ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR DR.

MAGDA TEODORESCU

A BRIEF COURSE IN ENGLISH CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION

LECTURE 1: SOME REMARKS CONCERNING ENGLAND IN ROMAN TIMES AND DURING EARLY MIDDLE AGES

I. 1. Introduction Unlike other European peoples, as we know them today, some of the ancient inhabitants of today Great Britain, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic, still live on their territories. For instance, the Celts live and speak their language in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but of course, not the original one. Before the Romans advent, the Celtic tribes were always at strife with each other; in fact, they dominated much of Europe in the last six centuries B.C., expanding up to todays Romania as well, and were known as both skilful warriors and craftsmen, which comes as no surprise. They used to live in treves (hamlets) with timber, wattles structures covered with mud, which could be easily destroyed. Valuable information about the Celts was provided by Julius Caesar following his conquest of Britain in 43 A. D. However, the Romans never occupied Ireland and Wales. The Celtic life was mainly focused on warfare and less on cultural life. In the 8th century AC they invaded Scotland, inhabited at that time by the Pitcs, and conquered it. So, when we refer to Celtic traces in England, we have to consider Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Around the time of Christ, Cunobelinus (Cymbeline) was their king made by W. Shakespeare a main character of his play (the only play dedicated to ancient England, whose story was read by Shakespeare in Raphael Holinsheds Chronicles [1577], who in his turn, took it from the famous history of Geoffrey of Monmouths Historia Regum Britanniae [1136]. However, besides the name, the play has nothing to do with the legend/history of this king). Cymbeline is also mentioned by Dio Cassius and Suetonius as The king of the Britons (Britannorum rex), and is a character in Welsh legends.

2. The Romans in Britain

When the Romans arrived, they found here several tribes that had their own organization. There were leaders, slaves, and priests, called Druids, who were extremely powerful in their society; for instance, if a Druid excommunicated a member of the tribe, he/she would be eliminated forever.

They had a lunar calendar and their time unit, the fortnight, is still used in English, weeks. The Roman occupation the meaning two

occurred

between

coming of the Celts and the coming of the Saxons. Unlike the Saxons, Celts, and Dance who came over to slaughter or expel the inhabitants and settle in their place, the Romans made an effort to induce their Western subjects to assimilate Latin life in all its aspects. The British historians agree that the Britons inherited practically nothing from the Romans, except for a good amount of infrastructure, architectural, and design patterns, I would say. However, Hadrian Wall did help the locals through centuries owing to its defense capacities. Moreover, architecture in the real sense of the word, appeared for the first time in the island with the Romans. Fine public buildings, both religious and secular, were built and embellished with statues and carved relieves. The walls were painted and the floors were of tesserae (square mosaic tiles) set in various designs.
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The Romans brought, it seems, a whole lot of their civilization facilities. Their roads were built to transport goods to Dover and then to the continent. The most famous is known as Watling Street ("Item a Londinio ad portum Dubris") which had been used before by the Britons and paved by the Romans. Towns developed on former castra (sing. castrum), a term present in locations like Lancaster, Gloucester, Winchester, etc. In matters of craftsmanship, the pottery for the table was embellished with a wealth of design. Moreover, there was a connection between the Celtic and Roman craftsmen. The former deserted their curvilinear patterns (much enjoyed by the 19th and 20th century artists) for the new classical style, and yet carried on some of their old tradition. An example of it is the Gorgons head, from the pediment of the temple of Sulis-Minerva at Bath (Bath Museum).

Even when the Romans deserted the island, a mixture of Roman-Celtic designs survived. Modified to suit the Nordic taste, these took their place in the pattern-books of Anglo-Saxon craftsmen. Obvious pattern traditions could also be traced in the medieval illuminations of the gospels. Recent archeological findings point to the migration of European population during the late Roman period. Thus, the Journal of Archeological Science (volume 33, 2006) contains an article about a burial place from Hampshire, southern England. By

appealing

to

scientific

methods, the research team1 discovered that the migrants had come there from the Danube region. Interesting, isnt it?

3. London a Roman city Let us consider now some facts regarding the history of London and its origin as a city. Finds have been made in the river bed, which suggest that the first edition of London Bridge may have been erected in timber before the Roman Conquest. There has been widely debated whether the name of the city has Celtic or Welsh origins. For instance, Geoffrey of Monmouth argues that the city was conquered by king Lud and the city was named after him. Modern linguists also think that there must have had a Celtic-Welsh origin. However, scholars have generally accepted it is a Roman name, Londinium, since references had been found both in Roman and Greek sources of the day. Moreover, London was not a great center of Celtic civilization before the Roman conquest. There was a forest and a marsh that covered much of the area. It was the Romans who found out the geographic potential of the place. So, they had roads built to connect London with the rest of the country. Moreover, the Roman walls enclosed an area corresponding very closely to the walls of the City in medieval times, which were in fact only the Roman walls restored.

4. The Nordic Roots Another important chapter in Englands history is the settlement of the Nordic peoples, the Anglo-Saxons, the Jutes, the Danes, and Norsemen. They started to plunder the

Department of Archeology, University of Nottingham.

coast of Roman Britain before 300 A. D. and the conquest was completed in 1020 by King Canute, who reconciled the kindred races of the Saxons and Danes. The gods of the Anglo-Saxons were those of Germanic mythology: Tiw, Woden, Thor, and the goddess Freya, still present in four days of the week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Under the Anglo-Saxons, the country was divided into shires governed by aldermen, shire-reeves (from which comes todays word sheriff) and a bishop. Another institution was the Kings Council, known as Witan, the ancestor of century-old Privy Council. The Witan is also the ancestor of the medieval parliament. Now, if compared to the Goth and Frank invasions, in Saxon England city life, Christian religion (later restored) and Roman-Celtic language all disappeared. It took almost one thousand and five hundred years to re-establish the benefits of the Roman civilization. So, as G. M. Trevelyan, the last Whig-tradition historian, points out: The first result of the conquest was the loss of the crafts, science, and learning of Rome. However, the withdrawn Celts, once civilized, became barbarous, while the Saxons grew more civilized. Nonetheless, the Romans left behind three things as permanent legacies the traditional site of London, the Roman roads, and Welsh Christianity. (p. 51) Romes missionaries kept coming to Wales, and among them the famous Saint Germanus of Auxerre, a former Roman soldier, who won a battle against the Picts and Saxons. Similarly, the Celtic Christianity developed in Cornwall.

5. Christianity, Arts and Architecture Some authors believe that the Christian conquest of the island primarily meant the return of Mediterranean (i.e., Roman) civilization in a new form and with a new

message. Two figures are of utmost importance: Augustine of Canterbury (circa first third of the 6th century 26 May 604), responsible for the Christianization of the British, and Theodore of Tarsus (602 19 September 690) the first Archbishop of Canterbury to be invested by Rome, following the Synod of Whitby in 664. They brought
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here a hierarchy similar to the former Roman Empire, and interestingly enough, the English kings borrowed forms and policies fitted to the need of their early state. In Ireland a tremendously important role was played by Saint Patrick who brought to Ireland the Latin language and the scholarly work. Some authors think that the acceptance of Christianity in Ireland as later in England was in part due to the admiration felt by the barbarians for the Empire even in its fall, and for all things appertaining to Rome. It is worth noting that the Irish did not imitate the Roman hierarchy, thus theirs was not parochial, it was monastic mainly, and this is due to their tradition established by St Patrick. As a rule, the normal Irish monastery was connected with a single tribe and acknowledged no ecclesiastical superior, even refusing Romes authority. Yet, this monasticism cannot be compared to the continental one. For instance, Ireland consisted of a congregation of hermits living each in his own beehive hut of wattle, clay and turf. They were hermits, scholars, artists, warriors, and missionaries. They would go and preach copy and illuminate manuscripts in monasteries or seek for more complete seclusion like St Cuthbert, who left the remote Lindisfarne for the Farne Islands. It is to them that the Irish and British owe the wonderful manuscript art of Lindisfarne Gospel or the Book of Kells wherein Celtic and Saxon nature ornamentation were blended in perfect harmony with southern Christian traditions. Moreover, far from the Papal censorship, they revived the knowledge of classical secular literature, which had almost died in Western Europe. Lindisfarne Bible

Book of Kells

If we cannot speak about a proper architecture earlier than the 11 century, Anglo-Saxon or Celtic churches are left are some reasons to it. Firstly, most of made of wood, except for the ones in were made of local stone.
th

secular not either. them Ireland many There were that

Saxon Church at Bardwell

8

Lindisfarne Abbey

Bosham Church

St Laurence: Bradford-on-Avon Secondly, the Normans demolished them just to rebuild them after the conquest. However, a handful has remained. The typical Anglo-Saxon church has a simple plan: two rectangles of unequal size linked by an arch, with a smaller rectangle to the east. An additional chamber or porticus could be attached to the church. The buildings tended to be of a much greater height than width, as at Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. The windows were small and round-headed, set high in the walls. Interiors were often decoratively painted, with little architectural ornament. The external decoration was often elaborate, usually pilaster-work (vertical strips of stone on the outside walls). The exterior might also have round-headed or triangular blank arcading. In some of these churches, as it happened in most parts of Europe, the builders used bricks from the Roman ruins or, as it is the case of the crypt at Hexam, Northumberland, and the abbey
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built by Wilfrid in the 7th century, using stone from the ruined Hadrians Wall. And there are other examples in Yorkshire.

Bayeux Tapestry As to the other arts, there are two examples that have been known so far. Firstly, St Cuthbert Vestments in Durham Cathedral. Secondly, the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry, which is a long strip of linen, embroidered in colored wools with lively, detailed scenes from the life of King Harold, the battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest. The tapestry is exhibited in Bayeux, Normandy, yet there is a Victorian replica in Reading, Berkshire.

II. The Norman Conquest and its Outcome 1. Introduction It did not take long after King Canute united Anglo-Saxon tribes at strife, that what we know as Great Britain today was conquered by the Normans. Culturally, the Canute kingdom was civilized due to Christian culture but it lacked organization. Thus, England was invaded by the most highly organized continental state of the day (p. 96), which also sustained the Church power. The Normans brought to England the luminaries of the day, like Lanfranc of Pavia and Anselm of Aosta, who became Archbishops of Canterbury. Moreover, Lanfranc and Anselm brought the knowledge of Roman and Canon Law, and the latest theology and philosophy of the day. Remember that that happened before the age of Universities, when the monasteries served as major centers of learning. At the same time, architecture was already laying its massive impact on the Norman landscape. You do not have to imagine that the average Norman aristocrat was a man of letters, a civilized person (in fact, at that time you could find
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such people only among the clergymen). The Normans were as barbaric as the AngloSaxons or Danes who, under Canute incorporated England into his Nordic Empire. Sometimes their methods of warfare were as cruel as ever. These Christians converts were as ruthless and primitive as their Viking ancestors were.

2. Edward the Confessor and his role in the development of London; William the Conqueror and the outcomes of the invasion Though less important as a political figure, Edward the Confessor, the half monk AngloSaxon king, (one of the first of Britains kings who grew up in exile in a monastery in France) was the one who prepared for Westminster the high place that it would hold in ecclesiastical history and its supreme place in the political development of England. He moved his residence on the rural island of thorns to be near the church he was building to St Peter. Besides, during his reign London regained the place it held in the Roman times, that of a great center of North European commerce. As concerns Westminster Abbey, which plays a tremendously important role in the history of England, one should notice that on its site there had been a Benedictine Monastery. The first monks were brought to Westminster in about 960 AD by St Dunstan, the then Bishop of London. No trace of the building to which they came has been found. Edward the Confessors Abbey was consecrated on December 28, 1065 and one year later, following the battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror forced his way and reached the Abbey for coronation on Christmas Day. In fact, William, the so-called Duke of Normandy, was a bastard, and it was through a chain of tricks and force that he deprived Harold, the rightful heir of the Confessor, of his throne, and got hold of the crown.

Now let us consider some consequences of the Norman Conquest. Firstly, William the Conqueror chased away the Anglo-Saxon priests and replaced them with French ones. During his reign, Lanfranc, whom I mentioned before, was his right hand.
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Naturally, continental architecture was brought to England by Norman builders who hastened to replace the largest Saxon churches with more magnificent structures. In fact, little has remained from the Anglo-Saxon buildings. Another result of the Conquest was the making of the English language. The language was spoken and written by King Alfred and Bede (the most important historian of the early medieval times), was despised as a peasants jargon, the talk of ignorant serfs. Now the clergy talked Latin and the gentry talked French. Some think it was a chance for the language as such because it lost its clumsy inflexions and elaborate genders, acquiring the grace, suppleness, and adaptability which are among its chief merits. At the same time, it was enriched by many French words and ideas. The English vocabulary is mainly French in words relating to war, politics, justice, religion, hunting, cooking and art. As for architecture, it is only partially French. I will gladly quote Trevelyans words on this matter: It is symbolic of the fate of the English race itself after Hastings, fallen to rise nobler, trodden under foot only to be trodden into shape. (p. 117)

3. Some facts about Norman Art and Architecture in England The Norman Conquest had little immediate effect on the style of English illumination I referred to earlier, but there was some influence on details. Some decorative features became more common, such as historiated initial letters (decorated with figures of men and animals), and inhabited scrolls, showing arabesques of foliage with animals inhabiting the branches.

During the first half of the 12th century a new style, the Romanesque, entered the country. This grew up alongside the surviving Anglo-Saxon style. It derived from Byzantium and the East and its characteristics were firmness of line, boldness of execution, and a rigid, monumental dignity in the portrayal of the human figure. A rare
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example surviving from this time is the wall-painting in St Anselm Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral, namely St Paul and the Viper. The most important English contribution to Romanesque painting is the development of the technique of pictorial narrative and of a complete cycle of ceremonial Bibles which were produced in the 12th century, in particular the Winchester Bible (Winchester Cathedral), the Lambeth Bible from Canterbury (Lambeth Palace), and the Bury Bible (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge). They all are the greatest achievements in European painting in the 12th century. At the end of the Norman period, they won for England the pre-eminence in the graphic arts which in sculpture belonged to France.

The Norman or Romanesque style in architecture is magnificent in scale, simple and inventive. Today we cannot see the churches as they were then. However, three large churches have stood as they were in Norman times: the cathedrals of Durham, Norwich, and Peterborough.

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Durham Cathedral, considered as one of the finest Romanesque churches in Europe, was begun by Bishop William of St Carilief in 1093 and completed by 1133, and it was the first large building in northern Europe to be ribvaulted in stone. Formally, it has stood so, I would say, but changes of details still occur.

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A good example is the stained glass window on the theme of the Last Supper (called Daily Bread) painted in the eighties of the last century by Mark Angus.

As to castle building, the first Norman forts were simple earth mounds with ditches and palisades. Their characteristic feature is the square Norman keep combining fortress and residence functions. Two examples survive from the 11th century: Colchester, Essex, and the white Tower in the Tower of London, completed by 1097. It is a fourstorey building divided by an internal wall into two parts. One half of the building was again subdivided to the plain but beautiful Chapel of St John, which is the oldest complete Norman church in England.

Chapel of St John

III. Some Facts about the English History in the Middle Ages 1. Introduction

The medieval period begins about the time of the First Crusade (1096), which also marks the first signs of anti-Semitism in Europe. Society at large consisted on the one
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hand of the disintegrated secular society of feudal barons and knights, each with an outlook limited to his province or his manor, while on the other hand there was the panEuropean Church, tightly organized from Rome. Furthermore, since the clergy enjoyed an almost complete monopoly of learning and clerkship, the control of Church over State in the early Middle Ages was very great. If for a period of time it was the king who appointed the Bishops, for instance, in the end it was the Pope who had the last word, yet with the tacit recommendation of the king. Some think that as compared to other religions, Christianity was more dynamic in the Middle Ages, and helped the transformation of society, from uniformity to variety, from the preeminence of the knight to that of the craftsman and merchant, from the hegemony of priesthood to lay emancipation, from feudal cosmopolitanism to national monarchy. Behind the fortified walls of the monasteries the monks were re-interpreting the works of Plato and Aristotle, while beyond the very same walls there was barbarism mixed with flashing lights of civilization. After the Norman Conquest, England acquired great institutions: representative assemblies, universities, juries. Some of these institutions, like the universities, the legal profession, the city guilds and companies, and Parliament itself, had their origin or analogy elsewhere because they were characteristic products of medieval Christendom as a whole. But the English Common Law was a development peculiar to England. Parliament and the Common Law gave England in the end a political life of her own in strong contrast to the later developments of Latin civilization.

