The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  The argument was learned and eloquent, but it called all actresses whores, and the Queen had just imported some actresses from France and was herself rehearsing a part in a court masque. Henrietta Maria took offense, and Laud indicted Prynne for seditious libel. The author protested that he had had no intention of libeling the Queen; he apologized for the intemperance of his book; nevertheless, with a severity which the Puritans long remembered, he was debarred from the practice of law, was fined the impossible sum of £5,000 ($250,000?), and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was placed in the pillory, and both his ears were cut off.32 From his prison he issued News from Ipswich (1636), in which he denounced Anglican prelates as devilish traitors and ravenous wolves, and recommended that these bishops be hanged. He was pilloried again, and the stumps of his ears were shorn away. He remained in jail until the Long Parliament freed him in 1640.

  In 1642 the Parliament ordered all the theaters of England closed. This was at first a war measure, apparently limited to “these calamitous times,” but it remained in force till 1656. The long career of the Elizabethan drama came to an end amid a drama greater than any that the English stage had ever played.

  IV. CAROLINE PROSE

  There were at least two men in England who could look out upon the seething scene with perspective and calm. John Selden was so learned that men said, “Quod Seldenus nescit nemo scit”—What Selden does not know, nobody knows. As an antiquarian he collected state records of pre-Norman England and compiled an authoritative Titles of Honor (1614); as an Orientalist he made a European reputation with his study of polytheism, De diis Syris (1617); as a jurist he expounded rabbinical law and wrote a History of Tythes refuting the claim of the divine origin of tithes; as an M.P. he took part in impeaching Buckingham and Laud and in drawing up the Petition of Right; he was twice imprisoned. He attended the Westminster Assembly as a lay delegate “to see wild asses fight,” and pleaded for moderation in religious disputes. After his death his Table Talk, recorded by his secretary, became an English classic. Shall we sample him?

  ’Tis a vain thing to talk of an heretic, for a man can think no otherwise than he does think. In the primitive times there were many opinions. One of these being embraced by some prince … the rest were condemned as heresies … No man is the wiser for his learning; it may administer matter to work in … but wit [intelligence] and wisdom are born with a man … Wise men say nothing in dangerous times. The lion … called the sheep to ask her if his breath smelled; she said Yes; he bit off her head for a fool. He called the wolf and asked him; he said No; he tore him to pieces for a flatterer. At last he called the fox, and asked him. Why [said the fox], he had got a cold and could not smell.33

  Sir Thomas Browne was a fox. Born in London (1605), educated at Winchester School, Oxford, Montpellier, Padua, and Leiden, absorbing arts and sciences and history at every turn, he resigned himself to the practice of medicine at Norwich. He sublimated his uroscopies by jotting down his ideas de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis (“on all things and a few others”), and eloquently concealed his theology in Religio medici (1642), one of the milestones in English prose. Here is a British Montaigne, quite as quaint and fanciful, as undulant and diverse, perhaps borrowing from him in the pages of friendship,34 subordinating his skepticism to conformity, relishing reason and professing faith, congested with classical allusions and derivatives, but loving the art and the music of words, and using style as “the antiseptic of decay.”

  He was by education inclined to doubt. His longest work, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), explained and chastised hundreds of “false opinions epidemic” in Europe—that a carbuncle gives light in the dark, that an elephant has no joints, that the phoenix regenerates itself from its own ashes, that the salamander can live in fire, that the unicorn has a horn, that swans sing before their death, that the forbidden fruit was an apple, that “the toad pisseth and this way diffuseth its venom.”35 But, like every iconoclast, he had his icons. He accepted angels, demons, palmistry, and witches;36 in 1664 he shared in the condemnation as witches of two women, who were soon thereafter hanged protesting their innocence.37

  He had no fancy for women, and thought sex ridiculous:

  I was never yet once, and commend their resolutions who never marry twice … I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of union; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life; nor is there anything that will more deject his cool’d imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.38

  As to his titular topic, he is apologetically Christian:

  For my religion, though there be several circumstances that might persuade the world I have none at all (as the general scandal of my profession, the natural course of my studies, the indifferency of my behavior and discourse in matters of religion, neither violently defending one, nor with that common ardor and contention opposing another), yet, in despite hereof, I dare without usurpation the honorable style of Christian. Not that I merely owe this title to the font, my education, or the clime wherein I was born … but having in my riper years and confirmed judgment seen and examined all.39

  He feels that the marvels and the order of the world declare a divine mind—”nature is the art of God.”40 He confesses to having entertained some heresies, and he slips into some doubts about the Biblical account of Creation;41 but now he feels the need of an established religion to guide wondering, wandering men; and he deplores the vanity of heretics who disturb the social order with their hot infallibilities.42 Puritans were not to his taste; he remained quietly faithful to the first Charles during the Civil War and was knighted for his pains by the second.

