CHAPTER XXII.

FROM 1588 TO 1591.

Effects of Leicester's death.--Rise of the queen's affection for

Essex.--Trial of the earl of Arundel.--Letter of Walsingham on religious

affairs.--Death of Mildmay.--Case of don Antonio.--Expedition to

Cadiz.--Behaviour of Essex.--Traits of sir C. Blount.--Sir H. Leigh's

resignation.--Conduct of Elizabeth to the king of Scots.--His

marriage.--Death and character of sir Francis Walsingham.--Struggle

between the earl of Essex and lord Burleigh for the nomination of his

successor.--Extracts of letters from Essex to Davison.--Inveteracy of

the queen against Davison.--Robert Cecil appointed assistant

secretary.--Private marriage of Essex.--Anger of the queen.--Reform

effected by the queen in the collection of the revenue.--Speech of

Burleigh.--Parsimony of the queen considered.--Anecdotes on this

subject.--Lines by Spenser.--Succours afforded by her to the king of

France.--Account of sir John Norris.--Essex's campaign in France.--Royal

progress.--Entertainment at Coudray--at Elvetham--at Theobald's.--Death

and character of sir Christopher Hatton.--Puckering lord-keeper.--Notice

of sir John Perrot.--Puttenham's Art of Poetry.--Verses by

Gascoigne.--Warner's Albion's England.

The death of Leicester forms an important aera in the history of the

court of Elizabeth, and also in that of her private life and more

intimate feelings. The powerful faction of which the favorite had been

the head, acknowledged a new leader in the earl of Essex, whom his

step-father had brought forward at court as a counterpoise to the

influence of Raleigh, and who now stood second to none in the good

graces of her majesty. But Essex, however gifted with noble and

brilliant qualities totally deficient in Leicester, was on the other

hand confessedly inferior to him in several other endowments still more

essential to the leader of a court party. Though not void of art, he was

by no means master of the profound dissimulation, the exquisite address,

and especially the wary coolness by which his predecessor well knew how

to accomplish his ends in despite of all opposition. His character was

impetuous, his natural disposition frank; and experience had not yet

taught him to distrust either himself or others.

With the friendships, Essex received as an inheritance the enmities also

of Leicester, and no one at court could have entertained the least doubt

whom he regarded as his principal opponent; but it would have been

deemed too high a pitch of presumption in so young a man and so recent a

favorite as Essex, to place himself in immediate and open hostility to

the long established and far extending influence of Burleigh. With this

great minister therefore and his adherents he attempted at first a kind

of compromise, and the noted division of the court into the Essex and

the Cecil parties does not appear to have taken place till some years

after the period of which we are treating. Meantime, the death of

Walsingham afforded the lord-treasurer an occasion of introducing to the

notice and confidence of her majesty, and eventually to the important

office of secretary of state, his son Robert, whose transcendent talents

for affairs, joined to the utmost refinement of intrigue and duplicity,

immediately established him in the same independence on the good will of

the new favorite, as the elder Cecil had ever asserted on that of the

former one; and appears finally to have enabled him to prepare in secret

that favorite's disastrous fall.

With regard to Elizabeth herself, it has been a thousand times remarked,

that she was never able to forget the woman in the sovereign; and in

spite of that preponderating love of sway which all her life forbade her

to admit a partner of her bed and throne, her heart was to the last

deeply sensible to the want, or her imagination to the charm, of loving

and being beloved. The death therefore of the man who had been for

thirty years the object of a tenderness which he had long repaid by

every flattering profession, every homage of gallantry, and every

manifestation of entire devotedness, left, notwithstanding any late

disgusts which she might have entertained, a void in her existence which

she felt it necessary to supply. It was this situation, doubtless, of

her feelings which led to the gradual conversion into a softer

sentiment, of that natural and innocent tenderness with which she had

hitherto regarded the brilliant and engaging qualities of her youthful

kinsman the earl of Essex;--a change which terminated so fatally to

both.

The enormous disproportion of ages gave to the new inclination of the

queen a stamp of dotage inconsistent with the reputation for good sense

and dignity of conduct which she had hitherto preserved. Nor did she

long receive from the indulgence of so untimely a sentiment any portion

of the felicity which she coveted. The careless and even affronting

behaviour in which Essex occasionally indulged himself, combined with

her own sagacity to admonish her that her fondness was unreturned; and

that nothing but the substantial benefits by which it declared itself

could have induced its object to meet it with even the semblance of

gratitude. As this mortifying conviction came home to her bosom, she

grew restless, irritable, and captious to excess; she watched all his

motions with a self-tormenting jealousy; she fed her own disquiet by

listening to the malicious informations of his enemies; and her heart at

length becoming callous by repeated exasperations, she began to visit

his delinquencies with an unrelenting sternness. This conduct, attempted

too late and persisted in too long, hurried Essex to his ruin, and ended

by inflicting upon herself the mortal agonies of an unavailing

repentance.

Lord Bacon relates, in his Apophthegms, that "a great officer about

court when my lord of Essex was first in trouble, and that he and those

that dealt for him would talk much of my lord's friends and of his

enemies, answered to one of them; 'I will tell you, I know but one

friend and one enemy my lord hath; and that one friend is the queen, and

that one enemy, is himself.'" But rather might both have been esteemed

his enemies; for what except the imprudent fondness of the queen, and

the excess of favor which she at first lavished upon him, was the

original cause of that intoxication of mind which finally became the

instrument of his destruction?

But from observations which anticipate perhaps too much the catastrophe

of this melancholy history, it is time to return to a narrative of

events.

The Spanish armament incidentally became the occasion of involving the

earl of Arundel in a charge of a capital nature. Ever since the

treachery of his agents, in the year 1585, had baffled his design of

quitting for ever a country in which his religion and his political

attachments had rendered him an alien, this unfortunate nobleman had

remained close prisoner in the Tower. Such treatment might well be

supposed calculated to augment the vehemence of his bigotry and the

rancor of his disaffection; and it became a current report that, on

hearing news of the sailing of the armada, he had caused a mass of the

Holy Ghost and devotions of twenty-four hours continuance to be

celebrated for its success. This rumor being confirmed by one Bennet, a

priest then under examination, and other circumstances of suspicion

coming out, the earl, on April the 14th, 1589, was brought to the bar of

the house of lords on a charge of high treason. Bennet, struck with

compunction, addressed to him a letter acknowledging his testimony to

have been false, and extorted from him solely by the fear of the rack.

But it appears that this letter, still extant among the Burleigh papers,

was intercepted by the government; and the prisoner, by this cruel and

iniquitous artifice, was deprived of all means of invalidating the

testimony of Bennet, who was brought into court as a witness against

him. By a second violation of every principle of justice, the matters

for which, as contempts, he had already undergone the sentence of the

Star-chamber, were now introduced into his indictment for high treason,

to which the following articles were added;--that he had engaged to

assist cardinal Allen in the restoration of popery;--that he had

intimated the unfitness of the queen to govern;--that he had caused

masses to be said for the success of the armada;--that he had attempted

to withdraw himself beyond seas for the purpose of serving under the

duke of Parma;--and that he had been privy to the bull of Pope Sixtus V.

transferring the sovereignty of England from her majesty to the king of

Spain.

To all these articles, which he was not allowed to separate, the earl

pleaded Not guilty; but afterwards, in his defence, confessed some of

them, though with certain extenuations. He asserted, that the prayers

and masses which he had caused to be said, were for the averting of a

general massacre of the English catholics, alleged to be designed; and

not for the success of the armada. The aid to the catholic cause, which

he had promised in his correspondence with cardinal Allen, he declared

to refer only to peaceful attempts at making converts, not to the

encouragement of any plan of rebellion. He acknowledged a design of

going to serve under the prince of Parma, since he was denied the

exercise of his religion at home; but he argued his innocence of any

view of cooperating in plans of invasion, from the circumstance, that

his attempt to leave England had taken place during the year fixed by

cardinal Allen and the queen of Scots for the execution of a scheme of

this nature.

The crown-lawyers, in order to make out a case of constructive treason,

urged the reconcilement of the prisoner with the church of Rome, which

they held to be of itself a traitorous act; his correspondence with

declared traitors; and the high opinion entertained of him by the queen

of Scots and cardinal Allen, as the chief support of popery in England.

They likewise exhibited an emblematical picture found in his house,

representing in one part a hand shaking off a viper into the fire, with

the motto, "If God is for us who can be against us?" and in another part

a lion, the cognisance of the Howard family, deprived of his claws,

under him the words, "Yet still a lion." On these charges, none of

which, though proved by the most unexceptionable witnesses, could bring

him within the true meaning of the old statute of Edward III., on which

he was indicted, the peers were base enough to pronounce an unanimous

verdict of Guilty; which he received, as his father had done before him,

with the words "God's will be done!" But here the queen felt herself

concerned in honor to interpose. It had ever been her maxim and her

boast, to punish none capitally for religious delinquencies unconnected

with traitorous designs; and sensible probably how imperfectly in this

case the latter had been proved, she was pleased, in her abundant mercy,

to commute the capital part of the sentence against her unhappy kinsman

for perpetual imprisonment, attended with the forfeiture of the greater

part of his estate.

In 1595, this victim of the religious dissensions of a fierce and

bigoted age ended in his thirty-ninth year an unfortunate life,

shortened, as well as embittered, by the more than monkish austerities

which he imagined it meritorious to inflict upon himself.

From the period of the abortive attempt at insurrection under the earls

of Northumberland and Westmorland, the whole course of public events had

tended to increase the difficulties and aggravate the sufferings in

which the catholics of England found themselves inextricably involved.

Their situation was thus forcibly depicted by Philip Sidney, in a

passage of his celebrated letter to her majesty against the French

marriage, which at the present day will probably be read in a spirit

very different from that in which it was written.

"The other faction, most rightly indeed to be called a faction, is the

papists; men whose spirits are full of anguish; some being infested by

others whom they accounted damnable; some having their ambition stopped

because they are not in the way of advancement; some in prison and

disgrace; some whose best friends are banished practisers; many thinking

you an usurper; many thinking also you had disannulled your right

because of the pope's excommunication; all burthened with the weight of

their consciences. Men of great numbers, of great riches (because the

affairs of state have not lain on them), of united minds, as all men

that deem themselves oppressed naturally are."

A further commentary on the hardships of their condition may be

extracted from an apology for the measures of the English government

towards both papists and puritans, addressed by Walsingham to M. Critoy

the French secretary of state.

* * * * *

"Sir,

"Whereas you desire to be advertised touching the proceedings here in

ecclesiastical causes, because you seem to note in them some inconstancy

and variation, as if we sometimes inclined to one side, sometimes to

another, as if that clemency and lenity were not used of late that was

used in the beginning, all which you impute to your own superficial

understanding of the affairs of this state, having notwithstanding her

majesty's doing in singular reverence, as the real pledges which she

hath given unto the world of her sincerity in religion and her wisdom in

government well meriteth; I am glad of this occasion to impart that

little I know in that matter to you, both for your own satisfaction, and

to the end you may make use thereof towards any that shall not be so

modestly and so reasonably minded as you are. I find therefore her

majesty's proceedings to have been grounded upon two principles.

