Among the female rulers of Europe there is one who on account of her

matchless beauty, her genius, her adventurous life, but especially her

tragic death, has enlisted the attention and admiration of authors and

poets even to a higher degree than Catherine the Second of Russia or

Elizabeth of England, who perhaps surpassed her in political genius.

More regretted and admired for her misfortunes and accomplishments than

condemned for her sins and crimes, Mary Stuart, the beautiful Queen of

Scots, lives in the recollections of posterity as a vision of

incomparable grace, beauty, and loveliness, hallowed by the genius of

great poets and redeemed by a tragic and cruel death. To no historical

memory poetry and tradition have been more kind and more idealizing than

to Mary Stuart; and yet she deserves a place in this gallery of

assassinations not as a victim, but as a murderess.

After reading the descriptions in prose and verse of her personal

charms, of her matchless beauty and grace, of her elegance and wit, of

her poetical inspiration and musical accomplishments, it is almost

impossible for the stern historian to maintain the self-possession of an

impartial judge and record the misdeeds of which this bewitching

creature was unquestionably guilty. She seemed to combine in her

incomparable personality all the physical and mental perfections woman

is capable of. We will say, however, that the crimes which have justly

been laid to her charge were, in part at least, excusable either on the

ground of the surrounding circumstances or of great provocations. Murder

itself, in the rude country and in the equally rude and violent times in

which it was committed, had not that horrid significance which

stigmatizes it in a more refined and cultured state of civilization.

Mary Stuart was the only daughter of King James the Fifth of Scotland by

his second wife, Marie de Lorraine. She was the niece of the famous

princes of the house of Guise--Duke Francis of Guise and the Cardinal de

Lorraine--who were rivals in authority and power with the kings of

France, and who on several occasions rose superior to them. James the

Fifth died young, with his daughter yet in her cradle. Quite young she

was betrothed to the Dauphin of France, who became afterwards King

Francis the Second, and she was married to him when a mere child. Her

renown for beauty and genius resounded from one end of Europe to the

other. With remarkable facility she learned French, Italian, Greek,

Latin, history, theology, music, painting, dancing, and she excelled in

writing poetry. Some of her short poems are still famous in French

literature. But her life as Queen of France was but a short dream of

splendor and delight. The weak and emaciated Francis the Second died

after a reign of eleven months, and the crown went to his young brother,

Charles the Ninth.

Mary Stuart retired for a while to a convent at Rheims, but soon, upon

the death of her mother at Edinburgh, she proceeded to Scotland, where a

throne awaited her. Quite a number of enthusiastic adorers among the

high nobility of France followed her to her new home, because they could

not bear the thought of separating from a princess so charming and

beautiful,--a princess who kindled in the hearts of all men who were

brought into contact with her, desires and frequently a passion which

became fatal to them. Unquestionably Mary Stuart was one of the most

dangerous coquettes who ever lived, and at the brilliant and voluptuous

court of the Valois in France, almost under the personal direction of

the famous Diana de Poitiers, she had cultivated the art of using her

extraordinary charms and accomplishments for the seduction of men to her

best advantage. One of the most conspicuous of these followers from

France was Du Chatelard, the scion of one of the noblest houses of the

French monarchy. He bears the sad distinction of having been the first

victim to Mary Stuart’s intrigues, and of having paid for the mad and

uncontrollable passion which he had conceived for her with his life.

Chatelard himself was a young man of high accomplishments. He was a poet

and musician, and by his sweet voice he easily won the favor of the

young Queen. She imprudently gave him so many proofs of her favor and

openly admitted him to such a close intimacy that young Chatelard not

without reason believed that she returned the love which he had

conceived for her. And Mary was not in the least afraid to show her

fondness for him. It is authentically reported, for instance, that in

bidding him goodnight in the presence of the court “she kissed him below

the chin, looking at him in a way that set his whole soul afire.” No

wonder that the young man in the transport of his passion committed acts

of indiscretion and madness, which in a short time led to his execution,

without visibly affecting the beautiful coquette who had encouraged his

passion. One night the ladies of the palace discovered him hidden behind

the curtains of the Queen’s bed, but his audacity was ascribed to his

thoughtlessness and vanity. He was expelled from the palace for a while,

but was soon afterwards forgiven and received again into the Queen’s

intimacy. This act of pardon turned the young man’s head again. He made

no secret of his glowing admiration for the Queen, and addressed amorous

verses to her, which were repeated by her attendants. One evening he was

again discovered in the Queen’s bedroom, where he had secreted himself

under the Queen’s bed. This second time he was put on trial, and was

condemned to death for having conspired against the Queen’s life. In

vain he protested his undying love for Mary Stuart, but the judges were

inexorable, and Mary herself, who had been trifling with his heart so

long, and who with a single stroke of the pen could have pardoned and

saved him, coolly handed him over to the executioner. A scaffold was

erected before the windows of Holyrood Palace, where Mary resided, and

Du Chatelard, the grand-nephew of the famous Chevalier Bayard, suffered

death with a heroism worthy of his great ancestor. His last words were,

as he cast a sorrowful look upon the windows behind which the Queen

stood with her attendants: “Farewell, thou who art so beautiful and so

cruel, who killest me, and whom I cannot cease to love!”

The death of Chatelard was the first of a series caused by the mad

passion which Mary Stuart kindled in the hearts of her adorers. Another

attendant who had followed Queen Mary from France to Scotland, and whose

tragic fate is even more generally known than that of Du Chatelard, was

David Rizzio, an Italian musician, who for some time had been attached

to the court of Francis the Second of France. Rizzio was of low birth,

but had some talent as a composer of songs and as a singer, and had been

brought from Italy by the French Ambassador at Piedmont, from whose

service he passed into that of one of the enthusiastic noblemen who had

escorted the young Queen to Scotland. The Queen’s attention was soon

attracted to the Italian composer and singer, and she begged Rizzio of

the nobleman, so that he might enter her own service and by his art make

her forget the lonesome hours and the homesickness for France which she

felt would be the inevitable result of her residence in Scotland. By a

congeniality of taste the poor and lowborn Italian artist and the

beautiful young Queen were thrown together a great deal, and gradually

the love for the art ripened into a preference for the artist. He soon

became the declared favorite and private secretary of the Queen, who

made him practically the omnipotent counsellor and minister of her

policy.

The scandal of this singular preference, which was at once announced as

a vulgar love affair, spread rapidly over all Scotland, and gave rise to

loud complaints by the Protestants, headed by John Knox, who preached

against the “woman of Babylon” and her low-bred paramour. The Queen was

blind to the consequences of her infatuation for this lute player, a

mere servant, who moreover, by his Italian nationality and Catholic

religion, defied the narrow prejudices of the Scotch people. In spite

of her beauty, youth, and loveliness the Queen became very unpopular,

not only with the nobility, but with the great mass of the people.

At that very time Mary Stuart was induced, mainly through the influence

of Queen Elizabeth of England, to contract a marriage with Henry

Darnley, a young Scot of the almost royal house of Lennox, of great

physical, although somewhat effeminate, beauty, but of very inferior

mind. On seeing this young Adonis, Mary Stuart fell immediately and very

desperately in love with him, while it was noticed that Darnley showed

much greater coldness than men generally manifested in their gallantry

toward her. Darnley, descending from a daughter of Henry the Eighth, had

perhaps as good a title to the crown of England as Mary Stuart, and by a

marriage of these two claimants, it was expected that their interests

would be consolidated and consequently strengthened. The interest which

Queen Elizabeth of England had to promote this marriage was her hope of

lowering Queen Mary’s standing and authority in the eyes of her many

Catholic adherents in England by this marriage with an English

subject,--an intention in which Elizabeth was largely successful. In

spite of the strong opposition of a number of the most prominent Scotch

nobles and most notably of Lord Murray, Mary’s half-brother, the

marriage was consummated on the twenty-ninth of July, 1565. On the other

hand. David Rizzio, Mary’s Italian secretary and confidant, had very

warmly advocated and promoted the marriage, and Darnley openly paid

court to him, expecting great results from his influence over the Queen.

Why Rizzio should have so eagerly encouraged the

[Illustration: LORD DARNLEY]

marriage is involved in doubt. Very likely the scandalous stories

circulated about the Queen’s relations to Rizzio were mere inventions;

and Rizzio, who moreover was deformed and ugly, far from being the

Queen’s lover, was only ambitious; he hoped to have even a greater share

of political authority under a nominal king, whom he recognized as an

intellectual nonentity, but whose personal beauty diverted the young

Queen’s thoughts from the cares of government.

During the first months after the wedding Rizzio’s expectations were

fully realized. The young Queen in the transport of her passion for

Darnley paid no attention to government affairs; her whole mind and soul

seemed to be enwrapped in her love for her young husband; apparently she

cared for nothing else but to caress him and to shower her favors upon

him. She conferred upon him the title of king, without, however, giving

him the attributes of royal power, which she reserved for herself. If

Darnley had been a man of greater mental calibre he could very easily

have made himself king in fact as well as in name; but he was a weakling

in every respect. After the first few weeks had passed away in the

closest intimacy with her consort, Mary’s extreme fondness, not to say

idolatry, of him, entirely disappeared, and in a very short time her

conduct toward him assumed a degree of estrangement and coldness which

contrasted strangely with the cordiality which had preceded them. Mary’s

full confidence and intimacy turned once more toward Rizzio, whose

ascendency over her mind seemed to be greater than ever before. More

than anybody else Darnley was dissatisfied with this turn of affairs. He

saw that the chance of empire had slipped away from him, and he found

that it was impossible for him to recover his former standing with the

Queen. In vain he tried to be admitted to a direction of the government

affairs and to perform some of the duties which seemed to pertain to his

exalted station in the state; but Queen Mary obstinately refused to

accede to these demands. Darnley, who ascribed this refusal, in part at

least, to Rizzio’s influence, then joined the party of political

malcontents who, either from motives of personal ambition or of

religious antipathy, were anxious to bring about the overthrow of the

Italian favorite and place a national and, if possible, a Protestant

ministry in power. To carry out this plan they won Darnley over to their

side, and filled his mind with dark insinuations and jealousy against

Rizzio. It seems they also promised him a co-regency with the Queen, and

full royal authority equal to hers in case the much-hated Italian should

be removed.

These prospects were sufficient to inflame Darnley’s ambition and make

him a willing tool in the hands of Rizzio’s enemies. He did not shrink

even from murder, and committed it openly and defiantly. As soon as the

conviction had been established in his mind that Rizzio stood in the way

of his ambition, he resolved upon his assassination, which was not only

to lead to his own aggrandizement, but also to punish Mary for having

preferred the Italian to him. He did not wait long to carry his plan

into execution; and the brutality and reckless ferocity with which the

murder was committed were even more atrocious and repulsive than the

crime itself. Only a brute and cowardly knave could have planned it.