  In his later years he was moved to meditation on death by the unearthing of some ancient sepulchral urns in Norfolk, and he recorded his thoughts in a desultory masterpiece of English prose, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall (1658). He recommends cremation as the least vain method of disencumbering the earth of ourselves. “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us”; but we flicker out with ignominious haste. “Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks.”43 The world itself is probably nearing its end in “this setting part of time.” We need the hope of immortality to gird us against this brevity; it is a precious prop to feel ourselves immortal—but a great pity that we must be scared into decency by visions of hell.44 Heaven is no “empyreal vacuity” but “within the circle of this sensible world,” in a condition of mental content and peace. Then, hurrying back from the verge of heresy, he ends his Religio with a modest prayer to God:

  Bless me in this life with but peace of my conscience, command of my affections, the love of Thyself and my dearest friends, and I shall be happy enough to pity Caesar. These are, O Lord, the humble desires of my most reasonable ambition, and all I dare call happiness on earth; wherein I set no rule or limit to thy Hand or Providence. Dispose of me according to the wisdom of Thy pleasure. Thy will be done, though in my undoing.45

  V. CAROLINE POETRY

  Meanwhile a bevy of minor bards—each of whom is someone’s major love—amused the leisurely with amorous rhymes and tuneful piety; and because the King liked them and they sang his cause through all vicissitudes, history knows them as the Cavalier Poets. Robert Herrick apprenticed his pen to Ben Jonson, and thought for a time that a bowl of wine would make a book of verse; he drank to Bacchus for hours on end, and then studied for the ministry. He took courses in love, pledged himself to prefer mistresses to marriage,46 and counseled virgins to “gather rosebuds” while they bloomed. His “Corinna” received further prodding:

  Get up, get up for shame! The blooming morn

  Upon her wings presents the god unshorn.

  See how Aurora throws her fair

  Fresh-quilted colors through the air;

  Get up, sweet Slug-a-bed, and see

  The dew bespangling
herb and tree …

  Come, let us go, while we are in our prime,

  And take the harmless folly of the time!

  We shall grow old apace, and die

  Before we know our liberty …

  Then while time serves, and we are but decaying,

  Come, my Corinna, come, let’s go a-Maying.47

  And so in many of the wanton poems that he published in 1648 in the collection Hesperides; even in our loose days they need expurgation to suit Everyman. But eating is also necessary, so Herrick left his beloved London (1629), and—taking Catullus with him—went sorrowfully to be vicar of a modest parsonage in distant Devonshire. Soon he began to write Noble Numbers, or Pious Pieces, and first a prayer for absolution:

  For those my unbaptised rhymes,

  Writ in my wild unhallowed times,

  For every sentence, clause, and word,

  That’s not inlaid with Thee (my Lord),

  Forgive me, God, and blot each line

  Out of my book that is not Thine.48

  In 1647 the Puritans deprived him of his benefice. He starved loyally through the dour days of the Commonwealth, but was restored by the Restoration to his vicarage, and died there at eighty-four, Corinna lost in the dusk of memory.

  Thomas Carew did not live so long, but he too found time for mistresses. Drunk with the inexplicable charms of woman, he sang them in such rapt detail (“A Rapture”), and with such cavalier contempt for chastity, that other poets reproved him for his licentious exactitude. The Puritans could not forgive Charles I for making him a gentleman of the privy chamber, but perhaps the King pardoned the matter for the form; in these Caroline poets all the Gallic finesse of Ronsard and the Pléiade is imported to grace with delicate art the indelicacies of desire.

  Sir John Suckling crowded much living into his thirty-three years. Born in 1609, he inherited a great fortune at eighteen, made the Grand Tour, was knighted by Charles I, fought under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War, returned to England (1632) to become by his good looks, his wit, and his generous wealth a favorite at the court. He was, says Aubrey, “the greatest gallant of his time, and the greatest gamester, both for bowling and cards … His sisters would come to the … bowling green, crying for fear he should lose all their portions.”49 He invented cribbage. He never married, but entertained “a great number of ladies of quality”; at one party he served the ladies, as dessert, silk stockings, then a great luxury.50 His play Aglaura was produced with lavish scenery, paid for from his purse. He raised his own troops to fight for the King and risked his life in an attempt to rescue the King’s minister, Sir Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, from the Tower. Frustrated, he fled to the Continent, and there, deprived of his fortune, he took poison and died.

  Richard Lovelace too served the King in war and verse, and he too was rich and handsome, “the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld”51—so Anthony à Wood saw him at Oxford. In 1642 he headed a delegation from Kent to petition the Long Parliament (transiently Presbyterian) for the restoration of the Anglican liturgy. For this audacious orthodoxy he was imprisoned for seven weeks. His Althea came to comfort him, and he made her immortal with a line:

  When Love with unconfined wings

  Hovers within my gates,

  And my divine Althea brings

  To whisper at the grates;

  When I lie tangled in her hair

  And fettered to her eye,

  The birds that wanton in the air

  Know no such liberty….

  Stone walls do not a prison make,

  Nor iron bars a cage;

  Minds innocent and quiet take

  That for an hermitage;

  If I have freedom in my love

  And in my soul am free,

  Angels alone, that soar above,

  Enjoy such liberty.52

  He went off to the wars again in 1645—and apologized to his betrothed (Lucy Sacheverell) in “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars”:

  Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind

  That from the nunnery

  Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind

  To war and arms I fly….