"1. The one, that consciences are not to be forced, but to be won and

reduced by the force of truth, with the aid of time, and use of all good

means of instruction and persuasion.

"2. The other, that the causes of conscience, wherein they exceed their

bounds, and grow to be matter of faction, lose their nature; and that

sovereign princes ought distinctly to punish the practice in contempt,

though coloured under the pretence of conscience and religion.

"According to these principles, her majesty, at her coming to the crown,

utterly disliking the tyranny of Rome, which had used by terror and

rigor to settle commandments of men's faiths and consciences; though, as

a prince of great wisdom and magnanimity, she suffered but the exercise

of one religion, yet her proceedings towards the papists was with great

lenity, expecting the good effects which time might work in them. And

therefore her majesty revived not the laws made in the 28 and 35 of her

father's reign, whereby the oath of supremacy might have been offered at

the king's pleasure to any subject, though he kept his conscience never

so modestly to himself; and the refusal to take the same oath without

further circumstance was made treason. But contrariwise her majesty, not

liking to make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts, except the

abundance of them did overflow into overt or express acts or

affirmations, tempered her laws so as it restraineth every manifest

disobedience in impugning and impeaching advisedly and maliciously her

majesty's supreme power, maintaining and extolling a foreign

jurisdiction. And as for the oath, it was altered by her majesty into a

more grateful form; the hardness of the name and appellation of supreme

head was removed; and the penalty of the refusal thereof turned only

into disablement to take any promotion, or to exercise any charge, and

yet with liberty of being reinvested therein if any man should accept

thereof during his life. But when, after Pius Quintus had excommunicated

her majesty, and the bills of excommunication were published in London,

whereby her majesty was in a sort proscribed; and that thereupon, as a

principal motive or preparative, followed the rebellion in the North;

yet because the ill-humors of the realm were by that rebellion partly

purged, and that she feared at that time no foreign invasion, and much

less the attempt of any within the realm not backed by some potent

succour from without, she contented herself to make a law against that

special case of bringing and publishing any bulls, or the like

instruments; whereunto was added a prohibition, upon pain, not of

treason, but of an inferior degree of punishment, against the bringing

in of _agnus Dei_, hallowed bread, and such other merchandise of Rome,

as are well known not to be any essential part of the Romish religion,

but only to be used in practice as love-tokens to inchant the people's

affections from their allegiance to their natural sovereign. In all

other points her majesty continued her former lenity: but when, about

the twentieth year of her reign, she had discovered in the king of Spain

an intention to invade her dominions, and that a principal part of the

plot was, to prepare a party within the realm that might adhere to the

foreigner; and after that the seminaries began to blossom, and to send

forth daily priests and professed men, who should by vow taken at shrift

reconcile her subjects from their obedience, yea, and bind many of them

to attempt against her majesty's sacred person; and that, by the poison

which they spread, the humors of papists were altered, and that they

were no more papists in conscience, and of softness, but papists in

faction; then were there new laws made for the punishment of such as

should submit themselves to such reconcilements, or renunciations of

obedience. And because it was a treason carried in the clouds, and in

wonderful secresy, and came seldom to light, and that there was no

presupposition thereof so great, as the recusants to come to divine

service, because it was set down by their decrees, that to come to

church before reconcilement was absolutely heretical and damnable.

Therefore there were laws added containing punishment pecuniary against

such recusants, not to enforce conscience, but to enfeeble and

impoverish the means of those of whom it resteth indifferent and

ambiguous whether they were reconciled or no. And when, notwithstanding

all this provision, this poison was dispersed so secretly, as that there

were no means to stay it but by restraining the merchants that brought

it in; then, lastly, there was added another law, whereby such seditious

priests of new erection were exiled, and those that were at that time

within the land shipped over, and so commanded to keep hence on pain of

treason.

"This hath been the proceeding, though intermingled not only with sundry

examples of her majesty's grace towards such as she knew to be papists

in conscience, and not in faction and singularity, but also with an

ordinary mitigation towards offenders in the highest degree committed

by law, if they would but protest, that in case the realm should be

invaded with a foreign army, by the Pope's authority, for the catholic

cause, as they term it, they would take part with her majesty and not

adhere to her enemies." &c.

* * * * *

The country sustained a heavy loss in 1589 by the death of sir Walter

Mildmay chancellor of the exchequer, one of the most irreproachable

public characters and best patriots of the age. He was old enough to

have received his introduction to business in the time of Henry VIII.,

under whom he enjoyed a gainful office in the court of augmentations.

During the reign of Edward he was warden of the mint. Under Mary, he

shrowded himself in that profound obscurity in which alone he could make

safety accord with honor and conscience. Elizabeth, on the death of sir

Richard Sackville in 1568, advanced Mildmay to the important post of

chancellor of the exchequer, which he held to the end of his life; but

not so, it should appear, the favor of her majesty, some of his _back

friends_, or secret enemies, having whispered in her ear, that he was a

better patriot than subject, and over-popular in parliament, where he

had gone so far as to complain that many subsidies were granted and few

grievances redressed. Another strong ground of royal displeasure existed

in the imputation of puritanism under which he labored.

Generously sacrificing to higher considerations the aggrandizement of

his children, Mildmay devoted a large share of the wealth which he had

gained in the public service to the erection and endowment of a

college;--that of Emanuel at Cambridge,--an action little agreeable it

seems to her majesty,--for, on his coming to court after the completion

of this noble undertaking, she said tartly to him; "Sir Walter, I hear

you have erected a puritan foundation." "No, Madam," replied he; "far be

it from me to countenance any thing contrary to your established laws;

but I have set an acorn, which, when it comes to be an oak, God alone

knows what will be the fruit of it." That this fruit however proved to

be of the flavor so much distasted by her majesty, there is good

evidence.

"In the house of pure Emanuel

I had my education,

Where some surmise I dazzled my eyes

With the light of revelation;"

says "the Distracted Puritan," in a song composed in king James's days

by the witty bishop Corbet.

Mildmay was succeeded in his office by sir John Fortescue, master of the

wardrobe, a gentleman whose accomplishments in classical literature had

induced the queen to take him for her guide and assistant in the study

of the Greek and Latin writers. In the discharge of his new functions he

too was distinguished by moderation and integrity, so that in this

important department of administration no oppression was exercised upon

the subject during the whole of the reign;--a circumstance highly

conducive both to the popularity of the queen, and to the alacrity in

granting supplies usually exhibited by her parliaments.

The late attempt at invasion, so gloriously and happily frustrated, had

given a new impulse to the public mind; the gallant youth of the country

were seized with an universal rage for military enterprise, and burned

at once for vengeance and renown. The riches and the weakness of the

Spanish empire, both of them considerably exaggerated in popular

opinion, tempted the hopes and the cupidity of adventurers of a

different class; and by means of the united stimulus of gain and glory,

a numerous fleet was fitted out in the spring of 1589 for an expedition

to Portugal, which was equipped and manned almost entirely by the

exertions of individuals, the queen contributing only sixty-six thousand

pounds to the expenses, and six of her ships to the armament.

It will be remembered, that on the death in 1580 of Henry king of

Portugal, Philip of Spain had possessed himself of that kingdom as

rightful heir; having compelled don Antonio, an illegitimate nephew of

the deceased sovereign, who had ventured to dispute the succession, to

quit the country, and take refuge first in France and afterwards in

England.

This pretender had hitherto received little support or encouragement at

the hands of Elizabeth; in fact, she had suffered him to languish in the

most abject poverty; for there is a letter extant from a person about

him to lord Burleigh[99], entreating that he would move her majesty

either to advance don Antonio two hundred thousand crowns out of her

share of the rich Portuguese carrack captured by sir Francis Drake, to

enable him to recover his kingdom,--or at least to take upon herself the

payment of his debts, amounting to twelve or thirteen pounds, without

which his poor creditors are likely to be ruined. The first part of this

extraordinary alternative the prudent princess certainly declined; what

might be the fate of the second does not in this place appear: but we

learn elsewhere, that during the long vacancy of the see of Ely which

the queen caused to succeed to the death of bishop Cox in 1581, a part

of its revenues were appropriated to the maintenance of this unfortunate

competitor for royalty. It was imagined however, by the projectors of

the present expedition, that the discontent of the Portuguese under the

yoke of Spain would now incline them to receive as a deliverer even this

spurious representative of their ancient race of monarchs; and don

Antonio received an invitation, which he joyfully embraced, to embark

himself and his fortunes on board the English fleet.

[Note 99: Strype's Annals, vol. iii. p. 450.]

The armament consisted of 180 vessels of all kinds, carrying 21,000 men;

it set sail from Plymouth on April 18th, sir Francis Drake being admiral

and sir John Norris general. The earl of Essex, urged by the romantic

gallantry of his disposition, afterwards joined the expedition with

several ships fitted out at his own expense in support of don Antonio's

title, though he bore in it no regular command, since he sailed without

the consent or privity of her majesty. The first landing of the forces

was at Corunna; where having captured four ships of war in the harbour,

they took and burned the lower town and made some bold attempts on the

upper, which was strongly fortified: but after defeating with great

slaughter a body of Spaniards who were intrenched in the neighbourhood,

sir John Norris, finding it impracticable to renew his assaults on the

upper town, on account of a general want of powder in the fleet,

re-embarked his men, already suffering from sickness, and made sail for

Portugal.

After some consultation they landed at Penicha, about thirty miles to

the north of Lisbon, took the castle; and having thrown into it a

garrison, every man of which was afterwards put to the sword by the

Spaniards, they began their march for the capital. So ill was the army

provided, that many died on the road for want of food; and others who

had fainted with the heat must also have perished, had not Essex, with

characteristic generosity, caused all his baggage to be thrown out, and

the carriages to be filled with the sick and weary. Instead of the

troops of nobility and gentry by whom don Antonio had flattered himself

and his companions that he should be joined and recognised, there only

appeared upon their march a band of miserable peasants without shoes or

stockings, and one gentleman who presented him with a basket of plums

and cherries. The English however proceeded, and made themselves masters

without difficulty of the suburbs of Lisbon, in which they found great

riches; but the entreaties of don Antonio, and his anxiety to preserve

the good will of the people, caused the general, to restrain his men

from plunder. Essex distinguished himself in every skirmish; and,

knocking at the gates of Lisbon itself, challenged the governor, or any

other of equal rank, to single combat: but this romantic proposal was

prudently declined; and though the city was known to be weakly guarded,

the total want of battering cannon in the English army precluded the

general from making an assault.