The murder was committed on the evening of Sunday, the ninth of March,

1566, in the Queen’s private dining-room in the palace of Holyrood,

adjoining her bedroom. The Queen was there with the Countess of Argyle,

one or two other ladies, and Rizzio, her secretary. The best of feeling

and humor prevailed in the little party. There was not the least

indication or suspicion of impending trouble or danger. Nevertheless an

armed force of five hundred adherents of the conspirators, under the

lead of one of Darnley’s lieutenants, had been posted on the outside so

as to surround the palace entirely. The greatest caution had been

observed to avoid all noise, and the first intimation that something was

wrong was conveyed to the little party in the dining-room by the sudden

appearance of Darnley. With great familiarity he throws his arm around

the Queen’s waist. He is almost immediately followed by Ruthven, one of

his friends, who is clad in full armor and is ghastly pale from

excitement and fear. The Queen haughtily commands him to leave the room;

but before he can answer, her bedroom is filled with men bearing torches

and brandishing their swords, nearly all under the influence of liquor,

and calling with loud and threatening voices for Rizzio. The Italian

knows immediately what this scene means. He jumps from his seat and

takes refuge behind the Queen, clutching her gown with the grasp of

despair and imploring her to save his life. Mary Stuart at this moment

stands erect in the consciousness of her outraged dignity, her eyes

sparkling with indignation and wrath, and trying to protect Rizzio

against the crowd of aggressors who are pushing up to her, upsetting the

table on which she leans her hand, and trying to push her aside in order

to get at Rizzio. For a few moments she succeeds in keeping them at bay;

but then it is Darnley who comes to their rescue. He seizes the Queen,

tries to push her away, and takes hold of Rizzio’s hand in order to make

him loose his grasp of Mary’s gown. In this struggle Mary has partly

uncovered the Italian, and one of the conspirators, espying the

opportunity, plunges a dagger over Mary’s shoulder into Rizzio’s breast.

It is a signal for a general assault on the unfortunate victim. Like

madmen they rush upon him from all sides; they drag him from behind the

Queen, who is herself in danger of being slain; they beat him, they kick

him, they plunge their swords, their knives, their daggers into his

bleeding and mutilated body, they pull him by the hair, lifeless and

maimed as he is, through the dining-room, through the bedroom, to the

outer door of the antechamber, and only desist when they see that it is

nothing but a corpse which they are maltreating.

The dead silence which suddenly follows gives notice to Mary that the

horrid crime has been fully committed, that her favorite lies prostrate

and silenced forever at the threshold of her bedroom. What wonder that

in that terrible hour thoughts of revenge and hatred against Darnley,

the leader of this gang of savages and murderers, arise in her brain,

never to leave it again?

* * * * *

The assassination of Rizzio had opened a chasm between Mary Stuart and

Darnley which nothing but his own blood could fill up. From the very

first moment it became evident--and the Queen made no secret of it--that

Mary Stuart intended to resent the foul murder of one who, if he had not

been her lover, had enjoyed her confidence and her friendship, and whom

not even her personal intercession had been able to save from a most

cruel and entirely undeserved death. Immediately after the murder, when

Ruthven came back to her presence, with the blood-stained dagger still

in his hand, and demanded wine, she answered: “It shall be dear blood to

some of you!” Nor would she permit the blood of Rizzio to be washed off

the floor; she wished that it should forever remain as a mark of the

murder which had been committed there, and she ordered a partition to be

built between the grand staircase and the door of the antechamber

leading to her bedroom, in order to protect the blood-stained floor from

being desecrated by the feet of visitors. In this condition the Palace

has remained for centuries and the stains caused by Rizzio’s blood have

withstood the lapse of hundreds of years.

The halcyon days which Mary had tried to create for herself at

Holyrood--the days and hours which she had hoped would console her by

poetry, music, and song for her absence from France--had come to a

sudden and cruel end. The conspirators were not satisfied with having

slain Rizzio; his murder was only the unavoidable means to accomplish a

certain purpose,--to get control of the government. They kept the Queen

in close captivity and would not permit any of her friends, not even her

ladies, to see or confer with her. It was then that Mary resorted to her

great power of duplicity. Carefully concealing the profound horror and

disgust with which the sight of Darnley filled her, she convinced him

easily that her interests and his were identical, that his strength lay

in his exalted station as consort of the Queen, and that their continued

estrangement and enmity would only lead to the elevation of her

half-brother, Lord Murray, or some other great nobleman. Darnley was

only too easily persuaded; he fell readily into the trap which the

deceitful Queen had set for him. In his overweening vanity, and

convinced of his own invincibility, he ascribed the passionate appeals

and the affectionate solicitations of the Queen for his support to a

renewal of her former love and passion for him. Carried away by her

tenderness and loveliness, he promised to release her from her captivity

and to abduct her to Dunbar castle, where she would be secure from any

plots of her enemies. Darnley induced a number of his personal friends

and adherents to join him in this undertaking, and a few nights later

the flight from Holyrood to Dunbar was effected with complete success.

Darnley, after having thus separated his cause from that of the enemies

of the Queen,--who were seriously debating whether she should be

imprisoned for life, exiled from the country, or put to death,--went a

step further. He openly denounced the assassination of Rizzio as an

inexcusable crime, and disclaimed all previous knowledge of and

complicity in it. Nobody believed him,--neither the Queen, who had seen

his active participation in the murder when he could easily have

prevented it; nor the conspirators, who knew that he had planned all the

details, had helped in its execution, and had promised to protect those

who would take a hand in it. But Darnley’s lying declaration served the

political aims of the Queen well. From Dunbar she issued an appeal to

the loyal people and nobles of Scotland, imploring their assistance

against the rebels who had driven her from Edinburgh and had insulted

and threatened her in her own palace, and using the presence and the

declaration of the King to contradict the stories and accusations

circulated by the conspirators and “rebels” against her scandalous

private life. Eight thousand loyal Scots responded to this appeal of

their Queen, and at the head of this enthusiastic army Queen Mary and

her husband returned to Edinburgh and once more took possession of

Holyrood.

It was not long before the Queen threw off the mask of affection for

Darnley, which she had assumed for political purposes, and openly again

showed that aversion which she really felt for him. Not even the birth

of her son, who afterwards as James the Sixth ruled over Scotland and as

James the First over England, changed the strained relations between

husband and wife. There seems to be no doubt that the new cause of these

strained relations, which grew more apparent from day to day, was a

criminal and adulterous love affair which had quite suddenly sprung up

between the Queen and one of the noblemen of her court, the Earl of

Bothwell.

The new favorite was a scion of one of the noblest and most renowned

families of Scotland, but his personal history was far from being

honorable. The mere fact that a man with such antecedents could appear

at court and be received in the very highest society is a sad comment on

the moral tone prevailing at that court and in that society. Bothwell

was at that time no longer a young man. When quite young he had one day

disappeared from the castle of his fathers and, on reaching the coast of

the North Sea, had joined a gang of adventurers who, as pirates,

infested those waters and were a terror to the merchant vessels of all

the nations of Europe. By natural ability, unbounded courage and daring

the young Scotchman had rapidly risen to a commanding position among the

wild corsairs; his name was repeated with fear and awe from the coasts

of Denmark to the west coast of Ireland. In one of the desperate

engagements with warships of the Hanseatic League he had lost one eye,

but had saved his life and his freedom. Many years of his life he had

passed in this wild and adventurous career. Then the news of the death

of his father reached him, and one morning he reappeared in his

ancestral home to take possession of his vast domain. The turbulent

condition of Scotland, the civil war between Protestants and Catholics,

the struggles for supremacy between the crown and the nobility, were

congenial to his adventurous and reckless spirit. He had been among the

first to greet Mary Stuart on her arrival from France and had shown her,

from the first day he saw her, an enthusiastic, almost worshipful

devotion. He was a passionate adorer of female beauty, and the romantic

halo of his past life which surrounded his brow had secured for him

triumphs in love-affairs with some of the fairest women of the court. He

was among those who escorted Mary from Holyrood to Dunbar, and again he

was one of those who led her back in triumph from Dunbar to Edinburgh.

During this return march Bothwell distinguished himself by the skill of

his military dispositions, by his boldness and intrepidity, and

attracted the personal notice of the Queen.

At Holyrood the acquaintance between the Queen and the daring general

quickly ripened into love and intimacy, although the Queen took great

care at first to conceal the new passion which had taken possession of

her inflammable heart, even from her closest friends. But while these

efforts on the part of the Queen may have been successful in deceiving

her intimate friends, there were always eyes turned upon her which were

not so easily deceived,--and these eyes were those of the ambassadors

of England, France, and Spain accredited at her court. They watched her

conduct very attentively, and almost simultaneously reported to their

sovereigns the nascent favor with which the Queen looked upon Bothwell,

and the growing coldness which became noticeable between her and

Darnley. It was only a serious accident, which befell Bothwell soon

afterwards and which imperilled his life for several days, that revealed

the new passion of the Queen to the whole court and placed the new

favorite at the head of the government, with similar honors and similar

powers to those previously showered on Rizzio.

We are neither writing a personal history of Queen Mary, nor a political

history of her reign; we are merely writing a history of the

assassinations of which she was, so to speak, the central figure that

gave them world-wide celebrity. We have therefore carefully excluded

from our narration all political and biographical facts which were

either not directly connected with these assassinations or had not a

psychological bearing upon them.

* * * * *

We have reached the period when Mary--blinded by passion and infatuated

with love for a man utterly unworthy of her, or to speak more correctly,

of the exalted position she occupied in the world--surrendered not only

herself, but also the dignity of the crown and the honor and the

interests of the realm to the Earl of Bothwell, known to the entire

court as a profligate and libertine of the worst sort and as a most

unscrupulous and reckless adventurer. It was this infatuation for

Bothwell and the shameless liaison she formed with him from which all of

Queen Mary’s sufferings and disasters now flowed in rapid succession.

Not even her incomparable beauty and loveliness could save her from the

contempt attached to this disgraceful liaison, of which she made soon no

more a secret than she had formerly made of her preference for Rizzio.

But while in her infatuation for the Italian singer the artistic taste

of the Queen was rather successfully used by her admirers as an excuse

for her enthusiastic preference for him, there was absolutely no excuse

for her liaison with Bothwell. And Bothwell did all he could do to

strengthen the unfavorable impression of Mary’s conduct by the haughty

and overbearing rudeness with which he treated the greatest lords and

the highest dignitaries of the kingdom, including the King himself, for

whom he openly showed the greatest contempt.

Outraged by the insults which he had to endure day after day and from

which the Queen herself did not seem to be willing to protect him,

Darnley suddenly left the court and went to Glasgow, where he took up

his residence in the house of his father, the Earl of Lennox. The King’s

sudden departure caused more unfavorable comment than the Queen had

anticipated. It greatly disconcerted her, because she was afraid that

from Glasgow Darnley might issue an appeal to the Scotch people, and

especially to the dissatisfied nobility, laying before them his

complaints and calling upon them to overthrow the disgraceful rule of an

adulterous wife and her paramour.

Soon the news came from Glasgow that Darnley had fallen seriously ill,

that he was suffering from the small-pox and was expected to die. The

Queen took advantage of this serious illness and once more resorted to

her power of dissimulation, which had served her so well after Rizzio’s

death. She intended now to employ it not only to temporarily deceive and

beguile her husband, but to decoy him into an ambush and put him to

death. Incredible as the enormity and ferocity of the crime may appear,

especially on the part of a young and beautiful woman distinguished by

so many mental advantages, there seems not to be the least doubt that

Mary, in going to Glasgow and appearing at the bedside of her sick

husband as a loving wife, had this horrid crime in view and successfully

paved the way for its execution. She again played with consummate art

the part of a loving and trembling wife, and deceived Darnley so fully

that he promised to follow her to Edinburgh as soon as the progress of

his convalescence would make it possible for him to undertake the

journey. Thus fully assured of Darnley’s forgiveness, she returned to

Holyrood and perfected there, together with Bothwell, the arrangements

for his murder.

When Darnley arrived at Edinburgh, a short time afterwards, he was not,

as he ought to have been, taken to the royal palace, where he could have

been cared for better than anywhere else, but to a private residence in

an isolated location in one of the suburbs of the city, whose salubrious

location, it was alleged, would facilitate the King’s rapid recovery.

