However, The Idea Of Setting Up In England The Sort Of Academy Which Was
Successful In France Was Such An Obvious One That It Kept Constantly
Recurring.
In 1649 a courtly parasite, Sir Balthazar Gerbier, who used
to be a miniature painter, an art-critic, and Master of Ceremonies to
Charles I., being sadly thrown out of occupation by the Civil War,
opened an academy at Bethnal Green.
There are still in existence his
elaborate advertisements of its attractions, addressed to "All Fathers
of Noble Families and Lovers of Vertue," and proposing his school as "a
meanes, whereby to free them of such charges as they are at, when they
send their children to foreign academies, and to render them more
knowing in those languages, without exposing them to the dangers
incident to travellers, and to that of evill companies, or of giving to
forrain parts the glory of their education."[259] But Gerbier was a
flimsy character, and without a Court to support him, or money, his
academy dissolved after a gaseous lecture or two. Faubert, however,
another French Protestant refugee, was more successful with an academy
he managed to set up in London in 1682, "to lessen the vast expense the
nation is at yearly by sending children into France to be taught
military exercises."[260] Evelyn, who was a patron of this enterprise,
describes how he "went with Lord Cornwallis to see the young gallants do
their exercise, Mr Faubert having newly railed in a manege, and fitted
it for the academy. There were the Dukes of Norfolk and Northumberland,
Lord Newburgh, and a nephew of (Duras) Earl of Feversham.... But the
Duke of Norfolk told me he had not been at this exercise these twelve
years before."[261] However, Faubert's could not have been an important
institution, since in 1700, a certain Dr Maidwell tried to get the
Government to convert a great house of his near Westminster into a
public academy of the French sort, as a greatly needed means of rearing
gentlemen.[262]
But all these efforts to educate English boys on the lines of French
ones came to nothing, because at the close of the seventeenth century
Englishmen began to realize that it was not wise for a gentleman to
confine himself to a military life. As to riding as a fine art, his
practical mind felt that it was all very well to amuse oneself in Paris
by learning to make a war-horse caracole, but there was no use in taking
such things too seriously; that in war "a ruder way of riding was more
in use, without observing the precise rules of riding the great
horse."[263] He could not feel that artistic passion for form in
horsemanship which breathes from the pages of Pluvinel's book Le
Maneige Royal[264] in which magnificent engravings show Louis XIII.
making courbettes, voltes, and "caprioles" around the Louvre, while a
circle of grandees gravely discuss the deportment of his charger. Even
Sir Philip Sidney made gentle fun of the hippocentric universe of his
Italian riding master:
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