Phillip Stubbes: An Elizabethan Puritan

Two Elizabethans with the name of Stubbes have found their way into school text-books, both of them Puritans. There is the John Stubbes who had his hand cut off for writing a seditious pamphlet against the Queen’s projected marriage with the Catholic Duke of Anjou. When the sentence had been carried out, John Stubbes raised his hat with his one remaining hand and cried: “God save the Queen!” The other Stubbes, Phillip, who may have been a relation, is remembered for his denunciations of football, dancing, acting, dicing, swearing, wenching and wearing ruffs and high-heeled shoes. His Anatomie of Abuses is, in fact, an important source of evidence upon the more frivolous sides of Elizabethan life.

Stubbes’s description of football, as played in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, is one of the earliest we possess, and certainly the most alarming. “As concerning football playing,” he writes,