden’s training at St Paul’s seems to have fostered other identifiable aspects of his personal development, particularly his appreciation of literature; indeed, he was a man who made the literature of his culture an important part of his vocation. In him we can see the profile of a new kind of public intellectual. The Camden who befriended and influenced some of the major writers of the period and whose praises were sung by poets and historians as diverse as Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, Edmund Campion, Joseph Hall, 50

A London Life: The Educator’s Education John Selden, and Michael Drayton enjoyed a literary bent that was nurtured early in his life. Throughout his career Camden stands out as a staunch supporter of English letters, new and old. And at a time when the modern idea of disciplines was beginning to take shape, he was recognized not only as a friend equally of poets and historians, but also as being himself both poet and historian. In this, for example, Camden stands radically at odds with the aristocratic Philip Sidney, whose refined, idealistic view of poetry strove to isolate it from more quotidian studies such as history.77 Camden’s position in the avant garde has its seeds in his humanist training and the desire to have England take its place in a cultural tradition that derives from Greece and Rome – that, after all, is the subtext of the Britannia. Camden is an avatar of Frederic Jameson’s exhortation to contextualize; he is the first in England to attempt to read cultural artefacts in their full historical contexts. As he cultivates his historical methods, the interest in vernacular history and literature merges with the study of Anglo-Saxon and British languages. The respect for vernacular literature was nurtured in the liberal climate of St Paul’s, whose varied curriculum included readings in scripture and theology, poetry, history, philosophy, epistles, orations, fables, drama, and philosophy (fine generic distinctions were not insisted on).78 Polonius was not the only one to reflect on the diversity of genres – ­“tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, [tragical-historical, tragical-comical-­historical-pastoral,] scene individable, or poem unlimited” (Hamlet II.ii.396–400). Essays – or assays – across the seven liberal arts as well as across genres were part of the freedom felt during this time of extraordinary literary vitality. This sort of “writing across the curriculum” was supported by the pedagogy itself, which had students doing writing of all kinds. We have looked at the political implications of the Renaissance school text, but not its literary influences, which can also be seen in Camden’s mature work. Lily’s grammar in the form that Camden would have used it for example, suggests that poetry in particular was found to be useful for developing language and style. It devotes a good deal of space to the study and practice of prosody and poetic devices. There are definitions and examples of rhetorical terms and tropes that were to be used in the written and oral exercises of the students. Educational historians writing about Ascham’s Scholemaster have spoken about the technique of “double translation” that was used in the grammar schools. Another regular exercise that is of importance (especially if we are concerned with the relation of poetry and the more prosaic world of politics) is that of translating from prose to verse, and from verse to prose. 51

William Camden – A Life in Context This, a classroom variant on double translation, is the teaching strategy that Camden used successfully with Ben Jonson. Not only does the technique say much about the relationship between the genres for a poet such as Jonson, but it also gives an insight into how the classical and humanist education fostered original writing among students.79 Obviously the sections in Lily’s grammar that dealt with prosody would assist the student and instructor in these exercises. Furthermore, the grammar that teaches the utility of “poetic” (that is, figurative, tropoglogical) language in this way is not greatly interested in distinguishing sharply between literary forms and genres. The grammar texts encourage the cross-fertilization of genres and are part of the era before the professionalizing of disciplines and their specialized modes of discourse that comes with Ramus. If we recognize that the grammar school student acquiring literary skills was accustomed to crossing boundaries between prose and verse (the epistle and the encomium, for example), between languages and between disciplines, we should have little trouble accepting the fact that experienced writers such as Philip Sidney, customarily cross and mix genres when they find it useful to do so. This was part of their training. During the 1560s and 1570s the rhetorical focus of the trivium and quadrivium was being supplemented by “modern” subjects. A curriculum unfragmented by our sense of “disciplines” prepared the early modern student for a holistic view of learning. This is what we see in Camden’s writing, for example, when he mixes genres and interlaces the Britannia with his poem “de Connubio Tamae et Isis”, or when he, like Bacon, assumes that the whole range of human experience is susceptible to historical study. Thus, it is possible to see connections between Camden’s early education and his own work, which experiments in form and mixed genres, and his influence on writers of various sorts. For example, it is easy to see how his grammar training fed his interest in fostering the literary arts. His Greek grammar with its material on tropes and figurative language was part of his classroom emphasis on developing prosodic and writing skills. We know from Jonson that this training did not consist of mere rote exercises to hone the skills of paraphrasis; Camden taught the Renaissance version of creative writing at Westminster and turned the direction of the exercise towards selfexpression, in English, Latin, or Greek. Jonson’s account clearly grows out of his classroom experience, in which the standard exercise of working from prose to verse was taught with sensitivity and literary appreciation. It was this training that made Jonson among the most “classical” of English poets and 52

A London Life: The Educator’s Education playwrights, and also among the most contemporary and indigenous in his handling of material. In this case we have a rare insight into how the humanist education that Camden received at St Paul’s re-emerged decades later in Westminster’s classroom in the 1580s. Under his tutelage, Jonson and others were freed from the retrospective “Renaissance” of an earlier generation and learned to experiment in different classical forms and modes, and to respect their own hybrid creations as of cultural importance. And so, the future that Camden made for himself from this humanist legacy was particular to his moment in history. It was not the aristocratic life of diplomat and courtier that Richard Pace paints for the educated humanist in his De Fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur Liber, a treatise on the benefits of the liberal arts. Pace, Dean of St Paul’s before Alexander Nowell, a friend of Erasmus, Hoby, and Ascham, and a career diplomat under Henry VIII, saw the bonae litterae as potentially a civilizing force for the coarse and privileged, whose world tended to the anti-intellectual. Pace provides one of the most direct statements about the importance of a humanist education; for him, its main purpose was to spread the gospel of the arts of peace among the anti-intellectual aristocracy for whom the idea of “arms” was still largely a military code and education a concession to the lower classes. But a world of difference separates the social dynamics of 1535 and that of 1570. As Grantley demonstrates in his Wit’s Pilgrimage, for Camden’s class and generation letters and humane learning were markers conferring greater social mobility, cultural capital that might help in the precarious quest for socio-economic stability or, better yet, prosperity. They were these things for Camden, but he travelled a somewhat different route. He became a professional intellectual, a man of letters in the public arena, using his training for its utility and adaptability to various situations, but also pursuing study for its own sake. His scholarly work – classics, antiquarian research, vernacular languages and literature, contemporary “political science” – was not undertaken as preparation for life at court, to engage in religious polemics, to earn patronage, or to win a professorship by editing patristic or classical texts, although he was trained for all these ventures. Camden recognized that his learning had its own value and could be carried usefully into varied situations that cut across class, religion, and politics. It was a commodity to be acquired and that made him infinitely flexible and yet socially and economically unstable. In this he is an excellent example of the changing role of education in a society where class barriers had become increasingly permeable. Caught between the aristo­ cratic compromise of the Renaissance and the age of the entrepreneur and 53

William Camden – A Life in Context ­ erchant of the seventeenth century, Camden is a distinctly early modern m man, a product of new values and emerging mobility. As such, he is also unattached – disenfranchised; this is both his strength and his vulnerability, and we will see it as a defining characteristic throughout his life. We see this quality clearly in Camden’s place – or lack of place – in the literary world of his generation. Camden made letters his profession and in so doing gave them a status different from that accorded them by men such as Pace and the humanists of the previous generation. He was not a professional writer working popular genres, such as Braithwaite or Munday; not a university wannabe such as Harvey or an academic recusant such as Nashe or Marlowe; and not a royal polemicist such as Leland. He does not ply the literary market place for his living or identity. For Camden the world of letters was not viewed as the path to another mode of living as it was for the writers of conduct books and for the satirists of the aspiring middle class, such as Braithwaite and Greene. In Camden we see the naturalization of a classless – or unclassed – humanist existing in the interstices of the social structure, whose learning and ability confer a degree of self-sufficiency and give him access to qualities that are themselves ennobling – as Jonson, the aristocrat of letters says of Camden: “camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe / All that I am in arts, all that I know … Pardon free truth, and let thy modestie, / Which conquers all, be once over-come by thee.”80 Jonson’s praise of Camden here and elsewhere is fulsome: he is a poet, a teacher, a “professor” of letters, a historian, and most of all, a seeker of truth. If, as I have shown elsewhere, Jonson sees Camden as the fulfilment of humanist ideals, he does so within the meritocratic context of his epigrams, where true nobility knows no social barrier. In Jonson’s debt to Camden we see the profession of letters in its early modern guise: just as Jonson in his 1616 Folio redefines the socio-economic and legal role of the writer in society, so before him his teacher transformed the role of the humanistically trained scholar into the professional, bourgeois man of letters. There are two other related areas of Camden’s experience at St Paul’s that we can confidently say exerted a powerful influence on him throughout his life, and they are music and drama. Apparent through faint but clear documentary traces, these two arts permeated Camden’s private and his professional lives. St Paul’s had a long-standing association with court drama and music. The tradition goes back to the pre-Reformation cathedral school, which maintained a “vicar choral” as well as a schoolmaster. There was a hospital for 54

A London Life: The Educator’s Education poor boys that put on theatrical performances, and a separate choir school attached to the cathedral. By the fourteenth century the theatrical and musical traditions of the children of St Paul’s were firmly established, and although Colet’s sixteenth-century establishment was strictly speaking separate from the “song school”, as E. K. Chambers says, “there was much give and take” between it and the grammar school.81 It should be noted that this kind of relationship between a choir school, an establishment for poor boys, and an independent grammar school is virtually identical to what existed in the West End at Westminster, and we know that master Camden sang regularly in the abbey choir school. Drama and music, then, are commonly found together in major ecclesiastical and educational communities such as these, and their traditions were deeply entrenched during the period before the Reformation. Choral music was, of course, at the centre of the Roman Catholic liturgy and mass. The persistence of choirs and choir schools in the Reformation was potentially problematic, since much of the vocal music was inextricable from doctrinal issues, and many of the rites which routinely involve vocal music, such as intercessory hymns for the dead, were forbidden under Elizabeth.82 As Duffy describes the change at this time, “the switch from Latin to English immediately rendered obsolete the entire musical repertoire of cathedral, chapel, and parish church”.83 Thus, the use of music in reformed church rites resonated with echoes of the old religion, and Camden’s deep love of music persisted either in spite of, or because of this. The place of dramatic performance in the schools has a similar ambiguity to it, and both St Paul’s and Westminster also had long-standing and rich traditions of theatrical activity. Interestingly, although St Paul’s was commonly associated with the Reformation, conventionally regarded as an enemy of the stage, it had a long uninterrupted history of school drama. Indeed, these links with the theatre were fostered by official figures such as Dean Nowell and the school’s early masters and teachers, including John Ritewise and Sebastian Westcott. John Ritwise, Lily’s son-in-law, was himself a dramatist, and involved the boys of the grammar school in court entertainments beyond the annual Christmas performance. The school’s dramatic activity continued unabated during Mary’s reign, but it flourished from the very first years of Elizabeth under Sebastian Westcott. Interestingly, in 1552 he and John Heywood brought boy players, probably from St Paul’s, to Hatfield House to perform for Princess Elizabeth.84 In 1557, under Queen Mary, Westcott was described as a “scolemaister of Powles”, and in spite of lingering, apparently legitimate charges of papistry, he weathered the return of Protestantism, 55