In the meantime Drake, who was to have co-operated with the land forces

by an attack upon the city from the water side, found his progress

effectually barred by the forts at the mouth of the Tagus, and was thus

compelled to relinquish all share in the enterprise. This

disappointment, joined to the want of ammunition and other necessaries,

and the rapid progress of sickness among the men, rendered necessary a

speedy retreat and re-embarkation. About sixty vessels lying at the

mouth of the Tagus, laden with corn and other articles of commerce, were

seized by the English, though the property of the Hanse Towns, and Drake

and Norris in their return burned Vigo: but various disasters overtook

the fleet on its homeward voyage, subsequently to its dispersion by a

violent storm. On the whole, it was computed that not less than eleven

thousand persons perished in this unfortunate and ill-planned

expedition, by which no one important object had been attained; and that

of eleven hundred gentlemen who accompanied it, not more than three

hundred and fifty escaped the united ravages of famine, sickness, and

the sword.

The queen, on discovering that Essex had without permission absented

himself from her court and from the duties of his office of master of

the horse, to embark in the voyage to Portugal, had instantly

dispatched a peremptory order for his return, enforced by menaces of her

utmost indignation in case of disobedience; but even to this pressing

mandate he had dared to turn a deaf ear. During the four or five months

therefore of his absence, the whole court had remained in fearful or

exulting anticipation of the thunderbolt about to fall on his devoted

head. But the laurels with which he had encircled his brows proved his

safeguard: Elizabeth had listened with a secret complacency to the

reports of his valor and generosity which reached her through various

channels; her tenderness had been strongly excited by the image of the

perils to which he was daily exposing himself; and her joy at his safe

return, too genuine and too lively for concealment, left her so little

of the power or the wish to chide, that his pardon seemed granted even

before it could be implored. Essex had too much sensibility not to be

deeply touched by this affectionate behaviour on the part of his

sovereign; he redoubled his efforts to deserve the oblivion of his past

offence, and with a success so striking, that it was soon evident to all

that the temerity which might have ruined another had but heightened and

confirmed his favor.

Essex possessed, as much as Leicester himself, the art of stimulating

Elizabeth in his own behalf to acts of munificence; and she soon

consoled him by some valuable grants for any anxiety which her

threatened indignation might have occasioned him, or any disappointment

which he might have conceived in seeing sir Christopher Hatton

preferred by her to himself as Leicester's successor in the office of

chancellor of the university of Cambridge.

Among the gallant adventurers in the cause of don Antonio sir Walter

Raleigh had made one, and he also was received by her majesty on his

return with tokens of distinguished favor. But not long after he

embarked for Ireland, in which country he remained without public

employment till the spring of 1592, when he undertook an expedition

against the Spanish settlements in South America.

The ostensible purpose of his visit to Ireland was to superintend the

management of those large estates which had been granted him in that

country; but it was the story of the day, that "the earl of Essex had

chased Raleigh from court and confined him into Ireland[100]:" and the

length of his absence, with the known enmity between these

rival-favorites, lends some countenance to the suggestion.

[Note 100: Birch's Memoirs.]

That Essex, even in the early days of his favor, already assumed the

right of treating as interlopers such as advanced too rapidly in the

good graces of his sovereign, we learn from an incident which probably

occurred about this time, and is thus related by Naunton. "My lord

Montjoy, being but newly come to court, and then but sir Charles Blount,

had the good fortune one day to run very well a tilt; and the queen

therewith was so well pleased, that she sent him a token of her favor, a

queen at chess of gold, richly enamelled, which his servants had the

next day fastened on his arm with a crimson ribbon; which my lord of

Essex, as he passed through the privy chamber, espying, with his cloak

cast under his arm, the better to commend it to the view, enquired what

it was, and for what cause there fixed. Sir Fulk Greville told him that

it was the queen's favor, which the day before, and after the tilting,

she had sent him: whereat my lord of Essex, in a kind of emulation, and

as though he would have limited her favor, said, 'Now I perceive every

fool must have a favor.'

"This bitter and public affront came to sir Charles Blount's ear, who

sent him a challenge, which was accepted by my lord; and they went near

Marybonepark, where my lord was hurt in the thigh and disarmed: the

queen, missing the men, was very curious to learn the truth; and when at

last it was whispered out, she swore by God's death, it was fit that

some one or other should take him down, and teach him better manners,

otherwise there would be no rule with him[101]."

[Note 101: Fragmenta Regalia.]

Notwithstanding her majesty's ostentation of displeasure against her

favorite on this occasion, it is pretty certain that he could not better

have paid his court to her than by a duel of which, in spite of her

wisdom and her age, she seems to have had the weakness to imagine her

personal charms the cause. She compelled however the rivals to be

reconciled: from this period all the externals of friendship were

preserved between them; and there is even reason to believe,

notwithstanding some insinuations to the contrary, that latterly at

least the sentiment became a genuine one. If the queen had further

insisted on cementing their reconciliation by an alliance, she would

have preserved from its only considerable blot the brilliant reputation

of sir Charles Blount. This courtier, whilst he as yet enjoyed no higher

rank than that of knighthood, had conceived an ardent passion for a

sister of the earl of Essex; the same who was once destined to be the

bride of Philip Sidney. She returned his attachment; but her friends,

judging the match inferior to her just pretensions, broke off the affair

and compelled her to give her hand to lord Rich; a man of disagreeable

character, who was the object of her aversion. In such a marriage the

unfortunate lady found it impossible to forget the lover from whom

tyrannical authority had severed her; and some years after, when Montjoy

returned victorious from the Irish wars, she suffered herself to be

seduced by him into a criminal connexion, which was detected after it

had subsisted for several years, and occasioned her divorce from lord

Rich. Her lover, now earl of Devonshire, regarded himself as bound in

love and in honor to make her his wife; but to marry a divorced woman in

the lifetime of her husband was at this time so unusual a proceeding and

regarded as so violent a scandal, that Laud, then chaplain to the earl

of Devonshire, who joined their hands, incurred severe blame, and

thought it necessary to observe the anniversary ever after as a day of

humiliation. King James, in whose reign the circumstance took place,

long refused to avail himself further of the services of the earl; and

the disgrace and vexation of the affair embittered, and some say

abridged, the days of this otherwise admirable person. Whether any

incidents connected with this attachment had a share in producing that

hostile state of feeling in the mind of Essex towards Blount which led

to their combat, remains matter of conjecture.

This year the customary festivities on the anniversary of her majesty's

accession were attended by one of those romantic ceremonies which mark

so well the taste of the age and of Elizabeth. This was no other than

the formal resignation by that veteran of the tilt-yard, sir Henry

Leigh, of the office of queen's champion, so long his glory and delight.

The gallant earl of Cumberland was his destined successor, and the

momentous transfer was accomplished after the following fashion.

Having first performed their respective parts in the chivalrous

exercises of the band of knights-tilters, sir Henry and the earl

presented themselves to her majesty at the foot of the gallery where she

was seated, surrounded by her ladies and nobles, to view the games. They

advanced to slow music, and a concealed performer accompanied the strain

with the following song.

My golden locks time hath to silver turn'd,

(Oh time too swift, and swiftness never ceasing)

My youth 'gainst age, and age at' youth hath spurn'd:

But spurn'd in vain, youth waneth by increasing,

Beauty, strength, and youth, flowers fading been,

Duty, faith, and love, are roots and evergreen.

My helmet now shall make a hive for bees,

And lovers songs shall turn to holy psalms;

A man at arms must now sit on his knees,

And feed on pray'rs that are old age's alms.

And so from court to cottage I depart;

My saint is sure of mine unspotted heart.

And when I sadly sit in homely cell,

I'll teach my swains this carrol for a song:

"Blest be the hearts that think my sovereign well,

Curs'd be the souls that think to do her wrong."

Goddess, vouchsafe this aged man his right,

To be your beadsman now, that was your knight.

During this performance, there arose out of the earth a pavilion of

white taffeta, supported on pillars resembling porphyry and formed to

imitate the temple of the Vestal virgins. A superb altar was placed

within it, on which were laid some rich gifts for her majesty. Before

the gate stood a crowned pillar embraced by an eglantine, to which a

votive tablet was attached, inscribed "To Elizabeth:" The gifts and the

tablet being with great reverence delivered to the queen, and the aged

knight in the meantime disarmed, he offered up his armour at the foot of

the pillar; then kneeling, presented the earl of Cumberland to her

majesty, praying her to be pleased to accept of him for her knight and

to continue these annual exercises. The proposal being graciously

accepted, sir Henry armed the earl and mounted him on his horse: this

done, he clothed himself in a long velvet gown and covered his head, in

lieu of a helmet, with "a buttoned cap of the country fashion."

The king of Scots had now for a considerable time deserved extremely

well of Elizabeth. During the whole period of the Spanish armament he

had remained unshaken in his attachment to her cause, resolutely turning

a deaf ear to the flattering offers of Philip II. with the shrewd

remark, that all the favor he had to expect from this monarch in case of

his success against England, was that of Polypheme to Ulysses;--to be

devoured the last. A bon mot which was carefully copied into _The

English Mercury_. The ambassador to Scotland, from an unfounded opinion

that the discomfited armada sought shelter in the ports of that country

under the faith of some secret engagement with James, had thought it

necessary to bribe him to fidelity by some brilliant promises, of which

when the danger was past Elizabeth unhandsomely evaded the fulfilment;

but even on this occasion he abstained from any vehement expressions of

indignation: in short, his whole demeanour towards his lofty kinswoman

was that of a submissive expectant much more than of a competitor and

rival prince. True it is, that he had begun to attach to himself among

her nobles and courtiers as many adherents as his means permitted; but

besides that his manoeuvres remained for the most part concealed from

her knowledge, they certainly carried with them no danger to her

government. The partisans of James were not, like those of his mother,

the adherents also of a religious faction leagued with the foreign

powers most inimical to her rule, and from whose machinations she was

exposed to daily peril of her throne and life. They were protestants and

Englishmen, and many of them possessed of such strong hereditary

influence or official rank, that it could never become their interest to

throw the country into confusion by ill-timed efforts in favor of the

king of Scots; whose cause they in fact embraced with no other view than

to secure the state from commotion, and themselves from the loss of

power on the event of the queen's demise. The puritan party indeed, by

whom several attempts were afterwards made in parliament to extort from

the queen a settlement of the crown in James's favor, were doubtless

actuated in part by discontent with the present church-establishment,

and the hope of seeing it superseded under James by a presbyterian form

resembling that of Scotland. For the present, however, these

religionists were sufficiently repressed under the iron rod of the

High-commission court, and James had entered with them into no regular

correspondence, and engaged their attachment by no promises of future

indulgence or support.

