CHAPTER I

ENGLISH POETRY AFTER THE SPANISH ARMADA

THE defeat of the Spanish Armada is a turning-point alike in the history of the English Constitution and of English Poetry. In the last volume I noticed the air of ambiguity and hesitation that characterises the work of our poets during the earlier portion of Elizabeth's reign. This uncertainty of design is the result not merely of the difficulties felt by all the writers of an infant literature in handling an unformed language: it is the reflection of an intellectual perplexity in the mind of the people. By the revolt of Henry VIII. from the authority of Rome, the kingdom was torn from that Catholic European system in which the separate functions of the Spiritual and the Temporal Power had been universally recognised. Though the English king was duly proclaimed head of the national Church, his supremacy was denied, both by those of his subjects who adhered to the old order, and by the extreme section of the Protestant Reformers. The great body of the nation were in doubt how the new system was to be brought into harmony with their customary beliefs. Scarcely any attempt was yet made to express national ideas in an imaginative form. Except in the Moralities, there was no sign in literature that the poets of the time were aware of the nature of the forces then revolutionising English life. Wyatt and Surrey contented themselves with an effort to refine poetical diction by adapting the Provençal tradition, common as this was to the

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whole of feudal Europe, to the actual manners of the English Court. Their immediate successors made little advance on their practice, beyond extending the sphere of translation, and trying a few experiments in metrical composition.

By degrees the ideas of the people began to form themselves round the person of the Queen. Elizabeth was the head both of the national Church and of the State; in both capacities she was well fitted to represent to her subjects the nature of the great social change which had been effected. She combined in her character the qualities of a man and a woman. As a ruler she mixed with a manly patriotism a feminine genius for intrigue, and by her skilful diplomacy contrived to give assistance to communities defending their civil and religious liberties against arbitrary power; at the same time she utterly disavowed their actions as rebels against lawful sovereignty. By her wise policy and thrift the nation advanced so rapidly in wealth and strength that, by the middle of her reign, it had come to regard its monarch as the concrete image of its own greatness.

This popular perception of Elizabeth's many-sided character is reflected in Spenser's Faery Queen. Strictly viewed, that poem, as it has come down to us, is a fragment of an incoherent design.. Nevertheless, in the central figure of Gloriana, who, by Spenser's own avowal, is meant to typify Elizabeth, the poet has expressed in his exquisite metrical dialect a vast idea of royal and national grandeur. Herself invisible in the fairyland of her Court, Gloriana breathes forth the emanations of her own nature through the allegorical personages of the poem. Her valour is embodied in the female warrior, Britomart, her chastity in the sylvan huntress, Belphoebe. Her knights are despatched to do battle, sometimes, like the Red Cross champion, against the deadly errors of the Papacy, sometimes, like Artegall, against the cruel injustice of the Spanish Geryoneo. Her royal lineage is poetically traced, partly in the Book of Antiquity shown to Sir Guyon by Eumnestes, partly in Merlin's prophecy to Britomart. The antiquities and local features of her country, originally

celebrated in the chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, afterwards popularised by the researches of Leland and Camden, are idealised, among a multitude of other poetical episodes, in the allegorical marriage of the Thames and the Medway.

After the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the glorified image of the Queen began to fade. The idea of Protestant Chivalry, hitherto expressed in the life of her Court, lost its verisimilitude. Sidney, who had given it form and reality, was no more, and Raleigh had lately been in disgrace. One by one the great masters of Machiavellian statecraft, the Queen's advisers in the most perplexed period of her policy, Burleigh, Nicholas Bacon, Walsingham, Randolph, had passed away from the scene of their labours. Factions divided the Court; various rivals struggled for the chief place in the Queen's regard, and her last years were embittered by the ingratitude of the reigning favourite. The policy of conformity, which, as head of the Church, she had successfully enforced while the independence of England was still threatened by the Papal and Spanish powers, had procured her the hatred of both the extreme religious parties; and though the safety of her country was assured, her person had become the object of all the conspiracies of the Jesuits, and her government of all the calumnies of Martin Mar-prelate. Her declining age, though still glorious, was discontented and unhappy.

