Social And Literary Progress Of England Under Elizabeth.
When Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, she found England
profoundly divided by religious questions, impoverished by the
excessive exactions of her father and sister, still agitated by
the bloody dissensions of the great nobles and the popular riots
under the reigns which had just elapsed. She governed for
forty-five years, amidst religious dissensions yet subsisting,
although stifled by her powerful hand. She oppressed the
Catholics, and their number, which at her accessions perhaps
balanced that of the Protestants, rapidly diminished under the
measures which she applied them. Men who cannot practise their
religion, or quit the kingdom, who cannot leave their homes
without authorization, who are incessantly exposed to vexation
and acts of injustice, not to mention the terrible risk of an
accusation of treason, abandon their worship if they are weak, or
take refuge in exile if they are energetic and zealous. Upon this
ruin of the liberty of her Catholic subjects, Elizabeth firmly
established the Anglican Church; but the protection with which
she surrounded it, while injuring the rights of the Catholics and
the nonconforming Protestants, did not prevent the Catholic
nucleus from subsisting in England, or the Puritan faith from
developing itself.
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With all their exaggerations, their narrow minds, the severity of
their principles, the Puritans were to become for their country
the salt of the earth. They were to save it successively from
despotism and moral corruption, from the ruin both of liberty and
of manners. Few things contributed more towards this progress of
the Protestant faith in its austere simplicity, than the reading
of the Bible in the English tongue. The translation of Miles
Coverdale had replaced that of Wycliffe, and the venerable
translator, imprisoned in his youth under Henry VIII., a bishop
under Edward VI., and again persecuted under Mary, had dearly
paid for the privilege of placing within the reach of his
brethren the bread of life; but with the progress of literature
and science, his translation was found to be bad and full of
errors. Parker, the first Archbishop of Canterbury under the
reign of Elizabeth, caused the undertaking of a new version,
which was ardently carried out by a commission of learned men. It
was completed in 1572, and published under the name of the Bible
of Bishop Grindall, the latter having, in 1575, succeeded Parker
as Primate. Grindall was, in favour of the reading of the
Scriptures and even of the Puritans, who developed under his
episcopate, notwithstanding the harshness of the queen towards
them, and the severe measures everywhere employed to bring about
uniformity of worship. Notwithstanding the fines of twenty pounds
sterling per month, declared against those who did not attend the
services of their parish church, the "Brownists," a Puritan sect
of the strongest tinge, originated at this period and endured
without flinching a violent persecution.
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Many of the Fathers of the American Republic frequented the
assemblages of the Brownists, before taking the course of
abandoning their country to worship God in liberty. After the
death of Grindall, in 1583, the Puritans found an implacable foe
in the new Archbishop, Whitgift. The struggle began between the
Primate and the nonconformist clergy; it lasted for a long time;
but during the last years of the life of Elizabeth it had
relaxed. The Puritans at that time grounded, upon the succession
to the throne of a Presbyterian prince, hopes which were to be
cruelly deceived.
If Queen Elizabeth oppressed at home those of her subjects who
did not purely and simply accept the religious doctrines which
she offered to them, she always supported upon the Continent the
political and religious efforts of the Reformers. We have seen
with what prudence she acted, and how her powerful instinct of
government, her taste for absolute power and her horror of
rebellion, often compelled Cecil to urge her into the way of that
great policy which tended to make England the protector and chief
of Protestantism in Europe. Throughout all the duplicities, timid
councils, and meannesses of Queen Elizabeth towards the French
Huguenots or the Dutch Protestants, it must yet be admitted that
it was the continental reformers alone who obtained her constant
favour, and it was solely through an economy hitherto unknown in
the royal expenditure, that she could cope with so many repeated
demands. Her father, Henry VIII., had confiscated the property of
the monasteries, and that of the subjects whom he caused to be
executed, and he had overwhelmed his people with unheard of
taxes.
