“I assert that all past days were what they must have been,
And that they could no-how have been better than they were.”
—_Walt Whitman._
Many years ago, when I happened upon a few extracts from the letters of
Mistress Dorothy Osborne, I wondered how they had escaped the grasp of
the historian learned in the domestic annals of the Commonwealth. And
in the same way it has always surprised me that the correspondence of
William Fleetwood, Recorder of London from 1571 to 1591, should have been
left hidden in the scarce but charming collection of Elizabethan Letters
edited by that excellent antiquary and man of letters, Thomas Wright.
Some day, perhaps, popular interest may demand a Life and Letters of
Fleetwood; but, meanwhile, a mosaic of the man and his work, pieced
together from his own written words, may interest latter-day readers. His
career was similar to that of many another minor Elizabethan official,
and the records show him to have been an honest, active Protestant
magistrate, full of zeal for his religion, honour for his Queen, and
integrity in his office. In his letters we have a twenty years experience
of an Elizabethan Quarter Sessions which we may use as a base to measure
our progress in law and humanity during the last four hundred years.
And first a word or two of the man himself that his message may be the
more clearly understood. The Recorder was a descendant of the ancient
Lancashire Family of the Fleetwoods of Hesketh, in which village
Baines, Lancashire’s historian, thinks our Recorder was born, and the
probable date of his birth seems to be 1535. He is said to have been an
illegitimate son of Robert Fleetwood, third son of William Fleetwood of
Hesketh, who married Ellen Standish, daughter of another old Lancashire
family. Their second son, Thomas, came to Buckinghamshire, and was known
as Thomas Fleetwood of the Vache in Chalfont St. Giles. He was Master
of the Mint, and Sheriff of Buckinghamshire. The Recorder must have
been recognised by the family, and no doubt visited his uncle Thomas,
for he himself married a lady of a well known Buckinghamshire family,
Mariana, daughter of John Bailey of Kingsey. He was educated at Oxford,
and was of Brazenose College, but he took no degree, and came to London
to study law at the Middle Temple, where at the age of twenty-eight we
find him appointed Reader. In Mary’s reign he was member for Lancaster,
and afterwards sat in the House for Marlborough and the City of London.
The Earl of Leicester was his patron, and it is said to be through his
influence that in 1571, at the early age of thirty-six, he became
Recorder of the City of London.
This office he held for twenty years, when he retired on a pension of
£100 a year, and becoming Queen’s Serjeant the following year, did not
live to enjoy the further honour, for he died at his home in Noble
Street, Aldersgate, in February, 1593, and was buried at Great Missenden,
in Buckinghamshire, where he seems to have had considerable estates.
Altogether he stands before us as a type of successful professional
lawyer coming from the ranks of the county families into the larger world
of London, bringing with him a certain amount of Lancashire grit and
humour, and a strong sense of duty to the Government and the public. Nor
does he seem to have been in any way a hide-bound, dry-as-dust, technical
minded official, but there is evidence that he had a wide sympathy with
many social movements of the time. He was an eager Protestant, but I
cannot find that he was fanatical in his dislike of the Roman Catholics,
whom it was his duty to prosecute. Anthony Wood describes him as “a
learned man and a good antiquary, but of a marvellous merry and pleasant
conceit”; and it is said he contributed much to the last of the old
editions of Holinshed. Strype, the annalist, speaks of him in reference
to a speech in the House of Commons as “a wise man,” and he seems to have
combined wisdom and humour with a stern sense of official duty. That
he was not a mere creature of Leicester’s and the Court is shown in his
examinations of one Bloss, who had uttered terrible scandals concerning
Elizabeth and her favourite, but Fleetwood reports upon his conscience
as a lawyer, that it is “a clear case of no treason.” A weak man would
have been tempted to strain the law against the prisoner, who was an
undeserving and dangerous person. There is a pleasant incident, too,
of his writing to Secretary Walsingham about some young orphans whose
Catholic mother had committed suicide, begging him to acquaint Peter
Osborn, the Lord Treasurer and the Master of the Wards, with the details
of the unfortunate case, in order that their monies may be kept for
them. “Such was the care,” writes Strype, “of this good Recorder, of the
Children of the City.”