William Camden – A Life in Context enjoyed the good will of Elizabeth, and remained the songmaster at St Paul’s and the director of Paul’s boys pretty much consistently until his death in 1582. During his tenure at the school he brought the children of Paul’s to Elizabeth’s court at least twenty-seven times, and the only year that the annual Christmas entertainment was not performed was in the plague year 1563/4, the year Camden was afflicted and left London for Islington. Westcott’s career further testifies to the close connection between musical and theatrical traditions in the schools, as well as to their tendency to be associated with Catholicism.85 The records of the school and court drama of the period rarely name the boys involved. Rather, they are alluded to in the inventories and other documents relating to court performances – “xii cottes for the boyes in Heywoodes play”, or “paide in rewarde to … Sebastian, towardes the charge of the children with the carriage of the plaiers garmentes xiiith of Februarye, xxs”.86 Although there is no record of Camden’s career as a student thespian, he probably had either an acting or a singing role in some of the performances of the boys at St Paul’s. The role of music in the educational and social history of the period is important though little explored, and it had a major place in Camden’s personal and professional life. He was deeply committed to music. He went from St Paul’s to Oxford as a chorister; he served regularly with the choir at Westminster; and his closest friend was William Heather, the court composer and musician. Just as “drama and education” and “music and education” are serious concerns among educators today, so too, the importance of music and drama in the education of children was recognized in the Renaissance. Although some regarded them as inappropriate for Protestant schools, influential Reformation educators such as Alexander Nowell, headmaster of Westminster from 1544 to 1555 before becoming Dean of St Paul’s, and Nicholas Udall, who succeeded him as headmaster, defended their place on educational grounds.87 Both drama and music effectively served the educational principles of the period, with their emphasis on role-playing generally, decla­mation, public recitations, and memory. Renaissance educational theory emphasized that learning involved the expression and “leading outward” of the truth and understanding that lies within the student, and drama and music were ­methods of perfecting this public “discovery” of the self. Education was a remarkably public forum, oral at all of its stages. The connection between educational practice and the development of the theatre is well known but has barely been examined in terms of the cultural history of the period. That the educational role of drama and music in the 56

A London Life: The Educator’s Education schools helped shape the theatrical tastes, however, is clear: the mnemonic devices of the classroom led directly to the euphuistic styles popular at court performances before the emergence of the professional theatres in 1576; thereafter, during the heyday of the boy companies under William Hunnis and John Lyly, the schools and the rival theatrical traditions enter the realm of theatre history and (as far as social historians have been concerned) leave the realm of pedagogy behind. But educational methods and theatrical performance continue to overlap, formally and informally, as we see in the relationship between Jonson and Camden in the 1580s. Jonson’s play Cynthia’s Revels, we remember, was written for the Children of the Queen’s Chapel and was originally dedicated to Camden.88 Throughout the sixteenth century the schools, where music and drama were part of their daily regimen, were a major force for theatrical experiment and expression, and it seems pretty clear that Camden brought his youthful experience to bear on his maturer practice as a teacher at Westminster. That the theatrical tradition at St Paul’s during Camden’s years there had its origins in the Catholic liturgical year and continued to have associations with the recent Catholic past through artistic elements and even instructors is not without significance. Educators at St Paul’s and Westminster throughout the sixteenth century, including Nowell, Ritewise, Westcott, and Udall, often transgressed what was deemed appropriate for Protestant audiences or for child actors. Theatre and music, particularly in schools closely associated with the church, called attention to the ambiguous and often precarious relation between the Roman and the Protestant elements in the Elizabethan settlement. Nicholas Udall, knowing how to negotiate the theatrical nuances of theology, prepared dramas for Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s tolerance of Westcott’s Catholicism can be traced back to his performance for her in 1552, when she was at Hatfield House, and reflects her general (if idiosyncratic) penchant for accommodating certain things ­redolent of Catholicism, including both musical and dramatic performance. Granting then that Camden was involved with the musical and theatrical activities at St Paul’s, we can also see his ongoing association with those profoundly social modes of self-expression, and his compatibility with latent or vestigial elements of Roman rite and ceremony that had been assimilated in varying degrees into Protestant institutions and that reflect continuities in aspects of English spiritual life. Vigorous throughout his life in defending his adherence to “the religion established”, he nevertheless finds himself in the company of men known for Roman Catholic tendencies if not 57

William Camden – A Life in Context actual ­recusancy. If we cannot speculate on what kind of religious “contagion” Camden may have experienced from these acquaintences, the association itself is surely there, and throughout his life he had to protect himself, right and left, from both Catholic and Puritan critics. But Camden’s involvement with the performing arts gave him a kind of experience that he shared with men like Jonson, Donne, and Tobias Matthew – men whose lives hovered between two churches.

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chapter iii Religious Conflict and Coming of Age at Oxford

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Magdalen College

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xoniam missus” is the terse entry in Camden’s Memorabilia for     1566.89 The records for the Oxford years are spare and questions     abound right from the start. Idiomatic though his Latin is, one wonders how he intended the self-effacing passive construction? Was he “sent” or did he go? Who sent him? Why Oxford, where the Earl of Leicester had recently (1564) been made chancellor, rather than Cambridge, where Lord Burghley had been chancellor since 1559? Whom did he know there when he arrived? The more we know about the years when he was at Oxford, the more vexing the questions become. When the fifteen-year-old Camden went to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1566, he was just the age one might expect an entering undergraduate to be.90 Taking the perspective of the anxious parent, we might simply observe that Camden left St Paul’s a student of frail health but alive and undisfigured, as “smart” as a parent could wish, personable and already having opportunities for making useful social connections. Of course, as all theories of personality development would agree, by fifteen he was, for all intents, fully developed; aside from academic “accidentals” to be picked up here and there, he is the man that he will become, psychologically, morally, emotionally, and for this reason I have spent some time trying to understand something about his youth. To start his life with his university career is to overlook the dynamics of all that must have been working on him as he began to make his very uncertain way in life. In Camden’s case, his life generally has been used as a gloss to narratives other than his own. Born marginal, he has been used marginally. In spite of the service capacity he has been given, he always manages to have a place at the table, and is welcomed with warmth and respect: he is not the antiquarian mocked by Sidney as a “tyrant in table talke”, not the pedantic teacher, beater 59

William Camden – A Life in Context of boys, or insensitive bookworm satirized by dramatists and Theophrastan wits. But the genial portraits of him, making him a legend in his own time, do not tell us where he came from emotionally and socially, what conflicts moulded him, how his personality served his career, indeed, why his career took the form it did. They also tend to idealize his academic and (in so far as it is mentioned) personal life. As we will see, however, his was a very precarious career, fraught with uncertainty and more than a little disappointment. Thus, Camden’s scholarly accomplishments should not be seen as synonymous with a successful university career. If it was academically successful, it was surely personally stressful. A young man entering Magdalen College as “a chorister, or servitor” in 1566, in the university where Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was a vigilant chancellor, would feel a mixture of different social, political, and academic pressures. The student already associated with Lord Burghley, as Camden may have been through Dean Nowell, John Cooke, Master of St Paul’s, and others would have been all the more sensitive to these pressures. The likelihood of young Camden’s direct or indirect association with Burghley casts his time at Oxford in a special light. Leicester’s Oxford is a place of special interest for the biographer of Camden. Dudley took an inordinately active role in university matters; as Mallet says, when he became chancellor, he “was determined to make his office a reality” – to exercise his authority to its full extent. Penry Williams calls him the most important influence on Elizabethan Oxford.91 Traditionally, the chancellor’s responsibilities were largely symbolic and his involvement would normally be at a level quite removed from daily collegiate affairs. His office was meant to be symbolic of the university’s importance in the nation, and although his impact might in fact be considerable, he would normally leave administrative matters to vice-chancellors and college presidents.92 The chancellor’s real, felt presence at this level might be as little as he wished, and commonly that was very little indeed: political good sense recommends aloofness, where involvement would invariably be regarded as interference, likely to generate resentment within the academic community. Political good sense, of course, was not Leicester’s great strength, and he threw himself into all aspects of university affairs to an unprecedented extent: “Comparison of the university’s registers before 1564 with subsequent volumes shows a sudden intensification of the chancellor’s activity under Leicester. His concern with the minutiae of academic life – sermons, disputation and dress – as well as with patronage, is surprisingly detailed.”93 The matters of greatest concern to Leicester tell us a great deal, not only about him but also about the peculiar sort of 60

Religious Conflict & Coming of Age at Oxford ­atmosphere he created in the university during a period of exceptional volatility. By all accounts, in exercising his authority, Leicester was a law-and-order man – rather like Shakespeare’s Angelo. Such was the impression that he made on Camden, who observes that “he Preferred Power and Greatness … before solid Vertue”.94 Leicester had strong feelings about what was happening at the university – it seemed to be going to the dogs. Form and protocol of every sort were being ignored. As Penry Williams’s account of these years shows, Leicester was concerned that elections were being conducted, offices filled, and appointments made without regard for protocol; attendance at lectures was slack, students were unmindful of matters of rank, and sartorial regulations were being ignored at all levels.95 It would be a mistake to trivialize this preoccupation with the minutiae of university life: these are the details of social hierarchy and authority, and were part of his determination to root out Roman Catholics and to entrench the Puritan faction. As Williams reminds us, “Leicester’s concern was not however confined to the dress of the university members.”96 The particularity of Leicester’s complaints are symptoms of the pathology that Camden notes in his discussion of the man’s obsession with superficial displays of power and control. Camden’s Oxford is very much Leicester’s Oxford. While Leicester’s involvement in university affairs may reflect his megalomania, it is also part of larger national controversies. The period of Leicester’s chancellorship, and of Burghley’s at Cambridge, was a time when the triple factions of Anglican establishment and the poles of Catholicism and Puritanism, were struggling for control within the universities and their colleges. At Elizabeth’s accession the universities became an important factor in the formation and consolidation of her religious policies. The universities were, perforce, the nurseries for the nation’s clergy, and the tenor of that group would depend on the administrators, faculty, fellows, and students, and on the nature of the religious life there, including ecclesiastical symbols and ceremonies – the vestments, imagery, the details of worship including the liturgy, the sacraments, and other extensions of religious doctrine. Swan’s study surveys the full range of measures taken to establish Protestantism in the universities, including more stringent enforcement of the Oath of Supremacy among college members and extensive weeding out of personnel who were not friendly to the reformed religion. Beginning in 1559, visitations were set in motion “for the maintenance of learning and the bringing about of religious uniformity in accord with the recent legal changes”.97 Among those taking part in the visitation was Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s. In the early years this process 61