On the whole, therefore, the violent jealousy with which Elizabeth

continued to regard this feeble and inoffensive young king, in every

point so greatly her inferior, must rather be imputed to her narrowness

and malignity of temper than to any dictates of sound policy or

advisable precaution; and the measures with which it prompted her were

impressed accordingly with every character of spite and meanness. She

was peculiarly solicitous to prevent James from increasing his

consequence by marriage, and through innumerable intrigues with his

ministers and favorites she had hitherto succeeded in her object. When

he appeared to have set his mind on a union with the eldest daughter of

the king of Denmark, she contrived to interpose so many delays and

obstacles that this sovereign, conceiving himself trifled with, ended

the affair by giving the princess in marriage to another. To embarrass

matters still more, she next proposed to James a match with the sister

of the king of Navarre, a princess much older than himself, destitute of

fortune, and whose brother might be influenced to protract the

negotiation to any length convenient to his valuable ally the queen of

England. This proposal being declined by James, and overtures made in

his name to a younger daughter of the Danish house, she again set her

engines at work to thwart his wishes: but indignation and an amorous

impatience for once lent to James resolution sufficient to carry his

point. Disregarding a declaration of his privy-council against the

match, he instigated the citizens of Edinburgh to take up arms in his

cause, and finally accomplished the sending out of a splendid embassy,

by which the marriage-articles were speedily settled, and the princess

conducted on board the fleet which was to convey her to Scotland. A

violent storm having driven her for shelter into a port of Norway, the

young monarch carried his gallantry so far as to set sail in quest of

her; and re-conducting her, at the request of the king her father, to

Copenhagen, he there passed the winter in great joy and festivity; and

as soon as the season would permit, conducted his royal consort home in

triumph, and crowned her with all the magnificence that Scotland could

display. Seeing the turn which matters had taken, Elizabeth now made a

virtue of necessity, and dispatched a solemn embassy to express to her

good brother of Scotland her hearty congratulations on his nuptials, and

her satisfaction in his happy return from so adventurous a voyage.

In April 1590 died sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary of state,

whose name is found in such intimate connexion with the whole domestic

policy of Elizabeth during several eventful years, that his character is

in a manner identified with that of the measures at this period pursued.

This eminent person, in his youth an exile for the protestant cause,

retained through life so serious a sense of religion as sometimes to

expose him to the suspicion of puritanism. In his private capacity he

was benevolent, friendly, and accounted a man of strict integrity: but

it is right that public characters should principally be estimated by

that part of their conduct in which the public is concerned; and to

Walsingham as a minister the unsullied reputation of virtue and honor is

not to be conceded. Unlike that pure and noble patriot who "would have

lost his life with pleasure to serve his country, but would not have

done a base thing to save it," this statesman seems to have held that

few base things ought to be scrupled by which his queen and country

might be served.

That Walsingham was of unimpeached fidelity towards his sovereign

requires no proof; that he was not stimulated by views of private

emolument seems also to be satisfactorily evinced, though somewhat to

the discredit of his mistress, by the load of debt incurred in his

official capacity under the pressure of which he lived and died: but

here our praise of his public virtue must end. It is impossible to

regard without indignation and disgust the system of artifice and

intrigue which he contrived for the purpose of insnaring the persecuted

and therefore disaffected catholics; and while due credit is given to

his unwearied diligence and remarkable sagacity in detecting dangerous

conspiracies, it cannot be doubted that the extraordinary encouragements

held out by him to spies and informers,--those pests of a

commonwealth,--must in numberless instances have rendered himself the

dupe, and innocent persons the victims, of designing villany. Looking

even to the immediate results of his measures, it may triumphantly be

demanded by the philanthropist and the sage, whether a system less

artificial, less treacherous and less cruel, would not equally well have

succeeded in protecting the person of the queen from the machinations of

traitors, with the further and inestimable advantage of preserving her

government from reproach, and the national character from degradation.

That the system of Walsingham was in the main that also of his court and

of his age, is indeed true; and this consideration might in some degree

plead his excuse, did it not appear that there was in his personal

character a native subtilty and talent of insinuation which, aptly

conspiring with the nature of his office, might truly be said to render

his duty his delight:--a feature of his mind which is thus happily

delineated by a witty and ingenious writer.

"None alive did better ken the secretary's craft, to get counsels out of

others and keep them in himself. Marvellous his sagacity in examining

suspected persons, either to make them confess the truth, or confound

themselves by denying it to their detection. Cunning his hands, who

could unpick the cabinets in the pope's conclave; quick his ears, who

could hear at London what was whispered at Rome; and numerous the spies

and eyes of this Argus dispersed in all places.

"The Jesuits, being outshot in their own bow, complained that he out

equivocated their equivocation, having a mental reservation deeper and

further than theirs. They tax him for making heaven bow too much to

earth, oft-times borrowing a point of conscience with full intent never

to pay it again; whom others excused by reasons of state and dangers of

the times. Indeed his simulation (which all allow lawful) was as like to

dissimulation (condemned by all good men) as two things could be which

were not the same. He thought that gold might, but intelligence could

not, be bought too dear;--the cause that so great a _statesman_ left so

small an _estate_, and so _public_ a person was so _privately_ buried in

St. Pauls[102]."

[Note 102: Fuller's Worthies in Kent.]

The long state of infirmity which preceded the death of Walsingham, had

afforded abundant opportunity for various intrigues and negotiations

respecting the appointment of his successor in office. Burleigh hoped to

make the choice of her majesty fall on his son Robert; Essex was

anxious to decide it in favor of the discarded Davison, who seems to

have been performing some part of the functions of a secretary of state

during the illness of Walsingham, though he did not venture to appear in

the sight of his still-offended mistress. No one was more susceptible of

generous emotions than Essex; and it ought not to be doubted that much

of the extraordinary zeal which he manifested, during two or three

entire years, in the cause of this unfortunate and ill-treated man, is

to be ascribed to genuine friendship: but neither must it be concealed

that this struggle for the nomination of a secretary was in effect the

great and decisive trial of strength between himself and the Cecils.

Several letters have been printed, written by Essex to Davison and

bearing date between the years 1587 and 1590, from which a few extracts

may be worth transcribing, both for the excellence of the style and the

light which they reflect on the behaviour and sentiments of Elizabeth in

this matter. "I had speech with her majesty yesternight after my

departure from you, and I did find that the success of my speech

(although I hoped for good) yet did much overrun my expectation.... I

made her majesty see what, in your health, in your fortune, in your

reputation in the world, you had suffered since the time that it was her

pleasure to commit you; I told her how many friends and well-wishers the

world did afford you, and how, for the most part, throughout the whole

realm her best subjects did wish that she would do herself the honor to

repair for you and restore to you that state which she had overthrown;

your humble suffering of these harms and reverend regard to her majesty,

must needs move a princess so noble and so just, to do you right; and

more I had said, if my gift of speech had been any way comparable to my

love. Her majesty, seeing her judgement opened by the story of her own

actions, showed a very feeling compassion of you, she gave you many

praises, and among the rest, that she seemed to please herself in was,

that you were a man of her own choice. In truth she was so well pleased

with those things that she spake and heard of you, that I dare (if of

things future there be any assurance) promise to myself that your peace

will be made to your content and the desire of your friends, I mean in

her favor and your own fortune, to a better estate than, or at least the

same you had, which with all my power I will employ myself to effect."

&c.

That these sanguine hopes were soon checked, appears by the following

passage of a subsequent letter. "I have, as I could, taken my

opportunity since I saw you to perform as much as I promised you; and

though in all I have been able to effect nothing, yet even now I have

had better leisure to solicit the queen than in this stormy time I did

hope for. My beginning was, as being amongst others entreated to move

her in your behalf; my course was, to lay open your sufferings and your

patience; in them you had felt poverty, restraint and disgrace, and yet

you showed nothing but faith and humility; faith, as being never wearied

nor discouraged to do her service, humbleness, as content to forget all

the burdens that had been laid upon you, and to serve her majesty with

as frank and willing a heart as they that have received greatest grace

from her. To this I received no answer but in general terms, that her

honor was much touched; your presumption had been intolerable, and that

she could not let it slip out of her mind. When I urged your access she

denied it, but so as I had no cause to be afraid to speak again. When I

offered in them both to reply, she fell into other discourse, and so we

parted." &c.

On the death of Walsingham he writes thus.... "Upon this unhappy

accident I have tried to the bottom what the queen will do for you, and

what the credit of your solicitor is worth. I urged not the comparison

between you and any other, but in my duty to her and zeal to her service

I did assure her, that she had not any other in England that would for

these three or four years know how to settle himself to support so great

a burden. She gave me leave to speak, heard me with patience, confessed

with me that none was so sufficient, and would not deny but that which

she lays to your charge was done without hope, fear, malice, envy, or

any respects of your own, but merely for her safety both of state and

person. In the end she absolutely denied to let you have that place and

willed me to rest satisfied, for she was resolved. Thus much I write to

let you know, I am more honest to my friends than happy in their cases."

&c.

As the fear of giving offence to the king of Scots was one reason or

pretext for the implacability of the queen towards Davison, Essex

hazarded the step of writing to request, as a personal favor to

himself, the forgiveness and good offices of this monarch in behalf of

the man who bore the blame of his mother's death. Nothing could be more

dexterous than the turn of this letter; but what reception it found we

do not discover. On the whole, all his efforts were unavailing: the

longer Elizabeth reflected on the matter, the less she felt herself able

to forgive the _presumption_ of the rash man who had anticipated her

final resolution on the fate of Mary. Other considerations probably

concurred; as, the apprehension which seems to have been of perpetual

recurrence to her mind, of rendering her young favorite too confident

and presuming by an uniform course of success in his applications to

her; the habitual ascendency of Burleigh; and, probably, some distrust

of the capacity of Davison for so difficult and important a post.

In conclusion, no principal secretary was at present appointed; but

Robert Cecil was admitted as an assistant to his father, who resumed on

this condition the duties of the office, and held it, as it were in

trust, till her majesty, six years afterwards, was pleased to sanction

his resignation in favor of his son, now fully established in her

confidence and good opinion. Of Davison nothing further is known;

probably he did not long survive.

Some time in the year 1590, the earl of Essex married in a private

manner the widow of sir Philip Sidney, and daughter of Walsingham; a

step with which her majesty did not scruple to show herself highly

offended. The inferiority of the connexion in the two articles of birth

and fortune to the just pretensions of the earl, and the circumstance

that the union had been formed without that previous consultation of her

gracious pleasure,--which from her high nobility and favorite courtiers,

and especially from those who, like Essex and his lady, shared the honor

of her relationship, she expected as a homage and almost claimed as a

right,--were the ostensible grounds of her displeasure. But that

peculiar compound of ungenerous feelings which rendered her the

universal foe of matrimony, exalted on this occasion by a jealousy too

humiliating to be owned, but too powerful to be repressed, formed

without doubt the more genuine sources of her deep chagrin. The

courtiers quickly penetrated the secret of her heart;--for what vice,

what weakness, can long lurk unsuspected in a royal bosom? and it is

thus that John Stanhope, one of her attendants, ventures to write on the

subject to lord Talbot.

"This night, God willing, she will to Richmond, and on Saturday next to

Somerset-house, and if she could overcome her passion against my lord of

Essex for his marriage, no doubt she would be much quieter; yet doth she

use it more temperately than was thought for, and, God be thanked, doth

not strike all that she threats[103]. The earl doth use it with good

temper, concealing his marriage as much as so open a matter may be: not

that he denies it to any, but for her majesty's better satisfaction, is

pleased that my lady shall live very retired in her mother's

house.[104]"

[Note 103: It may be regarded as dubious whether this expression is

to be understood literally or metaphorically.]

