Archives, ‘madness’ and emotion

How do you solve a problem like Lansdowne 99? Or, why does such an extraordinary collection of material survive, and what is the historian to make of it?Footnote ¹⁴ Since the onset of the ‘archival turn’ historians increasingly accept the importance of understanding the ways in which cultures and practices of documentary selection, rejection, storage, organisation, curation and ownership have shaped our sources.Footnote ¹⁵ The Burghley Papers are composed of 122 folio volumes of state papers and other miscellaneous documents, largely from the reign of Elizabeth I.Footnote ¹⁶ The collection descended through the family of Sir Michael Hickes, one of Lord Burghley’s two principal secretaries between 1580 and 1598, ending up in the possession of the antiquarian John Strype in 1682.Footnote ¹⁷ It remained in Strype’s possession until his death in 1737, passing via the antiquary James West to Lord Shelburne, first Marquis of Lansdowne, and finally to the British Museum. The papers were catalogued and bound in the early nineteenth century, forming the first portion of the much larger collection of Lansdowne’s manuscripts.Footnote ¹⁸ The remainder of William and Robert Cecil’s documents, originally housed across Whitehall, Burghley House and Salisbury House, were requisitioned by warrant and dispersed between the State Paper Office and Hatfield House.Footnote ¹⁹

The selection principles that determined which papers were retained by Hickes are uncertain, although Alan Smith has noted that Hickes was largely responsible for matters concerning patronage.Footnote ²⁰ The Burghley Papers have the following composition. Volume 1 contains medieval patents, grants, warrants and charters.Footnote ²¹ Volumes 2–87 are chronologically organised and contain correspondence addressed to Burghley interspersed with state papers and other documents. While they might loosely be described as concerning ‘patronage’, they also relate more widely to Church and university affairs (Burghley was Chancellor of Cambridge from 1559 to 1598), the courts, trade and foreign affairs, and politics and religion in the broadest senses.Footnote ²² Volumes 88–93 relate to the affairs of Hickes and matters after the death of Burghley.Footnote ²³ Following that, the archive takes on a different character. Volumes 94–104 contain assorted dated documents, ranging (for the most part) across the later sixteenth century.Footnote ²⁴ They are not precisely thematic, but they do contain themed clusters of material: for example, volume 96 contains letters to and from Catholic political and religious leaders; volume 98 contains documents relating to Protestant nations; and volume 100 contains documents pertaining to overseas trade. The remaining volumes (105–22) are collections of undated miscellaneous papers, again with some thematic clustering (volume 111 contains papers relating to Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the Channel Islands; volume 113 contains correspondence with China and Africa, etc.).Footnote ²⁵ Volume 117 belonged to Sir Francis Walsingham; volume 118 was Burghley’s private memorandum book; and volumes 115, 116 and 119 were miscellanies ‘of Mr Strype’s collection’.

Lansdowne 99 therefore sits among the volumes inhabited by thematic clusters of dated documents. It is a folio volume approximately 35 cm × 25 cm, faced in pale tan cloth-covered boards with dark brown half-Morocco trim and gold embossed lettering, and contains 109 numbered catalogue entries.Footnote ²⁶ Most (ninety-eight) are documents written predominantly in English; the other eleven are mainly works of poetry in Latin, Italian and French. Crucially for the present article, of the ninety-eight English-language documents, the catalogue describes the author or contents of twenty-five using the word ‘mad’ or a synonym (I use ‘mad’ here as a temporary shorthand, although I discuss terminology in more detail below); this is the largest thematic category. The second-largest thematic group is composed of ‘requests’ of one sort or another (twenty-one), followed by material relating to feuds (fifteen), and smaller clusters of material concerning forgery (eight), patronage (eight), trade (three), etc. Aside from the descriptions in the printed catalogue, there are three sets of annotations on the documents themselves: contemporary Elizabethan annotations; annotations in a seventeenth-century hand identified by Alexandra Walsham and Cecile Zinberg as belonging to the antiquarian John Strype; and nineteenth-century pencil markings made by the British Museum archivist.Footnote ²⁷

Table 1 summarises the descriptions of and annotations on the ninety-eight English Language documents in Lansdowne 99. Almost 80 per cent have sixteenth-century annotations, and almost 25 per cent of these describe the author or contents as ‘mad’. Just over 20 per cent of the documents are annotated by Strype, and 75 per cent of these describe the author or contents as ‘mad’. Strype’s judgements do not always overlap with (or echo) those of Burghley and his secretariat. Only seven letters are labelled ‘mad’ by both Strype and Burghley’s secretaries: an additional twelve are designated as such by Burghley’s secretariat, and a further nine by Strype, making twenty-eight documents altogether. The nineteenth-century catalogue identifies twenty-five letters as ‘mad’, and these judgements follow comments by Strype and/or the secretaries in most but not all instances.Footnote ²⁸ In total, of the ninety-eight English Language letters in Lansdowne 99, the authors or contents of thirty-one are identified as ‘mad’ by one or more of Burghley’s secretaries, Strype, or the nineteenth-century catalogue.

