Chapter XIII: Part 13

The impending Reformation was hastened by a famous invective in the form of "The Supplication of Beggars." Its flagrant argument lay in its arithmetic. It calculated all the possessions of the clergy, who though but "the four-hundredth part of the nation, yet held half of the revenues."

MORE replied to "The Supplication of the Beggars" by "The Supplications of the Souls in Purgatory." These he represented in terror at the sacrilegious annihilation of the masses said for their repose; and this with the Romanist was probably no weak argument in that day.

MORE more reasonably ridicules the extravagance of the estimates. Such accounts, got up in haste and designed for a particular purpose, are necessarily inaccurate; but the inaccuracy of a statement does not at all injure the drift of the argument, should that be based on truth.

With MORE "the heretics" were but ordinary rebels, as appears by the style of his narrative. "A rabble of heretics at Abingdon did not intend to lose any more labour by putting up bills (petitions) to Parliament, but to make an open insurrection and subvert all the realm, to kill the clergy, and sell priests' heads as good and cheap as sheep's heads--three for a penny, buy who would! But God saved the church and the realm. Yet after this was there one John Goose roasted at Tower-hill, and thereupon some other John Goose began to make some gaggling awhile, but it availed him not. And now we have this gosling with his 'Supplication of Beggars.' He maketh his bill in the name of the beggars. The bill is couched as full of _lies_ as the beggar swarmeth full of _lice_. We neither will nor shall need to make much business about this matter; we trust much better in the goodness of good men."

The marriage of the clergy was no doubt at first abused by some. MORE describes one Richard Mayfield, late a monk and a priest, and, it may be added, a martyr, for he was burned. Of this man he says, "His holy life well declares his heresies, when being both a priest and a monk he went about two wives, one in Brabant, another in England. What he meant I cannot make you sure, whether he would be sure of the one if t'other should happen to refuse him, or that he would have them both, the one here, the other there; or else both in one place, the one because he was priest, the other because he was monk."[7]

Such is the ludicrous ribaldry which runs through the polemical works of Sir THOMAS MORE: the opposite party set no better example, and none worse than the redoubtable Simon Fish, the writer of the "Supplication of Beggars." Oldmixon expresses his astonishment that "the famous Sir Thomas More was so hurried by his zeal that he forgot he was a gentleman, and treated Mr. Fish with the language of a monk."

Writers who decide on other men and on other times by the spirit of their own, try human affairs by a false standard. MORE was at heart a monk. He wore a prickly hair-shirt to mortify the flesh; he scourged himself with the knotted cord; he practised the penance; and he appeals to miraculous relics as the evidences of his faith! I give his own words in alluding to the Sudarium, that napkin sent to king Abgarus, on which Jesus impressed the image of his own face: "And it hath been by like miracle in the thin corruptible cloth kept and preserved these 1500 years fresh and well preserved, to the inward comforts, spiritual rejoicing, and great increase of fervour in the hearts of good Christian people." To this he joins another similar miraculous relic, "the evangelist Luke's portrait of our blessed Lady, his mother."[8]

Such were considered as the evidences of the true faith of the Romanists; but MORE with his relics was then dealing in a damaged commodity. Lord Herbert has noticed the great fall of the price of relics at the dissolution of the monasteries: some which had been left in pawn no one cared to redeem.

"The History of King Richard the Third," which first appeared in a correct state in this folio, has given rise to "historic doubts" which led to some paradoxes. The personal monster whom MORE and SHAKSPEAKE exhibited has vanished, but the deformity of the revolting parricide was surely revealed in the bones of the infant nephews. This, the earliest history in our vernacular literature, may still be read with delight. As a composition the critical justice of Lord Orford may be cited. "Its author was then in the vigour of his fancy, and fresh from the study of the Greek and Roman historians, whose manner he has imitated." The details in this history of a prince of the house of York, though they may be tinged with the gall of the Lancastrian Cardinal Morton, descend to us with the weight of contemporary authority. It is supposed that MORE may have derived much of the materials of his history from his early patron, but the charms which still may retain us are the natural yet dramatic dialogue--the picturesque touches--and a style, at times, whose beauty three centuries have not wrinkled--and the emotions which such vital pages leave in the reader's mind.[9]

The "UTOPIA" of Sir THOMAS MORE, which being composed in Latin is not included in this great volume of his "Workes," may be read by the English reader in its contemporary spirited translation,[10] and more intelligibly in Bishop Burnet's version. The title of his own coinage has become even proverbial; and from its classical Latinity it was better known among foreigners even in Burnet's day than at home. This combination of philosophy, politics, and fiction, though borrowed from the ideal republic of Plato, is worthy of an experienced statesman and a philosopher who at that moment was writing not only above his age, but, as it afterwards appeared, above himself. It has served as the model of that novel class of literature--political romances. But though the "Utopia" is altogether imaginary, it displays no graces of the imagination in an ingeniously constructed fable. It is the dream of a good citizen, and, like a dream, the scenes scattered and unconnected are broken into by chimerical forms and impracticable achievements. In times of political empiricism it may be long meditated, and the "Utopia" may yet pass through a million of editions before that new era of the perfectibility of the human animal, the millennium of political theorists, which it would seem to have anticipated.

