When we turned the leaf upon the Balladry of England, we were upon
fifteenth century ground, which, you will remember, we found very barren
of great writers. Gower and Froissart, whom we touched upon, slipped off
the stage just as the century began--their names making two of those
joined in that group of deaths to which I called attention, and which
marked the meeting of two centuries. Next we had glimpse of Lydgate and
of King James (of Scotland), who, at their best, only gave faint token of
the poetic spirit which illuminated the far better verses of Chaucer.
We then passed over the period of the Henrys, and of the War of the
Roses, with mention of Shakespeare’s Falstaff--of his Prince Hal--his
Agincourt--his courtship of Katharine of Valois--his inadequate
presentment of the Maid of Orleans--his crabbed and crooked Richard
III.--all rounded out with the battle of Bosworth field, and the coming
to power of Henry of Richmond.
We found the book-trade taking on a new phase with Caxton’s press:
we gave a tinkling bit of Skelton’s “Merry Margaret;” we put a
woman-writer--Dame Juliana Barnes--for the first time on our list; we
lingered over the quaint time-stained Paston Letters, which smelled so
strongly of old English home-life; and we summed up our talk with a
little bugle-note of that Balladry which made fitful snatches of music
all through the weariness of those hundred years.
_Early Days of Henry VIII._
To-day we front the sixteenth century. Great names and great deeds crop
out over it as thickly as leaves grow in summer. At the very outset,
three powerful monarchs came almost abreast upon the scene--Henry VIII.
of England, Francis I. of France, and Charles V. of Spain, Germany, and
the Low Countries.
Before the first quarter of the century had passed, the monk Luther had
pasted his ticket upon the doors of the church at Wittenberg; and that
other soldier-monk, Loyola, was astir with the beginnings of Jesuitism.
America had been planted; the Cape of Good Hope was no longer the outpost
of stormy wastes of water with no shores beyond. St. Peter’s church was
a-building across the Tiber, and that brilliant, courteous, vicious,
learned Leo X. was lording it in Rome. The Moors and their Saracen faith
had been driven out of the pleasant countries that are watered by the
Guadalquivir. Titian was alive and working; and so was Michael Angelo
and Raphael, in the great art-centres of Italy: and Venice was in this
time so rich, so grand, so beautiful, so abounding in princely houses,
in pictures, in books, in learning, and in all social splendors, that
to pass two winters in the City of the Lagoon, was equal to the half
of a polite education; and I suppose that a Florentine or Venetian
or Roman of that day, thought of a pilgrimage to the far-away, murky
London, as Parisians think now of going to Chicago, or Omaha, or San
Francisco--excellent places, with delightful people in them; but not the
centres about which the literary and art world goes spinning, as a wheel
goes spinning on its hub.
We have in the contemporary notes of a well-known Venetian chronicler,
Marini Sanuto--who was secretary to the famous Council of Ten--evidence
of the impression which was made on that far-off centre of business
and of learning, by such an event as the accession of Henry VIII. to
the throne of England. This Sanuto was a man of great dignity; and by
virtue of his position in the Council, heard all the “relations” of the
ambassadors of Venice; and hence his Diary is a great mine of material
for contemporary history.
“News have come,” he says, “through Rome of the death of the
King of England on April 20th [1509]. ’Twas known in Lucca on
the 6th May, by letters from the bankers Bonvisi. The new King
is nineteen years old, a worthy King, and hostile to France. He
is the son-in-law of the King of Spain. His father was called
Henry, and fifty odd years of age; he was a very great _miser_,
but a man of vast ability, and had accumulated so much gold
that he is supposed to have [had] more than wellnigh all the
other Kings of Christendom. The King, his son, is liberal and
handsome--the friend of Venice, and the enemy of France. This
intelligence is _most_ satisfactory.”
Certainly the new king was most liberal in his spending, and as certainly
was abundantly provided for. And money counted in those days--as it does
most whiles: no man in England could come to the dignity of Justice of
the Peace--such office as our evergreen friend Justice Shallow holds
in Shakespeare--except he had a rental of £20 per annum, equivalent to
a thousand dollars of present money--measured by its purchasing power
of wheat.[69] By the same standard the average Earl had a revenue of
£20,000, and the richest of the peers is put down at a probable income of
three times this amount.