Darnley himself was greatly surprised at these arrangements, especially

when he learned that the Queen would not take up her residence with him,

but would remain at the Palace. Apprehensions of some impending danger

haunted his mind, and he became melancholy and despondent. However, the

Queen by her appearance and the excess of her tenderness soon dispelled

his vague fears and convinced him that only care for his enfeebled

condition and the hope of quickening his convalescence had prompted her

to select his residence, from which he would be promptly removed after

his complete recovery. In order to reassure him fully, she remained

several nights with him, occupying a room immediately beneath his own,

and manifesting toward him the greatest affection and solicitude. One of

her pages slept in the same room with him, and five or six servants,

whom Bothwell had appointed, formed the entire household.

Late in the evening of February 9, 1567, the Queen left the house and

went back to Holyrood to pass the night there, because one of the

musicians attached to the royal chapel was to be married that night, and

she had promised to be at the wedding. It was while the

wedding-festivities were going on at Holyrood and while the Queen was

dancing with some of the courtiers in the most careless and unaffected

manner possible, that a terrific explosion took place which was heard

and felt in all parts of the city and at Holyrood. Soon the rumor spread

that the house of the King had been blown to atoms and that all the

inmates were buried under the ruins. This rumor was only partly true.

The morning light of the tenth of February revealed the fact that the

house had been blown up by means of an underground mine; but the corpse

of the King was not found among the ruins. On the contrary, it was

found, together with the corpse of the page, in an orchard adjoining the

house, and neither the King nor the page showed any marks of gunpowder;

but the bloated condition of their faces and the marks of finger-nails

on their necks showed that both had been choked to death and had been

left lying on the ground where the assassins had killed them. It was

then surmised that both the King and the page, having been disturbed in

their sleep by the approach of the assassins, had tried to make their

escape through the orchard, but had been overtaken in their flight and

slain. The explosion had unquestionably been intended to destroy all

vestiges of the crime by burying both the assassins and their victims

under the ruins, but it had either taken place too soon, before the

murderers could have carried the King and the page back to the house, or

the assassins had hurried away immediately after committing the deed. At

all events, Darnley was dead.

The evidences of premeditated murder were so plain that from the very

first not the least doubt was manifested as to the character of the

calamity. Neither was there the least uncertainty in the public mind as

to the author or authors of the terrible catastrophe and the

assassinations attending it. The public voice immediately named Bothwell

as the murderer and added, in a whisper, the name of the Queen as his

accomplice. In those times murders were committed so often that the

murderers in a majority of cases escaped unpunished. But in this case

the rank of the victim was so exalted, and moreover the circumstances

surrounding the crime were so damaging to the authority of the crown,

that public opinion demanding an investigation of the death of the King

could not be disregarded. The Queen, who, if innocent, should have been

the first to insist on a thorough investigation of the crime by which

her husband was killed, affected an absolute indifference in the matter.

She utterly disregarded the damaging rumors which openly charged

Bothwell with the murder, and by this indifference confirmed the

suspicion of her silent active (or at best, passive) participation in

the crime. The Queen even openly defied public opinion by leaving

Bothwell in the undisturbed possession of the honors and dignities she

had conferred upon him, and by adding new ones, showing the continued

favor the Earl enjoyed, in spite of the public clamor raised against

him. “But Banquo’s ghost would not go down!” The excitement and the

indignation of the people rose to the highest point. On her appearance

in the streets, the Queen was insulted by the women. She found it

necessary for her safety to leave Holyrood and seek refuge in the

fortified castle. Bothwell had the audacity to demand a public trial,

because the Earl of Lennox, Darnley’s father, had openly accused him of

the murder; and the cowardly judges, overawed by the power of the

accused, by the royal troops, by the authority of the Queen, acquitted

him, while the whole people considered and declared him guilty.

We have reached the end of this atrocious murder. Posterity holds Queen

Mary guilty of the crime of having murdered her young husband. Her

abduction by Bothwell and her marriage to him, although apparently

forced upon her, had been planned by the two murderers even before the

assassination. Mary’s long imprisonment and final execution at the

bidding of a cruel and jealous rival has often been deplored by

biographer, historian, and dramatist,--but were they more than a just

atonement for crimes as atrocious as they were unprecedented?

CHAPTER X

WILLIAM OF ORANGE

[Illustration: WILLIAM OF ORANGE]

CHAPTER X

ASSASSINATION OF WILLIAM OF ORANGE

(July 10, 1584)

It was said by one of the wild revolutionists of France, in extenuation

of his incessant demands for the execution of a larger number of the

nobility, that the tree of liberty, to grow vigorously, should be

watered with plenty of blood. Alas! The history of the republics of the

world, not only since the great French Revolution of 1789, but at all

times, both ancient and modern, proves the justice of this assertion,

but none furnishes a more convincing proof of it than the history of the

Dutch Republic in its heroic struggle against the gigantic power of

Spain and other monarchical nations. At the very threshold of that

history stands the luminous figure of the great Prince of Orange,

William the Silent,--warrior, statesman, orator, and patriot; whose

assassination, closely following upon the murders of the night of St.

Bartholomew, is but the first of the crimes committed against the

illustrious men of the Dutch Republic--Olden Barnevelt, the brothers De

Witt, and others.

The assassination of William of Orange is of a semi-political and

semi-religious character. The revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish

rule, of which the Prince of Orange was the principal figure, originated

in religious conflicts between the Netherlanders--most of whom were

Calvinists or Lutherans--and the bigoted King of Spain, Philip the

Second, who was more Catholic than the Pope himself. It was one of the

fixed ideas of Philip the Second, a perfect monomania, that in the

immense empire over which he ruled, none but faithful believers in the

Catholic faith should be tolerated, and that all heretics or dissidents

should be exterminated with fire and sword. In the Pyrenean

peninsula--for Portugal was at this time annexed to Spain--this idea was

most radically carried out, and year after year the Inquisition, which

flourished there as the first institution of the state, handed over

thousands of victims, convicted or suspected of heresy, to a most cruel

death at the stake for the purpose of purifying the spiritual atmosphere

of the country. But when an effort was being made on the part of the

King to introduce the same system of spiritual purification into the

Netherlands, which he had inherited from his father, the Emperor Charles

the Fifth, and whose population was mostly of Germanic race, that effort

met with a most stubborn and almost insuperable resistance.

Already, under Charles the Fifth, all attempts to smother the Protestant

Reformation--which had entered the Netherlands both from Germany and

France and which had immediately found many adherents--had failed. The

Emperor, himself a Netherlander and familiar with the character of the

people, had deemed it prudent to abolish the Inquisition (at least in

name) and not to interfere too strongly with those personal rights of

the inhabitants which their municipal or provincial statutes guaranteed

to them. Moreover the Emperor had a very affable and popular way of

dealing with the people, and he could do a great many things which no

other ruler might have presumed to do. When Charles the Fifth abdicated

in 1555, the grief of the people of the Netherlands was not only

general, but sincere; they seemed to feel instinctively that the change

which was to occur in the government was full of impending dangers and

calamities for them. The personality of the new ruler fully justified

these apprehensions. Philip the Second came to the Netherlands from

England, where he had resided a short time as consort of Queen Mary, and

his reputation for bigotry, fanaticism, and cruelty had preceded his

arrival. Many of the acts of bloodshed and cruelty which were committed

under that reign were more or less justly imputed to his influence, and

his new subjects trembled at the prospects of similar scenes of

persecution and despotism. No wonder that on the twenty-fifth of

October, 1555, when the act of abdication was consummated at Brussels,

and when the infirm Emperor, leaning upon the shoulder of Prince William

of Orange, appeared before the representatives and high dignitaries of

all the provinces constituting the Netherlands, and ceded the government

to his son, who stood on his right side, a shudder passed through the

high assembly. Many eyes passed apprehensively from the open and kindly

countenance of the Emperor, then bathed in tears, to the sinister and

cruel features of King Philip. What a contrast also between the majestic

form and noble countenance of William of Orange and the small, feeble,

narrow-chested son of Charles, who with distrustful eyes looked down

upon this assemblage of nobles as if they were strangers or enemies, and

whom not even the glitter of royalty could invest with dignity,

although his features showed uncommon pride and haughtiness! The hopes

of the people of the Low Countries rested upon the one; their fears were

centred on the other.

Unquestionably it had been the Emperor’s intention to place William of

Orange by the side of his son as chief adviser and protector; but the

characters of the two were so different--the one broad, humane, manly;

the other narrow, bigoted, timid--that it soon became manifest that a

hearty coöperation of the two men for the welfare of the state was

impossible. Moreover the aspirations and tendencies in regard to the

government of the provinces which the two men entertained were

absolutely conflicting, the Prince being in favor of liberal

institutions and scrupulous observance of the guaranteed rights of the

provinces, while the King was illiberal and despotic, without regard for

the local customs and rights of the Netherlanders, anxious to

concentrate all powers in his hands and to subordinate the whole

government to his autocratic will.

These conflicting tendencies and these antipathies grew and became

intensified as the months and years passed by; consequently, when Philip

in 1559 left Brussels for Spain, he did not appoint the Prince of Orange

Governor-General of the Netherlands, to which position he was clearly

entitled, but conferred that honor with the title of regent upon his

half-sister, Margaret, Duchess of Parma, who shared his own fanatical

ideas. As her chief adviser he appointed Cardinal Granvella, a man of

great sagacity and talent, but filled with animosity against the enemies

of the Catholic Church, and in full though secret accord with the King

concerning the necessity of wiping out the privileges of the “arrogant

burghers of the Low Countries.” William of Orange was appointed

Stadtholder of Holland and Zealand, and a member of the Council of

State, a sort of cabinet for the Regent Duchess in which Cardinal

Granvella was the leading spirit. Several other prominent noblemen of

the Dutch provinces, Count Egmont, the conqueror of Gravelines, and

Count Hoorn, were also members of the Council of State; but they were in

a minority, and the Spanish or Cardinalistic party ruled its decisions

absolutely. All of these decisions were hostile to the guaranteed rights

of the Provinces; they interfered with freedom of conscience; they

reintroduced the Spanish Inquisition under the disguise of creating new

episcopal sees and attaching two inquisitors to each; and by

establishing Spanish garrisons in the fortified towns they violated the

constitutional right of the provinces that no foreign troops should be

stationed there. The protests of the Prince of Orange and of Counts

Egmont and Hoorn were of no avail, so these three distinguished members

refused to attend the sessions of the Council of State.

In the meantime a spirit of public dissatisfaction and disorder

manifested itself which showed to the sagacious Regent that the measures

enacted and enforced by Cardinal Granvella would lead to a revolt

against the Spanish régime. The people of Brussels showed their hatred

and contempt for the Cardinal in many ways. In public processions they

carried banners with insulting inscriptions or offensive caricatures and

cartoons exhibiting him in ridiculous positions. Alarmed at these

manifestations of public hostility, the Duchess Regent applied to the

King, imploring him to remove Granvella from his post as President of

the Council of State. The King reluctantly complied with the request,

but Granvella’s removal did not change the spirit of the Council; and it

was only too evident that its decisions were emanations from the King’s

own mind. When Count Egmont, who had gone to Madrid on a special mission

to plead for the personal and political rights of the Netherlanders,

urged upon the King to give them greater religious liberty and to annul

some of the stringent laws of the Council of State, Philip got into a

rage and exclaimed: “No, no, I would rather die a thousand deaths and

lose every square foot of my empire than permit the least change in our

religion!” And he added that the decrees of the Council of Trent, which

had recently been held, and which had affirmed anew the immutable

doctrines of the Catholic Church, should be rigidly enforced in all his

states. New instructions to that effect were sent to the Netherlands,

followed by new convictions and new executions.

