CHAPTER I.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XI--FEBRUARY, 1863.--NO. LXIV.

SOVEREIGNS AND SONS.

The sudden death of Prince Albert caused profound regret, and the

Royal Family of Britain had the sincere sympathies of the civilized

world on that sad occasion. The Prince Consort was a man of brilliant

talents, and those talents he had cultivated with true German

thoroughness. His knowledge was extensive, various, and accurate.

There was no affectation in his regard for literature, art, and

science; for he felt toward them all as it was natural that an

educated gentleman of decided abilities, and who had strongly

pronounced intellectual tastes, should feel. Though he could not be

said to hold any official position, his place in the British Empire

was one of the highest that could be held by a person not born to the

sceptre. His knowledge of affairs, and the confidence that was placed

in him by the sovereign, made it impossible that he should not be

a man of much influence, no matter whether he was recognized by the

Constitution or not. As the director of the education of the princes

and princesses, his children, his character and ideas are likely to be

felt hereafter, when those personages shall have become the occupants

of high and responsible stations. The next English sovereign will be

pretty much what he was made by his father; and it is no light thing

to have had the formation of a mind that may be made to act, with

more or less directness, on the condition of two hundred millions of

people.

We know it is the custom to speak of the Government of England as if

there were no other powerful institution in that Empire than the House

of Commons; and that very arrogant gentleman, Mr. John Arthur Roebuck,

has told us, in his usual style, that the crown is a word, and nothing

more. "The crown!" exclaimed the member for Sheffield, in 1858,--"the

crown! it is the House of Commons!" Theoretically Mr. Roebuek is

right, and the British practice conforms to the theory, whenever the

reigning prince is content to receive the theory, and to act upon it:

but all must depend upon that prince's character; and should a British

sovereign resolve to rule as well as to reign, he might give the House

of Commons much trouble, in which the whole Empire would share. The

House of Commons was never stronger than it was in the latter part of

1760. For more than seventy years it had been the first institution in

the State, and for forty-six years the interest of the sovereign had

been to maintain its supremacy. The king was a cipher. Yet a new

king had but to appear to change everything. George III. ascended the

throne with the determination not to be the slave of any minister,

himself the slave of Parliament; and from the day that he became king

to the day that the decline of his faculties enforced his retirement,

his personal power was everywhere felt, and his personal character

everywhere impressed itself on the British world, and to no ordinary

extent on other countries. George III. was not a great man, and it has

been argued that his mind was never really sound; and yet of all men

who then lived, and far more than either Washington or Napoleon, he

gave direction and color and tone to all public events, and to not

a little of private life, and much of his work will have everlasting

endurance. He did not supersede the House of Commons, but he would not

be the simple vizier of that many-headed sultan, which for the most

part became his humble tool. Yet he was not a popular sovereign until

he had long occupied the throne, and had perpetrated deeds that should

have destroyed the greatest popularity that sovereign ever possessed.

It was not until after the overthrow of the Fox-and-North Coalition

that he found himself popular, and so he remained unto the end. The

change that he wrought, and the power that he wielded in the State,--a

power as arbitrary as that of Louis XV.,--were the fruits of his

personal character, and that character was the consequence of the

peculiar education which he had received.

Lord Brougham tells us that George III. "was impressed with a lofty

feeling of his prerogative, and a firm determination to maintain,

perhaps extend it. At all events, he was resolved not to be a mere

name or a cipher in public affairs; and whether from a sense of the

obligations imposed upon him by his station, or from a desire to enjoy

all its powers and privileges, he certainly, while his reason remained

entire, but especially during the earlier period of his reign,

interfered in the affairs of government more than any prince who ever

sat upon the throne of this country since our monarchy was distinctly

admitted to be a limited one, and its executive functions were

distributed among responsible ministers. The correspondence which he

carried on with his confidential servants during the ten most critical

years of his life lies before us, and it proves that his attention was

ever awake to all the occurrences of the government. Not a step was

taken in foreign, colonial, or domestic affairs, that he did not

form his opinion upon it, and exercise his influence over it. The

instructions to ambassadors, the orders to governors, the movements of

forces, down to the marching of a single battalion, in the districts

of this country, the appointment to all offices in Church and State,

not only the giving away of judgeships, bishoprics, regiments, but the

subordinate promotions, lay and clerical,--all these form the topics

of his letters; on all his opinion is pronounced decisively; in

all his will is declared peremptorily. In one letter he decides the

appointment of a Scotch puisne judge; in another the march of a troop

from Buckinghamshire into Yorkshire; in a third the nomination to

the Deanery of Westminster; in a fourth he says, that, 'if Adam, the

architect, succeeds Worsley at the Board of Works, he shall think

Chambers ill used.' For the greater affairs of State it is well known

how substantially he insisted upon being the king _de facto_ as well

as _de jure_. The American War, the long exclusion of the Liberal

party, the French Revolution, the Catholic question, are all sad

monuments of his real power."

This is a true picture of George III., and why it should be supposed

that no descendant of that monarch will ever be able to make himself

potently felt in the government of his Empire we are at a loss to

understand. The exact part of that monarch would not be repeated, the

world having changed so much as to render such repetition impossible;

but the end at which George III. aimed, and which he largely

accomplished for himself, that end being the vindication of the

monarchical element in the British polity, might be undertaken by one

of his great-grandsons with every reason to expect success. The means

employed would have to be different from those which George III. made

use of, but that would prove nothing against the project itself.

The men who followed Cromwell to the Long Parliament and the men who

followed Bonaparte into the Council of Five Hundred were differently

clothed and armed, but the pikemen of the future Protector were

engaged in the same kind of work that was afterward done by the

grenadiers of the future Emperor. The one set of men had never

heard of the bayonet, and the other set had faith in nothing but the

bayonet, believing it to be as "holy" as M. Michelet asserts it to

be. The pikemen were the most pious of men, and could have eaten an

Atheist with relish, after having roasted him. The grenadiers were

Atheists, and cared no more for Christianity than for Mahometanism,

their chief having testified his regard for the latter, and

consequently his contempt for both, only the year before, in Egypt.

Yet both detachments were successfully employed in doing the same

thing, and that was the clearing away of what was regarded as

legislative rubbish, in order that military monarchies might be

erected on the cleared ground. In each instance there was the element

of violence actively at work, and it makes no possible difference that

the English Commons went out because they did not care to come to push

of pike, and that the French Representatives departed rather than risk

the consequence of a bayonet-charge. So if the Prince of Wales should

see fit to tread in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, he would

have very different instruments from those "king's friends" whose

existence and actions were so fatal to ministers in the early part of

those days when George III. was king.

It is a common remark, that the institutions of England have been so

far reformed in a democratic direction, that no monarch could ever

expect to become powerful in that country. We think the observation

unphilosophical; and it is because the old aristocratical system of

England received a heavy blow in 1832 that we believe a king of that

country could make himself a ruler in fact as well as in theory.

Between a king and an aristocracy there never can be anything like a

sincere attachment, unless the king be content to be recognized as

the first member of the patrician order, to be _primus inter pares_ in

strict good faith, an agent of his class, but not the sovereign of his

kingdom. Kings generally prefer new men to men of established position

and old descent. They have a fondness for low-born favorites, who are

not only cleverer than most aristocrats will condescend to be, but who

recognize a chief in a monarch, and enable him to feel and to enjoy

his superiority when in their company. The hostility that prevails

between the peer and the _parvenu_ is the most natural thing in the

world, and is no more to be wondered at than that between the hare and

the hound. In earlier times the peerage had the best of it, and could

hang up the _parvenus_ with wonderful despatch,--as witness the

fate of Cochrane and his associates, favorites of the third James of

Scotland, who swung in the wind over Lauder Bridge. In later times

brains and intelligence tell in and on the world, and the peers,

having no longer pit and gallows for the punishment of presumptuous

plebeians who dare to get between them and the regal sunshine, must be

content to see those plebeians basking in the royal rays, if they are

not capable of outdoing them in those arts that ever have been found

most useful in the advancement of the interest of courtiers. Hanging

and heading have gone mostly out of date, or the peer would be in more

danger than the upstart.

The Reform Bill has made it much easier for a king of Great Britain to

become a ruler than it was for George III. to carry his point over

the old aristocracy, for it has created a class of voters who could be

easily won over to the aid of a king engaged in a project that should

not injure them, while its success should reduce the power of the

aristocracy. The father of the Reform Bill made a strange mistake

as to the character of that measure. "I hope," said the old Tory and

Pittite, Lord Sidmouth, to him, "God will forgive you on account of

this bill: I don't think I can." "Mark my words," was Earl Grey's

answer,--"within two years you will find that we have become unpopular

for having brought forward the most aristocratic measure that ever was

proposed in Parliament." The great Whig statesman was but half right.

The Whigs became unpopular within the time named, but it was for very

different reasons from that assigned by Earl Grey in advance for their

fall in the people's favor. The Reform Bill, instead of proving an

aristocratic measure, has wellnigh rendered aristocratical government

impossible in England; and as a democracy in that country is as much

out of the question as a well-ordered monarchy is in America, a return

to a true regal government would seem to be the only course left for

England, if she desires to have a strong government. When the Duke of

Wellington, seeing the breaking up of the old system because of the

triumph of the Whig measure, asked the question, "How is the King's

government to be carried on?" he meant, "How will it be possible to

maintain the old aristocratical system of party-government?"

