And now on a sudden her terrors were turned into a great joy; and what the Princess felt all England was soon experiencing, as soon as men realised that the tyranny of Rome and of Spain was shattered and gone.
Elizabeth was now at the close of her twenty-fifth year, of striking beauty and commanding presence, tall and comely, with a wealth of hair, yellow tinged with red; she inherited from her mother an air of coquetry, and her affable manners soon endeared her to her people. The English were tired of Smithfield fires and foreign priests and princes; a new era seemed to be dawning upon them at last—an era of freedom for soul and body; and imagination ran riot with hope to forecast a new and happier world. The homage of an admiring nation was stirred by her young beauty; and wild ambition, not content with the quiet fields of England, turned adventurously to the New World beyond the Atlantic, where men dreamed of real cities paved with gold. It is true that the Pope had given all the great West to his faithful daughter, Spain; but Englishmen thought they had as much right to colonise America as any son of Spain, and they soon obtained their Queen's leave to land and explore. But the first merchants who ventured west found that Spanish policy forbade "Christians to trade with heretics." Nay, if they were taken prisoners by the Spaniards they suffered the punishment of the rack and the stake; and if they escaped, they came home with tales of cruelty that set all England ablaze to take revenge. "Abroad, the sky is dark and wild," writes Kingsley, "and yet full of fantastic splendour. Spain stands strong and awful, a rising world-tyranny, with its dark-souled Cortezes and Pizarros, Alvas, Don Johns and Parmas, men whose path is like the lava stream: who go forth slaying and to slay in the names of their Gods.... Close to our own shores the Netherlands are struggling vainly for their liberties: abroad, the Western Islands, and the whole trade of Africa and India, will in a few years be hers ... and already Englishmen who go out to trade in Guinea, in the Azores and New Spain, are answered by shot and steel."
We know a good deal of the life in Elizabethan England from an account written by Harrison, Household Chaplain to Lord Cobham. He was an admirer of still older days, as we see from his complaint about improved houses: "See the change, for when our houses were builded of willow, then had we oaken men; but now that our houses are come to be made of oak, our men are not only become willow, but a great manie, through Persian delicacie crept in among us, altogether of straw, which is a sore alteration.... Now have we manie chimnies; and yet our tenderlings complain of rheumes, catarhs and poses. Then had we none but reredosses, and our heads did never ache. For as the smoke in those daies was supposed to be a sufficient hardning for the timber of the house, so it was reputed a far better medicine to keep the goodman and his family from the quake or pose."
Harrison notes how rich men were beginning to use stoves for sweating baths, how glass was beginning to be used instead of lattice, which was made out of wicker or rifts of oak chequer-wise, how panels of horn for windows had been going out for beryl or fine crystal, as at Sudeley Castle. Then for furniture, it was not rare to see abundance of arras in noblemen's houses, with such store of silver vessels as might fill sundry cupboards. There were three things that old men remembered to have been marvellously changed; one was the multitude of chimneys lately erected, whereas only the great religious houses and manor places of the lords had formerly possessed them, but each one made his fire against a reredosse in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat in the smoke and smother; the second thing was the improved bedding. Formerly folks slept on straw pallets covered only with a sheet, and a good round log under their heads for a bolster. "As for servants, if they had anie sheet above them, it was well, for seldom had they any under them to keep them from the pricking straws that ran oft through the canvas and rased their hardened hides."
The third thing was the exchange from wooden cups and platters into pewter or tin. Now the farmers had featherbeds and carpets of tapestry instead of straw, sometimes even silver salt-cellars and a dozen spoons of pewter.
Harrison bewails the decay of archery, and says that all the young fellows above eighteen wear a dagger. Noblemen wear a sword too, while desperate cutters carry two rapiers, "wherewith in every drunken fray they are known to work much mischief"; and as the trampers carry long staves, the honest traveller is obliged to carry horse-pistols; for the tapsters and ostlers are in league with the highway robbers who rob chiefly at Christmas time, "till they be trussed up in a Tyburn tippet."
There was a proverb, "Young serving-men, old beggars," because servants were spoilt for any other service or craft; so that the country swarmed with idle serving-men, who often became highwaymen.
A German traveller writes of England thus: "The women there are charming, and by nature so mighty pretty as I have scarcely ever beheld, for they do not falsify, paint or bedaub themselves as they do in Italy or other places, but they are some deal awkward in their style of dress; for they dress in splendid stuffs, and many a one wears three cloth gowns, one over the other. Then, when a stranger goeth to a citizen's house on business, or is invited as a guest, he is received by the master of the house and the ladies and by them welcomed: he has even a right to take them by the arm and to kiss them, which is the custom of the country; and if any one doth not do this, it is regarded and imputed as ignorance and ill-breeding on his part."
Erasmus, writing in 1500, after a visit to Sir Thomas More, exclaims merrily: "There is a custom which it would be impossible to praise too much. Wherever you go, every one welcomes you with a kiss, and the same on bidding you farewell. You call again, when there is more kissing.... You meet an acquaintance anywhere, you are kissed till you are tired. In short, turn where you will, there are kisses, kisses everywhere."
It was the same before and after a dance: you bowed, or curtseyed, and kissed your partner in all formal ceremony. So Shakespeare—