Part 5

John Shakespeare was fond of these shows, and there is no doubt that his son William was taken to see them before he went to the Stratford Grammar School when he was seven years old. Here the boy is said to have studied Latin, writing, and arithmetic. Judging from the specimens that are still to be seen of William Shakespeare’s penmanship, it was not a great success. One of the great

play-writers of Shakespeare’s time wrote that Will had learned “small Latin and less Greek” at school. But Latin was the chief study in the schools of that time. It was sung and spoken in church, and it was thought necessary for even a farmer’s son to study that language.

When William was thirteen his father was unfortunate in business, and the boy had to leave school to earn his living. There is a legend that he started in to learn the butcher’s trade, but it seems more likely that he worked as a lawyer’s boy and clerk. If all accounts are true, he must have been a mischievous lad, for the story goes that he was once taken up for poaching, or shooting a deer, in the park of one of the great men in the county.

When he was eighteen Will Shakespeare married a farmer’s daughter eight years older than himself. By the time he was twenty-one the young father had three children. Two of these, Hamnet and Judith, were twins. Hamnet died before he grew to manhood, and about all that is known of Judith Shakespeare is that she, like her mother, never learned to read. It was not thought necessary then for farmers’ wives and daughters to read and write.

A lawyer’s clerk with five mouths to feed could hardly find enough to do in Stratford to earn a living, so William Shakespeare went to London to seek his fortune. It is said that he began life in the great city by holding horses in front of one of the theaters, as they did not have hitching-posts in Shakespeare’s days. Then he was promoted to be prompter’s boy. One of his duties was to tell the actors when it was time for them to go on the stage and play their parts.

Nothing is really known of what the young man from Stratford was doing for six or seven years. He made his living in one way or another in connection with the theaters. At the end of that time a dying actor left some bitter lines about Will “Shake-scene.” But another actor at this time called Shakespeare a good man, a graceful actor, and a witty writer of plays. Shakespeare seems not to have been a leading actor. It is said that he took the part of the Ghost in his own play of “Hamlet.” He became so successful as a writer that he was “commanded” to bring his company and produce a play before Queen Elizabeth in one of her palaces.

It is recorded that Shakespeare was paid from thirty to seventy-five dollars for one of his plays. While it is true that thirty dollars would buy as much then as three hundred dollars to-day, yet that was a very small price to pay for the greatest dramas ever written. But the real value of the greatest things of the world cannot be measured by money.

Every one is said to have at least one great chance in life. Shakespeare’s Door of Opportunity was the door of a theater. He did not wait for it to open; he opened it himself. Shakespeare’s life showed that “poets are born, not made.” He had the keenest insight into the human heart and life of all the writers who ever lived.

HOW CROMWELL CHANGED PLACES WITH THE KING

In Shakespeare’s day Queen Elizabeth came first in the thoughts of all the people of England. She was almost worshiped by the men of wealth and genius whom she gathered at her court, and by the people at large. By her cleverness and wisdom she kept England peaceful and prosperous almost all through her reign. But she never married; so, when she died, her cousin, James Stuart, king of Scotland, became king of England.

James had been brought up to think that because he was king, everybody must bow to him as the Lord’s anointed. It was he and his councilors who drove the Pilgrim Fathers out of England because they would not worship God, as James wished them to, in the Church of England, of which he was the head.

On his way down to London to be crowned, James stopped at the beautiful estate of Sir Oliver Cromwell. In the royal company was the king’s eldest son, Charles, called by the Scottish people “the bonnie prince.” The little Scotch boy, only six years old, already thought that the world was created for him and that no other boy had any rights which he, Prince Charles, was bound to respect.

The story goes that Sir Oliver Cromwell sent for his nephew, whose name was Oliver Cromwell also, to play with the prince. When little Noll, as they nicknamed Oliver, came in, his uncle presented him to the boy prince. Young Oliver tried to shake hands with Charles. Old Oliver, who wanted the boy to bow and kiss the prince’s hand, said, “Pay your duty to Prince Charles.”

“I owe him no duty,” said Noll Cromwell. “Why should I kiss that boy’s hand?”

King James only laughed at the Cromwell lad’s spirit, and Charles and Noll were left to play together. The prince soon struck the other boy, as he was in the habit of doing, but naughty Noll struck back and sent “the bonnie prince” howling to the king with royal blood streaming from his little freckled nose.

Sir Oliver and the members of the royal party looked with holy horror at the boy who had laid his hands on the Lord’s anointed. Some of them thought young Oliver ought to be imprisoned in the Tower of London or even beheaded for his wickedness. But King James had sense enough to see that it was well for the prince to get “tit for tat” once in a while; so he only looked hard at little Oliver and said:

“Thou art a bold lad; and if thou live to be a man, my son Charlie would do wisely to be friends with thee.” Then he turned to Sir Oliver and the frightened friends standing there, saying, “Harm not the lad. He has taught my son a good lesson, if heaven do but give him grace to profit by it. If he be tempted to play the tyrant over the stubborn English, let him remember little Oliver Cromwell.”

Young Oliver went to Free School and then to a Puritan college in Cambridge University; but he had to leave school on account of the death of his father. Before he was thirty Cromwell was elected to Parliament, of which his cousin, John Hampden, was also a member.

Meanwhile King James died and his son, the prince with whom Oliver had quarreled when a boy, became King Charles the First. King James had been so sensible at times and so foolish at others that he has been called “the wisest fool in Europe.” But Charles had even less sense than his royal father. He tried to abolish Parliament, thus setting up his own will against the will of the people of all England and Scotland.

Parliament, led by such men as Cromwell and Hampden, stood up for the rights of the people against tyranny. All lovers of liberty and human rights are greatly in debt to these two brave men who risked their lives to save their country from the selfish wilfulness of kings. Englishmen now were divided into two parties. The king’s party were the Cavaliers, or Church of England men, who wore wigs or long curls and dressed in velvets, silks, and laces like grown-up Lord Fauntleroys. The parliamentary party were called Roundheads, so named because they cut their hair short, as men do to-day. Oliver Cromwell, who never saw an army until he was forty, was suddenly found to be a great general. Because of their stern, unyielding courage, Cromwell’s soldiers were called “Ironsides.” They often went into battle with a prayer on their lips, or, in a grand chorus, sang a psalm of David while striking valiantly for the right.

At last it became necessary to sacrifice King Charles in order to secure the victory for Parliament, which stood for the freedom of Englishmen against the tyranny of kings. So a court set up by Parliament voted to put the king to death, and Oliver Cromwell was one of the signers of the death-warrant. As James, the king’s father, had driven the Pilgrims out of the country, so now the Puritans in Parliament forced the king’s sons to leave the country for their country’s good.

During the few years in which Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector of England, he did much to strengthen the nation and to repair the great harm brought upon it by the foolish whims of its extravagant kings. It was then that England learned the terrible lesson which Europe had to be taught almost three hundred years later--that no king has a divine right to do wrong to the people.

NAPOLEON, THE CORSICAN BOY WHO RULED EUROPE

Though Napoleon Bonaparte was the greatest soldier of his time, he was small in body. His fullest height was a little above five feet. The story of his strange career shows how a poor, puny little lad made himself emperor of France and master of Europe, so that kings, generals, and prime ministers bowed, like so many servants, to his imperial will.

He began, while he wore petticoats, to wish to be a soldier. He threw away his baby rattle for a brass cannon, and his first playthings were little iron soldiers. When he was old enough to play with other boys, he always chose to be a soldier and, small as he was, he was the one who told the bigger boys just what to do. Even then, if his mother gave him a piece of cake, he would go out to the edge of the little town and trade it to an old soldier for some coarse, black army bread. As he grew older, this soldier-longing became his ambition. His health was never very good. He was often nervous, wilful, and hard to manage. But he had a keen sense of honor, and always despised a coward.

Napoleon’s home was the rugged island of Corsica. While he was still a little boy, he found, between some rocks, near the shore, a cave which he claimed for his own. This is still pointed out to thousands who come to visit the boy’s birthplace, as “Napoleon’s Grotto.”

At that time there was a feud between the boys of the town and the shepherd lads on the hills around. Little Napoleon told the other town boys that if they would do as he said, he would make those big country boys stop throwing stones at them whenever they met. The town lads agreed to this; so Napoleon told them to gather stones and pile them in a row a little distance below the fortress which the shepherds had chosen behind some rocks on top of their hill.

The pale Bonaparte boy led his young army up till the country youths fired a volley of stones at them. Then he turned and ran down the hill followed by his company. The enemy came out and gave chase, pell-mell. This was just what Napoleon expected. When the little leader got down to the piles of stones he shouted--_“Halt!”_

His soldiers obeyed.

_“Stones!”_

Each boy gathered up as many as he could carry.

“_About face!_--FIRE!”

Before the astonished shepherds could stop they were met by a shower of rocks. The big fellows broke and scattered in all directions, and two of them were taken prisoner. Captain Bonaparte would not let them go till the other country boys pledged themselves not to touch his “men” again.

Thus eight-year-old Napoleon became the leader of the boys in his home town.

Before he was ten, he was sent to a military school in France, where sons of noblemen were educated. Some of those French boys were wayward, mean, and savagely cruel. They made fun of the shy country lad, for his rough Corsican ways and speech, and because he was small and sallow. Napoleon had entered the school on a scholarship, so they sneered at him as “the charity boy.” He could not speak French at first, and pronounced his own name so that it sounded like the French words for “Nose of straw.” As Napoleon’s nose was long, straight, and thin, they laughed and shouted his nickname, “Mr. Straw Nose!”

