“What weappearis subject to the judgmentOf all mankind; and what weare, of no man.”Schiller in “Mary Stuart.”
“What weappearis subject to the judgmentOf all mankind; and what weare, of no man.”Schiller in “Mary Stuart.”
“What weappearis subject to the judgment
Of all mankind; and what weare, of no man.”
Schiller in “Mary Stuart.”
These lines upon the lips of Elizabeth Tudor are her condemnation in the judgment of all mankind. Short sighted, indeed, and headed directly towards the rapids of the all revealing Real is the mortal who thus honors appearances.
Elizabeth would have Mary Stuart put to death, but wouldseemto have tried to save her: Elizabeth would sign the deathwarrant, but wouldseemto have been constrained, to have done so regretfully, to have recalled the fatal sentence when, alas! too late. But all this flimsy Seeming has been blown away by the rugged years; and that which thisMachiavellian queenthought subject to the judgment of no man has become her condemnation in the eyes of all.
So close they lie together now in old Westminster Abbey—these rival queens who once so cordially feared and hated one another! and for whose conflicting ambitions all Britain was not room enough, but one must die! How ignoble seems now the strife, how despicable the deed of culminant hate, how diaphanous all the Seeming! Was it worth while?
The death of Mary, Queen of Scots, at the hands of her cousin Queen Elizabeth aroused a feeling of angry indignation in every court of Europe. France, Spain, and the Vatican, openly denounced the deed. And it was, in great measure, in execration of this unnatural cruelty that Pope Sextus V. espoused the cause of Philip II. of Spain and urged and aided the invasion of England.
Strange that such men as Edmund Spenser, author ofFærie Queenand Sir Walter Raleigh, mirror of chivalry, should have been among the foremost to demand the death of the Scottish queen. But those were turbulent times. Life and death never played the mortal game more boldly and recklessly and desperately than in the sixteenth century. The magic of the New World was upon the old; the glamour of gem-lit El Dorados shimmered across the seas; and thither responsively rushed in shaky ships andleaky caravelsthose whom the gods would destroy made mad by the bite of the gold-tarantula. “We are as near to heaven by sea as by land”, shouted Sir Humphrey Gilbert as his frail bark was lost in the storm; as his deck lights rose high and dashed low and darkened far down ’neath the sea-lashing storm.
And night with wondering stars looked down upon De Soto’s lordly grave. And then as now and even throughout the historic ages, the prehistoric, the geologic—the thundering waters fell and formed Niagara Falls. In silvery moonlight, in dazzling sun-radiance rainbow-frilled, in blinding white of winter, in rainy spring, in saber flashing summer storm—the thunder-waters fell; they fall; they shall fall.
When Columbus and his crew, secretly fearful of falling off the good old planet Earth, sailed the unknown sea; while Cortes conquered Mexico (not yet calm); while Pizarro ravaged Peru; while Balboa ascended the Andean heights and “silent upon a peak in Darien” first saw the vast Pacific; while De Soto died and was buried; while Drake circumnavigated the globe; while Mary, Queen of Scots laid her head on the block and the axe fell; while the Invincible Armada hurrying northward away from the foe, sailed brokenly back to Spain by way of the Orkneys: while Julius Cæsar fell pierced with twenty-three wounds; while Hannibal crossed the Alps; while Alexander, world-conqueror, aged thirty-two died at old Babylon; while Pericles of Athens reigned imperishably; while Sardis burned and Sardis was avenged; while Marathon, Salamis, Thermopylæ, Platæa, Mycale were fighting; while Babylon the Great was captured by Cyrus; while the Memphian pyramids were building; while the great Sphinx of Gizeh rose solemnly; while griffins and dragons and gummy pterodactyls winged the air; while plesiosauri and ichthyosauri fought for the empire of ocean; while the original of the Pittsburgh Diplodocus Carnegiei was sixty feet somewhere—why, even then were the waters rolling over the rock now called Niagara; even then Niagara Falls that fall and shall fall were falling.
The hostile encounters by land throughout the historic ages have been practically countless; sea fights are few. Man feelsintuitively that the yielding wave is not the fit place for battle. Salamis, Actium, Lepanto, Calais Roads are the chief naval engagements of history.
When Rome had won her first game in world conquest and all Italy was Rome, Carthage was mistress of the Mediterranean, and without her permission no man might even wash his hands in her “Phœnician Lake.” Triremes and quinqueremes with proudly curving prows scudded over the blue waters or huddled together in port as bevies of black swans.
And Rome had no fleet. But Rome could learn from her enemies; and when a wrecked Carthaginian galley was dashed against the Latian coast, Rome quickly learned the art of making galleys; and within two months the waving forest near the coast was metamorphosed into a fleet of one hundred and twenty Roman triremes.
And when the pain of growth was upon Rome making further conquest fatally necessary, she embarked unsteadily upon her late waving forest trees and went reeling forth to meet the swan bevies of the Mediterranean. The hostile fleets engaged and Rome’s was annihilated.
Then these sullen young-world children wildly wept, as did Romulus and Remus, perhaps, in the cave of the she-wolf. But when they were suckled and made strong with the milk of defeat, these wild young Romans built themselves another fleet. And Duillius devised a grappling contrivance whereby to catch and hold the enemy’s ship until a drawbridge could be thrown across o’er which the short-sword Roman soldiers might pass and so fight on the deck hand to hand as on land.
Again the hostile fleets engaged on the blue Mediterranean. But as the haughty quinqueremes with their decks filled with archers bore down upon the awkward Roman triremes, the grappling “hands” arose, the quinqueremes were grappled.Consternation prevailed among the Carthaginians as the drawbridges from ship to ship were thrown across, and the dreaded Roman soldiers short-sword in hand were seen slaughtering the archers and the rowers. Rome’s first naval victory was won.
