Note: Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
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Project Gutenberg has the other three volumes of this work.
I: From Celt to Tudor
see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54168
III: Queen Anne and the Georges
see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37226
IV: The Later Georges to Victoria
see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54143
Transcriber's note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
A carat character is used to denote superscription. A
single character following the carat is superscripted
(example: R^t).
ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS
From Elizabeth to Anne
* * * * * *
ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS
_By Donald G. Mitchell_
I. From Celt to Tudor
II. From Elizabeth to Anne
III. Queen Anne and the Georges
_Each one volume, 12mo, cloth, gilt top, $1.50_
* * * * * *
ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS
From Elizabeth to Anne
by
DONALD G. MITCHELL
[Illustration]
New York
Charles Scribner’s Sons
MDCCCXCVI
Copyright, 1890, by
Charles Scribner’S Sons
Trow’S
Printing and Bookbinding Company,
New York.
_PREFATORY LETTER._
[TO MRS. J. C. G. PIATT, OF UTICA SCHOOL, N. Y.]
MY DEAR JULIA,--_We have both known, in the past, a certain delightsome
country home; you--in earliest childhood, and I--in latest youth-time: and
I think we both relish those reminders--perhaps a Kodak view, or an autumn
gentian plucked by the road-side, or actual glimpse of its woods, or
brook, on some summer’s drive--which have brought back the old homestead,
with its great stretch of undulating meadow--its elms--its shady
lanes--its singing birds--its leisurely going big-eyed oxen--its long,
tranquil days, when the large heart of June was pulsing in all the leaves
and all the air:_
_Well, even so, and by these light tracings of Lands and Kings, and little
whiffs of metric music, I seek to bring back to you, and to your pupils
and associates (who have so kindly received previous and kindred
reminders) the rich memories of that great current of English letters
setting steadily forward amongst these British lands, and these
sovereigns, from Elizabeth to Anne. But slight as these glimpses are, and
as this synopsis may be, they will together serve, I hope, to fasten
attention where I wish to fasten it, and to quicken appetite for those
fuller and larger studies of English Literature and History, which shall
make even these sketchy outlines valued--as one values little flowerets
plucked from old fields--for bringing again to mind the summers of
youth-time, and a world of summer days, with their birds and abounding
bloom._
_Affectionately yours,
D. G. M._
_EDGEWOOD; MARCH, 1890._
_CONTENTS._
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY, 1
THE STUART LINE, 4
JAMES I., 6
WALTER RALEIGH, 11
NIGEL AND HARRISON, 19
A LONDON BRIDE, 23
BEN JONSON AGAIN, 26
AN ITALIAN REPORTER, 29
SHAKESPEARE AND THE GLOBE, 32
CHAPTER II.
GOSSON AND OTHER PURITANS, 42
KING JAMES’ BIBLE, 44
SHAKESPEARE, 56
SHAKESPEARE’S YOUTH, 61
FAMILY RELATIONS, 67
SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON, 73
WORK AND REPUTATION, 77
HIS THRIFT AND CLOSING YEARS, 81
CHAPTER III.
WEBSTER, FORD, AND OTHERS, 88
MASSINGER, BEAUMONT, AND FLETCHER, 93
KING JAMES AND FAMILY, 99
A NEW KING AND SOME LITERARY SURVIVORS, 105
WOTTON AND WALTON, 109
GEORGE HERBERT, 115
ROBERT HERRICK, 120
REVOLUTIONARY TIMES, 126
CHAPTER IV.
KING CHARLES AND HIS FRIENDS, 132
JEREMY TAYLOR, 135
A ROYALIST AND A PURITAN, 140
COWLEY AND WALLER, 144
JOHN MILTON, 150
MILTON’S MARRIAGE, 157
THE ROYAL TRAGEDY, 161
CHANGE OF KINGS, 167
LAST DAYS, 174
CHAPTER V.
CHARLES II. AND HIS FRIENDS, 182
ANDREW MARVELL, 189
AUTHOR OF HUDIBRAS, 193
SAMUEL PEPYS, 198
A SCIENTIST, 207
JOHN BUNYAN, 209
CHAPTER VI.
THREE GOOD PROSERS, 221
JOHN DRYDEN, 227
THE LONDON OF DRYDEN, 234
LATER POEMS AND PURPOSE, 240
JOHN LOCKE, 248
END OF THE KING AND OTHERS, 255
CHAPTER VII.
KINGS CHARLES, JAMES, AND WILLIAM, 261
SOME LITERARY FELLOWS, 268
A PAMPHLETEER, 272
OF QUEEN ANNE, 277
AN IRISH DRAGOON, 280
STEELE’S LITERARY QUALITIES, 285
JOSEPH ADDISON, 288
SIR ROGER DE COVERLEY, 291
CHAPTER VIII.
ROYAL GRIEFS AND FRIENDS, 301
BUILDERS AND STREETS, 306
JOHN GAY, 308
JONATHAN SWIFT, 312
SWIFT’S POLITICS, 324
HIS LONDON JOURNAL, 328
IN IRELAND AGAIN, 333
_ENGLISH LANDS, LETTERS, & KINGS._
CHAPTER I.
We take outlook to-day from the threshold of the seventeenth century.
Elizabeth is dead (1603), but not England. The powers it had grown to
under her quickening offices are all alive. The great Spanish dragon has
its teeth drawn; Cadiz has been despoiled, and huge galleons, gold-laden,
have come trailing into Devon ports. France is courteously friendly.
