Instrumentality: The Prison, Liberty and Writing Friendship in the Space in Between

Tosh, Will

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-49497-9_3

Will Tosh⁴

Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

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Abstract

Focusing on the letters between the imprisoned Catholic spy Anthony Standen and Anthony Bacon, this chapter offers a fresh take on the cultural history of the early modern prison. Tosh argues that this prison correspondence shows the ease with which a relation of mutual obligation between a prisoner and his un-incarcerated associate could be dressed with a rhetoric of intimacy and affection. Tosh shows that not only was the prison an environment conducive to the espionage activities in which both men were engaged, but that it was also a specifically facilitating institution for the formation of friendships based on favour, support and reciprocal assistance.

Thee haue I not lockt vp in any chest,

Saue where thou art not, though I feele thou art,

Within the gentle closure of my brest,

From whence at pleasure thou maist come and part.

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Notes

1.
Shakespeare, Sonnets, no. 48.
2.
The circumstances of his arrest are found in AS to WC, 12 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fols.206–208v. Standen’s fluency in French is attested to by the fact that he passed as a native during a later voyage as far as northern Spain (AS to AB, 9 December 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.132v). His Spanish attire comes from AS to AB, undated spring 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.143v. See also Albert Mousset (ed.), Dépêches diplomatiques de M. de Longlée, résident de France en Espagne (1582–1590) (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1912); Allen, Post and Courier Service, 30 and 49; Kathleen M. Lea, ‘Sir Anthony Standen and some Anglo-Italian Letters’, English Historical Review 48 (1932), 461–77; G. Ashe, ‘An Elizabethan adventurer: the career of Sir Antony [sic] Standen’, The Month new series 8 (1952), 81–92; Leo Hicks, ‘The Embassy of Sir Anthony Standen in 1603, Part I’, Recusant History 5:3 (1959), 91–127; Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘Standen, Sir Anthony’, ODNB (accessed 18 August 2015); Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘An Elizabethan Spy Who Came in from the Cold: the Return of Anthony Standen to England in 1593’, Bulletins of the Institute of Historical Research 65 (1992), 277–95.
3.
G.[effray] M.[inshall], Essayes and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners (London: Mathew Walbancke, 1618), sig.D2v.
4.
Standen wrote two self-aggrandizing accounts of his own career: ‘Sir Anthony Standen’s discourse of the murder of Rizzio’, HMCS, 16, 15; ‘Petition of Sir Anthony Standen, and Anthony Standen his brother, to the King, for arrears of pensions granted them by the late Queen of Scots’, TNA SP 14/1, fol.234r.
5.
AS to WC, 12 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.206v.
6.
AS to Edmund Standen, 30 September 1592, LPL MS 648, fol.266v (copy).
7.
‘BC’ to ‘Giacopo Mannuci’ [AS to Francis Walsingham], 30 April 1588, BL Harley MS 295, fol.194r.
8.
AB to WC, 29 January 1591, TNA SP 78/23, fol.41r; Maurice Wilkinson, ‘The English on the Gironde in 1592–3’, English Historical Review 31 (1916), 279–91.
9.
AS to WC, 12 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.206v.
10.
AS to AB, n.d. Spring 1591, LPL MS 649, fol.479r.
11.
AS to AB, n.d. Spring 1591, LPL MS 649, fol.479r.
12.
HF, 84.
13.
NF to AB, 12 March 1581/2, LPL MS 647, fol.108v.
14.
AS to AB, 8 April 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.27v.
15.
AS to Edward Selwyn, 13 June 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.45r (copy).
16.
AS to AB, n.d. Spring 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.143v.
17.
AS to AB, n.d. Spring 1591, LPL MS 649, fol.479v.
18.
AS to AB, 8 April 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.27r.
19.
Standen made reference to his prison debts on 25 June (LPL MS 648, fol.41r), 13 July (fol.54r), 27 July (fol.56r) and 24 September (fol.84r).
20.
AS to AB, 23 September 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.80r-v.
21.
Hicks, ‘The Embassy of Sir Anthony Standen’, 100; Hammer, ‘An Elizabethan Spy’, 280; GL, 78.
22.
AS to Edward Selwyn, 13 June 1591, LPL MS 646, fol.45r (copy).
23.
It is not clear that Anthony was responsible for raising the money, although he wrote to his uncle to ask for 200 crowns—rather more than three times Standen’s stated prison debt: ‘Les despens qu’il a faictz en prison montent desia plus de deux centz escus’ (AB to WC, 15 June, TNA SP 78/24, fol.229r). At the beginning of October, Standen was in contact with a man named Bullart who offered to pay his expenses (AS to AB, 2[?]<Author-Query></Author-Query> or 11[?] October 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.103r); it may have been as soon as the following day that he was released. Some funds may nonetheless have come from the highest level in England: Standen later thanked Burghley for ‘yowr honores favourable offices’ and ‘her Maiesties gratious inclynation’ in helping to secure his release (AS to WC, 14 November 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.112r (copy)).
