CHAPTER V.

When we turned the leaf upon the Balladry of England, we were upon fifteenth century ground, which, you will remember, we found very barren of great writers. Gower and Froissart, whom we touched upon, slipped off the stage just as the century began--their names making two of those joined in that group of deaths to which I called attention, and which marked the meeting of two centuries. Next we had glimpse of Lydgate and of King James (of Scotland), who, at their best, only gave faint token of the poetic spirit which illuminated the far better verses of Chaucer.

We then passed over the period of the Henrys, and of the War of the Roses, with mention of Shakespeare’s Falstaff--of his Prince Hal--his Agincourt--his courtship of Katharine of Valois--his inadequate presentment of the Maid of Orleans--his crabbed and crooked Richard III.--all rounded out with the battle of Bosworth field, and the coming to power of Henry of Richmond.

We found the book-trade taking on a new phase with Caxton’s press: we gave a tinkling bit of Skelton’s “Merry Margaret;” we put a woman-writer--Dame Juliana Barnes--for the first time on our list; we lingered over the quaint time-stained Paston Letters, which smelled so strongly of old English home-life; and we summed up our talk with a little bugle-note of that Balladry which made fitful snatches of music all through the weariness of those hundred years.

_Early Days of Henry VIII._

To-day we front the sixteenth century. Great names and great deeds crop out over it as thickly as leaves grow in summer. At the very outset, three powerful monarchs came almost abreast upon the scene--Henry VIII. of England, Francis I. of France, and Charles V. of Spain, Germany, and the Low Countries.

Before the first quarter of the century had passed, the monk Luther had pasted his ticket upon the doors of the church at Wittenberg; and that other soldier-monk, Loyola, was astir with the beginnings of Jesuitism. America had been planted; the Cape of Good Hope was no longer the outpost of stormy wastes of water with no shores beyond. St. Peter’s church was a-building across the Tiber, and that brilliant, courteous, vicious, learned Leo X. was lording it in Rome. The Moors and their Saracen faith had been driven out of the pleasant countries that are watered by the Guadalquivir. Titian was alive and working; and so was Michael Angelo and Raphael, in the great art-centres of Italy: and Venice was in this time so rich, so grand, so beautiful, so abounding in princely houses, in pictures, in books, in learning, and in all social splendors, that to pass two winters in the City of the Lagoon, was equal to the half of a polite education; and I suppose that a Florentine or Venetian or Roman of that day, thought of a pilgrimage to the far-away, murky London, as Parisians think now of going to Chicago, or Omaha, or San Francisco--excellent places, with delightful people in them; but not the centres about which the literary and art world goes spinning, as a wheel goes spinning on its hub.

We have in the contemporary notes of a well-known Venetian chronicler, Marini Sanuto--who was secretary to the famous Council of Ten--evidence of the impression which was made on that far-off centre of business and of learning, by such an event as the accession of Henry VIII. to the throne of England. This Sanuto was a man of great dignity; and by virtue of his position in the Council, heard all the “relations” of the ambassadors of Venice; and hence his Diary is a great mine of material for contemporary history.

“News have come,” he says, “through Rome of the death of the King of England on April 20th [1509]. ’Twas known in Lucca on the 6th May, by letters from the bankers Bonvisi. The new King is nineteen years old, a worthy King, and hostile to France. He is the son-in-law of the King of Spain. His father was called Henry, and fifty odd years of age; he was a very great _miser_, but a man of vast ability, and had accumulated so much gold that he is supposed to have [had] more than wellnigh all the other Kings of Christendom. The King, his son, is liberal and handsome--the friend of Venice, and the enemy of France. This intelligence is _most_ satisfactory.”

Certainly the new king was most liberal in his spending, and as certainly was abundantly provided for. And money counted in those days--as it does most whiles: no man in England could come to the dignity of Justice of the Peace--such office as our evergreen friend Justice Shallow holds in Shakespeare--except he had a rental of £20 per annum, equivalent to a thousand dollars of present money--measured by its purchasing power of wheat.[69] By the same standard the average Earl had a revenue of £20,000, and the richest of the peers is put down at a probable income of three times this amount.

