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HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
by
JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford
VOLUME V
PURITAN ENGLAND, 1603-1644
London
MacMillan and Co., Ltd.
New York: MacMillan & Co.
1896
First Edition 1879; Reprinted 1882, 1886, 1891.
Eversley Edition, 1896.
CONTENTS
BOOK VI
CHAPTER VII
PAGE
THE ENGLAND OF SHAKSPERE. 1593-1603 1
BOOK VII
PURITAN ENGLAND. 1603-1660
CHAPTER I
ENGLAND AND PURITANISM. 1603-1660 75
CHAPTER II
THE KING OF SCOTS. 120
CHAPTER III
THE BREAK WITH THE PARLIAMENT. 1603-1611 146
CHAPTER IV
THE FAVOURITES. 1611-1625 183
CHAPTER V
CHARLES I. AND THE PARLIAMENT. 1625-1629 242
CHAPTER VI
THE PERSONAL GOVERNMENT. 1629-1635 272
CHAPTER VII
THE RISING OF THE SCOTS. 1635-1640 315
CHAPTER VIII
THE LONG PARLIAMENT. 1640-1644 344
CHAPTER VII
THE ENGLAND OF SHAKSPERE
1593-1603
[Sidenote: English Literature.]
The defeat of the Armada, the deliverance from Catholicism and Spain,
marked the critical moment in our political developement. From that hour
England's destiny was fixed. She was to be a Protestant power. Her
sphere of action was to be upon the seas. She was to claim her part in
the New World of the West. But the moment was as critical in her
intellectual developement. As yet English literature had lagged behind
the literature of the rest of Western Christendom. It was now to take
its place among the greatest literatures of the world. The general
awakening of national life, the increase of wealth, of refinement, and
leisure that characterized the reign of Elizabeth, was accompanied by a
quickening of intelligence. The Renascence had done little for English
letters. The overpowering influence of the new models both of thought
and style which it gave to the world in the writers of Greece and Rome
was at first felt only as a fresh check to the revival of English poetry
or prose. Though England shared more than any European country in the
political and ecclesiastical results of the New Learning, its literary
results were far less than in the rest of Europe, in Italy, or Germany,
or France. More alone ranks among the great classical scholars of the
sixteenth century. Classical learning indeed all but perished at the
Universities in the storm of the Reformation, nor did it revive there
till the close of Elizabeth's reign. Insensibly however the influences
of the Renascence fertilized the intellectual soil of England for the
rich harvest that was to come. The court poetry which clustered round
Wyatt and Surrey, exotic and imitative as it was, promised a new life
for English verse. The growth of grammar-schools realized the dream of
Sir Thomas More, and brought the middle-classes, from the squire to the
petty tradesman, into contact with the masters of Greece and Rome. The
love of travel, which became so remarkable a characteristic of
Elizabeth's age, quickened the temper of the wealthier nobles.
"Home-keeping youths," says Shakspere in words that mark the time, "have
ever homely wits"; and a tour over the Continent became part of the
education of a gentleman. Fairfax's version of Tasso, Harrington's
version of Ariosto, were signs of the influence which the literature of
Italy, the land to which travel led most frequently, exerted on English
minds. The classical writers told upon England at large when they were
popularized by a crowd of translations. Chapman's noble version of Homer
stands high above its fellows, but all the greater poets and historians
of the ancient world were turned into English before the close of the
sixteenth century.
[Sidenote: Historic Literature.]
It is characteristic of England that the first kind of literature to
rise from its long death was the literature of history. But the form in
which it rose marked the difference between the world in which it had
perished and that in which it reappeared. During the Middle Ages the
world had been without a past, save the shadowy and unknown past of
early Rome; and annalist and chronicler told the story of the years
which went before as a preface to their tale of the present without a
sense of any difference between them. But the religious, social, and
political change which passed over England under the New Monarchy broke
the continuity of its life; and the depth of the rift between the two
ages is seen by the way in which History passes on its revival under
Elizabeth from the mediaeval form of pure narrative to its modern form of
an investigation and reconstruction of the past. The new interest which
attached to the bygone world led to the collection of its annals, their
reprinting and embodiment in an English shape. It was his desire to give
the Elizabethan Church a basis in the past, as much as any pure zeal
for letters, which induced Archbishop Parker to lead the way in the
first of these labours. The collection of historical manuscripts which,
following in the track of Leland, he rescued from the wreck of the
monastic libraries created a school of antiquarian imitators, whose
research and industry have preserved for us almost every work of
permanent historical value which existed before the Dissolution of the
Monasteries. To his publication of some of our earlier chronicles we owe
the series of similar publications which bear the name of Camden,
Twysden, and Gale. But as a branch of literature, English History in the
new shape which we have noted began in the work of the poet Daniel. The
chronicles of Stowe and Speed, who preceded him, are simple records of
the past, often copied almost literally from the annals they used, and
utterly without style or arrangement; while Daniel, inaccurate and
superficial as he is, gave his story a literary form and embodied it in
a pure and graceful prose. Two larger works at the close of Elizabeth's
reign, the "History of the Turks" by Knolles, and Raleigh's vast but
unfinished plan of the "History of the World," showed a widening of
historic interest beyond the merely national bounds to which it had
hitherto been confined.
[Sidenote: Euphuism.]
A far higher developement of our literature sprang from the growing
influence which Italy was exerting, partly through travel and partly
through its poetry and romances, on the manners and taste of the time.
Men made more account of a story of Boccaccio's, it was said, than of a
story from the Bible. The dress, the speech, the manners of Italy became
objects of almost passionate imitation, and of an imitation not always
of the wisest or noblest kind. To Ascham it seemed like "the enchantment
of Circe brought out of Italy to mar men's manners in England." "An
Italianate Englishman," ran the harder proverb of Italy itself, "is an
incarnate devil." The literary form which this imitation took seemed at
any rate ridiculous. John Lyly, distinguished both as a dramatist and a
poet, laid aside the tradition of English style for a style modelled on
the decadence of Italian prose. Euphuism, as the new fashion has been
named from the prose romance of Euphues which Lyly published in 1579, is
best known to modern readers by the pitiless caricature in which
Shakspere quizzed its pedantry, its affectation, the meaningless
monotony of its far-fetched phrases, the absurdity of its extravagant
conceits. Its representative, Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," is "a
man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight," "that hath a mint of
phrases in his brain; one whom the music of his own vain tongue doth
ravish like enchanting harmony." But its very extravagance sprang from
the general burst of delight in the new resources of thought and
language which literature felt to be at its disposal; and the new sense
of literary beauty which it disclosed in its affectation, in its love of
a "mint of phrases," and the "music of its own vain tongue," the new
sense of pleasure which it revealed in delicacy or grandeur of
expression, in the structure and arrangement of sentences, in what has
been termed the atmosphere of words, was a sense out of which style was
itself to spring.
[Sidenote: Sidney.]
For a time Euphuism had it all its own way. Elizabeth was the most
affected and detestable of Euphuists; and "that beauty in Court which
could not parley Euphuism," a courtier of Charles the First's time tells
us, "was as little regarded as she that now there speaks not French."
The fashion however passed away, but the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney
shows the wonderful advance which prose had made under its influence.
Sidney, the nephew of Lord Leicester, was the idol of his time, and
perhaps no figure reflects the age more fully and more beautifully. Fair
as he was brave, quick of wit as of affection, noble and generous in
temper, dear to Elizabeth as to Spenser, the darling of the Court and of
the camp, his learning and his genius made him the centre of the
literary world which was springing into birth on English soil. He had
travelled in France and Italy, he was master alike of the older learning
and of the new discoveries of astronomy. Bruno dedicated to him as to a
friend his metaphysical speculations; he was familiar with the drama of
Spain, the poems of Ronsard, the sonnets of Italy. Sidney combined the
wisdom of a grave councillor with the romantic chivalry of a
knight-errant. "I never heard the old story of Percy and Douglas," he
says, "that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." He
flung away his life to save the English army in Flanders, and as he lay
dying they brought a cup of water to his fevered lips. He bade them give
it to a soldier who was stretched on the ground beside him. "Thy
necessity," he said, "is greater than mine." The whole of Sidney's
nature, his chivalry and his learning, his thirst for adventures, his
freshness of tone, his tenderness and childlike simplicity of heart, his
affectation and false sentiment, his keen sense of pleasure and delight,
pours itself out in the pastoral medley, forced, tedious, and yet
strangely beautiful, of his "Arcadia." In his "Defence of Poetry" the
youthful exuberance of the romancer has passed into the earnest vigour
and grandiose stateliness of the rhetorician. But whether in the one
work or the other, the flexibility, the music, the luminous clearness of
Sidney's style remains the same.
[Sidenote: The Novelists.]
But the quickness and vivacity of English prose was first developed in a
school of Italian imitators which appeared in Elizabeth's later years.
The origin of English fiction is to be found in the tales and romances
with which Greene and Nash crowded the market, models for which they
found in the Italian novels. The brief form of these novelettes soon led
to the appearance of the "pamphlet"; and a new world of readers was seen
in the rapidity with which the stories or scurrilous libels that passed
under this name were issued, and the greediness with which they were
devoured. It was the boast of Greene that in the eight years before his
death he had produced forty pamphlets. "In a night or a day would he
have yarked up a pamphlet, as well as in seven years, and glad was that
printer that might be blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his
wit." Modern eyes see less of the wit than of the dregs in the books of
Greene and his compeers; but the attacks which Nash directed against the
Puritans and his rivals were the first English works which shook utterly
off the pedantry and extravagance of Euphuism. In his lightness, his
facility, his vivacity, his directness of speech, we have the beginning
of popular literature. It had descended from the closet to the street,
and the very change implied that the street was ready to receive it. The
abundance indeed of printers and of printed books at the close of the
Queen's reign shows that the world of readers and writers had widened
far beyond the small circle of scholars and courtiers with which it
began.
[Sidenote: Influence of the age.]
But to the national and local influences which were telling on English
literature was added that of the restlessness and curiosity which
characterized the age. At the moment which we have reached the sphere of
human interest was widened as it has never been widened before or since
by the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth. It was only in the
later years of the sixteenth century that the discoveries of Copernicus
were brought home to the general intelligence of mankind by Kepler and
Galileo, or that the daring of the Buccaneers broke through the veil
which the greed of Spain had drawn across the New World of Columbus.
Hardly inferior to these revelations as a source of intellectual impulse
was the sudden and picturesque way in which the various races of the
world were brought face to face with one another through the universal
passion for foreign travel. While the red tribes of the West were
described by Amerigo Vespucci, and the strange civilization of Mexico
and Peru disclosed by Cortes and Pizarro, the voyages of the Portuguese
threw open the older splendours of the East, and the story of India and
China was told for the first time to Christendom by Maffei and Mendoza.
England took her full part in this work of discovery. Jenkinson, an
English traveller, made his way to Bokhara. Willoughby brought back
Muscovy to the knowledge of Western Europe. English mariners penetrated
among the Esquimaux, or settled in Virginia. Drake circumnavigated the
globe. The "Collection of Voyages" which was published by Hakluyt in
1582 disclosed the vastness of the world itself, the infinite number of
the races of mankind, the variety of their laws, their customs, their
religions, their very instincts. We see the influence of this new and
wider knowledge of the world, not only in the life and richness which it
gave to the imagination of the time, but in the immense interest which
from this moment attached itself to Man. Shakspere's conception of
Caliban, like the questioning of Montaigne, marks the beginning of a new
and a truer, because a more inductive, philosophy of human nature and
human history. The fascination exercised by the study of human character
showed itself in the essays of Bacon, and yet more in the wonderful
popularity of the drama.
[Sidenote: The new English temper.]
And to these larger and world-wide sources of poetic power was added in
England, at the moment which we have reached in its story, the impulse
which sprang from national triumph, from the victory over the Armada,
the deliverance from Spain, the rolling away of the Catholic terror
which had hung like a cloud over the hopes of the new people. With its
new sense of security, its new sense of national energy and national
power, the whole aspect of England suddenly changed. As yet the interest
of Elizabeth's reign had been political and material; the stage had been
crowded with statesmen and warriors, with Cecils and Walsinghams and
Drakes. Literature had hardly found a place in the glories of the time.
But from the moment when the Armada drifted back broken to Ferrol the
figures of warriors and statesmen were dwarfed by the grander figures of
poets and philosophers. Amidst the throng in Elizabeth's antechamber the
noblest form is that of the singer who lays the "Faerie Queen" at her
feet, or of the young lawyer who muses amid the splendours of the
presence over the problems of the "Novum Organum." The triumph at Cadiz,
the conquest of Ireland, pass unheeded as we watch Hooker building up
his "Ecclesiastical Polity" among the sheepfolds, or the genius of
Shakspere rising year by year into supremer grandeur in a rude theatre
beside the Thames.
[Sidenote: Spenser.]
The glory of the new literature broke on England with Edmund Spenser. We
know little of his life; he was born in 1552 in East London, the son of
poor parents, but linked in blood with the Spencers of Althorpe, even
then--as he proudly says--"a house of ancient fame." He studied as a
sizar at Cambridge, and quitted the University while still a boy to live
as a tutor in the north; but after some years of obscure poverty the
scorn of a fair "Rosalind" drove him again southwards. A college
friendship with Gabriel Harvey served to introduce him to Lord
Leicester, who sent him as his envoy into France, and in whose service
he first became acquainted with Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney.
From Sidney's house at Penshurst came in 1579 his earliest work, the
"Shepherd's Calendar"; in form, like Sidney's own "Arcadia," a pastoral
where love and loyalty and Puritanism jostled oddly with the fancied
shepherd life. The peculiar melody and profuse imagination which the
pastoral disclosed at once placed its author in the forefront of living
poets, but a far greater work was already in hand; and from some words
of Gabriel Harvey's we see Spenser bent on rivalling Ariosto, and even
hoping "to overgo" the "Orlando Furioso" in his "Elvish Queen." The
ill-will or the indifference of Burleigh however blasted the
expectations he had drawn from the patronage of Sidney or Leicester, and
from the favour with which he had been welcomed by the Queen. Sidney, in
disgrace with Elizabeth through his opposition to the marriage with
Anjou, withdrew to Wilton to write the "Arcadia" by his sister's side;
and "discontent of my long fruitless stay in princes' courts," the poet
tells us, "and expectation vain of idle hopes" drove Spenser into exile.
In 1580 he followed Lord Grey as his secretary into Ireland, and
remained there on the Deputy's recall in the enjoyment of an office and
a grant of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond.
Spenser had thus enrolled himself among the colonists to whom England
was looking at the time for the regeneration of Munster, and the
practical interest he took in the "barren soil where cold and want and
poverty do grow" was shown by the later publication of a prose tractate
on the condition and government of the island. It was at Dublin or in
his castle of Kilcolman, two miles from Doneraile, "under the foot of
Mole, that mountain hoar," that he spent the ten years in which Sidney
died and Mary fell on the scaffold and the Armada came and went; and it
was in the latter home that Walter Raleigh found him sitting "alwaies
idle," as it seemed to his restless friend, "among the cooly shades of
the green alders by the Mulla's shore" in a visit made memorable by the
poem of "Colin Clout's come home again."
[Sidenote: The Faerie Queen.]
But in the "idlesse" and solitude of the poet's exile the great work
begun in the two pleasant years of his stay at Penshurst had at last
taken form, and it was to publish the first three books of the "Faerie
Queen" that Spenser returned in Raleigh's company to London. The
appearance of the "Faerie Queen" in 1590 is the one critical event in
the annals of English poetry; it settled in fact the question whether
there was to be such a thing as English poetry or no. The older national
verse which had blossomed and died in Caedmon sprang suddenly into a
grander life in Chaucer, but it closed again in a yet more complete
death. Across the Border indeed the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
century preserved something of their master's vivacity and colour, and
in England itself the Italian poetry of the Renascence had of late found
echoes in Surrey and Sidney. The new English drama too was beginning to
display its wonderful powers, and the work of Marlowe had already
prepared the way for the work of Shakspere. But bright as was the
promise of coming song, no great imaginative poem had broken the silence
of English literature for nearly two hundred years when Spenser landed
at Bristol with the "Faerie Queen." From that moment the stream of
English poetry has flowed on without a break. There have been times, as
in the years which immediately followed, when England has "become a nest
of singing birds"; there have been times when song was scant and poor;
but there never has been a time when England was wholly without a
singer.