Holland and England are in leash, as against the fainter-growing blasts of
Popedom. In Ireland, Tyrone has been whipped into bloody quietude. A
syndicate of London merchants, dealing in pepper and spices, has made the
beginnings of that East-Indian empire which gives to the present British
sovereign her proudest title. London is growing apace in riches and in
houses; though her shipping counts for less than the Dutch shipping, great
cargoes come and go through the Thames--spices from the East, velvets and
glass from the Mediterranean, cloths from the Baltic. Cheapside is
glittering with the great array of goldsmiths’ shops four stories high,
and new painted and new gilded (in 1594) by Sir Richard Martin, Mayor. The
dudes of that time walk and “publish” their silken suits there, and thence
through all the lanes leading to Paul’s Walk--which is, effectively, the
aisle of the great church. There are noblemen who have tall houses in the
city and others who have built along the Strand, with fine grounds
reaching to the river and looking out upon the woods which skirt the
bear-gardens of Bankside in Southwark. The river is all alive with
boats--wherries, barges, skiffs. There are no hackney carriages as yet for
hire; but rich folks here and there rumble along the highways in heavy
Flemish coaches.
Some of the great lights we have seen in the intellectual firmament of
England have set. Burleigh is gone; Hooker is gone, in the prime of his
years; Spenser gone, Marlowe gone, Sidney gone. But enough are left at the
opening of the century and at the advent of James (1603) to keep the great
trail of Elizabethan literary splendors all aglow. George Chapman (of the
Homer) is alive and active; and so are Raleigh, and Francis Bacon, and
Heywood, and Dekker, and Lodge. Shakespeare is at his best, and is acting
in his own plays at the newly built Globe Theatre. Michael Drayton is in
full vigor, plotting and working at the tremendous poem from which we
culled--in advance--a pageful of old English posies. Ben Jonson, too, is
all himself, whom we found a giant and a swaggerer, yet a man of great
learning and capable of the delicious bits of poesy which I cited. You
will further remember how we set right the story of poor Amy Robsart--told
of the great Queen’s vanities--of her visitings--of her days of
illness--and of the death of the last sovereign of the name of Tudor.
_The Stuart Line._
Henceforth, for much time to come, we shall meet--when we encounter
British royalty at all--with men of the house of Stuart. But how comes
about this shifting of the thrones from the family of Tudor to the family
of Stuart? I explained in a recent chapter how the name of Tudor became
connected with the crown, by the marriage of a Welsh knight--Owen
Tudor--with Katharine, widow of Henry V. Now let us trace, if we can, this
name of Stuart. Henry VII. was a Tudor, and so was Henry VIII.; so were
his three children who succeeded him--Edward, the bigot Mary, and
Elizabeth; no one of these, however, left direct heirs; but Henry VIII.
had a sister, Margaret, who married James IV. of Scotland. This James was
a lineal descendant of a daughter of Robert Bruce, who had married Walter
Stuart, the chief of a powerful Scotch family. That James I. of whom I
have spoken, who was a delicate poet, and so long a prisoner in Windsor
Tower, was great-grandson of this Stuart-daughter of Robert Bruce. And
from him--that is from James I.--was directly descended James IV., who
married the sister of Henry VIII. James IV. had a son, succeeding him,
called James V. who by a French marriage, became the father of that
Frenchy queen, poor Marie of Scotland, who suffered at Fotheringay, and
who had married her cousin, Henry Darnley (he also having Stuart blood),
by whom she had a son, James Stuart--being James VI. of Scotland and James
I. of England, who now succeeds Elizabeth.
This strong Scotch strain in the Stuart line of royalty will explain, in a
certain degree, how ready so clannish a people as the Scotch were to join
insurrection in favor of the exiled Stuarts; a readiness you will surely
remember if you have read _Waverley_ and _Redgauntlet_. And in further
confirmation of this clannish love, you will recall the ever-renewed and
gossipy boastfulness with which the old Scotch gentlewoman, Lady Margaret
Bellenden, in _Old Mortality_, tells over and over of the morning when his
most gracious majesty Charles II. partook of his _disjune_ at Tillietudlem
Castle.
But we have nothing to do with so late affairs now, and I have only made
this diversion into Scotland to emphasize the facts about the Stuart
affiliation to the throne of England, and the reasons for Scotch readiness
to fling caps in the air for King Charlie or for the Pretender.
_James I._
And now what sort of person was this James Stuart, successor to Elizabeth?
He was a man in his thirty-eighth year, who had been a king--or called a
king, of Scotland--ever since he was a baby of twelve months old; and in
many matters he was a baby still. He loved bawbles as a child loves its
rattle; loved bright feathers too--to dress his cap withal; was afraid of
a drawn sword and of hobgoblins. He walked, from some constitutional
infirmity, with the uncertain step of a child--swaying about in a
ram-shackle way--steadying himself with a staff or a hold upon the
shoulder of some attendant. He slobbered when he ate, so that his silken
doublet--quilted to be proof against daggers--was never of the cleanest.
He had a big head and protruding eyes, and would laugh and talk broad
Scotch with a blundering and halting tongue, and crack unsavory jokes with
his groom or his barber.
