Chapter XXII: From 1588 to 1591 (2)

In conclusion, no principal secretary was at present appointed; but Robert Cecil was admitted as an assistant to his father, who resumed on this condition the duties of the office, and held it, as it were in trust, till her majesty, six years afterwards, was pleased to sanction his resignation in favor of his son, now fully established in her confidence and good opinion. Of Davison nothing further is known; probably he did not long survive.

Some time in the year 1590, the earl of Essex married in a private manner the widow of sir Philip Sidney, and daughter of Walsingham; a step with which her majesty did not scruple to show herself highly offended. The inferiority of the connexion in the two articles of birth and fortune to the just pretensions of the earl, and the circumstance that the union had been formed without that previous consultation of her gracious pleasure,--which from her high nobility and favorite courtiers, and especially from those who, like Essex and his lady, shared the honor of her relationship, she expected as a homage and almost claimed as a right,--were the ostensible grounds of her displeasure. But that peculiar compound of ungenerous feelings which rendered her the universal foe of matrimony, exalted on this occasion by a jealousy too humiliating to be owned, but too powerful to be repressed, formed without doubt the more genuine sources of her deep chagrin. The courtiers quickly penetrated the secret of her heart;--for what vice, what weakness, can long lurk unsuspected in a royal bosom? and it is thus that John Stanhope, one of her attendants, ventures to write on the subject to lord Talbot.

"This night, God willing, she will to Richmond, and on Saturday next to Somerset-house, and if she could overcome her passion against my lord of Essex for his marriage, no doubt she would be much quieter; yet doth she use it more temperately than was thought for, and, God be thanked, doth not strike all that she threats[103]. The earl doth use it with good temper, concealing his marriage as much as so open a matter may be: not that he denies it to any, but for her majesty's better satisfaction, is pleased that my lady shall live very retired in her mother's house.[104]"

[Note 103: It may be regarded as dubious whether this expression is to be understood literally or metaphorically.]

[Note 104: "Illustrations" by Lodge.]

On the whole, the indignation of the queen against Essex stopped very short of the rage with which she had been transported against Leicester on a similar occasion; she never even talked of sending him to prison for his marriage. Her good sense came to her assistance somewhat indeed too late for her own dignity, but soon enough to intercept any serious mischief to the earl; and having found leisure to reflect on the folly and disgrace of openly maintaining an ineffectual resentment, she soon after readmitted the offender to the same station of seeming favor as before. There has appeared however some ground to suspect that the queen never entirely dismissed her feelings of mortification; or again reposed in Essex the same unbounded confidence with which she had once honored him. From a passage of a letter addressed by lord Buckhurst to sir Robert Sidney, then governor of the Brill, we learn, that in the autumn of the next year she still retained such displeasure against sir Robert for having been present at a banquet given by Essex, either on occasion of his marriage, or with a view to the furtherance of some design of his which excited her suspicion, that she could not be induced to grant him leave of absence for a visit to England.

But cares and occupations of a nature peculiarly uncongenial with the indulgence of sentimental sorrows, now claimed, and not in vain, the serious thoughts of this prudent and vigilant princess. The low state of her finances, exhausted by no wasteful prodigalities, but by the necessary measures of national defence and the politic aid which she had extended to the United Provinces and to the French Hugonots, now threatened to place her in a painful dilemma. She must either desert her allies, and suffer her navy to relapse into the dangerous state of weakness from which she had exerted all her efforts to raise it, or summon a new parliament for the purpose of making fresh demands upon the purses of her people; and this at the risk either of shaking their attachment, or,--a humiliation not to be endured,--seeing herself compelled to sacrifice to the importunities of the popular members some of the more oppressive branches of her prerogative; the right of purveyance for instance, or that of granting monopolies; both of which she had suffered to grow into enormous grievances. Mature reflection discovered to her, however, a third alternative; that of practising a still stricter oeconomy on one hand, and on the other, of increasing the productiveness to the exchequer of the customs and other branches of revenue, by reforming abuses, by detecting frauds and embezzlements, and by cutting off the exorbitant profits of collectors.

This last plan, which best accorded with her disposition, was that adopted by Elizabeth. It may be mentioned as a characteristic trait, that a few years before, she had accepted with thanks an offer secretly made to herself by some person holding an inferior station in the customs, of a full disclosure of the impositions practised upon her in that department. She had admitted this voluntary informer several times to her presence; had imposed silence in the tone of a mistress on the remonstrances of Leicester, Burleigh, and Walsingham, who indignantly urged that he was not of a rank to be thus countenanced in accusation of his superiors; and had reaped the reward of this judicious patronage, by finding herself entitled to demand from her farmer of the customs an annual rent of forty-two thousand pounds, instead of the twelve thousand pounds which he had formerly paid. She now exacted from him a further advance of eight thousand pounds per annum; and stimulated Burleigh to such a rigid superintendence of all the details of public oeconomy as produced a very important general result. It was probably in the ensuing parliament that a conference being held between the two houses respecting a bill for making the patrimonial estates of accountants liable for their arrears to the queen, and the commons desiring that it might not be retrospective, the lord treasurer pithily said; "My lords, if you had lost your purse by the way, would you look back or forwards to find it? The queen hath lost her purse."