This famous work was written at no immature period of life, for MORE was then thirty-six years of age. The author had clear notions of the imperfections of governments, but he was not as successful in proposing remedies for the disorders he had detected. A community where all the property belongs to the government, and to which every man contributes by his labour, that he may have his own wants supplied; a domestic society which very much resembles a great public school, and converts a citizen, through all the gradations of his existence, from form to form; and where every man, like an automatical machine, must be fixed in his proper place,--supposes a society of passionless beings which social life has never shown, and surely never can. The art of carrying on war without combating, by the wiliness of stratagems; or procuring a peace by offering a reward for the assassination of the leaders of the enemy, with whom rather than with the people all wars originate; the injunction to the incurable of suicide; the paucity of laws which enabled every man to plead his own cause; the utmost freedom granted to religious sects, where every man who contested the religion of another was sent into exile, or condemned to bondage; the contempt of the precious metal, which was here used but as toys for children, or as fetters for slaves;--such fanciful notions, running counter to the experience of history, or to the advantages of civilised society, induced some to suspect the whole to be but the incoherent dreams of an idling philosopher, thrown down at random without much consideration. It is sobriety indulging an inebriation, and good sense wandering in a delirium. Burnet, in his translation, cautiously reminds his readers that he must in nowise be made responsible for the matter of the work which "he ventured" to translate. Others have conceived "the Utopia" dangerous for those speculators in politics who might imagine the author to have been serious. MORE himself has adjudged the book "no better worthy than to lye always in his own island, or else to be consecrated to Vulcan."

But assuredly many of the extraordinary principles inculcated in "the Utopia" were not so lightly held by its illustrious author. The sincerity of his notions may be traced in his own simple habits, his opinions in conversation, and the tenor of his invariable life. His contempt of outward forms and personal honours, his voluntary poverty, his fearlessness of death--all these afford ample evidence that the singularity of the man himself was as remarkable as the work he produced. The virtues he had expatiated on, he had contemplated in his own breast.

This singular, but great man, was a sage whose wisdom lay concealed in his pleasantry; a politician without ambition; a lord chancellor who entered into office poor, and left it not richer. When his house was to be searched for treasure, which circumstance had alarmed his friends, well did that smile become him when he observed that "it would be only a sport to his family," and he pleasantly added, "lest they should find out my wife's gay girdle and her gold beads." When the clergy, in convention, had voted a donation amounting to no inconsiderable fortune, "not for services to be performed, but for those which he had chosen to do," More rejected the gift with this noble confession--"I am both over-proud, and over-slothful also, to be hired for money to take half the labour and business in writing that I have taken since I began." And when accused by Tyndale and others for being "the proctor of the clergy," and richly fed, how forcible was his expression! "He had written his controversial works only that God might give him thanks."

It happened, however, that his after-conduct in life, in regard to that religious toleration which he had wisely maintained in his ideal society, was as opposite as night to noon. Could he then have ever been earnest in his "Utopia?"--he who exults over the burning of a heretic, who "could not agree that before the day of doom there were either any saint in heaven or soul in purgatory, or in hell either," for which horrible heresy he was delivered at last into the secular hands, and "burned as there was never wretch I ween better worth."[11] This harmless and hapless metaphysical theologian did not disagree with More on the existence of saints, of souls, nor of hell. The heretic conceived--and could he change by volition the ideas which seemed to him just?--that no reward or punishment could be inflicted before the final judgment. A conversation of five minutes might have settled the difference, for they only varied about the precise time!

In that great revolution which was just opening in his latter days, MORE seems sometimes to have mistaken theology for politics. A strange and mysterious change, such as the history of man can hardly parallel, occurred in the mind of MORE, by what insensible gradations is a secret which must lie in his grave.

This great man laid his head on the block to seal his conscience with his blood. Protestants have lamented this act as his weakness, the Romanists decreed a martyrdom. In a sudden change of system in the affairs of a nation, when even justice may assume the appearance of violence, the most enlightened minds, standing amidst their ancient opinions and their cherished prejudices subverted, display how the principle of integrity predominates over that of self-preservation.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Sir Thomas More's Workes," 127.

[2] "The Workes of Sir Thomas More in the English Tongue, 1557, fo.,"
a venerable folio of nearly 1500 pages in double columns, is closely
printed in black-letter.

[3] Roper's "Life of Sir Thomas More," which had been suppressed
through the reign of Elizabeth, only first appeared in 1626, at
Paris, when a Roman Catholic princess in the person of Henrietta, the
queen of Charles the First, had ascended the throne of England; it
was republished in 1729. There is also an elegant modern reprint by
Mr. Singer.

[4] The Life by his great-grandson was printed in 1627, and
republished in 1726. This biography is the one usually referred to.
Though with a more lucid arrangement, and a fuller narrative, than
Roper's life, the writer inherited little of the family genius,
except the bigotry of his great ancestor.

[5] _Tres Thomae._ The three Thomases are, Aquinas, a Becket, and
More--by Dr. Thomas Stapleton. Another Life by J. H. is an
abridgment, 1662. These writers, Romanists, as well as the
great-grandson, have interspersed in their narrative more than one of
those fabulous incidents and pious frauds, visions, and miracles,
which have been the opprobrium of Catholic biographers.

[6] Macdiarmid, in his "Lives of British Statesmen," has chiefly
considered the political character of this Lord-Chancellor. Others
have written lives merely as accompaniments to the editions of some
of his works.

[7] Works, fo. 346.

[8] "Works of Sir Thomas More," 113, col. 2.