Yet he had a certain kindness of heart; he hated to see suffering, though
he had no objection to suffering he did not see; the sight of blood almost
made him faint; his affection for favorites sometimes broke out into
love-sick drivel. Withal he had an acute mind; he had written bad poems,
before he left Scotland, calling himself modestly a royal apprentice at
that craft. He had a certain knack at logical fence and loved to argue a
man to death; he had power of invective, as he showed in his _Counterblast
to Tobacco_--of which I will give a whiff by and by. He had languages at
command, and loved to show it; for he had studied long and hard in his
young days, under that first and best of Scotch scholars and
pedagogues--George Buchanan. He had, in general, a great respect for
sacred things, and for religious observances--which did not prevent him,
in his moments of petulant wrath or of wine-y exaltation, from swearing
with a noisy vehemence. Lord Herbert of Cherbury--elder brother of the
poet Herbert, and English ambassador to France--wittily excused this
habit of his sovereign, by saying he was too kind to anathematize men
himself, and therefore asked God to do so.
This was the man who was to succeed the great and courtly Elizabeth; this
was the man toward whom all the place-hunters of the court now directed
their thoughts, and (many of them) their steps too, eager to be among the
foremost to bow in obsequience before him; besieging him, as every United
States President is besieged, and will be besieged, until the disgraceful
hunt for spoils is checked by some nobler purpose on the part of political
victors than the rewarding of the partisans.
There was Sir Robert Cary--a far-away cousin of Elizabeth’s--who was so
bewitched to be foremost in this agreeable business that he dashes away at
a headlong gallop, night and day--before the royal couriers have
started--gets thrown from his horse, who gave him a vicious blow with his
heels, which he says “made me shed much blood.” But he pushes on and
carries first to Edinburgh the tidings of the Queen’s death. Three days of
the sharpest riding would only carry the news in those days; and the
court messenger took a week or so to get over the heavy roads between the
Scotch capital and London.
It does not appear that James made a show of much sorrow; he must have
remembered keenly, through all his stolidity, how his mother, Mary Queen
of Scots, had suffered at Fotheringay; and remembered through whose _fiat_
this dismal tragedy had come about. He hints that perhaps the funeral
services had better not tarry for his coming;--writes that he would be
glad of the crown jewels (which they do not send, however) for the new
Queen’s wearing.
Then he sets off at leisure; travels at leisure; receiving deputations at
leisure, and all manner of prostrations; stopping at Berwick; stopping at
Belvoir Castle; stopping at York; stopping wherever was good eating or
lodging or hunting; flatterers coming in shoals to be knighted by him;
even the great Bacon, wanting to be Sir Francised--as he was presently:
and I am afraid the poets of the time might have appeared, if they had
possessed the wherewithal to make the journey, and were as hopeful of fat
things.
Curiously enough, the King is grandly entertained in Huntingdonshire by
one Oliver Cromwell, to whom James takes a great liking; not, of course,
the great Cromwell; but this was the uncle and the godfather of the famous
Oliver, who was to be chief instrument in bringing James’ royal son,
Charles, to the scaffold. Thence the King goes for four or five days of
princely entertainment to Theobalds, a magnificent seat of old Burleigh’s,
where Elizabeth had gone often; and where his son, Cecil, now plies the
King with flatteries, and poisons his mind perhaps against Raleigh--for
whom Cecil has no liking;--perhaps representing that Raleigh, being in
Parliament at the time, might have stayed the execution of Queen Mary, if
he had chosen. The King is delighted with Theobalds; so far delighted that
a few years after he exchanges for it his royal home of Hatfield House,
which magnificent place is still held by a descendant of Cecil, in the
person of the present Earl of Salisbury.
That place of Theobalds became afterward a pet home of the King; he made
great gardens there, stocked with all manner of trees and fruits: every
great stranger in England must needs go to see the curious knots and
mazes of flowers, and the vineries and shrubbery; but the palace and
gardens are now gone. At last King Jamie gets to London, quartering at the
_Charter-house_--where is now a school and a home of worn-out old
pensioners (dear old Colonel Newcome died there!) within gunshot of the
great markets by Smithfield;--and James is as vain as a boy of sleeping
and lording it, at last, in a great capital of two realms that call him
master.
_Walter Raleigh._
I said that his mind had been poisoned against Raleigh;[1] that poison
begins speedily to work. There are only too many at the King’s elbow who
are jealous of the grave and courtly gentleman, now just turned of fifty,
and who has packed into those years so much of high adventure; who has
written brave poems; who has fought gallantly and on many fields; who has
voyaged widely in Southern and Western seas; who has made discovery of the
Guianas; who has, on a time, befriended Spenser, and was mate-fellow with
the gallant Sidney; who was a favorite of the great Queen; and whose fine
speech, and lordly bearing, and princely dress made him envied everywhere,
and hated by less successful courtiers. Possibly, too, Raleigh had made
unsafe speeches about the chances of other succession to the throne.
Surely he who wore his heart upon his sleeve, and loved brave deeds, could
have no admiration for the poltroon of a King who had gone a hunting when
the stains upon the scaffold on which his mother suffered were hardly dry.