It was at this perilous and critical time that William of Orange openly

accepted the Lutheran faith. Shortly before, he had been married to

Princess Anne of Saxony, a daughter of the famous Maurice, Elector of

Saxony, and a fervent Lutheran. William’s conversion to Protestantism

has been often ascribed to the influence of his wife, but it should be

remembered that William was born a prince of Nassau in Germany and the

son of Lutheran parents, and that his Catholicism dated only from the

time of his later education at the court of Charles the Fifth, where he

was placed as a page at the early age of nine years. William had never

forgotten the lessons of Protestantism which he had imbibed in his early

childhood, and while professing the Catholic faith in later years, he

had retained that respect and that affection for the principles of the

Reformation which so peculiarly qualified him to act as umpire and

leader in a contest in which religion played so conspicuous a part.

Up to that time the nobility had taken much less interest in the

religious quarrels than the lower classes of the people; but the

steadily increasing number of convictions and executions for heresy

aroused their fears that the Spanish monarch intended to abolish their

time-honored privileges and wished to substitute a Spanish autocracy for

their liberal self-government. Against this intention they loudly

protested, Catholics as well as Protestants, and bound themselves to

stand together in their resistance to further acts of aggression. They

presented petitions and protests to the Duchess Regent who received them

in a conciliatory spirit, and forwarded them to the King, recommending

at the same time greater leniency and moderation. But Philip the Second,

getting tired of the many complaints and remonstrances reaching him from

Brussels, and determined to stamp out heresy at whatever cost, sent the

Duke of Alva, the sternest and most cruel of all his commanders, at the

head of a considerable army to the Netherlands, with full powers to

restore order and to reëstablish the authority of the Catholic Church.

From the well-known character of the commander-in-chief it could not be

doubted that the King’s severe orders would be carried out in the most

cruel and unrelenting spirit, and that neither age nor sex nor rank

would be spared. That Alva’s mission would be successful, the King did

not doubt for a minute. But it was on his part a case of misplaced

judgment, because his narrow mind could not measure the difference

between the Jews and Moriscoes, and the Netherlanders: against the

former the policy of violence and compulsion had been successful;

against the latter that same policy was doomed to ignominious failure.

The rumor that he would come as a bloody avenger preceded Alva’s

arrival, and filled the hearts of the Netherlanders with terror. A

regular panic ensued, and an emigration _en masse_ was organized; it

looked as though the northern provinces were to be depopulated entirely

by this exodus of men, women and children, mostly belonging to the

mercantile and working classes, and taking their merchandise and their

household goods with them.

The sending of an army composed entirely of Spaniards and Italians into

the Netherlands was so flagrant a violation of the constitutional rights

of the provinces, which the King had sworn to maintain, that the Prince

of Orange thought the time for open resistance had come, and he

conferred with Egmont, Hoorn, and other prominent men concerning its

organization. But finding it impossible to organize united resistance

against Alva’s army, William of Orange, with his profound insight and

with his distrust in the Spanish King’s intentions, deemed it prudent to

leave the Netherlands and withdraw to his estates in Germany instead of

imperilling his head by remaining at Brussels. It was in vain that he

tried to persuade Egmont, to whom he was greatly attached, to accompany

him and to place his valuable life beyond the reach of the Spanish

“avenger.” Egmont’s openhearted and confiding character refused to

believe the sinister forebodings of the penetrating genius of his

friend; he relied on his immense popularity among the Netherlanders and

on the great services he had rendered, on the battle-field, to the

House of Hapsburg. He therefore remained at Brussels, and even welcomed

Alva on his arrival at the capital. The Spanish commander conducted

himself as the regent _de facto_ without paying much attention to the

Duchess, who still held that position nominally. One of his first

official acts was the appointment of a special tribunal, which he named

the Council of Troubles, composed exclusively of Spaniards, to try

charges of heresy and treason. The people, however, found another, and

more appropriate name for it. On account of the indecent haste and

rapidity with which persons were tried, convicted, and executed by this

Council, they named it “The Bloedraad” (The Council of Blood). The

number of victims was so great that gallows and scaffolds had to be

erected in all the cities and towns of the Netherlands, and that the

executioners were kept busy in beheading and quartering the heretics and

“traitors.” Counts Egmont and Hoorn had been arrested, soon after Alva’s

arrival, on the charge of treason; they were also tried before the Court

of Troubles and convicted on trumped-up charges. They were beheaded,

together with eighteen members of the nobility, at the public square of

Brussels.

This infamous act stirred up William of Orange to immediate action. What

he had foreseen and predicted had come to pass. Evidently it was Alva’s

intention to kill off the leaders in order to get control of the great

mass of the people without much difficulty or resistance. William of

Orange himself was charged with treason and summoned to appear before

the judges of the Court of Troubles. But since his appearance at

Brussels would have been equivalent to his conviction, he refused to

recognize the jurisdiction of the court, claiming that as a knight of

the Golden Fleece he had the right to be tried by the King personally

and by no other judges than his peers. At the same time he published an

address to the King in which he defended his public actions in a

masterly manner, convincing every unbiased mind not only of his

patriotic devotion to his country, but also of his loyalty to his

sovereign in all his legitimate and constitutional acts of government.

The Duke of Alva took no further notice of this defence; but when the

day for William’s appearance at court had passed, he was sentenced to

death, and his property, personal and real, was confiscated as that of a

rebel and traitor.

In the meantime the Prince of Orange had not been idle in Germany. He

had appealed to his co-religionists for assistance, pointing out to the

Protestant princes that the cause of Protestantism itself was the issue

of the war in the Netherlands, and that the complete victory of the

Spanish army over the Netherlanders would be followed by an overthrow of

the Protestant churches, both Lutheran and Calvinistic, in Europe. He

succeeded in collecting a considerable army, which he divided into two

corps, placing the one under the command of his brother Lewis, Count of

Nassau, and invading Brabant with the other. The Count of Nassau was

defeated in battle and driven out of Frisia with heavy loss, while Alva

avoided giving battle to the Prince of Orange. By skilful manœuvres

the Spanish general tired out the patience of the German troops, and

when the severe cold of winter set in, the Prince, finding himself

without means of paying his soldiers and getting no support from the

inhabitants (who were overawed by the Spanish authorities), had to

disband his army and to return, temporarily, to Germany. Alva triumphed

and pompously reported to the Spanish King that both the rebellion and

heresy had been stamped out in the Netherlands, and that his presence

was hardly required there any longer. In his overweening vanity he went

even so far as to order a bronze monument to be erected in his own

honor, in which he was represented as a conqueror, standing with one

foot on a Dutch nobleman in full armor and with the other on a man of

the people, kneeling and with a Lutheran prayer-book in his hands.

It is not my intention to go into the details of the cruel war in the

Netherlands,--cruel even beyond human imagination,--to recount the

sufferings, the tortures, the atrocities, the martyrdom imposed upon the

unfortunate victims of political and religious persecution, conceived by

human fiends educated in the school of the Spanish Inquisition and

warmly applauded by him whom both his cotemporaries and posterity have

justly named “the demon of the South.” Such a war had never been seen

between nations claiming to be civilized; and never has patriotic

devotion in defence of home and country, of liberty and creed, been

carried to a higher degree than by those brave Netherlanders in the

sixteenth century. The world should never forget the immense service

which they rendered to mankind by victoriously maintaining the

principles of religious liberty, which, without their heroic

perseverance, would very likely have perished under the incubus of

Spanish despotism and the Spanish Inquisition. That they did not succumb

and perish must be considered one of the marvellous enigmas of history,

in which the finger of God is plainly visible. Immortal glory and

renown should be accorded to the gallant leader who, under the most

discouraging and desperate circumstances, never lost hope and confidence

in the righteousness and final triumph of his cause, and who, undaunted

by personal danger and persecution, never wavered in his loyalty to

principle, and held high the banner of popular sovereignty and

individual liberty, until the pistol shot of a hired assassin

interrupted his glorious career.

If to-day, after the lapse of three centuries, we look back upon that

career, our admiration for William of Orange grows steadily. We follow

him from his first appearance on the public stage of the Netherlands, as

a friend and confidant of Charles the Fifth, as a loyal adviser of the

Duchess Regent, as a loyal subject pleading with Philip the Second and

warning him to respect the rights of citizenship and religion of the

Netherlanders,--pleading and warning in vain; we behold him unsheathing

his sword for the defence and, when they appeared to be lost, for the

recovery of those rights, toiling, struggling, fighting for the people,

always subordinating his own interests to those of the nation and to the

sublime cause of which he was the acknowledged champion; we recognize

him as the first in the field, the first in the council-room, filling

his countrymen with an enthusiasm and a confidence which alone could

sustain them in undergoing sufferings and hardships unequalled in

history. Thus he stands before us fully realizing and even surpassing

the eulogy which Goethe wrote for the monument of another national hero,

perhaps worthy, but certainly not so worthy of it as William the

Silent:--

“In advance or retreat,

In success or defeat,

Ever conscious and great,

Ever watchful to see,

From foreign dominion he made us free!”

In translating Goethe’s inscription on the famous Blücher monument at

Rostock we were strongly impressed with the fact that it was even better

adapted for a monument of the great Prince of Orange than for that of

the indomitable, but rather reckless, “Marshal Vorwärts.”

The King of Spain had from the first day of his accession known the

powerful influence which the Prince of Orange exerted in the

Netherlands. The Prince stood without a rival at the head of the

nobility, and his eminent talents enhanced the authority which his

illustrious birth had secured for him. The King was also informed by his

special representatives--the Duchess Regent, Granvella, the Duke of

Alva, Don John of Austria, and others--that this authority was steadily

increasing, that the great mass of the people idolized the Prince, that

his wish was a law for the burghers, and that practically the revolt,

its failure or success, depended on him. The exalted character of the

Prince precluded the very idea of winning him over to the other side by

means of high distinctions or honors, much less by pecuniary bribes or

corruption, and nothing remained therefore for the King to do, if he

wanted to get rid of the dangerous popular leader, who held a number of

the provinces entirely under his sway, than to place him beyond the pale

of the law and to offer a high reward for his head. This method of

removing rivals or enemies was not unusual in those days; and it should

cause no surprise that the monarch who is, and very likely justly,

suspected of having ordered the murder of his half-brother, Don Juan

d’Austria, and also that of his own son, Don Carlos, was perfectly

willing to adopt this method of getting rid of the Prince of Orange, who

in his eyes was not only a rebel, but also a heretic, and as such

deserved death a hundredfold. The price he put on the Prince’s

head--twenty-five thousand ducats--showed sufficiently the importance he

attached to his life, and how willing he was to tempt assassins by the

enormous sum of the reward.

The King, who evidently had experience in such matters, had not

miscalculated the temptation, for several attempts were made on the

Prince’s life in consequence; but they always failed, and it would

almost seem as if that life was under the special protection of

Providence that it might carry out the plans predestined for it. In

1582, Juan Jaureguy, a young man in the employ of a Spanish merchant of

Antwerp, and a religious fanatic, fired a pistol shot at the Prince

which came very near killing him. The ball entered the head under the

right ear, passed through the roof of the mouth, breaking several teeth,

and came out under the left jaw-bone. For a while the Prince’s life was

despaired of, but he finally rallied and recovered. His would-be

assassin was immediately killed, and his accomplices, of whom there were

several, were publicly strangled and quartered. In order to deter others

from making attempts on the Prince’s life, the ghastly remains of these

accomplices, one of them a Dominican monk, were nailed to the gates of

Antwerp. The joy at the Prince’s recovery was general, and thanksgiving

days, with divine service in the churches and public halls, were held

in a number of the provinces. Unfortunately neither these public

demonstrations of gratitude and delight, nor the terrible warnings

addressed to assassins were sufficient to protect a life so valuable to

his country and to the world.

