The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  Giordano Bruno’s statue broods over the Campo dei Fiori in Rome on the site where he was burned alive at the stake by the Inquisition. The statue was erected in the nineteenth century with money raised from enthusiastic Italian liberals, non-believers and anti-papalists of varied lands, who saw Bruno as an early champion of their agnosticism or irreligion. Certainly Bruno can be profitably studied from varied standpoints, and he continues to attract a varied press. One book, published by a great academic press as recently as 1991, concludes with Bruno’s gruesome fate and signs off with the words ‘it served him right’, which at least lets us know where the author stands. Yet this author, evidently a modern adherent of Counter-Reformation papalism, John Bossy, failed to convince one reader at least that Bruno was the ‘mole’ in the French Embassy in London, code-named Fagot, who shopped poor Francis Throckmorton. Nevertheless, if you look for books about Bruno in the London Library you will have an energetic time, moving between Biography, Occult Science and Spies.

  Even if we believe that Bruno was employed, during his shortish sojourn in England, by Walsingham to ‘shop’ English Catholics in the early 1580s, it would be a skewed vision that saw this as his primary significance. For Bruno-enthusiasts, such as Philip Sidney or John Dee, as for hostile members of his lecture audience like the Puritan zealot George Abbott, the great significance of Giordano Bruno was as an exponent of the occult philosophy that underpinned so much of their lives.

  The writings of Hermes Trismegistus (known in Latin as Mercurius Trismegistus) are, in the universal scale of things, as influential as any to emerge from late antiquity. In fact, as far as intellectuals of the Renaissance were concerned, Hermes Trismegistus was perhaps the most influential thinker-sage-magus of all time. Whether or not he existed, and whether his compilation of writings, sometimes known as the Corpus Hermeticum, was written by several hands, is of far less significance than the drift and influence of this body of writings.

  You can see a representation of Hermes Trismegistus (meaning ‘thrice-great’) in the inlaid pavement of Siena’s glorious cathedral, dating from the 1480s. Hermes, in his tall wizardy hat, receives the obeisance of Moses himself, who – it was believed in Renaissance times – was ‘Hermes’s contemporary’. We know now that the Hermetic writings, which are a mish-mash of late-Platonic ‘uplift’, numerology, astrology, Creation mythology, ethics and philosophical speculation, belong to the period AD 100–300, and that they were written in Greek. St Augustine (354–430), in The City of God (written 413–26), denounced ‘Hermes’, whom he read in a Latin translation, for a passage in which he described how the Egyptians could call down spirits by magic to animate the idols of their gods.

  Denunciation is often a useful form of literary advertisement, and Augustine’s condemnation ensured that Hermes Trismegistus was remembered by subsequent Christian generations. It also led to the muddle of supposing – because, in his rambling, encyclopaedic fashion, Hermes Trismegistus had alluded to the ancient Egyptians – that he actually was an ancient Egyptian; that his writings were, in fact, the very origin of theology and philosophy. Moses is bowing to Hermes in the Siena pavement because all religion, according to the Hermetic way of looking at life, derived from this ancient source of wisdom. Plato, who actually wrote 500 or 600 hundred years before Hermes, and some of whose myths and ideas form a substantial template for ‘Hermetic’ notions – of the superiority of Spirit over Matter, of God the remote and immovable Spirit producing the Demiurge who created matter, and many other influential notions – this Plato was conceived by those who revered Hermes to be, like Moses and Judaism, deeply in the ancient magus’s debt.

  The Renaissance in Europe is the name given to a series of intellectual and artistic developments which were in some ways innovatory, but which saw themselves as profoundly conservative. The so-called humanists rediscovered Greek, and tried to write Latin and Greek in a purity of style that matched that of the Classics, untainted by the monkish crudities of the Middle Ages. But, for a generation that grew up with the humanists as its masters, such striving after grammatical purity and formal correctness in language alone was arid and unprofitable. The Victorian poet Robert Browning, in his superb poem ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’, conveys the life-view of such a humanist scholar who has buried his whole existence in a devotion to the intricacies of Greek morphology. Even as he is dying, it is the death-rattle that is referred to:

  Still, thro’ the rattle, parts of speech were rife.