Since the grand organic change that was effected thirty years ago,

there has been no strong and stable government in England. Lord Grey

went out of office because he could not keep his party together. The

King, under the spurring of his wife, made an effort to play the part

of his father in 1783, with Peel for Pitt, and was beaten. Peel was

floored, and Lord Melbourne became Premier again; and though he held

office six years, he never had a working majority in the Commons, nor

a majority of any kind in the Peers. The largest majorities that he

could command in the lower House would have been considered something

like very weak support in the ante-Reform times, and would have caused

the ministers of those times to resign themselves to resignation.

When the Tories came back to power, in 1841, with about one hundred

majority in the Commons, they thought they were secure for a decade

at least; but in a few months they found they were not secure of even

their own chief; and in five years they were compelled to abandon

protection, and to consent to the death and burial of their own party,

which was denied even the honor of embalmment, young Conservatism

being nothing but old Toryism, and therefore it was beyond even the

power of spices to prolong its decay. It had rotted of the potato-rot,

and the League's powerful breath blew it over. The Whigs returned

to office, but not to power, the Russell Government proving a most

ridiculous concern, and living through only five years of rickety

rule. A spasmodic Tory Government, that discarded Tory principles,

endured for less than a year, not even the vigorous intellect of the

Earl of Derby, seconded though it was by the genius of Disraeli, being

sufficient to insure it a longer term of existence. Then came the

Aberdeen Ministry, a regular coalition concern, a no-party government,

and necessarily so, because all parties but the extreme Tories were

represented in it, and were engaged in neutralizing each other. How

could there be a party government, or, indeed, for long a government

of any kind, by a ministry in which were such men as Aberdeen and

Russell, Palmerston and Grahame, Gladstone and Clarendon, all pigging

together in the same truckle-bed, to use Mr. Burke's figure concerning

the mixture that was called the Chatham Ministry? The coalition went

to pieces on the Russian rock, having managed the war much worse

than any American Administration ever mismanaged one. The Palmerston

Government followed, and has existed ever since, deducting the

fifteen months that the second Derby-Disraeli Ministry lasted; but the

Palmerston Ministry has seldom had a majority in Parliament, and has

lived, partly through the forbearance of its foes, partly through the

support of men who are neither its friends nor its enemies, and partly

through the personal popularity of its vigorous old chief, who is

as lively at seventy-eight as he was at forty-five, when he was a

Canningite. Ministries now maintain themselves because men do not know

what might happen, if they were to be dismissed; and this has been the

political state of England for more than a quarter of a century, with

no indications of a change so long as the government shall remain

purely Parliamentary in its character, Parliament meaning the House of

Commons. There is no party in the United Kingdom capable of electing a

strong majority to the House of Commons, and hence a strong government

is impossible so long as that body shall control the country. With the

removal of Lord Palmerston something like anarchy might be expected,

there being no man but him who is competent to keep the Commons in

order without the aid of a predominating party. The tendency has been

for some time to lean upon individuals, at the same time that

the number of individuals possessed of influence of the requisite

character has greatly diminished. Sir Robert Peel, had he lived, would

have been all that Lord Palmerston is, and more, and would have been

more acceptable to the middle class than is the Irish peer.

The state of things that is thus presented, and which must become

every year of a more pronounced character, is one that would be highly

favorable to the exertions of a prince who should seek to make himself

felt as the wielder of the sceptre, and who should exert himself to

rise from the presidency of an aristocratical corporation, which is

all that a British monarch now is, to the place of king of a great and

free people. A prince with talent, and with a hold on the affection of

his nominal subjects, might confer the blessing of strong government

on Britain, and rule over the first of empires, instead of being a

mere doge, or, as Napoleon coarsely had it, a pig to fatten at the

public expense. The time would appear to be near at hand when England

shall be the scene of a new struggle for power, with the aristocracy

on the one side, and the sovereign and most of the people on the

other. A nation like England cannot exist long with weakness

organized for its government, and there is nothing in the condition

of Parliament or of parties that allows us to suppose that from them

strength could proceed, any more than that grapes could be gathered

from thorns or figs from thistles. A monarch who should effect the

change indicated might be called a usurper, and certainly would be a

revolutionist; but, as Mommsen says, "Any revolution or any usurpation

is justified before the bar of history by exclusive ability to

govern,"--and government is what most nations now stand most in need

of. The reason why George III.'s conduct is generally condemned is,

that he was a clumsy creature, and that he made a bad use of the power

which he monopolized, or sought to monopolize, his whole course being

unrelieved by a single trait of genius, or even of that tact which is

the genius of small minds.

It has been charged upon the princes of the House of Hanover that they

are given to quarrelling, and that between sovereign and heir-apparent

there has never been good-will, while they have on several occasions

disgusted the world by the vehemence of their hatred for each other.

That George I. hated his heir is well known; and George II. hated his

son Frederick with far more intensity than he himself had been hated

by his own father. The Memoirs of Lord Hervey show the state of

feeling that existed in the English royal family during the first

third of the reign of George II., and the spectacle is hideous beyond

parallel; and for many years longer, until Frederick's death,

there was no abatement of paternal and filial hate. George III.

was disgusted with his eldest son's personal conduct and political

principles, as well he might be; for while the father was a model of

decorum, and a bitter Tory, the son was a profligate, and a Whig,--and

the King probably found it harder to forgive the Whig than the

profligate. The Prince cared no more for Whig principles than he did

for his marriage-vows, but affected them as a means of annoying his

father, whose Toryism was of proof. He, as a man, toasted the buff and

blue, when that meant support of Washington and his associates,

for the same reason that, as a boy, he had cheered for Wilkes and

Liberty,--because it was the readiest way of annoying his father; but

he ever deserted the Whigs when his aid and countenance could have

been useful to them. George IV. had no child with whom to quarrel, but

while Prince Regent he did his worst to make his daughter unhappy,

as we find established in Miss Knight's Memoirs. The good-natured

and kind-hearted William IV. had no legitimate children, but he was

strongly attached to the Fitzclarences, who were borne to him by Mrs.

Jordan. Indeed, monarchs have often been as full of love for their

offspring born out of wedlock as of hate for their children born in

that holy state. Being men, they must love something, and what

so natural as that they should love their natural children, whose

helpless condition appeals so strongly to all their better feelings,

and who never can become their rivals?

Queen Victoria is the first sovereign of the House of Hanover who,

having children, has not pained the world by quarrelling with them.

A model sovereign, she has not allowed an infirmity supposed to be

peculiar to her illustrious House to control her clear and just mind,

so that her career as a mother is as pleasing as her career as a

sovereign is splendid. About the time of the death of Prince Albert,

a leading British journal published some articles in which it was

insinuated, not asserted, that there had been trouble in the Royal

Family, and that that quarrelling between parent and child which

had been so common in that family in former times was about to

be exhibited again. It was even said that domestic peace was an

impossibility in the House of Hanover, which was but an indorsement

of Earl Granville's remark, in George II.'s reign. "This family," said

that eccentric peer, "always has quarrelled, and always will quarrel,

from generation to generation"; and he did not live to see the ill

feeling that existed between George III. and his eldest son.

There is no reason for saying that the Hanover family is more

quarrelsome than most other royal lines; and the domestic dissensions

of great houses are more noted than those of lesser houses only

because kings and nobles are so placed as to live in sight of the

world. When a king falls out with his eldest son, the entertainment is

one to which all men go as spectators, and historians consider it

to be the first of their duties to give full details of that

entertainment. Since the Hanoverians have reigned over the English,

the world has been a writing and a reading world, and nothing has more

interested writers and readers than the dissensions of sovereigns and

their sons. If we extend our observation to those days when German

sovereigns were unthought of in England, we shall find that kings

and princes did not always agree; and if we go farther, and scan the

histories of other royal houses, we shall learn that it is not in

Britain alone that the wearers of crowns have looked with aversion

upon their heirs, and have had sons who have loved them so well and

truly as to wish to witness their promotion to heavenly crowns. The

Hanoverian monarchs of England, and their sons, have shared only the

common lot of those who reign and those who wish to reign.

