I have on my shelves an incomplete set
(seven of the eight volumes), rather garishly bound in a bright blue buckram
with lavish gold stamping, of Edward Arber’s An English Garner: Ingatherings from Our History and Literature. An unsigned inscription on the flyleaf of
the first volume reads “To James Abel Esq in memory of the editor of this
series May 1913”—that is, precisely 106 years ago. The publication dates of the various numbers
are curiously specific, that of the first volume being “15 Nov. 1877”. Arber was a transitional figure in the
history of British literary scholarship.
Born in 1836, a year before Victoria ascended the throne, he died in
1912 in the early years of George V. During
his lifetime the study of literature moved from amateur antiquarianism toward
more solid bibliographical science.
Arber, who became the first Professor of English Literature at
Birmingham, represented both the old and the new. His Transcript
of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers (1875–94) and
three-volume Term
Catalogues, mainly published at his own expense, were major
scholarly contributions. The
miscellanies printed in the Garner
show his more antiquarian instincts.
There is a clue to
Arber’s sensibility in the two authors from whom he took title-page epigraphs.
From Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the
World (1614) we get this: “Yea,
History hath triumphed over Time; which besides it nothing but Eternity hath
triumphed over.” And there is a
single phrase from Milton’s Areopagitca:
“[Who shall silence all the] Airs and
madrigals that whisper softness in chambers.” One major theme of Arber’s prose collections
is the greatness of English sea-power, particularly in the sixteenth
century. And he anthologizes a very
large amount of Tudor and Caroline poetry and song, much of it by famous hands and
now available in smart scholarly editions, some of it still rightly obscure and
bordering on the unreadable.
One of the maritime
themes favored by Arber are tales of combat, especially three-against-one combat. There may well be a study of this genre or
theme somewhere; there certainly ought to be.
I suspect that it may be related the theological commonplaces of the
“three enemies of man” (world, flesh, and devil) and the scriptural cognate of
the “three temptations” (lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, pride of
life). Nor do I doubt that it is related
to the various tales of three wishes, three obstacles, three challenges, etc.,
so frequent in European folklore. Arber
would appear to have been an enthusiastic Victorian imperialist, certain that any
Briton of any historical period was capable of taking on any three foreign
combatants, especially if they happened to be Catholics resident in parts below
the Olive Oil Line. I first became aware
of this attitude in Sir Thomas Urquart’s spirited account of the mano-a-mano trifecta performed by the
Admirable Crichton at the Court of the Duke of Milan in 1592. Crichton’s unadmirable reward, of course, was
base Italianate perfidy.
I turn to my blue-clad
Arbers from time to time either when moved by whimsy or when mentally jostled
to do so by some emergent event. It was
the horrible Easter terrorism in the churches in Sri Lanka that sent me back to
the first volume, where (I recalled) a certain Robert Knox, one among so many
unfortunate mariners, gives an account of his captivity on that island between
1660 and 1679. The coastal cities of the
island were under the control of vying European powers, but the interior (called
by Knox “the Kingdom of Conde Uda in the island of Ceylon”) was a heart of
darkness, which swallowed up Knox as in Conrad the Congo would swallow up Kurtz. But Knox at length escaped to write about
it. One thing led to another and I soon
enough found myself perusing a piece actually entitled Three Against One. It purports to be the autobiographical account
of an English merchant-warrior, one Richard Peeke of Tavistock in Devon, who in
1625 took part in a sanguinary Anglo-Dutch assault on the Spanish military
stronghold at Cadiz. The Protestants had
great success from their ships. They
drove the defenders from the fort and captured it. Imprudently rushing ashore, Peeke was captured, severely wounded, and placed under
sentence of death. His sporting captors,
however, offered him one chance for survival—if he could first sustain battle
against three Spanish champions. The
Spaniards were armed with rapiers and poniards. Peeke’s weapon of choice was an iron
halfstaff from which the halberd-head had been removed, but with a “small
pike” still one end. With
this formidable tool he immediately knocked one adversary to the ground dead
and soon enough disarmed the other two. His captors, irate but honorable, set
him free to walk 1500 kilometers to a French port from which he might find a
ship bound for England.
Maritime
(mis)adventure is a major subject of our early modern prose. One endlessly fascinating quarry is the
collection in many volumes of Hakluyt’s Voyages,
also on my shelves; but the great classic remains Defoe’s fictional Robinson Crusoe. Even in the “truest”
accounts it may be hard to distinguish the vero
from the ben trovato; one must take
Peeke’s narrative with an ample pinch of old salt. An Anglo-Irish bishop is supposed to have remarked
that he “doubted a good deal” of Gulliver’s
Travels! In the same vein I think
it’s safe to trust “certain parts of” Three
Against One.
It is clear that the
disaster of the Armada of 1588 had not quelled Spanish military ambitions
against England and that the Spanish authorities ran an excellent intelligence
operation that gave them detailed knowledge of the fortifications at Plymouth
and other English ports. All this came
out during Peeke’s interrogations at the inland military headquarters in Jérez
(“Sherrys”, that viticultural capital that was a Mecca for Falstaff and so many
other topers of the Elizabethan period).
The attitude taken toward him by his Spanish captors oscillated between competing
impulses—an incandescent hatred of Protestant heresy and a medieval chivalry
that honored courage and prowess in ceremonial combats. Fortunately for Master Peeke, it was the
latter that prevailed.
