How long has existed that numerous voice which we designate as "Public
Opinion;" which I shall neither define nor describe?
The history of the English "people," considered in their political
capacity, cannot be held to be of ancient date. The civil wars of
England, and the intestine discords of the bloody Roses, seem to have
nearly reduced the nation to a semi-barbarous condition; disputed
successions, cruel factions, and family feuds, had long convulsed the
land, and the political disorganization had been as eventful as were,
not long after, the religious dissensions.
The grandfather of Elizabeth, Henry the Seventh, had terminated a
political crisis. It was his policy to weaken the personal influence of
the higher nobility, whose domination our monarchs had often fatally
experienced. This seems to have been the sole "public" concern of this
prudential and passionless sovereign, who, as the authority of the
potent aristocracy declined, established that despotic regality which
remained as the inheritance of the dynasty of the Tudors.
In the days of the queen's father all "public interests" were
concentrated in the court-circle and its dependencies. The Parliament
was but the formal echo of the voice which came from the cabinet. The
learned Spelman has recorded that when the Lower House hesitated to pass
the bill for the dissolution of the monasteries, they were summoned into
the king's presence; and the Commons being first kept in waiting some
hours in his gallery, the king entered, looking angrily on one side and
then on the other: the dark scowl of the magnificent despot announced
his thoughts; and they listened to the thunder of his voice. "I hear,"
said he, "that my bill will not pass, but I will have it pass, or I will
have some of your heads."[1] I do not recollect whether it was on this
occasion that his majesty saluted his faithful Commons as "brutes!" but
the burly tyrant treated them as such. The penalty of their debates was
to be their heads; therefore this important bill passed _nemine
contradicente_!
However contemptuously this monarch regarded those who were within his
circle, he was sufficiently enlightened in the great national revolution
he meditated to desire to gain over the multitude on his side. The very
circumstance of the king allowing, as the letters patent run, "the free
and liberal use of the Bible in _our own natural English tongue_," was a
_coup-d'etat_, and an evidence that Henry at one time designed to create
a people of readers on whom he counted to side with him. The people were
already possessed of the Reformation, before Henry the Eighth had
renounced the papacy. The reformers abroad had diligently supplied them
with versions of the Scriptures, and no small numbers of pamphlets
printed abroad in English were dispersed among the early "gospellers,"
the expressive distinction of the new heretics; a humble but fervent
rabble of tailors, joiners, weavers, and other handicraftsmen, who left
"the new for the old God," ready martyrs against the gross papistical
impostures, and many females theological, who turned away from the
corporal presence, and whom no bishop could seduce to curtsey to a
saint.
The new concession made to this people was indeed received with
enthusiasm. All flocked to read, or to be read to. Never were the
Scriptures so artlessly scrutinised; they furnished whole scenes for
interludes, and were tagged with rhymes for ballads; even the grave
judges, before they delivered their charges, prefaced them by a text.
Each reader became an expounder, and new schismatics were busied with
new heresies. The king had not calculated on this result; and when he
found the nation abounded not with readers so much as with
disputants--that controversies raged where uniformity was
expected--Henry became so irritated at the universal distraction of
opinion, that his first attempt to raise a public voice ended, as has
been since often attempted, in its suppression. The permission to read
the sacred volume was contracted by the most qualifying clauses. The
noble and the gentry might read it "alone in their garden or orchard, or
other retired places," but men and women in the lower ranks were
absolutely forbidden to read it, or to have it read to them.[2]
The clashing polemics of the brother and the sister of Elizabeth did not
advance the progress of civil society. The novelists, if we may so term
these lovers of novelty, flushed with innovation, were raging with every
rapid change, while the ancients, in spite and in despondence, sullenly
clung to the old, which they held could never be the obsolete. The first
movements of the great reform seemed only to have transferred the late
civil wars which had distracted the land, to the minds of the people in
a civil war of opinions.
When Elizabeth ascended the throne, there was yet no recognised "public"
in the commonwealth; the people were mere fractional and incoherent
parts of society. This heroic queen, whose position and whose masculine
character bear some affinity to those of the great Catharine of Russia,
had to create "a people" subservient to the very design of advancing the
regal authority in its ascendancy. The policy of the maiden queen was
that of her ancestors; but the same jealousy of the aristocracy turned
her genius to a new source of influence, unknown to her progenitors, and
which her successors afterwards hardly recognised. In the awful
mutations through which society had been passing, some had been silently
favourable to the queen's views. The population had considerably risen
since the reign of Henry the Seventh.[3] Property had changed hands, and
taken new directions; and independent classes in society were rising
fast.