Table 1.

Descriptions of 98 English Language documents in BL MS Lansdowne 99

Lansdowne 99 has long been recognised as an unusual collection of material. Stephen Clucas described it as ‘a collection of Burghley’s papers which are effectively labelled “file under L for Lunatic”’, while Kathryn Hodgkin referred to them as “‘letters of several madmen”’ and Alexandra Walsham characterised them as ‘a remarkable collection of prophetic letters’, noting ‘whether a contemporary or some later individual grouped them together in this volume remains unclear’.Footnote ²⁹ While in general, as C. S. Knighton notes, ‘a catalogue of manuscripts deals with documents as they happen to be arranged’, the grouping of the Lansdowne manuscripts may have taken place according to different principles. The cataloguing of the Burghley papers was carried out by the British Museum’s troubled Keeper of the Manuscripts from 1807 to 1811, Francis Douce, in all likelihood according to the principles followed by his predecessor, Robert Nares. In the front matter to his catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts, Nares explained that he had been working under a Royal Commission from George III to ‘“methodise, regulate, and digest the records, rolls, instruments, books and papers, in any of Our public offices and repositories”’.Footnote ³⁰ The instruction to ‘methodise, regulate, and digest’ may well have resulted in a higher degree of archival intervention in the cataloguing of Lansdowne 99 than might otherwise be expected.Footnote ³¹ It is interesting to note that of twenty-six occurrences of the words ‘frantic’, ‘mad’, ‘distracted’, ‘crazy’, ‘deranged’, ‘insane’ and ‘madmen’ across the entirety of the catalogue of the Lansdowne Manuscripts, twenty (80 per cent) of the documents are in Lansdowne 99, with the remaining six documents scattered across five other volumes. This is a further strong indication that the material in Lansdowne 99 was deliberately grouped together by theme.

There are other clues which suggest that Douce may have significantly influenced the formation of the archive as we view it today. When the Leeds antiquarian Ralph Thoresby visited John Strype at his home in Low Leyton in 1709, he described seeing Strype’s ‘noble collection of original letters’.Footnote ³² Strype periodically sent documents to Thoresby to help build up his collection of sixteenth-century autographs, and he referred to his published work as ‘a repository for many choice monuments of antiquity; which otherwise, being in loose papers and private studies, might in time be utterly extinguished and irrecoverably lost’.Footnote ³³ Whilst in Strype’s possession the Burghley papers were a loose collection of working letters and documents, and only Lansdowne MS volumes 115, 116 and 119 are specifically recorded as miscellanies ‘of Mr Strype’s collection’.Footnote ³⁴ Somebody else seems to have made the decision to group and bind the material labelled ‘mad’ by Burghley’s secretariat with the material labelled ‘mad’ by Strype himself.

There is a third collection of material within Lansdowne 99 which suggests that this grouping ultimately took place during the nineteenth-century cataloguing of the archive: a sequence of twenty-six documents (comprising most of Lansdowne 58–83) with annotations of the word ‘silly’, probably in the sense of ‘foolish’ or ‘ridiculous’, in pencil by a nineteenth-century hand.Footnote ³⁵ The pencil foliation of Lansdowne 99 also suggests ongoing reordering and reorganisation of the documents to reflect the inclusion of late additions; towards the end of the volume, for example, a bold folio number 270 overwrites a faded 260 below a faded and struck-through 261 (Figure 1).Footnote ³⁶

Figure 1.

Evolving foliation in BL MS Lansdowne 99. From the British Library Collection: BL MS Lansdowne 99, fo. 270.

This grouping of thematically related material, labelled ‘mad’ and ‘silly’ at three different times, taken together with the pencil annotations and the revisions of foliation, suggests that Douce may have taken his instruction to ‘methodise, regulate, and digest’ the Burghley papers to heart, perhaps in ways that reflected his own scholarly desire ‘to illustrate the manners, customs, and beliefs … of the common people’ as well as his avowed ‘liking for the odd, the sardonic, and the macabre’.Footnote ³⁷

The exact process by which letters sent to the ruling authorities of Elizabethan England came to be ordered, preserved and catalogued in the modern archive remains foggy in some details. But as a result of these processes a collection of disparate material was formed into a corpus through the value-judgements of three sets of individuals: a sixteenth-century secretariat summarising and organising working documents for their master; a seventeenth-century antiquarian, responding to earlier assessments and contributing more of his own; and a nineteenth-century archivist with an interest in ‘anachronisms and absurdities’ and a commission to ‘methodise, regulate and digest’ the papers under his authority. It seems likely that Douce brought together the material annotated by the secretaries and by Strype with his own identification of ‘silly’ documents as one of the informal thematic miscellanies of dated material in Lansdowne MS vols 94–104. The result is a unique body of sources which presents the historian with substantial ethical and methodological challenges, but which I argue constitutes a significant corpus of material for revealing the experience and expression of ‘distress’ in Elizabethan England.Footnote ³⁸

