CHAPTER IX

IN LONDON
Bruno was in sad plight : stranded in a strange country, unable to speak its language and with a lank purse at his girdle. He found a saviour in the French Ambassador. Castelnau, he tells us, rescued him " from these doctors and from hunger " ; he proved a " firm and effective defender ... a solid, secure and enduring rock." ^ The Ambassador was himself in pecuniary straits: his salary was irregu- larly paid and he was obliged to borrow money,^ but he gave the wandering Italian scholar a home. " You did not maintain a man in your household of whom you had need, but one who stood in need of you in many ways," Bruno wrote him.' " I remained in his house as his gentleman — merely that." * Doubtless Castelnau found him of service ; Bruno frequently accompanied him to the Court of Elizabeth, and the French Ambassador, in want of money, might have been glad of the aid of an unofficial secretary at no great cost.
Michel de Castelnau, Lord of Mauvissiere, was sixty- three years old, a man of considerable learning and ex- perience of life. He was one of the very earliest men north of the Alps to become a professional diplomatist. He had travelled in Italy and had served in campaigns there and elsewhere ; he had been ambassador at the Court of Mary Stewart and also in Germany, and had represented France
* Causa, Proem. Epist. ^ Mclntyre, op. cit., p. 27.
' De I'lnfinito, Proem. Epist. * Doc. ix.
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at Elizabeth's court during the past ten years. He had Hterary tastes and had translated Ramus' book on the Gauls. His memory was excellent, and he shows himself, in the memoirs which he wrote for the instruction of his two sons, a searcher after causes, truthful, and a man of impartial judgement.^ Unhappily he tells us nothing about Bruno, for the memoirs end with the year I574- He seems to have been reticent and firm ; but too scrupulous to obtain great success in diplomacy. It is a testimony to his high character that while he defended the interests of Mary Stewart he retained the warm regard of Elizabeth Tudor. His great antagonist was the Spanish Ambassador, Bernar- dino de Mendoza, for whom he was a poor match in guile. Indeed, Castelnau was a broad-minded generous gentleman, sincerely religious, but so tolerant that he excused Bruno from attending mass and the other religious offices held at his house ; nay more, in permitting the dedication to himself of four of Bruno's works Castelnau accepted three of the most daring he ever wrote.^
Bruno found the embassy a peaceful haven, where, for more than two years, he was sheltered from the blasts which had whirled him hither and thither for seven years past and were to swoop on him again. The embassy was known as Beaumont House ; it was in Butcher's Row,^ a narrow lane which led into the Strand, close by St Clement Danes, not far from the boundary line of the City — a " timber-framed house, with projecting upper stories and barge-boarded gables, the front decorated with fleur-de-lis and coronets." *
' Castelnau, M de; MSmoires, Paris, 1621.
' "Exposition of the Thirty Seals" in Latin; "The Ash Wednes- day Supper," " On Cause Principle and Unity," and " The Infinity of the Universe and its Worlds," in Italian.
' Pulled down 1813.
' Wheatley, H. B ; Story of London, 1904, p. 392.
IN LONDON 91
We have a word or two about the lady of the house from Bruno. It occurs in one of those innumerable and protracted digressions which seem to have served the double purpose of entertaining the reader and discharging the sur- ging back-waters of his own mind. For a century there had been in Italy a stupid and interminable discussion which is not obsolete even now — a battle of books between the extravagant eulogists of woman as a prodigy of im- possible perfection and equally absurd detractors^ who debased her even below the more recent depreciations of Weininger and Strindberg. Bruno satirises the "oratoric art " that was employed by making one of his interlocutors almost exhaust the language of vituperation ; he loatds the female sex with no fewer than nine and thirty consecutive epithets, all equally abusive.^ Yet one retains a lurking suspicion that, behind the obvious satiric intention, there lay a secret satisfaction in the diatribe ; an acquittal of the inhererit obligations of masculinity and of coarse monkish prejudice. And he had suffered recently from the active ill will of some woman of whom he complains bitterly to Castelnau. She is mad and malicious, he says, with an evil tongue, and trusts to squeezed-out tears to back up her evil designs.^ Anyhow, Bruno succeeds in keeping his reader thoroughly awake after his long diatribe by one of his swift turns. In the worst possible taste all these objurgations of Madame de Castelnau's sex are made to serve as a foil to her own excellences ! She is an excep- tion to the general depravity of woman. By a clumsy literary artifice another interlocutor is made to say that all men are not unfortunate in their experience of the sex: Castelnau is happy in a wife "of no mean beauty, which
* These works make curious reading. Sometimes, as in Bruno's case, opposite opinions fall from the same mouth.
