Chapter XXI.

Social And Literary Progress Of England Under Elizabeth.

When Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, she found England profoundly divided by religious questions, impoverished by the excessive exactions of her father and sister, still agitated by the bloody dissensions of the great nobles and the popular riots under the reigns which had just elapsed. She governed for forty-five years, amidst religious dissensions yet subsisting, although stifled by her powerful hand. She oppressed the Catholics, and their number, which at her accessions perhaps balanced that of the Protestants, rapidly diminished under the measures which she applied them. Men who cannot practise their religion, or quit the kingdom, who cannot leave their homes without authorization, who are incessantly exposed to vexation and acts of injustice, not to mention the terrible risk of an accusation of treason, abandon their worship if they are weak, or take refuge in exile if they are energetic and zealous. Upon this ruin of the liberty of her Catholic subjects, Elizabeth firmly established the Anglican Church; but the protection with which she surrounded it, while injuring the rights of the Catholics and the nonconforming Protestants, did not prevent the Catholic nucleus from subsisting in England, or the Puritan faith from developing itself. {430} With all their exaggerations, their narrow minds, the severity of their principles, the Puritans were to become for their country the salt of the earth. They were to save it successively from despotism and moral corruption, from the ruin both of liberty and of manners. Few things contributed more towards this progress of the Protestant faith in its austere simplicity, than the reading of the Bible in the English tongue. The translation of Miles Coverdale had replaced that of Wycliffe, and the venerable translator, imprisoned in his youth under Henry VIII., a bishop under Edward VI., and again persecuted under Mary, had dearly paid for the privilege of placing within the reach of his brethren the bread of life; but with the progress of literature and science, his translation was found to be bad and full of errors. Parker, the first Archbishop of Canterbury under the reign of Elizabeth, caused the undertaking of a new version, which was ardently carried out by a commission of learned men. It was completed in 1572, and published under the name of the Bible of Bishop Grindall, the latter having, in 1575, succeeded Parker as Primate. Grindall was, in favour of the reading of the Scriptures and even of the Puritans, who developed under his episcopate, notwithstanding the harshness of the queen towards them, and the severe measures everywhere employed to bring about uniformity of worship. Notwithstanding the fines of twenty pounds sterling per month, declared against those who did not attend the services of their parish church, the "Brownists," a Puritan sect of the strongest tinge, originated at this period and endured without flinching a violent persecution. {431} Many of the Fathers of the American Republic frequented the assemblages of the Brownists, before taking the course of abandoning their country to worship God in liberty. After the death of Grindall, in 1583, the Puritans found an implacable foe in the new Archbishop, Whitgift. The struggle began between the Primate and the nonconformist clergy; it lasted for a long time; but during the last years of the life of Elizabeth it had relaxed. The Puritans at that time grounded, upon the succession to the throne of a Presbyterian prince, hopes which were to be cruelly deceived.

If Queen Elizabeth oppressed at home those of her subjects who did not purely and simply accept the religious doctrines which she offered to them, she always supported upon the Continent the political and religious efforts of the Reformers. We have seen with what prudence she acted, and how her powerful instinct of government, her taste for absolute power and her horror of rebellion, often compelled Cecil to urge her into the way of that great policy which tended to make England the protector and chief of Protestantism in Europe. Throughout all the duplicities, timid councils, and meannesses of Queen Elizabeth towards the French Huguenots or the Dutch Protestants, it must yet be admitted that it was the continental reformers alone who obtained her constant favour, and it was solely through an economy hitherto unknown in the royal expenditure, that she could cope with so many repeated demands. Her father, Henry VIII., had confiscated the property of the monasteries, and that of the subjects whom he caused to be executed, and he had overwhelmed his people with unheard of taxes. {432} Her brother and her sister, from different motives, had left their finances in the saddest disorder. Under the wise direction of Cecil, and thanks to the economy of Queen Elizabeth, the treasury of England was enabled to satisfy the constant calls from without, and to provide for the requirements within, notwithstanding the decrease in the public burdens. The developement of commerce and industry was encouraged. "The money which is in the pockets of my subjects is as useful to me as that in my treasury,"--a great economical maxim, which the kings, her predecessors, had neither known nor practiced.