The new English verse has been true to the source from which it sprang,
and Spenser has always been "the poet's poet." But in his own day he was
the poet of England at large. The "Faerie Queen" was received with a
burst of general welcome. It became "the delight of every accomplished
gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier." The
poem expressed indeed the very life of the time. It was with a true
poetic instinct that Spenser fell back for the framework of his story on
the faery world of Celtic romance, whose wonder and mystery had in fact
become the truest picture of the wonder and mystery of the world around
him. In the age of Cortes and of Raleigh dreamland had ceased to be
dreamland, and no marvel or adventure that befell lady or knight was
stranger than the tales which weather-beaten mariners from the Southern
Seas were telling every day to grave merchants upon 'Change. The very
incongruities of the story of Arthur and his knighthood, strangely as it
had been built up out of the rival efforts of bard and jongleur and
priest, made it the fittest vehicle for the expression of the world of
incongruous feeling which we call the Renascence. To modern eyes perhaps
there is something grotesque in the strange medley of figures that crowd
the canvas of the "Faerie Queen," in its fauns dancing on the sward
where knights have hurtled together, in its alternation of the
salvage-men from the New World with the satyrs of classic mythology, in
the giants, dwarfs, and monsters of popular fancy who jostle with the
nymphs of Greek legend and the damosels of mediaeval romance. But,
strange as the medley is, it reflects truly enough the stranger medley
of warring ideals and irreconcileable impulses which made up the life of
Spenser's contemporaries. It was not in the "Faerie Queen" only, but in
the world which it pourtrayed, that the religious mysticism of the
Middle Ages stood face to face with the intellectual freedom of the
Revival of Letters, that asceticism and self-denial cast their spell on
imaginations glowing with the sense of varied and inexhaustible
existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of feeling which
expressed itself in the fanciful unrealities of chivalry co-existed
with the rough practical energy that sprang from an awakening sense of
human power, or the lawless extravagance of an idealized friendship and
love lived side by side with the moral sternness and elevation which
England was drawing from the Reformation and the Bible.
But strangely contrasted as are the elements of the poem, they are
harmonized by the calmness and serenity which is the note of the "Faerie
Queen." The world of the Renascence is around us, but it is ordered,
refined, and calmed by the poet's touch. The warmest scenes which he
borrows from the Italian verse of his day are idealized into purity; the
very struggle of the men around him is lifted out of its pettier
accidents and raised into a spiritual oneness with the struggle in the
soul itself. There are allusions in plenty to contemporary events, but
the contest between Elizabeth and Mary takes ideal form in that of Una
and the false Duessa, and the clash of arms between Spain and the
Huguenots comes to us faint and hushed through the serener air. The
verse, like the story, rolls on as by its own natural power, without
haste or effort or delay. The gorgeous colouring, the profuse and often
complex imagery which Spenser's imagination lavishes, leave no sense of
confusion in the reader's mind. Every figure, strange as it may be, is
seen clearly and distinctly as it passes by. It is in this calmness,
this serenity, this spiritual elevation of the "Faerie Queen," that we
feel the new life of the coming age moulding into ordered and harmonious
form the life of the Renascence. Both in its conception, and in the way
in which this conception is realized in the portion of his work which
Spenser completed, his poem strikes the note of the coming Puritanism.
In his earlier pastoral, the "Shepherd's Calendar," the poet had boldly
taken his part with the more advanced reformers against the Church
policy of the Court. He had chosen Archbishop Grindal, who was then in
disgrace for his Puritan sympathies, as his model of a Christian pastor;
and attacked with sharp invective the pomp of the higher clergy. His
"Faerie Queen" in its religious theory is Puritan to the core. The worst
foe of its "Red-cross Knight" is the false and scarlet-clad Duessa of
Rome, who parts him for a while from Truth and leads him to the house of
Ignorance. Spenser presses strongly and pitilessly for the execution of
Mary Stuart. No bitter word ever breaks the calm of his verse save when
it touches on the perils with which Catholicism was environing England,
perils before which his knight must fall "were not that Heavenly Grace
doth him uphold and steadfast Truth acquite him out of all." But it is
yet more in the temper and aim of his work that we catch the nobler and
deeper tones of English Puritanism. In his earlier musings at Penshurst
the poet had purposed to surpass Ariosto, but the gaiety of Ariosto's
song is utterly absent from his own. Not a ripple of laughter breaks the
calm surface of Spenser's verse. He is habitually serious, and the
seriousness of his poetic tone reflects the seriousness of his poetic
purpose. His aim, he tells us, was to represent the moral virtues, to
assign to each its knightly patron, so that its excellence might be
expressed and its contrary vice trodden under foot by deeds of arms and
chivalry. In knight after knight of the twelve he purposed to paint, he
wished to embody some single virtue of the virtuous man in its struggle
with the faults and errors which specially beset it; till in Arthur, the
sum of the whole company, man might have been seen perfected, in his
longing and progress towards the "Faerie Queen," the Divine Glory which
is the true end of human effort.
The largeness of his culture indeed, his exquisite sense of beauty, and
above all the very intensity of his moral enthusiasm, saved Spenser from
the narrowness and exaggeration which often distorted goodness into
unloveliness in the Puritan. Christian as he is to the core, his
Christianity is enriched and fertilized by the larger temper of the
Renascence, as well as by a poet's love of the natural world in which
the older mythologies struck their roots. Diana and the gods of
heathendom take a sacred tinge from the purer sanctities of the new
faith; and in one of the greatest songs of the "Faerie Queen" the
conception of love widens, as it widened in the mind of a Greek, into
the mighty thought of the productive energy of Nature. Spenser borrows
in fact the delicate and refined forms of the Platonist philosophy to
express his own moral enthusiasm. Not only does he love, as others have
loved, all that is noble and pure and of good report, but he is fired as
none before or after him have been fired with a passionate sense of
moral beauty. Justice, Temperance, Truth, are no mere names to him, but
real existences to which his whole nature clings with a rapturous
affection. Outer beauty he believed to spring, and loved because it
sprang, from the beauty of the soul within. There was much in such a
moral protest as this to rouse dislike in any age, but it is the glory
of the age of Elizabeth that, "mad world" as in many ways it was, all
that was noble welcomed the "Faerie Queen." Elizabeth herself, says
Spenser, "to mine oaten pipe inclined her ear," and bestowed a pension
on the poet. In 1595 he brought three more books of his poem to England.
He returned to Ireland to commemorate his marriage in Sonnets and the
most beautiful of bridal songs, and to complete the "Faerie Queen"
amongst love and poverty and troubles from his Irish neighbours. But
these troubles soon took a graver form. In 1599 Ireland broke into
revolt, and the poet escaped from his burning house to fly to England,
and to die broken-hearted in an inn at Westminster.
[Sidenote: The Drama.]
If the "Faerie Queen" expressed the higher elements of the Elizabethan
age, the whole of that age, its lower elements and its higher alike, was
expressed in the English drama. We have already pointed out the
circumstances which throughout Europe were giving a poetic impulse to
the newly-aroused intelligence of men, and this impulse everywhere took
a dramatic shape. The artificial French tragedy which began about this
time with Garnier was not indeed destined to exert any influence over
English poetry till a later age; but the influence of the Italian
comedy, which had begun half a century earlier with Machiavelli and
Ariosto, was felt directly through the Novelle, or stories, which served
as plots for our dramatists. It left its stamp indeed on some of the
worst characteristics of the English stage. The features of our drama
that startled the moral temper of the time and won the deadly hatred of
the Puritans, its grossness and profanity, its tendency to scenes of
horror and crime, its profuse employment of cruelty and lust as grounds
of dramatic action, its daring use of the horrible and the unnatural
whenever they enable it to display the more terrible and revolting sides
of human passion, were derived from the Italian stage. It is doubtful
how much the English playwrights may have owed to the Spanish drama,
which under Lope and Cervantes sprang suddenly into a grandeur that
almost rivalled their own. In the intermixture of tragedy and comedy,
in the abandonment of the solemn uniformity of poetic diction for the
colloquial language of real life, the use of unexpected incidents, the
complication of their plots and intrigues, the dramas of England and
Spain are remarkably alike; but the likeness seems rather to have sprung
from a similarity in the circumstances to which both owed their rise,
than from any direct connexion of the one with the other. The real
origin of the English drama, in fact, lay not in any influence from
without but in the influence of England itself. The temper of the nation
was dramatic. Ever since the Reformation, the Palace, the Inns of Court,
and the University had been vying with one another in the production of
plays; and so early was their popularity that even under Henry the
Eighth it was found necessary to create a "Master of the Revels" to
supervise them. Every progress of Elizabeth from shire to shire was a
succession of shows and interludes. Dian with her nymphs met the Queen
as she returned from hunting; Love presented her with his golden arrow
as she passed through the gates of Norwich. From the earlier years of
her reign the new spirit of the Renascence had been pouring itself into
the rough mould of the Mystery Plays, whose allegorical virtues and
vices, or scriptural heroes and heroines, had handed on the spirit of
the drama through the Middle Ages. Adaptations from classical pieces
began to alternate with the purely religious "Moralities"; and an
attempt at a livelier style of expression and invention appeared in the
popular comedy of "Gammer Gurton's Needle"; while Sackville, Lord
Dorset, in his tragedy of "Gorbudoc" made a bold effort at sublimity of
diction, and introduced the use of blank verse as the vehicle of
dramatic dialogue.
[Sidenote: The theatre and the people.]
But it was not to these tentative efforts of scholars and nobles that
the English stage was really indebted for the amazing outburst of genius
which dates from the year 1576, when "the Earl of Leicester's servants"
erected the first public theatre in Blackfriars. It was the people
itself that created its Stage. The theatre indeed was commonly only the
courtyard of an inn, or a mere booth such as is still seen at a country
fair. The bulk of the audience sate beneath the open sky in the "pit" or
yard; a few covered seats in the galleries which ran round it formed the
boxes of the wealthier spectators, while patrons and nobles found seats
upon the actual boards. All the appliances were of the roughest sort: a
few flowers served to indicate a garden, crowds and armies were
represented by a dozen scene-shifters with swords and bucklers, heroes
rode in and out on hobby-horses, and a scroll on a post told whether the
scene was at Athens or London. There were no female actors, and the
grossness which startles us in words which fell from women's lips took
a different colour when every woman's part was acted by a boy. But
difficulties such as these were more than compensated by the popular
character of the drama itself. Rude as the theatre might be, all the
world was there. The stage was crowded with nobles and courtiers.
Apprentices and citizens thronged the benches in the yard below. The
rough mob of the pit inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid
transitions, the passionate energy, the reality, the lifelike medley and
confusion, the racy dialogue, the chat, the wit, the pathos, the
sublimity, the rant and buffoonery, the coarse horrors and vulgar
bloodshedding, the immense range over all classes of society, the
intimacy with the foulest as well as the fairest developements of human
temper, which characterized the English stage. The new drama represented
"the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure." The people
itself brought its nobleness and its vileness to the boards. No stage
was ever so human, no poetic life so intense. Wild, reckless, defiant of
all past tradition, of all conventional laws, the English dramatists
owned no teacher, no source of poetic inspiration, but the people
itself.
[Sidenote: The early dramatists.]
Few events in our literary history are so startling as this sudden rise
of the Elizabethan drama. The first public theatre was erected only in
the middle of the Queen's reign. Before the close of it eighteen
theatres existed in London alone. Fifty dramatic poets, many of the
first order, appeared in the fifty years which precede the closing of
the theatres by the Puritans; and great as is the number of their works
which have perished, we still possess a hundred dramas, all written
within this period, and of which at least a half are excellent. A glance
at their authors shows us that the intellectual quickening of the age
had now reached the mass of the people. Almost all of the new
playwrights were fairly educated, and many were university men. But
instead of courtly singers of the Sidney and Spenser sort we see the
advent of the "poor scholar." The earlier dramatists, such as Nash,
Peele, Kyd, Greene, or Marlowe, were for the most part poor, and
reckless in their poverty; wild livers, defiant of law or common fame,
in revolt against the usages and religion of their day, "atheists" in
general repute, "holding Moses for a juggler," haunting the brothel and
the alehouse, and dying starved or in tavern brawls. But with their
appearance began the Elizabethan drama. The few plays which have reached
us of an earlier date are either cold imitations of the classical and
Italian comedy, or rude farces like "Ralph Roister Doister," or
tragedies such as "Gorbudoc" where, poetic as occasional passages may
be, there is little promise of dramatic developement. But in the year
which preceded the coming of the Armada the whole aspect of the stage
suddenly changes, and the new dramatists range themselves around two
men of very different genius, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe.
[Sidenote: Greene.]
Of Greene, as the creator of our lighter English prose, we have already
spoken. But his work as a poet was of yet greater importance, for his
perception of character and the relations of social life, the
playfulness of his fancy, and the liveliness of his style, exerted an
influence on his contemporaries which was equalled by that of none but
Marlowe and Peele. In spite of the rudeness of his plots and the unequal
character of his work, Greene must be regarded as the creator of our
modern comedy. No figure better paints the group of young playwrights.
He left Cambridge to travel through Italy and Spain, and to bring back
the debauchery of the one and the scepticism of the other. In the words
of remorse he wrote before his death he paints himself as a drunkard and
a roysterer, winning money only by ceaseless pamphlets and plays to
waste it on wine and women, and drinking the cup of life to the dregs.
Hell and the after-world were the butts of his ceaseless mockery. If he
had not feared the judges of the Queen's Courts more than he feared God,
he said in bitter jest, he should often have turned cutpurse. He
married, and loved his wife, but she was soon deserted; and the wretched
profligate found himself again plunged into excesses which he loathed,
though he could not live without them. But wild as was the life of
Greene, his pen was pure. He is steadily on virtue's side in the love
pamphlets and novelettes he poured out in endless succession, and whose
plots were dramatized by the school which gathered round him.
[Sidenote: Marlowe.]
The life of Marlowe was as riotous, his scepticism even more daring,
than the life and scepticism of Greene. His early death alone saved him
in all probability from a prosecution for atheism. He was charged with
calling Moses a juggler, and with boasting that, if he undertook to
write a new religion, it should be a better religion than the
Christianity he saw around him. But he stood far ahead of his fellows as
a creator of English tragedy. Born in 1564 at the opening of Elizabeth's
reign, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, but educated at Cambridge,
Marlowe burst on the world in the year which preceded the triumph over
the Armada with a play which at once wrought a revolution in the English
stage. Bombastic and extravagant as it was, and extravagance reached its
height in a scene where captive kings, the "pampered jades of Asia,"
drew their conqueror's car across the stage, "Tamburlaine" not only
indicated the revolt of the new drama against the timid inanities of
Euphuism, but gave an earnest of that imaginative daring, the secret of
which Marlowe was to bequeath to the playwrights who followed him. He
perished at thirty in a shameful brawl, but in his brief career he had
struck the grander notes of the coming drama. His Jew of Malta was the
herald of Shylock. He opened in "Edward the Second" the series of
historical plays which gave us "Caesar" and "Richard the Third." His
"Faustus" is riotous, grotesque, and full of a mad thirst for pleasure,
but it was the first dramatic attempt to touch the problem of the
relations of man to the unseen world. Extravagant, unequal, stooping
even to the ridiculous in his cumbrous and vulgar buffoonery, there is a
force in Marlowe, a conscious grandeur of tone, a range of passion,
which sets him above all his contemporaries save one. In the higher
qualities of imagination, as in the majesty and sweetness of his "mighty
line," he is inferior to Shakspere alone.
[Sidenote: Shakspere.]
A few daring jests, a brawl, and a fatal stab, make up the life of
Marlowe; but even details such as these are wanting to the life of
William Shakspere. Of hardly any great poet indeed do we know so little.
For the story of his youth we have only one or two trifling legends, and
these almost certainly false. Not a single letter or characteristic
saying, not one of the jests "spoken at the Mermaid," hardly a single
anecdote, remain to illustrate his busy life in London. His look and
figure in later age have been preserved by the bust over his tomb at
Stratford, and a hundred years after his death he was still remembered
in his native town; but the minute diligence of the enquirers of the
Georgian time was able to glean hardly a single detail, even of the most
trivial order, which could throw light upon the years of retirement
before his death. It is owing perhaps to the harmony and unity of his
temper that no salient peculiarity seems to have left its trace on the
memory of his contemporaries; it is the very grandeur of his genius
which precludes us from discovering any personal trait in his works. His
supposed self-revelation in the Sonnets is so obscure that only a few
outlines can be traced even by the boldest conjecture. In his dramas he
is all his characters, and his characters range over all mankind. There
is not one, or the act or word of one, that we can identify personally
with the poet himself.