If the blue Mediterranean could make known all that has taken place upon its waves and shores—what a Homer of the waters it would be! But nature is indifferent to the human tragedy.
That other scene off the coast of Carthage, after the second Punic war, when Rome demanded as a condition of peace that the Carthaginian fleet should be destroyed—yet burns upon the historic page, but the waters that once reddened with the flames just ripple unrememberingly. Five hundred galleys—towering quinqueremes, sturdy triremes—were led out from the harbor before the mourning gaze of the dethroned Queen of the Seas, and set on fire; she watched them blaze down to the laughing waters.
Actium was fought on the Adriatic off the promontory on the west coast of Greece. Here half the world was bartered for one fleeing galley and one woman. While the conflict was yet doubtful and victory seemed even favorably inclined to perch upon the prow of Anthony’s vessel, the barge of Cleopatra shudderingly backed out from the bloody fray, wavered, turned, and sped southward. Marc Anthony followed. Upon the defeat of the allied Roman and Egyptian forces at Actium and over the tragically dead forms of Anthony and Cleopatra, Octavius Cæsar arose to world dominance, becoming Augustus Cæsar, Emperor, Pater Patriæ, and one man Ruler of Rome, Mistress of the world.
Lepanto was fought at the entrance of the Gulf of Corinth, not far from Actium. Here the Cross triumphed over the Crescent and rescued Europe from the deadly blight of Islamism.Don John of Austria, aged twenty-four, led the Christian forces; Alexander Farnese (Prince of Parma), then a youth of twenty, won here his first of many laurels under the generously approving eyes of his young cousin-commander, Don John.
And seventeen years later (1571-1588) the Prince of Parma, Captain general of all the Spanish armies, awaited impatiently at Dunkirk for Admiral Medina Sidonia to clear the channel of hostile vessels so that he and his veteran army might sail across and attack old England. He watched the fight off Gravelines. How his hot Spanish heart must have indignantly throbbed even to bursting, as helplessly cooped in port with a flotilla of unarmed barges to protect, and Lord Seymour with a strong blockading squadron at the mouth of the harbor, he could only see and know and acutely feel that a fearful battle was raging all day long from dawn till dark and that Spain was losing—Spain had lost. One by one hurrying northward past the Flemish ports limped the disabled Spanish ships; English and Dutch cruisers followed in fierce pursuit.
The invasion of England by way of the Thames, the conquest of an inveterate foe, Success proudly placing a flaming carbuncle upon the coronet of the Prince of Parma, the approving glance of Philip and of the fair girl-queen Isabella, Spanish dominance in the old and in the new world—all as burst bubbles died down in gray mist as twilight descended, as dark night gathered over the wave and the world and the fleeing scattered shattered ships of Spain’s vincible Armada.
The battle of Naseby was, perhaps, the anticipative preventive of an English “French Revolution.” The difference between Cromwell’s Ironsides and the gay Frondeurs measures the difference between the English people and the French.
Charles I. aimed to be in England what Louis XIV. was in France. Both fully believed in the divine right of Kings; both quoted as their favorite text of Scripture, “Where the word of a King is there is power; and who may say unto him ‘What doest thou?’” But Louis dealt with the fickle Frondeurs and Charles with Cromwell’s Ironsides; and this racial difference had as divergent results—absolutism for Louis le Grand and the block for Charles Stuart.
There will always be difference of opinion as to Cromwell’s place in history. Was he liberator or tyrant, Christian ruler or barbarously fanatic despot? There can be but one opinion as to the injustice of the trial, condemnation, and death of Charles. The Rump Parliament was certainly not representative of England. It was Cromwell’s creature as arbitrarily as ever the Star Chamber was Charles’.
“Must crimes be punished but by other crimes, and greater criminals?”—Byron.
But as a force in favor of constitutional government and civic liberty, however abused in immediate practice; and as a threatening protest against the abuse of power in high places; and as a veiled challenge of defiance to every absolute monarch—the battle fought June 14, 1645, at Naseby, Northamptonshire,between the Royalists under Charles I. and the Parliamentarians under Fairfax must ever be considered a victory decisive and for all time advantageous.
Henrietta Maria was the daughter of Henry IV. of France, the first Bourbon, and his second wife, Maria de Medici. At the age of fifteen she was married to Charles I. of England; and her best and happiest years as wife, mother, and Queen were spent in England.
In this princess many of the leading Italian, French and English characteristics were met and happily blended. Her dark, lithe beauty (as shown in her portrait by Van Dyke), her musical ability, instrumental and vocal, her fiery-hearted fidelity to the religion of her mother, were, perhaps, her heritage from sunny Italy; the France of Richelieu might, as an environment, conduce favorably to that diplomatic waywardness which, in early years, invariably won for the sweet girl-wife whatsoever her heart might desire; but perhaps from England, land of realism, chilly fogs, and Cromwellian barbarity, she imbibed her sturdy spirit of fortitude and heroic endurance of sorrow.
“To bear is to conquer our fate”, and to refuse to bear and to apparently end all by self-destruction, is to fail to conquer our fate.
The hopes and promises of religion are of inestimable value as an aid in the endurance of sorrows. When the dread culmination of all earthly fears and horrors—the beheading of Charles I.—clashed full upon the widowed heart of Queen Henrietta Maria, she withdrew at once from the court of Paris and sought solace in seclusion and prayer. The convent, not the court; the divine, not the human; the hopes and promises of religion as red-glowed in the sanctuary of a Carmelite conventchapel, held the balm that soothed her wounded soul in that awful culminant woe.