So it happened that Sir Walter Raleigh was accused of conspiring for the
dethronement of the new King, and was brought to trial, with Cobham and
others. The street people jeered at him as he passed, for he was not
popular; he had borne himself so proudly with his exploits, and gold, and
his eagle eye. But he made so noble a defence--so full--so clear--so
eloquent--so impassioned, that the same street people cheered him as he
passed out of court--but not to freedom. The sentence was death: the King,
however, feared to put it to immediate execution. There was a show,
indeed, of a scaffold, and the order issued. Cobham and Gray were haled
out, and given last talks with an officiating priest, when the King
ordered stay of proceedings: he loved such mummery. Raleigh went to the
Tower, where for thirteen years he lay a prisoner; and they show now in
the Tower of London the vaulted chamber that was his reputed (but
doubtful) home, where he compiled, in conjunction with some outside
friends--Ben Jonson among the rest--that ponderous _History of the World_,
which is a great reservoir of facts, stated with all grace and dignity,
but which, like a great many heavy, excellent books, is never read. The
matter-of-fact young man remembers that Sir Walter Raleigh first brought
potatoes and (possibly) tobacco into England; but forgets his ponderous
_History_.
I may as well finish his story here and now, though I must jump forward
thirteen and more years to accomplish it. At the end of that time the
King’s exchequer being low (as it nearly always was), and there being
rumors afloat of possible gold findings in Raleigh’s rich country of
Guiana, the old knight, now in his sixty-seventh year, felt the spirit of
adventure stirred in him by the west wind that crept through the gratings
of his prison bringing tropical odors; and he volunteered to equip a
fleet in company with friends, and with the King’s permission to go in
quest of mines, to which he believed, or professed to believe, he had the
clew. The permission was reluctantly granted; and poor Lady Raleigh sold
her estate, as well as their beloved country home of Sherborne (in Dorset)
to vest in the new enterprise.
But the fates were against it: winds blew the ships astray; tempests beat
upon them; mutinies threatened; and in Guiana, at last, there came
disastrous fights with the Spaniards.
Keymis, the second in command, and an old friend of Raleigh’s, being
reproached by this latter in a moment of frenzy, withdraws and shoots
himself; Raleigh’s own son, too, is sacrificed, and the crippled squadron
sets out homeward, with no gold, and shattered ships and maddened crews.
Storm overtakes them; there is mutiny; there is wreck; only a few forlorn
and battered hulks bring back this disheartened knight. He lands in his
old home of Devon--is warned to flee the wrath that will fall upon him in
London; but as of old he lifts his gray head proudly, and pushes for the
capital to meet his accusers. Arrived there, he is made to know by those
strong at court that there is no hope, for he has brought no gold; and
yielding to friendly entreaties he makes a final effort at escape. He does
outwit his immediate guards and takes to a little wherry that bears him
down the Thames: a half-day more and he would have taken wings for France.
But the sleuth-hounds are on his track; he is seized, imprisoned, and in
virtue of his old sentence--the cold-hearted Bacon making the law for
it--is brought to the block.
He walks to the scaffold with serene dignity--greets old friends
cheerfully--dies cheerfully, and so enters on the pilgrimage he had set
forth in his cumbrous verse:--
“There the blessed paths we’ll travel,
Strow’d with rubies thick as gravel;
Ceilings of diamonds, sapphire floors,
High walls of coral and pearly bowers.
From thence to Heaven’s bribeless hall,
Where no corrupted voices brawl;
No conscience molten into gold,
No forg’d accuser bought or sold,
No cause deferr’d, no vain-spent Journey,
For there Christ is the King’s Attorney,
Who pleads for all without degrees,
And He hath angels, but no fees.
And when the grand twelve-million jury
Of our sins, with direful fury,
Against our souls black verdicts give,
Christ pleads his death and then we live.”
Again to his wife, in a last letter from his prison, he writes:--
“You shall receive, my dear wife, my last words in these my last
lines: my love I send you, that you may keep when I am dead; and my
counsel, that you may remember when I am no more. I would not with
my will, present you sorrows, my dear Bess: let them go to the grave
with me and be buried in the dust. And seeing that it is not the
will of God that I shall meet you any more, bear my destruction
patiently, and with a heart like yourself.
“I beseech you for the love that you bear me living, that you do not
hide yourself many days; but, by your labors seek to help my
miserable fortunes, and the rights of your poor child. Your mourning
cannot avail me, that am but dust. I sued for my life, but, God
knows, it was for you and yours that I desired it: for, know it, my
dear wife, your child is the child of a true man, who in his own
respect, despiseth Death and his misshapen and ugly forms. I cannot
write much (God knows how hardly I steal this time when all sleep),
and it is also time for me to separate my thoughts from the world.
Beg my dead body, which living was denied you, and either lay it in
Sherborne or Exeter church, by my father and mother.
“My dear wife, farewell; bless my boy; pray for me; and let my true
God hold you both in his arms.”
It is not as a literary man proper that I have spoken of Raleigh; the
poems that he wrote were very few, nor were they overfine; but they did
have the glimmer in them of his great courage and of his clear thought.
They were never collected in book shape in his own day, nor, indeed, till
long after he had gone: they were only occasional pieces,[2] coming to the
light fitfully under stress of mind--a trail of fire-sparks, as we may
say, flying off from under the trip-hammer of royal wrath or of desperate
fortunes.
Even his _History_ was due to his captivity; his enthusiasms, when he
lived them in freedom, were too sharp and quick for words. They spent
themselves in the blaze of battles--in breasting stormy seas that washed
shores where southern cypresses grew, and golden promises opened with
every sunrise.