There was one exciting incident in his life when in 1576 he was cast
into the Fleet Prison. Lord Burghley seems to have suggested a raid
upon the Charterhouse, where unlawful Mass was being celebrated. The
Recorder carries out his instructions, and writes a vivid account of his
proceedings. Unfortunately, Lady Geraldi, the wife of the Portuguese
Ambassador, was present, and her husband carries his complaint of her
treatment to Court, with the result that Elizabeth—after the manner of
all rulers of all times—promptly disavows her agent, and by way of a
pleasant apology to Portugal, throws Fleetwood into gaol. The Recorder,
who probably thoroughly understands that he is only in the Fleet,
“without prejudice” and for purely Pickwickian state purposes, writes to
Lord Burghley: “I do beseech you thank Mr. Warden of the Fleet for his
most friendly and courteous using of me, for surely I thank God for it.
I am quiet and lack nothing that he or his bedfellow are able to do for
me.” And after a short experience of gaol he sums up the situation much
as Mr. Stead did after a similar experience: “This is a place wherein a
man may quietly be acquainted with God.”
It is in passages like these in the man’s own letters that his figure
becomes dimly discernible to us across the ages of time, and when our
eyes grow accustomed to the sight, we see before us the form of an
Englishman not unlike many we have known in our own time. The more one
studies the unaffected domestic documents of any period written without
afterthought of publication, the more convinced one is that social
progress moves like the tide and the rocks and the trees; its growth
is nearly imperceptible, and four hundred years in the development of
mankind is but a small moment of time.
The correspondence of William Fleetwood with Lord Burghley commences in
1575, when my Lord Burghley was at Buckestones—what a charming spelling
of the prosaic Buxton—for his health. In those days an English Premier
got rid of his gout in his own country, and knew not Homburg. The knowing
ones in the political circles of London whispered with emphasis that the
Prime Minister was “practising with the Queen of Scots,” then in custody
at Sheffield, but the historical evidence points to mere gout.
Our Recorder, being Leicester’s creature, and being also a man of the
world and looking for promotion as his deserts, writes careful reports
to my Lord Burghley, telling him of London that from a police point of
view “the state of the city is well and all quiet.” The Star Chamber had
received the city fathers, and my Lord Keeper with the Chancellor of
the Duchy, the Master of the Rolls and others had met the Recorder, and
Master Nicholas the Lord Mayor, and divers Aldermen who had reported to
them of city affairs. And as is the way of official men, they reported
all to be well.
“And as,” writes the Recorder, “my Lord Keeper’s order is to call for the
book of misbehaviours of masterless men, rogues, fencers, and such like,
we had nothing to present for London, for Mr. Justice Southcot and I had
taken fine of six strumpets such as haunt the hedge and which had lately
been punished at the Assizes at Croydon, and two or three other lewd
fellows, their companions, whom we despatched away into their countries.
As for Westminster, the Duchy (the Savoy), St. Giles, High Holborn, St.
John’s Street and Islington, (they) were never so well and quiet for
neither rogue nor masterless man dare once to look into those parts.”
Could Scotland Yard make a better report than that to-day? No doubt
Fleetwood believed with the optimism of a modern Home Office official
that he and his fellows had purged London of crime.
Crime being well in hand, these good men set out with feverish energy to
put down the source of crime, and like the social reformer of to-day,
thinking that pimples were the origin of disease rather than mere
evidence of a disordered system, commenced a crusade on the alehouse.
One is apt to think of the Star Chamber as merely a Court for the
oppression of English freedom and the abolition of Magna Charta, but in
Elizabeth’s day it was busying itself with much the same problems that
are troubling Parliament and the magistrates to-day. It is very modern
reading to learn that my Lord Keeper and the residue of the Council
at the Star Chamber have set down in writing certain orders for the
reforming of certain matters, and that the very first of these is “for
the suppressing of the over great number of alehouses, the which thing
upon Wednesday last my Lord Mayor, Sir Rowland Hayward and myself for the
liberties of Southwark, and Mr. Justice Southcot and myself for Lambeth
town, Lambeth Marsh, the Mint, the Bank, Parr’s Garden, the Overground,
Newington, Bermondsey Street and Kentish Street, sitting altogether, we
have put down, I am certain, above two hundred alehouses and yet have
left a sufficient number, yea, and more, I fear than my Lord Keeper will
well like of at his next coming.”