Which is better—to bear or to fail to bear? to hope and endure or despair and die? to pray and bless God saying,The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord, or to wither away in cursing and impotent hate? to believe and grow strongly peaceful in the belief that God is good and all is for the best; that all is little and short that passes away with time; that God’s explanation shall exultingly explain forever and ever—or to doubt, negative, deny, and bitterly live and despairingly die? Even as a matter of merely human wisdom, it is well to believe in the hopes and promises of religion.
The monastic sanctuaries that arise wherever the Catholic Church flourishes, and that lure into their prayerful solitudes the “hearts that are heavy with losses and weary with dragging the crosses too heavy for mortals to bear” are surely indicative of a far higher and happier state of society than that whose godless defiance finds suicidal expression in the insidious drug, the deadly acid, the desperate bullet.
The houses of Euthanasia of the near Socialistic future are surely as stones unto bread in comparison with the monastic sanctuaries of the Middle Ages.
How wonderful is the art which can impress upon canvas and so preserve from generation to generation and from century to century, a lifelike presentment of men and women whose flesh and blood realities have long since mouldered dust with dust! The canvas endures; the man dies?—Ah, no! he has but shuffled off the earth-garment and left it earth with earth; he lives.
The Van Dyke portraits of Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles I. and the children of Charles I. are mutely eloquent. The well-knownpicture, “Baby Stuart”, a detail from the group, “Children of Charles I.” suggests the high tide of love and happiness in the life of Queen Henrietta Maria. She was then surrounded by everything that heart could desire,—wealth, honor, power, a husband’s unbounded love and confidence and three beautiful and most promising children. They were Mary, who later married William, Prince of Orange; Charles, who, at the Restoration, became the “Merry Monarch” of England, and James, the baby Stuart, who later became the unfortunate James II., the monarch who lost his crown, and whose daughter Mary, wedded to her cousin, William, Prince of Orange, son of that sister Mary, who, in the portrait, stands athis side, abettedthe deposition of her father and wore his crown.
There is something eloquently pathetic in the portraits of men and women who have fallen victims to a tragic fate. The principle of contrast is, doubtless, here at work, setting side by side with the hour of portrayal that other hour of bitter death. Marie Antoinette and her children, as fixed upon canvas by the court painter, Madame Vigee LeBrun, derive their rich tonal qualities—warm grays and reds, their charm of evanescence, their magically somber fascination, from the shadows of the Conciergerie and the guillotine.
The portrait of Charles I. as painted by Van Dyke, must ever suggest to the thoughtful student of history that scene, disgraceful alike to the English nation and to human nature which took place on the scaffold just outside Whitehall Palace.
Yes; there are two sides to every question, and one is a ruler exercising arbitrary power and impregnated with belief in the divine right of kings and claiming it his prerogative to break up his parliament and govern alone; the other is an assembly of men, nominally a parliament, so narrowly fanatic and steeped in human hate that they demanded as condition under which they would agree to levy taxes for Charles I. to use in aid ofProtestant Holland, that he should first order every Catholic priest in his own realm to be put to death and the property of all Catholics to be confiscated. Charles refused. This side of the cause of the rupture between Charles I. and his Parliament has not the historic prominence of the other side. Why? Not very hard to tellwhyif one considers attentively the writers of the history of that period.
“I hope to meet my end with calmness. Do not let us speak of the men into whose hands I have fallen. They thirst for my blood, they shall have it. God’s will be done, I give Him thanks. I forgive them all sincerely, but let us say no more about them”—these words addressed to Bishop Juxon by Charles a few days before his death attest the inherent nobility of his nature. Whatever the life of Charles I. may have been, his death was kingly; and if death is the echo of life then, too, his life must have been vocal with virtues. But what virtue can outshine or even illumine the black chaos of creed-fanaticism, odium, obloquy? What power can break up and restore to their original settings the half-truths, untruths, errors and lies glitteringly crystalized in history, drama, story and song? Does time right ancient wrongs, readjust and make-whole torn, century-scattered truths? We dream so; we say so; but at deepest heart we whisperNo.
With unruffled calmness, with dignity, with kingly grace, Charles I. stepped from the opening of what had been in happier days his banqueting hall and advanced upon the scaffold. In the words of Agnes Strickland:
“It was past 1 o’clock before the grisly attendants and apparatus of the scaffold were ready. Colonel Hacker led the king through his former banqueting hall, one of the windows of which had originally been contrived to support stands for public pageantries; it had been taken out and led to the platform raised in the street. The noble bearing of the King as hestepped on the scaffold, his beaming eyes and high expression, were noticed by all who saw him. He looked on all sides for his people, but dense masses of soldiery only presented themselves far and near. He was out of hearing of any persons but Juxon and Herbert, save those who were interested in his destruction. The soldiers preserved a dead silence; this time they did not insult him. The distant populace wept, and occasionally raised mournful cries in blessings and prayers for him. The king uttered a short speech, to point out that every institute of the original constitution of England had been subverted with the sovereign power. While he was speaking someone touched the axe, which was laid enveloped in black crepe on the block. The king turned round hastily and exclaimed, ‘Have a care of the axe. If the edge is spoiled it will be the worse for me.’
“The king put up his flowing hair under a cap; then, turning to the executor asked, ‘Is any of my hair in the way?’ ‘I beg your majesty to push it more under your cap,’ replied the man, bowing. The bishop assisted his royal master to do so and observed to him: ‘There is but one stage more, which, though turbulent and troublesome, is yet a very short one. Consider, it will carry you a great way—even from earth to heaven.’ ‘I go,’ replied the king, ‘from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown.’
