# Cassell's Illustrated History of England/Volume 2/Chapter 17

CHAPTER XVII.
THE PROGRESS OF THE NATION.
The century of which we have just traced the events was a period marked by vast progress, and by changes which were the springs of still more wonderful progress in after ages. Though the character of the Tudors was essentially despotic, no dynasty since the days of Alfred and Magna Charta wrought out such revolutions in the constitution of England. These revolutions were effected by the very efforts of the Tudor monarchs to establish their own power and gratify their own self-will. They were wrought by Providence: and Providence works in his great scheme of the world's progress, by bending the stiffest spirits and the most tyrannical aspirations under the weight of those influences of the universe which are at the moment predominant. These revolutions extended not only into the political constitution of the nation but into its religious one; into its literature, its philosophy, and its morals; and that simply because the spirit of the age was of that tone and strength, that though outward powers could agitate it, nothing but its own momentum could direct its tendency. Henry VII., with an indifferent title, succeeded to the crown because the nation was weary of the long conflicts of the York and Lancaster monarchs, and longed for peace, which his disposition promised. Cold, cautious, and penurious, he took care not to raise a fresh race of powerful barons in place of that which the Wars of the Roses had destroyed, but hoarded up money; and beyond the injustice practised in its collection, left his people to pursue their trades and their agriculture, and thus renew their strength. Henry VIII., violent, passionate, sensual, and intensely arbitrary, but fond of parade, and in his youth boastful of his prowess, gratified the pride of the nation whilst he ruled it with a rod of iron. In the gratification of his lusts he did not hesitate to renounce allegiance to that great spiritual power which for above a thousand years had ruled haughtily over Europe and all its kings and warriors. By this act he set free for ever the mind and conscience of this nation. In vain did he endeavour to bind them down in a knot of his own making. Though he hurled his fiercest terms against those who claimed a universal liberty which he intended only for himself, he had broken the mighty spell of ages—a power and a mystery before which the world had bowed in impotent awe; and no chains which he could forge, no creed which he could set up, no hierarchy which he could frame, could possess more than the strength of the fire-scorched flax against the will of the enfranchised people. He had let loose the flood of religious desire, which had age-long been dashing moodily against the old mounds of superstition; and he might as well have attempted to stem the current of the Thames with a hurdle as to re-imprison the public mind. It had tasted that sweetness which never again dies from the palate; it had breathed that air which makes the memory of the dungeon atmosphere intolerable: and though he struck lustily right and left whenever the million-headed apparition of free-will showed itself—though he gave full employment to the headsman, the hangman, and the bigot with his fiery stake he succeeded only in teaching the national will to seek shelter from the passing tempest, well assured that it must blow over. He only deluded himself; his triumph was hollow and unreal. Beneath the hushed roofs and the closed shutters of the dwellings of the people, outwardly wearing an aspect of obedience, there lived unbroken and glowed uncrippled the freedom of the heart and the resolution to be free. The moment that he perished, the soul of the nation showed itself alive. The very Reformers around his throne, who had cowered beneath the fell and deadly ire of the tyrant, rose, with Cranmer at their head, and under the mild auspices of the religious Edward, gave free vent to the spirit and the ​doctrines of the Reformation. The return of theologic despotism under Mury only added force to the spirit of reform, by showing how terrible and bloody was the animus of ancient superstition. The fires of Smithfield lit up the dark places of spiritual tyranny to the remotest corners of the nation, and gave the blow to the tottering Bastile of restringent faith in this country. Elizabeth, with all the self-will of her father, lived to see, both in people and Parliament, a spirit that made her lion-heart shrink with awe, and own, however reluctantly, a power looking already gigantically down upon her own. She felt more than once, in the pride of her power, the terror of that national will which, in less than half a century from her death, shattered the throne of her successor, and gave to the world the unheard-of spectacle of a king decapitated for treason to his people.
The grand underlying impulse of the forward movement of this age was that of the general progress of the world in knowledge—knowledge of its rights and the powers inherent in popular association. The restoration of classical literature, and especially of the Greek, had rekindled the lofty and independent sentiments of antiquity; but still more, the knowledge of the doctrines, principles, and promises of the Bible, which had been disseminated amongst the people by the Reformers, had spread like a flame amongst them, and had given them totally new ideas of human prerogative and dignity. Henry VIII., after being induced to make public the Scriptures, saw so clearly their effect that he withdrew the boon as far as was possible, and pronounced the most severe penalties on any of the common people consulting that Divine fountain of truth and freedom. Throughout the civilised world, far even beyond the countries in which the Reformation had established itself, the stimulating boon of this knowledge was diffused, and gave a perilous and uneasy feeling to the most slavish nations and despotic sovereigns.
But in England many other causes had co-operated to raise the power and condition of the people. The long civil wars had, by the time of the accession of Henry VII., reduced the old nobility to a mere fragment. Such extraordinary specimens of baronial wealth and dominion as the Warwicks, Beauchamps, and Shrewsburys, no longer existed. In the first Parliament of Henry VII. the peers amounted to only twenty-eight; in that of Henry VIII. they had risen only to thirty-six. With their extinction had lapsed their vast estates to the Crown, and this property had in part been sold to defray the costs by which the throne had maintained its struggles against various claimants and their factions. Henry VII., as we have said, carefully kept down this haughty class to the limits into which it had fallen. His son, Henry VIII., like him, pursued the policy of Edward IV., who had established a system of fine and recovery to cut off entails; and by liberal use of attainders, with their consequent forfeitures of title and estate, made the nobility entirely subservient to the Crown, which augmented its wealth and power on their ruin. By conferring their estates in part on new aspirants to the peerage from the families of the lesser gentry, and in many cases—as in those of Wolsey and Cromwell—from the ranks of the common people, he divided the aristocracy against itself, and thus added fresh influence to the throne. The old nobles looked with a jealous and disdainful eye on the new ones; the new ones repaid the scorn by an equal scorn of imbecile antiquity, and by the most assiduous endeavours at rise in affluence and official dignity to a parity with them, and even an ascendancy over them.
This predominance of the Crown once established, Henry VIII. proceeded to a still more startling blow at a power hitherto equal and often paramount to that of the Crown—the Church. To the terror and astonishment of the whole of Papal Christendom, he stretched his hand not only against the supreme rule, but the vast property of that august and time-honoured institution. In 1532 he abolished the annats, or first-fruits, before that time paid to the court of Rome—an act in itself proclaiming his independence of that court. In the following year he declared by Act of Parliament that his subjects might discuss the claims and condemn the acts and opinions of the Pope without incurring any charge of heresy. Another year, and he caused himself to be proclaimed "Supreme head of the Church" in his own realms; and prohibited not only all payments to the Pope, but all appeals to or recognition of his authority. In 1535, the very next year, he confiscated the property of the lesser monasteries; and this course, once begun, never stopped till he had made himself master of the whole vast demesnes of the monasteries, the collegiate churches, hospitals, and houses of the order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem; the bulk of which he appropriated to his own use, turning adrift 100,000 monks, priests, and nuns into the world. So daring a sweep of ecclesiastical property, power, and privilege never was made by any other man or in any other era of the world; and nothing could have emboldened even this impious and lawless monarch to so astounding a deed but the clear consciousness that the spirit of the age was with him, and that there was a host of candidates for the spoils of this ancient corporation, who would do battle to the death for his object, which was still more their own.
By this unexampled coup-d'etat Henry made himself master of 644 convents, 90 colleges, 2,374 chantries and free chapels, and 110 hospitals; the whole of which property, with very trifling exception, was speedily conveyed to the vast swarm of hungry parvenus, the Russells, the Brownes, the Seymours, &c., who rapidly bloomed into aristocratic greatness, and constituted an army of invincible defence against any restoration of this great and affluent but corrupt ecclesiastical princedom.
These new men, in their turn, were necessitated to subdivide a portion, more or less, amongst their followers, to establish their own position; and other great extents of lands were sold in minor amounts to the successful merchants and traders, so that by this means there grew up a new power in the country—that of small but sturdy freeholders, who, at once independent of the Crown and the aristocracy, soon made their might felt in the community, and added to the House of Commons that popular infusion of authoritative life which speedily electrified the Government by its tone, and prostrated it by its measures.
That a large number of such men of substance, whose wealth was the produce of industry, existed at the period, is an indication that the nation had grown rich by trade, ​and had also advanced in population. When we talk of the England and other countries of Europe of former ages, we are scarcely aware of what extremely different countries they were, both in regard to the cultivation of their lands, the arts, aspects, and habits of their cities, their general knowledge, their polish of speech, and their amount of population. It will scarcely be credited, that at the close of the Wars of the Roses, the whole population of England and Wales did not exceed two millions and a half—less than the present population of London. But in 1575, that is, in the seventeenth year of Elizabeth, the men fit to bear arms alone amounted to 1,172,674, and the entire population to not less than 5,000,000. Harrison, in his "Description of England" at this time, says that "Some do grudge at the great increase of people in those days, thinking a necessary herd of cattle far better than a superfluous augmentation of mankind. They laid," he says, "the cause upon God, as though he were in fault for sending such increase of people, or want of wars that should consume them; affirming that the land was never so full." So little did they comprehend that the multitude of people, properly employed, were the strength and wealth of the nation.
But we shall have occasion to notice that with this wealth and strength there also co-existed much poverty; owing to the derangements of society in the days of Henry VIII., and to the great tendency to leave the land in pasture to supply the great growth of wool necessary for the large demand for the Netherlands, and the rapidly growing one at home, where the manufacture of both coarse and fine cloths had been increasing from the time that Edward III., at the instigation of his queen, Philippa of Hainault, invited the weavers of fine woollens over from that country. Still the rise in the value of all kinds of articles of life, including wages, during the whole of this period, is a proof of the enlarged demand for skilled workmen, and the capacity to pay much more than formerly, which could only be the case with augmented means in the bulk of the population. At various times, as in 1496 and 1514, acts were passed with the main object of keeping down wages—attempts which, though they show very little progress in political economy, show with equal clearness that employers were more numerous than they had been in proportion to labour. In 1500 the wages of a master mason were 6d. a day; in 1575 they were doubled; and in 1590 they had reached 1s. 2d. The wages of common labourers had risen from 6d. a day to 10d. In 1511 the salary of a domestic priest was £3 6s. 8d.; in 1545 it had risen to £4 14s. 6d. In 1544 the wages of sailors were advanced from 5s. per month, in the Royal navy, to 6s. 8d., and all other trades and professions exhibited the like advance of payment.
This, of course, was the result of the like advance in the prices of provisions, rents, and clothing—another proof that the people had become not only more numerous, but more luxurious, and, therefore, exigent of better diet and accommodation. Wheat, the great staple of the people's food, had advanced from 3s. 4d. a quarter in 1485 to 17s. in 1589; £2 2s. in 1596; and £1 7s. in 1599. It is true the price of wheat varied a great deal in this period, but except in a very few seasons it never approached the low price of the previous century; and in 1587, a year of scarcity, it rose to £5 4s. In 1500 a dozen pigeons were 4d., in 1541 they were 10d., in 1590 they were 1s., and in 1597, a year of scarcity, 4s. 3d. In 1500 a hundred eggs could be had for 6d., in 1541 they were 1s. 2d., and in 1597 they were 3s. A good fat goose in 1500 was only 4d., but in 1541 it was 8d., in 1589 it was 1s. 2d. A fat sheep in 1500 was 1s. 8d., in 1549 from 2s. 4d. to 4s., and in 1597, the dear year, it could not be had under 14s. 6d. In 1500 an ox could be purchased for 11s. or 12s., in 1541 its price had advanced from £1 to £2; in 1597 a single stone of beef was 2s., and a whole fat ox upwards of £5.
In "Stafford's Dialogue," published in 1581, all the speakers agree in respect to this advance of prices in their time. "I am fain," says the capper, "to give my journeymen twopence in a day more than I was wont to do, and yet they say they cannot sufficiently live thereon." "Such of us," says the knight, "as do abide in the country, still cannot, with £200 a year, keep that house that we might have done with 200 marks but sixteen years past. Cannot you, neighbour," he adds, addressing the farmer, "remember that within these thirty years I could in this town buy the best pig or goose that I could lay my hand on for 4d., which now costeth 12d., a good capon for 3d. or 4d., a chicken for 1d., a hen for 2d., which now costeth me double and triple the money? It is likewise in greater ware, as in beef and mutton. I have seen a cap for 13d. as good as I can get now for 2s. 6d.; of cloth ye have heard how the price is risen. Now a pair of shoes costs 12d., yet in my time I have bought a better for 6d. Now I can get never a horse shoed under 10d. or 12d., when I have also seen the common price was 6d."
This steady advance of prices of all articles is a sufficient test of the progress of the nation in general wealth and in notions of comfort and style of living; for though undoubtedly a vast mass of pauperism existed during this period, no people could go on paying higher and higher rates for everything, who had not the means of doing so. A poor nation might have suffered distress or scarcity, but could not have raised the means of living to such a degree as is here shown, if they had not had the money to purchase on such a scale. But we have abundant other means of demonstrating the progress of wealth in the nation from the splendour maintained by the Court, the cost in dress, jewellery, horses, and household establishments, the amount of taxation and revenue, the extent of shipping, of foreign commerce, and the rank and influence which the nation had assumed in Europe. We now proceed to notice these tokens of advance under their different heads.
CONSTITUTION AND LAWS.
The Tudors were a race who had the highest possible idea of their power and prerogative. Under Henry VIII. especially, the sentiment of Louis XIV. of France was thoroughly realised though the phrase was not yet coined, "L'etat c'est moi!" I am the State. By him the constitution appeared, if not utterly annihilated, yet reduced to a mockery and a mere machine, which moved only at his will. Yet in truth, paralysed as the nation appeared then, under the terror of the axe and the gallows, its spirit only waited, it was never extinguished; and under his successors it showed itself again unmistakably. It ​has been asserted by a modern author that the people in the time of Henry VIII. were most cowardly, for that he had no means of maintaining his arbitrary course against them, as he had no standing army. But this is not altogether true, for though he had no actual standing army, he had such authority over the minds of both aristocracy and people, that—as we have seen on all occasions in which the people revolted, chiefly on account of religion, and when they were instigated and supported by the Roman Catholic nobles—he speedily mustered sufficient forces to put them down. In contemplating the strange mystery of the base submission of the Parliament and people to the reckless caprices and the blood-thirsty despotism of Henry VIII., we must ever bear in mind that the whole nation was rent into two most antagonistic parts by the schism in religion. The Roman Catholics feared the loss of their estates, the Protestants were eager to secure them. Of the few noblemen remaining in the country, from the sanguinary decimation of the civil wars, some of the wealthiest remained stanch Roman Catholics, and were watched with greedy eyes by the host of poor but ambitious adventurers who were ready to second every scheme of spoliation meditated by the monarch. When the ancient Church was going to the ground, with all its proud establishments and enormous estates, the nobles who belonged to it felt the very earth shaking under their feet, and saw no means of safety but in the most implicit obedience. On the other hand, the numerous swarm of courtiers—whose only law was the word of the prince, and their only real creed the belief in plunder and in the acquisition of the lands of nobles, prelates, abbots, and chantries, as the reward of subservience—were ever ready to rush to arms or to the execution of the most fierce and unconstitutional orders of the king. No mercy was shown by the members of one family to each other, where the terror of the monarch and the hope of his favour intervened. And at that day, when the country swarmed with vagabonds, who had no home and no ties, who had been increasing ever since the abolition of villenage, there was no difficulty in mustering any number of soldiers, where there was the chance of liberal pay and more liberal plunder.
This state of things, this facility of drawing forces to the field on the shortest notice, and on the most certain basis, was particularly provided for by Henry VII. He took care to save money by all means, and hoard it, so that though no man was more reluctant to spend, and none ever incurred so much odium by his parsimony where the military fame of the nation was concerned, yet he gained at least the reputation of ample means, and the credit for a disposition to punish promptly and severely any disloyalty or adverse claims on his Crown. He moreover passed two express statutes for the purpose of bringing his nobles and dependents rapidly to his standard on any emergency. By the Acts 2 Henry VII. c. 18, and 19 Henry VII. c. 1, every one who possessed any office, fee, or annuity, by grant from the Crown, was required to attend the king whenever he went to war, under penalty, in case of failure, of forfeiture of all such grants. There were, of course, certain exemptions. Some obtained the king's licence, for an equivalent consideration, to remain at home, and such as could prove any disqualifying infirmity were excused. The clergy, as a matter of course, were exempt, also the judges and principal officers of the law; and by the latter Act this privilege was extended to the members of the king's Council, to such persons as had bought their patents for certain sum, and to all persons under twenty and above sixty years of age. The exemptions extended to comparatively a small number of persons, the fear of forfeiture applied to the majority. To render this more effectual, Henry VII., as we have seen, was rigorous in prohibiting a large array of retainers by the nobles, whilst he was strenuous to enforce the attendance of the feofees of the Crown.
To break the power of the nobles, he enacted in the fourth year of his reign the Statute of Fines, in fact, a renewal of the law of Edward IV., by which entails could be cut off at pleasure, and thus the great landowners were enabled to divide their estates amongst their children, or to bequeath or sell them. This was a powerful means of breaking down those enormous estates which had heretofore maintained the overgrown barons, to the danger and continual disturbance of the throne. This process was carried farther, by the free use of attainders, by Henry VIII., by which, at will, he struck down the most wealthy and exalted nobles, and appropriated their demesnes; so that eventually there was not a foot of land in the kingdom nor an individual life which was not held at the king's mercy.
But still more than the Statute of Fines, and the passing of attainders, were the lives, liberties, and property of the people, submitted to the will of the king, by the institution of the Court of "La Chambres des Estayers," or "des Esteilr," the Star Chamber. This court set aside all other courts at will, and by abandoning the use of juries in it, laid Magna Charta, and the life and fortune of every man, at the foot of the throne. From the moment, in fact, that this court was formally erected by the 2 Henry VII., 1487, there was an end of the constitution, the privilege of Habeas Corpus was suspended, and Parliament legislated in vain. The king was the State, and ruled in this arbitrary court by the officers of his Privy Council.
This court was so called, it has been generally supposed, from the stars which ornamented the ceiling of the room in which it met, but these would seem to have been originated by the name, not the name from them. It was the place where the Jewish contracts were deposited by Richard I., and which were called "starra," or stars, a corruption of the Hebrew word "shitar." No star was deemed valid except it was found in that depository, and they remained there till the banishment of the Jews by Edward I. This Royal tribunal had been employed by monarchs previously to Henry, but he was enabled to make it legal by Act of Parliament, during the depressed condition of both Parliament and aristocracy. It became speedily the great instrument of the oppression and extortion of the subject and the terror of the whole realm, till it was abolished in the 16 Charles I., 1641. The judges, the members of the Royal Council, amounted to from twenty-six to forty-two, the lord chancellor having the casting voice. Bishops as well as judges sate in this court, but the lord chancellor, the treasurer, and privy seal were the chief authorities till the 21 Henry VIII., when the president of the Council was added to them.
Henry VII., in his original enactment, plainly avows ​his reason for establishing this court to be, that he may reach and punish such persons as by one means or another escaped sentence in the ordinary courts through the bribery or "remissness" of juries. That is, that where juries were too independent to condemn the innocent at the Royal pleasure, the Royal pleasure could remedy that defect, and bring the offender into this safe tribunal, where it reigned paramount. Once established, there was no waiting for any other court, but all such persons as the king or Council thought fit, were at once summoned by writ or privy seal, and dealt with and punished as, says the Act, "they ought to be if they were convicted by the order of the law."
Tomb of Queen Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey.
This convenient creed being established had but one inconvenience; it necessitated the bringing of offenders to the capital. To obviate this, and extend the Star Chamber over the whole kingdom, in the 2 Henry VII. a statute was obtained, empowering all justices of assize and of the peace to hear and determine without a jury all offences, except treason, murder, and felony, which were perpetrated against any statute unrepealed. The object of this was to subject every one who was possessed of property to the arbitrary demands of the Crown. Informers overran the country, and few who had wealth escaped being charged with the violation of some obsolete statute. It was this Act which enabled Dudley and Empson to prosecute their horrible exactions, to the signal enrichment of the Crown and of themselves, till their oppressions rendered the people clamorous in their outcries, and compelled Henry VIII. to repeal the Act, and hang the two vile tools of his father's cupidity.
In the reign of Henry VII. the privilege of benefit of clergy was greatly modified. This privilege, which originally exempted all clergymen from the authority of lay tribunals, had become extended to all such laymen as could read, and were, therefore, capable of becoming "clerks." To restrict this abuse, Henry VII., in the fourth year of his reign, enacted that such privilege should be allowed to laymen only once; and afterwards, when a man had murdered his master, a statute was passed to deprive all murderers of their lords and masters of benefit ​of clergy. Where it was admitted, the culprit, if a layman, did not entirely escape punishment, for he was burnt with a hot iron in the brawn of the left thumb.
The statutes in this reign were drawn up in English, and printed as they came out, by De Worde, Pynson, and Faques, a signal step in progress towards a public knowledge of the laws.
Under Henry VIII. the principle of arbitrary government arrived at its culmination. The freedom from restraint which his father had prepared for him, the passionate and imperious nature of this prince led him to exercise to the utmost. By the means which we have described—the terror of death to those who offended, and the participation in the spoils of nobles and the Church, and in new honours to those who served him regardless of law or conscience—he put himself above all control of Parliament or statute, and ruled as royally, according to his own fancy, as any eastern despot. Out of this monstrous evil came, nevertheless, much good to the nation. Tyrants do that by a single volition, a single blow, which constitutional monarchs attempt in vain. By his own daring act he broke up the ancient system of the Church, with all its accumulated wealth, superstitions, and abuses, and cleared the ground for a new and more liberal state of things. By the distribution of this property he founded a new and influential class of freeholders, and enabled the affluence of trade to flow into land, and to give to the mercantile class a new status and influence. His motive was his own selfishness, but the result was the public good.
A Trial for High Treason, in Westminster Hall, during the Tudor period.
Amongst the useful statutes which he passed may be mentioned the Statute of Uses and the Statute of Bankruptcy. By the former he put an end to a most mischievous practice of conveying property for the use of certain parties or corporate bodies, which had been introduced to evade the statute of mortmain. So many secret modes of conveyance, so many legal fictions had been introduced into the transfer of this property, that it became difficult to ascertain the real owner; and creditors thus became defrauded, widows were deprived of their dowers, and husbands of their estates, by the curtesy. But above all, the great feudal lords were equally defrauded of their dues on wardships, marriages, and reliefs. By an Act of the twenty-seventh year of his reign, it was decreed that whoever was found in the possession of such property should be deemed its bonâ fide owner, and liable to the charges leviable upon it. By this means the dubious and fraudulent practice of uses was abolished, and the lawyers were compelled to resort to the simpler and more tangible theory of trusts. The nature of the tenure still remained the same, for the use was but a trust; but it was simplified and brought more into the ​region of common sense and common observation. By the preamble to the Statute of Bankruptcy, we find that the progress of commerce had led to great frauds. Men by means of credit got the property of others into their hands and absconded with it. In the 34 and 35 of Henry VIII., therefore, it was enacted that the chancellor or keeper of the great seal, with the lord treasurer, lord president, privy seal, and others of the privy council, and chief justices, or any three of them—the chancellor, keeper, president, or privy seal being one—should have power to constitute a court, before which, on complaints from a party aggrieved, they should summon the defaulter, should take possession of all property in his possession, should hear all necessary evidence on oath, and should make a distribution of his effects amongst the creditors according to their claims. Persons concealing effects of the offender were to forfeit double their value; and claimants making fraudulent claims were to forfeit double the amount demanded.
This was the first outline and foundation of our court and law of bankruptcy, the main principles of which are still in force, but considerably modified by the greater development of the action of trade, and a spirit of increased enlightenment and humanity. The bankrupt is no longer treated necessarily as a criminal, but as one who has suffered from misfortune; and where he is innocent of dishonest conduct, is discharged from such obligations as he has no means of fulfilling, and the way opened for future enterprise.
The laws of Henry VIII. regarding gaming were strict and rational, and afford a striking contrast to those of the so-called moral princes of Germany in our own day. No person, by himself, or his servant, or other person, for his gain, hiring, or living, was to keep any house, alley, or place of bowling, quoits, tennis, dicing-table, cards, or any other unlawful game, under penalty of forty shillings per day, and of six and eightpence to every such person playing. All justices, mayors, and head officers were empowered to enter any house and search for such offenders, and commit them till they gave security not to offend again. Officers were to make a strict search once a month, or were themselves to suffer a penalty of forty shillings. Workmen, apprentices, and husbandmen were only allowed to play at such games during Christmas, and then only in their masters' houses or presence.
Another statute of this reign introduces the earliest notice of a singular people—the gipsies. It was enacted in the 22 of Henry VIII. that persons calling themselves "Egyptians," who had lately come into the country, used no trade, and practised no handicraft, but wandered from shire to shire in great companies, pretending to tell fortunes, and committing many felonies and robberies, should be allowed sixteen days to depart, and if found in it after that time, should be imprisoned and deprived of all their goods and chattels; and all sheriffs and justices of the peace were commanded to seize all such Egyptians thereafter coming into the country, if they did not depart within fifteen days, and appropriate their effects to the king's use. The continuance of this nomadic tribe on our heaths and commons to the present day decides that the statute of Henry took no effect upon them.
But the laws of Henry were rarely so rational or innocent as these. Wo have seen, in tracing the events of his reign, that, to stop the mouths of his subjects regarding his many criminal deeds, the cruel calumnies on and divorces of his wives, followed by their execution, and the perpetration of fresh marriages equally revolting, he was continually creating new species of treasons, and loading the statute book with the most atrocious specimens of legislation which ever disgraced the annals of any nation, Christian or pagan.
The first of these extraordinary enactments was the statute 25 Henry VIII., c. 22, passed on the occasion of his divorce of Catherine of Arragon, and his marriage of Anne Boleyn. In this he declared that any one who dared to write, print, or circulate anything to the prejudice of this marriage, or the queen herself, or the issue of such marriage, should be guilty of high treason. The same was to be the fate of any one who endeavoured to dispute this alliance by advocating the validity of the former marriage with Catherine, and every one was to take an oath to obey this Act fully; and if any refused to take such oath, they were to be also guilty of misprision of treason. As, however, the tyrant could not prevent people thinking and speaking their minds in private, the next session he got from his pliant Parliament a fresh Act, forbidding all persons to speak or even think a slander against the king; for if they thought, they could have the oath put to them, and must either deny their very thought, or be found guilty of treason.
