Part 33 (2/2)

In point of priority by heredity King James of Scotland unquestionably stood first of the descendants of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York; yet the fact that he was not only an alien but King of Scotland made him in himself an unwelcome candidate. Next to him, since like him she descended from Margaret Tudor, stood his cousin Arabella--a Stewart too, but of the Lennox Stewarts, not the Royal House: an English subject; but with the drawback that she was a woman and unmarried. Third, but first under the will of Henry VIII. was Lord Beauchamp, son of Katharine Grey and the Earl of Hertford; about the validity of his parents' marriage however there was a doubt. The Stanleys of Derby, who through Margaret Clifford could claim descent from the younger daughter of Henry VII., would have nothing to do with inheriting the crown; no more would the Earl of Huntingdon who descended from Edward IV.'s brother, George of Clarence. But Philip of Spain claimed the crown for himself as a descendant of John of Gaunt; though, the union of the crowns of England and Spain being admittedly impracticable, he was under promise to transfer his claim to a hitherto unnamed nominee, presumably his sister. Virtually therefore Isabella ranked as a possible though not very enthusiastic candidate.

[Sidenote: The last intrigues]

By this time, it was perfectly obvious that the Infanta could not be forced upon England, though it was supposed that the Moderates would have favoured her candidature provided she brought Flanders with her: whereas the negotiations controlled by Cecil were not tending to bring about any such result. As 1602 drew to a close, the ablest man in Spain, Olivares, was emphasising the necessity for giving the English Catholics as a body a free hand to nominate an English candidate instead of an alien. It is probable, though it cannot be called certain, that there was a plot to unite the claims of Arabella and Lord Beauchamp by marrying them, with an implication that both were prepared in due time to declare themselves Catholics.

Meantime the Moderates were awaiting direction from Cecil; who ostensibly was himself waiting on a hint from the Queen, but was privily keeping the way clear for James, while seeking to implicate Raleigh and others in language and actions which might at any rate be interpreted as hostile to him. In this secret intriguing, Cecil's great ally was Lord Henry Howard, a brother of the last Duke of Norfolk; and he had with him the Careys of the Hunsdon family. Of the Moderates in general it can only be said that, while there was no candidate in whose favour they could combine with any warmth, James was rather more obnoxious to them than others. Yet they did not combine against him, while if any of them sought to ingratiate themselves with him Cecil was particularly careful to sow distrust of them in the Scots King's mind, unless they happened to be partisans of his own or at any rate probable allies. When Arabella tried to escape from what was practically the custody of her grandmother the Dowager Countess of Shrewsbury, the famous ”Bess of Hardwick,” the attempt was nipped in the bud: and the Catholics were still without any declared candidate when the lonely old Queen was seized in March with her last mortal illness.

[Sidenote: 1603 Death of the Queen]

As Elizabeth lay on her death-bed, her entourage consisted almost exclusively of Cecil and his friends, among whom is to be numbered the old Lord Admiral, though he was innocent of the intrigues going on. The s.h.i.+ps in the Thames, the troops in the North, were commanded by members of the same group; almost before the breath was out of her body Robert Carey was galloping North to hail James I. King of England: and the world was told that Elizabeth's last conscious act was to ratify by a sign the succession of her old-time rival's son. In her seventieth year, in the early hours of March 24th, 1603, ended the long and glorious reign of the Virgin Queen.

CHAPTER XXVII

ELIZABETH (xii), 1558-1603--LITERATURE

The Elizabethan Literature demands from the general Historian something more than the incidental references which may suffice in other periods. In earlier days, he may draw upon Piers Plowman or Chaucer for evidence and ill.u.s.trations of the prevalent social conditions; in the century following he may appeal to Milton and Bunyan to elucidate aspects of Puritanism. But the Elizabethan literature is in a degree quite unique, the expression of the whole spirit of the time, its many-sidedness, its vigour, its creative force; helping us to realise how it was that Elizabeth's Englishmen made Elizabeth's England. And this of course is beside the other fact that for the historian of literature _per se_ there is no period quite so interesting and instructive, none of such vital importance in the evolution of English Letters.

