The Elizabethans Read Online Free PDF Page B

Thatcher. It seems as if George Gascoigne spent some of his childhood in the North. He attended both Oxford and Cambridge, or so he says, though no college in either university has record of his attendance. He arrived at Gray’s Inn in 1555, and it was his obsessed aim, as a young man, to become a courtier. He wrote later that he had ruined himself financially in the attempt.
    It was, presumably, with the aim of mending his fortunes that Gascoigne married a rich widow, Elizabeth Bacon Breton, on 23 November 1561 at Christ Church, Newgate. She was a remote cousin of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and marriage to her would have helped to advance his career at court, had it not been for Gascoigne’s innate tendency to bad luck. (As he wrote in ‘Gascoigne’s wodmanship’, he shot away at everything.) Elizabeth had five children, one of whom was the poet Nicholas Breton. Upon the death of her husband in 1559 she had married Edward Boyes of Nonington, Kent, but this was not a success and after lengthy and, for Elizabethan times, most unusual legal proceedings, she was divorced from Boyes. Unfortunately, the divorce was not finalised when she married Gascoigne, who thereby became implicated in a bigamy.
    In May 1562 Gascoigne and his wife leased a farm at Willington in Bedfordshire, but the two years they spent there were far from being a bucolic idyll. He involved himself in a legal dispute with the Earl of Bedford from whom he leased his land, and with his brother John over the lease of a parsonage left to John by their father in his will. George Gascoigne claimed that his brother stole his sheep; John countered that he was merely recovering lambs stolen from his own mother, Margaret Scargill. By 1569 George Gascoigne was in Bedford gaol (ninety-one years later it would host John Bunyan, so it has a distinguished literary heritage) for debt. Somehow, in spite of the outrageous irregularity of his financial affairs, George Gascoigne followed in his father’s footsteps and served as a Member of Parliament. When his right to do so, as a debtor, was questioned, there was yet more legal argy-bargy. A letter to the Privy Council complained that ‘he is indebted to a great number of personnes for the which cause he hathe absented himself from the citie by a longe time and now beinge returned for a burgesse of Midehurste in the countie of Sussex, doethe shewe his face openlie in the despite of all his creditors’. 3 Gascoigne’s name was accordingly struck off the list of MPs drawn up on 8 May 1572.
    It was a good moment to cut loose. Gascoigne joined Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s ill-starred expeditionary force in the Netherlands. It was very much an independent operation, with Queen Elizabeth always insisting to the Spanish that she did not sanction English support for the Dutch rebels, while privately hoping that they would drive the French out of Flushing and overthrow Spanish hegemony in Holland. Gascoigne served as a soldier in the Netherlands, probably from July 1572 until the second siege of Leiden in May 1574. He returned to England from time to time – he attended the funeral of Reginald Grey, 5th Earl of Kent, at St Giles, Cripplegate on 17 April 1573 – but was able to observe the war at close hand. Being Gascoigne, he had plenty of complaints and quarrels. He was shocked by the incompetence of Gilbert and the other leaders and by the ineffectualness and downright cowardice of the English and Scottish mercenary troops. After the naval battle of Flushing (26–7 August 1573) Gascoigne quarrelled with his colonel about the lack of discipline in the regiment and resigned his captain’s commission. There was then another highly characteristic dispute as he waited to get paid at Strijen. But Gascoigne, who quarrelled freely with his incompetent English commanders, impressed the Prince of Orange with his soldierly qualities. Although he took a break at Christmas to return to England on leave, Gascoigne