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Lewkenor’s writings · 1595
The Estate of English Fugitives
For my meaning is not to speak of sophistical devices, projected drifts, or matters forged in the air, but plainly and simply, of things actually and really done in public view of the world, and confirmed with the witness of thousands.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), prefatory address; spelling modernised.
Soldiers, exiles, treachery and survival under the King of Spain: Lewkenor’s account of a world he had known.
The men in this book have crossed the sea in search of service, religious freedom, wealth or advancement. Some sell a town, some change employers, some wait for money that never comes. A captain becomes a seller of butter and cheese. A soldier borrows a friar’s habit to extract his wages from a treasurer. Commanders who have earned a reputation in battle discover that reputation will not buy them a pair of shoes.
Lewes Lewkenor makes these lives the subject of The Estate of English Fugitives under the King of Spain and his Ministers, published in London in 1595. Here “estate” means their condition or circumstances. His purpose is to warn English readers against the hopes that had drawn their countrymen into Spanish service. His method is to give names, places, conversations and consequences.
Private letters brought into print
The preface looks back to Flanders “some five or six years since”. Lewkenor recalls seeing Englishmen, including gentlemen of good families, unable to return home and unable to obtain relief where they were:
Seeing a miserable troop of my unhappy countrymen, (some of which were gentlemen of good houses in England,) wandering in poor habits and afflicted gestures, heavily groaning under the burthen of an extreme and calamitous necessity: on the one side, by their heedless demeanour there, debarred from return into their country: and on the other, daily overlooked with the proud eyes of disdainful Spaniards, and for want of due regard in that comfortless service, perishing without either pity or relief.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), prefatory address, extract; spelling modernised.
He wrote privately to acquaintances in England who were tempted to follow them. His explanation of how those letters became a book is unusually revealing:
Having to that effect, written from thence privately to some of my acquaintance, the copies of my letters (contrary to my intention) were since my return, by some of them given abroad, and lastly not long since, a discourse printed in Paul’s Churchyard, containing some part of the substance thereof, but many things that I had written left out, and many things inserted that I never meant, and finally in the whole so falsified and changed, as well in matter as words, and ignorantly intermixed with fictions of the publisher, that howsoever the vulgar sort be therewith pleased, those that are of farther reach and insight, cannot but condemn it as a thing fabulous, grossly handled and full of absurdities.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), prefatory address; spelling modernised.
The remedy, he says, is to publish “the true copy of my own letter”. The 1595 preface therefore preserves a history before the surviving book: correspondence from abroad, copies passed among readers, an unauthorised printing, and the writer’s attempt to recover control of his words. The date on the title page belongs to publication; the letters and experiences it contains are earlier.
Why young men went abroad
Lewkenor begins by answering a correspondent who wants to enter the Spanish king’s service. He distinguishes several motives: curiosity, ambition and conscience. His description keeps their attractions visible even while preparing to dismantle them:
Some thereunto (as I guess) moved of a youthful and vain tickling humour, to be wandering abroad in strange and foreign countries: others in hope there to grow to great preferment, advancement, employment, and wealth: other some pretending matter of conscience, seem to have sure confidence that there they may live with more liberty and ease of mind, than that which within our country they enjoy.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), opening letter, extract; spelling modernised.
The warning comes from a participant. He describes his own “long and dangerous experience” and hopes that his painful knowledge may become a “looking glass” in which others see the errors of their expectations. That position gives the book its mixture of autobiography, political persuasion, military history and sharply drawn human stories.
Parma’s soldiers and the price of service
Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, commands much of the military world through which the narrative moves. Lewkenor recalls six hundred English soldiers entering his service at the siege of Oudenaarde:
A troop of six hundred, the tallest and best appointed soldiers that I remember ever to have seen in all my life, their coming being the only cause, that the town (a matter of great importance, and on the land side, as it were the very key of the province of Flanders) was so soon delivered unto him as it was.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of the English soldiers at Oudenaarde, extract; spelling modernised.
The praise makes their subsequent treatment more devastating. Lewkenor first establishes their military value, then asks what they received for it:
But now to my newcome English that had done these notable services to the Spaniard, let us see how they were recompensed: within one year they were suffered all in a manner to famish, which misery some of them seeking to relieve by foraging out upon the country, four and twenty of them were taken by the Spanish provost, and carried to Oudenaarde (of the rendering whereof they had been the chiefest means) and openly hanged in the market place.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of the English soldiers after Oudenaarde; spelling modernised.