24.
Hammer, ‘An Elizabethan Spy’, 288.
25.
AS to AB, n.d. spring 1591, LPL MS 649, fol.479r-v.
26.
AS to AB, 7 April 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.27r-v.
27.
‘Ie l’ayme comme loyal Anglois et bon seruiteur et subiect de sa Maieste’ (AB to WC, 15 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.228v).
28.
HF, 121–39; GL, 76.
29.
‘Tel home peut beaucoup seruir a sa Maieste et la patrie, au cas qu’il voulut employer fidellement et opportunement l’amitie et creance quil s’est acquise en Espagne et en France parmi les francois espagnolizes’ (AB to WC, 15 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.228r).
30.
AS to WC, 12 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.207r-v.
31.
AS to Edward Selwyn, 5 September 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.87v (copy).
32.
Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2005), 140–1; R.B. Wernham, After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe 1588–1595 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 295–6; Paul E.J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544–1604 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 177; Alan David Francis, The Wine Trade (London: A&C Black, 1972), 25–46; Thomas Brennan, Burgundy to Champagne: The Wine Trade in Early Modern France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 79–81.
33.
AS to AB, 27 July 1591, LPL 648, fol.56r.
34.
AS to AB, n.d 1591, LPL MS 648 fol.142r.
35.
Peter Holmes, ‘Darrell, Thomas (b. 1538/9)’, ODNB (accessed 18 August 2015).
36.
HF, 111–13.
37.
Thomas Darrell to AB, 20 March 1593, LPL MS 649, fol.93r, and the same to the same, 20 June 1593, fol.198r.
38.
Francis Bacon, ‘Of Frendship’, in the revised second edition of his essays published in 1612 (the essay on friendship was wholly re-written in 1625) (Michael Kiernan (ed.), The Oxford Francis Bacon XV: The Essayes, or Counsells, Civill and Morall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, 2000), 80 (note) and 226–7).
39.
AS to AB, 1 September 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.94r.
40.
AS to WC, 12 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.206v.
41.
‘… sans au prealable auoir parle a luy mesme le qui m’a este impossible que despuis peu de temps en ca a cause de ma maladie’ (AB to WC, 15 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.228r).
42.
AS to AB, 8 April 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.27r.
43.
AS to AB, 24 May 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.34v.
44.
AS to AB, 8 May 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.31r.
45.
The same watermark is observable in the paper used for Standen’s holograph letters (LPL MS 648 fols.25, 27, 39, 41, 43, 47, 48, 54, 56, 58, 66 and 649 fol.479) and that used for Anthony’s copies of his own letters (MS 648 fols.37–38, 45, 64, 130).
46.
AS to AB, 31 August 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.75r. For Lawson, see fols.31r and 98r and GL, 85.
47.
AS to AB, n.d. June 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.39r and 25 June 1591, fol.41r.
48.
AS to AB, 21 July 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.63r and 29 July 1591, fol.58r.
49.
Lady Bacon’s efforts to frustrate her son’s activities are vividly described in a letter from AS to Edward Selwyn (5 September 1591, LPL MS 648 fols.86–87 (copy)), and with rather more respect in AS to AB, 31 August 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.75r. Anthony himself wrote to Lord Burghley that the ‘hatred and malice of certain individuals’ (‘la haine et malice de quelques particuliers’) was to blame for Standen’s isolation (AB to WC, 30 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.302r).
50.
AS to AB, n.d. June 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.39r; Janine Garrisson, A History of Sixteenth-Century France, 1483–1598: Renaissance, Reformation and Rebellion, trans. Richard Rex (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 33.
51.
AS to AB, n.d. spring 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.144r.
52.
AS to AB, 25 June 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.41r.
53.