[Sidenote: His actor's life.]
He was born in 1564, the sixth year of Elizabeth's reign, twelve years
after the birth of Spenser, three years later than the birth of Bacon.
Marlowe was of the same age with Shakspere: Greene probably a few years
older. His father, a glover and small farmer of Stratford-on-Avon, was
forced by poverty to lay down his office of alderman as his son reached
boyhood; and stress of poverty may have been the cause which drove
William Shakspere, who was already married at eighteen to a wife older
than himself, to London and the stage. His life in the capital can
hardly have begun later than in his twenty-third year, the memorable
year which followed Sidney's death, which preceded the coming of the
Armada, and which witnessed the production of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine."
If we take the language of the Sonnets as a record of his personal
feeling, his new profession as an actor stirred in him only the
bitterness of self-contempt. He chides with Fortune "that did not better
for my life provide than public means that public manners breed"; he
writhes at the thought that he has "made himself a motley to the view"
of the gaping apprentices in the pit of Blackfriars. "Thence comes it,"
he adds, "that my name receives a brand, and almost thence my nature is
subdued to that it works in." But the application of the words is a more
than doubtful one. In spite of petty squabbles with some of his dramatic
rivals at the outset of his career, the genial nature of the newcomer
seems to have won him a general love among his fellows. In 1592, while
still a mere actor and fitter of old plays for the stage, a
fellow-playwright, Chettle, answered Greene's attack on him in words of
honest affection: "Myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than he
excellent in the quality he professes: besides, divers of worship have
reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his
facetious grace in writing, that approves his art." His partner Burbage
spoke of him after death as a "worthy friend and fellow"; and Jonson
handed down the general tradition of his time when he described him as
"indeed honest, and of an open and free nature."
[Sidenote: His early work.]
His profession as an actor was at any rate of essential service to him
in the poetic career which he soon undertook. Not only did it give him
the sense of theatrical necessities which makes his plays so effective
on the boards, but it enabled him to bring his pieces as he wrote them
to the test of the stage. If there is any truth in Jonson's statement
that Shakspere never blotted a line, there is no justice in the censure
which it implies on his carelessness or incorrectness. The conditions of
poetic publication were in fact wholly different from those of our own
day. A drama remained for years in manuscript as an acting piece,
subject to continual revision and amendment; and every rehearsal and
representation afforded hints for change which we know the young poet
was far from neglecting. The chance which has preserved an earlier
edition of his "Hamlet" shows in what an unsparing way Shakspere could
recast even the finest products of his genius. Five years after the
supposed date of his arrival in London he was already famous as a
dramatist. Greene speaks bitterly of him under the name of "Shakescene"
as an "upstart crow beautified with our feathers," a sneer which points
either to his celebrity as an actor or to his preparation for loftier
flights by fitting pieces of his predecessors for the stage. He was
soon partner in the theatre, actor, and playwright; and another
nickname, that of "Johannes Factotum" or Jack-of-all-Trades, shows his
readiness to take all honest work which came to hand.
[Sidenote: His first plays.]
With his publication in 1593 of the poem of "Venus and Adonis," "the
first heir of my invention," as Shakspere calls it, the period of
independent creation fairly began. The date of its publication was a
very memorable one. The "Faerie Queen" had appeared only three years
before, and had placed Spenser without a rival at the head of English
poetry. On the other hand the two leading dramatists of the time passed
at this moment suddenly away. Greene died in poverty and self-reproach
in the house of a poor shoemaker. "Doll," he wrote to the wife he had
abandoned, "I charge thee, by the love of our youth and by my soul's
rest, that thou wilt see this man paid; for if he and his wife had not
succoured me I had died in the streets." "Oh that a year were granted me
to live," cried the young poet from his bed of death, "but I must die,
of every man abhorred! Time, loosely spent, will not again be won! My
time is loosely spent--and I undone!" A year later the death of Marlowe
in a street brawl removed the only rival whose powers might have
equalled Shakspere's own. He was now about thirty; and the twenty-three
years which elapsed between the appearance of the "Adonis" and his
death were filled with a series of masterpieces. Nothing is more
characteristic of his genius than its incessant activity. Through the
five years which followed the publication of his early poem he seems to
have produced on an average two dramas a year. When we attempt however
to trace the growth and progress of the poet's mind in the order of his
plays we are met in the case of many of them by an absence of certain
information as to the dates of their appearance. The facts on which
enquiry has to build are extremely few. "Venus and Adonis," with the
"Lucrece," must have been written before their publication in 1593-4;
the Sonnets, though not published till 1609, were known in some form
among his private friends as early as 1598. His earlier plays are
defined by a list given in the "Wit's Treasury" of Francis Meres in
1598, though the omission of a play from a casual catalogue of this kind
would hardly warrant us in assuming its necessary non-existence at the
time. The works ascribed to him at his death are fixed in the same
approximate fashion through the edition published by his fellow-actors.
Beyond these meagre facts and our knowledge of the publication of a few
of his dramas in his lifetime all is uncertain; and the conclusions
which have been drawn from these, and from the dramas themselves, as
well as from assumed resemblances with, or references to, other plays of
the period, can only be accepted as approximations to the truth.
[Sidenote: His earlier comedies.]
The bulk of his lighter comedies and historical dramas can be assigned
with fair probability to a period from about 1593, when Shakspere was
known as nothing more than an adapter, to 1598, when they are mentioned
in the list of Meres. They bear on them indeed the stamp of youth. In
"Love's Labour's Lost" the young playwright, fresh from his own
Stratford, its "daisies pied and violets blue," with the gay bright
music of its country ditties still in his ears, flings himself into the
midst of the brilliant England which gathered round Elizabeth, busying
himself as yet for the most part with the surface of it, with the
humours and quixotisms, the wit and the whim, the unreality, the
fantastic extravagance, which veiled its inner nobleness. Country-lad as
he is, Shakspere shows himself master of it all; he can patter euphuism
and exchange quip and repartee with the best; he is at home in their
pedantries and affectations, their brag and their rhetoric, their
passion for the fantastic and the marvellous. He can laugh as heartily
at the romantic vagaries of the courtly world in which he finds himself
as at the narrow dulness, the pompous triflings, of the country world
which he has left behind him. But he laughs frankly and without malice;
he sees the real grandeur of soul which underlies all this quixotry and
word-play; and owns with a smile that when brought face to face with
the facts of human life, with the suffering of man or the danger of
England, these fops have in them the stuff of heroes. He shares the
delight in existence, the pleasure in sheer living, which was so marked
a feature of the age; he enjoys the mistakes, the contrasts, the
adventures, of the men about him; his fun breaks almost riotously out in
the practical jokes of the "Taming of the Shrew" and the endless
blunderings of the "Comedy of Errors." In these earlier efforts his work
had been marked by little poetic elevation, or by passion. But the easy
grace of the dialogue, the dexterous management of a complicated story,
the genial gaiety of his tone, and the music of his verse promised a
master of social comedy as soon as Shakspere turned from the superficial
aspects of the world about him to find a new delight in the character
and actions of men. The interest of human character was still fresh and
vivid; the sense of individuality drew a charm from its novelty; and
poet and essayist were busy alike in sketching the "humours" of mankind.
Shakspere sketched with his fellows. In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona"
his painting of manners was suffused by a tenderness and ideal beauty
which formed an effective protest against the hard though vigorous
character-painting which the first success of Ben Jonson in "Every Man
in his Humour" brought at the time into fashion. But quick on these
lighter comedies followed two in which his genius started fully into
life. His poetic power, held in reserve till now, showed itself with a
splendid profusion in the brilliant fancies of the "Midsummer Night's
Dream"; and passion swept like a tide of resistless delight through
"Romeo and Juliet."
[Sidenote: His historical plays.]
Side by side however with these passionate dreams, these delicate
imaginings and piquant sketches of manners, had been appearing during
this short interval of intense activity a series of dramas which mark
Shakspere's relation to the new sense of patriotism, the more vivid
sense of national existence, national freedom, national greatness, which
gives its grandeur to the age of Elizabeth. England itself was now
becoming a source of literary interest to poet and prose-writer. Warner
in his "Albion's England," Daniel in his "Civil Wars," embalmed in verse
the record of her past; Drayton in his "Polyolbion" sang the fairness of
the land itself, the "tracts, mountains, forests, and other parts of
this renowned isle of Britain." The national pride took its highest
poetic form in the historical drama. No plays seem to have been more
popular from the earliest hours of the new stage than dramatic
representations of our history. Marlowe had shown in his "Edward the
Second" what tragic grandeur could be reached in this favourite field;
and, as we have seen, Shakspere had been led naturally towards it by his
earlier occupation as an adapter of stock pieces like "Henry the Sixth"
for the new requirements of the stage. He still to some extent followed
in plan the older plays on the subjects he selected, but in his
treatment of their themes he shook boldly off the yoke of the past. A
larger and deeper conception of human character than any of the old
dramatists had reached displayed itself in Richard the Third, in
Falstaff, or in Hotspur; while in Constance and Richard the Second the
pathos of human suffering was painted as even Marlowe had never dared to
paint it.
[Sidenote: His religious sympathies.]
No dramas have done so much for Shakspere's enduring popularity with his
countrymen as these historical plays. They have done more than all the
works of English historians to nourish in the minds of Englishmen a love
of and reverence for their country's past. When Chatham was asked where
he had read his English history he answered, "In the plays of
Shakspere." Nowhere could he have read it so well, for nowhere is the
spirit of our history so nobly rendered. If the poet's work echoes
sometimes our national prejudice and unfairness of temper, it is
instinct throughout with English humour, with our English love of hard
fighting, our English faith in goodness and in the doom that waits upon
triumphant evil, our English pity for the fallen. Shakspere is
Elizabethan to the core. He stood at the meeting-point of two great
epochs of our history. The age of the Renascence was passing into the
age of Puritanism. Rifts which were still little were widening every
hour, and threatening ruin to the fabric of Church and State which the
Tudors had built up. A new political world was rising into being; a
world healthier, more really national, but less picturesque, less wrapt
in the mystery and splendour that poets love. Great as were the faults
of Puritanism, it may fairly claim to be the first political system
which recognized the grandeur of the people as a whole. As great a
change was passing over the spiritual sympathies of men. A sterner
Protestantism was invigorating and ennobling life by its morality, its
seriousness, its intense conviction of God. But it was at the same time
hardening and narrowing it. The Bible was superseding Plutarch. The
"obstinate questionings" which haunted the finer souls of the Renascence
were being stereotyped into the theological formulas of the Puritan. The
sense of a divine omnipotence was annihilating man. The daring which
turned England into a people of "adventurers," the sense of
inexhaustible resources, the buoyant freshness of youth, the
intoxicating sense of beauty and joy, which created Sidney and Marlowe
and Drake, were passing away before the consciousness of evil and the
craving to order man's life aright before God.
From this new world of thought and feeling Shakspere stood aloof. Turn
as others might to the speculations of theology, man and man's nature
remained with him an inexhaustible subject of interest. Caliban was
among his latest creations. It is impossible to discover whether his
religious belief was Catholic or Protestant. It is hard indeed to say
whether he had any religious belief or no. The religious phrases which
are thinly scattered over his works are little more than expressions of
a distant and imaginative reverence. But on the deeper grounds of
religious faith his silence is significant. He is silent, and the doubt
of Hamlet deepens his silence, about the after-world. "To die," it may
be, was to him as it was to Claudio, "to go we know not whither." Often
as his questionings turn to the riddle of life and death he leaves it a
riddle to the last without heeding the common theological solutions
around him. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little
life is rounded with a sleep."
[Sidenote: His political sympathies.]
Nor were the political sympathies of the poet those of the coming time.
His roll of dramas is the epic of civil war. The Wars of the Roses fill
his mind, as they filled the mind of his contemporaries. It is not till
we follow him through the series of plays from "Richard the Second" to
"Henry the Eighth" that we realize how profoundly the memory of the
struggle between York and Lancaster had moulded the temper of the
people, how deep a dread of civil war, of baronial turbulence, of
disputes over the succession to the throne, it had left behind it. Men
had learned the horrors of the time from their fathers; they had drunk
in with their childhood the lesson that such a chaos of weakness and
misrule must never be risked again. From such a risk the Crown seemed
the one security. With Shakspere as with his fellow-countrymen the Crown
is still the centre and safeguard of the national life. His ideal
England is an England grouped around a noble king, a king such as his
own Henry the Fifth, devout, modest, simple as he is brave, but a lord
in battle, a born ruler of men, with a loyal people about him and his
enemies at his feet. Socially the poet reflects the aristocratic view of
social life which was shared by all the nobler spirits of the
Elizabethan time. Coriolanus is the embodiment of a great noble; and the
taunts which Shakspere hurls in play after play at the rabble only echo
the general temper of the Renascence. But he shows no sympathy with the
struggle of feudalism against the Crown. If he paints Hotspur with a
fire which proves how thoroughly he could sympathize with the rough,
bold temper of the baronage, he suffers him to fall unpitied before
Henry the Fourth. Apart however from the strength and justice of its
rule, royalty has no charm for him. He knows nothing of the "right
divine of kings to govern wrong" which became the doctrine of prelates
and courtiers in the age of the Stuarts. He shows in his "Richard the
Second" the doom that waits on a lawless despotism, as he denounces in
his "Richard the Third" the selfish and merciless ambition that severs
a ruler from his people. But the dread of misrule was a dim and distant
one. Shakspere had grown up under the reign of Elizabeth; he had known
no ruler save one who had cast a spell over the hearts of Englishmen.
His thoughts were absorbed, as those of the country were absorbed, in
the struggle for national existence which centred round the Queen. "King
John" is a trumpet-call to rally round Elizabeth in her fight for
England. Again a Pope was asserting his right to depose an English
sovereign and to loose Englishmen from their bond of allegiance. Again
political ambitions and civil discord woke at the call of religious war.
Again a foreign power was threatening England at the summons of Rome,
and hoping to master her with the aid of revolted Englishmen. The heat
of such a struggle as this left no time for the thought of civil
liberties. Shakspere casts aside the thought of the Charter to fix
himself on the strife of the stranger for England itself. What he sang
was the duty of patriotism, the grandeur of loyalty, the freedom of
England from Pope or Spaniard, its safety within its "water-walled
bulwark," if only its national union was secure. And now that the nation
was at one, now that he had seen in his first years of London life
Catholics as well as Protestants trooping to the muster at Tilbury and
hasting down Thames to the fight in the Channel, he could thrill his
hearers with the proud words that sum up the work of Elizabeth:--
"This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now that her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them! Nought shall make us rue
If England to itself do rest but true."
[Sidenote: Shakspere's prosperity.]
With this great series of historical and social dramas Shakspere had
passed far beyond his fellows whether as a tragedian or as a writer of
comedy. "The Muses," said Meres in 1598, "would speak with Shakspere's
fine-filed phrase, if they would speak English." His personal popularity
was now at its height. His pleasant temper and the vivacity of his wit
had drawn him early into contact with the young Earl of Southampton, to
whom his "Adonis" and "Lucrece" are dedicated; and the different tone of
the two dedications shows how rapidly acquaintance ripened into an
ardent friendship. Shakspere's wealth and influence too were growing
fast. He had property both in Stratford and London, and his
fellow-townsmen made him their suitor to Lord Burleigh for favours to be
bestowed on Stratford. He was rich enough to aid his father, and to buy
the house at Stratford which afterwards became his home. The tradition
that Elizabeth was so pleased with Falstaff in "Henry the Fourth" that
she ordered the poet to show her Falstaff in love--an order which
produced the "Merry Wives of Windsor"--whether true or false, proves his
repute as a playwright. As the group of earlier poets passed away, they
found successors in Marston, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, and Chapman,
and above all in Ben Jonson. But none of these could dispute the
supremacy of Shakspere. The verdict of Meres that "Shakspere among the
English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage," represented
the general feeling of his contemporaries. He was at last fully master
of the resources of his art. The "Merchant of Venice" marks the
perfection of his developement as a dramatist in the completeness of its
stage effect, the ingenuity of its incidents, the ease of its movement,
the beauty of its higher passages, the reserve and self-control with
which its poetry is used, the conception and unfolding of character, and
above all the mastery with which character and event are grouped round
the figure of Shylock. Master as he is of his art, the poet's temper is
still young; the "Merry Wives of Windsor" is a burst of gay laughter;
and laughter more tempered, yet full of a sweeter fascination, rings
round us in "As You Like It."
