The Courtier must be gallant in the use of arms, proficient in all exercises of the body, skilled in all exercises of the mind; he must be ready and witty of tongue; he must be well-born and distinguished. But his realm is beyond the mere enterprise of accomplishments and birth. For the book ends with Bembo's great praise of Beauty—that Beauty "which is the origin of all other beawtye, whiche never encreaseth nor diminisheth always bewtifull and of itself ... most simple. This is the beawtye unseperable from the high bountye, whiche with her voyce calleth and draweth to her all thynges...," and an understanding of this Heavenly Beauty must be the final trait of the Perfect Courtier.
And it is well to bear this in mind. For this feeling for beauty existed in the Elizabethan courtier, just as it gave the finishing touch to Castiglione's hero; and existed as really as the more conspicuous qualities of gallantry and strength and intellect. Vitality, as has been said again and again, was the keynote of the age; and it is apparent in this aspiration towards beauty, just as it is apparent in reckless cruelty. The compass of the age was immense. And every instinct, every tendency of brute or god, raged with intense life, and was expressed Nothing lay dormant. The centre of all this life, of all this genius for living was the Court; and the illustrious head of the Court was Queen Elizabeth.
QUEEN ELIZABETH
Guy de Maupassant has written a story of a small band of French soldiers who are at the last gasp with hunger and weariness and cold. They cannot march any further. They are content to lie down in the snow and die. But two fugitives come running to them, an old man and his grand-daughter, a young girl. "Allons les camarades," cries the Sergeant Pratique, "faut porter cette demoiselle-là ou bien nous n' sommes pu Français, nom d'un chien." So the worn-out men forget their weariness and carry her; they dare the cold and strip off their overcoats to keep her warm; they find new courage and drive back a party of the enemy, and they reach the French lines in safety. "What's that you're carrying?" asks a soldier. "Aussitôt une petite figure blonde apparut, depeignée et souriante qui répondit, 'C'est moi, monsieur.' Un rire s'éleva parmi les hommes et une joie courut dans leurs c[oe]urs. Alors Pratique agita son képi en vociferant, 'Vive la France.'"
There in little is the exact nature of Elizabeth's influence, and her influence was conscious and acted, not upon the immediate Court alone, but upon England. De Maupassant does not give any details of the girl, nothing of her character, not even her name. They are not relevant to his purpose. She may have as many faults in her small way as Elizabeth had in her great way. He does not mention them.
Such a mass of detail, however, is known about Elizabeth, and her faults have been so relentlessly exposed in the interest of Truth—her meanness, her avarice, her treachery, her wantonness, and what not—that the whole picture of the woman who was learned enough to speak in public impromptu in Latin and could converse in many languages, of the woman who was great enough to cause her own worship to be the fashion, and the sincere fashion, of the woman who was sufficiently beautiful and sufficiently distinguished to shine like a diamond on the forehead of that resplendent age,—is almost lost to view, so clouded with the dust of detraction has that picture become.
She was the very epitome of the time. All the brutality and energy and brilliance of that brutal, vital age found their counterpart in her. And she was a woman, a fitting contemporary of Catherine de Medicis. But she was too much a politician to be a good woman; and too much a woman to be a good politician.
To all the power which a beautiful woman, and a woman strong in body and intellect and passion, always has possessed and always will possess, she added the prestige of being Queen of England. Whereas the passions of her father threw Europe into confusion, the love affairs of Elizabeth, less impetuously managed, often held the balance between nations and brought every royal prince to England as suitor for her hand, and the great English courtiers scowled or laughed at them, but were kept in allegiance by their sovereign.