SIR THOMAS MORE
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.
FROM THE FRENCH OF THE PRINCESSE DE CRAON
IX.
After the king had declared that he no longer wished her to assume any authority in the household, the queen secluded herself entirely in the most retired portion of the palace. In default of happiness, she at least found forgetfulness there; for it was no longer thought necessary to watch over her. Her rival, on the contrary, glorying in the light of the king’s favor and of her own youth and beauty, spent her days in festivity and enjoyment. She allowed herself to be carried away by the flattery of the throng of courtiers who followed in her train and servilely implored a glance from the eye, a smile or a word from her whom they had so quickly abandoned but a short time before.
For several days, however, the tumult of these fêtes, the sound of music and dancing, had not entered to wound the heart of Catherine in her seclusion. She was seated near the fire, and turning in her hands some worsted stuff intended to make a garment for a poor child. The heavy folds of the curtains hung motionless, the light flame of the waxen tapers burning near her had not wavered, and yet Catherine started nervously and trembled. The anguish of mind she had so long endured had, so to speak, worn away the mortal covering and brought her soul in direct contact with exterior objects; she saw that which possessed no corporeal shape, she heard that which
had no sound. Some person unknown has entered her apartments; her beautiful eyes are turned towards the door. Very soon, in fact, the curtains roll on their golden rings. A man enters. He advances a step and pauses. It is Norris, the favorite attendant of Henry VIII.
“What wouldst thou?” asked the queen with that sweet but imposing majesty of manner so natural to her that she could not lay it aside.
“Madam—the king—madam!” And the unfortunate man hesitated, trembling in every limb.
A mist passed over Catherine’s eyes.
“Madam,” he was at last able to articulate, “the king, my lord, sends me to tell you that before daybreak to-morrow morning he wishes you to be ready to leave the palace.”
The queen turned pale.…
“Has your majesty any command to give me?” said Norris after a moment’s silence.
“The king shall be obeyed,” replied the queen coldly, and she made a sign for him to withdraw. He bowed and hastily left the apartment. Catherine remained mute with grief and astonishment. “I have, then, still more to suffer!” she cried at length, falling on her knees. “He drives me from his presence—he, my own husband. He will not even permit me to breathe in the most remote corner of his palace!… Ah! well. Yes, I will
fly from this house of malediction, whose hearthstone has been soiled by infamy, and may I never enter it again!”
But, alas! Catherine had as yet spoken for herself alone. Suddenly the mother’s heart asserted its supremacy; she arose hastily, seized one of the lights near her, and, passing rapidly through several apartments, she at length paused, panting for breath.
“No one!” she exclaimed, looking wildly around her, “no one has been near these apartments to disturb her rest. The most profound silence reigns.” And in her turn she feared to awaken her daughter.
Softly approaching the bed on which reposed the little Mary, she drew aside with her royal hand the heavy curtain of purple and gold. The child was sleeping profoundly; her head rested on one of the delicate arms; her long, golden hair, loosened from all confinement, hung over her lovely neck and shoulders, and down on her light muslin nightdress. She had thrown off the bedclothing that covered her. The blood, pure and calm, circulated gently through the transparent veins. She seemed as happy, as tranquil, as her mother was agitated and miserable. Catherine, in an agony inexpressible, regarded her sleeping child, her hand nervously clenching the curtain she was holding back.
“Sleep on, my daughter, sleep!” she murmured. “Mayst thou never know the weary vigils and bitter anguish of suffering! But what do I say? Does he not involve thee in the unjust proscription of thy mother? The hatred he bears towards her, will he not extend it to thee? Art thou not the very link that must be broken?”
And Catherine, in despair, drew
back like a stranger in this apartment she must leave before the dawn of the morning.… Again she returned to the couch of her child. She bent over her; her lips almost touched her forehead. Then a gloomy courage took possession of her soul.
“Why torture myself thus,” she cried, “since thou art still left to me? Though all forget me, though the earth open beneath me, I will never more be separated from thee. Thou shalt be my joy, my life, my hope; thou shalt become my sole, my only friend! One day, yes, one day thou wilt understand thy mother. Let him cast thee far away from him—ah! what matters it? I open my heart to thee! The earth is vast; she will welcome her unfortunate children. And when, worn down by sorrow, I shall be ready to yield up my life, my hand will still be raised to bless thee, and my eyes will be fixed upon thine. It shall be thou who wilt close these eyes before I descend into the night of the grave, and thy tears will bedew my last resting-place. Then wilt thou be courageous, and in thy turn learn how to vanquish and defy evil fortune.”
Thus spoke the unhappy queen. She arose and again fell on her knees. But the hour strikes—that hour she had desired, hoped, waited for, as a moment of happiness, of hope and consolation. It now strikes, clashing, resounding through the silent chambers of her stricken heart, only to awaken a new and fearful sorrow. Still, she hesitates not; she again embraces the child, then tears herself away—flies. She hastens eagerly on—Catherine has disappeared.…
* * * * *
On being informed of the clergy’s refusal the king fell into a furious
rage. For three days the bishops were shut up in Westminster. The royal commissioners went to and fro continually from the king’s palace to the assembly; but the deliberations were conducted with so much secrecy that nothing was known of them outside.
Meanwhile, night came on, and the most profound silence reigned throughout the long cloisters of the abbey. The pale rays of the moon alone illuminated the splendid arches. The sanctuary was deserted, and the red flicker of a lamp suspended in the immense vault showed no larger than a luminous point set in space. A woman covered with a long veil stood within the sacred place, leaning against the iron railing, apparently absorbed in prayer. But no, she was not praying; the human soul must be calm and resigned before it can truly lift itself up towards God. Burning tears streamed from her eyes in torrents upon the stone pavement beneath her feet; she started at the slightest creaking of the wooden stalls surrounding the choir, and her attentive ear caught even the least breath of air. Anon footsteps were heard.
“St. Catherine, pray for us,” said a dear and well-known voice.
“Amen,” responded the queen; and she advanced towards two men who were approaching.
“More!” she exclaimed, “More! you have abandoned me, then?”
“Never, madam!”
“Well, then,” she cried, seizing his hand, “abandon me now! Cease, cease to sacrifice yourself for me! Know that you have no longer a queen; the banished Catherine leaves to-morrow the palace of her cruel husband. No place of refuge is offered her; she is left to choose some obscure corner of
the earth where she will be at liberty to die. But he is mistaken! I will never leave the soil of England—no, never!” she cried. “I will never look again upon my own happy land. ‘Woman,’ they would say to me, ‘you have deserted your children; you have not known how to die in the land over which you ought to reign; has the Spanish blood, then, ceased to flow in your veins?’ No, never!”
On hearing her speak thus More stood transfixed with astonishment and sorrow.
“They have dared!” he said at last, “they have dared, Rochester!”
“Yes,” replied the queen, “they have dared! But, Rochester, speak; the time is short; every moment is precious. What has passed in the assembly?”
“Where shall I find words to tell you, madam?” replied the good and venerable old man. “Parliament has been won over; your friends, powerless, have been made to tremble for their own lives; threats of death pass from mouth to mouth. I myself have scarcely been able to escape their criminal attempts on my life; a dish on my table was poisoned, and several of my people have died from eating of it. Consternation reigns secretly in every heart. The clergy are threatened on all sides; the people are exasperated by a thousand calumnies, the sources of which remain scrupulously concealed. The soil of old England seems about to be shaken to its foundations. Vice stalks forth with head erect, while the virtuous man flies in terror. There is time yet, madam. Save yourself! Save us all! Renounce an alliance so fatal for you; abandon this prince who no longer puts
any restraint upon his passions—he is not worthy of you; and let the house of the Lord become your retreat and be your refuge!”
“What sayest thou?” replied Catherine. “Was it for cowardly advice like this I called you to me, Rochester? And my daughter—what kingdom and what father would you give her?”
“God, madam, and the justice of her cause!” cried the afflicted old bishop.
“Then you have yielded?” said the queen.
“Yes,” replied Rochester, “we have recoiled before our worst fears; we have made a pact with falsehood, since we can no longer believe in the veracity of the king. He has summoned before him in turn each one of the most influential members of the conference. He has sworn to them, in the presence of God himself, that he desired in naught to usurp the authority of the spiritual head of the church; that naught could ever change him from being the faithful and obedient child of the church he is; that he hated heresy, and that his sole desire was to prevent it spreading in his kingdom—in a word, that he wished to live and die in the Catholic faith, in the faith of his fathers, and that he only asked of them a title that would give him honor and prove the confidence they had in their prince and the love they bore toward their lawful sovereign. Now, madam, what shall I say to you? He has been so far successful in convincing them that they have carried the majority of votes. We have granted him everything—with this restriction, however: that we acceded to his demand only so far as the law of God would permit. But, alas! discouragement and dissensions have entered among us, and
the choice of men by whom the king surrounds himself is sufficient evidence of the road he is resolved to follow. Thomas Audley replaces More, and Cranmer, that base intriguer, is installed in the place of the learned and immortal Warham.”
“Great heaven!” said the queen, “that vile tool of Anne Boleyn primate of England? Then all is lost to faith, hope, the future, succor—all!”
Meanwhile, a strange disturbance was heard, and all at once a door leading to the interior of the abbey was opened. A number of the king’s guard appeared, armed and bearing torches. The queen, terrified, hurriedly retired with More and Rochester within the shadow of a chapel where for centuries had reposed the ashes of the old Saxon kings. The tombs, on which they were represented in sculpture the size of life, lying at full length, their hands crossed on their breasts, the head and feet resting on pillows of stone, cast deep shadows all around them. These shadows, fortunately, concealed the queen, Rochester, and More entirely from observation, while they could see distinctly all that took place in the choir.
The monks, marching in two lines, defiled two by two and took their places in the stalls, while the guards stationed themselves at the different openings. The gleam of the torches lighted up everything. Soon was seen to enter the Abbot of Westminster, who preceded three men richly dressed and enveloped in cloaks. They all three seated themselves in large velvet arm-chairs; but one of them sat in the loftiest and most richly adorned of all. In a word, it was plain that a tribunal was constituted, but that it waited the presence of the accused in order to give judgment. He tarried not long.
The door again opened, and they beheld a young woman enter whose countenance was very pale. She walked between two guards, and her dress was that of a religious.
“What!” said Sir Thomas in a stifled tone. “Why, that is the Holy Maid of Kent! I believe she has her hands bound. No, it is her veil. What a strange matter! Poor young girl! The rumor of her predictions must have reached the king’s ears. I have so constantly warned her not to meddle in affairs of state!” murmured More.
“Can it be she?” cried the queen and Rochester in the same breath. “More, are you sure of it?”
“Quite sure,” he answered. “I remember perfectly her pale and suffering countenance.”