In discussing the formation of the archive I have used the terminology of those describing its authors and contents as ‘mad’ as a temporary shorthand. But to what extent is it accurate, ethical or even helpful to characterise these authors as ‘mad’ when the only evidence of their ‘madness’ is a series of judgements made about the contents of their letters by external observers? There is a large and varied literature on early modern ‘madness’, which is undoubtedly a legitimate and revealing subject for historical investigation.Footnote ³⁹ In this article, however, I propose taking a different approach to the letters of Lansdowne 99, sidestepping problematic and anachronistic questions of medical classification and diagnosis, and analysing them through the lens of the history of emotions. This approach has the added advantage of being consonant with both modern and early modern understandings of the complex and porous relationships between emotion and mental illness.Footnote ⁴⁰ Robert Burton, for example, in his compendious Anatomy of Melancholy, distinguished between melancholy proper and other diseases of the head and mind (including madness), but explained that ancient authorities were not unanimous on this point, and that functionally speaking madness and melancholy could be indistinguishable from one another.Footnote ⁴¹ Taking many of their cues from Burton, modern historians stress the humoral basis of early modern theories of emotion, and the widespread belief that mental states were shaped by the interaction and interrelation between physical and mental health.Footnote ⁴² Modern practitioners of ‘neurohistory’, in ways which recall pre-Cartesian models, similarly collapse the analytical boundaries between histories of emotion, mind, body and environment.Footnote ⁴³

Attempting to determine whether or not the authors of Lansdowne 99 were ‘really mad’ (and if so, the cause or nature of that ‘madness’) is therefore not the most helpful way to approach these letters. The history of the archive suggests that at least three sets of observers felt that the contents of the letters, or their authors, exhibited beliefs or behaviours extreme enough to warrant accusations of ‘madness’. Indeed, in order to convey a flavour of these historical judgements, and a sense of the formation and character of the archive, I occasionally quote their descriptors in the following discussion. However, attempting to ‘diagnose’ the Lansdowne 99 authors, according either to modern or early modern understandings of mental illness, would for the reasons given above be methodologically and ethically problematic.Footnote ⁴⁴ Focusing on the emotional content of the letters of Lansdowne 99 allows us to step outside of the usual contexts of histories of ‘madness’ (medical, clinical or institutional settings) to take a wider look at the phenomenon of emotional distress.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary offers a helpful definition of distress, one which was in use in early modern England, as ‘the sore pressure or strain of adversity, trouble, sickness, pain, or sorrow; anguish or affliction affecting the body, spirit, or community’.Footnote ⁴⁶ This emphasis on feeling and experience rather than pathology is a fruitful one, allowing the researcher to adopt a stance of conceptual constructive ambiguity. Such a stance facilitates analysis by allowing the researcher to simultaneously acknowledge and explore distress whilst refraining from attempting to pathologise it.

‘Distress’ was ubiquitous in late-sixteenth-century England. As a crude but indicative metric, more than 1,350 works published between 1560 and 1600 referenced ‘distress’ according to the EEBO/TCP database of early modern English texts.Footnote ⁴⁷ ‘Distress’ could result from or find expression in physical, spiritual, or psychological circumstances. In the Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton discussed the distress of ‘miserable wretches’ brought to penury through addiction to gaming and other pleasures, as well as the potential for ‘scurrile jests, flouts, and Sarcasmes’ to cause emotional harm to people in distress, and the potential of philosophy to ‘settle a distressed mind’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Early modern authors also wrote extensively about the spiritual causes of and remedies for distress. In his exposition of the Apostle’s Creed, the Calvinist divine William Perkins explained that ‘when any man is in distresse, he should have recourse to the right meanes of comfort, namely the word & sacraments, & there he shall find the assistance of the holy ghost’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The physician Thomas Twyne, in his garlande of godly flowers, provided a model prayer for the godly, to ‘looke down into the bottome and deapth of my conscience, and consider the perpetual afflictions which daily I sustayne therin, to the daungerous distresse, & wonderful woundyng of the same’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nine of the BL Lansdowne MS 99 authors self-identified as ‘distressed’ in relation to their circumstances: it is not a large interpretative leap to take the broader corpus of letters as providing significant evidence not of ‘madness’, but rather of profound distress.Footnote ⁵¹