Another assassin was more successful than Jaureguy. The scene of the

murder, which took place on the tenth day of July, 1584, was the city of

Delft in Holland. Shortly after the noon hour of that day a

common-looking man, who had found access to the Prince’s residence for

the purpose of securing a passport, approached the Prince as he came

from the dining-hall and fired three shots at him, one passing through

the stomach and causing his death after a very short while. The assassin

was a man still young, less than thirty years of age. He was a

Frenchman, Balthasar Gérard by name, who had come from his home in

Franche-Comté or Burgundy to carry out his hellish design, which was

inspired by religious fanaticism and encouraged by Jesuits of the

College of Trèves. Through these he was introduced to the Duke of Parma,

then Governor-General of the Netherlands, who promised him the royal

reward in case of success, and other royal favors besides. Gérard had

made his preparations for the murder with considerable circumspection;

these preparations were very similar to those which Booth made for his

escape after the murder of Abraham Lincoln, and just like Booth, Gérard

stumbled and fell in making his escape and hurt himself, and this led to

his arrest.

After having undergone the most terrible tortures, his joints having

been wrenched and his body nearly roasted alive, he was executed in the

most cruel manner imaginable. His right hand was burnt off with red-hot

irons; the flesh was torn from half a dozen different parts of his body,

which was then broken on the wheel. Gérard was still alive; his vitality

was wonderful. The executioners then disembowelled and quartered him;

tore out his heart and flung it in his face. It was then only that the

unfortunate man breathed his last. His head was then cut off and placed

on a pike of a gate in the rear of the Prince’s residence, and the four

parts of his body were fastened to the four gates of the city. This

cruel mutilation and dismemberment of the assassin’s body was hardly

sufficient to satisfy the vengeance of the people; the certainty that

the King of Spain stooped even to murder of the basest sort to recover

his sovereignty over the Netherlands exalted their desire for absolute

and lasting national independence to a sort of religious dogma which

made all hope of peace illusory.

When the assassin’s hand cut short the life of the Prince of Orange, he

had not completed the great work for which he had toiled, fought,

suffered and died. But part of that work had been done, and it had been

done so well and so thoroughly that the Republic stood on a firm

foundation ready to receive the other provinces which were still in the

power of Spain as a fitting superstructure. For this reason history

recognizes William the Silent as the founder of the Dutch Republic and

of the independence of the United Provinces.

To Americans the character of William the Silent is of special interest

because it bears, in many respects, a striking resemblance to that of

George Washington. Both were the principal figures in wars for the

independence of their countries; both were soldiers and statesmen of a

high order. If Washington was very likely the greater general, William

the Silent was very likely the greater statesman, and the success of the

American cause would have been as impossible without Washington as the

failure of the Dutch struggle would have been certain without William of

Orange. Both were sterling patriots and subordinated their own interests

to those of the nations they represented; but in this respect Washington

was, perhaps, superior to William, who had an eye on the possibilities

which might arise after a successful issue of the war. It should be

remembered, however, that William of Orange was a prince and sovereign

before he was made the head of the Netherlanders rising in revolt

against Spain, and that, as a sovereign, it was natural for him to look

after the interests of his family and dynasty. As far as mental and

moral qualifications are concerned, both men were distinguished by that

perfect equilibrium of powers of the mind and powers of the soul, which

is but rarely found in men of the highest rank. Neither of these

statesmen had the capacity of immediately conceiving and executing plans

of a decisive character. Their minds, although full of resources, worked

slowly in elaborating such plans; they weighed and hesitated before

taking action; but as soon as their minds had been made up and a plan

had been resolved upon, they acted without wavering, and held on to it

until success or failure resulted from it. The great respect in which

Washington has been always held by British historians and statesmen is,

perhaps, the noblest tribute that can be paid to his character and

abilities. The fact that Philip the Second relied less on his splendid

armies, led by some of the ablest generals of Europe, and on his

powerful navy, than on the death of William the Silent is, perhaps, the

greatest eulogy which can be given to the great founder of the Dutch

Republic. Unquestionably the Spanish monarch considered the twenty-five

thousand gold pieces which he offered for the assassination of William

of Orange, although an enormous sum for those times, but a very cheap

equivalent for the life of a man who had been the very life and soul,

the inspiring genius of the rebellious Dutch provinces. If monuments of

foreign statesmen and rulers are to be erected on American soil, no

fitter and no worthier man can be found for that honor than William the

Silent.

CHAPTER XI

IVAN THE TERRIBLE

[Illustration: IVAN THE TERRIBLE]

CHAPTER XI

ASSASSINATIONS BY IVAN THE TERRIBLE

(1560-1584)

Russian history abounds in instances of famous assassinations. Sometimes

these murders were committed by the rulers of Russia, at other times

these rulers themselves were the victims. Ivan the Fourth, whose very

surname, “the Terrible,” sufficiently indicates his character, was one

of the most cruel and inhuman monarchs who ever ruled over a nation,

either in ancient or modern times. It is therefore not one famous

assassination which we wish to describe, but a series of monstrous

crimes, unparalleled in history as the acts of one individual.

Ivan was only three years old when his father died. A regency was

formed, composed of his mother and a council of boyars, belonging to

different factions, who were constantly at war with one another. At no

time had Russia been more poorly governed. As Ivan grew up, he was

despised and maltreated by the haughty nobility; his favorites were

abused. In order to divert his mind from nobler occupations and keep him

in profound ignorance of public affairs, he was amused and entertained

with coarse and brutal games which developed his innate cruelty and

ferocity, and made him, at an early age, the terror of those who were

subordinated to him. He delighted in torturing and slowly killing

domestic animals, and also in crippling and killing old men and old

women whom he encountered in the streets while riding fast horses or

driving a carriage like a madman, without looking either right or left.

He was a mere boy yet--hardly fourteen--when the boyars began to fear

him and predicted a reign of terror when he should assume the reins of

government.

At seventeen, he dissolved the regency and declared his intention to

reign for himself. He also wanted to get married, and sent out

messengers to the different provinces of the Empire to pick out the most

beautiful young girls and send them to the capital, that he might choose

a wife from among their number. Many noblemen hid their handsome

daughters, or sent them far away from home on hearing of the Czar’s

intention. His reputation for excessive cruelty had reached already the

remotest parts of the Empire, and nearly every boyar trembled at the

mere idea of becoming his father-in-law. But the messenger succeeded

nevertheless in bringing together several hundred young girls of

extraordinary beauty, and sent them to the capital. Ivan then chose from

their number Anastasia Romanowna, a young girl of great beauty and great

brilliancy of mind. He fell desperately in love with her, and through

the superiority of her mind she gained a great influence over him, and

succeeded even in keeping his cruelty in check.

Ivan was a man of natural ability. He had some striking qualities, and

might have been a great ruler if his education had been entrusted to

competent and wise teachers. At an early age he learned the art of

dissembling to perfection, and possessed the rare faculty of keeping

his plans and intentions secret even from his closest friends. It was

only after the conquest of Kasan that he threw off the mask. Until then

he had been exceedingly friendly and kind to a number of the powerful

noblemen, who considered themselves almost his peers in rank and birth.

But when that conquest had added to his power and authority, he suddenly

said to his boyars: “At last I am free! God has made me the master over

all. Beware!” Again it was his wife, Anastasia Romanowna, who with rare

political sagacity prevented him from too openly showing hostility and

impatience at their pretentious conduct. He was very young, and could

afford to wait. But in 1560, when Ivan was only twenty-nine years old,

Anastasia, his best friend and his ablest counsellor, died, and he found

no loving hand to restrain his passions and keep his cruelty and

ferocity in check. Nevertheless, for some time after her death the

softening influence of his wife (whom he had really loved) over his

cruel nature made itself felt, and for the next four years he proceeded

rather cautiously. He considered all the boyars his enemies and

traitors; and he commenced murdering them, one at a time.

In 1564 he threw off all restraint. He suddenly disappeared with all his

soldiers and servants, and rumors were circulated that he intended to

abdicate the crown and to retire from public life. The abject fear in

which the people had lived for thirty years had fully demoralized them.

Boyars, clergymen, and the great mass of the people went nearly crazy at

the idea that their “dear little father” would no longer rule over them.

At last they discovered his place of retirement, and the manifestations

of public delight at this discovery were almost boundless. Delegation

after delegation waited upon him and implored him on their knees that he

might return to his capital and continue to govern them. At last Ivan

consented to return, but he consented conditionally. He demanded--and

they all cheerfully agreed to the demand--that he should have full and

absolute power to punish all his enemies and all traitors by banishment

or death and confiscation of their property, without being interfered

with, even by the clergy. It was a regular _coup d’état_. From this act

dates the absolute rule of the emperors of Russia, and Ivan the Fourth

thenceforth took the official title of “Czar of all the Russias,” which

his successors have retained to the present day.

Ivan had carefully matured his plan. He took possession of a certain

number of cities and country districts, expelled the proprietors from

them, declared them territory forfeited to the government, and

distributed them among certain of his own adherents upon whose fidelity

he could count. These adherents generally were taken from the lowest

classes of the people, knew no other law than the will of their master,

and obeyed him blindly. While confiscating all these estates without

mercy or hesitation, on the most trivial or far-fetched pretexts, he was

shrewd enough to respect constitutional rights in other parts of the

Empire. His plan was to increase the imperial private domains gradually

to enormous proportions by dispossessing year after year the legitimate

proprietors of the soil, and by this method to destroy the power of the

nobility. In order to accomplish this purpose he did not hesitate to

employ the most cruel and disreputable means for the conviction and

punishment of his intended victims.

One of his favorite ways for entrapping and punishing a rich boyar was

to order one of the servants employed in the imperial household to steal

jewelry or other valuables, and then to seek refuge in the boyar’s

residence. Of course, the fugitive was closely pursued by the Czar’s

guards, drawn from his hiding-place, and then massacred together with

the boyar and his family, who, the Czar pretended to believe, were the

thief’s accomplices and deserved death as well as the offender. But much

oftener the terrible Czar rushed down, with a numerous suite of his

followers, upon the residence of a wealthy boyar, put all the men, the

children and the old women of the domain to the sword, carried off the

young women and girls, and abandoned them on the highways after he and

his gang had satisfied their desires on them. On the trumped up charge

that Grand Duke Wladimir, his own cousin, as well as the Grand Duke’s

wife and grown daughters had participated in a conspiracy against the

Czar’s life, he forced him to commit suicide by drinking poison, while

the Grand Duchess and her beautiful young daughters, and all their

ladies of honor and female servants, were divested of their garments,

exposed in a state of complete nudity on the market space of the town

adjacent to their domain, and afterwards butchered in cold blood.

Wladimir’s immense wealth and all his real estate were confiscated by

the crown. In this manner Ivan succeeded in overpowering the boyars, one

after another, in a very short time, and acquiring immense wealth. He

visited the different provinces and departments in succession, and

wherever he appeared he left a track of desolation, rapine, and murder.

From the capital of each province he organized marauding tours in all

directions, placing each under the command of an officer on whose

devotion to himself and ferocity to others he could count. But the most

terrible expeditions were those which he commanded himself. It can

truthfully be said that wherever Ivan “visited,” he destroyed everything

in sight,--not only the human inhabitants, but also the farm and

domestic animals, even dogs and cats. He took also a pleasure in

draining ponds and creeks, so as to cause the fish to die, and after

having killed or mutilated all things living, he ordered the buildings

to be set on fire, and left the scene of his cruelty and lust amidst the

wild huzzas of his comrades. No civilized, or half-civilized country had

ever witnessed such atrocities on the part of its own ruler.

If Ivan was not travelling and marauding he resided generally in the

Alexandrowna Convent, which he had strongly fortified. This convent,

situated in the neighborhood of Moscow, and surrounded by dense forests,

was not only the scene of his bestial orgies and excesses, and of his

more than beastly cruelty, but also of his hypocritical zeal for

religion and divine service. The convent, although transformed into a

palace, remained still a convent. Ivan’s most abject and infamous

favorites were acting as monks, while Ivan himself performed the

functions of the pontiff. He also acted as a bell-ringer for the church.

