The battle of Naseby was, perhaps, the anticipative preventive of an English “French Revolution.” The difference between Cromwell’s Ironsides and the gay Frondeurs measures the difference between the English people and the French.

Charles I. aimed to be in England what Louis XIV. was in France. Both fully believed in the divine right of Kings; both quoted as their favorite text of Scripture, “Where the word of a King is there is power; and who may say unto him ‘What doest thou?’” But Louis dealt with the fickle Frondeurs and Charles with Cromwell’s Ironsides; and this racial difference had as divergent results—absolutism for Louis le Grand and the block for Charles Stuart.

There will always be difference of opinion as to Cromwell’s place in history. Was he liberator or tyrant, Christian ruler or barbarously fanatic despot? There can be but one opinion as to the injustice of the trial, condemnation, and death of Charles. The Rump Parliament was certainly not representative of England. It was Cromwell’s creature as arbitrarily as ever the Star Chamber was Charles’.

“Must crimes be punished but by other crimes, and greater criminals?”—Byron.

But as a force in favor of constitutional government and civic liberty, however abused in immediate practice; and as a threatening protest against the abuse of power in high places; and as a veiled challenge of defiance to every absolute monarch—the battle fought June 14, 1645, at Naseby, Northamptonshire, between the Royalists under Charles I. and the Parliamentarians under Fairfax must ever be considered a victory decisive and for all time advantageous.

Queen Henrietta Maria.

Henrietta Maria was the daughter of Henry IV. of France, the first Bourbon, and his second wife, Maria de Medici. At the age of fifteen she was married to Charles I. of England; and her best and happiest years as wife, mother, and Queen were spent in England.

In this princess many of the leading Italian, French and English characteristics were met and happily blended. Her dark, lithe beauty (as shown in her portrait by Van Dyke), her musical ability, instrumental and vocal, her fiery-hearted fidelity to the religion of her mother, were, perhaps, her heritage from sunny Italy; the France of Richelieu might, as an environment, conduce favorably to that diplomatic waywardness which, in early years, invariably won for the sweet girl-wife whatsoever her heart might desire; but perhaps from England, land of realism, chilly fogs, and Cromwellian barbarity, she imbibed her sturdy spirit of fortitude and heroic endurance of sorrow.

“To bear is to conquer our fate”, and to refuse to bear and to apparently end all by self-destruction, is to fail to conquer our fate.

The hopes and promises of religion are of inestimable value as an aid in the endurance of sorrows. When the dread culmination of all earthly fears and horrors—the beheading of Charles I.—clashed full upon the widowed heart of Queen Henrietta Maria, she withdrew at once from the court of Paris and sought solace in seclusion and prayer. The convent, not the court; the divine, not the human; the hopes and promises of religion as red-glowed in the sanctuary of a Carmelite convent chapel, held the balm that soothed her wounded soul in that awful culminant woe.

Which is better—to bear or to fail to bear? to hope and endure or despair and die? to pray and bless God saying, The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord, or to wither away in cursing and impotent hate? to believe and grow strongly peaceful in the belief that God is good and all is for the best; that all is little and short that passes away with time; that God’s explanation shall exultingly explain forever and ever—or to doubt, negative, deny, and bitterly live and despairingly die? Even as a matter of merely human wisdom, it is well to believe in the hopes and promises of religion.

The monastic sanctuaries that arise wherever the Catholic Church flourishes, and that lure into their prayerful solitudes the “hearts that are heavy with losses and weary with dragging the crosses too heavy for mortals to bear” are surely indicative of a far higher and happier state of society than that whose godless defiance finds suicidal expression in the insidious drug, the deadly acid, the desperate bullet.

The houses of Euthanasia of the near Socialistic future are surely as stones unto bread in comparison with the monastic sanctuaries of the Middle Ages.

Wonders of Portraits.

How wonderful is the art which can impress upon canvas and so preserve from generation to generation and from century to century, a lifelike presentment of men and women whose flesh and blood realities have long since mouldered dust with dust! The canvas endures; the man dies?—Ah, no! he has but shuffled off the earth-garment and left it earth with earth; he lives.