The Norman kings of England did not always live on good terms with

their sons. William the Conqueror had a very quarrelsome family. His

children quarrelled with one another, and the King quarrelled with his

wife. The oldest son of William and Matilda was Robert, afterward Duke

of Normandy,--and a very trying time this young man caused his father

to have; while the mother favored the son, probably out of revenge for

the beatings she had received, with fists and bridles, from her royal

husband, who used to swear "By the Splendor of God!"--his favorite

oath, and one that has as much merit as can belong to any piece of

blasphemy,--that he never would be governed by a woman. The father and

son went to war, and they actually met in battle, when the son ran the

old gentleman through the arm with his lance, and dropped him out of

the saddle with the utmost dexterity. This was the first time that

the Conqueror was ever conquered, and perhaps it was not altogether

without complacency that "the governor" saw what a clever fellow his

eldest son was with his tools. At the time of William's death Robert

was on bad terms with him, and is believed to have been bearing arms

against him. Henry I. lost his sons before he could well quarrel

with them, the wreck of the White Ship causing the death of his

heir-apparent, and also of his natural son Richard. He compensated for

this omission by quarrelling with his daughter Matilda, and with her

husband, Geoffrey of Anjou. He made war on his brother Robert, took

from him the Duchy of Normandy, and shut him up for life; but the

story, long believed, that he put out Robert's eyes, has been called

in question by modern writers. King Stephen, who bought his breeches

at so low a figure, had a falling-out with his son Eustace, when he

and Henry Plantagenet sought to restore peace to England, and nothing

but Eustace's death made a settlement possible. William Rufus, the Red

King, who was the second of the Norman sovereigns of England, had

no legitimate children, for he was never married. He was a jolly

bachelor, and as such he has had the honor of having his history

written by one of the ablest literary ladies of our time, Miss Agnes

Strickland. He was the only king of England, who arrived at years of

indiscretion, who did not marry. The other bachelor kings were Edward

V. and Edward VI., whose united ages were short of thirty years. His

character does not tend to make the single state of man respected.

"Never did a ruler die less regretted than William Rufus," says Dr.

Lappenberg, "although still young, being little above forty, not a

usurper, and successful in his undertakings. He was never married,

and, besides the crafty and officious tools of his power, was

surrounded only by a few Normans of quality, and harlots. In his last

struggle with the clergy, the most shameless rapacity is especially

prominent, and so glaring, that, notwithstanding some exaggerations

and errors that may be pointed out in the Chronicles, he still appears

in the same light. Effeminacy, drunkenness, gluttony, dissoluteness,

and unnatural crimes were the distinguishing characteristics of his

court. He was himself an example of incontinence." This is a nice

character to travel with down the page of history. He quarrelled with

his brothers, and with his uncle, and kept up the family character in

an exceedingly satisfactory manner, considering that he was unmarried.

The statement that he was slain by Walter Tirel, accidentally, in the

New Forest, is now disregarded. Our theory of his death is, that he

fell a victim to the ambition of his brother, Henry I., who succeeded

him, and who certainly had good information as to his fall, and made

good use of it, like a sensible fellow.

Of all the royal races of the Middle Ages, no one stands out more

boldly on the historic page than the Plantagenets, who ruled over

England from 1154 to 1485, the line of descent being frequently

broken, and family quarrels constantly occurring. They were a bold and

an able race, and if they had possessed a closer resemblance to the

Hapsburgs, they would have become masters of Western Europe; but their

quarrelsome disposition more than undid all that they could effect

through the exercise of their talents. On the female side they were

descended from the Conqueror; and, as we have seen, the Conqueror's

family was one in which sons rebelled against the fathers, and brother

fought with brother. Matilda, daughter of Henry I., became the wife of

Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, and from their union came Henry II., first

of the royal Plantagenets. Now the Angevine Plantagenets were "a hard

set," as we should say in these days. Dissensions were common enough

in the family, and they descended to the offspring of Geoffrey and

Matilda, being in fact intensified by the elevation of the House to a

throne. Henry II. married Eleanora of Aquitaine, one of the greatest

matches of those days, a marriage which has had great effect on modern

history. The Aquitanian House was as little distinguished for the

practice of the moral virtues as were the lines of Anjou and Normandy.

One of the Countesses of Anjou was reported to be a demon, which

probably meant only that her husband had caught a Tartar in marrying

her; but the story was enough to satisfy the credulous people of those

times, who, very naturally, considering their conduct, believed that

the Devil was constant in his attention to their affairs. It was to

this lady that Richard Cocur de Lion referred, when he said, speaking

of the family contentions, "Is it to be wondered at, that, coming from

such a source, we live ill with one another? What comes from the Devil

must to the Devil return." With such an origin on his father's side,

crossing the fierce character of his mother, Henry II. thought he

could not do better than marry Eleanora, whose origin was almost as

bad as his own. Her grandfather had been a "fast man" in his youth and

middle life, and it was not until he had got nigh to seventy that he

began to think that it was time to repent. He had taken Eleanora's

grandmother from her husband, and a pious priest had said to them,

"Nothing good will be born to you," which prediction the event

justified. The old gentleman resigned his rich dominions, supposed to

be the best in Europe, to his grand-daughter, and she married Louis

VII., King of France, and accompanied him in the crusade that he was

so foolish as to take part in. She had women-warriors, who did their

cause immense mischief; and unless she has been greatly scandalized,

she made her husband fit for heaven in a manner approved neither by

the law nor the gospel. The Provençal ladies had no prejudices against

Saracens. After her return to Europe, she got herself divorced from

Louis, and married Henry Plantagenet, who was much her junior, she

having previously been the mistress of his father. It was a _mariage

de convenance_, and, as is sometimes the case with such marriages,

it turned out very inconveniently for both parties to it. It was not

unfruitful, but all the fruit it produced was bad, and to the husband

and father that fruit became the bitterest of bitter ashes. No

romancer would have dared to bring about such a scries of unions as

led to the creation of Plantagenet royalty, and to so much misery

as well as greatness. There is no exaggeration in Michelet's lively

picture of the Plantagenets. "In this family," he says, "it was a

succession of bloody wars and treacherous treaties. Once, when King

Henry had met his sons in a conference, their soldiers drew upon him.

This conduct was traditionary in the two Houses of Anjou and Normandy.

More than once had the children of William the Conqueror and Henry II.

pointed their swords against their father's breast. Fulk had placed

his foot on the neck of his vanquished son. The jealous Eleanora, with

the passion and vindictiveness of her Southern blood, encouraged her

sons' disobedience, and trained them to parricide. These youths, in

whose veins mingled the blood of so many different races,--Norman,

Saxon, and Aquitanian,--seemed to entertain, over and above the

violence of the Fulks of Anjou and the Williams of England, all the

opposing hatreds and discords of those races. They never knew whether

they were from the South or the North: they only knew that they hated

one another, and their father worse than all. They could not trace

back their ancestry, without finding, at each descent, or rape, or

incest, or parricide." Henry II. quarrelled with all his sons, and

they all did him all the mischief they could, under the advice and

direction of their excellent mother, whom Henry imprisoned. A priest

once sought to effect a reconciliation between Henry and his son

Geoffrey. He went to the Prince with a crucifix in his hand, and

entreated him not to imitate Absalom.

"What!" exclaimed the Prince, "would you have me renounce my

birthright?"

"God forbid!" answered the holy man; "I wish you to do nothing to your

own injury."

"You do not understand my words," said Geoffrey; "it is our family

fate not to love one another. 'T is our inheritance; and not one of us

will ever forego it."

That must have been a pleasant family to marry into! When the King's

eldest son, Henry, died, regretting his sins against his father,

that father durst not visit him, fearing treachery; and the immediate

occasion of the King's death was the discovery of the hostility of his

son John, who, being the worst of his children, was, of course, the

best-beloved of them all. The story was, that, when Richard entered

the Abbey of Fontevraud, in which his father's body lay, the corpse

bled profusely, which was held to indicate that the new king was his

father's murderer. Richard was very penitent, as his elder brother

Henry had been, on his death-bed. They were very sorrowful, were those

Plantagenet princes, when they had been guilty of atrocious acts,

and when it was too late for their repentance to have any practical

effect.

Richard I. had no children, and so he could not get up a perfect

family-quarrel, though he and his brother John were enemies. He died

at forty-two, and but a few years after his marriage with Berengaria

of Navarre, an English queen who never was in England. When on his

death-bed, Richard was advised by the Bishop of Rouen to repent, and

to separate himself from his children. "I have no children," the King

answered. But the good priest told him that he had children, and that

they were avarice, luxury, and pride. "True," said Richard, who was

a humorist,--"and I leave my avarice to the Cistercians, my luxury

to the Gray Friars, and my pride to the Templars." History has fewer

sharper sayings than this, every word of which told like a cloth-yard

shaft sent against a naked bosom. Richard certainly never quarrelled

with the children whom he thus left to his _friends_.

King John did not live long enough to illustrate the family character

by fighting with his children. When he died, in 1216, his eldest son,

Henry III., was but nine years old, and even a Plantagenet could not

well fall out with a son of that immature age. However, John did his

best to make his mark on his time. If he could not quarrel with his

children, because of their tender years, he, with a sense of duty that

cannot be too highly praised, devoted his venom to his wife. He was

pleased to suspect her of being as regardless of marriage-vows as he

had been himself, and so he hanged her supposed lover over her bed,

with two others, who were suspected of being their accomplices.

The Queen was imprisoned. On their being reconciled, he stinted her

wardrobe, a refinement of cruelty that was aggravated by his monstrous

expenditure on his own ugly person. Queen Isabella was very handsome,

and perhaps John was of the opinion of some modern husbands, who think

that dress extinguishes beauty as much as it inflames bills. Having

no children to torment, John turned his disagreeable attentions to his

nephew, Arthur, Duke of Brittany, who, according to modern ideas, was

the lawful King of England. The end was the end of Arthur. How he was

disposed of is not exactly known, but, judging from John's character

and known actions, we incline to agree with those writers who say that

the uncle slew the nephew with his own royal hand. He never could

deny himself an attainable luxury, and to him the murder of a youthful

relative must have been a rich treat, and have created for him a new

sensation, something like the new pleasure for which the Persian king

offered a great reward. Besides, all uncles are notoriously bad, and

seem, indeed, to have been made only for the misery of their nephews

and nieces, of whose commands they are most reprehensibly negligent.