And when I consider his busy and brilliant and perturbed life, with its
wonderful adventures, its strange friendships, its toils, its quiet hours
with Spenser upon the Mulla shore, its other hours amidst the jungles of
the Orinoco, its lawless gallantries in the court of Elizabeth, its booty
snatched from Spanish galleons he has set ablaze, its perils, its long
captivities--it is the life itself that seems to me a great Elizabethan
epic, with all its fires, its mated couples of rhythmic sentiment, its
poetic splendors, its shortened beat and broken pauses and blind turns,
and its noble climacteric in a bloody death that is without shame and full
of the largest pathos.
When you read Charles Kingsley’s story of _Westward, Ho!_ (which you
surely should read, as well as such other matter as the same author has
written relating to Raleigh) you will get a live glimpse of this noble
knight of letters, and of those other brave and adventurous sailors of
Devonshire, who in those times took the keels of Plymouth over great
wastes of water. Kingsley writes of the heroes of his native Devon, in the
true Elizabethan humor--putting fiery love and life into his writing; the
roar of Atlantic gales breaks into his pages, and they show, up and down,
splashes of storm-driven brine.
_Nigel and Harrison._
In going back now to the earlier years of King James’ reign, I shall make
no apology for calling attention to that engaging old story of the
_Fortunes of Nigel_. I know it is the fashion with many of the astute
critics of the day to pick flaws in Sir Walter, and to expatiate on his
blunders and shortcomings; nevertheless, I do not think my readers can do
better--in aiming to acquaint themselves with this epoch of English
history--than to read over again Scott’s representation of the personality
and the surroundings of the pedant King. There may be errors in minor
dates, errors of detail; but the larger truths respecting the awkwardness
and the pedantries of the first Stuart King, and respecting the Scotch
adventurers who hung pressingly upon his skirts, and the lawless street
scenes which in those days did really disturb the quietude of the great
metropolis, are pictured with a liveliness which will make them
unforgetable. Macaulay says that out of the gleanings left by historic
harvesters Scott has made “a history scarce less valuable than theirs.”
Nor do I think there is in the _Fortunes of Nigel_ a deviation from the
truth (of which many must be admitted) so extravagant and misleading as
Mr. Freeman’s averment, that in _Ivanhoe_ “there is a mistake in every
line.” There are small truths and large truths; and the competent artist
knows which to seize upon. Titian committed some fearful anachronisms, and
put Venetian stuffs upon Judean women; Balthasar Denner, on the other
hand, painted with minute truthfulness every stubby hair in a man’s beard,
and no tailor could have excepted to his button-holes: nobody knows
Denner; Titian reigns.
Among those whom Scott placed under tribute for much of his local coloring
was a gossipy, kindly clergyman, William Harrison[3] by name, who was
born close by Bow Lane, in London, who studied at Westminster, at Oxford,
and Cambridge (as he himself tells us), and who had a parish in Radwinter,
on the northern borders of Essex; who came to be a canon, finally, at
Windsor; and who died ten years before James came to power. He tells us,
in a delightfully quaint way, of all the simples which he grew in his
little garden--of the manner in which country houses were builded, and
their walls white-washed--of the open chimney vents, and the
smoke-burnished rafters. “And yet see the change,” he says, “for when our
houses were builded of willow, then had we oken men; but now that our
houses are come to be made of oke, our men are not onlie become willow,
but a great manie, through Persian delicacie crept in among us, altogether
of straw, which is a sore alteration.”
When the old parson gets upon the subject of dress he waxes eloquent; nor
was he without fullest opportunities for observation, having been for much
time private chaplain to the Earl of Cobham.
“Oh, how much cost,” he says, “is bestowed now-a-daies upon our
bodies, and how little upon our soules! How many sutes of apparel
hath the one, and how little furniture hath the other! How curious,
how nice are the men and women, and how hardlie can the tailer
please them in making things fit for their bodies. How many times
must they be sent back againe to him that made it. I will say
nothing of our heads, which sometimes are polled, sometimes curled,
or suffered to grow at length like woman’s locks, manie times cut
off above or under the ears, round, as by a wooden dish. Neither
will I meddle with our varieties of beards, of which some are shaven
from the chin like those of the Turks, not a few cut like to the
beard of Marquess Otto; some made round, like a rubbing brush,
others with a _pique devant_ (O fine fashion!).
“In women, too, it is much to be lamented that they doo now far
exceed the lightness of our men, and such staring attire as in times
past was supposed meet for none but light housewives onelie, is now
become an habit for chaste and sober matrons. What should I say of
their doublets with pendant pieces on the brest, full of jags and
cuts, and sleeves of sundrie colors, I have met with some of these
_trulles_ in London, so disguised, that it hath passed my skill to
discerne whether they were men or women.”
If this discerning old gentleman had shot his quill along our sidewalks, I
think it would have punctured a good deal of bloat, and stirred up no
little bustle. The King himself had a great liking for fine dress in
others, though he was himself a sloven. Lord Howard, a courtier, writes to
a friend who is hopeful of preferment:
“I would wish you to be well trimmed; get a new Jerkin well
bordered, and not too short: the King liketh it flowing. Your ruff
should be well stiffened and bushy. The King is nicely heedful of
such points. Eighteen servants were lately discharged, and many more
will be discarded who are not to his liking in these matters.” And
again, speaking of a favorite, he says:--“Carr hath changed his
tailors, and tiremen many times, and all to please the Prince, who
laugheth at the long-grown fashion of our young courtiers, and
wisheth for change everie day.”