This rigid parsimony, at once the virtue and the foible of Elizabeth, was attended accordingly with its good and its evil. It endeared her to the people, whom it protected from the imposition of new and oppressive taxes; but, being united in the complex character of this remarkable woman with an extraordinary taste for magnificence in all that related to her personal appearance, it betrayed her into a thousand meannesses, which, in spite of all the arts of graciousness in which she was an adept, served to alienate the affections of such as more nearly approached her. Her nobles found themselves heavily burthened by the long and frequent visits which she paid them at their country-seats, attended always by an enormous retinue; as well as by the contributions to her jewelry and wardrobe which custom required of them under the name of new year's gifts, and on all occasions when they had favors, or even justice, to ask at her hands[105]. There were few of the inferior suitors and court-attendants composing the crowd by which she had a vanity in seeing herself constantly surrounded, who did not find cause bitterly to rue the day when first her hollow smiles and flattering speeches seduced them to long years of irksome, servile, and often profitless assiduity.

[Note 105: Lists of the New Year's Gifts received by Elizabeth during many years have more than once appeared in print. They show that not only jewels, trinkets, rich robes, and every ornamental article of dress, were abundantly supplied to her from this source, but that sets of body linen worked with black silk round the bosom and sleeves, were regarded as no inappropriate offering from peers of the realm to the maiden-queen. The presents of the bishops and of some of the nobility always consisted of gold pieces, to the value of from five to twenty or thirty pounds, contained in embroidered silk purses. Her majesty distributed at the same season pieces of gilt plate; but not always to the same persons from whom she had received presents, nor, apparently, to an equal amount.]

Bacon in his Apophthegms relates on this subject the following anecdote. "Queen Elizabeth, seeing sir Edward---- in her garden, looked out at her window and asked him, in Italian, 'What does a man think of when he thinks of nothing?' Sir Edward, who had not had the effect of some of the queen's grants so soon as he had hoped and desired, paused a little, and then made answer; 'Madam, he thinks of a woman's promise.' The queen shrunk in her head, but was heard to say; 'Well, sir Edward, I must not confute you: Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.'"

"Queen Elizabeth," says the same author, "was dilatory enough in suits of her own nature; and the lord treasurer Burleigh, being a wise man, and willing therein to feed her humor, would say to her; 'Madam, you do well to let suitors stay; for I shall tell you, _Bis dat qui cito dat_; if you grant them speedily, they will come again the sooner.'"

It is probable that the popular story of this minister's intercepting the very moderate bounty which her majesty had proposed to herself the honor of bestowing on Spenser, is untrue with respect to this great poet; since the four lines relating to the circumstance,

"Madam,
You bid your treasurer on a time
To give me reason for my rhime,
But from that time and that season
I have had nor rhyme nor reason,"

long attributed to Spenser, are now known to be Churchyard's. Yet that the author of the _Faery Queen_ had similar injuries to endure, is manifest from those lines of unrivalled energy in which the poet, from the bitterness of his soul, describes the miseries of a profitless court-attendance. Few readers will have forgotten a passage so celebrated; but it will here be read with peculiar interest, as illustrative of the character of Elizabeth and the sufferings of her unfortunate courtiers.

"Full little knowest thou that hast not tried
What hell it is in suing long to bide;
To lose good days that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed today, to be put back tomorrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow;
To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peers;
To have thy asking, yet wait many years;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run;
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."

_Mother Hubbard's Tale._

One of the most laudable objects of the parsimony exercised by Elizabeth at this period was that of enabling herself to afford effectual aid to Henry IV. of France, now struggling, with adverse fortune but invincible resolution, to conquer from the united armies of Spain and the League the throne which was his birthright. In the depth of his distress, just when his Swiss and German auxiliaries were on the point of disbanding themselves for want of pay, the friendship of Elizabeth came in aid of his necessities with a supply of twenty-two thousand pounds; a sum, trifling as it may seem in modern estimation, which sufficed to rescue Henry from his immediate embarrassment, and which he frankly avowed to be the largest he had ever seen. The generosity of his ally did not stop here; for she speedily equipped a body of four thousand men and sent them to join him at Dieppe under command of the gallant lord Willoughby. By this reinforcement Henry was enabled to march to Paris and possess himself of its suburbs, and subsequently to engage in several other enterprises, in which he gratefully acknowledged the eminent service rendered him by the valor and fidelity of this band of English.

The next year Elizabeth, alarmed at seeing several of the ports of Bretagne opposite to her own shores garrisoned by Spanish troops, whom the Leaguers had called in to their assistance, readily entered into a new treaty with Henry, by virtue of which she sent a fresh supply of three thousand men to assist him in the recovery of this province. Her expenses however were to be repaid by the king after the expulsion of the enemy.

Sir John Norris, the appointed leader of this force, ranked among the most eminent of Elizabeth's captains; and was also possessed of some hereditary claims to her regard, which she did not fail to acknowledge as far as the jealousy of her favorites would give her leave. One of sir John's grandfathers was that Norris who suffered in the cause of Anne Boleyn; the other was lord Williams of Tame, to whom she had herself been indebted for so much respectful attention in the days of her greatest adversity. She had called up his father to the house of peers, as lord Norris of Ricot; and his mother she constantly addressed by a singular term of endearment, "My own Crow." This pair had six sons, of whom sir John was the eldest;--all, it is said, brave men, addicted to arms, and much respected by her majesty. But an unfortunate quarrel with the four sons of sir Francis Knolles, their Oxfordshire neighbour, arising out of a tournament in which the two brotherhoods were opposed to each other, procured to the Norrises the lasting enmity of this family, which, strong both by its relationship to the queen and its close alliance with Leicester, was able to impede their advancement to stations equal to their merits.

