5 JULY 1946, Page 18

A Queen's Favourite

Sir Christopher Hatton, Queen Elizabeth's Favourite. By Eric St. John Brooks. (Cape. 18s.)

IT will be remembered that Dr. Johnson "while he lived never desired to hear of the Punic War," and many have been found to agree with him. But there is history and history. Some of us. who were dragged through Livy sullen and yawning, can still pounce eagerly on lives of the doomed or glittering Elizabethans, men who may have figured in the sonnets or presented their guarded poker-faces for the portraits of Nicholas Hilliard.

Mr. St. John Brooks reminds us that of Queen Elizabeth's four most influential statesmen—Cecil, Walsingham, Leicester and Hatton —only Walsingham has had the distinction of a modern critical biography. Hatton was -Clearly not so sagacious as -the Polonius- like Cecil (but then who was?), nor so effectively sinister as Walsingham, who ran the Secret Service ; but it is an injustice to consider him merely as the incompetent gallant who danced his way into the Queen's heart. It is true that Froude and Lytton Strachey both suggest this view, but they are very often -as wrong as they are entertaining. "Hatton danced, and that is all we know of him," according to Strachey, but Mr. St. John Brooks has contrived to collect a longish book out of this knowledge, which seems to be less scanty than it was once thought. While his life has not perhaps the dramatic elements, the story-tale qualities, of Essex's or Leicester's lives, with rings going fatally astray and unwanted wives tumbling downstairs to their death, it is not un- eventful. He left behind a number of impassioned letters to Elizabeth which might suggest, but only to those who didn't know Elizabeth or the conventions of her court, that he had been her lover. He robbed the Bishop of Ely of his London residence where Hatton Garden stands today. At the Inns of Court Fuller records that "he rather took a bait than made a meal whilst he studied the lawe therein." He may perhaps first have come under the Queen's notice for his graceful dancing is the mask which followed the performance of that gloomy drama " Gorboduc " in 1562. About two years later he was made one of the Gentlemen Pensionsts who were,expected to joust in the tilt- yard and to accompany the Sovereign to chapel and on progresses. He was present at James Mtiville's embarrassing audience with the Queen when Elizabeth declared that she hoped for the marriage of Dudley and Mary Stuart (was this disingenuous?), and enquired whether she or her cousin was the fairer or played better on the virginals—an embarrassing question.

Hatton frequently accompanied the Queen on her costly and elaborate progresses, which were perhaps the most characteristic social functions of the reign. He was a patron of learned men, the target for one of the introductory sonnets to The Faerie Queene, and it has even been contended that he had a share in making the anthology called A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. His blackmailing letters to the Bishop of Ely were extremely venomous. " It will not like you that the world know of your decayed houses . . . of the leases that you violently pull from many . . . And to be flat. you nourish the ill and discourage the good." There was also a strong rumour that Hatton contrived the death of the treasonable Earl of Northumberland, who had been involved in the Northern Rebellion. He himself died in debt to the Crown, but visited and comforted by the Queen, and the grandeur of his tomb surpassed the neighbouring monuments to Walsingham and Sir Philip Sidney.

But to be flat, as Hatton would say, this biography is itself a little flattish. It is unfair to compare it with Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex, which has a more fascinating subject and in addition is not clogged with such a weight of historical evidence, but it could not sustain such comparison for a moment. Mr. St. John Brooks is not as selective as he should be, and so one cannot confidently recommend his book to any but convinced lovers of the Elizabethan scene.

PHOEBE POOL.