These letters offer a fresh, distinctive and immediate perspective on how those in distress saw the world, anchored themselves within it, and mobilised appeals for aid in relation to a series of reservoirs of social and cultural meaning. James Daybell and Andrew Gordan have cautioned that early modern letters are ‘a highly self-reflexive form in which we find not merely textual instances of the construction of the self, but an acute sensitivity to the cultures and practices of letter writing and a self-conscious creativity in the manipulation of these epistolary tools’.Footnote ⁵² But if letters are not simply windows into men’s (or women’s) souls, neither are they entirely unhelpful in revealing past emotion. Neurohistory offers a potentially helpful way to help square the circle: if all human feeling is mediated through culture, then the quest to separate out ‘authentic experience’ from ‘conventional formulae’ is doomed from the outset, as the former cannot exist independently of, but is at least partly created through, the latter.Footnote ⁵³ Of further relevance is the suggestion by Peter Goldie that humans make sense of their lives through ‘narrative thinking’, by which events are shaped and organised, giving coherence, structure and meaning to the content which is being narrated.Footnote ⁵⁴ All narratives contain fictionalising tendencies, and as such present a means to understand the ways in which people encounter and make sense of experience.Footnote ⁵⁵In the same vein, Natalie Zemon Davis has observed that ‘fiction’ can be taken to mean the ways in which historical subjects crafted narratives.Footnote ⁵⁶ And as Linda Pollock has suggested, ‘private documents’ allow historians ‘to investigate the lived experience of emotions, as well as the intersection between individual choice and cultural scripts’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Although literary constructions written with a specific audience in mind, letters are imbued with their authors’ sense of structure, coherence, meaning and emotional import. Despite their difficulties, they remain vital evidence of their authors’ experience of emotion, and the ways in which those experiences were informed by wider webs of language, culture and belief.

In discussing the authors and letters of BL Lansdowne MS 99, I illuminate commonalities in emotional expression across the corpus as a whole while remaining sensitive to the nuances of individual subjectivities.Footnote ⁵⁸ Carolyn James has noted that humble people’s petitions to wealthy patrons ‘constitute an important, if underutilised, resource for understanding how the poor and powerless represented themselves and sought to elicit sympathy from those who could help them’, and I use distress as a critical prism, refracting the perception, experience, construction and expression of emotion in extremis for a diverse group of Elizabethan subjects.Footnote ⁵⁹ In what remains I demonstrate that several recurring themes predominate in such cases, reinforcing our understanding of the extent to which distress was socially, culturally and historically constructed. Understanding their distress brings us to a richer understanding of the core anxieties which suffused Elizabethans’ attitudes to the world and their place within it. Footnote ⁶⁰

Experiencing and expressing distress

When Roger Crimble, with whom this article began, wrote to Queen Elizabeth I he called on her for aid, confident that she would take ‘pitie of my poore estate’ and ‘give me those things that are needfull’.Footnote ⁶¹ When Austin Metcalf wrote to Lord Burghley in 1590, he asked him to move the queen to give him money ‘towards meat drinck Clothinge … in the waie of pittie’.Footnote ⁶² The offer of William Hobby, ‘a pore subjecte of the Quenes’, to remove ‘a dyvell and his Dame’ from Skenfrith castle was on the condition that he would be allowed to keep the ‘hogshedd of gold’ and ‘hogshedd of sylver’ on which they sat; or else ‘then I will look for some other thinge at your handes’.Footnote ⁶³ In keeping with Hickes’ responsibility for patronage, almost all of the letters in Lansdowne 99 adopt a petitioning tone, requesting material aid, financial help, or making some other kind of bargain or demand.Footnote ⁶⁴ Petitioning was endemic in early modern England, and the Crown was a popular target for petitioners across the period.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the emotional extremity of their requests, language and framing, the distressed authors of Lansdowne 99 occasionally went beyond the standard rhetorical and generic expectations of petitioning, but generally in degree rather than kind. In some ways they were akin to the early seventeenth-century case, explored by David Cressy, of Lucy Martin. Martin, who wrapped a letter around a stone and threw it at Charles I in 1626, was subsequently interrogated, and for Cressy her responses revealed both ‘the national mission of a prophetess and the personal needs of a deeply disturbed woman’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Like Martin, the Lansdowne authors deserve ‘attention, not just as an arresting anecdote, but as a point of entry for exploring the social and religious complexities’ of the late-Tudor era.

The Lansdowne letters show us that, unsurprisingly, one of the most common features of distress in Elizabethan England was that individuals felt weak and powerless. Emphasising their helplessness also functioned as a rhetorical strategy to improve their chances of receiving aid. Susan Broomhall has described a rhetoric of ‘persuasive poverty’ in women’s pauper letters in sixteenth-century Tours, while Carolyn James and Jessica O’Leary have observed that early modern letter-writing manuals encouraged authors ‘to tug at the heart, or the purse strings’, in order to elicit the desired response.Footnote ⁶⁷ Miles Fry, judged by Strype to be ‘distempred in his wytts’, explained to Burghley that he was ‘in great extremity and redi to perish for lak of helpe’, threatening ‘yf you do not presentli helpe me … I shal end my life’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In a letter of 1588, William Darbishere wrote to Cecil that he had lived a loyal and honourable life, which through no fault of his own ‘hath brought me to some disgrace with no lesse lost of my living or maintenance’. Darbishere’s father had died in debt, and in return for aid he made Cecil an unusual offer: his ‘dewtifull service’ as ‘your honors secretery for the keeping of lies or writings not fit to be known by any others’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Robert Bushel, again labelled ‘distempered’ by Strype, approached Burghley in 1596, ostensibly to complain about ‘the price of corn & all other vetles’, claiming that god had ‘brought me out of such dangirs as all thee world could not do’, but bemoaning that he was ‘kept from all outward means’ and was ‘com for the savgard of my life & for them which god hath sent me as my wife & vij christians’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Such pleas emphasise that individual authors’ distress almost inevitably arose from straitened circumstances: often marginalised and desperate, they lacked the potential for redress through any other systems of support.