All this was done on Wednesday and Thursday, and on Wednesday there was
an influential dinner party at Mr. Campion, the brewer’s—one wonders
if he owned tied houses in those days and whether their licenses were
spared—and “at after dinner, Mr. Deane and I went to Westminster, and
there in the Court we had before us all the officers of the Duchy and of
Westminster, and there we have put down nearly an hundred alehouses. As
for St. Giles, High Holborn, St. John Street, and Islington, Mr. Randall
and I mean this Saturday at afternoon to see the reformation, in like
manner Mr. Lieutenant and Mr. Fisher deal for the East part. I am sure
they will use great diligence in this matter.”
One may piously hope that the souls of these good men are not vexed
to-day with the knowledge of the futility of their work on earth and that
they know nothing of our modern licensing system. Could Master Fleetwood
return to listen to the procedure of a local licensing bench in the
twentieth century he would perhaps laugh in his sleeve to think that the
methods of the Star Chamber were yet with us and that magistrates of
austere mind were still using “great diligence in these matters.”
Fleetwood’s earliest letter is dated from Bacon House, August 8th, 1575.
The vacation is on, yet it seems the Temple is full of students. For as
Richard Chamberlayne tells us this is the “second learning vacation”
which began on Lammas Day. Readings continued for “three weeks and three
days,” and the Recorder seems to think my Lord Burghley would take an
interest in the matter of legal education, which is not an affair that
has troubled the mind of any minister of modern times. The plague is
with them and the study of the law has to give way to the plague, for
the Recorder tells us that “as touching the Inns of Court it so fell
out that at Gray’s Inn there was no reading this vacation because one
died there of the plague. At the Inner Temple there hath been a meeting,
but by means that the plague was in the house, the reading being scarce
half done, is now broken up. In Lincoln’s Inn yesterday being Friday,
at afternoon one is dead of the plague and the company are now to be
dispersed. In the Middle Temple, where I am, I thank God we have our
health and our reading continually. I am always at the reading, and I
have taken stringent order upon the pain of putting out of commons, that
none of the Gentlemen of our house or their servants shall go out of the
house except it be by water and not to come in any place of danger, the
which order is well observed.”
“Our house” is the old world phrase familiar to Templars and means the
Middle Temple, and “putting out of commons” was in that day a serious
penalty. The “readings” took the form of “moots” or arguments on a case
put by the reader, and argued not only by students but by lawyers of
position. They must have been of considerable educational value and have
always been prized by the older generation of lawyers. I remember well
an old learned Judge solemnly exhorting me in the days of my youth, to
become a good “put-case,” a phrase which one does not hear used nowadays.
Moots and readings might, one would think, be revived especially in the
interest of the newly called barrister, who can say with but too much
truth as Fleetwood wrote in August, 1575, “For my own part I have no
business but go as quietly to my book as I did the first year that I came
to the Temple.”
In July, 1577, Lord Burghley is again at “Buckstons” [_sic_] and the
faithful recorder sends him a budget of news. He has been at the Mercers’
feast “and there were we all very merry ... and I told them that I was
to write privately to your Lordship; and they required me all to commend
them to your good Lordship; at which time the Master of the Rolls, who is
no wine drinker, did drink to your Lordship a bowl of Rhenish wine and
then Sir Thomas Gresham drank another, and Sir William Demsell the third
and I pledged them all.” It reads like a page from the Book of Snobs.
And after the “great and royal banquet” which took place at the house of
the new Master, some time we may suppose about mid-day, Fleetwood, as
he tells us “walked to Powle’s to learn some news.” For in that day St.
Paul’s was the Exchange and the club and the Market Place of the men of
the world where news came from all quarters of the world and where news
passed from lip to lip and thence out into the corners of England in such
letters as this of Fleetwood’s to Lord Burghley. The extraordinary uses
to which the Cathedral was put in Elizabeth’s time, are a constant theme
of reproach from religious-minded men. Idlers and drunkards used to sleep
on benches at the choir door, and porters, butchers and water bearers
were suffered in service time, to carry and re-carry their wares across
the nave, and in the upper choir itself irreverent people walked about
with hats on their heads, whilst if any entered the Cathedral booted
and spurred, the gentlemen of the choir left their places and demanded
“spur-money” and threatened their victim with a night’s imprisonment
in the choir if the tax were not paid. Such was “Powle’s” on this July
afternoon when Recorder Fleetwood went down in search of news, and
indeed he heard terrible tidings; for there “came suddenly into the
church Edmund Downing, and he told me that he was even then come out of
Worcestershire and that my Lord Chief Baron died at Sir John Hubbard’s
house and that he is buried at Leicester. And he said that the common
speech of that country is that Mr. Serjeant Barham should be dead at
Worcester, but that is not certain. The like report goeth of Mr. Fowler,
the Clerk of the same Circuit ... and a number of other gent that were at
the gaol delivery at Oxon are all dead. The inquest of life and death
are almost all gone. Such Clerks servants and young gent, being scholars
as were at the same gaol delivery, are either dead or in great danger.
