If Sir Humphrey Gilbert had too much idealism, England had too little, and this also prevented the success of the early colonists. When Raleigh took up the work of his half-brother and sent two ships to explore the American coast, the land which they found and called Virginia contained gentle and friendly Indians. The expedition that Raleigh sent to possess it, in 1585, under Sir Richard Grenville and Ralph Lane, and manned by the usual criminals and riff-raff, pillaged, tortured and slaughtered to such effect that the Indians revolted and wiped out the colony. ‘It is the sinfullest thing in the world’, commented Bacon, ‘to forsake or destitute a plantation once in forwardness: for besides the dishonour, it is the guiltiness of blood of many commiserable persons.’ But the Queen and the Council looked on colonies as places which favourite courtiers could exploit for their profit, using for their purpose rogues and criminals unwanted in England. Again, Bacon pointed out the folly of this: plantations abroad were like plantations of wood; they needed careful tending and only gave their profit after many years. And criminals were not the men to do the tending. ‘It is a shameful and unblessed thing’, Bacon wrote in his essay on Plantations, ‘to take the scum of the people and wicked, condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant, for they will ever live like rogues and not fall to work, but be lazy and do mischief, and spend victuals, and be quickly weary, to the discredit of the plantation.’2
Sir Humphrey Gilbert takes his proper place among the imaginative men, the artists, of the age. His memorial is not his practical success, but rather the example of his thought and trials. ‘We and the French’, wrote Richard Hakluyt, ‘are most infamous for our outrageous, common, and daily piracies.’ Gilbert was the first influential voice in England to assert that colonization was a nobler work than piracy, and one more likely to advance England’s wealth and power. And he asserted this against the general opinion of the country: the robbers—Hawkins, Drake, Grenville and the like—were the popular heroes whose thefts were blessed by the Queen’s policy. But Gilbert, with the confidence of the visionary, saw before the Queen and her Council that England was strong enough to turn from destruction to building. ‘The time approacheth,’ wrote Hakluyt in the preface to the first edition of his Principal Navigations, written just before Gilbert’s last voyage, ‘and now is, that we of England may share and part stakes (if we will ourselves) both with the Spaniard and Portingale, in part of America and other reasons yet undiscovered.’ Hakluyt, the epic chronicler of England’s voyages, was the disciple of Gilbert’s thought, and so great a believer in colonization that he wanted to accompany Gilbert in 1583; but his duties as chaplain to the Earl of Stafford stopped him.
It is no surprise that the sea voyages so laboriously collected by Hakluyt and published in his Principal Navigations between 1582 and 1600 should have possessed the imagination of his fellow countrymen:
Thy Voyages attend,
Industrious Hakluyt;
Whose reading shall inflame
Men to seek fame,
wrote Michael Drayton, in his Ode to the Virginian Voyage. The new riches, so astoundingly and suddenly revealed, brought forth new riches from the mind. ‘Gold’, Columbus said, ‘is the most precious of all commodities; gold constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of paradise.’ The mystical properties of gold exercised their powerful influence on the English mind. Lust for wealth and power invaded the writing. ‘I’ll have them fly to India for gold’, says Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus of the spirits he controls:
Ransack the Ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates.
The mariners returned with the raw wealth of their experience from which the poets cut the jewels of their imagery. For writing itself showed a splendour not seen before, so that the very language seemed like George Chapman’s Guiana:
whose rich feet are mines of gold,
Whose forehead knocks against the roof of stars,
Stands on her tiptoes at fair England looking.
(De Guiana Carmen Epicum)
The divinity of riches caused strange changes in men and art, a power that was recognized in the opening to Ben Jonson’s Volpone:
Good morning to the day; and, next, my gold:
Open the shrine, that I may see my saint.
Hail the world’s soul, and mine.
Marlowe, Chapman, Jonson—three men whose ambitions and unruly, high-flown spirits matched those of the great plunderers Hawkins and Drake. The former raided the resources of language as boldly as the latter pirated the treasure ships of the Spaniards. But the voyages opened up another, quieter vein of the imagination inspired more by Gilbert’s geographical inquisitiveness than by the rapacity of the sea-dogs. The plays of the time, Sir Philip Sidney complained, were so bespattered with foreign places that the audience was hard put to know where they were: ‘you shall have Asia of the one side, and Affrick of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the Player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is; or else the tale will not be conceived.’ Gascoigne, in his preface to Gilbert’s Discourse of a Discovery, pictured the author in 1576, planning the north-west passage at his house in Limehouse with the maps and tables of Ortelius by his side. And when Marlowe took Tamburlaine on his vast journeys of conquest, he did so with the same Ortelius in his hand:
Give me a map; then let me see how much
Is left for me to conquer all the world.