In the meantime they made the young girl seat herself on a stool in the midst of the assembly, and the Abbot of Westminster began to interrogate her.
“What is your name?” he asked in a very loud tone of voice.
She neither moved nor replied.
“I conjure you, my sister, to answer me,” he added more solemnly still. “What is your name?”
“Elizabeth Barton,” she answered, fixing on him a lingering look of surprise and astonishment.
“Where were you born?”
“In Aldington, in the county of Kent,” answered she very distinctly.
“What is your age?”
“Twenty-three years.”
“Why did you become a religious?” continued the abbot.
“I am not a religious; I have assumed this habit in order to do penance and take care of the poor.”
“Who has persuaded you to do this?”
“Myself.”
“But do you not pretend to have
revelations from heaven, and have you not told the assembled people of extraordinary things which are hidden in the future?”
“Yes, my lord,” she replied; and her eyes began to gleam with a singular light.
“Well! repeat what you have said,” interrupted he who was seated in the loftiest chair, rising abruptly to his feet. “Repeat what you have said,” he continued. And the long, flame-colored plume that shaded his large hat seemed to tremble with impatience, like the head which it covered.
At the sound of that voice, so imperious and bearing the expression of a soul so deeply agitated, the Holy Maid of Kent seemed stricken with horror. She arose and stood in the midst of the assembly, and, turning toward the speaker, extended her hand.
“O King Henry!” she cried, “think not to conceal yourself from my eyes. I know you; I know with what power you are invested; and now you would have me tell you what I have said and teach you what I have learned. Well, then, … yes, … king, … but mortal like myself, … tremble, recoil with horror and dismay, at sight of the black hypocrisy with which you have enveloped your heart. Look well; fix your eyes on the infamous vices that have eaten out the last sentiment of virtue God had implanted there.… Your crimes have multiplied like the sands which roll with the waves in the depths of the sea; you will inundate the steps of your throne with the blood of the noblest and purest. Heresy, introduced by you into this land, will multiply under a thousand different forms; everywhere with truth will be banished true charity. The years of your
reign will witness the birth of more calamities than the rain of heaven will cause flowers to grow. The woman you desire will dishonor your bed and perish on the scaffold which your own hands will have erected; and your daughter, the child you this day reject, shall reign. Yes! she shall reign,” she cried, “in spite of all your efforts. Then your bones, eaten by worms, shall be buried under the stones of the sepulchre; but your execrable memory shall live among men, and your name—this name of Henry VIII., stamped with the ineffaceable seal of blood—will carry down to ages most remote the horrible memory of a monster!… I have spoken!”[146]
Who could describe the effect produced by these last words on the spectators? Whiter than the linen robe which enveloped his form, the Abbot of Westminster was seized with terror. It was he who had persuaded the king to summon this woman, in order, he said, to undeceive the people, who believed in her, and pacify in this way the credulous and superstitious masses.
A prolonged silence reigned throughout that vast temple; who should dare to speak?
Cromwell alone turned towards the king. He encountered his fixed and furious gaze, which plainly said: “Woe to those who have deceived me!”
He was not at all disconcerted by it. “Be calm, sire,” he said in a low voice, “be calm; nothing is lost yet.”
Henry made no reply, but Cromwell needed no answer.
“My dear sister,” he said in a gentle and honeyed tone, “who has instructed you to say these things?”
And he saw Henry VIII. convulsively clench his fists.
“No one,” answered she in a sweet, sonorous voice.
“No one! That is hard to believe,” he replied in a tone almost of derision.… “You have, at least, repeated all this to several others.… That the king, your lord, may believe you to be sincere, you should hide nothing from him. Have you not written to Cardinal Wolsey?”
“Without doubt,” she replied, “I have informed him of what I ought to have let him know, … because that was my duty. Sir Thomas More, the lord chancellor, can bear witness that I tell you the truth.”
“Ah! Sir Thomas too,” replied with emphasis the odious Cromwell; and he dwelt especially on the name of this just man. “Sir Thomas More! It is very well, my dear sister. We verily believe thee.”
The anxiety that seized on the invisible spectators of the chapel may be imagined. The queen was entirely absorbed with the thought of her daughter; but on hearing the terrible indiscretion of this foolish or inspired woman she with difficulty stifled a cry of terror.
“More has written to you, then?” continued Cromwell, whose ingenuity was never at fault.
“Yes, to recommend himself to my prayers, but not on this subject.”
“But you have spoken with him many times,” replied Cromwell in a confident tone, although he really knew nothing about it.
“Once only,” she answered, “in the house of the Carthusians at Richmond, where I saw him with Masters Beering, Risby, and my Lord Rochester.… But they
advised me not to speak of these things, and to keep my revelations secret.”
“They were only the more criminal,” replied Cromwell; “because it was their duty to have unfolded the wicked designs of which you are guilty toward his royal majesty.”
At the word “guilty” she raised her head and fixed her black and piercing eyes upon Cromwell.
“Guilty!” she exclaimed. “It is a crime, then, to speak the truth?”
She said no more, but took her seat without awaiting permission.
In the meantime the king, thanks to Cromwell, had time to recover from the astonishment that had seized him, and to hide from the monks the humiliation which he could hardly wait to avenge; for, not disdaining himself to subdue this feeble enemy whom they had represented as unable to speak in his presence, he had believed, on the faith of his confidants, it was worth while to summon the Holy Maid of Kent before him, in order to show that she was worthy of no confidence. Now the most furious thoughts were at strife within him. How had she recognized him? Had the queen’s friends instructed her?… But she would not name them. What a story this would make throughout the kingdom! And his hardened heart could not cease being troubled.
Cromwell, despite the joy he felt at having made her name More and the Bishop of Rochester, was at a loss how to close with dignity this disagreeable scene. The monks opened their office-books and pretended to be reading; the woman remained seated on her stool and said nothing more; the guards waited some signal, which no one gave.
The king decided the question,
which was becoming every moment more and more embarrassing.
“It is well,” he said; “we have had enough of it; I am satisfied.”
He arose abruptly. All followed him; the guards threw open the doors, extinguished the lights, led away the Holy Maid of Kent, and the monks slowly retired into the abbey.
* * * * *
The hours of night rapidly succeeded each other; already a whitish circle began to rise and extend over the horizon. Nevertheless, all were wrapped in sleep in the plain and beneath the shadow of the woods. The industrious husbandman still rested his weary limbs on his rude couch; the dog which guarded his thatched cottage had ceased to howl; and even the invalid found, at the approach of day, a moment of repose. But idleness, always so prolonged in the palaces of kings, seemed to have been banished from the palace of Whitehall. Lights were seen glancing to and fro athwart the large windows; hurried footsteps were heard running up and down the marble stairways; whilst a coach with several horses attached, slowly drove around a distant courtyard.
Anne Boleyn herself was already occupied with the arrangement of her attire. She was seated upon soft cushions of velvet before a toilet table of ebony and gold. A young girl named Anne Savage, whom she preferred above all her maids because of her uninterrupted cheerfulness, her merry chat, and her expertness in the arts of the toilet, perfumed the long and beautiful hair which she was arranging with extreme care on the brow of her mistress, while the latter was searching in a casket she held in her lap for the
jewels she wished to adorn her ears and add to her coiffure.
“There is nothing at all in this box!” cried Boleyn, tossing over pell-mell the most magnificent jewelry.… “These emeralds are so trying to the face! These pearls injure the complexion! Anne, go bring me something else. All these are frightful I tell you!… But what is that? I hear a noise, … a cry.… Listen.… No, … it is in the king’s apartments.…”
“I hear nothing,” replied Anne Savage after a moment’s silence, during which she had not breathed.
“Ah! yes, I hear it,” replied Anne Boleyn; “I suspect the cause of it, too.… But I do not want to think about this.… However, it is a bad omen.…”
And as Lady Boleyn was very superstitious, and her conscience far from easy, she let the casket fall at her feet, and, bowing her head on her bosom, seemed to be absorbed in deep reflection.
Anne Savage tried to complete the coiffure as she sat in that position, but she failed in her task.
“If my lady cannot hold up her head,” at last cried the maid impatiently, “it will be impossible for me to arrange her head-dress properly.”
This admonition recalled Anne Boleyn to herself; she immediately raised her head and began carefully to scrutinize herself in the mirror placed before her. Well pleased with her appearance, she arranged two or three hair-pins ornamented with pearls strung like the beads of a rosary, and drew down a little the net-work of gold that fell below her cap and confined her tresses.
With this improvement she arose, in order to choose from among the
dresses she had caused to be brought and laid out on all the furniture in the room.
“This blue, … or rather this lilac,” she murmured; “no, these embroideries are heavy and ugly. I will try this white.… I would have liked a rose-color; here is one. Really, there is nothing here that pleases me.… It is true,” she continued spitefully, “any of these ought to be good enough for one who is going to be married in a garret!”
“In a garret!” interrupted the maid. “What! is it not in the chapel my lady is to be given away?”
“No,” replied Lady Boleyn, reddening. “The king has changed everything since yesterday evening. He has had an altar put up in one of the upper rooms of the palace. You alone are to carry my train, and Norris and Heneage will serve as witnesses. These are the honors which he deigns to accord the Queen of England.… Ah! my dear Anne, I am very miserable,” added Lady Anne, almost ready to burst into tears.
“In a garret!” repeated Savage, and she stood as if stupefied. “In a garret! O my lady! how can you suffer this?… Well, now do you not think I was right in telling you that you would do wrong to marry the king, and abandon so cruelly Lord Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and lord of I know not how many boroughs? He would not have believed himself obliged to marry you in the garret of Northumberland Castle! He loved you so much; he was so proud of you! Many a time has he said to me: ‘Anne, you are a good girl; you have the same name as your mistress. You shall never leave my wife; I will give you a marriage portion and an honest man for a
husband.’ Besides, madam,” continued Anne Savage in a grave, sententious manner, “I can never forget that my grandfather, who was very learned and respected by all the parish, used to say to me as I would sit by his side to sew: ‘Remember well, my little Anne, never to marry a man who is above you in wealth or rank; otherwise you will not be happy, because love flies away very quickly, and reproaches follow.’”
“Ah! my dear Anne, do not recall anew my regrets,” cried Lady Boleyn, with tears in her eyes. “I have never ceased to love Percy; … and when I compare the violence and haughty manner of the king with the gentleness and virtues of Percy, I am miserable for having listened to my ambition. Oh! how severely I am punished. Henry considers me overwhelmed with honor by his loving me! Submissive to all his caprices, I am for ever fearful of losing his favor; while Percy, happy in the sole hope of marrying me, always thanked me for every smile or word that I addressed him. Anne, do you believe that he has entirely forgotten me?” she asked suddenly.
