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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
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- [02:16]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
How can I help?
- [02:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
- [02:19]
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- [02:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
My refund, though.
- [02:25]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
I'm freaking out.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm so relieved.
- [02:33]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
No problem.
- [02:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'll be with you every step of the way.
- [02:36]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
One in four was a fraud.
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- [02:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. A woodcut from A pamphlet of 1628 shows a street in London with a tavern whose name, the Windmill, is indicated by a hanging sign. In the foreground, a richly dressed older man is being set upon by a large crowd of men, young men and boys. He attempts to defend himself with a sword, but they hurl stones and wield cudgels. The picture shows a real life street murder that had happened that year on 13 June. This was three years into the reign of Charles I, during the period of the ascendancy of the king's favorite George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. And the man being murdered was Dr. John Lamb. John Lamb was in his 80s and he was widely associated with both the occult and the horrific sexual assault of a young girl. He was a man to be hated. So what looks like random and irrational mob violence at first glance may have been something far from random and far from irrationally motivated. In actual fact, Lam's murder has inextricable links with the growing crisis, the standoff between King and Parliament which coalesced around the petition of Right, the question of whether the king was allowed to raise money, that is tax, without parliamentary consent. In other words, there's a red thread linking this act of street violence to the dark arts, high politics, and even to the Civil War. To discuss the death of John Lamb, I'm delighted to be joined again on the podcast by Professor John Alastair Bellamy, professor of History at Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences in the US With Thomas Cogwell. He's the author of the Murder of King James I published by Yale University Press, and he's been on the podcast before to discuss murder in the Stuart Court. Today, let's talk about murder in the Stuart streets. Welcome back to the podcast.
- [05:39]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Oh, thank you very much for inviting me back.
- [05:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I loved our conversation last time and the storytelling about true crime. So we're gonna be picking up with a similar story in some ways today, at least a similar time period and a murder. So maybe you could start by Telling us about what happened on that tempted to say, Fateful Night of 13 June, 1628.
- [06:08]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Well, the story probably begins in the afternoon when a man called John Lamb goes to the theatre. He goes to the Fortune Theatre, which is north of the walls of London. He's noticed that the play was, as we'll figure out a little later, he's quite well known figure. And as he walks back towards the city, a crowd begins to mill around him. He's probably getting nervous at this point by the crowd, but he has dinner at a tavern outside the city walls. And it may be at this point that he hires a couple of sailors to act as his bodyguard. He's concerned about this attention he's drawing. So he enters the city walls and the crowd starts to get bigger and more aggressive as he moves down through the city streets. He takes refuge in the Windmill Tavern, which is Lothberry and Old Jury. And the crowd is now sizable and threatens to essentially sort of invade the tavern. And the landlord throws John Lamb out at some point, and it may be at this point the sailors decide that this is not a particularly good idea for them to hang around and they disappear. And Lamb is chased through the streets. He tries to get into private houses, but he's not allowed to find any kind of refuge. And at some point the chase he gives up and he's surrounded by a crowd and he is savagely beaten on the streets of Old Jury. He is still alive. After the crowd finishes the assault, he's carried to one of the London prisons, the counter. But he dies the following morning on the 14th of tune. So we're dealing with a kind of a street murder.
- [07:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And how do we know all of that? What are the sources that have allowed you to reconstruct his final hours in that way?
- [08:02]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Well, there are a number of different sources. So the authorities are not surprisingly, very disturbed by this large scale act of violence in the streets of London. Parliament is in session at the moment. London, of course, is the kind of capital and the King is furious and we know a little bit about what happens. The King demands that the city of London figure out who was responsible for allowing this to happen. The various kind of parish constables and the other kind of figures responsible for keeping law and order in the city. A hold before and they have to say what happened. So we know a bit from that. But what we also know are a lot of details from newsletters from men in London writing back reports of what had gone on. Because this was immediately recognized to have been a significant Event not just as a nasty crime, but as something with a much broader political resonance. And so there's newsletter accounts which allow us to kind of reconstruct in quite a lot of detail that last journey that Lamb takes through the streets of London.
- [09:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And do we know who did it, who the crowd was, who the people were who were carrying out this savage beating?
- [09:13]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Well, unfortunately, we have no names. When the king demanded that the city investigate the assault and bring the malefactors to justice, the city is remarkably unsuccessful in fighting anyone. They just don't produce a single person. What we do know from descriptions both from a kind of city investigation and from the newsletter accounts is that the crowd is often characterized as a crowd of boys. And by that they probably mean London apprentices. So late teenagers, early 20s, young men in that sort of peculiar, prolonged adolescence that is an apprenticeship in London at this time. They're probably not the only people in the crowd, but they probably formed the core of the crowd. Usually in the instance like this, we know that there's a kind of core group of the crowd that is kind of setting the agenda, and it often attracts passersby and other opportunists who will join a crowd to see what's going on and may get involved in stuff. So the best evidence we have is that we're dealing with a crowd dominated by young men, probably apprentices.