  While he could stammer

  He settled Hoti’s business – let it be! –

  Properly based Oun – [Greek for therefore]

  Gave us the doctrine of the enclytic De . . . [Untranslatable little monosyllable used to create elegance in a Greek sentence]

  Browning’s grammarian is being buried in Italy, but this could be Sir John Cheke, who taught Burghley and others at Cambridge.

  The Hermetic devotees – men such as Giordano Bruno or John Dee – deplored the humanist preoccupation with the structure of language, at the expense of the contents of ancient texts.

  We live in the post-Romantic or post-Hegelian world, and are programmed by our collective myths to suppose that human history is a development, or evolution. We imagine ourselves moving onwards and upwards to sharper scientific understanding, ever more efficient or equitable political structures, a keener sense of The Good. Harbingers of this ‘modern’ outlook had dawned in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Aristotle was rediscovered through Arabic and Syriac texts, when the European study of mathematics was pioneered, thereby allowing for such innovations as the pointed arch or the striking clock.

  What we more commonly call the Renaissance, however, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a quest for the great values of antiquity. To this extent, it was largely reactionary. Far from believing, as Hegel or Darwin or Marx believed, that the Good Life was something to which they aspired in the future, when they had put behind them the crudities or injustices of the past, the wise men and women of the Renaissance looked backwards to a supposed Age of Gold. Both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation were trying to assert what they believed to be the core values and practices of the earliest age of Christianity. A new nation, such as Elizabethan England, in which so many of the new rich and powerful families were of recent coinage, looked back to bogus reconstructions of Arthurian history, or links between Albion and Rome, between the Brute coming from Troy to found their Britannium. In the twenty-first century our most avant-garde philosophical movements would wish to claim to be the newest. Their most avant-garde thinkers, such as Giordano Bruno, believed that they tapped into a wisdom, for a time lost in the mists of antiquity and now rediscovered. It was this ancient wisdom that Giordano Bruno was eager to impart: he became, indeed, a sort of missionary for it, abandoning the Dominican Order to which he had committed his youth in Naples and, in 1576 (having been inevitably accused of heresy), wandering through Europe and preaching with zeal the Hermetic mysteries.

  In March 1583 the English Ambassador in Paris, Henry Cobham, sent a dispatch to Walsingham: ‘Doctor Jordano Bruno Nolano, a professor in philosophy, intends to pass into England, whose religion I cannot commend.7 I have already alluded to the contribution Bruno might have made to Marlowe’s representation of the Faust myth. Marlowe had an instinctive contempt for what could, if we wanted to be harsh, be called mumbo-jumbo, which was every bit as fierce as the scepticism of the Aristotelians of Oxford about Copernicus.

  When Marlowe the contemptuous ‘atheist’ expresses views that coincide with orthodox English Calvinists, you can sense intellectual chauvinism. Here is a foreshadowing of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ philosophy’s contempt for ‘continental’ thinking in the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell’s dismissal of Hegelianism, later his quarrel with Wittgenstein. The studied refusal to discuss, let alone to read, Sartre or Heidegger or Derrida, by the mainstream analytical philosophical schools that exalted, on one side of the Atlantic, Ayer and Ryle, on the other Quine.
But although the Hermetic philosophy offended theological Protestants and ‘common-sense’ satirists such as Marlowe, it had a huge influence upon the way men and women, born during and after the Renaissance, viewed the world.

  What, perhaps, we need to remind ourselves, is that strong as its appeal might be to the inner coterie of intellectuals, to the would-be Fausts aspiring after knowledge-as-power, the Hermetic philosophy was also part of the common currency of the way in which Elizabethans thought about the world. It would be unsafe to press home with too great an emphasis analogies with modern thinkers. But for every dozen committed Darwinian scientists or scientifically minded philosophers, who had examined in learned detail the problems of the Natural Selection theory, there are, in our day in the Western world, millions of individuals who accept that Darwin has somehow or other ‘explained’ our life on this planet. Only one in a thousand students at universities a generation ago actually read Roland Barthes; but in our generation much of the Barthian language has filtered down into journalism, so that, for example, my last observation, about Darwinism, could be rephrased – ‘We believe in a Darwinian narrative.’ It is in this kind of way that we must see the importance of Giordano Bruno’s missionary journey to England, and to the spread, generally, of Hermetic ideas. In rather the same way, in the mid-twentieth century, vaguely Marxian ideas about economic determinism, or vaguely Freudian beliefs that human beings had been programmed by early childhood trauma, were maps by which to read the life-journey.