“Truly, my lady, I wot not; I only know by my cousin Savage that he no longer receives any one in his fair castle at York.… But be it as it may, how, my lady, could it profit you to-day?”
“Nay, as thou sayest, naught, my poor Anne,” replied Lady Boleyn; but as she spoke she could not restrain her tears.
She recalled to mind all that she had done to induce the king to marry her; that, since she had been able to attain an end so difficult, she certainly ought to feel satisfied; and yet, in spite of these considerations, she found herself
overwhelmed with regrets for the past and fears for the future. She reflected that Henry had conducted himself so cruelly toward the queen, if ever she ceased to please him she would have everything to fear; and the happiness of that brilliant picture of thrones and honors which she had always dwelt on with such ardent longings seemed to vanish at the very moment when she saw it about to be realized. But Anne Savage could not conceive what should afflict her on this point.
“Why,” she exclaimed, “should you torture yourself in this way? It is too late to think of bringing him back, since he is already married. Besides, it is very strange; for you have told me a hundred times that you loved nobody but the king.”
“You are right,” replied Lady Boleyn; “that is true. I did love him, and I love him still; but I feel that it is impossible to love very long a person whom one cannot respect.”
“Better to have thought of that sooner,” murmured the maid; but she took care not to say so aloud.
Absorbed as she was in her sorrow, Lady Boleyn did not forget the care of her toilet, and, to assist in drying her tears, she turned the Venetian mirror in every direction in order to survey herself; but she was by no means satisfied with the ensemble nor the details it presented to her.
“See!” she cried, “how badly these sleeves fit; and these heavy plaits around my waist. In sooth, never was I so badly dressed. This white satin robe with silver flowers is frightful.… Besides, I wanted a rose-colored dress, … but of a color that is not here. They leave me with naught indeed. This
may not be borne. Go, bid all my women enter; I would know what they think of me.”
Anne Savage ran to open the door. Scarcely had she opened it.…
But let us leave the frivolous and coquettish Boleyn to adorn with so much care that form which the dust of the tomb has long since claimed, and follow rather this man, all flushed, out of breath, and hurried, who eagerly mounts the stairs in search of the king. The guards are standing near the doors; the mats on which they passed the night are still lying on the floor in the lower hall of the palace; they rub their half-opened eyes, still bewildered with sleep. They offer the usual salutations to Norris, who advances, and whom they recognize; but he passes through their midst without seeming to perceive them, and enters abruptly the apartment of the king.
Henry VIII., leaning against one of the windows, his face pressed close to the glass, was gazing eagerly out to behold all he had been able to see of Catherine’s departure; but, hearing the door open, he turned quickly around, withdrew from the window, and, going to the far end of the apartment, took his seat.
“Well, good Norris,” he said, looking attentively at him, “what a sad air you wear! It was, then, very difficult to get Catherine off? I had foreseen it all, however.”
“Your majesty had foreseen it all, and yet methinks you have chosen not to be by the while.”
“What, then, has happed?”
“Naught, of great moment—no, in sooth, naught but what should have been. But I vow my heart was bruised sore when the queen’s grief brake forth. Nothing loath was she to go; but when she saw
the Princess Mary was not let go with her, and the door of the coach closed, she fain would have cast herself without. Then she uttered cries the most heartrending, and, stretching out her arms towards us, besought us to let her return and once more embrace her daughter. The princess, seeing the despair of her mother, with sobs and cries begged to follow her. At length, there being no way to prevent the queen from descending, she clasped her a thousand times in her arms. She then wrote something on a scrap of paper I have here, and bade me deliver it to your majesty, which I promised to do. She entreated all present to beg you to have compassion on her and send the Princess Mary to her; that she asked but this one favor, and then she would consent to do all that you wished. It was necessary to carry her to the coach; for she fell fainting while embracing her daughter for the last time.”
“Always these fainting fits of hers,” replied the king angrily; “yet will she say it is I who have slain her. Come, let us see the paper!”
Norris presented it.
The king opened it and read the following words which the queen had written in a trembling hand:
“Sire: What have I done to you that you treat me thus? You banish me from your palace and condemn me to exile. Alas! to this I had submitted; but why have you the cruelty to separate me from the only good of mine that is left in all the world? You know well that never have I gainsaid wish of yours; but is it in my power not to be your lawful wife? I conjure you, then, to have compassion on me! Give me back my daughter; give her to me, and I will weep no
more the lot you have cast for me. Become a stranger in the land over which you reign, at least permit to die in peace an unfortunate woman whom you have deprived of her rank, her country, and her friends. Leave me my daughter to console the last days of a life that is almost ended. What can you hope or fear from her? Since you cast her out from your arms, leave me the happiness to take her to mine. I am her mother; I have brought her into the world in sorrow; I have nourished her from my own bosom—she is mine; and, since it is your will to deprive her of a father, do not, at least, tear her from the arms of her unhappy mother.”
This letter, still all wet with tears, produced a painful impression on the mind of Henry.
“This fellow will assuredly find me of the cruelest,” he said to himself. “It is well, it is well,” he added in a loud voice. “It is a request that she makes to me; we will see to it later on. Everything is ready, Norris?” he added immediately.
“Yes, sire; your orders have been executed with the greatest exactness. Heneage and Lady Berkley are below; they await your majesty.”
“Is Dr. Roland also there?” demanded the king.
“Yes, sire; he has been there more than an hour.”
“Well, go and seek Lady Boleyn.”
Norris immediately descended. He found all the doors of Lady Boleyn’s apartments open, and in the distance heard exclamations mingling, and unceasingly repeated.
“Oh! how lovely is my lady. Never did she look more fair!” they cried. “How handsomely my lady’s hair is dressed, and what beautiful hair it is! What a sweet complexion, what a charming figure! There is not a woman in all the kingdom who is my lady’s equal!”
Hearing this concert of praise, Anne Boleyn began to take courage.
“No, no,” she said with an air of disdain; “I am very badly dressed to-day.”
As she said these words Norris entered and announced to Lady Boleyn that the king awaited her.
She followed him at once, accompanied by Anne Savage; the other women stood in astonishment, and were very curious to know why this favor was shown to their companion, while the jealousy with which they already regarded her was still further increased.
[146] See Sanders on the Holy Maid of Kent.
TO BE CONTINUED.
THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT IN NEW ENGLAND.[147]
This volume reads pleasantly. There is attached to it a peculiar interest, and something of the charm of a romance, for those who have had some knowledge of the transcendental movement in New England, and acquaintance with its leaders. The author has evidently written his account with feelings of sympathy and friendship, which he acknowledges, and these have led him to bring out all the good points of the movement, while its shortcomings, exaggerations, and absurdities are scarcely, if at all, hinted at. The style is clear and smooth, the narrative never falters; the writer has contrived to throw a certain halo around the leaders of transcendentalism, and succeeded in presenting in his book a series of ideal portraits calculated to impose somewhat upon strangers. The impression which the work leaves on the mind of the reader is as if he had been listening to the conversation of a member of a mutual admiration society. Octavius Brooks Frothingham is not a “central thinker,” his knowledge of the subject of which he treats is very limited, and his religious insight is null. Transcendentalism requires a differently-equipped man to be its historian. There is, somehow, a narrowness of structure and a peculiar twist in the faculties of the New England mind—perhaps a constitutional inheritance—which renders it inapt to conceive first principles and grasp universal
truths; and although transcendentalism was an effort to rise above this condition, it nevertheless carried with it in its flight all these defects.
Our author has not written a history, but an interesting sketch which will be useful, no doubt, to some future historian. To write a history, especially of a philosophical and religious movement such as transcendentalism pretended to be, and really was, requires more than an acquaintance with persons and facts. One must comprehend its real origin, and have mastered and become familiar with his subject. This is a task which Mr. Frothingham has not accomplished.
Every heresy segregates its adherents from the straight line of the true progress of the human race, all deviations from which are, in the nature of things, either transitory or fatal. They live, for the greater part, outside of the cumulated wisdom and the broad stream of the continuous life of humanity. When the heresy has almost exhausted its derived life—for no heresy has a source of life in itself—and the symptoms of its approaching death begin to appear, the intelligent and sincere who are born in it at this stage of its career are the first to seek to regain the unbroken unity of truth. This is reached by two distinct and equally legitimate ways. The first class gains the knowledge of the whole body of the originally revealed truth, from which its heresy cut it off, by tracing the truths retained by the sect to their logical connection with other no less important
truths equally contained in the same divine revelation. The second class falls back upon the essential truths of natural reason; and as all supernatural truth finds its support in natural truth, it follows that the denial of any of the former involves a denial of the latter. Heresy always involves a mutilation of man’s natural reason. Once the integral natural basis recovered, the repudiation of heresy as contrary to reason follows logically. But the experience of the human race, that of the transcendentalists included, shows plainly that nature does not suffice nature; and this class, at this moment, starts out to find a religion consonant with the dictates of reason, satisfactory to all their spiritual necessities, and adequate to their whole nature. They ask, and rightly, for a religion which shall find its fast foundations in the human breast. This appeal can only be answered, and is only met, by the revelation given to the world in the beginning by the Author of man, completed in the Incarnation, and existing in its entirety and in unbroken historical continuity in the Catholic Church alone.
This dialectical law has governed the course of all heresies, from which they could not by any possibility escape; the same law has governed the history of Protestantism on its native soil, in Germany, as well as in old England, in New England, and wherever it has obtained a foothold.
Our business at present is with those of the second class, under which head come our New England transcendentalists; and what is not a little amusing is the simplicity with which they proclaim to the world, in this nineteenth century of the Christian era, the truths of
natural reason, as though these were new and original discoveries! They appear to fancy that the petty sect to which they formerly adhered, and their dreary experience of its rule, have been the sad lot of the whole human race! It is as if a body of men had been led astray into a cavern where the direct rays of the sun never penetrated, and, after the lapse of some generations, their descendants approach its mouth, breathe the fresh air, behold the orb of light, the mountains, the rivers, and the whole earth covered with trees, flowers, and verdure. For the first time this glorious world, in all its wonderful beauty, bursts upon their view, and, in the candor of their souls, they flatter themselves that they alone are privileged with this vision, and knowledge, and enjoyment! Their language—but, be it understood, in their sober moods—affects those whose mental sight has not been obscured by heresy; somewhat like the speech of children when first the light of reason dawns in their souls. For the transcendental movement in New England was nothing else, in its first instance, than the earnest and righteous protest of our native reason in convalescence against a false Christianity for its denial or neglect of rational truths.