William Camden – A Life in Context focused on the Roman Catholic presence on campus, but that faction was so large (especially in Oxford) that officials were careful not to force a confrontation that could decimate the colleges.98 The strategy, then, was not to remove all Catholics, which would be destructive in the extreme, but to root out those stubbornly resisting conformity; as Swan says, “the government … were satisfied … with the barest measure of conformity, and the removal of those Catholic Heads who could not under any circumstances be tolerated even for a short while by the Protestants now in power”. Generally, the “purge”, largely overseen by Burghley, was “anything but rigorous”, and it stands in contrast with Leicester’s greater involvement at Oxford.99 The goal was not so much the establishment of Protestantism as it was the very definition of it. Exactly what were the terms by which Elizabethan Protestantism was to be understood – what could be accommodated under the Oath of Supremacy, what vestigial Catholic rites and liturgical elements would be acceptable? These were the norms that Elizabeth’s chief policymakers, particularly Burghley and Parker, with the help of Nowell, were trying to establish through the visitations. By 1564 much of the shake-up of the Catholics had taken place. Increasingly, the Catholics were not the problem. Rather, the emergent undefined Protestant factions that grew by virtue of the success of the Elizabethan settlement became the real threat to uniformity. The precarious equilibrium was jeopardized by Leicester’s chancellorship and his determination to administer the new university statutes (of 1565) by more rigorous supervision of religious tendencies throughout the university. This entailed the use of informants and covert information-gathering.100 Camden’s years at Oxford coincided with the period of increasing “internecine struggles within the Church of England – between the Puritans and the upholders of the ecclesia Anglicana”. It also coincided with one of Leicester’s more concerted efforts to wrest power from Burghley and with the increased animus between them.101 Camden’s arrival, first at Magdalen and then his transfer to Christ Church, placed him in the midst of the two most fervent Puritan camps in Oxford at a time when Leicester’s leadership of these factions was gaining momentum. Recognized by Elizabeth’s policy-makers as critical players in the all-important process of stabilizing current and future efforts at religious reform, the universities became important arenas for the sectarian struggles and controversies of the times. By most accounts, at Cambridge the Elizabethan compromise had been established more successfully and with less Protestant factionalism than at Oxford. Under Burghley’s chancellorship Cambridge had 62

Religious Conflict & Coming of Age at Oxford made the transition back to Protestantism relatively smoothly, without the frequent use of visitations and large numbers of ejections that resulted at Oxford.102 Leicester’s extraordinary involvement in university affairs greatly exacerbated the tensions among Protestants, to say nothing about the hostile relations with the Roman Catholics. It was he who set the tone and made his presence felt, and his influence at the university as it was at court was divisive and destabilizing. His obsession with enforcing clear social distinctions and with reintroducing vestigial regulations on student conduct and academic performance resulted in the kinds of inequities, confusion, and political hypersensitivity that typifies systems in which power is abused. Standing “at a guard with envy” so that “liberty” will not “pluck justice by the nose”, Leicester, like Shakespeare’s Angelo, carried out a regulatory policy that paradoxically accentuated superficial social, political, and religious distinctions rather than facilitating uniformity. Indeed, many of the initiatives of Reformation educational policy were meant to erode social barriers and increase socio-­economic mobility. Like other educational institutions, Oxford colleges made ample provision for poorer students; the majority of the student body matriculating were from the poorer and middle classes103 rather than the nobility, so that Leicester’s efforts, for example, to curb ostentatious dress among university members ended up reinforcing visible and behavioural forms of social stratification in ways that undermined the spirit of the institution and the social dynamic of post-Reformation education. While there is no question that Oxford was always a hierarchic institution, Leicester’s emphasis imposed on the academy the value system and exhibitionism of the court, compounded by the purposefulness of Puritan zeal. The colleges where this was felt most strongly were Magdalen and Christ Church. Oxford historian C. M. J. F. Swan, concerned that the influence of the Catholic underground has been exaggerated, points to areas where divisive Protestant activity was vigorous: “Lest one imagine that the whole of Oxford was made up at this period of those either hostile or indifferent to Protestantism, it is well to recall the attitude of Magdalen and Christ Church.” Both colleges exhibited “radically Protestant tendencies” and had officers so extreme as to run afoul of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.104 It was at these colleges that Leicester’s presence was most strongly felt. And it was on them that Elizabeth, Leicester, Burghley, and their entourage descended during the royal visitation that brought her to Oxford in 1566. Somewhere in the crowd was young Camden who found his way to Magdalen in that year. There, early in September, Elizabeth was greeted by 63

William Camden – A Life in Context the professors and administrators who would determine Camden’s fate for the next five or six years. Prominent among the welcoming officials were Dr Kennall, vice-chancellor, Dr Laurence Humphrey, President of Magdalen and Regius Professor of Greek, Dr Thomas Godwin, Dean of Christ Church. Even in the orderly show of welcome, controversy was close to the surface. As the Puritan Dr Humphrey bent to kiss the hand of the Queen, she archly observed “Dr. Humphrey, methinks this gown and habit becomes you very well; and I marvel that you are so straight-laced in this point: but I come not now to chide.”105 On that occasion, John Piers, later Bishop of Salisbury and the man who would confer the prebendship at Ilfracombe on Camden, placed a “long scroll of verses” at the “great gate” at Christ Church. Events involving Camden’s friends, patrons, and probably some enemies centred around Christ Church Hall. Disputations on subjects largely concerned with royal prerogative, supremacy, obedience, and theology filled the hours: Thomas Cooper, Camden’s master at Magdalen College, moderated “Moral Disputations”; Camden’s friend Toby Matthew (whose son, also a friend, was a recusant) and Thomas Thornton, with whom Camden and Philip Sidney lived at Christ Church, disputed on the subject of the merits of elective and successive monarchies; Thomas Godwin, John Piers, Laurence Humphrey, and John Jewel disputed theological questions; Edmund Campion, whose Catholic tendencies were tolerated at the university but who was later a martyr to Elizabeth’s ambiguous policies, participated in debates on natural philosophy. On the evening of 4 September players from Christ Church performed Richard Edwards’s play Palaemon and Arcyte, evidently much to the Queen’s delight. Edwards later became Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and later, the Master of the Children of the Chapel.106 The entertainments for Elizabeth’s Oxford visitation were a microcosm of the different kinds of cultural theatre in which Elizabethan issues, policies, and controversies were acted out or allowed controlled debate or exploration. The disputations for the occasion were on subjects not too subtly related to matters of royal supremacy – obedience and conscience, the illegality of bearing arms against one’s prince – in short, the issues at stake when religious and monarchic authority face off, although interestingly, as Swan points out, disputed doctrinal issues were not among the topics.107 Dramatic performances, recitations of encomiastic verse, debates, and other entertainments to amuse and celebrate Elizabeth made the visitation a masque-like event. Typical of such progresses, it was meta-dramatic, in that it enacted and affirmed its own principles of order, authority, and community. At the same time, during the 64

Religious Conflict & Coming of Age at Oxford visitation, while the performers danced to the music of Elizabethan supremacy, they were engaged in muted controversy; as they debated, recited, and performed, the names of some were pricked, identified as among those to be ejected, promoted, or shifted laterally. Celebratory as the visit seemed outwardly, it was, of course, a hard look at the community itself and a command performance in which the nature and strength of royal will was being made known. Leicester’s Oxford, then, was one of serious fragmentation of the sort that destabilizes the lives of those who are already either financially, socially, or otherwise vulnerable. In a setting such as Oxford between 1564 and 1575 you could be marginal whether you were Catholic or Protestant, and if you were financially dependent, as most of the student population was, your situation was still more precarious. The religious polarization that Leicester aggravated was compounded by social divisiveness, partly by his emphasis on social rank in an essentially bourgeois setting. Thus, it is well to remember that in 1565 the now secular Oxford was in the main an educational opportunity for the emerging middle classes, not for the nobility, who had recourse to other forms of study, improvement, and self-promotion.108 The large number of untitled students made the emphasis on rank and its outward appurtenances all the more divisive. Furthermore, the excessive involvement of the chancellor, who is appointed by the monarch, was seen to pose a threat to the autonomy of the university and to the meritocractic principles on which university fellowships and appointments were ostensibly made. Most of the colleges, including Magdalen and Christ Church, where Camden studied, made specific provision for poor students and many maintained free schools adjacent to the college itself. The foundations, bursaries, the fellowships, many of which were links with the grammar schools, all helped reinforce the institution’s mandate to provide opportunities for the less privileged. To be sure, there were students of every social rank at the university. Social station was, of course, a fact of life there, and we must not overstate the altruistic principles of the university or be blind to the political motives behind Reformation education. That said, Leicester, himself a seriously insecure man, in his activities as chancellor was seen by his adversaries to have contravened collegiate authority and its mandate in ways that compromised the very nature of the educational and social mission of the institution. The university and its officials, whatever their religious leanings, were jealous of their rights and privileges. Oxford historians agree that his appointment marked a new stage in royal involvement in university affairs. The first Elizabethan university 65

William Camden – A Life in Context appointment, he came from public office not from within the institution; he did not establish a residency at the university, which was traditionally the case but not obligatory; and with him began the custom of the chancellor appointing the vice-chancellor, a privilege wrested with difficulty from the university community. Indeed, religious controversy aside, his lengthy career as chancellor was marked by his consistent attempts to extricate control from university officers and bodies and to undermine the university’s autonomy. In short, he inaugurated a new phase of authoritarian presence at Oxford and, by all accounts, he filled his role with his usual insensitivity.109 Thus, when Camden entered Oxford, a penurious chorister or servitor, he would certainly have been reminded in various ways of his position. There are many ways in which university politics would bear directly on Camden’s career. Leicester’s determination to make his presence felt sent him into all areas of the university: into matters of teaching, curriculum, manners and customs, fellowships, proctorships – virtually everything – and directly or indirectly, it would have been felt by Camden.110 Generally speaking, of course, the career of the incoming student of obscure social status and meager financial means, as we assume Camden to have been, could be described with little or no reference to the chancellor. But Camden’s time at Oxford was a difficult one, and the man who wrote the first biography of Elizabeth at Burghley’s instigation was caught in the political cross-fire of the times. In the Annals of Elizabeth, when recording Leicester’s death in 1588, Camden’s portrait of the man is a vivid and damning close-up, couched in a style of cool disdain and measured ambiguity: He was esteemed a most accomplished Courtier, spruce and neat, free and bountifull to Souldiers and Students, a cunning Time-server and Respecter of his own Advantages, of a Disposition ready and apt to please, crafty and subtile towards his Adversaries, much given formerly to Women, and in his later days doating extremely upon Marriage.111 Camden may, of course, have been all innocence when he arrived at Magdalen College with his bag of books and belongings and a little money. Perhaps only in later years did the name Dudley mean anything to him: I doubt it. He arrived in 1566, probably at the very time of Elizabeth’s and Burghley’s visit in September, and when the two rival chancellors’ animosity was at its peak.112 Notwithstanding the festivities of the visitation, 1566 was also a year of considerable friction between the university, the Queen and her policy-makers; Leicester and his protégés, and a number of issues 66

