QUEEN ELIZABETH AND QUEEN MARY.
NOTE X.
Few rulers, few persons indeed, have ever been so much alike as our two rulers Henry VIII. and his daughter Elizabeth. No man was ever so like Henry as was the woman Elizabeth; no woman ever resembled Elizabeth so closely as did the man Henry. Both father and daughter were extreme examples of the intellectual and unimpassioned temperament. High capacity, acute perception, clear insight, correct inference were present in both. Both, too, were capricious, fault-finding, querulous and vain. Both, moreover, had their preferences and their dislikes. Both, too, felt and showed resentment when their vanity was wounded. But in neither of them, it may be truly affirmed, was there any consuming passion—any fervent love, or invincible hatred, or fierce jealousy, or overwhelming anger.
Those who preach the doctrine of an essential difference between the sexes and who, with the injustice which so frequently accompanies the abounding self-importance of masculinity, would deprive women not only of “equality of sphere” but “equality of opportunity,” may study the character of Henry and Elizabeth with great advantage. Human beings are first of all divided (I have elsewhere contended) into certain types of character and only afterwards into men and women. Many men are by nature devoted lovers and parents and friends; many women are not. Elizabeth was one of a number—a large number—of women who have, it may be, many of the qualities which tell in practical and public life, and but little of the emotion which wells up in true wifehood and motherhood and friendship.
Henry and Elizabeth stand far above the average level of rulers. In sagacity, in tact and in statesmanship only two of their successors can compare with them. But the methods of Oliver Cromwell and William III. were very different from the Tudor methods. Cromwell and William strove to be guided by what they sincerely held to be lofty principles. Henry and Elizabeth were guided merely, though wisely guided, by the fineness of their instincts. Fine instincts were perhaps better fitted for the earlier time, and lofty principles for the later. It is easier, alas, to bungle in formulating and in applying principles than in trusting to adroitness and intuitions.
All the elements of character which Henry possessed were found also in Elizabeth, and many of these elements, though not all, they possessed in equal degree. They were alike in capacity, courage, sincerity, versatility, industry; alike in their conservative proclivities and also in their love of pageantry—for Elizabeth, like Henry, revelled in public business and in public pleasures; she delighted in progresses, shows, masks and plays. They were alike, too, in their sense of duty, in their desire for the welfare of the people, and also in their thirst for the people’s good opinion. But Elizabeth, although she had immense self-importance (she heartily approved of the queen and, heartily indeed, of nothing else), was perhaps less self-confident than her father. She was not quite comfortable in her headship of the Church—but then she had not been educated for the Church as her father had been, and she did not possess her father’s devotional nature. Her conduct was however more decorous than her father’s, notwithstanding that she was distinctly less religious than he—less religious in principle, in inward conviction and in outward worship. If she was less devout than Henry she had however a larger share of fitfulness than even he. The historian who more vividly than any other has placed the Tudor time before us speaks of Elizabeth’s “ingrained insincerity;” the words “ingrained fitfulness” would perhaps be more correct, for she was in truth as sincere as her fitfulness permitted her to be. Although it is true she was not without—no one at that time was quite without—insincerity and intrigue and duplicity and falsehood in her diplomatic methods, she was fairly sincere in her views and aims and conduct. But unfortunately her views and aims and conduct were constantly changing. She was sincere too easily and too frequently. She had a dozen fits of sincerity in a dozen hours. Whenever she sent a message, no matter how carefully the message had been considered, a second was sent to recall or change it, and very shortly a third messenger would be despatched in pursuit of the second. Urgent and critical circumstance alone, and frequently not even this, forced upon her any conclusive action. I am compelled to agree with those who believe that the most distressing incident of her life was the final decision touching Mary Stuart’s death: it was distressing on several grounds—she was not naturally cruel, or, like her father, cruel to those only who stood in her path; she did not like to kill a queen; and, above all, she hated to do anything which (like marriage, to wit) could not be undone. Elizabeth was compelled by temperament to be always doing something, but by temperament also she was always reluctant to get anything done. In her two bushels of occupation there were not two grains of performance.
Her extreme fitfulness had at least one fortunate result—it saved many lives. Henry’s frequent change of view and of policy was unquestionable, but the change was slow enough to give to the ever-watchful enemies of a fallen minister time enough to tear the fallen minister to pieces. But if a minister of Elizabeth’s fell, his head was in little danger: if he fell from favour to-day, he was restored to-morrow. He might trip twenty times, and as many times his rivals would be on the alert; but twenty pardons would be granted all in good time.