With the voyages before him, what other material did a poet need for his imagination? ‘But read the report of the worthy Western discoveries, by the said Sir Humfry Gilbert’, Gabriel Harvey advised a fellow writer. Who in the past, Edmund Spenser inquired in the Faerie Queene:
in venturous vessel measured
The Amazons huge river now found true?
Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view?
And did not the noble work of exploration increase the fame and power of England? Again, Humphrey Gilbert was the inspiration of the poet; he was the first, said Thomas Churchyard, who:
all for countreys cause, and to enrich the same,
Now do they hazard all they have.
Gilbert’s bold motto had been Quid Non—Why Not?—and the possibilities opened up by his thoughts on colonization intrigued the mind. Even Chapman, for whom exploration was the pursuit of infinite riches, admired the idealism that put riches to the country’s service. In De Guiana he commended the ‘patrician spirits’—the true nationalists—
That live not for yourselves, but to possess
Your honour’d country of a general store.
Others, equally possessed by Gilbert’s idealism, had a more generous vision of England’s work in the new lands. Samuel Daniel, in his Musophilus published two years before the death of Elizabeth, saw England as the gentle civiliser:
And who, in time, knows whither we may vent
The Treasures of our tongue? To what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent
To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
What worlds in the yet unformed Occident
May come refin’d with the accents that are ours?
In his will, Gilbert had also dimly perceived a golden age where the virtue and knowledge of Europe, released from the historical problems of the homeland, could establish the ideal commonwealth in foreign parts. Others, also seeking a golden age, saw colonization not so much as an extension of European power and influence, but rather as a corrective to the fiery temper and greedy itch of Europe; gentle natives with simple and uncorrupted ways would teach Europe how to live.
And when Amadas and Barlow brought the first news from Virginia in 1585, it seemed that this idyllic place might tempt the English colonists to live a life of quiet and natural justice. No doubt Shakespeare had both Gilbert and the Virginian venture in mi
nd when he borrowed the words of Montaigne to describe the ideal state in the Tempest:
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
But Shakespeare, so much wiser than Gilbert and so much aware of human frailty, knew that the dream of simple justice could not withstand the energy, greed and ambition of his contemporaries. ‘You are gentlemen of brave mettle’, says Gonzalo in the Tempest, explaining why the ideal would never work: ‘you would lift the moon out of her sphere, if she would continue in it five weeks without changing.’ It is a fitting epitaph to the impossible hopes of Sir Humphrey Gilbert.
1 It was not unusual to go to university at a very young age. John Fisher took the grammar degree at Cambridge when he was fourteen, and Wolsey, the famous ‘boy bachelor’, received his B.A. from Oxford at fifteen.
2 Bacon became a shareholder in the Company that planted the first successful English colony at Cupid’s Bay, Newfoundland, in 1610.
8
Richard Hooker
ENGLISH RELIGION in the sixteenth century was a puzzle to the Christian world. Cardinal Allen, an Englishman banned from his homeland by his Catholicism, wrote at the end of the Tudor age that his country’s inconstancy was its shame: ‘We have had to our Prince a man who abolished the Pope’s authority by his laws, and yet in other points kept the faith of his fathers; we have had a child who by the like laws abolished together with the Papacy the whole ancient religion; we have had a woman who restored both again and sharply punished Protestants; and lastly her Majesty that now is who by the like laws hath long since abolished both again, and now severely punished Catholics as the other did Protestants; and all these strange differences within the compass of thirty years.’
The Middle Ages were a time of high Christian endeavour and the Tudors, inheriting a part of this legacy, could not help but show their religion in their lives; but the manifestations seemed odd, inconsequential. Henry VII, the founder of the dynasty, was a simple, orthodox son of the Church. Three successive popes resisted his attempt to have Henry VI canonized, lest the King’s naïvety should bring sainthood into disrepute. Henry VIII wrote on theology and for his work against Luther was proclaimed by the pope ‘Defender of the Faith’; within a few years Henry had utterly repudiated the papal claims. Marillac, the French ambassador, was amazed that the King, in the same hour, could condemn three men to death for Protestant heresy and another three for speaking in favour of the Pope. Edward VI was a pious Reformer with an interest in theology; his half-sister Mary was the most rigorous of Catholics. Elizabeth amused herself with religious argument but showed little religious feeling. In the interests of the State she executed Catholic and Puritan impartially.
