[3] An example of this may be seen in the new Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton, 1913, ii. 71-6. Bulwer-Lytton's letter, 15 March 1846, denying the authorship of the New Timon, might almost have been translated from Erasmus' to Campegio, except that it goes further in falsehood.
VII
PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS
An interesting parallel is often drawn between Indian life to-day and the life with which we are familiar in the Bible. The women grinding at the mill, the men who take up their beds and walk, the groups that gather at the well, the potter and his wheel, the marriage-feasts, the waterpots standing ready to be filled, the maimed, the leper, and the blind—all these are everyday sights in the streets and households of modern India.
But we may also make an instructive comparison between India and mediaeval, or even Renaissance, Europe. As soon as one gets away from the railway and the telegraph—indeed even where they have already penetrated—one still finds in India conditions prevailing which continued in Europe beyond the Middle Ages. The customary tie between master and servant, lasting from one generation to another, preserves the community of interest which prevented the feudal bond from being irksome. The modern severance of classes, the modern desire for aloofness, has not yet come. The servants are an integral part of the household, sharing in its ceremonies and festivities, crowding into their master's presence without impairing his privacy, and following him as escort whenever he stirs abroad. The child-marriage which we condemn in modern India, was frequently practised in Europe in the sixteenth century, when the uncertainty of life made men wish to secure the future of their children so far as they could. The foster-mothers with whom young Mughal princes found a home, whose sons they loved as their own brothers, had their counter-part in these islands as late as the days of the great Lord Cork. Walled cities with crowded houses looking into one another across narrow winding alleys, were an inevitable condition of life in sixteenth-century Europe before strong central government had made it safe to live outside the gates. Even the houses of the great were dark, airless, cramped, with tiny windows and dim, opaque glass; such as one may still see at Compton Castle in Devonshire or the Château des Comtes at Ghent. Communications moved slowly along unmetalled roads or up and down rivers. Carriages with two or four horses were occasionally used; but the ordinary traveller rode on horseback, and needy students coming to a university walked, clubbing together for a packhorse to carry their modest baggage. These are features which may still be matched in many parts of India.
The ravages of plague, the absence of sanitation, the recurrence of famine and war, all combined in sixteenth-century Europe to produce an uncertainty in the tenure of life, which modern India knows only too well from all the causes except the last; but India does not follow Europe in the resulting practice of frequent remarriage on both sides. In Erasmus' day a marriage in which neither side had previously or did subsequently contract a similar relation must have been quite exceptional. A certain German lady, after one ordinary husband, became the wife of three leading Reformers in succession, Oecolampadius, Capito, and Bucer—almost an official position, it would seem. She survived them all, and when Bucer died at Cambridge in 1551, was able to return to Basle, to be buried beside Oecolampadius in the Cathedral. Katherine Parr married four times. To her first husband, who left her a widow at fifteen, she was a second wife; to her second, a third wife; to her third, who was Henry VIII, a sixth; and only her fourth was a bachelor.
The custom of the year's 'doole' after the death of husband or wife was just at this period breaking down. In 1488 Edward IV declined a new marriage for his sister, Margaret of York, the new-made widow of Charles the Bold, on the ground that 'after the usage of our realms no estate or person honourable communeth of marriage within the year of their dool'. But Tudor practice was very different. For Mary, Queen of France, who married her Duke of Suffolk as soon as her six weeks of white mourning were out, there was some excuse of urgency; Henry, too, in his rapid marriage with Jane Seymour had special reasons. But Katherine Parr, when her turn to marry him came, was but a few months a widow; and later, in being on with her old love, Thomas Seymour, when her grim master was only just dead, she had no motive beyond the wishes of lovers long delayed. The Princess Mary, however, considered this latter action highly improper.
John Oporinus (Herbst), the Basle printer (1507-68), had a varied experience; taking four widows to wife. At the age of 20 he married—almost, it seems, out of a sense of duty—the widow of his teacher, Xylotectus of Lucerne; an elderly lady who persecuted him sorely, and once in a passion threw dirty water over him. After eight years, two of which he had spent roving through Germany with Paracelsus, she died, leaving her property to relations. Oporinus' next widow had three children, girls, who grew up to share their mother's expensive tastes. For nearly thirty years their extravagance vexed him, though his wife had tact enough to keep from open quarrels. Then one day he returned from the Frankfort fair to find her dead of the plague. The same visitation, 1564, by carrying off first John Herwagen the younger and then Ulrich Iselin, Professor of Law at Basle, made two more widows, successively to bear Oporinus' name. Herwagen's widow, Elizabeth Holzach, was a sweet woman, but died in the fourth month of her new marriage, 17 July 1565. Iselin's was Faustina, daughter of Boniface Amerbach, born in 1530. To her seven children by Iselin, she added one for Oporinus, Emmanuel, born 25 Jan. 1568; but the father of 60 did not live six months to have pleasure in his firstborn.
With such frequent changes the marriage-tie cannot have given the same personal attachment that is possible at the present day: indeed such unions can scarcely have seemed more lasting than the temporary associations of friends. One need only recall the bargainings that occur in the Paston Letters to realize that there was not much romance about their marriages, at any rate beforehand. Thus wrote Sir John Paston in 1473 of a suitor for his sister Anne: 'As for Yelverton, he said but late that he would have her if she had her money; and else not.'