The Murder of John Lambe Crowd Violence, Court Scandal and Popular Politics in Early SeventeenthCentury England

THE MURDER OF JOHN LAMBE:
CROWD VIOLENCE, COURT SCANDAL

AND POPULAR POLITICS IN EARLY
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
I
By the summer of 1628, the Fortune playhouse was one of only
three open-air, public theatres still in business in London. In its
heyday, before a devastating fire in the winter of 1621, the For-
tune had been considered by some ‘the fairest playhouse’ in the
town, and had drawn a respectable crowd;1 by 1628, five years
after the reconstructed theatre had opened, the venue had per-
haps begun to acquire what would become an ‘overwhelmingly
plebeian’ reputation, drawing rowdy audiences that one contem-
porary dismissed as a rabble of ‘prentizes and apell-wyfes’.2 Situ-
ated north of the City walls on the eastern side of Golden (or
Golding) Lane, in the impoverished parish of St Giles without
Cripplegate, the Fortune, like other open-air theatres, offered a
range of accommodation — from penny admission places among
the groundlings to more expensive seats in the galleries. On a
good day, perhaps three thousand people could pack themselves
into the building.3
We do not know whether Friday, 13 June 1628 was a good day
for the Fortune’s investors. No record survives of the entertain-
ment offered there that afternoon; and of the men and women who
paid to see it, we know the identity of only one. His name was John
Lambe and he was an old man, probably in his early eighties by
1
Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1941–68),
i, 141.
2
Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge, 1984), 304; Bentley,
Jacobean and Caroline Stage, i, 268, 315, 319–20.
3
S. P. Cerasano, ‘ ‘‘More Elbow Roome, but Scant Better Aire’’: The Fortune Play-
house and its Surroundings’, Indiana Social Studies Quart., xxxv (1982); John Scho-
field, The Building of London: From the Conquest to the Great Fire, 3rd edn (Stroud,
1999), 163–4; Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London,
1576–1642 (Princeton, 1981), 185–7. Schofield and Cook reconstruct capacity from
plans for the original Fortune; Cerasano (p. 80) suggests that the theatre was rebuilt to
the same scale.
Past and Present, no. 200 (August 2008) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2008
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtn013
38 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 200
June 1628.4 The actors knew him, at least by reputation, for in the
previous few years his notoriety had been exploited for comic relief
in at least two plays. The groundlings probably knew him too, for
John Lambe was a London celebrity.
The last act of John Lambe’s long life was played out, in bru-
tal fashion, that night on the streets of London.5 A number of
sources, differing in detail but not in essentials, allow us to re-
construct Lambe’s final hours. At the theatre, Lambe had been
noticed by ‘the boyes of the towne, and other unruly people’ who,
after the entertainment was done, began to threaten the old man
as he made his way back through the fields into the City.6 He may
have drawn a sword, but the boys continued to follow him. At
some point, probably before he entered the City walls, Lambe
hired some sailors to protect him from the crowd, and about nine
o’clock, after he had dined in a tavern near the walls, the sailors
escorted Lambe through Moorgate.7 By now the sun had set, and
the pursuing crowd grew larger as it tracked Lambe south down
Coleman Street towards Old Jewry. Frantically, Lambe looked
for a house or tavern to take him in, and for a while he took refuge
in the Windmill Tavern, at the corner where Lothbury crossed the
north end of Old Jewry. But when the crowd began to attack the
building, the host threw Lambe back out onto the street, where he
discovered that his bodyguard of sailors, assaulted by the crowd
outside the Windmill, had run off. The old man continued
4
National Archives, London, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), SP 14/164/
57:II. The only substantial consideration of Lambe is Leba M. Goldstein, ‘The Life
and Death of John Lambe’, Guildhall Studies in London Hist., iv (1979), a pioneering
work marred by several factual errors.
5
The sources are A Briefe Description of the Notorious Life of Iohn Lambe, Otherwise
Called Doctor Lambe: Together with his Ignominious Death (‘Amsterdam’, 1628, STC
15177), C3v–C4r; Matthew Parker, The Tragedy of Doctor Lambe, reproduced in fac-
simile in The Pepys Ballads, ed. W. G. Day, i (Cambridge, 1987), 134–5; a manuscript
diary printed in Proceedings in Parliament, 1628, ed. Mary Frear Keeler, Maija Jansson
Cole and William B. Bidwell, 6 vols. (New Haven and London, 1977–83), vi, 117; a
letter from Sir Francis Nethersole, printed ibid., 197; two newsletters from Joseph
Mead, in British Library, London (hereafter BL), Harley MS 390, fos. 412r, 415r–v
(printed with mistranscriptions in Thomas Birch (comp.), Court and Times of Charles I,
ed. R. F. Williams, 2 vols. (London, 1849), i, 364–8); and Edmond Howes’s continu-
ation of John Stow’s Annales: or, A Generall Chronicle of England (London, 1631, STC
23340), 1043. For another narrative, see Goldstein, ‘Life and Death of John Lambe’,
25–6.
6
Briefe Description, C3v.
7
Corporation of London Records Office (hereafter CLRO), Repertories of the
Court of Aldermen, vol. xlii, fo. 213v, states that the disturbance took place between
9 and 10 p.m.
THE MURDER OF JOHN LAMBE 39
seeking shelter, at one point apparently taking refuge in a lawyer’s
house, until the crowd ‘threw stones & threatened to pull downe
the House’ unless Lambe was surrendered.8 By now, the City
constables had been called out to deal with the disturbance, but
they either arrived too late or were powerless to intervene.9 Some-
where on Old Jewry, the crowd seized Lambe and pushed him to
the ground. Then, ‘with stones and cudgels, and other weapons’
the ‘people’ set upon him with merciless ferocity. By the time they
had finished, Lambe’s ‘skull was broken, one of his eyes hung out
of his head, and all partes of his body bruised and wounded so
much, that no part was left to receive a wound’.10 As his assailants
dispersed under cover of darkness, the semi-conscious Lambe
was carried southwards along Old Jewry to the Counter prison
where, early the next morning, as one contemporary noted, he
‘ended a wretched life by a miserable & strange death’.11
Even in death, however, he continued to draw a crowd. The
diarist Walter Yonge learned that ‘multitudes of people’ had come
to the Counter, paying up to sixpence to see Lambe’s corpse.
Joseph Mead reported that the prison keeper ‘gott above 20l by
taking 2d & groats apeece of such as came to see [Lambe] when he
was dead’. Another contemporary listed the strange assortment
of objects found on the murdered man’s body: not only the sword
or long knife brandished outside the Fortune, but also several
other knives, a ‘round crystal ball’, a dozen embroidered silk
pouches, a ‘gold nightcap’, forty shillings in cash and eight
engraved portraits — ‘such pictures as are ordinarily sold’ —
including one of Frances Howard, countess of Somerset, court
beauty, reputed witch and whore, and convicted murderer.12
II
Historians disagree sharply about the level and frequency of vio-
lent disorder in early modern London.13 But even accepting the
8
BL, Harley MS 390, fo. 412r.
9
Compare BL, Harley MS 390, fo. 412r, and Briefe Description, C4r.
10
Briefe Description, C4r.
11
12
BL, Add. MS 35331, fo. 21r; BL, Harley MS 390, fo. 412r; Proceedings in
Parliament, 1628, ed. Keeler, Cole and Bidwell, vi, 117.
13
See, for example, the critiques of some of the more excessive proponents of
the ‘stability’ school in K. J. Lindley, ‘Riot Prevention and Control in Early Stuart
(cont. on p. 40)
most pessimistic assessments, the events of 13 June 1628 repre-
sented a serious and unusual disturbance. The pursuit and beat-
ing of Lambe and the assaults on the Windmill Tavern and on
private houses clearly constituted, as one observer noted, a ‘pro-
digious disorder’, an unchecked riot in the very heart of the City at
a time when parliament was in session.14 Charles I — whose love
of order lay at the core of his political world view — reprimanded
the City authorities for their negligence. On 15 June the Privy
Council officially notified the mayor that the king was deeply dis-
turbed that a mob of ‘dissolute and disorderly persons assembled
together in great numbers’ had been able to swarm and murder
unimpeded by civic officers. The king was
verie sensible of the scandall that may hereby be cast upon the govern-
ment of the Realme in generall when the chiefe Cittie thereof and where
his owne person is resident should by the remissnes and neglect of
Magistrates in th’ execution of his lawes suffer a fact and misdemenor
of soe high a nature to be comitted and to passe unpunished.15
Charles ordered the City to punish those responsible for the riot
and for the failure to police it. According to Mead, Charles told
the mayor, who had been summoned to Whitehall ‘to give an ac-
count of this uprore’, that ‘though Lamb were a vicious fellow, he
would require an accompt of sombody for his subject’.16
The City made some effort to satisfy the king. Edward Grubb
and William Towleson, two City Marshal’s men present in Cole-
man Street Ward on the night of Lambe’s murder, were commit-
ted to Newgate for failing to ‘send word . . . of that Tumultuous
Assemblie whereby the same might have bin suppressed and his
Majesty’s peace kept’.17 A number of constables and other offi-
cers were also jailed for neglect of duty, but quickly bailed to help
in the search for the rioters, and though Grubb and Towleson
remained in custody, they too were allowed out ‘in the Companie
of their keeper’ to help ‘discover some of the said offendors’.18 No
suspect was identified or apprehended, however, and the City’s
(n. 13 cont.)
London’, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xxxiii (1983), and Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit
of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), esp. 1–9.
14
Proceedings in Parliament, 1628, ed. Keeler, Cole and Bidwell, vi, 197.
15
CLRO, Remembrancia, vol. vi, item 150, pp. 167–8; Acts of the Privy Council of
England, 1627–28 (London, 1940), 492.
16
17
CLRO, Repertories of the Court of Aldermen, vol. xlii, fo. 213v.
18
CLRO, Remembrancia, vol. vi, item 151, pp. 168–9.
belated police efforts failed to appease Charles. The king sued the
City in King’s Bench, and late in 1632, after lengthy legal pro-
ceedings, the court imposed a £1,000 fine on the mayor, alder-
men and citizens.19
III
It is hard not to see the crowd that murdered John Lambe through
the Privy Council’s own revealing adjectives: dissolute, dis-
orderly, tumultuous, its propensity to violence encoded, as it were,
in the presumed low social status of its members. But this assault
was no random act, no manifestation of the irrational ‘mob’ men-
tality of ‘the many-headed monster’. However brutal the crime,
however potent the psychic gratifications the murderers derived
from the unity of the crowd and the feel of skin and bone under
their cudgels, this was a meaningful, expressive and precisely
targeted piece of violence.20 Of course, such interpretative claims
are now common to historiographical analysis of collective action
and violence. Over thirty years ago, E. P. Thompson and Natalie
Zemon Davis pioneered approaches to the early modern crowd
that stressed the expressive and structured forms of popular
violence.21 To argue that the Lambe riot was structured and
19
CLRO, Journal of the Court of Common Council, vol. xxxvi, fos. 37r, 50r–v, 51r;
Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1602 to 1640, ed. William A. Jackson
(London, 1957), 246, 421–7, 480; Goldstein, ‘Life and Death of John Lambe’, 27–8,
30–2.