The Lansdowne 99 letters share some similarities with the later genre of ‘pauper letters’ examined by historians of modern Britain.Footnote ⁷¹ Individuals used such letters to prove and negotiate their eligibility for poor relief, demonstrating a sense of entitlement and a shared belief across the social spectrum that the wealthy were obliged to provide for those who were deserving and in need.Footnote ⁷² Scholarship emphasises that these letters were strategic documents as well as ‘in essence truthful scripts of experience’, ‘simultaneously documents of record, negotiation, rhetoric and strategy’.Footnote ⁷³ In her powerful critique of the limits of discourse analysis, Lyndal Roper has argued that we need to be alert to the ways in which historical subjects drew on familiar elements of discourse ‘in unusual ways, striving to express a particularly quality of experience’ in order to ‘do justice to the somatic and emotional experiences of people in the past’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The vast majority of Lansdowne 99 authors sought to demonstrate their deservingness, asserting a strong sense of worthiness alongside an expectation that the authorities were duty-bound to come to their aid. Prominent in this largely male sample was a masculine tendency in the narration of deservingness to emphasise dependants – wives and children who relied on them for care and protection. In 1591, a minister named ‘Johnson’ referenced his ‘wyfe and … Children of which I am deprived’, and in 1588 the supplicant Henry Cottismore wrote ‘he is utterly undone not having wherewith to releeve his poore infantes but is already constreined to pawne the cloke from his back to nourish them’.Footnote ⁷⁵ For William Renolds, described as ‘a person distracted’ by Burghley’s secretariat, it was for the relief of his ‘mother now also apore widowe, who dayly weepes in her distresse’ that he sought aid, ‘that I may clothe her which has clothed me, that I may refreshe & comfort her which comfertid me’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Not all supplicants had dependants, but another common technique to establish deservingness amongst the distressed was to fall back on extreme professions of loyalty, notwithstanding the fact that formulaic pleasantries were part and parcel of correspondence with such illustrious patrons.Footnote ⁷⁷ Thomas Woodhouse, the first Catholic priest to be executed during the reign of Elizabeth I, began his letter to William Cecil in 1572 fawningly:

Woodhouse’s biographer records that Cecil summoned Woodhouse to him a few days later, at which point, his pleas unheard, the priest ‘refused to recognise any of Cecil’s titles’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The prodigious William Renolds wrote to Cecil in 1588, signing off:

Such effusiveness proceeded from these authors’ distress and their straitened circumstances, while simultaneously functioning as a deliberate rhetorical strategy to secure aid.Footnote ⁸¹

The fact that the queen herself (or her most trusted councillor) was a natural source of help of last resort for distressed subjects in Elizabethan England tells us something about Elizabeth’s relationship with her people, and the extent to which she loomed large in the popular imagination. In his biography of Elizabeth I, Christopher Haigh makes brief mention of one of the Lansdowne 99 authors we have already met, Miles Fry, ‘a madman … who called himself “Emmanuel Plantagenet”’ and claimed to be the son of God and the Queen. For Haigh, this was an example of how ‘the official image of Elizabeth as virgin mother of her people also seems to have been effective – even if it was taken too literally by some.’Footnote ⁸² In a tangentially related phenomenon, Carole Levin has documented a range of Elizabethan subjects who dreamed about the queen and wrote to her to express their fears for her, while Louis Adrian Montrose has argued that such dreams allow us ‘to glimpse the cultural contours of an Elizabethan psyche’.Footnote ⁸³ Fry’s astonishing claim to be ‘an embassador from god the father unto the quenes highness to declare unto her that I am the sonne of them both’ was a particularly extreme example of a broader tendency by which Elizabeth was embraced by her subjects as their temporal and spiritual guardian.Footnote ⁸⁴ In less treasonous vein, Roger Crimble framed Elizabeth as ‘Christes spowse his testament his deputie the trew mother of the trew Church of Englande and Ireland, whereof I doe Come as one of your poore sonnes’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The radical antinomian Robart Banister, described by Strype as ‘a Religious Mad-man’, appended a poem to a pair of letters to Elizabeth beginning ‘O mother of marcy, with pitty, extende to see the ende, christis gospel to defende’, en passant ascribing to Elizabeth the traditional Catholic image of the Virgin Mary as Mother of Mercy.Footnote ⁸⁶ He explained how he, ‘a faithful subject & True Christian’, was ‘forsed to flye to your loving aide as to safe haven’, ending ‘O gracious Lady, save a poore Lambe from the pause of many lions’.Footnote ⁸⁷ In an undated letter, Roger Walles, described by Burghley’s secretariat as ‘some concipted person as it seems fantasticall’, tried to demonstrate his loyalty to Elizabeth by claiming that ‘as god hath appointed me I have saved your graces lyffe once all Redey and will do agayne yf I maye com to your graces presents’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Such language demonstrates that the powerful political and religious discourses of Elizabeth as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Virgin Queen, and mother of her people, had significant and enduring popular resonance, shaping and colouring the distress of the petitioners of Lansdowne 99, inflecting their petitions to the government, and raising hopes that she would offer maternal care and protection.

