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2 Hayward and his Contemporaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2009

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Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1991

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References

6 He was back in print even before the Essex rebellion, with a lengthy devotional piece written no later than autumn, 1600. Although the first (1599) edition of The First Part is Hayward's first extant published title, the 1601 edition of The Sanctuarie of a Troubled Soul (STC 13003.5), entered to John Wolfe, 13 Nov. 1600 (and Wolfe with Burby, 19 Jan. 1601) advertised itself as ‘newly enlarged and revised,’ suggesting a previous edition, conceivably even earlier than The First Part. See Edward, Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554–1640 (London, 18751877), iii 176, 179Google Scholar, hereafter cited as Arber, and below, ‘Chronology of Hayward's Publications.’

7 PRO SP 12/278, no. 17. Specifically, Hayward testified that he began to write it about a year before its publication, ‘but had intended it a dozen years before, although he acquainted no man therewith.’

8 Scarfe, Norman, ‘Sir John Hayward, his life and disappointments,’ Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, No. 25 (1950), 79Google Scholar. No baptismal records for either place survive, nor does clear documentary evidence of the Haywards of Felixstowe, but in Walton the property of a Thomas Harward (the historian's grandfather?) was valued at £2 in 1524, and of aJohn Haywarde (his father?) at £4 in 1568.

9 Hayward's will (PCC: Skynner 67), dated 30 March 1626, is reprinted in full by J. Bruce in his edition of Hayward, 's Annals of the First Four Tears of Queen Elizabeth (Camden Series, 1840), xlixlvi.Google Scholar

10 ‘I give to the poor of Felixstowe, in the County of Suffolk, out of which parish I received the means of my education, twenty pounds to remain as a stock, and the profits thence arising to be converted to the use of the poor there for the time being.’

11 John, and Venn, J. A., Alumni Cantabrigiensis, Part I (Cambridge, 1922), ii, 342Google Scholar; and The Book of Matriculations and Degrees in the University of Cambridge from 1544 to 1659 (Cambridge, 1913), 335Google Scholar; Hayward later sought incorporation as D.C.L. at Oxford in 1616: whether he achieved it is unknown: see Wood, Anthony A., Fasti Oxoniensis; Annals of the University of Oxford, New ed., additions by Philip Bliss (1815), I, 368Google Scholar. See also Foster, Joseph, Alumni Oxoniensis: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500–1714 (Oxford, 18911892), ii, 682.Google Scholar

12 PRO SP 12/275, no. 31 (see below).

13 The Act of 1545 allowed Doctors of Civil Law, although laymen and married, to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction. About two dozen civilians were in active practice at the turn of the century, and never numbered more than 70 at a time, whilst the barristers numbered at least 400 at the same time. Besides serving in the archbishop's courts (the Courts of the Arches and of Audience, the Prerogative Court, the Court of Peculiars and the Court of the Vicar General), and as ecclesiastical officials of various kinds, civilians were judges in Admiralty and peculiar jurisdictions, and masters in courts of Requests and Chancery, and the courts of high commission. See Levack, Brian, The Civil Lawyers in England, 1603–1641 (Oxford, 1973), 749Google Scholar; also Levack, , ‘The English Civilians, 1500–1750,’ 109, 112, 119Google Scholar; and Prest, Wilfred, ‘The English Bar, 1550–1700,’ 67Google Scholar; both in Prest, W., ed., Lawyers in Early Modern Europe and America (1981)Google Scholar. See also Holdsworth, W. S., A History of English Law, 7 vols. (1924), i, 593.Google Scholar

14 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1351; Whitgift Register ii, fol. 132.

15 In BL MS Lansdowne 418 (402) (‘Dr. Hayward touching remaunding of prisoners’) we see a remarkable illustration of the civilian's respect for the force of historical authority in legal pleadings. Here Hayward, in an opinion drafted for a case in admiralty (8 July 1618), reaches for instructive principle back to the Samnites, the Lacedaemonians, the Israelites and King Herod.

