Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth Part 42

Notwithstanding the respectful observances by which James exerted himself to disguise his impatience for her death, particular incidents occurred from time to time to aggravate her suspicion and exasperate her animosity; and the present year was productive of some remarkable circ.u.mstances of this nature. The queen had long been displeased at the indulgence exercised by the king of Scots towards certain catholic n.o.blemen by whom a treasonable correspondence had been carried on with Spain and a very dangerous conspiracy formed against his person and government. Such misplaced lenity, combined with certain negotiations which he carried on with the catholic princes of Europe, she regarded as evincing a purpose to secure to himself an interest with the popish party in England as well as Scotland, which she could not view without anxiety: And her worst apprehensions were now confirmed by the information which reached her from two different quarters, that James, in a very respectful letter to the pope, had given him a.s.surance under his own hand of his resolution to treat his catholic subjects with indulgence, at the same time requesting that his holiness would give a cardinal's hat to Drummond bishop of Vaison. Almost at the same time, one Valentine Thomas, apprehended in London for a theft, accused the king of Scots of some evil designs against herself. Explanations however being demanded, James solemnly disavowed the letter to the pope, which he treated as a forgery and imposture; though circ.u.mstances which came out several years afterwards render the king's veracity in this point very questionable.

To the charge brought by Thomas, he returned a denial, probably better founded; and required that the accuser should be arraigned in presence of some commissioner whom he should send: but Elizabeth, less jealous of his dealings with the papal party now that she no longer dreaded a Spanish invasion, judged it more prudent to bury the whole matter in silence, and resumed, in the tone of friendship, the correspondence which she regularly maintained with her kinsman.

This correspondence, which still exists in MS. in the Salisbury collection, is rendered obscure and sometimes unintelligible by its reference to verbal messages which the bearers of the letters were commissioned to deliver: but several of those of Elizabeth afford a rich display of character. She sometimes a.s.sures James of the tenderness of her affection and her disinterested zeal for his welfare in that tone of hypocrisy which was too congenial to her disposition; at other times she breaks forth into vehement invective against the weakness and mutability of his counsels, and offers him excellent instructions in the art of reigning; but clouded by her usual uncouth and obscure phraseology and rendered offensive by their harsh and dictatorial style. When she regards herself as personally injured by any part of his conduct, her complaints are seasoned with an equal portion of menace and contempt; as in the following specimen.

_Queen Elizabeth to the king of Scots:_

"When the first blast of a strange, unused, and seld heard of sound had pierced my ears, I supposed that flying fame, who with swift quills oft paceth with the worst, had brought report of some untruth, but when too too many records in your open parliament were witnesses of such p.r.o.nounced words, not more to my disgrace than to your dishonor, who did forget that (above all other regard) a prince's word ought utter nought of any, much less of a king, than such as to which truth might say Amen: But you, neglecting all care of yourself, what danger of reproach, besides somewhat else, might light upon you, have chosen so unseemly a theme to charge your only careful friend withal, of such matter as (were you not amazed in all senses) could not have been expected at your hands; of such imagined untruths as were never thought of in our time; and do wonder what evil spirits have possessed you, to set forth so infamous devices void of any show of truth. I am sorry that you have so wilfully fallen from your best stay, and will needs throw yourself into the hurlpool of bottomless discredit. Was the haste so great to hie to such opprobry as that you would p.r.o.nounce a never thought of action afore you had but asked the question of her that best could tell it? I see well we two be of very different natures, for I vow to G.o.d I would not corrupt my tongue with an unknown report of the greatest foe I have; much less could I detract my best deserving friend with a spot so foul as scarcely may be ever outrazed. Could you root the desire of gifts of your subjects upon no better ground than this quagmire, which to pa.s.s you scarcely may without the slip of your own disgrace? Shall amba.s.sage be sent to foreign princes laden with instructions of your rash-advised charge?... I never yet loved you so little as not to moan your infamous dealings, which you are in mind, we see, that myself shall possess more princes witness of my causeless injuries, which I should have wished had pa.s.sed no seas to testify such memorials of your wrongs. Bethink you of such dealings, and set your labor upon such mends as best may, though not right, yet salve some piece of this overslip; and be a.s.sured that you deal with such a king as will bear no wrongs and endure infamy; the examples have been so lately seen as they can hardly be forgotten of a far mightier and potenter prince than any Europe hath. Look you not therefore that without large amends, I may or will slupper up such indignities. We have sent this bearer Bowes, whom you may safely credit, to signify such particularities as fits not a letters talk. And so I recommend you to a better mind and more advised conclusions." Dated January 4th 1597-1598[125].