Religious Conflict & Coming of Age at Oxford bear directly on Camden’s college life. Camden’s arrival coincided with Leicester’s bold attempt to name the Puritan, Laurence Humphrey, as his vice-­chancellor. Humphrey was then President of Magdalen College, where Camden was first affiliated, and his Puritanism had embroiled him in other university controversies. He led a disobedient faction of nonconformists who refused to comply with Elizabeth’s and Archbishop Parker’s policies on vestments, and had been threatened with removal from office. Leicester’s choice of him as vice-chancellor was clearly provocative and was unsatisfactory to the university, who proceeded to select their own candidate, Thomas Cooper, a moderate and a conformist, also of Magdalen College and master of the adjoining Free School attended by Camden. Cooper’s career brought him in increasing conflict with the Puritan factions. Thus, at the time when Camden began at Magdalen College School, the master, Thomas Cooper, had just successfully resisted the candidacy of his superior, Laurence Humphrey, who had the rather intimidating support of Leicester, but who was acting in direct defiance of the Queen and Archbishop Parker.113 No college student, least of all one as vulnerable as Camden, could feel secure in such a situation. The episode is just one illustration of the complex forces that work across national, university, college, and personal levels. Even from his insignificant station, it would be difficult for Camden to have been unaware of the politics of his college and university, and it is likely that his fortunes suffered from the controversy. It is not clear how long Camden continued at Magdalen. Academically, it would seem to have been the ideal situation for a young man of his background: the Free School, something of an institutional vestige, was known as a place of innovative teaching (mainly of Latin), and Magdalen itself had a reputation for having among the highest standards, the fullest arts programme, and the most innovative lectures in the university. As a chorister, Camden would have studied music, and perhaps polyphony as well, which was one of the college’s strengths.114 Camden was evidently destined for a “demy’s” place, that is, one of the thirty half-­stipendary openings for poor students not entering the clergy who would study grammar, logic, and sophistry.115 Originally these positions were meant for students already well prepared in Latin and grammar and were created with the intention of strengthening the arts faculty; there were provisions for some of these students to pursue grammar and poetry, and ultimately to qualify as teachers of other students. The undergraduate structure was designed to foster study of the “artes humanitatis”, and in this it complemented Camden’s training at St Paul’s. 67

William Camden – A Life in Context Worthy as Camden’s candidacy may have been, for some reason he was passed over for the “demy’s place”. As a result he was “transplanted” to Broadgates Hall, which served commoners at Christ Church.116 His failure to get a fellowship at Magdalen and his relocation coincide with the contest between Laurence Humphrey and Thomas Cooper, and subsequently Vice-Chancellor Cooper’s elevation to Dean of Christ Church.117 The evidence is circumstantial, but it seems likely that Camden’s frustrated beginning at Magdalen and his translation to Christ Church were part of the after-effect of the larger political conflicts involving the university and its colleges, Leicester, and royal policy. Cooper, among the conservative voices of the university, had resisted the Puritan faction for years before; he later left Leicester’s Oxford to become Bishop of Lincoln and then Winchester. His episcopal Protestantism was ultimately Elizabeth’s and Archbishop Parker’s, and it stands in contradistinction with Leicester’s idiosyncratic Puritanism. It is also the kind of Anglicanism regarded by Puritans as too close to Rome, and with which Camden would become associated. Thus, given the players in the complex university drama taking place above and around the young Camden, it would seem that in this instance, he was the victim of the several Protestant factions or a combination of Protestant and Catholic rivalries, and that he was deemed unpromising material for the more radical contingent of Humphrey’s Magdalen College. In any event, he was effectively bumped from his place at Magdalen, and went on to Broadgates Hall and Christ Church, where he spent two and a half years. These years too were fraught with difficulty, but he formed there some of the most important and lasting acquaintances of his life, and extended those intellectual interests first roused at St Paul’s. If he arrived at Oxford a political naïf, he was no longer one when he crossed the river and walked along the meadows towards the college that its ambitious founder, Thomas Wolsey, originally called Cardinal College.

Christ Church

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hrist Church presents us with another distinct phase in the form ation of William Camden. Under the circumstances, he must have felt as much at home there as possible for a temporarily displaced young man in need of patronage. Aside from the political turmoil surrounding his and Cooper’s relocation, there were definite ties and no less definite similarities between Magdalen and Christ Church that must have eased the transition. There were historical connections between the colleges through Thomas 68

Religious Conflict & Coming of Age at Oxford Wolsey, who had been bursar at Magdalen, and based the plans for Cardinal College on his experience there.118 Both had curricula that were deeply rooted in the humanist enterprise and had reputations for academic rigour. Christ’s commitment to the bonae litterae was as deeply entrenched as Magdalen’s was, and the provisions for studying the ancient languages, philosophy, and logic were the best in the university, so Camden no doubt felt both the pressure and pleasure of his academic environment. At Magdalen Camden studied at the Free School adjoining the college, and at Christ Church he entered Broadgates Hall, described as “an annex for commoners at Christ Church”. Consequent upon the Edwardian reform of the college, it was specified that undergraduates were to be the sons of poor men and recruited from the collegiate grammar schools.119 Once again, then, the social covenant that lay behind much of Edwardian Protestant educational reform provided the vehicle for advancing Camden’s career. At Christ Church, he became part of another institution that, in 1566, was trying to put back on track fitful initiatives of the Henrician and Edwardian reform, but in a distinctly Elizabethan manner. Camden’s Christ Church in particular was a product of the humanist reform in education and religion. But its Protestantism was both old and new – unquestionably deeply rooted in Wolsey’s institution, it was conservative in tone and episcopal in spirit. The precarious religious balance at Oxford in the 1560s and 70s was one in which Puritanism on the one hand and Catholicism on the other were both capable of fostering radically disruptive behaviour. Between the shadows cast by these two poles move the figures of episcopacy and compromise, Cooper and Thornton, for example, who slide quietly into office in spite of Leicester’s mercurial opposition. The college that Camden entered around 1567 was a strange combination of tradition and instability, of establishment and disestablishment, élitism and egalitarian meritocracy. In some ways, the history of the college is like that of St Paul’s writ large. Founded in 1525 by Cardinal Wolsey, it too was born in the ambitious humanism of the Renaissance and accommodated itself to the political realities of the Reformation. James McConica and J. E. A. Dawson provide the details for the context I am trying to establish.120 Christ Church was a monument to the university’s ability to remake itself. While much of the curriculum might be traditional in content, as McConica emphasizes, Wolsey’s plan marks an absolute break from the medieval system of lectures and halls and the emergence of something modern, call it Renaissance, in both its educational and physical pretensions. It was begun in 1525, and so 69

William Camden – A Life in Context like St Paul’s it comes out of the cultural energies of the Catholic Renaissance at the time of intellectual foment; the point is important for reiterating the political and religious patterns that were alive in the institutions that nurtured Camden. Thus, Camden’s college for at least two and a half years was designed “to take in the full resources of the reformed and humanistic curriculum”.121 Educationally the regimen at Christ Church was consistently rigorous, and the opportunities that it offered were rich and varied. Regularity and amplitude rather than innovativeness marked its programmes: undergraduate instruction in dialectic, rhetoric, natural philosophy, and mathematics and philosophy was complemented with a large faculty offering theology, Hebrew, and Greek. The statutes appear to have been in a constant state of revision, but students were increasingly subject to severer ranking and examination. The various drafts of the statutes from Henry through Elizabeth attest to a persistent commitment to philosophy and theology, as well as to Greek and Hebrew. When Camden supplicated for his B.A. in June 1570, arguing that he “spent four years in the Study of Logic”, he is probably referring specifically to his time at Christ Church.122 There are various first-hand accounts of the rigours of college study, many having the tone of self-righteousness to be expected of long-suffering students. One in particular is exactly contemporary with Camden’s stay at Christ Church, and although he does not figure in it, it involves young men he lived and was friendly with, and so should help to historicize this world we are examining. It is also a telling illustration of the interpenetration of complex social, educational, and political forces in the world that Camden occupied in 1569, and of the way that the university’s combative education-by-­disputation prepared students for the world of human affairs. The story is the one Camden’s friend, Richard Carew tells in his Survey of Cornwall about his time at Broadgates Hall.123 This is also the Richard Carew who forty-five years after the event (1614) contributes an essay on the English language to Camden’s Remains. The time and setting are those of Camden’s residency (along with Philip Sidney) at Dr Thornton’s, in 1569. The story is a simple one – how Carew was required to meet the nonpareil, Philip Sidney, in a public debate in the presence of the the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of Leicester, Chancellor of the University and his opponent’s uncle. Carew uses the episode as an opportunity to praise Sidney’s learning, but it provides the reader with a snapshot of life at Christ Church, and depending on the reader, it can be construed in any of several ways. Carew’s own reading 70

Religious Conflict & Coming of Age at Oxford is simple enough: his academic performance had been on the decline, and in order to get him to shape up, his examiners pit him against the wonder of the age. This is the simplest, though still nicely layered reading, and in the innocent narrative, Carew assumes the role of faux-naïf. Carew, a country boy from Cornwall, member of the rural gentry and so much beneath Sidney socially (and yet well above Camden), conveys his deep respect for his social superior by praising him as his intellectual superior. The narrative derives its frisson from the implicit social tension, as the reader imagines being in the place of the young country boy. Carew matriculated at Broadgates in 1566, at age eleven. When the event took place he would have been about fourteen, and Sidney fifteen. In 1602, when writing about the event, Carew was probably not so naïve, but at age fourteen, his perspective was probably the one evoked in the Survey – nervous awe. As we have seen, the schools could at all levels be something of a gladiatorial arena. As Carew presents it, the debate was a kind of warning; terrible as it was – held, after all, in front of the head of the entire university, and two of the most powerful men in the kingdom – it was also the sort of trial one might expect at Oxford. At this level the anecdote suggests something of the combative, public nature of sixteenth-century university education, when the boys were liable to be called upon to prove their abilities in very exacting circumstances. The test is “educational” in a number of academic and non-academic ways. There is another perspective to the story, that of the adults involved. We think here of the story of Stephen Daedalus and Father Dolan, in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and of the contrasting perspectives of the boy and his father. Some kind of flattering presentation was needed to welcome Leicester on his visit to the university and college in 1568/9. It seems pretty clear that the debate was a set up job to show off the ability of Leicester’s nephew and heir, Philip Sidney, at a time when Leicester was on the rampage about low standards at the university. The ritualistic boy-baiting here is part of the political dimension of the college as much as it is part of the educational rigour of the boys’ life, and it is likely that virtually any of the sons of gentlemen might have been called upon as Carew was. In the incident, though, we see how Leicester’s involvement in university life filtered all the way down to the daily affairs of the fourteen-year-old boys, confirming the social strata on its way. However much Carew’s work had fallen off at that point, if at all – we can be fairly sure that he knew enough not to outshine Philip, if he were able to do so. The rhetoric of self-effacement was learned before, not after one made one’s way to court or office. 71