Ruth Ahnert, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 8–28; Thomas S. Freeman, ‘The Rise of Prison Literature’, Huntington Library Quarterly special edition 72:2 (2009); Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 181–210; Norman Johnston, Forms of Restraint: A History of Prison Architecture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Edward Douglas Pendry, Elizabethan Prisons and Prisons Scenes. Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 17, 2 vols. (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1974), vol. 2. Studies in English of prison culture on the continent are few, and include Monika Fludernik and Greta Olson (eds), In the Grip of the Law: Trials, Prisons and the Space Between (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004) and Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007).
54.
AS to WC, 12 June 1591, TNA 78/24, fol.207v.
55.
AS to AB, 25 June 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.41r.
56.
‘Miserable prison’ comes from AS to AB, 8 April 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.27v, but similar sentiments are scattered through the corpus of letters.
57.
Jonathan Gibson, ‘Significant Space’; Daybell, Material Letter in Early Modern England, 98.
58.
Michael Finlay, Western Writing Implements in the Age of the Quill Pen (Wetheral: Plains Books, 1990), 8–39, 59–62.
59.
Robyn Adams, ‘“The Service I am Here for”: William Herle in the Marshalsea Prison, 1571’, Huntington Library Quarterly 72:2 (2009), 217–38, 217–18.
60.
AS to WC, 12 June 1591, TNA 78/24, fol.206v.
61.
Ahnert, Rise of Prison Literature, 2–3.
62.
William Fennor, The Compters Common-wealth (London: Edward Griffin for George Gibbes, 1617), sig.C1r; Peter Beal, A Dictionary of Manuscript Terminology 1450–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 203–4; Finlay, Western Writing Implements, 35–9.
63.
John Harrington (trans. and ed.), Booke of freendeship of Marcus Tullie Cicero (London: Tho. Berthelette, 1550), sigs.A2v and A4r. The French edition Harrington used was Jean Collin (trans. and ed.), Le Livre de Amytié de Ciceron (Paris, 1537).
64.
[Thomas Savile], The Prisoners Conference. Handled by way of a Dialogue, between a Knight and a Gentleman, being abridged of their liberty (London: William Jaggard, 1605) (facsimile edition, The English Experience 486, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd, 1974), sigs. A3v and B1v.
65.
Pendry explains that it was a ‘standing joke’ that prison was a school for felons and debtors. Thomas Middleton used it at least three times, in Michaelmas Term, The Phoenix and The Roaring Girle (Elizabethan Prisons, 271).
66.
John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1563, sig.3D1r (The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011), http://www.johnfoxe.org (accessed 18 August 2015), and cited in Pendry, Elizabethan Prisons, 270).
67.
Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Publish and perish: the scribal culture of the Marian Martyrs’, in Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 235–54; Ahnert, Rise of Prison Literature, chs. 2, 3 and 4.
68.
John Aylmer, Bishop of London, to WC, 5 December 1583, BL MS Lansdowne 38, fol.212r.
69.
BL MS Lansdowne 33, fol.152r.
70.
AS to AB, 24 May 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.33r and 27 September, fol.90r.
71.
AS to AB, n.d. Spring 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.142r.
72.
‘D’autres occurences … ie nen scay point Mon Seigneur qui meritent l’escrire sinon celles que i’ay receues ces iours passes du pauure Gentilhomme prisonnier’ (AB to AC, 20 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.239r).
73.
AS to Jeanne de Charnoq, 27 August 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.77r (copy); AS to Bringbourne, 6 August 1591, fol.74r (copy).
74.
AS to AB, 8 September 1592, LPL MS 648, fol.246r (partly ciphered).
75.
Freeman, ‘Publish and Perish’, 241–3.
76.
AS to AB, 28 June 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.48r.
77.
AS to WC, 12 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fols.206–208 and AS to WC, 7/8 June 1591, LPL MS 648, fols.37–38 (copy?).
78.
AS to AB, 5 September 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.96r.
79.
AS to Edward Selwyn, 5 September 1591, LPL MS 648, fols.86–87v (copy).
80.
‘[N]e dittes iamais que c’est vne femme aduisee et sage, mais dittes qu’elle est moyns folle que les autres, car touttes en tiennent de la follie,’ AS to AB, 1 September 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.94r.
81.
AS to AB, 28 June 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.48r.
82.
Daybell, Material Letter in Early Modern England, 9–10, 12.
83.
Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 1–10 and 82–112. On Wyatt: H. A. Mason, Sir Thomas Wyatt A Literary Portrait (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1986). On Harington: Ruth Hughey, John Harington of Stepney: Tudor Gentleman. His Life and Works (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971). On Ralegh: Margaret Irwin, That Great Lucifer: A Portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962).
84.
Ruth Ahnert, ‘Writing in the Tower of London during the Reformation, ca. 1530–1558’, Huntington Library Quarterly 72:2 (2009), 168–92; Ahnert, Rise of Prison Literature, 33–59.
