In Shakspere's England

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. Queen Elizabeth i

II. Country Life 22

Chapter I

The England of Shakspere was the England of Elizabeth, and though in the great dramatist we have one whose genius has never been repeated, it is round the figure of the Queen that the life and literature of the time revolves.

She was Spenser's Faery Queene, she was Raleigh's Gracious Lady, she was the centre of the Court where Leicester and Essex played their part : she shared the work of Burghley, Parker, and Gresham.

Probably no woman, since the world began, had ever so difficult a part to play, or played it with such complete success ; throughout her life she held her people's heart, and she lives in history as one of the ablest rulers England has ever known : we must study her character and her life, if we would gain any idea of the England of Shakspere's day.

A

" The child that is born on the Sabbath Day, Is merry and bonny and wise and gay,"

SO runs the old rhyme, and it was on a Sunday, the 17th of September 1533, at Greenwich Palace, that the little Princess made her entry into a world where she had need of all her Sunday attributes. Motherless at three years old, and worse than fatherless, hers was indeed a tragic childhood.

First came her welcome, hardly less enthusiastic outwardly than if she had been the muchlonged for son, and her gorgeous christening as a babe of four days old, in the then standing church of the Grey Friars at Greenwich.

The magnificent ceremony which attended the rite of baptism was well fitted to the after-life of Elizabeth, to whom all pageants were dear, and in whose reign they played so large a part.

Could anything have been more appropriate to the future of the great Queen than the stately procession which heralded her christening ?

First marched citizens, two by two, then aldermen, and my Lord Mayor, all clad in their civic robes of office ; following them came a gallant array of peers and prelates, and then, bearing the gold-covered basin, walked the Earl of Essex, a fitting figure in this first public appearance of

Elizabeth, as his later namesake was to be the chief favourite of her declining years.

The royal babe, wrapped in a mantle of purple velvet, was carried in the arms of her great-grandmother, the Dowager-Duchess of Norfolk, and her long ermine - trimmed train was borne by the Countess of Kent, and the Earls of Wiltshire and Derby.

At the door of the church she was welcomed by the chief clergy of the land, and was carried to the centre of the church, where stood a silver font beneath a gold-fringed canopy, and there she was baptized by the Bishop of London.

Then onwards, to the altar, moved the stately procession, and the babe was there solemnly confirmed by Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, according to the ritual of the Catholic Church ; and the proclamation, above her head, of Garter- King-at-Arms, might well sound forth as a prophecy, " God, of His infinite goodness, send a properous life and long, to the high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth."

Such was her first public greeting by her future subjects, and what could be more appropriate to her after-life than this opening scene of crimson and gold, of costly gifts, and obsequious courtiers ?

But the rapid changes, to which the members of Henry VIII.'s Court were forced to accustom themselves, affected the tiny Princess before her babyhood was well over.

She was but three years old when her ill-fated mother, Anne Boleyn, was condemned to death upon the scaffold, leaving her daughter a heritage of vanity even greater than that which had cost her own life.

Elizabeth's childhood was marked by many changes. Her position was naturally somewhat affected by the attitude towards her of her constantly varying stepmothers: gentle Lady Jane Seymour only lived a few months after the birth of her son Edward ; between Elizabeth and Anne of Cleves there existed kindly relations throughout their lives; while Katherine Howard, the third lady within four years who filled the position of stepmother to the young Princess, was related to her own mother, Anne Boleyn, and so treated Elizabeth with marked courtesy and consideration during the two years that she retained the favour of her fickle husband.

With her father's last wife, Katherine Parr, Elizabeth was on friendly terms until some timeafter the king's death, when the unwise conduct, and boisterous behaviour, of Admiral Seymour,

Katherine's second husband, led to a breach between the royal ladies.

The early governesses of the orphan Princess were Lady Byran and Mrs. Ashley, and later she was entrusted to the care of the wise and pious Lady Tyrwhitt, to whose faithful and affectionate training her character owed much of its development.

As a girl she occupied various royal residences, Hunsdone, Hatfield, and others ; and at times she had the companionship of her elder sister Mary, and of her brother Edward, her junior by four years ; with him her studies were largely carried on, under the instruction of the most learned men of the day.

Her intellectual ability was above that of most women ; she had the love of knowledge, and the ease in acquiring it, more often seen in a man's mind than in a woman's ; and her powers of observation and diplomacy were early trained by the stormy and uncertain atmosphere of the three Courts which preceded her own ; while the quick clear wit, and logical powers which she inherited from her father and grandfather were of the utmost service to her throughout her life ; and, indeed, had much to do with the preservation of that life during the reign of her sister Mary.