- [10:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And given one thing we know about John Lamb is that he's older. Do you think there's a generational aspect to the crime?
- [10:26]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Yeah, it's hard to tell. First of all, yeah, I mean, what makes the crime even more unsettling is that Lamb is probably around 80 years old. So he's an old man, very old in 17th century terms, and clearly physically presumably quite frail. He does at one point, according to reports, draw a sword or attempt to draw a sword on the crowd, but clearly no effective means of self defense. What may matter less than the kind of the generation gap is that what we know about apprentices is that apprentice culture in London had a sort of attitude which allowed the apprentice to see themselves as kind of the people who keep the sort of the rules of the street, who regulate morality, who know the difference between right and wrong. London apprentices, for instance, would on Shrove Tuesday, often attack brothels in a kind of sign of, kind of moral regulation. And so there's an apprentice culture in which the kind of the apprentice is someone who is responsible for kind of keeping things in order. So it may be that what we're dealing with here is that a group of young men who. Who thought when they were attacking this old man, that they were doing the right thing. And I think this is kind of crucial to understanding what happened, that the crowd probably thought that what it was doing was legitimate.
- [11:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, one of the pamphlets that talks about this is called A Brief Description of the Notorious Life of John Lamb. And Another entry says, Dr. John Lamb, the witch, was beaten to death in London Street. So tell us who he was, why he was notorious, and is there any evidence he was a witch?
- [12:08]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Who was he? So you've kind of raised already the kind of. The problem here. There's who was John Lamb, really, and who was John Lamb in the minds of his contemporaries? And sometimes it's difficult to line those things up, partly because there are many, many gaps in our biography of John Lamb. So say he's about in his 80s, probably when he dies. He's probably born in the 1540s, so he's lived a long life. There is some hints that as a young man he worked as a tutor in gentry households. So he's educated. At some point, he becomes a physician, a doctor of some kind. He practices medicine. There's no evidence he had any formal medical training, but that's not uncommon. And he appears to have developed a practice as a kind of magically inclined medical practitioner. Many medical practitioners at the time are quite diverse in their methods. They'll use a bit of this, bit of that. And Lamb appears to have used astrology, more occult skills. People claim that he's telling fortunes with a crystal ball, offering advice as well as medical treatment. There's evidence that his clientele skewed rich, that he was a fashionable medical practitioner. So this is a kind of intrinsically ambiguous job to have. There's always a suspicion of fraud, that cheats get involved in this kind of thing. The men who regulate the medical profession in London, the College of Physicians, are very skeptical about these unlicensed practitioners and often clamp down quite hard on their practices. But anyone who's using the occult arts, even in what they claim to be a kind of positive white magic type of mode, are always vulnerable to the accusation that they're deploying the dark arts, that they're in fact a witch. And it seems that at some point in his career, probably 1607, 1608, Lamb is attached to the household of Lord Windsor and appears to get involved in a series of events about which we know very little, but may have involved Lord Windsor's impotence, which became a problem immediately after his marriage. And we don't know how this was settled at the time. But in 1622, Lamb is actually charged with witchcraft and goes to the Worcester assizes to face a trial. And he's convicted of witchcraft for these incident involving Lord Windsor. And he's convicted and so he's technically convicted witch. And then the trial judge reprieves him from execution. And again, we have no details about the trial, the nature of the evidence. What we do know is that the judge may have been being particularly cautious. He'd been involved in a earlier witchcraft case in which accused people had been convicted and hanged and then turned out to be probably innocent. We're at the point in time where lawyers and other members of the legal profession are beginning to worry about the evidentiary basis of witchcraft accusations. So he may have just been cautious, but we don't know why Lamb is reprieved. So he is technically convicted witch. He's convicted in Worcester, he's held in Worcester and then again, for reasons we're not entirely clear about, in 1623 he's transferred to the King's Bench Prison in London, where he's essentially able to resume his medical practice from prison prisons. If you had enough money to pay off the right people, prisons could be quite open places and you could live there relatively comfortably and at least in Lamb's case, resume this trade he developed as a medical practitioner.
- [16:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So, I mean, this is quite a backstory. Notorious is the right word, isn't it? I mean, so he's got very elevated clients. Lord Windsor is an example, so he's mixing at a very high level society to get a conviction as a witch. In the 17th century, you'd have thought was absolutely going to lead to a hanging, but somehow without, we don't have the evidence, but that has been sidestepped and yet he's still in prison but once again able to practice. So I mean, it's all quite murky and you'd have thought there would have been a stain on him as a result of that conviction, but that's not the only thing that is a stain on his character. In fact, arguably something far more serious.
