THE PROGRESS OF THE NATION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
The Tudors and the Nation--The Church--Population and
Wealth--Royal Prerogative--Legislation of Henry VIII.--The Star
Chamber--Beneficial Legislation--Treason Laws--Legislation
of Edward and Mary--Elizabeth's Policy--Religion and
the Church--Sketch of Ecclesiastical History under the
Tudors--Literature, Science, and Art--Greatness of the
Period--Foundation of Colleges and Schools--Revival of
Learning--Its Temporary Decay--Prose Writers of the Period--The
Poets--Scottish Bards--Music--Architecture--Painting and
Sculpture--Furniture and Decorations--Arms and Armour--Costumes,
Coins, and Coinage--Ships, Commerce, Colonies, and
Manufactures--Manners and Customs--Condition of the People.
The century of which we have just traced the events was a period marked
by vast progress and by changes which were the springs of still more
wonderful progress in after ages. Though the character of the Tudors
was absolutely despotic, no dynasty since the days of Alfred and Magna
Charta wrought out such revolutions in the constitution of England.
These revolutions were partly effected by the very efforts of the Tudor
monarchs to establish their own power and gratify their own self-will,
but were due also to the fact that the Tudor despotism was essentially
popular, and encouraged manifestations of the national will. These
revolutions extended not only into the political constitution of the
nation, but into its religious one; into its literature, its philosophy,
and its morals; and that simply because the spirit of the age was of
that tone and strength that, though outward powers could agitate it,
nothing but its own momentum could direct its tendency. Henry VII., with
an indifferent title, succeeded to the crown, because the nation was
weary of the conflicts of the York and Lancaster monarchs, and longed for
peace, which his disposition promised. Cold, cautious, and penurious,
he took care not to raise a fresh race of powerful barons in place of
that which the Wars of the Roses had destroyed, but hoarded up money;
and beyond the injustice practised in its collection, left his people to
pursue their trades and their agriculture, and thus renew their strength.
Henry VIII.--violent, passionate, sensual, and intensely arbitrary, but
fond of parade, and in his youth boastful of his prowess--gratified
the pride of the nation, whilst he ruled it with a rod of iron. In the
gratification of his lusts he did not hesitate to renounce allegiance to
that great spiritual power which for above a thousand years had ruled
haughtily over Europe and all its kings and warriors. By this act he
set free for ever the mind and conscience of England. In vain did he
endeavour to bind the nation in a knot of his own making. Though he
hurled his fiercest terms against those who claimed a universal liberty
which he intended only for himself, he had broken the mighty spell of
ages--a power and a mystery before which the world had bowed in impotent
awe; and no chains which he could forge, no creed which he could set up,
no hierarchy which he could frame, could possess more than the strength
of the fire-scorched flax against the will of the enfranchised people.
The moment that Henry perished, the soul of the nation showed itself
alive. The very Reformers around his throne, who had cowered beneath
the fell and deadly ire of the tyrant, rose, with Cranmer at their head
and, under the mild auspices of the religious Edward, gave free vent to
the spirit and the doctrines of the Reformation. The return of theologic
despotism under Mary only added force to the spirit of reform, by showing
how terrible and bloody was the animus of ancient superstition. The fires
of Smithfield lit up the dark places of spiritual tyranny to the remotest
corners of the nation, and gave the blow to the tottering Bastille of
restringent faith in Great Britain. Elizabeth, with all the self-will of
her father, lived to see both in people and Parliament, a spirit that
made her lion-heart shrink with awe, and own, however reluctantly, a
power looking already gigantically down upon her own. She felt more than
once, in the pride of her might, the terror of that national will which,
in less than half a century from her death, shattered the throne of her
successor, and gave to the world the unheard-of spectacle of a king
decapitated for treason to his people.
The grand underlying impulse of the forward movement of this age was
that of the general progress of the world in knowledge--knowledge of its
rights and of the force inherent in popular association. The restoration
of classical literature, and especially of the Greek, had rekindled
the lofty and independent sentiments of antiquity; but still more, the
knowledge of the doctrines, principles, and promises of the Bible, which
had been disseminated among the people by the Reformers, had spread like
a flame amongst them, and had given them totally new ideas of human
prerogative and dignity. Henry VIII., after being induced to make public
the Scriptures, saw so clearly their effect that he withdrew the boon
as far as was possible, and pronounced the severest penalties on any of
the common people who should consult that Divine fountain of truth and
freedom. Throughout the civilised world, far even beyond the countries
in which the Reformation had established itself, the stimulating boon of
this knowledge was diffused, and gave a perilous and uneasy feeling to
the most slavish nations and the most despotic sovereigns.
But in England many other causes had co-operated to raise the power and
condition of the people. The long civil wars had, by the time of the
accession of Henry VII., reduced the old nobility to a mere fragment.
Such extraordinary specimens of baronial wealth and dominion as the
Warwicks, Beauchamps, and Shrewsburys, no longer existed. In the first
Parliament of Henry VII., the peers amounted to only twenty-eight;
in that of Henry VIII. they had risen only to thirty-six. With their
extinction had lapsed their vast estates to the Crown, and this property
had in part been sold to defray the costs by which the throne had
maintained its straggles against various claimants and their factions.
Henry VII., as we have said, carefully kept down this haughty class to
the limits into which it had fallen. His son, Henry VIII., like him,
pursued the policy of Edward IV., who had established a system of fine
and recovery to cut off entails; and by liberal use of attainders, with
their consequent forfeitures of title and estate, made the nobility
entirely subservient to the Crown, which augmented its wealth and power
on their ruin. By conferring their estates in part on new aspirants to
the peerage from the families of the lesser gentry, and in many cases--as
in those of Wolsey and Cromwell--from the ranks of the common people, he
divided the aristocracy against itself, and thus added fresh influence to
the throne.
This predominance of the Crown once established, Henry VIII. proceeded to
a still more startling blow at a power hitherto equal and often paramount
to that of the Crown--the Church. To the terror and astonishment of the
whole of Papal Christendom, he stretched his hand not only against the
supreme rule, but the vast property of that august and time-honoured
institution. In 1532 he abolished the annates, or first-fruits, before
that time paid to the court of Rome--an act in itself proclaiming his
independence of that court. In the following year he declared by Act of
Parliament that his subjects might discuss the claims and condemn the
acts and opinions of the Pope without incurring any charge of heresy.
Another year, and he caused himself to be proclaimed "Supreme head of the
Church" in his own realms, and prohibited not only all payments to the
Pope, but all appeals to or recognition of his authority. In 1535, the
very next year, he confiscated the property of the lesser monasteries;
and this course, once begun, never stopped, till he had made himself
master of all the vast demesnes of the monasteries, the collegiate
churches, hospitals, and houses of the order of the Knights of St. John
of Jerusalem; the bulk of which he appropriated to his own use, turning
adrift 150,000 monks, priests, and nuns into the world. So daring a
sweep of ecclesiastical property, power, and privilege never was made by
any other man or in any other era of the world; and nothing could have
emboldened even this impious and lawless monarch to so astounding a deed
but the clear consciousness that the spirit of the age was with him.
By this unexampled stroke Henry made himself master of 644 convents,
90 colleges, 2,374 chantries and free chapels, and 110 hospitals; the
whole of which property, with trifling exception, was speedily conveyed
to the vast swarm of hungry upstarts--the Russells, the Brownes, the
Seymours, and the like--who rapidly bloomed into aristocratic greatness,
and constituted an impregnable barrier against any restoration of this
affluent but corrupt ecclesiastical princedom.
These new men, in their turn, were compelled to subdivide a portion, more
or less, among their followers, to establish their own position; and
other large areas of lands were sold in minor amounts to the successful
merchants and traders, so that by this means there grew up again a new
power in the country--that of small but sturdy freeholders, who, at once
independent of the Crown and the aristocracy, soon made their might felt
in the community, and added to the House of Commons that popular infusion
of authoritative life which speedily electrified the Government by its
tone, and prostrated it by its measures.
That a large number of such men of substance, whose wealth was the
produce of industry, existed at the period, is an indication that the
nation had grown rich by trade, and had also advanced in population. When
we talk of the England and other countries of Europe of former ages,
we are scarcely aware of what extremely different countries they were,
both in regard to the cultivation of their lands, the arts, aspects,
and habits of their cities, their general knowledge, their polish of
speech, and their amount of population. It will scarcely be credited that
at the close of the Wars of the Roses, the whole population of England
and Wales did not exceed two millions and a half--far less than the
present population of London. But in 1575, that is, in the seventeenth
year of Elizabeth, the men fit to bear arms alone amounted to 1,172,674,
and the entire population to not less than 5,000,000. Harrison, in his
"Description of England" at this time, says that "Some do grudge at the
great increase of people in these days, thinking a necessary herd of
cattle far better than a superfluous augmentation of mankind. They laid,"
he says, "the cause upon God, as though He were in fault for sending such
increase of people, or want of wars that should consume them; affirming
that the land was never so full." So little did they comprehend that the
multitude of people, properly employed, were the strength and wealth of
the nation.
But we shall have occasion to notice that with this wealth and strength
there also existed much poverty, owing to the derangements of society
in the days of Henry VIII., and to the great tendency to leave the land
in pasture to supply the growth of wool necessary for the large demand
for the Netherlands and the rapidly increasing one at home, where the
manufacture of both coarse and fine cloths had been growing from the time
that Edward III., at the instigation of his queen Philippa of Hainault,
invited the weavers of fine woollens over from that country. Still the
rise in the value of all kinds of articles of life, including wages,
during the whole of this period, is a proof of the enlarged demand
for skilled workmen, and the capacity to pay much more than formerly,
which could only be the case with augmented means in the bulk of the
population. At various times, as in 1496 and 1514, Acts were passed
with the vain object of keeping down wages--attempts which, though they
show little progress in political economy, prove with equal clearness
that employers were more numerous than they had been in proportion to
labour. In 1500 the wages of a master mason were 6d. a day; in 1575
they were doubled; and in 1590 they had reached 1s. 2d. The wages of
common labourers had risen from 6d. a day to 10d. In 1511 the salary of
a domestic priest was £3 6s. 8d. a year; in 1545 it had risen to £4 14s.
6d. In 1544 the wages of sailors were advanced from 5s. per month, in the
Royal navy, to 6s. 8d., and all other trades and professions exhibited
the similar advance of payment.
This, of course, was the result of the like advance in the prices of
provisions, rents, and clothing--another proof that the people had become
not only more numerous, but more luxurious, and, therefore, demanded
better diet and accommodation. Wheat, the staple of the people's food,
had advanced from 3s. 4d. a quarter in 1485 to 17s. in 1589; £2 2s. in
1596; and £1 7s. in 1599. It is true the price of wheat varied a great
deal in this period, but except in a very few seasons it never approached
the low price of the previous century; and in 1587, a year of scarcity,
it rose to £5 4s. In 1500 a dozen pigeons were 4d., in 1541 they were
10d., in 1590 they were 1s., and in 1597, a year of scarcity, 4s. 3d. In
1500 a hundred eggs could be had for 6d., in 1541 they were 1s. 2d., and
in 1597 they were 3s. A good fat goose in 1500 was only 4d., but in 1541
it was 8d., in 1589 it was 1s. 2d. A fat sheep in 1500 was 1s. 8d., in
1549 from 2s. 4d. to 4s., and in 1597, the dear year, it could not be had
under 14s. 6d. In 1500 an ox could be purchased for 11s. or 12s., in 1541
its price had advanced from £1 to £2; in 1597 a single stone of beef was
2s., and a whole fat ox upwards of £5.
In "Stafford's Dialogue," published in 1581, all the speakers agree in
respect to this advance of prices in their time. "I am fain," says the
capper, "to give my journeymen twopence in a day more than I was wont to
do, and yet they say they cannot sufficiently live thereon." "Such of
us," says the knight, "as do abide in the country, still cannot, with
£200 a year, keep that house that we might have done with 200 marks but
sixteen years past. Cannot you, neighbour," he adds, addressing the
farmer, "remember that within these thirty years I could in this town
buy the best pig or goose that I could lay my hand on for 4d., which now
costeth 12d., a good capon for 3d. or 4d., a chicken for 1d., a hen for
2d., which now costeth me double and triple the money? It is likewise in
greater ware, as in beef and mutton. I have seen a cap for 13d. as good
as I can get now for 2s. 6d.; of cloth ye have heard how the price is
risen. Now a pair of shoes costs 12d., yet in my time I have bought a
better for 6d. Now I can get never a horse shoed under 10d. or 12d., when
I have also seen the common price was 6d."