Quite early in the morning, at four o’clock, mass was read and public

service was held in the church, lasting till seven o’clock. Regularly

every evening, from seven to eight o’clock, there was again divine

service. The time intervening between the dinner and the last church

service was employed by him in going to the torture rooms of the palace

where his victims--and there was always a number of them--were subjected

to the most excruciating pain, and in many cases tortured to death. To

be invited to these scenes of horror was a mark of imperial favor.

Ivan was never in better humor or happier than after having witnessed

the tortures or the execution of a man whom he had sacrificed to his

greed for wealth or to his vindictiveness. It is reported that one day

when one hundred and twenty persons were to be executed--either

strangled, hung, beheaded, or quartered--at Moscow, and when the

inhabitants of the streets near the place of the execution had fled in

horror from the neighborhood, the Czar sent out his soldiery and

compelled thousands of citizens to be spectators of the wholesale

butchery. He sat there himself on an elevated stage applauding the

torturers and executioners when, in his opinion, they had done their

task well and had prolonged the agony of the victim as much as possible.

When the cruel spectacle was over, he rose to his feet and addressed the

spectators as follows: “My loyal subjects! You have seen torture and

death! Some of you are horror-struck at what you have witnessed! My

punishment is severe, but it is just. All these men and women were

traitors to their Czar, and deserved to die. Answer me, was I right in

punishing them?” And the tremendous audience, almost frightened to

death, as with one voice replied: “Glory and long life to the Czar!

Death to the traitors!” The sight of blood, of suffering and of death

seemed to have an intoxicating effect on this unparalleled monster, and

he never tired of it to the day of his death.

The high dignitaries of the Church fared no better at Ivan’s hands.

Whenever they stood in the way of his ambition, or whenever they

presumed to criticise him for his crimes, he treated them with the same

cruelty and inflicted the same punishments upon them as upon the boyars.

In that way he imposed silence on the clergy, and caused them even to

sanction his worst misdeeds. But one day, after an especially atrocious

marauding expedition of the Czar, the Metropolitan of Moscow mustered

sufficient courage to reprimand him publicly. On the twenty-second of

March, 1568, Ivan entered the cathedral, expecting the blessing of the

high-priest. The latter did not stir, but kept his eyes fixed upon a

picture representing Christ in all his glory. “Holy Father,” said one of

the boyars to the Metropolitan, “the Czar is here; bless him!” “I do not

recognize the Czar!” replied the Metropolitan. “Since this world was

created and the sun was placed in the skies, it has never been known

that a Czar has committed such atrocities and crimes in his own state as

ours has. Here in this church we offer our prayers to God, and beyond

its walls the blood of innocent Christians is shed in torrents.” Then

turning to Ivan, he said in a loud voice: “The very stones under thy

feet will rise against thee and cry out against thy crimes and

atrocities! God has bidden me tell you and warn you, even if I should

suffer death for my boldness!” And death was his punishment, although

not at the very moment. As a rebel, he was sentenced to imprisonment for

life at Twer. But it happened so that Ivan, the year after, passed

through Twer on one of his marauding expeditions. It was then that he

remembered Philip, the Metropolitan, who had accosted him so boldly. He

sent half a dozen of his soldiers to the prison, and they strangled the

Metropolitan without previous notice. This assassination paved the way

for many others among the clergy, until Ivan had so intimidated them

that thenceforth not even a whisper was heard among them against his

cruelties.

It then became apparent how readily the example of an infamous ruler is

followed by his courtiers and attendants. The boyars and officers

accompanying him on his expeditions of murder and pillage tried to

surpass him in iniquity; in their very appearance they showed their true

character, adorning themselves with symbols of their ferocity. When they

started on their marauding tour, they attached a bleeding dog’s-head and

a broom to the neck and saddle of each horse, signifying by these

decorations that they would bite like savage dogs and sweep off the

ground all they could find. Whomsoever they found on the highways they

would arrest and hang as traitors to the Czar, and in the villages and

towns on their route they would commit the most horrid excesses, sparing

neither sex nor age. If the inhabitants had fled at their approach, they

reported them to the Czar as his enemies who were plotting against his

life, and he issued decrees of vengeance declaring their property

confiscated and their lives forfeited. In this way they kept the

inhabitants at home waiting in terror for the arrival of their

tormentors.

After having decimated and terrorized the nobility and the clergy, Ivan

turned his attention principally to the merchants and wealthy citizens.

The commercial centres, in which a great amount of capital had

accumulated, were the special objects of his greed, especially if they

showed a spirit of independence. Prominent among these was Novgorod, the

ancient and wealthy city, proud of her free institutions and her honored

name. It was this pride and her great wealth which pointed out Novgorod

as a victim for Ivan’s wrath and cupidity, and the manner in which he

planned and executed his evil designs on the city shows his diabolical

genius at its height. Never has tyrant or despot conceived a more

sinister and treacherous plot for the ruin of a great city and for the

assassination of its inhabitants. The horrors of St. Bartholomew’s night

pale in comparison.

A Polish vagabond, on the personal command of Ivan, wrote a petition,

with the forged signatures of the Archbishop of Novgorod and a large

number of leading and wealthy citizens and addressed to the King of

Poland, in which the latter was supplicated to assume the sovereignty

over Novgorod and the province in which it was situated, and to assist

the citizens in their desire of shaking off the yoke of Ivan. By Ivan’s

direction this petition was concealed in the great cathedral, behind a

picture of the Holy Virgin. The Polish vagabond, after having executed

the task dictated to him, came to Moscow and charged the city of

Novgorod with treasonable designs against the Czar. Upon this

information the Czar immediately sent messengers with the Polish

vagabond to Novgorod, where, as a matter of course, the forged petition

was found hidden behind the picture of the Holy Virgin in the cathedral.

This was considered proof sufficient to condemn the whole city. No

further investigation was deemed necessary. Ivan kept quiet, but the

inhabitants knew what was in store for them. They trembled and waited.

They had not to wait a long time. Two weeks after the discovery, on the

twenty-first day of January, 1570, the first detachments of an imperial

army, commanded by some of Ivan’s most trusted and most cruel

lieutenants, entered the city. They immediately proceeded to seal the

doors of all the churches and chapels, and took possession of the

residences of the wealthy inhabitants, where they established their

headquarters. All traffic was suspended. No citizen was permitted to

leave the city, nor could goods of any kind be shipped from it. A dead

silence and fear hung over the city. Nobody knew what the Czar intended

to do, but that he would do something horrible, everybody felt, and also

that there was no escape from him.

At last he came. He took up his residence in the Archbishop’s palace. He

treated the priests and the Archbishop himself like servants; he drank

and feasted with his boyars, while the priests had to wait upon him at

table. And then suddenly, when he rose, he uttered a loud shout of

triumph, and this was the signal for his lieutenants to order a general

pillage throughout the city. Without any control by their superiors, the

soldiers committed plunder, murder, violence, and outrages of all kinds.

The treasures accumulated in the churches and large business houses Ivan

had reserved for himself, and his orders were strictly observed; nobody

touched what he had designated for his share. The palace of the

Archbishop became the scene of the most beastly orgies and excesses. The

wives and daughters of the noblest families were dragged before Ivan,

and after having picked out the most beautiful for his own use, he

turned the others over to his lieutenants and companions. Many of the

unfortunate women committed suicide, many others died from the effects

of the terrible abuse to which they had been subjected. The Czar knew no

pity. “Such scenes of horror, iniquity, and inhumanity,” says a foreign

eye-witness, “had not been seen in the world since the destruction of

Jerusalem.”

The work of devastation, pillage, murder, violence, and incendiarism

lasted five weeks. At last the Czar thought it was time to stop the

bloody carnival. The measure was full to overflowing,--not only the

measure of misery, affliction, distress, and death for the unfortunate

and innocent inhabitants of Novgorod, but also the measure of lust and

cruelty for himself. The constant indulgence in voluptuous excesses told

upon his constitution; he was worn out and surfeited with animal

gratification; his eyes had a vague, almost lifeless expression; his

herculean frame commenced to tremble, his legs to totter. No less than

twenty-seven thousand persons, men, women, and children, had perished;

there was not a family which did not lament one or more dead among its

members. The corpses were thrown into the river, and at some points they

had been thrown in in such numbers that the river was impeded in its

current. On the first day of the sixth week, Ivan called citizens living

in all the different streets of the city together and addressed them as

follows: “Men of Novgorod, and all of you who are still alive, pray to

God and thank him for your escape from peril; thank your Czar too, for

it is to his mercy and his fear of God that you owe your safety; and

thank also his soldiers, whose humane treatment saved you from death.

Pray to God that he may give us power and strength to vanquish all our

enemies! Much blood has been shed for the punishment of traitors. These

traitors are responsible to God for all that has happened here during

the last five weeks. May God have mercy on them. And now stop your

crying and weeping! Live and be happy, and may your city grow and

prosper!”

Cæsar Borgia could not have done better than this brutal monster of the

North. He was the genius of cruelty and hypocrisy personified in one

man.

CHAPTER XII

HENRY THE FOURTH OF FRANCE

[Illustration: HENRY IV.]

CHAPTER XII

ASSASSINATION OF HENRY THE FOURTH OF FRANCE

(May 14, 1610)

Religious wars--that is to say, civil wars for religious causes--had

desolated France for half a century, and tranquillity and apparent

harmony had finally been restored only by the genius of one man--Henry

the Fourth. He it was who issued the Edict of Nantes, conferring equal

religious and political rights upon the professors of both religions,

the Protestant and the Catholic.

A short time after Martin Luther had inaugurated the great movement of

religious reform in Germany, a similar movement had also been organized

in France; but it was only since 1536 and through the influential and

energetic agitation of John Calvin that it had assumed large dimensions

and acquired a really national importance. After the disastrous battle

of Pavia and after his release from Spanish captivity, King Francis the

First had ordered a cruel persecution against the Protestants for

political reasons, but it had utterly failed to put a stop to this

movement. On the contrary, a great many noblemen had joined the new

church and the originally purely religious movement had gradually

assumed a pronounced political character. But this change of tendency

only added fuel to the flame of intolerance and persecution. Not only

were hundreds of professors of the new church most cruelly executed on

the gallows or burnt alive for heresy, but among the Waldenses in

Provence and in the valleys bordering on Savoy a wholesale massacre was

inaugurated, which aimed at nothing less than their entire extirpation.

On account of their peaceful and industrial habits, these people had for

a long time enjoyed toleration in spite of their dissenting religious

opinions. No less than twenty flourishing villages were destroyed and

burned to the ground, and their entire population, men, women and

children, were butchered in the most barbarous manner. But it seemed as

if the very horror which such acts of inhumanity inspired, and the

heroic constancy and bravery with which these unfortunate victims of

religious fanaticism had sealed their convictions with their blood, had

rather increased than diminished the ranks of the Protestants. The

French translation of the Bible, which was secretly circulated

throughout the kingdom, proved also a powerful means of propagandism for

the principles of reform among the better educated and thinking classes.

Francis the First died in 1547 and was succeeded by his son, Henry the

Second, who considered the Protestant movement merely a political

question, and treated it as such. In Germany he supported the Protestant

princes in their fight against Charles the Fifth, but at home, in

France, he persecuted the adherents of Calvin even more persistently and

cruelly than his father had done. Hundreds of excellent citizens were

sent to the gallows or to the stake for heresy, and even the possession

or sale of a French Bible was deemed a sufficient crime to warrant the

death punishment. Henry the Second died after a reign of twelve years,

in 1559, from a wound received in a tournament and inflicted

accidentally by the captain of his own body-guard. His successor,

Francis the Second, the husband of Mary, Queen of Scotland, was entirely

under the control of his wife’s uncles, the Duke of Guise and the

Cardinal of Lorraine. For the Protestants matters grew worse and worse.