2. Major Kings You should not imagine that England was the land of milk and honey, of stories of knights courting ladies, or ladies waiting for their knights back from the crusade. The worst happened during the conflict between Stephen of Blois, a distinguished knight, and Matilda, wife of the great Plantagenet Count, Geoffrey of Anjou. Their fights torn the country apart. For instance, an English monk wrote about the tortures invented to oppress the common people. They took those whom they suspected to have goods, by night and by day, seizing both men and women, and they put them in prison for their
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gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable, for never were any martyrs tormented as these were. Finally, an agreement was reached: Stephen was to wear the crown till his death, while Matildas son was to succeed as Henry II (1154-89). He was a great king, the first who tried to separate the church and secular powers. He had an administrative mind trained in the best European learning institutions of his day. He was not merely Duke of Normandy but the ruler of Western France. By marriage, diplomacy, and war, the House of Anjou had accumulated such vast possessions that the monarchy at Paris and the Holy Roman Empire were of less account.

Map of England under Henry II

Henrys ever-moving court was filled with men of business, pleasure, and scholarship from every land in Western Europe. During his reign and that of his sons, the English knight became less interested in fighting, because he could buy the military service through what was known as shield money. So, more and more knights turned into what came to be known as the country gentleman. For these reasons the stone castle, typical of Stephens reign was gradually replaced by the stone manor house, typical of the Plantagenet era (1154-1485). The movement was hastened by Henry IIs demolition of unlicensed castles and his unwillingness to grant new licenses. The donjon-keep was replaced by a high-ceilinged stone hall, the lineal descendant of the high timber hall of the Anglo-Danish thong. In front of it there was a walled courtyard partly surrounded by buildings. The manor house was only to be entered through the gateway of the courtyard, and was often protected by a moat. That was true for southern and midland counties, while on the Welsh or
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Scottish borders, there dwelt the Marcher Lords in high castles. They participated in the chief fights during the troublesome times of the Plantagenet period.

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There is one significant fact that distinguishes the English upper class from the continental one. The feudal law of primogeniture, or the right to the land of the first born, turned into an advantage, because the other sons were sent out into the world to seek for their fortune. Unlike the continental upper class, who married inside their own order, and despised merchants and commerce, the English never became a closed caste, and that was a rapid way of escaping from feudalism. The great benefit of Henrys reign was the legal reform, that is, a native system common to the whole land, in place of the various provincial customs. It meant a step forward towards the emancipation from the feudal and ecclesiastical courts. He established the jury system that became the boast of England, contrasting the

French procedure, where torture was freely used. Yet, Henry wished greater power and control over the Church and refused to become vassal to the Pope a thing that goes like a red thread through the English history, culminating with Henry VIIIs act. In 1162, Henry II made his friend Thomas chancellor a Beckett, since his 1155,

Archbishop of Canterbury. However, when the latter became archbishop, he refused to give up any of the Churchs power. The word goes that when the ill-tempered Henry heard about it, he shouted: Will none of these cowards rid me of this priest. And his knights, like any of the contemporary boot-licking officers, took him at his word and went to Canterbury. On 29 December 1170, they killed the Archbishop while he was praying. The peoples reaction was so strong that soon he was made a saint. Moreover, Henry himself went to Canterbury and had himself whipped. The cult of Thomas a Beckett was the major one throughout Europe of that time.

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King Richard the Lion-Hearted (1189-99) distinguished himself in the Third Crusade as the greatest of knight-errant, the popular figure in the Middle Ages. He took with him other men of an adventurous disposition, but not the solid part of the baronage. As for the English common folk, the emotions of the Third Crusade touched them just enough to produce some shocking pogroms of Jews, of which the one in York was appalling. To put it briefly, Richard left England at the mercy of his treacherous brother, John. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, whom Richard had appointed, backed by the official baronage, the Mayor and citizens of London, suppressed Johns treason and purchased Richards deliverance from the Vienna prison into which his fellow crusaders had thrown him. But he had just returned home that he fled again and never returned to England.

King John (1199-1216) had no broad political strategy or foresight. He extorted money from all classes of his subjects and then spent it in clumsy attempts to defend his inheritance against the kings of France. The loss of Normandy to Philip Augustus took place in 1204, and ten years later, his scheme to recover it through a grand European coalition against France was shipwrecked by the defeat of his German allies. King John had problems with the Pope as well (he struggled with Pope Innocent III over the election of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, to which he eventually surrendered). In The Life and Death of King John by W. Shakespeare, King John sadly notices: It is the curse of kings to be attended By slaves that take their humours for a warrant To break within the bloody house of life, And on the winking of authority To understand a law, to know the meaning Of dangerous majesty, when, perchance, it frowns More upon humour than advisd respect.
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Oscar Wilde once wrote that children should learn history from Shakespeares historical plays. Yet Shakespeare himself missed to dramatize one important event of the Middle Ages: Magna Charta. An important role in the constitutional making, representing the tension between the king and the people, was played by Magna Charta, the first English Constitution that led in the end to yet undreamt of liberties for all. More than the barons, it was Archbishop Stephen Langton whose brain and moral strength helped the movement. His action was all the more remarkable considering that Pope Innocent III who had supported him to be appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, disagreed with him and backed instead King John and declared Magna Charta null and void. The new English baronial policy, as designed in Magna Charta, was meant to obtain public liberties and to control the king through the Common Law, baronial assemblies, and alliance with other classes. It was the first text setting a democratic legal law in general. Here how Article 1 sounds: In the first place we have conceded to God, and by this our present charter confirmed for us and our heirs for ever that the English church shall be free, and shall have her rights entire, and her liberties inviolate; and we wish that it be thus observed. This is apparent from the fact that we, of our pure and unconstrained will, did grant the freedom of elections, which is reckoned most important and very essential to the English church, and did by our charter confirm and did obtain the ratification of the same from our lord, Pope Innocent III., before the quarrel arose between us and our barons. This freedom we will observe, and our will is that it be observed in good faith by our heirs forever.

We have also granted to all freemen of our kingdom, for us and our heirs forever, all the underwritten liberties, to be had and held by them and their heirs, of us and our heirs for ever: Naturally, not all the terms used then have preserved the same meaning. For instance, free and freemen have to be understood as follows:
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Free here, particular liberty to obey the canon law of the Western Church which, amongst other things, insisted on ecclesiastical elections being free from lay pressure. [Article 1] it should be understood that the Church did not want the State to interfere with its own rules. Freeman those of free status in the eyes of the law (that is, not villeins2) and as such having certain rights denied to villeins, such as access to the Kings courts in certain actions, freedom to move about and marry and exemption from certain onerous duties. [Article 1] One interesting aspect, as it appears in Magna Charta is the problem of Jews, which the authors gave special attention, meaning that that was a hot issue and the population had to be educated: And if any one die indebted to the Jews, his wife shall have her dower and pay nothing of that debt; and if any children of the deceased are left underage, necessaries shall be provided for them in keeping with the holding of the deceased. The debt shall be paid out of the residue , save the service due to feudal lords. Let debts due to others than Jews be dealt with in similar manner. As to architecture, we find here the first reference to castles which: before the reign of Henry II even major castles were mostly built of wood, as were the less important buildings and auxiliary defences long after his time. The reference sounds rather funny today: Neither we nor our bailiffs shall take, for our castles or for any other of our works, wood which is not ours, except with agreement from the owner of that timber. Throughout the 13th century, the struggle for the Charter, with its constant reissues, revisions, infringements, and reassertions, was the battleground of parties, until the Edwardian Parliaments were fully established, yet the Charter remained in the foreground of mens thoughts. However, when the Parliament was established, and in the 16th century, for instance, the Charter was out of fashion. Shakespeares King John

Etym. Latin villanus. Meaning a sort of serf. There were two types, one assigned to the manor, the other to the lord and thus transferable from one to another. A newer meaning, though spelled differently, is that of a wicked person.
2

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shows that the author knew little about it. But when, under James I, Prince and people again began to take up opposing ground, Magna Charta came quickly back as the goddess of English freedom. It always happened so when the battle for freedom was looming. The name parliament was firstly applied during Henry IIIs reign to the feudal assemblies and kings Council. It carried no idea of election or representation. That particular Parliament was a revolutionary assembly to which only those Barons were summoned who were of Simons party, but it set a precedent for the summoning of burghers, imitated more closely the Parliament of Edward I (Apud Trevelyan). Edward I (1272-1307). It was during his reign that the Parliament was established. I would like to insist here on Trevelyans opinion of the nature of the English Parliament: No man made it, for it grew. It was the natural outcome, through long centuries, of the common sense and the good nature of the English people, who have usually preferred committees to dictators, elections to street fighting, and talking shops to revolutionary tribunals. (p. 152) And heres another valid remark, in my opinion: The English people have always been distinguished for the Committee sense, their desire to sit round and talk till an agreement or compromise is reached. This national peculiarity was the true origin of the English Parliament. (p. 153) There is one essential fact that characterized the Parliament life: it abolished the distinctions of feudalism. The knights of the shire, a semi-feudal class were acting as elected representatives of the rural yeoman, and were sitting cheek by jowl with the citizens of the boroughs. Neither was any House of the Clergy formed as part of the English Parliament. They voluntarily abandoned their seats among the Commons and the Lords. That explains why the English couldnt understand what in the world the

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French Revolution was about, although they had their own civil war more than a hundred years before *

Ireland, Wales, and Scotland What happened to Ireland during the period after the Conquest? It mainly remained disorganized, while the majority of its inhabitants preferred the country life to town life. Their towns were easily captured and transformed into English ones. The citizens of Bristol were given the right to inhabit Dublin. Dublin Castle, first built by the Vikings, became the centre of Saxon rule in Ireland from the 12th century. To put it briefly, England proved too weak to conquer and govern Ireland, but strong enough to prevent her from learning to govern herself. It is significant that the island that once was the lamp of learning in a barbarous Europe, had no university when the Middle Ages came to an end. Before the coming of the Anglo-Normans, the Welsh had been a pastoral rather than an agricultural people. They lived rather in huts than in towns and villages, that is, they did not have a community life. When the occupation occurred and they saw their valley dominated by a Norman castle of timber or stone, with an agricultural village attached to it, a part of them fled higher into the hills, while the others remained vassals of the new lord. All through the Middle Ages the native Welsh, in imitation of the English lords and neighbors, were slowly taking to agriculture, erecting permanent houses, trading in market-towns. Yet they preserved their own tongue [] and developed their bardic poetry and music destined in our own days to save Welsh intellect and idealism from perishing in the swamp of modern cosmopolitan vulgarity, Trevelyan says (p. 168). As you can see, in England there are people living at a different pace and within a different history. While Wales and Ireland were forced to submit to Englands rule more
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completely and for a longer time than Scotland, both remained to this day far more Celtic. For at least two centuries, Scotland fought for her independence from England, and remained an extremely poor, savage, bloodstained land of feudal anarchy, assassination, private wars, and public treason, with constant Border warfare against England, with peculiarly corrupt Church, no flourishing cities, no Parliament or other institutions that could promise her a great future. (Of course, this is an Englishmans opinion). England could have given her wealth and civilization. However, by and by, Scotland embraced her own religion and, it is worth noting, it gave several monarchs to Englands throne. The One Hundred Year War meant a period in which England, equipped with administrative machinery and national self-consciousness, exercised these new powers at the expense of the French feudal kingdom. In fact, the English kings tried to regain their possessions. In 1337, when the Hundred Years War began, Edward III and his nobles spoke French and were more at home at Gascony than in Scotland. In fact the Hundred Years War was a label of the transition from Middle Ages to Renaissance. What the One Hundred Years War did was to intensify the patriotic feeling of the English, which outlasted the war, and helped to put an end to the subordination of the English to the French culture, which the Norman Conquest had established. In Henry VIIs reign, for instance, the Venetian envoy noted: They think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say he looks like an Englishman and that it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman, and when they partake of any delicacy with a foreigner they ask him whether such a thing is made in his country (apud, Trevelyan, p. 189). Moreover, a law was passed by the Parliament declaring that since the French tongue was much unknown in this Realm, the judgment in the law courts should be spoken in
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English and enrolled in Latin. A more profound revolution took place regarding the language used in schools. English became once more the tongue of the educated and of the upper classes, as it had never been since Hastings. The Bible was translated into English by Wycliffes followers, and soon Chaucer was to write his works. Their work circulated first in manuscript, and then, in the 15th century came Caxtons printing press at Westminster, which popularized Chaucer and spread through the land translations of the Bible and Prayer Book in the same dialect, already regarded as the Kings English, which formed the standard English.

The Dawns of the Renaissance: The Lollardry and Other Cultural Issues In the 14th century there was a movement resembling Protestantism. It was called Lollardry and it owed its existence to John Wycliffe, the Oxford scholar, the initiator of the translation of the Bible in English. After his denial of the doctrine of Transubstantiation he and his followers were expelled from Oxford in 1382 by a combined action of Church and State. So, he initiated a popular movement spread by itinerant preachers. Though persecuted and suppressed, Lollardry never wholly died out; it revived and merged in the Lutheran movement of early Tudor times. The copies of the Bible translation were destroyed when possible by the Church authorities. However, they could not prohibit the lay study of the Scriptures. The end of the Middle Ages and the emergence of the New Learning was a great period for the foundation of schools, besides Winchester or Eton. Guilds and private persons were endowing chantries with priests and schools. Reading and writing ceased to be the monopoly of the clergy. Geoffrey Chaucer, who died in 1400, had a tremendous influence on the English letters. All the poets of the age followed him. In their verse they express their admiration for the beauty of natural sights and sounds in the orchards and artificial gardens. As you can notice, landscape architecture is very old in England, and that can be explained psychologically. From the 15th to the early 18th centuries, they liked artificial gardens because they had so much wild nature. At that time the beauty of
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domestic architecture of the manor houses, then coming to perfection in stone and brick, the artistic originality in dress, furniture, and homestead utensils enriched life with joys, we like to think. The everyday objects have acquired through time an esthetic value, quite different from the one given by the simple craftsman.

The End of the Middle Ages. Historians think that the Middle Ages ended in England in a curious way, and through the wars of Roses (the battle between the Houses of York and Lancaster). On each side was ranged a group of nobles, and each noble had its clientele of knights, gentry, captains, lawyers, and clergy. Of course, there were cases when they changed sides. London remained neutral in this civil strife. The fighting nobles were savage in their treatment of one another, and there were many sudden turns of the fortunes wheel, leading to confiscations of great estates. The Crown was enriched by these confiscations, while the nobles were impoverished and their number reduced. The way was prepared for the Tudor policy of suppressing over mighty subjects. The Wars of Roses were a bleeding operation performed by the nobility upon their own body and a blessing in disguise for the rest of the people. The Renaissance lights were shining already.

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LECTURE 2: SOME REMARKS ABOUT ENGLAND DURING THE TUDORS (RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION)

Introduction Renaissance in England like anywhere else, set religion in the light of the scholarly examination of the Scriptures, while on the other hand revealed the long forgotten ancient Greek and Roman ideals. Moreover, it encouraged man to explore the New World and thus changed the intellectual outlook on the world. All these tendencies dissolved the fabric of the medieval society in England. There is one thing, however, that distinguishes England from the rest of the Continent. While in France, Spain, and Portugal the monarchy was allied with the old Church, in England it was allied with the Parliament, and the country was more or less a constitutional monarchy. Yet most institutions remained intact on condition of submitting to the sovereign authority of the state, including universities, nobles, lawyers, Bishops, secular clergy, and town corporations. Cosmopolitan church went down before the new idea of a national state with a national church attached. A sort of labour regulation, started by the Plantagenet Parliament was carried further in Tudor times, meaning a national control over economy (one emerging from the Middle Ages, of course!).

Renaissance in England, called Tudor Renaissance was the time of the nation assertion of her strength, her claim to do whatever it liked within its own frontiers. The King exercised his power, while the Parliament played a lesser role. By putting himself at the head of the Anti-clerical revolution that destroyed the medieval power and privilege of the Church, Henry VIII (1491-1547), the son of the first Tudor King, Henry VII, set the new monarchy in alliance with the strongest forces of the coming age: London, the middle class, the seagoing population, and the Protestant preachers. They all formed a powerful opposition to the forces of the old world: the monks, the friars, the
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feudal nobility and gentry in the north and popular Catholic piety which was stronger in the districts far from London. However, both the Catholics and the Protestants were feeble and neither dared to defy the Crown as the Puritans afterwards defied it in England (during the 17th century). Renaissance was not an age of religious zeal in England, like the age of Becket, for instance, or that of Cromwell. So long as men persisted in the medieval error that there should be only one religion tolerated, so long the alternative was state supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs. And King Henry VIII was a living proof to it.

In fact, the first steps towards reforms were taken by Henry VII (from the House of Lancaster, who married Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV in an attempt to unite the factions at war and put an end to the War of Roses. Henry VII used to select his adviser from lower ranks, following the principle of personal merit.

The Tudors gave new directions to the external and expansive energies of the English. On the one hand, a new school of diplomacy was set, which from the Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1475-1530) to William Cecil (1520-98). The former pursued the Balance of Power as Englands only chance of security in face of great continental states. On the other hand, Henry VIII made a really fine Royal Navy that stood against the powerful Spanish one in the decades to come. Furthermore, the Celtic Welsh were reduced to order and Wales was annexed on terms of equality to England. That was possible due to their common Protestant interests. At the same time, the conquest of Ireland was undertaken in earnest.