Elizabeth had taken steps to second the industrial efforts of her people. In order to give an impetus to national manufactures, a sumptuary law, from 1581 to 1582, prohibited to certain persons silk clothing and precious laces manufactured abroad: at the same time, as the exportation of wool formed the greater part of the commerce of England, the rearing of sheep was everywhere encouraged. Pasture-grounds had increased in all directions, replacing in many parts the ploughed lands, and the cloth manufactories every day employed more hands. Linen cloth also began to be manufactured. The persecutions of Philip II. in the Low Countries brought to England skilled workmen, who gave fresh life to different branches of manufacture. It was at this period the happiness and honour of England to receive those who fled from the tyranny of the Spaniards, and she was subsequently to be the refuge of the French Huguenots after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. {433} Commerce and industry prospered, in fact, at home under the reign of Elizabeth; but the predominent achievement of this period was the formation of the English navy, which at her accession was yet only in its infancy, but which had become queen of the seas before her death. The protectionist system, practised in all its rigour by King Henry VIII., soon gave way to the wise liberality of Cecil. An act of the first Parliament of Elizabeth relaxed the navigation laws, authorized trading by foreign vessels on certain conditions, and favoured the development of great commercial companies. In 1566 the Royal Exchange of London was built under the auspices of Sir Thomas Gresham, and the relations with the Low Countries, Germany, and the kingdoms of the North suddenly took a fresh impulse, making up for the progressive decrease of the fisheries. "No more fish is eaten," said Cecil regretfully.

A new trade for England, the monopoly of which had hitherto been left to Spain and Portugal, was the odious slave-trade. An English sailor, John Locke was the first to embark in this traffic. Hawkins engaged in it with success, taking possession of a shipload of negroes upon the coast of Guinea, and selling them in St. Domingo; but this detestable commerce was not to attain its full development until later: it was the Spaniards and their colonies, not the unhappy blacks, whom the English sailors of the time of Elizabeth regarded as their legitimate prey.

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Under the reign of Queen Elizabeth began the great voyages of discovery, which gave rise to the abuses of buccaneering, but at the same time opened up a vast field to human enterprise and research. Martin Frobisher first entered the field in 1567. He desired to find a new passage to India; but he was stopped in the vicinity of Hudson's Bay, where he took possession of certain territories in the name of England, and discovered the strait which still bears his name. From this the first idea was conceived of a passage by the north-west, subsequently sought for ardently by John Davis, who, as well as his forerunner, also gave a name to a strait. Frobisher made three voyages to this region, where he thought that he had found gold, but he was finally employed in the service of the queen, commanded one of the vessels which repulsed the Spanish Armada, and was killed, in 1594, while attacking a fortress near Brest, which held out for the Leaguers against Henry IV.

While Frobisher was seeking the polar passage, Drake accomplished the journey round the world, an undertaking which had as yet only been attempted by the Portuguese Fernando Magellan, who gave his name to a celebrated strait. His voyage was secretly authorized by Elizabeth, in defiance of the claim of the Spaniards to the islands and seas of America, which they said, were solemnly conceded to them by the Pope. Drake took no heed of their claims, pillaged the coasts, captured ships, and accumulated by his acts of piracy enormous wealth, of which he brought her share to the sovereign, who treated him honourably in return, though without recognizing his missions. The little vessel in which Drake sailed was preserved at Deptford until it crumbled through decay.

