Author signature
Galileo-Galilei.
The great Tuscan astronomer is best known as the first telescopic observer, the fortunate discoverer of the Medicean stars (so Jupiter's satellites were first named); and what discovery more fitted to immortalize its author than one which revealed new worlds and thus gave additional force to the lesson, that the universe, of which we form so small a part, was not created only for our use or pleasure? Those, however, who consider Galileo only as a fortunate observer, form a very inadequate estimate of one of the most meritorious and successful of those great men who have bestowed their time for the advantage of mankind in tracing out the hidden things of nature. Galileo-Galilei was born at Pisa, February 15, 1564. In childhood he displayed considerable mechanical ingenuity, with a decided taste for the accomplishments of music and painting. His father formed a just estimate of his talents, and at some inconvenience entered him, when nineteen years old, at the university of his native town, intending that he should pursue the medical profession. Galileo was then entirely ignorant of mathematics; and he was led to the study of geometry by a desire thoroughly to understand the principles of his favorite arts. This new pursuit proved so congenial to his taste, that from thenceforward his medical books were entirely neglected. The elder Galilei, a man of liberal acquirements and enlarged mind, did not require the devotion of his son's life to a distasteful pursuit. Fortunately the young man's talents attracted notice, and in 1589 he was appointed mathematical lecturer in the University of Pisa. There is reason to believe that, at an early period of his studentship, he embraced, upon inquiry and conviction, the doctrines of Copernicus, of which through life he was an ardent supporter.
Galileo and his colleagues did not long remain on good terms. The latter were content with the superstructure whichà priorireasoners had raised upon Aristotle, and were by no means desirous of the trouble of learning more. Galileo chose to investigate physical truths for himself; he engaged in experiments to determine the truth of some of Aristotle's positions, and when he found him in the wrong, he said so, and so taught his pupils. This made the "paper philosophers," as he calls them, very angry. He repeated his experiments in theirpresence, but they set aside the evidence of their senses and quoted Aristotle as much as before. The enmity arising from these disputes rendered his situation so unpleasant, that in 1592, at the invitation of the Venetian commonwealth, he gladly accepted the professorship of mathematics at Padua. The period of his appointment being only six years, he was re-elected in 1598, and again in 1606, each time with an increase of salary; a strong proof of the esteem in which he was held, even before those astronomical discoveries which have immortalized his name. His lectures at this period were so fully attended that he was sometimes obliged to adjourn them to the open air. In 1609 he received an invitation to return to his original situation at Pisa. This produced a letter, still extant, from which we quote a catalogue of the undertakings on which he was already employed. "The works which I have to finish are principally two books on the 'System or Structure of the Universe,' an immense work, full of philosophy, astronomy, and geometry; three books on 'Local Motion,' a science entirely new, no one, either ancient or modern, having discovered any of the very many admirable accidents which I demonstrate in natural and violent motions, so that I may, with very great reason, call it a new science, and invented by me from its very first principles; three books of mechanics, two on the demonstration of principles and one of problems; and although others have treated this same matter, yet all that has been hitherto written, neither in quantity nor otherwise, is the quarter of what I am writing on it. I have also different treatises on natural subjects—on Sound and Speech, on Light and Colors, on the Tides, on the Composition of Continuous Quantity, on the Motions of Animals, and others besides. I have also an idea of writing some books relating to the military art, giving not only a model of a soldier, but teaching with very exact rules everything which it is his duty to know, that depends upon mathematics, as the knowledge of castrametation, drawing up of battalions, fortification, assaults, planning, surveying, the knowledge of artillery, the use of instruments, etc." Out of this comprehensive list, the treatises on the universe, on motion and mechanics, on tides, on fortification, or other works upon the same subjects, have been made known to the world. Many, however, of Galileo's manuscripts, through fear of the Inquisition, were destroyed, or concealed and lost, after the author's death.
In the same year, 1609, Galileo heard the report that a spectacle-maker of Middleburg, in Holland, had made an instrument by which distant objects appeared nearer. He tasked his ingenuity to discover the construction, and soon succeeded in manufacturing a telescope. His telescope, however, seems to have been made on a different construction from that of the Dutch optician. It consisted of a convex and concave glass, distant from each other by the difference of their focal lengths, like a modern opera-glass; while there is reason to believe that the other was made up of two convex lenses, distant by the sum of their focal lengths, the common construction of the astronomical telescope. Galileo's attention naturally was first turned to the moon. He discovered that her surface, instead of being smooth and perfectly spherical, was rough with mountains andapparently varied like the earth, by land and water. He next applied to Jupiter, and was struck by the appearance of three small stars, almost in a straight line and close to him. At first he did not suspect the nature of these bodies; but careful observation soon convinced him that these three, together with a fourth, which was at first invisible, were in reality four moons revolving round their primary planet. These he named the Medicean stars. They have long ceased to be known by that name; but so highly prized was the distinction thus conferred upon the ducal house of Florence, that Galileo received an intimation that he would "do a thing just and proper in itself, and at the same time render himself and his family rich and powerful forever," if he "named the next star which he should discover after the name of the great star of France, as well as the most brilliant of all the earth," Henry IV. These discoveries were made known in 1610, in a work entitled "Nuncius Sidereus," the Newsman of the Stars; in which Galileo further announced that he had seen many stars invisible to the naked eye, and ascertained that the nebulæ scattered through the heavens consist of assemblages of innumerable small stars. The ignorant and unprejudiced were struck with admiration; indeed, curiosity had been raised so high before the publication of this book, as materially to interfere with the convenience of those who possessed telescopes. Galileo was employed a month in exhibiting his own to the principal persons in Venice; and our unfortunate astronomer was surrounded by a crowd who kept him in durance for several hours, while they passed his glass from one to another. He left Venice the next morning, to pursue his inquiries in some less inquisitive place. But the great bulk of the philosophers of the day were far from joining in the general feeling. They raised an outcry against the impudent fictions of Galileo, and one, a professor of Padua, refused repeatedly to look through the telescope, lest he should be compelled to admit that which he had pre-determined to deny.