[Sidenote: His gloom.]
But in the melancholy and meditative Jaques of the last drama we feel
the touch of a new and graver mood. Youth, so full and buoyant in the
poet till now, seems to have passed almost suddenly away. Though
Shakspere had hardly reached forty, in one of his Sonnets which cannot
have been written at a much later time than this there are indications
that he already felt the advance of premature age. And at this moment
the outer world suddenly darkened around him. The brilliant circle of
young nobles whose friendship he had shared was broken up in 1601 by the
political storm which burst in a mad struggle of the Earl of Essex for
power. Essex himself fell on the scaffold; his friend and Shakspere's
idol, Southampton, passed a prisoner into the Tower; Herbert Lord
Pembroke, a younger patron of the poet, was banished from the Court.
While friends were thus falling and hopes fading without, Shakspere's
own mind seems to have been going through a phase of bitter suffering
and unrest. In spite of the ingenuity of commentators, it is difficult
and even impossible to derive any knowledge of Shakspere's inner history
from the Sonnets; "the strange imagery of passion which passes over the
magic mirror," it has been finely said, "has no tangible evidence before
or behind it." But its mere passing is itself an evidence of the
restlessness and agony within. The change in the character of his dramas
gives a surer indication of his change of mood. The fresh joyousness,
the keen delight in life and in man, which breathes through Shakspere's
early work disappears in comedies such as "Troilus" and "Measure for
Measure." Disappointment, disillusion, a new sense of the evil and
foulness that underlie so much of human life, a loss of the old frank
trust in its beauty and goodness, threw their gloom over these
comedies. Failure seems everywhere. In "Julius Caesar" the virtue of
Brutus is foiled by its ignorance of and isolation from mankind; in
Hamlet even penetrating intellect proves helpless for want of the
capacity of action; the poison of Iago taints the love of Desdemona and
the grandeur of Othello; Lear's mighty passion battles helplessly
against the wind and the rain; a woman's weakness of frame dashes the
cup of her triumph from the hand of Lady Macbeth; lust and
self-indulgence blast the heroism of Antony; pride ruins the nobleness
of Coriolanus.
[Sidenote: His passion plays.]
But the very struggle and self-introspection that these dramas betray
were to give a depth and grandeur to Shakspere's work such as it had
never known before. The age was one in which man's temper and powers
took a new range and energy. Sidney or Raleigh lived not one but a dozen
lives at once; the daring of the adventurer, the philosophy of the
scholar, the passion of the lover, the fanaticism of the saint, towered
into almost superhuman grandeur. Man became conscious of the immense
resources that lay within him, conscious of boundless powers that seemed
to mock the narrow world in which they moved. All through the age of the
Renascence one feels this impress of the gigantic, this giant-like
activity, this immense ambition and desire. The very bombast and
extravagance of the times reveal cravings and impulses before which
common speech broke down. It is this grandeur of humanity that finds
its poetic expression in the later work of Shakspere. As the poet
penetrated deeper and deeper into the recesses of the soul, he saw how
great and wondrous a thing was man. "What a piece of work is a man,"
cries Hamlet; "how noble in reason; how infinite in faculty; in form and
moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel; in
apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world; the paragon of
animals!" It is the wonder of man that spreads before us as the poet
pictures the wide speculation of Hamlet, the awful convulsion of a great
nature in Othello, the terrible storm in the soul of Lear which blends
with the very storm of the heavens themselves, the awful ambition that
nerved a woman's hand to dabble itself with the blood of a murdered
king, the reckless lust that "flung away a world for love." Amid the
terror and awe of these great dramas we learn something of the vast
forces of the age from which they sprang. The passion of Mary Stuart,
the ruthlessness of Alva, the daring of Drake, the chivalry of Sidney,
the range of thought and action in Raleigh or Elizabeth, come better
home to us as we follow the mighty series of tragedies which began in
"Hamlet" and ended in "Coriolanus."
[Sidenote: Bacon.]
Shakspere's last dramas, the three exquisite works in which he shows a
soul at rest with itself and with the world, "Cymbeline," "The
Tempest," "Winter's Tale," were written in the midst of ease and
competence, in a house at Stratford to which he withdrew a few years
after the death of Elizabeth. In them we lose all relation with the
world or the time and pass into a region of pure poetry. It is in this
peaceful and gracious close that the life of Shakspere contrasts most
vividly with that of his greatest contemporary. If the imaginative
resources of the new England were seen in the creators of Hamlet and the
Faerie Queen, its purely intellectual capacity, its vast command over
the stores of human knowledge, the amazing sense of its own powers with
which it dealt with them, were seen in the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon
was born in 1561, three years before the birth of Shakspere. He was the
younger son of a Lord Keeper, as well as the nephew of Lord Burleigh,
and even in childhood his quickness and sagacity won the favour of the
Queen. Elizabeth "delighted much to confer with him, and to prove him
with questions: unto which he delivered himself with that gravity and
maturity above his years that her Majesty would often term him 'the
young Lord Keeper.'" Even as a boy at college he expressed his dislike
of the Aristotelian philosophy, as "a philosophy only strong for
disputations and contentions but barren of the production of works for
the benefit of the life of man." As a law student of twenty-one he
sketched in a tract on the "Greatest Birth of Time" the system of
inductive enquiry which he was already prepared to substitute for it.
The speculations of the young thinker however were interrupted by his
hopes of Court success. But these were soon dashed to the ground. He was
left poor by his father's death; the ill-will of the Cecils barred his
advancement with the Queen: and a few years before Shakspere's arrival
in London Bacon entered as a barrister at Gray's Inn. He soon became one
of the most successful lawyers of the time. At twenty-three Bacon was a
member of the House of Commons, and his judgement and eloquence at once
brought him to the front. "The fear of every man that heard him was lest
he should make an end," Ben Jonson tells us. The steady growth of his
reputation was quickened in 1597 by the appearance of his "Essays," a
work remarkable, not merely for the condensation of its thought and its
felicity and exactness of expression, but for the power with which it
applied to human life that experimental analysis which Bacon was at a
later time to make the key of Science.
His fame at once became great at home and abroad, but with this nobler
fame Bacon could not content himself. He was conscious of great powers
as well as great aims for the public good: and it was a time when such
aims could hardly be realized save through the means of the Crown. But
political employment seemed farther off than ever. At the outset of his
career in Parliament he irritated Elizabeth by a firm opposition to her
demand of a subsidy; and though the offence was atoned for by profuse
apologies and by the cessation of all further resistance to the policy
of the Court, the law offices of the Crown were more than once refused
to him, and it was only after the publication of his "Essays" that he
could obtain some slight promotion as a Queen's Counsel. The moral
weakness which more and more disclosed itself is the best justification
of the Queen in her reluctance--a reluctance so greatly in contrast with
her ordinary course--to bring the wisest head in her realm to her
Council-board. The men whom Elizabeth employed were for the most part
men whose intellect was directed by a strong sense of public duty. Their
reverence for the Queen, strangely exaggerated as it may seem to us, was
guided and controlled by an ardent patriotism and an earnest sense of
religion; and with all their regard for the royal prerogative, they
never lost their regard for the law. The grandeur and originality of
Bacon's intellect parted him from men like these quite as much as the
bluntness of his moral perceptions. In politics, as in science, he had
little reverence for the past. Law, constitutional privileges, or
religion, were to him simply means of bringing about certain ends of
good government; and if these ends could be brought about in shorter
fashion he saw only pedantry in insisting on more cumbrous means. He had
great social and political ideas to realize, the reform and codification
of the law, the civilization of Ireland, the purification of the Church,
the union--at a later time--of Scotland and England, educational
projects, projects of material improvement, and the like; and the direct
and shortest way of realizing these ends was, in Bacon's eyes, the use
of the power of the Crown. But whatever charm such a conception of the
royal power might have for her successor, it had little charm for
Elizabeth; and to the end of her reign Bacon was foiled in his efforts
to rise in her service.
[Sidenote: The Novum Organum.]
Political activity however and Court intrigue left room in his mind for
the philosophical speculation which had begun with his earliest years.
Amidst debates in Parliament and flatteries in the closet Bacon had been
silently framing a new philosophy. It made its first decisive appearance
after the final disappointment of his hopes from Elizabeth in the
publication of the "Advancement of Learning." The close of this work
was, in his own words, "a general and faithful perambulation of
learning, with an enquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste and not
improved and converted by the industry of man; to the end that such a
plot, made and recorded to memory, may both minister light to any public
designation and also serve to excite voluntary endeavours." It was only
by such a survey, he held, that men could be turned from useless
studies, or ineffectual means of pursuing more useful ones, and directed
to the true end of knowledge as "a rich storehouse for the glory of the
Creator and the relief of man's estate." The work was in fact the
preface to a series of treatises which were intended to be built up into
an "Instauratio Magna," which its author was never destined to complete,
and of which the parts that we possess were published in the following
reign. The "Cogitata et Visa" was a first sketch of the "Novum Organum,"
which in its complete form was presented to James in 1621. A year later
Bacon produced his "Natural and Experimental History." This, with the
"Novum Organum" and the "Advancement of Learning," was all of his
projected "Instauratio Magna" which he actually finished; and even of
this portion we have only part of the last two divisions. The "Ladder of
the Understanding," which was to have followed these and led up from
experience to science, the "Anticipations," or provisional hypotheses
for the enquiries of the new philosophy, and the closing account of
"Science in Practice" were left for posterity to bring to completion.
"We may, as we trust," said Bacon, "make no despicable beginnings. The
destinies of the human race must complete it, in such a manner perhaps
as men looking only at the present world would not readily conceive.
For upon this will depend, not only a speculative good, but all the
fortunes of mankind, and all their power."
When we turn from words like these to the actual work which Bacon did,
it is hard not to feel a certain disappointment. He did not thoroughly
understand the older philosophy which he attacked. His revolt from the
waste of human intelligence which he conceived to be owing to the
adoption of a false method of investigation blinded him to the real
value of deduction as an instrument of discovery; and he was encouraged
in his contempt for it as much by his own ignorance of mathematics as by
the non-existence in his day of the great deductive sciences of physics
and astronomy. Nor had he a more accurate prevision of the method of
modern science. The inductive process to which he exclusively directed
men's attention bore no fruit in Bacon's hands. The "art of
investigating nature" on which he prided himself has proved useless for
scientific purposes, and would be rejected by modern investigators.
Where he was on a more correct track he can hardly be regarded as
original. "It may be doubted," says Dugald Stewart, "whether any one
important rule with regard to the true method of investigation be
contained in his works of which no hint can be traced in those of his
predecessors." Not only indeed did Bacon fail to anticipate the methods
of modern science, but he even rejected the great scientific
discoveries of his own day. He set aside with the same scorn the
astronomical theory of Copernicus and the magnetic investigations of
Gilbert. The contempt seems to have been fully returned by the
scientific workers of his day. "The Lord Chancellor wrote on science,"
said Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, "like a
Lord Chancellor."
In spite however of his inadequate appreciation either of the old
philosophy or the new, the almost unanimous voice of later ages has
attributed, and justly attributed, to the "Novum Organum" a decisive
influence on the developement of modern science. If he failed in
revealing the method of experimental research, Bacon was the first to
proclaim the existence of a Philosophy of Science, to insist on the
unity of knowledge and enquiry throughout the physical world, to give
dignity by the large and noble temper in which he treated them to the
petty details of experiment in which science had to begin, to clear a
way for it by setting scornfully aside the traditions of the past, to
claim for it its true rank and value, and to point to the enormous
results which its culture would bring in increasing the power and
happiness of mankind. In one respect his attitude was in the highest
degree significant. The age in which he lived was one in which theology
was absorbing the intellectual energy of the world. He was the servant
too of a king with whom theological studies superseded all others. But
if he bowed in all else to James, Bacon would not, like Casaubon, bow in
this. He would not even, like Descartes, attempt to transform theology
by turning reason into a mode of theological demonstration. He stood
absolutely aloof from it. Though as a politician he did not shrink from
dealing with such subjects as Church Reform, he dealt with them simply
as matters of civil polity. But from his exhaustive enumeration of the
branches of human knowledge he excluded theology, and theology alone.
His method was of itself inapplicable to a subject where the premisses
were assumed to be certain, and the results known. His aim was to seek
for unknown results by simple experiment. It was against received
authority and accepted tradition in matters of enquiry that his whole
system protested; what he urged was the need of making belief rest
strictly on proof, and proof rest on the conclusions drawn from evidence
by reason. But in theology--all theologians asserted--reason played but
a subordinate part. "If I proceed to treat of it," said Bacon, "I shall
step out of the bark of human reason, and enter into the ship of the
Church. Neither will the stars of philosophy, which have hitherto so
nobly shone on us, any longer give us their light."
The certainty indeed of conclusions on such subjects was out of harmony
with the grandest feature of Bacon's work, his noble confession of the
liability of every enquirer to error. It was his especial task to warn
men against the "vain shows" of knowledge which had so long hindered any
real advance in it, the "idols" of the Tribe, the Den, the Forum, and
the Theatre, the errors which spring from the systematizing spirit which
pervades all masses of men, or from individual idiosyncrasies, or from
the strange power of words and phrases over the mind, or from the
traditions of the past. Nor were the claims of theology easily to be
reconciled with the position which he was resolute to assign to natural
science. "Through all those ages," Bacon says, "wherein men of genius or
learning principally or even moderately flourished, the smallest part of
human industry has been spent on natural philosophy, though this ought
to be esteemed as the great mother of the sciences; for all the rest, if
torn from this root, may perhaps be polished and formed for use, but can
receive little increase." It was by the adoption of the method of
inductive enquiry which physical science was to make its own, and by
basing enquiry on grounds which physical science could supply, that the
moral sciences, ethics and politics, could alone make any real advance.
"Let none expect any great promotion of the sciences, especially in
their effective part, unless natural philosophy be drawn out to
particular sciences; and, again, unless these particular sciences be
brought back again to natural philosophy. From this defect it is that
astronomy, optics, music, many mechanical arts, and (what seems
stranger) even moral and civil philosophy and logic rise but little
above the foundations, and only skim over the varieties and surfaces of
things." It was this lofty conception of the position and destiny of
natural science which Bacon was the first to impress upon mankind at
large. The age was one in which knowledge was passing to fields of
enquiry which had till then been unknown, in which Kepler and Galileo
were creating modern astronomy, in which Descartes was revealing the
laws of motion, and Harvey the circulation of the blood. But to the mass
of men this great change was all but imperceptible; and it was the
energy, the profound conviction, the eloquence of Bacon which first
called the attention of mankind as a whole to the power and importance
of physical research. It was he who by his lofty faith in the results
and victories of the new philosophy nerved its followers to a zeal and
confidence equal to his own. It was he above all who gave dignity to the
slow and patient processes of investigation, of experiment, of
comparison, to the sacrifice of hypothesis to fact, to the single aim
after truth, which was to be the law of modern science.
[Sidenote: Advance of the Parliament.]
While England thus became "a nest of singing birds," while Bacon was
raising the lofty fabric of his philosophical speculation, the people
itself was waking to a new sense of national freedom. Elizabeth saw the
forces, political and religious, which she had stubbornly held in check
for half a century pressing on her irresistibly. In spite of the rarity
of its assemblings, in spite of high words and imprisonment and
dexterous management, the Parliament had quietly gained a power which,
at her accession, the Queen could never have dreamed of its possessing.