[Note 125: M.S. in Dr. Haynes's extracts from the Salisbury collection.--I am unable to discover to what particular circ.u.mstance this angry letter refers.]

From another of these letters we learn that James had addressed a love-sonnet to the queen and complained of her having taken no notice of it; reminding her that Cupid was a G.o.d of a most impatient disposition.

An author has the following notice respecting sir Roger Aston, frequently the bearer of these curious epistles. "He was an Englishman born, but had his breeding wholly in Scotland, and had served the king many years as his barber; an honest and free-hearted man, and of an ancient family in Cheshire, but of no breeding answerable to his birth.

Yet was he the only man ever employed as a messenger from the king to queen Elizabeth, as a letter-carrier only, which expressed their own intentions without any help from him, besides the delivery; but even in that capacity was in very good esteem with her majesty, and received very royal rewards, which did enrich him, and gave him a better revenue than most gentlemen in Scotland. For the queen did find him as faithful to her as to his master, in which he showed much wisdom, though of no breeding. In this his employment I must not pa.s.s over one pretty pa.s.sage I have heard himself relate. That he did never come to deliver any letters from his master, but ever he was placed in the lobby; the hangings being turned towards him, where he might see the queen dancing to a little fiddle; which was to no other end than that he should tell his master, by her youthful disposition, how likely he was to come to the possession of the crown he so much thirsted after: for you must understand, the wisest in that kingdom did believe the king should never enjoy this crown, as long as there was an old wife in England, which they did believe we ever set up as the other was dead[126]."

[Note 126: Weldon's Court of King James.]

Though in her own letters to James, Elizabeth made no scruple of treating him as the destined heir to her throne, she still resisted with as much pertinacity as ever, all the proposals made her for publicly declaring her successor; and on this subject, a lively anecdote is related by sir John Harrington in his account of Hutton archbishop of York, which must belong to the year 1595 or 1596.

"I no sooner," says he, "remember this famous and worthy prelate, but methinks I see him in the chappel at Whitehall, queen Elizabeth at the window in the closet; all the lords of the parliament spiritual and temporal about them, and then, after his three curtsies that I hear him out of the pulpit thundering this text, 'The kingdoms of the earth are mine, and I do give them to whom I will, and I have given them to Nebuchodonosor and his son, and his son's son:' which text when he had thus produced, taking the sense rather than words of the prophet, there followed first so general a murmur of one friend whispering to another, then such an erected countenance in those that had none to speak to, lastly, so quiet a silence and attention in expectance of some strange doctrine, where text itself gave away kingdoms and sceptres, as I have never observed before or since.

"But he... showed how there were two special causes of translating of kingdoms, the fullness of time and the ripeness of sin.... Then coming nearer home, he showed how oft our nation had been a prey to foreigners; as first when we were all Britons subdued by these Romans; then, when the fullness of time and ripeness of our sin required it, subdued by the Saxons; after this a long time prosecuted and spoiled by the Danes, finally conquered and reduced to perfect subjection by the Normans, whose posterity continued in great prosperity to the days of her majesty, who for peace, for plenty, for glory, for continuance, had exceeded them all; that had lived to change all her councillors but one; all officers twice or thrice; some bishops four times: only the uncertainty of succession gave hopes to foreigners to attempt fresh invasions and breed fears in many of her subjects of a new conquest. The only way then, said he, that is in policy left to quail those hopes and to a.s.suage those fears, were to establish the succession... at last, insinuating as far as he durst the nearness of blood of our present sovereign, he said plainly, that the expectations and presages of all writers went northward, naming without any circ.u.mlocution Scotland; which, said he, if it prove an error, yet will it be found a learned error.

"When he had finished this sermon, there was no man that knew queen Elizabeth's disposition, but imagined that such a speech was as welcome as salt to the eyes, or, to use her own word, to pin up her winding sheet before her face, so to point out her successor and urge her to declare him; wherefore we all expected that she would not only have been highly offended, but in some present speech have showed her displeasure.

It is a principle not to be despised, _Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare_; she considered perhaps the extraordinary auditory, she supposed many of them were of his opinion, she might suspect some of them had persuaded him to this motion; finally, she ascribed so much to his years, to his place, to his learning, that when she opened the window we found ourselves all deceived; for very kindly and calmly, without shew of offence (as if she had but waked out of some sleep) she gave him thanks for his very learned sermon. Yet when she had better considered the matter, and recollected herself in private, she sent two councillors to him with a sharp message, to which he was glad to give a patient answer."