Francis the Second, who was merely a boy, died after a reign of less

than two years, and was succeeded by his brother Charles the Ninth, of

bloody St. Bartholomew Night’s memory. He was succeeded by Henry the

Third, who after an inglorious reign, in which torrents of blood had

flowed without quenching the fire of religious fanaticism, was

assassinated in 1589 by Jacques Clément, a young Dominican monk, who had

become exasperated at the concessions which the King had made to the

Protestant Church. Before expiring, King Henry the Third recognized the

young King of Navarre as his successor, who then ascended the throne of

France under the name of Henry the Fourth.

The wars which devastated France during the preceding three reigns were

waged almost without interruption; they were of a semi-religious and

semi-political character. These wars must be largely ascribed to the

pernicious influence of Catherine de Médicis, the wife of Henry the

Second, and the mother of his three sons, Francis the Second, Charles

the Ninth and Henry the Third. Her name stands in history as a synonym

for an astute, unscrupulous, cruel, and intriguing ruler and politician.

At the time of Henry the Third’s assassination, he was investing the

city of Paris, which was in the hands of his enemies, the League, under

the command of the Duke of Mayenne, who himself was aspiring to the

throne. It was therefore not an easy matter for the new King to assume

the reins of government, the half of his kingdom being in arms against

him, and the royal army itself, in whose ranks he was fighting, being

hostile to the religion he (as a Protestant) professed.

But Henry the Fourth was equal to the difficult task. In fact, he was

one of the most remarkable men who ever sat on a European throne. His

career up to that day had been extremely stormy; his escape from death

and perils innumerable was wonderful and stamped him as a man of

destiny. It is reported of him that when he was present one day as a

very young man at a brilliant reception at the French court, where

nearly all the prominent men of the French capital were assembled, he

strongly impressed the foreign ambassadors with the brilliancy of his

wit and the sagacity of his observations. One of them said: “In this

whole assemblage of dukes, princes and great dignitaries, I see but one

man fit to rule either as king or emperor,” and pointing to Henry of

Navarre he continued: “It is that young man with the eye of an eagle!”

Henry the Fourth was born in 1553, the son of Antony of Bourbon. His

mother was Jeanne d’Albret, only child of Henry the Second, King of

Navarre, and of his wife, Queen Margaret of Navarre, who has won a

lasting place in literature by her famous collection of novels, known as

the “Heptameron.” Much of the genius and _esprit_ which distinguished

the grandmother was inherited both by her daughter and her grandson.

Jeanne d’Albret was not only an excellent woman and mother, but she was

also an enthusiastic admirer and supporter of the Calvinistic doctrine,

and brought up her son in that faith. On account of her religion both

Philip the Second of Spain and Catherine de Médicis, Queen of France,

hated her intensely, and it seems that at an early day a sort of rivalry

arose between Catherine and the mother of the boy concerning his

education. Catherine maintained that, inasmuch as Henry was a royal

prince and might be called upon some day to ascend the throne of France,

it was absolutely necessary to educate him in the Catholic faith in

order to make him worthy to rule over a Catholic country and occupy a

throne whose occupant had for centuries been honored with the noble

title of the “eldest son of the Church.”

In this contest over the boy the mother remained victorious, and, true

to her religious convictions, she surrounded him with Protestant

professors. But Catherine de Médicis was not a woman to abandon a scheme

which she had formed and in which politics played a large part. She

therefore concocted a plan for the abduction of young Henry, which would

have succeeded and would have placed him under the immediate control of

Philip the Second of Spain, had it not been betrayed to Henry’s mother,

the Queen of Navarre. Henry was thereupon hurried off to La Rochelle,

the headquarters of the Protestant army, where he was soon placed in

nominal command of all the Protestant forces, although the famous

Admiral Coligny was its real leader.

We may fitly pass without comment the stormy years preceding Henry’s

elevation to the throne of France. In order to reconcile the Protestant

and the Catholic branches of the reigning dynasty, Catherine de Médicis

was successful in her plan of a marriage between Henry of Navarre and

her own daughter Marguerite, although the Pope hesitated a long time in

giving his permission to this family alliance, which was in every

respect a very unfortunate one. As far as Catherine de Médicis was

concerned, her principal intention in planning it was the hope of

continuing under Henry the Fourth’s reign (if he ever should become

king) the absolute rule which she had so successfully maintained under

the reign of her sons. Far from using her influence and authority to

secure, if possible, the happiness of the young couple, she held out to

both all possible temptations to lead them astray, and openly advanced

Henry’s liaisons with other beautiful ladies of the court. It is also

pretty well established by historical evidence that Catherine, in order

to withdraw Henry from the beneficial influence of his mother, caused

her death by poison in the very year of his marriage. At the massacre of

St. Bartholomew’s night, Henry escaped death by abjuring Protestantism,

King Charles the Ninth having left him the choice between going to mass

and suffering death. Henry preferred the former and professed

Catholicism as his religion until 1576, when he suddenly and secretly

left the court, and, retracting his forced abjuration, placed himself

once more at the head of the Protestant party.

In 1584 the death of the Duke of Anjou made Henry the legitimate heir to

the crown of France, and five years later, the death of Henry the Third

made him King. But only the southern provinces and the Protestants

recognized him as their king. The Catholics vehemently protested against

this heretical king, and refused obedience to him. The League, which

kept an army of 30,000 men in the field against him, and which was

supported by the King of Spain, not only refused to recognize him, but

proclaimed an aged uncle of his, the Cardinal de Bourbon, King of

France, and Spain adhered to this decision. The civil war between the

contending factions continued with greater fury and obstinacy than ever,

and it was in this campaign, in which Henry always fought against

tremendous odds, that he displayed his wonderful ability and tact as a

political and military leader. Finally his second conversion to

Catholicism on the twenty-third of July, 1593, which was simply a

political measure and not at all dictated by religious motives, decided

the succession to the throne in his favor, although it took years of

warfare and diplomatic negotiation to secure his recognition by Spain

and the leaders of the League.

Henry the Fourth’s greatest political achievement, by which he

manifested his far-seeing ability as a statesman, was the Edict of

Nantes, promulgated on the thirteenth of April, 1598. It guaranteed

freedom of conscience and equality before the law to Catholics and

Protestants; and it was the first great manifesto of religious

toleration issued by any ruler. But noble and high-minded as it was,

even if inspired only by political motives, the fanatics of the Catholic

Church would not forgive him. Unquestionably it was the Edict of Nantes

which caused his assassination,--an act of revenge with which the Church

paid back the injury it supposed it had received at his hands.

Henry, with the assistance of his great minister, the Duke of Sully,

devoted the first few years, after peace had been restored, to building

up the prosperity of the country, which had been distracted by war for

nearly forty years. In this he admirably succeeded. With wonderful

rapidity the monarchy recovered from the disasters and calamities of the

religious and civil wars. Without Henry’s success, late as it came, this

national improvement would have been impossible, and France would have

sunk into the same condition of intellectual lethargy and material decay

from which Spain has suffered for three centuries. But Henry’s ambition

went much beyond the borders of his kingdom. The house of Hapsburg, a

branch of which ruled Spain, appeared to him too dangerous for the

security and greatness of France. He supported the German Protestant

princes in their opposition to Austria, which wanted to take possession

of Juliers-Cleves, two German principalities, and sent an army of ten

thousand men to their assistance. Henry wanted to join personally this

army on the nineteenth of May, 1610. On the thirteenth of May he

published a decree appointing the Queen, Mary de Médicis, Regent of the

kingdom, and her coronation was celebrated on the same day with great

pomp.

On the fourteenth of May, the day after the coronation, the King was

assassinated by Francis Ravaillac in the Ferronière Street at Paris,

where his carriage had stopped a few minutes. It was this short delay

which gave Ravaillac a chance: he climbed upon the hind-wheel of the

carriage and stabbed the King twice with a long poniard, with deadly

effect. It was thus that the greatest King France has produced died at

the hands of a miserable fanatic, at a moment too when, according to the

statement of Sully, who knew him better than any other man, he had

formed a plan of establishing a great European confederation, founded on

the civil equality of Catholics and Protestants and on an equilibrium

of power among the great nations of Europe. Ravaillac was executed with

revolting barbarity on the twenty-seventh of May, but not even the

repeated application of the torture elicited the least information as to

the motives or the accomplices which he may have had in his crime.

Henry’s death was a cruel loss not only for France, but for the whole

world.

The assassination of Henry the Fourth ended in France the era of famous

political murders, which during the religious wars had taken off

Coligny, Henry of Guise, and the two kings, Henry the Third and Henry

the Fourth, all during one generation. But of these only the

assassination of Henry the Fourth has made a lasting and profound

impression on his contemporaries as well as on posterity. It has

enhanced his reputation and glory by enshrining his name among the great

martyrs of history. It was one of the most patriotic and high-minded

thoughts of Voltaire to make Henry the Fourth the hero of his epic poem

“La Henriade,” which although not ranking with the great poems of

Milton, Tasso, and Virgil, in poetic merit, is still a noble hymn of

liberty and a glorification of religious toleration, as well as of

Henry, its representative. It is uncertain whether the profound horror

which the assassination of Henry caused throughout the world, or the

terrible punishment inflicted on Ravaillac, caused assassins to desist

from their nefarious work, but certain it is that no new assassination

of a king or any member of the royal family of France took place from

the death of Henry the Fourth to the assassination of the Duc de Berry,

the presumptive heir of Charles the Tenth, in 1820. Not that no

attempts on the life of any or all of the French monarchs since the

days of Henry the Fourth were made; but all such attempts had failed,

and instead of killing the rulers, had only led to the cruel and

horrible execution of the conspirators.

Most remarkable among these was the assault of Damiens on King Louis the

Fifteenth, one of the most dissolute and worthless monarchs,--one who in

the gratification of his lusts was utterly oblivious of common decency

and shame. Louis the Fifteenth came nearer reviving the atrocious

immorality of Claudius, Caligula, Caracalla, Heliogabalus in the palace

of the Cæsars of ancient Rome, than any other modern monarch had done.

It was the age of Madame de Pompadour and the monstrosities of the “deer

park.” The French nation blushed at the excesses of the court, which

paved the way for the great Revolution, already dimly foreseen by some

ingenious observers, as one of the necessities of the future. It was at

this time, when public indignation, not to say public disgust, had

reached its culminating point, that an attempt on the life of the King

was made.

It was on the fifth of January, 1757, at six o’clock in the evening, on

a cold and dark day, that he stepped out of the doorway of the palace of

Versailles and went up to a carriage waiting for him to take him to

Trianon. All at once he felt that somebody had run against him, and at

the same time that he was bleeding from a wound in the side. He uttered

a cry of pain and alarm, and when the torch-bearers drew near and

surrounded him, the King noticed a man who alone among all those present

had kept his hat on. “This man has assaulted and wounded me!” exclaimed

the King, pointing to the man whose head remained covered. “Arrest him,

but do not harm him!” It makes almost a painful impression to find that

an embodiment of vice and debauchery like Louis the Fifteenth should at

such a moment have been inspired with feelings of mercy toward his

assassin, and should have used almost the identical words which fell

from the lips of the pure and high-minded President McKinley after

Czolgosz had fatally wounded him! But history records them, and we must

give even the devil his due.

