DEATH OF ALEXANDER HENDERSON.
There was a death about this time more important than that of Dr. Twisse:—The health of Henderson had for some time been causing anxiety to his friends in London; and, when he left them, early in May, on his difficult mission to Newcastle, they had followed him in their thoughts with some foreboding. Actually, from the middle of May to the end of July, these two strangely-contrasted persons—the wise, modest, and massive Henderson, the chief of the Scottish Presbyterian clergy, and the sombre, narrow, and punctilious Charles I., the beaten sovereign of three Kingdoms—were much together at Newcastle, engaged in an encounter of wits and courtesies. Charles had seen a good deal of Henderson before (at Berwick in 1639, in Edinburgh during the royal visit to Scotland in 1641, and more recently during the Uxbridge Treaty of Feb. 1644-5), and had always singled him out as not only the most able, but also the most likeable, man of his perverse tribe. He had therefore received him graciously on his coming to Newcastle; and, though there arrived subsequently from Scotland three other Presbyterian ministers, Mr. Robert Blair, Mr. Robert Douglas, and Mr. Andrew Cant, all commissioned by the General Assembly to work upon his Majesty's conscience, it was still with Henderson that he preferred to converse. The main subject of their conversations was, of course, the question between Presbytery and Episcopacy. Could the King lawfully do what was required of him? Could he lawfully now, on any mere plea of State-necessity, give up that Church of England in the principles of which he had been educated, which he had sworn at his coronation to maintain, and which he still believed in his conscience to be the true and divinely-appointed form of a Church? If Mr. Henderson could prove to his Majesty even now that Episcopacy was not of divine appointment, then the plea of State-necessity might avail, and his Majesty might see his way more clearly! It was on this point that the repeated conversations of the King and Henderson at Newcastle did undoubtedly turn. Nay, there was more than mere conversation: there was an elaborate discussion in writing. The King, it is said, would fain have had a little council of Anglican Divines called to assist him; but, as that could not be, he was willing to adopt Henderson's suggestion of a paper debate between themselves. Accordingly, there is yet extant, in the Reliquiæ Sacræ Carolinæ or Printed Works of Charles I., what purports to be the actual series of Letters exchanged between the King and Henderson. The King opens the correspondence on the 29th of May; Henderson answers June 3; the King's second letter is dated June 6; Henderson's reply does not come till June 17; the King's third letter is dated June 22; Henderson replies July 2; and two short letters of the King, being the fourth and fifth on his side, are both dated July 16. There the correspondence ends, Henderson having, it is believed, thought it fit that his Majesty should have the last word. In the King's letters, as they are printed, one observes a stately politeness to Henderson throughout, with very considerable reasoning power, and sometimes a really smart phrase; in Henderson's what strikes one is the studied respectfulness and delicacy of the manner, combined with grave decision in the matter.—The controversy, whether in speech or in writing, was unreal on the King's part, and for the purpose of procrastination only; and Henderson, while painfully engaging in it, had known this but too well. His heart was already heavy with approaching death. He had been ill when he came to Newcastle; and in July, when he is said to have let the King have the last word in the written correspondence, he was hardly able to go about. His friends in London, hearing this, were greatly concerned. "It is part of my prayer to God." Baillie writes to him affectionately on the 4th of August, "to restore you to health, and continue your service a time: we never had so much need of you as now." In the same letter, referring to the King's obstinacy, and to the grief on that account which he believes to be preying on Henderson, he implores him to take courage, shake off "melancholious thoughts," and "digest what cannot be gotten amended." But Baillie knew what was coming. "Mr. Henderson is dying, most of heartbreak, at Newcastle," he wrote, three days later, to Spang in Holland. No! it was not to be at Newcastle. "Give me back one hour of Scotland: let me see it ere I die." Some such wish was in Henderson's mind, and they managed to convey him by sea to Edinburgh. He arrived there on the 1lth of August, and was taken either to his own house, in which he had not been for three years, or to some other that was more convenient. He rallied a little, so as to be able to dine with one friend and talk cheerfully, but never again left his room. There his brother- ministers of the city, and such others as were privileged, gathered round him, and took his hands; and the rest of the city lay around, making inquiries; and prayers went up for him in all the churches. On the 19th of August, eight days after his return, he died, aged sixty-three years, and there began a mourning in the Scottish Israel over the loss of their greatest man. They buried him in the old churchyard of Greyfriars, where his grave and tombstone are yet to be seen. [Footnote: Baillie, II. 381- 387; Burnet's Memoirs of the Hamiltons (ed. 1852), 356-7; Wodrow's Correspondence (Wodrow Society), III. 33, 34; Life of