Before Sidney left England to take up his post in Flushing, he had written to the Queen asking her ‘legibly to read my heart in the course of my life, and though itself be but of a mean worth, yet to esteem it like a poor house well set’. England judged him in this sense. The funeral, which was long delayed while Walsingham settled the complicated debts of the estate, took place on 16th February 1587 with solemn majesty and before a huge crowd. Seven hundred mourners followed the coffin and they could hardly pass through the streets to St Paul’s because of the press of the London populace. After the service in the black-hung cathedral, the body was buried by the choir while a double volley echoed in the churchyard. The respects, the lamentations, the memorials came from all over Europe, even from Philip of Spain who remembered that the younger Philip was his godson. The most affecting of the tributes very fittingly came from his friend and fellow-poet Edmund Spenser:
He grew up fast in goodness and in grace,
And doubly fair wox both in mind and face.
Which daily more and more he did augment,
With gentle usage, and demeanour mild;
That all men’s hearts with secret ravishment
He stole away, and wittingly beguiled.
At the distance of time, history judges him more severely. Gabriel Harvey declared that ‘his sovereign profession was arms’; but his experience of war was extremely limited and he had no success on the battlefield. He had the gallantry of a good soldier, but not the prudence of a good general. In the arts, though his achievements are important as the first of their kind in England, he was soon overtaken. Astrophel and Stella was certainly an extraordinary work, for though Wyatt and Surrey in the reign of Henry VIII had assimilated Italian forms and set the poetry of the English Renaissance on its way, Sidney had refined and disciplined their somewhat uncertain attempts. That Spenser and Shakespeare built grander edifices on the foundation he had laid is a part of his credit. But the Arcadia, with too much sentiment and too little characterization, has been taken as a mistake—a wrong direction—in English prose fiction. Milton called it ‘a vain and amatorious poem’. He wrote fine, musical songs and dignified translations of the Psalms; but Thomas Campion was soon to write better songs, and his Psalms would not displace those of the Authorized Version.
His contemporaries, however, could not look at him in this critical way. For them, Sidney was an extraordinary manifestation of an Elizabethan ideal, greatness in action, putting virtue and talent disinterestedly to the benefit of the community. That was how his oldest and best friend Fulke Greville saw him. ‘The truth is’, he wrote, ‘his end was not writing, even while he wrote; nor his knowledge moulded for tables, or schools; but both his wit and understanding bent upon his heart, to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great. In which architectural art he was such a Master, with so commanding and yet equal ways amongst men, that wheresoever he went he was beloved and obeyed.’ And this, it seems, was how Sidney saw himself. ‘I would rather be charged’, he once said, ‘with lack of wisdom than of patriotism.’ He was merely an instrument for the good of England, and to inspire goodness in her countrymen. Even Elizabeth, in his view, was only an agent in a great Protestant cause which would well continue without her. He wrote to Walsingham from Utrecht shortly before his death: ‘If her Majesty were the fountain I would fear, considering what I daily find, that we would wax dry but she is but a means whom God useth.’ Though from time to time, especially in letters to Languet, Sidney admitted self doubt, and though in his poems he sometimes put on the fashionable dress of melancholy, the whole of his life gave evidence of a great hope for humanity, and a confidence in the working out of God’s will.
Many regarded Sidney as the exemplar of an English gentleman, but even in his own time there were signs that his life was far out of touch with reality. Ideals must be paid for; Sidney’s were expensive ones, and he could not have pursued his grand design, in an inflationary age, without the support of his unlucky father-in-law who was left debts amounting to £6,000. His impatience with the intrigues and subtleties of government disqualified him from important office. The Queen grieved at his death but in his life showed him no favour. No man seemed to have more talent or a better preparation to serve the State. His father Sir Henry, as honest an official as the Tudors ever had, trained him well. His own brilliance and integrity were without question; his love of his country was profound. But no worthwhile employment came his way. Elizabeth, offended by his unyielding and impractical spirit, seemed deliberately cold to him. When the Earl of Oxford insulted him on the tennis court in front of the French envoy, Sidney challenged the nobleman to a duel. The Queen prevented this, pointing out that it was not for a gentleman to challenge an earl; such a disregard for the nobility, she said, taught the peasants the spirit of revolt. It is one of the little ironies of history that Philip Sidney, the chevalier par excellence, was only knighted so that he could stand substitute for a German prince in the ceremony of the Garter.
Elizabeth and Sidney were far opposed, representatives of contrary tendencies of the age. She was the voice of experience, he the voice of innocence. They became united in the affection of their countrymen who forgave the Queen her faults and remembered Sidney only for his virtues:
Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell, and as he lived and loved,
Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot.
To live in the national imagination is a fame reserved for few.
1 Catherine de Medici, the dowager Queen of France, whose compromising policies were generally held to have aggravated the religious troubles of the land.
