Famous Assassinations
of History

Famous Assassinations
of History

From Philip of Macedon, 336 B.C., to
Alexander of Servia, A.D. 1903
By Francis Johnson
WITH TWENTY-NINE PORTRAITS

Chicago
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1903

Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1903
Published September 19, 1903
UNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSON
AND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.

Preface

THE thirty-one assassinations, famous in history, which are narrated in this volume, have never before had their stories told in a collected form in any language. The accounts of them were scattered through the historical works of all nations, and through many volumes of private memoirs, which had to be scanned for proper and trustworthy material. It is hoped that their presentation in this form will make an interesting volume, not only for the student of history, but also for the general reader, on account of the historical and psychological interest which attaches to them.

These assassinations embrace a period of nearly twenty-five centuries,—that of Philip of Macedon, in 336 B.C., being the first, and that of Alexander and Draga, in the present year, being the last. Only those assassinations have been included which either had an important and political bearing on the world, or on the nation immediately affected, or which left a profound, and, it would seem, indelible impression on the imagination of contemporaries and posterity. All those which were not distinguished by one of these features were excluded from this series.

It will undoubtedly occur to some who read this volume that it should have included the assassination of President Garfield. It was omitted, not from any want of respect or sympathy for the memory of our illustrious martyr-President, but simply for the reason that his assassination rather grew out of the morbid aberration of one diseased mind than out of the general spirit of the epoch in which he lived.

Others may think that the assassinations of Henry the Third of France, of Henry of Guise, and of Marshal Coligny, which are certainly famous in history, should have found a place here. But they all grew out of the same spirit of religious hatred and conflict in France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Henry the Fourth was selected as its most illustrious victim.

It has been the object of the writer to make each of these “famous assassinations” the central scene of a picture in which the political, religious, or national features of the epoch in which the assassination occurred are portrayed with historical fidelity and strict impartiality.

F. J.

Lafayette, Ind., August 1, 1903.

Contents

Illustrations

CHAPTER I
PHILIP OF MACEDON

Famous Assassinations

CHAPTER I
ASSASSINATION OF PHILIP OF MACEDON
(336 B. C.)

THE assassination of Philip of Macedon, which occurred in the year 336 B.C., was one of the most important in ancient history, not only because it terminated the glorious career of one of the most remarkable men of his times, but also because it led immediately to the accession of Alexander, one of the supremely great men of history,—an event which would very likely not have taken place at all if Philip had continued to live for a number of years and had himself selected the successor to his throne. Philip of Macedon was then at the height of his power. The battle of Chæronea, in 338 B.C., had made him the master of Greece; and by his tactful and generous treatment of the vanquished he had even been appointed by the Amphictyon League commander-in-chief of all the Greek forces, which he intended to lead, at the head of his Macedonian army, against the Persians, and to conquer their mighty empire. This stupendous plan, by whose accomplishment Philip would have anticipated the glorious achievements of Alexander, his son, was frustrated by his assassination.

While Philip had arranged everything for his descent upon Persia, and had been frequently absent from home, his domestic affairs in his own capital, which had never been of a very satisfactory character, took such an unfavorable turn as to require his personal attention. As a husband, Philip had often given just cause of complaint to Olympias, his royal spouse. Wherever he went he formed liaisons, and several illegitimate children were openly recognized by him as his own. But when Olympias, the Queen, laid herself open to a suspicion of having violated her marriage vows in his absence, he repudiated her, charging her with gross infidelity, and intimating that he had very strong doubts of being the father of Alexander. Olympias thereupon went back to her native state, Epirus, accompanied by Alexander, who was highly incensed at the treatment shown to his mother and himself.

Philip contracted a second marriage with Cleopatra, a niece of Attalus, one of his generals; and it is said that at the wedding feast Attalus, half intoxicated, expressed the wish and hope that Cleopatra might give the Macedonians a lawful heir to the kingdom. This remark, overheard by Alexander, so enraged him that, throwing a full cup at Attalus’s head, he shouted to him: “What, you scoundrel! am I then a bastard?” Whereupon Philip, taking Attalus’s part, rose from his seat, and rushing with his drawn sword upon Alexander would have run his son through, if he had not, being himself more than half drunk with wine, slipped and fallen on the floor; at which sight Alexander scornfully said: “See there the man who is making great preparations to invade Asia at the head of a powerful army, and who falls to the ground like a helpless child in going from one seat to another.”

It is said that after this debauch both Olympias and Alexander retired from Philip’s capital, the one going to Epirus, and the other to Illyria. By the counsels and efforts of Demaratus, the Corinthian, an old friend of the royal family, Philip was, however, induced to send for Alexander, and the son returned to his father’s court. Soon afterwards, Cleopatra gave birth to a son; and the fears of Alexander, who remained in communication with his mother and was filled with jealous rage by her, revived.

It is more than likely—although absolute proof of it has never been furnished—that Olympias, in her revengeful jealousy, planned the assassination of the King who had so cruelly offended her pride as a woman, and who, she supposed, was also plotting to exclude her own son from the throne and place upon it the son of her young rival. An opportunity for this act of revenge soon presented itself. A young Macedonian, named Pausanias, had been mortally offended by Attalus and Queen Cleopatra. He appealed to the King for reparation of the wrong done to him; but this being refused, he resolved to revenge himself by taking the King’s life. All historians seem to agree that Pausanias was encouraged and incited to this act of revenge by Olympias; but whether or not Alexander was cognizant of the murderous plot, and approved it, has never been satisfactorily explained, and remains one of the unsolved problems of history.

The occasion for the murderous act of Pausanias was the wedding of Alexander’s sister with her uncle Alexander, King of Epirus. Philip considered this marriage between his daughter and the brother of his first wife, Olympias, an act of consummate statesmanship, inasmuch as it transferred an enemy and an ally of Olympias to his own side and made a friend of him. He therefore resolved to make the nuptials of this ill-matched couple as brilliant as possible. Grand Olympian games and spectacular festivities were arranged, and an incredible display of luxury and pomp, unheard of in those days, was planned to show to the wondering eyes of Greece the court of the new master of the civilized world in matchless splendor and grandeur. All the cities of Greece had sent delegations to these brilliant festivities; most of them came with costly wedding presents, among which golden crowns were conspicuous. Poets sent nuptial hymns and poems celebrating the beauty of the bride and the genius of the father in the most extravagant terms; and a noted dramatist of that age, Neoptolemus, composed a tragedy for the occasion, in which Philip, under a fictitious name, was represented as the conqueror of Asia and the triumphant vanquisher of the great Darius.

It was at the theatre, in which this tragedy was to be performed, that Philip met his doom. Accompanied by a brilliant cortège of all that were renowned at his court for birth, talent, and wealth, he proceeded to the theatre. On approaching the entrance, he bade the noblemen surrounding him to advance, and his body-guard to fall back, so that he might be personally more conspicuous before the enraptured eyes of his subjects. The procession was led by priests in white robes, each carrying a statue of one of the twelve principal gods; and a thirteenth statue, even more richly draped and ornamented than the others, with the insignia of divinity upon it, was that of Philip himself.

It was the supreme moment of his pride and happiness; but it was also his last. The noblemen and courtiers had already disappeared in the building. The body-guard, obedient to the King’s orders, remained behind. Just at the moment when the King stepped forward, alone, under the gateway of the theatre, a man sprang from a side corridor, thrust a sharp short sword into his side, and hurried off as the royal victim reeled and fell. In the tremendous confusion which arose, the assassin came very near making his escape. He ran toward a swift horse which was kept in readiness for him by friends who evidently knew of the murder and were in the plot; and, dazed as the people were who witnessed the assassination, he would probably have escaped, had not his sandal caught in a vine-stock and caused him to fall, which gave some of his pursuers time to lay their hands on him before he could get up. In their rage, they killed him with their spears and tore him to pieces.

The surroundings and execution of this plot bear a strong resemblance to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In both cases there was an individual murderer, the scene was a theatre, the act was done with incredible audacity in the presence of a large concourse of people, and the murderer was crippled by a misstep after the fatal blow.

The assassination of Philip of Macedon was not only one of the boldest and most dramatic in history, but it was also one of the earliest in point of time.

CHAPTER II
TIBERIUS GRACCHUS

CHAPTER II
ASSASSINATION OF TIBERIUS GRACCHUS
(133 B. C.)

IN the history of ancient Rome there occurs one political assassination which stands out as an event of special significance, not only on account of the great celebrity of the victim, but also owing to the fact that it is the first occasion on record in which the conflicting economical interests of different classes in a republic were settled by a resort to arms, instead of being adjudicated on principles of equity and justice, or simply by public authority.

This great historical event was the murder of Tiberius Gracchus, which was soon followed by the forced suicide of his brother, Caius Gracchus,—the immediate result of their attempt to enforce an agrarian law passed as an act of justice to the poorer classes of Roman citizens. The law was violently opposed by the rich, who organized an armed revolution against its originators and were powerful enough to do away with them.

There is in the whole conflict about that agrarian law (the so-called Sempronian law) a modern feature which makes it especially interesting to Americans at a time when party issues turn largely on economical questions, and when the antagonism between capital and labor (or the rich and the poor) threatens to enter the acute stage. It will be noticed that at that early age (more than two thousand years ago) capital already had a power and commanded a political influence against which right and justice, allied to poverty, battled in vain. History, both ancient and modern, has been written largely in conformity with the ideas and prejudices of the ruling classes, and in praise of them, while their enemies and opponents have generally been unjustly criticised and denounced as disturbers of public order and peace, or even as anarchists and rebels against public authority. The two illustrious brothers, the Gracchi, have shared this unjust treatment of historians, and in the estimation of many, pass to-day as dangerous and seditious characters whose death alone could have saved Rome from greater calamities. An impartial investigation of their case will, in our opinion, furnish sufficient proof to reverse this historical judgment.

The two Gracchi were the sons of Sempronius Gracchus, the famous Roman tribune, who won distinction by his great independence and ability in the administration of his office, and of the equally famous Cornelia, daughter of Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the renowned vanquisher of Hannibal. The brothers, so closely united and so much alike in political sentiments, designs, and efforts, were of different character, temperament, and appearance. Tiberius, who was nine years older than his brother, was gentle and mild in conduct; and his countenance, his eyes, and his gestures were of peculiar and winning gentleness. His brother Caius was animated, vehement, and high-tempered. His eloquence was distinguished by the same characteristics, while that of Tiberius was tactful, persuasive, and conciliatory. Tiberius would have made an ideal preacher; Caius seemed to be predestined for the part of a popular advocate and orator.

Tiberius had seen military service and won distinction both by his bravery and prudence in Spain as aid to his brother-in-law, Scipio Æmilianus, who was the commander-in-chief. It was, therefore, not his illustrious birth alone, but individual merit also, which caused him to be elected tribune of the people in the year 133 B.C. As such he introduced a bill for the re-apportionment of the public lands and their distribution among the poorer citizens of Rome. Various explanations have been given for this action of Tiberius Gracchus. It has been said that he was instigated by others to introduce a measure which could not fail to arouse against him the strongest hostility of the rich proprietors of some of these lands. But from a statement in writing left by his brother Caius, it appears that the idea of the bill originated with Tiberius himself, and that its introduction sprang much more from a noble and generous impulse than from political ambition.

Even to-day the traveller who traverses the silent and depopulated desert of the Roman Campagna, which is owned by a limited number of large proprietors and is left in an almost uncultivated state, is struck forcibly with the thought that the unwise and unjust distribution of the land has had much to do with the desolate and unproductive aspect of this district, which under judicious and scientific cultivation might yield rich harvests and contribute materially to the welfare of the inhabitants of Tuscany. The same thought struck Tiberius Gracchus as, on his departure for Spain, he travelled through Tuscany and found it almost a desert, or, at best, only rudely cultivated in some parts by barbarian and imported slaves. It was at that time that he first conceived the idea of bringing about a change—an idea which continued to haunt his mind until he was in a position to realize it. And in doing so he found a precedent for legislative action.

There already existed a law at Rome—the so-called Licinian law—which limited the number of acres to be possessed by any one citizen to five hundred. But this Licinian law had been a dead letter for many years, and there were many rich citizens in Rome who counted the number of their acres by the thousand or even ten thousand. It was this violation of the Licinian law, and the open injustice done to the poor by this violation, which Tiberius Gracchus wanted to correct. He therefore introduced a new agrarian law which aimed to revive the Licinian law, but at the same time greatly modified and attenuated its provisions. The change in the law which Tiberius Gracchus proposed was in one respect an act of injustice, because it put a premium on the violation of the law as it had existed, instead of punishing that violation by imposing an adequate fine. Under the new law a citizen might hold 500 acres of the public lands in his own name, and in addition, 250 acres for each son still under the paternal roof and authority. Moreover, the new law provided that, whenever a citizen should be compelled to give up land which he held in excess of the share which the law allowed him, he should be reimbursed for this loss, at the appraised value, from the public treasury. Tiberius Gracchus also favored the immediate distribution of the confiscated lands among the poor as their absolute property, and proposed that, whenever a Roman colony was founded on conquered territory, a similar distribution of the newly acquired land should be made.

The new law was enthusiastically applauded by the Roman people, even before it had been legally adopted; but the Senate most violently opposed it, because many Senators would have been deprived by its passage of most valuable lands. In order to defeat it they prevailed upon one of the ten tribunes to object to the third reading of the law. The unanimous support of the tribunes was necessary for its passage. When the day for the public vote on the law had come, an immense multitude of people was assembled at the Forum. The ten tribunes entered and took their seats on the platform. Tiberius Gracchus arose and ordered the clerk to read his law, but was immediately interrupted by Octavius, who ordered him to stop. The interruption caused an immense sensation and commotion among the spectators. Tiberius, after having vainly tried to persuade Octavius to withdraw his objection, adjourned the meeting to a later day. During this interval he used all his power of persuasion to overcome the resistance of Octavius, but in vain. It was then that Tiberius Gracchus, in his intense desire to pass a public measure which he considered highly beneficial to the people and almost indispensable to the public welfare, resolved to resort to an expedient which was really unconstitutional and which is the only public act of his that gives the least foundation to the charge of sedition so generally preferred against him. He came to the conclusion that the only way to overcome the veto of Octavius was to depose him from his office by a popular vote. This was a clear violation of the Constitution, and he carried out his intention in spite of the loud protests of the Senate.

The scene on the Forum in which Octavius was deposed must have been very pathetic and impressive; and while it signified an immediate victory for Tiberius Gracchus, it nevertheless incensed a great many Roman citizens and turned them against him. It is safe to say that this scene sealed his doom and furnished the principal reason for his assassination. Plutarch, a reliable and impartial authority, describes the scene as follows:

“When the people were met together again, Tiberius placed himself in the rostra and endeavored a second time to persuade Octavius. But all being to no purpose, he referred the whole matter to the people, calling on them to vote at once whether Octavius should be deposed or not; and when seventeen of the thirty-five tribes had already voted against him, and there wanted only the vote of one tribe more for his final deprivation, Tiberius put a short stop to the proceedings, and once more renewed his importunities; he embraced and kissed him before all the assembly, begging with all the earnestness imaginable that he would neither suffer himself to incur the dishonor, nor him to be reputed the author and promoter of so odious a measure. Octavius did seem a little softened and moved with these entreaties; his eyes filled with tears and he continued silent for a considerable time. But presently looking toward the rich men and proprietors of estates, who stood gathered in a body together, partly for shame, and partly for fear of disgracing himself with them, he boldly bade Tiberius use any severity he pleased. The law for his deposition being thus voted, Tiberius ordered one of his servants, whom he had made a freeman, to remove Octavius from the rostra, employing his own domestic freed servants instead of the public officers. And it made the action seem all the sadder that Octavius was dragged out in such an ignominious manner. The people immediately assaulted him, while the rich men ran in to his assistance. Octavius, with some difficulty, was snatched away, and safely conveyed out of the crowd; though a trusty servant of his, who had placed himself in front of his master that he might assist his escape, in keeping off the multitude, had his eyes struck out, much to the displeasure of Tiberius, who ran with all haste, when he perceived the disturbance, to appease the rioters.”

The law was then passed, and commissioners were immediately appointed to make a survey of the lands and see that they were equally divided.

The forcible ejection of Octavius and the subsequent passage of the new agrarian law opened a chasm between Tiberius Gracchus and the patricians, which nothing but his death could close up. He had made himself immensely popular with the poor, and other laws which he introduced increased that popularity. But the more the poor idolized him, the more the rich hated and abhorred him; and a large number of the better and more thoughtful class of plebeians resented his bold violation of the Constitution in removing Octavius from office.

Such were the conditions when the time for the expiration of his official term as tribune approached, and he as well as his friends saw the necessity for his reëlection as a measure for protecting his life. He therefore appeared as a candidate for reëlection; and when on the first day of the election no choice had resulted from the vote, the next day was appointed for the final decision. Tiberius knew that not only his political career, but his very life depended on the result, and he therefore left no stone unturned to rally his friends to the rescue. But unfortunately, it being harvest time, many of his adherents were absent from the city, and could not be reached in time for the struggle.

On the day following, the Senate convened at an early hour, while the people assembled at the Capitol to proceed with the vote. However, great confusion prevailed, and a large number of outsiders tried to force their way in and establish themselves among the voters. And even the appearance of Tiberius Gracchus, although he was received with loud acclamations, failed to restore order in the assemblage. Moreover, he showed by the depression in his countenance and conduct that he had lost confidence in the success of his cause. Several evil omens which he had encountered on his way to the Capitol disturbed his mind. At daybreak a soothsayer, who prognosticated good or bad success by the pecking of fowls, informed him that all his efforts to induce the fowls to eat had failed. Tiberius then remembered that, a short time before, two serpents had been found in his helmet. On stepping out of the house he stumbled on the threshold and hurt his great toe so badly that it bled profusely. As he walked through the streets he saw on his left hand two ravens fighting on the roof of a house, and suddenly a stone, detached from the roof, fell at his feet. The friends of Gracchus, who surrounded him, all stopped, and he himself hesitated as to whether he should proceed or return to his house. However, a philosopher from Cuma, one of his intimates, who was credited with inspiring Gracchus with his democratic ideas and who was free from the superstition of the Romans, persuaded him to continue on his way to the Capitol.

There the voting of the tribes was proceeding with great noise and confusion. All at once Gracchus noticed that one of his friends, Lucius Flaccus, a Senator, had mounted an elevation from which he could be easily seen, but where he was too far off to be heard, and was indicating by motions of his hand that he wished to communicate some important news. Tiberius told the crowd to let Flaccus pass. With great difficulty the Senator reached Tiberius and informed him that at the session of the Senate, after the Consul had refused to have him arrested, a resolution had been passed to kill him, and that the Senators had armed a large number of their clients and slaves to carry out this purpose. Tiberius immediately informed the friends who surrounded him of the action of the Senate, and signified to those at a greater distance the danger in which he was placed, by raising his hands to his head,—and it was this motion, entirely innocent in itself, which hastened his ruin. His enemies construed it as a desire on his part to wear a crown, and carried this ridiculous news to the Senate chamber. It caused a perfect explosion of maledictions and threats among the Senators; and Scipio Nasica, the most violent of all, immediately made a motion that the Consul be instructed to save the Republic and to exterminate the would-be tyrant. The Consul replied that he would resist any factious and criminal attempt against the Republic, but that he would not put to death a Roman citizen without trial. On this Scipio Nasica turned to the Senators, exclaiming: “Since the Consul betrays the city, let those who want to defend the laws follow me!” and followed by a large number of Senators and their clients, he rushed toward the place where Tiberius Gracchus, surrounded by his friends, was observing the progress of the election. Immediately a riot and fight ensued. The Senators, who were armed with clubs, canes, stones, or whatever weapon they could lay their hands on, rushed upon the crowd of voters, overthrew, beat, and killed them, stamping them under their feet and quickly and irresistibly advancing toward the spot where they beheld the man who was the object of their rage and bloodthirstiness. Tiberius, unarmed and forsaken by his friends, turned round to seek safety in flight, but, stumbling over those who had been knocked down, fell to the ground. It was at that moment, while Tiberius was trying to get on his feet again, that one of his own colleagues, a tribune of the people, dealt him a powerful and fatal blow, striking him on the head with the leg of a stool. Others rushed up and struck him again and again, but it was only a lifeless corpse which suffered from their abuse. Three hundred of his friends had fallen with him. It was the first Roman blood which had been shed in civil war, and this first conflict deprived Rome of one of its most illustrious citizens.

