chapter 13._

ALSO IN: _J. Gairdner, Story of Perkin Warbeck (appendix to Life of Richard III.)._

_C. M, Yonge, Cameos from English History, 3d series, chapters 21 and 24._

_J. Gairdner, Henry VII., chapters 4 and 7._

ENGLAND: 15th-16th Centuries. The Renaissance. Life in "Merry England." Preludes to the Elizabethan Age of literature.

"Toward the close of the fifteenth century ... commerce and the woollen trade made a sudden advance, and such an enormous one that corn-fields were changed into pasture-lands, 'whereby the inhabitants of the said town (Manchester) have gotten and come into riches and wealthy livings,' so that in 1553, 40,000 pieces of cloth were exported in English ships. It was already the England which we see to-day, a land of meadows, green, intersected by hedgerows, crowded with cattle, abounding in ships, a manufacturing, opulent land, with a people of beef-eating toilers, who enrich it while they enrich themselves. They improved agriculture to such an extent, that in half a century the produce of an acre was doubled. They grew so rich, that at the beginning of the reign of Charles I. the Commons represented three times the wealth of the Upper House. The ruin of Antwerp by the Duke of Parma sent to England 'the third part of the merchants and manufacturers, who made silk, damask, stockings, taffetas, and serges.' The defeat of the Armada and the decadence of Spain opened the seas to their merchants. The toiling hive, who would dare, attempt, explore, act in unison, and always with profit, was about to reap its advantages and set out on its voyages, buzzing over the universe. At the base and on the summit of society, in all ranks of life, in all grades of human condition, this new welfare became visible. ... It is not when all is good, but when all is better, that they see the bright side of life, and are tempted to make a holiday of it. This is why at this period they did make a holiday of it, a splendid show, so like a picture that it fostered painting in Italy, so like a representation, that it produced the drama in England. Now that the battle-axe and sword of the civil wars had beaten down the independent nobility, and the abolition of the law of maintenance had destroyed the petty royalty of each great feudal baron, the lords quitted their sombre castles, battlemented fortresses, surrounded by stagnant water, pierced with narrow windows, a sort of stone breast-plates of no use but to preserve the life of their masters. They flock into new palaces, with vaulted roofs and turrets, covered with fantastic and manifold ornaments, adorned with terraces and vast staircases, with gardens, fountains, statues, such as were the palaces of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, half Gothic and half Italian, whose convenience, grandeur, and beauty announced already habits of society and the taste for pleasure. They came to court and abandoned their old manners; the four meals which scarcely sufficed their former voracity were reduced to two; gentlemen soon became refined, placing their glory in the elegance and singularity of their amusements and their clothes. ... To vent the feelings, to satisfy the heart and eyes, to set free boldly on all the roads of existence the pack of appetites and instincts, this was the craving which the manners of the time betrayed. It was 'merry England,' as they called it then. It was not yet stern and constrained. It expanded widely, freely, and rejoiced to find itself so expanded. No longer at court only was the drama found but in the village. Strolling companies betook themselves thither, and the country folk supplied any deficiencies when necessary. Shakspeare saw, before he depicted them, stupid fellows, carpenters, joiners, bellow-menders, play Pyramus and Thisbe, represent the lion roaring as gently as possible, and the wall, by stretching out their hands. Every holiday was a pageant, in which townspeople, workmen, and children bore their parts. ... A few sectarians, chiefly in the towns and of the people, clung gloomily to the Bible. But the court and the men of the world sought their teachers and their heroes from pagan Greece and Rome. About 1490 they began to read the classics; one after the other they translated them; it was soon the fashion to read them in the original. Elizabeth, Jane Grey, the Duchess of Norfolk, the Countess of Arundel, many other ladies, were conversant with Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero in the original, and appreciated them. Gradually, by an insensible change, men were raised to the level of the great and healthy minds who had freely handled ideas of all kinds fifteen centuries ago. They comprehended not only their language, but their thought; they did not repeat lessons from, but held conversations with them; they were their equals, and found in them intellects as manly as their own. ... {825} Across the train of hooded school men and sordid cavillers the two adult and thinking ages were united, and the moderns, silencing the infantine or snuffling voices of the middle-age, condescended only to converse with the noble ancients. They accepted their gods, at least they understand them, and keep them by their side. In poems, festivals, tapestries, almost all ceremonies they appear, not restored by pedantry merely, but kept alive by sympathy, and glorified by the arts of an age as flourishing and almost as profound as that of their earliest birth. After the terrible night of the middle-age, and the dolorous legends of spirits and the damned, it was a delight to see again Olympus shining upon us from Greece; its heroic and beautiful deities once more ravishing the heart of men, they raised and instructed this young world by speaking to it the language of passion and genius; and the age of strong deeds, free sensuality, bold invention, had only to follow its own bent, in order to discover in them the eternal promoters of liberty and beauty. Nearer still was another paganism, that of Italy; the more seductive because more modern, and because it circulates fresh sap in an ancient stock; the more attractive, because more sensuous and present, with its worship of force and genius, of pleasure and voluptuousness. ... At that time Italy clearly led in every thing, and civilisation was to be drawn thence as from its spring. What is this civilisation which is thus imposed on the whole of Europe, whence every science and every elegance comes, whose laws are obeyed in every court, in which Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Shakspeare sought their models and their materials? It was pagan in its elements and its birth; in its language, which is but slightly different from Latin; in its Latin traditions and recollections, which no gap has come to interrupt; in its constitution, whose old municipal life first led and absorbed the feudal life; in the genius of its race, in which energy and enjoyment always abounded."

