IV. 14. 1597. Oct. Oct. 24. Bacon and Blount propose to Essex the two courses most opposed to each other: Bacon the abandonment of his military pomp, of his opposition to the Queen, and the acceptance now and for ever of that great part which Leicester filled for so many years; Blount the pursuit of war and glory, so as to dazzle the multitude, overawe the Queen, find employments for his companions, and consolidate his personal power. Bacon would make him chief of the Protestant nation, Blount of a discontented and disloyal Roman Catholic sect. One asks him to be grave, discreet, and self-denying. The other fires his blood with maddening and dramatic hopes. He cleaves to Blount, who tempts him with the things for which his restless and evil nature pants. He begins to toy with treason. He admits Roman Catholics of sullied reputation and suspected loyalty into his confidence. He even interferes to protect from justice the traitor Sir John Smyth. 15. At the end of those four years for which Bacon compelled the Government to accept of subsidies, the money being spent, writs for a new parliament go out. Bacon now stands for Ipswich, the family county town, to represent which is the aim of his ambition; having for his colleague Michael Stanhope, a grand-nephew of Lady Ann. His kinsmen muster strong in Westminster. Anthony sits for Oxford, Nathaniel for Lynn; Henry Neville, his sister's son, for Liskeard; Sir Edward Hoby, his cousin, for Rochester; Sir Robert Cecil, also his cousin, for Herts. Benedict Barnham, of Cheapside, whose pretty little daughter, Alice, Bacon will years hence make his wife, is returned for Yarmouth, having represented Mine 15. Mem. of Stages of Bills in Parliament, Oct. 1597, S. P. O.; Willis, Not. Parl., iii. 137, 139, 140, 141, 142; D'Ewes, 549; Townshend, 102. MOTION ON THE STATE OF THE COUNTRY. 87 1597. Oct. head in the former Parliament. Raleigh sits for Dorset- IV. 15. shire; and Christopher Yelverton, the Speaker nominate, for Northants. Sir Christopher Blount, by command from the Earl of Essex, serves for Staffordshire. In this new session the member for Ipswich sits; not, as Lord Campbell writes, a burgess prostrate, penitent, under the royal ban, anxious by his silence and servility to efface the recollection of his former speech. No voice is raised so often or so loud as his. Again he speaks for ample grants; again he votes with the reforming squires; again he wages battle of privilege against the Privy Council and the House of Lords. He serves on the Committee of Monopolies. He seconds Sir Francis Hastings' motion for amending the penal laws. But the great contest of this session, the one that makes it memorable in English history, is fought on a bill of his own, framed on the treason of Sir John Smyth, and meant to arrest the decay of tillage, the perishing of the yeomen from the English soil. 16. Yelverton chosen Speaker, Bacon rises with a motion on the State of the Country. State of the Country means to him the relation of the people to the land. The population lives on the soil. Mining is in its cradle, though the iron ordnance of Sussex and Arden has been heard on the Rhine and the Theiss. Manufactures are few and scant, though the dyed wools of Tiverton and Dunster have begun to find markets on the Elbe and the Scheldt. To grow corn, to herd cattle, to brew ale and press cider, to shear sheep, to fell and carry wood, are the main occupations of every English shire. The farms are small and 16. Summary Articles of the Bill for Maintenance of Husbandry, Oct. 1597, S. P. O.; D'Ewes, 550-53; Bacon's History of the Reign of Henry VII., Works, vi. 94. Nov. 1597. Nov. IV. 16. many; the farmers neither rich nor poor. The breeder of kine, the grower of herbs and wheat, is a yeoman born; not too proud to put hand to plough, not too pinched to keep horse and pike. A link between the noble and the peasant, he is of the very thew and marrow of the state; a man to stand at your shoulder in the day of work or in the day of fight. This sturdy class is dropping the plough for the weaver's shuttle and the tailor's goose; the rage for enclosing woods and commons, for impaling parks, for changing arable land into pasture, for turning holdings for life into tenancies at will, having driven thousands of yeomen from fields and downs which their fathers tilled before the Conqueror came in. Whole districts have been cleared. Where homesteads smoked and harvests waved, there is now, in many parts, a broad green landscape, peopled by a shepherd and