There were two competitors—Francis the First and Maximilian's grandson, afterwards the well-known Charles the Fifth.
Well, of the seven electors six were bribed. John Frederick of Saxony, Luther's friend and protector, was the only one of the party who came out of the business with clean hands.
But the Archbishop of Mayence took bribes six times alternately from both the candidates. He took money as coolly as the most rascally ten-pound householder in Yarmouth or Totnes, and finally drove a hard bargain for his actual vote.
The grape does not grow upon the blackthorn; nor does healthy reform come from high dignitaries like the Archbishop of Mayence.
The other aspect of the problem I shall consider in the following Lectures.
LECTURE II.
In the year 1467—the year in which Charles the Bold became Duke of Burgundy—four years before the great battle of Barnet, which established our own fourth Edward on the English throne—about the time when William Caxton was setting up his printing press at Westminster—there was born at Rotterdam, on the 28th of October, Desiderius Erasmus. His parents, who were middle-class people, were well-to-do in the world. For some reason or other they were prevented from marrying by the interference of relations. The father died soon after in a cloister; the mother was left with her illegitimate infant, whom she called first, after his father, Gerard; but afterwards, from his beauty and grace, she changed his name—the words Desiderius Erasmus, one with a Latin, the other with a Greek, derivation, meaning the lovely or delightful one.
Not long after, the mother herself died also. The little Erasmus was the heir of a moderate fortune; and his guardians, desiring to appropriate it to themselves, endeavoured to force him into a convent at Brabant.
The thought of living and dying in a house of religion was dreadfully unattractive; but an orphan boy's resistance was easily overcome. He was bullied into yielding, and, when about twenty, took the vows.
The life of a monk, which was uninviting on the surface, was not more lovely when seen from within.
'A monk's holy obedience,' Erasmus wrote afterwards, 'consists in—what? In leading an honest, chaste, and sober life? Not the least. In acquiring learning, in study, and industry? Still less. A monk may be a glutton, a drunkard, a whoremonger, an ignorant, stupid, malignant, envious brute, but he has broken no vow, he is within his holy obedience. He has only to be the slave of a superior as good for nothing as himself, and he is an excellent brother.'
The misfortune of his position did not check Erasmus's intellectual growth. He was a brilliant, witty, sarcastic, mischievous youth. He did not trouble himself to pine and mope; but, like a young thorough-bred in a drove of asses, he used his heels pretty freely.
While he played practical jokes upon the unreverend fathers, he distinguished himself equally by his appetite for knowledge. It was the dawn of the Renaissance—the revival of learning. The discovery of printing was reopening to modern Europe the great literature of Greece and Rome, and the writings of the Christian fathers. For studies of this kind, Erasmus, notwithstanding the disadvantages of cowl and frock, displayed extraordinary aptitude. He taught himself Greek when Greek was the language which, in the opinion of the monks, only the devils spoke in the wrong place. His Latin was as polished as Cicero's; and at length the Archbishop of Cambray heard of him, and sent him to the University of Paris.
At Paris he found a world where life could be sufficiently pleasant, but where his religious habit was every moment in his way. He was a priest, and so far could not help himself. That ink-spot not all the waters of the German Ocean could wash away. But he did not care for the low debaucheries, where the frock and cowl were at home. His place was in the society of cultivated men, who were glad to know him and to patronise him; so he shook off his order, let his hair grow, and flung away his livery.
The Archbishop's patronage was probably now withdrawn. Life in Paris was expensive, and Erasmus had for several years to struggle with poverty. We see him, however, for the most part—in his early letters—carrying a bold front to fortune; desponding one moment, and larking the next with a Paris grisette; making friends, enjoying good company, enjoying especially good wine when he could get it; and, above all, satiating his literary hunger at the library of the University.
In this condition, when about eight-and-twenty, he made acquaintance with two young English noblemen who were travelling on the Continent, Lord Mountjoy and one of the Greys.
Mountjoy, intensely attracted by his brilliance, took him for his tutor, carried him over to England, and introduced him at the court of Henry the Seventh. At once his fortune was made. He charmed every one, and in turn he was himself delighted with the country and the people. English character, English hospitality, English manners—everything English except the beer—equally pleased him. In the young London men—the lawyers, the noblemen, even in some of the clergy—he found his own passion for learning. Sir Thomas More, who was a few years younger than himself, became his dearest friend; and Warham, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury—Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester—Colet, the famous Dean of St. Paul's—the great Wolsey himself—recognised and welcomed the rising star of European literature.
Money flowed in upon him. Warham gave him a benefice in Kent, which was afterwards changed to a pension. Prince Henry, when he became King, offered him—kings in those days were not bad friends to literature—Henry offered him, if he would remain in England, a house large enough to be called a palace, and a pension which, converted into our money, would be a thousand pounds a year.
Erasmus, however, was a restless creature, and did not like to be caged or tethered. He declined the King's terms, but Mountjoy settled a pension on him instead. He had now a handsome income, and he understood the art of enjoying it. He moved about as he pleased—now to Cambridge, now to Oxford, and, as the humour took him, back again to Paris; now staying with Sir Thomas More at Chelsea, now going a pilgrimage with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb at Canterbury—but always studying, always gathering knowledge, and throwing it out again, steeped in his own mother wit, in shining Essays or Dialogues, which were the delight and the despair of his contemporaries.
Everywhere, in his love of pleasure, in his habits of thought, in his sarcastic scepticism, you see the healthy, clever, well-disposed, tolerant, epicurean, intellectual man of the world.
He went, as I said, with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb. At a shrine about Canterbury he was shown an old shoe which tradition called the Saint's. At the tomb itself, the great sight was a handkerchief which a monk took from among the relics, and offered it to the crowd to kiss. The worshippers touched it in pious adoration, with clasped hands and upturned eyes. If the thing was genuine, as Erasmus observed, it had but served for the archbishop to wipe his nose with—and Dean Colet, a puritan before his time, looked on with eyes flashing scorn, and scarcely able to keep his hands off the exhibitors. But Erasmus smiled kindly, reflecting that mankind were fools, and in some form or other would remain fools. He took notice only of the pile of gold and jewels, and concluded that so much wealth might prove dangerous to its possessors.
The peculiarities of the English people interested and amused him. 'You are going to England,' he wrote afterwards to a friend; 'you will not fail to be pleased. You will find the great people there most agreeable and gracious; only be careful not to presume upon their intimacy. They will condescend to your level, but do not you therefore suppose that you stand upon theirs. The noble lords are gods in their own eyes.'
'For the other classes, be courteous, give your right hand, do not take the wall, do not push yourself. Smile on whom you please, but trust no one that you do not know; above all, speak no evil of England to them. They are proud of their country above all nations in the world, as they have good reason to be.'
These directions might have been written yesterday. The manners of the ladies have somewhat changed. 'English ladies,' says Erasmus, 'are divinely pretty, and too good-natured.