The individuals were free to wander and seek for either adventure or new ways of commerce as the new map of the world yearly unfolded itself. One chief advantage that England had over Spain in the New World was that England had cloth to sell in exchange for goods, while the Spaniards had nothing to send except soldiers, priests
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and colonists. The cloth industry had deep roots in the English medieval industry and developed later as well. That is to say, the English were more pragmatic when faced with the inhabitants of the newly discovered territories.

I. Sources and Developments of the English Renaissance

All through the 15th c., Oxford suppressed the freedom of thought, mainly represented by Wycliffism. However, in early 16th c the echoes of Italian Renaissance came to Oxford. The English scholars and poets like John Lily (1554-1606), the Euphuist, William Grocyn (1446-1519), the first to teach Greek and Latin at Oxford, and Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), the physician and professor of Greek and Latin, they all brought a new interest in Greek literature, Latin grammar and scientific medicine.

The famous Dutch philosopher, Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) was a friend of the no less famous English thinker, Thomas More (1478-1535), the author of Utopia, first written in Latin and then translated into English, and the author of the first biography of King Richard III. They both gave a new character to Renaissance studies, making them moral and religious, yet not severe, which would have contradicted the Renaissance spirit, so different in various parts of Europe but showing an all-embracing openness. For Erasmus and More, Renaissance meant the New Testament in Greek and the Old Testament in Hebrew, apart from the ancient philosophers and poets. This approach is different from the ones taken by the Italians who were far more open to arts. In England the men of the Renaissance used to study Greek and Latin to reform not only the schools but also the church itself, calling on both the clergy and laity to act together.

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Another leading figure was the scholar John Colet (1467-1519). He and Erasmus were the Oxford Reformers who, in the name of scholarship, religion, and morality, began a series of bitter attacks on the monks and obscurantism, on the worship of images and relics and the worldliness of the clergy. Their influence reached London and, certainly, Cambridge. Colet also founded, in the shadow of St Pauls Cathedral, whose Dean he was, St Pauls School, where John Lily, the poet, was the headmaster and taught Greek and Latin. That was to become the prototype of the reformed grammar school.

What was the attitude of the Crown to the New Learning, as it is currently called? Henry VII paid less attention to it. For him the clergy were useful servants, while the Pope an important person on his personal diplomatic agenda. Henry VIII had a different story. He succeeded to the throne and married Catherine of Aragon, promised to his brother Arthur, who had died prematurely. He exceeded his subjects both in body and in brain. He was the paragon of Princes, the patron alike of sportsmen (he was a champion at tennis and a mighty hunter) and the men of the New Learning. But just like his father, he continued to encourage the burning of Lollards, wrote a book against Luther (Erasmus and More were against Luther as well), for which the Pope named him Fidei Defensor (Defender of Faith). At the same time he made friends with Colet and More, whom he forced to take up the profession of courtier. He also defended Colet against the obscurantist clergy by saying: Let every man have his doctor, this is mine, although Colet had denounced him in a song: For Henry loved a man. Henry, the young king was a good musician and played well on all known instruments. Another prominent figure at Henrys Court was Thomas More. Erasmus, in a letter to Ulbrich von Hutten, where he draws a marvelous portrait of Thomas More, described Henrys court as follows: You will scarcely find a court so well-ordered, as not to have much bustle and ambition and pretence and luxury or to be
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free from tyranny in some form or another. And he continues by praising Thomas More and his role in the Court: But as this excellent monarch was resolved to pack his household with learned, serious, intelligent and honest men, he especially insisted upon having More among them, - with whom he is on such terms of intimacy that he cannot bear to let him go. (Thomas More, Utopia, A Norton Critical Edition, p. 113).

At this point, I would like to discuss Mores Utopia because it shows on the one hand the Renaissance ideas, and on the other hand, the conflicting religious visions that led to the creation of this momentous work in the history of thought. Moreover, Mores book had a tremendous impact on the 19th century thinkers and artists, from William Morris to Karl Marx. My question is whether we can hold More responsible for the manner in which his book was read later. It was published in 1516 in Latin, and translated into English in 1556 (so, Shakespeare was aware of it). The word itself comes from two Greek words: ou and topos, meaning no place. Many of ideas Mores ideas come from Platos famous dialogue Republic, while apparently, the description of extravagant places reflect the recent geographic discoveries of new worlds. Utopia is composed of two books, two long chapters; the first debates present or recent ideas and events, mainly referring to the social conditions in England inherited from Henry VII. For instance, it is a long debate around the matter of crime; in fact, we can read Mores opinions on law and ethics and the role of the philosopher (read: intellectual) in attending a Prince. Nothing new so far, if we remember Machiavellis Il Principe. However, More wraps his message in a variety of meanings, obviously aiming at creating the ideal of the Ideal Commonwealth. The traveler who tells the story about Utopia is Raphael Hythloday. The etymology of his name is quite significant: hythloday, means to distribute nonsense, while Raphael means God heals; consequently, the translation would be God heals through nonsense. Having said that, I hope you can better understand its purpose: to cure people through an invention. Is it the role of any art? Cant we interpret it, in todays words, an example of meta-fiction? But the 19th century socialists and communists interpreted it literally and tried to transfer an ideal
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society on earth or fiction into real world.

So, what is all about? First, Utopia is an island where there is no private property, where people despise gold (which is worn only by slaves and kids play with it for fun), and has a rather complicated and picturesque government system. For instance, people have to change house every ten years not to develop attachment to things. People are educated in farming and other practical professions since their childhood. However, there are several symbols/layers underlying the entire construction. For instance, Utopia is shaped like a new moon, looking very much like England (if you reverse the map see above) or a maternal womb. The founder, Utopos, changed the name of the island from Abraxa, which has a mystical connotation alluding to the 365 days of the year, into Utopia. There are fifty-four similar cities built on the same plan, and the capital is Amaurot, meaning dark city in Greek. However, it was also interpreted as a derivation from Amaury of Bne, a medieval heretic from Flanders, whose teachings were responsible for several medieval communist sects of the Free Spirit. Amaurots plan is similar to that of London; so, in speaking about Utopia, More has England in his

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mind. From the description of the city life you can understand something about the material nature of utopia, echoing Tudor England:

Every house has a door to the street and another to the garden. The doors, which are made with two leaves, open easily and swing shut automatically, letting anyone enter who wants to and so there is no private property. Every ten years, they change houses by lot [lottery]. And he goes into further details: Their houses are all three stories high and handsomely constructed; the fronts are faced with stone, stucco, or brick, over rubble construction. The roofs are flat, and are covered with a kind of plaster that is cheap but fireproof, and more weather resistant even than lead. Glass is very generally used in windows to keep out the weather; and they also use thin linen cloth treated with oil or gum so that it let in more light and keeps out more wind (p. 38).

There are two sorts of utopias: one refers to the political and social system, and the values/virtues attached to them, and the other to technical dreams. We may say the latter is less dangerous, and from the last part I have quoted, you could notice Mores ideas about his dream house that, in fact, bears some resemblance to Tudor constructions. As for the first, it only bogged down when it was read literally.

If you read it from the 15th century point of view, it emphasizes the Ideal Commonwealth based on Catholic and ancient virtues, which makes his satire upon contemporary European abuses more pointed. After all, Thomas Mores Utopia is a satire of an ideal sort: you read the negative through the positive discourse. From this perspective, Thomas More just opened a door to the 17th-18th century prose writers like the famous Jonathan Swift.

a) Politics
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The last and the most famous Cardinal who labored over the state business was Wolsey, who was of humble family (he was the son of a butcher) but behaved like a Prince of Blood. For the English he epitomized all the faults of the church. Wolsey received from his bishoprics an income of 35,000 a year and did not conceal it; instead, he displayed it in the fabulous palace Hampton Court, eventually overtaken by Henry VIII (which shows the real relationship between the Crown and Church). However, in his hands the Balance of Power in Europe first became clearly defined as the object of Englands foreign policy. For several years, he kept the balance with perfect, consummate skill and with a minimum of expense to the English treasure. In 1513, the victory against the Scots and French raised England to a strong position. After 1521, his skill and foresight failed him. A new era began in Europe, with a strong Spain and a weak Italy, while the Habsburg supremacy became visible in Europe. Against this background, England herself was on the brink of destruction, hadnt been for the growth of popular, maritime, and religious forces in the island which, in fact, Wolsey had opposed. For one, he discouraged maritime adventure. Though Henry VIII himself did not encourage it in particular, he founded the Royal Navy. Not only did he create ships especially commissioned to fight, but his architects (read designers) designed many of these royal ships on an improved model that made them more adaptable to sea conditions than the ones built by the Mediterranean powers. In 1545, at the end of Henrys reign, a French army attempted to invade England, but it was smashed and in the very same year a baby called Francis Drake was born.

To put it concisely, Henry VIIIs creation of the Royal Navy saved him and later his daughter, Elizabeth I, when they had to oppose the European Catholic powers. By comparison, Wolsey was a man of the old school, a diplomatist of the old type, very good at pulling strings but of a lesser vision. Furthermore, the Tudors were the prototype of modern man, ready for any sort of adventure.

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b) The Royal and Parliamentary Reformation under Henry VIII

One important aspect during Henry VIIIs reign was the bitter struggle between the Catholics and the Protestants who acted against the backdrop of Luthers revolt. Yet some amazing things did happen. One of the Kings friends and a great scholar, Sir Thomas More, the scathing critic of religious order, became a martyr of Papal Supremacy when Henry broke with Rome, while others, known as famous papalists defended the kings option. Things were not very clear back then, because Henry VIII burnt Protestants, while hanging and beheading the Catholic opponents of an anticlerical revolution. Later on, under Elizabeth I the English anti-clericals defended themselves against the Catholic reaction by alliance with the Protestants.

But how did it happen? The Lutheran doctrines became very powerful in England and acted like a reactive; for instance, men like Erasmus feared Protestantism, More, as I said, opposed it and wrote against it. Oxford held back in doubt, but Cambridge stepped in. From 1521, students met at the White Horse tavern in the town to discuss Luther. The tavern was nicknamed Germany and those haunting it Germans - they were the makers of the new England.

Under such hazy circumstances, Henry decided to divorce from Catherine of Aragon. This request that the Popes had granted to other monarchs for government reasons was denied to him because the Pope himself was at the mercy of Charles V, Catherines nephew. So, the whole matter became one of national pride. And it was then that the King remembered the Parliament. So, the instrument chosen by Henry to effect his Royal Reformation was the Parliament. Unlike his predecessors, this one set
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for seven years and in the course of its eight sessions acquired a continuity of personal experience among its members, which helped build up the traditions of the modern House of Commons as a great instrument of government.

I think that you remember Louis XIV famous phrase, Ltat, cest moi! (I am/embody the state). Henry VIIIs authority was of a different sort. In 1543, he told the House of Commons: We be informed by our Judges that we at no time stand so high in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament, when we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic. (see Trevelyan, 223).

The Reformation Parliament suppressed the order of monks and friars, and secularized their property. Henry sold great part of their lands to peers, courtiers, public servants who resolved them to smaller men, and so we can clearly see a case of real estate speculation. Many abbeys had become manor houses or a quarry out of which a manor house was being built. In London, as in every other towns, valuable and conspicuous sites of religious houses and much house property belonging to them passed into lay hands, removing the last check on the ever-increasing Protestantism, anti-clericalism, and commercialism of the capital.

At Oxford and Cambridge, the monks and friars had been very numerous and resisted the New Learning. They gradually disappeared and were soon replaced by an increased proportion of gentlemens sons. Such graduates were to govern the Elizabethan England. People like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the great experimentalist and philosopher, father of empiricism and author of Novum Organum, fostered a new development of intellectual ideas which would have never taken roots if these universities had been left to the guidance of monks and friars.

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The anti-clericalism under Henry VIII led to the destruction of country relics and miracleworking images were taken down, while their crude machinery exhibited to the people on whose credulity it had imposed. The shrine and cult of Thomas a Becket, the center of English and continental pilgrimage, were suppressed.

The English Reformation, which had begun as a Parliamentary attack on church fees, and proceeded as a royal confiscation of Abbey lands, found at last its religious basis in the popular knowledge of the Scriptures which was Wycliffes dream. However, both Wycliffe and the Lollards would have been burnt because the Act of Six Articles was passed decreeing death against anyone who denied Transubstantiation, the need of confession and clerical celibacy.

I. The Elizabethan Era a). Main Ideas When Henry VIII died the State was heavily in debt and the religious feuds which he seemed to have suppressed by violence were bound to break out afresh. Elizabeth I (1558-1603) came at a right time to prevent civil war caused no less by Queen Mary Tudor (nicknamed Bloody Mary), her sister, who had almost yielded England to Spain through her marriage with Philip of Spain. What was more, the other possible successor to the throne of England was Mary Stuart, married to the Dauphin of France, a staunch catholic. However, throughout Elizabeths reign it was the rivalry of the two catholic powers, France and Spain, that saved England, the heretic island, from conquest, till it was strong enough to defend itself. Elizabeth was a cunning queen who knew how to fuel the internal fights in Spain and France by sending men and money to keep the rebellious movements alive. Elizabeth learned the lesson of her youth and understood that private affections and passions are not for Princes. So, she left to her rival, Mary Stuart, to lose a world for love. Elizabeth put all her strength and talent in the service of state. Her public appearances and progresses through the country were no dull and
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formal functions, but works of art, meant to strengthen the relation between the Queen and the people. She did not build palaces, but palaces were built to entertain her. Whenever she addressed the Parliament her speeches were neither stern nor dry. She could also discourse in Greek and Latin to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and was fluent in Italian. She was rather a child of the Renaissance than of the Reformation.

I will not go into the complex details of the relation between Scotland and England during Elizabeths reign. However, I would like to emphasize that an important role was played by the incessant fight between the Catholics and the Protestants in both countries. Mary Stuart was executed in 1587, but her son ruled England as James I after Elizabeths death. However, at the beginning of her reign the anti-clerical party still consisted of both Catholics and Protestants. When she died, the majority of the English regarded themselves as ardent Protestants, members of the Church of England, and not subjects to the Pope.

b) The English Sea Power If France had not been torn apart by religious strives, it might have become a mighty sea power. But while the massacre of St Bartholomews night was taking place, Francis Drake (1540-1596) and his Protestant sailors whom he led became the servants of the English monarch. We can refer further to the causes of the English supremacy over France and Spain, and emphasize that it was their medieval order that kept them from free enterprise. Having said that, there were obvious differences between the English and the Spaniards, for instance, and that finally led the former to win the battle with the Armada. The new spirit of private enterprise, individual initiative, and good-humored equality of classes were on the increase in the defeudalized England and manifested themselves even stronger among the commercial and maritime population. Francis Drake understood that discipline was needed on the board ship, but not feudalism and
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class pride. Richard Hakluyt (?1552-1616) a lecturer of geography or cosmography, who introduced the use of globes into the English schools, put together the stories of Drakes sailors in his book Principal Navigation, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation. [In the footnote you have a sample of the oversea adventures and also of the written English at that time]. Besides the stories about Drakes robbing of the Spaniards3 and opening trade with their colonies at the canons mouth, the ten volumes

From R. Hakluyts volume XIII: XXXVII. The relation of Nicholas Burgoignon, alis Holy, whom sir Francis Drake brought from Saint Augustine also in Florida, where he had remayned sixe yeeres, in mine and Master Heriots hearing. This Nicholas Burgoignon sayth, that betweene S. Augustine and S. Helen there is a Casique whose name is Casicla, which is lord of ten thousand Indians, and another casique whose name is Dicasca, and another called Touppekyn toward the North, and a fourth named Potanou toward the South, and [pg 535] another called Moscita toward the South likewise. Besides these he acknowledgth Oristou, Ahoia, Ahoiaue, Isamacon, alledged by the Spaniard. He further affirmeth, that there is a citie Northwestward from S. Helenes in the mountaines, which the Spaniards call La grand Copal, and is very great and rich, and that in these mountains there is great store of Christal, golde, and Rubies, and Diamonds: And that a Spaniard brought from thence a Diamond which was worth fiue thousand crownes, which Pedro Melendes the marques nephew to olde Pedro Melendes that slew Ribault, and is now gouerner of Florida, weareth. He saith also, that to make passage vnto these mountaines, it is needefull to haue store of Hatchets to giue vnto the Indians, and store of Pickaxes to breake the mountaines, which shine so bright in the day in some places, that they cannot behold them, and therefore they trauell vnto them by night. Also corslets of Cotton, which the Spanyards call Zecopitz, are necessary to bee had against the arrowes of the Sauages. He say farther, that a Tunne of the sassafras of Florida is solde in Spaine for sixtie ducates: and that they haue there great store of Turkie cocks, of Beanes, of Peason, and that there are great store of pearles. The things, as he reporteth, that the Floridians make most account of, are red Cloth, or redde Cotton to make baudricks or gyrdles: copper, and hatchets to cut withall. The Spaniards haue all demaunded leaue at their owne costs, to discouer these mountaines, which the King denyeth, for feare lest the English or French would enter into the same action once knowen. All the Spaniards would passe vp by the riuer of Saint Helena vnto the mountaines of golde and Chrystall. The Spaniards entring 50. leagues vp Saint Helena, found Indians wearing golde rings at their nostrels and eares. They found also Oxen, but lesse then ours. Sixe leagues from Saint Helena toward the North, there is a poynt that runneth farre into the sea, which is the marke to the Seamen to finde Saint Helena and Waterin. Waterin is a riuer fortie leagues distant Northward from Saint Helena, where any fleete of great ships may ride safely. I take [pg 536] this riuer to be that which we call Waren in Virginia, whither at Christmasse last 1585. the Spaniards sent a barke with fortie men to discouer where we were seated: in which barke was Nicholas Burgoignon the reporter of all these things. The Spaniards of S. Augustine haue slaine three hundred or the subjects of Potanou. One Potassi is neighbour to Potanou. Oratina is he which the French history calleth Olala Outina. Calauai is another casique which they knowe.
3

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narrate the history of navigation from ancient times, beginning with King Arthur, to his time.

