CHAPTER II
AT THE HAGUE. A DREARY COURT. A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE. A LADY OF HONOUR. HOME. THE FIRSTBORN. CLOUDY SUNSHINE
In 1626 Charlotte de la Trémoille was present with her mother at the Hague, the Court, at that time, of Prince Fréderic-Henri of Nassau, her great-uncle.
In the only letter preserved at this time, Charlotte expresses a great dislike to Holland. She finds the Court very “triste,” and already the conviction that “the world is a very troublesome place to live in” forces itself upon her.
Meanwhile, negotiations for her marriage were being speedily concluded, and in the month of July of the same year (1626) Charlotte de la Trémoille was married at the Hague to James Stanley, Lord Strange, eldest son of the Earl of Derby and Elizabeth de Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford.
The Earl of Derby, the representative of one of the most illustrious families of the English nobility, was lord paramount of the counties of Cheshire and Lancashire, and hereditary sovereign of the Isle of Man.
His eldest son, who took the title of Lord Strange, was only twenty years of age at the time of his marriage. Handsome, high-minded, brave, intellectual, he was worthy of the wife who shared so faithfully in the fortunes of his troubled existence. A marriage less of choice than of convenience, it was to prove a union that could put to shame many a love match; but the passing of the years was to test its value.
At first, the separation from the home and the scenes of her childhood and girlhood was very grievously felt by the young wife. The civil dissensions in France, scotched only, not destroyed, were beginning to regain their old virulence; and travelling, apart from its ordinary difficulties and perils at that period, was rendered almost impossible for women. In England a similar state of things was rapidly developing; and so it came about that Charlotte, now Lady Strange, never again set foot in her native country, or beheld the loved face of her more than sister, the Duchess de Thonars.
After the conclusion of the wedding festivities, Madame de la Trémoille accompanied her daughter to England, to see her duly installed in her new home.
For a very short time Lady Strange now appeared at Court, in the capacity of lady-of-honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, sister of the French King, herself but the wife of a year to King Charles I. Twelve months later, in the month of August, Lord and Lady Strange were established at Lathom House.
Lathom House was situated in Lancashire, about three miles north-east of Ormskirk, and eight from the sea-coast. The ground on which it stood, as well as its outlying territories and neighbourhood, had been in the possession of the Earls of Derby, and of the de Lathoms and Ferrars (from whom the Stanleys had descended) before them, from Saxon times. Orm, the Saxon lord of Halton, which is one of the thirty-eight manors mentioned in Domesday Book, married Alice, the daughter of a Norman nobleman; obtaining, thereby, large estates in the county. Orm appears to have founded the church which was co-existent with the name of Ormskirk in the reign of Richard I., when Robert, son of Henry de Tarbosh and Lathom—who is supposed to be a descendant of Orm—founded the priory[[3]] which was for long the burial-place of the Earls of Derby. The mansion, which was very ancient, moated and walled, and built for the defiance and self-defence which those turbulent and unsettled feudal days demanded, came into possession of the Stanleys by the marriage of Isabella de Lathom with Sir James Stanley in the reign of Henry IV.
[3]. Baines.
The Earl of Derby of the earlier years of Charles’s reign presented Lathom House to his eldest son and heir, James, Lord Strange, the Earl himself making his home at Chester. Concerning her father-in-law, Lady Strange writes to her mother in the following terms—after premising that her epistle is merely the replica of one previously written, but which had gone astray in transit; a matter of far from infrequent occurrence in those days, when postal facilities were only in the first throes of being:—
“I informed you Madame, that I had been to see my father-in-law at Chester, the capital city of Cheshire, where he has always lived, in preference to any of his other residences, for these three or four years past. He speaks French; and conversed with me in very agreeable terms, calling me lady and mistress of the house; that he wished to have no other woman but myself (sic, for daughter-in-law?), and that I was to have full authority. We were well received by the townspeople, although our visit was not expected. Many came out to conduct us. I also told you, Madame, how greatly I found Lathom House to my liking; and that I have to thank God and you for placing me so excellently. I do not question Madame, that you will do all in your power about my money. I am waiting to hear from you regarding it. Truly Madame, necessity constrains me to be more importunate than I ought; but your kindness gives me courage. Indeed, my happiness a little depends upon it, in order to shut the mouths of certain persons who do not love foreigners; although, thank God, the best among them wish me no harm. Your son (in law) is well, I am thankful to say, and feels no return of his disorder. He almost lives out of doors, finding the air very good for him.”
