[Sidenote: Robert Cecil]
The triumph of Cecil was complete. The utter overthrow of Essex had been his first objective; now he was free to work his own underground policy. Publicly and ostensibly as before he remained the chief of the "moderate" party, seeking reconciliation with Spain and amodus vivendibetween Catholics and Anglicans; privately he took Essex's vacated place as the friend of the Scots King. Thenceforth, from the Moderate camp, directing the Moderate programme, he was in intimate correspondence [Footnote: Now published in its entirety by the Camden Society.] with James; working for the ultimate destruction of his rivals and associates, when the Stewart should become King of England, owing his crown to Cecil's dexterity. James, realising his position, promptly fell in with Cecil's plans, dropped coquetting with Catholics abroad, and was quite content to wait for a dead woman's shoes, and to give up irritating demands for an immediate recognition, of which, with Cecil on his side, he felt ultimately assured.
[Sidenote: Ireland 1600-1]
During 1600, Montjoy had already been doing good service in Ireland. The 14,000 troops at his disposal—though thrice as many as had been allowed to Norreys—were insufficient for dealing a rapid and crushing blow at the heart of the rebellion in Ulster. In Munster, however, the Deputy had a vigorous lieutenant in Carew, and the chiefs were of a divided mind— largely because many of them held their positions precariously, in virtue of the English tenure which had been officially substituted for the Irish method of succession—so that the forces of resistance were to a great extent broken up. But in Ulster, Montjoy accomplished a fine strategic stroke by making a feint of invading the province from the south, while he sent a large force of 4000 men by sea, under command of Docwra, to Loch Foyle, where they established themselves at Londonderry. He was thus in a position to strike at Tyrone or O'Donnell whenever those chiefs should attempt to move southward in force: as was exemplified next year, when Donegal was seized, and the Blackwater fort was recaptured by a move from the South, because Tyrone could not withdraw his attention from Derry.
[Sidenote: 1601 The Irish rebellion broken]
About the time of Essex's crash, there were again rumours of a Spanish invasion. Carew could deal with the Irish rebels alone, but hardly with a strong invading force as well. When in September 1601 a real Spanish force did arrive at Kinsale, Montjoy had to concentrate in Munster. But though this expedition showed the limits of Philip's capacities, it was as usual so ill found that many of the ships had been obliged to put back to Corunna, and others, failing to make Kinsale, put in at Baltimore. Montjoy was in strength near Cork, Carew at Limerick ready to intercept the approach of the rebels from the North. In a very short time, Kinsale was beleagured, and when a portion of a Spanish reinforcement managed to reach the coast in December, it found an English flotilla before it, and its troops were isolated in a third station at Castlehaven. O'Donnell however succeeded in evading Carew, who then joined forces with Montjoy and the fleet before Kinsale. When Tyrone arrived, an attempt was made to relieve Kinsale; but Montjoy was unusually well served by his intelligence, his dispositions were skilful, and the rebels were totally routed beyond possibility of present recovery. Aguilar, the Spanish commander, was admitted to terms; Baltimore and Castlehaven were surrendered. Thus abortively collapsed the last effort of Philip III. The Irish rebellion was broken. Many of the chiefs after vain and desperate resistance escaped to Spain; others surrendered to the Queen's mercy. O'Donnell was of the former; he died soon after reaching Spain. But Tyrone the diplomatic succeeded in making terms. It seemed that once more the English Government was supreme.
[Sidenote: 1602 The Succession]
Once again, as the death of the great Queen becomes imminent, we must remind ourselves that to the last she refused to recognise any heir, and that there were various claimants, [Footnote: Genealogical Tables;Front.andApp. A, iii.] each one with a colourable claim. In point of priority by heredity King James of Scotland unquestionably stood first of the descendants of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York; yet the fact that he was not only an alien but King of Scotland made him in himself an unwelcome candidate. Next to him, since like him she descended from Margaret Tudor, stood his cousin Arabella—a Stewart too, but of the Lennox Stewarts, not the Royal House: an English subject; but with the drawback that she was a woman and unmarried. Third, but first under the will of Henry VIII. was Lord Beauchamp, son of Katharine Grey and the Earl of Hertford; about the validity of his parents' marriage however there was a doubt. The Stanleys of Derby, who through Margaret Clifford could claim descent from the younger daughter of Henry VII., would have nothing to do with inheriting the crown; no more would the Earl of Huntingdon who descended from Edward IV.'s brother, George of Clarence. But Philip of Spain claimed the crown for himself as a descendant of John of Gaunt; though, the union of the crowns of England and Spain being admittedly impracticable, he was under promise to transfer his claim to a hitherto unnamed nominee, presumably his sister. Virtually therefore Isabella ranked as a possible though not very enthusiastic candidate.
[Sidenote: The last intrigues]
By this time, it was perfectly obvious that the Infanta could not be forced upon England, though it was supposed that the Moderates would have favoured her candidature provided she brought Flanders with her: whereas the negotiations controlled by Cecil were not tending to bring about any such result. As 1602 drew to a close, the ablest man in Spain, Olivares, was emphasising the necessity for giving the English Catholics as a body a free hand to nominate an English candidate instead of an alien. It is probable, though it cannot be called certain, that there was a plot to unite the claims of Arabella and Lord Beauchamp by marrying them, with an implication that both were prepared in due time to declare themselves Catholics. Meantime the Moderates were awaiting direction from Cecil; who ostensibly was himself waiting on a hint from the Queen, but was privily keeping the way clear for James, while seeking to implicate Raleigh and others in language and actions which might at any rate be interpreted as hostile to him. In this secret intriguing, Cecil's great ally was Lord Henry Howard, a brother of the last Duke of Norfolk; and he had with him the Careys of the Hunsdon family. Of the Moderates in general it can only be said that, while there was no candidate in whose favour they could combine with any warmth, James was rather more obnoxious to them than others. Yet they did not combine against him, while if any of them sought to ingratiate themselves with him Cecil was particularly careful to sow distrust of them in the Scots King's mind, unless they happened to be partisans of his own or at any rate probable allies. When Arabella tried to escape from what was practically the custody of her grandmother the Dowager Countess of Shrewsbury, the famous "Bess of Hardwick," the attempt was nipped in the bud: and the Catholics were still without any declared candidate when the lonely old Queen was seized in March with her last mortal illness.
[Sidenote: 1603 Death of the Queen]
As Elizabeth lay on her death-bed, her entourage consisted almost exclusively of Cecil and his friends, among whom is to be numbered the old Lord Admiral, though he was innocent of the intrigues going on. The ships in the Thames, the troops in the North, were commanded by members of the same group; almost before the breath was out of her body Robert Carey was galloping North to hail James I. King of England: and the world was told that Elizabeth's last conscious act was to ratify by a sign the succession of her old-time rival's son. In her seventieth year, in the early hours of March 24th, 1603, ended the long and glorious reign of the Virgin Queen.
