of the Guise family of France, born 1542, died 1587. As
great-granddaughter of Henry VII of England, Mary was heir to the
English throne after the failure of direct descendants of Henry
VIII, the last of whom was Queen Elizabeth. At the age of sixteen
she was married to the dauphin of France; and, as she was put
forward as claimant of the English throne (even as against
Elizabeth, whom the Catholic powers of Europe affected to treat as
the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII), the arms of England were
quartered with those of France and Scotland on her escutcheon.
Mary’s persistence in protruding this claim, under advice of her
Catholic friends, was a main cause of the misfortunes of her sad
and romantic career. On the death of Mary’s husband, Francis II of
France, she returned to Scotland to resume the functions of
government, thoroughly imbued with Catholic and French notions of
policy, and already antagonistic to a large portion of her
subjects, who had become fanatically Protestant under the
leadership of such men as John Knox. Henceforward the Queen of
Scots was embarked on a sea of troubles, which are familiar
history. She married Lord Darnley in 1565, against the wish of her
own Protestant subjects and of Queen Elizabeth; and on the murder
of Darnley by the Earl of Bothwell, she consummated her follies by
espousing the latter. The rebellion which ensued resulted first in
her imprisonment by her own subjects, and afterward, consequent on
her escape and defeat in battle by the Protestant lords, her
confinement by the Queen of England, on whom she had thrown herself
for protection. For nineteen years Mary was the inmate of
successive English prisons, though not rigorously treated
otherwise. The numerous conspiracies in which she was implicated by
the enthusiasm of her supporters in England and France, some of
which involved the assassination of Elizabeth, and all of which
looked to the complete overthrow of Protestantism, at last caused
her trial and condemnation by an English commission. The signature
to the death-warrant has been claimed by some historians to have
been a forgery; by others to have been genuine, but its commission
under the great seal an act without Elizabeth’s consent. But the
weight of evidence shows Elizabeth’s conduct to have been a piece
of consummate duplicity, and that she manœuvred to receive the
benefits of Mary’s death without incurring the odium of its
authority. There is no personage in history whose character has
been the subject of more controversy. A school of English
historical critics, among whom are Carlyle, Froude, and Kingsley,
stigmatize her as the incarnation of all that was brilliantly
wicked; while others, equally distinguished, soften her errors and
eulogize her virtues as the victim of circumstances, and one “far
more sinned against than sinning.”]
Her change of abode and situation was very little agreeable to the
Scottish princess. Besides her natural preposessions in favor of a
country in which she had been educated from her earliest infancy, and
where she had borne so high a rank, she could not forbear both
regretting the society of that people, so celebrated for their humane
disposition and their respectful attachment to their sovereign, and
reflecting on the disparity of the scene which lay before her. It is
said that, after she was embarked at Calais, she kept her eyes fixed on
the coast of France, and never turned them from that beloved object till
darkness fell and intercepted it from her view. She then ordered a couch
to be spread for her in the open air, and charged the pilot that if in
the morning the land were still in sight, he should awake her, and
afford her one parting view of that country in which all her affections
were centered. The weather proved calm, so that the ship made little way
in the night-time, and Mary had once more an opportunity of seeing the
French coast. She sat up on her couch, and, still looking toward the
land, often repeated these words: “Farewell, France, farewell; I shall
never see thee more.”
The first aspect, however, of things in Scotland was more favorable, if
not to her pleasure and happiness, at least to her repose and security,
than she had reason to apprehend. No sooner did the French galleys
appear off Leith, than people of all ranks, who had long expected their
arrival, flocked toward the shore with an earnest impatience to behold
and receive their young sovereign. Some were led by duty, some by
interest, some by curiosity; and all combined to express their
attachment to her, and to insinuate themselves into her confidence on
the commencement of her administration. She had now reached her
nineteenth year, and the bloom of her youth and amiable beauty of her
person were further recommended by the affability of her address, the
politeness of her manners, and the elegance of her genius. Well
accomplished in all the superficial but engaging graces of a court, she
afforded, when better known, still more promising indications of her
character; and men prognosticated both humanity from her soft and
obliging deportment, and penetration from her taste in all the refined
arts of music, eloquence, and poetry. And as the Scots had long been
deprived of the presence of their sovereign, whom they once despaired
ever more to behold among them, her arrival seemed to give universal
satisfaction; and nothing appeared about the court but symptoms of
affection, joy, and festivity.