This steady advance of prices of all articles is a sufficient test of the
progress of the nation in general wealth, and in notions of comfort and
style of living; for though undoubtedly a vast mass of pauperism existed
during this period, no people could go on paying higher and higher rates
for everything, who had not the means of doing so. A poor nation might
have suffered distress or scarcity, but could not have raised the means
of living to such a degree as is here shown, if they had not had the
money to purchase on such a scale.
[Illustration: TOWN AND COUNTRY FOLK OF ELIZABETH'S REIGN.]
But we have abundant other evidence, with some degree of detail, of the
progress of wealth in the splendour maintained by the Court, in the cost
of dress, jewellery, horses, and household establishments, in the amount
of taxation and revenue, in the extent of shipping and foreign commerce,
and in the rank and influence which the nation had assumed in Europe. We
now proceed to notice these tokens of advance.
The Tudors were a race who had the highest possible idea of their power
and prerogative. Under Henry VIII. especially the sentiment of Louis XIV.
of France was thoroughly realised though the phrase was not yet coined,
"L'état? c'est moi!"--"I am the State." If he did not actually annihilate
the Constitution, he reduced it to a mockery and a mere machine, which
moved only at his will. Yet in truth, paralysed as the nation appeared
then under the terror of the axe and the gallows, its spirit only waited:
it was never extinguished, and under his successors it showed itself
again unmistakably. It has been asserted that the people in the time of
Henry VIII. were most cowardly, for that he had no means of maintaining
his arbitrary course against them, as he had no standing army. But this
is not altogether true, for though he had no actual standing army, he had
such authority over the minds of both aristocracy and people, that--as
we have seen on all occasions in which the people revolted, chiefly on
account of religion, and when they were instigated and supported by the
Roman Catholic nobles--he speedily mustered sufficient forces to put
them down. In contemplating the strange mystery of the base submission
of the Parliament and people to the reckless caprices and bloodthirsty
despotism of Henry VIII., we must ever bear in mind that the whole nation
was rent into two most antagonistic parts by the schism in religion. The
Roman Catholics feared the loss of their estates, the Protestants were
eager to secure them. Of the few noblemen remaining in the country from
the sanguinary decimation of the civil wars, some of the wealthiest were
still staunch Roman Catholics, and were watched with greedy eyes by the
host of poor but ambitious adventurers who were ready to second every
scheme of spoliation meditated by the monarch. When the ancient Church
was going to the ground, with all its proud establishments and enormous
estates, the nobles who belonged to it felt the very earth shaking
under their feet, and saw no means of safety but in the most implicit
obedience. On the other hand, the numerous swarm of courtiers--whose only
law was the word of the prince, and their only real creed the belief in
plunder and in the acquisition of the lands of nobles, prelates, abbots,
and chantries, as the reward of subservience--were ever ready to rush
to arms or to the execution of the most fierce and unconstitutional
orders of the king. No mercy was shown by the members of families to
one another, where the terror of the monarch and the hope of his favour
intervened. And at that day, when the country swarmed with vagabonds, who
had no home and no ties, who had been increasing ever since the abolition
of villenage, there was no difficulty in mustering numbers of soldiers,
where there was the chance of liberal pay and more liberal plunder.
This state of things, this facility of drawing forces to the field on
the shortest notice, and on the most certain basis, was particularly
provided for by Henry VII. He took care to save money by all means, and
to hoard it, so that though no man was more reluctant to spend, and none
ever incurred so much odium by his parsimony where the military fame of
the nation was concerned; yet he gained at least the reputation of ample
means, and the credit for a disposition to punish promptly and severely
any disloyalty or adverse claims on his Crown. He moreover passed two
statutes for the purpose of bringing his nobles and dependents rapidly
to his standard on any emergency. By the Acts 2 Henry VII. c. 18, and
19 Henry VII. c. 1, every one who possessed an office, fee, or annuity,
by grant from the Crown, was required to attend the king whenever he
went to war, under penalty, in case of failure, of forfeiture of all
such grants. There were, of course, certain exemptions. Some obtained
the king's licence, for an equivalent consideration, to remain at home,
and such as could prove any disqualifying infirmity were excused. The
clergy, as a matter of course, were exempt, also the judges and principal
officers of the law; and by the latter Act this privilege was extended
to the members of the king's Council, to such persons as had bought
their patents for a certain sum, and to all persons under twenty and
above sixty years of age. The exemptions extended to comparatively a
small number of persons, the fear of forfeiture applied to the majority.
To render this more effectual, Henry VII. was rigorous in prohibiting
a large array of retainers by the nobles, whilst he was strenuous to
enforce the attendance of the feoffees of the Crown. This process
was carried farther by Henry VIII. by the free use of attainders, by
which, at will, he struck down the most wealthy and exalted nobles, and
appropriated their demesnes; so that eventually there was not a foot of
land in the kingdom nor an individual life which was not held at the
king's mercy.
But still more than by the passing of attainders were the lives,
liberties, and property of the nobles submitted to the will of the king,
by the institution of the Court of the Star Chamber. This court set aside
all other courts at will, and by abandoning the use of juries in it, laid
Magna Charta and the life and fortune of every man, at the foot of the
throne. From the moment, in fact, that this court was formally erected
by the 3 Henry VII., c. 1, there was an end of the Constitution, the
privilege of Habeas Corpus was suspended, and Parliament legislated in
vain. The king was the State, and ruled in this arbitrary court by the
officers of his Privy Council. This court was so called from the stars
which ornamented the ceiling of the room in which it met.
Henry VII., in his original enactment, plainly avowed his reason for
establishing this court to be, that he might reach and punish such
persons as by one means or another escaped sentence in the ordinary
courts, through the bribery or "remissness" of juries, and check the
evils of "maintenance," or the overriding of justice through the
assistance of a powerful neighbour, and the granting of "liveries" for
the same purpose. The court was, therefore, directed against the licence
of the nobility, and though arbitrary was at first popular. It consisted
in its original form of the Chancellor, Treasurer, and Keeper of the
Privy Seal, or any two of them, with a bishop and a temporal lord of the
council and the chief justices of the King's Bench and Common Pleas, or
two other justices in their absence. Ultimately it developed into a mere
gathering of privy councillors, and its jurisdiction at first accurately
defined, and for the most part beneficial, became extremely vague and was
exercised at haphazard.
In the reign of Henry VII. the privilege of benefit of clergy was greatly
modified. This privilege, which originally exempted all clergymen from
the authority of lay tribunals, had become extended to all such laymen as
could read, and were therefore capable of becoming "clerks." To restrict
this abuse, Henry VII., in 1488, enacted that such privilege should be
allowed to laymen only once; and afterwards--when a man had murdered his
master--a statute was passed to deprive all murderers of their lords and
masters of benefit of clergy. Where it was admitted, the culprit, if a
layman, did not entirely escape punishment, for he was burnt with a hot
iron in the brawn of the left thumb.
The statutes in this reign were drawn up in English, and printed as they
came out, by De Worde, Pynson, and Faques, a signal step in progress
towards a public knowledge of the laws.
Under Henry VIII. the principle of arbitrary government arrived at its
culmination. The freedom from restraint which his father had prepared
for him, the passionate and imperious nature of this prince led him to
exercise to the utmost. By the means which we have described--terror
of death to those who offended, and participation in the spoils of
nobles and the Church, and hope of new honours to those who served him
regardless of law or conscience--he put himself above all control of
Parliament or statute, and ruled as royally, according to his own fancy,
as any Eastern despot. Out of this monstrous evil came, nevertheless,
much good to the nation. By his own daring act he broke up the ancient
system of the Church, with its accumulated wealth, superstitions,
and abuses, and cleared the ground for a new and more liberal state
of things. By the distribution of this property he founded a new and
influential class of freeholders, and enabled the affluence of trade to
flow into land, and to give to the mercantile class a new status and
influence. His motive was his own selfishness, but the result was the
public good.
Among the useful Statutes which he passed may be mentioned the Statute
of Uses and the Statute of Bankruptcy. By the former he put an end to a
most mischievous practice of conveying property for the use of certain
parties or corporate bodies, which had been introduced to evade the
Statute of Mortmain. So many secret modes of conveyance, so many legal
fictions had been introduced into the transfer of this property, that
it was difficult to ascertain the real owner; and creditors thus became
defrauded, widows were deprived of their dowers, and husbands of their
estates, by the courtesy. But the great feudal lords also were defrauded
of their dues on wardships, marriages, and reliefs. By an Act of the
twenty-seventh year of his reign (1536), it was decreed that whoever was
found in the possession of such property should be deemed its _bonâ-fide_
owner, and liable to the charges leviable upon it. By this means the
dubious and fraudulent practice of uses was abolished, and the lawyers
were compelled to resort to the more tangible theory of trusts. The
nature of the tenure still remained the same, for the use was but a
trust; but it was simplified, and brought more into the region of common
sense and common observation.
By the preamble to the Statute of Bankruptcy, we find that the progress
of commerce had led to frauds. Men by means of credit got the property
of others into their hands and absconded with it. In the 34 and 35 of
Henry VIII., therefore, it was enacted that the Chancellor or Keeper of
the great seal, with the Lord Treasurer, Lord President, Privy Seal,
and others of the privy council, and chief justices, or any three of
them--the Chancellor, Keeper, President, or Privy Seal being one--should
have power to constitute a court, before which, on complaints from a
party aggrieved, they should summon the defaulter, should take possession
of all his property, should hear all necessary evidence on oath, and
should make a distribution of his effects amongst the creditors according
to their claims. Persons concealing effects of the offender were to
forfeit double their value; and claimants making fraudulent claims were
to forfeit double the amount demanded.
This was the first outline and foundation of our court and law of
bankruptcy, the main principles of which are still in force, but
considerably modified by the greater development of the action of trade,
and a spirit of increased enlightenment and humanity. The bankrupt is no
longer treated necessarily as a criminal, but as one who has suffered
from misfortune; and where he is innocent of dishonest conduct, is
discharged from such obligations as he has no means of fulfilling, and
the way opened for future enterprise.
But the laws of Henry were rarely so rational or innocent as these. We
have seen, in tracing the events of his reign, that, to stop the mouths
of his subjects regarding his many criminal deeds, the cruel calumnies
on and divorces of his wives, followed by their execution, and the
perpetration of fresh marriages equally revolting, he was continually
creating new species of treasons, and loading the Statute book with the
most atrocious specimens of legislation which ever disgraced the annals
of any nation, Christian or pagan.
The first of these extraordinary enactments was the Statute 25 Henry
VIII., c. 22, passed on the occasion of his divorce of Catherine of
Aragon, and his marriage of Anne Boleyn. In this he declared that any
one who dared to write, print, or circulate anything to the prejudice
of this marriage, or the queen herself, or the issue of such marriage,
should be guilty of high treason. The same was to be the fate of any one
who endeavoured to dispute this alliance by advocating the validity of
the former marriage with Catherine, and every one was to take an oath to
obey this Act fully; and if any refused to take such oath, they were to
be also guilty of misprision of treason. As, however, the tyrant could
not prevent people from thinking and speaking their minds in private,
next Session he got from his pliant Parliament a fresh Act, forbidding
all persons to speak or even think a slander against the king; for if
they thought, they could have the oath put to them, and must either deny
their very thought, or be found guilty of treason.
But by the twenty-eighth year of his reign the fickle despot had cut off
the head of this very queen, against whom nobody had on any account been
allowed to whisper the slightest fault, on peril of their lives (1536).
The marriage with her, as well as that with Catherine, was declared
void, and never to have been otherwise; the issue of both was pronounced
illegitimate, and the same penalties were enacted against every one
who called in question the tyrant's marriage with Jane Seymour. Thus,
on every occasion that this Royal sensualist thought fit to destroy or
divorce a wife and marry another, did he compel the whole of his subjects
to swear and forswear at his pleasure. In a Statute of the thirty-first
of his reign, c. 8, he clearly enunciated that doctrine of Divine right
which the Stuarts, his successors, upheld to their perdition. It is
worthy of note, too, that by abolishing the authority of the Pope, to
serve his own selfish ends, he let loose the human mind from its long
thraldom, and prepared the way--a necessary sequence--for that political
rebellion which was certain to be assumed by a people who had once
triumphed in a religious one. Thus was political freedom the consequence
of this lawless monarch's attempt to crush it, as much as the Reformation
was that of his rejection of the Papacy for the gratification of his
passions.
It is needless to follow Henry VIII. through the still repeated progress
of those contradictory oaths as he slew or wedded fresh wives. It was the
same in the divorce of Anne of Cleves, on the decapitation of Catherine
Howard; but growing perfectly frantic with wrath and shame on finding
himself married to an unchaste woman whom he had proclaimed an angel, he
went a step farther, and denounced the terrors of high treason against
any woman who should dare to marry him if she had been incontinent before
marriage, and against all such persons as should know of this and should
not warn the king in time. When to these hideous Statutes we add that
of 31 Henry VIII., c. 14, which abolished all "Diversity of opinions,"
and that of 34 and 35 Henry VIII., c. 1, for the "Advancement of true
religion and abolishment of the contrary," we have exhibited the most
perfect example of what a man may become by the intoxication of unlimited
power.