At this point however, Lord Strange must have come indoors; for the postscript is in his handwriting, which is of a sort preferable to his wife’s, both in penmanship and spelling.
“Madame” (runs this post-scriptum),—“I cannot let my wife’s letter go without myself thanking you for the honour you do me. If I were able to speak with you, I should rejoice in constantly assuring you that I can never be other, Madame, than your very humble and obedient son and servant—J. Strange.”
In the autumn of this year, the first child of Lady Strange was born. The home was complete; but domestic peace and content were destined to be lost like a beautiful dream, in the gloom of the times. Charles had not reigned twelve months before the first signs of the coming struggle took form and shape; if even already, in marrying the Roman Catholic Henrietta Maria, he had not hopelessly offended his subjects. Marriage with French princesses has almost invariably brought disaster on our English kings, and violent death in some form; the union of Henry V. with the Princess Catherine of France being one of the exceptions proving the rule. Even in his domestic affections the evil destiny of the Stuarts thus attended Charles; and truly his fate was an ill one indeed which placed him at the head of a kingdom at such an epoch in its history. The times were out of joint; and the vacillating, arbitrary Charles was not the man to set them right at this crisis, when the very strength of the divinity hedging a king was being questioned and tested by that sense of the rights of individual and collective humanity which was beginning to quicken on every side.
The state of England however, on Charles’s accession, was but the effect of causes which had been at work for many a generation past. Looking back no farther than to the Wars of the Roses, we see the resistance of a proud and jealous nobility to supreme kingly power, and its subjection by the ruthless Henry VIII., who suffered no mortal to live, from loftiest to lowliest, who attempted to cross his path or to thwart his will. Henry’s despotism, inherent in Queen Mary, and carefully nourished by her bigoted husband, Philip of Spain, was in Elizabeth softened by the chastening experiences of early life, and throughout her long reign kept in check by prudent counsellors. During the time that she was on the throne moreover, the new religion was on its probation. In its form of “Church of England, as by law established,” it had still to approve itself to the nation. But long before her successor James I. took her place, Episcopalianism had been accepted by the English people from Tyne to Thames. By Roman Catholics it might be regarded as a hollow pretence, and by nonconformists as a popishly tainted compromise; but by the bulk of the community it was recognised as an ark of safety, spiritual and temporal, whose bulwarks warded off the shafts of Rome as effectually as her course ran clear of the shoals and whirlpools of the sectaries. The Church of England, risen purified from the ashes of Romanism, was, or at least was accepted as, the reproduction of the church of the early Christians. It contained the ideal scheme of a perfect law of liberty—religious, social, and political; and allowed a range of thought and of speculation not to be found in any other formulated expression of Christian belief whatever. Only of papistry the Church of England was intolerant. Pains and penalties, in countless instances not one degree less cruel than “Bloody Mary” inflicted on the Protestant martyrs, did “good Queen Bess” and her successor, “gentle King Jamie,” inflict on the confessors of the older creed. To all other Christians, the Church of England extended sympathy. While her sanctuaries, retaining much of the pomp and ceremonial of Roman ritual, were served by consecrated bishop, priest, and deacon, the crypts beneath them afforded places for the simple and austere public worship of refugee Huguenots and Calvinists. Singing boys still chanted psalm and antiphon; and in the private chapel of Elizabeth, the “morning star of the Reformation,” the retention of the lighted candles on the altar betokened the belief in the reality of Christ’s presence in the sacramental bread and wine. The transubstantiation of Romanism—the consubstantiation of Lutheranism—the spiritual presence only of Christ in the elements of Calvinism—the unchanged condition of the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper of Nonconformity and of Dissent generally, were alike set aside by the Established Church. The answer quoted by Elizabeth when questioned as to her conception of the manner of the divine presence in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper:—
“Christ’s was the Word that spake it;
He took the bread, and brake it.