' Causa, Dial. IV., Polinnio log. ' Ibid., Proem. Epist.
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indeed is a fit clothing to her soul ; she is a lady of judge- ment, prudence, modesty and polite dignity,"^ whence we may conclude that the noble lady, who was in failing health at the time, had still some traces of good looks and was fairly gracious and kind to Bruno.
But the heart of the monk, pathetically debarred from fatherhood, went out to the younger of the two girls of the house, to whom, perhaps, he gave lessons. One can dis- cover real tenderness in his description of how " hardly yet six years of age, she speaks Italian, French and English so equally well that no one can tell her nationality ; she plays various instruments so that one wonders whether she be flesh or spirit, and from her already ripe and noble bearing, whether she be of earth or have come down from the skies. Both her parents reappear alike in her body and in her mind." ^ In a year or two both mother and little daughter were among the dead.
However filled with the music of the starry heavens and with immortal thoughts, genius is peculiarly " gey ill to live wi'." We can credit Bruno with being very thin-skinned and not a little trying at the fire-side. He honestly believed himself to be a model of politeness and self-restraint. He thought that every one was against him. "No one ever blamed me for discourtesy" — so he assures Castelnau — " no one can justly complain of me." He plunges us into a cataract of contrasts in order that we may know how the worthy love and the unworthy maltreat him.* Small worries tortured the nerves of a man whom the cruelest death could not dismay. Like the rest of us, his was a strangely compounded clay. Full of noble gfratitude, lofty conception, serene wisdom and an heroic passion to know truth and proclaim it, he was yet a trifle prejudiced, a trifle
^ Causa, Dial. IV, Gervasio loq. • Ibid., loc. cit.
3 Cena, Dial. V.
IN LONDON 93
irritable and vain, very impulsive and restless, a little snappy, somewhat resentful, wholly indiscreet and given to singular crotchets and ill-timed bursts of strange, if generous, enthusi- asms — probably such would be a contemporary's judgement of Bruno. But our wonder at this man of high and con- tinued purpose is not lessened by his human weaknesses ; our respect for the unfailing patience and kindness of the Castelnaus towards their somewhat difficult guest is increased.
The passionate Southern Italian, knowing about three words of the English tongue and, since he deems it fit for dogs, not wishing to learn more,^ may have got into trouble in the London streets; if so, possibly the lady whose "malicious feminine rage and false tears, which can be more powerful than any volume of swollen billows " ^ had something to do with it. Sensini thinks he got into a row, was imprisoned, released by the good offices of Mauvissidre and kept at home for a time.* Certainly Bruno rehearses to Castelnau how " not only did you receive and sustain me, but defended me, set me free, held me safe, kept me in harbour." * We certainly learn that, on account of his severe strictures on the English people,^ he dared not appear in the streets and remained shut up at home,® and possibly the lady in question had some hand in this.
Very soon after taking up his abode at Beaumont House, Bruno must have accompanied his host to the Court, for he knew the Spanish Ambassador there,' and Mendoza was expelled from England in January 1584 after the detection of his complicity in the plots against Elizabeth's life. " The Queen knew me," says Bruno, "for I accompanied the
"^ Cena, Dial. III. " Causa, Proem. Epist.
' Sensini, T ; Sul pensiero filosofico di G. B., 1907.
* Causa, Proem. Epist. " Cena de le Ceneri.
« Causa, I, where Armesso speaks for the first time. ' Doc. xvij.
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Ambassador to Court habitually." ^ Italian gentlemen were welcome at Elizabeth's Court. She prided herself on her knowledge of their language ; most of her courtiers had visited Italy; many of them were well-versed in Italian literature, and all formed their manners on the Italian model. It was to the incalculable advantage of our be- haviour and of our literature that so many gentlemen were " tried and tutored in the world " ; but the less stable spirits came back from their travels to exhibit " strange antic tricks," the absurdity of which Bruno did not catch. But Shakespeare did. " Look you lisp, . . ." says Rosalind, "and wear strange suits and disable all the benefits of your own country and be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you of that countenance you are, or I will scarcely think you have swam in a gondola." It was the prevalent passion for Italy and deep respect for the Italian language and literature which gave Bruno an opportunity of publishing, through a London press, his noblest works in his own tongue. There was no university in London, or its scholars would have despised any thought, however profound, which was not expressed in the language of the learned.