20
See Christopher Hill, ‘The Many-Headed Monster’, in his Change and Continuity
in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1974); Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), trans. James Strachey (New York, 1959), esp. ch. 2
on Gustave Le Bon.
21
E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth
Century’, Past and Present, no. 50 (Feb. 1971); Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Rites of
Violence’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975); Suzanne
Desan, ‘Crowds, Community, and Ritual in the Work of E. P. Thompson and Natalie
Davis’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989). The key works
for this essay are Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de
religion, vers 1525–vers 1610, 2 vols. (Paris, 1990); Robert Darnton, ‘Workers Revolt:
The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin’, in his The Great Cat Massacre and
Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Harmondsworth, 1984); Tim Harris, London
Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the
Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987); Mark S. R. Jenner, ‘The Roasting of the Rump:
Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration England’, Past and Present, no. 177 (Nov.
2002); Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649
(London, 1976 and 1991); Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popu-
lar Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford, 1988); Alexandra Walsham, ‘ ‘‘The
Fatall Vesper’’: Providentialism and Anti-Popery in Late Jacobean London’, Past and
(cont. on p. 42)
meaningful, then, is not to make a radically novel methodological
claim. But I also want to argue that decoding Lambe’s death —
making sense of the violent act and of how contemporaries under-
stood, experienced and depicted it — allows us important new
insights into the fractures and strains of pre-revolutionary English
political culture. To interpret it, we must approach Lambe’s mur-
der on two levels: first, we must work out what members of the
crowd thought they were doing — we need to unlock motives; and
second, we must explore how observers represented, interpreted
and legitimized the murder. The two tasks are interrelated. Since
the authorities failed to apprehend any of the murderers, we have
no confessions or self-justifications from which to deduce moti-
vations, and no names and occupations from which to compile a
socio-economic profile of the crowd. But extant representations
of the attack provide other ways of deducing the crowd’s compos-
ition and motivations. Virtually all contemporary accounts of the
murder, including a woodcut of the attack (Plate 1), suggest that
the crowd was composed largely of ‘boys’: young men, teenagers,
apprentices. These social, age-specific and occupational identifi-
cations, while almost certainly understating the crowd’s hetero-
geneity — some sources claimed that ‘Saylers’ were present, for
instance, and the woodcut shows at least two older men among
the boys and youths — nevertheless allow us to place the riot in
the context of other apprentice-led disorder in early modern Lon-
don.22 Written accounts of the event interpret the action and give
it meaning, whether in gentry diaries and newsletters, in a cheap
printed pamphlet with a bogus Amsterdam imprint, in a one-
penny black-letter broadside ballad, or in verse libels circulating
orally or in manuscript copies from hand to hand. These sources
include reports of words yelled during the riot and posted up in
the streets afterwards, words that reveal or impute motivation.
(n. 21 cont.)
Present, no. 144 (Aug. 1994), esp. 55 ff.; John Walter and Keith Wrightson, ‘Dearth
and the Social Order in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, no. 71 (May 1976);
John Walter, ‘Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of
1629’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English and
their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New Brunswick, 1980); John
Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plun-
derers (Cambridge, 1999).
22
Parker, Tragedy of Doctor Lambe, 134. For problems with contemporary descrip-
tions of crowds, see Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in
England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), 160, 162–5.
1. Woodcut of the assault on Lambe outside the Windmill Tavern, from the title page of
A Briefe Description of the Notorious Life of Iohn Lambe (‘Amsterdam’, 1628).
Reproduced by permission of the British Library (shelfmark C.30.d.18).
They also provide fragments of evidence on the modes of violence

— in particular, on the weapons used — that reveal something of
the perpetrators’ understanding of their actions. Most important,
these and other sources allow us to reconstruct how contempor-
aries perceived John Lambe, and thus to understand what his frail
old body may have signified to the Londoners who killed him, paid
to see his corpse and celebrated his demise.
Given the nature of our sources, we must not rashly use textual
and visual representations of the murder and the victim to impute
motivations to the murderers. We need both to acknowledge
the ‘textuality’ of our sources — their status as artful and not-so-
artful representations — and to infer from them the attitudes and
perceptions that may have motivated real people and real ac-
tions.23 Many of our sources must also be read as communicative
23
See especially Roger Chartier’s critique of Darnton’s ‘Workers Revolt’ in ‘Text,
Symbols, and Frenchness’, Jl Mod. Hist., lvii (1985).
media — texts in circulation, produced and disseminated orally,
scribally or in print, by individuals and groups operating both
within and outside the confines of the censorship regime, and
consumed in different ways by people from a variety of social
strata. These texts not only reflected ideas and perceptions, but
also helped shape them.
I want to propose two interrelated interpretations of Lambe’s
murder. First, I want to argue that many participants and obser-
vers understood, represented and experienced the violence as a
moral and legitimate act, in the sense that it involved the exercise
of collective justice on a transgressive figure perceived to have
breached common boundaries of religious and sexual decorum
and to have escaped punishment for his crimes. Second, I want to
suggest that the murder was also a subversive political act (and
understood as such at the time). And it is here, perhaps, that this
essay’s major historiographical ambitions lie. The decoding of
John Lambe’s murder offers us new perspectives on the multi-
faceted political crisis that gripped England during the later
1620s.24 During the summer of 1628, England was engaged in
a poorly fought, chronically underfinanced and resolutely unsuc-
cessful war against Spain and France that, in late 1627, had
culminated in a humiliating retreat from the Île de Ré outside
La Rochelle. In the aftermath of this and earlier campaigns,
demobbed soldiers and sailors, desperate for pay, had haunted
the streets, sometimes venting their frustrations in violent acts.
Outside the Fortune theatre in 1626, for instance, a crowd of
sailors had run riot, one of them refusing to stop in the king’s
name, for ‘hee cared not for the Kinge, for the Kinge paide them
noe wages’.25 Attempting to raise money for the war effort, the
Crown triggered a constitutional crisis over the legality of extra-
parliamentary taxation, a crisis exacerbated by other legal prob-
lems connected to forced billeting and martial law.26 In June
1628 the constitutional crisis was unfolding in tense and closely
monitored debates between king and parliament about the Peti-
tion of Right. Religious anxieties were also growing: so-called
24
The key work on the politics of the 1620s is still Conrad Russell, Parliaments and
English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979).
25
Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, i, 265; Lindley, ‘Riot Prevention and Con-
trol’, 112–13.
26
See especially Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628
(Oxford, 1987).
Arminians seemed to be rising within the ecclesiastical hierarchy,
fuelling fears of theological innovation in the English Church
and exacerbating long-standing unease about ‘popery’s’ threat
to the spiritual and political health of the Protestant nation.27
At the centre of many of these crises — military, constitutional,
parliamentary and religious — stood the most controversial
and powerful political actor of the age, George Villiers, duke of
Buckingham, favourite of Charles I. In June 1628 he was the
MPs’ ‘grievance of grievances’.28 He was also a focal point of
socially widespread political anxiety. During the 1620s, Bucking-
ham had acquired a scandalous reputation as the embodiment of
multiple transgressions, and many contemporaries believed that
his personal crimes explained all that was wrong with the nation.
Ultimately, as we shall see, the events of 13 June were more
about George Villiers than about John Lambe.
The thesis that John Lambe’s murder was connected to Buck-
ingham’s ‘unpopularity’ is hardly unfamiliar, but scholars have
failed to explore the connection’s significance in any depth.29 To
get at this significance, we must explore the real and imagined
links between Lambe and Buckingham in much greater detail;
we must not only note that Buckingham was, by 1628, ‘unpopu-
lar’, but also delineate the nature of that unpopularity by situating
representations and perceptions of both Buckingham and Lambe
within a multiplicity of contemporary discourses.30 To do this,
27
Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590–1640
(Oxford, 1987).
28
Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First
Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (London, 1981), 439.
29
See, for example, Goldstein, ‘Life and Death of John Lambe’, 29–30; Lindley,
‘Riot Prevention and Control’, 114–15; Lockyer, Buckingham, 451; Manning, Village
Revolts, 215; Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 391–2; James Sharpe, Instruments
of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, 1997), 43–4. Far more
productive brief assessments anticipating this essay’s approach can be found in
James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London and
New York, 2000), 162–3; Michael MacDonald, ‘The Career of Astrological Medicine
in England’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Religio Medici:
Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot, 1996), 76; Andrew
McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge, 2004), 139–40; David
Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England
(Oxford, 1996), 34–5, 58–9. Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft, Politics, and Memory in
Seventeenth-Century England’, Hist. Jl, l (2007) appeared after this article was com-
pleted, and includes very useful reflections on Lambe on pp. 293–7 and 302–4.
30
Alastair Bellany, ‘ ‘‘Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse’’: Libellous Politics in
Early Stuart England, 1603–1628’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and
Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, 1994); Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, ch. 5.
(cont. on p. 46)
we must extend the reach of early Stuart English political his-
toriography beyond the familiar precincts of Whitehall and
Westminster and into new places, new topics and new sources.
We must explore not only the politics of parliament, court and
country house, but also the politics of the street, the tavern and the
theatre. We must read not only state papers and parliamentary
diaries, but also sources marginalized by traditional political
historiographies: ballads and libels, pictures and pamphlets, ru-
mours and newsletters. If these non-traditional sources focus less
on constitutional grievance and more on transgressive sexuality or
demonic witchcraft, then we must take contemporary discourses
of sexuality and demonology seriously as political languages.
Through the methods of such a new style of political history
— refigured unabashedly as an interdisciplinary cultural history
— English historians at last can transcend the now moribund
debates surrounding the revisionist interpretation of early
Stuart political history and put to rest certain revisionist assertions
about England’s ‘unrevolutionary’ nature. The new political his-
tory, I suggest, allows us to recapture and understand the peculiar
intensity, social breadth and proto-revolutionary dynamics of the
crisis of the 1620s, and thus helps us explain better the long-term
origins of the revolution that was to come.31
IV
News of Lambe’s murder spread rapidly across the country along
networks of manuscript and oral exchange. From jottings in pro-
vincial news diaries, one moralizing interpretation of Lambe’s
death emerges clearly, an interpretation based on Lambe’s per-
ceived identity as a witch. William Whiteway of Dorchester noted
tersely in his diary that ‘Dr Lambe the witch was beaten to death
(n. 30 cont.)
A full consideration of Buckingham’s libellous reputation will appear in Alastair
Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, England’s Assassin: John Felton and the Murder of the
Duke of Buckingham, Yale Univ. Press, forthcoming.
31
The target here is Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, and the allusion is to
his collected essays, Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London,
1990). On interdisciplinarity, see Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England:
The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge, 2000), and Kevin Sharpe,
Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven
and London, 2000); see also the fundamental critiques of revisionism in Richard
Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and
Politics, 1603–1642 (London, 1989).
in London streetes by the boyes and apprentises’.32 John Rous
recorded a slightly longer account of the event, concluding, with
evident satisfaction, ‘The devill is dead’.33 Verse celebrating the
murder repeated the theme of demonic witchcraft rightfully
punished. A two-part ballad written by Martin Parker, pub-
lished by the cheap print specialist Henry Gosson and set to a
tune identified as ‘Gallants come away’, cheered Lambe’s death
as a suitable reward for his sorcery (see Plates 2 and 3 below). The
opening stanza declared:
Neighbours sease to mone,
And leave your lamentation:
For Doctor Lambe is gone,
The Devill of our Nation,
As’tis knowne.