What a special favorite of the crown could do in the way of expenditure is still made clear to us by those famous walks, gardens, and gorgeous saloons of Hampton Court, where the great Cardinal Wolsey set his armorial bearings upon the wall--still to be seen over the entrance of the Clock Court. If you go there--and every American visitor in London should be sure to find a way thither--you will see, may be, in the lower range of windows, that look upon the garden court--the pots of geranium and the tabby cats belonging to gentlewomen of rank, but of decayed fortune--humble pensioners of Victoria--who occupy the sunny rooms from which, in the times we are talking of, the pampered servants of the great Cardinal looked out. And when the great man drove to court, or into the city, his retinue of outriders and lackeys, and his golden trappings, made a spectacle for all the street mongers.

Into that panorama, too, of the early days of Henry VIII., enters with slow step, and with sad speech, poor Katharine of Aragon--the first in order of this stalwart king’s wives. Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler used to read that queen’s speech with a pathos that brought all the sadnesses of that sad court to life again: Miss Cushman, too, you may possibly have heard giving utterance to the same moving story; but, I think, with a masculinity about her manner she could never wholly shake off, and which gave the impression that she could--if need were--give the stout king such a buffet on the ears as would put an end to all chaffer about divorce.

Shakespeare, writing that play of Henry VIII., probably during the lifetime of Elizabeth (though its precise date and full authenticity are matters of doubt), could not speak with very much freedom of the great queen’s father: She had too much of that father’s spirit in her to permit that; otherwise, I think the great dramatist would have given a blazing score to the cruelty and _Bluebeardism_ of Henry VIII.

I know that there be those acute historic inquirers who would persuade us to believe that the king’s much-marrying propensities were all in order, and legitimate, and agreeable to English constitutional sanction: but I know, too, that there is a strong British current of common-sense setting down all through the centuries which finds harbor in the old-fashioned belief--that the king who, with six successive wives of his own choice, divorced two, and cut off the heads of other two, must have had--vicious weaknesses. For my own part, I take a high moral delight--Froude to the contrary--in thinking of him as a clever, dishonest, good-natured, obstinate, selfish, ambitious, tempestuous, arrogant scoundrel. Yet, withal, he was a great favorite in his young days;--so tall, so trim, so stout, so rich, so free with his money. No wonder the stately and disconsolate Queen (of Aragon) said:--

“Would I had never trod this English earth, Or felt the flatteries that grow upon it; Ye’ve angels faces, but Heaven knows your hearts!”

And this wilful King befriended learning and letters in his own wilful way. Nay, he came to have ambitions of his own in that direction, when he grew too heavy for practice with the long-bow, or for feats of riding--in which matters he had gained eminence even amongst those trained to sports and exercises of the field.

_Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More._

It was with the King’s capricious furtherance that Cardinal Wolsey became so august a friend of learning. The annalists delight in telling us how the great Cardinal went down to St. Paul’s School to attend upon an exhibition of the boys there, who set afoot a tragedy founded upon the story of Dido. And at the boys’ school was then established as head-master that famous William Lilly[70] who had learned Greek in his voyaging into Eastern seas, and was among the first to teach it in England: he was the author too of that _Lilly’s Latin Grammar_ which was in use for centuries, and of which later editions are hanging about now in old New England garrets, from whose mouldy pages our grandfathers learned to decline their _pennæ--pennarum_. Wolsey wrote a preface for one of the earlier issues of this Lilly’s Grammar; and the King gave it a capital advertisement by proclaiming it illegal to use any other. The Cardinal, moreover, in later years established a famous school at his native place of Ipswich (a rival in its day to that of Eton), and he issued an address to all the schoolmasters of England in favor of accomplishing the boys submitted to their charge in the most elegant literatures.