Many of the Lansdowne 99 authors went beyond describing desperate circumstances and demonstrating deservingness and loyalty to reveal more sinister and frightening interpretations of their predicaments. Their letters suggest that the experience and expression of distress was frequently framed in relation to a sense of victimhood – a fear of persecution or danger which could be personal, national or even cosmic in nature. Some of those who articulated a sense of persecution did so in relation to protestations to clear their names from false accusations and ill fame. Historians have long recognised the importance of reputation and credit in early modern English society.Footnote ⁸⁹ So powerful was the impulse to demonstrate social worth and trustworthiness that it appears to have coloured the experience and expression of distress to a considerable degree, especially amongst the predominantly male Lansdowne 99 authors, with Alexandra Shepard noting that ‘men’s reputations were most frequently attacked through questioning their economic integrity in terms of plain dealing, reliability and personal worth’.Footnote ⁹⁰ When the Gravesend customs official William Darby sent his petition to the queen, labelled ‘silly’ by Douce and ‘strange and incoherent’ by the Lansdowne catalogue, not only was he ‘compelled of very nede to besech your Majestie to be good unto me as one destitute of relief & favor’, he was also explicit that ‘that I haue not byn acquainted with any thing in the world prejudiciall to any person much lesse to hinder your Majesties proffitt’.Footnote ⁹¹ Suspected of financial malpractice, Darby protested that ‘if there be anything in the world that may touch me in creditt, I may be admitted to the answere thereof for my dischardg’. In 1587, Thomas Silvester, described as ‘a fantasticall, or distracted person’ by Strype, wrote to Burghley to object to his banishment from court ‘for speaking the truth’. His sentence, he exclaimed, was ‘very harde and a thing that the quenes Eniemyes may Laught at and amene to in Curredge them to pretend more mischief’.Footnote ⁹² He denied libel and violence, praying ‘that I may Receive a beter Reward then banishment for my Dutifull service’. One of the most common ways in which this group of distressed individuals rationalised their misfortune and attempted to narrate their innocence and deservingness was in reference to wrongs and slanders suffered at the hands of others.

Sometimes the victimisation authors reported was reputational, as documented above, but in these narratives malice could take on a wider range of forms. William Barlee, who with his son was responsible for a total of eight letters in Lansdowne 99, first wrote to Burghley in 1589 demanding money from the Attorney General in recompense for unspecified ‘losses’, or else he threatened to make a ‘publike example’ of him.Footnote ⁹³ This first letter, characterised as ‘strange’ by Strype and ‘apparently insane’ by the Lansdowne catalogue, obscured the full extent of Barlee’s murky financial situation, because a series of further missives sent in 1592 identified both William and his son Thomas as prisoners in the Fleet. Barlee presented himself as an advocate for imprisoned ‘distressed’ souls desirous of suing ‘villanous Conspirators’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In particular, he explained, ‘(pressed) prisoners, doo (hartelie) wishe To have (Rigorous) lawes: (Towchinge, (hard dealing) Creditors: and, Concernynge those, (obstinate) offenders:)’. Barlee named individuals deserving immediate arrest for their predatory practices, and emphasised the impact of inmates’ incarceration with reference to ‘theire (sorrowfull) wyves, & (poore) Chiuldren’, a further example of the role of dependants in the narration of deservingness.Footnote ⁹⁵ Financial rapacity was also the concern of Henry Carter, described as ‘distracted’ by Burghley’s secretariat and ‘crazy’ by the Lansdowne catalogue. Carter claimed to be a servant of William Stanley, Sixth Earl of Derby, and wrote to Burghley ‘pittefully complening’ about one Richard Handforth, ‘A very bade member in this Coman welth … a descencion sower amongst his pouer nighboures A drunkerd A fornicator A forsworne man by his owne Confession And wellknowen to be a willfull morderer’ who ‘by his welth overronnes Everye man to the great Hurte of his pouer neighboures in thirsting after ther inosente bloudes’.Footnote ⁹⁶ From the perspective of the distressed, financial misfortune and personal injustice could become wrapped up with animosity and moral judgement to fuel a powerful sense of persecution, helping to explain misfortune as uncharacteristic and undeserved.