The true religion of the people was equally puzzling. Only his confessor knew that Wolsey, the proudest and most worldy of prelates, wore a hair shirt beneath his cardinal’s silken robes. The noble piety of Sir Thomas More was an example to his time, yet the faith he gave to the inhabitants of his Utopia was a kind of deism: ‘there is a certain Godly power unknown, everlasting, incomprehensible, inexplicable, far above the capacity and reach of man’s work, dispersed throughout all the world, not in bigness but in virtue and power.’ In the three years of his chancellorship, the humane, gentle More was no friend to heretics. In 1500 the English people were commended for their religious practice. The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘they always hear Mass on Sunday in their parish church and give liberal alms’, and he found the churches well furnished: ‘there is not a parish church in the kingdom so mean as not to possess crucifixes, candlesticks, censers, patens, and cups of silver.’ Yet some notable churches were put to strange use. Fair booths were set up in Exeter Cathedral, and St Paul’s in London was the business place for merchants, lawyers, pickpockets and prostitutes. Another commentator feared that the rich decoration of the churches was but for show; ‘men do it more for pomp and pride of this world to have a name and worship thereby in the country.’ At the dissolution of the monsteries the same men were quick enough to strip the riches from the monastic churches.
The religion of the masses was for the most part a question of habit; and the English Church, even in the days before the Reformation, had acquired English habits. It acknowledged the papal jurisdiction, but England was far from Rome, and to the Pope and the Curia these northern islands were cold, inhospitable, unattractive. Almost free from Roman intervention, the English Church was hiddenly national. In 1351, in the reign of Edward III, the Statute of Provisors prevented the Pope from making appointments to English ecclesiastical positions; two years later the first Statute of Praemunire decreed that there should be no appeals beyond the realm. And the doctrinal arguments of the fourteenth century only encouraged the latent nationalism of the English Church. The reformer Wyclif demanded that local men be appointed to local offices, that the Scriptures be translated into English and the laity instructed in the vernacular tongue. Thomas Fuller, describing the burning of Wyclif’s corpse by order of the Council of Constance, saw Wyclif as the inevitable precursor of the Reformation. The ashes were cast into the Swift; this brook led into the Avon, that into the Severn, and so by degrees to the ocean. ‘And thus the ashes of Wyclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed all the world over.’
Nationalism lay hidden, but close to the surface, barely covered by old habits, old traditions, old objects of reverence. It was the conscious task of the Tudors to bring nationalism out, to tend it and strengthen it for the safety of the crown. In 1485 Henry VII came to the throne of a lawless country. The feudal barons were puffed up with independent power and ambition, the populace was turbulent. Henry packed his coffers by new taxes and used the money to establish a strong centralized administration; he broke the power of the old nobility, and he gave a new form and authority to Parliament. In all this he was helped by the ardent desire of a tired, impoverished nation for peace. But with the ghost of discord and rebellion so close behind, the monarchy was still uneasy. If the ‘very and true commonweal’ was to be founded in England, the Tudors needed some doctrine which made it a religious duty to obey their authority. Henry VIII, with an obscure but intuitive understanding of what was required, set about the fashioning of this doctrine. And the lucky tool that came to hand, enabling him to shape the country to his wishes, was the Protestant Reformation.
The Catholic Church was then, as it always had been, ripe for reform. The King could count on the hearty national prejudice of the English who for two hundred years had taken scant notice of the Pope. He had also the enthusiastic support of the landed and wealthy classes who coveted the possessions of the Church. Jean Bodin in France and Sir Thomas More in England, the greatest political thinkers of their time, both concluded that the sixteenth-century reformation in Church and State sprang from greed. ‘When I consider and weigh in my mind all these commonwealths, which nowadays everywhere do flourish’, More wrote in Utopia, ‘so God help me, I can conceive nothing, but a certain conspiracy of rich men, procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.’
The time was right, then, for Henry VIII to proclaim himself the head of the native English Church. The dangers of this action came more from Henry’s unstable and despotic character than from the opposition of the people. The English, then as now, were not theologians. They had no understanding of the arguments for papal supremacy; and since they did not love the Pope saw no reason why they should not change religious masters, putting their palpable, haughty and powerful King in the place of some obscure foreigner in Rome. When the Reform Parliament met in 1529 it had behind it not only the vague approval of the masses, but also a weight of argument, as tedious as it was long, proving that God had intended national kings to rule national churches. T
he Scriptures proved, said the De Vera Differentia, setting out the characteristic Protestant argument in 1534, that the Pope’s claims were unfounded and that authority lay only in the prince. And Tyndale complained that the priest had stolen the power of the prince. ‘Kings they are, but shadows; vain names and things idle, having nothing to do in the world but when our holy father needeth their help.’ The title that Henry VIII assumed in the Acts of Supremacy was said to be merely the re-assertion of the ancient powers of the English monarchy. The power, said Bishop Gardiner, was there already, and Archbishop Cranmer agreed, saying that ‘all Christian Princes have committed unto them immediately of God the whole cure of all their subjects, as well concerning the administration of God’s Word for the cure of souls, as concerning the ministration of things political and civil governance’. That was the legal and ecclesiastical argument, and those who were too Catholic to be convinced by it were executed.
Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Page 18