_A London Bride._
One other little bit of high light upon the every-day ways of London
living, in the early years of King James, we are tempted to give. It comes
out in the private letter of a new-married lady, who was daughter and
heiress of that enormously rich merchant, Sir John Spencer, who was Lord
Mayor of London; and who, in Elizabeth’s time (as well as James’), lived
in Crosby Hall, still standing in the thick of London city, near to where
Thread and Needle Street, at its eastern end, abuts upon Bishopsgate.
Every voyaging American should go to see this best type of domestic
architecture of the fifteenth century now existing in London; and it will
quicken his interest in the picturesque old pile to know that Richard
III., while Duke of Gloucester, passed some critical days and nights
there, and that for some years it was the home of Sir Thomas More. The
Spencer heiress, however--of whom we began to make mention--brightened its
interior at a later day; there were many suitors for her hand; among them
a son of Lord Compton--not looked upon with favor by the rich
merchant--and concealing his advances under the disguise of a baker’s boy,
through which he came to many stolen interviews, and at last (as tradition
tells) was successful enough to trundle away the heiress, covertly, in his
baker’s barrow. Through the good offices of Queen Elizabeth, who stood
god-mother to the first child, difficulties between father and son-in-law
were healed; and when, later, by the death of Sir John Spencer, the
bridegroom was assured of the enormous wealth inherited by his bride, he
was--poor man--nearly crazed.
Among the curative processes for his relief may be reckoned the letter
from his wife to which I have made allusion, and which runs thus:--
“My sweet Life, I pray and beseech you to grant me the sum of £2,600
[equivalent to some $30,000 now] quarterly: also, besides, £600
quarterly for charities, of which I will give no account. Also, I
would have 3 horses for my own saddle, that none shall dare to lend
or borrow. Also; 2 gentlewomen (lest one should be sick)--seeing it
is an indecent thing for a gentlewoman to stand mumping alone, when
God hath blessed the Lord and Lady with a great Estate: Also, when I
ride, a hunting or a hawking, I would have them attend: so, for
either of those said women there must be a horse.
“Also, I would have 6 or 8 gentlemen; I will have my two
coaches--one lined with velvet to myself, with four very fair
horses, and a coach for my women lined with cloth, and laced with
gold;--otherwise with scarlet and laced with silver, with four good
horses. Thereafter, my desire is that you defray all charges for me,
and beside my allowance, I would have 20 gowns of apparel a
year--six of them excellent good ones. Also, I would have to put in
my purse £2,000 or so--you to pay my debts. And seeing I have been
so reasonable, I pray you do find my children apparel, and their
schooling, and all my servants, men and women, with wages. Also, I
must have £6,000 to buy me jewels, and £4,000 to buy me a gold
chain. Also, my desire is, that you would pay your debts--build up
Ashley House, and lend no money as you love God! When you be an Earl
[as he was afterward in Charles I.’s time] I pray you to allow
£2,000 more than I now desire and double attendance.”
Happy husband!
_Ben Jonson again._
We must not forget our literature; and what has become of our friend Ben
Jonson in these times? He is hearty and thriving; he has written
gratulatory and fulsome verses to the new sovereign. He is better placed
with James than even with Elizabeth. If his tragedy of “Sejanus” has not
found a great success, he has more than made up the failing by the
brilliant masques he has written. The pedantic King loves their pretty
show of classicism, which he can interpret better than his courtiers. He
battens, too, upon the flattery that is strown with a lavish hand:--
“Never came man more longed for, more desired,
And being come, more reverenced, lov’d, admired.”[4]
This is the strain; no wonder that the poet comes by pension; no wonder he
has “commands,” with goodly fees, to all the fêtes in the royal honor. Yet
he is too strong and robust and learned to be called a mere sycophant. The
more I read of the literary history of those days the more impressed I am
by the predominance of Ben Jonson;--a great, careless, hard-living,
hard-drinking, not ill-natured literary monarch. His strength is evidenced
by the deference shown him--by his versatility; now some musical masque
sparkling with little dainty bits which a sentimental miss might copy in
her album or chant in her boudoir; and this, matched or followed by some
labored drama full of classic knowledge, full of largest wordcraft,
snapping with fire-crackers of wit, loaded with ponderous nuggets of
strong sense, and the whole capped and booted with prologue and epilogue
where poetic graces shine through proudest averments of indifference--of
scorn of applause--of audacious self-sufficiency.
It was some fifteen years after James’ coming to power that Ben Jonson
made his memorable Scotch journey--perhaps out of respect for his
forebears, who had gone, two generations before, out of Annandale--perhaps
out of some lighter caprice. In any event it would have been only a
commonplace foot-journey of a middle-aged man, well known over all Britain
as poet and dramatist, with no special record of its own, except for a
visit of a fortnight which he made, in the north country, to Drummond of
Hawthornden:--this made it memorable. For this Drummond was a note-taker;
he was a smooth but not strong poet; was something proud of his Scotch
lairdship; lived in a beautiful home seated upon a crag that lifts above
the beautiful valley of Eskdale; its picturesque irregularities of tower
and turret are still very charming, and Eskdale is charming with its
wooded walks, cliffs, pools, and bridges; Roslin Castle is near by, and
Roslin Chapel, and so is Dalkeith.