But there was one circumstance which blasted all these promising
appearances, and bereaved Mary of that general favor which her
agreeable manners and judicious deportment gave her just reason to
expect. She was still a papist; and though she published, soon after her
arrival, a proclamation enjoining every one to submit to the established
religion, the preachers and their adherents could neither be reconciled
to a person polluted with so great an abomination, nor lay aside their
jealousies of her future conduct. It was with great difficulty she could
obtain permission for saying mass in her own chapel; and had not the
people apprehended that, if she had here met with a refusal, she would
instantly have returned to France, the zealots never would have granted
her even that small indulgence. The cry was, “Shall we suffer that idol
to be again erected within the realm?”
The whole life of Mary was, from the demeanor of these men, filled with
bitterness and sorrow. The rustic apostle John Knox scruples not, in his
history, to inform us that he once treated her with such severity that
she lost all command of temper, and dissolved in tears before him; yet,
so far from being moved with youth and beauty, and royal dignity reduced
to that condition, he persevered in his insolent reproofs; and when he
relates this incident, he discovers a visible pride and satisfaction in
his own conduct. The pulpits had become mere scenes of railing against
the vices of the court; among which were always noted, as the principal,
feasting, finery, dancing, balls, and whoredom, their necessary
attendant. Some ornaments which the ladies at that time wore upon their
petticoats, excited mightily the indignation of the preachers; and they
affirmed that such vanity would provoke God’s vengeance, not only
against these foolish women but against the whole realm.
Mary, whose age, condition, and education invited her to liberty and
cheerfulness, was curbed in all amusements by the absurd severity of
these reformers; and she found, every moment, reason to regret her
leaving that country from whose manners she had, in her early youth,
received the first impressions. Her two uncles, the Duke of Aumale and
the Grand Prior, with the other French nobility, soon took leave of her;
the Marquis of Elbeuf remained some time longer; but after his departure
she was left to the society of her own subjects--men unacquainted with
the pleasures of conversation, ignorant of arts and civility, and
corrupted beyond their usual rusticity by a dismal fanaticism, which
rendered them incapable of all humanity or improvement. Though Mary had
made no attempt to restore the ancient religion, her popery was a
sufficient crime; though her behavior was hitherto irreproachable, and
her manners sweet and engaging, her gayety and ease were interpreted as
signs of dissolute vanity; and to the harsh and preposterous usage which
this princess met with may in part be ascribed those errors of her
subsequent conduct, which seemed so little of a piece with the general
tenor of her character.
Mary was a woman of great accomplishments both of body and mind, natural
as well as acquired, but unfortunate in her life, and during one period
very unhappy in her conduct. The beauties of her person and graces of
her air combined to make her the most amiable of women; and the charms
of her address and conversation aided the impression which her lovely
figure made on the hearts of all beholders. Ambitious and active in her
temper, yet inclined to cheerfulness and society; of a lofty spirit,
constant and even vehement in her purpose, yet polite, and gentle, and
affable in her demeanor, she seemed to partake only so much of the male
virtues as to render her estimable, without relinquishing those soft
graces which compose the proper ornament of her sex.