[9] Mr. Singer has furnished us with a correct reprint of this
history. More's "Life of Richard the Third" had been given by our
chroniclers from copies mutilated or altered. A work whose merits
arise from the beauty of its composition admits of neither.

[10] The old translation, "by Raphe Robinson, 1551," has been
republished by Dr. Dibdin, accompanied by copious annotations. Almost
everything relating to the family, the life, and the works of the
author may be found in "the biographical and literary introduction."
It is the first specimen of an edition where the diligence of the
editor has not been wasted on trivial researches or nugatory
commentaries.

[11] "Sir Thomas More's Workes," 348.

THE EARL OF SURREY AND SIR THOMAS WYATT.

Not many years intervened between the uncouth gorgeousness of HAWES, the homely sense of BARCLAY, the anomalous genius of SKELTON, and the pure poetry of Henry Howard the EARL of SURREY. In the poems of SURREY, and his friend, Sir Thomas Wyatt,[1] the elder, the age of taste, if not of genius, opens on us. Dryden and Pope sometimes seem to appear two centuries before their date. There is no chronology in the productions of real genius; for, whenever a great master appears, he advances his art to a period which labour, without creation, toils for centuries to reach.

The great reformer of our poetry, he who first from his own mind, without a model, displayed its permanent principles, was the poetic Earl of Surrey. There was inspiration in his system, and he freed his genius from the barbaric taste or the undisturbed dulness which had prevailed since the days of Chaucer. His ear was musical, and he formed a metrical structure with the melodies of our varied versification, rejecting the rude rhythmical rhyme which had hitherto prevailed in our poetry. He created a poetic diction, and graceful involutions; a finer selection of words, and a delicacy of expression, were now substituted for vague diffusion, and homeliness of phrases and feeble rhymes, or, on the other hand, for that vitiated style of crude pedantic Latinisms, such as "purpure, aureate, pulchritude, celature, facunde," and so many others, laborious nothings! filling the verse with noise. The contemplative and tender SURREY charms by opening some picturesque scene or dwelling on some impressive incident. He had discerned the error of those inartificial writers, whose minute puerility, in their sterile abundance, detailed till nothing was remembered, and described, till nothing was perceptible. Hitherto, our poets had narrowed their powers by moulding their conceptions by temporary tastes, the manners and modes of thinking of their day; but their remoteness, which may delight the antiquary, diminishes their interest with the poetical reader. SURREY struck into that secret path which leads to general nature, guided by his art: his tenderness and his thoughtful musings find an echo in our bosoms, and are as fresh with us as they were in the court of Windsor three centuries past.

These rare qualities in a poet at such a period would of themselves form an era in our literature; but SURREY also extended their limits; the disciple of Chaucer was also the pupil of Petrarch, and the Earl of SURREY composed the _first sonnets_ in the English language, with the amatory tenderness and the condensed style of its legitimate structure. Dr. Nott further claims the honour for Surrey of the invention of heroic blank verse; Surrey's version of Virgil being unrhymed.

When Warton suggested that Surrey borrowed the idea of blank verse from Trissino's "Italia Liberata," he seems to have been misled by the inaccurate date of 1528, which he affixed to the publication of that epic. Trissino's epic did not appear till 1547,[2] and Surrey perished in the January of that year. It was indeed long a common opinion that Trissino invented the _versi sciolti_, or blank verse, though Quadrio confesses that such had been used by preceding poets, whose names he has recorded. The mellifluence and flexibility of the vowelly language were favourable to unrhymed verse; while the poverty of the poetic diction, and the unmusical verse of France, could never venture to show itself without the glitter of rhyme. The heroic blank verse, however, was an after-thought of Surrey: he first composed his unrhymed verse in the long Alexandrine, had afterwards felicitously changed it for the decasyllabic verse, but did not live to correct the whole of his version. Surrey could not therefore have designed the pauses and the cadences of blank verse in his first choice, nor will they be found in his last. Nor can it be conceded that blank verse was wholly unknown among us. Webbe, a critic long after, in the reign of Elizabeth, considers the author of Pierce Ploughman as "the first whom he had met with who observed the quantity of our verse, _without the curiosity of rhyme_."

Dr. Nott, with editorial ardour, considers that the unfinished model of Surrey was the prototype of all subsequent blank verse, and was also the origin of its introduction into dramatic composition. A sweeping conclusion! when we consider the artificial structure of our blank verse from the days of Milton, who, not without truth, asserted that "he first gave the example of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming." This indeed has been denied to Milton by those who look to dates, and have no ear; and are apt to imagine that rhymeless lines, mere couplets, with ten well-counted syllables in each, must necessarily form blank verse. Dr. Nott, in quoting the eulogy of Ascham on this noble effort of Surrey "to bring our national poetry to perfection," has omitted to add what followed, namely, the censure of Surrey for not having rejected our heroic verse altogether, and substituted the hexameter of Virgil, in English verse. It is therefore quite evident that Ascham had formed no conception of blank verse, no more than had Surrey, such as it was to be formed by the ear of Milton, and by some of his successors. All beginnings are obscure; something is borrowed from the past, and something is invented for the future, till it is vain to fix the gradations of invention which terminate in what at length becomes universally adopted.

Could the life, or what we have of late called the psychological history, of this poetic Earl of SURREY be now written, it would assuredly open a vivid display of fine genius, high passions, and romantic enthusiasm. Little is known, save a few public events; but the print of the footsteps shows their dimension. We trace the excellence, while we know but little of the person.

