Читать книгу Great Ralegh - Hugh De Sélincourt - Страница 15

Table of Contents

Court life—The Queen's position—Her character—She takes notice of Ralegh—Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester—Sir Philip Sidney—Burghley, the Lord High Treasurer, and Walsingham—Robert Cecil—The dress of the courtier—The language of the courtier—The other side, and the other Queen—Mary, Queen of Scots—The great intrigue—Its discovery—Death of Queen Mary.

The Court was the brilliant feature of the time. The Court was not confined to ceremonial functions and presentations—it was not a bath in which a man or a woman must be dipped before he or she could lay any real claim to distinguished respectability. The Court had a vivid existence of its own. "It was the centre, not of government alone, but of the fine arts: the exemplar of culture and civilization." The Court held a lien on the gaiety and life of the time. Courtiers and merchants (the two chief classes) were as distinct as a little later were town and gown at the Universities. To be a proper courtier became a cult.

Three great books, extraordinarily typical of the Renaissance, were written in almost identical years, books which pointed to new scope for the State, for the Prince, and for the private man. In 1513 Machiavel completed The Prince, in 1516 Sir Thomas More's Utopia was published, and in the same year Count Baldassare Castiglione finished his Book of the Courtier.

The dream of the Utopia may never be realized; but in some seventy-five years a close example of the Prince and of the Courtier were found in Queen Elizabeth, and in many of the men who surrounded her. The Book of the Courtier was translated into all the languages of Europe, and became the text-book of the cult. Its English translator was Thomas Hoby, and his work, as has been seen, was commended by the judicious Ascham. Castiglione was chaffed for moulding his own conduct precisely on the model of the perfect courtier he portrays in his book; and he could not but confess that the man of his imagination was the man he would choose to be. And, indeed, it would be what every courtier would aspire to be, as Wordsworth's Happy Warrior,

"This is the happy Warrior, this is he

That every man in arms should wish to be."

The Courtier must be gallant in the use of arms, proficient in all exercises of the body, skilled in all exercises of the mind; he must be ready and witty of tongue; he must be well-born and distinguished. But his realm is beyond the mere enterprise of accomplishments and birth. For the book ends with Bembo's great praise of Beauty—that Beauty "which is the origin of all other beawtye, whiche never encreaseth nor diminisheth always bewtifull and of itself … most simple. This is the beawtye unseperable from the high bountye, whiche with her voyce calleth and draweth to her all thynges … ," and an understanding of this Heavenly Beauty must be the final trait of the Perfect Courtier.

And it is well to bear this in mind. For this feeling for beauty existed in the Elizabethan courtier, just as it gave the finishing touch to Castiglione's hero; and existed as really as the more conspicuous qualities of gallantry and strength and intellect. Vitality, as has been said again and again, was the keynote of the age; and it is apparent in this aspiration towards beauty, just as it is apparent in reckless cruelty. The compass of the age was immense. And every instinct, every tendency of brute or god, raged with intense life, and was expressed Nothing lay dormant. The centre of all this life, of all this genius for living was the Court; and the illustrious head of the Court was Queen Elizabeth.

QUEEN ELIZABETH

Guy de Maupassant has written a story of a small band of French soldiers who are at the last gasp with hunger and weariness and cold. They cannot march any further. They are content to lie down in the snow and die. But two fugitives come running to them, an old man and his grand-daughter, a young girl. "Allons les camarades," cries the Sergeant Pratique, "faut porter cette demoiselle-là ou bien nous n' sommes pu Français, nom d'un chien." So the worn-out men forget their weariness and carry her; they dare the cold and strip off their overcoats to keep her warm; they find new courage and drive back a party of the enemy, and they reach the French lines in safety. "What's that you're carrying?" asks a soldier. "Aussitôt une petite figure blonde apparut, depeignée et souriante qui répondit, 'C'est moi, monsieur.' Un rire s'éleva parmi les hommes et une joie courut dans leurs c[oe]urs. Alors Pratique agita son képi en vociferant, 'Vive la France.'"

There in little is the exact nature of Elizabeth's influence, and her influence was conscious and acted, not upon the immediate Court alone, but upon England. De Maupassant does not give any details of the girl, nothing of her character, not even her name. They are not relevant to his purpose. She may have as many faults in her small way as Elizabeth had in her great way. He does not mention them.

Such a mass of detail, however, is known about Elizabeth, and her faults have been so relentlessly exposed in the interest of Truth—her meanness, her avarice, her treachery, her wantonness, and what not—that the whole picture of the woman who was learned enough to speak in public impromptu in Latin and could converse in many languages, of the woman who was great enough to cause her own worship to be the fashion, and the sincere fashion, of the woman who was sufficiently beautiful and sufficiently distinguished to shine like a diamond on the forehead of that resplendent age—is almost lost to view, so clouded with the dust of detraction has that picture become.

She was the very epitome of the time. All the brutality and energy and brilliance of that brutal, vital age found their counterpart in her. And she was a woman, a fitting contemporary of Catherine de Medicis. But she was too much a politician to be a good woman; and too much a woman to be a good politician.

