Part 25

[Daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Lorraine, a princess of the Guise family of France, born 1542, died 1587. As great-granddaughter of Henry VII of England, Mary was heir to the English throne after the failure of direct descendants of Henry VIII, the last of whom was Queen Elizabeth. At the age of sixteen she was married to the dauphin of France; and, as she was put forward as claimant of the English throne (even as against Elizabeth, whom the Catholic powers of Europe affected to treat as the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII), the arms of England were quartered with those of France and Scotland on her escutcheon. Mary’s persistence in protruding this claim, under advice of her Catholic friends, was a main cause of the misfortunes of her sad and romantic career. On the death of Mary’s husband, Francis II of France, she returned to Scotland to resume the functions of government, thoroughly imbued with Catholic and French notions of policy, and already antagonistic to a large portion of her subjects, who had become fanatically Protestant under the leadership of such men as John Knox. Henceforward the Queen of Scots was embarked on a sea of troubles, which are familiar history. She married Lord Darnley in 1565, against the wish of her own Protestant subjects and of Queen Elizabeth; and on the murder of Darnley by the Earl of Bothwell, she consummated her follies by espousing the latter. The rebellion which ensued resulted first in her imprisonment by her own subjects, and afterward, consequent on her escape and defeat in battle by the Protestant lords, her confinement by the Queen of England, on whom she had thrown herself for protection. For nineteen years Mary was the inmate of successive English prisons, though not rigorously treated otherwise. The numerous conspiracies in which she was implicated by the enthusiasm of her supporters in England and France, some of which involved the assassination of Elizabeth, and all of which looked to the complete overthrow of Protestantism, at last caused her trial and condemnation by an English commission. The signature to the death-warrant has been claimed by some historians to have been a forgery; by others to have been genuine, but its commission under the great seal an act without Elizabeth’s consent. But the weight of evidence shows Elizabeth’s conduct to have been a piece of consummate duplicity, and that she manœuvred to receive the benefits of Mary’s death without incurring the odium of its authority. There is no personage in history whose character has been the subject of more controversy. A school of English historical critics, among whom are Carlyle, Froude, and Kingsley, stigmatize her as the incarnation of all that was brilliantly wicked; while others, equally distinguished, soften her errors and eulogize her virtues as the victim of circumstances, and one “far more sinned against than sinning.”]

Her change of abode and situation was very little agreeable to the Scottish princess. Besides her natural preposessions in favor of a country in which she had been educated from her earliest infancy, and where she had borne so high a rank, she could not forbear both regretting the society of that people, so celebrated for their humane disposition and their respectful attachment to their sovereign, and reflecting on the disparity of the scene which lay before her. It is said that, after she was embarked at Calais, she kept her eyes fixed on the coast of France, and never turned them from that beloved object till darkness fell and intercepted it from her view. She then ordered a couch to be spread for her in the open air, and charged the pilot that if in the morning the land were still in sight, he should awake her, and afford her one parting view of that country in which all her affections were centered. The weather proved calm, so that the ship made little way in the night-time, and Mary had once more an opportunity of seeing the French coast. She sat up on her couch, and, still looking toward the land, often repeated these words: “Farewell, France, farewell; I shall never see thee more.”

The first aspect, however, of things in Scotland was more favorable, if not to her pleasure and happiness, at least to her repose and security, than she had reason to apprehend. No sooner did the French galleys appear off Leith, than people of all ranks, who had long expected their arrival, flocked toward the shore with an earnest impatience to behold and receive their young sovereign. Some were led by duty, some by interest, some by curiosity; and all combined to express their attachment to her, and to insinuate themselves into her confidence on the commencement of her administration. She had now reached her nineteenth year, and the bloom of her youth and amiable beauty of her person were further recommended by the affability of her address, the politeness of her manners, and the elegance of her genius. Well accomplished in all the superficial but engaging graces of a court, she afforded, when better known, still more promising indications of her character; and men prognosticated both humanity from her soft and obliging deportment, and penetration from her taste in all the refined arts of music, eloquence, and poetry. And as the Scots had long been deprived of the presence of their sovereign, whom they once despaired ever more to behold among them, her arrival seemed to give universal satisfaction; and nothing appeared about the court but symptoms of affection, joy, and festivity.

But there was one circumstance which blasted all these promising appearances, and bereaved Mary of that general favor which her agreeable manners and judicious deportment gave her just reason to expect. She was still a papist; and though she published, soon after her arrival, a proclamation enjoining every one to submit to the established religion, the preachers and their adherents could neither be reconciled to a person polluted with so great an abomination, nor lay aside their jealousies of her future conduct. It was with great difficulty she could obtain permission for saying mass in her own chapel; and had not the people apprehended that, if she had here met with a refusal, she would instantly have returned to France, the zealots never would have granted her even that small indulgence. The cry was, “Shall we suffer that idol to be again erected within the realm?”

The whole life of Mary was, from the demeanor of these men, filled with bitterness and sorrow. The rustic apostle John Knox scruples not, in his history, to inform us that he once treated her with such severity that she lost all command of temper, and dissolved in tears before him; yet, so far from being moved with youth and beauty, and royal dignity reduced to that condition, he persevered in his insolent reproofs; and when he relates this incident, he discovers a visible pride and satisfaction in his own conduct. The pulpits had become mere scenes of railing against the vices of the court; among which were always noted, as the principal, feasting, finery, dancing, balls, and whoredom, their necessary attendant. Some ornaments which the ladies at that time wore upon their petticoats, excited mightily the indignation of the preachers; and they affirmed that such vanity would provoke God’s vengeance, not only against these foolish women but against the whole realm.

Mary, whose age, condition, and education invited her to liberty and cheerfulness, was curbed in all amusements by the absurd severity of these reformers; and she found, every moment, reason to regret her leaving that country from whose manners she had, in her early youth, received the first impressions. Her two uncles, the Duke of Aumale and the Grand Prior, with the other French nobility, soon took leave of her; the Marquis of Elbeuf remained some time longer; but after his departure she was left to the society of her own subjects--men unacquainted with the pleasures of conversation, ignorant of arts and civility, and corrupted beyond their usual rusticity by a dismal fanaticism, which rendered them incapable of all humanity or improvement. Though Mary had made no attempt to restore the ancient religion, her popery was a sufficient crime; though her behavior was hitherto irreproachable, and her manners sweet and engaging, her gayety and ease were interpreted as signs of dissolute vanity; and to the harsh and preposterous usage which this princess met with may in part be ascribed those errors of her subsequent conduct, which seemed so little of a piece with the general tenor of her character.

Mary was a woman of great accomplishments both of body and mind, natural as well as acquired, but unfortunate in her life, and during one period very unhappy in her conduct. The beauties of her person and graces of her air combined to make her the most amiable of women; and the charms of her address and conversation aided the impression which her lovely figure made on the hearts of all beholders. Ambitious and active in her temper, yet inclined to cheerfulness and society; of a lofty spirit, constant and even vehement in her purpose, yet polite, and gentle, and affable in her demeanor, she seemed to partake only so much of the male virtues as to render her estimable, without relinquishing those soft graces which compose the proper ornament of her sex.

In order to form a just idea of her character, we must set aside one part of her conduct, while she abandoned herself to the guidance of a profligate man, and must consider these faults, whether we admit them to be imprudences or crimes, as the result of an inexplicable though not uncommon inconstancy in the human mind, of the frailty of our nature, of the violence of passion, and of the influence which situations, and sometimes momentary incidents, have on persons whose principles are not thoroughly confirmed by experience and reflection. Enraged by the ungrateful conduct of her husband, seduced by the treacherous counsels of one in whom she reposed confidence, transported by the violence of her own temper, which never lay sufficiently under the guidance of discretion, she was betrayed into actions which may with some difficulty be accounted for, but which admit of no apology, nor even of alleviation. An enumeration of her qualities might carry the appearance of a panegyric; an account of her conduct must in some parts wear the aspect of severe satire and invective.

Her numerous misfortunes, the solitude of her long and tedious captivity, and the persecutions to which she had been exposed on account of her religion, had wrought her up to a degree of bigotry during her later years; and such were the prevalent spirit and principles of the age, that it is the less wonder if her zeal, her resentment, and her interest uniting, induced her to give consent to a design which conspirators, actuated only by the first of these motives, had formed against the life of Elizabeth.

JOHN PYM.

BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[Born 1584, died in 1643. Leader of the House of Commons in its contest with Charles I, he was the most able and indefatigable opponent of royal usurpation, and the most active agent in the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford. From a pamphlet written just before his death, when war in the field had begun between king and people, it seems doubtful whether he would not in the end have resisted the usurpation of power by Cromwell and the Independents, and supported the king as the least of two evils.]