The tourist of our time can pass no pleasanter summer’s day than in
loiterings there and thereabout. Echoes of Scott’s border minstrelsy beat
from bank to bank. Poet Drummond was proud to have poet Jonson as a guest,
and hospitably plied him with “strong waters;” under the effusion Jonson
dilated, and Drummond, eagerly attentive, made notes. These jottings down,
which were not voluminous, and which were not published until after both
parties were in their graves, have been subject of much and bitter
discussion, and relate to topics lying widely apart. There is talk of
Petrarch and of Queen Elizabeth--of Marston and of Overbury--of Drayton
and Donne--of Shakespeare (all too little)--of King James and
Petronius--of Jonson’s “shrew of a wife” and of Sir Francis Bacon; and
there are more or less authentic stories of Spenser and Raleigh and
Sidney. Throughout we find the burly British poet very aggressive, very
outspoken, very penetrative and fearless: and we find his Scotch
interviewer a little overawed by the other’s audacities, and not a little
resentful of his advice to him--to study Quintillian.
_An Italian Reporter._
It was in the very year of Ben Jonson’s return from the north that a
masque of his--“Pleasure is Reconciled to Virtue”--was represented at
Whitehall; and it so happens that we have a lively glimpse of this
representation from the note-book of an Italian gentleman who was chaplain
to Pietro Contarini, then ambassador from Venice, and who was living at
Sir Pindar’s home in Bishopsgate Street (a locality still kept in mind by
a little tavern now standing thereabout called “Sir Pindar’s Head”).
This report of Busino, the Italian gentleman of whom I spoke, about his
life in London, was buried in the archives of Venice, until unearthed
about twenty years since by an exploring Englishman.[5] So it happens,
that in this old Venetian document we seem to look directly through those
foreign eyes, closed for two hundred and seventy years, upon the play at
Whitehall.
“For two hours,” he says, “we were forced to wait in the Venetian
box, very hot and very crowded. Then the Lord Chamberlain came up,
and wanted to add another, who was a greasy Spaniard.”
This puts Busino in an ill humor (there was no good-will between Italy and
Spain in those days); but he admires the women--“all so many queens.”
“There were some very lovely faces, and at every moment my
companions kept exclaiming: ‘Oh, do look at this one!’ ‘Oh, do see
that other!’ ‘Whose wife is this?’ ‘And that pretty one near her,
whose daughter is she?’ [Curious people!] Then the King came in and
took the ambassador to his royal box, directly opposite the stage,
and the play began at 10 P.M.”
There was Bacchus on a car, followed by Silenus on a barrel, and twelve
wicker-flasks representing very lively beer bottles, who performed
numerous antics; then a moving Mount Atlas, as big as the stage would
permit; scores of classic affectations and astonishing mythologic
mechanism; and at last, with a great bevy of pages, twelve cavaliers in
masques--the Prince Charles (afterward Charles I.) being chief of the
revellers.
“These all choose partners and dance every kind of dance--every
cavalier selecting his lady. After an hour or two of this, they,
being tired, began to flag;” whereat--says the chaplain--“the
choleric King James got impatient and shouted out from his box, ‘Why
don’t they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take you
all--dance!’”
What a light this little touch of the old gentleman’s choleric spirit
throws upon the court manners of that time!
Then Buckingham, the favorite, whom Scott introduces in _Nigel_ as
Steenie--comes forward to placate the King, and cuts a score of lofty
capers with so much grace and agility as not only to quiet the wrathy
monarch but to delight everybody. Afterward comes the banquet, at which
his most sacred majesty gets tipsy, and amid a general smashing of
Venetian glass, continues the Italian gentleman, “I went home, very
tired, at two o’clock in the morning.”
Ah, if we could only unearth some good old play-going chaplain’s account
of how Shakespeare appeared--of his dress--of his voice--and with what
unction of manner he set before the little audience at the Globe, or
Blackfriars, his part of Old Adam (which there is reason to believe he
took), in his own delightful play of “As You Like It.” What would we not
give to know the very attitude, and the wonderful pity in his look, with
which he spoke to his young master, Orlando:--
“Oh, my sweet master, what make you here?
Why are you virtuous? Why do people love you?
Oh, what a world is this, when what is comely
Envenoms him, that bears it!”
_Shakespeare and the Globe._
Neither our Italian friend, however, nor Ben Jonson have given us any such
glimpse as we would like to have of that keen-witted Warwickshire actor
and playwright who, in the early years of James’ reign, is living off and
on in London; having bought, within a few years--as the records tell
us--a fine New Place in Stratford, and has won great favor with that King
Jamie, who with all his pedantry knows a good thing when he sees it, or
hears it. Indeed, there is some warrant for believing that the King wrote
a commendatory letter to the great dramatist, of which Mr. Black, in our
time, makes shadowy use in that Shakespearean romance of his,[6] you may
have encountered. The novelist gives us some very charming pictures of the
Warwickshire landscape, and he has made Miss Judith Shakespeare very arch
and engaging; but it was perilous ground for any novelist to venture upon;
and I think the author felt it, and has shown a timidity and doubt that
have hampered him; I do not recognize in it the breezy freedom that
belonged to his treatment of things among the Hebrides. But to return to
“Judith’s father”--he is part proprietor of the Globe Theatre, taking in
lots of money (old cronies say) in that way; was honored by the Queen,
too, before her death, and had written that “Merry Wives of Windsor,”
tradition says, to show Queen Bess how the Fat Falstaff would carry his
great hulk as a lover.