Sir John Norris learned the rudiments of military science under the celebrated admiral Coligni, to whom in his early youth he acted as a page; and he enlarged his experience as captain of the English volunteers who in 1578 generously carried the assistance of their swords to the oppressed Netherlanders when they had rushed to arms in the sacred cause of liberty and conscience. This gallant band particularly signalized its valor in the repulse of an assault made by don John of Austria upon the Dutch camp; a hot action in which Norris had three horses shot under him. In 1588 he was a distinguished member of the council of war. The expedition to Portugal in which he commanded has been already related, and its ill-success was certainly imputable to no want of courage or conduct on his part. In the war of Bretagne he gained high praise by a skilful retreat, in which he drew off his small band of English safe and entire amid a host of foes. We shall afterwards hear of him in a high command in Ireland.

Military glory was the darling object of the ambition of Essex; and jealous perhaps of the fame which sir John Norris was acquiring in the French wars, he prevailed upon the queen to grant him the command of a fresh body of troops destined to assist Henry in expelling the Leaguers from Normandy. The new general was deeply mortified at being obliged to remain for some time inactive at Dieppe, while the French king was carrying his arms into another quarter, whither Essex was restrained by the positive commands of his sovereign from following him. At length they formed in concert the siege of Rouen; but when the town was nearly reduced to extremity, an unexpected march of the duke of Parma compelled Henry to desert the enterprise. Elizabeth made it a subject of complaint against her ally, that the English soldiers were always thrust foremost on every occasion of danger; but by themselves this perilous preeminence was claimed as a privilege due to the brilliancy of their valor; and their leader, delighted with the spirit which they displayed, encouraged and rewarded it by distributing among his officers, with a profusion which highly offended his sovereign, the honor of knighthood, bestowed by herself with so much selection and reserve. Essex supported his character for personal courage, and indulged his impetuous temper, by sending an idle challenge to the governor of Rouen, who seems to have known his duty too well to accept it; but his sanguine anticipations of some distinguished success were baffled by a want of correspondence between the plans of Henry and the commands of Elizabeth; perhaps also in some degree by his own deficiency in the skill of a general. He had the further grief to lose by a musket-shot his only brother Walter Devereux, a young man of great hopes to whom he was fondly attached; and leaving his men before Rouen, under the conduct of sir Roger Williams, a brave soldier, he returned with little glory in the beginning of 1592 to soothe the displeasure of the queen and combat the malicious suggestions of his enemies. In this bloodless warfare better success awaited him. His partial mistress received with favor his excuses; and not only restored him to her wonted grace, but soon after testified her opinion of his abilities by granting him admission into the privy-council.

The royal progress of this year in Sussex and Hampshire affords some circumstances worthy of mention. Viscount Montacute, (now written Montagu,) a nobleman in much esteem with Elizabeth, though a zealous catholic, solicited the honor of entertaining her at his seat of Coudray near Midhurst; a mansion splendid enough to attract the curiosity and admiration of a royal visitant. The manor of Midhurst, in which Coudray is situated, had belonged during several ages to a branch of the potent family of Bohun; thence it passed into possession of the Nevils, a race second to none in England in the antiquity of its nobility and the splendor of its alliances. It thus became a part of the vast inheritance of Margaret countess of Salisbury, daughter of George duke of Clarence. Coudray-house was the principal residence of this illustrious and injured lady, and it was here that the discovery took place of those papal bulls and emblematical banners which afforded a pretext to malice and rapacity to arm themselves against the miserable remnant of her days.

By the attainder of the countess, this with the rest of her estates became forfeited to the crown; but the tyrant Henry was prevailed upon to regrant it, in exchange for other lands, to the heirs of her great-uncle John Nevil marquis Montagu. From an heir female of this branch viscount Montagu, son of sir Anthony Brown master of the horse to Henry VIII., derived it and his title, conferred by queen Mary. But to the ancient mansion there had previously been substituted by his half-brother the earl of Southampton, a costly structure decorated internally with that profusion of homely art which displayed the wealth and satisfied the taste of a courtier of Henry VIII. The building was as usual quadrangular, with a great gate flanked by two towers in the centre of the principal front. At the upper end of the hall stood a buck, as large as life, carved in brown wood, bearing on his shoulder the shield of England and under it that of Brown with, many quarterings: ten other bucks, in various attitudes and of the size of life, were planted at intervals. There was a parlour more elegantly adorned with the works of Holbein and his scholars;--a chapel richly furnished;--a long gallery painted with the twelve apostles;--and a corresponding one hung with family pictures and with various old paintings on subjects religious and military, brought from Battle Abbey, the spoils of which had been assigned to sir Anthony Brown as that share of the general plunder of the monasteries to which his long and faithful service had entitled him from the bounty of his master.