Bruno admired Elizabeth and wrote of her as superlatively as custom demanded.* He called her — a Protestant ruler — "diva" "sacred" or "divine," just as he did His Most Chris- tian Majesty and the Head of the Holy Roman Empire : it was treasured against him and brought up at his trial.^
Of Elizabeth's courtiers, he neither knew nor expected to know Leicester, at least in the earliest part of 1584;* but he would certainly be known to Walsingham. He was noticed by Fulke Greville, a scholarly young courtier, about two years younger than himself. Greville stood high in
• Doc. xij. " Cena, Dial. II ; Causa, Dial. I.
3 Doc. xiij. * Cena, Dial. II.
IN LONDON 95
Elizabeth's favour and was fortunate in enjoying " the longest lease and the smoothest time .... of any of her favourites." ^ To know Master Greville was to know Sir Philip Sidney, his close friend from their school-days at Shrewsbury. The two friends were, at this time, busy translating the Frenchman, Philippe de Mornay, lord of Plessis- Marly. Sidney, whom Spenser calls " the president of nobless and courtesie " was the cynosure of his time — polished courtier, poet, scholar, patron of letters and the stage and a passionate admirer of Italian literature.* Bruno was not exempt from the fascination he exercised.' Sidney, Greville and Dyer were devoted to each other, but of Dyer he does not speak.
The courtiers probably regarded Bruno as an interesting oddity, an eccentric foreigner, and accepted him as the London society of to-day accepts a philosopher from Thibet.* The more sympathetic . Sidney expressed willing- ness to do him some service, and Greville followed with the same offer. Greville might have proved quite as munificent a patron as Sidney, for he held more than one post with light duties and enormous salaries attached — about ;£^2O0O a year — but he spent a great deal in furnishing the Court with tournaments and amusements.^ Bruno contrived to displease him ; perhaps by the strictures he passed on English life in the "Ash Wednesday Supper" and by associating them so closely with the banquet supposed to be given by Greville. He tells us that " the arsenic of vile, ill-conditioned and unworthy folk " caused their relations to
^ Naunton, Sir R; Fragmenta Regalia, ed. A. Arher, 1870, p. 50.
' Cfr. Bourne, H. R. Fox; Sir P. Sidney, N.Y, 1891.
' Spaccio, Epist. Esplic ; Eroici, Argomento del Nolano.
* Symonds, J. A ; Renaissance in Italy : Catholic Reaction, II,
P-SS-
° Edmondson, J ; An Historical and Geographical Account of the
Family of Greville, 1766, p. 79.
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be strained: he proposed to dedicate a book to Greville/ but never did so. To Sidney he dedicated his two important works on moral subjects.^
Sidney was the English representative of Petrarchism, though he was far from copying the current ignoble and degenerate affectation of love which now prevailed in Italy. He tumbled head over ears in love with Penelope Devereux when she was still a child. The only satisfaction he ever obtained was a kiss stolen from her when she was asleep ; but sexual fascination remained so divorced from matrimony in the sixteenth century that he continued to address verses of passionate devotion to her after she became Lady Rich (1581), with the full knowledge and consent of both his sister and the lady who was now his wife. He identified "Stella" with Beauty;* and it is the opinion of the best judges of the age that the representations of Spenser* as to the sincerity and depth of the passion are "calm and deliberate facts." * Now Sidney's verses were not published until after his death; but they were widely circulated in manuscript and were already famous ; his love for Stella was generally known. Bruno writes to him as a dis- tinguished poet ; * he had been in London and attending the Court at least considerably more than a year, if not over two years, when he did so, and would know therefore of this passion, and of how, repelled by Stella, Sidney had turned his love to nobler issues than personal gratification, though he nursed it still. Bruno wished to put before Sidney and the world a higher form of adoration ; he would substitute devotion to the imperishable beauty of wisdom for the courtly
1 Spaccio, Episi. Esplic.
* Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante ; Gli Eroici Furori.
" Sidney, Sir P ; Asirophel and Stella, 1598, xlv, Ixxxvj.
' Spenser Ed; Astrophel.