But by the twenty-eighth year of his reign the fickle despot had cut off the head of this very queen, against whom nobody had on any account been allowed to whisper the slightest fault, on peril of their lives. The marriage with her, as well as that with Catherine, was declared utterly void, and never to have been otherwise; the issue of both was pronounced illegitimate, and the same penalties were enacted against every one who called in question the present marriage with Jane Seymour. Thus, on every occasion that this Royal sensualist thought fit to destroy or divorce a wife and marry another, did he compel the whole of his subjects to swear and forswear at his pleasure; to perjure themselves over and over—to sanction the thing they had lately condemned, and to condemn the thing which lately it was death by his decree to call in question. In a statute of the thirty-first of his reign, c. 8, he clearly enunciated that doctrine of Divine right which the Stuarts, his successors, wielded to their perdition. It is worthy of note, too, that by abolishing the authority of the Pope, to serve his own selfish ends, he let loose the human mind from its long thraldom, and prepared the way—a necessary sequence—for that political rebellion which was certain to be assumed by a people who had once triumphed in a religious one. Thus was political freedom the consequence of this lawless monarch's attempt to crush it, as much as the Reformation was that of his rejection of the Papacy for the gratification of his passions; a triumph of omnipotent Providence over the blind selfishness of despots, which should teach us never to despair of the darkest times.
It is needless to follow Henry VIII. through the still repeated progress of those contradictory oaths as he slew or wedded fresh wives, what was the same in the divorce of Anne of Cleves, on the decapitation of ​Catherine Howard; but growing perfectly frantic with wrath and shame on finding himself married to an unchaste woman whom he had proclaimed an angel, he went a step further, and denounced the terrors of high treason against any woman who should dare to marry him if she had been incontinent before marriage, and against all such persons as should know of this and should not warn the king in time. When to these unexampled statutes we add that of 31 Henry VIII., c. 14, which abolished all "Diversity of opinions," and that of 34 and 35 Henry VIII., c. 1, for the "Advancement of true religion and abolishment of the contrary," we have exhibited the most perfect example of what a man may become by the intoxication of unlimited power.
Besides particular laws, Henry VIII. erected two now courts of justice—the Court of the Steward of the Marshal-sea, for the trial of all treasons, murders, manslaughters, and blows by which blood was shed in any of the palaces or houses of the king during his residence there; and the Court of the President and Council of the North. This latter court was established in the thirty-first year of his reign to try the rioters who had risen against his suppression of the lesser monasteries; but it included all the powers vested in the king's own council, and not only decided such civil cases as were brought before it, but was armed with authority, by secret instructions from the crown, to inquire into presumed illegalities, and to bring before it alleged offenders against the prerogatives of the king; and was made such oppressive use of by Strafford in the time of Charles I. as led to its abolition in the sixteenth year of that reign. As to the actual administration of the laws under the great Tudor despot, Reeve, in his History of the Laws of England, says:—"If we are to judge of the criminal law in this reign by the trials which have come down to us, it appears that the lives of the people were entirely in the hands of the crown. A trial seems to have been nothing more than a formal method of signifying the will of the prince, and of displaying his power to gratify it. The newly-invented treasons, as they were large in their conception, and of an insidious import, by giving a scope to the uncandid mode of inquiry then practised, enlarged the powers of oppression beyond all bounds."
To the honour of Edward VI. and his counsellors, all these arbitrary acts of his father were abolished by him: the law of treason was restored to its state under the statute of 25 Edward III.; religion was again set free, and proclamations by the king in council were declared to have no longer the force of Acts of Parliament. A few years, however, introduced Queen Mary, and a reversal of the state religion and all its laws. That dreadful persecution which we have narrated, and which is one of the darkest spots in the history of the world, was carried on to force the human mind into its former thraldom; and an attempt was made by the Spanish power which was then introduced to restore arbitrary rule by a singular suggestion. Charles V. of Spain presented, through his ambassador, a book to the queen, in which the principle was laid down that as she was the first queen regnant, none of the limitations which had been set to the prerogative of her ancestors the kings of England, applied to her, but to kings only; and that by consequence she was free and absolute. This book Mary showed to Gardiner, and asked his opinion of it, which was that it was a pernicious book, and could work her no good. Thereupon Mary threw the book into the fire; and Gardiner, on the plea of defining and establishing her authority, brought in an act, which, giving her the same powers as the kings before her possessed, consequently restrained her within the same limits.
Mary confirmed the act of her late brother, confining the law of treason to the statute of the 25th of Edward III.; nor does she seem to have created fresh treasons, except in one instance—making it treasonable to counterfeit not merely the coin of the realm, but also such coins as circulated there by Royal consent.
Once more the reformed religion was restored on the accession of Elizabeth; and, like her father, she was not only declared supreme head of the Church, but she assumed all his claims of supreme authority in the State. She frequently told her Parliament that it existed entirely by her will and pleasure; and when the members entered on matters disagreeable to her, she snubbed them in language which sounds oddly enough in these days of high Parliamentary privilege. By the very first statute passed in her reign, she proceeded to set up a new Court, ignored everything like Magna Charta and the right of jury, making her own will the entire law, and placing every subject, with his life and property, at her mercy. This was the Court of High Commission, which assumed all the pretensions of the Star Chamber, but was directed more especially to ecclesiastical affairs. The queen was empowered to appoint by letters patent, whenever she thought proper, such persons, being natural-born subjects, as she pleased, to execute all jurisdiction concerning spiritual matters, and to visit, reform, and redress all errors, heresies, schisms, abuses, offences, &c., which by any ecclesiastical authority might be lawfully ordered or corrected. The Reformers were only too eager to put this formidable engine into her hands, because it was to crush the Romish hierarchy; but they did not reflect that it could on occasion be employed against themselves, as Laud and Strafford afterwards demonstrated to their children. This inquisitorial court was armed with authority to employ torture to effect the necessary confessions, and its jurisdiction was extended to the punishment of breaches of the marriage vow, and all misdemeanours and disorders in that state. It was, therefore, sanctioned in forcing its operations into the very bosom of social and domestic life, and presents an aspect most fearful, and calculated effectually to lay the subject prostrate at the feet of the sovereign.
Elizabeth, indeed, was fully as arrogant and despotic as her father; and nothing but her lion-like resolution, her choice of able and unscrupulous ministers, and the cunning of her government, could have enabled her to maintain her sway so successfully as she did. The homage due to her sex no doubt also contributed essentially to this result. Yet not all these circumstances could prevent her clearly perceiving that her power was silently and even rapidly waning before that of the public. She frequently had to tell persons that they dared not have done or said certain things in her father's time. She had repeatedly to concede the point to the pertinacity of her Parliament; especially so when, towards the end of her reign, the House of Commons ​called so boldly upon her to abolish, the monstrous list of monopolies which had been granted to her favourites, commencing from the seventeenth year of her reign. Amongst these monopolies were those for the exclusive sale of salt, currants, iron, powder, cards, calf-skins, felts, poledavy (a kind of canvas), ox shin-bones, train-oil, lifts of cloth, potash, anise-seed, vinegar, sea-coal, steel, aqua-vitæ, brushes, pots, bottles, saltpetre, lead, accidences (or books of the rudiments of Latin grammar), oil, calamiue stone, oil of blubber, glasses, paper, starch, tin, sulphur, new drapery, dried pilchards; the exportation of iron, ham, beer, and leather; the importation of Spanish wool and Irish linen; and, in fact, such an astonishing list, that when it was read over in the Commons in 1601, but two years before her death, a member in amazement asked, as already stated, whether bread was not of the number.
These grants had been obtained from her by her courtiers through the weak side of the woman; but in the expenses of her government, considering the aid she had to render to her Protestant allies in Scotland, France, and the Netherlands, and the enemies she had to contend with, necessitating expensive armaments and navies, her administration shows most favourably. She would never incur debt, but paid off that incurred by her predecessors, Edward and Mary. Instead of debasing the coin, like her father, she increased its purity; and the annual outlay of her government averaged only about £65,000 per annum.
In fact, the more we recede from the personal history of Elizabeth, which no sophistry now can render fair, and approach her great political measures, the more we perceive the true evidences of her glory. She was courageous, beyond the power of a world in arms to terrify her; she was moderate in her demands on her subjects, though vain in her person and showy in her court; shrewd in her choice of ministers, though weak in her indulgence of favourites; she was ambitious of the reputation of her country, though staining her own character with the darkest crimes; and she rendered to the labouring people their birthright in the land, which her father had stripped them of in levelling the monastic institutions, by enacting the Poor Law, the celebrated statute of the forty-third of her reign, on which yet rests the whole fabric of parochial right to support in age and destitution. In nothing did she display her governmental sagacity so much as in her repeated declaration that money in her subjects' purse was as good as in her own exchequer. It was better, for there it would be growing tenfold in the ordinary augmentation of traffic, ready to yield the State proportionate interest on any real emergency.
RELIGION AND THE CHURCH.
We have so fully in the preceding chapters related the great struggle betwixt the Papal hierarchy and the increasing Protestant power both in England and Scotland, that we may here pass cursorily over the subject. There are, however, some features of the great crisis which demand placing in greater prominency, in order to a complete understanding of the causes in operation. And, in the first place, we must remark that complete and terrible as was the overthrow of the ancient hierarchy in these realms, it came at last with a rapidity which astonished even the friends of the change. From the time of Richard II. the new doctrine had been afloat amongst the people, and even in his day had availed to shake the throne, and fill the public mind with prognostics of Papal decay. Yet reign after reign had passed, and the Church had not only maintained its position, but had seemed to crush with a successful hand the Protestant schismatics. The fires which consumed the more daring advocates of the new opinions seemed to scare the rest into obscurity. The triumphant Church of Rome still presented a front of determined strength, and lorded it over the land with a magnificence which seemed destined to endure for ever.
Henry VII. was a firm upholder of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. "He advanced churchism," says Bacon; "he was tender of the privileges of sanctuaries, though they did him much mischief; he built and endowed many religious foundations, besides his memorable hospital of the Savoy; and yet he was a great alms-giver in secret, which showed that his works in public were rather dedicated to God's glory than his own." The fact was that Henry VII. was too cautious a man to become a reformer. He was too fond of money to risk its loss by the most distant chance of an unsuccessful enterprise, and he was too recently placed on the throne of a vanquished dynasty to venture on so bold a measure of ecclesiastical revolution had he been thus inclined, which he was far enough from being. On the contrary, his ministers were almost all great and able churchmen. Cardinals Bourchier and Morton, Archbishops Deane and Warham, were the accomplished churchmen who conducted the governmental affairs of Henry; and when the public outcry against the worldly and dissolute lives of the clergy, both secular and regular, became too loud to be disregarded, these clerical ministers of the king endeavoured with one hand to reduce the corruption by advice and remonstrance, and to check the progress of heresy by the stake and fagot. Henry VII. permitted this mode of extinguishing opinion by destroying the entertainers of it; and in the ninth year of his reign Joan Boughton was burnt in Smithfield, and this auto-da-fé was followed by a number of others; as William Tylsworth, at Amersham, whose daughter was compelled to set fire to the pile which destroyed her father; Laurence Guest, at Salisbury, and others; besides numbers who were burnt in the cheek, imprisoned, and otherwise cruelly treated. These atrocities, as usual, so far from diminishing the heresy, only excited the abhorrence of the people, and weakened their attachment to the Church.
Henry VIII. continued the persecuting practices of his father with unabated rigour. In his earlier days he appeared determined to do honour to the Church beyond most of his predecessors. He raised up and created in Cardinal Wolsey such a colossus of ecclesiastical pomp and greatness as the world had rarely seen. In 1513 Wolsey was made Bishop of Tournay, in France; in 1514, Bishop of Lincoln and Archbishop of York; in 1515, the king's almoner, cardinal, and lord high chancellor of the kingdom; in 1518 he became the Pope's legate "à latèré," Bishop of Bath and Wells; in 1521, Abbot of St. Albans; in 1523, Bishop of Durham, in exchange for the bishopric of Bath and Wells; and ​in 1529, Bishop of Winchester, in exchange for the bishopric of Durham. Besides all these dignities, he had pensions from the King of France, the Emperor of Germany, the Pope, and other princes. The whole power of the kingdom was in his hands; for Henry, so far from feeling any jealousy of his greatness, only felt himself the greater for having a servant who in pride and splendour rivalled the greatest monarchs. The state with which we have seen, in the course of our narrative of the reign of Henry VIII., this meteor of priestly eminence and affluence blazing along its course, would lead us to believe that the Church had reached a still higher pitch of power and grandeur than ever in this country. His palaces were more gorgeous, and crowded with more evidences of enormous wealth, than those of kings. The retinue of servants and attendants, many of the latter being nobles or the sons of nobles, was something inconceivable. It was only at Hampton Court that the whole train of his servants and the crowd of his visitors, including the nobility and ambassadors of foreign courts, could be suitably lodged and entertained. His secretary. Cavendish, says that his establishment consisted of 1,000 persons. His "cheino roll," he says, was of itself 800 persons, besides the servants of visitors. There was his steward, a clergyman; his treasurer, a knight; his comptroller, an esquire. His master cook presided in his kitchen clad in velvet or satin, and wearing a gold chain, besides two under cooks and their six labourers; yeomen, and grooms of the larder, the scullery, the ewry, the buttery, the collary, the chandlery, and the wafery. He had a master of the wardrobe, and twenty assistants; yeomen and grooms again of the laundry, the office of purveyance, of the bakehouse, the wood-yard, the barn, of his gate, his barge, his stables, his farriers, his yeomen of the stirrup, his maltster, with all their under grooms, horses, &c.
There were then the dean and sub-dean of his chapel; repeater of the choir, the gospeller, the epistler, the master of the singers, with his men and children. In his processions were seen forty priests, all in rich capes and other vestments of white satin, or scarlet, or crimson. The altar in his chapel was covered with massy plate, and blazed with jewels and precious stones. In his privy chamber he had his chief chamberlain, vice-chamberlain, and two gentlemen ushers; six gentlemen waiters and twelve yeomen, and at their head nine or ten lords to attend on him, each with their two or three servants, and some more, to wait on them, the Earl of Derby having five. Three gentlemen cup-bearers, gentlemen carvers and servers, forty in number; six gentlemen ushers, and eight grooms. Attending his table were twelve doctors and chaplains, clerk of the closet, two clerks of the signet, four counsellors learned in the law, and two secretaries. Besides these there were his riding-clerk, clerk of the crown, clerk of the hamper and chaffer, clerk of the cheque for the chaplains, clerk for the yeomen of the chamber, fourteen footmen garnished with rich running coats whenever he had a journey; a herald-at-arms, sergeant-at-arms, physician, apothecary, four minstrels, keeper of the tents, an armourer, an instructor of his wards in chancery, "an instructor of his wardrop of roabes," a keeper of his chamber, a surveyor of York, and clerk of the green cloth.
"All those," says his secretary, Cavendish, "were daily attending, down-lying, and uprising; and at need he had eight continual boards for the chamberlains and gentlemen-officers, having a mess of young lords and another of gentlemen, every one of which had two or three others to wait upon him."
This was his state at home. When he prepared to attend term at Westminster Hall, he was attired in his cardinal's robes, and was followed by all his retinue. His upper vesture was of scarlet or crimson taffeta, or crimson satin, ingrained; his pillion scarlet, with a sable tippet about his neck. He had in his hand an orange, which having the inside taken out, was refilled with a sponge and aromatic vinegar, lost in the crowd he might imbibe any pestilence. Before him were carried the great seal of England and the cardinal's hat, by "some lord or gentleman right solemnly." On entering his presence-chamber his two great crosses wore borne before him, and the gentlemen ushers cried, "On, masters, on, and make room for my lord." On descending to the hall of his palace, he was preceded by additional officers, a sergeant-at-arms with a great silver mace, and two gentlemen bearing great plates of silver. Arriving at his gate, he mounted his mule, trapped all in crimson velvet, with a saddle of the same, and thus he proceeded to Westminster—
Pole-axe and pillar borne before his face.—Moile.
His cross-bearers, and pillar-bearers were all upon great horses, and in fine scarlet, with a train of gentry, footmen with battle-axes, &c. When he went to the Court at Greenwich, he went in his barge in equal state, and when he proceeded to the Continent on great embassages, with far more. He astonished the people abroad by the actually regal splendour with which he travelled, attended by such a retinue of knights, nobles, and prelates, amounting to 4,000 horsemen or more, with his cardinal's hat carried before him on a cushion, as had never been seen in the proudest days of the Church, except in the pontiffs themselves. And this ostentatious parade was only in keeping with his substantial power. For a long course of years the whole government of England was in his hands. The king did nothing without him; and as prime minister and Lord Chancellor of England, Archbishop of York, and chief judge in the court of Star Chamber, there was no man or his estate that was not in his power. His revenues from a hundred sources were immense, and such was the magnificence of his position and influence, that well might he forgot himself and utter the famous words of unparalleled egotism—"Ego et rex meus."
Who could have deemed that the Papal Church was near its end as the State religion of this country, whilst the king thus delighted to honour its dignitaries? The very greatness of Wolsey hastened the fall of the Church as well as of himself. The envy born of such towering grandeur watched to avenge itself upon it. The arrogant demeanour, the rapacity, and the frequent injustice of the proud minister made for him and his Church deadly enemies. "For," says Strype, "he disobliged not only the inferior sort by his pride and haughty behaviour, but by laying his hands upon the rights, privileges, and profits of the gentry and clergy, he made them his ​implacable enemies too. He took upon him to bestow benefices, though the real right of patronage lay in others. He called all offending persons before him, whether of the laity or clergy, and compelled them to compound as his officers thought fit."
But this swollen apparition of mortal grandeur was but the creature of the most violent and capricious of men. A breath had made him, and a breath unmade. A single word and he fell headlong, assuredly shaking in his fall the great hierarchy of which he had seemed the most gorgeous pillar and ornament; for the whole system was corrupt and rotten to the core. The wealth of the monastic orders had especially demoralised them. Both the regular and secular clergy were accused of not only spending their time in taverns and gambling houses, but of abandoning in such resorts the very costume which distinguished thorn from the laity; of wearing daggers, gowns, and hoods of silk and embroidery, and letting their hair grow long and fall on their shoulders. The interiors of the monastic houses were described as very dens of licentiousness, both in monks and nuns. We have it on the evidence of one of the letters of reproof addressed by Archbishop Morton to the Abbot of St. Albans, that that famous abbey was filled with every species of vice and sensuality. The abbot is declared to have turned out all the nuns of two nunneries under his charge and filled them with women of scandalous character, and that both he and his monks led the most vile lives amongst them; that they besides this kept concubines, who are especially named, and indulged in still more monstrous excesses. He charges them with cutting down the woods, wasting and embezzling the property of the Church, stealing the plate, and even picking out the jewels from the shrine of the patron saint.
Whilst such was the corruption of the clergy—a corruption so complete that no warnings nor censures availed to produce amendment; though the criminal horde was well aware that every day the Reformers were growing in numbers and noting their enormities with vigilant eyes—these infatuated men fell to quarrelling amongst themselves, thus giving the last sign of a falling house, the being divided against itself. The most remarkable circumstance, moreover, in this schism is, the very question which has just recently furnished such a fiery theme of discussion in both Romanist and Protestant Churches—the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin.
The Star Chamber.
The Franciscans, or Grey Friars, were the champions of this doctrine; the Dominicans assumed the opposite position, admitting, however, that the Virgin became entirely purified in her mother's womb; so that the difference of opinion was so little that it might have satisfied any but ecclesiastical combatants. But these two parties divided the whole Catholic community, and thus threw the public into a very blaze of animosity. In vain did the Pope himself endeavour to conclude the strife by stepping forth as the champion of the immaculate dogma. The feud burned on; but the Franciscans, by the sanction of the Vatican, carrying the people with them, the Dominicans resorted to one of those pious frauds so frequent in the Church of Rome, and produced an image of the Virgin, which, besides moving her eyes, shedding tears, rising up and sitting down, also denied the immaculateness of holy conception, and declared the Franciscans impostors. The people, overcome by this miracle, at once abandoned the Franciscans; who, however, too well versed in such mysteries, seized the image and exhibited to the public the springs and machinery by which it had been worked. This fatal exposure being made, the four Dominicans who had been most active in the trick, were delivered over to their enemies, the provincial of the order being one of them, and were burned at the stake. The Franciscans triumphed, but the Church received a mortal wound.
With the blind tenacity which often induces falling bodies to assert their prerogatives with an arrogant obstinacy, the Church, in the fourth year of Henry VIII., commenced a daring opposition to the Government, in defence of the benefit of clergy. Henry VII., as we have stated, had limited this much abused privilege, by his statute ordering such laymen as claimed it under charge of murder to be burnt in the brawn of the thumb with the letter M. Henry VIII. had a bill introduced into ​Parliament for the purpose of still further limiting this mischievous right, and denying benefit of clergy to all murderers and robbers whatever. This the clergy opposed in Parliament, and preached against in the pulpit. The Lords and Commons were unanimously in favour of the bill as well as the public at large, but the clergy determined not to give way. "Whilst the public mind was in a ferment on this subject, a tailor of London, of the name of Huune, was brought into conflict with the incumbent of his parish, on account of mortuary dues; and being sued in the spiritual court, with a boldness which marked the rising spirit of the times, and which the clergy ought to have noted seriously, he took out a writ of præmunire against his prosecutor, for appealing to a foreign jurisdiction, the Spiritual Court, but still under the authority of the Pope. Enraged at this audacity, they threw the tailor into prison on a charge of heresy, where he was found hanging and dead. A coroner's inquest found the officers of the prison guilty of murder, and it appeared that the Bishop of London's Chancellor, the sumner, and bell-ringer had perpetrated the crime. This threw the deepest odium on the clergy, and greatly alienated the people from them; yet they did not cease to prosecute their claim of privilege, and after much contest, Wolsey prayed the King to refer the matter to the Pope. But even at this early period Henry showed that he was tenacious of his own power, and gave a striking foretaste of what he would one day do. He replied, "By permission and ordinance of God, we are King of England; and the kings of England in times past hath never had any superior, but God only. Therefore know you well that we will maintain the right of our crown, and of our temporal jurisdiction, as well in this as in all other points, in as ample a manner as any of our progenitors have done before our time."
William Tyndale.
Whilst Edward VI. thoroughly established Protestantism, Mary as completely reinstated Popery, and with a series of horrors which stamped terror and aversion of Roman Catholic ascendancy for ever deep in the spirit of this nation. The number of persons who died in the flames in that awful reign, for their faith and the freedom of conscience, is stated to have been 288; but Lord Burleigh estimated those who perished by fire, torture, famine, and imprisonment at not less than 400. Besides these, vast numbers suffered cruelly in a variety of ways. "Some of the professors," says Coverdale, "were thrown into ​dungeons, noisome holes, dark, loathsome, and stinking corners; others lying in fetters and chains, and loaded with so many irons that they could scarcely stir. Some tied in the stocks with their heels upwards; some having their legs in the stocks, with their necks chained to the wall with gorgets of iron; some with hands and legs in the stocks at once; sometimes both hands in and both legs out; sometimes the right hand with the left leg, or the left hand with the right leg, fastened in the stocks with manacles and fetters, having neither stool nor stone to sit on to ease their woful bodies; some standing in Skevington's gyves (commonly called 'Skevington's daughter')—which were most painful engines of iron—with their bodies doubled; some whipped and scourged, beaten with rods, and buffeted with fists; and some having their hands burned with a candle to try their patience, and force them to relent; some hunger-pined, and some miserably famished and starved." The chief Reformers fled out of the kingdom, chiefly to Frankfort and to Switzerland; and 800 or more lived to become the heads of the restored Church under Elizabeth; amongst these were Poynet, Bishop of Winchester; Grindal, afterwards Bishop of London, and finally Primate of England; Sandys, afterwards Archbishop of York; Ball, Bishop of Ossory; Pilkington, afterwards Bishop of Durham, Bentham, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield; Scorey, Bishop of Chichester, and afterwards of Hereford; Young, afterwards Archbishop of York; Cox, afterwards of Ely; Jewel, afterwards of Salisbury; Coverdale, the translator of the Bible, Bishop of Exeter; Horn, Dean of Durham; Knox, the apostle of Scotland; and Fox, the martyrologist. Besides these eminent men, there were Sir John Cheke, the famous Greek scholar, Sir Anthony Cooke, and Sir Francis Knollys, afterwards Elizabeth's vice-chamberlain.
Branding Iron.
On Elizabeth's accession to the throne she was by no means disposed to go so far as her brother Edward had gone, much less as far as the refugees, who now flocked back again from Geneva, would have carried her. They had imbibed all the rigid independent notion of Calvin and Zwinglius, and that probably before their departure from England—a circumstance which there is little doubt directed their course to that quarter, for the Reformers who resorted to Frankfort were much nearer to her standard—that standard very much the same as that of her father. She renounced all allegiance to the Pope and the Church of Rome, though she hesitated to declare herself the supreme head of the Church till it was conferred on her by Parliament. She issued orders to restrain the zeal of the Protestants, who began to pull down the images, and to restore the service to its state in King Edward's time. She gave directions that a part of the service should be read in English, and forbade the elevation of the host; but at the same time she suspended all preaching.
Permanent Pillory.