  An older generation of Elizabethan scholars liked to see coteries of heretics meeting in secret to expound their forbidden ideas. This could be exciting, but it could also blind us to the fact that such ideas, as well as being the secret preserve of adepts, were also part of the common currency.

  The genius of Frances Yates rediscovered, for example, the fact that Spenser’s Faerie Queene was a great magical poem, reflecting the ideas of Dee and Bruno. But this is not like discovering that Jane Austen was a secret Jacobin, infusing her novels with hidden revolutionary codes. It is not, in other words, a cranky conspiracy theory. It is a reminder that most intelligent readers of Spenser at the time would have responded cognitively to his astrological and numerological symbolism, just as when they saw the Globe Theatre, they would have realised that it had a symbolic architecture. Most Elizabethans, as well as the intellectuals, believed in magic, planetary influences and the package of Hermetic ideology. Not all had worked out the logical conclusions of such beliefs – if there were any – but such ideas were in the air. Shakespeare would throw such ideas about on the stage precisely because they were in the air. Edmund in King Lear would express the total scepticism about astrology that is probably shared by most twenty-first-century play-goers. But to Elizabethan audiences, his scepticism would be intentionally shocking:

  This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune – often the surfeits of our own behaviour – we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treacherous by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.8

  Much closer to what was generally thought, and much closer to the Hermetic philosophy, is the beautiful passage about the music of the spheres, and the soul’s kinship with them, expressed by Lorenzo to Jessica in The Merchant of Venice:

  How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

  Here will we sit and let the sounds of music

  Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night

  Become the touches of sweet harmony.

  Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

  Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold

  There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st

  But in his motion like an angel sings,

  Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

  Such harmony is in immortal souls,

  But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

  Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.9

  Hooker, contemplating the hierarchy of angels on his deathbed, would have shared the view (which had become a commonplace of the Italian Renaissance from the time that Marsilius Ficino translated Hermes Trismegistus into Latin for Cosimo de’ Medici in the fifteenth century, and indeed among those who had read him since Dante Alighieri in the fourteenth century) that the planets and the angelic hierarchies were one.

  The discovery by Copernicus that the Earth was part of a heliocentric planetary system was a revelation of the divinity of the universe. Far from banishing the angels, as a ‘modern’ space scientist might do in the imagination of some contemporaries, Copernicus brought them closer. The Copernican Sun, centre of the new system, had risen to bring light to the sixteenth century. That was how Giordano Bruno saw matters. Bruno viewed himself as the prophet of a new movement, a Gnostic rediscovery of ancient wisdom. In Cornelius Agrippa’s book on occult magic/philosophy, De occulta philosophia, he speaks of an ascent of the soul: ‘no one has such powers but he who has cohabited with the elements, vanquished nature, mounted higher than the heavens, elevating himself above the angels to the archetype itself, with whom he then becomes co-operator and can do all things’.10

  Bruno contrasts the religious maniacs of his own day, killing one another for theories about Justification by Faith or incomprehensible definitions of the Eucharist, with the kindly, reasonable adepts of Hermetic philosophy:

  The question which we ought to ask ourselves is whether we are in the daylight with the light of truth rising above our horizon, or whether the day is within our adversaries in the antipodes; whether the shadows of error are over us or over them; whether we who are beginning to revive the ancient philosophy are in the dawn which ends the night or in the evening of a day which is closing . . .11

