Members of the reactive Picaresque Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1512 and 1540; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1620.1 Their parents, members of either the last wave of the adaptive Humanist Generation or the first wave of the idealistic and zealous Reformation Generation, typically nurtured them in a particularly underprotective way, even by the standards of the sixteenth century. They were urged to grow up quickly by their parents, who were busy purifying Christianity with their Protestant Reformation.
The Picaresque Generation (of the Nomad archype in the Reformation Saeculum, or Cycle) spent childhood amid religious frenzy and a widespread erosion of social authority and came of age in a cynical, post-Awakening era of cutthroat politics and roller-coaster markets. They built a gritty young-adult reputation as swaggering merchants, mercenaries, spies, and sea-dog privateers who pulled off stunning reprisals through luck and pluck. Entering midlife just as their Queen (a shrewd orphan herself) squared off with Imperial Spain, these daredevil adventurers knew how to "singe King Philip's beard" while stealing his gold. Making simple appeals to national honor, they aged into worldly wise elder stewards of English solidarity whose sacrifices made possible a glorious new era.2
Their moralistic elders condemned this alienated generation as waffling and unprincipled. Actually, this generation's members just wanted to make their way in the world. If the King demanded that they swear loyalty to him rather than to the Pope as head of the Church of England, OK. If the Queen insisted that they be good Catholics, why not? These matters just weren't worth a hanging or a burning. Queen Elizabeth summed up the attitude of the Picaresque Generation, when asked her opinion of Christ's presence in the Sacrament:
'Twas God the word that spake it,
He took the Bread and brake it;
And what the word did make it;
That I believe, and take it.
On the other hand, many in this generation sought adventure in their early adult years. Some, like Francis Drake and John Hawkins, were semilegal pirates for their wily Queen Elizabeth, capturing booty from laden Spanish galleons. Historian Anthony Esler3 referred to them as "a burned-out generation" of risk takers who "grew up in an age of ideological ferment" and later aged into "cool, cautious, and politique elders."
This generation produced several very effective warriors and practical politicians. Through hard experience, they understood how the real world functioned, and they acted accordingly. They were capable grizzled commanders during the Armada Crisis conflict with Spain. But they were rascals all the same, acting in a way many would consider irresponsible. As the Armada bore down on the English coast, Drake was in no hurry to leave his game to take command: "There is plenty of time to win this game, and to thrash the Spaniards too."
As parents, they tended to be overprotective and smothering to their children in the civic Elizabethan Generation and especially to those in the adaptive Sentimental Generation.
As elders, in the first couple of decades of the seventeenth century, they tended to be reclusive and had little influence on the events around them. They mellowed out in their dotage, a mellowing reflected in the following lines by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey:
Martial, the things for to attain
The happy life be these, I find;
The riches left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind;
The equal friend; no grudge nor strife;
No charge or rule nor governance;
Without disease the healthful life;
The household of continuance.
. . .
The chaste wife wise, without debate;
Such sleeps as may beguile the night;
Content thyself with thine estate;
Neither wish death, nor fear his might.4
Birthyears for the Picaresque Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
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Notes:
1. The information on this page has been adapted with permission from William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991). I have coined the label Picaresque Generation for their "Reprisal Generation." [Back to your place on this page.]
2. William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (New York: Broadway Books [Bantam-Doubleday-Dell], 1997), p. 129. [Back to your place on this page.]
3. Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (1966), cited in Strauss and Howe, p. 114. [Back to your place on this page.]
4. The Means to Attain Happy LIfe. [Back to your place on this page.]
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