Parliament, on meeting, passed an Act asserting the supremacy of the Crown over the Church, revived the Acts of Henry VIII. which abolished the power and jurisdiction of the Pope in England, and authorised the use of King Edward's Book of Common Prayer, with some alterations, chiefly in the Communion Service. Thus they cast off the Roman Catholics who would not conform, but did not go far enough for the more zealous Reformers. The oath of supremacy was presented to the bishops, and it had the effect of clearing the Church of all but Kitchen of St. Asaphs. The inferior clergy, however, were not so firm, and only six abbots, twelve deans, twelve archdeacons, fifteen heads of colleges, fifty prebendaries, and eighty rectors refused compliance. The monks returned to secular life, but the nuns mostly went abroad. The clergy were ordered to wear the habits in use in the latter part of King Edward's time; and their marriages, against which the queen showed a strong repugnance, were put under stringent regulations. The press also was laid under the most rigorous restrictions, and no book was to be printed or published without the ​licence of the queen, or of six of her privy council, or of her ecclesiastical commissioners, or the two archbishops, the Bishop of London, the chancellors of the universities, and the bishop and archdeacons of the place where it was produced. All persons were commanded to attend their parish churches under severe penalties. In 1562 the articles of religion of King Edward were reduced from forty-two to thirty-nine. In 1571 they underwent a further revision, and were made binding on the clergy before they could be admitted to orders.
A Friar.
Like her father, the longer she lived the more resolute she became to enforce her own dogmas on the whole body of her subjects. In the twenty-third year of her reign the penalty for non-attendance of the Established Church was raised to £20 per month. In the same year another Act was passed, declaring it high treason to attempt to draw any one to the Church of Rome; and the persons thus drawn were equally guilty of treason, and all their aiders, abettors, and concealers were made guilty of misprision of treason. These arbitrary laws against the freedom of opinion went on increasing in severity. In 1585 an Act was passed, which made traitors of all Jesuits and other Popish priests who had been ordained abroad, and all subjects whatever educated in Papal seminaries who did not immediately return home and take the oath of supremacy. The receivers of any such persons were declared felons without benefit of clergy. Whoever sent money to any foreign Jesuits or priests were liable to præmunire; and parents sending their children to school abroad without licence from Her Majesty, were liable to a penalty of £100. Fresh Acts were added in 1581 and 1593, the former to make void all conveyances of property by Popish recusants, with the object of escaping the penalties imposed upon them, and to decree that the penalty of £20 a month for non-attendance at church should be levied by distress to the extent of all the offenders' goods and two-thirds of their lands; the latter ordered all Popish recusants above sixteen to repair to their proper places of abode, and never more to go more than five miles from them without special licence from the bishop of the diocese or lieutenant of the county, under penalty of forfeiture of their goods and of the profits of their lands for life; those having no goods or lands to be deemed felons.
Sanctuary, Westminster.
But if the atrocities committed by the Roman Catholics in the reign of Mary, and the fears of their recurrence should they regain the power, afforded some plea for these persecutions, what is to be said of the same rigour applied to the Reformers, who simply desired to form their religious opinions on the sacred volume—the divine charter of humanity? Thousands of these, from the earliest days of the Reformation, had claimed this privilege as their plain birthright; and many of those who came back from the Continent on the termination of the Marian persecution, were no little surprised and discouraged to find themselves equally excluded from the exercise of their own judgments by a Protestant queen. They were required to attend the preaching of those against whose doctrines they protested, and suffered the same monstrous fines if they absented themselves. Instead of that "glorious liberty of the gospel" which they had promised themselves, they found themselves required to accept with all homage the cut out and prescribed pattern of opinion dictated by an individual woman, who made a desperate stand against the removal of images from the churches, and practised many Popish ceremonies in her own private chapel. Instead of the form of service which the English refugees had established at Geneva, in which there was no Litany, no responses, and scarcely any rites or ceremonies, they were commanded to adopt a form which appeared to them little removed from Popery. The Genevan refugees, who, from their demand for the utmost purity and primitive simplicity in worship, were styled Puritans, would, had they been permitted, have planted a church far more like the church as it came to exist in Scotland than that which was and is established for England. They opposed the claims of the bishops to a superior rank or authority to the presbyters; they denied that they possessed the sole right of ordination, and exercise of church discipline; they objected to the titles and dignities which had been copied by the Anglican Church from the Roman, of archdeacons, deans, canons, prebendaries; to the jurisdiction of Spiritual Courts; to an indiscriminate admission of all persons to the communion; to many parts of the liturgy, and of the offices of marriage and burial, including the use of the ring in marriage; they repudiated set forms of prayers, and the use of godfathers ​and godmothers, the rite of confirmation, the observance of Lent and holidays, the cathedral worship, the use of the organ, the retention of the reading of apocryphal books in the church, pluralities, non-residence, the presentation of livings by the Crown, or any other patron, or by any mode but the free election of the people.
Pulpit Hour-glass, time of Edward VI.
But in that age no conception of religious liberty was entertained. The Puritans were as resolute in their ideas of conformity to their notions as Elizabeth was to hers; and had they had the power, would have used the same compulsion. Knox exhibited that spirit of exclusiveness to the extreme in Scotland, even calling for the deposition of the queen as a "Jezebel" and "an idolatress," because she would not adopt his peculiar tenets and view of things. The Puritans exhibited the same spirit long after in America, where they put to death the Quakers for the exercise of their faith. In fact, the great and divine principle of the entire liberty of the gospel was too elevated to be arrived at suddenly after so many ages of spiritual despotism, and required long and earnest study of the spirit and example of Christ; severe struggles, and bloody deaths, and incredible sufferings in those who came to see the sublime truth, before the battle of religious freedom was fought out, and all parties could admit the plain fact which had revealed itself to Charles V. after his abdication of the throne, when he amused himself with clock-making: that as no two clocks can be made to go precisely alike, it is folly to expect all men to think precisely alike. "Both parties," says Neal, in his "History of the Puritans," speaking of these times, "agreed too well in asserting the necessity of a uniformity of public worship, and in using the sword of the magistrate for the support and defence of their respective principles, which they made an ill use of in their turns whenever they could grasp the power in their hands.
The standard of uniformity, according to the bishops, was the queen's supremacy, and the laws of the land; according to the Puritans, the decrees of provincial and national synods, allowed and enforced by the civil magistrate: but neither party were for admitting that liberty of conscience and freedom of profession which is every man's right as far as is consistent with the peace of the civil Government he lives under."
Elizabeth, having the power, compelled all those clergymen who conformed sufficiently to accept livings and bishoprics, not only to conform, but more or less to persecute their brethren. Even men like Parker and Grindal, naturally averse to compulsion, were obliged to do her bidding, till Grindal rebelled and was set aside; but their places were supplied by Sandys, who had himself fled from Popish compulsion, and by Whitgift, who rigorously enforced the laws. Sandys actually sentenced the anabaptists who, in 1575, were burnt at the stake by order of the queen—for to this pass it came: Hammond, a ploughman, being burnt at Norwich in 1579, and Kett, a member of one of the universities, in the same place, ten years afterwards, under Elizabeth.
The Bishop of the Reformed Church.
Such was the state of the Protestant Church at the termination of the period we are now reviewing. The queen discouraged preaching and instruction of the people, allowing many bishoprics, prebends, and livings to be vacant, and receiving their incomes. She declared that one or two preachers in a county was enough, probably fearing the prevalence of the more advanced opinions. Parker in his time had been ordered to enforce strict compliance with the rubric, and numbers of the most eminent and eloquent clergymen resigned their livings and travelled over the country, and preached where they could, "as if," says Bishop Jewell, "they were apostles; and so they were with regard to their poverty, for silver and gold they had none." Being, however, continually brought before the authorities and fined and otherwise punished, they determined to break off all connection with the public churches, and form themselves into an avowed separate communion, worshipping God in their own way, and being ready to ​suffer for his sake. Here, then, commenced the great cause of Nonconformity, and the formation of all those sects which from time to time have since appeared, each claiming—and justly—the right to worship God and to regulate their particular church as seems conformable to their understanding of the Scriptures. These separate assemblies, however, were stigmatised as conventicles, and many from this time became the laws passed to put them down, as we shall hereafter find. Amongst the Nonconformists a most zealous and resolute sect arose called Brownists, from Robert Brown, a preacher in the diocese of Norwich, a man of good family, and said to be a relative of Lord Burleigh. His followers soon acquired the name of Independents, which they still retain, from their denial of all ecclesiastical dignities and authority whatever, asserting that each congregation constitutes a complete church, with the right to nominate their own minister and conduct their own affairs. This body of Christians, at this day so extensive and respectable, of course felt the especial weight of the persecution of the Established Church, with which it refused to hold the slightest communion; yet to such a degree did it flourish—a proof of the onward spirit of the time—that Sir Walter Raleigh declared in Parliament that there were before the death of Elizabeth not less than 20,000 members of that body in Norfolk, Essex, and the neighbourhood of London.
In the narration of the struggles of this period in Scotland we have sufficiently traced the persecution of the Protestants by the Romish Church—the martyrdom of Patrick Hamilton, George Wishart, Walter Mill, and others; the murder of Cardinal Beaton, and the final triumph of Knox and his compeers, from which period the organisation of the Protestant Church of Scotland went on rapidly. In 1560 the lords of the congregation entered Edinburgh in arms; and Parliament assembling, abolished for ever the Pope's jurisdiction, abolished the celebration of mass, and authorised "The Confession of the Faith and Doctrine believed and professed by the Protestants of Scotland." An Act also was passed to pull down all cloisters and abbey-churches still left standing: and the Church, not waiting for any further enactment of the Parliament or Crown, went on exercising its own proper functions as an independent church, governed, not by the State, but by presbyteries, synods, and general assemblies. In 1580 the general assembly, after having at various times diminished the power and rank of bishops, declared that episcopacy was unscriptural and unlawful—a dictum which the Parliament fully ratified in 1592, establishing the Presbyterian Church as the national one, with general assembly, provincial synods, presbyteries, and kirk sessions. In 1597 the Parliament admitted certain representatives of the clergy to seats in it, to which the general assembly assented at its next meeting; and thus was completed the system of church government in Scotland at that time.
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.
The present centennial produced as great a revolution in literature and science as in religion. We still look back to this era for some of the greatest names and greatest works which have adorned and enlightened not only our own country but the whole civilised world. When we enumerate Sir Thomas More, Lord Surrey, Roger Ascham, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, Buchanan, Gawin Douglas, Dunbar, and Sir David Lyndsay, we remind our readers that we are moving amid a constellation of genius, than which time has scarcely any brighter. But in the two words, Shakespeare and Bacon, we pronounce the names and glorious births of dramatic and philosophic genius, which have placed this country on the summit of intellectual fame, by works never since surpassed in any nation, and by discoveries in science and art which have flowed from the "Novum Organum" of Bacon as from an eternal and ever-strengthening fountain. True it is both these great men belong, by their published works, rather to the succeeding period than to the present, and in that we shall more fully review their works; but Bacon had, long before the death of Elizabeth, sketched out the plan of his immortal work, though he had not dared to publish it; and Shakespeare had not only written his poems, but had also written and acted in many of his most brilliant and original play's. By these great writers the English language was established as a great classical language; and though it has since extended and connected itself with the progress of knowledge and most astonishing and varied discoveries, we can produce no purer, no stronger nor more eloquent specimens of it than from the pages of Shakespeare, which continue to be read and listened to on our stage, the genuine speech of Englishmen—somewhat quaint occasionally, but always musical to the ear, familiar to the sense, and animating as old wine to the spirit.
The mass of men and topics with which we have to deal in this department of our subject is so great, that we must take but a cursory view of what can only be fully discussed in a history exclusively devoted to our literature and art. Our business is to sketch the great outlines of our progress; the reader must seek the details in the works and biographies belonging to the different subjects. The violent changes and spoliations of the Reformation did not check the foundation of new colleges and seminaries of learning—the fountains, under a more liberal order of things, certain to produce noble results. Even Henry VIII., in his wholesale destruction of endowed property, and though college property was included in the Acts which he procured from his obsequious Parliament, for the most part spared the resources of education. His reign was distinguished by the foundation, in Oxford, of Brazenose College, in 1509, by Sir William Smith, Bishop of Lincoln, and Sir Richard Sutton, of Presbury, in Cheshire. Old Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, who had been prime minister of Henry VII., and still was of the council of his son, in 1516 founded Corpus Christi. The only exception to Henry VIII.'s patronage of the colleges occurred in those founded by Wolsey—his Cardinal College at Oxford, and his college at Ipswich, which both fell with him. In 1515 Henry himself founded Christ Church instead of that of Wolsey, which he then dissolved. In 1554 Trinity College was founded on the basis of Durham College by Sir Thomas Pope. In 1555 Sir Thomas White, alderman and merchant tailor of London, founded St. John's College, on the site of Bernard College. These were in the reign of Queen Mary. In Elizabeth's time rose Jesus College, in 1571, from funds ​furnished by Dr. Hugh Price, and augmented by the queen herself.
Luther denouncing the Romish Ritual.
In Cambridge three colleges arose during the reign of Henry VII.—the only educational endowments of any note during that period. In 1496 John Alcock, Bishop of Ely, founded Jesus College. In 1505, Margaret, Countess of Richmond, mother of Henry VII., founded Christ's College, and also in 1511, very shortly before her son's death, St. John's College. In 1519 Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, commenced the College of Magdalen—now called Maudlin; but as he was executed for high treason in 1521, Lord Audley, the lord chancellor, completed it. Henry VIII, founded Trinity College in 1546, and at the same time four new professorships in the university; namely, for theology, law, Greek, and Hebrew. Henry was proud of his learning, and had the good sense to support, with all the imperative force of his character, the new study of Greek, when it was violently assailed by the Church and professors. Dr. Caius founded the college named after him, and popularly pronounced "Keys," on the basis of the old hall of Gonville, in 1558—the only extension of Cambridge University under Queen Mary. In Elizabeth's time, Sir Walter Mildmay founded Emanuel ​College in 1584, and in 1598 Sidney-Sussex College was founded by Lady Frances Sidney, widow of Ratcliffe, Earl of Sussex. The universities of Scotland were greatly extended during this period. That of Aberdeen was founded in 1494 under the name of King's College, James IV. having procured a bull for that purpose from Pope Alexander VII., though the bishop was the main benefactor. In 1593 Marischal College, in the same university, was erected by George, Earl Marischal. At St. Andrews the new college of St. Leonards was established in 1512 by Archbishop Stuart and John Hepburn, the prior of the metropolitan church. This was afterwards united with that of St. Salvator, and took the name of the United College. St. Mary's, in the same university, was founded, in 1537, by Archbishop Beaton. In 1582 James VI. founded the University of Edinburgh. In 1591 Queen Elizabeth founded in Dublin the University of Trinity College.
Destruction of the Cross in Cheapside.
Contemporaneous with these colleges and universities rose a great number of grammar-schools, designed to extend the knowledge of Latin to the mass of the people; and amongst the magnificent endowments, since too much withdrawn, by the influence of wealth, from the poor and the orphan, for whom they were designed, and devoted to the use of the affluent, for whom they were not designed, and who ought to educate their own children at their own expense, we may name St. Paul's School, London, founded by Dean Colet in 1509; that of Christ's Hospital, London, founded by Edward VI. in 1553, the year of his death; Westminster School, established by Elizabeth, 1560; and Merchant Tailors School, founded by that guild in 1561. In Scotland, the High School of Edinburgh was founded by the magistrates of that city in 1577.
Punishment of the Pillory.
Punishment of the Stocks.
It is a curious fact that the revival of the Greek language and literature was coincident with the Reformation. Widely opposed as the spirit of Christianity and of the Greek mythology are, yet in one particular they are identical, that is, in breathing a spirit of liberty and popular dominance which were not long in showing their effects in this country. Whilst the Scriptures were now translated and made familiar to the people at least by means of Puritan preachers, and were thus proclaiming that God had made of one blood all the nations of the earth, and that he was no respecter of persons, thereby laying the foundations of eternal justice in the public mind, and teaching, as a necessary consequence, that the end and object of all human government was not the good of kings or nobles, but of the collective people—the poets, the historians, the dramatists, and philosophers of republican Greece were brought to bear all the force of their fiery eloquence, their glowing narratives, and their subtle reasoning upon the same theme; presenting not only arguments for general liberty and a popular polity, but examples of the most sublime struggles of a small but glorious people against domestic tyrants and the vast ​hordes of barbarism without, of noblest orators thundering against the oppressions of the mighty, of awful tragedians steeping their stage in the imaged blood of tyrants and of traitors, of patriots perishing in joy for the salvation of their country.
It was not to be wondered at that on the bursting of these novel elements like a sudden and strong torrent into the arena of human life, there should arise a fearful struggle and combat betwixt the old intellectual ideas and the new. The duplex inundation pouring from the hills of Palestine and of Greece, and in united vastness deluging Europe, threatened to destroy all the old landmarks of the schoolmen, and to drown Duns Scotus and Aquinas amongst the owls and bats of the monkish cells and somnolent dream chambers. It was soon seen that this new language was the language of the very book from which the Reformers drew their words winged with the fire of destruction to the ancient slavery of popular ignorance and popular dependence on priests and Popes, and no time was lost in denouncing it as a gross and new-fangled heresy. It was a heresy from which not only freedom in Church but in State was to spring; the seed from which grew, in the next age, our Hampdens, Marvels, Pyms, Prynnos, Cromwells, and Miltons.
Yet it is only due to Henry VIII., to his ministers Wolsey, Fox, and More, and to other eminent dignitaries—amongst them Cardinal Pole in Queen Mary's reign—to state that they were zealous advocates and promoters of the Greek learning. The very first public school in which Greek is said to have been taught in England was the new foundation of Dean Colot, St. Paul's school, where the celebrated scholar William Lilly, who had studied in Rhodes, was the master. Wolsey introduced it into his new colleges, and Henry VIII. being at Woodstock and hearing of a furious harangue made at Oxford against the study of the Greek Testament in the university, immediately ordered the teaching of it, and established a professorship of it also in Cambridge.
Notwithstanding, a violent opposition arose against the study of Greek in consequence of the authority it gave to the now doctrines of the Reformers, rendering an appeal to the original text invincible, and Erasmus informs us that the preachers and declaimers against his edition of the Greek Testament really appeared to believe that he was by its means attempting to introduce some new kind of religion. The book was prohibited in the University of Cambridge, and a heavy penalty decreed for any one found with it in his possession. Erasmus attempted to teach the Greek grammar of Chrysoloras there, but a terrible outcry was raised against him, and his scholars soon deserted his benches. As the contest went on, however, the Universities, both here and abroad, became divided into the factions of the Greeks and Trojans, the Trojans being those who were advocates for Latin but not for Greek. The Greeks, however, victorious as of old, expelled the works of the famous Duns Scotus from the schools; they were torn up and trodden under foot; and the King sent down a commission, who altogether abolished the study of this old scholastic philosophy which had had so long and absolute a reign.
Yet the new knowledge appears for some time after the first excitement to have made less progress in the schools than at Court and amongst the aristocracy. On the surface of the age, therefore, it appeared a very learned one. All the great churchmen on both sides the question in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI.—Wolsey, Fox, Gardiner, Cranmer, Ridley, Tunstall, Cardinal Pole—were men of great acquirements. Henry was a fine scholar, and, with all his harsh treatment to his wives and children, he gave to the latter educations perhaps superior to those of any princes or princesses of the time. Edward was actually steeped in learning, to the injury, no doubt, of his over-taxed constitution. Mary and Elizabeth were both accomplished linguists, speaking Latin, French, and Spanish fluently; and Elizabeth adding to these Greek and Italian, with a smattering of Dutch and German. Mary was studiously instructed in the originals of the Scriptures, and made a translation of the Latin paraphrase of St. John, by Erasmus, which was printed and read as part of the Church service, till it was ordered to be burnt by herself in her own reign with other heretical books. She was deeply read in the fathers, and in the works of Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and selected portions of Horace, Lucan, and Livy. Elizabeth was a poetess of no mean pretensions, and besides her knowledge of the classical and modern languages, read by preference immense quantities of history. Roger Ascham, the instructor of Lady Jane Grey, says:—"Numberless honourable ladies of the present time surpass the daughters of Sir Thomas More," but that none could compete with the Princess Elizabeth; that she spoke and wrote Greek and Latin beautifully; that he had read with her the whole of Cicero, and great part of Livy; that she devoted her mornings to the New Testament in Greek, select orations of Isocrates, and the tragedies of Sophocles, whilst she drew religious knowledge from St. Cyprian and the "Common-places" of Melancthon; that she was skilful in music, but did not greatly delight in it.
With such examples, no wonder that there were such learned ladies at Court as Lady Jane Grey, Lady Tyrwhit, Mary Countess of Arundel, Joanna Lady Lumley, and her sister Mary, the Duchess of Norfolk—all learned in Greek and Latin, and authoresses of translations from them; the two daughters of Sir Thomas More, and the three daughters of the learned Sir Anthony Cooke—one of them the wife of the all-powerful statesman Burleigh, another the mother of the illustrious Francis Bacon, and the third, Lady Killigrew, a famous Hebrew scholar, as well as profound in Latin and Greek.
It is extraordinary that learning, under these very accomplished women, should have languished in the schools and amongst the people. Yet such appears to have been the fact, and is accounted for by the violent and continual changes which were taking place in Church and State. A great part of the reign of Henry VIII. was agitated and engrossed by the conflict with the Court of Rome regarding his divorce from Catherine, and then by his stupendous onslaught on the monastic and cathedral property. As no man at the Universities could tell where promotion was to come from in the Church under a man who equally took vengeance on Romanist and Protestant who dared to differ from him, and as it was equally uncertain whether, in some new fit of anger ​or caprice, he might suppress the colleges as he had suppressed monasteries, ministers, and chantries, it is nothing wonderful to hear Latimer exclaiming, "It would pity a man's heart to hear what I hear of the state of Cambridge. There be few that study divinity, but so many as of necessity must furnish the college."
Doing Penance in a Church.
Under Edward VI. things became far worse. Then it was a scramble amongst his courtiers who should get the most of the property devoted to religion or learning. Bishoprics, good livings, the remainder of the monastic lands which yet remained with the Crown, did not suffice. These cormorants clutched at the University resources. They appropriated exhibitions and pensions, and, says Warton, in his "History of English Poetry," "Ascham, in a letter to the Marquis of Northampton, dated 1550, laments the ruin of grammar-schools throughout England, and predicts the speedy extinction of the universities from this growing calamity. At Oxford the schools were neglected by the professors and pupils, and allotted to the lowest purposes. Academical degrees were abrogated as anti-Christian. Reformation was soon turned into fanaticism. Absurd refinements, concerning the inutility of human learning, were superadded to the just and rational purgation of Christianity from the Papal corruption." He adds that the Government visitors of the university totally stripped the public library, established by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, of all its books and manuscripts; and Latimer, in one of his sermons about that time, declared his belief that there were then 10,000 fewer students than there had been twenty years before.
Cathedral of Geneva.
Classical literature did not fare better during the persecuting reign of Mary, though Cardinal Pole was a warm friend of the introduction of Greek, notwithstanding the use made of it by the Protestants. When he urged Sir Thomas Pope to establish a professorship of that language in his new college of Trinity, Sir Thomas replied, "I fear the times will not bear it now. I remember, when I was a young scholar at Eton, the Greek tongue was growing apace, the study of which is now a-late much decayed." Nor was it likely when Elizabeth discouraged preaching even, saying that "one or two preachers in a county was enough," that classical studies would be much encouraged. In fact, nothing could be lower than the condition into which both learning and preaching had fallen in Elizabeth's church. The Bishop of Bangor stated that he had but two preachers in all his diocese. Numbers of churches stood vacant, according to Neal, where there was no preaching, nor even reading of the homilies for months together, and in many parishes there could be found no one to baptise the living or bury the dead; in others, unlearned mechanics, and even the gardeners of those who had secured the clerical glebes and income, performed the only service that there was. But no doubt this afforded good scope to the Puritans, who had now the Bible in English, Cranmer's, Coverdale's, and Parker's, or the Bishops' Bible; and these zealous men, spite of the crushing penalties, would find constant opportunities of diffusing their knowledge. In Oxford there were only three divines in 1563 who were considered able to preach a sermon, and these three were Puritans. The knowledge of the classics was fallen so low, that all that Archbishop Parker required of the holders of his three new scholarships in Cambridge, in 1567, was that they should be well instructed in grammar, and be able to make a verse. The classical qualifications in the two universities were below contempt even. It is a satisfaction to turn from this humiliating state of things to the great lights of genius and learning which were burning brightly amid this thick darkness. Here meet us the illustrious constellation of names of More, Ascham, Puttenham, Sidney, Hooker, Bacon, Barclay, Skelton, Sackville, Heywood, Surrey, Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, &c.—names which cast a lustre over this period in which all its faults and failings become dim. Of the prose writers Sir Thomas More is one of the earliest and most famous. He was equally remarkable for the suavity of his manners, his wit, his independence of character, and the eloquence and originality of his writings. We have seen how he served and was served by Henry VIII. Erasmus, who stayed some time at his house, says, "With him you might imagine yourself in the academy of Plato. But I should do injustice to his house by comparing it to the academy of Plato, where numbers and geometrical figures, and sometimes moral virtues, were the subjects of discussion. It would be more just to call it a school, and an exercise of Christian ​religion. All its inhabitants, male and female, applied their leisure to literal studies and profitable reading, although piety was their first care. No wrangling, no angry word was heard in it, no one was idle; every one did his duty with alacrity, and not without a temperate cheerfulness."
More's chief work is his "Utopia," and it may be pronounced the first enunciation of a system of socialism since the apostolic age. It may surprise many, but More, in fact, was the forerunner of Proudhon and Fourrier. His "Utopia" describes an island in which a commonwealth is established completely on socialistic principles. No one is allowed to possess separate property; because such possession produces an unequal division of the necessaries of life, demoralising those who become inordinately rich, and, in a different direction, depraving and degrading those who are obliged to labour incessantly. What is remarkable, More in his imaginary commonwealth admits the fullest toleration of religious belief, though he fell so far in practice as to join in the persecutions of his time. His principles were too noble for his practice; yet with this one flaw he was one of the most admirable men who ever lived. His "Utopia" was written by him in Latin, but was translated into English in 1551, afterwards by Bishop Burnet, and in 1808 by Arthur Cayley. Besides this, he wrote a life of Richard III., and various other compositions in Latin and English, besides a number of letters which have been published in his collected works. As a specimen of the prose style and state of the language in the early part of the reign of Henry VIII., we may quote a short passage from a letter to his second wife, Alice Middleton, in 1528, on hearing that his house at Chelsea was burnt down:—
"Maistress Alyce, in my most harty wise I recommend me to you; and whereas I am enfourmed by my son Heron of the losse of our barnes and of our neighbours also, with all the corne that was therein, albeit (saving God's pleasure) it is grit pitie of so much good corne loste; yet sith it hath liked hym to sende us such a chaunce, we must and are bounden, not only to be content, but also to be glad of his visitacion. Ho sente us all that we have loste: and sith he hath by such a chaunce taken it away againe, his pleasure be fulfilled. Let us never grudge thereat, but take in good worth, and hartily thank him as well for adversitie as for prosperite; and peradventure we have more cause to thank him for our losse than for our winning; for his wisdome better seeth what is good for us than we do our selves. Therefore I pray you be of good chere, and take all the howshold with you to church, and there thanks God, both for what he hath given us, and for that he hath taken from us, and for that he hath left us, which if it please hym he can encrease when he will. And if it please hym to leave us yet lesse at his pleasure be it. I pray you to make some good insearche what my poore neighbours have loste, and bid them take no thought therefore; for and I shold not leave myself a spone, there shal no poore neighboure of mine bere no losse by any chaunce happened in my house. I pray you be with my children and your howshold mery in God."