The great Hall of Christ’s Church College, Oxford, still further serves to keep in mind the memory and the munificence of Cardinal Wolsey: it must be remembered, however, in estimating his munificence that he had only to confiscate the revenues of a small monastery to make himself full-pocketed for the endowment of a college. ’Tis certain that he loved learning, and that he did much for its development in the season of his greatest power and influence; certain, too, that his ambitions were too large for the wary King, his master, and brought him to that dismal fall from his high estate, which is pathetically set forth in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.:

“----Farewell to all my greatness! This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms And bears his blushing honors thick upon him; The third day comes a frost--a killing frost; And--when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a ripening--nips his root And then he falls as I do. I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory; But far beyond my depth; my high-blown pride At length broke under me; and now has left me, Weary, and old with service, to the mercy Of a rude stream that must forever hide me.”

Another favorite of Henry in the early days of his kingship, and one bearing a far more important name in the literary annals of England than that of Wolsey, was Sir Thomas More. He was a Greek of the very Greeks, in both character and attainment. Born in the heart of London--in Milk Street, now just outside of the din and roar of Cheapside, he was a scholar of Oxford, and was the son of a knight, who, like Sir Thomas himself, had a reputation for shrewd sayings--of which the old chronicler, William Camden,[71] has reported this sample:--

“Marriage,” said the elder More, “with its chances, is like dipping one’s hand into a bag, with a great many snakes therein, and but one eel; the which most serviceable and comfortable eel might possibly be seized upon; but the chances are largely in favor of catching a stinging snake:”

But, says the chronicler--this good knight did himself thrust _his_ hand three several times into such a bag, and with such ensuing results as preserved him hale and sound to the age of ninety or thereabout. The son inherited this tendency to whimsical speech, joining with it rare merits as a scholar: and it used to be said of him as a boy, that he could thrust himself into the acting of a Latin comedy and extemporize his part, with such wit and aptness, as not to break upon the drift of the play. He studied, as I said, at Oxford; and afterward Law at Lincoln’s Inn; was onewhile strongly inclined to the Church, and under influence of a patron who was a Church dignitary became zealous Religionist, and took to wearing in penance a bristling hair-shirt--which (or one like it) he kept wearing till prison-days and the scaffold overtook him, as they overtook so many of the quondam friends of Henry VIII. For he had been early presented to that monarch--even before Henry had come to the throne--and had charmed him by his humor and his scholarly talk: so that when More came to live upon his little farm at Chelsea (very near to Cheyne Row where Carlyle died but a few years since) the King found his way thither on more than one occasion; and there are stories of his pacing up and down the garden walks in familiar talk with the master.

There, too, came for longer stay, and for longer and friendlier communings, the great and scholarly Erasmus (afterward teacher of Greek at Cambridge)--and out of one of these visitations to Chelsea grew the conception and the working out of his famous Praise of Folly, with its punning title--_Encomium Moriæ_.[72]

The King promised preferment to More--which came in its time. I think he was in Flanders on the King’s business, when upon a certain day, as he was coming out from the Antwerp Cathedral, he encountered a stranger, with long beard and sunburnt face--a man of the “Ancient Mariner” stamp, who had made long voyages with that Amerigo Vespucci who stole the honor of naming America: and this long-bearded mariner told Sir Thomas More of the strange things he had seen in a country farther off than America, called _Utopia_. Of course, it is something doubtful if More ever really encountered such a mariner, or if he did not contrive him only as a good frontispiece for his political fiction. This is the work by which More is best known (through its English translations); and it has given the word Utopian to our every-day speech. The present popular significance of this term will give you a proper hint of the character of the book: it is an elaborate and whimsical and yet statesmanlike forecast of a government too good and honest and wise to be sound and true and real.