Amongst other particulars of the visit of her majesty at Coudray, we are told that on the morning after her arrival she rode in the park, where "a delicate bower" was prepared, and a nymph with a sweet song delivered her a cross-bow to shoot at the deer, of which she killed three or four and the countess of Kildare one:--it may be added, that this was a kind of amusement not unfrequently shared by the ladies of that age; an additional trait of the barbarity of manners.

Viscount Montagu died two years after this visit, and, to complete his story, lies buried in Midhurst church under a splendid monument of many-colored marbles, on which may still be seen a figure representing him kneeling before an altar, in fine gilt armour, with a cloak and "beard of formal cut." Beneath are placed recumbent effigies of his two wives dressed in rich cloaks and ruffs, with chained unicorns at their feet, and the whole is surrounded with sculptured scutcheons laboriously executed with innumerable quarterings.

At Elvetham in Hampshire the queen was sumptuously entertained during a visit of four days by the earl of Hertford. This nobleman was reputed to be master of more ready money than any other person in the kingdom; and though the cruel imprisonment of nine years, by which Elizabeth had doomed him to expiate the offence of a clandestine union with the blood-royal, could scarcely have been obliterated from his indignant memory, certain considerations respecting the interests of his children might probably render him not unwilling to gratify her by a splendid act of homage, though peculiar circumstances increased beyond measure the expense and inconvenience of her present visit. Elvetham, which was little more than a hunting-seat, was far from possessing sufficient accommodation for the court, and the earl was obliged to supply its deficiencies by very extensive erections of timber, fitted up and furnished with all the elegance that circumstances would permit. He likewise found it necessary to cause a large pond to be dug, in which were formed three islands, artificially constructed in the likeness of a fort, a ship, and a mount, for the exhibition of fireworks and other splendid pageantries. The water was made to swarm with swimming and wading sea-gods, who blew trumpets instead of shells, and recited verses in praise of her majesty: finally, a tremendous battle was enacted between the Tritons of the pond and certain sylvan deities of the park, which was long and valiantly disputed, with darts on one side and large squirts on the other, and suddenly terminated, to the delight of all beholders, by the seizure and submersion of old Sylvanus himself.

Elizabeth quitted Elvetham so highly gratified by the attentions of the noble owner, that she made him a voluntary promise of her special favor and protection; but we shall find hereafter, that her long-enduring displeasure against him relative to his first marriage was not yet so entirely laid aside but that a slight pretext was sufficient to bring it once more into malignant activity.

Early in the same summer the queen had also paid a visit to lord Burleigh at his favorite seat in Hertfordshire, of which sir Thomas Wylks thus speaks in a letter to sir Robert Sidney:

"I suppose you have heard of her majesty's great entertainment at Theobalds', of her knighting Mr. Robert Cecil, and of the expectation of his advancement to the secretaryship; but so it is as we say in court, that the knighthood must serve for both[106]."

[Note 106: "Sidney Papers."]

Sir Christopher Hatton died in the latter end of the year 1591. It appears that he had been languishing for a considerable time under a mortal disease; yet the vulgar appetite for the wonderful and the tragical occasioned it to be reported that he died of a broken heart, in consequence of her majesty's having demanded of him, with a rigor which he had not anticipated, the payment of certain moneys received by him for tenths and first fruits: it was added, that struck with compunction on learning to what extremity her severity had reduced him, her majesty had paid him several visits, and endeavoured by her gracious and soothing speeches to revive his failing spirits;--but that the blow was struck, and her repentance came too late. It is indeed certain that the queen manifested great interest in the fate of her chancellor, and paid him during his last illness very extraordinary personal attentions:--but it ought to be mentioned, in refutation of the former part of the story, that she remitted to his nephew and heir, who was married to a grand-daughter of Burleigh's, all her claims on the property which he left behind him.

During his lifetime, also, Hatton seems to have tasted more largely than most of his competitors of the solid fruits of royal favor. Elizabeth persevered in the practice originating in the reigns of her father and brother, of endowing her courtiers out of the spoils of the church. Sometimes, to the public scandal, she would keep a bishopric many years vacant for the sake of appropriating its whole revenues to secular uses and persons; and still more frequently, the presentation to a see was given under the condition, express or implied, that certain manors should be detached from its possessions, or beneficial leases of lands and tenements granted to particular persons. Thus the bishop of Ely was required to make a cession to sir Christopher Hatton of the garden and orchard of Ely-house near Holborn; on the refusal of the prelate to surrender property which he regarded himself as bound in honor and conscience to transmit unimpaired to his successors, Hatton instituted against him a chancery suit; and having at length succeeded in wresting from him the land, made it the site of a splendid house surrounded by gardens, which have been succeeded by the street still bearing his name. He had even sufficient interest with her majesty to cause her to address to the bishop the following violent letter, several times, with some variations, reprinted.

* * * * *

"Proud prelate;

"I understand you are backward in complying with your agreement; but I would have you to know, that I who made you what you are can unmake you; and if you do not forthwith fulfil your engagement, by God I will immediately unfrock you.

"Yours as you demean yourself,

"ELIZABETH."

