Amenities of Literature Part 37

"Lastly; I can't believe that Parsons, who was expelled (or forced to resign his fellowship in Baliol) for his immoralities, and then pretended to be a physician, and at last went to Rome and turned Jesuit, would tell that story of Leicester's management of the University of Oxford. There are several other improbabilities.

"The book seems to be written by a man moderate in religion (whether Papist or Protestant, I can't say), but a bitter enemy to Leicester--one that was intimate with all the court affairs, and, to cover himself from _the bear's_ fury, contrived that this book should come as it were from abroad, under the name of Parsons."

_Dr. Mosse's Notes on the above Letter._

"First, He points out several facts to show that the book must have been written at the end of 1584, certainly between 1583 and '85, when in '85 Leicester went general into Holland, of which there is no mention in the book, as Drake observes.

"Secondly, The design. I see nothing in the book relating to the invasion, the design being to support the t.i.tle of the Queen of Scots and her son. Dr. James was the first who in print affirmed Parsons to be the only author--which was then in many mouths, that he wrote it from materials sent him by Burleigh. But as it is not very likely that Parsons, who lived at Rome, should be acquainted with all the transactions set down in that book, so 'tis less probable that Burleigh should pitch upon him for such a work; and I take the report to be grounded only on a pa.s.sage in the book that mentions the _papers_ Burleigh had against Leicester."

Dr. Mosse then gives what Wood has written, and Wood's inference, that neither Pitts nor Ribadeneira giving it in the list of his writings is a sufficient argument; and the doctor concludes--

"In short, the author is very uncertain; and, for anything that appears in it, it may as well be a protestant's as a papist's. I should rather think it the work of some subtle courtier, who for safety got it printed abroad, and sent into England under the name of Parsons."[9]

Allowing these arguments to the fullest extent, they are not sufficient to disprove the authorship ascribed to Parsons. The drift and character of this English Jesuit seem not to have been sufficiently taken in by these critics. There would certainly be no difficulty in the Jesuit a.s.suming the mask of a moderate religionist, and a loyal subject; for the advantage of the disguise, he would even venture the bold stroke of condemning the martyrs. The conclusion of Dr. Mosse, that the book might be written by either a protestant or a papist, betrays its studied ambiguity. It was usual with the Jesuits to conform to prevalent opinions to wrestle with them. Sometimes the Jesuit was the advocate for the dethronement of monarchs, and at other times urged pa.s.sive obedience to the right divine. In truth, it is always impossible to decide on the latent meaning of the Jesuitic pen. Pascal has exhausted the argument.

Dr. Ashton may be mistaken when he a.s.serts that Parsons and Campian came to England in 1580, to further the designs of the King of Spain. The policy of the Roman Catholic party at that moment did not turn on the Spanish succession; during the life of the Scottish Mary, the party were all united in one design; it was at her death, in 1587, that it split into two opposite factions. At the head of one stood the Jesuit Parsons; in his rage and despair, having failed to win over the Scottish prince, he raised up the claims of the Spanish line, reckless of the ruin of his country by invasion and internal dissension: the other party, British at heart, consisting of laymen and gentlemen, would never concur in the invasion and conquest of England by a foreign prince. This curious contingency has been elucidated by our amba.s.sador at the court of France, Sir Henry Neville, in a letter to Cecil.[10] It is therefore quite evident why "the book did not look _that way_," as Dr. Ashton expresses it, and why all Parsons' subsequent writings did.

Dr. Ashton considers it impossible that Parsons, who lived abroad so much of his lifetime, should be so intimate with the secret transactions of the court and country of England. But Parsons kept up a busy communication with this country. This he has himself incidentally told us, in his "Memorial for Reformation," written in 1596; he says, "I have had occasion, _above others_, for more than twenty years, not only to know the state of matters in England, but also of many foreign nations."

It is recorded that he received three hundred letters from England on his Book of t.i.tles. He was very critical in the history of our great families, and had a taste for personal anecdote, even to the gossip of the circle. In a remarkable work which he sent forth under the name of Andreas Philopater, a Latin reply to the queen's proclamation, he describes her ministers as _sprung from the earth_. Of Sir Nicholas Bacon, he says that he was an under-butler at Gray's Inn; of Lord Burleigh, that his father served under the king's tailor, and that his grandfather kept an alehouse, and that for himself during Mary's reign he had always his beads in his hand. In this defamatory catalogue, the Earl of Leicester is not forgotten: the son of a duke, the grandson of an esquire, and the great-grandson of a carpenter; a more flagitious man, a more insolent tyrant England never knew; _never had the Catholics a more bitter enemy_; books, both in the French and the English language, have exposed his debaucheries, his adulteries, his homicides, his parricides, his thefts, his rapines, his perjuries, his oppressions of the poor, his cruelties, his deceitfulness, and the injuries he did to the Catholic religion, to the public, and to private families. This is quite a supplement to Leicester's "Commonwealth," condensing all its original spirit.