_H. A. Taine, History of English Literature, book 2, chapter 1 (volume 1)._

"The intellectual movement, to which we give the name of Renaissance, expressed itself in England mainly through the Drama. Other races in that era of quickened activity, when modern man regained the consciousness of his own strength and goodliness after centuries of mental stagnation and social depression, threw their energies into the plastic arts and scholarship. The English found a similar outlet for their pent-up forces in the Drama. The arts and literature of Greece and Rome had been revealed by Italy to Europe. Humanism had placed the present once more in a vital relation to the past. The navies of Portugal and Spain had discovered new continents beyond the ocean; the merchants of Venice and Genoa had explored the farthest East. Copernicus had revolutionised astronomy, and the telescope was revealing fresh worlds beyond the sun. The Bible had been rescued from the mortmain of the Church; scholars studied it in the language of its authors, and the people read it in their own tongue. In this rapid development of art, literature, science, and discovery, the English had hitherto taken but little part. But they were ready to reap what other men had sown. Unfatigued by the labours of the pioneer, unsophisticated by the pedantries and sophistries of the schools, in the freshness of their youth and vigour, they surveyed the world unfolded to them. For more than half a century they freely enjoyed the splendour of this spectacle, until the struggle for political and religious liberty replunged them in the hard realities of life. During that eventful period of spiritual disengagement from absorbing cares, the race was fully conscious of its national importance. It had shaken off the shackles of oppressive feudalism, the trammels of ecclesiastical tyranny. It had not yet passed under the Puritan yoke, or felt the encroachments of despotic monarchy. It was justly proud of the Virgin Queen, with whose idealised personality the people identified their newly acquired sense of greatness. ... What in those fifty years they saw with the clairvoyant eyes of artists, the poets wrote. And what they wrote, remains imperishable. It is the portrait of their age, the portrait of an age in which humanity stood self-revealed, a miracle and marvel to its own admiring curiosity. England was in a state of transition when the Drama came to perfection. That was one of those rare periods when the past and the future are both coloured by imagination, and both shed a glory on the present. The medieval order was in dissolution; the modern order was in process of formation. Yet the old state of things had not faded from memory and usage; the new had not assumed despotic sway. Men stood then, as it were, between two dreams--a dream of the past, thronged with sinister and splendid reminiscences; a dream of the future, bright with unlimited aspirations and indefinite hopes. Neither the retreating forces of the Middle Ages nor the advancing forces of the modern era pressed upon them with the iron weight of actuality. The brutalities of feudalism had been softened; but the chivalrous sentiment remained to inspire the Surreys and the Sidneys of a milder epoch. ... What distinguished the English at this epoch from the nations of the South was not refinement of manners, sobriety, or self-control. On the contrary they retained an unenviable character for more than common savagery. ... Erasmus describes the filth of their houses, and the sicknesses engendered in their cities by bad ventilation. What rendered the people superior to Italians and Spaniards was the firmness of their moral fibre, the sweetness of their humanity, a more masculine temper, less vitiated instincts and sophisticated intellects, a law-abiding and religious conscience, contempt for treachery and baseness, intolerance of political or ecclesiastical despotism combined with fervent love of home and country. They were coarse, but not vicious; pleasure-loving, but not licentious; violent, but not cruel; luxurious but not effeminate. Machiavelli was a name of loathing to them. Sidney, Essex, Raleigh, More, and Drake were popular heroes; and whatever may be thought of these men, they certainly counted no Marquis of Pescara, no Duke of Valentino, no Malatesta Baglioni, no Cosimo de' Medici among them. The Southern European type betrayed itself but faintly in politicians like Richard Cromwell and Robert Dudley. . . . Affectations of foreign vices were only a varnish on the surface of society. The core of the nation remained sound and wholesome. Nor was the culture which the English borrowed from less unsophisticated nations, more than superficial. The incidents of Court gossip show how savage was the life beneath. {826} Queen Elizabeth spat, in the presence of her nobles, at a gentleman who had displeased her; struck Essex on the cheek; drove Burleigh blubbering from her apartment. Laws in merry England were executed with uncompromising severity. Every township had its gallows; every village its stocks, whipping-post and pillory. Here and there, heretics were burned upon the market-place; and the block upon Tower Hill was seldom dry. ... Men and women who read Plato, or discussed the elegancies of Petrarch, suffered brutal practical jokes, relished the obscenities of jesters, used the grossest language of the people. Carrying farms and acres on their backs in the shape of costly silks and laces, they lay upon rushes filthy with the vomit of old banquets. Glittering in suits of gilt and jewelled mail, they jostled with town-porters in the stench of the bear-gardens, or the bloody bull-pit. The church itself was not respected. The nave of old S. Paul's became a rendezvous for thieves and prostitutes. ... It is difficult, even by noting an infinity of such characteristics, to paint the many-coloured incongruities of England at that epoch. Yet in the midst of this confusion rose cavaliers like Sidney, philosophers like Bacon, poets like Spenser; men in whom all that is pure, elevated, subtle, tender, strong, wise, delicate and learned in our modern civilisation displayed itself. And the masses of the people were still in harmony with these high strains. They formed the audience of Shakspere. They wept for Desdemona, adored Imogen, listened with Jessica to music in the moon-light at Belmont, wandered with Rosalind through woodland glades of Arden. Such was the society of which our theatre became the mirror."

