English Lands Letters and Kings
From Elizabeth to Anne
9781465648198
102 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
We take outlook to-day from the threshold of the seventeenth century. Elizabeth is dead (1603), but not England. The powers it had grown to under her quickening offices are all alive. The great Spanish dragon has its teeth drawn; Cadiz has been despoiled, and huge galleons, gold-laden, have come trailing into Devon ports. France is courteously friendly. Holland and England are in leash, as against the fainter-growing blasts of Popedom. In Ireland, Tyrone has been whipped into bloody quietude. A syndicate of London merchants, dealing in pepper and spices, has made the beginnings of that East-Indian empire which gives to the present British sovereign her proudest title. London is growing apace in riches and in houses; though her shipping counts for less than the Dutch shipping, great cargoes come and go through the Thames—spices from the East, velvets and glass from the Mediterranean, cloths from the Baltic. Cheapside is glittering with the great array of goldsmiths’ shops four stories high, and new painted and new gilded (in 1594) by Sir Richard Martin, Mayor. The dudes of that time walk and “publish” their silken suits there, and thence through all the lanes leading to Paul’s Walk—which is, effectively, the aisle of the great church. There are noblemen who have tall houses in the city and others who have built along the Strand, with fine grounds reaching to the river and looking out upon the woods which skirt the bear-gardens of Bankside in Southwark. The river is all alive with boats—wherries, barges, skiffs. There are no hackney carriages as yet for hire; but rich folks here and there rumble along the highways in heavy Flemish coaches. Some of the great lights we have seen in the intellectual firmament of England have set. Burleigh is gone; Hooker is gone, in the prime of his years; Spenser gone, Marlowe gone, Sidney gone. But enough are left at the opening of the century and at the advent of James (1603) to keep the great trail of Elizabethan literary splendors all aglow. George Chapman (of the Homer) is alive and active; and so are Raleigh, and Francis Bacon, and Heywood, and Dekker, and Lodge. Shakespeare is at his best, and is acting in his own plays at the newly built Globe Theatre. Michael Drayton is in full vigor, plotting and working at the tremendous poem from which we culled—in advance—a pageful of old English posies. Ben Jonson, too, is all himself, whom we found a giant and a swaggerer, yet a man of great learning and capable of the delicious bits of poesy which I cited. You will further remember how we set right the story of poor Amy Robsart—told of the great Queen’s vanities—of her visitings—of her days of illness—and of the death of the last sovereign of the name of Tudor.