  Bruno’s enthusiasm for his beliefs was fatal to him in the end. His unguarded conversations in Venice with the aristocratic Giovanni Mocenigo were relayed to the Inquisition. After being tortured and cross-questioned in Venice he was passed on to Rome, where they eventually roasted him alive. Bruno, declared the Father Inquisitor, ‘is no simple heretic, but the leader of heretics, an organiser, a rebel. He has consorted with Protestants, he is an apostate monk who has openly praised the heretic queen Elizabeth of England and has written occult works that attempt to undermine the sanctity of the Church’.12 There was a measure of truth in the Inquisitor’s words. Bruno had seen himself as the leader of a new movement, which might – by a discovery of the Prisca Theologia, the origins of Judaeo-Christian and Greek religion in the wisdom of ancient Egypt, and the Prisca Sapientia, the Ur-philosophy of the Pharaohs – save the sixteenth century from its barbarously cruel, murderously quarrelsome self. You might consider Bruno more than a little crazy. Probably he was, but as he insisted in his writings and conversations, who would not prefer the gentleness of Trismegistus’s ideas to the homicidal intolerance of Bruno’s contemporaries? If – a very big if – he worked as a spy for Walsingham, his motivation would surely have been that he saw Elizabeth (who had patronised and befriended Dr Dee) as a potential ally against the disaster of the Inquisition. He had not calculated, in that event, upon Elizabeth’s political callousness, her need to play safe and, au fond, her religious conservatism.

  The Hermetic philosophy did not catch on in Elizabethan England in the sense that Bruno would have hoped. The Church of England did not ‘go Rosicrucian’. And yet it was the generality of Hermetic philosophy, not its esoteric secrecy, that stands out as a mark of the age. Those who enjoyed discussions about the new philosophy were inevitably regarded with suspicion or derision by others – hence (some believe) Shakespeare’s semi-humorous reference in Love’s Labour’s Lost to ‘the school of night.’ Whether such a group of intellectuals met formally we can take leave to question, though Marlowe, Thomas Harriot and others would appear to have belonged loosely to such a coterie. Notable among them was Harriot’s patron Henry Pe
rcy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, sometimes known as ‘the wizard earl’. He married Essex’s sister, Dorothy Perrot (widow of Sir Thomas, daughter-in-law of Sir John). He was one of those who had a tempestuous relationship with Essex, sometimes his friend, sometimes very much not. In spite of deafness, Northumberland was a courtier, soldier, gambler and feuder. Yet such is the esteem in which he was held that when the Queen was dying in 1603 he was invited to join the Council and there was even a short period when he might have been asked to serve as Lord Protector of the Realm until James I succeeded. So Northumberland was not a man on the political fringe. Indeed, after the suicide of his recusant father in the Tower, Northumberland did his utmost to emphasise his conformity to the Church of England while admitting, like many members of that Church at the time and since, that he ‘troubled not much himself’ with religion. Yet this ‘wizard earl’ was – almost certainly unjustly – condemned by James I and his council for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and he remained a scholarly prisoner in the Tower for sixteen years. His reputation during Elizabethan times as an ‘atheist’ probably did not help him at the time of the plot.

  At least Northumberland was eventually released and died in his bed, at Petworth, in 1632, aged sixty-eight. His friend Sir Walter Raleigh was not so lucky – thirteen years, 1603–16 in the Tower, falsely accused of treason; it was here that he wrote The History of the World before he was released to make his last fateful voyage to Orinoco. Raleigh was another ‘atheist’, according to the oafish Jesuit propagandist Robert Parsons. In Parsons’s propaganda, Raleigh presided over a ‘schoole of atheism’ in which, under Harriot’s direction, ‘both Moyses and our Savior, the olde, and the new testament are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backwarde’. There is no evidence for these wild accusations, though we can tell that Raleigh’s was an enquiring intelligence. During a supper at the house of Sir George Trenchard at Winterbourne, Dorset, in 1593, Raleigh and his brother Carew upset the vicar, Ralph Ironside, by enquiring what he meant by his soul and exposing his circular arguments.13 As we have already seen throughout this book, the Elizabethan Age was not one of religious tolerance, and such talk was dangerous. In the twenty-first century, if a cleric had an argument with a distinguished poet, courtier, public man and explorer, he might well get the worse of it (assuming such a figure as Raleigh to be remotely imaginable outside his own times). Ironside, perhaps stung by his own poor performance in theological debate, insisted that Raleigh be investigated by the Court of High Commission in March 1594. Raleigh, for his part, felt he must prove his orthodox Protestant credentials by ‘shopping’ a recusant Mass priest at Chideock – John Cornelius, alias Mooney, chaplain to the Arundell family, ‘a notable stout villain’ according to Raleigh. Another account suggests that Raleigh spent a long time trying to convince Cornelius, and that he was impressed by the man’s sincerity.14