William Camden – A Life in Context The greater part of Camden’s undergraduate study was at Christ Church, and the demanding programme of lectures and disputations ensured that his own preparation as a teacher had a solid foundation. Indeed, it appears that the undergraduate programme for students not intending to enter the clergy, as set forth in the statutes of 1565 – consisting of two terms of grammar, four of rhetoric, five of logic, and five more of arithmetic (for three of them) and another “related” (presumably numeric) science such as music – was designed to train future teachers.124 It is not surprising therefore that the professional path that Camden ended up following through Broadgates Hall and Christ Church was also travelled previously by Edward Grant, first master of Westminster, friend of Burghley, who later hired Camden as his second master. What Camden was probably reading for his lectures and disputations can be deduced from the diary of two brothers, Richard and Matthew Carnsew, who were at Broadgates Hall with Camden.125 Their studies were quite varied, combining classical and modern texts. Many of the texts do double duty by serving several subjects on the curriculum at the same time, with works of history, natural science, moral philosophy, and logic also assisting with the study of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and science. The texts they record reading are familiar enough, but reflect a balance of modern and classical that provides a valuable insight into the workings of the Protestant humanist curriculum. Sallust and Caesar were being read about the time that the boys were translating some of Foxe’s sermons into Latin; they studied Sturm, Johannes Caesarius’s Dialectica, and Melanchthon, in the same term that they studied Cicero’s De amicitia, Peter Martyr on the Nicomachean Ethics, and Livy. Contemporary works – often on contemporary issues – combined topicality with scholarship, so that works by Laurence Humphrey, Johannes Sleidanus, Melanchthon, and Realdo Colombo (De re anatomica, 1560) appear among their reading lists.126 The curriculum is unmistakably Renaissance and also very flexible in the way that it appropriates its humanist texts into Protestant and even national contexts. As James McConica says, the Carnsew diaries give us a “rare glimpse of the actual conduct and content of teaching for a man in the degree course in arts”.127 The readings, however, are not presented as part of their course syllabi per se; they cross the statutary subjects of the arts curriculum and thus show a programme that is remarkably adaptive and contemporary and anything but vestigial. From the diaries we can see the reality behind the humanist education that was still evolving in the 1560s: this was a decade when texts, editions, commentaries on classical authors were proliferating at Oxford and Cambridge, and in it we see the context 72

Religious Conflict & Coming of Age at Oxford from which Camden the Greek scholar came. But we also see the milieu in which contemporary texts and issues were a part of their training, and where Camden would learn to combine past and present, and marry text and artefact, as he would do in the Britannia, the Remains, and the Annals of Elizabeth. The Oxford of the 1560s was as intellectually rich as it was politically rife. For a time it held in balance medieval scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, and early modern vernacular interests. James McConica eloquently describes these years and the education that was to be had, as “catholic and eclectic, sensitive to the whole of the tradition of learning in the past, including the medieval achievement, widely read in contemporary continental thought, yet staunchly protestant”.128 The worst of the period of iconoclastic reform was past. The institution combined the medieval hall and the emerging form of an early modern university and arts faculty. It assimilated students attending lectures but unlikely to take degrees for a variety of reasons, and degree students of different sorts, reading with tutors and attending public, college, or university lectures, so that the student body was noteworthy for its socioeconomic diversity rather than its homogeneity. Christ Church in particular stood out as a community in which this combination of traditional and innovative curricular interests was deeply entrenched. There the literary, philosophical, and theological focus of the trivium and quadrivium were complemented by offerings in the sciences that might be described as “extracurricular”. These, history seems to suggest, were as much a function of the men at who were attending Christ Church and Broadgates Hall as they were a reflection of university curricular planning. The discovery of the “New World” seems to have been as much a part of their study as was the rediscovery of the ancient world. The interest in travel, discovery, local and vernacular history can be linked to the tradi­tional disciplines of geography and cosmography, as McConica notes,129 but it also opens new areas of study as well. At Broadgates Hall, under Thomas Thornton’s aegis, were Richard Hakluyt, Henry and Thomas Savile, Thomas Harriot, Philip Sidney, and Camden himself. These were men whose interests as students became part of the curriculum of later generations: Richard Hakluyt, a student with Camden in 1570, “lectured as a regent in 1577–9 in the new field of geography”; Henry Savile went on to establish the “first Oxford chairs in geometry and astronomy in 1619”.130 And in 1622 Camden established the first chair in civil history. These individuals might all be described as examples of a new kind of scholar, preparing for the 73

William Camden – A Life in Context ­emerging “new learning” and occupying a different social position than their predecessors had. They are not alone of their kind in Oxford or England, but together at Broadgates, they constitute a significant coterie of like-minded individuals. In this, Camden seems to have been in the right place at the right time, although we have to think that this was not accidental: that he helped to make Christ Church the right place, and his time the right time for such studies. How he ended up at Christ Church is still unknown, but somebody had to have been looking out for him from the time of his departure from St Paul’s. Furthermore, the friendships formed here became enduring social and scholarly connections that served Camden for the rest of his life. Typical of any youthful undergraduate experience, and in spite of ongoing disappointments, Camden formed a deep connection with Christ Church. Years later, Henry Savile, provost at Eton, offered the aged and infirm Camden a home with him. Richard Hakluyt, the zealous collector of travel literature and a man sharing Camden’s interests in physical geography, had been a Westminster student and later became a prebendary within the Westminster College Chapter, and so a part of Camden’s community there. Richard Carew, whose Survey of Cornwall is indebted to Camden’s influence, becomes a member of the Society of Antiquaries. Even at the time of Camden’s death, many of those contributing to the volume of Oxford elegies, Camdeni Insignia, are college men. While I suspect that the path leading to Christ Church was clearly marked with the names of friendly kindred spirits inviting Camden into their midst, the concrete evidence is not there. That he moved into a group that he made his own, left his mark on and remained close to, however, is clear. Furthermore, at this time, though still young, he began to be known in the national and international scholarly and political community. Presumably on the basis of a reputation earned at Oxford (since he had published nothing prior to 1576), Camden’s name enters the scholarly chain-mail network, and he is mentioned to European travellers to England as a man worth meeting. The intellectual community that Camden enjoyed at Christ Church itself becomes part of an international network of scholars, including Mercator, Ortelius, Parmenius, Gentili, who will seek Camden out after he has left his studies at Oxford. It is well to remember Powicke’s observation that Camden was a new breed of scholar. He is among the first generation of students beginning to professionalize the study of subjects that before had been marginal to the arts curriculum. I describe them as “new scholars”, suggesting by the phrase their 74

Religious Conflict & Coming of Age at Oxford association with the new science, but also their relation to emerging academic disciplines, and to the growing educated middle class. They are not courtierscholars, nor do they fit easily into the university mould. As Camden will be par excellence, these men and their community are early modern scholars cut free of court and church, and finding other ways to serve the broader community. Like Camden, they studied in reformed humanist schools and universities, and will go on to provide the models for the next wave of students and reforms, to create new kinds of knowledge, endow the chairs, define the subject matter for study, found organizations such as the Society of Antiquaries, and generally contribute to that wave of cultural re-examination and social change that culminates in the radical public paradigm shift of the Civil War. In our effort to contextualize Camden’s life, it will be helpful to keep the chronology clear. In men like Hakluyt, Camden, Savile, Carew, and others of their generation, we see the beginnings of the kinds of enquiry that fostered the far more professionalized, sophisticated study a generation or so later, by men like John Selden, Robert Cotton, Browne, Hobbes, Kenelm Digby.131 The ideas taking shape at Oxford during the late 1560s and early 1570s found their way into print and more popular discourse only in the mid-1580s; if only to keep our chronology straight, we should not identify them too casually with the work that they spawned one or two generations later. Not through radical new ideas, but through the slowly evolving changes in attitude and methodology from men such as Leland, Stow, Lambarde, Camden, Carew, Hakluyt the way is prepared for the scholarship, ideas, and politics of Bacon, Selden, Cotton, Browne, and Hobbes, for example. To compress generations in the interest of historical survey is to gloss over specific political and social contexts that give the contours and texture that are the details of social change. The Camden that begins to emerge from the 1560s is, like his generation itself, liminal. At this stage in our study of him, at a point when he has yet to write anything that has survived, we can say that what lies ahead in his future is quite unlike the lives his mentors lived. To predict the course of his literary life on the basis of his background and training up to 1570, we might expect editions, translations of, or commentaries on the Greek and Latin classics or the Church Fathers, work perhaps along the lines of Savile’s on Tacitus, or perhaps educational or rhetorical treatises in the manner of Thomas Cooper, Richard Mulcaster, or Roger Ascham. His aptitude for such work was great, as was the market. If we measure his achievement against what preceded him rather than against the Jacobean intellectual context that he helped foster, 75

William Camden – A Life in Context then the originality of his vision and work are all the more striking. Thus, his Greek grammar is a gesture towards an educational tradition that he does not pursue further, at least not in print; while it might be expected that the grammar would be the first in a lifetime of writings dedicated to classical texts, it was his first and last. Instead, his career takes several different turns – indeed, we can speak of his life and work, but not really about his “career”. Finally, his was a path that could not have been foreseen; nor, for that matter, was it freely chosen. We must remember that Camden had to make his way in the world. It was a secular path that led, for various reasons, away from the traditional venues of church and university. Unlike his schoolmate Philip Sidney, who would not be looking for a career at university, and who would be giving patronage not seeking it, Camden had to make the practical best of his time at Oxford. Notwithstanding some reversals, he did so successfully, although having the title “antiquary” on one’s business card might not at first seem likely to open doors. Suffice it to say that Camden’s university experience was fruitful but not particularly successful professionally. Throughout his life he was vulnerable – from St Paul’s to Magdalen to Christ Church, his progress through the ranks was hazardous, and it ended abruptly. In 1569 he failed to get a fellowship at All Souls. In June the following year he petitioned the Congregation of Regents that “whereas he had spent four years in the Study of Logic, he might be admitted Bach. of Arts”. This in itself was hardly an unusual request, but judging from his failure to win a fellowship, we can say that Camden was facing serious opposition. Leicester was the authority who had to approve all supplications, and Camden’s was rejected. In May of that year Leicester had written a stern rebuke to Dr Cooper, complaining of the disorderliness in the convocations and calling for greater supervision and rigour of all petitions relating to convocation; by June greater rigour had been imposed, and Camden was one of its victims. His ambitions again frustrated, Camden “relinquished his Conversation with the Muses”, although as Wood says, “to the great reluctancy of those who were well acquainted with the Pregnancy of his Parts”.132 His departure it would appear was not what he had intended or wanted. He left without a degree – something common enough among the nobility, but irregular in a man of Camden’s position. His disappointment is underscored by the fact that he renewed his petition in 1574. When he was finally granted the B.A., it was not by “determination in school street” – that is, without the normal disputation before examiners; such inconsistencies and irregularities were not uncommon at Oxford – especially among Catholics and the wealthy 76

