VAGABONDS IN KINGLY ROBES.
Roll back the hoary gates of the past, and look at Richard Crookback, who reveled in blood, and died in Bosworth Ditch, a death only a little better than that of Edward IV, whose children Richard basely murdered, and we find succeeding him a scoundrel like the Eighth Henry, a brutal fiend, with his six successive wives, all of whom perished miserably, but the first and last wives, Catharine of Arragon and Catharine Parr; and then we find his two children—Mary, an honest fanatic, burning human beings for the honor of God; and next comes Elizabeth, who has been facetiously styled the Virgin Queen—with her paramours and favorites. Follow this hideous old spinster to the yawning verge of the tomb, and she is still to be seen with her parchment visage and grey hairs, seeking new lovers, or butchering the unfortunate Queen of Scots, until at last the dread moment of all approaches, when she tells her horrified chaplain that she will give millions of money for a moment of time. Then we have a pusillanimous monarch, James I, who spends his best years discovering witches and writing fantastical and forgotten treatises against tobacco, or permitting a man like Bacon—whose life was worth that of a thousand Kings, to be degraded and made miserable, till at last his great, far seeing eyes are closed in a final sleep—his heart having broken to pieces in the meridian of his genius.
Then comes Charles I, a good man in his mild way, a patron of the arts, a good husband and father, but withal he is doomed to the block.
Vainly he endeavors, in battle and statecraft, to stem the onward march of the people who are determined to hurl all obstacles from their path which stand in the way of their new ideas.
And now comes up the Brewer, Oliver Cromwell, one of Carlyle's heroes, (and by the way, all of Carlyle's heroes are dripping with blood,) a most accomplished and unrelenting butcher, one who thanks God for his "precious mercies" when a thousand men, women, and children are driven over a bridge into a deep river beneath, impelled by the pikes of his ruffianly soldiery. Then he dies, and Charles II, a dissolute royal scamp succeeds, and he of course has to dig up the crumbling skeleton of Cromwell to hang it on Tyburn tree, that all men may see what manner of divinity it is that should hedge around a King.
Think of this royal vagabond, who has for his mistress a Stewart, a Duchess of Cleveland, a Louise de Queroailles, who also becomes a Duchess of Portsmouth, and last but not least, poor simple, soft hearted Mistress Nelly Gwynne, who left to the nation Greenwich Hospital to atone for her lost soul.
It might be expected that in these days of the daily newspapers and telegraph wires, of railroads, female suffrage and personal journalism, that royalty, and notably, English royalty, would improve, from a slight sense of decency and a proper regard for public opinion, if for no other cause. Let us see.
Ten years ago I vainly endeavored to penetrate the dense masses who lined Broadway, New York, and filled the air with their shouts, as an open barouche, containing the then Mayor of the chief city of America, sitting on the back seat, and a fair faced youth with flabby skin and retreating chin, clad in a scarlet uniform and having an Order of the Garter pendant from his breast, passed up the thronged thoroughfare between two lines of citizen soldiery, whose bayonets, bright as silver, reflected back the many hues of the excited and surging masses.
Five hundred thousand people of both sexes had turned out in holiday attire, that ever memorable day, to do honor to a foreign prince, whose government, since that thoughtless hour, sought during the terrible confusion of a civil war, by every means in its power, by money, influence, by Alabama pirates, by unceasing and bitterly hostile journalistic attacks, by speeches in and out of Parliament—through the pulpit and the rostrum, to destroy the Republic of the West. In fact that government moved Heaven and Earth to annihilate and obliterate the liberty, union, and might of the American people.
Such a reception had not been given, twenty-five years before, to the gallant, noble-minded, and chivalric Lafayette, the companion of George Washington, one of the finest characters in all history, or the unwritten records of mankind.