Service does not protect these men. Their contribution to taking the town becomes part of the bitter irony of their execution there. The passage also shows how unpaid armies turn upon the surrounding population: hunger produces foraging, followed by punishment.
“Not … a pair of shoes”
Lewkenor’s account of Martin Schenck brings the problem of reward into a remembered conversation. An officer with a formidable military reputation complains that he cannot meet the smallest personal expense:
I have heard Skinke earnestly protest, that he had not in his purse wherewithal to buy him so much as a pair of shoes—for those were his very words.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of Martin Schenck; spelling modernised.
The insistence on the speaker’s “very words” matters. Lewkenor offers the conversation as something he heard himself. Across the book, loyalty is tested by failures of payment, promises of promotion and rival claims to honour. Commanders change sides; men who have betrayed one employer seek an opportunity to betray the next.
The del Monte brothers
Not every officer is reduced to poverty. Lewkenor names Giovanni Battista and Camillo del Monte as distinguished soldiers who left Spanish service for commands under Italian rulers:
The sight of this hard and beggarly usage, but especially the feeling of that which they themselves received, have made many great and worthy soldiers to abandon him with mighty discontentments, as amongst the rest John Baptista de Monte, and Camillo de Monte, two notable captains, both now retained under two mighty states, the one being general to the Duke of Florence, the other bearing like charge under the Venetians, who both lie in wait to cry quittance with him.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of soldiers abandoning Spanish service; spelling modernised.
These are men to whom Lewkenor later acknowledges personal obligations. In The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599), p. 166, he identifies Battista as Venice’s Captain General, states that he served under him, and thanks both brothers for favours. The two books preserve complementary evidence: an account of their dissatisfaction in 1595 and an explicit declaration of his own service and gratitude in 1599.
Captain Smith: comedy inside misery
The book’s soldiers also quarrel, drink and improvise. Captain John Smith’s attempt to obtain money from the treasurer Juan de Lasture turns into a multilingual confrontation. The treasurer insults him in Spanish; Smith has only scraps of Dutch with which to answer:
Smith had not a word of Spanish, nor any other language, but a little Dutch, wherein he requited the treasurer in as snarling terms as he could, calling him honscont, Schellam, and Turk. Wherewith the treasurer came in a great rage, and would have thrust him down the stairs, but Smith drew out his dagger, and had without doubt mischieved him, if coronel Boyd and other Scottish gentlemen, that were there present as suitors for money, had not come between them.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), Captain Smith’s quarrel with the treasurer; spelling modernised.
The episode has the pace of a comic scene, but Smith’s later history is pitiful. Illness and poverty force him to abandon the status of captain for a precarious trade:
Smith held yet somewhat longer out, though drinking as deeply in the cup of misery, or rather deeplier than any of the rest; for he fell through sicknesses and poverty into such extremity of wants, that of a captain he was fain to become a victualler, and to buy butter and cheese, and by making sale thereof again to help and relieve his poor estate.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of Captain Smith’s decline; spelling modernised.
Lewkenor goes on to describe Smith’s severe dropsy and reports his death at Ghent in 1588, qualifying that last information with “as it is told me since”. The qualification separates the man he had seen from news received afterwards. This is the English captain of the Low Countries narrative, distinct from the later Virginia colonist.
The soldier in the friar’s coat
One of the most elaborate jests concerns a Spanish soldier who persuades the guardian of the Grey Friars in Brussels that he wishes to enter religious life. He obtains a habit, learns the appropriate behaviour and then enlists the guardian’s help in collecting money owed to him. His supposed debts weigh upon his conscience; any surplus, he says, will go to the cloister.
The performance succeeds. The treasurer pays, and the soldier returns with a different account of his spiritual vocation:
The Spaniard, upon his return to the cloister, told the guardian, that he could not by any means conform the frailness of his flesh to that austerity of life; and therefore, with many hearty thanks, delivering him his coat, went his ways to make good cheer amongst his cameradoes, not glorifying a little in the happiness of his success.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), the Spanish soldier’s jest at Brussels; spelling modernised.