Step by step the Lower House had won the freedom of its members from
arrest save by its own permission, the right of punishing and expelling
members for crimes committed within its walls, and of determining all
matters relating to elections. The more important claim of freedom of
speech had brought on from time to time a series of petty conflicts in
which Elizabeth generally gave way. But on this point the Commons still
shrank from any consistent repudiation of the Queen's assumption of
control. A bold protest of Peter Wentworth against her claim to exercise
such a control in 1575 was met indeed by the House itself with his
committal to the Tower; and the bolder questions which he addressed to
the Parliament of 1588, "Whether this Council is not a place for every
member of the same freely and without control, by bill or speech, to
utter any of the griefs of the Commonwealth," brought on him a fresh
imprisonment at the hands of the Council, which lasted till the
dissolution of the Parliament and with which the Commons declined to
interfere. But while vacillating in its assertion of the rights of
individual members, the House steadily claimed for itself a right to
discuss even the highest matters of State. Three great subjects, the
succession, the Church, and the regulation of trade, had been regarded
by every Tudor sovereign as lying exclusively within the competence of
the Crown. But Parliament had again and again asserted its right to
consider the succession. It persisted in spite of censure and rebuff in
presenting schemes of ecclesiastical reform. And three years before
Elizabeth's death it dealt boldly with matters of trade. Complaints made
in 1571 of the licences and monopolies by which internal and external
commerce was fettered were repressed by a royal reprimand as matters
neither pertaining to the Commons nor within the compass of their
understanding. When the subject was again stirred nearly twenty years
afterwards, Sir Edward Hoby was sharply rebuked by "a great personage"
for his complaint of the illegal exactions made by the Exchequer. But
the bill which he promoted was sent up to the Lords in spite of this,
and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the storm of popular indignation
which had been roused by the growing grievance nerved the Commons, in
1601, to a decisive struggle. It was in vain that the ministers opposed
a bill for the Abolition of Monopolies, and after four days of vehement
debate the tact of Elizabeth taught her to give way. She acted with her
usual ability, declared her previous ignorance of the existence of the
evil, thanked the House for its interference, and quashed at a single
blow every monopoly that she had granted.
[Sidenote: Growth of Puritanism.]
Dexterous as was Elizabeth's retreat, the defeat was none the less a
real one. Political freedom was proving itself again the master in the
long struggle with the Crown. Nor in her yet fiercer struggle against
religious freedom could Elizabeth look forward to any greater success.
The sharp suppression of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets was far from
damping the courage of the Presbyterians. Cartwright, who had been
appointed by Lord Leicester to the mastership of an hospital at Warwick,
was bold enough to organize his system of Church discipline among the
clergy of that county and of Northamptonshire. His example was widely
followed; and the general gatherings of the whole ministerial body of
the clergy and the smaller assemblies for each diocese or shire, which
in the Presbyterian scheme bore the name of Synods and Classes, began to
be held in many parts of England for the purposes of debate and
consultation. The new organization was quickly suppressed, but
Cartwright was saved from the banishment which Whitgift demanded by a
promise of submission, and his influence steadily widened. With
Presbyterianism itself indeed Elizabeth was strong enough to deal. Its
dogmatism and bigotry were opposed to the better temper of the age, and
it never took any popular hold on England. But if Presbyterianism was
limited to a few, Puritanism, the religious temper which sprang from a
deep conviction of the truth of Protestant doctrines and of the
falsehood of Catholicism, had become through the struggle with Spain and
the Papacy the temper of three-fourths of the English people. Unluckily
the policy of Elizabeth did its best to give to the Presbyterians the
support of Puritanism. Her establishment of the Ecclesiastical
Commission had given fresh life and popularity to the doctrines which it
aimed at crushing by drawing together two currents of opinion which were
in themselves perfectly distinct. The Presbyterian platform of Church
discipline had as yet been embraced by the clergy only, and by few among
the clergy. On the other hand, the wish for a reform in the Liturgy, the
dislike of "superstitious usages," of the use of the surplice, the sign
of the cross in baptism, the gift of the ring in marriage, the posture
of kneeling at the Lord's Supper, was shared by a large number of the
clergy and the laity alike. At the opening of Elizabeth's reign almost
all the higher Churchmen save Parker were opposed to them, and a motion
for their abolition in Convocation was lost but by a single vote. The
temper of the country gentlemen on this subject was indicated by that
of Parliament; and it was well known that the wisest of the Queen's
Councillors, Burleigh, Walsingham, and Knollys, were at one in this
matter with the gentry. If their common persecution did not wholly
succeed in fusing these two sections of religious opinion into one, it
at any rate gained for the Presbyterians a general sympathy on the part
of the Puritans, which raised them from a clerical clique into a popular
party.
[Sidenote: Philip and Ireland.]
But if Elizabeth's task became more difficult at home, the last years of
her reign were years of splendour and triumph abroad. The overthrow of
Philip's hopes in France had been made more bitter by the final
overthrow of his hopes at sea. In 1596 his threat of a fresh Armada was
met by the daring descent of an English force upon Cadiz. The town was
plundered and burned to the ground; thirteen vessels of war were fired
in its harbour, and the stores accumulated for the expedition utterly
destroyed. In spite of this crushing blow a Spanish fleet gathered in
the following year and set sail for the English coast; but as in the
case of its predecessor storms proved more fatal than the English guns,
and the ships were wrecked and almost destroyed in the Bay of Biscay.
Meanwhile whatever hopes remained of subjecting the Low Countries were
destroyed by the triumph of Henry of Navarre. A triple league of France,
England, and the Netherlands left Elizabeth secure to the eastward; and
the only quarter in which Philip could now strike a blow at her was the
great dependency of England in the west. Since the failure of the
Spanish force at Smerwick the power of the English government had been
recognized everywhere throughout Ireland. But it was a power founded
solely on terror, and the outrages and exactions of the soldiery who had
been flushed with rapine and bloodshed in the south sowed during the
years which followed the reduction of Munster the seeds of a revolt more
formidable than any which Elizabeth had yet encountered. The tribes of
Ulster, divided by the policy of Sidney, were again united by a common
hatred of their oppressors; and in Hugh O'Neill they found a leader of
even greater ability than Shane himself. Hugh had been brought up at the
English court and was in manners and bearing an Englishman. He had been
rewarded for his steady loyalty in previous contests by a grant of the
earldom of Tyrone, and in his contest with a rival chieftain of his clan
he had secured aid from the government by an offer to introduce the
English laws and shire-system into his new country. But he was no sooner
undisputed master of the north than his tone gradually changed. Whether
from a long-formed plan, or from suspicion of English designs upon
himself, he at last took a position of open defiance.
[Sidenote: Revolt of Ulster.]
It was at the moment when the Treaty of Vervins and the wreck of the
second Armada freed Elizabeth's hands from the struggle with Spain that
the revolt under Hugh O'Neill broke the quiet which had prevailed since
the victories of Lord Grey. The Irish question again became the chief
trouble of the Queen. The tide of her recent triumphs seemed at first to
have turned. A defeat of the English forces in Tyrone caused a general
rising of the northern tribes, and a great effort made in 1599 for the
suppression of the growing revolt failed through the vanity and
disobedience, if not the treacherous complicity, of the Queen's
lieutenant, the young Earl of Essex. His successor, Lord Mountjoy, found
himself master on his arrival of only a few miles round Dublin. But in
three years the revolt was at an end. A Spanish force which landed to
support it at Kinsale was driven to surrender; a line of forts secured
the country as the English mastered it; all open opposition was crushed
out by the energy and the ruthlessness of the new Lieutenant; and a
famine which followed on his ravages completed the devastating work of
the sword. Hugh O'Neill was brought in triumph to Dublin; the Earl of
Desmond, who had again roused Munster into revolt, fled for refuge to
Spain; and the work of conquest was at last brought to a close.
[Sidenote: The last years of Elizabeth.]
The triumph of Mountjoy flung its lustre over the last days of
Elizabeth, but no outer triumph could break the gloom which gathered
round the dying Queen. Lonely as she had always been, her loneliness
deepened as she drew towards the grave. The statesmen and warriors of
her earlier days had dropped one by one from her Council-board.
Leicester had died in the year of the Armada; two years later Walsingham
followed him to the grave; in 1598 Burleigh himself passed away. Their
successors were watching her last moments, and intriguing for favour in
the coming reign. Her favourite, Lord Essex, not only courted favour
with James of Scotland, but brought him to suspect Robert Cecil, who had
succeeded his father at the Queen's Council-board, of designs against
his succession. The rivalry between the two ministers hurried Essex into
fatal projects which led to his failure in Ireland and to an insane
outbreak of revolt which brought him in 1601 to the block. But Cecil had
no sooner proved the victor in this struggle at Court than he himself
entered into a secret correspondence with the king of Scots. His action
was wise: it brought James again into friendly relations with the Queen;
and paved the way for a peaceful transfer of the crown. But hidden as
this correspondence was from Elizabeth, the suspicion of it only added
to her distrust. The troubles of the war in Ireland brought fresh cares
to the aged Queen. It drained her treasury. The old splendour of her
Court waned and disappeared. Only officials remained about her, "the
other of the Council and nobility estrange themselves by all occasions."
The love and reverence of the people itself lessened as they felt the
pressure and taxation of the war. Of old men had pressed to see the
Queen as if it were a glimpse of heaven. "In the year 1588," a bishop
tells us, who was then a country boy fresh come to town, "I did live at
the upper end of the Strand near St. Clement's church, when suddenly
there came a report to us (it was in December, much about five of the
clock at night, very dark) that the Queen was gone to Council, 'and if
you will see the Queen you must come quickly.' Then we all ran, when the
Court gates were set open, and no man did hinder us from coming in.
There we came, where there was a far greater company than was usually at
Lenten sermons; and when we had staid there an hour and that the yard
was full, there being a number of torches, the Queen came out in great
state. Then we cried, 'God save your Majesty! God save your Majesty!'
Then the Queen turned to us and said, 'God bless you all, my good
people!' Then we cried again, 'God bless your Majesty! God bless your
Majesty!' Then the Queen said again to us, 'You may well have a greater
prince, but you shall never have a more loving prince.' And so looking
one upon another a while the Queen departed. This wrought such an
impression on us, for shows and pageantry are ever best seen by
torchlight, that all the way long we did nothing but talk what an
admirable Queen she was, and how we would adventure our lives to do her
service." But now, as Elizabeth passed along in her progresses, the
people whose applause she courted remained cold and silent. The temper
of the age in fact was changing, and isolating her as it changed. Her
own England, the England which had grown up around her, serious, moral,
prosaic, shrank coldly from this brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child
of earth and the Renascence.
[Sidenote: Elizabeth's death.]
But if ministers and courtiers were counting on her death, Elizabeth had
no mind to die. She had enjoyed life as the men of her day enjoyed it,
and now that they were gone she clung to it with a fierce tenacity. She
hunted, she danced, she jested with her young favourites, she coquetted
and scolded and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had done at thirty. "The
Queen," wrote a courtier a few months before her death, "was never so
gallant these many years nor so set upon jollity." She persisted, in
spite of opposition, in her gorgeous progresses from country-house to
country-house. She clung to business as of old, and rated in her usual
fashion "one who minded not to giving up some matter of account." But
death crept on. Her face became haggard, and her frame shrank almost to
a skeleton. At last her taste for finery disappeared, and she refused to
change her dresses for a week together. A strange melancholy settled
down on her. "She held in her hand," says one who saw her in her last
days, "a golden cup, which she often put to her lips: but in truth her
heart seemed too full to need more filling." Gradually her mind gave
way. She lost her memory, the violence of her temper became unbearable,
her very courage seemed to forsake her. She called for a sword to lie
constantly beside her and thrust it from time to time through the arras,
as if she heard murderers stirring there. Food and rest became alike
distasteful. She sate day and night propped up with pillows on a stool,
her finger on her lip, her eyes fixed on the floor, without a word. If
she once broke the silence, it was with a flash of her old queenliness.
When Robert Cecil declared that she "must" go to bed the word roused her
like a trumpet. "Must!" she exclaimed; "is _must_ a word to be addressed
to princes? Little man, little man! thy father, if he had been alive,
durst not have used that word." Then, as her anger spent itself, she
sank into her old dejection. "Thou art so presumptuous," she said,
"because thou knowest I shall die." She rallied once more when the
ministers beside her bed named Lord Beauchamp, the heir to the Suffolk
claim, as a possible successor. "I will have no rogue's son," she cried
hoarsely, "in my seat." But she gave no sign, save a motion of the head,
at the mention of the king of Scots. She was in fact fast becoming
insensible; and early the next morning, on the twenty-fourth of March
1603, the life of Elizabeth, a life so great, so strange and lonely in
its greatness, ebbed quietly away.
BOOK VII
PURITAN ENGLAND
1603-1660
AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK VII
1603-1660
For the reign of James the First we have Camden's "Annals" of that king,
Goodman's "Court of King James I.," Weldon's "Secret History of the
Court of James I.," Roger Coke's "Detection," the correspondence in the
"Cabala," the letters published under the title of "The Court and Times
of James I.," the documents in Winwood's "Memorials of State," and the
reported proceedings of the last two Parliaments. The Camden Society has
published the correspondence of James with Cecil, and Walter Yonge's
"Diary." The letters and works of Bacon, now fully edited by Mr.
Spedding, are necessary for any true understanding of the period.
Hacket's "Life of Williams" and Harrington's "Nugae Antiquae" throw
valuable side-light on the politics of the time. But the Stuart system,
both at home and abroad, can only fairly be read by the light of the
state-papers of this and the following reign, calendars of which are now
being published by the Master of the Rolls. It is his employment of
these, as well as his own fairness and good sense, which gives value to
the series of works which Mr. Gardiner has devoted to this period; his
"History of England from the Accession of James the First," his "Prince
Charles and the Spanish Marriage," "England under the Duke of
Buckingham," and "The Personal Government of Charles the First." The
series has as yet been carried to 1637. To Mr. Gardiner also we owe the
publication, through the Camden Society, of reports of some of the
earlier Stuart Parliaments. Ranke's "History of England during the
Seventeenth Century" has the same documentary value as embodying the
substance of state-papers in both English and foreign archives, which
throw great light on the foreign politics of the Stuart kings. It covers
the whole period of Stuart rule. With the reign of Charles the First our
historical materials increase. For Laud we have his remarkable "Diary";
for Strafford the "Strafford Letters." Hallam has justly characterized
Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion" as belonging "rather to the class
of memoirs" than of histories; and the rigorous analysis of it by Ranke
shows the very different value of its various parts. Though the work
will always retain a literary interest from its nobleness of style and
the grand series of character-portraits which it embodies, the worth of
its account of all that preceded the war is almost destroyed by the
contrast between its author's conduct at the time and his later
description of the Parliament's proceedings, as well as by the
deliberate and malignant falsehood with which he has perverted the whole
action of his parliamentary opponents. With the outbreak of the war he
becomes of greater value, and he gives a good account of the Cornish
rising; but from the close of the first struggle his work becomes
tedious and unimportant. May's "History of the Long Parliament" is
fairly accurate and impartial; but the basis of any real account of it
must be found in its own proceedings as they have been preserved in the
notes of Sir Ralph Verney and Sir Simonds D'Ewes. The last remain
unpublished; but Mr. Forster has drawn much from them in his two works,
"The Grand Remonstrance" and "The Arrest of the Five Members." The
collections of state-papers by Rushworth and Nalson are indispensable
for this period. It is illustrated by a series of memoirs, of very
different degrees of value, such as those of Whitelock, Ludlow, Sir
Philip Warwick, Holles, and Major Hutchinson, as well as by works like
Mrs. Hutchinson's memoir of her husband, Baxter's "Autobiography," or
Sir Thomas Herbert's memoirs of Charles during his last two years. The
Diary of Nehemiah Wallington gives us the common life of Puritanism
during this troubled time. For Cromwell the primary authority is Mr.
Carlyle's "Life and Letters of Cromwell," an invaluable store of
documents, edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a
poet. Fairfax may be studied in the "Fairfax Correspondence," and in the
documents embodied in Mr. Clements Markham's life of him. Sprigge's
"Anglia Rediviva" gives an account of the New Model and its doings.
Thurlow's State Papers furnish an immense mass of documents for the
period of the Protectorate; and Burton's "Diary" gives an account of the
proceedings in the Protector's second Parliament. For Irish affairs we
have a vast store of materials in the Ormond papers and letters
collected by Carte; for Scotland we have "Baillie's Letters," Burnet's
"Lives of the Hamiltons," and Sir James Turner's "Memoir of the Scotch
Invasion." Among the general accounts of this reign we may name
Disraeli's "Commentaries of the Reign of Charles I." as prominent on one
side, Brodie's "History of the British Empire" and Godwin's "History of
the Commonwealth" on the other. Guizot in his three works on "Charles I.
and the Revolution," "Cromwell and the Protectorate," and "Richard
Cromwell and the Restoration," is accurate and impartial; and the
documents he has added are valuable for the foreign history of the time.
A good deal of information may be found in Forster's "Lives of the
Statesmen of the Commonwealth," and Sandford's "Illustrations of the
Great Rebellion."
CHAPTER I
ENGLAND AND PURITANISM
1603-1660
[Sidenote: England at the death of Elizabeth.]
The death of Elizabeth is one of the turning-points of English history.