The youth of SURREY, and his life, hardly passed beyond that period, betrayed the buoyancy of a spirit vehement and quick, but rarely under guidance. Reckless truth, in all its openness and its sternness, was his habit, and glory was his passion; but in this restlessness of generous feelings his anger too easily blazed forth. He was haughty among his peers, and he did not even scorn to chastise an inferior. We are not surprised at discovering that one of so unreserved a temper should in that jealous reign more than once have suffered confinement. But the youthful hero who pursued to justice a relative and a court favourite, for a blow, by which that relative had outraged Surrey's faithful companion--he who would eat flesh in Lent--he who issued one night to break the windows of the citizens, to remind them that they were a sinful race, however that might have been instigated by zeal for "the new religion"--all such things betrayed his enthusiastic daring, but his deeds, to become splendid, depended on their direction. The lofty notions he attached to his descent; his proud shield quartering the arms of the Confessor, which the duke, his father, dared not show to a jealous monarch; his feats of arms at the barriers, and his military conduct in his campaigns,

----------Who saw Kelsal blaze,
Landrecy burnt, and battered Boulogne render;
At Montreuil's gate hopeless of a recure (recovery),

there, where that twin-spirit, his beloved associate, Clere, to save his wounded friend, had freely yielded his own life; his magnificence as a courtier, the companion of the princely Richmond; all "the joy and feast with a king's son;" his own record of the brilliant days, and the soothing fancies of "proud Windsor:" "its large open courts;" "the gravelled ground for the foaming horse;" "the palm-play;" "the stately seats and dances;" "the secret groves," and "the wild forest, with cry of hounds;" and more than all, the mysterious passion for "the fair Geraldine," cover the misty shade of Surrey with a cloud of glory, which, while it veils the man from our sight, seems to enlarge the object we gaze on.

We see this youth, he who first taught the English Muse accents she had never before tried, hurried from his literary seclusion to be immolated on the scaffold, by the arts of a remorseless rival, of him whose pride at last sent him to the block, and who signed the death-warrant of his own brother! It was at a moment when the dying monarch, as the breath was fleeting from his lips, once in his life was voiceless to condemn a state victim, that Somerset took up the stamp which Henry used, to affix it to the death-warrant of SURREY. Victim of his own domestic circle! The father disunited with the son, from fear or jealousy; the mother separated from the father, to the last vowing unforgiving vengeance; a sister disnatured of all kin, hastening to be the voluntary accuser of her father and her brother! These domestic hatreds were the evil spirits which raged in the house of the Howards, and hurried on the fate of the accomplished, the poetic, the hapless Earl of Surrey.

A tale of such grandeur and such woe passed away unheeded even by a slight record, so inexpert were the few writers of those days, and probably so perilous was their curiosity. The pretended trial of Surrey, who being no lord of parliament, was tried by a timorous jury at Guildhall, seems to have been studiously suppressed, and the last solemn act of his life, "the leaving it," is alike concealed. Even in the registers of public events by our chroniclers, they unanimously pass over the glorious name and the miserable death--to spare the monarch's or the victim's honour.

The poems of SURREY were often read, as their multiplied editions show; but of the noble poet and his Geraldine, tradition had not sent down even an imperfect tale. In this uncertainty, the world was disposed to listen to any romantic story of such genius and love and chivalry.

The secret history of SURREY was at length revealed, and the gravity of its discloser vouched for its authenticity. Who would doubt the testimony of plain Anthony a Wood?

SURREY is represented hastening on a chivalric expedition to Italy; at Florence he challenges the universe, that his Geraldine was the peerless of the beautiful. In his travels, Cornelius Agrippa exhibited to Surrey, in a magical mirror, his fair mistress as she was occupied at the moment of inspection. He beheld her sick, weeping in bed, reading his poems, in all the grief of absence. This incident set spurs to his horse. At Florence he hastened to view the chamber which had witnessed the birth of so much beauty. At the court he affixed his challenge, and maintained this emprise in tilt and tourney. The Duke of Florence, flattered that a Florentine lady should be renowned by the prowess of an English nobleman, invited Surrey to a residence at his court. But our Amadis more nobly purposed to hold on his career through all the courts of Italy, shivering the lances of whoever would enter the lists, whether "Christian, Jew, or Saracen." Suddenly the Quixotism ends, by this paragon of chivalry being recalled home by the royal command.

This Italian adventure seemed congenial with the romantic mystery in which the poet had involved the progress of his passion for his poetic mistress. He had himself let us into some secrets. Geraldine came from "Tuscany;" Florence was her ancient seat, her sire was an earl, her dame of "princes' blood," "yet she was fostered by milk of an Irish breast;" and from her tender years in Britain "she tasted costly food with a king's child." The amatorial poet even designates the spots hallowed by his passion; he first saw her at Hunsdon, Windsor chased him from her sight, and at Hampton Court "first wished her for mine!"

These hints and these localities were sufficient to irritate the vague curiosity of Surrey's readers, and more particularly of our critical researchers, of whom Horace Walpole first ventured to explain the inexplicable. With singular good fortune, and from slight grounds, Walpole conjectured that Geraldine was no Italian dame, but Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, one of the daughters of the Earl of Kildare; the family were often called the Geraldines. The Italian descent from the Geraldi was made out by a spurious genealogy. The challenge and the tournament no one doubted. But some harder knots were to be untied; and our theoretical historian, unfurnished by facts and dates, it has been recently shown, discovered some things which never existed.

