Charles II. also wrote on a matter completely apart from the religious question. In a former postscript, the king had engaged to recompense the Roman fraternity for all the extraordinary expenses to which they had been subjected on account of his son. Unfortunately, when the year expired, the funds of the civil list were found empty. It was one of those financial crises not unusual under a prince who never knew the worth of money until it was gone. Charles was therefore forced to subscribe to an obligation payable in six months for the sum of £800 sterling. This note will close the series of inedited pieces that Father J. Stuart has left for two centuries in the hands of Father Paul Oliva:
"We Charles, by the grace of God King of England, France, Scotland, and Ireland, acknowledge ourselves debtors to the reverend father-general [{605}] of the Jesuit Fathers to the amount of £800 sterling, viz., 800 pistoles for the maintenance and journeyings of our very dear and honored son the Prince James Stuart, a Jesuit living under the name of La Cloche, the which 800 pistoles the said reverend father-general, Jean Paul Oliva, has furnished him with, and which sum we acknowledge ourselves indebted for, and promise to pay him at his pleasure after six months have passed from the day and date, of the said obligation.
In witness whereof, we have given both our sign-manual and our ordinary seal.
CHARLES, King of England,
L.S. France, Scotland, and Ireland.
Clement IX. was now, for the first time, informed of the secret movement which was drawing into the bosom of the Church the posterity of Mary Stuart. The pontiff received a letter from the Duke of York, and it does not appear improbable that the young traveller had also some words to communicate from the king himself: such at least was the intention of Charles three months previous. But whatever was the monarch's desire, there was only one course open to the Pope. The Master had said to the highest ecclesiastic as to the humblest disciple, "Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or tittle shall not pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." There was then no response to be made but a non possumus, tempered by all those considerations of a charity the most tender which were fitting upon so important an issue. And such, as we know from history, was the nature of the reply of Clement IX. to the Duke of York.
The general of the Jesuits, in his turn, owed thanks for the royal benefactions to the fraternity of Mont Quirinal. This letter, which the commonest dictates of courtesy would have enjoined, is not, however, to be found in the archives of the Jesuits at Rome. One loves to think that it was written, that the son of Charles II. bore it to Whitehall, but that the author, for weighty motives, destroyed it to the last syllable. Fr. Oliva was a man of note. He was the chief of a great apostolic order; he had grown old amid important services rendered to the Church. Italy could justly pride itself for its orators; but in Italy itself his rank for eloquence was high. He had been official "predicateur" to four sovereign pontiffs, and the sermons which he has left behind still attest the vigor, the fire, and the opulence of his rhetoric. It was not in such a nature to leave so significant an event as the conversion of a great monarch to the unaided efforts of a novice. Through all the previous conduct of the mission, he bore a vital part; and now when the supreme moment had come, the king hesitating, the eternal life of a nation in the balance, we cannot doubt that he was moved to write with all the energy and persuasiveness of his being. He must have seen that something more than an Anglican Church or a suspicious parliament stood in the way of the monarch's conversion; that, in the scandalous licentiousness of the English court, there was a stumbling-block equally as great. If the father-general had the courage to mingle with the language of gratitude a sincere but gentle reproof for these delinquencies, it is easy to understand why not a trace of his message remains to us.
Father Stuart was in haste to return to England, where at any moment the great interests which Providence had intrusted to him might unexpectedly be compromised. His stay at Rome was therefore brief. As soon as he had received the verbal or written replies of Fr. Oliva, and in addition (according to our opinion) those that the Pope sent to the court at Whitehall, he set out at once on his return. He quitted Rome never to return. Without doubt, in the course of the following years, he communicated by letter with his superior, who [{606}] did not die till 1681, four years before Charles II.; but the very nature of this correspondence precluded its being deposited in the archives of the society. From this moment, therefore, we must rely upon English history for our details. Fr. Stuart drops into obscurity; but the work for which he labored still gleams above the darkness.
It was on Jan. 18, 1669, if our previous calculation be accepted, that the pretended Prince Henry de Rohan appears again at the court of London, bringing with him his old companion in accordance with the wish expressed by the king in his last letter to Fr. Oliva. The pontifical letters, touching, energetic, full of the wisdom of God, have then been remitted; the emphatic opinions of the general of the society are known. James Stuart and the French Jesuit have had their interview with Charles; they have aroused anew in his heart those earnest and holy impressions which swayed him two months before; and the venerable Henrietta de Bourbon is waiting anxiously and in tears the moment when she may say, in the language of the gospel, "Now thou dost dismiss thy servant, O Lord, according to thy word, in peace." Such is the situation of affairs at Whitehall. Recurring to the "Life of James II." we find that the historian, after speaking of the Duke of York, his interview with Fr. Symons, and his letter to the Pope, continues as follows:
"This is why his royal highness, knowing that the king was of the same mind, and had already opened himself to Lord Arundel, to Lord Arlington, and to Sir Thomas Clifford, seized an opportunity to converse with his majesty on this subject. He found him fully decided to become a Catholic, and penetrated with the danger and the constraint of his position. The king added that he desired to have, in the cabinet of the duke, a secret interview with the persons we have just named, in order to consult with them upon the means which it would be necessary to employ in order to extend the Catholic religion in the state. This interview was fixed for Jan. 25, the day on which the Church celebrates the conversion of St Paul:
"When they had come together, the king declared his sentiments upon matters of religion; he repeated what he had said to the duke regarding the embarrassments which he had experienced in being prevented from the profession of the faith to which he was attached, and told them that he had summoned them to consult upon the measures necessary to be employed in the re-establishment of the Catholic religion in his realm, and upon the most favorable measure for declaring himself openly. He remarked that there was no time to lose; that he expected to find great difficulties in the execution of his project; and that for himself he preferred to enter upon it while, like his brother, he was in the prime of life, and capable of supporting the greatest fatigues, rather than put it off later, when he would no longer have the energy to successfully manage so great a design. His majesty spoke with much force; tears filled his eyes, and he besought the gentlemen to do all that was fitting wise men and good Catholics.
"The consultation was protracted, and the ultimate decision was to act in concert with France, and to demand the assistance of his very christian majesty: the house of Austria being no longer in a condition to co-operate."
The Duke of York at once abjured with great secresy; but did Charles II. also abjure? Our opinion is that the two brothers separated from the Anglican Church at the same time; and that on the same day, at the foot of the same altar, in the hands of the same priest, they made the same profession of faith. Only one remained unchangeable in his fidelity. The other, sincere but feeble, made an honest effort to give his country liberty of conscience, was defeated at every point by the united mass of the [{607}] English factions, and finally fell back upon dissimulations and hypocrisies. It was Fr. Stuart who presided at this abjuration—a fact which the following considerations prove.
On the 5th of Jan., 1685, Fr. Huddleston, an English Benedictine, and a chaplain to the queen, summoned, says Lingard, in the absence of a foreign ecclesiastic in London, administered at evening the last sacraments to the king without demanding from him that act which should have preceded all others—abjuration. Charles throughout the rest of the night had full consciousness, and it would be perfectly absurd to suppose that neither Fr. Huddleston, a priest for twenty-five or thirty years, nor any of the queen's almoners, nor the Duke of York, as well as the other Catholics present, nor the sick man himself, should have thought, for five hours, of satisfying this most necessary of all conditions for admitting one among the children of the true Church.
Clearly, then, Charles had made his abjuration before his last illness. Studying the sequence of his reign, we remark that the year 1669 closes the period of calm which the brother of James II. enjoyed. Immediately after the French alliance exasperated the nation; and the rage and fury of Anglicanism were excited by the known conversion of the Duke and the Duchess of York, by that of Sir Thomas Clifford, by the second marriage of the Duke with the princess of Modena, by all that movement of Catholic activity the signs of which multiplied around the palace of the Stuarts. Presently persecution began anew, and Charles, incapable of holding head against the storm, yielded in everything; he signed the decrees of proscription, he permitted the flow of innocent blood. What priest, in such a conjuncture, would have consented to receive his abjuration? But in Jan., 1669, the presence of Henrietta of Bourbon, the pious joy of all that royal family, the hope which might reasonably be founded on the probable influence of Fr. James Stuart, united in urging forward so desirable a consummation. Charles, whose good faith we cannot justly suspect without satisfactory proof,—Charles persuaded himself that, assisted by the French monarch, and supported by his brother the duke, there was no domestic coalition which could defeat him, and he brought over the rest to his opinion by that seductive eloquence which, with him, was almost irresistible. The priest doubtless had many fears; but the priest, when there was the appearance of security, inclined toward indulgence, and on the present occasion so many reiterated assurances, so many moving supplications, so many marvellous advantages in perspective, finally disarmed him. Nothing in the duke's account prejudices this conclusion. His delicate sense of family honor, the reproach which would have attached to Charles and ultimately to all the Stuarts if the act were known, the reticence necessary to maintain regarding the king's eldest son—each and all explain the silence of that prince. Beside the offer to take the sword in hand, and to run the chances of a long and perilous civil war, would indicate less a future step than a step in the past. In our opinion, therefore, the council of Jan. 25 followed the abjuration of Charles rather than preceded it.