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Her brother and her sister, from different motives, had left
their finances in the saddest disorder. Under the wise direction
of Cecil, and thanks to the economy of Queen Elizabeth, the
treasury of England was enabled to satisfy the constant calls
from without, and to provide for the requirements within,
notwithstanding the decrease in the public burdens. The
developement of commerce and industry was encouraged. "The money
which is in the pockets of my subjects is as useful to me as that
in my treasury,"--a great economical maxim, which the kings, her
predecessors, had neither known nor practiced.
Elizabeth had taken steps to second the industrial efforts of her
people. In order to give an impetus to national manufactures, a
sumptuary law, from 1581 to 1582, prohibited to certain persons
silk clothing and precious laces manufactured abroad: at the same
time, as the exportation of wool formed the greater part of the
commerce of England, the rearing of sheep was everywhere
encouraged. Pasture-grounds had increased in all directions,
replacing in many parts the ploughed lands, and the cloth
manufactories every day employed more hands. Linen cloth also
began to be manufactured. The persecutions of Philip II. in the
Low Countries brought to England skilled workmen, who gave fresh
life to different branches of manufacture. It was at this period
the happiness and honour of England to receive those who fled
from the tyranny of the Spaniards, and she was subsequently to be
the refuge of the French Huguenots after the revocation of the
edict of Nantes.
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Commerce and industry prospered, in fact, at home under the reign
of Elizabeth; but the predominent achievement of this period was
the formation of the English navy, which at her accession was yet
only in its infancy, but which had become queen of the seas
before her death. The protectionist system, practised in all its
rigour by King Henry VIII., soon gave way to the wise liberality
of Cecil. An act of the first Parliament of Elizabeth relaxed the
navigation laws, authorized trading by foreign vessels on certain
conditions, and favoured the development of great commercial
companies. In 1566 the Royal Exchange of London was built under
the auspices of Sir Thomas Gresham, and the relations with the
Low Countries, Germany, and the kingdoms of the North suddenly
took a fresh impulse, making up for the progressive decrease of
the fisheries. "No more fish is eaten," said Cecil regretfully.
A new trade for England, the monopoly of which had hitherto been
left to Spain and Portugal, was the odious slave-trade. An
English sailor, John Locke was the first to embark in this
traffic. Hawkins engaged in it with success, taking possession of
a shipload of negroes upon the coast of Guinea, and selling them
in St. Domingo; but this detestable commerce was not to attain
its full development until later: it was the Spaniards and their
colonies, not the unhappy blacks, whom the English sailors of the
time of Elizabeth regarded as their legitimate prey.
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Under the reign of Queen Elizabeth began the great voyages of
discovery, which gave rise to the abuses of buccaneering, but at
the same time opened up a vast field to human enterprise and
research. Martin Frobisher first entered the field in 1567. He
desired to find a new passage to India; but he was stopped in the
vicinity of Hudson's Bay, where he took possession of certain
territories in the name of England, and discovered the strait
which still bears his name. From this the first idea was
conceived of a passage by the north-west, subsequently sought for
ardently by John Davis, who, as well as his forerunner, also gave
a name to a strait. Frobisher made three voyages to this region,
where he thought that he had found gold, but he was finally
employed in the service of the queen, commanded one of the
vessels which repulsed the Spanish Armada, and was killed, in
1594, while attacking a fortress near Brest, which held out for
the Leaguers against Henry IV.
While Frobisher was seeking the polar passage, Drake accomplished
the journey round the world, an undertaking which had as yet only
been attempted by the Portuguese Fernando Magellan, who gave his
name to a celebrated strait. His voyage was secretly authorized
by Elizabeth, in defiance of the claim of the Spaniards to the
islands and seas of America, which they said, were solemnly
conceded to them by the Pope. Drake took no heed of their claims,
pillaged the coasts, captured ships, and accumulated by his acts
of piracy enormous wealth, of which he brought her share to the
sovereign, who treated him honourably in return, though without
recognizing his missions. The little vessel in which Drake sailed
was preserved at Deptford until it crumbled through decay.