^ Arber, P ; Eng. Garner, 1897, vol. I, p. 469.
» Eroici, Argomenio del Nolano.
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service of mere perishable charms, whether of body or mind ; so, with characteristic zeal and directness of attack and equally characteristic absence of prudence and tact, he sneers at "that Tuscan poet who displayed such spasms on the banks of the Sorgue for a lady of Vaucluse — though I do not desire to say he was mad."^ No one who was not entirely insensitive to what might be passing in the mind of another could write thus. But Bruno was singularly defec- tive in this regard and, ultimately, it brought him to his end. In the same dedicatory letter there occurs a paean of virility. It has been remarked that " his tone is that of Walt Whitman ; he is strenuous and invincible and male." ^ FalstafF might be addressing Prince Hal in the Eastcheap tavern when Bruno asks : " What do I hold ? Am I per- chance a foe to , generation ? Do I hate the sun ? Do I regret having come into the world ? Shall I keep men from the delicious fruit of our earthly paradise ? Is it for me to bar the holy law of nature ? Shall I try to set myself or others free from the sweet-bitter yoke which God, in His providence, hath placed -on our neck ? Am I to persuade myself and others that we are not born to carry on the life we have received ? Methinks I am not cold. I doubt if the snows of Caucasus would put out my fires. . . . What do I conclude? Eminent Knight, that we should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things which are God's. That women, being women, should be honoured and loved as such." ^ We should not forget that, like Mercutio, Bruno is "a gentleman that loves to hear himself talk. He will say more in a minute than he will stand to in a^, month." Nevertheless, here was strange matter for Sidney's "wit, high, pure, divine"* to digest,
1 Eroici, Argomenio del Nolano, The work bears the date 1585. ' Elton, O ; op. cit.,p. 22. ' Eroici, Argomento.
* Spenser, Ed ; Epitaph upon the Rt. Hon. Sir P. Sidney.
G
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unless there was a side to his character which disappeared from our view in his apotheosis after Zutphen. And he is favoured, a little farther on, with the unromantic avowal, " made without blushing, that a woman is worthy of being loved in the flower of her beauty and ability to produce children of Nature and God." ^ Still farther on, " the Nolan" contrasts the sexual instinct with intellectual ardour. A strange address from a poet to a poet ! but at least it shews that Bruno knew his patron to be broad- minded and tolerant. Sidney would perceive that Bruno was wholly incapable of covering up a single one of the many sides to his character and that he trusted to candour as the best possible title to consideration. It is evidence of the merit of both men — the sincerity of the suitor is matched by the tolerance of "a spotless friend, a matchles man, whose vertue ever shinde."
Here in London, Bruno seems to have renewed his acquaintance with Gwynne, and he became friendly with John Florio, an Oxford man, but an Italian by birth, being the son of a refugee who was a protestant preacher in this country. Florio introduces Bruno and an unidentified adversary at Oxford as Nolano and Torquato ^ in " Second Fruites," published six years after Bruno's departure from England. A follower and friend of Bruno's was Alexander Dickson, who published " The Shadow of Reason " ^ in the year of Bruno's arrival in England. It is in Latin and is a mnemonic and Neo-Platonic work of little value, being but a poor imitation of Bruno's " Shadows of Ideas.'' Bruno says Dickson was as " dear to him as his own eye." * Among other adherents of "the Nolan" was one Smith, who be-
^ Eroici, Argomento.
' Called Torquato by Bruno himself in the Cena. 3 De Umbra Rationis. Cfr. Mclntyre, op. cit., p. 36, for Dickson and Watson^ who mentions Bruno. * Causa, Dial. I.
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comes an interlocutor in the "Ash Wednesday Supper." The difficulty of identifying this particular bearer of the patronymic is enhanced by the absence of his Christian name. He may have been John Smith, to whom Claudius Hollyband dedicated the "Italian Schoolmaster " in IS7S,* or Joseph Smith, who was at some time, not yet ascertained, consul at Venice,* or William Smith, the author of " Chloris or the Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepherd."* There are other folks introduced into the dialogues who also remain unidentified.
' Einstein, L ; The Italian Renaissance in England, N.Y., 1902,
p. lOI.
" Sicardi ; // Candelajo, Prefaz. e note, 1889, p. 39. Cfr. Gentile, G ; G.B. nella Storia delta cultura, 1907. ' Mclntyre ; op. cit., pp. 35, 36.