Character
Chamberlain's letters provide a portrait of a typical London gentleman of late Elizabethan and Jacobean times, moderate in politics and religion. Chamberlain emerges from his letters as a kind man and a considerate friend, who preferred a peaceful life and commented on the contemporary world as an onlooker. Though he willingly sought career openings for his friends, he was uninterested in office or financial gain for himself and lived the life of a quiet, even timid bachelor. As he once wrote: "I am past all ambition, and wish nor seek nothing but how to live suaviter and in plenty". This detached approach lends an objective quality to Chamberlain's letters. As a conscientious correspondent, he took pains to get his facts right. He saw through pretence and delusions but was never cynical or indignant. His generosity as a man is reflected in the fairness of outlook that pervades his letters. Just as his friends confided and trusted in him, often with important secrets, historians have trusted his information and insights into the Jacobean scene. Historian Alan Stewart calls Chamberlain, "a notable barometer of public opinion".
Chamberlain certainly had personal shortcomings, of which he was fully aware, but they are not such as to affect the quality of his letters. He was naturally inquisitive and a gossip, qualities that served as an asset to him as a letter writer. He had been a sickly and delicate child; and although he attended both Cambridge University and the Inns of Court, he never took his degree or qualified as a lawyer. Wallace Notestein, who included a long essay on Chamberlain in his Four Worthies (1956), described him as "wanting in initiative". He always lived in the households of friends and relatives; on the one occasion he attempted to run his own establishment, it proved too much for him. He was also timid in love; and though hints that he considered marriage creep into his letters now and then, nothing came of these opportunities. Editor Norman McClure suggests that Chamberlain may at one time have considered marrying Dudley Carleton's sister Alice. In his will, among many generous gifts to his friends, he made a sizeable bequest to Alice, explaining: "This I do, in regard of the sincere goodwill and honest affection I bear her, and of the true and long-continued friendship between us, and for a testimony of that further good I had intended her, if God had given me means".
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