- [17:02]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Right, so while in prison in the King's Bench, and again, this prison is a relatively open situation. Early in 1624, he's accused of sexually assaulting an 11 year old girl who is essentially running errands and bringing stuff to Lamb, and he is charged with rape. And again, in a world in which rape prosecution lags far behind probably the actual number of rapes. So he's put on trial again in 1624 for another capital offense and he's again convicted and this time very shortly after the conviction, he is pardoned. So he's not just reprieved, he's pardoned and then he's released from captivity.
- [17:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I mean, I've done quite a bit of work on the cases of rape in this period of time and the sort of prosecution rates and it is notoriously difficult to convict somebody of rape because it was just so very difficult to prove in 17th century England. I think Kathy Walker wrote about this, saying that the legal requirements of proof meant that a rape woman had to provide the near impossible tangible proof of active physical resistance, which means that, you know, the rates of conviction would have been tiny. So the fact that he's convicted suggests that the evidence was fairly substantial.
- [18:43]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Yeah, yeah. So there are a couple of things that are important in the case, it looks like. First is that his Victim is an 11 year old girl. And again, some of the evidence we don't have full statistics but again this is the kind of case more likely to be prosecuted in part because the girl is still in some ways the property of the father and thus the degree to which the offense is damaging not only to her reputation, but to her family's reputation, the future marriageability of the child all increases the sort of, the sort of, the seriousness of this particular offense. The pamphlet you mentioned earlier has a quite detailed account of some of the evidence given in the rape case. And there is a family friend who talks to the girl, gets some of the details and there is some kind of medical examination and it's the way the pamphlet writes about it very much has the kind of, has the whiff of witchcraft around it. The sort of the, the place where she's assaulted is kind of smoking, it's almost kind of poisoned. It's a very powerful account of the physical injuries of a potential sexual assault. So this seems to be in a good case and clearly a jury in London was willing to convict on this. So yeah, it is remarkable that he is convicted, but equally remarkable that he's very quickly pardon.
- [20:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So do you think that there might be some connection between his murder and these convictions? I mean in both cases from an early modern perspective and in the latter case very much from our perspective as well, he has done something absolutely beyond the pale and been found guilty of it. We know that there's been that famous research by people like Natalie zema Davis and E.P. thompson talking about the way that crowds could act in a judicial fashion. Is that what's going on, do you think? Or could it be?
- [20:50]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
I mean, I think there's an element of it. So if you look at the two accounts of Lamb's death that are printed in the immediate aftermath, there's a ballad and there's the pamphlet you mentioned earlier. The ballad in particular describes the murder as essentially the execution of a witch. So Lamb's witchcraft is the central feature of the kind of ballad, and the logic of the ballad is that here's a witch and everyone knows he's a witch, and the boys execute him. The pamphlet is slightly less direct. I mean, when you read the pamphlet, it has a very detailed account of this rape case, and then it jumps to the murder. And though it doesn't ever explicitly say that the murder is a kind of late retribution for this capital offense against the daughter of a Londoner, you can read like that. And it looks like the last thing we. The last serious criminal act he'd done was this kind of. This brutal assault for which he'd escaped all punishment. And so there's a way in which the murder can read like an execution. That the authorities had failed in their duty to execute a felon, and the boys, the apprentices, were taking up the slack. They were sort of stepping into the role of the authorities and doing what the authorities had failed to do. And so I think there's an element in that. I think you're quite right, that one of the important things we're trying to figure this out is to look at the ways in which what the crowd does, what it says has a meaning, has a structure to it. It's kind of not random violence. It's not mindless violence. It may be violence that we find appalling and unpleasant, but it is violence that has a structure to it, has a meaning to it, and has a kind of moral logic and a moral purpose to it, at least in the mind of the perpetrators.
- [22:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's striking, though, that there's that gap between those two sources, one stressing the witchcraft, one stressing the rape, the pedophilia. Is there any way of determining what the crowd would have been objecting to more?
- [23:02]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Right, so then the question returns to, well, what did Lamb do next? Pardoned and released from prison. So at what level? He resumes his London practice. But very quickly, his reputation, I think, takes another new turn. He becomes both more notorious and he becomes increasingly a kind of political figure. And that kind of political reputation that he acquires is entirely based on perceptions of his relationship with the most powerful figure at the Stuart court, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, the Favorite of King James I, who's king when Lamb is pardoned, and who, quite remarkably, remains the favorite of the new King Charles I, when he succeeds his father in March 1625. I think that the other element here is the relationship between Lamb and Buckingham is the most controversial figure of the mid and late 1620s.
- [24:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, remind us why Buckingham is so controversial, and then could you build for us what we know about how Lamb was connected to him?
