pageants by which Christmas was welcomed at the court of the then
monarch Henry II.; and from this period the wardrobe rolls and other
Household-Books of the English kings furnish continual evidences of the
costly preparations made for the festival. Many extracts from these
books have been made by Mr. Sandys and others, from which it appears
that the mirth of the celebration, and the lavish profusion expended
upon it, were on the increase from year to year, excepting during that
distracted period of England's history when these, like all other
gracious arrangements and social relations, were disturbed by the unholy
contests between the houses of the rival roses. There is, however, a
beautiful example of the sacred influence of this high festival
mentioned by Turner in his History of England, showing that its hallowed
presence had power, even in those warlike days, to silence even the
voice of war,--of all war save that most impious of (what are almost
always impious) wars, civil war. During the siege of Orleans, in 1428,
he says: "The solemnities and festivities of Christmas gave a short
interval of repose. The English lords requested of the French commanders
that they might have a night of minstrelsy, with trumpets and clarions.
This was granted; and the horrors of war were suspended by melodies,
that were felt to be delightful."
In the peaceful reign of Henry VII., the nation, on emerging from that
long and unnatural struggle, appears to have occupied itself, as did the
wise monarch, in restoring as far as was possible, and by all means, its
disrupted ties, and rebaptizing its apostate feelings; and during this
period the festival of Christmas was restored with revived splendor and
observed with renewed zeal. The Household-Book of that sovereign,
preserved in the chapter-house at Westminster, contains numerous items
for disbursements connected with the Christmas diversions, in proof of
this fact.
The reign of Henry VIII. was a reign of jousts and pageants till it
became a reign of blood; and accordingly the Christmas pageantries
prepared for the entertainment of that execrable monarch were
distinguished by increased pomp and furnished at a more profuse
expenditure. The festivities of Eltham and Greenwich figure in the pages
of the old chroniclers; and the account books at the chapter-house
abound in payments made in this reign, for purposes connected with the
revels of the season.
We shall by and by have occasion to present our readers with some
curious particulars, illustrative of the cost and pains bestowed upon
this court celebration during the short reign of the young monarch
Edward VI.
Not all the gloom and terror of the sanguinary Mary's reign were able
entirely to extinguish the spirit of Christmas rejoicing throughout the
land, though the court itself was too much occupied with its auto-da-fé
spectacles to have much time for pageants of less interest.
Our readers, we think, need scarcely be told that the successor of this
stern and miserable queen (and, thank God! the last of that bad family)
was sure to seize upon the old pageantries, as she did upon every other
vehicle which could in any way be made to minister to her intolerable
vanity, or by which a public exhibition might be made, before the slaves
whom she governed, of her own vulgar and brutal mind. Under all the
forms of ancient festival observance, some offering was presented to
this insatiable and disgusting appetite,--and that, too, by men entitled
to stand erect, by their genius or their virtues, yet whose knees were
rough with kneeling before as worthless an idol as any wooden god that
the most senseless superstition ever set up for worship. From all the
altars which the court had reared to old Father Christmas of yore, a
cloud of incense was poured into the royal closet, enough to choke
anything but a woman,--that woman a queen, and that queen a Tudor. The
festival was preserved, and even embellished; but the saint, as far as
the court was concerned, was changed. However, the example of the
festivity to the people was the same; and the land was a merry land, and
the Christmas time a merry time, throughout its length and breadth, in
the days of Queen Elizabeth.
Nay, out of this very anxiety to minister to the craving vanity of a
weak and worthless woman--the devices to which it gave rise and the
laborers whom it called into action--have arisen results which are not
amongst the least happy or important of those by its connection with
which the Christmas festival stands recommended. Under these impulses,
the old dramatic entertainments--of which we shall have occasion to
speak more at large hereafter--took a higher character and assumed a
more consistent form. The first regular English tragedy, called "Ferrex
and Porrex," and the entertainment of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," were
both productions of the early period of this queen's reign; and amid the
crowd of her worshippers (alas that it is so!) rose up--with the star
upon his forehead which is to burn for all time--the very first of all
created beings, William Shakespeare. These are amongst the strange
anomalies which the world, as it is constituted, so often presents, and
_must_ present at times, constitute it how we will. Shakespeare doing
homage to Queen Elizabeth! The loftiest genius and the noblest heart
that have yet walked this earth, in a character merely human, bowing
down before this woman with the soul of a milliner and no heart at all!