The great barons formerly had kept open houses for all comers and goers;
five hundred or a thousand "blue coats" in a single family crowded their
castles or their mansions; these were "trencher slaves" and
"swash-bucklers;" besides those numerous "retainers" of great lords,
who, neither menial nor of the household, yet yielded their services on
special occasions, for the privilege of shielding their own insolence
under the ostentatious silver "badge," or the family arms, which none
might strike with impunity, and escape from the hostility of the whole
noble family. In the opening scene of _Romeo and Juliet_ our national
bard has perpetuated the insolence of the wearers with all the reality
of nature and correctness of custom. Such troops of idling partisans
were only reflecting among themselves the feuds and the pride of their
rival masters; shadows of the late civil wars which still lingered in
the land.[4]
The first blow at the independent grandeur of the nobles had been struck
by the grandfather of the queen; the second was the consequence of the
acts of her father. The new proprietors of the recently-acquired
abbey-lands, and other monastic property, were not only courtiers, but
their humbler dependents; many of them the commissioners who had
undervalued all these manors and lordships, that they might get such
"Robin Hood's pennyworths" more easily by the novelty of "begging" for
them. These formed a new body of proprietors, who gradually constituted
_a new gentry_, standing between the nobles and the commonalty; and from
the nature of their property they became land-jobbers, letting and
under-letting, raising rents, enhancing the prices of commodities,
inclosing the common lands, and swallowing up the small farms by large
ones. There arose in consequence a great change in agricultural
pursuits, no longer practised to acquire a miserable subsistence; the
land was changed into a new mine of wealth; and among the wealthiest
classes of English subjects were the graziers, who indeed became the
founders of many families.[5]
The nobles found their revenues declining, as an excess of expenditure
surprised them; this changeable state only raised their murmurs, for
they seemed insensible to the cause. Their ancient opulence was secretly
consuming itself; their troops of domestics were thinned in numbers; and
a thousand families disappeared, who once seemed to have sprung out of
the soil, where whole generations had flourished through the wide
domains of the lord. A great change had visibly occurred in the baronial
halls. The octogenarians in Elizabeth's later days complained that the
country was depopulating fast; and the chimneys of the great mansions
which had smoked the year round, now scarcely announced "a merry
Christmas."
A transition from one state of society to another will always be looked
on suspiciously by those who may deem the results problematical; but it
will be eagerly opposed by those who find the innovation unfavourable to
themselves. The results of the new direction of landed property,
incomprehensible to the nobles, were abhorrent to the feelings of the
people. Among "the people," that is, the populace, there still survived
tender reminiscences of the warmth of the abbots' kitchens; and many a
wayfaring guest could tell how erst by ringing at the monastic gate the
wants of life had been alleviated. The monks, too, had been excellent
landlords living amid their tenants; and while the husbandmen stood at
easy rents, the public markets were regularly maintained by a constant
demand. In the breaking up of the monasteries many thousands of persons
had been dispersed; and it would seem that among that sturdy community
of vagabonds which now rose over the land, some low Latin words in their
"pedler's French," as the canting language they devised is called,
indicate their origin from the familiar dialect of the ejected poor
scholars of the late monastic institutions.
The commotions which rose in all parts of the country during the brief
reign of Edward the Sixth were instigated by the ancient owners of these
lands, who conceived that they had been disinherited by the spoliators;
thus weakly they avenged their irrecoverable losses; nor did such
leaders want for popular pretences among a discontented populace, who,
as they imagined, were themselves sufferers in the common cause. We are
informed, on the indubitable authority of the diary of the youthful
Edward, that "_the_ PEOPLE had conceived a wonderful hatred against
GENTLEMEN whom they held as _their enemies_." The king seems distinctly
to distinguish the gentry from the nobility.
In the decline of the great households a result, however, occurred,
which tended greatly to improve the independent condition of "the
people." The manual arts had been practised from generation to
generation, the son succeeding the father in the wide domains of some
noble; but when the great lords were contracting the scale of their
establishments, and failed to furnish occupation to these dependents,
the mechanics and artificers took refuge in the towns; there localised,
they were taught to reap the fruits of their own daily industry; and as
their labour became more highly appreciated, and the arts of commerce
were more closely pursued, they considerably heightened the cost of
those objects of necessity or pleasure which supplied the wants or the
luxuries of the noble. In becoming citizens, they ceased to be mere
domestics in the great households; a separate independence was raised
between the lord and his mechanic; the humble class lost something in
leaving the happy carelessness of life for a condition more anxious and
precarious; but the influence of the noble was no longer that of the
lord paramount, but simply the influence of the customer over the
tradesman; "an influence," as Hume shrewdly remarks, "which can never be
dangerous to civil government."