Mr. Robert Blair, by Row (Wodrow Society), 185-188; and "Reliquiæ Sacræ Carolinæ: or, The works of that great Monarch and glorious Martyr King Charles the I." (Hague edition of 1651), where the Letters are given in full. There is a fair abstract of them in Neal's Puritans (ed. 1795), III. 311-324. The death of Henderson at so critical a moment, and so closely after his conferences with the King at Newcastle, made a deep impression at the time, and became an incident of even mythical value to the Royalists. Hardly was the breath out of his body when there began to run about a lying rumour to the effect that he had died of remorse, acknowledging that the King had convinced him, and confessing his repentance of all he had said or done against that wisest and best of monarchs. Baillie, in London, was indignant. "The false reports which went here of Mr. Henderson," he wrote to Spang in Holland, Oct. 2, 1646, or less than six weeks after Henderson's death, "are, I see, come also to your hand. Believe me (for I have it under his own hand a little before his death) that he was utterly displeased with the King's ways, and over the longer the more; and whoever say otherwise, I know they speak false. That man died as he lived, in great modesty, piety, and faith." But the lie could not be extinguished; it circulated among the Royalists; and within two years it was turned into cash or credit by some scoundrel Scot in England, who forged and published a document entitled The Declaration of Mr. Alexander Henderson, principall Minister of the Word of God at Edinburgh, and chief Commissioner from the Kirk of Scotland to the Parliament and Synod of England, made upon his death-bed. This forgery was immediately denounced by the General Assembly of the Scottish Church in a solemn Declaration set forth by them Aug. 7, 1648, stating particulars of Henderson's last days, and vindicating his memory. Nevertheless the fiction was too convenient to be given up: it lasted; was embalmed by Clarendon in his History (605); and still leaves its odour in wretched compilations.—The genuineness of the series of Letters on Episcopacy between the King and Henderson, first printed in 1649, immediately after Charles's death, and included since then in all editions of Charles's works, does not seem to have been questioned by contemporaries on either side, or by subsequent Presbyterian critics. In the year 1826, however, the eminent and acute Godwin, in an elaborate note in his History of the Commonwealth (II. 179-185), did challenge the genuineness of the correspondence. He was inclined to the opinion that there had been no interchange of written Papers between the King and Henderson at all, but only "discourses and conferences," and that the whole thing was a Royalist forgery of 1649, contemporary with the Eikon Basilike, and for the same purpose. In venturing on so bold an opinion, Godwin, besides undervaluing other evidence to the contrary, seems to have dismissed too easily Burnet's information, in his Lives of the Hamiltons in 1673, as to the manner in which the Letters were written and kept. No less eminent a man than Sir Robert Moray, one of the founders of the Royal Society, and its first President, and of whom Burnet elsewhere says, "He was the wisest and worthiest man of his age, and was as another father to me," had told Burnet, "a few days before his much-lamented death" (June 1673), that he had been the amanuensis employed in the correspondence. Being with the King at Newcastle in 1646, then only as Mr. Robert Moray, it had fallen to him, as a person much in his Majesty's confidence, to receive each letter of the King's as it was written in his own royal hand, and make the copy of it which was to be given to Henderson, and also, Henderson's hand being none of the most legible, to transcribe Henderson's replies for the King's easier perusal; and with his Majesty's permission he had "kept Mr. Henderson's papers and the copies of the King's." After all, however, Godwin's sceptical inquiry leaves a shrewd somewhat behind it. For, granted that a written correspondence did take place, "the question remains," as Godwin asserts, "whether the papers now to be found in King Charles's works are the very papers that were so exchanged at Newcastle. The suspicion here suggested tells, in my mind, more against the King's letters as we now have them than against Henderson's. The King's letters, we may be sure, would be pretty carefully edited in 1649; and what may have been the amount and kind of editing thought allowable?">[
The last of Baillie's letters to Henderson, dated Aug. 13, 1646, contains a curious passage, "Ormond's Pacification with the Irish," writes Baillie, "is very unseasonable; the placing of Hopes (a professed Atheist, as they speak) about the Prince as his teacher is ill taken." The Hopes here mentioned is no other than THOMAS HOBBES, then just appointed tutor to the Prince of Wales in Paris. As the letter must have reached Edinburgh after Henderson was dead, he was not troubled with this additional piece of bad news before he left the world. Doubtless, however, he had heard of Hobbes, and formed some imagination of that dreadful person and his opinions. Hobbes indeed was now in his fifty- eighth year, or not much younger than the dying Henderson himself. But he was of slower constitution, and had begun his real work late in life, as if with a presentiment that he had plenty of time before him, and did not need to be in a hurry. He was to outlive Henderson thirty-three years.