The Elizabethans (59 page)

The Hermetic philosophy did not
catch on
in Elizabethan England in the sense that Bruno would have hoped. The Church of England did not ‘go Rosicrucian’. And yet it was the generality of Hermetic philosophy, not its esoteric secrecy, that stands out as a mark of the age. Those who enjoyed discussions about the new philosophy were inevitably regarded with suspicion or derision by others – hence (some believe) Shakespeare’s semi-humorous reference in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
to ‘the school of night.’ Whether such a group of intellectuals met formally we can take leave to question, though Marlowe, Thomas Harriot and others would appear to have belonged loosely to such a coterie. Notable among them was Harriot’s patron Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, sometimes known as ‘the wizard earl’. He married Essex’s sister, Dorothy Perrot (widow of Sir Thomas, daughter-in-law of Sir John). He was one of those who had a tempestuous relationship with Essex, sometimes his friend, sometimes very much not. In spite of deafness, Northumberland was a courtier, soldier, gambler and feuder. Yet such is the esteem in which he was held that when the Queen was dying in 1603 he was invited to join the Council and there was even a short period when he might have been asked to serve as Lord Protector of the Realm until James I succeeded. So Northumberland was not a man on the political fringe. Indeed, after the suicide of his recusant father in the Tower, Northumberland did his utmost to emphasise his conformity to the Church of England while admitting, like many members of that Church at the time and since, that he ‘troubled not much himself’ with religion. Yet this ‘wizard earl’ was – almost certainly unjustly – condemned by James I and his council for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and he remained a scholarly prisoner in the Tower for sixteen years. His reputation during Elizabethan times as an ‘atheist’ probably did not help him at the time of the plot.

At least Northumberland was eventually released and died in his bed, at Petworth, in 1632, aged sixty-eight. His friend Sir Walter Raleigh was not so lucky – thirteen years, 1603–16 in the Tower, falsely accused of treason; it was here that he wrote
The History of the World
before he was released to make his last fateful voyage to Orinoco. Raleigh was another ‘atheist’, according to the oafish Jesuit propagandist Robert Parsons. In Parsons’s propaganda, Raleigh presided over a ‘schoole of atheism’ in which, under Harriot’s direction, ‘both Moyses and our Savior, the olde, and the new testament are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backwarde’. There is no evidence for these wild accusations, though we can tell that Raleigh’s was an enquiring intelligence. During a supper at the house of Sir George Trenchard at Winterbourne, Dorset, in 1593, Raleigh and his brother Carew upset the vicar, Ralph Ironside, by enquiring what he meant by his
soul
and exposing his circular arguments.
¹³
As we have already seen throughout this book, the Elizabethan Age was not one of religious tolerance, and such talk was dangerous. In the twenty-first century, if a cleric had an argument with a distinguished poet, courtier, public man and explorer, he might well get the worse of it (assuming such a figure as Raleigh to be remotely imaginable outside his own times). Ironside, perhaps stung by his own poor performance in theological debate, insisted that Raleigh be investigated by the Court of High Commission in March 1594. Raleigh, for his part, felt he must prove his orthodox Protestant credentials by ‘shopping’ a recusant Mass priest at Chideock – John Cornelius, alias Mooney, chaplain to the Arundell family, ‘a notable stout villain’ according to Raleigh. Another account suggests that Raleigh spent a long time trying to convince Cornelius, and that he was impressed by the man’s sincerity.
¹⁴

Raleigh was not a secret adept of Giordano Bruno’s Hermetic creed, or a secret unbeliever. As his brush with Parson Ironside showed, he was a thoughtful, humorous, but basically serious person. Absolutely typical of intellectuals of his age, he – in common with Montaigne, or with Philip Sidney – was impossible to pin down to a position. The characteristic of the age was uncertainty, which was perhaps what made the institutions of Church and state so merciless to minds that, inevitably, strayed outside the orthodoxies. But Europe was fighting wars about matters that, as Raleigh’s playful Socratic dialogue in Winterbourne demonstrated to the foolish and vindictive clergyman, could not possibly be proved true or false. In the Preface to his
History of the World
, he wrote:

Certainly there is nothing more to bee admired, and more to bee lamented, than the privat contention, the passionate dispute, the personall hatred, and the perpetuall warre, massacres, and murders, for Religion among
Christians
: the discourse whereof hath so occupied the World, as it hath well neare driven the practise thereof out of the world.