We now distinctly perceive new classes in civil society rising out of
the decline of the preponderating power of the great barons, and of the
new disposition of landed property; the gentry, the flourishing
agriculturist, and those mechanics and artificers who carried on their
trades, independently of their former lordly patrons; we now, therefore,
discern the first elements of popularity.
There was now "a people," who might be worthy of entering into the views
of the statesman; but it was a divided people. Among them, the queen
knew, lay concealed her domestic enemies; a more novel religion than the
new was on the watch to shake her established church; and no
inconsiderable portion of her subjects in their papal consciences were
traitors. The arts of juncture, or the keeping together parts broken and
separated, making hearts compliant which were stubbornly opposed to each
other, demanded at once the firmness and the indulgence of the wisest
policy; and such was the administration of Elizabeth. A reign of
continued struggle, which extended to nearly half a century, was a
probationary period for royalty; and a precarious throne, while it
naturally approximated the sovereign to the people, also taught the
nation its own capacities, by maintaining their monarch's glory amid her
external and internal enemies.
The nobility was to feel the weight of the royal prerogative; no noble
families were permitted to intermarry, and no peer could leave the
kingdom, without the license of the queen. But at the very time she was
ruling them with a potent hand, Elizabeth courted the eyes and the
hearts of "the people;" she sought every occasion to exhibit her person
in processions and progresses, and by her speech and manner shed her
graciousness on the humblest of her subjects. Not slow to perceive their
wants and wishes, she it was who first gave the people a theatre, as her
royal style expressed it, "for the recreation of our loving subjects, as
for our solace and pleasure;" and this at a time when her council were
divided in their opinion.
Participating in the inmost feelings of the people, she commanded that
the awful tomes of Fox's "Acts and Monuments," a book written, as the
author has himself expressed it, for "the simple people," should be
chained to the desk of every church and common hall. In this "Book of
Martyrs," gathered from all quarters, and chronicling the obscurest
individuals, many a reader, kindling over the lengthened page, dwelt on
his own domestic tale in the volume of the nation. These massy volumes
were placed easy of access for perpetual reference, and doubtless their
earnest spirit multiplied Protestants.
No object which concerned the prosperity of the people but the Queen
identified herself with it; she saluted Sir Thomas Gresham as her "royal
merchant," and opening with her presence his Exchange, she called it
Royal. It is a curious evidence of her system to win over the people's
loyalty, that she suggested to Sir Thomas Wilson to transfuse the
eloquence of Demosthenes into the language of the people, to prepare
them by such solemn admonitions against the machinations of her most
dreaded enemy. Our translator reveals the design by his title: "The
Three Orations of Demosthenes, with those his fower Orations titled
expressly and by name against King Philip of Macedonie, most needful to
be redde in these dangerous dayes, of all them that love their
countrie's libertie." The Queen considered the aptness of their
application, and the singular felicity of transferring the inordinate
ambition of Philip of Macedon to Philip of Spain. To these famous
"philippics" was prefixed the solemn oath that the young men of Greece
took to defend their country against the royal invader, "at this time
right needful for all Christians, not only for Englishmen, to observe
and follow."
It was not until eighteen years after that the Armada sailed from the
shores of Spain, and this translation perpetuates an instance of
political foresight.
The genius of Elizabeth created her age; surrounding herself by no puny
favourites of an hour, in the circle of her royalty were seen the most
laborious statesmen our annals record, and a generation of romantic
commanders; the secretaries of state were eminently learned; and the
queen was all these herself, in her tried prudence, her dauntless
intrepidity, and her lettered accomplishments. The energies of the
sovereign reached the people, and were responded to; the spirit-stirring
events rose with the times: it was a reign of enterprise and emulation,
a new era of adventure and glory. The heroes of England won many a day's
battle in the Netherlands, in France, in Spain, and in Portugal; and the
ships of England unfurled their flags in unknown seas, and left the
glory of the maiden queen in new lands.
It would be no slight volume which should contain the illustrious names
of a race of romantic adventurers, who lost their sleep to gain new
trophies in a campaign, to settle a remote colony, or to give a name to
a new continent. All ranks in society felt the impulse of the same
electrical stroke, and even the cupidity of the mere trader was elevated
into heroism, and gained a patent of heraldry. The spirits of that age
seemed busied with day-dreams, of discovering a new people, or founding
a new kingdom. Shakespeare alludes to this passion of the times:
Some to the wars, to try their fortune there;
Some to discover islands far away.