In order to form a just idea of her character, we must set aside one
part of her conduct, while she abandoned herself to the guidance of a
profligate man, and must consider these faults, whether we admit them to
be imprudences or crimes, as the result of an inexplicable though not
uncommon inconstancy in the human mind, of the frailty of our nature, of
the violence of passion, and of the influence which situations, and
sometimes momentary incidents, have on persons whose principles are not
thoroughly confirmed by experience and reflection. Enraged by the
ungrateful conduct of her husband, seduced by the treacherous counsels
of one in whom she reposed confidence, transported by the violence of
her own temper, which never lay sufficiently under the guidance of
discretion, she was betrayed into actions which may with some difficulty
be accounted for, but which admit of no apology, nor even of
alleviation. An enumeration of her qualities might carry the appearance
of a panegyric; an account of her conduct must in some parts wear the
aspect of severe satire and invective.
Her numerous misfortunes, the solitude of her long and tedious
captivity, and the persecutions to which she had been exposed on account
of her religion, had wrought her up to a degree of bigotry during her
later years; and such were the prevalent spirit and principles of the
age, that it is the less wonder if her zeal, her resentment, and her
interest uniting, induced her to give consent to a design which
conspirators, actuated only by the first of these motives, had formed
against the life of Elizabeth.
JOHN PYM.
BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[Born 1584, died in 1643. Leader of the House of Commons in its
contest with Charles I, he was the most able and indefatigable
opponent of royal usurpation, and the most active agent in the
impeachment of the Earl of Strafford. From a pamphlet written just
before his death, when war in the field had begun between king and
people, it seems doubtful whether he would not in the end have
resisted the usurpation of power by Cromwell and the Independents,
and supported the king as the least of two evils.]
If Strafford embodied the spirit of tyranny, John Pym, the leader of the
Commons from the first meeting of the new houses at Westminster, stands
out for all after time as the embodiment of law. A Somersetshire
gentleman of good birth and competent fortune, he entered on public life
in the Parliament of 1614, and was imprisoned for his patriotism at its
close. He had been a leading member in that of 1620, and one of the
“twelve ambassadors” for whom James ordered chairs to be set at
Whitehall. Of the band of patriots with whom he had stood side by side
in the constitutional struggle against the earlier despotism of Charles
he was almost the sole survivor. Coke had died of old age; Cotton’s
heart was broken by oppression; Eliot had perished in the tower;
Wentworth had apostatized. Pym alone remained, resolute, patient as of
old; and as the sense of his greatness grew silently during the eleven
years of deepening misrule, the hope and faith of better things clung
almost passionately to the man, who never doubted of the final triumph
of freedom and the law. At their close, Clarendon tells us, in words all
the more notable for their bitter tone of hate, “he was the most popular
man, and the most able to do hurt, that has lived at any time.”
He had shown he knew how to wait, and when waiting was over he showed he
knew how to act. On the eve of the Long Parliament he rode through
England to quicken the electors to a sense of the crisis which had come
at last; and on the assembling of the Commons, he took his place not
merely as member for Tavistock but as their acknowledged head. Few of
the country gentlemen, indeed, who formed the bulk of the members, had
sat in any previous House; and of the few, none represented in so
eminent a way the parliamentary tradition on which the coming struggle
was to turn. Pym’s eloquence, inferior in boldness and originality to
that of Eliot or Wentworth, was better suited by its massive and
logical force to convince and guide a great party; and it was backed by
a calmness of temper, a dexterity and order in the management of public
business, and a practical power of shaping the course of debate, which
gave a form and method to parliamentary proceedings such as they had
never had before. Valuable, however, as these qualities were, it was a
yet higher quality which raised Pym into the greatest, as he was the
first, of parliamentary leaders.
Of the five hundred members who sat round him at St. Stephen’s, he was
the one man who had clearly foreseen, and as clearly resolved how to
meet, the difficulties which lay before them. It was certain that
Parliament would be drawn into a struggle with the Crown. It was
probable that in such a struggle the House of Commons would be hampered,
as it had been hampered before, by the House of Lords. The legal
antiquaries of the older constitutional school stood helpless before
such a conflict of co-ordinate powers--a conflict for which no provision
had been made by the law, and on which precedents threw only a doubtful
and conflicting light. But, with a knowledge of precedent as great as
their own, Pym rose high above them in his grasp of constitutional
principles. He was the first English statesman who discovered, and
applied to the political circumstances around him, what may be called
the doctrine of constitutional proportion. He saw that, as an element of
constitutional life, Parliament was of higher value than the Crown; he
saw, too, that in Parliament itself the one essential part was the House
of Commons. On these two facts he based his whole policy in the contest
which followed.