It is unnecessary to go into any details regarding the death of Caius Gracchus, who took up and continued the work of his brother. To the measures in favor of the poor which had been advocated by Tiberius, he added others,—for instance, regular distributions of corn among the poor at half price, the imposition of new taxes upon articles of luxury imported from foreign countries, and employment on public works for mechanics and laborers who could not find employment on private contract. It will be seen that these measures, as well as some other projects of minor importance which Caius Gracchus advocated and caused to be enacted as laws, form part of the platform of modern labor parties, and that the Gracchi can fitly be designated as the founders of these parties. They both fell victims to the attempt to carry out their theories. At first, it would seem, Caius Gracchus at the request of his mother, was inclined to abandon the projects of Tiberius; but one night, says Cicero in his book De Divinatione, he heard Tiberius saying to him: “Why hesitate, Caius? Thy destiny shall be the same as mine—to fight for the people, and to die for them.” It is said that this prophecy determined him in his course, and that his death was the consequence. In 121 B.C., during a public riot and conflict organized by his enemies for his destruction, he committed suicide, dying not by his own hand, but by commanding his slave to stab him,—an order which was promptly obeyed. The assassination of the one and the forced suicide of the other immortalized the two brothers.

CHAPTER III
JULIUS CÆSAR

CHAPTER III
ASSASSINATION OF JULIUS CÆSAR
(44 B. C.)

AMERICANS are not great students of history, especially ancient history. Very likely the assassination of Julius Cæsar, one of the most important events in the history of ancient Rome, would also be among the “things not generally known” among Americans, had not Shakespeare’s great tragedy made them familiar with it. It is true, the aims of the dramatist and of the historian are wide-apart. The dramatist places the hero in the centre of the plot, and causes every part of it to contribute to the catastrophe which overwhelms him under the decree of fate. He is the victim of his own guilt. The historian makes the great man but one of the principal factors in the evolution of events, and if a Cæsar or a Napoleon succumbs in the struggle, it is by force of external circumstances against which his genius is powerless to contend, although his ambition or his passion may have been the dominant cause of arraying those circumstances against him. By his matchless genius and incomparable art, Shakespeare has, to a certain degree, in his “Julius Cæsar,” solved the difficult problem of combining the task of the dramatic poet with that of the historian, and has placed before the spectator not only Cæsar himself with his world-wide and imperialistic ambition as the central figure of the play, but also Rome with its republican recollections and aspirations in antagonism to Cæsar’s ambition. The delineation of the character of the foremost man of the ancient world by the greatest dramatist of modern times, and his skilful grouping of the great republicans struggling for the maintenance of republican institutions, have been so indelibly engraved upon the minds of modern readers that the assassination of Julius Cæsar, which took place at Rome 44 B.C., is nearly as familiar to them as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And if we, in this series of Famous Assassinations in History, devote a chapter to it, it is simply for the reason that the series would be incomplete without it. Moreover, it may be both interesting and useful to call to the mind of the reader the circumstances and surroundings which led to the downfall of Cæsar. The conspiracy and assassination removed from the scene of action the master-mind of the age, without saving the republican institutions; and it is only by explaining the causes that we can do justice to the noble intentions of the conspirators, while lamenting the assassination of Cæsar as a public misfortune for Rome, inasmuch as it removed the strong hand that could have prevented the anarchy and civil war which broke out among his successors, immediately after his disappearance from the public stage.

Cæsar was at the height of his power. His achievements had eclipsed the military glory of Pompey, and by his wonderful career he might truly be looked upon as the “man of destiny.” On his return from Gaul, when the Senate had rejected his request for a prolongation of his command, and had ordered him to disband his army and to give up the administration of his province, his popularity was so great that his homeward journey, escorted as he was by his victorious army, was but a continuous triumphal march. Not only Rome, but all Italy welcomed him home as its greatest man, and was ready to heap its greatest, nay even divine honors upon him.

The Senate and its chosen commander-in-chief, Pompey, had fled on the approach of Cæsar. In the decisive battle of Pharsalus Cæsar defeated Pompey, and by this victory became the sole ruler of the Roman Republic. Pompey was assassinated on landing in Egypt, as a fugitive, and Cæsar returned to Rome, where he was received with the tumultuous acclamations of the people, and conducted to the Capitol as the savior of the country. The Senate, which had just made war upon him and outlawed him as an enemy of the fatherland, appointed him dictator for ten years with absolute and supreme power, gave him a body-guard of seventy-two lictors to proclaim his majesty and inviolability, and ordered his statue to be placed beside that of Jupiter on the Capitol. A public thanksgiving festival, continuing for forty days, was proclaimed, and four brilliant triumphs for his victories in Gaul, Egypt, Pontus, and Africa, were accorded to him.

Never before in the history of Rome had such honors, which seemed to pass the human limit, been conferred on any Roman citizen. It was evident that of the Republic nothing but the name remained, and that Cæsar, the dictator, was in fact the absolute monarch of the immense Empire. Once more the friends of liberty made an effort to shake off the yoke which Cæsar had imposed on the Republic. They flocked to the standards of the sons of Pompey, but the bloody and hard-fought battle of Munda sealed their fate; and Cæsar, again victorious, remained the absolute master of the civilized world,—not without an enemy, but certainly without a rival.

On his return to Rome new honors and new ovations awaited him. The dignity and pride of Roman citizenship seemed to have been lost entirely in the crouching servility with which the most distinguished and most highly stationed citizens prostrated themselves at the feet of the all-powerful ruler. Resistance to Cæsar had apparently disappeared. All bowed to his surpassing genius and ability, and to these qualities he added acts of clemency, kindness, and gentleness, which won him the hearts even of those who, from political principle, had opposed him. But while thus openly the more than imperial power of Cæsar was generally recognized, and while the Senate and the tribunes had been degraded to the position of mere tools to his autocratic will, there still remained in the hearts of a number of high-minded patriots the hope and anxious desire to save the republican form of government from the grasping ambition of the conqueror, who was evidently not satisfied with being Imperator in fact, but wanted to be also Imperator in name. At least the repeated attempts of the most intimate friends and most trusted lieutenants of Cæsar to induce him to accept the crown at the hands of a subservient people, and his rather hesitating conduct in refusing these proposals, seemed to confirm this suspicion.

These enthusiastic Republicans cautiously disguised their hostility to the Imperator under the mask of devoted friendship. Their hope was, perhaps, that Cæsar’s imperial régime would be but temporary and that, like Sulla, he would sooner or later get tired of his dictatorship, and resign his imperial honors. But Cæsar did not think of abdicating the honors he had won; on the contrary, every act and every public utterance of his indicated that he wished to prolong and augment them rather than to abandon them. In public he was anxious to show his preëminence. He appeared dressed in the costume of the kings of Alba, and with royal insignia. One day, when the entire Senate waited upon him in front of the temple of Venus, he remained seated while he was addressed, during the entire ceremony. His statue at the Capitol was placed beside those of the ancient kings of Rome, as though he were to continue their line. New titles of honor, not to say worship, were added to those which had been conferred upon him at the first moment of his brilliant victories, and his lieutenants and followers welcomed and adopted them as something that was due to his superhuman wisdom and greatness. He was called not only “Father of the Country,” but “Demi-God,” the “Invincible God,” “Jupiter Julius,”—as though Jupiter himself had taken mortal form and shape in him.

This public adoration irritated the Republicans we have mentioned, to the highest degree. They secretly charged Cæsar with encouraging or instigating this worship of himself, because they knew that his friends would not have proposed it unless confident that he would be pleased by it. Brutus and Cassius were at the head of these Republicans. Brutus, a stern Republican, a Roman in the noblest acceptation of the word, was reputed to be Cæsar’s son, the offspring of an adulterous love-affair, and was openly favored and distinguished by him. Cassius, a distinguished general, was much more prompted by jealousy and envy than by civic virtue and republican principle. When these two men and their friends became thoroughly convinced that Cæsar’s ambition would stop at nothing, and that the new imperialistic régime was to be permanent, they came to the conclusion that nothing but Cæsar’s death could prevent these calamities. They therefore resolved to assassinate him.

The ides of March (the fifteenth day of the month) in the year 44 B.C., was selected as the day of the assassination. The conspiracy had been formed with the greatest secrecy, but it came near failing at the eleventh hour. Cæsar’s wife had had dreams and presentiments of bad omen, and she persuaded him not to go to the Senate on that day. Very reluctantly he consented to remain at home. But Decimus Brutus, one of the conspirators, who was afraid that the postponement of the assassination might lead to its discovery, went to Cæsar’s residence, ridiculed the dreams of a timid woman, and said he could not believe that they would influence the mind of the great Cæsar. Then Cæsar, half ashamed at having yielded to his wife’s entreaties, accompanied him. On his way to the Senate a paper was handed to Cæsar, which gave all the particulars of the conspiracy, and warned him not to go to the Senate session on the fifteenth of March, because it was the day set for his assassination. But Cæsar kept the paper in his hand without reading it. Under various pretexts, all the particular friends of Cæsar had been kept from attending the session of the Senate, so that when he arrived, he was surrounded only by enemies or by those who were not considered his friends. The conspirators acted promptly. Cæsar was defenceless, and in a few minutes he lay prostrate,—a lifeless corpse, showing thirty-five wounds, many of which were absolutely fatal. The most celebrated of all political assassinations had been successful; and by a peculiar irony of fate, the dying Cæsar fell at the feet of the statue of Pompey, his great rival, whom he had vanquished at Pharsalus. His death did not, as the conspirators had hoped, prevent the establishment of the Empire; it but delayed it for a few years.

Cæsar has had many worshippers and admirers, and comparatively few calumniators and belittlers. Unquestionably he was one of the most extraordinary geniuses that ever lived, equally great as a general and as a statesman, as an orator and as a historian. In the whole range of history there is but one man—Napoleon—who, in the vastness of his conceptions and the masterly perfection of their execution, can be justly compared with him. All other men whom national vanity has occasionally placed by Cæsar’s side only suffer from the comparison; their immense inferiority appears on even superficial investigation. He was in fact the foremost man the world had seen to his day, and, but for his equally great rival in modern times, would still occupy the pinnacle of human greatness alone. Very likely, if he had lived, Rome would have been the happier.

CHAPTER IV
TIBERIUS, CALIGULA, CLAUDIUS, NERO

CHAPTER IV
ASSASSINATIONS OF TIBERIUS, CALIGULA, CLAUDIUS, NERO
(A. D. 37-68.)

AT the time of the assassination of Julius Cæsar, the Roman people, and especially the higher classes, had reached a degree of perversity and degeneracy which appears to the modern reader almost incredible. They had become utterly unfit for self-government. The most atrocious public and private vices in both sexes had taken the place of the civic virtues and the private honor for which the ancient Roman had been famous the world over. In public life, corruption, venality, and bribery were general; a public office-holder was synonymous with a robber of the public treasury. Nepotism prevailed to an alarming degree, and the ablest men were unceremoniously pushed aside for the incapable descendants of the nobility. In times like those, only the very strongest hand and the sternest character and mind can restrain the masses from falling into anarchy and civil war, and impose on society moderation and the rule of law.

The assassination of Cæsar had a most demoralizing effect on the Roman people. The hand of the master who might have controlled the unruly masses and restrained the degenerate nobility lay palsied in death; the giant intellect, which had embraced the civilized world in its dream of establishing a universal monarchy, thought no more; and the results were chaos, anarchy, and civil war. The absence of the master mind was lamentably felt; his heirs were unable to control the wild elements which the assassins had set free; and for many years, rapine, bloodshed, murder, and spoliation ruled supreme throughout the vast extent of the Roman Republic, until finally, in the year 30 B.C., Octavianus Augustus, Cæsar’s nephew, succeeded in establishing that imperium of which Cæsar had dreamed, and for which his genius and his victories had paved the way.

The imperial era, beginning with a display of magnificence and splendor, both in military achievements and literary production, soon degenerated into an era of crime, which, at least in the highest classes of society, has never been equalled in history. Its worst feature was, perhaps, the utter degradation and depravity of the women even of the highest classes, and their readiness to sacrifice everything—chastity, shame, name, and reputation—to the gratification of their passions. Soon the women excelled the men in assassinating, by poison or dagger, their victims or rivals. Augustus, the first Emperor, showed on the throne much less cruelty than he had manifested as a triumvir; but Livia Drusilla, his third wife, was the first of those female monsters on the throne of the Cæsars—Livia, Agrippina, Messalina, Domitia—who never shrank from murder, if by blood or poison they could rid themselves of a rival or of an obstacle to their criminal ambition. Livia, who wished Tiberius, her son by a former marriage, to be the successor of Augustus on the imperial throne, caused Marcellus (the

husband of Julia, daughter of Augustus), and also Julia’s two sons, to be poisoned; and by these crimes secured the succession for Tiberius. She is also suspected of having poisoned Augustus himself.

Tiberius, the second of the Roman Emperors, lives immortal in history rather by his crimes than by his valorous deeds. So does Caligula, the third, and Claudius, the fourth, and Nero, the fifth Emperor,—who were all assassinated after comparatively short reigns, but who had exhausted all forms of cruelty and crime; while their wives, Messalina, Agrippina, and Poppæa will live in history forever as the unrivalled types of female depravity. Above all, Messalina, the wife of Claudius, who ruled from the year 41 to the year 54 of the Christian era, became notorious for every species of vice. In her libidinous and voluptuous excesses, as well as in the demoniacal conception of her murderous plots against her enemies, she was easily first and foremost,—the real empress of the vicious and fallen women of Rome: she became their open rival in the houses of ill-fame in her capital, she contended with them for the palm of obscenity and prostitution, and vanquished them all.

Unless the great historians of Rome had recorded these excesses as facts abundantly substantiated by irrefutable testimony, the reports would have been relegated to the domain of fable, because they are too revolting to be believed without sufficient authority. Can the human mind conceive, for instance, an act of greater criminal insolence than that which the Empress Messalina committed by marrying, publicly and under the very eyes of the capital, a young Roman aristocrat, Caius Silius, for whom she was inflamed with an adulterous passion, while her husband, the Emperor, was but a few miles away at Ostia? And yet Tacitus, a stern and truthful historian, records this as an undeniable fact, adding that future generations will be loath to believe it.

When, in the year 68 A.D., Nero expired by the dagger of a freedman, courage having failed him to commit suicide, the family of Cæsar the Great became extinct, even in its adopted members. Only one hundred and twelve years had elapsed since the greatest of the Romans had fallen by the daggers of the Republican conspirators; but that short period had sufficed to subvert the Republic and to erect a despotic Empire on its ruins, to flood the vast territory of Rome, which embraced the entire civilized world, with streams of blood, to place imbeciles and assassins on the throne of the Cæsars, and to adorn the brows of courtesans and prostitutes, their partners in crime and depravity, with the imperial diadem. Never before in human history had human depravity and human lust displayed themselves more shamelessly; never before had the beast in man shown its innate cruelty so boldly and so openly as during the reigns of these five Roman Emperors. It is almost a consolation for the sorrowing mind to read that Tiberius was choked to death; that Caligula was beaten down and stabbed; that Claudius was killed by a dish of poisonous mushrooms; and that Nero, the last of Cæsar’s dynasty, was helped to his untimely death by the poniard of a freedman. Quick assassination was all too light a punishment for these monsters of iniquity who had so often feasted their eyes on the tortures of their innocent victims.

CHAPTER V
HYPATIA

CHAPTER V
ASSASSINATION OF HYPATIA
(A. D. 415.)

NEVER, perhaps, did the wonderful genius of Alexander the Great appear to better advantage than when he selected Alexandria as a commercial centre and distributing point for the products of three continents, and as an intellectual focus from which Hellenic culture should be transmitted to those countries of Asia and Africa which his victories had opened to Greek civilization. The rapidity with which the city—to which Alexander had given his own name—grew to the dimensions of a great capital and a world-emporium, proved the sagacity and ingenious foresight of its founder, and was unrivalled among all the cities of the ancient world. It became the greatest seaport of the world, surpassing in the grandeur and magnificence of its buildings every other city except Rome itself; and when, through the genius of the Ptolemies, the successors of Alexander as rulers of Egypt, the great library was added to its monuments and treasures of art, it became also the intellectual capital of the world, rivalling and in some respects eclipsing the city of the Cæsars. It is true, long before Alexandria had reached its greatest prosperity, the creative power of Hellenic genius in the higher spheres of poetry and philosophy had passed its zenith. In the so-called Alexandrian age of literature the most beautiful and most poetical inspirations were the idyls of Theocritus. But Alexandria was the first city in the ancient world which became the seat of a many-sided, methodical scholarship, and of systematic, zealous studies of the exact sciences,—a university in the modern sense. It also became the great library city of the world.

It is true, the great library of inestimable value collected by Ptolemy Philadelphus (who also purchased the large library of Aristoteles) had been ruthlessly destroyed in the Alexandrian war of Julius Cæsar. But Ptolemy Physcon collected a second valuable library, which was augmented by the splendid library of King Eumenes of Pergamus, and formed by far the grandest collection of books to be found in the world. Mark Antony gave this splendid library to Queen Cleopatra. It comprised the intellectual treasures of the ancient world, and was placed in a wing of the Serapeum,—in that gigantic and magnificent building which was the grandest temple of ancient Egypt and the pride of Alexandria. The great city of the Ptolemies, with a population of nearly a million souls, had also become a sort of neutral territory upon which all religions could meet on equal terms. The cosmopolitan character of this great commercial centre, in which Christians, Jews, and pagans of all countries competed for the acquisition of wealth, made it natural for all these different citizens to live in harmony and mutual toleration. The time came, however, when Christianity was proclaimed the official state religion under Theodosius the Great, upon whose instigation or order the Roman Senate (not by a unanimous, but by a simple majority vote) passed a resolution declaring that the Christian religion should be the only true religion for the Roman Empire. This official declaration became the signal for a brutal persecution of the old religion throughout the Empire, and especially in its eastern provinces. Very prominent in this work of persecution and destruction was Theophilus, Archbishop of Alexandria, who was famous far and wide as one of the great lights of the Church and as a man of exceptional piety, although many of his actions are utterly inexcusable from a moral point of view. Theophilus was in constant warfare with the pagans and Jews of Alexandria, who quite often joined hands in fighting him. But, as a rule, they were defeated by the pugnacious prelate, who, on such occasions, always found at his command a formidable army composed of the mob of the city and of the monks of the desert of Nitria, which was near the city. The main object of Theophilus’s attacks was the great Serapeum, in which immense treasures of gold, silver, and sacred vessels were stored away, and which contained also the great collection of books,—a perfect armory of pagan philosophy, religion, and poetry,—which was especially obnoxious to him. By shrewdly misrepresenting the spirit of revolt among the Jews and pagans of the city, he succeeded in getting an edict from the Emperor authorizing him to destroy this temple of ancient wisdom and culture,—and, for the second time, the magnificent library of Alexandria was partly destroyed, partly scattered to the winds.

The audacity of Theophilus had inflicted terrible defeats on the non-Christian population of Alexandria, and had utterly disheartened it. On the other hand, the Christian inhabitants showed by their increasing arrogance that they were conscious of the supremacy of their church and of the exclusive protection to which their religion entitled them. However, in spite of this cruel discrimination there still remained at Alexandria a large and intelligent element true to the old religion, or rather to the old philosophy.

