The Royal Tragedy.
Meantime the tide of war is flowing back and forth over England and engrossing all hopes and fears. The poor King is one while a captive of the Scots, and again a captive of the Parliamentary forces, and is hustled from palace to castle. What shall be done with the royal prisoner? There are thousands who have fought against him who would have been most glad of his escape; but there are others—weary of his doublings—who have vowed that this son of Baal shall go to his doom and bite the dust.
Finally, and quickly too (for events move with railroad speed), his trial comes—the trial of a King. A strange event for these English, who have venerated and feared and idolized so many kings and queens of so many royal lines. How the Royalist verse-makers must have fumed and raved! Milton, then just turned of forty, was, as I have said, living near High Holborn; the King was eight years his senior—was in custody at St. James’s, a short way above Piccadilly. He brought to the trial all his kingly dignity, and wore it unflinchingly—refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of the Parliament, cuddling always obstinately that poor figment of the divine right of kings—which even then Milton, down in his Holborn garden, was sharpening his pen to undermine and destroy.
The sentence was death—a sentence that gave pause to many. Fairfax, and others such, would have declared against it; even crop-eared Prynne, who had suffered so much for his truculent Puritanism, protested against it; two-thirds of the population of England would have done the same; but London and England and the army were all in the grip of an iron man whose name was Cromwell. Time sped; the King had only two days to live; his son Charles was over seas, never believing such catastrophe could happen; only two royal children—a princess of thirteen and a boy of eight—came to say adieu to the royal prisoner. “He sat with them some time at the window, taking them on his knees, and kissing them, and talking with them of their duty to their mother, and to their elder brother, the Prince of Wales.” He carried his habitual dignity and calmness with him on the very morning, going between files of soldiers through St. James’s Park—pointing out a tree which his brother Henry had planted—and on, across to Whitehall, where had come off many a gay, rollicking masque of Ben Jonson’s, in presence of his father, James I. He was led through the window of the banqueting-hall—the guides show it now—where he had danced many a night, and so to the scaffold, just without the window, whence he could see up and down the vast court of Whitehall, from gate to gate,[61] paved with a great throng of heads. Even then and there rested on him the same kingly composure; the fine oval face, pale but unmoved; the peaked beard carefully trimmed, as you see it in the well-known pictures by Vandyke, at Windsor or at Blenheim.
He has a word with old Bishop Juxon, who totters beside him; a few words for others who are within hearing; examines the block, the axe; gives some brief cautions to the executioner; then, laying down his head, lifts his own hand for signal, and with a crunching thud of sound it is over.
And poet Milton—has he shown any relenting? Not one whit; he is austere among the most austere; in this very week he is engaged upon his defence of regicide, with its stinging, biting sentences. He is a friend and party to the new Commonwealth; two months only after the execution of the King, he is appointed Secretary to the State Council, and under it is conducting the Latin correspondence. He demolishes, by order of the same Council, the Eikon Basilike (supposed in that day to be the king’s work) with his fierce onslaught of the Eikonoklastes. His words are bitter as gall; he even alludes, in no amiable tone—with acrid emphasis, indeed—to the absurd rumor, current with some, that the King, through his confidential instrument, Buckingham, had poisoned his own father.
He is further appointed to the answering of Salmasius,[62] an answer with which all Europe presently rings. It was in these days, and with such work crowding him, that his vision fails; and to these days, doubtless belongs that noble sonnet on his blindness, which is worth our staying for, here and now:
“When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent, which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he, returning, chide;
‘Dost God exact day-labor, light denied?’
I fondly ask: But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies—‘God doth not need
Either man’s work, or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve, who only stand and wait.’”
Wonderful, is it not, that such a sonnet—so full of rare eloquence and rare philosophy—so full of all that most hallows our infirm humanity could be written by one—pouring out his execrations on the head of Salmasius—at strife in his own household—at strife (as we shall find) with his own daughters? Wonderful, is it not, that Carlyle could write as he did about the heroism of the humblest as well as bravest, and yet grow into a rage—over his wife’s shoulders and at her cost—with a rooster crowing in his neighbor’s yard? Ah, well, the perfect ones have not yet come upon our earth, whatever perfect poems they may write.