The English gave the Black people a better treatment than they got from the Portuguese and tried to avoid conflicts with either black or white. By comparison, the Spaniards would hand over English merchants and sailors to the Inquisition. Thus the fight between England and the Catholic countries did not take place only in Europe, but also in the colonies. Nevertheless, England was aggressive, but hadnt she been so, she would have been forced to accept exclusion from the trade of every continent save Europe and abandon her maritime and colonial ambitions.

c) Tudor Architecture, Arts and Literature

Tudor architecture is also labeled as the age of the country house (1485-1603), because it is at this time that the country house first emerged as an architectural form. As you could have seen from the above presentation, church building had virtually ceased with the Reformation. The house still retained tones of Gothic, and some of its characteristics persisted until mid 17th c. Fortified gateways, grand courtyards, battlemented parapets, towers and turrets stayed for ornament rather than defense. The ornamented chimneys alluded to the interior comfort. In fact they are an important feature of the Tudor house. Often elaborately carved and decorated, they offered the bricklayers the chance to exploit their skills. The hall became a symbol of grandeur, with its carved fire-place, oak-paneled walls and timber roofs. Hampton Court is a famous surviving example.
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The original part of the palace is built of red brickwork in diamond pattern (also called diaper) and has battlemented parapets, a turreted gatehouse, many courtyards and ornamental chimneys. Later on, to the end of Henry VIIIs reign, the new Classicism of Renaissance came to England from France and continued to be superimposed on Tudor Gothic. An example must have been the Somerset House, now destroyed. Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-79), the founder of the Royal Navy imported from Antwerp a Classicism more flamboyant than the French style, overloaded with bulbous detail, cartouches or scroll ornament.

About 1580, during the Elizabethan Age, architecture took another course. It rejected the classical and returned to the glories of the English Perpendicular, with huge windows and a striking skyline. Although architects did not exist as a professional group before Inigo Jones, at the beginning of the 17th c, two creators of style could be singled out: Robert and John Smython, father and son. They designed Longlet and other castles in the neo-medieval style: Woolaton Hall, Hardwick Hall (more window than wall, as it is characterized), and Bolsover Castle. The Elizabethan buildings were impressive, set in a dramatic setting, often on hill tops. Their startling effect is enhanced by symmetry, and by areas of glass, making them look like lanterns twinkling across the countryside at night.

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Theater. Theaters were built in London during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I who was extremely fond of drama. The most successful company, in which Shakespeare had share, was the Globe. The Elizabethans followed the plan of the Roman Coliseum for the building of the Globe looked, yet they built it at a smaller scale, with a timber structure, and up to 100 feet in diameter. It consisted of an open arena, which meant that during winter the plays were performed in-doors. By following the Classical model, the designers were seeking for respectability. No evidence has been traced as to the dimensions of the Globe stage. However, we know that the stage dimensions of Elizabethan theaters varied from 20 foot wide 15 foot deep to 45 feet to 30 feet. The stage was raised - 3 to 5 feet and supported by bulky pillars. The Pit, or yard, was the area around the stage. There was no seating so, the audience had to stand. The stage structure projected halfway into the ' yard ' (see the picture below) where the commoners (groundlings) paid 1 penny to stand to watch the play. They would have crowded around the 3 sides of the stage structure. Above the main entrance of the Globe was a crest displaying the classical figure of Hercules bearing the globe on his shoulders together with the motto "Totus mundus agit histrionem" (the whole world is a playhouse). This phrase was slightly re-worded in the William Shakespeare play As You Like It - "All the worlds a stage".4

All the world's a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players:/ They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts,/ His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,/ Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms./ And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel/And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,/ Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad/Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,/ Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,/ Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation/Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,/ In fair round belly with good capon lined,/ With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,/ Full of wise saws and modern instances;/ And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts/Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,/ With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,/ His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide/For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,/ Turning again toward childish

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The pillars supported a roof called the Heavens '. The Heavens served to create an area hidden from the audience. This area provided a place for actors to hide. A selection of ropes & rigging (chains) would allow for special effects, such as flying or spectacular entries (Deus ex machina). The stage gallery above the stage wall was called the 'Lord's rooms ' used by the rich members of the audience, the Upper Classes and the Nobility. Immediately above the stage wall was the stage gallery, which was used by actors (Juliet's balcony, for instance). The 'Lord's rooms' were considered the best seats in the 'house' despite the poor view of the back of the actors. The cost was 5 pence & cushioned seats were provided for the elite members of the audience. The stage wall structure contained at least two doors leading to a small structure, back stage, called the 'Tiring House'. The stage wall was covered by a curtain. The actors used this area to change their clothes (perhaps from the older word for clothes, attire) thus it was called the 'Tiring House'! The 'Hut' above the ' Tiring House ' was a small house-like structure called the 'hut' complete with roof. The Hut was used as a covered storage space for the troupe. The grounds of the theatre were filled with stalls selling a variety of what we call today take-away foods and beverages! [In the Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde describes the interior of a theatre reminding of the atmosphere during Shakespeares time; for instance, the audience was allowed to eat and drink beer during the performance]. The Globe theatre was also used for gambling and prostitutes who plied their trade within the confines of the Globe building and grounds! Fights also broke out amongst audience members adding to the entertainment available! It would take long to talk about William Shakespeare (1564-1616), who was not only the genius of Elizabethan England but of all times. Yet, there were other artists of not a
treble, pipes/And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,/ That ends this strange eventful history,/ Is second childishness and mere oblivion,/ Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (As you like it, Act II, Scene 7)

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lesser scope at that time. For one, Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), the author of Faustus, who is said to have become greater than Shakespeare if he had not died young (they were born in the same year!). Shakespeare looked at him as his master. Another prominent literary figure was Philip Sidney, the author of Astrophel and Stella, that brought with it a flavor of Petrarch sonnet sequences, and so one model of Italian Renaissance. Ben Jonson was the comic playwright of the age who successfully speculated the theory of humors in his plays, such as Everyman in his Humor. However, Shakespeare surpassed them all. He was not only an author of tragedies but also of comedies and historical plays. He is universal as much as he created both villains and sublime characters, both Iago and Hamlet, both King John and Prospero. The essence of this insightful remark belongs to Oscar Wilde, yet he gave other examples. Shakespeare perceived the philosophical and political ideas of his age with an inescapable eye and shaped them into art. I shall quote and briefly comment on a passage from Troilus and Cressida, more precisely from Ulysses discourse: The heaven themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture [persistency] course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order; And therefore is the glorious planet Sol In noble eminence enthrond and spherd Amidst the other; whose medcinable eye Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil, And posts, like the commandment of a king, Sans check, to good and bad: but when the planets In evil mixture to disorder wander, What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny, What raging of the sea, shaking of earth, Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
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Divert and crack, rend and deracinate The unity and married calm of states Quite from their fixture! O! when degree is shakd Which is the ladder to all high designs, The enterprise is sick. The idea of the sick universe, of sick human kind is sustained against the Renaissance idea of universal symmetry and harmony, and only a genius like Shakespeare could have articulated it so powerfully in this age of restless pursuits and conflicts. By choosing a character like Ulysses, he goes against the general classical ideas of harmony and introduces a modern dimension to his age.

Shakespeare himself paid his homage to the great Elizabeth in The Famous History of the Life of King Henry VIII, when in the last act of the play Henry VIII speaks about his newly born infant:

Though in her cradle, yet now promises Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings, Which time shall bring to ripeness: she shall be But few now living can behold that goodness A pattern to all princes living with her.

So, even the greatest playwright ever described Elizabeth a pattern to all princes. It was then, in the 16th c, that an exceptional queen was the contemporary of the unparalleled Shakespeare whose work competes with the Bible.

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Sculptors were mostly employed to overlay and garnish a building or to carve a tomb with effigies. They did not carve or paint portraits, busts or mythological groups as in Italy. Painting in Renaissance England began quite abruptly with the arrival of a foreigner, the German Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543). He brought with him all the discoveries of High Renaissance in Italy: skill in perspective and illusionism, knowledge of Classical antiquity and acute psychological observation as can be noticed in his Portrait of Henry VIII. Another exiled painter was Hans Eworth who portrayed Mary I. His style is indebted to Holbein, and so is Nicholas Hillards (1547-1619), Queen Elizabeths miniaturist. He portrayed the queen, the romantic Raleigh, and other courtiers.

In the Middle Ages, as you already know, England was famous for its embroideries. During Elizabeths reign this decorative art revived. But it was no longer applied to vestments but to curtains, bed hangings, cushions, etc. In the Elizabethan period tapestry was woven in England for the first time under the auspices of the Sheldon family.

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Sheldon Tapestry showing the map of England

LECTURE 3: ENGLAND UNDER THE STUARTS

I Introduction In the Stuart era, the English developed for themselves a system of Parliamentary government, local administration and freedom of speech and person, contrary to the absolutist tendencies on the continent that subjected the individual to the state. (Under Henry VIII England had known that sort of movement, but rejected it).

The Stuart kings were James I (1603-25), Charles I (1625-49) and Charles II (16601685). If the power of the Tudors was not material but somehow metaphysical because they appealed sometimes to the love and loyalty of their subjects, struck by awe, in the 17th century the people showed a less obliging temper. The Stuarts claimed greater powers,
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higher than the English law and custom. At the same time, the Parliament made their own claims. The Parliamentary (MP) emerged as a profession under these two kings. They convinced their fellow citizens that they only claimed ancient privileges deriving from the spirit and the letter of Magna Charta. James I, the offspring of Mary Stuart and Lord Darnley, is described as a good-natured though arrogant person, who knew almost nothing of the English Law. Yet, his election as heir to Elizabeth mediated by the famous statesman Robert Cecil (1563-1612) is featured in a hyperbolical language in the Preface of the Bible (known as King James Bible to this day): Great and manifold were the blessings, most dread Sovereign, which Almighty God, the Father of all mercies, bestowed upon the people of England, when first he sent your Majestys Royal Person to rule and reign over us. For whereas it was the expectation of many, who wished not well onto our Sion, that upon the setting of that bright Occidental Star, Queen Elizabeth of most happy memory, some sick and palpable clouds of darkness would so have overshadowed this Land, that men should have been in doubt which way they were to walk []. The appearance of Your Majesty as of the Sun in his strength, instantly dispelled those supposed and surmised mists

However, James I brought with him the union with Scotland (he was also James VII of Scotland). He knew Scotland but never knew England, which comes as no surprise, and his son Charles never knew either of the lands. He could not understand the ways of the Parliament or the position of the Roman Catholic group who formed the conspiracy to destroy both the King and the Houses of Parliament (see below the information on Guy Fawkes5). Since then the anti-Roman (read anti-catholic) passion in England remained a constant and often a determining factor in the history of the House of Stuart.

Guy Fawks - Guy Fawkes (13 April 1570 31 January 1606), also known as Guido Fawkes, the name he adopted while fighting for the Spanish in the Low Countries, belonged to a group of provincial English Catholics who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Fawkes was born and educated in York. His

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While Elizabeth and her advisors succeeded in gaining absolute power, they were careful not to antagonize their ally, the Parliament. James I tended to emphasize his royal prerogatives publicly but they only accepted provided there had been something for them too. The Puritans, who had supported him as king of the Presbyterian Scots6 expected his help to purge the Church of all Catholic traces. However, when he became a king he had to take the side of bishops against the Puritans. Five years after the first colonists who boarded on the Mayflower and set sail for America in September 1620, where New England was founded, Charles I became king of England. He was even more drastic against them, which eventually cost his head. In fact, although the members of the Church of England rejected Papacy, they did not follow the ways of the Continental Protestants. Since the Puritans were wealthy burghers and landowners, with representation in Parliament, they challenged the king on his right to interfere with the common-law courts. In fact, the conflict started during James Is reign, with the king

father died when Fawkes was eight years old, after which his mother married a Catholic. Fawkes later converted to Catholicism and left for the continent, where he fought in the Eighty Years' War on the side of Catholic Spain against Protestant Dutch. He travelled to Spain to seek support for a Catholic rebellion in England but was unsuccessful. He later met Thomas Wintour, with whom he returned to England. Wintour introduced Fawkes to Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate King James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. The plotters secured the lease to an undercroft beneath the House of Lords, and Fawkes was placed in charge of the gunpowder they stockpiled there. Prompted by the receipt of an anonymous letter, the authorities searched Westminster Palace during the early hours of 5 November, and found Fawkes guarding the explosives. Over the next few days, he was questioned and tortured, and eventually he broke. Immediately before his execution on 31 January, Fawkes jumped from the scaffold where he was to be hanged and broke his neck, thus avoiding the agony that followed. Fawkes became synonymous with the Gunpowder Plot, which has been commemorated in England since 5 November 1605. His effigy is burned on a bonfire, often accompanied by a firework display.
6

The Presbyterian Church is a Protestant denomination which developed from the doctrines of Calvinist Churches of Switzerland and France. Presbyterianism itself was founded by John Knox in Scotland in 1557 and the standard expression of doctrines and faith can be found in the Westminster Confession of Faith. This was drawn up by a group of 151 laymen, clergy and scholars who were appointed to the task by the English Parliament in 1643. Strictly speaking, the term "Presbyterian" refers not so much to a particular set of doctrines but instead to a particular form of church government. For Presbyterians, their church is governed by a group of elders, or presbyteros. The denomination comprises teaching elders, who are the ordained ministers, and ruling elders who are elected from the ranks of church members. In each individual church, the elders are invested with supreme authority in all spiritual matters. Presbyterians do not, however, believe that theirs is the "One True Church" or that their system of church government is the only one authorized by the New Testament.

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who dismissed judge Edward Coke7 who had denied the kings right to be above the law. And again, the spirit of Magna Charta prevailed. The Parliament became even stronger due to its ability to tax. Thus, both James and his son, Charles I turned to the Parliament for money and, if denied, they started selling noble titles, which gained them little money and less respect. Thus, the Parliament became the place of further controversies between king and his wealthy subjects.

In 1625, Charles I obtained money from the Parliament to send ships to plunder Cadiz, as Drake once had done, hoping he would become very rich. However, the mission that the king and his protg, the Duke of Buckingham8, sent failed because the admiral
7

Sir Edward Coke (pronounced like "Cook") (1 February 1552 3 September 1634) was a seventeenthcentury English jurist and Member of Parliament whose writings on the common law were the definitive legal texts for nearly 150 years. Born into a family of minor Norfolk gentry, Coke travelled to London as a young man to make his living as a barrister. There he rapidly gained prominence as one of the leading attorneys of his time, eventually being appointed Solicitor General and then Attorney General by Queen Elizabeth. As Attorney General, Coke prosecuted Sir Walter Raleigh and the Gunpowder Plot conspirators for treason. In 1606, Coke was made Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, later being elevated, in 1613, to Lord Chief Justice of England. As a judge, Coke delivered numerous important decisions, and he gained a reputation as the greatest jurist of his age. Nonetheless, his unwillingness to compromise in the face of challenges to the supremacy of the common law made him increasingly unpopular with James I, and he was eventually removed as Lord Chief Justice in 1616. Despite his dismissal from the bench and his already advanced age, Coke remained an influential political figure, leading parliamentary opposition to the Crown in the 1620s. His career in parliament culminated in 1628 when he acted as one of the primary authors of the Petition of Right. This document reaffirmed the rights of Englishmen and prevented the Crown from infringing them.

