BRACCIOLINI IN LONDON.

Gaining insight into the darkest passions from associating with
Cardinal Beaufort.—II. His passage about London in the Fourteenth
Book of the Annals examined.—And III. About the Parliament of
England in the Fourth Book.

I. In the autumn of 1418, after the breaking up of the Council of Constance, Bracciolini left Italy and accompanied to England a member of the Plantagenet family, the second son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Henry Beaufort, whose placid and beardless face the great Florentine seems to have first seen at the Ecumenical Council which that princely prelate had turned aside to visit in the course of a pilgrimage he was making to Jerusalem. Henry Beaufort was then Bishop of Winchester, but afterwards a Cardinal, and though there was another Prince of the Roman Church, Kemp, Archbishop of York and subsequently of Canterbury, Beaufort was always styled by the popular voice and in public acts "The Cardinal of England," on account, perhaps, of his Royal parentage and large wealth, more enormous than had been known since the days of the De Spencers: he had lands in manors, farms, chaces, parks and warrens in seven counties, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Somersetshire, Hampshire and Surrey, besides having the Customs of England mortgaged to him, and the cocket of the Port of Southampton with its dependencies,—an indebtedness of the State which is so far interesting as being the foundation of our National Debt.

Bracciolini had now an opportunity of watching and unravelling the wiles of this august prelate and patron of his; he thus gained still more insight into the ways of the worldly and the feelings of the ambitious; acquired a masterly knowledge of the dark passions and became versed in the crooked policy of court intrigue. He had quitted provinces at home laid waste by hostile invasions and cities agitated by the discord of contending parties; Genoa sending warships to ravage in the Mediterranean, Venice reducing to subjection the smaller States along the Adriatic, and Florence warring with Pisa, still to fix his eyes on darkness and the degradation of humanity; for he was visiting a country,—as England was in the fifteenth century,—buried in the gloom of barbarism, and forlorn in its literary condition, with writers, unworthy the name of scholars, Walsingham and Whethamstede, Otterbourne and Elmham, inditing bald chronicles; students applying their minds to scholastic philosophy; divines confounding their wits with theological mysteries; and men with inclinations to science, as Thomas Northfield, losing themselves in witchcraft, divination and the barbarous jargon of astrology, while rendering themselves, at any moment, liable to be apprehended by order of the doctors and notaries who formed the Board of Commissioners for the discovery of magicians, enchanters and sorcerers; for it was the age when invention framed the lie of the day, the marvellous military leadership of Joan of Arc, and credulity stood as ready to receive it as little boys in nurseries the wondrous tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. Through this mist the figure of Cardinal Beaufort loomed largest, unsociable, disdainful, avaricious, immeasurably high-stomached (for he deemed himself on an equality with the king); and, in spite of immoderate riches, inordinately mean: along with these unamiable qualities, he upheld the policy of Martin V., which was to destroy the independence of the National Church of England: he was treacherous to his associates, and murderous thoughts were not strangers to his bosom.

Bishop Milner, in his History of Winchester under the Plantagenets (Vol. I. p. 301), denies that there is solid ground in history for representing Beaufort as depraved, and condemns Shakespeare for having endowed Humphry, Duke of Gloucester, with merit of which he deprived the memory of Cardinal Beaufort. The late Dean Hook, too, in his elegantly written life of Archbishop Chicheley (p. 97) is of opinion that Beaufort "has appeared in history with his character drawn in darker colours than it deserves." Those two distinguished dignitaries, one of the Roman Catholic and the other of the English Church, do not then seem to have heard of the anecdote related by Agnes Strickland, in her Life of Katherine of Valois (p. 114), that Henry V., when Prince of Wales, was narrowly saved from murder by the fidelity of his little spaniel, whose restlessness caused the discovery of a man who was concealed behind the arras near the bed where the Prince was sleeping in the Green Chamber in the Palace at Westminster, and a dagger being found on the person of the intruder, he confessed that he was there by the order of Beaufort to kill the Prince in the night, showing that the Cardinal was guilty of a double treachery, for he was setting on the heir-apparent at the time to seize his father\'s crown; nor do Milner and Hook seem to have known that the death of the Duke of Gloucester was principally contrived by Wykeham\'s successor in the See of Winchester, and that, whether poisoned or not, the Duke was hurried out of the world in a very suspicious manner, one of the first acts of Margaret of Anjou after her coronation being, in conjunction with the Wintonian diocesan to bring about the death of that Prince after arresting him in a Parliament called for the purpose at St. Edmund\'s Bury; Shakespeare, accordingly, had historic truth with him, when he represented the Cardinal suffering on his death-bed the tortures of a murderer\'s guilty conscience, from being implicated in taking away by violence the life of Humphry, Duke of Gloucester:—

    "Alive again! Then show me where he is,
    I\'ll give a thousand pound to look upon him.
    He hath no eyes, the dust hath blinded them.
    Comb down his hair. Look, look! it stands upright
    Like lime twigs set to catch my winged soul.
    Give me some drink; and bid the apothecary
    Bring the strong poison that I bought of him":—

to which a looker-on observes:—

    "O! thou Eternal Mover of the Heavens,
    Look with a gentle eye upon this wretch."