It was not long before Galileo had new and equally important matter to announce. He observed a remarkable appearance in Saturn, as if it were composed of three stars touching each other; his telescope was not sufficiently powerful to resolve them into Saturn and his ring. Within a month he ascertained that Venus exhibits phases like those of the moon—a discovery of great importance in confirming the Copernican system. The same phenomenon he afterward detected in Mars. We close the list with the discovery of the revolution of the sun round his axis, in the space of about a lunar month, derived from careful observation of the spots on his surface.
About this time (1610-1611) Galileo took up his abode in Tuscany, upon the invitation of the grand duke, who offered to him his original situation at Pisa, with a liberal salary, exemption from the necessity of residence, and complete leisure to pursue his studies. In 1612 he published a discourse on "Floating Bodies," in which he investigates the theory of buoyancy, and refutes, by a series of beautiful and conclusive experiments, the opinion that the floating or sinking of bodies depends on their shape.
Neither Copernicus nor his immediate followers suffered inconvenience or restrainton account of their astronomical doctrines; nor had Galileo, until this period of his life, incurred ecclesiastical censure for anything which he had said or written. But the Inquisition now took up the matter as heretical and contrary to the express words of Scripture; and in 1616, Copernicus's work, "De Revolutionibus," Kepler's "Epitome," and some of Galileo's own letters, were placed on the list of prohibited books; and he himself, being then in Rome, received formal notice not to teach that the earth revolves round the sun. He returned to Florence full of indignation; and considering his hasty temper, love of truth, and full belief of the condemned theory, it is rather wonderful that he kept silence so long, than that he incurred at last the censures of the hierarchy. He did, however, restrain himself from any open advocacy of the heretical doctrines, even in composing his great work, the "Dialogue on the Ptolemaic and Copernican Systems." This was completed in 1630, but not printed till 1632, under license from officers of the church, both at Rome and Florence. It is a dialogue between Simplicio, an Aristotelian, Salviati, who represents the author, and Sagredo, a half convert to Salviati's opinions. It professes "indeterminately to propose the philosophical arguments, as well on one side as on the other;" but the neutrality is but ill kept up, and was probably assumed, not with any hope that the court of Rome would be blinded as to the real tendency of the book, but merely that it would accept this nominal submission as a sufficient homage to its authority. If this were so, the author was disappointed; the Inquisition took cognizance of the matter, and summoned him to Rome to undergo a personal examination. Age and infirmity were in vain pleaded as excuses; still, through the urgent and indignant remonstrances of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he was treated with a consideration rarely shown by that stern tribunal. He was allowed to remain at the Florentine ambassador's palace, with the exception of a short period, from his arrival in February, until the passing of sentence, June 21, 1633. He was then condemned, in the presence of the Inquisitors, to curse and abjure the "false doctrines," which his life had been spent in proving, to be confined in the prison of the Holy Office during pleasure, and to recite the seven penitential psalms once a week during three years. The sentence and the abjuration are given at full length in the "Life of Galileo," in the "Library of Useful Knowledge." "It is said," continues the biographer, "that Galileo, as he rose from his knees, stamped on the ground, and whispered to one of his friends, 'e pur si muove,' it does move though."
Galileo before the Inquisition.
Galileo before the Inquisition.
