and who, with the injustice which so frequently accompanies the abounding
self-importance of masculinity, would deprive women not only of "equality
of sphere" but "equality of opportunity," may study the character of Henry
and Elizabeth with great advantage. Human beings are first of all divided
(I have elsewhere contended) into certain types of character and only
afterwards into men and women. Many men are by nature devoted lovers and
parents and friends; many women are not. Elizabeth was one of a number--a
large number--of women who have, it may be, many of the qualities which
tell in practical and public life, and but little of the emotion which
wells up in true wifehood and motherhood and friendship.
Henry and Elizabeth stand far above the average level of rulers. In
sagacity, in tact and in statesmanship only two of their successors can
compare with them. But the methods of Oliver Cromwell and William III.
were very different from the Tudor methods. Cromwell and William strove to
be guided by what they sincerely held to be lofty principles. Henry and
Elizabeth were guided merely, though wisely guided, by the fineness of
their instincts. Fine instincts were perhaps better fitted for the earlier
time, and lofty principles for the later. It is easier, alas, to bungle in
formulating and in applying principles than in trusting to adroitness and
intuitions.
All the elements of character which Henry possessed were found also in
Elizabeth, and many of these elements, though not all, they possessed in
equal degree. They were alike in capacity, courage, sincerity,
versatility, industry; alike in their conservative proclivities and also
in their love of pageantry--for Elizabeth, like Henry, revelled in public
business and in public pleasures; she delighted in progresses, shows,
masks and plays. They were alike, too, in their sense of duty, in their
desire for the welfare of the people, and also in their thirst for the
people's good opinion. But Elizabeth, although she had immense
self-importance (she heartily approved of the queen and, heartily indeed,
of nothing else), was perhaps less self-confident than her father. She was
not quite comfortable in her headship of the Church--but then she had not
been educated for the Church as her father had been, and she did not
possess her father's devotional nature. Her conduct was however more
decorous than her father's, notwithstanding that she was distinctly less
religious than he--less religious in principle, in inward conviction and
in outward worship. If she was less devout than Henry she had however a
larger share of fitfulness than even he. The historian who more vividly
than any other has placed the Tudor time before us speaks of Elizabeth's
"ingrained insincerity;" the words "ingrained fitfulness" would perhaps be
more correct, for she was in truth as sincere as her fitfulness permitted
her to be. Although it is true she was not without--no one at that time
was quite without--insincerity and intrigue and duplicity and falsehood in
her diplomatic methods, she was fairly sincere in her views and aims and
conduct. But unfortunately her views and aims and conduct were constantly
changing. She was sincere too easily and too frequently. She had a dozen
fits of sincerity in a dozen hours. Whenever she sent a message, no matter
how carefully the message had been considered, a second was sent to recall
or change it, and very shortly a third messenger would be despatched in
pursuit of the second. Urgent and critical circumstance alone, and
frequently not even this, forced upon her any conclusive action. I am
compelled to agree with those who believe that the most distressing
incident of her life was the final decision touching Mary Stuart's death:
it was distressing on several grounds--she was not naturally cruel, or,
like her father, cruel to those only who stood in her path; she did not
like to kill a queen; and, above all, she hated to do anything which (like
marriage, to wit) could not be undone. Elizabeth was compelled by
temperament to be always doing something, but by temperament also she was
always reluctant to get anything done. In her two bushels of occupation
there were not two grains of performance.
Her extreme fitfulness had at least one fortunate result--it saved many
lives. Henry's frequent change of view and of policy was unquestionable,
but the change was slow enough to give to the ever-watchful enemies of a
fallen minister time enough to tear the fallen minister to pieces. But if
a minister of Elizabeth's fell, his head was in little danger: if he fell
from favour to-day, he was restored to-morrow. He might trip twenty times,
and as many times his rivals would be on the alert; but twenty pardons
would be granted all in good time.
Touching the question of marriage the queen was far wiser than her father.
Neither father nor daughter had the needful qualities which go to make
marriage happy, and both had certain other qualities which in many cases
make it an intolerable burden. Henry, unlike Elizabeth, did not discover
this, for his perceptive powers generally were less acute than hers. She
probably knew that in her inmost heart (her brain was sufficiently acute
to gain a glimpse of what was in her heart and what was not) she was a
stranger to the deep and sustained affections without which marriage is so
often a cruel deception. She had admirers and favourites it is true; and,
after the fashion of the time, was unseemly enough in her fits of romping
and her fits of pettishness. But there has not yet been anywhere, or at
any time, under the sun a healthful temperament which has objected to
admiration and entertainment, and probably there never will be.