The Van Dyke portraits of Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles I. and the children of Charles I. are mutely eloquent. The well-known picture, “Baby Stuart”, a detail from the group, “Children of Charles I.” suggests the high tide of love and happiness in the life of Queen Henrietta Maria. She was then surrounded by everything that heart could desire,—wealth, honor, power, a husband’s unbounded love and confidence and three beautiful and most promising children. They were Mary, who later married William, Prince of Orange; Charles, who, at the Restoration, became the “Merry Monarch” of England, and James, the baby Stuart, who later became the unfortunate James II., the monarch who lost his crown, and whose daughter Mary, wedded to her cousin, William, Prince of Orange, son of that sister Mary, who, in the portrait, stands at his side, abetted the deposition of her father and wore his crown.

There is something eloquently pathetic in the portraits of men and women who have fallen victims to a tragic fate. The principle of contrast is, doubtless, here at work, setting side by side with the hour of portrayal that other hour of bitter death. Marie Antoinette and her children, as fixed upon canvas by the court painter, Madame Vigee LeBrun, derive their rich tonal qualities—warm grays and reds, their charm of evanescence, their magically somber fascination, from the shadows of the Conciergerie and the guillotine.

The portrait of Charles I. as painted by Van Dyke, must ever suggest to the thoughtful student of history that scene, disgraceful alike to the English nation and to human nature which took place on the scaffold just outside Whitehall Palace.

Yes; there are two sides to every question, and one is a ruler exercising arbitrary power and impregnated with belief in the divine right of kings and claiming it his prerogative to break up his parliament and govern alone; the other is an assembly of men, nominally a parliament, so narrowly fanatic and steeped in human hate that they demanded as condition under which they would agree to levy taxes for Charles I. to use in aid of Protestant Holland, that he should first order every Catholic priest in his own realm to be put to death and the property of all Catholics to be confiscated. Charles refused. This side of the cause of the rupture between Charles I. and his Parliament has not the historic prominence of the other side. Why? Not very hard to tell why if one considers attentively the writers of the history of that period.

“I hope to meet my end with calmness. Do not let us speak of the men into whose hands I have fallen. They thirst for my blood, they shall have it. God’s will be done, I give Him thanks. I forgive them all sincerely, but let us say no more about them”—these words addressed to Bishop Juxon by Charles a few days before his death attest the inherent nobility of his nature. Whatever the life of Charles I. may have been, his death was kingly; and if death is the echo of life then, too, his life must have been vocal with virtues. But what virtue can outshine or even illumine the black chaos of creed-fanaticism, odium, obloquy? What power can break up and restore to their original settings the half-truths, untruths, errors and lies glitteringly crystalized in history, drama, story and song? Does time right ancient wrongs, readjust and make-whole torn, century-scattered truths? We dream so; we say so; but at deepest heart we whisper No.

With unruffled calmness, with dignity, with kingly grace, Charles I. stepped from the opening of what had been in happier days his banqueting hall and advanced upon the scaffold. In the words of Agnes Strickland:

“It was past 1 o’clock before the grisly attendants and apparatus of the scaffold were ready. Colonel Hacker led the king through his former banqueting hall, one of the windows of which had originally been contrived to support stands for public pageantries; it had been taken out and led to the platform raised in the street. The noble bearing of the King as he stepped on the scaffold, his beaming eyes and high expression, were noticed by all who saw him. He looked on all sides for his people, but dense masses of soldiery only presented themselves far and near. He was out of hearing of any persons but Juxon and Herbert, save those who were interested in his destruction. The soldiers preserved a dead silence; this time they did not insult him. The distant populace wept, and occasionally raised mournful cries in blessings and prayers for him. The king uttered a short speech, to point out that every institute of the original constitution of England had been subverted with the sovereign power. While he was speaking someone touched the axe, which was laid enveloped in black crepe on the block. The king turned round hastily and exclaimed, ‘Have a care of the axe. If the edge is spoiled it will be the worse for me.’

“The king put up his flowing hair under a cap; then, turning to the executor asked, ‘Is any of my hair in the way?’ ‘I beg your majesty to push it more under your cap,’ replied the man, bowing. The bishop assisted his royal master to do so and observed to him: ‘There is but one stage more, which, though turbulent and troublesome, is yet a very short one. Consider, it will carry you a great way—even from earth to heaven.’ ‘I go,’ replied the king, ‘from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown.’