Galileo's imprisonment was not long or rigorous, for after four days he was reconducted to the Florentine ambassador's palace; but he was still kept under strict surveillance. In July he was sent to Sienna, where he remained five months in strict seclusion. He obtained permission in December to return to his villa at Arcetri, near Florence: but there, as at Sienna, he was confined to his own premises, and strictly forbidden to receive his friends. It is painful to contemplate the variety of evils which overcast the evening of this great man's life. In addition to a distressing chronic complaint, contracted in youth, he was now suffering under a painful infirmity which by some is said to have been produced by torture,applied in the prisons of the Inquisition to extort a recantation. But the arguments brought forward to show that the Inquisitors did resort to this extremity do not amount to anything like direct proof. In April, 1634, Galileo's afflictions were increased by the death of a favorite, intelligent, and attached daughter. He consoled his solitude, and lightened the hours of sickness, by continuing the observations which he was now forbidden to publish to the world; and the last of his long train of discoveries was the phenomenon known by the name of the moon's libration. In the course of 1636-37 he lost successively the sight of both his eyes. He mentions this calamity in a tone of pious submission, mingled with a not unpleasing pride. "Alas, your dear friend and servant Galileo has become totally and irreparably blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which with wonderful observations I had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of by-gone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into the narrow space which I myself fill in it. So it pleases God: it shall therefore please me also." In 1638 he obtained leave to visit Florence, still under the same restrictions as to society; but at the end of a few months he was remanded to Arcetri, which he never again quitted. From that time, however, the strictness of his confinement was relaxed, and he was allowed to receive the friends who crowded round him, as well as the many distinguished foreigners who eagerly visited him. Among these we must not forget Milton, whose poems contain several allusions to the celestial wonders observed and published by the Tuscan astronomer. Though blind and nearly deaf, Galileo retained to the last his intellectual powers; and his friend and pupil, the celebrated Torricelli, was employed in arranging his thoughts on the nature of percussion, when he was attacked by his last illness. He died January 8, 1642, aged seventy-eight.
It was disputed whether, as a prisoner of the Inquisition, Galileo had a right to burial in consecrated ground. The point was conceded; but Pope Urban VIII. himself interfered to prevent the erection of a monument to him in the church of Santa Croce, in Florence, for which a large sum had been subscribed. A splendid monument now covers the spot in which his remains repose with those of his friend and pupil, the eminent mathematician Viviani.
For an account of Galileo's application of the pendulum to the mensuration of time; his invention of the thermometer, though in an inaccurate and inconvenient form; his methods of discovering the longitude, and a variety of other points well worth attention, we must refer to the Life of Galileo already quoted. The numerous extracts from Galileo's works convey a lively notion of the author's character, and are distinguished by a peculiar tone of quaint humor. In conclusion, we quote the estimate of Galileo's character, from the same masterly memoir. "The numberless inventions of his acute industry; the use of the telescope, and the brilliant discoveries to which it led; the patient investigation of the laws of weight and motion, must all be looked upon as forming but a part of his real merits, as merely particular demonstrations of the spirit in which he everywhere withstood the despotism of ignorance, and appealed boldly from traditional opinions to the judgment of reason and common sense. He claimedand bequeathed to us the right of exercising our faculties in examining the beautiful creation which surrounds us. Idolized by his friends, he deserved their affection by numberless acts of kindness; by his good humor, his affability, and by the benevolent generosity with which he devoted himself, and a great part of his limited income, to advance their talents and fortunes. If an intense desire of being useful is everywhere worthy of honor; if its value is immeasurably increased when united to genius of the highest order; if we feel for one, who, notwithstanding such titles to regard, is harassed by cruel persecution, then none deserve our sympathy, our admiration, and our gratitude, more than Galileo."[Back to Contents]
Richelieu.
Armand Jean Du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, the future cardinal, was the third son of François Du Plessis, Grand Provost of the French Court, and was born on September 5, 1585, at Paris, say his biographers, Aubery and Leclerc; while tradition claims this honor for the family château in Poitou. He received the elements of education at home from the Prior of St. Florent, but soon quitted the paternal mansion, first for the College of Navarre, subsequently for that of Lisieux. From thence he removed to a military academy, being intended for the profession of arms. But on his brother, who was Bishop of Luçon, resolving to quit the world for the cloister, young Armand was advised to abandon the sword for the gown, in order that he might succeed to his brother's bishopric.
He adopted the advice, entered with zeal into the study of theology, and soon qualified himself to pass creditably through the exercises necessary to obtain the degree of doctor in theology. He already wore the insignia of his bishopric, but the Pope's sanction was still wanting, and was withheld on account of the extreme youth of the expectant. Resolved to overcome this difficulty, he set off to Rome, addressed the pontiff in a Latin oration, and gave such proofs of talent and acquirements above his age, that he was consecrated at Rome on the Easter of 1607, being as yet but twenty-two years of age.
This position attained, Richelieu endeavored to make the utmost advantage of it. He acquired the good-will of his diocese by rigid attention to the affairsthat fell under his jurisdiction; while in frequent visits to the capital, he sought to acquire reputation by preaching. In the Estates General of 1614, he was chosen deputy by his diocese, and was afterward selected by the clergy of the States to present theircahieror vote of grievances to the monarch. It was an opportunity not to be thrown away by the ambition of Richelieu, who instantly put himself forward as the champion of the queen-mother against the cabal of the high noblesse. He at the same time pointed out where she might find auxiliaries, by complaining that ecclesiastics had no longer a place in the public administration, and were thus degraded from their ancient and legitimate share of influence. Richelieu was rewarded with the place of almoner to the queen; and he was soon admitted to her confidence as well as to that of her favorite, the Maréchal D'Ancre.