Arms of Geneva.
Latimer was the son of a Leicestershire fanner, and rose to be Bishop of Worcester, and to the far higher rank of a martyr for his faith. He has been pronounced by writers of this age as a good but not a great man. To our mind he was a very great man. Not in worldly wisdom, for he was simple and unambitious as a child; but he was a genius, true, racy, original, and inspired. He was made, as his sermons show, for a preacher to the people rather than to princes, though to them he bore a bold and unblenching testimony. But to the people he was a prophet and an awakener. He had been amongst them; he knew their deepest feelings, their most secret thoughts, their language and their desires; and he addressed them from the pulpit with the loving and picturesque familiarity which be used at their firesides. There is occasionally much rudeness in his discourses, his images are often bizarre, his allusions grotesque; but there is a life ​that kindles, there is a poetry that warms, a spirit that arouses, a bold aggressive truth which must have made his hearers look into their souls and think. We take a short passage from a sermon preached before Edward VI. in 1549—twenty-one years after the composition of More just given, and yet how much more old-fashioned is the language. After telling the king that so plain was his preaching that it had boon called seditious, and that his friends, with tears in their eyes, assured him he would get into the Tower, he says:—"There be more of myne opinion than I. I thought I was not alone. I have now gotten one felowe more, a companyon of sedytyon, and wot ye who is my felowe? Esaye the prophete. I spake but of a lytle preaty shyllynge; but he speaketh to Hierusalem after another sorte, and was so bold to meddle with theyr coine. Thou proude, thou covetous, thou hautye cytye of Hierusalem, argentum tuum versum est in scoriam; thy sylver is turned into what? into testyers. Scoriam—into drosso. Ah, sediciouse wretch, what had he to do wyth the mynte? Why should not he have lefte that matter to some master of policy to reprove? Thy sylver is drosse, it is not fine, it is counterfeit, thy sylver is turned, thou haddest good sylver. What pertayned that to Esaye? Mary, he espyeth a piece of divinity in that policie; he threatened them God's vengeance for it. He went to the rote of the matter, which was covetousness. He espyed two poyntes in it: that eythere it came of covetousnesse, whych became hym to reprove; er els that it tended to the hurte of the pore people, for the haughtyness of the sylver was the occasion of dearth to all thynges in the realme. He imputeth it to them as a great cryme. He may be called a mayster of sedicion in dede. Was this not a sidicyouse varlet to tell them thys to theyr beardes, to theyr face?"
Amongst writers of this age who tended to purify and perfect the language were Sir Thomas Wilson, and Puttenham, who wrote the "Art of English Poesy," which was published in 1582. Wilson wrote his "Art of Rhetorique" thirty years before, only four years earlier than the sermon of Latimer's just quoted; yet what a wonderful advance of both style and orthography:—"What maketh the lawyer to have such utterance? Practice. What maketh the preacher to speako so soundly? Practice. Yea, what maketh women go so fast awai with their wordes? Marie, practice, I warrant you. Therefore in all faculties, diligent practice and earnest exercise are the only thynges that make men prove excellent."
Contemporary with Wilson and More, was Sir Thomas Elyot, whose treatise called "The Governor," is a fine example of vigorous English. Cranmer and Ridley were not less distinguished for their fine style than for their liberal principles; and Roger Ascham, the instructor of Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth, was equally distinguished for his fine caligraphy, his musical talents, his proficiency in the new learning—Greek—for his classical Latin, and his English composition. To relieve the severities of study he practised archery; and wrote his "Toxophilus, the Schole of Shootinge," to recommend that old English art. In it he strongly advocated the old English language, and the abstinence from foreign terms, a recommendation which succeeding generations have wisely declined, to the vast enrichment of the language. But Ascham was a genuine Englishman, and advised his countrymen to follow the counsel of Aristotle, and "speak as the common people do, but think as wise men do." His next principal work was the "Scholemaster: a plaine and perfite way of teaching children to understand, write, and speak the Latin tong"—a work which has become more known than any other of his, because in it he mentions his visit to Lady Jane Grey at Bradgate Park, near Leicester, where he found her deep in Plato's "Phædon" whilst the rest of the family were hunting. But besides these works he wrote on the affairs of Germany; and Latin poems, Latin letters, and his celebrated Apology for the Lord's Supper, in opposition to the mass.
As a prose writer of this period, too, Edmund Spenser, the author of the "Faerie Queene" must be mentioned for his "Discourse on the State of Ireland," which contained many judicious recommendations for the improvement of that country, and presents in its serious statesman-like views a curious contrast to the allegorical fancy of his great poem. But far greater as prose writers of the latter portion of this period stand forth Sir Philip Sidney and "the judicious Hooker." Sir Philip Sidney, who was celebrated as the most perfect gentleman of his time, or as, in the phrase of the age, "the Mirror of Courtesy," was killed at the age of thirty-three at Zutphen, in the Netherlands. Yet he left behind him the "Arcadia," a romance; the "Defence of Poesie," and various minor poems and prose articles, which were published after his death. The person and writings of Sidney have been equally the theme of unbounded panegyric. A writer in the "Retrospective Review" says:—"He was a gentleman finished and complete, in whom mildness was associated with courage, erudition mollified by refinement, and courtliness dignified by truth. He is a specimen of what the English character was capable of producing when foreign admixtures had not destroyed its simplicity, or politeness debased its honour." In his own day he was the object of the most enthusiastic praises, and has been lauded in the most vivid terms by writers of every period since. Near his own times Nash, Lord Brooke, Camden, Ben Jonson, Naunton, Aubrey, Milton, and Cowley, were his eulogists; Wordsworth and the writers of our own day are equally complimentary. Perhaps, after so continuous and high-toned a hymning, a modern reader, taking up his "Arcadia" for the first time, would find it stiff, formal, and pedantic. He might miss that fervid spirit which animates the fictions of the great masters of our own age, and wonder at the warmth of so many great authorities upon what failed to warm him. In fact, it must be confessed, that it is a noble specimen of what pleased the taste of the time in which it was written. It displays imagination, though often on stilts instead of on wings, and breathes the spirit which animated its author, of a refined nature, a chivalrous temperament, a generous heart, and the instincts of the perfect scholar. Of that period it is a noble monument; in this it is a unique work of art, which, however, strikes us as fair, mild, and antiquated. "The Defence of Poesie," with much of the same mannerism, is worthy of a poet, and of a man whose life was the finest poem, from its generous patronage of talent, its high literary taste, and the hero's death, in the very agonies of which he gave ​from his own scorched lips the draught of cold water to the dying soldier at his side.
The list of the great prose writers of this period presents no more honourable name than that of the great champion of the Church of England, Richard Hooker, whose composition is as remarkable for its cogent reasoning and grave but elevated style, as Sidney's is for fancy and grace of sentiment. Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity," in eight books, is justly regarded as the most able defence of church establishments that ever appeared. From the breadth of its principles it drew the applause of Pope Clement VIII. as well as of the Royal pedant James I. To those who study it as an example of the intellect, learning, and language of the time, it presents itself, even to such as dissent from its conclusions, as a labour most honourable to the country and age which produced it.
A still greater man was yet behind. Bacon was figuring as the great lawyer, the eloquent advocate and senator; but under the duties of these arduous offices lay concealed the master who was to revolutionise philosophy and science; the father of the new world of discovery, and the most marvellous career of social and intellectual advance. To this period he is the sun sending its rays above the horizon, but not yet risen. His speeches, his "Essays Civil and Moral," and "Maxims of Law," already predicated the fame which was ere long to dawn.
Christ's Hospital, Founded by Edward VI.
A very different writer was John Lyly, the Euphuist. Lyly was a poet and dramatist of repute; but in 1579 he published "Euphues; or, Anatomy of Wit;" which was followed, in 1581, by a second part, called "Euphues and his England." In this, like Carlyle in our day, he invented a style and phraseology of his own, which seized the fancy of the public like a mania, and set the court, the ladies, the dandies, and dilettanti of the day speaking and writing in a most affected, piebald, and fantastic style. Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Arcadia," ridiculed it, not without being in a considerable degree affected by it himself. Shakespeare, in "Love's Labour's Lost," and Sir Walter Scott, in his Sir Piercie Shafton, in "The Monastery," have made the modern public familiar with it. Yet, after all, probably, Lyly was only laughing in his sleeve at the follies of others, and was, as has been asserted, aiming at the purification of the language; for in his dramas, to which we shall call attention, his diction is simple enough, considering the taste of the age.
Amongst the rising writers was also Sir Walter Raleigh; but his literary reputation belongs rather to ​the age that was coming. On the whole, the period from the reign of Henry VII. to the end of that of Elizabeth was a period more kindred to our own than any which had gone before it. It produced prose writers whose minds still hold communion with and influence those of to-day. Its philosophy had assumed a more practical stamp, and was become pregnant with the elements of change and progress. Its poetry, which we have now to consider, reached the very highest pitch of human genius.
The earliest poet who has left any name of note is Stephen Hawes, whose principal work was "The Pastimes of Pleasure," which was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1517. It is an allegorical poem formed on the model of Lydgate, in which Grand Amour goes through the town of Doctrine, where he meets the Sciences, and falls in love with La Bell Parcel, whom he marries, and with whom he spends his life. It is said by the author "to contain the knowledge of the seven sciences, and the cause of man's life in this world." It would be in vain to look for poetry in such a subject according to our notions; yet, from Chaucer and Lydgate to this time, Hawes was about the only man who had done anything to arouse the imagination of a combative people and to improve their language. Hawes was a native of Suffolk, had travelled much, and by his proficiency in French and French literature acquired the favour of Henry VII., who had spent so many years of his life in France. Another poem, "The Temple of Glass," has been ascribed to Hawes, but is most probably Lydgate's, who, Hawes tells us, composed such a poem.
Shakespeare's Birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon.
Next to Hawes comes Alexander Barclay, the author of numerous works in prose and poetry, as "The Castell of Labour," wherein is "Rychesse, Vertue, and Honour," an allegorical poem, translated from the French; "The Shyp of Poles of the Worlde," translated from Sebastian Brandt's German poem, "Das Narron Schiff;" "Egloges; or, the Miseries of Courts and Courtiers;" a treatise against Skelton the poet; a translation of Livy's "Wars of Jugurtha;" "Life of St. George," &c. &c. The work, however, which has handed down his name to posterity is the "Ship of Fools," which, by interspersing with original touches on the follies of his countrymen, he made in some degree his own. But the chief merit of the poem in our time is the evidence of the polish which the English language had acquired, and to which Barclay probably contributed, for he had travelled through Germany, Holland, France, and Italy, studying diligently the best authors of those countries. His birth-place is unknown; his name would point towards Scotland; but Warton, the historian of our poetry, says he was of Gloucestershire—in which county there is a place of his name—or of Devonshire. He was successively a prebendary of the college of St. Mary Ottery, a Benedictine monk, Vicar of Great Barlow, in Essex, of Wokey, in Somersetshire, and Hector of All Hallows, London, terminating his life at Croydon. A stanza or two will suffice to show the state of the language at the close of the reign of Henry VII. A man in orders is speaking:—
"Eche is not lettred that nowe is made a lorde.
Nor eche a clerke that hath a benefice:
They are not all lawyers that plees do recorde, All that are promoted are not fully wise.
On such chaunce nowe fortune throwes her dice
That, though one knowe but the Yrishe game, Yet would he have a gentleman's name.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ I am like other clerkes which so frowardly them gyde, That after they are once come unto promotion,
They give them to pleasure, their study set aside,
Yet daily they preache, and have great derision
Against the rude lay men, and all for covetise.
Though, their own conscience be blinded with that vice."
The reign of Henry VIII. was distinguished chiefly by satirists: and it says much for the courage of poets that they were almost the only men in that terrible period who dared open their mouths on the crying sins of Government. Skelton, Heywood, and Roy were men who amused themselves with the follies and vices of their contemporaries. When the sun of poetry rose in a more glowing form in Surrey, the ferocious king, so ready with the headsman's axe, quenched it in blood. Skelton was a clergyman, educated at Oxford, and that with high distinction. Erasmus declared him to be "Britannicarum Literarum Lumen et Decus"—the light and ornament of Britain. He became Rector of Diss, in Norfolk; but, like Sterne at a later day, Skelton was overflowing with humour and satire rather than sermons, and so fell under the resentment of Nykke, Bishop of Norwich. He lashed with all the wonderful power of his merry muse the licentious ignorance of the monks and friars; and, soaring at higher game, attacked the swollen greatness of Cardinal Wolsey in a strain of the most daring invective. The incensed cardinal endeavoured to lay hold on him, and assuredly he would not have escaped scathless out of his hands, but the venerable John Islep, Abbot of Westminster, opened the sanctuary to him; and there Skelton lived secure for the remainder of his days, neither stinting his stinging lashes at the cardinal, nor suppressing his overflowing humour, which welled forth in a torrent of the most wild, sparkling, random, and rhodomontading character. His amazing command of language, his never-failing and extraordinary rhymes, remind us of one man only, and that of our own day—Hood. The airiness and irregularity of his lyrical measures equally suggest a comparison with that most untranslatable Swedish poet, Bellman.
His friend Thomas Churchyard, in a eulogium on him, enumerates a number of poets of that and preceding times, some of them now little known:—
"Peirs Plowmer was full plaine, And Chaucer's spreet was great;
Earl Surrey had a goodly veine, Lord Vaux the marke did beat.
And Phaer did hit the pricko In things he did translate,
And Edwards had a special gift; And divers men of late
Have helped our English tongue.
That first was base and brute. Oh! shall I leave out Skelton's name?—
The blossom of my fruit!"
The "Pithy, Pleasant, and Profitable Works of Maister Skelton, Poet Laureate to Henry VIII.," contain "The Crowne of Laurell," by way of introduction; "The Bouge of the Courte," in which this unique poet laureate attacks the vices of the Court without mercy; "The Duke of Albany," a poem equally severe on the Scots; "Ware the Hawk," a castigation of the clergy; "The Tunning of Eleanor Rumming," a wild rattling string of Thymes on an old ale-wife and her costume; and "Why come ye not to Court?" an unsparing satire on Wolsey. There is no part of the cardinal's history or character that he lets escape. His mean origin, his puffed-up pride, his sensuality, his lordly insolence, his covetousness and cruelties, run on in a strain of loose yet vivid jingle that was calculated to catch the ear of the people. His gentlest word of him is that—
"He regardeth lords No more than potsherds;
He is in such elation
Of his exaltation
Of our sovereign lord
That God to record, He ruleth all at will,
Without reason or skill,
Howbeit they be primordial
Of his wretched original
And his base progeny, And his greasy genealogy.
He came of the sink royal
That was cast out of a butcher's stall.
But however he was born,
Men would have the less scorn
If he could consider
His birth and room together."
He tells us that the king,
"Of his royal mind, Thought to do a thing
That pertaineth to a king— To make up one of nought, And made to him be brought A wretched poor man,
With his living wan,
With planting leeks,
By the days and by the weeks;
And of this poor vassal
He made a king royal!"
We cannot afford space for the wild riot of Skelton's description of old Eleanor Rumming—
Droupy and drowsy,
Scurvy and lousy,
Her face all bowsy;
Comely crinkled,
Wonderfully wrinkled, Like roast pig's car, Bristled with hair.
But Skelton has shown that he could pen strains worthy of the fairest and noblest, and buoyant with music of their own. Such is his canzonet to
MISTRESS MARGARET HUSSEY.
Merry Margaret
As midsummer flower, Gentle as falcon, Or hawk of the tower.
With solace and gladness,
Mirth and no madness
All good and no badness;
So joyously, So maidenly, So womanly,
Her demeanour
In everything
Far, far passing
That I can indite,
Or suffice to write
Of merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower.
Gentle as falcon,
Or hawk of the tower, &c.
A far more grave and not less vengeful satirist of Wolsey and the clergy, was William Roy, the coadjutor of Tyndal in the translation of the Bible. He was originally a friar, but joining the Reformers, he wrote ​a poem against Wolsey, who had ordered the burning of Tyndal's New Testament; it is called—
Rede me, and be not wrothe, For I saye no thynge but trothe."
In this work he placed on the title a coat of arms for Wolsey in black and crimson, with a description in verse at the back of the title, of which the following stanza, alluding to the deaths of the Duke of Buckingham (the swan), and the Duke of Norfolk (the white lion), may serve as a specimen:—
"Of the proude Cardinall this is the shelde, Borne up betweene two angels of Sathan, The sixe bloody axes in a bare felde Sheweth the cruelty of the red man, Which hath devoured the beautiful swan, Mortal enemy of the white lion, Carter of York, the vile butcher's sonne."
The burning of Tyndal's New Testament is denounced by Roy in many verses of the bitterest feeling, every stanza repeating his indignation at the unhallowed fact:—
"O miserable monster, most malicious Father of perversitie, patron of hell! O terrible tyrant, to God and man odious, Advocate of antichrist, to Christ rebell; To thee I speak, O caytife cardinall so cruell, Causeles chargynge by thy coursed commandment To burne Godde's worde, the wholly Testament."
Besides these satirists there was John Heywood, in the time of Henry VIII., Edward, and Mary, who wrote "Six Centuries of Epigrams," of a pious nature, a considerable number of plays, and an allegory called "The Spider and the Fly." Of course, he was a favourite with Henry and Mary, and is said to have been more amusing in his conversation than in his books. Heywood has the honour commonly assigned him of being the first author of interludes; the stepping-stones from the old mysteries and moralities to the regular drama. With the Church passed away these grotesque performances called religious; and the drama quickly expanded in all its fair proportions before the eyes of the public. Shakespeare arose, and the dates of the appearance of his plays show us that they were many of them produced before 1603, the close of the reign of Elizabeth. In fact, Shakespeare seems to have retired from the stage in the very year of Elizabeth's death. Before him, however, a number of dramatic writers had appeared; but as the greater part of them overlived the termination of Elizabeth's reign, or their works began after that period to take their due rank, we propose to defer the full consideration of the dramatic authors till the next centennial. We may here, however, mention the chief of these dramatic writers. Heywood had been preceded by Skelton in the line of interlude, whose strange "Nigro-mansia" was printed by Wynkyn de Worde as early as 1505. Heywood wrote various interludes, but his chief one was the "4 P's," namely, a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Poticary, and a Pedlar. On the heels of this appeared the first regular comedy, "Gammer Gurton's Needle," written by John Hill, and printed in 1551. Ten years after appeared the first English tragedy, "Gorboduc," written by Thomas Norton and the celebrated poet Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset. Passing over the "Damon and Pythias" of Richard Edwards, the "Promos and Cassandra" of George Whetstone, which, borrowed from an Italian novel, contains the rude outline of Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure," we come to Robert Greene, who with Kyd, Lyly, Peele, Nash, author of "Queen Dido," and Marlowe, constituted a remarkable constellation of genius. Greene's chief plays are "Friar Bacon and the Friar of Bungay," and "A Looking Glasse for London," written in conjunction with his friend Thomas Lodge. He also wrote much poetry. The principal dramas of George Peele are "David and Bethsabe, with the Tragedy of Absolon," written in 1579, which is a real mystery play, and "The Famous Chronicle of Edward I.," "The Old Wives' Tales, a Comedy," &c.
Lyly, the Euphuist, wrote nine plays, amongst them "Alexander and Campaspe," "Sappho and Phaon," "Midos," "Gallathea," &c. Lyly, as it will be seen, was fond of Greek subjects, but he could also enjoy English comedy, as in "Mother Bombie," and others; which are regular comedies, divided into acts and scenes, and interspersed with agreeable songs. Contemporary with the preceding, as well as with Shakespeare, Marlowe is the greatest name which precedes that of the supreme dramatist. We can do no more here than name some of his chief tragedies, for Marlowe was essentially a tragedian. These were "Tamburlaine the Great," in two parts, "The Massacre of Paris," "Edward II.," including the fall of Mortimer and Gaveston, "Doctor Faustus," "The Rich Jew of Malta," and "Lust's Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen." Marlowe was, moreover, a beautiful lyrical poet, as is evident by his charming madrigal "Come, live with me and be my love," given in Walton's Angler. Greene, Peele, Marlowe, Nash, and that whole company were extremely dissipated in their lives, and lived and died in deep poverty. To these we must add, as dramatic poets of this era, but whom it will be essential to our continuous view of the progress of the drama to dismiss with the rest. Decker; Kyd, author of "Joronimo," and the "Spanish Tragedy;" Lodge, author of "The Wounds of Civil War," &c.; Gascoine; Chapman, also the celebrated author of the translation of Homer; Jasper Heywood, son of John Heywood; Weston, Marston, &c. So much was the drama now advanced in estimation, that even Elizabeth's Lord Chancellor, Hatton, was in part author of the tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda," founded on the story of Boccaccio.
Amongst the lyrical poets, the reign of Henry VIII. presents us with a remarkable trio, who were associated as well by their genius as their position and fate. These were Sir Thomas Wyatt, the early lover of Anne Boleyn, her brother, George Boleyn, afterwards the unfortunate Earl of Rochford, and the equally unfortunate Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the last victim of the sanguinary Henry VIII. Surrey was the cousin-german of the Boleyns, Wyatt was their early neighbor and play-fellow; together they all figured amongst the most accomplished courtiers; two of them lost their heads, the third only narrowly escaping; and their poetry was printed together in one volume.
Sir Thomas Wyatt (called the Elder, to distinguish him, from his son of the same name, who was executed for rebellion in the reign of Queen Mary) was one of the most distinguished men of the Court of Henry VIII. His country-house was Allington Castle, in Kent, and its. ​vicinity to the residence of the Boleyns made him a youthful companion of Anne and her brother and sister. He became attached to Anne, but was obliged to give way to the passion of the king, not without some danger. After that he was long employed abroad in embassies to France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. Incurring the king's displeasure for aiding Cromwell in the promotion of the marriage with Anne of Cleves, he prudently withdrew from Court to his castle in Kent. He had never ceased writing poetry even when engaged in his diplomatic missions, and he now more than ever cultivated the muses. His amatory verses are polished and elegant, but his satires display more vigour, and are remarkable as containing the earliest English version of "The Town and Country Mouse." Besides his poems he has left letters, in which he not only gives us many insights into the state of the Courts where he resided, but various particulars regarding the fate of Anne Boleyn, and some addressed to his son, which place him in a most favourable light as a man and a father. His prose has been greatly admired. A short lyric, which we may give, addressed to Anne Boleyn, when her creation of Marchioness of Pembroke warned him that he saw in her the future queen, clearly informs us that he had been her accepted lover:—
Forget not yet the tried intent Of such a truth as I have meant; My great travail so gladly spent, Forget not yet.
Forget not yet when first began The weary life ye know; since when The suit, the service none tell can, Forgot not yet.
Forgot not yet the great assays, The cruel wrongs, the scornful ways, The painful patience, and delays, Forget not yet.
Forget not, O! forget not this, How long ago had been and is The love that never meant amiss, Forget not yet.
Forget not now thine own approved, The which so constant hath thee loved, Whose steadfast faith hath never moved, Forget not yet.
His friend George Boleyn was, perhaps, a more spirited poet than himself, and is said to have sung the night before his execution a lyric which had been printed some time, along with the poems of Wyatt, called, "Farewell, my lute," the refrain of which was too strikingly applicable to his situation:—
"Farewell, my lute, this is the last Labour that thou and I shall waste, For ended is that we began; Now is the song both sung and passed; My lute, be still, for I have done."
But most illustrious of these was the Earl of Surrey. Like his friend Wyatt, he had travelled in Italy, and brought home a high admiration of the great Italian poets, Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, on whose model he formed his taste. Like his ancestor, the conqueror of Flodden, he was brave and high-spirited, but seems to have had a facility for getting into scrapes, both with his own family and the Government. As a gay courtier, however, he was greatly admired by the ladies, and still more by people of taste for his poetry, which went through four editions in two months, and through seven more in the thirty years after their appearance. They are supposed to have strongly influenced the taste of Spenser and Milton. The great theme of his lyrics was the fair Geraldine, but who she was precisely neither critics nor historians have quite determined, though believed to be a lady of the Irish family of Fitzgerald. A single stanza may indicate the spirit with which he proclaimed her beauty:—
"Give place, ye lovers, here before That spent your boasts and brags in vain! My lady's beauty passeth more The best of yours, I dare well say'n, Than doth the sun the candle-light, Or brightest day the darkest night."
But the most important fact in Surrey's poetical history is his introduction of blank verse into the English language, a simple but, in its consequences, most eventful innovation, liberating both the heroic and the dramatic muse from the shackles of rhyme, and leading the way to the magnificent works of Shakespeare and Milton in that free form. There has been much dispute amongst the critics as to whether Surrey invented blank verse, or merely copied it from some other language; but the only wonder seems that some one of our poets had not attempted it before. What so likely as that Surrey, in translating the first and fourth books of the "Æneid," should adopt the blank verse in which the original was written, not precisely the hexameter, but a measure more suitable to the English language? All the verse of the ancient Greeks and Romans is of this blank species; and it is extraordinary that men well versed in these speeches had so long omitted the experiment; especially as the Italians, the French, and the Spaniards had tried it. Gonsalvo Perez, secretary to Charles V., had translated Homer's "Odyssey" into blank verse; and in 1528, Trissino, in order to root out the terra rima of Dante, had published his "Italia Liberata di Goti"—Italy delivered from the Goths—in blank verse. In the reign of Francis I. two of the most popular poets of France, Jodelle and De Baif, wrote poems in this style. Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, had already translated the "Æneid" into Scotch metre, and it would seem as if Surrey, in trying his hand on two books of the same poem, had been induced to make the essay of blank verse at the same time. Whatever was the immediate cause, nothing could exceed the success of Surrey's experiment. His verse flows with a stately dignity fall of music and strength. We take a specimen from the fourth book of the "Æneid," where Dido, who has vowed never to marry again, perceives her new passion for Æneas, and discloses her pain to her sister:—
Ne to her lymmes care graunteth quiet rest.
