NASEBY
The battle of Naseby was, perhaps, the anticipative preventive of
an English “French Revolution.” The difference between Cromwell’s
Ironsides and the gay Frondeurs measures the difference between the
English people and the French.
Charles I. aimed to be in England what Louis XIV. was in France.
Both fully believed in the divine right of Kings; both quoted
as their favorite text of Scripture, “Where the word of a King
is there is power; and who may say unto him ‘What doest thou?’”
But Louis dealt with the fickle Frondeurs and Charles with
Cromwell’s Ironsides; and this racial difference had as divergent
results--absolutism for Louis le Grand and the block for Charles
Stuart.
There will always be difference of opinion as to Cromwell’s
place in history. Was he liberator or tyrant, Christian ruler or
barbarously fanatic despot? There can be but one opinion as to the
injustice of the trial, condemnation, and death of Charles. The
Rump Parliament was certainly not representative of England. It was
Cromwell’s creature as arbitrarily as ever the Star Chamber was
Charles’.
“Must crimes be punished but by other crimes, and greater
criminals?”--Byron.
But as a force in favor of constitutional government and civic
liberty, however abused in immediate practice; and as a threatening
protest against the abuse of power in high places; and as a veiled
challenge of defiance to every absolute monarch--the battle fought
June 14, 1645, at Naseby, Northamptonshire, between the Royalists
under Charles I. and the Parliamentarians under Fairfax must ever
be considered a victory decisive and for all time advantageous.
QUEEN HENRIETTA MARIA.
Henrietta Maria was the daughter of Henry IV. of France, the first
Bourbon, and his second wife, Maria de Medici. At the age of
fifteen she was married to Charles I. of England; and her best and
happiest years as wife, mother, and Queen were spent in England.
In this princess many of the leading Italian, French and English
characteristics were met and happily blended. Her dark, lithe
beauty (as shown in her portrait by Van Dyke), her musical ability,
instrumental and vocal, her fiery-hearted fidelity to the religion
of her mother, were, perhaps, her heritage from sunny Italy; the
France of Richelieu might, as an environment, conduce favorably
to that diplomatic waywardness which, in early years, invariably
won for the sweet girl-wife whatsoever her heart might desire; but
perhaps from England, land of realism, chilly fogs, and Cromwellian
barbarity, she imbibed her sturdy spirit of fortitude and heroic
endurance of sorrow.
“To bear is to conquer our fate”, and to refuse to bear and to
apparently end all by self-destruction, is to fail to conquer our
fate.
The hopes and promises of religion are of inestimable value as an
aid in the endurance of sorrows. When the dread culmination of all
earthly fears and horrors--the beheading of Charles I.--clashed
full upon the widowed heart of Queen Henrietta Maria, she withdrew
at once from the court of Paris and sought solace in seclusion and
prayer. The convent, not the court; the divine, not the human; the
hopes and promises of religion as red-glowed in the sanctuary of a
Carmelite convent chapel, held the balm that soothed her wounded
soul in that awful culminant woe.
Which is better--to bear or to fail to bear? to hope and endure
or despair and die? to pray and bless God saying, _The Lord gave
and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord_, or
to wither away in cursing and impotent hate? to believe and grow
strongly peaceful in the belief that God is good and all is for the
best; that all is little and short that passes away with time; that
God’s explanation shall exultingly explain forever and ever--or to
doubt, negative, deny, and bitterly live and despairingly die? Even
as a matter of merely human wisdom, it is well to believe in the
hopes and promises of religion.
The monastic sanctuaries that arise wherever the Catholic Church
flourishes, and that lure into their prayerful solitudes the
“hearts that are heavy with losses and weary with dragging the
crosses too heavy for mortals to bear” are surely indicative of a
far higher and happier state of society than that whose godless
defiance finds suicidal expression in the insidious drug, the
deadly acid, the desperate bullet.
The houses of Euthanasia of the near Socialistic future are surely
as stones unto bread in comparison with the monastic sanctuaries of
the Middle Ages.
WONDERS OF PORTRAITS.
How wonderful is the art which can impress upon canvas and so
preserve from generation to generation and from century to century,
a lifelike presentment of men and women whose flesh and blood
realities have long since mouldered dust with dust! The canvas
endures; the man dies?--Ah, no! he has but shuffled off the
earth-garment and left it earth with earth; he lives.