In 1616 he was appointed secretary of state; but aware by what slender tenure the office was held, he refused to give up his bishopric. This excited not only the animadversions of the public, but the anger of the favorite. Richelieu offered to give up his secretaryship, but the queen could not dispense with his talents. The assassination of the favorite, however, soon overthrew the influence of the queen herself. Still Richelieu remained attached to her, and followed her to Blois; but the triumphant party, dreading his talents for intrigue, ordered him to quit the queen and repair to one of his priories in Anjou. He was subsequently commanded to retire to his bishopric, and at last exiled to Avignon. Here he sought to avert suspicion by affecting to devote himself once more to theological pursuits. During this period he published one or two polemical tracts, the mediocrity of which proves either that his genius lay not in this path, or, as is probable, that his interest and thoughts were elsewhere.
The escape of the queen-mother from her place of confinement, excited the fears of her enemies and the hopes of Richelieu. He wrote instantly to court, to proffer his services toward bringing about an accommodation. In the difficulty of the moment, the king and his favorite accepted the offer. Richelieu was released from exile, and allowed to join the queen at Angoulême, where he certainly labored to bring about a reconciliation. There were long and bitter struggles, but an agreement was finally concluded, and it was found that Richelieu, the negotiator, had himself reaped all the benefits. He received the cardinal's hat from the king's hand at Lyons, toward the close of the year 1622.
Not content with this advancement of her counsellor, Mary de Medici continued to press the king to admit Richelieu to his cabinet. Louis long resisted her solicitations, such was his instinctive dread of the man destined to rule him. Nor was it until 1624, after the lapse of sixteen months, and when embarrassed with difficult state questions, which no one then in office was capable of managing, that the royal will was declared admitting Richelieu to the council. Even this grace was accompanied by the drawback that the cardinal was allowed to give merely his opinion, not his vote.
Once, however, seated at the council table, the colleagues of the cardinal shrunk before him into ciphers. He boldly avowed his determination to adoptthe policy and resume the scheme of Henry IV., for the humiliation of the House of Austria. His anchor of safety was in the confidence reposed in him by Louis XIII. This prince, although of most feeble will, was not without the just pride of a monarch; he could not but perceive that his former ministers or favorites were but the instruments or slaves of the noblesse, who consulted but their own interests, and provided but for the difficulties of the moment. Richelieu, on the contrary, though eager for power, sought it as an instrument to great ends, to the consolidation of the monarchy, and to its ascendancy in Europe. He was in the habit of unfolding these high views to Louis, who, though himself incapable of putting them into effect, nevertheless had the spirit to admire and approve them. Richelieu proposed to render his reign illustrious abroad, and at home to convert the chief of a turbulent aristocracy into a real monarch. It forms indeed the noblest part of this great statesman's character, that he won upon the royal mind, not by vulgar flattery, but by exciting within it a love of glory and of greatness to which, at the same time, he pointed the way.
Accordingly, through all the plots formed against him, Louis XIII. remained firmly attached to Richelieu, sacrificing to this minister's pre-eminence his nobility, his brother Gaston, Duke of Orleans, his queen, and finally the queen-mother herself, when she too became jealous of the man whom she had raised.
If Richelieu thus imprudently indulged his passion or his pique, he redeemed the error by activity and exertion unusual to the age. He at once formed the project of attacking the Huguenots in their chief stronghold of La Rochelle. Buckingham, the English minister, could not fail to attempt the relief of this sea-port, and the cardinal anticipated the triumph of personally defeating a rival. He accordingly himself proceeded to preside over the operations of the siege. To render the blockade effectual, it was requisite to stop up the port. The military officers whom he employed could suggest no means of doing this. Richelieu took counsel of his classic reading, and having learned from Quintus Curtius how Alexander the Great reduced Tyre, by carrying out a mole against it through the sea, he was encouraged to undertake a similar work. The great mound was accordingly commenced, and well-nigh finished, when a storm arose and destroyed it in a single night. But Richelieu was only rendered more obstinate: he recommenced the mole, and was seen with the volume of Alexander's History in his hand, encouraging the workmen and overruling the objections of the tacticians of the army. The second attempt succeeded, the harbor was blocked up, and the promised aid of England rendered fruitless. The cardinal triumphed, for La Rochelle surrendered. In his treatment of the vanquished, Richelieu showed a moderation seldom observable in his conduct. He was lenient, and even tolerant, toward the Huguenots, content with having humbled the pride of his rival, Buckingham.
La Rochelle was no sooner taken, and Richelieu rewarded by the title of prime minister than he resumed those projects of humbling the House of Austria, in which he had previously been interrupted. A quarrel about the succession to Mantua afforded him a pretext to interfere; and he did so, after his fashion,not by mere negotiations, but by an army. This expedition proved a source of quarrel between him and the queen-mother, Mary de Medici, who hitherto had been his firm and efficient friend.
The voice of the conqueror of La Rochelle triumphed in council, and his project in the field. The French were victorious in Italy, and the minister equally so over the mind of the monarch.
