It was the revolt of his beloved son Conrad which crushed to the earth the emperor Henry IV. What Dean Milman calls “the almost fatal effect” of his conduct on his father, can only be ascribed to profound affection, deeply, cruelly, wantonly wounded. “The revolt of Conrad seemed to crush the aged Emperor to the earth. He had borne all the vicissitudes of his earlier life with unbroken courage, he had risen from his humiliation at Canosa with refreshed energy; he now abandoned himself to despair, threw off the robes and insignia of royalty, and was hardly prevented by his friends from falling on his own sword.”—There is a spice of the et tu Brute bitterness in Becket’s exclamation to John of Poitiers, when even that most ardent of his admirers followed him to Etampes, and implored him to yield. “And you too,” cried the primate, in a pang of wrath, “will you strangle us”—ut quid nos et vos strangulatis?—The great Emperor Frederick II. reproached Pope Gregory IX., in the height of their contest, as having been, while in the lower orders of the Church, his familiar friend; but that no sooner had he reached the height of his ambition than he threw off all gratitude, and became his determined foe.—When Queen Elizabeth broke out on a party of the peers for urging her whither she would not, Norfolk she as good as called traitor and conspirator, and Pembroke she said talked like a foolish soldier; but to Leicester it was that she exclaimed, “You, my lord, you! If all the world forsook me I thought that you would be true!”—Charles I.’s celebrated letter to Prince Rupert after the loss of Bristol, depriving him of his command, begins with assuring him that the surrender, in such a manner, and by his trusted, no longer trusty nephew, of that most important city, was the greatest trial of his constancy that had yet befallen him: “For what is to be done, after one that is so near me as you are, both in blood and friendship, submits himself to so mean an action (I give it the easiest term)? such—I have so much to say, that I will say no more of it.” The tone is that of the duke in Mr. Browning’s Colombe’s Birthday:
“Ah, the first bitterness is over now!
Bitter I may have felt it to confront
The truth, and ascertain those natures’ value
I had so counted on—that was a pang.”
Corneille, in his historical tragedy of Cinna, treats in a like strain the effect upon Augustus of the discovered conspiracy:
“Quoi! mes plus chers amis! quoi! Cinna! quoi! Maxime!
Les deux que j’honorais d’une si haute estime,
A qui j’ouvrais mon cœur, et dont j’avais fait choix
Pours les plus importants et plus nobles emplois!