Costume, gesture, contrition and a sympathetic intermediary have accomplished what ordinary requests could not. Lewkenor’s conclusion places the joke within the book’s larger argument about unpaid service:
In fine, you may see that these are no great tokens of that bottomless plenty which they speak of, when poor men that have spent their years, and their blood in his service, must be driven to use such dishonest sleights and cozening devices for the obtaining of their money.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), conclusion to the soldiers’ jests; spelling modernised.
The fraud makes the reader laugh, then returns attention to the conditions that make fraud useful. The institution and its clothing become instruments in a struggle for money already earned.
The country as a stage
Lewkenor widens his view from the English abroad to the population among whom armies move. His theatrical metaphor names a prolonged public catastrophe:
There is no calamity in the world, of which these miserable people hath not tasted: their country being as a stage, upon which for the space of this twenty years, there hath been nothing acted, but bloody tragedies.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of the condition of the Low Countries; spelling modernised.
He describes broken chests, stolen bedding, food consumed or carried away and violence against wives and daughters. The most brutal detail is introduced as eyewitness testimony:
I have seen the rude and barbarous soldier cut off the fingers of women to come to their rings, which otherwise would not come off with such speed as they desired.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of soldiers billeted in civilian households; spelling modernised.
The sentence gives cruelty a material motive. A ring cannot be removed quickly enough, so the soldier takes the finger with it. The body of a civilian becomes an obstacle to plunder. This testimony is central to reading the book’s political argument alongside its record of lived violence.
How to read Lewkenor’s evidence
Lewkenor writes to persuade. He condemns Spanish government and urges loyalty to Elizabeth. His choice of examples serves that purpose. At the same time, he makes distinctions within his evidence: personal sight, remembered speech, later report and events before his own arrival.
When discussing earlier executions, he explicitly draws a boundary around what he knows:
I touch these things the more sparingly, because they happened before my time of being there, and in matters delivered by hearsay I might err, which (undertaking to write nothing but that which is true and unrefutable) I would be loth to do, and therefore I will come to things of later time, and such as I do certainly know.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), transition from earlier events to his own period abroad; spelling modernised.
His claim to truth remains a claim to examine, but the distinctions are valuable. The book allows its reader to ask whose words are being reported, where the writer was present and when information reached him. Its strongest passages often combine a public argument with a sharply particular detail: the shoes, the cheese, the friar’s coat, the rings.
The appeal to return
Lewkenor ends by urging English soldiers to reconsider the course they have taken. Service abroad is figured as a dangerous substitute for the protection of home:
Let them not tire out their years and youth in so comfortless and unrewarded a service, the end whereof is never other than untimely death, desolation, or beggary; let them not trust themselves to sleep in the bosom of a flattering stepmother, that holdeth a knife in her hand to cut their throats, when they may securely throw themselves into the arms of a loving natural mother, that will receive them, coming like penitent and obedient children, with true tears and perfect joy.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), appeal to English captains and gentlemen abroad; spelling modernised.
This is a promise of restored belonging as well as a political demand. The country is a mother; exile has made its subjects vulnerable to a household that does not love them. The stories of individual soldiers give that final appeal its accumulated weight.
Follow the Shakespeare comparisons
The book supplies several distinct routes into the plays. Each investigation places Lewkenor’s words beside the dramatic text:
- Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor: Captain Smith, recruiting, drink, provisions and bodily decline.
- Measure for Measure: the soldier’s borrowed friar’s habit and a performance of religious authority.
- Othello and All’s Well That Ends Well: the del Monte brothers, Italian command, allegiance and military reputation.
- Titus Andronicus: civilian mutilation, damaged bodies and the country as a theatre of violence.
These comparisons range from named historical connections to shared situations and verbal details. The book deserves to be read in its own right as well: a work in which a returning soldier turns foreign experience into argument, narrative and memorable English prose.
Read the original
London, printed for John Drawater, sold at his shop in Canon Lane near St Paul’s, 1595. The title page is anonymous; the work is attributed to Lewes Lewkenor. Extracts on this page follow the 1595 text with spelling modernised, while retaining its wording. The preface distinguishes the work from an earlier unauthorised printed discourse drawn from his letters.
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