“He unfastened his cloak and took off the medallion of the order of the Garter. The latter he gave to Juxon, saying with emphasis, ‘Remember!’ Beneath the medallion of St. George was a secret spring which removed a plate ornamented with lilies, under which was a beautiful miniature of his Henrietta. The warning word, which has caused many historical surmises, evidently referred to the fact that he only had parted with the portrait of his beloved wife at the last moment of his existence. He then took off his coat and put on his cloak, and pointing tothe block, said to the executioner: ‘Place it so that it will not shake.’ ‘It is firm, sir,’ replied the man. ‘I shall say a short prayer,’ said the king, ‘and when I hold out my hand thus, strike.’ The king stood in profound meditation, said a few words to himself, looked upward on the heavens, then knelt and laid his head on the block. In about a minute he stretched out his hands, and his head was severed at one blow.”
News travelled slowly in the days of long ago; and the trial, death and burial of Charles I. were over long before intelligence of the dire happenings in England had been carried into France. Queen Henrietta Maria, then in the Louvre Palace, Paris, had just received into her motherly arms her second son, James, who had successfully passed through the belligerent lines and reached safety in Paris. This joy was soon dulled into woe.
Ominous whispers among the Louvre circle and pitying glances caused the queen to make inquiries. The worst was soon told. The queen had expected imprisonment, perhaps even deposition and exile, but death, the official beheading of an English sovereign—had not once entered into her mind as among the possibilities. The queen sat silent and tearless among her sympathizing English attendants. Pere Gamache approached. She received him apathetically. Her aunt, the Duchess de Vendome, took her hand and held it caressingly—but the Queen seemed in a state of frozen woe; no moan, no sigh, no tear. Pere Gamache withdrew unobserved and searching through the royal chambers he found the little Princess Henriette, the four-year-old idol of the once happy Stuart home. Leading the child gently by the hand, he returned to the scene of grief.
At the touch of baby hands, the impress of childish kisses,the unhappy Queen seemed slowly to come back to life even as it was, and clasping her little daughter in rapturous tenderness to her breast she wept. Long and wildly she wept and the frightened child weeping responsively and clinging helplessly to her bosom saved her at last to sanity and to heroic endurance.
Tennyson has beautifully expressed this power of childish love and helplessness to save a mother from despair:
Home they brought her warrior dead;She nor swoon’d, nor utter’d cry,All her maidens, watching said,“She must weep or she will die.”Then they praised him, soft and low,Called him worthy to be loved,Truest friend and noblest foe;Yet she neither spoke nor moved.Stole a maiden from her place,Lightly to the warrior steptTook the face-cloth from his face;Yet she neither moved nor wept.Rose a nurse of ninety years,Set his child upon her knee—Like summer tempest came her tears—“Sweet my child, I live for thee.”
Home they brought her warrior dead;She nor swoon’d, nor utter’d cry,All her maidens, watching said,“She must weep or she will die.”Then they praised him, soft and low,Called him worthy to be loved,Truest friend and noblest foe;Yet she neither spoke nor moved.Stole a maiden from her place,Lightly to the warrior steptTook the face-cloth from his face;Yet she neither moved nor wept.Rose a nurse of ninety years,Set his child upon her knee—Like summer tempest came her tears—“Sweet my child, I live for thee.”
Home they brought her warrior dead;She nor swoon’d, nor utter’d cry,All her maidens, watching said,“She must weep or she will die.”
Home they brought her warrior dead;
She nor swoon’d, nor utter’d cry,
All her maidens, watching said,
“She must weep or she will die.”
Then they praised him, soft and low,Called him worthy to be loved,Truest friend and noblest foe;Yet she neither spoke nor moved.
Then they praised him, soft and low,
Called him worthy to be loved,
Truest friend and noblest foe;
Yet she neither spoke nor moved.
Stole a maiden from her place,Lightly to the warrior steptTook the face-cloth from his face;Yet she neither moved nor wept.
Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stept
Took the face-cloth from his face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.
Rose a nurse of ninety years,Set his child upon her knee—Like summer tempest came her tears—“Sweet my child, I live for thee.”
Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her knee—
Like summer tempest came her tears—
“Sweet my child, I live for thee.”
A few days later the Queen withdrew from the French court for a brief period of retirement and prayer in the Carmelite Convent.
While the drama in high places was playing before the world, a more enduring side scene was enacting in a quiet English home. John Milton, in political disgrace, in sorrow of soul, and in total blindness was dictating to his daughters the lines of “Paradise Lost.” Cromwell and his Roundheads, the Merry Monarch and his dissolute court, James II. and his sorrows,passed away; the visions seen by the blind old bard remain.
As literary immortality is the highest prize that fate holds for mortals it is fitting that the cost of attainment should be proportionately high. And in this adjustment fate is inexorable. Heart’s blood and tears wrought into a book give it enduring qualities: much, much; little, little; some, some; none, none. The dictum of Horace in the olden day,Si vis me flere, etc., is still the exponent of an author’s power.
That poem by Mrs. Browning, “A Musical Instrument,” has fixed in rainbow evanescence—a Thoughts’ Niagara Bridal Veil—ten thousand blending, blinding truths and beauties that prose could never hold or catch.
Is the prize worth the price? In itself, No; but in the soul-growth that its mastery implies and in the soul-wealth that it makes one’s own forever and ever, Yes. Then, too, they to whom Fame shines as an ever luring star, urging on, on, incessantly even through blood and tears, are so formed by their fate that the prize seems to them worth while; its winning seems life’s only good, its loss, life’s supreme sorrow. “The attractions are proportional to the destinies.”
