Part 6 (1/2)
Two hundred and eighteen years ago in this very month of September, Queen Elizabeth was at Oxford, on her way to or from Kenilworth Castle, and she wrote the letter to Lady Hobby with those same Christ Church bells chiming the quarters and the hours within hearing of her lodgings.
What times those were! The fortunes of England under Elizabeth were recovering from long disgrace and decay. The foundation of the Royal Exchange, by Sir Thomas Gresham, in that very year 1566, gave English trade an impetus of which we in England and America are reaping the benefits. English s.h.i.+ps under such men as Drake and Frobisher, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, were sailing the seas, fighting the Spaniards, and bringing home the wealth of every country in the known globe to the port of London. A few years later, Drake in his little vessel with eighty men would sail through the straits of Magellan, and load his bark with gold-dust and silver ingots, with pearls, diamonds and emeralds, the spoils of the ”great galleon that sailed once a year from Lima to Cadiz,” and Raleigh would name Virginia after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.
But something more precious than commerce, or mere tangible wealth, was reviving in England. The prosperity of Elizabeth's reign was signalized by an outburst of literature such as the world has seldom seen. In 1566 Edmund Spenser was fourteen; Sir Philip Sidney was twelve; and William Shakespeare was a little two-year-old lad playing about his father's black and white half-timbered house in sunny Stratford-on-Avon. What need to go further? Those three names alone are enough, to say nothing of the host of other writers--Bacon and Fulke Grenville with the philosophers and the essayists, Hakluyt and his library of voyages and travels, Michael Drayton and the patriotic poets. These were some of the men who as statesmen, soldiers, discoverers, poets, have made the Elizabethan age the synonym for all that is most splendid, most brilliant at home and abroad.
Nine years after the queen's letter from Oxford, Elizabeth Hobby, who had meanwhile married Lord Russell, took refuge at Westminster from the plague which was then prevalent in London--that is to say in what we now call the city, where all the grand folks of those days lived.
Having obtained so much favor from Dr. Goodman, Dean of Westminster, as to have her lodgings within the late dissolved Abbey,
her little daughter was born in the precincts on October 22, 1575. Lord Russell wrote to announce the fact to his brother-in-law Lord Burleigh.
He was sorely disappointed at the child being a girl. ”I could have wished with all my heart to have had a boy:” but as that could not be he would like a wise man ”rejoice in having a girl.” Then he goes on to ask Lord Burleigh to pray the queen to be the baby's G.o.dmother. The queen willingly granted the request; for her old admiration for Lady Russell had by no means abated. Being at Windsor she sent Lady Warwick as her deputy, ”attended by Mr. Wingfield, the queen's gentleman usher, to direct all things in the same cathedral.”
Mr. Wingfield caused ”a traverse of crimson taffeta”--a kind of enclosure or regal pew if there be such a thing--to be set on the right side of the altar, near the steps within the chancel; and in the traverse a carpet, a chair and cus.h.i.+ons of state. This was for the deputy, Lady Warwick, who, as she represented the queen, was treated as if she were royal.
Then a great basin was set up in the middle, near to the high table, a yard high, upon a small frame for the purpose covered with white linen, and the basin set thereon with water and flowers about the brim.
[Ill.u.s.tration: QUEEN ELIZABETH.--_From painting in the English National Portrait Gallery._]
On Thursday, October 27, at ten o'clock, all was ready. The witnesses and a great company were a.s.sembled; and they proceeded from the Deanery through the cloister. First came the gentlemen in waiting; then the knights in their places; the barons and earls in their degree. Then the G.o.dfather--none other than that famous and brilliant personage, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the only man whom the great Queen Elizabeth really loved--her cousin, ”Sweet Robin.” If you ever come to Warwicks.h.i.+re go to Kenilworth Castle, and see the remains of the grand Hall where he received the queen with more than royal state at three different times. Then go to Warwick, and see his effigy in the Beauchamp Chapel, lying beside his third wife, whom he married after poor Amy Robsart's death.