And what that Word doth make it,
That I believe, and take it”—
was signally characteristic of the teaching of the Church of England, which claimed primitive Catholicity and unbroken Apostolical succession. The assertion was at once pious and safe, and eminently illustrates the temper of the communion which has embraced within its fold such children as Jeremy Taylor, Burnet, Nicholas Ferrar and his ascetic following, Sherlock, Laud, Stanley, Pusey, the Wilberforces; and whose rebuke to a Sacheverell was administered mainly on the score of good breeding, and, if it lost a Wesley, is not careful to cry mea culpa.
For a generation or two the interest attaching to the new-old teaching of the Church of England, and its general adopting, pretty well absorbed the attention of all classes, more especially of the upper and middle ranks; but the more the doctrines were assimilated, the more they nourished a sense of the need of temporal freedom, and roused speculation in thoughtful minds as to what was most needed and wholesome for the social well-being of the State. The old dogma of kingly supremacy had become, to say the least, unpalatable since the days of the despotic Henry VIII. The English nation had no mind to endure tyranny from the new dynasty; and many had looked with suspicion upon James Stuart, not forgetful that the blood of the papist and haughty Guises ran in his veins, and that he held with marvellous tenacity to the dogma, if in his case one might not call it the hobby, of kingly supremacy. Fond of scribbling, and endowed in his own estimation with surpassing argumentative and theological faculties, he sustained and comforted his bodily and mental timidity by pompous assertion and spiritual aphorism concerning the right of kingly control over everything the sun shone upon within his realm. The dogma of the infallibility of the Pope, James I. matched by his postulate that the king could not merely do no wrong, but that everything he did and willed was to be applauded and obeyed. The difficulty was to impose this view upon a sufficient number of his influential subjects to make it work satisfactorily; those wise and moderate counsellors of Elizabeth’s reign, who survived into James’ time, kept him in check, and their experience of feminine weaknesses and short-comings in Elizabeth’s vigorous mind was further widened by an acquaintance with the depths of folly and of childish self-conceit into which an anointed king could fall. Such men as Lord Chancellor Cecil and John Hampden had troublesome conviction of this; and King James I., whom Sully dubbed the wisest fool that ever lived, and Henri IV. relegated to the grades of “Captain of Arts and Bachelor of Arms,” however strong himself in the comfortable doctrines of the divine right of kings, failed in arresting the growth of the life of political liberty.
With much pompous declaration however, and long-winded argument, James did his best. Warfare of words was better suited to the man who, it is said, was apt to swoon at sight of a naked sword; and when all other argument and precept failed to produce the desired impression, he took refuge in citing the example of his brother monarchs of France and of Spain. “The King of England,” said James, by the mouth of his ministers to the Commons, “cannot appear of meaner importance than his equals.” And in this creed he caused his son to be reared. An early death took the elder and promising Prince Henry from the coming troubles, and the sensitive, proud, obstinate, vacillating Charles was left to struggle with the coil of cruel circumstance already so rapidly beginning to tangle up.