‘A long time hath he lived’, the ballad continued, ‘By cursed con-
iuration: / And by inchantments thrived’.34 Although Parker was
reluctant to praise the violent crowd (he stressed that the ‘reso-
lution . . . To kill the English Devill’ manifested an ‘evill’ intent), he
represented the murder as a justified evil, a national deliverance
from a literally demonic threat:
For such a wicked wretch
In England hath liv’d seldome,
Nor never such a Wich,
For his skill from Hell came . . .
Thus Doctor Lambe is dead,
That long hath wrongd our Nation.
His times accomplished,
And all his coniuration,
with him is fled.35
Verse libels, circulating orally and scribally through geograph-
ically broad news networks and outside the reach of the censor-
ship regime, exuberantly celebrated Lambe’s murder. One poet
presented a heavily moralized account of Lambe’s death as a
rightful reward for sin:
If heav’n rejoyce, when men leave off to sinne;
If hell rejoyce, when it a soule doth winne;
32
William Whiteway of Dorchester: His Diary, 1618 to 1635 (Dorset Record Soc., xii,
Dorchester, 1991), 97.
33
Diary of John Rous, Incumbent of Santon Downham, Suffolk, from 1625 to 1642, ed.
Mary Anne Everett Green (Camden Soc., 1st ser., lxvi, London, 1856), 17.
34
Parker, Tragedy of Doctor Lambe, 134.
35
Ibid., 134–5.
If earth rejoice, when it doth loose a knave;
Then all rejoyce, now thou art in thy grave.36
Another libel mixed moralized disdain for the damned Lambe
with a mocking, pun-laced humour:
Here Dr Lambe, the conjurer lyes,
Against his will untimely dies
The Divell did show himselfe a Glutton
In taking this Lambe before he was mutton
The Divell in Hell will rost him there
Whome the Prentises basted here.
In Hell they wondred when he came
To see among the Goats a Lambe.37
Diarists, balladeer and libellers all presented Lambe as witch,
conjuror, sinner and servant of Satan, whose death and inevit-
able descent to hell were to be celebrated as moral goods. Here
then is a motive for and a legitimization of the murder, understood
as the execution of a witch. Do Lambe’s life and reputation sup-
port this reading?
Much of Lambe’s life is lost to us. He was probably born in
1546 or 1547, and a hostile pamphlet published anonymously
after his death (A Briefe Description of the Notorious Life of Iohn
Lambe) stated that his first employment was as a tutor to the sons
of gentlemen. Later, however, Lambe began to practise medicine,
an activity that, the pamphleteer argued, marked his first step on
the road to infamy.38 His medical practice seems to have employed
the ‘therapeutic eclecticism’ typical of many early modern healers,
combining natural remedies with astrological and magical tech-
niques.39 Like many other such practitioners, Lambe did not
restrict himself to healing but also told fortunes and offered other
kinds of magical advice and assistance. The nature of his unregu-
lated and unlicensed work left Lambe vulnerable to attack from
36
BL, Add. MS 44963, fo. 38r, published in Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry
from Manuscript Sources, ed. Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae (Early Modern
Literary Studies, Text Series, i, 2005),5http://purl.oclc.org/emls/texts/libels4(here-
after ESL), O iii 7.
37
Huntington Library, San Marino, California, MS HM 116, pp. 96–7 (ESL, O iii 6).
38
Briefe Description, A2r.
39
Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in
Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), 178; Keith Thomas, Religion and
the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1973), 297, 359, 412, 414, 435; Barbara
Howard Traister, The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of
Simon Forman (Chicago, 2001); Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan
London. Simon Forman: Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford, 2005).
unsatisfied clients and from the authorities responsible for po-
licing the medical market place; his engagement in magic and
astrology also left him inherently vulnerable to charges of witch-
craft.40 We can date Lambe’s first documented troubles to 1619,
when a disgruntled accomplice denounced him to the Royal
College of Physicians as a ‘notable’ London ‘mountebank and
impostor’ making a handsome living charging clients large sums
for false cures and ‘delusions’ performed with a ‘crystall’. The
accusation alleged that several clients had died under his medical
supervision, while others were cheated out of fees paid for bogus
magical services: for instance, Lambe had taken £3 10s. from
a Mrs Littleton, ‘by making her believe he shewed her what hus-
band she should have’. Judging from the list of names his accuser
submitted to the college, Lambe’s clientele included merchants,
lawyers, gentlewomen and aristocratic ladies; his inflated prices
(sometimes £40 or £50 for a cure) suggest Lambe catered, though
not exclusively, to the upper end of the London market for magical
healers.41
Problems with the Royal College of Physicians were an occupa-
tional hazard for unlicensed healers in London, and Lambe may
simply have been unlucky enough to have quarrelled over money
with someone prepared to denounce him. But the 1619 affair was
only the beginning of his troubles. Sometime in 1622 Lambe was
tried and convicted at the Worcester assizes for conjuring with evil
spirits and for acts of witchcraft he had supposedly committed
more than a decade earlier upon Thomas, 6th Lord Windsor; one
contemporary heard that Lambe was charged with bewitching
Windsor’s ‘ymplement’.42 The assize judges, however, reprieved
40
MacDonald, ‘Career of Astrological Medicine’, 76–7.
41
Annals of the Royal College of Physicians, microfiche of typescript (Reading, 1991),
iii, fo. 37v (typescript, p. 125); Charles Goodall, An Historical Account of the College’s
Proceedings against Empiricks and Unlicensed Practisers (London, 1684), 397; Kassell,
Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London, 89; Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in
Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners, 1550–1640
(Oxford, 2003), 112. Healers of Lambe’s ilk usually charged much less: see
MacDonald, ‘Career of Astrological Medicine’, 68.
42
The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols. (Phila-
delphia, 1939), ii, 601. The most detailed account of the witchcraft trial is in Briefe
Description, A3r–B3r. The trial’s date has caused some confusion. Goldstein (‘Life and
Death of John Lambe’, 19) and Sharpe (Instruments of Darkness, 43) date it to 1608,
based on Briefe Description, A3r–A4r; the pamphlet does not, however, actually
state the date of the trial, only that the crimes were committed in 1607 and 1608.
Chamberlain (Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. McClure, ii, 601) wrote in 1625 that
the witchcraft trial at Worcester was ‘some yeare or two’ before Lambe’s second trial
(cont. on p. 50)
Lambe from the gallows. The reprieve’s rationale is unclear,
though one of the judges, Sir Humphrey Winch, may have been
erring on the side of caution after receiving a reprimand from
the king for sending nine Leicester witches to the gallows on the
flimsiest of evidence in 1616.43 In February 1623 Lambe was
transferred from Worcester Castle to the King’s Bench prison in
London, where, with the freedom of movement and action al-
lowed by many early modern prisons, he resumed his practice as
a magical healer and counsellor, being ‘much resorted unto by
people of severall conditions’.44 In the early spring of 1624,
Lambe allegedly attacked and raped an 11-year-old girl, Joan
Seager, who had brought a basket of herbs to his cell. In May
1624 Lambe was convicted of the rape, but once again he managed
to avoid the gallows, this time obtaining a royal pardon that not
only saved him from execution but also freed him from prison.45
Lambe continued to practise, renting a house in Westminster,
but he also continued to walk a very fine line, and by the end of
1627 he was once more rumoured to be in legal trouble, com-
mitted to the Gatehouse for ‘causing a Westminster scholar to
give himself to the Devil’.46 This scrape was probably the reason
the bishop of Durham sent Lambe to be questioned by the Royal
College of Physicians in December 1627. The examiners con-
cluded that Lambe was stunningly ignorant of even the basic
principles of medicine, astrology and surgery. Pressed by the doc-
tors about ‘the notoriousnes of his practise and publique fame that
goes of him, and the great resort made unto him’, and perhaps
(n. 42 cont.)
(in 1624) for rape, and this fits with the evidence that the two judges who reprieved
Lambe were Sir Humphrey Winch and Sir William Jones, who rode the Oxford circuit
(which included Worcester) from 1622 to 1624: see Oxford DNB on Winch and Jones;
PRO, SP 14/153/25; J. S. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes, 1558–1714 (Cam-
bridge, 1972), 24, 34, 270. The circumstances of the Windsor case are hard to
reconstruct. Windsor was born in 1591 and married by January 1608. His marriage
produced no children, and it is possible that he was impotent and later came to blame
Lambe, with whom he must have crossed paths at around the time of his marriage:
see G. E. Cokayne (ed.), The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great
Britain and the United Kingdom, 14 vols. (London, 1910–59), xii, pt 2, 799–800.
43
Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. McClure, ii, 26; Thomas, Religion and the De-
cline of Magic, 546; Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 49; George Lyman Kittredge,
Witchcraft in Old and New England (1929; New York, 1972), 322–3.
44
PRO, SP 14/153/25; Briefe Description, B4v.
45
Briefe Description, C1r–C3v; the case and pardon are discussed in more detail
below.
46
Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, ed. Williams, i, 305.
concerned about possible witchcraft charges, Lambe answered
that his fame ‘is without his desert, that he cannot hinder commers
to him and that all he did was trifles, fooleryes, and bables to gett
a little mony’.47
Lambe’s answer to the doctors evaded one common imput-
ation against healers of his ilk (that they derived their powers
from the devil) by embracing a second — that they were cheats
who used tricks and sleight of hand to separate the gullible from
their money. By the mid 1620s Lambe had acquired not only a
sizeable clientele but also great notoriety. Contemporaries dis-
agreed, however, about how exactly Lambe worked. His many
clients presumably paid him in the expectation of results. But the
playwrights depicted Lambe as a charlatan. Ben Jonson’s comic
allusions in his Staple of News (1626) connect Londoners’ fascin-
ation with Lambe’s supposed conjurings to the general problem
of popular (and female) ignorance and credulity broadly satirized
in the rest of the play.48 The allusions to Lambe in the co-written
Fair Maid of the Inn (c.1625–6) are explicitly sceptical of his
powers. The comic villain Forobosco recalls living in London
under the name of ‘Doctor Lambestones’, spending time coz-
ening gullible women: ‘thats all the familarity I ever had with the
Divell’, he notes, ‘my guift of lying — they say hees the Father of
lyes, and though I cannot conjure, yet I professe my selfe to be
one of his poore gossips’.49 But other contemporaries, aware of
Lambe’s conviction in the Windsor case or predisposed to see the
hand of the devil behind all magical healers’ activities, considered
Lambe a witch in league with Satan. Though A Briefe Description
initially notes that ‘some honest and able men’ thought Lambe
an ‘Impostour, whom the credulous ignorance of the common
people had raysed to that Fame, than to be truely and guiltily
learned in those wicked Mysteryes’, the pamphleteer noted that
the evidence at Lambe’s witchcraft trial made it ‘manifestly’ clear
47
Annals of the Royal College of Physicians, iii, fos. 77v–79v (typescript, pp. 240–3);
Goodall, Historical Account of the College’s Proceedings, 398–401; Kassell, Medicine and
Magic in Elizabethan London, 89–90. This incident might have triggered the rumours
of Lambe’s ‘execution’ recorded by Thomas Crosfield in December 1627: see The
Diary of Thomas Crosfield, ed. Frederick S. Boas (Oxford, 1935), 16, 17, 114.