ELIZABETH (xii), 1558-1603—LITERATURE
The Elizabethan Literature demands from the general Historian something more than the incidental references which may suffice in other periods. In earlier days, he may draw upon Piers Plowman or Chaucer for evidence and illustrations of the prevalent social conditions; in the century following he may appeal to Milton and Bunyan to elucidate aspects of Puritanism. But the Elizabethan literature is in a degree quite unique, the expression of the whole spirit of the time, its many-sidedness, its vigour, its creative force; helping us to realise how it was that Elizabeth's Englishmen made Elizabeth's England. And this of course is beside the other fact that for the historian of literatureper sethere is no period quite so interesting and instructive, none of such vital importance in the evolution of English Letters.
[Sidenote: Birth of a National Literature]
In the five centuries since the Norman Conquest, ending in 1566, England had produced but one single poet of the front rank or anything approaching it, Geoffrey Chaucer. From the time when Edmund Spenser in 1579 delighted his contemporaries by the publication of theShepherd's Calendar, she has never been without writers whose claim to eminence among poets can be at least plausibly maintained. Before very much the same date, English prose as a consciously artistic medium of utterance had hardly begun to be recognised; even Thomas More wrote hisUtopiain Latin, and it was not translated into English till many years after his death. The possibility of an English Prose Style—written prose as distinguished from spoken oratory—had hardly presented itself except to the translators of Scripture and the Liturgy. Before the century closed, the world was enriched by the compact and pregnant sentences of Francis Bacon'sEssaysand the dignified simplicity of Hooker'sEcclesiastical Polity. As with the Poets, so also the chain of masters of English Prose is unbroken from that day forward. But most sudden and startling of all the various developments was that of the Drama. It may be doubted if any critical observer in 1579 would have ventured even to suspect that the crowning glory of Elizabeth's reign was to be the work of playwrights; yet before she died the genius of Marlowe had blazed and been quenched,Hamlethad appeared on the boards, Jonson's "learned sock" had achieved fame; the men whose names we are wont to associate with the "Mermaid" had most of them already begun their career, even if they had not yet passed the stage of merely adapting, doctoring, and "writing up" for managers the stock-plays in their repertory. The Drama, proving itself the form of literary expression most perfectly adapted to the spirit of the age, absorbed the available literary talent as it has never done since.
Sudden as the outburst was however, it had been made possible by many years of wide and miscellaneous experiment, though little of any permanent intrinsic value had been actually achieved.
[Sidenote: Prose: before 1579]
Except for Ascham'sToxophilus, very few passages [Footnote: Such as may be lighted on for instance in "Sir John Mandeville," Mallory, and Hall'sChronicle.] of English prose notable as prose—that is, consciously essaying what is connoted by the termstyle—had been produced before Elizabeth's accession, apart from the liturgical, rhetorical, or controversial work of the clergy or clerical disputants. TheActs and Monumentsof Foxe, popularly known as, the "Book of Martyrs," published in the first decade of the reign, showed the development of a power of vigorously dramatic narrative which should not be overlooked. The enormous popularity however which that work achieved was at least in part the outcome of the general sterility. Men had not yet learned to write, but they were ready to read even voraciously. Culture was in vogue. As things stood culture, in practice, meant and could mean little else than the study of Latin and Italian authors—Greek being still reserved for the learned—of whose works translations, some of notable merit, were very soon beginning to appear on the market. It was inevitably to these two literatures—the Latin and the Italian—that men turned in the first instance to find the models and formulate the canons of literary art; with only occasional divagations in the direction of France or Spain, countries which were scarcely a generation in advance of England. We remark that the old idea that for prose which was intended to live the true medium was still the one international literary language, Latin, died exceedingly hard; Bacon himself, great master though he was of his mother-tongue, maintaining it quite definitely. This pedantic attitude however was not involved in the idea of culture, and men welcomed with avidity an author who made his appeal to the non-academic public in vigorous English. The conversion even of the academic mind was close at hand.
[Sidenote: 1579-89]
The year 1579 is in the strictest sense an epoch in the history of English Literature; as witnessing the first appearance of a new and original force in English verse, and the first deliberate and elaborate effort in the direction of artistically constructed English Prose. In that year, John Lyly published hisEuphues: the Anatomy of Wit, and Edmund Spenser hisShepherd's Calendar.
[Sidenote: Euphues]
Euphues, and its companion volumeEuphues and His Englandenjoyed a very remarkable if temporary vogue; running through numerous editions in the course of the ensuing fifty years. After that, it dropped. It is not surprising that it dropped. The work is tedious, prolix, affected, abounding in pedantry and in intellectual foppery. But its whole meaning and significance at the time when it was written are lost to us if we pay attention only to the ridicule which very soon fell upon it, to the mockery in Shakespeare's burlesques of Euphuism, or to Scott's later parody of it in the character of Sir Piercie Shafton. The everlasting antitheses, the perpetual playing with words, the alliterative trickery, the accumulation of far-fetched similes, the endless and often most inappropriate classical, mythological, and quasi-zoological allusions and parallels, are indeed sufficiently absurd and wearisome; and when "Euphuism" became a fashionable craze, its sillier disciples were a very fit target for jesting and mirth, very much as in our own day the humorists found abundant and legitimate food for laughter in the vagaries of what was known as "aestheticism". In both cases, the extravagances were the separable accidents, the superficial excrescences, of a real intellectual movement with a quite healthy motive.Euphuesitself was a real and serious if somewhat misdirected effort at making a moralised culture fashionable, and at elevating; the English tongue into a medium of refined and polished expression. If the Euphuists included Armados among them, they numbered also their Birons and Rosalines. Though Lyly practised exuberances of verbal jugglery, he was not their inventor; they were a vice of the times, largely borrowed from foreign models; and Shakespeare himself, in moments of aberrant ingenuity, produced—not for laughter—samples which Lyly might have admired but could never have emulated.
[Sidenote: Sidney's prose works]
Lyly's work was a novel experiment in prose, without previous parallel; critical judgments were no very long time in detecting and condemning his extravagances. But the same intellectual motive was soon to find a more chastened and artistic expression in the work of one who was still but a literary experimentalist when he meet his death at Zutphen. When Sir Philip Sidney, that "verray parfit gentil knight," scholar, soldier, and statesman, if the unanimous appraisement of the best of his contemporaries is worth anything, wrote hisDefence of Poesie, he had not indeed broken free from the trammels of academic theory; but it is a very often acute and always charming piece of critical work in scholarly and graceful language. More affected and generally inferior in style, but also still on the whole scholarly and graceful in its language, is hisArcadia, an example of the indefinitely constructed amorphous Romances out of which in course of long time the novel was to be evolved. The dwellers in that Arcady are as far removed from the nymphs and swains of Watteau's day as from a primitive Greek population; they behave as no human beings ever did or could behave; they belong in short to a particularly unconvincing kind of fairy-land, of which the vogue happily died out at an early stage. TheArcadiais not intrinsically a great book, nor can it be read to-day without a considerable effort; yet it must always be notable as not merely an experiment but a positive achievement in English prose style. Neither of these works was published till after 1590; but both must have been written before 1583.