Sir Thomas smacked the humor of the thing, in giving the name _Utopia_, which is Greek for _Nowhere_. If, indeed, men were all honest, and women all virtuous and children all rosy and helpful, we might all live in a Utopia of our own. All the Fourierites--the Socialists--the Knights of Labor might find the germs of their best arguments in this reservoir of the ideal maxims of statecraft. In this model country, gold was held in large disrespect; and to keep the scorn of it wholesome, it was put to the vilest uses: a great criminal was compelled to wear gold rings in his ears: chains were made of it for those in bondage; and a particularly obnoxious character put to the wearing of a gold head-band; so too diamonds and pearls were given over to the decoration of infants; and these, with other baby accoutrements, they flung aside in disgust, so soon as they came to sturdy childhood. When therefore upon a time, Ambassadors came to Utopia, from a strange country, with their tricksy show of gold and jewels--the old Voyager says:--

“You shᵈ have sene [Utopian] children that had caste away their peerles and pretious stones, when they sawe the like sticking upon the Ambassadours cappes;--digge and pushe theire mothers under the sides, sainge thus to them,--‘Loke mother how great a lubbor doth yet were peerles, as though he were a litel child stil!’ ‘Peace sone,’ saith she; ‘I thinke he be some of the Ambassadours fooles.’”

Also in this model state industrial education was in vogue; children all, of whatsoever parentage, were to be taught some craft--as “masonrie or smith’s craft, or the carpenter’s science.” Unlawful games were decried--such as “dyce, cardes, tennis, coytes [quoits]--do not all these,” says the author, “sende the haunters of them streyghte a stealynge, when theyr money is gone?”

The Russian Count Tolstoi’s opinion that money is an invention of Satan and should be abolished, is set forth with more humor and at least equal logic, in this Latin tractate of More’s.

In the matters of Religion King Utopus decreed that

“it should be lawful for everie man to favoure and folow what religion he would, and that he mighte do the best he could to bring other to his opinion, so that he did it peaceablie, gentelie, quietlie and sobelie, without hastie and contentious rebuking.”

Yet this same self-contained Sir Thomas More did in his after controversies with Tyndale use such talk of him--about his “whyning and biting and licking and tumbling in the myre,” and “rubbing himself in puddles of dirt,”--as were like anything but the courtesies of Utopia. Indeed it is to be feared that theologic discussion does not greatly provoke gentleness of speech, in any time; it is a very grindstone to put men’s wits to sharpened edges. But More was a most honest man withal;--fearless in advocacy of his own opinions; eloquent, self-sacrificing--a tender father and husband--master of a rich English speech (his _Utopia_ was written in Latin, but translated many times into English, and most languages of Continental Europe), learned in the classics--a man to be remembered as one of the greatest of Henry VIII.’s time; a Romanist, at a date when honestest men doubted if it were worthiest to be a King’s man or a Pope’s man;--not yielding to his royal master in points of religious scruple, and with a lofty obstinacy in what he counted well doing, going to the scaffold, with as serene a step as he had ever put to his walks in the pleasant gardens of Chelsea.

_Cranmer, Latimer, Knox, and Others._

A much nobler figure is this, to my mind, than that of Cranmer,[73] who appears in such picturesque lights in the drama of Henry VIII.--who gave adhesion to royal wishes for divorce upon divorce; who always colored his religious allegiances with the colors of the King; who was a scholar indeed--learned, eloquent; who wrought well, as it proved, for the reformed faith; but who wilted under the fierce heats of trial; would have sought the good will of the blood-thirsty Mary; but who gave even to his subserviencies a half-tone that brought distrust, and so--finally--the fate of that quasi-martyrdom which has redeemed his memory.

He stands very grandly in his robes upon the memorial cross at Oxford: and he has an even more august presence in the final scene of Shakespeare’s play, where amidst all churchly and courtly pomp, he christened the infant--who was to become the Royal Elizabeth, and says to the assembled dignitaries:

“This royal infant Tho’ in her cradle, yet now promises Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings, Which time will bring to ripeness: She shall be A pattern to all princes living with her, And all that shall succeed her. Truth shall nurse her, Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her: She shall be loved and feared. A most unspotted lily shall she pass To the ground, and all the world shall mourn her.”[74]

Tennyson, in his drama of Queen Mary (a most unfortunate choice of heroine) gives a statuesque pose to this same Archbishop Cranmer; but Shakespeare’s figures are hard to duplicate. He was with Henry VIII. as counsellor at his death; was intimate adviser of the succeeding Edward VI.: and took upon himself obligations from that King (contrary to his promises to Henry) which brought him to grief under Queen Mary. That brave thrust of his offending hand into the blaze that consumed him, cannot make us forget his weaknesses and his recantations; nor will we any more forget that he it was, who gave (1543) to the old Latin Liturgy of the Church that noble, English rhythmic flow which so largely belongs to it to-day.