“He unfastened his cloak and took off the medallion of the order of the Garter. The latter he gave to Juxon, saying with emphasis, ‘Remember!’ Beneath the medallion of St. George was a secret spring which removed a plate ornamented with lilies, under which was a beautiful miniature of his Henrietta. The warning word, which has caused many historical surmises, evidently referred to the fact that he only had parted with the portrait of his beloved wife at the last moment of his existence. He then took off his coat and put on his cloak, and pointing to the block, said to the executioner: ‘Place it so that it will not shake.’ ‘It is firm, sir,’ replied the man. ‘I shall say a short prayer,’ said the king, ‘and when I hold out my hand thus, strike.’ The king stood in profound meditation, said a few words to himself, looked upward on the heavens, then knelt and laid his head on the block. In about a minute he stretched out his hands, and his head was severed at one blow.”

Sorrow.

News travelled slowly in the days of long ago; and the trial, death and burial of Charles I. were over long before intelligence of the dire happenings in England had been carried into France. Queen Henrietta Maria, then in the Louvre Palace, Paris, had just received into her motherly arms her second son, James, who had successfully passed through the belligerent lines and reached safety in Paris. This joy was soon dulled into woe.

Ominous whispers among the Louvre circle and pitying glances caused the queen to make inquiries. The worst was soon told. The queen had expected imprisonment, perhaps even deposition and exile, but death, the official beheading of an English sovereign—had not once entered into her mind as among the possibilities. The queen sat silent and tearless among her sympathizing English attendants. Pere Gamache approached. She received him apathetically. Her aunt, the Duchess de Vendome, took her hand and held it caressingly—but the Queen seemed in a state of frozen woe; no moan, no sigh, no tear. Pere Gamache withdrew unobserved and searching through the royal chambers he found the little Princess Henriette, the four-year-old idol of the once happy Stuart home. Leading the child gently by the hand, he returned to the scene of grief.

At the touch of baby hands, the impress of childish kisses, the unhappy Queen seemed slowly to come back to life even as it was, and clasping her little daughter in rapturous tenderness to her breast she wept. Long and wildly she wept and the frightened child weeping responsively and clinging helplessly to her bosom saved her at last to sanity and to heroic endurance.

Tennyson has beautifully expressed this power of childish love and helplessness to save a mother from despair:

A few days later the Queen withdrew from the French court for a brief period of retirement and prayer in the Carmelite Convent.

Milton.

While the drama in high places was playing before the world, a more enduring side scene was enacting in a quiet English home. John Milton, in political disgrace, in sorrow of soul, and in total blindness was dictating to his daughters the lines of “Paradise Lost.” Cromwell and his Roundheads, the Merry Monarch and his dissolute court, James II. and his sorrows, passed away; the visions seen by the blind old bard remain.

As literary immortality is the highest prize that fate holds for mortals it is fitting that the cost of attainment should be proportionately high. And in this adjustment fate is inexorable. Heart’s blood and tears wrought into a book give it enduring qualities: much, much; little, little; some, some; none, none. The dictum of Horace in the olden day, Si vis me flere, etc., is still the exponent of an author’s power.

That poem by Mrs. Browning, “A Musical Instrument,” has fixed in rainbow evanescence—a Thoughts’ Niagara Bridal Veil—ten thousand blending, blinding truths and beauties that prose could never hold or catch.

Is the prize worth the price? In itself, No; but in the soul-growth that its mastery implies and in the soul-wealth that it makes one’s own forever and ever, Yes. Then, too, they to whom Fame shines as an ever luring star, urging on, on, incessantly even through blood and tears, are so formed by their fate that the prize seems to them worth while; its winning seems life’s only good, its loss, life’s supreme sorrow. “The attractions are proportional to the destinies.”

So who shall judge his unknown neighbor? Who shall justly say, Thou fool to the man who must needs follow his fate? Who shall justly pity him whose poverty, disgrace, bitterness of heart, and blindness of soul and body—lead to the star-luring heights of literary immortality?

Milton was Latin secretary under Oliver Cromwell and a man of great influence at the court. He shared in the amnesty proclaimed by Charles II. at the Restoration. Milton’s remaining years were spent in retirement and literary labors.

