“Must crimes be punished but by other crimes, and greater criminals?”—Byron.
But as a force in favor of constitutional government and civic liberty, however abused in immediate practice; and as a threatening protest against the abuse of power in high places; and as a veiled challenge of defiance to every absolute monarch—the battle fought June 14, 1645, at Naseby, Northamptonshire, between the Royalists under Charles I. and the Parliamentarians under Fairfax must ever be considered a victory decisive and for all time advantageous.
Queen Henrietta Maria.
Henrietta Maria was the daughter of Henry IV. of France, the first Bourbon, and his second wife, Maria de Medici. At the age of fifteen she was married to Charles I. of England; and her best and happiest years as wife, mother, and Queen were spent in England.
In this princess many of the leading Italian, French and English characteristics were met and happily blended. Her dark, lithe beauty (as shown in her portrait by Van Dyke), her musical ability, instrumental and vocal, her fiery-hearted fidelity to the religion of her mother, were, perhaps, her heritage from sunny Italy; the France of Richelieu might, as an environment, conduce favorably to that diplomatic waywardness which, in early years, invariably won for the sweet girl-wife whatsoever her heart might desire; but perhaps from England, land of realism, chilly fogs, and Cromwellian barbarity, she imbibed her sturdy spirit of fortitude and heroic endurance of sorrow.
“To bear is to conquer our fate”, and to refuse to bear and to apparently end all by self-destruction, is to fail to conquer our fate.
The hopes and promises of religion are of inestimable value as an aid in the endurance of sorrows. When the dread culmination of all earthly fears and horrors—the beheading of Charles I.—clashed full upon the widowed heart of Queen Henrietta Maria, she withdrew at once from the court of Paris and sought solace in seclusion and prayer. The convent, not the court; the divine, not the human; the hopes and promises of religion as red-glowed in the sanctuary of a Carmelite convent chapel, held the balm that soothed her wounded soul in that awful culminant woe.
Which is better—to bear or to fail to bear? to hope and endure or despair and die? to pray and bless God saying, The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord, or to wither away in cursing and impotent hate? to believe and grow strongly peaceful in the belief that God is good and all is for the best; that all is little and short that passes away with time; that God’s explanation shall exultingly explain forever and ever—or to doubt, negative, deny, and bitterly live and despairingly die? Even as a matter of merely human wisdom, it is well to believe in the hopes and promises of religion.
The monastic sanctuaries that arise wherever the Catholic Church flourishes, and that lure into their prayerful solitudes the “hearts that are heavy with losses and weary with dragging the crosses too heavy for mortals to bear” are surely indicative of a far higher and happier state of society than that whose godless defiance finds suicidal expression in the insidious drug, the deadly acid, the desperate bullet.
The houses of Euthanasia of the near Socialistic future are surely as stones unto bread in comparison with the monastic sanctuaries of the Middle Ages.