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The projects of Sir Walter Raleigh were not exclusively directed,
like those of Hawkins and Drake, to the parts of the world
occupied by the Spaniards. He had conceived the hope of enriching
his country and himself otherwise than by buccaneering, and had
attempted several successive expeditions towards the southern
part of North America. He had already failed twice and lost his
brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in one of his voyages, when he set
sail, in 1584, with the authorization of the queen, to take
possession, with full ownership, of the lands he might discover,
upon the condition of reserving a fifth part of the produce of
the mines for the crown. It was in this expedition that he
accidentally discovered the territory which now composes, in the
United States, Virginia and North Carolina, possessions which
Queen Elizabeth deigned to distinguish by the name of Virginia.
The letters patent granted to Raleigh were confirmed by an act of
Parliament, and in the following year Sir Richard Greville, a
relative of Sir Walter's, conducted to the new colony eight
hundred emigrants, who established themselves on the island of
Roanoke. They were nearly dead from hunger and privations, when,
in the following year. Sir Francis Drake, returning from an
expedition against the Spanish territories, received them on
board his ship. Two other attempts at colonization had the same
result, and Virginia remained abandoned to the savages without
having yielded any other result to England than the discovery of
tobacco, which for a long time bore the name of Virginian grass.
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We have seen that at the moment of the attack of the Spanish
Armada the royal navy was of little importance; but the
commercial navy was considerable. The proportion had increased by
a third in fifty years. Whale-fishing, which began to develop in
1575, soon occupied a large number of vessels. The protracted war
with Spain and Portugal having hindered the arrival of the
productions of India, a company of traders was formed in the city
of London to undertake voyages to the East Indies. In December,
1600, Queen Elizabeth granted them a charter; this was the
origin, the modest germ of the great East India Company. The
political and religious animosity which nourished the
buccaneering expeditions against Spain, and the cruel revenge
which the Spaniards took upon the English sailors who fell into
their hands, served to develop the taste for remote enterprises,
and to form that race of bold sailors who have so powerfully
contributed to the grandeur and independence of their country.
While material and social progress took so new a flight, the
splendour of literature under the reign of Elizabeth has not yet
faded. The intellectual movement preceded all others. It burst
forth towards the end of the civil war, and amidst the desolation
which intestine strife brings in its wake. Scotland even took
part in this glory, although civil war still reigned there. From
1494 to 1584 seven colleges were founded at Oxford and eight at
Cambridge. The university of Aberdeen in 1494, that of Edinburgh
in 1582, two colleges of the university of St. Andrew's between
1512 and 1537, the university of Trinity College at Dublin in
1591, assured in Great Britain the development of learning. The
suppression of the monasteries retarded this movement
momentarily, but the reformers did not lose sight of the danger.
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Cranmer in particular made serious efforts to remedy the evil.
The schools called grammar-schools, then instituted in great
numbers, spread elementary education and a certain degree of
intellectual culture; but the higher instruction, and, in
particular, the study of the classical languages, received a blow
from which they were long in recovering. Great disorder reigned
in the universities; morals were lax and the standard of study
very deficient. The revival of letters began with the study of
foreign languages. We have seen that Queen Mary, like Queen
Elizabeth, had studied French, Italian and Spanish, as well as
Latin and Greek. From this usage, more and more diffused, sprang
a strange abuse of foreign words, which introduced something like
a new tongue into the English language. Under the reign of
Elizabeth the lords and fine ladies at court spoke a language
designated by the word "Euphuism," composed of the harmonious
syllables of all languages, which is now difficult to understand,
and especially to read. Traces of it may yet be found in the
poems of Spenser.
Amidst this momentary decline of learning, a natural result of
violent convulsions, it is impossible not to recognize the fact
that the sixteenth century furnished, in England, as elsewhere, a
great number of distinguished men as learned as they were gifted
by nature. Without going beyond the reign of Elizabeth, we may
mention Roger Ascham, her tutor, born in Yorkshire in 1515, whom
the queen retained beside her in the capacity of secretary until
his death in 1568. His most esteemed work is entitled _The
Schoolmaster_.