To all the power which a beautiful woman, and a woman strong in body and intellect and passion, always has possessed and always will possess, she added the prestige of being Queen of England. Whereas the passions of her father threw Europe into confusion, the love affairs of Elizabeth, less impetuously managed, often held the balance between nations and brought every royal prince to England as suitor for her hand, and the great English courtiers scowled or laughed at them, but were kept in allegiance by their sovereign.

Wit, birth, and bearing found favour in her sight. There was no room at her Court for a fool. She loved wit as she loved splendour.

The Queen had heard of Humfrey Gilbert's nephew from Humfrey Gilbert's aunt, one of her intimate attendant women; and when Ralegh first came into notice by his exploits in Ireland, she was inclined to favour him. She was interested in his career, as a letter bears witness in which she writes, " … for that our pleasure is to have our Servaunt Walter Rawley treyned some longer tyme in that our realme for his better experience in Martiall affaires, and for the special care we have to doe him good in respect of his kyndred that have served us some of them (as you knowe) neer aboute our Parson: theise are to require youe that the leading of the said bande may be committed to the said Rawley."

Many stories are extant about his first meeting with Elizabeth. Truth hides in all of them. Some say that the Queen was present when Lord Grey de Wilton and young Ralegh were put face to face in a council chamber before Lord Burghley, and that she was struck by the power and skill with which he made good his case, proving the lack of judgment Lord Grey had shown in conducting the affairs of the war. Old Thomas Fuller, that worthiest of his own worthies (he had an eye for romantic effect, steadfast as he was for truth in matters of importance), relates that "Her Majesty, meeting with a plashy place, made some scruple to go on; when Ralegh (dressed in the gay and genteel habit of those times) presently cast off and spread his new plush cloak on the ground, whereon the Queen trod gently over, rewarding him afterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a footcloth. Thus an advantageous admission into the notice of a prince is more than half a degree to preferment." Industrious Fuller does not leave it at that; he proceeds to tell how Ralegh wrote on a window in the Queen's presence,

"Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall,"

and how the Queen added with more grace than rhythm,

"If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all."

Ralegh's heart did not fail him. He became the Queen's lover; and his influence over the Queen was so recognized that Tarleton, the famous comedian, dared, during a performance, to add point to the words, "See, the knave commands the queen," by stretching out his hand towards Ralegh, who stood by the Queen. And Elizabeth, it is recorded, frowned. Swift was his ascent to fortune, came the first step how it may.

Elizabeth was too clever to try to lay aside her sex, though she was a skilful markswoman, an able horse-woman. Even her staid Archbishop Whitgift she used to tease, saying (as Isaac Walton gravely records as a fair testimony of her piety) that "she would never eat flesh in Lent without obtaining a License from her little black husband: and that she pitied him because she trusted him."

She was so born a Queen that she was able to do and say the most dangerous things without losing her distinction, or lessening her dignity.

And it is small wonder in those days when in England the whole force of the Renaissance turned as it were to a rapture of patriotism that such a Queen should be the visible emblem of the country, and be herself worshipped. Men might rave at her whims, they were driven frantic by them, but in their hearts they cherished her as Queen of themselves and Queen of their country. Fortunately for herself, and fortunately for England, her intellect mastered her passions, though that does not prove that she was passionless: far from it. There is nothing to justify that last scandal of a moral age which would damn her as a feelingless flirt. Lord Bacon, the wise Baron of Verulam, summed the matter up pithily, attaching its right value to the question, which, after all, is a paltry one, when, in writing on the Fortunate Memory, he says: "She suffered herself to be honoured and carressed and celebrated and extolled with the name of Love; and wished it, and continued it beyond the suitability of her age. If you take these things more softly, they may not even be without some admiration, because such things are commonly found in our fabulous narratives of a Queen in the Islands of Bliss, with her hall and her institutes, who receives the administrations of Love, but prohibits its licentiousness. If you judge them more severely, still they have this admirable circumstance, that gratifications of this sort did not much hurt her reputation, and not at all her majesty; nor ever relaxed her government, nor were any notable impediment to her State affairs." And it must be remembered that the times were neither fastidious nor gentle, and that when Bacon says licentiousness (lasciviam is the Latin word he uses) he meant licentiousness. Elizabeth was too sane, and too clever, and too busy to have time to be licentious: just as she could not have retained her control over men and control over herself, seen in the adroit way in which she managed the foreign princes, if she had remained what is called pure.

Masterly was her knowledge and treatment of men. Roughly speaking, they were divided into two classes; those whom she liked, and those whom she valued: but she kept them all imperiously to her will. The great Burghley was her man of business; he and his son Robert Cecil were her chief statesmen, and well she knew their value: capricious and exacting as she might be, she respected their advice and gave way to it. "Burghley," wrote Leicester, at the height of his arrogant power, "could do more with her in an hour than others in seven years." And he wrote concerning some political business. Never, when Leicester had most influence with the Queen, did she ever allow him to control her political actions, or in any way to supplant Cecil.