That Lord Burleigh should have supplied materials for this political libel, stands next to an impossibility. One pa.s.sage a.s.serts that "the Lord Treasurer hath as much in his keeping of Leycester's own hand-writing as is sufficient to hang him, if he durst present it to her majesty." This could only have been a random stroke of the hardy writer; for were it absolutely true, that sage would never have entrusted that secret to any man. It would have been placing his own life in jeopardy.

As for the tattle of the lady who, in delivering a letter from Leicester into the hands of Lord Burleigh, "at the door of the withdrawing chamber," was instructed to drop it in a way that it might attract the queen's notice, and induce her majesty to read it, it surely was not necessary for Lord Burleigh to communicate this "shift" of Leicester's practices; the lady might have deposited this secret manoeuvre in the ear of the faithless courtier who unquestionably contributed his zealous quota to this Leicesterian Commonwealth.

With regard to "the Conference," the Roman Catholic historian, Dodd, and others, have inclined to doubt whether Parsons was the author; and their argument is--not an unusual one with the Jesuits--you cannot prove it, and he has denied it. Cardinal Allen and Sir Francis Englefield may have contributed to this learned work, but Parsons held the pen. It appeared under the name of Doleman; and it is said that the harmless secular priest who bore that name fell into trouble in consequence. We may for once believe Parsons himself, that the name was chosen for its significance, as "a man of dole," grieving for the loss of his country.

He has in other writings continued the initials, N. D., a.s.sociating his feelings with these letters. On the same querulous principle, he had formerly taken that of "John Howlett," or Owlet. He fancied such significant pseudonyms, in allusion to his condition; thus he took that of "Philopater." He varied his initials, as well as his fict.i.tious names. He was a Proteus whenever he had his pen in his hand; Protestant and Romanist, Englishman and Spaniard.

It is now, however, too late to hesitate in fixing on the true parent of these twin-productions; twins they are, though in the intellectual state twins are not born on the same day. These productions are marked by the same strong features; their limbs are fashioned alike; and their affinity betrays itself, even in their tones. The author could not always escape from adopting a peculiar phraseology, or identical expressions, which unavoidably a.s.sociate the later with the earlier work, the same in style, in manner, and in plan. Imitation is out of the question where there is ident.i.ty. One pen composed these works, as they did thirty more.

The English writings of the Jesuit PARSONS have attracted the notice of some of our philological critics. Parsons may be ranked among the earliest writers of our vernacular diction in its purity and pristine vigour, without ornament or polish. It is, we presume, Saxon English, unblemished by an exotic phrase. It is remarkable that our author, who pa.s.sed the best part of his days abroad, and who had perfectly acquired the Spanish and the Italian languages, and slightly the French, yet appears to have preserved our colloquial English, from the vicissitudes of those fashionable novelties which deform the long unsettled Elizabethan prose. To the elevation of Hooker his imagination could never have ascended; but in clear conceptions and natural expressions no one was his superior. His English writings have not a sentence which to this day is either obsolete or obscure. Swift would not have disdained his idiomatic energy. Parsons was admirably adapted to be a libeller or a polemic.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] At Rome there was "The English Hospital," founded by two of the kings of our Saxon Heptarchy; a thousand years had consecrated that small domicile for the English native; but now the emigrants, and not the pilgrims, of England claimed an abode beneath the papal eye. It had been a refuge to the fugitives from the days of Henry the Eighth; subsequently this English Hospital, under the auspices of Cardinal Allen, a.s.sumed the higher t.i.tle of "The English College at Rome," and the Jesuit Parsons closed his days as its rector without attaining to the cardinalship.

[2] The seminarists were universally revered as candidates of martyrdom.--See Baronius, "Martyrol." Rome, 29 Dec. St. Philip Neri, who lived in the neighbourhood of the English Seminary in Rome, would frequently stand near the door of the house to view the students going to the public schools. This saint used to bow to them, and salute them with the words--"_Salvete flores martyrum._"--Plowden's "Remarks on Missions of Gregorio Panzani," Liege, 1794, p. 97.

[3] As Roman Catholics usually interpolate history with miracles, so we find one here; being a.s.sured that the judge, while pa.s.sing sentence on Campian, drawing off his glove, found his hand stained with blood, which he could not wash away, as he showed to several about him who can witness of it.--Lansdowne MSS., 982, fo. 21.

[4] "Hist. Soc. Jesu." Pars quinta, Tomus posterior. Auctore Jos.