All this made the proud, sensitive lad speechless with rage. He kept himself away from the rest. A garden plot was assigned for each cadet to tend. A few of the others were too idle to take care of theirs, so they gave them to Napoleon and he kept them in order as his own. In the center of his little kingdom he built an arbor where he could stay alone to study and plan as he had done in his little cave in Corsica, and woe to those who entered there without his permission. He had suffered this sort of life nearly four years before his father and mother managed to visit their boy, who was almost a prisoner in military school. Napoleon wrote of the shock the visit gave his mother:

“When she came to see me at Brienne she was frightened at my thinness. I was indeed much changed, because I employed the hours of recreation in working, and often passed the nights in thinking about the days’ lessons. My nature could not bear the idea of not being first in my class.”

After finishing at this academy, Napoleon went to the military college at Paris. Father Bonaparte’s death, about this time, left the family poorer than ever. Sometimes Napoleon did not have enough to eat. But that did not prevent him from studying hard. His great ambition kept him from starving. Some time after his graduation he was assigned to a small command in Paris. “Red” revolutionists were trying to destroy the city. Young Napoleon thought it high time to stop them. A mob gathered in a public square threatening to kill people and burn their houses. He opened fire on the mob and cleared that square in short order. It was said afterward, “Bonaparte stopped the French Revolution with a whiff of grapeshot!”

From being “the Man of the Hour” Napoleon went on until he became “the Man of Destiny.” He was raised to the highest rank, and as General Bonaparte became commander-in-chief of the French army in Italy, where he gained brilliant victories over the Austrians. But the Austrians would not stay beaten, and while Napoleon was away in Egypt, Austria started in to win back its control of northern Italy.

When Napoleon returned to Paris he was the idol of the people. They elected him consul, a kind of president, of the French republic. The Austrians were pleased at this, as it would keep “the Little Corporal,” as the soldiers called Napoleon, in Paris. He would have to send another commander to Italy, and the Austrians had gotten such a start that they could win the victory before the French forces could go around the Alps.

Austria was already crowing over its triumph and all Europe was laughing because General Bonaparte had been “caught napping,” when one May morning Consul Napoleon and a great army came tobogganing down the mountain sides into the plains of Italy, as if they had fallen from the sky.

In a letter to his older brother, Napoleon wrote of this:

“We have dropped here like a thunderbolt; the enemy didn’t expect it, and hardly believe it yet.”

He had made his soldiers climb up the Alps Mountains in the highest, steepest place, dragging heavy cannon and army supplies after them. By his wonderful feat of crossing the Alps, Napoleon won by surprise the victory at Marengo, just as he had beaten the shepherd lads when he was a boy of eight.

The people now made their hero consul for life. After that it was easy for him to make himself Emperor of the French. At his coronation Napoleon snatched the crown out of the hands of the pope and placed it on his own head, to show that he was emperor by the right of his own might. Yet Emperor Napoleon kept on leading his armies in person. He still had to fight with other nations to hold his place as master of Europe. He gained even more brilliant victories, as Emperor Napoleon, than he had won as General Bonaparte. Not content with his record as a great conqueror, he gave the French people the _Code Napoléon_, a set of laws

which proved him to be also a wise statesman and law-giver.

The kings and nobles of Europe always hated Napoleon. They said he was vulgar, and called him “the Corsican upstart.” But the French people loved him as one of themselves. No general or emperor ever had more devoted followers than Napoleon Bonaparte. Millions of men gave their lives willingly to fight his battles. He waged war after war till there were but few fighting men left in France. Then the people began to think that Napoleon loved them because they could help him win victories to give him more power and fulfill his high ambition. They began to say among themselves, “He is sacrificing us for his own glory.” While at the height of his power, Napoleon exclaimed, “What are a million lives to a man like me!”

When the people lost their faith in him, Napoleon began to lose instead of win his battles. Generals and nobles stopped flattering him and began to fight him. His own brothers and sisters, whom he had made kings and queens, deserted him. Even his wife forsook him, taking with her his only son, the idol of his heart.

Napoleon’s last battle was at Waterloo, in Belgium. Because this loss brought ruin to him, the name of the place became a kind of proverb. When overwhelming defeat comes to a great man, people say, “He has met his Waterloo!”

The conquered conqueror was taken prisoner and sent thousands of miles away as a captive to the bleak island of St. Helena. He made the best of his hard lot as “the fortunes of war.” But the years of loneliness endured by this friendless conqueror, who all his life had been selfish and merciless, are suggested by a well-known picture, which shows Napoleon on the shore of that far-off rock in the southern sea, standing with hands clasped behind him, looking off across the ocean to where France lay.

NELSON, THE HERO OF TRAFALGAR

A small English boy strayed away from his grandmother’s house after she had warned him that gypsies encamped near by might carry him off. When the old lady found the little fellow sitting beside a stream too wide for him to cross, she exclaimed:

“Why did you run away, Horatio? I was half dead with fear--”

“Fear!” demanded the little lad, still in petticoats. “What is that? I never saw a fear.”

The boy’s father’s name was Nelson. He was a clergyman of the Church of England. His wife had died when this boy was a baby, leaving eight children for the invalid father to care for. Once while the father was away for his health, young Horatio heard that his mother’s brother had been appointed to the command of a British man-of-war. Horatio said to an older brother: “Do, William, write to my father and tell him that I should like to go to sea with Uncle Maurice.”

Thinking the navy might be a good place for the boy and a benefit to his health, Doctor Nelson wrote to his brother-in-law. The bluff sea-captain wrote right back:

“What has poor Horatio done, who is so weak, that he, above all the rest, should be sent to rough it out at sea? But let him come, and the first time we go into action a cannon-ball may knock off his head and provide for him at once.”

Thus young Horatio Nelson entered the Royal Navy. One of his first trips was as coxswain on a voyage to the Arctic regions. While dragging the ship’s boats over the ice, the sailors had to fight with walruses and polar bears. Coxswain Nelson killed a big white bear and carried home the skin for his father.

When Horatio was fifteen he made a voyage on the warship _Seahorse_ to the East Indies. A year and a half in that hot climate made the frail lad so ill that he had to go home. Of his thoughts while sailing home on sick leave he once said:

“After a long and gloomy revery in which I almost wished myself overboard, a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me and presented my king and country as my patrons. My mind exulted in the idea. ‘Well then,’ I exclaimed, ‘I will be a hero, and trusting in God, I will brave every danger.’”

Young Nelson had too much pluck to be sick long. England was then at war with France and Spain, and he fought his country’s enemies in malarial regions where hundreds of his fellows died from the poisoned air and serpent bites. When Horatio was twenty-two his health again failed, and he had to spend months in Brighton to recover it.

When peace was signed between England and France, in 1783, Nelson was twenty-five. He was presented at court in that year, as he was a favorite with the Duke of Clarence who afterward became King William the Fourth.

The next year Captain Nelson was placed in command of the battle-ship _Boreas_. He was very kind to the thirty midshipmen on board. When a boy was afraid to climb a mast, Nelson would say to him with a winning smile:

“I am going to race to the masthead and beg that I may meet you there.”

Once when he was invited to dinner with the governor of Barbadoes, Nelson said, “Your Excellency must excuse me for bringing one of my midshipmen. I make it a rule to introduce them to all the good company I can, as they have few to look up to besides myself while they are at sea.”

It is not surprising that men under his command exclaimed, in comparing him with other men, “_Nelson_ was the man to _love!_”

The wars of Great Britain with Napoleon kept the young navy officer in active service. During a siege a shell burst and destroyed the sight of his right eye. In another attack he was wounded in the arm. He shouted to those who wished to remove him from the fray,

“Let me alone; I have yet my legs and one arm. Tell the surgeon to make haste and get the instruments. I know I must lose my right arm; so the sooner it is off, the better.”

In 1798, when Napoleon started out with the French fleet for an unknown port, to surprise and lay waste the countries of people friendly to Great Britain, these instructions were issued to Admiral Nelson: “Take, sink, burn, and destroy the French fleet.” With his battleships Nelson set out to search the Mediterranean, but for a long time he was unable to find the French fleet. At last it was found at anchor in Aboukir Bay at the mouth of the Nile. The French were caught in a trap. Though Nelson had not eaten or slept much for many days and nights, he invited his officers to dinner on his flagship, the _Vanguard_, to discuss the coming battle. “If we succeed, what will the world say?” asked one of the officers.

“There is no ‘_if_’ in the case,” replied the admiral sharply. “We are sure to succeed, but who may live to tell the story is a very different question.”

Admiral Nelson had the colors flying from six different places on his flagship when they went into battle that very night. That engagement, now known as the battle of the Nile, was one of the greatest naval combats in history. The French flagship, _L’Orient_, on which Napoleon had sailed to carry war into Egypt, was blown up and the French admiral killed with all on board. The battle raged from seven in the evening until three in the morning. Though the French had thousands more men than the British, most of them were killed. Nelson sent boats to rescue them from the burning French ships, but they preferred to go on fighting through the flames, amidst bursting shells and exploding powder magazines.

Napoleon’s fleet was utterly destroyed. Nelson wrote of that night’s work:

“Victory is not a name strong enough for such a scene; it is a conquest.”