Mr. Frothingham tells us that “he was once a pure transcendentalist,” and that perhaps “his ardor may have cooled.” We protest, and as a disinterested party assure him that he writes with all the glow of youth, and in his volume he has furnished a pretty cabinet-picture, in couleur du rose, of transcendentalism in New England, without betraying even so much as the least sign of a suspicion of its true place in the history either of philosophy or religion. In seeking for the “distinct
origin” and the place in history of the transcendental movement in New England, he goes back to Immanuel Kant, born at Königsberg, in Prussia, April 22, 1724, and finds it, as he supposes, in Kant’s famous Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1771. After mentioning some of the disciples of Kant, we are taken to the philosophers of France—Cousin, Constant, Jouffroy; then we are next transported across the Channel to old England, and entertained with Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth; finally we are landed in New England and are told:
“With some truth it may be said that there never was such a thing as transcendentalism out of New England. In Germany and France there was a transcendental philosophy, held by cultivated men, taught in schools, and professed by many thoughtful and earnest people; but it never affected society in its organized institutions or practical interests. In old England this philosophy influenced poetry and art, but left the daily existence of men and women untouched. But in New England the ideas entertained by foreign thinkers took root in the native soil and blossomed out in every form of social life. The philosophy assumed its full proportions, produced fruit according to its kind, created a new social order for itself, or rather showed what sort of social order it would create under favoring conditions. Its new heavens and new earth were made visible, if but for a moment, and in a wintry season” (p. 103).
The contact with the productions of the foreign philosophers as well as religious and literary writers whom Mr. Frothingham mentions undoubtedly stimulated and strengthened the transcendental movement in New England; but it did not originate it. The movement was the spontaneous growth of the New England mind, in accordance with the law which we have stated, aided by the peculiar influence of our
political institutions, as will be shown further on. Its real authors were Channing, Alcott, and Emerson, who were neither affected at their start nor afterward—or if at all, but slightly—by foreign or extraneous influences.
Moreover, the Kantian philosophy afforded no logical foothold for the defence of the movement in New England. Were our New Englander, who still clings to his early faith in transcendental ideas, to present himself to the philosophical offspring of Kant, he would no more pass muster than his old orthodox Protestant antagonist of the exclusive traditional school. The logical descendants of Kant are, in the region of philosophy, to use an Americanism, played out, and those who still keep up an existence will be found in the ranks of positivism, materialism, and blank atheism.
The idea of God, the immortality of the soul, the liberty of the will, the creation of the world—these and all such ideas the descendants of Kant have politely conducted to the frontiers of philosophy, and dismissed each and every one, but not before courteously thanking them for their provisional services. Our New Englander would appear to their eyes as a babe still in swaddling-clothes, or as a child learning to read by amusing itself with the pictures of old Mother Goose stories. Whatever hankering Mr. Frothingham and some few others may have after their first love of transcendental ideas—and those in New England with whom they are most in sympathy, one and all are moving in the same direction—they are only in the initial stage of the process of evolution of the Kantian germ-cell, the product of Protestant protoplasm, and will end eventually in the same logical issues as
their less sentimental German, French, and English confrères.
To give us a right history of transcendentalism, Mr. Frothingham must enlarge the horizon of his mental vision, and include within its scope a stretch of time which elapsed before his ancestors were led off by heresy into the cavern of obscurity. He will find a historical no less than a “dialectical basis” for its ideas or primary truths, and other truths of natural reason of which he has not yet made the discovery, in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, in Augustine, in Vincent of Lerens, in Anselm, and above all in Thomas of Aquinas, whose pages contain all the truths, but purified from the admixture of error, of the pagan philosophers, as also of those who had preceded him in Christian philosophy—men whose natural gifts, as well as devotion to truth, were comparable, to say the least, with Immanuel Kant and his French, or English, or American disciples. Those profound thinkers maintained and demonstrated the truth of the great ideas which Kant, according to his own showing, neither dared affirm nor deny, and which the transcendentalists held for the most part by openly contemning logic and by submissively accepting the humiliating charge of being “sentimentalists.” What those great men taught from the beginning has been always taught, even to our day, by all sound Catholic teachers in philosophy. So jealous has the supreme authority of the church been in this matter of upholding the value of the natural powers of human reason against those who would exalt tradition at its expense it has required, if they would teach philosophy in the name of the church, as a test of their orthodoxy,
a subscription to the following proposition: “Reason can with certitude demonstrate the existence of God, the spirituality of the soul, and the liberty of man.” Had the author of the volume which we are briefly reviewing read the Summa of St. Thomas, or only the chapters which treat of these subjects, and understood them—which is not, we hope, asking too much from an advanced thinker of our enlightened age, inasmuch as St. Thomas wrote this work in the “dark ages” for mere tyros—he would have gained a stand-point from which he might have done what he tells us in his preface was “the one purpose of his book—to define the fundamental ideas of philosophy, to trace them to their historical and speculative sources, and to show whither they tended” (p. viii.) Such a work would have been more creditable to his learning, more worthy of his intellectual effort, more satisfactory to intelligent readers, and one of permanent value. We commend to Octavius Brooks Frothingham the perusal and study of St. Thomas’ Summa—above all, his work Contra Gentiles, which is a defence of Christianity on the basis of human reason against the attacks of those who do not admit of its divine revelation; or if these be not within his reach, to take up any one of the modern works on philosophy taught in Catholic colleges or seminaries to our young men.
After all, perhaps, the task might prove an ungracious one; for it would not be flattering to the genius of originality, on which our transcendentalists pride themselves, to discover that these utterances concerning the value of human reason, the dignity of the soul, and the worth of man—barring occasional extravagant expressions attributable
to the heat of youth—were but echoes of the voice of the Catholic Church of all ages, of the traditional teachings of her philosophers, especially of the Jesuitical school; all of which, be it said between ourselves, has been confirmed by the sacred decrees of the recent Vatican Council! Still, passing this act of humiliation on their part, it would have afforded them what our author says their system “lacked,” and for which he has had recourse—in our opinion in vain—to the great German systems: namely, a “dialectical basis.” He would have found in Catholic philosophy solid grounds to sustain every truth which the transcendentalists so enthusiastically proclaimed in speech, in poetry, and prose, and which truths, in their practical aspect, not a few made noble and heroic sacrifices to realize.
To have secured such a basis would not have been a small gain, when one considers that these primary truths of reason are the sources from which religion, morals, political government, and human society draw their vitality, strength, and stability. Not a small service to humanity is it to make clear these imperishable foundations, to render them intelligible to all, and transmit them to posterity with increased life and strength. It is well that this noble task of philosophy did not depend on the efforts of the transcendentalists; for Mr. Frothingham sadly informs us in his preface that “as a form of mental philosophy transcendentalism may have had its day; at any rate it is no longer in the ascendant, and at present is manifestly on the decline, being suppressed by the philosophy of experience, which, under different names, is taking possession of the speculative world” (p. vii.) Who knows what might have been the
precious fruits of all the high aspiration and powerful earnestness which were underlying this movement, if, instead of seeking for a “dialectical basis of the great German systems,” its leaders had cast aside their prejudices, and found that Catholic philosophy which had interpreted the divine oracles of the soul from age to age, consonant with man’s original and everlasting convictions, and sustaining his loftiest and noblest hopes?
But with the best will in the world to look favorably on the practical results of the transcendental movement, and our sincere appreciation of its leaders—both of which, the issues and the men, are described from chapter vii. to xv., which latter concludes the volume—in spite of these dispositions of ours, our sympathy for so much praiseworthy effort, and our respect for so many highly-gifted men, in reading these chapters a feeling of sadness creeps over us, and we cannot help exclaiming with the poet Sterling:
“O wasted strength! O light and calm
And better hopes so vainly given!
Like rain upon the herbless sea,
Poured down by too benignant heaven—
We see not stars unfixed by winds,
Or lost in aimless thunder-peals,
But man’s large soul, the star supreme,
In guideless whirl how oft it reels!”
But this is not to be wondered at; for although these men had arrived at the perception of certain great truths, they held them by no strong intellectual grasp, and finally they escaped them, and their intellectual fabric, like the house built upon sand, when the storm came and the winds blew, great was the fall thereof. This was the history of Brook Farm and Fruitlands, communities in which the two wings of transcendentalism attempted to reduce their
ideas into practice. Here let us remark it would have increased the interest of the volume if its author had given to his readers the programme of Brook Farm, “The Idea of Jesus of Society,” together with its constitutions. It is short, interesting, and burning with earnestness. There is scarcely any account of the singular enterprise of the group of idealists at Fruitlands, and the name of Henry Thoreau, one of the notables among transcendentalists, is barely mentioned, while to his life at Walden Pond there is not even an allusion. True, these experiments were, like Brook Farm, unsuccessful, but they were not without interest and significance, and worthy of a place in what claims to be a history of the movement that gave rise to them; at least space enough might have been afforded them for a suitable epitaph.
We will now redeem our promise of showing how the influence of our political institutions aided in producing what goes by the name of transcendentalism. But before doing this, we must settle what transcendentalism is; for our author appears to make a distinction between idealism and transcendentalism in New England. Here is what he says:
“There was idealism in New England prior to the introduction of transcendentalism. Idealism is of no clime or age. It has its proportion of disciples in every period and in the apparently most uncongenial countries; a full proportion might have been looked for in New England. But when Emerson appeared, the name of idealism was legion. He alone was competent to form a school, and as soon as he rose, the scholars trooped about him. By sheer force of genius Emerson anticipated the results of the transcendental philosophy, defined its axioms, and ran out their inferences to the end. Without help from abroad, or with such help only as none but he
could use, he might have domesticated in Massachusetts an idealism as heroic as Fichte’s, as beautiful as Schelling’s, but it would have lacked the dialectical basis of the great German systems” (p. 115).
If we seize the meaning of this passage, it is admitted that previous to the knowledge of the German systems Mr. Emerson had already defined the axioms, run out their inferences to the end, and anticipated the results of the German transcendental philosophy. But this is all that any system of philosophy pretends to accomplish; and therefore, by his own showing, the distinction between idealism and transcendentalism is a distinction without a difference.
Mr. Frothingham, however, tells us on the same page that “transcendentalism, properly so-called, was imported in foreign packages”; and Mr. Frothingham ought to know, for he was once, he tells us, “a pure transcendentalist”; and on pages 128 and 136 he criticises Mr. Emerson, who identifies idealism and transcendentalism. With the genius and greatness of the prince of the transcendentalists before his eyes, our author, as is proper, employs the following condescending language: “It is audacious to criticise Mr. Emerson on a point like this; but candor compels the remark that the above description does less than justice to the definiteness of the transcendental movement. It was something more than a reaction against formalism and tradition, though it took that form. It was more than a reaction against Puritan orthodoxy, though in part it was that. It was in a very small degree due to study of the ancient pantheists, of Plato and the Alexandrians, of Plutarch, Seneca, and Epictetus, though one or two of the
leaders had drunk deeply from these sources. Transcendentalism was a distinct philosophical system” (p. 136).