It is quite impossible to consider the literary aspects of the period of English history covered by the reign of Henry VIII., and the short reigns of the two succeeding monarchs, Edward VI. and Mary, without giving large frontage to the Reformers and religious controversialists. Every scholar was alive to the great battle in the Church. The Greek and Classicism of the Universities came to have their largest practical significance in connection with the settlement of religious questions or in furnishing weapons for the ecclesiastic controversies of the day. The voices of the poets--the Skeltons, the Sackvilles, the Wyatts, were chirping sparrows’ voices beside that din with which Luther thundered in Germany, and Henry VIII. thundered back, more weakly, from his stand-point of Anglicanism.

We have seen Wolsey in his garniture of gold, going from court to school; and Sir Thomas More, stern, strong, and unyielding; and Archbishop Cranmer, disposed to think rightly, but without the courage to back up his thought; and associated with these, it were well to keep in mind the other figures of the great religious processional. There was William Tyndale, native of Gloucestershire, a slight, thin figure of a man; honest to the core; well-taught; getting dignities he never sought; wearied in his heart of hearts by the flattering coquetries of the King; perfecting the work of Wyclif in making the old home Bible readable by all the world. His translation was first printed in Wittenberg about 1530:[75] I give the Lord’s Prayer as it appeared in the original edition:--

“Oure Father which arte in heven, halowed be thy name. Let thy kingdom come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well in erth, as hit ys in heven. Geve vs this daye oure dayly breade. And forgeve vs oure trespases, even as we forgeve them which treespas vs. Leade vs not into temptacion but delyvre vs from yvell. Amen.”

But Tyndale was not safe in England; nor yet in the Low Countries whither he went, and where the long reach of religious hate and jealousy put its hand upon him and brought him to a death whose fiery ignominies are put out of sight by the lustrous quality of his deservings.

I see too amongst those great, dim figures, that speak in Scriptural tones, the form of Hugh Latimer, as he stands to-day on the Memorial Cross in Oxford. I think of him too--in humbler dress than that which the sculptor has put on him--even the yeoman’s clothes, which he wore upon his father’s farm, in the Valley of the Soar, when he wrought there in the meadows, and drank in humility of thought, and manly independence under the skies of Leicestershire[76]--where (as he says), “My father had walk for an hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine.” He kept his head upon his shoulders through Henry’s time--his amazing wit and humor helping him to security;--was in fair favor with Edward; but under Mary, walked coolly with Ridley to the stake, where the fires were set, to burn them both in Oxford.

Foxe[77] too is to be remembered for his Stories of the Martyrs of these, and other times, which have formed the nightmare reading for so many school-boys.

I see, too, another figure that will not down in this coterie of Reformers, and that makes itself heard from beyond the Tweed. This is John Knox,[78] a near contemporary though something younger than most I have named, and not ripening to his greatest power till Henry VIII. had gone. Born of humble parentage in Scotland in the early quarter of the century, he was a rigid Papist in his young days, but a more rigid Reformer afterward; much time a prisoner; passing years at Geneva; not altogether a “gloomy, shrinking, fanatic,” but keeping, says Carlyle, “a pipe of Bordeaux in that old Edinboro house of his;” getting to know Cranmer, and the rest in England; discussing with these, changes of Church Service; counselling austerities, where Cranmer admitted laxities; afraid of no man, neither woman;--publishing in exile in Mary’s day--_The first Blaste of the Trumpet against the monstrous Regiment of Women_, and repenting this--quietly no doubt--when Elizabeth came to power. A thin, frail man; strong no ways, but in courage, and in brain; with broad brows--black cap--locks floating gray from under it, in careless whirls that shook as he talked; an eye like a falcon’s that flashed the light of twenty years, when sixty were on his shoulders; in after years, writhing with rheumatic pains--crawling upon his stick and a servant’s arm into his Church of St. Andrews; lifted into his pulpit by the clerk and his attendant--leaning there on the desk, a wilted heap of humanity--panting, shaking, quivering--till his breath came, and the psalm and the lifted prayer gave courage; then--fierce torrents of speech (and a pounding of the pulpit till it seemed that it would fly in shivers), with a sharp, swift, piercing utterance that pricked ears as it pricked consciences, and made the roof-timbers clang with echoes.