  Yet this inconstancy is such

  As thou too shalt adore;

  I could not love thee, dear, so much,

  Loved I not honour more.53

  On the false report of his death in battle, Lucasta (chaste Lucy) married another suitor. Having lost both his lady and his fortune in the Royalist cause, Lovelace was reduced to depend upon the charity of his friends for food, and he who had worn cloth of silver and gold now dressed in rags and lived in slums. He died of consumption in 1658, aged forty.

  He might have learned the art of survival from Edmund Waller, who managed to be active for sixty years on both sides of the Great Rebellion, became the most popular poet of his time, outlived Milton, and died in bed at eighty-one (1687). He entered Parliament at sixteen, went mad at twenty-three, recovered, married a London heiress at twenty-five, buried her three years later, and soon wooed “Sacharissa” (Lady Dorothy Sidney) with a fresh variant of an ancient theme:

  Go, lovely Rose!

  Tell her, that wastes her time and me,

  That now she knows,

  When I resemble her to thee,

  How sweet and fair she seems to be.

  Tell her, that’s young,

  And shuns to have her graces spied,

  That hadst thou sprung

  In deserts, where no men abide,

  Thou must have unrecommended died….

  Then die! that she

  The common fate of all things rare

  May read in thee;

  How small a part of time they share

  That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

  One other hardly minor poet enters this period. Richard Crashaw burned with religious ardor rather than with the fevers of the flesh. His father, an Anglican clergyman, wrote tracts against Catholicism and filled his son with fears of popery; Richard became a Catholic. He was expelled from Cambridge (1644) for supporting the King; he fled from England to Paris, where he consoled his poverty with visions of God. The Spanish mystics were to him a revelation of religious intensity and devotion. Standing before a picture of St. Teresa, he envied her transfixion by the dart of Christ, and begged her to accept him as her selfless disciple:

  By the full kingdom of that final kiss

  That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His;

  By all the heavens thou hast in Him

  (Fair sister of the seraphim);

  By all of Him we have in thee,

  Leave nothing of myself in me.

  Let me so read thy life that I

  Unto all life of mine may die.

  This and other poems he gave to the world in Steps to the Temple (1646), an ambivalent mixture of pious ecstasies and poetic conceits. Through him and a like but later poet, Henry Vaughan, we perceive that not all England was in those hectic days divided into Puritans and Cavaliers, but that amid the fury of poetical and theological war some spirits found religion neither in massive shrines and hypnotic ritual, nor in fearful dogmas and proud election, but in the childlike, trustful communion of the baffled and surrendering soul with a humane and forgiving God.

  VI. CHARLES I VERSUS PARLIAMENT: 1625–29

  And now this tragic King over whom all England was to fight, what sort of man and monarch was he? Before the storm soured the milk of human kindness in him, he was a reasonably good man—a loving son, an unusually faithful husband, a loyal friend, a father idolized by his children. He had begun the struggle of life by fighting a congenital weakness of physique; he could not walk till he was seven. He overcame this defect by resolute pursuit of vigorous sports, until in maturity he could ride and hunt with the best. He suffered from an impediment of speech; until ten he could hardly speak intelligibly; his father thought of having an operation performed on the boy’s tongue. Charles gradually improved, but to the end of his life he stammered and had to co
unter his difficulty by speaking slowly.54 When his popular brother Henry died, leaving him heir apparent, Charles was suspected of complicity in the death; the charge was unjust, but it shared in darkening the Prince’s mood. He preferred a studious solitude to the bibulous hilarity of his father’s court. He became proficient in mathematics, music, and theology, learned something of Greek and Latin, spoke French, Italian, and a little Spanish. He loved art; he cherished and expanded the collection left by his brother; he became a discriminating collector, and a generous patron of artists, poets, and musicians. He invited the Italian painter Orazio Gentileschi to his court, then Rubens, Vandyck, and Frans Hals; Hals declined, and Rubens came chiefly as ambassador; but all the world knows Charles as the proud and handsome king, with Vandyke beard, repeatedly painted by Vandyck. William Dobson, pupil of Vandyck, continued the idealization of the royal family.

  Charles’s parentage and marriage contributed to his ruin. He inherited his father’s conception of the royal prerogative as absolute, with power to make as well as administer laws, to rule without Parliament, and to override laws enacted by Parliament. This view seemed justified by precedents and was taken for granted in France and Spain; it was encouraged in Charles by Buckingham, the court, and the Queen. Henrietta Maria had been reared at the French court in the very days when Richelieu was making her brother Louis XIII absolute over everybody but Richelieu. She had come to England as an avowed Catholic, bringing priests in her bridal train, and her faith had been made more intense by the disabilities she saw it suffer there. She had all the allure of beauty, vivacity, and wit, and the full Medicean flair for politics. Inevitably she urged her devoted husband to alleviate the lot of English Catholics; doubtless she dreamed of converting the King himself. She gave him six children; it must have cost him many a struggle to resist her wish that they might be brought up Catholic. But he had developed a sincere attachment to the Anglican Church, and he realized that his England was predominantly Protestant and hostile to a threatening papacy.