- [24:15]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
So Buckingham has been controversial from the moment he appeared at court, around 1614, 1615, he's the royal favorite. He enjoys unrivaled access to both James I and Charles I. He exercises a huge amount of political influence and all the things that come with it, including control over the distribution of offices, large amounts of money, land, and then increasing influence over the direction of domestic and foreign policy. He is an object of great rivalry and envy within the court. So there's a lot of maneuvering at court to try and bypass him, even kind of bring him down. But the degree of his favor from both James and Charles is quite remarkable. They both stick with him despite criticism. From about 1623, 1624, he becomes increasingly independent minded. He breaks with James I and allies with the Prince Charles over foreign policy. He more or less along with Prince Charles, makes a deal or works with parliament to strong arm James I into a war with Spain. And he becomes the leading kind of military figure in the war with Spain that he's called for. And when in 1627, the English, for reasons which no one really fully understood, also declared war on France, Buckingham is the kind of major military leader of the campaign in France. And so he is an object of great fear, of great envy, and increasingly of great controversy. And the key thing is that the 1620s in England experience a kind of turbulent political environment. There are a lot of anxieties, a lot of debates, and increasingly there's a tendency to blame Buckingham for everything that is going wrong. He's the guy running the show. His influence over the King is far too great. He's far too rich, far too powerful. He's dangerous. He's making rash decisions. He's, as one poet put it at the time, he's the captain of the ship of state, and essentially he's steering the ship of state onto the rocks.
- [26:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what do we know about the nature of his relationship with Lamb? How possible is it to establish that as a reality as well as an idea, if that makes sense. Yeah.
- [26:41]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
So the reality of it is murky, complex. So the first time we get or I found Anyone claiming a connection is in the immediate aftermath of the pardon after the rape conviction in 1624, in which a newsletter reports kind of, that Buckingham had been instrumental in the lobbying process that achieves the pardon.
- [27:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I see. So it's so difficult to explain why he's pardoned that there must have been some sort of like high level intervention.
- [27:15]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Yeah, from the outside, it looks like that. From the inside, we do have some documents. There is someone asks the King to look into it, into the case. There's rumors that Lamb, being a lamb, had offered some secret intelligence to the King and that if you just help him out in this particular legal jam, he would reveal the whereabouts of kind of hidden jewels or more details about the Gunpowder Plot. Somehow the King's appetite is whetted and the King asks one of his chief lawyers to look into the case. And essentially the case for the pardon is on strictly legal terms, relatively strong. I mean, the case that Lamb makes is first, oh, he didn't do it, and this is a shakedown. The girl's father owes him money. This is an attempt to try and extort. He refused to play along, thus the charge. But he also makes a technical legal claim that even if he did do it, he wasn't technically raped because there's no physical evidence of penetration, which was needed for a rape conviction. And so there's enough for kind of doubt. And the King's lawyer sort of makes that case to the King and that's the ostensible reasons for the pardon. But again, there's rumors at the time that he must have had someone on the inside, close to the King, close to the Privy Council, helping him. But again, we have one voice speculating it's Buckingham, and it might have been the kind of natural assumption, but we don't know for sure. Then things get even murkier. In 1625, Buckingham's involved with a complex and for him, very serious interfamilial problem. His brother John, who's Viscount Purbeck, had made a kind of flashy marriage a few years earlier to Francis Coke, the daughter of Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer. Frances had been very unwilling to make this marriage. She'd been more or less strong armed into doing it. The marriage was rocky and the relationship between the couple grows worse because John Villiers suffers from mental illness and is clearly a very difficult man to live with. And Francis conducts an affair, and this is a great stain on the Buckingham family honor, and this attempt to bring her to some kind of reckoning for adultery. And in the course of the kind of the High Church court proceedings around adultery. Lamb's name appears again. This time, Lamb appears to be implicated in helping Lady Purbeck with her marital woes, perhaps again using his occult skills to render an inconvenient husband impotent. So in 1625, he's on the side of the people that the Duke of Buckingham is trying to attack legally and to bring to heel. So they're antagonists at this point. And then a year later, 1626 is probably the kind of watershed where we don't know exactly what has happened, whether Lamb, in the context of these legal proceedings against Lady Purbeck, has suggested to Buckheim that he could offer him services that might be useful. But 1626 is kind of key year in which Lamb and Buckingham get yoked together more frequently, in which the kind of claim starts being made that Lamb is the Duke's devil, Buckyham's kind of in house sorcerer, providing him with an array of nefarious services, all being used to advance Buckingham's power.
- [31:02]
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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Professor John Alastair Bellamy
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- [33:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Select homes only. That title was very interesting because it suggests a kind of political usefulness of witchcraft.
