An Elizabethan Assassin by John Hall

Author:John Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750964708
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2015-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

The earl was to enjoy a last triumph. The Star Chamber suit against the Dymokes was to drag on till 1610, when Lincoln obtained a rare legal verdict in his favour, though the wording of the judgement indicates that the severe sentences handed down owed more to the ‘frown of religion’ than to the libel against the earl. Talboys Dymoke, principal cause of all the trouble, was by this time beyond the judges’ reach – in what circumstances he died we do not know, but he was buried at Horncastle only a year after the notorious South Kyme games – and retribution fell on his brother Sir Edward and the lesser fry. Their defence that everything had been done ‘in the merriment at the time of the May game’ was dismissed out of hand.

The bailiff John Cradock and two other chief actors in the play were hauled off to London and committed to Fleet prison, paraded through Westminster Hall ‘with papers’ – that is, having signs around their necks naming their crimes – before being pilloried and whipped. They were then dispatched to the assizes in Lincoln where they were again set in the pillory, whipped and required to acknowledge their offences and to beg forgiveness of ‘God and the earl’. They were also fined £300 apiece, a ruinous sum for common men, and bound to good behaviour before release. As a gentleman Sir Edward escaped the degradation of physical punishment but was committed to the Fleet during the pleasure of the monarch, by this time King James. His fine of £1,000 began a permanent decline in the Dymoke fortunes, a course confirmed during the Civil War by hardships suffered for loyalty to the royal cause.

The judgement signalled a growing intolerance of festive licence as the Tudor era ended. Star Chamber’s role under the Stuarts was as an instrument of tyranny. The increasingly assertive demands for religious conformity sounded the knell for a tradition which had remained virtually unchanged for centuries but would be entirely erased during the Commonwealth. The South Kyme game might be seen as a last hurrah for Merry England.

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