What a special favorite of the crown could do in the way of expenditure
is still made clear to us by those famous walks, gardens, and gorgeous
saloons of Hampton Court, where the great Cardinal Wolsey set his
armorial bearings upon the wall--still to be seen over the entrance of
the Clock Court. If you go there--and every American visitor in London
should be sure to find a way thither--you will see, may be, in the lower
range of windows, that look upon the garden court--the pots of geranium
and the tabby cats belonging to gentlewomen of rank, but of decayed
fortune--humble pensioners of Victoria--who occupy the sunny rooms from
which, in the times we are talking of, the pampered servants of the great
Cardinal looked out. And when the great man drove to court, or into the
city, his retinue of outriders and lackeys, and his golden trappings,
made a spectacle for all the street mongers.
Into that panorama, too, of the early days of Henry VIII., enters with
slow step, and with sad speech, poor Katharine of Aragon--the first in
order of this stalwart king’s wives. Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler used to
read that queen’s speech with a pathos that brought all the sadnesses
of that sad court to life again: Miss Cushman, too, you may possibly
have heard giving utterance to the same moving story; but, I think, with
a masculinity about her manner she could never wholly shake off, and
which gave the impression that she could--if need were--give the stout
king such a buffet on the ears as would put an end to all chaffer about
divorce.
Shakespeare, writing that play of Henry VIII., probably during the
lifetime of Elizabeth (though its precise date and full authenticity are
matters of doubt), could not speak with very much freedom of the great
queen’s father: She had too much of that father’s spirit in her to
permit that; otherwise, I think the great dramatist would have given a
blazing score to the cruelty and _Bluebeardism_ of Henry VIII.
I know that there be those acute historic inquirers who would persuade us
to believe that the king’s much-marrying propensities were all in order,
and legitimate, and agreeable to English constitutional sanction: but I
know, too, that there is a strong British current of common-sense setting
down all through the centuries which finds harbor in the old-fashioned
belief--that the king who, with six successive wives of his own choice,
divorced two, and cut off the heads of other two, must have had--vicious
weaknesses. For my own part, I take a high moral delight--Froude to
the contrary--in thinking of him as a clever, dishonest, good-natured,
obstinate, selfish, ambitious, tempestuous, arrogant scoundrel. Yet,
withal, he was a great favorite in his young days;--so tall, so trim,
so stout, so rich, so free with his money. No wonder the stately and
disconsolate Queen (of Aragon) said:--
“Would I had never trod this English earth,
Or felt the flatteries that grow upon it;
Ye’ve angels faces, but Heaven knows your hearts!”
And this wilful King befriended learning and letters in his own wilful
way. Nay, he came to have ambitions of his own in that direction, when he
grew too heavy for practice with the long-bow, or for feats of riding--in
which matters he had gained eminence even amongst those trained to sports
and exercises of the field.
_Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More._
It was with the King’s capricious furtherance that Cardinal Wolsey
became so august a friend of learning. The annalists delight in telling
us how the great Cardinal went down to St. Paul’s School to attend
upon an exhibition of the boys there, who set afoot a tragedy founded
upon the story of Dido. And at the boys’ school was then established
as head-master that famous William Lilly[70] who had learned Greek in
his voyaging into Eastern seas, and was among the first to teach it in
England: he was the author too of that _Lilly’s Latin Grammar_ which
was in use for centuries, and of which later editions are hanging about
now in old New England garrets, from whose mouldy pages our grandfathers
learned to decline their _pennæ--pennarum_. Wolsey wrote a preface for
one of the earlier issues of this Lilly’s Grammar; and the King gave
it a capital advertisement by proclaiming it illegal to use any other.
The Cardinal, moreover, in later years established a famous school at
his native place of Ipswich (a rival in its day to that of Eton), and
he issued an address to all the schoolmasters of England in favor of
accomplishing the boys submitted to their charge in the most elegant
literatures.