16 Levack, , Civil Lawyers, 39.Google Scholar

17 The jurisdictions in which the civilians practised or held official posts — chancery, admiralty, the ecclesiastical courts — handled an enormous portion of the capital's legal work. Under More (C 1529–32) Chancery heard about 500 cases. Under the chancellors (or Lords Keeper) of James I, the same tribunal heard over 32,220 cases, an average of nearly 1500 per year (Holdsworth, i, 409). The adjudication and administration of matters pertaining to wills, family law and other proceedings depending for legitimacy upon the crown prerogative — like the peculiars and the courts of High Commission — similarly belonged almost exclusively to the civilians. The church courts were themselves far-reaching, handling cases of ecclesiastical property as well as persons. This great body of legal activity, which until the time of Elizabeth's grandfather and the last of the churchmen-chancellors had been guided by canon law and chancery procedures, was by now nominally secularized, but Henry VIII's statute dismantling the canon law in England had been quickly recognized as unfeasible, and its chief effect was a charge to the universities to replace the training of ‘canon’ lawyers with the training of ‘civil’ lawyers.

18 The phrase is Levack's, in Civil Lawyers, 7Google Scholar; ‘English Civilians’, 117.

19 Fussner, F. Smith, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 1580–1640 (1962), 118Google Scholar, and esp. Ch. 5.

20 STC 13003.5.

21 Arber, , iii, 176, 179.Google Scholar

22 The title-page of the (first extant) 1601 edition proclaims itself an enlarged and emended edition, and another edition in 1602 identifies itself as ‘a third time enlarged;’ this suggests a lost first edition, from 1600, or earlier.

23 Wood, , Fasti, I, 368.Google Scholar

24 PRO £407/56, pt. 2, fols. 93–98 (details below).

25 Bodl. MS Smith, 70, fols. 23–5.

26 7 Apr. 1603; Arber, iii, 94.

27 At the new king's accession, Catholic apologists disputed the justification of the new king's authority, whilst Puritans found fresh opportunity to dispute royal supremacy and episcopal jurisdiction in religious matters. Levack (Civil Lawyers, 88–9Google Scholar) notes that several civilians, including Hayward, ‘provided James with considerable intellectual assistance in his attempt to counter these claims.’ See also Mosse, G. L., ‘The Influence of Jean Bodin's République on English Historical Thought,’ Medievalia et Humanistica, V (1948), 7383Google Scholar, esp. 80.

28 This may have been a disingenuous undertaking: by rebutting ‘Doleman,’ Hayward put some distance between himself and Essex, to whom the Conference on Succession had been dedicated. On the other hand, the Essex connection would not, on the whole, have been entirely objectionable to James. Not incidentally, its dedication (to James) enabled Hayward to make, with benefit of hindsight, an exculpating claim about the politics of The First Part: ‘I here present unto your majesty this defence, both of the present authority of princes, and of succession according to proximity of blood: wherein is maintainted that the people have no lawful power to remove the one or repel the other: in which two points I have also heretofore declared my opinion, by publishing the tragical events which ensued the deposition of King Richard and usurpation of King Henry the Fourth. Both these labours were undertaken with particular respect to your majesty's just title of succession in this realm.’ Campbell, Lily B., Shakespeare's ‘Histories,’ Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, 1947), 186Google Scholar, for comment upon Hayward's claim that both An Answer and The First Part were intended as rejoinders to Parson's assertion that Richard II's deposition offered useful guidance in choosing Elizabeth's successor.

29 This was republished in 1624 as Of Supremacie in Affaires of Religion. Its sub-title summarizes accurately the book's argument: ‘Manifesting that this power is a right of regalitie, inseparably annexed to the soveraignty of every state: and that it is a thing both extreamely dangerous, and contrarie to the use of all auncient empires and commonwealths, to acknowledge the same in a forraigne prince.’

30 Levack, , Civil Lawyers, 86117Google Scholar; Levy, F. J., Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967), 263.Google Scholar

31 Faulkner, Thomas, An Historical and Topographical Description of Chelsea and its Environs, (2 vols., Chelsea, 1829), ii, 218–34Google Scholar. Faulkner describes the difficulties the college encountered: one of eight planned wings was actually built, and a programme carried out for several years, but in the absence of adequate funding it could not survive King Charles's indifference.