_J. A. Symonds, Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama, chapter 2, section 1, 2, and 5._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1497. Cabot's discovery of the North American Continent.

See AMERICA: A. D. 1497.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1498. Voyage and discoveries of Sebastian Cabot. Ground of English claims in the New World.

See AMERICA: A. D. 1498.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1502. The marriage which brought the Stuarts to the English throne.

See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1502.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1509. The character and reign of Henry VII.

"As a king, Bacon tells us that he was 'a wonder for wise men.' Few indeed were the councillors that shared his confidence, but the wise men, competent to form an estimate of his statesmanship, had but one opinion of his consummate wisdom. Foreigners were greatly struck with the success that attended his policy. Ambassadors were astonished at the intimate knowledge he displayed of the affairs of their own countries. From the most unpropitious beginnings, a proscribed man and an exile, he had won his way in evil times to a throne beset with dangers; he had pacified his own country, cherished commerce, formed strong alliances over Europe, and made his personal influence felt by the rulers of France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands as that of a man who could turn the scale in matters of the highest importance to their own domestic welfare. ... From first to last his policy was essentially his own; for though he knew well how to choose the ablest councillors, he asked or took their advice only to such an extent as he himself deemed expedient. ... No one can understand his reign, or that of his son, or, we might add, of his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth, without appreciating the fact that, however well served with councillors, the sovereign was in those days always his own Prime Minister. ... Even the legislation of the reign must be regarded as in large measure due to Henry himself. We have no means, it is true, of knowing how much of it originated in his own mind; but that it was all discussed with him in Council and approved before it was passed we have every reason to believe. For he never appears to have put the royal veto upon any Bill, as constitutional usage both before and after his days allowed. He gave his assent to all the enactments sent up to him for approval, though he sometimes added to them provisos of his own. And Bacon, who knew the traditions of those times, distinctly attributes the good legislation of his days to the king himself. 'In that part, both of justice and policy, which is the most durable part, and cut, as it were, in brass or marble, the making of good laws, he did excel.' This statement, with but slight variations in the wording, appears again and again throughout the History; and elsewhere it is said that he was the best lawgiver to this nation after Edward I. ... The parliaments, indeed, that Henry summoned were only seven in number, and seldom did anyone of them last over a year, so that during a reign of nearly twenty-four years many years passed away without a Parliament at all. But even in those scanty sittings many Acts were passed to meet evils that were general subjects of complaint. ... He could scarcely be called a learned man, yet he was a lover of learning, and gave his children an excellent education. His Court was open to scholars. ... He was certainly religious after the fashion of his day. ... His religious foundations and bequests perhaps do not necessarily imply anything more than conventional feeling. But we must not overlook the curious circumstance that he once argued with a heretic at the stake at Canterbury and got him to renounce his heresy. It is melancholy to add that he did not thereupon release him from the punishment to which he had been sentenced; but the fact seems to show that he was afraid of encouraging insincere conversions by such leniency. During the last two or three years of the 15th century there was a good deal of procedure against heretics, but on the whole, we are told, rather by penances than by fire. Henry had no desire to see the old foundations of the faith disturbed. His zeal for the Church was recognised by no less than three Popes in his time, who each sent him a sword and a cap of maintenance. ... To commerce and adventure he was always a good friend. By his encouragement Sebastian Cabot sailed from Bristol and discovered Newfoundland--The New Isle, as it at first was called. Four years earlier Columbus had first set foot on the great western continent, and had not his brother been taken by pirates at sea, it is supposed that he too might have made his great discovery under Henry's patronage."

_James Gairdner, Henry the Seventh,