The age of the Renascence and of the New Monarchy passed away with the
Queen. The whole face of the realm had been silently changing during the
later years of her reign. The dangers which had hitherto threatened our
national existence and our national unity had alike disappeared. The
kingdom which had been saved from ruin but fifty years before by the
jealousies of its neighbours now stood in the forefront of European
powers. France clung to its friendship. Spain trembled beneath its
blows. The Papacy had sullenly withdrawn from a fruitless strife with
the heretic island. The last of the Queen's labours had laid Ireland at
her feet, and her death knit Scotland to its ancient enemy by the tie of
a common king. Within England itself the change was as great. Religious
severance, the most terrible of national dangers, had been averted by
the patience and the ruthlessness of the Crown. The Catholics were weak
and held pitilessly down. The Protestant sectaries were hunted as
pitilessly from the realm. The ecclesiastical compromise of the Tudors
had at last won the adhesion of the country at large. Nor was the social
change less remarkable. The natural growth of wealth and a patient good
government had gradually put an end to all social anarchy. The dread of
feudal revolt had passed for ever away. The fall of the Northern Earls,
of Norfolk, and of Essex, had broken the last strength of the older
houses. The baronage had finally made way for a modern nobility, but
this nobility, sprung as it was from the court of the Tudors, and
dependent for its existence on the favour of the Crown, had none of that
traditional hold on the people at large which made the feudal lords so
formidable a danger to public order.
[Sidenote: Growth of social wealth.]
If the older claims of freedom had been waived in presence of the
dangers which so long beset even national existence, the disappearance
of these dangers brought naturally with it a revival of the craving for
liberty and self-government. And once awakened such a craving found a
solid backing in the material progress of the time, in the upgrowth of
new social classes, in the intellectual developement of the people, and
in the new boldness and vigour of the national temper. The long outer
peace, the tranquillity of the realm, the lightness of taxation till the
outbreak of war with Spain, had spread prosperity throughout the land.
Even the war failed to hinder the enrichment of the trading classes. The
Netherlands were the centre of European trade, and of all European
countries England had for more than half-a-century been making the
greatest advance in its trade with the Netherlands. As early as in the
eight years which preceded Elizabeth's accession and the eight years
that followed it, while the trade of Spain with the Low Countries had
doubled, and that of France and Germany with them had grown threefold,
the trade between England and Antwerp had increased twentyfold. The
increase remained at least as great through the forty years that
followed, and the erection of stately houses, marriages with noble
families, and the purchase of great estates, showed the rapid growth of
the merchant class in wealth and social importance. London above all was
profiting by the general advance. The rapidity of its growth awoke the
jealousy of the royal Council. One London merchant, Thomas Sutton,
founded the great hospital and school of the Charter House. Another,
Hugh Myddelton, brought the New River from its springs at Chadwell and
Amwell to supply London with pure water. Ere many years had gone the
wealth of the great capital was to tell on the whole course of English
history. Nor was the merchant class alone in this elevation. If the
greater nobles no longer swayed the State, the spoil of the Church
lands, and the general growth of national wealth, were raising the
lesser landowners into a new social power. An influence which was to
play a growing part in our history, the influence of the gentry, of the
squires--as they were soon to be called--told more and more on English
politics. In all but name indeed the leaders of this class were the
equals of the peers whom they superseded. Men like the Wentworths in the
north, or the Hampdens in the south, boasted as long a rent-roll and
wielded as great an influence as many of the older nobles. The attitude
of the Lower House towards the Higher throughout the Stuart Parliaments
sprang mainly from the consciousness of the Commons that in wealth as
well as in political consequence the merchants and country gentlemen who
formed the bulk of their members stood far above the mass of the peers.
[Sidenote: Growth of national spirit.]
While a new social fabric was thus growing up on the wreck of feudal
England, new influences were telling on its developement. The immense
advance of the people as a whole in knowledge and intelligence
throughout the reign of Elizabeth was in itself a revolution. The hold
of tradition, the unquestioning awe which formed the main strength of
the Tudor throne, had been sapped and weakened by the intellectual
activity of the Renascence, by its endless questionings, its historic
research, its philosophic scepticism. Writers and statesmen were alike
discussing the claims of government and the wisest and most lasting
forms of rule, travellers turned aside from the frescoes of Giorgione to
study the aristocratic polity of Venice, and Jesuits borrowed from the
schoolmen of the Middle Ages a doctrine of popular rights which still
forms the theory of modern democracy. On the other hand the nation was
learning to rely on itself, to believe in its own strength and vigour,
to crave for a share in the guidance of its own life. His conflict with
the two great spiritual and temporal powers of Christendom, his strife
at once with the Papacy and the House of Austria, had roused in every
Englishman a sense of supreme manhood, which told, however slowly, on
his attitude towards the Crown. The seaman whose tiny bark had dared the
storms of far-off seas, the young squire who crossed the Channel to
flesh his maiden sword at Ivry or Ostend, brought back with them to
English soil the daring temper, the sense of inexhaustible resources,
which had borne them on through storm and battle-field. The nation which
gave itself to the rule of the Stuarts was another nation from the
panic-struck people that gave itself in the crash of social and
religious order to the guidance of the Tudors. It was plain that a new
age of our history must open when the lofty patriotism, the dauntless
energy, the overpowering sense of effort and triumph, which rose into
their full grandeur through the war with Spain, turned from the strife
with Philip to seek a new sphere of activity at home.
[Sidenote: The spirit of religion.]
What had hindered this force from telling as yet fully on national
affairs was the breadth and largeness which characterized the temper of
the Renascence. Through the past half-century the aims of Englishmen had
been drawn far over the narrow bounds of England itself to every land
and every sea; while their mental activity spent itself as freely on
poetry and science as on religion and politics. But at the moment which
we have reached the whole of this energy was seized upon and
concentrated by a single force. For a hundred years past men had been
living in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Not only the world about
them but the world of thought and feeling within every breast had been
utterly transformed. The work of the sixteenth century had wrecked that
tradition of religion, of knowledge, of political and social order,
which had been accepted without question by the Middle Ages. The sudden
freedom of the mind from these older bonds brought a consciousness of
power such as had never been felt before; and the restless energy, the
universal activity of the Renascence were but outer expressions of the
pride, the joy, the amazing self-confidence, with which man welcomed
this revelation of the energies which had lain slumbering within him.
But his pride and self-reliance were soon dashed by a feeling of dread.
With the deepening sense of human individuality came a deepening
conviction of the boundless capacities of the human soul. Not as a
theological dogma, but as a human fact, man knew himself to be an all
but infinite power, whether for good or for ill. The drama towered into
sublimity as it painted the strife of mighty forces within the breast of
Othello or Macbeth. Poets passed into metaphysicians as they strove to
unravel the workings of conscience within the soul. From that hour one
dominant influence told on human action: and all the various energies
that had been called into life by the age that was passing away were
seized, concentrated, and steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of
religion.
[Sidenote: The Bible.]
The whole temper of the nation felt the change. "Theology rules there,"
said Grotius of England only two years after Elizabeth's death; and when
Casaubon was invited by her successor to his court he found both king
and people indifferent to pure letters. "There is a great abundance of
theologians in England," he says; "all point their studies in that
direction." Even a country gentleman, like Colonel Hutchinson, felt the
theological impulse. "As soon as he had improved his natural
understanding with the acquisition of learning, the first studies he
exercised himself in were the principles of religion." It was natural
that literature should reflect the tendency of the time; and the dumpy
little quartos of controversy and piety which still crowd our older
libraries drove before them the classical translations and Italian
novelettes of the age of the Renascence. But their influence was small
beside that of the Bible. The popularity of the Bible had been growing
fast from the day when Bishop Bonner set up the first six copies in St.
Paul's. Even then, we are told, "many well-disposed people used much to
resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that
had an audible voice to read to them."... "One John Porter used
sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of
himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a
big stature; and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him,
because he could read well and had an audible voice." But the "goodly
exercise" of readers such as Porter was soon superseded by the continued
recitation of both Old Testament and New in the public services of the
Church; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into every
home, and wove it into the life of every English family.
[Sidenote: Its literary influence.]
Religion indeed was only one of the causes for this sudden popularity of
the Bible. The book was equally important in its bearing on the
intellectual developement of the people. All the prose literature of
England, save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif, has grown up since the
translation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. So far as the
nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry
save the little-known verse of Chaucer, existed in the English tongue
when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sunday after
Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round the Bible in the
nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that hung on its words in the
devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature.
Legend and annal, war song and psalm, State-roll and biography, the
mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories of
mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathen,
philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast
over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The
disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution
of the Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature
wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the one revolution was
far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could
transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave
their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. Classical letters
therefore remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the
few; and among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the
pedants who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine
Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. But the
language of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek, lent
themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation. As a
mere literary monument the English version of the Bible remains the
noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it
from the instant of its appearance the standard of our language.
[Sidenote: Its social influence.]
For the moment however its literary effect was less than its social. The
power of the book over the mass of Englishmen showed itself in a
thousand superficial ways, and in none more conspicuously than in the
influence it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed, we must repeat, the
whole literature which was practically accessible to ordinary
Englishmen; and when we recall the number of common phrases which we owe
to great authors, the bits of Shakspere, or Milton, or Dickens, or
Thackeray, which unconsciously interweave themselves in our ordinary
talk, we shall better understand the strange mosaic of Biblical words
and phrases which coloured English talk two hundred years ago. The mass
of picturesque allusion and illustration which we borrow from a thousand
books, our fathers were forced to borrow from one; and the borrowing was
the easier and the more natural that the range of the Hebrew literature
fitted it for the expression of every phase of feeling. When Spenser
poured forth his warmest love-notes in the "Epithalamion," he adopted
the very words of the Psalmist, as he bade the gates open for the
entrance of his bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the hills
of Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the cry of David: "Let God
arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so
shalt thou drive them away!" Even to common minds this familiarity with
grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse gave a loftiness and
ardour of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and
bombast we may prefer to the slipshod vulgarisms of to-day.
[Sidenote: Its religious influence.]
But far greater than its effect on literature or social phrase was the
effect of the Bible on the character of the people at large. The Bible
was as yet the one book which was familiar to every Englishman; and
everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened
to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm. The whole
moral effect which is produced nowadays by the religious newspaper, the
tract, the essay, the missionary report, the sermon, was then produced
by the Bible alone; and its effect in this way, however dispassionately
we examine it, was simply amazing. The whole nation became a church. The
problems of life and death, whose questionings found no answer in the
higher minds of Shakspere's day, pressed for an answer not only from
noble and scholar but from farmer and shopkeeper in the age that
followed him. The answer they found was almost of necessity a
Calvinistic answer. Unlike as the spirit of Calvinism seemed to the
spirit of the Renascence, both found a point of union in their
exaltation of the individual man. The mighty strife of good and evil
within the soul itself which had overawed the imagination of dramatist
and poet became the one spiritual conception in the mind of the Puritan.
The Calvinist looked on churches and communions as convenient groupings
of pious Christians; it might be as even indispensable parts of a
Christian order. But religion in its deepest and innermost sense had to
do not with churches but with the individual soul. It was each Christian
man who held in his power the issues of life and death. It was in each
Christian conscience that the strife was waged between Heaven and Hell.
Not as one of a body, but as a single soul, could each Christian claim
his part in the mystery of redemption. In the outer world of worship and
discipline the Calvinist might call himself one of many brethren, but at
every moment of his inner existence, in the hour of temptation and of
struggle, in his dark and troubled wrestling with sin, in the glory of
conversion, in the peace of acceptance with God, he stood utterly alone.
With such a conception of human life Puritanism offered the natural form
for English religion at a time when the feeling with which religion
could most easily ally itself was the sense of individuality. The
'prentice who sate awed in the pit of the theatre as the storm in the
mind of Lear outdid the storm among the elements passed easily into the
Calvinist who saw himself day by day the theatre of a yet mightier
struggle between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, and his
soul the prize of an eternal conflict between Heaven and Hell.
[Sidenote: Growth of Calvinism.]
It was thus by its own natural developement that the temper of
Englishmen became above all religious, and that their religion took in
most cases the form of Calvinism. But the rapid spread of Calvinism was
aided by outer causes as well as inner ones. The reign of Elizabeth had
been a long struggle for national existence. When Shakspere first trod
the streets of London it was a question whether England should still
remain England or whether it should sink into a vassal of Spain. In that
long contest the creed which Henry and Elizabeth had constructed, the
strange compromise of old tradition with new convictions which the
country was gradually shaping into a new religion for itself, had done
much for England's victory. It had held England together as a people. It
had hindered any irreparable severance of the nation into warring
churches. But it had done this unobserved. To the bulk of men the
victory seemed wholly due to the energy and devotion of Calvinism. Rome
had placed herself in the forefront of England's enemies, and it was the
Calvinistic Puritan who was the irreconcileable foe of Rome. It was the
Puritan who went forth to fight the Spaniard in France or in the
Netherlands. It was the Puritan who broke into the Spanish Main, and who
singed Philip's beard at Cadiz. It was the Puritan whose assiduous
preachings and catechizings had slowly won the mass of the English
people to any real acceptance of Protestantism. And as the war drifted
on, as the hatred of Spain and resentment at the Papacy grew keener and
fiercer, as patriotism became more identified with Protestantism, and
Protestantism more identified with hatred of Rome, the side of English
religion which lay furthest from all contact with the tradition of the
past grew more and more popular among Englishmen.
[Sidenote: Puritanism and the people.]
To Elizabeth, whether on religious or political grounds, Calvinism was
the most hateful of her foes. But it was in vain that she strove by a
rigorous discipline to check its advance. Her discipline could only tell
on the clergy, and the movement was far more a lay than a clerical one.
Whether she would or no, in fact, the Queen's policy favoured the
Puritan cause. It was impossible to befriend Calvinism abroad without
furthering Calvinism at home. The soldiers and adventurers who flocked
from England to fight in the Huguenot camps came back steeped in the
Huguenot theology. The exiles who fled to England from France and from
the Netherlands spread their narrower type of religion through the
towns where they found a refuge. As the strife with Rome grew hotter the
government was forced to fill Parliament and the magistracy with men
whose zealous Protestantism secured their fidelity in the case of a
Catholic rising. But a zealous Protestant was almost inevitably a
Calvinist; and to place the administration of the country in Calvinist
hands was to give an impulse to Puritanism. How utterly Elizabeth failed
was seen at the beginning of her successor's reign. The bulk of the
country gentlemen, the bulk of the wealthier traders, had by that time
become Puritans. In the first Parliament of James the House of Commons
refused for the first time to transact business on a Sunday. His second
Parliament chose to receive the communion at St. Margaret's Church
instead of Westminster Abbey "for fear of copes and wafer-cakes."
[Sidenote: Puritanism in the Church.]
The same difficulty met Elizabeth in her efforts to check the growth of
Puritanism in the Church itself. At the very outset of her reign the
need of replacing the Marian bishops by staunch Protestants forced her
to fill the English sees with men whose creed was in almost every case
Calvinistic. The bulk of the lower clergy indeed were left without
change; but as the older parsons died out their places were mostly
filled by Puritan successors. The Universities furnished the new clergy,
and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the tone of the Universities was
hotly Puritan. Even the outer uniformity on which the Queen set her
heart took a Puritan form. The use of the Prayer-book indeed was
enforced; but the aspect of English churches and of English worship
tended more and more to the model of Geneva. The need of more light to
follow the service in the new Prayer-books served as a pretext for the
removal of stained glass from the church windows. The communion table
stood almost everywhere in the midst of the church. If the surplice was
generally worn during the service, the preacher often mounted the pulpit
in a Geneva gown. We see the progress of this change in the very chapel
of the Primates themselves. The chapel of Lambeth House was one of the
most conspicuous among the ecclesiastical buildings of the time; it was
a place "whither many of the nobility, judges, clergy, and persons of
all sorts, as well strangers as natives, resorted." But all pomp of
worship gradually passed away from it. Under Cranmer the stained glass
was dashed from its windows. In Elizabeth's time the communion table was
moved into the middle of the chapel, and the credence table destroyed.
Under James Archbishop Abbott put the finishing stroke on all attempts
at a high ceremonial. The cope was no longer used as a special vestment
in the communion. The Primate and his chaplains forbore to bow at the
name of Christ. The organ and choir were alike abolished, and the
service reduced to a simplicity which would have satisfied Calvin.
[Sidenote: Puritanism and politics.]