Religious Conflict & Coming of Age at Oxford and aristocratic. Camden’s plans, then, were, to have continued at the university, presumably in the way that Savile and others were able to do, but his academic career was being blocked. As we will see, the disappointment rankled Camden for the rest of his life. His own view of his uneasy time at Oxford was that it was the result of religious controversy. His often-quoted letter to James Ussher in 1618, filled with nuance and barely suppressed bitterness, illustrates his precarious position in the religious controversies at Oxford “when Popery was predominant”. Paradoxically, he makes Ussher his “Confessor” as he relates how “for defending the Religion established … [he] lost a fellowship in All souls”; with broken syntax, he continues rather ambiguously to say that, as Daniel Donne often related, he was “opposed by the Popish Faction”. Camden’s letter reveals his defensiveness against the Puritans and the Catholics: he insists on having taken the Oath of Conformity twice, thus defending himself against the suggestion that he was soft on Rome, and he notes proudly that he was responsible for converting Catholic noblemen to the established church. His commitment to the “Religion established” is the important detail: his loss of the fellowship and the opposition of the Popish party were two separate, and related issues, and the letter shows how Camden, minor figure as he was, was ground between the two forces of Puritan and Catholic opposition.133 In reviewing Camden’s frustrated university career, it is important that he seems at no time to have considered a career in the church. His early time at Magdalen was evidently in a programme designed for future teachers who would not be taking orders. His failure to proceed in the normal course to his degree is a pattern common among Catholics. During the period from 1564, and increasingly (but not always consistently) from 1566, matriculating and graduating students were required to take the Oath of Supremacy, and Camden probably eluded the second of these by not graduating as might be expected, and again in 1574 by not appearing for the “determination” – a survival strategy used by Catholics although it cost them their degree. Many of the outward signs of Camden’s university career are those associated with the Catholic contingent who attended university for various reasons but were willing to do without the formal degree. In 1618 he is determined to dissociate himself from both Catholics and Puritans. He was clearly not comfortable with Leicester’s zealous party, which would have put him afoul of Elizabeth’s insistence on moderation and toleration. However, had he cast his lot with Leicester’s contingent, as Sidney did, he would not have had difficulty winning his fellowship or qualifying for his degree. Rather, it would seem that 77

William Camden – A Life in Context from their perspective, he was viewed as being, if not too closely allied to the Catholic party, then not sympathetic enough to their own. The ambiguities of Camden’s religious construction by his contemporaries is significant, not only for his Oxford experience but for the rest of his life. They certainly remind us of the extent to which he is a product of his society. With few, but not insignificant exceptions, Camden has been viewed as an exemplary Protestant, but the reputation has been unexamined and the term is obviously lacking precision as a description of his religious identity. As we have seen, his career suggests intrigue from either side but most likely from the Protestant extremes. His university career is striking for his disaffiliation from religious issues and a church career – a possibility he never discusses – but it is worth noting that he becomes a lay prebendary in later years. He never wrote polemical material, although we will see that he was occasionally drawn into religious issues. He was willing to let it be thought that he had suffered for his religion, but whether for acts of omission or commission, or simply because he was a vulnerable pawn in the affairs of others is not clear either. I suspect that in avoiding polemics Camden cultivated a rhetoric of ambiguity as a way of making destiny his choice. Thus, from an early age he actively pursued a path of silent moderation that was attractive and ultimately useful for the conservative religious establishment with which he became affiliated. Considering his fellowship with Sidney, he could presumably have hitched his wagon to that shooting star. But already by 1569, whether from his own particular cast of mind, or because of already established ties (or both), he avoided what was zealous and confrontational, preferring instead the tactics of silence and understatement. His, we should say, was not the logical choice for a young man of his station. The court of Elizabeth, the church, the universities, and the bureaucracy were filled with bounders, comets, a veritable galaxy of short-lived celestial objects, men and some women who chose more boisterous routes to money and position. Given his literary, scholarly, and personal talents, Camden might have thrived had he sued for patronage in the appropriate quarters. In the absence of more specific data, we can suggest that he did not pursue some of the opportunities open to a Puritan willing to serve the likes of the Earl of Leicester, and that he chose a subtler strategy for life, a more private one the risks of which are difficult to know, and the success of which would be uncertain and long in coming. In contextualizing Camden’s time at Oxford, we need to resist the tendencies to idealize his scholarly life and to make it more successful than it 78

Religious Conflict & Coming of Age at Oxford was. What A. L. Rowse says of Camden may be true – that “never did a man have a greater capacity for friendship”, but in certain ways it was not serving him well during his vulnerable years in a highly volatile university community.134 Many opportunities that opened up for lesser men remained closed to Camden, and others open to him he refused. One of the few of his generation generally regarded as in the mainstream of European intellectual life, Camden left Oxford disappointed of his degree and without immediate prospects. Like many Catholics in similar position, when confronted with Protestant demands they could not meet, he too resorted to the Inns of Court, entering Inner Temple on 21 February 1572.135 When, in his memoirs, he encloses his entire university career within the brittle square brackets of two successive entries – “1566. Oxoniam missus. / 1571. Oxonia redii.” – we have reason to think that he is not simply being laconic, although he does progress from a passive to an active state in those two entries – from being “sent to Oxford” to “returned from Oxford”.136 Now in the active voice, his memorandum announces a more assertive self as he forges new paths for himself and also for his contemporaries. In returning to London in 1571 Camden recognized that there were no prospects for him at the university until the immediate defeats were forgotten and the political dust had settled. Judging from his two petitions for the B.A., and his refusal to accept an M.A. in later years because the recognition came too late, we know that Camden was embittered by his treatment, and that he originally felt the need of the degree. I would suggest, contrary to most views of Camden’s life, that at this point, the educational and political system failed him largely because it was anachronistic. The ladder of success though education held the prospect of a university future, but the highly fragmented and politicized university precluded that next step for Camden. At the university level, the reform humanist education lacked the intellectual and political coherence that it had at the grammar school level. As a result, a door closed for Camden. For all practical purposes, several traditional kinds of career were precluded from him: the church, the university, and the courtier-scholar. He has left no trace at the Inner Temple, and the years from 1571 to his appointment at Westminster School in 1575 are lost, with nothing but Godfrey Goodman’s word that Gabriel Goodman supported him in his antiquarian travels (although he mentions no dates). When he resurfaces at Westminster School under Edward Grant, he joins the network of Broadgates Hall and Christ Church alumni under the aegis of William Cecil. 79

notes: part one    1.  Camden’s epitaph on his monument in Westminster Abbey, here translated by the late Sir Anthony Wagner, Clarenceux King of Arms; notoriously, the epitaph misstates his age, reading “in aetatis suae 74” – a detail corrected in Wagner’s text. I am grateful to Sir Anthony for sharing his knowledge of William Camden and allowing me to use his files on Camden.    2.  The Gheeraerts portrait is now in the National Portrait Gallery collection, inventory no. 528. The earliest known instance of Camden’s use of this motto is in his inscription of his arms and motto, along with words of commendation, in Emanuel van Meteren’s album, which is now Bod., ms Douce 68, “Album amicorum Emanuelis de Meteren Mercatoris Antuerpiani […] anno 1585”, fols. 59v–60; other entries are by Richard Mulcaster, Joris Hoefnagel, Daniel Rogers, Francis Junius, and Nicholas Peiresc. For Camden and the new foundation of Christ’s Church Hospital for orphans, see Anthony à Wood, a t h e n a e o x o n i e n s e s … To Which Are Added t h e f a s t i or Annals of the Said University, 2 vols. (London, 1815), II, col. 340.   3.  Sir Maurice Powicke, “William Camden”, Essays and Studies, 1 (1948), pp. 66–84.   4.  Powicke, “William Camden”, pp. 67–8, 83; A. L. Rowse, The England of Elizabeth: the Structure of Society (London: Macmillan & Co., 1950), pp. 40, 57, 59. There are also the well-known poetic encomia by Spenser, in “The Ruines of Time”, and by Jonson, epigram 14.   5.  This is the first-hand account of the proceeding, part of the funeral certificate prepared by William Penson and witnessed by William Heather, executor; the certificate is in the College of Arms (ms i.22, p. 90), and printed in the Visitation of the County of Huntington Under the Authority of William Camden (Camden Society, 1849), pp. xi–xii. Edmund Gibson’s account also stresses the size and ceremony of the event as well as the large number of nobility: “he was carried to Westminster-Abbey in great pomp. The whole College of Heralds attended in their proper Habits, and great Numbers of the Nobility and Gentry accompanied the Corps, and, at their entrance into the Church, the Prebendaries, and the other Members, received the Corps in their Vestments, with great Solemnity, and conducted it into the Nave of the Church”: Edmund Gibson, “The Life of Mr. Camden”, in William Camden, Britannia […], trans. and ed. Edmund Gibson, 2 vols., 3rd edn (London, 1753), I, n.p. Mark Noble, A History of the College of Arms (London, 1805), p. 207, records Brooke’s absence from Camden’s funeral.   6.  For Camden’s will, see PRO, i.22.90 (prob 11/142); it is also reproduced in A Collection of Curious Discourses, Written by Eminent Antiquaries Upon Several Heads in Our English Antiquities, ed. Thomas Ayloffe, 2 vols. (Oxford: the Theatre, 1775), II, pp. 390–3. We know that Camden and Heather sang together in the abbey choir from Westminster Abbey Muniment (WAM) ms Treasury Accounts 1584–6.   7.  Gibson, “The Life of Mr. Camden”, sig. k.

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Notes: Part One   8.  Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 306–8; Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 104, 106–7.   9.  The funeral certificate identifies Camden as a bachelor; see also Mark Eccles, “Brief Lives: Tudor and Stuart Authors”, Studies in Philology, 79 (1982), pp. 20–1.   10.  In the plague year of 1609, when sickness broke out in houses neighbouring Camden, he removed to William Heather’s in Chislehurst; see Camden’s “Memorabilia […] de seipso”, in Gulielmi Camdeni [… ] Epistolae, ed. Thomas Smith (London, 1691), p. 85, and also Wagner file, p. 26; for the Bexley estate, see Oxford University ms, University Arch. S.E.P. c.7, and H. Stuart Jones, “The Foundation and History of the Camden Chair”, Oxoniensa 8 & 9 (1943–4), pp. 169–92, esp. pp. 173–5.   11 PRO, i.22.90 (prob 11/142) and Curious Discourses, II, p. 392; Camden also left £12 to the Company of Cordwainers, for a piece of plate that would bear much the same inscription. See W. A. D. Englefield, The History of the Painter-Stainers Company of London (London: Chapman & Dodd, 1923), pp. 48–65, for their changing relationship to the College of Arms and the heralds; for discussion of the Camden cup and a picture of it, see pp. 82–3; see also John Gregory Crace, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Painters, Otherwise Painter-Stainers (London, 1880) and The Worshipful Company of Painters, Otherwise Painter-Stainers (London: Painters’ Hall, 1981).   12.  Anthony Wagner, Heralds of England (London: HMSO, 1967), pp. 222–5.   13.  Arthur Bonner, “William Camden and Camden Place”, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society (23 July 1910), pp. 399–404; also Wagner file, p. 26.   14.  Eccles, “Brief Lives”, pp. 19–20.   15.  According to the statutes, WAM ms 25,122**, p. 65, as under-master, Camden’s salary would have been £7 6s 8d; he would have received for his living £1 3s 4d; and for his board £6 1s 8d; the headmaster (fol. 64) would receive a salary of £12 30s. for his living, and £6 1s 8d for his board. John Sargeaunt, Annals of Westminster School (London: Methuen, 1898), p. 12, says that the headmaster’s salary was raised to £20 “before the statutes took their final form”, but the change is not recorded in the documents. For details about the lectureship, see Oxford University ms, University Arch. S.E.P. c.7, and Jones, “The Foundation and History of the Camden Chair”, p. 174.   16.  Thus, the manor was “conveyed” to William Heather for 99 years, thereafter to revert to the University; the £140 were to be taken from its revenues; for the initial three years, the salary was staggered, at £20 in the first year, £40 in the second, and the full amount in the third; see Oxford University, ms Reg. Conv. n, fol. 144, and Jones, “The Foundation and History of the Camden Chair”, p. 174; for the letter of conveyance, signed and sealed, see Oxford University, ms University Arch. S.E.P. 7.   17.  Oxford University, ms University Arch. S.E.P. c.5 & c.7; Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, II, col. 343.   18.  Jones, “The Foundation and History of the Camden Chair”, p. 175.   19.  On the Chantries Acts, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 369–70, 454–9; on liturgical music, Woodward, Theatre of Death, pp. 40–2, 50, 58–9.