* * * * *

Sir John Harrington, in his Brief View of the Church of England, accuses the lord-chancellor Hatton of coveting likewise a certain manor attached to the see of Bath and Wells, and of inflaming the queen's indignation against bishop Godwin on account of his second marriage, in order to frighten him into compliance; a manoeuvre which in part succeeded, since the bishop was reduced, by way of compromise, to grant him a long lease of another manor somewhat inferior in value.

With all this, Hatton, as we have formerly observed, was distinguished as the patron of the established church against the puritans: but his zeal in its behalf, whether real or affected, was attended by a spirit of moderation then rare and always commendable. He disliked, and sometimes checked, the oppressions exercised against the papists by the rigid enforcement of recent statutes; and he is reported to have held the doctrine, at that time a novel one, that neither fire nor steel ought ever to be employed on a religious account.

The chancellor, besides his other merits and accomplishments, was a cultivator of the drama. In 1568 a tragedy was performed before her majesty, and afterwards published, entitled Tancred and Gismund, or Gismonde of Salerne, the joint performance of five students of the Temple, who appear each to have taken an act; the fourth bears the signature of Hatton. It is also probable that he gave the queen some assistance in similar pursuits, as her translation of a part of the tragedy of Hercules Oetaeus, preserved in the Bodleian, is in his handwriting.

But it was never forgotten by others, nor apparently by himself, that he was brought into notice by his dancing; and we learn from a contemporary letter-writer, that even after he had attained the dignity of lord chancellor he laid aside his gown to dance at the wedding of his nephew. The circumstance is pleasantly alluded to by Gray in the description of Stoke-Pogeis house with which his "Long Story" opens.

"In Britain's isle, no matter where,
An ancient pile of building stands;
The Huntingdons and Hattons there
Employed the power of fairy hands

To raise the ceiling's fretted height,
Each pannel in achievements clothing,
Rich windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing.

Full oft within the spacious walls,
When he had fifty winters o'er him,
My grave lord keeper led the brawls,
The seal and maces danced before him.

His bushy beard and shoe-strings green,
His high-crown'd hat and satin doublet,
Moved the stout heart of England's queen,
Though pope and Spaniard could not trouble it."

As chancellor of Oxford, Hatton was succeeded by lord Buckhurst, to the fresh mortification of Essex, who again advanced pretensions to this honorary office, and was a second time baffled by her majesty's open interference in behalf of his competitor.

The more important post of lord chancellor remained vacant for some months, the seals being put in commission; after which serjeant Pickering was appointed lord keeper,--a person of respectable character, who appears to have performed the duties of his office without taking any conspicuous part in the court factions, or exercising any marked influence over the general administration of affairs.

Towards one person of considerable note in his day, sir John Perrot, some time deputy of Ireland, Hatton is reported to have acted the part of an industrious and contriving enemy; being provoked by the taunts which sir John was continually throwing out against him as one who "had entered the court in a galliard," and further instigated by the complaints, well or ill founded, against the deputy, of some of his particular friends and adherents.

Sir John Perrot derived from a considerable family of that name seated at Haroldstone in Pembrokeshire, his name and large estates; but his features, his figure, his air, and common fame, gave him king Henry VIII. for a father. Nor was his resemblance to this redoubted monarch merely external; his temper was haughty and violent, his behaviour _blustering_, his language always coarse, and, in the fits of rage to which he was subject, abusive to excess. Yet was he destitute neither of merit nor abilities. As president of Munster, he had rendered great services to her majesty in 1572 by his vigorous conduct against the rebels. As lord deputy of Ireland between the years 1584 and 1588, he had made efforts still more praiseworthy towards the pacification of that unhappy and ill-governed country, by checking as much as possible the oppressions of every kind exercised by the English of the pale against the miserable natives, towards whom his policy was liberal and benevolent. But his attempts at reformation armed against him, as usual, a host of foes, amongst whom was particularly distinguished Loftus archbishop of Dublin, whom he had exasperated by proposing to apply the revenues of St. Patrick's cathedral to the foundation of an university in the capital of Ireland. Forged letters were amongst the means to which the unprincipled malice of his adversaries resorted for his destruction. One of these atrocious fabrications, in which an Irish chieftain was made to complain of excessive injustice on the part of the deputy, was detected by the exertions of the supposed writer, whom Perrot had in reality attached to himself by many benefits; but a second letter, which contained a protection to a catholic priest and made him employ the words _our_ castle of Dublin, _our_ kingdom of Ireland, produced a fatally strong impression on the jealous mind of Elizabeth.

Meantime the ill-fated deputy, conscious of his own fidelity and essential loyalty, and unsuspicious of the snares spread around him, was often unguarded enough to give vent in gross and furious invective against the person of majesty itself, to the profound vexation which he, in common with all preceding and following governors of Ireland under Elizabeth, was destined to endure from the penury of her supplies and the magnitude of her requisitions. His words were all carried to the queen, mingled with such artful insinuations as served to impart to these unmeaning ebullitions of a hasty temper the air of deliberate contempt and meditated disloyalty towards his sovereign.