Touching the question of marriage the queen was far wiser than her father. Neither father nor daughter had the needful qualities which go to make marriage happy, and both had certain other qualities which in many cases make it an intolerable burden. Henry, unlike Elizabeth, did not discover this, for his perceptive powers generally were less acute than hers. She probably knew that in her inmost heart (her brain was sufficiently acute to gain a glimpse of what was in her heart and what was not) she was a stranger to the deep and sustained affections without which marriage is so often a cruel deception. She had admirers and favourites it is true; and, after the fashion of the time, was unseemly enough in her fits of romping and her fits of pettishness. But there has not yet been anywhere, or at any time, under the sun a healthful temperament which has objected to admiration and entertainment, and probably there never will be.
Elizabeth’s attitude to the religious condition of her people marks a decided movement, if not an onward movement: for we must never forget that a multitude of high-minded and capable souls believe that the several steps of the Reformation were downward steps. But what were the steps, and what especially was Elizabeth’s step? The popes (and their times) had said, in effect, you need not read and you must not think or inquire; your duty is to obey and believe. Henry (and his time) said, you may think and you may read, especially if your reading enables you to understand the King, but you must believe what the King believes and worship as the King worships. Elizabeth (and her times), still more at the mercy of rising Teutonic waves, exclaimed, you may think and read and inquire and believe as you like—especially as you insist upon doing so—but you really must, all of you, go to church with me on Sunday mornings. Elizabeth’s church-going act, by the bye, is still unrepealed. Long after, William III. (and his time, though William was before his time) said, you may think, read, believe, and publicly worship as you will, but you must believe something and you must worship somewhere. John Milton, before William in time and long before him in largeness of view, was the one colossal figure who fought bravely and single-handed for freedom in every domain of thought and speech and conduct.
The Tudor time, more than any other in our history, lends itself to the study of character; a study which, although difficult, is the less difficult in that whatever of change may take place, old elements of character do not altogether disappear and entirely new elements do not make their appearance. These elements lie everywhere around us. A great writer and an acute observer of men declares indeed that we all contain the elements of a Luther and a Borgia (his ideal of the best and worst elements), and that if a man cannot see these near at hand he will not find them though he travel from Dan to Beersheba. The Tudor and the Stuart periods alike present remarkable persons and remarkable incidents; but in the earlier period the men and women were more striking than the events, while events attract our attention more than individuals in the later. With the Tudors men and women seemed to lead, for men and women were proportionately the stronger; circumstance seemed to be the stronger in the Stuart times.
No century contains three royal figures so striking in themselves and so clearly revealed to us as are the figures of Henry and Elizabeth and Mary in the sixteenth. Their capability, their vitality and their attainments would have made them striking persons in any position of life. Each, indeed, possessed the three qualities which make a really interesting personality—and such personalities are but a small proportion of the neutral-tinted multitude who are good and kind and industrious—and nothing more. They, the three personalities, could all see facts for themselves; they could all see the relative value of facts (the rarest of the three qualities); and they could all draw sound inferences from the larger facts.
The three individuals presented however but two types of character. Henry and Elizabeth were examples of one type and Mary of another. The Tudor father and daughter were, as we have already seen, not examples merely but extreme examples of the unimpassioned, ever active, ever visible class. Mary was as extreme an example of the impassioned, meditative, persistent and tenacious class. It was a remarkable coincidence that pitted two such mental and bodily extremes against each other. All sane human beings have much more of that which is common to the character of the race than they have of that which is peculiar to the individual. There was not only this common basis of human nature in Elizabeth and Mary, there was something more: both were singularly capable, brilliant, witty and brave (Mary being the braver and her bravery being the more tried). The two queens had certain unusual advantages in common, for both were educated to the highest ideal of female education—very curiously a higher ideal then than at any other time before, or even since, until our own generation; both, too, had much experience of life—the larger and the less elevating share falling to Mary’s lot. But here the resemblance ceases. What in Elizabeth Tudor were slight though shrill rivulets of love and hate and anger and scorn and jealousy, or of pity or gratitude, were mighty and rushing torrents in Mary Stuart. We have seen what Elizabeth was: in many ways Mary was the exact opposite, for she was not at all given to bustle or change or acrimony or captiousness or suspicion. She was not, it is true, without vanity; she had ample grounds for having it and she was deeply human, but (it was not so with Elizabeth) her pride was even greater than her vanity.
