The Elizabethans (29 page)

Spenser places the theme in the archaic setting of pseudo-history, freely drawing upon the new Elizabethan mythologies and upon such pageantry as the Accession Day tilts.

Lovers of Spenser come to read him more and more slowly. You come to enjoy the exactitude with which he paints each scene, the inventiveness with which he takes over and rewrites old legends and mythologies, and the whole Spenser idiom, this ‘olde tyme’ language, drawing on Chaucer, but which is in fact completely contemporary. Spenser is the classic example of the radical conservatism of the Renaissance, its belief that in order to achieve a just society, or to be wise, it is necessary to go back and rediscover the wisdom of the ancients: ‘O goodly usage of those antique times!’
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The paradox of his constant harping back to the olde tyme is that he is also celebrating the Now. When Britomart in Book Three is shown by Merlin a genealogical table, she springs from Arthur, and from Arthur’s loins come the Welsh Tudors:

Then shall a royal virgin raine, which shall

Stretch her wide rod over the Belgicke shore

That the great Castle smite so sore withal,

That it shall make him shake, and shortly learn to fall.
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After a certain point, we shall probably turn to the scholars and discover that what we have been reading in this multifaceted story is in part the most glorious of all contributions to political and historical reconstructed propaganda. We will find out that the wicked Duessa is in some senses the Scottish Queene. We will find unmistakable references to Ireland and to the Low Countries, especially in Book Five, the Book of Justice, and in the story of Timias and Belphoebe we shall trace the relationship between the Queen and Sir Walter Raleigh. But that is not all that we shall find in the poem. If it were, the book would have no life. It would be as dead as an old newspaper. As it is,
The Faerie Queene
pulsates with a unique emotional energy. Spenser was artist enough never to make the allegory bear only one meaning, still less to write pure propaganda or pure satire. Rather, his observant, luxuriant, abundantly creative unfinished masterwork is a monument to the inner life. Once you are taken by it, you will not want to live in a room that does not contain a copy of Spenser’s poem.

12

Kenilworth

ON 30 SEPTEMBER
1562 Henry Machyn, the old parish clerk of Holy Trinity the Less in the City of London, looked out of his window and saw an ugly street fight. Machyn’s diary, as befitted a parish clerk, began as a record of heraldic funerals, and extended to bring a compendium of news, crimes, executions and gossip, as well as such city ceremonies as the Lord Mayor’s Show. But this street fight, which he witnessed in the penultimate year of his life, was remarkable not least because both the participants were gentlefolk, and one of them was a (in his day) celebrated poet: ‘The sam day at nyght be-twyn viii and ix was a grett fray in Redcrosse stret between ii gentyllmen and ther men, for they dyd mare [i.e. marry] one woman, and dyvers were hurt; thes wher ther names, master Boysse and master Gaskyn gentyllmen.
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The accident-prone George Gascoigne was, when this affray took place, a member of Gray’s Inn, though he appears to have spent as much time there involved in his own personal litigation, some of it with his own father, as he did in legal work on others’ behalf. Gascoigne was the son of minor but prosperous gentry
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in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, MP for Bedfordshire (1542, 1553 and 1558), commissioner of the musters, justice of the peace and almoner at the coronations of both Edward VI and Mary I. At the time of Elizabeth’s coronation Sir John was ill, and George, then about twenty, deputised for him. Gascoigne’s mother was a northerner – Margaret, daughter of Sir Robert Scargill of Thorpe Hall, Richmond, Yorkshire: perhaps a kinswoman of Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers at the time of Margaret Thatcher. It seems as if George Gascoigne spent some of his childhood in the North. He attended both Oxford and Cambridge, or so he says, though no college in either university has record of his attendance. He arrived at Gray’s Inn in 1555, and it was his obsessed aim, as a young man, to become a courtier. He wrote later that he had ruined himself financially in the attempt.