The great Hall of Christ’s Church College, Oxford, still further serves
to keep in mind the memory and the munificence of Cardinal Wolsey: it
must be remembered, however, in estimating his munificence that he had
only to confiscate the revenues of a small monastery to make himself
full-pocketed for the endowment of a college. ’Tis certain that he loved
learning, and that he did much for its development in the season of his
greatest power and influence; certain, too, that his ambitions were too
large for the wary King, his master, and brought him to that dismal fall
from his high estate, which is pathetically set forth in Shakespeare’s
Henry VIII.:
“----Farewell to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost--a killing frost;
And--when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a ripening--nips his root
And then he falls as I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory;
But far beyond my depth; my high-blown pride
At length broke under me; and now has left me,
Weary, and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream that must forever hide me.”
Another favorite of Henry in the early days of his kingship, and one
bearing a far more important name in the literary annals of England
than that of Wolsey, was Sir Thomas More. He was a Greek of the very
Greeks, in both character and attainment. Born in the heart of London--in
Milk Street, now just outside of the din and roar of Cheapside, he
was a scholar of Oxford, and was the son of a knight, who, like Sir
Thomas himself, had a reputation for shrewd sayings--of which the old
chronicler, William Camden,[71] has reported this sample:--
“Marriage,” said the elder More, “with its chances, is like
dipping one’s hand into a bag, with a great many snakes
therein, and but one eel; the which most serviceable and
comfortable eel might possibly be seized upon; but the chances
are largely in favor of catching a stinging snake:”
But, says the chronicler--this good knight did himself thrust _his_ hand
three several times into such a bag, and with such ensuing results as
preserved him hale and sound to the age of ninety or thereabout. The son
inherited this tendency to whimsical speech, joining with it rare merits
as a scholar: and it used to be said of him as a boy, that he could
thrust himself into the acting of a Latin comedy and extemporize his
part, with such wit and aptness, as not to break upon the drift of the
play. He studied, as I said, at Oxford; and afterward Law at Lincoln’s
Inn; was onewhile strongly inclined to the Church, and under influence
of a patron who was a Church dignitary became zealous Religionist, and
took to wearing in penance a bristling hair-shirt--which (or one like
it) he kept wearing till prison-days and the scaffold overtook him, as
they overtook so many of the quondam friends of Henry VIII. For he had
been early presented to that monarch--even before Henry had come to the
throne--and had charmed him by his humor and his scholarly talk: so
that when More came to live upon his little farm at Chelsea (very near
to Cheyne Row where Carlyle died but a few years since) the King found
his way thither on more than one occasion; and there are stories of his
pacing up and down the garden walks in familiar talk with the master.
There, too, came for longer stay, and for longer and friendlier
communings, the great and scholarly Erasmus (afterward teacher of Greek
at Cambridge)--and out of one of these visitations to Chelsea grew the
conception and the working out of his famous Praise of Folly, with its
punning title--_Encomium Moriæ_.[72]
The King promised preferment to More--which came in its time. I think he
was in Flanders on the King’s business, when upon a certain day, as he
was coming out from the Antwerp Cathedral, he encountered a stranger,
with long beard and sunburnt face--a man of the “Ancient Mariner” stamp,
who had made long voyages with that Amerigo Vespucci who stole the honor
of naming America: and this long-bearded mariner told Sir Thomas More of
the strange things he had seen in a country farther off than America,
called _Utopia_. Of course, it is something doubtful if More ever really
encountered such a mariner, or if he did not contrive him only as a good
frontispiece for his political fiction. This is the work by which More is
best known (through its English translations); and it has given the word
Utopian to our every-day speech. The present popular significance of this
term will give you a proper hint of the character of the book: it is an
elaborate and whimsical and yet statesmanlike forecast of a government
too good and honest and wise to be sound and true and real.
