PRINCESS ANNE
November 5: 1640
Harsh words have been utter’d and written on her, Henrietta the Queen:
She was young in a difficult part, on a cruel and difficult scene:—
Was it strange she should fail? that the King overmuch should bow down to her will?
—So of old with the women, God bless them!—it was, so will ever be still!
Rash in counsel and rash in courage, she aided and marr’d
The shifting tides of the fight, the star of the Stuarts ill-starr’d.
In her the false Florentine blood,—in him the bad strain of the Guise;
Suspicion against her and hate, all that malice can forge and devise;—
As a bird by the fowlers o’ernetted, she shuffles and changes her ground;
No wile unlawful in war, and the foe unscrupulous round!
Woman-like overbelieving Herself and the Cause and the Man,
Fights with two-edged intrigue, suicidal, plan upon plan;
Till the law of this world had its way, and she fled,—like a frigate unsail’d,
Unmasted, unflagg’d,—to her land; and the strength of the stronger prevail’d.
But it was not thus, not thus, in the years of thy springtide, O Queen,
When thy children came in their beauty, and all their future unseen:
When the kingdom had wealth and peace, one smile o’er the face of the land:
England, too happy, if thou could’st thy happiness understand!
As those over Etna who slumber, and under them rankles the fire.
At her side was the gallant King, her first-love, her girlhood’s desire,
And around her, best jewels and dearest to brighten the steps of the throne,
Three golden heads, three fair little maids, in their nursery shone.
‘As the mother, so be the daughters,’ they say:—nor could mother wish more
For her own, than men saw in the Queen’s, ere the rosebud-dawning was o’er,
Heart-wise and head-wise, a joy to behold, as they knelt for her kiss,—
Best crown of a woman’s life, her true vocation and bliss!—
But the flowers were pale and frail, and the mother watch’d them with dread,
As the sunbeams play’d round the room on each gay, glistening head.
Anne in that garden of childhood grew nearest Elizabeth: she
Tenderly tended and loved her, a babe with a babe on her knee:
Slight and white from the cradle was Anne; a floweret born
Rathe, out of season, a rose that peep’d out when the hedge was in thorn.
‘Why should it be so with us?’ thought Elizabeth oft; for in her
The soul ’gainst the body protesting, was but more keenly astir:
‘As saplings stunted by forest around o’ershading, we two:
What work for our life, my mother,’ she said, ‘is left us to do?
Or is’t from the evil to come, the days without pleasure, that God
In mercy would spare us, over our childhood outstretching the rod?’
—So she, from her innocent heart; in all things seeing the best
With the wholesome spirit of childhood; to God submitting the rest:
Not seeing the desolate years, the dungeon of Carisbrook drear;
Eyes dry-glazed with fever, and none to lend even a tear!
Now, all her heart to the little one goes; for, day upon day,
As a rosebud in canker, she pales and pines, and the cough has its way.
And the gardens of Richmond on Thames, the fine blythe air of the vale
Stay not the waning pulse, and the masters of science fail.
Then the little footsteps are faint, and a child may take her with ease;
As the flowers a babe flings down she is spread on Elizabeth’s knees,
Slipping back to the cradle-life, in her wasting weakness and pain:
And the sister prays and smiles and watches the sister in vain.
So she watch’d by the bed all night, and the lights were yellow and low,
And a cold blue blink shimmer’d up from the park that was sheeted in snow:
And the frost of the passing hour, when souls from the body divide,
The Sarsar-wind of the dawn, crept into the palace, and sigh’d.
And the child just turn’d her head towards Elizabeth there as she lay,
And her little hands came together in haste, as though she would pray;
And the words wrestled in her for speech that the fever-dry mouth cannot frame,
And the strife of the soul on the delicate brow was written in flame:
And Elizabeth call’d ‘O Father, why does she look at me so?
Will it soon be better for Anne? her face is all in a glow’:—
But with womanly speed and heed is the mother beside her, and slips
Her arm ’neath the failing head, and moistens the rose of the lips,
Pale and sweet as the wild rose of June, and whispers to pray
To the Father in heaven, ‘the one she likes best, my baby, to say’:
And the soul hover’d yet o’er the lips, as a dove when her pinions are spread,
And the light of the after-life came again in her eyes, and she said;
‘For my long prayer it is not time; for my short one I think I have breath;
Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, that I sleep not the sleep of death.’
—O! into life, fair child, as she pray’d, her innocence slept!
‘It is better for her,’ they said:—and knelt, and kiss’d her, and wept.
In her; Henrietta’s mother was by birth Mary de’ Medici; the great-grandmother of Charles was Mary of Guise.