So far so good. Here is the place, if the author knows what he is talking about, to give us in clear terms the definition of transcendentalism. But what does he? Does he satisfy our anticipations? Mr. Emerson, be it understood, does not know what transcendentalism is! Well, hear our author, who thinks he does. He continues: “Practically it was an assertion of the inalienable worth of man; theoretically it was an assertion of the immanence of divinity in instinct, the transference of supernatural attributes to the natural constitution of mankind.… Through all was the belief in the living God in the soul, faith in immediate inspiration, in boundless possibility, and in unimaginable good” (p. 137). Ordinarily when writers attempt to give a definition, or convey information of a “distinct philosophical system,” they give one to understand its first principles or axioms, its precise method, and its important conclusions, and particularly wherein it differs in these respects from other systems of philosophy. This is what Mr. Frothingham in the passage last quoted has led us to expect; but instead of this he gives to the reader mere “assertions” and “beliefs.” And these assertions and beliefs every one knows who has heard Dr. Channing, or Mr. Emerson, or Mr. Alcott, or who has a slight acquaintance with their writings, to have been the sources of inspiration in their speech, which appear on almost every page they have written! Proof is needless; for there is no one who will venture a contradiction on this point. The men who were most influenced by the study
of the philosophers abroad were neither the originators nor leaders of the so-called transcendental movement in New England—Brownson, Parker, and William Channing. Mr. Frothingham, we submit, has not made out his case, and has given too much credit where it was not due, while robbing others of their just merit, whatever that may be. If “transcendentalism was a distinct philosophical system,” nowhere in his book has this been shown.
Transcendentalism, accepting the author’s statement as to its true character, was never a philosophical system in New England; and had its early disciples been content to cultivate the seeds sown by its true leaders, instead of making the futile attempt to transfer to our clime exotics from Germany which would not take root and grow in our soil, we should have had, in place of a dreary waste, stately trees whose wholesome and delicious fruits would now refresh us.
And now for our reasons why it was native to the soil from which it sprang. If we analyze the political system of our country, we will find at its base the maxim, “Man is capable of self-government.” The American system exhibits a greater trust in the natural capacities and the inherent worth of man than any other form of political government now upon this earth. Hence all the great political trusts are made elective; hence also our recourse to short periods of election and the great extension among us of the elective franchise. The genius and whole drift of the current of our political life runs in this direction. Now, what does this maxim mean, that “Man is capable of self-government”? It means that man is endowed by his Creator with reason to know
what is right, true, and good. It means that man possesses free-will and can follow the right, true, and good. These powers constitute man a responsible being. It supposes that man as he is now born is in possession of all his natural rights, and the primal tendencies of his native faculties are in accordance with the great end of his existence, and his nature is essentially good. But such views of human nature are in direct opposition to the fundamental doctrines of Puritanism and orthodox Protestantism. These taught and teach that man is born totally depraved, that his nature is essentially corrupt, and all his actions, springing from his nature, nothing but evil. Now, the political influence of our American institutions stimulated the assertion of man’s natural rights, his noble gift of liberty, and his inalienable worth, while the religion peculiar to New England preached precisely the contrary. In the long run, the ballot-box beat the pulpit; for the former exerted its influence six days in the week, while the latter had for its share only the Sabbath. In other words, the inevitable tendency of our American political system is to efface from the minds of our people all the distinctive dogmas of the orthodox Protestant views of Christianity by placing them on a platform in accordance with man’s natural capacities, his native dignity, and with right and honorable views of God. Herein lies the true genesis of Unitarianism and its cogenitor, the transcendental movement in New England.
Dr. Channing was right in discarding the attempt to introduce the worse than idle speculation of the German and French philosophical systems in New England. “He considered,” so says his biographer,
“pretensions to absolute science quite premature; saw more boastfulness than wisdom in ancient and modern schemes of philosophy; and was not a little amused at the complacent confidence with which quite evidently fallible theorists assumed to stand at the centre, and to scan and depict the panorama of existence.” “The transcendentalists,” he tells James Martineau in 1841, “in identifying themselves a good deal with Cousin’s crude system, have lost the life of an original movement.” In this last sentence Dr. Channing not only anticipated history but also uttered a prophecy. But how about a philosophy whose mission it is to maintain all the great truths for which he so eloquently and manfully fought? How about a conception of Christianity which places itself in evident relations with human nature and the history of the universe?—a religion which finds its sanctuary in man’s soul, and aims at the elevation of his finite reason to its archetype and its transformation into the Infinite Reason?
Unitarianism in New England owes its existence to the supposition that Calvinism is a true and genuine interpretation of Christianity. “Total depravity,” “election,” “reprobation,” “atonement,” etc., followed, it was fancied, each other logically, and there was no denying one without the denial of all. And as it was supposed that these doctrines found their support in the divinity of Christ, and in order to bring to ruin the superstructure they aimed at upsetting its base by the denial of the divinity of Christ. They had grown to detest so heartily the “five points” of Calvinism that they preferred rather to be pagans than suckled in such a creed.
Is it probable, is it reasonable to suppose that our New Englanders, who have a strong vein of earnest religious feeling in their nature, would have gone across the ocean to find a support for the great truths which they were so enthusiastic in affirming among the will-o’-the-wisps of the realms of thought, when at their very doors was “the church which has revealed more completely man to himself, taken possession of his inclinations, of his lasting and universal convictions, laid bare to the light those ancient foundations, has cleansed them from every stain, from every alien mixture, and honored them by recognizing their impress of the Divinity?”
But Mr. Frothingham tells us: “The religion of New England was Protestant and of the most intellectual type. Romanism had no hold on the thinking people of Boston. None besides the Irish laboring and menial classes were Catholics, and their religion was regarded as the lowest form of ceremonial superstition” (p. 107); and almost in the same breath he informs his readers that “the Unitarians of New England were good scholars, accomplished men of letters, humane in sentiment and sincere and moral in intention” (p. 110). Is Octavius Brooks Frothingham acquainted with all “the ceremonial superstitions” upon this earth, and does he honestly believe that the Catholic religion is “the lowest form” of them all? Or—what is the same thing—does he think that the “good scholars and accomplished men of letters” of New England thought so? Perhaps such was his received impression, but that it was common to this class of men we stoutly deny. No one stood higher among them than Dr. Channing, and his estimate of the Catholic religion was certainly
not the same as Mr. Frothingham’s. It would be difficult to find in a non-Catholic writer a higher appreciation of her services to humanity, and more eloquent descriptions of certain aspects of the Catholic Church, than may be found in his writings. Mr. Frothingham ought to know this, and only the limits of our article hinder us from citing several of these. Is he aware that President John Adams headed the subscription-list to build the first Catholic church in Boston. Our author, by his prejudices, his lack of insight, and limited information, does injustice to the New England people, depreciates the intelligence and honesty of the leaders in Unitarianism, and fails to grasp the deep significance of the transcendental movement.
He does injustice to the people of Boston especially, who, when they heard of the death of the saintly Bishop Cheverus, tolled the bells of the churches of their city to show in what veneration they held his memory; and if he was not of the age to have listened, he must have read the eloquent and appreciative eulogium preached by Dr. Channing on this great and good man. And Bishop Cheverus was the guide and teacher of the religion of the Irish people of Boston!
Mr. Frothingham will not attempt to make a distinction between the “Catholic religion” and “the religion of the Irish menial and laboring classes”—a subterfuge of which no man of intelligence and integrity would be guilty. The Irish people—be it said to their glory—have from the beginning of their conversion to Christianity kept the pure light of Catholic faith unsullied by any admixture of heresy, and have remained firm in their obedience to the divine authority of the
holy church, in spite of the tyranny, of the bitterest persecution of its enemies, and all their efforts of bribery or any worldly inducements which they might hold out. When our searchers after true religion shall have exhausted by their long and weary studies Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Svenalis, Plato, Epictetus, Brahma, Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet, and any other notable inventor of philosophy or religion; when they have gathered up all the truths scattered among the different heresies in religion since the Christian era, the end of all their labors will only make this truth the plainer: that the Catholic Church resumes the authority of all religions from the beginning of the world, affirms the traditions and convictions of the whole human race, and unites, co-ordinates, and binds together all the scattered truths contained in every religious system in an absolute, universal, divine synthesis.
[147] Transcendentalism in New England. A History. By Octavius Brooks Frothingham. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1876.
CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLLTON.[148]
Charles Carroll’s is a household name in the American family—the name of a man marked among his peers for a purity of character on which a Christian mind loves to dwell: integer vitæ scelerique purus! His independence was so noble and sublime, yet so toned with homeliness withal, that of him it was said he walked the streets of his regenerated country with brow erect and mien expanded, because he was sans peur et sans reproche, a preux chevalier—the idol in the family sanctuary. He alone of the great founders chosen by the angel of
this land was destined to witness, beyond the span of days usually allotted to man, the unparalleled prosperity and unequalled development of the resources of a virgin country. Such was the well-earned reward of a career marked by the purest disinterestedness in motives, justice in the choice of means, and humblest dependence on the assistance of the Lord God of nations.
On the anniversary of that day when the covenant that saved mankind was announced by an archangel from the highest heavens, and ratified on earth by the assent of the lowly maid of Jesse, the Ark and the Dove moored on the American waters of the Potomac. A stalwart band of men who were to herald—and they alone of all the Pilgrims—the great covenant of true liberty leaped on shore and planted the standard of salvation. They planted the cross on a new land to be added to Mary’s dowry. Truer men were never hailed by an uncivilized people—men who had learned how to fulfil their destinies in the schools of Bethlehem and of Golgotha.
The Catholic student of American history feels his heart glowing with sentiments of the holiest pride, as, reverting to the twenty-fifth day of March, 1632, he reads that the Catholic pilgrim alone, with his descendants after him, has held steadfastly and without swerving, even to this day, to the true dictates of that moral and religious economy whereby man can secure his happiness and moral independence here, with a never-wavering certainty of thereby securing a claim to an everlasting welfare hereafter. Cardinal McCloskey to-day represents and enacts these very same principles and laws among and to the millions of Catholics in America, which the humble Jesuit missionary
Andrew White proclaimed among and to the tribes of the Potomac two hundred and forty-three years ago—nay, the same principles and laws which were, by the Lord’s mandate, proclaimed by Peter and the apostles when for the first time they announced their mission to the throngs gathered in the city of David.