When Charles refused to act with the Parliament, Pym treated the refusal
as a temporary abdication on the part of the sovereign, which vested the
executive power in the two Houses until new arrangements were made. When
the Lords obstructed public business, he warned them that obstruction
would only force the Commons “to save the kingdom alone.” Revolutionary
as these principles seemed at the time, they have both been recognized
as bases of our constitution since the days of Pym. The first principle
was established by the Convention and Parliament which followed on the
departure of James II; the second by the acknowledgement on all sides,
since the Reform Bill of 1832, that the government of the country is
really in the hands of the House of Commons, and can only be carried on
by ministers who represent the majority of that House. Pym’s temper,
indeed, was the very opposite of the temper of a revolutionist. Few
natures have ever been wider in their range of sympathy or action.
Serious as his purpose was, his manners were genial, and even courtly;
he turned easily from an invective against Strafford to a chat with Lady
Carlisle; and the grace and gayety of his social tone, even when the
care and weight of public affairs were bringing him to the grave, gave
rise to a hundred silly scandals among the prurient royalists. It was
this striking combination of genial versatility with a massive force in
his nature which marked him out from the first moment of power as a born
ruler of men. He proved himself at once the subtlest of diplomatists and
the grandest of demagogues. He was equally at home in tracking the
subtle intricacies of royalist intrigues, or in kindling popular passion
with words of fire. Though past middle life when his work really
began--for he was born in 1584, four years before the coming of the
Armada--he displayed from the first meeting of the Long Parliament the
qualities of a great administrator, an immense faculty for labor, a
genius for organization, patience, tact, a power of inspiring confidence
in all whom he touched, calmness and moderation under good fortune or
ill, an immovable courage, an iron will. No English ruler has ever shown
greater nobleness of natural temper or a wider capacity for government
than the Somersetshire squire, whom his enemies, made clear-sighted by
their hate, greeted truly enough as “King Pym.”
HENRY IV, KING OF FRANCE.
BY JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.
[First French king of the Bourbon family, born king of Navarre
1553, assassinated 1610. Educated a Huguenot, he, as representing
this religious party, was married to Marguerite de Valois, the
sister of Charles IX, to signalize the pretended reconciliation of
religious differences, a few days before the massacre of St.
Bartholomew. For four years he was detained at the French court and
compelled to abjure his faith, till he succeeded in escaping and
putting himself at the head of the Protestant forces. After a life
of remarkable vicissitudes, Henry of Navarre became _de jure_ king
of France as the next of surviving blood after Henry III, but was
not crowned till 1794, at which time he, for political reasons,
again and finally abjured Protestantism. Paris, and shortly
afterward the whole of France, then submitted to his rule. During
his reign of sixteen years Henry showed the highest qualities of
the great ruler, and his genius promised to make him as powerful a
potentate as Charles V had been, when he fell by the knife of the
assassin Ravaillac.]
At his very name a figure seems to leap forth from the mist of three
centuries, instinct with ruddy, vigorous life. Such was the intense
vitality of the Bearnese prince, that even now he seems more thoroughly
alive and recognizable than half the actual personages who are fretting
their hour upon the stage.