The "bright particular star" humbling itself before the temporal crown!
The swayer of hearts, the ruler of all men's minds, in virtue of his own
transcendent nature, recognizing the supremacy of this overgrown child,
because she presided over the temporalities of a half emancipated
nation, by rights derived to her from others and sanctioned by no
qualities of her own!
And yet if to the low passions of this vulgar queen, and the patronage
which they led her to extend to all who could best minister to their
gratification, we owe any part of that development by which this
consummate genius expanded itself, then do we stand in some degree
indebted to her for one of the greatest boons which has been bestowed
upon the human race; and as between her and mankind in general (for the
accounts between her and individuals, and still more that between her
and God, stand uninfluenced by this item) there is a large amount of
good to be placed to her credit. Against her follies of a day there
would have to be set her promotion of a wisdom whose lessons are for all
time; against the tears which she caused to flow, the human anguish
which she inflicted, and the weary, pining hours of the captives whom
she made, would stand the tears of thousands dried away, many and many
an aching heart beguiled of its sorrow, and many a captive taught to
feel that
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;"
all the chords of human feeling touched with a hand that soothes as did
the harp of David, all the pages of human suffering stored with
consolations!
To any one who will amuse himself by looking over the Miracle Plays and
Masques, which were replaced by the more regular forms of dramatic
entertainment, and will then regale himself by the perusal of "Gammer
Gurton's Needle" or "Ferrex and Porrex," which came forward with higher
pretensions in the beginning of this reign, there will appear reason to
be sufficiently astonished at the rapid strides by which dramatic
excellence was attained before its close and during the next, even
without taking Shakespeare into the account at all. Put when we turn to
the marvels of this great magician, and find that in his hands not only
were the forms of the drama perfected, but that, without impeding the
action or impairing the interest invested in those forms, and besides
his excursions into the regions of imagination and his creations _out
of_ the natural world he has touched every branch of human knowledge and
struck into every train of human thought; that without learning, in the
popular sense, he has arrived at all the results and embodied all the
wisdom which learning is only useful if it teaches; that we can be
placed in no imaginable circumstances and under the influence of no
possible feelings of which we do not find exponents,--and _such_
exponents!--"in sweetest music," on his page; and above all, when we
find that all the final morals to be drawn from all his writings are
hopeful ones, that all the lessons which all his agents--joy or sorrow,
pain or pleasure--are made alike to teach are lessons of goodness--it is
impossible to attribute all this to aught but a revelation, or ascribe
to him any character but that of a prophet. Shakespeare knew more than
any other mere man ever knew; and none can tell how that knowledge came
to him. "All men's business and bosoms" lay open to him. We should not
like to have him quoted against us on _any_ subject. Nothing escaped
him, and he never made a mistake (we are not speaking of technical
ones). He was the universal interpreter into language of the human mind,
and he knew all the myriad voices by which nature speaks. He reminds us
of the vizier in the Eastern story, who is said to have understood the
languages of all animals. The utterings of the elements, the voices of
beasts and of birds, Shakespeare could translate into the language of
men; and the thoughts and sentiments of men he rendered into words as
sweet as the singing of birds. If the reign of Elizabeth had been
illustrated only by the advent of this great spirit, it might itself
have accounted for some portion of that prejudice which (illustrated, as
in fact it was, by much that was great and noble) blinds men still--or
induces them to shut their eyes--to the true personal claims and
character of that queen.
But we are digressing, again, as who does not when the image of
Shakespeare comes across him? To return:--
The court celebrations of Christmas were observed throughout the reign
of the first James; and the Prince Charles himself was an occasional
performer in the pageantries prepared for the occasion, at great cost.