If Strafford embodied the spirit of tyranny, John Pym, the leader of the Commons from the first meeting of the new houses at Westminster, stands out for all after time as the embodiment of law. A Somersetshire gentleman of good birth and competent fortune, he entered on public life in the Parliament of 1614, and was imprisoned for his patriotism at its close. He had been a leading member in that of 1620, and one of the “twelve ambassadors” for whom James ordered chairs to be set at Whitehall. Of the band of patriots with whom he had stood side by side in the constitutional struggle against the earlier despotism of Charles he was almost the sole survivor. Coke had died of old age; Cotton’s heart was broken by oppression; Eliot had perished in the tower; Wentworth had apostatized. Pym alone remained, resolute, patient as of old; and as the sense of his greatness grew silently during the eleven years of deepening misrule, the hope and faith of better things clung almost passionately to the man, who never doubted of the final triumph of freedom and the law. At their close, Clarendon tells us, in words all the more notable for their bitter tone of hate, “he was the most popular man, and the most able to do hurt, that has lived at any time.”

He had shown he knew how to wait, and when waiting was over he showed he knew how to act. On the eve of the Long Parliament he rode through England to quicken the electors to a sense of the crisis which had come at last; and on the assembling of the Commons, he took his place not merely as member for Tavistock but as their acknowledged head. Few of the country gentlemen, indeed, who formed the bulk of the members, had sat in any previous House; and of the few, none represented in so eminent a way the parliamentary tradition on which the coming struggle was to turn. Pym’s eloquence, inferior in boldness and originality to that of Eliot or Wentworth, was better suited by its massive and logical force to convince and guide a great party; and it was backed by a calmness of temper, a dexterity and order in the management of public business, and a practical power of shaping the course of debate, which gave a form and method to parliamentary proceedings such as they had never had before. Valuable, however, as these qualities were, it was a yet higher quality which raised Pym into the greatest, as he was the first, of parliamentary leaders.

Of the five hundred members who sat round him at St. Stephen’s, he was the one man who had clearly foreseen, and as clearly resolved how to meet, the difficulties which lay before them. It was certain that Parliament would be drawn into a struggle with the Crown. It was probable that in such a struggle the House of Commons would be hampered, as it had been hampered before, by the House of Lords. The legal antiquaries of the older constitutional school stood helpless before such a conflict of co-ordinate powers--a conflict for which no provision had been made by the law, and on which precedents threw only a doubtful and conflicting light. But, with a knowledge of precedent as great as their own, Pym rose high above them in his grasp of constitutional principles. He was the first English statesman who discovered, and applied to the political circumstances around him, what may be called the doctrine of constitutional proportion. He saw that, as an element of constitutional life, Parliament was of higher value than the Crown; he saw, too, that in Parliament itself the one essential part was the House of Commons. On these two facts he based his whole policy in the contest which followed.

When Charles refused to act with the Parliament, Pym treated the refusal as a temporary abdication on the part of the sovereign, which vested the executive power in the two Houses until new arrangements were made. When the Lords obstructed public business, he warned them that obstruction would only force the Commons “to save the kingdom alone.” Revolutionary as these principles seemed at the time, they have both been recognized as bases of our constitution since the days of Pym. The first principle was established by the Convention and Parliament which followed on the departure of James II; the second by the acknowledgement on all sides, since the Reform Bill of 1832, that the government of the country is really in the hands of the House of Commons, and can only be carried on by ministers who represent the majority of that House. Pym’s temper, indeed, was the very opposite of the temper of a revolutionist. Few natures have ever been wider in their range of sympathy or action.

Serious as his purpose was, his manners were genial, and even courtly; he turned easily from an invective against Strafford to a chat with Lady Carlisle; and the grace and gayety of his social tone, even when the care and weight of public affairs were bringing him to the grave, gave rise to a hundred silly scandals among the prurient royalists. It was this striking combination of genial versatility with a massive force in his nature which marked him out from the first moment of power as a born ruler of men. He proved himself at once the subtlest of diplomatists and the grandest of demagogues. He was equally at home in tracking the subtle intricacies of royalist intrigues, or in kindling popular passion with words of fire. Though past middle life when his work really began--for he was born in 1584, four years before the coming of the Armada--he displayed from the first meeting of the Long Parliament the qualities of a great administrator, an immense faculty for labor, a genius for organization, patience, tact, a power of inspiring confidence in all whom he touched, calmness and moderation under good fortune or ill, an immovable courage, an iron will. No English ruler has ever shown greater nobleness of natural temper or a wider capacity for government than the Somersetshire squire, whom his enemies, made clear-sighted by their hate, greeted truly enough as “King Pym.”

HENRY IV, KING OF FRANCE.

BY JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

[First French king of the Bourbon family, born king of Navarre 1553, assassinated 1610. Educated a Huguenot, he, as representing this religious party, was married to Marguerite de Valois, the sister of Charles IX, to signalize the pretended reconciliation of religious differences, a few days before the massacre of St. Bartholomew. For four years he was detained at the French court and compelled to abjure his faith, till he succeeded in escaping and putting himself at the head of the Protestant forces. After a life of remarkable vicissitudes, Henry of Navarre became _de jure_ king of France as the next of surviving blood after Henry III, but was not crowned till 1794, at which time he, for political reasons, again and finally abjured Protestantism. Paris, and shortly afterward the whole of France, then submitted to his rule. During his reign of sixteen years Henry showed the highest qualities of the great ruler, and his genius promised to make him as powerful a potentate as Charles V had been, when he fell by the knife of the assassin Ravaillac.]

At his very name a figure seems to leap forth from the mist of three centuries, instinct with ruddy, vigorous life. Such was the intense vitality of the Bearnese prince, that even now he seems more thoroughly alive and recognizable than half the actual personages who are fretting their hour upon the stage.

We see at once a man of moderate stature, light, sinewy, and strong; a face browned with continual exposure; small, mirthful, yet commanding blue eyes, glittering from beneath an arching brow, and prominent cheek-bones; a long, hawk’s nose, almost resting upon a salient chin; a pendent mustache, and a thick, brown, curly beard, prematurely grizzled; we see the mien of frank authority and magnificent good-humor; we hear the ready sallies of the shrewd Gascon mother-wit; we feel the electricity which flashes out of him and sets all hearts around him on fire, when the trumpet sounds to battle. The headlong, desperate charge, the snow-white plume waving where the fire is hottest, the large capacity for enjoyment of the man, rioting without affectation in the _certaminis gaudia_, the insane gallop, after the combat, to lay its trophies at the feet of the Cynthia of the minute, and thus to forfeit its fruits--all are as familiar to us as if the seven distinct wars, the hundred pitched battles, the two hundred sieges, in which the Bearnese was personally present, had been occurrences of our own day.

He at last was both king and man, if the monarch who occupied the throne was neither. He was the man to prove, too, for the instruction of the patient letter-writer of the Escorial,[24] that the crown of France was to be won with foot in stirrup and carbine in hand, rather than to be caught by the weaving and casting of the most intricate nets of diplomatic intrigue, though thoroughly weighted with Mexican gold.

The king of Navarre was now thirty-one years old; for the three Henrys were nearly of the same age. The first indications of his existence had been recognized amid the cannon and trumpets of a camp in Picardy, and his mother had sung a gay Bearnese song as he was coming into the world at Pau. “Thus,” said his grandfather, Henry of Navarre, “thou shalt not bear to us a morose and sulky child.” The good king without a kingdom, taking the child as soon as born in the lappel of his dressing-gown, had brushed his infant lips with a clove of garlic and moistened them with a drop of generous Gascon wine. “Thus,” said the grandfather again, “shall the boy be both merry and bold.” There was something mythologically prophetic in the incidents of his birth.

The best part of Navarre had been long since appropriated by Ferdinand of Aragon. In France there reigned a young and warlike sovereign with four healthy boys. But the newborn infant had inherited the lilies of France from St. Louis, and a later ancestor had added to the escutcheon the motto “_Espoir_.” His grandfather believed that the boy was born to revenge upon Spain the wrongs of the house of Albret, and Henry’s nature seemed ever pervaded with Robert of Clermont’s device.

The same sensible grandfather, having different views on the subject of education from those manifested by Catharine de Medici toward her children, had the boy taught to run about bareheaded and barefooted, like a peasant, among the mountains and rocks of Béarn, till he became as rugged as a young bear and as nimble as a kid. Black bread and beef and garlic were his simple fare; and he was taught by his mother and his grandfather to hate lies and liars, and to read the Bible.

When he was fifteen, the third religious war broke out. Both his father and grandfather were dead. His mother, who had openly professed the Reformed faith since the death of her husband, who hated it, brought her boy to the camp at Rochelle, where he was received as the chief of the Huguenots. His culture was not extensive. He had learned to speak the truth, to ride, to shoot, to do with little sleep and less food. He could also construe a little Latin, and had read a few military treatises; but the mighty hours of an eventful life were now to take him by the hand and to teach him much good and much evil, as they bore him onward. He now saw military treatises expounded practically by professors like his uncle Condé, and Admiral Coligny, and Lewis Nassau in such lecture rooms as Laudun, and Jarnac, and Moncontour, and never was apter scholar.