That we e’er saw Irish land.
He turned his charger as he spake
Beside the river shore:
He gave his bridle rein a shake,
Cried “Adieu for evermore, my love;
Adieu for evermore.”
The Hanoverians have been good enough constitutional monarchs but without much appeal to the imagination. “I never can think of that German fellow as King of England,” says Harry Warrington in “The Virginians,” who has just been snubbed by George II, the sovereign who hated “boetry and bainting.” The Stuarts were bad kings, but they managed to inspire a passionate loyalty in their adherents, a devotion which went proudly into battle, into exile, and onto the scaffold: which followed them through their misfortunes and survived their final downfall. They were a native, or at least a Scottish dynasty; and Scotland, though upon the whole Presbyterian in religion and Whiggish in politics, was most tenacious of the Jacobite tradition. Consider the loss to British romance if the Stuarts had never reigned and sinned and suffered! Half of the Waverley novels and all the royalist songs, from Lovelace toasting in prison “the sweetness, mercy, majesty, and glories of his King,” down to Burns’s “Lament for Culloden” and the secret healths to “Charlie over the water.” Three centuries divide Chastelard, dying for Mary Stuart, from Walter Scott, paralytic, moribund, standing by the tomb of the Young Pretender in St. Peter’s and murmuring to himself of “Charlie and his men.” Nay, is there not even to-day a White Rose Society which celebrates yearly the birthday of St. Charles, the martyr: some few score gentlemen with their committees, organs, propaganda, still bent on dethroning the Hanoverians and bringing in some remote collateral descendant? thinnest ghost of legitimism, walking in the broad sunlight of the twentieth century, under the nose of crown and parliament, disregarded of all men except, here and there, a writer of humorous paragraphs for the newspapers?
For the passion of loyalty is extinct—extinct as the dodo. It was not patriotism, as we know it; nor was it the personal homage paid to great men, to the Cromwells, Washingtons, Bonapartes, and Bismarcks. It was a loyalty to the king as king, to a symbol, a fetich whom divinity doth hedge. In the political creed of the Stuarts, such homage was a prerogative of the crown, and right royally did they exact it, accepting all sacrifices and repaying them with neglect, ingratitude, and betrayal. Yes, loyalty is obsolete, and the Stuarts were unworthy of it. But no matter, it was a fine old passion.
After all, one of the finest things ever said of Charles I was said by a political opponent, the poet Andrew Marvell, Milton’s assistant in the secretaryship for foreign tongues, when speaking of the King’s dignified behavior upon the scaffold, he wrote:—
He nothing common did or mean,