- [34:04]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
So to figure out or why a court favorite would need an in house witch, you can look at some of the attacks that begin to accelerate in 1626 around Buckingham. So 1626 is a kind of crucial year. 1626 is dominated by the Parliament's attempt to impeach Buckingham, to try and remove him from government. And he's charged with an array of crimes, including meddling in the medical treatment for James I and contributing to the King's death. So those particularly tense hearings in the House of Commons, Charles I is standing behind his favorite very firmly, but Parliament is going after him. So we start to get these underground writings, whether they're manuscript poems or pamphlets printed overseas, directly attacking Buckingham and linking him to Lamb. So one of the most notorious and long lasting of these pamphlets is a book called the Forerunner of Revenge, written by a Scottish doctor called George Egglesham, which lays out the case that Buckingham had poisoned his rivals at court and had poisoned King James I. And as part of the kind of narrative of Buckingham's career as a poisoner at court, Eglisham makes the claim that one of Buckingham's victims had refused a marriage alliance with Buckingham's family because Buckingham was an ally of the ringleader of the witches, Dr. Lamb. And so in the context of that pamphlet, which is about poisoning, the implication is that Buckingham may have used the witch's stereotypical skill in poisons to help his campaign of murder through the court. The other way in which the witchcraft connection is usually invoked is that Buckingham has somehow bewitched the King. And this becomes, for many people, a way to explain what is in certain ways, inexplicable, why first James and then Charles refused to offload Buckingham, despite the serious crimes and misdemeanors that are being alleged against him. And so one argument is that the King has been bewitched by the Jew, literally bewitched by the Jew. So for some people, this is a way of exculpating the King from responsibility. He's a victim of Buckingham's evil ways, too. So, again, this is suggestion that Lamb and other witches in the Duke's employ might be providing special kinds of filters of charms in order to control the King. There are allegations that Buckingham using witchcraft as a mode of protection against his enemies. And there are also more scandalous allegations that he's using witchcraft and charms in order to seduce court women.
- [36:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So does this mean that we should start to rethink the attack on Lamb as a political act?
- [37:02]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
This is the kind of key point. So it helps to go back to June 1628 and what's going on politically. We mentioned earlier that one of the reasons this disorder in the streets was so shocking was it's happening during session of parliament. And so June 1628 is a very famous month in the history of the English Parliament. It begins with debates over the Petition of Right, in which the House of Commons wants to kind of reassert English liberties that have been, in their view, violated by royal policy over the previous year or so, which the King had raised money to fund the war effort without Parliamentary consent, in which he'd imposed martial law in parts of England. While the army was being assembled, he billeted troops on people without their permission. So early in June, the Petition of Right is being debated, and almost immediately after the Petition of Right is reluctantly assented to by the King, Parliament starts drawing up a kind of document, a Remonstrance on the State of the Nation, which is a remarkable document in many ways. It anticipates a lot of the language that we find in 1640, 41 on the road to Civil War. It's a document that sort of essentially alleges the existence of a plot to undermine English liberties and to undermine English religion. A plot that's Catholic in origin involves dealing with foreign powers. It involves corrupting the English church from within. It involves eroding the rights of freeborn Englishmen and at the core of the problem, according to the Remonstrance, is Buckingham. Buckingham is the problem. What's also going on is that the war effort has been almost consistently disastrous. There have been two major expeditions, one against the Spanish in 1625, one against the French in 1627. Both had ended very badly. The one against the French, Buckingham is actually commanding an English fleet that lands on the Ile de Rais outside La Rochelle. They set siege to a French fortress there. They spent weeks outside the fortress. When they assault it, they are repelled. Many men are lost in the retreat. It's a humiliating military setback. London and other places are kind of crawling with demob soldiers and sailors who are unpaid, desperate for money, angry at Buckingham in particular as a military commander. There's a kind of aura of. Kind of discontent, of crisis. And there is this kind of growing sense that Buckingham is the problem and that the only way to somehow regenerate English greatness, to restore English liberties, English religion, is to eliminate Buckingham. And so the remonstrance in Parliament asks the King essentially, remove this man, let him go. But Charles I is both loyal and stubborn and will not accede to it. So there's a kind of sense of real political tension in the air, crystallizing June 1628. And we also have to assume, given the amount of talk and rumor and libelous poems that are in circulation, is that everyone in London knows John Lamb is connected to the Jinn, that the two men are a pair, that he's the Duke's devil. And I think this is probably the key to figuring out why, on June 13, 1628, that crowd of boys starts the menace and then attacks him.
- [40:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Am I right in thinking that prophecy also has a role to play?