32 PRO HCA 1/32/1, fols. 38,55; HCA 24/73, fols.10, 110, 262, 266.

33 PRO DEL 5/5–6; DEL 8/70, part ii.

34 PRO C. 181/2, fols. 101v, 194, 213, 214, 219v, 220.

35 Al though strictly speaking not Crown appointments, each of his assignments represented advancement within the patronage system governing nomination and confirmation of officials in these courts, and indicates a degree of security within the central government's judicial civil service. Such appointments were commonly obtained — and maintained — upon substantial payment to the Crown official in whose gift they lay: Hayward's very ability to capitalize his advancement argues a degree of success. Moreover, the readiness of candidates to invest in such positions reveals something of their value. Officers like Hayward were paid in fees and gratuities, not salaries or wages, and the very volume of court business whose execution they supervised ensured a rather good living for most civilians who secured such posts.

36 Holdsworth, , i, 417Google Scholar; Foss, Edward, The Judges of England (1857), 89.Google Scholar

37 Aylmer, G. E., The King's Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625–1642 (London, 1961), 238.Google Scholar

38 His name appears among investors with ‘several summes adventured’ in certain of the speculative ventures in the New World. Although the evidence is scattered, he seems to have backed both the Bermuda and Virginia Companies (1615, 1618), and he is very likely the ‘Maister John Hayward’ entered for the latter company as late as 1620. Kingsbury, Susan M., The Records of the Virginia Company of London, (4 vols., Washington, 19061935), iii, 84, 327Google Scholar; iv, 306, 365. Rabb, Theodore K., Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 233–410.

39 Lambeth Palace Library, Register of Doctors' Commons, fols. 47v, 108; Coote, C., Sketches of the Lives and Characters of Eminent Civilians, etc. … to the Close of the Year 1803 (1804), 73–4Google Scholar; Foster, Joseph, The Register of Admissions to Gray's Inn, 1521–1889 (1889), 154.Google Scholar

40 Corder, Joan, A Dictionary of Suffolk Arms (Suffolk Records Society, vii, 1965), 295.Google Scholar

41 DNB; Venn, , ii, 342Google Scholar; Coote, , 73Google Scholar; Foster, , Alum. Ox., ii, 682.Google Scholar

42 Toward the end of his life, Hayward's posts as Master and Commissioner brought him nearer to centre stage as early scenes of the estrangement between parliament and crown were acted out. One victim of parliamentary displeasure thinly disguised as judicial reform was Chancellor Bacon, charged with financially exploiting his office, and particularly its fee and gratuity system. He and civilian officials like Hayward were said to have evaded recent statutory efforts to limit the fee abuse in Chancery and other prerogative courts. As part of this complicated business a charge was brought in the Parliament of 1621 that ‘Sir John Bennet, as Judge of the Prerogative, of Delegates, as Chancellor to the Queen, as Master of Chancery and as High Commissioner’ had ‘deeply offended’ by collecting extortionate fees. Hayward was named, on 19 April, as the deputy who took £40 in a probate case for delivery to Bennett. See Notestein, W., Reif, F. H., and Simpson, H. (eds.), Commons Debates, 1621 (New Haven, 1935) 5:337–8Google Scholar, and Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons in 1620 and 1621, Collected by a Member of that House (Oxford, 1766), 279–80, 304Google Scholar. Four days later in the Commons were singled out ‘the Masters in Chancery charged with taking fees contrary to the Statute: Sir John Bird, Sir Edward Thelwel, Sir John Hayward and James Hussey.’(Notestein, 6:92) The target was Bacon, not the Masters, and his fall left his Masters in place. Five years later another Commons, more jealous than its predecessor of its prerogatives, reacted fiercely against an action in which the High Commission (of which Hayward was by now a member) excommunicated and imprisoned a sitting member, Sir Robert Howard, despite his claim of parliamentary privilege. On 3 May 1626, Hayward was grilled about his role in the affair: ‘Sir Jo. Hayward called in about Sir Ro. Howard his Business, and interrogated, by Mr. Speaker, divers questions: Answereth, he was not present, when Sir Ro. Howard was committed close Prisoner. That he was present at the Excommunication: he saw Sir Ro. Howard tender a Paper to the Lord Keeper, but heard no Word of Privilege of Parliament spoken of…’ (Journal of the House of Commons, i, 854Google Scholar; also 858, 861, 869, 871.) As before, Hayward and his colleagues seem not to have been penalized. See also Bulstrode Whitelock's Journal of the Parliament of 1626 (in CUL Compiled Parliamentary Journals, Dd 12. 20–2.), fols. 175V, 176.

