Under The Laws
Of James He Was Denied Any Share In The Government, Could Hold No Public
Office, Practise No Profession.
Neither law nor medicine, nor parliament
nor the army, nor the university, was open to him.
Banished from London
and the Court, shunned by his contemporaries, he lurked in some country
house, now miserably lonely, now plagued by officers in search of
priests. At last, generally, he went abroad, and wandered out his life,
an exile, despised by his countrymen, who met him hanging on at foreign
Courts; or else he sought a monastery and was buried there. To be sure,
the laws against recusants were not uniformly enforced; papistry in
favourites and friends of the king was winked at, and the rich noblemen,
who were able to pay fines, did not suffer much. But the fact remains
that for the average gentleman to turn Romanist generally meant to drop
out of the world. "Mr Lewknor," writes Father Gerard to Father
Owen,[203] "growing of late to a full resolution of entering the Society
(of Jesus), and being so much known in England and in the Court as he
is, so that he could not be concealed in the English College at Rome;
and his father, as he considered, being morally sure to lose his
place,[204] which is worth unto him L1000 a year, he therefore will come
privately to Liege, where I doubt not but to keep him wholly unknown."
* * * * *
CHAPTER V
THE INFLUENCE OF THE FRENCH ACADEMIES
The admonitions of their elders did not keep young men from going to
Italy, but as the seventeenth century advanced the conditions they found
there made that country less attractive than France. The fact that the
average Englishman was a Protestant divided him from his compeers in
Italy and damped social intercourse. He was received courteously and
formally by the Italian princes, perhaps, for the sake of his political
uncle or cousin in England, but inner distrust and suspicion blighted
any real friendship. Unless the Englishman was one of those who had a
secret, half-acknowledged allegiance to Romanism, there could not, in
the age of the Puritans, be much comfortable affection between him and
the Italians. The beautiful youth, John Milton, as the author of
excellent Latin verse, was welcomed into the literary life of Florence,
to be sure, and there were other unusual cases, but the typical
traveller of Stuart times was the young gentleman who was sent to France
to learn the graces, with a view to making his fortune at Court, even as
his widowed mother sent George Villiers, afterwards Duke of Buckingham.
The Englishmen who travelled for "the complete polishing of their parts"
continued to visit Italy, to satisfy their curiosity, but it was rather
in the mood of the sight-seer. Only malcontents, at odds with their
native land, like Bothwell, or the Earl of Arundel, or Leicester's
disinherited son, made prolonged residence in Italy. Aspiring youth,
seeking a social education, for the most part hurried to France.
For it was not only a sense of being surrounded by enemies which during
the seventeenth century somewhat weakened the Englishman's allegiance to
Italy, but the increasing attractiveness of another country. By 1616 it
was said of France that "Unto no other countrie, so much as unto this,
doth swarme and flow yearly from all Christian nations, such a
multitude, and concourse of young Gentlemen, Marchants, and other sorts
of men: some, drawen from their Parentes bosoms by desire of learning;
some, rare Science, or new conceites; some by pleasure; and others
allured by lucre and gain.... But among all other Nations, there cometh
not such a great multitude to Fraunce from any Country, as doth yearely
from this Isle (England), both of Gentlemen, Students, Marchants, and
others."[205]
Held in peace by Henry of Navarre, France began to be a happier place
than Italy for the Englishman abroad. Germany was impossible, because of
the Thirty Years' War; and Spain, for reasons which we shall see later
on, was not inviting. Though nominally Roman Catholic, France was in
fact half Protestant. Besides, the French Court was great and gay, far
outshining those of the impoverished Italian princes. It suited the
gallants of the Stuart period, who found the grave courtesy of the
Italians rather slow. Learning, for which men once had travelled into
Italy, was no longer confined there. Nor did the Cavaliers desire exact
classical learning. A knowledge of mythology, culled from French
translations, was sufficient. Accomplishments, such as riding, fencing,
and dancing, were what chiefly helped them, it appeared, to make their
way at Court or at camp. And the best instruction in these
accomplishments had shifted from Italy to France.
A change had come over the ideal of a gentleman - a reaction from the
Tudor enthusiasm for letters. A long time had gone by since Henry VIII.
tried to make his children as learned as Erasmus, and had the most
erudite scholars fetched from Oxford and Cambridge to direct the royal
nursery. The somewhat moderated esteem in which book-learning was held
in the household of Charles I. may be seen in a letter of the Earl of
Newcastle, governor to Prince Charles,[206] who writes to his pupil:
"I would not have you too studious, for too much contemplation spoils
action, and Virtue consists in that." The Prince's model is to be the
Bishop of Chichester, his tutor, who "hath no pedantry in him: his
learning he makes right use of, neither to trouble himself with it or
his friends: ... reades men as well as books: ... is travell'd, which
you shall perceive by his wisdome and fashion more than by his
relations; and in a word strives as much discreetly to hide the scholler
in him, as other men's follies studies to shew it: and is a right
gentleman."[207]
Of pedantry, however, there never seems to have been any danger in Court
circles, either in Tudor or Stuart days. It took constant exhortations
to make the majority of noblemen's sons learn anything at all out of
books.
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