Theophilus died in the year 412 A.D., and was succeeded by his nephew Kyrillos, better known as St. Cyril, who continued the vindictive policy against the Jews and pagans which his uncle had inaugurated. It was not long before Cyril had fanaticized the mob against the Jews to such an extent that the latter, driven to despair, took up arms against their aggressors, who had undertaken a regular crusade against their lives and property. Pitched battles and massacres took place in the streets of Alexandria. Hundreds of the unfortunate Jews were slain, and very likely the Jewish population would have been entirely exterminated or expelled from the city, had not Orestes, the imperial governor, interfered in their behalf, and defeated the infuriated mob and the monks of Nitria, who as usual had taken a hand in the fight. But it was a long and stubbornly contested battle. Although Cyril personally did not show himself, it was nevertheless well known that he directed the attacks against the Jews from his hiding-place. Moreover all his most intimate friends actively participated in the riot and strenuously resisted the efforts of the governor to restore peace.

One of these friends personally assaulted and seriously wounded the governor. After the revolt had been quelled, this man was put on trial and sentenced to death. In vain Cyril appealed for mercy and tried to save the life of the accused man. Orestes was implacable, and the condemned man was executed. The disdain with which he had been treated by the governor, enraged the prelate and stimulated him to revenge. A large procession of priests and citizens took the body of the criminal from the gibbet and carried it to the principal church of Alexandria, where the Archbishop read high mass and delivered a sermon full of admiration and eulogy for the victim, filling the hearts of the congregation with hatred and contempt for the authorities, and invoking the punishment of Heaven upon their heads. But even this public demonstration did not satisfy the Archbishop; and with consummate cruelty he hit upon a plan for deeply wounding the governor without attacking him personally.

At that time there lived at Alexandria a young lady of great talent and renown. Her name was Hypatia. She was the daughter of Theon, a celebrated mathematician who lived at Alexandria, and whose genius for mathematics she seemed to have inherited. She first became his pupil, but soon surpassed him in ability and reputation. She also applied herself with great zeal and rare penetration to the study of the philosophy of Plato, whom she greatly admired and much preferred to Aristotle. Since Alexandria had no professors superior to herself in attainments and learning, Hypatia went to Greece and for several years attended the lectures of the most famous professors of Athens. She then returned to Alexandria, and was immediately invited by the authorities to the chair of philosophy in the University. Hypatia accepted this honor and filled the position with brilliant success. It was not only her profound and extensive learning, embracing the entire compass of the exact sciences, but also the charm of her persuasive and mellifluous eloquence which filled her hearers with admiration.

Her reputation as a public lecturer soon equalled her renown as a mathematician and philosopher, and a number of the most distinguished men of Alexandria and other cities were among her regular disciples, listening with delight to her dissertations. One of her most enthusiastic students was Synesius, afterwards Bishop of Ptolemais, who always held her in affectionate reverence, although she had steadily refused to profess the Christian religion. Orestes, the governor, was also among the number of her admirers and was frequently seen at her lectures, which were attended by Christians as well as by pagans. To the great qualities of her mind were added rare physical beauty and a suavity of manners which won the hearts of all those who became acquainted with her. Several of Alexandria’s most prominent citizens desired to marry her, but she refused all proposals because she wanted to live only for the sciences to which she had devoted her life. In spite of her great popularity and the steadily increasing number of admirers, Hypatia’s reputation was spotless; she had many friends, but never had a lover. While this eminent woman’s celebrity as a thinker—which entirely eclipsed his own—would have been sufficient to fill the heart of Cyril with envy and jealousy, there was an additional reason for his hatred and hostility. Orestes, the governor, was a frequent visitor at her house and was known to consult her frequently on important public questions. The Archbishop, perhaps justly, attributed to Hypatia’s influence the governor’s evident leaning toward paganism and his open admiration for the philosophical doctrines of the Greek philosophers. Seeking for a victim on whom to vent his spite against Orestes, he therefore selected Hypatia as the one whose destruction would hurt him most deeply, while at the same time it would deliver himself and the church from their most dangerous opponent. It was comparatively easy for him to inflame the minds of the ignorant masses with rage against the woman who was represented to them as the implacable enemy of their religion, and whose pernicious teachings had led so many others from the path of virtue and salvation.

Everything was carefully but secretly prepared for the fatal blow, which was struck in the month of March, 415. It was a beautiful sunny day, and Hypatia got ready to proceed to the University, where she was to lecture that forenoon. A carriage was waiting for her at the door of her residence. When she entered the carriage she was surprised at the unusual number of people filling the street, and at the great number of monks passing through their ranks and apparently haranguing them. She could not account for this strange gathering, for it was not a Christian holiday, nor was any civil procession to come off that morning.

All at once she noticed that this great assemblage of people began to move in the direction of her own house. As it came nearer she heard wild exclamations and threats, without comprehending, however, that she was the object of this hostile demonstration. At the head of the procession marched Peter, the reader, one of the most fanatical of the priests of the city; he had played a very prominent part in the previous riots, and was evidently the leader in this new movement. With growing astonishment Hypatia saw them coming, but in the consciousness of her innocence she had no fear. She was soon to be cruelly disabused.

As soon as the rioters were within a few hundred feet of her residence and saw her seated in her carriage ready to start, the leaders and those in the front rank rushed toward her. Peter, the reader, was the first to reach her and to lay hands on her. As she recoiled from his touch in terror, others climbed upon the wheels of the carriage and dragged her down into the street. She resisted and called for help, but her cries died away unheard in the tumult of the roaring and jeering multitude who surrounded the carriage and with ever-increasing violence uttered threats against her.

Popular excitement is a flame which feeds itself by the electric current emanating from thousands of impassioned and excited minds. It is ready on slight provocation to burst forth in all-devouring violence. But a few minutes had passed from the moment the procession reached Hypatia’s carriage until the infuriated mob, holding the victim firmly in their grasp, had torn the garments from her body and hurried her with wild cheers and laughter to the Cæsarium, the great Christian church. Paralyzed with fear, unable to utter anything but screams and cries for help, she was dragged, in a state of perfect nudity, through the streets, and neither her helplessness nor her beauty softened the hearts of her tormentors and murderers. She was doomed to die, to be sacrificed at a Christian altar, atoning for her unbelief and her pernicious teachings with her life. One of her own friends, like herself adhering to the ancient cult and to Platonic philosophy, fitly compared Hypatia’s murder to the sacrifice of a Greek goddess by drunken and infuriated barbarians. But the crowning infamy of this assassination, as brutal as any that history has recorded, was that the victim was dragged to the church of Christ,—Christ, the incarnation of love and mercy,—and slaughtered there amidst the yells and curses of the so-called believers.

Hundreds of women had swelled the mob, and like the men they were brandishing flints, shells, and broken pottery, with which to cut and lacerate their victim that they might feast their eyes on her agony.

Charles Kingsley has given in his famous novel, “Hypatia,” a heart-rending description of the last moments of the illustrious woman-philosopher. The description may not be accurate in every little detail, but Mr. Kingsley sees the scene with the eye and with the imagination of a poet, and his description is poetically true. Our readers will thank us for quoting his words in rendering this final scene:—

“Whither were they dragging her?... On into the church itself! Into the cool dim shadow, with its fretted pillars, and lowering domes, and candles, and incense, and blazing altar, and great pictures looking from the walls athwart the gorgeous gloom; and right in front, above the altar, the colossal Christ watching unmoved from off the wall, his right hand raised to give a blessing—or a curse?

“On, up the nave, fresh shreds of her dress strewing the holy pavement—up the chancel steps themselves—right underneath the great, still Christ: and there even those hell-hounds paused.... She shook herself free from her tormentors, and springing back, rose for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around—shame and indignation in those wide, clear eyes, but not a stain of fear. With one hand she clasped her golden locks around her; the other long white arm was stretched upward toward the great still Christ, appealing—and who dare say in vain?—from man to God. Her lips were open to speak; but the words that should have come from them reached God’s ear alone; for in an instant Peter struck her down, the dark mass closed over her again ... and then wail on wail, long, wild, ear-piercing, ran along the vaulted roofs.... What in the name of the God of mercy were they doing? Tearing her piece-meal? Yes, and worse than that!... It was over. The shrieks had died away into moans, the moans to silence.... A new cry rose through the dome: ‘To the Cinaron! Burn the bones to ashes! Scatter them into the sea!’”

In the whole annals of crime not a more heart-rending and more brutal scene can be found than the murder of Hypatia. The assassination of the beautiful young Princess de Lamballe, the friend of Marie Antoinette, during the worst days of the French Revolution, bears some resemblance to it; but, after all, political fanaticism is never equal in its intensity and cruelty to religious fanaticism. Moreover, the fate of Hypatia shows that not all the martyrs were on the side of Christianity in the early ages of the Christian church. It should be stated, however, that a general cry of horror resounded through the world when the terrible news of Hypatia’s death crossed the seas and was echoed from land to land, and that the Christian Church, by its most illustrious representatives, was loud in its denunciation of the murder.

Upon the fame and name of St. Cyril the murder of Hypatia has left a lasting stain; for the plan and execution were generally attributed to him. Even Catholic Church historians, both ancient and modern, criticise him severely for his imprudent and ill-advised instigations against Hypatia and her followers, although they try to protect his memory against the reproach of having intentionally caused her death.

CHAPTER VI
THOMAS À BECKET

CHAPTER VI
ASSASSINATION OF THOMAS À BECKET
(December 29, 1170)

ONE of the most remarkable careers and one of the most famous assassinations in the middle ages were the career and the assassination of Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. His life (at least after he had been elevated to the Primacy of England) and his death show him as the great representative of the Church of Rome, standing up for the defence of its rights and dying in their defence; and they show also how necessary, in those dark ages, was a superhuman power, to hold the arrogance and brute force of warriors and princes in check, and bring into subjection their unbridled passions and their insolent usurpations. Even if Thomas à Becket miserably perished in his bold resistance to kingly assumption, his death was a wholesome lesson to the tyrants on European thrones, and raised him higher in the estimation of the world than a victory over King Henry the Second would have done.

Thomas Becket, or, as he is oftener called, Thomas à Becket, rose to his eminent station in State and Church from comparatively low birth. He was born in 1119, the son of a London merchant and an Oriental mother. This lady had followed the merchant to England after his return from the Holy Land, where he had been a crusader. The merchant rapidly acquired wealth, and was able to give his son, who was distinguished by brilliant talents, a splendid education. After having studied for some time at Oxford, the young man was permitted to complete his studies at the University of Paris, which at that time attracted students from all parts of Europe by the reputation of its professors and the superiority of its methods of instruction. From Paris Thomas went to Bologna, in order to study theology; by his travels and the application and zeal with which he pursued his studies, he acquired an exceptional reputation for the extent, variety, and depth of his knowledge. On his return from Italy Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury was charmed with the attainments and learning of the young man, and recommended him to the King for the appointment of Chancellor. The King appointed him and made him also the tutor of his son. In the position of Chancellor he ingratiated himself with the King, and his counsels in matters of State and of importance to the crown proved so valuable that the King soon distinguished him above all other courtiers and officials, and treated him more as a friend than as a subject.

Having inherited immense wealth from his father, and having, moreover, been endowed by the munificence of the King with a number of offices and benefices from which he derived large revenues, the Chancellor made a great display of splendor and wealth. His household eclipsed almost that of the King himself, and looked more like the court of a prince than the household of a citizen. However, he neglected no opportunity to show his loyalty and devotion to the King. In 1159 he accompanied the King to Toulouse, with a retinue of seven hundred knights and twelve hundred mounted men, all of whom he had equipped at his own expense. The King also intrusted him with a confidential mission to Paris, where he was to negotiate the marriage of the King’s eldest son with the eldest daughter of the King of France. The Chancellor succeeded in concluding a family alliance between the two courts, and conducted the young princess personally to England.

In 1162 Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, died, and King Henry the Second immediately declared that Thomas à Becket should be his successor. When the King’s plan to make him Archbishop was mentioned to Becket, he protested against it, and it would seem, sincerely. He even went so far as to tell the King, when the latter urged him to work for his election, that he was making a mistake in advocating his elevation to the See of Canterbury, using these words: “If I should be raised to that office, you would soon hate me as much as you now love me; for you will meddle in the affairs of the Church more than I can consent to, and people will not be wanting to embroil us.” But the King laughed at these warnings. He supposed that Becket, as Archbishop, would be as complaisant and willing a tool to assist him in curtailing the prerogatives of the Church and transferring them to the crown, as he had been on a former occasion. He therefore continued to use his influence in favor of Becket’s election, and succeeded in placing him in the Archbishop’s See. At first the Pope objected to his election, but he finally ratified it in order to please the kings of England and France, who had both appealed to him in Becket’s behalf.

No sooner had Becket been installed as Archbishop of Canterbury—which dignity carried with it that of Primate of England—than he entirely changed his mode of living. No more luxury, no more display of wealth, no more horses or magnificent costumes for him! On the contrary, the new Archbishop ostentatiously chose the coarsest and plainest garments. Instead of the fine lace shirt of former days he wore a coarse haircloth, dirty in the extreme, and his outer garments were frequently ragged. His food was of the plainest quality, consisting of bread, water, and skimmed milk. He affected austerity in every way, frequently flogged himself for impure thoughts or nominal sins which he might have committed, and every day he knelt and washed the feet of thirteen beggars. He resigned his office as Chancellor in order to devote all his time and zeal to his new office and the affairs of the Church.

The King did not like the change in the Archbishop’s ways, and protested against his resignation, but Becket would not reconsider it. The King rightly guessed that there might be a hidden meaning and a secret ambition in the Archbishop’s sudden conversion to Christian humility, which so strangely contrasted with his past conduct. The storm between the two mighty men, each self-willed and irascible, was brewing, and when it finally broke out, it was fierce and relentless. It never ended until the prelate lay prostrate as a victim of assassins before the altar of the church which he tried to protect from the King’s usurpation.

It was not long before the conflict broke out. It then appeared that the change which had taken place in Becket was not confined to the outer man only, but had also affected his relation to the Church and the State. From a King’s counsellor and servant he had suddenly turned to be the counsellor and servant of the Church, and he carried over into his new station the impulsiveness and stubbornness which had always distinguished him in the service of the King. It is difficult to say which of the two, in this struggle for ascendency, was right, or rather which of the two was the more to blame. For while the King was aggressive, arrogant, domineering, in the consciousness of his power, the Archbishop was imperious, insolent, and inconsistent, inasmuch as he now boldly condemned what he had formerly counselled. But it seemed to be a trait of Becket’s character, that he always devoted himself unconditionally to the master he served at the time, and that from the moment he abandoned the service of the King for that of the Church it was quite natural for him to defend the interests and rights of the latter against the usurpations of the former.

At that time a priest who had committed any crime could be tried by an ecclesiastical court only; consequently very few criminals of this class were convicted and adequately punished; in most cases the accused, even if found guilty, were only reprimanded and degraded. This abuse was carried to such excess that during the first years of the reign of Henry the Second no less than one hundred murders committed by priests had not been punished. A priest had seduced the daughter of a gentleman living in Worcestershire, and, confronted by the angry father of the girl, assassinated him. Public indignation was aroused by this atrocity to such an extent that the King ordered the arrest of the guilty priest and his trial before a civil tribunal. Becket protested against this order, claiming that it was an infringement of the prerogatives of the Church. He ordered an ecclesiastical court to investigate the charges, and the result was as usual, that the punishment awarded was only degradation. The King was furious. He made up his mind to beat the Archbishop at his own game and to punish him for his presumption. He therefore submitted the question of ecclesiastical immunities and of church prerogatives to a council of jurists and ordered them to investigate whether these prerogatives were founded on a solid historical basis. The jurists knew what sort of decision the King wanted, and they gave it. Thereupon the King convened a general council of the high nobility and also of the Church at Clarendon, and there, among other restrictions placed upon the Church, it was enacted that members of the clergy indicted for a crime should be tried by civil tribunals, exactly like other subjects.

Becket, seeing that all the barons and many prelates had submitted to the decree of the council, was compelled to yield, and swore to obey it; but his submission was caused only by his powerlessness. But when this so-called Constitution of Clarendon was sent to the Pope for ratification, he rejected it haughtily and condemned it in the most energetic manner. Thereupon Becket, basing his action on the condemnation of the Pope, openly retracted the consent which he had given to the Clarendon decree, and subjected himself to great austerities and macerations proportionate to the greatness of the sin he had committed in yielding to the royal demands. He even refused to perform any functions connected with his episcopal rank until the Pope had acquitted him of his great wrong against the Church. This action made the rupture between the King and the Archbishop irreparable. Henry swore to have his revenge on a priest who was not only an ingrate but a perjurer. He arraigned him before a parliament convened at Northampton in 1165 as a rebel, as having violated his oath of allegiance. Becket was convicted, his personal estate was confiscated, the revenues of his archbishopric were seized, and Becket himself, abandoned even by his clergy, fled to France, whose King, in spite of the protests of Henry, offered him a refuge.

Becket’s spirit was far from being broken. From his retreat in France he wrote to the bishops of England that the Pope had annulled the Constitution of Clarendon, and at the same time he excommunicated a number of those, bishops as well as other high officials, who had assisted in violating the sacred rights of the Church. The King answered by exiling all his relatives from England, and forbidding his subjects to correspond with him, or to send him money; he even forbade prayers in behalf of the Archbishop to be offered in church.

But the conditions between the Church and the court created by this conflict were such that the King found it expedient to make overtures of reconciliation to Becket, first through the bishops and church officials of England, and afterwards personally. In a conference which he held for that purpose with the King of France, he said to the latter: “There have been several kings of England, some more and others less powerful than myself; there have been also several Archbishops of Canterbury, in my opinion as respectable and as sainted as Thomas à Becket; let him show to me the same deference which the greatest of his predecessors have shown to the least powerful of my predecessors, and there will be no controversy between us.” King Henry also offered to take the clergy of France as umpires in the questions at issue; but when Becket stubbornly refused to be reconciled to the King of England, the King of France lost his patience and withdrew the protection which up to that day he had accorded to him.

These and other changes unfavorable to him finally induced Becket to lend to the King’s proposals of reconciliation a more willing ear, and at last an interview took place between them which resulted in their reconciliation—apparently at least. The interview was much more cordial than might have been supposed from the exceedingly strained relations that had existed between them for years. The Archbishop approached the King as became a subject, and the King met him with the humility shown at that time to princes of the Church; when they parted, Becket bent his knee to the King, who held the stirrup of his horse as the Archbishop mounted. The interview had resulted in settling their differences. Both had made concessions, but the larger part of these had been made by the King. All the Archbishop’s personal property had also been restored to him; he thereupon agreed to return to England and resume the functions of his office. He had been absent seven years.

The people at large, and especially the poor, greeted him with enthusiasm; but the barons kept away, and some of them showed open hostility to the Archbishop, or mysteriously hinted at a speedy ending of his newly regained honors. His arrival in England had been preceded by a messenger from the Pope carrying writs of excommunication for three English bishops who had been especially hostile to Becket. These bishops immediately went to Normandy, where Henry the Second had remained, and laid their complaints before him, laying all the blame on Becket, whom they charged with inflaming the people of England against their King and sowing discord in their hearts. When these matters were laid before him, and also a statement that Becket had excommunicated two barons whom he considered his special enemies, the King got into a rage and exclaimed: “What? Is there among the cowards whom I feed at my table not one brave enough to deliver me from this firebrand of a priest?” These words could have but one meaning. Four of the barons took it upon themselves to deliver the King from the obnoxious priest. The King afterwards declared that he had never intended to suggest the assassination of Becket; but what other construction could be given to his words? The assassination itself was one of the most dramatic in history. The would-be murderers travelled in such haste that a messenger whom the King sent after them to warn them not to kill Becket could not overtake them. Arriving at Canterbury on December 29, 1170, they, with twelve other noblemen, went to the Archbishop’s residence, and expostulated with him concerning the excommunication of certain priests and barons, and when he refused to revoke the excommunications, the barons left him with threats. They returned toward evening. The bell of the church was ringing for vespers, and the Archbishop had gone there. The priests wanted to close and barricade the doors, but he objected. “The doors of the house of God should not be barricaded like a fortress!” said he. Just then the assassins came in, brandishing their swords and calling for the traitor. The priests surrounding the Archbishop fled in terror; only his cross-bearer stayed with him. It was so dark that neither the intruders nor the priest could be seen distinctly. Another voice called: “Where is the Archbishop?” “I am here,” answered Becket. “I am no traitor, but only a priest of the Lord!” They were afraid to kill him in the holy precincts. Once more they asked him to absolve those he had excommunicated. He refused, because they had not repented. “Then you shall die!” they cried. “I am ready, in the name of the Saviour,” he answered; “but I forbid you, by the Lord Almighty, to touch any of these present, priests or laymen.” They heeded him not, but rushed upon him, and with three or four thrusts from their swords, one of them splitting his skull, laid him prostrate at the foot of the altar.