Sir Thomas smacked the humor of the thing, in giving the name _Utopia_,
which is Greek for _Nowhere_. If, indeed, men were all honest, and women
all virtuous and children all rosy and helpful, we might all live in a
Utopia of our own. All the Fourierites--the Socialists--the Knights of
Labor might find the germs of their best arguments in this reservoir of
the ideal maxims of statecraft. In this model country, gold was held
in large disrespect; and to keep the scorn of it wholesome, it was
put to the vilest uses: a great criminal was compelled to wear gold
rings in his ears: chains were made of it for those in bondage; and a
particularly obnoxious character put to the wearing of a gold head-band;
so too diamonds and pearls were given over to the decoration of infants;
and these, with other baby accoutrements, they flung aside in disgust,
so soon as they came to sturdy childhood. When therefore upon a time,
Ambassadors came to Utopia, from a strange country, with their tricksy
show of gold and jewels--the old Voyager says:--
“You shᵈ have sene [Utopian] children that had caste away their
peerles and pretious stones, when they sawe the like sticking
upon the Ambassadours cappes;--digge and pushe theire mothers
under the sides, sainge thus to them,--‘Loke mother how great a
lubbor doth yet were peerles, as though he were a litel child
stil!’ ‘Peace sone,’ saith she; ‘I thinke he be some of the
Ambassadours fooles.’”
Also in this model state industrial education was in vogue; children
all, of whatsoever parentage, were to be taught some craft--as “masonrie
or smith’s craft, or the carpenter’s science.” Unlawful games were
decried--such as “dyce, cardes, tennis, coytes [quoits]--do not all
these,” says the author, “sende the haunters of them streyghte a
stealynge, when theyr money is gone?”
The Russian Count Tolstoi’s opinion that money is an invention of Satan
and should be abolished, is set forth with more humor and at least equal
logic, in this Latin tractate of More’s.
In the matters of Religion King Utopus decreed that
“it should be lawful for everie man to favoure and folow what
religion he would, and that he mighte do the best he could
to bring other to his opinion, so that he did it peaceablie,
gentelie, quietlie and sobelie, without hastie and contentious
rebuking.”
Yet this same self-contained Sir Thomas More did in his after
controversies with Tyndale use such talk of him--about his “whyning
and biting and licking and tumbling in the myre,” and “rubbing himself
in puddles of dirt,”--as were like anything but the courtesies of
Utopia. Indeed it is to be feared that theologic discussion does
not greatly provoke gentleness of speech, in any time; it is a very
grindstone to put men’s wits to sharpened edges. But More was a most
honest man withal;--fearless in advocacy of his own opinions; eloquent,
self-sacrificing--a tender father and husband--master of a rich English
speech (his _Utopia_ was written in Latin, but translated many times
into English, and most languages of Continental Europe), learned in
the classics--a man to be remembered as one of the greatest of Henry
VIII.’s time; a Romanist, at a date when honestest men doubted if it were
worthiest to be a King’s man or a Pope’s man;--not yielding to his royal
master in points of religious scruple, and with a lofty obstinacy in what
he counted well doing, going to the scaffold, with as serene a step as he
had ever put to his walks in the pleasant gardens of Chelsea.
_Cranmer, Latimer, Knox, and Others._
A much nobler figure is this, to my mind, than that of Cranmer,[73] who
appears in such picturesque lights in the drama of Henry VIII.--who
gave adhesion to royal wishes for divorce upon divorce; who always
colored his religious allegiances with the colors of the King; who was
a scholar indeed--learned, eloquent; who wrought well, as it proved,
for the reformed faith; but who wilted under the fierce heats of trial;
would have sought the good will of the blood-thirsty Mary; but who
gave even to his subserviencies a half-tone that brought distrust, and
so--finally--the fate of that quasi-martyrdom which has redeemed his
memory.
He stands very grandly in his robes upon the memorial cross at
Oxford: and he has an even more august presence in the final scene of
Shakespeare’s play, where amidst all churchly and courtly pomp, he
christened the infant--who was to become the Royal Elizabeth, and says
to the assembled dignitaries:
“This royal infant
Tho’ in her cradle, yet now promises
Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings,
Which time will bring to ripeness: She shall be
A pattern to all princes living with her,
And all that shall succeed her. Truth shall nurse her,
Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her:
She shall be loved and feared.
A most unspotted lily shall she pass
To the ground, and all the world shall mourn her.”[74]
Tennyson, in his drama of Queen Mary (a most unfortunate choice of
heroine) gives a statuesque pose to this same Archbishop Cranmer; but
Shakespeare’s figures are hard to duplicate. He was with Henry VIII. as
counsellor at his death; was intimate adviser of the succeeding Edward
VI.: and took upon himself obligations from that King (contrary to his
promises to Henry) which brought him to grief under Queen Mary. That
brave thrust of his offending hand into the blaze that consumed him,
cannot make us forget his weaknesses and his recantations; nor will we
any more forget that he it was, who gave (1543) to the old Latin Liturgy
of the Church that noble, English rhythmic flow which so largely belongs
to it to-day.
