How Elizabeth I’s Armada caused murder in the Lakes

To defeat Spain, the Virgin Queen needed cannons. She encouraged Germans to build a smelly, smoke-belching copper smelter in Keswick. That's when the trouble started...

The Armada portrait of Elizabeth I (Royal Museum, Greenwich)

Keswick, Saturday night, 5th October, 1566. Twenty drunken young toughs, many waving hefty oak staves, paraded up the Market Square…

They were shouting like maniacs and kicking their way through the rubbish left on the cobblestones from that day’s trade.

A few of the well-lubricated men danced threateningly in front of any passers-by who looked remotely “Dutch” (they meant German). Bawling in their faces, they threatened to give the off-comers a good thrashing if they did not go back to where they came from.

Londoners in the middle of the seventeenth century regarded Keswick, if they had ever heard of it, as a fantastically remote outpost lost in a despised, even feared, wilderness.

It would be more than two hundred years before the Romantic poets started praising mountain landscapes as sublime or lauding Lakeland inhabitants as noble.

Elizabethan England was a much more youthful and violent society than ours. The average age of the people was twenty-two and few lived past forty. Death was an ever- present force in daily life. Shakespeare set his plays in exotic foreign locations to avoid accusations that he was criticising the Queen’s policies.

But the audience at the first performance of Romeo and Juliet a few years later knew that he was really writing about England. The squalid street murder of Mercutio could just as easily have taken place in an English provincial town as in Verona.

The murder rate in Elizabethan England was about one in ten thousand; by comparison today in Britain the toll is one in a hundred thousand. Elizabethan men looked like boys and often behaved like reckless juveniles. Hence, the atmosphere in Keswick was inherently threatening religiously charged, intemperate and riotous.

On that night in the Market Place the community reeked not just of the sulphurous fumes from the smelter, but also of xenophobia, religious bigotry, sexual rivalry, and envy.

Leonard Stoultz was one of a hundred and fifty foreigners drafted in to help save England from the Spanish threat. Smart, disciplined and well-paid, the Cumbrian girls began thinking he was better husband material than the local competition.

The tempers of the Keswick men had frayed not only because Germans like Stoulzt made an impression on the surrounding rock faces but also because the local women had increasingly come to admire the miners’ prodigious earning power, superior self-discipline and more regular bathing habits. These were qualities that made many Keswick girls see them as more marriageable than the indigenous males.

Suddenly, the rabble, led by a shoemaker called Fisher surrounded Stoultz, one of the German technicians hired to smelt the copper needed to forge bronze cannons to defeat the threat from the Spanish Armada. In behaviour, Stoultz was as unlike his assailants as it was possible to be. The German lived by Calvinism’s strict code of behaviour.

He didn’t gamble, dance, get drunk, wear colourful or rich clothes, swear or even sing non-religious songs. But he was not a pacifist. He fought back against his attackers with his own stick for what seemed like an age.

Finally, Christopher Woodborne delivered the death blow.

But at last another member of the mob, John á-Wood’s son, raised his staff and smashed the German’s arm so that he could no longer defend himself. The crowd of bellowing locals then fell upon the foreigner. Finally, Christopher Woodborne delivered the death blow. In the following days the Bishop of Carlisle demanded the attackers’ execution.

But no-one was ever punished for the murder. Without question this was thanks to the influence of Keswick’s immensely powerful and well-connected local landowner Lady Derwentwater, Catherine Radcliffe, who lived in a manor house on Lord’s Island in the nearby lake.

She was a Catholic and she had originally opposed the arrival of the Germans who were making a good living pulling copper ore from the nearby Cumberland hills.

However, once the foreigners were there she was happy enough to make their lives a misery. Firstly she enticed them into leasing, for a peppercorn rent, a plot a mile out of town at Brigham on the banks of the tumbling River Greta where they built their smelter and water-powered hammer to pound the ore into manageable chunks.

Then, once they were committed, she sold the Germans the wood they needed to make charcoal, without which they could do nothing, at extortionate prices. No other landowner dared risk her wrath by offering the Germans cheaper timber.

But what caused the murderous clash in the Market Place? It was unexpected because for two years relations between the townsfolk and the off-comers had been relatively peaceful. Everyone had benefited from the industrial project.

The rich seam of ore the Germans had discovered in Newlands Valley had brought prosperity to the locals, too. Dozens of residents had taken jobs carrying coal from Caldbeck, peat and slates from Skiddaw and timber from Borrowdale to feed the expanding smoky, belching, smelly new copper works.

Admittedly, the wages on offer to the unskilled were a fraction of those that the German mining specialists could command. Even so, Keswick had become a sort of English Klondike. It was not enough to staunch the raging jealousy of the local men…

Just as in late Victorian times the town of Klondike in the Yukon Valley of North West Canada was transformed by a gold strike into a raucous boomtown, so the discovery of a thick vein of copper infused with silver on the lower slopes of Hindscarth in Newlands Valley delivered a similar social shock to the Northern Lakes. The Germans were so awed by the richness of the deposit that they found near Newlands’ Lower Snab Farm they reverentially named it “Gottesgab” (God's Gift) which English tongues rendered as Goldscope, though gold was never found there.

The discovery turned Keswick, which had suffered a decline in its sheep and wool business following Henry VIII’s dissolution of Furness and Fountains Abbeys thirty years before, into England’s first significant centre of industry. But on that night in the Market Place the community reeked not just of the sulphurous fumes from the smelter, but also of xenophobia, religious bigotry, sexual rivalry, and envy.

The tempers of the Keswick men had frayed not only because the Germans made an impression on the surrounding rock faces but also because the local women had increasingly come to admire the miners’ prodigious earning power, superior self-discipline and more regular bathing habits, qualities that made many Keswick girls see them as better husband material than the local competition.

By the end of 1567 sixteen Cumberland women had opted to marry a German miner - and by 1600 the total was at least sixty. So how did Keswick become such a fraught social and economic melting pot? The answer lies in fierce ambition and terrible fears of one woman - the charismatic, hugely intelligent and deeply insecure Queen Elizabeth I.

This is an extract. You can read the rest of this piece in my book called People of the Sacred Valley. You can buy the book at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe at Lakeside, Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.

Or you can get a copy instantly here:

https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/product/secrets-of-the-lost-kingdom

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