"Oui! oui! Say merci, and go."
"Merci, Monsieur," the boy answered. And then to us with a solemn nod. "J'ai eu sa Majesté for my chevaux!"
"Cheval! Cheval!" corrected the gentleman in black. "And be off."
[CHAPTER XXIV]
Apprised by what I heard, not only that I stood in the Gallery of Kensington Court--a mansion which His Majesty had lately bought from Lord Nottingham, and made his favourite residence--but that the gentleman in black whom I had found so simply employed was no other than the King himself, I ask you to imagine with what interest I looked upon him. He whom the old King of France had dubbed in bitter derision, the "Little Squire of ----," and whom two revolutions had successfully created Stadtholder of Holland and Sovereign of these Isles, was at this time forty-six years old, already prematurely bent, and a prey to the asthma which afflicted his later life. Reserved in manner, and sombre, not to say melancholy, in aspect, hiding strong passions behind a pale mask of stoicism as chilling to his friends as it was baffling to his enemies, he was such as a youth spent under the eyes of watchful foes, and a manhood in the prosecution of weighty and secret designs, made him. Descended on the one side from William the Silent, on the other from the great Henry of France, he was thought to exhibit, in more moderate degree, the virtues and failings which marked those famous princes, and to represent, not in blood only, but in his fortunes, the two soldiers of the sixteenth century whose courage in disaster and skill in defeat still passed for a proverb; who, frequently beaten in the field, not seldom garnered the fruits of the campaign, and rose, Antæus-like, the stronger from every fall.
That, in all stations, as a private person, a Stadtholder and a King, his late Majesty remembered the noble sources whence he sprang, was proved, I think, not only by the exactness with which his life was wrought to the pattern of those old mottoes of his house, Sœvus tranquillus in Undis, and Tandem fit Surculus arbor, whereof the former was borne, I have read, by the Taciturn, and the latter by Maurice of Nassau--but of two other particulars of which I beg leave to mention. The first was that more majorum he took naturally and from the first the lead as the champion of the Protestant religion in Europe; the second, that though he had his birth in a republic, and was called to be King by election (so that it was no uncommon thing for some of his subjects to put slights upon him as little more than their equal--ay, and though he had to bear such affronts in silence), he had the true spirit and pride of a King born in the purple, and by right divine. Insomuch that many attributed to this the gloom and reserve of his manners; maintaining that these were assumed less as a shield against the malice of his enemies, than as a cloak to abate the familiarity of his friends.
And certainly some in speaking of him of late years belittle his birth no less than his exploits, when they call him Dutch William, and the like; speaking in terms unworthy of a sovereign, and as if he had drawn his blood from that merchant race, instead of--as the fact was--from the princely houses of Stuart, Bourbon, Nassau, and Medici; and from such ancestors as the noble Coligny and King Charles the Martyr. But of his birth, enough.
For the rest, having a story to tell, and not history to write, I refrain from recalling how great he was as a statesman, how resourceful as a strategist, how indomitable as a commander, how valiant when occasion required in the pitched field. Nor is it necessary, seeing that before the rise of my Lord Marlborough (who still survives, but alas, quantum mutatus ab illo!) he had no rival in any of these capacities, nor in the first will ever be excelled.
Nor, as a fact, looking on him in the flesh as I then did for the first time, can I say that I saw anything to betoken greatness, or the least outside evidence of the fiery spirit that twice in two great wars stayed all the power of Louis and of France; that saved Holland; that united all Europe in three great leagues; finally, that leaping the bounds of the probable, won a kingdom, only to hold it cheap, and a means to farther ends. I say I saw in him not the least trace of this, but only a plain, thin, grave, and rather peevish gentleman, in black and a large wig, who coughed much between his words, spoke with a foreign accent, and often lapsed into French or some strange tongue.
He waited until the door had fallen to behind the child, and the long gallery lay silent, and then bade my lord speak. "I breathe better here," he said. "I hate small rooms. What is the news you have brought?"