[Sidenote: Hooker 1594]
It was not till the last decade of the reign had begun that the first great monument of English Prose appeared; nor is it surprising that, when it did come, it was an example of the Ecclesiastical or politico-ecclesiastical order. With the publication in 1594 of the first four books of Richard Hooker'sEcclesiastical Polity, the full claims of English as a great literary language were decisively established by his rhythmical, stately, and luminous periods. In their own field, Poets and Dramatists had already secured those claims; with the works of Marlowe, the earliest plays of Shakespeare, and the opening books of theFaerie Queene.
[Sidenote: Verse; before 1579]
While the Eighth Henry was still ruling England, Surrey and Wyatt, heedful of things Italian, had already discovered that verse-making was at any rate a delectable pastime for a gentleman of wit, especially if he had a love-affair on hand; a pastime certainly pleasing to himself and probably agreeable to his mistress. They made metrical experiments, introducing both the sonnet and blank verse. The example they set was followed by others, andTottel's Miscellany, published towards the end of Mary's reign, shows that a considerable skill in this minor art had already been acquired, and not only by the two principal contributors, though the writers were still working within very narrow metrical limitations. In 1559 appeared theMirrour for Magistrates, for the most part dull and uninteresting but containing in theInductionand theComplaint of Buckinghamtwo contributions by Thomas Sackville (afterwards Lord Buckhurst) which are a good deal more than clever verse-making. But after one other experiment—the part-authorship of the first English Tragedy in blank verse,Gorboduc—Sackville deserted the Muses, for public affairs; in his later years becoming a leading member of Elizabeth's Council. The little verse that he left is of a quality to make us wish that he had written more: for there is in him at least a hint of some possibilities which were actualised in Spenser. But twenty years passed before the appearance of theShepherd's Calendar, during which it is probable enough that courtiers and lovers continued to practise, after the school of Surrey and Wyatt; nothing however was published that has survived, save the work of the universal experimentalist and pioneer George Gascoigne, who tried his hand at most forms of literary production, achieving distinction in none but a laudable respectability in all.
[Sidenote: 1579-90 Spenser and others ]
TheShepherd's Calendar/by itself would give Spenser nothing more than a high position among minor poets; but with him verse reappeared as something more than an elegant exercise for courtiers, scholars or lovers. Above all, theShepherd's Calendargave unexpected proof of the metrical capacities and verbal felicities of the English language, though setting it forth to the accompaniment of an excessive use of archaic forms and expressions. Even that excess had its value as a protest against the pedantic precision of the Latinists, who were already indulging in a grotesque attempt to displace natural English metres by Ovidian and Horatian prosody. Spenser himself made some futile efforts in this direction; so did Sidney—sundry more or less ingenious examples are scattered about theArcadia; but Sidney realised his error in time to write theAstrophel and Stellasonnets (about 1581-2), which though still somewhat stiff and academic might well have been the precursors of some noble poetry had the writer lived longer. As it is, his life and death form the noblest poem he has bequeathed to us.
Those sonnets also remained unpublished till some years later. The first three books of theFaerie Queene, which at once established Spenser for all time as a true poet of the highest rank, did not appear till 1590. In the interval, the English Drama was finding itself, and some of the dramatists were revealing that gift of song—in the restricted sense of the word—which was bestowed in such unparalleled measure on the later Elizabethans. To this decade belong songs by Lyly and Peele, Lodge and Greene, which have already caught the delicate daintiness and the exquisite lilt of Shakespeare's songs and a host of others found in the later songbooks—qualities of which there is little more than a rare hint here and there in the earlier Miscellanies, for all the bravery of such titles asA Paradise of Dainty Devises(1576):A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions(1578): orA Handefull of Pleasant Delites(1584).
[Sidenote: The Drama before Elizabeth]
The definite triumph of Christianity over Paganism killed the Drama of the old world, the Church deliberately setting its face against the theatre. But primitive popular instincts, embodied in the continued celebration, as holiday sports, of what had originally been pagan rites, kept in existence crude and embryonic forms of dramatic representation at the festival seasons; which after a time the ecclesiastics saw more advantage in adapting to their own ends than in suppressing. Hence arose the miracle plays or Mysteries (probablyministerium, not [Greek: mystaerion]) of the middle ages—representations chiefly of episodes in the Biblical narrative. These in turn suggested the Moralities, dialogues with action in which the characters were personifications of virtues or vices relieved, in consideration of the weakness of the flesh, by passages of broad buffoonery. Lastly in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries came the representation of what were called "Interludes," for the most part short farces of a very primitive order—probably the offspring of the aforesaid passages of buffoonery. These did not constitute a literary drama; but they kept the idea of dramatic representation in being, though no such thing as a theatre or building constructed for the purpose existed as yet. The performances were given either in Church, or, later, in a nobleman's hall, or in the courtyard of an inn. The "masque" or pantomimic pageant, without dialogue, was also a familiar spectacle of the later times, and remained an occasional feature of the drama in its development.
The revival of interest in the classics caused some attention to be paid to the Roman drama; and hence Italy led the way—as in all things literary—in producing imitations of the plays then known. These however hardly got beyond the stage of being mere imitations; though as models Terence and Seneca were superior to the compilers of miracle plays, something more was required than copying their works before a Drama worthy of the name could be evolved. But from about the middle of the sixteenth century, the dramatic instinct in England was struggling to find for itself new and adequate expression.
[Sidenote: Early Elizabethan Drama]
With the Educational revival, it would appear that schoolmasters occasionally caused their pupils to act scenes, in Latin or perhaps at times in a translated version, from Terence: and it is not surprising to find that what is recognised as the first English Comedy was written by a schoolmaster for his boys to perform.Ralph Roister Doisterderived from the Latin model, and is in doggerel couplets. It was the work of Nicholas Udall who was Master of Eton and afterwards of Westminster; but whether it was produced in the earlier or later period is not certainly known. At any rate it preceded the accession of Queen Mary.Gammer Gurton's Needle, dated 1553, holds the second place in point of time; andGorboducotherwise known asFerrex and Porrex, the first English blank-verse tragedy, the work of Sackville and Norton, was acted in 1561. From this time, we have notices of the production of a considerable number of plays of which it may be assumed that they were exceedingly crude, being either very formless experiments derived from the interludes or else direct imitations or translations of Latin or Italian plays; to which Gascoigne contributed his share. A nearer approach to the coming Comedy is found in the plays of John Lyly preceding hisEuphues. By this time dramatic performances had achieved such popularity that the City Fathers were scandalised—not indeed without reason—by their encroachments on the more solid but less inviting attractions of Church Services; and by banishing them from the City precincts caused the first regularly constructed theatres to be established outside the City bounds in Shoreditch: a departure which no doubt tended to the more definite organisation of the Actor's profession. As the Eighties progressed, a higher standard of dramatic production was attained by the group of "University" play wrights—-Peele, Greene, Nash, and others; wild Bohemian spirits for the most part, careless of conventions whether moral or literary, wayward, clever, audacious; culminating with Marlowe, whose first extremely immature playTamburlaine, was probably acted in 1587 when he was only three and twenty; his career terminating in a tavern brawl some six years later. By that time (1593) it is certain that Shakespeare, born in the same year as Marlowe, was writing for the managers; though none of his known work can with confidence be dated earlier than the year of Marlowe's death. The great age of the Drama had begun.
