TOWTON FIELD

Palm Sunday: 1461

Love, Who from the throne above
Cam’st to teach the law of love,
Who Thy peaceful triumph hast
Led o’er palms before Thee cast,
E’en in highest heaven Thine eyes
Turn from this day’s sacrifice!
Slaughter whence no victor host
Can the palms of triumph boast;

Blood on blood in rivers spilt,—
English blood by English guilt!

From the gracious Minster-towers
Of York the priests behold afar
The field of Towton shimmer like a star
With light of lance and helm; while both the powers
Misnamed from the fair rose, with one fell blow,
—In snow-dazed, blinding air
Mass’d on the burnside bare,—
Each army, as one man, drove at the opposing foe.

Ne’er since then, and ne’er before,
On England’s fields with English hands
Have met for death such myriad myriad bands,
Such wolf-like fury, and such greed of gore:—
No natural kindly touch, no check of shame:
And no such bestial rage
Blots our long story’s page;
Such lewd remorseless swords, such selfishness of aim

—Gracious Prince of Peace! Yet Thou
May’st look and bless with lenient eyes
When trodden races ’gainst their tyrant rise,
And the bent back no more will deign to bow:
Or when they crush some old anarchic feud,
And found the throne anew
On Law to Freedom true,
Cleansing the land they love from guilt of blood by blood.

Nor did Heaven unmoved behold
When Hellas, for her birthright free
Dappling with gore the dark Saronian sea,
The Persian wave back, past Abydos, roll’d:—
But in this murderous match of chief ’gainst chief
No chivalry had part,

No impulse of the heart;
Nor any sigh for Right triumphant breathes relief.

—Midday comes: and no release,
No carnage-pause to blow on blow!
While through the choir the palm-wreathed children go,
And gay hosannas hail the Prince of Peace:—
And evening falls, and from the Minster height
They see the wan Ouse stream
Blood-dark with slaughter gleam,
And hear the demon-struggle shrieking through the night.

Love, o’er palms in triumph strown
Passing, through the crowd alone,—
Silent ’mid the exulting cry,—
At Jerusalem to die:
Thou, foreknowing all, didst know
How Thy blood in vain would flow!
How our madness oft would prove
Recreant to the law of love:
Wrongs that men from men endure
Doing Thee to death once more!

‘On the 29th of March 1461 the two armies encountered one another at Towton Field, near Tadcaster. In the numbers engaged, as well as in the terrible obstinacy of the struggle, no such battle had been seen in England since the field of Senlac. The two armies together numbered nearly 120,000 men’: (Green, B. IV: ch. vi).

Saronian sea; Scene of the battle of Salamis, b.c. 480.

They see the wan Ouse stream; Mr. R. Wilton, of Londesborough, has kindly pointed out to me that Wharfe, which from a brook received the bloodshed of Towton, does not discharge into Ouse until about ten miles south of York. The gleam is, therefore, visionary: (1889).

GROCYN AT OXFORD

THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

1491

As she who in some village-child unknown,
With rustic grace and fantasy bedeck’d
And in her simple loveliness alone,
A sister finds;—and the long years’ neglect
Effaces with warm love and nursing care,
And takes her heart to heart,
And in her treasured treasures bids her freely share,

And robes with radiance new, new strength and grace:—
Hellas and England! thus it was with ye!
Though distanced far by centuries and by space,
Sisters in soul by Nature’s own decree.
And if on Athens in her glory-day
The younger might not look,
Her living soul came back, and reinfused our clay.

—It was not wholly lost, that better light,
Not in the darkest darkness of our day;
From cell to cell, e’en through the Danish night,
The torch ran on its firefly fitful way;
And blazed anew with him who in the vale
Of fair Aosta saw
The careless reaper-bands, and pass’d the heavens’ high pale,

And supp’d with God, in vision! Or with him,
Earliest and greatest of his name, who gave
His life to Nature, in her caverns dim
Tracking her soul, through poverty to the grave,
And left his Great Work to the barbarous age
That, in its folly-love,
With wizard-fame defamed his and sweet Vergil’s page.

But systems have their day, and die, or change
Transform’d to new: Not now from cloister-cell
And desk-bow’d priest, breathes out that impulse strange
’Neath which the world of feudal Europe fell:—
Throes of new birth, new life; while men despair’d
Or triumph’d in their pride,
As in their eyes the torch of learning fiercely flared.

For now the cry of Homer’s clarion first
And Plato’s golden tongue on English ears
And souls aflame for that new doctrine burst,
As Grocyn taught, when, after studious years,
He came from Arno to the liberal walls
That welcomed me in youth,
And nursed in Grecian lore, long native to her halls.

O voice that spann’d the gulf of vanish’d years,
Evoking shapes of old from night to light,
Lo at thy spell a long-lost world appears,
Where Rome and Hellas break upon our sight:—
The Gothic gloom divides; a glory burns
Behind the clouds of Time,
And all that wonder-past in beauty’s glow returns.

—For when the Northern floods that lash’d and curl’d
Around the granite fragments of great Rome
Outspread Colossus-like athwart the world,
Foam’d down, and the new nations found their home,
That earlier Europe, law and arts and arms,
Fell into far-off shade,
Or lay like some fair maid sleep-sunk in magic charms.