We love to dwell on these facts. The child who was christened in his mother’s arms in Jerusalem on the day after Pentecost became endowed with the same heavenly prerogatives as the Indian babe regenerated in the laver of redemption by Father White sixteen ages later or by any priest of the church on this very day! In very deed, the indelible marks and divine perfections of the heavenly court are mirrored and reflected by the city of God on earth. That same and one Christ who reigned, with his laws, in the church of Jerusalem, and a thousand years after in Vineland of North America, reigns and rules to-day, with the same laws, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Meanwhile, where is the church of the Puritans? Where are her antecedents? Has any of her aspirations been fulfilled? Is there any mark of benediction left by her professors?
The past of Charles Carroll clusters around his life in manifold benedictions; his name is borne aloft on the waters of that grand stream over which the bark of Peter has triumphantly glided for eighteen centuries, and will continue its triumphant course to the consummation of the world. Such is the perpetuity of faith!
A half-century had hardly passed away since the landing of the Pilgrims when Daniel Carroll, the grandsire of our Charles, came to
America (A.D. 1680). He was an Irishman, of that prodigious stock which, in the wonderful ways of Providence, being transplanted on our shores, was on some future day to give to America most energetic and determined laborers in the rearing of our independence. Surely did the orator of Concord, amid the festivities of the last Centennial, prove himself miserably ignorant of what his sires owed to the Irish[149] of Pennsylvania.
For let it be recorded for the hundredth time: but for those men our cause would have been lost, in the straits to which the public weal was brought. They came to the rescue, and George Washington took good heart and went on to victory.
Daniel was born in Littemourna, King’s County, Ireland. During the reign of James II. he held responsible offices. Lord Baltimore was his patron, and by his favor, close application, sterling honesty, and persevering industry he became the owner of large estates,
and the family prospered and increased in wealth, although not in social or political position, during the second and third generations.[150]
Daniel Carroll rose very high in the estimation of the colony, and was chosen to offices of important and delicate trust. So great was his renown for spotless integrity, extraordinary ability, and love of the public weal that when Protestant bigotry obtained the upper hand, and, in the language of McMahon, the non-Catholic historian of Maryland, “in a colony which was established by Catholics, and grew up to power and happiness under the government of a Catholic, the Catholic inhabitant became the only victim of religious intolerance,” he was exempted from the opprobrious and hateful disqualifications inflicted upon his coreligionists by the penal code—an exemption, at first sight, of doubtful honor, were it not for the exceptional nature and circumstances of the case. It entailed not the least compromise on the part of the recipient, who accepted it without hindrance to an open profession of his faith; moreover, it enabled him to shelter less favored colonists in the enjoyment of rights most dear to their hearts and indispensable to their happiness.
Charles Carroll, the father of the signer, was born in 1702. He was a high-spirited man, but he had no chances to display his talents, nor field on which to exert his energies. He chafed under the wrong and ingratitude with which the children of mother church were harried in the “Land of the Sanctuary” which they had opened to the oppressed of all climes. Alluding to the legislation of the Maryland colony in 1649, Chancellor Kent says: “The Catholic planters of Maryland won for their adopted country the distinguished praise of being the first of American States in which toleration was established by law. And while the Puritans were persecuting their Protestant brethren in New England, and Episcopalians retorting the same severity on the Puritans in Virginia, the Catholics, against whom the others were combined, formed in Maryland a sanctuary where all might worship and none might oppress, and where even Protestants sought refuge from Protestant intolerance.”
But Protestant intolerance demolished the sanctuary, the handiwork of noble and loving Catholic hands. In accord with the wish of many, Mr. Carroll entertained the idea of seeking freedom of action, liberty of conscience, and equality of rights under another sky. Thus, in one of his journeys to Europe, he applied to the French minister for the purchase of a tract of land in Louisiana. The project was far advanced, when the minister growing alarmed at the vast purchase which it was their wish to make on the Arkansas River, the negotiations were (providentially?) broken off. The project, viewed in the light of succeeding events, may appear, as it was then by many deemed, injudicious.
Yet great praise is due to Charles Carroll, Sr., for his taking the lead in the movement at a time when, as Mr. Latrobe observes, “the disqualifications and oppressions to which Catholics were subjected amounted to persecution. Roman Catholic priests were prohibited from the administration of public worship. The council granted orders to take children from the pernicious contact of Catholic parents; Catholic laymen were deprived of the right of suffrage; and the lands of Catholics were assessed double when the exigencies of the province required additional supplies.”… Nay, more: a Catholic was levelled to the condition of a pariah or a helot—he was not even allowed to walk with his fellow-citizen before the State-house. Things were carried to a point beyond endurance. No wonder the Catholics of Maryland felt relief even in the thought of fleeing from home. And yet, with these facts, admitted by all American historians, staring him in the face, the British ex-premier has dared to flaunt a lie in the face of the whole world!
Charles Carroll, Sr., died at a patriarchal age, more than four-score years. Like Simeon of old, he had long waited for the consolations of Israel, for the day when the spouse of Christ would cast aside the slave’s garb, and, emerging from American catacombs, come forth in the radiant panoply of freedom and celestial splendor. He himself never had faltered in this hope. He always felt that Mary’s land would not be forsaken by her in whose name it was first held. He saw his country free, and he rejoiced. He witnessed around him the beneficent results accruing from the influences of mother church. He raised his
hand to bless God, to bless his kin, to bless the land. But how shall we portray the emotions of his heart when no more in hiding-places, but in full noon-day, openly and freely, he saw the clean Sacrifice offered by the priests of the Most High? And when the form of his beloved son knelt before him for a last blessing, how with the father’s benedictions must have mingled feelings of pride and gratitude because even by the untiring labors of that son had the blessings of liberty to church and state been won!
It was the writer’s good-fortune, a great many years ago, to seek for rest in what, among Catholic Marylanders, was formerly known as the “Jesuit Tusculum.” In a secluded nook in Cecil County, on the Eastern Shore, lies embosomed within dense thickets and shady lanes the Bohemia Manor, a dependency of Georgetown College. When the Catholic youth of Maryland were debarred the privilege of collegiate training in their native schools, the members of the Company of Jesus had, at a very early period, opened there a boarding-school, especially for such of the American boys as would afterwards, like their persecuted peers in England, seek for a sound education and a thorough Christian training at the well-known academies of Belgium and France. Wandering through those woods, rowing over the meandering streams whose soft murmurings give life to the silent homes of the crane and gentle game, the youthful forms of the Carrolls and Brents, Dorseys and Darnells, haunted the imagination and brought one back to those days of fervent Catholic spirit, pure hearts, and high-minded youths who waxed in years and strength under the saintly training of Hudson and
Manners, Farmer and Molineux. To the care of experienced, learned, and saintly Jesuits was entrusted the training of that part of the Lord’s vineyard which, amid persecution and manifold dangers, mirrored the days of primitive Christianity.
Young Charles Carroll, who was born in 1737, was sent thither to drink the first pure waters of secular learning and Christian training. At one time well-nigh twoscore of the sons of the more fortunate colonists were there united with him at the Tusculum of the Company of Jesus.
But a day of separation dawned. Charles was in his eleventh year when not the swift steamship of our time but a laggard craft was to convey him to distant shores. He was accompanied in his journey by his cousin, John Carroll, with whom many years after he accomplished a most delicate and important mission at the command of the government. Thus he added to the ties and sympathies of blood a link of such friendships as are so apt to knit in college life and ever after congenial souls and hearts beating in unison. True, when the day arrived on which each was to enter an avenue of life that would lead to the career for which each was fitted by nature, they chose different gates, but came forth on the great drama of life to be the leaders of two generations, one in the church, the other in the state. Charles Carroll with unerring finger points to the Catholic layman the resources which he should improve for the perfect execution of his part; John Carroll has represented him who is the infallible guide of the church, becoming at the same time the model of bishop and priest, the pride and the joy of the
anointed minister of that same church in the United States.
Six years did young Carroll spend at St. Omer’s, in French Flanders, in the study of the classics of ancient and modern times under Jesuit tuition; thence he passed to Rheims; and lastly he entered the college of Louis le Grand in Paris. In the two last places he applied himself, under the guidance of learned Jesuits, to the study of logic and metaphysics, mathematics and natural sciences. When at Louis le Grand the elder Charles crossed the ocean a third time to feast his eyes and gladden his doating heart on the son who had waxed in years as well as in grace. He found the promising boy grown into a manly youth, and bade him say farewell to the charms of a life whose days glided on in unruffled peace, breathing in an atmosphere of religion and science. His intercourse there was with men whose aspirations were to the greatest glory of God, whose conversation was in heaven. These men, so noble, so learned, so perfect, had entwined the hearts of their pupils with their own.
In 1757 Charles Carroll removed to London to enter upon the study of law. Admitted to the Inner Temple, an inmate, or at least a frequenter, of those halls wherein surely the Holy Ghost did not hold an undisputed sway, the noble-minded and pure-souled Maryland youth must have felt the change to the quick. What a contrast to the simplicity of his western home at the paternal manor, the sweet influences and innocent life at the Bohemian Tusculum, and in the blessed halls of Bruges and St. Omer’s! At the Temple he spent the five years requisite in order to be called to the bar; but
he remained in Europe until 1764, when he again set sail for his western home.
A great change had meanwhile come over the moral atmosphere of his native State. Whilst bickerings about religion were growing distasteful, a rumbling noise of threatened disasters in the distance drew the hearts of the colonists together. Indistinct and sombre figures of enemies lurking around the premises counselled measures of internal peace, equal distribution of civil rights, and a unity of sentiments and aims as the only hope of averting ruin and of conquering a powerful foe. Ties of friendship were strengthened, measures of concerted action were discussed, whilst religious questions were laid aside, and arrogant claims of superior rights on the part of non-Catholics forgotten, in the presence of an impending danger; the more so because it was felt that there was a party brooding in their midst which was in accord with the enemy outside.
When the boy left the land of his birth, and the prow of the ship that bore him ploughed the waters of the Atlantic, his soul expanded with a heretofore unexperienced sentiment of liberty; for only then did he begin to feel that freely under the canopy of heaven he could practise his religion without let or hindrance, without the sneers or intermeddling of his neighbors. Add to this the anticipated enjoyment of the liberty in wait for him on the eastern lands of Catholic faith. Yet the prospective and future return to the land of bondage must from time to time have thrown shadows of sadness over the gushing and joyful youth at school. But now comes a truce to religious dissensions and family
quarrels; a victory is gained: the church is free, her shackles broken. Catholic and non-Catholic worship at the altar of their choice freely and publicly. They are all children of the same political family, members of the same moral body!