To the shadowed childhood of Elizabeth, the circumstances of which afforded her so much leisure for the pursuit of all branches of knowledge, the ladies of her time owed much ; for she set an example in womanly cultivation which was followed by many, so that it was a common thing for any lady at her Court to be able to converse in three languages.

She was, herself, both learned and accomplished ; under Roger Ascham she had studied Livy, Cicero, and Sophocles, and her Latin exercises, with their characteristically firm handwriting, are still to be seen in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, together with her letters in the same language to her brother, for whom she had a strong affection. She spoke Latin fluently, as well as French and Italian, and was skilled in music and dancing, and in fine needlework — the last evidently at an early age, as the Royal Letters of the time mention her gift to Prince Edward, on his second birthday, of a cambric shirt, worked by her own hands.

She also shared the theological studies so dear to her precocious brother, though her views must always have differed widely from his on matters of religion. He and his elder sister Mary were fanatics, while Henry VIII. and Elizabeth always regarded the Church more or less from a political point of view.

Her early training had given the young Princess the art of avoiding dangerous subjects, and extricating herself from difficult situations, and of this art she had need throughout her life, and never more so than during the five years of her sister's reign. Owing to the religious difference between them, there was at one time a strong desire on the part of Queen Mary's advisers to get rid of Elizabeth, as they had already done of the unfortunate Lady Jane Grey, and so to lessen the chances of England passing into the power of the New Religion ; and the fact that this scheme was not carried out was due partly to Mary's sense of sisterly duty and affection, but even more to Elizabeth's own conduct. However difficult the part she had to play, she played it always with the same ready wit and dexterity which yet none could call hypocrisy, and with the absolute fearlessness inherent in her Tudor race.

Whether it were in her studious life at Hatfield, under the care of Lady Tyrwhitt, and the tutelage of Roger Ascham, where, clad in Puritan simplicity, she devoted her time to such studies as befitted a maiden of royal rank ; or when, summoned post-haste to London by the Queen, to answer the charge of being concerned in Wyatt's rebellion, she was borne in a litter through the streets, robed in white, and pale with recent illness ; or, while waiting for her trial, she employed her time in penning letters of loyalty and affection to her sister ; or even when, on Palm Sunday, she entered the Tower by the dreaded Traitors' Gate, with the high-souled words, " Here landeth as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs, and before Thee, O God, I speak it, having none other friend but Thee alone," she was always the same, strong, clear-headed, selfsufficient, and she showed in each crisis her power of gaining that which she held all through her own reign, and in which, like the flowing locks of the Nazarite of old, her great strength lay, the heart of the English people.

Her position of danger and difficulty, and her escape from them, is well summed up in a couplet said to have been scratched by her with a diamond on a window-pane in Woodstock Manor, while she was living there under the severe charge of Sir Henry Bedingfield —

" Much suspected by me ; Nothing proved can be,

Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner."

The five years of Mary's reign ran their course in ever-deepening gloom and disappointment, and the end came fitly in the dreariest month of the year.

On the 17th of November 1558, the pious, weary-hearted Queen laid down the burden of life, which had never been to her anything but grievous, and in disquiet and uncertainty began the reign which was to change the state of England, and to be remembered as one of the greatest and most prosperous times our country has ever known.

Bishop Godwin thus speaks of the general feeling at the period of Mary's death : " The rich were fearful, the wise careful, the honestly-disposed doubtful ; the discontented and desperate were joyful, wishing for strife as the door for plunder."

But the rich, the wise, and the doubtful, as well as those who were desperate and discontented, were all soon to find themselves united by common aims and common sympathies, beneath the rule of such able ministers as Elizabeth, from the first, knew how to choose, and how to keep.

No Court of English monarch has ever been adorned by so many great figures, and we must dwell on them separately if we would catch — even for a moment — the spirit of that mighty age.

lo IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND

Raleigh, with his visionary gaze fixed always beyond the sea ; Bacon, yearning to bring men's minds to the full knowledge of his New Philosophy ; Spenser, touched by the fairy grace of his own creation ; and Sidney, the Galahad of that noble band ; there, too, was the great Lord Burghley, her faithful minister for more than forty years ; there were the rugged figures of the Seamen, and such courtly favourites as Leicester and Essex.

And in their midst stands Elizabeth, always alone, in the stately isolation best suited to her imperious nature, which could never brook the sharing of her power with a husband.

