All In All, Academies Seemed To Be
The Solution Of Preparing For Life Those Who Were Destined To Shine At
Court.
The problem had been felt in England, as well as in France.
In
1561, Sir Nicholas Bacon had devised "Articles for the bringing up in
virtue and learning of the Queens Majesties Wardes."[254] Lord Burghley
is said to have propounded the creation of a school of arms and
exercises.[255] In 1570, Sir Humphrey Gilbert drew up an elaborate
proposal for an "Academy of philosophy and chivalry,"[256] but none of
these plans was carried out. Nor was that of Prince Henry, who had also
wanted to establish a Royal Academy or School of Arms, in which all the
king's wards and others should be educated and exercised.[257] A certain
Sir Francis Kinaston, esquire of the body to Charles I., "more addicted
to the superficiall parts of learning - poetry and oratory (wherein he
excell'd) - than to logic and philosophy," Wood says, did get a licence
to erect an academy in his house in Covent Garden, "which should be for
ever a college for the education of the young nobility and others, sons
of gentlemen, and should be styled the Musaeum Minervae."[258] But
whatever start was made in that direction ended with the Civil War.
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.
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