But every writer followed in the track. Warton compliments the sagacity of Walpole, and embroiders the narrative. The historian of our poetry not only details the incident of the magical mirror, but adds that "the imagination of Surrey was _heated anew_ by this _interesting spectacle_!" He therefore had no doubt of the reality; and, indeed, to confirm the whole adventure of the romantic chivalry, he refers the curious to a finely sculptured shield which is still preserved by the Dukes of Norfolk. The Italian adventures of Surrey, and all that Walpole had erroneously suggested, are fully accepted, and our critic observes--"Surrey's life throws so much light on the character and the subjects of his poetry, that it is almost impossible to consider the one without exhibiting the _few anecdotes_ of the other." But the critical sagacity of Warton did not wholly desert him through all the circumstantial narrative, for suddenly his pen pauses, and he exclaims on these travels of Surrey, that "they have the air of a romance!"

And it was a romance! and it served for history many a year![3] This tale of literary delusion may teach all future investigators into obscure points of history to probe them by dates.

It was long after the days of Walpole and Warton, and even of George Ellis, that it was discovered that these travels into Italy by Surrey had been transferred literally from an "Historical Romance." A great wit, in Elizabeth's reign, Tom Nash, sent forth in "the Life of Jack Wilton, an unfortunate traveller," this whole legend of Surrey. The entire fiction of Nash annihilates itself by its extraordinary anachronisms.

In what respect Nash designed to palm the imposture of his "Historical Romance" on the world, may be left to be explained by some "Jack Wiltons" of our own. He says "all that in this _phantastical treatise_ I can promise is some _reasonable conveyance of history_, and variety of mirth." Must we trust to their conscience for "the reasonable conveyance?"

We now trace the whole progress of this literary delusion.

On Surrey's ideal passion, and on this passage misconceived--

From Tuscan came my lady's worthy race;
Fair Florence was sometime her ancient seat--

the romancer inferred that Geraldine must be a fair Florentine; Surrey had alluded to the fanciful genealogy of the Geralds from the Geraldi. On this single hint the romancer sends him on his aerial journey in this business of love and chivalry.

This romance, of which it is said only three copies are known, was published in 1594. Four years after, DRAYTON, looking about for subjects for his Ovidian epistles, eagerly seized on a legend so favourable for poetry, and Geraldine and Surrey supplied two amatory epistles. Anthony a Wood, finding himself without materials to frame a life of the poetic Surrey, had recourse to "the famous poet," as he calls Drayton, whom he could quote; for Drayton was a consecrated bard for the antiquary, since Selden had commented on his great topographical poem. But honest Anthony on this occasion was not honest enough. He did not tell the world that he had fallen on the romance itself, Drayton's sole authority. Literally and silently, our antiquary transcribed the fuller passages from a volume he was ashamed to notice, disingenuously dropping certain incidents which would not have honoured the memory of Surrey. Thus the "phantastical" history for ever blots the authentic tomes of the grave _Athenae Oxonienses_. A single moment of scrutiny would have detected the whole fabricated narrative; but there is a charm in romance which bewitched our luckless Anthony.

Thus it happened that the romancer, on a misconception, constructs an imaginary fabric; the poet Drayton builds on the romancer; the sober antiquary on both; then the commentators stand upon the antiquary. Never was a house of cards of so many stories. The foundation, Surrey's poetic passion, may be as fictitious as the rest; for the visionary Geraldine, viewed in Agrippa's magic mirror was hardly a more mysterious shadow.

Not one of these writers was informed of what recent researches have demonstrated. They knew not that this Earl of Surrey in boyhood was betrothed to his lady, also a child--one of the customs to preserve wealth or power in great families of that day. These historians were unfurnished with any dates to guide them, and never suspected that when Surrey is made to set off on his travels in Italy, after a Donna Giraldi who had no existence, he was the father of two sons, and "the fair Geraldine" was only _seven_ years of age! that Surrey's first love broke out when she was _nine_; that he declared his passion when she was about _thirteen_; and finally, that Geraldine, having attained to the womanly discretion of _fifteen_, dismissed the accomplished Earl of Surrey, with whom she never could be united, to accept the hand of old Sir Anthony Brown, aged sixty. Lady Brown disturbs the illusion of Geraldine, in the modest triumph of sixteen over sixty.

Dr. Nott is in trepidation for the domestic morality of the noble poet; yet some of these amatory sonnets may have been addressed to his betrothed. He has perplexed himself by a formal protest against the perils of Platonic love, but apologises for his hero in the manners of the age. It appears that not only the mistress of Petrarch, but those of Bayard the chevalier "sans reproche," and Sir Philip Sidney, were married women, with as crystalline reputations as their lovers. Nor should we omit the great friend of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was a staid married man, notwithstanding his romantic passion for Anne Bullen. The courtly imitators of Petrarch had made love fashionable. It is evident that Surrey found nothing so absorbing in his passion, whatever it might be; for whenever called into public employment he ceased to be Petrarch--which Petrarch never could, and possibly for a want of occupation. A small quantity of passion, dexterously meted out, may be ample to inspire an amatorial poet. Neither Surrey nor Petrarch, accomplished lovers and poets, with all their mistress' coquetry and cruelty, broke their hearts in the tenderness of their ideas, or were consumed by "the perpetual fires" of their imagination.

