Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (20 page)

The corrupted morals of government were all too plain in Elizabeth’s last years. ‘I will forbear to mention’, said one of Burghley’s panegyrists, ‘the great and unusual fees exacted lately by reason of buying and selling offices, both judicial and ministerial, as also the privileges granted unto private persons to the great prejudice and grievance of the common people.’ The old Queen herself found her grip slipping as the tide of materialism swept over the kingdom. In 1601 she voiced her resentment to her antiquary, William Lambarde: ‘Now the wit of the fox is everywhere on foot, so as hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be found.’

Walsingham, in an official career of seventeen years, naturally received a good share of the spoils. He received few honours, for Elizabeth gave these out with a mean hand. He was knighted in 1577, became chancellor of the Garter in the next year, and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1587. These posts increased his dignity but not his income. His wealth was based on the many perquisites of his office. He was allowed a farm of the customs, and was given on occasion licences for the export of cloth and wool. The Queen granted him several parcels of land, some of which he
retained for his own use and some of which he used for speculation. In the patent rolls of the reign are very many sums of money put down to the name of Walsingham without any explanation. And his influential position made him one of the chief brokers at court, the happy receiver of innumerable gifts and fees for favours done. It was said by Camden that he died in debt having spent his wealth on the secret service he had built up. Certainly he was put to great expense by this and by the complicated debts left to him at the death of his brilliant son-in-law Sir Philip Sidney in 1586. But he always lived in great style and had numerous houses. In London he lived at first in London Wall, near Sir Thomas Gresham, in a house that almost rivalled the financier’s fabulous mansion. Later he moved to Seething Lane where he was a neighbour of the Earl of Essex. But in the manner of great gentlemen his favourite house was in the country just outside London. At Barn Elms, a few miles up the river from Westminster, he kept a large establishment; the stables were said to house sixty-eight horses.

To the observer, Walsingham was composed, calculating and silent. King James of Scotland called him ‘a very Machiavel’. He was in ill health for much of his life, and often had to rest from his strenuous duties. ‘My disease groweth so dangerously upon me’, he wrote to Burghley from France in 1571, ‘as I most humbly desire her Majesty to take some speedy order for some to supply my place.’ The French ambassador in London reported that he had some kind of recurring bladder or kidney trouble, and he became something of a hypochondriac, dosing himself excessively with medicines. Neither his affliction nor his unpalatable medicines was likely to sweeten his temper. Hawking, hunting and sports of all kinds, which the Elizabethans loved, were not for one of such delicate health. He caught some of the contemporary enthusiasm for gardens, and was content to saunter there gently. His powers and his interests were intellectual, not physical.

But at home he was an affectionate man and the pleasant harmony of his private life was at variance with the austere front and unremitting labour of his public appearance. He married twice, both times perhaps more for money than love. Of his second wife Ursula, who bore him two daughters, he seems to have been very fond, and this capable, homely woman supported her husband well all his life. The younger daughter died at an early age; the elder, Frances, grew to be something of a beauty and made two of
the most brilliant marriages of the time. In 1583, when she was only sixteen, she married Sir Philip Sidney. This was more a political arrangement than a love match, intended to bind fast the alliance between Walsingham and Leicester, who was Sidney’s uncle. But Walsingham soon came under the spell of his most attractive son-in-law. The young couple stayed in his house, and the grave secretary delighted in the notice which came to Sidney from all sides. When Sir Philip was killed in 1586 Walsingham conscientiously looked after the tangled finances though it cost him dearly. Frances then married the Earl of Essex, a man almost as brilliant as Sidney, but the most wayward, proud and troublesome man in the kingdom.

Walsingham’s Puritan faith did not override his natural generosity; nor did his severe views on religion prevent him from being a man of cultivated refinement. Puritans too often became known for a carping, censorious criticism of art and society, but Walsingham was not one of these. From the early day of his Italian travels he had been something of a dandy. His keen mind and wide reading kept up with art and thought. He took upon himself the duties of patron, and hardly anyone encouraged arts and sciences as faithfully as he did. Much of what he did was for the good of the country. He was a great friend of both Oxford and Cambridge, doing more for Oxford though he himself had been to Cambridge. He pressed forward the English sea voyages and encouraged the writers on discovery and the arts of navigation; Nicholas, Peckham and Horsey dedicated to him the accounts of their travels; and Dr John Dee, inventive scientist and great charlatan, was indebted to him. Hakluyt, in his dedication, commended Walsingham’s ‘wisdom to have a special care of the honour of her Majesty, the good reputation of our country and the advancing of navigation’.