The next morrowe with Phœbus' lampe the ertho
Alightened clere, and eke the dawning daye,
The shadowe danke gan from the pole remove,
When all unsownd her sister of like minde,
Thus spoke she to: O sister Au, what dremes
Be these that me tormenten, thus afraide?
What newcome gest unto our realm ys come?
What one of chere? How stowt of harte in arms?
Truelie I think, ne vaine ys my beliefe,
Of goddishe race some of springe should be seeme.
Cowardie noteth harts swarved owt of kinde
He driven, lord, with how hard destinie!
What battells eke atchieved did he tell! And but my minde was fixt immovablie
Never with wight in wedlocke for to joine,
Sithe my first love me lefte by deth disseverid,
Yf bridal bowndes and bed me lothed not,
To this one fawlt perchannce yeet might I yeld;
For I will graunt sith wretched Syche's dethe,
My spouse and hawse with brother slaughter stained,
This onley man hath made my senses bend,
And pricketh forthe the mind that gan to slide:
Feelinglie I taste the steppes of mine old flame.
But first I wishe the erth me swallow downe,
Or with thunder the mighty Lord me send
To the pale gostes of hell and darkness depe,
Or I thee stayne shamefastness, or the lawes."
If we turn to Sackville's "Gorboduc," acted before Queen Elizabeth in 1561, we shall see how thoroughly blank verse had asserted its freedom of the language. Even Greene, in his "Friar Bacon," in 1594, has passages that in their rich and harmonious diction display the wonderful power of blank verse. The true vehicle for the deathless dramas of Shakespeare was established, and already he had taken possession of it with some of his noblest imaginings, for Nash, as early as 1589, alludes to "Hamlet."
But before coming to Shakespeare, we must add another word regarding Sackville. In 1559 he had published "The Mirrour for Magistrates." He was then a mere youth, but the poetical preface to this work, which he called "The Induction," and the "Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham," displayed the most remarkable powers of poetry, and at once arrested the public attention. The work itself was a mere series of the lives of personages prominent in English history, supposed to be an imitation of Lydgate's "Fall of Princes;" but expanded by the loftier genius of the author, and the induction so illustrated by allegory, as to give rise to the belief that Spenser was greatly indebted to him.
Edmund Spenser, the greatest of our allegoric poets, was born in East Smithfield, in London, and was educated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. He had the good fortune to secure the friendship of the all-powerful Earl of Leicester, of Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Walter Raleigh. By their introduction to Queen Elizabeth, he obtained an annuity of £50 a year; and besides being employed by Leicester on a mission to France, went to Ireland in 1580, with Lord Grey de Wilton. We have noticed his "Views on the State of Ireland" under the head of the prose writers of this period, and for that able work, as well as for other services, he received a grant of the abbey and manor of Enniscorthy, in Wexford, which the same year, probably under pressure of necessity, he transferred to a Mr. Lynot. The estate, at the time of Gilbert's survey of Ireland, was worth £8,000 a year. Afterwards he obtained the grant of the Castle of Kilcolman, in the county of Cork, part of the estate of the unfortunate Earl of Desmond, with 3,000 acres of land. On this property Spenser went to live, and his dear friend Sir Philip Sidney being just then killed at the battle of Zutphen, he wrote his pastoral elegy of "Astrophel" in his honour. Ho also wrote his great work the "Faerie Queen" there; but in 1597 ho was chased by the exasperated Irish from his castle, which was burned over his head, his youngest child perishing in the cradle. He reached London, with his wife and two boys and a girl, and thus broken down by his misfortunes, he sank and died at an inn or lodging-house in King Street, Westminster. Ben Jonson says "he died for lake of bread, yet refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of Essex, adding he was sorry he had not time to spend them."
It has been asked how he could die of "lack of bread" with an annuity of £80 a year. The thing is very possible. Burleigh was his life-long enemy. He hated him as the commonplace soul instinctively hates the man of genius, and this hatred was aggravated by his being patronised by Leicester, Essex, and Raleigh, all men who were detested by him. Nothing was, therefore, easier than for Burleigh to withhold the dying poet's pension, or his son Robert Cecil, who now possessed his power, for Burleigh was in his last days, and Cecil inherited all his meanness. Spenser has recorded the malice of Burleigh in various places. In his "Ruins of Time" he says:—
"The rugged foremost that with grave foresight
Wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state, My looser verse, I wot, doth sharply wite
For praising love."
And at the close of the sixth book of "The Faerie Queen," he declares there is no hope of escaping "his venomous despite." Spenser's verses in "Mother Hubbard's Tales," describing the miseries of court dependence, have often been quoted:—
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried
What hell it is in suing long to byde;
To lose good days that might be better spent;
To waite long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow;
To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peeres';
To have thy asking, yet wait many years;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy heart with comfortless despairs; To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."
The minor poems of Spenser beside the "Astrophel," are the "Epithalamion" on his own marriage; four "Hymns to Love and Beauty;" "Sonnets;" "Colin Clout come Home again;" "The Tears of the Muses;" "Mother Hubbard's Tales," which refer to court characters of the time; "The Ruins of Time;" "Petrarch's Visions," "Bellaye's Visions," &c. In all these there is much beauty and fancy, mingled with much that is far-fetched and fantastic—the inevitable fault of that age. The "Faerie Queen" rises above all these as the cathedral over the lesser churches of a great city. It was written in a stanza which from him has over since been called the Spenserian, a stanza so capable of every grace, strength, and harmony, that there are few poets who have not essayed it: Thomson's "Castle of Indolence," Beattie's "Minstrel," Mrs. Tyghe's "Psyche," Campbell's "Gertrude of Wyoming," and Byron's "Childe Harold," have made it the vehicle of many immortal thoughts.
To the modern reader, nevertheless, the "Faerie Queen" would prove a tedious task in a continuous persual. It is of a fashion and a taste so entirely belonging to the age in which it was written, that of courtly tourneys, of parade of knighthood, at least in books, and of a fondness of high-flown allegory, that it unavoidably strikes a reader of this more realistic age as visionary, formal in manner, and descriptive not of actual human life. ​but of an impossible style of existence. It is dedicated to Queen Elizabeth as "The Most High, Migthtie, and Magnificent Empresse," and in a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh he explains its plan. Following the example of Ariosto in his "Orlando," he endeavours to exalt worthy knighthood, by portraying Prince Arthur before he was king, under the "image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised, in "which is the purpose of these first twelve books." From the arguments of "Despair" to "The Red-Crosse Knight," we may take our specimen of the "Faerie Queen."
William Shakespeare.
"'Who travailes by the wearie, wandering way,
To come unto his wished home in haste,
And meets a flood that doth his passage stay,
Is not great grace to help him over past.
Or free his feet that in the myre sticke fast?
Most envious man that grieves at neighbour's good,
And fond, that joyest in the woe thou hast,
Why wilt not let him pass, that long hath stood
Upon the bancke, yet wilt thyself not pas the flood?
"'He there does now enjoy eternall rest,
And happy ease, which thou dost want and crave,
And further from it daily wanderest:
Wiat if some little payne the passage have,
That makes frayle flesh to feare the bitter wave?
Is that not payne well borne, that bringes long ease,
And lays the soul to sleepe in quiet grave?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, deathe after life, does greatly please.
"The knight much wondered at his suddeine wit.
And sayst, 'The terme of life is limited,
Ne may a man prolong, nor shorten it;
The soldier may not move from watchful steed,
Nor leave his stand, untill his captaine bid.'
'Who life did limit by Almightie doome,'
Quoth he, 'knows best the terms established;
And he that points the centenel his roome,
Doth license his depart at sound of morning droome.
"'Is not his deed, whatever thing is done,
In heaven and earth? Did he not all create
To die againe ? All ends, that was begoune,
Their times in his eternall booke of fate
Are written sure, and have their certain date.
Who, then, can strive with strong necessitie?
That holds the world in its still changing state,
Or shunne the death ordayned by destinee?
When houre of death is come, let none aske whence nor why.
"'The longer life, I wote, the greater sin;
The greater sin, the greater punishment.
All those great battles which thou boasts to win,
Through strife, and bloodshed, and avengement,
Now praysed, hereafter deare thou shalt repent—
For life must life, and blood must blood repay.
Is not enough thy evill life forespent?
For he that once hath missed the right way,
The further he doth goe, the further he doth stray.'"
The language of Spenser must not be held to be the language of the time; he purposely used an antiquated diction to give a quaint and piquant tone to his romance. A modern critic has denied that the language is thus treated by the poet; but it must be allowed that Sir Philip Sidney, living at the moment, was a competent judge of this fact, and in his "Defence of Poesie" he complains of this very circumstance in the "Faerie Queen."
Representing Shakespeare's Plays in the Hall of the Middle Temple.
We arrive now at the last name which we intend to introduce in our review of the literature of England at this period, and it is the greatest; perhaps the greatest which has yet diffused its glory over this or any other country. The genius of Shakespeare appears to penetrate into all departments of human knowledge, and his instincts to possess a universal accuracy. Whether he describes the beauties of Nature at large, or enters the haunts of busy life, high or low, royal, noble, or plebeian, or sends his all-searching glance into the depths of the human mind, or the strange intricacies of human nature, we are equally astonished at the clearness of his perceptive faculties, and the justness of his conclusions. We shall not here discuss the various guesses, for such to a great degree they are, which have been indulged in by his host of critics and biographers, regarding his little known life. It is sufficient that we know that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564; that his father was in the Town Council, and a man of property; his mother connected by birth with the family of John Hampden, the illustrious patriot; that the Shakespeares, therefore, were of gentle blood, and bore a coat of arms. That William was said to have been apprenticed to a butcher, or that one of his father's trades was that of a butcher. That at the age, it is said, of eighteen, but probably not till later, for some cause he went to London, where he became connected with the theatre, and so early as 1589 we find that he had written ​"Hamlet," if no other of his dramas, though none of them appear to have been published till 1597, eight years afterwards. The first of his poems, "Venus and Adonis," was printed in 1593, four years earlier, and the "Rape of Lucrece" in the following year. From that time to 1603, the year of the death of Elizabeth, a great number of his dramas were published, but "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale," the "Tempest," "Troilus and Cressida," "Henry VIII.," "Coriolanus," "Julius Cæsar," and "Anthony and Cleopatra," would appear to have been the glorious products of his ten or thirteen years of leisure in his native town. One of the first labours of his retirement appears to have been the collection of his sonnets, for they were published in 1609.
We mention these facts here merely as historical data; because it will be necessary to notice the whole of the plays in the next centennial period of our history, in connection with the drama at large; but we shall confine our notice of Shakespeare on this occasion solely to his poetical character.
The poems of Shakespeare are "Venus and Adonis," "The Rape of Lucrece," "Sonnets," "A Lover's Complaint," and "The Passionate Pilgrim." The poems for the most part, if not altogether—"The Passionate Pilgrim" and some of the sonnets excepted—would appear to have been his earliest productions. He dedicates "Venus and Adonis" to Lord Southampton, and styles it "the first heir of my invention." Both it, "The Rape of Lucrece," and the "Lover's Complaint," bear all marks of youthful passion. They burn with a voluptuous fire, and would, had they been printed in this age, have subjected their author to all the censure which "Don Juan" brought down on Lord Byron. Yet they are at the same time equally prodigal of a masterly vigour, imagination, and the faculty of entering into and depicting the souls of others. They as clearly herald the great poet of the age, as a morning sun in July announces what will be its intensity at noon. The language, in its purity and eloquence, is so perfect that it might have been written, not in the days of Elizabeth, but of Victoria, and presents a singular contrast to that of his contemporary, Spenser. "The Passionate Pilgrim" is an extraordinary production; it has no thread, even the slightest, of story or connection, and seems to be merely a stringing together of various passages of poetry, which he had struck off at different moments of inspiration, and intended to use in his dramas. Some of them indeed we find there. It opens with a commencement of the legend of "Venus and Adonis," apparently his first rude sketch of the poem he afterwards wrote more to his mind. It then breaks suddenly off with those well-known lines, beginning—
"Crabbed age and youth
Cannot live together;"
soon after as suddenly changes into—
"It was a lording's daughter, the fairest one of three;"
as abruptly gives us those charming stanzas opening with—
"Take, oh, take those lips away That so sweetly were forsworn;"
and presents us with a number of disjointed passages which are found in "Love's Labour's Lost."
But the sonnets are the most interesting, because they give us glimpses into his own life and personal feelings. Many of them are plainly written in the characters of others; some express the sentiments of women towards their lovers, but others are unmistakably the deepest sentiments and feelings of his own life. From these we learn that Shakespeare was not exempt from the dissipations and aberrations incident on a town-life at that time, but his true and noble nature led him to abandon the immoral city as early as possible, and retire to his own domestic roof in his own native place. We may select one specimen of these sonnets, which probably was addressed to his wife, and which at once betrays his dislike of his profession of an actor, and his regret over the influence which it had had on his mind, and the stigma which it had cast on his name; for the profession of a player was then so low as to stamp actors as "vagabonds."
"Oh, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds;
Thence came it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
Pity me then, and wish I were renewed;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eysell 'gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye,
Even that your pity is enough to cure me."
But if the great dramatist and inimitable poet shrunk with disgust from the profession of acting, from the estimation in which the actor then was held, and the pollutions which surrounded the stage, he held a very different opinion of the vocation of a dramatist. In the peaceful and virtuous retirement of his country residence he still occupied himself with the composition of the noblest dramas of all time; and whilst he was so free from the petty egotism of a small mind that he left scarcely any record of himself, he boldly avowed his assurance of the immortality of his fame:—
"Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes; Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent."
We shall have occasion to show that Shakespeare had much to do in shaping and raising the drama out of that chaotic state in which he found it, and the wonder has always been, that with his apparently imperfect education he could accomplish so much. But there is no education like self-education; that was William Shakespeare's, and his genius was of that brilliant and healthy kind that gave him all the advantages of such a tuition. In history and in society he found the materials of the drama, but the wealth and power of the poet he found in the great school of nature.
In Scotland the language had remained much more stationary than in England. In this period we find the chief Scottish poets writing in a diction far more " ​unintelligible to the English reader than Chaucer or Gower were in the middle of the thirteenth century. Two of the Scotch poets of that period, Barbour and King James I., wrote in English, and, therefore, in a language far in advance of Gawin Douglas, Dunbar, and Sir David Lyndsay in the sixteenth century. One great reason of this probably was the constant strife and enmity betwixt the nations, which made the Scotch cling in confirmed nationality to their own language and customs, for the works and merits of the English poets were known and acknowledged. James I. called Chaucer and Gower "his maisters dear." Henryson, a succeeding poet, even wrote a continuation of Chaucer's "Troilus and Cresseide," under the names of the "Testament," and the "Complaint of Cresseide;" and Gawin, or Gavin, Douglas, the famous Bishop of Dunkeld, of whom we have to speak, pronouncing his vernacular tongue barbarous, declared that rather than remain silent through the scarcity of Scottish terms, he would use bastard Latin, French, or English. A still greater and later poet, Dunbar, expresses repeatedly his admiration of "Chawcer of Makars flowir," of "the Monck of Berry," "Lydgate," and "Gowyr." Yet if we use the very language which he did to utter his admiration in, we find no advance towards the polish of these poets:
"O reverend Chawcer, rose of rethouris all,
As in our toung the flowir imperiall,
That ever raise in Brittane, quhn reids richt,
Those biers of makars the triumphs ryall,
The fresche enainallit termes celestiall;
This matter thou couth haif iliumint bricht,
Was thou not of our Inglis all the licht;
Surmounting every tonng terrestiall,
As far as May is fair morning does midnight.
"O morale Gower and Lidgate laureat,
Zour suggurat toungs and lipps aureate
Bene till our eirs cause of grit delyte."
It is curious that Dunbar calls this English and not Scotch. Ho also enumerates a. long list of Scottish poets who were deceased, as Sir Hew of Eglintoun, Etrick, Heriot, Wintoun, Maister John Clerk, James Afflek, Holland, Barbour, Sir Mungo Dockhart of the Lie, Clerk of Tranent, who wrote the adventures of Sir Gawayn, Sir Gilbert Gray, Blind Harry, and Sandy Traill, Patrick Johnstone, Mersar, Rowll of Aberdeen, and Rowll of Corstophine, Brown of Dunfermline, Robert Henryson, Sir John the Ross, Stobo, Quinten Schaw, and Walter Kennedy. Of these little is now known, except of Henryson, and that chiefly for his ballad of "Robert and Makyn," given by Bishop Percy in his "Reliques of English Poetry."
Gawin Douglas was the third son of the celebrated fifth Earl of Angus, called Bell-the-Cat; he lived a troubled life in those stormy times, and died a refugee in London, of the plague, in 1522. He was warmly patronised by Queen Margaret, sister of Henry VIII., and richly deserved it, for his learning, his genuine virtues, and his genius. He was most celebrated in his own time for his translation of Virgil's "Æneid," the first metrical version of any ancient classic in either English or Scotch. He also translated Ovid's "De Remedio Amoris." But his original poems, "The Palace of Honour," "King Hart," and his "Comœdiæ Sacræ," or dramatic poems from the Scriptures, are now justly esteemed the real trophies of his genius. "The Palace of Honour" and "King Hart" are allegoric poems, abounding with beautiful descriptions and noble sentiments.
The principal poems of William Dunbar are "The Golden Terge," or target; "The Thistle and the Rose," a poem in honour of the marriage of Margaret of England with James IV. of Scotland; "The Fained Friar;" the "Lament of the Death of the Makars," that is, poets, and a number of other poems, chiefly lyrical, which display a most versatile genius, comic, satirical, grave, descriptive, and religious, and place him in the very first rank of Scotland's poets, notwithstanding the obsolete character of his language; and not the least of his distinctions is the absence of that grossness which disfigured the writings of the poets of those times. A few lines may denote the music of his versification:
"Be merry, man, and tak nocht far in mynd
The waivering of this wrechit world of sorrow,
To God be humill, and to thy freynd be kind,
And with thy nychtbouris glaidly len and borrow;
His chance to-nycht, it may be thyne to-morrow."
The last poet of this period that we must notice is Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, Lyon King-at-Arms, whom Sir Walter Scott, in "Marmion," has made so familiar to modern readers, predating, however, Sir David's office of Lyon King seventeen years. Sir David was born about 1490, and is supposed to have died about 1567; so that he lived in the reigns of Henry VII. of England and of Elizabeth, through the whole period of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Mary. His life was cast in times most eventful, and Sir David, as Lyon-Herald of Scotland, occupied a prominent position in the shaping of those events. At the time of the battle of Flodden, 1513, both Pitscottie and Buchanan assure us that he was with James IV. when the ghost appeared to him in the church at Linlithgow, warning him against the battle. Lyndsay was then only three-and-twenty. He was appointed page to the young king, and continued about him and in his service during the king's life. In his "Complaynt," addressing the king, he says:—
"How as ane chapman beres his pack,
I bore thy grace upon my back,
And sometymes stridlingis on my neck,
Dansand with mony bend and beck;
The first syllabis that thou did mute,
Pa-da-lyn upon the lute;
For play, thou leit me never rest,
But gyngertoun, thou luffit ay best.
And ay quhen thou come from the scule,
Then I luffit to play the fule."
Lyndsay went to France on embassages of royal marriage; and after the king's early death, under the regency, he was again sent to the Low Countries on a mission, to the Emperor Charles V. In 1518 he went as Lion-King to Denmark, to King Christian, to seek aid against the English, and afterwards lived to see the great struggle betwixt the old Church and the Reformation, the murder of Cardinal Beaton, the return of Knox, and must have died about the time of the murder of Darnley.
Sir David, though bred a courtier, was a thorough Reformer; and his poems abound with the most unrestrained exposures of the corruptions of Courts and of the Church. On the flagitious lives of monks, nuns, and clergy, he pours forth the most trenchant satire and denunciation; and in this respect he may be styled the ​Chaucer of Scotland. His poems are "The Dreme," "The Complaynt," "The Complaynt of Papingo," "The Complaynt of Bagscho," "Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Three Estatis;" "The Answer to the King's Flyting," "Kittie's Confession," "The Tragedie of the Cardinal," "The Historie and Testament of Squire Meldrum," "Monarchie," and "The Epistill Nuncupatorie."
"The Dreme" reminds one of the dreams of former poems, of Chaucer, Dante, Langland, called "the Visions of Pierce Plowman," and those of Douglas and Dunbar. Probably "The Golden Terge" of Dunbar was the immediate suggestor; for as Dunbar goes out, as "the stern of day began to schyne," and lying under a roseir, or arbour of roses, lulled by the songs of birds and the sound of a river, dreams, so does Lyndsay, passing, with Dame Remembrance as his guide, through earth, hell, purgatory, heaven, paradise, and "the planets seven," hearing and seeing all the works of God, and the rewards and punishments of the good and the evil. It has great poetic merit. "The Complaynt" describes the degenerate manners of the Court whilst Lyndsay was banished from it, and the grapes were sour. "The Complaynt of the Papingo," or the king's parrot, deals out the same measure to the hierarchy as Lyndsay had given to the State, in which Cardinal Beaton, and the Pope and clergy in general, are soundly rated. Next comes "The Three Estatis," an actual Morality Play, in which all kinds of emblematicial personages. Rex Humanitas, Sensualitie, Chastitie, &c., act their parts. Its scope may be inferred from its being declared to be "in commendation of vertew and vituperation of vyce." This is the great work of Lyndsay, and was acted before the king and queen, who sat out nine mortal hours in its performance, in which they successively heard every order in the State—Court, nobility, Church, and people—severely criticised. Lyndsay's play has the merit of preceding both "Gorboduc" and "Gammer Gurton's Needle;" and it certainly possesses the moral of the former and the wit of the latter. "The Answer to the King's Flyting" is a very curious example of what the indulgence of a professional fool at Court led to: it produced not only the jester but the poet laureate. The king condescended to flyte, or jibe, with his jester; the jester in return became the satirist, and the poet laureate healed all wounds by his eulogies. James V. flyted with Lyndsay, and Lyndsay answered with interest. In "Kittie's Confession" Lyndsay ridicules auricular confession. In "The Cardinal" he sings a song of triumph over the fall of Beaton. In the "Legend of Squire Meldrum" the poet dresses up the adventures of a domestic of Lord Lyndsay's of that name in the manner of an ancient romance, and it was extremely popular. It has been declared by critics of note to be the best of Lyndsay's poems, and equal to the most polished pieces of Drayton, who lived a century after him.
We have given thus much notice of the Lyon King-at-Arms, because nowadays he does not enjoy, perhaps, his due fame in comparison with that of our Chaucer and our early dramatists; yet a perusal of his works is necessary to a real knowledge of the times in which he lived. The leader, however, must be warned that in the search after this knowledge he will have to wade through much filth, and language now astonishing for its naked coarseness. On the other hand, he will occasionally find scientific theories of modern pretension quite familiar to our Lyon-King. For instance, Kirwan has claimed the geologic discovery that the currents which broke up the hills in Europe came from the south-west, leaving the diluvial slopes declining to the north-east. But hear Lynsday three hundred years ago:—
"I reid how clerkis dois conclude, Induryng that maist furious flude With quhilk the erth was sa opprest, The wynd blew feorth of the south-west, As may be sene be experience. How, throw the watter's violence, The heich montanis, in every art, Ar bain fornenst the south-west part; As the montanis of Pyreneis,
The Alpis, and rochis in the seis; Richt sa the rochis gret and gray Quhilk standis into Norroway. The heichest hillis, in every art, And in Scotland, for the maist part, Throuch weltryng of that furious flude, The craigis of erth war maist denude. Travelling men may considder best The montanis bair nixt the south-west."
MUSIC.
The present century was nearly as distinguished for its music as its poetry. The censure which has been cast on England in our own time for not being a musical or music-producing nation did not exist then. On the contrary, we stood at the head of Europe in original musical composition. The monarchs of that age, like their most illustrious predecessors from Alfred downwards, were highly educated in music. Henry VIII. was himself a composer of Church music. It must be recollected that Henry, being but the second son of Henry VII., was originally educated for the Church, whose dignities were then princely; and, as a matter of course, he was made familiar with its music, which occupied so prominent a part in its worship. Erasmus bears testimony to the fact of Henry having composed offices for the Church—a fact confirmed by Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Bishop Burnet; and Sir John Hawkins in his history of music, and Boyce, in his "Cathedral Music of English Masters," have preserved specimens of the Royal composition. Boyce gives a fine anthem of Henry's, "Lord, the Maker of all things." The king's musical establishment for his chapel cost annually upwards of £2,000, consisting of 114 persons, and was continued by Edward. Mary and Elizabeth were equally learned in music, though they do not appear to have patronised it as royally.
Under these circumstances great composers, both of sacred and social music, flourished in the sixteenth century. The names of Tye, Marbeck, Tallis, Bird, Farrant, Dowland, Bennet, Wilbye, Ford, &c., stand in superb array as composers of some of our finest Church music, or of madrigal and part singing.
Tye was so much esteemed by Henry VIII., that he was made music preceptor to Edward VI., and was afterward organist to Elizabeth. He composed both anthems and madrigals; and his motett, "Laudate nomen Domini," is still famous. Marbeck composed the notes to the Preces and Responses, which, with some alterations, are still in use in all our cathedrals. He was organist at Windsor, and was very nearly losing his life under the ferocious Henry, being found to be the member of a society for religious reformation. He and his three accomplices ​were condemned to the stake; but Marbeck was saved by his musical genius, Henry observing, on Marbeck's Latin Concordance, on which he had been employed, being shown to him, "Poor Marbeck! it would be well for thine accusers if they employed their time no worse." His fellows were burnt without mercy, though no more guilty than himself.