The murderers hurried back to Normandy to get their reward. The news of the murder, when it reached the ears of the King, struck terror into his heart. He knew he was, and would be held, responsible for Becket’s death. Fear seized him, that he would feel the Pope’s wrath, that he would be excommunicated, that England and his possessions in France would be placed under an interdict, that the Saxon population of England, which already revered Becket as a saint, might rise in open rebellion against him. He therefore made haste to disclaim publicly any complicity in the murder, and sent an ambassador to the Pope to assure him of his entire innocence and of his profound grief at the bloody deed. The Pope at first refused to receive the ambassador, and it was only by means of many prayers, promises, and humble supplications that he finally absolved the King of intentional complicity in the heinous crime. The King actually purchased this absolution by pledging himself to support, during three years, two hundred well-equipped horsemen for the protection of the Holy Sepulchre.

But even this act of papal absolution was not deemed sufficient by the King to protect him from the evil consequences of the assassination. To remove this danger the King two years afterwards undertook a pilgrimage to the tomb of Becket, who had in the meantime been buried in the Cathedral with royal honors. As soon as the steeple of the Cathedral appeared on the horizon, the King dismounted, and proceeded on his way barefooted, his bleeding feet leaving a spot of blood at every step. On his arrival at the tomb he prostrated himself, and subjected himself to the humiliation of a severe flagellation at the hands of the monks, each of whom applied to his bare back three strokes from a knotted rope.

Having undergone this public chastisement, the King remained praying and fasting the following night, prostrated on the tombstone. Next morning he returned to London, where, immediately after his arrival, he fell seriously ill from the effects of his pilgrimage.

The Pope canonized the martyr who had so heroically died in the defence of the prerogatives of the Church.

CHAPTER VII
GESSLER

CHAPTER VII
ASSASSINATION OF GESSLER
(A.D. 1307.)

THE assassination of Julius Cæsar and of the first Roman Emperors led to greater demoralization of the people, and thereafter to anarchy, bloodshed, civil war, and ultimately to an atrocious despotism; but at an interval of twelve hundred and forty years after the death of Nero there occurred a political assassination, growing out of personal revenge, which freed a whole people from oppression and placed the murderer among the heroes of mankind and the liberators of nations. We speak of William Tell, the national hero of Switzerland, who in 1307 deliberately murdered Gessler, the Austrian governor.

This governor, who resided at the castle of Kuessnacht, had committed the greatest outrages and acts of despotism against the inhabitants of his gubernatorial district, embracing the so-called three Waldstädte (Forest Cantons),—Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden. Until then these Forest Cantons had enjoyed a republican government, and had given to the German Empire a merely nominal recognition, by acknowledging the German Emperor as their suzerain. There is a great resemblance in the relations between these Swiss Cantons and the German Empire to the relations which existed, before the South African war, between the two Boer Republics and the crown of England. Rudolph of Hapsburg, himself a Swiss by birth, who had been elected German Emperor, had pursued a liberal policy toward the Cantons and in special charters had guaranteed to them their inherited rights and liberties. But his son Albrecht the First, who succeeded Rudolph on the imperial throne, resolved to do away with these prerogatives, deprive the Swiss Cantons of their independence, and make them subject to the crown of Austria. Theretofore the German Emperors had been represented in a few cities of Switzerland by bailiffs, who exerted the same authority in the Cantons as our federal judges in United States Territories; but Albrecht changed their duties and authority entirely, investing them with many additional powers, so that they became practically governors of their districts, appointed by the Emperor and administering their office as imperial officials.

Against this change the inhabitants of the Cantons entered their solemn protests; they sent delegations to Albrecht to remonstrate with him; but he gave evasive answers, increased the soldiery protecting the governors, shut his ears to all complaints about their arrogance and growing usurpation, and secretly encouraged them “to do all in their power to break the stubborn resistance of these uncouth mountaineers and boors, and make them obedient subjects of the Austrian crown.” To the strong men of the Cantons, who had never bowed their necks under the yoke of a foreign despot, the tyranny of these Austrian governors became intolerable; their leading men made up their minds to throw it off by all means, and to maintain their independence at any cost. Even the members of the nobility scattered through the Cantons were indignant at the arbitrary and haughty ways of the imperial bailiffs, who treated them with the same arrogance as they treated the common people; they therefore made common cause with the latter, so that practically the imperial officials were isolated in a hostile country, without friends or party.

The public discontent culminated in a secret conspiracy, of which Walter Fuerst of Uri, Werner Stauffacher of Schwyz, and Arnold Melchthal of Unterwalden, were the originators. These three men, each a representative and influential citizen of his own Canton, met at the house of Walter Fuerst and agreed to meet for further consultation on the Ruetli, an elevated plateau, hidden in the woods, near the lake of Uri, on certain nights, each undertaking to bring along ten men tried and true, who had promised to act with them, for life and death, for the deliverance of their country. They also pledged themselves by oath to keep this league a secret from all but the initiated, who like themselves had sworn to coöperate for the deliverance of the country, until the time had come for united action on one and the same day. This was done in the fall of 1307. A later consultation of the conspirators on the Ruetli took place some weeks afterwards, and was attended by the three leaders and thirty others. They were all full of enthusiasm and hope of victory. They all pledged the almost unanimous support of the inhabitants of the three Cantons, and finally agreed that the people should rise in rebellion on New Year’s Day, 1308. The humane feature of this proposed revolution appears from their joint agreement, affirmed under oath, that, in expelling the Austrian governors and their followers from their castles and their country, they would not kill them except in self-defence, but would treat them with leniency and charity. Is it not as if we heard Oom Krueger and his friends of the Transvaal and Orange Free State counsel on measures for their independence? They placed their full confidence in the justice of their cause, the assistance of God, and their own bravery.

The day for the execution of their plot was anticipated by an unforeseen event. Gessler, the Governor of Uri and Schwyz, had made himself especially odious by all sorts of petty acts of tyranny. Among these was an order that the ducal hat of Austria was to be placed on the top of a long pole to be erected on the market space of Altorf and that nobody should pass by it without uncovering his head and showing it respect as if the Duke of Austria (Albrecht, Emperor of Germany) himself were there. The citizens generally complied with the order. But one day William Tell and his little son passed by the hat without minding Gessler’s order. William Tell was the son-in-law of Walter Fuerst, one of the three leaders of the Ruetli conspiracy, and, like Walter Fuerst himself, he was looked upon with suspicion by the Austrian authorities. The openness with which he ignored Gessler’s order was immediately construed as an act of defiance and rebellion. He was taken before Gessler, and the cruel bailiff imposed upon him a punishment which, he thought, would wound him to the heart.

“Tell,” said he to him, “by your act of disobedience you have forfeited your life. But I will be merciful to you,” and pointing to Tell’s crossbow, he continued: “You have the reputation of being the best archer of our Canton, if not of all Switzerland. I have never seen a test of your skill yet; very well, let your skill be tried now, and if it is as great as your reputation it will save your life. There is an apple. Place it upon your boy’s head, and at a distance of thirty steps shoot it with an arrow. But take good aim! For, if you hit the boy, your life will pay for it!”

William Tell complied with the cruel order, and with his usual masterly skill brought down the apple from the boy’s head. Gessler was enraged at the result, and, before dismissing Tell, he asked him with an insidious smile: “Now tell me, William Tell, why did you take two arrows from your quiver before you took aim at the apple on your boy’s head? Tell me sincerely, and whatever your answer may be, your life shall not be imperilled.”

Carried away by his wrath, Tell contemptuously replied: “If I had missed my aim and hit my boy, the second arrow was for you, and, by God Almighty, it would not have gone astray!”

“That’s what I thought,” cried Gessler, and turning to his escort he ordered them to put Tell in chains and take him to the boat on the lake. “Your life,” said he to Tell, “is not in peril; but I will take you to my castle in Kuessnacht; there in one of the darkest dungeons underground you shall be imprisoned, and may find time to repent the rebellious words which you have uttered!”

In the immediate neighborhood of Kuessnacht, on a mountain top overlooking the town, was the fortified castle where Gessler resided. It was on the way to that residence that Tell did the act by which he satisfied his personal revenge and also freed his country from the bloody tyranny of the despot. While Gessler and his prisoner were crossing the lake, a storm arose, which endangered the boat. The fury of the tempest filled the hearts of the boatmen with dismay and terror, and tremblingly they turned to Gessler, saying: “The boldest and most skilful boatman in the Canton is Tell. He may be able to save the boat, but we cannot! Set him free and he may bring us safe to port.”

Gessler ordered the chains to be removed from Tell’s limbs and ordered him to take the helm, promising him life, liberty, and a full pardon if he should bring them safe into port. Tell took the helm, and the boat, obedient to its master’s hand, sped through the storm-tossed waves like a seabird dancing on the surface. But turning round a rock-bound bluff close to the shore, Tell suddenly took up his cross-bow lying on the bench near by, and with a mighty leap jumped on the rock, hurling the boat far back into the hissing and tempestuous flood.

Gessler also escaped from the watery grave, but only to meet his doom on land even before he had reached his home. Tell was lying in ambush on the road from the lake to Kuessnacht. It was the road which Gessler and his party had to take on their return to the castle, if they should succeed in effecting a landing on the shore. After some time Gessler, accompanied by a few friends, came in sight. No sooner had the party entered the defile than Gessler, shot through the heart by Tell’s unerring arrow, fell from his horse.

Tell’s shot was the signal for the general uprising of the people of Switzerland. Years of struggle and warfare against Austria’s nobility and armed forces followed Tell’s heroic act, but the entire independence of Switzerland was finally secured. Switzerland is to this day a free and independent republic, and Tell’s name shines with imperishable lustre not only as its great national hero, but also among the immortal patriots and liberators of mankind.

We are well aware that recent historical criticism has expressed doubt as to Tell’s great act of deliverance, and even as to his existence, and that in some histories the tale is simply relegated to the domain of legend and tradition. But there is no real justification for this decision. It is founded only on a statement in the chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus recording a feat of archery in Scandinavia similar to that of William Tell, and performed hundreds of years before Tell’s day.

As Johannes von Mueller, the great historian, judiciously says: “It shows but scanty knowledge of history to deny the truth of a historical event simply because another similar event occurred in another century and country.” But truth or fiction, history or legend, the heroic act and name of Tell will live on, immortal and inspiring, as they have lived during the last six hundred years. Poets and novelists have immortalized the great national hero of Switzerland in song and story. Frederick Schiller, Germany’s greatest dramatist, has made him the central hero of his greatest drama, and has given his name to that great hymn of liberty and patriotism, which stirred up the German nation to its glorious struggle against Napoleon the First. It is one of the few truly patriotic assassinations recorded in history.

CHAPTER VIII
IÑEZ DE CASTRO

CHAPTER VIII
ASSASSINATION OF IÑEZ DE CASTRO
(A.D. 1355.)

AS one of the most cruel and heart-rending tragedies of the middle ages, the love-story and the assassination of Iñez de Castro has lived in song and story for five hundred and fifty years, and still awakens echoes of pity and sorrow whenever read or heard.

Constancia, the wife of Pedro, son of Alfonso the Fourth of Portugal, and heir-presumptive to the crown of that kingdom, died in 1344, and left to her husband a son of tender age, named Ferdinand. Pedro thereupon desired to marry the countess Iñez de Castro, a young lady of great beauty and loveliness, and, like himself, sprung in direct lineage, but on her mother’s side, from the royal house of Castile. Iñez de Castro was of an illustrious family, it is true, but her rank was not deemed sufficient to entitle her to become the wife of the Crown Prince; therefore when Dom Pedro mentioned to his father his intention to marry her, the King positively refused his consent. Dom Pedro, however, instead of obeying his father, secured permission from the Pope, and secretly married her, bestowing upon her the full rank and all the rights of a legitimate wife.

In the meantime the King and his advisers urged Dom Pedro to get married again, and proposed a number of young princesses of renowned beauty and ancestry for his choice. But Pedro, without disclosing the secret of his marriage with Iñez de Castro (rumors of which were nevertheless whispered and busily circulated at the court of the King), persistently rejected all these proposals, giving no other reason for his refusal than his personal disinclination to marry. While Pedro’s father reluctantly accepted his son’s emphatic declaration, the most trusted advisers and counsellors of the King, Diego Lopez Pacheco, Pedro Coello, and Alvaro Calvarez, did not, because they were afraid lest the influence of the beautiful and accomplished Iñez de Castro—no matter whether she was legally married to Pedro or not—would be dangerous and possibly fatal to their own preëminence at the court, as soon as Pedro should succeed his father on the throne. They shrewdly worked upon the King’s mind by insinuating that if the rumor of Pedro’s secret marriage should prove to be true, the ultimate succession of Ferdinand, Pedro’s son by his first wife, to whom the King was very much attached, might be endangered, and that possibly the son of Iñez de Castro would become Pedro’s successor on the throne.

The King summoned Pedro to a private interview, and asked him concerning his relations with Iñez de Castro, informing him at the same time of the rumor of his secret marriage. Pedro denied the truth of this rumor, admitting, however, that Iñez de Castro, while not his wedded wife, was so dear to his heart that on her account he would not consent to form a new matrimonial alliance, no matter how illustrious by birth or beauty the princess proposed to him might be. The emphasis with which Pedro made this assertion satisfied his father that the rumor of a secret marriage was true; and when the King, at the next cabinet council, repeated to his confidants the result of his interview with the Crown Prince, they predicted that the greatest calamities would arise, after the King’s death, from the Crown Prince’s infatuation for Iñez, which they ascribed rather to unnatural evil influences than to the surpassing beauty and loveliness of the young woman. The King, a man of very irascible temperament, became excited and indignant; he declared again and again that, if there were no other means of separating Pedro and Iñez, the young woman would have to die. The council then broke up.

It was but a short time afterwards that Dom Pedro left the court for a few days to go out hunting with some friends. But warned by his mother, who had heard of the King’s evil designs upon Iñez de Castro, he had taken her and her two children to Coimbra, where he left them in a convent to await his return. On the day after his departure, King Alfonso suddenly appeared at the convent and demanded to see Iñez de Castro. Pedro’s wife immediately made her appearance, accompanied by her two children. As she looked upon the King, whose mien was grim and menacing, and who was surrounded by a number of his knights in full armor, a presentiment of some terrible calamity which was to befall her and her two children entered her breast, and from an impulse of both fear, and of hope to save her children, she threw herself at the King’s feet, imploring him to forgive her and to take pity on her innocent children. Alfonso’s heart melted with pity at the sight of so much beauty and innocence. He raised her from her kneeling position and told her to be of good cheer, and that no harm would befall her. And then turning round, he left the convent, followed by his attendants, who were not a little surprised at this peaceful ending of a visit which had promised to be a tragedy.

But while Iñez already congratulated herself on her lucky escape from a terrible death, and even on her good fortune in having softened the King’s heart toward herself and her two children, she was nevertheless doomed to ruin. The three counsellors so hostile to her had not accompanied the King on his visit to the convent; they were waiting for the return of their sovereign at some distance from Coimbra, and were greatly disappointed when they learned from his own lips that, instead of having slain with his own hands, as he had promised to do, the woman who had seduced his son and enthralled him either by her beauty or by the employment of supernatural means, he had changed his mind concerning her, and now spoke feelingly and affectionately of her and her sweet children. The counsellors concealed with great difficulty the irritation and disgust with which the King’s weakness filled them; they immediately proceeded to counteract the favorable impression which Iñez had made, uttering the foulest insinuations and aspersions upon her character. The very change which she had succeeded in effecting in the King’s sentiments toward her was made the means of renewing and corroborating the charge that evil spirits were assisting her in bewitching the royal family for her own selfish purposes. “Since she has so easily captured your majesty,” said one of them cunningly, “who can hope to resist her and her ambitious designs? Poor Ferdinand!”

The artful mention of the name of the young prince, whose right of succession was endangered by the recognition of Iñez de Castro, was sufficient to elicit from the King the promise that his son’s mistress should never be received at the court. Having obtained this concession, the three counsellors found it comparatively easy to persuade him that the original purpose for which they had come to Coimbra—the death of Iñez—was the only salvation for the throne and the dynasty, and that it was his duty as a monarch to remove her as soon as possible in order to avert greater calamities. They told him that it was perhaps right that he had not soiled his royal hands with the blood of one who was unworthy of the high distinction of dying by his sword, but that it was a duty he owed to the state and to the legitimate heir to the throne to order her death at the earliest moment. Alfonso was weak and foolish enough to believe them and to sanction the murder of the fair and innocent wife of his son. That very night Iñez de Castro fell a victim to the daggers of two assassins.

The assassination provoked terror throughout Portugal and Spain, and general were the denunciations of the King and the counsellors who had advised him to commit the crime. But in this case what followed the murder has, even more than the atrocity of the crime itself, made it famous in song and story. The murder of Iñez de Castro occurred in 1355.

A rumor of the tragedy reached Dom Pedro while he was taking dinner at the small tavern of a village, some thirty leagues from Coimbra. The Crown Prince was travelling incognito, and neither the host nor the guests of the tavern, except his own companions, knew him and how deeply he was interested in the terrible news which a cattle dealer had just reported as the latest sensation in the city. Dom Pedro hurried back to Coimbra and to the convent. The rumor was only too true. His idolized wife was dead. Three horrible wounds, each of which would have been sufficient to cause death, disfigured her beautiful corpse; but her countenance shone with angelic radiance and sweetness, and the agony of death seemed to have left no trace on it. When Dom Pedro learned from the nuns how the assassins had demanded entrance in the name of the King and had burst open the bedroom of Iñez and butchered her without mercy, he knelt down by the coffin and swore bloody vengeance against all those who had taken a hand in this inhuman and atrocious crime. He called upon Heaven to assist him in bringing the assassins and their instigators to justice, and laying his hands upon the breast of his murdered wife, he swore that he would not desist from the pursuit of the guilty persons, even if he had to seek them on the throne. The meaning of these words could not be misconstrued, for it was generally understood that, while the three counsellors had proposed the murder, the King had given his consent to it. When Dom Pedro’s threat was repeated to him, the King, highly incensed, loudly proclaimed that Iñez de Castro’s death was a just punishment for her criminal liaison with the Crown Prince, in open violation of the King’s order, and assumed the full responsibility for the murder. The Crown Prince, so rudely repelled by his father and deeply wounded by the disgrace heaped upon his virtuous wife, refused to return to the court; on the contrary, he called his friends, and the friends of Iñez de Castro, her brothers and cousins, to arms. The cruel and unjustifiable homicide he justly ascribed to the calumnies and intrigues of a set of rapacious cut-throats who were ready to sacrifice everything to their own personal interests, and who had deceived the King. In a very short time Dom Pedro found himself at the head of an army, with which he invaded those provinces in which the castles and mansions of the counsellors were situated. With merciless severity their lands were laid waste, their castles razed to the ground, their families and friends killed, and everything was done to make their very names and memories odious to their fellow-men.

By that time the King had also been informed by high dignitaries of the Church that the union between his son and Iñez de Castro had been consecrated, that the Pope himself had granted them permission to get married, and that strict secrecy had been observed simply out of high regard for the King, in the hope that he would never hear of it and would consequently not feel irritated by it. This information had a powerful effect on the King’s mind. He began to see what a great crime he had committed in sanctioning the murder of a virtuous and innocent young wife, whose only fault had possibly been her yielding, against the King’s outspoken wishes, to the Prince’s ardent wooing. And when the Queen, Dom Pedro’s mother, added her supplications and tears in behalf of her son, whom the murder of his wife had made nearly insane from grief, the King became more and more willing to be reconciled to him. He not only forgave his acts of rebellion, but even made amends, as much as he could, for the cruel wrong he had done him.

