Prince Henry and English Literature by Elkin Calhoun Wilson (review)

REVIEWS 105 Prince Henry and English Literature. By ELKIN CALHOUN WILSON. Ithaca, N.Y._ : Cornell University Press. 1946. Pp. xiv, 188. ($3.00) IN Prince Henry and English Literature, the author of England's Eliza continues his collection of tributes to royal personages, on a necessarily smaller and less significant scale than in his earlier volume, since the elder son of King James did not attain, during his short life (1594-1612), anything like the symbolic importance for the English imagination of Queen Elizabeth. It is, nevertheless, useful to have this careful and· well documented study of the prince who bade fair, while he lived, to surpass his royal father in generosity and sobriety and in the qualities of the statesman -a feat not so difficult as to strain the imagination to conceive it. Prince Henry inspired a universal chorus of praise and hopeful prophecy among the literary men of his time, as well as a biographical memoir by the treasurer of his household, Sir Charles Cornwallis, and a biography by the eighteenth-century antiquary, Thomas Birch. In the present study, the author writes: "lhave written neither orthodox biography nor conventional literary history. Into the short and simple annals of Henry's life I have woven the tributes to him in literature, imaginat-ive and otherwise, and glanced at the stimulus he gave to kindred arts. I am addressing the student of literary history, and using the appealing, ifunexciting, chronicle of Henry's brief life as a framework to sustain the portrait of him_ in the books of his age." Dr. Wi~son has surveyed the evidence with a thoroughness that leaves nothing more to be desired. There is little to be gleaned from contemporary testimony concerning Henry's character beyond the praise of his reputed virtues. He was fond of all manner of exercises befitting a prince, though he did not share ·his father's passion for the chase. He was positive in enforcing his own wishes, though not headstrong, generous to his dependants and forward in supporting their interests. He early displayed an interest in naval affairs and encouraged the master shipwright, Phineas Pett. He was not bookish, in Bacon's words "a favourer of learning, though rather in the honour he paid it than the time he spent upon it"; yet he acquired the famous library of John, Lord·Lumley and added to the collection, and he befriended Sir Walter Raleigh during the latter's confinement in the Tower and professed an interest in his Hi.s.tory of the World. Henry's own court was celebrated for its cultivation and its decorum-the prince himself had boxes set up at each of his residences "causing all those who did sweare in his hearing to pay moneyes to the same, which were after duly given to the poore., H~s active support of his sister Elizabeth's marriage to the Elector Palatine raised hopes that he would prove a notable champion of the Protestant cause. But all such hopes were extinguished with the death of the prince, November 6, 1612, from a fever that has been conjecturally diagnosed as typhoid. The most judicious verdict pronounced upon him was that of Bacon: "Many points there were indeed in this prince's nature which were 106 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY obscure, and could not be discovered by any man's judgement, but only by time, which was not allowed him. Those however which appeared were excellent; which is enough for fame." The literary world of Henry's day echoed with the prince's praises. Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, Jonson, Hall, Drummond, Campion, Owen, and a host of lesser voices joined in the paean of adulation; but most of these effusions were conventional .flatteries and included no very noteworthy literary work, unless we include Chapman's Homer and -Raleigh's History, for the sake of the tributes they contain. Prince Henry can hardly be said to have exerted an important influence upon English letters; even the modest suggestion of Dr. Wilson that the elegies upon Henry's death may have influenced Milton's Lycidas is not capable of proof. But Prince Henry did inspjre genuine feeling and high hopes...