dukes and earls, as powerful in their counties as he is in his kingdom, but he surrounds himself with able ministers whom he raises from low estate, and uses as his instruments for the still further weakening and degrading of the nobles. Nash in 1589 reproaches Shakespeare with stealing conceits like Blood is a beggar" out of Seneca. Nash was wrong in supposing that the dramatist required Seneca to tell him this secret. It was the first fact patent to the eye that looked into the Tudor rule; and the first three scenes of "Henry VIII.” are taken up in illustrating it. Buckingham, the son of the duke that had been Richard's tool for hoisting him into the throne, courted while needed, broken when done with, is now no longer necessary for anything but the amusement of the sovereign. Henry is pleased with his talk, admires his talents, but when he becomes a nuisance to his minister he sends him, in spite of the Queen's intercession, to the block. King-makers have dwindled down to courtiers. Their lives, which under the former dynasties could only be taken by violence or lawless treachery, are now game for the labyrinthian subtlety of intriguing lawyers. The great families are ruined by being brought to court, not to honour them, but to weigh them down with expenditure. Young nobles are encouraged to "break their backs with laying manors on 'em." Cardinal Wolsey, the "butcher's cur," the beggar whose "book outworths a noble's blood," omnipotent under the king, makes and mars, sets up and pulls down nobles as he lists, and pulls down, though he fails to set up, a queen. After Wolsey has fallen, another like him takes his place -Cranmer, like Wolsey raised from low estate to the highest ecclesiastical dignities; and Cranmer is simply a ministerial tool for carrying out the king's designs about the divorce. Now it is noticeable that in assigning this characteristic to the Tudor times, and in the lament implied in the terms "Blood is a beggar" which he expresses, Shakespeare is taking the Catholic view of the Elizabethan era. It was one of the charges made against the Queen in the Bull of Pius V. that "she had dismissed the royal council of English nobles, and filled their places with obscure men and heretics." Father Parsons, according to whom the only purpose of the rebellion of 1569 was to restore their due influence to the old nobles, traces the plebeian origin of the Queen's five councillors, Bacon, Cecil, Dudley, Hatton, and Walsingham, and declares that in the whole bench of Anglican bishops there was scarce a drop of noble blood, while the ministry was filled up with beggars' brats. It is to be remarked that this feeling in Shakespeare marks his party clearly. Raleigh's friends complained indeed that except a man were of noble blood he had no chance of promotion in 1 Philopater, Resp. ad. ii. Edict. Elizabethæ, 2 et seq. Lugduni, THE NEW NOBILITY 177 Elizabeth's court. But it was not mere court favour that Shakespeare desired for the nobility; he wanted power, such power as would make them balance the crown and obstruct its despotism. It was easy for Elizabeth to combine a narrow and senseless love of caste with a determination to destroy aristocratic privileges and to break the nobles as an independent power in the State. Though Shakespeare evidently felt the regrets which Allen as well as Parsons express, he was not theorist enough to think that the old state of things could be restored by edict. He had traced the progress of decay through centuries, and knew that neither Pope's Bull, nor Act of Parliament, nor Royal Proclamation, could recall the dead to life. Nevertheless, he looked back to the past wistfully, and felt that he and his dearest friends were misplaced in the times when they were living: "Why should he live, now Nature bankrupt is, Beggared of blood? Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, With needy nothing trimmed in jollity, Shakespeare's conception of Henry VIII. shows how he judged him. Henry would fain have been absolute monarch, to whom the least presumption of independence was present death, as the prejudged and murdered Buckingham felt to his sorrow; but knowing that he could not discontent the Commons M with impunity, Henry rebuked his favourite minister for oppressing them. Queen Catherine patronised the Commons out of charity, the king out of policy. Wolsey, whose consummate art is only administrative, who has none other but personal ends, revenge and ambition, will oppress them when he may, and pretend to be their friend when oppression is forbidden. Thus the king, sitting in the seat of Richard III., but raised to it by peaceable succession, not by war and murder, has to maintain himself there by other weapons. Remorseless as Richard and libertine as Edward IV., he is yet a peaceful monarch, and must, apparently at least, confine himself within the limits of law and conscience. The weapons of the barefaced usurper are denied him, but those of the hypocrite are in constant use. Richard III. is an actor, a consummate hypocrite. Henry is a more melodramatic, pretentious, arrogant, oily hypocrite, and his perpetual cry almost serves to characterise him ". . . Conscience, conscience, O! 'tis a tender place, and I must leave her." Shakespeare is not content with once saying this, the audience must not be allowed to forget it. The marriage with the brother's widow had crept too near Henry's conscience-"No! his conscience has crept too near another lady," whose beauty was such and so tempting that, as one of the courtiers says, "I cannot blame his conscience." It is for this hypocrisy that Cranmer is made necessary for Henry,-" with thy approach I know my comfort comes"; and till this comfort is administered no accusation shall stand between Cranmer and the king's favour. It is here that Shakespeare, supposing this scene to be his, for once condescends to borrow from "Foxe's Acts and Monuments" the first scene of the fifth act, where the king is convinced of Cranmer's honesty by his tears, and delivers him the ring which is to protect him against Gardiner and the rest of the Council. In the whole play the poet takes care to secure our interest successively for Henry's victims; for the noble but wilful Buckingham; for the repudiated Queen, one of the grandest, most touching, most constant, and purest figures that Shakespeare has drawn, and after his fall, for Wolsey himself. In "Henry VI." the people first appear as a political force, in the rebellion of Jack Cade (1450). Shakespeare's treatment of that rising has been condemned by Mr. Wilkes, the American critic, as a deliberate perversion of every fact in the interest of falsehood, selfishness, and tyranny. His account is indeed not historical, yet it accurately represents many features in the Lollard revolt under Wat Tyler in 1380, and is instructive as showing the bent of the poet's sympathies in religion no less than in politics. Those sympathies were certainly not with any Lollard movement. But Shakespeare is not to be considered 1 66 'Shakespeare from an American Point of View," 239. 1877. |