Tallis was indebted to Marbeck for the notes just mentioned in his compositions for the Church. His entire service, including prayers, responses, Litany, and nearly all of a musical kind, are preserved in Boyce's collections. They became the most celebrated of any of that remarkable age. In conjunction, also, with his pupil, William Bird, he published, in 1575, "Cantiones Sacræ"—perfect chefs-d'œuvre of their kind; one of them, "O sacrum convivium," since adapted by Dean Aldrich to the words "I call and cry," still continues to be frequently performed in our cathedrals. The "Cantiones" are remarkable from having been the first things of the kind protected by a patent for twenty-one years, granted by Elizabeth.
Bird was the author of the splendid canon, "Non nobis, Domine," which has been claimed by composers of Italy, France, and the Netherlands, but, as sufficiently proved, without any ground. The names of Tallis and Bird are of themselves an ample guarantee to the claim of musical genius by this country. Richard Farrant and Dr. Bull—the first a chorister in Edward VI.'s chapel, and the latter organist to Queen Elizabeth—added greatly to the sacred music of the period. Farrant's compositions especially are remarkable for their deep pathos and devotion. His anthem, still preserved by Boyce, "Lord, for thy tender mercy's sake," is unrivalled. Dr. Bull is now said to have been the original composer of our national air, "God save the Queen," which has long been claimed as foreign.
In social music the poetical Surrey stands conspicuous, having set his own sonnets to music. Madrigals and other part singing—since better known as glee singing—were carried to a brilliant height in this country. The madrigal was originally invented by the Flemings, but glee singing seems to be English, though no doubt derived from the madrigal. Morley's first book of madrigals was published in 1594, Weelkes's in 1597, Wilbye's in 1598, Bennet's in 1599, and soon after Ward's and Orlando Gibbons'. Dowland's and Ford's are more properly glees than madrigals; the former appeared in 1597, and the latter in 1607. Morley, one of the gentlemen of Queen Elizabeth's chapel, would seem, like Dowland, to have studied the works of the great composers abroad; and the harmony and science which he evinces are eminent. His canzonets for two voices are especially lively and pleasing. Dowland not only travelled in France, Italy, and Germany, but, at the request of King Christian IV., who saw him in England, he went to reside in Denmark. Fuller declares that he was the rarest musician of the age. In 1598 Wilbye published thirty madrigals, and a second book, applicable to instrumental as well as vocal music, in 1609, amongst which are, "Lady, when I behold the roses sprouting," "As fair as morn," "Down in a valley," &c.; and in 1599 John Bennet published a set of madrigals, including the admirable ones of "O sleep, fond Fancy!" "Flow, O my tears!" and lastly, John Milton, the father of the poet, who also composed several psalm tunes, was a contributor to "The Triumphs of Oriana," a set of madrigals in praise of Queen Elizabeth. Altogether this century was brilliant in both Church and convivial music; and if we are to judge from some specimens to be found in "The Dancing Master," and "Queen Elizabeth's Virginal Book," the popular airs were in many instances of a superior character, amongst which we may mention Bird's "Carman's Whistle," and the "Newe Northern Ditty of Ladye Green Sleeves."
ARCHITECTURE.
The change which marked religion and literature in this country extended itself as strikingly into architecture. We have no longer to record the rise of new orders of ecclesiastical building, nor to direct the attention of the reader to splendid churches as examples of them. The unity of the Church, which had enabled it to erect such a host of admirable cathedrals and abbeys, was broken up; the wealth which had supplied the material and engaged the skill was dispersed into other hands, and destined not only to produce now orders of society, but new forms of architecture. Churches must give way to palaces and country halls, as full of innovations as the very faith of the country. From this period to our own time the last for ecclesiastical architecture continued to decline, till the very principles of what are called Gothic were forgotten.
Our architects, as Wren and Jones, went back to classic models, so little adapted to the spirit of Christian worship that, spite of the genius expended upon them, they have remained few in number, and from the revival of the knowledge of Anglo-Gothic amongst us, are not likely to increase.
But it is even a question whether the Gothic style had not reached its full development at the period of the Reformation; for we find in most European countries that the noblest buildings of this kind are for the most part anterior to this period. It is at the same time true that the same causes which brought our ecclesiastical architecture to a sudden stand in the sixteenth century strongly affected all Europe, even where Roman Catholicism managed to maintain its ground. Everywhere the conflict was raging—everywhere the rending influence was felt; and the ancient power and wealth of the Church were broken and diminished. In England a few churches might be pointed to of this period, but they exhibit the influence of the age in marks of decline, and to none can we turn as examples to be named with our Westminsters, Yorks, and Winchesters. Bath Abbey was in progress of erection when the Reformation burst forth and arrested its progress. It was not completed till 1616—more than ten years after the death of Elizabeth—and cannot be named as one of our finest erections.
The wealth which was diverted from the Church into the hands of the Crown and the aristocracy, reappeared in palaces and country halls; and a totally new genius displayed itself in these. The old Tudor, so called, which marked the baronial residences oven before the Tudors reached the throne, the mixture of castle and manorhouse, with its small windows, battlemented roofs, and flanking turrets, began to enlarge and exaggerate most of these features, and to mix with them new elements ​clearly brought into the country by foreign architects, and in a great measure from Italy. The windows rapidly augmented themselves, till they soon occupied a predominant portion of the towers and fronts; the turrets became surmounted by domes, and by those bulbous domes which were often piled one above another. There were soon seen one tier of pillared or pilastered storey above another, in the Palladian or Paduan fashion. Turrets often gave way to scroll-work parapets; and instead of the house standing as heretofore on a level plain, it was elevated on a terrace, with broad and balustraded flights of steps, and all the adjuncts of fountains, statues, and balustraded esplanades, essential to the Italian garden.
The houses were still built round a court or quadrangle, and adorned with outer and inner gateways, while groined roofs and rich oriels still demonstrated the connecting link of descent from the Gothic. In fact, the architecture of the Tudor period is a singular yet often superb mixture of the Gothic and the Italian, with profusion of ornaments and ingraftment of parts which tell strongly of a more eastern origin. Nor does it appear that these foreign elements were introduced at the latter portion of this period only—they stand forth conspicuously in the very commencement of it. In the later years of the reign of Elizabeth we can point to noble houses which are more allied to the ancient Tudor, with its small windows and simple towers and roofs, than those of the Henrys VII. and VIII., who in their earlier days had a gorgeous and even fantastic taste for palatial architecture. For example, Hampton Court is far more simple and chaste than Richmond Palace, built by Henry VII., or Nonsuch, built by Henry VIII. Again, in family mansions, Wimbledon House, built in 1588, with its open court, its two descents of terraces, clearly Italian in character, is yet so chaste and simple, with its flat roof, its square slated towers, and mixture of small and large windows, that, compared to Nonsuch, as it has been, you at once see the violent contrast of the fanciful and the grave. Again, in Charlton House, in Kent, with its central entrance of Italian character, with two tiers of engaged columns, its ornamented parapets just verging into scroll-work, its turret windows of medium size, and its turret domes simple, and still plainer chimneys; or Holland House, built in 1607, without domes, but with ogee-gables; or Campden House, as it was built in 1612, with roof of plainest character, and pilastered entrance, we mark a far less ornate style than in the days of the Henrys. The whole of this period was one of a mixed style, in which different architects indulged themselves in employing more or less of one or other of the prevailing elements, according to their tastes; what is more strictly called Elizabethan being such houses as Wollaton or Hardwicke, in which the ample square windows, the square towers superseding the octagon ones of Nonsuch, the absence of the eastern-looking domes, and the presence of superb scroll-work give a fine and distinctive style.
Globe Theatre, Bankside.
The Palace of Richmond, as built by Henry VII., with its projecting towers occupied almost entirely with windows, and its roof presenting an immense number of double domes, a smaller one surmounting a lantern placed on the larger domes, had an air more Saracenic than English; but the Palace of Nonsuch, built by Henry VIII., outdid that in the singularity of its style, and was the wonder of its age. It was built round a quadrangle, and the front flanked by octagonal towers, which, at the height of the ordinary roof, rose, by a demi-arch expanding over the lower one, into three more storeys, and upon these, lesser towers of two storeys, surmounted by domes and fanes. All the lower storeys were divided into compartments by pilasters and bands, these compartments embellished by figures and groups in bas-relief. The lower part of this palace was of stone, the upper of wood. Hentzner, the German traveller, became quite enthusiastic in describing it as a palace in which everything that architecture could perform seemed to have been accomplished; and says that it was "so encompassed with parks full of deer, delicious gardens, groves ornamented with trellis-work, cabinets of verdure, ​and walks so embowered by trees, that it seemed to be a place pitched upon by Pleasure herself to dwell in along with Health."
But there were two men in the reign of Henry VII. who drew him off from this more florid and fanciful style to others of a very different, but equally imposing character, and full of rich detail. These were Wolsey and John of Padua. Wolsey appeared to have an especial penchant for brick-work, and Hampton and the gate-house of his mansion at Esher remain as proofs of the admirable masonry which he used. In Hampton Court we actually go back from the barbaric pomp of Nonsuch to the castellated style; to small windows, pointed archways, castellated turrets and battlements, mingled with rich oriel windows over the entrances, rich groined roofs in the archways, but a very sparing use of the ordinary aid of the bulbous dome. In this and the other buildings of this class, as Hengrave in Suffolk, the richly cross-banded chimneys are a conspicuous ornament.
Music Book and Musical Instrument belonging to Queen Elizabeth
Audley Gate. Tudor Period.
Gateway of Speke Hall. Tudor Period.
John of Padua, who became chief architect to Henry VIII., and afterwards built Somerset House for the Protector, seems to have been unknown in his own country, but originated a modified Italian style here which bears his name, possessing great grace and dignity, and of which Stoneyhurst College, Lancashire, and Longleat, in Wiltshire, are fine examples. To the many mansions of this style, as well as those of the more purely Elizabethan, and drawings of them, as Wollaton, Hardwicke, and the Duke's House, Bradford, we would recommend the architects of our own day to turn their attention, instead of burdening the finest parks and scenes of England with the square, unmeaning masses of brick and stone, which offend our eyes in so many directions, and cause foreigners to ridicule the want of architectural genius in England. In the smaller houses of town and country there continued to be little change. They were chiefly of timber, and displayed much more picturesqueness than they afforded comfort. In towns the different storeys, one overhanging another till the inhabitants could almost shake hands out of the attic windows across the narrow streets, and their want of internal cleanliness and ventilation, occasioned the plague periodically to visit them. The Spaniards who accompanied Philip, in Mary's reign, were equally amazed at the good living of the English people and the dirt about their houses. One great improvement about this time was the introduction of chimneys; and in good country-houses the ample space of their staircases, which were often finely ornamented with balustrade work, diffused a pure atmosphere through them. Specimens of architecture of this period are given above, and on page 603.
PAINTING AND SCULPTURE.
In these arts the sixteenth century in England was almost totally destitute of native talent. In statuary and carving the former age had made great progress, but the destruction of the churches, and the outcry raised against images, and even carving on tombs, as idolatry and vain-glory, gave a decided check to their development. As for painting, for some cause or other, it had never, except in illumination, flourished much amongst the English, and now that the Italian and Flemish schools had taken so high a position, it became the fashion in the princes and nobility, not to call forth the skill of natives, but to import foreign art and artists. In the reign of Henry VII. a Holbein, supposed to be the uncle of the great Hans Holbein, visited England, but we know little of his performance here. There is a picture at Hampton Court, called a Mabuse, of the Children of Henry VII.—Prince Arthur, Prince Henry, and the Princess Margaret. As Prince Henry appears to be about seven years old, that would fix the painting of the picture about 1499, and as this is the very year of Mabuse's birth, the picture is clearly not his. In Castle Howard there is a painting by him of undoubted authority, "The Offering of the Magi," containing thirty principal figures. It is in the highest state of preservation, and Dr. Waagen, who is well acquainted with the productions of this artist in the great galleries of the Continent, pronounced it of the highest excellence. He is said to have painted the children of Henry VIII., which is another proof that he did not paint those of his father. Probably, most that he painted for Henry perished in the fire at Whitehall. Mabuse was a very dissipated man, and had fled from Flanders on account of his debts or delinquencies, yet the character of his performances is that of the most patient industry and pains-taking. His works done in England could not have been many, as his abode here is supposed to have been only a year.
Besides Mabuse, the names of several other foreign artists are known as having visited England; but little or nothing is known of the works of Toto del Nunziata, an Italian, or of Corvus, Fleccius, Horrebout or Horneband, or of Cornelii, Flemish artists; but another Fleming was employed, in the early part of the reign of Henry VIII., by Bishop Sherbourne, in painting a series of English kings and bishops in Chichester Cathedral.
Of the celebrated Hans Holbein, the case is clear and determinate. He resided in this country nearly thirty years, and died in London of the plague. There is an obscurity about both the time and place of his birth, but the latter appears now to be settled to be Grünstadt, formerly the residence of the Counts of Leiningen-Westerburg. He accompanied his father to Basle, receiving from him his instructions in his art; and becoming acquainted with Erasmus, he received from him letters to Sir Thomas More. He arrived in England in 1526, and lived and worked in the house of his noble patron, Sir Thomas, for three years. The learned chancellor invited Henry VIII. to see his pictures, who was so much delighted with them, as to take him instantly into his service. It is related of him that whilst busily engaged with his works for the king, he was so much annoyed and interrupted by a nobleman of the court, that he ordered him to quit his atelier, and on his refusing, pushed him down-stairs. When the nobleman complained to Henry of this rudeness, Henry bluntly told him that the painter had served him right, and warned him to beware of seeking any revenge. "For," added he, "remember you now have not Holbein to deal with, but me: and I tell you, that of seven peasants I can make as many lords, but I cannot make one Holbein."
The demand of portraits from Holbein by the Court and nobility was so constant and extensive, that he completed comparatively few historical compositions. He has left us various portraits of Henry, and adorned the walls of a saloon at Whitehall with two large paintings representing the triumphs of riches and poverty. He also painted Henry as delivering the charter of the barber-surgeons, and Edward VI. delivering that for the foundation of Bridewell Hospital. The former piece is still at the hall of that guild. Amongst the finest of Holbein's paintings on the Continent is that of "The Burgomaster and his Family" in the gallery at Dresden. There is less of the stiffness of his manner in that than in most of his pieces; but in spirited design, clearness and brilliance of tone, and perfection of finish, few painters except Holbein; he wanted only a course of study in the Italian school to have placed him amongst the greatest masters of any age. His defect is a want of full attainment of "chiar'oscuro," which Italy could give given him; at the same time we are not to form our idea of him by the host of indifferent copies of his portraits which have been made, and puffed by interested dealers as originals.
Henry VIII. not only employed artists at home, but he gave orders to artists abroad, and Raffael painted for him a St. George. His collection furnished some of the earliest specimens to the gallery of Charles I.; but if what Walpole says of his collection be true, it is probable that Hampton Court has preserved a number of the worthless subjects which he got together. "If," says Walpole, "it be allowed that the mind and taste of Henry VIII. were demonstrated by the subjects upon which he employed the painters whom he patronised, and to whom he dictated them, an opinion exactly corresponding with his character will be the result. We find in his collections numerous portraits of himself; repetitions of those of contemporary princes, particularly those of the emperor and Francis I.; of his predecessors; two of the Duchess of Milan, who refused to marry him, but not one of his six wives! The historical and Scriptural subjects were the violation and death of Lucrece; the decollation of John the Baptist, with his head in a charger; a similar exhibition of Judith and Holofernes; St. George, his patron saint; the Virgin and Child, with the Dead Christ; sundry Flemish moralities in which death is personified; and drolls of the imbecility of old men, with caricatures of the Pope."
In the reign of Mary, Sir Antonio More, a Flemish artist, was the great portrait-painter. In that of Elizabeth, though she was not more liberal to the arts than to literature, yet her personal vanity led her to have her own portrait repeatedly painted, and the artists, chiefly Flemings, were much employed by the nobility in the same department. Some of the foreign artists also executed historical and other pieces. Amongst these artists may be named Frederic Zuccaro, an Italian portrait-painter; Lucas de Heere, who executed a ​considerable number of orders here, amongst them a series of representations of national costume for the Earl of Lincoln; and Cornelius Vroom, who designed the defeat of the Spanish Armada, for the tapestry which adorned the walls of the House of Lords, and which was destroyed by the fire in 1831. In this reign also, two native artists distinguished themselves: Nicolas Hilliard, a miniature-painter; and Isaac Oliver, his pupil, who surpassed his master in portraits, and also produced historical works of merit.
Helmingham Hall, Suffolk. Tudor period.
Amongst the sculptors were Pietro Torregiano, from Florence, who, assisted by a number of Englishmen, executed the bronze monument of Henry VII., and is supposed also to be the author of the tomb of Henry's mother in his chapel. John Hales, who executed the tomb of the Earl of Derby at Ormskirk, was one of Torregiano's English assistants. Benedetto Rovezzano designed the splendid bronze tomb of Henry VIII., which was to have exhibited himself and Jane Seymour, as large as life, in effigy, an equestrian statue, figures of the saints and prophets, the history of St. George, amounting to 133 statues and forty bas-reliefs. This monument of Henry's egotism none of his children or successors respected him enough to complete; and the Parliament, in 1646, ordered the portion already completed to be melted down.
In Scotland during this period the arts were still less cultivated. The only monarch who had evinced a taste for their patronage was James V., who improved and adorned the royal palaces, by the aid of French architects, painters, and sculptors whom he procured from France, with which he was connected by marriage and alliance. His chief interest and expenditure were, however, devoted to the palace at Linlithgow, which he left by far the noblest palace of Scotland, and worthy of any country in Europe.
Gate House, Westwood House. Tudor Period.
FURNITURE AND DECORATIONS.
The furniture of noble houses in the sixteenth century was still quaint; but in many instances rich and picturesque. The walls retained their hangings of tapestry, on which glowed hunting-scenes, with their woodlands, dogs, horsemen, and tlying stags, or resisting boars or lions; scenes mythological or historical. In one of the finest preserved houses of that age, Hardwick, in Derbyshire, the state-room is hung with tapestry representing the story of Ulysses; and above this are figures, rudely executed in plaster, of Diana and her nymphs. The hall is hung with very curious tapestry, of the fifteenth century, representing a boar-hunt and an otter-hunt. The chapel in this house gives a very vivid idea of the furniture of domestic chapels of that age; with its brocaded seats and cushions, and its very curious altar-cloth, thirty feet long, hung round the rails of the altar, with figures of saints, under canopies, wrought in needle-work. You are greatly struck as you pass along this noble old hall, which has had its internal decorations and furniture carefully retained as they were, with the air of rude abundance, and what looks now to us nakedness and incompleteness, mingled with old baronial state, and ​rich and precious articles of use and show. There are vast and long passages, simply matted; with huge chests filled with coals, which formerly were filled with wood, and having ample crypts in the walls for chips and fire-wood. There are none of the modern contrivances to conceal these things; yet the rooms, which were then probably uncarpeted, or only embellished in the centre with a small Turkey carpet bearing the family arms, or perhaps merely with rushes, are still abounding with antique cabinets, massy tables, and high chairs covered with crimson velvet, or ornamental satin. You behold the very furniture used by the Queen of Scots; the very bed, the brocade of which she and her maidens worked with their own fingers. In the entrance hall the old feudal mansion still seems to survive with its huge antlers, its huge escutcheons, and carved arms thrust out of the wall, intended to hold lights. But still more does its picture gallery, extending along the whole front of the house, give you a feeling of the rude and stately grandeur of those times. This gallery is nearly 200 feet long, of remarkable loftiness, and its windows are stupendous, comprising nearly the whole front, rattling and wailing as the wind sweeps along them, whilst the walls are covered with the portraits of the most remarkable personages of that and prior times. You have Henry VIII., Elizabeth, the Queen of Scots, with many of the statesmen and ladies of the age.
In such old houses we find abundance of furniture of the period. The chairs are generally high-backed, richly carved, and stuffed and covered with superb velvet or satin. At Charlcote House, near Stratford-on-Avon, the seat of the Lycys, there are eight fine ebony chairs, inlaid with ivory, two cabinets, and a couch of the same, which were given by Queen Elizabeth to Leicester, and made part of the furniture of Kenilworth. At Penshurst, Kent, the seat of the Sidneys, in the room called Elizabeth's room, remain the chairs which it is said she herself presented, with the rest of the furniture. They are fine, tall, and capacious ones, the frames gilt, and the drapery yellow and crimson satin, richly embroidered; the walls of each end of the room being covered with the same embroidered satin. In the Elizabethan room at Greenwich Court are chairs as well as other articles of that age. In Winchester Cathedral is yet preserved the chair, a present from the Pope, in which Queen Mary was crowned and married.
At Penshurst we have, in the old banqueting hall, the furniture and style which still prevailed in many old houses in Sir Philip Sidney's time: the dogs for the fire in the centre of the room, from which the smoke ascended through a hole in the roof, the rude tables, the raised dais, and the music gallery, such as Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon, as well as the Royal Elizabeth, witnessed them. In this house is also preserved a manuscript catalogue of all the furniture of Kenilworth in Leicester's time, a document which would enlighten us on the whole paraphernalia of a great house and household of that day.
Looking-glasses were now superseding mirrors of polished steel. My late friend, Sir Samuel Meyrick, had a fine specimen of the looking-glass of this age at Goodrich, as well as a German clock, tire-dogs, a napkin-press, and an "arriere-dos" or "rere-dosse," and a small brass fender of that age. I have already mentioned that he possessed the box containing the original portraits of Henry VIII. and Anne of Cleves. The clock, like the large one over the entrance at Hampton Court, has the Italian face, with two sets of figures, twelve each, thus running the round of the twenty-four hours, such as Shakespeare alludes to in Othello:—
"He'll watch the horologe a double set," If drink rock not his cradle."
Richly carved wardrobes and buffets adorned the rooms of this age: some of these buffets were of silver and of silver gilt. Engravings of these, as well as of tables with folding tops, round tables with pillar and claw, and many beds of this age may still be seen in old houses, and are represented in engravings in Montfaucon, Shaw, and Willemin. The beds we have alluded to at Hardwicke, the great bed at Ware, a bedstead of the time of Henry VIII. at Lovely Hall, near Blackburn, are specimens. Forks, though known, were not generally used yet at table, and spoons of silver and gold were made to fold up, and were carried by great people in their pockets for their own use. Spoons of silver—apostle-spoons, having the heads of the twelve apostles on the handles—were not unfrequent, but spoons of horn or wood were more common.
ARMS AND ARMOUR.
The armour of every period bears a coincident resemblance to the civil costume of the time, and is in this period rather noticeable by its fashion than by a material change of another kind. The breastplate was still globose, as in the reign of Edward IV., but was beautifully fluted in that of Henry VII. In the reign of Henry VIII., the breastplate being still globose, the old fashion revived of an edge down the centre, called a tapul; and in this reign puffed and ribbed armour, in imitation of the slashed dresses of the day, was introduced, as may be seen in the Meyrick collection. In the reign of Elizabeth the breastplate was thickened to resist musket-balls. The helmet in all these reigns assumed the form of the head, having movable plates at the back to guard the neck, and yet allow free motion to the head. In the reign of Elizabeth the motions were much ornamented by engraving. In the time of Henry VII. the panache which had appeared on the apex of the bassinets of Henry V. was changed for plumes, descending from the back of the helmet almost to the rider's saddle. A new feature in armour also came in with Henry VII., called "lamboys," from the French "lambeaux," being a sort of skirt or petticoat of steel, in imitation of the puckered skirts of cloth or velvet worn at this time, and this fashion, with variations in form, continued through the whole period. In the reign of Henry VIII. the armour altogether became very showy and rich, in character with the ostentation of that monarch. A magnificent suit of the armour of Henry is preserved in the Tower, which was presented to him by the Emperor Maximilian, on his marriage with Catherine of Arragon, and is the fellow to a suit of Maximilian's preserved in the Little Belvidere Palace in Vienna, in the collection of armour and arms formed on the model of Sir Samuel Meyrick's. It covers both horse and man, and is richly engraved with legendary subjects, badges, mottoes, &c. The seal of Henry presents a fine ​figure of him on horseback, in armour, with his tabard and crowned helmet, and its depending plumes.
The tilting helmet disappeared altogether in the time of Henry VIII., and a coursing-hat was worn instead, with a "mentonnière," or defence for the lower part of the face. In the reign of Mary we learn that the military force of the kingdom consisted of demi-lancers, who supplied the place of the men-at-arms; pikemen, who wore back and breast plates, with tassets, gauntlets, and steel hats; archers, with steel scull-caps and brigandines; black-billmen or halberdiers, who wore armour called almain rivet and morions; and harquebussiers, similarly appointed. In Elizabeth's reign the armour was seldom worn on the legs and thighs, except in jousting, and not always then.
There were various changes in the shapes of swords and glaives; the battleaxe changed into the halberd in the time of Edward IV., and it became general in that of Henry VII. In the reign of Henry VIII. was added the partisan, a kind of pike or spontoon; but the great change was in firearms, the hand-gun making several steps towards its modern termination in the musket and rifle, with detonating caps. The first improvement was to place a cock to the gun-barrel, to hold and apply the match instead of the soldier holding it in his hand. This was called an arc-a-bousa, thence corrupted into the arquebuse, much used by Henry VII. In his son's reign the wheel-lock was invented by the Italians, in which a wheel revolving against a piece of sulphuret of iron, ignited the powder in the pan by its sparks. Pistols were also introduced now, and called pistols or dags, according to the shape of the butt-ends; the pistol finishing with a knob, the dag, or tacke, having its butt-end slanting. Pistols at first more resembled carabines in length, and the pocket pistol was of a considerable bulk. Cartridges were first used in pistols, and were carried in a steel case called a patron. In the reign of Elizabeth we hear of carabines, petronels, and dragons. Carabines were a sort of light, Spanish troops, who, probably, used this kind of arm; petronels were so called because their square butt-end was placed against the chest, or "peitrine;" and the dragon received its name from its muzzle being terminated with the head of that fabulous monster, and gave the name of "dragoon" to the soldiers who fought with them. Bandoliers, or leathern cases, each containing a complete charge of powder for a musket, were used till the end of the seventeenth century, when they gave way to the cartridge-box.