The Van Dyke portraits of Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles I. and
the children of Charles I. are mutely eloquent. The well-known
picture, “Baby Stuart”, a detail from the group, “Children of
Charles I.” suggests the high tide of love and happiness in
the life of Queen Henrietta Maria. She was then surrounded by
everything that heart could desire,--wealth, honor, power, a
husband’s unbounded love and confidence and three beautiful and
most promising children. They were Mary, who later married William,
Prince of Orange; Charles, who, at the Restoration, became the
“Merry Monarch” of England, and James, the baby Stuart, who later
became the unfortunate James II., the monarch who lost his crown,
and whose daughter Mary, wedded to her cousin, William, Prince of
Orange, son of that sister Mary, who, in the portrait, stands at
his side, abetted the deposition of her father and wore his crown.
There is something eloquently pathetic in the portraits of men and
women who have fallen victims to a tragic fate. The principle of
contrast is, doubtless, here at work, setting side by side with the
hour of portrayal that other hour of bitter death. Marie Antoinette
and her children, as fixed upon canvas by the court painter,
Madame Vigee LeBrun, derive their rich tonal qualities--warm
grays and reds, their charm of evanescence, their magically
somber fascination, from the shadows of the Conciergerie and the
guillotine.
The portrait of Charles I. as painted by Van Dyke, must ever
suggest to the thoughtful student of history that scene,
disgraceful alike to the English nation and to human nature which
took place on the scaffold just outside Whitehall Palace.
Yes; there are two sides to every question, and one is a ruler
exercising arbitrary power and impregnated with belief in the
divine right of kings and claiming it his prerogative to break
up his parliament and govern alone; the other is an assembly of
men, nominally a parliament, so narrowly fanatic and steeped in
human hate that they demanded as condition under which they would
agree to levy taxes for Charles I. to use in aid of Protestant
Holland, that he should first order every Catholic priest in his
own realm to be put to death and the property of all Catholics to
be confiscated. Charles refused. This side of the cause of the
rupture between Charles I. and his Parliament has not the historic
prominence of the other side. Why? Not very hard to tell _why_ if
one considers attentively the writers of the history of that period.
“I hope to meet my end with calmness. Do not let us speak of the
men into whose hands I have fallen. They thirst for my blood, they
shall have it. God’s will be done, I give Him thanks. I forgive
them all sincerely, but let us say no more about them”--these words
addressed to Bishop Juxon by Charles a few days before his death
attest the inherent nobility of his nature. Whatever the life of
Charles I. may have been, his death was kingly; and if death is
the echo of life then, too, his life must have been vocal with
virtues. But what virtue can outshine or even illumine the black
chaos of creed-fanaticism, odium, obloquy? What power can break up
and restore to their original settings the half-truths, untruths,
errors and lies glitteringly crystalized in history, drama, story
and song? Does time right ancient wrongs, readjust and make-whole
torn, century-scattered truths? We dream so; we say so; but at
deepest heart we whisper _No_.
With unruffled calmness, with dignity, with kingly grace, Charles
I. stepped from the opening of what had been in happier days his
banqueting hall and advanced upon the scaffold. In the words of
Agnes Strickland:
“It was past 1 o’clock before the grisly attendants and apparatus
of the scaffold were ready. Colonel Hacker led the king through his
former banqueting hall, one of the windows of which had originally
been contrived to support stands for public pageantries; it had
been taken out and led to the platform raised in the street. The
noble bearing of the King as he stepped on the scaffold, his
beaming eyes and high expression, were noticed by all who saw
him. He looked on all sides for his people, but dense masses of
soldiery only presented themselves far and near. He was out of
hearing of any persons but Juxon and Herbert, save those who were
interested in his destruction. The soldiers preserved a dead
silence; this time they did not insult him. The distant populace
wept, and occasionally raised mournful cries in blessings and
prayers for him. The king uttered a short speech, to point out that
every institute of the original constitution of England had been
subverted with the sovereign power. While he was speaking someone
touched the axe, which was laid enveloped in black crepe on the
block. The king turned round hastily and exclaimed, ‘Have a care of
the axe. If the edge is spoiled it will be the worse for me.’
“The king put up his flowing hair under a cap; then, turning to
the executor asked, ‘Is any of my hair in the way?’ ‘I beg your
majesty to push it more under your cap,’ replied the man, bowing.
The bishop assisted his royal master to do so and observed to
him: ‘There is but one stage more, which, though turbulent and
troublesome, is yet a very short one. Consider, it will carry you
a great way--even from earth to heaven.’ ‘I go,’ replied the king,
‘from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown.’