48
Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester, 1988), 1st inter-
lude, ll. 46–7; 3rd interlude, ll. 28–31.
49
‘John Fletcher’ (John Webster, Philip Massinger, John Ford), The Fair Maid of the
Inn, in The Complete Works of John Webster, ed. F. L. Lucas, 4 vols. (London, 1927), iv,
215–17 (Act V, Scene ii).
2. Woodcut from the front side of the broadside ballad The Tragedy of Doctor Lambe
(London, 1628). Reproduced by permission of the Pepys Library,
Magdalene College, Cambridge.
‘that the said Doctor Lambe was an absolute Witch, a Sorcerer

and Iugling person absolutely given over to lewd wicked and dia-
bolicall courses, an invocator and adorer of impious and wicked
Spirits’.50 Parker’s ballad sends similarly mixed messages: its title
refers to Lambe as ‘The great suposed Coniurer’ who later in the
ballad is seen pulling ‘pranks’, but Parker nevertheless insists
that those ‘pranks’ were played ‘By the help o’th Devill’.51 Two
recycled woodcuts illustrating the ballad added a further demonic
gloss (Plates 2 and 3). One image (previously used in early seven-
teenth-century editions of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus) depicts a schol-
arly conjuror summoning a black and monstrous demonic spirit;
the other (taken from a 1620 edition of The Historie of Frier Rush)
50
Briefe Description, A2v, B1v.
51
3. Woodcut from the reverse side of the broadside ballad The Tragedy of Doctor
Lambe (London, 1628). Reproduced by permission of the Pepys Library,
Magdalene College, Cambridge.
displays a monastic scene of demonically inspired mayhem.52 A

quarter-century after his death, Lambe was presented as an agent
of Satan by two pamphlets claiming he had been the tutor of the
Salisbury witch Anne Bodenham who was executed in 1653 for
inflicting a demonic possession on a serving-girl.53
V
We can thus plausibly read Lambe’s murder as a form of crowd
justice on a notorious witch who had escaped the punishment due
to him by law. But witchcraft was not the only capital crime for
which Lambe had escaped punishment. He was also a convicted
rapist. Indeed, implicitly but powerfully, A Briefe Description
52
Goldstein, ‘Life and Death of John Lambe’, 29; David Riggs, The World of Chris-
topher Marlowe (New York, 2005), 177.
53
Edmond Bower, Doctor Lamb Revived: or, Witchcraft Condemn’d in Anne Bodenham
(London, 1653); Anon., Doctor Lamb’s Darling: or, Strange and Terrible News from Salis-
bury (London, 1653). The Bodenham case and the links to Lambe are discussed in
Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft, Politics, and Memory’, and in Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History:
Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London, 1996), 147–53.
represented Lambe’s murder as a belated punishment for the
rape of Joan Seager. Although the pamphlet details Lambe’s
witchcrafts, it devotes much more attention to the rape. And,
although the pamphleteer never makes the crowd’s motivations
explicit, his narrative of the murder follows almost immediately
upon an extensive account of the rape trial, with the intervening
years of 1624–8 barely mentioned. This narrative juxtaposition
and chronological foreshortening make Lambe’s murder com-
prehensible, and justifiable, as an act of popular vengeance for
the sexual violation of a young girl. The pamphlet’s carefully
crafted representation of the rape itself reinforces this point.
The text quotes in detail from what it claims was the testimony
given in court by one Mabel Swinnerton, who had helped the
child and her mother after the attack. Afraid of a beating from
her mother and ‘much abashed and ashamed’, Joan had first told
Swinnerton what had happened: how she had carried a basket of
herbs to Lambe’s cell; how he had allowed her to play on his vir-
ginals; how he had dismissed his manservant, locked the door,
dragged her into his closet and ‘put his tongue in her mouth to
kisse her’; how ‘she was wonderous fearefull of him, and strived
with him as much as she could, but hee would not let her alone,
but strove with her’. Swinnerton had tried to dress Joan’s wounds
and had found ‘the place did smoake like a pot that had seething
liquor in it’; Joan was so sore that she ‘could not abide to bee
touched’. Swinnerton also testified that one of Lambe’s maids
had treated Joan with a ‘vilde’, ‘base’ and ‘venimous’ substance.
Swinnerton claimed that she had then confronted Lambe, telling
him that ‘in plaine tearmes you have burnt her, eyther you have
a foule body, or you have delt with some uncleane person’.54
The pamphlet’s version of Mabel Swinnerton’s testimony made
the rape charge all the more plausible and provocative by effect-
ively deploying the tropes of the most culturally compelling type
of rape narrative: the weak female body physically overpow-
ered by masculine violence behind locked doors. Furthermore,
by omitting (ostensibly ‘for Modestie sake’) any description of
sexual penetration — an act that, Garthine Walker argues, was
virtually impossible to describe in early modern vocabulary with-
out imputing female consent — the narrative makes Joan’s
complaint as credible as it could be in a society reluctant to
54
Briefe Description, C1v–C3v.
prosecute and convict rape.55 The narrative also extrapolated
the charge further into broader insinuations about Lambe’s moral
and physical corruption; the vile substance used to treat Joan
connected the rape to Lambe’s dubious medical and magical
practices, and Joan’s burning wounds suggested Lambe was rid-
dled with venereal disease. Swinnerton’s testimony also stated
clearly the consequences of Lambe’s crime given contemporary
gender ideologies: Swinnerton told him that he had ‘undone an
honest mans child, for well shee may recover her health of body
againe, but never her credit, for it will bee a staine to her repu-
tation whil’st shee lives: so many strumpets in the towne and to
seeke the ruine of a poore child’. Swinnerton here glosses the
rape as a failure of Lambe’s sexual self-control — especially un-
forgivable since so many adult women were willing, whether for
money or not, to relieve such unruly passions. Lambe’s actions,
she noted, had damaged both Joan’s sexual reputation (ideally
protected, in Swinnerton’s revealing formulation, by the exist-
ence of ‘strumpets’ who lacked sexual credit), and the ‘honesty’ of
her father.56 Indeed, Lambe’s crime fell into the category of rapes
most likely to be prosecuted and convicted in this period: what
little statistical analysis we have of rape prosecutions indicates
that courts and juries more readily convicted those accused of
raping young girls, in part, suggests Nazife Bashar, because
the violent theft of a young girl’s virginity irrevocably destroyed
not only her own reputation but also the ‘property of her father’.57
Thus the pamphlet represents the rape very carefully indeed,
shaping the narrative in ways that made the accusation credible
and the crime contemptible. The story of Joan Seager’s rape could
be framed to convict and condemn Lambe and could function
implicitly to explain and legitimize his murder. But at the time of
the rape in 1624, Lambe had constructed his own narrative of the
incident in order to extricate himself from the hangman’s noose.
The pamphlet touches very briefly on one aspect of this counter-
narrative, an alternative version of events that the text’s narrative
55
Ibid., C2v; Garthine Walker, ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early
Modern England’, Gender and History, x (1998), esp. 5–9, 14–15.
56
On rape, lust and self-control, see Walker, ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence’,
16–17, and Cynthia B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of
Castlehaven (New York and Oxford, 1999), 26–38.
57
Nazife Bashar, ‘Rape in England between 1550 and 1700’, in London Feminist
History Group, The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance
(London, 1983), 37–8, 42.
strategies work to efface. The glimpse comes in Swinnerton’s
testimony that when she confronted Lambe, he threatened to
have Joan searched by a panel of matrons ‘to see if she be torne’.
In the pamphlet narrative, Swinnerton ambiguously retorts that
Joan was ‘not so much torne’ as burned, but this vagueness about
whether sexual penetration had occurred is outweighed within
the narrative by the strategic omission of the intimate details of
the attack and by the presence of the powerful images of the smok-
ing wounds and soreness around Joan’s genitalia. Documents
from 1624, however, reveal that the denial of the physical tearing
consistent with the forcible sexual penetration of a virgin — pene-
tration being necessary if an assault was to constitute rape under
the common law — was at the centre of Lambe’s vigorous self-
defence at trial and in his pleas for a royal pardon.58 Lambe
claimed that the evidence presented against him in court sug-
gested only that the assault was ‘outward’, not ‘inward’: he noted
that two surgeons had inspected Joan and found her intact, and
pointed out that Swinnerton had testified to burning, not to tear-
ing. He also argued that Joan herself had not alleged penetration
during her testimony. On its own terms, Lambe argued, the case
against him fell apart. He also claimed that the real truth of the
matter was that no attack had occurred at all. He insisted that he
was never alone with Joan on the day in question and that he could
call witnesses to prove it.59 More significantly, perhaps, he argued
that the prosecution, initiated a full seven weeks after the alleged
assault, began only after he called in a debt owed by Joan’s father.
At first, Lambe argued, the Seagers had tried to blackmail him,
and when that failed, they had handed him over to the authorities.
The case also turned, Lambe argued, on questions of ‘credit’.
Although several witnesses spoke against him, Lambe insisted
that their testimony rested solely on what they said Joan had told
them. Furthermore, Lambe alleged, Joan’s testimony had been
58
Briefe Description, C3v; Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of
England, 4th edn (London, 1669), 60. Lambe’s self-defence is in PRO, SP 14/164/57:II.
59
Walker (‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence’, 6) argues that accused rapists
typically mounted a consensual sex defence, but Bashar (‘Rape in England’, 38) sug-
gests that the ‘accused’s defence was more apt to rest on a denial that sexual relations
took place’, a finding supported by the small number of cases analysed in Susan D.
Amussen, ‘‘‘The Part of a Christian Man’’: The Cultural Politics of Manhood in Early
Modern England’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds.), Political
Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Under-
down (Manchester, 1995), 218.
coached by her mother and by Mabel Swinnerton. But ‘credit’
was also a socially constituted commodity, and Lambe invoked
the opinion of the Seagers’ ‘honest’ neighbours to undercut the
social credit of the prosecution’s witnesses. Both the Seagers and
Mabel Swinnerton were, Lambe argued, of ‘evill and lewde con-
versacon’, of immoral character and thus of weak credibility:
the father was a convicted forger and suborner of witnesses; the
mother was the stereotypical disordered early modern woman —
contentious, envious, cruel, untruthful and so quarrelsome that
she had once accused a neighbour of bewitching Joan; and Mabel
Swinnerton was also ‘noe competent witness’ — she had three
husbands, the neighbours alleged, and was a practised ‘sollicitor’
of legal proceedings, stirring up trouble to make money for her-
self. Lambe also thought it highly significant that the neighbours
reported that the chronically indebted and impoverished Seagers
were now parading around in new clothes.