With the progress of fire-arms, it is almost needless to say, that the famous art of archery, by which the English had won such fame in the world, was gradually superseded. During the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., bows were much used in their armies as well as fire-arms, but it was impossible long to maintain the bow and arrow in the presence of the hand-gun and powder. In vain did Henry VIII. pass severe laws against the disuse of the bow; by the end of his reign it had fallen, for the most part, from the hands of the warrior into that of the sportsman. In vain did Henry forbid the use even of the cross-bow to encourage the practice of archery, and Roger Ascham in his "Toxophilus" endeavour to prolong the date of the bow. By the end of the reign of Elizabeth, the endeavour to protract the existence of archery by statute was abandoned, and its long reign, except as a graceful amusement, was over.
COSTUME.
The costumes of this age come down to us depicted by great masters, Holbein, Rubens, and Vandyke, and are displayed to us in their full effect, at least those of the aristocracy. Looking at these ladies and gentlemen, they appear as little like plain, matter-of-fact, English people, as possible. There is a length and looseness of robes about the men which has more the air of a holiday, gala garb, than that of people who had very serious affairs to carry through, and you would scarcely credit them to be the ancestors of the present plain, buttoned up, and busy generation. In a MS. of this date, called the Boke of Custome, the chamberlain is commanded to provide against his master's uprising, "a clene sherte and breche, a pettycotte, a doublette, a long cotte, a stomacher, hys hosen, hys socks, and his shoen." And the Boke of Kervynge, quoted by Strutt, says to the chamberlain, "Warme your soverayne his pettycotte, his doublette, and his stomacher, and then put on his hosen, and then his schone or slyppers, then stryten up his hosen mannerly, and tye them up, then lace his doublette hole by hole." Barclay in the "Ship of Fools," printed by Pynson in 1508, mentions some who had their necks
   "Charged with collars and chaines,
   In golden withs, their fingers fall of rings, Their necks naked almost to the raines.
   Their sleeves blazing like unto a crane's winges."
Their coats were generally loose and with broad collars, and turned back fronts, with loose hanging sleeves, often slashed, and sometimes without sleeves at all, but the sleeves of their doublets appearing through them, laced tight to the elbow, and puffed out above. Hats and caps were of various fashions in the time of Henry VII. There was the square turned-up cap, a round hat something like the present wide-awake, but the more gay and assuming wore large felt hats, or bonnets, of velvet, fur, or other materials, with great spreading plumes of party-coloured feathers. They wore these showy hats so much on one side, as to show under them other close-fitting caps, often of gold network. Others, again, wore only the small cap, and let the great plumed hat hang on their shoulders.
The hose, when the dress was short enough to show them, were close-fitting, and of gay, often of two different colours; the long-toed shoes had given way to others, with toes called duck-bills, from their shape, being wider in front than they were long. Top-boots were worn for riding. The face was close shaven, except in the case of soldiers or old men, and the hair was suffered to hang long and flowing. The first mention of a collar of the Garter occurs in this reign, and a collar is seen on the effigy of Sir George Daubeny, of this date.
The costume of the ladies displayed sleeves equally wide with those of the men, and have been imitated in modern times, and called bishop's sleeves in London. The gown was cut square in the neck, with stomachers, belts, and buckles, girdles with long pendents in front, and hats and feathers—from which the modern opera hats have been copied. Others wore caps and cauls of gold net, or embroidery, from beneath which the hair hung down the shoulders, half way to the ground. The morning dress was a full, loose, flowing robe, with cape and hood, and the extent and material of it was regulated by Royal ordinance.
​Every one is familiar with the costume of the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. The ordinary costume of bluff Harry was a full-skirted jacket or doublet, with large sleeves to the wrists; over which was worn a short but equally full cloak or coat, with loose, hanging sleeves, and a broad, rolling collar of fur.
Entrance from the Courtyard of Burghley House.
Many, however, still wore the doublet sleeves as in the last reign: tight to the elbow, puffed out about the shoulders, and the coat sleeveless, allowing this to appear. The cap was square or round, and still worn somewhat sideways, jewelled, and plumed with ostrich feathers. The hose were now often divided into hose and stockings, and the shoes, though sometimes square-toed, yet often resembling the modern shape. The Norman "chausses" were revived under the older name of "trousses," being close hose, fitting exactly to the limbs.
Henry VIII. was most extravagant in dress, and was followed with so much avidity by his subjects in his ostentation, that in the twenty-fourth year of his reign he was obliged to pass a sumptuary law to restrain them; and the style and quality of dress for every different rank was prescribed—as we may suppose, with indifferent success. No person of less degree than a knight was to wear crimson or blue velvet or embroidered apparel, broched or guarded with goldsmith's work, except sons and heirs of knights and barons, who might use crimson velvet, and tinsel in their doublets. Velvet gowns, jackets and coats, furs of martins, &c., chains, bracelets, and collars of gold, were proscribed to all but persons possessing two hundred marks per annum; except the sons and heirs of such persons, who might wear black velvet doublets, coats of black damask, &c.
Henry's own dress was of the most gorgeous kind. He is described at a banquet at "Westminster as arrayed in a suit of short garments of blue velvet and crymosine, with long sleeves all out, and lined with cloth of gold, and the outer garments powdered with castles and sheaves of arrows—the badges of Queen Catherine—of fine ducat gold; the upper part of the hose of like fashion, the lower parts of scarlet, powdered with timbrels of fine gold. His bonnet was of damask silver, flat, "woven in the stall," and therefore wrought with gold, and rich feathers on it. When he met Anne of Cleves he had tricked himself out in a frock of velvet, embroidered all over with flatted gold of damask, mixed with a profusion of lace; the sleeves and breast all cut and lined with cloth of gold, and tied together with great buttons of diamonds, rubies, and orient pearls.
Henry ordered his subjects to cut off their long hair; beards and moustaches were now worn at pleasure.
The reigns of Edward and Mary did not vary greatly in the costume of the men, except that small round flat caps were introduced, and are still retained by the boys of Christ Hospital, which Edward founded.
Couch used by Mary Queen of Scots during her imprisonment.
The whole dress of these boys is that of the apprentices of London of that period—blue coats and yellow stockings being, besides, very common to the citizens then. The jackets of our firemen and water-men are also of that period, the badge being made of metal and placed on the arm instead of being embroidered on the back or breast as before. The square-toed shoes were banished by proclamation in the reign of Queen Mary.
The costume of the ladies of the reign of Henry VIII. is extremely familiar, from the numerous portraits of his six wives, engravings of which are in "Lodge's Portraits." With the exception of the bonnet or coif, which, though worn by Catherine of Arragon, came to be called the Anne Boleyn cap, the dress of the ladies of this reign bears a striking resemblance to that of the ladies of ​our own day, though differing, of course, in material. You find the gown fitting close to the bust, of the natural length of waist, and cut square at the chest,
Arras in Knowle House.
is edged with narrow lace. The sleeves, tight at the shoulder, widened to the elbow, where they hung deep, showing an under-sleeve of fine lawn or lace extending to the wrist, and terminated by lace ruffles. On the neck was generally worn a pearl necklace, with a jewelled cross. The skirts wore full, the train long, according to rank. Seven yards of purple cloth of damask gold were allowed for a kirtle for Queen Catherine, in a wardrobe account of the eighth year of Henry's reign. The sleeves of the ladies, like those of the gentlemen, could be changed at pleasure, being separate, and attached at will. They were extremely rich; and we find in one lady's inventory three pair of purple satin sleeves, one of linen paned with gold over the arms, quilted with black silk, and wrought with flounces between the panes and at the hands; one pair of purple gold tissue damask wire, each sleeve tied with aglets of gold; one pair of crimson satin, four buttons of gold on each sleeve, and in every button nine pearls.
Fire Dogs.
The coif was of various materials, from simple linen to rich velvet and cloth of gold; either with the round where it front, as in Mary and Elizabeth as princesses, in Catherine Parr and Catherine Howard, or dipping in front, which came to be called the Queen of Scots bonnet; but most frequently the five-cornered one. This last was indeed the hood of the time of Henry VII., in which we have a portrait of his queen, Elizabeth of York; the lappets of
Nursery Chair of James VI. of Scotland.
the hood depending on the bosom, embroidered and edged with pearls; the scarf behind hanging on the shoulders. In Catherine of Arragon, the front, embroidered and jewelled, had become shorter, touching the neck ​only; but the scarf behind still spread on the shoulder. In Anne Boleyn the coif had reached its extreme of elegance; the frontlet, consisting of the five-pointed frame, is still shorter, only covering the ears, and is faced with a double row of pearls. Her hair is scarcely seen, being concealed by an under-coif, which shows as a band in a slanting direction over the forehead. The back consists of a green velvet hood, with broad scarf lappets, of which one is turned up over the back of the head, and the other hangs gracefully on the right shoulder.
Of the dross of the ladies of the citizen class we have a curious account in the bride of John of "Winchcomb, the famous clothier, called "Jack of Newbury." "She was habited in a gown of sheep's russet, and a kirtle of fine worsted, her head attired with a billiment of gold, and her hair, as yellow as gold, hanging down behind her, which was curiously combed and plaited. She was led to church by two bows with bride laces and rosemary tied about their silken sleeves. "When she in after years came out of her widow's weeds, she appeared in a fair train gown stuck full of silver pins, having a white cap on her head, with cuts of curious needlework under the same, and an apron before her as white as driven snow."
With Elizabeth came in a totally new fashion, not only of women's but of men's costumes. The large trunk hose made their appearance; the long-waisted doublet, the short cloak or mantle, with its standing collar, the ruff, the hat, the band and feather, the roses in their shoes, are all of this period. To such a degree did the fashion of puffed and stuffed breeches obtain, which had begun to swell in the prior reigns, that about the thirty-third of Elizabeth, over the seats in the Parliament House, were certain holes, some two inches square, in the walls, in which were placed posts to uphold scaffolds round about the house for those to sit upon who wore great breeches stuffed with hair, like woolsacks.
As to ruffs, Stubbs, in his "Anatomic of Abuses," tells us that, sooner than go without them, men would mortgage their lands, or risk their lives at Tyburn; and he adds "They have now newly (1595) found out a more monstorus kind of ruff, of twelve, yea, sixteen lengths apiece, set three or four times double, thence called three steps and a half to the gallows." The French or Venetian hose, he tells us, cost often £100 a pair, probably from Using cloth of gold and set with jewels. To these were added boot-hose of the finest cloth, also splendidly embroidered with birds, beasts, and antiques. The doublets, he says, grew longer and longer in the waist, stuffed and quilted with four, five, or six pounds of bombast, the exterior being of silk, satin, taffeta, gold or silver stuff, slashed, jagged, covered, pinched, and laced with all kinds of costly devices. Over those their coats and jerkins, some with collars, some without, some close to the body, some loose, called mandilions; some buttoned down the breast, some under the arm, some down the back, &c. They had cloaks also, white, red, tawny, yellow, green, violet, &c., of cloth, silk, or taffeta, and of French, Spanish, or Dutch fashion, ornamented with costly lace of gold, silver, or silk. These cloaks, he says, were as costly inside as out. Their slippers "pantoufles" were of all colours, and yet, he says, they were difficult to keep on, and went flap-flap up and down in the dirt, casting the mire up to their knees. Their hats, he says, were sharp at the crown, peaking up like the shaft of a steeple a quarter of a yard above the crown of their heads, some more, some loss; others flat and broad on the crown; some with royal crowns and bands of all colours; and these hats or caps were of velvet, taffeta, or sarcenet, ornamented with great bunches of feathers; and finally we hear of beaver hats, costing from twenty to forty shillings apiece, brought from beyond seas.
But if such was the dress of gentlemen to please the strange taste of the maiden queen, that of this famous queen her-self, as evidenced by her numerous portraits, has nothing like it in all the annals of fashion. In an early portrait of Elizabeth we have her dressed in a costuma very little different to that of a man. Over her gown or doublet she wore a coat with the enormous shoulder-points standing up six inches, and with a close upright collar completely enveloping her neck, and surmounted by a ruff; her coat cut and slashed all over, and on her head a round hat, pulled down to a peak in front, and thickly jewelled. Stubbs, alluding to this p.articular fashion, says, "The women have doublets and jerkins as the men have, buttoned up to the breast, and made with wings, welts, and pinions on the shoulder points, as men's apparel in all respects. . . . Yet they blush not to wear it."
But it was about the middle of her reign that Elizabeth introduced that astounding style of dross in which she figures in most of her portraits, and in which the body was imprisoned in whalebone to the hips; the partlet or habit-shirt, which had for some time been in use, and covered the whole bosom to the chin, was removed, and an enormous ruff, rising gradually from the front of the shoulders to nearly the height of the head behind, encircled the wearer like the enormous wings of some nondescript butterfly. In fact, there was ruff beyond ruff; first, a crimped one round the neck like a collar; and then a round one standing up from the shoulders behind the head; and, finally, the enormous circular fans towering high and wide. The head of the queen is seen covered with one of her eighty sets of false hair, and hoisted above that a jaunty hat, jewelled and plumed.
In order to enable this monstrous expanse of ruff to support itself, it was necessary to resort to starch, and, as Stubbs tolls us, also to a machinery of wires "erected for the purpose, and whipped all over with gold thread, silver, or silk." This was called a "supportasse, or underpropper." The queen sent to Holland for women, skilled in the art of starching; and one Mistress Dingham Vander Plasse came over and became famous in the mystery of tormenting pride with starch. "The devil," says Stubbs, "hath learned them to wash and dress their ruffs, which, being dry, will then stand inflexible about their necks."
From the bosom, now partly left bare, descended an interminable stomacher, and then the farthingale spread out its enormous breadth like the modern crinoline. In nothing did Elizabeth so much betray the absence of a fine and healthy taste as in her dress; a modern historian justly observing that in her full attire she resembled, with all her ruffs, her lace, her jewels, her embroidery, her rings, and bedizenmeuts, more an Indian idol than an English queen. Stockings of worsted, yarn, and silk had now become common; and Mistress Montague presented Her Majesty, in the third year of her reign, with a ​pair of silk stockings, knit in this country; thereupon; she would never wear any else. A fashion of both ladies and gentlemen of this time was to wear small looking-glasses hanging at their sides or inserted in the fan of ostrich feathers.
COINS AND COINAGE.
Helmets and Headpieces.
The history of the coinage from Henry VII. to the reign of Elizabeth is one of depreciation and adulteration, as it had been in the preceding century. Not till Elizabeth did it begin to return to a sound and honest standard.
Armour of the Reign of Henry VII. From the Effigy of Sir Thomas Peyton, in Isloham Church, Cambridge.
Armour of the Reign of Henry VIII. From the Effigy of Richard Gyll, in the Church of Shottesbrooke, Hampshire.
Foot Soldier in the Reign of Henry VIII. From Meyrick's "Ancient Arms and Armour."
Henry VII. made several variations in the money of the realm. He preserved the standard of Edward IV. and Richard III., coining 450 pennies from the pound of silver, or thirty-seven nominal shillings and sixpences. He introduced shillings as actual money, being before only nominal, and used in accounts. These shillings, struck in 1504—called at first large groats, and then testons, from the French "teste," or "tête," a head—bore the profile of the king instead of the full face; a thing unknown since the reign of Stephen, but ever after followed, except by Henry VIII. and Edward VI., who, however, used the profile in their groats. Henry coined also a novel coin—the sovereign, or "double rose noble," worth twenty shillings, and the "rose dial," or half-sovereign. These gold coins are now very rare. On the reverse of his coins he for the first time placed the arms.
Guards of the Reign of Henry VIII.
Group of Weapons, &c., preserved in the Tower.
A, inside view of a circular shield, in which is inserted a pistol or short gun; B, breach of pistol; C, fire-match for the purpose of igniting the gunpowder at the touch-hole; D, small grate for the purpose of enabling the bearer to take aim at his opponent; E, barrel; F, spiked mace, called Henry VIII.'s walking-stick: in the head of the mace are four barrels which could be charged with powder, &c.; G, catchbob for taking thieves: the upper part acts with a spring which, after admitting the neck of a culprit, holds it tightly in the circular part; H, cresset carried by the marching watch during the reign of Henry VIII,; I, ancient musket, on a principle similar to the revolvers in use at the present day.
The gold coins of Henry VIII. were sovereigns, half-sovereigns, or rials, half and quarter rials, angels, angelets and half-angels, and quarter-angels, George nobles—so called from bearing on the reverse St. George and the dragon—crowns, and half-crowns. His silver coins were shillings, groats, half-groats, and pennies. Amongst these appeared groats and half-groats coined by Wolsey at York, in accordance with a privilege exercised by the Church long before. In his impeachment it was made a capital charge that he had placed the cardinal's hat on the groats under the king's arms. The groats also bore on each side the arms his initials, "T. W.," and the half-groats "W. A."—Wolsey Archiepiscopus.
We have already stated the scandalous manner in which Henry adulterated the coin, and not only so, but depreciated the value of the silver coins, by coining a much larger number of pennies out of a pound of the base alloy. Before his time the mixed mint pound had consisted of eleven ounces two pennyweights of silver, and eighteen pennyweights of alloy; but Henry, in 1543, altered it to ten ounces of silver and two ounces of alloy. Two years later he added as much alloy as there was silver; and not content with that, in 1546, or one year after, he left only four ounces of silver in the pound, or eight ounces of alloy to the four ounces of silver! But this even did not satisfy him: he next proceeded to coin his base metal into a larger amount than the good metal had ever produced before. Instead of 37s. 6d., or 450 pennies, into which it had been coined ever since the reign of Edward IV., he made it yield 540 pennies, or 45s., in 1527, and in 1543 he extended it to 48s., or 576 pennies. He thus, instead of 450 pennies out of a pound containing eleven ounces two pennyweights of silver, coined 576 pennies out of only four ounces of silver! Such were the lawless robberies which "Bluff Harry" committed on his subjects. Any one of the smallest debasements by a subject would have sent him to the gallows. He certainly was one of the most wholesale issuers of bad money that ever lived.
Artillery of the Tudor period.
Group of Arms of the Tudor period.
1, halberd of the reign of Henry VII.; 2, halberd of the reign of Henry VIII.; 3, a pike; 4, partisan of the time of Henry VIII.; 5 and 6, sword and dagger of James IV. of Scotland; 7, pole-axe of the time of Queen Elizabeth.
​The counsellors of his son Edward—a most rapacious set of adventurer's—however, even out-Harryed Harry; for though Edward restored at first the value of the mint mixture in some degree, in 1551 the amount of silver in a pound of that alloy was only three ounces, or an ounce less than the worst coin of his father. And still worse, instead of 48s., the largest number coined by his father out of a pound, he coined 72s., or instead of 450 pennies out of four ounces of silver, 861 pennies were coined out of three ounces. The ruin, the confusion of prices, and the public outcry, however, consequent upon this violent public fraud, at length compelled Government to restore the amount of silver in the pound to nearly what it was at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII., and the number of shillings was reduced from seventy-two to sixty. The gold, which was equally abased, was also restored to the same extent.
Dandies of the time of Henry VII.
Queen Mary, whilst she issued a proclamation at the commencement of her reign, denouncing the dishonest proceedings of her predecessors, again increased the alloy in a pound of mint silver to an ounce instead of nineteen pennyweights; and she added two pennyweights more of alloy to the ounce of gold. The coins issued by Philip and Mary bear both their profiles.
Ehzabeth honourably restored the coinage to its ancient value. She fixed the alloy in a pound of silver at only eighteen pennyweights; but she coined sixty-two shillings out of the pound instead of sixty, at which it remained till 1816, when it became sixty-six, as it still remains. The standard mixture of Elizabeth has continued the same to our own day. She called in and melted down the base money of her father and brother to the nominal value of £638,000, but of real value only £244,000. The gold coins of Elizabeth are rials, angels, half-angels, and quarter-angels, crowns and half-crowns, nobles and double nobles. Some of her coins were the first which had milled edges, both of gold and silver. Besides shillings, sixpences, groats, and pence, Elizabeth coined a crown, for the use of the East India Company, called portcullis crowns, in imitation of the Spanish dollar. These were valued at four shillings and sixpence, and are now rare.
In Scotland the alloy of the silver at the mint was not so great as in England during this period; but the number of shillings coined out of one pound of silver was astonishingly increased. This kind of depreciation had been going on for two centuries before this period; but from 1475, when only 144 shillings were coined out of the pound of silver, the number was rapidly augmented every few years, till in 1601 no less than 720 shillings were coined out of it, or, in other words, the original value of one pound was made to pass for thirty-six pounds.
SHIPS, COMMERCE, COLONIES, AND MANUFACTURES.
In tracing the historical events of these reigns, we have had occasion to show the increasing strength of the Royal navy of England. Both in the reigns of Henry VIII. and of Elizabeth the sea fights were of a character and attended by results which marked out England as a maritime power growing ever more formidable. In the fourth year of his reign Henry drove the French fleet
Dress of the Commenalty in the time of Edward VI.
from the Channel with forty-two ships, Royal and others. He chastised the Scotch, who, under James V., had become daring at sea; and on various occasions during his reign he showed his superiority to the French and Spaniards.
But it was the victory of the Armada under Elizabeth, and the exploits of Drake, Essex, Raleigh, and others in the Spanish ports, and of Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher in the Spanish settlements of America, that raised the fame of the British fleet to a pitch which it had never reached before. Yet, after all, the amount of Henry's fleet never was large. We are told, indeed, that at first he had only one ship of war, the Great Harry, till he took the Lion, a large Scottish ship, with its commander, the celebrated Andrew Barton; but probably this is meant of such size as to merit the name of man-of-war. Parsimonious as was Henry VII., and careful to avoid any collisions with foreign powers, we cannot suppose he left the kingdom totally destitute of a navy. But Henry VIII. was not contented with owning merely a mediocre fleet; he had an ambition of building large vessels; and in 1512 he built one of 1,000 tons, called the Regent. This was blown up in a battle with the French fleet off Brest, and instead of it he built another called Gráce de Dieu. The ​rivalry of Henry was excited by the King of Scotland building a much larger ship than his Regent, which was said to carry 300 seamen, 120 gunners, and 1,000 soldiers. This ship, like Henry's Regent, was unfortunate, being lost at sea. By the end of Henry's reign, his fleet altogether amounted to 12,500 tons.
Besides building of ships, Henry seems to have planned all the necessary offices for a naval system. He established the Navy Office, with a sort of Board of Admiralty for its management, and he also founded, in the fourth year of his reign, the Corporation of the Trinity House, at Deptford, for managing everything relating to the education, selection, and appointment of pilots, the putting down of buoys, and erecting beacons and lighthouses. Similar establishments were by him created at Hull and Newcastle. He erected at great cost the first pier at Dover, and passed an Act of Parliament improving the harbours of Plymouth, Dartmouth, Tynemouth, Falmouth, and Fowey, which had been choked up by the refuse of certain tin-works, which he prohibited. But perhaps his greatest works of the kind were his establishment of the navy-yards and storehouses of Woolwich and Deptford. No monarch, in fact, had hitherto planned so efficiently and exerted himself so earnestly to found an English navy. Great merit is due to him for his advancement of the maritime interests of the nation.
The manner in which the different monarchs of the Tudor dynasty advanced or neglected the navy is well shown by the returns of the Navy Office to Parliament, in 1791. As we have stated, at the end of Henry's reign it amounted to 12,500 tons, at the end of that of Edward VI. to only 11,065 tons, and at the end of Mary's to merely 7,110 tons, but at the end of Elizabeth's to 17,110. At the time of the Armada, Elizabeth had at sea 150 sail, of which, however, only forty were the property of the Crown; the rest belonged to the merchants who were
A Gentleman of Fashion of the time of Henry VIII.
Lady and Country-woman of the days of Elizabeth.
A Beggar of the time of Henry VIII.
Ladies' Head-dress of the time of Henry VII.
Ladies' Head-dress of the time of Henry VIII.
Ordinary Costume of the days of Queen Mary. Beards of the sixteenth Century. 1. The Spade. 2. The Stiletto. 3. Double Stiletto. 4. Round Beard. Dress of a Lady, 1485.
Beards of the sixteenth Century. Head-dresses of the sixteenth Century.
Female Costume, 1600. Ladies' Head-dresses, sixteenth Century. Ordinary Costume, Time of Henry VIII.
This extent of Royal and mercantile navy had not been reached without much fostering care on the part of the queen. With all her parsimony and dread of expense, it was one of the finest parts of her very mixed character, that she saw the necessity of a strong power at sea, and had all the pride of her father to maintain it. Whilst on land she introduced the manufacture of gunpowder, and raised the pay of the soldiers, she extended her care ​to the fleet, and made it, in the end, the best equipped navy in Europe. She raised the pay of the sailors, as she had done that of the soldiers, and the merchants entered so readily into her service that she had no longer occasion to hire vessels, as her predecessors had done, from the Hanse Towns, or from Venice and Genoa. She built a fort on the Medway, somewhere near the present Sheerness, to protect her fleet, and justly acquired the name of the Queen of the North Seas. Many circumstances combined to give a, new and wonderful development in her time to commerce: the discovery and partial settlement of the New World; the way opened by the Cape to India; the extension of commercial inquiry and enterprise into the north of Europe and to the banks of Newfoundland. But ere this stirring period arrived, commerce had had many severe restrictions, the fruit of the ignorance of political economy, to struggle with.
Henry VII. is greatly praised by Hall, the chronicler, as a prince who "by his high policy marvellously enriched his realm and himself, and left his subjects in high wealth and prosperity; as is apparent by the great abundance of gold and silver yearly brought into the kingdom, in plate, money, and bullion, by merchants passing and repassing." But the great reason of the rapid advance of commerce under Henry VII. was, undoubtedly, the quietness and stability of affairs which he introduced; for Henry was too fond of hoarding to be a very munificent patron of trade. Amongst the very first measures which he passed was one against usury, totally forbidding the loan of money on interest, which, if it could have been really carried out, would have nearly extinguished commerce altogether. In this, however, Henry was but continuing the practice of his predecessors, who, though great warriors, were no merchants. So severe was Henry's enactment against usury, that, by the Act of the third year of his reign, every offender was, on discovery, to be fined £100, and the bargain to be made void. Henry VIII. abrogated this absurd law, and allowed usury under ten per cent.; it was again put in force by Edward VI. in terms of the utmost severity, declaring it to be "a vice most odious and detestable, and utterly prohibited by the Word of God." Elizabeth again restored the law of her father in love, permitting interest under ten per cent.