So who shall judge his unknown neighbor? Who shall justly say,Thou foolto the man who must needs follow his fate? Who shall justly pity him whose poverty, disgrace, bitterness of heart, and blindness of soul and body—lead to the star-luring heights of literary immortality?
Milton was Latin secretary under Oliver Cromwell and a man of great influence at the court. He shared in the amnesty proclaimed by Charles II. at the Restoration. Milton’s remaining years were spent in retirement and literary labors.
The return of the Stuarts shattered all his hopes, religious and political. He seemed to see in the Stuart restoration thefirst gathering gloom of a darkness which should overwhelm himself, England, and all the earth. Subjectively this was true. Milton never saw beyond that gathering cloud; and when the culminant blackness of his own blindness closed in upon him, then, too, into a common gloom sank Milton, England and all the earth.
“And darkness shows us worlds by nightWe never see by day.”
“And darkness shows us worlds by nightWe never see by day.”
“And darkness shows us worlds by night
We never see by day.”
Would Paradise Lost have been born into literature if Milton had not become blind?
Would we of today find congenial that Milton of the old Puritanical day? Do we admire the Miltonic God? Milton liked best his Lucifer, and that liking elusively throbs through Paradise Lost and elicits response.
There must have been a great measure of compensation to Charles I. in the filial devotion of his household. It is related that Prince Charles, eldest son, and heir apparent to the throne, sent to his father, when in prison, a documentcarte blanchesigned with his name. And in a letter enclosed the Prince assured his father that whatever conditions he should see fit to make with Cromwell and his followers relative to the succession would be agreeable to him, in token whereof he had signed his name to the document. There was something heroic in that, and something even more magnanimously heroic in the response of Charles I. He at once tore the document to pieces, fearing that the enemy might get possession of it and make use of it against Prince Charles. He wrote tenderly to his son, admitting the pleasure his generous offer had given, but declaring that death would be preferable to any act whereby the rights of his children should be tampered with or signed away.
It is well to note these nobler actions and emotions in the lives of kings: the ambitious selfishness and cruelty of a Macbeth, a King John, a Richard III. are pedestaled for all the world to see; why not the mutual magnanimity of the Stuarts? Truly the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oftimes interred with their bones.
At the death of Cromwell, after a five years’ stormy reign as Lord Protector of England, and after a twelve years’ exile of the family of Charles I., the people of England unanimously welcomed the restoration of the Stuarts. Charles II.—known in France under this title since the death of Charles I.—was crowned King of England.
The times were troubled. Roundhead and Cavalier still stood at misunderstandingenmity onedirectly opposed to the other and never the twain might meet. The pendulum swung with bewildering rapidity from harshly somber Cromwellian Puritanism to the excessive dissipation of the Court of the Merry Monarch: the country followed the pendulum.
Charles II., while humane on the whole, and more inclined to ease and pleasure than to troublesome revenge, yet displayed a touch of the savage in his treatment of the body of Oliver Cromwell. He ordered that it be disinterred and the head struck off. This was done; and the ghastly head of the man who had ruled England with a rod of iron for five years, was fastened to the gibbet at Tyburn.
Horrible is the hate which pursues its victim beyond death and wreaks vengeance upon an unresisting mass of putrefaction! All such excesses, no matter by whom committed or under what provocation, are atavistic expressions of the jackal and the tiger in the heart of man.
Truly there is no eye that can foresee the future! Cromwell, passing for the thousandth time through the thoroughfare ofTyburn, saw not there his own head fastened to a gibbet. Charles I., at the stately banquet board of Whitehall Palace, saw not the great end window of the hall opening upon the scaffold. And we, secure in the hour, see not that other hour of fatal import that yet shall be; and—’tis well.
Queen Henrietta Maria was not present at the scenes of acclamation which welcomed the return of her son, Charles II. She was at that time happily absorbed in the forth-coming marriage of her charming daughter, the Princess Henriette Maria, to Philip, Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV.
Some time later Queen Henrietta Maria went to England. She resided there three years, but her heart’s best interests were in sunny France where her idolized daughter, the Duchess of Orleans, moved amid the gay court of Versailles as its chief honor and ornament. Charles II. and his wife, Catherine, of Braganza, reluctantly bade farewell to the Queen-mother after accompanying her as far as the Nore; but doubtless there was secret joy in the heart of Henrietta Maria as the foggy shores of England receded from view and France arose in expectancy.
Then, too, all seemed calm in England; Charles II. and his wife were high in popular favor. Her second son, James, Duke of York, was happily married and surrounded by a promising family. James’ eldest daughter, the Lady Mary, later Queen Mary II. of England, was a great favorite with the affectionate grandmother, Henrietta Maria. Anne, James’ second daughter, afterward Queen Anne of England, was also attached to the kindly old Queen-mother.
The old-age years of Henrietta Maria rolled on in comparative happiness. Some lives seem to have their sorrows scattered uniformly over the years, a gentle drizzle, never dazzlingsunlight; other lives are marked by dynamic contrasts—brilliancy, ecstatic light suddenly blackened by tornado blasts and torn by lurid lightning, and after that, calm again and even the bright light.
Queen Henrietta Maria’s tornado blast and searing lightning flash came full upon her when her husband was beheaded; her later years were calmly happy. In philanthropic labors, in the exercise of all the gentle charities of the Christian heart, in the hopeful fulfilment of religious obligations, the old age years drifted calmly to the great Calm.
It chanced that at that time the use of opium as a sedative, narcotic, and harmless medicine was in vogue at the court. M. Valot, favorite physician of Louis XIV., ordered it for the Queen. In the best of spirits and laughing at the supposed wonderful qualities of the new panacea, Henrietta Maria took the prescribed drug. An hour later she fell into a peaceful slumber; the night passed and the day passed, and still she slept. Alarm was felt, her son-in-law, the Duke of Orleans, was soon at her bedside; the little granddaughter, Anne, was brought near in hopes of arousing the dormant sensibilities—but in vain. Queen Henrietta had sunk into the calm; it was too good to leave; she stayed, sank deeper, deeper, and with a little sigh of relief she died.