his dog. Where the maypole sprang, and the village green crowed with frolic, are now a sheepwalk and a park of deer. 17. The loss of this martial race, the bowmen of Cressy, the billmen of Boulogne, is a grievous weakness for the Crown; thinning the musters for defence, while swelling the materials for mutinies and plots. Nor has this change escaped the Jesuits, or those who live to watch and thwart the Jesuits. A paper of instructions for the Roman Catholic priests and gentry, On the means of recovering England to the Holy See, lays stress on the discontent caused by these enclosures of commons and village greens. Smyth used this argument at Colchester. The Catholic peers have not been slow to increase an evil which their party 17. Discourse of the Providence necessary to be had for the setting up of the Catholic Faith when God shall call the Queen out of this life, Aug. 1600, S. P. O.; Dr. James to Burghley, May 26, 1597, S. P. O.; Stillman to Cecil, Jan. 2, 1600, S. P. O. 1597. Nov. treats as a means of future good to the Church. Dr. IV. 17. James, the Dean of Durham, has had to warn Burghley of the consequences of this waste of tillage and population in the two shires of Durham and Northumberland; shires in which two or three Roman Catholic earls own nearly all the soil. The yeomen have embraced the national faith, while most of the old nobility cling to the foreign creed; and a fanatic like Percy or Seymour may often find a legal form of persecution in the pretence of converting his arable land into pasture, or of forming a park for deer. But if this rage for enclosure is sometimes abused into a means of sectarian spite, it is very far from being confined to the Roman Catholic lords. From Durham to Devon the tenants are chased from their farms that sheep may feed and stags disport. Ire fills and inflames the yeomen's veins. In every park wall they see a menace, in every fawn the substitute of a child. They throw down the pales and ensnare the deer. A youth of Stratford-upon-Avon kills his buck in Charlcote Park. A crowd from Enfield scours the preserves of Hatfield Chace. Every spark becomes his own Robin Hood, and haunches of venison smoke on the tables of Cheapside and Paternoster Row. To snare deer is, in all the popular comedies and songs, an heroic protest, not at all a crime. 18. Unlike the Jesuits and the Jesuitized peers, whose purpose it may be to thin the fibre and relax the power of England in the field, Bacon seeks to arrest this evil in its germ. Placed by his birth between the nobles and the commons, he shares neither the pride of the superior nor 18. Discourse of Providence necessary to be had for the setting up of the Catholic Faith, Aug. 1600, S. P. O. 1597. Nov. IV. 18. the envy of the inferior rank. His genius, too, is singularly free from taint of sect or class. Wholly English, his glory is to reconcile classes through reform, to strengthen the Crown by justice. Concord, tolerance, loyalty at home; sway, extension, trade abroad; these are the points at which he aims. Not so the Jesuits. They have begun to despair of aid from Spain; after the wreck of the Armada, the sack of Cadiz, they fear lest England may be found too strong for subjection to Rome by either foreign guile or foreign steel. They turn their eyes, therefore, to the men with sore hearts and brawny arms, and, taking note of the discontent among the yeomen, begin to count with confidence on the approaching days of civil war. 19. Bacon's plan for staying the decline of population is to convert this new grass-land into arable, to put these new parks under the plough. A committee of the House of Commons, named to consider this plan, votes in its favour, when the House commissions its author to frame and introduce his bill. He brings in two bills: one for the Increase of Tillage and Husbandry; one for the Increase of People; which provide that no more land shall be cleared without special reason and a special licence. They provide that all land turned into pasture since the Queen's accession, no less a period than forty years, shall be taken from the deer and sheep within eighteen months, and restored to the yeoman and the plough. 20. If the Commons pass these bills at once, the Peers receive them with amazement. Ask the Shrewsburys, 19. Summary Articles of the Bill for Maintenance of Husbandry, Oct. 1597, S. P. O.; Breviate of a Bill entitled 'An Act for the Increase of People for the Service and Defence of the Realm,' Dec. 20, 1597, S. P. O. 20. Lords' Jour., ii. 212, 217. |