She is described by contemporary writers as of middle-height, graceful, and of regal bearing, with a fair complexion, a hooked nose, hazel eyes, and a broad forehead crowned with masses of fair reddish hair ; her hands were small, and, like those of Queen Victoria, beautifully shaped, and she lost no opportunity of displaying them ; her bearing was like her father's, and so was her manner, cheery and hearty when pleased, and violent when angry, distributing cuffs and caresses equally among her favourites, according to her temper at the moment, and possessed of a vanity even greater than that which had proved to fatal to her unhappy mother.

QUEEN ELIZABETH ii

Gallantry, under Elizabeth, became a profession ; her Court was filled with young men of noble and gentle birth, in whom promise of any kind usually met with recognition ; thither they came, and there they were retained, to bask in the somewhat capricious smiles of the Virgin Queen, who loved to have all men at her feet, and who exacted from her courtiers a lover-like demeanour, and a fictitious personal devotion even to the year of her death at the age of seventy-two.

But, in spite of this weaker side to her nature, Elizabeth was the true daughter of Henry VOL, and to no man was she prepared to yield "the half of her kingdom " ; where policy came in, her affections could always be made to draw back, her heart was never allowed to govern her head.

Nowhere is she better described than in the words which Sir Walter Scott puts into the mouth of the Earl of Leicester : "/ 1 think God, when He gave her the heart of a woman, gave her the head of a man to control its follies. . . . She will accept love-tokens, — ay, and answer them too, — push gallantry to the very verge where it becomes exchange of affection, — but she writes nil ultra to all which is to follow, and would not barter one iota of her supreme power for all the alphabet of both Cupid and Hymen."

Her early life had not been such as to encourage or develop natural affections ; bereft of her mother by her father's command, imprisoned, and almost condemned to death by her sister, and continually separated from all those for whom she cared, repression of her feelings must have become a habit. Then had come her first, and perhaps her deepest, love-affair, that with Admiral Seymour, who wooed her in a somewhat boisterous fashion when she was only sixteen years old. But the trouble which this attachment and Seymour's ambition brought about, her own danger and disgrace, and the Admiral's death upon the block, gave her such a terrible warning against royal ladies indulging in private affections, that she seemed to take the lesson to heart for life.

The best beloved among her Court favourites was, without doubt, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and she seemed at one time intent on making him her husband.

He was the son of the Duke of Northumberland, and brother of the unfortunate Guildford Dudley, whose fate as Prince-Consort might well have deterred Robert from seeking the same position.

Robert was a man of unusual personal beauty, tall and graceful, with finely-cut features, and keen dark eyes, and skilled in all knightly accom-

// 'alker &^ CockercU

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester plishments of the time ; but he was entirely wanting in true nobility of mind, he was arrogant, self-seeking, and lacking in sincerity, and he would have made but a sorry Prince-Consort had Elizabeth ever raised him to the position for which he longed : saving that, she showed him every mark of royal favour.

He was constantly beside her at the feasts and pageants which she loved, when she indulged in her favourite sports of hunting or hawking, or was rowed in her barge from London to the palace at Greenwich where she had been born, and which she always favoured as a residence.

But even from Leicester she would allow no act of presumption ; when he had interfered with a royal usher, so as to gain admittance for one of his followers into her presence, her rebuke, in spite of her affection for him, was sharp and significant.

" My lord," she said, " I have wished you well, but my favour is not so locked up for you that others shall not partake thereof ; for I have many servants, to whom I have, and will at my pleasure bequeath my favour, and likewise resume the same ; and if you think to rule here, I will take a course to see you forthcoming. I will have but one mistress, and no master,"

But vain, haughty, and unscrupulous as he was, Robert Dudley kept the Queen's affection to the day of his death, which took place fifteen years before her own ; their birthday was said to have been the same.

Though Dudley had her affection, Elizabeth carried on, for political purposes, negotiations of marriage with foreign princes ; but into their experiences, while engaged in the difficult process of wooing the Virgin Queen, we need not enter.

Besides these royal suitors, her Court was filled with her " Royal Pensioners," young men of gentle birth, who basked in the somewhat variable light of her smiles, and used her favour as much as possible to their own advantage ; they were always ready to offer the adoring homage which she exacted, and their influence, based on anything but moral worth, often greatly interfered with the counsels of her more serious advisers.

One of the methods by which Elizabeth increased her popularity, and also saved her private purse, was her habit of making royal progresses through different parts of her kingdom, being always the guest of some highly-favoured noble, who had the privilege of providing the most costly series of entertainments in her honour.

At none of these visits was she treated with more regal splendour than during the three weeks, in 1575, that she spent at Kenilworth Castle, as the guest of the Earl of Leicester.