We might meet this Shakespeare at that Mermaid Tavern we spoke of; but
should look out for him more hopefully about one of the playhouses. Going
from the Mermaid, supposing we were putting up there in those days, we
should strike across St. Paul’s Churchyard, and possibly taking Paul’s
Walk, and so down Ludgate Hill; and thence on, bearing southerly to
Blackfriars; which locality has now its commemoration in the name of
Playhouse Yard, and is in a dingy quarter, with dingy great warehouses
round it. Arrived there we should learn, perhaps by a poster on the door,
that the theatre would not open till some later hour. Blackfriars[7] was a
private theatre, roofed over entirely and lighted with candles; also,
through Elizabeth’s time, opening generally on Sundays--that being a
popular day--hours being chosen outside of prayer or church-time; and this
public dramatic observance of Sunday was only forbidden by express
enactment after James came to the throne. At her palace, and with her
child-players, Sunday was always Queen Elizabeth’s favorite day.
This Blackfriars was at only a little remove down the Thames from that
famous Whitefriars region of which there is such melodramatic account in
Scott’s story of _Nigel_, where Old Trapbois comes to his wild death. If
we went to the Globe Theatre, we should push on down to the river--near to
a point where Blackfriars Bridge now spans it--then, a clear stream free
from all bridges, save only London Bridge, which would have loomed, with
its piles of houses, out of the water on our left. At the water-side we
should take wherry (fare only one penny) and be sculled over to
Southwark, landing at an open place--Bankside--near which was Paris
Garden, where bear-baiting was still carried on with high kingly approval;
and thereabout, on a spot now swallowed in a gulf of smoked and blackened
houses--just about the locality where at a later day stood Richard
Baxter’s Chapel, rose the octagonal walls of the Globe Theatre, in which
Mr. Shakespeare was concerned as player and part proprietor. There should
be a flag flying aloft and people lounging in, paying their two-pence,
their sixpences, their shillings, or even their half-crowns--as they chose
the commoner or the better places. Only the stage is roofed over; perhaps
also a narrow space all round the walls; from all otherwheres within, one
could look up straight into the murky sky of London. There is
apple-eating, nut-cracking, and some vender of pamphlets bawling “Buy a
new booke;” such a one perhaps as that _Horne Booke of Gulls_--which I
told you of, written by Dekker--would have been a favorite for such
venders. Or, possibly through urgence of the Court Chamberlain, King
James’ _Counterblaste to Tobacco_ may be put on sale there, to mend
manners; or Joshua Sylvester’s little poem to the same end, entitled
_Tobacco battered and the Pipes shattered about their Eares that idly
idolize so base and barbarous a Weed, by a Volley of hot shot, thundered
from Mount Helicon_.
“How juster will the Heavenly God,
Th’ Eternal, punish with infernal rod
In Hell’s dark furnace, with black fumes to choak
Those that on Earth will still offend in Smoak.”
But hot as this sort of shot might have been, we may be sure that some
fast fellows, the critics and _æsthetes_ of those days, will have their
place on the stage, sprawling there upon the edge, before the actors
appear; criticising players and audience and smoking their long pipes; may
be taking a hand at cards, and if very “swell,” tossing the cards over to
people in the pit when once their game is over--a showy and arrogant
largess.
Perhaps Ben Jonson will come swaggering in, having taken a glass, or two,
very likely, or even three, in the tap-room of the Tabard Tavern--the
famous Tabard of Chaucer’s tales--which is within practicable drinking
distance; and Will Shakespeare, if indeed there, may greet him across two
benches with, “Ah, Ben,” and he--tipsily in reply, with “Ah, my good
fellow, Will.” Those prim young men, Beaumont and Fletcher, who are just
now pluming their wings for such dramatic flights as these two older men
have made, may also be there. And the play will open with three little
bursts of warning music; always a prologue with a first representation;
and it may chance that the very one we have lighted upon, is some special
exhibit of that great military spectacle of “Henry V.” which we know, and
all the times between have known; and it may be that this Shakespeare,
being himself author and in a sense manager of these boards, may come
forward to speak the prologue himself; how closely we would have eyed him,
and listened:--
“Pardon, gentles all;
The flat, unraiséd spirit, that hath dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O, the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts,
Into a thousand parts divide one man;
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth,
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times;
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass.”
And then the play begins and we see them all: Gloucester and the brave
king, and Bedford, and Fluellen, and the pretty Kate of France (by some
boy-player), and Nym, and Pistol, and Dame Quickly; and the drums beat,
and the roar of battle breaks and rolls away--as only Shakespeare’s words
can make battles rage; and the French Kate is made Queen, and so the end
comes.
All this might have happened; I have tried to offend against no historic
data of places, or men, or dates in this summing up. And from the doors of
the Globe, where we are assailed by a clamor of watermen and linkboys, we
go down to the river’s edge--scarce a stone’s-throw distant--and take our
wherry, on the bow of which a light is now flaming, and float away in the
murky twilight upon that great historic river--watching the red
torch-fires, kindling one by one along the Strand shores, and catching the
dim outline of London houses--the London of King James I.--looming
through the mists behind them.
In our next chapter I shall have somewhat more to say of the Stratford
man--specially of his personality; and more to say of King James, and of
his English Bible.