Mr. Solicitor’s son and heir being brought home to his father’s house at
Woodstock, lieth at the mercy of God. Mr. Attorney’s son and heir was
brought very sick from Oxon to his father’s house at Harrow, where he
lieth in as great danger of death as might be, but now there is some hope
of amendment. The gaol delivery of Oxon, as I am told, was kept in the
Town Hall, a close place and by the infection of the gaol as all men take
it, this mortality grew.”
We know now all about the Oxford Black Assizes of the 5th and 6th of
July, 1577, and how Judges, Sheriffs, Knights, Squires, Barristers and
members of the Grand Jury were stricken down with what was probably
typhus. The disease spread to the Colleges. Masters, Doctors and heads
of houses left almost to a man. “The Master of Merton remained _longe
omnium vigilantissimus_ ministering to the sick. The pharmacies were soon
emptied of their conserves, oils, sweet waters, pixides and every kind
of confection.” Wild rumours spread abroad that it was the result of a
Papist plot. In a few weeks of the Assizes, some five hundred perished,
nearly all men of the better class. The disease did not attack the poor
or women. There seems little doubt that the infection was among the
prisoners and there is a record that two or three thieves had died in
chains shortly before the Assizes. One would have supposed that such a
visitation would have been a signal for prison reform, but those who have
read of Howard’s experiences, know how little was done to mitigate the
horrors of life in gaol until a much more recent date.
Fleetwood tells us a great deal about his own activity at this time. He
is holding an oyer and terminer at the Guildhall in the vacation “to
keep the people in obedience.” He sits with the Justices to discuss the
abolition of alehouses and the advancement of archery, he is constant
in his search after rogues and masterless men and there being cases of
plague in the Savoy, he takes occasion to pass with all the constables
between the bars and the tilt-yard in both the liberties, to see the
houses shut, which he notes with pride “neither the Master of the Rolls
nor my cousin Holcroft the Bailiff, would or durst do.” At the same time
he was writing a book on “The Office of a Justice of the Peace” which was
printed a hundred years later. Amidst these various employments however,
he finds room for the lighter social duties and spends an afternoon
with the Shoemakers of London, who “having builded a fair and a new
hall, made a royal feast there for their friends, which they call their
housewarming.”
A really heavy sessions must have been a terrible experience since this
is what the Recorder evidently regards as a light one. “At the last
Sessions,” he writes, “there were executed eighteen at Tyburn, and
one, Barlow, born in Norfolk but of the house of the Barlows in the
county of Lancashire, was pressed. They were all notable cut-purses and
horse-stealers. It was the quietest Sessions that ever I was at.” At the
beginning of the year he makes an audit of known criminals “that I may
know what new may be sprung up this last year and where to find them
if need be” and he makes out a list of “receivers and gage takers and
melters of stolen plate and such like.”
Part of his duty was the actual police work of “searching out of sundry
that were receptors of felons.” In the course of this duty he tells
Burghley on another occasion of the discovery of a den that Dickens
might have used as a model in Oliver Twist, so little had the ways of
criminals altered from Elizabeth to Victoria. “Amongst our travels this
one matter tumbled out by the way, that one, Walters, a gentleman born
and some time a merchant of good credit, who falling by time into decay,
kept an alehouse at Smart’s Keye (Quay) near Billing’s Gate, and after
some misdemeanour being put down he reared up a new trade of life and in
the same house he procured all the cut-purses about this city to repair
to his same house. There was a school-house set up to learn young boys
to cut purses. There were hung up two devices, the one was a pocket, the
other was a purse. The pocket had in it certain counters and was hung
about with hawk’s bells, and over the top did hang a little sacring
bell; and he that could take out a counter without any noise was allowed
to be a publique foyster, and he that could take a piece of silver out
of the purse without the noise of the bells, he was adjudged a judicial
nipper.” Note that a foyster is a pick-pocket, and a nipper is termed a
pick-purse or a cut-purse.