“He unfastened his cloak and took off the medallion of the order
of the Garter. The latter he gave to Juxon, saying with emphasis,
‘Remember!’ Beneath the medallion of St. George was a secret spring
which removed a plate ornamented with lilies, under which was a
beautiful miniature of his Henrietta. The warning word, which has
caused many historical surmises, evidently referred to the fact
that he only had parted with the portrait of his beloved wife at
the last moment of his existence. He then took off his coat and put
on his cloak, and pointing to the block, said to the executioner:
‘Place it so that it will not shake.’ ‘It is firm, sir,’ replied
the man. ‘I shall say a short prayer,’ said the king, ‘and when
I hold out my hand thus, strike.’ The king stood in profound
meditation, said a few words to himself, looked upward on the
heavens, then knelt and laid his head on the block. In about a
minute he stretched out his hands, and his head was severed at one
blow.”
SORROW.
News travelled slowly in the days of long ago; and the trial,
death and burial of Charles I. were over long before intelligence
of the dire happenings in England had been carried into France.
Queen Henrietta Maria, then in the Louvre Palace, Paris, had just
received into her motherly arms her second son, James, who had
successfully passed through the belligerent lines and reached
safety in Paris. This joy was soon dulled into woe.
Ominous whispers among the Louvre circle and pitying glances caused
the queen to make inquiries. The worst was soon told. The queen
had expected imprisonment, perhaps even deposition and exile, but
death, the official beheading of an English sovereign--had not once
entered into her mind as among the possibilities. The queen sat
silent and tearless among her sympathizing English attendants. Pere
Gamache approached. She received him apathetically. Her aunt, the
Duchess de Vendome, took her hand and held it caressingly--but the
Queen seemed in a state of frozen woe; no moan, no sigh, no tear.
Pere Gamache withdrew unobserved and searching through the royal
chambers he found the little Princess Henriette, the four-year-old
idol of the once happy Stuart home. Leading the child gently by the
hand, he returned to the scene of grief.
At the touch of baby hands, the impress of childish kisses, the
unhappy Queen seemed slowly to come back to life even as it was,
and clasping her little daughter in rapturous tenderness to her
breast she wept. Long and wildly she wept and the frightened child
weeping responsively and clinging helplessly to her bosom saved her
at last to sanity and to heroic endurance.
Tennyson has beautifully expressed this power of childish love and
helplessness to save a mother from despair:
Home they brought her warrior dead;
She nor swoon’d, nor utter’d cry,
All her maidens, watching said,
“She must weep or she will die.”
Then they praised him, soft and low,
Called him worthy to be loved,
Truest friend and noblest foe;
Yet she neither spoke nor moved.
Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stept
Took the face-cloth from his face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.
Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her knee--
Like summer tempest came her tears--
“Sweet my child, I live for thee.”
A few days later the Queen withdrew from the French court for a
brief period of retirement and prayer in the Carmelite Convent.
MILTON.
While the drama in high places was playing before the world, a more
enduring side scene was enacting in a quiet English home. John
Milton, in political disgrace, in sorrow of soul, and in total
blindness was dictating to his daughters the lines of “Paradise
Lost.” Cromwell and his Roundheads, the Merry Monarch and his
dissolute court, James II. and his sorrows, passed away; the
visions seen by the blind old bard remain.
As literary immortality is the highest prize that fate holds
for mortals it is fitting that the cost of attainment should be
proportionately high. And in this adjustment fate is inexorable.
Heart’s blood and tears wrought into a book give it enduring
qualities: much, much; little, little; some, some; none, none. The
dictum of Horace in the olden day, _Si vis me flere_, etc., is
still the exponent of an author’s power.
That poem by Mrs. Browning, “A Musical Instrument,” has fixed in
rainbow evanescence--a Thoughts’ Niagara Bridal Veil--ten thousand
blending, blinding truths and beauties that prose could never hold
or catch.
Is the prize worth the price? In itself, No; but in the soul-growth
that its mastery implies and in the soul-wealth that it makes one’s
own forever and ever, Yes. Then, too, they to whom Fame shines as
an ever luring star, urging on, on, incessantly even through blood
and tears, are so formed by their fate that the prize seems to them
worth while; its winning seems life’s only good, its loss, life’s
supreme sorrow. “The attractions are proportional to the destinies.”
So who shall judge his unknown neighbor? Who shall justly say,
_Thou fool_ to the man who must needs follow his fate? Who shall
justly pity him whose poverty, disgrace, bitterness of heart, and
blindness of soul and body--lead to the star-luring heights of
literary immortality?
Milton was Latin secretary under Oliver Cromwell and a man of great
influence at the court. He shared in the amnesty proclaimed by
Charles II. at the Restoration. Milton’s remaining years were spent
in retirement and literary labors.