Juvencio, 1710.

[5] This remarkable incident, in keeping with the rest, was discovered by Dr. Bliss in a ma.n.u.script note on "Leicester's Ghost,"

as communicated by the page to the writer from his own personal observations.--"Athenae Oxon.," ii. col. 74.

If this voracious Apicius did not die of a surfeit, the fever might have been caught from the cordial. The marriage of the Master of the Horse seems to wind up the story.

[6] See the subsequent article on "SPENSER."

[7] "There is," continues our author, "a point much to be noted,"

which is, "what men have commonly succeeded in the places of such as have been deposed?" The successors of five of our deposed monarchs have been all eminent princes; "John, Edward the Second, Richard the Second, Henry the Sixth, and Richard the Third, have been succeeded by the three Henries--the Third, Fourth, and Seventh; and two Edwards--Third and Fourth."

[8] I have not seen this edition of "The Conference," or "Speeches,"

but it must a.s.suredly have suffered some mutilations; for Parsons often puts down some marginal notes which were not suitable to the republicans of that day. Such, for instance, as these--"A Monarchy the best Government;" "Miseries of Popular Governments." Mabbott, the licenser, must have rescinded such unqualified axioms.

[9] Cole's MSS., x.x.x. 129. Cole adds, that Baker, in a ma.n.u.script note upon Pitt's and Ribadeneira's silence, observes, "That's no argument--the book was a libel, and libels are not mentioned in catalogues by friends."

[10] Winwood's "Memorials," vol. i., p. 51.

HOOKER.

The government of Elizabeth, in the settlement of an ecclesiastical establishment, had not only to pa.s.s through the convulsive transition of the "old" to the "new religion," as it was called at the time; but subsequently it was thrown into a peculiar position, equally hateful to the zealots of two antagonist parties or factions.

The Romanists, who would have disputed the queen's t.i.tle to the crown, were securely circ.u.mscribed by their minority, or pressed down by the secular arm; they were silenced by penal statutes, or they vanished in a voluntary exile; and even their martyrs were only allowed to suffer as traitors. A more insidious adversary was lurking at home; itself the child of the Reformation, it had been nourished at the same breast, and had shared in the common adversity; and this youthful protestantism was lifting its arm against its elder sister.

A public event, when it becomes one of the great eras of a nation, has sometimes inspired one of those "monuments of the mind," which take a fixed station in its literature, addressed to its own, but written for all times. And thus it happened with the party of the MAR-PRELATES; for these mean and scandalous satirists, and their abler chiefs, were the true origin of Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity." The scandalous pamphlets of the MAR-PRELATES met their fate, crushed by the sharper levity of more refined wits; the more solemn volumes of their learned chiefs encountered a master genius, such as had not yet risen in the nation.

In the state of the language, and the polemical temper of these early opposite systems of church, and indeed of civil government, it was hardly to be expected that the vindication of the ruling party should be the work of an elevated genius. The vernacular style was yet imperfectly moulded, the ear was not yet touched by modulated periods, nor had the genius of our writers yet extended to the lucid arrangement of composition; moreover, none had attained to the philosophic disposition which penetrates into the foundations of the understanding, and appeals to the authority of our consciousness. On a sudden appeared this master-mind, opening the hidden springs of eloquence--the voice of one crying from the wilderness.

It had been more in the usual course of human affairs, that the whole controversy of ecclesiastical polity should have remained in the ordinary hands of the polemics; the cold mediocrity of the Puritan Cartwright might have been answered by the cold mediocrity of the Primate Whitgift. Their quarrel had then hardly pa.s.sed their own times; and "the admonition," and "the apology," and all "the replies and rejoinders," might have been equally suffered to escape the record of an historian.

But such was not the issue of this awful contest; and the mortal combatants are not suffered to expire, for a master-genius has involved them in his own immortality.[1]

The purity and simplicity of Izaak Walton's own mind reflected the perfect image of HOOKER; the individualising touches and the careful statements in that vital biography seem as if Hooker himself had written his own life.

We first find our author in a small country parsonage, at Drayton-Beauchamp, near Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire; where a singular occurrence led to his elevation to the mastership of the Temple.

Two of his former pupils had returned from their travels--Sir Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, men worthy of the names they bore; for the one became his ardent patron, and the other the zealous a.s.sistant in his great work. Longing to revisit their much-loved tutor, who did not greatly exceed them in age, they came unexpectedly; and, to their amazement, surprised their learned friend tending a flock of sheep, with a Horace in his hand. His wife had ordered him to supply the absence of the servant. When released, on returning to the house, the visitors found that they must wholly furnish their own entertainment--the lady would afford no better welcome; but even the conversation was interrupted by Hooker being called away to rock the cradle. His young friends reluctantly quit his house to seek for quieter lodgings, lamenting that his lot had not fallen on a pleasanter parsonage, and a quieter wife to comfort him after his unwearied studies. "I submit to G.o.d's will while I daily labour to possess my soul in patience and peace," was the reply of the philosophic man who could abstract his mind amid the sheep, the cradle, and the termagant.