It is quite impossible to consider the literary aspects of the period of
English history covered by the reign of Henry VIII., and the short reigns
of the two succeeding monarchs, Edward VI. and Mary, without giving large
frontage to the Reformers and religious controversialists. Every scholar
was alive to the great battle in the Church. The Greek and Classicism of
the Universities came to have their largest practical significance in
connection with the settlement of religious questions or in furnishing
weapons for the ecclesiastic controversies of the day. The voices of the
poets--the Skeltons, the Sackvilles, the Wyatts, were chirping sparrows’
voices beside that din with which Luther thundered in Germany, and Henry
VIII. thundered back, more weakly, from his stand-point of Anglicanism.
We have seen Wolsey in his garniture of gold, going from court to school;
and Sir Thomas More, stern, strong, and unyielding; and Archbishop
Cranmer, disposed to think rightly, but without the courage to back up
his thought; and associated with these, it were well to keep in mind the
other figures of the great religious processional. There was William
Tyndale, native of Gloucestershire, a slight, thin figure of a man;
honest to the core; well-taught; getting dignities he never sought;
wearied in his heart of hearts by the flattering coquetries of the King;
perfecting the work of Wyclif in making the old home Bible readable by
all the world. His translation was first printed in Wittenberg about
1530:[75] I give the Lord’s Prayer as it appeared in the original
edition:--
“Oure Father which arte in heven, halowed be thy name. Let thy
kingdom come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well in erth, as hit
ys in heven. Geve vs this daye oure dayly breade. And forgeve
vs oure trespases, even as we forgeve them which treespas vs.
Leade vs not into temptacion but delyvre vs from yvell. Amen.”
But Tyndale was not safe in England; nor yet in the Low Countries whither
he went, and where the long reach of religious hate and jealousy put its
hand upon him and brought him to a death whose fiery ignominies are put
out of sight by the lustrous quality of his deservings.
I see too amongst those great, dim figures, that speak in Scriptural
tones, the form of Hugh Latimer, as he stands to-day on the Memorial
Cross in Oxford. I think of him too--in humbler dress than that which the
sculptor has put on him--even the yeoman’s clothes, which he wore upon
his father’s farm, in the Valley of the Soar, when he wrought there in
the meadows, and drank in humility of thought, and manly independence
under the skies of Leicestershire[76]--where (as he says), “My father had
walk for an hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine.” He kept
his head upon his shoulders through Henry’s time--his amazing wit and
humor helping him to security;--was in fair favor with Edward; but under
Mary, walked coolly with Ridley to the stake, where the fires were set,
to burn them both in Oxford.
Foxe[77] too is to be remembered for his Stories of the Martyrs of these,
and other times, which have formed the nightmare reading for so many
school-boys.
I see, too, another figure that will not down in this coterie of
Reformers, and that makes itself heard from beyond the Tweed. This is
John Knox,[78] a near contemporary though something younger than most
I have named, and not ripening to his greatest power till Henry VIII.
had gone. Born of humble parentage in Scotland in the early quarter of
the century, he was a rigid Papist in his young days, but a more rigid
Reformer afterward; much time a prisoner; passing years at Geneva; not
altogether a “gloomy, shrinking, fanatic,” but keeping, says Carlyle,
“a pipe of Bordeaux in that old Edinboro house of his;” getting to know
Cranmer, and the rest in England; discussing with these, changes of
Church Service; counselling austerities, where Cranmer admitted laxities;
afraid of no man, neither woman;--publishing in exile in Mary’s day--_The
first Blaste of the Trumpet against the monstrous Regiment of Women_,
and repenting this--quietly no doubt--when Elizabeth came to power. A
thin, frail man; strong no ways, but in courage, and in brain; with
broad brows--black cap--locks floating gray from under it, in careless
whirls that shook as he talked; an eye like a falcon’s that flashed
the light of twenty years, when sixty were on his shoulders; in after
years, writhing with rheumatic pains--crawling upon his stick and a
servant’s arm into his Church of St. Andrews; lifted into his pulpit by
the clerk and his attendant--leaning there on the desk, a wilted heap
of humanity--panting, shaking, quivering--till his breath came, and
the psalm and the lifted prayer gave courage; then--fierce torrents of
speech (and a pounding of the pulpit till it seemed that it would fly in
shivers), with a sharp, swift, piercing utterance that pricked ears as it
pricked consciences, and made the roof-timbers clang with echoes.