Into all the festivities was introduced the element of personal devotion and admiration which Elizabeth so dearly loved. The Earl himself, at the head of a noble retinue, met and escorted her to the castle-gate ; there she was received by a giant porter, who, in halting speech, declared his intention of guarding the entrance with his club against all comers. But, on seeing the Queen, his attitude changed, he flung his weapon away, and himself on his knees before her, and presented to her his keys of office.

Then, as the party advanced to the moat, they beheld a floating island, whereon stood a lovely maiden clothed in silk, and decked with golden bracelets on her bare wrists and ankles ; attended by two nymphs she knelt before the Queen, and told her tale in the somewhat lengthy verse of the period. She had been Lady of the Lake, she said, ever since the great days of King Arthur, and in her crystal palace she had nursed the gallant Sir Lancelot ; and there she had dwelt unmoved while Saxons, Normans, Mountforts, and Plantagenets had each in their turn inhabited the castle ; but now, at last, one had come to the gates before whose fame and beauty she too must bow ; and so she had risen from her home beneath the water to do homage to the Peerless Queen.

And the same story was told throughout the castle and the grounds : whether in the decorations, beautiful or grotesque, in the music, or in the speeches, sometimes in Latin and sometimes in English, everywhere was expressed the same boundless admiration for the person, the character, and the wisdom of Elizabeth.

When she rode in the park, a Wild Man of the Woods met her, and flinging himself at her feet, declared that the mere sight of so fair a vision, made him willing at once to renounce his savage way of life.

When a pleasure-party rowed upon the lake, the very fishes were made to sound her praise on various musical instruments, with Arion, on his dolphin, at their head ; and so magnificent were the fireworks displayed in her honour, that Robert Laneham writes, "The heavens thundered, the waters surged, and the earth shook ; and for my part, hardy as I am, it made me vengeably afraid."

Such was the form of entertainment which Elizabeth approved, and serious was the expense it involved upon the nobleman with whom she might elect to stay during one of these royal progresses ; for, besides having no option in the matter of receiving her, he rarely had more than a few days' notice of her coming, and so was often in great straits as to the needful preparations.

In this way she travelled, in the course of her reign, throughout a large part of England, and many are the interesting records that remain in town and country of these various royal journeys.

On her visit to Norwich a characteristic incident took place, which showed her well-known love of money.

At the entrance of the town she was welcomed by the mayor, in a carefully prepared Latin speech, and he ended it by presenting her with a silver cup filled with gold pieces ; " Sunt hie centum libras puri auri," said the mayor, and the Queen, before making any recognition of the welcoming oration, took off the cover and looked eagerly inside, then handed the cup to a servant, saying with a smile, " Look to it ; there is a hundred pound."

In August 1564 she visited Cambridge, and two years later, in the same month, she went to Oxford, and at both her Universities she was re-

B ceived and entertained in a thoroughly academical manner.

At Cambridge the master of King's College, as Public Orator, greeted her in a Latin speech of three quarters of an hour, delivered upon his knees. At his excessive praise of her virtues, the Queen bit her fingers, and shook her head, exclaiming, " Non est Veritas," but when he went on to praise virginity, she cried out, " God's blessing on thy heart, there continue."

On Sunday she attended the service in King's College Chapel, and was escorted thither by four doctors of divinity, who held a canopy of state above her head.

She praised the Latin sermon ; she conversed in that language with young scholars in the colleges and streets, seeming to enjoy the exercise of her mental powers ; and we are told that, among her many criticisms of University matters, was a highly unfavourable one upon the ragged and soiled condition of many of the academical gowns and hoods. Could her spirit walk again the streets of Oxford and Cambridge, she would doubtless see good reason for a repetition of her words !

She bade farewell to Cambridge in a wellprepared Latin oration, though feigning maiden modesty and want of preparation, she answered the enthusiastic applause with which her words were greeted, by wishing that her hearer "had drank of Lethe."

Two years later she entered Oxford, by way of Woodstock and Wolvercote, and at the latter village she was met by Leicester, who was Chancellor of the University, and a learned band of doctors of divinity in their scarlet robes. She listened with interest to the speech of the Public Orator, but when Dr, Humphreys, the great Puritan leader drew near, she greeted him with the famous words, " Mr. Doctor, that loose gown becomes you mighty well ; I wonder your notions should be so narrow."

Among other entertainments provided for her in Oxford, was a play called "Palamon and Arcite," by Richard Edwards, enacted in Christ Church Hall, and in which the heroine was clad in robes lent for the occasion, which had belonged to the late Queen Mary.

The heroine's part was played by a lad of fourteen, whose good looks so pleased Elizabeth that she bestowed upon him the sum of eight pounds. The borrowed robe was of purple velvet, with a satin ground, and seemed to have suffered somewhat from its academical use, as it was returned to the wardrobe officials with a valuable portion missing !