The premature death of Edmund Spenser, under circ.u.mstances of severe distress, now called forth the universal commiseration and regret of the friends and patrons of English genius. After witnessing the plunder of his house and the destruction of his whole property by the Irish rebels, the unfortunate poet had fled to England for shelter,--the annuity of fifty pounds which he enjoyed as poet-laureat to her majesty apparently his sole resource; and having taken up his melancholy abode in an obscure lodging in London, he pined away under the pressure of penury and despondence.

The genius of this great poet, formed on the most approved models of the time, and exercised upon themes peculiarly congenial to its taste, received in all its plenitude that homage of contemporary applause which has sometimes failed to reward the efforts of the n.o.blest masters of the lyre. The adventures of chivalry, and the dim shadowings of moral allegory, were almost equally the delight of a romantic, a serious and a learned age. It was also a point of loyalty to admire in Gloriana queen of Faery, or in the empress Mercilla, the avowed types of the graces and virtues of her majesty; and she herself had discernment sufficient to distinguish between the brazen trump of vulgar flattery with which her ear was sated, and the pastoral reed of antique frame tuned sweetly to her praise by Colin Clout. Spenser was interred with great solemnity in Westminster abbey by the side of Chaucer; the generous Ess.e.x defraying the cost of the funeral and walking himself as a mourner. That ostentatious but munificent woman Anne countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery, erected a handsome monument to his memory several years afterwards; the brother-poets who attended his obsequies threw elegies and sonnets into the grave; and of the more distinguished votaries of the muse in that day there is scarcely one who has withheld his tribute to the fame and merit of this delightful author. Shakespeare in one of his sonnets had already testified his high delight in his works; Joseph Hall, afterwards eminent as a bishop, a preacher, and polemic, but at this time a young student of Emanuel college, has more than one complimentary allusion to the poems of Spenser in his "Toothless Satires" printed in 1597. Thus, in the invocation to his first satire, referring to Spenser's description of the marriage of the Thames and Medway, he inquires,

..."what baser Muse can bide To sit and sing by Granta's naked side?

They haunt the tided Thames and salt Medway, E'er since the fame of their late bridal day.

Nought have we here but willow-shaded sh.o.r.e, To tell our Grant his banks are left forlore."

And again, in ridiculing the imitation of some of the more extravagant fictions of the Orlando Furioso, he thus suddenly checks himself;

"But let no rebel satyr dare traduce Th' eternal legends of thy faery muse, Renowned Spenser! whom no earthly wight Dares once to emulate, much less dares despight.

Sal.u.s.t of France[127] and Tuscan Ariost, Yield up the laurel garland ye have lost."

[Note 127: Du Bartas, then an admired writer in England as well as France.]

These pieces of Hall, reprinted in 1599 with three additional books under the uncouth t.i.tle of "Virgidemiarum" (a harvest of rods), present the earliest example in our language of regular satire on the ancient model, and have gained from an excellent poetical critic the following high eulogium. "These satires are marked with a cla.s.sical precision, to which English poetry had yet rarely attained. They are replete with animation of style and sentiment. The indignation of the satirist is always the result of good sense. Nor are the thorns of severe invective unmixed with the flowers of pure poetry. The characters are delineated in strong and lively colouring, and their discriminations are touched with the masterly traces of genuine humour. The versification is equally energetic and elegant, and the fabric of the couplets approaches to the modern standard[128]."

[Note 128: Warton's History of English Poetry, vol. iv.]

A few of his allusions to reigning follies may here be quoted.

Contrasting the customs of our barbarous ancestors with those of his own times, he says:

"They naked went, or clad in ruder hide, Or homespun russet void of foreign pride.

But thou can'st mask in garish gaudery, To suit a fool's far-fetched livery.

A French head joined to neck Italian, Thy thighs from Germany and breast from Spain.

An Englishman in none, a fool in all, Many in one, and one in several."

Shakespeare makes Portia satirize the same affectation in her English admirer;--"How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior every where."

Other contemporary writers have similar allusions, and it may be concluded, that the pa.s.sion for travelling then, and ever since, so prevalent amongst the English youth, was fast eradicating all traces of a national costume by rendering fashionable the introduction of novel garments, capriciously adopted by turns from every country of Europe.