Of all these men there are no books that take high rank in Literature proper--unless we except the _Utopia_ of More, and the New Testament of Tyndale: but their lives and thought were welded by stout blows into the intellectual texture of the century and are not to be forgotten.

_Verse-Writing and Psalmodies._

And now, was there really no dalliance with the Muses in times that brought to the front such fighting Gospellers as we have talked of?

Yes, even Thomas More did write poems--having humor in them and grammatic proprieties, and his Latin prosody is admired of Classicists: then there were the versifiers of the Psalms, Sternhold and Hopkins, and the Whittingham who succeeded John Knox at Geneva--sharing that Scotchman’s distaste for beautiful rubrics, and we suspect beautiful verses also--if we may judge by his version of the Creed. This is a sample:--

“The Father, God is; God, the Son; God--Holy Ghost also; Yet are not three gods in all But one God and no mo.”

From the Apostles’ Creed again, we excerpt this:--

“From thence, shall he come for to judge All men both dead and quick. I, in the Holy Ghost believe And Church thats Catholick.”

Hopkins,[79] who was a schoolmaster of Suffolk, and the more immediate associate of Sternhold, thus expostulates with the Deity:--

“Why doost withdraw thy hand aback And hide it in thy lappe? Oh, plucke it out, and be not slacke To give thy foes a rap!”

As something worthier from these old psalmists’ versing, I give this of Sternhold’s:--

“The earth did shake, for feare did quake, The hills their bases shook Removed they were, in place most fayre At God’s right fearful looks. He rode on hye and did so flye Upon the Cherubins, He came in sight, and made his flight Upon the wings of winds,” etc.

It may well be that bluff King Harry relished more the homely Saxonism of such psalms than the _Stabat Maters_ and _Te Deums_ and _Jubilates_, which assuredly would have better pleased the Princess Katharine of Aragon. Yet even at a time when the writers of such psalmodies received small crumbs of favor from the Court, the English Bible was by no means a free-goer into all companies.

“A nobleman or gentleman may read it”--(I quote from a Statute of Henry VIII.’s time)--“in his house, or in his garden, or orchard, yet quietly and without disturbance of order. A merchant may read it to himself privately: But the common people, women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen and servingmen, are to be punished with one month’s imprisonment, as often as they are detected in reading the Bible, either privately or openly.”[80]

Truly this English realm was a strange one in those times, and this a strange King--who has listened approvingly to Hugh Latimer’s sermons--who harries Tyndale as he had harried Tyndale’s enemy--More; who fights the Pope, fights Luther, holds the new Bible (even Cranmer’s) in leash, who gives pension to Sternhold, works easy riddance of all the wives he wishes, pulls down Religious Houses for spoils, calls himself Defender of the Faith, and maybe goes to see (if then on show) _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_,[81] and is hilariously responsive to such songs as this:--

“I cannot eat but little meat My Stomach is not good But sure I think, that I can drink With him that wears a hood; Tho’ I go bare, take ye no care I nothing am a colde, I stuffe my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and olde.”

