But now his mother, who lived remote from him and had never come into his life but to bring doom with her, like the terrible, mysterious queen in Maeterlinck's Mort de Tintagiles, reappeared. What was the exact secret of her hold, what fears she worked on, what hopes she appealed to, cannot be said; but her effect was like the effect of blackmail. The young Earl with the ardent ambition and the noble ideals yielded—with what anguish the indecision of his whole future career indicates—to the inexplicable influence of his mother. One of the first steps in that life of brilliant promise was one of treachery. The would-be saviour of England secretly trafficked with the Court of St. Germain. Nor was he allowed to stand forth as an open champion of the Stuarts whom he could not love; he was made to remain at Whitehall as William of Orange's chief and most confidential Minister in order that his mother and the Jacobites might know all that was going on there. That such a man as Shrewsbury could continue to play this double game long was impossible. His pleas to be allowed to resign the seals of office were pitiable, and his behaviour, when his treachery was finally denounced and King William nobly and secretly gave him the chance to clear himself by a lie which he professed to believe, was painful. The King's attitude on this occasion gave him a fresh chance; he took it but to betray it and his own better nature. At last his conscience could endure the strain no longer; he left office and the country after a veritable martyrdom of ten years. "Had I a son," he said, "I would sooner bind him a cobbler than a courtier, and a hangman than a statesman."
After the death of his mother, who, if not wilfully, at least heartlessly, contributed quite as much as his own temperament to the ruin of his career, he returned to England in Queen Anne's reign. But now, though his country, still believing in him, "called" him and he tried to respond, it was too late. He flung all his influence on the side of liberty and Protestantism, but his statecraft was demoralised by his past experiences, and his opportunity, which seldom comes to a man more than once, had been bungled in the previous reign. Like his mother, he too was born out of his fitting age. In the more congenial atmosphere of our day he would have won something more worthy of his great talents than his dukedom and garter. To his lofty ambition such prizes were of small account beside what his soul lost in grandeur.
Of all tragedies those of one's ideals are the saddest. The lives of statesmen who have failed are always interesting, and as English history is full of such the book that may some day record them will be worth both reading and writing. In such a work, of a surety, the career of the first and only Duke of Shrewsbury, who set out not to win fame and fortune, but to do what he believed right, and miserably failed, will be not the least dramatic. Like Tyrconnel, he was more sinned against than sinning; to be forgotten by posterity as they are is not so dreadful as to have the faint memory of them revived by the fleeting mention of some "Wanton Shrewsbury" or other. To us the marring of her son seems the greatest of this Messalina's crimes.
["MADAME"—HENRIETTA, DUCHESS OF ORLEANS]
THE FRENCH COURT—THE EVIL GENIUS OF THE RESTORATION
AS she was French in all but her birth, the favourite sister of Charles II. can only be said to belong to the Court of the Restoration by courtesy. Nevertheless, on the occasion of her two short visits to England during her brother's reign the impression she created was so lasting, so sympathetic, that posterity, like her own generation, has agreed that of all the women who graced Whitehall the most fascinating was Madame.
She was born in the thick of the Civil War at Exeter, whither her mother had fled, and from which soon after her birth the Reine Malheureuse was also obliged to flee, leaving her child to the care of the faithful Lady Dalkeith. On the capitulation of Exeter the royal infant fell into the hands of the Parliament, to which the charge of such a prisoner was extremely embarrassing. It was, however, relieved from its dilemma by Lady Dalkeith, who was a woman of courage and resource. For Cromwell, very rightly looking upon every adherent of the Stuarts as a possible conspirator, decided to dismiss her and confine the tiny princess at St. James's, under his own supervision, whereupon Lady Dalkeith promptly fled the country with her charge.
The story of their flight to Dover on foot, clad in the rags of peasants—a disguise to which the little girl had such an objection that she angrily announced to all they met, "that she was not a peasant boy, but the Princess Henrietta of England"—when related at the French Court no doubt excited a suitable thrill. But Parliament was not ridiculous enough to pursue such fugitives, and they crossed to Calais in the ordinary French packet. Such was Madame's début on the theatre of life. She was two years old at the time. Fifteen years later she again appeared before the public as a star, so to speak,—a rôle in which she scored a brilliant popular success. Like most such intervals, these intervening years were obscure, hard, discouraging.