Under such circumstances it was comparatively easy for the Archbishop of Braga, whom the Pope had authorized to impart to the King the information concerning Dom Pedro’s marriage, to effect a reconciliation between father and son. Thereupon the son returned to the court, where he was received with the highest honors, after he had solemnly promised not to take revenge on the counsellors who had been instrumental in causing the death of his wife, and who had already been so severely punished by the devastation of their lands and the destruction of their castles. To consent to this condition was the cruelest sacrifice on the part of Dom Pedro, but he finally yielded to the tears and prayers of his mother—very likely, however, as we shall see, with a mental reservation.

Two years later, King Alfonso the Fourth died, and Dom Pedro ascended the throne of Portugal. The old King’s death was also the signal for the flight of his three counsellors, Pacheco, Coello, and Gonsalvez, whose absence was first noticed at the King’s obsequies. They had sought refuge in Castile, because they felt instinctively that it would not be safe for them to remain in Portugal, and that the ill-concealed hatred of Dom Pedro might break forth at any moment and punish them terribly for the part they had taken in Iñez de Castro’s death. In fact Pedro had never forgiven the assassins of his wife. On the contrary, his heart had never ceased to yearn for the day when he could not only take full and bloody revenge on her persecutors and murderers, but also restore the honor of her name and memory, which had been sullied by the calumnies of those scoundrels.

Castile was at that time ruled by Pedro the Cruel, one of the worst and most bloodthirsty tyrants that ever sat upon a Spanish throne. Some of his victims had made their escape into Portugal and had found protection at the court of Alfonso, Dom Pedro’s father. But when the counsellors of Alfonso arrived at his court, Pedro the Cruel formed the diabolical plan of delivering them up to Pedro of Portugal, provided the latter would deliver, in exchange for them, the Castilians who had found an asylum in his kingdom. No more agreeable proposition could have been made to the King of Portugal, and the exchange was readily made. Two of the counsellors, Coello and Gonsalvez, were transported in chains to Portugal, and executed with inhuman cruelty. They were put to the torture in the hope of extorting from them the names of other accessories to the crime; thereupon they were burned at the stake, and their hearts were torn out; and thereafter their ashes were scattered to the winds. Pacheco, however, escaped this terrible fate. Being absent from the court of Castile when his two colleagues were arrested, he fled to Aragon.

After having in this manner satisfied his vengeance on the assassins, King Pedro assembled the high nobility and the great dignitaries of his kingdom at Cataneda, and in their presence swore that, after the death of his first wife, Constancia, he had legally married Iñez de Castro; that the Pope of Rome had given him special permission to do so, and that the marriage ceremony had been performed by the Archbishop La Guarda, in the presence of two witnesses, whom he mentioned by name. He ordered these facts to be entered upon the archives of the state and to be proclaimed publicly in every city, town, and village of the kingdom. The children of Iñez de Castro were declared legitimate and entitled to all the rights and prerogatives of princes of the blood, including succession to the throne of Portugal. Proceeding thence to Coimbra, the King ordered the vault in which the remains of Iñez had been deposited to be opened, her corpse, which had been embalmed, to be dressed in a royal robe and placed upon a throne, and her head to be adorned with a royal crown. He compelled his attendants, composed of the highest men of the monarchy, to pass by the throne and bow their knees and kiss the edge of the Queen’s robe,—in fact, to show the same reverence and respect to the dead Queen as they might have shown to the living Queen on the day of her coronation. As soon as this ghastly ceremony was over, the corpse was placed in a magnificent metal coffin and escorted by the King and a most brilliant cortège of knights and noblemen to Alcobaza, a royal residence about seventeen miles from Coimbra, and placed in a royal vault. A magnificent monument, which represented Iñez de Castro in her incomparable beauty and loveliness, was shortly after erected near the vault. It was the last tribute which the love and admiration of her husband could render to her memory.

CHAPTER IX
RIZZIO AND DARNLEY

CHAPTER IX
ASSASSINATIONS OF RIZZIO AND DARNLEY
(March 9, 1566; February 9, 1567)

AMONG the female rulers of Europe there is one who on account of her matchless beauty, her genius, her adventurous life, but especially her tragic death, has enlisted the attention and admiration of authors and poets even to a higher degree than Catherine the Second of Russia or Elizabeth of England, who perhaps surpassed her in political genius. More regretted and admired for her misfortunes and accomplishments than condemned for her sins and crimes, Mary Stuart, the beautiful Queen of Scots, lives in the recollections of posterity as a vision of incomparable grace, beauty, and loveliness, hallowed by the genius of great poets and redeemed by a tragic and cruel death. To no historical memory poetry and tradition have been more kind and more idealizing than to Mary Stuart; and yet she deserves a place in this gallery of assassinations not as a victim, but as a murderess.

After reading the descriptions in prose and verse of her personal charms, of her matchless beauty and grace, of her elegance and wit, of her poetical inspiration and musical accomplishments, it is almost impossible for the stern historian to maintain the self-possession of an impartial judge and record the misdeeds of which this bewitching creature was unquestionably guilty. She seemed to combine in her incomparable personality all the physical and mental perfections woman is capable of. We will say, however, that the crimes which have justly been laid to her charge were, in part at least, excusable either on the ground of the surrounding circumstances or of great provocations. Murder itself, in the rude country and in the equally rude and violent times in which it was committed, had not that horrid significance which stigmatizes it in a more refined and cultured state of civilization.

Mary Stuart was the only daughter of King James the Fifth of Scotland by his second wife, Marie de Lorraine. She was the niece of the famous princes of the house of Guise—Duke Francis of Guise and the Cardinal de Lorraine—who were rivals in authority and power with the kings of France, and who on several occasions rose superior to them. James the Fifth died young, with his daughter yet in her cradle. Quite young she was betrothed to the Dauphin of France, who became afterwards King Francis the Second, and she was married to him when a mere child. Her renown for beauty and genius resounded from one end of Europe to the other. With remarkable facility she learned French, Italian, Greek, Latin, history, theology, music, painting, dancing, and she excelled in writing poetry. Some of her short poems are still famous in French literature. But her life as Queen of France was but a short dream of splendor and delight. The weak and emaciated Francis the Second died after a reign of eleven months, and the crown went to his young brother, Charles the Ninth.

Mary Stuart retired for a while to a convent at Rheims, but soon, upon the death of her mother at Edinburgh, she proceeded to Scotland, where a throne awaited her. Quite a number of enthusiastic adorers among the high nobility of France followed her to her new home, because they could not bear the thought of separating from a princess so charming and beautiful,—a princess who kindled in the hearts of all men who were brought into contact with her, desires and frequently a passion which became fatal to them. Unquestionably Mary Stuart was one of the most dangerous coquettes who ever lived, and at the brilliant and voluptuous court of the Valois in France, almost under the personal direction of the famous Diana de Poitiers, she had cultivated the art of using her extraordinary charms and accomplishments for the seduction of men to her best advantage. One of the most conspicuous of these followers from France was Du Chatelard, the scion of one of the noblest houses of the French monarchy. He bears the sad distinction of having been the first victim to Mary Stuart’s intrigues, and of having paid for the mad and uncontrollable passion which he had conceived for her with his life. Chatelard himself was a young man of high accomplishments. He was a poet and musician, and by his sweet voice he easily won the favor of the young Queen. She imprudently gave him so many proofs of her favor and openly admitted him to such a close intimacy that young Chatelard not without reason believed that she returned the love which he had conceived for her. And Mary was not in the least afraid to show her fondness for him. It is authentically reported, for instance, that in bidding him goodnight in the presence of the court “she kissed him below the chin, looking at him in a way that set his whole soul afire.” No wonder that the young man in the transport of his passion committed acts of indiscretion and madness, which in a short time led to his execution, without visibly affecting the beautiful coquette who had encouraged his passion. One night the ladies of the palace discovered him hidden behind the curtains of the Queen’s bed, but his audacity was ascribed to his thoughtlessness and vanity. He was expelled from the palace for a while, but was soon afterwards forgiven and received again into the Queen’s intimacy. This act of pardon turned the young man’s head again. He made no secret of his glowing admiration for the Queen, and addressed amorous verses to her, which were repeated by her attendants. One evening he was again discovered in the Queen’s bedroom, where he had secreted himself under the Queen’s bed. This second time he was put on trial, and was condemned to death for having conspired against the Queen’s life. In vain he protested his undying love for Mary Stuart, but the judges were inexorable, and Mary herself, who had been trifling with his heart so long, and who with a single stroke of the pen could have pardoned and saved him, coolly handed him over to the executioner. A scaffold was erected before the windows of Holyrood Palace, where Mary resided, and Du Chatelard, the grand-nephew of the famous Chevalier Bayard, suffered death with a heroism worthy of his great ancestor. His last words were, as he cast a sorrowful look upon the windows behind which the Queen stood with her attendants: “Farewell, thou who art so beautiful and so cruel, who killest me, and whom I cannot cease to love!”

The death of Chatelard was the first of a series caused by the mad passion which Mary Stuart kindled in the hearts of her adorers. Another attendant who had followed Queen Mary from France to Scotland, and whose tragic fate is even more generally known than that of Du Chatelard, was David Rizzio, an Italian musician, who for some time had been attached to the court of Francis the Second of France. Rizzio was of low birth, but had some talent as a composer of songs and as a singer, and had been brought from Italy by the French Ambassador at Piedmont, from whose service he passed into that of one of the enthusiastic noblemen who had escorted the young Queen to Scotland. The Queen’s attention was soon attracted to the Italian composer and singer, and she begged Rizzio of the nobleman, so that he might enter her own service and by his art make her forget the lonesome hours and the homesickness for France which she felt would be the inevitable result of her residence in Scotland. By a congeniality of taste the poor and lowborn Italian artist and the beautiful young Queen were thrown together a great deal, and gradually the love for the art ripened into a preference for the artist. He soon became the declared favorite and private secretary of the Queen, who made him practically the omnipotent counsellor and minister of her policy.

The scandal of this singular preference, which was at once announced as a vulgar love affair, spread rapidly over all Scotland, and gave rise to loud complaints by the Protestants, headed by John Knox, who preached against the “woman of Babylon” and her low-bred paramour. The Queen was blind to the consequences of her infatuation for this lute player, a mere servant, who moreover, by his Italian nationality and Catholic religion, defied the narrow prejudices of the Scotch people. In spite of her beauty, youth, and loveliness the Queen became very unpopular, not only with the nobility, but with the great mass of the people.

At that very time Mary Stuart was induced, mainly through the influence of Queen Elizabeth of England, to contract a marriage with Henry Darnley, a young Scot of the almost royal house of Lennox, of great physical, although somewhat effeminate, beauty, but of very inferior mind. On seeing this young Adonis, Mary Stuart fell immediately and very desperately in love with him, while it was noticed that Darnley showed much greater coldness than men generally manifested in their gallantry toward her. Darnley, descending from a daughter of Henry the Eighth, had perhaps as good a title to the crown of England as Mary Stuart, and by a marriage of these two claimants, it was expected that their interests would be consolidated and consequently strengthened. The interest which Queen Elizabeth of England had to promote this marriage was her hope of lowering Queen Mary’s standing and authority in the eyes of her many Catholic adherents in England by this marriage with an English subject,—an intention in which Elizabeth was largely successful. In spite of the strong opposition of a number of the most prominent Scotch nobles and most notably of Lord Murray, Mary’s half-brother, the marriage was consummated on the twenty-ninth of July, 1565. On the other hand. David Rizzio, Mary’s Italian secretary and confidant, had very warmly advocated and promoted the marriage, and Darnley openly paid court to him, expecting great results from his influence over the Queen. Why Rizzio should have so eagerly encouraged the

marriage is involved in doubt. Very likely the scandalous stories circulated about the Queen’s relations to Rizzio were mere inventions; and Rizzio, who moreover was deformed and ugly, far from being the Queen’s lover, was only ambitious; he hoped to have even a greater share of political authority under a nominal king, whom he recognized as an intellectual nonentity, but whose personal beauty diverted the young Queen’s thoughts from the cares of government.

During the first months after the wedding Rizzio’s expectations were fully realized. The young Queen in the transport of her passion for Darnley paid no attention to government affairs; her whole mind and soul seemed to be enwrapped in her love for her young husband; apparently she cared for nothing else but to caress him and to shower her favors upon him. She conferred upon him the title of king, without, however, giving him the attributes of royal power, which she reserved for herself. If Darnley had been a man of greater mental calibre he could very easily have made himself king in fact as well as in name; but he was a weakling in every respect. After the first few weeks had passed away in the closest intimacy with her consort, Mary’s extreme fondness, not to say idolatry, of him, entirely disappeared, and in a very short time her conduct toward him assumed a degree of estrangement and coldness which contrasted strangely with the cordiality which had preceded them. Mary’s full confidence and intimacy turned once more toward Rizzio, whose ascendency over her mind seemed to be greater than ever before. More than anybody else Darnley was dissatisfied with this turn of affairs. He saw that the chance of empire had slipped away from him, and he found that it was impossible for him to recover his former standing with the Queen. In vain he tried to be admitted to a direction of the government affairs and to perform some of the duties which seemed to pertain to his exalted station in the state; but Queen Mary obstinately refused to accede to these demands. Darnley, who ascribed this refusal, in part at least, to Rizzio’s influence, then joined the party of political malcontents who, either from motives of personal ambition or of religious antipathy, were anxious to bring about the overthrow of the Italian favorite and place a national and, if possible, a Protestant ministry in power. To carry out this plan they won Darnley over to their side, and filled his mind with dark insinuations and jealousy against Rizzio. It seems they also promised him a co-regency with the Queen, and full royal authority equal to hers in case the much-hated Italian should be removed.

These prospects were sufficient to inflame Darnley’s ambition and make him a willing tool in the hands of Rizzio’s enemies. He did not shrink even from murder, and committed it openly and defiantly. As soon as the conviction had been established in his mind that Rizzio stood in the way of his ambition, he resolved upon his assassination, which was not only to lead to his own aggrandizement, but also to punish Mary for having preferred the Italian to him. He did not wait long to carry his plan into execution; and the brutality and reckless ferocity with which the murder was committed were even more atrocious and repulsive than the crime itself. Only a brute and cowardly knave could have planned it.

The murder was committed on the evening of Sunday, the ninth of March, 1566, in the Queen’s private dining-room in the palace of Holyrood, adjoining her bedroom. The Queen was there with the Countess of Argyle, one or two other ladies, and Rizzio, her secretary. The best of feeling and humor prevailed in the little party. There was not the least indication or suspicion of impending trouble or danger. Nevertheless an armed force of five hundred adherents of the conspirators, under the lead of one of Darnley’s lieutenants, had been posted on the outside so as to surround the palace entirely. The greatest caution had been observed to avoid all noise, and the first intimation that something was wrong was conveyed to the little party in the dining-room by the sudden appearance of Darnley. With great familiarity he throws his arm around the Queen’s waist. He is almost immediately followed by Ruthven, one of his friends, who is clad in full armor and is ghastly pale from excitement and fear. The Queen haughtily commands him to leave the room; but before he can answer, her bedroom is filled with men bearing torches and brandishing their swords, nearly all under the influence of liquor, and calling with loud and threatening voices for Rizzio. The Italian knows immediately what this scene means. He jumps from his seat and takes refuge behind the Queen, clutching her gown with the grasp of despair and imploring her to save his life. Mary Stuart at this moment stands erect in the consciousness of her outraged dignity, her eyes sparkling with indignation and wrath, and trying to protect Rizzio against the crowd of aggressors who are pushing up to her, upsetting the table on which she leans her hand, and trying to push her aside in order to get at Rizzio. For a few moments she succeeds in keeping them at bay; but then it is Darnley who comes to their rescue. He seizes the Queen, tries to push her away, and takes hold of Rizzio’s hand in order to make him loose his grasp of Mary’s gown. In this struggle Mary has partly uncovered the Italian, and one of the conspirators, espying the opportunity, plunges a dagger over Mary’s shoulder into Rizzio’s breast. It is a signal for a general assault on the unfortunate victim. Like madmen they rush upon him from all sides; they drag him from behind the Queen, who is herself in danger of being slain; they beat him, they kick him, they plunge their swords, their knives, their daggers into his bleeding and mutilated body, they pull him by the hair, lifeless and maimed as he is, through the dining-room, through the bedroom, to the outer door of the antechamber, and only desist when they see that it is nothing but a corpse which they are maltreating.

The dead silence which suddenly follows gives notice to Mary that the horrid crime has been fully committed, that her favorite lies prostrate and silenced forever at the threshold of her bedroom. What wonder that in that terrible hour thoughts of revenge and hatred against Darnley, the leader of this gang of savages and murderers, arise in her brain, never to leave it again?

The assassination of Rizzio had opened a chasm between Mary Stuart and Darnley which nothing but his own blood could fill up. From the very first moment it became evident—and the Queen made no secret of it—that Mary Stuart intended to resent the foul murder of one who, if he had not been her lover, had enjoyed her confidence and her friendship, and whom not even her personal intercession had been able to save from a most cruel and entirely undeserved death. Immediately after the murder, when Ruthven came back to her presence, with the blood-stained dagger still in his hand, and demanded wine, she answered: “It shall be dear blood to some of you!” Nor would she permit the blood of Rizzio to be washed off the floor; she wished that it should forever remain as a mark of the murder which had been committed there, and she ordered a partition to be built between the grand staircase and the door of the antechamber leading to her bedroom, in order to protect the blood-stained floor from being desecrated by the feet of visitors. In this condition the Palace has remained for centuries and the stains caused by Rizzio’s blood have withstood the lapse of hundreds of years.

The halcyon days which Mary had tried to create for herself at Holyrood—the days and hours which she had hoped would console her by poetry, music, and song for her absence from France—had come to a sudden and cruel end. The conspirators were not satisfied with having slain Rizzio; his murder was only the unavoidable means to accomplish a certain purpose,—to get control of the government. They kept the Queen in close captivity and would not permit any of her friends, not even her ladies, to see or confer with her. It was then that Mary resorted to her great power of duplicity. Carefully concealing the profound horror and disgust with which the sight of Darnley filled her, she convinced him easily that her interests and his were identical, that his strength lay in his exalted station as consort of the Queen, and that their continued estrangement and enmity would only lead to the elevation of her half-brother, Lord Murray, or some other great nobleman. Darnley was only too easily persuaded; he fell readily into the trap which the deceitful Queen had set for him. In his overweening vanity, and convinced of his own invincibility, he ascribed the passionate appeals and the affectionate solicitations of the Queen for his support to a renewal of her former love and passion for him. Carried away by her tenderness and loveliness, he promised to release her from her captivity and to abduct her to Dunbar castle, where she would be secure from any plots of her enemies. Darnley induced a number of his personal friends and adherents to join him in this undertaking, and a few nights later the flight from Holyrood to Dunbar was effected with complete success.

Darnley, after having thus separated his cause from that of the enemies of the Queen,—who were seriously debating whether she should be imprisoned for life, exiled from the country, or put to death,—went a step further. He openly denounced the assassination of Rizzio as an inexcusable crime, and disclaimed all previous knowledge of and complicity in it. Nobody believed him,—neither the Queen, who had seen his active participation in the murder when he could easily have prevented it; nor the conspirators, who knew that he had planned all the details, had helped in its execution, and had promised to protect those who would take a hand in it. But Darnley’s lying declaration served the political aims of the Queen well. From Dunbar she issued an appeal to the loyal people and nobles of Scotland, imploring their assistance against the rebels who had driven her from Edinburgh and had insulted and threatened her in her own palace, and using the presence and the declaration of the King to contradict the stories and accusations circulated by the conspirators and “rebels” against her scandalous private life. Eight thousand loyal Scots responded to this appeal of their Queen, and at the head of this enthusiastic army Queen Mary and her husband returned to Edinburgh and once more took possession of Holyrood.

It was not long before the Queen threw off the mask of affection for Darnley, which she had assumed for political purposes, and openly again showed that aversion which she really felt for him. Not even the birth of her son, who afterwards as James the Sixth ruled over Scotland and as James the First over England, changed the strained relations between husband and wife. There seems to be no doubt that the new cause of these strained relations, which grew more apparent from day to day, was a criminal and adulterous love affair which had quite suddenly sprung up between the Queen and one of the noblemen of her court, the Earl of Bothwell.