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The tutor of King James VI. of Scotland has left a more
celebrated name. The historian and poet, George Buchanan, born at
Killearn, in 1506, was originally a soldier. He lived for a long
time in France, in Portugal, in Piedmont, leading a life
interspersed with adventures, until he returned to Scotland in
1560. Being nominated by Queen Mary to a post of public
instruction, he did not cease to attack her ardently and to write
violent pamphlets against her. Parliament nominated him tutor to
the young king, whom he instructed with considerable care. When
he was accused of having made a pedant of him, he replied, "That
is the best thing I could make of him." His _History of
Scotland_ possesses real interest, although it is
characterized by much partiality. He died at Edinburgh in 1582.
Doctor Hooker had no taste for taking part in the great
agitations of his time. Born in 1554, domestic dissensions,
caused by the temper of his wife, led him to seek a peaceful and
retired life. He had been master of the temple in London, but a
preacher, his colleague, an ardent Puritan, made existence so
hard for him that he retired to a country living, where he wrote
his great work _Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Policy_, a
book full of judgment, moderation, and learning, a model of the
most beautiful English style. He died in 1600, being only
forty-seven years of age, at the moment when he had just finished
his book. The courtiers did not abandon exclusively to the
learned the cultivation of letters. Lord Surrey, beheaded during
the last days of Henry VIII., has left some charming verses. The
Lion King-of-Arms of Scotland, Sir David Lyndsay, of the Mount,
was also a poet.
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The type of knight and gentleman, Sir Philip Sydney, nephew of
the Earl of Leicester, and son-in-law of Walsingham, who has left
in a life-time of thirty-two years an accomplished model and an
ineffaceable remembrance to posterity, wrote in prose and in
verse. His romantic allegory of _Arcadia_, is the most
important of his works. He dedicated it to his sister Mary,
Countess of Pembroke, a worthy friend of such a brother. It was
said of her that to love her was to receive a liberal education.
She died young, like himself, having published the book which her
brother had left, and which had an immense success. We have
mentioned the learned and lettered courtiers. We now come to the
real poets. England numbers two under the reign of Elizabeth: the
one charming, elegant, prolific; the other, unique in the history
of the world: Spenser and Shakespeare. Edmund Spenser was born in
London in 1533. He wrote at first some poems of little
importance, but he devoted several years to the composition of
the _Faery Queene_, of which Sydney was the first patron,
and which was completed under the auspices of Raleigh. We might
have placed Spenser among the courtiers, if that had not been to
do too much honour to the latter, for his patrons often employed
him, and he finally obtained considerable estates in Ireland out
of the confiscated lands of the Earl of Desmond. The _Faery
Queene_ was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, who is constantly
celebrated in the poem. She granted a pension to Spenser, and the
success of the work was greater from the fact, that the court
took pleasure in searching for the persons concealed beneath the
allegorical names. An inexhaustible imagination, the most
elevated sentiments, and the most charming descriptions, cause
one to forget the peculiar taste of the time, the confusion and
complication of incidents, as well as the strange form of
versification.
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Read without pausing, the _Faery Queene_ may appear
tiresome, but a great number of detached portions will always
remain masterpieces. Spenser died in 1598, after being obliged to
fly from Ireland, then a prey to insurrection.
Let us finally mention the great comedian, the great philosopher,
the great poet, who was in his life time butcher's apprentice,
poacher, actor, theatrical manager, and whose name is William
Shakespeare. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in 1564. In twenty
years, amidst the duties of his profession, the care of mounting
his pieces, of instructing his actors, he composed thirty-two
tragedies and comedies, in verse and prose, rich with an
incomparable knowledge of human nature, and an unequalled power
of imagination, terrible and comic by turns, profound and
delicate, homely and touching, responding to every emotion of the
soul, divining all that was beyond the range of his experience,
and for ever remaining the treasure of ages. All this being
accomplished, Shakespeare left the theatre and the busy world at
the age of forty-five, to return to Stratford-on-Avon, where he
lived peacefully in the most modest retirement, writing nothing,
and never returning to the stage, ignored and unknown, if his
works had not for ever marked out his place in the world. A
strange example of an imagination so powerful, suddenly ceasing
to produce, and closing once for all the door to the efforts of
genius. Shakespeare died in 1616. After mention of his name, no
one will ask whether the reign of Elizabeth is entitled to occupy
a great place in the literary history of England and the world.