The whole story of the marriage of this artless student would be ludicrous, but for the melancholy reflection that it brought waste and disturbance into the abode of the author of the "Ecclesiastical Polity."

According to the statutes of his college he had been appointed to preach a sermon at Paul's-cross: he arrived from Oxford weary and wet, with a heavy cold; faint and heartless, he was greatly agitated lest he should not be able to deliver his probationary sermon; but two days' nursing by the woman of the lodgings recovered our young preacher. She was an artful woman, who persuaded him that his const.i.tutional delicacy required a perpetual nurse; and for this purpose offered, as he had no choice of his own, to elect for him a wife. On his next arrival she presented him with her daughter. There was a generosity in his grat.i.tude for the nursing him for his probationary sermon, which only human beings wholly abstracted from the concerns of daily life could possibly display. He resigned the quiet of his college to be united to a female dest.i.tute alike of personal recommendations and of property. As an apology for her person, he would plead his short-sightedness; and for the other, that he never would have married for any interested motive.

Thus, the first step into life of a very wise man was a folly which was to endure with it. The wife of Hooker tyrannized over his days, and at last proved to be a traitress to his fame.

The mastership of the Temple was procured for the humble rector of Drayton-Beauchamp by the recommendation of his affectionate Edwin Sandys. But not without regret did this gentle spirit abandon the lowly rectory-house for "the noise" of the Temple-hall. Hooker required for his happiness neither elevation nor dignities, but solely a spot wherein his feeble frame might repose, and his working mind meditate; solitude to him was a heaven, notwithstanding his eternal wife Joan!

Hooker might have looked on the Temple as a vignette represents the greater picture. The Temple was a copy reduced of the kingdom, with the same pa.s.sions and the same parties. What had occurred between the Archbishop Whitgift and the Puritan Cartwright, was now opened between the lecturer and the master of the Temple.

The Evening Lecturer at the Temple was Walter Travers--an eminent man, of insinuating manners and of an irreproachable life. He had been nursed in the presbytery of Geneva, and was the correspondent of Beza in the French, and of Knox in the Scottish Church; above all, Travers was the firm a.s.sociate of Cartwright, and the consulted oracle of the English dissenters. He ruled over an active party of the younger members, and, by insensible innovations, appears to have there established the new ecclesiastical commonwealth, which at first consisted of the most trivial innovations in ceremonies and the most idle distinctions.

Travers was looking confidently to the mastership, when the appointment of Hooker crossed his ambitious hopes.

With the disciples of parity, a free election, and not a royal appointment, was a first state principle. To preserve the formality, since he could not yet possess the reality, Travers suggested to the new master of the Temple that he should not make his appearance till Travers had announced his name to the body of the members, and then he would be admitted by their consent. To this point in "the new order of things,"

the sage Hooker returned a reasonable refusal. "If such custom were here established, I would not disturb the order; but here, where it never was, I might not of my own head take upon me to begin it." The formality required was, in fact, a masked principle, which cast a doubt on his right and on the authority which had granted it. "You conspire against me," exclaimed the nonconformist, "affecting superiority over me;" and condensing all the bitterness of his mingled religion and politics, he reproached Hooker that "he had entered on his charge by virtue _only of an human creature_, and not by the _election of the people_." With TRAVERS the people were more than "human creatures;" the voice of the people was a revelation of Heaven; this sage probably having first counted his votes. These were the inconveniences of a transition to a new political system; the parties did not care to understand one another. These two good men, for such they were, now brought into collision, bore a mutual respect, connected too by blood and friendly intercourse. But in a religious temper or times, while men mix their own notions with the inscrutable decrees of Heaven, who shall escape from the torture of insolvable polemics? Abstruse points of scholastic theology opened the rival conflict. A cry of unsound doctrine was heard. "What are your grounds?" exclaimed TRAVERS. "The words of St.

Paul," replied HOOKER. "But what author do you follow in expounding St.

Paul?" Hooker laid a great stress on reason on all matters which allowed of the full exercise of human reason. Two opposite doctrines now came from the same pulpit! The morning and the evening did not seem the same day. The son of Calvin thundered his shuddering dogmas; the child of Canterbury was meek and merciful. If one demolished an unsound doctrine, it was preached up again by the other. The victor was always to be vanquished, the vanquisher was always to be victor. The inner and the outer Temple appeared to be a mob of polemics.