The return of the Stuarts shattered all his hopes, religious and
political. He seemed to see in the Stuart restoration the first
gathering gloom of a darkness which should overwhelm himself,
England, and all the earth. Subjectively this was true. Milton
never saw beyond that gathering cloud; and when the culminant
blackness of his own blindness closed in upon him, then, too, into
a common gloom sank Milton, England and all the earth.
“And darkness shows us worlds by night
We never see by day.”
Would Paradise Lost have been born into literature if Milton had
not become blind?
Would we of today find congenial that Milton of the old Puritanical
day? Do we admire the Miltonic God? Milton liked best his Lucifer,
and that liking elusively throbs through Paradise Lost and elicits
response.
CHARLES II.
There must have been a great measure of compensation to Charles I.
in the filial devotion of his household. It is related that Prince
Charles, eldest son, and heir apparent to the throne, sent to his
father, when in prison, a document _carte blanche_ signed with his
name. And in a letter enclosed the Prince assured his father that
whatever conditions he should see fit to make with Cromwell and his
followers relative to the succession would be agreeable to him, in
token whereof he had signed his name to the document. There was
something heroic in that, and something even more magnanimously
heroic in the response of Charles I. He at once tore the document
to pieces, fearing that the enemy might get possession of it and
make use of it against Prince Charles. He wrote tenderly to his
son, admitting the pleasure his generous offer had given, but
declaring that death would be preferable to any act whereby the
rights of his children should be tampered with or signed away.
It is well to note these nobler actions and emotions in the lives
of kings: the ambitious selfishness and cruelty of a Macbeth, a
King John, a Richard III. are pedestaled for all the world to see;
why not the mutual magnanimity of the Stuarts? Truly the evil that
men do lives after them, the good is oftimes interred with their
bones.
At the death of Cromwell, after a five years’ stormy reign as Lord
Protector of England, and after a twelve years’ exile of the family
of Charles I., the people of England unanimously welcomed the
restoration of the Stuarts. Charles II.--known in France under this
title since the death of Charles I.--was crowned King of England.
The times were troubled. Roundhead and Cavalier still stood at
misunderstanding enmity one directly opposed to the other and never
the twain might meet. The pendulum swung with bewildering rapidity
from harshly somber Cromwellian Puritanism to the excessive
dissipation of the Court of the Merry Monarch: the country followed
the pendulum.
Charles II., while humane on the whole, and more inclined to ease
and pleasure than to troublesome revenge, yet displayed a touch
of the savage in his treatment of the body of Oliver Cromwell. He
ordered that it be disinterred and the head struck off. This was
done; and the ghastly head of the man who had ruled England with a
rod of iron for five years, was fastened to the gibbet at Tyburn.
Horrible is the hate which pursues its victim beyond death and
wreaks vengeance upon an unresisting mass of putrefaction! All such
excesses, no matter by whom committed or under what provocation,
are atavistic expressions of the jackal and the tiger in the heart
of man.
Truly there is no eye that can foresee the future! Cromwell,
passing for the thousandth time through the thoroughfare of
Tyburn, saw not there his own head fastened to a gibbet. Charles
I., at the stately banquet board of Whitehall Palace, saw not the
great end window of the hall opening upon the scaffold. And we,
secure in the hour, see not that other hour of fatal import that
yet shall be; and--’tis well.
DEATH OF QUEEN HENRIETTA.
Queen Henrietta Maria was not present at the scenes of acclamation
which welcomed the return of her son, Charles II. She was at that
time happily absorbed in the forth-coming marriage of her charming
daughter, the Princess Henriette Maria, to Philip, Duke of Orleans,
brother of Louis XIV.
Some time later Queen Henrietta Maria went to England. She resided
there three years, but her heart’s best interests were in sunny
France where her idolized daughter, the Duchess of Orleans, moved
amid the gay court of Versailles as its chief honor and ornament.
Charles II. and his wife, Catherine, of Braganza, reluctantly bade
farewell to the Queen-mother after accompanying her as far as the
Nore; but doubtless there was secret joy in the heart of Henrietta
Maria as the foggy shores of England receded from view and France
arose in expectancy.
Then, too, all seemed calm in England; Charles II. and his wife
were high in popular favor. Her second son, James, Duke of York,
was happily married and surrounded by a promising family. James’
eldest daughter, the Lady Mary, later Queen Mary II. of England,
was a great favorite with the affectionate grandmother, Henrietta
Maria. Anne, James’ second daughter, afterward Queen Anne of
England, was also attached to the kindly old Queen-mother.