- [40:44]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Yeah. I mean, the other thing that is clear by. I mean beginning in 1626, accelerating, 27, but very clear in early 1628, is that there is this sense that Buckingham is doomed, that the King will not give him up, will not surrender into justice. Parliament had tried to impeach him. That had been thwarted. The King had dissolved Parliament to protect the Duke. He'd sacrificed any hope of additional funding to do that. But there was a sense that there's a kind of violent storm brewing around the Duke. Many of these libelous poems that are circulating from hand to hand or being spoken out loud are actively calling for the Duke's death. When the Duke dies, all will be well. Some of them have kind of fantasies of the Duke as a great stag buck, king of game, hunted and killed and again, his death being imagined in this moment of redemption. And it thus becomes relatively safe bet for those of a prophetic inclination to think that Buckingham's days may be numbered. Lady Eleanor Davis, who's a quite notorious self branded prophetess, prophesies in 1628 that Buckingham will die in the summer. There are little word games called chronographs that we 17th century people like to play with where you wrote out a person's name in kind of Roman letters in there, every time you came across a Roman numeral, you would add up the names. So if you write out Buckinghamius, Dux, so Gorgias dux, buccinghamei, and you add up the Roman numerals in it, you get 1628. It works, right? And again these would circulate with little couplets saying that, you know, since thy name with this year doth agree, it shall be either fatal to us or thee. So there is this sort of violent rhetoric in the air, this sincerely held, if completely naive opinion that the nation's political problems would be solved by the removal of one man and this kind of mood of inevitability. So there's a violent atmosphere. Politics is moved out of kind of discourse and debate into violence. And there are concerns, people are showing concerns that there will be blood, that they're in a situation of such tension in which violence appears to some people to be the only solution, that this is part of the mood.
- [43:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And indeed that is what happens. Lamb's murder only presages that of his patron by a couple of months.
- [43:31]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
It does. And what we can probably argue is that Lamb's murder is in part a kind of proxy murder of Buckingham. Yes, he's a rapist, yes, he's a witch, but he's the Duke's devil. And we know in some of the reports from the newsletters and the investigation is that some of the shouts on the street, the language on the street is directly connecting Lamb to Buckingham as he's being attacked. And immediately after his death there are people drawing the connection. The libelous poems celebrating Lamb's death all see it as, okay, Lamb first, Buckingham next. There's a handwritten placard that's posted near the site of the assault. Shortly after there are, which basically says, you know, who rules the king? The Duke. Who rules the Duke? The devil's now dead. The Duke is next. Unless the King does something. There is a threat. And there's also a couplet that does the round, a little jingle that does the rounds. And we find copies of it in gentlemen's books. And we know that ordinary people on the streets of London are repeating it. You've got something like, George and Charles do what they can, yet George shall die like Dr. Lamb. And so immediately after the Lamb's murder, the sense that this is the beginning of this kind of regeneration of the nation. The Duke's devil is dead first and Buckingham will be next.
- [45:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So are you suggesting that the conviction of rape and the pardon and perhaps the London Crown's attitude towards that maybe a red herring and that we should understand Lamb's murder far more in the context of the language around witchcraft and this association with this desperately difficult man at the heart of the government.
- [45:29]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Well, I think you could kind of play with that a little bit and actually see that these aren't kind of contradictory statements. Because there's a degree to which the reputation of Lamb, which rapist, charlatan, dark arts advisor to politically corrupt leader, overlaps very clearly with kind of Buckingham's reputation. Right. So Buckingham is associated with witchcrafted in all kinds of ways, not only employing witches, his mother is often accused of dabbling in witchcraft. The fact that Lamb has committed an act of sexual violence, he's a sexual transgressor, fits very clearly also with Buckingham's reputation as a sexual transgressor. He's always been an object of suspicion, whether it was suspicion about the nature of his relationship with James I, but by this point in the late 1620s, particularly kind of reputation for rampant womanizing, the seduction of the wives of political rivals, a kind of insatiable sexual appetite which is coded as a form of. Of lack of self governance. And this inability to control his appetite is read as definitive proof of his inability to hold any kind of political responsibility. The man cannot control himself. So Lamb as sexual offender, Lamb as witch maps onto Buckingham as sexual offender, Buckingham as witch, and the two can become fused. So there's a degree in which one might imagine that the apprentices beating up this old man felt that they were attacking the much younger, more vigorous, more powerful body of George Villiers at the same time. But they couldn't get at him. Right. He's out of reach, he's protected. And so the two figures become fused. And I think it's important that we recognize that political storms around Buckingham include a lot of what we might now consider kind of scandalous material, but which at the time had a deep kind of moral weight to them and fit in with all the other things that he was being accused of.
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- [49:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
This suggests an extraordinary level of popular engagement with politics among the young men of London at least. Does this disrupt our ideas about ordinary folks involvement in such matters?
- [50:02]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Well, I think. I think it does. The London is this kind of center of political life in many ways. And historians have long known that the royal administration, the parliament, the law courts in London, adjacent to London as kind of sophisticated city government, these are centers of important political activity. But there's an important kind of street level political culture that we've been able to reconstruct over the last 20 years or so of academic research, which has been looking at the kind of news discourse writing circulating in London, both in places where gentlemen and lawyers and elite figures circulate, but also on the streets, in shops, in taverns. If you pay attention to the cases of seditious speech, you find quite ordinary People talking at great length about what's going on in high politics. And we know that there's, particularly by the late 20s, London is just buzzing with talk and writing and rumor about Buckingham. Men writing newsletters, who these people tend to be from the elite, are recording that this stuff is everywhere. We've got interesting snapshots of relatively humble people talking about Buckingham in ways that make sense. And we've got decent evidence that the kind of material where we can reconstruct the image of Lamb or we can reconstruct the image of Buckingham, this kind of material circulates widely across different classes. You might remember too, that literacy rates in London are higher than they are elsewhere. Apprentices skew more literate than one would imagine. And so they have access to written as well as kind of oral discourse around the Duke. So I see the late 1620s as a moment in the intensification of popular political engagement, that ordinary people are invested in some of these big questions about the relationship between King and Parliament, about the nation at war, about royal favoritism and its problems. And it's important to take this seriously because if we jump forward a decade to the late 1630s, early 1640s, when Charles I's regime collapses, one of the striking features about the crisis that begins in 1640 is the over role of large London crowds in accelerating the crisis, engaging with the politics. And that doesn't come out of nowhere. The 1620s are in many ways an education in ordinary people's kind of political worldviews.
