'This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war.
'The silver sea,' he says, serves it
'In the office of a wall,
Or, as a moat, defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
while once again he refers to England as
'Bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune.'
There is one thing, however, without which, in Shakespeare's view, even
our lucky isolation cannot avail to save us, as a nation, from
destruction. 'If they (the English) were true within themselves they
need not to fear, although all nations were set against them.' So wrote
Andrew Borde, when Henry VIII. was King; and in the old play of 'John,
King of England' the author made one of his _personae_ say:
'Let England live but true within itself,
And all the world can never wrong her state.'
So Shakespeare, when he came to treat of the same subject, made the
Bastard declare that
'This England never did, nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself...
Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.'
There is much virtue in an 'if,' and the poet repeats the warning in
another play. In '3 Henry VI.' Hastings says:
'Why, knows not Montague that of itself
England is safe, if true within itself?'
That, again, which most troubles John of Gaunt, in the passage already
quoted, is the fact that England, which was wont to conquer others,
'Hath made a shameful conquest of itself;' while Chorus, in 'Henry V.,'
laments that France has found in England 'a nest of hollow bosoms, which
he fills with treacherous crowns,' adding,
'What might'st thou do, that honour would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural?'
Here, then, is a lesson for our times. What Shakespeare felt to be true
in his own day is equally, nay more, true now--that England, 'set in a
silver sea,' is safe from all assaults, save those which she may suffer
at the hands of her own 'degenerate and ingrate' sons.