_Wyatt and Surrey._

The model poets, however, of this reign[82]--those who kept alive the best old classic traditions, and echoed with most grace and spirit the daintiness of Italian verse, were the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt. The latter was son of an old courtier of Henry VII., and inheritor of an estate and castle in Kent, which he made noteworthy by his decorative treatment, and which is even now counted worthy a visit by those journeying through the little town of Maidstone. He was, for those times, brilliantly educated; was in high favor with the King (save one enforced visit to the Tower); he translated Petrarch, and in his own way imitated the Italian poet’s manner, and was, by common consent, the first to graft the “Sonnet” upon English forms of verse. I find nothing however in his verse one-half so graceful or gracious as this tribute to his worth in Tennyson’s “Queen Mary:”--

“Courtier of many courts, he loves the more His own gray towers, plain life, and lettered peace, To read and rhyme in solitary fields; The lark above, the nightingale below, And answer them in song.”

Surrey was well born: was son to the Duke of Norfolk who figures in the Shakespearean play of Henry VIII., and grandson to the Surrey who worsted the Scotch on Flodden Field: he was companion of the King’s son, was taught at the Universities, at home and abroad. There was no gallant more admired in the gayer circles of the court; he too loved Petrarch, and made canzonets like his; had a Geraldine (for a Laura), half real and half mythical. The further story once obtained that he went with a gay retinue to Florence, where the lists were opened--in the spirit of an older chivalry--to this Stranger Knight, who challenged the world to combat his claims in behalf of the mythical Geraldine. And--the story ran--there were hot-heads who contended with him; and he unhorsed his antagonists, and came back brimming with honors, to the court--before which Hugh Latimer had preached, and where Sternhold’s psalms had been heard--to be imprisoned for eating flesh in Lent, in that Windsor Castle where he had often played with the King’s son. The tale[83] is a romantic one; but--in all that relates to the Florentine tourney--probably untrue.

I give you a little taste of the graceful way in which this poet sings of his Geraldine:--

“I assure thee even by oath And thereon take my hand and troth That she is one of the worthiest The truest and the faithfullest The gentlest, and the meekest o’ mind That here on earth a man may find; And if that love and truth were gone In her it might be found alone: For in her mind no thought there is But how she may be true, iwis, And is thine own; and so she says And cares for thee ten thousand ways; Of thee she speaks, on thee she thinks With thee she eats, with thee she drinks With thee she talks, with thee she moans With thee she sighs, with thee she groans With thee she says--‘Farewell mine own!’ When thou, God knows, full far art gone.”

Surrey is to be held in honor as the first poet who wrote English blank verse; he having translated two books of the Æneid in that form. But this delicate singer, this gallant soldier cannot altogether please the capricious monarch; perhaps he is too fine a soldier; perhaps too free a liver; perhaps he is dangerously befriended by some ladies of the court: Quite certain it is that the King frowns on him; and the frowns bring what they have brought to so many others--first, imprisonment in the Tower, and then the headsman’s axe. In this way the poet died at thirty, in 1547: his execution being one of the last ordered by Henry VIII., and the King so weak that he could only stamp, instead of signing the death warrant.

Honest men breathed freer, everywhere, when the King died, in the same year with Surrey: and so, that great, tempestuous reign was ended.

_A Boy-King, a Queen, and Schoolmaster._

Edward VI. succeeded his father at the age of ten years--a precocious, consumptive boy, who gave over his struggle with life when only sixteen; and yet has left his “Works,” printed by the Roxburgh Club. There’s a maturity about some of the political suggestions in his “Journal”--not unusual in a lively mind prematurely ripening under stress of disease; yet we can hardly count him a literary king.

The red reign of Mary, immediately following, lasted only five years, for which, I think, all Christian England thanked God: In those five years very many of the strong men of whom we have talked in this chapter came to a fiery end.

Only one name of literary significance do we pluck from the annals of her time; it is that of Roger Ascham,[84] the writer of her Latin letters, and for a considerable time her secretary. How, being a Protestant as he was, and an undissembling one, he kept his head upon his shoulders so near her throne, it is hard to conjecture. He must have studied the art of keeping silence as well as the arts of speech.