From a strictly legal standpoint, Lambe’s self-defence may
have been enough to convince the authorities that he deserved a
pardon. Lord Chief Justice Ley believed that the evidence against
Lambe was ‘indifferent’, meaning that a reasonable jury could
either convict or acquit. It was, he believed, the kind of ‘doubtfull’
case in which a judge might very well urge mercy. The witnesses
against Lambe were few, Ley noted, and of ‘Weake Creditt’: they
were of low social status, and Seager owed money to the accused.
On the other hand, a jury of their neighbours had chosen to be-
lieve them. Just as Lambe invoked the opinion of the honest neigh-
bours to undercut the Seagers’ credit, so Ley cited that same
opinion, manifested in the jury’s verdict, to bolster their credit.60
The pardon had legal grounds, but that does not fully explain
how Lambe secured one.61 The first evidence of what happened
is a letter from Ley to Secretary Conway, sent on 9 May 1624,
reporting that at James I’s request he had questioned Lambe.
During the two and a half weeks following Lambe’s conviction,
Conway and the king asked Ley for a legal opinion about whether
Lambe’s case fell under the scope of a royal pardon — and on 29
May Ley concluded that, because of the ‘indifference’ of the evi-
dence, it did. A few days later, Conway asked the attorney-general
60
PRO, SP 14/165/63; 14/164/57; 14/164/57:I.
61
The following paragraph is based on PRO, SP 14/164/57; 14/164/57:I; 14/164/
62; 14/165/63; 14/167/14. For a different reading of the same evidence, see Goldstein,
‘Life and Death of John Lambe’, 20–3.
to draw up, at royal request, a pardon for Lambe on the rape
conviction. Lambe had thus managed early on to interest king
and Privy Council in his case, and had been able to get the king
himself to take the lead on the issue. Lambe may have used friends
at court to petition the king (we know that one Richard Morton
was already lobbying on his behalf against the 1622 witchcraft
conviction), but as the substance of his first conversation with Ley
suggests, Lambe had in fact first attracted James’s attention by
claiming to know the whereabouts of seven or eight thousand
pounds’ worth of royal jewels, and to possess evidence concerning
the 1605 Gunpowder Plot.
If the exact circumstances of the pardon remain murky, the fact
of the pardon suggests an explanation of the 1628 murder: the
attack on Lambe could have been motivated, as the Briefe Descrip-
tion implied, by the perceived failure of justice in the rape case.
The crowd thus could have played the role of executioner, enact-
ing justice on a criminal and sexual deviant, avenging the attack
on an ‘honest man’s child’. Certainly, the pamphlet’s depiction
of the rape as the worst and most convictable form of the crime
appeared to render Lambe’s subsequent pardon egregiously
unjust. Yet while the rape pardon works well within the pam-
phlet’s narrative as a motive and legitimization for murder, the
Briefe Description’s curious elision of the years 1624–8 suggests
that something else is being evaded. The silence was in fact
more strategic than interpretative: there was something that the
pamphlet, despite the cover supplied by its anonymity and fake
Amsterdam imprint, could not risk saying; for in those missing
years John Lambe was increasingly known as the creature and
intimate of the royal favourite Buckingham.
VI
As early as 1624, some believed that Buckingham himself had
facilitated Lambe’s second escape from the hangman. One Lon-
don newsletter reported that Lambe had boasted after his con-
viction that they would not hang him for five years, a prophecy
that ‘as yet houlds true, for they say the duke has sent to the
Lord cheife iustice to reprive him for six dayes, which is done
accordingly’.62 No official correspondence substantiates this
62
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wynn Papers, L II 12.
gossip, although the fact that Ley was Buckingham’s client made
the story plausible enough. But the truth may be beside the point:
the popular perception of Lambe’s relationship with Bucking-
ham matters much more than the more complicated reality. And
that reality was indeed complicated: the next time we find a
Lambe–Buckingham link, the two appear as antagonists. While
in prison, Lambe had become involved in the adulterous affairs
of the estranged wife of Buckingham’s mentally ill brother John
Villiers, Viscount Purbeck. In February 1625 the duke had Lady
Purbeck imprisoned, and the following month she was accused
before the court of High Commission of an adulterous relation-
ship with Sir Robert Howard that had produced an illegitimate
child. At the time of her commitment, it was reported that in
addition to the adultery charge, ‘There is an imputation laide on
her that with powders and potions she did intoxicate her husbands
braines, and practised somwhat in that kinde upon the Duke of
Buckingam’. This action, the report added, ‘is confest by one
Lambe a notorious old rascall’.63 Upon learning of this evi-
dence, Buckingham had urged royal legal officials to extract the
truth of the matter from Lambe: although the magician himself
had declared that ‘what he did was but . . . juglinges’, Buckingham
insisted that ‘Lambe hath hitherto by such means played mock
with the wirld to presserve himself’.64 In the end, the prosecutors
found insufficient proofs to proceed on the ‘matters of sorcerie,
witchcraft, and the like’ during the heavily attended and much
reported High Commission hearings in 1625. When the case
was reheard in November 1627, Lambe figured prominently in
the prosecutors’ account, but this time accused of lending the
adulterous lovers a room for their assignations.65
In 1625, then, Lambe and Buckingham were at odds. By 1626,
however, popular perception began to yoke the two together. In-
creasingly, though not universally, they were associated as patron
and client, and increasingly their relationship acquired a sinister
hue: Lambe was Buckingham’s sorcerer. George Eglisham’s Fore-
runner of Revenge, a notorious illicit pamphlet from May 1626
accusing Buckingham of poisoning the Marquis Hamilton and
63
Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. McClure, ii, 601.
64
PRO, SP 14/183/65; 14/183/66; 14/183/51.
65
Laura Norsworthy, The Lady of Bleeding Heart Yard (London, 1935), 146–7;
Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. McClure, ii, 605; Birch, Court and Times of Charles
I, ed. Williams, i, 296.
King James, played on long-standing assumptions that poisoning
and sorcery were interrelated crimes. Eglisham noted that Ham-
ilton, who had fought Buckingham over a proposed marriage al-
liance, had been horrified by the prospect of a family connection
with a man ‘infamous for his frequent consultations with the
ring-leaders of witches’. Buckingham ‘principally’ associated,
Eglisham alleged, with ‘that false Doctor Lamb’, a man ‘publikly
condemned for witchcraft’.66 In June 1626 some contemporaries
thought Lambe had conjured a prodigious waterspout outside the
favourite’s York House residence on the Thames.67 And after
the dissolution of parliament that same month, one diarist noted a
rumour that ‘Lamb the coniurer sayd the D[uke] should have two
yeare longer after the parli[ament]’.68 The Buckingham–Lambe
relationship may have been the subject of The Devil and the Duke,
a book, now lost, which caused a stir in London in November
1626.69 In July 1627 Joseph Mead reported London gossip that a
Colonel Gray had been transferred from the duke’s ship intended
for Ré because the duke’s mother,
solicitous to know what would become of her son, consulted Dr Lambe,
who showed her, in a glass, a big, fat man, with a reddish face, brown
beard, an iron arm and a long dagger, &c, which she presently took to be
Colonel Gray . . . and therefore, suspected he should kill her son.70
After the duke returned from the fiasco at Ré, one poet wondered
mockingly why ‘Lambe’s / Protection’ could not ‘safeguard from
thee those French Ramms?’ Another alleged that ‘Foole Lambe,
that lewde Impostar’ had helped Buckingham escape injury on Ré
by conjuring a spectral substitute, a ‘devill armed lyke his Lorde’,
who went into battle while the cowardly duke hid ‘coyld’ in ship’s
‘cable’.71
66
George Eglisham, The Forerunner of Revenge: Upon the Duke of Buckingham for the
Poysoning of the Most Potent King Iames (‘Franckfort’, 1626, STC 7548), B2v; Michael
MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England
(Oxford, 1990), 226.
67
John Rushworth, Historical Collections (London, 1659), 391; Goldstein, ‘Life and
Death of John Lambe’, 24; Underdown, Freeborn People, 35; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Vox
Piscis: or, The Book-Fish: Providence and the Uses of the Reformation Past in Caroline
Cambridge’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxiv (1999), 586; Trinity College, Cambridge, MS
O.7.3, fo. 5r.
68
Trinity College, MS O.7.3, fo. 6r.
69
70
Ibid., 252–3.
71
BL, Sloane MS 826, fos. 161v–164r (ESL, O ii 12); Cheshire County Record
Office, Chester (hereafter CCRO), MS CR 63/2/19, fo. 63r (ESL, O ii 11). I.R., The
(cont. on p. 61)
VII
Many of the images of Buckingham’s alleged relationship with
Lambe assume that the ‘false doctor’ possessed real and demonic
powers, and that Buckingham had used these powers for various
transgressive ends. The underground printed poem The Spy listed
witchcraft among the manifest sins embraced by the favourite to
satisfy the insatiable demands of his ambition. To transcend his
appropriate place in the social hierarchy — an action that for many
contemporaries constituted Buckingham’s original sin — the
ambitious man must turn to a whole series of strategic crimes
and abuses:
So boundlesse is ambition, that no lets
Right, virtue, friendship, or Religion sets
Before’t, can stay it’s course. But wrong or right,
In spight of iustice, with a restles flight,
She seekes her ruine. Poyniards, poysons, swords,
With Playsters, potions, witchcraft, coyning Lords,
Corrupting, selling Iustice . . .
Nay all the hellish cunning
That from old Sathans brains hath bene a running
Five thousand yeares, must all conspire together
To mount ambition up I know not whether.72
The 1628 libel ‘The Duke’s Rotomontados’ (brags), on the other
hand, had Buckingham declare to his critics that they would
never prove that
by Magick charmes
I wrought the Kings Affection, or his harmes,
Or that I need Lambes Philters to incite
Chast Ladies to give my fowle lust delight.73
Here, Buckingham’s association with Lambe is linked to other
politically resonant transgressions attributed to the duke in the
later 1620s: to lust-driven predatory womanizing that to some
contemporaries may have appeared both as a symptom of the
duke’s tyrannical lack of self-control and as a cause of the alleged
softness and effeminacy that explained his failure as leader of the
(n. 71 cont.)
Spy: Discovering the Danger of Arminian Heresie and Spanish Trecherie (‘Strasburgh’,
1628, STC 20577), E2v, suggests that Buckingham received no wounds on Ré be-
cause he had traitorously dealt with the French in advance: ‘Th[ere] are not Lambs
philters, nor a Beldames charmes, / Can flesh and bloud, secure from gen’rall harmes’.
72
Spy, F4v–G1r.
73
BL, Sloane MS 826, fos. 157r–159r (ESL, O iii 5).