[Note 104: "Illustrations" by Lodge.]

On the whole, the indignation of the queen against Essex stopped very

short of the rage with which she had been transported against Leicester

on a similar occasion; she never even talked of sending him to prison

for his marriage. Her good sense came to her assistance somewhat indeed

too late for her own dignity, but soon enough to intercept any serious

mischief to the earl; and having found leisure to reflect on the folly

and disgrace of openly maintaining an ineffectual resentment, she soon

after readmitted the offender to the same station of seeming favor as

before. There has appeared however some ground to suspect that the queen

never entirely dismissed her feelings of mortification; or again reposed

in Essex the same unbounded confidence with which she had once honored

him. From a passage of a letter addressed by lord Buckhurst to sir

Robert Sidney, then governor of the Brill, we learn, that in the autumn

of the next year she still retained such displeasure against sir Robert

for having been present at a banquet given by Essex, either on occasion

of his marriage, or with a view to the furtherance of some design of his

which excited her suspicion, that she could not be induced to grant him

leave of absence for a visit to England.

But cares and occupations of a nature peculiarly uncongenial with the

indulgence of sentimental sorrows, now claimed, and not in vain, the

serious thoughts of this prudent and vigilant princess. The low state

of her finances, exhausted by no wasteful prodigalities, but by the

necessary measures of national defence and the politic aid which she had

extended to the United Provinces and to the French Hugonots, now

threatened to place her in a painful dilemma. She must either desert her

allies, and suffer her navy to relapse into the dangerous state of

weakness from which she had exerted all her efforts to raise it, or

summon a new parliament for the purpose of making fresh demands upon the

purses of her people; and this at the risk either of shaking their

attachment, or,--a humiliation not to be endured,--seeing herself

compelled to sacrifice to the importunities of the popular members some

of the more oppressive branches of her prerogative; the right of

purveyance for instance, or that of granting monopolies; both of which

she had suffered to grow into enormous grievances. Mature reflection

discovered to her, however, a third alternative; that of practising a

still stricter oeconomy on one hand, and on the other, of increasing

the productiveness to the exchequer of the customs and other branches of

revenue, by reforming abuses, by detecting frauds and embezzlements, and

by cutting off the exorbitant profits of collectors.

This last plan, which best accorded with her disposition, was that

adopted by Elizabeth. It may be mentioned as a characteristic trait,

that a few years before, she had accepted with thanks an offer secretly

made to herself by some person holding an inferior station in the

customs, of a full disclosure of the impositions practised upon her in

that department. She had admitted this voluntary informer several times

to her presence; had imposed silence in the tone of a mistress on the

remonstrances of Leicester, Burleigh, and Walsingham, who indignantly

urged that he was not of a rank to be thus countenanced in accusation of

his superiors; and had reaped the reward of this judicious patronage, by

finding herself entitled to demand from her farmer of the customs an

annual rent of forty-two thousand pounds, instead of the twelve thousand

pounds which he had formerly paid. She now exacted from him a further

advance of eight thousand pounds per annum; and stimulated Burleigh to

such a rigid superintendence of all the details of public oeconomy as

produced a very important general result. It was probably in the ensuing

parliament that a conference being held between the two houses

respecting a bill for making the patrimonial estates of accountants

liable for their arrears to the queen, and the commons desiring that it

might not be retrospective, the lord treasurer pithily said; "My lords,

if you had lost your purse by the way, would you look back or forwards

to find it? The queen hath lost her purse."

This rigid parsimony, at once the virtue and the foible of Elizabeth,

was attended accordingly with its good and its evil. It endeared her to

the people, whom it protected from the imposition of new and oppressive

taxes; but, being united in the complex character of this remarkable

woman with an extraordinary taste for magnificence in all that related

to her personal appearance, it betrayed her into a thousand meannesses,

which, in spite of all the arts of graciousness in which she was an

adept, served to alienate the affections of such as more nearly

approached her. Her nobles found themselves heavily burthened by the

long and frequent visits which she paid them at their country-seats,

attended always by an enormous retinue; as well as by the contributions

to her jewelry and wardrobe which custom required of them under the name

of new year's gifts, and on all occasions when they had favors, or even

justice, to ask at her hands[105]. There were few of the inferior

suitors and court-attendants composing the crowd by which she had a

vanity in seeing herself constantly surrounded, who did not find cause

bitterly to rue the day when first her hollow smiles and flattering

speeches seduced them to long years of irksome, servile, and often

profitless assiduity.

[Note 105: Lists of the New Year's Gifts received by Elizabeth

during many years have more than once appeared in print. They show that

not only jewels, trinkets, rich robes, and every ornamental article of

dress, were abundantly supplied to her from this source, but that sets

of body linen worked with black silk round the bosom and sleeves, were

regarded as no inappropriate offering from peers of the realm to the

maiden-queen. The presents of the bishops and of some of the nobility

always consisted of gold pieces, to the value of from five to twenty or

thirty pounds, contained in embroidered silk purses. Her majesty

distributed at the same season pieces of gilt plate; but not always to

the same persons from whom she had received presents, nor, apparently,

to an equal amount.]

Bacon in his Apophthegms relates on this subject the following anecdote.

"Queen Elizabeth, seeing sir Edward---- in her garden, looked out at

her window and asked him, in Italian, 'What does a man think of when he

thinks of nothing?' Sir Edward, who had not had the effect of some of

the queen's grants so soon as he had hoped and desired, paused a little,

and then made answer; 'Madam, he thinks of a woman's promise.' The queen

shrunk in her head, but was heard to say; 'Well, sir Edward, I must not

confute you: Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.'"

"Queen Elizabeth," says the same author, "was dilatory enough in suits

of her own nature; and the lord treasurer Burleigh, being a wise man,

and willing therein to feed her humor, would say to her; 'Madam, you do

well to let suitors stay; for I shall tell you, _Bis dat qui cito dat_;

if you grant them speedily, they will come again the sooner.'"

It is probable that the popular story of this minister's intercepting

the very moderate bounty which her majesty had proposed to herself the

honor of bestowing on Spenser, is untrue with respect to this great

poet; since the four lines relating to the circumstance,

"Madam,

You bid your treasurer on a time

To give me reason for my rhime,

But from that time and that season

I have had nor rhyme nor reason,"

long attributed to Spenser, are now known to be Churchyard's. Yet that

the author of the _Faery Queen_ had similar injuries to endure, is

manifest from those lines of unrivalled energy in which the poet, from

the bitterness of his soul, describes the miseries of a profitless

court-attendance. Few readers will have forgotten a passage so

celebrated; but it will here be read with peculiar interest, as

illustrative of the character of Elizabeth and the sufferings of her

unfortunate courtiers.

"Full little knowest thou that hast not tried

What hell it is in suing long to bide;

To lose good days that might be better spent;

To waste long nights in pensive discontent;

To speed today, to be put back tomorrow;

To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow;

To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peers;

To have thy asking, yet wait many years;

To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;

To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs;

To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run;

To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."

_Mother Hubbard's Tale._

One of the most laudable objects of the parsimony exercised by Elizabeth

at this period was that of enabling herself to afford effectual aid to

Henry IV. of France, now struggling, with adverse fortune but invincible

resolution, to conquer from the united armies of Spain and the League

the throne which was his birthright. In the depth of his distress, just

when his Swiss and German auxiliaries were on the point of disbanding

themselves for want of pay, the friendship of Elizabeth came in aid of

his necessities with a supply of twenty-two thousand pounds; a sum,

trifling as it may seem in modern estimation, which sufficed to rescue

Henry from his immediate embarrassment, and which he frankly avowed to

be the largest he had ever seen. The generosity of his ally did not stop

here; for she speedily equipped a body of four thousand men and sent

them to join him at Dieppe under command of the gallant lord Willoughby.

By this reinforcement Henry was enabled to march to Paris and possess

himself of its suburbs, and subsequently to engage in several other

enterprises, in which he gratefully acknowledged the eminent service

rendered him by the valor and fidelity of this band of English.

The next year Elizabeth, alarmed at seeing several of the ports of

Bretagne opposite to her own shores garrisoned by Spanish troops, whom

the Leaguers had called in to their assistance, readily entered into a

new treaty with Henry, by virtue of which she sent a fresh supply of

three thousand men to assist him in the recovery of this province. Her

expenses however were to be repaid by the king after the expulsion of

the enemy.

Sir John Norris, the appointed leader of this force, ranked among the

most eminent of Elizabeth's captains; and was also possessed of some

hereditary claims to her regard, which she did not fail to acknowledge

as far as the jealousy of her favorites would give her leave. One of sir

John's grandfathers was that Norris who suffered in the cause of Anne

Boleyn; the other was lord Williams of Tame, to whom she had herself

been indebted for so much respectful attention in the days of her

greatest adversity. She had called up his father to the house of peers,

as lord Norris of Ricot; and his mother she constantly addressed by a

singular term of endearment, "My own Crow." This pair had six sons, of

whom sir John was the eldest;--all, it is said, brave men, addicted to

arms, and much respected by her majesty. But an unfortunate quarrel with

the four sons of sir Francis Knolles, their Oxfordshire neighbour,

arising out of a tournament in which the two brotherhoods were opposed

to each other, procured to the Norrises the lasting enmity of this

family, which, strong both by its relationship to the queen and its

close alliance with Leicester, was able to impede their advancement to

stations equal to their merits.

Sir John Norris learned the rudiments of military science under the

celebrated admiral Coligni, to whom in his early youth he acted as a

page; and he enlarged his experience as captain of the English

volunteers who in 1578 generously carried the assistance of their swords

to the oppressed Netherlanders when they had rushed to arms in the

sacred cause of liberty and conscience. This gallant band particularly

signalized its valor in the repulse of an assault made by don John of

Austria upon the Dutch camp; a hot action in which Norris had three

horses shot under him. In 1588 he was a distinguished member of the

council of war. The expedition to Portugal in which he commanded has

been already related, and its ill-success was certainly imputable to no

want of courage or conduct on his part. In the war of Bretagne he gained

high praise by a skilful retreat, in which he drew off his small band of

English safe and entire amid a host of foes. We shall afterwards hear

of him in a high command in Ireland.

