Part 5

We pass over the little Princess’s first reception, the splendour and hyperbole of it all. To insist on such in such connection is like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. She was for all human purposes just a desirable baby, most precious in her lovable disposition; and if the States of Holland thought fit, for political purposes, to signalise her minute advent by a congratulatory present to King Charles I, her father, of ambergris, incomparable china, a cunning clock, and several Titians and Tintorettos, those gifts were not to be considered representative of anything but her material values. Her real dearness was moral and inestimable. Only the ambergris, perhaps, symbolised the sweetness of her nature.

We dwell on her sweetness, the kind little soul, more fondly than on her reputed learning and her piety. At eight years old she was said, on the authority of Mrs. Makin, her parliamentary governess, to be suitably proficient, Angelica-like, in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish, all of which languages she could read and write. Well, we don’t believe a word of it, any more than we believe in the precocious pietism allowed her by godly Mr. Stephen Marshall and other long-winded Fifth-Monarchists appointed by the Parliament to preach her and her brothers into a state of dead-with-sleepiness grace. Like a sweet-natured child she struggled dutifully to please her tutors, and the very love in her disarmed and moved them to the utterance of those fond fictions. No doubt she could stammer without a solecism of Balbus and his wall-building, or, in childish cacography, indite her _Déme un beso_ with little rosy fist cramped tight and her lips pursed to the message. But that any tongue but her own spoke naturally in or to her we will not believe.

The most prettily pathetic letter ever written by a child she addressed to the Lords of the Parliament, and that was in 1642, when she was really eight years old. It was at the time when King father and Queen mother were gone, launched on the flood of that long disaster, and Elizabeth and her baby brother, the little Duke of Gloucester, had been left together in the great empty Palace of St. James’s under the guardianship of the Houses. It was a period of tense national emotion--the opening of the great Civil War. The two children, who figured more or less as hostages, were a source of perpetual anxiety and embarrassment to the revolted Commons, who could not forbear, nevertheless, imposing upon the twain their own loveless ruling. The infants were stripped of all privileges of State, were maintained meagrely, and were delivered to the dronings of orthodox divines for their spiritual sustenance. It being decreed that none, unless he were a subscriber to the Solemn League and Covenant, should be permitted to hold any office about them, the cashiering of most of the household followed of necessity. And it was this, the dismissal of her few loved familiars, which produced the letter. The child, in a burst of passionate grief, appealed from the Lower to the Upper House:

“My Lords,

“I account myself very miserable that I must have my servants taken from me, and strangers put to me. You promised me that you would have a care of me, and I hope you will show it, in preventing so great a grief as this would be to me. I pray, my Lords, consider of it, and give me cause to thank you, and to rest,

“Your loving friend, “Elizabeth.”

Your loving friend! No polyglot precocity there, but just the stumbling iterative language of a child’s swelling heart. Cannot you picture her, in her plain black frock and falling collar, her slim arms bare from the elbow, the shining golden curls dropping over her cheeks and the shining tears dropping from her eyes, as she sits at the long table in the bare panelled room carefully shaping the characters of her desperate little plea. Her throat has a lump in it; her breath catches from time to time; so almost does ours, when we think of her, as of any other imprisoned child, so lonely, so non-understanding, deprived in one amazed moment of all love and luxury, conscious of vague frightening things around, awake, as if in the night, from a terror of dreams, and no one, no least footstep in the dark house, hurrying to her with reassurance of comfort and soothing words.

But we would not overpaint the picture; and indeed this little girl had the compensations of her nature. Few could be harsh with her or help loving her--not Mrs. Makin, nor Mr. Obadiah Sedgewick, who knew so much about the Bible that he might have written it, especially its wrathful passages, nor certainly the Earl of Northumberland, who was the guardian appointed by the Houses. Moreover, being of the stuff maternal, she had natural duties to occupy her. She had mothered her dolls, very lovingly and intimately, in the times of absorbing unreality; now, awakened to the tremendous responsibilities of fact, her solicitude was transferred to their living substitute, the little baby Duke Henry of Gloucester. In her pretty, faithful stewardship of this small charge she forgot the worst of her own grief and loneliness.

We would dilate upon her maternal resourcefulness, for in that was her natural development. It came to embrace in time the fortunes of her elder brother, the Duke of York, who, when he was thirteen and she eleven, was added to the party at St. James’s. In the interval Elizabeth had had a fall and broken one of her legs, an accident which, though surmounted, had further weakened an already delicate constitution. And then events came fast, culminating, after many disastrous defeats, in the virtual imprisonment of the King father at Hampton Court. There was a day which the little Princess never forgot, when all three were taken to visit the captive in his prison-palace. They slept the night there, and the tramp of the sentries in the long corridor got upon her nerves and haunted them for weeks afterwards. It seemed so dreadful that a king should have a gaoler.

But now affairs were rushing to a crisis, and the alarmed heart of the child-mother inspired her to action. In this threatening of a dynasty it was imperative to secure the escape of her elder boy brother, and she set herself, the little courageous thing, to devise the means. Love made of her a very Machiavellian plotter, made of her small wits a counter-force against all the watchfulness and caution of great Ministers and their servants. Very innocently--in seeming--she prepared her ground: the three children, to beguile the tedium of their long confinement, took to playing hide-and-seek in the great empty Palace every evening after dark. And on the 21st of April, in the year 1648, the plot was ripe.

“I will not hide to-night, Harry.”

“Yes, Jamie, do, do.”

“Will you not, Jamie dear, to please him?”

“Why not you, sister? With your sad raiment, toning into the hangings and the shadows, you have always the advantage over us.”

“But you have the better ideas. You shall wear one of my gowns if you like.”

“Shall I? Then I shall be doubly equipped. Very well, send for a gown.”

Amid the laughter of all, governess and attendants, assembled in the room, the young Prince became a girl. Little Harry was delighted, and clapped his hands.

“Find me to-night, Harry, if you can,” cried the Duke of York as, holding up his skirts, he danced out of the room. “I will take ten minutes’ law, and then give you two hours for the task.”

He disappeared; Elizabeth had hard ado to hold in the child the stipulated time; but punctually on the tick of the eleventh minute she rose, and took his hand, and the hunt began.

There was always a fearful joy in this sport for the little boy. The vast glooms; the imagined crouching shapes; the starts and shrieks of discovery over some object which would reveal itself when approached--no dim, half-shrouded face, but just a ghostly bowl or ornament; the crawling silences and puckered shadows--the appalling venture of it all was just endurable if one kept the prize in view. And then this elder brother did such things. Once, actually, standing on a mantelpiece, he had become the figure of a pale-faced Moroni Cavalier, whose picture hung convenient; and Elizabeth and little Hal had passed and repassed hand in hand without ever discovering the imposition. And to-night again, it seemed, was to record one of his inspirations.

Long before the two hours were passed in fruitless search Harry was so tired that he could scarce drag one foot after the other. But he was still trailing his weary toes undaunted when the Earl came home. Prepared to attend the Princes to bed, Elizabeth, by then worn out, had transferred her place in the hunt to a couple of menservants, who, amused and unsuspecting, accompanied the little boy.

Northumberland, being informed that the Duke was hiding, tarried impatiently awhile, until, seeing his growing irritation, one of the servants whispered to his charge. The child, brightening and clapping his hands, shrieked out, “O, Jamie! In the gardener’s house!” The Earl turned on the speaker.

“What is that?”

“His Highness,” answered the man, “ran into the servants’ hall, demanding of Job his key to hide withal. He’s been there, my lord, these two hours.”

“There? Where?”

“In Job’s lodge in the garden, my lord.”

The Earl, hastily calling his attendants, hurried, the little boy trotting beside him, to the house--only to find it empty and the bird flown. Undetected in his disguise, the young Duke, after slipping from the window of the lodge into the darkness without, had made his way down to the river, where, at a certain spot, by preconcerted arrangement, a boat awaited to convey him to a Dutch vessel. And the demure deviser of all this pretty scheme had been from first to last the little good Princess.

She looked up when the Earl came to acquaint her of the result of their evening’s play. Her eyes filled; her lips quivered; but she was too long inured to shocks to express surprise.

“He hath fled, then,” she said. “I can only pray, sir, for his preservation. Yet be sure you have left no corner unexplored.”

Northumberland convinced her, even as he turned away. There was a puzzled frown in his eyes.

“No, it is impossible,” he whispered to himself. “Was she not born on the feast of the Holy Innocents?”

A big heart in a frail body. She came to die, this tired little lamb, really of neglect and loneliness, when she was no more than fifteen. Emotional pietists have declared that she was found dead with her head resting on the Bible. So short-sighted people can mistake for a book the Good Shepherd’s knee.

James II

The City clocks were chiming four in the starry chill of a December morning as the King and his two attendants hurried down Whitehall stairs to the river. A boat, bespoken hours earlier by his valet Abbadie, who was in waiting for the party, lay ready off the public steps. These, for an obvious reason, had been chosen in preference to the privy stairs, and the result seemed to justify the precaution. The fugitives were not observed or followed, it appeared--unless any significance attached to the form of a sleeping loafer, sprawled heavily over a baulk of timber hard by--and in any case they were all prepared, if challenged, to assume the rôle of belated citizens taking boat after a frolic.

The two oars, proved men, were, if not in the actual secret of the escape, sufficiently near it to act in all things with quiet and dispatch. The embarkation proceeded noiselessly, and Sir Edward Hales, the last of the party, was about to step on board, when a remark, _sotto voce_, from one fellow to the other arrested his attention. He paused, his foot on the gunnel, and quickly demanded an explanation.

“Why, see, your honour,” said the man in a low voice, “you’re over-late, and the tide’s at the slack. With a pull of thirty miles before us and a heavy boat, it’s odds but we meet the flow this side Greenwich.”

“What, then, waterman?”

“We shan’t fetch Gravesend before daylight, that’s all.”

Sir Edward, being a faithful Papist and Jacobite, cursed ecumenically. Ex-Lieutenant of the Tower, he had only just been dispossessed of his post, a significant one, by dictate of the usurper, and Fate, he felt, might have spared him these lesser vexations. It was important above all things at this pass to get the King bestowed under cover of darkness in the vessel that awaited him at the river-mouth.

“Where two failed, three might succeed, eh?” he said sharply.

The man acquiesced. “Pulling randan we might do it,” he said--“two oars and the sculls.”

Abbadie, the valet, was a loyal but fibreless French dandyprat; Mr. Sheldon, the fourth of the party, was old and infirm; was it to be left to him, Sir Edward, a man of a large and weighty dignity, to set his back to a task about which he knew perhaps just enough to confound the efforts of the others? He hesitated; and, as he stood, a voice sounded behind him:

“Here’s at your service, master.”

Sir Edward started and turned round. It was the sleeper, it seemed, who had risen and come behind him unobserved--an immense shambling figure of a man, ragged and hoary. Power no less than age spoke in his massive frame, in his hands like roots, in his sinewy neck. Even the few teeth that remained to him were like bones of contention in a resolute jaw. Shadowy, a dim giant, he stood up in his mouldy duds in the starlight.

An opportune phantom, too foul and solitary for a spy. Sir Edward, under stress of urgency, took what the Fates had sent him.

“Can you pull?” he asked only.

The great creature jeered hoarsely.

“Aye,” he said, “though it were the house of Dagon about the ears of the Philistines.”

Sir Edward made a wry mouth; there was a tang in this of the pietistic cant he was old enough to remember. But the occasion was urgent.

“We desire to light at Gravesend before dawn,” he said. “You shall be well paid if you enable us.”

He entered the boat, and the man followed, the latter signifying in a determined manner that he would pull stroke. The concession being made to a certain arrogance of will in the fellow as much as to his physical strength, they took their seats and the craft put off.

The four passengers were all in cloaks and unfeathered hats. The King, unconscious, it seemed, of the addition to their number, or of the brief parley which had led to it, sat next the water, dark, silent, preoccupied. They had hardly reached midstream when he put his hand over the side, and something slid from it into the flood without splash or sound. As he recovered his position with a sigh, his eyes encountered those of the new-comer, and he started slightly and spoke under his breath:

“Who is this?”

“A figure of exigency, sir,” whispered Sheldon, “hired to speed us the quicker to an end. A supplementary hand and a strong one was needed, it seems, to bring us under night to our goal.”

His Majesty said no more, but his eyes, hollow and tragic, continued to con the stranger. He seemed to him to have arisen, like a sudden cloud, huge and menacing, against the dim horizon of his hopes. That had not ceased to glimmer faintly, to his mind’s strained vision, through all the gloom of this long bitter night. A haunting sense of unreality pursued and half stupefied him. He felt like one in an enchanted wood, always sighting deliverance and always mistaken, yet drawn on by perpetual expectation. There had been something fantastic and illusory in this rapid vanishing of a kingdom; it seemed even now a myth, a jest. He would wake presently and laugh over the strangeness of that very vivid dream. It had been the oddest experience to feel State, authority, service, friendship, a throne, a people, all suddenly slipping from him, as if the bottom, in one unexpected moment, had come out of his universe; to feel himself, when in a condition of normal security, all at once, as in a nightmare, standing exposed and reviled, an alien not only in his own Court, but in his own country. The thing seemed too preposterous for belief, like the fantasy of a dead man witnessing in substance his own funeral, and he existed and moved in the constant expectation of the strange cloud’s dispelling. These shadows of the few faithful who remained to him would explain themselves and their insignificance; the flight by icy starlight would merge itself into the confused flow of a dream; the very curdling of the water would become the ropy web of moisture over sleeping eyeballs. Steadily he had kept his vision concentrated on that line of dawn which was to end the long delusion, and when the new shape rose to block it he felt suddenly as if his hope were overcast, and he awake at length to full consciousness of the truth. From that moment, for some unknown reason, he despaired.

The boat was sped on its course by muscular arms. The regular pump of the oars, churning up liquid gold, the flight of house and palace, vast hilly hulks of shadow that fled behind them into vaster glooms, the silence and the stress seemed to hypnotise the party, so that none spoke or moved. But the eyes of the King, fixed and haggard, never left the face of the nearest oarsman. Even when, with a dive and rush, they shot into the stream that thundered under London Bridge, his gaze did not falter or withdraw itself for a moment. But presently, when they hove into the weltering shadow of the Tower, as if in an uncontrollable impulse he leaned forward, and, touching the stranger on the knee, spoke: “You guess what destinies you carry, my friend?”

Sir Edward Hales started and put out an expostulatory hand; but the great thing, never ceasing in his labours, only mowed and nodded.

“Aye,” he said, “I knew you from the first, James Stuart.”

The King sat back, stiff and motionless.

“No traitor?” he demanded rigidly.

The man gave a short laugh.

“No traitor to my own principles,” he said, “which are to free Judea of the last of thy house and dynasty.”

Sir Edward ground out a killing oath; but the King silenced him. Here was evidently a survival of the fierce fanaticism of the ’forties, and still unappeased by the blood of an ancient holocaust. It seemed a significant, an ominous chance to have encountered him at this pass. A profounder dejection settled upon James’s heart. He spoke as if appealing:

“You wish us gone, my friend?”

“Aye,” said the creature, “I wish you gone.”

“For what reason?”

“So that I may live again.”

“Live?”

“Other than as the scapegoat that bore upon his head the iniquities of the unclean. For twenty-eight years have I sojourned in the desert, nameless, hungry, and abhorred--I, that delivered Judah of her sins. Yet the hour is mine at last. The elect shall receive and justify me. Thy deposition is my restoration, James Stuart. Judge if I rejoice to speed thee on thy way.”

“Mad,” snapped Sir Edward shortly.

The midmost sculler, without stopping pulling, put in his oar, so to speak:

“Let the ranter mouth, master, so he keeps his fists shut on his task and swings to ’t.”

“Not so mad, either,” retorted the giant. Continuing to pull with his left hand, he flung out his right towards the dark blot of the Tower shrinking behind them. “It fades, King,” he cried--“the symbol of thy sovereignty, the shambles sanctified by the blood of Freedom’s martyrs. Harrison, Coke, Peters, and the rest--remember them in the day of thy tribulation, since the Lord hath made of their servant and right hand the instrument of His retribution. They died to testify; but the instrument remains to extirpate. It shall be acclaimed and honoured henceforth in the temples of the Lord.”

The prospect seemed somehow to goad him to more furious exertions; the boat groaned under his strokes. A madman, no doubt, and best humoured and disregarded. He did not speak again, and in silence the journey was continued. Only an oppression as of death sat upon the heart of the King, and his eyes for ever sought behind the great rocking figure some sign of the dawn that his soul so desired and his interests so feared.

But they drove, unpursued and unmolested, down the starry flood; and presently the waters broadened and there blew a little sea-breeze among the scattered shipping. And suddenly Sir Edward Hales, intently alert, gave a sharp low order, and they ran under the counter of a small unobtrusive vessel lying at anchor in the midstream. There were white faces here looking over the bulwarks, and, down in the chains, hands ready to support the fugitives aboard. Then his Majesty, having mounted, and before he turned to withdraw, bade Sir Edward reward his boatmen with a liberal vail, which duty the knight performed. But, even as he received his tribute, and the boat drifted away, the hoary giant rose in his place and cast the money into the water.

“I am paid a thousandfold,” he roared, “in the extirpation of thy race.”

The King, with a ghastly face, leaned forward.

“In God’s name, who are you?” he cried.

The answer came back, mad and jubilant, across the widening interval:

“Ask me who I was, and I reply, Lieutenant-Colonel Joyce, who cut off the King your father’s head upon the scaffold.”

The King’s Champion

“And now, schentelmen, about that little inzident at the goronation?” It was his Majesty King William III who spoke, crumpled back into his big chair. His eyes, bright as a sparrow’s, peered from the nest of an enormous wig. His small, shrewd features, diminutive frame, and legs like cribbage-pegs, were the least adapted, one might have thought, to carry the extravagant vesture of his day. He appeared, indeed, to be always lost in it, and as if just on the point of finding his way out. Yet the clothes of a Daniel Lambert would hardly have sufficed for his spirit.

The Marquis of Halifax, his Lord Privy Seal, smiled, and shrugged his stout shoulders deprecatingly. There were four others present in this his Majesty’s somewhat melancholy little Cabinet at Whitehall: Lord Denby, his President of the Council, and three solemn Dutch mynheers--D’Auverquerque, Schomberg, and Zuylestein, who had been appointed respectively the King’s Masters of Horse, Ordnance, and the Robes. These last were all as grave as mustard-pots, and the subject, long-expected and broached at last, made them graver.

It turned upon an incident, slight in itself, significant only in its context, which had struck a discordant note in the tremendous ceremonial of the day before. When the King’s Champion, riding in by the great door of Westminster, had cast his gage upon the floor, offering to prove in person upon the body of whomsoever should challenge the right of King William and Mary his Queen to reign as sovereign inheritors of the realm that that same dissentient lied in his throat and was a false traitor, a most unexpected response had followed. A little old lady, dressed in a watered tabby and mittens, and having large spectacles on her nose and a stiff three-storied _commode_ of lace perched on her white hair, had darted from among the spectators, and, whipping up the steel glove, had returned it to the Champion with a whispered word or two, and then fairly run away, melting into the crowd which thronged about the entrance before anyone could think of interposing.

The affair had caused a momentary stir, and even a titter, instantly subdued to the august occasion, as Sir Charles Dymoke, the Champion, had ridden up the Hall, his face as red as fire, to deliver and re-deliver his cartel.