English war effort; and to allegations that Buckingham had poi-
soned James I. These lines also use Buckingham’s patronage of
Lambe to explain the favourite’s extraordinary political hold over
the king. Rumours that the duke had used sorcery to secure royal
favour had first surfaced in parliament in 1626. Robert Ramsey
had testified to a Commons committee investigating James I’s
final illness and death that he had had a number of enigmatic con-
versations with an Irishman called Pierce Butler, who had told
Ramsey that he possessed ‘strange faculties’, and claimed that
‘the King and the parliament could do nothing to the Duke’ as
long as Buckingham ‘keeps one thing’ Butler had given him.74
The Venetian ambassador had heard similar stories about an
amulet; Butler, he reported, ‘is generally believed to be a magi-
cian, and as the duke gives him a handsome salary . . . he can have
given him nothing except some secret service’.75 These rumours,
like the offhand remark in ‘The Duke’s Rotomontados’, had com-
plicated political resonances. Similar accusations had been lev-
elled against Buckingham’s predecessor as royal favourite, the earl
of Somerset, and they could work not only to demonize the favour-
ite but also to exculpate the monarch.76 If the king was literally
bewitched, he could not be fully blamed either for his favourite’s
actions or for his own public defence of them. The witchcraft al-
legation could thus explain away some very worrying circum-
stances. It could, for instance, explain Charles’s public gestures
of support for Buckingham during the 1626 parliament’s
thwarted attempts to impeach him. More generally, it could ex-
cuse (or at least explain) Charles’s complicity in the power reversal
lamented by a number of libellers, whose verses in the late 1620s
articulated and exacerbated the fear that the real king of England
was not a Stuart but a Villiers. As one poet wrote in the summer
of 1627,
And wilt thou goe, great Duke, and leave us heere,
Lamenting thee and eke thy Pupill deare
Great Charles? Alas! who shall his Scepter sway,
And Kingdome rule now thou art gone away?77
74
Proceedings in Parliament, 1626, ed. William B. Bidwell and Maija Jansson, 4 vols.
(New Haven and London, 1991–6), iii, 73.
75
Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1625–1626, 604–5, 605 n.
76
Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News
Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge, 2002), 194.
77
BL, Sloane MS 826, fo. 161r (ESL, O ii 5). See also BL, Add. MS 29492, fo. 55v
(ESL, O ii 1), and BL, Sloane MS 826, fo. 181r (ESL, O iii 11).
Beyond the political resonances of the specific interconnec-
tions between witchcraft, on the one hand, and other scandalous
charges against the duke, on the other, the Lambe–Buckingham
link also embodied a more generally disturbing vision of Buck-
ingham’s complicity in an inverted, anti-Christian moral order.
Buckingham was increasingly represented and perceived as a lit-
erally demonic figure. The duke’s dominant position at court —
the place that, in both James I’s writings and in the masques per-
formed for his successor, was supposed to set the moral tone for
the nation — meant that the crystal fountain of the nation’s moral
health had been tainted with a sin that to many contemporaries
signified the inversion of all proper order: sexual, moral, religious
and political.78 Furthermore, the anti-Christian rites of witchcraft
were analogous in Protestant thought to the rites of popery: Buck-
ingham’s supposed patronage of witches confirmed widespread
suspicions of his corruption by Catholicism. Rumours that Buck-
ingham’s Catholic mother (often linked with Lambe in reports
from the later 1620s) also dabbled in the occult arts further
strengthened the witchcraft–popery connection and linked it to
fears of gender disorder. In January 1623 Simonds D’Ewes noted
that a book (now lost) had been ‘sett foorth called ‘‘the Chast
Matron’’, in which was discovered all the villanis, witchcrafts and
lasciviousness of the old Countesse’.79 A libel on the Ré fiasco
explicitly fused the countess’s popery and sorcery, asking the
defeated Buckingham, ‘Could not thy Mothers Masses, nor her
Crosses, / Nor Sorceries prevent these fatall losses?’80
VIII
These images of Lambe and Buckingham suggest that the
crowd’s attack on John Lambe had a political logic. The libellous
78
Bellany, Politics of Court Scandal, 1–4, 152–3; Stuart Clark, ‘King James’s Dae-
monologie: Witchcraft and Kingship’, in Sydney Anglo (ed.), The Damned Art: Essays in
the Literature of Witchcraft (London, 1977); Stuart Clark, ‘Inversion, Misrule and
the Meaning of Witchcraft’, Past and Present, no. 87 (May 1980); Stuart Clark, ‘The
‘‘Gendering’’ of Witchcraft in French Demonology: Misogyny or Polarity?’, French
Hist., v (1991); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early
Modern Europe (Oxford, 1996).
79
The Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1622–1624), ed. Elisabeth Bourcier (Paris,
1974), 112–13.
80
BL, Sloane MS 826, fos. 161v–164r (ESL, O ii 12).
materials circulating in the literary underground during 1626,
1627 and 1628 make clear that the notorious duke and the
equally notorious doctor were commonly perceived as scandalous
associates, even if the truth of their relationship was more com-
plex. Although no printed account dared to make the connection
explicit — A Briefe Description evaded the matter entirely, while
Parker’s ballad alluded only to those ‘men of worthy fashion’
who had ‘conived’ in Lambe’s life of ‘cursed coniuration’81 —
the evidence suggests that the London boys and apprentices were
acting out on the decrepit body of John Lambe their violent
impulses towards the all-too-vigorous body of George Villiers,
attacking a constellation of profound moral and politically reson-
ant disorders and inversions that both he and the victim Lambe
were perceived to embody. The fragments of evidence from the
streets on 13 June and in the days that followed suggest that the
crowd that murdered Lambe was clearly aware of the association
between the two men. Newsmongers reported that the boys at the
Fortune had taunted Lambe as ‘the Dukes Devill’, and that as he
was being beaten to death, the apprentices had declared that they
would, if given the chance, do the same to the duke. A later news-
letter made the crowd’s meaning even clearer: if Buckingham had
been there, the boys had declared, they would have ‘minced his
flesh, & have had every one a bitt of him’.82 A Florentine agent
thought that the only reason Lambe had been killed ‘was that
he was in the duke’s service’.83
The anti-Buckingham implications of the murder were also
obvious to the libellers, who used Lambe’s death as a medium
through which to imagine the duke’s demise. One poem
announced,
For Lambe go ringe some bell
well killed nere coleman street
his soule I hopes in hell
where he and’s Lorde must meete.
Another declared that Lambe had ‘gon to the devills Dambe / to
stay, till his Loarde come ther’.84 On the streets of London, the
81
82
BL, Harley MS 390, fos. 412r, 415r.
83
Eleventh Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (London, 1887),
appendix, pt 1, 156.
84
CCRO, MS CR 63/2/19, fo. 60r (ESL, O iii 8 and O iii 9).
violent forebodings were palpable. Thomas Foster, a servant, was
imprisoned by the London authorities for removing, reading and
then replacing a ‘libell against his Majestie and the duke which
was sett upp upon a poste in Coleman Streete’.85 London news-
mongers reported that the libel, copies of which had circulated
around the City, had read:
Who rules the Kingdome? The King. Who rules the King? The Duke.
Who rules the Duke? The Devill. And that the libellers there professe, Lett
the Duke look to it; for they intend shortly to use him worse then they
did his Doctor, and if thinges be not shortly reformed, they will work
a reformation themselves.86
Soon, an ominous rhyming couplet began circulating across a
broad social spectrum in London and from the capital into the
provinces:
lett Charles & george doe what they can
Yet george shall dye like Doctor Lambe.87
Lambe’s murder can thus be read as the first deadly manifest-
ation of violent impulses towards the favourite that had, until
then, been mostly confined to the fervid imaginings of libellers
and other denizens of the literary underground. As early as 1623,
‘The King’s Five Senses’ had envisioned Jove’s thunderbolt strik-
ing dead Phaeton, the ‘proud Usurping Charioter’, who signified
in the poem the unschooled and reckless George Villiers.88 But in
the aftermath of the 1626 parliament and its failure to impeach
the favourite, explicit fantasies about Buckingham’s death began
to multiply. In the summer of 1626, for instance, John Brown, a
Suffolk churchwarden, was denounced by his rector for declaring
that ‘it woulde never be [a] good worlde till he that is so gratious
with the kinge the Duke of Buckenham be cutt off which he did
hoope woulde not be longe in the hearinge of us’.89 Fantasies
about Buckingham’s death were further encouraged by military
calamities abroad. One libeller, writing before the meeting of the
1628 parliament, tied his frustrated desire for Buckingham’s
85
CLRO, Repertories of the Court of Aldermen, vol. xlii, fo. 218v.
86
87
PRO, SP 16/114/32 (ESL, P i 1); Bellany, Politics of Court Scandal, 103.
88
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Malone 23, pp. 28–31 (ESL, L 8); Bellany, Politics
of Court Scandal, 258–61.
89
PRO, SP 16/32/27; for a similar case, see PRO, SP 16/33/60 and 16/38/20; see
also Eglisham, Forerunner of Revenge, A2v.
death to anxieties about national degeneracy and effeminacy,
symbolized by the retreat from Ré:
O Admirall! since thou camst back againe
more base from Rhee, then Cecill did from Spaine
Since thou hast bin againe receaved at Court
beyond thy owne conceite beyond Reporte.
Since thou hast guilt of all the bloud Rhee spent
must thou still live to breake a Parliament!
hath no witch poyson! not one man a dagger
or hath our Coward Age forgott to swagger?
Changing tack, the libeller admitted that Buckingham’s con-
tinued sinful ascendancy was probably the result of ‘our owne
Amisse’, and that therefore only national moral renewal could
bring the duke down. ‘Would each of us mend one’, the libel
argued, ‘though thou mend none / then all thy plots were straight-
waies overthrowne’. ‘This is the state of our lost land’, the poem
concluded; ‘thou standst we fall & when thou fallst we stand’.90
Other libels from early 1628 express a far less conflicted violent
impulse towards the duke. Reflecting on the retreat from Ré, one
poem argued that Buckingham ‘Deserves, to have Sejanus ende’,
evoking the death of the notorious favourite of Tiberius, executed
on order of the senate and dragged through the streets by an ex-
ultant Roman mob.91 Two verses developed a hunting metaphor,
based on a pun that rewrote Buckingham as ‘Buck-King of
Game’ or ‘Buck-in-game’. ‘Of Brittish Beasts the Buck is King’,
one began,
His Game and fame through Europe ringe,
His horne exalted, keepes in awe
The lesser flocks; his Will’s a Lawe.
Our Charlemaine takes much delight
In this great beast soe faire in sight,
With his whole heart affects the same,
And loves too well Buck-King of Game.
Like an omnivorous beast, the buck/duke pillages the forest/
nation so cruelly that the ‘tender thicketts nere can thrive’, and
all the trees are stripped of bark. This national devastation neces-
sitates — and legitimizes — the hunt, for the buck/duke must die
for the forest/nation’s good. Buckingham’s death is thus imagined
90
BL, Add. MS 29492, fo. 55r (ESL, O iii 1). The reference to Cecil alludes to the
1625 expedition to Cadiz.
91
CCRO, MS CR 63/2/19, fo. 63r (ESL, O ii 11).
(and legitimized) as an occasion for national joy and national
renewal:
When hee is chac’d, then ’gins the sport,
When nigh his End, who’s sorry for’t?