Whilst Henry VII. endeavoured to extinguish usury, he was equally jealous of foreign merchants—of their bringing their foreign manufactures and carrying out English goods—lest our wealth should be drained away by them. The careful old king could not see that it mattered little by whom the exchanges of commerce were made, so that merchants were left to make their own bargains; whence the result would be that they would only purchase such things as they wanted, and sell such as they did not want, with benefit to everybody. It accorded, however, with Henry's ideas, and was so far beneficial as to induce the settling of English merchants in foreign countries, with the object of endeavouring to drain them of their wealth. Therefore, he was careful to heal the breach with the Netherlands which the patronage of Perkin Warbeok by the Duchess of Burgundy had made, and the company of Merchant Adventurers was again established in Antwerp. The treaty on this occasion was termed by the rejoicing Flemings the "Intercursus Magnus," or Great Treaty of Intercourse; but, as we have related, Henry, in 1496, on intercepting the Archduke Philip at Weymouth, forced from him a less liberal treaty, which the Flemings branded as the "Intecursus Mains," or Evil Treaty.
In the same one-sided spirit of trade, Henry, in 1489, concluded a treaty with Denmark, by which English companies were authorised to purchase lands in Bergen in Norway, Lamden and Landscrona in Schonen, Dragor in Zealand, and Loysa in Sweden, on which to erect factories and warehouses, to remain theirs in perpetuity for the purposes of trade. He also renewed a similar treaty at the same time with the great trading republic of Venice, by which the English companies were to enjoy all the privileges of the citizens of Florence and Pisa, where they were established, and were privileged to export English wool, and re-ship the spices and valuable articles brought by the Venetians overland from India.
It was not long, however, before Henry was called on to check the effects of monopoly in his English companies. The Merchant Adventurers of London soon showed so strongly these effects that they compelled the king to interfere.
The markets of Europe were now fast growing in importance and demand. The wealth of South America was flowing into Spain, in the shape of gold, to the amount of a million sterling annually, and the spices and riches of the East Indies into Portugal, since the discovery of the way round the Cape. Amsterdam became a groat mercantile depot of these commodities as central in Europe, and the benefit of it was felt nowhere more sensibly than in England. Henry VII., who had let slip the opportunity of securing South America and the West Indies by neglecting the offers of Columbus, now endeavoured to repair the mischief by granting patents to the Cabots and others for the discovery of new lands. He could not open his heart or his coffers sufficiently to assist the adventurers with funds, but he was ready to reap his share of the benefit, which was to consist of all the countries discovered, and a fifth of the immediate proceeds. Under such patents the Cabots, father and son, in the course of several voyages, discovered Labrador, in 1497, and afterwards ran along the whole coast of North America, to the Gulf of Mexico.
From this moment the spirit of mercantile enterprise rapidly developed itself. In 1530 we find Captain Hawkins trading to Guinea for elephants' teeth, and to Brazil, to which coasts voyages soon became common. Trading to all parts of the Mediterranean was frequent during the reign of Henry VIII.; taking out wool, cloth, and skins, and importing silks, drugs, wines, cotton-wool, spices, and Turkey carpets. The voyages of Cabot had opened up a new trade—that of cod-fishing—on the coasts of Newfoundland, which was eagerly engaged in; and the voyages of Willoughby and Richard Chancellor, by exploring the White Sea, at the suggestion of Cabot, opened a new trade with Russia. A Russian company was formed by Edward VI., and fully incorporated by Mary, who vigorously prosecuted that trade; and in 1556 an ambassador arrived at London from the Czar. Jenkinson, an agent of this company, afterwards descended the Volga to Astracan, and crossing the Caspian Sea, reached Bokhara, the great resort of the merchants of ​Russia, Persia, India, and China. He is said to have made six. other voyages to Bokhara by that route—a striking proof of the growing enterprise of the English merchant. The loss of Calais by Mary, and her restoration of the monopoly of the Steelyard Company, who were Hanse Town merchants—the withdrawal of whose charter by Henry VIII. had been most beneficial to freedom of trade—were circumstances which acted adversely on commerce in her reign.
The earliest European trade with India was Venetian, and was conducted by way of the Black Sea. On the discovery by Vasco de Gama of the passage by the Cape of Good Hope, in 1497, the Dutch claimed the exclusive right of navigating those seas. The Spaniards again were equally exclusive with regard to their own subsequent discovery of a passage by
A Courtier of Queen Bess's Time.
Gentlemen of the Queen's Chapel, in the Time of Queen Elizabeth.
the Straits of Magellan. These monopolies, so strange in their contrast to our modern conceptions and practice, left the English the sole alternative of a north-west or north-east passage. About 1500, a Portuguese named Corte Real attempted to discover a north-west passage, which was followed by a similar effort on the part of the English in 1553. The idea received the greatest encouragement from Queen Elizabeth, and a company was formed in 1585 called the "Fellowship for the discovery of the North-West Passage." Sir Hugh Willoughby's last voyage, which was entered on with a view to discover a north-east passage to China, was fatal to him and his brave comrades, who perished in the ice. The instructions given to Sir Hugh by Sebastian Cabot, Grand Pilot of England by appointment of Henry VII., are extant, and furnish a curious and interesting specimen of naval regulation. No dicing, carding, tabling, nor other such practices were to be allowed on ship-board morning and evening prayers were to be diligently observed. On the other hand, the natives of strange countries were to be "enticed on board and made drunk with your beer and wine, for then you shall know the secrets of their hearts;" and they were to be cautious with regard to "certain creatures with men's heads and the tails of fishes, who swim with bows and arrows about the fords and bays, and live on human flesh."
During the long reign of Elizabeth foreign trade made gigantic strides. Among the very first acts of this queen was one to abolish the restriction of English merchants to English bottoms in the transport of goods. The Act states that this restriction had provoked the natural adoption of like restrictions by foreign princes. This was the first acknowledgment of the mischief of meddling with the freedom of trade; and our foreign trade had now acquired an importance which demanded respect. With the Netherlands alone our trade was extraordinary, its value amounting to nearly two millions and a half sterling annually; and we find at this time the first mention of insurance of goods on their voyage. In 1562 we hear also of that detestable commerce the slave trade, which was introduced by John Hawkins, so well known afterwards as the daring compeer of Drake and Frobisher, and one of the heroic conquerors of the Armada. Hawkins carried out English goods, called at the Guinea Coast, Gentlemen of the Queen's Chapel, in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, and took in slaves, sailed to Hispaniola, and brought thence sugar, ginger, hides, and pearls.
During the reign of Elizabeth the many voyages which were made in order to discover a north-west passage to India, led to a more intimate knowledge of the North American coasts. In these Frobisher, Cavendish, and Davis distinguished themselves. From 1576 to the end of Elizabeth's reign, Raleigh and his step-brother. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, made repeated attempts to colonise North America, and particularly Virginia—so called in honour of Elizabeth—but in vain. Equally strenuous and unsuccessful efforts were made to open a direct sea communication with India by the English; and it was not till the close of Elizabeth's reign that the incorporation of an East India Company, destined to establish that trade, was effected. The charter was granted by Elizabeth in 1600. Elizabeth also chartered a company in 1579 for the exclusive right of trading to all the countries of the Baltic.
As regarded the domestic manufactures of this period, the woollen manufactures were the most important, and extended themselves greatly on account of the foreign demand. This manufacture had to contend with many ​old charters and restrictions which were introduced to monopolise the practice of it to certain towns and persons; but these were gradually broken through after much contest, and people in both town and country were allowed to make cloths and other woollen goods.
Sovereign of Henry VII.
Originally London, Norwich, Bristol, Gloucester, and Coventry were the privileged places. Essex became a clothing county; but by degrees the trade spread into those quarters where it still prevails.
Gold Real of Mary.
Berks, Oxford, Surrey, and Yorkshire made kerseys for exportation; Wales manufactured fringes and coarse cloths; but Tiverton, Bridgewater, Chard, and other towns of Wilts, Gloucester, and Somerset were famous for their broad-cloths; those of Kidderminster, Bromwich, Coventry, Worcester, Eversham, Droitwich, as also of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, were in esteem.
Crown of Edward VI.
Manchester and Halifax were already noted for rugs and fringes, Norfolk for coverlets, and Lincolnshire and Chester for what were called "cottons," but which were a species of woollen. There was much complaint at that day of the adulteration of these fabrics by intermixture of inferior yarns, and by not taking the proper means to prevent them running up on being exposed to wet. Norwich had manufactures of woollen different to ordinary cloth, in which it excelled all other places; and in Elizabeth’s reign the Norwich manufactures introduced new kinds under the name of Norwich satins and fustians.
Milled Sixpence of Elizabeth.
The art of dyeing received a new impulse and new colours from the discovery of Brazil and other distant countries. Soap-making was also introduced, soap having before 1524 been chiefly imported. Many new manufacturing processes, both in weaving, dyeing, and cleaning ​cloths, were brought over by the refugees from the Netherlands, driven hither by the Spanish persecutions. During Elizabeth's reign the smelting of iron, which had been chiefly carried on in Kent, Sussex, and Surrey, became restricted there on account of the consumption of wood. Copper mines and alum pits were discovered in the time of Elizabeth, in Cumberland and Yorkshire, which contributed to the extension of the manufacturing arts.
Sir Thomas Gresham, the great financial leader of the day, although a protègé of the Duke of Northumberland's, was received with great favour by Elizabeth on her accession. The great merchant then gave her advice—the following of which may well be called an epoch in the history of this country. He told her that all the debased coin should be converted into fine coin of a certain weight; that their monopoly should not be restored to the Steelyard merchants; that licences should be granted as seldom as possible; that she should incur no debt, or as little debt as possible, beyond the seas; and that she should keep her credit with her own merchants, as they would be her best and most powerful friends. These wise measures of reform were gradually carried out. Elizabeth probably perceived their value in a great measure, but she could not find it in her heart to act altogether with the necessary self-denial and liberality. Thus, she would not yield her power to reward and punish favourites by means of special grants and licences. The monopoly of sweet wines which Essex enjoyed is an instance of her influence in this respect.
George Noble of Henry VIII.
The Ships of Columbus
A Ship of the Sixteenth Century
Gresham himself superintended the restoration of the coinage, and his advice with regard to the Steelyard merchants was also carried into practice. It was to him that the merchants of that day owed their first place of meeting for the transaction of business; before that, being "constrained either to endure all extremities of weather, viz., heat and cold, snow and rain, or else to shelter themselves in shops." He built, therefore, a house for them, which the queen visited in 1570 and called the Royal Exchange. This building, like many others belonging to the City companies, was destroyed in the great fire. It was designed after the model of the Bourse of Antwerp, and was Flemish also in its architect, its workmen, and its materials.
During this century much progress was made in the improvement of London. Henry VIII. passed various Acts for the paving of the thoroughfares, which before were horrible sloughs, "very foul and full of pits."
The commerce of Scotland during this century was affected by precisely the same circumstances as that of England.
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.
The public amusements of the nation underwent as great a revolution during this century as its religion or its literature. The fall of the Church and the introduction of tire-arms were fatal to the spirit of chivalry, and the whole host of religious pageants and plays. Henry VIII. and Elizabeth exerted themselves to prolong the exercises of chivalry, but they had lost their real soul, and fell lifeless to the ground. In vain was the tournament of the Cloth of Gold, or the jousts at which Elizabeth presided at Greenwich. They were become mere mockeries of what once had been the all-engrossing contests of knightly honour. In vain did they endeavour to keep alive the long bow and the feats of archery. The musket and the sportsman's gun had made the bow and quiver mere playthings. The tournament gave way to the joust, in which the contest was conducted with headless lances, and fighting at the barriers with blunted ​axes; and that gave way to "riding at the ring," in which the gentlemen did not run their lances through their antagonists, but through a ring suspended for the purpose. The last of the ancient exercises was the contest with the sword and buckler; but the sword was deprived of both edge and point; and as the combatants were not allowed to lunge, but only to strike, the practice was perfectly harmless. In the time of Henry VIII., however, the art of fencing was introduced; and in the time of Elizabeth the use of the rapier and the deadly thrust rendered the acquirement of the art of fence a matter of the first importance.
But though the chivalric exercises went out in this age, never was the love of pageant and display more alive. The revival of the Greek literature brought forward a crowd of gods and goddesses, who figured in public processions and galas; and the strangest allegoric absurdities were gazed upon by grave princes and their counsellors, as well as by the ladies, with all the enthusiasm of country lads and lasses gaping at a strolling theatre or a puppet-show.
Sir Thomas Gresham, Founder of the Royal Exchange.
We have described the strange masquerading and allegoric pageants got up in London for Queen Mary and Elizabeth; and any one who will wade through worthy Laneham's description of the nineteen days in which Queen Bess was entertained at Kenilworth by Leicester, will find plenty of giants, distressed Ladies of the Lake, "salvage men," presents from Bacchus, Pomona, Ceres. &o., floating islands, and sham Arions riding on sham dolphins. More healthy but little less romantic were the holiday sports which had survived the Church, and were mingled in by both princes, nobles, and people. The old Mystery did not for some time disappear before the secular drama, and the Coventry Play was played before Elizabeth at Kenilworth. May-day had its grand maypole still; and Henry VIII. did not disdain, on May-day, 1515, to go a-maying to Shooter's Hill, with his queen and his sister, the Queen-Dowager of France. May-day was also the great day of the milkmaids, who danced from door to door with a pyramid of plates on their heads.
Stubbs—who, Puritan as he was, seems to have enjoyed ​what he describes so well—gives us the following description of the amusements of the many gentlemen of the Temple in those days:— "First, all the wild heads of the parish covening together, choose them a grand captain of mischief, whom they ennoble with the title of My Lord of Misrule, and him they crown with great solemnity and adopt for their king. This king anointed chooseth for him twenty, forty, three-score, or a hundred lusty guts like to himself to wait upon his lordly majesty and to guard his noble person.
State Coach of Queen Elizabeth.
Then every one of these his men he investeth with his liveries of green, yellow, or some other wanton colour. And, as though they were not gaudy enough, they bedeck themselves with scarfs, ribbons, and laces, hanged all over with gold rings, precious stones, and other jewels; this done, they tie about either leg twenty or forty bells, with rich handkerchiefs in their hands, and sometimes laid across over their shoulders and necks, borrowed for the most part of their pretty Mopsies and loving Bessies.
Side-saddle of Queen Elizabeth.
. . . . Thus all things set in order, then have they their hobby-horses, dragons, and other antics, together with their pipers and thundering drummers to strike up the devil's dance withal; then march those heathen company towards the church and churchyard, their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobby-horses and other monsters skirmishing amongst the throng; and in this sort they go to the church (though the minister be at prayer or preaching), dancing and swinging their hand-kerchiefs over their heads in the church like devils incarnate, with such a confused noise that no man can hear his own voice. Then the foolish people they look, they come stare, they laugh, they fleer, and mount upon forms and pews to see these goodly pageants solemnised in this sort.
Charing Cross and the Strand in the days of Edward VI.
Then, after this, about the church they go again and again, and so forth into the churchyard, where they have commonly their summer halls, their bowers, arbours, and banqueting houses set up, wherein they ​feast, banquet, and dance all that day, and peradventure all that night, too. And thus these terrestrial furies spend the Sabbath-day in the country."
To relate all the jollity with which Christmas was celebrated is beyond our space. The Christmas carols with which the waits awoke all the sleeping people for a fortnight before; the yule-log dragged into the hall and piled on the fire, the boar's-head feast, with plum-pudding and mince-pies, and all the dances and games, were as much in fashion as in the days of the ancient Church. Plough Monday, Valentine Day, Easter and Whitsuntide, St. John's Eve, and all the charities of Maunday Thursday, were still maintained. Even Palm Sunday, when the figure of Christ went on its procession mounted on a wooden ass, resisted the Reformation till the year 1548, or nearly to the end of the reign of Edward VI.
The drama, which was now shaping itself into freedom and splendour under such men as Shakespeare and Marlowe, was yet conducted in a style very rude. The theatres were mostly of wood; the actors were rarely arrayed in proper costume; women's parts were represented by boys; any scenery which the play had, remained, like a, picture of a country fair booth, through the whole piece. The aristocratic frequenters sate on the stage, for there wore no boxes or dress-circle, and the commonalty sate on stools and enjoyed their pipes and beer during the performance. What was worse, the theatre had to contend with the bear-garden, bull-baiting, and cock-fighting in the affections of the public, even the highest portion of it.
As Sunday had been the great day of the Church plays or Mysteries, so Sunday was the chief day of the theatre, which brought it into disrepute with the serious portion of the community; and when there was bull-baiting, the theatre was closed that it might not interfere. Queen Elizabeth was especially fond of the bear-garden, and that sport was consequently included by Leicester in the recreations which he provided for her at Kenilworth. In truth, bear-gardens, cook-pits, bowling-greens, tennis-courts, dicing-houses, taverns, smoking ordinaries, and the like, abounded, giving us a fair idea of the grade of taste of that age. Hunting and hawking were still pastimes of the gentry, and horse-racing became a great rage. The first notice we have of this latter pastime in on the occasion before mentioned, when Henry went a-Maying in 1515; after which it is said that he and his brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, diverted themselves by "racing on great coursers." In fact, the taste of this remarkable age was of a very low type—sensual, empty, and vulgar; of a stamp, indeed, which none but the lowest of our present population could for a moment endure: a fact showing in a marked degree the immense advance since then of refinement in mind and in morals. A people any purer and more humane could not, in truth, have existed amid the daily spectacles which surrounded them: the heads of traitors stuck on gate and bridge, the bloody execution of queens and nobles, the crowds of wretches Jangling from a thousand gibbets, the flaming stake, the branding-iron, the scourge, and the stocks, were the most familiar objects to a people who required a Shakespeare to interlard his finest tragedies with harlequins and fools.
CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE.
But amid the grossness of this century there must have existed a large intermixture of a more moral class, for the Bible had become extensively read, and the Reformers must have been numerous to enable the Government to effect the ecclesiastical changes which they did; and the advance of physical improvement must not be judged of by the popular condition of to-day, but of previous times. In the course of the century the condition of the people considerably advanced. At the beginning the houses of farmers were generally of timber, and those of labourers of mud, or wattle and mud. In many of them were no chimneys, except one for cooking. Wooden trenchers and wooden spoons were used instead of pewter or earthenware; and a yeoman who had half-a-dozen pewter dishes in his house was looked on as wealthy. Their lodging was equally mean. Straw beds and pillows of chaff were most common; flock beds were a rural luxury; and the farm servants lay on straw, and often had not even a coverlet to throw over them. The bread of the common people was made of rye, barley, or oats, and in many districts of peas or beans. The gentry only ate wheaten bread. The men by the fire in the evening, after their day's work, made their own shoes, or prepared the yokes for oxen, and their plough-gear. The women made the wool and the hemp or flax ready for the weaver at the spinning-wheel. As they do now on the Continent, the countrywomen worked much in the fields. Fitzherbert, the first of our writers on husbandry, says that it was the business of the farmer's wife "to winnow all manner of corn, to make malt, to wash, to make hay, to shear corn, and, in time of need, to help her husband to fill the muckwain, or dung-cart, drive the plough, to load hay or corn, to go to market and sell butter or pigs or fowls."
Latimer, who was a farmer's son, describes the advance in the value of land in his time. When he was young, he says, his father's farm was rented by him at £4 a year; that he employed half-a-dozen men upon it, and had 100 sheep and thirty cows; that his father managed to send him to school and college, and to give to each of his daughters £5 on her marriage. But, continues Latimer, at the time he wrote this, the same farm was charged £16 a year, or fourfold, and that the farmer of it could do nothing for his prince, himself, or his children, nor give a cup of drink to the poor. The cause of this was the increased demand for wool, which had occasioned great enclosures, and a decrease of tillage in favour of pasturage. This pressed greatly on the labouring class who were not employed; for the gentlemen had flocks of from 10,000 to 20,000, and a few shepherds were all they needed in their great enclosures. The gentry, who thus occupied the land, we are told, did not reside there, but crowded up to London, and hung about the Court. "Hence," says Roger Ascham, "so many families dispersed, so many houses ruined. Hence the honour and strength of England, the noble yeomanry, are broken up and destroyed."
The evils of this state of things compelled the legislature to put restrictions on the extent of pasturage, to insist on the tillage of sufficient land for the wants of the community; and penalties were enacted for such as did not build proper cottages for their labourers, with forty acres of land each, or who allowed more than one family in one ​cottage. The evil produced its own remedy. The scarcity of tillage land raised the price of produce, and that stimulated to the manufacturing and better culture of the land.
Pack Horses of the Tutor period.
We learn from Harrison and Norden, writers of the period, that towards the end of the century things were greatly improved. The farmers and small builders ware become more painstaking and skilful. They collected manure and even the sweeping of streets, burnt lime, and carted seasand, as in Cornwall and Devon. The consequence was that they had better cattle and better crops, they had milk from their cows, ewes and goar; and they used much more meat. In the autumn they cured bacon and beef for the winter; and in summer they had abundance of veal beef, and mutton, which, says Harrison, they ceased to baste with lard, but basted with butter, or suffered the fattest to taste itself.
A Statute Fair in the days of Henry VIII.
With their living, their houses improved. Wood or wattle gave way to stone or brick, the wooden trenchers were superseded at substantial tables by pewter, and with the pewter began to show themselves articles of silver.
​Feather beds replaced the straw and chaff mattresses; there was more abundant linen, bed-covers, and better clothing. Coal was beginning to make the scarcity of wood less felt.
The vast increase of foreign trade and of manufactures which we have noticed, must have proved the most effectual means, far more than enactments, for encouraging tillage, from the augmented demand of provisions and luxuries; and the same causes would provide employment and good wages for increased numbers. The land as well as every other thing in the kingdom was in a transition state, and as the vast estates of nobles and the Church, now divided amongst a multitude, came to be settled and cultivated, the diffusion of life and prosperity through the rural districts was no doubt proportional. At this time there must have been a great flow of population from the agricultural to the manufacturing districts, as the latter were making increased demands on the strength of the nation; yet it appears that the produce both of the tilled ground and of pasturage was steadily increasing. The small cottagers, who had probably been but poor farmers, being now gradually absorbed into the growing artisan population, gave place to greater and wealthier men, who laid out the ground in large grazing farms. This gave rise to the false impression that the population was decreasing, and the statistics of the period give frequent evidence of the alarm thus occasioned. Harrison, in his "Description of England," says:—"It is an easy matter to prove that England was never less furnished with people than at this present; for if the old records of every manor be sought, and search made to find what tenements are fallen, either down or into the lords' hands, or bought and united together by other men, it will soon appear that in some one manor seventeen, eighteen, or twenty houses are shrunk. I know what I say by mine own experience, notwithstanding that some one cottage be here and there erected of late which is to little purpose. Of cities and towns either utterly decayed, or more than a quarter or half diminished, though some one be a little increased here and there—of towns pulled down for sheep-walks and no more but the lordships now standing in them, beside those that William Rufus pulled down—I could say somewhat." Our evidence, however, for the increase of the population
Sections showing the Increase of London since the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII.
Outline Plan, showing the extent of London in the reigns of King Henry VIII. and Queen Victoria.
Hunting the Hare in St Giles's Fields in the days of Queen Mary
We find a statute of the first year of Edward VI. containing the following:—"Idleness and vagabondry is the mother and root of all thefts, robberies, and all evil acts and other mischiefs, and the multitude of people given thereto hath always been here within this realm very groat and more in number, as it may appear, than in other regions; the which idleness and vagabondry all the king's highness noble progenitors, kings of this realm, and this high court of Parliament hath often and with great travail gone about and assayed with godly acts and statutes to repress; yet until this our time it hath not had that success which hath been wished; but—partly by foolish pity and mercy of them which should have seen the said godly laws executed, partly by perverse natures and long-accustomed idleness of the persons given to loitering—the said godly statutes hitherto hath had small effect, and idle and vagabond persons hath been suffered to remain and increase, and yet so do." "If," continues the Act, "they should be punished by death, whipping, imprisonment, or with other corporal pain, it were not without their desert, for the example of others and to the benefit of the commonwealth; yet if they could be brought to be made profitable and do service, it wore much to be wished and desired." Such words would lead us to conclude that they were about to adopt conciliatory measures with regard to this troublesome class, but we find on the contrary the harshest enactments put in execution. Thus, every person found idle and wandering without any effort to find work was to be considered a vagabond, and was liable to be seized by any one and forced to labour, for which he was to receive only his daily food. If he attempted to run away, he was to be branded on the breast with the letter "V" and made the slave of his owner for two years. If he made a second attempt for liberty, he was to be branded on the forehead or cheek with the letter "S" and made his master's slave for ever; while a third effort at escape was punishable by death. The severity of this law prevented its being properly executed, and caused its repeal in two years. After various futile enactments, Henry VIII., in 1530, gave the sick and impotent permission to beg; and in ​the magistrates and the clergy were ordered to make collections for their relief. These were the first approaches to a poor-law, and in the year 1562 Queen Elizabeth passed an Act making parochial assessments for the poor compulsory. The poor-law, therefore, in reality dates from that period; but in the year 1601, the celebrated Act of the 43rd of Elizabeth organised and completed that system of employing and maintaining the destitute poor, which has remained for ever the law of England.
Such was the sixteenth century in England; a period more remarkable than any which had gone before it, and which, with all its dark and repulsive features, was the gloomy dawn of the glorious day which we now enjoy. It was an age in which the whole system of society was in a state of convulsion, in which whatever was antiquated, contracted, or rotten, was severed and thrown down; and the seeds of a thousand new things thrown into the upturned soil, already showed those vigorous germs and shoots which have ever since been growing and ripening into a country and a moral and political condition which have no parallel.
END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
* ↑ Vinegar.
* ↑ Submits.