Vandyck Period Piece
THIS carefully-dated study, from the death of Buckingham to the outbreak of the Civil War, makes the second part of what is to be a trilogy, coming between The Jacobean Age and another yet to come on the genesis of the war, which is to tell us of the King's Government, the Parliamentary Opposition and the political orienta- tion of religious parties, together with the parallel and vital develop- ments in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Till that is done, we cannot pass considered judgement, or dwell on this or that over- or under- emphasis, measure the scale or agree with the conclusions. Thus it stands as a period piece of the Caroline, the Vandyck age, in its pure essence ; the age, Clarendon thought, of "the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age for so long time together have been blessed with" ; when " Haman " Buckingham had played his last part and when the young Milton was writing, Vandyck por- traying that short-lived happiness, and Inigo Jones planning to house it in glory. An age, at any rate of pre-eminent virtue, when George Herbert was parson of Bemerton and Henry Vaughan meditating by Usk, and Edmund Verney was the royal standard-bearer and Falkland's home was "a college in a purer air," while Lucy Hutchinson was setting up house and Baxter not without hope of one English Jerusalem. What does Archbishop Mathew make of this age of gold ? An engaging, accomplished, and beautifully written book, his best historical study, as I think, since the Celtic Peoples in the Age 01 the Renaissance. Apart from tracking down to their source the banal memoranda of the Calendars of State Papers Domestic, its special merit is to demonstrate how many lights are still to be found in the vast accumulation of diaries, family letters and account books, all in print and accessible to us all, but all alike tolerably neglected in virtue of the disastrous obsession of later days for " original " material. Originality, he shows us, is not an attribute of material but of the write: who uses it. His role has rather been to reinterpret than to construct, repainting here by suggestion, there turning to a new angle of light, here again scraping away the accumulated varnish on that wide canvas over which the Victorian Irvingite S. R. Gardiner drove his heavy-laden wain of retrospective ideals.
His own artistic process belonging rather to painting than to record, the gleaning of eye or sense impression rather than of ratiocination, its strength naturally has its weaker side. Those who knew best that age will appreciate the general exactness of these distilled epitomes and epithets, yet sometimes they seem to get " deranged," building up a soaring Baroque façade on too flimsy a foundation. Why Prince Rupert's "high mind," which, one would have thought, was middle-brow at best, should be called "starched and curious," I cannot imagine ; "the great smooth prelates" of Sheldon's generation do not ring true to me of Wilkins or Seth Ward or even George Morley, far less of Cosin ; while I should be sorry to deduce from one anecdote of Archbishop Abbot that this was how England was governed in Jacobean days, by "the great bland ease at the coach window." That is, unless the axe was inside the coach, or a corrupt scrivener on the box.
Though the author shows himself well aware of the difficulty of carving history into "eras," it crops up in his contrast of Strafford's rustic humour with what was to come in Clarendon's " jollity" or the talking-down of Robert Walpole: and, even in his fascinating chapter on "the attitude to property," I take leave to doubt some of his generalisations. Was there not house-purchase for amenity merely, and were there not social hangers-on in the fifteenth century—Pastons and Stonors ?
Without the sequel, this second panel of the triptych seems to shed too mild and golden a glow. For Eliot lay dead in the Tower, the prisons of Scilly and Jersey held some mutilated victims, small ships threading the Atlantic were carrying many thousands now in flight from King and bishops. We read with delight his pen- picture of the antiquary Lord William Howard, but await the entry on this fair scene of Pym and Hampden, Prynne and Harry Vane ; with some expectation, too, that Archbishop Mathew may under- rate the reality of democracy in the Independents, Quakers, Baptists, and Ranters.
So here is a rich ground for pleasure and reflection, with many beams shooting into the well-garnished periods of our standard histories, and many corrective notes in the chapters on the Catholic minority, country life, or the reading of different social strata. As for illustrations, apart from those of the royal house, we are given portraits of Portland, the elder Vane, and Endymion-Porter—lovely pictures, but of mean or insignificant men. There were others of solid worth, on whom hitherto there is silence, Coventry and Elles, mere, Edward Hyde and the first Bristol ; we should hear more of those who were to suffer most, of Hertford and Derby, Hopton and Capel. Of the author's minute and tessellated skill we are bound to ask that he shall do justice to the reasons that fitted "the gentry" to survive as rulers of a triumphant country for another two hundred years to come. For to make the history of Caroline England a requiem is to miss the enduringness of some substantial English values, and how we should hate to see that history go down tied to the fatal skirts of Henrietta Maria !
KEITH FE1LING.
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