There were several people for whom the title (and dukedom) was created. In this case, we refer to George Villiers, James Is protg, who was made Duke of Buckingham. He was made Baron Whaddon, of Whaddon in the County of Buckingham, and Viscount Villiers in 1616, Earl of Buckingham in 1617, Marquess of Buckingham in 1618 and Earl of Coventry and Duke of Buckingham in 1623. Buckingham, who continued in office as chief minister into the reign of James's son, Charles I, was responsible for a policy of war against Spain and France, and was assassinated by a Puritan fanatic, John Felton, in 1628, as he prepared an expedition to relieve the Huguenots of La Rochelle. His son, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, an extravagant, fashionable person, was a notable advisor in the reign of Charles II, and, along with Lord Ashley made up the Protestant axis of the famous Cabal Ministry. He started the first foxhunt in England, The Bilsdale Hunt, in 1668 and later started the Sinnington Hunt in 1680. He died from a chill after digging for a fox above Kirkbymoorside in the house of a tenant as he was too far from his home in Helmsley, North Yorkshire. At his death in 1687, the title again became extinct.

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was incompetent and a drunk. The king asked the Parliament for more, but the leader of the House of Commons, Sir John Eliot9 refused him. Then, the king had him imprisoned. In 1628, the Parliament produced The Petition of Right (see footnote on page 49), which cited as legal and historical precedent Magna Charta, setting out limitations upon the power of the king, denying him the right to tax, to imprison, to punish soldiers or people without due process of law. The kings response was the dismissal of the Parliament that was to be called back after eleven years. Charles I turned for help to Archbishop Laud, who supported the kings claim to divine authority. The Archbishop seeking to strengthen the power of the Church of England turned against the Puritans of whom many left the country for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in America, where they had a tremendous influence.

However, without Parliament, the king continued to collect ship money from the town ports, which antagonized the people even more.

II Everyday life under the Stuarts (Map of London during the Stuarts)

Sir John Eliot (11 April 1592 27 November 1632) was a statesman who was often imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he eventually died, by King Charles I for advocating the rights and privileges of Parliament.

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To meet the increased demands for houses, London expanded westwards towards Westminster. Though for the most part it remained the haphazard, overcrowded town, described by John Stow (1525-1605, a tailor who devoted himself to antiquarian pursuits and became a well-known chronicler), the Italianizing of Londons architecture began under Inigo Jones. The great trading companies were based in the City, the cloth trade including. There was also the market for raising loans and buying and selling land. The magnetic influence of London was not only economic but also political, social, and legal. Every session of Parliament brought over 400 members to the city, sometimes with their families. King James I denounced those swarms of gentry, who through the instigation of their wives did neglect their country hospitality and cumber [=encumber] the city. The beginnings of London season can be found in the early seventeenth century; parks, pleasure gardens, theaters, and transport [hackney coaches a fourwheeled carriage having six seats and drawn by two horses and sedan chairs an enclosed windowed chair with an upholstered interior suitable for a single occupant, which was carried by two porters, one in front, one behind, using wooden rails that passed through metal brackets on the sides of the chair - existed under Charles I] were developed to meet the demand. The king even issued a proclamation stating that these countrymen haunting London should return to their estates, and in 1632 some 250 were prosecuted for disobeying it. In his diary, Sir Humphrey Mildmay (Royalist Gentleman Glimpses of English Scene, 1633-1652) described what he was doing in London. Besides swimming and boating on the Thames, dicing and card-playing and going to Hyde Park, he went to wrestling matches and to the theatre (sometimes three times a week), seeing Fletchers or Shakespeares plays. Like everybody else, he watched the spectacles of the Court and the city activity, the reception of an ambassador, the progress of a knight of the Garter, and the Lord Mayors pageantry.

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The Court played a central role within society; contact with it could give power, office, and wealth. Both humble people and intellectuals sought for the kings favors. The Court imitated the tastes of the sovereign, but Elizabeths successor lacked her dignity. However, Charles I described as being tempered, chaste, and serious succeeded in astonishing Rubens for his luxurious Court. Van Dycks10 portraits (almost of the people in the court circle) reveal the way in which Charles and his Court liked to be portrayed. Charles was a lover of art and did patronize artists like Rubens and Van Dyck. He got involved in art collecting-diplomatic ties with the Catholic monarchs and the Pope. His collection included Mantegna cartoons, the Leonardo sketchbooks, the Raphael cartoons, and others. The king was an ambitious man, who wanted England to be in the forefront of artistic taste and achievement. However, Charles competed with another art collector (as you may notice art collection became fashionable in the 17th century), Earl of Arundel, who had Holbeins portrait of Erasmus and antique marbles in his collection.

The two universities were at this period dominated by the Crown and government. During the two Stuarts, one could see the royal interference not only in the election of the Chancellors, but also in the Colleges: the curriculum of the universities was matters of concern to the Crown. Several Chairs were founded at Oxford (Geometry, Astronomy, History, Music, and Natural Philosophy), while its library, through the donation of books and manuscripts, became the second after that of the Vatican. However, the core of education remained the theological studies. London gained the character of a university town from the Inns of Court11. They taught law, but not only
10

The Flemish Baroque painter, famous for the portrait of Charles I of England and Scotland.

11

Inns of Court in London are the professional associations to one of which every barrister in England and Wales (and those judges who were formerly barristers) must belong. They have supervisory and disciplinary functions over their members. The Inns also provide libraries, dining facilities and professional accommodation. Each also has a church or chapel attached to it and is a self-contained precinct where barristers traditionally train and practise, although growth in the legal profession, together with a desire to practise from more modern accommodation caused many barristers' chambers to move outside the precincts of the Inns of Court in the late 20th century.

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that. Ben Jonson (the famous comic playwright), for instance, praised the Inns as the noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty in the kingdom. Oliver Cromwell, the major figure of the Civil War, was but one of those who went to an Inn. The core of the legal education until after the Restoration was the readings and public disputations on matters of law. Moreover, the Inns delighted in dramatic entertainments combining music, poetry, and spectacle. There were the so-called masques by Chapman and Francis Beaumont that were played along with Shakespeares plays, mostly his comedies.

The country life, with both gentry and nobleman interested in literature, arts, optics, experiments was the foundation of the cultivated society to be found in London, at Court, and in the universities and Inns of Court, forming the milieu of the artistic life before the Civil War. They were the people for whom the architects designed manors and villas.

In poetry, one major trend of the age was marked by the appearance of the so-called metaphysical poets. They were a loose group who share a new way of conceiving metaphors and comparisons, mainly based of scientific discoveries (especially the studies on the nature of light). Of them, the most important was John Donne (15721631), whose poetry combines both wit and metaphysical spirit. Donne was mostly inspired by Neo Platonism. By wittily combining the spiritual and material (read the philosophical thought based on science), Donnes refined poetry withstood all fashions. Here is an example of Donnes art in a poem about taking leave from his lover, abounding in unusual imagery, such as the comparison between the two lovers with a pair of compasses: A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING. by John Donne

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AS virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say, "Now his breath goes," and some say, "No." So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ; 'Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity our love. Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ; Men reckon what it did, and meant ; But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent. Dull sublunary lovers' love Whose soul is sensecannot admit Of absence, 'cause it doth remove The thing which elemented it. But we by a love so much refined, That ourselves know not what it is, Inter-assurd of the mind, Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two ; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th' other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
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Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.

However, he was not the only one. Although they did not form what we may call a school, many English poets of the 17th century followed this line. George Herbert (1593-1633), Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), and Henry Vaughan (1622-1695) have been regarded as the best. Their poetry reflects in a new manner the new relation between man and God within a world in which the relationship with God becomes more and more private; it is worth noting that all of them were priests or involved in religious matters. However, their poetry shows the signs of their time, and their pursuits are connected to the problem of form and content, as we may put it today, which is indeed the focus of any art. For instance, George Herberts poem The Altar (see the Reader) is shaped like an altar and the capitalized words in it lead to the major theme of his work. George Herbert set an example for other poets of his time. Both the modernists and postmodernist artists, including architects returned to the metaphysical poets as a powerful source of inspiration. However, it was the modern poet T. S. Eliot who first discussed them in his essay The Metaphysical Poets. His essay reopens the debate on metaphysical poetry, that is, on the nature of that poetry bridging between the spiritual and the material. Moreover, the Marxist art critic Georg Lukasz, advocated that the English metaphysical poets foreshadowed existentialism, which I find a little bit exaggerated.

III The Age of Inigo Jones and Wren Inigo Jones (1573-1652) was the outstanding figure of the English art. He was the arbiter of taste in James I and Charles Is Courts almost for 20 years. He designed stage designs for the Court ballets and buildings. He worked in Italy and admired the
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work of the 16th century Venetian architect Palladio, whose style he introduced into England.

His Banqueting House is thought to have revolutionized the English architecture through the classical facades and pediments rising among the shambling black and white timbered houses of Stuart London, almost rural. The interior painting of the ceiling is the work of Rubens. He also designed the Queens House at Greenwich on an Hplan in the Palladian manner. Briefly speaking, Inigo Jones greatly influenced the evolution of the English country houses.

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Charles II imposed his own artistic taste inspired from the French baroque. The second half of the 17th century witnessed the attempt to adapt it to the English taste.

In fact, this tendency was crystallized in the career of Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723). He rebuilt 51 churches and St Paul after the Great Fire (1666). He was also extremely skilful in planning buildings on awkward sites. Under the later Stuarts, Wren worked on frustrating palace projects, such as Whitehall, Greenwich, Kensington, and Hampton Court.

Wren was not fundamentally a domestic architect; his followers Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1739) and Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) were particularly interested in great houses.

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IV The Civil War In 1638, Charles I was forced to call the Parliament as he had to put down the rebellion of the Presbyterian Scots. However, in the following year, the Parliament was dissolved again that was called The Short Parliament. After the dismissal of the Short Parliament, the king called again the Parliament that stayed until 1660, eleven years after the kings execution. That was called The Long Parliament.

However, no simple explanation could account for the way men divided in early 1640; political and religious issues, social distinctions played their part, but equally personal characteristics, family traditions, and local feuds. The broad division into Royalist north and west and Parliamentarians south and east obscures the substantial minorities in each area. In 1642, there were 300 Parliamentarians and 230 Royalists, which reflected the real division among the gentry. The issue was the establishment of common law monarchy. The indecisions and changes of sides at the beginning and the splits within many families, were the essence of the English War. Cromwell led the Parliament army, which was better organized and made up mostly of Puritans (he himself had undergone religious conversion to Puritanism and made it an independent style, which means his ideas were more moderate at times). The Civil War lasted for ten years, and the number of country houses and cathedrals destroyed and ransacked was considerable. Many members of the gentry and Parliament went into exile, following Bonnie Prince Charles itinerant court or were killed during sieges. The Fellows of the universities were expelled and many of them went into exile. As Parliament extended its control, taxation and heavy fines forced many Royalists to sell part of their estates, while many had their estates confiscated. Broadly, the forties saw the destruction of the traditional structure of authority in Church and State. The symbolic climax was the execution of the king and the abolition of the House of Lords. That was the true turning point in the political history of England. It not only prevented the English monarchy from hardening into an absolutism of the
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type then becoming general in Europe, but it made a great experiment in direct rule of the country by the House of Commons. In the course of that experiment the Long Parliament successfully organised the largest military operation ever till then conducted by Englishmen, in a four years war against the king. In fact, it taught monarchy a good lesson. After all those memorable years, the House of Stuart could be restored; it would never again be possible to govern the country without the participation of the House of Commons. Now, let us pick up again the problems of the Civil War. On 20 April 1653, Oliver Cromwell12 dissolved the Long Parliament with a short yet emotional speech, featuring the Puritan principles: It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas

12

Oliver Cromwell (25 April 1599 3 September 1658) was a military and political leader best known in England for his involvement in making England into a republican Commonwealth and for his later role as Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. Events that occurred during his reign and his politics are a cause of animosity between Ireland and the UK. He was one of the commanders of the New Model Army which defeated the royalists in the English Civil War. After the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Cromwell dominated the short-lived Commonwealth of England, conquered Ireland and Scotland, and ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death from a combination of malarial fever and septicemia in 1658. Cromwell was born into the ranks of the middle gentry, and remained relatively obscure for the first 40 years of his life. His lifestyle resembled that of a yeoman farmer until he received an inheritance from his uncle. After undergoing a religious conversion during the same decade (conversions became quite ordinary during that period), Cromwell made an Independent style of Puritanism an essential part of his life. He was elected Member of Parliament for Cambridge in the Short (1640) and Long (164049) Parliaments. He entered the English Civil War on the side of the "Roundheads" or Parliamentarians. As a soldier, he was more than capable (nicknamed "Old Ironsides"), and was soon promoted from leading a single cavalry troop to command of the entire army. Cromwell was one of the signatories of Charles I's death warrant in 1649. He was a member of the Rump Parliament (16491653), which selected him to take command of the English campaign in Ireland during 164950. He led a campaign against the Scottish army between 1650 and 1651. On 20 April 1653, he dismissed the Rump Parliament by force, setting up a short-lived nominated assembly known as the Barebones Parliament, before being made Lord Protector of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland on 16 December 1653. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. After the Royalists returned to power, they had his corpse dug up, hung in chains, and beheaded.

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betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!

As you might have noticed, the core of the speech was the word vice. It is not opposed by virtue, yet that was implied indirectly: Puritans were the virtuous lot. Religion played a major role in the widespread of visionary Utopianism. The Puritans behaved as if the kingdom of God was waiting behind the door, and later, in the very same year, Cromwell opened the Parliament of Saints with the words Why should we be afraid to say or think, that this way may be the door to usher in the things that God hath promised and prophesized of? Moreover, in his battle with the king, Cromwell, a plain person yet an excellent commander, found a reason to motivate his small army (nicknamed Roundheads), capable of fighting the ideals of chivalry of the kings supporters (also nicknamed the Cavaliers). His was an army of godly men, that is, with strong religious beliefs, very much like the medieval crusaders fighting the nonChristians. But, as you know, a knight embodied both the religious and chivalry virtues. Modern times had split the ideal fighter in two. Eventually, they could capture the king himself. Although some MP wanted the king back to the throne, Cromwell and his army refused it for fear they might be sent to prison. Instead, they chased all the kings
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supporters from the Parliament and what remained was called The Rump Parliament (= the piece left) that proclaimed the power of the people. This Parliament tried and condemned the king, who was beheaded in 1649 just in front of his Banqueting Hall (designed by Inigo Jones) at Whitehall.

Cromwell, however, had a Great Design by which Protestant countries (Sweden, Denmark, and Holland) would unite against the Roman Catholic countries (Austria, France, and Spain). Yet, this design overlooked the rivalries that overrode religious affinities. Countries like Holland, Denmark and Sweden were more successful in their trades than England. Fortunately, Cromwell modernized the English Navy that was able to chase the Dutch away and took Hollands place on the market. That was the beginning of the so-called mercantilism. Though a Protestant himself, Cromwell was more tolerant than others; for instance, he accepted the Quakers13 and the Jews. Even in his army, there were dissenters, the most famous being the Levellers who wanted the landlords be eliminated along with the king. They proposed the right to vote and an annually elected Parliament. Cromwell suppressed this movement and had the leaders shot.

V The Beginning of Restoration

13

Founded in the 1650s by John Fox. Quakers try to bear witness or testify to their beliefs in their everyday life - an expression of "spirituality in action. The ways in which they testify are often known as Quaker testimonies or Friends' testimonies: these are not a formal, static set of words, but rather a shared view or attitude of how many Quakers relate to God and the world. This leads to each Quaker having a different understanding of what the testimonies are and, while the ideologies remain quite similar for all Quakers, they go by different names, and different values are included throughout the Religious Society of Friends. The Testimonies are interrelated and can be seen as a coherent philosophical system, even outside Christian theology. The testimonies have not always been consistent, but throughout their history they have challenged Friends and provided them with guidance.

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Cromwells refusal of the crown did not prevent him from assuming many of its attributes, including the hereditary succession of his son. In fact, he was made Lord Protector of England. The Puritan zeal for righteousness led him to attempt moral reform. Thus, after dissolving the Parliament of Saints, he worked for the ideal he set before his last Parliament, to bring the repairs of breaches, and the restorers of paths to dwell in. He died in 1658, and soon, the Parliament called Charles II back as king of England in 1660.

Charles II (1660-1685) or Bonnie Prince Charlie did not persecute those opposing the Church of England but denied them several rights. At the same time, he made every effort to put the clock back to the somewhat carefree days of the 1630s. Theatres reopened, racing started at Newmarket, clothes blossomed out into ruffles and ribbons.

Charless brother, James II (1685-88) had to flee the country in 1688 for promoting the interests of his Catholic supporters. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 set on the throne William of Orange from Netherlands, and his wife, Jamess daughter Mary, and established Parliamentary monarchy (constitutional monarchy). Under William and Mary, and their successor Queen Anne (1702-14), Britain gained a political and constitutional equilibrium never again upset.

Intellectual life continued with vigour surprising in view of the purges of Church and universities. Some were in exile, but at home an active group met first in London and then in Oxford to discuss science in the Baconian tradition. After the Restoration it was formally instituted as the Royal Society, whose member was Christopher Wren. Later he was elected chairman.