[Sidenote: The younger generation]
It will have become apparent from this survey that, although we talk with very good reason of the Elizabethan Age of English Literature, the Queen had been reigning for thirty years, the great political crisis of her rule had been reached, the Armada had perished, before any single work had been written, or at any rate published, which on its merits—judged by the criteria of an established literature with established canons—would have entitled its author to a position of any distinction on the roll of fame. Up to 1589, the most remarkable productions had been: in prose, Foxe'sBook of Martyrsand Lyly'sEuphues; in verse, some lines of Sackville, and theShepherd's Calendar. Even when we have added to these Sidney'sSonnetsand hisArcadia—written but not published—the significant fact remains that he, as well as Spenser and Lyly, was not born till the second half of the century had begun: and all three were older than any of the group of dramatists who are named as Shakespeare's precursors. Spenser was actually the eldest of all the men whose writings shed lustre on the great Queen's reign: and Spenser himself had not attained to the full maturity of his genius—had not, at least given its fruits to the world—at the hour of England's triumph. Had he died in the year of Zutphen, "Colin Clout" would have ranked little if at all higher than "Astrophel." Further: save for Sidney and Marlowe, who were both cut off prematurely, and Spenser himself who died at forty-six, the work of all the greater Elizabethan writers—Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, Bacon, Hooker, Raleigh, Middleton, Drayton—lies as much in the time of James as in that of Elizabeth; while a whole group of those to whom the same general title is applied—Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Ford, Massinger—belong in effect wholly to the later reign.
Broadly speaking therefore it is worth noting that state-craft, soldiering, seamanship, affairs of a very practical character, absorbed the keen brains and the abundant energies of the earlier generation; even for the men born in the fifties, like Raleigh and Sidney, literature (except with Spenser) held a quite secondary place. But no sooner is the National triumph ensured than the younger generation displays in the literary field characteristics essentially the same as those whereby their elders had raised England in war and in politics to the first rank among the nations.
For years to come, for the first time certainly in English History, literature in one form or another appropriates the best work of the best brains. There are men of ability in politics, but no giants: or if one of the giants, like Bacon, divides his attention between the two fields, the best half of it goes to literature. Yet it is essentially the same spirit which works in the great men of Elizabeth's closing years as in the great men of her youth and of her maturity.
[Sidenote: Pervading Characteristics]
The quality which conditions the whole English character through the period is an exuberant, often even a riotous energy, a vast imaginativeness, which breeds in the first place an immense daring, saved from degenerating into mere recklessness by a coolness of head in emergencies which is singularly marked. Whether we look at Elizabeth, Cecil, and Walsingham, or at Hawkins and Drake and Frobisher, or broadly at the actions of the rank and file, these characteristics are apparent. They are no less patent in the poets.
[Sidenote: displayed in the Drama and other fields]
Thus if we consider the tragedies of the period, their tremendous audacity is perhaps their most prominent feature. The stage reeks with blood and reverberates thunder, to an extent which could not fail to become merely grotesque but for the immense pervading vitality. These men could and did venture upon extravagances and imbue them with a terrific quality, when in weaker hands they would have become ridiculous. For anything less than the vibrating energy of Marlowe, the final scene of hisFaustuswould have sunk to burlesque. A cold analysis of the plot ofHamletorMacbethwould suggest mere melodrama. A Shakespeare or a Marlowe had no hesitation in facing tasks which offered no mean between great success or great failure. Nor was the audacity in their choice of subjects more remarkable than in their methods, their defiance of recognised canons. Just as the seamen had ignored the convention of centuries, creating a new system of naval tactics and a new type of navy, so the Tragedians brushed aside the academic convention, creating new dramatic canons and a new type of drama. The innovation in the structure of comedy was no less daring, since it proceeded on parallel lines. And here again the same quality of superabundant vitality is equally prominent. But it is to be noted that while the Elizabethan vitality would have made the drama great in spite of its audacity, the greatest productions are distinguished from the less great precisely by that peculiar sanity which stamped the master-spirits of the time. As it is with the dramatists, so is it with the rest. The same fulness of life is apparent in the luxuriance of Spenser's imagination, and in the spontaneity of half a hundred anonymous song-writers, the same audacity in Raleigh, embarking on his History of the World, and in Bacon, assuming all knowledge to be his province, while affirming and formulating the principles of Inductive Reasoning in substitution for the Deductive methods by which the Schools had lived for centuries. Wherever the critic turns his glance, he can find no sign of the Decadent. In every field of life, in politics, in war, in religion, in letters, the Elizabethan was virile even in his vices. His offences against morals or against art were essentially of the barbaric not the effete order; as the splendours of his productions were the natural beauties of plants nurtured in the open, not in the hothouse.
[Sidenote: Breadth of view]
Other aspects of the national character could be readily inferred from the prevalent tone of this literature. Toleration as a political principle was not yet recognised: tolerance as a private attitude of mind was very prevalent. The Jesuit and the extreme Puritan, the doctrinal propagandists who would endure no deviation from their own standard, were thoroughly unpopular, and managed to put themselves outside the field of consideration; the immense bulk of the nation was in sympathy with neither the one nor the other, and it is only to the extremists that the men of letters show a direct antipathy. Catholics can make a presentable case for the theory that Shakespeare himself was a "crypto-Catholic," though the case is not more than presentable. Rome is abhorrent to Spenser, yet it is apparent that many of his ethical conceptions are infinitely nearer akin to those of mediaeval Catholicism than of the current Puritanism. Hooker, most earnest of Christians, was also the most liberal-minded of men. Jonson was half a Catholic. All were manifestly men of deep religious feeling, but none can be associated with any religious party. When England was pitted as a Protestant Power against a Power aggressively determined on the eradication of Protestantism, it was inevitable that the prevailing sentiment should be increasingly Protestant; on the whole, it is surprising that there should have been so little bigotry in it. The public inclination was to be tolerant of all but the intolerant, and that attitude is reflected in all the literature of the time, except the specifically partisan writings of controversialists.
[Patriotism]
So also another note of the day was the general patriotism, national pride, or insularity; the sentiment which made the Catholics themselves, even when they were most under suspicion and had most cause to welcome an opportunity for rebellion, ready and eager to fall into line and resist the invader who was to liberate them. Again the poets gave voice to the national feeling, none more emphatically or more admirably than Shakespeare himself. Patriotic lines might of course be written for the sake of the gallery's inevitable applause; but Shakespeare's panegyrics of England are absolutely and unmistakably whole hearted, and it may be doubted if in all his plays he presented any single character with a more thorough and convincing sympathy and appreciation than his Henry V., the incarnation of English aggressiveness.