Of all these men there are no books that take high rank in Literature
proper--unless we except the _Utopia_ of More, and the New Testament of
Tyndale: but their lives and thought were welded by stout blows into the
intellectual texture of the century and are not to be forgotten.
_Verse-Writing and Psalmodies._
And now, was there really no dalliance with the Muses in times that
brought to the front such fighting Gospellers as we have talked of?
Yes, even Thomas More did write poems--having humor in them and grammatic
proprieties, and his Latin prosody is admired of Classicists: then
there were the versifiers of the Psalms, Sternhold and Hopkins, and the
Whittingham who succeeded John Knox at Geneva--sharing that Scotchman’s
distaste for beautiful rubrics, and we suspect beautiful verses also--if
we may judge by his version of the Creed. This is a sample:--
“The Father, God is; God, the Son;
God--Holy Ghost also;
Yet are not three gods in all
But one God and no mo.”
From the Apostles’ Creed again, we excerpt this:--
“From thence, shall he come for to judge
All men both dead and quick.
I, in the Holy Ghost believe
And Church thats Catholick.”
Hopkins,[79] who was a schoolmaster of Suffolk, and the more immediate
associate of Sternhold, thus expostulates with the Deity:--
“Why doost withdraw thy hand aback
And hide it in thy lappe?
Oh, plucke it out, and be not slacke
To give thy foes a rap!”
As something worthier from these old psalmists’ versing, I give this of
Sternhold’s:--
“The earth did shake, for feare did quake,
The hills their bases shook
Removed they were, in place most fayre
At God’s right fearful looks.
He rode on hye and did so flye
Upon the Cherubins,
He came in sight, and made his flight
Upon the wings of winds,” etc.
It may well be that bluff King Harry relished more the homely Saxonism
of such psalms than the _Stabat Maters_ and _Te Deums_ and _Jubilates_,
which assuredly would have better pleased the Princess Katharine of
Aragon. Yet even at a time when the writers of such psalmodies received
small crumbs of favor from the Court, the English Bible was by no means a
free-goer into all companies.
“A nobleman or gentleman may read it”--(I quote from a
Statute of Henry VIII.’s time)--“in his house, or in his
garden, or orchard, yet quietly and without disturbance of
order. A merchant may read it to himself privately: But the
common people, women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen and
servingmen, are to be punished with one month’s imprisonment,
as often as they are detected in reading the Bible, either
privately or openly.”[80]
Truly this English realm was a strange one in those times, and this a
strange King--who has listened approvingly to Hugh Latimer’s sermons--who
harries Tyndale as he had harried Tyndale’s enemy--More; who fights the
Pope, fights Luther, holds the new Bible (even Cranmer’s) in leash, who
gives pension to Sternhold, works easy riddance of all the wives he
wishes, pulls down Religious Houses for spoils, calls himself Defender
of the Faith, and maybe goes to see (if then on show) _Gammer Gurton’s
Needle_,[81] and is hilariously responsive to such songs as this:--
“I cannot eat but little meat
My Stomach is not good
But sure I think, that I can drink
With him that wears a hood;
Tho’ I go bare, take ye no care
I nothing am a colde,
I stuffe my skin so full within
Of jolly good ale and olde.”
