The Princess Elizabeth
She was really the most affectionate and harmless of little princesses, though, in the cruelty of her fate, one of the most tragic figures of her sad time. Destiny, the great bully, in the absence of any celestial S.P.C.C., often delights in torturing good children, and surely he had never vented his spite on a prettier innocence than this. She was born on the Holy Innocents’ day, actually; and that may have prejudiced the odious tyrant. A counterpane of snow covered the earth at the time, and when the sun of the New Year withdrew it, there was this smiling snowdrop underneath.
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.