We mean to write a book, one of these days, for the express purpose of

showing what a mistake it was to allow any such relationship to exist,

and tracing all the evil that ever has afflicted humanity to the

innate wickedness of uncles, and requiring their extirpation. We

err, then, on the safe side, in supposing that John despatched Arthur

himself,--not to say, that, when you require that a delicate piece of

work should be done, you must do it with your own hand, or you may

be disappointed. John did the utmost that he could do to keep up the

discredit of the family; for, when a man has no son to whip and to

curse, he should not be severely censured for having done no more than

to kill his nephew. Men of large and charitable minds will take all

the circumstances of John's case into the account, and not allow their

judgment of his conduct to be harsh. What better can a man do than his

worst?

Henry III. appears to have managed to live without quarrelling

with his children; but then he was a poor creature, and even was so

unkingly, and so little like what a Plantagenet should have been, that

he actually disliked war! He might with absolute propriety have worn

the lowly broom-corn from which his family-name was taken, while it

was a sweeping satire on almost all others who bore it. His heir,

Edward I., was a king of "high stomach," and as a prince he stood

stoutly by his father in the baronial wars. He, too, though the father

of sixteen children, dispensed with family dissensions, thus showing

that "The more, the merrier," is a true saying. Edward II. came to

grief from having a bad wife, Isabella of France, who made use of

his son against him. That son was Edward III., who became king in his

father's lifetime, and whose marriage with Philippa of Hainault is

one of the best-known facts of history, not only because it was an

uncommonly happy marriage, but that it had remarkable consequences.

This royal couple got along very happily with their children; but the

ambition of their fourth son, the Duke of Lancaster, troubled the

last days of the King, and prepared the way for great woes in the next

century. The King was governed by Lancaster, and the Black Prince, who

was then in a dying state, was at the head of what would now be called

the Opposition, as if he foresaw what evils his brother's ambition

would be the means of bringing upon his son.

Richard II., son of the Black Prince, had no children, though he

was twice married. He was dethroned, the rebels being headed by his

cousin, Henry of Lancaster, who became Henry IV. Thus was brought

about that change in the course of descent which John of Gaunt seems

to have aimed at, but which he died just too soon to see effected.

It was a violent change, and one which had its origin in a family

quarrel, added to political dissatisfaction. Had the revolutionist

wished merely to set aside a bad king, they would have called the

House of Mortimer to the throne, the chief member of that House being

the next heir, as descended from the Duke of Clarence, elder brother

of the Duke of Lancaster; but more was meant than a political

revolution, and so the line of Clarence was passed over, and its right

to the crown treated with neglect, to be brought forward in bloody

fashion in after-days. In fact, the Englishmen who made Henry of

Lancaster king prepared the way for that long and terrible struggle

which took place in the fifteenth century, and which was, its

consequences as well as its course considered, the greatest civil

war that has ever afflicted Christendom. The movement that led to the

elevation of Henry of Holingbroke to the throne, though not precisely

a palace-revolution, resembles a revolution of that kind more than

anything else with which it can be compared; and it was as emphatic

a departure from the principle of hereditary right as can be found in

history. So much was this the case, that liberals in polities mostly

place their historical sympathies with the party of the Red Rose, for

no other reason, that we have ever been able to see, than that the

House of Lancaster's possession of the throne testified to the triumph

of revolutionary principles; for that House was jealous of its power

and cruel in the exercise of it, and was so far from being friendly to

the people, that it derived its main support from the aristocracy,

and was the ally of the Church in the harsh work of exterminating the

Lollards. The House of York, on the other hand, while it had, to use

modern words, the legitimate right to the throne, was a popular House,

and represented and embodied whatever there was then existing in

politics that could be identified with the idea of progress.

The character of the troubles that existed between Henry IV. and his

eldest son and successor, Shakspeare's Prince Hal, is involved in much

obscurity. It used to be taken for granted that the poet's Prince was

an historical character, but that is no longer the case,--Falstaff's

royal associate being now regarded in the same light in which Falstaff

himself is regarded. The one is a poetic creation, and so is the

other. Prince Henry was neither a robber nor a rowdy, but from his

early youth a much graver character than most men are in advanced

life. He had great faults, but they were not such as are made to

appear in the pages of the player. The hero of Agincourt was a mean

fellow,--a tyrant, a persecutor, a false friend and a cruel enemy, and

the wager of most unjust wars; but he was not the "fast" youth that

he has been generally drawn. He had neither the good nor the bad

qualities that belong to young gentlemen who do not live on terms with

their papas. He was of a grave and sad temperament, and much more of

a Puritan than a Cavalier. It is a little singular that Shakspeare

should have given portraits so utterly false of the most unpopular of

the kings of the York family, and of the most popular of the kings of

the rival house,--of Richard III., that is, and of the fifth Henry

of Lancaster. Neither portrait has any resemblance to the original,

a point concerning which the poet probably never troubled himself, as

his sole purpose was to make good acting plays. Had it been necessary

to that end to make Richard walk on three legs, or Henry on one leg,

no doubt he would have done so,--just as Monk Lewis said he would have

made Lady Angela blue, in his "Castle Spectre," if by such painting

he could have made the play more effective. Prince Henry was a very

precocious youth, and had the management of great affairs when he was

but a child, and when it would have been better for his soul's and

his body's health, had he been engaged in acting as an esquire of some

good knight, and subjected to rigid discipline. The jealousy that

his father felt was the natural consequence of the popularity of the

Prince, who was young, and had highly distinguished himself in both

field and council, was not a usurper, and was not held responsible for

any of the unpopular acts done by the Government of his father. They

were at variance not long before Henry IV.'s death, but little is

known as to the nature of their quarrels. The crown scene, in which

the Prince helps himself to the crown while his father is yet alive,

is taken by Shakspeare from Monstrelet, who is supposed to have

invented all that he narrates in order to weaken the claim of the

English monarch to the French throne. If Henry IV., when dying, could

declare that he had no right to the crown of England, on what could

Henry V. base his claim to that of France?

Henry V. died before his only son, Henry VI., had completed his first

year; and Henry VI. was early separated from his only son, Edward

of Lancaster, the same who was slain while flying from the field

of Tewkesbury, at the age of eighteen. There was, therefore, no

opportunity for quarrels between English kings and their sons for the

sixty years that followed the death of Henry IV.; but there was

much quarrelling, and some murdering, in the royal family, in those

years,--brothers and other relatives being fierce rivals, even unto

death, and zealous even unto slaying of one another. It would be hard

to say of what crime those Plantagenets were not guilty.[A] Edward

IV., with whom began the brief ascendency of the House of York, died

at forty-one, after killing his brother of Clarence, his eldest son

being but twelve years old. He had no opportunity to have troubles

with his boys, and he loved women too well to fall out with his

daughters, the eldest of whom was but just turned of seventeen. The

history of Edward IV. is admirably calculated to furnish matter for a

sermon on the visitation of the sins of parents on their children. He

had talent enough to have made himself master of Western Europe,

but he followed a life of debauchery, by which he was cut off in his

prime, leaving a large number of young children to encounter the worst

of fortunes. Both of his sons disappeared, whether murdered by Richard

III. or Henry VII. no one can say; and his daughters had in part to

depend upon that bastard slip of the Red-Rose line, Henry VII., for

the means to enable them to live as gentlewomen,--all but the eldest,

whom Henry took to wife as a point of policy, which her father would

have considered the greatest misfortune of all those that befell his

offspring. Richard III's only legitimate son died a mere boy.

[Footnote A: It has been said of the Plantagenets that they "never

shed the blood of a woman." This is nonsense, as we could, time and

space permitting, show by the citation of numerous facts, but we shall

here mention only one. King John had a noble woman shut up with her

son, and starved to death. Perhaps that was not shedding her blood,

but it was something worse. Before English statesmen and orators and

writers take all the harlotry of Secessia under their kind care and

championship, it would be well for them to read up their own country's

history, and see how abominably women have been used in England for a

thousand years, from queens to queans.]