Foiled as it was, the effort of Elizabeth to check the spread of
Puritanism was no mere freak of religious bigotry. It sprang from a
clear realization of the impossibility of harmonizing the new temper of
the nation with the system of personal government which had done its
work under the Tudors. With the republican and anti-monarchical theories
indeed that Calvinism had begotten elsewhere, English Calvinism showed
as yet no sort of sympathy. The theories of resistance, of a people's
right to judge and depose its rulers, which had been heard in the heat
of the Marian persecution, had long sunk into silence. The loyalty of
the Puritan gentleman was as fervent as that of his fellows. But with
the belief of the Calvinist went necessarily a new and higher sense of
political order. The old conception of personal rule, the dependence of
a nation on the arbitrary will of its ruler, was jarring everywhere more
and more with the religious as well as the philosophic impulses of the
time. Men of the most different tendencies were reaching forward to the
same conception of law. Bacon sought for universal laws in material
nature. Hooker asserted the rule of law over the spiritual world. It was
in the same way that the Puritan sought for a divine law by which the
temporal kingdoms around him might be raised into a kingdom of Christ.
The diligence with which he searched the Scriptures sprang from his
earnestness to discover a Divine Will which in all things, great or
small, he might implicitly obey. But this implicit obedience was
reserved for the Divine Will alone; for human ordinances derived their
strength only from their correspondence with the revealed law of God.
The Puritan was bound by his religion to examine every claim made on his
civil and spiritual obedience by the powers that be; and to own or
reject the claim, as it accorded with the higher duty which he owed to
God. "In matters of faith," a Puritan wife tells us of her husband, "his
reason always submitted to the Word of God; but in all other things the
greatest names in the world would not lead him without reason."
[Sidenote: Puritanism and the Crown.]
It was plain that an impassable gulf parted such a temper as this from
the temper of unquestioning devotion to the Crown which the Tudors
termed loyalty; for it was a temper not only legal, but even pedantic in
its legality, intolerant from its very sense of a moral order and law of
the lawlessness and disorder of a personal tyranny, a temper of
criticism, of judgement, and, if need be, of stubborn and unconquerable
resistance. The temper of the Puritan indeed was no temper of mere
revolt. His resistance, if he was forced to resist, would spring not
from any disdain of kingly authority, but from his devotion to an
authority higher and more sacred than that of kings. He had as firm a
faith as the nation at large in the divine right of the sovereign, in
the sacred character of the throne. It was in fact just because his
ruler's authority had a divine origin that he obeyed him. But the nation
about the throne seemed to the Puritan not less divinely ordered a thing
than the throne itself; it was the voice of God, inspiring and
directing, which spoke through its history and its laws; it was God that
guided to wisdom the hearts of Englishmen in Parliament assembled as He
guided to wisdom the hearts of kings. Never was the respect for positive
law so profound; never was the reverence for Parliaments so great as at
the death of Elizabeth. There was none of the modern longing for a king
that reigned without governing; no conscious desire shows itself
anywhere to meddle with the actual exercise of the royal administration.
But the Puritan could only conceive of the kingly power as of a power
based upon constitutional tradition, controlled by constitutional law,
and acting in willing harmony with that body of constitutional
counsellors in the two Houses, who represented the wisdom and the will
of the realm.
[Sidenote: Puritanism and society.]
It was in the creation of such a temper as this that Puritanism gave its
noblest gift to English politics. It gave a gift hardly less noble to
society at large in its conception of social equality. Their common
calling, their common brotherhood in Christ, annihilated in the mind of
the Puritans that overpowering sense of social distinctions which
characterized the age of Elizabeth. There was no open break with social
traditions; no open revolt against the social subordination of class to
class. But within these forms of the older world beat for the first time
the spirit which was to characterize the new. The meanest peasant felt
himself ennobled as a child of God. The proudest noble recognized a
spiritual equality in the poorest "saint." The great social revolution
of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate was already felt in the demeanour
of English gentlemen. "He had a loving and sweet courtesy to the
poorest," we are told of one of them, "and would often employ many spare
hours with the commonest soldiers and poorest labourers." "He never
disdained the meanest nor flattered the greatest." But it was felt even
more in the new dignity and self-respect with which the consciousness of
their "calling" invested the classes beneath the rank of the gentry.
Take such a portrait as that which a turner in Eastcheap, Nehemiah
Wallington, has left us of a London housewife, his mother. "She was very
loving," he says, "and obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her
husband, very tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were
godly, much misliking the wicked and profane. She was a pattern of
sobriety unto many, very seldom was seen abroad except at church; when
others recreated themselves at holidays and other times, she would take
her needlework and say 'here is my recreation.'... God had given her a
pregnant wit and an excellent memory. She was very ripe and perfect in
all stories of the Bible, likewise in all the stories of the Martyrs,
and could readily turn to them; she was also perfect and well seen in
the English Chronicles, and in the descents of the kings of England. She
lived in holy wedlock with her husband twenty years, wanting but four
days."
[Sidenote: Puritanism and human conduct.]
Where the new conception of life told even more powerfully than on
politics or society was in its bearing on the personal temper and
conduct of men. There was a sudden loss of the passion, the caprice, the
subtle and tender play of feeling, the breadth of sympathy, the quick
pulse of delight, which had marked the age of Elizabeth; but on the
other hand life gained in moral grandeur, in a sense of the dignity of
manhood, in orderliness and equable force. The larger geniality of the
age that had passed away was replaced by an intense tenderness within
the narrower circle of the home. Home, as we conceive it now, was the
creation of the Puritan. Wife and child rose from mere dependants on the
will of husband or father, as husband and father saw in them saints
like himself, souls hallowed by the touch of a divine Spirit and called
with a divine calling like his own. The sense of spiritual fellowship
gave a new tenderness and refinement to the common family affections.
"He was as kind a father," says a Puritan wife of her husband, "as dear
a brother, as good a master, as faithful a friend as the world had." The
wilful and lawless passion of the Renascence made way for a manly
purity. "Neither in youth nor riper years could the most fair or
enticing woman draw him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. Wise
and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and
unblameable conversation with them, but so as never to excite scandal or
temptation. Scurrilous discourse even among men he abhorred; and though
he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that which was mixed
with impurity he never could endure." A higher conception of duty
coloured men's daily actions. To the Puritan the wilfulness of life, in
which the men of the Renascence had revelled, seemed unworthy of life's
character and end. His aim was to attain self-command, to be master of
himself, of his thought and speech and acts. A certain gravity and
reflectiveness gave its tone to the lightest details of his converse
with the world about him. His temper, quick as it might naturally be,
was kept under strict control. In his discourse he was on his guard
against talkativeness and frivolity, striving to be deliberate in
speech, and "ranking the words beforehand." His life was orderly and
methodical, sparing of diet and self-indulgence; he rose early; "he
never was at any time idle, and hated to see any one else so." The new
sobriety and self-restraint showed itself in a change of dress. The
gorgeous colours and jewels of the Renascence disappeared. The Puritan
squire "left off very early the wearing of anything that was costly, yet
in his plainest negligent habit appeared very much a gentleman."
[Sidenote: Puritanism and culture.]
The loss of colour and variety in costume reflected no doubt a certain
loss of colour and variety in life itself. But as yet Puritanism was
free from any break with the harmless gaieties of the world about it.
The lighter and more elegant sides of the Elizabethan culture harmonized
well enough with the temper of the Calvinist gentleman. The figure of
such a Puritan as Colonel Hutchinson stands out from his wife's canvas
with the grace and tenderness of a portrait by Vandyck. She dwells on
the personal beauty which distinguished his youth, on "his teeth even
and white as the purest ivory," "his hair of brown, very thick-set in
his youth, softer than the finest silk, curling with loose great rings
at the ends." Serious as was his temper in graver matters, the young
squire of Owthorpe was fond of hawking, and piqued himself on his skill
in dancing and fence. His artistic taste showed itself in a critical
love of "paintings, sculpture, and all liberal arts," as well as in the
pleasure he took in his gardens, "in the improvement of his grounds, in
planting groves and walks and forest-trees." If he was "diligent in his
examination of the Scriptures," "he had a great love for music and often
diverted himself with a viol, on which he played masterly."
[Sidenote: Milton.]
The strength however of the religious movement lay rather among the
middle and professional classes than among the gentry; and it is in a
Puritan of this class that we find the fullest and noblest expression of
the new influence which was leavening the temper of the time. John
Milton is not only the highest but the completest type of Puritanism.
His life is absolutely contemporaneous with his cause. He was born when
it began to exercise a direct influence over English politics and
English religion; he died when its effort to mould them into its own
shape was over, and when it had again sunk into one of many influences
to which we owe our English character. His earlier verse, the pamphlets
of his riper years, the epics of his age, mark with a singular precision
the three great stages in its history. His youth shows us how much of
the gaiety, the poetic ease, the intellectual culture of the Renascence,
lingered in a Puritan home. Scrivener and "precisian" as his father was,
he was a skilled musician, and the boy inherited his father's skill on
lute and organ. One of the finest outbursts in the scheme of education
which he put forth at a later time is a passage in which he vindicates
the province of music as an agent in moral training. His home, his
tutor, his school were all rigidly Puritan; but there was nothing narrow
or illiberal in his early training. "My father," he says, "destined me
while yet a little boy to the study of humane letters; which I seized
with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever
went from my lessons to bed before midnight." But to the Greek, Latin,
and Hebrew he learned at school, the scrivener advised him to add
Italian and French. Nor were English letters neglected. Spenser gave the
earliest turn to the boy's poetic genius. In spite of the war between
playwright and precisian, a Puritan youth could still in Milton's days
avow his love of the stage, "if Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest
Shakspere, Fancy's child, warble his native woodnotes wild," and gather
from the "masques and antique pageantry" of the court-revel hints for
his own "Comus" and "Arcades." Nor does any shadow of the coming
struggle with the Church disturb the young scholar's reverie, as he
wanders beneath "the high embowed roof, with antique pillars massy
proof, and storied windows richly dight, casting a dim religious light,"
or as he hears "the pealing organ blow to the full-voiced choir below,
in service high and anthem clear."
Milton's enjoyment of the gaiety of life stands in bright contrast with
the gloom and sternness which strife and persecution fostered in
Puritanism at a later time. In spite of a "certain reservedness of
natural disposition," which shrank from "festivities and jests, in which
I acknowledge my faculty to be very slight," the young singer could
still enjoy the "jest and youthful jollity" of the world around him, its
"quips and cranks and wanton wiles"; he could join the crew of Mirth,
and look pleasantly on at the village fair, where "the jocund rebecks
sound to many a youth and many a maid, dancing in the chequered shade."
There was nothing ascetic in Milton's look, in his slender, vigorous
frame, his face full of a delicate yet serious beauty, the rich brown
hair which clustered over his brow; and the words we have quoted show
his sensitive enjoyment of all that was beautiful. But his pleasures
were "unreproved." From coarse or sensual self-indulgence the young
Puritan turned with disgust: "A certain reservedness of nature, an
honest haughtiness and self-esteem, kept me still above those low
descents of mind." He drank in an ideal chivalry from Spenser, though
his religion and purity disdained the outer pledge on which chivalry
built up its fabric of honour. "Every free and gentle spirit," said
Milton, "without that oath, ought to be born a knight." It was with this
temper that he passed from his London school, St. Paul's, to Christ's
College at Cambridge, and it was this temper that he preserved
throughout his University career. He left Cambridge, as he said
afterwards, "free from all reproach, and approved by all honest men,"
with a purpose of self-dedication "to that same lot, however mean or
high, towards which time leads me and the will of heaven."
[Sidenote: The narrowness of Puritanism.]
Even in the still calm beauty of a life such as this we catch the
sterner tones of the Puritan temper. The very height of the Puritan's
aim, the intensity of his moral concentration, brought with them a loss
of the genial delight in all that was human which gave its charm to the
age of Elizabeth. "If ever God instilled an intense love of moral beauty
into the mind of any man," said the great Puritan poet, "he has
instilled it into mine." "Love Virtue," closed his "Comus," "she alone
is free!" But this passionate love of virtue and of moral beauty, if it
gave strength to human conduct, narrowed human sympathy and human
intelligence. Already in Milton we note "a certain reservedness of
temper," a contempt for "the false estimates of the vulgar," a proud
withdrawal from the meaner and coarser life around him. Great as was his
love for Shakspere, we can hardly fancy him delighting in Falstaff. In
minds of a less cultured order, this moral tension ended, no doubt, in a
hard unsocial sternness of life. The ordinary Puritan "loved all that
were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane." His bond to other
men was not the sense of a common manhood, but the recognition of a
brotherhood among the elect. Without the pale of the saints lay a world
which was hateful to them, because it was the enemy of their God. It is
this utter isolation from the "ungodly" that explains the contrast which
startles us between the inner tenderness of the Puritans and the
ruthlessness of so many of their actions. Cromwell, whose son's death
(in his own words) went to his heart "like a dagger, indeed it did!" and
who rode away sad and wearied from the triumph of Marston Moor, burst
into horse-play as he signed the death-warrant of the king.
[Sidenote: Its extravagance.]
A temper which had lost sympathy with the life of half the world around
it could hardly sympathize with the whole of its own life. Humour, the
faculty which above all corrects exaggeration and extravagance, died
away before the new stress and strain of existence. The absolute
devotion of the Puritan to a Supreme Will tended more and more to rob
him of all sense of measure and proportion in common matters. Little
things became great things in the glare of religious zeal; and the godly
man learnt to shrink from a surplice, or a mince-pie at Christmas, as he
shrank from impurity or a lie. Nor was this all. The self-restraint and
sobriety which marked the Calvinist limited itself wholly to his outer
life. In his inner soul sense, reason, judgement, were too often
overborne by the terrible reality of invisible things. Our first
glimpse of Oliver Cromwell is as a young country squire and farmer in
the marsh-levels around Huntingdon and St. Ives, buried from time to
time in a deep melancholy, and haunted by fancies of coming death. "I
live in Meshac," he writes to a friend, "which they say signifies
Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies Darkness; yet the Lord forsaketh
me not." The vivid sense of a Divine Purity close to such men made the
life of common men seem sin. "You know what my manner of life has been,"
Cromwell adds. "Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light. I
hated godliness." Yet his worst sin was probably nothing more than an
enjoyment of the natural buoyancy of youth, and a want of the deeper
earnestness which comes with riper years. In imaginative tempers, like
that of Bunyan, the struggle took a more picturesque form. John Bunyan
was the son of a poor tinker at Elstow in Bedfordshire, and even in
childhood his fancy revelled in terrible visions of Heaven and Hell.
"When I was but a child of nine or ten years old," he tells us, "these
things did so distress my soul, that then in the midst of my merry
sports and childish vanities, amidst my vain companions, I was often
much cast down and afflicted in my mind therewith; yet could I not let
go my sins." The sins he could not let go were a love of hockey and of
dancing on the village green; for the only real fault which his bitter
self-accusation discloses, that of a habit of swearing, was put an end
to at once and for ever by a rebuke from an old woman. His passion for
bell-ringing clung to him even after he had broken from it as a "vain
practice"; and he would go to the steeple-house and look on, till the
thought that a bell might fall and crush him in his sins drove him
panic-stricken from the door. A sermon against dancing and games drew
him for a time from these indulgences; but the temptation again
overmastered his resolve. "I shook the sermon out of my mind, and to my
old custom of sports and gaming I returned with great delight. But the
same day, as I was in the midst of a game of cat, and having struck it
one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the second
time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said,
'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to
Hell?' At this I was put in an exceeding maze; wherefore, leaving my cat
upon the ground, I looked up to heaven; and was as if I had with the
eyes of my understanding seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as
being very hotly displeased with me, and as if He did severely threaten
me with some grievous punishment for those and other ungodly practices."
[Sidenote: Belief in witchcraft.]
The vivid sense of a supernatural world which breathes through words
such as these, the awe and terror with which it pressed upon the life of
men, found their most terrible expression in the belief in witchcraft.
The dread of Satanic intervention indeed was not peculiar to the
Puritan. It had come down from the earliest ages of the Christian
Church, and had been fanned into a new intensity at the close of the
Middle Ages by the physical calamities and moral scepticism which threw
their gloom over the world. Joan of Arc was a witch to every Englishman,
and the wife of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester paced the streets of London,
candle in hand, as a convicted sorceress. But it was not till the chaos
and turmoil of the Reformation put their strain on the spiritual
imagination of men that the belief in demoniacal possession deepened
into a general panic. The panic was common to both Catholics and
Protestants; it was in Catholic countries indeed that the persecution of
supposed witches was carried on longest and most ruthlessly. Among
Protestant countries England was the last to catch the general terror;
and the Act of 1541, the first English statute passed against
witchcraft, was far milder in tone than the laws of any other European
country. Witchcraft itself, where no death could be proved to have
followed from it, was visited only with pillory and imprisonment; where
death had issued from it, the penalty was the gallows and not the stake.
