"How am I griev'd,"
she cries out,
"The world should everywhere Be vext into a storme save only here, Thou over-lucky, too much happy Ile! Grow more desirous of this flatt'ring style For thy long health can never alter'd be But by thy surfets on Felicitie."[221]
After these words, which surely might have been spoken by the lying spirit in the mouth of the prophets of Ahab, the Queen came forward to be greeted by an outburst of triumphant loyalty:—
"But what is she that rules the night That kindles Ladies with her light And gives to Men the power of sight? All those that can her Virtue doubt Her mind will in her face advise, For through the Casements of her Eyes Her Soule is ever looking out.
"And with its beames, she doth survay Our growth in Virtue or decay, Still lighting us in Honours way! All that are good she did inspire! Lovers are chaste, because they know It is her will they should be so, The valiant take from her their Fire!"
The masque "was generally approved of, specially by all strangers that were present, to be the noblest and most ingenious that hath been done heere in that kind." When, in future days, some of the company looked back upon that evening, its festivities must have seemed to them as one of the jests of him whom Heine called the Aristophanes of Heaven.
But these revels were only an interlude; Charles was not a man to fiddle while Rome was burning, and he turned to grapple as best he could with the problem before him. The country was rushing on to meet its fate: the topic of the hour was that of the Parliament, to the holding of which the King was finally persuaded by a new counsellor; Strafford[222] had crossed St. George's Channel and had entered on the last and most remarkable stage of his career.
It is thought that when years later Milton drew his portrait of the great apostate of heaven, he had in his mind this man who was to many the great apostate of earth: that character of inevitable greatness which is in the Miltonic Satan is also in the royalist statesman, who scorned the weaker spirits of his time, much as the fiend despised the weaker spirits of heaven and hell. Neither Charles nor Henrietta had ever truly loved him. Greatness disturbs and frightens smaller minds, and the Queen had other reasons to regard him coldly. He was not handsome (though she noted and remembered years after his death that he had the most beautiful hands in the world), he was unversed in the courtier-like arts which she loved, he was the friend of Spain rather than of France, and above all his policy in Ireland was strongly anti-Catholic. Nevertheless, experience and trouble were opening her eyes. Lady Carlisle, Strafford's close friend, had done something to prepare his way with the Queen, and the sense of common danger was coming to complete her work.