Jacques Benigne Bossuet, the eloquent pulpit orator of the court of Louis XIV., added a classic to French literature in his masterly discourse at the obsequies of Henrietta Maria. It was delivered in the convent chapel of the nuns of the Visitation of Chaillot, whom the late Queen particularly favored, and for whom she had founded the convent.
The nobility of France were gathered together on this occasion, the “most illustrious assembly of the world” sat spell-boundunder the eloquence of the “Eagle of Meaux.” Bossuet had proved equal to his opportunity.
Perhaps, though, Bossuet is better known today by that other funeral oration delivered some months later at the obsequies of Queen Henrietta Maria’s youngest daughter, Henriette of England, Duchess of Orleans.
When the old die, well—there can be no Shelleyan lamentation.
“Grief made the young Spring wild,And she threw down her opening budsAs if she autumn were and they dead leaves.”—Shelley.
“Grief made the young Spring wild,And she threw down her opening budsAs if she autumn were and they dead leaves.”—Shelley.
“Grief made the young Spring wild,
And she threw down her opening buds
As if she autumn were and they dead leaves.”
—Shelley.
The young spring may, indeed, thus lavishly lament for the young, but not for the old. When a poet Keats, aged twenty-six, lies brokenheartedly and beautifully dead; when a queenly woman, wife and bereaved mother, aged twenty-eight, lies pathetically dead—oh, then, all that Shelley may poetically declare, all that Bossuet may magically proclaim, seem fitting and just and true. We understand the young Spring tantrums; and the sobbings of the buds as roughly sundered from the grief-swept trees, seem strangely familiar, as though ages ago we ourselves had thus wildly wept when the world was young.
Wealth, station, honor, health, happiness, youth, beauty, love—today; and the tomb tomorrow! This contrast has ever most forcefully appealed to the human heart. Bossuet knew full well the force of this appeal and again the orator and the occasion were well met.
“O vanity,” he exclaimed, “O nothingness! O mortals, ignorant of their destiny! Ten months ago would she have believed it? And you, my hearers, would you have thought, while she was shedding so many tears in this place, while I was discharging a like office for the Queen, her mother—that she would so soon assemble you here to deplore her own loss? ‘Vanity ofvanities; all is vanity.’ Nothing is left for me to say but that that is the only sentiment which, in presence of so strange a casualty, grief so well grounded and so poignant permits me to indulge. No; after what we have just seen, health is but a name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow, charms and pleasures are but a dangerous diversion.”
“Keep cool, it will be all one in a hundred years.” So we say to others, so we try to persuade ourselves; but the tempestuous teapot seems fatally fixed over the live coals of life and the teapot tempest must as fatally follow. So mightily important, so imperative, so irresistibly puissant where those seeming geyser-forces in their day; perhaps we who laugh at their spent spray would more wisely learn the lessons they may teach us.
But just as a matter of spent spray and evanishing iridescence, those struggles of the long ago seem magically beautiful; and the men and women who figured prominently in them seem to peer through the mist even as flame-light from which flame has fled, even as pictured pain, reflex sorrows, unrealities—spray-shrouded, color-clouded. Cleopatra, nobly dead, a Queen forever; ugly old Socrates growing humanly dear and beautiful to all the ages as he drinks the poison-hemlock; Marie Antoinette,in the tumbrel, at the guillotine, under the glittering blade; Charles I. upon the scaffold, on the block awaiting the headsman’s blow—these things have been, but now they are not; yet they endure.
Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet—somehow these names lie contiguous in the mind; so stored away, perhaps, in the brain cells long ago, and thus forever associative.
Where is all that we know when it is not in play upon the plane of consciousness? Where is the music of a Rachmaninoff—while he sleeps? the reminiscent wealth of a Gladstone—while he plays with his great grandchild? the genius of an Edgar Allan Poe—while narcotic night silences the streets of Baltimore?
“Potentially down in subconsciousness,” says my glib psychologist. Eloquent answer! But where and whatissubconsciousness?
Better is it silently to gaze wide-eyed, sincere, perplexed into the omnipresentI-do-not-know, than to squirrel gyrate in the old vicious circle, or to cob-web life-deep chaos with verbiage, subterfuge, and explanations that do not explain.
Blenheim, cumulatively at least, stands for the first and fatal blow that fortune dealt to her fair haired favorite Louis le Grand. The treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastadt (1714) were an appalling humiliation to the Grand Monarch who had imperiously dictated the conditions of Aix-la-Chapelle and Nimeguen.
“There are no longer any Pyrenees”, said Louis XIV., arbiter of Europe, as his grandson, a boy of seventeen, was raised tothe throne as Philip V. of Spain. And then all Europe flew to arms and for thirteen years blood flowed and war dogs killed one another because that boy was on the throne and Louis’ witty words hadrazed the Pyrenees.
This war is known as the War of the Spanish Succession. A second Grand Alliance was formed; England, Holland, Sweden, Savoy, Austria fought against France. The famous English general, Marlborough, and Prince Eugene of Savoy, in the service of the Emperor, won the memorable battles, Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet.
The allies chose for the Spanish throne, the Archduke Charles, of Austria, the second son of the Emperor Leopold I.; but when after ten years’ fighting there was a vacancy in the imperial line and Archduke Charles suddenly became Emperor of Austria, the allies, fearing the preponderance of Austria in European affairs, withdrew their claim. Philip V. grandson of Louis XIV., was permitted to remain upon the throne of Spain.