The Tudors fame to the English throne in 1485. There was no want of

domestic quarrelling with them. Arthur, Henry VII.'s eldest son, died

young, but left a widow, Catharine of Aragon, whom the King treated

badly; and he appears to have been jealous of the Prince of Wales,

afterward Henry VIII., but died too soon to allow of that jealousy's

blooming into quarrels. According to some authorities, the Prince

thought of seizing the crown, on the ground that it belonged to him in

right of his mother, Elizabeth Plantagenet, who was unquestionably the

legitimate heir. Henry VIII. himself, who would have made a splendid

tyrant over a son who should have readied to man's estate,--an

absolute model in that way to all after-sovereigns,--was denied

by fortune an opportunity to round and perfect his character as

a domestic despot. Only one of his legitimate sons lived even to

boyhood, Edward VI., and Henry died when the heir-apparent was in his

tenth year. Of his illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, Henry

was extravagantly fond, and at one time thought of making him

heir-apparent, which might have been done, for the English dread of

a succession war was then at its height. Richmond died in his

seventeenth year. Having no sons of a tormentable age, Henry made his

daughters as unhappy as he could make them by the harsh exercise of

paternal authority, and bastardized them both, in order to clear the

way to the throne for his son. Edward VI. died a bachelor, in his

sixteenth year, so that we can say nothing of him as a parent; but he

treated his sister Mary with much harshness, and exhibited on various

occasions a disposition to have things his own way that would have

delighted his father, provided it had been directed against anybody

but that severe old gentleman himself. Mary I. was the best sovereign

of her line, domestically considered; but then she had neither son nor

daughter with whom to quarrel, and the difficulties she had with her

half-sister, Elizabeth, like the differences between the Archangel

Michael and the Fallen Angel, were purely political in their

character. We do not think that she would have done much injustice,

if she had made Elizabeth's Tower-dungeon the half-way house to the

scaffold. But though political, the half-sisterly dissensions between

these ladies serve to keep Mary I. within the rules of the royal

houses to which she belonged. Mary, dying of the loss of Calais and

the want of children, was succeeded by Elizabeth, who, being a

maiden queen, had no issue with whom to make issue concerning

things political or personal. But observe how basely she treated her

relatives, those poor girls, the Greys, Catharine and Mary, sisters of

poor Lady Jane, whose fair and clever head Mary I. had taken off. The

barren Queen, too jealous to share her power with a husband, hated

marriage with all "the sour malevolence of antiquated virginity," and

was down upon the Lady Catharine and the Lady Mary because they chose

to become wives. Then she imprisoned her cousin, Mary Stuart, for

nineteen years, and finally had her butchered under an approach to

the forms of law, and in total violation of its spirit. She, too, kept

within the royal rules, and made herself as great a pest as possible

to her relatives.

The English throne passed to the House of Stuart in 1603, and, after

a lapse of six-and-fifty years, England had a sovereign with sons and

daughters, the first since the death of Henry VIII. at the beginning

of 1547. There was little opportunity for family dissensions in the

days of most of the Stuarts, as either political troubles of the most

serious nature absorbed the attention of kings and princes, or the

reigning monarchs had no legitimate children. The open quarrel

between Charles I. and the Parliament began before his eldest son had

completed his eleventh year; and after that quarrel had increased to

war, and it was evident that the sword alone could decide the issue,

the King parted with his son forever. They had no opportunity to

become rivals, and to fall out. There is so much that can be said

against Charles I. with truth, that it is pleasing--as are most

novelties--to be able to mention something to his credit. Instead

of being jealous of his son, or desiring to keep him in ignorance of

affairs, he early determined to train him to business. According

to Clarendon, he said that he wished to "unboy him." Therefore he

conferred high military offices upon him before he had completed his

fifteenth year; and sent him to the West of England, to be the

nominal head of the Western Association. Charles II. had no legitimate

children, and so he could not have any quarrels with a Prince of

Wales. He was fond of his numerous bastards, and, like an affectionate

royal father, provided handsomely for them at the public-expense. What

more could a father do, situated as that father was, and always in

want of his people's money? Some of them were not his sons,--Monmouth,

the best beloved of them all, being the son of Robert Sidney, a

brother of the renowned Algernon, a fact that partially excuses the

harsh conduct of James II. toward his nominal nephew. James II. had

no legitimate son until the last year of his reign; but his two eldest

daughters treated him far worse than any sovereign of the Hanoverian

line was ever used by a son. They were most respectable women, and

their deficiency in piety has worked well for the world; but it must

ever be repugnant to humanity to regard the conduct of Mary and Anne

with respect. No wonder that people called Mary the modern Tullia.

Mary II. died young, and childless; and Queen Anne, though a most

prolific wife, and but fifty-one at her death, survived all her

children. Anne believed that her children's deaths were sent in

punishment of her unfilial conduct; and she would have restored her

nephew, the Pretender, to the British throne, but that the Jacobites

were the silliest political creatures that ever triumphed in the

how-not-to-do-it business, and could not even hold their mouths open

for the rich and ripened fruit to drop into them.

The first of the English Stuarts, James I., is suspected of having

allowed his jealousy of his eldest son, the renowned Prince Henry, to

carry him to the extent of child-murder. The Stuarts are called the

Fated Line, and it is certain that none of their number, from Robert

II.--who got the Scottish throne in virtue of his veins containing a

portion of the blood of the Bruce, and so regalized the family, which,

like the Bruces, was of Norman origin, and originally Fitzalan

by name--to Charles Edward, and the Cardinal York, who died but

yesterday, as it were, but had a wonderful run of bad luck. They had

capital cards, but they knew not how to play them. With them, to play

was to lose, and the most fortunate of their number were those kings

who played as little as they could, such as James I. and Charles II.

Those who lost the most were those who played the hardest, as Charles

I. and his second son, James II. Yet the family was a clever one, with

strong traits, both of character and talent, that ought to have made

it the most successful of ruling races, and would have made it so,

if its chiefs could have learned to march with the times. They had to

contend, in Scotland, with one of the fiercest and most unprincipled

aristocracies that ever tried the patience and traversed the purposes

of monarchs who really aimed at the good government of their people;

and the idiosyncrasy contracted during more than two centuries of

Scottish rule clung to the family after it went to England, and found

itself living under altogether a different state of things. What was

virtue in Scotland became vice in England; and the ultra-monarchists,

who came into existence not long after James I. succeeded to

Elizabeth, helped to spoil the Stuarts. Both James and his successor

were dominated by Scotch traditions, and supposed that they were

contending with men who had the same end in view that had been

regarded by the Douglases, the Hamiltons, the Ruthvens, the Lindsays,

and others of the old Scotch baronage. What helped to deceive them was

this,--that their opponents in England, like the opponents of their

ancestors in Scotland, were aristocrats; and they supposed, that, as

aristocratical movements in their Northern kingdom had always been

subversive of order and peace, the same kind of movements would

produce similar results in their Southern kingdom. They could not

understand that one aristocracy may differ much from another, and

that, while in Scotland the interest of the people, or rather of the

whole nation, required the exaltation of the kingly power, in England

it was that exaltation which was most to be feared. Sufficient

allowance has not been made for the Stuarts in this respect, little

regard being paid to the effect of the family's long training at home,

which had rendered hostility to the nobility second nature to it. Had

the Stuarts been the supporters of liberal ideas in England, their

conduct would have given the lie to every known principle of human

action. As their distrust of aristocracy rendered them despotically

disposed, because the Scotch aristocracy had been the most lawless of

mankind, so did they become attached to the Church of England because

of the tyranny they had seen displayed by the Church of Scotland, the

most illiberal ecclesiastical body, in those times, that men had ever

seen, borne with, or suffered from. James I. and his grandson Charles

II. had their whole conduct colored, and dyed in the wool, too, by

their recollections of the odious treatment to which they had

been subjected by a harsh and intolerant clergy. They had not the

magnanimity to overlook, in the day of their power, what they had

suffered in the day of their weakness.

James I. undoubtedly disliked his eldest son, and was jealous of him;

but it is by no means clear that he killed him, or caused him to

be killed. He used to say of him, "What! will he bury me alive?"

He ordered that the court should not go into mourning for Henry, a

circumstance that makes in his favor, as murderers are apt to affect

all kinds of hypocrisy in regard to their victims, and to weep in

weeds very copiously. Yet his conduct may have been a refinement of

hypocrisy, and, though a coward in the common acceptation of the word,

James had much of that peculiar kind of hardihood which enables its

possessor to treat commonly received ideas with contempt. His conduct

in "The Great Oyer of Poisoning" was most extraordinary, it must

be allowed, and is not reconcilable with innocence; but it does not

follow that the guilt which the great criminals in that business could

have established as against James related only to the death of Henry.

It bore harder upon the King than even that crime could have borne,

and must have concerned his conduct in matters that are peculiarly

shocking to the ears of Northern peoples, though Southern races have

ears that are less delicate. It was in Somerset's power to

explain James's conduct respecting some things that puzzled his

contemporaries, and which have continued to puzzle their descendants;

but the explanation would have ruined the monarch in the estimation of

even the most vicious portion of his subjects, and probably would have

given an impetus to the growing power of the Puritans that might have

led to their ascendency thirty years earlier than it came to pass

in the reign of his son. James was capable of almost any crime or

baseness; but in the matter of poisoning his eldest son he is entitled

to the Scotch verdict of _Not Proven_.