[The Normal Types] Finally, what manner of men and women they were who peopled the England that Shakespeare knew, we can see from the men and women whom Shakespeare drew. The types manifest themselves; the normal and the exceptional are readily distinguishable. The normal type is keen of wit, impulsive; it is observable for instance that both men and women habitually—almost invariably—fall in love unreservedly at first sight; generous for the most part; in action prompt and more often than not over-hasty, but resourceful—the women more resourceful than the men. It is a commonplace of course to remark that his types are types for all time; but different types are more prevalent at one time than another, and the inference is that Shakespeare's prevalent types were the prevalent ones of his own day. Hamlet, Brutus, Cleopatra, belonged to eternal but not to normal types; Hotspur and Mercutio, Rosalind and Cordelia—even if the latter were glorified examples—were obviously normal. For in play after play, whether as leading or as minor characters, they recur again and again; and more than that we find the same characteristics—presented no doubt with less incisiveness and less brilliancy—reappearing in the Dramatis Personae of the whole Elizabethan group. Such were the gentlemen of England who fought the Spaniard and overthrew him; such were their sisters and their wives.
ELIZABETH (xiii), 1558-1603—ASPECTS OF THE REIGN
[Sidenote: Features of the Reign]
The reign of Elizabeth may be said to have been distinguished primarily by three leading features. The first is the development and establishment of England as the greatest maritime power in the world, a process which has been traced with some fulness. The second is that sudden and amazing outburst of literary genius in the latter half, and mainly in the last quarter, of the reign, for which there is no historical parallel except in Athens, unless once again we find it in England two centuries later: whereof the last few pages have treated. The third is the Ecclesiastical settlement, on which it has hitherto been possible only to touch. This, with certain other aspects of the reign, remain for discussion in this concluding chapter.
[Sidenote: State and Church]
In this settlement, the primary fundamental fact, politically speaking— for theological problems do not fall within our range—is the recognition by the State of the Church as an aspect of the body politic, and of her organisation as a branch of the body politic, subject to the control of the Sovereign and maintained by the sanction of the Sovereign's supremacy; precluding the interference of any external authority, and overriding any claims to independent authority on the part of the organisation itself; requiring from all members of the body politic conformity, under penalties, to the institutions thus regulated, and rejection of any authority running counter thereto. The secondary fact is that the State thus sanctioned such institutions as, under a reasonable liberty of interpretation, might be accepted without a severe strain of conscience by persons holding opinions of considerable diversity; so that conformity should be possible to the great bulk of the nation, including many who might not in theory admit the right of the State to a voice in the matter at all.
The politicians, that is, deliberately chose avia media. Theologically, the dividing line lay between those who desired the Mass and reunion with Rome, and those who rejected the Mass and derived their dogmas from Geneva. Under Mary, the Government had thrown itself on the side of the former; under Edward, mainly on that of the latter. Elizabeth's Government would have neither. It would not admit the papal claim to override the secular authority, or the equally dictatorial claims of the Genevan ministry as exemplified by John Knox; the first necessity for it was to assert secular supremacy, the second to make its definitions of dogma sufficiently ambiguous to be reconcilable with the dogmatic scruples of the majority of both parties; with the result however of shutting out both determined Romanists and determined Calvinists, while the Church thus regulated contained two parties, one with conservative, the other with advanced, ideals.
The outward note of Conservative churchmen was insistence on ceremonial observances, as that of the advanced men was dislike of them. But as the reign advanced, another feature acquires prominence—the protest of the Puritans against the Episcopalian system of Church Government, with the correspondingly increased emphasis laid on the vital necessity of that system by the Conservatives.
[Sidenote: The State and the Catholics]
The Queen's personal predilections were at all times on the Conservative side; those of her principal advisers always leaned towards the Puritans— at the first Cecil, Bacon, and Elizabeth's own kinsmen, Knollys and Hunsdon; then Walsingham, drawing Leicester with him. But in the early years of her rule, when it was imperative to minimise all possible causes of discontent, the admission of the largest possible latitude in practice was required, even if it was accompanied by legislation which gave authority for restrictive action. It followed however from the political conditions that direct hostility to the Queen was to be feared only from the Catholics—the whole body of those who would have liked to see the old religion restored in its entirety. This was emphasized by the Papal Bull excommunicating Elizabeth in 1570—a political blunder on the part of the Pope which greatly annoyed and embarrassed Philip at the time. The result, joined with the Northern Rising, the Ridolfi plot, and the indignation aroused by the day of St. Bartholomew, was to strengthen the hands of the Puritans and to give open Catholicism the character of a political offence; and to this an enormously increased force was added in 1581 by the Jesuit mission. During these years, parliaments were all unfailingly and increasingly Puritan, and Puritanism was steadily making way all over the country, not without the favour of the leading divines. Elizabeth herself viewed this tendency with extreme dislike, mercilessly snubbing bishops and others who seemed to betray inclinations in this direction—Grindal in particular, Parker's successor at Canterbury, suffered from her displeasure; but she could not suppress it. She might—and did—say a good deal; but she could not in act go nearly as far as she would have wished, in opposition to subjects whose political loyalty was indisputable, as well as extremely necessary to her security.
[Sidenote: The Church and the Puritans]
So long as the advanced movement concerned itself chiefly with the "Vestiarian Controversy" and matters of ceremonial observance, it did not assume primary importance in the eyes of politicians. But by the middle of the reign the question of the form of Church Government had come to the front, and the demand to substitute the Presbyterian system for the Episcopalian was being put forward by Cartwright and his followers and had even produced a Presbyterian organisation within the Church. Moreover the school commonly called Brownists, who developed into the sect of Independents, were propounding the theory that the Church consisted not of the whole nation but only of the Elect. Puritanism was therefore threatening to become directly subversive of the established order. Then came the mission of Parsons and Campian. The effect of this in regard to Catholics was twofold. It necessitated an increased severity in dealing with any one who recognised papal authority: and made it more imperative than ever to induce Catholics to be reconciled with the State Church, by emphasizing the Catholic side of her institutions, and consequently by checking Puritan developments. On the other side, it was so obviously impossible for the Puritans to withdraw their loyalty from Elizabeth that to conciliate them was superfluous; they were adopting an attitude antagonistic to the approved constitution of the Church; and there was a suggestion of rigid even-handed justice in waging war upon their propaganda at the same time as on that of Rome. Whitgift, succeeding Grindal at Canterbury in 1583, opened the campaign against Puritanism—not indeed with the favour either of parliament or of the leading statesmen, whose personal sympathies were with the advanced party, but manifestly with encouragement from the Queen.
