If this book ends abruptly, it is because my material was also abruptly terminated. It is Robert Finch's story, not mine, and if I am to be faithful to it, it must end here. The last entry of Finch's diary has been given as I found it. The bottom part of the sheet had rotted away and if there were any further entries, they have not been found.
Did Finch run into trouble he couldn't handle, on his last recorded mission? Did he succeed and go away from England as he planned to do? We do not know. It isn't important that we know. The importance of this book lies in the vivid descriptions it gives us of daily life in Elizabethan England.
As we know, Mary of Scotland was at last caught out in her plotting and beheaded in 1587. Walsingham, himself, was her chief prosecutor and it was the evidence of his agents that brought about her conviction. At the news of her execution, all England breathed more easily. All, that is, except Elizabeth. Although, in the light of damning evidence, she had had no choice but to sign the death warrant, she was deeply grieved by the death of the woman who would have snuffed out the Queen's life without a qualm-rather, with the greatest of pleasure.
Elizabeth was a strange woman. In her lifetime many understood her partially, none wholly, and at this distance it is impossible to do better than her contemporaries.
That her England was licentious in the extreme is not to be denied, but nor is it to be denied that England was also as flourishing as at any time in her long history. Excesses were rife, debauchery the norm. The Elizabethans themselves were a baffling maze of contradictions. Man, no doubt, would cease to be man were he not inconsistent, but the inconsistency of the Elizabethan much exceeds the limits permitted to human beings. Their subtlety and their naivete, their delicacy and their brutality; their grossness and their modesty, their piety and their lust. What kind of mental fabric was woven from the warp of filthy, savage, 16th century London and the wool of an impassioned familiarity with the splendor of Tamburlaine, and the exquisiteness of Venus and Adonis? How can we fully comprehend those iron-nerved creatures who passed so readily from listening to some divine madrigal sung to a lute by a gentle boy in a tavern to the spectre of mauled and bleeding dogs savaging a chained bear to it's death?
We cannot understand, as, doubtless, they could not understand themselves, and it little behooves us now to judge them. One of the greatest of all the great men of that time, put into the mouth of Marc Anthony the words;
“The evil that men do lives after them: The good is oft inter'd with their bones.” In the case of the Elizabethan, exactly the opposite is true. Had he not his failings, would he have had his virtues? Had he not his lusts and violent passions, would he have had the drive to lift England from the status of foundling to that of the greatest nation on earth?
Whatever their vices, great and appalling though they certainly were, we are much too deeply in their debts to slap their wrists.
Blackburn Wendell
London