_Wyatt and Surrey._
The model poets, however, of this reign[82]--those who kept alive the
best old classic traditions, and echoed with most grace and spirit
the daintiness of Italian verse, were the Earl of Surrey and Sir
Thomas Wyatt. The latter was son of an old courtier of Henry VII., and
inheritor of an estate and castle in Kent, which he made noteworthy by
his decorative treatment, and which is even now counted worthy a visit
by those journeying through the little town of Maidstone. He was, for
those times, brilliantly educated; was in high favor with the King (save
one enforced visit to the Tower); he translated Petrarch, and in his own
way imitated the Italian poet’s manner, and was, by common consent, the
first to graft the “Sonnet” upon English forms of verse. I find nothing
however in his verse one-half so graceful or gracious as this tribute to
his worth in Tennyson’s “Queen Mary:”--
“Courtier of many courts, he loves the more
His own gray towers, plain life, and lettered peace,
To read and rhyme in solitary fields;
The lark above, the nightingale below,
And answer them in song.”
Surrey was well born: was son to the Duke of Norfolk who figures in the
Shakespearean play of Henry VIII., and grandson to the Surrey who worsted
the Scotch on Flodden Field: he was companion of the King’s son, was
taught at the Universities, at home and abroad. There was no gallant
more admired in the gayer circles of the court; he too loved Petrarch,
and made canzonets like his; had a Geraldine (for a Laura), half real
and half mythical. The further story once obtained that he went with a
gay retinue to Florence, where the lists were opened--in the spirit of
an older chivalry--to this Stranger Knight, who challenged the world to
combat his claims in behalf of the mythical Geraldine. And--the story
ran--there were hot-heads who contended with him; and he unhorsed his
antagonists, and came back brimming with honors, to the court--before
which Hugh Latimer had preached, and where Sternhold’s psalms had been
heard--to be imprisoned for eating flesh in Lent, in that Windsor Castle
where he had often played with the King’s son. The tale[83] is a romantic
one; but--in all that relates to the Florentine tourney--probably untrue.
I give you a little taste of the graceful way in which this poet sings of
his Geraldine:--
“I assure thee even by oath
And thereon take my hand and troth
That she is one of the worthiest
The truest and the faithfullest
The gentlest, and the meekest o’ mind
That here on earth a man may find;
And if that love and truth were gone
In her it might be found alone:
For in her mind no thought there is
But how she may be true, iwis,
And is thine own; and so she says
And cares for thee ten thousand ways;
Of thee she speaks, on thee she thinks
With thee she eats, with thee she drinks
With thee she talks, with thee she moans
With thee she sighs, with thee she groans
With thee she says--‘Farewell mine own!’
When thou, God knows, full far art gone.”
Surrey is to be held in honor as the first poet who wrote English blank
verse; he having translated two books of the Æneid in that form. But
this delicate singer, this gallant soldier cannot altogether please the
capricious monarch; perhaps he is too fine a soldier; perhaps too free a
liver; perhaps he is dangerously befriended by some ladies of the court:
Quite certain it is that the King frowns on him; and the frowns bring
what they have brought to so many others--first, imprisonment in the
Tower, and then the headsman’s axe. In this way the poet died at thirty,
in 1547: his execution being one of the last ordered by Henry VIII., and
the King so weak that he could only stamp, instead of signing the death
warrant.
Honest men breathed freer, everywhere, when the King died, in the same
year with Surrey: and so, that great, tempestuous reign was ended.
_A Boy-King, a Queen, and Schoolmaster._
Edward VI. succeeded his father at the age of ten years--a precocious,
consumptive boy, who gave over his struggle with life when only sixteen;
and yet has left his “Works,” printed by the Roxburgh Club. There’s a
maturity about some of the political suggestions in his “Journal”--not
unusual in a lively mind prematurely ripening under stress of disease;
yet we can hardly count him a literary king.
The red reign of Mary, immediately following, lasted only five years, for
which, I think, all Christian England thanked God: In those five years
very many of the strong men of whom we have talked in this chapter came
to a fiery end.
Only one name of literary significance do we pluck from the annals of her
time; it is that of Roger Ascham,[84] the writer of her Latin letters,
and for a considerable time her secretary. How, being a Protestant as
he was, and an undissembling one, he kept his head upon his shoulders so
near her throne, it is hard to conjecture. He must have studied the art
of keeping silence as well as the arts of speech.
He was born in that rich, lovely region of Yorkshire--watered by
the River Swale--where we found the young Wyclif: his father was a
house-steward; but he early made show of such qualities as invited the
assistance of rich friends, through whose offices he was entered at St.