43 Holdsworth, , v, 257–61 and 423–4.Google Scholar

44 Archaeologia, i (1770), ‘Introduction: containing an historical account of the origin and establishment of the Society of Antiquaries.’ xvxxiGoogle Scholar. (The petition, possibly by Henry Ferrars, is unsigned.) See also Portal, Ethel M., ‘The Academy Roial of King James I,’ Proceedings of the British Academy, 1915–16, 189208Google Scholar. She cites Edmund Bolton's proposed membership list of ‘84 essential members,’ which does not include Hayward, and in which many of Bolton's Catholic associates have displaced several earlier nominees. See also BL Harl MS 5177 (1591?), fol. 171, which offers a similar list, including a ‘Dr. of Lawes’ who might be Hayward.

45 BL Additional MS 22587, fols. 33–6. This MS, probably an abstract of such a session, is dated retrospectively (Hayward was neither knight nor Master until much later). Tate was well known as a learned barrister and member of Middle Temple. Until Elizabeth's reign the Masters in Chancery had enjoyed an unquestioned social ascendancy over the Serjeants-at-law, the officers of the Court of Common Pleas whose position was most analogous to the Masters' own. Their contest for precedence was an early emblem of a rivalry that would flare into open resentment under Egerton and Coke, and it reflected the contending constitutional assumptions of both parties about Crown prerogative and common law.

46 In A Reporte of a Discourse concerning Supreme Power in Religion (1606; see above). In this ‘symposium’ piece, dinner-table conversation initiates Hayward's discourse, which becomes a carefully-argued, citation-laden brief supporting supremacy in religion as a point of regality. Mathew, himself a notable civilian, was Bishop of Durham and eventually Archbishop of York, while several dinner guests sound like thoroughly royalist Protestants.

47 Wheare, Degory, The Method and Order of Reading Both Civil and Ecclesiastical Histories … etc. (1685), 171Google Scholar. Originally published as De Rotione et Methodo Legendi Historias (1623).Google Scholar

48 BL MS Stowe 76, fols. 257–7b.

49 Hayward records (in the Dedication of The Lives of the III Normans, Kings of England, 1613Google Scholar) that the prince asked if he ‘had wrote any part of our English history.’ Hayward told him of his work on the III Normans, but expressed a preference for writing upon contemporary matters. The prince desired to see both sorts, and Hayward readied for his inspection both the III Normans and ‘certain yeares of Queene Elizabeth's reigne’ (edited for the Camden Society in 1840 by J. Bruce as Annals of Elizabeth). ‘At his return from the progress to his house at St. James, these pieces were delivered unto him; which he did not only courteously, but joyfuly accept: and, because this [III Normans] seemed a perfect work, he expressed a desire that it should be published. Not long after he died; and with him died both my endeavours and my hopes.’ One of ‘these pieces’ may have been the large-copy reprint of The First Part (see Prof. Jackson's remarks, below, in ‘Bibliographical History’).

50 SirStrong, Roy, Henry, Prince of Wales, and England's Lost Renaissance (1986)Google Scholar. Associates of Essex in Henry's circle included the Earl of Southampton, Thomas Chaloner, Walter Ralegh, Lionel Sharp, Inigo Jones and Francis Bacon; the prince also encouraged the poets Joseph Hall, Sir Arthur Gorges, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, George Chapman (who made his translation of Homer at Henry's urging) and Sir William Alexander.

51 James, Mervyn, ‘At a crossroads of the political culture: the Essex Revolt, 1601,’ in Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1986), 416–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. James argues that the Essex revolt, ‘like that of Hayward's Henry of Lancaster, had honour as its constitutive principle’ (423). He analyses ‘the secular, politic and Tacitean formulation of these attitudes undertaken by the intellectuals in the ambience of Essex House, of whose work Hayward's First Part was an outstanding instance’ (437). See also his ‘English politics and the concept of honour, 1485–1642’, ibid. 308–415.