But the liberties of the colonies are crushed by the mother country, and Charles Carroll lands on these shores only in time to be one of the mourners at the funeral of liberty. His countrymen had been galled with bitterness by the contempt, insolence, and arrogance of the British soldiery, and felt a contempt for the martinet leaders of the Braddock defeat, while at the same time a feeling of superiority was engendered in their heart by the warlike qualities displayed by rank and file under the leadership of him who was already first in the hearts of his peers. They chafed at being made the hewers of wood and drawers of water to British indolence; they felt the sanctuary of their homes desecrated by the writs of assistance; their inmost souls were moved with indignation at being ordered to sacrifice their hard-earned comforts, their very subsistence, to the pleasure of a ribald soldiery. Such things could not be endured by the sons of liberty. And thus it happened that Charles Carroll was not welcomed with the cheers of a hearty greeting; he only heard the groans, the smothered curses, the oaths of vengeance deep and resolute, uttered by his oppressed fellow-colonists.
His soul was fired with wrath and zeal; but a wrath subdued by self-control, a zeal swayed by prudence. His was a self-possession that was never thrown off its guard. He seemed ever to be on the alert against surprises—a foe more fatal to armies than cannon and shot.
During the excitement of the Stamp Act Charles Carroll, who had returned from the Continent “a finished scholar and an accomplished gentleman,” was at first a silent but careful and discerning observer. He studied the tendency of events, and the moral elements on which these events should work some remarkable development. Cautious but firm, he gradually entered the lists, and then in the struggles which seemed so unequal he fought heart and soul with that noble galaxy of Maryland patriots who, bold and undismayed, opposed an unbroken front to those first encroachments which were even countenanced by interested parties in the colony. But for a prompt resistance a breach would have been opened for such inroads into the domain of our liberties as would break down its ramparts, overwhelm our defenders, and enslave the people.
It is not necessary for us here to relate how the obnoxious law was repealed—a tardy and unwilling act of atonement (“an act of empty justice,” as McSherry well defines it); yet its revocation was hailed by the colonies with great rejoicings as the harbinger of a better rule and the dawn of a day of just polity in the home government. Surely, the rulers in the mother country had felt the temper of her children abroad; they loved her fondly as long as she proved herself a mother; woe were she to forget the ties of love and harshly deal with them!
Charles Carroll was neither blinded nor hoodwinked by this sporadic token of motherly justice. Those years of residence in England were not lost to him. He well knew the temper of the British lion, his arrogance and his treachery. Sooner or later another paroxysm of exigencies
would come over him; they must be met, cost what it may.
“Wicked is the only word which I can apply to the government of your colonies. You seem to regard them as mere material mines from whence the mother country is to extract the precious ore for her own luxury and splendor.”[151]
The victory gained and the danger averted for the nonce, Mr. Carroll devoted himself to promoting the welfare of the colony. In fact, whilst a short period of comparative peace lasted outside the colonies, Maryland was not free from internal disturbance. Two sources of disquietude were then opened—the Proclamation and the Vestry Act. Nor was the colony less annoyed by the unfaithfulness of leading merchants in Baltimore, who, goaded by thirst of money and not prompted by feelings of love for their country, had slackened in their opposition to the encroachment of the government at home. They only followed in the wake of New York and Philadelphia, and even of Boston. The love of lucre and the diseased tastes of what was then called the quality allowed the merchants of those cities to fall away from the compact entered upon with the sister colonies. To advance their interests and to satisfy a portion of the community, they forsook their principles and paid the hated tributes for proscribed commodities. But outside Baltimore the people in the counties remained firm and unshaken in their patriotism.
Charles Carroll was young in years, but ripe in judgment. The future statesman lost no opportunities. It was of the utmost importance that he should thoroughly
know the habits of his fellow-citizens and their calibre, whether he looked upon them as a distinct colony or in their relations to the other provinces; what were the materials and the resources of the whole country; what guarantees could be drawn from the past for the welfare of the future; how far or within what bounds should the liberties of the colonies be restrained; what security for the rights of conscience; were the rights of each colony to be paramount over the exigencies of the whole family of provinces?… To a mind well stored with the choicest theoretical lore it became an easy matter to trace its course and clearly see the way ahead. Thus prepared, he grappled with Charles Dulany, the champion of those who opposed the people’s claims and remonstrances. Dulany was his senior by many years, had grown up identified with the selfish interests of office-holders and of the established clergy, himself high in the councils of the government, whilst his opponent had just arrived from a long sojourn abroad, and was a “papist” enthralled and disfranchised.
The main point of dispute turned on the rights of the government of the colony to tax the people arbitrarily for the payment of officers and the support of the clergy. The history of the Proclamation, drawn up by Dulany himself, and the burial thereof amid a most solemn pageant by the freemen of Annapolis on the 14th of May, 1673, are too well known to require detailing here. It is enough to say that by general acclamation the people acknowledged Charles Carroll as their champion. He could not be selected as a delegate, enthralled as he was, but in public meetings held in Frederick, Baltimore, and Annapolis
they unanimously voted and formally tendered him the thanks of the people.
Mr. Carroll entered the lists veiled under the name of First Citizen, whilst Dulany met him in combat as Antilon—an unnecessary disguise, for he was too well known, being the patriot “who,” says McSherry, “had long stood the leading mind of Maryland.” The war was carried on in the columns of the Maryland Gazette, and Mr. Carroll sustained his character of “finished scholar and accomplished gentleman.” Never did he swerve from the high tone of a writer who was conscious of his own powers. Assailed with offensive names by his adversaries, he never descended to their level. When the real name of the First Citizen was yet unknown, the excitement created by his articles, written in a style ready and incisive, and withal most graceful, was enhanced by and received a keener zest from the stimulus of curiosity. Wonderful was the avidity with which they were sought and read. These articles fed the public spirit, inspired the people with courage, and shaped the course to be pursued not only by the colonists of Maryland, but even in sister colonies. The articles by First Citizen were held in so much esteem that Joseph Galloway, when speaker in the Pennsylvania Assembly, would copy them with his own hand, on the loan from a fortunate subscriber, and send them to Benjamin Franklin.
Thus the popular party triumphed. The party of oppression, with the established clergy at their back, was discomfited. Hammond and Paca were elected. Maryland was saved, and her saviour was Charles Carroll. Amid these controversies arose a young man, spirited,
wealthy, and highly educated, who threw himself headlong into the struggle, and, growing with its trials, became renowned in its darkest hours, and honored and cherished in its glorious success” (McSherry, p. 170). That young man, only seven-and-twenty, was already a renowned statesman.
A distinguished non-Catholic historian remarks that Charles Carroll brought to play on whatever he undertook “a decided character, stern integrity, and clear judgment.” Truly, the star of his name had reached the meridian of its course already. There it became fixed. His countrymen were guided by it during the dark days of the most perilous events, through battles and storms, dissensions and heart-burnings, the exuberancy of victories and the dejection of defeats. Thirty years, the best of his life, his whole manhood, a long manhood—for he grew old only when others cease to live—he devoted to the welfare of his country.
The life of Charles Carroll becomes at this period so entwined and blended with the history of the country that our article would swell into a portly volume were we to undertake a narrative of the details of his public career. We have endeavored to give a faithful portrait of the character of a man who is the pride of the secular history of the Catholic Church in America. It has been our aim to give a key to open the inmost recesses of that soul the noblest of the noble, that heart the purest of the pure, that mind greatest among the great. Therefore we shall only hint at the events of his public life, omnia quæ tractaturi sumus, narratione delibabimus, as Quintilian would teach us.
As foreseen, the British lion awoke from his apparent lethargy,
and with a roar and a spring he bounded anew. Stung to the quick at being, even only once, foiled in his endeavors to saddle on the colonies unjust burdens, he made renewed attempts, and the tax on the “detestable weed” was revived. The people arose in their indignation, and gave vent to it in the hazardous but successful festivities of the famous Boston Tea Party. Massachusetts was disfranchised. Indeed, it was the vent of a petty spite. Not the Bay State alone, but all the colonies, would soon disfranchise themselves, all in a body, and in a way of their own. But Massachusetts had given the example, and Maryland followed close in the wake. The latter even improved on the act of the former; for what had been achieved in the Boston Bay under disguise the citizens of Maryland consummated at Annapolis openly and undisguised. And yet brave Maryland had intestine troubles that engrossed her attention—troubles which were aggravated even by the fact that the abettors thereof were interested in carrying out the measures of the home government. But there shone above them the guiding star—Charles Carroll led them to victory. Undaunted and uncompromising, Mr. Carroll looked coming events in the face; and when Mr. Chase indulged in the hope that there would be no more trouble, for “had they not written down their adversaries?” he would not thus flatter himself with illusions of enduring peace. To other means they would have yet to resort. “What other means have we to resort to?” asked the other. “The bayonet,” calmly rejoined Charles Carroll. And so firm was his conviction that they should resort to arms that he held his opinion against many at home
and abroad. His reply to the Hon. Mr. Graves, M.P., who averred that six thousand soldiers would easily march from one end of the colonies to the other, is too characteristic of the statesman not to copy it here: “So they may, but they will be masters of the spot only on which they encamp. They will find naught but enemies before and around them. If we are beaten on the plains, we will retreat to our mountains and defy them. Our resources will increase with our difficulties. Necessity will force us to exertion, until, tired of combating in vain against a spirit which victory after victory cannot subdue, your armies will evacuate our soil, and your country retire, a great loser by the contest. No, sir; we have made up our minds to abide the issue of the approaching struggle, and, though much blood may be spilt, we have no doubt of our ultimate success.” In these few lines the spirit, the gallantry, the tactics, the greatness of our armies from Lexington to Yorktown are both eloquently and accurately described.
And when a second cargo of the “detestable weed” entered the waters of Maryland, the friends of Mr. Stewart, a leading merchant in the colony, to whom the brig Peggy Stewart belonged, and to whom the cargo was consigned, appealed to Charles Carroll for advice and protection. The First Citizen was ever consistent. Was not the importation an offence against the law? Was not the majesty of the people insulted? To export the tea to the West Indies or back to Europe was no adequate reparation—what if Mr. Stewart was a friend of his?… “Gentlemen, set fire to the vessel, and burn her with her cargo to the water’s edge!” With sails set and colors flying, she floated, a sheet of fire,
amid the shouts of the people on shore.
Besides the powerful promptings of a heart burning with love of country, Charles Carroll felt moved to deeds of heroism and self-defence by motives of equal, if not superior, importance. He became, nay, he seemed to feel that he was, in the hands of Providence, the chosen champion to assert Catholic rights and liberty—ay, might we not look upon him as the O’Connell of America in the eighteenth century? It can be proved beyond all doubt that the Catholics of the colonies placed great trust in him. Surely he became their representative. There was power in his name. He had become a leading genius, inspiring with wise resolves, and determination to carry them out, those valiant men of his faith who had clustered around the Father of his Country, or were admitted to the councils of the nation, or formed part of the rank and file in the American army, or had it in their power to swell with generous hands the national resources. This power of Mr. Carroll was felt even outside the pale of his own church. The case of the Peggy Stewart is one to the point.