John’s College, Cambridge, at fifteen, and took his degree at eighteen.
He was full of American pluck, aptness, and industry; was known specially
for his large gifts in language; a superb penman too, which was no little
accomplishment in that day; withal, he excelled in athletics, and showed
a skill with the long-bow which made credible the traditions about Robin
Hood. They said he wasted time at this exercise; whereupon he wrote a
defence of Archery, which under the name of _Toxophilus_ has come down
to our day--a model even now of good, homely, vigorous English. “He that
will write well in any tongue,” said he, “must follow this counsel--to
speak as the common people do--to think as wise men do.” Our teachers of
rhetoric could hardly say a better thing to-day.
The subject of Archery was an important one at that period; the long-bow
was still the principal war weapon of offence: there were match-locks,
indeed, but these very cumbrous and counting for less than those
“cloth-yard” shafts which had won the battle of Agincourt. The boy-King,
Edward, to whom Ascham taught penmanship, was an adept at archery,
and makes frequent allusion to that exercise in his Journal. In every
hamlet practice at the long-bow was obligatory; and it was ordered by
statute that no person above the age of twenty-four, should shoot the
light-flight arrow at a distance under two hundred and twenty yards.
What would our Archery Clubs say to this? And what, to the further
order--dating in Henry VIII.’s time--that “all bow-staves should be three
fingers thick and seven feet long?”
This book of Ascham’s was published two years before Henry’s death,
and brought him a small pension; under the succeeding king he went to
Augsburg, where Charles V. held his brilliant court; but neither there,
nor in Italy, did he lose his homely and hearty English ways, and his
love of English things.
In his tractate of the _Schoolmaster_, which appeared after his death, he
bemoans the much and idle travel of Englishmen into Italy. They have a
proverb there, he says, “_Un Inglese italianato é un diabolo incarnato_”
(an Italianized Englishman is a devil incarnate). Going to Italy, when
Tintoretto and Raphael were yet living, and when the great Medici family
and the Borgias were spinning their golden wheels--was, for a young
Englishman of that day, like a European trip to a young American of ours:
Ascham says--“Many being mules and horses before they went, return swine
and asses.”
There is much other piquant matter in this old book of the
_Schoolmaster_; as where he says:--
“When the child doeth well, either in the choosing or true
placing of his words, let the master praise him, and say, ‘Here
ye do well!’ For I assure you there is no such whetstone to
sharpen a good wit, and encourage a will to learning as is
praise. But if the child miss, either in forgetting a word, or
in changing a good with a worse, or mis-ordering the sentence,
I would not have the master frown, or chide with him, if the
child have done his diligence and used no truantship: For I
know by good experience, that a child shall take more profit of
two faults gently warned of, than of four things rightly hit.”
And this brings us to say that this good, canny, and thrifty Roger
Ascham was the early teacher, in Greek and Latin, of the great Princess
Elizabeth, and afterward for years her secretary. You would like to hear
how he speaks of her:--
“It is your shame (I speak to you all young gentlemen of
England) that one mind should go beyond you all in excellency
of learning, and knowledge of divers tongues. Point forth
six of the best given gentlemen of this court, and all they
together show not so much good will, spend not so much time,
bestow not so many hours daily, orderly, and constantly, for
the increase of learning and knowledge as doth this Princess.
Yea, I believe that beside her perfect readiness in Latin,
Italian, French and Spanish, she readeth here now, at Windsor
more Greek every day, than some prebendarys of this Church doth
read Latin in a whole week.”
He never speaks of her but with a hearty tenderness; nor did she speak
of him, but most kindly. At his death, she said, “She would rather that
£10,000 had been flung into the sea.” And--seeing her money-loving, this
was very much for her to say.
* * * * *
In our next chapter we shall meet this prudent and accomplished Princess
face to face--in her farthingale and ruff--with the jewels on her
fingers, and the crown upon her head--bearing herself right royally. And
around her we shall find such staid worthies as Burleigh and Richard
Hooker; and such bright spirits as Sidney and Raleigh, and that sweet
poet Spenser, who was in that day counting the flowing measures of that
long song, whose mellow cadences have floated musically down from the far
days of Elizabeth to these fairer days of ours.