We have now traced the literary delusion which long veiled the personal history of the Earl of Surrey, and which has duped so many ingenious commentators. The tale affords an additional evidence of that "confusion worse confounded" by truth and fiction, where the names are real, and the incidents fictitious; a fatality which must always accompany "Historical Romances." The same mischance occurred to "The Cavalier" of DE FOE, often published under different titles, suitable to the designs of the editors, and which tale has been repeatedly mistaken for an authentic history written at the time. Under the assumed designation by "a Shropshire Gentleman," whole passages have been transferred from the Romance into the authentic history of Nichols's Leicestershire--just as Anthony a Wood had felicitously succeeded in his historical authority of Tom Nash's "Life of Jack Wilton."

In the story of SURREY and WYATT, one circumstance is too precious to be passed over. WYATT commenced as a writer nearly ten years before Surrey, and his earlier poetic compositions are formed in the old rhythmical school. His manuscripts, which still exist, bear his own strong marks in every line to regulate their caesura; for our ancient poets, to satisfy the ear, were forced to depend on such artificial contrivances. It was in the strict intercourse of their literary friendship that the elder bard surrendered up the ancient barbarism, and by the revelation of his younger friend, studied an art which he had not himself discovered. Wyatt is an abundant writer; but he has wrought his later versification with great variety, though he has not always smoothed his workmanship with his nail. For many years Wyatt had smothered his native talent, by translation from Spanish and Italian poets, and in his rusty rhythmical measures. He lived to feel the truth of nature, and to practise happier art. Of his amatory poems, many are graceful, most ingenious. The immortal one to his "Lute," the usual musical instrument of the lover or the poet, as the guitar in Spain, composed with as much happiness as care, is the universal theme of every critic of English poetry.

His defrauded or romantic passion for Anne Bullen often lends to his effusions a deep mysterious interest, when we recollect that the poet alludes to a rival who must have made him tremble as he wrote.

Who list to hunt? I know where is an hind!
But as for me alas! I may no more,
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore;
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain;
Graven with diamonds, in letters plain,
There is written, her fair neck round about--
"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
_And wild to hold, though I seem tame_."

We perceive Wyatt's keen perception of character in the last verse, admirably expressive of the playfulness and levity of the thoughtless but susceptible Anne Bullen, which never left her when in the Tower or on the scaffold. The poems of WYATT accompanied the unhappy queen in her imprisonment; and it was Wyatt's sister who received her prayer-book with her last smile, for the block before her could not disturb the tenderness of her affections.

WYATT is an ethical poet, more pregnant with reflection than imagination; he was intimately conversant with the world; and it is to be regretted that our poet has only left three satires, the first Horatian Epistles we possess. These are replete with the urbanity and delicate irony of the Roman, but what was then still unexampled, flowing with the fulness and freedom of the versification of Dryden. Wyatt had much salt, but no gall.

WYATT excelled SURREY in his practical knowledge of mankind; he had been a sojourner in politic Madrid, and had been employed on active embassies. Surrey could only give the history of his own emotions, affections, and habits; he is the more interesting poet for us; but we admire a great man in Wyatt, one whose perception was not less subtile and acute, because it spread on a far wider surface of life.

WIAT, for so he wrote his name, was a great wit; as, according to the taste of his day, his anagram fully maintained. We are told that he was a nice observer of times, persons, and circumstances, knowing when to speak, and we may add, how to speak. That happened to Wyatt which can be recorded probably of no other wit: three prompt strokes of pleasantry thrown out by him produced three great revolutions--the fall of Wolsey, the seizure of the monastic lands, and the emancipation of England from the papal supremacy. The Wyatts, besides their connexion with Anne Bullen, had all along been hostile to the great Cardinal. One day Wyatt entering the king's closet, found his majesty much disturbed, and displeased with the minister. Ever quick to his purpose, Wyatt, who always told a story well, now, to put his majesty into good humour, and to keep the Cardinal down in as bad a one, furnished a ludicrous tale of "the curs baiting a butcher's dog." The application was obvious to the butcher's son of Ipswich, and we are told, for the subject but not the tale itself has been indicated, that the whole plan of getting rid of a falling minister was laid down by this address of the wit. It was with the same dexterity, when Wyatt found the king in a passion on the delay of his divorce, that, with a statesmanlike sympathy, appealing to the presumed tendency of the royal conscience, he exclaimed, "Lord! that a man cannot repent him of his sin but by the pope's leave!" The hint was dropped; the egg of the Reformation was laid, and soon it was hatched! When Henry the Eighth paused at the blow levelled at the whole ponderous machinery of the papal clergy, dreading from such wealth and power a revolution, besides the ungraciousness of the intolerable transfer of all abbey lands to the royal domains, Wyatt had his repartee for his counsel:--"Butter the rooks' nests!"--that is, divide all these houses and lands with the nobility and gentry.

Wyatt should have been the minister of Henry; we should then have learned if a great wit, where wit was ever relished, could have saved himself under a monarch who dashed down a Wolsey.