Besides particular laws, Henry VIII. erected two new courts of
justice--the Court of the Steward of the Marshalsea, for the trial of
all treasons, murders, manslaughters, and blows by which blood was shed
in any of the palaces or houses of the king during his residence there;
and the Court of the President and Council of the North. This latter
court was established in the thirty-first year of his reign to try the
rioters who had risen against his suppression of the lesser monasteries;
but it included all the powers vested in the king's own Council, and
not only decided such civil cases as were brought before it, but was
armed with authority, by secret instructions from the Crown, to inquire
into presumed illegalities, and to bring before it alleged offenders
against the prerogatives of the king. Such oppressive use was made of
it by Strafford in the time of Charles I., that it was abolished in the
sixteenth year of that monarch's reign.
[Illustration: STATE TRIAL IN WESTMINSTER HALL IN THE TIME OF ELIZABETH.]
To the honour of Edward VI. and his counsellors, all these arbitrary Acts
of his father were repealed by him: the law of treason was restored to
its state under the Statute of 25 Edward III.; religion was again set
free, and proclamations by the king in council were declared to have no
longer the force of Acts of Parliament. A few years, however, introduced
Queen Mary, and a reversal of the State religion and all its laws. That
dreadful persecution which we have narrated, and which is one of the
darkest spots in the history of the world, was carried on to force the
human mind into its former thraldom; and an attempt was made by the
Spanish power which was then introduced to restore arbitrary rule by a
singular suggestion. Charles V. presented, through his ambassador, a
book to the queen, in which the principle was laid down that as she was
the first queen regnant, none of the limitations which had been set to
the prerogative of her ancestors the kings of England, applied to her,
but to kings only; and that by consequence she was free and absolute.
This book Mary showed to Gardiner, and asked his opinion of it, which
was that it was a pernicious book, and could work her no good. Thereupon
Mary threw the book into the fire; and Gardiner, on the plea of defining
and establishing her authority, brought in an Act which, giving her the
_same_ powers as the kings before her possessed, consequently restrained
her within the same limits.
Mary confirmed the Act of her late brother, confining the law of treason
to the Statute of the 25th of Edward III.; nor does she seem to have
created fresh treasons, except in one instance--making it treasonable
to counterfeit not merely the coin of the realm, but also such coins as
circulated there by Royal consent.
On the accession of Elizabeth the Reformed religion was once more
restored; and, like her father, she was not only declared supreme head of
the Church, but she assumed all his claims of supreme authority in the
State. She frequently told her Parliament that it existed entirely by her
will and pleasure; and when the members entered on matters disagreeable
to her, she snubbed them in language which sounds oddly enough in these
days of high Parliamentary privilege. By the very first Statute passed
in her reign, she proceeded to set up a new Court, ignored everything
like Magna Charta and the right of jury, making her own will the entire
law, and placing every subject, with his life and property, at her mercy.
This was the Court of High Commission, which assumed all the pretensions
of the Star Chamber, but was directed more especially to ecclesiastical
affairs. The queen was empowered to appoint by letters patent, whenever
she thought proper, such persons, being natural-born subjects, as she
pleased, to execute all jurisdiction concerning spiritual matters, and
to visit, reform, and redress all errors, heresies, schisms, abuses,
offences, &c., which by any ecclesiastical authority might be lawfully
ordered or corrected. The Reformers were only too eager to put this
formidable engine into her hands, because it was to crush the Romish
hierarchy; but they did not reflect that it could on occasion be employed
against themselves, as Laud and Strafford afterwards demonstrated to
their children. This inquisitorial court was armed with authority to
employ torture to effect the necessary confessions, and its jurisdiction
was extended to the punishment of breaches of the marriage vow, and all
misdemeanours and disorders in that state. It was, therefore, sanctioned
in forcing its operations into the very bosom of social and domestic life.
Elizabeth, indeed, was fully as arrogant and despotic as her father; and
nothing but her lion-like resolution, her choice of able and unscrupulous
ministers, and the cunning of her Government, could have enabled her
to maintain her sway so successfully as she did. The homage due to her
sex no doubt also contributed essentially to this result. Yet not all
these circumstances could prevent her from perceiving that her power
was silently and even rapidly waning before that of the people. She
frequently had to tell persons that they dared not have done or said
certain things in her father's time. She had repeatedly to concede the
point to the pertinacity of her Parliament; especially so when, towards
the end of her reign, the House of Commons called so boldly upon her to
abolish the monstrous list of monopolies which had been granted to her
favourites, commencing from the seventeenth year of her reign. Amongst
these monopolies were those for the exclusive sale of salt, currants,
iron, powder, cards, calf-skins, felts, poledavy (a kind of canvas),
ox shin-bones, train-oil, lifts of cloth, potash, anise-seed, vinegar,
sea-coal, steel, aqua-vitæ, brushes, pots, bottles, saltpetre, lead,
accidences (or books of the rudiments of Latin grammar), oil, calamine
stone, oil of blubber, glasses, paper, starch, tin, sulphur, new drapery,
dried pilchards; the exportation of iron, ham, beer, and leather; the
importation of Spanish wool and Irish linen; such an astonishing list, in
fact, that when it was read over in the Commons in 1601, but two years
before her death, a member in amazement asked, as already stated, whether
bread was not of the number.
These grants had been obtained from her by her courtiers through
the weak side of the woman; but in the expenses of her government,
considering the aid she had to render to her Protestant allies in
Scotland, France, and the Netherlands, and the enemies she had to contend
with, necessitating costly armaments and navies, her administration shows
most favourably. She would never incur debt, but paid off that incurred
by her predecessors, Edward and Mary. Instead of debasing the coin,
like her father, she increased its purity; and the annual outlay of her
government averaged only about £65,000 per annum.
In fact, the more we recede from the personal history of Elizabeth,
and approach her great political measures, the more we perceive the
true evidences of her glory. She was courageous, beyond the power of a
world in arms to terrify her; she was moderate in her demands on her
subjects, though vain in her person and showy in her court; shrewd in
her choice of ministers, though weak in her indulgence of favourites;
she was ambitious of the reputation of her country; and she rendered to
the labouring people their birthright in the land, which her father had
stripped them of in levelling the monastic institutions by enacting the
Poor Law, the celebrated Statute of the forty-third of her reign (1601),
on which yet rests the whole fabric of parochial right to support in age
and destitution. In nothing did she display her sagacity so much as in
her repeated declaration that money in her subjects' purse was as good
as in her own exchequer. It was better, for there it would be growing
tenfold in the ordinary augmentation of traffic, ready to yield the State
proportionate interest on any real emergency.
The great struggle between the Papacy and the growing Protestant forces
was nearly ended, but complete and terrible as was the overthrow of
the ancient hierarchy in England and Scotland, it came at last with a
rapidity which astonished even the friends of the change. From the time
of Richard II. hatred of the Papacy had been afloat among the people,
and even in his day had availed to shake the throne, and fill the public
mind with prognostics of Papal decay. Yet reign after reign had passed,
and the Church had not only maintained its position, but had seemed to
crush with a successful hand the Protestant schismatics. The fires which
consumed the more daring advocates of the new opinions seemed to scare
the rest into obscurity. The triumphant Church of Rome still presented
a front of determined strength, and lorded it over the land with a
magnificence which seemed destined to endure for ever.
Henry VII. was a firm upholder of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. "He
advanced churchism," says Bacon; "he was tender of the privileges of
sanctuaries, though they did him much mischief; he built and endowed
many religious foundations, besides his memorable hospital of the Savoy;
and yet he was a great alms-giver in secret, which showed that his works
in public were rather dedicated to God's glory than his own." The fact
was that Henry VII. was too cautious a man to become a reformer. He was
too fond of money to risk its loss by the most distant chance of an
unsuccessful enterprise, and he was too recently placed on the throne of
a vanquished dynasty to venture on so bold a measure of ecclesiastical
revolution had he been thus inclined, which he was far enough from
being. On the contrary, his ministers were almost all great and able
churchmen. Cardinals Bourchier and Morton, Archbishops Deane and Warham,
were the accomplished churchmen who conducted the governmental affairs
of Henry; and when the public outcry against the worldly and dissolute
lives of the clergy, both secular and regular, became too loud to be
disregarded, these clerical ministers of the king endeavoured with one
hand to reduce the corruption by advice and remonstrance, and to check
the progress of heresy by the stake and fagot. Henry VII. permitted this
mode of extinguishing opinion by destroying the entertainers of it. In
the ninth year of his reign Joan Boughton was burnt in Smithfield, and
this auto-da-fé was followed by that of William Tylsworth, at Amersham,
whose daughter was compelled to set fire to the pile which destroyed
her father, and that of Laurence Guest at Salisbury. In addition to the
victims of these odious crimes, many persons were burnt in the cheek,
imprisoned, and otherwise cruelly treated. These atrocities so far from
diminishing the heresy, only excited the abhorrence of the people and
weakened their attachment to the Church.
Henry VIII. continued the persecuting practices of his father with
unabated rigour. In his earlier days he appeared determined to do honour
to the Church beyond most of his predecessors. He raised up and created
in Cardinal Wolsey such a colossus of ecclesiastical pomp and greatness
as the world had rarely seen. In 1513 Wolsey was made Bishop of Tournay,
in France; in 1514, Bishop of Lincoln and Archbishop of York; in 1515,
the king's almoner, Cardinal, and Lord High Chancellor of the kingdom;
in 1518 he became the Pope's legate _à latere_ and Bishop of Bath and
Wells; in 1521, he was made Abbot of St. Albans; in 1523, Bishop of
Durham, in exchange for the bishopric of Bath and Wells; and in 1529,
Bishop of Winchester, in exchange for that of Durham. Besides these
dignities, he had pensions from the King of France, the Emperor of
Germany, the Pope, and other princes. The whole power of the kingdom was
in his hands; for Henry, so far from being jealous of his greatness, only
felt himself the greater for having a servant who in pride and splendour
rivalled the greatest monarchs. The state which Wolsey kept would lead us
to infer that the Church had reached a higher pitch of power and grandeur
than ever in this country. His palaces were more gorgeous, and filled
with more evidences of enormous wealth, than those of kings. His retinue
of servants and attendants, many of the latter being nobles or the sons
of nobles, was inconceivable. It was only at Hampton Court that the
whole train of his servants and the crowd of his visitors, including the
nobility and ambassadors of foreign courts, could be suitably lodged and
entertained. For a long course of years the whole government of England
was in his hands. The king did nothing without him; and as prime minister
and Lord Chancellor of England, Archbishop of York, and chief judge in
the court of Star Chamber, there was no man or his estate that was not in
his power. His revenues from a hundred sources were immense, and such was
the magnificence of his position and influence, that he might well forget
himself and utter the famous words of unparalleled egotism--"Ego et rex
meus."
Who could have deemed that the Papal Church was near its end as the State
religion of England, whilst the king thus honoured its dignitaries? The
very greatness of Wolsey hastened the fall of the Church as well as of
himself. The arrogance, the rapacity, and the frequent injustice of
the proud minister made for him and his Church deadly enemies. "For,"
says Strype, "he disobliged not only the inferior sort by his pride and
haughty behaviour, but by laying his hands upon the rights, privileges,
and profits of the gentry and clergy, he made them his implacable enemies
too. He took upon him to bestow benefices, though the real right of
patronage lay in others. He called all offending persons before him,
whether of the laity or clergy, and compelled them to compound as his
officers thought fit."
But in spite of all his grandeur, Wolsey was but the creature of the
most violent and capricious of men. A single word and he fell headlong,
assuredly shaking in his fall the great hierarchy of which he had
seemed the most gorgeous pillar and ornament; for the whole system was
corrupt and rotten to the core. The wealth of the monastic orders had
especially demoralised them. Both the regular and secular clergy were
accused of not only spending their time in taverns and gambling-houses,
but of abandoning in such resorts the very costume which distinguished
them from the laity, of wearing daggers, gowns, and hoods of silk and
embroidery, and of letting their hair grow long and fall on their
shoulders. The interiors of the monastic houses were described as dens of
licentiousness, both in monks and nuns. We have it, on the evidence of
one of the letters of reproof addressed by Archbishop Morton to the Abbot
of St. Albans, that that famous abbey was filled with every species of
vice and sensuality. He further charges them with cutting down the woods,
wasting and embezzling the property of the Church, stealing the plate,
and even picking out the jewels from the shrine of the patron saint.