It could have been with no gentle eye that Bracciolini looked on
Cardinal Beaufort, whose "bad death," as Shakespeare makes the
Earl of Warwick observe, "argued a monstrous life."

Repeatedly in letters to his friend Niccoli, during two years and more of anxiety and discontent passed by him from 1420 to 1422 in the Palace of the Prince Prelate, Bracciolini complained bitterly of the magnificent promises not being fulfilled that the Cardinal had held forth to him on condition of his accompanying him to England. In vain he looked forward to considerable emolument; day after day he found himself doomed to the common lot of those who depend on the patronage of the great;—"in suing long to bide":—

    "To lose good days that might be better spent;
    To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
    To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
    To feed on hope; to pine on fear and sorrow;
    To fret the soul with crosses and with cares;
    To eat the heart through comfortless despairs;
    To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
    To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."

And, really, Bracciolini may be said to have been "undone"; for when he got what he had bargained to purchase, the frivolous goodwill of his master, it was, as he expressed it, "the birth of the mouse after the labour of the mountain": he obtained a benefice of 120 florins a year, with what he did not anticipate would be attached to it,—hard work.

In order to have a precise and not a vague and confused idea of the galling effect produced on his feelings by this offer, it is necessary to turn to two paragraphs (37, 38), in the Second Book of the Annals;—for I cannot divest myself of the suspicion that this incident in his life is there indirectly referred to, where an account is given that has no historical basis of the "nobilis juvenis, in paupertate manifesta," Marcus Hortalus, whose noble parentage and straightened circumstances closely corresponded to the birth and means of Bracciolini. When seeking recompense from Tiberius for his four sons, he calls on the Emperor to behold in them "the scions and offspring of what a multitude of consuls! what a multitude of dictators! which he says not to mortify, but to excite commiseration."—"En! stirps et progenies tot consulum! tot dictatorum! nec ad invidiam ista, sed conciliandae misericordiae refero;" commenting on which Justus Lipsius bursts into the angry exclamation: "What a braggart, lying speech on this man\'s part! For where was this multitude of consuls, this multitude of dictators? Why, I can find only one dictator and one consul in the Hortensian family; the dictator in the year of Rome, 467, when the Commons revolted; and the Consul, Quintus Hortensius, the grandfather of the speaker,—who, perhaps, however, reckoned in the ancestors also in his mother\'s line": —"Vaniloqua hominis oratio et falsa! Ubi enim isti tot consules, tot dictatores? Certe ego in Hortensia gente unum, dictatorem reperio, et Consulem unum; dictatorem anno urbis 467 secessione plebis; consulem, Q. Hortensium hujus avum. Sed intellegit fortasse majores suos etiam ex gente materna."

Lipsius would have spared himself the trouble of inditing this indignant note and throwing out this useless suggestion had he known that Bracciolini forged the Annals, and playfully interspersed his fabrication occasionally with fanciful characters and fictitious events. The picture of Marcus Hortalus, who had received from Augustus the munificent gift of a million sesterces, being in the days of Tiberius once more poor, married, with children, and seeking aid from the State for his four sons, seems to be all purely imaginary, introduced merely as a photograph from life, the feelings and conduct of Hortalus, after the treatment of his sons by Tiberius, being such a faithful reflex, as far as can be judged from his own confessions, of the feelings and conduct of Bracciolini himself after the way in which his hopes of preferment were blasted by Cardinal Beaufort. Just as Hortalus, if he had been left to himself, would have remained a bachelor, and only from pressure on the part of Augustus, became a husband, and, while incapable of supporting children, a father, so Bracciolini would have remained in Italy and never visited this country, had it not been for the importunities of the Cardinal, and never turned his thoughts to preferment in the Church, which he is invariably telling us he disliked, had not Beaufort given assurance that he would put him in the way of holding some high and lucrative post in England; and then when he received a paltry benefice, instead of expressing thanks like the other dependents on the Prince Prelate, he was silent, from fear of the power possessed by Beaufort, or from retaining even in his contracted fortunes the politeness which he had inherited from his noble forefathers:—"egere alii grates; siluit Hortalus, pavore, an avitae nobilitatis, etiam inter angustias fortunae, retinens" (An. II. 38).