Military glory was the darling object of the ambition of Essex; and

jealous perhaps of the fame which sir John Norris was acquiring in the

French wars, he prevailed upon the queen to grant him the command of a

fresh body of troops destined to assist Henry in expelling the Leaguers

from Normandy. The new general was deeply mortified at being obliged to

remain for some time inactive at Dieppe, while the French king was

carrying his arms into another quarter, whither Essex was restrained by

the positive commands of his sovereign from following him. At length

they formed in concert the siege of Rouen; but when the town was nearly

reduced to extremity, an unexpected march of the duke of Parma compelled

Henry to desert the enterprise. Elizabeth made it a subject of complaint

against her ally, that the English soldiers were always thrust foremost

on every occasion of danger; but by themselves this perilous preeminence

was claimed as a privilege due to the brilliancy of their valor; and

their leader, delighted with the spirit which they displayed, encouraged

and rewarded it by distributing among his officers, with a profusion

which highly offended his sovereign, the honor of knighthood, bestowed

by herself with so much selection and reserve. Essex supported his

character for personal courage, and indulged his impetuous temper, by

sending an idle challenge to the governor of Rouen, who seems to have

known his duty too well to accept it; but his sanguine anticipations of

some distinguished success were baffled by a want of correspondence

between the plans of Henry and the commands of Elizabeth; perhaps also

in some degree by his own deficiency in the skill of a general. He had

the further grief to lose by a musket-shot his only brother Walter

Devereux, a young man of great hopes to whom he was fondly attached; and

leaving his men before Rouen, under the conduct of sir Roger Williams, a

brave soldier, he returned with little glory in the beginning of 1592 to

soothe the displeasure of the queen and combat the malicious suggestions

of his enemies. In this bloodless warfare better success awaited him.

His partial mistress received with favor his excuses; and not only

restored him to her wonted grace, but soon after testified her opinion

of his abilities by granting him admission into the privy-council.

The royal progress of this year in Sussex and Hampshire affords some

circumstances worthy of mention. Viscount Montacute, (now written

Montagu,) a nobleman in much esteem with Elizabeth, though a zealous

catholic, solicited the honor of entertaining her at his seat of Coudray

near Midhurst; a mansion splendid enough to attract the curiosity and

admiration of a royal visitant. The manor of Midhurst, in which Coudray

is situated, had belonged during several ages to a branch of the potent

family of Bohun; thence it passed into possession of the Nevils, a race

second to none in England in the antiquity of its nobility and the

splendor of its alliances. It thus became a part of the vast inheritance

of Margaret countess of Salisbury, daughter of George duke of Clarence.

Coudray-house was the principal residence of this illustrious and

injured lady, and it was here that the discovery took place of those

papal bulls and emblematical banners which afforded a pretext to malice

and rapacity to arm themselves against the miserable remnant of her

days.

By the attainder of the countess, this with the rest of her estates

became forfeited to the crown; but the tyrant Henry was prevailed upon

to regrant it, in exchange for other lands, to the heirs of her

great-uncle John Nevil marquis Montagu. From an heir female of this

branch viscount Montagu, son of sir Anthony Brown master of the horse to

Henry VIII., derived it and his title, conferred by queen Mary. But to

the ancient mansion there had previously been substituted by his

half-brother the earl of Southampton, a costly structure decorated

internally with that profusion of homely art which displayed the wealth

and satisfied the taste of a courtier of Henry VIII. The building was as

usual quadrangular, with a great gate flanked by two towers in the

centre of the principal front. At the upper end of the hall stood a

buck, as large as life, carved in brown wood, bearing on his shoulder

the shield of England and under it that of Brown with, many quarterings:

ten other bucks, in various attitudes and of the size of life, were

planted at intervals. There was a parlour more elegantly adorned with

the works of Holbein and his scholars;--a chapel richly furnished;--a

long gallery painted with the twelve apostles;--and a corresponding one

hung with family pictures and with various old paintings on subjects

religious and military, brought from Battle Abbey, the spoils of which

had been assigned to sir Anthony Brown as that share of the general

plunder of the monasteries to which his long and faithful service had

entitled him from the bounty of his master.

Amongst other particulars of the visit of her majesty at Coudray, we are

told that on the morning after her arrival she rode in the park, where

"a delicate bower" was prepared, and a nymph with a sweet song delivered

her a cross-bow to shoot at the deer, of which she killed three or four

and the countess of Kildare one:--it may be added, that this was a kind

of amusement not unfrequently shared by the ladies of that age; an

additional trait of the barbarity of manners.

Viscount Montagu died two years after this visit, and, to complete his

story, lies buried in Midhurst church under a splendid monument of

many-colored marbles, on which may still be seen a figure representing

him kneeling before an altar, in fine gilt armour, with a cloak and

"beard of formal cut." Beneath are placed recumbent effigies of his two

wives dressed in rich cloaks and ruffs, with chained unicorns at their

feet, and the whole is surrounded with sculptured scutcheons laboriously

executed with innumerable quarterings.

At Elvetham in Hampshire the queen was sumptuously entertained during a

visit of four days by the earl of Hertford. This nobleman was reputed to

be master of more ready money than any other person in the kingdom; and

though the cruel imprisonment of nine years, by which Elizabeth had

doomed him to expiate the offence of a clandestine union with the

blood-royal, could scarcely have been obliterated from his indignant

memory, certain considerations respecting the interests of his children

might probably render him not unwilling to gratify her by a splendid act

of homage, though peculiar circumstances increased beyond measure the

expense and inconvenience of her present visit. Elvetham, which was

little more than a hunting-seat, was far from possessing sufficient

accommodation for the court, and the earl was obliged to supply its

deficiencies by very extensive erections of timber, fitted up and

furnished with all the elegance that circumstances would permit. He

likewise found it necessary to cause a large pond to be dug, in which

were formed three islands, artificially constructed in the likeness of a

fort, a ship, and a mount, for the exhibition of fireworks and other

splendid pageantries. The water was made to swarm with swimming and

wading sea-gods, who blew trumpets instead of shells, and recited verses

in praise of her majesty: finally, a tremendous battle was enacted

between the Tritons of the pond and certain sylvan deities of the park,

which was long and valiantly disputed, with darts on one side and large

squirts on the other, and suddenly terminated, to the delight of all

beholders, by the seizure and submersion of old Sylvanus himself.

Elizabeth quitted Elvetham so highly gratified by the attentions of the

noble owner, that she made him a voluntary promise of her special favor

and protection; but we shall find hereafter, that her long-enduring

displeasure against him relative to his first marriage was not yet so

entirely laid aside but that a slight pretext was sufficient to bring it

once more into malignant activity.

Early in the same summer the queen had also paid a visit to lord

Burleigh at his favorite seat in Hertfordshire, of which sir Thomas

Wylks thus speaks in a letter to sir Robert Sidney:

"I suppose you have heard of her majesty's great entertainment at

Theobalds', of her knighting Mr. Robert Cecil, and of the expectation of

his advancement to the secretaryship; but so it is as we say in court,

that the knighthood must serve for both[106]."

[Note 106: "Sidney Papers."]

Sir Christopher Hatton died in the latter end of the year 1591. It

appears that he had been languishing for a considerable time under a

mortal disease; yet the vulgar appetite for the wonderful and the

tragical occasioned it to be reported that he died of a broken heart, in

consequence of her majesty's having demanded of him, with a rigor which

he had not anticipated, the payment of certain moneys received by him

for tenths and first fruits: it was added, that struck with compunction

on learning to what extremity her severity had reduced him, her majesty

had paid him several visits, and endeavoured by her gracious and

soothing speeches to revive his failing spirits;--but that the blow was

struck, and her repentance came too late. It is indeed certain that the

queen manifested great interest in the fate of her chancellor, and paid

him during his last illness very extraordinary personal attentions:--but

it ought to be mentioned, in refutation of the former part of the story,

that she remitted to his nephew and heir, who was married to a

grand-daughter of Burleigh's, all her claims on the property which he

left behind him.

During his lifetime, also, Hatton seems to have tasted more largely than

most of his competitors of the solid fruits of royal favor. Elizabeth

persevered in the practice originating in the reigns of her father and

brother, of endowing her courtiers out of the spoils of the church.

Sometimes, to the public scandal, she would keep a bishopric many years

vacant for the sake of appropriating its whole revenues to secular uses

and persons; and still more frequently, the presentation to a see was

given under the condition, express or implied, that certain manors

should be detached from its possessions, or beneficial leases of lands

and tenements granted to particular persons. Thus the bishop of Ely was

required to make a cession to sir Christopher Hatton of the garden and

orchard of Ely-house near Holborn; on the refusal of the prelate to

surrender property which he regarded himself as bound in honor and

conscience to transmit unimpaired to his successors, Hatton instituted

against him a chancery suit; and having at length succeeded in wresting

from him the land, made it the site of a splendid house surrounded by

gardens, which have been succeeded by the street still bearing his name.

He had even sufficient interest with her majesty to cause her to

address to the bishop the following violent letter, several times, with

some variations, reprinted.

* * * * *

"Proud prelate;

"I understand you are backward in complying with your agreement; but I

would have you to know, that I who made you what you are can unmake you;

and if you do not forthwith fulfil your engagement, by God I will

immediately unfrock you.

"Yours as you demean yourself,

"ELIZABETH."

* * * * *

Sir John Harrington, in his Brief View of the Church of England, accuses

the lord-chancellor Hatton of coveting likewise a certain manor attached

to the see of Bath and Wells, and of inflaming the queen's indignation

against bishop Godwin on account of his second marriage, in order to

frighten him into compliance; a manoeuvre which in part succeeded,

since the bishop was reduced, by way of compromise, to grant him a long

lease of another manor somewhat inferior in value.

With all this, Hatton, as we have formerly observed, was distinguished

as the patron of the established church against the puritans: but his

zeal in its behalf, whether real or affected, was attended by a spirit

of moderation then rare and always commendable. He disliked, and

sometimes checked, the oppressions exercised against the papists by the

rigid enforcement of recent statutes; and he is reported to have held

the doctrine, at that time a novel one, that neither fire nor steel

ought ever to be employed on a religious account.

The chancellor, besides his other merits and accomplishments, was a

cultivator of the drama. In 1568 a tragedy was performed before her

majesty, and afterwards published, entitled Tancred and Gismund, or

Gismonde of Salerne, the joint performance of five students of the

Temple, who appear each to have taken an act; the fourth bears the

signature of Hatton. It is also probable that he gave the queen some

assistance in similar pursuits, as her translation of a part of the

tragedy of Hercules Oetaeus, preserved in the Bodleian, is in his

handwriting.

But it was never forgotten by others, nor apparently by himself, that he

was brought into notice by his dancing; and we learn from a contemporary

letter-writer, that even after he had attained the dignity of lord

chancellor he laid aside his gown to dance at the wedding of his nephew.

The circumstance is pleasantly alluded to by Gray in the description of

Stoke-Pogeis house with which his "Long Story" opens.

"In Britain's isle, no matter where,

An ancient pile of building stands;

The Huntingdons and Hattons there

Employed the power of fairy hands

To raise the ceiling's fretted height,

Each pannel in achievements clothing,

Rich windows that exclude the light,

And passages that lead to nothing.

Full oft within the spacious walls,

When he had fifty winters o'er him,

My grave lord keeper led the brawls,

The seal and maces danced before him.

His bushy beard and shoe-strings green,

His high-crown'd hat and satin doublet,

Moved the stout heart of England's queen,

Though pope and Spaniard could not trouble it."

