Charles II.
There must have been a great measure of compensation to Charles I. in the filial devotion of his household. It is related that Prince Charles, eldest son, and heir apparent to the throne, sent to his father, when in prison, a document carte blanche signed with his name. And in a letter enclosed the Prince assured his father that whatever conditions he should see fit to make with Cromwell and his followers relative to the succession would be agreeable to him, in token whereof he had signed his name to the document. There was something heroic in that, and something even more magnanimously heroic in the response of Charles I. He at once tore the document to pieces, fearing that the enemy might get possession of it and make use of it against Prince Charles. He wrote tenderly to his son, admitting the pleasure his generous offer had given, but declaring that death would be preferable to any act whereby the rights of his children should be tampered with or signed away.
It is well to note these nobler actions and emotions in the lives of kings: the ambitious selfishness and cruelty of a Macbeth, a King John, a Richard III. are pedestaled for all the world to see; why not the mutual magnanimity of the Stuarts? Truly the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oftimes interred with their bones.
At the death of Cromwell, after a five years’ stormy reign as Lord Protector of England, and after a twelve years’ exile of the family of Charles I., the people of England unanimously welcomed the restoration of the Stuarts. Charles II.—known in France under this title since the death of Charles I.—was crowned King of England.
The times were troubled. Roundhead and Cavalier still stood at misunderstanding enmity one directly opposed to the other and never the twain might meet. The pendulum swung with bewildering rapidity from harshly somber Cromwellian Puritanism to the excessive dissipation of the Court of the Merry Monarch: the country followed the pendulum.
Charles II., while humane on the whole, and more inclined to ease and pleasure than to troublesome revenge, yet displayed a touch of the savage in his treatment of the body of Oliver Cromwell. He ordered that it be disinterred and the head struck off. This was done; and the ghastly head of the man who had ruled England with a rod of iron for five years, was fastened to the gibbet at Tyburn.
Horrible is the hate which pursues its victim beyond death and wreaks vengeance upon an unresisting mass of putrefaction! All such excesses, no matter by whom committed or under what provocation, are atavistic expressions of the jackal and the tiger in the heart of man.
Truly there is no eye that can foresee the future! Cromwell, passing for the thousandth time through the thoroughfare of Tyburn, saw not there his own head fastened to a gibbet. Charles I., at the stately banquet board of Whitehall Palace, saw not the great end window of the hall opening upon the scaffold. And we, secure in the hour, see not that other hour of fatal import that yet shall be; and—’tis well.