Then there was Holinshed,[89] who, though the date of his birth is uncertain, must have been of fair working age now—a homely, honest, simple-hearted chronicler (somewhat thievish, as all the old chroniclers were) but whose name is specially worth keeping in mind, because he—in all probability—supplied Shakespeare’s principal historic reading, and furnished the crude material, afterward beaten out into those plaques of gold, which we call Shakespeare’s Historic Plays. Therefore, we must always, I think, treat Holinshed with respect. Next, there was the great Lord Burleigh,[90] the chief minister and adviser of the Queen—whom she set great store by: the only man she allowed to sit in her presence; and indeed he was something heavy, both in mind and in person; but far-sighted, honest, keen, cautious, timid—making his nod count more than most men’s words, and in great exigencies standing up for the right, even against the caprices of the sovereign. Whoever goes to Stamford in England should not fail to run out—a mile away only—to the princely place called Burleigh House (now the property of the Marquis of Exeter) which was the home of this minister of Elizabeth’s—built out of his savings, and equipped now with such paintings, such gardens, such magnificent avenues of oak, such great sweeps of velvet lawn, such herds of loitering deer as make it one of the show-places of England. Well—this sober-sided, cautious Burleigh (you will get a short, but good glimpse of him in Scott’s tragic tale of Kenilworth) wrote a book—a sort of earlier Chesterfield’s Letters, made up of advices for his son Robert Cecil, who was cousin, and in early life, rival of the great Francis Bacon. I will take out a tid-bit from this book, that you may see how this famous Lord Burleigh talked to his son:
“When it shall please God to bring thee to man’s estate”—he says—“use great Providence, and circumspection in choosing thy wife: For from thence will spring all thy future good and evil. And it is an action of life—like unto a stratagem of War, wherein a man can err but once. If thy estate be good, match near home and at leisure: if weak—far off, and quickly. Inquire diligently of her disposition, and how her parents have been inclined in their youth. Choose not a base, and uncomely creature, altogether for Wealth; for it will cause contempt in others, and loathing in thee: Neither make choice of a fool, for she will be thy continual disgrace, and it will irk thee to hear her talk.”
A Group of Great Names.
But the greater names which went to illustrate with their splendor the times of Elizabeth, only began to come to people’s knowledge after she had been upon the throne some twenty years.
Spenser was a boy of five, when she came to power: John Lilly, the author of Euphues which has given us the word euphuistic, and which provoked abundant caricatures, of more or less fairness—was born the same year with Spenser; Sir Philip Sidney a year later; Sir Walter Raleigh a year earlier (1553); Richard Hooker, the author of the Ecclesiastical Polity, in 1554; Lord Bacon in 1561; Shakespeare in 1564. These are great names to stand so thickly strewed over ten or twelve years of time. I do not name them, because I lay great stress on special dates: For my own part, I find them hard things to keep in mind—except I group them thus—and I think a man or woman can work and worry at worthier particularities than these. But when Elizabeth had been twenty years a Queen, and was in the prime of her womanly powers—six years after the slaughter of St. Bartholomew—when the first English colony had just been planted in Virginia, and Sir Francis Drake was coasting up and down the shores of California; when Shakespeare was but a lad of fourteen, and poaching (if he ever did poach there—which is doubtful) in Charlecote Park; when Francis Bacon was seventeen, and was studying in Paris—Philip Sidney was twenty-four; in the ripeness of his young manhood, and just returned from Holland, he was making love—vainly as it proved—to the famous and the ill-fated Penelope Devereaux.
Richard Hooker—of the same age, was teaching Hebrew in the University of Oxford, and had not yet made that unfortunate London marriage (tho’ very near it) by which he was yoked with one whom old Izaak Walton—charitable as the old angler was—describes as a silly, clownish woman, and withal a perfect Xantippe.
The circumstances which led to this awkward marriage show so well the child-like simplicity of this excellent man, that they are worth noting. He had come up to London, and was housed where preachers were wont to go; and it being foul weather, and he thoroughly wetted, was behoven to the hostess for dry clothes, and such other attentions as made him look upon her as a special Providence, who could advise and care for him in all things: So, he accepted her proffer to him of her own daughter, who proved to him quite another sort of Providence, and a grievous thorn in the side; and when his friends, on visits to his homestead in after years, found the author of the Ecclesiastical Polity—rocking the cradle, or minding the sheep, or looking after the kettles, and expressed sympathy—“My dear fellows,” said he—“if Saints have usually a double share in the miseries of this Life, I, that am none, ought not to repine at what my Wise Creator hath appointed for me, but labor (as indeed I do daily) to submit mine to his will and possess my soul in patience and peace.”
I don’t know if any of our parish will care to read the Ecclesiastical Polity; but if you have courage thereto, you will find in this old master of sound and cumbrous English prose, passages of rare eloquence, and many turns of expression, which for their winning grace, their aptitude, their quality of fastening themselves upon the mind, are not overmatched by those of any Elizabethan writer. His theology is old and rankly conservative; but he shows throughout a beautiful reverence for that all-embracing Law, “whose seat (as he says) is the Bosom of God, and whose voice is the Harmony of the World.”[91]