[Sidenote: Birth of a National Literature]

In the five centuries since the Norman Conquest, ending in 1566, England had produced but one single poet of the front rank or anything approaching it, Geoffrey Chaucer. From the time when Edmund Spenser in 1579 delighted his contemporaries by the publication of the _Shepherd's Calendar_, she has never been without writers whose claim to eminence among poets can be at least plausibly maintained. Before very much the same date, English prose as a consciously artistic medium of utterance had hardly begun to be recognised; even Thomas More wrote his _Utopia_ in Latin, and it was not translated into English till many years after his death. The possibility of an English Prose Style--written prose as distinguished from spoken oratory--had hardly presented itself except to the translators of Scripture and the Liturgy. Before the century closed, the world was enriched by the compact and pregnant sentences of Francis Bacon's _Essays_ and the dignified simplicity of Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_. As with the Poets, so also the chain of masters of English Prose is unbroken from that day forward. But most sudden and startling of all the various developments was that of the Drama. It may be doubted if any critical observer in 1579 would have ventured even to suspect that the crowning glory of Elizabeth's reign was to be the work of playwrights; yet before she died the genius of Marlowe had blazed and been quenched, _Hamlet_ had appeared on the boards, Jonson's ”learned sock” had achieved fame; the men whose names we are wont to a.s.sociate with the ”Mermaid” had most of them already begun their career, even if they had not yet pa.s.sed the stage of merely adapting, doctoring, and ”writing up” for managers the stock-plays in their repertory. The Drama, proving itself the form of literary expression most perfectly adapted to the spirit of the age, absorbed the available literary talent as it has never done since.

Sudden as the outburst was however, it had been made possible by many years of wide and miscellaneous experiment, though little of any permanent intrinsic value had been actually achieved.

[Sidenote: Prose: before 1579]

Except for Ascham's _Toxophilus_, very few pa.s.sages [Footnote: Such as may be lighted on for instance in ”Sir John Mandeville,” Mallory, and Hall's _Chronicle_.] of English prose notable as prose--that is, consciously essaying what is connoted by the term _style_--had been produced before Elizabeth's accession, apart from the liturgical, rhetorical, or controversial work of the clergy or clerical disputants. The _Acts and Monuments_ of Foxe, popularly known as, the ”Book of Martyrs,” published in the first decade of the reign, showed the development of a power of vigorously dramatic narrative which should not be overlooked. The enormous popularity however which that work achieved was at least in part the outcome of the general sterility. Men had not yet learned to write, but they were ready to read even voraciously. Culture was in vogue. As things stood culture, in practice, meant and could mean little else than the study of Latin and Italian authors--Greek being still reserved for the learned--of whose works translations, some of notable merit, were very soon beginning to appear on the market. It was inevitably to these two literatures--the Latin and the Italian--that men turned in the first instance to find the models and formulate the canons of literary art; with only occasional divagations in the direction of France or Spain, countries which were scarcely a generation in advance of England. We remark that the old idea that for prose which was intended to live the true medium was still the one international literary language, Latin, died exceedingly hard; Bacon himself, great master though he was of his mother-tongue, maintaining it quite definitely. This pedantic att.i.tude however was not involved in the idea of culture, and men welcomed with avidity an author who made his appeal to the non-academic public in vigorous English. The conversion even of the academic mind was close at hand.

[Sidenote: 1579-89]

The year 1579 is in the strictest sense an epoch in the history of English Literature; as witnessing the first appearance of a new and original force in English verse, and the first deliberate and elaborate effort in the direction of artistically constructed English Prose. In that year, John Lyly published his _Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit_, and Edmund Spenser his _Shepherd's Calendar_.

[Sidenote: Euphues]

_Euphues_, and its companion volume _Euphues and His England_ enjoyed a very remarkable if temporary vogue; running through numerous editions in the course of the ensuing fifty years. After that, it dropped.