‘With Charles I,’ says Ranke, ‘nothing was more seductive than secrecy. The contradictions in his conduct entangled him in embarrassments, in which his declarations, if always true in the sense he privately gave them, were only a hair’s-breadth removed from actual, and even from intentional, untruth.’—Whether traceable to descent, or to the evil influence of Buckingham and the intriguing atmosphere of the Spanish marriage-negotiations, this defect in political honesty is, unquestionably, the one serious blot on the character of Charles I.—Yet, whilst noting it, candid students will regretfully confess that the career of Elizabeth and her counsellors is defaced by shades of bad faith, darker and more numerous.
When the kingdom; See Clarendon’s description of England during this period, ‘enjoying the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age for so long time together have been blessed with.’
Three golden heads; Mary, the second child of Charles and Henrietta, was born Nov. 4, 1631: Elizabeth, Dec. 28, 1635: Anne, Mar. 17, 1637. The last two were feeble from infancy. Consumption soon showed itself in Anne, and her short life, passed at Richmond, closed in November, 1640. For her last words, we are indebted to Fuller, who adds: ‘This done, the little lamb gave up the ghost.’
The affection and care of the royal parents is well attested. ‘Their arrival,’ when visiting the nursery, ‘was the signal of a general rejoicing.’
In the latter portion of this piece I have ventured, it will be seen, on an ideal treatment. The main facts, and the words of the dear child, are historical:—for the details I appeal to any mother who has suffered similar loss whether they could have been much otherwise.
Not seeing; See the Captive Child.
The frost; It is noticed that death, the Sarsar-wind of Southey’s Thalaba, often occurs at the turn between night and day, when the atmosphere is wont to be at the coldest.
AFTER CHALGROVE FIGHT
June 18: 1643
Flags crape-smother’d and arms reversed,
With one sad volley lay him to rest:
Lay him to rest where he may not see
This England he loved like a lover accursed
By lawlessness masking as liberty,
By the despot in Freedom’s panoply drest:—
Bury him, ere he be made duplicity’s tool and slave,
Where he cannot see the land that he could not save!
Bury him, bury him, bury him
With his face downward!
Chalgrove! Name of patriot pain!
O’er thy fresh fields that summer pass’d
The brand of war’s red furnace blast,
Till heaven’s soft tears wash’d out the blackening stain;—
Wash’d out and wept;—But could not so restore
England’s gallant son:
Ere the fray was done
The stately head bow’d down; shatter’d; his warfare o’er.
Bending to the saddle-bow
With leaden arm that idle hangs,
Faint with the lancing torture-pangs,
He drops the rein; he lets the battle go:—
There, where the wife of his first love he woo’d
Turning for retreat;—
Memories bitter-sweet
Through death’s fast-rising mist in youth’s own light renew’d.
Then, as those who drown, perchance,
And all their years, a waking dream,
Flash pictured by in lightning gleam,
His childhood home appears, the mother’s glance,
The hearth-side smile; the fragrance of the fields:
—Now, war’s iron knell
Wakes the hounds of hell,
Whilst o’er the realm her scourge the rushing Fury wields!
Doth he now the day lament
When those who stemm’d despotic might
O’erstrode the bounds of law and right,
And through the land the torch of ruin sent?
Or that great rival statesman as he stood
Lion-faced and grim,
Hath he sight of him,
Strafford—the meteor-axe—the fateful Hill of Blood?
—Heroes both! by passion led,
In days perplex’d ’tween new and old,
Each at his will the realm to mould;
This, basing sovereignty on the single head,
This, on the many voices of the Hall:—
Each for his own creed
Prompt to die at need:
His side of England’s shield each saw, and took for all.
Heroes both! For Order one
And one for Freedom dying!—We
May judge more justly both, than ye
Could, each, his brother, ere the strife was done!
—O Goddess of that even scale and weight,
In whose awful eyes
Truest mercy lies,
This hero-dirge to thee I vow and dedicate!
—Slanting now,—the foe is by,—
Through Hazeley mead the warrior goes,
And hardly fords the brook that flows
Bearing to Thame its cool, sweet, summer-cry.
Here take thy rest; here bind the broken heart!
By death’s mercy-doom
Hid from ills to come,
Great soul, and greatly vex’d, Hampden!—in peace depart!
In the heart of the fields he loved and the hills,
Look your last, and lay him to rest,
With the faded flower, the wither’d grass;
Where the blood-face of war and the myriad ills
Of England dear like phantoms pass
And touch not the soul that is with the Blest.
Bury him in the night and peace of the holy grave,
Where he cannot see the land that he could not save!
Bury him, bury him, bury him
With his face downward!