Whether James killed his son or not, it is certain that the Prince's

death was a matter of extreme importance. Henry was one of those

characters who are capable of giving history a twist that shall

last forever. He had a fondness for active life, was very partial

to military pursuits, and was friendly to those opinions which

the bigoted chiefs of Austria and Bavaria were soon to combine to

suppress. Henry would have come to the throne in 1625, had he lived,

and there seems no reason to doubt that he would have anticipated the

part which Gustavus Adolphus played a few years later. He would have

made himself the champion of Protestantism, and not the less readily

because his sister, the Electress-Palatine and Winter-Queen of

Bohemia, would have been benefited by his successes in war. Bohemia

might have become the permanent possession of the Palatine, and

Protestantism have maintained its hold on Southern Germany, had Henry

lived and reigned, and had his conduct as a king justified the hopes

and expectations that were created by his conduct as a prince. The

House of Austria would in that case have had a very different

career from that which it has had since 1625, when Ferdinand II. was

preparing so much evil for the future of Europe. Had Henry returned

from Continental triumphs at the head of a great and an attached army,

what could have prevented him from establishing arbitrary power in

his insular dominions? His brother failed to make himself absolute,

because he had no army, and was personally unpopular; but Henry would

have had an army, and one, too, that would have stood high in English

estimation, because of what it had done for the English name and the

Protestant religion in Germany,--and Henry himself would have been

popular, as a successful military man is sure to be in any country.

Pym and Hampden would have found him a very different man to deal with

from his foolish brother, who had all the love of despotism that man

can have, but little of that kind of ability which enables a sovereign

to reign despotically. Charles I. had no military capacity or taste,

or he would have taken part in the Thirty Years' War, and in that way,

and through the assistance of his army, have accomplished his domestic

purpose. His tyranny was of a hard, iron character, unrelieved by

a single ray of glory, but aggravated by much disgrace from the ill

working of his foreign policy; so that it was well calculated to

create the resistance which it encountered, and by which it was

shivered to pieces. Henry would have gone to work in a different way,

and, like Cromwell, would have given England glory, while taking from

her freedom. There is nothing that the wearer of a crown cannot do,

provided that crown is encircled with laurel. But the Stuarts seldom

produced a man of military talent, which was a fortunate thing for

their subjects, who would have lost their right to boast of their

Constitutional polity, had Charles I. or James II. been a good

soldier. We Americans, too, would have had a very different sort

of annals to write, if the Stuarts, who have given so many names to

American places, had known how to use that sword which they were so

fond of handling.

The royal families of England did by no means monopolize the share of

domestic dissensions set apart for kings. The House of Stuart, even

before it ascended the English throne, and when it reigned over only

poor, but stout Scotland, was anything but famous for the love of its

fathers for their sons, or for its sons' love for their fathers; and

dissensions were common in the royal family. Robert III., second king

of the line, had great grief with his eldest son, the Duke of Rothsay;

and the King's brother, the Duke of Albany, did much to increase the

evil that had been caused by the loose life of the heir-apparent. The

end was, that Rothsay was imprisoned, and then murdered by his uncle.

Scott has used the details of this court-tragedy in his "Fair Maid of

Perth," one of the best of his later novels, most of the incidents in

which are strictly historical. James I. was murdered while he was yet

young, and James II. lost his life at twenty-nine; but James III. lost

both throne and life in a war that was waged against him in the name

of his son, who became king in consequence of his father's defeat and

death. When James IV. fell at Flodden, because he fought like a brave

fool, and not like a skilful general, he left a son who was not three

years old; and that son, James V., when he died, left a daughter, the

hapless Mary Stuart, who was but a week old. There was not much room

for quarrelling in either of these cases. Mary Stuart's son, then an

infant, was made the head of the party that dethroned his mother,

and forced her into that long exile that terminated in her murder by

Elizabeth of England. Mary's quarrels with her husband, Darnley, were

of so bitter a character as to create the belief that she caused

him to be murdered,--a belief that is as common now as it was in the

sixteenth century, though the Marian Controversy has been going on for

wellnigh three hundred years, and it has been distinctly proved by a

host of clever writers and skilful logicians that it was impossible

for her to have had any thing to do with that summary act of divorce.

Several of the sovereigns of Continental Europe have had great

troubles with their children, and these children have often had very

disobedient fathers. In France, the Dauphin, afterward Louis XI.,

could not always keep on good terms with his father, Charles VII., who

has the reputation of having restored the French monarchy, after the

English had all but subverted it, Charles at one time being derisively

called King of Bourges. Nothing annoyed Louis so much as being

compelled to run away before the army which his father was leading

against him. He would, he declared, have stayed and fought, but that

he had not even half so many men as composed the royal force. He

would have killed his father as readily as he killed his brother in

after-days,--if he did kill his brother, of which there is some

doubt, of which he should have the benefit. As was but natural, he

was jealous of his son, though he died when that prince was thirteen.

Owing to various causes, however, there have been fewer quarrels

between French kings and their eldest sons than between English kings

and their eldest sons. Few French monarchs have been succeeded by

their sons during the last three hundred years,--but two, in fact,

namely, Louis XIII., who followed his father, Henry IV., and Louis

XIV., who succeeded to Louis XIII., his father. It is two hundred

and twenty years since a father was succeeded by a son in France,--a

circumstance that Napoleon III. should lay to heart, and not be too

sure that the Prince Imperial is to become Napoleon IV. There seems

to be something fatal about the French purple, which has a strange

tendency to spread itself, and to settle upon shoulders that could not

have counted upon experiencing its weight and its warmth. Sometimes it

is hung up for the time, and becomes dusty, while republicans take a

turn at governing, though seldom with success. There were troubles

in the families of Louis XIV., who was too heartless, selfish, and

unfeeling not to be that worst kind of king, the domestic tyrant. He

tyrannized over even his mistresses.

Philip II., the greatest monarch of modern times,--perhaps the

greatest of all time, the extent and diversity of his dominions

considered, and the ability of the races over which he ruled taken

into the account,--was under the painful necessity of putting his

eldest son, Don Carlos, in close confinement, from which he never came

forth until he was brought out feet foremost, the presumption being

that he had been put to death by his father's orders. Carlos has been

made a hero of romance, but a more worthless character never lived.

On his death-bed Philip II. was compelled to see how little his son

Philip, who succeeded him, cared for his feelings and wishes. Peter

the Great put to death his son Alexis; and Frederick William I.

of Prussia came very near taking the life of that son of his who

afterward became Frederick the Great.

Jealousy is so common a feeling in Oriental royal houses, that it is

hardly allowable to quote anything from their history; but we may be

permitted to allude to the effect of one instance of paternal hate in

the Ottoman family at the time of its utmost greatness. Solyman

the Magnificent was jealous of his eldest son, Mustapha, who is

represented by all writers on the Turkish history of those times as

a remarkably superior man, and who, had he lived, would have been a

mighty foe to Christendom. This son the Sultan caused to be put to

death, and there are few incidents of a more tragical cast than those

which accompanied Mustapha's murder. They might be turned to great

use by an historical romancer, who would find matters all made to his

hand. The effect of this murder was to substitute for the succession

that miserable drunkard, Selim II., who was utterly unable to lead the

Turks in those wars that were absolutely essential to their existence

as a dominant people. "With him," says Ranke, "begins the series of

those inactive Sultans, in whose dubious character we may trace one

main cause of the decay of the Ottoman fortunes." Solyman's hatred of

his able son was a good thing for Christendom; for, if Mustapha had

lived, and become Sultan, the War of Cyprus--that contest in

which occurred the Battle of Lepanto--might have Lad a different

termination, and the Osmanlis have been successful invaders of both

Spain and Italy. It was a most fortunate circumstance for Europe,

that, while it was engaged in carrying on civil wars and wars of

religion, the Turks should have had for their chiefs men incapable of

carrying on that work of war and conquest through which alone it was

possible for those Mussulmans to maintain their position in Europe;

and that they were thus favored was owing to the causeless jealousy

felt by Sultan Solyman for the son who most resembled himself: and

Solyman was the greatest of his line, which some say ended with him.

UNDER THE PEAR-TREE.

IN TWO PARTS.

PART I.

CHAPTER I.

One Sunday morning, long ago, a girl stood in her bed-room,

lingeringly occupied with the last touches of her toilet.

A string of beads, made of pure gold and as large as peas, lay before

her. They had been her mother's,--given to her when the distracted

state of American currency made a wedding-present of the precious

metal as welcome as it was valuable. Three several times, under

circumstances of great pecuniary urgency, had the beads sufficed, one

by one, to restore the family to comfort,--to pay the expenses of a

journey, to buy seed-grain, and to make out the payment of a yoke of

oxen. Afterwards, when peace and plenty came to be housemates in the

land, the gold beads were redeemed, and the necklace, dearer than

ever, encircled the neck of the only daughter.

The only daughter took them up, and clasped them round her throat with

a decisive snap. But the crowning graces remained in the shape of two

other ornaments that lay in a small China box. It had a head on the

cover, beautifully painted, of some queen,--perhaps of the Empress

Josephine, the girl thought. The hat had great ostrich-feathers, that

seemed proper to royalty, and it was a pretty face.

In the box lay a pin and ring. On the back of the pin was braided

hair, and letters curiously intertwined. The young girl slipped the

ring on her own finger once more, and smiled. Then she took it off,

with a sigh that had no pain in it, and looked at the name engraved

inside,--DORCAS FOX.