Even this statute was repealed in the following reign. But the fierce
religious strife under Mary roused a darker fanaticism; and when
Elizabeth mounted the throne preacher after preacher assured her that a
multitude of witches filled the land. "Witches and sorcerers," cried
Bishop Jewel, "within these few years are marvellously increased within
your grace's realm. Your grace's subjects pine away even unto the death;
their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed,
their senses are bereft!" Before remonstrances such as these the statute
against witchcraft was again enacted; but though literature and the
drama show the hold which a belief in satanic agency had gained on the
popular fancy, the temper of the times was too bold and self-reliant,
its intelligence too keen and restless, its tone too secular, to furnish
that atmosphere of panic in which fanaticism is bred.
It was not till the close of the Queen's reign, as hope darkened round
Protestantism and the Puritan temper woke a fresh faith in the
supernatural, that the belief in witchcraft and the persecution of the
unhappy women who were held to be witches became a marked feature of the
time. To men who looked on the world about them and the soul within them
as battle-fields for a never-ceasing contest between God and the Devil,
it was natural enough to ascribe every evil that happened to man, either
in soul or body, to the invisible agency of the spirit of ill. A share
of his supernatural energies was the bait by which he was held to lure
the wicked to their own destruction; and women above all were believed
to barter their souls for the possession of power which lifted them
above the weakness of their sex. Sober men asserted that the beldame,
whom boys hooted in the streets and who groped in the gutter for bread,
could blast the corn with mildew and lame the oxen in the plough, that
she could smite her persecutors with pains and sickness, that she could
rouse storms in the sky and strew every shore with the wrecks of ships
and the corpses of men, that as night gathered round she could mount her
broomstick and sweep through the air to the witches' Sabbath, to yield
herself in body and soul to the demons of ill. The nascent scepticism
that startled at tales such as these was hushed before the witness of
the Bible, for to question the existence of sorcerer or daemoniac seemed
questioning the veracity of the Scriptures themselves. Pity fell before
the stern injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"; and the
squire who would have shrunk from any conscious cruelty as from a blow
looked on without ruth as the torturers ran needles into the witch's
flesh, or swam her in the witch's pool, or hurried her to the witch's
stake.
[Sidenote: The Protestant defeat.]
But the terror with which the Puritan viewed these proofs of a new
energy in the powers of ill found a wider sphere of action as he saw
their new activity and success in the religious and political world
about him. At the opening of Elizabeth's reign every Protestant had
looked forward to a world-wide triumph of the Gospel. If Italy and
Spain clung blindly to the Papacy, elsewhere, alike on the Danube or the
Rhine, on the Elbe or the Seine, the nations of Europe seemed to have
risen in irreconcileable revolt against Rome. But the prospect of such a
triumph had long since disappeared. At the crisis of the struggle a
Catholic reaction had succeeded in holding Protestantism at bay, and
after years of fierce combat Rome had begun definitely to win ground.
The peaceful victories of the Jesuits were backed by the arms of Spain,
and Europe was gradually regained till the policy of Philip the Second
was able to aim its blows at the last strongholds of Calvinism in the
west. Philip was undoubtedly worsted in the strife. England was saved by
its defeat of the Armada. The United Provinces of the Netherlands rose
into a great power as well through their own dogged heroism as through
the genius of William the Silent. At a moment too when all hope seemed
gone France was rescued from the grasp of the Catholic League by the
unconquerable energy of Henry of Navarre. But even in its defeat
Catholicism gained ground. England alone remained unaffected by its
efforts. In the Low Countries the Reformation was finally driven from
the Walloon Provinces, from Brabant, and from Flanders. In France Henry
the Fourth found himself compelled to purchase Paris by a mass; and the
conversion of the king was the beginning of a quiet breaking-up of the
Huguenot party. Nobles and scholars alike forsook the cause of heresy,
and though Calvinism remained dominant south of the Loire, it lost all
hope of winning France as a whole to its side.
[Sidenote: Puritan intolerance.]
At Elizabeth's death therefore the temper of every earnest Protestant,
in England as elsewhere, was that of a man who after cherishing the hope
of a crowning victory is forced to look on at a crushing and
irremediable defeat. The dream of a Reformation of the universal Church
was utterly at an end. Though the fierce strife of religions seemed for
a while to have died down, the borders of Protestantism were narrowing
every day, nor was there a sign that the triumph of the Papacy was
arrested. Even the older Lutheranism of Germany was threatened; and the
minds of men were already presaging the struggle which was to end in the
Thirty Years War. Such a struggle could be no foreign strife to the
Puritan. The war in the Palatinate kindled a fiercer flame in the
English Parliament than all the aggressions of the monarchy; and
Englishmen followed the campaigns of Gustavus with even keener interest
than the trial of Hampden. We shall see how great a part this sympathy
with outer Protestantism played in the earlier struggle between England
and the Stuarts: but it played as great a part in determining the
Puritan attitude towards religion at home. As hope after hope died into
defeat and disaster the mood of the Puritan grew sterner and more
intolerant. The system of compromise by which the Tudors had held
England together became more and more distasteful to him. To one who
looked on himself as a soldier of God and as a soldier who was fighting
a losing battle, the struggle with the Papacy was no matter for
compromise. It was a struggle between light and darkness, between life
and death. No innovation in faith or worship was of small account if it
tended in the direction of Rome. The peril in fact was too great to
admit of tolerance or moderation. At a moment when all that he hated was
gaining ground on all that he loved, the Puritan saw the one security
for what he held to be truth in drawing a hard-and-fast line between
that truth and what he held to be falsehood.
[Sidenote: Hooker.]
This dogged concentration of thought and feeling on a single issue told
with a fatal effect on his theology. The spirit of the Renascence had
been driven for a while from the field of religion by the strife between
Catholic and Protestant; and in the upgrowth of a more rigid system of
dogma, whether on the one side or on the other, the work of More and
Colet seemed to be undone. But no sooner had the strife lost its older
intensity, no sooner had a new Christendom fairly emerged from the
troubled waters, than the Renascence again made its influence felt. Its
voice was heard above all in Richard Hooker, a clergyman who had been
Master of the Temple, but had been driven by his distaste for the
controversies of its pulpit from London to a Wiltshire vicarage at
Boscombe, which he exchanged at a later time for the parsonage of
Bishopsbourne among the quiet meadows of Kent. During the later years of
Elizabeth he built up in these still retreats the stately fabric of his
"Ecclesiastical Polity." The largeness of temper which marked all the
nobler minds of his day, the philosophic breadth which is seen as
clearly in Shakspere as in Bacon, was united in Hooker with a grandeur
and stateliness of style which raised him to the highest rank among
English prose-writers. Divine as he was, his spirit and method were
philosophical rather than theological. Against the ecclesiastical
dogmatism of Presbyterian or Catholic he set the authority of reason. He
abandoned the narrow ground of Scriptural argument to base his
conclusions on the general principles of moral and political science, on
the eternal obligations of natural law. The Puritan system rested on the
assumption that an immutable rule for human action in all matters
relating to religion, to worship, and to the discipline and constitution
of the Church, was laid down, and only laid down, in the words of
Scripture. Hooker urged that a divine order exists not in written
revelation only, but in the moral relations, the historical
developement, and the social and political institutions of men. He
claimed for human reason the province of determining the laws of this
order; of distinguishing between what is changeable and unchangeable in
them, between what is eternal and what is temporary in the Bible itself.
It was easy for him to push on to the field of ecclesiastical
controversy where men like Cartwright were fighting the battle of
Presbyterianism, to show that no form of Church government had ever been
of indispensable obligation, and that ritual observances had in all ages
been left to the discretion of churches and determined by the
differences of times.
[Sidenote: His influence on the Church.]
From the moment of its appearance the effect of the "Ecclesiastical
Polity" was felt in the broader and more generous stamp which it
impressed on the temper of the national Church. Hooker had in fact
provided with a theory and placed on grounds of reason that policy of
comprehension which had been forced on the Tudors by the need of holding
England together, and from which the church, as it now existed, had
sprung. But the truth on which Hooker based his argument was of far
higher value than his argument itself. The acknowledgement of a divine
order in human history, of a divine law in human reason, harmonized with
the noblest instincts of the Elizabethan age. Ralegh's efforts to grasp
as a whole the story of mankind, Bacon's effort to bring all outer
nature to the test of human intelligence, were but the crowning
manifestations of the two main impulses of their time, its rationalism
and its humanity. Both found expression in the work of Hooker; and
coloured through its results the after history of the English Church.
The historical feeling showed itself in a longing to ally the religion
of the present with the religion of the past, to find a unity of faith
and practice with the Church of the Fathers, to claim part in that great
heritage of Catholic tradition, both in faith and worship, which the
Papacy so jealously claimed as its own. Such a longing seized as much on
tender and poetic tempers like George Herbert's as on positive and
prosaic tempers, such as that of Laud. The one started back from the
bare, intense spiritualism of the Puritan to find nourishment for his
devotion in the outer associations which the piety of ages had grouped
around it, in holy places and holy things, in the stillness of church
and altar, in the pathos and exultation of prayer and praise, in the
awful mystery of sacraments. The narrow and external mood of the other,
unable to find standing ground in the purely personal relation between
man and God which formed the basis of Calvinism, fell back on the
consciousness of a living Christendom, preserving through the ages a
definite faith and worship, and which, torn and rent as it seemed, was
soon to resume its ancient unity.
[Sidenote: The Arminians.]
While the historical feeling which breathes in Hooker's work took form
in the new passion for tradition and ceremonialism, the appeal which it
addressed to human reason produced a school of philosophical thinkers
whose timid upgrowth was almost lost in the clash of warring creeds
about them, but who were destined--as the latitudinarians of later
days--to make as deep an impression as their dogmatic rivals on the
religious thought of their countrymen. As yet however this rationalizing
movement hovered on the borders of the system of belief which it was so
keenly to attack; it limited itself rather to the work of moderating and
reconciling, to recognizing with Calixtus the pettiness of the points of
difference which parted Christendom and the greatness of its points of
agreement, or to revolting with Arminius from the more extreme tenets of
Calvin and Calvin's followers and pleading like him for some
co-operation on man's part with the work of grace. As yet Arminianism
was little more than a reaction against a system that contradicted the
obvious facts of life, a desire to bring theology into some sort of
harmony with human experience; but it was soon to pass by a fatal
necessity into a wider variance, and to gather round it into one mass of
opposition every tendency of revolt which time was disclosing against
the Calvinism which now reigned triumphant in Protestant theology.
[Sidenote: The doctrinal bigotry of Puritanism.]
From the belief in humanity or in reason which gave strength to such a
revolt the Puritan turned doggedly away. In the fierce white light of
his idealism human effort seemed weakness, human virtue but sin, human
reason but folly. Absorbed as he was in the thought of God, craving for
nothing less than a divine righteousness, a divine wisdom, a divine
strength, he grasped the written Bible as the law of God and
concentrated every energy in the effort to obey it. The dogma of
justification, the faith that without merit or act of man God would save
and call to holiness His own elect, was the centre of his creed. And
with such a creed he felt that the humanity of the Renascence, the
philosophy of the thinker, the comprehension of the statesman, were
alike at war. A policy of comprehension seemed to him simply a policy of
faithlessness to God. Ceremonies which in an hour of triumph he might
have regarded as solaces to weak brethren, he looked on as acts of
treason in this hour of defeat. Above all he would listen to no words of
reconciliation with a religious system in which he saw nothing but a
lie, nor to any pleas for concession in what he held to be truth. The
craving of the Arminian for a more rational theology he met by a fiercer
loyalty to the narrowest dogma. Archbishop Whitgift had striven to force
on the Church of England a set of articles which embodied the tenets of
an extreme Calvinism; and one of the wisest acts of Elizabeth had been
to disallow them. But hateful as Whitgift on every other ground was to
the Puritans, they never ceased to demand the adoption of his Lambeth
Articles.
[Sidenote: Its hatred of sectaries.]
And as he would admit no toleration within the sphere of doctrine, so
would the Puritan admit no toleration within the sphere of
ecclesiastical order. That the Church of England should both in
ceremonies and in teaching take a far more distinctively Protestant
attitude than it had hitherto done, every Puritan was resolved. But
there was as yet no general demand for any change in the form of its
government, or of its relation to the State. Though the wish to draw
nearer to the mass of the Reformed Churches won a certain amount of
favour for the Presbyterian form of organization which they had adopted,
as an obligatory system of Church discipline Presbyterianism had been
embraced by but a few of the English clergy, and by hardly any of the
English laity. Nor was there any tendency in the mass of the Puritans
towards a breach in the system of religious conformity which Elizabeth
had constructed. On the contrary, what they asked was for its more
rigorous enforcement. That Catholics should be suffered under whatever
pains and penalties to preserve their faith and worship in a Protestant
Commonwealth was abhorrent to them. Nor was Puritan opinion more
tolerant to the Protestant sectaries who were beginning to find the
State Church too narrow for their enthusiasm. Elizabeth herself could
not feel a bitterer abhorrence of the "Brownists" (as they were called
from the name of their founder Robert Brown) who rejected the very
notion of a national Church, and asserted the right of each congregation
to perfect independence of faith and worship. To the zealot whose whole
thought was of the fight with Rome, such an assertion seemed the claim
of a right to mutiny in the camp, a right of breaking up Protestant
England into a host of sects too feeble to hold Rome at bay. Cartwright
himself denounced the wickedness of the Brownists; Parliament, Puritan
as it was, passed in 1593 a statute against them; and there was a
general assent to the stern measures of repression by which Brown
himself was forced to fly to the Netherlands. Two of his
fellow-congregationalists were seized and put to death on charges of
sedition and heresy. Of their followers many, as we learn from a
petition in 1592, were driven into exile, "and the rest which remain in
her Grace's land greatly distressed through imprisonment and other great
troubles." The persecution in fact did its work. "As for those which we
call Brownists," wrote Bacon, "being when they were at the most a very
small number of very silly and base people, here and there in corners
dispersed, they are now, thanks to God, by the good remedies that have
been used, suppressed and worn out; so that there is scarce any news of
them." The execution of three Nonconformists in the following year was
in fact followed by the almost utter extermination of their body. But
against this persecution no Puritan voice was raised.
[Sidenote: Its wish for reforms.]
All in fact that the bulk of the Puritans asked was a change in the
outer ritual of worship which should correspond to the advance towards a
more pronounced Protestantism that had been made by the nation at large
during the years of Elizabeth's reign. Their demands were as of old for
the disuse of "superstitious ceremonies." To modern eyes the points
which they selected for change seem trivial enough. But they were in
fact of large significance. To reject the sign of the Cross in baptism
was to repudiate the whole world of ceremonies of which it was a
survivor. The disuse of the surplice would have broken down the last
outer difference which parted the minister from the congregation, and
manifested to every eye the spiritual equality of layman and priest.
Kneeling at the Communion might be a mere act of reverence, but formally
to discontinue such an act was emphatically to assert a disbelief in the
sacramental theories of Catholicism. During the later years of Elizabeth
reverence for the Queen had hindered any serious pressure for changes to
which she would never assent; but a general expectation prevailed that
at her death some change would be made. Even among men of secular stamp
there was a general conviction of the need of some concession to the
religious sentiment of the nation. They had clung to the usages which
the Puritans denounced so long as they were aids in hindering a
religious severance throughout the land. But whatever value the
retention of such ceremonies might have had in facilitating the quiet
passage of the bulk of Englishmen from the old worship to the new had
long since passed away. England as a whole was Protestant; and the
Catholics who remained were not likely to be drawn to the national
Church by trifles such as these. Instead of being the means of hindering
religious division, the usages had now become means of creating it. It
was on this ground that statesmen who had little sympathy with the
religious spirit about them pleaded for the purchase of religious and
national union by ecclesiastical reforms. "Why," asked Bacon, "should
the civil state be purged and restored by good and wholesome laws made
every three years in Parliament assembled, devising remedies as fast as
time breedeth mischief, and contrariwise the ecclesiastical state still
continue upon the dregs of time, and receive no alteration these
forty-five years or more?"