And as in lands once flourishing, now forlorn,
And desolate capitals, the traveller sees
Wild tribes, in ruins from the ruins torn
Hutted like beasts ’mid marble palaces,

Unknowing what those relics mean, and whose
The goblets gold-enchased
And images of the gods the broken vaults disclose;

So in the Mid-age from the Past of Man
The Present was disparted; and they stood
As on some island, sever’d from the plan
Of the great world, and the sea’s twilight flood
Around them, and the monsters of the unknown;
Blind fancy mix’d with fact;
Faith in the things unseen sustaining them alone.

Age of extremes and contrasts!—where the good
Was more than human in its tenderness
Of chivalry;—Beauty’s self the prize of blood,
And evil raging round with wild excess
Of more than brutal:—A disjointed time!
Doubt with Hypocrisy pair’d,
And purest Faith by folly, childlike, led to crime.

O Florentine, O Master, who alone
From thy loved Vergil till our Shakespeare came
Didst climb the long steps to the imperial throne,
With what immortal dyes of angry flame
Hast blazon’d out the vileness of the day!
What tints of perfect love
Rosier than summer rose, etherealize thy lay!

—Now, as in some new land when night is deep
The pilgrim halts, nor knows what round him lies
And wakes with dawn, and finds him on the steep,
While plains beneath and unguess’d summits rise,
And stately rivers widening to the sea,
Cities of men and towers,
Abash’d for very joy, and gazing fearfully;—

New worlds, new wisdom, a new birth of things
On Europe shine, and men know where they stand:

The sea his western portal open flings,
And bold Sebastian strikes the flowery land:
Soon, heaven its secret yields; the golden sun
Enthrones him in the midst,
And round his throne man and the planets humbly run.

New learning all! yet fresh from fountains old,
Hellenic inspiration, pure and deep:
Strange treasures of Byzantine hoards unroll’d,
And mouldering volumes from monastic sleep,
Reclad with life by more than magic art:
Till that old world renew’d
His youth, and in the past the present own’d its part.

—O vision that ye saw, and hardly saw,
Ye who in Alfred’s path at Oxford trod,
Or in our London train’d by studious law
The little-ones of Christ to Him and God,
Colet and Grocyn!—Though the world forget
The labours of your love,
In loving hearts your names live in their fragrance yet.

O vision that our happier eyes have seen!
For not till peace came with Elizabeth
Did those fair maids of holy Hippocrene
Cross the wan waves and draw a northern breath:
Though some far-echoed strain on Tuscan lyres
Our Chaucer caught, and sang
Like her who sings ere dawn has lit his Eastern fires;—

Herald of that first splendour, when the sky
Was topaz-clear with hope, and life-blood-red
With thoughts of mighty poets, lavishly
Round all the fifty years’ horizon shed:—
Now in our glades the Aglaian Graces gleam,
Around our fountains throng,
And change Ilissus’ banks for Thames and Avon stream.

Daughters of Zeus and bright Eurynomé,
She whose blue waters pave the Aegaean plain,
Children of all surrounding sky and sea,
A larger ocean claims you, not in vain!
Ye who to Helicon from Thessalia wide
Wander’d when earth was young,
Come from Libethrion, come; our love, our joy, our pride!

Ah! since your gray Pierian ilex-groves
Felt the despoiling tread of barbarous feet,
This land, o’er all, the Delian leader loves;
Here is your favourite home, your genuine seat:—
In these green western isles renew the throne
Where Grace by Wisdom shines;
—We welcome with full hearts, and claim you for our own!

If, looking at England, one point may be singled out in that long movement, generalized under the name of the Renaissance, as critical, it is the introduction of the Greek and Latin literature:—which has remained ever since conspicuously the most powerful and enlarging element, the most effectively educational, among all blanches of human study.

In the vale Of fair Aosta; See Anselm’s youthful vision of the gleaners and the palace of heaven (Green: History, B. II: ch. ii).

His Great Work; Roger Bacon’s so-named Opus Majus: ‘At once,’ says Whewell, ‘the Encyclopaedia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century.’ Like Vergil, Bacon passed at one time for a magician.

That new doctrine; Grocyn was perhaps the first Englishman who studied Greek under Chalcondylas the Byzantine at Florence; certainly the first who lectured on Greek in England. This was in the Hall of Exeter College, Oxford, in 1491. To him Erasmus (1499) came to study the language.—See the brilliant account of the revival of learning in Green, Hist. B. V: ch. ii.

Master, who alone; See The Poet’s Euthanasia.

Sebastian; Cabot, who, in 1497, sailed from Bristol, and reached Florida.

The golden sun; Refers to Copernicus; whose solar system was, however, not published till 1543.

The little-ones; Colet, Dean of S. Paul’s, founded the school in 1510.

‘The bent of its founder’s mind was shown by the image of the Child Jesus over the master’s chair, with the words Hear ye Him graven beneath it’ (Green: B. V: ch. iv).

Fifty years; Between 1570 and 1620 lies almost all the glorious production of our so-called Elizabethan period.

From Libethrion;—Nymphae, noster amor, Libethrides! . . . What a music is there in the least little fragment of Vergil’s exquisite art!