But Mary de Medici could not forgive, and she now openly showed her hatred of Richelieu, and exerted herself to the utmost to injure him with the king. Though daily defeating her intrigues, the cardinal dreaded her perseverance, and resolved to drag the king with him to another Italian campaign. Louis obeyed, and the court set out for the south, the queen-mother herself accompanying it. Richelieu, however, did not tarry for the slow motions of the monarch. He flew to the army, took upon him the command, and displayed all the abilities of a great general in out-manœuvring and worsting the generals and armies of Savoy. In the meantime Louis fell dangerously ill at Lyons. His mother, an affectionate attendant on his sick-couch, resumed her former empire over him. At one moment his imminent death seemed to threaten the cardinal with ruin. Louis recovered, however, and his first act was to compel a reconciliation, in form at least, between the cardinal and the queen-mother.
The king's illness, although not so immediately fatal to Richelieu as his enemies had hoped, was still attended with serious consequences to him. The French army met with ill success through the treachery of the general, Marillac, who was secretly attached to the queen's party, and the failure was attributed to Richelieu.
Mary de Medici renewed her solicitations to her son, that he would dismiss his minister. Louis, it appears, made a promise to that effect; a reluctant promise, given to get rid of her importunity. Mary calculated too securely upon his keeping it; she broke forth in bitter contumely against Richelieu; deprived him of his superintendence over her household, and treated Madame de Combalet, the cardinal's niece, who had sunk on her knees to entreat her to moderate her anger almost with insult. The king was present, and seemed to sanction her violence so that Richelieu withdrew to make his preparations for exile. Louis, dissatisfied and irresolute, retired to Versailles; while Mary remained triumphant at the Luxembourg, receiving the congratulations of her party. Richelieu, in the meantime, ere taking his departure, repaired to Versailles, and, once there, resumed the ascendant over the monarch. The tidings of this was a thunder-stroke to Mary and her party, who became instantly the victims of the cardinal's revenge. Marillac was beheaded, and Mary de Medici, herself at length completely vanquished by her rival, was driven out of France to spend the rest of her days in exile.
The trial of Marillac had roused the spirit and indignation even of those nobles who had previously respected, and bowed to, the minister of the royal choice. Richelieu not only threatened their order with the scaffold, but his measures of administration were directed to deprive them of their ancient privileges,and means of wealth and domination. One of these was the right of governors of provinces to raise the revenue within their jurisdiction, and to employ or divert no small portion of it to their use. Richelieu, to remedy this, transferred the office of collecting the revenue to new officers, called theElect. He tried this in Languedoc, then governed by the Duc de Montmorenci, a noble of the first rank, whose example, consequently, would have weight, and who had always proved himself obedient and loyal. Moved, however, by his private wrongs, as well as that of his order, he now joined the party of the nobles and the king's brother, Gaston, Duke of Orleans. That weak prince, after forming an alliance with the Duke of Lorraine, had raised an army. Richelieu lost not a moment in despatching a force which reduced Lorraine, and humbled its hitherto independent duke almost to the rank of a subject. Gaston then marched his army to Languedoc and joined Montmorenci. The Maréchal de Brezé, Richelieu's brother-in-law, led the loyal troops against them, defeated Gaston at Castelnaudari, and took Montmorenci prisoner. This noble had been the friend and supporter of Richelieu, who even called him his son; yet the cardinal's cruel policy determined that he should die. There was difficulty in proving before the judges that he had actually borne arms against the king. "The smoke and dust," said St. Reuil, the witness, "rendered it impossible to recognize any combatant distinctly. But when I saw one advance alone, and cut his way through five ranks of gens-d'armes, I knew that it must be Montmorenci."
This gallant descendant of five constables of France perished on the scaffold at Toulouse. Richelieu deemed the example necessary to strike terror into the nobility. And he immediately took advantage of that terror, by removing all the governors of provinces, and replacing them throughout with officers personally attached to his interests.
Having thus made, as it were, a clear stage for the fulfilment of his great political schemes, Richelieu turned his exertions to his original plan of humbling the House of Austria, and extending the territories of France at its expense. He formed an alliance with the great Gustavus Adolphus, who then victoriously supported the cause of religious liberty in Germany. Richelieu drew more advantage from the death than from the victories of his ally; since, as the price of his renewing his alliance with the Swedes, he acquired the possession of Philipsburg, and opened the way toward completing that darling project of France and every French statesman, the acquisition of the Rhine as a frontier.
The French having manifested their design to get possession of Trèves, the Spaniards anticipated them; and open war ensued betwixt the two monarchies. Richelieu in his wars was one of those scientific combatants who seek to weary out an enemy, and who husband their strength in order not to crush at once, but to ruin in the end. Such, at least, were the tactics by which he came triumphant out of the struggle with Spain. He made no conquests at first, gained no striking victories; but he compensated for his apparent want of success by perseverance, by taking advantage of defeat to improve the army, and by laboring to transfer to the crown the financial and other resources which had been previouslyabsorbed by the aristocracy. Thus the war, though little brilliant at first, produced at last these very important results. Arras in the north, Turin in the south, Alsace in the east, fell into the hands of the French; Roussillon was annexed to the monarchy; and Catalonia revolted from Spain. Richelieu might boast that he had achieved the great purposes of Henry IV., not so gloriously indeed as that heroic prince might have done, but no less effectually. This was effected not so much by arms as by administration. The foundation was laid for that martial pre-eminence which Louis XIV. long enjoyed; and which he might have retained, had the virtue of moderation been known to him.