The path of an honest judge in the days of Elizabeth was beset with
difficulties. Although bribes were not actually offered to the individual
magistrate, yet he was written to by influential persons about the Court,
and he had to choose between doing his duty and incurring the dislike
of powerful men. Fleetwood complains “that when by order we have justly
executed the law ... we are wont either to have a great man’s letter, a
lady’s ring, or some other token from some other such inferior persons
as will devise one untruth or another to accuse us of if we prefer not
their unlawful requests.” Our honest Recorder is strong to maintain the
principle that all men are equal in the sight of the law.
Here is a typical case of which he complains: “Mr. Nowell of the Court
hath lately been in London. He caused his man to give a blow unto a
carman. His man hath stricken the carman with the pommel of his sword and
therewith hath broken his skull and killed him. Mr. Nowell and his man
are likely to be indicted thereof, I am sure to be much troubled with his
letters and his friends, and what by other means, as in the very like
case heretofore, I have been even with the same man. Here are sundry
young gentlemen that use the Court that most commonly term themselves
gentlemen; when any of them have done anything amiss, and are complained
of or arrested for debt, then they run unto me and no other excuse or
answer can they make but say—‘I am a gentleman, and being a gentleman I
am not thus to be used at a slaves and a colion’s (scullion’s) hands.’ I
know not what other plea Mr. Nowell can plead. But this I say, the fact
is foul.”
A “gentleman” in England in Elizabethan days seems to have thought
himself as little amenable to law as an American millionaire, but
Fleetwood had the English gist of the matter in him when he says “the
fact is foul.”
But though the Recorder stood firm against the hangers on of the Court,
London was not a happy soil for judicial integrity. He never attained
to the promotion he deserved, and maybe it was because he could not
dishonour his office to serve his friends at Court. Such mercy as the
Recorder could honestly show to a prisoner, he was only too ready
to exercise. “Truly, my Lord,” he writes, “it is nothing needful to
write for the stay of any to be reprieved for there is not any in our
commission of London and Middlesex but we are desirous to save or stay
any poor wretch if by colour of any law or reason we may do it. My
singular good Lord, my Lord William of Winchester was wont to say: ‘When
the Court is furthest from London then is there the best justice done in
all England.’ I once heard as great a personage in office and authority
as ever he was and yet living say the same words. It is grown for a
trade now in the Court to make means for reprieves; twenty pounds for a
reprieve is nothing, although it be but for bare ten days. I see it will
not be holpen unless one honoured gentleman who many times is abused by
wrong information—and surely upon my soul not upon any evil meaning—do
stay his pen. I have not one letter for the stay of a thief from your
Lordship.”
But Elizabethan mercy was not a very vigorous virtue and did little
to temper the wind to the criminal lamb. Here is a typical day’s work
and its terrible results. “Upon Friday last we sat at the Justice Hall
at Newgate from seven in the morning until seven at night when were
condemned certain horse-stealers, cut-purses and such like to the number
of ten, whereof nine were executed and the tenth stayed by a means from
the Court. These were executed on Saturday in the morning. There was a
shoemaker also condemned for wilful murder committed in the Black friars,
who was executed upon the Monday in the morning.” The superior criminal
dignity of murder over larceny appears to have given the murderer two
days further life.
The Recorder’s main work however, was a constant warfare with rogues and
masterless men. The Elizabethan vagabonds were to be “grievously whipped
and burnt through the gristle of the right ear” unless they could find
someone who under penalty of five pounds would keep them in service for a
year. Rogues and vagabonds were all those able-bodied men having no land
or master practising no trade or craft and unable to account for the way
in which they earned their living, and further included actors, pedlars,
poor scholars and labourers who would not work for what employers called
“reasonable wages.” London swarmed with these vagabonds, and Fleetwood
seems to have been the official who was made responsible if they
committed any excesses.