As chancellor of Oxford, Hatton was succeeded by lord Buckhurst, to the

fresh mortification of Essex, who again advanced pretensions to this

honorary office, and was a second time baffled by her majesty's open

interference in behalf of his competitor.

The more important post of lord chancellor remained vacant for some

months, the seals being put in commission; after which serjeant

Pickering was appointed lord keeper,--a person of respectable character,

who appears to have performed the duties of his office without taking

any conspicuous part in the court factions, or exercising any marked

influence over the general administration of affairs.

Towards one person of considerable note in his day, sir John Perrot,

some time deputy of Ireland, Hatton is reported to have acted the part

of an industrious and contriving enemy; being provoked by the taunts

which sir John was continually throwing out against him as one who "had

entered the court in a galliard," and further instigated by the

complaints, well or ill founded, against the deputy, of some of his

particular friends and adherents.

Sir John Perrot derived from a considerable family of that name seated

at Haroldstone in Pembrokeshire, his name and large estates; but his

features, his figure, his air, and common fame, gave him king Henry

VIII. for a father. Nor was his resemblance to this redoubted monarch

merely external; his temper was haughty and violent, his behaviour

_blustering_, his language always coarse, and, in the fits of rage to

which he was subject, abusive to excess. Yet was he destitute neither of

merit nor abilities. As president of Munster, he had rendered great

services to her majesty in 1572 by his vigorous conduct against the

rebels. As lord deputy of Ireland between the years 1584 and 1588, he

had made efforts still more praiseworthy towards the pacification of

that unhappy and ill-governed country, by checking as much as possible

the oppressions of every kind exercised by the English of the pale

against the miserable natives, towards whom his policy was liberal and

benevolent. But his attempts at reformation armed against him, as usual,

a host of foes, amongst whom was particularly distinguished Loftus

archbishop of Dublin, whom he had exasperated by proposing to apply the

revenues of St. Patrick's cathedral to the foundation of an university

in the capital of Ireland. Forged letters were amongst the means to

which the unprincipled malice of his adversaries resorted for his

destruction. One of these atrocious fabrications, in which an Irish

chieftain was made to complain of excessive injustice on the part of the

deputy, was detected by the exertions of the supposed writer, whom

Perrot had in reality attached to himself by many benefits; but a second

letter, which contained a protection to a catholic priest and made him

employ the words _our_ castle of Dublin, _our_ kingdom of Ireland,

produced a fatally strong impression on the jealous mind of Elizabeth.

Meantime the ill-fated deputy, conscious of his own fidelity and

essential loyalty, and unsuspicious of the snares spread around him, was

often unguarded enough to give vent in gross and furious invective

against the person of majesty itself, to the profound vexation which he,

in common with all preceding and following governors of Ireland under

Elizabeth, was destined to endure from the penury of her supplies and

the magnitude of her requisitions. His words were all carried to the

queen, mingled with such artful insinuations as served to impart to

these unmeaning ebullitions of a hasty temper the air of deliberate

contempt and meditated disloyalty towards his sovereign.

Just before the sailing of the armada, Perrot was recalled, partly

indeed at his own request. A rigid or rather a malicious inquiry was

then instituted into all the details of his actions, words and behaviour

in Ireland, and he was committed to the friendly custody of lord

Burleigh. Afterwards, the lords Hunsdon and Buckhurst, with two or three

other councillors, were ordered to search and seize his papers in the

house of the lord treasurer without the participation of this great

minister, who was at once offended and alarmed at the step. Perrot was

carried to the Tower, and at length, in April 1592, put upon his trial

for high treason. The principal heads of accusation were;--his

contemptuous words of the queen;--his secret encouragement of O'Rourk's

rebellion and the Spanish invasion, and his favoring of traitors. Of all

these charges except the first he seems to have proved his innocence,

and on this he excused himself by the heat of his temper and the absence

of all ill intention from his mind. He was however found guilty by a

jury much more studious of the reputation of loyalty than careful of the

rights of Englishmen.

On leaving the bar, he is reported to have exclaimed, "God's death! will

the queen suffer her brother to be offered up as a sacrifice to the envy

of my frisking adversaries!"

The queen felt the force of this appeal to the ties of blood. It was

long before she could be brought to confirm his sentence, and she would

never sign a warrant for its execution. Burleigh shed tears on hearing

the verdict, saying with a sigh, that hatred was always the more

inveterate the less it was deserved.

Elizabeth, when her first emotions of anger had passed away, was now

frequently heard to praise that rescript of the emperor Theodosius in

which it is thus written:--

"Should any one have spoken evil of the emperor, if through levity, it

should be despised; if through insanity, pitied; if through malice,

forgiven." She is likewise said, in language more familiar to her, to

have sworn a great oath that they who accused Perrot were all knaves,

and he an honest and faithful man. It was accordingly presumed that she

entertained the design of extending to him the royal pardon; but her

mercy, if such it merits to be called, was tardy; and in September 1592,

six months after his condemnation, this victim of malice perished in the

Tower, of disease, according to Camden; but, by other accounts, of a

broken heart. In either case the story is an affecting one, and worthy

to be had in lasting remembrance, as a striking and terrible example of

the potency of court-intrigue, and the guilty subserviency of judicial

tribunals under the jealous rule of the last of the Tudors.

English literature, under the auspices of Elizabeth and her learned

court, had been advancing with a steady and rapid progress; and it may

be interesting to contemplate the state of one of its fairest provinces

as exhibited by the pen of an able critic, who in the year 1589 gave to

the world an Art of English Poesy. This work, though addressed to the

queen, was published with a dedication by the printer to lord Burleigh;

for the author thought proper to remain concealed: on its first

appearance its merit caused it to be ascribed to Spenser by some, and by

others to Sidney; but it was traced at length to Puttenham, one of her

majesty's gentleman-pensioners, the author of some adulatory poems

addressed to her and called Partheniads, and of various other pieces now

lost.

The subject is here methodically treated in three books; the first, "Of

Poets and Poesy;" the second, "Of Proportion;" the third, "Of Ornament."

After some remarks on the origin of the art and its earliest professors,

and an account of the various kinds of poems known to the ancients,--in

which there is an absence of pedantry, of quaintness, and of every

species of puerility, very rare among the didactic writers of the

age,--the critic proceeds to an enumeration of our principal vernacular

poets, or "_vulgar makers_," as he is pleased to anglicize the words.

Beginning with a just tribute to Chaucer, as the father of genuine

English verse, he passes rapidly to the latter end of the reign of Henry

VIII., when, as he observes, there "sprung up a new company of courtly

makers, of whom sir Thomas Wyat the elder and Henry earl of Surry were

the two chieftains; who having travelled into Italy, and there tasted

the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as

novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Arioste, and Petrarch,

they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy, from

that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first

reformers of our English metre and style[107]."

[Note 107: I have quoted this passage partly for the sake of the

express and authentic testimony which it bears to the fact of Surry's

having visited Italy, which Mr. Chalmers and after him Dr. Nott, in

their respective biographies of the noble poet, have been induced to

call in question.]

After slight notice of the minor poets, who flourished under Edward VI.

and Mary, he goes on to observe that "in her majesty's time that now is,

are sprung up another crew of courtly makers, noblemen and gentlemen of

her majesty's own servants, who have written excellently well, as it

would appear if their doing could be found out and made public with the

rest." And in a subsequent passage he thus awards to each of them his

appropriate commendation. "Of the latter sort I think thus: That for

tragedy the lord Buckhurst and master Edward Ferrys (Ferrers), for such

doings as I have seen of theirs do deserve the highest price. The earl

of Oxford and master Edwards of her majesty's chapel for comedy and

interlude. For eglogue and pastoral poesy, sir Philip Sidney and master

Chaloner, and that other gentleman who wrate the late 'Shepherd's

Calendar'[108]. For dirty and amorous ode I find sir Walter Raleigh's

vein most lofty, insolent and passionate. Master Edward Dyer for elegy,

most sweet, solemn and of high conceit. Gascoigne for a good metre and

for a plentiful vein. Phaer and Golding for a learned and well corrected

verse, specially in translation clear and very faithfully answering

their author's intent. Others have also written with much facility, but

more commendably perchance if they had not written so much nor so

popularly[109]." The passage concludes with a piece of flattery to her

majesty in her poetical capacity, unworthy of transcription.

[Note 108: Spenser published this work under the signature of

"Immerito."]

[Note 109: Art of English Poesy, book i.]

Under the head of "Poetical proportion" or metre, our author writes

learnedly of the measures of the ancients, and on those employed by our

native poets with singular taste and judgement, except that the

artist-like pride in difficulty overcome has inspired him with an

unwarrantable fondness for verses arranged in eggs, roundels, lozenges,

triquets, and other ingenious figures, of which he has given diagrams

further illustrated by finished specimens of his own construction.

Great efforts had been made about this period by a literary party, of

which Stainhurst the translator of Virgil, Sidney and Gabriel Hervey

were the leaders, to introduce the Greek and Roman measures into

English verse, and Puttenham has judged it necessary to compose a

chapter thus intituled: "How, if all manner of sudden innovations were

not very scandalous, specially in the laws of any language or art, the

use of Greek and Latin feet might be brought into our vulgar poesy, and

with good grace enough." But it is evident on the whole, that he bore no

good will to this pedantic novelty.

In treating of "Ornament," our author enumerates, explains and

exemplifies all the rhetorical figures of the Greeks; adding, for the

benefit of courtiers and ladies, to whom his work is principally

addressed, translations of their names; several of which would require

to be retranslated for the benefit of the modern reader, as for example

the three following, all figures of derision:--"The fleering

frump;"--"The broad flout;"--"The privy nip." At the present day,

however, the work of Puttenham is most of all to be valued for the

remarks on language and on manners, and the contemporary anecdotes with

which it abounds, and of which some examples may be quoted. After

observing that "as it hath been always reputed a great fault to use

figurative speeches foolishly and indiscreetly, so it is esteemed no

less an imperfection in man's utterance, to have none use of figure at

all, specially in our writing and speeches public, making them but as

our ordinary talk, than which nothing can be more unsavory and far from

all civility:--'I remember,' says he, 'in the first year of queen Mary's

reign a knight of Yorkshire was chosen speaker of the parliament, a

good gentleman and wise, in the affairs of his shire, and not unlearned

in the laws of the realm; but as well for lack of some of his teeth as

for want of language, nothing well spoken, which at that time and

business was most behoveful for him to have been: this man, after he had

made his oration to the queen; which ye know is of course to be done at

the first assembly of both houses; a bencher of the Temple, both well

learned and very eloquent, returning from the parliament house asked

another gentleman his friend how he liked Mr. Speaker's oration; 'Mary,'

quoth the other, 'methinks I heard not a better alehouse tale told this

seven years.'... And though grave and wise councillors in their

consultations do not use much superfluous eloquence, and also in their

judicial hearings do much mislike all scholastical rhetorics: yet in

such a case... if the lord chancellor of England or archbishop of

Canterbury himself were to speak, he ought to do it cunningly and

eloquently, which cannot be without the use of figures: and nevertheless

none impeachment or blemish to the gravity of the persons or of the

cause: wherein I report me to them that knew sir Nicholas Bacon lord

keeper of the great seal, or the now lord treasurer of England, and have

been conversant with their speeches made in the Parliament house and

Star-chamber. From whose lips I have seen to proceed more grave and

natural eloquence, than from all the orators of Oxford or Cambridge; but

all is as it is handled, and maketh no matter whether the same eloquence

be natural to them or artificial (though I rather think natural); yet

were they known to be learned and not unskilful of the art when they

were younger men.... I have come to the lord keeper sir Nicholas Bacon,

and found him sitting in his gallery alone with the works of Quintilian

before him; indeed he was a most eloquent man, and of rare learning and

wisdom as ever I knew England to breed; and one that joyed as much in

learned men and men of good wits." He mentions being a by-stander when a

doctor of civil law, "pleading in a litigious cause betwixt a man and

his wife, before a great magistrate, who (as they can tell that knew

him) was a man very well learned and grave, but somewhat sour and of no

plausible utterance: the gentleman's chance was to say: 'My lord, the

simple woman is not so much to blame as her leud abettors, who by

_violent_ persuasions have led her into this wilfulness.' Quoth the

Judge; 'What need such eloquent terms in this place?' The gentleman

replied, 'Doth your lordship mislike the term (_violent_)? and methinks

I speak it to great purpose; for I am sure she would never have done it,

but by force of persuasion.'" &c.