85.
Molly Murray, ‘Measured Sentences: Forming Literature in the Early Modern Prison’, Huntington Library Quarterly 72:2 (2009), 147–67, 150 and 157.
86.
Harkness, Jewel House, 191.
87.
The term ‘antipanopticon’ has been used to describe the early modern prison, asserting its fundamental difference from the Benthamite ideal penitentiary of modern times (Michael Collins, ‘The Antipanopticon of Etheridge Knight’, Publications of the Modern Library Association of America 123 (2008), 580–97; Murray, ‘Measured Sentences’, 152; Ahnert, Rise of Prison Literature, 10).
88.
‘Tout inferme qu’il est rien ne se passe pour l’aduantage de l’Espagnol et de la ligue qu’il n’en soit quant et quant aduerti’ (AB to WC, 15 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.228r).
89.
Standen sent Anthony a list of such English pensioners in Spain as he could remember, ‘my memorye extendinge no farther’, at some point during his captivity (LPL MS 648, fol.144r).
90.
Blaye (LPL MS 648, fols. 34r, 82r-v and 102r), Matignon (fol.31r), Henri IV (fol.33r), Rouen (fol.72r), Spain (fols. 89r and 93r).
91.
AS to AB, 20[?] September 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.89r.
92.
AS, ‘Instructions’, 15 and 28 June 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.51r (copy). In June, Standen told Anthony about a student who had been arrested for possessing a seditious pamphlet printed in Agen (AS to AB, n.d. June 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.43r), a piece of news that Anthony incorporated into his letter to Burghley (AB to WC, 20 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.239r-v).
93.
AS, ‘Instructions’, 15 and 18 June 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.51r. Later, in March 1593, Anthony was obliged to inform Standen, undercover in northern Spain, that the queen ‘wold haue me let you know that she liketh wel of your advertisements if they moght come in season adding therto that an apple in tyme was better then an apple of gould out of tyme’ (AB to AS, 14 March 1592/3, LPL MS 649, fol.161r).
94.
‘Instructions’, LPL MS 648 fol.51r; AS to AB, 16 August 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.72r.
95.
AS to AB, 19 August 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.71r.
96.
AS to AB, 20 September 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.82r-v.
97.
‘Even during his misfortune he has been lucky enough to have won over the greater part of those who have been to see him, indeed his judges [and] even the principal members of this court’ (‘durant son malheur mesmes il a este si heureux que d’auoir gaigne la plus part de celle qui l’ont veu et frequente; voire ses iuges mesme les principaux de ceste court’) (AB to WC, 15 June 1591, TNA SP 78/24, fol.228r).
98.
AS to AB, 24 May 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.33r.
99.
AS to Mr Bringbourne, 6 August 1591 (copy), LPL MS 648, fol.74r.
100.
AS to AB, 5 September 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.96r.
101.
AS to Edward Selwyn, 5 September 1591, LPL MS 648, fol. 86r (copy).
102.
Fludernik and Olson, In the Grip of the Law, xxvi.
103.
Minshall, Essayes and Characters, sig.D2v.
104.
Minshall, Essayes and Characters, sig.D1r.
105.
Fennor, Compters Common-wealth, title-page.
106.
Minshall, Essayes and Characters, sig. B2r.
107.
‘Ce petit cachot où il se trouve logé, j’entends l’univers’, Pascal, Pensées, quoted in Victor Brombert, The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 19.
108.
[Luke Hutton], The Blacke Dogge of Newgate: both pithie and profitable for all Readers (London: G. Simson and W. White, [1596]), sig.C2v.
109.
[R.S.], The Covnter Scvffle, Whereunto is added, the Covnter-Ratt (London: W. Stansby for R. Meighen, 1628), sigs.A3r-v.
110.
Fennor, Compters Common-wealth, sig.B4v.
111.
Savile, Prisoners Conference, sigs.B2r-v.
112.
Minshall, Essayes and Characters, sigs.G2r-v; Fennor, Compters Common-wealth, sig.C2v.
113.
LPL MS 648, fols. 96r, 51r and 82v.
114.
King Lear, 5.3.13-15 (Riverside Shakespeare).
115.
AS to AB, 24 May 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.33r.
116.
AS to AB, 20[?] June 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.43r.
117.
HMCS, 4, 330 and 13 (Addenda), 483; AS to AB, 24 March 1593/4, LPL MS 650, fol. 132v.
118.
Edward Selwyn to AS, 10 July 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.64r (copy).
119.
AS to AB, 2[?] or 11[?] October 1591, LPL MS 648, fol.103r (it is unclear whether this letter is endorsed ‘11 Octobris’ or ‘ii Octobris’).
120.
Harrington (ed. and trans.), Booke of freendeship, sigs.A2r-v.

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Tosh, W. (2016). Instrumentality: The Prison, Liberty and Writing Friendship in the Space in Between. In: Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49497-9_3

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