Just before the sailing of the armada, Perrot was recalled, partly indeed at his own request. A rigid or rather a malicious inquiry was then instituted into all the details of his actions, words and behaviour in Ireland, and he was committed to the friendly custody of lord Burleigh. Afterwards, the lords Hunsdon and Buckhurst, with two or three other councillors, were ordered to search and seize his papers in the house of the lord treasurer without the participation of this great minister, who was at once offended and alarmed at the step. Perrot was carried to the Tower, and at length, in April 1592, put upon his trial for high treason. The principal heads of accusation were;--his contemptuous words of the queen;--his secret encouragement of O'Rourk's rebellion and the Spanish invasion, and his favoring of traitors. Of all these charges except the first he seems to have proved his innocence, and on this he excused himself by the heat of his temper and the absence of all ill intention from his mind. He was however found guilty by a jury much more studious of the reputation of loyalty than careful of the rights of Englishmen.

On leaving the bar, he is reported to have exclaimed, "God's death! will the queen suffer her brother to be offered up as a sacrifice to the envy of my frisking adversaries!"

The queen felt the force of this appeal to the ties of blood. It was long before she could be brought to confirm his sentence, and she would never sign a warrant for its execution. Burleigh shed tears on hearing the verdict, saying with a sigh, that hatred was always the more inveterate the less it was deserved.

Elizabeth, when her first emotions of anger had passed away, was now frequently heard to praise that rescript of the emperor Theodosius in which it is thus written:--

"Should any one have spoken evil of the emperor, if through levity, it should be despised; if through insanity, pitied; if through malice, forgiven." She is likewise said, in language more familiar to her, to have sworn a great oath that they who accused Perrot were all knaves, and he an honest and faithful man. It was accordingly presumed that she entertained the design of extending to him the royal pardon; but her mercy, if such it merits to be called, was tardy; and in September 1592, six months after his condemnation, this victim of malice perished in the Tower, of disease, according to Camden; but, by other accounts, of a broken heart. In either case the story is an affecting one, and worthy to be had in lasting remembrance, as a striking and terrible example of the potency of court-intrigue, and the guilty subserviency of judicial tribunals under the jealous rule of the last of the Tudors.

English literature, under the auspices of Elizabeth and her learned court, had been advancing with a steady and rapid progress; and it may be interesting to contemplate the state of one of its fairest provinces as exhibited by the pen of an able critic, who in the year 1589 gave to the world an Art of English Poesy. This work, though addressed to the queen, was published with a dedication by the printer to lord Burleigh; for the author thought proper to remain concealed: on its first appearance its merit caused it to be ascribed to Spenser by some, and by others to Sidney; but it was traced at length to Puttenham, one of her majesty's gentleman-pensioners, the author of some adulatory poems addressed to her and called Partheniads, and of various other pieces now lost.

The subject is here methodically treated in three books; the first, "Of Poets and Poesy;" the second, "Of Proportion;" the third, "Of Ornament." After some remarks on the origin of the art and its earliest professors, and an account of the various kinds of poems known to the ancients,--in which there is an absence of pedantry, of quaintness, and of every species of puerility, very rare among the didactic writers of the age,--the critic proceeds to an enumeration of our principal vernacular poets, or "_vulgar makers_," as he is pleased to anglicize the words. Beginning with a just tribute to Chaucer, as the father of genuine English verse, he passes rapidly to the latter end of the reign of Henry VIII., when, as he observes, there "sprung up a new company of courtly makers, of whom sir Thomas Wyat the elder and Henry earl of Surry were the two chieftains; who having travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Arioste, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy, from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style[107]."

[Note 107: I have quoted this passage partly for the sake of the express and authentic testimony which it bears to the fact of Surry's having visited Italy, which Mr. Chalmers and after him Dr. Nott, in their respective biographies of the noble poet, have been induced to call in question.]

After slight notice of the minor poets, who flourished under Edward VI. and Mary, he goes on to observe that "in her majesty's time that now is, are sprung up another crew of courtly makers, noblemen and gentlemen of her majesty's own servants, who have written excellently well, as it would appear if their doing could be found out and made public with the rest." And in a subsequent passage he thus awards to each of them his appropriate commendation. "Of the latter sort I think thus: That for tragedy the lord Buckhurst and master Edward Ferrys (Ferrers), for such doings as I have seen of theirs do deserve the highest price. The earl of Oxford and master Edwards of her majesty's chapel for comedy and interlude. For eglogue and pastoral poesy, sir Philip Sidney and master Chaloner, and that other gentleman who wrate the late 'Shepherd's Calendar'[108]. For dirty and amorous ode I find sir Walter Raleigh's vein most lofty, insolent and passionate. Master Edward Dyer for elegy, most sweet, solemn and of high conceit. Gascoigne for a good metre and for a plentiful vein. Phaer and Golding for a learned and well corrected verse, specially in translation clear and very faithfully answering their author's intent. Others have also written with much facility, but more commendably perchance if they had not written so much nor so popularly[109]." The passage concludes with a piece of flattery to her majesty in her poetical capacity, unworthy of transcription.

[Note 108: Spenser published this work under the signature of "Immerito."]

[Note 109: Art of English Poesy, book i.]

Under the head of "Poetical proportion" or metre, our author writes learnedly of the measures of the ancients, and on those employed by our native poets with singular taste and judgement, except that the artist-like pride in difficulty overcome has inspired him with an unwarrantable fondness for verses arranged in eggs, roundels, lozenges, triquets, and other ingenious figures, of which he has given diagrams further illustrated by finished specimens of his own construction.