John Hampden met his death at Chalgrove in an attempt to check the raids which Prince Rupert was making from Oxford. Struck at the onset in the shoulder by two carabine balls, he rode off before the action was ended by Hazeley towards Thame, finding it impossible to reach Pyrton, the home of his father-in-law. The body was carried to his own house amid the woods and hills of the Chiltern country, and buried in the church close by.
With his face downward; This was the dying request of some high-minded Spaniard of old, unwilling, even in the grave, as it were, to look on the misfortunes of his country.
O’erstrode the bounds; ‘After every allowance has been made,’ says Hallam, speaking of the Long Parliament from a date so early as August, 1641, ‘he must bring very heated passions to the records of those times, who does not perceive in the conduct of that body a series of glaring violations, not only of positive and constitutional, but of those higher principles which are paramount to all immediate policy’: (Const. Hist. ch. ix).
The axe; A clear and impartial sketch of Stafford’s trial will be found in Ranke (B. viii): who deals dispassionately and historically with an event much obscured by declamation in popular narratives. Even in Hallam’s hand the balance seems here to waver a little.
Heroes both;—Each his side; See Appendix B.
A CHURCHYARD IN OXFORDSHIRE
September: 1643
Sweet air and fresh; glades yet unsear’d by hand
Of Midas-finger’d Autumn, massy-green;
Bird-haunted nooks between,
Where feathery ferns, a fairy palmglove, stand,
An English-Eastern band:—
While e’en the stealthy squirrel o’er the grass
Beside me to the beech-clump dares to pass:—
In this still precinct of the happy dead,
The sanctuary of silence,—Blessed they!
I cried, who ’neath the gray
Peace of God’s house, each in his mounded bed
Sleep safe, nor reck how the great world runs on;
Peasant with noble here alike unknown.
Unknown, unnamed beneath one turf they sleep,
Beneath one sky, one heaven-uplifted sign
Of love assured, divine:
While o’er each mound the quiet mosses creep,
The silent dew-pearls weep:
—Fit haven-home for thee, O gentlest heart
Of Falkland! all unmeet to find thy part
In those tempestuous times of canker’d hate
When Wisdom’s finest touch, and, by her side,
Forbearance generous-eyed
To fix the delicate balance of the State
Were needed;—King or Nation, which should hold
Supreme supremacy o’er the kingdoms old.
—God’s heroes, who? . . . Not most, or likeliest, he
Whom iron will cramps to one narrow road,
Driving him like a goad
Till all his heart decrees seem God’s decree;
That worst hypocrisy
When self cheats self, and conscience at the wheel
Herself is steer’d by passion’s blindfold zeal;
A nether-world archangel! Through whose eyes
Flame the red mandates of remorseless might;
A gloom of lurid light
That holds no commerce with the crystal skies;
Like those rank fires that o’er the fen-land flee,
Or on the mast-head sign the wrath to be.
As o’er that ancient weird Arlesian plain
Where Zeus hail’d boulder-stones on the giant crew,
And changed to stone, or slew,
No bud may burgeon in Spring’s gracious rain,
No blade of grass or grain:
—So bare, so scourged, a prey to chaos cast
The wisest despot leaves his realm at last!
Though for the land he toil’d with iron will,
Earnest to reach persuasion’s goal through power,
The fruit without the flower!
And pray’d and wrestled to charm good from ill;
Waking perchance, or not, in death,—to find
Man fights a losing fight who fights mankind!
And as who in the Theban avenue,
Sphinx ranged by Sphinx, goes awestruck, nor may read
That ancient awful creed
Closed in their granite calm:—so dim the clue,
So tangled, tracking through
That labyrinthine soul which, day by day
Changing, yet kept one long imperious way:
Strong in his weakness; confident, yet forlorn;
Waning and waxing; diamond-keen, or dull,
As that star Wonderful,
Mira, for ever, dying and reborn:—
Blissful or baleful, yet a Power throughout,
Throned in dim altitude o’er the common rout.
Alas, great Chief! The pity of it!—For he
Lay on his unlamented bier; his life
Wreck’d on that futile strife
To wed things alien by heaven’s decree,
Sword-sway with liberty:—
Coercing, not protecting;—for the Cause
Smiting with iron heel on England’s laws:
—Intolerant tolerance! Soul that could not trust
Its finer instincts; self-compell’d to run
The blood-path once begun,
And murder mercy with a sad ‘I must!’
Great lion-heart by guile and coarseness marr’d;
By his own heat a hero warp’d and scarr’d.
Despot despite himself!—And when the cry
Moan’d up from England, dungeon’d in that drear
Sectarian atmosphere,
With glory he gilt her chains; in Spanish sky
Flaunting the Red Cross high;—
Wars, just or unjust, ill or well design’d,
Urged with the will that masters weak mankind.
