We have seen that at the moment of the attack of the Spanish Armada the royal navy was of little importance; but the commercial navy was considerable. The proportion had increased by a third in fifty years. Whale-fishing, which began to develop in 1575, soon occupied a large number of vessels. The protracted war with Spain and Portugal having hindered the arrival of the productions of India, a company of traders was formed in the city of London to undertake voyages to the East Indies. In December, 1600, Queen Elizabeth granted them a charter; this was the origin, the modest germ of the great East India Company. The political and religious animosity which nourished the buccaneering expeditions against Spain, and the cruel revenge which the Spaniards took upon the English sailors who fell into their hands, served to develop the taste for remote enterprises, and to form that race of bold sailors who have so powerfully contributed to the grandeur and independence of their country.
While material and social progress took so new a flight, the splendour of literature under the reign of Elizabeth has not yet faded. The intellectual movement preceded all others. It burst forth towards the end of the civil war, and amidst the desolation which intestine strife brings in its wake. Scotland even took part in this glory, although civil war still reigned there. From 1494 to 1584 seven colleges were founded at Oxford and eight at Cambridge. The university of Aberdeen in 1494, that of Edinburgh in 1582, two colleges of the university of St. Andrew's between 1512 and 1537, the university of Trinity College at Dublin in 1591, assured in Great Britain the development of learning. The suppression of the monasteries retarded this movement momentarily, but the reformers did not lose sight of the danger. Cranmer in particular made serious efforts to remedy the evil. The schools called grammar-schools, then instituted in great numbers, spread elementary education and a certain degree of intellectual culture; but the higher instruction, and, in particular, the study of the classical languages, received a blow from which they were long in recovering. Great disorder reigned in the universities; morals were lax and the standard of study very deficient. The revival of letters began with the study of foreign languages. We have seen that Queen Mary, like Queen Elizabeth, had studied French, Italian and Spanish, as well as Latin and Greek. From this usage, more and more diffused, sprang a strange abuse of foreign words, which introduced something like a new tongue into the English language. Under the reign of Elizabeth the lords and fine ladies at court spoke a language designated by the word "Euphuism," composed of the harmonious syllables of all languages, which is now difficult to understand, and especially to read. Traces of it may yet be found in the poems of Spenser.
Amidst this momentary decline of learning, a natural result of violent convulsions, it is impossible not to recognize the fact that the sixteenth century furnished, in England, as elsewhere, a great number of distinguished men as learned as they were gifted by nature. Without going beyond the reign of Elizabeth, we may mention Roger Ascham, her tutor, born in Yorkshire in 1515, whom the queen retained beside her in the capacity of secretary until his death in 1568. His most esteemed work is entitled The Schoolmaster. The tutor of King James VI. of Scotland has left a more celebrated name. The historian and poet, George Buchanan, born at Killearn, in 1506, was originally a soldier. He lived for a long time in France, in Portugal, in Piedmont, leading a life interspersed with adventures, until he returned to Scotland in 1560. Being nominated by Queen Mary to a post of public instruction, he did not cease to attack her ardently and to write violent pamphlets against her. Parliament nominated him tutor to the young king, whom he instructed with considerable care. When he was accused of having made a pedant of him, he replied, "That is the best thing I could make of him." His History of Scotland possesses real interest, although it is characterized by much partiality. He died at Edinburgh in 1582. Doctor Hooker had no taste for taking part in the great agitations of his time. Born in 1554, domestic dissensions, caused by the temper of his wife, led him to seek a peaceful and retired life. He had been master of the temple in London, but a preacher, his colleague, an ardent Puritan, made existence so hard for him that he retired to a country living, where he wrote his great work Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Policy, a book full of judgment, moderation, and learning, a model of the most beautiful English style. He died in 1600, being only forty-seven years of age, at the moment when he had just finished his book. The courtiers did not abandon exclusively to the learned the cultivation of letters. Lord Surrey, beheaded during the last days of Henry VIII., has left some charming verses. The Lion King-of-Arms of Scotland, Sir David Lyndsay, of the Mount, was also a poet. The type of knight and gentleman, Sir Philip Sydney, nephew of the Earl of Leicester, and son-in-law of Walsingham, who has left in a life-time of thirty-two years an accomplished model and an ineffaceable remembrance to posterity, wrote in prose and in verse. His romantic allegory of Arcadia, is the most important of his works. He dedicated it to his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, a worthy friend of such a brother. It was said of her that to love her was to receive a liberal education. She died young, like himself, having published the book which her brother had left, and which had an immense success. We have mentioned the learned and lettered courtiers. We now come to the real poets. England numbers two under the reign of Elizabeth: the one charming, elegant, prolific; the other, unique in the history of the world: Spenser and Shakespeare. Edmund Spenser was born in London in 1533. He wrote at first some poems of little importance, but he devoted several years to the composition of the Faery Queene, of which Sydney was the first patron, and which was completed under the auspices of Raleigh. We might have placed Spenser among the courtiers, if that had not been to do too much honour to the latter, for his patrons often employed him, and he finally obtained considerable estates in Ireland out of the confiscated lands of the Earl of Desmond. The Faery Queene was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, who is constantly celebrated in the poem. She granted a pension to Spenser, and the success of the work was greater from the fact, that the court took pleasure in searching for the persons concealed beneath the allegorical names. An inexhaustible imagination, the most elevated sentiments, and the most charming descriptions, cause one to forget the peculiar taste of the time, the confusion and complication of incidents, as well as the strange form of versification. Read without pausing, the Faery Queene may appear tiresome, but a great number of detached portions will always remain masterpieces. Spenser died in 1598, after being obliged to fly from Ireland, then a prey to insurrection.
Let us finally mention the great comedian, the great philosopher, the great poet, who was in his life time butcher's apprentice, poacher, actor, theatrical manager, and whose name is William Shakespeare. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in 1564. In twenty years, amidst the duties of his profession, the care of mounting his pieces, of instructing his actors, he composed thirty-two tragedies and comedies, in verse and prose, rich with an incomparable knowledge of human nature, and an unequalled power of imagination, terrible and comic by turns, profound and delicate, homely and touching, responding to every emotion of the soul, divining all that was beyond the range of his experience, and for ever remaining the treasure of ages. All this being accomplished, Shakespeare left the theatre and the busy world at the age of forty-five, to return to Stratford-on-Avon, where he lived peacefully in the most modest retirement, writing nothing, and never returning to the stage, ignored and unknown, if his works had not for ever marked out his place in the world. A strange example of an imagination so powerful, suddenly ceasing to produce, and closing once for all the door to the efforts of genius. Shakespeare died in 1616. After mention of his name, no one will ask whether the reign of Elizabeth is entitled to occupy a great place in the literary history of England and the world.