The appalling disparity between the bitterness of the quarrels and the message of Love that lay at the heart of the Christian message could not but induce an aghast cynicism: ‘Wee are all (in effect) become Comoedians in religion: and while we act in gesture and voice, divine vertues, in all the course of our lives wee renounce our Persons, and the parts wee play.’
¹⁵

If there was a School of Night, as opposed to a group of friends who felt free, when together, to air their thoughts without reference to thought-police, then Raleigh was the centre of it. The most fascinating and attractive character, he understandably drew to himself poets and philosophers, explorers and adventurers. He was much the most interesting of all Queen Elizabeth’s favourites, and from 1582 to 1592 she showered him with honours: Lord Warden of the Stanneries, Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, Vice Admiral of the Western Counties and, as Captain of the Queen’s Bodyguard, a courtier who was all but unable to leave her side.

Sir John Harington, the Queen’s godson and the translator of Ariosto, tells the story that when Raleigh was riding between Plymouth and the court, he fell in love with Sherborne Castle, the country seat of the Bishops of Sherborne. ‘This Castle being right in the way, he cast such an eye upon it as Ahab did upon Naboth’s vineyard, and once above the rest being talking of it, of the commodiousness of the place, and how easily it might be got from the bishopric, suddenly over and over came his horse, that his very face, which was then thought a very good face, ploughed up the earth where he fell.’

It was perhaps an unhappy omen of Raleigh’s accident-prone career. At the time, the Queen was only too happy to force the Bishops of Sherborne to allow the Crown a ninety-nine-year lease upon the castle and estate, and to give the castle to Raleigh as his grace-and-favour residence. The favour did not last long. In the early days, when the Queen was still smarting from the marriage of her greatest love, Leicester, to Lettice Knollys, Raleigh’s flattering attentions were a consolation. It is pointless to ask whether his protestations of love for Elizabeth were ‘genuine’. Court life was an elaborate dance. The abject gestures and hyperbolic words of the successful courtier would be insanely sycophantic if translated into a modern context – if, for example, we were to imagine a modern male office worker addressing such words to his female boss as Raleigh wrote to Elizabeth:

O princely form, my fancy’s adamant,

Divine conceit, my pain’s acceptance,

Oh all in one, oh heaven on earth transparent,

The seat of joy’s and love’s abundance!

But the poem ‘The Ocean to Scinthia’ (that is, Raleigh to Elizabeth) subverts and extends many of the courtly conventions. Behind the ritualistic façade of the courtier’s devotion to his jewel-encrusted monarch-doll there was a tempestuous, very often serious and unhappy friendship between two extremely strong characters. Raleigh, exceptionally tall and very good-looking, undoubtedly attracted the Queen sexually. He was also a match for her intellectually, which few people were. She must have relished the side of him that was cynical, enquiring and angry, and which surfaces from time to time in some of the very few poems agreed by scholars to be of his composition:

Tell potentates, they live

Acting by others’ action,

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by affection.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

Raleigh’s cleverness, his ability to read and converse in three modern European languages, his grace, his panache and his physical courage would all have been appealing to the Queen. But it was not to be expected that such a person would be sexless, and Ocean’s (Walter’s, or Wa’ter’s) love for the Chaste Moon-Goddess could not be the whole of Raleigh’s life. Elizabeth might try to hide this obvious fact from herself, but it could not be hidden from Raleigh.