The war ended disadvantageously for France. Philip V. was obliged to renounce his claims to the succession in France, so that France and Spain might never be under the same monarch; and thus by miracle-words the august Pyrenees were reinstated (of course they had been deeply disturbed and were, in consequence, duly grateful!); England obtained Gibraltar and the island Minorca; the Duke of Savoy was rewarded with the island Sicily, and Austria obtained Milan, Naples, Sardinia, and part of the Netherlands.
Thirteen years of bloodshed for the whim of an ambitious old man! And thousands fell on both sides, who if questioned, could not honestly have told why they were killing one another.
“‘Now tell us all about the war,And what they fought each other for?’Young Peterkin he cries,While little Wilhelmine looks upwith wonder waiting eyes.”*****“‘It was the English’, Caspar said,Who put the French to rout,But what they fought each other for—I couldn’t well make out:But things like that, you know, must beAt every famous victory.”—Southey.
“‘Now tell us all about the war,And what they fought each other for?’Young Peterkin he cries,While little Wilhelmine looks upwith wonder waiting eyes.”*****“‘It was the English’, Caspar said,Who put the French to rout,But what they fought each other for—I couldn’t well make out:But things like that, you know, must beAt every famous victory.”—Southey.
“‘Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for?’
Young Peterkin he cries,
While little Wilhelmine looks up
with wonder waiting eyes.”
*****
“‘It was the English’, Caspar said,
Who put the French to rout,
But what they fought each other for—
I couldn’t well make out:
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory.”
—Southey.
And the world is as fatuous as Southey’s old “Caspar”, and we of the awakening twentieth century are sorely perplexed “Peterkins”. Why must things like that be; and why do men speak of successful human slaughter as a “famous victory”; and why do martial music and blare of trumpet and drum and epaulettes and ribbons and medals and barbaric pomp in general—succeed in silencing the death groans and in hiding from view the bloody agonies and the demon horrors of the battlefield?
“Why ’twas a very wicked thing”Quoth little Wilhelmine.“Nay, nay, my little girl”, said he,“It was a famous victory.”“But what good came of it at last”?*****“Why, that I cannot tell”, said he,“But ’twas a famous victory.”
“Why ’twas a very wicked thing”Quoth little Wilhelmine.“Nay, nay, my little girl”, said he,“It was a famous victory.”“But what good came of it at last”?*****“Why, that I cannot tell”, said he,“But ’twas a famous victory.”
“Why ’twas a very wicked thing”
Quoth little Wilhelmine.
“Nay, nay, my little girl”, said he,
“It was a famous victory.”
“But what good came of it at last”?
*****
“Why, that I cannot tell”, said he,
“But ’twas a famous victory.”
And the voice of the questioning child is lost in answerless fatuity. When will the world hear and honestly answer?
Louis le Grand, greatest of the Bourbons, lived too long. For seventy-two years (1643-1775) Louis was king and for, at least, fifty years his power was absolute.
Louis’ long reign had as contemporary English history the disastrous Civil War and the beheading of Charles I. (1649); the Cromwellian Protectorate (1653); the Restoration of the Stuarts (1660); the reign of the Merry Monarch, the misfortunes of James II., the revolution of 1688, the battle of the Boyne, andthe final deposition and expulsion of James II.; the accession to the throne of England as King William III., of Louis’ most inveterate foe, William, Prince of Orange (1688); the death of King William III. (1702); the reign of Queen Anne, her death, and the beginning of the House of Hanover (1715).
On the continentthe ThirtyYears’ War was happily ended by the treaty of Westphalia (1648). Peter the Great ascended the throne of Russia (1682). In the great battle of Pultowa (1709) the power of Sweden was practically annihilated; the madly victorious career of Charles XII. of Sweden was stopped, and his successes together with the more solid attainments of his predecessor, Gustavus Adolphus, were rendered negative; Russia advanced over her prostrate foe to her place among the nations.
For forty years success, pleasure, honor, power, and glory beamed in full radiance upon Louis—both as man and monarch. Had he died even as late as 1702 when William, his great rival foe, died, Louis would have been, to all appearances, the most blessed of mortals and his reign the most glorious in the annals of France.
If Pompey the Great had died on his triumphal return from the Mithradatic war, his life would have been esteemed singularly happy and free from the reverses and misfortunes that are the ordinary lot of mortals. But Pompey lived to see all his blushing honors grow gray, as the admiring eyes that had once adoringly gazed upon Pompey the Great turned from him, the setting sun, to the dazzling effulgence of the rising orb, Caius Julius Cæsar. Pharsalia lay in that alienating gaze and assassination and bloody death.
The last years of Louis XIV. were burdened with many miseries. His fortitude and magnanimity under these crushing blows form, perhaps, his best claim to the titleGreat. The War of the Spanish Succession ended with the humiliating treaty ofUtrecht. Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet had, in great measure, swept away all that the successful years had, with blood and treasure, attained. But it was in his domestic relations that the aged monarch was most sorely afflicted. The Dauphin died, and a few months later his second son, the Duke of Burgundy, Fenelon’s favorite pupil, died; Adelaide of Savoy, wife of the Duke of Burgundy, soon followed her husband to the grave; their two sons yet lived, and of these, the elder, a promising youth, died suddenly and there remained only a delicate infant—the future Louis XV.
Louis bore all these sorrows with fortitude and sublime resignation. In the same stoic or heroic attitude of mind he looked forward into the gathering darkness of death. There is something truly great in the man who can suffer cataclysmic misfortunes and deny to himself the relief of a cry of complaint.