But at no period do they appear to have been more zealously sought
after, or performed with more splendor, than during that which
immediately preceded the persecution, from whose effects they have never
since recovered into anything like their former lustihood. In the early
years of Charles the First's reign, the court pageants of this season
were got up with extraordinary brilliancy,--the king with the lords of
his court, and the queen with her ladies, frequently taking parts
therein. This was the case in 1630-31; and at the Christmas of 1632-33
the queen, says Sandys, "got up a pastoral in Somerset House, in which
it would seem she herself took a part. There were masques at the same
time, independently of this performance, the cost of which considerably
exceeded £2,000, besides that portion of the charge which was borne by
the office of the revels and charged to the accounts of that
department." In the same year, we learn that a grant of £450 was made to
George Kirke, Esq., gentleman of the robes, for the _masking attire_ of
the king and his party. In 1637 there is a warrant, under the privy
seal, to the same George Kirke for £150, to provide the masking dress of
the king; and, in the same year, another to Edmund Taverner for £1,400
towards the expenses of a masque to be presented at Whitehall on the
ensuing Twelfth Night. We have selected these from similar examples
furnished by Sandys, in order to give our readers some idea of the sums
expended in these entertainments, which sums will appear very
considerable when estimated by the difference between the value of
money in our days and that of two hundred years ago. Several of the
masques presented at court during this reign, and the preceding ones,
were written by Ben Jonson.
[Illustration: MUMMERS.--_Page 65._]
During the whole of this time, the forms of court ceremonial appear to
have been aped, and the royal establishments imitated as far as
possible, by the more powerful nobles; and the masques and pageantries
exhibited for the royal amusement were accordingly reproduced or
rivalled by them at their princely mansions in the country. Corporate
and other public bodies caught the infection all over the land; and each
landed proprietor and country squire endeavored to enact such state in
the eyes of his own retainers, as his means would allow. The sports and
festivities of the season were everywhere taken under the protection of
the lord of the soil; and all classes of his dependants had a customary
claim upon the hospitalities which he prepared for the occasion. The
masques of the court and of the nobles were imitated in the mummings of
the people,--of which we give a representation here, and which we shall
have occasion particularly to describe hereafter,--they having survived
the costly pageants of which they were the humble representatives. The
festival was thus rendered a universal one, and its amusements brought
within the reach of the indigent and the remote. The peasant, and even
the pauper, were made, as it were, once a year sharers in the mirth of
their immediate lord, and even of the monarch himself. The laboring
classes had enlarged privileges during this season, not only by custom,
but by positive enactment; and restrictive acts of Parliament, by which
they were prohibited from certain games at other periods, contained
exceptions in favor of the Christmas-tide. Nay, folly was, as it were,
crowned, and disorder had a license! Sandys quotes from Leland the form
of a proclamation given in his "Itinerary" as having been made by the
sheriff of York, wherein it is declared that all "thieves, dice-players,
carders" (with some other characters by name that are usually repudiated
by the guardians of order) "_and all other unthrifty folke_, be welcome
to the towne, whether they come late or early, att the reverence of the
high feast of Youle, till the twelve dayes be passed." The terms of this
proclamation were, no doubt, not intended to be construed in a grave and
literal sense, but were probably meant to convey something like a satire
upon the unbounded license of the season which they thus announce.
There are very pleasant evidences of the care which was formerly taken,
in high quarters, that the poor should not be robbed of their share in
this festival. The yearly increasing splendor of the royal celebrations
appears at one time to have threatened that result, by attracting the
country gentlemen from their own seats, and thereby withdrawing them
from the presidency of those sports which were likely to languish in
their absence. Accordingly, we find an order, in 1589, issued to the
gentlemen of Norfolk and Suffolk, commanding them "to depart from London
before Christmas, and to repair to their countries, there to keep
hospitality amongst their neighbors." And similar orders appear to have
been from time to time necessary, and from time to time repeated.