The case of the Barlees also highlights a sad reality that many of the Lansdowne authors wrote from prison or having had experience of imprisonment, underlining their position (if only temporarily) on the social margins, and indicating that a familiar modern correlation between straitened circumstances, emotional distress and incarceration may have held true for Elizabethan England.Footnote ⁹⁷ When the ‘poore distressed suppliant’ Helen Lee wrote to Burghley, she explained that she had been involved in legal suits for seven years across some of the most powerful courts in Tudor England. Lee, described as ‘silly’ by Douce and ‘a mad woman’ by the Lansdowne catalogue, had been ‘this viij weekes in the gatehouse at westminster’, another London prison. Lee’s two letters to Burghley were written in different hands, suggesting that different scribes had penned them on her behalf. Like the Barlees' and Carter’s, her letter evidenced significant financial hardship, ‘she havinge bin putt to sell her smockes for the safegarde of her lief from famishementes’. Her financial and legal misfortunes formed but a mild prelude to the shocking main claim of her letter: the accusation that one Edwarde Roste:

Lee’s desperate letter ended with the acknowledgement that ‘I goo adread of my life night and day for christes sake’.Footnote ⁹⁹

The religious radical Robert Banister and prophetic William Renolds also spent time in prison and spoke in strong terms about their persecution. Writing in 1578, Banister complained that he ‘hath bin greatly wronged, with longe imprisonment, in bridewell, only to defame me’. To Banister the identity of his enemies was crystal clear: he was tormented ‘from the great envy of … the presies puritantes … that do in all places of your dominions, pervuate youre highness subjectes from all obedience’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These unnamed puritans had not only ‘malishiously & very slanderously’ written against Banister, but ‘they caused me to be laide in prison, for on of the phamily of lewde love’, an antinomian sect inspired by the Dutch mystic Henrik Nikalaes which came to prominence in England from the mid-1570s.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Banister promised Elizabeth that he could reveal hidden religious truths and profound alchemical discoveries and was desperate to publish his writings, but had been falsely defamed and subsequently imprisoned.Footnote ¹⁰² In the fissile religious underworld of Elizabethan London, where individuals at the fringes of radical puritanism generated hostile antinomian critiques of the theological and devotional emphases of orthodox Calvinism, the broad outlines of Banister’s position are familiar.Footnote ¹⁰³ But the extremity of his sense of persecution stands out as noteworthy.

So does that of William Renolds. Renolds wrote more than 20,000 words across half a dozen letters surviving across the English state papers, predominantly in Lansdowne 99. In them, he recounted the conspiracy of his alleged enemies ‘to take more advantage against me to trouble me, and to commit me to pryson, as once they did to new gate by adevise 6 yeares … and to the tower abowte 3 eares agoe, and to the marsheallsea abowte a eare ago’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Over the space of a decade, Renolds had spent time in three major London prisons. Writing to the Privy Council, he alleged ‘great treasons’ amongst many of the central figures of the Tudor establishment, including Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; Sir Francis Walsingham; and Sir Christopher Hatton. By his later letters he seemed to hold particular animus against Burghley himself, writing (in reference to the 1570 portrait of Burghley riding a mule): ‘I saw your picture once in a cham-ber, whear you are fayerly made riding uppon an ase … your ase has littell offendid but in going to fast & kicking pore suters when ther tayles shuld be heard’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ While Banister’s and Renolds’s letters are amongst the most dramatic examples, overall the Lansdowne 99 correspondence reveals a group of individuals suffering extreme distress during periods of great pain, hardship and desperation, some of whom experienced spells in prison, and many of whom interpreted their misfortune with reference to allegations of persecution by enemies known and unknown.

Some authors wrote to Burghley and the queen to communicate equally immediate but less personal threats, including dangers faced by the entire kingdom. William PagetFootnote ¹⁰⁶ wrote to Burghley in 1583, recounting various ‘revelacions & Devinacions’, during which ‘terrible movinges in the aire of Fyrrye Flashes’ had presaged ‘gret murders and troobles’, including the 1569 Northern Rebellion. Paget had recently seen over London ‘a Fyry Canapy or tent open in the tope & stremeing Flashes coming from most partes about it’, taking it as a sign of ‘gret troobls’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ His main concern was the military threat of Spain, who hungered to ‘reveng and overthrow this Land’. The schoolmaster and Latinist Christopher Ocland similarly wrote a letter (labelled ‘fantastical’ by Strype) to Burghley in 1587 to warn against the sea voyage of Thomas Cavendish.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Ocland had won official recognition for his patriotic Latin poetry, but by 1589 was penniless, and in 1590 wrote to Burghley as ‘yower poor and infortunate Christopher’, having accrued so much debt that ‘my labor wyll not fynde me bread and drynck’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Ocland’s example, like Roger Crimble’s, shows that people could drift in and out of periods of hardship and distress, and that desperate circumstances and emotions could afflict those of any station or education.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A letter of 1583 to Burghley and Secretary Walsingham from John Payne, described by Strype as ‘a puritan minister … very zealous against popery & prelacy’, inveighed against the Catholic threat at home. Payne wrote: ‘I wyll pray for the increase of your honorable corrage against suche lurckyng & Detected papistes, as under fayre semblans may labor styll to Dygg at the roote, to stryke at the braunches, & to overthrow religion’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Roger Edwards, described as ‘a religious madman’ by Strype and whose apocalyptic writings have been examined by Steven Clucas, wrote to Burghley in 1579, pleading to meet with him ‘to amplifie … upon the high mysteries of God’.Footnote ¹¹² This was an urgent matter, because ‘the lorde [hath] unriveted all the Spheres: and from this daye forth shall hee make a shorte worke upon earth’. Apocalyptic and millenarian beliefs were widespread in early modern England, and on the one hand Edwards appears to have been using his revelations quite deliberately as a lever to persuade Burghley to meet with him.Footnote ¹¹³ On the other, such extreme fears represented the broadest possible manifestation of distress in the face of impending threat.