It was, presumably, with the aim of mending his fortunes that Gascoigne married a rich widow, Elizabeth Bacon Breton, on 23 November 1561 at Christ Church, Newgate. She was a remote cousin of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and marriage to her would have helped to advance his career at court, had it not been for Gascoigne’s innate tendency to bad luck. (As he wrote in ‘Gascoigne’s wodmanship’, he shot away at everything.) Elizabeth had five children, one of whom was the poet Nicholas Breton. Upon the death of her husband in 1559 she had married Edward Boyes of Nonington, Kent, but this was not a success and after lengthy and, for Elizabethan times, most unusual legal proceedings, she was divorced from Boyes. Unfortunately, the divorce was not finalised when she married Gascoigne, who thereby became implicated in a bigamy.

In May 1562 Gascoigne and his wife leased a farm at Willington in Bedfordshire, but the two years they spent there were far from being a bucolic idyll. He involved himself in a legal dispute with the Earl of Bedford from whom he leased his land, and with his brother John over the lease of a parsonage left to John by their father in his will. George Gascoigne claimed that his brother stole his sheep; John countered that he was merely recovering lambs stolen from his own mother, Margaret Scargill. By 1569 George Gascoigne was in Bedford gaol (ninety-one years later it would host John Bunyan, so it has a distinguished literary heritage) for debt. Somehow, in spite of the outrageous irregularity of his financial affairs, George Gascoigne followed in his father’s footsteps and served as a Member of Parliament. When his right to do so, as a debtor, was questioned, there was yet more legal argy-bargy. A letter to the Privy Council complained that ‘he is indebted to a great number of personnes for the which cause he hathe absented himself from the citie by a longe time and now beinge returned for a burgesse of Midehurste in the countie of Sussex, doethe shewe his face openlie in the despite of all his creditors’.
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Gascoigne’s name was accordingly struck off the list of MPs drawn up on 8 May 1572.

It was a good moment to cut loose. Gascoigne joined Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s ill-starred expeditionary force in the Netherlands. It was very much an independent operation, with Queen Elizabeth always insisting to the Spanish that she did not sanction English support for the Dutch rebels, while privately hoping that they would drive the French out of Flushing and overthrow Spanish hegemony in Holland. Gascoigne served as a soldier in the Netherlands, probably from July 1572 until the second siege of Leiden in May 1574. He returned to England from time to time – he attended the funeral of Reginald Grey, 5th Earl of Kent, at St Giles, Cripplegate on 17 April 1573 – but was able to observe the war at close hand. Being Gascoigne, he had plenty of complaints and quarrels. He was shocked by the incompetence of Gilbert and the other leaders and by the ineffectualness and downright cowardice of the English and Scottish mercenary troops. After the naval battle of Flushing (26–7 August 1573) Gascoigne quarrelled with his colonel about the lack of discipline in the regiment and resigned his captain’s commission. There was then another highly characteristic dispute as he waited to get paid at Strijen. But Gascoigne, who quarrelled freely with his incompetent English commanders, impressed the Prince of Orange with his soldierly qualities. Although he took a break at Christmas to return to England on leave, Gascoigne rejoined Prince William to lend his support during the siege of Delft. The Prince paid Gascoigne 300 gulden above his pay for his part in the Spanish surrender of Middelburg. Gascoigne’s last spell of active service was his participation in the siege of Leiden in early 1574. The Dutch edgily feared that the English were colluding with the Spanish, and Gascoigne himself was accused of treacherously surrendering to the Spanish; 400 English mercenaries were taken prisoner and led to Haarlem. It seems as if Elizabeth did a deal with Philip II. In exchange for sparing the lives of these prisoners, she allowed the Spanish fleet to revictual in England. Among the released prisoners was George Gascoigne.

How so it were, at last we were dispatcht,

And home we came as children come from schoole,

As gladde, as fishe which were but lately cacht,

And straight againe were cast into the poole:

For by my fay I coumpt him but a foole,

Which would not rather poorely live at large,

Than rest in pryson fedde with costly charge,

as he wrote in his rather deft verse account of the expedition, ‘The fruites of warre’ or ‘
Dulce Bellum Inexpertis
’, a Latin motto all too apposite to politicians of our own day as well as to the warmongers of the sixteenth century: that war seems a good idea to people who do not know anything about it.

Gascoigne skilfully represented himself as one such, who has returned from the battlefields of the Netherlands disgusted by war. Brave as ‘our English bloudes’ have been in the fighting (and Gascoigne writes the poem partly to repair his own reputation and to rebut the rumours of his treachery), he left his readers in no doubt that war is a bloody business. He ended the poem with a ‘Peroratio’ to Queen Elizabeth, urging her (she hardly needed urging, all her instincts were those of the sensible peacemaker) not to get involved in unnecessary war:

Your skilfulle minde (O Queene without compare)

Can some conceive that cause constraynes me so,

Since wicked warres have bredde such cruell care,

In Flanders, Fraunce, in Spaine and many mo,

Which reape thereby none other worth but wo . . .

The Peroration contains apostrophes not merely to Queen Elizabeth, but also to the Earl of Bedford, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Kent, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Law Lords (‘You gemmes of Justice, chiefe of either bench’) and the merchants of London. Clearly, it was a penitent Gascoigne who returned from the Netherlands, resolved to make friends with many of his former enemies, and desperate for advancement. And in 1575 his luck turned. He published a revised version of his war and other poems, this time under his own name (
A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres
, the anonymous volume of 1572/3, became
The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire
of 1575). He revised and republished his amusing novel,
Master F.J.
He advertised his own reformed character by translating and publishing a version of a Dutch play based upon the parable of the Prodigal Son (
The Glasse of Government
) and put together a collection of prose and poetry on a subject, which he knew to be close not only to his own heart, but to the heart of the Queen:
The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting . . . Translated and collected for the pleasure of all Noblemen and Gentlemen
. The source of Gascoigne’s work was a French book, Jacques du Fouilloux’s
La Vénérie
, and it reflects the delight in the hunt, which has been the passion of countrymen and women in France and England since the Middle Ages. The new, moralistic Gascoigne cannot resist pointing out that the real devious foxes were not Mr Reynard who was chased over the fields, but human beings who are as cunning and devious as a fox!

But shall I say my minde? I never yet saw day,

But every town had two or three which Rainard’s part could play,

So that men vaunt in vaine, which say they hunt the Foxe

To kepe their neighbours poultry free, & to defend their flockes.

When they them selves can spoyle, more profit in an houre,

Then Raynard rifles in a year, when he doth most devoure.

Although Gascoigne dwells on fox-hunting and badger-hunting (‘I have lent a Foxe or Badgerd ere nowe, a piece of my hose, and the skyn and fleshe for companie, which he never restored agayne’), his chief concern in
The Noble Arte of Venerie
was with hunting the deer: the Queen’s great passion. He showed himself an adept, even of such tricky situations as hunting a hart ‘at bay’ in a stream when the animal will not come out of the water. If a huntsman finds himself in this situation: ‘let him get a boate, or if he can swymme, let him put off his clothes, and swymme to him with a Dagger readie drawne to kyll him . . . It hath beene my happe oftentimes to kyll in this sorte verie great Hartes, and that in sight and presence of divers witnesses, and afterwardes I have guided their deade bodyes to the banke swymming.’
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There is some comedy in the fact that Gascoigne should have described himself as ‘friend to al Parkes, Forress and Chases’ when most of his experience of ‘venery’ had been as a poacher. He illustrated the work himself with woodcuts, which boldly showed him kneeling before no less a hunting enthusiast than the Queen herself. One of the woodcuts shows a shooting picnic. Another shows a dead hart at the foot of Queen Elizabeth, and the kneeling Gascoigne about to ‘breake’ it up with a knife. (Did Landseer know this woodcut when he painted a remarkably similar scene of a Highland ghillie presenting a slain deer to Queen Victoria?) Another delightful woodcut demonstrates ‘How to slee the Hearon’, with a heron falling out of an English sky towards the Queen and a group of noblemen.

These woodcuts are probably intended to be illustrations of the Earl of Leicester’s lavish summer entertainments for the Queen at Kenilworth in 1575. That summer’s royal progress had been the most extravagant of the reign, and Leicester was determined that Elizabeth’s sojourn with him should be longer and more splendid than her visits anywhere else.

Burghley spent in the region of £3,000 each time the Queen visited Theobalds, and the sum was nearly ruinous – in his private capacity. In 1588, in his public capacity as Lord Treasurer, between £8,000 and £9,000 paid the wages of every mariner in the Royal Navy.
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