The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume III. Renascence and Reformation.
§ 6. William Camden
With William Camden, the chronicle reached its zenith. His Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum Annales, regnante Elizabetha is by far the best example of its kind. Though it is “digested into annals,” according to the practice of the time, though its author bundles marriages, deaths, embassies and successions together, like the common “stitchers of history,” though he does not disdain strange stars and frozen rivers, it is informed throughout with a sense of history and with a keen perception of conflicting policies. Old-fashioned in design alone, the work is a genuine piece of modern history, in which events are set in a proper perspective, and a wise proportion is kept of great and small. Its faults are the faults inherent in the chronicle: no sure plan of selection, a rigid division into years, an interspersion of the text with documents. Its virtues are its own: clearness of expression, catholicity of interest, a proud consciousness of the great events, whereof Camden was at once the partaker and the historian.
He declares in his preface that William Cecil, baron Burghley, “opened unto him first some memorials of state of his own,” and that afterwards he
Such is the history of the book. Its purpose and motive are apparent upon every page: to applaud the virtues of the queen and to uphold the protestant faith. In devising fitting titles for Elizabeth, Camden exhausts his ingenuity. She is the Queen of the Sea, the North Star, the restorer of our naval glory. He defends her actions with the quiet subtlety which suggests that defence is seldom necessary. His comment upon the death of Mary of Scotland is characteristic. Thus were achieved, he thinks, the two things which Mary and Elizabeth always kept nearest their hearts: the union of England and Scotland was assured in Mary’s son, and the true religion, together with the safety of the English people, was effectively maintained. But Camden was not wholly engrossed in the glory and wisdom of the queen. He looked beyond her excellences to the larger movements of the time. None understood better than he the spirit of enterprise which was founding a new England across the sea. He pays a just tribute of honour to Drake and Hawkins, he celebrates the prowess of John Davis and William Sanderson and he hails the rising colony of Virginia. Of Shakespeare and the drama he has not a word to say. The peculiar glory of his age escaped him. The death of Ascham, it is true, tempts him to a digression, and persuades him to deplore that so fine a scholar should have lived and died a poor man through love of dicing and cock-fighting. And he fires a salute over the grave of Edmund Spenser, who surpassed all English poets, not excepting Chaucer, and into whose tomb the other poets cast mournful elegies and the pens wherewith they wrote them. But, in the end, he returns to his starting-place, and concludes, as he began, on a note of panegyric. “No oblivion,” he says,
Master Camden, as his contemporaries call him with respect, was well fitted for his task by nature and education. He was a man of the world as well as a scholar. Born in 1551, he was brought up at the Blue Coat school, and sent thence, as chorister, or servitor, to Magdalen College, Oxford. Presently, he migrated to Broadgate’s Hostel, now Pembroke College, and, afterwards, to Christ Church. In 1582, he took his famous journey through England, the result of which was his Britannia; ten years later, he was made headmaster of Westminster school; and, in 1597, was appointed, successively, Richmond Herald, and Clarencieux King of Arms. His life was full and varied; his character, as all his biographers testify, candid and amiable. The works he left behind speak eloquently of his learning and industry. To our age, he is best known as the historian of Elizabeth. To his own age, he was eminent as an antiquary, and it was his Britannia, published in 1582, and rescued from Latin by the incomparable Philemon Holland in 1610, which gave him his greatest glory. Anthony à Wood calls him “the Pausanias of the British Isles.” Fuller, not to be outdone in praise, says that “he restored Britain to herself.” Like all the other topographers of his century, he made use of Leland’s notes, but the works of the two men are leagues apart. Camden’s Britannia is, in effect, a real piece of literature. It is not intimate, like Harrison’s England. It is not a thing of shreds and patches, like the celebrated Itinerary. Wisely planned, nobly written and deliberately composed, it is the fruit of deep and diligent research. Camden loved England and loved to embellish her with phrases. He carried his readers along the high-roads, through the towns and cities of his native country, revealing, as he went, her natural scenery, her antiquities, her learning and her strength. And if, to-day, we shared his pride in England, we should still echo, with all sincerity, the praises lavished upon his work by his contemporaries.
Ralph Brooke, with more malice than discretion, charged Camden with making an unacknowledged use of Leland’s Collectanea. The acknowledgment was generously given, and Leland’s Collections were made but to be used. Camden, in fact, was only following the general practice of his age. There was no topographer who did not take what he wanted from Leland, and there was none who did not improve what he took. If Leland’s inchoate notes were of service to Harrison and Camden, they did all that could be expected of them. The truth is, Leland was a superstition. He received the inordinate praise which is easily given to those of whom it is said that they might achieve wonders if they would. The weight of learning which he carried was thought to be so great that he could not disburden it in books. He aroused great expectations, and never lessened them by performance. His erudition was inarticulate; his powers were paralysed by ambition; he knew so much that he feared to give expression to his knowledge; and he won the greater glory because the masterpiece never achieved was enveloped in an atmosphere of mystery. His career, however, the career of the silent scholar, is not without its interest and tragedy. Born in 1506, he studied both at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and at All Souls, Oxford, and, after some years spent in Paris, where he was the friend of Budé, and may, through his mediation, have encountered Rabelais, he was appointed chaplain and librarian to Henry VIII, and rector of Pepeling in the marches of Calais. In 1533, his great opportunity came, for, in that year, he was given a commission, under the broad seal, to travel in search of England’s antiquities, to examine whatever records were to be found and to read in the libraries of cathedrals, colleges, priories and abbeys. For some six years he gave himself to this toil with tireless diligence, and, in 1546, presented to the king the only finished piece of his writing that exists in English: The laboriouse Journey and Serche of Johan Leylande, for Englandes Antiquities, geven of hym as a newe yeares gyfte to kyng Henry the VIII in the XXXVII yeare of his raigne. In this somewhat ornate pamphlet, Leland extols the reformation, reproves the usurped authority of the bishop of Rome and his complices and sets forth the extent and result of his many journeys. In no spirit of pride, but with a simple truth, he describes his peragration. “I have so traveled in your domynions,” he writes,