Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age by Foss Michael

Author:Foss, Michael [Foss, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781782432210
Published: 2013-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

7

Sir Humphrey Gilbert

ON MONDAY, 9th September 1583, undone by idealism, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his little ship the Squirrel, a mere cockleshell of ten tons burthen on the black sea, vanished beneath the Atlantic waves.

Gilbert’s short and vigorous life was a continuous preparation for this calamity. Uncertain in his inheritance, schooled by pedants, trained in the courtly modes of a departed heroic age, he sought a new England overseas which he imagined as the grand Platonic form of the old England he knew, through whose perplexed ways he wandered dragging his abstract ideas and leaving incidentally a trail of blood. He was born to the sound of water, about the year 1539 at Greenway on the River Dart. The Gilberts had grown wealthy from maritime business pursued with energy and ruthlessness. They had been, and were, warriors, merchants, smugglers and privateers. Among his relatives were many West Country adventurers—Carews, Champernowns, Grenvilles—turbulent men full of seamanship and egotism, who knew the atrocious loneliness of small ships far from land. Humphrey’s father died in 1547, and soon after his mother married Walter Raleigh, another Devon sailor; from this union came, in 1552, the famous Sir Walter Raleigh, destined, like his half-brother Humphrey, to laborious journeys, to obscure triumphs and ultimate defeat.

At the early age then usual, young Humphrey was sent to Eton, which until 1541 had been under the rod of Nicholas Udall, scholar, playwright, thief of the college plate, and the ‘greatest beater’ of his time. At Eton, the too familiar acquaintance with Lily’s Latin Syntax, the text book of the age mentioned in no less than eight of Shakespeare’s plays, the mere repetition of Latin grammar which Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570) called ‘tedious for the master, hard for the scholar, cold and uncomfortable for both’, failed to prevent Gilbert from becoming modestly learned in the manner of the gentlemen of the time, sound in the classics and proficient in French and Spanish. But the method was rough and deficient, as Gilbert saw; twenty years after his school-days he wrote a work on education called Queen Elizabethes Achademy in which he tried to reform the schooling of rich youths who were, he said, ‘obscurely drowned in education’. Leaving Eton, Gilbert took the lean fruits and sore bruises of Udall’s method and went on to Oxford; for no doubt he had suffered the kind of barbarity that caused his cousin, Peter Carew, to be chained like a mad dog in the school-yard until he broke his fetters and ran away. In Gilbert’s short time at Oxford—he entered the service of Princess Elizabeth at sixteen1—he remembered the traditions of his family and studied navigation and the arts of war.

The Gilberts were Protestants, and relatives of Humphrey were implicated in Wyatt’s unsuccessful rebellion against Mary in 1554. Oxford, where the Protestant churchmen Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer were burnt to death in 1555 and 1556, was Catholic and no place for young Gilbert. He left puzzled. The study of Latin, which had taken up

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