VI The Coffee Houses

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It should be said from the start that the intellectual and civic life of London and England in general owes much to the tradition of coffee houses/shops. They were the favorable milieus for long debates. So, you should not wonder that the first coffee houses was opened at Oxford by Jacob, a Jew, who opened a Coffee house at the Angel, in the Parish of St Peter in the East, Oxon, and there it was by some, who delighted in the novelty, drank. Certainly shortly after this, coffee houses began to open in London. By 1663 it is recorded that there were 82 coffee houses in London. The popularity of these establishments led to certain opposition. For example, 'The Women's Petition Against Coffee' was set up and it claimed in 1674 that coffee: ... made men as unfruitful as the deserts whence the unhappy berry is said to be brought. In the following year, King Charles II tried to rid London of its coffee houses with an edict: Whereas it is most apparent that the multitude of coffee houses of late years set up and kept within this kingdom, the dominion of Wales and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, and the great resort of idle and disaffected persons to them, have produced very evil and dangerous effects, as well as that many tradesmen and others do therein misspend much of their time, which might and probably would otherwise be employed in and about their lawful callings and affairs, but also for that in such houses, and by occasion of the meeting of such persons therein, many false, malicious, and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad, to the deformation of his Majesty's government and to the disturbance of the peace and quiet of the realm, his Majesty has thought it fit and necessary that the said coffee houses be for the future put down and suppressed. The edict went on to ban the sale of coffee, chocolate, sherbet, and tea in coffee houses or private homes. The disagreement was such that Charles decided to back off and no further mention was made of his edict. However, the several bans on coffee or tea led to the increase of smuggling.
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The Grecian Coffee House Different coffee houses acted as the meeting place for different groups of people. In fact, many people would give a particular coffee house as the address where they might be contacted. For example Child's Coffee House near Gresham College (the place where Christopher Wren taught astronomy, and the future Royal Society), was frequented by the clergy. Lloyd's Coffee House (see below), founded by Edward Lloyd of Tower Street in the 1680s, had ship owners and merchants as customers and acted as a hub through which news about ships was passed. It moved to Lombard Street in 1692 and eventually moved into insurance and became Lloyd's of London. In the two pictures you can see Grecian Coffee House and Lloyd's Coffee House. The Grecian, as the name might suggest, attracted those interested in philosophy and
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other academic disciplines. Macaulay14 wrote: Those who wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lance, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow. The second coffee house mentioned in this quote is the Rainbow, the second oldest coffee house in London, opened by James Farr in Fleet Street in 1657. Another quote by one who frequented the Grecian is the following: While other parts of the town are amused with the present actions, we generally spend the evening at this table in inquiries into antiquity, and think anything news which gives us new knowledge. In Inns and Taverns of Old London by Henry C Shelley, one can read: Men of science as well as scholars gave liberal patronage to the Grecian. It was a common thing for meetings of the Royal Society to be continued in a social way at this coffee-house, the president, Sir Isaac Newton, being frequently of the parties. Hither, too, came Professor Halley, the great astronomer, to meet his friends on his weekly visit to London from Oxford ... So, one of the gentlemen one might find in the Grecian Coffee House was Isaac Newton, where sometimes he met de Moivre (the French mathematician). Jonathan's Coffee House, in Exchange Alley, had merchants as customers and is now considered as developing into the London Stock Exchange. Hooke and Wren were often in Jonathan's taking part in scientific discussions. Talking of Newton, de Moivre, Hooke and Wren brings us back to the topic of mathematics in the coffee houses of London. First, let us quote from a play by Thomas

14

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800-1859), politician, poet, historian in the Whig tradition.

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Sydserf called Tarugo's Wiles, or, The Coffee House. A Comedy. In Act 3 there is a conversation between two coffee house customers: Customer 1: I'm told Sir, that coffee inspires a man in the mathematics. Customer 2: So far as it keeps one from sleep, which you know is the ready way to distract, consequently the improvement of the mathematics. Not only were the coffee houses meeting places, but lectures were given in them. These were not just unprepared lectures given in the course of discussion, but rather were properly advertised and usually not random lectures but rather organized in a series of lectures. Because of this educational function coffee houses were often called the Penny Universities - the name coming from the fact that they charged an entrance fee of a penny. Daniel Button owned Button's Coffee House, situated in Russell Street, Covent Garden. This coffee house had many literary customers and, in particular, Richard Steele who used it as an office for the Guardian which he began to publish in 1713. Steele placed an advertisement for a course of lectures in Button's Coffee House: Beginning January 11, 1713-14, a course of philosophical lectures on mechanics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, optics. This course of experiments is to be performed by Mr William Whiston and Francis Hauksbee ... Another frequent customer of Button's Coffee House was John Arbuthnot who wrote many popular pamphlets. He would sometimes end letters with: From a sparkish pamphleteer of Button's Coffee House. Slaughter's Coffee House in St Martin's Lane was established in 1692. It was famed as a centre for chess players but it was also a popular place for those seeking mathematical advice. Abraham de Moivre was considered the resident mathematician at Slaughter's. He would give advice on risk, or chance of loss as he called it. It was a
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way to make a little money, as was chess playing where de Moivre would play for money. In Inns and Taverns of Old London by Henry C Shelley, the author writes: Among the earliest coffee-houses to be established in the West-end of London was that opened by Thomas Slaughter in St Martin's Lane in 1692 and known as Slaughter's. It remained under the oversight of Mr Slaughter until his death in 1740, and continued to enjoy a prosperous career for nearly a century longer, when the house was torn down. The bulk of its customers were artists, and the famous men numbered among them included Wilkie, Wilson, and Roubiliac. But the most pathetic figure associated with its history is that of Abraham De Moivre, that French mathematician who became the friend of Newton and Leibniz. Notwithstanding his wonderful abilities he was driven to support himself by the meager pittances earned by teaching and by solving problems in chess at Slaughter's. In his last days, sight and hearing both failed, and he finally died of somnolence, twenty hours' sleep becoming habitual with him. By the time of De Moivre's death, or shortly after, the character of the frequenters of Slaughter's underwent a change ... To put in a nutshell, the coffee houses were forms of socializing and, when established, they became the hotbeds of the English cultural and political life, soon to develop in the famous clubs.

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LECTURE 4:

I. The Aftermath of the Civil War: New Parties and Ways of Life

When Charles II came to the thrown he issued the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (= the act of protection and forgiving/forgetting), which was stigmatized by the Cavaliers (members of the future Whig Party Liberals) as Indemnity for the Kings enemies and Oblivion for the Kings friends. For instance, the royalists who had suffered under Cromwell never forgot Clarendon, who had followed the royal family in exile and then became the Kings Chancellor, for advising him on the act. So, they failed to recover the lands which they had been forced to sell. In the 1661 elections, the majority formed a party, later known as Tory (the Conservatives). The latter were more Anglican than the royalists, and followed their own interest rather than of the Court. All along there was a bitter fight between the Puritans and the Protestant Dissenters. After the restoration, the religious settlement was not conceived in the spirit of compromise, which marked the political and social life. This led to the variety of competition among the religious bodies, characteristic of modern England. The Whig Party had affinities in its rank and file with Puritanism and in its higher grades with latitudinarianism and rationalism of the new age. The scientific and latitudinarian movement, to which Sir Isaac Newton belonged, slowly created an atmosphere favorable to the doctrine of religious toleration as propounded by the famous Whig philosopher John Locke (1632-1704).

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Within the national Church, latitudinarianism15 had a party, respectable for its learning and eloquence rather than for its numbers. That was the Low Church party, a name that then denoted not evangelicalism but what should now be called as broad or liberal views. They were advocates of toleration and friends of the Protestant Dissenters. The name of High Church given to the great majority of the clergy did not mean ritualism; they upheld the doctrine of non-resistance to kings and their hereditary right, and a high view of the authority of the Church in politics and society.

This is how the social and political stage was shaped in late 17th century. There were other apparently less important consequences that worked at the level of the average man. For instance, before the execution of Charles I, Sunday was a day of amusement, a day in which various plays and games were performed. During Cromwells years and after, Sunday became a day for rest and religious meditation, showing how profound the changes were at the grass roots level.

II. The Cultural and Social setting of the Augustan Age According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Augustan derives from the prestige of Latin literature in the age of Augustus and it is applied to the period of highest refinement of any national art. Normally it refers in England to the years from about

15

Latitudinarian was initially a pejorative term applied to a group of 17th-century English theologians who believed in conforming to official Church of England practices but who felt that matters of doctrine, liturgical practice, and ecclesiastical organization were of relatively little importance. Good examples of the latitudinarian philosophy were found among the Cambridge Platonists. Currently, latitudinarianism should not be confused with ecumenical movements, which seek to draw all Christian churches together, rather than to de-emphasize practical doctrine. The term has taken on a more general meaning, indicating a personal philosophy, which includes being widely tolerant of other views, particularly (but not necessarily) on religious matters. In the Roman Catholic Church, latitudinarianism was condemned in the 19th century document Quanta Cura, because Pope Pius IX felt that this attitude was undermining the Church, with its high emphasis on religious liberty and possibility to discard traditional Christian doctrines and dogmas. Although the Church's attitude on this has softened a bit since Dignitatis Humanae, latitudinarianism is still commonly criticized under the epithet of Cafeteria Catholic.

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1680 to 1750, yet some researchers stretched it from 1660 to 1780, so almost one hundred years. The Augustan Age, roughly corresponding to the reign of the Hanoverian House, is looked upon as a decorative and elegant period, unadventurous and rather dull; briefly, an age of prose and reason. In fact, it set a new model: the normal. The authors addressed to an extended public, and a new relation appeared between the artist and his patron, who supposedly dictated the public taste. A new system of interests appeared, sometimes politically oriented, and so taste was established in circles where social distinction, political importance, and classical reading predominated. However, the Augustan artists were freer to express themselves than their predecessors. That was also encouraged by the circulation of the early periodicals, like Addisons and Steels The Spectator. These editors took seriously their task of educating the public morality and criticism, as well as amusing it by satire and portraiture.

Why did the English embrace the ways of reason? One simple answer would be the effects of the Civil War and the persecution of the Dissenters. The events provoked a wish for harmony. They discovered that in normality lay novelty. They satirized, and I would mention Jonathan Swift in particular, the departures from the general bank and capital of reason, of decent responsible humanity. Originality lies somewhere else and it is a source of strength. Old ideas of harmony were given new interpretations. For instance, the medieval and Elizabethan idea of organic harmony between the parts of the body politic was reinforced and interpreted in terms of economic independence. So, the nations concern was the organization of its practical affairs. The philosopher John Locke desired man to be well-skilled in knowledge of material and effects of things in his power; directing his thought to the improvement of such arts and inventions, engines, and utensils. In his opinion such improvements had a precise aim: conveniency and delight.

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Important elements of business organization came into being: the Bank of England (1694), insurance and trading companies, including Lloyds coffee-house from which emerged the great shipping agency, and the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Encyclopedias of the arts and sciences began to appear, while periodicals ran columns of useful projects. A new character appeared on the stage: the business man. Trade is defended as a liberal pursuit, while men of all sects and creeds were, in fact, taking to business as to a philosophy of life.

London was the heart of this change. Between 1660 and 1789, it was transformed from a late medieval town into an early modern one, not only by the fire of 1666 but by the steady replacement of medieval brick and timber houses with neoclassic brick and Portland stone ones. The intellectual centers of debate were the coffee-houses, taverns, clubs, book-and print shops, while the landscape architects and architects created pleasure-gardens and new residential squares. Daniel Defoe enthused on London, describing it as the most glorious sight, without exception, that the whole world at present can show.

However, for most of the century rural England seemed busy and prosperous. It is the sense of local vigour that to some extent counterbalances the dominance of London and gives Augustan culture a healthy wide basis. Again, it is Daniel Defoe who celebrates the great houses which were the economic and cultural centers of local life, and a whole series of country towns, with particular praise for their social advantages. If at the beginning of the 18th c it was Defoe who was delighted by the blooming country, at the end of the very same century, Horace Walpole, the dilettante architect and writer, wrote to his cousin of the felicity of my countrymen and of such a scene of happiness and affluence in every village and amongst the lowest of the people New streets, new towns, are rising everyday and everywhere; the earth is covered with gardens and crops of grain.
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Augustan England as it as was described by these authors and later by Jane Austen and Trollope featured the detailed beauty of enclosed meadows and hedgerows, the enthusiasm for landscape gardening, new manors, great houses with classical porticoes and far-spreading symmetrical wings set against the undulating park-lands.

I mentioned the emergence of the businessman as a social figure. The role and concept of gentlemen is of now lesser importance. Gentlemanliness was not mere outward decorum or the show of courtesy; it included all the qualities, including religious faith, moral and physical courage, and mental and physical energy, which make up the force of the social life. The 34th issue of The Guardian describes him as the most uncommon of all the great characters of life [] a Man completely qualified as well for the Service and Good, as for the Ornament and delight, of society. A gentleman had a reasonable knowledge of Latin authors and some skill in Latin composition. He was educated in the spirit of humanism, which selected its tradition to produce social man according to the canons of the best models of the past that showed how to live well in this world.

You should not infer that the gentleman or the philosopher or the artist was just a reasonable creature, governed merely by the physical world. Religion was the center of their world and it was served with passion by architects like Wren, Hawksmoor, Gibbs and their fellows. The Augustans were closer to the Middle Ages in this respect than to the 20th century rationalism.

To better understand the Romantic reaction, let me tell you something about the Augustan style. It was extremely clear and the word meant what at first sight appeared to mean. As the great rationalist of the age, John Locke recommended, the word was used lucidly and without mystifying aura. Those who tried to find similarities between the
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Augustans and the Postmodern have failed to some extent, because the postmodern clarity is laid on a maze of connotations. They have not failed as concerns the approach to Reason. Reason is a powerful talisman in the Augustan understanding of the world. Maybe they resented too much the turmoil of feelings that had governed the 17th century.

There is one more thing to be added about the centurys evolution from reason to sensitivity. An increasing pleasure in natural landscape, after the geometrical French and Dutch gardens of the late 17th century; a reviving interest in Gothic architecture, a fashion of twilight or graveyard poetry, a taste for pre-Restoration styles (the return to Palladianism, for one) and pseudo-medievalism, and interest in the Celtic and Norse art they all marked the shift to the 19th century rich background. III A passion for pleasure gardens, parks, and resorts The 18th century ushered in landscape architecture in England, and with it, key names of landscape designers. Among the first notable ones was Charles Bridgeman who became famous and popular due to his designs for the wealthy nobles. For instance, he designed the extravagant estate garden of Lord Cobham, which included temples, finely carved statues, pillars, summer houses, a replica of an Egyptian pyramid, that is, the common elements of design at that time. He also participated into the layout of a garden at Rousham House, Oxfordshire, that contained cascades, fountains, square pools, and an open air theatre. Charles Bridgeman is still an inspiration for landscape architects today. Some of the private pleasure gardens in this century ended with high walls; on the other side was the forest where the lords would go hunting, while the ladies would walk and talk by the garden pool. Another key landscape designer was Lancelot (Capability) Brown. He preferred the idea of tended nature, asymmetrical structured landscapes, evergreen trees, expansive lawns, meandering streams and sylvan lakes. Workers had to grade the
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earth, set up pathways or simply follow the natural rise and fall of the landscape. It all resulted in an amazingly beautiful mixture of natural and manmade landscape.

Capability Brown designed the famous gardens at Stowe in the 1740s. To the end of the decade he met the architect William Kent whose disciple he became. He created the most important private gardens of the 18th century at Pentworth House, Kew, Blenheim Palace. In general, Kent and Brown placed a particular emphasis on those elements that could turn the estate into a landscaped wilderness, which did not imply the total

elimination of formal elements but, instead of grids they

preferred curved pathways.

The

planting by

scheme

was

dominated species of

indigenous and

evergreens

hardwoods. As a rule, plants were not manicured as in the past but left in their natural shape.