- [52:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's fascinating. So we can draw links between the violent murder of John Lamb in 1628 and the events of 1640-42, the road to civil War.
- [52:52]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Yeah, I think you can draw the links in a number of ways. I mean, one way is looking at the degree of ideological polarization in 1628. You can see it in the reaction to Lamb's murder. So if you look at popular poems, the ballad, the pamphlet, the general mood is that, oh, this was a good thing, this is a moral thing, an evil man died. And when you get away from the printed material into the underground material, it's quite clear earlier about this is about Buckingham, and this is the first step towards the restoration of the kingdom. But the King looks at this and he is horrified. Charles I, we know, is a ruler highly attuned to questions of order, disorder. He likes things regulated. And this is an event designed to essentially conjure up his worst nightmares, his worst fears, that his people had become subject to what is sometimes called popularity. Crazed arguments, misperceptions unruliness and disorder. And here he was seeing it on the streets and he's remarkably persistent with the city. He's very annoyed that the city cannot produce any malefactors. And he eventually sues the city and fines the city for their failure to kind of police the streets effectively. So he would look at this event as a dangerous event. And we can see men around him, Charles and the Privy Council trying to kind of step up a defense of Buckingham. So there's a wonderful little case that's going on simultaneously. There's a man called Robert Melvin who gets seriously drunk in a pub in London in May 1628. And as many people tended to do in 1628 when drunk spouted off about Buckingham. And when he sobered up, he realized he was in big trouble. He denied he'd said most of it, but maybe he said it and he's, he's thrown into prison and left there for a while. But in the immediate wake of the Lamb murder, the authorities decide that the sort of the anti Buckingham sentiment needed dealing with and they put Melvin on trial for treason. Right. So having seen him as a relatively minor, annoying offender, they try to try him of treason and that case collapses embarrassingly. And so you can see the authorities trying to kind of contain this and to read it and if you move a few months later. So in August 1628, Buckingham is in fact murdered. He's aware he's at risk, but he famously says to his friends, look, if there's an assassin who's willing to die while killing me, then you'll never be able to protect me. There's no protection against that. And that's essentially what happens. He's in Portsmouth, he's about to lead an expedition back to France. He's in a crowd of people in a small room. The assassin slips in and punches a knife in his chest. And the reaction to the Buckingham's assassination is on the one hand, the nation's redeemed, the assassin is a great hero. We are now back on the road to English greatness. And on the King's side is that there is something seriously wrong with my kingdom and the road, which Charles decides. I don't want to deal with Parliament anymore. I don't trust my people. I think they're unruly, disorderly and dangerous. All these things that lead him to the personal rule essentially grow out of that experience of this popular violent politics in the late 1620s. This is a story there. The other way you can link it is that Lamb and Lamb's death, just like Buckingham, and Buckingham's death don't get forgotten. They are talked about, they are remembered through the 1630s. There's a play apparently, about Dr. Lamb that never sees the light of day, I think, but written in the 1630s. People are still talking and reading about Buckingham during the 1630s. They're reading libelous poems. They're still processing the assassination all through the 1630s. And then in 1640, when the Caroline regime collapses. And one of the first major signs that the London crowd is going to be a big player in this crisis is that apprentices again lay siege to the Lambeth palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. And this is a major popular disorder. It shows the degree to which Charles's religious policies are at the center of the crisis. But that old jingle from 1628 gets recycled. And it probably goes something like, let Charles and Marie. So Henrietta Maria's replaced George. Let Charles and Marie do what they can, yet Law Lord shall die. Luck, Dr. Lamb. So it was the apprentices almost saying to themselves, well, we did it once, we stepped in when no one else would do it, and now we can do it again, but this time with another thing. So the memory of the case is clearly got air on the streets of London.
- [57:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I suppose if you just think about the passage of time, 12 or 14 years, the apprentices in 1628 are men in their prime in 1640, 42. Yeah.
