Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

before he was eight years old he wrote Latin letters to his father, "who was a prince of that stern severity that one can hardly think those about his son durst cheat him by making letters for him." The difficulty, however, of believing this is insuperable, nursed and fed as he was upon Latin. How thoroughly imbued with partiality must that historian be who asserts that, without the assistance and corrections of his preceptors, a prince of Edward's tender years could pen epistles in the Latin_tongue, interlarded with quotations from Erasmus, Job, Solomon, Ludovicus, Vives, St. Paul, Horace, Cicero, and Aristippus !* Admiration of this brilliant meteor, that blazed for so short a time above the horizon of history, has led Burnett to assure us "that Edward had studied the matter of the mint, with the exchange and value of money, so that he understood it well as appears by his journal. He also understood fortification, and designed well. He knew all the ports, both of his own dominions and of France and Scotland, and how much water they had, and what was the way of coming into them. He had acquired great knowledge in foreign affairs, so that he talked with the ambassadors about them in such a manner, that they filled all the world with the highest opinion of him that was possible, which appears in most of the histories of that age." From the first sentence, it might almost be imagined that Edward was capable of expounding the doctrines of political economy; and from the concluding one we are required to believe that a boy of fourteen could speak upon addressed to Sir Anthony St. Leger, but the other, though expressly stated to have been the production of this extraordinary boy, is attributed by Park to Decker. See note to Warton's History of English Poetry, vol. iv., p. 18, 19.

We have had, certainly, very surprising instances of juvenile acquirement of languages. William Wotton, who so distinguished himself by his book on ancient and modern learning, when a boy, could readily translate Latin, Greek and Hebrew. This he could do in his sixth year; and at thirteen he was acquainted with twelve languages.-See Monk's Life of Bentley, vol. i., p. 9. 10. It is curious, however, that while Burnett is so positive respecting the astonishing proficiency of Edward in classical learning, he should have been so sceptical about Catherine Parr's scholar-like attainments, as only to infer her knowledge of Latin from the fact of the young king addressing her, letter by letter, in that language. But the Bishop is in error here; for Strype has printed a Latin epistle of that queen to the Princess Mary. The opinion of the retainer and biographer of Wolsey respecting Edward is unquestionably entitled to much value: first, because it was delivered after Edward's death; and secondly, because Cavendish, being a staunch Roman Catholic, was not likely to run off into extravagant misrepresentations or conclusions in describing the beauties either of the reforming prince's person or mind. Yet hear his uncouth laudatory rhymes:

"In connying and wisdome Solomon's right heyer,
His wytt was so excellent, his sentence so profound.
Absolon in beawtie, his visage was fayer;

If he myght have lyved, there should not have been found,
A prince more excellent rayning on the ground."

Metrical Visions When enlightened foreigners who had visited the court of Edward were likewise so loud in his praises, posterity will hardly accuse his subjects of adulation. See the account of the young king in the Florentine Petruccio Ubaldini's description of England in the year 1551; Raumer, vol, ii., p.

71.

subjects of foreign policy like a man of business and an orator: a supposition which would be hyperbolical even to extravagance. His journal is certainly written with a clearness, simplicity, and precision, which bespeak those comprehensive talents that are not to be expected in a stripling. His letters, also, to his young friend, Barnaby Fitzpatrick, contain another example of the forwardness of the mental faculty. There is strong presumption, however, that the letter which he addressed to his sister Mary, exhorting her to abjure the errors of popery, was not his own production; since the princess could not help exclaiming, as she read it, "Ah! Mr. Cecil's pen has taken great pains here." Referring again to Edward's journal, we would say, in the temper of reprehension, that, if it be really his own composition, Burnett's humanity ought to have been shocked at the want of goodness and gentleness in it. Without a pang or sigh, this young prince could consign an uncle to the scaffold, whose only fault seems to have been that he wished to make himself the guardian of his crown and person, in the room of his brother, and to whose decapitation he thus most unfeelingly alluded in his journal "The Lord Sudley, Admiral of England, was condemned to death, and died in March ensuing." Two more passages in this celebrated diary give evidence that the heart of this young logician and theologian was but little alive to right notions on the destruction of life: "A certain Arian of the strangers, a Dutchman, being excommunicated by the congregation of his countrymen, was, after long examination, condemned to the fire."-" The Duke of Somerset" (his other uncle) "had his head cut off upon Tower Hill, between eight and nine o'clock." This unconcern about those executions, to borrow an expressions of Mr. Hallam's, "betokens the young prince to have had too much Tudor blood in his veins." But, though we cannot echo all Burnett's praises of this precocious boy, that he was a youth of great promise, is put out of all dispute by many contemporaneous testimonies. Old Latimer, whose temper was little disposed to flatter kings, allowed this unqualified panegyric to fall from his lips: "His Majesty hath more godly wit and understanding, more learning and knowledge, at this age, than twenty of his progenitors I could name had at any time of their lives." The boy who, from a single hint thrown out in a sermon on charity by another prelate, could meditate those glorious institutions of his reign, the foundation of Christ's Hospital for the education of poor children; of St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew for the relief of the sick; and Bridewell for a penitentiary,† must have been possessed of some of the exalted qualities of a patriot and a true Christian.