Whilst such was the corruption of the clergy, these infatuated men fell
to quarrelling amongst themselves. The most remarkable circumstance,
moreover, in this schism, is the very question which in these latter
days has furnished such a fiery theme of discussion in both Romanist and
Protestant Churches--the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin.
With the blind tenacity which often induces falling bodies to assert
their prerogatives with arrogant obstinacy, the Church, in the fourth
year of Henry VIII., commenced a daring opposition to the Government,
in defence of the benefit of clergy. Henry VII., as we have stated,
had limited this much abused privilege, by his Statute ordering such
laymen as claimed it under charge of murder, to be burnt in the brawn
of the thumb with the letter M. Henry VIII. had a Bill introduced into
Parliament for the purpose of still further limiting this mischievous
right, and denying benefit of clergy to all murderers and robbers
whatever. This the clergy opposed in Parliament and preached against in
the pulpit. The Lords and Commons were unanimously in favour of the Bill
as well as the people, but the clergy determined not to yield. Whilst
the public mind was in a ferment on this subject, a tailor of London, of
the name of Hunne, was brought into conflict with the incumbent of his
parish, on account of mortuary dues. Being sued in the spiritual court,
with a boldness which marked the rising spirit of the times and which the
clergy ought to have noted seriously, he took out a writ of Præmunire
against his prosecutor, for appealing to a foreign jurisdiction, the
spiritual court, still under the authority of the Pope. Enraged at this
audacity they put the tailor into prison on a charge of heresy, and there
he was discovered hanging dead. A coroner's inquest found the officers of
the prison guilty of murder, and it appeared that the Bishop of London's
chancellor, the sumner, and bell-ringer had perpetrated the crime. This
threw the deepest odium on the clergy, and alienated the people from
them; yet they did not cease to prosecute their claim of privilege, and
after much contest, Wolsey prayed the king to refer the matter to the
Pope. But even then Henry showed that he was tenacious of his power, and
gave a striking foretaste of what he would one day do. He replied, "By
permission and ordinance of God, we are King of England; and the king of
England in times past hath never had any superior but God only. Therefore
know you well that we will maintain the right of our crown, and of our
temporal jurisdiction, as well in this as in all other points, in as
ample a manner as any of our progenitors have done before our time."
[Illustration: JOHN KNOX. (_From a Portrait of the Period._)]
Whilst Edward VI. thoroughly established Protestantism, Mary as
completely reinstated Popery, and with a series of horrors which for
ever stamped terror and aversion of Roman Catholic ascendency deep on
the spirit of the nation. The number of persons who died in the flames
in that awful reign, for their faith and the freedom of conscience, is
stated to have been 288; but Lord Burleigh estimated those who perished
by fire, torture, famine, and imprisonment at not less than 400. Besides
these, vast numbers suffered cruelly in a variety of ways. "Some of
the professors," says Coverdale, "were thrown into dungeons, noisome
holes, dark, loathsome and stinking corners; others lying in fetters and
chains, and loaded with so many irons that they could scarcely stir.
Some tied in the stocks with their heels upwards; some having their
legs in the stocks, with their necks chained to the wall with gorgets
of iron; some with hands and legs in the stocks at once; sometimes both
hands in and both legs out; sometimes the right hand with the left
leg, or the left hand with the right leg, fastened in the stocks with
manacles and fetters, having neither stool nor stone to sit on to ease
their woful bodies; some standing in Skevington's gyves [commonly called
"Skevington's daughter"]--which were most painful engines of iron--with
their bodies doubled; some whipped and scourged, beaten with rods, and
buffeted with fists; and some having their hands burned with a candle
to try their patience, and force them to relent; some hunger-pined, and
some miserably famished and starved." The leading Reformers fled out
of the kingdom, chiefly to Frankfort and to Switzerland; and 800 or
more lived to become the heads of the restored Church under Elizabeth;
amongst these were Poynet, Bishop of Winchester; Grindal, afterwards
Bishop of London, and finally Primate of England; Sandys, afterwards
Archbishop of York; Ball, Bishop of Ossory; Pilkington, afterwards Bishop
of Durham; Bentham, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield; Scorey, Bishop of
Chichester, and afterwards of Hereford; Young, afterwards Archbishop of
York; Cox, afterwards of Ely; Jewel, afterwards of Salisbury; Coverdale,
the translator of the Bible, Bishop of Exeter; Horn, Dean of Durham;
Knox, the apostle of Scotland; and Foxe, the martyrologist. Besides
these eminent men, there were Sir John Cheke, the famous Greek scholar,
Sir Anthony Cooke, and Sir Francis Knollys, afterwards Elizabeth's
vice-chamberlain.
On Elizabeth's accession to the throne she was by no means disposed
to go so far as her brother Edward had gone, much less as far as the
refugees--who now flocked back again from Geneva--would have carried her.
They had imbibed the rigid independent notions of Calvin and Zwinglius,
and that probably before their departure from England--a circumstance
which there is little doubt directed their course to Switzerland,
for the Reformers who resorted to Frankfort were much nearer to her
standard--a standard very much the same as that of her father. She
renounced all allegiance to the Pope and the Church of Rome, though she
hesitated to declare herself the supreme head of the Church till it was
conferred on her by Parliament. She issued orders to restrain the zeal of
the Protestants, who began to pull down the images, and to restore the
service to its state in King Edward's time. She gave directions that a
part of the service should be read in English, and forbade the elevation
of the Host; but at the same time she suspended all preaching.
Parliament, on meeting, passed an Act asserting the supremacy of the
Crown over the Church, revived the Acts of Henry VIII. which abolished
the power and jurisdiction of the Pope in England, and authorised the
use of King Edward's Book of Common Prayer, with some alterations,
chiefly in the Communion Service. Thus they cast off the Roman Catholics
who would not conform, but did not go far enough for the more zealous
Reformers. The oath of Supremacy was presented to the bishops, and it
had the effect of clearing the Church of all but Kitchen of St. Asaph.
The inferior clergy, however, were not so firm, and only six abbots,
twelve deans, twelve archdeacons, fifteen heads of colleges, fifty
prebendaries, and eighty rectors refused compliance. The monks returned
to secular life, but the nuns mostly went abroad. The clergy were ordered
to wear the habits in use in the latter part of King Edward's time; and
their marriages, against which the queen showed a strong repugnance,
were put under stringent regulations. The press also was laid under the
most rigorous restrictions, and no book was to be printed or published
without the licence of the queen, or of six of her privy council,
or of her ecclesiastical commissioners, or the two archbishops, the
Bishop of London, the chancellors of the universities, and the bishop
and archdeacons of the place where it was produced. All persons were
commanded to attend their parish churches under severe penalties. In 1562
the articles of religion of King Edward were reduced from forty-two to
thirty-nine. In 1571 they underwent a further revision, and were made
binding on the clergy before they could be admitted to orders.
Like her father, the longer she lived the more resolute she became
to enforce her own dogmas on the whole body of her subjects. In the
twenty-third year of her reign the penalty for non-attendance of the
Established Church was raised to £20 per month. In the same year another
Act was passed, declaring it high treason to attempt to draw any one
to the Church of Rome; and the persons thus drawn were equally guilty
of treason, and all their aiders, abettors, and concealers were made
guilty of misprision of treason. These arbitrary laws against the freedom
of opinion went on increasing in severity. In 1585 an Act was passed
which made traitors of all Jesuits and other Popish priests who had
been ordained abroad, and of all subjects whatever educated in Papal
seminaries who did not immediately return home and take the oath of
supremacy. The receivers of any such persons were declared felons without
benefit of clergy. Whoever sent money to any foreign Jesuits or priests
was liable to Præmunire; and parents sending their children to school
abroad without licence from her Majesty were liable to a penalty of £100.
Fresh Acts were added in 1581 and 1593, the former to make void all
conveyances of property by Popish recusants, with the object of escaping
the penalties imposed upon them, and to decree that the penalty of £20 a
month for non-attendance at church should be levied by distress to the
extent of all the offenders' goods and two-thirds of their lands; the
latter ordered all Popish recusants above sixteen to repair to their
proper places of abode, and never more to go more than five miles from
them without special licence from the bishop of the diocese or lieutenant
of the county, under penalty of forfeiture of their goods and of the
profits of their lands for life; those having no goods or lands to be
deemed felons.
But if the atrocities committed by the Roman Catholics in the reign of
Mary, and the fears of their recurrence should the Papists regain the
power, afforded some plea for these persecutions, what is to be said of
the same rigours applied to the Reformers, who simply desired to form
their religious opinions on the Bible--the Divine charter of Humanity?
Thousands of these, from the earliest days of the Reformation, had
claimed this privilege as their birthright; and many of those who came
back from the Continent on the termination of the Marian persecution,
were surprised and discouraged to find themselves equally excluded with
the Catholics from the exercise of their own judgments by a Protestant
queen. They were required to attend the preaching of those against whose
doctrines they protested, and suffered the same monstrous fines if they
absented themselves. Instead of that "glorious liberty of the gospel"
which they had promised themselves, they had to accept with all homage
the cut out and prescribed pattern of opinion dictated by an autocratic
woman, who made a desperate stand against the removal of images from the
churches, and practised many Popish ceremonies in her own private chapel.
Instead of the form of service which the English refugees had established
at Geneva, in which there were no Litany, no responses, and scarcely any
rites or ceremonies, they were commanded to adopt a form which appeared
to them little removed from Popery. The Genevan refugees--who, from
their demand for the utmost purity and primitive simplicity in worship,
were styled Puritans--would, had they been permitted, have planted a
church far more like the church as it came to exist in Scotland than
that which was established for England. They opposed the claims of the
bishops to a superior rank or authority to the presbyters; they denied
that they possessed the sole right of ordination, and exercise of church
discipline; they objected to the titles and dignities which had been
copied by the Anglican Church from the Roman, of archdeacons, deans,
canons, prebendaries; to the jurisdiction of Spiritual Courts; to an
indiscriminate admission of all persons to the Communion; to many parts
of the liturgy, and of the offices of marriage and burial, including
the use of the ring in marriage; they repudiated set forms of prayers,
and the use of godfathers and godmothers, the rite of confirmation,
the observance of Lent and holidays, the cathedral worship, the use of
the organ, the retention of the reading of apocryphal books in church,
pluralities, non-residence, the presentation to livings by the Crown, or
any other patron, or by any mode but the free election of the people.
But in that age no conception of religious liberty was entertained. The
Puritans were as resolute in their ideas of conformity to their notions
as Elizabeth was to hers; and had they had the power, would have used
the same compulsion. Knox exhibited that spirit of exclusiveness to the
extreme in Scotland, even calling for the deposition of the queen as a
"Jezebel" and "an idolatress," because she would not adopt his peculiar
tenets and view of things. The Puritans exhibited the same spirit long
after in America for the exercise of their faith. In fact, the great and
divine principle of the entire liberty of the gospel was too elevated to
be arrived at suddenly after so many ages of spiritual despotism, and
required long and earnest study of the spirit and example of Christ.
Severe struggles, bloody deaths, and incredible sufferings in those
who came to see the truth, had to be undergone before the battle of
religious freedom was fought out, and all parties could admit the plain
fact which had revealed itself to Charles V. after his abdication of the
throne, when he amused himself with clock making--that as no two clocks
can be made to go precisely alike, it is folly to expect _all_ men to
think precisely alike. "Both parties," says Neal, in his "History of the
Puritans," "agreed too well in asserting the necessity of a uniformity of
public worship, and in using the sword of the magistrate for the support
and defence of their respective principles, which they made an ill use
of in their turns whenever they could grasp the power in their hands.
The standard of uniformity, according to the bishops, was the queen's
supremacy, and the laws of the land; according to the Puritans, the
decrees of provincial and national synods, allowed and enforced by the
civil magistrate: but neither party were for admitting that liberty of
conscience and freedom of profession which is every man's right as far
as is consistent with the peace of the civil Government he lives under."
Heresy was, in fact, punished by the Government as a purely political
offence.
Elizabeth, having the power, compelled all those clergymen who conformed
sufficiently to accept livings and bishoprics, not only to conform
but more or less to persecute their brethren. Even men like Parker
and Grindal, naturally averse from compulsion, were obliged to do her
bidding, till Grindal rebelled and was set aside; but their places were
supplied by Sandys, who had himself fled from Popish compulsion, and by
Whitgift, who rigorously enforced the laws. Sandys actually sentenced
the anabaptists who, in 1575, were burnt at the stake by order of the
queen--for to this pass it came: Hammond, a ploughman, being burnt at
Norwich in 1579, and Kett, a member of one of the universities, in the
same place, ten years afterwards, under Elizabeth.
