Arts of the Elizabethan age
In the visual arts the Elizabethan age was not mature. Silversmiths made handsome salt cellars and fine openwork screens, like the grand one in St George's Chapel at Windsor. Venetian-style glassmaking took root in England about 1560, and many people preferred glass objects to similar ones of silver or gold. Sculpture and pottery counted for little. Nicholas Hilliard founded the school of miniature painting, and Elizabeth gave him a monopoly on her likeness. Portraitists were mostly foreigners: Federigo Zuccaro from Italy, and Marcus Gheeraerts and his son of the same name from the Low Countries; the elder painted William Cecil in the robes of the Order of the Garter. Otherwise portraiture languished in England between the younger Holbein and Van Dyck.
In the reigns of Elizabeth and James, architecture was the one major art, and almost entirely secular. In a Europe torn by religious conflict, art, like manners, lost its religious element. In the Middle Ages, when poetry and art drew inspiration from heaven, builders raised churches and houses were like prisons. Under the Tudors, religion entered politics, and wealth passed to laymen and became public buildings and great houses. Style changed with it. In 1563 John Shute returned from Italy, full of Vitruvius, Palladio and Serlio, and wrote a book praising classical style, which carried the Italian contempt for the Gothic to England. Renaissance buildings stressed the horizontal, and the vertical lines of the Gothic fell out of favor.
Several fine buildings rose: the gate of Caius College and the courts of Clare in Cambridge, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Royal Exchange in London and Middle Temple. Since judges, not bishops, had run England's affairs since Wolsey, it was fitting that the great hall of the law school at Middle Temple, finished in 1572, should be Renaissance. Its oak screen at the far end was the finest piece of English carpentry, though the book says it was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War (the source seems to overstate the damage).
The great houses
Elizabethan nobles built, where they could, houses to rival the chateaux of the Loire. Sir John Thynne built Longleat. Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, built Hardwick Hall. Thomas, Earl of Suffolk, built Audley End for, says the book, 190,000 pounds, much of it from Spanish bribes (a claim the book makes without proof). Sir Edward Phelips built Montacute in a pleasing Renaissance style and Sir Francis Willoughby founded Wollaton Hall. William Cecil spent part of his fortune on a huge house at Stamford, and his son Robert spent nearly as much on Hatfield. Their great halls, on the upper floor, are among the grandest interiors of the period and replaced the old timber hall. Magnificent chimneypieces, heavy furniture of walnut and oak, grand staircases, carved balustrades and wooden ceilings gave the rooms a warmth and majesty unmatched in French palaces. As far as we know, the planners of these houses were the first to be called architects; Robert Smythson, who built Wollaton, bore the title simply as 'architect', the name the profession at last found for itself.
Inigo Jones
Now English art also gained a personality, a man who left the mark of his will on his work. Inigo Jones was born at Smithfield in 1573. In youth he showed such talent for drawing that a nobleman sent him to Italy (1600) to learn Renaissance architecture. Back in England (1605) he designed scenery for the masques of James I and his Danish queen. He returned to Italy (1612 to 1614) and came home a champion of classical principles, which he had read in a translation of Vitruvius and seen in the buildings of Palladio and Scamozzi at Venice and Vicenza. Jones rejected the unnatural mixture of German, Flemish, French and Italian forms in Elizabethan building and proposed a wholly classical style, with Doric, Ionic and Corinthian kept separate or combined in due proportion.
In 1615 he became Surveyor General of the royal works. When the Banqueting House at Whitehall burned, he was commissioned to build a new one, and he planned a vast complex, according to the book 351 by 266 meters, which would have given the King of England a house larger than the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Escorial or Versailles. But James preferred his daily drink to buildings that would last centuries, and spent only on the new banqueting hall, which, standing off its true site, has a front that is an unattractive mix of classical and Renaissance. When Archbishop Laud asked for the repair of St Paul's, Jones gave the nave a Gothic treatment and the front a Renaissance one, which the book calls a 'crime'; happily the building was lost in the Great Fire of 1666. Jones's Palladian fronts gradually replaced the Tudor style and ruled English building until the mid-eighteenth century.
Jones served Charles I as chief architect and loved the unlucky king so much that when civil war came he hid his savings in the Lambeth marshes and fled to Hampshire (1643). Cromwell's soldiers captured him there, but he was let go on payment of 1,045 pounds, says the book. Away from London he built a country house for the Earl of Pembroke in Wiltshire (Wilton). Its front is plain Renaissance, but the interior is a model of grandeur, and its 'double cube' room, over 21 meters long and more than 9 wide and high, was held the finest room in England. When the war consumed the wealth of the nobility, Jones lost his patrons, withdrew from the world and died in poverty in 1651. As art fell asleep, war changed the government of England.
Elizabethan man
How can we tell the men of Elizabeth's day from the grave, taciturn Englishmen of a later time? Is character a product of place, time and change? Puritanism and Methodism came between the two ages, and for centuries Harrow, Eton and Rugby trained pupils; reckless conquerors grow quiet once they master affairs.
In general the Elizabethan Englishman was a child of the Renaissance. In Germany the Reformation crushed the Renaissance; in France the Renaissance blocked the Reformation; in England the two movements fused. Under Elizabeth the Reformation won, but in Elizabeth herself the Renaissance triumphed. There were Puritans, stern and unyielding but not tongue-tied, yet they set no pattern. The typical man was a force freed from old beliefs and prohibitions but not yet bound to new principles. He was ambitious and wanted to develop his powers; he was free-minded and wanted a literature that spoke of life; he was given to violence and fierce speech, yet amid his excesses, faults and cruelties tried to be courteous and dignified. His ideal lay between the affectionate courtesy of Castiglione's courtier and the ruthless cunning of Machiavelli's prince; he admired Sidney but wished to be Drake.
Meanwhile philosophy was making its way through the cracks of a shaken religion, and the best minds were the most disturbed. In this unchallenged current there were men of sound views, conservatives and timid, quiet souls too. Good men like Roger Ascham spoke despairingly of the moral standards of the past, while their pupils were bold and daring. Consider Gabriel Harvey on Cambridge: the Gospel is taught but no one learns it, Christianity has no vogue, nothing is praised unless it is called good, formal laws are outdated, justice is gone and morals have fled; all are curious about news, new books, new fashions and new laws; some chase new heavens and new hells; every day brings new opinions, heresies in theology, philosophy, humanity and manners; and the devil is hated no more than the pope.