His ambitious, lofty, and reserved spirit tasted great agony while he waited through the long days of early spring, tramping his chamber in the Tower–he who had hoped to make England great–and here was England howling for his life and honours … here was John Pym and his fanatic followers triumphant.
“What is left? Can the great spirit rise to the great crisis? Having proudly lived, can I proudly die? Can I still serve England–now?”
The King was firm, and public feeling rose to a panic of excitement. Revolution was on the point of shaking the very palace. The Queen, with a baseness doubly vile in a woman, used her arts to wrest death from Strafford for her husband, vowed with tears to flee to France. The Bishop of Lincoln urged that the needs and desires of the nation were more than a mere private promise.
But the King was firm; he would not sign the death warrant of Strafford.
Then the Queen, potent for mischief, wrought on the King, since he was obstinate on that point, to save his servant by violent means. The distracted Charles took her fatal advice and endeavoured to seize the Tower of London by force by means of the troops lately raised by the Queen.
This attempt on the keys of the kingdom threw the nation, already in a ferment, into a tumult of wrath and fear, and Lord Strafford was lost.
The wildfire of party zeal inflamed men into believing anything desperate of the King; thrice the members of the House of Commons fled on a cracking of the floor, thinking they had trod again over gunpowder as in the former reign. There was nothing too monstrous to be stated, nor too extravagant to be believed.
But the King would not sign the death warrant of his friend and servant; he was supported by the Bishop of London, who bade him listen to his conscience rather than to the fierce demands of party. Amid all the press of turning strife one man was calm–the prisoner in the Tower who saw every day how he had failed in his scheme of government and how he had been the means of embroiling the King with the people instead of establishing a great man over a great nation and making a light in Europe of Charles Stewart.
Of all bitter failures, what can be more bitter than that of a great statesman who hugely stakes and hugely loses beyond redemption, beyond hope? The proud dark-faced man who had stood so high and dreamt so daringly had his vigils of anguish during those long May days and nights in the old Tower already darkened with noble blood and the memory of splendid sufferers. He had lost everything but his life, and that hung on the promise of the King. My lord did not doubt that his master would keep that promise; but what was mere life to a man who only valued existence as it meant use, power, achievement?