Great efforts had been made about this period by a literary party, of which Stainhurst the translator of Virgil, Sidney and Gabriel Hervey were the leaders, to introduce the Greek and Roman measures into English verse, and Puttenham has judged it necessary to compose a chapter thus intituled: "How, if all manner of sudden innovations were not very scandalous, specially in the laws of any language or art, the use of Greek and Latin feet might be brought into our vulgar poesy, and with good grace enough." But it is evident on the whole, that he bore no good will to this pedantic novelty.

In treating of "Ornament," our author enumerates, explains and exemplifies all the rhetorical figures of the Greeks; adding, for the benefit of courtiers and ladies, to whom his work is principally addressed, translations of their names; several of which would require to be retranslated for the benefit of the modern reader, as for example the three following, all figures of derision:--"The fleering frump;"--"The broad flout;"--"The privy nip." At the present day, however, the work of Puttenham is most of all to be valued for the remarks on language and on manners, and the contemporary anecdotes with which it abounds, and of which some examples may be quoted. After observing that "as it hath been always reputed a great fault to use figurative speeches foolishly and indiscreetly, so it is esteemed no less an imperfection in man's utterance, to have none use of figure at all, specially in our writing and speeches public, making them but as our ordinary talk, than which nothing can be more unsavory and far from all civility:--'I remember,' says he, 'in the first year of queen Mary's reign a knight of Yorkshire was chosen speaker of the parliament, a good gentleman and wise, in the affairs of his shire, and not unlearned in the laws of the realm; but as well for lack of some of his teeth as for want of language, nothing well spoken, which at that time and business was most behoveful for him to have been: this man, after he had made his oration to the queen; which ye know is of course to be done at the first assembly of both houses; a bencher of the Temple, both well learned and very eloquent, returning from the parliament house asked another gentleman his friend how he liked Mr. Speaker's oration; 'Mary,' quoth the other, 'methinks I heard not a better alehouse tale told this seven years.'... And though grave and wise councillors in their consultations do not use much superfluous eloquence, and also in their judicial hearings do much mislike all scholastical rhetorics: yet in such a case... if the lord chancellor of England or archbishop of Canterbury himself were to speak, he ought to do it cunningly and eloquently, which cannot be without the use of figures: and nevertheless none impeachment or blemish to the gravity of the persons or of the cause: wherein I report me to them that knew sir Nicholas Bacon lord keeper of the great seal, or the now lord treasurer of England, and have been conversant with their speeches made in the Parliament house and Star-chamber. From whose lips I have seen to proceed more grave and natural eloquence, than from all the orators of Oxford or Cambridge; but all is as it is handled, and maketh no matter whether the same eloquence be natural to them or artificial (though I rather think natural); yet were they known to be learned and not unskilful of the art when they were younger men.... I have come to the lord keeper sir Nicholas Bacon, and found him sitting in his gallery alone with the works of Quintilian before him; indeed he was a most eloquent man, and of rare learning and wisdom as ever I knew England to breed; and one that joyed as much in learned men and men of good wits." He mentions being a by-stander when a doctor of civil law, "pleading in a litigious cause betwixt a man and his wife, before a great magistrate, who (as they can tell that knew him) was a man very well learned and grave, but somewhat sour and of no plausible utterance: the gentleman's chance was to say: 'My lord, the simple woman is not so much to blame as her leud abettors, who by _violent_ persuasions have led her into this wilfulness.' Quoth the Judge; 'What need such eloquent terms in this place?' The gentleman replied, 'Doth your lordship mislike the term (_violent_)? and methinks I speak it to great purpose; for I am sure she would never have done it, but by force of persuasion.'" &c.

