For God and Gold

Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, has uttered a sharp note against those scribbling fops who think to eternise their memory by setting up for authors, and especially those who spoil paper in blotting it with mere trifles and impertinences. Yet have I, that was none before, resolved to turn author, and set down certain passages in my life that I have thought not unworthy to be remembered.

Many who share my respect for him who is rightly called the honour of learning of all our time, forgetting therein, as it must be said, all tenderness for me, have marvelled openly that I listen not to his wisdom, but will still be spending paper, time, and candles upon such trifles and impertinences as he condemns. It were better, say they, for a scholar to take in hand some weighty matter of religion, or philosophy, or civil government.

But stay, good friends, till I bid you show me how it were better. Such treatises are ordnance of power; and are we sure that of late years scholars have not been forging too many weapons for dunces to arm themselves withal in these wordy wars that now be? A harquebuss is a dangerous toy in unskilled hands, and so I know may be a discourse of religion, or philosophy, or civil government to unlearned controversialists, of whom, God knows, there is a mighty company in this present time.

So, I pray you, consider whether Erasmus has not here a little dishonoured his scholarship and sounded his note false. Should he not rather have placed amidst all other folly that he praises these very trifles and impertinences also with which a scholar may seek to comfort his solitude?

I am the more moved to the part I have chosen because it is not clear that all I have to tell shall be found wholly trifling and impertinent. Indeed I think it may contain something noteworthy, not in respect of myself, or even of that noble gentleman whose story this is as much as mine, but rather in respect of that very mirror and pattern of manhood who was my good friend in those days, though now with God, and whom of all I ever knew or heard of I honour as in courage unsurpassed, in counsel unequalled, and in constancy passing all I ever deserved.

So much by way of preface or apology; and now, with a good wish on all honest, kindly readers, let me to my tale.

As with many others, my life, it may be said, began with my father's death. Till then I had been kept in so great subjection that, save in my books, I had hardly lived. For he was an austere, grave man of the Reformation party, and one whom the fires of Mary's reign had hardened against all Popery, so that towards the end of his life he became what is now called a Puritan, ay, and that of a strict sort too.

Outwardly to his great friends in the county he was still good company. For, not to speak more, because of the honour I bear him, he was a worldly man, and not one to use a shoe-horn to drag ill-fitting opinions on to men of quality, nor in any way to seek a martyr's crown. His chiding and severity were kept for me and his servants and tenants, who were all hard-pressed, though, in truth, not beyond what justice would warrant were mercy laid aside.

It was a hard case for me, because of my mother I had not even a memory. The same hour that I was born she died, leaving my father alone in the world save for me. It was then that he most changed, they told me, but in no respect showed his grief so much as in misliking me.

Yet I think I loved him, for all his chiding and sharpness. Indeed I had so little else to love. At least I know that I was sobbing bitterly when my old nurse came to tell me that his short sickness had come suddenly to an end: for he had but a little time past been seized with a quartan ague, which carried off so many that same glorious year that our great Queen came to her throne.

It was a cold, gray afternoon in January. I was sitting, hungry and forgotten, in my favourite nook in the dim old library. It was an ancient, low room, which my father had left standing when he had rebuilt the rest of the place in the new style soon after he had purchased it. It had been a house of Austin Canons which fell to the lot of some spendthrift courtier in King Henry's time, which gentleman, getting past his depth in my father's books with over much borrowing, was at last driven to release the place to him. So it was that the old monastery became our dwelling, but this, the Canons' refectory, was all that was left of the former buildings.

At one end there was a deep recess, where I could sit and see the dreary darkness settling down on the distant Medway, and the Upchurch Marshes, and the Saltings. It was but a sad prospect at any time in winter, and made me sad, though I would never sit elsewhere with my books. I must have loved it because my father never came to chide me there, and because on that cold stone sill I could sit and sob undisturbed over the sorrows of men long dead, as I now sat sobbing over my own, when Cicely came hurriedly to me.