If our Drake was considered by the Spaniard as the most terrible of
pirates, in England he was admired as another Columbus. The moral
feeling may sometimes be more justly regulated by the degree of
latitude. The Norrises, the Veres, the Grenvilles, the Cavendishes, the
Earl of Cumberland, and the Sidneys, bear a lustre in their characters
which romance has not surpassed; and many there were as resolutely
ambitious as Sir John Davies, who has left his name to the Straits still
bearing it. Sir Henry Sidney, the father of Sir Philip, who became a
distinguished statesman, had once designed to raise a new kingdom in
America; and his romantic son resumed this design of founding an empire
for the Sidneys. The project was secretly planned between our puerile
hero and the adventurous Drake, and was only frustrated by the queen's
arrest of our hero at Plymouth. Of the same batch of kingdom-founders
was Sir Walter Rawleigh; he baptised with the spirit of loyalty his
"Virginia." Muscovy, at that stirring period, was a dominion as strange
as America and the Indies; during the extraordinary events of this
period, when Elizabeth had obtained a monopoly of the trade of that
country, the Czar proposed to marry an English lady; a British alliance,
both personal and political, he imagined, should his subjects revolt,
might secure an asylum in the land of his adoption. The daughter of the
Earl of Huntington was actually selected by the queen to be the Czarina;
but her ladyship was so terrified at the Muscovite and his icy region,
that she lost the honour of being a romantic empress, and the civilizer
of all the Russias. Thus, wherever the winds blew, the name of Elizabeth
was spread; "the great globe itself" seemed to be our "inheritance," and
seemed not too vast a space to busy the imaginations of the people.
This was the time of first beginnings in the art of guiding public
opinion. Ample volumes, like those of Fox, powerful organs of the
feelings of the people, were given to them. The Chronicles of Hall and
Holinshed opened for them the glory of the love of their father-land. It
was the genius of this active age of exploits which inspired RICHARD
HAKLUYT to form one of the most remarkable collections in any language,
yet it was solely to be furnished from our own records, and the mighty
actors in the face of the universe were solely to be Englishmen. Now
appeared the three tomes of "The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and
Discoveries, made by the English Nation;" northward, southward, and
westward, and at last "the new-found world of America;" a world, with
both Indies, discovered within their own century!--these amazed and
delighted all classes of society. The legendary voyages of the monkish
chroniclers, their maritime expeditions, opening with the fabulous
Arthur, hardly exceeded the simplicity of our first discoverers. Many a
hero had led on the adventurers; but their secretaries and historians
were often themselves too astonished at what they witnessed, and stayed
too short a time, to recover their better judgment in new places, and
among new races of men. Sanctioned by many noble and genuine adventures,
not less authentic appeared their terrors and their wonder; in polar
icebergs, or before that island which no ship could approach, wherein
devils dwelt; or among the sunny isles of Greece, and the burning
regions of Ormus and Malacca, and the far realms of Cambaya and Cathay;
in Ethiopia and in Muscovy, in Persia and in Peru; on the dark coast of
Guinea, and beyond in Africa; and in Virginia, with her feathered
chiefs; with many a tale of Tripoli and Algiers, where Britons were
found in chains, till the sovereign of England demanded their
restitution, and of the Holy Land, where the peaceful crusaders now only
knelt in pilgrimage. All this convinced them that the world was
everywhere inhabited; and that all was veracious, as Sebastian Cabot,
the true rival of Columbus, and perhaps our countryman, had marked in
his laborious maps, which he had engraved, and which were often wondered
at, as they hung in the Privy Gallery at Westminster. Alas! for the
readers of modern travels, who can no longer participate in the wild and
awful sensations of the all-believing faith of "the home-bred wit" of
the Elizabethan era--the first readers of HAKLUYT'S immense collection.
The advancement of general society out of its first exclusive circle
became apparent when "the public" themselves were gradually forming a
component part of the empire.
"The new learning," as the free discussions of opinions and the popular
literature of the day were distinguished, widely spread. Society was no
longer scattered in distant insulations. Their observation was more
extended, their thought was more grave; tastes multiplied, and finer
sympathies awakened. "The theatre" and "the ordinary" first rose in this
early stage of our civilization; and the ceaseless publications of the
day, in the current form of pamphlets, were snatched up, even in the
intervening pauses of theatrical representation, or were commented upon
by some caustic oracle at the ordinary, or in Powles' walk. We were now
at the crisis of that great moral revolution in the intellectual history
of a people, when the people become readers, and the people become
writers. In the closer intercourse with their neighbours, their
insulated homeliness was giving way to more exotic manners; they seemed
to imitate every nation while they were incurring the raillery or the
causticity of our satirists, who are not usually the profoundest
philosophers. The satirists are the earliest recorders of manners, but,
fugitive historians of fugitive objects, they only sport on the surface
of things. The progressive expansion of social life, through its
homeliest transitions, are more clearly discerned in the perspective
view; for those who are occupied by opening their narrow ways, and by
lengthening their streets, do not contemplate on the architectural city
which is reserved for posterity.