Such was the state of the Protestant Church at the termination of
the period we are now reviewing. The queen discouraged preaching and
instruction of the people, allowing many bishoprics, prebends, and
livings to be vacant, and receiving their incomes. She declared that one
or two preachers in a county was enough, probably fearing the prevalence
of the more advanced opinions. Parker in his time had been ordered to
enforce strict compliance with the rubric, and numbers of the most
eminent and eloquent clergymen resigned their livings and travelled over
the country, and preached where they could, "as if," says Bishop Jewell,
"they were apostles; and so they were with regard to their poverty, for
silver and gold they had none." Being, however, continually brought
before the authorities and fined and otherwise punished, they determined
to break off all connection with the public churches, and form themselves
into an avowed separate communion, worshipping God in their own way and
being ready to suffer for His sake. Here, then, commenced the great cause
of Nonconformity, and the formation of all those sects which from time
to time have since appeared, each claiming--and justly--the right to
worship God and to regulate their particular church as seems conformable
to their understanding of the Scriptures. These separate assemblies,
however, were stigmatised as conventicles, and from this time many were
the laws passed to put them down, as we shall hereafter find. Among the
Nonconformists a most zealous and resolute sect arose called Brownists,
from Robert Brown, a preacher in the diocese of Norwich, a man of good
family, and said to be a relative of Lord Burleigh. His followers soon
acquired the name of Independents, which they afterwards changed for that
of Congregationalists, from their denial of all ecclesiastical dignities
and authority whatever, asserting that each congregation constitutes
a complete church, with the right to nominate their own minister and
conduct their own affairs. This body of Christians, at this day so
extensive and respectable, of course felt the especial weight of the
persecution of the Established Church, with which it refused to hold
the slightest communion; yet to such a degree did it flourish--a proof
of the onward spirit of the time, that Sir Walter Raleigh declared in
Parliament that there were before the death of Elizabeth not less than
20,000 members of that body in Norfolk, Essex, and the neighbourhood of
London.
[Illustration: REDUCED FACSIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF THE GREAT BIBLE,
ALSO CALLED CROMWELL'S BIBLE.]
In the narration of the struggles of this period in Scotland we have
sufficiently traced the persecution of the Protestants by the Romish
Church--the martyrdom of Patrick Hamilton, George Wishart, Walter
Mill, and others; the murder of Cardinal Beaton, and the final triumph
of Knox and his compeers, from which period the organisation of the
Protestant Church of Scotland went on rapidly. In 1560 the Lords of
the Congregation entered Edinburgh in arms; and Parliament assembling,
abolished for ever the Pope's jurisdiction, abolished the celebration of
Mass, and authorised "The Confession of the Faith and Doctrine believed
and professed by the Protestants of Scotland." An Act also was passed to
pull down all cloisters and abbey-churches still left standing: and the
Church, not waiting for any further enactment of the Parliament or Crown,
went on exercising its own proper functions as an independent church,
governed, not by the State, but by presbyteries, synods, and general
assemblies. In 1580 the General Assembly, after having at various times
diminished the power and rank of bishops, declared that episcopacy was
unscriptural and unlawful--a dictum which the Parliament fully ratified
in 1592, establishing the Presbyterian Church as the national one, with
general assembly, provincial synods, presbyteries, and kirk sessions. In
1597 the Parliament admitted certain representatives of the clergy to
seats in it, to which the General Assembly assented at its next meeting;
and thus was completed the system of Church government in Scotland at
that time.
The sixteenth century produced as great a revolution in Literature and
Science as in religion. We still look back to this era for some of the
greatest names and greatest works which have adorned and enlightened not
only our own country, but the whole civilised world. When we enumerate
Sir Thomas More, Lord Surrey, Roger Ascham, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney,
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, Buchanan, Gawin Douglas, Dunbar, and
Sir David Lyndsay, we remind our readers that we are moving amid a
constellation of genius, than which Time has scarcely any brighter.
But in the two words Shakespeare and Bacon, we pronounce the names and
glorious births of dramatic and philosophic genius, which have placed
England on the summit of intellectual fame, by works never surpassed
before or since in any nation, and by discoveries in science and art
which have flowed from the "Novum Organum" of Bacon as from an eternal
and ever-strengthening fountain. True it is both men belong, by their
works, rather to the succeeding period than to the present; but Bacon
had, long before the death of Elizabeth, sketched out the plan of his
immortal work, though he had not dared to publish it; and Shakespeare had
not only written his poems, but had also written and acted in many of his
most brilliant and original plays. By these great writers the English
language was established as a classical language; and though it has since
extended and connected itself with the progress of knowledge and most
astonishing and varied discoveries, we can produce no purer, no stronger,
nor more eloquent specimens of it than from the pages of Shakespeare,
which continue to be read and listened to on our stage, the genuine
speech of Englishmen--somewhat quaint occasionally, but always musical to
the ear, familiar to the sense, and animating to the spirit.
The violent changes and spoliations of the Reformation did not check the
foundation of new colleges and seminaries of learning--the fountains,
under a more liberal order of things, certain to produce noble results.
Even Henry VIII., in his wholesale destruction of endowed property, and
though college property was included in the Acts which he procured from
his obsequious Parliament, for the most part spared the resources of
education. His reign was distinguished by the foundation, in Oxford, of
Brazenose College, in 1509, by Sir William Smith, Bishop of Lincoln, and
Sir Richard Sutton, of Prestbury, in Cheshire. Old Richard Fox, Bishop
of Winchester, who had been prime minister of Henry VII., and still was
of the council of his son, in 1516 founded Corpus Christi. The only
exception to Henry VIII.'s patronage of the colleges occurred in those
founded by Wolsey--his Cardinal College at Oxford, and his college at
Ipswich, which both fell with him. In 1545 Henry himself founded Christ
Church instead of that of Wolsey, which he then dissolved. In 1554
Trinity College was founded on the basis of Durham College by Sir Thomas
Pope. In 1555 Sir Thomas White, alderman and merchant tailor of London,
founded St. John's College, on the site of Bernard College. These were
in the reign of Queen Mary. In Elizabeth's time rose Jesus College, in
1571, from funds furnished by Dr. Hugh Price, and augmented by the queen
herself.
In Cambridge three colleges arose during the reign of Henry VII.--the
only educational endowments of any note during that period. In 1496 John
Alcock, Bishop of Ely, founded Jesus College. In 1505 Margaret Countess
of Richmond, mother of Henry VII., founded Christ's College, and also in
1511, very shortly before her son's death, St. John's College. In 1519
Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, commenced the College of Magdalene;
but as he was executed for high treason in 1521, Lord Audley, the Lord
Chancellor, completed it. Henry VIII. founded Trinity College in 1546,
and at the same time four new professorships in the university; namely,
for theology, law, Greek, and Hebrew. Henry was proud of his learning,
and had the good sense to support, with all the imperative force of his
character, the new study of Greek, when it was violently assailed by
the Church and professors. Dr. Caius founded the college named after
him, and popularly pronounced "Keys," on the basis of the old hall of
Gonville, in 1558--the only extension of Cambridge University under
Queen Mary. Sir Walter Mildmay founded Emmanuel College in 1584, and in
1598 Sidney-Sussex College was founded by Lady Frances Sidney, widow of
Ratcliffe, Earl of Sussex.
The universities of Scotland were greatly extended during this period.
That of Aberdeen was founded in 1494 under the name of King's College,
James IV. having procured a bull for that purpose from Pope Alexander
VI., though the bishop was the main benefactor. In 1593 Marischal
College, in the same university, was erected by George, Earl Marischal.
At St. Andrews the college of St. Leonard's was established in 1512 by
Archbishop Stuart and John Hepburn, prior of the metropolitan church.
This was afterwards united with that of St. Salvator (founded in 1456),
and together bore the name of the United College. St. Mary's, in the same
university, was founded, in 1537, by Beaton. In 1582 James VI. founded
the University of Edinburgh. In 1591 Elizabeth founded in Dublin the
University of Trinity College.
Contemporaneous with these colleges and universities rose a great number
of grammar-schools, designed to extend the knowledge of Latin to the
mass of the people. Among the magnificent endowments, since too much
withdrawn, by the influence of wealth, from the poor and the orphan, for
whom they were designed, and devoted to the use of the affluent, for whom
they were not designed, we may name St. Paul's School, London, founded
by Dean Colet in 1509; Christ's Hospital, London, founded by Edward
VI. in 1553, the year of his death; Westminster School, established by
Elizabeth, 1560; and Merchant Taylors School, founded by that guild
in 1561. In Scotland the High School of Edinburgh was founded by the
magistrates of that city in 1577.
It is a curious fact that the revival of the Greek language and
literature was coincident with the Reformation. Widely opposed as the
spirit of Christianity and of the Greek mythology are, yet in one
particular they are identical, in breathing a spirit of liberty and
popular dominance which were not long in showing their effects in
Great Britain. The Scriptures were now translated and made familiar
to the people, at least by means of Puritan preachers, who were thus
proclaiming that God had made of one blood all the nations of the earth,
and that He was no respecter of persons; thereby laying the foundations
of eternal justice in the public mind, and teaching, as a necessary
consequence, that the end and object of all human government was not the
good of kings or nobles, but of the collective people. The poets, the
historians, the dramatists, and the philosophers of republican Greece
were made to bring all the force of their fiery eloquence, their glowing
narratives, and their subtle reasoning to bear upon the same theme;
presenting not only arguments for general liberty and a popular polity,
but examples of the most sublime struggles of a small but glorious people
against domestic tyrants and the vast hordes of barbarism without, of
noblest orators thundering against the oppression of the mighty, of awful
tragedians steeping their stage in the imaged blood of tyrants and of
traitors, of patriots perishing in joy for the salvation of their country.
It was not to be wondered at that on the bursting of these novel elements
like a sudden and strong torrent into the arena of human life, there
should arise a fearful struggle and combat between the old intellectual
ideas and the new. The two-fold inundation pouring from the hills
of Palestine and of Greece, and in united vastness deluging Europe,
threatened to destroy all the old land-marks of the schoolmen, and to
drown Duns Scotus and Aquinas along with the owls and bats of the monkish
cells and dream chambers. It was soon seen that this new language was
the language of the very book from which the Reformers drew their words
winged with the fire of destruction to the ancient slavery of popular
ignorance and popular dependence on priests and Popes, and no time was
lost in denouncing it as a gross and new-fangled heresy. It was a heresy
from which not only freedom in Church but in State was to spring; the
seed from which grew, in the next age, our Hampdens, Marvels, Pyms,
Prynnes, Cromwells, and Miltons.
Yet it is only due to Henry VIII., to his ministers Wolsey, Fox, and
More, and to other eminent dignitaries--amongst them Cardinal Pole
in Queen Mary's reign--to state that they were zealous advocates and
promoters of the Greek learning. The very first public school in which
Greek is said to have been taught in England was the new foundation of
Dean Colet, St. Paul's school, where the celebrated scholar William
Lilly, who had studied in Rhodes, was the master. Wolsey introduced it
into his new colleges, and Henry VIII. being at Woodstock, and hearing
of a furious harangue made at Oxford against the study of the Greek
Testament in the University, immediately ordered the teaching of it, and
established a professorship of it also in Cambridge.
Notwithstanding, a violent opposition arose against the study of Greek in
consequence of the authority it gave to the doctrines of the Reformers,
rendering an appeal to the original text invincible. Erasmus informs
us that the preachers and declaimers against his edition of the Greek
Testament really appeared to believe that he was by its means attempting
to introduce some new kind of religion. The book was prohibited in the
University of Cambridge, and a heavy penalty decreed for any one found
with it in his possession. Erasmus attempted to teach the Greek grammar
of Chrysoloras there, but a terrible outcry was raised against him, and
his scholars soon deserted his benches. As the contest went on, however,
the Universities, both here and abroad, became divided into the factions
of the Greeks and Trojans, the Trojans being those who were advocates for
Latin, but not for Greek. The Greeks, however, victorious, as of old,
expelled the works of the famous Duns Scotus from the schools; they were
torn up and trodden under foot; and the King sent down a Commission which
altogether abolished the study of this old scholastic philosophy which
had had so long and absolute a reign.
Yet the new knowledge appears for some time after the first excitement
to have made less progress in the schools than at Court and amongst the
aristocracy. On the surface, therefore, the age appeared a very learned
one. All the chief churchmen on both sides of the question in the reigns
of Henry VIII. and Edward VI.--Wolsey, Fox, Gardiner, Cranmer, Ridley,
Tunstall, Cardinal Pole--were men of great acquirements. Henry was a fine
scholar, and, despite his harsh treatment of his wives and children,
gave to the latter educations perhaps superior to those of any princes
or princesses of the time. Edward was steeped in learning, to the injury
of his overtaxed constitution. Mary and Elizabeth were both accomplished
linguists, speaking Latin, French, and Spanish fluently; and Elizabeth
adding to these Greek and Italian, with a smattering of Dutch and German.