The return of the Stuarts shattered all his hopes, religious and political. He seemed to see in the Stuart restoration the first gathering gloom of a darkness which should overwhelm himself, England, and all the earth. Subjectively this was true. Milton never saw beyond that gathering cloud; and when the culminant blackness of his own blindness closed in upon him, then, too, into a common gloom sank Milton, England and all the earth.

Would Paradise Lost have been born into literature if Milton had not become blind?

Would we of today find congenial that Milton of the old Puritanical day? Do we admire the Miltonic God? Milton liked best his Lucifer, and that liking elusively throbs through Paradise Lost and elicits response.

Charles II.

There must have been a great measure of compensation to Charles I. in the filial devotion of his household. It is related that Prince Charles, eldest son, and heir apparent to the throne, sent to his father, when in prison, a document carte blanche signed with his name. And in a letter enclosed the Prince assured his father that whatever conditions he should see fit to make with Cromwell and his followers relative to the succession would be agreeable to him, in token whereof he had signed his name to the document. There was something heroic in that, and something even more magnanimously heroic in the response of Charles I. He at once tore the document to pieces, fearing that the enemy might get possession of it and make use of it against Prince Charles. He wrote tenderly to his son, admitting the pleasure his generous offer had given, but declaring that death would be preferable to any act whereby the rights of his children should be tampered with or signed away.

It is well to note these nobler actions and emotions in the lives of kings: the ambitious selfishness and cruelty of a Macbeth, a King John, a Richard III. are pedestaled for all the world to see; why not the mutual magnanimity of the Stuarts? Truly the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oftimes interred with their bones.

At the death of Cromwell, after a five years’ stormy reign as Lord Protector of England, and after a twelve years’ exile of the family of Charles I., the people of England unanimously welcomed the restoration of the Stuarts. Charles II.—known in France under this title since the death of Charles I.—was crowned King of England.

The times were troubled. Roundhead and Cavalier still stood at misunderstanding enmity one directly opposed to the other and never the twain might meet. The pendulum swung with bewildering rapidity from harshly somber Cromwellian Puritanism to the excessive dissipation of the Court of the Merry Monarch: the country followed the pendulum.

Charles II., while humane on the whole, and more inclined to ease and pleasure than to troublesome revenge, yet displayed a touch of the savage in his treatment of the body of Oliver Cromwell. He ordered that it be disinterred and the head struck off. This was done; and the ghastly head of the man who had ruled England with a rod of iron for five years, was fastened to the gibbet at Tyburn.

Horrible is the hate which pursues its victim beyond death and wreaks vengeance upon an unresisting mass of putrefaction! All such excesses, no matter by whom committed or under what provocation, are atavistic expressions of the jackal and the tiger in the heart of man.

Truly there is no eye that can foresee the future! Cromwell, passing for the thousandth time through the thoroughfare of Tyburn, saw not there his own head fastened to a gibbet. Charles I., at the stately banquet board of Whitehall Palace, saw not the great end window of the hall opening upon the scaffold. And we, secure in the hour, see not that other hour of fatal import that yet shall be; and—’tis well.

Death of Queen Henrietta.

Queen Henrietta Maria was not present at the scenes of acclamation which welcomed the return of her son, Charles II. She was at that time happily absorbed in the forth-coming marriage of her charming daughter, the Princess Henriette Maria, to Philip, Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV.

Some time later Queen Henrietta Maria went to England. She resided there three years, but her heart’s best interests were in sunny France where her idolized daughter, the Duchess of Orleans, moved amid the gay court of Versailles as its chief honor and ornament. Charles II. and his wife, Catherine, of Braganza, reluctantly bade farewell to the Queen-mother after accompanying her as far as the Nore; but doubtless there was secret joy in the heart of Henrietta Maria as the foggy shores of England receded from view and France arose in expectancy.

Then, too, all seemed calm in England; Charles II. and his wife were high in popular favor. Her second son, James, Duke of York, was happily married and surrounded by a promising family. James’ eldest daughter, the Lady Mary, later Queen Mary II. of England, was a great favorite with the affectionate grandmother, Henrietta Maria. Anne, James’ second daughter, afterward Queen Anne of England, was also attached to the kindly old Queen-mother.