The attempt on the King’s life caused a tremendous sensation in Paris,

where immediately the most exaggerated reports concerning the fatal

wounding of the King and the discovery of a widespread conspiracy to

assassinate him were circulated. Damiens was treated with the greatest

severity. As though the crime which he had tried to commit had been

really committed, and as though the stab he had given to the King had

had fatal effect, the criminal was treated as a regicide, and the

terrible machinery of the law provided for in such cases, and in France

not employed since the trial of Ravaillac, was put in operation. Even

during his transportation from Versailles to Paris measures of

precaution were used, as if a state prisoner of the most dangerous

character and of the greatest importance were to be guarded. Regiments

of soldiers surrounded his carriage, and six sergeants with drawn swords

marched on each side. Strict orders had been issued to the citizens of

Paris not to go out on the streets or appear at the front windows of

their houses. Everything had been done to create the impression of a

conspiracy against the government which counted many influential men

among its members and of which the assassin was merely the tool, while

those who were directing him and using his arm against the King, had to

be sought in the highest classes of the aristocracy, and especially

among the enemies of Madame de Pompadour. Great efforts were made to get

a full confession from Damiens. Who was he? How had he formed the plan

to assassinate the King? Who had instigated him to commit the act? Who

were his accomplices? These were the questions to be solved by the

French police authorities, and for whose solution they did not hesitate

to apply the most cruel measures known to them. But the result of their

painstaking investigation was far from realizing their expectations. It

was found that Damiens belonged to the lower classes of the people. He

had learned the trade of a locksmith, but had preferred to enter the

service of rich lords and ladies as a domestic. Being of a very restless

and quarrelsome disposition, he had changed his positions as often as

Gil Blas had changed his masters. He had been in the houses of

parliamentarians, clergymen, noblemen, orthodox Catholics, Jansenists,

Molinists, Protestants, free thinkers. Often he had served at the table

of the great lords and ladies of the kingdom and had listened to the

conversation of the guests; and invariably the subject of the

conversation had turned on the disgraceful conduct of the King, on his

excesses, on the shameful orgies of the court, on the mysteries of the

“deer park,” where not only the virtue of young girls of the people was

ruthlessly sacrificed, but also the money extorted from the sweat of the

people criminally squandered. Wherever he had gone he had heard the same

story, and it had made a deep impression upon him. Damiens had always

been of an eccentric turn of mind; he had even had spells of religious

exaltation, and for three years he had seriously meditated on the

possibility of rescuing the King from his sinful excesses and debauches.

He finally had come to the conclusion that the only possibility of

turning the King’s mind away from his vicious habits and arousing his

soul to sentiments of honor and duty might come through fear, by placing

him in the immediate presence of death. This thought preyed so

incessantly and so strongly on his mind that he resolved to become the

instrument of the King’s redemption, by attacking and wounding, but not

killing him. The attempt on the King’s life was therefore the result of

a psychological process which was, perhaps, based on wrong and

extravagant premises, but which, if all the circumstances are taken into

consideration, was rather meritorious than criminal in its aim. The

assassin had acted strictly in accord with his preconceived theory. He

had in his possession a knife with two blades, one of which was very

long, sharp and pointed like a dagger, while the other was quite short

and sharp. It seemed to be impossible to inflict a mortal wound with the

short blade, and Damiens had used it in wounding the King. He had no

accomplices. At first, very likely to mitigate his punishment, he had

hinted at the existence of a widespread conspiracy, contemplating the

assassination of the King, the Dauphin, and others, but he soon

retracted these statements, and even the most severe application of the

torture could not elicit from him any other declaration than this: that

he had no accomplices, that nobody, not even his wife and his young

daughter, had known anything of his intention; that he did not intend to

kill the King, though he could easily have done so; that he had only

intended to wound him for the purpose of frightening and warning him;

that his act had been inspired by the wish of saving France and the

dynasty.

But all these statements, which could not be controverted by conflicting

evidence, made no impression upon judges who had fully made up their

minds beforehand, and who looked upon the man that wanted to touch even

the King’s finger with the same horror as upon a regicide who might have

stabbed him through the heart and killed him. The sentence passed upon

Damiens was therefore in conformity with their preconceived opinion, and

cruel in the extreme. It was based upon the sentence carried out against

Ravaillac for having killed the greatest of kings and one of the

benefactors of mankind. Though Damiens was an eccentric ponderer, a

foolish dreamer, who had but slightly wounded a heartless voluptuary

that had deserved death a hundred times, his sentence was terrible

beyond description, and was actually carried out in the presence of an

immense multitude. At first his right hand, in which was placed the

knife with which he had struck the King, was burned to the bone.

Thereupon his arms, his legs, his breast, his back and his feet were

lacerated with burning tongs; molten lead, boiling oil, burning sulphur,

rosin, and wax were poured into the open wounds; and finally, while he

was still suffering unimaginable pain, four strong horses, hitched to

his arms and legs, tried for half an hour with all their might to tear

out his limbs. After that time only one arm remained in the body, and it

took another five minutes’ work to pull it out of its socket. The body

of the unfortunate man had been pulled to almost double its length and

width, and its power of resistance amazed all the spectators. When at

last the cruel execution was over, the bleeding trunk and the arms and

legs were thrown upon a pile of wood near the scaffold and destroyed by

fire. The spectacle had struck terror into the hearts of the beholders.

But even with this terrible act of revenge the criminal justice of

France was not satisfied; it reached out for the innocent family of the

criminal. His father, his wife, and his daughter were banished from

France for life, not to return there on penalty of death, while his

brothers, sisters, and other relatives had to change their names. The

house in which he was born was burned to the ground, and any other trace

which he might have left was carefully obliterated. The crime of Damiens

was not one of the famous assassinations in history, but it caused such

a sensation in Europe, and it was punished so cruelly, that we thought

his attempt on the life of Louis the Fifteenth might very properly be

recorded in this book.

CHAPTER XIII

WALLENSTEIN

[Illustration: WALLENSTEIN]

CHAPTER XIII

ASSASSINATION OF WALLENSTEIN

(February 24, 1634)

In a previous chapter we have seen how a King of England got rid of a

contentious Archbishop of the Church of Rome by assassination when the

latter stood in the way of his usurpation. In a similar manner, also by

assassination, an Emperor of Germany freed himself from a general who

had twice saved him from ruin, but who had grown too powerful for his

security, and whose loyalty he (perhaps justly) mistrusted. Although

nearly three hundred years have passed away since Wallenstein’s

assassination at Eger, Bohemia, the most searching investigations of

historians have been unable to establish beyond a reasonable doubt the

certainty or extent of his treasonable intentions, although there are

strong indications that they existed, and that the crown of Bohemia, as

a sovereign state, was to be the price which he exacted for his treason.

The religious war, which had broken out between the Emperor of Germany,

as representative of the Catholic Church, and the Protestant princes of

North Germany in 1618, had been waged with great cruelty and varying

success for several years. Neither party had won such decisive

advantages that the end of the terrible struggle, which partook as much

of the character of a civil war as of a religious war, could be

predicted with any degree of certainty. The most unfortunate feature of

this strife was that not only the different German princes were fighting

against each other, but that also foreign princes, upon the invitation

of the Germans, participated in the struggle and gave their support to

either the Catholic or the Protestant side. The German princes

themselves had formed two different alliances: the Catholics had formed

the League, while the Protestants were members of the Protestant Union;

and both parties had powerful armies in the field commanded by

experienced and able generals, the Catholics by Tilly, the Protestants

by Mansfeld and the Duke of Brunswick. The greatest of these generals

was perhaps Tilly, but he was extremely cruel and vindictive, fully as

much from religious hatred for the enemies of his church as from natural

disposition. His conquest and pillage of Magdeburg has given to his name

a deplorable immortality. The Emperor of Germany, Ferdinand the Second,

was rather nominally than actually the war-lord of the Catholic party;

for the Catholic League, which had placed the army in the field, had

elected Maximilian of Bavaria as its supreme chief. Thus, while the

Catholic armies were called the Imperialists, and while the victories

which they achieved were supposed to redound to the Emperor’s glory,

Ferdinand could not repress a feeling of humiliation at the thought that

he owed these victories and the advantages which resulted from them more

to the generosity and loyalty of the Catholic League than to his own

power and resources. Once or twice Protestant soldiers had even

threatened him in his own imperial palace, and he had owed his safety

from capture or death only to the timely intervention of some Spanish

and Croatian horsemen who dispersed the aggressors.

In November, 1620, Tilly had, at the head of a powerful army, won a

decisive victory over the army of the Protestant Union by the battle of

White Mountain; then, having restored Bohemia and Moravia to the rule of

the Emperor, the victorious general quickly marched to the Palatinate,

where the cause of the Protestants was at that time supreme. But he was

defeated there by the Protestant army under Mansfeld and the Margrave of

Baden; and at that time Protestantism might have been triumphantly

established in western and northern Germany at least, had not the two

victorious Protestant generals made the mistake of separating their

armies,--a mistake which proved fatal to both of them. Tilly was not

slow to see the advantage which he gained by this dismemberment of the

army which had so signally defeated him at Wiesloch; he rallied his

forces and defeated first the Margrave of Baden at Wimpfen, and shortly

afterwards Mansfeld and the Duke of Brunswick at Höchst. Then the

Protestant armies crossed the frontier of the Netherlands in the hope of

receiving assistance from England.

In the meantime the German Emperor, emboldened by the successes of

Tilly, strained every nerve to reëstablish Catholicism and stamp out

Protestantism in the Empire. The excessive zeal which he displayed in

accomplishing this purpose, and the terrible work of destruction which

Tilly and his lieutenants were carrying on in all those districts of the

Empire which were unfortunate enough to fall under their sway, were,

however, the means of setting Protestantism on its feet again, of

reviving the waning hopes of the German Protestant princes, and of

arousing a powerful interest in their behalf among their neighbors. The

most important accession which the cause of Protestantism had at that

time was that of King Christian the Fourth of Denmark, who joined the

Protestants with a large army and took supreme command in northern

Germany.

Such were the conditions in Germany at the moment when the man who is

the subject of this chapter appeared on the stage as principal actor in

the terrible war of thirty years. This man, one of the most remarkable

men of the seventeenth century, and one of the most eminent generals in

German history was Wallenstein. For seven years he was the greatest man

of the war, eclipsing the fame of Tilly himself, filling the minds of

enemies and friends, and finally that of the Emperor himself, with vague

fears and apprehensions of his treason and unbridled ambition. But in

the flower of his age his life was cut short by the hands of assassins.

The Empire seemed to be hopelessly divided between Catholicism and

Protestantism, and civil war with all its terrors and horrors laid waste

its fairest provinces. The Emperor had lost much of his authority, while

Maximilian of Bavaria, commander-in-chief of the armies of the Catholic

League, wielded a power which was supreme wherever the so-called

Imperialists held possession of country or town. It was a humiliating

position for the Emperor, but he was utterly powerless to extricate

himself from it. Suddenly a deliverer came to him in the person of

Albert, Lord Wallenstein, a Bohemian nobleman, who had married the

daughter of Count Harrach, the Emperor’s special favorite. He was

immensely rich, and had won great military distinction in the Bohemian

wars. It was this Lord Wallenstein who on a morning in June, 1625,

presented himself before the Emperor Ferdinand of Germany with a

proposition which, at first, appeared so extravagant and incredible to

the Emperor himself and to his counsellors that they doubted the sanity

or sincerity of the man who made it. But he insisted on the feasibility

of his plan with so much eloquence and enthusiasm that they finally

consented to it. Wallenstein proposed to the Emperor to enroll, entirely

at his own personal expense, an army to fight for the cause of the

Emperor and to protect his hereditary states, provided he should have

the power to make that army at least fifty thousand strong, to appoint

all the officers, and take supreme command himself, without being

interfered with by other generals, no matter how highly stationed they

might be. The immense wealth of Wallenstein guaranteed the financial

success of the plan; moreover he received permission to make his army

self-sustaining by pillage, marauding, and forced contributions in all

those districts which it might temporarily occupy.