Mary was studiously instructed in the originals of the Scriptures, and
made a translation of the Latin paraphrase of St. John, by Erasmus, which
was printed and read as part of the Church service, till it was ordered
to be burnt by herself in her own reign with other heretical books.
She was deeply read in the fathers, and in the works of Plato, Cicero,
Seneca, Plutarch, and selected portions of Horace, Lucan, and Livy.
Elizabeth was a poetess of no mean pretensions and, besides her knowledge
of the classical and modern languages, read by preference immense
quantities of history. Roger Ascham, the teacher of Lady Jane Grey, said
that "numberless honourable ladies" of the time surpassed the daughters
of Sir Thomas More, but that none could compete with the Princess
Elizabeth; that she spoke and wrote Greek and Latin beautifully; that
he had read with her the whole of Cicero, and great part of Livy; that
she devoted her mornings to the New Testament in Greek, select orations
of Isocrates, and the tragedies of Sophocles, whilst she drew religious
knowledge from St. Cyprian and the "Common-places" of Melanchthon; that
she was skilful in music, but did not greatly delight in it.
With such examples, no wonder that there were such learned ladies at
Court as Lady Jane Grey, Lady Tyrwhit, Mary Countess of Arundel, Joanna
Lady Lumley, and her sister Mary the Duchess of Norfolk--all learned
in Greek and Latin, and authoresses of translations from them; the two
daughters of Sir Thomas More, and the three daughters of the learned
Sir Anthony Cooke--one of them the wife of the all-powerful statesman
Burleigh, another the mother of the illustrious Francis Bacon, and the
third, Lady Killigrew, a famous Hebrew scholar, as well as profound in
Latin and Greek. It is extraordinary that learning, which had been so
ardently taken up by these accomplished women, should have languished
in the schools and amongst the people. Yet such was the fact, and is
explained by the violent and continual changes which were taking place
in Church and State. A great part of the reign of Henry VIII. was
engrossed by the conflict with the Court of Rome regarding his divorce
from Catherine, and then by his stupendous onslaught on the monastic
and cathedral property. As no man at the Universities could tell where
promotion was to come from in the Church under a king who equally took
vengeance on Romanist and Protestant who dared to differ from him, and as
it was equally uncertain whether, in some new fit of anger or caprice,
he might not suppress the colleges as he had suppressed monasteries,
ministers, and chantries, it is not surprising to hear Latimer exclaim,
"It would pity a man's heart to hear what I hear of the state of
Cambridge. There be few that study divinity, but so many as of necessity
must furnish the college."
[Illustration: CHRIST'S HOSPITAL, LONDON (1899).]
Under Edward VI. things became far worse. Then it was a scramble amongst
his courtiers who should get the most of the property devoted to religion
or learning. Bishoprics, good livings, the rest of the monastic lands
which yet remained with the Crown did not suffice. These cormorants
clutched at the University resources. They appropriated exhibitions
and pensions, and, says Warton, in his "History of English Poetry,"
"Ascham, in a letter to the Marquis of Northampton, dated 1550, laments
the ruin of grammar-schools throughout England, and predicts the speedy
extinction of the universities from this growing calamity. At Oxford the
schools were neglected by the professors and pupils, and allotted to the
lowest purposes. Academical degrees were abrogated as anti-Christian.
Reformation was soon turned into fanaticism. Absurd refinements,
concerning the inutility of human learning, were superadded to the just
and rational purgation of Christianity from the Papal corruption." He
adds that the Government visitors of the University totally stripped the
public library, established by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, of all its
books and manuscripts; and Latimer, in one of his sermons about that
time, declared his belief that there were then 10,000 fewer students than
there had been twenty years before.
Classical literature did not fare better during the persecuting reign
of Mary, though Cardinal Pole was a warm friend of the introduction of
Greek, notwithstanding the use made of it by the Protestants. When he
urged Sir Thomas Pope to establish a professorship of that language
in his new college of Trinity, Sir Thomas replied, "I fear the times
will not bear it now. I remember, when I was a young scholar at Eton,
the Greek tongue was growing apace, the study of which is now a-late
much decayed." Nor was it likely when Elizabeth discouraged preaching
even, saying that "one or two preachers in a county was enough," that
Classical studies would be much encouraged. In fact, nothing could be
lower than the condition into which both learning and preaching had
fallen in Elizabeth's Church. The Bishop of Bangor stated that he had
but two preachers in all his diocese. Numbers of churches stood vacant,
according to Neal, where there was no preaching, nor even reading of the
homilies for months together, and in many parishes there could be found
no one to baptise the living or bury the dead; in others, unlearned
mechanics, and even the gardeners of those who had secured the clerical
glebes and income, performed the only service that there was. But no
doubt this afforded good scope to the Puritans, who had now the Bible in
English, Cranmer's, Coverdale's, and Parker's, or the Bishops' Bible; and
these zealous men, despite the crushing penalties, would find constant
opportunities of diffusing their knowledge. In Oxford there were only
three divines in 1563 who were considered able to preach a sermon, and
these three were Puritans. The knowledge of the Classics was fallen
so low that all that Archbishop Parker required of the holders of his
three new scholarships in Cambridge, in 1567, was that they should be
well instructed in grammar and be able to make a verse. The classical
qualifications in the two Universities were below contempt.
It is a satisfaction to turn from this humiliating state of things to
the great lights of genius and learning which were burning brightly amid
this thick darkness. Here there meets us the illustrious constellation
of names of More, Ascham, Puttenham, Sidney, Hooker, Bacon, Barclay,
Skelton, Sackville, Heywood, Surrey, Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare,
Marlowe, and others--names which cast a lustre over this period, and in
whose blaze all its faults and failings are forgotten.
Of the prose writers Sir Thomas More (_b_. 1480, _d_. 1535) is one of the
earliest and most famous. He was equally remarkable for the suavity of
his manners, his wit, his independence of character, and the eloquence
and originality of his writings. We have seen how he served and was
served by Henry VIII. Erasmus, who stayed some time at his house, says,
"With him you might imagine yourself in the academy of Plato. But I
should do injustice to his house by comparing it to the academy of Plato,
where numbers and geometrical figures, and sometimes moral virtues, were
the subjects of discussion. It would be more just to call it a school,
and an exercise of Christian religion. All its inhabitants, male and
female, applied their leisure to liberal studies and profitable reading,
although piety was their first care. No wrangling, no angry word was
heard in it, no one was idle; every one did his duty with alacrity, and
not without a temperate cheerfulness."
More's chief work is his "Utopia," and it may be pronounced the first
enunciation of a system of Socialism since the Apostolic age. It may
surprise many, but More, in fact, was the forerunner of Proudhon and
Fourrier. His "Utopia" describes an island in which a commonwealth is
established completely on Socialistic principles. No one is allowed to
possess separate property; because such possession produces an unequal
division of the necessaries of life, demoralising those who become
inordinately rich and, in a different direction, depraving and degrading
those who are obliged to labour incessantly. What is remarkable, More in
his imaginary commonwealth admits the fullest toleration of religious
belief, though he fell so far in practice as to join in the persecutions
of his time. His principles were too noble for his practice; yet with
this one flaw he was one of the most admirable men who ever lived. His
"Utopia" was written by him in Latin, but was translated into English
in 1551, afterwards by Bishop Burnet, and in 1808 by Arthur Cayley.
In addition to this, he wrote a life of Richard III., and various
compositions in Latin and English, besides a number of letters which have
been published in his collected works. As a specimen of the prose style
and state of the language in the early part of the reign of Henry VIII.,
we may quote a short passage from a letter to his second wife, Alice
Middleton, in 1528, on hearing that his house at Chelsea was burnt down:--
"Maistress Alyce, in my most harty wise I recommend me to you; and
whereas I am enfourmed by my son Heron of the losse of our barnes and of
our neighbours also, with all the corne that was therein, albeit (saving
God's pleasure) it is grit pitie of so much good corne loste; yet sith
it hath liked Hym to sende us such a chaunce, we must and are bounden,
not only to be content, but also to be glad of His visitacion. He sente
us all that we have loste; and sith He hath by such a chaunce taken it
away againe, His pleasure be fulfilled. Let us never grudge thereat, but
take in good worth, and hartily thank Him, as well for adversitie as for
prosperite; and peradventure we have more cause to thank Him for our
losse than for our winning; for His wisdome better seeth what is good
for us than we do our selves. Therefore I pray you be of good chere, and
take all the howshold with you to church, and there thanke God, both for
what He hath given us, and for that He hath taken from us, and for that
He hath left us, which, if it please Hym He can encrease when He will.
And if it please Hym to leave us yet lesse, at His pleasure be it. I
pray you to make some good insearche what my poore neighbours have loste,
and bid them take no thought therefore; for an I shold not leave myself
a spone, there shal no poore neighboure of mine bere no losse by any
chaunce happened in my house. I pray you be with my children, and your
howshold mery in God."
Latimer (_b._ 1470, _d._ 1555) was the son of a Leicestershire farmer,
and rose to be Bishop of Worcester, and to the far higher rank of a
martyr for his faith. He has been pronounced by writers of this age as
a good but not a great man. To our mind he was a very great man. Not in
worldly wisdom, for he was simple as a child; but he was a genius, true,
racy, and original. He was made, as his sermons show, for a preacher
to the people rather than to princes, though to them he bore a bold
and unblenching testimony. But to the people he was a prophet and an
awakener. He had been amongst them; he knew their deepest feelings, their
most secret thoughts their language and their desires; and he addressed
them from the pulpit with the loving and picturesque familiarity which
he used at their firesides. There is occasionally much rudeness in his
discourses, his images are often bizarre, his allusions grotesque;
but there is a life that kindles, there is a poetry that warms, a
spirit that arouses, a bold aggressive truth which must have made his
hearers look into their souls and think. We take a short passage from a
sermon preached before Edward VI. in 1549--twenty-one years after the
composition of More just given, and yet how much more old-fashioned is
the language. After telling the king that so plain was his preaching
that it had been called seditious, and that his friends, with tears in
their eyes, assured him he would get into the Tower, he says:--"There
be more of myne opinion than I. I thought I was not alone. I have now
gotten one felowe more, a companyon of sedytyon, and wot ye who is my
felowe? Esaye the prophete. I spake but of a lytle preaty shyllynge; but
he speaketh to Hierusalem after another sorte, and was so bold to meddle
with theyr coine (Isaiah i. 22). Thou proude, thou covetous, thou hautye
cytye of Hierusalem, _argentum tuum versum est in scoriam_; thy sylver is
turned into what? into testyiers. _Scoriam_--into drosse. Ah, sediciouse
wretch, what had he to do wyth the mynte? Why should not he have lefte
that matter to some master of policy to reprove? Thy sylver is drosse,
it is not fine, it is counterfeit, thy sylver is turned, thou haddest
good sylver. What pertayned that to Esaye? Mary, he espyeth a piece of
divinity in that policie; he threatened them God's vengeance for it. He
went to the rote of the matter, which was covetousness. He espyed two
poyntes in it: that eythere it came of covetousnesse, whych became hym
to reprove; er els that it tended to the hurte of the pore people, for
the naughtyness of the sylver was the occasion of dearth to all thynges
in the realme. He imputeth it to them as a great cryme. He may be called
a mayster of sedicion in dede. Was this not a sidicyouse varlet to tell
them thys to theyr beardes, to theyr face?"
Amongst writers of this age who tended to purify and perfect the language
were Sir Thomas Wilson, and Puttenham, who wrote the "Art of English
Poesy," which was published in 1582. Wilson (_b._ 1520, _d._ 1581) wrote
his "Art of Rhetorique" thirty years before, only three years later
than the sermon of Latimer's just quoted; yet what an advance in both
style and orthography:--"What maketh the lawyer to have such utterance?
Practice. What maketh the preacher to speake so soundly? Practice. Yea,
what maketh women go so fast awai with their wordes? Marie, practice, I
warrant you. Therefore in all faculties, diligent practice and earnest
exercise are the only thynges that make men prove excellent."
Contemporary with More was Sir Thomas Elyot (_b._ 1495, _d._ 1546), whose
treatise called "The Governor" is a fine example of vigorous English.
Cranmer and Ridley were not less distinguished for their fine style than
for their liberal principles; and Roger Ascham (_b._ 1515, _d._ 1568),
the instructor of Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth, was equally famed
for his caligraphy, his musical talents, his proficiency in the new
learning--Greek--for his classical Latin, and his English composition.
To relieve the severities of study he practised archery, and wrote his
"Toxophilus, the Schole of Shootinge," to recommend that old English art.
