Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/362

Rh 342 ENGLAND [HISTOE.Y. Execu tion of Mary Stewart. Change in rela tions with France and Spain, Protest ant power worship were made criminal, though liable to the fate of treasoii and not of heresy. Plots of all kinds went on till the execution of Mary Stewart in 1587. After that time there was less material for plots ; but the persecution went on on both sides. But by this time the foreign relations of the kingdom had become even more important than the condition of things at home. At the death of Mary Tudor, England was at war with France and in close alliance with Spain. This state of things lasted during the early part of Elizabeth s reign. She helped the French Protestants; but she concluded peace in 1564. During the rest of her reign the old enmity towards France died out. Elizabeth was at one time almost ready to accept a Catholic husband; at another time she again encouraged the French Protestants. But the accession of Henry of Navarre made France and England friends. Henry and Elizabeth had a common enemy. As enmity against France died out, so friendship for Spain died out also. Philip, Elizabeth s first suitor, gradually changed into her most dangerous enemy, the assertor of the claims of Mary, and, after her death, her would- be avenger, and moreover the assertor of the claims of his own daughter as a remote descendant of John of Gaunt. The Armada, the dealings of England with the insurgents in the Netherlands, the expedition to Cadiz, are all events which stand out on the surface of English history. England England now stood cut as the great Protestant power of Europe, the the chief maintainer of the Protestant cause everywhere. In short, the reign of Elizabeth finally gave to England and English men their special religious character, as earlier times had given them their special political character. That special political character, overshadowed for a while by Tudor despotism, showed itself again towards the end of her reign. The England of the seventeenth century, free and Protest ant, was now fully formed. The course of the century of which Elizabeth only saw the opening was to win back the freedom of England, to confirm the national Protes tantism, and to take the first steps towards that religious toleration on both sides of which the age of Elizabeth had not dreamed. Discov- But another feature in the character of England was cries and added in the reign of Elizabeth. If England now took up distant a new an( j definite position as an European power, the first steps were also taken towards making her more than an European power. In the clays of Edward and Mary English commerce and maritime enterprise had a new range opened to them by the beginning of intercourse with Russia. That nation, great in earlier days on the Euxine, was now shut out from all southern and western outlets, and access to her one haven of Archangel could be had only by the Frozen Ocean and the White Sea. Under Elizabeth maritime enterprise, commercial and warlike, took a far wider range. American colonization did not as yet begin ; Indian do- niuion was yet more distant ; but it was in these times that the first steps were taken towards both. The seamen of England now broke into the preserved maritime empire of Spain, and gave the land which was to give birth to Wash ington a name in honour of their own virgin queen. The merchants of England, chartered as usual as a company, now first made their way to the great Indian continent, to behold, under the rule of Akbar, that religious toleration which Elizabeth denied to Catholic and Puritan. It is hard for us to conceive the effect which was made on men s minds by a change which was practically an enlargement of the bounds of the physical world. If it is absurd to set up the great seamen of Elizabeth s clay, Drake and Gilbert and Cavendish and Raleigh, as though they were faultless heroes, it is equally unfair to decry them as mere pirates. They were the natural creation of a new state of things. It was not theoretically justifiable, but it was in no way wonderful, if men of all nations deemed that, in new and barbarous com merce Lan guage the si teent! centu lands and seas, they were set free from the obligations of public law which bound them in their European homes. But one stain, deeper and more lasting, dates from Elizabeth s days. At home personal slavery had long been forgotten, and the last traces of villainage can now be dis cerned only by the most prying eyes. The distant enterprises of England now brought back in a new shape the shame of our earliest days. The kidnapping and selling of negroes Thes now became a chief branch of English commerce. And it trjule&amp;lt; must not be forgotten that, till the humane decisions of the last century, the negro, like the British captive or the English criminal of ancient times, was as much a slave on the soil of England as he was on the soil of America. The completed national character of England dates from the days of the Tudors, and mainly from the reign of Elizabeth. From this time, in dealing with the actors in English history, we seem, more thoroughly than in any earlier time, to be dealing with men who are in all things our own fellows. One main cause of this is that the language of the sixteenth century is the earliest form of English which an ordinary modern reader can understand without an effort. The handwriting of the sixteeenth century is harder to read than the handwriting of any age before or since. The spelling of the sixteenth century is more chaotic and unreasonable than the spelling of any age before or since. But the language itself, when taken out of its uncouth clothing, is in the main intelligible, even to those who have not made language a special study. The philologer sees that the language of the nineteenth century is the same, by unbroken personal unity, as the language of the fifth century. He sees that the changes which dis tinguish the language of the nineteenth century from the language of the fifth century were fully accomplished by the fourteenth. But all this -is for the philologer. The ordi nary reader, who reads merely for the matter or the style of his book, cannot understand the language of the fifth century at all; he can understand the language of the four teenth century only with an effort. But the language of the sixteenth century is clear to every one who reads with decent attention. It is near enough to the speech of our own times to be understood ; it is far enough removed from the speech of our own times to have an archaic flavour, venerable or quaint, according to the matter in hand and its treatment. The literature of the sixteenth century gives us the earliest English writings in prose and verse which we read simply as literature. Spenser and Shakespere, Hooker and Raleigh, stand to us in a different relation from Caedmon, or even from Chaucer. And, greater than all, the sixteenth century has given us, in our national prayer- book, in our national translation of the Bible, 1 models of the English tongue which, as long as they survive, will survive to rebuke its corrupters. For them we have to thank the reigns of Henry and of Edward. Henry first gave his people the Scriptures in their own tongue, and then restricted their use. But his gift went for more than his restriction. From that day to this, the English Bible has been the only literary, as well as the only religious, food of millions of Englishmen. The Puritan lived in the English Bible, as the medueval scholar had lived in the Latin Bible. That two great works of sixteenth century English have been familiar to us ever since, while no earlier writing has been commonly known in the like sort, it 1 The authorized version, as it stands, is, as every one knows, a work of the seventeenth century, not of the sixteenth. But it was the work of men whose minds had been formed in the sixteenth century, and. the translation of the sixteenth century was taken as its groundwork. Whenever it departs from that model, however much it may gain as a more accurate representation of the original, it loses as a piece of English and English rhythm. Compare the Psalms u. the translation of Henry s day and in that of the days of James. Eliza- lietha litera ture. The Englis Bihle.