Pursuing the subject of language, which, he says, "in our maker or poet must be heedily looked unto that it be natural, pure, and the most usual of all his country," after some other rules or cautions he adds: "Our maker therefore at these days shall not follow Piers Plowman, nor Gower, nor Lydgate, nor yet Chaucer, for their language is now out of use with us: neither shall he take the terms of Northern men, such as they use in daily talk, whether they be noblemen or gentlemen or of their best clerks, all is a matter; nor in effect any speech used beyond the river of Trent, though no man can deny but that theirs is the purer English Saxon at this day, yet it is not so courtly nor so current as our Southern English is; no more is the far Western man's speech: ye shall therefore take the usual speech of the court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within sixty miles and not much above. I say not this but in every shire of England there be gentlemen and others that speak, but specially write, as good Southern as we of Middlesex or Surry do; but not the common people of every shire, to whom the gentlemen and also their learned clerks do for the most part condescend; but herein we are ruled by the English dictionaries and other books written by learned men, and therefore it needeth none other direction in that behalf. Albeit peradventure some small admonition be not impertinent, for we find in our English writers many words and speeches amendable, and ye shall see in some many inkhorn terms so ill affected brought in by men of learning, as preachers and schoolmasters; and many strange terms of other languages by secretaries and merchants and travellers, and many dark words and not usual nor well sounding, though they be daily spoken in court. Wherefore great heed must be taken by our maker in this point that his choice be good." He modestly expresses his apprehensions that in some of these respects he may himself be accounted a transgressor, and he subjoins a list of the new, foreign or unusual words employed by him in this tract, with his reasons for their adoption. Of this number are; _scientific_, _conduict_, "a French word, but well allowed of us, and long since usual; it sounds something more than this word (leading) for it is applied only to the leading of a captain, and not as a little boy should lead a blind man;" _idiom_, from the Greek; _significative_, "borrowed of the Latin and French, but to us brought in first by some noblemen's secretary, as I think, yet doth so well serve the turn as it could not now be spared; and many more like usurped Latin and French words; as, _method_, _methodical_, _placation_, _function_, _assubtiling_, _refining_, _compendious_, _prolix_, _figurative_, _inveigle_, a term borrowed of our common lawyers: _impression_, also a new term, but well expressing the matter, and more than our English word:" _penetrate_, _penetrable_, _indignity_ in the sense of unworthiness, and a few more[110]. The whole enumeration is curious, and strikingly exhibits the state of language at this epoch, when the rapid advancement of letters and of all the arts of social life was creating a daily want of new terms, which writers in all classes and individuals in every walk of life regarded themselves as authorized to supply at their own discretion, in any manner and from any sources most accessible to them, whether pure or corrupt, ancient or modern. The pedants of the universities, and the travelled coxcombs of the court, had each a neological jargon of their own, unintelligible to each other and to the people at large; on the other hand, there were a few persons of grave professions and austere characters, who, like Cato the Censor during a similar period of accelerated progress in the Roman state, prided themselves on preserving in all its unsophisticated simplicity, or primitive rudeness, the tongue of their forefathers. The judicious Puttenham, uniting the accuracy of scholastic learning with the enlargement of mind acquired by long intercourse among foreign nations, and with the polish of a courtier, places himself between the contending parties, and with a manly disdain of every species of affectation, but especially that of rusticity and barbarism, avails himself, without scruple as without excess, of the copiousness of other languages to supply the remaining deficiencies of his own.

[Note 110: Art of English Poesy, book iii.]

Several chapters of the book "of Ornament" are devoted to the discussion of the decent, or seemly, in words and actions, and prove the author to have been a nice observer of manners as well as a refined critic of style. He severely censures a certain translator of Virgil, who said "that AEneas was fain to _trudge_ out of Troy; which term better became to be spoken of a beggar, or of a rogue, or of a lackey:" and another who called the same hero "by fate a _fugitive_;" and who inquires "What moved Juno to _tug_ so great a captain;" a word "the most indecent in this case that could have been devised, since it is derived from the cart, and signifies the draught or pull of the horses." The phrase "a prince's _pelf_" is reprobated, because _pelf_ means properly "the scraps or shreds of taylors and of skinners." He gives strict rules for the decorous behaviour of ambassadors and all who address themselves to princes, being himself a courtier, and having probably exercised some diplomatic function. "I have seen," says he, "foreign ambassadors in the queen's presence laugh so dissolutely at some rare pastime or sport that hath been made there, that nothing in the world could have worse becomen them." With respect to men in other stations of life he is pleased to say, it is decent for a priest "to be sober and sad;" "a judge to be incorrupted, solitary, and unacquainted with courtiers or courtly entertainments... without plait or wrinkle, sour in look and churlish in speech; contrariwise a courtly gentleman to be lofty and curious in countenance, yet sometimes a creeper and a curry favell with his superiors." "And in a prince it is decent to go slowly and to march with leisure, and with a certain grandity rather than gravity; as our sovereign lady and mistress, the very image of majesty and magnificence, is accustomed to do generally, unless it be when she walketh apace for her pleasure, or to catch her a heat in the cold mornings. Nevertheless it is not so decent in a meaner person, as I have discerned in some counterfeit ladies of the country, which use it much to their own derision. This comeliness was wanting in queen Mary, _otherwise a very good and honorable princess_. And was some blemish to the emperor Ferdinando, a most noble-minded man, yet so careless and forgetful of himself in that behalf, as I have seen him run up a pair of stairs so swift and nimble a pace, as almost had not become a very mean man, who had not gone in some hasty business."

Respecting the poets mentioned by Puttenham whose names have not already occurred in the present work, it may be observed, that excepting a few lines quoted by this critic, there is nothing remaining of sir Edward Dyer's, except, which is highly probable, he is to be reckoned among the anonymous contributors to the popular collections of that day. Of Gascoigne, on the contrary, enough is left to exhaust the patience of any modern reader. In his youth, neglecting the study of the law for poetry and pleasure, he poured forth an abundance of amatory pieces; some of them sonnets closely imitating the Italian ones in style as well as structure. Afterwards, during a five-years service in the war of Flanders, he found leisure for much serious thought; and discarding the levities of his early years, he composed by way of expiation a moral satire in blank verse called the Steel Glass, and several religious pieces. Notwithstanding however this newly assumed seriousness, he attended her majesty in her progress in the summer of 1575, and composed a large number of courtly verses as a contribution to "the princely pleasures of Kennelworth." Gascoigne died in October 1577. Of his minor poems the following may be cited as a pleasing specimen.

THE LULLABY OF A LOVER.

Sing lullaby as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest,
And lullaby can I sing too
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child;
And if I be not much beguil'd,
Full many wanton babes have I,
Which must be still'd with lullaby.