Amongst those bodies who were distinguished for the zeal of their
Christmas observances, honorable mention may be made of the two English
universities; and we shall have occasion hereafter to show that traces
of the old ceremonials linger still in those their ancient haunts. But
the reader who is unacquainted with this subject would scarcely be
prepared to look for the most conspicuous celebration of these revels,
with all their antics and mummeries, in the grave and dusty retreats of
the law. Such, however, was the case. The lawyers beat the doctors
hollow. Their ancient halls have rung with the sounds of a somewhat
barbarous revelry; and the walls thereof, had they voices, could tell
many an old tale, which the present occupants might not consider as
throwing any desirable light upon the historical dignities of the body
to which they belong. Our readers, no doubt, remember a certain scene in
"Guy Mannering," wherein the farmer Dinmont and Colonel Mannering are
somewhat inconsiderately intruded upon the carousals of Mr. Counsellor
Pleydell at his tavern in the city of Edinburgh and find that worthy
lawyer in what are called his "altitudes," being deeply engaged in the
ancient and not very solemn pastime of "High Jinks." Their memory may
probably present the counsellor "enthroned as a monarch in an
elbow-chair placed on the dining-table, his scratch-wig on one side, his
head crowned with a bottle-slider, his eye leering with an expression
betwixt fun and the effects of wine," and recall, assisted by the
jingle, some of the high discourse of his surrounding court:--
"Where is Gerunto now? and what's become of him?"
"Gerunto's drowned, because he could not swim," etc.
Now, if our readers shall be of opinion--as Colonel Mannering and the
farmer were--that the attitude and the occupation were scarcely
consistent with the dignity of a gentleman whom they had come to consult
on very grave matters, we may be as much to blame as was the
tavern-waiter on that occasion, in introducing them to the revels of the
Inns of Court. We will do what we can to soften such censure by stating
that there certainly appears at times to have arisen a suspicion, in the
minds of a portion of the profession, that the wig and gown were not
figuring to the best possible advantage on these occasions. For, in the
reign of the first James, we find an order issued by the benchers of
Lincoln's Inn, whereby the "under barristers were, by decimation, put
out of commons because the whole bar offended by not dancing on
Candlemas Day preceding, according to the ancient order of the society,
when the judges were present;" and this order is accompanied by a threat
"that, if the fault were repeated, they should be fined or disbarred."
There seems to have been a contest between the four Inns of Court as to
which should get up these pageantries with the greatest splendor, and
occasionally a struggle between the desire of victory and the
disinclination, or perhaps inability, to furnish the heavy cost at which
that victory was to be secured. Most curious particulars on these
subjects are furnished by the accompt-books of the houses: by the "Gesta
Grayorum" (which was published for the purpose of describing a
celebrated Christmas kept at Gray's Inn in 1594, and had its title
imitated from the then popular work called the "Gesta Romanorum"); by
Dugdale, in his "Origines Juridiciales,"; and by Nichols, in his
"Progresses of Queen Elizabeth." For some time Lincoln's Inn appears to
have carried it all its own way, having been first on the ground. The
Christmas celebrations seem to have been kept by this society from as
early a period as the reign of Henry VI.; although it was not until the
reign of Henry VIII. that they began to grow into celebrity, or at least
that we have any account of their arrangements. When, however, the
societies of the two Temples, and that of Gray's Inn, began, with a
laudable jealousy, to contest the palm of splendor, the necessary
expenditure appears occasionally to have "given them pause."
Accordingly, they held anxious meetings, at the approach of the season,
to decide the important question whether Christmas should be kept that
year or not; and one of the registers of the society of Lincoln's Inn,
bearing date the 27th of November, in the twenty-second year of the
reign of Henry VIII. contains the following order: "Yt is agreed that if
the two Temples do kepe Chrystemas, then Chrystemas to be kept here; and
to know this, the Steward of the House ys commanded to get knowledge,
and to advertise my master by the next day at night."