It was popular to ridicule the finical "Monsieur Traveller," who was
somewhat insolent by having "swum in a gondola;" or to raise a laugh at
him who had "bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, and
his bonnet in Germany." It did not occur to our immortal satirist that
the taste which had borrowed the doublet and the bonnet, had also
introduced to his happier notice the tales of Bandello and the Giuletta
of Luigi Porto. The dandy of Bishop Hall almost resembles the fantastic
picture of Horace, in illustrating a combination of absurdities. Hall
paints with vigour:
A French head join'd to neck Italian;
His thighs from Germany, his breast from Spain;
An Englishman in none, a fool in all.
But if this egregious man of fashion borrowed the wordiness of Italian
compliment, or the formality of the Spanish courtesy, he had been also
taught the sonnet and the stanza, and those musical studies which now
entered into the system of education, and probably gave delicacy to our
emotions, and euphony to our language. The first attempts in the
refinements of manners are unavoidably vitiated by too close a copy; and
it is long before that becomes graceful which began in affectation. When
the people experienced a ceaseless irritability, a marvelling curiosity
to learn foreign adventures and to inspect strange objects, and "laid
out ten doits to see a dead Indian," these were the nascent propensities
which made Europe for them a common country, and indicated that insular
genius which at a distant day was to add new dominions to the British
empire.
This public opinion which this sovereign was creating she watched with
solicitude, not only at home, but even abroad. No book was put forth
against her government, but we find her ministers selecting immediately
the most learned heads or the most able writers to furnish the replies.
Burghley, we are told, had his emissaries to inform him of the ballads
sung in the streets; and a curious anecdote at the close of the reign of
Elizabeth informs us how anxiously she pondered on the manifestations of
her people's feelings. The party of Lord Essex, on the afternoon before
their insurrection, ordered the play of the tragical abdication of
Richard the Second. It is one of the charges in their trial; and we
learn, from a more secret quarter than the public trial, that the queen
deeply felt the acting of this play at that moment as the watchword of
the rebels, expressive of their designs. The queen's fears transformed
her into Richard the Second; and a single step seemed to divide her
throne from her grave. The recollection of this circumstance long
haunted her spirits; for, a year and a half afterwards, in a literary
conversation with the antiquary Lambarde, the subject of a portrait of
Richard the Second occurring, the queen exclaimed, "I am Richard the
Second, know ye not that?" The antiquary, at once wary and ingenuous,
replied, well knowing that the virgin queen would shrink were her
well-beloved Essex to be cast among ordinary rebels, "Such a wicked
imagination was attempted by a most unkind gentleman, the most adorned
creature that ever your majesty made." The queen replied, "He that will
forget God will also forget his benefactors." So long afterwards was
the royal Elizabeth still brooding over the gloomy recollection.
In the art of government a new principle seemed to have arisen, that of
adopting and guiding public opinion, which, in the mutations of civil
and political society, had emerged as from a chaos. A vacillating and
impetuous monarch could not dare it; it was the work of a thoughtful
sovereign, whose sex inspired a reign of love. Elizabeth not only lived
in the hearts of her people, but survived in their memories; when she
was no more, her birthday was long observed as a festival day; and so
prompt was the remembrance of her deeds and her words, that when Charles
the First once published his royal speech, an insidious patriot sent
forth "The Speech of Queen Elizabeth," which being innocently printed by
the king's printer, brought him into trouble. Our philosophic
politician, Harrington, has a remarkable observation on the
administration of Elizabeth, which, laying aside his peculiar views on
monarchy, and his theoretical balances in the State, we may partly
adopt. He says, "If the government of Elizabeth be rightly weighed, it
seems rather the exercise of a principality in a commonwealth than a
sovereign power in a monarchy. Certain it is that she ruled wholly with
an art she had to high perfection, by humouring and blessing her
people."
Did Harrington imagine that political resembles physical science? In the
revelations of the Verulamian philosophy, it was a favourite axiom with
its founder, that we subdue Nature by yielding to her.