It is not surprising that it dropped. The work is tedious, prolix, affected, abounding in pedantry and in intellectual foppery. But its whole meaning and significance at the time when it was written are lost to us if we pay attention only to the ridicule which very soon fell upon it, to the mockery in Shakespeare's burlesques of Euphuism, or to Scott's later parody of it in the character of Sir Piercie Shafton. The everlasting ant.i.theses, the perpetual playing with words, the alliterative trickery, the acc.u.mulation of far-fetched similes, the endless and often most inappropriate cla.s.sical, mythological, and quasi-zoological allusions and parallels, are indeed sufficiently absurd and wearisome; and when ”Euphuism” became a fas.h.i.+onable craze, its sillier disciples were a very fit target for jesting and mirth, very much as in our own day the humorists found abundant and legitimate food for laughter in the vagaries of what was known as ”aestheticism”. In both cases, the extravagances were the separable accidents, the superficial excrescences, of a real intellectual movement with a quite healthy motive. _Euphues_ itself was a real and serious if somewhat misdirected effort at making a moralised culture fas.h.i.+onable, and at elevating; the English tongue into a medium of refined and polished expression. If the Euphuists included Armados among them, they numbered also their Birons and Rosalines. Though Lyly practised exuberances of verbal jugglery, he was not their inventor; they were a vice of the times, largely borrowed from foreign models; and Shakespeare himself, in moments of aberrant ingenuity, produced--not for laughter--samples which Lyly might have admired but could never have emulated.

[Sidenote: Sidney's prose works]

Lyly's work was a novel experiment in prose, without previous parallel; critical judgments were no very long time in detecting and condemning his extravagances. But the same intellectual motive was soon to find a more chastened and artistic expression in the work of one who was still but a literary experimentalist when he meet his death at Zutphen. When Sir Philip Sidney, that ”verray parfit gentil knight,” scholar, soldier, and statesman, if the unanimous apprais.e.m.e.nt of the best of his contemporaries is worth anything, wrote his _Defence of Poesie_, he had not indeed broken free from the trammels of academic theory; but it is a very often acute and always charming piece of critical work in scholarly and graceful language. More affected and generally inferior in style, but also still on the whole scholarly and graceful in its language, is his _Arcadia_, an example of the indefinitely constructed amorphous Romances out of which in course of long time the novel was to be evolved. The dwellers in that Arcady are as far removed from the nymphs and swains of Watteau's day as from a primitive Greek population; they behave as no human beings ever did or could behave; they belong in short to a particularly unconvincing kind of fairy-land, of which the vogue happily died out at an early stage. The _Arcadia_ is not intrinsically a great book, nor can it be read to-day without a considerable effort; yet it must always be notable as not merely an experiment but a positive achievement in English prose style. Neither of these works was published till after 1590; but both must have been written before 1583.

[Sidenote: Hooker 1594]

It was not till the last decade of the reign had begun that the first great monument of English Prose appeared; nor is it surprising that, when it did come, it was an example of the Ecclesiastical or politico-ecclesiastical order. With the publication in 1594 of the first four books of Richard Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_, the full claims of English as a great literary language were decisively established by his rhythmical, stately, and luminous periods. In their own field, Poets and Dramatists had already secured those claims; with the works of Marlowe, the earliest plays of Shakespeare, and the opening books of the _Faerie Queene_.

[Sidenote: Verse; before 1579]

While the Eighth Henry was still ruling England, Surrey and Wyatt, heedful of things Italian, had already discovered that verse-making was at any rate a delectable pastime for a gentleman of wit, especially if he had a love-affair on hand; a pastime certainly pleasing to himself and probably agreeable to his mistress. They made metrical experiments, introducing both the sonnet and blank verse. The example they set was followed by others, and _Tottel's Miscellany_, published towards the end of Mary's reign, shows that a considerable skill in this minor art had already been acquired, and not only by the two princ.i.p.al contributors, though the writers were still working within very narrow metrical limitations. In 1559 appeared the _Mirrour for Magistrates_, for the most part dull and uninteresting but containing in the _Induction_ and the _Complaint of Buckingham_ two contributions by Thomas Sackville (afterwards Lord Buckhurst) which are a good deal more than clever verse-making. But after one other experiment--the part-authors.h.i.+p of the first English Tragedy in blank verse, _Gorboduc_--Sackville deserted the Muses, for public affairs; in his later years becoming a leading member of Elizabeth's Council. The little verse that he left is of a quality to make us wish that he had written more: for there is in him at least a hint of some possibilities which were actualised in Spenser. But twenty years pa.s.sed before the appearance of the _Shepherd's Calendar_, during which it is probable enough that courtiers and lovers continued to practise, after the school of Surrey and Wyatt; nothing however was published that has survived, save the work of the universal experimentalist and pioneer George Gascoigne, who tried his hand at most forms of literary production, achieving distinction in none but a laudable respectability in all.

[Sidenote: 1579-90 Spenser and others ]

<script>