- [57:47]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
And you could think the degree to which people, both in Parliament and then on the streets in the crisis, 1640-42, mostly people who probably came of political age in the 1620s. And the legacy of the 20s, the memory of the 20s, the sense that what is happening now has been coming a long time. And one of the things that a remarkable feature of the Civil War years is that when Parliament gets to tell its story, why are we doing this? It routinely goes back to the 20s, usually 1625, and it tells a story that begins with 1625. And it's often in a story in which Buckingham will appear in a relatively important role before his disappearance in 1628. So the memory is important, and I think also perhaps the political education is important. It's hard really to sort of be entirely comfortable with making the argument that there's something progressive about an act of street violence. But there is a degree to which the Lamb's murder becomes a kind of way in which ordinary people are asserting or claiming a kind of political agency that in the absence of leadership, we, the ordinary people, can take up the burden of fighting against Popish plots, of fighting against the enemies of the kingdom. And this kind of sentiment is explicitly mobilized during the early Civil War with the Parliament's protestation oath, which essentially asks ordinary people to affirm that thing. But I think we can see as part of this political education of the 1620s, the sense of both a right to political action and a sense that it could achieve something, even if it achieves something through brutal violence.
- [59:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
One last question for you, then. I remember Professor Glynn Parry talking about how the accumulated documents from the 19th century, of state papers from the late 16th century, omit many references to occult matters, to the dark arts, to witchcraft in dealings between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, for example, because they didn't think that was political. How should we reassess the role of witchcraft beliefs in the political culture of early modern England?
- [60:04]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think there's probably very broadly kind of two ways we could answer it. One would go back to perhaps John Lamb's ideal version of himself as magical advisor to the great and the good, working the elite market in London and around court, providing services that may toe the line between the illicit and illicit. And we have evidence of other figures, Lamb like figures in London on the verges of the court, who are called in surging the Overbury murder case. Notoriously, Frances Howard, the Countess of Somerset, is alleged of consulted Simon Forman, an astrological physician, in order to obtain charms to render her first husband, the Earl of Essex, impotent. And there is kind of sense that elite figures might consult these occult experts. And you can probably draw a line between respectable all the way, from the more respectable versions to the least respectable versions of men peddling this kind of advice. So they're on the edge of things. Clearly, Lamb gets involved in the lives of the elite, the marital lives of the elite, is involved in some way with Lord Windsor and again with Lord and Lady Purbeck. So that's one way degree to which these kind of figures are actually deployed at court and the knowledge they have is useful. And the other is in terms of kind of images, political imagery, the political imagination. What does it mean when the royal court becomes associated in widely read writings with the occult, with witchcraft? And here we can see the kind of political potential, political costs, you know, if you take seriously, as many did, the notion that witches obtain their power via a demonic pact, that they're not somehow skilled or inherited, they make a deal with the devil, that witchcraft is in many ways, as the historian Stuart Clark famously Put in this kind of radical inversion of every sort of positive value you can imagine. It inverts the gender order, the political order, the religious order, the social order. Witchcraft is this master inversion. What happens when the royal court becomes associated in ordinary people's minds with witchcraft, with the crime of witchcraft? And what happens when this crime, this pollution, this corruption, is not being dealt with by the people who should deal with it? So the King's responsibility is, the King himself, increasingly and repeatedly says in the early 17th century, the court is his household. As the head of that household, he's responsible for keeping it in order, just like a good patriarch everywhere should keep his household in order. What happens when the King's not doing it? What happens when the King seems remarkably close to a person like Buckingham, who is now rumored to be deploying witches, employing witches for his political and personal ends. And that is a powerful negative image of the royal court, which I think we have to take seriously. And I think because we tend to think, well, witchcraft and high politics belong in different units of an academic course. People who work on witchcraft work on getting village life and social tensions, and people who work on high politics work on parliaments and courtiers. But those two worlds are connected in interesting ways. And the image of the court as a kind of a site of demonic activity is potentially very explosive. Particularly, I'd say, the last thing degree to which the inversion of witchcraft can be connected to the other great religious anxiety of the age, which is that the court has been corrupted by Catholicism. I mean, this becomes the great trope repeated through the late 1620s and into the 1640s, that there's a popish plot afoot, that Catholic forces has secured power at court and that the court has become not the bastion against popery, against Catholicism, but it's become that complicit in the plot to undermine the true religion. And again, potpourri, like witchcraft, is often imagined through this series of inversions, that it's a back to front version, an upside out version of Christianity. And so the witchcraft potpourri link is a particularly volatile political mix.
- [64:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, that was an amazing deep dive into a really important moment in politics in London, in England, in the country more broadly. It will have implications for all of the nations that make up this country. And thank you, Professor Alastair Bellany, for explaining how we get from a street murder to civil war and far beyond.
- [65:08]
Professor John Alastair Bellamy
Well, thank you for asking me. It's fun to talk about John Lamb, even though he was not a very nice person.
- [65:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you. You, thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History. Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistorykit.com and I look forward to joining you you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors From History.
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