Moreover, no one who knew his business as a sight-seer omitted Antwerp. Trade and political importance had for some time been deserting it until it suggested to Howell in 1619 "a disconsolate Widow, or a superannuated Virgin that hath lost her Lover," but in 1600 it had not passed a state of mellowness without stagnation, with traces of its greatness fresh. Every visitor repeats the same idea—"the most beautiful town in Europe"; and not in the same formula, as would result from the idea being a guide's commonplace, but in words drawn from his own experience: "as seen from the cathedral tower the most beautiful town after Constantinople," says one; or Lithgow, extolling Damascus, "the most beautiful city in Asia," compares it, for every respect save style of architecture, to "that matchless pattern and mirror of beauty, Antwerp." It would seem to have been the first town to turn its fortifications into promenades, laid out in walks and planted with trees.[45] The citadel, too, was the finest out of Italy, on the word of a Venetian ambassador.
Elizabethan England, on the other hand, was rendered still more remarkable by possessing no fortresses at all. Two exceptions, Berwick and the Tower of London, served but to call attention to the rule, the Tower in particular, whose out-of-date character in the matter of defences greatly amused connoisseurs. One Venetian ambassador, indeed, with this fact in his mind, together with the miscellaneous character of its contents, describes it as not so much a fortress as a "sicuro deposito"—a safe-deposit.[46] The peacefulness which brought about this state of things is still borne witness to by the large glazed windows on the ground floors of Elizabethan country-houses, but no foreigner remarks on that in the presence of the other more striking points that testified to it then. Foscarini, the successor of the ambassador just referred to, had occasion to traverse the length of England in 1613. Writing home[47] he remarks on five facts concerning the country he passes through which seemed particularly noteworthy: (1) No unfruitful land throughout; (2) Every eight or ten miles a town comparable to a good Italian town (this was on the post-road to Scotland); (3) Number of navigable rivers; (4) and of beautiful churches; (5) No mercenary soldiers.
To make it clear why the visitor should be so specially struck by these features, it is necessary to recall how differently matters stood abroad.
During this period two thirty-year civil wars broke out in Europe, one in each half of the period, the first in France while the Empire was at peace, the second in the Empire while France was at peace. Between these two came twenty years of comparative quiet, but never a year when war was not to be seen in progress, or its effects still horribly new, in the course of a Continental tour. Incidentally, it may be pointed out that this peculiarly even distribution of peace and war gives the writings of travellers in Europe at this time striking value in relation to the effects of war and peace, not only in themselves but also as to their special characteristics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. No tourist came into contact with both wars; almost every tourist saw something of one district under the influence of war or of peace, while some other is seeing another district in an opposite state. There remains, therefore, in their writings, a continuous comment on each other; so continuous and so unconscious as to leave no room for this or that man's bias to influence the general impression.
Yet striking as the peacefulness of England was, it probably lessened rather than heightened what degree of attraction England possessed; since with war so normal a condition, war and its incidentals became a primary object of study even to those who did not profess soldiership. Neither did any but the Dutch need to learn the language of the country, which was what induced so many to make a lengthy stay in Tuscany and in Touraine. Neither was England a thoroughfare. Nor, even, were the recent achievements of Englishmen more than a minor cause of the considerable influx of visitors; not, at least, apart from the idea which is best expressed, perhaps, in the private letter of an Englishman writing from Aleppo: "Your last letter made me exceeding sorrowful, for therein you acquainted me with the death of blessed Queen Elizabeth, at the hearing whereof not only I and our English nation [i. e., the residents] mourned, but many other Christians who were never in Christendom, but born and brought up in heathen countries, wept to hear of her death, and said that she was the most famous queen that ever they heard or read of since the world began."[48]
For the "Virgin Queen" was a far greater marvel to contemporaries than to posterity. Except for her namesake of Spain, a century earlier, who throughout her political life had been the ally and wife of one of the cleverest statesmen of the age, there was no instance since the mistiest past of a queen-regnant a leader of men. At her accession civil war or conquest seemed inevitable and insolvency was a fact: yet before her death the bond of London "is," writes one of the chief financiers of the time,[49] "the first to-day [1595] in Europe," and she had added victory abroad to peace at home. To say "she had added" suggests nowadays the phraseology of the lady's paper, but it does really express not only the convention which the tourist may be taken as accepting but also the belief of reasonable men of the time.
It is true that many denied her right to the title of "Queen," or, indeed, to that of "Virgin"; but no one had the opportunity of doubting that both claims belonged to that secondary order of facts known as "historical." And just as her position as sovereign, and a strikingly successful one, was more wonderful then than it seems to-day, so too did her celibacy assure her of more reverence than we should instinctively concede. The mediæval idealisation of virginity, one of the most beneficial, perhaps, of all the ideas of the past that the Reformation killed, ensured a place in the life of the world, and the self-respect contingent on that, for all the unmarried women whose counterparts since have had no assistance socially from any convention, from nothing but their own individuality. But this idea, though dying, was not dead; and, as is the way with ideas, challenged attention all the more definitely for ceasing to be taken for granted.
These two facts, then, glorified Elizabeth in the eyes of foreigners; first, that she was a queen and a great ruler when effective queenship was half a myth; secondly, that she remained unmarried when virginity, considered as a virtue, was, so to speak, due to have its last flicker before finally dying down. The reign of James I was a sort of after-glow, except in so far as he had a reputation as a philosopher-king.
These ideas have a marked effect on the visitor's itinerary. He hurried, as a rule, to London, and thence, if the court was away, to that one of the palaces which was in use for the time being. The other country palaces, none far from London, would receive a visit, at any rate Windsor and Hampton Court; Oxford probably, Cambridge possibly, and there an end. Of Scotland and Wales it can only be said that the former was practically ignored except by a few Frenchmen, as a result of the ancient alliance; while to Wales they paid as little attention as the semi-Welsh queen did—none at all.
Among the foreigners who have given us their impressions of England are several who have much that is of interest to say and yet who seem to have been entirely overlooked. Nevertheless, these pages are already more numerous than the relative importance of England warrants. Let us therefore take but one, and that one the briefest; the more so since he is the likeliest to continue to be overlooked, writing as he did in Polish, from which hitherto no translation seems to have been made, not even in paraphrase.