Of the five hundred members who sat round him at St. Stephen’s, he was the one man who had clearly foreseen, and as clearly resolved how to meet, the difficulties which lay before them. It was certain that Parliament would be drawn into a struggle with the Crown. It was probable that in such a struggle the House of Commons would be hampered, as it had been hampered before, by the House of Lords. The legal antiquaries of the older constitutional school stood helpless before such a conflict of co-ordinate powers—a conflict for which no provision had been made by the law, and on which precedents threw only a doubtful and conflicting light. But, with a knowledge of precedent as great as their own, Pym rose high above them in his grasp of constitutional principles. He was the first English statesman who discovered, and applied to the political circumstances around him, what may be called the doctrine of constitutional proportion. He saw that, as an element of constitutional life, Parliament was of higher value than the Crown; he saw, too, that in Parliament itself the one essential part was the House of Commons. On these two facts he based his whole policy in the contest which followed.
When Charles refused to act with the Parliament, Pym treated the refusal as a temporary abdication on the part of the sovereign, which vested the executive power in the two Houses until new arrangements were made. When the Lords obstructed public business, he warned them that obstruction would only force the Commons “to save the kingdom alone.” Revolutionary as these principles seemed at the time, they have both been recognized as bases of our constitution since the days of Pym. The first principle was established by the Convention and Parliament which followed on the departure of James II; the second by the acknowledgement on all sides, since the Reform Bill of 1832, that the government of the country is really in the hands of the House of Commons, and can only be carried on by ministers who represent the majority of that House. Pym’s temper, indeed, was the very opposite of the temper of a revolutionist. Few natures have ever been wider in their range of sympathy or action.
Serious as his purpose was, his manners were genial, and even courtly; he turned easily from an invective against Strafford to a chat with Lady Carlisle; and the grace and gayety of his social tone, even when the care and weight of public affairs were bringing him to the grave, gave rise to a hundred silly scandals among the prurient royalists. It was this striking combination of genial versatility with a massive force in his nature which marked him out from the first moment of power as a born ruler of men. He proved himself at once the subtlest of diplomatists and the grandest of demagogues. He was equally at home in tracking the subtle intricacies of royalist intrigues, or in kindling popular passion with words of fire. Though past middle life when his work really began—for he was born in 1584, four years before the coming of the Armada—he displayed from the first meeting of the Long Parliament the qualities of a great administrator, an immense faculty for labor, a genius for organization, patience, tact, a power of inspiring confidence in all whom he touched, calmness and moderation under good fortune or ill, an immovable courage, an iron will. No English ruler has ever shown greater nobleness of natural temper or a wider capacity for government than the Somersetshire squire, whom his enemies, made clear-sighted by their hate, greeted truly enough as “King Pym.”
HENRY IV, KING OF FRANCE.
By JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.
[First French king of the Bourbon family, born king of Navarre 1553, assassinated 1610. Educated a Huguenot, he, as representing this religious party, was married to Marguerite de Valois, the sister of Charles IX, to signalize the pretended reconciliation of religious differences, a few days before the massacre of St. Bartholomew. For four years he was detained at the French court and compelled to abjure his faith, till he succeeded in escaping and putting himself at the head of the Protestant forces. After a life of remarkable vicissitudes, Henry of Navarre became de jure king of France as the next of surviving blood after Henry III, but was not crowned till 1794, at which time he, for political reasons, again and finally abjured Protestantism. Paris, and shortly afterward the whole of France, then submitted to his rule. During his reign of sixteen years Henry showed the highest qualities of the great ruler, and his genius promised to make him as powerful a potentate as Charles V had been, when he fell by the knife of the assassin Ravaillac.]
At his very name a figure seems to leap forth from the mist of three centuries, instinct with ruddy, vigorous life. Such was the intense vitality of the Bearnese prince, that even now he seems more thoroughly alive and recognizable than half the actual personages who are fretting their hour upon the stage.
We see at once a man of moderate stature, light, sinewy, and strong; a face browned with continual exposure; small, mirthful, yet commanding blue eyes, glittering from beneath an arching brow, and prominent cheek-bones; a long, hawk’s nose, almost resting upon a salient chin; a pendent mustache, and a thick, brown, curly beard, prematurely grizzled; we see the mien of frank authority and magnificent good-humor; we hear the ready sallies of the shrewd Gascon mother-wit; we feel the electricity which flashes out of him and sets all hearts around him on fire, when the trumpet sounds to battle. The headlong, desperate charge, the snow-white plume waving where the fire is hottest, the large capacity for enjoyment of the man, rioting without affectation in the certaminis gaudia, the insane gallop, after the combat, to lay its trophies at the feet of the Cynthia of the minute, and thus to forfeit its fruits—all are as familiar to us as if the seven distinct wars, the hundred pitched battles, the two hundred sieges, in which the Bearnese was personally present, had been occurrences of our own day.
He at last was both king and man, if the monarch who occupied the throne was neither. He was the man to prove, too, for the instruction of the patient letter-writer of the Escorial,[24] that the crown of France was to be won with foot in stirrup and carbine in hand, rather than to be caught by the weaving and casting of the most intricate nets of diplomatic intrigue, though thoroughly weighted with Mexican gold.
The king of Navarre was now thirty-one years old; for the three Henrys were nearly of the same age. The first indications of his existence had been recognized amid the cannon and trumpets of a camp in Picardy, and his mother had sung a gay Bearnese song as he was coming into the world at Pau. “Thus,” said his grandfather, Henry of Navarre, “thou shalt not bear to us a morose and sulky child.” The good king without a kingdom, taking the child as soon as born in the lappel of his dressing-gown, had brushed his infant lips with a clove of garlic and moistened them with a drop of generous Gascon wine. “Thus,” said the grandfather again, “shall the boy be both merry and bold.” There was something mythologically prophetic in the incidents of his birth.
The best part of Navarre had been long since appropriated by Ferdinand of Aragon. In France there reigned a young and warlike sovereign with four healthy boys. But the newborn infant had inherited the lilies of France from St. Louis, and a later ancestor had added to the escutcheon the motto “Espoir.” His grandfather believed that the boy was born to revenge upon Spain the wrongs of the house of Albret, and Henry’s nature seemed ever pervaded with Robert of Clermont’s device.