Pursuing the subject of language, which, he says, "in our maker or poet

must be heedily looked unto that it be natural, pure, and the most usual

of all his country," after some other rules or cautions he adds: "Our

maker therefore at these days shall not follow Piers Plowman, nor Gower,

nor Lydgate, nor yet Chaucer, for their language is now out of use with

us: neither shall he take the terms of Northern men, such as they use in

daily talk, whether they be noblemen or gentlemen or of their best

clerks, all is a matter; nor in effect any speech used beyond the river

of Trent, though no man can deny but that theirs is the purer English

Saxon at this day, yet it is not so courtly nor so current as our

Southern English is; no more is the far Western man's speech: ye shall

therefore take the usual speech of the court, and that of London and the

shires lying about London within sixty miles and not much above. I say

not this but in every shire of England there be gentlemen and others

that speak, but specially write, as good Southern as we of Middlesex or

Surry do; but not the common people of every shire, to whom the

gentlemen and also their learned clerks do for the most part condescend;

but herein we are ruled by the English dictionaries and other books

written by learned men, and therefore it needeth none other direction in

that behalf. Albeit peradventure some small admonition be not

impertinent, for we find in our English writers many words and speeches

amendable, and ye shall see in some many inkhorn terms so ill affected

brought in by men of learning, as preachers and schoolmasters; and many

strange terms of other languages by secretaries and merchants and

travellers, and many dark words and not usual nor well sounding, though

they be daily spoken in court. Wherefore great heed must be taken by our

maker in this point that his choice be good." He modestly expresses his

apprehensions that in some of these respects he may himself be accounted

a transgressor, and he subjoins a list of the new, foreign or unusual

words employed by him in this tract, with his reasons for their

adoption. Of this number are; _scientific_, _conduict_, "a French word,

but well allowed of us, and long since usual; it sounds something more

than this word (leading) for it is applied only to the leading of a

captain, and not as a little boy should lead a blind man;" _idiom_, from

the Greek; _significative_, "borrowed of the Latin and French, but to us

brought in first by some noblemen's secretary, as I think, yet doth so

well serve the turn as it could not now be spared; and many more like

usurped Latin and French words; as, _method_, _methodical_, _placation_,

_function_, _assubtiling_, _refining_, _compendious_, _prolix_,

_figurative_, _inveigle_, a term borrowed of our common lawyers:

_impression_, also a new term, but well expressing the matter, and more

than our English word:" _penetrate_, _penetrable_, _indignity_ in the

sense of unworthiness, and a few more[110]. The whole enumeration is

curious, and strikingly exhibits the state of language at this epoch,

when the rapid advancement of letters and of all the arts of social life

was creating a daily want of new terms, which writers in all classes and

individuals in every walk of life regarded themselves as authorized to

supply at their own discretion, in any manner and from any sources most

accessible to them, whether pure or corrupt, ancient or modern. The

pedants of the universities, and the travelled coxcombs of the court,

had each a neological jargon of their own, unintelligible to each other

and to the people at large; on the other hand, there were a few persons

of grave professions and austere characters, who, like Cato the Censor

during a similar period of accelerated progress in the Roman state,

prided themselves on preserving in all its unsophisticated simplicity,

or primitive rudeness, the tongue of their forefathers. The judicious

Puttenham, uniting the accuracy of scholastic learning with the

enlargement of mind acquired by long intercourse among foreign nations,

and with the polish of a courtier, places himself between the contending

parties, and with a manly disdain of every species of affectation, but

especially that of rusticity and barbarism, avails himself, without

scruple as without excess, of the copiousness of other languages to

supply the remaining deficiencies of his own.

[Note 110: Art of English Poesy, book iii.]

Several chapters of the book "of Ornament" are devoted to the discussion

of the decent, or seemly, in words and actions, and prove the author to

have been a nice observer of manners as well as a refined critic of

style. He severely censures a certain translator of Virgil, who said

"that AEneas was fain to _trudge_ out of Troy; which term better became

to be spoken of a beggar, or of a rogue, or of a lackey:" and another

who called the same hero "by fate a _fugitive_;" and who inquires "What

moved Juno to _tug_ so great a captain;" a word "the most indecent in

this case that could have been devised, since it is derived from the

cart, and signifies the draught or pull of the horses." The phrase "a

prince's _pelf_" is reprobated, because _pelf_ means properly "the

scraps or shreds of taylors and of skinners." He gives strict rules for

the decorous behaviour of ambassadors and all who address themselves to

princes, being himself a courtier, and having probably exercised some

diplomatic function. "I have seen," says he, "foreign ambassadors in the

queen's presence laugh so dissolutely at some rare pastime or sport that

hath been made there, that nothing in the world could have worse becomen

them." With respect to men in other stations of life he is pleased to

say, it is decent for a priest "to be sober and sad;" "a judge to be

incorrupted, solitary, and unacquainted with courtiers or courtly

entertainments... without plait or wrinkle, sour in look and churlish in

speech; contrariwise a courtly gentleman to be lofty and curious in

countenance, yet sometimes a creeper and a curry favell with his

superiors." "And in a prince it is decent to go slowly and to march with

leisure, and with a certain grandity rather than gravity; as our

sovereign lady and mistress, the very image of majesty and magnificence,

is accustomed to do generally, unless it be when she walketh apace for

her pleasure, or to catch her a heat in the cold mornings. Nevertheless

it is not so decent in a meaner person, as I have discerned in some

counterfeit ladies of the country, which use it much to their own

derision. This comeliness was wanting in queen Mary, _otherwise a very

good and honorable princess_. And was some blemish to the emperor

Ferdinando, a most noble-minded man, yet so careless and forgetful of

himself in that behalf, as I have seen him run up a pair of stairs so

swift and nimble a pace, as almost had not become a very mean man, who

had not gone in some hasty business."

Respecting the poets mentioned by Puttenham whose names have not

already occurred in the present work, it may be observed, that excepting

a few lines quoted by this critic, there is nothing remaining of sir

Edward Dyer's, except, which is highly probable, he is to be reckoned

among the anonymous contributors to the popular collections of that day.

Of Gascoigne, on the contrary, enough is left to exhaust the patience of

any modern reader. In his youth, neglecting the study of the law for

poetry and pleasure, he poured forth an abundance of amatory pieces;

some of them sonnets closely imitating the Italian ones in style as well

as structure. Afterwards, during a five-years service in the war of

Flanders, he found leisure for much serious thought; and discarding the

levities of his early years, he composed by way of expiation a moral

satire in blank verse called the Steel Glass, and several religious

pieces. Notwithstanding however this newly assumed seriousness, he

attended her majesty in her progress in the summer of 1575, and composed

a large number of courtly verses as a contribution to "the princely

pleasures of Kennelworth." Gascoigne died in October 1577. Of his minor

poems the following may be cited as a pleasing specimen.

THE LULLABY OF A LOVER.

Sing lullaby as women do,

Wherewith they bring their babes to rest,

And lullaby can I sing too

As womanly as can the best.

With lullaby they still the child;

And if I be not much beguil'd,

Full many wanton babes have I,

Which must be still'd with lullaby.

First lullaby my youthful years.

It is now time to go to bed,

For crooked age and hoary years

Have won the haven within my head:

With lullaby then youth be still,

With lullaby content thy will,

Since courage quails and comes behind,

Go sleep and so beguile thy mind.

Next lullaby my gazing eyes,

Which wonted were to glaunce apace;

For every glass may now suffice

To shew the furrows in my face.

With lullaby then wink awhile,

With lullaby your looks beguile:

Let no fair face or beauty bright

Entice you eft with vain delight.

And lullaby my wanton will,

Let reason's rule now reign thy thought,

Since all too late I find by skill,

How dear I have thy fancies bought:

With lullaby now take thine ease,

With lullaby thy doubts appease;

For trust to this, if thou be still,

My body shall obey thy will.

Thus lullaby my youth, mine eyes,

My will, my ware, and all that was,

I can no mo delays devise,

But welcome pain, let pleasure pass:

With lullaby now take your leave,

With lullaby your dreams deceive,

And when you rise with waking eye,

Remember then this lullaby.

Respecting another poet of greater popularity than Gascoigne, and of a

more original turn of genius, Warner, the author of Albion's England,

Puttenham has preserved a discreet silence; for his great work had been

prohibited by the capricious tyranny, or rigid decorum, of archbishop

Whitgift, and seizure made in 1586 of the copies surreptitiously

printed. This long and singular poem is a kind of metrical chronicle,

containing the remarkable events of _English_ history from the

flood,--the starting point of all chroniclers,--to the reign of queen

Elizabeth. It is written in the common ballad measure, and in a style

often creeping and prosaic, sometimes quaint and affected; but passages

of beautiful simplicity and strokes of genuine pathos frequently occur

to redeem its faults, and the tediousness of the historical narration is

relieved by a large intermixture of interesting and entertaining

episodes. The ballads of Queen Eleanor and fair Rosamond, Argentile and

Curan, and the Patient Countess, selected by Dr. Percy in his Relics of

Ancient Poetry, may be regarded by the poetical student of the present

day as a sufficient specimen of the talents of Warner: but in his own

time he was complimented as the Homer or Virgil of the age; the

persevering reader travelled, not only with patience but delight,

through his seventy-seven long chapters; and it is said that the work

became popular enough, notwithstanding its prohibition by authority, to

supersede in some degree its celebrated predecessor the Mirror for

Magistrates.