It was not without incurring great personal perils, with proportionate address and good fortune, that Cardinal Richelieu arrived at such great results. Constant plots were formed against him, the most remarkable of which was that of Cinq-Mars, a young nobleman selected to be the king's favorite, on account of his presumed frivolity. But he was capable of deep thoughts and passions; and wearied by the solitude in which the monarch lived, and to which he was reduced by the minister's monopoly of all power, he dared to plot the cardinal's overthrow. This bold attempt was sanctioned by the king himself, who at intervals complained of the yoke put upon him.
Great interests were at stake, for Richelieu, reckoning upon the monarch's weak health, meditated procuring the regency for himself. The Queen, Anne of Austria, aware of this intention, approved of the project of Cinq-Mars, which, of course, implied the assassination of the cardinal. No other mode of defying his power and talent could have been contemplated. But Richelieu was on the watch. The court was then in the south of France, engaged in the conquest of Roussillon, a situation favorable for the relation of the conspirators with Spain. The minister surprised one of the emissaries, had the fortune to seize a treaty concluded between them and the enemies of France; and with this flagrant proof of their treason, he repaired to Louis, and forced from him an order for their arrest. It was tantamount to their condemnation. Cinq-Mars and his friends perished on the scaffold; Anne of Austria was again humbled; and every enemy of the cardinal shrunk in awe and submission before his ascendancy. Among them was the king himself, whom Richelieu looked upon as an equal in dignity, an inferior in mind and in power. The guards of the cardinal were as numerous as the monarch's, and independent of any authority save that of their immediate master. A treaty was even drawn up between king and minister, as between two potentates. But the power and the pride of Richelieu reached at once their height and their termination. A mortal illness seized him in the latter days of 1642, a few months after the execution of Cinq-Mars. No abatement of his pride marked his last moments. He summoned the monarch like a servant to his couch, instructed him what policy to follow and appointed the minister who was to be his own successor.
Such was the career of this supereminent statesman, who, although in the position of Damocles all his life, with the sword of the assassin suspended over his head, surrounded with enemies, and with insecure and treacherous supporteven from the monarch whom he served, still not only maintained his own station, but possessed time and zeal to frame and execute gigantic projects for the advancement of his country and of his age. It makes no small part of Henry IV.'s glory that he conceived a plan for diminishing the power of the House of Austria. Richelieu, without either the security or the advantages of the king and the warrior, achieved it. Not only this, but he dared to enter upon the war at the very same time when he was humbling that aristocracy which had hitherto composed the martial force of the country.
The effects of his domestic policy were indeed more durable than those of what he most prided himself upon, his foreign policy. He it was, in fact, who founded the French monarchy, such as it existed until near the end of the eighteenth century—a grand, indeed, rather than a happy result. He was a man of penetrating and commanding intellect, who visibly influenced the fortunes of Europe to an extent which few princes or ministers have equalled. Unscrupulous in his purposes, he was no less so in the means by which he effected them. But so long as men are honored, not for their moral excellences, but for the great things which they have done for themselves, or their country, the name of Richelieu will be recollected with respect, as that of one of the most successful statesmen that ever lived.
As a patron of letters and of the arts, Richelieu has acquired a reputation almost rivalling that of his statesmanship. His first and earliest success in life had been as a scholar supporting his theses; and, as it is continually observed that great men form very erroneous judgments of their own excellences, he ever prided himself especially in his powers as a penman.[Back to Contents]
A Concert At Richelieu's Palace.
A Concert At Richelieu's Palace.
Seal of Massachusetts.
Greatness is not allied to rank alone, nor is heroism to blood. The noblest of the Pilgrims of Plymouth was sprung from the people. For generations the little farming village of Austerfield, a royal manor of the West Riding of Yorkshire close to the Nottingham line, had known the family of Bradfurth or Bradford as a race of tenant-yeomen who, besides tilling the lands of the Mortons, possessed also a freehold of their own. But no man or woman of the Bradford name had given it prominence or worth until, on March 19, 1589, William Bradford was born in that low-roofed farm-house on the great plain of York. Puritan writers speak of Austerfield as a "profane and irreligious" village in which wasto be found "no bible and a careless priest." Whatever the facts, the environments, undoubtedly, were not such as would suggest the making of a leader or the development of a religious nature. But we are assured that, before the age of twelve, the boy William Bradford, brought up in that Austerfield farm-house "in the innocent trade of husbandry," displayed alike a thoughtful temperament and "a pious mind." At sixteen he fell, in some unknown way, under the influence of one of the much-maligned Puritan preachers of Scrooby, a Nottinghamshire village but a few miles from Austerfield. As a result he gave up his farming-life, left his Austerfield home, and in the face of bitter opposition, distrust, censure, and persecution, joined the Puritan church and settlement at Scrooby, established there by William Brewster, the postmaster of Scrooby and a prominent leader in the new sect of dissenters from the English church, known first as separatists and, later, because of their frequent changes and wanderings, as Pilgrims.