Surrey and Wyatt, though often engaged, the one as a statesman, the other as a general, found their most delightful avocation in the intercourse of their studies. Their minds seemed cast in the same mould. They mutually confided their last compositions, and sometimes chose the same subject in the amicable wrestlings of their genius. It was a community of studies and a community of skill; the thoughts of the one flowed into the thoughts of the other, and we frequently discover the verse from one in the poem of the other. Wyatt was the more fortunate man, for he did not live to see himself die in the partner of his fame perishing on a scaffold, and he has received a poet's immortality from that friend's noble epitaph. In his epitaph, Surrey dwells on every part of the person of his late companion; he expatiates on the excellences of the head, the face, the hand, the tongue, the eye, and the heart--but these are not fanciful conceits; the solemnity of his thoughts and his deep emotions tell their truth. Wyatt's was

A head, where Wisdom's mysteries did frame,
Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain,
As on a stithy,[4] where some work of fame
Was daily wrought.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "The Works of the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt," by Dr.
Nott, form an important accession to our national literature. If we
cannot always agree with the conclusions of our literary antiquary,
we must value the variety of his researches, not less profound than
extensive.

[2] "Tiraboschi," vol. vii.--Haym's "Bibliotheca Italiani." When
Conybeare communicated the same information to Dr. Bliss, it must
have been derived from Warton.

[3] And, strange to add, it is still history! Mr. Godwin, in "The
Lives of Necromancers," details every part of this apocryphal tale!
And the Edinburgh reviewer very philosophically, not doubtful of its
verity, accounts for all its supernatural magic, and clearly explains
the inexplicable!

[4] The smith's forge.

THE SPOLIATION OF THE MONASTERIES.

Incidents of such an overwhelming nature in political history as are those of the Reformation can have no sudden origin. They are but the consequences of something which has preceded. In our country the suppression of the monasteries and the abbeys had been long prepared; it was not, and it could not have been, the temporary passions, nor the absolute will, of an arbitrary monarch, which by a word could have annihilated an awful power, had not the royal edict been but the echo of many voices. It was attacking but an aged power dissolving in its own corruption, which, blind with pride, looked with complacency on its own unnatural greatness, its political anasarca. Its opulence was an object it could not conceal from its enviers, and its paramount eminence was too heavy a yoke for its rising rivals. This power, in the language of the times, had "covered the land with an Egyptian darkness," and when appeared the "Godly and learned king," as the eighth Henry was called, he was saluted as "a Moses who delivered them from the bondage of Pharaoh." It is not therefore strange that the act which at a single blow annihilated the monastic orders and their "lands and tenements," was hailed as the most patriotic which had been ever passed by an English sovereign. It made even a tyrannous and jealous monarch, who cut off more heads of men and women than any other on record, popular and extolled even in his latter days.

Henry the Eighth had paused at the blow he was about to level. The plunder was too monstrous even for the hand of an arbitrary monarch. Its division among the nobility and gentry was an expedient which removed the odium from royalty, and invested it with that munificence which dazzled the pride of Henry. In the vast harvest, the king refused the lion's share, looking for his safer portion in the secure loyalty of the new possessors to whom he transferred this vast and novel wealth.

As the scheme was managed, therefore, it was a compromise or co-partnership of the king and his courtiers. The lands now lie the open prey of the hardy claimant or the sly intriguer; crowds of suppliants wearied the crown to participate in that national spoliation. Every one hastened to urge some former service, or some present necessity, as a colourable plea for obtaining a grant of some of the suppressed lands. A strange custom was then introduced, that of "begging for an estate." Kneeling to the king, and specifying some particular lands, was found a convenient method to acquire them; and these royal favours were sometimes capriciously and even ludicrously bestowed. Fuller has a pleasant tale concerning one Master Champernoun. One day, observing two or three gentlemen waiting at a door through which the king was to pass, he was inquisitive to learn their suit, which they refused to tell. On the king's appearance, they threw themselves on their knees, and Champernoun was prompt in joining them, with an implicit faith, says Fuller, that courtiers never ask anything hurtful to themselves. They were begging for an estate. The king granted their petition. On this Champernoun claimed his share of the largesse; they remonstrated that he had never come to beg with them; he appealed to the king, and his brother beggars were fain to allot him the considerable priory of St. Germains, which he sold to the ancestor of the present possessor, the Earl of St. Germains.

The king was prodigal in his grants; for the more he multiplied the receivers of his bounties, the more numerous would be the stanch defenders of their new possessions:[1] gratitude was the least of their merits. He counted on their resolution and their courage. The bait was relishing, and there were some, when land-grants became more scarce, whose voracity of reformation attempted to snatch at the lands of the universities, which had certainly gone had not Henry's love of literature protected their trembling colleges. We have his majesty's own words, in replying to the suggestion of some hungry courtier:--"Ha! sirrah! I perceive the abbey-lands have fleshed you, and set your teeth on edge, to ask also those colleges. We pulled down sin by defacing the monasteries; but you desire to throw down all goodness by subversion of colleges. I tell you, sir, that I judge no land in England better bestowed than on our universities, which shall maintain our realm when we be dead and rotten. Follow no more this vein; but content yourselves with what you have already, or else seek honest means whereby to increase your worldhoods."

Lord Cromwell was the chief minister through whose mediation these novel royal grants of houses and lands were distributed. There was evidently no chance of attention from his lordship without the most open and explicit offers of the grossest bribery. The Chancellor Audley, in bargaining with Lord Cromwell for the abbey of St. Osyth, for "some present trouble in this suit," one day sent twenty pounds, with "my poor hearty good will, during my life." Perhaps the bribe, though only placed to account, had not its full weight, as the chancellor does not appear, in the present instance, to have possessed himself of this abbey, though, afterwards, with the spoils of two rich monasteries, he built the most magnificent mansion in England, by which he perpetuated his own name in the once-famed Audley-End. Sir Thomas Elyot, in soliciting his lordship's mediation with the king to reward him with "some convenient portion of the suppressed lands," found it advisable to offer a conditional promise! "Whatsoever portion of land that I shall attain by the king's grace, I promise to give to your lordship the first year's fruits, with my assured and faithful heart and service." All were offering their hearts and the rest of their lives to Lord Cromwell.