Whoever saw this name in the town records would naturally image to

himself the town tailoress or nurse, or somebody's single sister

who had been wise too long,--somebody tall, a little bent, and

bony,--somebody weather-beaten and determined--looking, with a sharp,

shrewd glance of a gray eye that said you could not possibly get the

better of her and so need not try,--somebody who goes out unattended

and fearless at night; for, as she very properly observes, "Who'd want

to speak to _me_?"

This might have described the original owner of the pin and ring, who

had died years before, and left the ornaments for her namesake and

niece, when she was too young to remember or care for her, but not the

niece herself. She was young, blooming, twenty-two, and the belle of

the country-village where she dwelt.

The bed-room where the girl stood and meditated, after her fashion,

was six feet by ten in dimensions, and the oval mirror before which

she stood was six inches by ten. It was a genuine relic of the

Mayflower, and had been brought over, together with the great chest in

the entry, by the grand-grand-grandmother of all the Foxes. If anybody

were disposed to be skeptical on this point, Colonel Fox had only to

point to the iron clamp at the end, by which it had been confined to

the deck; that would have produced conviction, if he had declared it

came out of the Ark. This was a queer-looking little mirror, in which

the young Dorcas saw her round face reflected: framed in black oak,

delicately carved, and cut on the edge with a slant that gave the

plate an appearance of being an inch thick.

Sixty years ago there were not many mirrors in country-towns in New

England; and in Colonel Fox's house this and one more sufficed for the

family-reflections. In the "square room," a modern long looking-glass,

framed in mahogany, and surmounted by the American emblem of triumph,

was the astonishment of the neighbors,--and in Walton those were many,

though the population was small.

Dorcas looked wistfully and wishingly at the oval pin; but with no

more notion of what she was looking at than the child who gazes into

the heavens on a winter night. When she looked into the oval mirror,

no dream of the centuries through which it had received on its surface

fair and suffering faces, grave, noble, self-sacrificing men, and

scenes of trial deep and agonizing,--no dream of the past disturbed

the serene unconsciousness of her gaze. She looked at the large

pearls that formed the long oval pin, and at the exquisite allegorical

painting, which, in the quaint fashion of the time of its execution,

was colored with the "ground hair" of the beloved; so materializing

sentiment, and, as it were, getting as near as possible to the very

heart's blood. Yet the old gold, the elaborate execution of the quaint

classical device, and the fanciful arrangement of the braided hair

interwoven with twisted gold letters, all told no tales to the

observer, whose unwakened nature, indeed, asked no questions.

The little room, so small that in these days a College of Physicians

would at once condemn it, as a cradle of disease and death, had

nevertheless for twenty years been the nightly abode of as perfect a

piece of health as the country produced. Whatever might be wanting

in height and space was amply made up in inevitable and involuntary

ventilation. Health walked in at the wide cracks around the little

window-frame, peeped about in all directions with the snow-flakes in

winter and the ready breezes in summer, and settled itself permanently

on the fresh cheeks and lips of the light sleeper and early riser.

Beside the white-covered cot there stood a straight-backed,

list-seated oaken chair, a mahogany chest of drawers that reached from

floor to ceiling, and a little three-legged light-stand. Everything

was covered with white, and the room was fragrant with the lavender

and dried rose-leaves with which every drawer was scrupulously

perfumed. There was no toilet-table, for Dorcas had use neither for

perfumes nor ointment. No Kalydors and no Glycerines came within the

category of her healthful experience. Alert and graceful, she neither

burnt her fingers nor cut her hands, and had need therefore of no

soothing salves or sirups; and as she did not totter in scrimped shoes

or tight laces, and so did not fall and break her bones, she had no

need even of that modern necessity in all well-regulated families,

"Prepared Glue." There was no medicine-chest in Colonel Fox's house.

Healthy, occupied, active, and wise--but not too wise--was Dorcas Fox.

It is no proof that Dorcas was a beauty, that she looked often in the

little mirror. Ugliness is quite as anxious as beauty on that point,

and is even oftener found gazing with sad solicitude at itself, if

haply there may be found some mollifying or mitigating circumstance,

either in outline or expression. But Dorcas's face pleased herself and

everybody else.

A certain freedom and ease, the result partly of a symmetrical form,

and partly of conscious good-looks, gave the grace of movement to

Dorcas which attracted all eyes. Almost every one has a sense of

harmony, and old and young loved to watch the musical motion of Dorcas

Fox, whatever she might be doing,--whether she queened it at the

"Thanksgiving Ball," and from heel-and-toe, pigeon-wing, or mazy

double-shuffle, evolved the finest and subtlest intricacies of muscle,

or whether, on the Sabbath, walking behind her parents to meeting,

she married the movement to the solemnity of the day, and, as it were,

walked in long metre.

She always was in Hallelujah metre to the Blacks, Whites, Grays,

Greens, and Browns that color so largely every New-England community;

and the youths who were wont to form the crowd that invariably settled

at the corner of the meeting-house waited only till Dorcas Fox went up

the "broad-oil" to express open-mouthed admiration. After her fashion,

she was as much wondered at as the Duchess of Hamilton in her time,

and with much more reason, since Dorcas was composed of real roses and

lilies.

On Sunday, though the Puritanic doctrine prevailed, as far as doctrine

can, of not speaking week-day thoughts, or having them, if they would

keep away, yet inevitably, among the younger portion of the flock, the

day of "meeting" was one of more than religious importance; and many

lads and lasses who were never attracted by Father Boardman's eloquent

sedatives still made it a point to be regular in their attendance at

meeting twice on every Sunday. From far and near came open one-horse

wagons, piled high with weekly shaven and dressed humanity,--young

and old with solemn and demure faces, with brown-ribboned queues, and

garments of domestic making. Fresh, strong, tall girls of five feet

ten, dressed in straw bonnets of their own handiwork, and sometimes

with scarlet cardinals lightly flung over their shoulders, sprang over

the wagon-thills to the ground. Now and then the more remote dwellers

came on horseback, each Jack with his Gill on a pillion behind, and

holding him with a proper and dignified embrace.

Hard-handed youths, with bright, determined faces,--men nursed in

blockhouses, born in forts,--men who had raised their corn when the

loaded gun went every step with the hoe and the plough,--such men,

of whom the Revolution had been made, who could say nothing, and do

everything, stood in a crowd around the meeting-house door. There was

some excitement in meeting each other, though there was very little,

if anything, to say. There was time enough in those days. Progress

wasn't in such a hurry as now. Inventions came calmly along, once in

a man's life, and not, as now, each heel-trodden by that of his

neighbor, tripping up and passing it, in the speed of the breathless

race.

The sun itself seemed to shine with a calmer and silenter radiance

over the broad, leisurely land.

Time enough, bless you! and the Sunday, any way, is _so_ long!

This Sunday morning, at ten o'clock, Dorcas has already been up and

dressed six hours. Everything having the remotest connection with

domestic duties has been finished and laid aside long ago, and she has

devoted the last two hours to solitary meditations, mostly of the kind

already mentioned.

In the great oven, since last night, has lain the Sunday supper of

baked pork-and-beans, Indian-pudding, and brown bread, all the

better the longer they bake, and all unfailing in their character

of excellence. In the square room, in the green arm-chair, sits the

Colonel, fast asleep.

Four hours ago, he fumed and fretted about barn and cow-house,

breakfasted, and had family-prayers. Since then, he has donned his

Sabbath array, both mental and bodily. Mentally, having dismissed the

cares of the week, he has strictly united himself with his body, and

gone to sleep. Bodily, he appears in a suit of hemlock-dyed, with

Matherman buttons, knee- and shoe-buckles of silver. His gray hair is

neatly composed in a queue, his full cheeks rest on his portly chest,

and the outward visibly harmonizes with the inward man. He

sleeps soundly now, purposing faithfully to keep awake during the

three-and-twenty heads of the minister's discourse. If he finds it

too much for him, he means to stand, as he often does. Sometimes he

partakes freely of the aromatic stimulants carried by his wife and

daughter as bouquets. The southernwood wakes him, and the green seeds

of the caraway get him well along through the sermon.

Mrs. Fox steps softly in, rustling in the same black taffeta she

always wears, and the same black silk bonnet,--worn just fifty-two

days in a year, and carefully pinned and boxed away for all the other

three hundred and thirteen.

As fashions did not come to Walton oftener than once in ten years,

it followed that apparel among the young people wore very much the

expression of individual taste, while among the elders it was wont to

assume the cast now irreverently designated by "fossil remains." And,

really, it did not much matter. Whatever our country-grandmothers were

admired and esteemed for, be sure it was not dress.

As the clock pointed to half-past ten, the door opened quickly, and

Dorcas stood on the threshold, like a summer breeze that has stopped

one moment its fluttering, and hovers fresh, sweet, and sunny in

the morning air. The breath of her presence, if indeed it were not

association, roused old Colonel Fox from his sleep. He glanced at her,

took the ready arm of his wife, looked again at the clock, and passed

out over the flat door-stone with his cocked hat and cane, as became

an invalid soldier and a gentleman. Behind them, hymn-book in hand

and with downcast eyes, walked Dorcas. Not a word passed between the

parents and their only daughter. On Sunday, people were not to think

their own thoughts. And familiarity between parents and children,

never allowed even on week-days, would have been unpardonable

unfitness on the Sabbath.

