Great Ralegh. Hugh De Sélincourt
bath in which a man or a woman must be dipped before he or she could lay any real claim to distinguished respectability. The Court had a vivid existence of its own. "It was the centre, not of government alone, but of the fine arts: the exemplar of culture and civilization." The Court held a lien on the gaiety and life of the time. Courtiers and merchants (the two chief classes) were as distinct as a little later were town and gown at the Universities. To be a proper courtier became a cult.
Three great books, extraordinarily typical of the Renaissance, were written in almost identical years, books which pointed to new scope for the State, for the Prince, and for the private man. In 1513 Machiavel completed The Prince, in 1516 Sir Thomas More's Utopia was published, and in the same year Count Baldassare Castiglione finished his Book of the Courtier.
The dream of the Utopia may never be realized; but in some seventy-five years a close example of the Prince and of the Courtier were found in Queen Elizabeth, and in many of the men who surrounded her. The Book of the Courtier was translated into all the languages of Europe, and became the text-book of the cult. Its English translator was Thomas Hoby, and his work, as has been seen, was commended by the judicious Ascham. Castiglione was chaffed for moulding his own conduct precisely on the model of the perfect courtier he portrays in his book; and he could not but confess that the man of his imagination was the man he would choose to be. And, indeed, it would be what every courtier would aspire to be, as Wordsworth's Happy Warrior,
"This is the happy Warrior, this is he
That every man in arms should wish to be."
The Courtier must be gallant in the use of arms, proficient in all exercises of the body, skilled in all exercises of the mind; he must be ready and witty of tongue; he must be well-born and distinguished. But his realm is beyond the mere enterprise of accomplishments and birth. For the book ends with Bembo's great praise of Beauty—that Beauty "which is the origin of all other beawtye, whiche never encreaseth nor diminisheth always bewtifull and of itself … most simple. This is the beawtye unseperable from the high bountye, whiche with her voyce calleth and draweth to her all thynges … ," and an understanding of this Heavenly Beauty must be the final trait of the Perfect Courtier.
And it is well to bear this in mind. For this feeling for beauty existed in the Elizabethan courtier, just as it gave the finishing touch to Castiglione's hero; and existed as really as the more conspicuous qualities of gallantry and strength and intellect. Vitality, as has been said again and again, was the keynote of the age; and it is apparent in this aspiration towards beauty, just as it is apparent in reckless cruelty. The compass of the age was immense. And every instinct, every tendency of brute or god, raged with intense life, and was expressed Nothing lay dormant. The centre of all this life, of all this genius for living was the Court; and the illustrious head of the Court was Queen Elizabeth.
Guy de Maupassant has written a story of a small band of French soldiers who are at the last gasp with hunger and weariness and cold. They cannot march any further. They are content to lie down in the snow and die. But two fugitives come running to them, an old man and his grand-daughter, a young girl. "Allons les camarades," cries the Sergeant Pratique, "faut porter cette demoiselle-là ou bien nous n' sommes pu Français, nom d'un chien." So the worn-out men forget their weariness and carry her; they dare the cold and strip off their overcoats to keep her warm; they find new courage and drive back a party of the enemy, and they reach the French lines in safety. "What's that you're carrying?" asks a soldier. "Aussitôt une petite figure blonde apparut, depeignée et souriante qui répondit, 'C'est moi, monsieur.' Un rire s'éleva parmi les hommes et une joie courut dans leurs c[oe]urs. Alors Pratique agita son képi en vociferant, 'Vive la France.'"
There in little is the exact nature of Elizabeth's influence, and her influence was conscious and acted, not upon the immediate Court alone, but upon England. De Maupassant does not give any details of the girl, nothing of her character, not even her name. They are not relevant to his purpose. She may have as many faults in her small way as Elizabeth had in her great way. He does not mention them.
Such a mass of detail, however, is known about Elizabeth, and her faults have been so relentlessly exposed in the interest of Truth—her meanness, her avarice, her treachery, her wantonness, and what not—that the whole picture of the woman who was learned enough to speak in public impromptu in Latin and could converse in many languages, of the woman who was great enough to cause her own worship to be the fashion, and the sincere fashion, of the woman who was sufficiently beautiful and sufficiently distinguished to shine like a diamond on the forehead of that resplendent age—is almost lost to view, so clouded with the dust of detraction has that picture become.
She was the very epitome of the time. All the brutality and energy and brilliance of that brutal, vital age found their counterpart in her. And she was a woman, a fitting contemporary of Catherine de Medicis. But she was too much a politician to be a good woman; and too much a woman to be a good politician.
To all the power which a beautiful woman, and a woman strong in body and intellect and passion, always has possessed and always will possess, she added the prestige of being Queen of England. Whereas the passions of her father threw Europe into confusion, the love affairs of Elizabeth, less impetuously managed, often held the balance between nations and brought every royal prince to England as suitor for her hand, and the great English courtiers scowled or laughed at them, but were kept in allegiance by their sovereign.
Wit, birth, and bearing found favour in her sight. There was no room at her Court for a fool. She loved wit as she loved splendour.
The Queen had heard of Humfrey Gilbert's nephew from Humfrey Gilbert's aunt, one of her intimate attendant women; and when Ralegh first came into notice by his exploits in Ireland, she was inclined to favour him. She was interested in his career, as a letter bears witness in which she writes, " … for that our pleasure is to have our Servaunt Walter Rawley treyned some longer tyme in that our realme for his better experience in Martiall affaires, and for the special care we have to doe him good in respect of his kyndred that have served us some of them (as you knowe) neer aboute our Parson: theise are to require youe that the leading of the said bande may be committed to the said Rawley."
Many stories are extant about his first meeting with Elizabeth. Truth hides in all of them. Some say that the Queen was present when Lord Grey de Wilton and young Ralegh were put face to face in a council chamber before Lord Burghley, and that she was struck by the power and skill with which he made good his case, proving the lack of judgment Lord Grey had shown in conducting the affairs of the war. Old Thomas Fuller, that worthiest of his own worthies (he had an eye for romantic effect, steadfast as he was for truth in matters of importance), relates that "Her Majesty, meeting with a plashy place, made some scruple to go on; when Ralegh (dressed in the gay and genteel habit of those times) presently cast off and spread his new plush cloak on the ground, whereon the Queen trod gently over, rewarding him afterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a footcloth. Thus an advantageous admission into the notice of a prince is more than half a degree to preferment." Industrious Fuller does not leave it at that; he proceeds to tell how Ralegh wrote on a window in the Queen's presence,
"Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall,"
and how the Queen added with more grace than rhythm,
"If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all."
Ralegh's heart did not fail him. He became the Queen's lover; and his influence over the Queen was so recognized that Tarleton, the famous comedian, dared, during a performance, to add point to the words, "See, the knave commands the queen," by stretching out his hand towards Ralegh, who stood by the Queen. And Elizabeth, it is recorded, frowned. Swift was his ascent to fortune, came the first step how it may.
Elizabeth was too clever to try to lay aside her sex, though she was a skilful markswoman, an able horse-woman. Even her staid Archbishop Whitgift she used to tease, saying (as Isaac Walton gravely records as a fair testimony of her piety) that "she would never eat flesh in Lent without