AN ELIZABETHAN RECORDER.
“I assert that all past days were what they must have been,
And that they could no-how have been better than they were.”
—Walt Whitman.
Many years ago, when I happened upon a few extracts from the letters of Mistress Dorothy Osborne, I wondered how they had escaped the grasp of the historian learned in the domestic annals of the Commonwealth. And in the same way it has always surprised me that the correspondence of William Fleetwood, Recorder of London from 1571 to 1591, should have been left hidden in the scarce but charming collection of Elizabethan Letters edited by that excellent antiquary and man of letters, Thomas Wright.
Some day, perhaps, popular interest may demand a Life and Letters of Fleetwood; but, meanwhile, a mosaic of the man and his work, pieced together from his own written words, may interest latter-day readers. His career was similar to that of many another minor Elizabethan official, and the records show him to have been an honest, active Protestant magistrate, full of zeal for his religion, honour for his Queen, and integrity in his office. In his letters we have a twenty years experience of an Elizabethan Quarter Sessions which we may use as a base to measure our progress in law and humanity during the last four hundred years.
And first a word or two of the man himself that his message may be the more clearly understood. The Recorder was a descendant of the ancient Lancashire Family of the Fleetwoods of Hesketh, in which village Baines, Lancashire’s historian, thinks our Recorder was born, and the probable date of his birth seems to be 1535. He is said to have been an illegitimate son of Robert Fleetwood, third son of William Fleetwood of Hesketh, who married Ellen Standish, daughter of another old Lancashire family. Their second son, Thomas, came to Buckinghamshire, and was known as Thomas Fleetwood of the Vache in Chalfont St. Giles. He was Master of the Mint, and Sheriff of Buckinghamshire. The Recorder must have been recognised by the family, and no doubt visited his uncle Thomas, for he himself married a lady of a well known Buckinghamshire family, Mariana, daughter of John Bailey of Kingsey. He was educated at Oxford, and was of Brazenose College, but he took no degree, and came to London to study law at the Middle Temple, where at the age of twenty-eight we find him appointed Reader. In Mary’s reign he was member for Lancaster, and afterwards sat in the House for Marlborough and the City of London. The Earl of Leicester was his patron, and it is said to be through his influence that in 1571, at the early age of thirty-six, he became Recorder of the City of London.
This office he held for twenty years, when he retired on a pension of £100 a year, and becoming Queen’s Serjeant the following year, did not live to enjoy the further honour, for he died at his home in Noble Street, Aldersgate, in February, 1593, and was buried at Great Missenden, in Buckinghamshire, where he seems to have had considerable estates.
Altogether he stands before us as a type of successful professional lawyer coming from the ranks of the county families into the larger world of London, bringing with him a certain amount of Lancashire grit and humour, and a strong sense of duty to the Government and the public. Nor does he seem to have been in any way a hide-bound, dry-as-dust, technical minded official, but there is evidence that he had a wide sympathy with many social movements of the time. He was an eager Protestant, but I cannot find that he was fanatical in his dislike of the Roman Catholics, whom it was his duty to prosecute. Anthony Wood describes him as “a learned man and a good antiquary, but of a marvellous merry and pleasant conceit”; and it is said he contributed much to the last of the old editions of Holinshed. Strype, the annalist, speaks of him in reference to a speech in the House of Commons as “a wise man,” and he seems to have combined wisdom and humour with a stern sense of official duty. That he was not a mere creature of Leicester’s and the Court is shown in his examinations of one Bloss, who had uttered terrible scandals concerning Elizabeth and her favourite, but Fleetwood reports upon his conscience as a lawyer, that it is “a clear case of no treason.” A weak man would have been tempted to strain the law against the prisoner, who was an undeserving and dangerous person. There is a pleasant incident, too, of his writing to Secretary Walsingham about some young orphans whose Catholic mother had committed suicide, begging him to acquaint Peter Osborn, the Lord Treasurer and the Master of the Wards, with the details of the unfortunate case, in order that their monies may be kept for them. “Such was the care,” writes Strype, “of this good Recorder, of the Children of the City.”
There was one exciting incident in his life when in 1576 he was cast into the Fleet Prison. Lord Burghley seems to have suggested a raid upon the Charterhouse, where unlawful Mass was being celebrated. The Recorder carries out his instructions, and writes a vivid account of his proceedings. Unfortunately, Lady Geraldi, the wife of the Portuguese Ambassador, was present, and her husband carries his complaint of her treatment to Court, with the result that Elizabeth—after the manner of all rulers of all times—promptly disavows her agent, and by way of a pleasant apology to Portugal, throws Fleetwood into gaol. The Recorder, who probably thoroughly understands that he is only in the Fleet, “without prejudice” and for purely Pickwickian state purposes, writes to Lord Burghley: “I do beseech you thank Mr. Warden of the Fleet for his most friendly and courteous using of me, for surely I thank God for it. I am quiet and lack nothing that he or his bedfellow are able to do for me.” And after a short experience of gaol he sums up the situation much as Mr. Stead did after a similar experience: “This is a place wherein a man may quietly be acquainted with God.”