In it he strongly advocated the old English language, and the abstinence
from foreign terms, a recommendation which succeeding generations wisely
declined, to the vast enrichment of the language. But Ascham was a
genuine Englishman, and advised his countrymen to follow the counsel of
Aristotle, and "speak as the common people do, but think as wise men do."
His next principal work was the "Scholemaster: a plaine and perfite way
of teaching children to understand, write, and speak the Latin tong"--a
work which has become more known than any other of his, because in it he
mentions his visit to Lady Jane Grey at Bradgate Park, near Leicester,
where he found her deep in Plato's "Phædo" while the rest of the family
were hunting. But besides these works he wrote on the affairs of Germany;
and Latin poems, Latin letters, and his celebrated Apology for the Lord's
Supper, in opposition to the Mass.
[Illustration: LATIMER PREACHING BEFORE EDWARD VI. (_From a Woodcut in
Foxe's "Martyrs," 1563._)]
As a prose writer Edmund Spenser (_b._ 1553, _d._ 1599), the author
of the "Faerie Queene," must be mentioned for his "View of the State
of Ireland," which contained many judicious recommendations for the
improvement of that country, and presents in its serious statesmanlike
views a curious contrast to the allegorical fancy of his great poem.
But far greater as prose writers of the latter portion of this period
stand forth Sir Philip Sidney and the "judicious Hooker." Sir Philip
Sidney (_b._ 1554, _d._ 1586), who was celebrated as the most perfect
gentleman of his time, or as, in the phrase of the age, "the Mirror of
Courtesy," was killed at the age of thirty-three at Zutphen. Yet he
left behind him the "Arcadia," a romance; the "Defence of Poesie," and
various minor poems and prose articles, which were published after his
death. The person and writings of Sidney have been the theme of unbounded
panegyric. He was a gentleman finished and complete, in whom mildness
was associated with courage, erudition mollified by refinement, and
courtliness dignified by truth. He is a specimen of what the English
character was capable of producing when foreign admixtures had not
destroyed its simplicity, or politeness debased its honour. In his own
day he was the object of the most enthusiastic praises, and has been
lauded in the most vivid terms by writers of every period since. Near his
own times Nash, Lord Brooke, Camden, Ben Jonson, Naunton, Aubrey, Milton,
and Cowley, were his eulogists; Wordsworth and the writers of our own day
are equally complimentary. Perhaps, after so continuous and high-toned
a hymning, a modern reader, taking up his "Arcadia" for the first time,
would find it stiff, formal, and pedantic. He might miss that fervid
spirit which animates the fictions of the great masters of our own age,
and wonder at the warmth of so many great authorities upon what failed to
warm him. In fact, it must be confessed, that it is a noble specimen of
what pleased the taste of the time in which it was written. It displays
imagination, though often on stilts instead of on wings, and breathes
the spirit which animated its author, of a refined nature, a chivalrous
temperament, a generous heart, and the instincts of the perfect scholar.
Of that period it is a noble monument; in this it is a unique work of
art, which, however, strikes us as fair, mild, and antiquated. "The
Defence of Poesie," with much of the same mannerism, is worthy of a poet,
and of a man whose life was the finest poem, from its generous patronage
of talent, its high literary taste, and the hero's death, in the very
agonies of which he gave from his own scorched lips the draught of cold
water to the dying soldier at his side.
[Illustration: ROGER ASCHAM'S VISIT TO LADY JANE GREY. (_See p._ 364.)]
The list of the prose writers of this period presents no more honourable
name than that of the great champion of the Church of England, Richard
Hooker (_b._ 1553, _d._ 1600), whose composition is as remarkable for its
cogent reasoning and elevated style, as Sidney's is for fancy and grace
of sentiment. His "Ecclesiastical Polity," in eight books, is regarded as
the most able defence of church establishments that ever appeared. From
the breadth of its principles it drew the applause of Pope Clement VIII.
as well as of the royal pedant, James I. To those who study it as an
example of the intellect, learning, and language of the time, it presents
itself, even to such as dissent from its conclusions, as a labour most
honourable to the country and age which produced it.
A still greater man was yet behind. Bacon (_b._ 1561, _d._ 1626) was
figuring as the great lawyer, the eloquent advocate and senator;
but under the duties of these offices lay hid the master who was to
revolutionise philosophy and science; the father of the new world of
discovery, and the most marvellous career of social and intellectual
advance. To this period he is the sun sending its rays above the horizon,
but not yet risen. His speeches, his "Essays Civil and Moral," and
"Maxims of Law," already foretold his fame.
A very different writer was John Lyly, the Euphuist (_b._ 1553, _d._
1601). Lyly was a poet and dramatist of repute; but in 1579 he published
"Euphues; or, Anatomy of Wit," which was followed, in 1581, by a second
part, called "Euphues and his England." In this he invented a style
and phraseology of his own, which seized the fancy of the public like
a mania, and set the Court, the ladies, the dandies, and dilettanti of
the day speaking and writing in a most affected, piebald, and fantastic
style. Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Arcadia," ridiculed it, not without
being in a considerable degree affected by it himself. Shakespeare, in
"Love's Labour's Lost," and Sir Walter Scott, in his Sir Piercie Shafton,
in "The Monastery," have made the modern public familiar with it. Yet,
after all, probably Lyly was only laughing in his sleeve at the follies
of others, and was, as has been asserted, aiming at the purification of
the language; for in his dramas his diction is simple enough, considering
the taste of the age.
Among the rising writers was also Sir Walter Raleigh; but his literary
reputation belongs rather to the age that was coming. On the whole, the
period from the reign of Henry VII. to the end of that of Elizabeth was
a period more kindred to our own than any which had gone before it.
It produced prose writers whose minds still hold communion with and
influence those of to-day. Its philosophy had assumed a more practical
stamp, and was full of the elements of change and progress. Its poetry,
which we have now to consider, reached the very highest pitch of human
genius.
The earliest poet who has left any name of note is Stephen Hawes, whose
principal work was "The Pastime of Pleasure," which was printed by Wynkyn
de Worde in 1517. Hawes was a native of Suffolk, had travelled much, and
by his proficiency in French and French literature acquired the favour
of Henry VII. Another poem, "The Temple of Glass," has been ascribed to
Hawes, but is most probably Lydgate's, who, Hawes tells us, composed such
a poem.
Next to Hawes comes Alexander Barclay, the author of numerous works in
prose and poetry, as "The Castell of Labour," wherein is "Rychesse,
Vertue, and Honour," an allegorical poem, translated from the French;
"The Shyp of Foles of the Worlde," translated from Sebastian Brandt's
German poem, "Das Narren Schiff;" "Egloges; or, the Miseries of Courts
and Courtiers;" a treatise against Skelton the poet; a translation of
Livy's "Wars of Jugurtha;" "Life of St. George," &c. &c. The work,
however, which has handed down his name to posterity is the "Ship of
Fools," which, by interspersing it with original touches on the follies
of his countrymen, he made in some degree his own. But the chief merit
of the poem in our time is the evidence of the polish which the English
language had acquired, and to which Barclay probably contributed, for
he had travelled through Germany, Holland, France, and Italy, studying
diligently the best authors of those countries. He was successively a
prebendary of the college of Ottery St. Mary, a Benedictine monk, Vicar
of Great Barlow, in Essex, of Wokey, in Somersetshire, and Rector of All
Hallows, London, terminating his life at Croydon. A stanza or two will
suffice to show the state of the language at the close of the reign of
Henry VII. A man in orders is speaking:--
"Eche is not lettred that nowe is made a lorde,
Nor eche a clerke that hath a benefice:
They are not all lawyers that plees do recorde,
All that are promoted are not fully wise.
On such chaunce nowe fortune throwes her dice
That, though one knowe but the Yrishe game,
Yet would he have a gentleman's name.
* * * * *
I am like other clerkes which so frowardly them gyde,
That after they are once come unto promotion,
They give them to pleasure, their study set aside,
Their avarice covering with fained devotion.
Yet daily they preache, and have great derision
Against the rude lay men, and all for covetise,
Though their own conscience be blinded with that vice."
The reign of Henry VIII. was distinguished chiefly by satirists: and it
says much for the courage of poets that they were almost the only men in
that terrible period who dared open their mouths on the crying sins of
Government. Skelton, Heywood, and Roy were men who amused themselves with
the follies and vices of their contemporaries. When the sun of poetry
rose in a more glowing form in Surrey, the ferocious king, so ready with
the headsman's axe, quenched it in blood. John Skelton (_b._ 1460, _d._
1529) was a clergyman, educated at Oxford. Erasmus declared him to be
"Britannicarum Literarum Lumen et Decus"--"the light and ornament of
Britain." He became Rector of Diss, in Norfolk; but, like Sterne at a
later day, Skelton was overflowing with humour and satire rather than
sermons, and so fell under the resentment of Nykke, Bishop of Norwich.
He lashed with all the wonderful power of his merry muse the licentious
ignorance of the monks and friars; and, soaring at higher game, attacked
the swollen greatness of Cardinal Wolsey in a strain of the most daring
invective. The incensed cardinal endeavoured to lay hold on him, and he
would not have escaped scatheless out of his hands, had not the venerable
John Islip, Abbot of Westminster, opened the sanctuary to him; and there
Skelton lived secure for the remainder of his days, neither stinting his
stinging lashes at the cardinal, nor suppressing his overflowing humour,
which welled forth in a torrent of the most wild, sparkling, random, and
rodomontade character. His amazing command of language, his never-failing
and extraordinary rhymes, remind us of one man only, and that of last
century--Hood. The airiness and irregularity of his lyrical measures
equally suggest a comparison with that most untranslatable Swedish poet,
Bellmann.
His friend Thomas Churchyard, in a eulogium on him, enumerates a number
of poets of that and preceding times, some of them now little known:--
"Peirs Plowman was full plaine,
And Chaucer's spreet was great;
Earl Surrey had a goodly veine,
Lord Vaux the marke did beat.
And Phaer did hit the pricke
In things he did translate,
And Edwards had a special gift;
And divers men of late
Have helped our English tongue,
That first was base and brute.
Oh! shall I leave out Skelton's name?--
The blossom of my fruit!"
The "Pithy, Pleasant, and Profitable Works of Maister Skelton, Poet
Laureate to Henry VIII.," contain "The Crowne of Laurell," by way of
introduction; "The Bouge of the Courte," in which this unique poet
laureate attacks the vices of the Court without mercy; "The Duke
of Albany," a poem equally severe on the Scots; "Ware the Hawk," a
castigation of the clergy; "The Tunning of Eleanor Rumming," a wild
rattling string of rhymes on an old ale-wife and her costume; and "Why
come ye not to Court?" an unsparing satire on Wolsey. There is no part
of the cardinal's history or character that he lets escape. His mean
origin, his puffed-up pride, his sensuality, his lordly insolence, his
covetousness and cruelties, run on in a strain of loose yet vivid jingle
that was calculated to catch the ear of the people. The gentlest word
that Skelton has for him is that--
"He regardeth lords
No more than potsherds;
He is in such elation
Of his exaltation
Of our sovereign lord
That God to record,
He ruleth all at will,
Without reason or skill,
Howbeit they be primordial
Of his wretched original
And his base progeny,
And his greasy genealogy.
He came of the sink royal
That was cast out of a butcher's stall.
But however he was born,
Men would have the less scorn
If he could consider
His birth and room together."
He tells us that the king,
"Of his royal mind,
Thought to do a thing
That pertaineth to a king--
To make up one of nought,
And made to him be brought
A wretched poor man,
With his living wan,
With planting leeks,
By the days and by the weeks;
And of this poor vassal
He made a king royal!"
We cannot afford space for the wild riot of Skelton's description of old
Eleanor Rumming--
Droupy and drowsy,
Scurvy and lousy,
Her face all bowsy;
Comely crinkled,
Wonderfully wrinkled,
Like roast pig's ear,
Bristled with hair.
But Skelton has shown that he could praise in strains not unworthy the
fair and noble, and buoyant with music of their own. Such is his canzonet
to
MISTRESS MARGARET HUSSEY.
Merry Margaret
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as falcon,
Or hawk of the tower.
With solace and gladness,
Mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness:
So joyously,
So maidenly,
So womanly,
Her demeanour
In everything
Far, far passing
That I can indite,
Or suffice to write
Of Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as falcon,
Or hawk of the tower, etc.
A far more grave and not less vengeful satirist of Wolsey and the clergy
was William Roy, the coadjutor of Tyndale in the translation of the
Bible. He was originally a friar, but joining the Reformers, he wrote
a poem against Wolsey, who had ordered the burning of Tyndale's New
Testament. It is called--
"Rede me, and be not wrothe,
For I saye no thynge but trothe."