Robert Dudley, born about the year 1532, made Earl of Leicester in 1564, enjoyed the Queen's good-will more continuously and more to his advantage than any other of her lovers. He was regarded as the chief man in England by the ambassadors of foreign princes: he was for a long time the most magnificent. But Elizabeth kept always to her maxim, that England should be a country with one mistress and no master; much to Leicester's displeasure. His desire was to be master. He suggests a comparison with Milton's Satan, "better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heav'n," when he tried, and tried with conspicuous ill-success, to become King of the Netherlands. By the old nobility, staunch Sussex and proud Norfolk, he was hated. With the Duke of Norfolk, he on one occasion came to blows, when, during a game of tennis, of which the Queen was a spectator, he snatched her pocket-hand-kerchief to wipe the sweat from his forehead. They thought him saucy and overweening. To the Queen his insolence was not unpleasant. Cecil disliked him (he does not appear a man to hate any one) and judiciously draws up papers contrasting Leicester and other suitors, especially the Archduke Charles, much to Leicester's disadvantage. But for all his glitter and influence, he was hated by the English people. His name had an ill sound ever since the untoward death of his wife, Amy Robsart. Though the pamphlet Leicester's Commonwealth is wholly unreliable, which among other slanders, states that the Lady Amy was actually murdered at his command, it is most probable that she committed suicide through misery at her neglect. Well enough men knew what was meant when the husband in the Yorkshire Tragedy says, after he has thrown his wife down and slain her:

"The surest way to charm a woman's tongue

Is—break her neck: a politician did it."

They thought of the stone staircase at Cumnor and shuddered. The people did not like his way of cheapening their Queen's good name: they did not like the man who caused scandals to arise round her. In 1560 Anne Dowe of Brentford was imprisoned for asserting that Elizabeth was with child by Robert Dudley; and she was the first of a long line of offenders who were punished for the same assertion.

And just as men hated Dudley for his arrogance, and for his daring to think even of setting himself beside their Queen, so they loved his nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, for the grace which his hand brought to everything which he touched. He fulfilled the ideal of Castiglione's Courtier. He was the antithesis of the rough, unmannered Dudley. In Dudley all the cruelty and ostentation and savage power of the time seem to find expression; whereas in Philip Sidney, all its grace and skill and poetry were manifest. Men vied with one another in his praises, men fought for the right to call him friend, and a woman became immortal by being "Sidney's sister." "Sidney, the Siren of this latter age," writes Barnefield; "divine Sir Philip," Michael Drayton calls him; and Ben Jonson, as though in defiance of the charge of exaggeration utters (you can hear him say it), "the godlike Sidney." Even the ribald Nash lowers his mad voice to the note of reverence, "Apollo hath resigned his Ivory Harpe unto Astrophel and he, like Mercury, must lull you a sleep with his musicke. Sleepe Argus, sleep Ignorance, sleep Impudence, for Mercury hath Io and onely Io Paean belongeth to Astrophel. Deare Astrophel, that in the ashes of thy Love livest againe like the Phoenix; o might thy bodie (as thy name) live againe likewise here amongst us; but the earthe, the mother of mortality hath snacht thee too soone into her chilled cold armes, and will not let thee by any meanes be drawne from her deadly imbrace; and thy divine Soule, carried on an Angels wings to heaven, is installed in Hermes place sole prolocutor to the Gods." His life was a poem, which all the men who lived with him, and all the men who knew his name, were great enough to read and to appreciate; his death is an example for all time. Fame with its common story cannot sully the brightness of the superb sacrifice of that superb self.

Dudley expressed the presumptuous vitality of the Court, and Sidney its vital poetry. A little aloof from the Court, which he was apt to regard with kindly disdain at its frivolity, moved the staid figure of Burghley, the Lord High Treasurer of England, Elizabeth's great man of business, perhaps the finest political intelligence that has ever thought out a way for a country through the most complicated difficulties, at a time when disaster crouched ever ready to spring and involve that country in ruin.

William Cecil had an absolute mastery over every detail; he possessed a genius for arrangement. Nothing escaped his notice. He was a kind of machine which attracted all the wild impulses of the time; they passed into the machine's mouth disordered, unarranged; and they passed out shaped, controlled by his slow inevitable will. As a statesman he appears hardly human in his freedom from all personality; he seems a mask hiding the brain of England, and regulating it to the only end where success could be. Men rose to fame fiercely struggling, and did brilliant acts or mad acts, and sank again or settled as the case might be; but always at the supreme head, always alert, always careful, impassive as some Eastern Buddha, sat the Lord Burghley, managing the affairs of the state, managing even the state's impulsive, whimsical mistress. His impassivity afflicted her at times, so that she played pranks on him, vainly endeavouring to upset his restraint and his dignity; but her pranks were hardly heeded. He was English to the solid backbone, and resisted unequivocally the rage of fashion that went out towards all that was foreign; and yet his foreign policy was unswerving and level-headed; he looked upon war as the last terrible resource of state-craft, in an age in which fighting was regarded as the highroad to glory, and was loved for its own wild sake. Elizabeth showed her knowledge of the right word when she called him her "spirit" and her "oracle"; and the courtiers their discernment of the obvious, when they called him "old fox." Together the two names describe him with some accuracy.