Louis died calmly at Versailles, Sept. 1, 1715. His last words were to his little grandson, a frail boy of five years; sadly the dying monarch said, “My child, you are about to become a great king. Do not imitate me either in my taste for building or in my love of war. Endeavor on the contrary to live in peace with the neighboring nations. Render to God all that you owe to him and cause his name to be honored by your subjects. Strive also to relieve the burdens of your people which I myself have been unable to do.”
And with this futile advice carrying with it his own confession of failure Louis le Grand died. The king is dead—long live the king!
Russia came into existence as a nation on the day of the victory of the Muscovite troops under Peter the First over the Swedes and allies under Charles XII. of Sweden, at Pultowa, A.D. 1709. What Russia has attained to since that date is known and startling significant; what she was previous to that date is insignificant.
As Creasy says: “Yet a century and a half (two centuries) have hardly elapsed since Russia was first recognized as a member of the drama of modern European history—, previous to the battle of Pultowa, Russia played no part. Charles V. and his great rival (Francis I.), our Elizabeth and her adversary Philip of Spain, the Guises, Sully, Richelieu, Cromwell, De Witt, William of Orange, and the other leading spirits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thought no more about the Muscovite Czar than we now think about the King of Timbuctoo.”
Sweden lost on that dread day when “fortune fled the royal Swede”, all that she had toilsomely gained thro’ the slow centuries. At one blow her fairest provinces were torn from her; and the rival Russian throne ascended to European prominence over the prostrate power of Sweden.
Peter the Great even upon the field of victory fully realized that Pultowa was for him the key to the Baltic. Even amid the carnage of the slaughter-field where ten thousand men lay dying or dead and the Vorksla river ran red, his eagle gaze beheld the Russia resultant from the Treaty of Nystadt. Exultantly he cried out that “the sun of the morning had fallen fromHeaven, and the foundation of St. Petersburg at length stood firm.”
From dread Pultowa’s day even to the hour, Russia has steadily advanced by slow, gigantic strides unto a dominating prominence among the family of nations. The cabinets of Turkey, Austria, Germany, Italy, France, and England are secretly tho’ effectively influenced by Russia.
Napoleon said that all Europe would ultimately become either Muscovite or Republican. Which shall it be? The answer as deduced from present tendencies might be—Republican: but no thoughtful observer can fail to regard attentively and apprehensively that sullen Sclavonic dominance extending insidiously and simultaneously into India, Persia, Mongolia, Turkey, the Balkans, and Central Europe.
Amalgamation, the mergence of the many into one, sameness—quiescent and content under a powerful, capable, and just administration, seem to be and ever to have been the ideal form of government. The empires of the past—Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Grecian, Roman; the Holy Roman Empire and the Socialistic commune of the future—all include as fundamental principle this solidarity. So far, indeed, it has proved a marsh-light leading to the marsh; but we dream that it will yet lead out of and beyond the muddy, bloody marsh and ultimately light up millennial realms of world-wide oneness, goodness, gladness, peace.
When Charles set out on that expedition having for its object the castigation and possible subjugation of the upstart Tartar hordes weakly held together by Peter of Russia,—allEurope believed that Charles would briefly and successfully accomplish that object.
Sweden was then a power for whose alliance and friendly interest the most powerful monarchs of Europe contended. Louis XIV. of France sought the aid of Charles in the war then waging between France and England; and Marlborough, leader of the English forces in France, went personally to the court of Charles in order to solicit that monarch’s aid or at least his neutrality in the great struggle then in progress.
Charles himself was fully confident of victory; and in his romantic plans drawn up for the future, the overthrow of Peter formed only an episode. A year, perhaps, would be required for the full accomplishment of the Russian enterprise; then he, Charles of Sweden, victor of Moscow and arbiter from the Kremlin, would hastily return to western Europe and begin preparations on a gigantic scale for his master-achievement—the dethronement of the Pope of Rome, and the demolition of the Papacy.
Desire-dream of many; achievement of none: for this magic Gibraltar elusively endures bearing its age-old scars as brightest ornamentations. Charles XII. did not, indeed, attack Rome; but did Pultowa save the Papacy? No: the missiles of the Madman of the North whether hurled in the real or only in that futile future plan, would have been equally ineffectual; the magic rock would, perhaps bear another scar bright shining today as trophy of its past struggle and victory.
The lesson of history would seem to teach mortals to expect the unexpected. At Saratoga, at Valmy, at Pultowa, in the Teutoberger Wald, at Marathon, and at Babylon—the undreamed of, the altogether unanticipated, unprepared for, both by the combatants themselves and the world-spectators—took place.
Charles XII., who had set out from Sweden with an armyof eighty-five thousand men, Swedes and allies, escaped from the shambles of Pultowa only by swimming across a river red with blood and thus reaching an alien shore weak, wounded, a fugitive, and comparatively alone. Eighty-five thousand men died for the gratification of the personal ambition of the Swedish king; and, by the irony of fate, for the ruination of their native land and the aggrandizement of Peter the First, subsequently and, perhaps, consequently Peter the Great, of Russia.
The battle of Pultowa was the first decisive victory of the Sclavonic race over the Germanic. Arnold, in hisLectures on Modern History, says that the last chapter of the history of Europe will narrate the achievements leading to Muscovite ascendency and the glories of world-dominant Panslavism.
Do nations and races attain only to a certain degree of excellence and then deteriorate? And is that the plan fatefully fixed for the planet Earth? Mycenæ, Troy, Philæ, Babylon, Athens make answer in the affirmative.
A poem,Christ in the Universe, by Alice Meynell comes to mind. In a few master touches the writer describes God’s way of revealing Himself to us mortals: