Truly a noble woman—a true wife, a true mother, a true princess of her principality—she sought no woman’s rights, but did a woman’s duty—her duty as her absent husband’s representative—her duty as her orphaned son’s protectress—her duty as her unsovereigned people’s sovereign lady. Nobility and circumstance obliged her; and nobly she discharged the obligation.
Much as I contemn women, whom a morbid craving after notoriety and excitement urges to grasp the attire, the arms, the attributes of the other sex; in the same degree do I honor, in the same degree admire and laud, the true-hearted woman, the true heroine, who not forcing or assailing, but obeying the claims of her nature, compels her temper to put on strength instead of softness, steels herself to do what she shrinks from doing, not because she arrogates the power of doing it better than the man could do it, but because she has no man to whom she might confide the doing of it.
The hen fighting the sparrow-hawk careless of self for her defenseless brood, is a spectacle beautiful to behold, filling every heart with genuine sympathy, because her act itself is genuine; is part and parcel of her sex, her circumstances, her maternity; in a word, is the act of the God of nature. The hen gaffed and cropped and fighting mains against the males of her own family in the beastly and bloody cock-pit, is a spectacle that would make the lowest frequenter of such vile arenas shudder with disgust, would wring from his lips an honest cry of shame.
Margaret of Anjou, in Hexham forest awing the bandit into submission by the undaunted royalty of her maternal eye—the Countess of Montfort, reanimating her faint-hearted garrisons, even by donning on steel harness for “her young child John”—Elizabeth of England, a-horse at Tilbury, for her protestantism and her people—Maria Theresa, waving her sabre from the guarded mount to the four quarters of heaven in the maintenance of her kingdom and her cause—Marie Antoinette of France, defying her accusers at the misnamed judgment seat, fearless of her butchers at the guillotine—these are the true types of nature, the true types of their sex, the true heroines, mastering the weakness of their sexual nature, through the might of their maternal nature—these are the hens championing their broods against the falcon.
But of this day of cant and fustian, the man-women, not heroines, called by no duty to the attire or the attributes of men, but panting indelicately for the notoriety, the fierce, passionate excitement of the political, nay! for aught that appears, of the martial arena—these are the hens, if they could but see themselves as they see effeminate, unsexed men, gaffed and cropped and fed to do voluntary battle in the sinks and slaughterhouses of humanity, against the gamecocks of their species.
The Lady Macbeths of a falser period, who fancy that, by proving themselves so much less the woman, they can shine out so much more the man.
“But I wish now to return,” with my old friend Froissart, “to the Countess de Montfort, who possessed the courage of a man, and the heart of a lion,” and I will add—the soul, the instincts and the excellence of a true woman.
During the winter succeeding the seizure of her lord, and the treason of Sir Hervè de Léon, who had attached himself to the Count de Blois, she remained peacefully occupied in Hennebon, in the education of her young child John; and how she educated him was seen in his after career, as a knight valorous and gentle, a prince beloved and popular.
But with the summer there came strife and peril, and protection became paramount to every thing beside.
During the winter, while the Countess de Montfort lay tranquil in Hennebon, the Count Charles de Blois lay as tranquilly in Nantes, which—as I have before related—had been treasonably surrendered to him by Sir Hervè de Léon and the citizens of the place. But now, that the fair weather had returned, that the swallows were disporting themselves in the summer air, the cuckoos calling by the river-sides, now that armies could hold themselves in the fields with plenty of all sorts around them, he summoned to him all those great princes of the royal blood, and all the noble barons and valiant knights who had fought with him in the last campaign. And, mindful of their promises, they drew all their forces to a head, and came with a great array of spears of France, and Genoese cross-bowmen, and Spanish men-at-arms, under the leading of the Lord Lewis d’Espagne, to re-conquer for him all that remained unconquered of the fair land of Brittany.