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.
CHAPTER VI.
In our last talk we entered upon that brilliant sixteenth century, within whose first quarter three great kings held three great thrones:—Charles V. of Spain, Francis I. of France, and Henry VIII. of England. New questions were astir; Art—in the seats of Art—was blazing at its best: the recent fall of Constantinople under the Turk had sent a tide of Greek scholars, Greek art, and Greek letters flowing over Western Europe, and drifting into the antiquated courts of Oxford and Cambridge. I spoke of the magnificent Wolsey, and of his great university endowments; also, of that ripe scholar, Sir Thomas More, who could not mate his religion, or his statesmanship with the caprices of the King, and so, died by the axe. We saw Cranmer—meaning to be good, if goodness did not call for strength; we heard Latimer’s swift, homely speech, and saw Tyndale with his English Testament—both these coming to grief; and we had glimpses of John Knox shaking the pulpit with his frail hand, and shaking all Scotch Christendom with his fearless, strident speech.
We heard the quaint psalmody of Sternhold, and the sweeter and more heathen verse of Wyatt and of Surrey; lastly, I gave a sketch of that old schoolmaster, Roger Ascham, who by his life, tied the reigns of Henry and of Elizabeth together, and who taught Greek and Latin and penmanship and Archery to that proud princess—whom we encounter now—in her high ruff, and her piled-up head-dress, with a fair jewelled hand that puts a man’s grip upon the sceptre.
Elizabethan England.
Elizabeth was in her twenty-sixth year when she came to the throne, and it was about the middle of the sixteenth century; the precise year being 1558. The England she was to dominate so splendidly was not a quiet England: the fierce religious controversies which had signalized the reign of Henry VIII.—who thwacked with his kingly bludgeon both ways and all ways—and which continued under Edward VI.—who was feebly Protestant; and which had caught new vigor under Mary—who was arrant and slavish Papist—had left gouts of blood and a dreadful exasperation. Those great Religious Houses, which only a quarter of a century before, were pleasantly embayed in so many charming valleys of Great Britain—with their writing-rooms, their busy transcribing clerks—their great gardens, were, most of them, despoiled—and to be seen no more. An old Venetian Ambassador,[85] writing to the Seigneury in those days, says—“London itself is disfigured by the ruins of a multitude of Churches and Monasteries which once belonged to Friars and Nuns.” Piers Plowman, long before, had attacked the sins growing up in the pleasant Abbey Courts; Chaucer had echoed the ridicule in his Abbot riding to Canterbury, with jingling trappings: Gower had repeated the assault in his Vox Clamantis, and Skelton had turned his ragged rhymes into the same current of satire. But all would have availed nothing except the arrogant Henry VIII. had set his foot upon them, and crushed them out.