Held in peace by Henry of Navarre, France began to be a happier place than Italy for the Englishman abroad.  Germany was impossible, because of the Thirty Years’ War; and Spain, for reasons which we shall see later on, was not inviting.  Though nominally Roman Catholic, France was in fact half Protestant.  Besides, the French Court was great and gay, far outshining those of the impoverished Italian princes.  It suited the gallants of the Stuart period, who found the grave courtesy of the Italians rather slow.  Learning, for which men once had travelled into Italy, was no longer confined there.  Nor did the Cavaliers desire exact classical learning.  A knowledge of mythology, culled from French translations, was sufficient.  Accomplishments, such as riding, fencing, and dancing, were what chiefly helped them, it appeared, to make their way at Court or at camp.  And the best instruction in these accomplishments had shifted from Italy to France.

A change had come over the ideal of a gentleman—­a reaction from the Tudor enthusiasm for letters.  A long time had gone by since Henry VIII. tried to make his children as learned as Erasmus, and had the most erudite scholars fetched from Oxford and Cambridge to direct the royal nursery.  The somewhat moderated esteem in which book-learning was held in the household of Charles I. may be seen in a letter of the Earl of Newcastle, governor to Prince Charles,[206] who writes to his pupil: 

“I would not have you too studious, for too much contemplation spoils action, and Virtue consists in that.”  The Prince’s model is to be the Bishop of Chichester, his tutor, who “hath no pedantry in him:  his learning he makes right use of, neither to trouble himself with it or his friends:  ... reades men as well as books:  ... is travell’d, which you shall perceive by his wisdome and fashion more than by his relations; and in a word strives as much discreetly to hide the scholler in him, as other men’s follies studies to shew it:  and is a right gentleman."[207]

Of pedantry, however, there never seems to have been any danger in Court circles, either in Tudor or Stuart days.  It took constant exhortations to make the majority of noblemen’s sons learn anything at all out of books.  For centuries the marks of a gentleman had been bravery, courtesy and a good seat in the saddle, and it was not to be supposed that a sudden fashionable enthusiasm for literature could change all that.  Ascham had declared that the Elizabethan young bloods thought it shameful to be learned because the “Jentlemen of France” were not so.[208] When with the general relaxation of high effort which appeared in so many ways at the Court of James I., the mastery of Greek authors was no longer an ideal of the courtier, the Jacobean gallant was hardly more intellectual than the mediaeval page.  Henry Peacham, in 1623, described noblemen’s flagging faith in a university education.  They sent their sons to Oxford or Cambridge at an early