As for the regal dispenser himself, so stupendous was his portion that it became necessary to found a court never heard of before--"The Court of Augmentation," an expressive designation, indicating its plenary character, with its chancellor and its treasurer, and a long routine of officers, and none too many, "that the king might be justly dealt with," says Cowell, "the interpreter," "for all the manors and parks, the colleges and chantries, and the religious houses which the king did not sell or give away;" that is, the selected prey which the royal eagle grasped in his own talons.

We are accustomed to trace the Reformation to Henry the Eighth; but in verity small are the claims of this sovereign on posterity, for through all the multiplied ramifications of superstition, nothing under him was reformed. The other great event of the Reformation--the assumption of the spiritual supremacy--accorded with the national independence from a foreign jurisdiction. The policy was English; but it originated in the private passions of the monarch. Assuredly, had the tiara deigned to nod to the regal solicitor, then had "the Defender of the Faith" only given to the world another edition of his book against Luther.

In the last years of his reign, Henry vacillated in his uncertain reform. Sometimes leaning on one party and sometimes on another; he had lost the vigour of his better days. In his last parliament, though not without some difficulty, both from Protestant and Papist, they had voted for "the augmentation" of the royal revenue, their grant of the chantries. These chantries were the last wrecks of the monastic lands. A single church had often several chantries attached to it. Chantries were endowments of estates by the sinners of that age for the benefit of having eternal masses sung for their departed souls. Henry on this occasion, in his last speech, strongly animadverts on the national disunion; and among his thanks mingles his menaces "to unite them in a more unacceptable way" than the tenderness with which at that moment he addressed them, for their concessions to his "Court of Augmentation."

It is also evident, by this able and extraordinary speech, that Henry would gladly have revoked his gift to the people of "the Word of God in their mother-tongue," as his majesty expresses himself.[2] He had, indeed, already in part withdrawn the freedom he had granted by restricting it to a few persons, and only to be used on particular occasions. His majesty proceeds--"You lay too much stress on your own expositions and fantastical opinions. In such sublime matters you may easily mistake. This permission of reading the Bible is only designed for private information, not to furnish you with reprimanding phrases and expressions of reproach against priests and preachers. I am extremely sorry to find with how little reverence the Word of God is mentioned; how people squabble about the sense; how it is turned into wretched rhyme, sung and jingled in every alehouse and tavern." This part of the king's speech was pointed at the general readers of the Scriptures; but his majesty did not discover any happier union among the clergy themselves, whom he roundly rates:--"I am every day informed that you of the clergy are declaiming against each other in the pulpit; and here your charity and discretion are quite lost in vehemence and satire. Some are too stiff in their old _mumpsimus_, and others too busy and curious in their new _sumpsimus_.[3] Thus the pulpits are, as it were, batteries against each other; the noise is hostile and ruinous. How can we expect the poor people should live friendly with their neighbours when they have such unhappy precedents of discord and dissension in those that teach them?"

Henry the Eighth rejected the Pope, but surely he died a Romanist. His unwieldy huge form was lifted up from his death-bed that he might prostrate himself, and, in the writer's language, who, however, was a papist, "bury himself in the earth," to testify his reverence for "the real presence," when it was brought before him. His will, which, though it was put aside, was not the less the king's will, attested his last supplications to "the Virgin Mary, and all her holy company of Heaven." And he endowed an altar at Windsor, "to be honourably kept up with all things necessary for _a daily mass_, there to be read _perpetually while the world shall endure_." At the same time Henry endowed the poor knights of Windsor, upon condition that they should repeat their eternal masses for his soul. His magnificence was proportionate to his sins; but his perpetual masses, and the world, did not endure together.

With this fact before us, it is not therefore strange that foreign historians should have declared that our Henry the Eighth never designed a Reformation, that he altered nothing; and had only raised a schism which those who contest the papal sovereignty in their civil affairs, as the Gallican Church affected to do, would incline more to approve than to censure.

This monarch has been lauded as a patriot king for the suppression of the monasteries and the national emancipation from the tiara--but patriotism has often covered the most egotistical motives.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A fear of the restitution of these abbey-lands to their former
uses appears to have prevailed long after their alienation. So late
as in the reign of James the First, the founder of Dulwich College,
in a dispute respecting the land, observes hypothetically--"If the
State should be at any time pleased to returne all abbey lands to
their former use, I must lose Dulwich, for which I have paid now
5000_l._" At a later revolution, when the bishops' lands were seized
on by the parliamentarians, many obtained those lands at easy rates,
or at no rate at all; the greater part reverted, but, if I am not
misinformed, there are still descendants of some of these
parliamentarians who hold estates without title-deeds.

[2] See an abstract from one of his Proclamations in "Curiosities of
Literature," vol. iii. p. 373.--ED.

[3] This alludes to the well-known story of the old priest, who
having blunderingly used _mumpsimus_ for _sumpsimus_, would never be
put right, alleging that "he hated all novelties."

A CRISIS AND A REACTION. ROBERT CROWLEY.