he was

* Burnett paints him en beau: but Collyer, perhaps, more to the life when he says, "his conscience was not always under a serviceable direction; tinctured with Erastian principles, and under wrong impressions as to church government. He seems to have had no notion of sacrilege, and-what is somewhat remarkable-most of the hardships were put upon ecclesiastics in the latter end of his reign, when his judgment was in the best condition-p. 331. † See Sir John Hayward's Life and Raigne of Edward VI., p. 169; and likewise a short account of the Royal Hospitals in Entick's Survey of London, Westminster, and Southwark, vol. ii., 34, 35.

Detesting, as we do, so much of the conduct of Mary, yet we cannot help remarking that Burnett has drawn such an appalling picture of her superstition and cruelty, that his account of this queen would justify the belief that, among other disgusting singularities connected with her character, was a keen relish for cutting off her subject's heads, and for converting her palaces into human slaughterhouses.* Now it is well known that the temper of the people whom she ruled had become so violent, by the religious and political crisis of the preceding reign, that nothing short of her adherence to the new religion would conciliate and satisfy them. Mary, however, having the taint of intolerance so deeply in her-which taint, be it remarked, her Protestant opponents fully shared-of course, was not prepared to please them so far as to renounce what she felt, not merely rested upon authority and presumption, but what had been inculcated upon her by education, and had been established by law. It is not difficult, then, to imagine her holding the opinion in perfect sincerity, awfully erroneous as it was, that to extirpate schism, by delivering over her Protestant subjects to the secular arm,† was a most righteous act. She was, in short, an honest, fearless, uncompromising bigot. But with respect to crimes which had no connexion with state affairs, there is ample evidence that she wished to have justice administered with clemency and equity; while in private life she was scrupulously moral, with a superiority of conduct which rendered her court a model of respectability and virtue. For even they who viewed the papal system with the same abhorrence as they did her bloody policy, hesitate not to acknowledge that she combined in her character some of the best feelings and sentiments of domesticity. Camden,‡ in enumerating her other virtues, eulogizes her compassion for the poor and liberality to the distressed; and Godwin, the unexceptionable purity of her conduct.§ The tyran

[ocr errors]

*If we are to believe the statement of an earlier historian of the Reformation, and who composed his history under equally strong party prejudices, her exterminating fury even exceeded that of Bonner," whom all generations," says Fuller (book viii.), "shall call bloody. "Their blood she caused to be poured forth like water in most parts of the kingdom, but no where more abundantly than in Bonner's slaughter-house.”—Heylin's Hist. of the Reform, preface, p. 3. † Burnett even insists that Mary endeavoured to establish the Inquisition in this country. See Introduction to the third volume of the History of the Reformation, p. xxix. While Dr. Lingard as stoutly denies the fact. In another passage he says, "arbitrary torture and secret informers seem to be two great steps made to prepare the nation for an Inquisition."-vol. iii., p. 247. With the council books before him, surely Burnett might have collected sufficient information to ascertain the fact, that the use of the rack was not confined to the reign of Mary.

[ocr errors]

Princeps apud omnes ob mores sanctissimos, pretatem in pauperes liberalitatem in nobiles, atque ecclesiasticos nunquam satis laudata, Britannia London, 1607, fol p. 130. Even the Protestant bishop has the candour to say, She was a woman of a strict and innocent life, that allowed herself few of the diversions with which courts abound."-Hist. of the Reform., vol. ii., p. 743, See also a similar statement from Faust, the Puritan secretary of Walsingham, apud Birch, i., p. 39.

S Mulier sane pia, clemens, moribusque castissimis, etusquaque laudanda, si religionis spectes.-Rev. Angl. Annal. Henry VIII., Edv VI., et Maria regnantibus. London, 1616, fol., p. 123.

nical persecutions of the Reformers by this queen have taken such fast hold of the sensitive imagination of Burnett, that, instead of speaking of her other actions and proceedings with the accuracy of a contemporary annalist, by drawing his materials from the fountain head, he has suffered erroneous conjectures and traditional fictions to usurp the place of facts; so that he has occasionally delineated Mary as if he had taken his information from that grave and creditable writer, who asserts that "she intended to make all the English women give suck to puppy dogs."