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William Camden – A Life in Context   20.  John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Olive Lawson Dick (London: Secker & Warburg, 1950), pp. 51–2, describes how John Hacket “did filch it [the manuscript containing the annals of James’s reign and memorabilia of Camden’s life] from Mr. Camden as he lay dying”; see also Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, II, col. 347; for Godfrey Goodman’s machinations to inherit Camden’s “records”, see Geoffrey Ingle Soden, Godfrey Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester (London: SPCK, 1953), pp. 32–4: Goodman wrote that since “I was his [Camden’s] scholar, and my father had recommended him to be schoolmaster in Westminster, and had put him upon the study of antiquity, and had bought him books …, and it was my uncle who bore his charge when he travelled” he should inherit the records; Camden replied that he would have done so, but, as Goodman says, “Archbishop Bancroft had prevented me”.   21.  Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Facts of the Matter: Satiric and Ideal Economies in the ­Jonsonian Imagination”, in Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, ed. Jennifer Brady and W. H. Heren­ deen (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1991), pp. 67–8, 77.   22.  Alexander Leggatt, Ben Jonson, his Vision and his Art (London: Methuen, 1981), chapter 2.   23.  John Stow, A Survey of London [1598 & 1603], ed. Henry Morley (Dover: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1994), p. 68.   24.  Stow, A Survey of London, p. 42.   25.  Wyman H. Herendeen, From Landscape to Literature: The River and the Myth of Geography (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1986), pp. 102–8.   26.  The process is an example of the commodification of space explored in Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).   27.  See Britannia, cols. 372–4, for Camden’s account of Ludgate and Newgate.   28.  Britannia, II, col. 1010.   29.  Eccles, “Brief Lives”, p. 19.  30.  Eccles, “Brief Lives”, p. 20.  31.  Eccles, “Brief Lives”, p. 20, “Sampson married Avis Carter, a second wife, on 4 September 1575”.  32.  Thomas Smith, “G. Camdeni Vita”, in Epistolae, pp. ii–iii.  33.  Stow, A Survey of London, p. 64. For the hospital’s creation and mission, see Guildhall ms, a.2.3., no. 43, “The Order of the Hospitalls of K. Henry the viiith and K. Edward the vith”, fols. b6–c8; and Guildhall, ms a.i.6., no. 67, fols. 7–8, “A Copy of the Deed of Settlement … by … Edward the sixth, on the Hospitals of Christ …”; The Christ’s Hospital Book (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), pp. 3–4, documents its incorporation on 6 June 1553, although it had been open for use for seven months; on its opening it was meant to provide for 500 poor children.  34.  Arthur F. Leach, English Schools at the Reformation, 1546–8 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1896, 1968), p. 65; Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 268–87, discusses the Edwardian educational legacy.

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Notes: Part One  35.  Leach, English Schools, pp. 1–7; for the long-range political and social agenda of the educational reformers, see also Simon, Education and Society, pp. 120, 268–87.  36.  Leach, English Schools, pp. 77–8; this sceptical view is not, however, Leach’s own.  37.  Stow, A Survey of London, pp. 301–6.  38.  The Merchant Taylors’ School, for example; see Darryll Grantley, Wit’s Pilgrimage: Drama and the Social Impact of Education in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000), p. 211, n. 7.  39.  Stow, A Survey of London, p. 141.  40.  Eccles, “Brief Lives”, p. 19.  41.  Memorabilia, p.85.  42.  The Historie of […] Princesse Elizabeth, late Queene of England (London, 1688), p. 67; with characteristic restraint he makes no mention of his own sickness in this entry.  43.  Wyman H. Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus: John Colet – Patron or Reformer?”, in Renaissance and Reformation, 12 (1988), p.170; Arthur F. Leach, Educational Charters and Documents, 598–1909 (Cambridge, 1911); F. J McDonnell, A History of St. Paul’s School (London: Chapman & Hall, 1908), pp. 33–42.  44.  From Erasmus, “Life of Colet”, cited in Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus”, p. 172.  45.  The statutes were only completed in 1518; for a review of the statutes and the school’s mission, see Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus”, pp. 172–80.  46.  For Colet’s Italian journey in 1492 and his relation to Grocyn, Linacre, and Latimer, see Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus”, pp. 166–7; see also Leland Miles, John Colet and the Platonic Tradition (La Salle: Open Court Publishing Company, 1961), pp. 26–9.  47.  Erasmus, “Life of Colet”, cited in Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus”, p. 172.  48.  Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus”, p. 177; J. H. Lupton, A Life of Dean Colet (London: George Bell & Sons, 1909), pp. 168–9.  49.  See Colet’s letter to Erasmus (Collected Works of Erasmus, no. 258) cited in Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus”, p. 184.  50.  For the school’s building size and the significance of his enrolment target of 153 students, see Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus”, p. 171.  51.  Lily’s son, for example, speaks of how the school the school was recognized for its revolutionary originality; for its ongoing reputation in the next century, see Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of ­Illinois, 1956), I, pp. 154–65, 427–31.  52.  In particular, T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), and Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton.  53.  See Baldwin, Small Latine, I, pp. 436–49, for details on the five forms of grammar and the three forms of rhetoric taught in Renaissance schools.  54.  George Lily, quoted in Samuel Knight, The Life of Dr. John Colet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1823), pp. 96–7.  55.  Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus”, pp. 177, 174–80.

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William Camden – A Life in Context  56.  Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1986), pp. 98–121; also Simon, Education and Society, p. 305, and Baldwin, Small Latine, I, pp. 380–6, and passim, for extensive discussion of the vicissitudes of teaching Greek from the early humanist period through the sixteenth century, through the time of Goodman, Grant, and Camden.  57.  Herendeen, “Coletus Redivivus”, pp. 179; for further discussion of the ideal connection between a pure style and virtuous conduct, see J. N. Rieger, “Erasmus, Colet, and the Schoolboy Jesus”, Studies in the Renaissance, 9 (1962), pp. 187–94.  58.  Stow, A Survey of London, p. 101.  59.  Baldwin, Small Latine, II, appendix ii, pp. 690–701; Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, I, p. 129.  60.  Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 442–58, for revision of primers arising from changes in the official religion; the use and revisions of the primers figures prominently in T. W. Baldwin’s study of the subject in William Shakespere’s Petty School (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1943); Leach, English Schools, documents the prescription of their use; the best analyses of the cultural and social significance of the use of the prescribed grammars and the classical curriculum are in Grantley’s and Simon’s books.  61.  Baldwin, Small Latine, II, p. 700.  62.  Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, I, p. 128.  63.  On changes to Lily’s text, see Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, I, p. 129.  64.  On libraries and curricula at St Paul’s and other schools, see Baldwin, Small Latine, I, pp.422–8.  65.  Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, pp. 102–11, 119–21.  66.  Baldwin, Small Latine, I, pp. 419–20; also Simon, Education and Society, pp. 378–9 and passim for discussion of the complex social significance of what she calls “the triumph of the vernacular”.  67.  William Camden, Remains […] Concerning Britain, ed. R. D. Dunn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 30, 29.  68.  Remains, p.31.  69.  Remains, p. 30.  70.  For Robert Dunn’s view of Camden’s historical approach to language, see Remains, pp. 371–2, 392.  71.  Use of Lily’s text was prescribed by royal acclamation by Henry, Edward, Elizabeth, and James; Mary ceased printing of the grammar, but apparently it continued to be used; see Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, I, pp. 127–34, 128.  72.  Arthur Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 447.  73.  For the foundation and unique nature of Westminster School, see WAM ms 6470, “The booke of the Erecion of the Kings newe College at Westm~” and WAM ms 25,122* and WAM ms 25,122**, Westminster Statutes, in Latin and English, and discussion of the

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Notes: Part One School and its mandate in Sargeaunt, Annals of Westminster School, esp. pp. 36–40, for the curriculum and the importance of Greek, and also Lawrence E. Tanner, Westminster School: A History (London: Country Life, 1934), p. 6. Baldwin, Small Latine, I, pp.384– 407, locates a further shift in Westminster’s growing influence and in its commitment to Greek in 1574, just prior to Camden’s appointment.  74.  History of the King’s Works, vol. 3: 1485–1660, part 1, ed. H. M. Colvin, D. R. Ransome, John Summerson (London: HMSO, 1975) and vol. 4: 1485–1660, part 2, ed. H. M. Colvin, John Summerson, Martin Biddle, J. R. Hale, Marcus Merriman (London: HMSO, 1982), provides a detailed history of the physical changes in Westminster and London under the different monarchs. This complements discussion of the political and social characteristics of Tudor and Stuart court life.  75.  For a general view of Burghley’s interest in the arts, letters, and antiquities, see B. W. Beckingsale, Burghley, Tudor Statesman, 1520–1598 (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 245–69. He and Matthew Parker joined their efforts and influence to bring the study of antiquities, British history, vernacular languages, and the collection of books and manuscripts into the service of the government and the Elizabethan settlement; as John Strype says in The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1821), the two had “a constant learned intercourse together” about the acquisition of books and manuscripts. For specific ways in which their offices overlap with these areas of study and collecting, see also R. I. Page, Matthew Parker and his Books (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1993), pp. 43–5, and Kenneth R. Bartlett and Wyman H. Herendeen, “The Library of Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham (British Library Add. ms 40,676)”, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 85 (1991), pp. 235–96.  76.  Powicke, “William Camden”, p. 67; Simon, Education and Society, p. 268, sees a comparable change in what she calls a “new generation of lay teacher by profession”.  77.  Wyman H. Herendeen, “Wanton Discourse and the Engines of Time: William Camden among Poets-Historical”, in Renaissance Rereadings: Intertext and Context, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Anne J. Cruz, Wendy A. Furman (Chicago: University Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 145–50.  78.  Baldwin, Small Latine, I, pp. 418–21.  79.  Drummond recounts Jonson’s comment that “he wrott all his [verses] first in prose, for so his master Cambden had learned him” – cited in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52), I, p. 143.  80.  Jonson, epigram 14.  81.  E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), II, p. 11.  82.  Woodward, Theatre of Death, pp. 37–60.  83.  Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 465.  84.  Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, II, p. 12, conjectures this to be John Heywood the dramatist, although it could be Jasper.  85.  For historical overviews of the changing role of drama in the schools and the different religious perspectives on theatre, as well as for the influence of school drama on the growth of the public theatre, see Grantley, Wits Pilgrimage, Harold Newcomb ­Hillebrand,