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The projects of Sir Walter Raleigh were not exclusively directed, like those of Hawkins and Drake, to the parts of the world occupied by the Spaniards. He had conceived the hope of enriching his country and himself otherwise than by buccaneering, and had attempted several successive expeditions towards the southern part of North America. He had already failed twice and lost his brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in one of his voyages, when he set sail, in 1584, with the authorization of the queen, to take possession, with full ownership, of the lands he might discover, upon the condition of reserving a fifth part of the produce of the mines for the crown. It was in this expedition that he accidentally discovered the territory which now composes, in the United States, Virginia and North Carolina, possessions which Queen Elizabeth deigned to distinguish by the name of Virginia. The letters patent granted to Raleigh were confirmed by an act of Parliament, and in the following year Sir Richard Greville, a relative of Sir Walter's, conducted to the new colony eight hundred emigrants, who established themselves on the island of Roanoke. They were nearly dead from hunger and privations, when, in the following year. Sir Francis Drake, returning from an expedition against the Spanish territories, received them on board his ship. Two other attempts at colonization had the same result, and Virginia remained abandoned to the savages without having yielded any other result to England than the discovery of tobacco, which for a long time bore the name of Virginian grass.

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We have seen that at the moment of the attack of the Spanish Armada the royal navy was of little importance; but the commercial navy was considerable. The proportion had increased by a third in fifty years. Whale-fishing, which began to develop in 1575, soon occupied a large number of vessels. The protracted war with Spain and Portugal having hindered the arrival of the productions of India, a company of traders was formed in the city of London to undertake voyages to the East Indies. In December, 1600, Queen Elizabeth granted them a charter; this was the origin, the modest germ of the great East India Company. The political and religious animosity which nourished the buccaneering expeditions against Spain, and the cruel revenge which the Spaniards took upon the English sailors who fell into their hands, served to develop the taste for remote enterprises, and to form that race of bold sailors who have so powerfully contributed to the grandeur and independence of their country.

While material and social progress took so new a flight, the splendour of literature under the reign of Elizabeth has not yet faded. The intellectual movement preceded all others. It burst forth towards the end of the civil war, and amidst the desolation which intestine strife brings in its wake. Scotland even took part in this glory, although civil war still reigned there. From 1494 to 1584 seven colleges were founded at Oxford and eight at Cambridge. The university of Aberdeen in 1494, that of Edinburgh in 1582, two colleges of the university of St. Andrew's between 1512 and 1537, the university of Trinity College at Dublin in 1591, assured in Great Britain the development of learning. The suppression of the monasteries retarded this movement momentarily, but the reformers did not lose sight of the danger. {437} Cranmer in particular made serious efforts to remedy the evil. The schools called grammar-schools, then instituted in great numbers, spread elementary education and a certain degree of intellectual culture; but the higher instruction, and, in particular, the study of the classical languages, received a blow from which they were long in recovering. Great disorder reigned in the universities; morals were lax and the standard of study very deficient. The revival of letters began with the study of foreign languages. We have seen that Queen Mary, like Queen Elizabeth, had studied French, Italian and Spanish, as well as Latin and Greek. From this usage, more and more diffused, sprang a strange abuse of foreign words, which introduced something like a new tongue into the English language. Under the reign of Elizabeth the lords and fine ladies at court spoke a language designated by the word "Euphuism," composed of the harmonious syllables of all languages, which is now difficult to understand, and especially to read. Traces of it may yet be found in the poems of Spenser.