And when he falls the Hunter’s gladd,
The hounds are flesh’d, and few are sadd.92
The uneasy proceedings of the 1628 parliament intensified the
more violent fantasies, and within this parliamentary context, the
specific timing of the attack on Lambe was highly significant.93
Charles’s shifting response to the Petition of Right during the first
week of June had created intense anxiety both within and outside
the Commons. But popular concern, in London at least, focused
more on Buckingham than on the constitutional issues articu-
lated by the petition. Many of the bonfires lit in London and
surrounding towns in apparently spontaneous celebration of
Charles’s assent to the petition on 7 June were in fact, noted one
observer, lit upon the misapprehension ‘that the duke either was
or should be sent to the Tower’. The old scaffold on Tower Hill
was rumoured to have been pulled down by ‘certain unhappy
boys’ who claimed that ‘they would have a new one built for the
Duke of Bucks’.94 The rumour was no more than wishful think-
ing, but the speed with which it gripped the popular imagina-
tion was an ominous indication of popular hostility towards the
favourite. This hostility only intensified as the Commons turned
from the petition to concentrate on their grievances against
Buckingham. It was the culmination of the debate on these grie-
vances, encapsulated in the parliamentary remonstrance against
the duke, that supplied the immediate parliamentary context, and
perhaps the immediate trigger, for the assault on Lambe: a com-
pelling example of the dynamic interaction between the politics
of Westminster and the politics of the street.95
The violent fantasies figured in the libels and in the gestures
of the ‘unhappy boys’ on Tower Hill, like the all-too-real violence
inflicted on Lambe, were also expressed in, and perhaps encour-
aged by, a spate of ominous prophecy and prodigy. In June 1628
92
BL, Sloane MS 826, fos. 184v–185r (ESL, O iii 12); Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, 160.
For a second poem using the pun, see Bodleian Lib., MS Ashmole 36–37, fo. 174v
(ESL, O iii 13).
93
Note Rushworth, Historical Collections, 618.
94
95
L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge, 1989), 33.
the eccentric prophetess Eleanor Davies reportedly predicted
that Buckingham would die in August.96 Newsletters reported
popular speculation about certain ominous signs, or prodigies,
connected to Lambe’s death. The day Lambe died, 14 June,
Buckingham had been struck in the face by a Scotsman angered
that the duke did not remove his hat in the royal presence. The
same day, the portrait of the duke hanging in the High Commis-
sion chamber in Lambeth had, it was said, fallen off the wall.97
Although some thought these stories ‘toys’, others did not, and we
risk missing something of early modern political culture if we
ignore them.98 In the later 1620s, hostility to Buckingham —
and a sense that God was angry at the duke and the nation — was
often expressed by widely circulated prodigy stories. Once again,
the dissolution of the 1626 parliament was an important source
of popular anxiety. ‘Every body’, one diarist recorded, under-
stood the ‘terrible monday’ storm shortly before parliament’s
dissolution ‘as a ju[dgement] ag[ainst] the D[uke]’.99 A well in
Oundle, Northamptonshire, which had let out a roar at the time
of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) and the death of Prince Henry
(1612), had, the diarist learned, made a ‘great noyse’ in 1626,
perhaps presaging another great popish plot, a divine mercy or
a divine judgement.100 In 1628, however, the most widely circu-
lated prophetic expression about the duke was an explicitly violent
one, a chronogram which divined from the letters of Bucking-
ham’s Latinized name the date 1628.101 Various rhymes, in both
Latin and English, were appended to copies of the chronogram.
‘Sith number with thy name doth thus agree’, ran one couplet,
‘This yeare shall fatall prove to state or thee’.102 Another version,
which may, in fact, have been invented after Lambe’s murder,
ran, ‘When in his name Anno Domini doth appeare, /Feare not
him, nor his lambe, for their deaths are neare’.103 At one (inten-
sively studied and privileged) level of political discourse, MPs
96
Esther S. Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe Mad
a Ladie (Ann Arbor, 1992), 51–2.
97
BL, Harley MS 390, fo. 415v.
98
See Walsham, ‘Vox Piscis’; Underdown, Freeborn People, 35.
99
Trinity College, MS O.7.3, fo. 4v; compare CCRO, MS CR 63/2/19, fo. 46r.
100
Trinity College, MS O.7.3, fo. 5v; Walsham, ‘Vox Piscis’, 585–7; and, on a storm
of December 1626, BL, Sloane MS 826, fos. 28v–29r (ESL, O i 11).
101
Bellany, ‘ ‘‘Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse’’ ’, 290.
102
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, MS V.a.162, fo. 80r (ESL, P i 2).
103
Bodleian Lib., MS Tanner 465, fo. 100r (ESL, P i 3).
contemplated the need to reform the duke or, if necessary, re-
move him from his position of paramount influence over the king.
At another level of discourse, men from many parts of the so-
cial spectrum contemplated punishment, vengeance and violent
death.
Holed up in London, his mind and body damaged by the
traumatic events on Ré, his fragile feelings of personal and familial
honour wounded by the denial of pay and promotion, and his
sense of grievance focused squarely on Buckingham, the de-
mobbed lieutenant John Felton moved through the world of
rumour and libel, prophecy and prodigy, anxiety and accusation,
that had precipitated into deadly violence on Coleman Street
Ward that Friday night in June. Two months later, convinced
that his own sufferings were also the nation’s, he left the city for
Portsmouth, where, wielding a cheap knife in his one good
hand, he would work the much-desired reformation on the body
of George Villiers.104 Under pressure to legitimize Felton’s act,
contemporaries would rake over the favourite’s many sins, often
returning to Buckingham’s relationship with John Lambe and
incorporating the duke’s witchcrafts into the often lengthy versi-
fied catalogues of sins justifying his murder. Some verse libels
evoked the murdered pair reunited in a shared and sometimes
comically imagined hell, where Lambe could still serve his master,
by introducing him with appropriate pomp at Pluto’s court, or by
helping him thrive in his new political environment.105 Many
libels repeat the specific charges about Buckingham’s use of
Lambe’s witchcraft that had circulated prior to their deaths.
Some, for instance, alluded to Lambe’s supposed role in cement-
ing Buckingham’s disturbing hold over the king. ‘Where is
thy devill, and thy Doctor Lambe?’ asked one, ‘that purchased
the[e], with Charles, so great a name’.106 Other poems suggest
that Lambe’s murder had left Buckingham without supernatural
protection and thus vulnerable to Felton’s knife: ‘The Shep-
heards struck, The sheepe are fledd, / For want of Lambe the
Wolfe is dead’, noted one;107 ‘Coulde not the reliquices off his
104
On Felton’s motives, see Bellany and Cogswell, England’s Assassin.
105
BL, Egerton MS 2026, fo. 64r (ESL, P i 35); Hell’s Hurlie-Burlie (London, 1644),
7–8 (ESL, P i 30); BL, Sloane MS 826, fo. 182r–v (ESL, P i 16).
106
CCRO, MS CR 63/2/19, fos. 70v–71r (ESL, P i 31); see also BL, Add. MS 5832,
fos. 197v–199r (ESL, P i 32).
107
BL, Sloane MS 826, fo. 185r (ESL, P i 6).
Lambe / or his owne deere Idolatrous Damme / From Felton him
preserve’, asked another.108
Other poets implicitly legitimized the assassination as the exe-
cution of justice against a sinful, criminal transgressor, integ-
rating Buckingham and Lambe’s witchcrafts into the bill of
indictment. As one poet wrote of Buckingham in hell,
Iff Conjuracions, Carrecters and spells,
Circles, and figures, furyes, feends of hell;
and all enchauntments, were off any merrytte,
then might thy soule, Elyzean Joyes enherrytte.109
‘Pride lies heere, Revenge and Lust, / Sorcerie and Averice, all
accurst’, one poem noted, ending with a vision of Buckingham
in hell, in the spot picked out for him by Lambe: ‘’Gainst justice
liv’d they, soe did dye’.110 Another poet evoked, in Buckingham’s
voice, the futility of faith in witchcraft in the face of divine justice:
‘The glittering sword is now unsheath’d; / The Witches With by
Vengeance hand is wreath’d’.111 For Richard James, Bucking-
ham’s assassination was an act of national disenchantment, the
breaking of a spell, a liberation from ‘Magique thralldome’. Buck-
ingham’s transgressive dominance — his monopoly of power, his
ambition, his betrayal of English liberties and the Protestant
cause — was figured by James as a form of witchcraft. Now the
‘illusion’ was shattered, the right order was restored, and the poet
hailed the duke’s assassin as a ‘stout Machabee’:
In spight of charme
Of Witch or Wizard, thy more mighty Arme,
With Zeale and Justice arm’d, hath in truth wonne
The prize of Patriott to a Brittish Sonne.112
IX
How, then, should we read the murder of John Lambe, and what
general conclusions might we draw from it? There was not a homo-
geneous contemporary reaction to Lambe’s murder — and this
split in responses is evidence in and of itself of the fissures opening
108
CCRO, MS CR 63/2/19, fo. 69r (ESL, P i 23).
109
Ibid., fos. 70v–71r (ESL, P i 31).
110
BL, Sloane MS 826, fo. 182r–v (ESL, P i 16); see also BL, Add. MS 5832,
fos. 197v–199r (ESL, P i 32).
111
BL, Sloane MS 826, fos. 171r–178r (ESL, P i 36).
112
Ibid., fos. 191v–192r (ESL, P ii 8).
up within the English polity. The Crown was officially condem-
natory, chastising the City for its police failures, and no doubt
dwelling with horror on a murderous event that seemed to incar-
nate vividly the Caroline regime’s worst fears about popular unru-
liness and disobedience.113 Joseph Mead heard that the king had
been seriously disturbed by the Coleman Street libel threatening
further reformation and had taken the precaution of doubling
the guard. With the other feeble police powers at their disposal,
the authorities also attempted to stifle popular discourse on the
murder, suppressing at least one printed ballad, removing the
offending libellous placard from the streets and jailing some of
those who had read it.114 Some contemporaries, while neither
mourning Lambe nor supporting Buckingham, were neverthe-
less unnerved at the political intervention of what Mead termed
the ‘barbarous rabble’, and concerned at the possibilities of more
violence to come. ‘God grant’, Mead reflected, ‘that to our other
sins, there be no bloud layd to our charge’.115
We also should not impute homogeneous motivation to the
crowd, but we can argue that for the animating core of the crowd
and for many contemporaries Lambe’s violent murder was experi-
enced, represented and understood as a moral and political
action: the execution of a witch (and perhaps a rapist), and a
symbolic assault on the royal favourite Buckingham.116 Lambe
could have signified many things to the young men who destroyed
him: sexual and religious transgression, both his own and
Buckingham’s; fraud and deception; demonic witchcraft and
thus the radical inversion of the moral order; the corruption of
the court; the perversion of royal justice. Lambe’s death, like the
much-anticipated death of the favourite that August, thus held
the promise of moral and political restoration and rebirth: like the
regularized violence of the early modern public execution or the
official and unofficial iconoclastic smashing of popish idols,
the popular violence on the London streets in the summer of
1628 was perceived, represented, and perhaps also experienced
113
On royal fears of ‘popularity’, see Richard Cust, ‘Charles I and Popularity’, in
Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity
in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002).