The elements which met together in Mary were all of a finer quality than those which were found in Elizabeth; but in Mary some troublous elements were added to the choicer ones. In her high land there were ominous volcanic peaks, while in the decorous plain of Elizabeth’s character there was a monotonous blending of vegetation and sand. In some of our greatest characters (the truism is well-worn) there have been grave defects. Burns’ life never comes to any generous mind save with the deepest regret as well as the keenest admiration. Bacon’s was a great mind with a great fault. Shakspere and Goethe—the two foremost spirits which time has yet given to us—are not held to have led altogether stainless lives. Now the Queen of Scots was not by any means one of the immortals, but she was nevertheless and in truth a great woman. Yet in the splendid block out of which the ever-pathetic figure of Mary was chiselled there came to light an ineradicable flaw. The good and evil of all these characters were mainly, though not wholly (for circumstance must not be forgotten), due to organisation and inheritance. A little difference in their organisation, and they would have been other individuals than they were, and would most likely have remained unknown to us; but having the parentage they had, and being what they were, a little difference in circumstance would probably have mattered little. What there was in each of organisation, what of circumstance, and what of volition, is a problem the solution of which is still far off. In all of them volition, whatever that may be, did its best; organisation, let us say, did its worst; circumstance looked on, helping here and hindering there,—the compromise is history.
As the six-wives business clings to Henry’s name, so does the Darnley matter, though curiously with less odium, cling to that of Mary. Henry has had no friends save those who lived in or near his time. In our time an inquirer, here or there, strives perhaps to gain for him something of impartial judgment. Mary has never been without warm friends, and her friends seem to grow in number and in warmth. The controversy still rages touching Mary’s part in the tragic event which inflicted so deep a wound into her life. But although the controversy goes on at even fever heat, the public judgment remains cool and is probably just. It is kept cool and just by the weight of a few colossal truths which the deftest manipulation of a cloud of smaller truths cannot hide. At critical moments the physiological historian, who looks steadily at a few large incidents in the light of human nature, discovers clues which escape the vision of the purely literary historian, who is for ever diving—and usefully diving—into the wells of parchment detail. In reality it matters little whether this diver or that has dived most deeply; matters little whether certain documents are spurious or genuine. Mary Stuart accepted—she certainly did not reject—the passion of a certain man; that man was a leader among a number of men who murdered her husband; after the murder Mary Stuart married that particular man, and thereby most assuredly held a candle to murder. This was Mary. Now if everything that has been said in her favour could be proved, she would be but little better than this; if everything that has been said against her could be proved, she would be but little worse.
The student of historic characters never forgets the time the country and the circumstance in which his characters lived. We are now looking at a time when not only noble and ignoble characters existed side by side, but when noble and less noble elements existed together in one and the same character. For indeed the good elements of a better time come in slowly, and the evil elements of a bad past die a lingering death. The active Scotland (there was, we know, a good quiet Scotland in the background), the active Scotland of Tudor times was given over to factions, fanatics, self-seekers and assassins. Life was taken and given with scant ceremony. The highest personages of that time contrived murder, or sanctioned it, or forgave it—the popes did, continental sovereigns did, Henry did, Elizabeth did. The murders thus contrived or sanctioned or condoned were, it is true, mainly on behalf of thrones or dominions or religions, while the murder which Mary assuredly forgave, if she did not sanction, was on behalf of her passions. The moral difference between murder for a crown and murder for a love we may not now discuss.
It was to this Scotland, the active and factious Scotland just described, that the young queen of nineteen years was brought—brought from a different atmosphere and with an unpropitious training. The more favoured Elizabeth meanwhile was ruling over a quieter, a more united people, and was helped at her council-table by high-minded and unselfish men. It is useless now perhaps to ask if we may be allowed to admire the gifts, to deplore the faults, and to pity the fate of the more unfortunate queen. We can indeed, individually, do what we please, but the queen’s posterity with no uncertain voice has declared that we may. Emerson says that the great soul of the world is just, and the great soul has kept Mary within the territory of its favour. It would seem that the affection and devotion which were given to Mary were not based on any single great or on any group of great actions; they were based (it is to her credit) on daily acts of kindliness and patience and unruffled grace. The sum of Mary’s qualities, whatever they were, endowed her with the rare gift of making the world her friend; and the world does not, as a rule, make lasting friendships on insufficient grounds. Mary indeed, with all her faults, deserved a better country than Scotland; and England, it may be added, deserved a more gracious queen than Elizabeth. But whatever she deserved or whatever she was fitted for, Mary’s fate was destined to be one of the saddest of recorded time. Inward force and outer circumstance are so commingled that mortal reason fails to disentangle them. To-day men seem to put a curb on circumstance, and to-morrow circumstance seems to run away with men. An ocean of complex and imperious circumstance surged around two queens, one it lifted up and kept afloat and carried into a secure haven, the other it tossed mercilessly to and fro and finally drew her underneath its waves.