The old-age years of Henrietta Maria rolled on in comparative happiness. Some lives seem to have their sorrows scattered uniformly over the years, a gentle drizzle, never dazzling sunlight; other lives are marked by dynamic contrasts—brilliancy, ecstatic light suddenly blackened by tornado blasts and torn by lurid lightning, and after that, calm again and even the bright light.

Queen Henrietta Maria’s tornado blast and searing lightning flash came full upon her when her husband was beheaded; her later years were calmly happy. In philanthropic labors, in the exercise of all the gentle charities of the Christian heart, in the hopeful fulfilment of religious obligations, the old age years drifted calmly to the great Calm.

It chanced that at that time the use of opium as a sedative, narcotic, and harmless medicine was in vogue at the court. M. Valot, favorite physician of Louis XIV., ordered it for the Queen. In the best of spirits and laughing at the supposed wonderful qualities of the new panacea, Henrietta Maria took the prescribed drug. An hour later she fell into a peaceful slumber; the night passed and the day passed, and still she slept. Alarm was felt, her son-in-law, the Duke of Orleans, was soon at her bedside; the little granddaughter, Anne, was brought near in hopes of arousing the dormant sensibilities—but in vain. Queen Henrietta had sunk into the calm; it was too good to leave; she stayed, sank deeper, deeper, and with a little sigh of relief she died.

Bossuet’s Sermon.

Jacques Benigne Bossuet, the eloquent pulpit orator of the court of Louis XIV., added a classic to French literature in his masterly discourse at the obsequies of Henrietta Maria. It was delivered in the convent chapel of the nuns of the Visitation of Chaillot, whom the late Queen particularly favored, and for whom she had founded the convent.

The nobility of France were gathered together on this occasion, the “most illustrious assembly of the world” sat spell-bound under the eloquence of the “Eagle of Meaux.” Bossuet had proved equal to his opportunity.

Perhaps, though, Bossuet is better known today by that other funeral oration delivered some months later at the obsequies of Queen Henrietta Maria’s youngest daughter, Henriette of England, Duchess of Orleans.

When the old die, well—there can be no Shelleyan lamentation.

The young spring may, indeed, thus lavishly lament for the young, but not for the old. When a poet Keats, aged twenty-six, lies brokenheartedly and beautifully dead; when a queenly woman, wife and bereaved mother, aged twenty-eight, lies pathetically dead—oh, then, all that Shelley may poetically declare, all that Bossuet may magically proclaim, seem fitting and just and true. We understand the young Spring tantrums; and the sobbings of the buds as roughly sundered from the grief-swept trees, seem strangely familiar, as though ages ago we ourselves had thus wildly wept when the world was young.

Wealth, station, honor, health, happiness, youth, beauty, love—today; and the tomb tomorrow! This contrast has ever most forcefully appealed to the human heart. Bossuet knew full well the force of this appeal and again the orator and the occasion were well met.

“O vanity,” he exclaimed, “O nothingness! O mortals, ignorant of their destiny! Ten months ago would she have believed it? And you, my hearers, would you have thought, while she was shedding so many tears in this place, while I was discharging a like office for the Queen, her mother—that she would so soon assemble you here to deplore her own loss? ‘Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ Nothing is left for me to say but that that is the only sentiment which, in presence of so strange a casualty, grief so well grounded and so poignant permits me to indulge. No; after what we have just seen, health is but a name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow, charms and pleasures are but a dangerous diversion.”

Reflections.

“Keep cool, it will be all one in a hundred years.” So we say to others, so we try to persuade ourselves; but the tempestuous teapot seems fatally fixed over the live coals of life and the teapot tempest must as fatally follow. So mightily important, so imperative, so irresistibly puissant where those seeming geyser-forces in their day; perhaps we who laugh at their spent spray would more wisely learn the lessons they may teach us.

But just as a matter of spent spray and evanishing iridescence, those struggles of the long ago seem magically beautiful; and the men and women who figured prominently in them seem to peer through the mist even as flame-light from which flame has fled, even as pictured pain, reflex sorrows, unrealities—spray-shrouded, color-clouded. Cleopatra, nobly dead, a Queen forever; ugly old Socrates growing humanly dear and beautiful to all the ages as he drinks the poison-hemlock; Marie Antoinette, in the tumbrel, at the guillotine, under the glittering blade; Charles I. upon the scaffold, on the block awaiting the headsman’s blow—these things have been, but now they are not; yet they endure.