How very wrong, you think?
Well, perhaps so;—we will talk of the wrongs and the rights of it presently. One of quite the most curious facts bearing upon them is that the very strict queen (the mother of Cœur-de-Lion) who poisoned the Rose of Woodstock and the world for her improper conduct, had herself presided at the great court of judgment held by the highest married ladies of Christian Europe, which re-examined, and finally re-affirmed, the decree of the Court of Love, held under the presidency of Ermengarde, Countess of Narbonne;—decree, namely, that “True love cannot exist between married persons.”[4] Meantime let me finish what I have mainly to tell you of the divine Astrophel. You hear by the general character first given of him that he was as good a soldier as a lover, and being about to take part in a skirmish in the Netherlands,—in which, according to English history, five hundred, or a few more, English, entirely routed three thousand Dutchmen,—as he was going into action, meeting the marshal of the camp lightly armed, he must needs throw off his own cuishes, or thigh armour, not to have an unfair advantage of him; and after having so led three charges, and had one horse killed under him and mounted another, “he was struck by a musket shot a little above his left knee, which brake and rifted the bone, and entered the thigh upward; whereupon he unwillingly left the field,” (not without an act of gentleness, afterwards much remembered, to a poor soldier, wounded also;) and, after lingering sixteen days in severe and unceasing pain, “which he endured with all the fortitude and resignation of a Christian, symptoms of mortification, the certain forerunner of death, at length appeared; which he himself being the first to perceive, was able nevertheless to amuse his sick-bed by composing an ode on the nature of his wound, which he caused to be sung to solemn music, as an entertainment that might soothe and divert his mind from his torments; and on the 16th October breathed his last breath in the arms of his faithful secretary and bosom companion, Mr. William Temple, after giving this charge to his own brother: “Love my memory; cherish my friends. Their faith to me may assure you they are honest. But above all govern your will and affections by the will and word of your Creator,[5] in me beholding the end of this world, with all its vanities.”
Thus died, for England, and a point of personal honour, in the thirty-second year of his age, Sir Philip Sidney, whose name perhaps you have heard before, as well as that of his aunt-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, for whose capital punishment, as well as that of the Duke of Northumberland, (his grandfather,) his mother, as above stated, was in mourning when he was born.
And Spenser broke off his Faëry Queen, for grief, when he died; and all England went into mourning for him; which meant, at that time, that England was really sorry, and not that an order had been received from Court.
16th October. (St. Michael’s.)—I haven’t got my goose-pie made, after all; for my cook has been ill, and, unluckily, I’ve had other things as much requiring the patronage of St. Michael, to think of. You suppose, perhaps, (the English generally seem to have done so since the blessed Reformation,) that it is impious and Popish to think of St. Michael with reference to any more serious affair than the roasting of goose, or baking thereof; and yet I have had some amazed queries from my correspondents, touching the importance I seem to attach to my pie; and from others, questioning the economy of its construction. I don’t suppose a more savoury, preservable, or nourishing dish could be made, with Michael’s help, to drive the devil of hunger out of poor men’s stomachs, on the occasions when Christians make a feast, and call to it the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the blind. But, putting the point of economy aside for the moment, I must now take leave to reply to my said correspondents, that the importance and reality of goose-pie, in the English imagination, as compared with the unimportance and unreality of the archangel Michael, his name, and his hierarchy, are quite as serious subjects of regret to me as to them; and that I believe them to be mainly traceable to the loss of the ideas, both of any ‘arche,’ beginning, or princedom of things, and of any holy or hieratic end of things; so that, except in eggs of vermin, embryos of apes, and other idols of genesis enthroned in Mr. Darwin’s and Mr. Huxley’s shrines, or in such extinction as may be proper for lice, or double-ends as may be discoverable in amphisbaenas, there is henceforward, for man, neither alpha nor omega,—neither, beginning nor end, neither nativity nor judgment; no Christmas Day, except for pudding; no Michaelmas, except for goose; no Dies Iræ, or day of final capital punishment, for anything; and that, therefore, in the classical words of Ocellus Lucanus, quoted by Mr. Ephraim Jenkinson, “Anarchon kai atelutaion to pan.”
There remains, however, among us, very strangely, some instinct of general difference between the abstractedly angelic, hieratic, or at least lord- and lady-like character;—and the diabolic, non-hieratic, or slave- and (reverse-of-lady-) like character. Instinct, which induces the ‘London Journal,’ and other such popular works of fiction, always to make their heroine, whether saint or poisoner, a ‘Lady’ something; and which probably affects your minds not a little in connection with the question of capital punishment; so that when I told you just now who Sir Philip’s aunt was, perhaps you felt as if I had cheated you by the words of my first reference to her, and would say to yourselves, “Well, but Lady Jane Grey wasn’t hanged!”
No; she was not hanged; nor crucified, which was the most vulgar of capital punishments in Christ’s time; nor kicked to death, which you at present consider the proper form of capital punishment for your wives; nor abused to death, which the mob will consider the proper form of capital punishment for your daughters,[6] when Mr. John Stuart Mill’s Essay on Liberty shall have become the Gospel of England, and his statue be duly adored.
She was only decapitated, in the picturesque manner represented to you by Mr. Paul de la Roche in that charming work of modern French art which properly companions the series of Mr. Gerome’s deaths of duellists and gladiators, and Mr. Gustave Doré’s pictures of lovers, halved, or quartered, with their hearts jumping into their mistresses’ laps. Of all which pictures, the medical officer of the Bengalee-Life-insurance Society would justly declare that “even in an anatomical point of view, they were—per-fection.”
She was only decapitated, by a man in a black mask, on a butcher’s block; and her head rolled into sawdust,—if that’s any satisfaction to you. But why on earth do you care more about her than anybody else, in these days of liberty and equality?