From his earliest association with this feeble and despised communion, William Bradford was zealous in his readiness to stand boldly for his faith, whatever the risk involved. He was one of the first to appreciate the real meaning of the struggle; he saw that dissent implied not alone a religious opposition, but a political defiance as well, and that its followers, braving the will of England's royal bigot, James Stuart, and denying his assumption of the divine right of kings, would ere long do open battle in the cause of the people against despotism, and stand for that deeper question of liberty which the Pilgrims of Scrooby and Leyden first fully grasped.
Bradford was one of that venturesome company which, in 1607, embarking at Boston, in Lincolnshire, sought to flee from English tyranny, and find a home in Holland. They were betrayed, turned back, and imprisoned. The next year this young eighteen-year old enthusiast escaped from his jailers, and made his way to Amsterdam. Here he apprenticed himself to a silk-weaver, and became an efficient member of the association of English exiles in Holland.
Upon his coming of age in 1610, he sold off the Austerfield lands that had descended to him upon the death of his father, and entered upon an unsuccessful business investment in Amsterdam. This failing, he joined himself to the Pilgrim colony that Brewster and Robinson, the Pilgrim preachers, had established at Leyden.
When those far-seeing reformers awoke to the fact that an English-speaking community in Holland must, in time, become Dutch in manners, speech, and life, and looked across the western ocean with the dream of founding a religious republic of English-speaking folk in the New World, Bradford was one of the most earnest in adopting and carrying out their views, and was one of that famous company which, on September 16, 1620, sailed from Plymouth in England, to cast anchor, three months later, in the harbor of the new Plymouth in New England.
It has been said that if William Brewster was the Aaron of the Plymouth enterprise, William Bradford was its Moses. Certainly he was, almost from its inception, its leader and deliverer. It was his brain that conceived and his handthat executed that memorable compact which the forty-one earnest men signed in the cabin of the Mayflower, as she rode at anchor in Provincetown harbor—"the first instrument of civil government ever subscribed as the act of the whole people." It was into his hands, when Carver, the first governor, died of sunstroke in the spring of 1621, that the colonists gave the guidance of their affairs, electing him governor of the Plymouth colony on April 21, 1621—"the first American citizen of English race who bore rule by the free choice of his brethren." More than this, we may look upon William Bradford, so says Mr. Doyle, the English historian of the Puritan colonies, "as heading that bead-roll of worthies that, from his day, America has never wanted—men who, with no early training in political life, and lacking much that the Old World has deemed needful in her rulers, have yet, by inborn strength of mind and lofty public spirit, shown themselves in all things worthy of high office."
Certainly William Bradford showed himself worthy the trust and confidence of his fellows. For nearly forty years he filled the office of governor of the Plymouth colony. His hand guided it through the perils of its early years, his brain planned that systematic development of its slender resources that made it the one successful episode in America's beginnings. His treatment of the Indians was always firm but friendly; his dealings with the grasping "London adventurers," whose greed would have seriously crippled the colony had it not been for his restraining hand, were courteous but convincing; it was Bradford who led the colony from the unsatisfactory communism of its first years to the system of individual property that, from 1623, held sway, and turned an uncertain venture into a career of industrial prosperity. Always tolerant, never injudicious, and alike pure-minded, liberty-loving, courageous, and wise, no hand could have better guided than did his, or have more systematically shaped, the destinies of the infant State. The testimony of contemporaries and the judgment of historians unite in crediting to William Bradford that rare combination of intelligence and industry, of judicial and executive ability, by which a small and obscure band of persecuted fugitives laid in an unexplored wilderness the foundations of a great and prosperous commonwealth.
His methods were as simple as was his own noble nature. Each advance was the outgrowth of his own observation and the colony's necessities, and while the corner-stone of the community was religion, he stood himself for religious liberty, and never permitted the zeal of his associates to degenerate into intolerance and persecution. While other of the early American colonies were narrow, bigoted, and vindictive, it is to the credit of the Pilgrim colony of Plymouth that the cargo of the Mayflower contained no seeds of persecution, and throughout the long administration of Governor William Bradford the colony he guided had, in his time at least, a clear comprehension of the meaning of religious and political freedom, and did not descend into the harrying of so-called heretics, the scourging of Quakers, nor the burning of witches. Whatever intolerance of this sort may, at a later day, have stained the records of the colony, was of foreign growth and contrary to the heritage of charity left by William Bradford.
A Puritan Christmas.
A Puritan Christmas.