Now, I am going to tackle up the issue of public gardens in London. They were called resorts. First of all, you have to know that the meaning of resort has slightly changed. Although it means a place, particularly a town, where people go for entertainment, in the 18th century, resort also meant a place, generally a pleasure garden. Two major pleasure gardens dominated the 18th and 19th century: Vauxhall and Ranelagh. From
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1661 (after the return of the Bonnie Prince Charles) to 1859, Vauxhall ministered to the amusement of citizens (Henry C. Shelley). The origin of the gardens is pretty obscure; supposedly, it developed on the grounds of the Faux family who owned a manor in the area. Some information about the gardens can be found in Samuel Pepys Diary. He visited the gardens in 1662 and was impressed by the nightingales and other birds, by the music played and the fact that you could spend hours on end there. However, he was displeased at the fact that there were also rogues, besides the fine and honorable people. The gardens were mentioned in several works of fiction and comedies of the time. For instance, Amelia, a character of Fieldings fiction, describes the delicious sweetness of the place and like Pepys, she notices the charms of music. The place contained formal but richly wooded walks, The principal entrance Shelley writes, led into what was known as the Grand Walk, a tree-lined promenade some three-hundred yards in length, and having the South Walk, parallel. The latter, however, was distinguished by its three triumphal arches and its terminal painting of the ruins of Palmyra. [You should notice that even such places contained hints of the then archeological findings]. All in all, the Vauxhall gardens had a high quota of popularity among the general public. Moreover, it was not simply a garden, since it contained super-boxes and pavilions arranged in long rows or in curving fashion (echoing, of course, the landscape fashion of the day). There was also a Rotunda of 70 m in diameter. The Rotunda, where a band used to play on rainy evenings, was connected to a Picture Room (an art gallery, as we put it today). One of the most popular attractions was the Cascade. The whole landscape, including the cascade, was illuminated by hidden lamps. The best evidence of the importance of the place was the fact that it was chosen as scene of a national event in 1813. A festival was organized there to celebrate the victory of the Allies under Wellington against Napoleon. However, not even the author of Inns and Taverns of the Old London could have foreseen what Vauxhall would become in the 21st century. Well, today, the former grounds of the gardens are famous for its gay pubs.
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Ranelagh was a serious rival to Vauxhall. First, the place was owned by the Earl of Ranelagh who built a house in Chelsea, surrounded by a large garden. On his death, the grounds and the house were purchased by Swift and Timbrell, who sought to establish a grander place than that at Vauxhall, and obtained financial support for it. After the gardens were laid out, the new owners wanted to erect a suitable building. The famous Rotunda was designed by the architect William Jones, who was later suspected of having plagiarized a similar building designed in Henry VIIIs time. The Rotunda could be accessed from four points corresponding to the four points of the compass, each designed to resemble a triumphal arch. However, the interior looked very much like a late 19th century opera house. There were 52 boxes around the wall, accommodating 78 people each. Higher up there was a row of windows. Numerous tables were set on the matted floor. The Rotunda was painted by the Italian painter Canaletto in 1754. The whole arrangement of the gardens, including its lighting system, was meant for the upper classes who could afford the expensive entertainment. In the 19th century the Chelsea Hospital was built on the grounds. Even today, Ranelagh is a green pleasure ground with finely shaded pathways, part of the grounds of Chelsea Hospital, and the site of the annual Chelsea Flower Show.

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LECTURE 5: The Background of Pre-Victorian and Victorian Age

The Romantic Mood; Major personalities; Major concepts; Major events; The City. This introduction is not a lecture on William Wordsworths poetry, but an attempt at catching the spirit of an age through the mind of a great poetic mind. Moreover, my approach considers the sometimes-traumatic changes that occurred at the turn of the 18th century triggered by both the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars.

At the turn of the 18th century, fancy becomes for poets a land where wounds are healed. As Wordsworth puts it, fancy peoples the harmless fields with signs of woe:/Beneath her sway, a simple forest cry/Becomes an echo of mans misery (Poems of the Fancy, A Morning Exercise).

Poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, in a word, the Romantic generation, seek for new ways of contemplation and comprehension of reality. Most of them lived through the Napoleonic wars and the changes brought about the industrial revolution in Europe. I think I am not wrong when stating that the Napoleonic wars shuttered the grounds of old Europe as much as World War I did in the early 20th century. Thus, in his volume Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1820), the poet contemplates the field of Waterloo, and comments: While glory seemed betrayed, while/patriot-zeal/Sank in our hearts, we felt as one should feel/With such vast hoards of hidden carnage/near/And horror breathing from the silent/ground!

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Likewise, other places from Europe are marked and marred by the memory of battles. Fancy, that inner land of sorrow, escape and healing, is called upon to testify to the terrible losses: What lovelier home could gentle Fancy/choose?/ Is this the stream whose cities, heights,/and plains,/Wars favourite playground, are with crimson/stains/Familiar, as the Morn with pearly dews? (Between Namur and Liege).

Certainly, the tone of such poems differ from those written at the turn of the century, when Europe was smashed by Napoleons army, and the poet evokes the spirit of John Milton, the poet of the Civil War. Wordsworth, like many other poets of his time, was thrilled with the promised freedom that made Napoleon the role-model of the age. In the poets words, Milton should be living at this hour because England has become a fen of stagnant waters and betrayed, forfeited their ancient English dower/Of inward happiness. We are selfish men. The stagnant waters are somehow alluded to in a famous sonnet (Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 2, 1802), yet from an aesthetical point of view. I am going to quote the whole sonnet here: Earth has not anything to show more Fair: Dull would he be of soul who could Pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples Lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless Air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill
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Neer saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! The very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still.

As you might have noticed, this is not only a composition made of words but a paintinglike picture of London, one still remembered today.

After this prelude (to name the title of Wordsworths autobiographical poems), I am going to approach the Victorian Age from diverse perspectives. I have found that the best way of doing it is through the mind of a historian, not a simple historian dedicated to facts and dates, but a true intellectual who was also a dedicated art critic. Lytton Stratchey belonged to a circle of intellectuals based in Londons posh district, Bloomsbury. Several personalities from a wide range of fields were part of the Bloomsbury Group like John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E. M. Foster, Lytton Stratchey, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Dora Carrington and many others. It is good to know they had a liberal attitude towards civilization and life in general. Lytton Stratchey published several books on the Victorian Age: French Literature (1912), Eminent Victorians (1918), Queen Victoria. He developed his own theory of biography, which he sketched in his Introduction to Eminent Victorians. THE history of the Victorian Age he thinks, will never be written; we know too much about it. Quite ironically, he adds: For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke16 would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon17 would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing
16

Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) a famous German historian who insisted on the precision of sources (he is said to have invented the footnote). 17 Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), Englands most famous historian, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

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searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided by these considerations, I have written the ensuing studies. I have attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian visions to the modern eye. Like a true aesthete, Stratchey circumscribes history to art, converting it into a way of illustration rather than explanation, yet explanation you will find to a full extend, even if not explicit. He is aware, as any modernist that he has to deal with fragments of truth and not to cling to facts. Was he also a philosopher of history? Yes, he was indeed, as he underlined that Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had, it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men. What about his attitude? Well, he declares himself uninvolved but committed, dispassionate, impartial, without ulterior intentions, but you will judge for yourselves.

When approaching the Victorian Age, we should bear in mind that much of it is still with us, or it was with my generation, and the generation of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin. For people like Stratchey, things were even more complicated. Though they were not so much aware of it, they lived with its haunting memories; they praised or rejected many of the things Victorians themselves did. Never were such seemingly unending debates about moral values, about the role of the artist, about decency, about better housing and better life in general. Yet, critics like Stratchey will give us a more comprehensive picture about the period. Besides the eminent Victorians studied by the critic (Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning, etc), there were other eminent Victorians, famous critics and theorists like John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, William Morris.

The truth is that much of the opposition to Victorianism came from poets and artists, whether they shared Carlyles bitter criticism or not. Their protests could be summed up in the all-too-comprehensive word materialism. At the beginning of the 19th century, William Wordsworth, the great poet of the Lake School, had noted the combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, while at the turn of the century, the novelist D. H. Lawrence described it in terms of ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideas, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly
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furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread, he concluded. In fact, the 20th century criticism shares much of the artists perception of their century. If you read Ruskins books or Wildes essays, you will find fine and comprehensive statements about their own world. We shall discuss at length about artists and their ideas, but first you should know something about the general scene. Many still refer to the 19th century as the age of industrialization and rise of democracy. The former created what is currently labeled as the economic man, while the latter is treated as the democratic experiment. I. A Queen that Gave a Name to an Age Queen Victoria (1819-1901) was the only child of Edward, Duke of Kent, and Victoria Maria Louisa of Saxe-Coburg, a fact that related the English royal family of the German one. However, she became a queen in 1837 because her uncle, William IV had no legitimate surviving heirs. When she came to the throne, the Prime Minister was Lord Melbourne, a Whig. He treated her as if she were her own daughter, yet rumors were spread about their intimate relationship. However, he kept away from the misfortunes of the daily life, advising her, for instance, against reading Oliver Twist because it narrated about paupers, criminals and other unpleasant subjects.

In 1839, her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg visited London and she fell madly in love with him and got married in 1840. Prince Albert played a key role in the British politics, as much as it was allowed to the royal family, competing with Lord Melbourne for a while. Anyway, never had she a better relation with a PM to follow Melbourne. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert believed that the British government should do whatever it could to help preserve European royal families against revolutionary groups advocating republicanism, also present in England. This was very important to Victoria and Albert, and for the heir to the throne, the future king Edward VII, because they were closely related to several of the European royal families that faced the danger of being overthrown, which eventually happened. But, for a long time they sustained a sort of United Royal Europe. Prince Albert was her valuable advisor, and we could say he opened her eyes on the dark side of Englands life, like child labor. He was also involved in cultural projects, among which the competition for the Crystal Palace. In 1861, Prince Albert died and she mourned for him for a long time, withdrawn in her castle at Balmoral, in the Scottish Highlands, a place where the family used to reunite and live a quiet, domestic life surrounded by their nine children. However, her grief was so deep that she refused to open Parliament and the government began to question whether they were going to pay her any longer.
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In 1884, The Reform Act, initiated by the Prime Minister William Gladstone, a liberal, and her archrival, was voted against her conservative convictions. Nevertheless, the Act was necessary, because it restrained many of the Lords privileges, allowing the uppermiddle class member to have access to the House of Lords.

Much of the attention of the country was focused abroad during her reign. In 1876, she was declared Empress of India and the English Empire constantly expanded, turning London in the capital of the world. The prevailing attitude in Britain was that expansion was good for everyone and the queen became an extremely popular figure, an example as a mother and queen.

Now, let us consider Lytton Stratcheys final portrait of the queen from the book I have already mentioned: Queen Victoria (1921). A PORTRAIT OF QUEEN VICTORIA BY LYTTON STRATCHEY

Queen Victoria & Prince Albert The queens religious opinions: Her piety, absolutely genuine, found what it wanted in the sober exhortations of old John Grant and the devout saws of Mrs. P. Farquharson. They possessed the qualities, which, as a child of fourteen, she had so sincerely admired in the Bishop of Chester's "Exposition of the Gospel of St. Matthew;" they were "just plain and comprehensible and full of truth and good feeling." The Queen, who gave her name to the Age of Mill and of Darwin, never got any further than that. The queens social opinions/attitudes:
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Lytton Strachey From the social movements of her time Victoria was equally remote. Towards the smallest no less than towards the greatest changes she remained inflexible. During her youth and middle age smoking had been forbidden in polite society, and so long as she lived she would not withdraw her anathema against it. Kings might protest; bishops and ambassadors, invited to Windsor, might be reduced, in the privacy of their bedrooms, to lie full-length upon the floor and smoke up the chimneythe interdict continued! It might have been supposed that a female sovereign would have lent her countenance to one of the most vital of all the reforms to which her epoch gave birththe emancipation of womenbut, on the contrary, the mere mention of such a proposal sent the blood rushing to her head. In 1870, her eye having fallen upon the report of a meeting in favour of Women's Suffrage, she wrote to Mr. Martin in royal rage"The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Woman's Rights,' with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety. Ladyought to get a GOOD WHIPPING. It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women differentthen let them remain each in their own position. Tennyson has some beautiful lines on the difference of men and women in 'The Princess.' Woman would become the most hateful, heartless, and disgusting of human beings were she allowed to unsex herself; and where would be the protection which man was intended to give the weaker sex? The Queen is sure that Mrs. Martin agrees with her." The argument was irrefutable; Mrs. Martin agreed; and yet the canker spread.

The queens knowledge of English polity [general organization of the state]: The English polity was in the main a common-sense structure, but there was always a corner in it where common-sense could not enterwhere, somehow or other, the ordinary measurements were not applicable and the ordinary rules did not apply. So our ancestors had laid it down, giving scope, in their wisdom, to that mystical element which, as it seems, can never quite be eradicated from the affairs of men. Naturally it was in the Crown that the mysticism of the English polity was concentratedthe Crown, with its venerable antiquity, its sacred associations, its imposing spectacular array. But, for nearly two centuries, common-sense had been predominant in the great building, and the little, unexplored, inexplicable corner had attracted small attention. Then, with
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the rise of imperialism, there was a change. For imperialism is a faith as well as a business; as it grew, the mysticism in English public life grew with it; and simultaneously a new importance began to attach to the Crown. The need for a symbola symbol of England's might, of England's worth, of England's extraordinary and mysterious destinybecame felt more urgently than ever before. The Crown was that symbol: and the Crown rested upon the head of Victoria. Thus it happened that while by the end of the reign the power of the sovereign had appreciably diminished, the prestige of the sovereign had enormously grown.

Peoples opinions about their queen: And then, she was a character. The outlines of her nature were firmly drawn, and, even through the mists which envelop royalty, clearly visible. In the popular imagination her familiar figure filled, with satisfying ease, a distinct and memorable place. It was, besides, the kind of figure which naturally called forth the admiring sympathy of the great majority of the nation. Goodness they prized above every other human quality; and Victoria, who had said that she would be good at the age of twelve, had kept her word. Duty, conscience, moralityyes! in the light of those high beacons the Queen had always lived. She had passed her days in work and not in pleasurein public responsibilities and family cares. The standard of solid virtue which had been set up so long ago amid the domestic happiness of Osborne had never been lowered for an instant. For more than half a century no divorced lady had approached the precincts of the Court. Victoria, indeed, in her enthusiasm for wifely fidelity, had laid down a still stricter ordinance: she frowned severely upon any widow who married again.

The Queens nature: For, though many of her characteristics were most often found among the middle classes, in other respectsin her manners, for instanceVictoria was decidedly aristocratic. And, in one important particular, she was neither aristocratic nor middleclass: her attitude toward herself was simply regal. [...]She moved through life with the imposing certitude of one to whom concealment was impossibleeither towards her surroundings or towards herself. There she was, all of herthe Queen of England, complete and obvious; the world might take her or leave her; she had nothing more to show, or to explain, or to modify; and, with her peerless carriage, she swept along her path. And not only was concealment out of the question; reticence, reserve, even dignity itself, as it sometimes seemed, might be very well dispensed with. [...]Her utterly unliterary style has at least the merit of being a vehicle exactly suited to her thoughts
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and feelings; and even the platitude of her phraseology carries with it a curiously personal flavour. Undoubtedly it was through her writings that she touched the heart of the public. Not only in her "Highland Journals" where the mild chronicle of her private proceedings was laid bare without a trace either of affectation or of embarrassment, but also in those remarkable messages to the nation which, from time to time, she published in the newspapers, her people found her very close to them indeed. They felt instinctively Victoria's irresistible sincerity, and they responded. And in truth it was an endearing trait. Relationship between Queen and her subjects: The last and the most glorious of such occasions was the Jubilee of 1897. Then, as the splendid procession passed along, escorting Victoria through the thronged re-echoing streets of London on her progress of thanksgiving to St. Paul's Cathedral, the greatness of her realm and the adoration of her subjects blazed out together. The tears welled to her eyes, and, while the multitude roared round her, "How kind they are to me! How kind they are!" she repeated over and over again. That night her message flew over the Empire: "From my heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them!" The long journey was nearly done. But the traveller, who had come so far, and through such strange experiences, moved on with the old unfaltering step. The girl, the wife, the aged woman, were the same: vitality, conscientiousness, pride, and simplicity were hers to the latest hour.

When, two days previously, the news of the approaching end had been made public, astonished grief had swept over the country. It appeared as if some monstrous reversal of the course of nature was about to take place. The vast majority of her subjects had never known a time when Queen Victoria had not been reigning over them. She had become an indissoluble part of their whole scheme of things, and that they were about to lose her appeared a scarcely possible thought. She herself, as she lay blind and silent, seemed to those who watched her to be divested of all thinkingto have glided already, unawares, into oblivion. Yet, perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she had her thoughts, too. Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for the last time, the vanished visions of that long historypassing back and back, through the cloud of years, to older and ever older memoriesto the spring woods at Osborne, so full of primroses for Lord Beaconsfieldto Lord Palmerston's queer clothes and high demeanour, and Albert's face under the green lamp, and Albert's first stag at Balmoral, and Albert in his blue and silver uniform, and the Baron coming in through a doorway, and Lord M. dreaming at Windsor with the rooks cawing in the elm-trees, and the
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Archbishop of Canterbury on his knees in the dawn, and the old King's turkey-cock ejaculations, and Uncle Leopold's soft voice at Claremont, and Lehzen with the globes, and her mother's feathers sweeping down towards her, and a great old repeater-watch of her father's in its tortoise-shell case, and a yellow rug, and some friendly flounces of sprigged muslin, and the trees and the grass at Kensington.

II. Some Remarks about the 19th Century Scene There was a great amount of discussion about democracy, individualism, nationalism, and liberalism through the century. Education becomes a general concern, while the place of religious teaching in a national system of education is sharply debated. The early and middle Victorian periods were intensely moralistic, heavy with responsibility and anxiety. The century produced a large number of theories of society, party, government, yet the peacefulness of social evolution, contrary to Marxs prophesies, should be ascribed to the empirical, unideological, trademanlike qualities of the rising middle class. It struggled to shape the turbulent lower levels of society in its own image by example, by preaching, and propaganda. The main topic was democracy and its good to remember De Tocquevilles words in Democracy in America: The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from being equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or to freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness. The English democracy led people to knowledge and prosperity, not that kind of prosperity Marx prophesized. Which was the strategy? Mainly the moralizing attitudes of the mind, that is, to mingle business with moralism that can make good intentions seem hypocritical or brutal. And it is hypocrisy and rudeness that woke up the criticism of Ruskin and Carlyle. Quite subtly, the latter called it the Age of Machinery in a philosophical sense, in his book Signs of Time: It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches, and practices the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. [] Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the spiritual also [] Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand.

III. An Age of Contrasts and Its Key-Concepts

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The Age of Machinery went hand in hand with standardization. The ugly combination of slate and brick, which became the standard materials for the new working-class houses, was the cheapest available in quantity. Thomas Carlyle denounced it in moral terms. However, the worst aspect of town development following the Napoleonic Wars and in early Victorian times was the overcrowding, especially in back- to-back terraces. It was only in the second half of the century that legislation was passed to impose tolerable standards in structure and sanitation, but the absence of any kind of townplanning has left permanent evils. I mention such aspects because there is much of one side of the Victorian period reflected in housing and planning. Even the houses of the middle-class seemed spacious, solid, and immensely dignified, though they needed huge quantities of coal to be heated, since wood had to be imported.

At that time, Englands Empire grew stronger and the colonies offered opportunities to her citizens. New Zeeland, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and America were places of emigration and fortune seekers created a new world there. We could draw a parallel between 17th century England and 19th century England in this respect, and note that the New Babylon (London) was generating new worlds.

A new concept arose: self-help; it reflected the new values of the great doers, and features many characters of the period novel, from Dickens to Henry James. This idea counterbalanced the emerging working-class which through the Trade Union Act of 1871 was recognized as part of the mechanism of modern life. Thus, they were no longer dependent on humanitarian sentiment that had pervaded the thought of Carlyle and Ruskin, much indebted to the earlier Romantics and the revival of religious feeling and speculation about more Christian order of society.

There are other key-concepts that occupied the Victorian stage and the general literature, like: political economy, utilitarianism, and religious revivalism. Many critics pointed out that the stress on self-interest of utilitarian political economy was reinforced by Calvinist-Evangelical emphasis on personal salvation and on the conviction that poverty was ordained. However, utilitarianism was full of paradoxes and some of its supporters were also humanitarians (Oscar Wilde used to call them Philistines). Although based on a minimal view of human nature, the economic man, it inspired many of the most important reforms of the age in parliamentary and local government, in the working of the law, in standards of sanitation and in education. The core concept of utilitarianism was the laissez-faire, theorized by Jeremy Bentham. The
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Benthamite legislator artificially harmonizes interests in order to ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number, while economic interests would seem to be selfharmonizing and require little intervention from the legislator. Many thought it full of contradictions, which made room for stronger determinism. The most incisive critic of utilitarianism was Dickens who entitled his first chapter of Hard Times that takes place in a classroom, Murdering the Innocents. There he describes the psychological and educational ideas which formed the philosophical part of utilitarianism. In fact utilitarianism had erased from the vocabulary words like conscience, moral sense, love, and right, because it thought they were fictions, that is vague. Instead, it established a moral arithmetic by which the greatest happiness of the greatest number might be calculated, thus making traditional ethics superfluous. Just imagine: one can calculate happiness, the degree of pleasure or dissatisfaction. You needed much courage to resist, living outside this caged rationalism, which in psychology was based on the associations logic deriving from John Locke and David Hartley, and which Bentham and J. S. Mill incorporated into their scheme of man and of society. According to this pattern the mind was made up of an increasing complexity of associations originating in sensations. In this determinism of self-interest there was no room for the growth of conscience, but this kind of theory was made the substratum of utilitarian political thought and was an essential part of the theoretical justification for the reform of the law, and for majority government: Nature has placed man under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we say, in all we think; every effort we make to throw off our subjection will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it The principle of utility recognizes this subjection and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by hands of reason and law. (Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation).

However, they all claimed that their moral was scientific and banished the old-fashioned moral. As you can note, in this chain of associations, there is no much room for imagination and feeling, and so the artists reaction was powerful. One of them was Oscar Wilde who insisted on free imagination, and the other one was a mathematician, poet, and humorist: Lewis Carroll, both precursor of the 20th century modernism. Let us end these few remarks by saying that 19th century tried to be materialist but it could not hold there were too many tendencies that diversified the mainstream.
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IV. Some Key-Events of Victorian England As you might know, the 19th century was marked by some essential changes in various realms. In fact, it was the turning point of modernity, its move towards the 20th century modernism. You could sense it in the concepts discussed above as well as in the following brief presentation. In the realm of human rights the battle waged in the early days of her reign. For instance, in 1839 the movement known as Chartism started. The document was created for the Working Mens Association, and was it was mainly the work of William Lovett. They demanded universal male suffrage, and the authorities dealt with it harshly. Here are their demands that were later supported by the PM to be, Benjamin Disraeli: - Institution of a secret ballot; - General elections be held annually Members of Parliament not be required to own property MPs be paid a salary Electoral districts of equal size Universal male suffrage Some believe that the authority reaction was strong because the memory of the French Revolution was still fresh and they feared a popular upheaval. Though it failed, because it could not gather either the Parliament support or the middle class approval, its demands were introduced in the Election Bills of 1864 and 1867. As you may notice that happened in the middle of Queen Victorias reign, a time when her sympathies changed, and men like Benjamin Disraeli, a brilliant writer and political thinker was chancellor of the Exchequer and for a short period of time, Britains Prime Minister, yet not as liberal and trenchant as Gladstone. In fact he was an open-minded Tory. Women Movements, who equally demanded woman suffrage and rights for women, paralleled their claims. In fact, their actions brought them some victories, but only in house planning for the moment, so at the private level. Women became more and more outspoken and their liberalism contrasted with the conservative pattern established by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the Consort Prince.

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It was also in mid century that Indias administration was taken over by the British Government, following an army mutiny (1857). England was also involved in the Crimean War (1854) with no other outcome but its promoting of nurses practices, under the influence of Florence Nightingale also known as The Lady with the Lamp. As concerns the prevailing position in the world that England held, there is one event that reflected it: The Great Exhibition of 1851, initiated by the Prince Consort. He envisaged a self-financing event, and gave an impetus to the rather reluctant government to set up a Royal Commission to survey the Exhibition to be held in Hyde Park. There were 200 projects submitted, but the Commission selected one that proved to be less feasible because of its const. There came Paxton who had submitted a project too, but was rejected. Paxton had a good sense of the power of the press and used it for his ends and finally his project was approved. This gigantic glass and steel construction, based on a greenhouse pattern (Paxton was a gardener) revolutionized the world of both construction and architecture, setting an example. The event itself opened on May 1, 1851, with 17,000 exhibitors from as far away as China, and over 6 million visitors who enjoyed the fantastic display of goods, from silks to clocks, and furniture to farm machinery. Its worth noting that in fact, it celebrated the Industrial Revolution. The construction itself, the first example of temporary architecture, was dismantled and reassembled in Sydenham, South London and it stayed there until 1936, when it burnt down.

V. Some Facts about the Role of London as the Metropolis of the Empire

First, the population increased in the 19th century, from about 1 million to over 6 million at the end of the century. This fact exceeded London capacity to look after the basic sanitation and building needs of the inhabitants. A combination of coal-fired stoves and poor sanitation made the air heavy and foul smelling, which also affected the Buckingham Palace. London as much as other cities in the country to which a large of population moved resulted in horrifying slums and cramped areas. The city was organized into geographical zones based on social class: the poor in the inner city, with the more fortunate living further away from the city core. However, a providential engineer appeared: his name was Joseph Bazalgette. He was responsible for the building of over 2,100 km of tunnels and pipes to divert sewage outside the city. This helped drop the outbreaks of cholera dramatically. He also built pumping stations and
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designed the fitting out of the Thames project resulting in the Embankment, and some bridges like Battersea, Hammersmith, and Albert Bridges.

In 1834, the Houses of Parliament at Westminster Palace burned down. They were gradually replaced by the triumphant mock-Gothic design of Charles Barry and A. W. Pugin, both stark advocates of Gothicism. Remaining in the same area, Id like to mention the construction of Big Ben in 1859, one of the symbols of London for almost one hundred and fifty years.

Londons transport system also expanded. In 1863, the first underground railway was built from Paddington (the railway station) to Farringdon Road. The project was so successful, that other lines soon followed.

As to architecture, London became more and more a city of contrasts, from the Italianate villas to those infamous back-to-backs. However, a project, initiated among others by William Morris intended to bring rural cottage comfort to the desolate neighborhoods. The Garden City Movement took roots in London, and many cottages were built by the city council, yet they failed to provide the comfort they claimed to.

Both the lower and middle-class changed their taste during the century, and the industrial revolution also meant mass production reflecting in the house decoration, even in the low-cost cottages I mentioned. The dark crimsons of fabrics and wallpaper, and the grained and varnished woodwork were replaced by more adventurous color schemes. Velvet, serge, or damask curtains trimmed with ball fringes, dark green, or blue, covered with exaggerated damask patterns, and almost hidden by large realistic paintings in wide, heavy gilded frames were replaced by vivid colors of dazzling effect. To the end of the century, white was preferred, for instance. The major designer of the age was William Morris.

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LECTURE 6: EDWARDIAN ENGLAND; ENGLAND DURING AND AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, her eldest son, Edward, Prince of Wells, and his spouse, Princess Alexandra of Denmark became king and queen. The king to be had already been popular with artists and liberal minded elite, though he was more inclined to tradition. His reign, which was of short duration, until 1910, coincided with what we currently label as fin de sicle or Art Nouveau period in art. It is interesting to note the reaction of some intellectuals such as Beatrice Webb, co-founder with her husband of the Fabian Society, I am going to approach below. She remarks with bitter irony that We are at last free of the funeral. It has been a true national wake, a real debauch of sentiment and loyalty and a most impressive demonstration of the whole people in favor of the monarchical principle. The streets are still black with the multitudes in mourning, from the great ladies in their carriages to the flower girls, who are furnished with rags of crepe. The king is hugely popular as for the German Emperor, we all adore him. H. G. Wells, the science-fiction writer felt relief, while the famous novelist, Henry James, thought Bertie, the new king a vulgarian and believed Victoria had died after being sickened and humiliated by the Boer War. Young Winston Churchill, whose father clashed with Bertie in the past, in a mocking letter, wondered if Bertie would revolutionize his way of life, sell his horses, scatter his Jews or he would enshrine Reuben Sassoon among the crown jewels. The Edwardian kings were not merely monarchs at home but they also enjoyed the title of King-Emperor. Though this is the beginning of the democratic age, the old web of royal marriages still spread across Europe, making diplomacy familial, which is no longer a case today, when royalties prefer to marry into commoner families. As for Bertie, he preferred France to Germany, being suspicious of his German cousin. That explains Englands choices in the First World War. Actually, Bertie was much known in Paris, where he frequently visited brothels and caused gossips across European royal
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families. He even appeared in a Toulouse-Lautrec poster with top hat and bulging belly. This jocular, Falstaffian side of him also made him popular at home, where he had many mistresses ranging from cockney girls to Mrs. Keppel, a devoted liberal who influenced his political choices. As to the political weather during what we call La Belle poque, the English had to confront with a disastrous war, the Boer War(s); there we could see various reactions. For instance, Winston Churchill was appalled by the British cruelty against the native population (Dutch colonists). Another important figure in British politics in pre-war and post-war England was Lord Herbert Henry Asquith 1st Earl of Oxford (1852-1928), who was famous for his academic merit and great appetite for hard work. He was the countrys Prime Minister from 1908 until 1916, the longest career as PM until Margaret Thatchers. He was a Liberal and brought about several reforms, particularly those regarding social welfare, which infuriated the landowners who had to pay heavy taxes. The period was strongly marked by the Suffragettes Movement that started in Manchester. As Andrew Marr puts it: The Edwardian suffragette campaign was extraordinarily violet. It involved arson and death as well as marches and windowsmashing. Members of Emmeline Pankhursts Womens Social and Political Union disrupted meetings of Liberal politicians, heckled (booed), petitioned and sold their newspaper on the streets. But they also rushed Parliament, challenged the police with mass marches which turned violent, smashed huge numbers of shop windows, set fire to letter-boxes, slashed famous paintings in art galleries, disrupted courtrooms and deliberately got themselves arrested, refusing to pay fines and therefore facing imprisonment, during which many went on hunger strike and had to be force fed (The Making of Modern Britain, p. 56). In a word, many of these rebel girls died for the cause willingly. The Fabian Society started as a Fellowship of New Life setting to change the society gradually by setting a good example for other people. When some of its
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members decided to enter the political arena, they changed their name into Fabian Society in honor of the Roman general Fabius Maximus, also nicknamed Cunctator, meaning the Delayer), which meant they chose a strategy of harassment. The first Fabian Society pamphlets advocating tenets of social justice coincided with the zeitgeist of Liberal reforms during the early 1900s. The Fabian proposals however were considerably more progressive than those that were enacted in the Liberal reform legislation. The Fabians lobbied for the introduction of a minimum wage in 1906, for the creation of a universal health care system in 1911 and for the abolition of hereditary peerages in 1917. At the same time, since most of its members belonged to the middleclass and even upper-middle class, they initiated a network of vacation houses, sometimes old restored mansions, that could be accessed by workers. Their socialism laid the foundation for the Labour Party that was to be created in 1900. People like Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, members of the London School of Economics, Leonard Woolf and others who later formed the Bloomsbury Group, the finest intellectual movement during interwar England. Here are some points about entertainment during the period before the First World War. The former shows that took place in the back of the pub made their way to the city center and so the music hall won the hearts of the general public and even of the royal family. A new star system emerged encouraged by the songs that became popular very quickly among a growing audience that started to buy pianos, music sheets and so everybody was singing! What is interesting about this phenomenon is that a new architectural programme emerged: music hall theatres. The greatest architect of music halls was Frank Matcham. He had a hand in no fewer than 150 theaters between 1879 and 1920. However, most of them were demolished, burned down or were altered beyond recognition. As Andrew Marr remarks Only a few of the grandest, such as Londons Coliseum and hippodrome, the Shepherds Bush Empire and the Bristol Hippodrome remain. [] In Matcham halls, the classic tiers and stalls arrangements of conventional theatres were copied, and ever more fantastic decorations were added. His grandest confection, the Coliseum, boasted the first lift in any theatre in the world, a
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revolving stage for horse-races and other spectacles, and a small railway to convey the King and his party to the royal box. [] There were great singers like Mark Sheridan, famous for his hit I do like to be beside the seaside, launched in 1909 [see link] but he saw his career on the slide, was booed and shot himself. Again, there was the famous Harry Houdini, the magician who became famous after escaping the prison of Sheffield after having been locked with seven locks. So, the star system started in early 1900s and with it, a new class of successful and rich artists. Of course, there were no pre-recordings and so singers would go from theatre to theatre and all depended on the manager and the audience. Here are two examples. Its a long way to Tipperary, written by a composer and a semi-professional singer who ran a fish stall, was sheet-music hit when it came out in 1912 and two years later and towards the end of the war was selling and astonishing 10,000 copies every day. Another example is that of Katie Lawrence who sang Daisy, Daisy, Give me Your answer Do; when she was about to drop it, she heard it hummed in a London railway station; in fact, it was all over the city. So, it all depended on the audience who at that time did not have records or CDs; they simply heard the song and then bought the music. But this is not all, the song is still sung today by both babies and adults. However, we must beware golden-ageism. As the novelist Colin MacInnes, a lover of music hall tradition put it, Theyre [the songs] inhibited emotionally, too limited intellectually, too frankly commercial in their intentions. I think the highest one can claim for them is that they are a sort of bastard folk song of an industrial-commercial imperial age.

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Bibliography: Histories: The Pelican Guide to English Literature (vol. 1-6), Pelican Books, 1980 Trevelyan, G. M, A Shortened History of England, Penguin Books, 1987 Dictionaries: Chambers Biographical Dictionary, New Edition, W&R. Chambers, LTD, 1961 Works of: Anthony Trollope; Charles Dickens;
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D. H. Lawrence John Donne; John Locke; John Ruskin; Lytton Stratchey; Oscar Wilde; Thomas More William Morris; William Shakespeare; William Wordsworth Books: Uglow, Jenny, A Gambling Man; Charles II and the Restoration, Faber and Faber, 2009 Marr, Andrew, The Making of Modern Britain, from Queen Victoria to VE Day, Pan Books, 2009 Shelley, C, Henry, Inns and Taverns of Old London, www.buildinghistory.org

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