The new favorite was a scion of one of the noblest and most renowned families of Scotland, but his personal history was far from being honorable. The mere fact that a man with such antecedents could appear at court and be received in the very highest society is a sad comment on the moral tone prevailing at that court and in that society. Bothwell was at that time no longer a young man. When quite young he had one day disappeared from the castle of his fathers and, on reaching the coast of the North Sea, had joined a gang of adventurers who, as pirates, infested those waters and were a terror to the merchant vessels of all the nations of Europe. By natural ability, unbounded courage and daring the young Scotchman had rapidly risen to a commanding position among the wild corsairs; his name was repeated with fear and awe from the coasts of Denmark to the west coast of Ireland. In one of the desperate engagements with warships of the Hanseatic League he had lost one eye, but had saved his life and his freedom. Many years of his life he had passed in this wild and adventurous career. Then the news of the death of his father reached him, and one morning he reappeared in his ancestral home to take possession of his vast domain. The turbulent condition of Scotland, the civil war between Protestants and Catholics, the struggles for supremacy between the crown and the nobility, were congenial to his adventurous and reckless spirit. He had been among the first to greet Mary Stuart on her arrival from France and had shown her, from the first day he saw her, an enthusiastic, almost worshipful devotion. He was a passionate adorer of female beauty, and the romantic halo of his past life which surrounded his brow had secured for him triumphs in love-affairs with some of the fairest women of the court. He was among those who escorted Mary from Holyrood to Dunbar, and again he was one of those who led her back in triumph from Dunbar to Edinburgh. During this return march Bothwell distinguished himself by the skill of his military dispositions, by his boldness and intrepidity, and attracted the personal notice of the Queen.

At Holyrood the acquaintance between the Queen and the daring general quickly ripened into love and intimacy, although the Queen took great care at first to conceal the new passion which had taken possession of her inflammable heart, even from her closest friends. But while these efforts on the part of the Queen may have been successful in deceiving her intimate friends, there were always eyes turned upon her which were not so easily deceived,—and these eyes were those of the ambassadors of England, France, and Spain accredited at her court. They watched her conduct very attentively, and almost simultaneously reported to their sovereigns the nascent favor with which the Queen looked upon Bothwell, and the growing coldness which became noticeable between her and Darnley. It was only a serious accident, which befell Bothwell soon afterwards and which imperilled his life for several days, that revealed the new passion of the Queen to the whole court and placed the new favorite at the head of the government, with similar honors and similar powers to those previously showered on Rizzio.

We are neither writing a personal history of Queen Mary, nor a political history of her reign; we are merely writing a history of the assassinations of which she was, so to speak, the central figure that gave them world-wide celebrity. We have therefore carefully excluded from our narration all political and biographical facts which were either not directly connected with these assassinations or had not a psychological bearing upon them.

We have reached the period when Mary—blinded by passion and infatuated with love for a man utterly unworthy of her, or to speak more correctly, of the exalted position she occupied in the world—surrendered not only herself, but also the dignity of the crown and the honor and the interests of the realm to the Earl of Bothwell, known to the entire court as a profligate and libertine of the worst sort and as a most unscrupulous and reckless adventurer. It was this infatuation for Bothwell and the shameless liaison she formed with him from which all of Queen Mary’s sufferings and disasters now flowed in rapid succession. Not even her incomparable beauty and loveliness could save her from the contempt attached to this disgraceful liaison, of which she made soon no more a secret than she had formerly made of her preference for Rizzio. But while in her infatuation for the Italian singer the artistic taste of the Queen was rather successfully used by her admirers as an excuse for her enthusiastic preference for him, there was absolutely no excuse for her liaison with Bothwell. And Bothwell did all he could do to strengthen the unfavorable impression of Mary’s conduct by the haughty and overbearing rudeness with which he treated the greatest lords and the highest dignitaries of the kingdom, including the King himself, for whom he openly showed the greatest contempt.

Outraged by the insults which he had to endure day after day and from which the Queen herself did not seem to be willing to protect him, Darnley suddenly left the court and went to Glasgow, where he took up his residence in the house of his father, the Earl of Lennox. The King’s sudden departure caused more unfavorable comment than the Queen had anticipated. It greatly disconcerted her, because she was afraid that from Glasgow Darnley might issue an appeal to the Scotch people, and especially to the dissatisfied nobility, laying before them his complaints and calling upon them to overthrow the disgraceful rule of an adulterous wife and her paramour.

Soon the news came from Glasgow that Darnley had fallen seriously ill, that he was suffering from the small-pox and was expected to die. The Queen took advantage of this serious illness and once more resorted to her power of dissimulation, which had served her so well after Rizzio’s death. She intended now to employ it not only to temporarily deceive and beguile her husband, but to decoy him into an ambush and put him to death. Incredible as the enormity and ferocity of the crime may appear, especially on the part of a young and beautiful woman distinguished by so many mental advantages, there seems not to be the least doubt that Mary, in going to Glasgow and appearing at the bedside of her sick husband as a loving wife, had this horrid crime in view and successfully paved the way for its execution. She again played with consummate art the part of a loving and trembling wife, and deceived Darnley so fully that he promised to follow her to Edinburgh as soon as the progress of his convalescence would make it possible for him to undertake the journey. Thus fully assured of Darnley’s forgiveness, she returned to Holyrood and perfected there, together with Bothwell, the arrangements for his murder.

When Darnley arrived at Edinburgh, a short time afterwards, he was not, as he ought to have been, taken to the royal palace, where he could have been cared for better than anywhere else, but to a private residence in an isolated location in one of the suburbs of the city, whose salubrious location, it was alleged, would facilitate the King’s rapid recovery. Darnley himself was greatly surprised at these arrangements, especially when he learned that the Queen would not take up her residence with him, but would remain at the Palace. Apprehensions of some impending danger haunted his mind, and he became melancholy and despondent. However, the Queen by her appearance and the excess of her tenderness soon dispelled his vague fears and convinced him that only care for his enfeebled condition and the hope of quickening his convalescence had prompted her to select his residence, from which he would be promptly removed after his complete recovery. In order to reassure him fully, she remained several nights with him, occupying a room immediately beneath his own, and manifesting toward him the greatest affection and solicitude. One of her pages slept in the same room with him, and five or six servants, whom Bothwell had appointed, formed the entire household.

Late in the evening of February 9, 1567, the Queen left the house and went back to Holyrood to pass the night there, because one of the musicians attached to the royal chapel was to be married that night, and she had promised to be at the wedding. It was while the wedding-festivities were going on at Holyrood and while the Queen was dancing with some of the courtiers in the most careless and unaffected manner possible, that a terrific explosion took place which was heard and felt in all parts of the city and at Holyrood. Soon the rumor spread that the house of the King had been blown to atoms and that all the inmates were buried under the ruins. This rumor was only partly true. The morning light of the tenth of February revealed the fact that the house had been blown up by means of an underground mine; but the corpse of the King was not found among the ruins. On the contrary, it was found, together with the corpse of the page, in an orchard adjoining the house, and neither the King nor the page showed any marks of gunpowder; but the bloated condition of their faces and the marks of finger-nails on their necks showed that both had been choked to death and had been left lying on the ground where the assassins had killed them. It was then surmised that both the King and the page, having been disturbed in their sleep by the approach of the assassins, had tried to make their escape through the orchard, but had been overtaken in their flight and slain. The explosion had unquestionably been intended to destroy all vestiges of the crime by burying both the assassins and their victims under the ruins, but it had either taken place too soon, before the murderers could have carried the King and the page back to the house, or the assassins had hurried away immediately after committing the deed. At all events, Darnley was dead.

The evidences of premeditated murder were so plain that from the very first not the least doubt was manifested as to the character of the calamity. Neither was there the least uncertainty in the public mind as to the author or authors of the terrible catastrophe and the assassinations attending it. The public voice immediately named Bothwell as the murderer and added, in a whisper, the name of the Queen as his accomplice. In those times murders were committed so often that the murderers in a majority of cases escaped unpunished. But in this case the rank of the victim was so exalted, and moreover the circumstances surrounding the crime were so damaging to the authority of the crown, that public opinion demanding an investigation of the death of the King could not be disregarded. The Queen, who, if innocent, should have been the first to insist on a thorough investigation of the crime by which her husband was killed, affected an absolute indifference in the matter. She utterly disregarded the damaging rumors which openly charged Bothwell with the murder, and by this indifference confirmed the suspicion of her silent active (or at best, passive) participation in the crime. The Queen even openly defied public opinion by leaving Bothwell in the undisturbed possession of the honors and dignities she had conferred upon him, and by adding new ones, showing the continued favor the Earl enjoyed, in spite of the public clamor raised against him. “But Banquo’s ghost would not go down!” The excitement and the indignation of the people rose to the highest point. On her appearance in the streets, the Queen was insulted by the women. She found it necessary for her safety to leave Holyrood and seek refuge in the fortified castle. Bothwell had the audacity to demand a public trial, because the Earl of Lennox, Darnley’s father, had openly accused him of the murder; and the cowardly judges, overawed by the power of the accused, by the royal troops, by the authority of the Queen, acquitted him, while the whole people considered and declared him guilty.

We have reached the end of this atrocious murder. Posterity holds Queen Mary guilty of the crime of having murdered her young husband. Her abduction by Bothwell and her marriage to him, although apparently forced upon her, had been planned by the two murderers even before the assassination. Mary’s long imprisonment and final execution at the bidding of a cruel and jealous rival has often been deplored by biographer, historian, and dramatist,—but were they more than a just atonement for crimes as atrocious as they were unprecedented?

CHAPTER X
WILLIAM OF ORANGE

CHAPTER X
ASSASSINATION OF WILLIAM OF ORANGE
(July 10, 1584)

IT was said by one of the wild revolutionists of France, in extenuation of his incessant demands for the execution of a larger number of the nobility, that the tree of liberty, to grow vigorously, should be watered with plenty of blood. Alas! The history of the republics of the world, not only since the great French Revolution of 1789, but at all times, both ancient and modern, proves the justice of this assertion, but none furnishes a more convincing proof of it than the history of the Dutch Republic in its heroic struggle against the gigantic power of Spain and other monarchical nations. At the very threshold of that history stands the luminous figure of the great Prince of Orange, William the Silent,—warrior, statesman, orator, and patriot; whose assassination, closely following upon the murders of the night of St. Bartholomew, is but the first of the crimes committed against the illustrious men of the Dutch Republic—Olden Barnevelt, the brothers De Witt, and others.

The assassination of William of Orange is of a semi-political and semi-religious character. The revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish rule, of which the Prince of Orange was the principal figure, originated in religious conflicts between the Netherlanders—most of whom were Calvinists or Lutherans—and the bigoted King of Spain, Philip the Second, who was more Catholic than the Pope himself. It was one of the fixed ideas of Philip the Second, a perfect monomania, that in the immense empire over which he ruled, none but faithful believers in the Catholic faith should be tolerated, and that all heretics or dissidents should be exterminated with fire and sword. In the Pyrenean peninsula—for Portugal was at this time annexed to Spain—this idea was most radically carried out, and year after year the Inquisition, which flourished there as the first institution of the state, handed over thousands of victims, convicted or suspected of heresy, to a most cruel death at the stake for the purpose of purifying the spiritual atmosphere of the country. But when an effort was being made on the part of the King to introduce the same system of spiritual purification into the Netherlands, which he had inherited from his father, the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and whose population was mostly of Germanic race, that effort met with a most stubborn and almost insuperable resistance.

Already, under Charles the Fifth, all attempts to smother the Protestant Reformation—which had entered the Netherlands both from Germany and France and which had immediately found many adherents—had failed. The Emperor, himself a Netherlander and familiar with the character of the people, had deemed it prudent to abolish the Inquisition (at least in name) and not to interfere too strongly with those personal rights of the inhabitants which their municipal or provincial statutes guaranteed to them. Moreover the Emperor had a very affable and popular way of dealing with the people, and he could do a great many things which no other ruler might have presumed to do. When Charles the Fifth abdicated in 1555, the grief of the people of the Netherlands was not only general, but sincere; they seemed to feel instinctively that the change which was to occur in the government was full of impending dangers and calamities for them. The personality of the new ruler fully justified these apprehensions. Philip the Second came to the Netherlands from England, where he had resided a short time as consort of Queen Mary, and his reputation for bigotry, fanaticism, and cruelty had preceded his arrival. Many of the acts of bloodshed and cruelty which were committed under that reign were more or less justly imputed to his influence, and his new subjects trembled at the prospects of similar scenes of persecution and despotism. No wonder that on the twenty-fifth of October, 1555, when the act of abdication was consummated at Brussels, and when the infirm Emperor, leaning upon the shoulder of Prince William of Orange, appeared before the representatives and high dignitaries of all the provinces constituting the Netherlands, and ceded the government to his son, who stood on his right side, a shudder passed through the high assembly. Many eyes passed apprehensively from the open and kindly countenance of the Emperor, then bathed in tears, to the sinister and cruel features of King Philip. What a contrast also between the majestic form and noble countenance of William of Orange and the small, feeble, narrow-chested son of Charles, who with distrustful eyes looked down upon this assemblage of nobles as if they were strangers or enemies, and whom not even the glitter of royalty could invest with dignity, although his features showed uncommon pride and haughtiness! The hopes of the people of the Low Countries rested upon the one; their fears were centred on the other.

Unquestionably it had been the Emperor’s intention to place William of Orange by the side of his son as chief adviser and protector; but the characters of the two were so different—the one broad, humane, manly; the other narrow, bigoted, timid—that it soon became manifest that a hearty coöperation of the two men for the welfare of the state was impossible. Moreover the aspirations and tendencies in regard to the government of the provinces which the two men entertained were absolutely conflicting, the Prince being in favor of liberal institutions and scrupulous observance of the guaranteed rights of the provinces, while the King was illiberal and despotic, without regard for the local customs and rights of the Netherlanders, anxious to concentrate all powers in his hands and to subordinate the whole government to his autocratic will.

These conflicting tendencies and these antipathies grew and became intensified as the months and years passed by; consequently, when Philip in 1559 left Brussels for Spain, he did not appoint the Prince of Orange Governor-General of the Netherlands, to which position he was clearly entitled, but conferred that honor with the title of regent upon his half-sister, Margaret, Duchess of Parma, who shared his own fanatical ideas. As her chief adviser he appointed Cardinal Granvella, a man of great sagacity and talent, but filled with animosity against the enemies of the Catholic Church, and in full though secret accord with the King concerning the necessity of wiping out the privileges of the “arrogant burghers of the Low Countries.” William of Orange was appointed Stadtholder of Holland and Zealand, and a member of the Council of State, a sort of cabinet for the Regent Duchess in which Cardinal Granvella was the leading spirit. Several other prominent noblemen of the Dutch provinces, Count Egmont, the conqueror of Gravelines, and Count Hoorn, were also members of the Council of State; but they were in a minority, and the Spanish or Cardinalistic party ruled its decisions absolutely. All of these decisions were hostile to the guaranteed rights of the Provinces; they interfered with freedom of conscience; they reintroduced the Spanish Inquisition under the disguise of creating new episcopal sees and attaching two inquisitors to each; and by establishing Spanish garrisons in the fortified towns they violated the constitutional right of the provinces that no foreign troops should be stationed there. The protests of the Prince of Orange and of Counts Egmont and Hoorn were of no avail, so these three distinguished members refused to attend the sessions of the Council of State.

In the meantime a spirit of public dissatisfaction and disorder manifested itself which showed to the sagacious Regent that the measures enacted and enforced by Cardinal Granvella would lead to a revolt against the Spanish régime. The people of Brussels showed their hatred and contempt for the Cardinal in many ways. In public processions they carried banners with insulting inscriptions or offensive caricatures and cartoons exhibiting him in ridiculous positions. Alarmed at these manifestations of public hostility, the Duchess Regent applied to the King, imploring him to remove Granvella from his post as President of the Council of State. The King reluctantly complied with the request, but Granvella’s removal did not change the spirit of the Council; and it was only too evident that its decisions were emanations from the King’s own mind. When Count Egmont, who had gone to Madrid on a special mission to plead for the personal and political rights of the Netherlanders, urged upon the King to give them greater religious liberty and to annul some of the stringent laws of the Council of State, Philip got into a rage and exclaimed: “No, no, I would rather die a thousand deaths and lose every square foot of my empire than permit the least change in our religion!” And he added that the decrees of the Council of Trent, which had recently been held, and which had affirmed anew the immutable doctrines of the Catholic Church, should be rigidly enforced in all his states. New instructions to that effect were sent to the Netherlands, followed by new convictions and new executions.

It was at this perilous and critical time that William of Orange openly accepted the Lutheran faith. Shortly before, he had been married to Princess Anne of Saxony, a daughter of the famous Maurice, Elector of Saxony, and a fervent Lutheran. William’s conversion to Protestantism has been often ascribed to the influence of his wife, but it should be remembered that William was born a prince of Nassau in Germany and the son of Lutheran parents, and that his Catholicism dated only from the time of his later education at the court of Charles the Fifth, where he was placed as a page at the early age of nine years. William had never forgotten the lessons of Protestantism which he had imbibed in his early childhood, and while professing the Catholic faith in later years, he had retained that respect and that affection for the principles of the Reformation which so peculiarly qualified him to act as umpire and leader in a contest in which religion played so conspicuous a part.

Up to that time the nobility had taken much less interest in the religious quarrels than the lower classes of the people; but the steadily increasing number of convictions and executions for heresy aroused their fears that the Spanish monarch intended to abolish their time-honored privileges and wished to substitute a Spanish autocracy for their liberal self-government. Against this intention they loudly protested, Catholics as well as Protestants, and bound themselves to stand together in their resistance to further acts of aggression. They presented petitions and protests to the Duchess Regent who received them in a conciliatory spirit, and forwarded them to the King, recommending at the same time greater leniency and moderation. But Philip the Second, getting tired of the many complaints and remonstrances reaching him from Brussels, and determined to stamp out heresy at whatever cost, sent the Duke of Alva, the sternest and most cruel of all his commanders, at the head of a considerable army to the Netherlands, with full powers to restore order and to reëstablish the authority of the Catholic Church. From the well-known character of the commander-in-chief it could not be doubted that the King’s severe orders would be carried out in the most cruel and unrelenting spirit, and that neither age nor sex nor rank would be spared. That Alva’s mission would be successful, the King did not doubt for a minute. But it was on his part a case of misplaced judgment, because his narrow mind could not measure the difference between the Jews and Moriscoes, and the Netherlanders: against the former the policy of violence and compulsion had been successful; against the latter that same policy was doomed to ignominious failure. The rumor that he would come as a bloody avenger preceded Alva’s arrival, and filled the hearts of the Netherlanders with terror. A regular panic ensued, and an emigration en masse was organized; it looked as though the northern provinces were to be depopulated entirely by this exodus of men, women and children, mostly belonging to the mercantile and working classes, and taking their merchandise and their household goods with them.

The sending of an army composed entirely of Spaniards and Italians into the Netherlands was so flagrant a violation of the constitutional rights of the provinces, which the King had sworn to maintain, that the Prince of Orange thought the time for open resistance had come, and he conferred with Egmont, Hoorn, and other prominent men concerning its organization. But finding it impossible to organize united resistance against Alva’s army, William of Orange, with his profound insight and with his distrust in the Spanish King’s intentions, deemed it prudent to leave the Netherlands and withdraw to his estates in Germany instead of imperilling his head by remaining at Brussels. It was in vain that he tried to persuade Egmont, to whom he was greatly attached, to accompany him and to place his valuable life beyond the reach of the Spanish “avenger.” Egmont’s openhearted and confiding character refused to believe the sinister forebodings of the penetrating genius of his friend; he relied on his immense popularity among the Netherlanders and on the great services he had rendered, on the battle-field, to the House of Hapsburg. He therefore remained at Brussels, and even welcomed Alva on his arrival at the capital. The Spanish commander conducted himself as the regent de facto without paying much attention to the Duchess, who still held that position nominally. One of his first official acts was the appointment of a special tribunal, which he named the Council of Troubles, composed exclusively of Spaniards, to try charges of heresy and treason. The people, however, found another, and more appropriate name for it. On account of the indecent haste and rapidity with which persons were tried, convicted, and executed by this Council, they named it “The Bloedraad” (The Council of Blood). The number of victims was so great that gallows and scaffolds had to be erected in all the cities and towns of the Netherlands, and that the executioners were kept busy in beheading and quartering the heretics and “traitors.” Counts Egmont and Hoorn had been arrested, soon after Alva’s arrival, on the charge of treason; they were also tried before the Court of Troubles and convicted on trumped-up charges. They were beheaded, together with eighteen members of the nobility, at the public square of Brussels.

