The good fortune of Lord Buckhurst did not come to an end with the death of Queen Elizabeth. He was one of those who travelled to meet the new King on his journey down from the North, was confirmed by him in his tenure of the office of Lord Treasurer, and early in the following year was created Earl of Dorset. The illuminated patents of creation are at Knole, showing portraits of both Elizabeth and James I, not very flattering to either; and the Lord Treasurer’s chest is at Knole likewise, a huge coffer covered in leather and thickly studded with large round-headed brass nails. There is a warrant, signed by him as Lord Treasurer, for increasing the duty on tobacco, “That tobacco, being a drug brought into England of late years in small quantities, was used and taken by the better sort only as physic to preserve health; but through evil custom and the toleration thereof that riotous and disorderly persons spent most of their time in that idle vanity.” This warrant, which is dated 1605, shows how little time had elapsed since its introduction before tobacco established its popularity.
He was now advancing in years, and his own letters prove that his health was not very good. In one letter, written to Cecil, he complains that he cannot rest more than two or three hours in the night at most, also that he is constantly subject to rheums and cold and coughs, forced to defend himself with warmth, and to fly the air in cold or moist weathers. In another letter, also written to Cecil, he again complains of a cough, and says that he cannot come abroad for three or four days at least. But his devotion to his public affairs was greater than his attention to his health, for he says, “I have by the space of this month and more foreborne to take physic by reason of her Majesty’s business, and now having this only week left for physic I am resolved to prevent sickness, feeling myself altogether distempered and filled with humours, so as if her Majesty should miss me I beseech you in respect hereof to excuse me.” In 1607, when the old man was seventy-one, there was a report current in London that he was dead, but on the King sending him a diamond, and wishing that he might live so long as that ring would continue, “My Lord Treasurer,” says a letter dated June 1607, “revived again.” In the following year, however, he died dramatically in harness, of apoplexy while sitting at the Council table in Whitehall. His funeral service took place in Westminster Abbey, but his body was taken to Withyham, where it now lies buried in the vault of his ancestors.
§ iii
I have dealt as briefly as possible with the Lord Treasurer’s life, because no one could pretend that the history of his embassies or his occupations of office could have any interest save to a student of the age of Elizabeth. But as a too-much-neglected poet I should like presently to quote the opinions of those well qualified to judge, showing that he was, at least, something of a pioneer in English literature—crude, of course, and uniformly gloomy; too gloomy to read, save as a labour of love or conscience; but nevertheless the author—or part-author—of the earliest English tragedy, and, in some passages, a poet of a certain sombre splendour. That he was a true poet, I think, is unquestionable, unlike his descendant Charles, who by virtue of one song in particular continues to survive in anthologies, but who was probably driven into verse by the fashion of his age rather than by any genuine urgency of creation.
The tragedy of Gorboduc, whose title was afterwards altered to Ferrex and Porrex, was written in collaboration with Thomas Norton, although the exact share of each author is not precisely known and has been much argued.
To the modern reader [says Professor Saintsbury] Gorboduc is scarcely inviting, but that is not a condition of its attractiveness to its own contemporaries. [It] is of the most painful regularity; and the scrupulosity with which each of the rival princes is provided with a counsellor and a parasite to himself, and the other parts are allotted with similar fairness, reaches such a point that it is rather surprising that Gorboduc was not provided with two queens—a good and a bad. But even these faults are perhaps less trying to the modern reader than the inchoate and unpolished condition of the metre in the choruses, and indeed in the blank verse dialogue. Here and there there are signs of the stateliness and poetical imagery of the Induction, but for the most part the decasyllables stop dead at their close and begin afresh at their beginning with a staccato movement and a dull monotony of cadence which is inexpressibly tedious.
Professor Saintsbury rightly points out that the dullness of Gorboduc to our ideas is not a criterion of the effect it produced on readers of its own day. Sir Philip Sidney, for example, while excepting it from the particular charges he brings against all other English tragedies and comedies, and granting that “it is full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style, and as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtain the very end of poesy,” finds fault with it in an unexpected quarter, namely, that it fails in two unities, of time and place, so that the modern criticism of its “painful regularity” was far from occurring to a mind intent upon a yet more rigorous form.
In spite of its manifest imperfections [says the Cambridge Modern History], the tragedy of Gorboduc has two supreme claims to honourable commemoration. It introduced Englishmen who knew no language but their own to an artistic conception of tragedy, and it revealed to them the true mode of tragic expression.
I might also quote here the sonnet of a greater poet, who owed much, if not to Gorboduc, at least to the Induction—Edmund Spenser.
In vain I think, right honourable lord,