Evidently there were always tensions in their relationship, and even before the 2nd Earl of Essex invaded her heart, she could be petulant and dismissive of Raleigh in his role of favourite. For a while, the two men were uneasy friends and rivals for the position of chief favourite at court. In 1588, after some petty squabble, Essex challenged Raleigh to a duel. Raleigh went to Ireland, and it was on this visit that he befriended Spenser, and read Spenser’s work-in-progress, probably the first three books of
The Faerie Queene
. As well as being one of the poem’s first great champions, Raleigh also became some of the characters within Spenser’s fantasy: not only within
The Faerie Queene
, but in the charming
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe
. It tells the story of how Raleigh – the Shepherd of the Sea – came to Ireland, and persuaded Spenser to cross the sea to visit Cynthia (Elizabeth) and the beautiful ladies of her court. They left Kilcolman, Spenser’s Irish seat, in the autumn of 1589; eighteen months later the Queen rewarded Spenser with an annual pension of £50 to complete his epic. The poem is dated ‘the 27th of December 1591, from my house of Kilcolman’. So, for this London-born poet, Ireland had become home, even though England is represented as a land of peace and civilisation beside the tormented island:

For there all happie peace and plenteous store

Conspire in one to make contented blisse:

No wayling there nor wretchednesse is heard,

No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,

No grisly famine, nor no raging sweard,

No nightly bodrags [raids], nor no hue and cries . . .
¹⁶

It is a glorious poem. The description of the sea-voyage to England is especially fine. The list of court beauties is in part poetry, in part the Elizabethan equivalent of a ‘social diary’ in a modern illustrated magazine, and in part an application for patronage. His praise of ‘Amaryllis’ – Alice Spencer, the recent widow of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange – will catch the eye of literary historians, for this is the lady who would live well into the seventeenth century and would be the patroness – by then as the Countess of Derby – to whom Milton dedicated
Comus
. Her splendid tomb in Harefield, Middlesex, shows her golden hair streaming over her shoulders.

It is noticeable that Spenser singles out love, and the worship of the love-god Cupid, as the particular occupational hazard of the poet – ‘For him the greatest of the gods we deem.’ But the contrast between the rancorous, feud-ridden court and the idyllic rural delights of Kilcolman is the real theme of this extremely deft and backhanded piece of pastoral. Whereas the Shepherd of the Ocean has promised the simpleton-bard a journey to a place where there are no ‘Troubles’ of the classic Irish kind – midnight raids, fights, killings – he actually leads him into a court where the rivalries and feuds provide evidence of human depravity that is every bit as strong. In the dedication to Raleigh, Spenser alludes to the ‘malice of evill mouthes, which are always wide open to carpe at and misconstrue my simple meaning. I pray continually for your happinesse’. The poem was not published until 1595, but this dedication is dated 1591, when Raleigh’s happiness – and indeed his very life – was threatened by a situation that Spenser, in his apparently simple pastoral poem of two bumpkin shepherds, had so laid bare.

During the period of Spenser’s visit back to England, and his excited taste of court life with its beautiful women – ‘Beautie is the bayt, which with delight / Doth man allure’
¹⁷
– Raleigh fell in love with one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting: Elizabeth Throckmorton. By the time Raleigh had taken possession of Sherborne Castle, and Spenser had gone back to Ireland, Bess Throckmorton was pregnant. The lovers were to grow into a devoted married couple, but they both knew the Queen and realised they were in deadly peril. Raleigh was thirty-six or thirty-seven. Bess was twenty-five when her baby was born. The child was hastily christened: the godparents were his uncle, Arthur Throckmorton, Anna Throckmorton and, of all people, the Earl of Essex. He was then hastily sent to a wet-nurse in Enfield. Raleigh was supposed to be planning a naval expedition against the Spanish, and Bess tried to return to court as if the marriage and the baby had never happened. There was no real hope of keeping their marriage a secret – not in such a court as that. For this reason, presumably, Raleigh attempted ‘damage limitation’: getting Essex as the godfather of the child, and a building-up of his own reputation as an indispensable sea-hero. But there was no denying what had happened. He, the favourite, or ex-favourite, had committed that unpardonable sin. Raleigh and Bess were sent to the Tower of London.

It was probably while he was in the Tower that Raleigh wrote his poem, the ‘Book of the Ocean to Cynthia’. He let it be known that this was to be an extended work of twelve books, like
The Faerie Queene
. How seriously are we to take this? The first ten books are supposedly ‘lost’, but it is just as possible that he never wrote them. Given his friendship with Spenser, his sardonic nature, his anger with the Queen, is it not likely that he built up the idea of the long poem to Cynthia as a sort of bitter joke? There is certainly a great bitterness in the poem as he looks back on his twelve years as the companion-courtier of that impossible character ‘Cynthia’: