Chapter XI: Part 11

[Ferdinando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, a Spanish statesman
and general, born 1508, died 1582. From his earliest years a
soldier, the dominating passion of his soul was hatred of heretics
and infidels. He bore a distinguished part in the wars and
negotiations of Charles V’s splendid reign, and on the accession of
Philip II was equally honored by that monarch. On the outbreak of
the rebellion in the Netherlands, Alva was sent thither with an
army, as viceroy. His six years of rule was one of the most bloody
and atrocious episodes in modern history. His great opponent was
the Prince of Orange. Utterly failing in stamping out the
rebellion, he was recalled by his master in 1573.]

Ferdinando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, was the most successful and experienced general of Spain, or of Europe. No man studied more deeply, or practiced more constantly the military science. In the most important of all arts at that epoch, he was the most consummate artist. In the only honorable profession of the age, he was the most thorough and the most pedantic professor. Since the days of Demetrius Poliorcetes, no man had besieged so many cities. Since the days of Fabius Cunctator, no general had avoided so many battles, and no soldier, courageous as he was, ever attained to a more sublime indifference to calumny or depreciation. Having proved in his boyhood, at Fontarabia, and in his maturity, at Mühlberg, that he could exhibit heroism and headlong courage, when necessary, he could afford to look with contempt upon the witless gibes which his enemies had occasionally perpetrated at his expense. Conscious of holding his armies in his hand, by the power of an unrivalled discipline, and the magic of a name illustrated by a hundred triumphs, he could bear with patience and benevolence the murmurs of his soldiers when their battles were denied them.

He was born in 1508, of a family which boasted imperial descent. A Palæologus, brother of a Byzantine emperor, had conquered the city of Toledo, and transmitted its appellation as a family name. The father of Ferdinando, Don Garcia, had been slain on the Isle of Gerbes, in battle with the Moors, when his son was but four years of age. The child was brought up by his grandfather, Don Frederic, and trained from his tenderest infancy to arms. Hatred to the infidel, and a determination to avenge his father’s blood crying to him from a foreign grave, were the earliest of his instincts. As a youth he was distinguished for his prowess. His maiden sword was fleshed at Fontarabia, where, although but sixteen years of age, he was considered by his constancy in hardship, by his brilliant and desperate courage, and by the example of military discipline which he afforded to the troops, to have contributed in no small degree to the success of the Spanish arms.

In 1530 he accompanied the emperor in his campaign against the Turks. Charles, instinctively recognizing the merit of the youth who was destined to be the life-long companion of his toils and glories, distinguished him with his favor at the opening of his career. Young, brave, and enthusiastic, Ferdinando de Toledo at this period was as interesting a hero as ever illustrated the pages of Castilian romance. His mad ride from Hungary to Spain and back again, accomplished in seventeen days, for the sake of a brief visit to his newly-married wife, is not the least attractive episode in the history of an existence which was destined to be so dark and sanguinary. In 1535 he accompanied the emperor on his memorable expedition to Tunis. In 1546 and 1547 he was generalissimo in the war against the Smalcaldian league. His most brilliant feat of arms--perhaps the most brilliant exploit of the emperor’s reign--was the passage of the Elbe and the battle of Mühlberg, accomplished in spite of Maximilian’s bitter and violent reproaches, and the tremendous possibilities of a defeat. That battle had finished the war.

The gigantic and magnanimous John Frederic, surprised at his devotions in the church, fled in dismay, leaving his boots behind him, which for their superhuman size were ridiculously said afterward to be treasured among the trophies of the Toledo house. The rout was total. “I came, I saw, and God conquers,” said the emperor, in pious parody of his immortal predecessor’s epigram. Maximilian, with a thousand apologies for his previous insults, embraced the heroic Don Ferdinand over and over again, as, arrayed in a plain suit of blue armor, unadorned save with the streaks of his enemies’ blood, he returned from pursuit of the fugitive. So complete and so sudden was the victory, that it was found impossible to account for it save on the ground of miraculous interposition. Like Joshua in the vale of Ajalon, Don Ferdinand was supposed to have commanded the sun to stand still for a season, and to have been obeyed. Otherwise, how could the passage of the river, which was only concluded at six in the evening, and the complete overthrow of the Protestant forces, have all been accomplished within the narrow space of an April twilight?

The reply of the duke to Henry II of France, who questioned him subsequently upon the subject, is well known. “Your Majesty, I was too much occupied that evening with what was taking place on the earth beneath, to pay much heed to the evolutions of the heavenly bodies.” Spared as he had been by his good fortune from taking any part in the Algerine expedition, or in witnessing the ignominious retreat from Innspruck, he was obliged to submit to the intercalation of the disastrous siege of Metz in the long history of his successes. Doing the duty of a field-marshal and a sentinel, supporting his army by his firmness and his discipline when nothing else could have supported them, he was at last enabled, after half the hundred thousand men with whom Charles had begun the siege had been sacrificed, to induce his imperial master to raise the siege before the remaining fifty thousand had been frozen or starved to death.

The culminating career of Alva seemed to have closed in the mist which gathered around the setting star of the empire. Having accompanied Philip to England in 1554, on his matrimonial expedition, he was destined in the following year, as viceroy and generalissimo of Italy, to be placed in a series of false positions. A great captain engaged in a little war, the champion of the cross in arms against the successor of St. Peter, he had extricated himself at last with his usual adroitness, but with very little glory. To him had been allotted the mortification, to another the triumph. The luster of his own name seemed to sink in the ocean, while that of a hated rival, with new spangled ore, suddenly “flamed in the forehead of the morning sky.” While he had been paltering with a dotard, whom he was forbidden to crush, Egmont had struck down the chosen troops of France and conquered her most illustrious commanders. Here was the unpardonable crime which could only be expiated by the blood of the victor. Unfortunately for his rival, the time was now approaching when the long-deferred revenge was to be satisfied.

On the whole, the Duke of Alva was inferior to no general of his age. As a disciplinarian, he was foremost in Spain, perhaps in Europe. A spendthrift of time, he was an economist of blood, and this was, perhaps, in the eyes of humanity, his principal virtue. “Time and myself are two,” was a frequent observation of Philip, and his favorite general considered the maxim as applicable to war as to politics. Such were his qualities as a military commander. As a statesman, he had neither experience nor talent. As a man, his character was simple. He did not combine a great variety of vices, but those which he had were colossal, and he possessed no virtues. He was neither lustful nor intemperate, but his professed eulogists admitted his enormous avarice, while the world has agreed that such an amount of stealth and ferocity, of patient vindictiveness and universal bloodthirstiness, were never found in a savage beast of the forest, and but rarely in a human bosom. His history was now to show that his previous thrift of human life was not derived from any love of his kind. Personally he was stern and overbearing. As difficult of access as Philip himself, he was even more haughty to those who were admitted to his presence.

The duke’s military fame was unquestionable when he came to the provinces, and both in stricken fields and in long campaigns he showed how thoroughly it had been deserved; yet he left the Netherlands a baffled man. The prince might be many times defeated, but he was not conquered. As Alva penetrated into the heart of the ancient Batavian land, he found himself overmatched as he had never been before, even by the most potent generals of his day. More audacious, more inventive, more desperate than all the commanders of that or any other age, the spirit of national freedom now taught the oppressor that it was invincible, except by annihilation. The same lesson had been read in the same thickets by the Nervii to Julius Cæsar, by the Batavians to the legions of Vespasian; and now a loftier and a purer flame than that which inspired the national struggles against Rome glowed within the breasts of the descendants of the same people, and inspired them with the strength which comes from religious enthusiasm.

As an administrator of the civil and judicial affairs of the country, Alva at once reduced its institutions to a frightful simplicity. In the place of the ancient laws of which the Netherlander were so proud, he substituted the Blood Council. This tribunal was even more arbitrary than the Inquisition. Never was a simpler apparatus for tyranny devised than this great labor-saving machine. Never was so great a quantity of murder and robbery achieved with such dispatch and regularity. Sentences, executions, and confiscations, to an incredible extent, were turned out daily with an appalling precision. For this invention Alva is alone responsible. The tribunal and its councilors were the work and the creatures of his hand, and faithfully did they accomplish the dark purpose of their existence. Nor can it be urged, in extenuation of the governor’s crimes, that he was but the blind and fanatically loyal slave of his sovereign.

A noble nature could not have contaminated itself with such slaughter-house work, but might have sought to mitigate the royal policy without forswearing allegiance. A nature less rigid than iron would at least have manifested compunction, as it found itself converted into a fleshless instrument of massacre. More decided than his master, however, he seemed by his promptness to rebuke the dilatory genius of Philip. The king seemed, at times, to loiter over his work, teasing and tantalizing his appetite for vengeance before it should be gratified. Alva, rapid and brutal, scorned such epicureanism. He strode with gigantic steps over haughty statutes and popular constitutions; crushing alike the magnates who claimed a bench of monarchs for their jury, and the ignoble artisans who could appeal only to the laws of their land. From the pompous and theatrical scaffolds of Egmont and Horn, to the nineteen halters prepared by Master Karl to hang up the chief bakers and brewers of Brussels on their own thresholds; from the beheading of the twenty nobles on the horse-market, in the opening of the governor’s career, to the roasting alive of Uitenhoove at its close; from the block on which fell the honored head of Antony Straalen, to the obscure chair in which the ancient gentlewoman of Amsterdam suffered death for an act of vicarious mercy; from one year’s end to another’s--from the most signal to the most squalid scenes of sacrifice, the eye and hand of the great master directed without weariness the task imposed by the sovereign.

QUEEN ELIZABETH.

BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[Daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, second queen-regnant of
England, born 1533, crowned 1558, died 1603. As princess during the
reign of her sister, Queen Mary, she was subjected to many perils
on account of her devotion to Protestantism. Shortly after her
accession to the throne she was declared illegitimate by the pope
and the Catholic kings of Europe, and a claim of the English
succession set up for Mary, Queen of Scots. Threatened on all
sides, Queen Elizabeth bore herself with consummate skill and
prudence, and even managed to make herself felt aggressively in
continental affairs. The more striking events of her reign were the
defeat of the great Spanish Armada, probably the most brilliant and
complete sea-victory recorded in history, and the execution of
Mary, Queen of Scots, her rival and captive. Queen Elizabeth’s
reign shines as probably the most remarkable known for its
intellectual flowering in every branch of human energy.]

England’s one hope lay in the character of her queen. Elizabeth was now in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she had more than her mother’s beauty; her figure was commanding, her face long but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick and fine. She had grown up amid the liberal culture of Henry’s court a bold horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful dancer, a skilled musician, and an accomplished scholar. She studied every morning the Greek Testament, and followed this by the tragedies of Sophocles or orations of Demosthenes, and could “rub up her rusty Greek” at need to bandy pedantry with a vice-chancellor. But she was far from being a mere pedant. The new literature which was springing up around her found constant welcome in her court. She spoke Italian and French as fluently as her mother-tongue. She was familiar with Ariosto and Tasso. Even amid the affectation and love of anagrams and puerilities which sullied her later years, she listened with delight to the “Faery Queen,” and found a smile for “Master Spenser” when he appeared in her presence. Her moral temper recalled in its strange contrasts the mixed blood within her veins.

She was at once the daughter of Henry and of Anne Boleyn. From her father she inherited her frank and hearty address, her love of popularity and of free intercourse with the people, her dauntless courage, and her amazing self-confidence. Her harsh, manlike voice, her impetuous will, her pride, her furious outbursts of anger, came to her with her Tudor blood. She rated great nobles as if they were school-boys; she met the insolence of Essex with a box on the ear; she would break now and then into the gravest deliberations to swear at her ministers like a fish-wife. But strangely in contrast with the violent outlines of her Tudor temper stood the sensuous, self-indulgent nature she derived from Anne Boleyn. Splendor and pleasure were with Elizabeth the very air she breathed. Her delight was to move in perpetual progresses from castle to castle through a series of gorgeous pageants, fanciful and extravagant as a caliph’s dream. She loved gayety and laughter and wit. A happy retort or a finished compliment never failed to win her favor. She hoarded jewels. Her dresses were innumerable. Her vanity remained, even to old age, the vanity of a coquette in her teens. No adulation was too fulsome for her, no flattery of her beauty too gross. “To see her was heaven,” Hatton told her, “the lack of her was hell.” She would play with her rings that her courtiers might note the delicacy of her hands; or dance a coranto that the French ambassador, hidden dexterously behind a curtain, might report her sprightliness to his master. Her levity, her frivolous laughter, her unwomanly jests, gave color to a thousand scandals. Her character, in fact, like her portraits, was utterly without shade. Of womanly reserve or self-restraint she knew nothing. No instinct of delicacy veiled the voluptuous temper which had broken out in the romps of her girlhood and showed itself almost ostentatiously throughout her later life. Personal beauty in a man was a sure passport to her liking. She patted handsome young squires on the neck when they knelt to kiss her hand, and fondled her “sweet Robin,” Lord Leicester, in the face of the court.

It was no wonder that the statesmen whom she outwitted held Elizabeth almost to the last to be little more than a frivolous woman, or that Philip of Spain wondered how “a wanton” could hold in check the policy of the Escurial. But the Elizabeth whom they saw was far from being all of Elizabeth. The willfulness of Henry, the triviality of Anne Boleyn, played over the surface of a nature hard as steel, a temper purely intellectual, the very type of reason untouched by imagination or passion. Luxurious and pleasure-loving as she seemed, Elizabeth lived simply and frugally, and she worked hard. Her vanity and caprice had no weight whatever with her in state affairs. The coquette of the presence-chamber became the coolest and hardest of politicians at the council-board. Fresh from the flattery of her courtiers, she would tolerate no flattery in the closet; she was herself plain and downright of speech with her counselors, and she looked for a corresponding plainness of speech in return. If any trace of her sex lingered in her actual statesmanship, it was seen in the simplicity and tenacity of purpose that often underlies a woman’s fluctuations of feeling.

It was this, in part, which gave her her marked superiority over the statesmen of her time. No nobler group of ministers ever gathered round a council-board than those who gathered round the council-board of Elizabeth. But she was the instrument of none. She listened, she weighed, she used or put by the counsels of each in turn, but her policy as a whole was her own. It was a policy not of genius but of good sense. Her aims were simple and obvious: to preserve her throne, to keep England out of war, to restore civil and religious order. Something of womanly caution and timidity, perhaps, backed the passionless indifference with which she set aside the larger schemes of ambition which were ever opening before her eyes. She was resolute in her refusal of the Low Countries. She rejected with a laugh the offers of the Protestants to make her “head of the religion” and “mistress of the seas.” But her amazing success in the end sprang mainly from this wise limitation of her aims. She had a finer sense than any of her counselors of her real resources; she knew instinctively how far she could go and what she could do. Her cold, critical intellect was never swayed by enthusiasm or by panic either to exaggerate or to underestimate her risks or her power.

Of political wisdom, indeed, in its larger and more generous sense Elizabeth had little or none; but her political tact was unerring. She seldom saw her course at a glance, but she played with a hundred courses, fitfully and discursively, as a musician runs his fingers over the key-board, till she hit suddenly upon the right one. Her nature was essentially practical and of the present. She distrusted a plan, in fact, just in proportion to its speculative range or its outlook into the future. Her notion of statesmanship lay in watching how things turned out around her, and in seizing the moment for making the best of them. A policy of this limited, practical, tentative order was not only best suited to the England of her day, to its small resources and the transitional character of its religious and political belief, but it was one eminently suited to Elizabeth’s peculiar powers. It was a policy of detail, and in details her wonderful readiness and ingenuity found scope for their exercise. “No war, my lords,” the queen used to cry imperiously at the council-board, “No war!” but her hatred of war sprang less from her aversion to blood or to expense, real as was her aversion to both, than from the fact that peace left the field open to the diplomatic manœuvres and intrigues in which she excelled. Her delight in the consciousness of her ingenuity broke out in a thousand puckish freaks--freaks in which one can hardly see any purpose beyond the purpose of sheer mystification. She reveled in “by-ways” and “crooked ways.” She played with grave cabinets as a cat plays with a mouse, and with much of the same feline delight in the mere embarrassment of her victims. When she was weary of mystifying foreign statesmen, she turned to find fresh sport in mystifying her own ministers.