We see at once a man of moderate stature, light, sinewy, and strong; a
face browned with continual exposure; small, mirthful, yet commanding
blue eyes, glittering from beneath an arching brow, and prominent
cheek-bones; a long, hawk’s nose, almost resting upon a salient chin; a
pendent mustache, and a thick, brown, curly beard, prematurely grizzled;
we see the mien of frank authority and magnificent good-humor; we hear
the ready sallies of the shrewd Gascon mother-wit; we feel the
electricity which flashes out of him and sets all hearts around him on
fire, when the trumpet sounds to battle. The headlong, desperate
charge, the snow-white plume waving where the fire is hottest, the large
capacity for enjoyment of the man, rioting without affectation in the
_certaminis gaudia_, the insane gallop, after the combat, to lay its
trophies at the feet of the Cynthia of the minute, and thus to forfeit
its fruits--all are as familiar to us as if the seven distinct wars, the
hundred pitched battles, the two hundred sieges, in which the Bearnese
was personally present, had been occurrences of our own day.
He at last was both king and man, if the monarch who occupied the throne
was neither. He was the man to prove, too, for the instruction of the
patient letter-writer of the Escorial,[24] that the crown of France was
to be won with foot in stirrup and carbine in hand, rather than to be
caught by the weaving and casting of the most intricate nets of
diplomatic intrigue, though thoroughly weighted with Mexican gold.
The king of Navarre was now thirty-one years old; for the three Henrys
were nearly of the same age. The first indications of his existence had
been recognized amid the cannon and trumpets of a camp in Picardy, and
his mother had sung a gay Bearnese song as he was coming into the world
at Pau. “Thus,” said his grandfather, Henry of Navarre, “thou shalt not
bear to us a morose and sulky child.” The good king without a kingdom,
taking the child as soon as born in the lappel of his dressing-gown, had
brushed his infant lips with a clove of garlic and moistened them with a
drop of generous Gascon wine. “Thus,” said the grandfather again, “shall
the boy be both merry and bold.” There was something mythologically
prophetic in the incidents of his birth.
The best part of Navarre had been long since appropriated by Ferdinand
of Aragon. In France there reigned a young and warlike sovereign with
four healthy boys. But the newborn infant had inherited the lilies of
France from St. Louis, and a later ancestor had added to the escutcheon
the motto “_Espoir_.” His grandfather believed that the boy was born to
revenge upon Spain the wrongs of the house of Albret, and Henry’s nature
seemed ever pervaded with Robert of Clermont’s device.
The same sensible grandfather, having different views on the subject of
education from those manifested by Catharine de Medici toward her
children, had the boy taught to run about bareheaded and barefooted,
like a peasant, among the mountains and rocks of Béarn, till he became
as rugged as a young bear and as nimble as a kid. Black bread and beef
and garlic were his simple fare; and he was taught by his mother and his
grandfather to hate lies and liars, and to read the Bible.
When he was fifteen, the third religious war broke out. Both his father
and grandfather were dead. His mother, who had openly professed the
Reformed faith since the death of her husband, who hated it, brought her
boy to the camp at Rochelle, where he was received as the chief of the
Huguenots. His culture was not extensive. He had learned to speak the
truth, to ride, to shoot, to do with little sleep and less food. He
could also construe a little Latin, and had read a few military
treatises; but the mighty hours of an eventful life were now to take him
by the hand and to teach him much good and much evil, as they bore him
onward. He now saw military treatises expounded practically by
professors like his uncle Condé, and Admiral Coligny, and Lewis Nassau
in such lecture rooms as Laudun, and Jarnac, and Moncontour, and never
was apter scholar.
The peace of Arnay-le-Duc succeeded, and then the fatal Bartholomew
marriage with the Messalina of Valois. The faith taught in the mountains
of Béarn was no buckler against the demand of “The mass, or death!”
thundered at his breast by the lunatic Charles, as he pointed to
thousands of massacred Huguenots. Henry yielded to such conclusive
arguments, and became a Catholic. Four years of court-imprisonment
succeeded, and the young king of Navarre, though proof to the artifices
of his gossip Guise, was not adamant to the temptations spread for him
by Catharine de Medici. In the harem entertained for him in the Louvre,
many pitfalls entrapped him, and he became a stock-performer in the
state comedies and tragedies of that plotting age.