Elizabeth's attitude to the religious condition of her people marks a
decided movement, if not an onward movement: for we must never forget that
a multitude of high-minded and capable souls believe that the several
steps of the Reformation were downward steps. But what were the steps, and
what especially was Elizabeth's step? The popes (and their times) had
said, _in effect_, you need not read and you must not think or inquire;
your duty is to obey and believe. Henry (and his time) said, you may think
and you may read, especially if your reading enables you to understand the
King, but you must believe what the King believes and worship as the King
worships. Elizabeth (and her times), still more at the mercy of rising
Teutonic waves, exclaimed, you may think and read and inquire and believe
as you like--especially as you insist upon doing so--but you really must,
all of you, go to church with me on Sunday mornings. Elizabeth's
church-going act, by the bye, is still unrepealed. Long after, William
III. (and his time, though William was before his time) said, you may
think, read, believe, and publicly worship as you will, but you must
believe something and you must worship somewhere. John Milton, before
William in time and long before him in largeness of view, was the one
colossal figure who fought bravely and single-handed for freedom in every
domain of thought and speech and conduct.
The Tudor time, more than any other in our history, lends itself to the
study of character; a study which, although difficult, is the less
difficult in that whatever of change may take place, old elements of
character do not altogether disappear and entirely new elements do not
make their appearance. These elements lie everywhere around us. A great
writer and an acute observer of men declares indeed that we all contain
the elements of a Luther and a Borgia (his ideal of the best and worst
elements), and that if a man cannot see these near at hand he will not
find them though he travel from Dan to Beersheba. The Tudor and the Stuart
periods alike present remarkable persons and remarkable incidents; but in
the earlier period the men and women were more striking than the events,
while events attract our attention more than individuals in the later.
With the Tudors men and women seemed to lead, for men and women were
proportionately the stronger; circumstance seemed to be the stronger in
the Stuart times.
No century contains three royal figures so striking in themselves and so
clearly revealed to us as are the figures of Henry and Elizabeth and Mary
in the sixteenth. Their capability, their vitality and their attainments
would have made them striking persons in any position of life. Each,
indeed, possessed the three qualities which make a really interesting
personality--and such personalities are but a small proportion of the
neutral-tinted multitude who are good and kind and industrious--and
nothing more. They, the three personalities, could all see facts for
themselves; they could all see the relative value of facts (the rarest of
the three qualities); and they could all draw sound inferences from the
larger facts.
The three individuals presented however but two types of character. Henry
and Elizabeth were examples of one type and Mary of another. The Tudor
father and daughter were, as we have already seen, not examples merely but
_extreme_ examples of the unimpassioned, ever active, ever visible class.
Mary was as extreme an example of the impassioned, meditative, persistent
and tenacious class. It was a remarkable coincidence that pitted two such
mental and bodily extremes against each other. All sane human beings have
much more of that which is common to the character of the race than they
have of that which is peculiar to the individual. There was not only this
common basis of human nature in Elizabeth and Mary, there was something
more: both were singularly capable, brilliant, witty and brave (Mary being
the braver and her bravery being the more tried). The two queens had
certain unusual advantages in common, for both were educated to the
highest ideal of female education--very curiously a higher ideal then than
at any other time before, or even since, until our own generation; both,
too, had much experience of life--the larger and the less elevating share
falling to Mary's lot. But here the resemblance ceases. What in Elizabeth
Tudor were slight though shrill rivulets of love and hate and anger and
scorn and jealousy, or of pity or gratitude, were mighty and rushing
torrents in Mary Stuart. We have seen what Elizabeth was: in many ways
Mary was the exact opposite, for she was not at all given to bustle or
change or acrimony or captiousness or suspicion. She was not, it is true,
without vanity; she had ample grounds for having it and she was deeply
human, but (it was not so with Elizabeth) her pride was even greater than
her vanity.
The elements which met together in Mary were all of a finer quality than
those which were found in Elizabeth; but in Mary some troublous elements
were added to the choicer ones. In her high land there were ominous
volcanic peaks, while in the decorous plain of Elizabeth's character there
was a monotonous blending of vegetation and sand. In some of our greatest
characters (the truism is well-worn) there have been grave defects. Burns'
life never comes to any generous mind save with the deepest regret as well
as the keenest admiration. Bacon's was a great mind with a great fault.
