On 6 April 1580, as Queen Elizabeth I was taking the air in the fields around Whitehall, south-east England experienced its greatest seismic event for two hundred years. Dr Andrew Thrush, editor of our Elizabethan House of Lords project, explains…
On a clear, calm evening in April 1580, south-eastern England, as well as the Low Countries and parts of northern France and Germany, were struck by a violent earthquake. In London, as the ground moved, church bells rang uncontrollably, water courses ‘shook and frothed wonderfully’ and many chimney stacks collapsed. At a church near Newgate Market, falling masonry killed an apprentice named Thomas Gray and fatally injured his servant, Mabel Everitt. At Sandwich, in east Kent, a sound like the discharge of several cannons was heard before the ground shook, the sea swelled and the gable end of St Peter’s church collapsed. Down the coast at Dover part of the cliffs fell, while Saltwood Castle, overlooking Hythe, suffered damage. The quake was followed by as many as four aftershocks, the last of which occurred on 1 or 2 May. Tremors were evidently felt as far afield as Edinburgh; in October the Master of Gray reported that his house ‘did shake and rock in the night as with an earthquake’.
These sudden bursts of violent seismic activity struck terror into the populace. Two days after the main quake, the court jester Richard Tarlton recorded that many in the Royal Exchange ‘wept with fear’. At the same time the writer Thomas Churchyard reported that in one London theatre those in the balcony were so frightened that the gallery would collapse that they leapt ‘from the lowest standings’. In Kent, according to a contemporary chronicler, many of those woken by the last of the aftershocks during the night of 1 May ran to the local church to pray.
Although the main earthquake lasted for little more than a minute, it was of an unusually high magnitude for the British Isles, where seismic activity is rare. Dr Roger Musson, the author of the historical earthquake catalogue for the UK (maintained by the British Geological Survey), includes the 1580 event among the four greatest earthquakes ever to have struck England. Originating 33km below the seabed in the Straits of Dover, the quake was almost certainly associated with movement of a major structural feature in the eastern English Channel known as the Variscan Thrust Front. This area has a long history of seismic activity. As early as 1382 a synod in London held to examine the writings of the Lollard John Wycliffe was interrupted by an earthquake in the Dover Straits which caused widespread damage in south-eastern England and the Low Countries. In November 1776 another earthquake, of lesser magnitude, originated in the same location. It is because the Straits of Dover are seismically active that the Channel Tunnel was designed to be earthquake-proof.
In early modern England, understanding of earthquakes was limited. One theory held that they were caused by the earth’s expulsion of trapped wind, a view first advanced by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. In the quake’s immediate aftermath, the Cambridge academic Gabriel Harvey agreed that it might have been caused by ‘some forcible and violent eruption of wind, or the like’, occasioned by excessive rainfall the previous autumn. This, Harvey argued, had ‘stopped and filled’ up ‘the pores and vents and crannies’ of the earth with moisture, so that ‘the windy exhalation and vapours pent up as it were in the bowels thereof could not otherwise get out’. However, many contemporaries were sceptical whether the Aristotelian argument was relevant in this case. They included the Essex gentleman Arthur Golding, who argued in print that the 1580 earthquake cannot have had a natural cause since among the places affected were areas ‘which by reason of their substantial soundness and massy firmness, are not to be pierced by any winds from without’. Moreover, quakes that had natural causes were preceded by signs such as tempestuous seas, whereas in this case the weather was ‘fair, temperate and unwindy’.
For many Elizabethan Englishmen – perhaps the vast majority of them – the 1580 earthquake, like most natural disasters, was an obvious expression of God’s displeasure at the nation’s sinfulness. To argue otherwise was, as Arthur Golding saw it, a mere evasion, an attempt ‘to keep themselves and others from the due looking back into the time erst misspent … lest they should see their own wretchedness’. Among the many sins Golding imputed to the English were widespread corruption, hatred, malice, disdain, pride, flattery, dissimulation and the desire for revenge. He also complained that servants behaved like masters; that men adopted ‘the garish attire and nice behaviour of women’; and that women ‘have gotten up the apparel and stomach of men’. To Golding, the 1580 earthquake was just one in a recent series of warnings to the English to mend their ways. Other signs of God’s wrath included unseasonal heavy rainfall and snow, and sharp and long-lasting frosts. Golding could not have known that a temporary dip in solar sunspot activity meant that England, like the rest of the globe, was experiencing what many historians have dubbed the mini ice age.
In fact Golding, who had worked at the London house of the Queen’s chief minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley, during the mid-1560s, was expressing views commonly held in official circles. Immediately after the quake, both John Aylmer, bishop of London, and Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, drew up prayers for circulation in their respective dioceses calling for repentance. The Privy Council approved of these initiatives. It also declared, like Golding, that England had had a lucky escape. Whereas other countries had suffered far greater disasters in recent years, such as civil wars, massacres and the earthquake which had destroyed a large part of the city of Ferrara, in northern Italy, ten years earlier, England had escaped relatively lightly. As the Council put it, God had dealt ‘more favourably with us … than he hath dealt with other nations in the like case’, having sustained little damage and few casualties (just two fatalities in fact).
By comparison, other countries had suffered the loss of whole cities and thousands of people. At the Council’s urging, Grindal’s prayer service was circulated throughout the realm, along with Golding’s short treatise. Urging repentance, it described the quake as ‘the strange and terrible token’ of God’s ‘wrath and indignation’. As if to set an example to her subjects, the Queen shortly after the earthquake urged the principal gentry of every shire to contribute generously to a collection on behalf of the plague-afflicted Huguenots of Montpellier. She cited ‘God’s merciful warning by the late earthquake’ as an ‘extraordinary admonition’ to England to act with Christian compassion.
The 1580 earthquake is unlikely to have been quickly forgotten; a line in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Act One, Scene 3), written sometime in the early 1590s, seems to allude to it (‘’Tis since the earthquake now 11 years’). For a short while it may even have shaken the English in their confident belief that God was an Englishman, an idea which can be traced back to at least the early stages of the Reformation and was still current: in 1559 John Aylmer urged his fellow countryman to fear neither French nor Scots ‘as God is English’, and in 1573 Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, pressed Burghley to advance the cause of true religion because God was ‘so much English’. However, if the 1580 earthquake did give the English pause for thought about their favoured status, these doubts were dispelled eight years later with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, when ‘God blew and they were scattered’.
AT
Further reading:
Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer Set Forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Parker Society, 1847) ed. W.K. Clay
Pamphlets on the Earthquake of 1580 – Darin Hayton
Biographies of the 1st Lord Burghley, John Aylmer, bishop of London, and archbishops Matthew Parker and Edmund Grindal will in due course feature in our volumes on the Elizabethan House of Lords.