Another and far more important illustration of his power is the following: Thomas Conway, a meteor of sinister forebodings, with his plots of disaster and ruin, has defiled a very short page of American history. Yet, brief as his career was in this country, it worked mischief. “Conway’s Cabal” is well known. It is well known how the despicable adventurer was bribed into a conspiracy against Washington in favor of an unpopular superior officer. Charles Carroll was a member of the Board of War. In that
board there was a party covertly yet powerfully at work to displace the commander-in-chief in favor of Horatio Gates. Mr. Carroll, as usual, always on his guard, watched his opportunity. He was approached cautiously and warily, even before a vote was taken. Then calmly and stoutly, yet with that rock-like firmness of his that had become proverbial, he said: “Remove General Washington, and I’ll withdraw.” Words were those pregnant with weighty consequences. Carroll was at the head, he was the representative of the Catholics. Maryland went with him; the Catholics of Pennsylvania, nine-tenths of the whole population, an element of great power, indispensable to success, were with him. The colonies needed the aid of Catholic France sadly. What if Charles Carroll withdrew to Carrollton? What if he recrossed the ocean? George Washington was not removed; and under God’s favor was not George Washington the chosen leader, the appointed conqueror, the Moses of his day, the Josue of his people? Who was there to take his place as the first over those fierce legions of sturdy and resolute assertors of a nation’s life?
We must be allowed here to transfer to these columns, in words far more eloquent and true than we could ever command, both the source and the development of the ideas to which the deeds of those two men in the infancy of the nation has given rise in our mind.
In a dialogue between himself and a mysterious apparition on the threshold of that Temple whose entrance was forbidden to the Emperor Theodosius, Frederick Faber, yet an Anglican, thus addresses his companion:
“Do you not think that we should
be in a more healthy state if there were a greater indifference to politics amongst us?”
“No,” replied he; “I know of no indifference which is healthy, except indifference to money. The church has a great duty to perform in politics. It is to menace, to thwart, to interfere. The Catholic statesman is a sort of priest. He does out in public the secular work of the retired and praying priesthood; and he must not be deserted by those spiritual men whom he is arduously, wearily, and through evil report conscientiously representing.”
Could modern publicist ever utter words more squarely tallying with the circumstances of our own times?
We have followed our hero only to the performance of his first acts in the great drama in which the Ruler of nations had appointed him to bear such important parts. Charles Carroll, in his adjuncts and circumstances, as regards both his cast of religion and politics, stood alone among his peers. Much he had to destroy ere he could build. But he addressed himself to his work with well-appointed tools, a clear mind, a steady hand, a glowing heart, and an immovable reliance in Him who hath said that “unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it; unless the Lord keep the city, he watcheth in vain that keepeth it” (Ps. cxxvi.) Thus appointed, he never faltered. On, on he advanced, step after step; stretching forth himself to those things that were before him, he pressed towards the mark, until he had received the prize.
More than onescore years and ten he labored as man never did labor for the well-being of his
country. When he had reached the sixty-fourth year of his life, and only then, he rested; he unbuckled his armor and laid it down, to enjoy the blessings which his own heart and mind had drawn on America. How beautifully were his talents apportioned, in equal distribution—thirty years of study in the best schools of Europe; thirty years of the most faithful service in the greatest work that it ever was the lot of man to be engaged in; thirty years of unruffled peace in the bosom of his family, in the home of his youth, which became the Mecca of the people, as a writer calls it—a shrine of wisdom and goodness! There “the patriarch of the nation” taught two generations; he laid before their appreciative minds the principles and inspired their grateful hearts with those sentiments of Christian polity of which he himself was such a shining ornament and faithful embodiment.
We well remember how, in days long passed away, old men who had known him in the days of his manhood were wont to speak of him; how that heart, so noble and so pure, fondly watched the healthy growth of that tree of liberty to plant which he himself had lent a strong hand. These men would tell how the ripe and veteran statesman felt as much zest in the enjoyment of surrounding events as when, a boy and a youth, he applied himself to literary studies, or pursued the more arduous acquisition of scientific lore in the halls of philosophy or in those of law and jurisprudence. His was an equanimity of character seldom witnessed in man. And that placid, calm bearing which made his countenance the mirror of a soul preserved in patience and perfect in self-control never forsook him to the very last
hours of his life. A very old member of the Company of Jesus, a professor and superior of the Georgetown University, has more than once related, within hearing of the writer, that the appearance of Charles Carroll riding into the college enclosure, on a docile and yet lively pony, when the great patriot had already overstepped the fourscore years of life, conveyed the impression of a youthful and innocent old age, so full of charm and gravity, pensiveness and gayety, authority and condescension, that it was felt indeed, but could not be described. It was the reflection of a past without reproach, and of a future without fear. His very carriage, the manner of his conversation, were an embodiment of his last words: “In the practice of the Catholic religion the happiness of my life was established!” Holy words! Sublime expression of the hopes of Christianity! May the example of such a man never fail, and be for ever the mould in which the young American spirit should be cast! Providence seems to have granted him so long an existence because he was the purest of the Revolutionary patriots, and he wished his example to last the longest!
After his death no page was ever written to vindicate his character or plead in behalf of one single shortcoming! No word of merciful forgiveness was heard at his grave. His peers, his descendants, had naught to forgive. With one voice of acclamation from one end of the country to the other, amid wreaths of unspotted lilies and fragrant roses, his name was emblazoned on the fair escutcheon of the American nation as the name of
THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT WITHOUT FEAR AND WITHOUT REPROACH.
On the shield of this untrammelled
and free American Church let two names for ever be emblazoned with undying fame—John and Charles Carroll; one the father of his clergy, the other the leader of his people; John Carroll, the first vicar-apostolic, the first American bishop; Charles Carroll, a signer of our Magna Charta, the assertor and defender of those rights which shall for ever be the palladium of religious freedom. Could a line of conduct be laid before us in more unmistakable words and surer meaning?
Not by the ties of blood alone were those two souls knit to one another, like David and Jonathan of yore; but inspired with love of country, and deep, holy, unswerving affection for the church, they fully appreciated the resources, moral and physical, which with proper culture would make of this land a favorite portion of the mystical Vineyard and the asylum for the oppressed. John within the sacred enclosure of God’s tabernacle, Charles in the halls of legislation, they worked in different departments, yet with one accord, the former to give the great garden fit husbandmen, and provide it with every appurtenance in nurseries of virtue and learning; the latter to lead the instincts born with a people, purified by trials and trained to justice, into a current which, swelling in its course within the bounds of Christian discipline, would, the one directing, strengthening, hallowing the other, run to endless days in great majesty and overwhelming power.
Charles outlived the archbishop by many years, and witnessed the triumphs of the Redeemer’s spouse to the achievement of which his great kinsman had devoted the resources of his extraordinary mind, the most tender and inviolate
affections of his exuberant heart, and the untiring exertions of a long apostleship.
And here we feel as if we may lay down our pen and look upon our task as accomplished. We have endeavored to be the faithful limner of a character noblest among the noble, the pride and the guide of our Catholic laity in the American Church.
How grand that figure loometh in the galaxy of our greatest men! Great and grand, pure, unselfish, guileless, wise, loving, he stands on a pedestal of imperishable renown, religion blended with wisdom, charity with prudence, firmness with condescension!… When shall we look upon his like again? Yea, the memory of his deeds is fresh, and his many virtues as a Christian and as a statesman are even mirrored in the lives of many noble, devoted, valiant followers—bright examples of true patriotism and golden righteousness to our rising youth, on whose stern vigor, unfaltering courage, and sterling virtues mother church will lean for comfort and defence—a youth called, may be, to fight even fiercer battles than our great ancestor, their shining model, had to meet; battles that will need stout hearts, level minds, souls prompt in bold resolves. But the God of yesterday is the God of to-day; and with Charles Carroll in the van our gallant youth will advance to the battle, sure also of the victory.
[148] The medal of which the above is an engraving gives its own history. It was struck, we are informed at the expense of the Carroll family. It was suggested long since that if the fiftieth anniversary of American Independence was so befittingly honored by thin tribute of love and heartfelt gratitude of a whole nation to the only survivor of the signers, and he a Catholic, it would be dulce et decorum for the Catholics of these United States to restrike it for distribution, and as a lively reminder on the dawn of the hundredth anniversary. Nor would it be a difficult or costly undertaking. We are told the die is still preserved, although not at the mint. The only alteration should occur in the legend of the reverse, thus: d. Nov. 14, 1832, æt. 98. The exergue should read: July IV. MDCCCLXXVI.
[149] “We enter upon the second century of the republic with responsibilities which neither our fathers nor the men of fifty years ago could possibly foresee.” Again: “This enormous influx of strangers has added an immense ignorance and entire unfamiliarity with republican ideas and habits to the voting class.” And: “It has introduced powerful and organized influences not friendly to the republican principle of freedom of thought and action,” etc.—Geo. W. Curtis, LL.D., of New York, oration before the town authorities of Concord, Mass., April 19, 1875. Printed by permission. The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. xxix., October, 1875.—Strange that Mr. Curtis should have forgotten the foreign influx among the signers! Yet Thornton was born in Ireland; Smith also, Taylor also; Lewis in Wales; Witherspoon near Edinburgh; Morris in Lancashire, England; Wilson in Scotland; Gwinnett in England. Strange that of fifty-nine signers so many should be strangers, besides those who were born of foreigners! And strange that the most refined and elegant civilians George Washington associated with in Philadelphia were Irishmen. And was not that a strange influx of Nesbitt saving Washington’s army from starvation? And what of the $25,000 that Barclay gave, and the $50,000 given by McClenaghan, etc., etc.?—an influx in infinitum. The influx worked well a hundred years ago; fear not, it will work well even now, but keep demagogues and false patriots aside. Yet on what side are most of them to be found?
[150] Hence sprung the qualification added to the name of Daniel’s grandson. When Charles, as one of the members delegated by the State of Maryland to attend the Convention in Philadelphia, advanced on the 2d of August, 1776, to the secretary’s desk to sign his name to the Declaration, allusion was made to the great wealth of the Maryland delegate, who would thereby jeopardize it all. “But,” remarked a bystander “it will be hard to identify; are there not several Charles Carrolls?”
“Ah! yes,” rejoined the signer; and dipping the pen anew in that famous ink-stand, with that noble grace of person so peculiar to him, he bent over the parchment once more, and added, of Carrollton. Surely Carrollton was the only manor of that name, and our Charles was the only master thereof. Hence the qualification which has since become useless—Charles Carroll of Carrollton. In our days the great American family knows only one Charles Carroll.
[151] A supernatural interlocutor in Father Faber’s Sights and Thoughts. London: Rivingtons, 1842, p. 181.