One January afternoon in 1582, Her Majesty at even was taking of the
air in her coach at Islington, in which suburb she had a Lodge. During
her drive, writes Fleetwood, “Her Highness was environed with a number
of rogues. One, Mr. Stone, a footman, came in all haste to my Lord
Mayor, and after to me and told us of the same.” No mention is made of
any molestation, but the complaint rouses the Recorder to extraordinary
efforts. “I did, the same night,” he writes, “send warrants out to
the said quarters and in the morning I went abroad myself and I took
seventy-four rogues whereof some were blind, and yet great usurers and
very rich.” All these were sent to the Bridewell, and the next day “we
examined all the said rogues and gave them substantial payment, (a
euphemism for grievous whipping), and the strongest we bestowed in the
mylne (mill) and the lighters. The rest were dismissed with a promise of
double pay if we met with them again.” In the Southwark district, forty
rogues, men and women, were taken and “I did the same afternoon peruse
Poole’s (St Paul’s) where I took about twenty cloaked rogues.” All these
went to the Bridewell and to punishment. The constables of the Duchy (the
Savoy), brought in “six tall fellows that were draymen unto brewers. The
Master did write a very courteous letter unto us to pardon them. And
although he wrote charitably unto us, yet they were all soundly paid and
sent home to their masters”; which seems to have been in excess of the
Recorder’s jurisdiction, as the draymen were clearly not “masterless.”
Another day a hundred lewd people were taken and the Master of Bridewell
received them and immediately gave them punishment. The bulk of these
poor wretches were unemployed seeking work in the City, which they could
not obtain in their own counties. And Fleetwood writes: “I did note that
we had not of London, Westminster nor Southwark, nor yet Middlesex nor
Surrey above twelve, and those we have taken order for. The residue for
the most were of Wales, Salop, Chester, Somerset, Buckingham, Oxford and
Essex and that few or none of these had been about London above three or
four months. I did note also that we met not again with any in all our
searches that had received punishment. The chief nursery of all these
evil people is the Savoy, and the brick-kilns near Islington.” It is
curious to remember that a hundred and fifty years afterwards Defoe
writes of the beggar boys getting into the ash-holes and nealing arches
of the glass houses in Ratcliff Highway, and that to-day one of the
difficulties of Manchester magistrates is to keep vagabonds from sleeping
in suburban brick-kilns. Truly the ways of the vagabond seem to be a
force of nature which centuries of progress and reform have done very
little to amend.
The history of the Bridewell which was filled with so many generations
of evil-doers, is a very curious one. An ancient palace of the Kings
of England, it was in the reign of Edward VI. standing empty. The
suppression of the monasteries and other religious houses filled London
with multitudes of necessitous and to some extent dissolute persons.
It was Bishop Ridley who wrote to Sir William Cecil: “Good Mr. Cecil I
must be a suitor unto you in our Master Christ’s cause,” and pointed out
that “there is a wide, large empty house of the King’s Majesty called
Bridewell, that would wonderfully serve” to house these poor wanderers.
Thus in a spirit of pure charity, did the good Bishop open the doors of
one of the most miserable prisons that ever disgraced humanity. Already
we see in Fleetwood’s time how it had fallen away from the Bishop’s ideal
Christian home to shelter the hungry, naked and cold. What it was then
it remained for more than a hundred and fifty years, as we may see in
Hogarth’s print in the “Harlot’s Progress,” with its pillory and its
whipping post, and the heavy log to be fastened on the prisoner’s leg and
the gaoler with his rod standing over the wretched woman beating out the
hemp with her mallet.
The Recorder seems to have had absolute power in dealing with prisoners
charged with offences, to use force to obtain confessions. Here is a
very horrible story which Fleetwood reports to Lord Burghley as a matter
of every day routine. A French merchant charged a carrier’s wife with
stealing £40. After great search the money was found and restored. The
carrier’s wife denied all knowledge of it. “Then,” says Fleetwood, “I
examined her in my study privately, but by no means, she would not
confess the same, but did bequeath herself to the devil both body and
soul if she had the money or ever saw it.” After much cross-examination,
the woman refused to answer anything further. “And then,” continues
Fleetwood, “I took my Lord Mayor’s advice and bestowed her in Bridewell,
where the Masters and I saw her punished, and being well whipped she said
that the devil stood at her elbow in my study and willed her to deny
it, but so soon as she was upon the cross to be punished he gave her
over. And thus, my singular good Lord, I end this tragical part of this
wretched woman.”