52 Sharpe, Kevin, ‘The Earl of Arundel, his circle and the opposition to the Duke of Buckingham,’ in Sharpe, K., ed., Faction and Parliament: Essays in Early Stuart History (Oxford, 1978).Google Scholar

53 Most of Cotton's work in the 1620s resulted from his connections with other of Arundel's friends and household. Sharpe, Kevin, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1979), 208–9.Google Scholar

54 It is in the context of discussing Meyrick's seditious intent in reviving the Richard play that Camden mentions Hayward's book: ‘Liberque paullo ante eodem argumento ab Haywardo erudito viro editas, & Essexio dicatus, eandem judicii aleam subiit, quasi in documentant & incitamentum Reginam solio deturbandam scriptus; infelici auctoris fato, qui diturno luit intempestivam editionem, & haec verbula in Praefatione ad Essexium, Tu magnus spe, majar futuri temporis exspectatione’ In Hearne, Thomas, ed., Annalium Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum Regnante Elizabetha (3 vols., 1717), 867–8.Google Scholar

55 BL MS Cotton Julius C III, f. 60: ‘Good Sir Cotton: Mr. Bill sent to me 2 Copies Rexs Normannicarum, but without Titles, Praefaces, or Lettre. I doubt not but they were sent by Mr. Peiresc, or by Chesne, to you and me, and therefore have sent you one of them. I hope I shall not be seen in the matter of Arundell. Tuus tuo merito, Guil. Camdenus.’ This is undated, but Hayward's book was first published in 1613. Bill, printer to the king, would become Hayward's publisher during the 1620s, and his mortgagee as well. Camden's somewhat cryptic remark about ‘the matter of Arundell’ may refer to the ancestral research commissioned by the Earl Marshal from Cotton and Hay ward (below).

56 Arundel (from Padua, 29 August 1613): ‘Sir Robert Cotton, I must give you thankes (for the care you please to take nowe) double, because it is for an absent frend, which is not generall in these our times. For Mr. Doctor Haywardes opinnion, to weave in our auncestors lives into the story of the kinges, I should concurre with him, if it were a thinge to be published. But you may lette him knowe that I only intend it as a private memory to befit my house.… I beseech you the story may goe on, I will sticke no chardge that is fitt’ (BL MS Cotton Julius C III, f. 204). And two weeks later, from Venice, another letter to Cotton: ‘I beseech you, let the story of my ancestors go on, as I intended, by itself, because (as I wrote unto you) it shall never be published’ (ibid, f. 205). Bodl. MS Smith 71, ff. 95, 125.

57 The will mentions holdings near Wood Green and at Felixstowe, and houses and lands in Kentish Town worth £1300 mortgaged to him by the king's printer, John Bill, and substantial cash bequests.

58 The elegant scale of Hayward's house is evident not only from area plans, but from its division at his death into three houses, and again into five by 1739. In the late 16th century it brought the highest rental of all the glebe houses. Hayward's rent is not recorded, but before 1622 it brought £4 p.a., and upon expiration of his lease in 1662 it was let again at £16 p.a. Webb, E. A., The Records of St. Bartholomew's Priory and of the Church and Parish of St. Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield. (2 vols., Oxford, 1921), ii, 224, 274.Google Scholar

59 It had been a fashionable address for many years, during which period Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Thomas Neale, Sir Henry Carey, Sir Roger Manwood and Sir Thomas Walsingham had maintained their residences there. The nearby Charterhouse had become, after the dissolution, the residence of the Duke of Norfolk; Lord Rich, Chancellor under Edward VI, had lived near Hayward's house. The district, as Bruce points out (p. xxxiv), was ‘a situation well suited to the practice of [Hayward's] profession, and containing, at that time, many excellent family mansions.’ The site of Hayward's home, later nos. 92 and 93 Bartholomew Close, was damaged by German bombs in both wars. See Webb, ii, 222, 224, 274–5.