As if to strengthen the effect of this mental sustenance with which Charles had been fed as regularly as he had partaken of daily material food, James sent the young prince—or at least allowed him to go—to Spain with the gay, extravagant, thoughtless Duke of Buckingham. “Baby Charles” and “Steenie,” as the King called the two, travelled incognito upon this romantic pilgrimage, stopping by the way in Paris, to sow the seeds of future mischief at the Court of Louis XIII. in the Duke’s thinly veiled admiration for Anne of Austria. The journey to Madrid however, which was originated for the end of marrying Charles to the Infanta, defeated its own object; but Charles returned to England perfected by what he had seen in his travels—in his lesson of kingcraft. Endowed with a graceful presence, and, despite a certain coldness and reserve, with winning manners, he had a scholarly and thoughtful mind; but both nature and rearing had made him a man only of his day, or, more truly, of the time preceding it. He had no gifts of penetration or of prescience. He could not look into the future, any more than he was able to read the existing signs of the times. He had been to Spain. His eyes had been dazzled by the glitter of spoil from the New World, the splendour and pomp and punctilio of the Court of Madrid, and the magnificence of the Spanish grandees. He had seen with his own eyes the success of Loyola’s scheme of religious and political orthodoxy, and its supreme power of snuffing out obnoxious speculation, theological and scientific; but he could not discern beneath the rich embroidery of the veil its rotten foundation, which in two or three generations was to crumble like the cerements of the grave in the pure light of day, and disclose the corruption and festering beneath. He had witnessed the brilliancy of the afterglow which the memory of the adored soldier Henri Quatre had left, and it was small wonder if his mind’s eye failed to reach across the gulf of coming years to that time when lettres de cachet would make fuel for burning the Bastille, and the yellow sanbenitos of heretics should be changed for bonnets rouges and carmagnoles. The guillotine was to reek with the blood, not alone of aristocrats, but of the sons and daughters themselves, of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. “The Revolution,” said one of its noblest victims, “is devouring its own children”; and the contagion of hatred against kings and queens and all their tribe spread over Europe till confusion grew worse confounded.
Looking back to those early days of Charles’s reign, the question hardly fails to suggest itself, how far the troubles of the time would have been even aggravated had he married the Infanta of Spain instead of the French princess. Protestantism in Spain had been stifled at the birth; but in France it still had healthy breathing-room, tempering the atmosphere of Romanist belief, and influencing even the most devoted and uncompromising of Rome’s adherents. Neighboured by Switzerland, Holland, and Germany, the philosophy of Erasmus, the humanitarianism of Arminius, the teaching of Luther and of Calvin, all mingled with the stream of orthodox theological speculation, till, overflowing into fresh channels, it verged so closely and so frequently on theories of Catholic reform, that Pope Urban made a vigorous attempt to stem the tide by his bull Unigenitus, ostensibly directed against the Jansenists only. Thus, in France, thought and religious speculation were kept not merely from stagnating, but in active ferment; while in Spain, the repressive Jesuit system froze and fossilised religion. Outside passive obedience to dogma, said the disciples of Loyola, could be no salvation; but in France, such cast-iron ruling was gone for ever in Church and State. The white plume in the cap of the Huguenot-reared hero of Ivry brought loyal subjects rallying round him, as entirely as the little leaden images of Our Lady and the saints, with which the bigoted Louis XI. decorated his hat-brims, had repelled his people.
The growing Puritanic spirit in England however, which had but scanty affection for Episcopalianism itself, was not likely to draw fine distinctions. In the popular acceptation of the term, “Catholic” was identical with papist and Romanist; for, with a singular indifference, the papists had been permitted to appropriate the term. The young Queen was a Roman Catholic, greatly attached to the forms and ceremonial of her Church; bringing with her from France a train of Romanist priests and followers. Charles himself was the grandson of the woman who had died kissing the crucifix with her last breath. None of these considerations were lost sight of when the King began to ask subsidies of his faithful Commons, and showed generally a disposition to rule with a high hand.
He met with a strong resistance; and fearing the influence of Buckingham over him, the flame of accusations which had long smouldered, was fanned against the Duke, until his removal was brought about. Thus the Commons triumphed; but Parliament was dissolved.
These events took place a year after Charles’s accession; and about that time Lady Strange arriving in England, entered upon her post of lady-of-honour to the Queen. The coveted position has, before and since that time, been found to have its drawbacks, as rosebuds have their crumpled leaves; and Lady Strange seems to have relinquished her part in the Court pageantry as soon as might be, retiring to the home which one day she was so bravely to defend—Lathom House, in Lancashire.