They reached the church-door just as the minister, with his white wig

shedding powder on his venerable back, passed up the broad-aisle.

A perfectly decorous throng of the loiterers followed, and the

pews rapidly filled. The Colonel and his wife, being persons of

consequence, took their way with suitable dignity and deliberation. In

the three who turned, about half-way up the broad-aisle, into a square

pew, a physiognomist would have seen at one glance the characteristic

features of each mind. In the Colonel, choleric, fresh, and

warm-hearted, a good lover, and not very good hater. In his wife, "a

chronicler of small-beer," with a perfectly negative expression. One

might guess she did no harm, and fear she did no good,--that she saved

the hire of an upper servant,--that she was an inveterate sewer and

cleaner, and would leave the world in time with an epitaph.

On the third figure and face the physiognomist might dwell

longer,--but that rather because youth, hope, and inexperience had

refused to make any of the life-marks that tell stories in faces.

There was abundant room for imagination and prophecy.

A figure not too tall, but full of wavy lines,--two dark-blue eyes,

whose full under-lids gave an expression of arch sweetness to the

glance,--a delicate complexion of roses and lilies, as suggestive of

fading as of blossoming,--features small, and not at all of the Greek

pattern,--and the rather large head and slightly developed bust,

typical of American rural beauty.

To this summary of youthful charms would be at once added the grace of

motion before spoken of, which made Dorcas Fox a favorite with all the

young men in Walton, and which gave her a reputation of beauty which

in strictness she did not deserve. A little habitual ill-health,

and the glamour is gone, with the roses and lilies and the music

of motion. In our climate of fierce extremes, both field- and

garden-flowers speedily wilt and chill. Dorcas herself had been a

thousand times told she was the very picture of her mother at her age.

And just to look now at Mrs. Colonel Fox!

A tall young man stood on the doorsteps of the meeting-house, as

Dorcas went demurely behind her parents in at the open door. He looked

at her with a quick, inquiring glance from his keen Yankee eyes, which

she answered with an almost imperceptible nod of her graceful head.

She dropped her eyes, and passed on. This young man was Henry Mowers,

and he owned the Mowers farm. He was a very good, sensible fellow, and

had "kept company," as the country-phrase is, with Dorcas Fox for

the last few weeks, having, indeed, had his eye on her ever since the

New-Year's sleigh-ride and ball.

After Dorcas had reached her seat in the pew, and adjusted her

spotless Sunday chintz and the ribbon that confined her jaunty

gypsy-hat over her sunny hair, she raised her eyes carelessly to a pew

in a side-aisle. The Dorrs generally occupied it alone; but sometimes

Swan Day, when he wasn't in the choir, sat there too.

Swan Day, or, as he might better have been called, Night Raven, kept

the country-store in Walton. One naturally thought of afternoon

rather than morning at seeing his olive complexion, dark eyes, and

thick-clustering black curls. Such romance as was to be had in Walton,

without the aid of a circulating library, certainly gathered about

Swan Day. An orphan, born of a Creole mother and a British sergeant,

he had been left early to his own resources. He had found them

sufficient thus far, in a cordial neighborhood like Walton, when

industry and temperance were cardinal virtues not carried to excess;

and he was rather a favorite among the young women.

The peculiar languor and richness of his complexion,--the dark eyes,

soft as an Indian girl's,--the mouth, melting and red as the grapes

where under a tropical sun his foreign mother had lain, and, gathering

them ripe, had dropped them lazily into his baby mouth: these were new

and strange features in the Saxon community where he had accidentally

been left on the death of his father, who was shot at Saratoga. The

mother lingered awhile, and then dropped away, leaving Swan to thrive

in the bracing air in which she had shivered to death.

Many Sundays before this, Swan had looked at Colonel Fox's pew, and,

looking, loved.

Dorcas looked occasionally.

All the time, while the minister preached, she twiddled her

caraway-stems, sometimes biting a seed in two very softly between her

little teeth, and keeping, on the whole, an appearance of exemplary

devoutness. When Father Boardman reached "sixthly," she raised her

eyes, and saw Henry Mowers looking straight at her. Then she

dropped her eyelids at once, sniffed delicately at her bouquet of

southernwood, and, gaining strength from its pungency, applied herself

to staring once more at the great pine pulpit, where, like a very old

sparrow on the house-top, Father Boardman denounced and anathematized

at leisure all who did not think as he did. By degrees, all the eyes

in Dorcas's neighborhood that had been any length of time in the world

were dozing and closing with the full leave of the spirit. Finally,

when Father Boardman entered on the "improvement," Dorcas, who had

not heard a word, looked again in the direction of the Dorr pew. Henry

Mowers had succumbed to Morpheus half an hour before. Still there

flamed on the deep, bewitching eyes of Day; and as all the rest in her

neighborhood had gone to sleep, and the young girl had really nothing

specially to keep herself awake with, she looked up, too, and then

down, and then rosily, and timidly, and consciously, and then at

him once more. By that time she blushed again, and a smile was just

beginning to wake from its sleep in the corner of her mouth, when

a rush, a rising, and a general clatter and banging of pew-seats

announced the blessed news of suspended instruction.

In the fashion of sixty years ago, the congregation waited reverently,

until the pastor walked down the broad-aisle and out at the door,

before a soul stirred. Then the men followed, and last of all the

women. In the crowd, there were frequent opportunities for whispered

words, all the sweeter for the stealing; and in the crowd, after he

had seen Henry Mowers jump into the wagon and drive off his three

sisters half a mile to their home, and after seeing Jenny Post ride

off on a pillion behind her old brother, as in the gone-by days when

wide roads and wagons were not, Swan sauntered carelessly towards

Dorcas, and said, in a tone too low for her parents to hear, but very

distinctly,--

"I must see you to-morrow night."

"I can't," was the murmured reply.

"For the last time, Dorcas! come down to the old pear-tree to-morrow,

before sunset," he whispered, imploringly.

He was wise to turn suddenly away before her parents could hear him,

touching on secular subjects, and before she could herself get up any

new objection. Her objections, truly, were very faint and few, and,

being tossed about awhile, finally settled out of sight. Henry

would, she knew, come to his weekly wooing as soon as the setting sun

proclaimed the Sabbath-day over. After that time she was safe. She

could slip down the orchard to the pear-tree, and hear what was the

important word, and what Swan meant by "the last."

Eight or ten persons, who lived at a distance from "meeting," were in

the habit of partaking the hospitality of Colonel Fox, of a Sunday,

as the hour's intermission gave them no opportunity to return to

their distant homes. After the Puritan fashion, unlike enough to the

present, families were restricted on Sunday to two meals, and those

were provided with a Jewish regard to the fourth commandment. All

labor was scrupulously anticipated or postponed, but such hospitality

as consisted with the strict observance of the Sabbath was at the

service of their friends.

On coming in at the door of the square room, with its sanded floor,

its old desk, its spare bed in the corner, and its cherry table with

wavy outlines, which had belonged to Colonel Fox's mother, Dorcas

found the cloth already laid, and the bonnets and cardinals of half a

dozen old friends on the bed.

In five minutes, early apples, old cider, and a plate of raised

doughnuts, flanked by plates of mince- and apple-pie, rewarded the

patience and piety of the company. Colonel Fox, solemnly, and as if

he were quite accustomed to it, poured from a jug into large tumblers

that held at least a pint, dropped three large lumps of loaf-sugar,

filled the glass with water, grated some nutmeg on the top, and bade

his guests refresh themselves with toddy, unless they preferred flip:

if they did, they had only to say so: the poker was hot.

They all ate and drank, and by that time the bell rang again; and then

they all went again. And if they heard Father Boardman at all, it was

with utterly composed minds, when he told them it was their duty to be

contented, even should their condemnation be eternally decreed, since

it must, of course, be for the good of the whole, and for the glory of

God. Hopkinsianism was in fashion then, and the minds of men in many

parts of the country had accepted the logic of its founder, negatived

as it was, in its practical application, by the sweetness of his

Christian benevolence and his large humanity. Then the toddy helped

them to swallow many doctrines that in our cold-water days are sharply

and defiantly contested. The head is much clearer; whether hearts are

better is doubtful.

After supper, and while yet the sun lingered smilingly over the

Great Meadows and on the hills, behind which he sank, Dorcas, who had

meanwhile adorned herself with Aunt Dorcas's bequest, broke the long

silence, by whispering so low that her father's sleep should not be

disturbed,--

"Mother, do you set much by this pin?"

"Of course I do, child! 'T was your Aunt Dorcas's," said Mrs. Fox,

"your father's own sister."

"Yes, I know it, mother; but how did she come by it?"

All these years, and this was the first time Dorcas had asked the

question! She colored a little, too, as if some secret thought or

story were busy about her heart, as she looked at the ring.

"Well,--it was a man she 'xpected to 'a' bed. They was to 'a' ben

merried, an' he was to 'a' gi'n up v'yagin'. But he was cast away, an'

she never heerd nothin' about neither him nor the ship. He was waitin'

to git means, an' he did, privateerin' an' so; but I 'xpect he was

drownded," concluded Mrs. Fox, in a suitably plaintive tone.

And that was Aunt Dorcas's story.