Shakspere and Goethe--the two foremost spirits which time has yet given to
us--are not held to have led altogether stainless lives. Now the Queen of
Scots was not by any means one of the immortals, but she was nevertheless
and in truth a great woman. Yet in the splendid block out of which the
ever-pathetic figure of Mary was chiselled there came to light an
ineradicable flaw. The good and evil of all these characters were mainly,
though not wholly (for circumstance must not be forgotten), due to
organisation and inheritance. A little difference in their organisation,
and they would have been other individuals than they were, and would most
likely have remained unknown to us; but having the parentage they had, and
being what they were, a little difference in circumstance would probably
have mattered little. What there was in each of organisation, what of
circumstance, and what of volition, is a problem the solution of which is
still far off. In all of them volition, whatever that may be, did its
best; organisation, let us say, did its worst; circumstance looked on,
helping here and hindering there,--the compromise is history.
As the six-wives business clings to Henry's name, so does the Darnley
matter, though curiously with less odium, cling to that of Mary. Henry has
had no friends save those who lived in or near his time. In our time an
inquirer, here or there, strives perhaps to gain for him something of
impartial judgment. Mary has never been without warm friends, and her
friends seem to grow in number and in warmth. The controversy still rages
touching Mary's part in the tragic event which inflicted so deep a wound
into her life. But although the controversy goes on at even fever heat,
the public judgment remains cool and is probably just. It is kept cool
and just by the weight of a few colossal truths which the deftest
manipulation of a cloud of smaller truths cannot hide. At critical moments
the physiological historian, who looks steadily at a few large incidents
in the light of human nature, discovers clues which escape the vision of
the purely literary historian, who is for ever diving--and usefully
diving--into the wells of parchment detail. In reality it matters little
whether this diver or that has dived most deeply; matters little whether
certain documents are spurious or genuine. Mary Stuart accepted--she
certainly did not reject--the passion of a certain man; that man was a
leader among a number of men who murdered her husband; after the murder
Mary Stuart married that particular man, and thereby most assuredly held a
candle to murder. This was Mary. Now if everything that has been said in
her favour could be proved, she would be but little better than this; if
everything that has been said against her could be proved, she would be
but little worse.
The student of historic characters never forgets the time the country and
the circumstance in which his characters lived. We are now looking at a
time when not only noble and ignoble characters existed side by side, but
when noble and less noble elements existed together in one and the same
character. For indeed the good elements of a better time come in slowly,
and the evil elements of a bad past die a lingering death. The active
Scotland (there was, we know, a good quiet Scotland in the background),
the active Scotland of Tudor times was given over to factions, fanatics,
self-seekers and assassins. Life was taken and given with scant ceremony.
The highest personages of that time contrived murder, or sanctioned it,
or forgave it--the popes did, continental sovereigns did, Henry did,
Elizabeth did. The murders thus contrived or sanctioned or condoned were,
it is true, mainly on behalf of thrones or dominions or religions, while
the murder which Mary assuredly forgave, if she did not sanction, was on
behalf of her passions. The moral difference between murder for a crown
and murder for a love we may not now discuss.
It was to this Scotland, the active and factious Scotland just described,
that the young queen of nineteen years was brought--brought from a
different atmosphere and with an unpropitious training. The more favoured
Elizabeth meanwhile was ruling over a quieter, a more united people, and
was helped at her council-table by high-minded and unselfish men. It is
useless now perhaps to ask if we may be allowed to admire the gifts, to
deplore the faults, and to pity the fate of the more unfortunate queen. We
can indeed, individually, do what we please, but the queen's posterity
with no uncertain voice has declared that we may. Emerson says that the
great soul of the world is just, and the great soul has kept Mary within
the territory of its favour. It would seem that the affection and devotion
which were given to Mary were not based on any single great or on any
group of great actions; they were based (it is to her credit) on daily
acts of kindliness and patience and unruffled grace. The sum of Mary's
qualities, whatever they were, endowed her with the rare gift of making
the world her friend; and the world does not, as a rule, make lasting
friendships on insufficient grounds. Mary indeed, with all her faults,
deserved a better country than Scotland; and England, it may be added,
deserved a more gracious queen than Elizabeth. But whatever she deserved
or whatever she was fitted for, Mary's fate was destined to be one of the
saddest of recorded time. Inward force and outer circumstance are so
commingled that mortal reason fails to disentangle them. To-day men _seem_
to put a curb on circumstance, and to-morrow circumstance _seems_ to run
away with men. An ocean of complex and imperious circumstance surged
around two queens, one it lifted up and kept afloat and carried into a
secure haven, the other it tossed mercilessly to and fro and finally drew
her underneath its waves.