[Sidenote: Archbishop Whitgift]
Whitgift's own attitude was that of the Disciplinarian rather than of the theologian. The method of operation was by the issue of Fifteen Articles to which all the clergy were required to subscribe: the sanction thereof being the authority of the Court of High Commission. Under the Act of Supremacy of 1559, the appointment of a Commission to enforce obedience to the law in matters ecclesiastical had been authorised. This Court was fully constituted in December 1583, and proceeded by methods which Burghley himself held to be too inquisitorial. A good deal of indignation was aroused, and the Puritans were in effect made more aggressive, their attacks on the existing system culminating in 1589 in the distinctly scurrilous "Martin Mar-prelate" tracts, which were so violent as to produce a marked reaction. This on the one side, coupled with the partly genuine and partly mythical plots of the ultra-Catholics on the other, brought about sharp legislation in 1593, resulting in an increased persecution of the Catholics after that time, and in the compulsory withdrawal of the extreme nonconformists to the more sympathetic atmosphere of the Netherlands. At the same time the "High" theory of the Church's authority was formulated by Bancroft (afterwards Archbishop), and what may be called the Constitutional theory of Church Government was propounded in theEcclesiastical Polityof Hooker. All of this was the prologue to the great controversy which was to acquire such prominence under the Stuarts.
[Sidenote: The Persecutions]
In writing of the persecutions under Elizabeth alike of Catholics and of Puritans, it is not uncommon to imply that the political argument in their defence was a mere pretext with a theological motive. As a matter of fact however, the distinction between Elizabeth's and Mary's persecutions is a real one. Broadly speaking, it is now the universally received view that no man ought to be penalised on the score of opinions conscientiously held, however erroneous they may be; but that if those opinions find expression in anti-social acts, the acts must be punished. Punishment of opinions is rightly branded as persecution. Now although in effect not a few persons, Puritans or Catholics, were put to death by Elizabeth, and many more imprisoned or fined—as they would have said themselves, for Conscience' sake—this was the distinction specifically recognised by her; which, without justifying her persecutions, differentiates them from those of her predecessors. Henry and Mary frankly and avowedly burnt victims for holding wrong opinions—for Heresy. Anabaptism no doubt was accounted a social as well as a theological crime; but no one ever dreamed of regarding Ann Ascue or Frith as politically dangerous. Mary kindled the fires of Smithfield for the salvation of souls, not for the safety of her throne. Whereas the foundation of Elizabeth's persecutions was thatopinionsas such were of no consequence: but that people who would not conform theirconductto her regulations must either be potential traitors politically or anarchists socially. Her proceedings are brought into the category of persecutions, because she treated potential anarchism or treason as implying overt anarchism or treason, though unless and until she discovered such implication in a given opinion, any one was at liberty to hold it or not as he chose; its truth or falsity was a matter of entire indifference. To punish the implied intention of committing a wrong act is sufficiently dangerous in principle; but it is to be distinguished from punishment for holding an opinion because it is accounted a false one.
Finally, while we must condemn her persecution both of Puritans and of Catholics alike, it is only fair, in comparing her with her predecessor, to remember that, in the five and forty years of her reign, the whole number of persons who suffered death as Catholics or as Anabaptists was considerably less than the number of the Martyrs in four years of Mary's rule.
[Sidenote: Economic progress]
By adopting Cecil's ecclesiastical policy of thevia media, Elizabeth saved England from the internecine religious strife which almost throughout her reign made the political action of France so inefficient. The constant wars of the Huguenots with the Leaguers or their predecessors had their counterpart for Philip also, whose struggle with the Netherlanders was to a great extent in the nature of a civil war. Fully realising how seriously both France and Spain were hampered by these complications, she was able to conduct her diplomatic manoeuvres with an audacity quite as remarkable as her duplicity, gauging to a nicety the carrying capacity of the very thin ice over which she was constantly skating. Thus while both those Powers were perpetually exhausting their resources and draining their exchequers with costly wars, England, free from any similar strain, was rapidly growing in wealth; and while the national expenditure was kept comparatively low, manufactures were multiplied, and the commerce which was driven by the stress of war from the great trade-centres of the Netherlands was being absorbed by English ports. Moreover that forcible trading indulged in by John Hawkins in the earlier ventures of the reign—giving place, as time went on to the process of systematic preying upon Spanish treasure—provided very substantial dividends for the Queen, as well as filling the pockets of her loyal subjects. Thus again she was able to avoid making perpetual demands on her parliaments, and when demands were made the parliaments could usually meet them in a generous and ungrudging spirit.
[Sidenote: The currency; Retrenchment]
Nevertheless, no little financial skill and courage were required to restore the public credit which had fallen to such disastrous depths in the two preceding reigns; and this was done to a large extent by a policy of determined financial honesty. The miserable system of debasing the coinage was brought to an end; the current coins were called in and paid for at not much under their actual value in silver, and the new coins issued were of their face value. Debts contracted by Government were punctually paid, and as an immediate consequence the Government soon found itself able to borrow at reasonable instead of ruinous rates of interest. Private prosperity and public confidence advanced so swiftly that before Elizabeth had been a dozen years on the throne substantial loans could be raised at home without applying to foreign sources. Elizabeth never spent a penny of public money without good reason; sometimes—as in Ireland habitually, and to some degree at the time of the Armada though not so seriously as is commonly reputed—her parsimony amounted to false economy; often it took on a pettifogging character in her dealings with the Dutch, with the Huguenots, and with the Scots, though in the last case at least it must be admitted that either party was equally ready to overreach the other if the chance offered. But for very many years a very close economy was absolutely essential if debts were to be paid. That economy was facilitated by the lavish expenditure of prominent men on public objects; due partly to a desire for display, partly—at least in the case of the buccaneering enterprises—to bold speculation in the hope of large profits, but partly also beyond question to a very live public spirit. Yet when every allowance has been made for the assistance from such sources, it remains clear that Elizabeth's resources were husbanded with great skill, and her government carried on with a surprisingly small expenditure; that expenditure being on the whole very judiciously directed—so that, for instance, the royal navy, at least throughout the latter half of the reign, was maintained in a very creditable state of efficiency; though the number of the ships was not large, and the organisation proved inadequate, when the crisis came, to meet all the demands of the seamen.
[Sidenote: Wealth and Poverty]
The general prosperity however was not due to any notable advance in official Economics. What it owed to the Government was the immense improvement in public credit brought about by the restored coinage, and the punctual repayment of loans and settlement of debts, coupled with confidence in a steady rule and freedom from costly wars. Trade did indeed greatly benefit by the enlightened action of the State in encouraging the settlement in England of craftsmen from the Netherlands, with the consequent development of the industries they practised and taught. But the vital fact of the enormously increased wealth of the country must be attributed to the energy and initiative of the merchants and the adventurers in taking advantage of the new fields opened to them, of the displacement of trade by the wars on the Continent, and of the exposure of foreign, especially but not exclusively Spanish, shipping to depredation.