He was born in that rich, lovely region of Yorkshire--watered by the River Swale--where we found the young Wyclif: his father was a house-steward; but he early made show of such qualities as invited the assistance of rich friends, through whose offices he was entered at St. John’s College, Cambridge, at fifteen, and took his degree at eighteen. He was full of American pluck, aptness, and industry; was known specially for his large gifts in language; a superb penman too, which was no little accomplishment in that day; withal, he excelled in athletics, and showed a skill with the long-bow which made credible the traditions about Robin Hood. They said he wasted time at this exercise; whereupon he wrote a defence of Archery, which under the name of _Toxophilus_ has come down to our day--a model even now of good, homely, vigorous English. “He that will write well in any tongue,” said he, “must follow this counsel--to speak as the common people do--to think as wise men do.” Our teachers of rhetoric could hardly say a better thing to-day.

The subject of Archery was an important one at that period; the long-bow was still the principal war weapon of offence: there were match-locks, indeed, but these very cumbrous and counting for less than those “cloth-yard” shafts which had won the battle of Agincourt. The boy-King, Edward, to whom Ascham taught penmanship, was an adept at archery, and makes frequent allusion to that exercise in his Journal. In every hamlet practice at the long-bow was obligatory; and it was ordered by statute that no person above the age of twenty-four, should shoot the light-flight arrow at a distance under two hundred and twenty yards. What would our Archery Clubs say to this? And what, to the further order--dating in Henry VIII.’s time--that “all bow-staves should be three fingers thick and seven feet long?”

This book of Ascham’s was published two years before Henry’s death, and brought him a small pension; under the succeeding king he went to Augsburg, where Charles V. held his brilliant court; but neither there, nor in Italy, did he lose his homely and hearty English ways, and his love of English things.

In his tractate of the _Schoolmaster_, which appeared after his death, he bemoans the much and idle travel of Englishmen into Italy. They have a proverb there, he says, “_Un Inglese italianato é un diabolo incarnato_” (an Italianized Englishman is a devil incarnate). Going to Italy, when Tintoretto and Raphael were yet living, and when the great Medici family and the Borgias were spinning their golden wheels--was, for a young Englishman of that day, like a European trip to a young American of ours: Ascham says--“Many being mules and horses before they went, return swine and asses.”

There is much other piquant matter in this old book of the _Schoolmaster_; as where he says:--

“When the child doeth well, either in the choosing or true placing of his words, let the master praise him, and say, ‘Here ye do well!’ For I assure you there is no such whetstone to sharpen a good wit, and encourage a will to learning as is praise. But if the child miss, either in forgetting a word, or in changing a good with a worse, or mis-ordering the sentence, I would not have the master frown, or chide with him, if the child have done his diligence and used no truantship: For I know by good experience, that a child shall take more profit of two faults gently warned of, than of four things rightly hit.”

And this brings us to say that this good, canny, and thrifty Roger Ascham was the early teacher, in Greek and Latin, of the great Princess Elizabeth, and afterward for years her secretary. You would like to hear how he speaks of her:--

“It is your shame (I speak to you all young gentlemen of England) that one mind should go beyond you all in excellency of learning, and knowledge of divers tongues. Point forth six of the best given gentlemen of this court, and all they together show not so much good will, spend not so much time, bestow not so many hours daily, orderly, and constantly, for the increase of learning and knowledge as doth this Princess. Yea, I believe that beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French and Spanish, she readeth here now, at Windsor more Greek every day, than some prebendarys of this Church doth read Latin in a whole week.”

He never speaks of her but with a hearty tenderness; nor did she speak of him, but most kindly. At his death, she said, “She would rather that £10,000 had been flung into the sea.” And--seeing her money-loving, this was very much for her to say.

* * * * *

In our next chapter we shall meet this prudent and accomplished Princess face to face--in her farthingale and ruff--with the jewels on her fingers, and the crown upon her head--bearing herself right royally. And around her we shall find such staid worthies as Burleigh and Richard Hooker; and such bright spirits as Sidney and Raleigh, and that sweet poet Spenser, who was in that day counting the flowing measures of that long song, whose mellow cadences have floated musically down from the far days of Elizabeth to these fairer days of ours.