This willingness to serve, to spend and be spent, is apparent throughout the whole story of Bradford's life. It displayed itself in the boyish spirit of renunciation that led him to join the Scrooby society, and held him loyal to his association even through imprisonment and persecution, through exile, flight, and emigration. Again and again through his long service as governor of the Plymouth colony, he wished to lay aside the burden, but always yielded to the wishes of his comrades. Elected by the suffrages of his associates, he himself restricted his own authority by the formation, in 1624, of the governor's council of five members, increased in 1633 to seven, in which the only privilege held by the governor was a double vote. In 1624 he with seven of his associates assumed, what was for that day and the uncertainties involved, a great risk, and bought out the "London Adventurers" who had so feebly backed the colonists. In 1629 he obtained a patent that conferred upon himself, his associates, and assigns the title to the whole Plymouth tract, and in 1640 he conveyed this valuable title to the colony, reserving only his personal proportion as a settler.
It was this unselfishness of disposition, this loyalty to duty—accepting honors as trusts and burdens as obligations—this union of justice and faith that made William Bradford great and kept him noble.
"With malice toward none, with charity for all," even as had that great American of two centuries later, Bradford could keep the even tenor of his way in the midst of obstacles and discouragements. Unmoved by the ingratitude of Weston, the insolence of Morton, the treachery of Oldham and Lyford, and the selfishness of Allerton; calm amid the controversies brought about by the arrogance of the greater colony of Massachusetts Bay, the encroachments of the French in Maine, and of the Dutch on the Connecticut, he could yet, when occasion demanded, display that stern justice that meted out the extreme penalty of the law to offenders, and condemned to death Billington, the first murderer in the colony, and Peach, the assassin of a defenceless Indian.
William Bradford is one of the most interesting figures in the history of New England. He is the noblest of the Puritans—a type of their best element, an exponent of their highest effort, a pioneer in their struggle for liberty for justice, and for law. The boy who could brave opposition and contumely for conscience's sake, could also be of gentlest manners and serenest mood when called to lead and govern those who put their trust in him; the same native courage and independence that held him loyal to his convictions in his early years made him, when responsibilities multiplied and burdens were laid upon him, the very staff and hope of the Pilgrim colony of Plymouth.
He combined with executive ability other notable gifts. Though bred to the soil in an age when the farmer was a drudge and had no ambition beyond his crops, he yet, when opportunity offered, applied himself to study with such good results that he was learned in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and conversed in French and Dutch. He was acquainted with the history and philosophy of his day, was deeply versed in theology, and even attempted poetry. He wrote much and well. His most important production was his "History of the PlymouthPlantations"—a detailed chronicle of the history of the Pilgrims from 1608 to 1646. Carried away from the old South Church by British soldiers, it was completely lost, until almost providentially discovered, though partially destroyed, in the shop of a Halifax grocer, and to-day it tells us almost all that we know of the Plymouth settlers, from the day when they left Lincolnshire till they became a prosperous commonwealth in America.
Of this important contribution to American history, Mr. Doyle, the English historian, says: "Gratitude is quickened when we compare the simple, vigorous, and picturesque chronicle set before us by Bradford, with the tedious and pedantic writings from which so much of the later history of New England has to be extracted.... His work is in the true sense scholarly. The language is like the language of Bunyan, that of a man who trained himself not merely to speak but to think in the words of Scripture. Every expression is simple and effective, never far-fetched, never mean nor common. The substance is worthy of the style. Faults no doubt there are ... yet with all its defects Bradford's writings still remain the worthy first-fruits of Puritan literature in its new home. They are the work of a wise and good man, who tells with a right understanding the great things that he and his brethren have done."
The wise governor was loyal to his colony to the last. He resisted the ambition to take larger holdings of land and become great estate owners that influenced Standish and Brewster, Alden and Winslow, and other of his Mayflower companions, drawing them away from Plymouth to the broader acres at Duxbury and Scituate and Marshfield. The governor deplored this withdrawal as a desertion on the part of his old friends, and a menace to the welfare of the colony. He lived on in Plymouth, where his home on Leyden Street, still standing, gradually outgrew its early primitive dimensions as became the house of the governor of Plymouth. Here he died on May 9, 1657, "lamented by all the colonists of New England as a common blessing and father to them all," and the only special memorial that tangibly recalls his fame is the unpretentious obelisk on Burial Hill.
As Miles Standish and John Alden had a romance in their lives that has made them historic, so this Puritan governor of Plymouth had his. His first wife, gentle Dorothy May, was drowned in Cape Cod harbor while her husband was away exploring the new-found coast. He had married her in Leyden in 1613 and less than three years after her death, on August 14, 1623, he married Mistress Alice Carpenter Southworth, who in earlier days, it is alleged, had been young William Bradford's "dearest love." She came across the sea—at his call—a widow, to marry the widowed governor of Plymouth and thus complete the unwritten romance begun in his earlier years.
A self-made man, a scholar of repute, a writer of renown, an upright and fearless magistrate, a model citizen, a courageous leader, gentle, just and generous, practical and wise, William Bradford stands in history as the essence and exponent of what was best in the Puritanism of his day, the architect and builder of a God-fearing, independent, and progressive community that, throughout theages, remains the most notable because the most typical of the foundation-stones that underlie the mighty structure of the Republic of the United States of America.[Back to Contents]