In St. Mary's Church the Queen heard learned disputations ; and there she was greatly displeased with a certain Dr. Westphaling, who spoke at such length that her own oration was obliged to be postponed until the next day ; even though — with manners more regal than academic — she sent a messenger to bid him, " make an end of his discourse without delay."

She spent a week in Oxford, and made her final farewell to the University in a Greek oration, receiving as a parting present six fine pairs of gloves for her own use, and others for members of her household.

She had a passion for receiving presents, and her courtiers and ladies constantly made her offerings of gold and silver jewelry, and garments wonderfully embroidered in silk and lace. Her love of dress, and of elaborate toilettes, seemed to grow with her years ; no material could be too rich, no jewels too precious, with which to deck her person, and she never allowed herself to be seen, even by her intimate friends, except elaborately attired.

Her pictures are well known ; she usually appears in them attired in the close-fitting headdress of the time, surmounted by a mass of jewels.

the lace ruffle, stiffened until it adds an unnatural width to the shoulders, and a dress as rich and rare as skill can produce, and of which probably she possessed a greater number than any woman who has ever lived.

Such was Elizabeth, a grand human figure, with the grandeur of one who recognised from the first her part in Hfe, and played it successfully to the end ; and yet human in the yearning for love and admiration which seemed to grow with her years.

Her lonely isolation weighed increasingly upon her, until it reached its pathetic end in the deathbed scene, in March 1603.

" Robin, I am not well," she said to her kinsman Sir Robert Carey, who found her stretched among cushions on the floor of her chamber.

There were none to watch with clinging affection round the bed to which at last they carried her, so sorely against her will ; and though her faithful ministers and loyal friends, her ladies-inwaiting, and the good Archbishop of Canterbury, all did their part in aiding her to make ready for that last great royal progress, still they were all far from her in race and station ; and in the early dawn of that chill March morning, alone, as she had lived, the spirit of the mighty Queen Elizabeth passed to its rest.

Chapter II

During the reign of Elizabeth, English social life underwent an entire change. Men ceased to live in the stormy atmosphere of political intrigue or religious controversy to which they had become accustomed ; peace and prosperity settled down on the land, and the beginnings were established of that comfortable country life throughout England which endures to our own day.

The country gentleman, freed from the duty of spending himself and his substance in warfare either political or religious, could now live on his own land, and turn his attention to the improvement of his property, and the greater comfort of himself and his family.

Houses could now be built more with a view to convenience, than to fortification, and so there arose many stately homes which still bear record to the style of Elizabethan architecture. The ordinary houses of the country gentlemen were still built usually of wood, of two storeys, thatched with straw or slate, and with the modern glass window taking the place of the horn or lattice of earlier days. But some people were beginning already to have their houses " wrought of bricke or hard stone, with roomes large and comelie, and houses of office further distant from their lodgings." Men were beginning also to understand more what comfort and cleanliness meant inside their houses. Carpets were now constantly used, and rich hangings, as well as good feather beds and pillows, instead of the dirty rushes renewed perhaps but once a year, the straw pallet and " good round log " which formerly did duty as a pillow. Meals were beginning to be served upon fine table linen, and in glass and pewter vessels, with silver plate and silver spoons ; while knives and forks generally took the place of the more primitive fingers ! In the houses of the rich drinks were served in goblets, jugs, and bowls of silver or Venetian glass, while the less wealthy drank from earthern pots sometimes ornamented in silver ; these were not set on the table, but each man called for " such drinke as him listeth to have : so that when he hath tasted of it, he delivered the cup againe to some one of the standers by, who making it cleane [by pouring out the drinke that remaineth] restoreth it to the cupbord." From which it is evident that the method of " washing up " was still in a primitive state. That the difficulty as to breakages existed even then is plain when we hear that the glass in household use all goes " one waie, that is to shards at the last," and that " our great expenses in glasses breed much strife toward such as have the charge of them."

Men usually took two meals in the day, dinner and supper ; the nobles and gentlefolk dined at eleven and supped at five, the merchants dined at noon and supped at six, and the agricultural classes dined at twelve, but did not sup till seven or eight o'clock.

The tables of all but the poorest seem to have been well filled, and foreign visitors at the time marvelled to see what Englishmen did eat. Fish, fowl, and meat, prepared in the houses of noblemen by cooks who are, for the most part " musicall-headed Frenchmen and strangers," not only beef and mutton, but red and fallow deer, pork and veal, with kid and conie, and various kinds of foreign game.