The old-age years of Henrietta Maria rolled on in comparative
happiness. Some lives seem to have their sorrows scattered
uniformly over the years, a gentle drizzle, never dazzling
sunlight; other lives are marked by dynamic contrasts--brilliancy,
ecstatic light suddenly blackened by tornado blasts and torn by
lurid lightning, and after that, calm again and even the bright
light.
Queen Henrietta Maria’s tornado blast and searing lightning flash
came full upon her when her husband was beheaded; her later years
were calmly happy. In philanthropic labors, in the exercise of
all the gentle charities of the Christian heart, in the hopeful
fulfilment of religious obligations, the old age years drifted
calmly to the great Calm.
It chanced that at that time the use of opium as a sedative,
narcotic, and harmless medicine was in vogue at the court. M.
Valot, favorite physician of Louis XIV., ordered it for the Queen.
In the best of spirits and laughing at the supposed wonderful
qualities of the new panacea, Henrietta Maria took the prescribed
drug. An hour later she fell into a peaceful slumber; the night
passed and the day passed, and still she slept. Alarm was felt,
her son-in-law, the Duke of Orleans, was soon at her bedside; the
little granddaughter, Anne, was brought near in hopes of arousing
the dormant sensibilities--but in vain. Queen Henrietta had sunk
into the calm; it was too good to leave; she stayed, sank deeper,
deeper, and with a little sigh of relief she died.
BOSSUET’S SERMON.
Jacques Benigne Bossuet, the eloquent pulpit orator of the court of
Louis XIV., added a classic to French literature in his masterly
discourse at the obsequies of Henrietta Maria. It was delivered in
the convent chapel of the nuns of the Visitation of Chaillot, whom
the late Queen particularly favored, and for whom she had founded
the convent.
The nobility of France were gathered together on this occasion, the
“most illustrious assembly of the world” sat spell-bound under the
eloquence of the “Eagle of Meaux.” Bossuet had proved equal to his
opportunity.
Perhaps, though, Bossuet is better known today by that other
funeral oration delivered some months later at the obsequies of
Queen Henrietta Maria’s youngest daughter, Henriette of England,
Duchess of Orleans.
When the old die, well--there can be no Shelleyan lamentation.
“Grief made the young Spring wild,
And she threw down her opening buds
As if she autumn were and they dead leaves.”
--_Shelley._
The young spring may, indeed, thus lavishly lament for the young,
but not for the old. When a poet Keats, aged twenty-six, lies
brokenheartedly and beautifully dead; when a queenly woman, wife
and bereaved mother, aged twenty-eight, lies pathetically dead--oh,
then, all that Shelley may poetically declare, all that Bossuet may
magically proclaim, seem fitting and just and true. We understand
the young Spring tantrums; and the sobbings of the buds as roughly
sundered from the grief-swept trees, seem strangely familiar, as
though ages ago we ourselves had thus wildly wept when the world
was young.
Wealth, station, honor, health, happiness, youth, beauty,
love--today; and the tomb tomorrow! This contrast has ever most
forcefully appealed to the human heart. Bossuet knew full well the
force of this appeal and again the orator and the occasion were
well met.
“O vanity,” he exclaimed, “O nothingness! O mortals, ignorant of
their destiny! Ten months ago would she have believed it? And you,
my hearers, would you have thought, while she was shedding so many
tears in this place, while I was discharging a like office for the
Queen, her mother--that she would so soon assemble you here to
deplore her own loss? ‘Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ Nothing
is left for me to say but that that is the only sentiment which,
in presence of so strange a casualty, grief so well grounded and so
poignant permits me to indulge. No; after what we have just seen,
health is but a name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow,
charms and pleasures are but a dangerous diversion.”
REFLECTIONS.
“Keep cool, it will be all one in a hundred years.” So we say
to others, so we try to persuade ourselves; but the tempestuous
teapot seems fatally fixed over the live coals of life and the
teapot tempest must as fatally follow. So mightily important,
so imperative, so irresistibly puissant where those seeming
geyser-forces in their day; perhaps we who laugh at their spent
spray would more wisely learn the lessons they may teach us.
But just as a matter of spent spray and evanishing iridescence,
those struggles of the long ago seem magically beautiful; and
the men and women who figured prominently in them seem to peer
through the mist even as flame-light from which flame has fled,
even as pictured pain, reflex sorrows, unrealities--spray-shrouded,
color-clouded. Cleopatra, nobly dead, a Queen forever; ugly old
Socrates growing humanly dear and beautiful to all the ages as he
drinks the poison-hemlock; Marie Antoinette, in the tumbrel, at
the guillotine, under the glittering blade; Charles I. upon the
scaffold, on the block awaiting the headsman’s blow--these things
have been, but now they are not; yet they endure.