librsnet@mail.ru
Great Ralegh. Hugh De Sélincourt
and that she pitied him because she trusted him."
She was so born a Queen that she was able to do and say the most dangerous things without losing her distinction, or lessening her dignity.
And it is small wonder in those days when in England the whole force of the Renaissance turned as it were to a rapture of patriotism that such a Queen should be the visible emblem of the country, and be herself worshipped. Men might rave at her whims, they were driven frantic by them, but in their hearts they cherished her as Queen of themselves and Queen of their country. Fortunately for herself, and fortunately for England, her intellect mastered her passions, though that does not prove that she was passionless: far from it. There is nothing to justify that last scandal of a moral age which would damn her as a feelingless flirt. Lord Bacon, the wise Baron of Verulam, summed the matter up pithily, attaching its right value to the question, which, after all, is a paltry one, when, in writing on the Fortunate Memory, he says: "She suffered herself to be honoured and carressed and celebrated and extolled with the name of Love; and wished it, and continued it beyond the suitability of her age. If you take these things more softly, they may not even be without some admiration, because such things are commonly found in our fabulous narratives of a Queen in the Islands of Bliss, with her hall and her institutes, who receives the administrations of Love, but prohibits its licentiousness. If you judge them more severely, still they have this admirable circumstance, that gratifications of this sort did not much hurt her reputation, and not at all her majesty; nor ever relaxed her government, nor were any notable impediment to her State affairs." And it must be remembered that the times were neither fastidious nor gentle, and that when Bacon says licentiousness (lasciviam is the Latin word he uses) he meant licentiousness. Elizabeth was too sane, and too clever, and too busy to have time to be licentious: just as she could not have retained her control over men and control over herself, seen in the adroit way in which she managed the foreign princes, if she had remained what is called pure.
Masterly was her knowledge and treatment of men. Roughly speaking, they were divided into two classes; those whom she liked, and those whom she valued: but she kept them all imperiously to her will. The great Burghley was her man of business; he and his son Robert Cecil were her chief statesmen, and well she knew their value: capricious and exacting as she might be, she respected their advice and gave way to it. "Burghley," wrote Leicester, at the height of his arrogant power, "could do more with her in an hour than others in seven years." And he wrote concerning some political business. Never, when Leicester had most influence with the Queen, did she ever allow him to control her political actions, or in any way to supplant Cecil.
Robert Dudley, born about the year 1532, made Earl of Leicester in 1564, enjoyed the Queen's good-will more continuously and more to his advantage than any other of her lovers. He was regarded as the chief man in England by the ambassadors of foreign princes: he was for a long time the most magnificent. But Elizabeth kept always to her maxim, that England should be a country with one mistress and no master; much to Leicester's displeasure. His desire was to be master. He suggests a comparison with Milton's Satan, "better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heav'n," when he tried, and tried with conspicuous ill-success, to become King of the Netherlands. By the old nobility, staunch Sussex and proud Norfolk, he was hated. With the Duke of Norfolk, he on one occasion came to blows, when, during a game of tennis, of which the Queen was a spectator, he snatched her pocket-hand-kerchief to wipe the sweat from his forehead. They thought him saucy and overweening. To the Queen his insolence was not unpleasant. Cecil disliked him (he does not appear a man to hate any one) and judiciously draws up papers contrasting Leicester and other suitors, especially the Archduke Charles, much to Leicester's disadvantage. But for all his glitter and influence, he was hated by the English people. His name had an ill sound ever since the untoward death of his wife, Amy Robsart. Though the pamphlet Leicester's Commonwealth is wholly unreliable, which among other slanders, states that the Lady Amy was actually murdered at his command, it is most probable that she committed suicide through misery at her neglect. Well enough men knew what was meant when the husband in the Yorkshire Tragedy says, after he has thrown his wife down and slain her:
"The surest way to charm a woman's tongue
Is—break her neck: a politician did it."
They thought of the stone staircase at Cumnor and shuddered. The people did not like his way of cheapening their Queen's good name: they did not like the man who caused scandals to arise round her. In 1560 Anne Dowe of Brentford was imprisoned for asserting that Elizabeth was with child by Robert Dudley; and she was the first of a long line of offenders who were punished for the same assertion.
And just as men hated Dudley for his arrogance, and for his daring to think even of setting himself beside their Queen, so they loved his nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, for the grace which his hand brought to everything which he touched. He fulfilled the ideal of Castiglione's Courtier. He was the antithesis of the rough, unmannered Dudley. In Dudley all the cruelty and ostentation and savage power of the time seem to find expression; whereas in Philip Sidney, all its grace and skill and poetry were manifest. Men vied with one another in his praises, men fought for the right to call him friend, and a woman became immortal by being "Sidney's sister." "Sidney, the Siren of this latter age," writes Barnefield; "divine Sir Philip," Michael Drayton calls him; and Ben Jonson, as though in defiance of the charge of exaggeration utters (you can hear him say it), "the godlike Sidney." Even the ribald Nash lowers his mad voice to the note of reverence, "Apollo hath resigned his Ivory Harpe unto Astrophel and he, like Mercury, must lull you a sleep with his musicke. Sleepe Argus, sleep Ignorance, sleep Impudence, for Mercury hath Io and onely Io Paean belongeth to Astrophel. Deare Astrophel, that in the ashes of thy Love livest againe like the Phoenix; o might thy bodie (as thy name) live againe likewise here amongst us; but the earthe, the mother of mortality hath snacht thee too soone into her chilled cold armes, and will not let thee by any meanes be drawne from her deadly imbrace; and thy divine Soule, carried on an Angels wings to heaven, is installed in Hermes place sole prolocutor to the Gods." His life was a poem, which all the men who lived with him, and all the men who knew his name, were great enough to read and to appreciate; his death is an example for all time. Fame with its common story cannot sully the brightness of the superb sacrifice of that superb self.
Dudley expressed the presumptuous vitality of the Court, and Sidney its vital poetry. A little aloof from the Court, which he was apt to regard with kindly disdain at its frivolity, moved the staid figure of Burghley, the Lord High Treasurer of England, Elizabeth's great man of business, perhaps the finest political intelligence that has ever thought out a way for a country through the most complicated difficulties, at a time when disaster crouched ever ready to spring and involve that country in ruin.
William Cecil had an absolute mastery over every detail; he possessed a genius for arrangement. Nothing escaped his notice. He was a kind of machine which attracted all the wild impulses of the time; they passed into the machine's mouth disordered, unarranged; and they passed out shaped, controlled by his slow inevitable will. As a statesman he appears hardly human in his freedom from all personality; he seems a mask hiding the brain of England, and regulating it to the only end where success could be. Men rose to fame fiercely struggling, and did brilliant acts or mad acts, and sank again or settled as the case might be; but always at the supreme head, always alert, always careful, impassive as some Eastern Buddha, sat the Lord Burghley, managing the affairs of the state, managing even the state's impulsive, whimsical mistress. His impassivity afflicted her at times, so that she played pranks on him, vainly endeavouring to upset his restraint and his dignity; but her pranks were hardly heeded. He was English to the solid backbone, and resisted unequivocally the rage of fashion that went out towards all that was foreign; and yet his foreign policy was unswerving and level-headed; he looked upon war as the last terrible resource of state-craft, in an age in which fighting was regarded as the highroad to glory, and was loved for its own wild sake. Elizabeth showed her knowledge of the right word when she called him her "spirit" and her "oracle"; and the courtiers their discernment of the obvious, when they called him "old fox." Together the two names describe him with some accuracy.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО