The Elizabethans (40 page)

Chief among the patrons – chief because brightest, cleverest and themselves distinguished practitioners – were Mary, Countess of Pembroke, and her brother Philip Sidney. But as is shown by the life of the greatest (non-dramatic) poet of the age, Edmund Spenser, a literary life was nurtured by many. Spenser, a ‘poor scholler’ of the Merchant Taylors’ School, was the beneficiary of the will of a rich Lincolnshire-born London lawyer, Robert Nowell (brother of the Dean of St Paul’s), which paid for the poor to go to university. At Cambridge, Spenser’s brilliance was recognised by that peculiar, quarrelsome don, Gabriel Harvey, who put him forward and enabled him to get employment – for example, in the household of Dr John Young, Bishop of Rochester. By the late 1570s Spenser had attracted the attention of the poetry-crazed Leicester circle and had befriended Sidney, and it was through Sidney that Spenser, who had been writing verse in ever greater quantity throughout the decade, was taken on by Lord Grey de Wilton as his confidential secretary in Ireland. ‘We cannot imagine Spenser as a publisher’s hack, writing pamphlets to order, like Nashe, and living a hand-to-mouth existence in the back streets near St Paul’s. Sidney knew that something better than this must be found for the poet who was to write the great English heroic poem.’
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At the beginning of this book we faced up to the fact that the Elizabethan policy in Ireland, and Edmund Spenser’s
View
of the Irish question, were, to put it mildly, problematic for the modern reader. It would, however, be a distortion of the truth if all we remembered of Spenser in Ireland was his career as an administrator, seen through the Fenian lens of a later age’s sensibilities. True, Spenser was one of those Englishmen who made himself the enemy of the Irish people. He took possession of the castle of Renny in County Cork, for £200, as well as Buttevant Abbey. He was made Sheriff of Cork by the Privy Council for his ‘good and commendable parts (being a man endowed with good knowledge in learning and not unskilful or without experience in the service of the wars)’.
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On 15 October 1598 his castle at Kilcolman was sacked and burned by a marauding army of 2,000 Irish – ‘rebels’ or ‘patriots’, depending upon your viewpoint. Years later, Ben Jonson, gossiping to Drummond of Hawthornden, said that ‘the Irish having robbed Spenser’s goods and burnt his house and a little child new born, he and his wife escaped, and after he died for lack of bread in King Street’.
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This melodramatic foreshortening is probably a distortion. Spenser did have a small pension. But the fire is true, the violent expulsion from Ireland is true, and Spenser died aged less than fifty (probably forty-seven) in London, with his great epic unfinished.

Great, however, it is, not least in its evocation of Ireland, a place whose languages, traditions, landscapes, rivers and coastlines he paints more beautifully than any other poet – as with his passage about the Irish rivers in Book IV, Canto XI:

There was the Liffy, rolling downe the lea

The sandy Slane, the stony Aubrian,

The spacious Shenan spreading like a sea,

The pleasant Boyne, the fishy fruitfull Ban.

Swift Awniduff which of the English man

Is cal’de Blacke water, and the Liffar deep,

Sad Trowis, that once his people overran,

Strong Allo tombling from Slewlogher steep,

And Mulla mine, whose waues I whilom taught to weep.

Spenser’s premature death left the great Elizabethan epic poem unfinished. In its reflections on Ireland, the poem, and all it represents, left unfinished a tale of woe that reverberates to this day.

18

Hakluyt and Empire

IS ENGLAND, OR
what is now called Britain, at one with the rest of Planet Earth, or is it pursuing a parallel life of its own, with its own Church, its own weights and measures, its own monarchy, its own arcane sense of comedy? This is a question that sets up puzzles in many non-English minds, and in the writings of our contemporary historians and political commentators. Conversations about, for example, modern Britain’s relationship to Europe or to the United States might begin with very specific concerns: the economic advisability of joining a single European currency, the need (or otherwise) to send troops alongside American forces to one of the world’s troublespots. Sooner or later, however, when the pros and cons of such a strategy have been rehearsed, we find ourselves in the realm of metaphysics; we find that our view of contemporary events – in Afghanistan, in Ireland, in the Church – is determined by some vision of a Platonic England. And the origins of these concepts took shape in the sixteenth century during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when England – here the word means the land-mass containing the English counties and Wales – shaped an entirely new relationship with the rest of the world. On the one hand, because of its decision to reject the Pope, England cut itself off from the European mainstream; it became a beleaguered little island doughtily maintaining its difference from the rest of Europe, and prepared, ultimately, to ward off an invasion threat from the greatest military and naval power in the world. In this respect, Elizabethan England’s attitude to Philip II and the Spanish Armada prepared generations of English people for the belligerently insular mindset that served it so well when resisting Napoleon and Hitler, but which, viewed from another perspective, seemed embarrassingly anachronistic when contemplating the new world order and the European Union. Another part of the story, however, is of an Elizabethan England which, because of the skills of its navigators and its pioneer geographers, had a truly global sense of itself. The two most portentous examples of this are from the English advances into India in the 1570s, with the subsequent founding of the East India Company, to compete with Dutch merchants; and, second, the establishment of English colonies in America, and the efforts, between 1583 and 1588, by Walter Raleigh, to found what became, in turn, the states of Virginia and North Carolina. From these two outgoing ventures stemmed the growth of the British Empire (the phrase first coined by Dr John Dee) and the existence, on the western side of the Atlantic, of an English-speaking people.

From this it can be clearly seen that modern history began with the Elizabethans: not simply modern English history, but the modern world as we know it today, with the English-speaking United States, with the post-colonial East. And these two great enterprises, as we have already hinted when considering Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the Earth, are only two of the Elizabethan expansions into the greater world. Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert had laid claim to Greenland for the Queen and discovered the North-West Passage. Anthony Jenkinson had voyaged to Siberia, China, Japan, Canada, the coasts of Africa – there was no part of the
known
world unvisited by English voyagers at this date. Humphrey Gilbert, who had made an abortive attempt to land Englishmen in America in 1578, was inspired to try again because of the experience of Davy Ingram, a common sailor from Barking (a town just east of London) whose story was winkled out of him partly by Gilbert, partly by Walsingham himself: for, if even a part of it were true, it showed what marvels, what riches, existed on the other side of the Atlantic, ripe for the picking.

Ingram, about forty years of age when interviewed by Gilbert, had been one of the unlucky sailors on John Hawkins’s slave-trading mission of 1567, when Hawkins had that disastrous battle with the Spanish and abandoned half his men on the shores of Mexico. Having heard that English fishing vessels regularly visited Newfoundland, and having no notion of the distances involved, Ingram and two friends decided to risk the hike. Twelve months later they turned up in Nova Scotia, and were able to secure a passage on a French ship to Le Havre. Ingram had vivid stories to tell – of ‘brutish’ Native American tribesmen whose heads were ‘shaven in sundry spots’. (‘When any of them is sicke and like to die [the] nexte of his kinne doe cut his throte and all his kinne must drinke up his bloude.’) He had seen ‘savages’ feast on raw human flesh. Adulterers he had seen pinned to a stone slat, ‘flat on their backs, and their hands and legges being holde or tyed, the executioner commeth and kneeleth on their breastes, and with a crooked knife cutteth both their throats’. He had escaped the beasts of the forest. He had seen – and this was of especial interest to Gilbert and Walsingham – tribesmen carrying buckets made of ‘massie silver’, lumps of gold ‘as bigge as his fyst’ and stark-naked women wearing ‘plates of gold over their body’. The adventures of Othello in his youth, which melted the heart of Desdemona, were culled by Shakespeare from contemporary travel-writers, and the London audiences who heard these experiences filtered through what has been called the Othello-music would have realised what a large and extraordinary world they inhabited compared with their late medieval grandparents:

Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Of hair-breadth scapes i’ th’imminent deadly breach.

Of being taken by the insolent foe

And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence,

And portance in my traveller’s history;

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

Rough quarries, rocks, hills whose heads touch heaven,

It was my hint to speak: such was my process.

And of the cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders . . .
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At one and the same time, then, Elizabethan England was more insular and more outward-looking than it had been in the past, more open to the world, but more insistent that the world must accept it on its own terms.

The last sentence perhaps asks to be rephrased. ‘At one and the same time’ as the rest of Europe the England of Elizabeth refused to be. Few things are more eloquently emblematic of Elizabethan England’s difference from the world than its ignoring the change in the European calendar, which took place in 1582.

The solar year is 365 days and the lunar year is only 354 days, and this has always presented the human race with a challenge when devising calendars. The ancient calendar of the Christian Church had been founded on two mistakes. One was that a year consisted of 365.25 days and the other was that 235 lunations were exactly equal to seventy-nine solar years.
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In 730 the Venerable Bede had noted that the equinoxes took place about three days earlier than they must have done when the calendar was fixed at the Council of Nicaea (ad 345). By the time of the later Middle Ages the divergence was seven or eight days. Pope Sixtus IV in 1474 had commissioned the foremost astronomer of the time to superintend a revised calendar, but he – Regiomontanus – had died before the scheme got under way. The Reformation and other little local difficulties had distracted subsequent popes from attending to the matter.

Gregory XIII was determined to set his mark on history by commissioning Luigi Lilio Ghiraldi, an astronomer from the University of Naples (Latin name Aloysius Lilius), and the mathematician Clavius to do the necessary calculations. The lunar cycle contained 6,939 days 18 hours, whereas the exact time of 235 lunations is 6,939 days 16 hours and 31 minutes. This amounts to an error of one day every 308 years. By the time of the sixteenth century the error had accumulated to four days, so that new moons marked on the calendar as happening on the fifth of the month were actually happening on the first.

It was decided, in order to get the calendar back into kilter with the actual movements of the planets, that the feast of St Francis of Assisi, 1582 – that is, 5 October, – should become 15 October. This meant that the next vernal equinox, instead of occurring on the eleventh, would take place when it should, on 21 March. The difference between the old, or Julian, Calendar remained ten days from 1582 to 1700; because 1700 was a leap year, and a common year in the new Gregorian Calendar, the difference in styles then became eleven days. The Protestant states of Germany held out against the Pope’s astronomical innovation until Frederick the Great brought them into line in 1774. Great Britain had caved in rather earlier, with the passage of the Calendar (New Style) Act of 1750. This was also the moment when England adopted the Scottish habit of regarding 1 January as the first day of the year. Until then in England the year began on Lady Day (25 March), the day in the calendar when Almighty God became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mother and brought new life to the world.

From 1582 onwards, therefore, the Elizabethans were on a different time-scale from Spain, Portugal, Italy and France. For us, who have adopted
both
the Gregorian method of regarding the solar calendar and the Scottish division of the calendar months, the Elizabethans were doubly out of sync. For instance, Sir Philip Sidney’s funeral happened on what we call 16 February 1587, which for those who were present was 1586. It makes dating any event in the later Elizabeth period a fiddly and confusing business and adds to our sense of their otherness. But one should not be distracted by this small thing from seeing their bigger thing, and above all their imaginative enlargement through the pioneering study of geography.

The figure who stands out as the greatest English geographer of the age is also the man who in his monumental multi-volume book brought to life the Voyagers. Richard Hakluyt’s
The Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation
did for explorers and navigators what John Foxe did for the Protestant martyrs. There is no better book in which to browse if what you want is armchair-travel, excitement, wonder and human oddity. But Hakluyt (
c
.1552–1616) – his name is pronounced Hackle-wit – was much more than just an anecdotalist. He was one of those Englishmen (note the title of his book: the achievements are those of the English
Nation
) who saw the almost limitless political possibilities of the new geography and who radically redefined the position of England in the world. ‘Give me a map,’ says Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, ‘then let me see how much is left for me to conquer all the world.’
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