But if the personal image of the monarch, hitherto the sole representative of the greatness of the nation, was thus obscured, the nation's consciousness of its destiny was growing always more vivid. By her victory over Spain in 1588, England had not only secured her own independence, but had become the recognised head of the reformed religion in Europe. Her merchants and traders saw a boundless prospect of wealth opening out to them in the East Indies and in the Spanish main. The minds of many of Elizabeth's subjects, absorbed during the previous generation with the dread of foreign invasion, were now turned to the perils which threatened their domestic

liberties. They had saved themselves from Pope and Spaniard by their own energies: they were now inclined to look on the Crown not so much as their chief weapon of defence against aliens, as an obstacle to the expansion of their native powers. Under these circumstances a body of public opinion began to be organised and to find expression in Parliament, and the changed political spirit of the times is vividly illustrated by the opposition offered in the last Parliament of Elizabeth's reign to the Government policy respecting monopolies. Moreover, however sagaciously the Queen might adapt herself to what she perceived to be the wishes of her people, she was growing old, and none could tell what would be the character of her successor. The day for trifling rhetoric about the excellences of Gloriana or Cynthia had gone by, and a generation of settled government had taught men something of the causes of political phenomena. The language also had acquired a vocabulary which fitted it for philosophic reasoning; and the result of all these concurrent tendencies is seen after the Armada in the appearance of such profound treatises as Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity and Bacon's speculations as to the nature of the English Constitution.

The great problem that presented itself for solution in the seventeenth century was the development, out of conflicting powers, of the principle of National Unity. In each of the earlier volumes of this History I have attempted to illustrate contemporary ideas of European Unity by examining their operation in concrete cases, namely, in the matters dealt with by the Diet of Coblenz in 1338, and by the Diet of Augsburg in 1518. Now that the question has been removed into the heart of the nation, I shall pursue the same method by reference to the idea of Unity in the English Church and State formed by the two great philosophic minds I have just mentioned. It will then be easier to begin at our new starting-point with a conception both of the unifying and of the sectional forces which were working within the spheres of English politics and English 1 Vol, i, pp. 154, 155; vol. ii. pp. 2, 3.

poetry to reform men's imaginative ideas of Nature and Society.

Hooker defines with admirable precision the effect of the union of Temporal and Spiritual Powers in the holder of the Crown, after the separation of England from the Papacy and from the dual government of the Christian Republic:

Wherefore to end this point I conclude: First, that under dominions of infidels the Church of Christ and her Common wealth were two societies independent: Secondly, that, in those Commonwealths where the Bishop of Rome beareth sway, one society is both the Church and the Commonwealth; but the Bishop of Rome doth divide the body into two diverse bodies, and doth not suffer the Church to depend upon the power of any civil prince or potentate: Thirdly, that, within the realm of England the case is neither as in the one nor as in the other of the former two; but that from the state of pagans we differ, in that with us one society is both the Church and the Commonwealth, which with them it was not; as also from the state of those nations which subject themselves to the Bishop of Rome, in that our Church hath dependency upon the chief in our Commonwealth, which it hath not under him. In a word, our State is according to the pattern of God's own ancient elect people, which people was not part of them the Commonwealth and part of them the Church of God, but the self-same people, whole and entire, were both under one chief Governor, on whose supreme authority they all depend.1

Equally well defined is Bacon's idea of the English Constitution, which is thus described by Mr. Gardiner :—

There can be no doubt whatever that his ideal form of government was one in which the Sovereign was assisted by councillors and other ministers selected from among the wisest men of the kingdom, and in which he was responsible to no one for his actions within the wide and not very clearly defined limits of his political prerogative. The House of Commons, on the other hand, was called upon to express the wishes of the people, and to enlighten the Government upon the general feeling which prevailed in the country. Its assent would be required to any laws which might be requisite, and to any extraordinary taxation which might be called for in time of war or of any other emergency. . . . The Sovereign, enlightened by

1 Ecclesiastical Polity, viii. I, [7].