114
BL, Harley MS 390, fo. 415r; BL, Add. MS 35331, fo. 21v.
115
BL, Harley MS 390, fos. 412r, 415r.
116
On the risks of reifying the crowd as a single intentional agent, see Harris, London
Crowds in the Reign of Charles II, 9; Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English
Revolution, 306; Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 160–5.
as a form of ‘regenerative violence’, destroying in order to restore
and create anew.117 Both the act itself and the contemporary
interpretation of it are symptomatic of a strain of political think-
ing that, while clearly not universal, nevertheless spanned both
elite and popular political texts and cultures: the belief that indi-
vidual corruption was at the root of national decay, and that
the violent elimination of transgressive individuals could restore
national order. If the core of the crowd that murdered Lambe was
indeed drawn from London’s vast population of apprentices, the
events of that night may also fit the pattern of apprentice violence
against immorality that led, in many years, to Shrove Tuesday
riots against the capital’s bawdy-houses and playhouses. The act
would also conform to what Tim Harris sees as a pattern of ‘self-
coordinated collective protest’ and of apprentice ‘crowd unrest . . .
as a method of enforcing what might be termed a ‘‘popular’’
perception of justice . . . an extension of the people’s role in law-
enforcement’.118
The modes of that night’s violence also support these lines of
interpretation. Contemporary reports agree on two things: that the
violence was intense, extreme and deliberately deadly; and that
the primary weapons were ‘stones and cudgels’.119 Cudgels were
the quintessential apprentice weapon; young men in London
commonly played with them, sometimes smuggling them under
their cloaks to avoid detection by adults, and the use of cudgels
in the Lambe murder could have added a festive element to the
regenerative, execution-like violence.120 Lambe’s murderers do
not seem to have closely mimicked the rituals of public execu-
tion (though perhaps their reported desire to tear Buckingham to
117
I have appropriated ‘regenerative violence’ from Stephen Greenblatt, Renais-
sance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), 188. On the restora-
tive function of executions, see Peter Lake, ‘Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print,
Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in Sharpe and
Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England.
118
Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II, 22, 24; see also Steven R. Smith,
‘The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents’, Past and Present,
no. 61 (Nov. 1973), 161. Without completely abandoning this line of interpretation,
Griffiths questions whether there was a single ‘apprentice’ world view structuring
disorder in early Stuart London: see Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 151 ff.
119
Briefe Description, C4r; Parker, Tragedy of Doctor Lambe, 135; Proceedings in
Parliament, 1628, ed. Keeler, Cole and Bidwell, vi, 117, 197.
120
Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 138. On festivity and execution, see Thomas W.
Laqueur, ‘Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868’, in A. L.
Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society:
Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989).
pieces alluded to the drawing and quartering of traitors), but the
use of stones could have echoed (as they did in the anti-Catholic
stonings following the Blackfriars disaster of 1623) biblical modes
of punishment for ‘idolators, sabbath breakers, blasphemers and
adulterers’.121 There are thus hints that the weapons used and
the physical intensity deployed may also have revealed a desire
to cleanse London and England of the interconnected arrays of
moral and political transgressions symbolized by the bodies of
Lambe and his master.
The murder can also be read as evidence of the high degree of
popular politicization in London in the later 1620s, a politiciza-
tion that scholars of popular politics have noted but under-
analysed, and that mainstream histories of the high political
events of the decade have all but ignored.122 The young men who
killed Lambe inhabited an urban popular culture deeply engaged
in the national politics of the day. They lived in an environment
saturated in political gossip and rumour, cheap illicit pamphlets
and bawdy political verse that circulated throughout the capital,
not only in the sites of elite sociability such as St Paul’s Cathedral
or the Royal Exchange, but also in the places where the social
orders mixed, in taverns and ordinaries, in shops, and on the
river.123 The unusually high literacy of London apprentices and
their proximity to the sites of urban news exchange allowed them
access to all kinds of political information and misinformation.
No doubt they misunderstood George Villiers, but their per-
ceptions of him and of his supposed associate John Lambe —
perceptions shaped by the news culture of the day, stimulated
by the tense debates at Westminster, and expressed in a language
of moral corruption that traditional political historians have
marginalized and ignored — drove them to act.
And not only to act, but also to claim a kind of moral-political
agency. The placard posted on Coleman Street threatened that
121
Walsham, ‘ ‘‘Fatall Vesper’’ ’, 58; see also Davis, ‘Rites of Violence’, 162–3.
122
Ian Archer, ‘Popular Politics in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’,
in Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and
Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester, 2000), 39–41. For a program-
matic synthesis of approaches to early modern popular politics, see Tim Harris, ‘Intro-
duction’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke
and New York, 2001).
123
Bellany, Politics of Court Scandal, 80–3; Archer, ‘Popular Politics’, 28–30; Adam
Fox, ‘Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart
England’, Hist. Jl, xl (1997).
‘if thinges be not shortly reformed, they will work a reformation
themselves’.124 Here was someone not only engaging in a nego-
tiating tactic, using threats to bring the authorities to live up to
their responsibilities, but also claiming for the crowd a political
agency, translating the culture of the Shrove Tuesday brothel riots
and the broader English culture of non-elite participation in local
office and law enforcement into something that was (in this pol-
itical context) altogether more ambitious, a willingness to seize
moral and judicial responsibility for ‘reformation’ if king or par-
liament failed to act.125 It is clear that John Felton, for one, came
to feel similarly: his justification for assassinating Buckingham
was, in part, that everyone else had failed in the duty to punish
the duke. Felton saw himself as taking on the judicial role neglected
by the constituted legal authorities, and many contemporaries
were happy to concede him the right to act in that role.126 The
Coleman Street libel’s assertion of legitimate popular political
agency has both short- and longer-term London contexts. We
have already noted its roots in claims that London apprentices
could act as (in Paul Griffiths’s words) ‘overseers of justice and
morality’.127 William Hunt and Ian Archer have stressed the role
of London civic chivalry and pulpit-inspired post-Reformation
civic anti-popery as important longer-term cultural legitimiza-
tions for Londoners’ claims to a popular political agency.128
Hunt notes, for instance, that chivalric literature fostered ap-
prentice identity formation, providing ‘inspiration as well as
distraction’ and furnishing ‘the young with a narrative repertoire
through which to articulate their own dreams and projects’.129
During the crisis years of the 1620s, these longer-term cultural legi-
timizations were catalysed by diverse shorter-term political stimuli
— confessional war on the Continent that polarized English
124
125
On riot and threat-filled libels as negotiating tactics, see Archer, Pursuit of
Stability, 7–8; Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early
Modern England’, in Harris (ed.), Politics of the Excluded.
126
Alastair Bellany, ‘ ‘‘The Brightnes of the Noble Leiutenants Action’’: An Intel-
lectual Ponders Buckingham’s Assassination’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxviii (2003).
127
Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 154.
128
Archer, ‘Popular Politics’, 32–4, 37–40; William Hunt, ‘Civic Chivalry and the
English Civil War’, in Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (eds.), The Transmission of Cul-
ture in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 1990).
129
Hunt, ‘Civic Chivalry and the English Civil War’, 209.
opinion at home, and gave London civic chivalry a militantly
Protestant hue;130 heightened pulpit rhetoric inveighing against
the popish threat and warning of the price to pay for inaction; an
expanding and explicitly controversial news culture and political
public sphere; and the scapegoating of a single prominent individ-
ual as the cause of both foreign and domestic crisis. Throughout
the 1620s, we can find London crowds — some, though not all,
with significant apprentice membership — acting in politicized
ways and, on occasion, resorting to sometimes deadly violence
to assert their (usually anti-Catholic or anti-Spanish) religio-
political point.131
The events of the later 1620s also anticipate events in 1640–2,
when crowds in and out of London contributed markedly to the
succession of political crises that led to civil war. In his important
analysis of the Stour Valley anti-popish riots in the summer of
1642, John Walter argues that the rioters were acting out a
political agency that parliamentary propaganda had invested
in them. They were, he argues, ‘an active citizenry, mobilised by
the politics of anti-popery and popular Parliamentarianism’, cre-
ated by the networks of communication linking London and the
provinces, shaped by the language of parliamentary orders and
Puritan sermons, ritually activated by the swearing of oaths to
the parliamentary protestation. In 1642, Walter suggests, rioting
crowds had been given a right, even a duty, to act against the
popish threat.132 In London in June 1628, the apprentices who
killed Lambe, and the commentators who celebrated them,
claimed for themselves that same status as ‘active citizenry’ and
that same ensuing right of action. Drawing these connections
does not require us to propose a linear progression of ever increas-
ing popular politicization, a kind of high road to the Stour Valley.
Rather these parallels point us towards a recognition of cultural
origins, the capacity of early seventeenth-century political culture
to produce, under certain combinations of forces, certain kinds of
popular political activity. Thus, long-standing customary notions
of the popular duty to police transgression, to protest against
violations of moral economies, and to call negligent authorities
130
Ibid., 225.
131
Archer, ‘Popular Politics’, 39–41; Walsham, ‘ ‘‘Fatall Vesper’’ ’, 55–62; Griffiths,
Youth and Authority, 126–7.
132
Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution, 286 ff., quota-
tion at 287.
to action could, under the pressure of confessionalized politics,
war and internal political fragmentation, and in the context of
communicative practices that disseminated news, rumour,
libel and opinion to broad swathes of the populace, produce
and legitimize ‘oppositional’, subversive, even proto-revolution-
ary popular political activity.
Yet perhaps we can recuperate a more direct causal connection
between 1628 and 1640–2. In the London crowds of the early
1640s were men who must have come of political age during the
1620s, whose memories of the earlier crisis may have shaped their
responses to the more intense, but in some ways similar, current
one. John Lambe, for one, remained a resonant object of political
memory. In the 1630s a theatre company had attempted to stage a
play about him; in 1653 stationers believed they would sell more
copies of a witchcraft pamphlet if Lambe’s name featured prom-
inently on the title page. And on the streets of London in the
spring of 1640, as crowds rioted against William Laud and the
Caroline religious regime, an old jingle from the summer of 1628
was reworked to articulate the crowd’s desires and give them a
pedigree. Our witness, alas, loses the rhyme; but the connection
between the two crises is preserved: ‘that Charles and Marie do
what they will, We will kill the Archbishop of Canterbury like
Doctor Lambe’.133
Rutgers University Alastair Bellany
133
Lindley, ‘Riot Prevention and Control’, 115; Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage,
v, 1455; Bower, Doctor Lamb Revived; Anon., Doctor Lamb’s Darling. See also Thomas
Randolph, Poems with the Muses Looking-Glasse (Oxford, 1638, STC 20694), 53.
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THE MURDER OF JOHN LAMBE:

CROWD VIOLENCE, COURT SCANDAL

They also provide fragments of evidence on the modes of violence

‘that the said Doctor Lambe was an absolute Witch, a Sorcerer

displays a monastic scene of demonically inspired mayhem.52 A

Rutgers University Alastair Bellany

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