This infamous act stirred up William of Orange to immediate action. What he had foreseen and predicted had come to pass. Evidently it was Alva’s intention to kill off the leaders in order to get control of the great mass of the people without much difficulty or resistance. William of Orange himself was charged with treason and summoned to appear before the judges of the Court of Troubles. But since his appearance at Brussels would have been equivalent to his conviction, he refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court, claiming that as a knight of the Golden Fleece he had the right to be tried by the King personally and by no other judges than his peers. At the same time he published an address to the King in which he defended his public actions in a masterly manner, convincing every unbiased mind not only of his patriotic devotion to his country, but also of his loyalty to his sovereign in all his legitimate and constitutional acts of government. The Duke of Alva took no further notice of this defence; but when the day for William’s appearance at court had passed, he was sentenced to death, and his property, personal and real, was confiscated as that of a rebel and traitor.

In the meantime the Prince of Orange had not been idle in Germany. He had appealed to his co-religionists for assistance, pointing out to the Protestant princes that the cause of Protestantism itself was the issue of the war in the Netherlands, and that the complete victory of the Spanish army over the Netherlanders would be followed by an overthrow of the Protestant churches, both Lutheran and Calvinistic, in Europe. He succeeded in collecting a considerable army, which he divided into two corps, placing the one under the command of his brother Lewis, Count of Nassau, and invading Brabant with the other. The Count of Nassau was defeated in battle and driven out of Frisia with heavy loss, while Alva avoided giving battle to the Prince of Orange. By skilful manœuvres the Spanish general tired out the patience of the German troops, and when the severe cold of winter set in, the Prince, finding himself without means of paying his soldiers and getting no support from the inhabitants (who were overawed by the Spanish authorities), had to disband his army and to return, temporarily, to Germany. Alva triumphed and pompously reported to the Spanish King that both the rebellion and heresy had been stamped out in the Netherlands, and that his presence was hardly required there any longer. In his overweening vanity he went even so far as to order a bronze monument to be erected in his own honor, in which he was represented as a conqueror, standing with one foot on a Dutch nobleman in full armor and with the other on a man of the people, kneeling and with a Lutheran prayer-book in his hands.

It is not my intention to go into the details of the cruel war in the Netherlands,—cruel even beyond human imagination,—to recount the sufferings, the tortures, the atrocities, the martyrdom imposed upon the unfortunate victims of political and religious persecution, conceived by human fiends educated in the school of the Spanish Inquisition and warmly applauded by him whom both his cotemporaries and posterity have justly named “the demon of the South.” Such a war had never been seen between nations claiming to be civilized; and never has patriotic devotion in defence of home and country, of liberty and creed, been carried to a higher degree than by those brave Netherlanders in the sixteenth century. The world should never forget the immense service which they rendered to mankind by victoriously maintaining the principles of religious liberty, which, without their heroic perseverance, would very likely have perished under the incubus of Spanish despotism and the Spanish Inquisition. That they did not succumb and perish must be considered one of the marvellous enigmas of history, in which the finger of God is plainly visible. Immortal glory and renown should be accorded to the gallant leader who, under the most discouraging and desperate circumstances, never lost hope and confidence in the righteousness and final triumph of his cause, and who, undaunted by personal danger and persecution, never wavered in his loyalty to principle, and held high the banner of popular sovereignty and individual liberty, until the pistol shot of a hired assassin interrupted his glorious career.

If to-day, after the lapse of three centuries, we look back upon that career, our admiration for William of Orange grows steadily. We follow him from his first appearance on the public stage of the Netherlands, as a friend and confidant of Charles the Fifth, as a loyal adviser of the Duchess Regent, as a loyal subject pleading with Philip the Second and warning him to respect the rights of citizenship and religion of the Netherlanders,—pleading and warning in vain; we behold him unsheathing his sword for the defence and, when they appeared to be lost, for the recovery of those rights, toiling, struggling, fighting for the people, always subordinating his own interests to those of the nation and to the sublime cause of which he was the acknowledged champion; we recognize him as the first in the field, the first in the council-room, filling his countrymen with an enthusiasm and a confidence which alone could sustain them in undergoing sufferings and hardships unequalled in history. Thus he stands before us fully realizing and even surpassing the eulogy which Goethe wrote for the monument of another national hero, perhaps worthy, but certainly not so worthy of it as William the Silent:—

“In advance or retreat,
In success or defeat,
Ever conscious and great,
Ever watchful to see,
From foreign dominion he made us free!”

In translating Goethe’s inscription on the famous Blücher monument at Rostock we were strongly impressed with the fact that it was even better adapted for a monument of the great Prince of Orange than for that of the indomitable, but rather reckless, “Marshal Vorwärts.”

The King of Spain had from the first day of his accession known the powerful influence which the Prince of Orange exerted in the Netherlands. The Prince stood without a rival at the head of the nobility, and his eminent talents enhanced the authority which his illustrious birth had secured for him. The King was also informed by his special representatives—the Duchess Regent, Granvella, the Duke of Alva, Don John of Austria, and others—that this authority was steadily increasing, that the great mass of the people idolized the Prince, that his wish was a law for the burghers, and that practically the revolt, its failure or success, depended on him. The exalted character of the Prince precluded the very idea of winning him over to the other side by means of high distinctions or honors, much less by pecuniary bribes or corruption, and nothing remained therefore for the King to do, if he wanted to get rid of the dangerous popular leader, who held a number of the provinces entirely under his sway, than to place him beyond the pale of the law and to offer a high reward for his head. This method of removing rivals or enemies was not unusual in those days; and it should cause no surprise that the monarch who is, and very likely justly, suspected of having ordered the murder of his half-brother, Don Juan d’Austria, and also that of his own son, Don Carlos, was perfectly willing to adopt this method of getting rid of the Prince of Orange, who in his eyes was not only a rebel, but also a heretic, and as such deserved death a hundredfold. The price he put on the Prince’s head—twenty-five thousand ducats—showed sufficiently the importance he attached to his life, and how willing he was to tempt assassins by the enormous sum of the reward.

The King, who evidently had experience in such matters, had not miscalculated the temptation, for several attempts were made on the Prince’s life in consequence; but they always failed, and it would almost seem as if that life was under the special protection of Providence that it might carry out the plans predestined for it. In 1582, Juan Jaureguy, a young man in the employ of a Spanish merchant of Antwerp, and a religious fanatic, fired a pistol shot at the Prince which came very near killing him. The ball entered the head under the right ear, passed through the roof of the mouth, breaking several teeth, and came out under the left jaw-bone. For a while the Prince’s life was despaired of, but he finally rallied and recovered. His would-be assassin was immediately killed, and his accomplices, of whom there were several, were publicly strangled and quartered. In order to deter others from making attempts on the Prince’s life, the ghastly remains of these accomplices, one of them a Dominican monk, were nailed to the gates of Antwerp. The joy at the Prince’s recovery was general, and thanksgiving days, with divine service in the churches and public halls, were held in a number of the provinces. Unfortunately neither these public demonstrations of gratitude and delight, nor the terrible warnings addressed to assassins were sufficient to protect a life so valuable to his country and to the world.

Another assassin was more successful than Jaureguy. The scene of the murder, which took place on the tenth day of July, 1584, was the city of Delft in Holland. Shortly after the noon hour of that day a common-looking man, who had found access to the Prince’s residence for the purpose of securing a passport, approached the Prince as he came from the dining-hall and fired three shots at him, one passing through the stomach and causing his death after a very short while. The assassin was a man still young, less than thirty years of age. He was a Frenchman, Balthasar Gérard by name, who had come from his home in Franche-Comté or Burgundy to carry out his hellish design, which was inspired by religious fanaticism and encouraged by Jesuits of the College of Trèves. Through these he was introduced to the Duke of Parma, then Governor-General of the Netherlands, who promised him the royal reward in case of success, and other royal favors besides. Gérard had made his preparations for the murder with considerable circumspection; these preparations were very similar to those which Booth made for his escape after the murder of Abraham Lincoln, and just like Booth, Gérard stumbled and fell in making his escape and hurt himself, and this led to his arrest.

After having undergone the most terrible tortures, his joints having been wrenched and his body nearly roasted alive, he was executed in the most cruel manner imaginable. His right hand was burnt off with red-hot irons; the flesh was torn from half a dozen different parts of his body, which was then broken on the wheel. Gérard was still alive; his vitality was wonderful. The executioners then disembowelled and quartered him; tore out his heart and flung it in his face. It was then only that the unfortunate man breathed his last. His head was then cut off and placed on a pike of a gate in the rear of the Prince’s residence, and the four parts of his body were fastened to the four gates of the city. This cruel mutilation and dismemberment of the assassin’s body was hardly sufficient to satisfy the vengeance of the people; the certainty that the King of Spain stooped even to murder of the basest sort to recover his sovereignty over the Netherlands exalted their desire for absolute and lasting national independence to a sort of religious dogma which made all hope of peace illusory.

When the assassin’s hand cut short the life of the Prince of Orange, he had not completed the great work for which he had toiled, fought, suffered and died. But part of that work had been done, and it had been done so well and so thoroughly that the Republic stood on a firm foundation ready to receive the other provinces which were still in the power of Spain as a fitting superstructure. For this reason history recognizes William the Silent as the founder of the Dutch Republic and of the independence of the United Provinces.

To Americans the character of William the Silent is of special interest because it bears, in many respects, a striking resemblance to that of George Washington. Both were the principal figures in wars for the independence of their countries; both were soldiers and statesmen of a high order. If Washington was very likely the greater general, William the Silent was very likely the greater statesman, and the success of the American cause would have been as impossible without Washington as the failure of the Dutch struggle would have been certain without William of Orange. Both were sterling patriots and subordinated their own interests to those of the nations they represented; but in this respect Washington was, perhaps, superior to William, who had an eye on the possibilities which might arise after a successful issue of the war. It should be remembered, however, that William of Orange was a prince and sovereign before he was made the head of the Netherlanders rising in revolt against Spain, and that, as a sovereign, it was natural for him to look after the interests of his family and dynasty. As far as mental and moral qualifications are concerned, both men were distinguished by that perfect equilibrium of powers of the mind and powers of the soul, which is but rarely found in men of the highest rank. Neither of these statesmen had the capacity of immediately conceiving and executing plans of a decisive character. Their minds, although full of resources, worked slowly in elaborating such plans; they weighed and hesitated before taking action; but as soon as their minds had been made up and a plan had been resolved upon, they acted without wavering, and held on to it until success or failure resulted from it. The great respect in which Washington has been always held by British historians and statesmen is, perhaps, the noblest tribute that can be paid to his character and abilities. The fact that Philip the Second relied less on his splendid armies, led by some of the ablest generals of Europe, and on his powerful navy, than on the death of William the Silent is, perhaps, the greatest eulogy which can be given to the great founder of the Dutch Republic. Unquestionably the Spanish monarch considered the twenty-five thousand gold pieces which he offered for the assassination of William of Orange, although an enormous sum for those times, but a very cheap equivalent for the life of a man who had been the very life and soul, the inspiring genius of the rebellious Dutch provinces. If monuments of foreign statesmen and rulers are to be erected on American soil, no fitter and no worthier man can be found for that honor than William the Silent.

CHAPTER XI
IVAN THE TERRIBLE

CHAPTER XI
ASSASSINATIONS BY IVAN THE TERRIBLE
(1560-1584)

RUSSIAN history abounds in instances of famous assassinations. Sometimes these murders were committed by the rulers of Russia, at other times these rulers themselves were the victims. Ivan the Fourth, whose very surname, “the Terrible,” sufficiently indicates his character, was one of the most cruel and inhuman monarchs who ever ruled over a nation, either in ancient or modern times. It is therefore not one famous assassination which we wish to describe, but a series of monstrous crimes, unparalleled in history as the acts of one individual.

Ivan was only three years old when his father died. A regency was formed, composed of his mother and a council of boyars, belonging to different factions, who were constantly at war with one another. At no time had Russia been more poorly governed. As Ivan grew up, he was despised and maltreated by the haughty nobility; his favorites were abused. In order to divert his mind from nobler occupations and keep him in profound ignorance of public affairs, he was amused and entertained with coarse and brutal games which developed his innate cruelty and ferocity, and made him, at an early age, the terror of those who were subordinated to him. He delighted in torturing and slowly killing domestic animals, and also in crippling and killing old men and old women whom he encountered in the streets while riding fast horses or driving a carriage like a madman, without looking either right or left. He was a mere boy yet—hardly fourteen—when the boyars began to fear him and predicted a reign of terror when he should assume the reins of government.

At seventeen, he dissolved the regency and declared his intention to reign for himself. He also wanted to get married, and sent out messengers to the different provinces of the Empire to pick out the most beautiful young girls and send them to the capital, that he might choose a wife from among their number. Many noblemen hid their handsome daughters, or sent them far away from home on hearing of the Czar’s intention. His reputation for excessive cruelty had reached already the remotest parts of the Empire, and nearly every boyar trembled at the mere idea of becoming his father-in-law. But the messenger succeeded nevertheless in bringing together several hundred young girls of extraordinary beauty, and sent them to the capital. Ivan then chose from their number Anastasia Romanowna, a young girl of great beauty and great brilliancy of mind. He fell desperately in love with her, and through the superiority of her mind she gained a great influence over him, and succeeded even in keeping his cruelty in check.

Ivan was a man of natural ability. He had some striking qualities, and might have been a great ruler if his education had been entrusted to competent and wise teachers. At an early age he learned the art of dissembling to perfection, and possessed the rare faculty of keeping his plans and intentions secret even from his closest friends. It was only after the conquest of Kasan that he threw off the mask. Until then he had been exceedingly friendly and kind to a number of the powerful noblemen, who considered themselves almost his peers in rank and birth. But when that conquest had added to his power and authority, he suddenly said to his boyars: “At last I am free! God has made me the master over all. Beware!” Again it was his wife, Anastasia Romanowna, who with rare political sagacity prevented him from too openly showing hostility and impatience at their pretentious conduct. He was very young, and could afford to wait. But in 1560, when Ivan was only twenty-nine years old, Anastasia, his best friend and his ablest counsellor, died, and he found no loving hand to restrain his passions and keep his cruelty and ferocity in check. Nevertheless, for some time after her death the softening influence of his wife (whom he had really loved) over his cruel nature made itself felt, and for the next four years he proceeded rather cautiously. He considered all the boyars his enemies and traitors; and he commenced murdering them, one at a time.

In 1564 he threw off all restraint. He suddenly disappeared with all his soldiers and servants, and rumors were circulated that he intended to abdicate the crown and to retire from public life. The abject fear in which the people had lived for thirty years had fully demoralized them. Boyars, clergymen, and the great mass of the people went nearly crazy at the idea that their “dear little father” would no longer rule over them. At last they discovered his place of retirement, and the manifestations of public delight at this discovery were almost boundless. Delegation after delegation waited upon him and implored him on their knees that he might return to his capital and continue to govern them. At last Ivan consented to return, but he consented conditionally. He demanded—and they all cheerfully agreed to the demand—that he should have full and absolute power to punish all his enemies and all traitors by banishment or death and confiscation of their property, without being interfered with, even by the clergy. It was a regular coup d’état. From this act dates the absolute rule of the emperors of Russia, and Ivan the Fourth thenceforth took the official title of “Czar of all the Russias,” which his successors have retained to the present day.

Ivan had carefully matured his plan. He took possession of a certain number of cities and country districts, expelled the proprietors from them, declared them territory forfeited to the government, and distributed them among certain of his own adherents upon whose fidelity he could count. These adherents generally were taken from the lowest classes of the people, knew no other law than the will of their master, and obeyed him blindly. While confiscating all these estates without mercy or hesitation, on the most trivial or far-fetched pretexts, he was shrewd enough to respect constitutional rights in other parts of the Empire. His plan was to increase the imperial private domains gradually to enormous proportions by dispossessing year after year the legitimate proprietors of the soil, and by this method to destroy the power of the nobility. In order to accomplish this purpose he did not hesitate to employ the most cruel and disreputable means for the conviction and punishment of his intended victims.

One of his favorite ways for entrapping and punishing a rich boyar was to order one of the servants employed in the imperial household to steal jewelry or other valuables, and then to seek refuge in the boyar’s residence. Of course, the fugitive was closely pursued by the Czar’s guards, drawn from his hiding-place, and then massacred together with the boyar and his family, who, the Czar pretended to believe, were the thief’s accomplices and deserved death as well as the offender. But much oftener the terrible Czar rushed down, with a numerous suite of his followers, upon the residence of a wealthy boyar, put all the men, the children and the old women of the domain to the sword, carried off the young women and girls, and abandoned them on the highways after he and his gang had satisfied their desires on them. On the trumped up charge that Grand Duke Wladimir, his own cousin, as well as the Grand Duke’s wife and grown daughters had participated in a conspiracy against the Czar’s life, he forced him to commit suicide by drinking poison, while the Grand Duchess and her beautiful young daughters, and all their ladies of honor and female servants, were divested of their garments, exposed in a state of complete nudity on the market space of the town adjacent to their domain, and afterwards butchered in cold blood. Wladimir’s immense wealth and all his real estate were confiscated by the crown. In this manner Ivan succeeded in overpowering the boyars, one after another, in a very short time, and acquiring immense wealth. He visited the different provinces and departments in succession, and wherever he appeared he left a track of desolation, rapine, and murder. From the capital of each province he organized marauding tours in all directions, placing each under the command of an officer on whose devotion to himself and ferocity to others he could count. But the most terrible expeditions were those which he commanded himself. It can truthfully be said that wherever Ivan “visited,” he destroyed everything in sight,—not only the human inhabitants, but also the farm and domestic animals, even dogs and cats. He took also a pleasure in draining ponds and creeks, so as to cause the fish to die, and after having killed or mutilated all things living, he ordered the buildings to be set on fire, and left the scene of his cruelty and lust amidst the wild huzzas of his comrades. No civilized, or half-civilized country had ever witnessed such atrocities on the part of its own ruler.

If Ivan was not travelling and marauding he resided generally in the Alexandrowna Convent, which he had strongly fortified. This convent, situated in the neighborhood of Moscow, and surrounded by dense forests, was not only the scene of his bestial orgies and excesses, and of his more than beastly cruelty, but also of his hypocritical zeal for religion and divine service. The convent, although transformed into a palace, remained still a convent. Ivan’s most abject and infamous favorites were acting as monks, while Ivan himself performed the functions of the pontiff. He also acted as a bell-ringer for the church. Quite early in the morning, at four o’clock, mass was read and public service was held in the church, lasting till seven o’clock. Regularly every evening, from seven to eight o’clock, there was again divine service. The time intervening between the dinner and the last church service was employed by him in going to the torture rooms of the palace where his victims—and there was always a number of them—were subjected to the most excruciating pain, and in many cases tortured to death. To be invited to these scenes of horror was a mark of imperial favor.

