Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (16 page)

Where some like Bacon were possessed by the possibilities of progress in the natural sciences, others believed that the world was in the process of fatal decline. When in 1612 Galileo discovered the presence of spots upon the face of the sun, it was considered to be proof that even the heavens were in a state of dissolution.

Yet proof of decay also lay closer to home, and much of the atmosphere of
The Duchess of Malfi
is conveyed by the image of a corrupt court.

A Prince’s court

Is like a common fountain, whence should flow

Pure silver-drops in general. But if’t chance

Some cursed example poison’t near the head

Death and diseases through the whole land spread.

This is likely to be an indirect allusion to the court of James I, already rendered suspect by whispers of corruption and malfeasance. The loss or abdication of authority is a context for the disorientation and instability that afflict all of the characters. That is why it is a play of scepticism, disillusion and disgust united in an overwhelming pessimism.

Pleasure of life, what is’t? Only the good hours

Of an ague …

The figure of melancholy, therefore, might be used as the frontispiece to the play. Melancholy was the time’s delight, its presiding deity. It had its own dark dress and its own music in the compositions of John Dowland such as ‘In darkness let me dwell’ and ‘Flow my tears’. That pensive, fearful and tearful mood also had its greatest celebration and exposition in the reign of James with the publication of Robert Burton’s
The Anatomy of Melancholy
. Burton was the master of melancholy in all its moods and phases. His great volume – more than 1,200 pages in its modern form – was first published in 1621 and went through six editions in his own lifetime.

Burton professed that ‘all the world is melancholy, or mad, dotes, and every member of it’. We sense here the curiosity of his prose, at once precise and unsettled; it is a characteristically Jacobean touch. Melancholy is a disease both grievous and common, which he describes as ‘a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions, fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion’.

So Burton follows it through all its declensions and divisions, its intervals and digressions; he creates three ‘partitions’ with a variety of sections and subsections into which the various types and forms of melancholy are arranged. There are sections entitled ‘Miseries of Scholars’, ‘The Force of Imagination’, ‘Poverty and Want’, ‘Unfortunate Marriage’ and ‘Old Age’. He devotes a passage to ‘Symptoms of Maids’, Nuns’ and Widows’ Melancholy’. Hundreds of pages are consumed by ‘Love Melancholy’ and ‘Religious Melancholy’. The madness, if such it is, can be caused by stars or spirits, by the quality of meat or wine, by catarrh or constipation, by bad air or immoderate exercise, by idleness or solitariness, by anger or discontent, by poverty or servitude or shame.

All was grist to his capacious mill, and he striates his narrative with stories, anecdotes, digressions, quotations, aphorisms and the most colourful detail. ‘A young merchant going to Nordeling Fair in Germany, for ten days’ space never went to stool; at his return he was grievously melancholy, thinking that he was robbed, and would not be persuaded but that all his money was gone … a Jew in France (saith Lodovicus Vives) came by chance over a dangerous passage or plank that lay over a brook, in the dark, without harm; the next day, perceiving what danger he was in, he fell down dead.’

He describes the inner working of obsessive temperaments who are ‘to your thinking very intent and busy, still that toy runs in their minds, that fear, that suspicion, that abuse, that jealousy, that agony, that vexation, that cross, that castle in the air, that crotchet, that whimsy, that fiction, that pleasant waking dream, whatsoever it is’. He piles up heaps of words and throws himself into them; he has different voices, and different tones; he elaborates, and then qualifies his elaborations; he can be inconsistent and even contradictory. No opinion is stable, no judgement is certain. On eventually finishing the volume, you may feel that you know everything or that you know nothing.

He anatomized himself. He professed that ‘I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy’. He was a student of Christ Church, Oxford, until the time of his death, and he confessed that ‘I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life,
mihi et musis
[for myself and the muses] in the university, as long almost as Xenocrates in Athens…’ He was a cormorant of books whose library of 1,700 volumes of forgotten lore was both his refuge and his inspiration. Burton was the magpie scholar, curator of the world’s learning, a lord of books who hoped that by quilting together references and allusions and quotations he could stitch so strong a cloth that he would be able to cover himself with it. He makes reference to more than 1,250 authors. His is a book in praise of books and a literary fancy in praise of reading. He wished to fashion an incantation to exorcize melancholy. The book concludes with an aphorism, ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’, and an epigraph:

SPERATE MISERI

CAVETE FELICES

You that are unhappy, hope. You that are happy, fear.

We are close, perhaps, to the religious spirit of the age. Lancelot Andrewes, bishop of Winchester, had on many occasions preached before James in the royal chapel and was well known to the court as he mounted the pulpit at Whitehall. He was tall and slim, with a long narrow face and expressive hands; he had a neatly trimmed beard and high forehead. In the winter of 1622 he had preached from the words of the text taken from St Matthew, ‘
vidimus enim stellam Ejus
’, ‘For we have seen his star’:

Vidimus stellam
. We can well conceive that: any that will but look up, may see a star. But how could they see the
Ejus
of it, that it was His? Either that it belonged to any, or that He it was it belonged to. This passeth all perspective: no astronomy could show them this. What by course of nature the stars can produce, that they by course of art or observation may discover. But this birth was above nature. No trigon, triplicity, exaltation could bring it forth. They are but idle that set figures for it. The star should not have been His, but He the star’s, if it had gone that way. Some other light, then, they saw this
Ejus
by.

The style is hard and elliptical, almost tortuous in its slow unwinding of the sense. It relies upon repetition and alliteration, parallel and antithesis. It is knotty and difficult, almost impossible for the hearers fully to understand. Yet it is the devotional style of the Jacobean period, fully mastered by a king who prided himself on his scholarship and erudition. Andrewes hovers over a word, even a syllable, eliciting its meaning by minute degrees; he is constantly questioning, refining and rephrasing. He does not express a thought but, rather, the process of thought itself; he dramatizes the act, or art, of creative reasoning. This is the luxuriant etymology of Jacobean scholarship, similar in its strenuous tone to the prose of Francis Bacon.