A number of leading Scottish nobles gave out and probably believed that
the wretched Darnley's life was incompatible with the general good.
Bothwell was but one of this number. Yet how clear it has ever been to all
eyes, save to those of the blindly passionate actors themselves, that the
Scottish queen's fatal error, even if there were no grave error before,
was in marrying any one of the misguided band. But misguidance was in the
ascendant. Could she by some magic web have concealed the husbands from
each other and have married them all, she would at any rate have fared no
worse than she did. But, to be serious, if a queen marries one of half a
dozen ambitious assassins, the other five will assuredly make her life
intolerable and her rule impossible.
In no aspect of character did the two queens differ more than in their
attitude to religion. Elizabeth's piety, like her father's, though less
deep than his, was of a similar passionless, perceptive, unreflective
order. Mary's religion, like Elizabeth's, like that of all individuals in
all parts of the world, was no doubt at first the product of her early
surroundings; but with the Scottish queen it was much more than this--it
was a profoundly passionate conviction and a deeply revered ideal. A
living writer, who is perhaps unrivalled in the historic art and who
rarely errs in his historic judgments, is less happy than is his wont in
his verdict on the catholic queen. He avers that she had no share "in the
deeper and nobler emotions;" yet almost in the same breath he states that
she had "a purpose fixed as the stars to trample down the Reformation." To
have a purpose "fixed as the stars" to trample down _one_ religion was, in
that age of the world, surely to have a purpose "fixed as the stars" to
strengthen and protect _another_; to yearn to put down the Reformation was
surely to yearn to bring in catholicism--catholic teaching and catholic
rites and catholic rule. We may not be catholics, but we are not entitled
to say that from an impassioned catholic woman's point of view this was
not a high ideal; it had been the ideal of the judicial mind, Sir Thomas
More, as well as the ideal of the enthusiast, Ignatius Loyola; it had been
for a thousand years the ideal of a multitude of noble natures both men
and women. Elizabeth, opportunely enough, had no ideals of any kind;
ideals indeed are often inconvenient in a ruler; but she had, despite her
acrimonious speech, plenty of sincerely good wishes and good intentions
for all the world. If the Queen of England had no ideals she had many
devices, and one was to check the flow of all sorts of zeal, especially
Protestant zeal. In the two lives religion told in different ways--the
difference was in the two natures, be it noted, not in the two religions.
Elizabeth, with a skin-deep religion only, was evenly and enduringly
virtuous. Mary had ardent and deep convictions, but her career was not one
of unbroken virtue. Elizabeth was certainly unfortunate in her religious
attitudes. She did not like the Protestants for she was not a good
Protestant; the Catholics did not like her for she was not a good
Catholic. In religion, indeed as in all things, she was greatly influenced
by her inborn spirit of "contrariness." If the Catholics had intrigued
less persistently against her throne and her life, and if (the idea is
sufficiently ludicrous) the Queen of Scotland had chanced to run in
harness with the hated John Knox (hated of both queens), she would gladly
have given the rein to her Catholic impulses.
The two queens differed as much in body as in mind. I have elsewhere
sought to show not only that certain leading features of character tend to
run together (in itself a distinct contribution to our knowledge), but
also that these allied features are associated with a group of bodily
peculiarities, a contribution, if it really is a contribution, of greatly
additional interest. Elizabeth, large and pink-skinned like her father,
was by no means without impressiveness and even stateliness. She carried
her head a little forward and her chin a little downward, both these
positions being due to a slightly curved upper spine. Her hair was scanty
and her eyebrows were practically absent. All these bodily items, as well
as her mental items, she inherited from her father. Mary had a wholly
different figure and a different presence; her head was upright, her spine
straight; in her back there was no convexity either vertically or
transversely. Her eyebrows were abundant and her head of hair was long and
massive. All these peculiarities, too, we may be quite sure, she derived
from her parentage (not necessarily the nearest parents) on one side or
the other. In my little work on body and parentage in character I urge--it
is well to say here--that the bodily signs of certain classes of character
(two more marked and one intervening) are now and then subject to the
modifying influences of ailment and accident, and especially when these
happen in early life. In Elizabeth and Mary, however, no such influences
disturbed the development of two strongly-marked examples, both in body
and in character, of two large classes of women and, with but little
alteration, of two large classes of men also.
[FOR INDEX SEE FULL TABLE OF CONTENTS.]
HALL & ENGLISH, Printers, No. 71, High Street, Birmingham.