There was a wild justice in it—if not an orderly one. The spoils went to fill the Royal coffers; many of those beautiful properties were bestowed upon favorites; many princely estates are still held in England, by title tracing back to those days of spoliation—a fact which will be called to mind, I suspect—with unction, in case of any great social revolution in that country. Under Mary, some of these estates had been restored to Church dignitaries; but the restoration had not been general: and Elizabeth could not if she would, and would not if she could, sanction any further restitution.
She was Protestant—but rather from policy than any heartiness of belief. It did not grieve her one whit, that her teacher, Roger Ascham, had been private secretary to bloody Mary: the lukewarmness of her great minister, Lord Burleigh, did not disturb her; she always kept wax tapers burning by a crucifix in her private chamber; a pretty rosary gave her no shock; but she was shocked at the marriage of any member of the priesthood, always. In fact, if Spanish bigotry had not forced her into a resolute antagonism of Rome, I think history would have been in doubt whether to count her most a Lutheran, or most a Roman.
Yet she made the Papists smoke for it—as grimly as ever her sister Mary did the Protestants—if they stood one whit in the way of England’s grasp on power.
Personality of the Queen.
I think our friend Mr. Froude, whose history we all read, is a little unfair toward Queen Bess, as he was a little over-fair, and white-wash-i-ly disposed in the case of Henry VIII.: both tendencies being attributable to a mania this shrewd historian has—for unripping and oversetting established forms of belief. I think that he not only bears with a greedy zeal upon her too commonly manifest selfishness and heartlessness, but that he enjoys putting little vicious dabs of bad color upon her picture—as when he says, “she spat, and swore like a trooper.” Indeed it would seem that this clever biographer had carried a good deal of his fondness for “vicious dabs” in portraiture into his more recent post-mortem exhibits; as if it were his duty and pleasure to hang out all sorts of soiled linen, in his office of Clean-Scrubber: Yet, I wish to speak with all respect of the distinguished historian—whose vigor is conspicuous—whose industry is remarkable, whose crisp sentences are delightful, but whose accuracy is not of the surest; and whose conscience does, I think, sometimes go lame—under strain of his high, rhetorical canter.
The authority for all most damnatory statements with respect to the private life of the Queen, rests upon those Spanish Relations—so minute as to be suspicious—if they were not also so savagely bitter as to twist everything to the discredit of the Protestant Sovereign. Signor Soranzo—the Venetian ambassador (whom Froude does not cite—but who had equal opportunities of observation with the Spanish informer), says of Elizabeth (in a report—not written for publication, but lying for years in the archives of Venice): “Such an air of dignified majesty pervades all her actions that no one can fail to judge her a queen. She is a good Greek and Latin scholar; and beside her native tongue she speaks Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian benissimo—and her manners are very modest and affable.”[86]
I talk thus much—and may talk more—about the personality of Queen Elizabeth, because she must be counted—in a certain not very remote sense—one of the forces that went to endow what is called the English Literature of her day—so instructed was she; so full of talent; so keen-sighted; so exact—a most extraordinary woman. We must not think her greatness was factitious, and attributable to her only because she was a queen. There could be no greater mistake. She would have been great if she had been a shoemaker’s daughter; I do not mean that she would have rode a white horse at Tilbury, and made the nations shake: but she would have bound more shoes, and bound them better, and looked sharper after the affairs of her household than any cobbler’s wife in the land. Elizabeth would have made a wonderful post-mistress—a splendid head of a school—with perhaps a little too large use of the ferule: and she would have had her favorites, and shown it; but she would have lifted her pupils’ thoughts into a high range of endeavor; she would have made an atmosphere of intellectual ambition about her; she would have struck fire from flinty souls; and so she did in her court: She inspired work—inspired imagination; may we not say that she inspired genius. That auburn hair of hers (I suppose we should have called it red, if her name had been Abigail) made an aureole, around which wit coruscated by a kind of electric affinity. It was counted worth toil to have the honor of laying a poem at her gracious feet, who was so royally a Queen—whose life, and power, and will and culture, made up a quadrature of poems.
Burleigh and Others.
And who was there of literary significance about Elizabeth in those early days of her reign? Roger Ascham was still doling out his sagacious talk, and his good precepts; but he was not a force—only what we might call a good creature. There was Sackville[87] (afterward the elegant Earl of Dorset); he was in his prime then, and had very likely written his portion of the Mirror for Magistrates—a fairish poetic history of great unfortunate people—completed afterward by other poets, but hardly read nowadays.
Old Tusser,[88] too—the farmer-poet—lived in these times; an Essex man, of about the same age as Ascham, but who probably never came nearer to the court than to sing in the choir of old St. Paul’s. He had University experience, which, if it did not help his farming, on the banks of the Stour, did, doubtless, enable him to equip his somewhat prosy poems with such classic authentication and such directness and simplicities as gave to his Pointes of Husbandrie very great vogue. Many rhyming saws about farming, still current among old-fashioned country-folk, trace back to Master Tusser, who lived and farmed successively (tradition says not very successfully) at Ipswich, Dereham, and Norwich. His will, however, published in these later times, shows him to have been a man of considerable means.