In this work he placed on the title a coat of arms for Wolsey in black
and crimson, with a description in verse at the back of the title,
of which the following stanza, alluding to the deaths of the Duke of
Buckingham (the swan) and the Duke of Norfolk (the white lion), may serve
as a specimen:--
"Of the proude Cardinall this is the shelde,
Borne up betweene two angels of Sathan.
The sixe bloody axes in a bare felde
Sheweth the cruelty of the red man,
Which hath devoured the beautiful swan,
Mortal enemy of the white lion,
Carter of York, the vile butcher's sonne."
The burning of Tyndale's New Testament is denounced by Roy in many verses
of the bitterest feeling, every stanza repeating his indignation at the
unhallowed deed:--
"O miserable monster, most malicious
Father of perversitie, patron of hell!
O terrible tyrant, to God and man odious,
Advocate of antichrist, to Christ rebell;
To thee I speak, O caytife cardinall so cruell,
Causeles chargynge by thy coursed commandment
To burne Godde's worde, the wholly Testament."
Besides these satirists there was John Heywood, in the time of Henry
VIII., Edward, and Mary, who wrote "Six Centuries of Epigrams," of a
pious nature, a considerable number of plays, and an allegory called
"The Spider and the Fly." Of course, he was a favourite with Henry and
Mary, and is said to have been more amusing in his conversation than in
his books. Heywood has the honour commonly assigned him of being the
first author of interludes; the stepping-stones from the old mysteries
and moralities to the regular drama. With the Church passed away these
grotesque performances called religious; and the drama quickly expanded
in all its fair proportions before the eyes of the public. Shakespeare
arose, and the dates of the appearance of his plays show us that they
were many of them produced before 1603, the close of the reign of
Elizabeth. In fact, Shakespeare seems to have retired from the stage in
the very year of Elizabeth's death. Before him, however, a number of
dramatic writers had appeared; but the greater part of them overlived
the termination of Elizabeth's reign, or their works began after that
period to take their due rank. Of these dramatic writers some may be
noted in passing. Heywood had been preceded by Skelton in the line of
interlude, whose strange "Nigromansia" was printed by Wynkyn de Worde as
early as 1505. Heywood wrote various interludes, but his chief one was
the "4 P's," namely, a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Poticary, and a Pedlar. On
the heels of this appeared the first regular comedy, "Gammer Gurton's
Needle," written by John Hill, and printed in 1551. Ten years after was
acted the first English tragedy, "Gorboduc," written by Thomas Norton
and the celebrated poet Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst and
Earl of Dorset. Passing over the "Damon and Pythias" of Richard Edwards,
the "Promos and Cassandra" of George Whetstone, which, borrowed from
an Italian novel, contains the rude outline of Shakespeare's "Measure
for Measure," we come to Robert Greene, who with Kyd, Lyly, Peele,
Nash author of "Queen Dido," and Marlowe, constituted a remarkable
constellation of genius. Greene's chief plays are "Friar Bacon and
the Friar of Bungay," and "A Looking Glasse for London," written in
conjunction with his friend Thomas Lodge. He also wrote much poetry.
The principal dramas of George Peele are "David and Bethsabe, with the
Tragedy of Absolon," written in 1579, which is a real mystery play, and
"The Famous Chronicle of Edward I.," "The Old Wives' Tales, a Comedy,"
&c. Lyly, the Euphuist, wrote nine plays, amongst them "Alexander and
Campaspe," "Sappho and Phaon," "Midos," "Gallathea," etc. Lyly was fond
of Greek subjects, but he could also enjoy English comedy, as in "Mother
Bombie," and others, which are regular comedies, divided into acts and
scenes, and interspersed with agreeable songs.
Contemporary with the preceding, as well as with Shakespeare, Marlowe
(_b._ 1564, _d._ 1593) is the greatest name which precedes that of
the supreme dramatist. We can do no more here than name some of his
chief tragedies, for Marlowe was essentially a tragedian. These were
"Tamburlaine the Great," in two parts, "The Massacre of Paris," "Edward
II.," including the fall of Mortimer and Gaveston, "Doctor Faustus," "The
Rich Jew of Malta," and "Lust's Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen."
Marlowe was, moreover, a beautiful lyrical poet, as is evident by his
charming madrigal "Come live with me and be my love," given in Walton's
"Angler." Greene, Peele, Marlowe, Nash, and that whole company were
dissipated in their lives, and lived and died in deep poverty. To these
we must add, as dramatic poets of this era whom it is essential to a
continuous view of the progress of the drama to mention with the rest,
Decker; Kyd, author of "Jeronimo" and the "Spanish Tragedy;" Lodge,
author of "The Wounds of Civil War," &c.; Gascoine; Chapman, also the
celebrated author of the translation of Homer; Jasper Heywood, son of
John Heywood; Weston, Marston, &c. So much was the drama now advanced in
estimation, that even Elizabeth's Lord Chancellor, Hatton, was in part
author of the tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda," founded on the story
of Boccaccio.
[Illustration: EDMUND SPENSER.]
Amongst the lyrical poets, the reign of Henry VIII. presents us with a
remarkable trio, who were associated as well by their genius as their
position and fate. These were Sir Thomas Wyatt, the early lover of Anne
Boleyn, her brother, George Boleyn, afterwards the unfortunate Earl of
Rochford, and the equally unfortunate Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the
last victim of the sanguinary Henry VIII. Surrey was the cousin-german
of the Boleyns, Wyatt was their early neighbour and playfellow; together
they all figured amongst the most accomplished courtiers: two of them
lost their heads, the third only narrowly escaping; and their poetry was
printed together in one volume.
Sir Thomas Wyatt (_b._ 1503, _d._ 1542, and called the Elder, to
distinguish him from his son, who was executed for rebellion in the reign
of Queen Mary) was one of the most illustrious men of the Court of Henry
VIII. His country-house was Allington Castle, in Kent, and its vicinity
to the residence of the Boleyns made him a youthful companion of Anne and
her brother and sister. He became attached to Anne, but was obliged to
give way to the king, of whose wrath he was in some danger. After that he
was long employed abroad in embassies to France, Spain, Italy, and the
Netherlands. Incurring the king's displeasure for aiding Cromwell in the
promotion of the marriage with Anne of Cleves, he prudently withdrew from
Court to his castle in Kent. He had never ceased writing poetry even when
engaged in his diplomatic missions, and he now more than ever cultivated
the muses. His amatory verses are polished and elegant, but his satires
display more vigour, and are remarkable as containing the earliest
English version of "The Town and Country Mouse." Besides his poems he has
left letters, in which he not only gives us many insights into the state
of the Courts where he resided, but various particulars regarding the
fate of Anne Boleyn, and some addressed to his son, which place him in a
most favourable light as a man and a father. His prose has been greatly
admired. A short lyric, which we may give, addressed to Anne Boleyn, when
her creation of Marchioness of Pembroke warned him that he saw in her the
future queen, clearly informs us that he had been her accepted lover:--
"Forget not yet the tried intent
Of such a truth as I have meant;
My great travail so gladly spent,
Forget not yet.
"Forget not yet when first began
The weary life ye know; since when
The suit, the service none tell can,
Forget not yet.
"Forget not yet the great assays,
The cruel wrongs, the scornful ways,
The painful patience and delays,
Forget not yet.
"Forget not, O! forget not this,
How long ago had been and is
The love that never meant amiss,
Forget not yet.
"Forget not now thine own approved,
The which so constant hath thee loved,
Whose steadfast faith hath never moved,
Forget not yet."
His friend George Boleyn was, perhaps, a more spirited poet than himself,
and is said to have sung the night before his execution (May 17, 1536) a
lyric which had been printed some time, along with the poems of Wyatt,
called, "Farewell, my lute," the refrain of which was too strikingly
applicable to his situation:--
"Farewell, my lute, this is the last
Labour that thou and I shall waste,
For ended is that we began;
Now is the song both sung and passed;
My lute, be still, for I have done."
But the most famous of these was the Earl of Surrey (_b._ 1516, _d._
1547). Like Wyatt, he had travelled in Italy, and formed a high
admiration of the great Italian poets, Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, on
whose model he formed his taste. Like his ancestor, the conqueror of
Flodden, he was brave and high-spirited but seems to have had a facility
for getting into scrapes, both with his own family and the Government.
As a gay courtier, however, he was much admired by the ladies, and
still more by people of taste for his poems, which went through four
editions in two months, and through seven more in the thirty years
after their appearance. They are supposed to have strongly influenced
the taste of Spenser and Milton. The theme of his lyrics was the fair
Geraldine, but who she was precisely neither critics nor historians
have quite determined, though believed to be a lady of the Irish family
of Fitzgerald. A single stanza will indicate the spirit with which he
proclaimed her beauty:--
"Give place, ye lovers, here before
That spent your boasts and brags in vain!
My lady's beauty passeth more
The best of yours, I dare well say'n,
Than doth the sun the candle-light,
Or brightest day the darkest night."
But the most important fact in Surrey's poetical history is his
introduction of blank verse into the English language, a simple but, in
its consequences, most eventful innovation, liberating both the heroic
and the dramatic muse from the shackles of rhyme, and leading the way to
the magnificent works of Shakespeare and Milton in that free form. There
has been much dispute among critics as to whether Surrey invented blank
verse, or merely copied it from some other language; but the only wonder
seems that some one of our poets had not attempted it before. What so
likely as that Surrey, in translating the first and fourth books of the
"Æneid," should adopt the blank verse in which the original was written,
not exactly the hexameter but a measure more suitable to the English
language? All the verse of the ancient Greeks and Romans is of this blank
species; and it is extraordinary that men well read in these tongues had
so long omitted the experiment; especially as the Italians, the French,
and the Spaniards had tried it. Gonsalvo Perez, secretary to Charles V.,
had translated Homer's "Odyssey" into blank verse; and in 1528 Trissino,
in order to root out the _terza rima_ of Dante, had published his "Italia
Liberata di Goti"--"Italy delivered from the Goths"--in blank verse. In
the reign of Francis I. two of the most popular poets of France, Jodelle
and De Baif, wrote poems in this style. Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld,
had already translated the "Æneid' into Scots metre, and it would seem
as if Surrey, in trying his hand on two books of the same poem, had been
induced to make the essay of blank verse at the same time. Whatever
was the immediate cause, nothing could exceed the success of Surrey's
experiment. His verse flows with a stately dignity full of music and
strength. We take a specimen from the fourth book of the "Æneid," where
Dido, who has vowed never to marry again, perceives her new passion for
Æneas, and discloses her pain to her sister:--
"Ne to her lymmes care graunteth quiet rest.
The next morrowe with Phoebus' lampe the erthe
Alightened clere, and eke the dawning daye,
The shadowe danke gan from the pole remove,
When all unsownd her sister of like minde,
Thus spoke she to: 'O sister An, what dremes
Be these that me tormenten, thus afraide?
What newcome gest unto our realm ys come?
What one of chere? How stowt of harte in arms?
Truelie I think, ne vaine ys my beliefe,
Of goddishe race some of springe should he seeme.
Cowardie noteth harts swarved owt of kinde
He driven, lord, with how hard destinie!
What battells eke atchieved did he tell!
And but my minde was fixt immovablie
Never with wight in wedlocke for to joine,
Sithe my first love me lefte by deth disseverid,
Yf bridal bowndes and bed me lothed not,
To this one fawlt perchaunce yeet might I yeld;
For I will graunt sith wretched Syche's dethe,
My spouse and hawse with brother slaughter stained,
This onley man hath made my senses bend,
And pricketh forthe the minde that gan to slide:
Feelinglie I taste the steppes of mine old flame.
But first I wishe the erth me swallow downe,
Or with thunder the mighty Lord me send
To the pale gostes of hell and darkness depe,
Or I thee stayne shamefastness, or the lawes.'"
If we turn to Sackville's "Gorboduc," acted before Queen Elizabeth in
1561, we shall see how thoroughly blank verse had asserted its freedom of
the language. Even Greene, in his "Friar Bacon," in 1594, has passages
that in their rich and harmonious diction display the wonderful power of
blank verse. The true vehicle for the deathless dramas of Shakespeare was
established, and already he had taken possession of it with some of his
noblest imaginings, for Nash, as early as 1589, alludes to "Hamlet."
But before coming to Shakespeare, we must add another word regarding
Sackville (_b._ 1527, _d._ 1608). In 1559 he published "The Mirrour for
Magistrates." The poetical preface to this work, which he called "The
Induction," and the "Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham," displayed
the most remarkable powers of poetry, and at once arrested the public
attention. The work itself was a mere series of the lives of personages
prominent in English history; it is supposed to be an imitation of
Lydgate's "Fall of Princes," but is expanded by the loftier genius of the
author, while the induction is so illustrated by allegory, as to give
rise to the belief that Spenser was indebted to him.