There is a curious story told in Baker's Chronicle of an awkward
predicament into which the society of Gray's Inn brought themselves by a
play which they enacted amongst their Christmas revels of 1527. The
subject of this play was to the effect that "Lord Governance was ruled
by Dissipation and Negligence; by whose evil order Lady Public-Weal was
put from Governance." Now, if these gentlemen did not intend, by this
somewhat delicate moral, any insinuation against the existing state of
things (which, being lawyers, and therefore courtiers, there is good
motive to believe they did not), it is, at all events, certain that, as
lawyers, they ought to have known better how to steer clear of all
offence to weak consciences. That respectable minister, Cardinal Wolsey,
felt himself (as we think he had good right to do) greatly scandalized
at what, if not designed, was, by accident, a palpable hit; and, in
order to teach the gentlemen of Gray's Inn that they were responsible
for wounds given, if they happened to shoot arrows in the dark, he
divested the ingenious author, Sergeant Roe, of his coif, and committed
him to the Fleet, together with one of the actors, of the name of
Moyle,--in order to afford them leisure for furnishing him with a
satisfactory explanation of the matter.
In Dugdale's "Origines Juridiciales," we have an account of a
magnificent Christmas which was kept at the Inner Temple, in the fourth
year of Queen Elizabeth's reign; at which the Lord Robert Dudley,
afterwards Earl of Leicester, presided, under the mock-title of
Palaphilos, Prince of Sophie, High Constable Marshal of the Knights
Templars, and Patron of the honorable order of Pegasus. A potentate with
such a title would have looked very foolish without a "tail;" and
accordingly he had for his master of the game no less a lawyer than
Christopher Hatton, afterwards Lord Chancellor of England, with four
masters of the revels, a variety of other officers, and fourscore
persons forming a guard. Gerard Leigh, who was so fortunate as to obtain
the dignity of a knight of Pegasus, describes, as an eye-witness, in his
"Accidence of Armorie," the solemn fooleries which were enacted on the
occasion by these worthies of the sword and of the gown.
Of course, it was not to be expected that such shrewd courtiers as
lawyers commonly are, if they had ever kept Christmas at all, should
fail to do so during the reign of this virgin queen, when its
celebration offered them such admirable opportunities for the
administration of that flattery which was so agreeable to her Majesty,
and might possibly be so profitable to themselves. We have great
pleasure in recording a speech made by her Majesty on one of these
occasions, nearly so much as two centuries and a half ago, but which for
its great excellence has come down to our days. The gentlemen of Gray's
Inn (their wits, probably, a little sharpened by the mistake which they
had made in her father's time) had ventured upon a dramatic performance
again; and, in the course of a masque which they represented before the
queen's Majesty, had administered to her copious draughts of that nectar
on which her Majesty's vanity was known to thrive so marvellously. They
appear, however, with a very nice tact, to have given her no more of it
on this occasion than was sufficient to put her Majesty into spirits,
without intoxicating her, for by this period of her life it took a great
deal of that sort of thing to intoxicate the queen's Majesty; and the
effect was of the pleasantest kind, and could not fail to be most
satisfactory to the gentlemen of Gray's Inn. For after the masque was
finished (in which we presume there had been a little dancing by the
lawyers who, would, as in duty bound, have stood on their wigs to
please her Majesty), and on the courtiers attempting, in _their_ turn,
to execute a dance, her Majesty was most graciously pleased to exclaim,
"What! shall we have bread and cheese after a banquet?"--meaning
thereby, we presume, to imply that the courtiers could not hope to leap
as high or, in any respect, to cut such capers as the lawyers had done.
Now, this speech of the virgin queen we have reported here less for the
sake of any intrinsic greatness in the thought or elegance in the form
than because, out of a variety of speeches by her Majesty, which have
been carefully preserved, we think this is about as good as any other,
and has the additional recommendation (which so few of the others have)
of exhibiting the virgin queen in a good humor. And, further, because
having recorded the disgrace into which the gentlemen of Gray's Inn
danced themselves, in the lifetime of her illustrious father, it is but
right that we should likewise record the ample indemnification which
they must have considered themselves to have received, at the lips of
his virgin daughter.