But Fleetwood did not spend all his days in the Criminal Courts. As a
Serjeant-at-law, he is present when his “brother” Sir Edmund Anderson,
was made Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and he took part in the
ceremony by following the “ancient” in the ceremony of putting a case to
the new Judge. And the way of it was thus: “my Lord Chancellor did awhile
stand at the Chancery bar upon the side of the hall, and anon after that
the Justices of the Common Place (Pleas) were set, his Lordship came to
the Common Place and there sat down and all the Serjeants, my brethren,
standing at the bar, my Lord Chancellor my brother Anderson called by
name and declared unto him Her Majesty’s good liking and opinion of him,
and of the place and dignity that Her Majesty had called him unto, and
then my Lord Chancellor made a short discourse what the duty and office
of a good Justice was, and in the end his Lordship called him up unto
the midst of the Court and then Mr. Anderson kneeling, the commission
was read, and that done, his Lordship took the patent into his hand, and
then the clerk of the Crown, Powle, did read him his oath, and after he
himself read the oath of his supremacy, and so kissed the book, and then
my Lord Chancellor took him by the hand and placed him upon the bench.
And then Father Benloos, because he was “ancient” did put a short case,
and then myself put the next. To the first my new Lord Chief Justice did
himself only argue, but to the next that I put, both he and the residue
of the Bench did argue. And I assure your good Lordship he argued very
learnedly and with great facility delivered his mind. And this one thing
I noticed in him, that he despatched more orders and answered more
difficult cases in this the fore-noon than were despatched in one whole
week in his predecessor’s time.”
So too, when the Lord Mayor was sworn in in the Exchequer, the Recorder
presented him in the name of the City, and they “did such services
as appertained viz.: in bringing a number of horse-shoes and nails,
chopping knives and little rods.” These customs were antiquarian even in
Elizabeth’s days, but they are with us still.
And no doubt Fleetwood loved to take part in these things, for he was a
good antiquary himself, and we must not think of him merely as a harsh
persecutor of the “rogues and masterless,” for away from his work we
hear record of his merry and pleasant conceit, and note that he is an
eloquent and witty speaker at City banquets. And there is evidence in
these letters that he did not love much of his work, as indeed what man
can take pleasure in so unfortunate a task, but to him it was a duty,
and one to be done like all duties—thoroughly. And that he did it to the
best of his ability and with honesty seems clear, but that he longed
to be removed from the intolerable toil of it, even as early as 1582,
is shown by this pathetic appeal to Lord Burghley. “Truly, my singular
good Lord, I have not leisure to eat my meat, I am so called upon. I
am at the least the best part of one hundred nights in a year abroad in
searches. I never rest. And when I serve Her Majesty, then I am for the
most part worst spoken of and that many times. In the Court I have no man
to defend me, and as for my Lord Mayor, my chief hand, I am driven every
day to back him and his doings. My good Lord, for Christ’s sake! be such
a mean for me as that with credit I may be removed by Her Majesty from
this intolerable toil. Certainly I serve in a thankless soil. There is,
as I learn, like to fall a room of the Queen’s Serjeant; if your Lordship
please to help me to one of these rooms, I assure your honour that I will
do Her Majesty as painful service as six of them shall do. Help me, my
good Lord, in this my humble suit, and I will, God willing, set down for
your Lordship such a book of the law as your Lordship will like of.”
The offer of a new law book did not tempt Lord Burghley, and the end
did not come until nearly ten years afterwards, when in 1591 Fleetwood
resigned with a pension of £100 a year, which the Common Council voted
him. And in the next year he obtained the wished for post of Queen’s
Serjeant, which he held for scarcely two years, as he died on February
28th, 1594.
And this is the last piece of writing I have found of his, written the
day he gave up his Recordership. Even with his resignation upon his mind
he notes down for Lord Burghley’s satisfaction the excellent punishment
awarded to two lewd people for misconduct against the public health.
“This day I rode to the Yeld (Guild) Hall to sit on the commission for
strangers and in the lower end of Cheapside towards Poole’s (St. Paul’s)
there stood a man and a woman both aged persons with papers upon their
heads. The man was keeper of the conduit there. These two lewd people in
the night entered into the Conduit and washed themselves, _et ad hunc et
ibidem turpiter exoneraverunt ventres eorum, etc._
This day Mr. Recorder surrendered his office. The lot is now to be cast
between Mr. Serjeant Drew and one Mr. Fleming of Lincoln’s Inn. This
present Saturday.