All that can be seen as part of his duty to his Protestant island, but he did not forget his pleasure and his curiosity. Edmund Spenser in an introductory sonnet to the
Faerie Queen
called Walsingham ‘the great Maecenas of this age’:

As well to all that civil arts profess,

As those that are inspired with martial rage.

Though the compliment, as usual with Spenser, was overdone, Walsingham was well known for his wide interests. He knew poets and wits such as Sidney, Spenser, Thomas Watson and John
Harington. He was kind also to the obscure; he favoured alike John Rider, the laborious compiler of a Latin dictionary, and Richard Tarlton, the Queen’s fool. Nor was his interest confined to England. No man in the realm had a wider knowledge of continental affairs. He was called the best linguist of his time; and his knowledge of ancient literature was equal to his command of modern languages. He was able to carry off conversation with the greatest in Europe: ‘He could well fit King James his humour with sayings out of Xenophon, Thucydides, Plutarch or Tacitus, as he could King Henry’s with Rabelais’s conceits and the Hollander with mechanic discourses.’

For all his remarkable talents, the sum of his life was service. ‘You have fought more with your pen’, Drake wrote to him, ‘than many here in our English navy fought with their enemies.’ The bulk of his official correspondence was incredible; there was hardly any business of government that did not come under his eye. He came to public service not only driven by ambition and the hope of gaining wealth, but also fired by a great devotion to the Queen and to the country. The success of Elizabeth’s government depended on the learned, ambitious, patriotic new men like Walsingham, and for the greater part of the reign the compelling character of the Queen and the manifest destiny of England attracted them in sufficient numbers. Walsingham died on 6th April 1590 and his old colleague Burghley recognized that ‘the Queen’s Majesty and her realm and I’ had suffered a great loss, the more so because his kind of service was now hard to find. He died just at the point when Elizabeth’s system began to break down. Greed, fraud and ambition displaced the idealism of former years. The strength of Tudor government rested on the strength of the Tudor despots. Elizabeth was old and weary; the country was no longer in danger; the firm grip of the monarchy relaxed, discipline slipped, corruption thrived and a problematic inheritance gathered to dismay her weak successor.

7

Sir Humphrey Gilbert

O
N
M
ONDAY
, 9th September 1583, undone by idealism, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his little ship the
Squirrel
, a mere cockleshell of ten tons burthen on the black sea, vanished beneath the Atlantic waves.

Gilbert’s short and vigorous life was a continuous preparation for this calamity. Uncertain in his inheritance, schooled by pedants, trained in the courtly modes of a departed heroic age, he sought a new England overseas which he imagined as the grand Platonic form of the old England he knew, through whose perplexed ways he wandered dragging his abstract ideas and leaving incidentally a trail of blood. He was born to the sound of water, about the year 1539 at Greenway on the River Dart. The Gilberts had grown wealthy from maritime business pursued with energy and ruthlessness. They had been, and were, warriors, merchants, smugglers and privateers. Among his relatives were many West Country adventurers—Carews, Champernowns, Grenvilles—turbulent men full of seamanship and egotism, who knew the atrocious loneliness of small ships far from land. Humphrey’s father died in 1547, and soon after his mother married Walter Raleigh, another Devon sailor; from this union came, in 1552, the famous Sir Walter Raleigh, destined, like his half-brother Humphrey, to laborious journeys, to obscure triumphs and ultimate defeat.