10
Robert Greene
HIS NAME WAS notorious. ‘I know you are not unacquainted with the death of Robert Greene’, his printer wrote to his readers, ‘whose pen in his lifetime pleased you as well on the stage, as in the stationers’ shops.’ His work was prolific, his death sad and edifying; but his origins were obscure, and his conduct a scandalous enigma. In troubled times he came to London, a provincial youth of bright attainments whose feckless and indulgent life challenged the old order of society. Like a little meteor he blazed for a while, and died suddenly.
Greene was born in 1558, in Norwich, where his parents, as he wrote in his Repentance, ‘for their gravity and honest life were well known and esteemed amongst their neighbours’. His father was not rich; when Robert went to university he was a poor sizar, a scholar who waited at table in return for his tuition. But the family did their best, as the son admitted: ‘My father had care to have me in my nonage brought up at school, that I might through the study of good letters grow to be a friend to myself, a profitable member to the commonwealth, and a comfort to him in his age.’ Greene became none of these things.
In November 1575 Greene went to St John’s College, Cambridge. The Reformation in England had severely damaged Oxford and Cambridge, since both had been intimately connected with the Church, and when Greene arrived at St John’s his university was in the process of recovering and changing. Oxford, with its Catholic sympathies, had suffered the more, and now Cambridge was rivalling the reputation and achievements of the older institution. The new colleges, Queens’, Christ’s, St John’s, were founts of the New Learning of the Renaissance, being particularly strong on Greek studies. Sir John Cheke, the greatest Greek scholar of the day, Roger Ascham, Elizabeth’s tutor, and William Cecil, her great minister, had all been at St John’s; no wonder the Queen looked favourably on Cambridge. She visited it first, in 1564, and Cecil—Lord Burghley—was the chancellor of the university. Elizabeth’s government was also pleased that the religion of Cambridge was distinctly Protestant, though later the university fell somewhat from grace when it became the breeding place for Puritans. But in the first days of the reign, when the Queen was anxious to assert her mastery over all aspects of national life, the Reformed faith of Cambridge enabled the university to accept the secular spirit of the new reign. The government co
uld rest easy that the sons of Cambridge were being prepared to become good servants of the State.
Other changes were afoot. The colleges ‘were erected by their founders’, William Harrison wrote in the Description of England, ‘at the first only for poor men’s sons, whose parents were not able to bring them up unto learning; but now they have the least benefit of them, by reason the rich do so encroach upon them’. In the Middle Ages the universities had provided the poor, diligent clerics that the vast organization of the Church required; now the university was becoming the place where the gentleman completed his education, perhaps with no thought at all of a life in the Church. There was now some competition for preferment in which the poor student was at a disadvantage: ‘it is in my time’, wrote Harrison, ‘an hard matter for a poor man’s child to come by a fellowship (though he be never so good a scholar and worthy of that room).’ And the new wealthy students brought a new attitude to their studies, a casual approach of those who knew that their prospects in life, because of their birth and connections, did not desperately depend on a university degree. ‘I would I had bestowed’, lamented Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, ‘that time in the tongues that I have in fencing, dancing and bear-baiting. O had I but followed the arts.’
In 1575 there were temptations enough to distract the poor, young student. ‘Such playing at dice,’ Lyly wrote of the Oxford of the time, ‘such quaffing of drink, such daliance with women, such dancing, that in my opinion there is no quaffer in Flanders so given to tippling, no courtier in Italy so given to riot, no creature in the world so misled as a student.’ The student was becoming better known for his style than his study; in the manner of the country gentleman he played when he could, and when he could not play he idled. John Earle, in the elegant portraits of his Micro-cosmography (1628), gave him this character: ‘The two marks of his seniority are the bare velvet of his gown and his proficiency at tennis, where when he can once play a set, he is a fresh-man no more. His study has commonly handsome shelves, his books neat silk strings, which he shews to his father’s man, and is loathe to untie or take down, for fear of misplacing.’
Some, of course, worked amid temptations; and Greene, a poor scholar, needed his degree. In 1578 he graduated from St John’s and passed on to Clare Hall where he became, in 1583, Master of Arts. He had studied the philosophy of Aristotle and perhaps flirted with the Protestant logic of Ramus fashionable at Cambridge. He had looked into the works of Cardano for arithmetic, Euclid for geometry, and Ptolemy for astronomy. Cicero and Quintilian had taught him rhetoric. He knew the Latin poets well, and the plays of Seneca; he was likely to have some knowledge of Greek and French. His learning was sufficiently solid for Oxford also to grant him a degree. After 1588 he proudly announced himself as Academiae Utriusque Magister in Artibus—‘Master of Arts in both Universities’. But his studies did not prevent him from tasting the pleasures of the place. The poor young man plunged happily into the world of the idle wits. ‘At the University of Cambridge’, he wrote in his Repentance, ‘I light amongst wags as lewd as myself, with whom I consumed the flower of my youth.’
