Great Ralegh. Hugh De Sélincourt

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СКАЧАТЬ stone staircase at Cumnor and shuddered. The people did not like his way of cheapening their Queen's good name: they did not like the man who caused scandals to arise round her. In 1560 Anne Dowe of Brentford was imprisoned for asserting that Elizabeth was with child by Robert Dudley; and she was the first of a long line of offenders who were punished for the same assertion.

      And just as men hated Dudley for his arrogance, and for his daring to think even of setting himself beside their Queen, so they loved his nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, for the grace which his hand brought to everything which he touched. He fulfilled the ideal of Castiglione's Courtier. He was the antithesis of the rough, unmannered Dudley. In Dudley all the cruelty and ostentation and savage power of the time seem to find expression; whereas in Philip Sidney, all its grace and skill and poetry were manifest. Men vied with one another in his praises, men fought for the right to call him friend, and a woman became immortal by being "Sidney's sister." "Sidney, the Siren of this latter age," writes Barnefield; "divine Sir Philip," Michael Drayton calls him; and Ben Jonson, as though in defiance of the charge of exaggeration utters (you can hear him say it), "the godlike Sidney." Even the ribald Nash lowers his mad voice to the note of reverence, "Apollo hath resigned his Ivory Harpe unto Astrophel and he, like Mercury, must lull you a sleep with his musicke. Sleepe Argus, sleep Ignorance, sleep Impudence, for Mercury hath Io and onely Io Paean belongeth to Astrophel. Deare Astrophel, that in the ashes of thy Love livest againe like the Phoenix; o might thy bodie (as thy name) live againe likewise here amongst us; but the earthe, the mother of mortality hath snacht thee too soone into her chilled cold armes, and will not let thee by any meanes be drawne from her deadly imbrace; and thy divine Soule, carried on an Angels wings to heaven, is installed in Hermes place sole prolocutor to the Gods." His life was a poem, which all the men who lived with him, and all the men who knew his name, were great enough to read and to appreciate; his death is an example for all time. Fame with its common story cannot sully the brightness of the superb sacrifice of that superb self.

      Dudley expressed the presumptuous vitality of the Court, and Sidney its vital poetry. A little aloof from the Court, which he was apt to regard with kindly disdain at its frivolity, moved the staid figure of Burghley, the Lord High Treasurer of England, Elizabeth's great man of business, perhaps the finest political intelligence that has ever thought out a way for a country through the most complicated difficulties, at a time when disaster crouched ever ready to spring and involve that country in ruin.

      William Cecil had an absolute mastery over every detail; he possessed a genius for arrangement. Nothing escaped his notice. He was a kind of machine which attracted all the wild impulses of the time; they passed into the machine's mouth disordered, unarranged; and they passed out shaped, controlled by his slow inevitable will. As a statesman he appears hardly human in his freedom from all personality; he seems a mask hiding the brain of England, and regulating it to the only end where success could be. Men rose to fame fiercely struggling, and did brilliant acts or mad acts, and sank again or settled as the case might be; but always at the supreme head, always alert, always careful, impassive as some Eastern Buddha, sat the Lord Burghley, managing the affairs of the state, managing even the state's impulsive, whimsical mistress. His impassivity afflicted her at times, so that she played pranks on him, vainly endeavouring to upset his restraint and his dignity; but her pranks were hardly heeded. He was English to the solid backbone, and resisted unequivocally the rage of fashion that went out towards all that was foreign; and yet his foreign policy was unswerving and level-headed; he looked upon war as the last terrible resource of state-craft, in an age in which fighting was regarded as the highroad to glory, and was loved for its own wild sake. Elizabeth showed her knowledge of the right word when she called him her "spirit" and her "oracle"; and the courtiers their discernment of the obvious, when they called him "old fox." Together the two names describe him with some accuracy.

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