Had Elizabeth written the story of her reign, she would have prided herself not on the triumph of England or the ruin of Spain, but on the skill with which she had hoodwinked and outwitted every statesman in Europe during fifty years. Nor was her trickery without political value. Ignoble, inexpressibly wearisome as the queen’s diplomacy seems to us now, tracing it as we do through a thousand dispatches, it succeeded in its main end. It gained time, and every year that was gained doubled Elizabeth’s strength. Nothing is more revolting in the queen, but nothing is more characteristic than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom. A falsehood was to her simply an intellectual means of meeting a difficulty; and the ease with which she asserted or denied whatever suited her purpose, was only equaled by the cynical indifference with which she met the exposure of her lies as soon as their purpose was answered. The same purely intellectual view of things showed itself in the dexterous use she made of her very faults. Her levity carried her gayly over moments of detection and embarrassment where better women would have died of shame. She screened her tentative and hesitating statesmanship under the natural timidity and vacillation of her sex. She turned her very luxury and sports to good account. There were moments of grave danger in her reign, when the country remained indifferent to its perils, as it saw the queen give her days to hawking and hunting and her nights to dancing and plays. Her vanity and affectation, her womanly fickleness and caprice, all had their part in the diplomatic comedies she played with the successive candidates for her hand. If political necessities made her life a lonely one, she had at any rate the satisfaction of averting war and conspiracies by love-sonnets and romantic interviews, or of gaining a year of tranquillity by the dexterous spinning out of a flirtation.

As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of lying and intrigue, the sense of her greatness is almost lost in a sense of contempt. But, wrapped as they were in a cloud of mystery, the aims of her policy were throughout temperate and simple, and they were pursued with a singular tenacity. The sudden acts of energy which from time to time broke her habitual hesitation proved that it was no hesitation of weakness. Elizabeth could wait and finesse; but when the hour was come she could strike, and strike hard. Her natural temper indeed tended to a rash self-confidence rather than to self-distrust. She had, as strong natures always have, an unbounded confidence in her luck. “Her Majesty counts much on Fortune,” Walsingham wrote bitterly; “I wish she would trust more in Almighty God.” The diplomatists who censured at one moment her irresolution, her delay, her changes of front, censure at the next her “obstinacy,” her iron will, her defiance of what seemed to them inevitable ruin. “This woman,” Philip’s envoy wrote after a wasted remonstrance, “this woman is possessed by a hundred thousand devils.”

To her own subjects, indeed, who knew nothing of her manœuvres and retreats, of her “by-ways” and “crooked ways,” she seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution. Brave as they were, the men who swept the Spanish main or glided between the icebergs of Baffin Bay never doubted that the palm of bravery lay with their queen. Her steadiness and courage in the pursuit of her aims was equaled by the wisdom with which she chose the men to accomplish them. She had a quick eye for merit of any sort, and a wonderful power of enlisting its whole energy in her service. The sagacity which chose Cecil and Walsingham was just as unerring in its choice of the meanest of her agents. Her success, indeed, in securing from the beginning of her reign to its end, with the single exception of Leicester, precisely the right men for the work she set them to do, sprang in great measure from the noblest characteristic of her intellect. If in loftiness of aim her temper fell below many of the tempers of her time, in the breadth of its range, in the universality of its sympathy, it stood far above them all. Elizabeth could talk poetry with Spenser and philosophy with Bruno; she could discuss euphuism with Lyly, and enjoy the chivalry of Essex; she could turn from talk of the last fashions to pore with Cecil over dispatches and treasury books; she could pass from tracking traitors with Walsingham to settle points of doctrine with Parker, or to calculate with Frobisher the chances of a northwest passage to the Indies. The versatility and many-sidedness of her mind enabled her to understand every phase of the intellectual movement of her day, and to fix by a sort of instinct on its higher representatives. But the greatness of the queen rests above all on her power over her people.

We have had grander and nobler rulers, but none so popular as Elizabeth. The passion of love, of loyalty, of admiration, which finds its most perfect expression in the “Faery Queen,” throbbed as intensely through the veins of her meanest subjects. To England, during her reign of half a century, she was a virgin and a Protestant queen; and her immorality, her absolute want of religious enthusiasm, failed utterly to blur the brightness of the national idea. Her worst acts broke fruitlessly against the general devotion. A Puritan, whose hand she cut off in a freak of tyrannous resentment, waved his hat with the hand that was left, and shouted, “God save Queen Elizabeth!” Of her faults, indeed, England beyond the circle of her court knew little or nothing. The shiftings of her diplomacy were never seen outside the royal closet. The nation at large could only judge her foreign policy by its main outlines, by its temperance and good sense, and above all by its success. But every Englishman was able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at home, in her love of peace, her instinct of order, the firmness and moderation of her government, the judicious spirit of conciliation and compromise among warring factions, which gave the country an unexampled tranquillity at a time when almost every other country in Europe was torn with civil war. Every sign of the growing prosperity, the sight of London as it became the mart of the world, of stately mansions as they rose on every manor, told, and justly told, in Elizabeth’s favor.

