Huguenot stealing a good English wife
Life was so different when Shakespeare was alive.
There were no problems with religious fundamentalists.
People weren’t furious with the government over their immigration policies.
Not like they are today.
Or were they?
In fact, during the time that Shakespeare started writing for the theater, London’s population had grown alarmingly with the growing number of asylum seekers fleeing their persecutions in France and the Low Countries.
It was all people could talk about; taxes would be raised, they would take the jobs of all honest Englishmen, they would steal their wives and our daughters, they would bring the plague.
Anti-immigration slogans were scrawled on the walls and posters appeared all over the city:
“You strangers that inhabit this land, Note this same writing, do it understand, Conceive it well for safeguard of your lives, Your goods, your children and your dearest wives.”
Huguenots being welcomed back where they came from
The political temperature was raised at Westminster when a new Bill ‘against Alien Strangers selling by way of Retail any Commodities’ was introduced.
‘This Bill should be ill for London, for the riches and renown of the City cometh by entertaining of Strangers and giving liberty unto them’, said Sir John Wolley.
Master Fuller added ‘the exclamations of the City are exceeding pitiful and great against these Strangers who had not quiet times in their own countries, otherwise they would have returned home of their own accord.’
Other lawmakers opposed any notion of welcome or charity and wanted these ‘unholy foreigners’ deported without further delay.
killing people for God - because That’s What God Wants
The unholy foreigners in question were the Huguenots, a religious minority escaping persecution at the hands of the Catholics in France. In those days, if you didn’t believe in the Pope and his Church, it was a good Catholic’s duty to slaughter you. It was what God wanted.
There were political motives behind the killings, of course, masquerading as religion.
It’s good to appreciate how far we’ve all progressed.
The research was sobering for me personally because my brother can trace his family line to the Huguenots. One of his ancestors was one of those despised immigrants. But three hundred years later these same Huguenots were still living in the East End, as Cockney as you could get.
But that’s the one thing that writing history has taught me.
The human race has never learned a damned thing from it.
The research that inspired the post came from Book 2 in the The William Shakespeare Detective Agency - The Dark Lady - which will be released on January 2.
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The more things change, the more they remain the same.