A number of the distressed Lansdowne 99 authors sought to establish their honourable and deserving status (as well as make sense of their parlous and persecuted state) through reference to family and dynastic connections. Alexandra Walsham has argued that ‘the fascination with lineage, birth, blood, and descent that was a hallmark of the Tudor and Stuart elite … stretched further down into English society than we have hitherto realised’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It is then no surprise that the distressed authors of Lansdowne 99 frequently resorted to lineage as a tool to construct, narrate and inhabit a sense of their legitimacy and connectedness to the wider social fabric, both for their own reassurance and for the recipients of their letters.

Early modern family trees could ‘trace lineages that were tenuous, if not spurious and fictitious’, and in some of the Lansdowne 99 letters genealogies strayed into the downright fantastical. Miles Fry, as we have seen, claimed to be the result of a union between God and Queen Elizabeth I. On that basis he claimed that ‘my autoriti is greater then [the angel] gabriels: I am the soonne he is but a servant’, despite which he had ‘not the favor of a subject’ in his mother’s realm.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Equally extraordinary was the case of Robert Mantle, who in 1580 was examined for claiming to be the deceased King Edward VI. His interrogators concluded that ‘he useth many vayne and ydle Speeches as though he were a Lunaticke person’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Prior to his examination Mantle had been held at Colchester gaol, but in 1579 he escaped. After being re-apprehended the Privy Council ordered his incarceration at Newgate until the time of the next meeting of the Essex assizes, where the justices were ‘to proceade to his execucion’.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Claims to royal status not only stretched credulity but were dangerous for their potential impact on the political stability of an Elizabethan state with an unmarried queen and no clear heir to the throne. Other correspondents within Lansdowne 99 wrote with less destabilising but equally incredible accounts of noble lineage. Hugh Russhe, described by the Lansdowne catalogue as ‘a frantic man’, wrote to Burghley to plead the restoration of his inheritance, for despite his poverty he claimed to be ‘from Noble Parents discendid’. Russhe asserted that his parents had died when he was young, but that he had found out the truth of his status after discovering documents revealing a sinister conspiracy, beginning with a series of murders. The noble parents of the infant Russhe were killed, and he claimed to have been in the subsequent keeping of several individuals who were all assassinated for their role in concealing him, culminating with Lady Catherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, who famously went into exile during the reign of Mary I: according to Russhe, however, that she ‘went oversee that I can not believe for they did morder her in Hereford’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Ultimately Russhe laid claim to the names (and inheritances) of multiple noble houses, and asserted rights to land in Derbyshire, Norfolk and Lincolnshire, plus ‘tenne £’ and a ‘gowld ring’, for good measure.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Russhe wove a lurid dynastic tapestry to justify and rationalise a life of distress and hardship, situate himself as a person of wealth and status with an illustrious pedigree, demonstrate the extent of his victimisation at the hands of others, and establish his credentials to lay claim to a vast landed fortune.

The notion of an exalted lineage exerted a powerful pull on the Tudor imagination and seems to have been a natural way for distressed authors to justify adversity, as well as to establish their status and trustworthiness for the exalted recipients of their letters. A man named Johnson, labelled by Burghley’s secretariat as ‘a frantique person’, wrote a pair of letters to Burghley in 1591 with a similar underlying narrative to Russhe’s: he had been ‘borne a noble man from noble Parentes’, but ‘by many morders’ had ‘lost my Parentes in my infancie’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Like Russhe, Johnson claimed to have moved around between various noble families, and like Russhe sinister forces left a series of deaths in their wake as they attempted to keep him from his inheritance.Footnote ¹²¹ Johnson’s narration of his lineage contained apparent autobiographical fragments blended with real members of the Tudor nobility and mythical figures of medieval chivalric romance.Footnote ¹²² The Fellow of Pembroke College Cambridge Anthony Greene, described as ‘distracted’ by Burghley’s secretariat, also constructed a fantastical pedigree in a letter to Burghley’s secretary Sir Michael Hickes, seeking assurance that Burghley would ‘assiste me to clam claime [the throne of] Scotland for my selfe’.Footnote ¹²³ Greene also indicated a desire to marry the elder daughter of the king of Spain in order to assert a claim to the Spanish throne, and ‘for r recompence of suffering my selfe to be so much the more empoverished’, he requested ‘the Byshopperie of Elie’ and Durham house in London. He ended his life in Bethlehem hospital (Bedlam).Footnote ¹²⁴ Reflections on personal, national, dynastic, international, confessional and ecclesiastical politics all merged in the distressed mind of Anthony Greene, the leitmotif of which was a desperate desire for authority and security.