Amidst this momentary decline of learning, a natural result of violent convulsions, it is impossible not to recognize the fact that the sixteenth century furnished, in England, as elsewhere, a great number of distinguished men as learned as they were gifted by nature. Without going beyond the reign of Elizabeth, we may mention Roger Ascham, her tutor, born in Yorkshire in 1515, whom the queen retained beside her in the capacity of secretary until his death in 1568. His most esteemed work is entitled _The Schoolmaster_. {438} The tutor of King James VI. of Scotland has left a more celebrated name. The historian and poet, George Buchanan, born at Killearn, in 1506, was originally a soldier. He lived for a long time in France, in Portugal, in Piedmont, leading a life interspersed with adventures, until he returned to Scotland in 1560. Being nominated by Queen Mary to a post of public instruction, he did not cease to attack her ardently and to write violent pamphlets against her. Parliament nominated him tutor to the young king, whom he instructed with considerable care. When he was accused of having made a pedant of him, he replied, "That is the best thing I could make of him." His _History of Scotland_ possesses real interest, although it is characterized by much partiality. He died at Edinburgh in 1582. Doctor Hooker had no taste for taking part in the great agitations of his time. Born in 1554, domestic dissensions, caused by the temper of his wife, led him to seek a peaceful and retired life. He had been master of the temple in London, but a preacher, his colleague, an ardent Puritan, made existence so hard for him that he retired to a country living, where he wrote his great work _Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Policy_, a book full of judgment, moderation, and learning, a model of the most beautiful English style. He died in 1600, being only forty-seven years of age, at the moment when he had just finished his book. The courtiers did not abandon exclusively to the learned the cultivation of letters. Lord Surrey, beheaded during the last days of Henry VIII., has left some charming verses. The Lion King-of-Arms of Scotland, Sir David Lyndsay, of the Mount, was also a poet. {439} The type of knight and gentleman, Sir Philip Sydney, nephew of the Earl of Leicester, and son-in-law of Walsingham, who has left in a life-time of thirty-two years an accomplished model and an ineffaceable remembrance to posterity, wrote in prose and in verse. His romantic allegory of _Arcadia_, is the most important of his works. He dedicated it to his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, a worthy friend of such a brother. It was said of her that to love her was to receive a liberal education. She died young, like himself, having published the book which her brother had left, and which had an immense success. We have mentioned the learned and lettered courtiers. We now come to the real poets. England numbers two under the reign of Elizabeth: the one charming, elegant, prolific; the other, unique in the history of the world: Spenser and Shakespeare. Edmund Spenser was born in London in 1533. He wrote at first some poems of little importance, but he devoted several years to the composition of the _Faery Queene_, of which Sydney was the first patron, and which was completed under the auspices of Raleigh. We might have placed Spenser among the courtiers, if that had not been to do too much honour to the latter, for his patrons often employed him, and he finally obtained considerable estates in Ireland out of the confiscated lands of the Earl of Desmond. The _Faery Queene_ was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, who is constantly celebrated in the poem. She granted a pension to Spenser, and the success of the work was greater from the fact, that the court took pleasure in searching for the persons concealed beneath the allegorical names. An inexhaustible imagination, the most elevated sentiments, and the most charming descriptions, cause one to forget the peculiar taste of the time, the confusion and complication of incidents, as well as the strange form of versification. {440} Read without pausing, the _Faery Queene_ may appear tiresome, but a great number of detached portions will always remain masterpieces. Spenser died in 1598, after being obliged to fly from Ireland, then a prey to insurrection.

Let us finally mention the great comedian, the great philosopher, the great poet, who was in his life time butcher's apprentice, poacher, actor, theatrical manager, and whose name is William Shakespeare. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in 1564. In twenty years, amidst the duties of his profession, the care of mounting his pieces, of instructing his actors, he composed thirty-two tragedies and comedies, in verse and prose, rich with an incomparable knowledge of human nature, and an unequalled power of imagination, terrible and comic by turns, profound and delicate, homely and touching, responding to every emotion of the soul, divining all that was beyond the range of his experience, and for ever remaining the treasure of ages. All this being accomplished, Shakespeare left the theatre and the busy world at the age of forty-five, to return to Stratford-on-Avon, where he lived peacefully in the most modest retirement, writing nothing, and never returning to the stage, ignored and unknown, if his works had not for ever marked out his place in the world. A strange example of an imagination so powerful, suddenly ceasing to produce, and closing once for all the door to the efforts of genius. Shakespeare died in 1616. After mention of his name, no one will ask whether the reign of Elizabeth is entitled to occupy a great place in the literary history of England and the world.