Ivan was never in better humor or happier than after having witnessed the tortures or the execution of a man whom he had sacrificed to his greed for wealth or to his vindictiveness. It is reported that one day when one hundred and twenty persons were to be executed—either strangled, hung, beheaded, or quartered—at Moscow, and when the inhabitants of the streets near the place of the execution had fled in horror from the neighborhood, the Czar sent out his soldiery and compelled thousands of citizens to be spectators of the wholesale butchery. He sat there himself on an elevated stage applauding the torturers and executioners when, in his opinion, they had done their task well and had prolonged the agony of the victim as much as possible. When the cruel spectacle was over, he rose to his feet and addressed the spectators as follows: “My loyal subjects! You have seen torture and death! Some of you are horror-struck at what you have witnessed! My punishment is severe, but it is just. All these men and women were traitors to their Czar, and deserved to die. Answer me, was I right in punishing them?” And the tremendous audience, almost frightened to death, as with one voice replied: “Glory and long life to the Czar! Death to the traitors!” The sight of blood, of suffering and of death seemed to have an intoxicating effect on this unparalleled monster, and he never tired of it to the day of his death.

The high dignitaries of the Church fared no better at Ivan’s hands. Whenever they stood in the way of his ambition, or whenever they presumed to criticise him for his crimes, he treated them with the same cruelty and inflicted the same punishments upon them as upon the boyars. In that way he imposed silence on the clergy, and caused them even to sanction his worst misdeeds. But one day, after an especially atrocious marauding expedition of the Czar, the Metropolitan of Moscow mustered sufficient courage to reprimand him publicly. On the twenty-second of March, 1568, Ivan entered the cathedral, expecting the blessing of the high-priest. The latter did not stir, but kept his eyes fixed upon a picture representing Christ in all his glory. “Holy Father,” said one of the boyars to the Metropolitan, “the Czar is here; bless him!” “I do not recognize the Czar!” replied the Metropolitan. “Since this world was created and the sun was placed in the skies, it has never been known that a Czar has committed such atrocities and crimes in his own state as ours has. Here in this church we offer our prayers to God, and beyond its walls the blood of innocent Christians is shed in torrents.” Then turning to Ivan, he said in a loud voice: “The very stones under thy feet will rise against thee and cry out against thy crimes and atrocities! God has bidden me tell you and warn you, even if I should suffer death for my boldness!” And death was his punishment, although not at the very moment. As a rebel, he was sentenced to imprisonment for life at Twer. But it happened so that Ivan, the year after, passed through Twer on one of his marauding expeditions. It was then that he remembered Philip, the Metropolitan, who had accosted him so boldly. He sent half a dozen of his soldiers to the prison, and they strangled the Metropolitan without previous notice. This assassination paved the way for many others among the clergy, until Ivan had so intimidated them that thenceforth not even a whisper was heard among them against his cruelties.

It then became apparent how readily the example of an infamous ruler is followed by his courtiers and attendants. The boyars and officers accompanying him on his expeditions of murder and pillage tried to surpass him in iniquity; in their very appearance they showed their true character, adorning themselves with symbols of their ferocity. When they started on their marauding tour, they attached a bleeding dog’s-head and a broom to the neck and saddle of each horse, signifying by these decorations that they would bite like savage dogs and sweep off the ground all they could find. Whomsoever they found on the highways they would arrest and hang as traitors to the Czar, and in the villages and towns on their route they would commit the most horrid excesses, sparing neither sex nor age. If the inhabitants had fled at their approach, they reported them to the Czar as his enemies who were plotting against his life, and he issued decrees of vengeance declaring their property confiscated and their lives forfeited. In this way they kept the inhabitants at home waiting in terror for the arrival of their tormentors.

After having decimated and terrorized the nobility and the clergy, Ivan turned his attention principally to the merchants and wealthy citizens. The commercial centres, in which a great amount of capital had accumulated, were the special objects of his greed, especially if they showed a spirit of independence. Prominent among these was Novgorod, the ancient and wealthy city, proud of her free institutions and her honored name. It was this pride and her great wealth which pointed out Novgorod as a victim for Ivan’s wrath and cupidity, and the manner in which he planned and executed his evil designs on the city shows his diabolical genius at its height. Never has tyrant or despot conceived a more sinister and treacherous plot for the ruin of a great city and for the assassination of its inhabitants. The horrors of St. Bartholomew’s night pale in comparison.

A Polish vagabond, on the personal command of Ivan, wrote a petition, with the forged signatures of the Archbishop of Novgorod and a large number of leading and wealthy citizens and addressed to the King of Poland, in which the latter was supplicated to assume the sovereignty over Novgorod and the province in which it was situated, and to assist the citizens in their desire of shaking off the yoke of Ivan. By Ivan’s direction this petition was concealed in the great cathedral, behind a picture of the Holy Virgin. The Polish vagabond, after having executed the task dictated to him, came to Moscow and charged the city of Novgorod with treasonable designs against the Czar. Upon this information the Czar immediately sent messengers with the Polish vagabond to Novgorod, where, as a matter of course, the forged petition was found hidden behind the picture of the Holy Virgin in the cathedral. This was considered proof sufficient to condemn the whole city. No further investigation was deemed necessary. Ivan kept quiet, but the inhabitants knew what was in store for them. They trembled and waited. They had not to wait a long time. Two weeks after the discovery, on the twenty-first day of January, 1570, the first detachments of an imperial army, commanded by some of Ivan’s most trusted and most cruel lieutenants, entered the city. They immediately proceeded to seal the doors of all the churches and chapels, and took possession of the residences of the wealthy inhabitants, where they established their headquarters. All traffic was suspended. No citizen was permitted to leave the city, nor could goods of any kind be shipped from it. A dead silence and fear hung over the city. Nobody knew what the Czar intended to do, but that he would do something horrible, everybody felt, and also that there was no escape from him.

At last he came. He took up his residence in the Archbishop’s palace. He treated the priests and the Archbishop himself like servants; he drank and feasted with his boyars, while the priests had to wait upon him at table. And then suddenly, when he rose, he uttered a loud shout of triumph, and this was the signal for his lieutenants to order a general pillage throughout the city. Without any control by their superiors, the soldiers committed plunder, murder, violence, and outrages of all kinds. The treasures accumulated in the churches and large business houses Ivan had reserved for himself, and his orders were strictly observed; nobody touched what he had designated for his share. The palace of the Archbishop became the scene of the most beastly orgies and excesses. The wives and daughters of the noblest families were dragged before Ivan, and after having picked out the most beautiful for his own use, he turned the others over to his lieutenants and companions. Many of the unfortunate women committed suicide, many others died from the effects of the terrible abuse to which they had been subjected. The Czar knew no pity. “Such scenes of horror, iniquity, and inhumanity,” says a foreign eye-witness, “had not been seen in the world since the destruction of Jerusalem.”

The work of devastation, pillage, murder, violence, and incendiarism lasted five weeks. At last the Czar thought it was time to stop the bloody carnival. The measure was full to overflowing,—not only the measure of misery, affliction, distress, and death for the unfortunate and innocent inhabitants of Novgorod, but also the measure of lust and cruelty for himself. The constant indulgence in voluptuous excesses told upon his constitution; he was worn out and surfeited with animal gratification; his eyes had a vague, almost lifeless expression; his herculean frame commenced to tremble, his legs to totter. No less than twenty-seven thousand persons, men, women, and children, had perished; there was not a family which did not lament one or more dead among its members. The corpses were thrown into the river, and at some points they had been thrown in in such numbers that the river was impeded in its current. On the first day of the sixth week, Ivan called citizens living in all the different streets of the city together and addressed them as follows: “Men of Novgorod, and all of you who are still alive, pray to God and thank him for your escape from peril; thank your Czar too, for it is to his mercy and his fear of God that you owe your safety; and thank also his soldiers, whose humane treatment saved you from death. Pray to God that he may give us power and strength to vanquish all our enemies! Much blood has been shed for the punishment of traitors. These traitors are responsible to God for all that has happened here during the last five weeks. May God have mercy on them. And now stop your crying and weeping! Live and be happy, and may your city grow and prosper!”

Cæsar Borgia could not have done better than this brutal monster of the North. He was the genius of cruelty and hypocrisy personified in one man.

CHAPTER XII
HENRY THE FOURTH OF FRANCE

CHAPTER XII
ASSASSINATION OF HENRY THE FOURTH OF FRANCE
(May 14, 1610)

RELIGIOUS wars—that is to say, civil wars for religious causes—had desolated France for half a century, and tranquillity and apparent harmony had finally been restored only by the genius of one man—Henry the Fourth. He it was who issued the Edict of Nantes, conferring equal religious and political rights upon the professors of both religions, the Protestant and the Catholic.

A short time after Martin Luther had inaugurated the great movement of religious reform in Germany, a similar movement had also been organized in France; but it was only since 1536 and through the influential and energetic agitation of John Calvin that it had assumed large dimensions and acquired a really national importance. After the disastrous battle of Pavia and after his release from Spanish captivity, King Francis the First had ordered a cruel persecution against the Protestants for political reasons, but it had utterly failed to put a stop to this movement. On the contrary, a great many noblemen had joined the new church and the originally purely religious movement had gradually assumed a pronounced political character. But this change of tendency only added fuel to the flame of intolerance and persecution. Not only were hundreds of professors of the new church most cruelly executed on the gallows or burnt alive for heresy, but among the Waldenses in Provence and in the valleys bordering on Savoy a wholesale massacre was inaugurated, which aimed at nothing less than their entire extirpation. On account of their peaceful and industrial habits, these people had for a long time enjoyed toleration in spite of their dissenting religious opinions. No less than twenty flourishing villages were destroyed and burned to the ground, and their entire population, men, women and children, were butchered in the most barbarous manner. But it seemed as if the very horror which such acts of inhumanity inspired, and the heroic constancy and bravery with which these unfortunate victims of religious fanaticism had sealed their convictions with their blood, had rather increased than diminished the ranks of the Protestants. The French translation of the Bible, which was secretly circulated throughout the kingdom, proved also a powerful means of propagandism for the principles of reform among the better educated and thinking classes.

Francis the First died in 1547 and was succeeded by his son, Henry the Second, who considered the Protestant movement merely a political question, and treated it as such. In Germany he supported the Protestant princes in their fight against Charles the Fifth, but at home, in France, he persecuted the adherents of Calvin even more persistently and cruelly than his father had done. Hundreds of excellent citizens were sent to the gallows or to the stake for heresy, and even the possession or sale of a French Bible was deemed a sufficient crime to warrant the death punishment. Henry the Second died after a reign of twelve years, in 1559, from a wound received in a tournament and inflicted accidentally by the captain of his own body-guard. His successor, Francis the Second, the husband of Mary, Queen of Scotland, was entirely under the control of his wife’s uncles, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine. For the Protestants matters grew worse and worse. Francis the Second, who was merely a boy, died after a reign of less than two years, and was succeeded by his brother Charles the Ninth, of bloody St. Bartholomew Night’s memory. He was succeeded by Henry the Third, who after an inglorious reign, in which torrents of blood had flowed without quenching the fire of religious fanaticism, was assassinated in 1589 by Jacques Clément, a young Dominican monk, who had become exasperated at the concessions which the King had made to the Protestant Church. Before expiring, King Henry the Third recognized the young King of Navarre as his successor, who then ascended the throne of France under the name of Henry the Fourth.

The wars which devastated France during the preceding three reigns were waged almost without interruption; they were of a semi-religious and semi-political character. These wars must be largely ascribed to the pernicious influence of Catherine de Médicis, the wife of Henry the Second, and the mother of his three sons, Francis the Second, Charles the Ninth and Henry the Third. Her name stands in history as a synonym for an astute, unscrupulous, cruel, and intriguing ruler and politician. At the time of Henry the Third’s assassination, he was investing the city of Paris, which was in the hands of his enemies, the League, under the command of the Duke of Mayenne, who himself was aspiring to the throne. It was therefore not an easy matter for the new King to assume the reins of government, the half of his kingdom being in arms against him, and the royal army itself, in whose ranks he was fighting, being hostile to the religion he (as a Protestant) professed.

But Henry the Fourth was equal to the difficult task. In fact, he was one of the most remarkable men who ever sat on a European throne. His career up to that day had been extremely stormy; his escape from death and perils innumerable was wonderful and stamped him as a man of destiny. It is reported of him that when he was present one day as a very young man at a brilliant reception at the French court, where nearly all the prominent men of the French capital were assembled, he strongly impressed the foreign ambassadors with the brilliancy of his wit and the sagacity of his observations. One of them said: “In this whole assemblage of dukes, princes and great dignitaries, I see but one man fit to rule either as king or emperor,” and pointing to Henry of Navarre he continued: “It is that young man with the eye of an eagle!”

Henry the Fourth was born in 1553, the son of Antony of Bourbon. His mother was Jeanne d’Albret, only child of Henry the Second, King of Navarre, and of his wife, Queen Margaret of Navarre, who has won a lasting place in literature by her famous collection of novels, known as the “Heptameron.” Much of the genius and esprit which distinguished the grandmother was inherited both by her daughter and her grandson. Jeanne d’Albret was not only an excellent woman and mother, but she was also an enthusiastic admirer and supporter of the Calvinistic doctrine, and brought up her son in that faith. On account of her religion both Philip the Second of Spain and Catherine de Médicis, Queen of France, hated her intensely, and it seems that at an early day a sort of rivalry arose between Catherine and the mother of the boy concerning his education. Catherine maintained that, inasmuch as Henry was a royal prince and might be called upon some day to ascend the throne of France, it was absolutely necessary to educate him in the Catholic faith in order to make him worthy to rule over a Catholic country and occupy a throne whose occupant had for centuries been honored with the noble title of the “eldest son of the Church.”

In this contest over the boy the mother remained victorious, and, true to her religious convictions, she surrounded him with Protestant professors. But Catherine de Médicis was not a woman to abandon a scheme which she had formed and in which politics played a large part. She therefore concocted a plan for the abduction of young Henry, which would have succeeded and would have placed him under the immediate control of Philip the Second of Spain, had it not been betrayed to Henry’s mother, the Queen of Navarre. Henry was thereupon hurried off to La Rochelle, the headquarters of the Protestant army, where he was soon placed in nominal command of all the Protestant forces, although the famous Admiral Coligny was its real leader.

We may fitly pass without comment the stormy years preceding Henry’s elevation to the throne of France. In order to reconcile the Protestant and the Catholic branches of the reigning dynasty, Catherine de Médicis was successful in her plan of a marriage between Henry of Navarre and her own daughter Marguerite, although the Pope hesitated a long time in giving his permission to this family alliance, which was in every respect a very unfortunate one. As far as Catherine de Médicis was concerned, her principal intention in planning it was the hope of continuing under Henry the Fourth’s reign (if he ever should become king) the absolute rule which she had so successfully maintained under the reign of her sons. Far from using her influence and authority to secure, if possible, the happiness of the young couple, she held out to both all possible temptations to lead them astray, and openly advanced Henry’s liaisons with other beautiful ladies of the court. It is also pretty well established by historical evidence that Catherine, in order to withdraw Henry from the beneficial influence of his mother, caused her death by poison in the very year of his marriage. At the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s night, Henry escaped death by abjuring Protestantism, King Charles the Ninth having left him the choice between going to mass and suffering death. Henry preferred the former and professed Catholicism as his religion until 1576, when he suddenly and secretly left the court, and, retracting his forced abjuration, placed himself once more at the head of the Protestant party.

In 1584 the death of the Duke of Anjou made Henry the legitimate heir to the crown of France, and five years later, the death of Henry the Third made him King. But only the southern provinces and the Protestants recognized him as their king. The Catholics vehemently protested against this heretical king, and refused obedience to him. The League, which kept an army of 30,000 men in the field against him, and which was supported by the King of Spain, not only refused to recognize him, but proclaimed an aged uncle of his, the Cardinal de Bourbon, King of France, and Spain adhered to this decision. The civil war between the contending factions continued with greater fury and obstinacy than ever, and it was in this campaign, in which Henry always fought against tremendous odds, that he displayed his wonderful ability and tact as a political and military leader. Finally his second conversion to Catholicism on the twenty-third of July, 1593, which was simply a political measure and not at all dictated by religious motives, decided the succession to the throne in his favor, although it took years of warfare and diplomatic negotiation to secure his recognition by Spain and the leaders of the League.

Henry the Fourth’s greatest political achievement, by which he manifested his far-seeing ability as a statesman, was the Edict of Nantes, promulgated on the thirteenth of April, 1598. It guaranteed freedom of conscience and equality before the law to Catholics and Protestants; and it was the first great manifesto of religious toleration issued by any ruler. But noble and high-minded as it was, even if inspired only by political motives, the fanatics of the Catholic Church would not forgive him. Unquestionably it was the Edict of Nantes which caused his assassination,—an act of revenge with which the Church paid back the injury it supposed it had received at his hands.

Henry, with the assistance of his great minister, the Duke of Sully, devoted the first few years, after peace had been restored, to building up the prosperity of the country, which had been distracted by war for nearly forty years. In this he admirably succeeded. With wonderful rapidity the monarchy recovered from the disasters and calamities of the religious and civil wars. Without Henry’s success, late as it came, this national improvement would have been impossible, and France would have sunk into the same condition of intellectual lethargy and material decay from which Spain has suffered for three centuries. But Henry’s ambition went much beyond the borders of his kingdom. The house of Hapsburg, a branch of which ruled Spain, appeared to him too dangerous for the security and greatness of France. He supported the German Protestant princes in their opposition to Austria, which wanted to take possession of Juliers-Cleves, two German principalities, and sent an army of ten thousand men to their assistance. Henry wanted to join personally this army on the nineteenth of May, 1610. On the thirteenth of May he published a decree appointing the Queen, Mary de Médicis, Regent of the kingdom, and her coronation was celebrated on the same day with great pomp.

On the fourteenth of May, the day after the coronation, the King was assassinated by Francis Ravaillac in the Ferronière Street at Paris, where his carriage had stopped a few minutes. It was this short delay which gave Ravaillac a chance: he climbed upon the hind-wheel of the carriage and stabbed the King twice with a long poniard, with deadly effect. It was thus that the greatest King France has produced died at the hands of a miserable fanatic, at a moment too when, according to the statement of Sully, who knew him better than any other man, he had formed a plan of establishing a great European confederation, founded on the civil equality of Catholics and Protestants and on an equilibrium of power among the great nations of Europe. Ravaillac was executed with revolting barbarity on the twenty-seventh of May, but not even the repeated application of the torture elicited the least information as to the motives or the accomplices which he may have had in his crime. Henry’s death was a cruel loss not only for France, but for the whole world.

The assassination of Henry the Fourth ended in France the era of famous political murders, which during the religious wars had taken off Coligny, Henry of Guise, and the two kings, Henry the Third and Henry the Fourth, all during one generation. But of these only the assassination of Henry the Fourth has made a lasting and profound impression on his contemporaries as well as on posterity. It has enhanced his reputation and glory by enshrining his name among the great martyrs of history. It was one of the most patriotic and high-minded thoughts of Voltaire to make Henry the Fourth the hero of his epic poem “La Henriade,” which although not ranking with the great poems of Milton, Tasso, and Virgil, in poetic merit, is still a noble hymn of liberty and a glorification of religious toleration, as well as of Henry, its representative. It is uncertain whether the profound horror which the assassination of Henry caused throughout the world, or the terrible punishment inflicted on Ravaillac, caused assassins to desist from their nefarious work, but certain it is that no new assassination of a king or any member of the royal family of France took place from the death of Henry the Fourth to the assassination of the Duc de Berry, the presumptive heir of Charles the Tenth, in 1820. Not that no attempts on the life of any or all of the French monarchs since the days of Henry the Fourth were made; but all such attempts had failed, and instead of killing the rulers, had only led to the cruel and horrible execution of the conspirators.

Most remarkable among these was the assault of Damiens on King Louis the Fifteenth, one of the most dissolute and worthless monarchs,—one who in the gratification of his lusts was utterly oblivious of common decency and shame. Louis the Fifteenth came nearer reviving the atrocious immorality of Claudius, Caligula, Caracalla, Heliogabalus in the palace of the Cæsars of ancient Rome, than any other modern monarch had done. It was the age of Madame de Pompadour and the monstrosities of the “deer park.” The French nation blushed at the excesses of the court, which paved the way for the great Revolution, already dimly foreseen by some ingenious observers, as one of the necessities of the future. It was at this time, when public indignation, not to say public disgust, had reached its culminating point, that an attempt on the life of the King was made.