One instance, however, of fair dealing towards her, on the part of our historian, must not be passed over-his giving us a paper to the council, written in her own hand; from which we select a passage that will be thought worthy of being inscribed in letters of gold, by those who maintain that the cause of genuine piety can only be aided, and the true interests of religion powerfully asserted, by a reform in every part of our National Establishment: "She also vainly believed that many benefices should not be in one man's hand, but that every priest ought to look to his cure, and reside upon it. And she looked on the pluralities over England to be a main cause of the want of good preachers, whose sermons, if joined with a good example, would do much good; and without that, she thought that their services would profit little."

POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.

BY A FELLOW OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES.

WITCHCRAFT.-NO. II.

(Continued from p. 198.)

NEXT to Merlin in rank as well as in antiquity stands Michael Scott; who, though like Merlin called a wizard, was not accused of witchcraft, but of magic and alchemy, on which subjects he wrote many treatises which are said to be, or have been, buried with him at Melrose Abbey. That he was a man of profound and extensive learning is unquestionable, and there yet remain several works which he wrote at the request of the Emperor Frederic II., who much prtronized him. Alexander III. of Scotland, who made him a knight, and Edward II. of England, were among those who honoured him with their esteem. His grave, and the books it was thought to contain, are beautifully introduced by a mightier magician-Sir Walter Scott-in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel." The wonderful deeds of Michael Scott were, until the last few years, the favourite subjects of winter-evening tales among the Scottish peasantry, who never mentioned the name of their great enchanter but with terror and respect. Of the latter he was well worthy for his great and varied attainments. The Welch also, as well as the English and Scotch, boast their wizard. At a period rather later flourished Owen Glendower; and he, according to tradition, was really a wizard, that is, he derived his power from an infernal source. He is said to have made a compact with the devil, by virtue of which he

having all the benefit of supernatural power on earth, when he died, provided always the devil did not kill him, his soul was to be forfeited; and this was to take place whether he was buried in a church or out of a church. This singular agreement was properly signed and sealed and delivered on both sides. Owen Glendower had sovereignty over all the spirits of the air, and by their aid he became both great and famous; but he had not the slightest intention of performing his part of the agreement-he directed that after his death he should be buried neither in a church or out of a church, but under the church wall, so that the devil's precautions were all in vain, and he was cheated at last. This is not the spirit, at least the ordinary spirit, of withchcraft.

In common parlance, a witch was a poor aged woman, generally a widow; elderly maiden ladies seem seldom to have been suspected, though we have some instances of suspicion falling on younger ones. Now, though in legends, poems, and ballads, these beings make a very imposing figure, yet when we come to read of them in more sober records, we find them worthy only of the most sincere pity. Some poor old woman who was thought ugly, and who happened to have a black cat or a raven, was suspected of causing all the mischief which took place for miles around. Did a farmer lose his cattle, did a thunder storm turn his beer sour, did his butter turn out badly, or his mastiff grow mad, it must be the work of a witch; some persons vomited pins, and others were afflicted with rheumatism, and all through her incantations. This point being settled (for how could these things be without witchcraft ?), the next question was how to punish the witch, and to recover the bewitched. (we do not specify instances, for it will be found, on recurring to Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft," that all witches were accused of the same things). These two were inseparable, for when the witch was destroyed, the patients recovered of themselves. First, then, to prove that the unfortunate wretch was under the devil's especial protection (and truly the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel), they pricked her all over with pins, in order to find out the witch's mark, which was thought to be insensible; they then tied her hands together and, wrapping her in a sheet, plunged her into a pool of water-if the poor creature sank, she was innocent, and was commonly drowned; if she swam, she was a witch, and was either beaten or burnt to death on being taken out of the water. These monstrous customs were regularly authorized by law in the time of James I. and then there were regular witch-finders, whose business it was to hunt down poor old women, and sometimes poor old men ; and, as they were paid for every witch they found, it was their interest to put to death all the unfortunate objects of suspicion that fell into their hands. It is said that after having used a real pin for some time in their tortures, they would at last substitute a mock pin, which had the point sliding into a grove when it appeared to enter the flesh, such as is used by jugglers in their deceptions; so that if the previous torture failed to induce the poor wretches to confess, in order to shorten and mitigate their sufferings, they might convict them by means of this diabolical invention: for the old women, not feeling the pain which

« ElőzőTovább »