Look at the Earl's handsome proud face; and then picture him to yourselves as he walked through the cloisters and into the n.o.ble Abbey, magnificent in dress and bearing, in the heydey of his youth, splendor and prosperity at little Bess Russell's christening. After the G.o.dfather came the unconscious baby--the centre of all this display--wrapped
in a mantle of crimson velvet, guarded with two wrought laces of gold, having also over the face a lawn, striped with bone lace of gold athwart, and powdered with gold flowers and white wrought thereon.
She was carried by the nurse, Mrs. Bradshaw. Her second G.o.dmother, the Countess of Suss.e.x--Frances Sidney, aunt of Sir Philip Sidney, and foundress of Sidney-Suss.e.x College at Cambridge, followed her. Then a gentleman usher. And then the Countess of Warwick, deputy for the queen.
Her train was borne by Lady Russell's two sisters, Lady Burleigh and Lady Bacon; and after them came ”other ladies and gentlemen, many.”
The deputy went within the traverse, the rest remaining without, while the Dean made a short address. After it was over
Lady Bacon took the child and brought it to the font, where the Dean attended in his surplice. Then the Earl Leicester approached near to the traverse, and there tarried until the deputy came forth, from whence they leisurely proceeded to the font, the deputy's train still borne, where she christened the child by the name of Elizabeth; which done the deputy retired back into the traverse again, and the nurse took the child, and came down, and there dressed it.
Now comes one of the most impressive and picturesque episodes in the story.
The account says--
In the meantime, Mr. Philip Sidney came out of the Chapel called St. Edward's shrine having a towel on his left shoulder, and with him came Mr. Delves, bearing the basin and ewer. Then the deputy came forth, her train borne, and they two kneeling, she washed.
Imagine Philip Sidney, then twenty-three years old, appearing from the Confessor's Chapel, which as I have explained lies directly behind the altar, with his towel over his shoulder, to kneel before the good and charming Countess of Warwick--Philip Sidney, that exquisite and n.o.ble soul, the very type and pattern of all that is most beautiful and admirable in the age of Elizabeth.
Fair as he was brave, quick of wit as of affection, n.o.ble and generous in temper, dear to Elizabeth as to Spenser, the darling of the Court and of the camp; his learning and his genius made him the centre of the literary world which was springing into birth on English soil.
Poet, philosopher, chivalrous knight errant, grave councillor, what wonder that he was the idol of the whole country? And the story of his death, which we all know, but of which I, for one, never tire, was a fitting close to the thirty-two years of this Bayard without fear and without reproach. He threw away his life to save the army of his queen in Flanders. As he lay dying he called for water. But when it was brought and the bottle was put to his lips he saw a poor soldier dying near him, and bade them give it to him. ”Thy necessity,” he said, ”is greater than mine.” And so he died. This was the man who humbly served Lady Warwick, the deputy, at our baby's christening.
Then other gentlemen with two basins and ewers, came to the Countess of Suss.e.x and the Earl of Leicester; and they having washed, immediately came from the aforesaid place of St. Edward's shrine, gentlemen with cups of hippocras and wafers; that done, they all departed out of the Church through the choir, in such order as before, the Lady Bacon carrying the child, and so the said ladies and G.o.dfather went into the Lady Russell's chamber.
Then the company went to dinner, ”a stately and costly delicate banquet;” and grace being said by Lord Russell's chaplain, the lords washed, and after rose and returned to Lady Russell's rooms.
The baby Bess, like babies nowadays, had her christening presents: ”By the queen's majesty a great standing cup; Countess of Suss.e.x a standing cup; Earl of Leicester a great bowl.”
So the pretty child's life began; ushered into that splendid and brilliant court with all the pomp and circ.u.mstance possible. Not only is the record of her baptism curious because it gives us a vivid picture of the court at that time, and a glimpse of many famous men and women who were present at it: but christenings have been few and far between at Westminster. For a long while they ceased altogether; and during this century up to about 1868 the few baptisms have been those of children of members of the Abbey body. Since that date a very few children, more or less connected with Westminster, have been christened each year in Henry the Seventh's chapel. And on the last page of the register for 1883, there is the name of a little grandson of Alfred, Lord Tennyson--the Poet Laureate--a baby well-deserving such an honor, for his grandfather claims descent from King Edward the Third; and from his mother, whose wedding took place in the Abbey, he inherits the blood of Robert Bruce.