II. We are indebted to Bracciolini\'s stay among us for one or two matters that are interesting about our country. His two years\' residence here filled him with a marked admiration of London as well as with the most confused ideas of the antiquity and greatness of its commerce; and though comments have already been made on his description of it as eminently absurd, the passage is too curious not to be examined again; the more so as it has misled good historians of London, who believing that the account actually proceeded from Tacitus, have taken it to be incontrovertibly true, whereas it is only true, if it be applied, as it is applicable only to the advanced state of society and the large commercial town of which Bracciolini was the eye witness towards the close of the reign of Henry V., and the commencement of that of his infant son and successor. The slightest investigation will carry conviction of this.

A hundred years before the birth of Tacitus, Britain was so monstrously barbarous and obscure, that Julius Caesar, when wanting to invade it and wishing for information of its state and circumstances, could not gain that knowledge, because, as he tells us, "scarcely anybody but merchants visited Britain in those times, and no part of it, except the seacoast and the provinces opposite Gaul": ("neque enim temere praeter mercatores illo adiit quisquam, neque iis ipsis quidquam, praeter oram maritimam, atque eas regiones, quae sunt contra Gallias." (Caesar De Bell. Gall. IV. 20). From this we see that, in the middle of the century before the Christian era, the only trade with Britain was then confined to the shores, and the southern parts, from Kent to Cornwall: it is then, against every probability that, in a period extending over no more than about a hundred years, this trade should have extended up the navigable rivers and have reached London enough for it to have risen up, by the year 60 of our era, into an immense emporium and be known all over the world for its enormous commerce. That this was not the case we know from Strabo, who lived in the time of Augustus, and who, though saying a great deal about our island and its trade, has not a word about London, howbeit that the author of the Annals does record in his work that it was exceedingly famous for the number of the merchants who frequented it and the extent of its commerce; but it is not likely that it was so, if the whole island did no more trade than Strabo informs us, the articles exported from all Britain being insignificant and few;—corn and cattle; such metals as gold, silver, tin, lead and iron; slaves and hunting dogs (Strabo III. 2. 9.—ib. 5. 11.—IV. 5. 2), which Oppian says were beagles. Musgrave, in his Belgicum Britannicum adds "cheese," from some wretched authority, for Strabo says that the natives at that time were as ignorant of the art of making cheese, as of gardening and every kind of husbandry:—[Greek: "Mae turopoiein dia taen apeirian, apeirous d\'einai kai kaepeias kai allon georgikon."] (IV. 5. 2).

The statement, then, that London had the very greatest reputation for the number of its merchants and commodities of trade in Nero\'s time is utterly unfounded—nothing more nor less than outrageously absurd; the picture, however, is quite true if London be considered at the time when Bracciolini was here. Its merchants then carried on a considerable trade with a number of foreign countries, to an extent far greater, and protected by commercial treaties much more numerous than previous to investigation I could have been led to suppose. The foreign merchants who principally came to the Port of London were those of Majorca, Sicily, and the other islands in the Mediterranean; the western parts of Morocco; Venice, Genoa, Florence and the other cities of Italy; Spain and Portugal; the subjects of the Duke of Brabant, Lorraine and Luxemburgh; of the Duke of Brittany, and of the Duke of Holland, Zealand, Hanneau and Friesland; the traders of the great manufacturing towns of Flanders; of the Hanse Towns of Germany, 64 in number, situated on the shores of the Baltic, the banks of the Rhine, and the other navigable rivers of Germany; the people of the great seaport towns of Prussia and Livonia, then subject to the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order of Knights, along with the traders of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland.

In addition to these bringing their goods here in their own bottoms, a great number of other foreign merchants were established in London for managing the trade of their respective States and Cities, performing, in fact, the duties now attached to the office of Consul, first instituted by the maligned but enlightened Richard III. These foreign merchants being as powerful as they were numerous, formed themselves into Companies: independently of the German merchants of the Steel Yard, there were the Companies of the Lombards; the Caursini of Rome; the Peruchi, Scaldi, Friscobaldi and Bardi of Florence, and the Ballardi and Reisardi of Lucca. The Government protected them, and, as they were viewed with intense jealousy by the native traders, they were judged, in all disputes, not by the common law, but the merchant law, which was administered by the Mayor and Constables; and of the mediators in these disputes, two only were native, four being foreigners, two Germans and two Italians.

The Londoners had made prodigious advances upon their forefathers in the commodities of merchandize in which they dealt. Their most valuable articles of exportation were wool and woollen clothes in great varieties and great quantity; corn; metals, particularly lead and tin; herrings from Yarmouth and Norfolk; salmon, salt, cheese, honey, wax, tallow, and several articles of smaller value. But their great trade was in foreign imports and that was entirely in the hands of foreign merchants who came here in shoals, bringing with them their gold and silver, in coin and bullion; different kinds of wines from the finest provinces in the south of France, and from Spain and Portugal; also from the two last countries (to enter into a nomenclature that\'s like the catalogue of an auctioneer for monotony of names and unconnectedness of things), figs, raisins, dates, oils, soap, wax, wool, liquorice, iron, wadmote, goat-fell............