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William Camden – A Life in Context “The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History”, University Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XI, parts 1 & 2 (1926), and Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).  86.  Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, II, p. 12, n. 4.  87.  The Westminster statutes, for example, required music study for two hours a week; see Leach, Educational Charters and Documents, p. 364. Craig R. Thompson, Schools in Tudor England (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1958), p. 22, notes that “Westminster was especially famous for its plays”.  88.  See Wyman H. Herendeen, “‘Like a circle bounded in itself ’: Jonson, Camden, and the Strategies of Praise”, JMRS 11 (1981), pp. 141–3, 162–7.  89.  Memorabilia, pp. 85–6.  90.  James McConica (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3: The Collegiate University (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1986), p. 3.  91.  C. E. Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924–7), II, p. 110; Penry Williams, “Elizabethan Oxford: State, Church and University”, in History of Oxford, III, p. 423; see also C. M. J. F. Swan, “The Introduction of the Elizabethan Settlement into the universities of Oxford and Cambridge” (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1955), p. 113.  92.  Williams, “Elizabethan Oxford”, pp. 400–2, 423–31.  93.  Williams, “Elizabethan Oxford”, p. 424.  94.  Annals of Elizabeth, p. 420.  95.  Williams, “Elizabethan Oxford”, pp. 425–7; Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, II, pp. 116–18.  96.  Williams, “Elizabethan Oxford”, p. 427.  97.  Swan, “The Introduction of the Elizabethan Settlement”, p. 77.  98.  Swan, “The Introduction of the Elizabethan Settlement”, pp. 77–9.  99.  Swan, “The Introduction of the Elizabethan Settlement”, pp. 85–6. 100.  See Swan, “The Introduction of the Elizabethan Settlement”, pp. 113–16, for discussion of Leicester’s information-gathering and enforcement of the Oath of Supremacy for entering students. 101.  Swan, “The Introduction of the Elizabethan Settlement”, pp. 185–6; Beckingsale, Burghley, p. 123. 102.  Swan, “The Introduction of the Elizabethan Settlement”, pp. 185, notes that by 1569 at least 113 men had been ejected from Oxford for their suspected “Roman” tendencies, and he surmises that the number was in fact considerably higher; V. H. H. Green, Religion at Oxford and Cambridge (London: SCM Press, 1964), pp. 102–17; Williams, “Elizabethan Oxford”, pp. 422–31. 103.  McConica’s terms for those from the poorer and middle classes are “plebians” and “gentry”: History of the University of Oxford, III, p. 722. 104.  Swan, “The Introduction of the Elizabethan Settlement”, pp. 92–3.

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Notes: Part One 105.  John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (London, 1823), I, p. 207. 106.  Nichols, The Progresses … of Queen Elizabeth, I, pp. 210–14, and Wood, Fasti, II, col. 354. 107.  Swan, “The Introduction of the Elizabethan Settlement”, p. 121, provides a list of the topics. 108.  For discussion and particulars on the demographics of Oxford, see McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 722–8; class distinctions are inevitably imprecise descriptors for the period; McConica’s terms, “plebian” and “gentry” provide two rough classifications within the large group comprising the non-aristocratic student majority; Simon and Grantley also acknowledge the growing demand for more accessible education for these groups. 109.  L. H. Dudley Buxton, Strickland Gibson, Oxford Ceremony (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), pp. 129–30 for the role of the chancellor, and pp. 137–9, for that of the vicechancellor; Williams, “Elizabethan Oxford”, pp. 423–4. 110.  See Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, II, pp. 119–21. 111.  Annals of Elizabeth, p. 419. 112.  Nichols, The Progresses … of Queen Elizabeth, I, 206; Leicester and Burghley arrived on 29 August, two days before Elizabeth; Beckingsale, Burghley, p. 123. 113.  Williams, “Elizabethan Oxford”, pp. 415–17; Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, II, pp. 15–18, 435, for the transfer from Magdalen to Christ Church, and Burghley’s influence. 114.  For Magdalen’s innovative and rigorous curriculum, see McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 4–7, 55–6, 715–22; and, for music study, J. M. Fletcher, “The Faculty of Arts”, in McConica, p. 175; Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, II, pp. 119–20, notes that the new statutes of 1565 included two terms of music study. Similarly, the statutes of Westminster required students to study music. 115.  McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 4–5. 116.  Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, II, col. 340. 117.  Nichols, The Progresses … of Queen Elizabeth, I, p. 211; Cooper is at Magdalen in 1566; soon after he became dean. 118.  McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 3–6, 29–42. 119.  McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 38, 41. 120.  McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 32–3; J. E. A. Dawson, “The Foundation of Christ Church, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1546”, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 57 (1984), pp. 208–15. 121.  McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 42, 40, 56. 122.  For Wood’s record of Camden’s supplications to the university, see Athenae Oxoniensis, II, col. 340, and Fasti, cols. 185, 193, 243, 354. 123.  Richard Carew, Survey of Cornwall (1602), fol. 102v. 124.  Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, II, p. 120; McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 4–5, 699–700.

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William Camden – A Life in Context 125.  PRO, sp 46/15, fols. 212–20; McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 697–701. 126.  McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 699–700. 127.  McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, p. 701. 128.  McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, p. 713. 129.  McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, p. 717. 130.  McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 716–17; M. Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.101. 131.  McConica, History of the University of Oxford, III, pp. 717–18; Feingold, The Mathemat­ icians’ Apprenticeship, p. 101; like other cultural historians, these two sources tend to roll these individuals together chronologically, when in fact they represent different generations. 132.  Oxford University, ms University Oxford Archives, NEP / Supra, “Register of Congregation and Convocation, 1564–1582”, fol. 95v, records Camden’s supplication of June(?) 1570; fol. 93v records Leicester’s letter to Cooper, virtually coinciding with the rejection of Camden’s request; fol. 162v records his second supplication, on 8 March 1573/4, by which we know that his first had been turned down. Printed text of Camden’s petitions appear in Register of the University of Oxford, vol. 1, ed. C. W. Boase (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), p. 279, and vol. 2, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), p. 237. 133.  Epistolae, pp. 246–8. 134.  Rowse, The England of Elizabeth, p. 57. 135.  Inner Temple, ms “Registry Books”, entry for 21 February 1572: “William Camden, of Yoxall, Staffordshire and late of Lyons Inne, gen. Pleg. Robertus Nichus”. His name does not appear in the Call Books. 136.  Memorabilia, p. 85.

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part two Elizabethan Camden

chapter iv The Way to Westminster

W

On the Road

hat the twenty-year-old Camden did after relinquishing his “conversation with the muses” is not known. There is no concrete information about Camden’s “lost years” between 1571, when he left Oxford, and 1575, when he became under-master at Westminster School. What a man of his modest means and considerable talents did for four years is interesting white space on our canvas – if he did not have an important future ahead, we could accept it as the oblivion that lay ahead for most people, regardless of background. But given his personable, Protestant personality, his solid connections, and his literary predilections, it is odd that he does not take his place in history’s subordinate clauses as someone’s secretary or tutor, or enter the patronage market as a poet – courses of action taken by others of his background and talent such as Spenser, Drayton, Daniel. When we study the lives of people living on the margins of Tudor society, we are particularly aware of the peripatetic nature of their existence and the need to find some occupational branch to settle on temporarily. The term “marginal” is useful here. As “marginalium” he remains on the periphery of more fixed social groups and institutions, drawing some identification from their stabler “text” around which he moves. Camden’s case is interesting, though, because in an increasingly mobile late-Tudor society, a man with his skills, his Anglican religious leanings, and his Oxford education had the ability and contacts to make his (documentary) mark on the margins if not actually to enter the text itself. He should not have disappeared so completely. It is hard to imagine that he was so lacking ambition that he drifted for five years. He virtually slips off the page for these years, only to return to marginality, and finally be absorbed into the text itself. It is a commonplace that “history” perpetuates hegemony and excludes those individuals or groups who, for whatever reason, lack a recordable voice; it is also commonplace that writing history from the margins is, for this reason, difficult. Camden’s career reveals two things about this reality. One is the 91

William Camden – A Life in Context ease with which a person can enter and disappear from the text – the way out being rather more heavily travelled. More interesting, though, is how Camden’s importance for the future is itself the result of his place at the margin: from the tactical suppression of his own voice; from the way that his life, on the margins of institutions, is that of a ventriloquist. During these silent years, Camden found the effectively understated manner of living and working that served him throughout his life. Thus, we can learn something even from Camden’s disappearance – by knowing what he was not doing, if not what he was doing. The university was closed to him, and he seems (interestingly) to have early on ruled out the church as a career. Other likely avenues of livelihood open to him he left unexplored. We can confidently say that in 1572 he was admitted to the Inner Temple, having formerly been associated with Lyon’s Inn. There had been some doubt whether or not this Camden was the author of the ­Britannia; however the Inner Temple Registry Books for 21 February identified him as “William Camden, of Yoxsall, Staffordshire, and late of Lyons Inne, gen.”. Robert Nichus was his pledge.1 His father had property in Yoxall that he would inherit in 1576. It may be, then, that after leaving Oxford Camden spent some time in Staffordshire before entering the Inns of Court. If he flirted with the law, he seems never to have intended to wed it – he is not mentioned in the Call Books for these years and so he was not called to the bar. Nor is there any evidence that he studied at the Inns of Court; it may be the he simply took up residence there. Camden was a letter-writer by nature, and at this time, one might have expected to find a flurry of “letters of application” and recommendation typical of the period, but there is none. He obviously had a wide-ranging academic background, extensive literary, political, and religious interests and acquaintances, but there is no evidence to suggest an emerging author figure in search of a patron. His earliest publication, commendatory verses contributed to Edward Grant’s 1575 edition of Ascham’s letters, dates from after he began teaching at Westminster School. There were many kinds of writing that might generate a patron, a livelihood, or at least a paper-trail. But there is no evidence of his having attempted to initiate a literary career through his writings or through the pursuit of patronage. This, of course, may simply be the merciful way by which Time conceals our private failures. But lesser people have left a fuller trail of documents. The Dictionary of National Biography ingenuously observes that after leaving Oxford, Camden “had no regular employment, and for the next few years 92

The Way to Westminster he was free to pursue his antiquarian studies”. Such an expanse of time may be “freedom” for the wealthy, but is more likely to spell hardship and unemployment for a man of Camden’s position. Normally a person of Camden’s background must work to escape a precarious existence, to secure a position of relative stability. The marginally middle-class of the sixteenth century were not in a position to spend four or five years “finishing” their education – the idea of a “Grand Tour” did not yet exist even for the very wealthy. It is this economic reality that makes Milton’s retirement during the Horton period (1632–8) and his Italian journey