After university, foreign travel was a usual course for young gentlemen. ‘Travel, in the younger sort,’ said Francis Bacon, ‘is a part of education.’ And Greene was drawn to Italy and Spain by his wealthy friends at Cambridge. For Bacon, the travels of the student were to be a sober and diligent time: he was to keep a diary; observe architecture, harbours, fortifications; attend the courts of justice and church consistories; visit libraries and colleges; listen to disputations and lectures; look at comedies, pageants and fairs; and enquire into the business of governments, armies and merchants. And most of all he was to remain modest and English; ‘let it appear that he doth not change his country manners for those of foreign parts, but only prick in some flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of his own country.’
But many of the young travellers were rich, idle and wilful; and the wonders of their voyages spun their giddy heads. ‘Farewell, Monsieur Traveller,’ says Rosalind to the affected and melancholy Jaques in As You Like It: ‘look you lisp, and wear strange suits, disable all the benefits of your own country, be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are; or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola.’ Italy, indeed, the home of notorious Machiavelli where Renaissance princes luxuriated in sin and wealth, was thought particularly dangerous to unsophisticated English lads. ‘Italy now is not that Italy, that it was wont to be’, Ascham wrote in The Scholemaster (1570): ‘and therefore now not so fit a place, as some do count it, for young men to fetch either wisdom or honesty from thence.’ Alas, he admitted, the very reputation of the place made the young eager to try its charms; ‘many of our travellers into Italy do not eschew the way to Circe’s court, but go, and ride, and run, and fly thither.’ Greene and his companions were of this kind. In Italy and Spain, he wrote, ‘I saw and practised such villany as is abominable to declare.’
For his friends, the case was perhaps not serious, for they had money to squander and secure places to return to at home. But Greene was from a poor family living beyond his means in spend-thrift company. He became proud and touchy, and the expenses of his life led him into deceit. He sponged on his family, tricking his father and playing on the tender heart of his mother, ‘so that being then conversant with notable braggarts, boon companions and ordinary spend-thrifts, that practised sundry superficial studies, I became a sien grafted into the same stock, whereby I did absolutely participate of their nature and qualities’. Everything joined to divorce him from family and home—his education, his new luxurious habits, his pride, his dishonesty. He could not go back to Norwich and the provincial life. ‘At my return into England, I ruffled out my silks, in the habit of Malcontent, and seemed so discontent, that no place would please me to abide in, nor no vocation cause me to stay myself in.’ He had become the displaced man.
The social changes of the sixteenth century made it the century of the dispossessed. Agrarian reform, enclosures, the advent of capitalism, wide-spread inflation, the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries—all shook the social fabric. Vagrancy and lawlessness were the preoccupation of Tudor government. Numberless measures for their control were passed, but the country still seemed overburdened with turbulent men, thrown out of their accustomed order and living on their wits. All observers remarked on the extraordinary dislocation of everyday life. ‘There is no country in the world’, an Italian visitor wrote around 1500, ‘where there are so many thieves and robbers as in England; insomuch that few venture to go alone in the country, excepting in the middle of the day, and fewer still in the towns at night, and least of all in London.’ Harrison, writing in about 1577, dated the increase in vagabondage from the first decade of the century. ‘It is not yet full threescore years since this trade began,’ said his Description of England: ‘but how it has prospered since that time it is easy to judge, for they are now supposed, of one sex and another, to amount unto above 10,000 persons.’ In 1594 Sir John Spenser, Lord Mayor of London, estimated the number of begging poor in London alone at 12,000. In England, three to four hundred vagrant rogues were hanged each year; according to Strype’s Annals, the searches of 1569 caught some 13,000 master-less men.
The ranks of the vagabonds included all sorts of men and women. Very many were peasants turned off the land by enclosures. Others, particularly at the beginning of the century, were disbanded retainers from the feudal armies. Later, soldiers discharged at Plymouth, Dover or Southampton after a foreign expedition were reluctant to go home; used to a riotous, brutal life of arms, they took their pay and formed robber gangs. In 1589 the remnants of an unsuccessful expedition to Portugal, which had been led by Drake and Norris, drifted up to London and threatened the city so that martial law was proclaimed and 2,000 militiamen called out. Other vagabonds were servants of aristocrats, perhaps dismissed for bad service, or perhaps let go because inflation caused the lord to cu
t back his expenses. And yet others were churchmen and monastic servitors cast adrift by the Reformation—former monks and friars, pardoners and proctors, monastic butlers, valets, cellarmen, gardeners, etc. And last of all there were the gypsies, known to the Elizabethans as ‘Egyptians’. The gypsies had first come to England in the middle of the fifteenth century, and their strange appearance and wandering ways were immediately suspicious. ‘They be swart and do go disguised in their apparel contrary to other nations’, Andrew Borde wrote in 1547. ‘They be light-fingered and use picking; they have little manner and evil lodging, and yet they be pleasant dancers.’ As early as 1530 Parliament began to legislate against them; in 1562 it was enacted that anyone consorting with Egyptians and counterfeiting their speech and behaviour would be apprehended as a felon.
Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Page 23