"Cadiz spoil" is more than once referred to by Hall; and amongst expedients for raising a fortune he enumerates, with a satirical glance at sir Walter Raleigh, the trading to Guiana for gold; as also the search of the philosopher's stone. He likewise ridicules the costly mineral elixirs of marvellous virtues vended by alchemical quacks; and with sounder sense in this point than usually belonged to his age, mocks at the predictions of judicial astrology.

In several pa.s.sages he reprehends the new luxuries of the time, among which coaches are not forgotten.

It should appear that the increasing conveniences and pleasures of a London life had already begun to occasion the desertion of rural mansions, and the decay of that boundless hospitality which the former possessors had made their boast; for thus feelingly and beautifully does the poet describe the desolation of one of these seats of antiquated magnificence:

"Beat the broad gates, a goodly hollow sound With double echoes doth again rebound; But not a dog doth bark to welcome thee, Nor churlish porter canst thou chafing see; All dumb and silent like the dead of night, Or dwelling of some sleepy Sybarite!

The marble pavement hid with desert weed, With houseleek, thistle, dock, and hemlock-seed.-- Look to the towered chimneys, which should be The windpipes of good hospitality:-- Lo there the unthankful swallow takes her rest, And fills the tunnel with her circled nest."

The translation of the Orlando Furioso through which that singular work of genius had just become known to the English reader, was executed by sir John Harrington, the same who afterwards composed for Henry prince of Wales, the Brief View of the English Church, the G.o.dson of Elizabeth, and the child of her faithful servants James Harrington and Isabella Markham.

After the usual course of school and college education, young Harrington, who was born in 1561, presented himself at court, where his wit and learning soon procured him a kind of distinction, which was not however unattended with danger. A satirical piece was traced to him as its author, containing certain allusions to living characters, which gave so much offence to the courtiers, that he was threatened with the animadversions of the star-chamber; but the secret favor of Elizabeth towards a G.o.dson whom she loved and who amused her, saved him from this very serious kind of retaliation. A tale which he sometime after translated out of Ariosto proved very entertaining to the court ladies, and soon met the eyes of the queen; who in affected displeasure at certain indelicate pa.s.sages, ordered him to appear no more at court--till he had translated the whole poem. The command was obeyed with alacrity; and he speedily committed his Orlando to the press, with a dedication to her majesty. Before this time our sprightly poet had found means to dissipate a considerable portion of the large estate to which he was born; and being well inclined to listen to the friendly counsels of Ess.e.x, who bade him, "lay good hold on her majesty's bounty and ask freely," he dexterously opened his case by the following lines slipped behind her cushion.

"For ever dear, for ever dreaded prince, You read a verse of mine a little since; And so p.r.o.nounced each word and every letter, Your gracious reading graced my verse the better: Sith then your highness doth by gift exceeding Make what you read the better for your reading; Let my poor muse your pains thus far importune, Like as you read my verse, so--read my fortune.

"_From your Highness' saucy G.o.dson._"

Of the further progress of his suit and the various little arts of pleasing to which Harrington now applied himself, some amusing hints may be gathered out of the following extracts taken from a note-book kept by himself[129].

[Note 129: See Nugae Antiquae.]

..."I am to send good store of news from the country for her highness entertainment.... Her highness loveth merry tales."

"The queen stood up and bade me reach forth my arm to rest her thereon.

O! what sweet burden to my next song. Petrarch shall eke out good matter for this business."

"The queen loveth to see me in my new frize jerkin, and saith 'tis well enough cut. I will have another made liken to it. I do remember she spit on sir Matthew's fringed cloth, and said the fool's wit was gone to rags.--Heaven spare me from such jibing!"

"I must turn my poor wits towards my suit for the lands in the north....

I must go in an early hour, be fore her highness hath special matters brought up to counsel on.--I must go before the breakfast covers are placed, and stand uncovered as her highness cometh forth her chamber; then kneel and say, G.o.d save your majesty, I crave your ear at what hour may suit for your servant to meet your blessed countenance. Thus will I gain her favor to follow to the auditory.

"Trust not a friend to do or say, In that yourself can sue or pray."

The lands alluded to in the last extract, formed a large estate in the north of England, which an ancestor of Harrington had forfeited by his adherence to the house of York during the civil wars, and which he was now endeavouring to recover. This further mention of the business occurs in one of his letters.

"Yet I will adventure to give her majesty five hundred pounds in money, and some pretty jewel or garment, as you shall advise, only praying her majesty to further my suit with some of her learned counsel; which I pray you to find some proper time to move in; this some hold as a dangerous adventure, but five and twenty manors do well justify my trying it."