A number of leading Scottish nobles gave out and probably believed that the wretched Darnley’s life was incompatible with the general good. Bothwell was but one of this number. Yet how clear it has ever been to all eyes, save to those of the blindly passionate actors themselves, that the Scottish queen’s fatal error, even if there were no grave error before, was in marrying any one of the misguided band. But misguidance was in the ascendant. Could she by some magic web have concealed the husbands from each other and have married them all, she would at any rate have fared no worse than she did. But, to be serious, if a queen marries one of half a dozen ambitious assassins, the other five will assuredly make her life intolerable and her rule impossible.
In no aspect of character did the two queens differ more than in their attitude to religion. Elizabeth’s piety, like her father’s, though less deep than his, was of a similar passionless, perceptive, unreflective order. Mary’s religion, like Elizabeth’s, like that of all individuals in all parts of the world, was no doubt at first the product of her early surroundings; but with the Scottish queen it was much more than this—it was a profoundly passionate conviction and a deeply revered ideal. A living writer, who is perhaps unrivalled in the historic art and who rarely errs in his historic judgments, is less happy than is his wont in his verdict on the catholic queen. He avers that she had no share “in the deeper and nobler emotions;” yet almost in the same breath he states that she had “a purpose fixed as the stars to trample down the Reformation.” To have a purpose “fixed as the stars” to trample down one religion was, in that age of the world, surely to have a purpose “fixed as the stars” to strengthen and protect another; to yearn to put down the Reformation was surely to yearn to bring in catholicism—catholic teaching and catholic rites and catholic rule. We may not be catholics, but we are not entitled to say that from an impassioned catholic woman’s point of view this was not a high ideal; it had been the ideal of the judicial mind, Sir Thomas More, as well as the ideal of the enthusiast, Ignatius Loyola; it had been for a thousand years the ideal of a multitude of noble natures both men and women. Elizabeth, opportunely enough, had no ideals of any kind; ideals indeed are often inconvenient in a ruler; but she had, despite her acrimonious speech, plenty of sincerely good wishes and good intentions for all the world. If the Queen of England had no ideals she had many devices, and one was to check the flow of all sorts of zeal, especially Protestant zeal. In the two lives religion told in different ways—the difference was in the two natures, be it noted, not in the two religions. Elizabeth, with a skin-deep religion only, was evenly and enduringly virtuous. Mary had ardent and deep convictions, but her career was not one of unbroken virtue. Elizabeth was certainly unfortunate in her religious attitudes. She did not like the Protestants for she was not a good Protestant; the Catholics did not like her for she was not a good Catholic. In religion, indeed as in all things, she was greatly influenced by her inborn spirit of “contrariness.” If the Catholics had intrigued less persistently against her throne and her life, and if (the idea is sufficiently ludicrous) the Queen of Scotland had chanced to run in harness with the hated John Knox (hated of both queens), she would gladly have given the rein to her Catholic impulses.
The two queens differed as much in body as in mind. I have elsewhere sought to show not only that certain leading features of character tend to run together (in itself a distinct contribution to our knowledge), but also that these allied features are associated with a group of bodily peculiarities, a contribution, if it really is a contribution, of greatly additional interest. Elizabeth, large and pink-skinned like her father, was by no means without impressiveness and even stateliness. She carried her head a little forward and her chin a little downward, both these positions being due to a slightly curved upper spine. Her hair was scanty and her eyebrows were practically absent. All these bodily items, as well as her mental items, she inherited from her father. Mary had a wholly different figure and a different presence; her head was upright, her spine straight; in her back there was no convexity either vertically or transversely. Her eyebrows were abundant and her head of hair was long and massive. All these peculiarities, too, we may be quite sure, she derived from her parentage (not necessarily the nearest parents) on one side or the other. In my little work on body and parentage in character I urge—it is well to say here—that the bodily signs of certain classes of character (two more marked and one intervening) are now and then subject to the modifying influences of ailment and accident, and especially when these happen in early life. In Elizabeth and Mary, however, no such influences disturbed the development of two strongly-marked examples, both in body and in character, of two large classes of women and, with but little alteration, of two large classes of men also.
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Footnote:
[1] From historic comparison we may feel sure that no such cruelty was found in the Gothic and Frankish and Norman blood of France.