In one act of her civil administration she showed the boldness and originality of a great ruler; for the opening of her reign saw her face the social difficulty which had so long impeded English progress, by the issue of a commission of inquiry which ended in the solution of the problem by the system of poor-laws. She lent a ready patronage to the new commerce; she considered its extension and protection as a part of public policy, and her statue in the center of the London Exchange was a tribute on the part of the merchant class to the interest with which she watched and shared personally in its enterprises. Her thrift won a general gratitude. The memories of the Terror and of the martyrs threw into bright relief the aversion from bloodshed which was conspicuous in her earlier reign, and never wholly wanting through its fiercer close. Above all, there was a general confidence in her instinctive knowledge of the national temper. Her finger was always on the public pulse. She knew exactly when she could resist the feeling of her people, and when she must give way before the new sentiment of freedom which her policy unconsciously fostered. But when she retreated, her defeat had all the grace of victory; and the frankness and unreserve of her surrender won back at once the love that her resistance had lost. Her attitude at home, in fact, was that of a woman whose pride in the well-being of her subjects, and whose longing for their favor, was the one warm touch in the coldness of her natural temper. If Elizabeth could be said to love anything, she loved England. “Nothing,” she said to her first Parliament in words of unwonted fire, “nothing, no worldly thing under the sun, is so dear to me as the love and good-will of my subjects.” And the love and good-will which were so dear to her she fully won.

She clung, perhaps, to her popularity the more passionately that it hid in some measure from her the terrible loneliness of her life. She was the last of the Tudors, the last of Henry’s children; and her nearest relatives were Mary Stuart and the house of Suffolk, one the avowed, the other the secret, claimant of her throne. Among her mother’s kindred she found but a single cousin. Whatever womanly tenderness she had, wrapped itself around Leicester; but a marriage with Leicester was impossible, and every other union, could she even have bent to one, was denied to her by the political difficulties of her position. The one cry of bitterness which burst from Elizabeth revealed her terrible sense of the solitude of her life. “The Queen of Scots,” she cried at the birth of James, “has a fair son, and I am but a barren stock.” But the loneliness of her position only reflected the loneliness of her nature. She stood utterly apart from the world around her, sometimes above it, sometimes below it, but never of it. It was only on its intellectual side that Elizabeth touched the England of her day. All its moral aspects were simply dead to her.

It was a time when men were being lifted into nobleness by the new moral energy which seemed suddenly to pulse through the whole people, when honor and enthusiasm took colors of poetic beauty, and religion became a chivalry. But the finer sentiments of the men around her touched Elizabeth simply as the fair tints of a picture would have touched her. She made her market with equal indifference out of the heroism of William of Orange or the bigotry of Philip. The noblest aims and lives were only counters on her board. She was the one soul in her realm whom the news of St. Bartholomew stirred to no thirst for vengeance; and while England was thrilling with its triumph over the Armada, its queen was coolly grumbling over the cost, and making her profit out of the spoiled provisions she had ordered for the fleet that saved her. To the voice of gratitude, indeed, she was for the most part deaf. She accepted services such as were never rendered to any other English sovereign without a thought of return. Walsingham spent his fortune in saving her life and throne, and she left him to die a beggar.

But, as if by a strange irony, it was to this very want of sympathy that she owed some of the grander features of her character. If she was without love, she was without hate. She cherished no petty resentments; she never stooped to envy or suspicion of the men who served her. She was indifferent to abuse. Her good-humor was never ruffled by the charges of wantonness and cruelty with which the Jesuits filled every court in Europe. She was insensible to fear. Her life became at last the mark for assassin after assassin, but the thought of peril was the one hardest to bring home to her. Even when the Catholic plots broke out in her very household, she would listen to no proposals for the removal of Catholics from her court.

MARY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS.

BY DAVID HUME.

[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.