At the early age then usual, young Humphrey was sent to Eton, which until 1541 had been under the rod of Nicholas Udall, scholar, playwright, thief of the college plate, and the ‘greatest beater’ of his time. At Eton, the too familiar acquaintance with Lily’s
Latin Syntax
, the text book of the age mentioned in no less than eight of Shakespeare’s plays, the mere repetition of Latin grammar which Roger Ascham’s
The Scholemaster
(1570) called ‘tedious for the master, hard for the scholar, cold and uncomfortable for both’, failed to prevent Gilbert from becoming modestly
learned in the manner of the gentlemen of the time, sound in the classics and proficient in French and Spanish. But the method was rough and deficient, as Gilbert saw; twenty years after his school-days he wrote a work on education called
Queen Elizabethes Achademy
in which he tried to reform the schooling of rich youths who were, he said, ‘obscurely drowned in education’. Leaving Eton, Gilbert took the lean fruits and sore bruises of Udall’s method and went on to Oxford; for no doubt he had suffered the kind of barbarity that caused his cousin, Peter Carew, to be chained like a mad dog in the school-yard until he broke his fetters and ran away. In Gilbert’s short time at Oxford—he entered the service of Princess Elizabeth at sixteen
¹
—he remembered the traditions of his family and studied navigation and the arts of war.

The Gilberts were Protestants, and relatives of Humphrey were implicated in Wyatt’s unsuccessful rebellion against Mary in 1554. Oxford, where the Protestant churchmen Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer were burnt to death in 1555 and 1556, was Catholic and no place for young Gilbert. He left puzzled. The study of Latin, which had taken up the greatest part of his education, was intended by schoolmasters under the influence of the enthusiastic humanists of the Renaissance to teach the pupils the grave Roman ideals of probity and public service; the humanist Vives, praising the advantages of Latin, wrote that it expressed ‘the image of a right prudent and valiant man born and nurtured in a well-ordered commonwealth’. But as to the nature of that commonwealth, education was silent. Under the torment of the whip the young came to know Cicero, but the relevance of these republican views to mid-sixteenth-century England was not explained. The young, Gilbert complained in
Queen Elizabethes Achademy
, were ‘estranged from all serviceable virtues to their prince and country’. As he was a Protestant, Gilbert followed the great example of Luther and Calvin and made nationalism a large part of his belief. But his serious aspirations to do good for his country were blocked by a neglectful education and by a Catholic queen whose policies would consign England to a minor place in a Christendom dominated by the Spanish power.

From the pain of his inchoate idealism Humphrey Gilbert was rescued by a kinswoman. Katherine Ashley, a close relative of Humphrey’s mother, had been appointed companion and womanly guide to Princess Elizabeth before the death of Henry VIII. With her excellent talent for intrigue, Mrs Ashley had kept the affection of Elizabeth until her death in 1565. At the end of 1555, when the Queen finally absolved Elizabeth from complicity in Wyatt’s rebellion and allowed her to return to the peace of Hatfield, Katherine Ashley preferred young Gilbert to a place in the princess’s household.

The princess was thin, active, sardonic, learned, riding easily among the complexities of her State. Her new page was ardent, handsome, a sturdy young skiff from the Devon slipways. She was twenty-two and he was sixteen; ‘such was his countenance, forwardness and good behaviour’, said the continuation of Holinshed’s
Chronicles
in 1587, giving a likely elaboration to events long past, ‘that her Majesty had a special good liking to him, and very oftentimes would familiarly discourse and confer with him in matters of learning.’ He now began his proper education, learning that ‘serviceable virtue’ to prince and country that could not be found at Eton and Oxford, and which Elizabeth was extremely apt to teach. He saw the image of England’s future greatness in Elizabeth’s Protestant court. ‘O noble prince’, he wrote to his Sovereign in
Queen Elizabethes Achademy,
‘that god shall bless so far as to be the only mean of bringing this seely, frozen Island into such everlasting honour that all the nations of the World shall know and say, when the face of an English gentleman appeareth, that he is either a soldier, a philosopher, or a gallant courtier.’ He saw also his own advantage, his position at court saving him from the desperate place-hunting forced upon the gentry and small landholders by a vertiginous inflation. He saw his own small glitter as part of Elizabeth’s royal resplendence; at the end of his life, in 1581, Gilbert wrote truthfully that he had ‘served her Majesty in wars and peace, above seven and twenty years … from a boy to the age of white hairs’.