—God’s hammer Thou!—not hero!—Forged to break
The land,—salve wounds with wounds, heal force by force;
Sword-surgeon keen and coarse:—
To all who worship power for power’s own sake,—
Strength for itself,—Success, the vulgar test,—
Fit idol of bent knee, and servile breast!
—O in the party plaudits of the crowd
Glorious, if this be glory!—o’er that shout
A small still voice breathes out
With subtle sweetness silencing the loud
Hoarse vaunting of the proud,—
A song of exaltation for the vale,
And how the mountain from his height shall fail!
How God’s true heroes, since this earth began,
Go sackcloth-clad through scourge and sword and scorn,
Crown’d with the bleeding thorn,
Down-trampled by man’s heel as foes to man,
And whispering Eli, Eli! as they die,—
Martyrs of truth and Saint Humility.
These conquer in their fall: Persuasion flies
Wing’d, from their grave: The hearts of men are turn’d
To worship what they burn’d:
Owning the sway of Love’s long-suffering eyes,
Love’s sweet self-sacrifice;
The might of gentleness; the subduing force
Of wisdom on her mid-way measured course
Gliding;—not torrent-like with fury spilt,
Impetuous, o’er Himalah’s rifted side,
To ravage blind and wide,
And leave a lifeless wreck of parching silt;—
Gliding by thorpe and tower and grange and lea
In tranquil transit to the eternal sea.
—Children of Light!—If, in the slow-paced course
Of vital change, your work seem incomplete,
Your conquest-hour defeat,
Won by mild compromise, by the invisible force
That owns no earthly source;
Yet to all time your gifts to man endure,
God being with you, and the victory sure!
For though o’er Gods the Giants in the course
May lord it, Strength o’er Beauty; yet the Soul
Immortal, clasps the goal;
Fair Wisdom triumphs by her inborn force:
—Thus far on earth! . . . But, ah!—from mortal sight
The crowning glory veils itself in light!
Envoy
—Seal’d of that holy band,
Rest here, beneath the foot-fall hushing sod,
Wrapt in the peace of God,
While summer burns above thee; while the land
Disrobes; till pitying snow
Cover her bareness; till fresh Spring-winds blow,
And the sun-circle rounds itself again:—
Whilst England cries in vain
For thy wise temperance, Lucius!—But thine ear
The violent-impotent fever-restless cry,
The faction-yells of triumph, will not hear:
—Only the thrush on high
And wood-dove’s moaning sweetness make reply.
Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, may perhaps be defined as at once the most poetically chivalrous and the most philosophically moderate amongst all who took part in the pre-restoration struggles. He was killed in the royal army at the first battle of Newbury, Sep. 20, 1643, aged but 33 years, and buried, without mark or memorial, in the church of Great Tew (North Oxfordshire), the manor of which he owned.
English Eastern; The common brake-fern and its allies seem to betray tropical sympathies by their late appearance and sensitiveness to autumnal frost.
That Arlesian plain; Now named the Crau. It lies between Aries and the sea—a bare and malarious tract of great size covered with shingle and boulders. Aeschylus describes it as a ‘snow-shower of round stones,’ which Zeus rained down in aid of Heracles, who was contending with the Ligurians.
Mira; A star in the Whale, conspicuous for its singular and rapid changes of apparent size.
The Cause; After passing through several phases this word, in Cromwell’s mouth, with the common logic of tyranny, became simply a synonym for personal rule.
Smiting with iron heel; The terrorism of the Protector’s government, and the almost universal hatred which it inspired, are powerfully painted by Hallam. ‘To govern according to law may sometimes be an usurper’s wish, but can seldom be in his power. The protector abandoned all thought of it. . . . All illusion was now (1655) gone, as to the pretended benefits of the civil war. It had ended in a despotism, compared to which all the illegal practices of former kings, all that had cost Charles his life and crown, appeared as dust in the balance.’
The blood-path; The trials under which Gerard and Vowel were executed in 1654, Slingsby and Hewit in 1658, are the most flagrant instances of Cromwell’s perversion of justice, and contempt for the old liberties of England. But they do not stand alone.
Guile and coarseness; ‘A certain coarse good nature and affability that covered the want of conscience, honour, and humanity: quick in passion, but not vindictive, and averse to unnecessary crimes,’ is the deliberate summing-up of Hallam,—in the love of liberty inferior to none of our historians, and eminent above all for courageous impartiality,—iustissimus unus.
With glory he gilt; See Appendix C.
Success, the vulgar test; See Matthew Arnold’s finely discriminative Essay on Falkland.