‘Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and especially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in
solsitio brumali
, O the very dead of winter.’ The prose is disciplined and pure, evincing clarity of thought and expression as well as a great power of ordered analysis. It may not possess the inspired eloquence or impassioned fervour of the great Elizabethan preachers, but it is marked by what T. S. Eliot described as ‘ordonnance, precision, and relevant intensity’. Andrewes moves forward in pulses of light; he stops and repeats a phrase for more lucidity; he is always reaching out for the full revelation of the interior sense. An association of words can lead him further forward, caressing or coaxing their intention; he professed that such meanings can ‘strike any man into an ecstacy’.

The soaring cadence and expressive emotionalism evident in the sermons of John Donne may seem a world away from the concerted pressure of Andrewes’s words; the articulations of any one culture, however, will not be very far apart. On 13 November 1622, the month before the bishop of Winchester gave his sermon to the king on the journey of the Magi, John Donne, the dean of St Paul’s, entered the pulpit of the cathedral.

The first word of the text is the cardinal word, the word, the hinge, upon which the whole text turns. The first word,
But
, is the
But
, that all the rest shoots at. First it is an exclusive word: something the Apostles had required, which might not be had; not that; and it is an inclusive word; something Christ was pleased to afford to the apostles, which they thought not of; not that, not that which you beat upon,
But
, but yet, something else, something better than that, you shall have.

The rapid associations are like a sudden peal of bells.

For Donne the sermon was a species of erudite oratory, a performance that like the plays of the Jacobean tragic stage would surprise and delight the audience. He must remind his auditors of the damnation of being ‘secluded eternally, eternally, eternally, from the sight of God’. He must move and direct their emotions or else he had failed. That is why he exerts all the power of the macabre that John Webster had employed. So in one sermon Donne reminds his hearers that ‘between that excremental jelly that thy body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last; there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature’.

The settled truths of the old medieval faith had utterly gone. It was now necessary to argue and to convince. In this endeavour Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne were united. Yet this meant that they were sometimes engaged in tortuous and self-involved trials of the spirit; this was in many respects a sceptical, ambiguous and ambivalent age, at least in direct comparison with its predecessors, and against that unstable background both preachers protested and declaimed.

The syntactic parallels and paradoxes of both churchmen are attempts to riddle out individual truths and certainties from ambiguous matter. They needed to convince as much as to inspire their hearers. Yet the sermons are characterized by the caustic rhetoric that is so much part of the period. Donne preached that ‘sects are not bodies, they are but rotten boughs, gangrened limbs, fragmentary chips, blown off by their own spirit of turbulency, fallen off by the weight of their own pride…’ The immediacy and urgency of the language, with its rough cadence, are also part of Donne’s secular poetry. We may note the pessimism and melancholy, anatomized in an earlier part of this chapter, that also underlie his being in the world. In one of his meditations he enquires about the source of his disease. ‘They tell me that it is my melancholy. Did I infuse, did I drink in melancholy into my self? It is my thoughtfulness; was I not made to think? It is my study; doth not my calling call for that?’ This is the true music of the Jacobean period, now come to a close.

11

Vivat rex

Charles Stuart had become king of England at the age of twenty-four. He was proclaimed on the same day as his father’s death, 27 March 1625, and a contemporary at Cambridge wrote that ‘we had thunder the same day, presently on the proclamation, and ’twas a cold season, but all fears and sorrows are swallowed up in joy of so hopeful a successor’. Had the new king not put himself at the head of the anti-Spanish alliance in England?

He was more severe and reserved than his father, with a strong sense of formality and order, and the change of tone at court was soon evident. Charles announced that during the reign of his ‘most dear and royal father’ idle and unnecessary people had thronged the court, bringing ‘much dishonour to our house’. There were to be no more bawds or catamites. The new king had been impressed by the decorum of the Spanish court, where he had spent many months; he appreciated the privacy by which the royal family was protected, and the gravitas with which courtly affairs were conducted. The moral tone appealed to a young man who had become dismayed by the laxness and libertinism of his father’s court. He began to dress in black. In the preface to his orders for the royal household he remarked that his purpose was ‘to establish government and order in our court which from thence may spread with more order through all parts of our kingdom’. This art of control, however, might be more congenial in theory than in practice.

The Venetian ambassador noted that within days of his accession ‘the king observes a rule of great decorum. The nobles do not enter his apartments in confusion as heretofore, but each rank has its appointed place.’ The ambassador also reported that the king had drawn up rules and regulations that divided his day, from first rising, into separate compartments; there was a time for praying and a time for exercising, a time for business and a time for audiences, a time for eating and a time for sleeping. He did not wish his subjects to be introduced to him without warning; they were only to be sent for. Servants proffered meals to him on their bended knees, and such was the protocol around royal dining that he seldom if ever ate a hot meal; food took too long to serve. Whenever he washed his hands, those parts of the towel he touched were raised above the head of the gentleman usher who removed it from the royal presence.

Charles set to work in earnest at the beginning of April when he asked Buckingham and other grandees to review all aspects of foreign policy; the fraught relationship with Spain, and a possible alliance with France, were to be considered in the light of Charles’s desire to recover the Palatinate for his brother-in-law. A committee was established, a few days later, in order to supervise the nation’s defences in case of war. The new king then set up two further commissions to investigate financial fraud by the collectors of the customs and to examine the trade of the East India Company with Russia. It was a business-like start but, as is generally the case with the work of committees and commissions, it achieved very little.