How far this increased wealth benefited the labouring classes is a moot question. It would seem on the whole that the process of converting arable land into pasture which had been going on all through the century was already becoming less active even in the first years of the reign, and had reached its limit some while before the Armada. As the displacement of labour diminished, fixity and regularity of employment increased, while the labour already displaced was gradually absorbed by the rapid growth of manufactures. This may perhaps in some degree explain the almost unaccountably sudden cessation of laments over agricultural depression. Still, the effective wage earned tended to drop: that is, although wages rose when measured in terms of the currency, that rise did not keep pace with the advance in prices, the influx of silver into Europe diminishing its purchasing power. Hence the old problem of dealing with poverty in its two forms—honest inability to work and dishonest avoidance of work— remained acute. There was always a humane desire that the deserving poor should be assisted, and an equally strong sentiment in favour of punishing rogues and vagabonds—persons who declined to dig but were not ashamed to beg; with perhaps an excessive inclination to assume that wherever there was a doubt the delinquent should not have the benefit of it. The savagery however of the earlier Tudor laws against vagabonds was mitigated, and honest efforts were made to find a substitute for the old relief of genuine poverty by the Monasteries. This took in the first place the form of enactments for the local collection of voluntary contributions to relief-funds; and culminated in the Acts of the last five years of the reign, substituting compulsory for voluntary contribution, and establishing that Poor-law system which remained substantially unchanged until its reformation in the nineteenth century.
[Sidenote: Trade Restrictions and Development]
The idea that Governments do well not to interfere with the natural unaided operation of economic laws had not yet come into being; and attempts, mainly futile, to control wages and to force labour into particular channels, continued. In one direction however the artificial encouragement of one industry may have had a beneficial effect. Navigation laws tended,per se, to check general commerce; but they gave a stimulus to the English marine at a time when its rapid development was of the utmost national importance; not directly increasing the interchange of commodities as a whole, but encouraging the English carrying-trade, and advancing the growth of the sea-power which made a more extended commerce possible; and thus indirectly counterbalancing the direct ill effects. It is possible even to find some defence for one aspect of Monopolies. The granting of a monopoly of trade in particular regions—Russia, Guinea, the Levant, the East Indies—to Companies of merchants, had a definite justification. Individual private competitors could not conduct the trade on a large scale; large corporations, secured against rivals, could face the risks and the heavy expenditure requisite to success, and could be granted a liberty of action, being left to their own responsibilities, which was impracticable for the private trader. Amongst these, very much the most notable is the great East India Company which was incorporated on the last day of December 1600. Here, its birth only is to be chronicled; its history belongs to the ensuing centuries. But the bestowal on individuals of the monopoly of trade in particular articles by the Royal privilege was manifestly bad in itself; it became so serious an abuse that a determined parliamentary attack was made on the system in 1597; and even then Elizabeth found it necessary to promise enquiry. Nothing practical however was done, and the parliament of 1601 returned to the charge with such obvious justification that the Queen very promptly and graciously promised to abolish the grievance, and thanked the Commons for directing her attention to the matter.
[Sidenote: Tavellers]
We have already in a previous chapter followed in the wake of adventurous voyagers and explorers prior to the Armada, and recorded the first disastrous experimental efforts towards colonisation; but, in dealing specifically with the seamen, we passed by overland explorations such as those of Jenkinson, who during the first decade of Elizabeth's reign journeyed through Russia, and into Asia over the Caspian sea. More momentous still in its results was the Eastern expedition of Newbery and Fitch; who starting in 1583 went through Syria to Ormuz, and were thence conveyed to Goa, the Portuguese head-quarters on the West coast of India. Fitch remained longer than his chief, visiting Golconda, Agra (the seat of the Great Mogul Akbar), Bengal, Pegu, Malacca, and Ceylon, and bringing home in 1591 stories of India and its wealth, which were in no small degree responsible for the formation, in 1599, of the Association which was next year incorporated as the East India Company.
[Sidenote: Maritime expansion]
After the Armada, the sea-faring spirit was naturally even intensified. To a great extent however it was absorbed in privateering—which combined with its attractions in the way of mere adventure the advantages of being profitable, patriotic, and pious. In connexion with the direct scheme of colonial settlements, we have only Raleigh's two unsuccessful relief expeditions to Virginia conducted by White and Mace, and the attempt, also unsuccessful, to start a colony in what afterwards became New England, under Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602. More striking, but belonging to a somewhat different category, was Raleigh's own voyage to the Orinoco, in search of Eldorado and the golden city of Manoa; disappointing in its results, but ably conducted and from the point of view of explorers, as such, by no means unfruitful. Equally noteworthy are the two great voyages of James Lancaster, who was the first English captain to reach the Indian seas by the Cape route (1592), and in 1601 sailed thither again in command of the first fleet of the new Association of East India Merchants, and opened up for his countrymen the trade with the Spice Islands. But except for this second voyage of Lancaster's, a very real and definite achievement in the history of commercial expansion, the voyages of the day, full of brilliant exploits in the annals of seamanship and of adventure, and collectively marking an epoch in England's oceanic development, were not individually notable for specific results.
[Sidenote: The Constitution]
Constitutional theory does not appear to have differed in the reigns of Henry VIII. and his great daughter. The monarch's will was supreme; but the people could give expression to its will through Parliament when in session. The practical rule, however, which prevented any collision between the two forces, was that both monarchs kept a careful finger on the pulse of the nation. Like her father, Elizabeth never allowed herself to set a strong popular feeling at defiance. She desired that her people should be prosperous and free, though she objected to their interference in the conduct of political affairs; she desired that within the realm of England order should be maintained and the law strictly administered. If practices inconsistent with the liberty of the subject prevailed, they were applied only to persons who were assumed by herself, her ministers, and the bulk of their fellow-subjects, to have placed themselves outside the pale. The ministers who carried out her will avoided the arbitrary methods of Wolsey and Cromwell, whose master had preserved his own popularity by making scape-goats of them when their unpopularity ran too high, squaring his account with the People at their expense. Elizabeth never found it necessary to square her account with the People, whose hearts vibrated in sympathy with her essential loyalty to them. Few of them probably shared her views on the sanctity of crowned heads as such, which amounted almost to a superstition; but the country was pervaded with a passionate loyalty to the person of its Queen. On the other side, the record of her Parliaments shows that freedom of speech was making way, though she would not formally admit the principle: while the Parliaments cared much less about its formal admission than its practical prevalence. She snubbed the persistent Puritans for their obstinate oratory on the ecclesiastical and matrimonial questions, but they managed to have their say (which she ostensibly ignored), without suffering more than sharp reprimands and occasional detention in ward; and that contented them. Like Henry, she recognised that the one thing Parliaments would not endure was taxation without their own consent. On one occasion when she found she could do without a grant she had asked for and obtained, she remitted it; the harmony of mutual confidence ensured the readier co-operation.
Parliament under Elizabeth gave not infrequent proof that it was tenacious of what it held to be its privileges: as the Queen showed that she was tenacious of what she considered her prerogatives. But each, without abating their right, or prejudicing their theoretical claim, was willing to make practical concession to the other in action. It was only in the closing years of the reign that abstract Theories of the State began to be formulated—a process which became exceedingly active in the next century, when kings and parliaments began to take diametrically conflicting views of political exigencies. Under Elizabeth, all such discussions were purely academic; under the Stuarts, they became actively practical. For the Stuarts, unlike Elizabeth, recklessly challenged popular opposition precisely on the points as to which popular opinion was most sensitive. Harmony gave way to discord, co-operation to antagonism; collision and disaster followed—"red ruin and the breaking up of laws".
[Sidenote: The Elizabethans]
The popular judgment which has glorified the reign of Elizabeth as perhaps the most splendid period in the annals of England can be endorsed, without ignoring the defects in the character of the Queen, her Ministers, her Courtiers, or her People. A new day had dawned upon the world; new possibilities, vast and undefined, were presenting themselves; new thoughts were possessing the minds of men; new blood was throbbing in their veins. The English race was awaking to a sense of its powers, grasping with a splendid audacity at the mighty heritage whose full import was yet unrealised. The Elizabethans were, as a nation, triumphing in the first glow of exuberant and healthy youth: with the faults of youth as well as its virtues. Sheer delight in the exercise of physical energies, in perilous adventure for its own sake irrespective of ulterior ends, in the keen encounter of wit, in the bold fabric-building of imagination, characterised the Elizabethan as they characterised theMarathonomachoitwo thousand years before; as the Athens of Salamis was the mother of Aeschylus and Sophocles, so the England of the Armada was the mother of Marlowe and Shakespeare and Spenser.
[Sidenote: Raleigh]
The typical Elizabethan, the man who presents in his own person the most marked characteristics that belong to his time, is Sir Walter Raleigh. His was the large imagination which conceived a new and expanding England beyond the seas; the broad grasp of ideas which made him a leading exponent of the theory of the Oceanic policy and the new naval methods; the ready practicality which made him, after Drake's day, perhaps the ablest of Elizabeth's captains; the versatility and culture, which place him securely in the second flight of the writers of the time; the breadth of intellectual outlook which caused his enemies to call him an atheist, coupled with an actual sincerity of belief; boundless energy, daring, ambition. His too were the fiery temper and the contemptuous arrogance which made him at one time the best-hated man in England outside a narrow circle of devoted admirers; while for all his pride he could match Hatton himself in preposterous adulation of the Queen. He could be as chivalrous as Sidney, and as merciless as an Inquisitor: he could be gorgeously extravagant, or the veriest Spartan, as circumstances demanded. He was in brief the epitome of Elizabeth's England: a figure assuredly very far from godlike but no less assuredly heroic.
It may be doubted if ever thejoie de vivrewas so generally prevalent in England as in those spacious days. Such a national mood is in danger of being followed by a lapse into an effeminate hedonism, from which England as a whole was saved by the antagonistic development of the essentially masculine if crude puritanism, whose vital spirit had already begun to take possession of a large proportion of the population without as yet evicting paganism. Under this at present secondary impulse, attributable very largely to the new familiarity with the Old Testament engendered by the translation of the Bible, men quickly learnt to look upon themselves as the chosen people of the Lord of Sabaoth who gave them the victory over their enemies, and to whom with entire sincerity they gave the glory; while they found a satisfying warrant in the Scriptures for spoiling the Egyptians and smiting the Amalekites, symbolising specifically the Spaniards and the Irish. The particular aspect of Puritanism which belongs to rigid Calvinism, in all its grim austerity, was confined so far to a very limited section: for the majority an extensive biblical vocabulary was consistent with a thorough appreciation of virile carnal enjoyments: the dourness of John Knox hardly infected the neighbouring country. For the most part, even the intolerance of the age was not that born of religious fanaticism, but was the normal outcome of a full-blooded self-confidence. The Elizabethans are apt to startle us by a display of apparently callous cruelty at one moment, and an almost reckless generosity at the next. They slaughtered the garrison of Smerwick in cold blood, and treated the vanquished at Cadiz with a chivalrous consideration which amazed its recipients. They kidnapped the sons of Ham from Africa for lucre; with the "Indians" of South and Central America they were always on excellent terms, and the Californians proffered divine honours to Francis Drake. These are paradoxes precisely similar in kind to those which so often puzzle amiable and mature observers of the British schoolboy to-day. Broadly, they were governed by instincts and impulses rather than by reasoned ethical theory, instincts occasionally barbaric but for the most part frank and generous; and they were sturdily loyal to the somewhat primitive code of right and wrong which was the outcome.
[Sidenote 1: The Queen's Ministers][Sidenote 2: The Queen]
These qualities, joined with an indomitable audacity and an eminently practical shrewdness, were characteristic of the men who were the hand and heart of England. Other qualities were needed for the brains which had to direct her policy; the patient common sense of Burghley, the keen penetration of Walsingham, the solid shrewdness of Nicholas Bacon,vir pietate gravis. The craftiness of the younger Cecil, the time-serving of Francis Bacon, mark a lower type of politician; not rare perhaps in Elizabeth's time, but not generally characteristic among her servants. To draw full value, however, from the capacities of those statesmen, a monarch of exceptional ability was needed. It was the peculiar note of Elizabeth's dealings with her ministers that having once realised their essential merits, she never withdrew her confidence. She flouted, insulted and browbeat them when their advice ran counter to her caprices; but no man suffered in the long run for standing up to her, however she might be irritated. Nor can we attribute this to such a loyalty of disposition on her part as marked her rival Mary alone among Stuarts: to whom such baseness as she displayed in her treatment of Davison would have been impossible. Elizabeth had no sort of compunction in making scape-goats of such men as he. But she knew the men who could not be replaced, a faculty rare in princes; she would never have deserted a Strafford as did Mary's grandson. She drove Burghley and Walsingham almost to despair by her caprices; but if she overrode their judgment, it was not to displace them for other advisers more congenial to her mood, but to take affairs into her own hands, and manipulate them with a cool defiance of apparent probabilities, a duplicity so audacious that it passed for a kind of sincerity, which gave her successes the appearance of being due to an almost supernatural good luck. Histrionics were her stock-in-trade: she was eternally playing a part, and playing it with such zest that she habitually cheated her neighbours, and occasionally, for the time being, even herself, into forgetting that her role was merely assumed for ulterior purposes. When a crisis was reached where there was no further use for play-acting, she was again the shrewd practical ruler who had merely been masked as the comedienne. Other queens have been great by the display of intellectual qualities commonly accounted masculine, or of virtues recognised as the special glories of their own sex; Elizabeth had the peculiar ingenuity deliberately to employ feminine weakness, incomprehensibility, and caprice, as the most bafflingly effective weapons in her armoury.
A noble woman she was not. The miracle of virtues and charms depicted by courtiers and poets existed, if she did exist at all, entirely in their exuberant imaginations. She could be indecently coarse and intolerably mean; she could lie with unblushing effrontery; her vanity was inordinate. But voracious as she was of flattery it never misled her; she could appreciate in others the virtues she herself lacked; behind the screen of capriciousness, an intellect was ever at work as cool and calculating as her grandfather's, as hard and resolute as her father's. To understand her People was her first aim, to make them great was her ultimate ambition. And she achieved both.